their group and their cars, Tommy grabbed Tonya and wrestled her to the broken asphalt of the rest stop parking lot. Automatic weapon fire from multiple weapons, from too far away to be fully successful. The weapons fire came from a dark blue station wagon, rolling to a stop eighty feet behind them, where the driveway into the rest stop widened into parking spaces for cars on one side and truck and busses on the other. Most of the occupants of the attacking car shot forwards at Tonya and her group, but at least one shot backwards at another car following behind. This second car didn’t slow. It passed the station wagon at freeway speed and kept going on its own while the driver rolled out of the driver’s side door onto the pavement, managed to miss the 2 parked cars of Tonya’s entourage, and finally veered off into the trees about 50 feet before the rest stop driveway rejoined the freeway, where it hit a sturdy pine with a thunderous crash.
Tonya had been lost in internal reverie when the shooting started, repeatedly going over the recently concluded East Region Executive Committee. She had decided they should drive home after the meeting instead of finding a motel for the night, and she hadn’t expected any trouble at all, especially in a random rest stop north of New York City just before midnight. Besides Tommy Landis, her other three bodyguards were Greg Marzuka and Todd Batten, both Transforms, and Robert Dawson, a normal. Todd and Robert, although new at bodyguarding, did have the benefit of Tommy’s training. Tonya hoped it would suffice.
Todd had a head on his shoulders. All her bodyguards carried pistols, but they stored their long guns in the trunk of the Ford. After the speeding station wagon containing the shooters rolled to a stop short of them, Todd crouched over between the cars, popped the trunk, tossed out the duffel with their long guns, and unzipped it. Robert and Greg crawled over, grabbed rifles, and shot at their attackers, who had taken cover behind their car. Today, Tonya found the loud concussion of the Monster-stopping rounds in the rifles to be a welcome noise.
Tonya stayed down and extended her metasense, cursing her initial reverie. She picked out one male Transform among the enemy shooters, but she didn’t recognize his Focus tag. Someone had obscured his tag, an advanced Focus trick long forbidden by the Focus Council. The person who bailed from the now ruined trailing car also metasensed as a Transform, but indistinct and obscure, nothing like Tonya had metasensed before. Tonya had three wounded among her people, all from the initial barrage: Todd, Honey Landis, and Janet Paugh. Janet had fallen behind the Ford with her left leg shattered above the knee, protected from the shooting. Honey bled heavily from her shoulder, chest and hip, and managed to duck between the two cars before she fell. Todd had taken a shot in the abdomen when he went for the guns and fell to his knees once he returned to cover. He grabbed one of the guns from the bag anyway and tried to aim it over the car to return fire. Tonya kept all three of them well pumped and hoped it would be enough. Transforms were tough and often survived bullet wounds a normal would not, but only if their Focus was quick with the juice support and the bullet wounds not too severe. Transforms weren’t invulnerable, not even close.
The firing stopped.
Her people hadn’t fired more than a few shots, too few to have killed their attackers. Tommy helped Tonya to her feet, while she tried to understand what happened to the fight. “What’s going on?” she asked, confused.
“I…”
Something streaked by, running, close, in among Tonya’s people. A Monster perhaps? Tonya had never seen a Monster run so fast. She found herself elbowed to the ground, hard, with Tommy on top. The space on the pavement where Janet had laid was now empty except for her blood. The unknown Transform had grabbed Janet; Tonya followed Janet with her metasense as the Monster-like creature carried her into the woman’s rest room.
“Careful,” Tonya said to Tommy. “That…” Sudden pain slammed into Tonya, unexpected pain from Janet, felt through the metasense link. For an instant, she found herself linked to the unknown Transform. She tried to act, to support Janet, but the attack ended before she could react. Tonya screamed. The unknown Transform had killed Janet and the pain of her death ripped through Tonya like horror, like death, like someone had grabbed hold of her soul and ripped it out of her. Tonya grabbed her hair and pulled as she writhed on the ground fighting for control over herself. Fighting for control over the juice. She instinctively shorted all her Transforms, including her wounded, and she had to force the juice back into them quickly before they died.
“No one move or talk,” Tonya ordered between pants. She tried to gather her mind and her metasense, and figure out what happened. Nothing in the fight made sense to her; it started and stopped far too quickly. This was even worse than the chaos of a botched Monster hunt, and she leaned on her Monster hunting expertise to pull herself out of her panic.
No one moved. No one spoke. No one was alive at the rest stop except Tonya’s people and the Transform in the rest room, and the area was silent as death. Several minutes later, Tonya finally quieted her mind and rapidly beating heart.
“Tommy,” she said into the silence.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Janet’s dead. The unknown Transform took her into the woman’s rest room and killed her.” Tonya took a deep breath and sat up. “Whatever it is, it’s still in the bathroom.” Still in the bathroom and still very dangerous.
Tonya concentrated her metasense and studied. After a half minute, she resolved the unknown in the bathroom as a Major Transform, just like herself. A woman? The unknown looked male when he had run by, but the unknown was a woman.
“What happened to the people shooting at us?” Tonya asked. A few feet away, Todd started to moan, in pain from his wounds, edging toward shock. This was his first combat wound; with the overt danger over and his adrenaline dissipated, he was feeling it. Despite Tonya’s juice support.
“They’re dead,” Tommy said. “We got one, maybe two of the six, but the unknown who took Janet went right after them and killed them. Killed them trivially.”
“Went after them? How?”
“Ran right into them. Bleeding from all sorts of wounds and still ran right at them. Looked like knife-work to me, Mom,” Tommy said.
Knife-work. Against a station wagon filled with an assassination squad? “They shot her and she still did that?”
“‘Her’? The thing was a woman? A Monster?”
“Yes,” Tonya said. The creature still didn’t move. Wounded, maybe? But that didn’t explain why she had taken Janet and killed her. Oh. Tonya began to understand. “But not an ordinary Monster. Our unknown is a failed Focus, the serial killer Stacy Keaton most likely.”
“An Arm?” Tommy said, a dark grin now covering his face. “Let’s go in and kill her.” He knew positive press and public relations when it stared him in the face.
“In an enclosed area, when she can move so fast? No way, Tommy. Think Monster hunting rules,” Tonya said. She decided she felt well enough to stand and carefully rose to her feet, leaning on Tommy’s extended right arm.
“Right. Never go into an enclosed area with a Monster.” Tommy thought for a moment. “With her speed, we can’t take her. We don’t have enough people.”
“We can’t run, either,” Tonya said, taking stock of their vehicles. One casual sniff told the tale. “We have six people, five flat tires, and one leaky gas tank.”
Tommy looked around. “There’s cover over there,” he said, pointing to a four foot tall mound crowned by a set of bushes, about fifty yards away and across the driveway from the rest room.
Tonya nodded and got a tight grip on her emotions. It would be easy for her to make this personal and go all-out after this Arm Monster, regardless of how many of her people the Arm killed defending herself. She knew better to let her emotions guide her in a hot situation. Monster hunting had taught her better; mixing her emotions with the professional needs of being a leader never worked. She would hate herself later for her cold heartlessness, bu
t only in private. “We have another option. The Council wants to get in contact with Keaton, figure out a way to keep her from killing household Transforms, and turn her into an ally.” Just another woman Transform who should join with the Council in sisterly solidarity.
Tommy stared at her as if she had grown bat ears. “You’re not thinking of going in there, are you? Alone?”
“Yes.”
“She killed Janet,” Tommy said.
“She’s a Major Transform.” A Major Transform who killed Transforms for their juice, something Tonya had figured out, but the Council did not yet believe. However, more than enough unsupported Transforms existed who were going to die anyway. Keaton didn’t need to poach household Transforms to survive. Stopping Keaton’s poaching would save household lives.
Tommy’s eyes widened in fear, but he didn’t respond. A threat to Tonya threatened the survival of everyone in the household. From their ample Monster hunting experiences, though, he knew Tonya’s personal tricks and strengths were often necessary to bag the big game.
Tonya tapped her fingers on the hood of the Ford and thought through a plan. If the Arm was sated and full of juice, she should be tractable. Juice was, after all, juice. All Transforms had a limited amount of juice they could