Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (9 page)

“At least that’s something.  I’ll just wait, then,” Keaton said.  “I’ll check back next month.”

Tonya tapped a pencil on her desk and counted to ten, backwards.  Damn Keaton!  “You said that if you waited too long you weren’t sure you’d be able to reach a new Arm and get control of her.”  What Stacy had said was if the new Arm was anything like her, after a few months nobody would be able to tell her shit because she would be too full of herself.  Tonya sure wouldn’t disagree with
that
.

“You get me in then, Tonya.  You’re the devious Focus bitch.”

Tonya’s pencil snapped in her fingers.  She threw it across her desk and shook her head, looking over the roster of Network people involved in the Hancock situation.  Keaton may have be the most frightening human being Tonya had ever met, able to terrify her even in a telephone conversation, but the stress of dealing with her did keep Tonya on her toes.  It helped her think.

Tonya liked stress.  The stress often weighed heavily on her household, but that didn’t bother Tonya.  That’s what her household was for.  “I think I’ve got an idea,” Tonya said, after looking over her paperwork.

“Talk to the phone, bitch.”

Tonya told the Arm about her idea.

Dr.
Henry Zielinski: September 18, 1966

“Have a seat, Hank,” Special Agent in Charge Paul Gauthier said, snapping his eyes up at
Dr. Zielinski as he came into the room.  Gauthier went back to ladling sugar into his oversized coffee mug.

Dr.
Zielinski sat at the conference room table and passed up the doughnuts left from the last meeting he had attended six hours ago.  A moment later, Dr. Bentwyler sat down beside Zielinski, a pen clenched tightly in his teeth and a sketchpad in his hands.  Special Agent Tommy Bates already sat at the end of the table, the ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips.  He wore dark circles under his eyes from his travels of the past few days.

This quickly organized meeting had yanked
Dr. Zielinski out of his office with a mere five-minute’s notice.  Not that he had been working.  The Hancock case already had the bureaucratic paperwork piled high, but he had done enough of
that
for one day.  Instead, he had pushed the piles to the side and taken out his photos and slides.  His photography hobby was even defensible as part of his work on Transforms; it helped him spot the physical changes Focuses and Arms accumulated over time.  He had gotten academic papers published based on those photos.  Before he had started the paperwork, he had made a phone call to one of his Network contacts to fill them in on what was going on.  All normal routine.

The fact someone had flushed Gauthier out from under the floorboards before the shit hit the fan meant the FBI was more serious about this new Arm transformation than normal.  Paul Gauthier was the Special Agent in Charge for Transform Affairs.  He reported directly to the Assistant Director in charge of the FBI’s Washington headquarters, who reported directly to Director Hoover.  Gauthier’s younger brother was a Transform in Focus Elisabeth Holder’s household.  It gave Gauthier a more compassionate perspective on Transforms than most.

Perhaps there was some hope for the Hancock project, despite Dr. Zielinski’s worries.  He hated situations where he didn’t have full responsibility over a newly transformed Arm.  Not good for the Arm and not good for his career.

“What brings you here, Paul?” Zielinski asked as Gauthier looked up, ready to speak.

From long association with the FBI, Dr. Zielinski knew that unless he took control of the meeting he wouldn’t learn anything useful.  Gauthier frowned at Dr. Zielinski but answered his question anyway.  “It’s been awhile since I’ve worked with either you or Dr. Bentwyler, so I decided to touch base with the two of you before we really got going on this Hancock project.”  Gauthier took a long sip of coffee.  He was a tall man, just over six feet, athletic despite being in his early fifties.  He wore his gray-flecked red hair in a crew cut, and had been out in the sun recently, because his freckles were prominent.  Gauthier still drank coffee by the gallon, Dr. Zielinski noted, and his teeth were still coffee stained.  “So far, none of my peers or superiors in the FBI has shown any interest in Mrs. Hancock’s transformation.  On the other hand, my phone has been ringing off the hook with questions from various important Focuses, including the Network head.”  Focus Michelle Claunch, not one of Dr. Zielinski’s favorite people.  “There’s some disagreement among the Focuses as to whether we should help Mrs. Hancock or make sure she dies.”

Nods around the table.  The leading Focuses had changed their minds several times on the Arm issue, and the official position of the Focuses this year was to cultivate the Arms.  ‘They are our fellow sisters!  They could protect us.’  He hadn’t believed the Arms would be able to get along with the Focuses until he
had spent some time with the one Arm who’d survived, Stacy Keaton.  She had proven him and many others wrong, but her help didn’t keep a sizeable number of Focuses from agitating for Keaton’s death.

“You have a plan?” Zielinski asked.  Outside, the sun made the day bright, the sum total of what he could tell of the outside world through the barred windows.  If this place didn’t have air conditioning it would be unbearable.

“I have interests,” Gauthier said, as he looked Zielinski over.  “I’m counting on you for the plan, Hank.” Gauthier took another swig of coffee.  “Since the last time we worked together my main interest in Transforms has changed from placement of new Transforms to the Monster problem.”  Zielinski nodded.  After the ’64 elections, the Johnson Administration established a department within HEW to support the Transforms (at least with lip service) and to direct research on Transform Sickness (millions of dollars of pork barrel spending, often wasted due to needless duplication and unnecessary bureaucratic overhead).  For the last eighteen months Dr. Zielinski had been butting heads with the HEW, who thought they possessed all the answers and didn’t respect his expertise.  The FBI had once placed the new Transforms into Focus households due to a historical accident.  Not anymore.  Gauthier continued:  “I’ve given Tommy authorization to hire Mrs. Hancock to help us with the Monster Eradication Program.  We don’t like to publicize this, but some large sections of Federal land have gotten so Monster infested we’ve had to close them off to civilians.”

“I see,” Zielinski said.  He hadn’t realized the Monster problem was so bad.  “How are you proposing to handle the juice issue?” Arms were juice consumers who got their juice by killing Transforms and the public was understandably squeamish on the subject.

“The usual,” Gauthier said.  All Detention Centers had surplus Transforms, many who chose suicide as opposed to withdrawal or becoming a Monster.  Some of these people would go to Mrs. Hancock.  It was one thing, though, to provide her with surplus Transforms while she was confined as a ward of the state, another to provide her with surplus Transforms as an employee perk.  That would be unprecedented, and Dr. Zielinski couldn’t imagine the legal issues involved.  The public outcry wouldn’t be pretty, either.  “Unfortunately, as you well know, we can’t work out the details until we have a living Arm on board.  We’re going to be counting on you, Hank, to provide us the Arm.  Before we can train Mrs. Hancock to be a Monster hunter, she has to survive her initial transformation and stabilize.”

Dr.
Zielinski nodded.  It sounded like he might actually get the support he needed to keep Mrs. Hancock alive, which would give him a leg up on his own goals as well.  Any support, beyond the normal government ambivalence toward Arms, would be good. 

The history of government involvement with Transforms wasn’t promising; before their escape near the end of the Eisenhower administration, all Transforms had been locked up in Quarantine.  The Kennedy and Johnson administration had accepted the Transforms’ escape from Quarantine and implemented plans to integrate the surviving Transforms into local communities, in households led by Focuses.  This was fine for Transforms and Focuses but left a gaping policy hole concerning Arms.  What came next was anybody’s guess, except in the last presidential election the Republicans pledged to put all the Transforms back in Quarantine ‘to stop this deadly scourge in its tracks’.  Zielinski had always voted Republican, but hadn’t been able to force himself to vote in the ’64 elections.

He didn’t say that if this Arm was anything like the other two who had lasted more than a month, there wasn’t a chance in hell she would agree to hunt Monsters for a living.  Two Arms weren’t a large enough sample to be worth even a side comment, though.

“Although I have my own experiences to draw on regarding Arm transformations, for the Hancock project to succeed we’re going to need the records on Stacy Keaton’s transformation and adjustment period,”
Dr. Zielinski said.  He had dealt with Stacy Keaton in a few terrifying episodes these past two years, but he hadn’t been able to convince the touchy Arm to reminisce.  She was the one Arm he hadn’t been involved with during her initial transformation, and it irked him that she was the only one who survived her transformation and succeeded as an independent Arm.  Unfortunately, as a one-woman crime wave, she had soured the public and medical community opinion on Arms, enough to prompt the local officials in Missouri to agitate for Mrs. Hancock’s immediate execution.

“I wouldn’t mind getting hold of those records myself, but they’re just not available,” Bates said.  Gauthier nodded.

“According to Director Hoover, that episode officially didn’t happen,” Gauthier said.  “As you know, we weren’t involved in the Stacy Keaton affair.”  “We” being the Network-affiliated pro-Transform FBI Agents.  “All I know is that the Assistant Directors involved were asked to retire afterward and that the records were sealed.”  Gauthier’s explanation fit Dr. Zielinski’s knowledge on the subject.  Keaton had been abused while she had been in the custody of the FBI, likely driven psychotic, and after her escape, she became a criminal to survive, a profound embarrassment to the FBI. 

Dr.
Bentwyler looked up, startled.  While the rest of them had been jawing, Dr. Bentwyler had been sketching a picture of Mrs. Hancock from memory, Dr. Bentwyler’s equivalent of Dr. Zielinski’s own photography hobby.  “You were involved with other Arm transformations besides Rose Desmond?” he asked Dr. Zielinski.  The Rose Desmond affair had made the national media.  Everyone knew about Dr. Zielinski’s involvement with Rose Desmond. 

Dr.
Bentwyler’s official title was Staff Psychologist of the St. Louis Detention Center, but his main purpose here was to act as the Focus Network’s spy.  Dr. Zielinski suspected Bentwyler reported directly to Focus Claunch and didn’t envy him one bit.  Dr. Zielinski’s Network ‘boss’, Focus Tonya Biggioni, was difficult to deal with, but even she was more reasonable than Focus Claunch.

Dr.
Zielinski nodded.  “I consulted on the Julie Bethune case, and after Desmond, on the Francine Sarles case.  The last Arm who transformed, Elsie Conger, was also in my care.  You wouldn’t have heard anything about Conger.  She didn’t even survive to her first juice draw due to severe problems with her initial transformation.”  Her death had been unavoidable.  The medical community was slowly putting together a set of guidelines on what to do and what not to do with a new Arm.  What not to do was a longer list and he had written most of it.

Dr.
Zielinski occasionally wondered if he had made a horrible mistake when he turned his attention to Arms.  He had been in medical school during World War II, married young, and in his early career he had been a surgeon.  During the Korean War he had been recognized as an exceptional surgeon.  After Korea he had moved into academia, taught in several East Coast teaching hospitals, and gained his first academic kudos doing research on improved surgical techniques.  By the time he wrangled a plum teaching position at Harvard Medical in ’57, he had already become interested in the epidemiology of Transform Sickness, which became his second successful research specialization.  He hadn’t fully specialized in Transform Sickness until after the Quarantine ended and the government started letting new Focuses establish Focus households in the general population.  By then, he had already done enough innovative research on Transform Sickness to be considered one of the top six experts in the field.

There was very little he hadn’t done during the peak of his career.  He had put his minor prestige on the line to help those new Focuses get their feet on the ground, and it had helped his career as much as it had helped the Focuses and their households.  Since its beginning he had been involved with the Focus Network, the sub-rosa support group the Focuses had put together to help them survive.  Paul Gauthier and Tommy Bates had been involved just as long.

As a new department head at Harvard Medical, he had turned to the knotty question of Armenigar’s Syndrome.  At first, the Focuses had been sympathetic toward Arms, willing to take all sorts of risks to help them.  The Arms were failed Focuses, right?  It was soppy humanitarianism, and he warned the Focuses from the start the Arms were likely something entirely different from what they expected.  He had used his reputation to gain full control over the third Arm, Rose Desmond, right after she transformed.  Rose had lived beyond her initial transformation and adjustment period, and he thought he had mastered the subject and secured his reputation forever. 

Then, disaster struck.  Early in Rose’s seventh month as an Arm,
Dr. Zielinski and Rose tried an experiment.  It failed spectacularly.  Rose went berserk, killed people, wounded him, and in the end, was shot dead.  The media exposed the method he had used to provide Desmond with juice, volunteer unclaimed Transforms from the Transform Clinics, the same as they were going to use to keep Mrs. Hancock alive.  The media moralists had drowned out his supporters and the Dean succumbed to pressure and fired him as department head.  Rose’s death had broken his heart, but he had long since recovered his dispassion.