As punishment for my big flinch, Bass injected me with one of her trick chemicals and showed me her true capabilities. “You were always curious about how I broke people. Learn.” Along with the pain came hallucinations, one after the other. My body dead and rotting in a sewer. My mind broken by the juice as I slowly ate my friends. The white witch, Focus Shirley Patterson, dressed as a magician, ceremoniously entering my mind and beginning to gnaw on my brain. Howling loss as I clung to an electrical wire twenty feet above fifty thousand juice zombies howling for my flesh. Hank succumbing to insanity and plucking out his eyes. The images and attendant emotions didn’t stop, each one sapping more of my will and my sanity. Time jumped around me and I lost track of how much time passed.
“Please, stop,” I said. I had been insane, years before, after going through juice withdrawal. Although I hid this fear deep inside me, the fear of returning to the land of the insane never left. “Please. What do you want? Stop!”
Bass let me beg, and although I no longer saw her, I felt her inject me again. Crow-like panic flooded through me, the heart-racing terror of being unable to do anything. I experienced the loss of self along with the loss of self-control as I fell further and further into the panic.
I screamed and screamed and screamed.
“Accept my tag,” Bass said. “Accept my tag and I’ll stop.”
I stalled by continuing to scream. With what little of my mind remained I expected Keaton to step in and stop this insanity. This went against the deepest Arm instinct I knew, you never forced a tag on an Arm when you hadn’t earned the right to do so. Another betrayal. A tag represented dominance, and unearned dominance wasn’t dominance at all. Keaton had given me to Bass to play with, not to tag.
“Never.”
Another injection. More pain, pain beyond what I imagined possible for my body to feel, made worse by Bass’s juice trick to amplify the pain the chemical caused. I wanted to rip my body off my soul, the only way to end the pain. Only, now, I couldn’t move.
“Accept my tag.”
Keaton didn’t step in.
I didn’t accept Bass’s tag.
Another injection, and another. Somewhere around the sixth injection, as I hallucinated dismembering myself, I broke and accepted Bass’s tag.
If I thought Bass’s tag was foul to hold, being subject to her tag proved far worse. When my eyes cleared from her drugs, what I saw around me was a world I needed to destroy. When I saw a person, I saw someone to torture. Something to torture. I hungered for the pain of others.
I became my beast.
“Carol, you’re more than mine, you’re me,” Bass said. The words, and even the tone, mostly, carried the sudden affection of a superior Arm for a newly tagged subordinate, but I heard the lie. She no more cared for me than she did before she tagged me, and somehow her unearned tag on me didn’t work properly on her. “We need to torture. Torture is our way, our destiny. You’ll torture for a minimum of an hour a day, and the only way you’ll live is through the pain of the others who so rightly need to be tortured. That’s an order. I’m bringing you back to your true self. You’ll be whole again, not some mangled excuse for a predator, taking your hostilities out on yourself instead of your prey. You won’t ever stop, and you will enjoy every moment of the torture you need so much.”
As soon as I moved back to Chicago, my basement would be open for business.
Still trapped in the bunny outfit, I served everyone dinner, and later, late dinner. The entire time I had to fight the urge to rip the outfit off, stomp the fluffy cottontail into oblivion, and then kill anything and everything that moved. I should have been happy in my obedience, but Bass’s tag, so foully gained, didn’t act like a normal Arm tag. I felt no deference to her, nor humbled, and my subservience remained unenforced. If I thought I had a chance to flip the dominance back on her, I would do so in an instant. All of this showed the folly of an improperly forced tag.
Bass didn’t care. Whenever her eyes turned to me, she smiled, enjoying her possession and reveling in my pain. Rayburn, though, barely kept her gorge down. Something unnatural and wrong had happened to me, and the fear ate at her.
Keaton? Keaton watched me eat my hot anger with her mocking smile, and otherwise didn’t acknowledge my existence.
No one talked about the Focus in the basement while I steamed, simpered and served. The Focus in the basement remained under heavy discipline, and had an older feel, meaning she wasn’t Wendy Mann, Gail’s age as a Focus. My sense of denial, still addled by Bass’s torture drugs, raved with illogic. For all I knew, that was Tonya down there. In my current state, amid the creak of the ropes, the rattle of shackles, and the moans of the prisoners, I would believe anything.
After late dinner, Keaton gathered Bass, Rayburn and me into the living room. Bass sat in the place of honor on the end of the couch with a smug smile aimed at me and Rayburn took the ottoman. Me, I stood and served beverages and Arm food. The two older student Arms did kitchen duty, both competent at their work. They didn’t miss a word of the living room conversation. After I served a plate of smoked duck, Keaton stared down the chatter, studied each of us, with a special sneer of contempt for me.
“You two,” she nodded at Bass and at me. “You’ve both been exploring different paths for the Arms. Bass proposes a path of dominance, where the Arms use our power and predatory nature to prey upon the rest of the world. Bunny here proposes we should quake in fear because of the advancing tide of Transform Sickness, and let our fear force us into deeper and ever yet more foolhardy alliances” read: tags “with other Major Transforms.
“In any case, I’ve made my decision. We’ve got the power, and we’re going to use it.” It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about power, who has it and who doesn’t. Bass’s twisted ideology boiled down into one pithy sentence.
“Ma’am, I…”
“Shut the fuck up. You had your chance,” Keaton said. My humbling was no surprise reaction in response to the extra tags I wore. She had planned this long before my arrival, including the bunny outfit for my humiliation if I came up with some way to avoid her offered challenge. The Focus in the basement took on new significance. The Focus knew me, and her fear grew every time Keaton cut me off or further humiliated me.
“Now, as I was saying, all the Arms. That means Haggerty as well as you, Hancock, and all the Arms you control. Before we gain the freedom to rampage wherever we want, we need to deal with some obstacles. Such as the Focuses.”
Fear turned to horror at the idea of going after the Focuses. I wouldn’t, I couldn’t!
The mere thought of disobedience brought the walls close in on me, bars on cages, hot breath on my neck. Prey in a roomful of starving hyenas. I could no longer speak my objections.
Keaton smiled at my reaction. “The first Focuses are weaker than they pretend to be. Their most powerful juice tricks are hidebound old artifices we will defeat with ease. We’ll take control of them one by one, and use the power and information we gain to use on the next. The first Focuses control the Council, the Council controls the rest of the Focuses. I’ve already got Biggioni. We’ll get them all.”
Taking the first Focuses one at a time was strategic insanity. By the fourth or fifth, they would all go gypsy or set up to defeat us with traps and the government’s soldiers. You can’t keep shit like this secret, not with so many Focuses able to use the Dreaming.
Keaton read me and laughed, loud enough to elicit sympathetic gasps of terror from at least one basement victim. “We’re far stronger than we used to be, Hancock, and the Focuses haven’t kept up. You’re thinking like it’s 1966 and we need to take their shit because they own us. Knowing we’re coming will just sweeten the taste of their defeat.”
My boss had gone mad with arrogance, spoon-fed to her by Bass. When Keaton stumbled, Bass would take the Arm leadership away the same illegitimate way she took control of me.
Bass motioned me to come over and serve her one of Rayburn’s broth and vi
tamin-based beverage concoctions, and I did so. The reek of lust surrounded her like the stench of an outhouse. “We don’t need to kill them, Hancock,” Keaton said. “You’ve been listening to that idiot Haggerty for far too long. To take them for slaves, or to get the information you need, just torture them. Maiming works well, too. Some of those first Focuses respond well if you do gruesome permanent damage to their favorites.” Bass licked her lips. “Flo, why don’t you bring our guest upstairs.”
Why the fuck was Rayburn going along with this? She had never developed any notable sadism, and this kind of thing didn’t arouse her more than moderately, similar to the proper Arm thrill of the hunt. She trusted Keaton, though. If Keaton said this was the way to go, Rayburn wouldn’t hold back.
Keaton’s captive Focus was Denise Pitre, the first Focus who supported Tommy Bates’ wife. She was known as a good woman, one who wouldn’t have anything to do with the depraved evil of the ruling first Focuses. The ruling first Focuses considered her pathetic and weak, and had left her out of the Quarantine breakout planning. She remained apolitical, far from any of the reins of power.
She was a first Focus, though.
She didn’t kick and scream, or faint, or even refuse to move, as Rayburn led her upstairs. She walked sedately to her doom, faltering only when a confined Monster roared and charged at her. The Monster stopped with a yelp when it reached the end of its chain, and the inward-spiked collar I knew Keaton was so fond of bit. The Monster mewled in agony for hours from its new self-inflicted wounds.
I had never met Pitre, but I had made a point years ago of obtaining pictures of all the significant Focuses and memorizing faces and facts. She was a kind looking woman, with dark brown hair and deep eyes, one of the more naturally beautiful Focuses. When Rayburn brought her up from the basement, she wore shackles on her wrists and ankles, her clothing was torn and stained, and her wise eyes appeared hollow. Even so, she stood with her back straight, not in the slightest bit broken.
Interesting. Pitre tougher than Biggioni? Pitre’s strength called into play a bunch of assumptions of mine regarding the first Focuses, but her unbroken firmness didn’t bother Keaton.
“Good afternoon, Focus Pitre,” Keaton said, mocking. “Focus Pitre is a pleasant woman who loves her people. She loves her people so much that she can’t stand to see anything happen to them. Why, she even loves them so much that when she saw them tortured, one after the other, she couldn’t stand their pain and she offered herself in their place. Isn’t that right, Focus Pitre?”
“You can’t get away with this,” Pitre said. She prayed to God for salvation, and she hoped with all her heart I would find a way to save her.
Keaton laughed at Pitre’s defiance and hope. As she laughed, she turned her predator effect on. The aura of Keaton’s hunger swept over the room. Pitre sneered. She had experienced far worse.
Bass picked up Keaton’s predator effect and echoed it. Rayburn did the same. Keaton didn’t have time for more than a quick glare at me before I echoed Keaton’s predator myself, unable to disobey a direct order from my true boss. Pitre’s hope in me was badly misplaced.
The combined Arm predator echoed raw power through me. I shivered with the power, and the emotions carried along with the power. All my hunting and predatory instincts came raging to the fore, as out of my control as the predator effect. I joined with Bass and Rayburn, wild hyenas straining at our master’s leash.
I gloried in the power display, unable to resist. My powerful aura forced one of the two student Arms out of the link, terrified of me. I memorized the face of the other student Arm, as, normally, only senior Major Transforms were able to cope with the full power of my predator.
Pitre’s defiance vanished the instant I joined my predator to Keaton’s. She screamed and fell to the floor, caught by her own terror. Keaton laughed. I did, too, and felt the heat of lust rising in me. I snarled at the prey in front of me, and wished Keaton would let me loose to savage the victim and revel in her pain.
“Why Denise,” Keaton said, “you seem to have come into a little trouble. Tell me, are you ready to give us that information now?”
That desperate Focus only covered her head with her arms and screamed. “Stop! Make it stop!”
Keaton did no such thing.
We played with Focus Pitre all night long. Keaton first wanted the little things, the personal, secret things giving her access to Pitre’s mind and heart. Keaton pried them out, one after another, and with every one, destroyed a piece of the Focus. Keaton played our predator effect, sometimes too faint to metasense, sometimes so overwhelming we took Focus Pitre to the brink of insanity.
I shivered with lust, lost in the emotions conjured up by Bass’s tag and Keaton’s hunger. I was the master at this sort of manipulation, better even than Keaton, and I wanted to take the Focus apart the proper way. Keaton held the leash on my beast tight, though, and she was competent enough.
Focus Pitre’s last remnant of resistance didn’t collapse until just before dawn. “Please,” she said, as she crawled sobbing on the floor. She no longer knew herself and what she whispered for, except relief from the misery.
“You’re mine,” Keaton whispered, in that closed room so saturated with the hot stench of lust. The lust had even taken Rayburn.
“Yes,” the Focus said. “I’m yours. Please, whatever you want. Anything. I’m yours.” Oh, those magic words. This, this was the way you tagged an enemy.
The juice moved.
Only now would Pitre tell us all she knew of the first Focuses.
And what she told us about first Focus Fingleman, the long-time supposed ally of the Arms, was enough to curdle all our souls. Enough to make me wonder if Keaton’s way was better than my chosen path.
Not enough to make me reconsider my desire to kill Bass, though.
I sat on the floor and leaned against Keaton’s legs, still lethargic after the intensity and release of the Focus-breaking. The mid-morning light wafted over both of us, barely warm. Rayburn entertained the Focus downstairs, teaching her some basic Arm courtesies. Bass had retreated to the basement as well, evoking screams from one of the heartier prisoners, loud enough to test Keaton’s soundproofing. In a little while, they would all be back again for another round of questioning. To my senses, Keaton’s foul den had shrunk to the size of a closet, the polluted detritus of lust and pain stacked sideways upon themselves, always behind my back, always just out of sight, always ready to jump me.
Keaton rubbed my hair and I flinched, still twitchy. She scratched lazily behind my ears. I wondered, morosely, whether if she did that enough, the psychological effects would cause me to grow ears like a dog.
“Are you going to give me any trouble about orders, Hancock?” Keaton said, lethargic herself.
“Not unless you tell me to kiss and make up with Fingleman,” I said. The bitch had not only spied on us for years, she had been the one who sold us out to Wandering Shade. Repeatedly. Keaton snorted. “Ma’am, please don’t go after the firsts piecemeal. You won’t be able to take Patterson or Fingleman if you do so.” My advice meant nothing to Keaton.
The stroking hand stopped, and she held my hair in a tight grip. “I’m still not happy with your level of cooperation.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry. You know I always want to serve you to the best of my abilities, but this is a strategic disaster. Please, ma’am.”
“Shut up, asshole,” Keaton said, hard-edged and lethargy gone. “I know your position and I’ve made my decision. It’s time for you to shut the fuck up and follow orders.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Instincts pulled me closer toward her, hoping to appease her anger with my humble presence. I rubbed my cheek against her thigh. I’m yours, love me, indulge me. I’m not dropping your tag. I’ll follow your orders.
Hopeless.
“I gave you plenty of room since the Focuses betrayed us so you can work on your projects. You can’t expect to get things right every time.”
; “Ma’am.”
“I’ve got a shitload of work for you, and you’re not going to have any time to spare for your personal projects. You’re back to working full time for me. If Haggerty objects, either take back your rightful position over her or die trying.” Fuck. “So I ask you again, are you going to give me any trouble about orders?”
“No, ma’am. I’m yours. I follow orders.”
“Good. Now pay attention,” Keaton said. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”
Something Arm Egregious and Evil
“Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell.” – Aldous Huxley
Gilgamesh: October 19, 1972
“I can’t find her either,” Gilgamesh said. His hands shook and he fought off the urge to find somewhere to hide. He couldn’t remember not being able to find Tiamat in the flow, not since he had mastered pheromone flow scrying. “I don’t…”
“Something happened,” Gail said, interrupting him. He tensed and forced himself to relax. “I couldn’t find her in the Dreaming, and, well, I didn’t think that was possible for someone I’m linked to.” Gail had spent four hours last night and early this morning in her Dreaming box, after awakening from sleep having dreamt about Carol in agony.
They met in his room, even more cluttered than Gail’s. Somehow sleeping with boxes of surplus family items, extra furniture and the like made the place homier. He had spent too much time as a Crow to appreciate mattresses; for too many years mattresses came from dumps and were most often beyond disgusting. Fresh linens wadded into a nest worked better for him, and in his cluttered room he could vary where he slept every night. There were just so many possibilities.
He enjoyed Gail’s response to his three-dimensional maze of a room. She loved it. They were both wadded together, Gail nestled with her head on Gilgamesh’s shoulder, under a child’s desk about ten feet as the Crow crawled from the door to the room. Gail spent more time touching him, and more time dampening her sexual responses to him with her charisma. He expected Gail would be jealous of the time he spent with her household women, as that had been Lori’s response to Sky’s dalliances (and why Gilgamesh had never dallied with any of Lori’s women), but Gail not only wasn’t jealous, she encouraged him. ‘Just don’t break too many hearts,’ had been her only warning. Instead of a Focus foible, objections to sleeping with the household women had proven to be a Lori foible.
Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) Page 22