No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Read online

  “Ma’am, actually, I don’t.” Gilgamesh had to turn away, the ache in his gut consuming his entire self. Carol had been through so much, and it took so much for even an echo of her Tiamat self to shine through.

  The Skinner sighed. “One of your loose recruits, Pete Sanchek, had been trolling your assumed name around in the underbelly of the Chicago police department and telling them you could turn into a demon. He finally got the ear of an FBI Agent serving as liaison, who recognized the ‘turn into a demon’ as the Arm predator effect.”

  “Ma’am. I should have killed him.”

  “Killed him or fully broken him to your service. Live and learn; do better next time,” the Skinner said. “Understand that if things worked normally you would have, at worst, been forced to flee Chicago with your tail between your legs, giving me a good belly laugh. As it was, only three hours passed between Sanchek’s chat with the FBI Agent and the first boots on the ground in Skokie.”

  Gilgamesh goggled. He knew the attack had happened fast, but three hours was insane. “Then Officer Canon must be a real police officer or federal agent. I’m going to have to check out the FBI, dammit.”

  His comment caught both Arms by surprise. “Kiddo, I think you’re going to solve this,” the Skinner said to him. “You’ve got the right sort of mind for this kind of work.” Keaton paused. “So, who wants to hear about my swamp?”

  Carol Hancock: April 17, 1968

  Keaton leaned back in her chair and studied the night sky. I had no idea what Keaton wanted or where she was going with her ‘swamp’ comment. This whole situation bothered the hell out of me, for no good reason. “I transformed five years ago; today marks the five year anniversary of the start of my stay at the James Mead Transform Sanitarium in upstate New York,” Keaton said. She had never before spoken of her past. I drank this up like a thousand page page-turner novel, instantly forgetting all my worries. “Before Mead, the Feds held me for a week in a now defunct Transform Transfer Center in Westchester County, run by the Communicable Disease Center, what they called the CDC back then.”

  President Johnson, as part of his Great Society, had turned the Communicable Disease Center into the Centers for Disease Control, of which a goodly part of their budget went to Transform Sickness research. According to Zielinski, they wasted most of their budget on Transform management and bureaucracy, not actual research. I had never caught Keaton in a mood like this before, though the wonder of the mood didn’t even come close to papering over the agony of knowing Gilgamesh would be leaving.

  I didn’t understand my feelings. They were too strong and involved emotions I couldn’t name. I felt like I had agreed to give up a limb.

  “As bad as the Feds are now about Transform Sickness, the idiots who held me were worse. They understood so much less back then.” Keaton shook her head slowly. Five years may not sound like much, but my eighteen months as an Arm contained as many memories and experiences as my entire previous life.

  Sorry about not putting all of my experiences in these books – I’ll save the excess detail for when I do my complete leather-bound 120 volume memoirs.

  “My keepers were bastards,” Keaton said, hyena laughter in her voice. “They published my death notice the day they moved me to the Mead, so today is also the fifth anniversary of my death. Officially dead, they were free to do to me whatever they wanted, and they did. They certainly didn’t ask my permission. I didn’t know why at the time, but I learned much later the entire show happened because a year earlier Rose Desmond, Zielinski’s favorite dead Arm, shot him up just before she got killed. The authorities now thought of us as dangerous Monster Focuses, instead of pathetic failed Focuses. They kept me in the maximum security section of the Mead, and, as well, in a cell too tiny for exercise.”

  I sensed understanding growing in Gilgamesh, an understanding of why Keaton became Keaton. This story was for him, yet another tie to bind him to the Arms. Her story seemed almost inevitable to me, based on what I had gone through.

  “Their treatment made me so angry I refused to participate in any way. As you might expect, my defiance didn’t last, as they broke me by using the juice weapon, the same way they broke you, Carol. Only they did it by accident, as they also withheld food and water.

  “I became theirs and did whatever they wanted. The bastards, though, kept me on tight rations, so I never had enough to eat. Because of their treatment, I became seriously cranky. The only defiance I had left was that I refused to talk. My defiance proved of minimal use, as they didn’t particularly care if I talked or not and they didn’t push the issue, which unfortunately later led to the common CDC-backed story about Arms losing their ability to talk. The worst part about those early weeks was, since I was officially dead and cut off from my husband and family, I didn’t have anyone to sleep with after taking juice.”

  Keaton had a husband. That was an appalling thought.

  “They brought in the FBI early to run security at the Mead, and as time went on the Feebs took more control over the situation. This was Joe Patrelle’s fief as a Division Chief, his rank back then, and his two main flunkies on the scene were Special Agent Patrick McIntyre and his partner, Special Agent David Warshauer. As time went on my mind deteriorated from the conditions, and unlike you, Carol, I didn’t have any prior life wisdom to fall back on. I transformed at the age of 23, married for just over a year to a rough man who had taken to beating me when he got drunk. I’d never been to college and my only work experience was three years as a waitress. I knew absolutely shit about anything. I had no friends at the Mead, becoming just another lab animal, and the people who considered me human hated me because I killed to live. The only good thing about the entire mess was that I never suffered any delusions about anyone being on my side.”

  Grim. I would be perpetually angry, too.

  Keaton kept talking, staring off into the sky, reminiscing. “About a month after they broke me they decided I wasn’t dangerous anymore and I got more freedom, including access to a weight room left over from the place’s prison days. Whenever I couldn’t stand the boredom any longer I’d get the guards to take me there and I’d pump iron. They thought I was crazy, but I’d do it for hours at a time. I didn’t have anything else to do and after a while my exercises started to feel good.

  “Two and a half months in they screwed up getting me a kill by two hours. It took me a week and two more kills to put my sanity back together enough to be functional. As the two of you are well aware, those two hours of withdrawal left me with a nasty problem I’d love to fix but have no idea how.” Keaton smiled her sardonic smile, but I think even a normal would have spotted the fact her smile was false. She used the false smile to paper over a gaping raw spot in her soul.

  Gilgamesh coughed, barely audible. Keaton turned to him. “Ma’am?” he whispered. She motioned for him to speak. “I have reason to believe that some leading senior Crows, such as the three who signed my mission letter, have the skills and knowledge to fix your problem.”

  “You can metasense the problem, then? What is it?”

  “It’s…” Gilgamesh paused. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I understand Wire’s technical explanation enough to translate, but I think in your terms your withdrawal scars left an opening which attracts bad juice to you, leaving you over the long haul with Monster juice in your juice structure.”

  “Who’s Wire? You’ve never talked about him before,” Keaton said, demanding.

  Gilgamesh shivered and held my hand tight. “He… This is painful, ma’am. Wire was a trainee Guru in Philadelphia and for several months, my teacher – until the Beast Man you killed in Philadelphia, Grendel, killed him after Grendel and Enkidu captured Wire, Tolstoy and myself.”

  Keaton hissed. “He was my Crow the same way you’re Carol’s?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Fuck,” Keaton said, barely audible.

  She went back to watching the stars and didn’t say anything for another five minutes. I watched her
put away her rage until she buried it from view. Not gone, but waiting for some appropriate time to be let loose again.

  “After I recovered, I was no longer broken to their will, but they didn’t realize it.” Now there’s an Arm trick I didn’t suspect. I had been worrying Biggioni would be able to come to me at any time, threaten my juice supply, say ‘heel’ and I would heel. I guessed the juice lever only worked if you actually supplied the juice. “I took Special Agent Warshauer as a lover and convinced him I was being horribly mistreated. He slipped up a few days later and let me take his weapon, after which I convinced him to let me escape.”

  She held him at gunpoint and forced him to let her out.

  “I didn’t know shit about how to escape, so I couldn’t shake the manhunt. We got jumped by two cops just outside the Mead’s outer perimeter. Both of us got shot up and Warshauer died.”

  Thus the reason McIntyre became her Ahab. I hadn’t realized his hatred was personal.

  “I went berserk and killed the cops, moving faster than I’d thought possible. I’d discovered the burn. My discovery almost killed me before I figured out how to stop the burn.” She laughed, a laugh of pain and loss. This was where Keaton became hard. I wondered if she had cared for Warshauer, and suspected she had.

  “I was on the run for nine months after my escape. At first, I tried not to kill or even hurt people, but I made mistakes. I stole when I needed to. I used cash for everything, disguised myself as well as I knew how. I figured out how to pass myself off as a man. I took kills whenever I found them, but every time I did, the Feds found my trail again. I didn’t understand how to hide my kills. I had money, so I could eat whenever I got hungry. My muscles started to grow like wildfire and I had miserable problems with them. Every time I slacked off on the exercise the least bit, my muscle problems got worse. In the middle of a nation-wide manhunt, I needed to spend time at a gym every day.

  “The Feds finally caught up with me at a gym. I broke into a gym in the middle of the night and I pushed myself until I could hardly move, trying to ease the pain in my muscles. I was so exhausted I was shaking. I could barely stand. The Feds got to me while I took my shower.” Keaton shook her head.

  “That night we all found out what an Arm is really capable of. I was stark naked in the shower and I cleared the top of the shower rod as they shot the curtain out underneath me. Six FBI agents were in the locker room with me and I killed every one of them. I was burning so hot it was a wonder the gym didn’t catch fire. I ran and blundered into another group of six FBI agents, including McIntyre. I tried to shield myself with the big weight plates, but they shot me in more places than I care to think about. I threw smaller plates like Frisbees at the agents; I killed several of them and broke McIntyre’s leg.

  “They weren’t ready for me. By then, I was doing things beyond the capabilities of top male athletes, although I didn’t look as muscular as Carol did when she left St. Louis. They didn’t expect me to be dangerous and they didn’t expect me to be hard to kill. I got away.”

  Keaton stopped speaking for a moment. Remembering again. “None of us knew shit. The Feds these days wouldn’t send just six men into a small room with me. They would have had the exits blocked. They would lay out a shooting gallery and they would be carrying heavier weaponry. There would be a hell of a lot more of them.

  “The funny thing was, once I got away and started recovering, I discovered my muscles actually felt better. This was the first time after my escape from the Mead that my muscles felt better rather than worse. Fighting for my life after I worked myself to exhaustion turned out to be enough to do some good.

  “After the gym shower ambush I changed my style. I realized I was being stupid and that if I kept on as I had been, eventually they’d kill me. I had to either decide to be a normal, give myself up and die, or I had to reject all the half-assed rules I still tried to live by and make my own rules. I needed to stop worrying about right or wrong and just worry about survival.”

  Keaton was skipping a lot of her story here. I didn’t care, engrossed in the abbreviated story she told. She paused and looked over at Gilgamesh. “After several short misadventures I found out the Feds held another Arm in California, in the Bakersfield Detention Center. I went there to break her out but she killed herself before I arrived. I figured I needed to know more about myself, so I kidnapped the leading researcher, the only one there whose name I recognized from my desultory reading on the subject.”

  “Zielinski,” I said.

  “Bingo. It took work to get him to help me: threats, sex, more threats, and dangling myself in front of him as a research subject. I’d never run into anyone like him before; everyone else either folded when I confronted them or shot at me. He bargained with me; hell, he’s never stopped bargaining with me. He taught me how to read a juice meter and why I ended up so stupid and angry most of the time – I’d been keeping my juice count way too low, afraid of going Monster if it got too high.”

  She sighed. “He was the first normal who survived meeting with me. With my juice high I could think again. I figured out how to properly hunt, beat the muscle problems, and keep myself in money.”

  This must be where she spent time as a Mafioso, something I had heard her reference once or twice beforehand. This also had to be the period when she figured out how to control normals and build up a personal organization.

  “Not too much later I blundered into a piece of hard-case Focus politics termed the Mary Beth Julius Rebellion. I was sniffing around the edges of a Transform Clinic, one of my standard haunts back then, when a group of assassins left the Clinic with an unclaimed Transform as baggage. I followed the assassins, their unclaimed Transform became mine, and they led me to their target, a Focus and her entourage. I’d been looking for a way to make contact with the Focuses, as many of the established ones had Clinic contacts and some of the Focuses wanted me dead because of my Clinic kills. I just wanted access to the unclaimed male Transforms left to die in withdrawal.

  “So I decided to intercept the assassination squad. Unfortunately, they were prepared to take out a Focus, which meant large caliber weapons, and I got shot up real bad. Worse, the Focus’s bodyguards killed the unclaimed male Transform in the melee, so I got irate and took one of the Focus’s Transforms in recompense. The Focus was Biggioni. She and I had a little talk while I recovered, then a little fight that left her tied up in knots.”

  There was a whole hell of a lot she didn’t say about this episode. I didn’t ask.

  “Biggioni and I eventually worked out a deal. I’d quit taking tagged Transforms, join the Focus Network and listen to various offers for work. In return I got oodles of information and the chance to bargain for easy kill Transforms. Biggioni, already a celebrity Focus and a token member of the Focus Council, earned a lot of her political power from the work she had me do helping the Council deal with the Julius Rebellion. I got a lot of free unclaimed Clinic Transforms and a load of eye-opening personal grief. One of the rebel Focuses, by the name of Martine DeYoung, rebelled because she had been swatted down for experimenting with juice tricks the older Focuses didn’t like; she was also in cahoots with a Crow, though I didn’t find out about this until later. I helped Biggioni capture DeYoung, when the rebel Focus was on the run, in Indiana, and DeYoung claimed the first Focuses and first Crows deliberately sat on a lot of useful Transform tricks, and kept the younger Focuses and Crows ignorant on purpose.”

  “That’s where you had the hostile encounter with a Crow, ma’am?” Gilgamesh said.

  “Yes. The Julius Rebellion wanted to replace the Council and the Network with a top-down dictatorship, one which would treat the lesser Focuses as underlings, as powerless ignorant sheep. Oh, and kill off any other Major Transforms who weren’t Focuses and their allied Crows, just because they were too dangerous. Although Julius’s effort failed she succeeded with her goals, as the ruling Focuses reacted by setting themselves up as hidden dictators who treat the other Focuses as ignorant
underlings. I got hired to guard the group escorting DeYoung to Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh Focus Patterson’s people grabbed me, subjected me to illusions that made me think I was in a literal hell, and I managed to break free only because they made a mistake and didn’t disable my sense of smell. I still don’t understand why Patterson turned on me. Worse, when I confronted Biggioni about the betrayal, later, she claimed the betrayal never happened. In addition, Biggioni’s description of Patterson’s place didn’t match what I saw at all.”

  I had never before sensed real fear in Keaton. Now I did. Far more went on with Focus Patterson than she, or I, or any of the Focuses knew.

  “Less than a month after Pittsburgh I was trailing a Transform in Ohio, unable to decide if she was tagged or not. That had never happened, before. Real strange. It could have been a trap, but I got curious. Maybe she was another Arm. Maybe she was something else I’d never run into before. I let her go cross-country and trailed her by car. Eventually, she got to some factory complex in Detroit, went in through the back way, and then of all things, started going down. Underground, literally, well out of my range. I later found out she had gone into a salt mine, not the sort of place women tend to go.

  “Those two incidents made me far more paranoid and less than enthusiastic about the Focus community. There’s something rotten going on there. I’ve come to believe DeYoung’s claims, that the first Focuses and first Crows really are sitting on a large amount of important technology.”

  Keaton took a deep breath and cracked her knuckles. “This is just the background. Soon after I ran into Focus Biggioni I started to have crazy chaotic dreams, reoccurring nightmares, dreams I swore weren’t random. In early ’66, three years and four months after I transformed, the chaos settled down and when I dreamed I found myself in a consistent dream world that to me appeared as a swamp. There were others in the swamp, all fantastic creatures with a swamp theme to their appearance save one: the Madonna and child.”