The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Five (8 page)

Keaton feared worse.  She feared enslavement.  Torture.  Something else, something far worse.  The fear ate at the Arm, but unlike with a Focus, the fear edged into the dark corners of the Arm’s mind, priming her
to
explode in suicidal fury.

Tonya no longer had enough leverage – with Zielinski alive – to enslave the Arm. 
Tonya had counted on her guilt, her psychological weakness over her obvious failure of control, to open those cracks in Keaton’s mental defenses for Tonya’s charisma to slip through.  Insufficient death, insufficient weakness. 
How the hell had Zielinski survived, damn it? 
“Yes.  You’ll
need
to keep in contact with me.  Regular contact.”  Enough regular contact to allow me to establish some level of
ongoing
charismatic control over you.
  “We need to be allies.  We’re your sisters; you can help us, and we can help you.  You must be a part of our family.”  Or I’ll put a .777 through your goddamned skull, Tonya didn’t say.

Keaton heard quite well what Tonya didn’t say.

“I’ve seen your Focuses and their pathetic households,” Keaton said, the tears gone from her still raspy voice.  “I can make better money robbing Boy Scouts and gas stations.”

Tonya licked her lips.  “We won’t be paying in money.  We’ll be paying with information, access to other secretive specialists like Dr. Z
ie
linski, and access to Transform-friendly accountants and lawyers.”  Tonya paused, taking in the Arm’s reactions, readying the kicker.  “In addition, we’ll be able to arrange for access to clinic Transforms with no hope of finding Focuses.”

“Fuck,” Keaton said.  “Juice?”  She shied away from Tonya.  Juice was a powerful lever on the Arm, more than even with a household Transform, Tonya realized.  “I’d end up
as
your slave.”

“Today, perhaps, if I pushed it,” Tonya
lied
.  “I don’t want you as a slave, though.” 
Couldn’t get her as a slave, not today.  Over the long term,
maybe things would be different. 
Suzie
wanted her as a slave
. 
The Council did
, as well. 
“Too much danger to my household.  Having you as an ally would serve me much better.”

“You’re a fool.”

Dr. Zielinski.  His voice was a bare croak.

“Hank!”  Tonya rushed to his side, keeping an eye on the Arm.  “How bad off are you?”

He looked over at Keaton, fear in his eyes.  “Tell her,” Keaton said, voice low and stony.  “She has to learn about the danger.”

Tonya’s eyes flickered from one to the other.  She had no idea what either of them meant, or what motivated this.

“She thought I
might be
behind the attack on her, or kn
o
w who was.”  Dr. Zielinski closed his eyes.  “She made sure I wasn’t
, and didn’t know who
.”

Torture.  “When she decided I
didn’t
have the information she wanted
, she promised to pay me for my time and effort.”  Time and effort.  Hell, there’s a euphemism for torture I’ve never heard before, Tonya thought.  Dr. Zielinski
pulled his torn shirt aside
and showed Tonya some bandages.  Keaton had skinned pieces of his arms, one patch on his right arm and two on
his
left, and dislocated his left shoulder.  “Then I tried to operate on her leg.”

Dr. Zielinski looked away.

“She suffered a psychotic break,” Dr. Zielinski said.  His hold on his own sanity was weak, amid a boiling cauldron of anger.  He couldn’t even speak Keaton’s name aloud.  “Dr. Mitchell didn’t survive.”  Oh, of course.  Dr. Zielinski’s replacement for Dr. Kepke.  None of his assistants lasted long.  None of them had his cast iron gorge or his knack for survival.  “I’m not sure how I survived, or what actually happened, but there’s something wrong with my legs, and I feel like I’m
about to go into
shock.”

“What do you mean by psychotic break?” Tonya said.  The intestin
al
decorati
o
n
s
, perhaps?

Keaton put her head in her hands and sobbed.  Radiating fear of herself, and perhaps a tiny bit of remorse.

“She loses herself.  She can’t talk.  She becomes a true monster, in all senses of the word. 
She ate human flesh.
”

Right now, the Arm wasn’t very Arm-like, destroyed by her own actions and Tonya’s machinations.  Destroyed enough to enslave, as the Council wanted?

Eating human flesh wasn’t enough
of a
hold.  Not when you were already a mass murderer.

“I don’t remember,” Keaton said, a whisper.  “I don’t remember a thing.  When I came back to myself, I had the taste of human flesh in my mouth, and a big memory gap.  I’ve had these memory gaps before, but, before this, I never knew what happened in them.”

Time to consolidate the victory.  “Okay, Hank, how are we going to do this?  Is there any way for you to do the surgery if I hold K…her down?”

Dr. Zielinski got up on his good elbow, wobbly.  “Bandage up my legs.”  No kindness, just a preemptory order.

Keaton moved before Tonya did; the Arm’s hands shook, but she walked just fine on one leg.  Well, hopped.  Her eyes and Dr. Zielinski’s eyes met, and she moved ever so slowly to the bed, where she slowly ripped an already
shredded
sheet into new bandages.

Very very strange, as if the two of them had snake-charmed each other. 
B
oth barely
kept grip
of a towering murderous rage, Dr. Zielinski toward the Arm, Keaton toward her enemies, the ones who
had
ambushed her.  Focus Julius’s thugs.  Oh, and all other human life, Tonya suspected.  All it would take to push Keaton into another psychotic break would be
the backfire of a
nearby car.

Focus Council dictates or not, Tonya made ready
to
take Keaton’s juice from her and end
the Arm’s
miserable life.  The Arm didn’t have much juice to take.  The juice weapon was too slow to keep a sane Keaton in line, but against a mindless psycho?  Tonya doubted she would have any problems.

The Arm wrapped up Dr. Zielinski’s legs
, showing care and affection she hadn’t know
n
the Arm
possessed
.  “Some help here, please,” she said.  “I need a splint for the Doc’s leg.”  Tonya looked around, found a dining room chair to sacrifice, and created a splint the hard way.  “He still needs a hospital,” Keaton said, after immobilizing his left leg.

Tonya nodded.  She turned to Dr. Zielinski, caught his eyes and ordered him to stay awake.  “Amputation?”
  Of what was left of the Arm’s ruined leg.

Dr. Zielinski nodded.  “My kit’s in the other room, or what’s left of it.” 

Tonya gathered supplies.  If Arms were even close to as tough as Focuses, and threw off diseases anywhere near as well, the condition of Dr. Zielinski’s tools wouldn’t matter.

“It wasn’t me,” Keaton said.  Tonya glanced back; Keaton
sat on the bed in the puddle of blood and wrapped
her arm around Dr. Zielinski, trying to comfort him.  Dr. Zielinski stared straight ahead, shivering, emotions locked down tight.  “They…they…they did something to me.  The FBI.  When they had me as their prisoner and slave.  They didn’t get me juice soon enough, once.  Even before I passed out, it was worse than anything I’d ever experienced, or experienced after.  I…I can’t even face
the memories
.  I don’t even know what it’s fucking called.”

Dr. Zielinski’s face softened.  “Withdrawal.  Same as for male Transforms.  You came back from this?”  After a couple of minutes or so, male Transforms in juice withdrawal
took life altering damage; after ten or twenty minutes, they
were as good as dead, unrecoverable, even if you gave them back their juice.
  Mindless vegetables.

“Two hours,” Keaton said.  Tonya’s breath caught.  “So they said.  I don’t remember the depths of, of…”  She let her voice trail off.  “I wasn’t myself until they got me juice the second time.  But ever since then…it happens.  Sometimes.  The same state.  The memory loss.
  The absurd violence.
”

Hell.  Tonya turned away.  A Major Transform in juice withdrawal?  She had seen Transforms in withdrawal, and nothing she knew of compared to the horror of a male Transform deep in withdrawal.  Satanic horror.  Focuses couldn’t go into withdrawal, not real
ly
.  They could drive themselves to the edge of withdrawal, but Focuses were juice producers.  As soon as they knocked themselves out doing so, the juice naturally came back.

Arms, as juice consumers, were as vulnerable as male Transforms to withdrawal.

Now there was a lever.

Even contemplating using such a lever made Tonya’s stomach clench and her soul ache.

Dr. Zielinski tried to smile, his natural curiosity and empathy warring with his recent eyewitness account of what a mature Major Transform could do in a juice-induced psycho episode.  “Do you want to make
amends
for what you’ve done?”

“Yes, Hank.  You…” she paused “don’t take this wrong, but you’re
my
doctor.  I screwed up.  I have to own up to my screw-up and make recompense.”

Tonya grabbed a set of clamps and a bone saw, slowly, very interested in th
e
exchange.  This was Arm politics at work.  Keaton wasn’t operating much above her basic instincts; her heart spoke, here.  No, Arm’s weren’t Focuses, but they weren’t purely beasts, either.

Most normal humans would have been ducking the consequences of their actions so soon after the event.  Papering them over, denying them, making excuses for them.  Hell, she had seen Focuses do the same.  Arms were tougher, more rational, in
some
screwy fashion.

Another lever, and one usable for the mutual benefit of both the Arms and those they dealt with.

“I want the story, as best you remember.  I want samples, uh, some blood you shed during the episode.  Some from afterwards.  I want…”

“Fuck.  I might as well surrender to the FBI.”  She smiled.  “I
will
give you anything you want of that nature, as long as you keep your results secret.”

“If I can use the results on the next baby Arm I run into, it’s a deal.”  Dr. Zielinski held out a trembling hand.  Keaton took it, and shook.

Tonya
felt the juice quiver, shook her head,
strolled back in and grabbed Keaton’s eyes.

“Stacy, lie down and don’t move.”

Keaton did so, as Tonya ordered.  Tonya straightened out the Arm to
a position
approaching comfortable, her ruined leg barely hanging off the end of the bed.  Keaton was heavier than she looked.

“Dammit, Tonya, if you could do that, why didn’t you do so to start with?” Dr. Zielinski said.

“Tell me, what are the limits of Focus charisma use on Arms, Hank?”

He didn’t bother saying ‘How the
hell
should I know’, and he didn’t have to.  “I treated her as a Focus, and, so far, it’s working.  I’m helping her cooperate.  If we try anything other than what we’re supposed to be doing…”

Keaton, still conscious, grinned and twitched her mostly ruined right hand.

“Exactly,” Tonya said.  She went over, took Stacy’s
left
hand and stared into her eyes.  “You will feel no pain.  Your leg is already gone.  It will regenerate.  You feel no pain…”

Dr. Zielinski did his thing without any Arm interference, though she and Keaton ended up being the ones to bandage up the Arm’s leg stump after
Tonya’s
charismatic order to keep Dr. Zielinski awake failed, due to his own injuries.
  She understood Keaton now, at the gut level.  She was a living war machine, deadly to her enemies, and willing to bargain with her friends.  In some screwy way, she and the Arm had bonded, something Tonya never expected would
or could
happen.

“Here’s an address for a safe house you can use in Philadelphia.  I’ll arrange for Clinic transfers…” for juice.

“I’m going to owe you bitches big time, aren’t I?”  Keaton was up and hopping.  Having her stump bandaged up gave her far too much energy for Tonya’s taste.

Tonya nodded
and sat on the bloody bed, exhausted herself
.  She made sure Dr. Zielinski wasn’t awake.  He was, but only barely.  She told him to go back to sleep, and he did.  “Let me tell you about a problem the Council is having with a rebel Focus faction.  We thought Focus Martine DeYoung’s ‘New Transform International’ rebel group was just espousing intra-household Transform rights.  What we didn’t know was they were also espousing, in their words, ‘freeing the Focuses from enslavement by the Focus Council and Network’, and had secretly joined up with Focus Mary Beth Julius and her ‘Lucy Peoples Fund’, dedicated to the eradication of Arms and all other Major Transforms who aren’t Focuses.  Stacy, we’re going to be hiring you to be, in the worst case, on the front lines of an intra-Focus civil war.”