The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four

by Randall Farmer

  2.0 Juice Differentiation among Major Transforms

  Juice Differentiation divides the Major Transforms into two groups, the constant juice users (Crows and Focuses) and the inconstant juice users (Beast Men and Arms).

  Fundamental juice levels – Focuses and Crows have a fundamental juice level about 65. Arms and Beast Men have a fundamental juice level about 90.

  Usage Rates – Male Transforms use about 3 juice points a week. This seems to be almost entirely utilized to support their fundamental juice, with only negligible amounts left for physical enhancements. A Crow or Focus will use about 5 juice points a week, of which an estimated 80% is utilized to support their fundamental juice, leaving the remaining for physical enhancements. An Arm or Beast Man uses about 15 juice points a week, of which less than half is utilized to support their fundamental juice, leaving the majority for physical enhancements.

  Usage Patterns – Crows and Focuses tend toward constant juice levels. Crows absorb dross slowly, and function best on small quantities of dross every day. Focuses, despite handling large quantities of juice, only absorb minute quantities of what they handle and also tend toward a constant juice level. Arms and Beast Men tend to extreme variability. Note the psychological effects of this! The variability induces addictive behaviors and intense mood swings.

  Transformation – Crows and Focuses transformations seem to require little or no external juice supply. A Crow makes his transformation with no support, and a Focus makes use of the excess juice of a small number of women. An Arm takes more, killing the women in the process, while a Beast Man seems to awake before his transformation is complete, requiring a large quantity of dross from some external source in order to complete his transformation.

  3.0 The Transforms

  The differentiation factors between Transforms lie in gender and support needs. The Goldilocks variations are as rare as Arms and Beast Men. The reason for their rarity is not known, but is statistically tied to the number of Induced (non-disease) Transformations occurring in society.

  Male Transforms – Male Transforms run a fundamental juice level of 15.5, and use about 0.4 points of supplemental juice per day. When this is exhausted, they go into withdrawal. Male Transforms require Focus support to survive.

  Female Transforms – Female Transforms run a fundamental juice level of 15.5, and produce about 0.4 points of extra supplemental juice per day. When this reaches a level of 27.8, they become Monsters. Female Transforms require Focus support to survive. The requirement of two female Transforms to support one male Transform is due to inefficiency in the transfer process.

  Male Goldilocks – Male Goldilocks run a fundamental juice level of 22.2. They produce about 0.4 points of supplemental juice per day, and use around the same amount. They need no support to survive.

  Female Goldilocks – Female Goldilocks run a fundamental juice level of 22.2. They produce about 0.4 points of supplemental juice per day, and use around the same amount. They need no support to survive.

  4.0 Sports

  Sports are variants on the Major Transforms. Sports do not appear to duplicate each other, meaning they appear to be unique flawed (or variant) versions of the Major Transforms. The mortality rate among Sports is excessive.

  His précis was quite succinct, the book an in-depth treatment regarding the capabilities of Transforms, something he had never encountered in any of the technical or popular literature. Yet, he had written nothing new or creative, just a synthesis of many different sources, Crow and normal. As dry and dull as an old dishrag. With one big flaw – the Philadelphians hadn’t produced anything on the subject of Monsters.

  He couldn’t send his book off to Shadow written like this. Nobody would be able to get past the first chapter! He had to redo it. Make it real. Somehow.

  Gilgamesh shrugged. If he ever finished his book, he would collect his thoughts about the organization of Focus households. He had avoided tackling the household organization subject to start with, because of the complexities involved. The subject interested him, though. He had thought Focuses would end up with an infinite number of household organizations, but his observations and those of the other Philadelphians showed only nine organization types.

  His second book would probably be just as dry and soporific.

  He gathered his available small bills and coins, and totaled them up. Yes, he had enough to get his précis copied. Once. Chicago wasn’t being good on his finances.

  Why was the nature of Transform Sickness so complex? It didn’t seem logical to him Transform Sickness could be a sudden evolutionary mutation, or a biological experiment gone wrong.

  The only thing he knew was the Transform community had only started to plumb the complexities of their transformations.

  Bobby’s Illness (early December ‘67)

  [Carol Hancock POV]

  I arrived home just before midnight, home being the perfect spot to be one day post-kill. I had hunted Indianapolis this time, and successfully. I slammed the door of the Buick with that little extra edge of anticipation and glided past the stacks of old newspapers Bobby kept ignoring. I swore when I noticed them, my good mood gone, and then swore again when I realized I had left my coat in the car. I turned back and fished it out.

  It was a man’s coat, because I had been Mr. Beacon today, a dark brown coat made of heavy wool. I was tempted to carry the coat and not wear the thing, but I knew better. The cold didn’t bother me, but the walk from the garage to the house was long enough and cold enough that a normal would have wanted the coat. I sighed and shrugged into the coat, slamming the car door again with my foot.

  A mouse rustled in the stacks of newspapers, burrowing underneath for warmth. In a brief fit of aggravation and kill lust, I grabbed the ragged broom from the corner and jabbed it down with a snap, butt end first, into the little rustle under the papers. The mouse died with a crackle of small bones, giving me a brief surge of satisfaction.

  A bit of disgust with myself followed my satisfaction. Carol Hancock, the dangerous Arm, kills a mouse in her own garage! Next, I would be chasing the cockroaches.

  Damn. I couldn’t even manage my own reactions. Somewhere along the line, I had lost the connection between my juice count and my emotional state. Thinking back, I realized I lost my sense of correlation after my encounter with Enkidu. Probably the little bit of Monster juice I took from him, I guessed. I also had more trouble with my juice monkey, at ever-higher juice counts. The overwhelming hunger for juice started to creep in even when I was immediately post-kill, and became nearly intolerable when I was low.

  I stalked across the driveway and back to the house, and stopped cold when I opened the kitchen door. There, as I stood in the kitchen doorway, dripping on the worn tile, the smell hit me, a sick, putrid smell, the smell of death and disease, overpowering in its intensity. The odor hit me like a club and made me gag. The stench was like a thick reeking cloud, poisoning the air of the entire house. I knew of only one thing in my house big enough to make a stink like this. The panic hit me with the same club the smell used and I ran.

  Bobby lay on the bare mattress that lay on the floor of my room, wrapped tight in a blanket and shivering. His breathing sounded like a train engine and his skin burned hot to my touch. He didn’t respond to me. I rolled him over and he didn’t even wake up. He just lay there with his mouth slack and the fever burning in him and his breath wheezing in his chest.

  Hell.

  I looked at him. His condition hit me like a lump of lead in my stomach when I realized how sick he was. I might lose him. The blood drained out of my face and real fear settled in my gut.

  I couldn’t lose Bobby. My hands shook and I got dizzy. I thought I could do anything I wanted to with him, with never a cost to pay. I never thought about how much a threat to Bobby might hurt me. Bobby was my safe prey. Losing him would turn my whole world upside down. I depended on him to be there to assuage my loneliness. I needed him. He was mine.

  I had let him in under my de
fenses. I had let myself care for him. Now he slipped away, pulling my heart out by the roots. He was weak. He was helpless. He held my heart in a grip like iron.

  He wouldn’t die if I found a way to save him.

  I bent down and scooped him up, blanket and all, grateful for my enhanced strength. His head lolled against me, dirty locks of hair falling against my coat. I cradled him tenderly against my chest. He shivered harder when I picked him up, but he didn’t wake up. The heat from him hit me the same way an open hot oven would.

  He needed a hospital. I didn’t know what he had or how bad the illness was, but I needed a doctor to fix it. They would make him well or I would carve their intestines out with a spoon. I would break their every bone one by one and crush them until they were dust. Bobby was mine.

  I jogged back through the house with Bobby in my arms, careful not to bump his head. He whimpered when I got him outside to the driveway and the rain hit him. His shivering grew so strong I thought I might lose him right here. I took the driveway at a run, held him with one hand for the brief moment I needed to open the garage door, and slammed the garage door open. The garage door slammed all the way up from the force I used to open it, bounced, and tried to come back down again. I caught the door, pushed it back, opened the back door of that old Buick and laid Bobby carefully inside my still warm car.

  I pulled the car out of the garage and raced for the hospital.

  I didn’t get home again until nearly twelve hours later. Bobby never woke up. Pneumonia, the doctors said. They promised to do ‘the best they could’. Reading them hurt me – they thought Bobby would most likely die. I stayed for hours anyway, terrifying the doctors and nurses, waiting helplessly by Bobby’s bed. I only left when my aching body started to complain, forcing me to spend some time at Pete’s gym.

  I came in through the kitchen door from the garage and looked over the usual mess. Bobby and I were slobs. It was a good thing that the house was so cold, or the bugs would rule. Bobby was supposed to keep everything clean, his job, but I couldn’t exactly be irritated with Bobby now. Not when he was in the process of dying.

  Such a cold, cheerless place. It reminded me of Keaton’s warehouse, last winter.

  Cold.

  Frigid, in fact.

  “It’s a good thing that the house is so cold, or the bugs would rule,” I muttered to myself.

  I didn’t notice the cold unless I was on the low end of low juice. My enhanced body adapted to the cold and the cold didn’t bother me. I had lived for almost a year in an unheated warehouse with Keaton and I scarcely paid attention to the cold any more. The house had a gas heater, but I had never bothered to have the damned thing lit. Too much of a hassle, too large of a chance of an accident.

  Hmm. I scraped some ancient paint off the old round thermostat in the back hall and winced. Mid thirties, the same as outside.

  Crap. Bobby had been living in a house with no heat, too beaten down to mention the problem to me.

  He must have thought I did this to him on purpose. I couldn’t say I hadn’t done things to him equally as noxious.

  Bobby had been sporting a runny nose ever since early October, but I thought nothing about it. After Thanksgiving he began to hack and cough. I…hell, I had enjoyed his misery. I liked his pain and the power I had over him.

  This was my fault. Bobby was going to die because of my own sadistic stupidity.

  I sank down against the wall and I rocked back and forth, a horrible keening noise coming out of me. How could Bobby hurt me like this? I was a monster. Monsters don’t care for people. Nothing should hurt like this. Bobby would die, and I figuratively died with him, my soul trapped in his gentle hands as he slipped away.

  I recognized this crazy Arm crap emotion, though. I remembered feeling this way once before, when Keaton trashed my storeroom home after I had fixed it up.

  Bobby had, somehow, in an impossible illogical manner, become territory.

  I had never imagined people might become territory. How the hell was I supposed to deal with possessions as complex as human beings?

  Not the way I had been dealing so far, obviously. I had gone so far into ‘Arm’ that I left most of my humanity behind, clinging to those last few remnants like the coat in winter only so I didn’t stand out. The lack of heat in the house was so obvious and so screwed up I flinched with embarrassment, but the desolate emptiness of the house declared a callous inhumanity as well. Whether I lost Bobby or not, I had already lost something of me.

  I screwed up. So, screw-ups happen. When you screw up, you admit the problem, then deal. Keaton taught me that.

  I would fix the problem I had created.

  Somehow.

  ---

  Dr. Johnson signed the papers, unhappy. Bobby was ready to come home from the hospital, at least according to me and my Arm instincts. He wasn’t healthy, but he wasn’t dying, either. Ten days. Ten horrible hurt-filled days.

  I winterized the house, of course. I even cleaned the kitchen and living room. I fought my memories and emotions as I cleaned; I once did this sort of thing for Keaton, and after I graduated I decided I would never clean again. I was an Arm, dammit, and cleaning was beneath me.

  What stupid pride.

  My pride wasn’t worth spit in a hurricane. Keaton had taught me that lesson long ago.

  Such an ordinary little house we lived in. Over on the wall by the fireplace, I hung one of Bobby’s poems. I copied the poem to parchment, in a surprisingly elegant hand, and had it framed. It was good to use my enhanced physical capabilities on something besides murder and mayhem. Supernatural coordination made for a nice hand with a pen.

  I didn’t know if the poem was any good. Poetry wasn’t my strong suit. But Bobby’s poem was about silence, and night, and waiting for something that never came, and his words touched something in me. When Bobby got healthier, I thought maybe I would have him sit for a portrait, and hang that on the wall, too.

  I decorated for Bobby’s sake, I thought, but I found I liked those ordinary things as well. Some remnant of humanity apparently still lurked in my Arm soul. I chose floral prints and landscape scenes for my wall decorations, and harmless knick-knacks for the decorations I put on my meager furniture.

  I found I enjoyed the minutia of decorating. Decorating took my mind off other things. The results made the house seem that much more like a home, and much more mine.

  I liked mine.

  Hmm, so maybe an inhuman Arm shared a few points in common with normal humanity. This was the last sort of thing I should be abandoning and I mentally thanked Bobby for the lesson, and for being a gentler teacher than Keaton. Lessons involved pain, always. I promised myself to learn from this one, my debt to Bobby.

  I decorated the kitchen in a quaint country style, and daisies and baby ducks covered everything. I got a jolt sometimes when I came into the kitchen, wondering what made me decorate the kitchen in such a way. I made a point of keeping the kitchen clean of all signs of my less savory activities.

  A week later, Bobby was still sick, but healing. He had an annoying raspy cough, but he walked and talked, and I had him under orders not to go out in public, where he could catch a cold. I was easy on him – no rough sex, no rough anything. No shorting him on sleep just to teach him another lesson about the power of Arms.

  When we talked, Bobby stayed polite with me. Too polite. He had always feared me, but now there was something more, something deeper. When I had carried him inside to the cleaner, warm and now more homey house, he had broken down and cried. I had broken him. Not too long ago, he had been a tough aspiring amateur boxer with a crashingly large ego. No longer.

  I took care of him. I was unfailingly gentle with him. He got everything he needed. Fear and pain haunted his eyes, but now, instead of titillating and enticing me, his reactions hurt. Dammit, I wanted a lover, not a terrified sex slave.

  Should I convince him to go somewhere else, like Los Angeles or Miami? Far away from Arms and their problems? I couldn’t.
He was mine, and once an Arm owns something, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of it, even if you would rather see it gone. I understood, now, about why my graduation task from Keaton had been so hard, and why Keaton had nearly reneged when I did graduate.

  I stewed as I went through my days and dealt with my normal Arm problems. I was one Arm, alone. Keaton and Zielinski remained but distant voices on the phone and typewritten letters delivered to Milwaukee. I thought up the idea of a Transform clearing house – you have a problem, we have the Major Transform with the specialty to solve it. I worked out my idea in exquisite detail, in every aspect. A useful idea, but useless now. I didn’t dare speak of my idea to Keaton or Zielinski. In my current condition, they would label a wild-ass idea like mine certifiably insane and not be wrong.

  I found a kill and took out my passions on a stockbroker I found out trolling for tail at a local bar. After I finished with him, I stuck his wedding ring half way to his heart via his rear end for cheating on his wife. I found another man later, a potential recruit, and took him apart physically and mentally to find out if he was worthy. He wasn’t, and afterwards, I made sure he wouldn’t be robbing any more old ladies of their social security checks and raping them afterwards. Doing a good deed at least cheered me up, some.

  Finished with my work, I came home.

  Just before dawn, Bobby’s skin almost glowed in the almost-darkness of the room. He had slipped mostly out of the covers, his back lay naked to the air. My eyes lingered on the lean curves, and the fall of his brown hair over his eyes and I wanted to gently run my fingered down the length of his back and tease him awake.

  Foolish me. My breath caught at the sight of Bobby, and the energy inside of me tightened into an ache. I wanted to climb into bed on top of him, breathe into his ear, and turn him on until he went crazy. I wanted to spend the rest of the day here, stroking my own lusts as I fed his, until we were both sated to exhaustion.