The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Three (4 page)

No matter, he decided
.  T
he tainted juice
would do
him in first. 
He crawled back to his office,
the blurry auras strengthening
. 
A
roaring noise
grew in his
ears,
trying to drown everything out.
 
His mouth was now wooden and dry, his
nose fully clogged.  Sweat poured off of him
as he crawled, leaving
handprints on the floor.

I should have already died, he thought. 
Pretty good for a fifty-year-old MD.

When he reached his desk, he
pulled on
the wire to drop his phone to the floor.  He dialed the first three numbers of
his home phone
, and
realized Keaton’s induced phone
willies
had vanished
.  He stopped and put his finger
on the buttons and got the dial tone back.  “’ve got a better place to call,” he
said,
and
dialed Philadelphia.

“It’s the middle of the night, Hank. 
This had better be important – did you finally find Keaton or Hancock for me?”
Biggioni said.

His thoughts swam. 
Finding
Keaton was
one of his assigned tasks.  “Ahhurrghhh, no.  I’m
in big trouble.  Attackers injected me with juice.”

He
made out some
rustling and thumping
on the other end of the phone line,
and
Tonya said something about trouble, but he couldn’t make
it out.  He faded.

“You’ll have to speak up,” he said. 
“I can’t hear very well.”

“Zielinski?” She had to be shouting
;
the roaring in his ears continued to grow louder
.  “Pay
attention!”

Suddenly, h
is hearing cleared
up
.  “Yes.  I’m here.  Injected with juice.”  Had to be her
charisma,
a decent trick over a long-distance
phone
call
.

“Damn!”  Pause.  “What can I do to
help?  How much danger are you in?”

“I don’t know.  I’ve read that the
Stasi,” the East German secret police, “inject victims with juice to torture
them.  Some die quickly.  Others turn into Monsters and die slowly.  Some get
Transform Sickness.  That’s all I know.”

“I can’t get to you,” Tonya said. 
“Can
you get to us?”

“I don’t think so.  I can barely
crawl, and I’m not sure how long I’m going to be able to do even that much.”

“Damn.  Damn.  Damn!”  She paused and
said something to someone else on the other end of the connection.  “What about
your colleague, Dr. Sellstrom?”

“Pete’s in California, attending a
conference.”

Tonya
read
down
some sort of list
, he guessed
.  “Dr. Kochanek?”

“New York City.”  Dr. Zielinski
spasmed and dry heaved for a moment.  “None of my trusted colleagues are
around.  Too much family business this close to Christmas.”
 He paused. 
“Where do you have Dr. Kepke stashed?”

Tonya muttered something, perhaps obscene.  “You’re not
supposed to know about him,” she said.  Dr. Kepke was an old colleague of his,
who had supposedly quit dealing with Transforms during his residency.  He knew
otherwise.  “He’s working on a project for me in the CDC’s Transform lab in
Virginia.”

Too far away, as well.

A
long pause
followed
.  “How about Focus Rizzari?” Tonya
said
. 
“Can you get to her?”

“We’ve always met in neutral
locations,” he said.  “I don’t…”  He paused to collect his thoughts.  “I don’t
know where her household is, or any of her household’s phone numbers.  Just her
phone number at Boston College.”

“She hasn’t shown you her household? 
You’ve got to see it, Hank.  It’s a zoo.  You
woul
d l
ove
it.”

“I haven’t earned her trust, but I do
thank you for the introduction,” Hank said.

“I didn’t arrange that contact,
Hank.” 
Frosty.
  Had Tonya been the one who made sure
he and
Focus
Rizzari never made contact before?  “Flo
Ackermann
did
.”  Flo was his most
frequent
Focus contact. 
As Region treasurer, she counted as
politically well connected,
another of the regional Network
leaders,
but
lower ranking than Tonya
and Focus
Rizzari
. 
Unfortunately, Flo was
too
squeamish
about
the reality of life as a Transform. 
If he called her about something like this, she
woul
d
panic.

He suspected
Tonya and Focus Rizzari
didn’t get along. 
He suspected Focus power games,
since
Rizzari was the Region VP and Tonya was the Region Council Rep.  He hoped that
the rumors of Tonya’s organized crime connections weren’t true.  Although he
knew it was unfair of him to jump to this sort of conclusion, his first guess
was that if someone named Biggioni was having problems with someone named
Rizzari, there might be some organized crime problems in the stew pot, as
well.  Though weren’t the Irish in charge of Boston’s mobsters?

Damn.  I
’
m not
thinking straight, he thought.  Not able to keep focused.  Tonya said
something, and he missed it, despite her strange charisma trick.

“Help!  I think I’m
passing
out, Tonya!”

“Is this your office or home phone,
Hank?”

“Office.”

“I’ll have Rizzari call you. 
Immediately.”

The phone went dead.  He hung up,
waited,
and
perhaps blacked out for a few moments,
because it seemed
like
the phone rang immediately.

“Dr. Zielinski speaking,” he answered,
unthinking.

He could not
make out any words
in response
.

“I can’t hear.  Scream.”

“I’m on my way,” he thought he heard a
voice say.

---

 “Probation?” Dr. Zielinski asked.  Opposite his office
desk at Harvard Medical, his lawyer, Mr. O’Donnelly, nodded.  Hank’s gray hair
came loose from where he combed it to fall across his narrow forehead.  “You
mean I need to plead guilty?”  The damned FBI tried to kill him, and after they
failed they had arrested him on ridiculous moral charges.  Among other things.

Dr. Zielinski’s office was far less sterile than Dr. Josephs’. 
Diplomas, awards, and magazine clippings covered his walls.  A leather cover
surrounded the desk pad, and an elegant wooden stand held the pens Glory had
given him one Christmas many years ago, in happier times.  A letter opener sat
on top of the papers held in his carved wooden outbox.  Behind him hung
pictures of every Arm he had worked with.  Five pictures, because he couldn’t
admit to Stacy Keaton.

“Actually, ‘no contest’,” O’Donnelly said.  “I’ve got it
all worked out with the judge and prosecutor.”  O’Donnelly was a youngster,
barely thirty, but sharp and aggressive.  He cost, but Dr. Zielinski was
willing to pay for brains, and an infinite supply of energy.

Dr. Zielinski had spent only one night in jail before O’Donnelly
bailed him out.  The punks and hoods he shared the city jail cell with were
enough to convince Dr. Zielinski of his unsuitability for jail.

“What about my medical license?”

“Consider it gone,” O’Donnelly said.  He sat on the edge
of his chair, too energetic to relax.  He made Dr. Zielinski feel old.  “You
should feel lucky the FBI didn’t bring up any federal charges.  I think they’re
waiting to see if you beat the Massachusetts charges.”

“My reputation?”

“It could be worse,” O’Donnelly said.  “Trust me, you
don’t want the publicity of a trial on these asinine sodomy charges if we want
to have any chance at all of retaining your medical license, or if that fails,
getting your medical license back later.”

Ever since the start of the Hancock project, his life
had gone downhill; now, the slope deepened.  His days of helping the FBI were
over.  The Network wouldn’t talk to him, unable to afford the publicity.  Even
Keaton wouldn’t talk to him, though he doubted she cared about his legal
problems.  He had hit up damned near every Network contact he knew in the last
two weeks, delicately trying to figure out what happened to Hancock.  Nothing. 
As far as he could tell, Keaton hadn’t told anyone she had Hancock, much less
discuss her plans for the young Arm.

Or talk in more than grunts to any of her standard
contacts.

“Any word on my position here at Harvard Medical?”  Even
the colleagues he called ‘friends’ ducked him now.  The two days of picketing
outside Harvard Medical by a Monsters Die throng when the scandal went public
didn’t help.  He hadn’t appreciated the ‘Throw Him to the Monsters’ placards or
their silly threat to boycott Harvard because Harvard had Transform-loving
staff members.  Or the Tennessee Congressman toady of Monsters Die, who wanted
to expand the network of opprobrium to anyone who merely dealt with Harvard
Medical.  All because of him.

O’Donnelly looked away.  “Harvard’s going to put you on
indefinite leave of absence.  They can’t afford to publicly support you
either.”

Dr. Zielinski sat and put his head in his hands.  The Monsters
Die idiots would celebrate, though he doubted their opinions mattered to the
Harvard administrators.  “What am I going to do?”  The AMA would take away his
medical license, he knew.  He would be a doctor no more.  Of all his recent
miseries, losing his license would be the worst.

“You’ll figure something out.”

There was a knock at his office door.  Dr. Zielinski
looked up, and saw an unfamiliar man in a blue suit.  “Come in.”

The man looked dour.  He held out a sheaf of papers to Dr.
Zielinski, and stepped back.  Dr. Zielinski took the papers, slowly fanned
through them, and abruptly sat down on his office chair.

“What is it?” Mr. O’Donnelly asked.  Dr. Zielinski shook
his head, composed himself, and took a deep breath.

“Divorce papers.  My wife’s suing me for divorce.  More
work for you, more grief for me.”  Dr. Zielinski shook his head again.  “So the
last bit of my old life has fallen away.”

“You’re not bankrupt and they haven’t found your
offshore accounts,” Mr. O’Donnelly said.

“Yet.”  He didn’t expect much to be left in them when
this whole charade ended.

Gilgamesh, Watching

Gilgamesh puzzled again over the nature of the metasense. 
Something like telepathy, maybe?  Gilgamesh wasn’t a believer – he had never
bought into religion, or UFOs, ESP, eastern meditation, or even Freudian
psychotherapy.  At times, he thought the situation humorous that he possessed an
extraordinary sense without a realistic explanation for why the crazy thing
existed.  He and the other Crows had talked about the metasense being akin to a
sense of smell.  The metasense did have many smell-like properties at short
ranges, including being stronger when downwind of something.  On the other
hand, his metasense didn’t seem to be affected by wind or weather at longer
ranges, but at longer ranges, buildings affected it.  He struggled to find an
explanation for any form of sensing at multi-mile ranges.  Nothing he came up
with satisfied him.

He nursed a cup of coffee in a rear corner of the 34
^th
Street Deli and pretended to read a newspaper.  The deli was miles from 34
^th
Street, and he wondered sometimes why they chose this name.  Outside, rain had
poured since morning.  The Arms were, as always, engrossing.  Hancock didn’t exercise,
but she did move purposefully around the warehouse.  Gilgamesh metasensed her
for several minutes and finally realized that she was cooking and cleaning
house.  Fast.  He swore she walked faster than most people ran.

A little while later, Hancock went to a different part
of the warehouse and began to exercise.  He found her exercising amazing now,
at times almost like ballet.  There had to be ropes or something way up in the
air; he couldn’t believe she had learned to fly.  When she got to her weight
work, the dross seeped off her far less than in St. Louis, but he knew she worked
with far heavier weights.

Hancock was high on juice, a day or two post-kill, but
she hadn’t killed in Philadelphia.  Somewhere dross in quantity waited for some
brave Crow.

The older Arm, Keaton, arrived that evening after
Gilgamesh returned to his haunted house.  He metasensed her and froze in place. 
Keaton, low on juice, radiated a foul mood Gilgamesh flinched away from, from
where he sat, nestled in a pile of blankets on an old mattress he had found.  Gilgamesh
guessed she had been out hunting and hadn’t been successful.

After the two Arms talked for a moment, Keaton sat and
ate.  Hancock waited on her, waitress style, only eating after Keaton finished. 
She ate quickly and after she finished, she cleaned up the dinner dishes.

With no warning, with her appalling, inhuman speed,
Keaton struck Hancock.  Struck her again.  Again several times after that.  She
drove Hancock to the ground and kicked her once she fell.  Hancock didn’t fight
back, and Gilgamesh realized Keaton didn’t use her full strength.  After Keaton
finished kicking Hancock, she leaped on Hancock and struck her several more
times.

Only a minor amount of dross leaked from them.  This had
to be one of their strange rituals.

After three minutes of this, Keaton stood up and Hancock
struggled to her feet.  Keaton barked something and Hancock went off toward the
exercise equipment.  She worked for over an hour, straining at those intense
exercises, while Keaton hunched at a desk, fidgeting and irritable with low
juice.  After an hour, Keaton returned to Hancock and beat her some more,
forcing her into exercises even more intense.  Now the dross started to flow.  None
of the Crows moved, all filled up from yesterday’s trip to Keaton’s oft-used graveyard.

Minutes later, Keaton turned to her own exercises while
Hancock took a breather, went to the kitchen, and ate a snack, likely the cold
remains of dinner.  Keaton worked at her exercises even harder than Hancock,
until a thin film of dross began to seep from her.  In a manner of speaking, she
sweated dross.

Finished with her snack, Carol went back to her
exercises.  Keaton barked again and hovered over Hancock, but didn’t do
anything terrible.  After Hancock finished her exercises, she showered and
cleaned some more.  She masturbated in the shower.  Her shower pleasures were one
of those personal things Gilgamesh had no business observing but did anyway,
because he observed everything.  Gilgamesh wondered if she would kill him for
nothing more than metasensing her private moments, if she knew what he always
did, and she got her hands on him.  He wondered how many other things she would
want to kill him for.  He knew so much about her.

After her shower, Hancock and Keaton talked.  Keaton was
angry, pressing Hancock on something, but Gilgamesh couldn’t tell what.  His
metasense was good, but not that good.  He had heard a rumor that at least one
Crow could use his metasense to eavesdrop, but Gilgamesh didn’t believe it.

Gilgamesh did metasense it when Keaton snapped, going
from angry to livid.  In a moment she drove Hancock down to the floor, in
another moment she tied Hancock down on some apparatus.  Finished, Keaton went
to another room and came back with something.  Her torture tools, most likely.

Keaton said something to Hancock, while Hancock grew
angry inside but subservient outside, a strange emotional state.  Keaton extracted
some sort of tool from a tool belt she wore and held it against Hancock’s neck. 
Hancock tensed and now showed fear.  A few moments later Keaton used the tool
on Hancock, ripping into her in some obscene fashion.

Now the dross began to flow in quantity.  Tomorrow
night, or the night after, once the dross matured, the Crows would have a feast.

After several minutes of torture Keaton stopped, stood,
and freed Hancock.  Hancock didn’t stand, but crawled, cringing in terror.  His
blood ran cold to metasense her.  She crawled with her belly to the floor, and
licked Keaton’s feet.

Gilgamesh didn’t move, glued to his metasense in
appalled fascination.  Something both repulsed and engrossed him to metasense someone
so completely dehumanized.  He understood predators.  This was more than that. 
This was evil, raw and cruel.

He cringed at Keaton’s cruelty.  The torture bothered
him more than the first time he metasensed one person kill another, Hancock
killing for her juice.  At least Hancock’s action reflected her needs.  This
was nothing more than sadism and barbarism.  Thousands of years of civilization
meant there were things men simply did not do to one another.  Limits.  Boundaries
you didn’t cross.  You even treated enemies better than this.

Hancock was Keaton’s pet animal.  Her degradation sickened
him.  Hancock, an Arm capable of such extraordinary feats, didn’t meet his
Tiamat hopes and dreams.  Not under Keaton.  All those months of following her
trail, all his dreams of paradise and infinite fountains of dross hadn’t come
true.  She was supposed to save him and bring him back from the edge of animal
desperation.

Instead, she cringed and cowered at Keaton’s feet,
nothing more than her pet dog.

The thought made him physically sick.

They were predators.  His source of dross.  Not
necessarily any more human than the Beast Men.  Just Beast Women, acting like
animals, nothing he should let bother him.

He told himself so, firmly.

Keaton went to another part of the warehouse and slung
something over her shoulder.  She headed out back to the other end of the
warehouse.  Hancock got off her belly and followed orders, moving this and
that, and loading something into the older Arm’s vehicle.

Gilgamesh froze.  Keaton opened the warehouse door and
drove the car out.  Hancock closed the door for her.  Gilgamesh didn’t move
until Keaton drove away.

He sighed, relieved.  Hancock, after her abuse, went
back to her exercises.  He had followed the California Spree Killer’s rampage
in the newspapers, convinced his Tiamat had come into her true power.  What she
did was appalling and terrifying, but not unexpected.  Not for a goddess of
death and destruction.  He had metasensed, somehow, back when he first
encountered her, that she had this in her.  Inhuman, terrible, a goddess of
death walking the earth.  The world didn’t know what it was in for.

Then he found this.

Was this training, or was this nothing more than
destruction, one jealous goddess destroying an inferior?  They both possessed such
power and such inhumanity.  What was Keaton doing, and why?

What was her goal?

Gilgamesh had no idea, and when he figured it out, he
didn’t expect to like it.