Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (27 page)

I kept myself awake by force of will.  McIntyre and the FBI techs whispered to each other most of the day, softly enough they thought I couldn’t hear them.  Hah.  I learned a lot from them, none of it good.

After a huge dinner, they led me to the weight room for more tests.  I reveled as much in the exercise as in their discomfort with my near instant recovery from their poisoning.

Back in my padded room, I went back to my calisthenics.  From what I overheard, I now knew how I would die.  It turned out Arms didn’t have exactly the same withdrawal symptoms as male Transforms.  An Arm did go through a wild and violent psychotic phase, but after some unspecified amount of time the Arm curled into a ball and went catatonic.  I remembered
Dr. Zielinski telling me about Julie Bethune, who died of her wounds while in withdrawal.  I guessed they wanted to see what happened to an Arm in withdrawal who wasn’t wounded.

I was close to being useless from lack of juice, either tomorrow or the next day.  I was terrified of the yawning blackness of need.  My craving for juice crept up on me, a dark shadow of an unknown beast stalking me and overwhelmed me with despair.  I tried to pray but I doubted God heard me. 

I hated myself for the choices I had made, choices turning me into the title character of my own Greek tragedy.

Blood, death and fear filled my dreams these past nights.  And juice.  Always juice.  The terrible craving never stopped.  My dreams echoed the terrible highs and terrible lows that wore me out and wore me down.  Lack of human contact had dried out my voice and my humanity. 

I became powdered hate, my tears acid rage.

I came to understand Keaton’s kill or be killed viewpoint toward our fellow humans, or at least one of them.  I had never met anyone before like Agent McIntyre, only heard of his kind of people in stories.  To him, I wasn’t a human being, I was a puzzle to be solved to give him the knowledge he needed to go hunt down that great white whale of his named Stacy Keaton.  Doctors Manigault and Fredericks were sadistic, but they needed human targets for their sadism.  For them, at least I was human.

A little after midnight, tired of my calisthenics, I sat down on the floor of my cell, closed my eyes, and began to think.  Mom
had told me a million times if I didn’t like a situation, I needed to change it.  Good advice, which I had passed on to my children.  Well then, I needed to change my situation.  Take risks, because all the options I thought of involved risks. 

The question was which risks to take.

I assumed, first off, that everything Dr. Zielinski had told me was meaningful.  As a hidden ally of Stacy Keaton, he had to have something going for him.  She would have killed him otherwise.  Based on his comments, I knew I might last six months or more if I had juice and proper exercise, even if I didn’t learn whatever secrets Keaton knew to keep herself alive indefinitely.  Based on Dr. Zielinski’s comments, I could pass notes to this underground thing the Focuses ran, and these notes would be delivered to other conspirators, such as Dr. Zielinski, Agent Bates and if my assumptions were correct, Stacy Keaton herself.  I doubted he would have bothered to speak about the Quarantine otherwise.  Also based on what he said, I should be able to get help from the staff members at this Detention Center, because the low-end staff members here were naturally sympathetic toward Transforms.  If I behaved myself.

I came up with several possibilities.  First, I needed to get a message out.  For that, I needed an ally.  It would have been better if I had allies among the staff already, but I hadn’t been that smart.  Instead, I needed to depend on a little history.  I needed someone on the staff who had been here back during the Quarantine, which I hoped meant he or she would be inclined to help a Transform in trouble, and also still had connections to the Focuses.  I ran down my mental list of the people on the staff I had remotely friendly dealings with, and found one, and only one, who had been here since the fifties.  Doris Trotter, the kitchen lady.

If she was actually willing to help me, I would be a hell of a lot luckier than I deserved.

I wrote two letters, one to
Dr. Zielinski and another to Agent Bates, and in both I asked them to help me get out of this place.  They would go under my plate at breakfast.  If the FBI found out, I would end up back in the suicide cell, which lead down another avenue of minor hope.  I would have Dr. Zielinski’s knife back.

I also made the overdue decision to start befriending the staff in my own right.  Based on my observations, save for the doctors, they weren’t all bad.  At least compared to the FBI people.  If none of my letters helped, I suspected that with the help of the Detention Center staff, I still would be able to find a way to escape.  I didn’t have any idea where to start, so I considered that option far riskier than the letters. 

I still didn’t know how to get juice on my own, but I was more afraid of the possibility the FBI would drive me into withdrawal in this hideous place.  Besides, if I was going to die, I didn’t want to give McIntyre and his sadistic crew the pleasure of being the ones to do the job.

I also decided to keep up with my hygiene.  I was a woman, dammit.  I wanted to look like a woman again.  Act like a woman again.  I had to get over my annoyance at the damned muscles that made me look so mannish.  If those female Olympic athletes found a way to work around their muscles, I could as well.  I vowed to take a shower every day, especially after any exercises.  Brush my teeth.  Wear deodorant.  Wear proper makeup and clothes; if I couldn’t befriend one of the women here and get her to provide me with real clothing, I deserved what I got from the FBI.

I dealt with one more decision, and that one bothered me more than the others did.  Keaton.  She was a killer, a monster.  I might write her a letter and put myself in her hands, if she would take me, but doing so would cost me my soul.  Assuming my soul hadn’t already been damned.  No church would ever welcome me, because of what I had already done.  Yet, placing m
yself in Keaton the atheist Antichrist’s hands would go far beyond my previous actions.

I didn’t remember anything in “Thou shalt not kill” along the lines of “unless you’re an Arm about to go into juice withdrawal”.  Or “unless the person you’re about to kill has volunteered to die for you”.  To survive, I would have to kill unattached Transforms.  Sure, I would save them from a worse fate, but that was nothing more than a fancy argument.  God knew better.  I thought I had been a good Christian.  No.  I
knew
I had been a good Christian. 

Not anymore, not since I became an Arm.  Not from the moment I transformed.

Those church doors closed for me just because of what I was.  Those church bells rang now for someone else.  I was on the other side.  The only question I had yet to resolve was
how far on the other side
.  If I gave myself to Keaton, I would be giving myself to someone so far on the other side of God as to have joined the pantheon of names like Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Eichmann, Stalin and the rest of those termed Antichrists in the books I’d read and the sermons I had listened to. 

Surely, Keaton would not require me…

No.  I couldn’t predict Keaton.  That was obvious.  If I placed myself in her hands, all I could do was hope.

Therefore, in the end, I gathered my courage, calmed my nervous hands, and wrote a third letter, to Keaton.  I asked her for her help.  I put myself in her position and decided that since I rejected her help once, she wouldn’t likely want to help me.  It didn’t feel right to me, as an Arm.  I had to offer something. 

I thought for a long time, and looked at the problem from all sides.

I really had only one thing to offer.  Myself.  My meager skills at business, organization of volunteer groups and entertaining all went into the letter.  Weak, but those were my strengths.  I didn’t mention I could clean house, cook or care for young children.  I couldn’t imagine Keaton would have any use for those skills.

I looked the letter over and almost crumpled it up.  My gut said my offer wasn’t enough.  I chewed my lips for several minutes and added, at the end, that I would do whatever she wanted. 

I gave up my soul in that letter.  I had considered my soul worth preserving, once.  Now, to hell with my soul.  I wanted life.  I wanted the disease’s taking of my daughter Sarah’s life to be something more than a pointless tragedy.

Now I had to hope.

That hope was all I had left.

Chapter 6

“There is no known cure for the chronic phase of Transform Sickness – once caught, the effects last for the lifetime of the Transform.  Although the need for continual maintenance of juice levels is a significant burden for a Transform, they have been noted to possess improved health and physical stamina.  The amount of juice within a Transform influences his mood and activity level.  For this reason, Transforms should not be considered suitable for high stress jobs, or any other job in which the employer is uncomfortable with an employee of varying moods and activity levels.” [Department of Labor circular, 1960]

Dr. Henry Zielinski: October 18, 1966

Focus Iris Casso’s St. Louis household had recently moved, for reasons she couldn’t even put into words.  Iris was tall and thin, with wavy black hair done up in an old fashioned style that reminded
Dr. Zielinski of what his older sister looked like back in the forties.  Not the brightest person he had ever run into, but she tried hard.  The Focuses he normally worked with lived in New England, but the Network always liked him to meet new Focuses and make sure they were coping with new situations, such as an Arm in a nearby Detention Center. 

He knocked on the door to the household’s new home, some sort of run-down converted apartment, one of the large pre-Depression city houses with brick-embossed shingles on the exterior walls.  One of the ladies in the house answered the door, furtively, and he introduced himself.  She invited him in and led him back to Iris.  He took off his hat, and followed.

Like every Focus household he had ever visited, the place was packed with people and smelled off.  Close, with some extra odor unique to Focus households.  It wasn’t the too-many-people odor of a crowded room with no ventilation.  Many Network people had remarked on the odor over the years, but none of them had been able to figure out where it came from.

People in Focus households didn’t notice the odor, ever.  They took to crowding better than most as well.  They had to, if they expected to live.

The Transform led him to one of the bathrooms, where Iris was giving a bath to three squirming toddlers.  She looked up at him and smiled, up to her elbows in suds.  “Dr. Zielinski!  Come in,” Iris said.  She frowned.  “Have you got the Arm out of St. Louis yet?”

Dr.
Zielinski shook his head, looked around, and found a place to sit on the commode lid.  One of the toddlers splashed water at him and grinned.  He grinned in return and turned back to Iris.

“No.  She’s still in the Detention Center, but a different crew of FBI agents arrived and got me fired.”

Iris frowned.  “Then who from the Network is in charge of her?”

He had hoped to learn more from Hancock than he had with Elsie Conger, the last Arm he dealt with.  Instead, he left with more questions than he had to start with.  Hancock’s mental problems headed the list.  Her fast development progression into aggression and muscle hypertrophy was second.  Even her incredible post-draw lusts needed explanation. 

He had so many questions, about Transform Sickness in general and Arms in specific.  The Network had some ideas, but no proof.  Their only contacts with Arms, worldwide, were with Keaton (homicidal, insane, and too often for his liking
his
contact) and with Erica Eissler in West Germany.  The only other Arm Dr. Zielinski knew about, in Canada, refused to cooperate with doctors, researchers and the American Focuses. 

No one could say whether Eissler was sane, but in any case, she was more communicative about her life as a Transform than the other Arms.  She refused to talk about her personal life at all, though, and none of the researchers could figure out how she managed.  Tommy had based his FBI job offer to Hancock on Eissler’s job, as she did the GDR’s mercy killings of extra Transforms, at government request.  Such a job wasn’t possible in the United States, because of bad publicity, which was why the public part of his offer involved hunting down Monsters.  All a lost chance now.

“Nobody, Focus Casso,” he said.  He waited while the Focus slowly worked out the implications of his comment.

“I’m having bad dreams, doctor,” she said a minute later, turning away from him.  A toddler slipped in the tub, and Focus Casso caught her before she banged her head.  The little girl whimpered experimentally a couple of times before she decided tears weren’t worth the effort and went back to her play.

This wasn’t the first time he had heard a Focus complain of her dreams.  It always gave him chills.  He thought of Hancock and her stubborn conviction that Transform Sickness was supernatural.  “What kind of dreams?”

“I dream of a killer on the loose.  A Monster who kills Transforms.  I see a big knife with a serrated edge and a huge dog running through the woods.  Rape, murder.  Monsters with huge teeth, and slaughtered normals.”

Iris turned back to him, intent.  “You have some kind of mindless Monster living in the Detention Center, Doctor.  This Monster is endangering to my people.  You’ve got to help us.”

“Focus, Arms aren’t mindless.  An Arm can speak, and think, and has a fully human intellect.” He had told her this before, but she had forgotten.  Focus Casso forgot many things.  The media reported that Arms were Monsters, and so people thought of them as mindless beasts.  Monsters might be cunning, but they weren’t human, and they couldn’t talk.  No matter how many times he explained that an Arm transformation made an Arm more intelligent rather than less, his comments never seemed to take.  “There are certainly no huge dogs in the Detention Center.  You must be dreaming about something else.” He remembered Keaton’s knife, that big knife with the serrated edge, and wondered what else Focus Casso had seen.

Iris ignored him, plucked a little boy from the tub and wrapped him in a towel.  She turned back to him, a Madonna with a little child in her arms, charming as only a Focus could be.  “We might just kill them, you know.  Like wolves. 
Or you might take care of the Arms for us.
” Oh, oh, I’m so helpless, I need your protection, please save me!  The reaction Iris wanted was akin to falling in love, without any aspect of lust involved.  If a person fell for a Focus’s charm, he would do almost anything for her.  A Focus took several years to fully develop her charisma, thanks heavens, according to his extensive personal experience.  The better Focuses learned to control their charisma, which made their charm harder to resist, but most Focuses, like Iris, used their charisma automatically.  He had a lot of practice resisting Focus charisma, though, from Focuses much more experienced than Iris.

Iris wasn’t the only Focus who wanted the Arms dead.  It was a common sentiment among many of the Focuses he had dealt with.  There were far too many misunderstandings about Arms.  The official medical literature still claimed Armenigar’s Syndrome was the result of a failed Focus transformation, a story he was ‘requested’ to parrot to any new Arms he met. 

“We’re not sure killing them would be right,” Dr. Zielinski said to Iris.  “We still don’t understand what the proper function for an Arm is in Transform society.  We might need them, remember.”

Iris snorted.  “That’s what everyone keeps saying, but I don’t believe it.  I mean, all these extra Transforms are dying in agony because there aren’t enough Focuses, and Arms may be the proper solution to the surplus Transform problem.  But how can an Arm determine which Transforms are safe under the care of a Focus, and which aren’t?  I mean, I know which ones are mine, but I can’t tell if the Transform isn’t mine.  Can these failed Focuses tell?”

“We don’t know,” Dr. Zielinski said.  That, alas, was another of those nasty unanswered questions.

Rover (Interlude)

They were back.  The moon had gone through half of her phases since these hunters last found him, but they had found him again.

“I’m Rover,” Rover said to himself.  He had to talk to himself.  If he didn’t, he started to forget how to talk.  He hadn’t made any big mistakes like the one that put the teeny Monster-like hunter and her followers on his trail to begin with, but he found there were some things he couldn’t resist.  The worst was cars.  Every day or so, in the early morning or early evening, he found he couldn’t resist chasing cars.  He also found he enjoyed terrifying those in the cars with his loud barks.  He could taste their fear, and liked it.  He had gotten good at picking out good places to chase down cars, and gotten very good at picking out cars with groceries in their trunks.  He had been shot at many times now, hit many times, and while painful, he learned that after a few days, he healed so completely he couldn’t even tell he had been shot.  He was a magic dog!  He also learned that if he barked a lot and avoided the people in the car while he went after groceries in the trunk, he almost never got shot at.

That’s how these hunters had found him, he decided.  The car chases.  He was a stupid magic dog.

“I’m Rover.  I hunt cars.”

Soon, he needed to find more of that good loving.  He smelled Monsters down in the valleys, hidden among the humans, minding their own business.  He had already taken one, a Monster in the form of a donkey save for the ripping and slashing teeth.  There were more, for when he needed them.

If he stayed here long enough, he might even find out why the last Monster he had taken the good loving from hadn’t died.  It had slunk off, afterwards, and hid down in a river bottom.  They always died before.

He might have to move, though.  The hunters.

He climbed to the top of the mountain, in the nastiest and rockiest part, and waited.  Come at me here, Rover thought.  Unexplainably, this time he wanted to fight.  The stupid part of him was talking again, and he listened.

Five of them came up toward him, about noon, a group of two and a group of three.  Not the Monster-like woman.  She stayed a half mile away, down in a valley.  A cold rain fell, glistening on the rocks, and Rover growled.  He would show them.  “I’m Rover,” he barked out.  “I hunt you!”

They froze in place.  He slunk toward the group of two, and they raised their weapons at him.

“No,” a woman in the group of three said.  “Don’t shoot him.  He said something!”

They understood him!  Even though he was a stupid magic dog.  “Go ‘way.  Leave Rover ‘lone,” Rover said.  He didn’t like the looks of the guns these hunters carried.  The holes in the center of the barrels were twice as wide as the rifles the rural folk around here used.  His stupid side fled when he saw the hunters’ guns.

“Your name is Rover?” the woman asked, fearless.  The others were terrified, as they should be, but this one was utterly nuts.

“Sadie, you’re going to get yourself killed,” the woman standing beside her said.

From the valley floor, the Monster-like woman took off in a run toward the five hunters who confronted him.  Fast.  Her good loving was terrifying and beautiful, hypnotic and cold.  Huge and powerful.

“We can help you,” Sadie said.  She put down her gun and walked toward him.

He would take her good loving, paltry as it was, and kill her if she got too close.  Then they would shoot him.  Or the Monster-like woman would kill him.

“I no want to hurt you,” Rover said.  He fled as fast as his four feet could carry him, across the rocks and low mountain peaks.  He didn’t stop until the next day.

The next day, he cried.  Cried, and was surprised he remembered how.

Gilgamesh: October 19, 1966

Gilgamesh walked down the busy St. Louis streets, enjoying the cool and crisp afternoon.  Above him, the sky was blue with not a cloud in it.  Soon it would be dark.  The streets were comparatively quiet now, but in a few minutes, the rush hour traffic would start to build.  The heavy rumbling of a bus shivered the pavement under his feet.  No one noticed the plain man in the worn clothes, walking along the sidewalk as if he had a purpose.

The sounds of the sixties were around him, society transforming on its own without the help of Transform Sickness.  Being a Crow made Transform Sickness seem all-important, but on the greater stage of life, it was well below the radar.  People worried about the escalation in Vietnam, about the Cold War, about
Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement while they listened to the Beatles.  Hell, they worried more about the length of their son’s hair or daughter’s skirt than they worried about Transform Sickness.  Gilgamesh sniffed the air and smiled as he watched warily around him.  Mostly he preferred the night, but a day like this almost convinced him otherwise.  Despite the smell of exhaust and people, bustling city and big river, he smelled the hint of freshness.  The weather was cold and windy, but his thin coat was enough, and he felt healthy and alive.  As Midgard had noted, he had changed considerably after his transformation.  He used to have a potbelly.  He used to be sedentary.

Not anymore.

Behind him, a light turned, and the lead car in the left lane didn’t move.  The man in the next car sounded his horn.  Gilgamesh leapt into the air, turning as he came down, and froze, his system roiling and ready to vomit up the bad dross. 

A horn, damn it.  Just a horn.

His heart hammered in his chest, and he forced the dross back down by raw will.  Beside him, a woman with two children by her side looked at him suspiciously. 

Damn.  He
had attracted attention.  That was dangerous.  He had to pull himself together.