“Hey, are you listening to me? Hello-o. Is anybody in there? Untie me. I said, ‘Un. Tie. Me.’ Come over here and undo the knot on my hands. Come on, you can do it. Just come on over here.
“Untie me, I said. Untie me!
“God damn it. I’ve been kidnapped by mental retards!
“Are you going to do anything over there, are you just going to sit there?”
I responded this time, my voice carefully meek. “Actually, sir, I was taking mental bets as to how long it would take you to burst a blood vessel.”
He took a long breath and struggled for control. I wasn’t much better. My head pounded, my temper was shot from lack of juice, and I was about ready to teach that man some manners with a club. Keaton was damned right when she hinted he would be different when the alcohol wore off. He had turned into a raving jackass.
I don’t like raving jackasses.
I hadn’t had any real sleep in days. I needed juice. If I got some juice, this would all be better. Killing him would be an act of kindness to the universe.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so rude. I haven’t ever been kidnapped before. I let my temper get out of control.” He tried a smile, watching me to see how I would react.
“Hmm,” I said, noncommittal. Me the meek.
“So what am I doing here? Can you fill me in? I can’t see any reason someone would want to kidnap me.” Still a raving jackass.
“Hmm,” I said again. “For that, you’ll have to ask her.” With the word her, I flashed ‘predator’ at him for an instant. His heart skipped a beat.
“Her?” He blanched. “My kidnapper really is a woman?”
I nodded.
“Who is she? Who are you, for that matter?” he said, a moment later.
“That’s not something I can tell you, sir,” I said, careful. “I think that’s enough questions for now.”
“What? You haven’t answered anything!”
“Shhh. If you can calm down a bit, sir, maybe I can do something about your hands.”
He tilted his head up and took a breath. Yes, he wanted his hands untied. He sat still as I untied the rope on his hands. He rubbed his raw wrists.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I think I can do better. If you promise to be very good, sir, and promise you won’t try and run away, I might be able to unlock your ankle.”
He looked toward me and his eyes shifted slightly to the right before his eyes turned to meet my gaze. His breathing altered slightly and an almost imperceptible tension grew in the muscles around his eyes.
“If you would unshackle me, I would very much appreciate it. I promise I won’t try to get away.”
He lied. I took careful notes about what his lies looked like with all my Arm enhanced senses. Satisfied, I took the key and unlocked the ankle shackle.
He didn’t run. Color me shocked.
“Come with me, sir,” I told him. “You can use the bathroom back this way.” I turned my back to him, almost ordering him to run.
He ran.
I let him go for a second. He sprinted about halfway across the open area before I started after him. I caught him just before he rounded the boxes to the entry, knocked him to the ground, and came down on top of him. I got my arm around his neck, put it in a lock and began the yank that would…
I stopped myself. Crap. It’s so hard to control yourself when your prey runs. My head pounded. I wanted to kill this jackass. I needed to kill him. Killing him wasn’t my job, though. I relaxed the tension in my arms and let go of my lock around his neck. Slowly, practicing my self-control, I got up.
He turned over and looked at me anew. He breathed in quick pants and the smell of fear rolled off him like San Francisco Bay fog on a warm night. He saw the predator in me now.
“Shit,” he said.
“I apologize for my actions, but what you did was stupid, sir,” I forced out, my voice hoarse and unable to hit the same level of meekness I earlier managed. My hands itched for his neck, and the need to kill him burned bright inside of me.
“Yeah.” He still whispered. He watched me warily, his heart still pounding in terror. His fear smelled different now, and I cataloged the difference as I forced myself back under control. Almost a minute passed before I found a way to make my body relax and give up the stalk posture. Once I did, Joe’s heart slowed, and he went from petrified to merely terrified.
“Get up,” I told him.
He got up, as slowly as possible, favoring a new collection of bruises.
“Don’t do that again, sir. You’re not going to leave that way. Don’t even try. You won’t survive.”
He nodded, still watching me with care.
“Go take a shower.”
I collected myself again while he showered. He wouldn’t ever consider me ‘safe’, but I needed to let go of the predator.
My plan worked better than I expected. Joe thought me crazy, but he preferred me to be a calm and restrained crazy instead of a predatory and dangerous crazy. He would put a lot of work into keeping me happy.
He thought he manipulated me.
Actually, his actions might even have been funny, if I weren’t so short on juice. His choices reminded me of the choices I made in managing my relationship with Keaton. Mirror, mirror on the wall…
I decided to get some use out of him and his delusions, so I had him do dishes and help me with the cleaning. While we worked, we talked. He tried to lead me into giving him information. I lied and learned his reactions, all in a way I would be able to explain to Keaton. I hoped.
I succumbed to a momentary flash of weakness and told him my name was Carol. It had been so long since anyone had called me that, and Keaton said he would die anyway. His name wasn’t really Joe, of course; Keaton called all her toys ‘Joe’. His real name was Tom Lehy. He was only twenty-three, he worked as a clerk at a plant down by the river, and he lied when I asked him if anyone would notice he was gone.
Tom was young and innocent; by the end of the day, he trusted me again. Since both of us were under Keaton’s control, we were natural allies. From his perspective. I didn’t try to convince him otherwise.
I chained him back up before Keaton came home, and tied his wrists again.
After dinner, Keaton grilled me about Tom. I gave her a complete run-down, mimicking Tom’s reactions in myself as I explained. Keaton nodded and mentally took notes; I had a strong feeling I did better than Keaton expected.
However, when I finished my lecture, a cold expression settled on her face. “So, did you try your predator tricks while I was gone?”
Damn, I thought she gave me permission to use my predator if she wasn’t here! She said so! But, dammit, she did like to change the rules without warning. And go after me for ‘screwing up’. I needed to come up with an answer that would keep her off me. My eyes flicked a little and my breath caught, and I felt the tension around my eyes.
Keaton she smiled her sardonic smile as she watched the realization on my face.
Keaton loved to toy with me. She had just been yanking my chain, mirroring my playing with Tom.
That night I went to Newark to hunt. I found nothing.
The next day I went back to working with Tom. I was too low on juice, my temper shot, for my best work. Tom treated me with exquisite care. I tried to dig deeper into his reactions, trying to get a handle on his deeper motivations, but I did a lousy job of it. At least I kept enough control over my temper to keep from killing him.
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 f
urther 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.”
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Three Page 7