Beastseer

Beastseer

By Scott Crowder

Published by r[E]volution Press at Smashwords

Contents copyright © 2014 Scott Crowder / r[E]volution Press

All rights reserved. Any reproduction, sale, or commercial use of this book without express written permission of the author is strictly forbidden.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are inventions of the author. Any resemblance to actual events or people, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover images courtesy of FrostBo (texture) and Silaynne Stock (eye), both on Deviant Art.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Chapter 1

Katelynn Ross, caught in the tides of people heaving to and fro along Atlanta’s streets, tried her best to keep up with man she’d been following for more than an hour, her head abuzz with thoughts of her father.

Daddy was a cold-hearted son of a bitch if ever there was one. Isn’t that the way these things were always supposed to start out?

So here goes.

Daddy was a cold-hearted son of a bitch if ever there was one, tall and splendidly handsome in a way that hid what lay beneath his chocolate skin. His eyes and words were as cold as his heart, and his heart itself was as cold as the wind that might blow on a February night. The only thing not frozen about him was his explosive temper, and she wondered sometimes how the two didn’t cancel each other out, the napalm of his temper and the ice of his indifference…

Damn it, Katelynn thought. I…I can’t make the lies stick to him. Not today. Especially not today.

In reality, Daddy’d been neither cold nor abusive. His eyes had been like a fire let burn to warm embers. His words had been ointments and bandages, his steady voice the hands that had applied them to her hurts and wounds.

The lies she tried to tell herself, that she begged her innermost heart to believe, didn’t help and they never had. The pain of his death still lay so deep, though, that she had no choice but to try. She’d rather hate him than miss him so damn much.

She shook her head to chase the lies away, careful not to draw attention to herself, knowing she blended in well and unwilling to lose the homogeneity: a young black girl as unremarkable in frame and feature as she could hope. Sixteen years old, average height, black hair in tight curls around her ears, and she thought herself pretty, but only marginally so, not that it mattered anyway, and she harbored no ill will toward her own genes for not making her prettier. She tried to look exactly like the people in whose midst she walked as she followed her neighbor, Cooper…whatever the hell his last name was, Cooper Somethingorother.

He moved slowly, walking twenty or so feet ahead, hands in his pockets, his eyes cast ever downward to the sidewalk, heedless of the people around him and the tiny acts of violence their collisions caused, whether his fault or theirs. He simply mumbled his apologies and kept walking, never looking up even when threats of violence were trumpeted in his direction.

He’d been doing this for an hour or more now.

She kept her eyes as fixated on him as he kept his fixated on the sidewalk just in front of his feet. Still he didn’t look up, wouldn’t look up; refused to, apparently.

He’s like a damn kid, Katelynn thought, fingertips stuck in his ears chanting ‘La la la la’ so that he won’t have to hear what’s going on around him.

Oh God I hate him. I hate him and I hope he dies in a fire.

As she strode along, keeping an eye on Cooper Somethingorother but also trying to avoid the throngs of people crowding river-like around her, she noticed a woman climbing atop a huge concrete planter in front of a building to her left across the street, the building itself all steel and black glass. Katelynn slowed involuntarily; she knew what was coming but couldn’t help but slow and watch anyway. The woman on the planter yelled to be heard above the din of the city.

People! Listen to me! Listen to Sebastian, and believe in him! the woman yelled even as she turned a gas can up over her head. The gasoline within sloshed out over her, soaking her and plastering her hair to her face. She sputtered and spit as it ran into her mouth.

Shut up, dumb-ass! someone in the crowd shouted to her. Katelynn fought the urge to both wince and laugh when others cheered in agreement with the heckler.

No! the woman shouted back, dropping the can to the sidewalk below, and the flow of people carried Katelynn on past until she lost sight of the woman. "No! Please listen to me! He knows the way to forgiveness and freedom, freedom from fear and death! We are the doorways and the doorways must be closed! Sebastian has shown me that I have to do this for my children and for your children, too, and it’s in his name that I do this now!"

Katelynn heard the whump of igniting gasoline and then the woman began to scream.

Burn, you coward! Katelynn heard someone behind her yell, and others laughed as the woman shrieked. Katelynn shook her head in resignation; these members of the so-called San Sebastian Motorcade claimed to be killing themselves for everyone else’s safety, by denying Subjekt 44s passage into this world, but Katelynn had to agree with the person who’d called her a coward. They were simply too afraid to live with the fear.

The woman’s screams receded as Katelynn kept pace with the man she followed and ended abruptly with a gunshot. Probably some passerby had taken pity and put the moron out of her misery.

Nobody bothered to stop at the screams or the gunshot. The man she was following didn’t even bother to look up.

He continued on, eyes downcast, passing a gun emplacement on Peachtree Street, and Katelynn glanced at it, in awe as always at the size of them. The words ‘Casement Thirty Three’ were painted beneath a grinning death’s head skull on its armored side. The open-topped turret bristled with Browning 50 caliber machine guns, because sometimes the beastseers caught the Subjekt 44s before they had a chance to rip their way through their human doorways, but sometimes they didn't, and what were you supposed to do when a nine foot tall monstrosity escaped into the city and butchered everyone it could sink its claws into trying to escape? If you were the Atlanta Chief of Police or the City Council, you set up gun turrets like these is what you did. Then you prayed to the God that so many had shed like old ratty clothes that these gun turrets wouldn't have to open fire on crowded thoroughfares.

She glanced back up into the turret at the cops sitting within; they flicked their cigarette butts at the people passing below.

One of these butts hit Cooper behind the ear and he didn’t even flinch, just kept walking, his steps metronomic and methodical.

You’re as much a coward as those idiots in the San Sebastian Motorcade, Katelynn thought, turning away at last from the gun casement, wishing to God she could beam her thoughts directly into his head, wishing she at least had the courage she cursed him for lacking. I could tell you what I really think about you. Tell you how much I hate you. He plodded along, oblivious to her venom. At the corner of Peachtree Street and Abernathy Boulevard he took a blind left and plowed into a well-dressed woman, her Remington shotgun slung loosely over the shoulder of a business suit.

Watch out, asshole, she barked, putting a well-manicured hand on the stock of the gun.

Sorry, he mumbled, Sorry. And still he didn’t look up. Katelynn turned her head away in disgust, unable to look at him anymore, at his cowardice, at the hang-dog slump of his shoulders. Instead, she looked up and around herself, at the snipers’ nests clinging to the buildings like barnacles and gun turrets looming like huge armored toadstools, at the flawless blue sky squeezed between the skyscrapers, at the skyscrapers themselves.

And down at street-level, between the buildings, squeezed onto every available inch of sidewalk stood the vendors’ carts, capitalism only spurred on further in these bleak times by the knowledge that humanity existed in a war-zone now, an invasion beach-head that couldn't be driven back into any ocean.

At these carts she could buy, if so inclined, everything from hotdogs and handguns to crossbows and nachos, from Wiccan protection spells to home-made poultices that claimed to protect against Subjekt 44s. She saw strings of necklaces and bracelets made from monstrous, long black and red and white tusks and fangs, racks of wallets and belts fashioned from Subjekt 44 skin, pebbled and green or scaly and black or smooth and pale, as if taken from any imaginable creature here in this world instead of from creatures crossing over from another.

The smell of cooking came to her and she saw a woman walking away from a particular cart carefully holding a disposable bowl, some type of stew steaming inside it. Screamin’ Demon Soup read the placard on the cart itself. A bowlful of what ails ya! Katelynn grunted in disgust and as she turned to look for Cooper once more she saw what had to be an illegal collection for sale behind someone’s display tent: the heads of several Subjekt 44s, partially preserved and mounted on poles, price tags dangling from tufts of thorny spines or long fangs or pointed lupine ears.

Oh God, I wish I could tell you how much I hate you, she thought about Cooper as she caught sight of him again. And I could tell you that I’m gonna kill you.

As they caught the light and crossed Jefferson, Katelynn noticed a peculiar hush fall over the crowd, as if by simply walking from one side of the street to the other, they’d left behind the mundane and entered someplace holy. Eyes fell to the ground and paces quickened, and suddenly Katelynn found herself caught in a crush. The man following her bumped into her and actually had to grab hold of her shoulders and push her along to keep from knocking her down and trampling her.

Come on, he mumbled. Try and keep up.

Through a break in the crowd she saw what had caused the consternation; a beastseer, a Transmigrating Hostile Detection Specialist or Thud, standing in the street and stopping traffic in both lanes, watching the people as they flowed by on Katelynn’s side of the street. Tall and lean; a woman, to judge by the figure, dressed in black. Tall boots, huge handguns holstered at her waist, a long black coat pushed back over them, and of course the mask, hers a simple black full-face mask trimmed in red, its only holes those for the eyes. She's gotta be hot dressed like that, Katelynn thought, but she understood why beastseers wore the masks. Anonymity. You spend your days condemning your fellow citizens to death and some of them are going to take offense…

The beastseer turned her head this way and that, scanning the rapidly-moving crowd for any sign of a Subjekt 44 about to claw its way out of someone. After a moment she motioned to the TAC team, the Tactical Assault Corps, escorting her and they swept away from her in fans of gleaming gun and black body armor, flanking and stopping a great portion of the crowd on Katelyn’s side of the street. The beastseer moved slowly back and forth before this crowd like a general inspecting her troops, silent until the crowd started grumbling.

You’ve seen enough! someone called out. Now let us go!

Leave us alone!

Go away!

Katelynn felt the crowd grow taut, like a great muscle gathering tension to itself before exploding, people not yet surging but preparing to surge…

You refuse to cooperate, the beastseer called back to them, her voice muffled and hollow behind her mask but still thick with condescension, and who knows? We may have to declare martial law! Katelynn was surprised to see several of the TAC cops wince at the beastseer’s words.

Bullshit! called the very man who’d kept Katelynn from falling a moment ago, now standing beside her. Everyone in the crowd turned their heads to him. They can’t impose martial law. How would the beastseers do their jobs with nobody on the streets?

Would you rather riot, the beastseer answered, and kill each other?

And now the crowd did surge and the TAC cops surged back, one large handgun pointed into the air and fired twice. Everybody stopped, dead silent, and stared at the gun held motionless in the hand of the TAC cop who himself stared disgustedly at the beastseer. He turned after a moment to face the crowd.

People, there isn’t going to be any martial law, he said and lowered his gun, de-cocking it and sliding it smoothly into its holster. And if we stand together against our fear, there won’t be any rioting either.

The beastseer turned quickly on the cop, and even though Katelynn couldn’t see her eyes, she could still feel the venom that must have poisoned that gaze. The beastseer whirled suddenly and stormed off, lost in the flapping of her black coat and the collective sigh of relief from those she’d been observing. The cops turned and followed her much more slowly.

God, what a bitch, Katelynn thought as people began moving down the street once more. I know beastseers gotta do what they gotta do, but why do they have to be so…arrogant about it? She glanced ahead for Cooper Somethingorother and panicked slightly when she was unable to find him in the crowd before her, even as she realized that she didn’t know why she felt the anxiety in the first place. She wasn’t following him for any particular reason, only to get a feel for what he did on his days off, the hate she felt for him driving her to obsess over his habits lately. Still, she didn’t want this morning’s work to be wasted and so she darted forward, weaving through the crowd, pushing her way around people until…

There he was. Cooper Somethingorother, and at the sight of him anger flared in her anew. She could still see his fear and cowardice clearly in the droop of his head, his hunched shoulders and shuffling feet. Everyone else had regained their composure, had shed their fears when the beastseer had left, but not Cooper Somethingorother. He still shambled along as if carrying on his bent and aching back the weight of every burden that any human being ever felt, and she hated him for this as much as for anything else.

Dad had died a year ago…no, Katelynn corrected herself. Bullshit. Not died: he’d been murdered, and by one of these goddamn beastseers, to boot. So as far as Katelynn was concerned she had as much right to feel sorry for herself as anyone, and still she didn’t. She’d not crawled into a bottle or a needle, nor spent her days stewing in self-pity like this drunken lout of a neighbor of hers, Cooper Somethingorother. And to top it all off, to add insult to bleeding injury, it wasn’t enough that Dad was dead, but this man had to seduce Mom into his bed whenever he felt lonely or something, whenever he wanted to fuck her.

Her anger blazed even higher at the thought of this pathetic man touching Mom, an inferno fueled with bones and memory, and she had to choke back the urge to run up and simply attack him with her bare hands.

She wasn’t kidding about wanting to kill him.

He stumbled as he stepped off the curb at Hightower and bumped into a little girl walking toward him. The girl said something to him, though Katelynn wasn’t close enough to hear what, and he simply stared down at the girl as the girl’s mother pulled at her. As mother and daughter walked past him, he turned to watch them move away, twisting in Katelynn’s direction as his eyes widened in shock. He pulled his handgun from its holster at the small of his back even as his face seemed to crumble into deteriorating planes of fear and misery. Katelynn glanced down at the girl to see what had given him such a shock.

And saw. Oh God, she saw.

Chapter 2

Cooper Kirby hadn’t even glanced up when the hush had fallen over the crowd through which he waded, so fierce was his hangover. He already knew what the cause of the hush was, anyway. Hell, he even knew who it was: Helen Danbury. This was the zone she’d been assigned to walk today as a beastseer, and she was doing it with all the histrionics he would expect from her, she and her big Glock .40 caliber long-slides. She couldn’t fire one gun accurately with both hands but carried the two of them anyway because, she’d told him once, they make me look wicked! Egotistical bitch had even started calling herself Eden Darque; Eden Darque, can you imagine that? Too much like that idiot Hugo Hammerheart over in Zone 4, and Cooper knew good and goddamn well the name on that particular half-wit’s Early Entry Detection Specialist’s license read Hubert Galloway.

This was the world and these the people he’d had to face today, unable to look at the drab walls of his living room or smell the stink of his house for one more minute. The stench of spoiled food in the kitchen sink and sweat and mildewed bathroom had simply become overpowering, the sights of clutter and unwashed dishes, dirty clothes and filthy carpet so forceful, pushing and pushing and pushing, that he found himself unable to resist the pressure any more. He’d awoken this morning knowing that he had to get out, despite the hangover that begged him