No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5)

  No Sorrow Like Separation

  Book Five of “The Commander”

  Randall Allen Farmer

  Copyright © 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 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.

  No Sorrow Like Separation

  Book Five of “The Commander”

  There is no fire like greed,

  No crime like hatred,

  No sorrow like separation,

  No sickness like hunger of heart,

  And no joy like the joy of freedom.

  – The Buddha

  Part 1

  Recuperation

  However looked at,

  It’s a world

  to be loathed –

  but as long as you live here

  I'm drawn to it!

  – Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home

  Chapter 1

  “…and I could not believe it. For over three weeks not a single Chicago Clinic has registered any new woman Transforms. They are very reticent to speak of this matter, and the Focus Council’s attention to this matter would be greatly appreciated.”

  “Hunter Activity Near Chicago and Media Responses”

  Carol Hancock: April 9, 1968

  I awoke.

  That in itself was astonishing. My last chaotic memories were of Hell, the land of demons, answering questions, slipping lower and lower on juice. I had been nearing withdrawal and I hadn’t expected to wake up.

  I sat up, startled. Memories fled.

  I sat in a bed, a stark Danish modern style bed, of the palest wood. White sheets, white blanket, white bedspread. The floor was a dusty shade of white, polished wood of some variety. The bed was queen sized and sat on a half-round white rug in a huge undecorated bedroom. Cool dry air with a hint of ocean spray blew the white window curtains obliquely across open windows. The stark white room smelled freshly painted.

  The sheets beside me appeared rumpled, the pillow beside mine showed a head-shaped indentation, and the room smelled of fresh sex. Was this heaven?

  My muscles ached slightly, which I recognized as from extensive exercise, not from muscle problems. I looked down at myself and marveled. I guessed I had lost perhaps a third of my weight, all in muscle. My arms and thighs were noticeably thinner. I carried no noticeable fat on my body, save for my perky young-teen breasts. Under my downy fur, my skin appeared translucent, paper-thin.

  I heard quiet steps and puzzled. They walked in heaven? A mental image of myself wafting around as a weightless astronaut filled my thoughts, and made me giggle. Distantly, I recognized something was wrong with my mind.

  The footsteps came to the door. Stacy Keaton, naked as a sunbeam, stuck her head in the room. My mentor, former teacher, and oftentimes my sadistic torturer, was now good looking and well kept up. I cringed reflexively, horror scenarios from my memories appearing out of nowhere. Nope. Not heaven. The other place. I hadn’t escaped Hell. Breathless little screams leaked from my throat as I tried to retreat into the headboard.

  Keaton’s eyes widened as the relaxed expression on her face vanished. “You cringed!” she said. She came into the room, and her eyes lit up. Happy! Surprised!

  I attempted to close my mouth on the screams and set my face to stone. I recognized through my panic my vulnerability, and vulnerability was a specter of terror.

  “Now you’re trying to mask your emotions.” A slight smile appeared on her hard face. She sat down beside me on the bed and held my face in her hands, holding me tight as I tried to pull away. I shivered as she stared into my eyes. “Is there a real Carol Hancock in there now?”

  I tried to convey a complex submissive explanation of my fears. My explanation came out as “Torture?” I spoke no words.

  “Do you need to torture someone?”

  I shook my head.

  “Ah. We’re not doing that this time.” Her gaunt, cruel face remained hard, but her words were gentle. I shivered, just a little, and the beginnings of tears leaked out of my eyes. I tried to respond to her and my body shouted my message as I tried to force content from my mind to my voice, but no words came.

  She studied me carefully as I struggled to form words. “Help, I’m stuck in my head and I can’t talk. Right?” Keaton said.

  I nodded, sagging as I let the effort of my futile attempt to speak slip away. Her eyes followed me closely and my fear bubbled up inside.

  Keaton relaxed and smiled a little more. “Gilgamesh and I were beginning to worry the Carol Hancock we knew and loved was gone for good,” she said. “You were in withdrawal for over a day.”

  Confusion. Gilgamesh with Keaton? A day’s worth of withdrawal? Loved? I couldn’t bear to understand. I reflexively grabbed Keaton and hugged her as the confusion and horror of her statement churned inside me. She stiffened momentarily, put her arms around me, and hugged me back. Only then did I realize whom I sought comfort from, but by then it was too late.

  Keaton’s hug was parental. Her reaction could have been worse, far worse.

  I shivered again as memories of incarceration flashed through my mind. I couldn’t understand what I remembered and I remembered so little of my recent past. My memories, Arm perfect, faded into chaos on February 29th, during a victory celebration over the Chimera Odin and his pack of baby Chimeras. Shit had happened after the 29th, feces fragments flying through my mind. Keaton rubbed her hand in my hair, whispering ‘it’s all right,’ as the screams finally came out, ripped loose from my throat. I didn’t cry, now. Crying would hurt too much. I left as much of my reactions bottled up inside as I found possible. Only those screams escaped, despite me.

  I understood Keaton. Back in Chicago I had treated Bobby, my lover, like this when he got hurt. As a treasured possession. As horrible and demeaning as this might sound for an Arm, being a treasured possession of Keaton was a vast improvement over the fragments I remembered of our previous relationship. Given what little remained of my former spirit and aggressiveness, horrible and demeaning wasn’t half bad.

  One of the times when I looked up during my screaming I spotted a man standing in the room. Clothed in a short-sleeve shirt and slacks. Worried. Nearly as hard to read as an Arm or Focus. He was thin and wiry, with flyaway dark brown hair and hooded dangerous wary eyes. His muscles were all wrong, wrong sizes, wrong attachment points, wrong shapes. A shiner surrounded his right eye and recent defensive wounds decorated his lower arms. He had to be the strangest normal I had ever seen. I did wonder what Keaton was thinking, letting a normal man wander around freely in whatever place she lived.

  “Carol?” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Is that you?”

  I recognized the voice – Gilgamesh. I realized I had a problem: the man I thought of as ‘my Crow’ was here, trapped, in some crazy fashion Keaton’s prisoner. Given my current state, I couldn’t do much about it, so I just nodded in response.

  My name is Carol Hancock and I’m an Arm. Victim of Armenigar’s Syndrome. So is Stacy Keaton, who was my former sadistic teacher and current – cringe – nurse. She has a teeny tiny issue with occasional psychotic breaks and is a hazard to be around. Gilgamesh, who I had never before seen in the daylight, is a Crow. He, like all Crows, takes the term ‘skittish’ to heights previously unimagined. Crows and Arms, along with the Chimeras and the Focuses, are Major Transforms, the rarer and more powerful versions of the normal male and female Transforms. We’re all victims of Transform Sickness, a ra
re but worrisome disease that made its presence known in the early 1950s. The authorities do not like Transforms, and given the fact us Arms needed to hunt down Transforms and kill them in order to live, the authorities had us Arms on the top of their most wanted lists.

  As always, I drowned in deep shit. Keaton, again? Gilgamesh stuck with her as well? A gap in my mind as wide as the Pacific, screaming ‘withdrawal’? Withdrawal meant my supplemental juice supply had zeroed out. Transforms died from withdrawal. I guessed us Arms were tougher.

  Worse, my old memories didn’t make sense to me, something wrong with my mind. Why, for instance, did cars start when you put the key in the ignition?

  We found a closet and dressed in workout clothes, hand-made especially for Keaton and me. A part of me expected this, another part of me found the hand-made clothing absurd and incongruous. Was there some sort of ritual involved? Why?

  “I can feel her think,” Keaton said to Gilgamesh. “She’s safe right now.”

  Safe? Gilgamesh warily gave me a hug. We had never touched before, that I could remember. The comfort of his embrace overwhelmed me and my eyes misted over. He met my eyes, still holding me. He was stronger than a normal man. Nowhere near as strong as an Arm. “Yes. The Q bands in her glow have complexified. She’s worried about far too many things.” I never before realized, but Gilgamesh was as smart as I was. Or as smart as I used to be, before this withdrawal thing.

  “Can you blame her, kiddo?”

  They were bantering. Keaton and Gilgamesh were bantering. God!

  I let the two of them lead me through Keaton’s house, a mansion on a large estate with several outbuildings. Keaton talked a bit, explaining things, and showed me around. She wasn’t a person of many words. Gilgamesh was worse, saying nothing, although he kept a firm grip on my hand. As we walked from room to room, I found a measure of calm. I was safe here from the outside world in this pale palace. Keaton’s sadism didn’t terrify me, just her psychotic breaks, which at the moment I could do nothing about. She might hurt me, she might not. Things would be as things would be.

  Keaton’s perfectly maintained mansion held little in the way of furniture. The house was pale, stark, and immaculate. Her home’s plainness eased my mind. Tomorrow was cleaning day, she explained, when she vacated the premises and a cleaning crew came in and did what cleaning crews do.

  Gilgamesh lived in the five-car garage, by choice. I had spent some time there as well, according to Keaton. One of her outbuildings, a guesthouse, had a basement I could smell from the porch. I magically knew the basement was where she kept her workshop and her torture chamber. No, Keaton hadn’t changed her spots. She tortured as a way of working off stress and anger, and she enjoyed her play immensely. She had a gym in her main house, not a full Arm gym but usable. Seeing a quizzical expression on my face, she said that her gym would pass inspection by normals. Her logic went beyond my understanding. More magic.

  The tour of the house eased some tension inside of me. I remained lost, but as she opened every closet and took me through every room, the lost feeling began to fade. I didn’t know where I was, what state, what city, but all that was information about the outside. Better to stay in my pale womb for a while longer. A lesser territory, safe with my occasionally terrifying teacher.

  As we inspected a library, filled with empty shelves and a few books, I found something in my memories, a ritual I could perform that would please her. I knelt at her feet, curled small, and laid my cheek on her shoes. She stopped, startled. Then she rubbed her hand affectionately in my hair. Pleased. Her actions made me feel safer.

  Gilgamesh didn’t get down on the floor with me. Nor did he gain any pleasure from my ritual. The ritual made him nervous, but he didn’t leave my side. Different rituals gave him pleasure: quiet whispers, dark of night meetings, excessive politeness. I could satisfy none of them now. My inability saddened me.

  The kitchen appeared lived in, somewhat messy, but only a little. Then it hit me – I recognized this sort of mess. I had been doing the cooking. How?

  “Once we got you back on your feet,” Keaton said, “you wouldn’t let either of us cook. You couldn’t speak or remember what you did an hour previous, but you wouldn’t let us cook. You were, are, amazing to watch.”

  Right. Memories rose to the surface of my mind. Keaton’s cooking skills consisted of warming pre-prepared foods and cracking eggs on top of canned corned beef hash. Keaton ate raw hamburger by the pound if I wasn’t around to cook for her.

  I noticed hints of other things while I walked her house. I still couldn’t speak, but I put the word “training” firmly in my mind and met her eyes.

  She looked at me as if I was a ghost. Too much observation for the little mind she expected of me. I sensed the gears spin in her head; she now realized my inability to speak didn’t make me stupid. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve spent pretty much the entire time since you left me honing my capabilities and advancing my skills. Recently I’ve been working on helping both you and Gilgamesh.”

  I had no cause to argue and buried my confusion, though to me it didn’t appear Gilgamesh was getting Arm training. Instead, I fixed us a proper Arm-sized breakfast. Keaton hung back, leaning against the kitchen cupboards. Silent, thinking. Gilgamesh vanished. Well, not really. He retreated to a corner of the kitchen, there but not there. I couldn’t find him unless I put ‘where is Gilgamesh?’ firmly in my mind and concentrated. He seemed distracted.

  “You spoiled me, you know,” Keaton said, about half way through my preparations. I had finished the Eggs Benedict, but the homemade waffles (and berries) had a little way to go. “In Philadelphia. Things being clean. Food like you prepare. It made me think.”

  I didn’t understand. That was okay. I understood I had mental problems.

  After breakfast was the gym. The gym was on the first floor in the wing that led toward the back. The room once had been a large high-ceiling family room, now stark and plain, with immaculate off-white mats to contrast the iron gray of the weights. Keaton set up a buffet table, brought out some books and papers, and spread them out. “Your experiences in withdrawal reset your Arm physique…and stop cringing when you hear the word ‘withdrawal’, Hancock, you’re an Arm!” She pointed. “This curve was from your first time through, which when you finished maturing you would have hit 295 pounds.” I never got there, but I got close. “I topped out at 265 pounds, a little less bulky on a much smaller frame,” Keaton said. “Now, this is your current curve.”

  I looked at it and didn’t understand a thing. I met Keaton’s gaze and put that in my mind.

  “Hmm. Okay. You’re going to top out at 180 pounds this time. According to Zielinski’s old paper on the subject, that means you’ve replaced a lot of slow-twitch muscles with fast-twitch muscles. You’ll be a lot quicker than you used to be, you’ll have less endurance, and be significantly less strong. At your current weight, you should be able to lift about 300 pounds on your bench press with your Arm muscles. You can’t do 150 now. We’re going to fix that, but it’ll take time.”

  The numbers didn’t make any sense. Her words were gibberish.

  “New problem,” Gilgamesh said. His whisper contained no panic, far more confident than he had ever been when I heard his voice before. He had followed us into the gym, but I hadn’t noticed. There he was! Over in the corner. Dressed in workout gear. I wondered why. “Carol’s incapable of even basic logic and mathematics. She can’t tell that 180 is smaller than 295.”

  I nodded. They were just numbers. Arbitrary codes with minimal meaning.

  “Crap,” Keaton said. “Can’t speak, can’t do logic, but to my metasense I’d swear she’s back to normal. We’re still fucked.”

  Her words made me wonder, though. How did Gilgamesh figure out my thoughts?

  I ached to speak, a hard need. Something moved inside me, not physical, not mental, but something in-between. “Magic,” I said. “Gilgamesh. Magic.”

  Keaton’s eyes opened wide. “Yes!” sh
e said, snapping her fingers. A happy noise.

  “That was more than strange,” Gilgamesh said. “Just before she spoke she burned juice.”

  I sat down, confused, and put my head in my hands. Too much strangeness. Gilgamesh knew about the big Arm secret of burning juice? How did he know I burned juice? Was his metasense that good?

  “This is new,” Keaton said. She wasn’t worried that Gilgamesh knew the big secret. He showed no signs of torture. Perhaps he was innately deferential to her dominance? I wished I knew how I figured things out. Had to be this ‘logic’ thing that no longer made sense to me. “Burning juice is a physical trick, or at least it is for me. The question is, then, whether this is another of her post-withdrawal changes or some trick she figured out while in Chicago?”

  Such as this. Keaton’s ‘logic’ went over my head. Annoyed, I leapt up and hopped on top of a cabinet that held gym supplies, and leapt over to one of the two ropes. “Unsafe,” Keaton barked out with her drill sergeant voice. Not at me, so I ignored her. I climbed up the rope, upside down, until my feet met the ceiling. Gilgamesh vanished for real this time, taking cover outside the gym.

  I hissed and growled down at the room. Angry and frustrated, I wanted to bite something and thrash it. Some creature’s neck would do.

  Keaton walked over to the bottom of the rope and glared up at me. “Get the fuck down from there and lose the Monster attitude,” she said. Her voice brooked no delay and I followed her orders. Only her orders hadn’t been given in her drill sergeant voice. I knew they were orders, though. I didn’t know why.

  I met her gaze, quizzical. “Monster?”

  “Your predator effect doesn’t come across as Arm, but as Monster, when you do that,” Keaton said.

  This was good and bad. Keaton didn’t think of me as an Arm but as a Monster. I wasn’t competition. My memories flagged this as ‘good’. However, I flagged Monsters in my memories as ‘bad’, as in ‘to be slain on sight’. Keaton didn’t appear ready to kill me, though. I didn’t understand.