All Beasts Together (The Commander) Read online

  All Beasts Together

  Book Three of “The Commander”

  Randall Allen Farmer

  Copyright © 2012, 2013 by Randall Allen Farmer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, in any form. This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and products depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  All Beasts Together

  Book Three of “The Commander”

  All you beasts of the field, come together for your meat, even all you beasts of the wood.

  His watchmen are blind, they are all without knowledge;

  they are all dogs without tongues, unable to make a sound; stretched out dreaming, loving sleep.

  - Isaiah 56: 9-10 (Bible in Basic English)

  Part 1

  The Lonely Road

  This then is life.

  Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.

  How Curious! How real!

  Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.

  - Walt Whitman

  Chapter 1

  Her choice was ‘be a bitch’ or ‘be enslaved by your own household’. If you had a choice, which would you have chosen?

  “Inventing Our Future”

  Gilgamesh: September 8, 1967

  “In, in, in,” Sinclair said.

  Night surrounded Gilgamesh in the culvert, murmuring madness. “Shadow,” he whispered back. “Must go…” He needed to run and he could barely walk. There, up the slope at the edge of the culvert, he spotted Sinclair’s pickup, a beat up ’61 Chevy. He shook his head, trying to quiet the rampage inside. What surfaced out of his mental chaos was the overwhelming urge to escape Philadelphia and its horrors, and the remnant of hope that if he got to Shadow, he would be safe.

  Gilgamesh felt Sinclair’s arms tighten around his shoulders, urging him to stand. “I’m glad I found you. Shadow said you survived. Up we go.” Gilgamesh followed Sinclair’s lead and let the other Crow load him into the pickup, where he curled up, half on the floor and half on the ripped passenger seat. He used his belongings, the Philadelphia notes, as his pillow. Sinclair covered him with a blanket.

  Five hours passed in the rumbling truck, while the sun rose from the bare hints of dawn to the brilliant illumination of a clear fall morning. Sinclair wouldn’t go anywhere near the freeways and wouldn’t go faster than forty-five miles an hour. He complained about the traffic, cursing the entire way. Normally he left his truck in a lot by the Hoboken Path station, or so he said, but he, thankfully, decided Gilgamesh was in no shape for any subway rides and drove him into Manhattan.

  Shadow’s stationery store was well north of midtown, up just past 83rd street, in a shabby, quiet neighborhood filled with small shops and old brownstones. The girl behind the counter looked up from her magazine and raced to help Sinclair with Gilgamesh when they came to the door. A Crow, who had to be Shadow, came rushing down the main aisle of the store to help as well, the wooden floor creaking as he walked. The three of them bundled Gilgamesh away from the gaze of two mildly curious customers. Gilgamesh had stopped thinking hours ago, and let the sensation of continued life wash over him.

  Shadow’s store was small, long and narrow, with two aisles that ran the length of the customer area, lined with shelves displaying paper, pens and stationery. The small windows at the end let in little light and the shop was comfortably dim. The door at the far end of the store led them to a small storage area, filled high with boxes of pens and paper. A door on the left led to a small bathroom. Beyond the bathroom door, a door led to a set of stairs. Hanging from the ceiling over the landing was an intricate and beautiful piece of abstract dross artwork. Gilgamesh had only heard about dross artwork – artwork made of dross by a Crow – second hand. Perhaps he would appreciate the art better another day. The thoughts in his mind raced, unable to slow down or make any sense.

  “There, there,” Shadow said, after he and Sinclair led Gilgamesh up the stairs and laid him down on a couch in Shadow’s office. Shadow was a calm and contained man, as youthful as all Crows, with dark hair, an olive complexion, and a comforting presence, just as all the other Philadelphia Crows had said. “Sleep, rest. You’re stressed and wounded. There’s dross for you. Whatever you…”

  Shadow’s calming voice faded into the beyond as Gilgamesh finally relaxed, lost himself and passed out.

  Enkidu: September 8, 1967

  “We lost, Master,” Enkidu said. He knelt on the ground, head bowed. His Master had caught up with him near Cobb’s Creek, west of Philadelphia, where they now found privacy among the beeches by the creek. His wounds from the fight with the Arm still ached. The pack Gals continued their keening cries, mourning Grendel’s death. “I failed.” Even the crisp smell of Pennsylvania autumn couldn’t overcome the reek of blood and despair.

  “You didn’t fight to the death! You had her on the ropes!” Wandering Shade said. He was a lean man with brown hair; he wore the uniform of a Philadelphia police officer and an expression of twisted anger. “I don’t understand you at all.” He paced among the trees, beating an oval path through the witch hazel and woodsorrel that flourished under the beeches. Chipmunks had been scrabbling in the brush before Wandering Shade arrived, but they were gone now.

  Enkidu searched his mind and his instincts. “It wasn’t my responsibility to fight to the death,” he said, after much thought.

  “The Law says otherwise,” Wandering Shade said. “My Law!”

  Enkidu shivered at his Master’s incomprehension. “Master, it doesn’t.” Wandering Shade didn’t answer. “Master, you’re above the Law. You give us the Law. But the Law is itself, beyond truth and understanding.”

  “What have I done?” Wandering Shade said, his voice barely audible through the ongoing cries of mourning. “Was this all wrong?” He sat down on the ground beside Enkidu and put his head in his hands. The top of his head barely came up to Enkidu’s shoulders. “I’m afraid you’re right, Enkidu. The Law is itself. I can touch the edges of the Law, but because I am what I am, the Law can’t guide me.”

  The Wandering Shade was a Transform, a Major Transform, but also a mystery; some different thing, perhaps something new or perhaps something hidden.

  “What shall I do, Master?” Enkidu asked. His deep voice rumbled low in his broad chest. “I could hunt down those Arms. Attack them again. It should be easier now that they’ve gone their separate ways.”

  Wandering Shade sighed, half in disgust. “All you’d do is get yourself killed. You were lucky that Grendel had already wounded the Arm. Otherwise you’d be dead, too.” His Master shook his head. “We fought them and they won. The contest is settled. We need to move on to other matters.”

  “But Master, I…” The contest didn’t feel settled to Enkidu. The memory ate at him from inside, demanding his attention. The past and the future all held threads in the same responsibility: leaving the fight, to fight another day. He left the fight and satisfied one part of that responsibility. Now he needed to complete the responsibility and ‘fight another day’.

  Wandering Shade interrupted him, not letting him finish. “Go home. Take the pack Gals with you.” His Master waved his hands in exasperation at the distraught Gals. “We’re done here. I’m done here.”

  Sorrow and sadness filled his Master’s voice. “Master? Are you abandoning us?”

  Wandering Shade sighed. “I don’t know.” He paused and rubbed his temples. “My path led us to this failure. I need to meditate on it and figure out why, what the flaw was in my plans. Texas calls.”

  “Texas, Master?”


  “Out west of San Antonio is a land of hot dry rocky hills, scrublands of salt cedar and mesquite, good for nothing but snakes. There’s solitude and beauty in those rocky hills. I may not return.”

  “Master?” In the blink of an eye, Wandering Shade vanished. One second he sat beside Enkidu, the next second he was gone.

  Enkidu joined the Gals in a roar of agony and loss. All of them but Cleo skittered away from Enkidu’s grief. Grendel might have been a fool, but he had been the elder Hunter and far more skilled at keeping the pack Gals in line. He would need to chain them together to keep them from running.

  He must get better. To meet his responsibility he had to master the skills necessary to keep the pack together, or he would lose them as well. He stood and looked over the pack where they clustered by the small creek; as he gazed at them they all skittered away farther. All except Cleo, who strode toward him.

  “What’s to become of me?” Cleo asked. She was a dragon-formed monster on two feet, with glistening scales and vicious two-inch claws. She was the most intelligent and most human of them, but she mourned Grendel as much as the rest. Her reptilian eyes could not cry, but she had scratched her face in the pain of her loss and blood ran down her cheeks like tears. “The rest of them are too addled to remember Grendel past their next draw, but I will.”

  Cleo was a mystery. No other Gals were so smart or so talkative. In the end, she had been smarter than Grendel. Enkidu found her daunting.

  “I’ll give you a choice,” Enkidu said. He leaned forward, wolf-man style, into her personal space. “If you want, I’ll give you a clean death. Or you can choose to be my Gal.”

  “How can I choose? Grendel made the choice for me, months ago,” she said, not backing down.

  “Your link to Grendel was through the Law,” Enkidu said. “I can undo that and bind you to me through the Law just as easily.”

  Cleo blinked her reptilian eyes and stepped back. “Can you?” Enkidu nodded thoughtfully in answer to her question. “If you can do that, then yes, I’ll be yours.” She bowed to him, formal. “I will be yours, under the Law.”

  “I can’t bind you yet, but in a week, when your juice gets too large for you, I promise I’ll make you mine,” Enkidu said. “Until then, do you think you can help me corral the Gals?”

  “Yes, master,” she said. Her voice had an edge of defiance in it, but also the barest beginnings of respect.

  Enkidu suspected the week would be very long.

  Enkidu: September 18, 1967

  Enkidu stood and stretched, fingers scraping the low ceiling. Sex and juice. Marcie, the latest of Grendel’s Gals to go over, gazed up at him in wonder. “Master! I…I’m not afraid of you anymore!”

  He smiled at his success. He had taken her down, a little over the line into withdrawal, and driven the Law into her deeper than it had been before. The change showed in her eyes: intelligence and love.

  She would stay with him by choice now, and he wouldn’t have to keep her chained. Another success. Now if she would just lose the Grendel-scales, everything would be fine. He liked his Gals so much better when they had fur.

  Three days ago, they had commandeered a semi-truck outside of Harrisburg. He and Cleo took turns driving and they had made their way back to Illinois. After ditching the truck, they found an abandoned flooded-out farmhouse on the Kishwaukee River, north of DeKalb, and made it their new home.

  Enkidu heard a commotion up top. He unchained Marcie and led her up the stairs from the basement, into the kitchen and the bright light of the afternoon sun streaming through the windows, the standard promotion for a Gal who no longer needed chaining. He found Cleo on her knees next to the sink, terrified, in front of a man he didn’t recognize. A lawman with no scent.

  “Master?”

  “Yes, Enkidu, it is I,” the man said. He turned to Enkidu; his Master looked and felt different. Today he stood just over six feet, his face tanned and chiseled. “It’s time to see.”

  The man dropped his metasense protections and revealed himself and his glow. Enkidu’s knees hit the ground with a loud bang. “Master!” Marcie fled the kitchen with a scrambling of claws on linoleum, desperate to be as far away from the Master’s attention as possible.

  Enkidu couldn’t turn his metasense away from Wandering Shade. His glow shined like a beacon, brilliant and hypnotic. His Master had become the Law, a Law far greater than Enkidu held. The Law illuminated his Master’s glow, deeper and more complex than anything Enkidu had metasensed before.

  Enkidu fought terror, for he knew from his own experience what each of those lines and bands in his Master’s glow meant: horrible agony, a trip into withdrawal. That was how you placed the Law; you took a person’s juice away, edging them to the terrible border of withdrawal, then in the scars of withdrawal wrote the Law into their glow. This was how Enkidu had received the Law, and this was how his Gals received it from him, as they were taken all the way from the edge of Monster and too much juice down down down to no juice at all, the edge of withdrawal. His Master did this to himself. The thought was both awesome and horrifying.

  And terrifying. All things cost, and the Law was no different, despite its benefits. Because of the Law, Enkidu had lost his wild animal abandon, the passion driving him away from humanity. The most chilling loss Enkidu discovered was that he had forgotten the concept of money. Even now, after weeks relearning it, he still struggled with the concept.

  The Law had weakened the wild part of him, but America was no jungle. The Law allowed him to retain his understanding of modern society, and Enkidu knew he was far more powerful as a whole because of the Law.

  What had his Master lost?

  “I am now the Law,” Wandering Shade said. The afternoon sun illuminated his face like the glory of an angel. “Now I understand. Now I share your responsibility. I am now perfection incarnate and I finally know the way forward: my flocks of Beasts, the Hunters and the others, are going to multiply until we are strong enough to fight the Transform leaders. Then we shall fight, and then we shall win. All shall have the Law and be content. All who take on the Law shall be allies. All who spurn the Law shall be our enemies.”

  His words were formal and hummed with power. Enkidu smiled.

  “I have a present for you, Enkidu, as an example of my power,” the Wandering Shade said. “I brought this nameless wretch of a Beast Man all the way back to near humanity with but one potent Legalization. I have named him Horace.”

  His Master’s tone implied an in-joke, but Enkidu didn’t understand. A bipedal armored bear appeared beside his Master, between the pantry and the non-functioning stove. The Beast hadn’t been there a second before.

  Wandering Shade had indeed become all-powerful.

  “I am Horace, and I am to be your trainee,” the bear said, in Law-driven formality. He bowed to Enkidu. “I abase myself to you, and humble myself to you, so that you can train me well.” Horace, like Grendel, was far older and stronger as a Beast-Man than Enkidu, but he had lost his mind in the process. Now, under the Law, he had regained enough mind to be able to speak, and kept much of his former strength.

  “I accept the responsibility,” Enkidu said, guided by the Law.

  Things were looking up, he decided.

  Gilgamesh: September 20, 1967

  Gilgamesh got up in the morning refreshed, without pain, and nearly full up on dross. He didn’t remember where he was for several heartbeats, until the memories all came flooding back to him. If he could trust his memories, this was Shadow’s spare room, in Shadow’s apartment above his stationery shop. Gilgamesh had nested here for an unknown number of days, resting and recovering from his panic and injuries. He had left the room only to go to the bathroom across the hallway. In the beginning, he had crawled to the bathroom at night, panicked even by the idea of leaving his tiny sanctuary. In his time here, he hadn’t had to deal with anyone at all.

  He poked his head into the hallway and smelled bacon, eggs, orange juice and toast. On the opposi
te wall was an oval mirror ringed in tarnished brass. Below hung a fake birdbath filled with tiny ceramic robins. Gilgamesh looked at his reflection and barely recognized himself: thin, emaciated and far too youthful for his own comfort.

  “Come on over here,” Shadow said, calmingly cheerful, from the dinette attached to his tiny kitchenette. Gilgamesh startled for only a second before he padded down the hall, hungry.

  “Have some breakfast,” Shadow said, placing a plate at the seat nearest Gilgamesh. Shadow sat at the other seat at the small two-person table. “Dig in. I had an inkling you might come out today.”

  “Thank you,” Gilgamesh said, and sat. He ate a rasher of bacon and sipped from a cat-inscribed glass of orange juice.

  “How much do you remember?” Shadow asked. Gilgamesh shrugged. “Do you remember your name? Do you remember you’re a Crow?”

  Gilgamesh nodded. He ate some scrambled eggs and nibbled on a slice of toast. “I remember Philadelphia,” he said. Shadow sat up straighter. “I remember the attack by the two Beast Men. I remember Wire and Tolstoy’s deaths. I don’t remember many details.”

  “I’m glad you remember. Crows often forget everything after such a horrific set of experiences.”

  “Even that they were Crows?” Gilgamesh asked.

  Shadow nodded.

  He remembered Shadow’s meals, large ones, left waiting by his door after Shadow had gone to bed at night. He didn’t understand his current hunger.

  “Stressed Crows don’t eat much,” Shadow said, easily picking Gilgamesh’s question out of his mind. Typical senior Crow behavior, but to Gilgamesh’s surprise, the mind-reading no longer bothered him. “Panicked Crows don’t eat anything, even when they are suffering from grievous wounds.”

  Gilgamesh flashed back to Enkidu’s initial attack. He had slashed Gilgamesh’s hamstrings. He stopped eating for a moment and felt the backs of his thighs. They were still tender to the touch, bloated and swollen.