Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (8 page)

Tonya wanted to weep; the doctor had been right.  Now that she was part of Tonya’s household, Tonya could sense her juice level.  She had been due to become a Monster in six hours.  Tonya fixed that in an instant.

Transform Sickness didn’t normally behave like this.  The Shakes had come up with a nasty surprise for them.  Again.

“I think it’s time you unshackled this woman,” Tonya said, meeting the eyes of the doctor and the two policemen beside him.  This time, she wielded her charisma like a club.  The researchers didn’t know much about how Focus charisma worked, except they theorized it involved chemicals called hormones and pheromones.  All Tonya cared about was when she said ‘jump’ in that tone of voice, men did.

The men freed the woman from her shackles in moments.

“Hon,” Tonya said to the woman, “what’s your name?”

The woman sniffled and Danny lent her his handkerchief.  She blew her nose and dried her eyes.  “Delia.  Delia Vinote.  Alice
’s my sister.”  Delia looked like she was in her early twenties, sturdy and not at all like she had recently come down with a deadly disease. 

“Did you have a bad illness in the past month?” Tonya asked.

“No, no ma’am.  You a Focus, ma’am, like on the television?”  Delia looked Tonya over and her eyes widened.  “You’re the Focus on the TeeVee from Philly!”

Tonya nodded.  She was, alas, a minor local celebrity.  Anything to bring in extra money for the household.  Prejudice made jobs scarce for Transforms, and so everyone did what they could.  The local CBS network affiliate paid her a tiny salary to be their resident expert on Transform Sickness and Transforms.  Once or twice a month she had a few minutes on the local news.  The exposure generated an astonishing amount of hate mail and death threats, but the money helped and as a Focus she needed the bodyguards anyway.  She certainly wasn’t the first Focus who had been attacked in public.  Nor would she be the last.

“No sickness at all?” Tonya asked, eyes on Delia.  Tonya could use her years of experience and a Transform trick or two to tell truth from falsehood.

“No, that was Alice.  We thought she had the flu.  My hands didn’t start shakin
’ ’til after Pete and, and…” Delia glanced over at the remains in the clearing.  Her voice trailed off and her eyes teared up again.

Truth unfortunately.  This was bad.

A person could become a Transform in one of two ways.  The first, the normal way, was for a person to catch Transform Sickness.  He became sick, he transformed, and he either found a Focus or if the world was kind he died. 

The other way a person could transform was via an induced transformation.  On those rare occasions when a woman began a Focus transformation, several women around her would transform as well, with no sickness at all.  There were all sorts of good biological reasons for this, which weren’t relevant right now, because no Focus transformations had happened anywhere near here. 

Delia had made an induced transformation anyway.

Two years ago Lorraine Rizzari, a Focus colleague of Tonya’s, had made an impassioned presentation before the local chapter of the national Focus organization.  She asked the Focuses to be on the lookout for obscure cases of induced transformations.  Rizzari, then a PhD student, had come to believe atypical induced transformations were possible, and had been looking for evidence to back up her theory.  She had theorized that induced transformations were a significant and steadily more common source of transformations and would eventually outnumber those caused by disease. 

Right now, fewer than 4000 Transforms lived in the country.  Rizzari’s thesis was that within the next couple of decades, induced transformations would significantly increase and Transforms would number in the tens of millions.

Her presentation had been dismissed by the powers-that-be, who decided the sporadic reports of induced transformations were mistaken, attributable instead to people who didn’t recognize their symptoms when they caught Transform Sickness the usual way.

If Rizzari’s theory was correct, the implications were terrifying.  The mortality rate from the Shakes was over ninety percent.  Deaths would number in the millions.  Tonya felt like she was staring the Grim Reaper in the eyes.  It made her legs rubbery and stomach sour, for fear of the lives of future generations.

“Nobody else shows any signs?  Any other women around at all?”

“No, ma’am.  Just Alice’n me.”

Tonya took a deep breath.  “Well, Delia, you may not have been sick, but you’re a Transform anyway.”

“That’s what the doctor said.” Delia paused, wiping the tears from her face with the handkerchief.  “I’m scared, ma’am.  What’s gonna happen to me?”

Delia worried that she would become a Monster, Tonya knew.  It was a legitimate worry.  “I’ve made you one of my Transforms, Delia, and you’ll have to move to my household in Philadelphia.  You’ll live with a couple dozen other Transforms.  Your husband, too, if he wants.”  Big “if”.  Fewer things broke up a marriage faster than a transformation.  It had cost Tonya her own husband and cut off most contact with her children.

“What am I gonna do in a city?” Delia said.  “I’m just a country girl.  I cain’t support myself
there
.”

“You can cook, cain’t y
a?” Rhonda said.  Delia looked up, surprised at the homey sound.  Rhonda had slipped back into her native backwoods accent.  “We need all types, girl.  At least you’ll know how to work, not like some of the laggards I deal with.”

Delia nodded slowly.  “I can cook.”

Tonya grinned, heartened, and pushed the unnerving memories of Focus Rizzari into the back of her mind where she could worry about them later.

Footsteps clunked down the back steps of the house and Tonya saw the second local man from the house stalk through the mud towards her.  He was a strong man, with corded muscles, a hard face, and he wore anger like a cloud around him.  Tonya wondered what some fool of an official in the house had said to set him off.  He glared at the doctor and the officials, but when he saw Delia unchained, in Tonya’s arms, the glare faded into a smile, an unnatural expression on that hard face.

“Ma’am, my name’s Pete, and this here’s my wife, Delia.  You clear up this nonsense about her bein’ a Transform?”

“Pete,” Tonya said.  “Delia is a Transform.  I’ve had to make her a part of my household to save her life.”

“Oh,” Pete said.  “Damn.” He paused and studied Tonya for a while.  “You the Focus from Philly?” Tonya nodded.  Pete licked his lips.  “She’s gonna have to go live with you, right?”

“Yes.” 

“What about me?” Pete asked.  “Do I get a say in this?  Can I come visit her?”

“No, I’m sorry, but you don’t get a say in this.”  This was the hardest part, especially for a normal man dealing with a newly transformed wife.  “You’re more than welcome to join my household also, Mr. Vinote.  We have a great many jobs for strong men.”  Tonya didn’t use even a hint of her charisma as she spoke.  This decision he had to make on his own.  “What do you do?”

Pete laughed bitterly.  “Logging.  Not much call for that in Philly.”

Transform households needed two Transform women to support each Transform man.  From the days of Anne Marie Sieurs, the European Focus who discovered how to move juice from Transform women to Transform men, households always needed more men.  “Willing to learn to be a bodyguard?” Tonya said.

“Sure, ma’am, if your people’ll teach me.”

Tonya nodded.  Delia flew from Tonya’s embrace into her husband’s arms and beamed back at Tonya.  She smiled back, happy to see something work out well for once.

Delia’s joy wasn’t enough to banish the nagging fear from the back of Tonya’s mind.  “So this anomalous induced transformation was what brought you here today, Tommy?” she asked, on the way back to her car a few minutes later.  He normally delegated problems of this nature to others.

Tommy leaned over, close to Tonya’s ear.  “No, ma’am,” he said.  “There’s been an Arm transformation.  We have the new Arm in the St. Louis Transform Detention Center and we need your help with her.  Desperately.”

Tonya’s stomach clenched.  Arms were trouble…and Arms were one of Tonya’s official responsibilities.

---

Sweat dripped down Focus Tonya Biggioni’s back as she concentrated on the telephone conversation with the Arm, Stacy Keaton.  Tonya was the appointed (and supposedly elected) Northeast Region Representative on the Focus Council of the United Focuses of America and Stacy’s contact with the Focus Network.  As an important Focus she did enough business to merit an office, but it was small, hot and sticky, even with the door and window open.  She had spent the last day on the phone dealing with the problems this new Arm transformation had caused.

Even at her best, Keaton was nearly impossible to deal with and always stressful.

Today, Keaton was not at her best.

“We talked about this six months ago, Stacy,” Tonya said.  “You said you wanted to get hold of the next Arm who transformed and break her in, because you’d decided that there was no way for a young Arm on her own to survive.”

“The original idea, bitch, was that both of us would be involved,” Keaton said.  Something in Keaton’s voice when they were negotiating always reminded Tonya of wild animals.  Dangerous wild animals.

“The Council, in their inestimable wisdom, has forbidden me to get directly involved with this new Arm,” Tonya said.  “If I were to push that limit, you’re likely to find me out of a job on the Council and you being hunted down by Focuses.  They’re not going to object if you get involved, though.  I can provide indirect help, but that’s about it.”  If Stacy got herself killed, quite a few of the more senior Focuses would have a party – at least those who didn’t have the stomach to hire her, through Tonya, for intimidation and wet
work.  Over the last eighteen months Keaton had received quite a few significant payments from the wealthier Focuses for that sort of job.  Many of the payments Keaton received from the less wealthy Focuses were in trade or barter, in the form of surplus Transforms extracted from nearby Transform Clinics.  Tonya wondered, at times, what their tame FBI friends would think if they knew some of the Focuses they were helping and protecting had been pimping surplus Transforms to an Arm. 

Part of Tonya’s job was to make sure they didn’t find out, one of the many reasons her negotiations with Keaton were so stressful.

Tonya heard something crash and break on the other end of the line.  “Fucking first Focuses,” Keaton said, referring to the cadre of Focuses who’d arranged the breakout from Quarantine and who were still very important.  At least Keaton knew the politics involved.  “Is it because those shit-faced whores are afraid of exposure, because they’re afraid you’ll get to much fucking political power, or have they just lost their goddamned minds?” About the only time Keaton didn’t sprinkle her language with obscenities was when she was about to do serious physical harm to a person or needed something badly.  Or when she fell into a psychotic rage, in which case she rarely said a thing as she ripped people apart.

“They’re spooked by the new Arm’s attempted escape and the deaths of those two State Troopers,” Tonya said.  “What Suzie said was that this Arm is too dangerous to take a chance on.”  Focus Suzie Schrum, the eighth Focus to transform in the United States, ‘retired’ from ‘public’ Focus politics three years ago but served as Tonya’s political boss.  Tonya often felt she was little more than Suzie’s mouthpiece.  Only about a quarter of the time, though, as Suzie didn’t care about most issues, which made Tonya’s political post bearable.  It didn’t help that Tonya’s other major backer, Shirley Patterson, was the leader of the first Focuses.  Shirley’s patronage made Tonya’s dealings with the rest of the first Focuses politically tricky.

“Suzie’s a fucking loon,” Keaton said.  Tonya didn’t argue.  “Hancock panicked and the idiot Troopers shot each other.  The fact that some cops died and Hancock’s still walking is a plus in my book.  On the other hand, the scene around the St. Louis Detention Center is hot, crawling with State Police.  Some fucking turd-town Mayor’s raised hell or something.”

“Too high profile for you?”

“Look bitch, face facts.  That’s my face on the damned wanted posters in all the goddamned Post Offices, not yours.  I’ve got my own problems to deal with, and I can’t just waltz in and start training some motherfucking baby Arm without attracting the wrong sort of attention.”

Tonya wiped her face with a handkerchief and took a deep breath to steady herself.  “Be patient.  You know how this will play out.  The locals will quiet down once the FBI takes over security and I’ve already made sure that it’s our FBI people.”

“You got Bates?”

“Bates got me.”

“You got Focus Adkins?”

First Focus Wini Adkins indirectly ran the Midwest Region and thought of the St. Louis Detention Center as hers.  She had been Tonya’s Focus mentor early on; they were still friends.  Wini had hired Keaton, through Tonya, several times.  “No.  She doesn’t want to get involved.”

“Figures.  You got Zielinski?”

“He got himself.”  That damned doctor – Secret Agent Zielinski, her pet name for him – had already been in St. Louis when she
had found out about the new Arm.  He was nearly as annoying to work with as Keaton.