All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Read online

  Nor did he answer the Focus. He just sat quietly, remembering. To his surprise, the Focus didn’t play with his mind with her charisma. She just sat with him.

  “What happened, Focus?” Hank said.

  “Lori,” the Focus said, exasperated.

  “Lori. What happened?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw concern on Lori’s face. For him. For everyone in her household. It eased something inside of him.

  “I was working late, and talking to Gilgamesh on the phone. The attackers tossed two firebombs into the hallway outside the lab, no warning,” Lori said, her voice distant. “Bill got a shot off at one of the attackers, but had to retreat into the lab because of the fire. The attackers must have figured out we built a back way out of the lab for emergencies like this, because as soon as we got out the back way, one of them fired at us. I don’t remember anything after I got shot.”

  Hank looked Lori over. A head shot would kill a Focus as easily as it would kill a normal, but she showed no visible wounds. They would have been running fast, exiting the back way, ducking and dodging, bobbing and weaving. Tom said standard procedure for an attacker in that situation would be to attempt a torso shot because a head shot would be too difficult. A torso shot shouldn’t even make Focus pause in her stride. Focuses were damned tough.

  “I’m missing something,” Hank said.

  Lori nodded. “Hank, they were using .700 Nitro Express Monster-stopper rounds.”

  Hank winced. Those newish rounds had well over twice the stopping power of the .45 service pistol he carried, more than the shorter and now antiquated .707s, made to stop even the largest Monster in her tracks. Hydrostatic shock alone from a torso hit would not only kill a normal, it would kill a Transform. “Where’d it hit?”

  Lori lifted up her shirt, showed him front and back. The front scarring was dime sized, just below the breastbone, and the back scarring was the size of his hand. Shit! Dammit! “I’d like to get some X-Rays, so I…”

  “They’re in the lab.”

  “Range?”

  “About forty meters.”

  “Why are you still walking around? You can’t be fully healed.”

  “I’m not,” Lori said. “Physically or mentally. Inferno calls, though. They need me, I need them. How long does it take bones to regrow? I’ve never lost any before.”

  “A month, if you eat like a pig. Less, since you had Carol feeding you juice.”

  Lori smiled. It didn’t touch her tired eyes. “I told Ann you’d be able to figure everything out, and trying to keep anything from you was nothing more than a waste of time.”

  “How low did you run Carol?”

  “99.3, at which point something kicked in on her side and I couldn’t take any more without her willing it. I wasn’t in that much danger, so I didn’t press my case.” Lori’s face went dreamy. “I just let her kiss me.” Hank would have to think over the latter, later, when his sleep deprived brain functioned better.

  Instead, Hank found a spare sheet of paper, and did some calculations. “Hmm. 99.3 is equivalent to 17.5 on a Transform, the edge of low juice.”

  “Interesting. I hadn’t thought any of the intermediate values meant anything for Major Transforms.” Lori snuggled up against him, and rubbed her torso against his.

  “Lori?”

  “It may be primitive, but it works.” She ran her hands and arms around his neck and face, lifted his shirt and rubbed her arms along his chest and back. Businesslike, not sexual at all. “I’m hungry again, and I want you to come with me into the main house. This is the only way I know of to get you to feel like ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’ as far as the household is concerned.”

  Scent marking. He was being scent marked with the juice of a Focus. What next? Crows and Chimeras peeing on trees?

  ---

  The entire household was being physical, touching and hugging, almost like the prelude to the Inferno Friday night extravaganzas. Nothing sexual, though. Instead, danger filled the air. Ann attached herself to him, almost protectively. Lori had been right. No one gave him any more funny looks and they accepted him as one of the household. They were distracted, though, enough so that when he told them about the attacks on the other Council Focuses only Lori registered his words. He also didn’t like the tone of the conversation he heard from the householders and decided he needed to do something about it.

  “I’m going to go down to the lab,” Hank said to Ann, after dinner. “Could I get you to come down and visit me in the lab after an hour?”

  “Sure,” Ann said. Oblivious. Acting on Transform instincts. This he had to stop.

  “Could you bring Bill Fentress and Bob Masterson with you, as well?”

  “Okay. That’s a strange mix, Doc. Sure you know what you’re doing?”

  He nodded but didn’t explain. Instead, he excused himself and went down to the lab.

  An hour later, Ann, Bill and Bob came trooping down. He moved the metal autopsy gurney out of the way and unfolded three of the battered metal folding chairs. He piled his notes and material on a metal table by the wall, next to Lori’s surgical instruments and the old gas chromatograph. The lab was cold, and the air stale. Not a friendly place, but at least it was private.

  “What is this, some sort of presentation?” Ann said, as they sat. Hank nodded.

  “Each of you represents a different group within Inferno,” Hank said. Ann nodded. She was part of the house leadership team, Bill Fentress a leading bodyguard and Transform, while Dr. Bob, a normal, headed the engineer group. Hank’s other former roommate from his stay in Inferno, as well. “I would like to talk to you about your Focus.”

  His audience tensed, but didn’t say a thing.

  Hank licked his lips and walked over to the table where he had his presentation set up. “What I want to talk to you about are wounds. In specific, Lori’s wounds, and why Inferno isn’t yet out of the woods.”

  He slapped up two X-Rays of Lori’s torso, and dragged over an anatomy poster. “This is the pancreas. When ruptured, it spews toxins into the body, which in a normal can be fatal…”

  Hank presented the medical details involved in Lori’s wound. The round, which passed through her body and only ‘wounded’ her had hit Jim Simpson and killed him instantly, after losing much of its punch. The only reason Lori still lived was that she was a Focus who ran a high juice count compared to most Focuses, and because she had switched over to a Major Transform instinctive trick known as juice metabolism. The hydrostatic pressure of the high velocity high caliber round alone had shredded her lungs and intestines, severely bruised her heart and circulatory system, and punched a hole in her back big enough to stick a fist in. It was a miracle the fetus survived, and the pregnancy put even more stress on her body.

  When he got into the details of Lori’s recovery, and how the internal blood loss and intestinal leakage stressed her body, the sound of someone vomiting interrupted his lecture. Hank blinked and put his diagram down. He had three of the oldest and most blooded of the Inferno household here. The last thing he expected was for one of them to lose their lunch. He turned to look at the three, and they all looked as surprised as he did. None of them showed any sign of vomiting.

  Bill stood, walked over to the infamous repair-hog gas chromatograph, and picked up a younger Transform who had been hiding behind it, eavesdropping.

  “Hello, Amy,” Hank said. “Sneaking into meetings, eh? You’ve gotten better at your stealth.”

  Amy Cizek was a young Transform, now all of 14, who Hank had trained during his previous stay with Inferno. He felt a little glow of paternal pride, even despite the circumstances. “Sorry, Doc, about the spew. What you’re talking about’s just too gross, you know.”

  Bill growled at her, his arms crossed and his brows down. As one of Lori’s chief bodyguards, there was damned little in the world he couldn’t stare down.

  “We deserve to know, too,” Amy said, pleading, wheedling.

  “We?” Bill said.


  “The younger Transforms. We all saw what Doc Pain here was cooking up, and we decided we needed to know what was going on. They chose me because, well…”

  Bill looked at Ann and Hank, and motioned his eyes at the door. Hank shook his head. Amy did have a point, considering how important the younger Transforms were to Lori. The young Transforms formed their own house faction, and he should have invited one of them to this meeting.

  Ann sighed. “Not before she cleans that mess up.” Hank handed Amy a towel and she quickly swiped over what turned out to be a very small mess.

  “Amy,” Hank said, as Bill disgustedly dragged over the chair Hank had been sitting in and dropped Amy into it, “Have you ever heard of something called a juice grope?”

  Amy nodded, suddenly scared. “Superorganism theory. That’s part of those unreadable papers you and the Focus have been exchanging for the last year, isn’t it?” Hank wondered if he should tell Lori about her youngest Transform’s interest in her private papers.

  “It actually happens, in many households,” Hank said. “The juice grope is an instinctive response by the woman members of a household to a threat to their Focus. It increases their juice production and gives the Focus a lot more juice to work with. It can be fought off, but in this case, don’t, especially you younger woman Transforms. Remember the training sessions? Younger Transforms produce much more juice when stressed than older Transforms.”

  Amy nodded. “That’s scary, Doc. You know what large amounts of stress does to us kids. We’ll be knocked out. How come you’re telling us about all this extreme stuff? The Focus is all better, walking around normal and moving juice. Isn’t she?”

  “I expect at least one round of renal failure is coming up.” Hank hadn’t gotten to that part of his presentation yet, and Ann and Bill cursed when they heard. “Don’t panic when it happens,” he told Amy. “It’s entirely reasonable for a Focus to sweat, vomit and defecate three quarters of her blood supply during renal failure. When a Major Transform’s blood gets too toxic, she just removes it from her body and makes new blood. Once she finishes the blood sweat, feed her a liquid heavy diet.” Amy looked like she wanted to vomit again.

  Hank went from there into a gory description of another half dozen Major Transform coping mechanisms for physical stress they might be seeing in the next several days.

  “Doesn’t the Focus need to be here to hear this?” Amy said.

  Amy was a treasure, smart as a whip, but she needed to learn to master her Transform panic. “You tell me,” Hank said. “Figure it out.”

  Amy squirmed, and thought. “She knows this already, doesn’t she?”

  Hank nodded.

  “She’s out walking around and helping us cope because we need her, not because she’s ready to be up and about.”

  Hank nodded again. Tears brimmed in Amy’s eyes as she thought through the implications.

  “I could just kick her!” Amy said, loudly, after a long pause. “The Focus doesn’t have to show us that she loves us by sacrificing herself. We already know that.”

  Hank stared at Amy, still not explaining, watching her fidget. Then she got it. “It’s the Focus’s philosophy, that deeds speak louder than words…that’s what’s driving her, isn’t it?”

  Hank nodded.

  “That’s who she is,” Hank said. The Focus.

  ---

  “Gilgamesh is coming.”

  Hank woke up with a start. He had dropped off, exhausted, around ten, and then woke up, restless, around three. His old stress reactions were kicking in again, those long ago lessons from his days as a resident and from his two years in Korea.

  For a second he didn’t recall his location. Then he got it: library, book in his lap, blanket over him…and over Lori, who cuddled up next to him on the love seat. She was oven warm, a shivering oven.

  “Focus?”

  “Shh. I was helping you dream.”

  He didn’t want to know. His dreams had been of work, though, not great events. He once thought his ‘amygdala reorganization as a second marker for a Major Transformation’ discovery might be Nobel Prize quality, but now, three steps back from the work, he realized he had been fooling himself. He had been out of the research game for too long. He was a has-been, a washed-up shell of his former self, too easily distracted from his research by the far more exciting Major Transform antics.

  “Helping me work? On what?” Hank said. He had a problem, one familiar to him: he was good at solving problems, but finding the right problem often proved difficult. He had chosen a great many blind alleys in his days. These days he practically drowned in administrative duties and blind alleys.

  Lori made muttering noises, and put her head on his shoulder. Hank found he could follow Gilgamesh’s progress through the house by following Lori’s gaze. The Crow slipped through the half-open door to the library like a half seen ghost, stopping in a dark corner.

  “Hello, Focus Rizzari, Doctor Zielinski,” Gilgamesh whispered. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get here, but…”

  “Get over here, you big galoot,” Lori said, a charismatically backed order. She raised the other side of the blanket in an invitation. Gilgamesh hesitantly walked over, then cuddled up on the other side of Lori. Lori squirmed in pleasure between the two of them as they crowded together on a love seat meant for two. “I’m not going to die, you idiot. You didn’t have to come all the way from Detroit to comfort me.”

  Hah. If Gilgamesh hadn’t found a way to master his panic and leave Detroit on his own, Hank would have gone there to drag him here. Their main problem would be Lori’s psyche, on a whole host of different fronts. He trusted Gilgamesh would be able to deal with the Focus’s head problems better than anyone else he knew.

  “If you believe you’re healthy, I can list all the problems I see in your glow, and how they mirror your wounds,” Gilgamesh said. Gilgamesh was, as always, a dose of much needed reality.

  “Okay. I’m a friggen zombie running on a fifteen percent juice metabolism. You don’t have to remind me. Actually, that’s the last thing I want to talk about,” Lori said. “Anyone here in Inferno know you’ve arrived?”

  Gilgamesh twitched, for him a shrug. “Should they? They feel safe to me.”

  Lori opened her mouth to say something, and then shrugged. Hank began to understand the attraction between Lori and Gilgamesh: both of them loved quiet and contemplation. They allowed events to thrust them into the public eye only due to their own sense of obligation and morality.

  “We’re in big trouble, you know,” Gilgamesh said. His quiet voice suited the night stillness of the room. A couple of stars shone through the near window, the only light.

  Lori grunted. “How so?” Hank asked.

  “I had some time to think on my way here,” Gilgamesh said. His voice sounded pained. “I’m positive that much, if not all, of the harassment that’s happened to us ever since the emergency Council meeting at the end of January is from the first Focuses, or some of the first Focuses, and not Rogue Crow. I managed to scrape up evidence that the information that got sent to the Detroit FBI office came from a Focus household. I’m positive we’ll find that the stuff Haggerty uncovered will turn out the same. Also, I think the timing on this is no coincidence – I think the FBI information was sent to keep Carol out of Boston, one way or the other, the same way the FBI information kept Keaton out of Boston.”

  This mirrored Hank’s thoughts on the subject. Gilgamesh was right. They were in big trouble.

  “So, Gilgamesh, Hank’s worried he’s wasting time doing administration,” Lori said. He hadn’t said anything out loud, but she knew anyway. She clearly didn’t want to think about the war against the first Focuses they now fought. “What do you think?”

  Lost down esoteric conversational byways, he eventually fell asleep, only to awake when Autumn Idoux waved a plate of scrambled eggs under his nose around breakfast time. Gilgamesh and Lori had at least left him the blanket.

  ---

 
“There’s no sign of any Transform involvement. The attackers were hired by the Antonella family – mobsters – and the Antonellas operate out of the Bronx. You know any reason why a bunch of mobsters would be after you?”

  They sat around a table in the Inferno dining room, an hour before noon, and the room was quiet except for the four of them. The serving plates held a considerable quantity of food, intended for Lori, but Carol was the one making use of it. Keaton and Sky were out patrolling, each leading an Inferno squad. Hank would have loved to see what Stacy was doing with the Inferno Transforms right now, but he was under virtual house arrest, with his own bodyguard, Autumn Idoux, shadowing him. Gilgamesh sat closest to Lori, and the tension between Gilgamesh and Carol was thick enough to cut.

  Lori shook her head. Hank monitored her ongoing condition uneasily. He still wasn’t confident of her health. She had gone into renal failure earlier in the morning, and Hank had led the Inferno medics through the procedure to bring her out of it, stabilize her, and clean up the mess she left behind. Carol showed up about an hour later, which Hank considered no coincidence at all. Deep links connected the two of them, and the links seemed to work just fine over multiple miles. Carol spent a while bitching about the bad hunting in the Boston area, and the amount of territory the Nobles had marked as off limits in the northern Boston suburbs, and gave Lori another round of juice. Those rounds of juice worked miracles, and were the reason Hank was merely uneasy. The one round this morning got Lori up and moving again, and likely cut another week off her total recovery time. Now, if she would just lie down and rest for a while, she might actually get better.

  Hank should have guessed that Chimeras didn’t pee on light posts to mark their territory. They left elaborate élan messes even an Arm could recognize. Carol had told him all about the marks, in excruciating and inevitably profane detail.

  “Gilgamesh has a theory about…” Lori started to say, cut off by an impressive Arm glare from Carol. “You weren’t here when we got word, but Polly and Tonya are pinned down as well – Focus Schrum released her blackmail material on them to the FBI and several New York and Pennsylvania prosecuting attorneys.” Carol’s ire vanished, as her face turned to blank stone. “I’ve also verified that Focus Bentlow and Focus Webb were both hit; their households were firebombed and burnt to the ground.”