Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (25 page)

Dr.
Bentwyler jumped in and confirmed my surmise.  “McIntyre, you don’t understand the value of the research we’re doing.”  The other FBI agents frowned when Dr. Bentwyler left off ‘Agent’ McIntyre’s honorific.  I’d walked into the middle of a years old argument.  Bad, very bad.  “This has the potential for a medical breakthrough.  You can’t just come in here and screw that up.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about treatment or breakthroughs, Dick,” McIntyre said.  Bentwyler frowned.  “I’m interested in knowledge.  I don’t know enough about Arms.  You have an Arm.  She’s going to teach me everything I need to know.  End of story.”  McIntyre slapped his hands together.

“The only danger…” 

Dr.
Manigault held up his hand, interrupting Dr. Zielinski.

“
Dr. Zielinski.  You’re a guest here at our facility.  If you’d like to remain here, you’d better remember that.  I have no problem with Agent McIntyre’s new plans and procedures.  We weren’t getting anywhere before.” Dr. Manigault gave me a sadistic leer.

I wasn’t getting anywhere trying to break into the conversation by being ladylike.  Years of holding offices in PTAs and women’s groups had taught me how to bring a room to order.  I wasn’t fool enough to use those techniques here.  I was the only woman in the room.  Assertive was not the image I wanted to project.

As McIntyre responded to Dr. Bentwyler, I edged over to Dr. Peterson. 

“
Dr. Peterson?”

He looked over to me and listened, uneasy.

“Do you think I might get a few words in?” I asked.

He grunted and rose to his feet.  “Gentlemen!”  His voice cut through the other noise.  “Mrs. Hancock would like to say a few words.”

The men turned and looked at me.  I took a breath, and told myself to remember
meek
and
non-threatening.

“Agent McIntyre,” I said to him, eyes properly downcast.  “I apologize for any danger I may pose to anyone.” I kept my voice low and mild.  I wanted them to think of me as a normal human woman, not some rabid murderess.  “I didn’t choose to become an Arm.  This isn’t the sort of thing a proper woman wants to become.  I’m trying to do the best I can despite my transformation, so I’m helping…”

McIntyre cut me off.  “Legally, Arms are classified as Monsters.  Like any other woman Transform who’s gone Monster, you’re subject to summary justice by any agent of the law, at any time.”  He drew his weapon, a duplicate of the gun Bates carried, and pointed it at me.  “Now.  Shut up.”  I got the point, and shut up.  McIntyre turned to Mr. Cook.  “You.  Take her out of here and put her in Detention Cell 1-B.  I don’t want to see this Monster again until I ask for her.  In writing, in triplicate.  Got that?”  Cook nodded.

1-B was the padded room, my new home away from home.  I was quiet and polite on the way to 1-B, but inside I seethed.  I ached at the way I had been treated.  I lusted for my knife, hidden in the suicide cell.   I longed for my personal belongings, especially the family pictures.  I attempted not to consider that Keaton might have been right.  I’d thought I could handle the new FBI agents.  I hadn’t had any problems with Special Agent Bates. 

Less than four hours after I turned Keaton down, I already suffered second thoughts.

---

The next day, Dr. Peterson had me brought down to Lab One, where he introduced Dr. Fredericks to me and left.  Dr. Fredericks was the FBI doctor, the short fellow with the rattish face.  “Today we’re going to study how Arms respond to some common chemicals,” he said.  An orderly I hadn’t met before copied notes on a clipboard.  Dr. Fredericks’ man, presumably.

Dr.
Fredericks instructed the orderlies to tie me to the examining table, while he instructed the clipboard orderly to wheel in a footlocker filled with chemical bottles, many of which were marked as poisons.  No, he hadn’t asked my permission.

“Hey!  What…”

“Gag her,” Fredericks said, with an offhand wave of his hand.  The orderlies did so before I could even flinch.  I panicked and thrashed, to no avail.  They fitted me with an IV and catheter, and the test commenced.  After each test, Dr. Fredericks took blood samples and urine samples.  They monitored my heart and breathing as they tested.  I was aware enough of Dr. Fredericks to know he really enjoyed his job, got off on it.

The chemicals went into the IV line.  Some of them stung, some of them made my heart beat off rhythm, some of them hurt like hell.  My body was doing something energetic with most of them; I became feverish and dehydrated in moments.  They ended up having to change the IV bag every ten minutes.  Other tests made my vision blur, others made me feel full of energy, others made me woozy, and one made me pass out and sent the heart monitor machine screaming.  Hours of agony later, they finished, wheeled me into my padded cell, and unceremoniously dropped me on the floor.  I’d never been so hungry in my life, but they did not give me extra food.

Chalk one up for Keaton.  To Dr. Fredericks, I was nothing more than a lab rat.

---

The next morning I wouldn’t move and I wouldn’t let them drag me from my cell.  Eventually, they called in Dr. Peterson, who told me to cooperate or there would be no food, no water and no juice.  After a mere moment of hesitation, I cooperated.  After the previous day’s horrors I had little resistance left in me.

The first test was one of
Dr. Zielinski’s.  If anyone could help me, he could.  My guards led me down to Lab Room Two, the room with the fancy equipment where the doctors performed the most complicated tests.  Dr. Zielinski waited for me in the room, along with  Dr. Fredericks.  The orderlies strapped me down, in what seemed to be the new standard procedure.

Dr.
Zielinski turned from the papers he was looking through and frowned at me.  Dr. Zielinski’s frown was frightening: cold, distant, and impersonal, without affection, the same as the other doctors’ frowns.  I thought of the calves on my uncle Herbie’s farm.  Cute and cuddly, but the children knew better than to love them, because they were slated to die.

“Carol, how are you feeling today?” he said, cold and impersonal.

“No worse than normal,” I said.  He already knew about the pain, the hunger and the craving. 

I felt like one of Uncle Herbie’s calves.

“We have something a little different we need to do today.  We need a sample of your bone marrow.”

“All right,” I said.  I didn’t see anything special about that.

“Excellent.  There’s going to be some discomfort associated with the process.”

“What do you mean, ‘discomfort’?” I said, suspicious of his cavalier attitude toward pain.

“Well, we’ll try and make the procedure as painless as possible, of course.  Unfortunately, we already know that painkillers don’t work on you, and…”

Dr.
Fredericks coughed.  Loudly.

Dr.
Zielinski looked over at Dr. Fredericks, his face dark.  Dr. Fredericks looked back at him and didn’t say a thing.  I wondered what was going on and I decided Dr. Zielinski must have violated some new security rule.  I guessed I wasn’t cleared to know the results of research done on my own body.

Dr.
Zielinski looked away from Dr. Fredericks without any of his normal fight.

Keaton had predicted this as well.

“I can’t go into the details.  You’ll just have to trust us to do the best we can,” he told me.

“What if I don’t want to?” I hurt and I was irritable, and I wasn’t interested in their test.

“I can’t help you with that problem now.”

The orderlies tightened the straps to make sure I didn’t move at all when they took the sample.  The sample was to come from something called the Iliac Crest.

When I was completely immobilized Dr. Zielinski brought out his bone marrow needle, a large, heavy thing.  I was lying on my back, and he began to force the needle in through the skin over my left hip.

That needle hurt.  When the needle got down to the bone, it more than just hurt, it was agony.  I screamed.  I screamed with everything I had and no one cared. 
Dr. Zielinski kept pushing the needle.  “Hold her,” he said to the guards, as I tried to buck.

The needle went in, bit by agonizing bit, deep into the bone.  I screamed and kept screaming.  The orderlies held me down and the needle kept going in.

Finally, forever later, red fluid came up the needle into the vial at the end.  I shook and whimpered.  Sweat pooled all around me and tears dripped down the side of my face.  One tiny vial filled.  Dr. Zielinski swapped it out and replaced the vial with another one.  Slowly, that one filled also.

With one smooth motion,
Dr. Zielinski pulled the needle out.  I shrieked again as it came out, but he was done.  I shook and shivered with sudden cold, and sobs came out of me in a storm.  I cried with heartbroken, exhausted pain.

Dr.
Zielinski bent over my miserable form, right next to my ear.  “I’m sorry, Carol,” he said.

“I need to talk to you in private.  Please,” I whispered urgently, gulping back my sobs.  “I’ll explain everything I’ve learned about Arms.”  The information from Keaton.  “I want what you promised me.  Back when we talked about the Arms who died.  A way to survive.”  He had promised me he would find me a way to survive.

“You turned that down just before Special Agent McIntyre arrived,” Dr. Zielinski said, in a whisper.

My last hope turned to ashes in my mouth.  His promised way to help me survive had been to give me to
Keaton
.  The bastard!

Still, I was desperate.  “Please?”

Dr. Zielinski’s face turned to stone and he turned away without an answer.  I had no idea if I would get to talk to him in private.  As Keaton had predicted, Dr. Zielinski was now on the outside, standing back and taking notes.  Or worse, in collaboration with the enemy.

They wheeled me back to my room.  As I was leaving the lab, I heard
Dr. Fredericks say, “I still think you should have had monitors on her.  There was valuable information regarding pain responses that we could have recorded.”

The door shut before
Dr. Zielinski answered and I could not hear through the closed door and my own tears.  I’d learned a valuable and painful lesson in the past three days: I was surrounded by men who played a game for high stakes and that my wants and desires were only a small thing.

I was but a pawn in their game, at best a minor pawn.  Soon the pawn would be sacrificed and the game would go on without me.  I didn’t like that at all.

Keaton had been right.  I’d screwed up.  I was dead.

Dr. Henry Zielinski: October 17, 1966

Dr.
Zielinski frowned as the guards unhooked Hancock from all but one of the chains and handed the one chain to him.  He thought he had arranged for normal security, the standard four guards to accompany him and Hancock in the Detention Center courtyard.  Instead, no guards, and they handed Hancock a weapon she could use against him.

He smelled McIntyre’s devious mind at work here, born out when he examined the empty enclosed courtyard and found a dozen FBI agents stationed in the shadows behind open second story windows. 

His position here grew more untenable with each day.  He had hoped Hancock would go with Keaton, but she hadn’t.  Stubborn, not yet desperate enough.  He hoped she didn’t harbor him any ill will over the way he lied to her about Keaton.

McIntyre had the FBI set up in a position where if Hancock as much as twitched, they could blow him away without any administrative or legal risks.  The setup explained why McIntyre had easily approved his request to talk to Hancock alone.  He only had to promise not to reveal any of the information gained from the tests.

Hancock frowned when she noticed the arrangement in the courtyard.  Still shackled at the feet, she couldn’t run well, but Dr. Zielinski knew the Arm could still escape the courtyard if she desired, with only a small chance of being fatally shot.  The FBI underestimated her capabilities if they thought they were safe.  Dr. Zielinski didn’t.  Instead, he hoped her excellent mind would be able to override her more violent Arm urges and she wouldn’t make any threat displays and spook the FBI agents.  If she did, he was dead.  If she was still angry about the bone marrow test this morning, she would kill him herself.  This conversation was a gamble, but he wagered Hancock valued survival over revenge.

Once the last of the guards backed off, out of the courtyard, Hancock leaned over to him.

“They don’t like you very much, do they?” Hancock asked, mild.  She had seen the marksmen.  Dr. Zielinski relaxed.  The Arm was desperate for allies and not out for revenge.

“Agent McIntyre would like to see me dead today more than he
would like to see you dead today.”  The FBI was listening. 

Hancock didn’t respond as they ambled in a slow circle around the small courtyard.  “I want to apologize for messing up my last talk with Larry,” Carol said, her words filled with as many hidden meanings as his.  “I’ve been an idiot.  A fool.  I’m really worried about my future.  I would like to accept Special Agent Bates’ job offer.  Please?”