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

  “Fuck,” I said. I looked around and shook my head, wistful to be losing the barn, with its records and relics and peace. I had done some of my best research work here. When the Amazons found my now former home they would burn it to the ground, too polluted by what they wrongfully termed ‘bad juice’ to stand. Nor would they appreciate the homey reek of the prey carcasses. All the more Monsterish Gals were carnivores, and most could eat decayed carrion as well. We went through a lot of meat.

  I knew the normals appreciated us wherever we lived, at least when we didn’t hunt them. None of the places we lived had any stray dog or cat problems.

  “Any idea which Focus?”

  “Lady Death,” Cleo said. Cleo was a beautiful part-Monster, five years old and as powerful as a young Hunter. She would have been a dragon if I and her various masters hadn’t modified her shape so regularly over the years. Instead, her form was within speaking distance of human, and entirely unique. An orbital crest ran from just above her nostrils across the top of her head and midway down the length of her head. Iridescent amber scales surrounded her eyes, flowed past her ear holes, and transformed into skin upon her shoulders. A line of feathery down ran along the top of the crest above her eyes, which expanded to cover the entire crest as it topped her head, and then spread out over her back as the crest terminated. Her head was bald and slightly mottled, and her fingers and toes were short, muscular, and tipped with vicious claws.

  Her torso was the most human. Heavily muscled with a Monster’s muscles, but with a woman’s curves on top of that. Her legs were long and strong, her butt muscular and round. Her breasts were high and full, with tight nipples and a deep cleavage. She was proud of her body, and loved to show it off. Today, she wore leather. Human leather. A few opaque patches to cover her privates, the rest a network of leather thongs. I smiled, as always horny just from looking at her. I might have trouble finding a decent Pack Mistress, but when I got myself a Pack Alpha, I had drawn aces.

  No time for that now, though.

  Lady Death – Focus Rizzari of Boston – and her household were one of the three most dangerous Focus households we might face. Worse, Lady Death and the Commander were unnatural lezzie lovers or something similar, and their perverted and unnatural partnership meant that the Commander and her merc army would be either with them or nearby.

  “We have to move!” I originally hoped the other officer Hunters: Colonel Montana Winter, Captain Calgary, Captain Turbulent Waters and Captain Red Claws, would have enough time to gather here, with their Gals and ancillaries. No longer. “We’ll concentrate in our place west of Shorewood, tonight.”

  Thunder howled a hiss and hit the wall of one of the laboratory stalls, creaking the wood with his fist. “It’s official,” he said, after drawing our attention. Always the drama with him. “They killed Cassava.” His long-time Pack Alpha. “Fuck the military crap, boss. We must fight here and make them pay!”

  He did have a point.

  “We need time if we’re going to preserve our records,” Cleo said. She nodded to the left at a couple of what used to be horse stalls and now served as records rooms. As she spoke, I metasensed another Focus household, a weaker one, driving in from the north. A Council Focus? Likely. These Transforms exuded the metastench of corrupt politics. Perhaps this was the crazy old one from Salt Lake City. “Wandering Shade’s records are worth dozens of lives, Boss. Losing them would be a disaster.”

  I nodded. Most importantly, the Shade’s records included the original documentation on what made up the Law, at least in Crow-speak. I was more concerned about the loss of the papers on the Shade’s secret businesses and other secret dealings, which I had been poring over, with difficulty, for the last year. Amazing documents, especially concerning the mysterious troublemaking Provocateur, who Cleo had renamed ‘Patient Zero’. We had even captured one of the Provocateur’s part-time agents, one Chas Beebe, and made him into one of our enslaved normal men, a juice zombie. Here. He knew a hell of a lot, especially concerning the trick Wandering Shade pulled on the first Focuses, using the Provocateur to buy his way into the first Focus’s secret business, Chrysanthemum.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on, here?” Cleo asked. “This isn’t anything like the fight you said was coming. What happened to the traps, the defensive positions, all our turned police and reserve juice zombies?”

  I understood what happened, but I didn’t have time to speak about it now. Just thinking about it angered me. I tuned my thoughts to my Responsibility, which washed away the anger. “We need to stage a delaying fight if we want to survive,” I said. I metasensed Arms, at least three, coming in on motorcycles, from the east, along with Lady Death and her household. Turbulent Waters was on his way, from the northeast, on the enemy’s flanks, along with his pack of Gals and his five hundred juice zombies, what he called The Big Red One. “Pack up to move, but we’re going to go out and kill and eat a few of our enemies first. If there’s enough time, make sure you pack up the shrine to the Great Hunter, and our pictures of the Israelites conquering the Promised Land.”

  Cleo nodded. Only we knew the true name of God, and recognized his true Hunting Prowess. Fighting in the Israelite way was the only way!

  ---

  Fools and idiots. “Gals with arms, switch to specials 4,” I said, crouching behind the berm. The cool dirt pressed against my wolf-man chest. I had been slowly shifting to my wolf-man form, a process which, given the current abundance of élan, took me about 90 minutes even while I led my forces in a war.

  Anise Bloom, Quiet Creeper’s Pack Alpha, nodded and organized the switch from the Gals’ standard weapons, M16s, to the up-converted M21 sniper rifles. The sun had set, and early evening shadows helped conceal us. The scents of turned dirt, winter wheat, and fresh grass vied with the usual stench of automobiles and farmyard diesel equipment. I metasensed more trouble coming, a Focus household creeping up, to the south of us. That made six Focus households within metasense range, now in a semicircle around us, a mile to two miles out. The latest would close the circle.

  They thought they were going to envelop us and destroy us. I would have something to say about that. Lots of things, actually. “Just like we’ve practiced, let your will flow out of you, and let my metasense guide your aim.” I could only spare eleven Gals for this. I had ordered Thunder out with three junior Hunters, thirty Gals who couldn’t manage firearms and ninety or so juice zombies, to stage a sortie to our north. Quiet Creeper was with me to make this Legal; these were his Gals and I couldn’t command them without his presence.

  I closed my eyes and stopped breathing. The Gals steadied and I concentrated on my metasense, focusing it down so I could pick up individuals instead of vague juice, dross and élan smears. “Fire,” I said, in my soft voice.

  With these weapons, a normal would have a hard time hitting a fixed target on a windless day at three quarters of a mile. Lash fired first, and with my help, blew the head off some Focus’s Transform a mile and a half away. The enemy learned fast; we only picked off three before they dove for the ditches and stopped their forward movement.

  And, no, they hadn’t been in line of sight.

  One down, five Focus households to go.

  The Gal’s gunfire also pinned down the Arms, saddling them with the responsibility of trying to keep the weak sisters among the Amazons from bolting in panic. Double the fun.

  I crept to the next group of Gals, this group my own. The shooters lay with their weapons at the ready and watched me eagerly. The rest shifted restlessly, hoping for their own turn at the fight. Cleo grinned with ferocious bloodlust. “Let’s see if we can get Inferno to crawl through the dirt!” I growled.

  My Gals shot, and Inferno complied.

  The sixth Focus household, the one creeping in from the south, continued its slow approach. The more I metasensed them, the more I metasensed weakness, caution and incipient panic. We also needed a distraction to allow Turbulent Waters and his people enough time to join up with
us. “Lil, Wicked, Narm and Cheer.” A wolf, a lion, a horse with wolf teeth and claws, and a gator-dragon, and thus, not a part of the shooter crew. All mine. They rose eagerly to their feet. “Sortie time. Close to me. Run.”

  I switched over from focusing on my metasense to focusing on my wolf-man presence. I swatted each of them with one of my tricks, and as we ran, we kept in close proximity, often touching.

  To the enemy, we would be metasense, gaze and odor invisible until we got within a hundred yards. We ran through the wheat and corn fields, over a road, through a partly built-out subdivision, and to the corn field beyond, freshly plowed and ready for late spring planting.

  The Focus and her household approached slowly as a pack of a half dozen barely functional cars and light trucks, with most of the forces on foot using the vehicles as cover. I didn’t recognize the Focus or her household, either by sight or stench. Someplace swampy and industrial, though, large enough to provide ample automobile-based air pollution. The vehicles were local, likely retrieved from a junk heap specifically for use in this attack, but the people carried their own stench, and lead compounds in car exhaust were distinctive enough for even a student Hunter to identify. This wasn’t a first-line household, nor a Focus Council household, as those households had been tested so often by Focus internecine warfare that they were all hard as iron. These were only brass, far above the standard Focus ‘target’ household but far below my worries.

  Their blood exploded into the air as we charged into them, but before I reached the Focus and disabled her enough to take her captive – I’ll take freebies any day – I picked up a metasense flicker to my left, between a station wagon and a rusted out pickup truck. I barked retreat and turned my Gals to the left, and leapt.

  The Commander. Smelling of the same odors as the Focus and her household. Ah. This was one of her enslaved Houston Focuses. I was on her before she reacted.

  “Tasty,” I said, as I bit and swallowed. “A bit oily, though.”

  “Say goodbye to Chicago,” she said, carving divots on my chest and right arm. We always chatted as we fought; it was part of our game. I swiped at her and missed; I leapt backward, bounced off the side of the pickup truck, and got her on her return pass. She started the damned Arm juice burn trick and shot my body to shit with one of her handguns. I tossed a knife through her leg. “Say goodbye to the Hunter Empire. Say goodbye to life.” She lost her pistols and almost stuck a knife in my eye. I rolled and stuck a boot in her midsection, sending her flying fifty feet through the air into the unplanted corn field.

  I did a wolfman charge while signaling my Gals to take cover and start heading back. My teeth missed her neck by less than four inches and I picked up a slice into my ribcage – and her knife, which I nabbed on the way by. “The only thing I’m saying goodbye to is you,” I said. Wounded from my fifty foot boot, she didn’t charge; instead she moved between me and her Focus.

  I didn’t charge, either. Instead, I howled my Wolfman Jack best, tuned to the ongoing near-panic of her enslaved Focus’s Transforms. The Commander gave me enough time to taste their fear. I knew lots of nasty tricks like this.

  So, off the Focus’s household went, in a thunder of bad motors and a cloud of black exhaust from the pickup truck. Followed by the Focus on the roof of an undersized import, and after a moment, the Commander on foot, though she did have the gall to scuttle off sideways as she followed the Focus, keeping a hot glare on me.

  Heh. This would buy me enough time to get us the hell out of the enemy’s trap and get my people together.

  Quad Cities (May 3, 1971)

  “Thank the Great Hunter,” I said, and meant it. I looked up from my wounded Gals, gathered on the back porch of my confiscated farmhouse. I lacked the spare élan to heal any but the most badly injured.

  Montana Winter, his Gals, Pack Mistress, juice zombies and hireling ancillaries were finally inside my metasense range. He and his troops were the last of the stragglers to arrive. Unfortunately, and predictably, an Arm-led gaggle of three Amazon households and their mercenaries trailed him, less than a mile behind. I got on the walkies in my comm center and called back Captains Turbulent Waters and Calgary from their latest sortie. They, the other five Hunters, and the packs they led, obeyed my orders and retreated back to us, relieved. Nearly a quarter of the Gals and men out with them did not return.

  I wasn’t winning this nasty war of attrition.

  “So, are you ever going to unbend your spine and tell me what the fuck’s going on?” Cleo asked, at this moment responsible for barking at the slaves chopping up dinner for us. She was growly, likely because I had been leaning on her too much to manage our logistics, and not giving her any chance to fight.

  We held, if you want to loosely use the term, about a square mile of East Moline, consisting of a Bald Eagle refuge, a forest preserve, a golf course, and the cornfields and farmhouses between them. The Amazon bitches stuck us with the Mississippi at our back and they and the underarmed flashing light brigade – the local police – held the bridges to the north and southwest of us.

  “Might as well,” I said. I put the walkie down and left the bedroom communication center to join Cleo in the kitchen. The slaves cringed and cut faster. “There’s only one way to explain what happened to us. Someone on the enemy side can hide from the Horuses and the metasenses and noses of our patrols. This someone or someones got into Chicago and marked all our traps, ambush points, and juice zombie reserves.” Until I got Turbulent Waters’ report I didn’t realize how badly we had been compromised. Around the time the damned Arm Hero ambushed me, these someones had been assassinating nine of my top suborned police officers. Instead of police help in fighting off the attack, we got chaos. Instead of my FBI mole locking down the Chicago FBI office, we ended up with my FBI mole in jail and a flying squad of Transform-loving FBI agents taking over and coordinating the arrest of dozens of my allies among the normal population. “Their initial attack wasn’t on us, but our infrastructure. The first thing the enemy did was go after our safe houses, our frozen food reserves, our bank accounts, and our suborned normals.” When they finally got around to attacking us, we didn’t have any boltholes or reserves to call on.

  Cleo blinked in shock. “No wonder everything went to shit so fast.”

  I nodded. “They even found a way to free our juice zombie slaves from my control, which meant they had one of the senior Crows with them, probably Guru Arpeggio.” The Hunter feud with Guru Arpeggio was long and nasty. The life-loving bastard probably volunteered for this fight.

  “The Commander,” Cleo said. “That bitch did it to us again.”

  Another nod. “Nobody else on their side has enough nerve to shit in the woods and enough brainpower to remember to wipe backwards. I’m actually quite impressed. I would be a lot more impressed if she hadn’t found a way to pin us here.” I was sure we would be getting a ‘surrender or die’ note within a few hours. The weak sisters among the Amazons would demand such a thing.

  Unless I came up with a miracle, we were doomed. Either the Amazons would get us or the Federal authorities would. Five days of combat, from Chicago to the Quad Cities, would see to the latter. The televisions talked about National Guard mobilization, and although we tended to think of ourselves as bulletproof, we were at best bullet resistant. And we certainly weren’t artillery shell resistant. Ten fucking infantry-supported tanks could take us out without working up a sweat.

  “Oh, they’re bleeding tears,” Turbulent Waters said. I had called a meeting of my surviving Colonels and Captains in the infirmary. Monsters and slaves moaned behind us in the big barn. The portable hospital screens didn’t muffle the sound or the stench. We gathered around a bloody workshop table serving double duty as a surgery cot. Of my senior officers, we had only permanently lost Red Claws. Colonel Orion remained absent, out with the Hunter army holding and guarding our supposedly secret Minneapolis Hunter academy, but he remained in phone contact. The next generation of both the Eastern and Wes
tern Hunters was now in his hands, and if the real world didn’t interfere with his orders, he should have them on the way to our fly and mosquito-infested Lake Nipigon island stronghold in Ontario. “Losing one Transform hurts the bitches at least five times as much as us losing one of our Gals. They’re weak, and we’ve hurt them more than they’re admitting in public.”

  “Of course they’re weak, they’re women,” I said. “So, what’s with the chicken leg, Calgary?”

  His Gals were still sewing the leg back on him. Blood ran in a little runnel on the hard dirt floor, under a screen toward the main section of the barn, to be lost among the large pools under the wounded. “It’s from Eclipse, one of my favorites. Some damned Arm, dressed in black, appeared out of nowhere and fired an RPG from twenty feet right in to Eclipse’s back.” He grunted as one of his Gals got overenthusiastic with the sewing needle.

  “That’s the Hero,” I said. “Consider what that says about the other side – the one they name the Hero is an honorless sneak-thief who would rather appear from invisibility, blow you up, and vanish.” Instead of offering honorable combat, I didn’t need to say. “If we capture her, don’t bother with anything fancy. Down her and eat her.” We would treat Kali the same. The Commander? She, I wanted to turn. With her at my side, I would conquer the world.

  “You’re not hearing what I’m saying, General,” Turbulent Waters said. “We’ve got them if we want them. Finishing them might cost us half our people, and likely a few of us Officers, but if you want to drink their blood, we can do it.”

  “How so?” I paused to let my ire at Turbulent Waters’ comment sink in. “They’ve got us pinned down and unable to run. Once they get their shit together…” I wasn’t impressed by the enemy’s organizational speed, at least after their initial assault on Chicago. Three times in the last four days, if I had been in charge of their army, with their numbers, the Hunters would already be dead or captured. “…they’re going to slowly press the circle until either the Feds intervene and slaughter us, or we’re forced to surrender.” I paused. “So, how are we supposed to win against this?”