Weapons instruction continued until our mid-afternoon snack. She showed me several handguns, and told me about the differences between them and their different uses. Then she talked about ammo. Then the long guns.
After I fed her the mid-afternoon snack, she started in on knives, and their balance, edges, and weight. Next came switchblades, shivs, and throwing knives. I foresaw endless days of practice ahead with all of these.
“No, you don’t hold it like that,” she said, after examining my technique with the gift knife. “It isn’t a sword. It’s not a big fork you’re stabbing into a steak, either. Hold the knife underhand.” I complied.
What annoyed me the most was when, on those rare occasions where I forgot something and Keaton pasted me for it, I found I did not forget the lesson afterwards. I had to admit: pain helped me remember.
I gave up on the idea that weapons were only for emergencies a little after my late afternoon snack. If I carried a weapon of my own, I would be able to threaten people with the weapon. Keaton wouldn’t have to cut a bloody swath through clinics to get me my juice if I mastered the use of these weapons. I would be able to bluff my way through on my own.
When we finished, the lesson moved to the kitchen, where I prepared dinner. “From now on, you’re going to carry,” Keaton said, amid an exhaustive lesson on why and how you cleaned firearms. “I want you carrying a pistol, along with your knife, on your person at all times. Minimum. You understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The world was a dangerous place and Arms weren’t always going to be able to sneak around the dangers.
After dinner, Keaton taught me about holsters and ways to carry weaponry. Why the leather knife thing I once thought of as a holster turned out to be a knife sheath. When we finished, I wore a pistol in the small of my back and my knife under my skirt along my thigh.
Keaton taught. I learned.
---
Keaton gave me another kill six days after my first Clinic kill. Six days! She meant what she said about juice levels. I was only down to about 110 when the next kill came. I had never before gotten a kill when I was so high.
The second kill was, all by itself, enough to counter many beatings. My relationship with Keaton didn’t improve in this period. Keaton was cruel. She humiliated me. She played games with my mind. She was arbitrary and opaque in her motivations. Once she screamed at me for looking at her office door, which I hadn’t done, and beat me nearly unconscious anyway. She meant every cruel thing she did.
Keaton expected more of me with my second kill. She expected me to be coherent and cooperative. She demanded I control my kill lust, to function, at least moderately, within range of my kill. She told me that if I didn’t manage to control myself, she would take my kill herself.
I managed.
For the second kill, we went to Chicago, a full day trip, arriving at the Clinic at night. We snuck in, and Keaton had me knock out the one duty nurse.
Heaven, in the form of a tag-less woman Transform, awaited.
---
“The cops are coming!” Keaton said. “We’ve got to get out of here! Goddammit! Get your shit together! MOVE!”
I moved.
This was the first time I killed a woman for juice. Keaton was right. A woman held more juice. Wonderful juice. I had never been so high on juice. I wanted sex. Lots of sex.
I didn’t see any signs of the police as we slipped out the gate and off of the clinic grounds. We got to the car without any issues. The car was another one of Keaton’s stolen specials, this one an ancient ’49 Packard. When we got to the car, I relaxed the control I had been using to keep myself going. I let myself go back into the ecstasy of the kill.
“God. If you could keep yourself going this long, you’d think you could manage to keep control of yourself all of the time,” Keaton said, contemptuous.
The ecstasy vanished.
“I don’t see any cops coming,” I said.
“Hmm? Oh, there never were any cops. I lied.”
Damn Keaton!
Keaton drove us to an apartment building about fifteen minutes away from the Chicago clinic. I perched on the edge of the car seat and tried to keep from crawling out of my clothes. Every few minutes Keaton would ask me a question that required a response from me, just to keep me from enjoying my post-kill bliss. She took us to a shabby looking third story apartment, in an old brownstone left over from a previous century, and opened the door. Inside was a seedy looking man about twenty-five years old.
He wasn’t happy to be answering the door at this time of night, but after a glance at Keaton his face froze into immobility.
Keaton said to the man, “Do what she wants,” and to me “I’ve got to go make some phone calls.” She closed the door and never even came in.
This encounter was merely physical. He was business-like about satisfying my needs, but nothing exceptional happened. After several hours, Keaton came back and we left again. I didn’t need to kill the man this time. This time I told him my name was Kelly.
After I came down from the kill high, feeling as bouncy and brainy as I had ever felt in my life, I came up with a new plan for dealing with Keaton. The key now was anticipation. Put myself in her place and think: what would I want with my slave? It gave me a bunch of insights about little things I should be doing.
The next morning I glanced at myself in the mirror. I looked a lot more like Keaton and a lot less like a human woman.
Chilling.
---
Two days later, we sat at the kitchen table in the warehouse, quietly eating roast turkey and mashed potatoes. I had spent hours preparing the meal, complete with little chef crowns on the turkey legs and the mashed potatoes in an elegant spiral mound made by squirting them through a cake decorator, and asparagus with cheese sauce standing like a miniature forest on its plate.
Keaton didn’t notice one bit of my preparation. She stared off into space as she ate, not acknowledging my existence. Keaton’s last kill was ten days ago, and she had to be getting low on juice.
I was silent from sheer terror of the new situation. I thought I had everything figured out this time. I would be artistic. Artful presentation of dinner. Artful decoration of the warehouse. Well, you know what they say about best laid plans…
With no warning, Keaton’s hand snapped out and clamped around my wrist, doubling my pulse rate in an instant. She pulled me to her and forced me to my knees at her feet. Her face never changed expression as she made a long cut on the inside of my arm. Finished, she made a second long cut parallel to it, a quarter of an inch away. She then made a short cut across the top connecting them.
I pinched my tongue between my teeth as she paused before starting to pull the strip of skin off my arm.
I screamed at the top of my lungs, of course. I cried and pleaded with her to stop. She held on to my arm with her iron grip as I tried to pull away from her.
Inexplicably, miserable long minutes later, she stopped and let go of my arm. I fell to the floor and turned to eye her through my tears, shivering and wondering what she would do next.
She didn’t even glance at me. Instead, she stared at the strip of skin she held in front of her.
“Go exercise,” she said.
I fled. I never found the bloody strip of skin she ripped off me.
I exercised, expecting Keaton to continue her torture at any moment. She didn’t show and didn’t show, and the anticipation finally got to me. I slunk out of the gym, and to the shower. No Keaton. I took my shower, expecting a Psycho shower episode. Nothing. I crept around until I found Keaton, off in a corner, on her recliner. I had missed her on the way to the shower. She stared into space, her youthful face looking old and haggard. In her right hand she held her serrated knife. Her left arm rested on the arm of the recliner, torn and bloody. Every once in a while, the expression on her face would twist, and she would take the knife and draw it slowly, almost gently, up the inside of that bloody arm. She would watch the blood flow and massage
the cut so the blood kept flowing. When, finally, the bleeding stopped, she stared off into space again. I couldn’t imagine the agony her muscles must have been putting her through, but she never showed it. She just sat, unmoving, with dead eyes and a black expression on her face. Whatever demons shared Keaton’s head with her were more important than me. I fled. I ran back into the gym and into my storeroom and waited, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, attempting not to vomit up my impressively artistic dinner.
She left the next day without saying anything to me. She returned two days later, after her kill.
That was Keaton on low juice.
A major problem with Keaton, as with any Arm, was ‘who Keaton was’ cycled wildly, depending on her juice level. I hadn’t picked up on this when she worked at the Center, masquerading as Larry.
Down on juice, Keaton would give unclear orders, and go after me for not interpreting them correctly. If I asked for clarification, she would go after me for being stupid and dense. She would go after me for not following orders she didn’t give me. She would give me impossible orders. I did nothing right. Sometimes, I couldn’t even figure out what I was being beaten for.
Keaton’s temper and control also deteriorated as her juice level fell, and she lost all sense of proportion and consistency. The size of the punishment no longer fit the offense. She would give me a severe beating for a minor offense, just because. At times, when I legitimately screwed up, she didn’t beat me at all. She just didn’t have the energy. Exercise sessions became a nerve-wracking experience, because I never knew what she would do. She wasn’t interested in them, did not care if I did things right, and my exercise made her irritable. Several times she left me to my own devices for exercise.
I stayed away from her as much as possible, trying my very best to be invisible. When she did notice me, I tried everything I could think of to appease her. The only things that seemed to work at all were abject subservience, and groveling. I did as much as I could of both.
The best thing to be said about Keaton when she was low on juice was that at least she wasn’t around much. She spent most of her time out hunting.
---
After Keaton returned, high on juice, we returned to intense training. She took me to a shooting range and worked me on my shooting. She added serious running to my lexicon, and we went out late at night to quiet parks and ran for hours at speeds normals couldn’t match. I obeyed her orders now with an instinctive obedience.
After the shooting range, she taught me more tumbling in the gym. I learned to walk on my hands, and how to do walkovers and cartwheels and backbends on any surface. She taught me kick-fighting, leaving me practice kicking at a mat attached to the wall for hours. I learned to walk the length of a canted parallel bar without falling off.
Robbery lessons followed, right after another of my five star restaurant dinners she didn’t bother to acknowledge.
“The first thing to remember is you have to make it look like a normal robbery,” she said. “Robberies occur every day and don’t get any special attention from the authorities. If you’re reasonably intelligent, and careful, you can bring in a decent amount of money at fairly low risk. You need to distribute your robberies geographically, keep the violence down, and vary your style.” Keaton munched on her second piece of chocolate almond torte. I would have liked a second piece myself, but she didn’t give me permission.
“To do anything, dipshit, you need to learn how to pass as a man,” Keaton said, mid-bite. She motioned for me to take a second piece of the torte; high on juice, she was a tolerant lord and master. “Muscular women stand out like sore thumbs, especially if they shake people down or commit robberies. The Feebs,” FBI, in Keaton-speak, “will immediately think ‘Arm’, and you’ll have well trained Feebs trying to chase you down.”
Keaton hauled me off to the dressing room. She had acquired some men’s clothes of my current size, which fit me tolerably well. She wrapped my torso and had me dress.
I made, depressingly enough, a convincing man. More convincing than Keaton, actually. I was 5’8”, tall enough not to stand out. My muscles were mannish, my breasts shrunken, so, with my breasts flattened and my waist thickened, I appeared to have a man’s build. My flat breasts depressed me, the most visible sign of my inhumanity. Although my ongoing changes slowly consumed my body fat, I had actually gained weight because of all the muscle growth. Definitely unfair.
My hair didn’t match, still ragged from Keaton’s inexpert hair chopping. Keaton had me strip down to my underwear, neatened up my hair a bit with a pair of scissors, scattering locks of dark blonde hair all over the floor of the dressing room. I made note of the mess and sighed inside – the cleanup was my job. When she finished my hair still looked sloppy, but now more like a man’s cut.
A hairdresser she wasn’t.
“Put your clothes back on,” Keaton said. “Before you can pass as a man, you need to be able to talk like a man.”
Right. Keaton sneered at me. “You’re an Arm, not a fucking normal, skag. This is easy shit. Just expand your thorax and your voice will lower.”
I nodded, but I didn’t believe a word she said.
“Like this,” she said, her voice a deep bass. “Or like this,” she said, her voice a high soprano.
“Okay. How’s this sound?” My voice sounded like I had a cold. Keaton did the stone face routine.
I tried again and failed. I tried repeatedly, but I couldn’t do it. Whatever trick Keaton used to change the size of her voice box remained beyond my abilities.
After about fifteen minutes, she decided that maybe a little pain would help motivate me. Pain had worked before.
Not this time.
Then Keaton started to get irritated. The entirely predictable followed, made worse because she hadn’t ever gotten mad at me while still high enough on juice to be effective.
Not a good combination.
Even despite the blowtorch suntan, I never did manage to get my voice down.
---
Seven days after my second Clinic kill, I collapsed during an exercise session. I rolled off the bench and fell to the floor. Keaton beat me and tried to force me up, but I had nothing left to give. Keaton’s session with me after the voice training lesson had cost me too much juice. Low on juice from too much healing, damaged by Keaton’s beatings and skinnings, I retained no reserves to draw on for exercise. Keaton tried various motivators, including a partial dislocation trick with my elbow so painful I almost went unconscious. I didn’t get up. I didn’t even cry. I just lay on the floor and didn’t move.
She would start beating me soon, I predicted.
Keaton sat down on the bench and sighed.
“You’re not making it as an Arm, are you?” Keaton asked, gentle. I had never heard her speak gently before. As I would learn later, Keaton could be a real heartbreaker when she put her mind to it.
I couldn’t move because of the low juice.
Keaton didn’t move either. Time passed and I recovered a bit. Eventually, I glanced at her. She carried the serrated knife she liked so much. She rolled the hilt back and forth between her hands, an expectant look in her eyes.
It was over.
She would kill me.
I had a hard time making myself care.
Keaton eyed me, silently, as I lay on that cold concrete floor.
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked, after a while.
She shrugged. “Do you want me to?” she asked, in her gentle voice.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know the answer. I covered my head with my arms, and waited.
She sighed again. “You’re not strong enough. You’re just so much like a normal. What am I going to do with you?”
She was silent for a long time. I didn’t move from my curled up position on the floor.
She spoke again, softly this time. “I don’t have any other way to teach you. I know how I survive, and I try to teach you, because I don’t know any other way.
What else can I do? I just can’t get through to you. All you do is fall apart on me.”
She was silent again.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I said.
She didn’t answer.
After another long silence, she spoke again. “The one thing you can’t do is give up. If you want to keep going, I’ll keep trying to teach you. I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing. I expect, pretty soon, you’ll die of it.
“Or I’ll kill you, if you want me to. You’ve kept trying, even though you are a lump of mush. I think that earns you a quick death. I’ll make it quick, and clean, and as painless as possible.”
I didn’t move. I couldn’t answer.
Keaton waited.
She wouldn’t wait forever.
Slowly, very slowly, I picked myself up from the floor. I stood in front of Keaton.
She shook her head. “You’re a fool,” she said. “I’m not making a standing offer.”
Slowly, very slowly, I turned to the kitchen to make breakfast.
---
“Sit,” Keaton said.
I sat, an automaton. My will? Fled long ago. The shattered pieces of me were ground to nothing.
“There he is.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I metasensed the kill, in his cell in the Buffalo Clinic.
“See the window? Climb up and take him.”
I climbed up and took him. The next thing I knew, Keaton dragged me back to the car. I slept off the draw effects in the car.
“Go get laid, skag,” Keaton said. I got out of the car in the bar parking lot, found a man at the bar, got laid, left. Keaton waited.
“Get in.”
I got.
We traveled. I made my elaborate post-kill plans to please Keaton. We arrived in Philadelphia.
“Go fix…” Keaton said. I was already on my way to fix her food. I fixed.
All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Two) Page 9