Once We Were Human

by Randall Allen Farmer

Chapter 6

  “There is no known cure for the chronic phase of Transform Sickness – once caught, the effects last for the lifetime of the Transform. Although the need for continual maintenance of juice levels is a significant burden for a Transform, they have been noted to possess improved health and physical stamina. The amount of juice within a Transform influences his mood and activity level. For this reason, Transforms should not be considered suitable for high stress jobs, or any other job in which the employer is uncomfortable with an employee of varying moods and activity levels.” [Department of Labor circular, 1960]

  Dr. Henry Zielinski: October 18, 1966

  Focus Iris Casso’s St. Louis household had recently moved, for reasons she couldn’t even put into words. Iris was tall and thin, with wavy black hair done up in an old fashioned style that reminded Dr. Zielinski of what his older sister looked like back in the forties. Not the brightest person he had ever run into, but she tried hard. The Focuses he normally worked with lived in New England, but the Network always liked him to meet new Focuses and make sure they were coping with new situations, such as an Arm in a nearby Detention Center.

  He knocked on the door to the household’s new home, some sort of run-down converted apartment, one of the large pre-Depression city houses with brick-embossed shingles on the exterior walls. One of the ladies in the house answered the door, furtively, and he introduced himself. She invited him in and led him back to Iris. He took off his hat, and followed.

  Like every Focus household he had ever visited, the place was packed with people and smelled off. Close, with some extra odor unique to Focus households. It wasn’t the too-many-people odor of a crowded room with no ventilation. Many Network people had remarked on the odor over the years, but none of them had been able to figure out where it came from.

  People in Focus households didn’t notice the odor, ever. They took to crowding better than most as well. They had to, if they expected to live.

  The Transform led him to one of the bathrooms, where Iris was giving a bath to three squirming toddlers. She looked up at him and smiled, up to her elbows in suds. “Dr. Zielinski! Come in,” Iris said. She frowned. “Have you got the Arm out of St. Louis yet?”

  Dr. Zielinski shook his head, looked around, and found a place to sit on the commode lid. One of the toddlers splashed water at him and grinned. He grinned in return and turned back to Iris.

  “No. She’s still in the Detention Center, but a different crew of FBI agents arrived and got me fired.”

  Iris frowned. “Then who from the Network is in charge of her?”

  He had hoped to learn more from Hancock than he had with Elsie Conger, the last Arm he dealt with. Instead, he left with more questions than he had to start with. Hancock’s mental problems headed the list. Her fast development progression into aggression and muscle hypertrophy was second. Even her incredible post-draw lusts needed explanation.

  He had so many questions, about Transform Sickness in general and Arms in specific. The Network had some ideas, but no proof. Their only contacts with Arms, worldwide, were with Keaton (homicidal, insane, and too often for his liking his contact) and with Erica Eissler in West Germany. The only other Arm Dr. Zielinski knew about, in Canada, refused to cooperate with doctors, researchers and the American Focuses.

  No one could say whether Eissler was sane, but in any case, she was more communicative about her life as a Transform than the other Arms. She refused to talk about her personal life at all, though, and none of the researchers could figure out how she managed. Tommy had based his FBI job offer to Hancock on Eissler’s job, as she did the GDR’s mercy killings of extra Transforms, at government request. Such a job wasn’t possible in the United States, because of bad publicity, which was why the public part of his offer involved hunting down Monsters. All a lost chance now.

  “Nobody, Focus Casso,” he said. He waited while the Focus slowly worked out the implications of his comment.

  “I’m having bad dreams, doctor,” she said a minute later, turning away from him. A toddler slipped in the tub, and Focus Casso caught her before she banged her head. The little girl whimpered experimentally a couple of times before she decided tears weren’t worth the effort and went back to her play.

  This wasn’t the first time he had heard a Focus complain of her dreams. It always gave him chills. He thought of Hancock and her stubborn conviction that Transform Sickness was supernatural. “What kind of dreams?”

  “I dream of a killer on the loose. A Monster who kills Transforms. I see a big knife with a serrated edge and a huge dog running through the woods. Rape, murder. Monsters with huge teeth, and slaughtered normals.”

  Iris turned back to him, intent. “You have some kind of mindless Monster living in the Detention Center, Doctor. This Monster is endangering to my people. You’ve got to help us.”

  “Focus, Arms aren’t mindless. An Arm can speak, and think, and has a fully human intellect.” He had told her this before, but she had forgotten. Focus Casso forgot many things. The media reported that Arms were Monsters, and so people thought of them as mindless beasts. Monsters might be cunning, but they weren’t human, and they couldn’t talk. No matter how many times he explained that an Arm transformation made an Arm more intelligent rather than less, his comments never seemed to take. “There are certainly no huge dogs in the Detention Center. You must be dreaming about something else.” He remembered Keaton’s knife, that big knife with the serrated edge, and wondered what else Focus Casso had seen.

  Iris ignored him, plucked a little boy from the tub and wrapped him in a towel. She turned back to him, a Madonna with a little child in her arms, charming as only a Focus could be. “We might just kill them, you know. Like wolves. Or you might take care of the Arms for us.” Oh, oh, I’m so helpless, I need your protection, please save me! The reaction Iris wanted was akin to falling in love, without any aspect of lust involved. If a person fell for a Focus’s charm, he would do almost anything for her. A Focus took several years to fully develop her charisma, thanks heavens, according to his extensive personal experience. The better Focuses learned to control their charisma, which made their charm harder to resist, but most Focuses, like Iris, used their charisma automatically. He had a lot of practice resisting Focus charisma, though, from Focuses much more experienced than Iris.

  Iris wasn’t the only Focus who wanted the Arms dead. It was a common sentiment among many of the Focuses he had dealt with. There were far too many misunderstandings about Arms. The official medical literature still claimed Armenigar’s Syndrome was the result of a failed Focus transformation, a story he was ‘requested’ to parrot to any new Arms he met.

  “We’re not sure killing them would be right,” Dr. Zielinski said to Iris. “We still don’t understand what the proper function for an Arm is in Transform society. We might need them, remember.”

  Iris snorted. “That’s what everyone keeps saying, but I don’t believe it. I mean, all these extra Transforms are dying in agony because there aren’t enough Focuses, and Arms may be the proper solution to the surplus Transform problem. But how can an Arm determine which Transforms are safe under the care of a Focus, and which aren’t? I mean, I know which ones are mine, but I can’t tell if the Transform isn’t mine. Can these failed Focuses tell?”

  “We don’t know,” Dr. Zielinski said. That, alas, was another of those nasty unanswered questions.

  Rover (Interlude)

  They were back. The moon had gone through half of her phases since these hunters last found him, but they had found him again.

  “I’m Rover,” Rover said to himself. He had to talk to himself. If he didn’t, he started to forget how to talk. He hadn’t made any big mistakes like the one that put the teeny Monster-like hunter and her followers on his trail to begin with, but he found there were some things he couldn’t resist. The worst was cars. Every day or so, in the early morning or early eve
ning, he found he couldn’t resist chasing cars. He also found he enjoyed terrifying those in the cars with his loud barks. He could taste their fear, and liked it. He had gotten good at picking out good places to chase down cars, and gotten very good at picking out cars with groceries in their trunks. He had been shot at many times now, hit many times, and while painful, he learned that after a few days, he healed so completely he couldn’t even tell he had been shot. He was a magic dog! He also learned that if he barked a lot and avoided the people in the car while he went after groceries in the trunk, he almost never got shot at.

  That’s how these hunters had found him, he decided. The car chases. He was a stupid magic dog.

  “I’m Rover. I hunt cars.”

  Soon, he needed to find more of that good loving. He smelled Monsters down in the valleys, hidden among the humans, minding their own business. He had already taken one, a Monster in the form of a donkey save for the ripping and slashing teeth. There were more, for when he needed them.

  If he stayed here long enough, he might even find out why the last Monster he had taken the good loving from hadn’t died. It had slunk off, afterwards, and hid down in a river bottom. They always died before.

  He might have to move, though. The hunters.

  He climbed to the top of the mountain, in the nastiest and rockiest part, and waited. Come at me here, Rover thought. Unexplainably, this time he wanted to fight. The stupid part of him was talking again, and he listened.

  Five of them came up toward him, about noon, a group of two and a group of three. Not the Monster-like woman. She stayed a half mile away, down in a valley. A cold rain fell, glistening on the rocks, and Rover growled. He would show them. “I’m Rover,” he barked out. “I hunt you!”

  They froze in place. He slunk toward the group of two, and they raised their weapons at him.

  “No,” a woman in the group of three said. “Don’t shoot him. He said something!”

  They understood him! Even though he was a stupid magic dog. “Go ‘way. Leave Rover ‘lone,” Rover said. He didn’t like the looks of the guns these hunters carried. The holes in the center of the barrels were twice as wide as the rifles the rural folk around here used. His stupid side fled when he saw the hunters’ guns.

  “Your name is Rover?” the woman asked, fearless. The others were terrified, as they should be, but this one was utterly nuts.

  “Sadie, you’re going to get yourself killed,” the woman standing beside her said.

  From the valley floor, the Monster-like woman took off in a run toward the five hunters who confronted him. Fast. Her good loving was terrifying and beautiful, hypnotic and cold. Huge and powerful.

  “We can help you,” Sadie said. She put down her gun and walked toward him.

  He would take her good loving, paltry as it was, and kill her if she got too close. Then they would shoot him. Or the Monster-like woman would kill him.

  “I no want to hurt you,” Rover said. He fled as fast as his four feet could carry him, across the rocks and low mountain peaks. He didn’t stop until the next day.

  The next day, he cried. Cried, and was surprised he remembered how.

  Gilgamesh: October 19, 1966

  Gilgamesh walked down the busy St. Louis streets, enjoying the cool and crisp afternoon. Above him, the sky was blue with not a cloud in it. Soon it would be dark. The streets were comparatively quiet now, but in a few minutes, the rush hour traffic would start to build. The heavy rumbling of a bus shivered the pavement under his feet. No one noticed the plain man in the worn clothes, walking along the sidewalk as if he had a purpose.

  The sounds of the sixties were around him, society transforming on its own without the help of Transform Sickness. Being a Crow made Transform Sickness seem all-important, but on the greater stage of life, it was well below the radar. People worried about the escalation in Vietnam, about the Cold War, about Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement while they listened to the Beatles. Hell, they worried more about the length of their son’s hair or daughter’s skirt than they worried about Transform Sickness. Gilgamesh sniffed the air and smiled as he watched warily around him. Mostly he preferred the night, but a day like this almost convinced him otherwise. Despite the smell of exhaust and people, bustling city and big river, he smelled the hint of freshness. The weather was cold and windy, but his thin coat was enough, and he felt healthy and alive. As Midgard had noted, he had changed considerably after his transformation. He used to have a potbelly. He used to be sedentary.

  Not anymore.

  Behind him, a light turned, and the lead car in the left lane didn’t move. The man in the next car sounded his horn. Gilgamesh leapt into the air, turning as he came down, and froze, his system roiling and ready to vomit up the bad dross.

  A horn, damn it. Just a horn.

  His heart hammered in his chest, and he forced the dross back down by raw will. Beside him, a woman with two children by her side looked at him suspiciously.

  Damn. He had attracted attention. That was dangerous. He had to pull himself together.

  Midgard said Crows could earn money doing day labor, and although it had taken Gilgamesh several attempts, he had managed to earn a few dollars pushing brooms and mopping floors. Now, if he found a way to quell his panic, he would be able to buy himself a Coleman stove. He could live on garbage, but he liked warm food.

  He forced his muscles to relax. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said with a smile, as he barely quelled his panic and backed away. The woman turned away and dismissed him from her mind.

  Gilgamesh caught a flash with his metasense, and he high-tailed it into an alley. For a moment, he wondered if Zaltu had returned from wherever she had gone. After a moment, he realized what he sensed was another Crow. Not like any Crow he had ever metasensed before. First, he had appeared out of nowhere a mile away from Gilgamesh. Second, he glowed nearly as brightly as Tiamat did.

  Third, he vanished from Gilgamesh’s metasense as quickly as he appeared. In the instant he had been visible, he had waved and pointed to Gilgamesh with obvious meaning. ‘Come here’.

  There was no mistaking the strange Crow’s location: smack dab in the middle of Forest Park. Gilgamesh’s first instinct was to run.

  Phooey. If he ran from everything new, he would never learn anything. Gilgamesh began the walk to Forest Park.

  ---

  Midgard joined Gilgamesh as he walked. They walked silently, and Gilgamesh found his thoughts drifting back to Tiamat, as they had ever since that new crew of tormenters had arrived at the Detention Center. What they were doing to her was little more than torture. Horrible, horrible things. He feared for Tiamat’s life.

  Gilgamesh and Midgard didn’t arrive in the deserted park until just after dark. No children claiming a last few minutes on the slide, no strolling lovers enjoying the evening, no exercise enthusiasts running for their health. It was as if this Crow had driven the normals away. Gilgamesh hadn’t imagined any Crows possessed such power, and guessed the visiting Crow was what Midgard termed a ‘senior Crow’. When Gilgamesh got about a quarter mile from this Crow, he metasensed the Crow again and found him stuffed with dross, an immense amount. The dross roiled around the visiting Crow, ever changing, as if it was under his control, doing something.

  Gilgamesh wound his way past the yellow duck on the giant spring. Midgard stepped away from him, and lingered in the shadow of the slide. “I’m Echo,” the Crow said from the picnic tables, a thousand feet away, with what Gilgamesh thought of as a loud whisper. The term ‘loud whisper’, borrowed from Midgard, brought a smile to Gilgamesh’s face as he thought it, remembering Midgard’s comment about Crow terminology. “Who might you two be?”

  “Midgard.” Midgard spoke in his own loud whisper, and stopped coming closer.

  “Gilgamesh,” Gilgamesh said, his voice eerily similar to Midgard’s. He kept walking, through the baseball fields a
nd the belt of trees, and stopped about two hundred feet from Echo. Echo was on the short side, a young man like any other, but well dressed. He had light brown hair he wore long, in the style of the modern youth.

  So close, Gilgamesh recognized some of the dross on Echo as taken from the Detention Center.

  Echo must have cleaned the place out to get so much.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” Echo whispered. His expression was smug and his tone was patronizing. “The St. Louis Detention Center is reserved for the followers of the Crow Guru Chevalier, and for no others. If you take dross here, you’ll be interfering in the business of other Crows.”

  Damn. A cold fear crept through Gilgamesh, and his thoughts turned black. He had discovered Tiamat. That was his dross!

  “Isn’t there enough for all of us?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “That’s not your business, but the answer is ‘no’,” Echo said. “I have uses for dross in that quantity, for as long as it lasts. Arms always die, and the usable dross will run out.” He smirked. “Your infinite dross supply was due to dry up in a few weeks anyway, so don’t get so offended that I’m pulling rank.”

  Gilgamesh tried to think of something to say. This was horrible. Arm dross was so much better than any other he had found, and no interloper had the right to steal it from him. Worse, he had come to feel some affection for the terrifying Arm, and he didn’t want her to die.

  He couldn’t think of anything to say, though.

  “Interesting,” Echo said, after a long pause. “I’d assumed the two of you baby Crows would run after I named the source of the dross. You know about this monster of an Arm?”

  “Her name is Carol Hancock,” Gilgamesh said. Midgard backed away, and made a throat cutting motion at Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh wasn’t ready to give up so easily. He had never liked being bullied, and that huge sea of dross was too much of a treasure to abandon without a fight. “She’s not a Monster. The other Arm, Stacy Keaton, has been through here as well, I believe to help the new Arm cope with her transformation. Neither of them can sense Crows. Both can pass as normal women.”

  Echo flinched when he heard Zaltu’s name.

  “I expect her back any day now,” Gilgamesh said. Echo flinched again, then crossed his arms across his chest and stared at Gilgamesh.

  “Good try, kid. Ain’t gonna work.”

  Crap.

  “Don’t convince yourself the Arm is human. She’s a Monster,” Echo said. “They’re all Monsters, all the other Major Transforms. Horrible disgusting Monsters. Even Focuses.”

  “But it’s Beast Men who we need to fear,” Midgard said. His voice was faint with distance, but he stopped edging back. “They’re the predators who prey on unwary Crows. Not Arms.”

  “You think that just because Arms can’t metasense you that proves they’re friendly?” Echo said and laughed an ugly laugh, loud enough to cause Gilgamesh and Midgard to take several steps back. “Fool. We Crows are the universal prey. Everyone preys on us if they get a chance. Even the goddamned normals. All we’re made to do is run in fear. Run run run.” He paused, and his dross presence turned nasty. Echo seemed bigger and dangerous, full of unpleasant surprises for any obstinate Crow. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure the Monster dies, like all those other ones. She’s too dangerous to live. I’ll keep watch. If she tries to escape, I’ll make sure the authorities know. I’ll help the police track her down if I have to.”

  Midgard ran.

  “That’s horrible,” Gilgamesh said, edging uneasily away. He had liked the previous Crows he had run into, but this one pissed him off. Crows had enough trouble in life without other Crows purposefully making their lives miserable.

  “Tough. You annoy me, Gilgamesh,” Echo said, still nasty. “I hereby ban you from St. Louis due to your interference in the affairs of senior Crows. Get out of here.”

  Gilgamesh still did not flee, though his feet were definitely thinking about it. “I’d heard that the senior Crows were kindly, sir,” he said. “Why are you acting like this? What harm…”

  Echo laughed again. “I’m no senior Crow. I only transformed back in ’62. I work for the senior Crows, though, and they’ve taught me a few tricks. Now, get a move on! Or I’ll show you a few of those tricks.”

  Echo did something terrible with his writhing mass of stolen dross and a wave of overwhelming panic washed over Gilgamesh. His feet took off on their own initiative. He didn’t stop fleeing until he jumped on a freight train. He didn’t care where it took him, as long as it was elsewhere.

  In a graffiti-covered boxcar, he curled himself in a tight ball and cried.

  Carol Hancock: October 21, 1966 – October 31, 1966

  The messages vanished from under my plate the next morning, and found me my first real friend in Doris Trotter. She was the staff cook and nutritionist, and to my surprise she checked up on me personally at lunch. Strode right up to the FBI boys who made my life miserable.

  “You think she’s an animal, but I haven’t noticed she can’t talk,” Doris said, to McIntyre. “Besides, do your boys enjoy feeding her?”

  “We can’t allow her to have silverware,” an FBI agent said. “Too dangerous.”

  Doris held up a cheap wooden spoon, nothing more than a stamped spoon-shaped thin piece of wood, the kind you might find as a kid with your half-pint cup of ice cream. “This too dangerous for you?”

  McIntyre snorted. “A real Arm, which she isn’t, could kill you with that. Still, she’s chained to the floor, so you’ll be the only idiot at risk if she does anything violent. Your neck. Feed her. Be my guest.” To my great pleasure, the FBI men strode off.

  Doris and I chatted as I ate my food. Despite my juice cravings, I held my temper and stayed pleasant. At one time, before I transformed, I held the opinion I could befriend anyone. During my first month as an Arm, I became one of those people who could antagonize everyone. I had to change that, now.

  In the midst of a conversation on rude men, Doris slipped in a neat double entendre to let me know she had found my letters and passed them along.

  The first step of my gamble, it seemed, had worked. Now I had to wait.

  McIntyre’s sadism of the afternoon tested my reactions to having the blood drained from my body. Exsanguination, he called it. I play-fainted at the end. If I messed up their tests, all the better. While they drained my blood, I talked to them about intimate woman’s issues and the resemblance to their test. McIntyre had to pull his gun on me again to get me to shut up.

  Charming as I was to the rest of the staff, I wanted McIntyre and his crew to be as uncomfortable as possible. Intimate woman’s issues were the best weapon I knew.

  Next time? Penis length comparisons…

  ---

  The next several days I suffered through low juice, until they got me a new draw. Their only tests were repeats, to show what differences low juice made. The tests were so dull McIntyre didn’t bother to show. After I recovered from the draw, they returned to the real tests. However, when I became myself again, I had a surprise waiting for me: a return letter, unsigned.

  “You know, if you’d written while I had any of my people there, I’d be able to help you. As it is, you’ve stuck your neck in your own noose. If you get free, use the telephone. Ask for the name.”

  Cryptic, but Doris whispered the name, “Focus Michelle Claunch, Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” to me later. I recognized her as the important Focus Dr. Zielinski worked with who had transformed at age fifteen a decade or so ago. I wondered why she was important, but didn’t have anyone to ask.

  I also made several more friends among the staff after I recovered from the juice draw. Two were techs, Mike Artusy and Fred Parrish; another was Nurse Wilson. Artusy had papered over the memories of our night of never-ending sex and now looked at me as if I was some sort of nympho sex machine that he wanted to try for a second time. A few glances at him and a kind
word was all it took for his interest in me to stiffen again. I doubted he would have a chance, but hope proved to be a good lure.

  I attracted Fred into my orbit with a more grown up emotion: compassion. To lure him to my side I simply told him exactly what the FBI had done to me. He was less willing to bend or break rules than the others, but he talked and didn’t care what secrets he told.

  I got to Nurse Wilson in an entirely different fashion: she feared several of the dark-spirited men who worked at the Detention Center, including all the current FBI team, and especially the chief FBI doc, Fredericks. All I had to do was to stand up to them when she attended me, back her up when they hassled her, and make things easier for her when she worked with them.

  I did all this instinctively, quite strange, and it worked out better than I anticipated. All I had to do was approach the situation with the desire to befriend the staff and I found I could. I didn’t know whether I’d discovered a new Arm trick, or whether, in my desperation, I’d recovered my old social skills. Maybe some combination of both. I doubted I could have claimed Nurse Wilson before, though, a woman who had once hated my very existence. Something supernatural? I had no idea. Right now, I would settle for results and skip the understanding.

  I also learned as much as possible about the Detention Center, to pull off an escape. I kept track of routines, I made mental maps of the place, and I paid attention to everything going on around me. I kept track of my observations easily, which surprised me and made me wonder again what I was becoming. This time, though, I didn’t doubt I’d learned an Arm trick.

  What was an Arm? That question occupied me through the empty hours. A Focus helped a few Transforms live. Stacy Keaton was the mirror image of that, but she didn’t restrict her killing to Transforms, she killed anyone who got in her way, in job lots. Or had. I couldn’t remember reading about any new depredations in the past eighteen months or so. My instincts thought this important, but I didn’t have any idea why. Keaton had suffered an ‘accident’ before her escape that had turned her ‘psychotic’, supposedly. I had no faith in the small bits of information I had collected, and no way to judge whether Keaton’s path of murderous mayhem was the destiny of all Arms.

  In the rest of my free time, I did calisthenics. The pain continued to get worse, but I only let the agony out in my cell.

  After my latest draw, I no longer understood Dr. Fredericks’ tests. They had entered a technical realm I had no background to comprehend.

  The tests were still painful and humiliating, but in an impersonal way. Two days of painful biopsies, including one where they drew fluid from my left eye. On the first day, they also cut off my left earlobe. They took a bunch of pictures and measurements, and then repeated the measurements every day. I guessed they wanted to learn how quickly my earlobe grew back, which it did after about three days. They also staged several other painful tests involving an apparatus, which pulled at my arms and legs.

  Agent McIntyre was unhappy with the tests, and several times he and Dr. Fredericks argued. I didn’t interfere or attempt to befriend either of them; each time I edged toward that, I got a bad feeling and stopped. These two were beyond my influence, and my instincts knew it.

  I still didn’t get enough exercise, and I’d been reduced to doing push-ups and sit-ups in my padded cell to ease the pain. Jumping jacks and running in place had become too painful.

  Unexpectedly, on the evening of the twenty-ninth, four of the FBI techs grabbed me and moved me from the padded room to the suicide cell on the third floor. I writhed in itchy agony the entire night from that foul room, deathly afraid that the next day they would drag me down to the Detention Center basement and shoot me.

  I cradled the knife in my arms and wondered if I would have enough nerve to use it.

  The next morning, two of the Detention Center techs, Fred Parrish and another named Lewis, came into the suicide cell with welding equipment, heavy metal shackles and chains. Six well-armed soldiers accompanied them, all soldiers new to me. For a moment, I decided I had been right and this was the end, but the soldiers didn’t do anything more than immobilize my arms. The Detention Center techs started their work and the soldiers left.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Parrish, once he and Lewis started setting up the welding equipment and the shackles. I’d put the knife back in its hiding place after I awakened. I wasn’t desperate enough to attempt an escape.

  “There’s a new team on your case,” Parrish said, as he welded the chain to the shackle on my left leg. “They’ve decided to hit you with the terminal stage procedure. We do it for all the Transforms, toward the end.” He rattled the chain between the heavy shackles.

  Terminal stage procedure. I nodded. For a Transform, that would be when all hope of a Focus had fled, and he was about to go psychotic with withdrawal or cross over to Monster if the Transform was a woman. I had experience with leg shackles and knew they cramped my style. I suspected they would make even a newly turned Monster more tractable.

  “I’m not getting any more draws, am I?” I asked, voice shaky.

  “Rumor has it there are still more on the way,” Parrish said. At least he put a piece of leather between the metal and my ankle when they welded the shackle on.

  “What’s this about new management?” I asked.

  “The FBI doctor, Fredericks, is gone. So are a bunch of McIntyre’s techs. Some FBI big-wig, Joe Patrelle, just showed up and is causing all sorts of ruckus. He brought his own techs and doctors with him.”

  I smelled office politics, FBI faction politics and perhaps outside pressure of one variety or other.

  I shivered, scared, and wondered what this change was going to bring. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew this wasn’t the right time for an escape attempt.

  At least I was in the room with my knife.

  An hour later, my guards brought me in to see Dr. Peterson. He sat up straight and attempted to look confident, but he still looked lost behind that huge desk.

  “I’m in charge of your care again,” he said. “By my orders, you now have unlimited time in the exercise room.” He glanced at his telephone and I decided he had called Dr. Zielinski for advice. “I’ve also arranged for you to move around on your own again. You’ll be guarded, but the nonsense of wheeling you around from place to place chained to a table is over.”

  “Why the change?” I asked. Low juice slowed my thoughts. Dr. Peterson’s news was a pleasant shock, but I feared the cost.

  Dr. Peterson didn’t answer my question. “The new FBI team, under Special Agent Patrelle, has a test scheduled for you at one PM.” He dismissed me.

  I went to the exercise room and took a good look at myself. Yuck! I had biceps, plainly visible biceps for gosh sake. Hard as rocks, too. If I squinted, I could see those tiny triangular things on the side of my neck. More muscles. If those things kept growing, I was going to join the no-neck brigade. My tummy had shrunk down to where it had been before my first pregnancy, which was good, and it had picked up a few of those funny lumps Keaton called ‘abs’. Not prominent, but enough to see.

  In the mirror, I realized my breasts were shrinking, as well. Disgusting. No wonder I thought the elastic had gone out of my brassiere and girdle. Still, I would rather be funny looking than have these horrible joint and muscle pains.

  Needless to say, I worked myself into chain-clanking exhaustion, imagining Keaton, as Larry, hounding me. Access to the exercise room was good.

  The procedure change bothered me, though. So did Dr. Peterson’s attitude.

  I learned why at one PM.

  The FBI brought me out into the courtyard, where someone, likely the FBI techs, had buried a concrete I-beam in the interior courtyard at the far end of the U. They had a chain attached to the concrete I-beam, light enough for me to rip apart if I had a good set of gloves and ten minutes. It clanked in the cold breeze, and I smelled the ozone odor of a c
oming storm.

  They put a shackle around my right wrist and attached the chain to it. Opposite me, out of chain range, stood ten marksmen. They each wore a blue jacket with FBI written on the left pocket, and watched me with hard eyes. The cold didn’t bother me, but I shivered anyway.

  McIntyre was there in his own FBI jacket, still in charge. Whoever this Patrelle was, he didn’t show his face. “Today, Carol, you get to play target. These men are going to shoot at you. They need to experience how fast an Arm moves. No, they won’t shoot purposely at your head. You win if you survive. My men don’t get to reload.”

  The shock flushed my face and I snarled, my good intentions about my temper gone in a flash. I had assumed Dr. Fredericks had been chased out because of his sadistic tests. Now, I realized the most likely explanation was the exact opposite: the sadistic Dr. Fredericks had left in protest over tests like this.

  I lost it.

  “Fuck you!” I had never said that in my life. The profanity seemed appropriate. “I refuse to serve as a training target for your Arm hu…”

  McIntyre drew his weapon, not an Arm-killer, thankfully, and shot me in the lower left leg. He lifted his weapon and pointed it at my head. “Dance with me, or die.”

  That did it. I did rabid dog imitations for the next ten minutes, doing my best to rip the chain off the pillar and avoid headshots. I didn’t calm down for hours afterwards. I couldn’t believe my fellow human beings would do such a thing. I couldn’t believe even the most inhumane members of the Detention Center staff would put up with someone else doing such a thing.

  I practically passed out from blood loss and lack of food before I would let even my new Detention Center friends near me. Eventually I let Doris feed me, and as she did, tears rolled down her face. Food helped me recover my sanity.

  Later, I got to eat an unlimited amount of food for dinner.

  Dr. Manigault came by to inspect me personally, after dinner, clucking over my wounds, astonished over how rapidly they healed. He had a rock solid erection. I noticed, and told him so.

  That was the last time I saw Dr. Manigault.

  McIntyre, the bastard, staged the exact same scene again the next day.

  Tonya Biggioni: October 23, 1966

  Rhonda handed Tonya the day’s mail and left Tonya’s office. The day had been pleasant, with no emergency phone calls she had to make when the long distance rates were high, no pressing emergencies. Nothing bad at all. She had taken advantage of the abnormally warm mid-October weather by taking the morning off and going to Fairmont Park with the non-working mothers and young children of her household. She had even opened her office window to let in the fresh air.

  The first letter was a plea from a Focus Ellen O’Donnell, who Tonya had met only once, at the last Northeast Region meeting. Ellen was a young Focus, twenty months past her transformation. Her letter was a series of complaints about how Tonya’s boss, Suzie Schrum, had taken more interest in Focus O’Donnell’s household than Ellen liked. Tonya couldn’t stop Suzie’s interference, unfortunately, and so she answered Focus O’Donnell’s letter with a few choice platitudes about perseverance.

  The second letter had a post office box in Quebec City as its return address. The unknown Canadian again. Tonya suspected the unknown could be a legendary Focus who lived in Montreal, but whoever this person was, she was cagey, very cagey.

  Tonya

  You, more than I, know what is going on in your life. Beneath the surface, events and currents are moving in ways you will not enjoy. Tests, choices, and change come. Now it starts, the conflict I warned you about after you witnessed the induced transformation of Delia Vinote. Are you on the right side? The conflict will destroy you if you are not, body, mind and soul. Although we’ve never talked about it before, I am familiar with how much you worry about how the choices you’ve made have harmed your soul. Worse choices are to come, and the obvious choices may not be the correct ones.

  Your Friend

  Tonya carefully folded up the letter and put it in the file with the other letters from this person. The file went into the small safe she kept for her private business. The message bothered Tonya but didn’t surprise her. She had felt the turn of the tide in her dreams; the relative stasis that had held for nearly six years, since the Kennedy administration had officially forgiven the first Focuses and their households for their escape from Quarantine, was drawing to a close. Shirley had hinted the same in her last phone call, when the leading first Focus had ignored the unstated chain of command to quiz Tonya about Keaton and Hancock.

  Tonya had a hard time believing she would be allowed any real choices on the important issues. Suzie would make those for her and Tonya couldn’t do anything about it. Too many of Tonya’s orders called on her to harm her soul, and she couldn’t avoid any of them.

  Still, the unknown writer thought differently. Tonya had learned to take those rare letters seriously over the years.

  The third letter was from a Philadelphia businessman acquaintance. He had some inside information about a pending and unannounced hotel bankruptcy, the hotel located in a marginal section of South Philly. He wanted to know if Tonya and her household were interested in purchasing the property. Tonya put the third letter in her ‘to be researched’ file, which her moneyman, Marty Fenner, would take a look at.

  The fourth letter was from a Marie Caravello, a Network volunteer in the Midwest Region. Inside Tonya found another letter, addressed to Stacy Keaton, marked urgent.

  Tonya sighed. The day had started out so promising. She called the immigrant lady who she paid to be her answering service for sub rosa affairs and left a message for Keaton to call ASAP. Keaton used the immigrant lady as well, for the same purposes, and the lady was the standard way they contacted each other.

  “It’s her,” Rhonda said, after dinner. Tonya, who had been snacking on a deliciously gooey coffeecake Delia had made, begged off Marty’s bridge game and took the phone call in Rhonda’s office.

  “Biggioni,” she said, licking the last of the caramel goo off her fingers.

  “What’s so urgent, oh most magnificent queen of darkness,” Keaton said. Stacy had been on Tonya’s case ever since the FBI chased her out of St. Louis. Keaton’s voice today was of a tremulous beaten-down man; Keaton often practiced her play-acting when she dealt with Tonya.

  “I have a letter addressed to you, marked urgent,” Tonya said. “What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Smell the letter and tell me what it smells like.”

  Keaton had never made that request before, but Tonya’s nose was good. Not as good as Keaton’s nose, which Keaton had taken great glee to point out on several occasions, but good enough to make a mockery of anyone else’s nose that wasn’t attached to the face of a Major Transform. “Antiseptic hospital, bacon and maple syrup.”

  “The letter’s from Hancock. Open it and read it to me. This ought to be worth a laugh or three.”

  “If you insist, Stacy.” Tonya opened the letter and began to read.

  Mrs. Stacy Keaton

  My name is Carol Hancock, the new Arm who is imprisoned in St. Louis as a laboratory experiment. I am scheduled to be terminated in two months or so, if I survive the tests I’m currently being put through. I don’t want to die. I would like your help. I have made many mistakes already as a new Arm, some of them that you are familiar with, and I’d like to rectify them and learn how to be a proper Arm, as you are. I understand you will wish payment for helping me, so I’m offering myself as payment. In my former life I learned much about my husband’s rapidly growing business, and learned much about his accounts by looking over his shoulder. I know how to entertain important clients, and how to win them over. I’m an expert at organization of volunteer efforts, of which I did often. I’m positive I can help you in one way or another. I thank you for taking the time to consider this offer, and hope for a positive reply.

  Mrs. Carol Ha
ncock

  After Tonya finished, Keaton had a long belly laugh. Tonya found the letter strange, more of a cold contact letter than one to an acquaintance this Hancock thing had met. Either Hancock was well deluded, or she was being devious in some fashion. Tonya wasn’t sure what to make of ‘Mrs. Stacy Keaton’. That was a strange way to address an Arm. “Are you going to help?” Tonya asked.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” Tonya said. “Not after she turned you down already. This one’s too uncooperative to save.”

  “Wait a minute, bitch,” Keaton said. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be trying to sell me on this. You’re the Transform-protecting soft-hearted altruistic Focus. Not me.”

  Tonya smiled. “I deal with forty-one Northeast Region Focuses, Stacy. I don’t have the time or political capital to help every Focus who gets into trouble. If one of them ignores me, rejects my advice, or works counter to my interests, they have a problem. Anyone who wastes my time in such a way is going to have to pay excessively before I’ll lift a finger to help her. That’s just the way of the world.”

  Which was one of the things her Canadian friend had warned her to watch, Tonya decided. The standard obvious responses and choices.

  “Oh, mamma, you’re a nastier bitch than I realized,” Keaton said and chuckled. “That was a compliment, by the way.”

  “I’d guessed,” Tonya said. “So since this is settled, I have a different offer to talk to you about.” Tonya had been sitting on this one, waiting for one of those instances where Stacy was in a good mood. “One of my people,” Janet Paugh, “is fluent enough in German to catch articles on Transforms. I’m proposing a clipping service from one or more West German newspapers.”

  “Keep talking,” Stacy said.

  Tonya gave Keaton the entire prepared spiel. The lure was the West German Arm, Erica Eissler. “What do you want out of this, anyway?” Stacy said. “For me to grab Hancock?”

  “Be serious,” Tonya said. “What I want is a little debt collection muscle. Personal, for my household’s businesses. We’re running up quite a few unpaid debts from people who believe the legal system won’t give Transforms any help if we complain.”

  “We already have an agreement on that subject,” Stacy said. Which was true. The payment had been in surplus Transforms stolen by Tonya from Clinics.

  “You turned down my last offer.”

  “I’d had a good run of finding my prey and didn’t need any extras,” Stacy said. Tonya shook her head. Keaton had a screwy notion she was some sort of predator, rather than a human being. Tonya knew better than to try to convince her she was as full of beans as Rizzari. “That isn’t always the case.”

  “Debt collection is, unfortunately, timing dependent, which is why I’d like to change our earlier agreement. I’d like to save the Clinic style payments for less timing dependent services.”

  Keaton paused for a moment. “Send a contract to my New York City PO Box,” she said. The Arm had agreed, but it wasn’t Keaton’s style to admit it out loud.

  There wasn’t a court in the land that would arbitrate this contract if it showed up on their docket, but she and Keaton worked their relationship this way anyway. The formality made things easier on both of them.

  “I’ll have it out tomorrow.”

  “Great,” Keaton said. “About Hancock? Tell you what, since I’m in a forgiving mood: I’m positive that fucking idiot Zielinski still wants her out. Tell him about the letter, and tell him that if he wants Hancock out, he gets to pay.” Keaton chuckled. “Have him provide me a surplus Transform.”

  Tonya smiled. Secret Agent Zielinski would have kittens, him being a doctor and all. “Consider it done,” she said.

  Nor would she help Zielinski provide the surplus Transform. That was exactly the sort of thing the Council had forbidden her to do when they ordered her to avoid any direct involvement.