The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Three (7 page)

That night, while Keaton drove me to exhaustion doing
bench presses, I felt her attention leave me.  I glanced over to find her
watching Tom.

He wore the blindfold again, his face now a study in
astonishment and fear, his skin pale and sweaty.  He scrambled back against the
wall, as if doing so would help him escape Keaton’s gaze.  I heard his heart
pound.  Keaton clapped her hands and he jumped into the air and came down in a
stark panic.  Keaton laughed.

I didn’t know what set him off.  The bench presses were
nothing unusual.  I thought further back, quite a while back.  I had been doing
squats, and I remembered Keaton saying, “You get that ass back, Hancock, or
I’ll carve you a new hole to decorate it with.”  Keaton at her sweetest.

Keaton had called me by name.  Now, twenty minutes
later, Tom finally figured who his captors were.  He realized he was dead.

Lucky for him, he was young.  A little while later, he
decided that since he wasn’t dead yet, maybe he still had a chance.

Fool.

That night, I hunted Baltimore.  I got lucky, in the
form of a teenage girl Transform, asleep in her room in her parents’ home.

I had a scenario for just such an occasion as this.

I drove my car to over by the bay bridge, left it there,
and jogged back to the house.  I picked the lock on the door and took the keys
to her parents’ car.  Then I sneaked up to the girl’s room and cut off her
breathing until she passed out.  I took both her and the family car and drove
to the bridge over the bay.  Once we got there, I forced her to write a suicide
note.  She fought me, and I broke a few of her fingers to bring her back in
line, but she did write the note.  The tears on the note made it appear more
authentic.

I left the car and the note by the bridge and took the
girl.  I killed her in my own car and dumped the body in a landfill on the
outskirts of town, buried well under other debris.

The police would decide she jumped off the bridge, and
nothing would be able to convince them otherwise.

I woke up from my pleasure around the time the bars were
getting out.  I found someone male, muscular and desperate, and located a motel
room.  When I finished with him, I went out to my car.  I sat there for just a
moment, and laid my head back on the seat and closed my eyes.  Just for a
moment.

I woke up to the sunrise.

I couldn’t afford such stupidity.  Keaton expected me
back in time to cook breakfast.  However, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t
go four nights without sleep.

Time to pay for my sins.

Keaton, pissed, hauled me off into the kitchen the
minute I came in.  She slapped me around some before driving her knife through
my left hand.  Again and again, she sent that knife through, driving it between
the bones.

Thinking ahead, I had stopped at a diner on the way home
and picked up some breakfast.  After a few minutes, Keaton lost interest in torturing
me and turned to eat.  I shivered with reaction and sank to the floor.

The last few days, I had been too concerned with my own
problems to pay proper attention to Keaton.  A cursory study told me Keaton was
down on juice herself.

I stayed on the floor and tried to keep from bumping my
tortured hand.  The floor was a fine place when Keaton got low on juice.  I
didn’t want to set off her hair-trigger temper.

After eating her fill, she left.  She picked up her
duffel on the way out.

Good riddance.  I hoped her hunt lasted at least a
couple of days before she killed.  Just so long as she didn’t come back here
until after she succeeded.

Luckily for me, she didn’t get a look at my face as she
left.

Keaton hunted for two days, a very pleasant two days.  I
learned a lot about Tom Lehy.  He was a wonder to study.  Each time I prodded
him, he would jump, and over time his body’s reactions made a picture in my
mind.

High on juice, I learned far more, far faster, with all
my senses.  All his actions and reactions and deepest motivations became
mine
.

I slept with Tom, of course.  I was just hours past a
kill when Keaton left, and alone in the warehouse with an available young man. 
I ignored his protests.

Men have a funny reaction to rape.  As long as you make
them enjoy the act, they are unwilling to believe they were forced.  It’s as if
they re-write the episode in their minds.  After I finish with them, they
convince themselves they wanted the sex.  They think they attracted me.  They
think the experience was a consensual sexual encounter with an aggressive
woman.

It’s strange to watch happen.  I think they have their
egos and masculinity tied up in their sexuality, and can’t comprehend the idea
they were forced.

Raping men doesn’t always work that way, and almost
never if you hurt the man in the process.  But, if you make the sex good,
nearly every damn time, the man will tell you he never objected in the first
place.

My rape trick worked on Tom.  By the time I finished, he
decided I was a wonderful human being, with Keaton being the real problem.  He got
all concerned about my various injuries.  He spent a lot of time trying to
convince me to run away with him.

I let him try.  I learned most of his deepest
motivations by studying his futile efforts.

I also learned he knew something about rape, from an
aggressive threat-of-violence male perspective.  Tom wasn’t the innocent he
appeared to be.

That night, after I finished my exercises and Tom fell
asleep, I spent some time in the shower cleaning myself off and thinking about
my various problems.

The big one, as always, was Keaton.  I soaped myself up
and thought dark thoughts.  After Mary Fouke died, she was ready to kill me.  She
even slit my throat.  She had given up on me.

What changed, and when?  Right now, she didn’t seem to
be more than her usual sadistic self, and she no longer acted like she had
given up on me.  I worked backward and forward and finally pinned the change to
my ease of learning to control people.

I forced myself to think about this from her viewpoint. 
Here she was, the only Arm in the country, her survival dependent on her own
skills.  The Network helped, but only a little.  Zielinski also helped, but not
as much as he believed he did.  She had enemies, Major Transform enemies, who
overmatched her.  She needed real Major Transform allies.

So, she tried to train up a second Arm.  I, however,
turned down her initial apprenticeship offer.  Later, I won back her
interest…or so I thought.  Now, deeper into understanding my own Arm nature, I
realized how little
I
had anything to do with winning her back.  Along
comes a third Arm, Fouke, who doesn’t survive a month under Keaton’s care. 
Keaton decides she has been wasting her time.

Until…

Until I showed her my skills at controlling people.  I
was better at the predator effect, and all its uses, than she was.  Now, and
likely forever.

I would be a useful ally after I graduated, a useful
resource in whatever unstated long term schemes Keaton kept banging around in the
back of her mind.  The purpose of the current test was obvious – to prove to
Keaton I could teach
her
.

She would keep me alive as long as I stayed on her side,
as an ally.

So…I was safe, now.  Indefinitely.

Save for one problem, her psychotic rages.

I needed to graduate before she had a bad one and killed
me by accident.

She might even shed a tear over my grave, but I would
still be dead.

Keaton came back around dawn a day later.  Poor Tom.  She
wanted me to teach her the ins and outs of Tom control, which involved me
showing her Tom’s reactions under stress.  I passed
my
test, but Tom lasted
only three hours.

I kept my feelings barricaded inside.  For four days,
Tom had tried to believe I was on his side.  Now, reality set in: as a
subordinate, I followed orders, no matter how grim.  He, and his beliefs, died
unhappy.

The First Focus

“You didn’t finish the last hamburger,” Carol said.  Awake
again and sounding better.  “Give it over.”  She lay on the autopsy table in
Focus Rizzari’s cold Boston College lab, as fixed up as he had been able to
manage and now attempting to recover.  Keaton’s damage was both chilling and
inevitable.

The last hamburger was hours cold, accompanied by soggy
fries he suspected only a cockroach would eat.  He handed both over to Carol,
who didn’t even bother to sit up as she ate.  The cold lumps of fast food
grease disappeared in a few bites.  “I can’t believe this tasted good,” she
said with her eyes closed.  “Why the hell would I want to eat this shit?”

“You need food, and Major Transforms can eat nearly
anything in an emergency situation.”

“I’ve seen it.  Keaton snacks on raw hamburger; she
doesn’t even mind if it goes bad.  Or at least not too bad.”  Carol paused and
opened her eyes.  “Hank?”

“Yah?”

“Something’s been bothering me for quite a while.”  He
grunted.  “None of your sass.”  Pause.  “How in the hell did the world’s first
Focus, Sieurs, figure out how to be a Focus?  After knowing how bad off the
early Arms were, it strains my credulity that she figured out so much so fast. 
It makes me wonder if the people who say Transform Sickness was a bit of messed
up Nazi weapons research might be correct.”

He smiled at her question, as part of the answer dealt
with his epidemiological work.  “Focus Sieurs was not the actual first Focus;
she was just the first one to be recognized as different.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know.  I know too much on the subject to give you an
easy answer.”  Too true, in many ways.  “The closest I can give to a simple
answer is this: Focus Sieurs was a genius, an extraordinary woman in an
extraordinary situation.”  He gave into the temptation to arrange the sheet she
had disturbed when she took the hamburger and fries.  He knew she didn’t feel
the cold like a normal would, but he still hated to see her naked in this
chilly room.

“So, what was this paragon of brainpower before she
transformed?”

“A housewife,” Hank said.  “She was also a talented
nurse during WWII.  In the French resistance.”  He pulled one of the metal
folding chairs over and settled near Carol’s resting head.  Stress carved deep lines
on her face, adding temporary years to her apparent age.  Her mouth still clamped
tight with tension, holding in the pain.

“So she was already experienced with life or death
decision making,” Carol said.  She closed her eyes again and tried to relax,
with no particular success.  “Her experience must have helped a lot.”

Hank nodded.  “Yes.  She even made sure one of her
friends called a doctor before she started her transformation coma.  Such
presence of mind is still quite rare, even these days when the Shakes is well
known.”

“To me, calling a doctor sounds like a bad thing.  Sorry,
but you Docs haven’t done much for us Arms.”

“I understand,” he said.  “The doctor took her to a
hospital, along with two of her friends.  Her Focus attendants.  The doctors at
the hospital kept the three of them alive through Sieurs’ transformation coma,
and although they were puzzled about the behavior of her friends, who refused
to be separated from Sieurs after they transformed, they allowed them to stay
together; if they hadn’t, Sieurs would have likely died.  Her doctors didn’t
know they dealt with the Shakes; if they knew, and went into ‘panicky epidemic
mode’, Sieurs wouldn’t have lived.  Taking away a Focus’s attendants almost always
kills the Focus.”

Carol didn’t say anything, but she did wave one finger
at him, signaling for him to continue.  Well, this wouldn’t be the first time someone
used one of his lectures as a soporific.

“What I find the most amazing is what happened after
Focus Sieurs woke up.  She accepted the metasense at face value instead of a
delusion, figured out she and her friends were Transforms, and unless she did
something, her friends would turn into Monsters.  She also started a journal,
which I’ve found to be engrossing reading, at least the published parts, which
cover her first six months as a Focus.  During her first six months as a Focus she
figured out how to tag her attendants, that juice existed inside all
Transforms, how to take down her attendant’s juice to keep them from turning
into Monsters, the benefits and limitations of the Focus metasense, that she
had to do something with the juice she was collecting or
she
would go
Monster, how to tag male Transforms, the two to one ratio between women and male
Transforms, how to add more Transforms to her household by keeping to the two
to one ratio, and the concept that something bad, which she called ‘bad juice’,
built up in an area she and her Transforms lived in for too long.  Her
discoveries didn’t come easy; she went down quite a few dead ends along the
way, and suffered through the deaths of several male Transforms she didn’t have
enough juice to support.  Unlike many of the other early Focuses, she didn’t
make egregious mistakes with her juice movement; because of her incessant
note-taking she found a way around the memory problems many of the other early
Focuses suffered through.  Her discovery of the effects of juice quantities on
her Transforms’ well-being led her to the idea she could judge juice levels by
watching her Transforms’ reactions.  Much of our Transform terminology comes
from Focus Sieurs; she developed the whole thing during her first months as a
Focus, very scientifically, one test after another.”

“Okay.  Wow,” Carol said.  “Definitely an extraordinary
woman.  I take it that even early on she considered all the Transform
strangeness natural and scientific?”

“Yes, for the most part.  She didn’t realize the
metasense possessed an electromagnetic component; instead, she thought the
metasense was smell related and considered the non-smell related aspects of it
miraculous.”

Carol opened her eyes and looked at him.  “So, how does
this tie into your work?  You’re reacting like this is personal.”

Much of which he couldn’t share.  “Yes, you’re right:
personal and professional.  The accepted viewpoint of Transform Sickness as a standard
spreading infectious disease doesn’t work.  The numbers are wrong, and despite
the papers I wrote on the subject, I still can’t get many others to understand my
point.  The early numbers fit a different model: a chronic illness
geographically spread by an environmental factor, more like scurvy than
influenza.  It wasn’t until about ’52, when the Shakes started to make the
headlines, that the Shakes began to spread in a more disease-like manner.”

“Try that again, this time with a better explanation,”
Carol said, putting a little Arm predator into her voice.  Hank smiled.  This
topic even made Focus Professor Rizzari’s eyes glaze over.  This bit of science
was
his
baby, even if his discovery wasn’t world-shaking.

“The Shakes is a variety of listeriosis, a bacterial
disease spread by contaminated food.  In particular, the Shakes is transmitted
by what we call the Listeria B and C bacteria strains, to differentiate them from
what we call Listeria A, which causes ‘common listeriosis’.  Listeria A effects
resemble the effects of a Transformation coma…without the coma…and occurs about
5 in one million each year, striking people whose immune systems are
compromised, as well as pregnant women.  Listeria B and C are different,
thriving in low oxygen environments where plant decay is occurring.  Save for the
induced transformations that accompany a Major Transform’s transformation, this
form of listeriosis can’t be spread from person to person.  I have never been
able to pin down the exact origin point of the Shakes, but as best as I can
figure, Listeria B and C got picked up somewhere in Asia by US servicemen early
in WWII, and got spread world-wide by modern transportation systems long before
the Shakes was identified.”

“So quarantines could have worked?” Carol asked.

“By the time the Shakes was identified it was already
too late,” Hank said.  “But, yes, if the authorities quarantined the leaf
litter or mud the original bacterial spores came from before they spread out of
their origin area, quarantine would have worked.”  He paused to think.  “There
are several other viable theories about the origin point, including Alaska, New
Guinea and Antarctica, but the origin point isn’t what’s most important.  What
matters is the fact Listeria B and C got carried world-wide by the WWII
allies.”

“Okay, then, why do the Shakes continue to spread?  Why
isn’t it scurvy?”

Hank turned away for a moment.  “Listeria B and C alone
are one trigger, causing about 5 in a million infections a year, a constant and
non-growing rate.  However, Listeria B and C, interacting with juice
byproducts, are another trigger, causing about 75 in a million infections a
year at the present time.”

“Oh, shit,” Carol said.  “You could control the disease
by killing all the Transforms, couldn’t you?”

“Yes, if you did so world-wide, within a few weeks of
each Transform’s transformation,” Hank said.  “You would need to kill off all
the Monsters as well; my evidence shows it’s primarily Monster juice byproducts
which are the trigger, evidence that will likely remain unpublished…”

“Bah and bah again,” Carol said.  “On that cheery note,
I think I’m going to try and get some more rest.”  In a moment she fell asleep
again.

Hank couldn’t rest, his mind filled with the ever
growing number of induced transformations, those transformations caused directly
by the byproducts of juice, without any interactions with the Listeria B and C
bacteria.  Within a decade the number of induced transformations would pass the
number of Listeria caused and triggered transformations, and then they were all
severely and royally screwed.