Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (29 page)

In the rest of my free time, I did calisthenics.  The pain continued to get worse, but I only let the agony out in my cell.

After my latest draw, I no longer understood
Dr. Fredericks’ tests.  They had entered a technical realm I had no background to comprehend.

The tests were still painful and humiliating, but in an impersonal way.  Two days of painful biopsies, including one where they drew fluid from my left eye.  On the first day, they also cut off my left earlobe.  They took a bunch of pictures and measurements, and then repeated the measurements every day.  I guessed they wanted to learn how quickly my earlobe grew back, which it did after about three days.  They also staged several other painful tests involving an apparatus, which pulled at my arms and legs. 

Agent McIntyre was unhappy with the tests, and several times he and Dr. Fredericks argued.  I didn’t interfere or attempt to befriend either of them; each time I edged toward that, I got a bad feeling and stopped.  These two were beyond my influence, and my instincts knew it.

I still didn’t get enough exercise, and I’d been reduced to doing push-ups and sit-ups in my padded cell to ease the pain.  Jumping jacks and running in place had become too painful.

Unexpectedly, on the evening of the twenty-ninth, four of the FBI techs grabbed me and moved me from the padded room to the suicide cell on the third floor.  I writhed in itchy agony the entire night from that foul room, deathly afraid that the next day they would drag me down to the Detention Center basement and shoot me. 

I cradled the knife in my arms and wondered if I would have enough nerve to use it.

The next morning, two of the Detention Center techs, Fred Parrish and another named Lewis, came into the suicide cell with welding equipment, heavy metal shackles and chains.  Six well-armed soldiers accompanied them, all soldiers new to me.  For a moment, I decided I had been right and this was the end, but the soldiers didn’t do anything more than immobilize my arms.  The Detention Center techs started their work and the soldiers left.

“What’s going on?” I asked Parrish, once he and Lewis started setting up the welding equipment and the shackles.  I’d put the knife back in its hiding place after I awakened.  I wasn’t desperate enough to attempt an escape. 

“There’s a new team on your case,” Parrish said, as he welded the chain to the shackle on my left leg.  “They’ve decided to hit you with the terminal stage procedure.  We do it for all the Transforms, toward the end.”  He rattled the chain between the heavy shackles.

Terminal stage procedure.  I nodded.  For a Transform, that would be when all hope of a Focus had fled, and he was about to go psychotic with withdrawal or cross over to Monster if the Transform was a woman.  I had experience with leg shackles and knew they cramped my style.  I suspected they would make even a newly turned Monster more tractable.

“I’m not getting any more draws, am I?” I asked, voice shaky.

“Rumor has it there are still more on the way,” Parrish said.  At least he put a piece of leather between the metal and my ankle when they welded the shackle on.

“What’s this about new management?” I asked.

“The FBI doctor, Fredericks, is gone.  So are a bunch of McIntyre’s techs.  Some FBI big-wig, Joe Patrelle, just showed up and is causing all sorts of ruckus.  He brought his own techs and doctors with him.”

I smelled office politics, FBI faction politics and perhaps outside pressure of one variety or other.

I shivered, scared, and wondered what this change was going to bring.  I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew this wasn’t the right time for an escape attempt. 

At least I was in the room with my knife.

An hour later, my guards brought me in to see
Dr. Peterson.  He sat up straight and attempted to look confident, but he still looked lost behind that huge desk. 

“I’m in charge of your care again,” he said.  “By my orders, you now have unlimited time in the exercise room.”  He glanced at his telephone and I decided he had called
Dr. Zielinski for advice.  “I’ve also arranged for you to move around on your own again.  You’ll be guarded, but the nonsense of wheeling you around from place to place chained to a table is over.”

“Why the change?” I asked.  Low juice slowed my thoughts. 
Dr. Peterson’s news was a pleasant shock, but I feared the cost.

Dr.
Peterson didn’t answer my question.  “The new FBI team, under Special Agent Patrelle, has a test scheduled for you at one PM.”  He dismissed me. 

I went to the exercise room and took a good look at myself.  Yuck!  I had biceps, plainly visible biceps for gosh sake.  Hard as rocks, too.  If I squinted, I could see those tiny triangular things on the side of my neck.  More muscles.  If those things kept growing, I was going to join the no-neck brigade.  My tummy had shrunk down to where it had been before my first pregnancy, which was good, and it had picked up a few of those funny lumps Keaton called ‘abs’.  Not prominent, but enough to see.

In the mirror, I realized my breasts were shrinking, as well.  Disgusting.  No wonder I thought the elastic had gone out of my brassiere and girdle.  Still, I would rather be funny looking than have these horrible joint and muscle pains.

Needless to say, I worked myself into chain-clanking exhaustion, imagining Keaton, as Larry, hounding me.  Access to the exercise room was good.

The procedure change bothered me, though.  So did Dr. Peterson’s attitude. 

I learned why at one PM.

The FBI brought me out into the courtyard, where someone, likely the FBI techs, had buried a concrete I-beam in the interior courtyard at the far end of the U.  They had a chain attached to the concrete I-beam, light enough for me to rip apart if I had a good set of gloves and ten minutes.  It clanked in the cold breeze, and I smelled the ozone odor of a coming storm.

They put a shackle around my right wrist and attached the chain to it.  Opposite me, out of chain range, stood ten marksmen.  They each wore a blue jacket with FBI written on the left pocket, and watched me with hard eyes.  The cold didn’t bother me, but I shivered anyway.

McIntyre was there in his own FBI jacket, still in charge.  Whoever this Patrelle was, he didn’t show his face.  “Today, Carol, you get to play target.  These men are going to shoot at you.  They need to experience how fast an Arm moves.  No, they won’t shoot purposely at your head.  You win if you survive.  My men don’t get to reload.”

The shock flushed my face and I snarled, my good intentions about my temper gone in a flash.  I had assumed Dr. Fredericks had been chased out because of his sadistic tests.  Now, I realized the most likely explanation was the exact opposite: the sadistic Dr. Fredericks had left in protest over tests like
this
.

I lost it.

“Fuck you!”  I had never said that in my life.  The profanity seemed appropriate.  “I refuse to serve as a training target for your Arm hu…”

McIntyre drew his weapon, not an Arm-killer, thankfully, and shot me in the lower left leg.  He lifted his weapon and pointed it at my head.  “Dance with me, or die.”

That did it.  I did rabid dog imitations for the next ten minutes, doing my best to rip the chain off the pillar and avoid headshots.  I didn’t calm down for hours afterwards.  I couldn’t believe my fellow human beings would do such a thing.  I couldn’t believe even the most inhumane members of the Detention Center staff would put up with someone else doing such a thing. 

I practically passed out from blood loss and lack of food before I would let even my new Detention Center friends near me.  Eventually I let Doris feed me, and as she did, tears rolled down her face.  Food helped me recover my sanity.

Later, I got to eat an unlimited amount of food for dinner.

Dr.
Manigault came by to inspect me personally, after dinner, clucking over my wounds, astonished over how rapidly they healed.  He had a rock solid erection.  I noticed, and told him so. 

That was the last time I saw
Dr. Manigault.

McIntyre, the bastard, staged the exact same scene again the next day.

Tonya Biggioni: October 23, 1966

Rhonda handed Tonya the day’s mail and left Tonya’s office.  The day had been pleasant, with no emergency phone calls she had to make when the long distance rates were high, no pressing emergencies.  Nothing bad at all.  She had taken advantage of the abnormally warm mid-October weather by taking the morning off and going to Fairmont Park with the non-working mothers and young children of her household.  She had even opened her office window to let in the fresh air.

The first letter was a plea from a Focus Ellen O’Donnell, who Tonya had met only once, at the last Northeast Region meeting.  Ellen was a young Focus, twenty months past her transformation.  Her letter was a series of complaints about how Tonya’s boss, Suzie Schrum, had taken more interest in Focus O’Donnell’s household than Ellen liked.  Tonya couldn’t stop Suzie’s interference, unfortunately, and so she answered Focus O’Donnell’s letter with a few choice platitudes about perseverance.

The second letter had a post office box in Quebec City as its return address.  The unknown Canadian again.  Tonya suspected the unknown could be a legendary Focus who lived in Montreal, but whoever this person was, she was cagey, very cagey. 

Tonya

You, more than I, know what is going on in your life.  Beneath the surface, events and currents are moving in ways you will not enjoy.  Tests, choices, and change come.  Now it starts, the conflict I warned you about after you witnessed the induced transformation of Delia Vinote.  Are you on the right side?  The conflict will destroy you if you are not, body, mind and soul.  Although we’ve never talked about it before, I am familiar with how much you worry about how the choices you’ve made have harmed your soul.  Worse choices are to come, and the obvious choices may not be the correct ones.

Your Friend

Tonya carefully folded up the letter and put it in the file with the other letters from this person.  The file went into the small safe she kept for her private business.  The message bothered Tonya but didn’t surprise her.  She had felt the turn of the tide in her dreams; the relative stasis that had held for nearly six years, since the Kennedy administration had officially forgiven the first Focuses and their households for their escape from Quarantine, was drawing to a close.  Shirley had hinted the same in her last phone call, when the leading first Focus had ignored the unstated chain of command to quiz Tonya about Keaton and Hancock.

Tonya had a hard time believing she would be allowed any real choices on the important issues.  Suzie would make those for her and Tonya couldn’t do anything about it.  Too many of Tonya’s orders called on her to harm her soul, and she couldn’t avoid any of them.

Still, the unknown writer thought differently.  Tonya had learned to take those rare letters seriously over the years.

The third letter was from a Philadelphia businessman acquaintance.  He had some inside information about a pending and unannounced hotel bankruptcy, the hotel located in a marginal section of South Philly.  He wanted to know if Tonya and her household were interested in purchasing the property.  Tonya put the third letter in her ‘to be researched’ file, which her moneyman, Marty Fenner, would take a look at.

The fourth letter was from a Marie Caravello, a Network volunteer in the Midwest Region.  Inside Tonya found another letter, addressed to Stacy Keaton, marked urgent.

Tonya sighed.  The day had started out so promising.  She called the immigrant lady who she paid to be her answering service for sub rosa affairs and left a message for Keaton to call ASAP.  Keaton used the immigrant lady as well, for the same purposes, and the lady was the standard way they contacted each other.

“It’s her,” Rhonda said, after dinner.  Tonya, who had been snacking on a deliciously gooey coffeecake Delia had made, begged off Marty’s bridge game and took the phone call in Rhonda’s office.

“Biggioni,” she said, licking the last of the caramel goo off her fingers.

“What’s so urgent, oh most magnificent queen of darkness,” Keaton said.  Stacy had been on Tonya’s case ever since the FBI chased her out of St. Louis.  Keaton’s voice today was of a tremulous beaten-down man; Keaton often practiced her play-acting when she dealt with Tonya.

“I have a letter addressed to you, marked urgent,” Tonya said.  “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Smell the letter and tell me what it smells like.”

Keaton had never made that request before, but Tonya’s nose was good.  Not as good as Keaton’s nose, which Keaton had taken great glee to point out on several occasions, but good enough to make a mockery of anyone else’s nose that wasn’t attached to the face of a Major Transform.  “Antiseptic hospital, bacon and maple syrup.”

“The letter’s from Hancock.  Open it and read it to me.  This ought to be worth a laugh or three.”

“If you insist, Stacy.”  Tonya opened the letter and began to read.

Mrs. Stacy Keaton