Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (12 page)

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The next morning, Tuesday, I didn’t get up on my own.  I was even more depressed and had a headache besides.  Achy muscles.  A sharp pain in my abdomen, under my right lower ribs.  The nurse came in and tried to get me out of bed.  I ignored her.  They sent for
Dr. Zielinski.

Dr.
Zielinski sat down in the chair beside my bed.  I opened my eyes briefly, closed them again and ignored him.  It reminded me briefly of the first morning, when I’d been so hungry, and he had come for the first time.  I was still hungry.

He just sat for several minutes and didn’t say anything.  I wallowed in my misery. 

“I’m hungry.”

“Hmm,” he responded, non-committal.

“I’m hungry and I have a blistering headache and I hurt.  I hate the stupid exercises and I hate having armed orderlies always following me around and I’m tired and I don’t want to kill anybody and I hate it.  I
hate
it,
hate
it,
hate
it!” I turned over and buried my face into my pillow.  Even to myself I sounded like an over-tired two year old.

“Your problems are because you need juice,” he said.

“What?” I took my face out of the pillow and looked at him.

“Your juice level affects your mood.  As your juice level falls, you get more depressed and feel worse.  When you take juice, you’ll feel much better, and be cheerful and optimistic and generally pleased with life.  Unfortunately, you used a lot of juice to heal, after they shot you.  Normally, we have over two weeks before a new Arm has to face the need for more juice.”

His words appalled me.  Life was going to get worse.  Dr. Zielinski wanted me to kill someone to get over my depression.  I couldn’t even visualize the corresponding good side.  I buried my face back in the pillow and cried.

“You can’t survive unless you take juice,”
Dr. Zielinski said.  “We’re in the process of locating a suitable volunteer.  You’re just going to have to be patient.”

I tried to brush his arm off the bed with a swipe of my hand.  He fell backwards as if I had punched him.

“Carol, you need to get up,” Dr. Zielinski said from the floor, voice firm.  “People are depending on you and you have a responsibility.”

I dragged myself out of bed.  Slowly.

I didn’t function well that day.  I hated the exercise session and I was cranky with everyone.  When Nurse Callahan did a sloppy job of finding my vein to draw blood, I vented all my pent-up hostility and depression at her.

“Did you actually go to nursing school?” I said, my voice as cold as ice.  “Or did you go and just sleep through the classes?”  Everything came out at once and I couldn’t stop my river of vitriol.  “No, you used your time trying to get a husband, but you weren’t any good at that either.  Now you’re not married and you’re still a lousy nurse.  So now, you’re trying to get Mr. Cook to go after you.  Except he’s smart enough to figure out that you’re stupid and incompetent, and he’s too smart to want anything to do with a cheap whore like you.  How did you manage to get this job, anyway?  I would have thought that for something this important they would have gotten competent staff.  Or were you just here and they didn’t bother to get rid of you when they brought in people who knew what they were doing?”

I didn’t have the slightest idea where I’d come up with that hateful garbage.  Nurse Callahan just stared at me all through my diatribe, then whispered “No, it’s not like that…” before tears filled her eyes and she fled the room.  Tears filled my own eyes, from anger, misery and disgust with what I said.  All I’d really known was that she seemed serious when she flirted with Mr. Cook and she didn’t seem to think well of herself.  I should have apologized to Nurse Callahan when she came by after lunch to take my blood pressure, but all I did was glare at her, aching from my exercises.  She left the room quickly and I never saw her again.  I learned later she quit.  The story of what I did made the rumor mill among the staff, lowering my already low reputation.

Mom tried to cheer me up later, but she had no luck.  “You’ll just have to work your way through all these changes, dear.  I know this has got to be difficult.”  She left after I turned away, hiding my tears.  The flowers and letters had stopped.  I was passing out of people’s memories, a bad dream they didn’t want to think about anymore.  After Mom left, I railed at the unfairness of my life and broke two of the flower vases.

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Wednesday, they didn’t even try to get me out of bed.  Two orderlies came in and moved me bodily to a gurney.  For the rest of the day they hauled me around, baggage to be tested.

All day long, my head throbbed and my muscles and joints ached.  My stomach was a cavern inside of me.  My skin felt raw and every touch was painful.  A thick goo coated my teeth; every light was too bright and every noise too loud.  Depression descended on me, a curtain in front of my thoughts.  I curled my arms over my head and tried to shut everything out.

Thursday they left me in bed as I pleaded and cursed for relief, not fit for company at all.  Later in the morning the orderlies came, hauled me into a room overlooking the entrance to the Detention Center and sat me in a chair facing the barred window.  They had to strap me in to keep me sitting up.  We waited as the minutes dragged by in an eternity of torture.

An eon later, I discovered how different I was.  I noticed something coming, something beautiful, pleasant, a soothing touch on my raw nerves, a well-done picture or a pure note.  My extra sense picked this up as it came into the Detention Center, similar to what I had sensed in those two Transform women on my first day here, but even more alluring now. 

I turned toward it.  Beside me, I heard someone say, “She’s got it.” Someone else said “About 1400 feet.  Maybe 1350.  Call it 1375.  Mark her down for a range of 1375 feet with her metasense.  Second best I’ve seen.”

Metasense
?  What a word.  I smiled and focused in on the beauteous wonder that approached.  I tried to go towards it, but couldn’t.  Dimly, remembering my restraints, I pulled absent-mindedly at the straps.

The soothing harmony came closer.  I forgot my other senses and focused only on this
metasense
, the one showing me the beauteous wonder.

It was in the building; the elevator; closer still.  I held my breath, clenching my hands into fists, again and again. 

I
liked
it.

Now it was in the room next to me and stopped.  I made a little whimpering noise.  I wanted it closer. 

“Wait,” someone commanded, a voice I was accustomed to obeying.  Dr. Zielinski, I eventually realized.  The same voice who called out the distances on my metasense.  I tugged again at the straps.

“Wait.” I heard again.

Finally, a different voice:  “We’re set.  Let her go.”

I thought I would have a choice whether I killed or not.  I was a fool back then. 

I was an Arm.  Taking juice was never my choice. 

The hands guiding me pushed me against warm flesh, flooded with juice.  They laid my hands directly on the skin, and my body thrilled to the touch.  The hand of God was upon me, my whole psyche pillowed in warmth.

“Pull.  Draw it into you.  Drink down the juice.  Pull it into you.  Carol, take the juice…”

I pulled in the juice, just as Zielinski commanded.  I had no control.  None.

The juice was ecstasy.  The first tiny fragment of juice entering through my hands rang like a glass of pure crystal.  My body sang in that pure moment of utter clarity and purpose, the infinite now, that both lasted forever and lasted no time at all, poised at rapture’s edge.  However, my initial pleasure was only the prelude.  In the next undefined instant, the juice surged into me as a tsunami of purest unadulterated bliss, better than life, better than sex, beyond heaven.  Like the flowing of the tide, the juice inexorably drowned my thoughts and words in overwhelming sensation.  Love and lust gripped me in swirled union, mixed with wondrous emotions that I, then, could not name.  I touched heaven and beheld God.  As the juice swept in and through and beyond me it thrilled my body and mind, touching delight in every way imaginable.  I pulled and pulled until there was no more, yet still the pleasure went on and on and on.  I lost myself and the ecstasy consumed me.  That which had been me succumbed to the mindless and exhaustingly vital bewitchment that was the wondrous drawing of the juice, and there had never been anything so perfect in my life.

I awoke in the afternoon, in my hospital bed in the St. Louis Transform Detention Center.  My body thrilled to the lure of sex.  Every touch on my body was a stimulus.  I ached with need, thrilled with joy, and moaned with pleasure.  My nipples were hard with excitement and every nerve in my body longed for a touch.  I panted with need and my breath came in ragged gasps.

I lay alone in my bed.  No one would come near me for the rest of the day, not even Mom, who fled after she took one look at me.  I rubbed against the bed rails, the headboard, anything.  I couldn’t satisfy myself.  I wanted more.  More.  More!

No one would come near me. 

I groaned in frustration. 

I stared at the ceiling and masturbated over and over.  On the eighth day after awakening from my transformation coma, my conversion into an Arm was complete. 

Bob Scalini: September 23, 1966 – September 25, 1966

Bob curled up in the pile of old blankets under a bent metal counter, nestled into the corner of the kitchen of the burned-out St. Louis restaurant.  He was no longer the wild-looking mountain man, thanks to a shave, a bath and the hand washing of his worn clothes.

To his left, sitting on the blackened floor beside his little nest, he kept two glass milk jugs filled with water.  He stashed a ball of soap scraps and a nicked razor in the remains of the cabinet over the sink, with a neatly folded stack of old rags beside them.  Two ovens had survived the fire almost intact; he hid the small supply of extra clothes he had collected in the rightmost oven.  The left held a loaf and a half of stale bread, three dented cans of Libby’s cut green beans, and a can opener.  The can opener was new, rather than old and battered.  Bob had spent real money for it.

Nestled in his cozy cave, Bob watched.  More technically, he metasensed.

Three miles to the south, he metasensed the St. Louis Transform Detention Center.  Four and a half miles to the northeast, he metasensed the only Focus household in range, a household that had recently completed a house move.  The other Focuses in the St. Louis area were located in distant suburbs, outside of his metasense range.

He didn’t know the names of either the Focus or the brilliant creature in the Detention Center, so he made up names of his own to call them.  The Focus he named Ishtar, after the Babylonian Goddess of fertility and motherhood.  The Transform held in the Detention Center had to be a woman, so he named her Tiamat, after the Goddess of death and destruction.

He laughed to himself about the names.  He had hated the Ancient Myths course when he took it in college, but for some reason he had become fond of the Babylonian myths.  Enough to remember the names of dozens of Babylonian Gods, though he swore he had forgotten them all before he transformed.

Ishtar was in with the babies again.  He wasn’t sure how many babies the household had, but she always seemed to be holding one.  He recognized the motions her arms made as she held a baby, and the easy way she managed the juice when she was content.  Sterility was a tragedy for Ishtar.  She put the baby down and moved to a different room, unhappy. 

Ishtar needed to get better control of her moods, Bob decided.  They were life and death to the people of her household.

Bob had expected a Focus household to be like any other group of normal people living closely together.  He expected fights and squabbles, but they would get along the way people normally did.  He figured the household would have a loose organization, led by one of the older men, and the leaders would spend significant energy taking good care of their Focus.  A big happy family.

Too bad he had been wrong. 

The problem was the juice.  Ishtar’s concentration often failed, and when it failed her emotions controlled the household’s juice.  If she was happy and relaxed and content, the household had a comfortable amount of juice.  If she was sad or depressed, she shorted the household’s juice.  When she was angry…

The first time Bob saw Ishtar angry she ripped the juice right out of a woman Transform, and her hapless victim visibly
cringed
.

Ishtar’s Transforms both loved and feared her.

The household’s old place, an ancient hotel, had been worse, rank with some form of old foul dross that reminded him of sludge.  The sludge dross hindered Ishtar’s ability to move the juice from one Transform to another, making her and everyone else miserable.  The only reason Bob came up with to explain why they hadn’t moved earlier was cost.  Bob had tried to consume the plentiful sludge dross, but like eating water and calling it food, the sludge dross was useless.