All so they could support this new organization Gauthier and the Focuses were cooking up, this so-called Focus Network, without attracting the attention of the authorities. Although the Feds wouldn’t go after them if they kept their heads down, the various State authorities stayed hot on the trail of the Transforms. The Transforms needed to stay underground, and Gauthier’s Network would serve as their non-Transform support lifeline and safe communication method.
Dahlia studied him, face blank. “I can live with that,” she said. “I’m familiar with your type, though. You know too much, but you don’t have enough real-world experience to back up your knowledge. If you’re not careful, you’re going to get yourself killed taking chances you shouldn’t, and blow the Network sky-high.”
“I assure you, Miss Woo, I have no intention of taking any such chances.” He knew his business. He hoped Dahlia knew hers.
“You probably won’t even realize you’re taking a chance before it’s too late.” He shook his head, and Dahlia stood. Faster than he could react, she slipped around behind him, grabbed his right thumb, and yanked up. A single left index finger touch bowed his back and plastered his face on the grimy and dusty table. “Despite your tricks and skills, you need to avoid any physical confrontations, Dr. Zielinski. Living through one of those takes months of training and continuous practice, neither of which you’re getting here.” She pulled up a bit more on his finger, the pain making Hank grimace. “Nor do you have any natural aptitude in this area.”
“Point taken,” he said, forcing his words out through the pain. Damned spooks. He should have expected this, especially after he had caught similar grief from some of his comrades in the Liaison Detachment. He wasn’t a warrior. Never was, never would be.
The pain stopped and he sat back up. All ninety pounds of Dahlia Woo was gone.
Tails (continued)
(1964)
He needed a plan to ditch these tails, Hank decided. Following Dahlia Woo’s old advice, he needed help. He leafed through his contacts in his mind, and found only two within a reasonable driving distance: Focus Schrum in White Plains and Focus Abernathy in Long Hill, to the northwest of Bridgeport. Of the two, he trusted Focus Abernathy more – in specific, he trusted her often-stated desire to stay out of Focus politics. Focus Schrum, one of the leading Focuses, bothered him more than he liked to admit. She wasn’t the overall leader of the Focuses, and given her personality, she could easily take umbrage at his uninvited appearance, or be the Focus behind the current Focus faction fight, on the side of the ones tailing him.
Focus Abernathy it was. To get to her place, though, he would have to backtrack a bit, as he had passed the Bridgeport exit ten minutes ago.
His main worry was that whoever was tailing him was using more than two vehicles. A four-car box tail would be a bitch to lose, and enough of a threat that Focus Abernathy would have his hide if he brought that many people on his tail to her place.
He tried to remember all the ways you could elude a tail, something better than driving the wrong way down a freeway. The old lessons came back. Slowly. Do illogical things (it makes the tailing vehicles stand out). Run red lights. Drive the wrong way down one-way streets. After rounding a blind curve, make a bootlegger’s turn and double back. Get out into the wide-open country, where sightlines are long and tails become obvious. Go through alleys, dirt roads, parking lots, and people’s lawns. Take a freeway exit without warning, cutting across as many lanes of traffic as you can.
He decided to do the latter, after he spotted the next exit, to Fairfield, give its one-mile warning. He took the exit with a sudden twist of the steering wheel, at the last possible instant. His Mercedes handled the cut well, and his swerve didn’t cause an accident, although the car to his right honked at him on the way by.
On the back roads to Long Hill, he smiled when he realized only one vehicle still tailed him, hanging nearly a half mile back.
“You’re being tailed?” Focus Abernathy said. “You?” She had come down the driveway on foot, to find out whom her two outer guards had detained. She wore overalls, a bandana, and smelled of manure.
He nodded. “There they are,” he said, spotting the wood-toned Chrysler Town and Country wagon through the bushes that lined the road edge ditch. He suspected the brains of the outfit had to be in the other car, the one he had lost with his quick freeway exit. Tailing him, here, wasn’t very bright of them.
They spotted Hank’s vehicle, parked a mere ten feet up Focus Abernathy’s driveway and slowed. Hank had parked his Mercedes at the end of the driveway on purpose, both to attract the attention of the tail, to attract Focus Abernathy’s bodyguards’ attention, and to block the driveway in such a way that to go around his car the unknowns would have to cross the ditch.
“Two of them are Transforms,” Focus Abernathy said. “Focus DeYoung’s stooges. I recognize the tag from when DeYoung visited last month, when she tried to get me to turn coat on Suzie.”
Focus Abernathy’s loose lips answered a half dozen questions Hank had futilely asked several other Focuses. Most Focuses wouldn’t have recognized the owner of another Tansform’s tag, but Focus Abernathy had the power and the talent. Now if only she had brains too, she would be a top end Focus.
The vehicle sped up, and both Hank and Focus Abernathy ducked down behind Hank’s Mercedes. “That’ll teach’m,” Focus Abernathy said, chuckling her old farmwoman best, as the Chrysler sped on by.
“You didn’t,” Hank said, secretly pleased. Things were looking up. The opposition, this ‘Focus DeYoung’, wasn’t even a Focus he had ever heard of. She had to be from somewhere other than the Northeast Region, and both young and stupid. Focus Suzie Schrum was opposing Focus DeYoung, and thus ostensibly on his side in this.
More accurately, he was on their side. Politics often got in the way of his research and his ability to help Focuses and their households.
“Uh huh, Hank,” Focus Abernathy said. “I untagged the sons of bitches.”
Focus Schrum was going to owe Focus Abernathy for saving Hank’s bacon, as well as counting coup on the opposition. Focus Abernathy knew this quite well, enough to scratch a smile across her dour face.
---
Hank drove by the address in Queens once, careful. As advertised, the place was a small run down vacant warehouse. He found no cars parked out front, so after checking yet again to make sure he had lost the tails, he circled around back. Someone had cleared an obvious path across a truck parking area, removing the weeds growing through the asphalt. The path led to an open truck-sized doorway. He caught a flicker of movement from inside, a hand wave he interpreted as ‘get the hell inside before anyone sees you’. Keaton, he guessed. He rolled inside the warehouse and turned off his Mercedes.
Keaton opened the car door, yanked him out, and sat him painfully on the concrete floor. While he sat she rifled through his car, inspecting his teaching materials, every other second swiveling her head out the doorway. A half minute later she walked away, grabbed a walkie-talkie from her belt, and held a whispered conversation. At the end, she said “Fuck” and slammed shut the warehouse door.
“Zielinski, the Focus Bitch said you could help me. She promised you would be able to help me. So far, one strike.” She stalked back, lifted him up, and held a knife to his right eye. “You’d better hope you can help me and my medical issues for real, or it’s strike two and I’m going to cut out your eye and feed it to my guard dogs.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He didn’t hear any guard dogs. He had no idea what she meant about strike one, either. Somehow, he had already disappointed her. “I’m ready right now, ma’am.”
“Do it, motherfucker,” she said. Her voice was raspy, as if she had been shouting for hours. As he gathered his materials, he studied her as best he could out of the corner of his eyes. She looked worn, not wounded. Hassled and annoyed. Twitchy and paranoid. Her hair was a wig and she was dressed as a female factory worker. Smudges covered her face, she had an M-16 slu
ng over her right shoulder, and as she walked she clanked, or her small backpack clanked. Extra ammo. A great deal of extra ammo.
What, did she expect he would visit a potentially hostile Arm armed?
At least she was past her pawnshop pistol phase.
As he set up the mirrors, the easels and a small TV table for his notes, an armed man walked out of the shadows toward them. Hank froze, but Keaton didn’t. She signaled with one finger, and the man followed, to stand beside Hank’s Mercedes. Blocking the driver’s side door of the Mercedes. He, too, carried a walkie-talkie, and proved Hank’s guess about Keaton hiring other thugs correct when he talked to one of them on the walkie-talkie.
“Ma’am,” he said. “You aren’t the first Arm to suffer from these particular muscle issues. I can help.”
“Fine. Give me the magic pill or injection and get the hell out of here,” Keaton said.
“It’s not that simple, ma’am.”
She strode up to him and looked him in the eye. “How so?” He didn’t know how she did so, but she, at just over five feet tall, was about the most intimidating human being he had ever met, and he had met some real winners in his day.
Was this the Arm equivalent of the Focus lie-detector trick? If so, she needed practice. “It’s based on knowledge, and you can cure yourself with an appropriate change in diet and exercise.”
Keaton relaxed. “Huh.” She looked at his set up. “Who the fuck are these idiots?
“The picture on the left is a standard male muscle anatomy chart,” he said. “Male, because, well, they don’t make any female anatomy charts with the right muscle proportions. On the center easel is a blown up and annotated photograph of Focus Abernathy” who wouldn’t have been at all amused to find out he had this with him today, when he visited “and the next easel over has a blown up and annotated photograph of a more recently transformed Focus who goes by the name of Mother.” Mother wore considerably more clothes. Focus Abernathy had been willing to strip down to her panties and bra, quite proud of the way she looked. He hadn’t gotten Mother to reveal more than her arms and legs.
“Huh again,” Keaton said. “I hadn’t realized the Focuses got the same shit body changes I have.” She walked over to the Abernathy poster and pointed to the ankles and wrists, then turned to the standard anatomy poster. “Joe the normal here’s muscles are different.”
So much for his long prepared lecture. Damn, but the Arms were good at this sort of thing. He had Doctors with twenty years of experience miss these subtle changes until he showed them. Twice. “Not the muscles, but the attachment points, where the muscle tendons attach to the bones,” he said. They tended all to be uniformly wider, and closer to the central joints, which increased reaction times at the cost of reduced leverage and strength.
“This one,” Keaton said, pointing at the Abernathy poster, “has more changes than this one.” Pointing at the Mother poster. Fully engaged, her bad mood vanished.
“Five years versus two years as a Focus,” Hank said. “Your changes are happening much faster, ma’am, because you’re an Arm and have a much higher juice count.” He watched her as she studied the diagrams. “The relevance of this to your problem is thus: all Major Transforms subtly remake their bodies. The problem with your painful joints is due to this remaking process going haywire. I found this hard to believe when I first discovered this issue, but you’re growing muscle tissue inside your joints, what I term muscle nodules.”
“Huh,” Keaton said. She circled around him and stuck her head over his right shoulder. Disquieting. “Who had this problem before? One of your earlier Arm failures?”
Hank nodded. “Rose Desmond developed them in her wrists, and the Focus on the far right, Mother, developed them in her hips.” He went on to explain Mother’s unique medical history, the only Focus ever to transform while suffering from early onset dementia. Until her mind redeveloped, she couldn’t walk, and had been confined to a wheelchair.
“Wrists, though?” Keaton asked, about Desmond.
“Rose liked to run, and did no other exercise until after her wrist problems started.”
“So, somehow, I’m exercising the wrong muscles,” Keaton said.
“Yes. To find out what, I’m going to need you to strip down, ma’am, and…”
Keaton flung him to the hard concrete warehouse floor and put her right foot on his chest. “Motherfucking pervert.”
Hank closed his eyes for a moment, attempting to catalog all the pains and aches caused by the toss to the concrete. Left shoulder and hip. Back of his head. Left hand and wrist. He looked up at Keaton in fear. Inhuman anger spread over her face, her nostrils flared, her blue-grey eyes cold daggers as she continued to press down on his chest with her foot. He readied several arguments, but decided waiting out the Arm would be safer.
“So you’re a real doctor, not just some fancy researcher?” Keaton said, barely a question.
“I served as a general practitioner and surgeon in the Korean War, a surgeon after the war, and after I began to work with the Transforms, I’ve done an extensive amount of GP work.” Just the facts. No emotions. Not with Keaton about to go Arm berserk on him.
“Fine,” she said. She took her foot off his chest. “Get up.”
Yes, there was an Arm equivalent of the Focus lie detector trick, and Arms got it sometime after six months as an Arm, as Rose had never showed any sign of it. Keaton must have had it in his earlier encounter with her, but he hadn’t noticed.
He stood. She disrobed down to her panties and bra. He stopped in astonishment and gazed, spellbound, at her body. Amazing. She showed nearly as many muscles as his anatomy diagram, her skin almost translucent in its thinness. Every exterior muscle showed precise definition, her veins standing out so much he could count her pulse as he watched. “This level of Arm development is new to me, ma’am,” he said, slowly, almost reverently. “If you don’t mind, I would like to take a picture of…”
“Will it help me?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“No head,” Keaton said. She smiled, happy at his awestruck reaction to her near naked body, and took the Abernathy poster, flipped it around and covered her head. He took his pictures. “You really are fascinated by us Arms, aren’t you, Doc.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Arms are my calling, and, I believe, a level of human perfection beyond that of even the Focuses.” Her Arm beauty, all those precisely sculpted muscles, would be a lot more striking if her muscle development wasn’t so asymmetric. “If you would, ma’am, I would like to show you, in the mirror, where your problems lie.”
She complied, eager now. He suspected, deep in the back of her mind, she thought of herself as a monster, not as a woman or as a Major Transform. The fact he saw her differently helped immensely. He suspected, now, that Keaton was able to read him better than just ‘truth’ or ‘lies’. To some small degree, she was able to discern his deeper emotions, at least enough to sense his true wonder at her mature Arm body-form.
“As you can see, ma’am, the muscles on the left side of your body are visually smaller than those on the right.” He measured around her biceps, lower arm, calf and thigh, carefully wrote down the measurements, and shared them with Keaton. Her left thigh was only an inch less in circumference than her right thigh, but her left arm was an amazing 3.2 inches smaller around the biceps than her right arm. She, it appeared, was very right handed. “Humans, including Major Transforms, have 640 different skeletal muscles. I wasn’t able to find any documentation on how one might exercise each of those 640, but I do have a portfolio of information I’ve obtained from bodybuilders and Olympic weightlifting programs covering their training regimens.”
“If you’re going to deal with Arms, you need to learn this, Zielinski,” Keaton said, eagerly leafing through the material.
“If you master this and are willing to teach it to me, ma’am, I will learn.”
“Huh.” Leaf, leaf. “Arrogant pustule, aren’t you?”
&nb
sp; He felt safe not commenting on Keaton’s insult. “The way around the nodule growth problem is to trick your body into consuming the nodules. An Arm can burn off muscles as easily as she can gain them. Excessive exercise of the area of the body in question, and caloric reduction, will solve your issues quickly. The asymmetric muscle problem is similarly solved, but will take longer, the difference being that while nodule development is an utterly wrong thing for a body to be doing, the asymmetric muscle issue is only potentially…”
“Fine. Quit droning,” Keaton said. He stopped talking. Keaton’s impatience with his pedantry was worse than even the most driven of the Focuses he dealt with.
She asked him about the 30 major muscle groups listed on his anatomy chart, where the 640 number came from, the name differences between the bodybuilder literature and his anatomy diagram, and so on and so forth, for almost an hour. About every ten minutes she grilled him on his suggested therapy, hoping for a different answer than ‘excessive exercise and near starvation’. He didn’t have any other options, no matter how many times she expressed her disgust at his suggestions.
Keaton’s unintroduced Monster hunter watched the entire time, silent and unmoving from his post at the driver’s side door to his Mercedes. He always kept at least part of his attention on Keaton.
“Ma’am, one other thing,” Dr. Zielinski said, after he finished putting away his easels and posters. “You need to know that your enemies attempted to follow me here, but I lost them. From an inadvert…”
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four Page 6
