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

  Beasts Ascendant

  (The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two)

  Pertaining to events before, during and after the three novels The Shadow of the Progenitors, Love and Darkness and The Forgefires of God, but before the events of No Small Dreams (the 4th Novel of “The Cause”) and that which follows.

  Randall Allen Farmer

  Copyright © 2016 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.

  Part One

  That Which Came Before

  [April 1971 to December 1972]

  Background Information About Part One

  The Battle in Detroit (see the novel All That We Are) is roughly 2 years in the past as of the start of Part One. With one exception, the Chronicles that make up Part One occur before the novel The Shadow of the Progenitors.

  The roster of graduated Arms in April of 1971 is: Stacy Keaton, Carol Hancock, Amy Haggerty, Sylvia Bass, Peggy Svensen, Florence Rayburn, Rose Webberly, Christine Naylor and Mary Sibrian. Grace Billington and Elizabeth Whetstone are Student Arms.

  Mary Sibrian is the ‘special Arm’ of the moment; she transformed in June of ’70 and graduated in September, the fasted Arm to graduate, ever. She’s not overly powerful at normal Arm tricks, but she’s a ‘natural’ in the non-Juice aspects of Arm survival because of her criminal background. She and Keaton don’t get along. Because Keaton had too many Student Arms to take care of she ‘sold’ Sibrian over to Carol, who graduated her and tagged her, so she could serve as Carol’s apprentice.

  Also, as of April of 1971, Amy Haggerty is 7 months into her duties as Keaton’s subsidiary teacher. As Keaton’s subsidiary teacher she’s lost her New York City territory to Rose Webberly and her (recently gained) position as the number 2 Arm to Carol Hancock.

  Chronicle I

  The Hunters

  Ambush (April 29, 1971)

  “Never forget, we’re your friends,” I said, waving my prop in Luis’ face. My limo driver made the slow turn from W 63rd to South Morgan, attracting angry looks from a small crowd of local late teens. “If you had any brains at all, you would want to be my friend. The benefits of my friendship should be self-evident to you.” The words echoed in my deep voice in the limo as I nibbled on my prop, a nibble for me that to Luis would seemingly be a large bite. I swallowed and smiled. Then I carefully wiped my hands on my handkerchief and straightened my suit coat, which had been riding up. All my suits were hand-tailored; I frequented Mr. Wilson’s haberdashery, Mr. Wilson being the only local tailor able to cope with my size and bulk. Nobody sold off the rack suits to fit someone seven foot six and weighing almost five hundred pounds.

  Luis, the Halsted underboss in charge of marijuana distribution, had long since gone beyond terror into a more primitive state where his flesh became death-like and plastic. He cringed deep into the seat across from me and stank of the pollution and filth of his neighborhood, mixed with the more pleasant odors of fear, terror and defeat. “What do you want, sir?” he said, after far too many moments of thought. “How can we make this right?” He didn’t know my name.

  I didn’t bother with names with my slaves.

  “I don’t tolerate late payments from my friends,” I said. I flared my nostrils and leaned forward. From the center of the long right side limo seat, with my knees touching the seat opposite, I occupied most of the interior of the limo. Luis contorted himself to avoid all physical contact with me. The idiot Chicago punk didn’t know he was a slave. Yet. “You’ve missed two. This one time, I’ll allow you to make good.” I paused and leaned in toward him. “If you pay double my normal cut.” I normally took only a twenty five percent cut, far less than the others who protected their shipments. Why? First, to increase the size of my distribution network, and second, because protecting their shipments wasn’t a difficult task for me and my people.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll have it for you tomorrow. May I…”

  I didn’t want to hear his explanation for the late payment. I growled, cutting him off, and let my growl fill with the Terror, the roar of the lion and tiger on the hunt. To finalize my point I tossed the prop, his daughter’s arm, on his lap. He flinched. Bits of blood and flesh joined the other stains on his pants. “Send your man Cutter to me,” I said. “Hire a replacement. Cutter’s mine, now.” Cutter would make an acceptable juice zombie soldier. He possessed the right combination of ‘no moral compass’, ‘excessive will to live’, and the overabundance of muscles that would made him a perfect soldier in my army. I would become his moral compass. Enforced by the Law, of course.

  “Yes, sir,” Luis said, staring at his lap and fighting the urge to puke. “Of course…”

  Luis never got to finish his groveling. The cough of two rocket propelled grenades, inaudible to the other passengers in my limo, but not to me, sent my adrenaline into overdrive, making the world stand still around me. The RPGs came from the left. I leapt out the door on the right side of the limo and into the desultory traffic at the corner of Morgan and Marquette. I shredded Luis on the way by, but that was of no matter in the greater scheme of things.

  He would have died anyway, along with my limo driver and the two ‘bodyguards’ I kept with me as props, when the RPGs hit the limo and exploded.

  My name is Enkidu, and I’m commonly called ‘the General’. I’m a Hunter Chimera, a Major Transform, and one of the eight known varieties of Transforms. As with all Transforms, I’m a victim of Transform Sickness. I’m a military specialist, the combat leader of the Hunters for nearly two years in our fight against the tradition-hating Amazons, the unholy and radical Focus community and their allies.

  Eleven months ago, my former leader, Wandering Shade, led us into an ambush in Detroit. He died. The Hunter Empire mourned him and publicly declared our grief for his passing and our reverence for his former leadership, but in secret I knew better. Wandering Shade had not only been a Crow, the pacifistic non-predatory counterparts to us Hunter Chimeras, but also he had been a lunatic Crow.

  People who followed madmen died. I certainly came close. All but one of my peers did, at least as we Hunters term death.

  I wasn’t the only General among the Hunters. Leo also held that rank, but he wasn’t called ‘the General’; instead, he termed himself the Clan-Chief of the Mountain Men. His branch of the Hunter Empire got to do far more hunting than we did here in the Midwest. The Midwest was ours because we needed to recruit and replenish the ranks of Hunters and Gals – specially trained woman Transforms – to replace those lost in Detroit.

  However, we in the Midwest got to do far more fighting than Leo did. Such as right now!

  I plowed through the bay window of a two and a half story tall brownstone and roared Terror, scattering the residents. This area was filled with mostly lower middle class factory workers out of Eastern Europe, and the place stank of sauerkraut and moldy furniture. My attacker remained invisible to me, but didn’t move like a Crow, the only Major Transform variety I thought able to fool my keenly honed metasense and eyesight. The passage of the RPG shell roiled the air, though, and that I could see, leading me back from the open door to the roiling of the air caused by the motion of my sneak attacker, next to a flowered sofa still covered in clear plastic.

  I saw the dropping RPG guns, meaning my attacker charged. I took two steps, a crunching one on an old woman attempting to flee, le
apt out the bay window, and charged back toward my attacker through the open door. I wore my man form today – Chimeras change shape, slowly, and I couldn’t do business in my beast form, a car-sized wolf – and in my man form I was fast. My intermediate stage, that of a wolf-man, tended to attract too much attention in the daylight. I reached the attacker before he or she noticed my return charge, and I clawed.

  The attacker, a woman and thus an Arm, went flying, impaling herself on the broken glass of the bay window. Visible now. The tall Arm wore black leather, head to toe, with a black demon mask over her face. She didn’t lose her weapons, neither her steel-shafted spear nor her long knife. Or her backpack, heavy with other weapons. Or her two grenade belts.

  This was Arm Haggerty, the one the Crows named The Hero. She had gotten better. Last time we fought she had been barely worth noticing. “Son of a fucking bitch!” she said, exuding the cute juice-powered trick the Arms termed, with typical Arm overcompensation for the natural weakness of their sex, ‘the predator effect’.

  This would have ordinarily been music to my ears, and normally I wouldn’t have turned down a chance to dance with an Arm. Responsibility called, though, and instead of making this a contest I grabbed one of her legs and tossed her and her leg out the bay window and across Marquette, blood and a single loop of intestines trailing behind. The growing roar of motorcycles meant more enemies queued up for the dance, in this case the various motorcycle thugs my Horuses reported the Hero ran with.

  I sprinted the other way, out the back of the brownstone. My Horuses – that is, the Crow spies recruited by my Crow so-called allies to be my eyes and ears in the Midwest – said that Haggerty was currently enslaved by Kali, the Arm Leader who held Detroit as her territory. Held close, as punishment for losing a challenge fight or something equally inane. If Haggerty was here, then Kali was here, and when Kali stuck her nose out of Detroit, with her came the Commander, the Arm I most wanted to fight. With the Commander would come her inevitable large army of thugs, and who knew what else. I didn’t think the Commander took a dump without prior military surveillance and a skirmish line moving ahead of her.

  Which meant this wasn’t a personal challenge, but war. Now I would get to see how well my traps worked.

  I didn’t get to be the General by being either stupid or unprepared.

  My local HQ, an abandoned and burned out church on S. Western, was only a mile away, and I didn’t stop sprinting until I got there. “Captain Thunder?”

  “General,” Captain Thunder rumbled, turning toward me and half-bowing. He was in his half form, a squat and scaly lizard-man right out of a horror movie. His claws dug grooves into the wooden floor of what used to be the sanctuary, and as always, he stank of swamp. “It’s war, sir. We have Arms and non-local Focus households in Chicago.”

  “You call and mobilize the police?” Pews lay stacked to the sides, and several long tables now occupied the center of the sanctuary. The afternoon sun illuminated maps of Chicago and the surrounding area, except for one odd multicolored section of the table closest to the pulpit, an effect of half of a broken stained glass window.

  “Yes, sir, already done.” The police throughout Chicagoland were mine the same way the local gangs were, but the police I paid as well as intimidated. They were my main expense. I had even initiated several of them into the Hunter Empire, the ones who appreciated the basics: God and country, the flag and the Constitution, tradition and ceremony. When we took power, though, as any proper American elite, the Hunter Empire would be choosing who would be eligible to vote, and who not. The police recruits were my secret brownshirts, believing in a social counter-revolution that would pull down the hippies, the industrialists, the bankers and the anti-war protesters who threatened our fair nation. Me, I was well read, and knew exactly how to use these useful idiots in the coming struggle, and how to get rid of them when the time came to consolidate. I had already planned out my own ‘night of long knives’, to rid myself of the social counter-revolutionaries the same way the Nazis got rid of the Socialist wing of the National Socialist Party in their ‘night of long knives’. I wanted my followers loyal to me, not some stupid ideology.

  “Send them after the invading Focuses and their households,” I said. Responsibility ate at me. Chicago was both a trap and a tripwire; the real meat was in Minneapolis, where Colonel Orion ran the Hunter ‘finishing school’ for student Hunters and Gals. Covering Minneapolis was my number one Responsibility. “Any idea which Focuses?”

  “None at all, sir,” Thunder said. “Shall we follow the plan, then, and leave here?”

  “Of course.” Most of my Colonels and Captains wouldn’t have been able to question my orders, because of the Law, the network of juice keeping our minds and bodies from regressing into beasts. The Law had been Wandering Shade’s innovation, and some of us needed the Law more than others to keep our thoughts proper and our beastly natures leashed. Thunder and I were on the ‘less’ side of things, which often meant conflict between us. Since I always won any fights with him, I made sure he was safely two ranks lower than me.

  Colonel Quiet Creeper, my oldest former-apprentice Hunter, poked his furry orange head up from the basement; behind him were the Gals from our three packs, as well as Shaman Tone Deaf, my personal enslaved Crow. Tone Deaf turned pasty white as he saw me snacking on a leg from one of the fallen Focus-enslaved Transforms I grabbed on the way in. Crows, not even the late Wandering Shade, didn’t understand how we honored those who fell to the Hunters in combat by eating them. That had been the first thing I changed in the Law when I took control of the Eastern Hunters.

  We were Hunters! We ate what we hunted! Why else hunt?

  Crows were just too damn squeamish.

  “To the bus, ladies, while the Hunters prepare to suck the blood of our enemies,” Quiet Creeper said. I sighed. The Law was both wonderful and essential, because of Hunters of Quiet Creeper’s ilk; he wouldn’t be able to either think or speak without the Law. He would follow the plan, unless someone told him otherwise, even if it led to a stupid and suicidal end.

  “The Gals and the Shaman will take the bus,” I said. “We’re going to run.”

  “Yes, sir,” Quiet Creeper said. He padded across the shadowed sanctuary, making no noise and nearly invisible to the naked eye, a good trick for an eight foot long orange-striped tiger. His mellow voice was quiet for a Hunter. He was small for a Hunter, too. Six months ago, he decided he preferred small and supple over large and muscular, so now his half form was only a little over six feet tall. Which was why I wanted him in his full beast form. The Law demanded at least one Hunter remain in his beast form in any stronghold, the same way the Law gave each Hunter total Responsibility over his pack and how he used them.

  The ‘suck blood’ comment was an old leftover memory, from Quiet Creeper’s former life as the Hunter Joshua, from before the Battle in Detroit. The gleaners had brought him back to Chicago as a head, all we needed to bring a Hunter back to the living. As in most cases, though, we ended up with an entirely new Hunter.

  “Won’t that attract too much attention, sir, this being daylight?” Thunder said, as always full of thoughts.

  “Irrelevant,” I said. “This war will chase us out of Chicago, no matter whether we win or lose.” The Amazons possessed too many Fed contacts. I had neutered the local FBI office, but the bitches would find a way to fix the issue, even if we eventually chased them away.

  “Oh, right,” Thunder said, not the world’s smartest Hunter. In his case, his scatter-brained nature was a Law side effect, one I hoped to someday fix. If I could ever afford the upper-end Crow help necessary to make such changes to the Law. “So, we run?”

  “We run. Now.”

  The Oak Lawn safehouse? Trashed. Dead Gals everywhere. Same for the Bedford Park and La Grange safehouses. I found Focus Dipstick – Esther Weiczokowski – in the midst of trashing the Woodridge safehouse. She, along with her household combatants, and her seventy uniform-wearing mercenaries.
Bitch. I personally killed two of her mercs out of disgust at their barbarity; as far as I could tell they weren’t giving our Gals any quarter, even the ones who looked passably human. Typical anti-Monster prejudice. They would get theirs when the Hunter Empire took over.

  “Kill the bassstardsss,” Thunder said, his voice reduced to a hiss. “Kill them all, now.” Some quirk in his mind made him feel responsibility for all the fallen Gals.

  Great Jaws and Stinkass’s headless bodies upset me more, sprawled bloodily over a couple of parked cars. Junior Hunters weren’t easy to kill, or shouldn’t be. Their headless bodies stank of Arms, actually, of Arm packs. Arms acting alone normally couldn’t kill even the most junior of the Hunters.

  “Naperville,” I said. “Naperville first.” We eased out of the now unmanned rooftop guard post, and headed away.

  Naperville was our grand headquarters, safely away from the teeming masses of inner Chicago, and close enough to allow us to commute. Thunder and I took to our feet, and we ran through the suburbs and the wheat fields to our disguised fortress, sucking air and juice, ignoring the honks of car horns and the squeal of tires as the locals intelligently attempted to flee. Our fortress’s disguise? A barn, standard issue. The stench of barbeque grills and chlorine from swimming pools wrinkled my nose; Naperville’s farms were far too quickly turning into expensive suburban housing. We slipped past the ring of police guarding the line a mile out from the barn – my well-bought police. We didn’t hunt Naperville, and they loved us and our piles of under-the-table cash. I pitied whatever Major Transform took over Chicago from us; the police weren’t going to be friendly to them unless they continued our extensive payments.

  “Boss, thank the Great Hunter!” Cleo said, as I stepped into the barn. My Cleo, my one and only Pack Alpha. “The Bolingbrook Police weren’t able to stop one of the Amazon’s armies – Focus charisma – and they’re on the way here.”