The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Five (11 page)

After my little burn,
m
y rashes returned.  My sense of my own juice count
went
haywire.
 
Low juice, now for real. 
Hour by hour, minute by minute, I slowly fell apart.

Endless time passed after I prepared my memory gift
, alone and cold in the wet dark
.  I feared any more experiments with tagging; I couldn’t risk using any more juice. 
Nothing remained to distract me. 
My
juice craving
s
got worse.

The craving would defeat me eventually and
the results
would be much better if I gave in now, while I still had some remnant of intelligence left to deflect them from Bobby.
I needed them now.
I had to
surrender
now.

So I did. 
I
said
I would give them what they wanted.
I
said
I
would answer their questions and do
all
their tests.
As long as they gave me juice, I would give them what they wanted.

The
y didn
’
t
respon
d
.

I offered examples.
I told them I knew where Keat
on
lived.
I told them
I knew about
multiple murders and
dozens of
missing persons cases that I
w
ould resolve for them.

N
o one came.

Finally, I acknowledged what
my gut
had recognized long ago.
They
didn’t want my information, they
wanted
me broken
.  Broken so far that I would do whatever they wanted, forever.  They wanted me pliant, weak, desperate, and willing to bind m
yself
to them, forever.  Some damned Focus waited on the other end of this, a Focus with a tag with my name on it.  I would be her slave forever and ever and ever.

I wanted to say I would rather be dead.  My juice monkey wouldn’t let me even think such things.  Even ending my own life was no longer in my hands.
  Such is the lot of the mature Arm.

I
decided to try to
convince them
they
had
broken
me
.
I acted, I faked hallucinations,
I begged and pleaded
, I spoke nonsense
.
 
In the end,
I let my mind go,
so far
I swear other voices spoke through my mouth.

I
needed
juice.
I
had to
get
juice.
I would do whatever they wanted for juice.

My best acting, with far too much real
ity invested in the process, and still n
o one came.

They didn’t want to break me, I realized.  Dr. Jeffers’ so-called offer had lapsed when I trashed the place. 
No one ever would
come
.
I was trapped here and helpless, and
my only remaining option was death
.
The horrible claw of withdrawal reach
ed
into me
, unstoppable, inexorable.

They left me
here to die.  Agonizing death, at their hands, was now their purpose.

Panic replaced my fear
,
the
horrible dehumanizing panic that consumes reason.
I screamed and begged.
I offered everything I could think of.
I told them how horrible
my craving
was and
I
pleaded with those cameras to have mercy on me.
I would do anything, everything.
Just get me juice.
I
must have
juice.

N
o one came.

No one came the next
day, either
.
No one came as
my need
consumed
me
, as
my need
ate me and destroyed me.
C
onsumed
,
devoured and shattered
.  Carol Hancock, Keaton’s former student, Bobby’s master, owner of Chicago, slayer of Beasts, Mr. Beacon, Mr. McIngle, all gone
.

I became endurance, and little else.

Hammered
(1965)

Lori vomited again, head still spinning. 
Flushed the toilet.  Again. 
Only bile
remained
inside
her
, foul and laden with bad juice.  If she could vomit out everything
her unknown enemies
had done to her, whoever they were,
whatever they had done,
she
would
end
of all her problems.

She wouldn’t live that long.

She shivered, and couldn’t stop shivering.  She shook, and couldn’t stop shaking.  Call Flo and Tonya, she told her people
as they watched her, terrified, from the doorway of the bathroom
.  They might be able to save some of you.  Then she fled, leaving her household behind
, before she lost her mind and accidentally destroyed them all
.
  In her current state, the destr
uction
called to her, the un-Focus-like urge to maim and
kill, to punish the world for what the world had done to her.  She
understood
her urges were wrong, now – but in a day, or two days?  At least with her household out of range, when she died, she wouldn’t take them with her.

She huddled, knees to her chest, in some ditch in a park.
  Cool fall air wafted around her, carrying with it the odors of distant wood-fires, blue-cloud belching automobiles, and plants dead from the last frost.
  Lori didn’t even know which park she had fled to, save that she was far enough from home to
be out of range of her repeaters. 
She wasn’t a real Focus witch; she hadn’t mastered the juice patterns as the
other witches
had, and her repeaters
only
went hundreds of yards, not miles.

Still, s
he had run a long way, mind half gone.

“Focus.  What happened to you?”

The whisper again.  A rough, aged voice, not a native English speaker.  She didn’t place the accent, but the voice reminded her of her Aunt Marcine, who
had
immigrated from Yugoslavia between the wa
rs.  Only this voice was male.

A hallucination.  Her mind
was falling
apart.
  Her worst fear.  She would rather die than
lose
her mind.  Life wasn’t worth living with an addled mind.

She balled her fists, bit her tongue, and push
ed
again.  She had helped three of her women through labor, and
her efforts
reminded her of those terrifying moments, when the recently transformed women, who no other Focus would touch, fell into her care and into labor.  Only Lori wasn’t trying to give birth to a child, but to a mass of bad juice she had sequestered in her abdomen area.

She knew of no way to give birth to her own intestines, though.
  She would push and push and push until either she succeeded, or she died.

“Let it go, Focus.  I’ll clean you off, afterwards.”

The whisper again.

“Go away
.  You’re a
darned hallucination,” Lori said.  This she didn’t need.  Predictable, though.  Whenever the juice got strange, and the stress of life got intense, sanity always
went
first.  She had seen this in herself, and in her household, many times before.

She certainly didn’t trust a hallucination to ‘clean it off of her’ if she let the bad juice take her.  Was this the bad juice talking?
  Seducing her into the end she
wanted to refuse
, but would now accept?  Or seducing her into something worse, a Focus Monster
?

“Hallucination?  Oh, that’s the reason you’re ignoring me like two week old milk.  Hell and damnation and halitosis! 
Dammit, Focus Rizzari,
I’ve never seen anything like what you did to yourself this time.”

Hell and damnation and halitosis?  “Occum?”  They had never met or even talked on the phone before, but she recognized the
unique phrase
from his letters.

“What other Crow would be willing to get
his
nose out of
his
navel and help someone
, especially a Focus
?”

Definitely Occum.  “Thank God,” Lori said.
  Occum, as a Crow, might even be able to help her.
  “I didn’t do this to myself.”

“This was done to you?”  Something scurried away.  Tears leaked out from the corners of Lori’s eyes.  She had scared
Occum
away.

Friggen Crows.

Now she would either die or find a way to remove this crazy
bad
juice.  Alone.  As it should be.  As always, a test, always tests, life always gave her tests and she either passed or failed and…

“Who the fuck did this to you?”

Occum again.  He must have scurried back.  He was as offputting in person as she had feared from his letters.
  He was as socially inept as she was, if not worse.
 
“I…I
’m not sure
.  Focuses
, definitely
.  They took me into a dark room, for some chastisement, or so I thought, and the world went dark and I woke up with this crazy bad juice inside me and my people wouldn’t come near me and this stuff was ripping into my mind and trying to eat my thoughts and I found a way to sequester it but
even though I’ve sequestered it
I can’t do anything with it
and the bad juice is gnawing at my intellect and…
”

“Wordy, aren’t you.  ‘Her mouth fills with an ocean of words and vomit, a nighttime mirror of the Monster juice inside her.’
”

Right.  Occum was a poet.  He called her his muse.  Right now, she didn’t find this a-musing.  “Monster juice?  No wonder I can’t do anything with
this stuff
but sequester it and
this bad juice is
eating at my mind and if I just accept it
if I don’t become a Monster Focus
I’ll become just another Focus, one of the failed Focuses who
needs to be spoon-fed oatmeal to be kept alive and moving the juice and I’ll never ever be
…”

A rough hand covered her mouth.  “Shhh.”

She was being touched by a Crow!  She had the urge to panic, but worn down by the Monster juice, she feared that if she moved, she would lose control and lose the sequester.

She relaxed into the touch, and Occum’s touch moved, across her face, down her left arm, and to her juice-
bloated
abdomen.  He did something to her, a rustling of juice, a splay of emotions echoing inside her.  Love.  Comfort.  Family.

“Brother,” she said.  That’s what Occum felt like, to her.
  Brother.  Family.  She had never loved anyone before the way she
now
loved Occum.  Not even her real family.

“Sister in arms,” he
said, answering
the unasked question.  “The two shunned Boston crazy Major Transforms, alone against the
hideous
world.”

“Why couldn’t we meet before
?
” she said, her voice a juice-laden whisper.  Did all Crows talk this way in person, with
juice in their calm voices?
  She loved his voice; she could listen to it forever and ever and…

“You’re terrifying, sister,” Occum said.  “So inconstant, so powerful.”  She hear
d
the love in his whisper.
  She understood
.  He was
like
her, beaten down and twisted
.
  “I can help now because your fearsome metasense is down.  I couldn’t not help.”

She had sensed him as a young Focus, less than a month past her transformation, some strange combination of metasense and sense of smell,
an ability t
hat broke all the rules about Focuses the various doctors and Focuses had told her.  When she tried to contact him, he ran.  Given he always approached from the same direction and went to the same spot near the Boston Transform Clinic, she left him a note.  He wrote a note back, and they had been exchanging letters ever since.  He took her household’s dross when she and her household vacated the premises for just that purpose; they gave him stipends and helped him with political contacts.  Eight months ago, Lori had traded for a new woman Transform, a mind-broken lesbian poet
, abused for no reason by a Focus who hated poets, hated strong-willed women, and thought lesbians should die
a most horrible death
.  I
n the process of bringing Sadie back to herself,
and getting Sadie to answer all the curious prurient questions Lori had about lesbians (just in case she was one, which she still couldn’t
decide
)
Lori
had introduced her to Occum’s poetry.  Soon Occum and Sadie were exchanging their own letters, and even meeting in person.
  With Lori’s tacit under-the-table approval
and chaste hugs
from
Sadie
.

The Focus establishment forbade such contacts, but they were uneducated idiots
whose advice wasn’t worth writing on toilet paper.
  Stupid people, and stupid people had no rights, save the right to get out of her way before she trampled them on the way to wherever she was going.
  Unfortunately, her
instincts
about stupid people not having or deserving power appeared to be mildly inaccurate.

“Why did they do this to you?  How could you let them?”

“
Don’t move
,” Lori said.  “Whatever you’re doing is helping.”  She paused to gather her scattered thoughts.  “Remember my comments about the new thing I’ve been
attempting
, not moving juice during the week and doing all my juice moving once a week?  It’s sort of embarrassing, but my new house president, Connie Yarizarian, pointed out to me that what I was doing was
, um, ‘
turning on
’
my Transforms.  She talked me into an experiment; during the weekly juice adjustment I put my people at their juice stimulation optimums for as long as I could hold.  Well, not only did
my Transforms
really appreciate the amor, afterwards I found I had the room to support two extra triads of Transforms.”

“Sadie mentioned something about this, what she called the juice-magical release of tension.”  He paused.  “It produces the most amazing dross.  I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before, because of
your discovery
.”

“It’s embarrassing,” Lori said.  She blushed, as always uncomfortable with the Friday night discovery
and what she had inadvertently created.  The whole situation made her think of herself as a sordid pimp or an evil drug pusher
.  “I mean…anyway, if it comes down to a choice between saving lives and my old-fashioned parochial embarrassment, I choose to save the lives
and eat the embarrassment
.
”  Occum’s other hand found her left hand, and gave
her hand
a squeeze. 
She should desire him, being male and helpful, but she didn’t.  Why did her desires lie frozen within her?  Perhaps she was male, in a female body.  Perhaps she should try cross-dressing again.

Perhaps this wasn’t the time for her crazy thoughts.  Not so close to death.  A car of noisy uncivilized college boys drove past, hooting and yelling.  She could smell their alcohol from her ditch.

She and Occum did
share the same obsession
:
saving the lives of the otherwise unsaveable.
  The whole world was going to hell, would transform, and in the fall of civilization everyone would die.  Lori knew she couldn’t save the world herself, but her cold logic wouldn’t keep her from trying.
  “The problem came when I took it upon myself to report this to the Focus Council.  They
had
like
d
me
before
, even when I mentioned various unmentionable things.
  They thought I was cute, and I thought they needed the truth.
”  She had been so darned naïve.  She had believed the Council’s assertion that they believed that male Major Transorms didn
’
t exist.  When she proved their existence to them, scientifically, she had learned, the hard way, that they knew th
e truth
all the long, and had been lying – lying! – about reality. 
She would have never guessed. 
“Something’s changed, though.  Ever since the Julius Rebellion got
itself
squashed, I’ve been hearing disquieting rumors from the other Focuses.  The Council once used threats and persuasion to keep the peace.  ‘Please don’t do X, or I’m afraid the Network won’t be able to support you anymore.’  The rumors swirled about Focuses being
roughed up, blackmailed, and losing household Transforms, but I paid them no mind.  I mean, the Council?  The good guys?  Well, I presented my story, and the
Council
got upset.  They told me that if the public learned of what I was doing, to save those extra lives, the
authorities would round up all the
Transform
s and shoot them
.  So, I said,
let’s
fight back.  It’s our right as individuals to do as we need to do, especially given how the rest of society has turned their backs on us.  The
Council
didn’t want
a
fight.  They think we’re too weak.  They won me over, and I agreed to keep my discoveries quiet.  I thought that
was
that, but the next day
the Council
asked
me
to go to a room, where
I would talk to
a delegation of Focuses
about
my discovery.  I
went to the room, and
waited…and that’s all I remember, until I woke up with this bad juice inside me, eating away at my mind.”