The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Nine

by Randall Farmer

  “Sleeping. If she follows the recovery curve, probably only six hours, tonight.”

  “Err, that sounds like juice burnthrough,” Keaton said, sitting up, and then studying her new leg. It was about eighteen inches long, with a cute little baby foot at the end of it. “Hunting’s going to be awkward.”

  “Carol’s assuming she’ll keep you supplied until you’re ready to hunt on your own.”

  “Why am I not dead?” Keaton said. Zielinski, startled at the tone, rolled back almost involuntarily. Vulnerable? Unsure of herself? Uncontrolled, on the ragged edge of a murderous psychotic attack? “What’s that idiot thinking? She should have killed me. She’s not going to torture me, is she?”

  Vulnerable. Yes, she was close to a murderous psychotic attack. Hank relaxed. He couldn’t do anything about it, physically, if Keaton decided to go that route again. The truth. It was the only option that might work.

  “Stacy, you aren’t in any danger, save perhaps to your pride. Carol doesn’t want to throw dirt on your coffin or torture you just to hear you scream.” Hank took a deep breath, and decided to make his next point Crow-style. “If I may be so bold as to make a guess, based on watching Carol’s reactions, there is a little instinctive voice in her head saying ‘Keaton may be hurt now, but Arms recover quickly, and trying to adjust dominance while one’s superior is hurt will make things worse for the subordinate in the long run’.”

  “That assumes I’m rational, even for an Arm,” Keaton said, speaking quickly. “You know I’m not. Carol knows I’m not. I don’t want you anywhere near me when I’m in a state like this.” She was trying to protect him. His fondness for the psychotic Arm grew.

  “We’ve given that some thought,” Zielinski said. Hell, he had even agreed with it. Not too long ago, he would have wondered how he could live with himself for being a party to such evil, but he had caught some of the darkness of the Arms. “I think we may have a mutually satisfactory solution to this problem.” One they weren’t going to be mentioning to anyone in Inferno.

  “Let me guess,” Keaton said, smiling, lust in her eyes. “He’s about six two, around thirty years old, and qualifies as scum of the earth who needs killing. Probably a mass murderer, or a rapist, or both.” Pause. “You want to share?” Keaton said, her voice deep and husky.

  Eissler ordered him to keep his Arms happy, but he would only be able to keep an Arm happy if he wasn’t disgusted himself. “Carol has him stashed in the Nobles’ old lair. I’ll take you there, but I’m not going in.”

  Keaton nodded, and relaxed. “So, who ended up being Rogue Crow, then, if it wasn’t Shadow?”

  “Guru Innocence,” he said. “Carol killed him. Shot him to shit.”

  “So the Commander had to kill Innocence to save the Transforms,” she said. “The symbology makes me want to puke.”

  “I know the feeling,” Hank said. “I’m not well equipped to be part of a myth.” Then he figured out what Keaton’s last remaining source of panic had to be. “Oh, and you don’t have to worry about Carol trying to flip dominance on you after you recover. What you did while directing the fight against the senior Hunters and their packs has Carol convinced, again, that you can walk on water. You’re about as elevated in her eyes as you’ve ever been.”

  “You know way too fucking much about us, Hank,” Keaton said.

  He nodded and didn’t bother to answer, confident that Keaton would read him and recognize the emotion of love.

  Training Lori (Carol Hancock’s POV)

  The doorbell rang and I smelled Focus. I had called Zielinski and told him to keep out until I told him otherwise, and that I wouldn’t say why until later. He wasn’t too miffed, as the Detroit fight and our move to Los Angeles had eaten into his work schedule. He had some screwy idea about Focuses and their juice patterns, and he was neck deep into what he termed the barest preliminaries.

  Gilgamesh wasn’t here, thankfully. He was coming to my California Cause meeting with a full entourage of Crows and two Nobles, all in his motor home. I believed the planned topic of discussion on the trip was whether Transforms should attempt to influence the movement of modern dance toward more aggressively athletic dance moves. I wondered how long it would take them to give up on the highbrow crap and start yakking about their favorite subject, baseball.

  I didn’t sense any Inferno bodyguards nearby – Lori had for some reason decided to leave Boston without them. Knowing Inferno, they would be apoplectic.

  I whistled, and then opened the door personally. “Welcome!” The whistle was to alert Consuela, who was in the kitchen doing dishes. I didn’t want her here for this either.

  Lori didn’t say a thing; she rushed up and gave me a hug. “Dammit I screwed up I screwed up and I wanted to apologize to you in person before it festered any longer and I’m sorry for the way I’ve been acting toward you and I’ve been being all high and mighty good-guy Focus toward you when I knew full well I’m as dark and as evil as you are no one can stop me if I want to kill and I’ve been taking it out on you because I’ve been unhappy about being dark and nasty myself. Can you forgive me?”

  And they call me moody and mercurial? Whoever ‘they’ are…

  “Yes, yes, Lori, I forgive you. But I do think you need to talk a little about these issues.”

  “Okay.” She looked around. “Wow. I like your new place!” I thought so as well, all bare, expensive and elegant. I had the living room decorated in stark chrome and glass furniture. Upstairs, I had five bedrooms, each furnished in a different fashion, each a retreat for my mood of the day. And for guests. Outside, there was a patio and a pool. I had the guesthouse filled with my gym equipment. When the blinds went down in the pool cabana, the soundproofing went up, and I had a place ready for the darker work us Arms occasionally needed to do.

  Gotta love California. Only place I knew of with pret-a-porter decadence.

  Los Angeles didn’t sit well in my mind. This wasn’t Houston or Chicago. I had stood on the famous overlook on Mulholland Drive and looked out over my new city at night and claimed the surrealistic grid of city lights, but it hadn’t assuaged the ache in my heart. Fuck. I might not like the place, which reminded me of a ten thousand Focus tea party, but it was mine, and I could live with that.

  “You know, I’ve never had the nerve to ask, but now that I’m here, it does make me wonder,” Lori said, after she looked around my living room. “What do Arms do for a living, anyway?”

  “For Carol, armed robbery,” Keaton said, sneaking up behind Lori.

  “Yii!” Lori spun and kicked; Keaton blocked, Lori said “Stacy! You’ve learned how to mask your metapresence from me!”

  Keaton responded “I thought you took a bullet to the brain” and tried an arm lock, Lori did a back flip, landing upside down on Keaton’s head, balanced on one hand. An incongruous sight. I winced and moved the crystal vase off the white marble entryway table. I thought about it and moved the table, too.

  “Well, I’m not as good at this as I once was,” Lori said. Keaton swiped at Lori’s hand and arm with one hand, the other extended out for balance since Keaton was doing this on one leg. In fact, Keaton had taught herself how to walk on one leg rather than use a wheelchair or crutches. Walk, perhaps, was the wrong word. Keaton hopped.

  In response to Keaton’s swipe, Lori switched hands, still balanced on the top of Keaton’s head. Keaton swiped three more times, faster each time, and Lori just did the hand switch routine timed with the swipes. Keaton tried two swipes at once (don’t ask), and Lori evaded the second not by putting the palm of her hand on Keaton’s head, but instead, just one finger.

  “I’m down a leg, so we ought to be even.”

  Keaton did a forward roll into the living room. I leapt away, and moved one of the few pieces of furniture in the front room on the way by, a chromed metal and leather modernist chair I planned to make my more annoying visitors sit in. I got to see Lori hand-walk down Keaton’s back, leg, left arm, and back up to Keaton’s head, sta
ying perfectly vertical and upside down. “I’m okay if you don’t make me do engraving or any form of handwriting,” Lori said as she hand walked. “You don’t seem to have picked up any problems from the fight either.” Juice problems, she meant.

  Lori had taken a few bullets in the fight, enough to have Gilgamesh in a dead panic, but she had been up and about last I saw her. Much better than Sky, who even after Hank’s best reconstructive surgery would be in a wheelchair for at least another month due to the damage to his hips and pelvis.

  “Huh.” Keaton bounced straight up in the air, rolled while in the air, did a half twist, and then a reverse roll, landing on the floor balanced on her one remaining foot. This was too much for Rizzari, who ended up with a leg caught in Keaton’s right hand, held upside down. Same position Armenigar had me in, save that Keaton wasn’t much taller than Rizzari, so Keaton had hold of Rizzari’s leg an inch below the knee. “What’s this about juice problems?”

  “I estimated you were in withdrawal for ten to twelve minutes before I got to you,” I said.

  “What was I doing? Symptoms?”

  “Sweating profusely, twitching and kicking. I slapped juice into you immediately.” At least I didn’t have to haul live prey home for her, thanks to the tag.

  “Not sweating blood?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I think you cut the rescue real fine, Hancock.”

  “Thank Gilgamesh. He’s the one who spotted that you’d slipped into withdrawal.” I had gotten too caught up in the victory celebration.

  “Huh.” Keaton turned back to Lori. “I’m not impressed with what you did in the fight, and it’s convinced me that you need some advanced training to keep this Cause of yours going. Arm style training.”

  Lori’s face got serious. “Let me guess. You’re not talking about combat training.”

  “Correct.”

  “How much of a say do I have in this?” Lori turned to study me.

  “Your apology said all that needed saying,” I said. “You’re demanding someone punish you for something you thought you did wrong. Well, we will oblige. As you may have heard, Arms are quite good at punishment. Oh,” I said, starting to get into the spirit of the scene, “don’t worry about being so dangerous that we don’t dare punish you. There’s two of us, and we’re more than enough…”

  “Right.” She glanced at me, then back to Keaton, and put on her arrogant Focus bitch face. “So is this toughening me up or getting your rocks off?”

  Keaton reached her other hand down to the back of Lori’s neck, and brought Lori’s head up to hers. “You will learn proper respect for your peers,” Keaton said, her now predatory face only inches from Lori’s. She squeezed with her other hand, and nearly broke Lori’s leg. “The proper term of respect is ‘ma’am’. The answer to your question is yes to both. It is unwise,” Keaton said, mimicking Lori’s voice, “to waste opportunities.”

  We started by exercising her into total exhaustion, and then pushed some more. I took mental notes. I knew I wasn’t nasty enough to train Arms, given that it took Keaton’s psychopathic worst to get through to any of us, but the Focuses and Crows didn’t know anything about proper training techniques. Being of a more gentle sort myself, for an Arm, I was fairly sure I would be able to teach Focuses and Crows.

  In between our brutal sets, we grilled Lori about all sorts of interesting things.

  “You think you’re so high and mighty and powerful with your special juice alteration skill that you need to be feared and loathed,” I said as I leaned up against the Smith machine with a quirt in my hand. “What’s so special about this skill of yours?” She was doing squats, and was down to 185 pounds on the bar. We had her doing descending sets, and as soon as she exhausted herself at this weight, we would take twenty pounds off the bar and she would do it again.

  “It’s unfair,” Lori said, barely able to catch her breath, welts on her behind. Yes, because Lori was a former Catholic girl from New England, we had her exercising naked, as part of the psychology. Lori, as I had guessed, wasn’t comfortable with other people seeing her naked. The poor dear had somehow gotten nakedness and sexuality confused. “No one should be able to point their finger and kill, ma’am. I’m a menace to society.”

  Someone needed to get back to a more dispassionate scientific outlook.

  “Let’s see. You have a method to kill. You wave your hand and they fall over. Good only against Transforms, though,” Keaton said. She straddled a weight bench on the opposite side of the squat rack and tapped her own quirt menacingly against the steel leg of the bench.

  “Not true,” Lori said, panting. “Ouch! Dammit, ma’am.” Keaton smiled, and her quirt went back to tapping against the leg of the bench. No, we weren’t going to give her anything like the full Arm treatment, at least physically. Mind games, though – I suspected we were going to have to hit her with everything we had just to make a dent. This was no newbie Transform we were playing with. This was a powerful Focus who had more experience as a Focus than both of our Arm tenures, combined. “Ma’am, like with many things Transform, I have to tune my attack to the targets. I can’t get Major Transforms and normals in the same attack.”

  I wasn’t sure how Keaton had managed to get hold of a gun, or hide it on her body, as she did not have the combination to my arsenal. A handgun appeared in her hand anyway, aimed at Lori’s forehead from four feet away. My boss was full of such nasty tricks. “Either as a normal or a Transform, with a weapon in my hand, all I have to do is tighten my finger and you fall over. What’s different about this and what you can do as a Focus?”

  “Uh,” Lori said, freezing in place. After thinking about the question for a few moments, she went ice cold as she figured out Keaton’s point. “Ma’am, I apologize. I’ve been thinking of the juice as something special, something sacred. My gut says my attack wasn’t true to what the juice is. Instincts, though, not logic. The answer to your question, ma’am, is logically there is little difference between a firearm and what I can do as a Focus against enemies. Firearms have a longer range, but inside my range, with my juice weapon, I don’t miss.”

  “What’s the point, Focus?” I said, and switched her on the side as she slowed down on the squats.

  “Your point is, ma’am, the millions of people in the United States who own firearms are functionally as deadly as I am, with my Focus talent. None of them are worried sick about being feared and loathed because of it.”

  “Not true,” Keaton said. “Policemen who kill often have this problem. They learn to get over it. They learn that what they’re doing is what they’ve been entrusted to do. Some of them are like you, and worry about overusing their power. They may learn not to care at all: their victims are all going to die anyway, in the end. What does it matter? Or they may learn that who they decide to kill is what’s important.”

  “Ma’am, how does this work for an Arm?”

  “What I teach, Focus, is that Transforms are both our prey and our people. Taking the wrong Transform is bad and should be avoided.”

  “Ma’am, is this morality or expediency?”

  Lori screamed as Keaton grabbed Lori’s arm and nearly dislocated it. She pushed her face up against Lori’s. “What Transform Bible is there to learn morality from? What Transform religion is there to learn morality from? Give me some Transform Saints, and I’ll give you some morality. Until then, expediency must suffice.”

  “You discount all pre-existing human morality, ma’am?” Her breath came in gasps, but she still argued. Lori would argue with the sunrise if she could get it to talk back.

  “Damn straight. It would be foolish not to.”

  “There is a possible exception I have found, ma’am. I hold it possible, based on my interpretations, that the Buddha was a Transform.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion, but it isn’t relevant in the United States. We’re at odds with the morality of the normals, the ethics of the normals, and the government and laws of the normals of
the United States. All Christian based. You’re lying to yourself if you think anything else.”

  “You came here without bodyguards,” I said. “Why?” We were in my gymnastics arena now, an open area lined with mats. I squatted on my haunches on a narrow tightrope ten feet above the ground. Keaton lurked an inch or three behind Lori.

  “Isn’t it obvious, ma’am? I end up protecting my bodyguards, or watching them die. The household needs protecting, not me.” Lori was kneeling, naked, hands tied behind her back. A little game of forfeits for one unwise enough to lie to herself, and thus to two Arms.

  “They died whether you were with them or whether you weren’t,” Keaton said. “The ones on the roof died without your protection, and without you watching.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m a failure as a Focus, ma’am.”

  Whap! “They were doing their job! Your household selects your bodyguards for you, not you. They barely even consider your preferences. They were all volunteers, even the ones on the roof. We were all at risk in the battle.”

  Both Keaton and Hank were more broken up about one of the Inferno deaths, Tina Williams, than Lori. They had both been close to Tina, in their own ways. So had Lori – Tina had been one of her favorites. Yet, Lori hadn’t grieved, couldn’t grieve. Yet.

  “I actually died,” Lori said. “Ma’am.”

  Keaton and I both froze. I knew Focus Anderson and her people had shot Lori, among many others, and that she needed help healing from Focus Keistermann, the price to become the witch’s apprentice.

  “That story isn’t known,” I said.

  “Two Transforms emptied a full magazine from a full-auto machine pistol into me. Some of the shots hit as high as my head. Others as low as my belly. Ma’am.”

  “How in the hell did you heal from that, Focus?” I said, almost slipping and saying Lori or darling or dear or something idiotic. For idiotic was what I was feeling. This must have been what Gilgamesh had been hiding from me, what had pushed him over the edge to challenge me, Crow fashion. She had been clinically dead, or so I read, similar to what had happened to Gail. Nor did Lori have an Arm heal her.