All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Two)

by Randall Farmer

  Buried deep inside me. I would do damned near anything to survive. I smiled, and cut her another piece of roast.

  “Ma’am, if you want me to feed you your dinner, I’m happy to comply.”

  Her hunting knife, twin of my own, her gift to me, appeared at my throat. Tiny beads of blood dripped down its edge and to the table, to make more stains among the flowers. I froze, but Keaton motioned with her eyes at her plate. I went back to feeding her.

  “Ma’am,” I said. “Let me rephrase the last. If you want me to feed you your dinner, I’m willing to comply.”

  “Better. Tell me how you’re planning to make me happy,” she said. “Why do you find it so difficult?” At times Keaton read my thoughts faster than I thought them. She still denied any supernatural involvement in this trick.

  “Ma’am. I have trouble sensing your mood. Your face tells me nothing until it’s too late.” ‘Too late’ meaning beatings and torture. “So I’ve decided to provide you with as many comforts as I can. I’ve cleaned this place from top to bottom and made it look like home.” Cleaning the bathroom itself was an adventure worthy of James Michener in an effusive mood. “Good food and bathmats, ma’am.”

  “Why?”

  This was all too personal, the secret thoughts and plans I make to improve my life with Keaton. I couldn’t refuse her, though. “I want to reduce the beatings and torture, ma’am.”

  “Remember our agreement?”

  “Yes, ma’am, of course ma’am.” My beading sweat soaked through my t-shirt. ‘I’m going to enjoy hurting you,’ she had said.

  “Tell me why your goal here isn’t idiotic.” She took the knife from my throat as I cut and fed her asparagus.

  “Ma’am, my limited experience shows that life as an Arm is full of pain,” I said, giving my prepared answer. “Even my friends in the Center caused me pain. I can’t imagine your lessons are going to be any less painful.”

  “Huh,” she said. She wiggled her eyebrows at me and did something with her face too fast for me to catch. I didn’t react, and she shook her head. “Get back in your chair and eat, dammit,” she said, her face a frozen mask again. “Skag, your goals are wrong. You should even be able to tell me why they’re wrong.”

  This time, I held my knife and fork long enough to get in several bites of food before the terror glare of Keaton’s headlight eyes sweated them out of my hands. I thought through what she didn’t say, and figured it out. Damn her! “My goal should be to become the best Arm I can be. The faster I learn, the more painful it’ll be.”

  “More,” she said.

  Right to the place I didn’t want to go. “The happier you are with me, the more you’ll teach, ma’am.” Her initial words on the subject – ‘I’m going to enjoy hurting you’ – echoed through my mind again.

  “Can’t force yourself to say it, eh?” Keaton said. She paused, eyed me, and laughed her sadistic laugh.

  The obvious corollary refused to escape my throat. The happier I made her, the more pain I would suffer; the more pain, the happier she would be, and the more she would teach. However, my mind wouldn’t survive; I already felt the fingers of madness creeping into my thoughts. Too much pain, too much pleasure. Things, dark things, twisted inside of me and carried me to far shores distant from my former humanity. Keaton encouraged them.

  Those dark twisted things were part of her lesson.

  Keaton looked at me, her face blank. Though I sensed nothing from her, I knew she enjoyed my terror, my fear of madness. When she saw what she wanted, she grabbed three slices of cheesecake and began to eat them.

  With Keaton’s gaze off me, I speed-ate my dinner.

  Later, after Keaton finished the cheesecake, she dragged out a stained newspaper, the Daily News from New York. She discarded the first section and dropped the second section into my lap. I dropped the last crumbs of graham cracker crust I had been scooping from the pie plate.

  “Read,” she said.

  I read. The lead article, which covered most of the first page of the second section, dealt with what they termed ‘the Brooklyn Transform Clinic massacre’. Seven dead, five others hospitalized. None of the ones hospitalized had gotten a look at his attacker. The attackers left no obvious clues. Oh, and one of the victims was a Transform, in the Transform holding tank, waiting with almost no hope for a Focus to take him.

  Huh. This was the clinic where Keaton took me for my draw. Oh, crap! Keaton did this, killed and wounded all those people, just to get me juice. She did this for me.

  All those people killed and hurt. For me.

  I put the newspaper down, slowly and gently, and looked up at Keaton. Her gaze was hard, unyielding, but not angry. Killing people? No problem. My weakness? A big problem.

  “Seven people died, so you might live for another week,” Keaton said. I tried to disappear into my kitchen chair, with no success. “Doesn’t this make you feel all warm and cuddly? Talk to me, skag!”

  Madness. She thrived on it. “Ma’am, I’m not yet convinced my life is worth so much.”

  “Really. You would rather go into withdrawal? I can arrange that.”

  “No!” Panic. “No, ma’am.”

  “So, what’s your problem with the killing?”

  I flushed in shame. “Guilt, ma’am. If I possessed the strength to hunt on my own, the only ones who would need to die would be my own draws. My kills. Transforms who would be dying, anyway.” My hands shook, hard. I owed Keaton for this. I was in debt to her for all this killing. Oh, I was hers, all right. Nothing but hers.

  We went over every single point in the article. Every time she found a hurtful place she picked at it endlessly. Several times, she found places where I protected myself with delusions. She took great joy in carefully shredding each pleasant illusion.

  “So you were ignorant about why I’d gone into the clinic? Did you think I was signing in? Chatting up the orderlies?”

  I thought back. What Keaton did had been obvious. “I knew you cleared a way for me. I didn’t want to admit it to myself.”

  “So, why are you always lying to yourself?” Keaton said.

  “Because I’m a decent person,” I said, after a little thought. “Inside. All these new things from being an Arm isn’t the real me. The real me obeys the laws, helps others, is decent, reasonable, and kind. I attended church, I was a good Christian.” I had obeyed the Golden Rule before I became an Arm.

  “What, you think you’re going to ever stop being an Arm?” Keaton said, and cracked her knuckles. “Remember how you treated your mother? Why should anybody treat you any differently?”

  Tears gathered at the corners of my eyes.

  “They shouldn’t,” I said.

  Keaton didn’t have to come up with opinions and force them on me. She just asked questions.

  I never before understood how terrible a thing was the truth.

  “Who made you kill the boy you fucked?”

  “Ma’am. You did.” I distrusted my answer.

  “You had a choice, didn’t you? What was the choice?”

  Did I have a choice? “I might have refused. You would have killed me.”

  “What killing you have been a bad thing? From the perspective of society?”

  “No.”

  “So you didn’t do society any good by refusing to die. Whose side are you on?”

  I turned away from the question, until Keaton’s tapping fingers forced the admission from me. “My side, ma’am.”

  “What sort of person kills others when ordered to by their superiors?”

  Claiming to ‘just follow orders’ wasn’t a moral justification. “Killers, I guess. Monsters. Evil people.”

  “You guess? You lying to yourself again?” Keaton said. “What’s the proper punishment for killers, monsters and evil people?”

  I remembered the Nuremburg trials. “Death. Prison.” Keaton stared at me. “Death.” I shivered.

  “What’s going to happen to your family, skag?” Keaton demanded. “The
press is going to surround them and ask them their personal feelings, how they feel about the fact their mother, daughter or wife is a mass murderer. How are they going to cope?” I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t even want to think about such horrors. Keaton made me. “Will your children still love you? What will be in their dreams at night?”

  My voice caught as I tried to hold back tears. “They can’t love me. They’re human. I’m not.”

  “What’s your problem, then? Why do you allow yourself to do such things?”

  “Low juice?”

  “What does low juice matter? I know your type, skag. What do you feel when you read in the newspapers about criminals who try the insanity defense?”

  I clenched my fists and stared down at the tablecloth. Little flowers on cheap fabric. Old bloodstains and new. “They’re lying, of course. Faking it.”

  “What’s your so-called reason? Low juice?”

  I took a deep breath. “Low juice is no excuse. I did it. Those deaths are my responsibility.”

  “What are you, Hancock? What are you as an Arm?”

  “I’m a monster,” I said. The final admission. “I’m willing to sacrifice anything and everything in order to get juice. I’m willing to kill innocent human beings to ensure my own survival. I’m an immediate danger to society. Evil. Satanic. The only sane response a normal person could have to me is to kill me. The police are right to be hunting me down.” My throat remained tight and my stomach wanted to come up, but I knew this to be the truth.

  Keaton gave me a wicked smile. “Did you enjoy your time in bed with the boy?”

  Her question surprised me, and I looked up in fear. The word “No” almost escaped my throat, but I stopped myself before I stated a lie that would get me beaten. “Yes.”

  “Some of the best sex you have ever had, wasn’t it?”

  I had to agree.

  “What would Bill think?”

  I looked away. I didn’t want to think about Bill. “He would hate me. It would help him justify divorcing me.”

  “He divorced you? Good for him.” Mocking. Keaton almost never had to laugh to get a point across. “Being divorced gives you permission to sleep around?”

  What could I say? There were always unstated caveats. “No, not exactly.”

  “Why?” Keaton said.

  “It’s not done. It’s not right.”

  “What’s that word they use in church, skag?” She cocked her right ear toward me. “Suddenly, I don’t remember.”

  “Sin.”

  Keaton nodded. “You trusted Dr. Zielinski. He respected you enough to help. Did he give you permission to kill?”

  I hated her direction shifts. “Uh, well, yes. Transforms.”

  “Innocents?”

  “No.”

  “So,” Keaton said, grabbing some summer sausage she had gotten for herself as a snack, “will he still respect you if he finds out you killed the boy?”

  “No, he’ll have a fit.”

  “So, when he learns the truth, Dr. Zielinski isn’t going to respect you any more, is he?”

  “No,” I said, quietly, after a long pause.

  “Why?”

  Keaton loved the torment of the mind as much as the torment of the body. “I’m not the same person. He has no idea what it takes to be an Arm in the real world.”

  “What about your mother? Your father? Your former friends in Jefferson City? Your former acquaintances? What will they think?”

  “They’ll all think I’m a monster.” A silent tear slid down my cheek. A second followed.

  “Let’s say I agreed to drop off a volunteer Transform once a week for the next year at your former home. Would you go back? Could you go back? Could any of them love you?”

  Keaton offered me my dream.

  My dream was a lie. “No. I’d still be a killer. They’d still despise me. They’d be right to lynch me.”

  “What does this mean, skag?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to look away, but Keaton grabbed my chin. “Tell me.”

  “My former life is over,” I said with a snuffle. My throat pinched so tight I could barely force the words out. “I can’t go back. Ever.”

  Keaton let go of my chin, and laughed. I cried.

  “Well,” Keaton said. “I think it’s time for some good hard exercise.” She already had her blood-soaked belt in her hands.

  I stood and walked to the exercise area, a murderess led to the gallows.

  Carol Hancock was dead. No, that wasn’t right. Carol Hancock had transformed.

  At night, as I lay on my mat in the storeroom, listening to the creak of the ceiling fans and the hum of distant traffic, I thought through Keaton’s argument. She made me admit to being an evil person. Her logic made sense, but I refused to accept it. It didn’t matter that her argument fit the facts. I refused to give in. I wasn’t evil, no matter what I did or what happened to me. I was Carol Hancock, a decent human being. I merely did what I needed to do to survive. Nothing else. I sinned now, but I would repent later. I wouldn’t let myself be evil, no matter what Keaton tried to force me to do.

  Was giving myself to Keaton better than giving myself to death? Yes. Even after her abuse in my short time in her warehouse home, I didn’t regret my decision. All I regretted were my mistakes and my weakness. I promised myself I would do better.

  Back in the clinic, Keaton had said she enjoyed causing pain. I had thought in terms of the yardstick and prepared myself accordingly. At the time, I had no idea what she really meant. Normal people can withstand terrible pain, withstand torture and abuse. In theory. Normal people can withstand nearly anything to defend great causes, or loved ones, or moral principles. So they say. I, however, was alone. I didn’t know if I would do better with something beside myself to defend.

  The shield over my sanity held, but thinner than before.

  (7)

  Keaton prodded my shoulder joint with her fingers, and the pain nearly brought tears to my eyes. “Well,” she said. “Your muscle nodules have shrunk to the point where we can finally start some real training.”

  Right. As if the killer exercises she put me through two to three times a day hadn’t been real training? Keaton sneered at me, hearing my thoughts as plainly as if I had spoken aloud. She turned and walked down the partition walled hallway to the gym, expecting me to follow.

  She was correct in her no-training-thus-far assumption, I decided, as I followed her. Killer exercise, perhaps, but not real training. Keaton was always correct. It was the mantra I lived by. Even when she was wrong, Keaton was correct. She led me out into the back part of the gym, to the ropes and rings and parallel bars. Training was good, my reward for all the pain.

  “Arms are fighters, Hancock. You’re going to need to be able to fight. Before I can teach you that, though, you need to be able to move. We’ll start you out on the basics, and,” tap tap tap on the tool belt, “you’re going to learn all of this at Arm speed. Tumbling. Learning to fall. And unlike the boys at the YMCA, Arms don’t need any damned padding on the floor, either. Concrete is just fine.”

  I learned.

  When I finished her initial lessons, she led me over to a set of parallel bars. “Get up there and walk one,” she said. I blinked in sudden horror. I had been doing cartwheels on the balance beam, but walking on top of a parallel bar? I heard Keaton inhale, enough for me to know what would come if I didn’t obey immediately. I leapt up and started walking. One step, then fall. Then two. Then four.

  Keaton sighed and gave me the eye. “Let me show you how this is done.” Her practice routine was a sight to see. She almost flew. She ran up and down those ropes like a squirrel. She leapt from one bar to another. She did flips in mid-air. She could leap from a ring, hanging in the air, do a flip, and then land on one of those thin bars, as stable as if she exercised on the ground. Then she would run and leap again, to grab a rope, and then swing herself somewhere else. It was a magnificent display.

  “Always remember, b
ullets are faster than juice,” Keaton said, cheery. She must have liked today’s lunch. We were in her workroom for my weapons lesson.

  “Hold this,” she said, and handed me a large pistol of some sort. “Turn it around in your hand, get the feel of it. No! Hold it solidly, shithead, not like it’s some baby’s dirty diaper.”

  I obligingly took a sturdier grip. I didn’t like it. The terrible deadliness made me cold. Guns were for my enemies, not for me.

  “All right. Bounce it in your hand. Now pass it to your other hand. This one’s a .357 Magnum. The .357 refers to the size of the ammo.”

  This was more information than I wanted to know about guns. Keaton continued anyway.

  “This one is unloaded. First thing you do when you get your hands on firearms, always, you check if they’re loaded. It doesn’t matter who you get it from, or what they say. Even me. You check. Make it a reflex. Pick up a piece, check if it’s loaded.” Keaton handed me a gun, and I checked. She held out her hand, and I handed it back. “It appears to be unloaded, right?” I nodded. She slid something on the top of the pistol back and forth. With a click, a bullet dropped out. “The bullet was ready to fire, what’s called chambered. Taking the magazine out doesn’t take the bullet out of the chamber. When you’re finished with any firearms and you want to store them unloaded, always remember to check if a bullet is chambered.”

  Keaton took the .357 away from me, and handed me another pistol. I took it tentatively and didn’t immediately check. With a flash of invisible motion, Keaton hit me. I flew through the doorway opening and landed on my ass in the hallway hard enough to slam my teeth shut on the tip of my tongue.

  I took several quick breaths and forced away any hint of tears. I stood up and walked slowly and painfully back into the workroom, swallowing the blood from my tongue. Keaton handed me the gun again. She had caught it when it pinwheeled out of my hand after she hit me.

  My face burned with humiliation, but I checked if the pistol was loaded.

  Keaton glared at me with her dead eyes. “Never let go of your weapon,” she said, her voice low pitched and quiet.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Blood in my mouth blurred my words. I lowered my head and studied her feet.