“How do I survive Gail, though?”
“You need to follow your own advice to yourself.”
“Give in, you mean. Why?” Hank said. His expression turned sour. “Giving in to her will break me.” He would never bend a knee to a hippie-Focus.
“Have you forgotten the many lessons your Teacher taught you?” Carol, she meant. “Submission will just forge the iron within you some more.”
“I’d rather die.”
“Join the crowd.” The mound of bodies he sat on. If he gave up and let himself die, the mound would grow far larger, or so she thought. Subliminal communication in the Dreaming. “You’re fighting your responsibility, Hank. A karmic debt you recently learned of, taught to you by the last person you saw die.” Kim. He carried the karmic debt of a mature Arm, as all the harm in the world he had caused wasn’t balanced by the good he did. That was why he couldn’t just give up or die. “You need to act on this karmic debt.”
“Embrace giving in to Gail as just punishment for my previous sins?” Hank said. “Logically correct and straightforward. However, I can’t see how I’m going to be effective afterwards as a broken man.”
“Oh, don’t wallow in it. Please. The answers will come to you faster than you can implement them no matter what you do. Show some patience. Remember that being a Transform is a positive thing.”
The world turned gray and faded to darkness.
---
“Stand up, Hank. You’re a Transform now, and it’s time for you to understand what that means.” Hank opened his eyes to find himself sprawled out on the floor in front of Gail’s desk. Still. Right where he blacked out.
Keaton’s voice echoed in his memories, the cold voice of harsh Arm discipline. “The proper response is ‘yes, ma’am’.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. Now he understood how to accept Gail’s orders and her leadership – as a junior Arm to a senior Arm. She had just won the dominance fight, and like a good Arm he needed to suck shit and serve his superior. Hank tried to stand, got as far as his knees, and stopped.
“Shit, what’s with the blood?” Gail said. Hank couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even catch his breath. He wheezed.
Gail stood, walked around her desk, and knelt beside him. “Doctor! Tell me what’s going on!”
“Can’t speak, ma’am,” Hank tried to say. His words came out as a garbled wheeze. “Dying.” He felt wet around his midsection, and realized he had let loose, the urine on the carpet the same fluorescent orange as before.
Suddenly, he felt better. Lots better. Oh, that was wonderful. Gail gave him juice. Without tagging him, of course. Yes, he could easily see how that ended up being addictive. Just another mountain to carry on his shoulders.
“Now, Doctor, you’re going to tell me what this sorry mess is all about.” Or I’ll let you die. Carol will understand. Being a new male Transform is dangerous. Accidents happen.
Hank shook himself out of Gail’s thoughts, took several deep breaths, holding an index finger up, indicating he couldn’t speak yet. Gail frowned, aggravated. She let him catch his breath, though.
“Back in late 1966, a faction of the FBI tried to assassinate me by injecting me with élan, what we called Monster juice back then.”
“I heard the story.”
“I almost died.”
“Pity.”
“I’ve had a great many problems with the residue of the attack over the years, despite the number of times it’s been cleaned out of me. Using modern terminology, I suffered a partial Monster transformation. Now that I’ve made a real transformation, the two parts of my body are fighting it out. Things like the blood in my sweat and the foul urine are a result of the fight. I’m what, a week into the fourteen to eighteen day Transform adjustment period? I’m not dead yet, but I have another week to ten days to go. Ma’am, if you desire me to survive this period, I will need constant medical and Transform maintenance.” Treating Gail as a boss Arm felt right. He understood Arms, and after Carol’s training; Gail understood both the necessary Arm harshness and their responsibility to their possessions.
“So part of the reason you’ve been fighting me so hard is that you need medical help far beyond what you’ve been given?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m not willing to tag you and take care of you if you aren’t willing to serve as a true member of the Abyss.” She looked over the mess he made in her office and grimaced.
“The Abyss?” He wiped the sweat from his forehead, and his hand came away bloody. The sudden change in juice level left him light-headed, and the room spun slowly around him. He grasped Gail’s visitor’s chair for support, leaving yet more bloodstains.
“That’s the name Van, bless his dear heart” a vicious verbal jab at the absent man “decided to slap on my household.” Hell. She no longer appreciated the initiative her husband showed by inviting the Madonna to the end of the Crow duel. “Goes along with Inferno, doesn’t it? He’s, well, not been happy with some of the changes in me over the last few months. I can’t say I blame him. I’m not the same person I was before Carol, Lori and the rest of the Arms got hold of me. Needless to say, my household immediately picked up on the name.” Gail stood and loomed over him as he knelt at her feet.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Anne-Marie was right. This would be good for him. By the time he ‘graduated’, he would understand exactly why he needed to change things. In the meantime, he would be the perfectly submissive junior Arm to his figurative Keatonic boss.
“Ma’am, I wasn’t lying or exaggerating when I said you were in danger from Patient Zero,” he said. Gail didn’t comment. “Surely you’ve heard of him.” She grunted a ‘no’. “Arm Haggerty’s number one candidate for the hidden great unknown enemy of the Cause?”
“The man?” Gail said. “He can’t be here. I would have sensed his presence.”
Anne-Marie’s hints were right, of course. Juiced up, the answer was obvious: not fewer tags, but more tags, especially more Focus tags. Two – from Lori and Gail – would be a good start. He suspected he would have to belong to all Carol’s Focus’s households to see any real benefits and get some real synergy out of the situation. Arm Debardelaben had it right – the more Focus tags, the better.
The long-term solution to the puzzle Anne-Marie and Kim had set before him was also obvious: codify household superorganism use. He hadn’t worked on it in the past, as it needed time and a dedicated effort, as well as a cooperative Focus and household. Inferno had done some work on this, which he discovered when he had stayed with Inferno during the Clearing of Chicago episode. Lori rolled him to keep his mouth shut.
Now, the time was right. With help, he would be able to crack the rest. Get it all. Turn the Transforms into partly functional Major Transforms. Bring balance to the household and the Transform community.
Oh, and likely cause wars, bloody and red. Too bad. He sided with the household Transforms now. Given time, he would change the world. Again. Upset all the applecarts. Again. He couldn’t succeed alone, but he knew who he would get to help him: Connie Yerizarian, Ann Chiron and Tim Egins. They wouldn’t be able to resist. Van and Daisy, too. They wouldn’t be able to resist, either.
Gail wouldn’t listen to him about Patient Zero until he proved himself. Pushing any further, though, would be an improper dominance display. “Ma’am, as a member of your household, I will serve you and your household to the best of my abilities as a Transform,” Hank said. He had heard the submissive Arm equivalent a half dozen times.
Gail knew he pulled something on her. He prayed she wouldn’t ask, and that she wouldn’t get Arm-aggravated over someone pledging to do exactly as she asked while still pulling something on her. Good ol’Junior Arm 101.
Someday, he would pull this off. Not today, or any time soon. Until then, he would do his best, despite his age and the problems of being a new Transform. Karma, again. Maybe, just maybe, even mangled by the constraints of being a Transform, he could discover
a few useful things. Ten percent of his capability wasn’t much, but better than most.
“Fine,” Gail said, laying her hand on his head. Not as sure of herself as before. “Here’s the tag.”
Whap.
“Let’s see if we can get you fixed up enough to work.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You can call me Gail.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Humbling, but in its own sick way, fun. A lesson in how junior Arms survived and thrived. A lesson in karma, in being on the other side of the needle.
Chronicle V
Beast (1/29/73 – 2/1/73)
Carol Hancock (1/5/73 – 1/7/73))
The sun rose at eleven o’clock in the morning, invisible behind the gray clouds. The only sound was the crunch of our snowshoes through the pine forest as we followed the path of the Mackenzie River. Lori, Sky, and I had been walking since six.
Desolate wilderness surrounded me, all cold, lonely, and empty. Snow drifted down from the gray sky, muffling the land in another frozen layer. Breathing air this cold would practically kill a normal.
I couldn’t imagine how Armenigar cared for this bleak country. Armenigar, the oldest Arm in the world. Six foot eight, muscles on top of muscles, and bald as an egg. We got along as well as Arms ever did. That is, we had worked out the dominance issues between us, and we had no special reason to hate each other. She had spent several days back in Calgary, me subordinate to her and truthfully enjoying the relative lack of responsibility – she turned out to be less of an asshole as a boss than either Keaton or Haggerty – while she trained up my not inconsiderable combat skills so I would be ready to deal with Beast. Beast. The ur-Chimara, not my mental beastliness.
We were three days out from Fort Simpson, far from the nearest human being.
I hated the Canadian near-Arctic with a passion.
“So, what’s going through your mind, Lori?” I said. The pines swallowed the sound of my voice. If they were pines. I couldn’t tell a pine tree from a fir or a spruce to save my life.
The trees ate my voice as if they hungered to consume any sign of life.
I had asked the question before. Lori had ignored me. Not this time, though. Maybe the silence finally bothered her. “This is crazy, to be out here like this,” she said. “And I’m cold.”
“There’s no reason for you to be cold, love,” Sky said.
“Then tell me, oh master of my body: why am I cold?” There were times when Lori even sounded like a Crow.
Lori was a Major Transform, a top-end Focus. We were all Major Transforms. She shouldn’t be cold.
“Perhaps you’re adjusting to not having Inferno around,” Sky said. Inferno, Lori’s household, remained back in Chicago.
“Will you lose your household juice buffer?” I asked Lori. I turned to the northwest, toward the Mackenzies, where Beast would be, but the trees blocked my view. We still had days to go before we found him. Weeks, probably. If he let us find him.
“I don’t know,” she said, in her Boston patrician accent she used when stressed, the one I found so appealing. She refused to look at me. “I can’t predict if the changes I’m noticing will lead to that. We should start thinking about what we might need to do if my household buffer does go away.”
I nodded. She assured me, earlier, that she was witch enough to hold on to the buffer, if possible. The only question was as to whether or not it was possible.
That was my life in there, dammit!
I’m Carol Hancock, a currently screwed Arm, and this part of my memoirs I’m releasing with utmost reluctance. The reason I’m stuck in the Canadian wilderness in winter is that I’ve been sent on an impossible quest – yes, quest, dammit – by the Madonna of Montreal, the first and oldest Focus. She was clearly good enough with her charisma to roll me without me even noticing. Grrr.
The quest is the price for my greatest success, successfully leading an American and Canadian Transform army against Focus Shirley Patterson and her enslaved followers. The old order has fallen, long live the new order…but, wait! No new order for me.
Sigh.
Daylight lasted only three hours before the sun set again. I could understand why Lori felt cold. The land’s soul was cold. Every step I took sucked more of the fire of my life out of me. If we spent long enough here, our hearts would freeze to numbness and our souls would ice over to match the local evergreens. We would become soulless creatures, walking endlessly through the snow, with no origin and no destination. The old Norse considered hell to be a cold place. I understood why.
I tried to summon up hot memories. Chicago, crowded with people, reeking with pollution, noisy with the bustle of everyday life in the city of sharp elbows. Home. There was prey there, in abundance, not like these hungry lands where nothing lived. There was warmth and life.
The memories of Chicago brought other memories. Pittsburgh. Slaughter. Insane juice enemy things. The reek of death, the screaming of the dying. I lost people there, more than I ever lost before. The loss made me want to kill, to balance the scales of justice, pain to balance my pain, but the emptiness here left nothing for me to kill.
Other memories intruded. My prey, the human version thereof, the evil ones I stalked, captured, and gave them torture beyond what they meted out in their miserable lives. Their hot blood as it dripped to the floor aroused me, as did their screams as they tried to escape me through death or shock, which I prevented. My brutality passed beyond cruel, beyond monstrous, beyond evil, to places humanity as yet imagined no words to describe. The dark places in my mind fed and grew strong. My personal and sadistic beast refused to leave me alone.
I brought my mind back to the present. The hot poison in my soul, reintroduced to me by the Arm Sylvia Bass and Focus Shirley Patterson, had nearly consumed me, doing the enemy’s work for them. Even after I shucked their control. The torture and mayhem became my solace from the stresses of life as an Arm, always there at the end of the day to bind my mental wounds and make me feel better.
There was no reason to remember the hot poison here. I let the cold hunger of the northern wasteland leech the heat from me, and let myself and my beast grow numb.
The wind howled loneliness, and I became the wind.
“So, what can we do to help?” I said. Since there was no prey up here in the frozen north, Lori would keep me alive by feeding me juice from her juice buffer. She carried months’ worth of juice with her. If the juice went bad…well, I wasn’t Haggerty and Monster juice did nothing for me. The juice in Lori’s juice buffer needed to not go bad.
I wondered if Lori’s cold came from the inside, emanating from her soul. The last two nights, we didn’t even come near each other. We each zipped up our individual sleeping bags, as far from each other as the small tent would allow. Distant. Cold. Colder than the icy land around us.
Sky muttered something unintelligible. Lori shook her head.
“Come on, guys. Why can’t we talk to each other?”
Sky turned around and walked backwards, in front of me. Damned impossible in snowshoes, though Sky possessed all sorts of similar nifty tricks. He was a Crow, the male Major Transform scavenger type, the Crow, the archetype and source of the Crow name. He could even run in the snowshoes and not break through the snow, the creep. A short man, with East Asian eyes, golden skin, and a romantic French-Canadian accent, he weighed less than he appeared because of his hollow bones. He was farther from human than either Lori or I.
“I’m beginning to wonder if Anne-Marie sent us out here to not come back. Her betrayal of our long friendship’s left me in a foul mood.”
“Not come back?” Punishment, yes, but not permanent exile. I would have sensed such an attack, if true.
Then again, I still didn’t understand how she rolled me, the Arms’ charisma expert, without me noticing.
“Exactly,” Sky said. “You think we’re going to just be able to go up to Beast and say ‘Hey there, civilization calls’, and convince him to come bac
k with us just like that? I’ve told you how powerful he is. Arm’s told you how powerful he is. Merde!” Sky turned around to face forward again, snowshoes crunching underneath him. He shrugged. “Would it be so bad if we stayed? I like it out here. We could support each other so we could survive. This way the rest of the world won’t end up stuck with us and our issues. We’re more trouble than we’re worth back there.”
I wiped snow off my goggles and used a fraction of a point of juice to suppress my hunger. Hunger used to be a problem for me, but this cold land finally forced me to learn the ‘ignore hunger’ trick. Just as well. We didn’t carry anything with us that a person would enjoy eating anyway.
Snow fell, steadily, unendingly. I kept replaying visions in my mind, as I trudged, of other snowy days trudging through the snowy arctic cold in goggles and three layers of parkas. Only…only…I had never done this before in my life, I wasn’t male, and I wasn’t a new Transform. I guessed the wilderness had numbed me to such stillness that I tapped into some juice-powered hallucinations, something sent by the goddamned Progenitors, or some other new-to-me juice phenomenon. Why the fuck did I fall into the mind of a Goldilocks, of all things? Him? Here? I doubted Haggerty’s ‘great unknown enemy’ had ever been stupid enough to trudge out here alone, in winter. Or did I tap into Dan Freeman’s memories somehow, of his journey on the Eskimo Spear quest? “Not much to worry about,” I said. “I don’t want to stay out here. I’ll drag you back.” I always suspected Sky was more than a little crazy, but this was positive proof. Only a lunatic would want to stay out in this subsection of hell.
I turned to Lori. “So, why are you in such a foul mood?”
She didn’t answer. I opened my metasense to her and felt her pain. She was beautiful, even bundled up in layers of winter coats. A little less than five feet tall, with glossy black hair and pale skin. With eight months’ worth of baby extending out in front of her, she glowed with life.
Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two Page 31