Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two

by Randall Farmer

  The Monster fixated on Ann, following her every move, but didn’t attack. The Monster seemed to ignore the blood dripping from her shredded mouth. Dowling bowled over the crab-Hunter, who tried to pincer him and missed. Dowling knew a bunch of anti-crab tricks from his sparring with Duke Hoskins. For starters, he knifed the front pincer joints just so, immobilizing them until the Hunter figured out Duke Hoskins’ counter. If he survived that long.

  The Hunter charged out of the water and ran over Dowling. He hadn’t expected that! The young Hunter was fast, far faster than Duke Hoskins. He got to the captive and the Inferno team before Dowling could turn. Boom! Boom!

  Inferno RPG rounds. The Hunter was on them before they got a third off. Luckily for them, because of Dowling’s knives, he couldn’t close his claws and annihilate them. What he could do, though, was kick, which worked well enough to drop the entire team, all wounded. Ann put one .707 round in him after another, even as she fell. Ann was fast and smart; she dropped her RPG launcher the instant the Hunter left the water.

  “Die, you bitch! Die!” The Hunter cocked a claw arm and made ready to punch it through Ann.

  Dowling let loose his Terror, which stopped the Hunter for a second, claw arm cocked. Good enough. Dowling leapt at the claw arm, intending to lever it away from Ann and move the fight far enough away from the Inferno combatants for Dowling to let loose his beast and go all-out in the fight.

  The Hunter vanished from Dowling’s sight as Dowling leapt, in a distantly moving scream.

  The summoned Monster had grabbed the young Hunter.

  Dowling turned. The upper half of the young Hunter fell to the beach, the bottom half now down the Monster’s gullet. Three seconds later the Monster struck again, this time eating the rest of the Hunter.

  Then the Monster glared at Dowling.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Dowling said, at the Monster. Instincts. “I thought you were the enemy, ma’am.”

  More glare.

  Dowling got to his knees and bowed. “So sorry,” he said. Charisma. The old Monster wielded Major Transform-like charisma. He had the willies, as if the Monster was metasense scanning him.

  With a splash, the Monster returned to Lake Erie.

  The motorcycle chugged to a stop while Dowling and the Inferno team were still on the beach, treating the wounded and wondering how they could transport the more severely wounded without killing them in the process. Dowling let Crow Master Zero handle the intruder, as Dowling wasn’t yet mobile. Regrowing a lower leg took more élan than was locally available, and he couldn’t ignore his other wounds, either.

  “Arm Hancock,” Zero said. “How did you know to stop?”

  “So all this screaming in my head for me to stop here wasn’t you?” the Arm said. Hancock was both good and bad news. She was the best healer among the Arms. She was also the most difficult to deal with for a Noble. The second worst, Keaton, accepted trades of all types. Hancock wanted allies and personal services. You got help from her, you tended to find yourself up to your neck in fights you had no business being involved in and accumulating unwanted Responsibility.

  She was linked to Inferno, though. Several of the Transforms here wore her tag. She couldn’t not stop.

  Hancock shrugged and shook her head. “Probably Focus Rizzari, then.” She took off her motorcycle helmet – one of Arm Haggerty’s, Dowling guessed – and did smell of the absent Arm. He suspected Hancock had just fought the Hero and reclaimed her position as the number two Arm. “Well, I certainly know why I’m here. Point me to the worst.” Zero did. “Margo, I said you needed to be blooded, but you didn’t need to take me so literally.” Followed by quips such as “Chiron, I’ve always admired your guts, they’re so pink and wiggly” and “Hey, Steve. I thought you knew to avoid shellfish” as she healed. Eventually she got to him.

  “Count Dowling?” She knelt beside him and whistled. “Someone put a nasty charismatic whammy on you, didn’t they?”

  “Not that I know of, ma’am.”

  “Huh.” She stood up straight and took a step back. “Get to your feet, you lollygagging furball! Now! Get the fuck up! Heal that goddamned wound!”

  Dowling got to his feet without thinking, automatically obeying the Arm. His lost lower leg started to heal on its own. “Now, start talking. Tell me what the fuck happened here.”

  The Monster-hating Arm wasn’t at all happy to hear the tale, which he told her after he thanked her for knocking the Monster’s charismatic whammy off him. She stalked off and continued healing.

  “Tell me, Chiron, why are you calling this Monster ‘Bessie’?” Hancock said. She had finished her healing, saying she didn’t want to waste any more juice on this lunacy. “Did she speak to you in private or something?”

  “No, ma’am,” Ann said. “Bessie is the name of the legendary sea monster living in Lake Erie, a tale going back to pre-Colonial days. The eel Monster we saw matched Bessie’s description exactly, save that the legend doesn’t speak about barnacles, kelp growth, or intelligence.” Hancock shook her head. “Ma’am, all the big lakes have these legends.”

  “I know that,” Hancock said, stalking back to her motorcycle. “I’m just trying not to think too hard about what that means.”

  Parting (1/17/73 – 1/18/73)

  “We love you, Focus, beyond all others,” the Inferno leadership team said, in unison. This was the fourth attempt. After each failed attempt they adjusted the odor cues, ceremony location, team positioning, as well as the thought patterns going through each team member’s mind. This fourth attempt they situated in Connie’s office, after a crew of teens hastily cleaned the place. Way too many people crammed into too small a space.

  This time the juice moved. Inferno had tagged Gail.

  “Got it,” Gail said. She turned away as Van, Daisy and Hank – the authors of this crazy test – congratulated each other. Part of this was on Gilgamesh; he had helped them with the personality type identification procedures. Everyone else started milling around and talking.

  Gail examined herself, her thoughts and her juice structure. Being tagged by Inferno definitely brought the beast, as Carol would say. She hadn’t realized they were the violent ones, and she now blamed them for Lori’s problems with her own darkness. At least a little. She easily decoded the effect on her brain chemistry – more aggression, less thought, more snarl and grit. Not as an Arm – the tag didn’t mess with her instincts – but as a Focus. More ‘cast iron bitch’ wasn’t what she needed in life. Ever.

  There had to be more. Arms got stature from tags. Focuses got, well, not a whole hell of a lot, from what she could find. She wasn’t sure about other Focuses, though. Making it so an Arm can boss you around wasn’t a benefit to her, that was clear.

  “So, did this work on your end?” Gail asked.

  “Yes,” Connie said. “My whole suite of household juice signaling tricks are working again.” She had been limited to signaling just the household leaders. “I can feel everyone.”

  “So, explain to me what’s going on for real,” she said.

  “Our household superorganism is now back to where it was,” Ann Chiron said.

  “Great,” Gail said. Useless. They knew more, but refused to tell. “Go do your experiments. There’s some Focuses I need to teach over at Littleside.”

  “You dropped the tag?” Connie said, after snarling her way into Gail’s Branton office. Gail nodded and didn’t bother offering Connie a seat. “Why?” The rest of the experimentation crew – Ann, Zielinski, Van and Daisy, crowded in behind Connie, blocking the office doorway.

  “I’m not doing any extended personal experimentation with this sort of thing while the Commander’s off on her quest,” Gail said. The experimentation crew all frowned. They knew she made excuses, but she didn’t care. She had barely restrained her bitch Focus side during her morning teaching, slipping twice and doing the Focus at her students, who deserved better. “You know it works. That should be enough for what you need.”

 
; After lunch, Gail returned to work. The magic corkboard, the Abyss name for Gerry’s toy, kept showing up with more Hunter incidents. Too many were near Chicago for her comfort. She worried her lip in frustration. She could have kept Hoskins and Sinclair’s Barony here if she insisted, but, strategically, sending them off was the correct thing to do. Letting her fear for her household do her thinking for her was a mistake the first Focuses had made, and one she wouldn’t repeat.

  Gail sat down at her desk and, after doing a quick clean-up, started her afternoon work. She had another meeting with the media this afternoon, at 4 PM, an interview with a reporter and photographer from Time Magazine. More fallout from her being shot in public. She needed to be properly prepared; the Transform community didn’t need any stumbles or temper losses. They didn’t need Gail generating unwanted attention.

  Before the Time interview, she first dealt with a bunch of Network issues. While working on the Network paperwork, she found a note she had been ignoring, regarding another two juice music students Esther wanted to send her way. Another item to add to her list. Then she made a bunch of long-distance phone calls to reinforce her Transform rights stance. Next came another set of phone calls, all in the Chicago area, another attempt to set a time for the next Chicago Focus meeting on citywide defenses against the Hunters. Her stomach rumbled when some early dinner cooking smells wafted into her cluttered office. Miraculously, Anita happened to wander by, drop off a large bowl of beef and barley soup on her desk, and remove the plates from her last snack. On the way out Anita also bussed out a full trashcan, replacing it with one sitting by her open hall door. Gail ignored the distraction.

  Next, the letters. Most were open already, vetted by her staff. The first was a request for a Crow from a Focus from southern Illinois who wanted to try doing some household tuning (and, Gail suspected, just wanted the Crow to clean out the dross in her household so she wouldn’t need to move). Next was an official letter from Courtier Freeman, approving her request and setting a date for his arrival. She answered with a ‘Thanks!’ and moved on.

  The letters finished, she checked the time and found she had enough time to do a quick exercise run and also do some more juice pattern development. She didn’t possess anywhere near as many battle-useful juice patterns as she needed, and the rising number of incidents on the magic corkboard was a prod she couldn’t ignore. She could combine her exercise and her juice pattern development, though she needed to make sure nobody was in the same room with her when she did so.

  “…and I’m fully back on my feet,” Gail said. The formal sit-down interview over, she followed Tonya’s suggestion and showed Mr. Zeigler, the Time reporter, and Mr. Bartowski, the photographer, around the Branton. “At the moment, the Branton holds all or part of four households – mine, the household of Focus Lori Rizzari who I’m supporting in her absence, the household of Focus Ellen O’Donnell, and some of the household of Focus Geraldine Caruthers. Focus Caruthers is doing some experimentation on her own, to see if a Focus can maintain a household in two distant cities. She’s spending a lot of time in transit on the weekends.” As well as learning juice music and being Tonya’s spy. Which Gail didn’t mind. Someone as weak as Tonya was in the Dreaming needed all the help she could manage.

  The one place she wouldn’t be taking the reporters was the pool. It wouldn’t sit well with the message of ‘poor Focus households’. These days, with the four households in residence, the Branton was properly cramped and noisy.

  “Director, we’ve been hearing a lot about the threat of the Hunters from the Transform community and the law enforcement community,” Mr. Zeigler said. “Can you tell me about your personal involvement in this?”

  “Certainly,” Gail said. Perfect. This is what the world needed to know, not those absurd questions about her personal life and pre-Transformation background that dominated the sit-down interview.

  “Gail, you’ve upset a lot of people in Inferno today,” Sylvie said.

  She snorted. “Tell me.” Sylvie had actually needed to schedule a meeting with her, at 8:30 PM, to get more than ten seconds of her Focus’s time today. Gail checked and saw the next thing on her calendar was another phone call with Tonya, this one a conference call with Connie Webb and Pearl Innkeep. The topic? Focus Council restructuring.

  She did wonder where Sylvie came up with a plate of freshly cooked eggrolls. They had to be from Focus Caruthers’ cooking team.

  Sylvie sat down in Gail’s guest chair, stretched her feet out and snagged an eggroll. “They believed they could keep the household tag they put on you indefinitely. They’re also real upset about the Time Magazine reporter and photographer being in ‘their household’, they’re still complaining about crowding and about how you split off Bob’s Barn crew from the rest of Inferno, and Van, Daisy and Hank think that there’s something missing with the ‘tag a Focus’ tech and they want more time with a tagged Focus to find out what’s going on.”

  Gail didn’t want to hear about Inferno and juice experiments. “What does Abyss think about this?” Gail worried more about her own household. She had been practically ignoring her household since Pittsburgh.

  “They’re thinking you’re working yourself into the ground,” Sylvie said. “I’m thinking we may need…”

  The magic corkboard beeped.

  Gail looked and cursed. So much for her schedule.

  “The Hunters grabbed Focus Elspeth at dusk tonight,” Gail said. She called Tonya immediately after the magic corkboard beep and Gail’s quick investigation, well before the scheduled conference call time. Gail sat with her elbows on her desk and her fingers in her hair, resisting the urge to clench them in frustration.

  “Shit! How’d that happen?” Tonya said. “She had her entire merc crew drawn in, protecting her.”

  “I don’t know the details. What I know is this: five of her Transforms are in the custody of the Salt Lake City police. They can’t find Cathy and Cathy’s place is burned to the ground. What are we going to do, Tonya?”

  “I wish I knew,” Tonya said. “I wish I knew. Contact the Arms for help, I guess.” She sighed, as she was having as hard a time with the Arms as Gail, and Keaton remained utterly non-functional. “It’s good to hear your voice; it’s been a rough day. I’m glad we got a chance to talk; somewhere in your stack of notes on your desk is a cancellation note about our conference call.”

  “Thanks!” Gail said. Tonya’s friendship was one of the few real pleasures she had over the last few weeks, and it was priceless. “I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you on your election. Congratulations!” The Focus Council had appointed Tonya Council President pro-tem a few days ago. A real election this time, the first step in making the Focus Council something besides a shill of the now fallen first Focuses. Tonya wanted to bring the Focuses into the UFA legitimately, a big job, because it meant cleaning up the corruption and decay left by the first Focuses and rebuilding a functional organization out of a chaos of bickering parts.

  “Thanks so much,” Tonya said. “Finally. I swear Jill Bentlow could give the devil himself lessons in being difficult.” Tonya needed four out of the seven votes on the Council, and getting those votes had been tricky. “Which brings me to why I wanted the conference call tonight.”

  “Yes?”

  “The flip side of the Council no longer being at the beck and call of the first Focuses is that our credibility is shot. We need fresh elections for everyone.”

  Gail smiled. “I know.” She looked forward to voting out Region President Hocutt.

  Tonya sighed. “Sorry. I’ve given this spiel so many times the words are automatic. I swear I’ve talked to every Focus in the US, and half of them want the explanation three times over.”

  “You’re tired.”

  “You don’t know how tired.” Tonya let the energetic cheerfulness go, and Gail could hear the exhaustion in her voice. “I miss Polly so much.”

  The Christmas Eve attack on Pittsburgh won the Focuses freedom from P
atterson and the other first Focuses, but at the cost of many lives, including Polly Keistermann’s, the former Chairwoman of the Council. Polly had been a consummate politician and Tonya’s friend.

  Gail reached for her notepad, stuck under a teacup missing its saucer. When she attempted to move the teacup, the notepad stuck to the bottom for a moment, before falling to her desk, sending an avalanche of paperwork to the already paper covered floor of her office. “I know. I know,” Gail said, shaking her head at the utter mess in her office. It had been pristine during the sit-down interview, less than six hours ago.

  They both went silent for a moment, remembering. Then Tonya brought herself back to the present. “Anyway, all the regions will be electing new Council members at the regional meetings in mid-February. That’s not going to be a problem in some areas. Flo Ackerman and I have things under control in the East Region, and we’ve got a plan for the South and West.”

  “But?”

  “But we’ve got a problem in the Midwest. The first Focuses ran the other regions directly, so when they fell, they left a power vacuum we can fill if we organize. The problem is, Wini Adkins ran the Midwest Region by proxy. The Midwest Region still has a functioning President and organization, and it’s corrupt down to the bone.”

  Gail understood. Addie Hocutt, the Midwest Region president, had been Adkins’ sub-rosa tax collector, and she still squeezed the more gullible Focuses to line her own pockets. Esther Weiczokowski, the Council rep, gave pond scum a bad name. “So what’s the plan?”

  “Vote them out. Even without the backing of the first Focuses, they both possess enough power to keep a bunch of younger Focuses under their thumbs.” Tonya paused. “This revolt needs to come from within the Midwest Region. That means you, and as many other Focuses as we can round up who want out from under the old first Focus style dictatorship.”

  “Me? Tonya, I’m snowed under by Network issues, and I don’t have time to lead a revolt.” Her voice lowered. “I can’t believe Claunch ran the Network by herself.”