Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (17 page)

How did I think about breaking my marriage vows for the first time?  I wasn’t sure.  Now that I knew what sex as an Arm was like, though, I had no doubt I could make the indiscretion up to Bill.  Sex that good would make up for a lot.  I’d just have to be careful not to overdo it.  Bill wasn’t a young kid anymore.  What I’d done to Mike might give a man Bill’s age a heart attack. 

I couldn’t shake the vague disquiet inside me, as if I had broken more than my marriage vows.  There was something deeply immoral about being an Arm.  Every day it sucked me farther down into Satan’s abyss.  The muscle growth, the killing, the insane quantity of food, the absurd lusts, the emotional roller coaster ride – all these changes harmed my soul. 

No matter what I did, I couldn’t fight Satan’s seductions.

About two in the afternoon, they brought me to an unfamiliar section of the Transform Detention Center, on the ground floor in the far part of the U.  An interview room.  The orderlies wouldn’t explain.  They had me sit, and shackled my legs to the chair.  To a chair someone had bolted to the floor.

The orderlies left.  A few minutes later, a man I had never met entered the room and sat in a chair behind a desk well out of reach.  He was a grey haired man in an impeccable suit, in his late fifties, with an old fashioned thin moustache.  Fear hid within his exterior expressions, which radiated power.  A manager of some sort.

“Mrs. Hancock, my name is
Dr. Harold Manigault, Director of this Detention Center.  Pardon me if I don’t shake your hand.”

“What’s going on, Mr. Director, sir?”  From long experience hosting Bill’s many dinners and parties, I knew how to deal with powerful men. 

Manigault gave me the willies, though.  Something was wrong with this man.

“I’ve been authorized to offer you a job.”

“A job?” After a moment of confused thought, I understood.  I was a commodity, a valuable commodity.  Carol Hancock, second Arm to survive.  People would bid for my services if I kept myself alive.  I was flattered.  I’d never participated in Bill’s negotiations but I knew how it was done.

“Yes.  The State of Missouri is prepared to offer you the position of Executioner of Unwanted Transforms.”

“Oh.” Chilled, goose bumps on my arms, I flashed on something Dr. Manigault projected.  He had pulled the trigger on many a Transform and enjoyed the killing.  I wanted to run.  My skin wanted to crawl off my body. 

I was in the presence of evil.

I had no idea how I knew this, or what to do about it.

“I have an employment contract for you to sign.  Would you like to look it over, Mrs. Hancock?”

“Yes, I would,” I said, and he slid the contract over the wide desk to me.  I picked up the contract and read it over. 

The contract offered a thousand a month, before taxes.  I would be traveling constantly, between the main Detention Centers in Springfield, Kansas City and St. Louis, and one I had never heard of, down in the boot heel, near Caruthersville.  While in transit, they would hold me ‘in close security’.  I would live in whichever Detention Center needed me.  The contract was for a single year.  The State of Missouri would drop all legal charges against me.

“The terms may seem onerous, Mrs. Hancock, but the pay is excellent.  After the contract is up and you have proven your worth and safety, the onerous conditions could be altered.”

“Of course, sir,” I said.  I suspected I would see a clause like that one in whatever deal I took.  “Sir, as an Arm, I need Transforms for juice at specific intervals.  I don’t read anything in this contract regarding that.”

“That’s out of our hands, Mrs. Hancock.  Some months we have as many as ten to deal with, others, well, I’ve seen as few as two.”

“Two?” I would die.  I would go into withdrawal myself.

“We all have risks in this profession, Mrs. Hancock.  The risk of withdrawal will be yours,” Dr. Manigault said, and smiled.

Lust filled his smile.  He had seen withdrawal many times.  He
enjoyed
watching someone die of withdrawal. 

I pushed the contract back to him, queasy.  “I’ll take your offer under advisement,” I said.  “I want fifteen hundred a month and no more than ten days between kills.” A negotiating position.  I was prepared to go as high as twelve days.  Perhaps thirteen.

“Well,” he said.  “Unfortunately, Mrs. Hancock, my hands are tied.  I cannot alter this contract.  You can take it or you can leave it.” Dr Manigault stood, hiding a smile on his face.  “Give the offer some thought.  You’ll get no better offers.”  With that, he left.

A minute later, an orderly came in and unshackled my legs.

During my afternoon exercises,
Dr. Zielinski stuck his head in the room.  I was doing curls with a huge barbell loaded with more weight than most men could lift.  “Agent Bates and I are arranging something special for Wednesday, Carol,” he said.  “Some physical tests outside the Center.  Think you’ll be up for it tomorrow?”

I slowly lowered the barbell down to rest on my thighs.  Outside, he said.  I thought for a moment.  I was feeling good today.  Tomorrow would be worse, but it would be only the fourth day after a draw.  “I’m game.”

“Good,” Dr. Zielinski said, and left.

Larry relaxed.  He hadn’t greeted
Dr. Zielinski, and had kept his face turned towards me during the short conversation.  “It’s not quitting time, Carol,” he said, with a sharp whack of the yardstick on my rear.  “Let’s get a move on it!”

Mom came into my room right after dinner.  She had been out over the weekend.  I guessed she didn’t want to visit me right after a draw, and I couldn’t blame her.

“Bill has been causing problems, dear,” she said, after we had chatted about traffic and one of her friends who was in the hospital in Columbia.  My husband?

“How so?”  Bill’s last letter had arrived last Thursday, when I was low on juice.  I hadn’t gotten around to answering it yet.  He had been his kind and loving self.  I made a mental note to answer his letter tonight.

“He won’t let me visit Billy and Jeffery.  I’d hinted at it several times, and nothing, so I finally asked him point blank.  He refused.”

“Whatever is he doing that for?”  This didn’t sound like Bill.  He was normally very smooth with people.

“I can’t figure it out, Carol.  Do they think I’m carrying the taint of Transform Sickness with me because I visit you?  Because I’m your mother?” She paused.  “It’s so unfair.  They’re my grandchildren, too.”

“Do you want me to put in a good word for you in the next letter I write?  Think it will do any good?”

Mom’s voice dropped half an octave and moved back to Alabama for a while.  “What I’d like you to do is chew your husband out, Carol.  This situation is bad enough without him being so rude and unfair about things.”

Things.  Plural.  I put two and two together.  “Bill got the legal charges against him dropped, didn’t he?”

Mom nodded, and turned away.  I pushed the books on my end table away from the tissue box and offered her a tissue.

“He could be visiting me, the bastard, and isn’t.  How long?”

“Two weeks.”

Damn.  Since before my first draw.  He could have been here and comforted me, loved me, if he had wanted to.  Mom blew her nose.

“He blames me for Sarah’s death, doesn’t he?”

She nodded.

I put my head in my hands, tempted to take Sarah’s picture out and hug it.  I couldn’t take any more of this.  Even my husband thought I was a monster.  Mom hadn’t wanted to tell me, and again I didn’t blame her.  “Don’t feel bad for me, Mom.”

“It’s so unfair, Carol!  You shouldn’t be suffering through this horrendous disease without Bill’s support.  Without the support of anyone in our family except me.”

“I’d be doing it too, Mom, if I didn’t have Transform Sickness.  None of us would give a Transform the time of day.  Bill wouldn’t hire a Transform on a bet.”  No more than we would give the colored folk or a Jew, or even an Italian immigrant the time of day.  Or hire one.  What did this say about my other views on things, eh?  I didn’t ask to be a Transform.  Of course, no one asked to be born colored, or born into the Jewish faith, or for their parents to have immigrated to the United States.

Certainly,
that
prejudice
wasn’t the sin that had landed me in Satan’s claws.  Why, if it was, nearly everyone I knew was similarly doomed.

“They might be right, Mom.  I’m not the woman I once was.  I’ve killed, now, twice, of my own free will.”

“Don’t say that, Carol.  It isn’t proper to think about.”

“I’ve got to, Mom.  It’s my life.  I hate what I’m forced to do, but it’s my life.  Reverend Akins is wrong.  If I’ve been called by anyone, the call came from the devil.”  These thoughts had occupied my nights ever since Reverend Akins’ visit.  The killing, the lusts, the amorality of the juice.  I was working on the seven deadly sins one sin at a time, even gluttony.

“Oh, Carol,” she said, grabbing me, hugging me, crying.  “Please don’t think that.  Y’all in this Center are doing what you have to do.  You don’t have any choice in the matter.”

“We choose to live, Mom.  We choose to live in sin.”  I reached for the Gideon’s, for a passage from Paul, which I thought described me to a T.  I’d read all of Paul’s writings after Reverend Akins’ visit.  Called?  Not likely.  “I do not understand my own actions,” I quoted.  “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.  Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good.  So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.  For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh.  I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” I could have read it from memory, but I didn’t want to upset my mother more.  No, Christianity was not for Transforms, or at least, not for Arms.

Mom held me, and cried and cried. 

She left without a word.

After she left, I opened the Bible again to the front page, where I kept my daughter’s picture; I cried.  No loving God could have put me through this horror. 

---

Dr. Zielinski came and got me in the morning, wheeling a massive gurney.  Dr. Peterson trailed behind him, fretting.  “Are you ready to go?”

I nodded.  “Certainly,
Dr. Zielinski, Dr. Peterson.”

“There’s one unfortunate thing that we need to ask of you, though,”
Dr. Zielinski said.  “Since we’re going to be transporting you out of the Detention Center, Special Agent Bates wants us to be sure of security.  He apologizes to you about this, in advance.”

Oh, wonderful.  I knew where this led.

“We’re going to need to restrict your movement a bit.  If you’ll please lay down on the gurney, we’ll transport you.”

I laid down on the gurney.  They chained me by my wrists and ankles, and then wheeled me to an ambulance waiting out front. 

On the way to the ambulance I got to see the sky, for the first time in days.  It was early October, the sky was clear and blue, the air, cold and fresh.  They covered me with a blanket to keep me from getting cold but I could have done without, simply to experience the wonderful fresh air.

I rode for about an hour and a half in the ambulance.  A military truck led the ambulance, and another one followed behind.  The trip took far too long with far too little movement.  By the time we arrived I was ready to scream in pain.

We didn’t pass any Transforms on the way, probably a good thing.  I might have made a scene. 

We ended up at a military base.  They unloaded me from the ambulance at the edge of what appeared to be an obstacle course.  Armed soldiers filled the entire area.  The air held the scent of metal, wild grass and male sweat.  They took me out of the truck but didn’t unchain me.  Instead, they left me lying on the gurney at the parking lot edge.  The blanket had fallen off when they took me out of the truck and I forced my legs together to keep soldiers from looking up my skirt.

Agent Bates approached me from the lead truck, followed by Dr. Zielinski, Dr. Peterson and a uniformed man I didn’t recognize.  “Mrs. Hancock,” Bates said.  “We’re going to free you now.  Please don’t make any moves we don’t ask you to, because we’re guests here and these soldiers don’t know you.  They’re a little nervous having an Arm on their base and their orders are to shoot if you misbehave.”

I studied the hundreds of soldiers, and every one of them watched me.  Hundreds of soldiers to stop me if I went wild?  Unbelievable.

Agent Bates released me and I stood, attracting a murmuring of voices as they all got a look at me.  I overheard every word they said, but I didn’t know why they considered me so interesting.  I wore a blouse and skirt, from the stock of institutional clothing the center supplied, with stockings and low pumps.  I didn’t think I looked any different from any other woman.  I stretched, trying to work out the pain in my muscles without screaming.  I was ravenous.  More juice would have been good, too.