All Beasts Together (The Commander) Read online

  The day I graduated from my apprenticeship had been a glorious day filled with optimism and hope. I settled in Chicago and started to make the city mine. I hunted. I earned money the old-fashioned way: I took it. I worked on building an organization, playing to my recruiting and organizational strengths. Life was peachy.

  Then I went and found this easy kill and my life went back into its usual spin cycle…

  When reason finally clawed its way back to the surface of my juice-addled mind, I noticed the warm edge of an orgasm just completed. Long and lingering, such a perfect way to wake up and perfectly rare since I had to hunt for a partner after a kill.

  Contrariwise, I was burning juice to stay alive. My throat had been cut and I wasn’t breathing. Both of my breasts had been torn off. My left shoulder had been pulled out of its socket, shredded down to the bone. Last, something was badly wrong with my abdomen.

  These two realizations didn’t quite make simultaneous sense. After a moment of turgid thought distracted by what appeared to be sexual pleasure, I realized I lay stripped naked, flat on my back, and I was being raped by well over three hundred pounds of Chimera. His foot plus of pummeling pistoning steel hard cock punctured through every organ in its path. As he stroked, the Chimera roared something about killing the Arm who had killed his harem. Clearly not a sixty-minute man, if you catch my drift. He was huge, at least seven feet tall, and half again as broad across the shoulders as any normal human. Lying on top of me he had to hunch his massive shoulders and curl his back to bring his face anywhere near mine.

  After a few more piston thrusts his dark, animal eyes met mine, his brown and white muzzle only inches from my face. He pulled back his lips in a cruel smile to show the gobbets of red flesh hanging from his pointed teeth. My red flesh. His hot fetid breath blew into my face as he roared “Die! Die! Die!”…and he thrust again.

  Damn, this hurt! Even through my high juice, the thrust of his impossible steel cock ripped agony as it tore through my innards. The beast paused while still on top of me and in me, his eyes glazed and he shivered, in the grip of some pleasure not quite an orgasm.

  Memories from a few minutes earlier came surfacing, the hazy time immediately post kill when reason fled and I lost myself in the grip of sensation and desire. I remembered the Chimera, dressed in a heavy concealing cloak, coming into the apartment. I remembered the Chimera speaking. “She was just about to go Monster and you took her,” he said. “She was mine! You did it again, you fucking Arm!” And: “I’ll get juice out of you one way or another, you Lawless Beast.”

  I finally came to enough to put everything together. Yes, back during my apprenticeship with Keaton, we had found and killed the harem of this prick and his buddy outside of Memphis, in a place we called Monster Arms. Later, these same two Chimeras found us in Philadelphia. We fought one of them, Mr. Lizard, but he and his new harem got away. Later, on my graduation day, these two fiends jumped Keaton in her lair. I hadn’t gotten the whole story from her – fancy that – but I did know Mr. Lizard had gone to the great Monster harem in the sky and his werewolf buddy rapist escaped, severely wounded.

  Finally, the shock congealed and my mind and my will came roaring back.

  What the hell was I doing?

  This motherfucking Chimera was taking me apart the long way and I lay here on the floor asking for it. What the fuck had I been thinking? Except, well, there hadn’t been any thinking involved, or I wouldn’t just be lying here. I knew something about snuff sex but I was on the wrong end!

  Fuck. I was pinned, both by his weight and by his damned oversized penis stuck up somewhere in intestine-land. Yes, I could go for minutes without breathing, perhaps a half hour or more if my juice held out so I didn’t die from lactic acidosis. He had ripped through at least one of my jugulars, but I had already healed them closed. Arms are tough. Worse, the glaze in the damned Chimera’s eyes looked fucking familiar. Something was wrong with his juice, but I couldn’t quite tell what.

  Oh. That was my juice inside this male version of an Arm.

  Now that wasn’t fair!

  Quickly, burning even more juice as I did so, I reached for the gun at my waist. No gun. Dimly, I remembered the Chimera taking away my pistol and throwing it across the room. I burned hotter and reached farther down for the knife I wore on my thigh. Shreds of my skirt covered the sheath, and the knife remained, albeit blood-slippery. I tore through the fabric to my knife and pulled it loose. I stabbed him right under the navel and pulled up as he thrust yet again, my teeth clenched in fury as he buried his fangs in my right shoulder.

  The Chimera bucked, roared and pulled away. I backhanded his left arm with my knife with all the leverage I had available and, impossibly lucky, severed clean through the joint in his wrist. His hand remained attached by a few threads of flesh, and those parted as he threw his arm wide for balance. The hand bounced off the wall to land on the floor behind me.

  I followed him as he scrabbled away and plunged my knife back into his midsection, through his stomach and towards his heart. Die, damn it! I needed a longer knife. Six inches wouldn’t, um, cut it in this situation. I needed to do far more damage than this.

  The Chimera’s blood poured over me to join the red of my own blood. He roared again and struck me, throwing me through the air to land against the opposite wall. The motherfucker was damned strong.

  I tried to get my legs underneath me to land on my feet, but my legs wouldn’t hold and I fell to the floor. The Chimera backed against the other wall with a gush of blood and he too fell to the floor. The bed fell apart as he clipped the rickety thing on the way by, and my kill bounced off the mattress toward me. The Chimera’s severed hand danced on its own in the middle of the floor, insanely twitching. I hoped the fucker was dying. I hoped like hell he couldn’t heal like an Arm.

  Through the blood of combat I saw the Chimera wore a layer of piebald brown and white fur, had a muzzle on his face and short wide fingers with claws at the ends. A twisted black fury roared through me. I wanted to torture him, make him suffer pain beyond what he ever imagined. I would sacrifice one of my own fingers simply to hear him scream.

  I would have given anything right then to scream myself, but with my throat cut even breathing wasn’t on the schedule. Leaning against the wall in a pile of shattered plaster kittens and fallen shelving, unable to stand, I envisioned his death. My pistol lay only ten feet away but underneath the dresser on my left. I only had one knife; much as I wanted to throw it at him, I didn’t dare lose my only weapon.

  Somehow, I would make this bastard pay. He was a juice user, a predator like me, and like me he preyed on and took juice from other Transforms. He had my juice now, and I wanted my damned juice back!

  His furry left foot extended only inches from where my right foot twitched from muscle spasms.

  Close enough.

  I knew I attempted something dangerous. I knew, from personal experience with a Monster kill, the dangers of strange juice. I was so profoundly angry I didn’t care (and, to long time readers of my memoirs, this should not surprise). I extended a toe, reached out to his foot and pulled. Damn the consequences! Full speed ahead!

  My draw didn’t work. I couldn’t quite grab hold of his juice. Like mist or water his juice kept slipping through my metaphorical fingers.

  He felt me, though. His eyes went wide. For a moment he stopped breathing. I smiled a tight smile of anger and kept pulling.

  I started to get some. Not much. Minute, tiny quantities, like the damp on my hands after passing through a mist. But something. The Chimera growled and thrashed, all he had in him right then.

  My skin began to crawl as I drew. Monster juice. Fuck. I hurt myself more than I hurt him! I stopped.

  The Chimera stopped roaring and he watched me warily through those animal eyes. Did he think Arms were only able to fight and fuck? He had best not make that complaint, though: bleeding as he was, the creature was still turned on. He had just taken juice, my juice, and his body res
ponded whether he wanted it to or not, ammunition I could use.

  I had only one weapon left to use against the Chimera: words. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t even breathe. I coughed, rubbed my throat and burned juice. A thick wad of instantly congealed blood pudding flew out of my throat. Yes!

  I loved being an Arm.

  After taking several deep breaths I slid my back up the wall and forced a contemptuous expression onto my face as I stared down on the Chimera, an imitation of one of Keaton’s best. My sneering face covered a black, black fury.

  “You must be new at this,” I said, my voice mocking. “I got off and you’re the one with your prick waving in the breeze. Anyone ever tell you it’s supposed to be the other way around?” Rage and high juice let me suppress the terrible pain in my throat, shoulder, abdomen and chest, keeping my tone light and contemptuous.

  He snarled at me from the other side of the room, his eyes open inhumanly wide. The fool thought I was a mute animal! His fur and canine face made him hard to read, but I couldn’t mistake his mixture of rage and shock. I remembered something he said earlier…

  “Poor baby Chimera. You lost your kill to me, didn’t you? Tsk tsk tsk. Just like you lost your Monster harem of scaly, gushy, furry bed partners.” I shook my head sadly. My act took incredible control. I amazed even myself at the control I managed. “She was a really good kill, rich and full of juice. Taking her juice was wonderful.” My voice dripped honey and hunger. “You can’t imagine how good this felt, all that juice just coming right in.” I let my voice slow, lingering over it, sensual and gloating. Nothing hurt worse than losing a kill.

  “I’m going to kill you, Arm!” His voice growled low with rage and threat, thunder in the small room: huge, male, predator, death incarnate. “Over and over and over again!”

  I laughed at him. My torn chest burned as my ribs moved but I tuned out the pain. I was on the attack.

  He roared and rushed me. Idiot. He only made two steps before his wounds gaped and the blood gushed. Gravity did its floor thing to him, splashing blood and gore around the room, more damage to him. The skittering severed hand bounced toward me.

  I snagged the severed hand with my left foot, flipped it up, caught it on the end of my knife and stuck it under my left armpit. The damn thing didn’t stop wiggling.

  Mine.

  I laughed again. “Definitely not good at this,” I said and shook my head. “I can see how my teacher was able to best the two of you. Do you miss Mr. Lizard much? Were you fuck-buddies?” He did have the overly manly sense of someone who would consider that sort of insult fighting words.

  The bastard bared his teeth at me, growled hatred and still refused to die. The fucker did have Arm-class enhanced healing. Perhaps better. I was sure I had cut his heart. Damn.

  “I’m going to kill you, you murderous Arm bitch.” His lips pulled back in a snarl of pure rage. “I’m going to split you right open and you’re going to beg for mercy before I let you die.” No moron him, though. He didn’t try and rush me again.

  I smiled wider, absently twisting the knife between my fingers, and relaxed to a casual contemptuous ease. Relaxing cost me, but I had learned control at Keaton’s hands under pain worse than this. This Chimera hadn’t learned any control. His buttons were all on the outside, asking to be pushed.

  “I like a good fuck after I kill,” I said, “but you weren’t very good. You might want to work on your technique. Oh, and your oversized prick looks ridiculous. It makes you look like you have some kind of disease. Next time you get close, I’ll trim junior down some for you.” I flipped the knife into the air and caught it. I accidentally joggled my left shoulder when I did and agony stabbed through me, pain so intense blackness crept in at the edges of my vision. Grimly, I forced down the pain. I smelled a faint ozone smell and realized I still held a low burn.

  “You’re dead, bitch,” he said, his growl now hinting at his version of my predator effect. I wasn’t impressed. “That’s a promise. Name’s Enkidu. You remember my name, because I’m the one who’s going to kill you.”

  “No,” I said. I shook my head, applying raw willpower to force relaxation, to make the motion seem normal. “I don’t think so.” I gave him cold and serious. “You’re weak, you’re stupid, and you look like a fool trying to pretend to be a predator. You can’t even get up off the floor.”

  I made my point when I stood up. I had to burn juice to do it, blood dribbled down my neck and gushed down between my legs when I stood, but I made it to my feet. Hell, I even made standing look natural.

  That shut the fucker up.

  Enkidu? What sort of idiotic name was that? What was this moron, anyway, some sort of reject from a Harryhausen movie? Twenty Million Miles to Earth, perhaps?

  I sauntered out of the apartment with that contemptuous thought in mind, as casually as if I didn’t hurt at all. My saunter cost me a lot of juice, but the growl of raw frustrated fury behind me was worth every bit of the pain.

  Carol Hancock: September 24, 1967 – September 25, 1967

  I awoke later, hungry, needing to pee, no idea how I had gotten wherever the hell I was. I remembered being in periwithdrawal, a Zielinski term for ‘too damned close to withdrawal for comfort’, complete with light sensitivity and the shakes. I tried to remember anything from after I fled Enkidu, but all I managed to force up were fragments. A car crash. A manhunt. Corn stubble. The sky above, the hounding of tracking dogs I had sent away. Oh. The camper. I hid in a folded down camper.

  Of all the damned things, my hands no longer shook, my eyes didn’t overreact to the light. Nothing made sense to me. I craved juice like I had never craved juice before. I would have to think about my situation later, because I wasn’t thinking about it now.

  The camper bumped along with the thrumming vibration of a highway. Cloud-filtered daylight, but which day? I smelled industry, which was good. Perhaps the south side of Chicago? I waited for the smell of cattle but that smell never came. Instead, more industry. Gary? Too far. I needed to get out of the camper.

  The door had a window, the window had louvers; the louvers were shut. No handle attached but after many minutes of scrabbling, I found a handle in a storage slot. Not being mechanically inclined – in a previous life, people changed light bulbs for me – I took almost ten minutes to solve the problem. I opened the louvers and in the distance saw…mountains.

  Well, at least little mountains. Or big hills.

  This was not Chicago.

  While I cursed fate the idiot driver exited the freeway. I couldn’t afford to get out of the camper in broad daylight on some damned street. I waited. Did they stop for gas? No. Did they stop for food? No. Did they stop at a hotel? No.

  Instead, they drove for a few minutes before pulling into a driveway in a subdivision filled with identical small houses, probably around ten years old. Not an ounce of cover in the place. I heard the people complain about lugging luggage and their stiff bodies and I placed them as an older couple, retired or at least with their kids out of the house. They slammed the door to their house on the way in to continue their argument in private.

  Now what?

  Well, I had to be patient. Very patient. Dusk fell about three hours later and with the night, I was out of there. I broke into the first empty house I found, showered, took stock, glanced at the phone book…

  No. That was what I planned on doing.

  What I really did was fall into a state I had never before experienced, as soon as I got out of the camper, stretched, and walked around enough to get my blood flowing. My conscious thoughts ceased. Words left me. My vision narrowed. The only thing that mattered was finding juice. Juice or death. Each beat of my heart drummed out the message ‘juice’. Juice juice juice juice…

  Five people screamed at me, beating at me, three men and two women. Other people surrounded me, scattering away. The last thing I remembered was getting out of the camper.

  I wasn’t anywhere near the camper.

  I stood
over a corpse in a fancy restaurant. Blood and gunsmoke covered the floor and the air. I held an empty .32 handgun in my right hand. In my left hand I held Enkidu’s grisly souvenir paw.

  Love those Arm basic instincts. At least I knew I had my priorities in the right place.

  My juice count ran low, say 105 or so. The well-dressed corpse at my feet died smiling and I guessed he had been a male Transform. I had just drawn from him. I had a bad feeling my kill had recently been a tagged Transform. Some Focus somewhere owned him. I threw off two of the men beating on me, took my kill’s wallet (his name was Richard Kensington), decided the older woman beating on me was his wife, the younger his daughter. I took their purses and ran for the kitchen.

  Kitchens always had back doors and I wanted to be gone before the police showed up. Twice in a row I had screwed up a kill. If I survived this one I would be shocked. Keaton had given me the lowdown on the misery of an urban police dragnet. Sloppy Arms stood out.

  Especially wounded sloppy Arms.

  I had never before ‘come to’ from a kill. Normally, they knocked me out. I guessed I had been near withdrawal for real. Keaton had never told me about the somnambulist hunter routine.

  I couldn’t imagine what people thought, save “Monster!” Still caked in mud, blood, and ripped clothing, I clearly didn’t present well. My left arm still hung funny at the shoulder. The makeshift bandages around my shredded breasts had come loose and showed fresh red muscle open to the air. No wonder some of the restaurant guests were puking instead of running.