Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (2 page)

My God.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

They’d taken me to a Transform Detention Center, one of the old ones where they took Transforms to die in the bad old days, before they had discovered Focuses.  I thought the authorities had closed down all the Detention Centers.

I raged for a moment, furious I’d been sent
here
in a prisoner bus.  Transforms were dangerous!  What a horrible thing to do to an innocent God-fearing housewife.

Then I got it.  They thought I was a Transform. 

I looked at my handcuffed hands, and, yes, they shook a little.  The Shakes was one of the most horrifying diseases known to mankind, nearly as bad as Leprosy and the disease they described once on the Dr. Kildare show.  The one that makes your skin fall off.  They called this disease the Shakes because your hands shook, at least at the start of it.  The proper term for the Shakes was Transform Sickness.  You got it and you never recovered.  You became something else.  Someone else.  Transformed.

This shouldn’t have happened to
me!
  Transform Sickness was one of the ways God worked in the world, the hand of his wrath upon the blatant sinners.

The Shakes wasn’t supposed to be a death sentence for a woman if diagnosed early enough.  I’d learned the truth in Parade magazine and Readers’ Digest: Focus households wanted woman Transforms and regularly took them in.  Male Transforms, though, often couldn’t be saved and had to be euthanized or face a death too horrible to describe.  Back before World War II euthanasia had been illegal, but because of the horror of the Shakes many state governments had legalized euthanasia, including Missouri.  When the end came, male Transforms often went psychotic and tried to kill everyone around them.  Women Transforms became Monsters if they weren’t taken in by a Focus, literally demonic monsters.  Killing them was a kindness. 

A rare variety of Transform, the Focus, saved other Transforms from death by moving a special Transform-only compound all Transforms had in them, juice, from one Transform to another.  Only women transformed into Focuses, and only after spending several days in a coma.  However, salvation from becoming a Monster or psychotic didn’t save the Transform from the eternal punishment of sterility, or the other marks of the curse they wore.

Now, I wasn’t a blatant sinner – or sprouting fur or growing claws.  So why bring me
here
? 

Was I a Focus?

The bus approached the brick wall around the u-shaped building and went down a ramp into a bright well-lit basement.  Through the cracks in my eyelids, I saw tall concrete pillars, parking spaces, and a roped-off, pock-marked, discolored wall: the shooting gallery, where authorities shot women transforming into Monsters in the bad old days. 

The wall looked freshly washed to me, though.

The bus rumbled by the wall and stopped.

We waited.

Ten minutes later a doctor in a white lab coat, flanked by two well-armed orderlies, came up to the bus.  The doctor tapped on the door and the driver opened it.  After he walked up the bus steps he held a huddled conversation with the officer.  They talked, exchanged paperwork and signed papers.  They took a moment to point at me and talked some more.

Eventually the driver opened the gate into the back part of the bus.  The doctor turned to the guards, waved his hands at me and said “Bring her”.  He turned and left, ignoring my presence.

“Hey.  Talk to me,” I said.  He didn’t.  Sudden hot hot anger erased my tears and I slammed the cuffs against the metal pole.  “I” slam “Want” slam “Some” slam “Answers!” slam.

The cuffs broke.

The Goddamned cuffs broke.

Rach – rat!  went the guns in the guards’ hands.  I held my hands in front of me in disbelief.  I was a housewife, a town girl.  My wrists bled red under the broken cuffs, with actual strips of skin laid open.  Oooh!  Yuck.  The wounds should have been horribly painful, but no.  Not too much.  They did make me want to throw up when I looked at them, though.  My anger melted away along with my blood as it dripped on the metal floor of the bus.

“Mrs. Hancock?”

I looked up at the firing squad of terrified state troopers in front of me and wanted to shake my head.  The doctor had spoken, on the other side of the guards.  He had come back into the bus.  The nametag on his white lab coat read ‘Dr. Peterson’.

“Yes,
Dr. Peterson?”

He slipped back a few feet when I addressed him by name, his face ashen.  “These men are going to fire their weapons and kill you unless you allow us to shackle you again, Mrs. Hancock.”

At least he knew my name.

“I saw the shooting gallery as we drove in, Doctor.  All of a sudden, I feel safer in here than out there.  You wouldn’t want to puncture the gas tank shooting up some Monster, would you?”  Phooey.  I was making things up as I went along.

“Monster?” the doctor said.  “Where’d you get that idea, Mrs. Hancock?”

“Why else would I be here?  Why else would you treat me like this?”

“Truthfully, Mrs. Hancock, we don’t know what’s going on.  None of us has ever even heard of a Transform like you.  Unfortunately, you were involved in an apparent homicide.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“When you started your transformation coma, Mrs. Hancock, you took four women with you.  You killed them.” The doctor flipped through his papers.  “A Mrs. Susan Holtwich.” Paper flip.

“No,” softly.  Transformation coma?  Me?

“A Mrs. Alice Winslow.” Paper flip.

“No,” agonized, louder.  Kill?

“A Mrs. Beth Farragut.” Paper flip.

“No,” pain, terror, agony, and louder.

“and lastly, a Sarah Hancock, a minor, age twel…”

“You
lie!
”  I screamed teary agony at the top of my lungs and launched myself forward.  Guns fired.  I ripped the clipboard from the doctor’s hands, ran headlong out the bus door and fell to the concrete.  A siren to my left screamed air raid.  I got up with barely a pause and ran as fast as I could with the shackles on my legs, faster than I believed possible.  Behind me, boots pounded on concrete like a herd of horses.  I stopped, looked at my bare feet, and noticed a growing red pool around them. 

My blood.

I bolted, backtracking to the ramp the bus had used.  It didn’t take me long to find it or to realize the futility of escape.  The authorities had set up this place for people like me, for horrid monsters who killed their own daughters and their best friends.  Instead of an open ramp, I found a floor to ceiling metal mesh net blocking my way.  Beyond the mesh net sat a row of steel bars; behind that, another net.  I turned right and ran along the edge of the underground garage, searching for another way out. 

I started to slow, lightheaded and weak, overwhelmed by the worsening craving.  I reached a corner and had to turn right again, past the shooting gallery.  I could smell death there, recent death.  The freshest blood on the concrete had spattered on it less than a month ago.

I had no idea how I knew that.

It hit me that I had no way out.  I was dead.  They would kill me if I didn’t bleed to death first.  The people who chased me didn’t seem to care.

I sat behind a pillar, covered in cold sweat and woozy, a narrow stream of blood slowly snaking away from me.  Only the state troopers in the truck had shot at me, not the men who chased me.  The men who followed me walked and ran differently, though again I had no idea how I knew that.

I read the doctor’s paperwork.  They had my name right.  My husband was in custody, for striking a police officer and for four counts of involuntary manslaughter. 

That puzzled me for a moment until I worked it out.  The authorities blamed Bill because he hadn’t taken me to a hospital or police station.  I’d read about cases like this.  I actually considered it appropriate punishment – or had. 

The paperwork listed me as “Transform, unknown variety”.  I had killed my daughter along with three other women, probably while they took care of me…

I flipped back to the first page in sudden shock.  There it was: coma onset.  I checked the transfer paper remanding me from the custody of the Jefferson City Jail to the St. Louis Transform Detention Center and found the date.  I’d been in a coma for three days.  Strange.  The transformation coma that produced a Focus lasted four or five days.  I’d never heard of three.

Memories flooded back, dim memories of my couch and women caring for me.  Some sort of rapture, ascension to heaven, pleasure akin to passionate love with my husband but something else.  Then darkness.

Somehow, I’d killed them all, right there and then.

The authorities were right.  I deserved to die.  Transforms were monsters.  I was a monster.

I’d killed my own daughter.  I must have recognized my condition.  I wasn’t stupid, I knew the symptoms of the Shakes, and I knew to be on the lookout for them. 

However, the Shakes was the curse of God, punishment meted out to sinners and unbelievers.  I was neither.  In my pride at my sinless life, I must have denied to all that I had the Shakes. 

Well, sinless life no more, if I’d done that.  I stood and almost passed out.  Tossed the paperwork away.  “Go ahead.  Shoot,” I said through my tears.  I deserved it for what I had done.  For being a Transform.  They didn’t shoot.  “Yaaaaah!”

I stumbled toward one of them.

The men were not the state troopers.  They were armed hospital orderlies, men with experienced eyes.

Something hit me with the force of a jackhammer on the back of my head, and down I went.

---

“Hello, Mrs. Hancock?  I’m
Dr. Peterson.”

I awoke on the floor of a featureless concrete cell, right next to a six-inch grate in the floor that smelled like a neglected woman’s restroom in an east Texas highway rest stop.  In a heat wave.  The straightjacket and chains were gone and I wore a hospital gown.  I cautiously levered myself into a sitting position. 

The voice came from a speaker set in the ceiling.  “Hello.  I’m hungry,” I said.  It took me a few moments to remember how I got here.  I was surprised I was still alive.  My annoying craving hadn’t left; I now guessed I wanted juice, the strange life-chemical of Transforms I thought of as the Devil’s soft drink.

“Now that you’re awake, let’s start out with some information.” 
Dr. Peterson’s tinny voice from the speaker echoed off the concrete walls.  “Technically, you’re a multiple murderess.  However, in my medical opinion, you haven’t harmed anyone of your own volition.  Thus, if we can come to an agreement, I
would
like to work with you in a less confined situation.  You would have a real hospital bed, receive medical care, and yes, we would feed you.  You wouldn’t be tied down.”

“I’m confined to a Transform Detention Center?” Let it all be a mistake.  Please, God.  Let it all be a mistake.

“Yes,” Dr. Peterson said, dashing my hopes and prayers.  “Confined for the safety of the surrounding community.  Although you’re human now, things can happen quickly to those with Transform Sickness.”

I took a deep breath and accepted the situation.  “Yes, yes, I have the Shakes, if I turn Monster or am about to, you’ll shoot me.  Fine.  I don’t have a problem with that.  Can I have some breakfast?”  The horrors in
Dr. Peterson’s paperwork evaporated, replaced by numbness.

“Yes.  You should know that all of us in the Transform Detention Center have signed waivers.  If we’re taken hostage, the guards here will shoot to kill the person who took us hostage.  If we die, so be it.”

“Hard life.”

“Hard life, and government hazard pay at two and a half times normal.”

“Good for you, Dr. Peterson.”

While I waited, I counted bullet wounds.  Four, none through my torso.  Five, if you counted the long red welt along my ribcage, a graze.  Amazing.  I must have been out for weeks to heal so much.

The secret cell door opened to reveal five orderlies.  “Mrs. Hancock?  I’m going to push in a tray of food.  When you finish eating it, leave it in place, and stand.”

Looked like dinner, not breakfast, to me, but I didn’t complain.  I ate it, a man’s portion, but still felt hungry afterwards.  I was used to dieting to keep my figure trim and expected to be hungry after eating.  The hunger normally went away after a half hour or so.

I stood.

“Mrs. Hancock, you’ve been approved to be a status four prisoner,” the lead orderly said, a tall, thin man with a complexion problem.  “You’ll be allowed to walk from room to room, but only when accompanied by four or more orderlies.  Two will accompany you in front, two in back.  You won’t be restrained.”

“Okay.”

“Two of us will now enter the room.  Please do not move.”

I obeyed orders and the orderlies did a complicated dance of positioning, ending up with me between the four of them.  The two in front did not put their backs to me, but walked half sideways, half backing down the corridor in front of me.  The orderlies pointed guns at me the entire time.  They hadn’t mentioned that as part of being a status four prisoner.