Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) (30 page)

By the time they reached Boston College, Carol had told him what Keaton had done to her.  She
had already started to heal, but from the reek of juice in Ed’s car, he suspected she would soon have juice trouble.  The VW van would likely reek of juice as well, once he finished with it.  If Lori was correct, one of her Crow friends would have the makings of an all-night party out of this.

Zielinski fought hard to keep from panicking.  He h
oused an achingly familiar feeling in his gut: the horrible moment when he realized one of his Arms would die, no matter what he did.  Arms were social predators, dammit!  There had to be a way for one Arm to settle the issue of dominance with another without having to kill her.  Only dumb luck had saved Carol’s life this time.  This recurring problem refused to go away.  Next time she would likely die.

He didn’t have even the slightest bit of advice to offer the Arms.
  The terrible familiar helplessness twisted inside him.

He led Carol down into the basement lab, Carol half leaning on him, half protectively clutching the three remaining bags of fast food. 
She commented on the obvious legality of this lab when they arrived and he keyed open the door.  Carol stopped cold, though, when she entered the lab, putting down her sacks of Big Macs and fries.  Interesting.  The lab had none of the ambience of a Transform Clinic, Detention Center or even a normal doctor’s office.  He doubted he would be able to explain to Carol what a gas chromatograph did, much less…

“This place is crawling with Transforms.  Normally.  Is one of them a Focus?”  Carol turned on him with wide eyes.  “I need juice.  Juice! 
Juice
!”  Her comment was only half an act.

Zielinski nodded at her question.  “Dr. Rizzari.”

“Oh, her.  You’ve told me about her, I think,” Carol said.  She closed her eyes and shook her head.  “I seem to be having memory problems.”

He pointed to a table in a far corner.  “Up you go.”  This was the fourth time she had told him she was having memory problems.

“Dammit, doc, this is an autopsy table!”

“The ambience of my current practice is somewhat lacking,” he said, and started the examination.

“It’s not healing right, Carol,” Zielinski said.  Juice count ninety-eight, not too low, but Carol had a history of complaining about low juice at a higher juice level than the other Arms.  Someday he would have to figure out why.  He found blood in her urine and inflammation around the abdominal suture, an actual nascent infection.  She heard voices, a recurrence of her Monster-juice induced schizophrenia.  He took careful notes, in case one of his suspicions later proved correct.

“What?”  She sat on the table and leaned, exhausted, against the wall behind her, with the remaining McDonald’s bags tucked protectively by her side.  She wore a sheet over her lap, but only because he insisted.  Her nudity didn’t bother the Arm at all.

“Your, um, dammit, I’m not a gynecologist.  Your vagina.”  He wasn’t embarrassed talking to a Focus about such things.  Why the problem now?  Oh, right.  Focus charisma to make it easier on the doc, or make the doc forget to check the privates if doing so embarrassed the Focus.

He was dead on his feet.  Hungry, too, though when he had asked for one of Carol’s dozen Big Macs, she had grabbed it away from him and said “Mine!”

Once the burgers had gone cold, Carol relented and gave Zielinski a Big Mac and fries.  He munched on cold French fries and slurped instant coffee.  Carol had been appalled at what passed as lab cuisine.  It wasn’t his fault Carol didn’t know about the connection between Bunsen burners and instant coffee.

Between the two of them, if they were lucky, they might count as a single functional human.

Carol, oblivious to normal decorum, stuck her right middle finger in her vagina and probed.  “Feels much smaller and shorter.  Tighter too.”  Her voice was hoarse.  Her throat damage hadn’t healed yet.

Zielinski turned red.  “At least one Focus reports that she heals her hymen back after every sexual encounter.  I’m not surprised this occurred after your Arm regeneration triggered in that area of your body.  The other…is the problem I was speaking about.  Your body regenerated it incorrectly.  I need to do some minor surgery.”

“Won’t it just heal back?” Carol said.  She paused, as Zielinski let show on his face exactly how embarrassed he was and what the only solution was to the problem.  “You’ve got to be kidding, doc.  I’m going to walk around with a dildo in there until it heals
?”

---

“I didn’t think I could get an infection,” Carol said, lying on the autopsy table now.  She spoke with her eyes closed and exerted willpower to stay awake.

“Surprise.  To become infected your healing needs to be overtaxed.  If I hadn’t told you about the infection, you would have never known.  Your infections aren’t life threatening.”  He hoped.  “On the other hand, I think I’d better re-suture your abdomen.  Some pain coming.”

Carol’s eyes opened again and she shook.

Zielinski met her gaze.  “Keaton.”

She nodded.

“Keaton, Keaton, Keaton…” Zielinski said, his comment an exclamation of dismay and disgust, as well as a psychological test.  Carol managed to cover up her well-deserved traumatic reactions.

“Doc, I can’t afford to be traumatized by Keaton,” she said, reading him better than he read her.  “I
am
going back to her lair.”

He started the re-suturing.  “Hmmm?  I’d think you’d want to be as far away from Keaton as possible.”

“I do want to be as far away from her as possible, but I can’t run.  Ow!  Fuck!  Can’t you be a little more careful?”

“Sorry.”

“Besides, aren’t you the one who said ‘never run from an Arm’?” Hancock said.

“Yes, but I was talking literally, not metaphorically.  I’m not sure my comment applies under these circumstances.”

“The comment applies because I made an agreement with her, this graduation test.  If I run now I’m breaking the agreement, which isn’t a real good path to long-term survival.  In any case, wouldn’t you rather I was in a cage somewhere, being fed frozen hamsters like a pet snake?  So you can study me?  Sell me to the FBI?”

More low juice memory problems.  “You know better, Carol.  From the first time we met, in the Detention Center, I’ve been working on getting you out on your own.”

Carol gritted her teeth for a moment as he tied up the last suture.  “Well, then, you’ve got some catch up work to do.”

“I do need juice, doc.  If I know I’m getting juice, I can heal faster.”

Zielinski
frowned.  “Your juice count is only ninety-eight.”

“My count feels lower, like I’m nearing withdrawal.  Look,” she said, and held out one of her hands.  It shook.  Zielinski stepped forward and shined a light into her eyes.  Dilated.  “Ow!” Carol said.  Light sensitive, too.

“You’re right.  Those are the reactions of an Arm at about ninety-two.”  He took notes and slapped her on her mostly healed right shoulder.  “Luckily for you, I found three Clinics in New England with…”

“That’s not going to help much, doc.  I’m having memory fugues every few minutes and I’m in no condition to drive.  I think I may be having low juice memory problems.”

Zielinski nodded and licked his lips.  “How about if I drive you to the Clinics?”

“That ought to be okay if I can get a little rest first,” Carol said.

Carol was half-asleep on the autopsy table, after padding it with ripped up cardboard computer paper boxes heisted from the department computer room.  Doctor’s orders: lie down, eat a ton, rest, let your body heal.

“What have you been working on for me, anyway?”  Carol said.

“Talking.”

“I can do that without your help, you know,” Carol said.

Zielinski sighed.  “Sadie, the Transform in Focus Rizzari’s household who’s their contact with the Crow who helped me survive the juice poisoning, arranged a phone conversation between me and the Crow.  From it, I can say the Crows don’t understand how their Transform capabilities work.  She says there are as many Crows as Focuses.  In case you were wondering.”

“Gad.”  Clearly, Carol had never given his hypothesis much weight.  “I really really didn’t want to know.”  Zielinski smiled.  “You stink.  Old moldy juice.  Not much, only a little.”

Zielinski stopped, the pen in his hand twitching once.  “I shouldn’t.  Is it uniform or localized?”

Carol sniffed the air, looked at him, sniffed again.  “Abdomen area.”

Goosepimples ran up his arms.  “The smell must be something left over from the assassination attempt.”  He needed to get that taken care of, perhaps via another trip to visit the Crow.

Carol didn’t return a comment and Zielinski wrote down some observations on Carol’s keen sense of smell while she rested.

“What ever happened to Ed, doc?”  Carol said, a few minutes later.  “Didn’t he drive me to Boston?  Or am I misremembering things?”

“I sent him off.”

Carol rested and thought. 
A piece of lab equipment chimed, finished with a blood toxicity test.  Zielinski shuffled over, checked the result, which was normal.  At least for an Arm.

“What do you mean, you sent him off?”

“He’d figured out who you and Keaton were,” Zielinski said.  “I gave him some money and told him to get out of the country.  Unless he’s stupider than he looks, he’s long gone already.  He knew the story about what happened the last time one of Keaton’s contacts tried to rat her out.”

“Dammit, Keaton’s going to shit bricks.”

“Don’t tell her he’s fled the country,” Zielinski said.  “Tell her he’s been disposed of.”

“Great.  Thanks,” Carol said.  A moment later, she fell asleep.

Four blocks from the warehouse I stopped, mouth dry, hands shaking, my mind filled with flashbacks of Keaton’s torture.  I had gotten two kills with Zielinski’s help and managed to drive my way back to Philadelphia in a stolen vehicle without falling apart.  Now, this.  I reminded myself of all the reasons I couldn’t run: I was hers, I would make an enemy for life if I ran, and she would hunt me down and torture me to death.  She was an Arm.

That’s what I would do.

I drove to the warehouse, parked the car in the loading dock ramp, went to the garage door and let myself in.  My heart pounded madly as I pulled up the door.

No Keaton.

The warehouse still stank.  The squat rack was still in its place.

I got mad.  I refused to fold up in fear.  So, I had been tortured.  So, I was afraid.  I would live and the fear would just have to get out of my way.  I refused to let the fact I relive
d each instant of the torture in flashbacks stop me.

I had work to do.

I metasensed Keaton on her way back to the warehouse a few minutes after six, while kneeling on a chair at the counter buttering bread for dinner.  I fell to the floor when the garage door opened and I stayed on the floor until she came into the kitchen.  I didn’t have to fake my fear today.

I couldn’t read her face.  I couldn’t tell if she was surprised to find me here.  I couldn’t tell anything at all.  She studied me for several long moments before she said “Strip.”

I stripped.  Keaton ordered me to lie down on the cold concrete floor; once I did so she slowly, painfully! checked over each inch of my body. 
I had been able to get rid of the damned dildo, thank God.  She poked at my wounds and kneaded my skin.  She pulled on tender spots and squeezed the broken bones.  I breathed deeply and steadily through it.  Pain.  I concentrated on ignoring the pain and did a better job than I had been able to do before.

Keaton’s actions bothered me.  She knew she hurt me a lot more than she needed to.  She didn’t care or, at least, she didn’t show she cared.  I didn’t see any demand for submission from her, either.  I didn’t understand what she wanted.  Perhaps she just wanted to cause pain.  Perhaps she wanted to evaluate my injuries.

Probably both, come to think of it.

My heart rate spiked when she took out her small torture knife, but I grimly forced my heart rate back down.  If she wanted my fear,
I would give it to her, but she hadn’t asked.  I refused to risk showing any reactions until I understood what she wanted.

She ran the knife along my stomach, and then, slowly and carefully, she cut Zielinski’s replacement stitches and took them out.

Her face never changed expression.  I still couldn’t read her.

I kept my heart steady and my signals down as she cut the stitches.  She laid the little knife down on my abdomen when she was done.

Then she took her belt off, slowly, and laid it along my throat.

“How’s your breathing?” she asked, watching me carefully with those cold eyes.

I gazed back with my own cold eyes.  I knew her ‘time to grovel’ signals.  She wasn’t giving them.  This was one of her tests.

I studied her and knew I was right.  She wanted to know what I was made of, whether she had broken me.  When I ran from her, before the torture session, she must have lost some of her respect for me.