The trip up the stairs from the basement was still quite dizzying. Dr. Zielinski tried not to be sick on the trip back to Occum’s apartment and on the return trip up a long flight of steep wooden stairs (backwards, still sitting in the wheelchair with the bent axel and one out-of-round wheel).
Back in the dark room above the pizza parlor, his benefactor lifted him off the wheelchair and laid him on the mattress, carefully on his back. “Sleep, Dr. Zielinski. Sleep. Now that Rover’s cleaned the Monster juice out of you, I’ll be able to clean the remaining dross out of you in a few hours.”
Dross is certainly a funny name for jism, Dr. Zielinski thought to himself as he dropped back asleep.
This time he awoke in a bright sunlit empty room, to the sound of an old wooden door opening. Yet another location, this one with the mothball smell of a dry cleaners in his nose.
Focus Rizzari stalked into the room behind two bodyguards, trailed by two others. No Occum. Of all things, Dr. Zielinski’s stomach grumbled with hunger. “Grab him,” Focus Rizzari said, to her bodyguards. “Let’s get out of here.” They grabbed, his feet scrabbling on the floor. “You conscious?” she asked him.
He nodded.
“Good,” Focus Rizzari said. “We’ve a lot to talk about. Whatever Occum did fixed you and I want to know how he did it.” He nodded again, still not able to talk.
Two of the bodyguards led him out the door, down a set of rickety stairs, and outside.
Waiting beside one of Focus Rizzari’s two cars, weapons drawn on a grumpy looking Ann Chiron, were three FBI agents. Special Agent McIntyre stood pale and unsteady in front, angry and annoyed. Behind him, Dr. Zielinski caught a quite unladylike set of curses from one of Focus Rizzari’s female bodyguards, surprised at the appearance of the FBI.
Agent McIntyre fixed Dr. Zielinski with his gaze, then dropped his gaze to the immense semen stain on Zielinski’s pants and smiled. “You have the right…”
“I’d like to speak to my attorney, now,” Dr. Zielinski said, his voice raw and painful. He had expected this moment ever since Hancock’s escape. His arrest couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time.
Henry Zielinski: April 7, 1967 – April 12, 1967 (continued)
“…out on probation. The nonsense is, of course, what got me fired.”
Carol shook her head. She listened to him with full Arm attention. She even had a bit of concern on her face when he described the assassination attempt. Oh, and total anger when he mentioned Special Agent McIntyre.
“So, beyond the fact Rover was addled enough to mistake your leg for a woman, what’s your personal opinion of the male Major Transforms you met?” Carol said, eventually, her mouth slightly turned up at her own wit.
“Personal opinion?” Zielinski took a deep breath and marshaled his thoughts. “Rover was little more than an animal, a retarded child with the body of a Monster. Occum was quite intelligent, fast on his feet, and polite for someone so anti-social. A polite grouch.” A sudden image came to him, of Arms as the inverse of Crows, impolite but social.
“I have something for you in trade,” Carol said. “A small anecdotal adventure of my own.”
She told him an incredible story of an abandoned farmhouse encounter with nine Monsters and two Transforms. “In any event, the free Monster fled, screaming for help at the top of her lungs. We…”
“Screaming for help?” Zielinski said, interrupting. “I’ve never heard of a talking Monster before. Or one who could do housework. The possibilities…”
Carol interrupted him with a faux cough. “Am I telling this story, or are you?” Zielinski covered his mouth sheepishly. Carol continued, recounting the gory details. “We never saw the Chimeras,” she concluded, “but we smelled them. There were two of them.”
Zielinski put down his note pad and took a deep breath. “I’ve never encountered anything remotely like this before. That’s amazing.” Zielinski paused, and wrote. Carol didn’t say any more. “Any idea how long they had been there?”
“Weeks, perhaps months. What does it mean?”
“Well, from my encounter in Boston, we know Chimeras can feed on Monster juice and they don’t have to kill to take it,” Zielinski said. “Your encounter hints that Chimeras actually prefer Monster juice, they hunt for new women Transforms, let them go Monster and that some of them have learned to keep their prey alive afterwards as part-Monsters. I don’t have to tell you how big an advantage such a trick gives the Chimeras over Arms.”
“Keaton noticed several different sizes of footprints around the house with the same scent,” Carol said. “Can Chimeras change shape? How quickly?”
Zielinski closed his eyes in thought. “It takes months for a new Monster to change from human to her true Monster form and years for the last human vestiges to vanish. Simple physics and chemistry argues against any quick changes. My anecdotal encounter and some leading questions to Focus Rizzari hints that Chimeras can change much more quickly than a woman Transform who’s turned Monster. In specific, Focus Rizzari described Rover as a pony sized dog before his capture, while my juice-addled memory of Rover is of a seven-foot tall werewolf able to walk on two legs. Given a Major Transform’s supercharged metabolism and unlimited food, water and juice, I would guess fast shape changes are at least theoretically possible. Whether it takes days or weeks is something we need real data to determine. I wouldn’t expect minutes or hours, though.”
“Just fucking great,” Carol said. “Thanks, Hank.” She smiled and took in the messy ambience of his office. “Just don’t forget you work for us Arms, not this Focus Rizzari.”
“Of course,” Zielinski said.
“Oh, and the Transform from the basement of Monster Arms provided me with the worst juice I’ve ever taken. I swear it made me itch. Could it have been contaminated?”
“Let me take some blood samples and we’ll see.” Hank smiled. Back to work, on his favorite project of all.
---
“Incredible,” Lori said, sipping coffee, after Zielinski relayed Carol’s story. “Occum isn’t the only one experimenting on Chimeras, is he?”
Zielinski nodded. He had visited Focus Rizzari’s Focus household several times after his juice poisoning, the first visit to apologize for his behavior while juice poisoned. Her household exceeded his expectations, something new and different, and wonderful. “This information needs to get passed on to the Focus Council. With the Arm stuff filtered out.” Information trading served as one of the bedrocks of the Focus Network economy.
“Hey! I’m not a Network top honcho, Henry. I’m just a regional VP,” Lori said. “Don’t expect me to present this story to the Council.”
“Why not?” Zielinski asked, annoyed. “Isn’t passing on information part of your job?” He often had to remind himself that Lori was a Focus; she didn’t seem to take her Focus duties seriously. It didn’t help that she wore the most absurd Focus outfit he had ever seen, matching off-white tennis shorts and halter top. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a Focus’s belly button outside of an examination room. She looked like she just stepped out of a shower.
Zielinski covered his annoyance by sipping on orange juice and looking around. Ten in the morning and the kitchen still buzzed with activity; it made him wonder if anyone in this household held a proper job. He and the Focus sat in a small three-table nook just off the kitchen, and they had both served themselves. Not only did the Focus’s people not fawn over her, they barely registered her existence.
Lori waved her hands. “Tonya’s given me enough grief over this already. You tell her.” He shrugged. Telling Tonya, who professed not to believe in the existence of male Major Transforms, would be a waste of his time. “So, Henry, what have you been up to in the past few months? Did you get to keep your house?” Lori wanted him to move into her household. He was tempted; he wouldn’t be the first non-Transform non-spouse to move in. He shared the household’s cause – save the world from Transform Sickness – but he didn’t trust his emotions,
fearing the real reason he gave any thought to moving in was the fact he had fallen for Lori.
He nodded in answer to her question. “The divorce is final and I kept the house.” Only after a raid on his nearly depleted offshore money stash, though. “I’ve been doing Network business, or at least until the Arms showed up back in my life. The itinerant Network doctor routine.”
“You’re still welcome to use my Boston College lab,” Lori said. He currently stored his research papers and his works in progress in her lab. “Come on over today. I teach classes all afternoon, and you’ll have the place to yourself.”
“I think I’m going to take you up on your offer,” he said, glad to receive the Focus’s invitation again. He had tests to run on Carol’s blood.
“Great! So your ex-officio Network doctoring’s mostly Transform Dystrophy and cancer work?” Lori asked.
“Yes,” he said. Transforms didn’t often catch normal diseases. However, they did get injured, fall victim to cancer, and at times developed a nasty auto-immune disorder called the Transform Dystrophy.
“Any progress on either?” About ten minutes ago, one of Focus Rizzari’s women Transforms sat herself down at the next table over in the nook, blatantly eavesdropping on them. Zielinski didn’t know what, if anything, he should do about it.
“Little. I’ve become convinced Major Transforms are immune to the dystrophy; I managed to cadge some records on the disease from Focus Ackermann, enough for a good statistical sampling.” Epidemiology was his second specialty. “Statistically, there’s about a ninety-seven percent chance I’m right.” Good enough numbers for a working hypothesis, but not enough to publish. “The cancers? Nothing.”
“So they have you doing surgery?”
He nodded. Surgery was his first specialty. Transform cancers didn’t progress in a normal fashion. No Focus with cancer had died from it, yet, just men and woman Transforms. On the other hand, tumors in a Focus with cancer spread like a plague, often to where she needed surgery, on a monthly basis, to remove another twenty-five percent of her body weight in tumors.
“I’m hoping my Network contacts can get me back into the research business,” he said. “Not yet, though.” He glared at the back of the head of the eavesdropping woman Transform and finally recognized her: Ann Chiron, the career-shortened anthropologist, a co-author of the myth hypothesis. She had died her hair blonde, cut it short and pixie style and changed her wardrobe to match. He couldn’t get too upset at Ann’s eavesdropping. He half expected eavesdropping was in her job description.
They called the place Inferno. He couldn’t disagree.
He sighed, and went after a doughnut and took a bite. “What’s in this?” he asked, after he barely choked down the bit of doughnut.
Lori sniffed. “Oh, it’s just whole wheat with blueberry yoghurt filling.”
Inferno was strange.
---
“So, Henry, which of them was it, Keaton or Hancock?” Lori asked.
Zielinski looked up from his cleaning job on the gas chromatograph in Lori’s Boston College basement lab. For hours, he had been doing the separate – fix – analyze routine on his most recent samples from Hancock. Three days of lab work on Hancock’s samples proved Hancock’s tainted juice from Monster Arms was indeed abnormal and her reaction to it not psychosomatic. He would need months more work to calculate the minimum number of new juice fractions involved, and in what amounts. However, he decided to leave any attempts to work out the chemical makeup of the new juice fractions to biochemists with time on their hands. Biochemical analysis at that level was way outside of his area of expertise. He would pass the samples over to his friend and colleague Dr. Littleside in Denver, without mentioning the source of the samples. He owed Littleside quite a few favors of this nature.
“You’re talking about what happened in California a couple of weeks ago?” Zielinski asked.
Focus Rizzari had waited on her question until she got him alone and relatively private. She thought her household bugged. Interesting.
“Yes.” Focus Rizzari had shown up early today, likely to get a chance to buttonhole him. Normally, Zielinski worked the day shift in her lab and Focus Rizzari got the night shift. Lori’s last teaching responsibility, office hours, ended at four PM, and between four and six, the Focus was impossible to find.
Zielinski closed up the gas chromatograph and turned to the Focus. She wore her academic outfit, her dowdy clothing, fake glasses and bad makeup, all to reduce her Focus allure. Her bodyguards today included two women: Terry Bishop, a normal and Tina Williams, a Transform, both young and absurdly athletic, along with two men, Steve Huddleston, a normal, and Jim Simpson, a Transform, equally young and absurdly athletic. He now knew the Focus’s standard bodyguards by name; she preferred to work with bodyguards who were approximately her age, a personal peculiarity of hers. None of the four in today’s crew was over thirty. The Focus’s main partner in crime, Ann Chiron, was absent.
“Hancock,” Zielinski said. “But I didn’t get it from her, I got it from Tonya.”
“Tonya?” Lori turned stone faced. “Okay, who else are you talking to besides me, and how often?”
“I don’t have anything regular set up with Tonya, but she, along with Flo” Focus Ackermann “are the ones I get my itinerant doctor assignments from,” he said. Lori licked her lips and he felt the onset of a headache. “I also report weekly to Keaton.” He had talked to Keaton in person yesterday, instead of leaving his report with her answering service lady. She had grilled him unmercifully on the gaps in his previous reports and his ongoing research on Hancock’s blood samples.
“You phone in reports to Keaton?” Lori asked, surprised enough to show it. She motioned for him to come over to her desk and sit. “What do you tell her about me?”
Oh. Right. Lori was a security conscious Focus. Her fierce question was more than enough to remind him, and she put enough charisma behind her questions to ensure he answered. “Keaton knows I share lab space with you and your main research topic at the moment is the physiology of Focus juice transfer. Keaton’s instructions to me were ‘Don’t bother to fill me in on that crap’.”
“How about security?”
“Keaton has no interest at all in my observations on anyone’s security,” Zielinski said. “She said, quote ‘since you can’t ever tell how many weapons I’m carrying to within a factor of three, don’t waste your time telling me about Hancock, the Focus or her bodyguards’ equipment. You aren’t qualified’.” The Focus’s bodyguards laughed. The Focus tapped her fingernails on her desk.
“That wasn’t what she said,” Lori said, harsh enough to rock Zielinski back in his chair. Top Focuses were almost impossible to lie to.
“I left out the expletives,” Zielinski said. “If you don’t mind.”
Lori shrugged and looked off into space. “I thought she was teaching Hancock how to be an Arm, not how to be a psychotic killer.”
“I’m not happy with Keaton’s training either, but we don’t know enough about Arms to say what normal Arm behavior is and what are Keaton’s personal quirks.” He paused and decided he could expound a bit on the subject of Keaton’s training without violating his agreement with the Arms. “Keaton’s trained Hancock to be an athlete and fighter, similar to your bodyguard training, except at a Major Transform level.” Guns, knives, and gymnastics. He wanted the details but neither of the Arms would talk on the subject. Yet. “Hard discipline is involved, quite brutal from what I’ve seen: cuts, bruises, even broken bones. Hancock’s also been trained in many skills you could call espionage or criminal: breaking and entering, disguise work, tailing people and dropping tails. All of those are needed for hunting down Transforms for their juice, so even the absolute Arm basics delve into gray areas.”
“So Hancock’s fully trained in Arm survival and so now Keaton’s torturing her and driving her insane? How is this a good thing?” Lori asked. The Focus’s bodyguards grew more nervous; Arms and their imagined skills
were not what they wanted to hear about.
“Lori, that isn’t quite what I said,” Zielinski said, batting away the Focus’s charismatic jab. “Hancock doesn’t think she’s fully trained. She is far more interested in learning the rest of Keaton’s tricks than going independent. She made that abundantly clear to me.” He looked Lori in the eyes. “Their relationship may not be the utter horror show you’re thinking it is. Last time I talked to her Carol said she had convinced Keaton to upgrade their kitchen so Carol could, in her words, ‘cook those gourmet meals that both of us Arms have been lusting after’. My guess is their relationship is far more complex than us outsiders can judge.”
“You’ve got to get her out of there before she becomes as nutso as Keaton,” Lori said.
Zielinski nodded, although such a mild charismatic order wouldn’t have any lasting effects. Luckily, the Focus wasn’t going after him as fiercely as she had on the security issue. “Carol is a quite different person than Keaton. For one thing, she has a wicked sense of humor, which often leaves me in stitches, and in addition to being witty, she’s brilliant. I suspect you’d like her.”
Lori glared. “Okay, okay,” he said, unable to wiggle out from under Lori’s charisma this time. “I’ll do what I can, but I can’t push Carol about her graduation. Pushing an Arm isn’t something you ever want to do.”
“Fine,” Lori said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some tests to run…”
Zielinski stood and caught the bodyguard’s reactions before they covered them up: amused and impressed, especially Terry and Steve, the other two normals in the room. Focus Rizzari’s behavior was a bit rough, enough to make an unenlightened normal fawn in terror or, if they had any resistance to charisma, make them annoyed and angry. He didn’t mind. Other Focuses treated him far worse than this.
In his estimation, the Focuses weren’t half as civilized as they thought, and had no right to complain about the Arms.
Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) Page 11
