workout unlike anything he had ever experienced before, arousing him whether he wanted to or not.
“The, um, Arms I’ve worked with, ma’am, get extremely hostile when their juice gets low.”
“My juice level couldn’t have been low,” Keaton said. “I wasn’t seeing spots or shaking yet.” She still had him pinned underneath her and his bare shoulders were now as bruised as the rest of his body from the wooden floor. She hadn’t bothered to undress; she just unzipped her fly and lowered her trousers a few inches before screwing him silly.
Hank winced. This was the first time he had held a medical consultation while stark naked and staring up at his patient. Not optimal conditions. Sweat dripped down her not particularly clean face.
“What! Give Me The Answer,” Keaton demanded. She gave him another ‘I-am-death’ stare. He didn’t panic, now marginally used to them.
“When I meant low juice, I meant below your optimums, whatever they are. What you were describing is the edge of withdrawal, much worse than a normal low juice situation, ma’am.”
Keaton nodded.
“How do I learn?”
Shit. Should he? Keaton would kill him, regardless. Unlike the failed…Arms he worked with, she had given in to her built-in anger and violence, stripped herself of her humanity and become little more than a walking juice hunter. A juice predator, of all the damned unexpected things. Was this what all fail…Arms were supposed to be?
Was it at all moral to help someone like this? The Focus Network, his backers, blamed Keaton for the deaths of several household Transforms. They wanted her dead.
“Yes, of course I have several groups trying to kill me. How do I learn?”
Would bargaining work? Not openly, Hank decided. “I have a way, a piece of medical equipment,” he said. Keaton glared at him. “Not on me.”
“Huh.” She was still not happy he could read her. “Let’s go find this miracle of yours,” Keaton said. “After I exercise and get some food.”
Keaton grabbed him and got into his face. “Look, you idiot, I can’t go in there! That’s a Transform Clinic!” They had been driving for two hours, to get to the nearest place Hank knew had the equipment he needed – not counting the Bakersfield Transform Research Center, of course. Their trip had taken them to the outskirts of Los Angeles, in particular, to the San Fernando Transform Clinic. About once an hour, Keaton stopped the taxi and did a short bit of stretching and exercising. Now they parked a block away from the clinic, in front of a closed corner grocery.
“This time of the night, there shouldn’t be any Transforms around,” Hank said. “Are there?” Keaton threw him across the car, not as hard as earlier, but enough to shake him up. He knew too well how long the metasense range of a fai…an Arm was.
“No Transforms. There are guards, though.”
“Ma’am, I am a Doctor.” Albeit a beat up doctor with a broken nose stuffed with gauze. Would he be able to convince anyone of his bona fides? “My credentials will get me into any Transform Clinic in the country.”
Keaton lowered her eyebrows and stared, questioning. Hank handed the Arm his FBI and CDC badges. She glanced at them and tossed them back.
“You’re going to take me in there legit?”
“It will work.” Trust me. I’m the arrogant doctor, remember? “You don’t much look like your wanted posters, you know.”
Keaton glared. “I don’t trust doctors,” she said, very quietly. “Doctors are the enemy. I kill doctors!”
Hank took a deep breath, treading into another of these I’m-dead-already-it-doesn’t-matter-what-I-say moments. “I’m a doctor, ma’am.”
“You’re a researcher and you’d damned well better not forget it.” Exasperated, a ‘this is stupid, kill him and get it over with’ look covered her face. She momentarily winced and put her head in her hands.
Hank waited her out.
“Forget about what I just said,” Keaton muttered, a minute later. “Let’s do it.”
“Rough yourself up a little to match my appearance,” Hank said. The Arm pulled out a canvas bag from the rear seat and extracted a few tools. She scruffed up her clothes and gave herself a shiner. She was a wizard with disguise makeup, her only noticeable post-human capability.
He walked them into the Clinic, presented his credentials and spun a story about an auto accident and a male Transform who needed medical attention with his commanding Doctor voice. The guard’s gaze stayed entirely on Zielinski, as if Keaton didn’t even exist.
“This,” Hank said, after they commandeered an examination room and he wheeled in the item in question, “Is a TI 1228 juice analyzer.” The small television-sized device had two meters and a dozen knobs, switches and buttons. Keaton frowned.
“How is this piece of shit going to help?” Keaton asked, leaning close to Hank, dangerous.
“It will tell you what your juice reading is. How much juice you have in you. If you take juice readings on yourself at various points in your juice cycle, you can learn to estimate your own juice numbers.”
Keaton pulled him close to her, nose to nose again, and lifted him off the floor with one hand. Damn her strength! “I don’t know how to operate shit like this. I was a fucking housewife before my transformation, dammit!”
“I’ll teach you, ma’am,” Hank said, attempting to fight off Keaton’s danger aura. “I’ve worked with other, um, Arms, and I’m positive you’ll be able to learn to use this.”
“Huh.” Keaton dropped Hank, picked up the device and put it on her shoulder sack of cement style. “Let’s go.”
What the hell? “You’re not going to just walk out of here like that, are you, ma’am?”
“I trusted you. Now you have to trust me,” she said, and grinned at him. Again, her humanity momentarily showed through her killer mask. She grabbed the back of Hank’s collar and walked him out of the examination room, down the hallway the opposite direction from the guard, and to an emergency exit. She studied it for a moment, let go of Hank, reached up and ripped the set of wires connecting the emergency exit to the fire alarms. Snarling, she grabbed Hank again, pushed open the exit door and started walking.
“What about your car?”
“We’re not going out front to where the guard can see us, now are we? Besides, did you think I bought that taxi or something? I’ll just steal another.”
“Ma’am, you are currently at 121,” Hank said. They had returned to the vacant house and Hank had the machine set up in the empty living room. He had spent the last hour going over the device, showing Keaton how to set it up and use it. What buttons to push, how to twiddle the knobs and read the meters to get a null current, and finally how to get a juice reading. “Don’t pay too much attention to the actual number. This device is primitive and its precision is to only two and a half points.”
Keaton nodded, and took a reading on herself. This time it came out to 122. “As I said, it is imprecise. It will need…”
“Shut up, I want to think,” Keaton said.
Hank stopped talking. He didn’t want to aggravate the Arm any more than he had to, now that his usefulness was about shot. From the stories he had read he expected her to be a walking arsenal, but she carried only two knives and a pistol. In fact, she seemed unfamiliar with firearms in general; she fiddled with her pistol in an amateurish manner.
Keaton paced the room, did some stretches and followed with some push-ups.
“Get in the car,” she said, her voice low and angry. He did as she told him, and watched as she loaded the TI into the trunk, along with a box of notes, clothes and makeup. As they drove away from the house, he noticed it was on fire. She didn’t want to leave any evidence behind.
She stopped them in downtown Bakersfield, a block north of the bus depot. “Get out,” she said. “I’ll contact you later.”
“Ma’am?” He looked at her and saw black anger rippling over her face.
�
��Don’t make me have to tell you again, Zielinski. Get out of the car and just stand there.”
Hank popped open the passenger’s side door and exited the car, stepped back, and stood, following the Arm’s orders. He looked away, his thoughts turning to his loved ones. He had exhausted his plans and his body, was now bone tired and ready to collapse from Keaton’s abuse. She was going to shoot him and drive off.
He had no desire to watch her shoot him.
Keaton surprised him, stepping on the gas and driving off. He looked up and realized what had happened only after she drove around the corner and her car vanished out of sight.
Why had she been so angry right then? What thoughts had been going through her head?
Hank found a bench to sit on and put his head in his hands. Focuses and their bodyguards had treated him roughly in the past, but he had never been on a roller coaster ride like this. He waited for the panic and hysterics to start. They didn’t. Instead, he got an inspiration. He walked over to the corner drug store, just opening for the day, bought a pad of paper and a pen, and started to write down what he could remember about Keaton’s condition. Her right biceps was fifty percent larger than her left biceps. Stacy Keaton had some severe muscle problems, now didn’t she…
A wry grin crossed Hank’s face. You know, he thought to himself, this was sort of fun, wasn’t it?
Tonya Biggioni Meets Stacy Keaton
(1964)
Just after the first shots sprayed into
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio One Page 3