A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  “Give us your real cooperation,” he said. Uh oh. “After reviewing the information we’ve gotten from you, we’ve decided that you’ve been holding back in many of your answers, and in some cases, lying to us. Because of this, there’s been a change in plan. Until you give us your real cooperation, you aren’t going to be getting any juice. No bargaining, no exceptions. If you do everything we want, you get juice. If you don’t, you don’t get any juice at all. Until we judge you ready to cooperate, you’ll be held in isolation.”

  Fuck. My captors used the juice weapon correctly for the first time. They also made sure I wouldn’t have any personal contact with the interrogator or anyone else. Either they had found and pinned Zielinski down about how to control me, they had gotten Keaton on retainer, or they had gotten one of the top Focus bitches on retainer.

  Given Teas’ departure and Zielinski’s note, possibility three was by far the most likely.

  I didn’t dare show my real reaction. Instead, I laughed. “You’re dreaming.”

  “I see,” Dr. Jeffers said. “Too bad. I’ll talk to you again, after we’ve determined you’re ready to cooperate.”

  I had to say something. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I let a big sneering smile cover my face. “Do you really think you’re going to manipulate me as easily as that? You’ll get nothing from me if I go into withdrawal.”

  “No juice,” Dr. Jeffers said. “If you want juice, you give us absolutely everything.”

  Dr. Jeffers turned off the intercom.

  I started to pace.

  I had my escape scheduled for two or three days after my second kill. I would be fully healed then and ready to go. Nothing too difficult: a simple, straightforward run, powered off a juice burn to let me rip open the outer door of my confinement area. The inner door I would get past by surprising a guard. I would bull-rush my way out of the rest of this place. Exactly half a kill of burn.

  I needed the second round of juice to complete my healing.

  It didn’t look like I would get it.

  I didn’t cope well with the news. Without juice, I had no hope for escape. My predicament ate at my mind. With each passing hour, it became harder and harder to keep up my good-natured Carol the Cooperative Prisoner false front on.

  Fear they would properly use the juice weapon had haunted me from the start. Even McIntyre didn’t understood, equating juice to hard drugs. I didn’t disagree with his assessment – because juice was worse, far worse, than any hard drug. Now someone who knew the secret had told them how to use the juice weapon correctly.

  I needed juice. I craved the juice. I must have juice. I asked to speak to Dr. Jeffers and got no response.

  Time passed. Late dinner arrived. To test my new status I requested a replacement bra, just to see if they would withhold everything, but they delivered the bra with late dinner. The kicker? They slid the dinner under the door, along with instructions on how to knock twice when I finished, so the guards could remotely open the door-bottom slot, allowing me to slide out the remains. No personal contact. Someone had realized I had been manipulating everyone in this place and solved that security issue by cutting me off from any and all human contact.

  The old deal of food, water and supplies hadn’t lapsed, just the part about juice. I understood the psychology well: they didn’t want me to have any distractions to keep me from thinking about the juice.

  Dr. Jeffers didn’t come back on the intercom in the evening.

  “Murderer” the whispering said. Without distractions, the whispering began to dominate my senses. About three hours in, I recognized one of the whispering voices as that of my daughter. I’m afraid I lost it for a while, a full bore howling psychotic break.

  I wasn’t supposed to have psychotic breaks – that was Keaton’s thing. Eventually, mentally shaken, I went to sleep, my dreams memory-fueled nightmares all starring Keaton.

  ---

  “You will get up and exercise, cunt!” Whack. “Now!”

  I couldn’t move, my exhaustion so intense I couldn’t shiver. Keaton turned the blood-soaked belt around and hit me with the buckle end, tearing the skin on my lower back. I twitched and moaned as vomit spilled from my mouth and pooled underneath me. “I said now!”

  The belt buckle hit, a second time, with a meaty smack on my left thigh. I turned to Keaton to plead, to do anything. Let me rest. Let me recover. She smiled, enjoying every second of what she did to me. I mouthed a “Please,” to which she responded to by peeling the skin from my right thigh with another stroke of the belt buckle. Her smile twisted into a sneer.

  “You’re weak, bitch,” she said. “You’re the most pathetic specimen of an Arm I’ve ever seen. There are elderly normals driving around in wheelchairs who can do better than you just did. We’re going to do this twice a day from now on. Get used to it.

  “Clean this mess up. Clean yourself up. Then fix dinner. I expect food to be on the table when I’m done with my workout.”

  I did as she ordered, a kaleidoscope of images leaving me in the kitchen, feeding Keaton one bite at a time. “So, bitch, did you think about running away?” Keaton said.

  “No, ma’am,” I said, unwilling to give her even the smallest hint of disobedience.

  Keaton flashed, something supernatural, changing from her normal self to death incarnate in an instant, without as much as moving a muscle. She stared at me as if I was her dinner, instead of the one serving it to her. I dribbled pee, beyond terror.

  “I’m sorry! Please…” I said, hitting the floor in full grovel.

  “You will never lie to me,” Keaton said, her voice lowering in anger, man-like. “I know when you lie. I will always know when you lie.” She laughed, sadistic. “Concentrate on your metasense.”

  I blinked and found myself in a moving car, Keaton at the wheel, driving us through Philadelphia. I concentrated and spotted a Transform. I couldn’t make out the Transform’s tag pattern, though…

  The car lurched to a halt, and Keaton’s knife touched my throat. I fought off my juice monkey and flickered my eyes over to Keaton. Her face appeared right in front of mine, her lips pulled back in an animal snarl of pure Keatonic rage. Panic and adrenaline shot through me, catching my breath in my throat.

  “That’s my kill,” Keaton said, her snarl hoarse and inhuman.

  “No, it’s mine!” I said, the words spilling out faster than my thoughts because of my lack of juice. “We’re hunting for juice for me, and…”

  Keaton’s eyes turned ice cold and inhuman, and she slit my throat. My blood sprayed the inside of the car’s windshield, and I fell, and fell, an endless funhouse mirror fall, ending up on the concrete floor of Keaton’s warehouse.

  My hands went to my throat to hold the blood in, the usual futile gesture. She kicked my head, hard, and I rolled over. She sneered down at me.

  “Disobey me and you die.” She wiped the bloody knife off on my Catholic schoolgirl uniform. “Displease me and you die. Come back smelling like Monster juice and you die.” She growled her predator at me, and I flinched. The blood seeping around my hands pulsed to a stop, but I remained alive. Arms were tough.

  “Read,” Keaton said.

  I sat up, wiped the blood off my hands, and took the day’s Times from Keaton’s hand. Front page, second section, and the lead article covered some sort of massacre at the Brooklyn Transform Clinic. Seven dead, five others hospitalized.

  I almost vomited, in moral agony. Keaton had killed all those innocents to get me my juice. “Seven people died just so you might live another week,” Keaton said. She shook her head at my still human emotional reaction. “Doesn’t this make you feel all warm and cuddly?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, a whisper. Keaton laughed her mad laugh.

  “Well, next time I’ll just let you go into withdrawal.”

  “No!” Panic. “Not that.”

  I looked at my so-called clean hands and found them coved in blood, again.

  “Who
made you kill the boy you fucked afterwards?”

  “Ma’am. You did.”

  “You had a choice, didn’t you? What was the choice?”

  “I could have refused,” I said. “You would have killed me.”

  “Would that be a bad thing? From society’s perspective?”

  “No.”

  “So you didn’t do society any good by refusing to die. What does that make you?”

  “A monster,” I said. “An evil monster.”

  I turned away, unable to face the dark beast inside. The darkness curled around me, closing in, ever tighter and tighter, to where I couldn’t breathe anymore. I fought through the darkness as I always did, though each time I came through darker and more soiled. Exercise time! I did a set of bench presses, and another, and repeated them until my arms failed from exhaustion and I fell from the bench.

  “Arms failed you again?” Keaton said, and sighed. She sat down on the bench and tapped her own leg with the bloody belt. “You’re not making it, are you?” she said, her voice uncommonly gentle.

  I couldn’t move in my low juice exhaustion. Keaton didn’t move either. Time passed and I recovered a bit, enough to look up at her. She carried the serrated knife she liked so much, rolling the hilt back and forth between her hands, a hungry look in her eyes.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

  “If you want, you failure of an Arm.”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re a fool,” she said. “I’m not making a standing offer.” She spread out her torture implements in front of me. “You know how this is going to end, otherwise.”

  A mere glimpse of her torture implements filled me with new energy. I stood and walked over to where Keaton sat in the cheap hotel chair. “Ma’am.”

  “You seem to be suffering a serious attitude problem,” Keaton said.

  “Ma’am,” I said. ‘Yes, ma’am’ didn’t seem like a good answer just then.

  “I’ve spent the last four weeks straightening out your attitude. I let you out of my sight for two days, just so you can hunt, and you completely forget everything I’ve taught you. How much more pain do you need, skag?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I apologize. I’ll straighten out my attitude immediately.”

  Her eyes narrowed at my neutral response.

  “Let me see it now, bitch.”

  Panic gripped me. She thought I poached her kill! I went down on my knees, on that tacky hotel room floor, and groveled my normal grovel. When my normal grovel didn’t suffice, I went full prone on the floor, licking her ratty smelly tennis shoes. Her anger still didn’t abate. I needed more. I thought of dogs and wolves, and twisted my head against the carpet to expose my neck to her.

  She put her foot on my neck, hard, cutting off my breathing. Tacky hotel carpet turned into concrete warehouse floor.

  “You only graduate when I say you graduate!” Keaton said, her voice a hiss. She ignored the gift Transform I brought her as if he wasn’t there. “I’ll never let you go! You’re mine, forever. Mine. Mine. Mine!”

  I was hers, and I knew it, but I couldn’t face the bald truth of the matter. So instead of stating the truth, I groveled some more.

  Tonya Biggioni: March 19, 1968

  Tonya watched the films as they came in Tuesday afternoon with Marty, Delia, and Zielinski. Dr. Jeffers, trailed by three faceless new-to-her CDC doctors, joined them for this particular viewing, interested in Hancock’s reaction to Tonya’s plan. No. Not Hancock any more. Tonya couldn’t afford to think of her as a person. She was just the Arm.

  None of the doctors bothered to talk to Zielinski when they came in. Zielinski didn’t react to Dr. Jeffers’ cold contempt, his face its normal unreadable self. Tonya wondered about the history between him and Dr. Jeffers. She promised herself she would ask Zielinski later, when she could get a few minutes free from the celluloid presence of the Arm.

  The Arm stalked the boundaries of her cell like a caged tiger at the zoo. Restless. Dangerous. An inhuman grace filled her movements, and the muscles so grotesque when she stood still appeared natural now. There was something even beautiful about her deadly grace and power.

  Four minutes into the tape Dr. Jeffers’ voice came in over the intercom. He explained the new rules: no juice, no cooperation.

  Tonya almost missed it, a little flicker of appalled horror on the Arm’s face when she heard Dr. Jeffers comments about juice, before the Arm laughed. The Arm’s laugh sounded heartfelt, deep and mocking. The only hint otherwise was the fraction of a second before the laugh. Tonya asked the aide to re-run the section of the film three times to be sure, while the doctors watched her in silence. She saw the flicker of horror all three times. The Arm knew what her vulnerability was.

  The section of film finished and the aide turned the projector off and the lights on. No one said anything. They looked at her and waited.

  “She’s going to want to bargain soon, likely about two hours in,” Tonya said. “Wait her out. Her control needs to start to break before we go to phase two.”

  Jeffers fiddled with a file full of papers on the table in front of him. “How can you be so sure, Focus Biggioni?”

  “Years of experience adjusting Transforms to my will, Dr. Jeffers. Just wait.” One of the more sensitive docs turned away, face pale. Zielinski frowned. Marty and Delia fretted, tried to maintain control. They rarely saw Tonya do the full Focus Bitch and she did the whole show now.

  “I would like some results to confirm your theories, Focus Biggioni,” Dr. Jeffers said.

  Tonya opened her mouth to speak, but stopped when she heard running feet come down the hall. The others in the room heard it a few seconds later and all the heads turned to Dr. Ascot as he came barreling through the door.

  “Dr. Jeffers,” he said between breaths, his round face florid, “We just got the call from the Center. The Arm wants to talk to you.”

  Tonya turned to Dr. Jeffers and raised one eyebrow with a slight smile. The Arm recognized the trap, knew she couldn’t win a head-to-head confrontation, so she decided to cut her losses and shift to a different battleground. She attempted to capitulate now because every moment without juice would only weaken her ability to bargain.

  A reasonable and rational response. Under other circumstances, the Arm’s response might even work. However, unfortunately for the Arm, her response was also predictable. Tonya had already blocked the exits.

  Tonya felt a momentary chill, and prayed the Arm never figured out who did this to her. A familiar déjà vu, given Tonya’s long history of these games.

  Dr. Jeffers checked the time before looking at Tonya with new respect.

  “Two hours on the nose,” he said.

  Tonya nodded. “Wait her out. What you are doing will weigh on your conscience, but remember you aren’t doing anything to her. Just wait her out.”

  Dr. Jeffers nodded. “We wait.”

  “In the meantime I’m going back to Philadelphia,” Tonya said. “Call me if you need me here or you have any questions. Follow the plan as I’ve outlined it, starting phase 2 tomorrow and phase 3 on Saturday after her juice count’s down to the appropriate level. I’ll be back Sunday afternoon. She’ll break before midnight.”

  ---

  The phone rang in the little CDC office she and Zielinski shared. Tonya sighed. Getting out of the CDC this afternoon appeared to be impossible. Paperwork. Leaning on Jeffers to cough up the money and to arrange for one of her normals – Pete, Delia’s husband – to be included in the inevitable interrogations. Fencing with Zielinski, who although he hadn’t outright said she should disobey her orders, thought she should. He was worried about the Arm’s history of anomalous low juice reactions and her excessive willpower, which he said was much higher than Tonya gave the Arm credit for. He predicted she was many days closer to actual withdrawal than Tonya or the other doctors calculated and would break closer to withdrawal than Tonya predicted. The real problem? In Tonya’s plan, they couldn’t measure the
Arm’s juice levels while they sweated her. Isolation from all human contact was a necessary part of the plan.

  Hank answered the phone. In a perfectly innocent manner, he stated ‘a phone call from Focus Adkins, for Focus Biggioni’, as if one of her lesser household members. He had the subservient but haughty sniff down to perfection. His wicked social commentary on Focus household matters never ceased to amaze her, especially since he never came out and said anything insulting.

  “So, did you break the Arm today?” Wini said. After handing Tonya the phone, Zielinski fled the office, his nerves finally getting to him. Tonya read the now agitated Zielinski and realized he fingered Wini as the one with the contract out on him. Absurd. She doubted Wini remembered Zielinski existed. “Or have you spent the day sitting in the shadows again watching the Arm lead those idiot doctors and FBI agents around by the nose?” Wini’s voice dripped contempt.

  “I’m in charge now,” Tonya said. Wini gave a little ‘heh’ of approval. “After watching the tapes I decided breaking the Arm in person would be too dangerous. Instead, I put a plan into motion I’m sure will work by Sunday night.” Tonya shook her head. Wini sounded almost hungry for Hancock’s pain.

  “Tell me,” Wini said. Tonya outlined her plan. When she got to the kicker at the end, Wini cooed in almost orgasmic glee. “I like it, Tonya. Ohh, this is a good one. She’ll break real nice for you. Tell me, how’s she doing so far? Has the Arm figured out anything about what you’re going to do with her?” Tonya winced at the open pleasure in Wini’s voice. Her former mentor had a few kinks, but again, Tonya had known so for many years. The hellish years in the Quarantine had given all of the first Focuses far too many quirks.

  “I’m sure she’s figured out her captors are going to use the juice weapon against her properly. Last I saw of Hancock, she was sitting on a bench, glaring at the walls and twitching with a suppressed rage that would have fooled anyone but one of us. Her skin is still covered with open sores from the bad juice in her first cell here, but they’re healing.” Very slowly; even the Arm’s current cell had to be crawling with bad juice. “She’s been trying to get her body back into shape with excessive exercise.” Tonya attempted to keep her voice as flat and free of emotion as possible.