The lioness Monster still didn’t cow. Instead, she fought back, resisting Tonya’s charisma and shrugging off her wounds, which were numerous. Hell, the Monster was missing a part of her skull and one ear. She still didn’t drop.
“Die,” Tonya commanded. The lioness Monster stared at her, coughed, and exuded unnatural terror, a bowel loosening instinctive terror that once haunted her ancestors back when her ancestors wore natural fur and perhaps even flicked their tails.
The lioness shook her head but her wounds didn’t bleed. This Monster healed, incredibly, just like a Focus. Perhaps better, like an Arm. Tonya grimaced at this new Monster trick. Warnings echoed in her head, from Focus Rizzari’s presentation of a year ago: “Monsters with many years under their belts will have tricks and natural capabilities none of us can imagine, because the bad juice they carry is so potent. The Monster transformation never stops.” She had sneered at Rizzari’s idiocy, dry dusty theory spoken by someone who had never seen a Monster in her life, but here it was, proven right. The hard way. This was a hell of an old Monster, dumb as a stump, one of the stupidest Monsters Tonya had ever encountered, but utterly unstoppable.
“Die.”
Tonya didn’t have any place to back up, not any more, caught at the interior corner of two brick walls. The Monster lioness stopped and crouched just over fifteen feet away, and watched Tonya. Fought Tonya’s charismatic lock. Fought hard; Tonya refused to let the lioness Monster move, yet she moved anyway.
Readied to pounce.
Pounced.
Tonya screamed and hit the Monster with her charisma, putting the last of her own personal juice into the command. Freeze in place! Do Not Move! She shrugged to the side, and the Monster rammed the wall head on, inches to the left side of Tonya. The Monster’s front left paw sliced Tonya’s arm to the bone on the way by, taking her hand with it.
She expected the creature to shrug off the impact of the wall, gut her and kill her, but the creature slumped to the ground, immobile, stunned for the moment by Tonya’s charisma and control. Tonya grabbed at her with her good right hand, skin to skin contact. Now, the Monster’s foul juice became distinct, as distinct as Tonya’s own Transforms always appeared to her.
As a Focus, Tonya could manipulate juice on any Transform she touched, even foul Monster juice. And her blood was up. She ordered the Monster’s juice out of her brain.
The juice left.
The brain of the Monster died instantly.
Now the heart and lungs.
Tonya smiled as the Monster died again. “Now!” she screamed.
She let go of the Monster and backed off. Her attack would have finished any other Monster she had ever encountered. She wasn’t sure about this one. Todd, Ronald Ebbs and Greg Mazurka, the last of her people still standing, ran around the corner and peppered the fallen Monster with their rifles. They kept firing until the Monster was more skeleton than corpse.
Keaton was right. This had been a trap. However, the trap had been the Monster herself.
Tonya fell into a healing trance, oblivious to the world.
---
Half the Transform women in her household packed Tonya’s combination of office and bedroom. Writhing. Touching each other, touching Tonya. Her amputated hand had triggered it, Tonya guessed. Panic in the household. Behavior normally seen only during a Focus’s initial transformation, like nothing Tonya had seen or heard of since. Honey, Rhonda, Anna and Mary, her attendants as the induced Transforms created during a Focus’s initial transformation, would not let go of Tonya. They pushed her into the bed, the pressure of their bodies holding her there.
Whatever obscure instincts caused the household women to clump around her did have one effect: the omnipresent ache of being a Focus vanished. Tonya felt alive, so very alive, right this moment, her head clearer than it had been in years.
Not enough to lift the weight of those deaths from her. Two male Transforms and two normal men died in the Bronx Monster hunt. Tonya thought of herself as tough, inured to pain, death and sorrow – the lot of all Focuses – but with those deaths, something inside her now gaped open.
Her whole household grieved.
On the way back from New York, Tommy had gone on about how he failed her. He wanted to resign as head of household security. He wanted, demanded, punishment. Todd Batten’s viewpoint was different, one shared by several of her newer Transforms, those brought in to replace past losses during Monster hunting. As he held one end of the stretcher that had carried Tonya to the car, in the aftermath of the fight, he blamed those who died. “They failed. They failed their jobs to protect their Focus. Death is an appropriate punishment for them.”
Bobby Harper’s mangled body filled Tonya’s mind’s eye. Harper, one of her original male Transforms from before she knew even the basics, from before Focus Wini Adkins taught Tonya how to take control of her household and become a real Focus. Bobby had been one of the ringleaders back at the start of her household, back when her Transforms would punish her when she didn’t properly move the juice. A month after she took control of her household he apologized for his earlier behavior, volunteered to take on the worst of the household jobs and later, the most hazardous of the household jobs. Bodyguard, Monster hunter, and later, the dog trainer. Tonya had grown to love Bobby for his later selflessness, more than just the normal love of a Focus for her Transforms. He had become a part of her life, and she couldn’t imagine what life in her household would be like without him.
When she relived the fight in her memory, she could never get past the point in the fight where Bobby died.
What right did she have to lead her Transform men and normal men into Monster hunt after Monster hunt? How many had died over the years, seventeen or eighteen? Whatever the count, it appalled her. It hurt her to realize just how many the tally of death represented – an entire complement of household Transform men, and nearly as many normal men. What had she become?
A Monster, just like those she hunted.
The thought of leading her people on another Monster hunt brought tears to her eyes. Her lost hand would regrow. It would take time, lots of time, but Focuses regenerated lost legs and arms. They didn’t advertise this trick in public; the normals already feared the Transforms too much, and more Transform unnaturalness would not help. But she couldn’t bring back to life the four who died on this hunt.
More hunts would mean more deaths.
What options were available to her? Her household depended on the money the Monster hunting brought it. The hunts kept her people from living in the abject poverty forced on the other Focus households. The hunts kept Tonya’s household in relative luxury, with household late-model used cars, three phone lines, televisions, radios, good food and clothing. The hunts kept a real roof over their heads, instead of the trailer parks and inner city ghettos other Focus households suffered. They funded much of the new home the household planned to inhabit shortly.
Grief overcame Tonya again, and the household women huddled up even closer to her. Cried with her.
Her Monster hunting had to stop. It just had to.
Afterward
I have been studying Transforms and Arms since the earliest days of Transform Sickness, back when it was called Transform Syndrome and we all knew almost nothing about it. My worthwhile research has all been published, but the personal side of Transform Sickness has received much less attention. Now that Transform Sickness has become part of everyone’s lives, and many of the early Transforms achieved almost the status of myth, I’m sharing a few of the stories I know from those early years. They come either from my own experience or directly to me from those involved. If we are wise, we’ll learn from those early Transforms, both their mistakes and their successes. Extract what wisdom you can from them.
Dr. Henry Zielinski
Author’s Afterward
Thanks to Randy and Margaret Scheers, Michelle and Karl Stembol, Gary and Judy Williams, Melissa May, Maurice Gehin, and as always my wife, Marjorie
Farmer. Without their help this document would have never been made.
As stated earlier, The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio One is a companion piece to my novel “Once We Were Human”. Some of the pieces in here are here for completeness, others for fun, and they all serve to flesh out the story. The flashback sections are excerpted from a project the author once envisioned as a prequel to “Once We Were Human”. More of this prequel will show up in further Folios of The Good Doctor’s Tales.
You can find out more information about the world of the Transforms and other stories published by this author on http://majortransform.com.
The Commander series continues with in Book Two: “Now We Are Monsters”, and Folios Two and Three of “The Good Doctor’s Tales”.
Randall Allen Farmer
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio One Page 6