Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (3 page)

They brought me to see
Dr. Peterson.

Dr. Peterson offered me a chair and I sat.  The armed orderlies boxed the room, their guns still aimed at me.  The cold men with their guns seemed odd in such an ordinary office.

“Mrs. Hancock.”
Dr. Peterson said to me from behind his oversized wooden desk.  “You present us with many problems.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I didn’t ask for this to happen.” To my surprise, I was already famished and wobbly.  On top of my annoying craving for juice and my stiff joints, hunger made my mind feel like old molasses.  It would be impolite to demand another meal so soon, so I decided to tough it out.

“I understand,” Dr. Peterson said, laying his hands flat on the desk as if it would rise up if he didn’t hold it down.  He was in his forties, with dark hair and facial stubble like Nixon.  He had a round face and a solemn look of professional competence, which I might have believed more if he hadn’t been so callous in the bus. 

I’d killed my daughter Sarah.  My thoughts hurt too much to face, so I turned my mind away from them.

“As best as we can determine,” Dr. Peterson said, “you contracted Transform Sickness and started to make a Focus transformation.  However, something unexpected happened soon after you slipped into a coma, while your friends and daughter were trying to call for an ambulance.”

“Transform Sickness did something that killed two friends, a neighbor, and my daughter.” A Focus transformation induced transformations in nearby women, but didn’t affect children.  Sarah must have been barely old enough. 

Phooey.  I didn’t believe my own words and rationalizations.

“Yes, that’s the right way to look at it.  You’re not at fault, Mrs. Hancock, save that under the archaic laws of the state you still might be prosecuted after you’re released from the Detention Center.”

“What can you do for me here, Dr. Peterson?” I asked.

“You’re of course familiar with the fact,”
Dr. Peterson said.  He paused and brought his hands together on his desk to make a little church steeple.  “That if a Focus cannot be found for a Transform, he’ll die.”

I nodded.  “Men go into withdrawal and go psychotic, women turn Monster.”

“We can predict to within the hour, these days, when this is going to happen.  A day ahead of time, the authorities take unfortunate unwanted Transforms from a Transform Clinic and ship them here.  This Detention Center also deals with the aberrant cases, of which there are plenty.  For instance, there are two women Transforms on the third floor who…”

All of a sudden I knew their location.  That’s what had been bothering me.  I wanted them, a strange sexual arousal mixed with a deep hunger.  I needed them.  They could satisfy my mysterious craving.

“Yesrightthere, Doctor,” I said, turning swiftly and pointing up.  We must have been on the ground floor.  “Let’s go.  I need them.”

Dr.
Peterson blinked at me.  “You
need
them?”  He backed away, white as a sheet and breathing rapidly, and slowly rose to stand with his back against a window.  Thin stripes of black shadow from the thick metal grate on the outside of the safety glass dappled his white lab coat.  Terrified, he slid along the glass to stand next to an armed orderly.

“I need them. 
Now
,” I said, and hissed. 

“Mrs. Hancock,”
Dr. Peterson bellowed.  He gathered himself.  “You have just been reassigned as a status six prisoner,” he said, with authority.  “Bend forward and place your hands on the desk.”

“Will that get me to those women?”

“Yes, yes,” Dr. Peterson said.  “Absolutely.”

Sure.  Anything to arrange a visit with those two women Transforms.  I bent.  They shackled me with heavy shackles.  When I looked up,
Dr. Peterson had left the room.

I waited and examined my situation, suspicious of
Dr. Peterson’s smooth assurance.  There were little half-moons cut in the office carpeting.  I had noticed them when I came in.  The guards had peeled one of them up, revealing an eyebolt embedded in the concrete floor.  They had shackled me to it.

A few minutes later I felt the woman Transforms moving closer to me, arousing my desires.  Then, to my appalled anger, they moved farther away.  When they left the building, a couple minutes later, I howled in agony and danced around the embedded bolt, pulling furiously at my restraints.  I don’t know what I would have done if I’d actually managed to break free; the armed guards watched my manic performance with cold indifference.  Eventually, the women went so far away I couldn’t sense them anymore.

I swung the chain at the floor in a futile display of anger and sat back down in the chair.  I cried, furious and miserable with the loss of those two Transforms.  They were mine.  I needed them.

Dr.
Peterson returned and wove his way in through the guards.  “Yes, now that that has been taken care of, Mrs. Hancock, where were we?” he said as he settled in behind his desk again.

“You bastard,” I said.  Hot anger.  “You lied to me.”

“I apologize, but it was necessary.  You’re a Major Transform, Mrs. Hancock.”

“You said I’d failed my Focus transformation.” I said, still livid with anger.  Those Transforms had been mine!

“You did.  You’re a Major Transform, but you’re not a Focus.”

His comment made no sense.  To me, Major Transform and Focus were synonymous.  Like Santa Claus and Kris Kringle.  It didn’t help that my mind felt like mush.

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” he said, and artfully raised one and only one eyebrow.  His smarmy air of smug superiority galled me.  I tensed.  “This is outside my area of expertise.  However, I have an expert flying in to deal with you who predicted you’d be…what you are.  So, other than the fact that I have to keep you shackled up and that you are indeed some form of Major Transform, are there any other questions I can answer?”

He lied.  I wished I’d spotted his lies the first time.  I despised doctors and their arrogance, not the least when regarding Transform Sickness.  They spouted glib explanations for something far more complicated than they understood.  I suspected Transform Sickness was supernatural. 

I broke down in tears as the misery hit me again.  I was alone, among cold-blooded men who lied to me and thought nothing of my pain.  I wanted my husband and my children.  I wanted friends to care for me and my minister to pray for me.  Instead, I had a lying doctor who wouldn’t even tell me what little he knew.  This wasn’t the world I knew.

None of the cold guards surrounding me would even pass me the box of tissues.  They wouldn’t come that close.  Eventually, Dr. Peterson tossed me his suit handkerchief.  I caught it (momentary surprise) and bent my head down so I could daub my eyes with the hankie in my shackled hand. 

My weepy behavior stung my own pride.  I took a deep breath and did my best to push the tears away.  “I have some questions,
Dr. Peterson.  Where’s my husband and my family?  Since it’s been a week, they should have…” I stopped as horror filled Dr. Peterson’s face.

“Mrs. Hancock.  Your coma ended a little more than two days ago.  You arrived here last night around nine.  You woke up today at two-thirty in the afternoon.”

I looked at my arm and my once-mangled wrists.  The bullet wounds were still red, but that was about it.  “Well, whatever I am, I heal like the dickens.”

“Yes, you do,”
Dr. Peterson said.  He took off his glasses and searched his pockets for a handkerchief to wipe them with, but of course, I had it. 

“Okey dokey, I can live with that.  So, what’s the status of my family?”

“Your daughter’s funeral was three days ago.  Your husband is out on bail but can’t leave Jefferson City.  Your father attended the demonstration in Jefferson City, shouting ‘death to monsters’ with the rest of the Monsters Die crowd.”  Monsters Die was an activist organization, like the NAACP, but instead of pushing for civil rights for colored people they wanted the Transforms eradicated or confined.  “Your mother has been hospitalized in Pilot Grove with exhaustion.  Your widowed mother-in-law is staying at your house, taking care…” Dr. Peterson let his voice tail off, because I’d started bawling again.

Eventually, I stopped.  “Until your specialist gets here I think I’d just prefer to be left alone,” I said. 
Dr. Peterson’s bedside manner repelled me.  He sat up more stiffly and pushed his glasses back farther on his nose.  “Do you have any of those prisoner cells with any amenities, like those fancy tin cups that prisoners get in the movies?  Or am I stuck with concrete slab number six, complete with five inch grate?”

He grimaced at my sardonic comment.  “You’ll be in a locked cell, but one far nicer than you awoke in earlier.”

I stood, moaned from a set of unexpected phantom pains in my extremities, and waited for the guards to unhook me from the floor.  “Another thing.  I seem to be famished.  Hungry.  Can I please have some extra food?”

“I’m sorry,”
Dr. Peterson said.  “Until our expert arrives, you’re on standard Transform rations.”

I hadn’t expected my second floor cell to be a reinforced hospital room, single occupancy.  The room had all the plugs, valves, sinks and do-hickies of a modern hospital room, plus an electric bed, a nurse call button, a pitcher of ice water, a vase with plastic flowers, and the day’s newspaper.  I could hardly believe it was only Wednesday, September fourteenth.  I’d probably have cards and flowers by now if I hadn’t killed all my best friends and put my family in jail.  An armed orderly stood guard outside my door, which they locked.  From the outside.

The guards hadn’t removed my shackles, but they had done something to them to increase the slack.  They gave me a new hospital smock to wear, cut to go around the shackles.  I changed and went to the bathroom (down the hall, second left), escorted by armed orderlies.  If you ever want a challenge, try going to the bathroom in heavy shackles.

All alone in my room, my mind turned to better things.  My old life.  My daughter. 

I cried.

I was born in Macon, Georgia, a simple town girl, named for my great aunt Carol.  My maiden name was Stevens.  My father lost his dry goods store in the middle thirties, blamed the Republicans, and moved his family to Missouri.  I don’t remember ever having a Deep South buttery molasses accent, but my mother Eunice did, a constant joy to listen to.  Ann, my older sister, always fought with Mom, and our younger brother, Jeff, always fought with Dad.  I was the good kid, the saintly middle child; I got along with everyone.

My childhood memories centered on our home in Pilot Grove, Missouri.  Dad, or Old Jeff as everyone in town called him, bought himself another dry goods store in the early forties, which later became a combination feed store and small town grocery.  I was exceptional in school, and much to the chagrin of my siblings graduated as Valedictorian from Pilot Grove Normal.  With Mom’s blessing and Dad’s mute acceptance, I went off to college in the middle of the Korean War.  The ivy halls of Iowa State were filled with men when I arrived, ever more so in the following years due to the GI Bill, a tidal wave of older men who had been through World War II, ready to make a new life of their own.  Younger men returning from Korea soon joined them.  I majored in history and never got a bad grade.  My dorm friends and I were all studious, save when we were dating, which we did as a group as often we could.

In my third year of college, I met Bill Hancock, a new freshman.  Wounded in the Korean War, he
had finished his long military service career.  Bill was five years older than I was, bright, witty, and driven.  He knew what he wanted from life.  Later, I would realize how much he resembled Dad, not physically, but in attitude and interests.  Business was Bill’s life.  He liked nothing better than to make a sale and close a deal.  He wanted to be more than a salesman, though; he wanted to start a business, build it, and make it successful.  Bill was in college to learn how to do so.

I didn’t finish my junior year at Iowa State.  Bill set his sights on me, won my heart, swept me off my feet, and sold me on his vision of the future.  Wife.  Mother.  Homemaker.  The works.  I was no looker, not even close.  I had no sense of fashion and my appearance had never been a top priority.  My dream had been to teach at a women’s college somewhere, a dowdy academic spinster.  My time in college had shown me one thing, though: I was one of those people who found changing light bulbs a challenge.  My family had taken care of me and I never had to learn much about the work-a-day world of houses, cars and gardens.  Bill’s presence reminded me that I needed someone to care for me, at least for the physical things of life. 

Mom and Dad approved of Bill, a pleasant surprise, as they had frowned at both my siblings’ choices.  He sold them on his dreams as well.  A June bride, I had a house of my own by the end of summer, thanks to the vacuum cleaners Bill sold on his summer vacation.

The next decade flew by fast.  Two miscarriages, then Sarah.  I learned to cook and keep house, although it became clear after awhile that I needed a maid for certain things.  I put work into cooking, though, becoming an excellent cook.  After college Bill started up a dry cleaning chain and later took it national.  We were never rich but we were never poor, either.  I expected to be rich by the time I had grandchildren.  We entertained constantly and my cooking expertise was an essential ingredient to the sales made during our parties.