Epilog
Karen: “How dare you! A Transform woman! If you’re going to be deluded, at least make me a Focus in your delusions.” (fluff hair)
Luke:“I know your secrets. You can’t hide them from me. Those trips out at night, your strange hours, the knives you carry. Level with me, Karen. Please, for the sake of our love and our friendship!”
Karen:(laughter, then spoken in a much deeper voice) “If that is what you want, then I shall oblige! You are right – I am a Transform. But I’m no ordinary Transform. I’m an Arm!”
Luke: “No! It can’t be. No. I won’t…”
Karen: (grabs Luke and begins to suck at his neck – then looks up) “It is the last of your many mistakes.”
(Cut to: darkness)
[from “Nights of our Passion” (daytime soap opera premiering January of 1967)]
Carol Hancock: November 15, 1966
“Clumsy idiot,” Keaton said, and took a good look at me. Once she had driven us away from the rail yard and warehouses, she slowed down. “Makeup, freshly painted fingernails and toenails? What the fuck’s going on in your head, Hancock? You’re an Arm, dammit. You smell like chocolate éclairs.”
“It was part of my escape,” I said. I caught her sudden anger, “Ma’am.”
I sat, tense as all get out, and waited for the other shoe to drop. Nothing. Keaton drove, the beat-up car rattled and shook, and I slowly calmed down. She didn’t want to talk to me.
I studied her, anxious for any sign of what she expected me to do. Except for the hair and the fake moustache, she looked exactly like Larry Borton. She hadn’t clouded my mind with her Larry masquerade and her supernatural Arm tricks. Nope. All those muscles were real.
Keaton had curly dark brown hair, shoulder length, almost certainly a wig. Her gaunt face was recognizably female. Her eyes were blue. Her skin had the same perfect smoothness mine now had. Above the neck, she might have even been attractive if she wasn’t so gaunt.
Below the neck? She wore a sleeveless dress with a matching jacket, and she had taken the jacket off and draped it over the back of the seat. Underneath her female exterior was Larry’s perfect body-builder body. Shoulders like footballs, biceps bigger than my calves, forearms a mass of thick cables of muscle, wrists as thick as both of mine put together. Even her hands were heavy with muscles. The muscles continued from her shoulders under the narrow sleeve of her dress and on to her chest. They bulged out at the top of the dress and sloped up from her shoulders to her neck. Below her dress, I made out her massive thighs, calves, and hamstrings, all larger than most men had.
Keaton had no layer of fat over her muscles to smooth them out and hide them below her paper-thin layer of skin, giving her the appearance of an anatomy model someone had covered with flesh-colored spray paint. The fine details of her near shoulder, with its complex network of interconnecting musculature, amazed me. As Larry, she had taught me the names of those muscles, and on her, I recognized every one of them: the anterior deltoids, the posterior deltoids, the medial deltoids…and the deep gaps between them. And where each muscle attached to the bone. And where the biceps and triceps muscles started and terminated. Her pectoral muscles in her chest bulged, but the gap that ran down the center of her chest was as big as a canyon.
I found it insanely incongruous to see such a male caricature of a body wearing a dress.
She wore my future shape. If I survived.
As Keaton drove the car, I watched her muscles move. They flexed and extended, and slid over the bone in a pattern both complex and engrossing. Helpless and riveted, I studied in horrified fascination.
Keaton noticed my reaction. I could swear I amused her.
“Ma’am,” I whispered, desirously polite. “Thank you for coming.”
“You and your friends paid an expensive price to get me here,” she said. Different voice, harsh, one I hadn’t heard before. Angry. “You’re mine, now. Why?”
“Ma’am, I want you to train me,” I said.
She growled and tensed. I hadn’t given her the answer she wanted. The front seat shrank around me as my stomach clenched in sudden terror. Keaton was a puma, a tiger, a lioness.
“I can help you,” I said. “I’ll do whatever you want me to. You’ll have another Arm…”
She moved her head to the side and back, a tiny motion. She didn’t want my help as an Arm. Dammit. I needed her to train me how to hunt, how to prosper as an Arm. Save my life. I would do whatever it took to get me that information.
She hadn’t yet decided to help me. Hell, she hadn’t yet decided to let me live.
“I’ll do anything you want me to.”
Keaton didn’t respond. I didn’t understand her silence any more than I understood her question.
“I won’t get involved in anything you don’t want me to, ma’am. I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me what you want from me.”
Keaton twirled the steering wheel of the car with one finger and whipped us around a corner. She didn’t respond, and more silence commenced, which left me with a very bad feeling I’d failed some sort of test.
Not a good start. I had this strange giddy desire to kiss Keaton’s feet and humble myself to her. Only I was too terrified to move. Given her reaction to my earlier thanks, I couldn’t risk any such demonstration of gratitude.
“Right now, cunt, I want to know how you escaped,” she said, several blocks later.
I obeyed without a thought, despite a flinch at the insult. I told her the story of my escape from the start, where I started to befriend the staff, to the end, where I moved everyone around on my mental chessboard and found a clear path out without having to fight.
Then I told her about McIntyre’s surprise and the fight I hadn’t expected. Her anger grew.
“You’re useless! You’re no Arm,” Keaton said, eyes straight ahead. “With the FBI gone for the evening, you just should have taken my knife, slaughtered them all and fucking walked out. Without your goddamned parlor tricks. You should have at least made sure McIntyre was fucking dead.”
She turned to me and snarled the last. I backed away from her, up against the passenger side door, and froze in complete terror.
She shook her head in disgust and went back to driving.
I hadn’t met any of Keaton’s expectations. I had bought myself another chance to gain her help and here I went, messing up again. Despite the work I put into my escape, she would kill me for my stupidity.
Now I understood what her ‘You’re mine. Why?’ question had been about. I hadn’t met her expectations when she first offered to help as herself. “Ma’am, I apologize for not going with you when you had to leave the Detention Center,” I said. “I was a fool. You were right. I’ve learned my lesson.” Sweat poured out of me in earnest now.
Keaton didn’t answer. My apology came too late.
My heart skipped a beat, and another. Her anger filled the car. I smelled my death on her.
“How can I make this up to you, ma’am?” I said. “I’ll do anything you want me to.”
Keaton didn’t answer and I waited, sweaty and terrified. She didn’t think like me or anyone else I’d ever met. I didn’t understand her. After my success in the Detention Center making friends and identifying enemies, I expected I would be able to read her much better than this. She was an unknown and unknowable abyss, opaque and terrifying.
“Anything?” she asked, her anger no longer palpable. Keaton licked her lips and gave me a strange hungry sideways stare. She had made a decision, but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell if she had accepted me.
“Yes, ma’am. Anything.” My life as an Arm, my soul, sold to the Antichrist in exchange for survival. Keaton turned away, a contemptuous dismissal of my secret thoughts.
“Do you have anything you can do? I don’t need someone to organize ladies’ church socials and I certainly don’t need someone to organize fattening
cocktail parties for me.”
“I can sew.” My offer sounded ridiculous, even to me. “I can cook and clean house.” That sounded worse. “Um...” I tried to think. She already knew everything I could do. I was a housewife, dammit. If my untrained potential as an Arm wasn’t good enough, I had nothing.
“You can cook?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, confident. I could have cooked everything at that party. Mine would have been better, too.
Keaton turned to study me, again. She stared at me for a long time. I found it hard to believe she cared whether I could cook or not. It seemed so small. Keaton paused for long seconds before she spoke. “You’ll obey me absolutely, do anything I ask of you. The only way you get away from me is if I say you’re done, or you die.” She smiled, and I finally realized she had accepted me. “I’m going to enjoy hurting you. You will not complain.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Will you teach me to survive, ma’am?” I would do it all in exchange for the training.
Keaton studied the traffic ahead and shrugged her shoulders, a small, barely visible, motion. “I think there’s a decent possibility I can teach you to survive, even for an Arm as pathetic as you are. My god! Chocolate éclairs!”
She held my life in her hands. I wanted to live. I so badly wanted to live. I would drown her in chocolate éclairs.
“Ma’am, what is an Arm? What am I?” The longer I lived as an Arm, the less I understood. Keaton knew the answer. I read the answer in her confidence.
Keaton laughed. “That’s what you think this is all about, dipshit? Academic questions even a fool should know to leave to the highbrow types like Zielinski? I don’t fucking care what an Arm is as long as I can find us a way to survive.”
Her answer to my question, her understanding of the purpose of the Arm: survival. I didn’t believe her answer, but I didn’t say anything.
Survival.
And she had said ‘us’.
“Thank you, ma’am.” I would take survival in a heartbeat.
A quick glare from her pinned me back against the car door again. After she turned away, my mind went back to work. Keaton accepted me as a student but she still threatened my life.
To learn to survive as an Arm, I would need to learn to survive Keaton.
Once We Were Human Page 14
