Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (5 page)

“So what happens now?  What happens to me?”

He smiled at me.  “First you eat breakfast.  I’m going to look through your chart in more detail and start arranging your care.  I’m also going to start you on an exercise program, as our experience shows that an Arm will be much healthier if she gets a lot of exercise.  There will be some folks coming through to run tests on you.  You can have visitors occasionally and we can get you magazines, books and other things.”

That sounded permanent.  Fatally permanent.

“How long do I have to stay here?  Will I be tried as a criminal?” I asked.

“Agent Bates can answer the latter question better than I can,” Dr. Zielinski said, with a smile.  “In regard to your other question, well, there haven’t been enough Arm transformations to establish good statistics for how they progress.  We’ll just have to take things as they come and hope for the best.”

Dr.
Zielinski didn’t think I’d leave this Detention Center alive.  I barely kept my tears from leaking down my cheeks.  I’d always wondered about the expression ‘a lump in your throat’ and what it might mean.  I found I couldn’t swallow without crying.  A lump in my throat.

I choked out another question.  “What am I supposed to do about juice?”

Dr. Zielinski looked away for an instant. 

“Juice,” I insisted.  “Transforms need juice, right?  Where do I get it?  I don’t see any Focus around here.  Where do Arms get juice?”

“Mrs. Hancock,” Dr. Zielinski said, gently.  Now I looked away, abashed. 

Reader’s Digest had written about Keaton and Arms once.  They were demons who grabbed people like storybook vampires, but they drained juice instead of blood as they killed their victims.  I had a vision of myself with giant canine teeth and red droplets hanging from their tips.  A lust of a new sort ran through me and I found myself looking at
Dr. Zielinski almost in hunger.

“You said Armenigar sucked juice from Transforms like a vampire,” I said.  “The Transforms died?”

Dr. Zielinski sighed and scooted his chair backwards a couple of feet.  “That isn’t the best way of looking at it.  The people you need are Transforms who are already dying because they can’t find a Focus.  You’ll make their deaths a lot less unpleasant than they might be otherwise.  You don’t suck their blood; you’re not a vampire.  You’ll take their juice, a painless process when done by an Arm.  Taking their juice prevents them from going into withdrawal or becoming a Monster.  As you said, they won’t live through it.”

“I’m not sure that’s something I can do,” I said.

“Your choices are limited, Mrs. Hancock,” Dr. Zielinski said.  I heard rattling and squeaking coming down the hall, and smelled food.  A kitchen lady wheeled in a metal cart with the breakfasts on it.  Doris, her nametag said.  She gave me a friendly smile and started transferring the food to my bed table.  “It’s a hard decision you face, I know.  Yet, if you don’t take juice, you’ll die in withdrawal too.” He took my hand in his and I could feel his strength.  “Would it help if I told you that the other Arms have had to deal with the same issue?”

“How did they deal with it?” I asked.  I took my hand from his and helped the kitchen lady arrange my bed table.  I dug in. 

“It’s hard for all of them.  Mostly, though, they realize eventually there’s nothing to be gained by refusing to take juice.  Transforms without hope of a Focus are brought to Detention Centers like this all the time.  They’ll die here with or without you.  If you take the juice from them you continue your own life.”  He paused and gazed deep into my eyes, as if he was looking for something in my mind.  “One other thing: I’m a Doctor and Tommy Bates is an FBI Agent, but we’re also researchers.  Any Major Transform case, whether a Sport or a known type like a Focus or an Arm, is so rare as to be a potentially valuable research subject.  If you cooperate, you allow us to continue our research efforts on Major Transforms.  What we learn about Major Transforms is important, because without them, none of the other Transforms would live.  What we learn from you could conceivably save thousands of lives, Mrs. Hancock.”

“Carol,” I said. 
Dr. Zielinski blinked a couple times and nodded.  He made an impressive case, down to earth and inspiring.

“Carol,” he said.  “Good to have you on board.”

---

Dr.
Zielinski was right about the food.  After an absurd six thousand calories I was still ravenously hungry and still over-stressed.  I spent the day in the lab.  Blood samples, urine samples, x-rays, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, monitors, eyesight.  Those I could understand.  Tests of strength, reaction time, and flexibility I didn’t understand. 

I was no athlete or Jack La Lanne, but remembering my escape from the prisoner bus I did better than I expected.  I wondered what I was becoming.  Magazines talked a lot about the extra abilities Major Transforms acquired and I’d never heard a scientific explanation for any of them that made sense.  It was magic, maybe, or a gift from God or more likely the Devil.  I wondered if I would develop those supernatural abilities myself.

Next came more tests I didn’t understand.  There were nurses, orderlies, Dr. Zielinski, Dr. Peterson, doctors I didn’t recognize.  There was even a psychologist, a Dr. Richard Bentwyler.  He had the best psychologist name I ever encountered.  I bet no one contracted his first name to Dick!  He gave me IQ tests, Rorschach tests, and I spent two hours talking while lying on a couch.  I doubted my childhood relationship with my father had anything to do with Transform Sickness, but they were the doctors.  I hoped they knew what they were doing.

The tests started after breakfast and continued ‘til seven at night.  Half the time they didn’t even stop while I ate. 

At least the tests kept me distracted.

Between tests in the afternoon, Agent Bates came by to check up on me as I waited for the next doctor to come through.  I sat on an examination table in a cold room with worn linoleum tile and shiny metal instruments.  The examination table had metal rings bolted to it, which held heavy canvas straps.  I wondered how often they had to strap someone to that table to do their examination.

We talked while I snacked, about his wife, his children and about life in a Focus household.  It didn’t sound pretty.  He loved his wife but they were nearly estranged.  She
had gotten stuck in a California Focus household after she transformed.  To my amazement, his small government salary was one of the few reliable sources of income her household had. 

Agent Bates also filled me in on some of the darker aspects of life as a Transform, part of his recruiting effort.  I knew from my husband’s business that it was difficult for a Transform to find a job.  I didn’t know people were often fired just because they lived in a Focus household.  A known Transform often couldn’t get service in stores and restaurants.  Because of this, many Focuses moved their households to large cities for anonymity.  However, banks rarely lent money to Focuses and Transforms, which meant they had to pay cash for housing.  He also told me how the justice system rarely prosecuted crimes against Transforms. 

“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” I said, after he asked me if I had any questions and I had pushed away my plate.  The institutional mystery meat in the snack had been tough and overcooked, but tasted delicious anyway.  I could have eaten another six servings.

“Yes?”

I explained what Dr. Zielinski had said about where I’d be getting juice.  “If my killing someone is supposed to be better than withdrawal, I’d like to see what it is that makes withdrawal so awful.  Surely you have a movie of it, or something.  They never talk about it on T.V. or in any of the magazines or newspapers I read.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”  He glanced out the window, but there was little to see past the bars and the thick wire mesh.

“Why not?”

Agent Bates lit a cigarette, a foul unfiltered Camel.  “Some things a person is better off not seeing.  Withdrawal is horrible.  You don’t want to see movies of withdrawal.”  He paused.  “We show these movies to men who are facing withdrawal themselves to convince them that suicide is a better option.”  I shivered, thinking of these men trying to convince some desperate Transform to commit suicide.  Was withdrawal bad enough to justify such a thing? 

I looked at his sunken eyes, still bleak with old horrors, and didn’t wonder anymore.

“Mr. Bates, if I’m going to kill people I need to be able to live with myself afterwards.  I’d like to know.”

He looked at me for a long while, judging me in some studied FBI manner.  I looked back at him.  My stomach rumbled in the middle, and ruined the effect, but finally he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

I returned to my room after seven and found three bouquets of flowers and a plant waiting for me.  Perhaps life wasn’t so bad.  Despite all that had happened and all I had done, I still had people who cared for me enough to send flowers.  There was a bouquet from the Junior League and one from the church.  There was a philodendron from the school and a bouquet from Ann Henley, who was Jeffrey’s second grade teacher and a good friend.  There were even cards from several other friends and neighbors.  It wasn’t reasonable.  I was a murderess.  I was a demon.  I was a monster.  Normal people should not want anything to do with me. 

No visitors, though.

Bob Scalini: August 12, 1966 – September 18, 1966

Bob Scalini cowered under the 9
th
Street bridge in downtown Miami and shivered in fear.  He was an ordinary looking man in his early forties, balding, with the soft flabbiness of someone who sat at a desk all day.  He wasn’t the sort of man who should be wearing filthy clothes and three weeks’ worth of beard, or cowering under a bridge at two thirty in the morning.

He had no idea how or why he
had fallen into such a state.

The city was silent.  When the occasional car passed overhead, his heart raced in panic and he curled up in pure unvarnished terror.

For three weeks every noise and every human contact brought more terror.  He hid under bridges and in abandoned buildings, scrounged food from garbage cans, barely slept at all, and fled from anyone who tried to come near him.  He had never experienced terror like this, not even the one time back in the War in Italy when he had been shot at.  The terror went on and on, day after terrible day, for three endless weeks.

He didn’t understand why he was filled with such terror.

Four weeks ago he had been a respected engineer, happily married, with four kids.  Three weeks ago, he had been a homeless man on the streets, fleeing from everyone and everything. 

He had no memory whatsoever of the time in between.

Another car passed overhead, sending a strong enough surge of panic through Bob that he wanted to cry.  He couldn’t do
anything about the fear.  He thought again about approaching a doctor, but even his innocent thoughts filled him with such consuming terror he knew he couldn’t do it.

The panic was the worst, but he
had also acquired a craving, a constant hunger for something besides food.  Without the craving he wouldn’t be out here in the dangerous night, but his craving drove him despite his fear.

He also saw things that weren’t there, as if he had a new sense. 

“The only logical explanation,” Bob said to himself, “is Transform Sickness.  How else could I be sensing a Focus and her household?”  He had figured this out a week ago, but blocked the discovery out of his mind, the idea itself too terrifying to contemplate.

Not now.

Bob smiled.  “I’ve got to be sensing their juice.  Nothing else makes sense.”

His smile vanished as he waited for the terror to come.  It didn’t.

“The first problem with my logic is that the only Transforms with an extra sense are Focuses, and Focuses are always women.” He did a great deal of talking to himself now, crazy words for crazy thoughts.  “The second problem is that the range of a Focus’s juice sense is short, only a hundred yards or so.  I can sense juice for miles.”  He could nearly sense the entire city of Miami.  “I wonder how.”

This new sense wasn’t any form of fictional extra-sensory perception; Bob’s engineering background made him instinctively discard supernatural explanations.  The sense faded in and out at range, and the quality of the sense varied with the weather, wind direction, and the presence of electrical power lines.  Apparently, his extra sense was something like radio or television, mixed in with a chemical sense like the sense of smell.  His explanation bothered the engineer in him.  “What’s the transmitter?  Transmitters take energy and Focuses aren’t radio stations.  Someone would have noticed.”  A lack of a scientific explanation didn’t make the phenomenon supernatural, though.

He didn’t remember ever reading anything about the panic.  Something was seriously wrong with him, perhaps a nasty psychological malady, but he didn’t even know if there
were
any psychological maladies like this.

The panic from the car faded and the craving took hold again, stronger than before, a compulsion strong enough to override his fears.  His hands shook and his legs would barely hold him, but he forced himself to stand.  One step, another step.  If he stayed low, surely no one would notice as he walked along the dry creek bed in the middle of the night.  He forced himself forward, one quiet step at a time.  The mosquitoes swarmed in the thick humidity.