Juice seeped out of me unending. I had spent several days’ worth of juice in those few brief minutes while I burned. The burn was gone, but the injuries remained, and healing used far too much juice. I was probably down to 110 already. Normally I started hunting when I reached 115. When I got down to 110, I dropped everything else and did nothing but hunt. I expected that with all my injuries, I would be down to 100 in just a few days. I would hit 90 just a few days beyond that. I would go into withdrawal at 88. I would cease being functional long before then.
The craving burned in me, eating at my will and reason. I needed juice. I ached with longing. The consuming need made everything worse, the pain, the fear, the terrible despair. I careened down the steep slope toward madness, falling out of control. Fear ate at my gut like a cold little monster, clawing at my insides. Fear of pain, of withdrawal, of death, of the unknown. I feared my captors, their cruelty and their ignorance.
This was Hell. Things were bad now and would soon get far worse. Much worse. I expected I would die soon, and the death would be horrific.
The nightmares started somewhere during my transit. I needed less sleep than a normal, and could go for days without, but I remained exhausted from my injuries. Even despite the lights and the people and the hunger and the grinding pain, I found my way into sleep.
My sleep didn’t last long.
Moments after my mind left my control and sleep took me, the nightmares started. They were old enemies, these nightmares, endlessly varied yet always the same. They all featured Stacy Keaton, Officer Canon, and the Hunters.
I paid a high price for my survival, and this was part of it. Bad as my situation was, my Major Transform enemies were worse. They ruled the dark places of my mind, dark places I couldn’t escape.
I woke up shaking and gasping for air, my heart racing. I was safe, I told myself. My Major Transform enemies weren’t here. They weren’t coming after me, and my captors didn’t understand me well enough to really hurt me. Anything short of withdrawal would be less than what Keaton had done to me, and Keaton had done far worse than Officer Canon and the Hunters. I was all right, I told myself. I was all right. I took deep breaths and tried to calm my heart.
In my mind, Officer Canon transformed into the terror clown, and began to giggle.
Lori Tries Bribery
Zielinski was packed and waiting in the great room for the taxi to arrive when the Focus tracked him down and cornered him. He had been waiting for Lori to try again. She didn’t agree with his plans, and he knew she couldn’t let that sit.
Hank hadn’t predicted this approach, though. The Focus had added so much sexual heat to her presence he caught his breath.
“Here, Henry. Take a look at this,” the Focus said, in her husky voice, settling next to him on the couch with her hip against his. She took out a diagram, what appeared to be from a preliminary document at the pre-blueprint stage and leaned close to show it to him.
“I’m not sure what I’m seeing,” he said. She smelled of soap, and flowers, with a faint heady odor of healthy woman.
“It’s a plan for the expansion of my home lab. We’re going to move the armory out of the basement and into the bomb shelter, which is currently being utilized for storage.”
Hank looked at the diagram again, seeing the possibilities. The expansion would free up enough room for a real laboratory. “Focus, are you trying to bribe me?”
“You’re a researcher, Henry. Investigating what’s happening to Hancock is going to be dangerous, and you’re not a private detective.” The Focus licked her lips, too slow, and gave him an alluring half smile, annoyingly alluring. She didn’t used to be annoyingly alluring. When he arrived, she didn’t even know how.
Why him, and why now, though? His time here in Inferno had cured him of his inappropriate infatuation with the Focus, an infatuation acquired during the Monster Juice assassination attempt.
“Correct,” Zielinski said. “I know a few tricks, though.”
“I’m willing to equip the expanded laboratory with the sort of equipment you use,” the Focus said. Zielinski shrugged and didn’t answer. Her offer was ingenious; he didn’t lack for Transform issues to investigate. “Give me a list of what you need most, and I’ll scrape up what I can. I promise to make the rest of your stay here worthwhile.” The Focus gave him a dimpled smile, a quite disquieting dimpled smile. Experience had inured him to the snares and attractions of mature Focuses over the years, but he had never faced a problem like this. Against his will, he found his old infatuation with her rekindled.
Before he came to Inferno, he never suspected a sensible Focus like Lori would aim the allure show at him. While he had been attracted to her, she hadn’t been attracted to him. Worse, given their age difference, her double-entendre laden bribe was almost creepy.
“You know I have other issues with staying here, Focus.”
“Yes?” The Focus was pushing again. You would think someone might tire of pushing him around, as he wasn’t the easiest person to push under the best of circumstances, but she never stopped.
“I don’t fit into your household,” Zielinski said.
The Focus frowned. A bedroom invitation frown. He wasn’t sure he had ever seen the combination before. “You’re talking about something more than just the problem with not being on the leadership team.”
“Yes,” he said. “I hate to brag, but I’m not an ordinary person.”
“I would have never guessed,” she said, laughing. “You mean being a department head at Harvard Medical isn’t a sinecure position?” The Focus took him by the arm and his manly interest in her increased greatly. Damnation! He had no idea her mastery of the subtle nature of Focus charisma was so complete. “I’m not an ordinary person, either…and an acquaintance of mine you haven’t met strongly hinted I should find other extraordinary people to be close to when he wasn’t around.”
Damn. If her comment meant what he thought her comment meant, this was a serious problem.
He needed to get out of Inferno now. He had few doubts about what would happen to him, an outsider, in a place like this, during an inevitable relationship tiff.
“That isn’t what I was getting at, Focus,” he said. “I’ve had to catch myself several times from saying or doing something foolish that would harm our professional relationship.”
Zielinski suspected she didn’t understand the problem. He knew she couldn’t read him well, and after several rounds of training him to resist her charisma, her ability to read him had suffered even more.
The Focus increased the allure, put her left arm around his waist, and gave him a set of bedroom eyes that would give a corpse an erection. “I really mean this, Henry.”
Zielinski almost laughed at the Focus’s forwardness, but didn’t. The last time he laughed at such an obvious piece of manipulation he had gotten himself tortured by Hancock. He still cursed his old loss of control, having made the mistake of letting false camaraderie fool him into believing he had made enough of an emotional linkage with Hancock to share laughter over a verbal gaffe.
“As do I,” he said. “My biggest problem is that I’m bored here.” No, and extra bathroom cleaning duty didn’t cut it, either. “I truly am a workaholic. Your people are wonderful and amazing, but they aren’t up to my standards as far as effort is concerned.”
She nodded. “You would have fired them for laziness.” She blinked, fetchingly. “You know from experience that I’m not that way, of course.”
“How easy would it be for you to take orders from me, as a researcher?”
The Focus took her hand from around his waist, and her allure vanished. Her mask of self-control partly down, he realized Lori was working out of near-panicked desperation, possibly not even realizing she was projecting the level of allure she projected. Perhaps she was doing so subconsciously. “I could do it. I would probably make a mess of things to start with, though. I’m sure we would be able to work through it.” She smiled. “I even came up with a sol
ution to the household leadership team problem: I’ll get Connie to create a new position – head of household medical research, to match Dr. Bob’s position of head of engineering.” Dr. Bob Masterson’s position was real enough to run a household department, but as a normal, it wasn’t real enough to get him included in the real household leadership team.
Her compromise tempted him. A lab, a small staff, a small budget, and tasked to produce Transform advances and information able to be traded to other households for non-monetary favors. If Carol hadn’t been captured, he likely wouldn’t have been able to resist, even knowing Focus Schrum had gotten to Lori, somehow.
“How would we deal with the problem that I see far too much for my own safety? I understand your decision to keep me out of the real leadership loop: I’m not a Transform, and you don’t have any handles on me at all, save friendship. Let me mention a few words to you to help you understand the problem: lover, dojo, and rebellion.” His comment died in a moment of silence.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit!” the Focus whispered. From outside, he heard the honk of his cabbie’s horn. Hank had the sudden desire to go join Lori’s dojo and learn martial arts.
More of the Focus’s charisma. Mildly out of control charisma; and, yes, this explained the earlier breathless allure. She didn’t want him to leave, and she panicked, which she didn’t show. Her control suffered, though, and her charisma slipped out of her grasp.
The Focus tensed, making fists with her small hands. “I hate this disease, I just hate it, I hate being a Focus and I hate having to go through scenes like this every goddamned time things start looking up!” She turned her eyes heavenward. “You could marry someone in the household. Ann. Tina. Hell, even me. Marriage would provide the handle you think I need; I’m positive marrying in would make you one of us at the juice level.”
Zielinski sighed. Here we went back to the creepy again. Rizzari’s household didn’t follow a true Weak Focus model; she and Connie had incorporated aspects of the corporate model, the charismatic model and, what he found disturbing, the hedonist household model. “Would that truly solve anything? I hadn’t realized how deep you swam in the political cesspool before I came here. I had hoped you and your household were a political backwater, but you’re not, and neither is Inferno. Focus politics, Council politics and Cause politics are difficult at best. Ever since Carol escaped from St. Louis, I’ve become a lightning rod for many dangerous problems. My being here makes things more dangerous for your household.”
“True, but necessary,” the Focus said. “You’re not the worst danger, by far, and Inferno and I are going to be attracting more problems as time goes on.” She met his gaze, and this time he felt her charisma wash over him. “Lay it out then, Henry. What will it take to keep you here?” Her voice crawled deep with heartfelt emotions. She did love him, in her own screwy way, but her love for him lived in the Focus-only emotions. Nothing like a normal woman’s love for a normal man. He didn’t understand its ramifications, and he suspected the Focus didn’t, either.
He couldn’t answer her question without binding himself to the answer. This deep into her charisma, even if he answered with an absurdity, she would be able to negotiate it into a lever big enough to own him.
The Arms already owned him, and he had decided over the past year and a half that he much preferred Arm ownership to Focus ownership. He suspected he had a better gut feel for the Arm-only emotions than the Focus-only emotions.
“You are what you are, doing what needs to be done,” he said. His non-sequitur froze the Focus in place. “I still count Keaton as my friend.”
Her face fell an octave as she worked out the implications of his statement. “Ouch,” the Focus said. As he watched, the Focus’s iron mask of self-control came over her, the one she used when dealing with strangers. “I guess you have been too burned by the Focuses to be able to trust me.”
He heard the honk of the horn again, repeatedly now.
“Just remember the advice you often give your own people when they’re down in the dumps: Transform Sickness makes things difficult, but it’s not an insoluble trap.”
She nodded, formal. “Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done while you’ve been here. Thank you for being willing to be so frank with me. Good luck. And call. I want to hear everything that’s going on over there.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I will.”
She turned and walked away, giving him neither hug, nor handshake, nor kiss. By rejecting her, and likely in some small way breaking her heart, he had successfully pissed her off.
Tonya at the March Focus Council Meeting, Day 1
Tonya came out of her tent into the pre-dawn darkness of the Georgia cow pasture. She stepped out into the dewy grass still wearing her long flannel nightgown and rubber boots over her bare feet. She carefully avoided a large cow patty by the entrance to her tent and stretched. Dawn wasn’t due for another hour and her breath steamed in the 40 degree early March air. Her troupe had arrived yesterday, on a Friday. In theory, these meetings started late on Friday and ended before noon on a Sunday, under the assumption that the Focuses would fly in late Friday and fly out late on Sunday, missing a minimal amount of work in their real world jobs.
The Focuses based their assumption on a big dream, a dream that the leading Focus households would be financially self-sufficient. The dream had never panned out; save for a few Focuses who could afford to travel with their entourages by air, everyone else came by cars and busses. This stretched the weekend meeting to between a week and ten days of travel and missed work, far too long for any Focus to be away from her household. So, the tradition had been born and the Focuses showed up at these meetings with their entire households. The cost in disrupted work (and wasted vacations) was immense, a cost the Council Focuses were willing to pay. The prestige and power a Focus gained by sitting on the Council did compensate.
At least Tonya thought so.
Delia, already awake, cooked breakfast in the open area their tents surrounded. Tonya picked up her nightgown to clear the dew covered grass and went to join her.
Delia, oblivious to the world, flipped several pancakes from the batch she cooked on a Coleman stove set up on an old card table. Her brown hair, still tangled from sleep, lay limply on a worn woolen coat she wore over a faded housecoat. She turned when she noticed Tonya behind her and smiled.
“Ma’am, the first batch of pancakes is done if you’re hungry,” she said in her back-hills Appalachian accent. “Would you like some hot chocolate to go with them?”
Tonya smiled in response. “Thank you.” She loved hot chocolate. At the same time, without even thinking, she pumped Delia a little. Delia felt the warm glow of pleasure of a better juice count and knew, in a way that counted, that her Focus approved of her.
Delia’s plain face beamed with delight. Tonya frowned to herself. The juice surge had been a little stronger than she had intended.
Delia did deserve it. Waking up early to serve breakfast to her ever-hungry Focus deserved a little extra reward, but Tonya wasn’t normally so casual about blatantly manipulating her people.
But Delia did love it. She did deserve it.
Tonya took her plate of pancakes over to a second card table and pulled a folding chair from the stack to sit in. Delia brought her the syrup and butter, and went off to make the hot chocolate while her Focus ate. Tonya sat at the table, the legs of her chair sinking deep into the damp ground, and thought about the juice she manipulated.
Here, in their Georgia pasture home away from home, the juice flowed like water. This always happened when she stole away from their current residence. Tonya shook her head, fighting the lure of going gypsy like so many of the other Focuses, never to stay in the same place more than a week. She would need to be extra-careful how she handled the juice if she didn’t want to hurt her people.
The pancakes tasted good this morning. A few minutes later Delia came with the hot chocolate. Tonya didn’t have the headache s
he lived with back home. The juice flowed with ease. Life was good.
Tonya looked around at her motley collection of tents, shining in the moonlight. Only the Transforms were with her now, twenty women and nine men. All the spouses and children had stayed home to save money. The dilapidated old school bus they had rented for the trip stood parked beyond the leftmost row of tents. Beyond the bus sat the tents of Jill Bentlow’s household. Up slope Esther Weiczokowski camped with her people, with Connie Webb next to her. Connie and her small entourage had actually flown in by plane because Connie was a partner in a viable law firm and brought in real money. It was nice to see a household actually comfortably well off for once. Polly Keistermann camped at the top of the hill, just outside the small farmhouse. The farm belonged to the sister of one of Polly’s people; she and her family were delighted and honored to share it with the Focuses.
Cathy Elspeth and Virginia Mansfield were due in the morning, the last of the Council members. The meeting itself was due to start at 10:00, the semi-annual meeting of the Council of the United Focuses of America, the UFA. The UFA served as a front organization for the more informal Focus Network, which linked the Focuses together with their families, their governmental support (minimal as it was) and their friends in the medical, research and business community. The Council, often spoken of with dread, was the visible face of the Transform community in the United States, and because of the Cold War, the visible face of the Transform Community in the entire free world.
Maybe in the summer they would do the meeting up in the northeast and she wouldn’t need to travel so far. She wondered what idiot had decided these meetings needed to be in the winter and summer, instead of the spring and fall. At least the meeting wasn’t in California this time.
Tonya finished off her first plate of pancakes just as Delia showed up with the second plate. Tonya lathered on the butter, planning the day’s events in her mind.
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Five Page 2