Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (38 page)

Dr.
Zielinski turned away, his thoughts dark.  It was one thing to catch that sort of grief from innocents and outsiders, it was another to hear a serial killer telling him the medical community was as evil as she was.

He had nothing to say on the subject, though.  Keaton was correct.  Her lesson? 
This is what life’s like on the other side of the needle, you fucking quack.

“So, do you think this will work?” Jeff said several minutes later, finally tamed by Keaton’s rough charisma.  “Can this reverse my transformation?”

They were naked, now, snuggling on the motel bed.  The expression on Keaton’s face was priceless.  So filled with wonder and joy.  Dr. Zielinski had never seen an Arm like this.  Never.

“We’ll find out, now won’t we,” Keaton said, her voice husky with a great many desires.  She covered Jeff’s mouth with hers, and the two of them passed beyond words. 
Dr. Zielinski found he could not look away.  There was something riveting about what Keaton was doing, far beyond normal seduction and sex.  Juice had to be involved, somehow, but Dr. Zielinski couldn’t say how.  Focus Rizzari’s term, ‘post-human morality’, stuck itself in his mind and would not go away.

Keaton was beautiful like this, naked and seductive.  Her grotesque muscles seemed natural, her movements graceful, her body feminine, some dark goddess of life and death and sex.  She worked her allure into the primitive parts of the mind that had never learned thought and reason.  The room was hot with passions civilized men kept leashed, the air thick with the smell of it.

He shouldn’t be here.  This was too powerful and too private.  He could feel only an echo of the passions gripping the two lovers, but even so, his body was hot, his clothes binding, and he had to struggle to control his breathing.  He couldn’t believe his own arousal, or its depth.  No amount of willpower let him look away.

Beautiful, sensual, this was something more than merely human sex.  The act consumed the both of them, and him as well.  Two bodies entwined, finding passion normal humans only dreamed of.  Panting breaths, moans of lust and desire, screams of passion and pleasure.  The goddess and the mortal man, re-enacting some ancient fertility rite, to seed the earth and bring the rains. 

The act took Keaton twenty-seven minutes, a long, long time for an Arm draw, but she had been practicing.  Jeff spent the entire time in the grip of lust and pleasure, and so did she.  When she finished, Keaton gently rolled to the side, off Jeff, and lay on her back staring at the ceiling.  She remained conscious, the byproduct of such an extended draw and the reason she had been practicing it. 

Dr.
Zielinski wiped the sweat from his face and stood to check on Jeff, to find out if their chancy attempt had worked.

“Back off,” Keaton said. 
Dr. Zielinski obeyed, and sat back down.

“Ma’am?”

“He died.  He was alive and sane right to the end, dammit.  I thought I had it!” Keaton slammed her fist down on the bed, and her sweat-slick body and Jeff’s corpse bounced.  “Why didn’t this work, Hank?”

Dead.  Twenty-seven minutes of gripping rapture, and she had been killing Jeff the entire time. 
Dr. Zielinski still looked at her and saw the lover, the goddess.  His body wanted her at the same time his mind recoiled in horror.  Neither response was good, not here, not now.  Keaton wanted analysis, the cold clinical Dr. Zielinski, to interpret for her.  Unfortunately, his analytical skills lay buried under layers of primal emotion and a rock hard erection.

If she invited him to join her in her bed, he would go.

“You felt the pleasure of drawing juice the entire time?” he said finally, hoping he at least presented the illusion of impersonal logic.

“Yes, dammit.  Logically, he should have been dead two minutes in.”  She turned to look at Jeff’s body beside her, and the expression of loss on her hard face forced
Dr. Zielinski to turn away.

Two minutes.  That’s what
Dr. Zielinski had predicted.  “I only have guesses and hypotheses, ma’am.”

“Spit them out.”  If he hadn’t seen the expression of loss on her face, he might have believed the cold tone of her voice.

“We don’t know, biochemically, how Arms draw juice, ma’am.  There’s no physical vacuum cleaner attached to your body.  Logically, unsupported by evidence, the Arm must take over her victim’s body and essentially order the body of the victim to cooperate with the draw procedure and give you his juice.”

“Order?”

“Hormones and pheromones.”

Keaton nodded, still lying on the bed next to Jeff’s corpse.  They had talked many times about hormones and pheromones with regard to her metasense and Tonya’s charisma.  “Yah.  Continue.”

“Following this chain of logic, what must have happened was that you kept him alive during the procedure.”

“Huh.” ‘Yes you idiot’ in ‘Keaton’.

Keaton thought for a moment, and her face softened.  He had never seen that expression on her face before.  She rolled over, kissed Jeff’s corpse on the forehead, and gently arranged his body into a peaceful resting pose.  “More.”  So gentle.  This wasn’t the Keaton he knew, certainly not the Keaton who confronted him a half hour ago.  She was one of the least sentimental people he had ever met.

“If this wild chain of logic is true, what you did implies a great many possibilities for what else Arms could do with their capabilities.”  To be able to control the physical processes of another human being in such an intimate fashion was a vast and untapped capability.

“Disquieting.”  Keaton didn’t look away from Jeff.  She might be interested in potential opportunities later.  Not now.  “It was a blessed sacrament.  A holy sacrifice.  I got more juice out of him than I’ve ever gotten from a draw before.  I’m not drained or woozy.  I’m not horny either, so don’t you be getting fresh on me, Hank.”

That was a relief.  Mostly.  Now, if he could hold his gorge…  A holy sacrament, she said.  Such a close combination of sex and death was an abomination, and she called what she did a holy sacrament.  One would have to be a goddess to consider something like this in such a fashion. 
Dr. Zielinski certainly wasn’t equipped for such emotions.

Such gentleness.  No understanding he had of Arms included such gentleness.  Or respect for a normal human.  Or sentimentality.  Or any form of mysticism.  His entire carefully developed image of Arms collapsed into pieces.  He had thought they were intelligent Monsters, useful, but not complex.  Now, he had no idea what they were, except that it couldn’t be simple. 

“I’d almost say this was a virgin sacrifice, save for the role reversal,” Keaton said.  “Never heard of anything like it, though.”

Hank had, spurred on by Ann Chiron’s hopeless hypothesis.  He remembered old myths of Goddesses and their lovers, who always died as the price of loving their Goddesses.  Myths.  Even the thought unnerved him.  Utterly non-scientific, specious and misleading.  He put those notions far back into his mind.  He had to.

“Goddammit, Hank, don’t you go puking on me.  Give me a hand here; we need to sanitize this place.  The last thing I want to be doing is handing the fucking Feds any clues to work with.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  He stood and went over to lend Keaton a hand with the cleanup.  Her order came from the Arm he knew.  Much easier to deal with.  He would save his true reactions for later.

“Distract me.  Ask your goddamned questions,” Keaton said, handing him a body bag.

She knew him too well.  “What’s the problem with springing Hancock from the Detention Center?” Hank asked.  Keaton should be able to do get in and out of the Detention Center in her sleep.

“Patrelle and McIntyre have fifty FBI agents holed up in some nearby fleabag hotel, lying doggo, doing nothing but waiting and watching,” Keaton said, folding the body into the body bag.  “They’ve set a trap for me.  I can’t discount the possibility that they’ve turned Hancock and that she’ll betray me to them if I show my face.  Nope, she has to break herself out before I’ll touch her.  Secondly, some Focus bitch farther up the food chain than Tonya fucking Biggioni wants Hancock dead.”  Dr. Zielinski nodded.  “I see you already knew.  Had problems getting this volunteer, eh?  Did you do this yourself or with the help of a Focus?”

“A Focus named Lorraine Rizzari.”

“The rebel?  The one who believes in ‘Crows’?  She’s a major pain in Tonya’s posterior, which says a lot of good things about her.”  Dr. Zielinski nodded again.  “I need you to hand deliver a message to Hancock.”

Visiting the Detention Center would be suicidal.  He hadn’t promised to jump on his sword if he could find another way out, though.  “I take it, ma’am, that you don’t trust the Focuses in the Network to pass the message along without tipping the killer Focus?”

“Huh.”

“What if I could pass the message along without involving any of the Focuses?”

Keaton slung the now filled body bag over her shoulder and motioned for Dr. Zielinski to follow her.  “Acceptable.  That way, I don’t have to break you out of jail later.  However, Hank, no more of your Network phone calls until this is over.  Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”  There went his trust factor with the Focuses.  He had the sensation this was a bad thing.  Suddenly, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to follow Keaton’s order.  Hell, he had a nearly unstoppable urge to make a phone call
now
.

Some damned Focus must have got him bad with her charisma.  Wouldn’t be the first time.  “Ma’am?”

“I see it.  Fucking goddamned Focuses.  Look at me.”  He did.  Keaton’s eyes were alive with bowel-clenching fire.  “No more Network phone calls until this is over, or I’ll skin you alive for a fucking
week
!”  It wasn’t an empty threat.  He had seen her do nearly as bad when she was low on juice.

Hank’s bladder let loose and he fell back, limp as tissue paper.

“That ought to do it, ma’am,” he said, from where he had collapsed on the ground.  He hadn’t had that reaction to Keaton for several years.  Her aura of danger had been worse than when she pushed him into committing to the Transform cause.  No answer, though.

Keaton was gone, as was the corpse.  He must have been out for longer than he realized.  For a moment, he thought about phone calls, remembering her orders, and he shivered in terror.  Nope, no phones for a while.

She had left him the note to deliver to Hancock, though. 

Carol Hancock: November 12, 1966

I rested on my footlocker-bed in the suicide cell and recovered from Patrelle and McIntyre’s goddamned test of the day, which had involved blindfolds, electrical shocks and a maze.  I’d gotten another draw only three days ago, but the first fingers of miserable craving already worked themselves into my mind.  I still hadn’t met the famous Patrelle, or even heard his voice, but I could tell when he was near.  The FBI people’s posture stiffened and they became precise in everything they did.

By now, I had the entire Detention Center laid out in my mind, like a 3-D floor plan.  I knew when the FBI people showed up and left.  After Patrelle had taken over the FBI had dropped their round-the-clock surveillance.  I suspected Patrelle didn’t think I was nearly the threat that McIntyre did.  I knew when each of my friends among the staff showed up and left.  I had the guards schedules memorized, as well as their rounds, and, mostly, who they reported to and when. 

I found it unsettling to be able to keep all this in my head.  Save for when I was low
on juice, I didn’t have any problems with that sort of mental game.  It was as useful as it was disturbing, because I had come up with a problem in my escape.  The Detention Center had guards on the grounds all night long.  Three at a minimum, and I couldn’t find any path out of this place, once I exited the building, that didn’t leave me in sight of one of them.

However, based on my conversations with Mike Artusy and Fred Parrish, I had found out the night guards did have a tendency to slack off.  Fred had even complained about the night guards occasionally gambling and drinking, giving me hope.

What was I that I could keep this all in my head?

That night, as the guards escorted me to my nightly shower, I let my robe gape.  “Like what you see, Mike?”

Artusy smiled and didn’t say anything.  He’d seen my assets before.  I leaned in close to him.  “You want to take some pictures?  Impress your friends?  I’ll pose,” I said.  This place had a darkroom, and Artusy knew how to use it.

“In the buff?”

I nodded.

He gave me a sidelong look…and also a sidelong look at the door guard.  “What do you want?”  He knew me well.

“My family pictures and the Gideon’s Bible from my old room.  Several oversized steak dinners, a television and a radio,” I said.  “Oh, and some new books.  I’m bored.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Of course.  But that’s my demand,” I said.  My demand wouldn’t be accepted, all a part of my plan.

He snorted.  “I’ll get you your Bible and pictures, no problem no charge.  How about an extra dinner for the other?” he asked.

I shook my head.  “Come up with a better offer than that and I’ll pose for the pictures,” I said, and went into the bathroom for my shower.