Once We Were Human

by Randall Allen Farmer

Chapter 7

  “Transform Sickness is a very rare disease. In 1961, there were fewer than 5,000 cases in the whole country. That means your chance of contracting it is just under one in 30,000. You’re much more likely to die in an auto accident. There’s no need to panic over Transform Sickness. Many factors determine whether someone catches Transform Sickness, including general health, hygiene, age and perhaps even the local climate. The medical establishment hopes to be able to pin down the specifics of this within the next year or two and have a cure within the next three years.” [CDC pamphlet, 1962]

  Dr. Henry Zielinski: October 24, 1966

  Dr. Zielinski wasn’t sure he was interested in establishing a new Focus contact so soon after the debacle with Hancock. His highest priority was the Keaton payment problem, and solving it required a disproportionate number of phone calls to his Network contacts. He wished Tonya’s project was his only problem, but he struggled with several others. The fact he had returned to Harvard without an Arm in tow was the worst. Dr. Josephs, his incompetent department head, was irate. Dr. Zielinski had even gotten a phone call from Assistant Dean Franklin not so gently reminding him that they sent him to St. Louis to come back with an Arm, not with complaints from the FBI. His work with Hancock wasn’t going to help his reputation one bit, especially if she died.

  If, however, he found a way to pay off Keaton and get her help in extracting Hancock from the Detention Center, that led to other, more profitable, scenarios. The reality of a live and free Arm, willing to aid him in his research, without the baggage Keaton had with her criminal record and wanted posters, would be more than enough to salvage his reputation. He would be able to publish the data he had learned about Arms through his work with Keaton. Published papers meant official notice, award nominations, grant money, a new set of assistants, and a nicer laboratory. Perhaps a book or two for the popular press, rounds on the lecture circuit, and enough of the good things in life to keep Glory, his wife, happy for once.

  He wouldn’t hold his breath, though. Perhaps the next Arm would work out better…

  Dr. Zielinski found the Network’s information on Focus Lorraine Rizzari fascinating, if incomplete. Few Focuses possessed any sort of higher education, but Focus Rizzari had recently completed her Ph.D. The story behind her Ph.D. had to be interesting, but wasn’t in the meager information packet. In fact, he hadn’t even been aware that someone of Focus Rizzari’s talents lived in the Boston area. He wondered why he hadn’t been told.

  Dr. Zielinski finished brushing his teeth and lathered up to shave. Glory disliked the situation. No, ‘disliked’ was putting it mildly. She had been on his case about his interest in Transform Sickness ever since his first NSF research grant dealing with Transforms, right after the first Focuses had broken out of Quarantine. She thought studying Transform Sickness was too dangerous. He couldn’t disagree with the danger, of course, but no matter how politically hot Transform Sickness became, it still was a large public health problem, and it wouldn’t go away if people chickened out and refused to study it. He finished shaving, washed his face, and studied the image in the mirror. He could swear his bald spot was getting bigger and his hair greyer by the day. He combed his hair over the bald spot, and made a face at how silly it looked. He decided to continue wearing his hat, even if hats had gone out of style.

  Glory had become even more unhappy four years ago, when he started his work with Arms. Arms were dangerous! Then Rose Desmond had shot him. Glory had put her foot down, but he didn’t stop working on Arms, costing him much of her trust.

  He finished tying his tie and frowned. Glory had been livid after he returned from St. Louis. The FBI had come to their house and interviewed her, which played into her fears about his work. He suspected the FBI would grill him about Hancock soon; they suspected him of vague interference in their affairs. They smelled something off in the St. Louis situation, but they couldn’t put their fingers on what. He hoped they didn’t suspect him of his work with Keaton.

  Glory gave him a dirty look and stayed out of his way as he ate his breakfast, silent and brooding. He ate his Cheerios and his banana, slugged down his prerequisite two cups of coffee, and headed out the door to his office.

  He ignored the rumble of traffic, the diesel exhaust of buses, and the annoyances of the city on his commute. Something was wrong with everyone’s approach to the Arm transformation problems, including his. The FBI fixated on Arms as potential agents and actual lawbreakers. The medical community considered Arms nothing more than another lethal Transform Sickness effect. The Network Focuses considered Arms to be another sort of Transform to bring into Focus households as peons.

  Until recently, he had viewed the Arm’s problems as purely medical. His experiences with Hancock convinced him that all these views were wrong. If a man walking on a beach found an old rusty non-working pocket watch, would he then conclude that pocket watches were mere decoration, not meant to serve a purpose? Even with all those gears inside?

  No. Arms were Major Transforms. They should have a powerful, positive and independent role in Transform society. He knew he was right! If only he had some proof.

  If only the Arms could find their own role and take it.

  His meeting with Focus Rizzari was not at his office or at her Transform household. Instead, they had arranged to meet at the Park Plaza, one of Boston’s older hotels. The Park Plaza had been a fixture of Boston’s downtown and theater district since the roaring twenties. Discreet. On the other hand, most Focuses felt more secure if you came to them. Focus Rizzari’s desire to meet in a neutral location made Dr. Zielinski a little wary. Women Ph.D.s had always struck him as a little strange to begin with. A woman Ph.D. Focus might be far beyond strange.

  He waited in the Park Plaza foyer, brooding about his career and his reputation.

  Focus Rizzari came in with an undersized entourage of only two. Given their general air of health and energy, he guessed they were both Transforms. One was a woman, a surprise. A Focus’s entourage was supposed to be her protection, her bodyguards, and Dr. Zielinski couldn’t imagine what sort of protection a woman could afford this Focus, even if the woman Transform bodyguard was young, fit and taller than he was. Focus Rizzari herself was easy to pick out of a crowd. All Focuses were, for the cognoscenti; although nothing anyone could put into words or numbers, Focuses were just ‘more there’. Focus Rizzari stood just under five foot tall and wore a subdued dress and blouse combination more typical for a high end corporate secretary than a newly minted professor. She wore her black hair bobbed short, and her hairstyle framed, in a severe way, her narrow face and her dark brown eyes. Her wide rimmed almost triangular glasses aroused his suspicion, confirmed when he shook hands and he got a good look through the lenses. Cheaters. Purely decoration. From what he knew, any Focus worth the name had twenty-twenty vision or better after about a year or two, and Rizzari had been a Focus for five years.

  During the introductions, he put it all together. Focus Rizzari was into misdirection, into hiding who she was. Security conscious, the FBI would say.

  “Call me Lori, Dr. Zielinski,” she said right after introducing herself.

  “Lori.”

  “Shall we have a seat?” She motioned to a couple of over-stuffed chairs with muted floral patterns, located near the far corner of the hotel foyer. Dr. Zielinski nodded.

  “So…” He didn’t know where to start. He had agreed to the meeting cold, probably not the smartest thing to do, but he was still rattled by the events in St. Louis. Normally he had a better feel for meetings of this nature, but he didn’t even know why this Focus wanted to talk to him today.

  “You’re wondering why I needed to talk to you?” Focus Rizzari said, the sort of uncanny comment Focuses often produced. Focus Rizzari exuded calmness, not at all fidgety or flighty. She didn’t have an academic feel to her, which puzzled him. Dr. Zielinski’s Network contacts said she had start
ed teaching at Boston College earlier this fall.

  Her hiring by Boston College had to be a political statement, a reaction to the recent rumblings from the left, none of which made him happy. The civil rights struggle didn’t bother him; more power to them if they lifted themselves up by their own bootstraps. The protests sparked by the escalation of the Vietnam War were a different story. When one’s President called on Americans to fight in a war, especially against the Communists, one went and fought. He had done his time in Korea, as an MD. While it hadn’t been pretty, it had been necessary. The war protesters tied their protests into the youth fads of the day – dirty, messy, longhaired beatniks – and, lately, they tied the treatment of Transforms into their lefty equations. That was the last thing Dr. Zielinski wanted to see. Transforms were resented enough already, and every time the details of life as a Transform or details of the disease were brought into the limelight, things got worse.

  Perhaps Focus Rizzari’s paranoia was correct.

  In any event, Boston College had hired a few colored professors, a few longhaired liberal arts types, and now a Transform professor, all to head off any student protests against their school administration. So, here she was, the token Transform professor, Focus Rizzari. He didn’t expect much.

  “Yes,” he said. “Our mutual friends only informed me of the basics: you’re a beginning professor at Boston College, and you need some information I might be able to provide.”

  Focus Rizzari nodded, her face an emotional blank. “Although I’m going to spend most of my time teaching, I do want to help my fellow Transforms through my research. I don’t know if our mutual friends told you, but my Ph.D. was in microbiology, and my thesis involved the identification of additional components in Para-procorticotrophin.” Juice. Interesting. He hadn’t recognized her name, nor did her dissertation topic ring a bell, so he suspected it hadn’t yet been published. Probably her dissertation never would be.

  “Through our mutual friends, I recently discovered that there’s some unpublished work by a Dr. Liutraven Van Reijn in the Netherlands. I believe his unpublished work has some relevance to mine, and, well, you’re the local expert in Dr. Van Reijn’s work.”

  Dr. Zielinski nodded. Focus Rizzari didn’t have any idea who he really was. He guessed she had read his recent papers and knew he was on the staff at Harvard Medical School, but he doubted she knew of his academic history, his long association with the Focus Network or his fieldwork. “Dr. Van Reijn’s recent work is quite speculative and he’s not ready to publish.” He and Liutraven had been in contact with each other for a year or so, trading data on Transform Sickness and Transforms. Liutraven’s ideas had good data support, answered many troublesome questions, and supplied quite a few disturbing hints and further questions. They weren’t proven yet, at least to Dr. Zielinski’s standards.

  “So, Dr. Zielinski, can you tell me anything about Dr. Van Reijn’s unpublished work?” No Focus charisma at all, not what he expected from a Focus with a Ph.D. Most of the time, but not always, the more intelligent the Focus, the better she wielded the various Focus tricks.

  Dr. Zielinski glanced around the hotel foyer. No eavesdroppers. “Dr. Van Reijn is working on a radically different understanding of Transform Sickness. You’re familiar with the standard research model for Transform Sickness?” As opposed to the medical establishment model, as popularized in the national press.

  “The MRC model? Yes,” Focus Rizzari said.

  The MRC – the United Kingdom Medical Research Council – had established themselves as the early leader in Transform Sickness research back in the mid ‘50s. He wasn’t so sure they would be able to maintain their early lead, not only because he supported the research done at Harvard, but also because he couldn’t believe an organization tied to a socialist medical establishment could keep its standards up for long. He half expected they would be out of business by the end of the decade. The CDC and the medical researchers accepted the MRC model, while the AMA and an overwhelming number of practicing physicians promoted the medical establishment model. The fights between the proponents of each model always livened up any medical conference that dealt with Transform Sickness, even peripherally.

  “Dr. Van Reijn’s new model does away with the MRC’s insistence that Transform Sickness produces a broad spectrum of effects derived from a single biochemical alteration,” he said. “The Van Reijn model includes only eight stable states, not an infinite number of effects, based on three variables: gender, abundance, and presence of a metacampus; he also posits a large network of biochemical alterations.” The metacampus was the extra addition to the hippocampus that made a Major Transform.

  Focus Rizzari smiled, of all things. “Good. Someone with a little sense. As a Focus, the MRC model’s insistence of an infinite gradation of effects between men and women Transforms, Focuses and Arms struck me as counterintuitive.” One of the reasons the Focuses tended to discount the MRC model in favor of the medical establishment model. “Yes, I understand why the MRC model requires an infinite gradation of effects. Their premise. I’m very interested in what Dr. Van Reijn has to say about the MRC model’s premise, especially regarding Sports.”

  “Hmm.” Focus Rizzari’s stock rose in his estimation. When Liutraven’s name came up, he expected his information would disturb Focus Rizzari’s worldview. Likely not.

  Dr. Zielinski took out a yellow legal pad, drew two large crosses and filled in the eight varieties of Transforms that Van Reijn recognized. “In Dr. Van Reijn’s model, the most significant division among Transforms is gender. He also recognizes axes of variation based on whether the Transform is a Major Transform, and another based on whether the Transform is a juice producer.” The most shocking aspect of Van Reijn’s model was his insistence on the inclusion of male Major Transforms. Leading Focuses never liked speculation about male Major Transforms.

  “I think I see it, though several of the terms don’t ring a bell,” Focus Rizzari said, not visibly thrown by the inclusion of the male Major Transforms. “What’s a Goldilocks?”

  Dr. Zielinski smiled at his major contribution to Van Reijn’s work. “Goldilocks is an MD term, not recognized by the MRC at all. They think we’re crazy, but I’ve seen several. A Goldilocks is someone who goes through Transform Sickness and comes out clean, with no visible effects. They have juice, and they come out of their transformations with supplemental juice levels elevated by a point or two for men and depressed by a point or two for women. After about a month, their supplemental juice levels zero out, unless a Focus tags them and gives them juice. All they’re left with is fundamental juice, but they don’t have any of the normal low juice effects.” He decided to leave the details for later.

  Focus Rizzari’s stone face wavered, but only for an instant. “Wild. Why isn’t this in the literature?”

  “At least four papers have been rejected on that subject, because there’s no theoretical model to support the existence of the Goldilocks Transforms.” An automatic rejection criteria for the medical journal referees. “Clinically, the Goldilocks Transforms are treated as ordinary Transforms and are put into Focus households, although they don’t need Focus support after the first month. Perhaps not even before then. Many of us MDs suspect that there are dozens of these Goldilocks hanging around in normal society, undetected.”

  Focus Rizzari studied the male section of the diagram. “Chimeras I’ve read about. The so-called Male Monster. Are they actually confirmed? Real?” she asked. “I thought the evidence on them anecdotal.”

  Dr. Zielinski nodded. “They’re quite real, though we would like to keep their existence out of the press, for obvious reasons. Like Arms, they consume juice.” This brought Focus Rizzari’s eyebrows together momentarily, which puzzled him. She didn’t agree with his straightforward statement. Instead, she changed the subject, despite her obvious interest. He smelled a rat.

  “How human are these Chimeras
?” she asked, now focused and intense. “Can they talk?”

  “They’re not human at all. As with Monsters, they change into an animal-like form. However, at least one maintained a limited speaking vocabulary, even in his animal-like form,” Dr. Zielinski said. “The four Chimeras in the records are all quite intelligent, however, and all retained the ability to understand language.” And, if his information was correct, only one of the four still lived, hunting Monsters in the northern Canadian Rockies.

  “Okay, I’ll buy that. What’s this about Male Focuses? In quotes? Don’t you mean Crows?” Focus Rizzari asked. “Dr. Van Reijn’s model has them under positive abundance, which doesn’t match my experience.”

  “Crows?” he said, and shook his head. “I’ve never heard that term.” Interesting. He hadn’t expected to actually learn anything from Focus Rizzari. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a total waste of his time.

  “Some Focuses have met male Transforms who called themselves Crows,” Focus Rizzari continued, causing him to shiver. Met. She said ‘met’, not ‘heard of’. Damn. “Crows aren’t comfortable with people and like to stay in the shadows. Met, though, might be too strong a word. Talked to on the telephone might be more appropriate.”

  “It could be a hoax.” He had heard rumors about male Focuses for years, but without the Crow name. He suspected he even met a couple of them back during the Quarantine days. They hadn’t called themselves either Crows or ‘male Focuses’. Back then, he and several other doctors had classified them as Sports. Victims of anomalous transformations.

  “Perhaps,” Focus Rizzari said. “These self-named Crows knew things, though. They can sense Para-procorticotrophin,” juice, “like Focuses and Arms do, which implies they’re Major Transforms. They have enough accuracy to be able to tell a Focus where she’s calling from, and enough range to do so from miles away. The reason I’m surprised is that they considered themselves Para-procorticotrophin consumers. No. That’s what the Focuses deduced from the terms the Crows used. What the Crows actually said appeared to be utter nonsense. They have no understanding of what they are or how they work.”

  “Would you mind if I passed your information along to Dr. Van Reijn?”

  Focus Rizzari shook her head. “No. No problem.” She paused. “What does Dr. Van Reijn say about Monsters? How do they fit in?”

  “He considers Monsters to be a failed state,” Dr. Zielinski said.

  “I disagree,” Focus Rizzari said. “Unlike the male Transforms in juice withdrawal, who die, Monsters can live for an indefinite amount of time. Not only do they not deteriorate, they improve as they get older.”

  “You know this for certain?” he asked. He knew they didn’t die, but he hadn’t realized they improved.

  “Personal experience,” Focus Rizzari said. Enigmatic. “Have you encountered any information on any Monster juice capabilities? Juice weaponry? The ability to talk?”

  “Not a word on any of those.” Her questions were unexpected and intriguing. “I take it you have?”

  She paused, looked him in the eyes for the first time, and didn’t answer his question. “I think we’re going to have to work together, Dr. Zielinski. What you’ve shown me today indicates that the rest of our medical and research establishment doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on with Transform Sickness. Especially considering what I discovered during my dissertation research.”

  “What was that, Focus…Lori?”

  “Para-procorticotrophin is only a carrier. The biochemically active substances are trace hormones within Para-procorticotrophin. Several different varieties of trace hormones.”

  Dr. Zielinski took a deep breath, goose pimples rising on his arms. “Your results don’t surprise me,” he said, and thought fast. He didn’t know much to say on the subject, or what would be appropriate, such as his knowledge of Transform pheromones. “That does lead into Dr. Van Reijn’s conclusion, though. Dr. Van Reijn is convinced Transform Sickness isn’t a disease in the standard sense, despite the fact we’ve isolated the disease vector behind it. Diseases cannot cause new organs to grow, or cause such a fine-tuned set of effects, in his mind.”

  “Then what is Transform Sickness?”

  “His hypothesis states Transform Sickness is a reactivation of some part of humanity that, for one reason or another, went dormant a long time ago. His hypothesis requires a minimum of two mutated genes, one or both activated when Transform Sickness hits, with discrete physical transformation outcomes. Any gradations we think we see are what he terms archetype flaws, variations away from the distinct transformation outcomes instead of variants along a continuum. In his view, Arms aren’t failed Focuses, but many of the other Sports are.”

  Focus Rizzari’s face went blank. “I’ll have to think about that. That fits with the work my people are doing.”

  Cryptic. She wasn’t going to elucidate either, he realized. Or answer the other unanswered question. He realized she played her cards as close to the chest as he did. She didn’t trust him.

  “I know you don’t trust me,” he said. She raised eyebrows; she wasn’t used to being read by a normal, but turnabout was fair play. “I can accept that. I do ask that you check into my background and my history with our mutual friends, including your regional representative to the Focus Council. You’ll find the information educational.”

  “I see.” Her head tilted to one side, momentarily, and within seconds, her bodyguards surrounded her. Interesting signaling trick, not one he had seen before. “Your FBI problems have arrived and I have no interest in talking to them today,” she said. He wondered how she figured that out. Perhaps she guessed. “I’ll get back in contact with you shortly.” She stood, without a goodbye and walked a few paces away. She turned back to look at him. “No, I’m not immune to a certain Focus problem you were too polite to mention,” she said, which proved she had read and understood several of his papers. “If you ever come up with any ideas on how to get around that little problem, I would like to know.” She and her entourage walked away, toward the back of the Park Plaza foyer.

  He stood and turned. What she had mentioned was a tendency for Focuses to have memory problems and, because of the memory problems, suffer a diminishment in IQ and perhaps overall intelligence. He smiled for a moment, remembering the Hancock data, which showed Van Reijn’s predicted opposite effect in Arms. Memory enhancement, with secondary IQ elevation, because of those large pulses of juice Arms got when they drained juice from a surplus Transform. Smart Arms, or at least Arms who started at the top end of the intelligence scale, such as Hancock, could easily end up being a real big problem as time went on. Something to watch for.

  The memory problems didn’t seem to bother Focus Rizzari as much as it had bothered some of the Focuses he had met, such as Focus Casso. Focus Rizzari clearly had been quite intelligent before her Focus transformation. However, her lack of Focus charisma meant that on the Transform side of the equation, she was a Focus without a future. The other Focuses, the big bitches with their overwhelming Focus charisma, would see to that. He would check up on her, anyway, but he couldn’t see bothering to work with her.

  He sighed. Somehow, Focus Rizzari had been correct. Two FBI agents waited for him as he walked out of the hotel.

  Gilgamesh: October 25, 1966

  Her name was Wilhelmina Minton. According to the newspapers in the archives of the Chicago Daily News, Miss Minton had transformed seven months ago, in March. She was a Focus, and a minor, barely seventeen. Her parents had initially kept control of her, but her household of Transforms had sought and received a court ruling declaring Miss Minton an adult, a ward of the Transforms whose lives depended on the actions of the Focus. They had filed suit against Mr. and Mrs. Minton to provide monetary support for them, after Mr. and Mrs. Minton had filed suit to reverse the court ruling against their daughter. A month ago, they settled, mutually agreeing to drop both suits.
>
  Gilgamesh had no fear of this Focus. He and Midgard were able to creep right up to the apartment complex she and her household lived in and take dross. It wasn’t enough, but it was better than nothing.

  He had never felt so bad about anything in his life.

  “I say we should rent one of those apartments,” Midgard said, once the two of them had gone back to their hidey-hole in a culvert in the Busse Woods Reservoir. Midgard had hopped the same freight train as Gilgamesh, and they had ended up in Chicago. For the moment, they decided to work together. Gilgamesh had once found the thought of spending large amounts of time with the other Crow unnerving. Now they stayed together for convenience, but he doubted it would last long. “It would be safe for us. Her Transforms don’t believe a single thing Minton tells them.”

  Midgard’s observation wasn’t surprising, as Miss Minton was a prisoner in one of the apartments, under strict discipline. If she didn’t move the juice correctly, her household punished her, led by several of the male spouses of the women Transforms. Some of this ‘discipline’ had come out in the court case. The newspapers reported that if she messed up the juice flow a little, she was grounded, and if she messed it up a lot, she lost television privileges.

  “Where are we going to get the money?” Gilgamesh asked, hugging his knees and resting his chin on his arms. Depression crushed down his soul, amplifying the emotional loss he had been experiencing since he left St. Louis and Tiamat behind. “What they’re doing to Minton is criminal. I can’t stand her pain, and I don’t want to live near her.” If the newspaper reports had been correct a month ago, Miss Minton’s discipline had rapidly worsened. She was currently confined to a bedroom with several other female Transforms, on short rations, and in the short time Gilgamesh and Midgard had been watching the Focus she had twice been beaten with a belt until she bled.

  Midgard nodded, and picked at a splinter off the wooden crates they sat on. They had collected the crates from behind the Sears, and piled them high enough to keep them from having to sit in the icy water that ran through the culvert. “You want to leave Chicago? I’ll have to admit that I’m still a little unnerved by the three Arm kills we found. I’m sure they’re Zaltu’s.”

  Zaltu wasn’t anywhere that Gilgamesh could find in Chicago. Nor was Gilgamesh bothered by the idea of sharing a town as big as Chicago with the Arm, despite her violent nature. “They’re Zaltu’s. If she didn’t kill those Transforms, two of them would have turned into psycho killers and the other into a Monster. Yes, she’s a killer, but she saves the lives of normals as well.” Which was a hell of a lot more than Gilgamesh was able to do, which bothered him a lot.

  Midgard shook his head and picked up a piece of the stale bread they had looted from some trashcans behind a diner. He leaned back against the curving concrete and gnawed halfheartedly. “About the only thing going for this place is that my bad dreams have stopped.” Midgard had complained about bad dreams in St. Louis, and when Gilgamesh had asked about them, Midgard had said that Gilgamesh would get them too, when he got older. “Minton’s no worse off than any of us are.”

  Gilgamesh paused and tried to find a more comfortable position in the cold culvert. As he moved the garbage, a car rumbled by overhead and the wooden crates shivered. “What’s happening to the Minton Focus has no reason. She’s not a killer. Her problem is that she’s too nice a person.”

  “You want to save her, don’t you?” Midgard asked. He polished off the last bite of bread and brushed the crumbs from his pants.

  “Yes, of course, but I don’t see how.”

  Midgard chuckled. “We’re living in a culvert under a road, and you want to save this Minton Focus, and Tiamat, and on the side find a way to chastise Echo for chasing us out of St. Louis? You’re too nice a person yourself, Gilgamesh. We’re Crows, dammit! We’re going to be lucky if we can find a way to keep ourselves alive.”

  They had hashed this out before and gotten nowhere. It was hard enough for Gilgamesh to be in close contact even with another Crow for so long. Minton’s pain made it unbearable. “I’m bored,” Gilgamesh said. “At least St. Louis was interesting, trying to figure out Tiamat and Zaltu. Watching a bunch of nasty old adult Transforms torture a kid Focus is nothing but horrible.”

  “Crows don’t like things interesting,” Midgard said. “However, if you want life to be interesting, head east. Many Crows live along the east coast, and bumping heads with them ought to keep you from being bored for quite a while. I might head there myself, but first, I want to check out Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo.”

  Gilgamesh shrugged. “Good luck,” he said. “I’ll stick around here until I’ve grabbed the last of the dross from Zaltu’s kills

  “Good luck, yourself,” Midgard said.

  Gilgamesh nodded. After Midgard left, Gilgamesh walked south until he was out of range of Miss Minton, and found a condemned tenement where he could squat. Alone again. He thought dark thoughts about the lives of Crows. The lives of all Transforms. Why everything was so bad.

  He wasn’t able to come up with any answers.

  Carol Hancock: November 1, 1966 – November 3, 1966

  I exercised all morning after McIntyre’s second target practice session. It took an effort of will, because what I preferred to do was curl up in my bed and wallow in the misery of my descending juice count. The ache in my muscles prodded me into motion anyway. With ‘Larry Borton’ gone, my muscles deteriorated faster.

  Nurse Wilson snuck me extra food and I smelled Doris’s scent on her. My friends were cooperating. Of all things, the extra food routine appeared to be part of the low-end staff’s established clandestine procedures. With a little thought, I decided Focuses must need extra food as well.

  After lunch, McIntyre’s goons led me out into the courtyard again. I expected another target shooting session, but instead, McIntyre stood next to a tank of water. The tank was slightly larger than a coffin and about four feet tall. Slow raindrops plinked on its surface. “Chain her up and drop her in,” he said.

  For an instant, I thought they had come up with a novel way of killing me. Then I took a good look at McIntyre and his techs, and realized they all thought I would survive this. They tossed me in and I tried to hold my breath. That worked for a while. After I coughed out the air in my lungs, I didn’t pass out as I’d expected I would. I bounced on the bottom, chained and immobile, and breathed water. Many minutes passed, and I went to sleep. Dreams and everything. I have no idea how long they held me under – over an hour, my guess – but the next thing I knew, I was awake and spitting out water. Apparently, breathing wasn’t as essential as it had once been. I wondered how that worked and cursed the fact I hadn’t had a science class since high school biology.

  They hauled me into Lab One, and the techs started their work. I shivered, soaking wet and too low on juice to resist the cold. Six days had passed since my last draw, normally not a problem, but their tests cost me juice, the water test the most.

  McIntyre proved to be chatty as the techs took post-test measurements and samples. My urine was the most obscene bright yellow I’d ever seen. “You know, Carol, it’s too bad no one can trust Arms, because of what that bitch Keaton did when she turned on us. You’d make a hell of an FBI agent.” He leered, and my skin crawled. “As it is, we’re going to keep going today, even though Dr. Peterson says your juice levels are dangerously low. I even have some incentive for you – you’re going to get a draw tonight. My people got lucky and found a man about to go into withdrawal at a suburban St. Louis Transform Clinic, and you get to keep this incipient psycho from dying in withdrawal.”

  Again, I refused to answer. My instincts on the subject had served me right before and I let them guide me again. The last thing I wanted was to encourage McIntyre or befriend him.

  McIntyre’s next test involved a rigged gurney. They attached me to it, wheeled it out onto the Detention Center roof,
and dropped me three stories down onto concrete. I strained a few muscles and tendons when I landed on my toes, but didn’t break a single bone. I was so shocked that, without thinking, I stood up.

  Mistake. I shouldn’t have stood up. Low juice made me stupid. Both Dr. Peterson and the FBI goons were so surprised they repeated the test a half hour later. This time, I writhed on the ground in agony afterwards, all a show, to convince them the result of the first test was a fluke.

  I was glad of that test, though. Now I knew how I would escape from this damned place, if the time ever came: through the unbarred third story window in the bathroom I used, three doors down from the suicide cell. Before the test, I had decided it was too high to be useful. In addition, by taking me up onto the roof, they gave me a bird’s eye view of the Detention Center and its surroundings, improving my map of the Detention Center.

  My preparations for a possible escape progressed on other fronts as well. Mike Artusy and I had a routine going, where I took a late shower, and he was always available to escort me from the suicide cell to the bathroom. He got to feel me up and I got to encourage him. Low on juice, I could hardly stand to have him touch me, but necessity made me a good actress. My purpose was to provide him incentive to find a way to remove the two guards from outside the suicide cell so he could get laid again. He might not be able to pull it off, but I had many long shots percolating, and I only needed one to come through.

  Now, because I’d learned I could walk away from a three story fall, I had other uses planned for my late night shower routine.

  Patrelle’s sadistic plans for the day weren’t finished. Yes, I sensed my next draw, another volunteer Transform, come into the Detention Center, but they took him out into the courtyard. Like an obedient puppy, they led me on a leash to the courtyard, where I found my draw guarded by four starving attack dogs, German Shepherds.

  I crouched down and studied the situation. I wasn’t anywhere near as advanced as that Rose Desmond Arm that Dr. Zielinski had told me about, who could slow down her draws, but I wasn’t a mindless juice-hungry zombie in front of a draw anymore. That is, I didn’t attack the German Shepherds with my teeth and chipped-painted fingernails.

  Instead, I let my instincts guide me. I growled the dogs into whining submission before I took the Transform.

  I awoke back in the suicide cell. I amused myself as normal until, to my surprise, I got a knock on the door. My watch, which I still couldn’t believe they hadn’t taken from me, said it was time for my late night shower. Artusy.

  I did him in the corridor. Now, I wanted him to touch me. We clung to each other, all hot hands and desperate post-draw urgency. To my shock, there was only one guard and he didn’t interfere. “That’s ‘cause she couldn’t get the dog,” the guard said. “You shoulda seen her. Stoned off her ass, an’ she’s tryin’ to make it with a fuckin’ dog, only the dog wouldn’t have her. McIntyre and his guys laughed so hard they were rollin’ on the ground.”

  Someday, McIntyre would die for his laughter.

  I didn’t disappoint Mike Artusy. I figured twenty minutes would satisfy him beyond his wildest dreams and wouldn’t drive him to flee in terror. I’d even gained sufficient self-control that I didn’t make a pass at the leering guard, to my surprise.

  The shower afterwards was abnormally long, though, and Artusy had to pound on the door to get me to finish after my allotted fifteen minutes.

  The next day, they set up movie cameras and gave me a death row inmate to play with. He survived the experience. I probably would have gotten the clap or syphilis, save that as an Arm I was immune to nearly any imaginable communicable disease. I wasn’t anywhere near as kind to him as I’d been to Mike Artusy.

  After I fucked the diseased rapist-murderer into gibbering insanity, I realized I had changed my outlook on life since the shadowy Patrelle’s arrival. To hell with my reluctance to sink to the level of my enemies. I’d go lower. I wanted revenge. Blood-soaked revenge.

  Rover (Interlude): November 1, 1966

  What was with these hunters! He hadn’t even chased any cars since the last time they hunted him, or killed anyone. At least that he remembered. He stayed up in the mountains, avoiding humans altogether.

  Rover panted and crept through the underbrush to the overlook to watch them. In his mind, he cursed them as carrion.

  They pushed a cage into a clearing, a cage with a wounded and dying Monster in it, a Monster shot full of big holes. Luckily, Rover got some good loving a paw’s worth of days ago. The hunters carried different thunder sticks this time, shorter and wider. He tried to understand, but couldn’t.

  He had made a mistake after the last good loving. He saw something in himself he hadn’t seen before. A possibility. He tried something, after the good loving.

  It worked, making his teeth sharper and longer. Sort of. He hadn’t been able to make his existing teeth grow sharper and longer. Instead, he grew a new set of teeth that had forced out his old teeth. In the process, he lost things. Memories. Words. Like the real name of the thunder sticks. He had lost a bit of his humanity.

  “I’m Rover,” he whispered. A dog, a large dog. Only he was back to ‘robber’. He had to remember not to try the trick with the teeth. He didn’t have much more humanity to lose.

  They put boxes around the Monster’s cage. Rover shook his head. Traps of some sort, he decided. Nets. They wanted to capture him, not kill him.

  Why?

  “Go ‘way,” Rover barked down at the hunters. The not-a-Monster lady with the huge amount of good loving, who was tiny, about the same size as the little girl who named him Rover, looked up at him and met his gaze. Rover slunk back. He hadn’t realized she could see him from so far away.

  “Rover, we’re here to help you,” she said. Her voice was loud but beautiful, matching her personal beauty. He could almost believe her words, but not quite. She terrified him.

  “Monster trap,” he said.

  He fled. They were too dangerous, and too precious. If he stayed with them, he would eventually need the good loving, and either he would kill them or they would kill him.

  Tonya Biggioni: November 2, 1966

  “Biggioni.”

  “Tonya, this is Lori.”

  “How did you get this number? My television station office’s phone number is a secret.”

  “Focus tricks. Trust me, Tonya, you don’t want to know.”

  “So, what’s the occasion? You finally take care of the Catskills Monster?”

  “No. Something else came up.”

  “Are you trying to get yourself in trouble? Taking care of the Monster is priority number one, and…”

  “The Catskills Monster isn’t a Monster. He’s a male Major Transform, what’s called a Chimera. The male version of an Arm.”

  “You’re crazy. I don’t care what this creature is as long as this creature dies.”

  “Tonya, he’s got a name: Rover. He talks. He’s as much of a Major Transform as either of us is. It would be wrong to kill him; he’s not a mindless beast. Tonya, we need a plan to take care of him that doesn’t involve killing. I don’t think any of us should be in the business of killing Major Transforms of any variety. The consequences of killing Major Transforms might spiral out…”

  “Kill the Monster. Without the excuses.”

  “Tonya, look, I convinced a Crow who tames animals and Monsters to try and tame Rover. Bring him into civilization; give him another alternative other than killing innocents. I’m gambling, here, but I think we need to give…”

  “Lori, Crows don’t exist. Chimeras don’t exist. Male Major Transforms don’t exist. You can’t…”

  “The fact the Council, in its infinite wisdom, refuses to condescend to admit they really exist isn’t going to change the reality that they do exist and the Council’s refusal to recognize the existence of the male Major Transforms is going to bite them in the derrière som
e dark day soon, if not tomorrow and Rover is most definitely male and there’s no mistaking his sex. His manhood is as long as my forearm!”

  “I can’t help you if you persist in falling into these delusions, Lori. Nor am I going to say word one about your delusionary report to the Council. Believe what you want, just so the Catskills Monster is taken care of one way or another.”

  “What I need is help. Men and women with guns, to serve as a perimeter, and…”

  “That’s your problem to solve. Solve it. Bye.”

  Gilgamesh: November 3, 1966

  The automobile-laden freight train slowed as it approached another big city. Gilgamesh had no idea where he was; he had lost track of his exact location somewhere in Ohio. His food had run out and twinges of need for dross had him talking to himself again. Zaltu’s kill spots in Chicago had been too small and too old, and he hadn’t managed to eke out more than a few days’ worth of dross from any of them. When the train slowed down to a crawl, inside the city, he rolled off onto the gravel siding.

  He stood and examined his surroundings. The pothole-filled streets nearby crossed the train tracks with at best worn-down warning signs, and the nearby dilapidated buildings reminded him of pictures of 19th Century cities. The air was filled with a cold mist and the eastern sky held the hint of morning. He decided to walk, and as he went, he checked trashcans for edible garbage and ate things he didn’t want to think about.

  He got to a main highway ten minutes later and followed the boulevard, warily, as far from the pavement as possible. Ahead, Gilgamesh saw some newspaper men filling newspaper boxes. Once they left, he walked up and read the name of the newspaper: The Pittsburgh Post. He continued to walk, amazed at the lack of dross anywhere in metasense range.

  Just after dawn, he found an abandoned factory, and caught some sleep.

  He woke up in the afternoon. The weather had cleared and turned cold. Gilgamesh decided to go out anyway, despite the fact his jacket wasn’t heavy enough for the weather and might turn some heads. The cold no longer bothered him; just another street bum, not worth anyone’s attention. He could swear his beard would be completely gone in another two months. Reverse puberty? Surely not.

  He crossed the Monongahela, skirted the city center, and headed northeast, away from the dross-desolate area he had been in. After another two hours, Gilgamesh found himself in an older residential neighborhood, on the other side of a university campus. Carnegie-Mellon. Finally he sensed dross, far to the northeast, a couple of sets. He couldn’t figure out either of them.

  Gilgamesh continued on his way. He metasensed no other Crows, nor any Focuses, although he did metasense several Transforms. One of the sets of dross he found resolved itself into a conglomeration of several small sources, around a large older source of sludgy ick. He recognized the pattern as that of a Transform Clinic. Certainly worth a visit, even though it was within two miles of the other, unknown, dross.

  Night fell and Gilgamesh became more careful. City police wouldn’t be at all tolerant of an unwashed bum like him in any fine neighborhoods. The Transform Clinic turned out to be located at the edge of a Veterans’ Administration Medical Center, a sprawling expanse of hospitals, doctors’ offices and outpatient clinics. The other dross source, close now, gave Gilgamesh chills. The Clinic was an abyss of black sludge, deeper and fouler than anything he had metasensed before. There were Transforms in it, though he lost track of them if he didn’t pay attention to his metasense.

  Gilgamesh had no trouble getting to the edge of the Transform Clinic, where he found two dross patches safely hidden in the parking garage. The Clinic was a busy place, even at night, but no one noticed him. He hid himself behind a trashcan in the parking garage and sipped dross. Neither he nor Migdard had been able to figure out what caused these dross patches, though they had spent many hours whispering theories about them to each other. Two patches were enough to satisfy him for the day, and he left to seek shelter. Perhaps find some fresher garbage.

  “Young friend, this town is not safe for one like yourself,” a voice whispered, from far too close.