Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (22 page)

“Doc, is there a medical reason why I’m behaving this way, or am I just losing it?”

“There’s a reason.”  He studied me carefully.  “Are you interested in learning why?”

I nodded.

“We don’t understand the details behind all your changes in behavior, but we do have some information.  Your body is producing testosterone in incredible quantities, as is normal for an Arm.  Testosterone is the male hormone we think is linked to aggressive male behavior.  We don’t believe the testosterone is the only cause of your behavioral changes, but it’s at least part of it.  If a normal woman was producing testosterone in these quantities, she would be shaving twice a day.”

I reflexively rubbed my chin.  No stubble at all.  “Not Arms,” I said.

He nodded.

“I’m getting dangerous, aren’t I?”  Earlier, before I insulted my mother and chased her off, I shoved aside another nurse and hurt one of the orderlies, Mr. Kelsey, after I grabbed his arm and squeezed.

Dr.
Zielinski nodded, again.

“You’d better get me a draw immediately, Doc.  I need more juice.  I don’t want to kill anyone by accident.” On purpose, yes, by accident, no.

“Special Agent Bates is working on the problem.  Unfortunately, he’s being interfered with.”

Interfered with?  Guess people didn’t like Arms.  Not surprising with the damned Antichrist Arm, Keaton, on the loose.  Nevertheless, they were the professionals at this, not me.  “So?”

“I can’t say any more.  Save for your exercise sessions, I think we need to lock you down for your own and our own safety.”

I shrugged.  If my rages were due to me being an Arm, they were something I would have to learn to live with.  Eventually, I hoped, control.

This reminded me of the promise I made to myself several days ago.

“I apologize for the way I’ve been behaving,” I said.  “Perhaps since I now understand what’s happening to me, I can control the rages.” 
Dr. Zielinski didn’t respond, but kept his face stone blank.  No encouragement.  He didn’t think it would be easy for me to control my rages. 

Of course it wouldn’t be easy.  Nothing useful was ever easy.

“So, Dr. Zielinski, what can you tell me about the other Arms you’ve worked with?  Did they have the same problems?  All these changes I’m going through are difficult to cope with and I do value your experience.”

His stone blank expression stayed unreadable.  Perhaps I’d laid it on a bit too thick with that trowel.  “I’ve worked with four other Arms after their transformations,” he said.  “I can tell you about my experiences, but you may find them disheartening.”

“I coped with the movie of the man in withdrawal.  I can cope with your earlier failures as well.”

Dr.
Zielinski nodded and leaned forward with his elbows on his desk.  “Very well.  The first Arm I worked with was Julie Bethune, back in ’61, the second known American Arm transformation.  I’d been called in to consult; I had no real power over the situation.  The people in charge of the CDC’s Virginia Detention Center were of the opinion that since she was a female Transform, she would eventually start to make her own juice.  I predicted otherwise.  After she exhausted her initial juice supply, she slipped into withdrawal and went on a psychotic rampage inside the Detention Center.  After they managed to restrain her, she died of the wounds she suffered during her rampage.”

I shivered.  “Idiots.”

Dr. Zielinski nodded.  “The second was Rose Desmond, about a year after Julie.  I’d recently been installed as the head of the new Transform Research Department at Harvard Medical.”  Whoa!  I was impressed.  I sat up straighter and paid more attention to his story.  I’d had no idea.  “I managed to snag Desmond out of a Detention Center and set her up at Harvard.  She survived six months, but died in an accident.”

Six months.  Hell.  I hadn’t survived a month.  Six months was a hell of a long time.  I hadn’t known any of the deceased Arms had lasted so long.  “What sort of accident?”

“Like you, Carol, Desmond was bothered by the morality of her juice draws.  She convinced me to try to find a way to save the Transform she was drawing from.  Over a six-week period, Desmond found a way to slow down the juice draw from instant to several minutes.  The plan was to remove the woman Transform after Desmond had drawn about a quarter of her juice.  We tried, but the plan didn’t work.  Instead, Desmond snapped and went berserk.  The woman Transform went into withdrawal and Desmond didn’t snap back when we returned the Transform to her.  She grabbed a guard’s gun and shot up the lab, and in the melee that followed she got shot in the head and died.  If it wasn’t for the head shot, I’m convinced Desmond would still be alive today.”

Dr.
Zielinski’s mask of indifference broke, and I could tell he was still upset about what had happened.  “The idea to remove the Transform was yours?”

He nodded.  “Experimentation with Transform Sickness is very dangerous.  Anything new we try with any Transforms runs the risk of blowing up in our faces.”  His voice lowered to a whisper.  “In far too many cases, we don’t have the option to avoid the new.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t kill you, Dr. Zielinski.”  Even if Desmond had agreed to the experiment, he was the one who had arranged everything.

“She tried and damned near succeeded.”

“You got shot.”

He nodded.

“How dangerous is a six month old Arm?  How strong?”  What did I have to look forward to? 

“About the same as a year old tiger with a human intellect…but remember, this was before Stacy Keaton and no one had any idea how dangerous an Arm could become.  Not only did we test for the wrong things, we trained the wrong things as well: metasense and draw techniques instead of physical activities.”  Her muscles must have come in slower than mine did.  “Desmond was restrained during the experiment and she broke restraints strong enough to hold the world’s strongest human men.” He paused for a moment, chewing over something.  Ah.  He blamed himself for the weakness of the restraints.

Great.  Just great.  Not only was I was going to be some monstrous killer, I was going to be pug-ugly and muscle-bound as well.  What was the purpose of an Arm, anyway?  Why, for heaven’s sake, did God create Arms?  Were we nothing more than Satan’s spawn, doomed to howl like animals and kill?

Why were we so strong?

Dr. Zielinski met my eyes and grabbed my attention.  “You need to know that her musculature developed about a third as fast as yours is developing, Carol, and that her rages came most strongly in her third and fourth month.”  Ah hah!  I’d been right.  “By the time of her death, she only lost control if her juice count fell below a hundred.”

Blessed hope.  What I was going through now was not permanent.  If I progressed as fast on the control issues as with the damned muscles, I would be back in control of myself in a month or two.  “The other two?” I asked.

“Both in ’64.  The first, Francine Sarles, was stuck in the Bakersfield Transform Detention Center in California.  I wasn’t in charge.  She couldn’t cope with her first draw and refused to kill again.  The people in charge of her case offered her a man already in withdrawal for her second draw, and she accepted.  I argued against the plan, got ignored, argued that she should be heavily restrained and got ignored again.  Her mind snapped when she took the man in withdrawal.  Afterwards, she freed herself, got hold of a gun, and put a bullet through her head.” Bullets are faster than juice.  I had heard that story from Borton.  “The second, Elsie Conger, transformed in New York City and had problems from the day she woke up from her transformation coma.  She weighed over three hundred pounds before she transformed and the transformation tried to convert her fat to muscle.  Her body couldn’t cope and she fell back into a coma less than a week after she awakened.  Eventually her kidneys and liver failed.  By then, she had been moved to Harvard, under my care, but there wasn’t anything we could do to save her.  By the time she lost most of the fat, her muscles had hypertrophied and shattered her arm and leg bones.  We amputated, but it was too late: her ribs shattered and she died.”

Elsie Conger must have been the Arm that Borton warned me about to goad me into more exercise.  “What about Stacy Keaton?  She survived.”

He nodded.  “She survived.  I wasn’t involved with her transformation.  No one was.  An FBI team captured her about a month after she transformed; they used a live male Transform as bait and trapped her like a wild animal.  She got whisked to a secret FBI facility and supposedly cooperated with them for several months until, for unknown reasons, she went insane and escaped.  There are rumors that her captors messed up her care, but I’m not sure how much faith I have in those rumors.  The FBI refuses to pass any information along about Keaton.  Truthfully, I must admit that nobody knows how to handle an Arm transformation.  Not even me.”

I wasn’t impressed.  “So it’s been one failure after another?  Have you had any successes with anything?”

He wasn’t angry at my words.  Too arrogant for that.  Instead, he smiled, happy to talk about a better subject.  “Plenty.  Besides the Arms I’ve told you about, I’ve been working with male and female Transforms, and Focuses, since ’57.”

“Since before the Focuses broke out of Quarantine?”

He nodded.  “Did you know the St. Louis Detention Center was one of the main Detention Centers where the first Focuses and their Transforms were held during the Quarantine?”

I shook my head. 

“I know quite a few interesting stories about how the first Focuses managed to get out of Quarantine”, Dr. Zielinski said.  “Their plight was bad enough to gain the sympathy from many of their captors, and those who worked with them, including myself.  They even convinced their captors to help them send messages to each other, even messages from one Detention Center to another.”

Oh.  I leaned forward and made sure
Dr. Zielinski knew he had my full attention.  “How did they manage to do that?” I asked.

“Notes under plates and in their laundry,” Zielinski said, with utter nonchalance.  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.  He was flat out telling me how to get around the authorities!  “It’s amazing what sort of cooperation Transforms can get from the staff members at Detention Centers if the staff members think the Transforms are being mistreated.”

I sniffed.  “So this is some sort of hint I should stop slapping around the nurses?  If they treated me right to begin with, they wouldn’t have any problems with me at all.”

Dr.
Zielinski’s face darkened, but I smiled at him and tapped my lower leg, right where my knife would go.  His eyes widened and he nodded back when he realized I hadn’t meant what I said.  If he could be cagey, so could I.  If someone listened to a tape of this conversation, they would conclude I’d rejected his advice.

“Carol, what do you want to do when you get out of here?”
Dr. Zielinski asked.

I hadn’t been prepared for his question.  I could think of only one answer, though.  “Survive.”

He nodded.  “Anything else beyond survival?”

“I’m not stupid enough to consider anything beyond survival until survival is assured.”  To agree to anything less would be foolish.

Dr. Zielinski frowned again.  “For Transforms of any stripe, survival is not a sure thing.  Focuses die as well, though not often.  Transforms die in droves every day.  No one can guarantee the survival of an Arm at this point.”

“I’ll take anything close to the survival rate of Focuses,” I said. 

My answer pleased him more.  I half expected him to make me an offer, as Bates and Dr. Manigault had done.  “In that case, Carol, I think I might be able to find a way for you to give yourself a chance of survival.”

I waited, but didn’t say a thing.  I wasn’t sure what to say.  His comment didn’t sound like an employment offer, but I couldn’t tell what it actually was.

“I can’t talk about it, yet,” he said.  “Later.”

I nodded, depressed.

---

Immediately after my conversation with
Dr. Zielinski the orderlies manacled my legs and put me back in the suicide room.  Punishment for shoving the nurse and hurting the orderly.  The next day, they put me in a new room.  This one was padded.  After my exercises they put me in a straitjacket.  Apparently, the only one who could handle me was Larry.  The rest of the time, I was a prisoner again.

Agent Bates wasn’t able to get me a draw until a few more days had passed, more than ten days after my second draw.  I don’t remember the days in between.  I’m told that I was loud.

I lay on the floor of that rubber room, and there was nothing left of me but need.  I couldn’t even speak words anymore there was so little of my mind left.  The world was pain, and need, and endless, eternal agony.

They were smart, this time.  They sedated the draw, a poor male Transform, into total unconsciousness before they brought him into the Detention Center.  I don’t remember when they removed me from my straitjacket, or even who did it, but I suspect they did it before my draw was in range.  I do remember the moment when they wheeled him into my padded cell.  I do remember when I ripped his clothes off and drew the juice.

That I never forget.  Never.