Read Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) for Free Online Page B

learned while I was away, based on your example.”
    “Oh?”  Pause.  “Dammit skag, stand up if you’re going to show me something you’ve learned.”
    I stood and waited until it was my turn to speak.  Despite the recent beating, I was refreshed and exhilarated, high on tension and adrenaline.  Arms heal fast and recover faster.  “I’ll need a target, ma’am.  Can I make use of your toy?”
    Keaton often kept toys around the warehouse , and I heard the ragged breathing of one in residence.  Always men, to be tortured or killed.  She went through one or two a juice cycle.  Some lasted for days.  All, I think, had abused their wives or their children.  Or they just annoyed the crap out of her.
    Being able to kill one of her toys, on my own, when she wasn’t around, had earned me my California spree.
    Yes, the pleasant and kind Carol Hancock was gone.  A beastly monster, an Arm, had taken her place.
    I wondered how many more transformations still waited for me.
     
    The toy, a scruffy-looking wretch, stank of alcohol, dirt and old sweat.  He knelt, attached by a chain to a support pillar in the partition-marked room Keaton used as a torture chamber.  He looked like Keaton had found him on the street somewhere.  Certainly enough street had come in with him.
    “Well?” Keaton said.  The man looked up and probably would have pissed himself if he wasn’t already half gone from dehydration and Keaton’s abuse.  He was certainly afraid of Keaton.
    Me, not so much.
    His lack of fear of me offended me.  I shifted position slightly and my mouth turned up in a hunter’s smile.  The blood drained from the man’s face just before he slumped over, heart no longer beating.
    Oops.
    Without warning, I found myself flying through the air toward the partition separating the torture chamber from her bedroom.  The partition fell to the ground in a clatter and I fell with it.  Before I bounced to my feet, Keaton leapt on me. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she snarled, holding her knife against my throat with her right hand.  I barely repressed the urge to pull out my own knives and start hacking.  The partition, spattered with blood, some of it Transform blood, turned me on and boosted my aggression.
    “Ma’am.” I took several deep breaths to quell the adrenaline and started again, slower and calmer.  “I thought I would use the predator effect to make the man afraid.  I learned the predator effect from watching you.  I’m sorry he die…” The ‘d’ died in my throat, squeezed to death by Keaton.  Her iron fingers clawed into my windpipe.  She stared into my eyes for a minute before releasing her grip.
    “Come with me,” she said.  I followed her out of the torture chamber, around the partition corner and into the filthy, reeking kitchen.
    Keaton turned to me as soon as we reached the kitchen’s dining table, a Formica thing that hadn’t been wiped down since I left.  I wondered what had happened to the tablecloth.  “What.  The fuck.  Did you do?”
    Sweat dripped down my sides.  I learned this from her, dammit!  What the hell did she want?
    “I do…” I started, and then stopped to clear my throat, trying to force my voice out through my aching voice box.  I still felt the vice grip of her fingers in my neck.  “I noticed the effect you project sometimes, ma’am, where people around you seem to be aware of how dangerous you are.  I call this trick the ‘predator effect’, but until my trip out west I couldn’t do it.”  Normally, around Keaton, I was as predatory as a mouse.  She didn’t interrupt me.  I kept talking, ignoring the stabbing pain in my throat.  “Out west I followed your orders, let my beast out, and discovered I could do the predator effect as well.  I played with it a lot.”  Even thinking about the predator effect made my loins tighten.
    Keaton smiled.  Yes, she read the loin tightening.  “Tell me how you do