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

by Randall Farmer

  I cleaned.

  I exercised.

  “More!” Keaton said, after my muscles failed doing toe raises. I rested for thirty seconds, and started again. I didn’t complain when Keaton provided motivation.

  “Lick my feet,” Keaton said, after exercises.

  I licked feet.

  ---

  “Come here, skag.” Skag, dipshit, dog, cow, shithead and hey you were my names, now. Fine. A name implied too much independence. Complete anonymity was much better.

  I obeyed Keaton. I would give her anything. Anything. No more arguments. The last remnants of the real me were ground into powder and burned to ash. I spent every moment thinking of ways to please Keaton. Juice became my second highest priority.

  I no longer thought of my former life. I no longer thought of anything good, or pleasant, because Keaton always knew when I tried to find refuge there. The pain was always greater than the pleasure.

  I accepted whatever degradation Keaton gave me. The degradation made her happy, and so the degradation made me happy as well.

  She thought I was worthless, and so I thought I was worthless, too.

  Nothing remained of my humanity.

  (8)

  One day, after I finished the supper dishes, Keaton came from her office carrying a quantity of papers. I came and groveled at her feet.

  “Sit at the table,” she said.

  I sat at the table and waited for Her next order.

  She moved the little vase of fresh flowers off to the side and spread the papers out over the flowered tablecloth. Maps. She spread a sheet of clear plastic over one map, and tossed a straightedge, some pencils and some markers on the map as well.

  “All right,” she said. “Time for you to learn how to hunt. Three of those clinic kills is all I’m willing to risk giving you. From now on, you get your juice on your own.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We’re going to do this in California. I want you as far from home as possible when you fuck things up. This map here is Los Angeles.” She tapped a finger on the map in front of her. “What we need to do is identify the prime hunting territory. Normally, you’d do this yourself, but in this case, I’m going to do it for you. I’ve hunted Los Angeles a few times, and know where the best areas are.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, a cringe in my voice. Obedient. Humble.

  “All right. Here.” She turned the map to face me and moved her chair next to mine, so we could both study the map. She sat down.

  I shivered to have Her so close to me. Keaton smiled and absently moved a little closer. I shivered some more.

  She marked up several areas on the map.

  “This large area here is downtown.” She pointed to the largest circle. “You’ll want to cover that during working hours, but downtown areas are almost always good. Same thing for the factories along the waterfront. There’s another smaller cluster of office buildings in the Hollywood area that are also good, for the same reason. Now this area,” she pointed to another large circle, “is your colored ghetto. And these two are barrios. Those areas are packed tight with people and make good hunting. Also, over here,” she pointed some more, “this is a more expensive area, but because of the number of high rise apartments in the area, the density is good.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I nodded eagerly and memorized the locations she pointed out.

  “Those are the best areas. Other areas aren’t quite this good, but some are reasonable to hunt. We’ll start with the prime locations, though.”

  Keaton handed me one of the markers and the straightedge.

  “The next step is to make your grid. You need to use the scale on the map, and draw a grid with a half mile between lines. You do it.”

  I carefully drew the grid. Keaton went off and got herself some more food from the refrigerator. I always kept the refrigerator stocked with good things for Her to snack on.

  Keaton came back eating some leftover baked chicken. She examined my work and grunted. She stood right behind me. I teetered on my chair from Her closeness.

  “All right. Now overlay your grid on the map. You want to find the street pattern that best matches your grid.”

  I did as she told me.

  “No, no,” she said. “Do it separately for each area. You’re trying to find the path through each of these areas that provides you with the best coverage. Try it again, and this time just do it for the downtown area.”

  I fooled with it. Keaton corrected my matching and I drew a path up and down the streets that best matched my grid. Keaton corrected several mistakes. Eventually, I drew out a path through downtown Los Angeles, my first Keaton-approved hunting path.

  “Now that you have your plan laid out,” she said, seated across from me once more, “you need to figure out how long you should expect this grid plan to take.” She leaned back in her chair, lifting three of the legs into the air, and absently balanced on the remaining leg. I fidgeted nervously, waiting for the single hollow leg to collapse underneath her. “Assume that you’re going to be averaging about 15 miles per hour. The speed limit is higher, but these are slow streets, and you need to account for stoplights and such. 15 miles per hour is about right. Since you have a quarter mile metasense range in each direction, you cover a half-mile wide sweep as you go. This gives you about seven and a half square miles in an hour. Assuming you have a little bit of gap in your coverage, this gives you a four mile by four mile area covered every two hours. This isn’t an exact number, and your coverage will vary a lot with the circumstances, but this is a good baseline number to work with.”

  I nodded acknowledgement. Maybe if the chair didn’t collapse, she wouldn’t beat me. She would if it did.

  “Anyway, you should expect to cover the central business district in about two hours,” she said. “I want you to come up with hunting paths through the other areas I’ve circled, and tell me how long you’ll need to hunt each area. After that, I want you to come up with a list of other areas you’d consider good prospects for hunting. I’ll have a look at what you’ve got tomorrow morning.” She leaned forward again and brought all the legs of her chair down to the floor. Finally. I tried to conceal a sigh of relief.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, acknowledging her orders. I looked over at her, a question in mind.

  She lifted her chin slightly and raised an eyebrow, giving me permission to ask my question.

  “What happens if I can’t do this? Ma’am.” I looked down at my hands. “Hunting seems like a difficult thing, and, well, you know, I’m not…” I searched for the right word.

  She made a sort of snort of disgust. I fell to my knees at her feet and cowered.

  I glanced up at Keaton. She rolled her eyes in exasperation. I had gotten my signals wrong. I got up off the floor and sat back in my chair.

  “You just do what I’ve told you and you’ll do fine,” she said. “God, those clinic kills are too risky. If you can’t hunt after all this, cow, you’re not worth my time.

  “Now go finish the dishes. You owe me another workout. You can get back to this when you’re done with everything else.”

  After my workout, Keaton went back to the hunting lesson. I made hunting paths for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. I came up with alternate places to hunt. Keaton ran me through endless hunting scenarios. Five different ways to cut someone out of a crowd, ten different ways to get a person to a quiet location, what things I needed to consider when picking a kill site, when to do it in a car, when to kill other people who were present, all elaborations on her earlier lessons.

  The lesson she reiterated the most, hit hardest, was how to tell when the risk got too high. How to determine if my kill site would stay private. Whether my chances of getting away clean were too low. She ran me through scenario after scenario.

  “What do you do if you spot a kill in a bar, surrounded by friends? Wait until when? Where are you going to wait? What if a cop decides you look suspicious as you’re waiting? What if he wants to
take you to the station for questioning? What if your kill is home asleep in an apartment, with a half dozen family members in the apartment with him? What if your kill is under a death watch, with friends and family waiting for her to go Monster? What if you’re going down the highway and you spot your kill going seventy miles an hour in the other direction? What if your kill is in a grocery store with her four kids with her? What do you do with the lady’s four kids? What if your kill doesn’t behave rationally? That happens a lot with Transforms. What do you do when the kill you’re trying to quietly haul off makes a scene? What do you do with the body when you’re done?”

  Hour after hour we went through these scenarios. The answers to the above questions, by the way, are wait, wait for as long as necessary, wait either in a car parked in a quiet nearby location or as a customer in the bar itself, try to convince the cop that everything is fine and vacate the area, and return a few minutes later to wait in a different location. If a cop tries to take you to the station, kill the cop. Once any hope of being inconspicuous is lost, grab the kill if you can do it immediately, write off the kill if you can’t, and vacate the city. The kill in an apartment overloaded with people is no good. Wait, and try to kidnap him when he leaves the apartment in the morning. Kill him later in a quiet location. For the death watch, kill all the normals and pin their deaths on a Monster (meaning no gun, and using weapons mimicking claws), then take the kill. Follow the kill in the car. Something might turn up. If he stops at a store or similar place, park near him, stick a gun in his back, and take both him and his car. If he turns on an isolated road, honk at him and try to convince him to stop. He may go home to an empty house. The mother with four kids will be a loud kill no matter what. Killing the mother and leaving the kids also attracts a lot of attention, as does killing the mother and the kids and making them all disappear. Generally, it’s better to leave the kids, but to do that, you have to extract the mother without the kids noticing. If you’re in your home city, leave the kill alone. Irrational kills are a pain in the neck. Control them any way possible, including breaking bones, and serious physical damage. Otherwise, cut and run, and try again later.

  The body disposal session turned out to be a long one, and disgusting. If you break several of the bones, you can fold a body into a fairly small space. This is important if you have to carry the body out somewhere at all public, because otherwise bodies are hard to disguise. It’s best if a body never turns up again. Bodies can be buried, but they need to be buried deep, and in such a way that doesn’t make the area appear to have been disturbed. Houses on pilings instead of slabs or basements are also quite good, as an Arm can quickly dig a pit underneath one to drop a body in, without having to worry about the area looking disturbed afterwards. Weighting a body and dropping it in the ocean is classic, but requires use of a boat.

  If all else fails, Keaton said, take the body out into the woods, shoot the hell out of it, and leave it for the wild animals. The authorities will likely find the body, but too late to figure out an Arm killed the victim.

  ---

  I got into the car Keaton rented at the Los Angeles airport. I was here to hunt, only five days after my last kill, with enough time to screw up. I would be hunting on my own for the first time. I had absorbed all of Keaton’s drills on how to hunt, and boiled them down into a thick notebook of possible scenarios.

  We ate and stretched. Keaton drove us to a seedy section of town, parked the car on a side street, and ordered me out of the car. We walked. It was cold for Los Angeles, and gray, and the wind whipped our coats. I shivered from nerves, not the cold.

  Keaton led us to a seedy used car lot, a suspicious looking place, holding about thirty cars. A small shack stood in the back, not much larger than a small room, and ready to blow down in the angry wind. Large banners advertising ‘Quality Used Cars!!!’ and ‘Best Deals in L.A.!!!’ snapped. Weeds had taken root through cracks in the pavement, and so had the cars. I suspected it would take as much work to get either to move.

  Keaton started looking over the cars. After a few minutes, a man came hurrying out of the shack. He was a thin man, about forty or so, shivering in a thin suit coat. He exuded a hearty cheerfulness, but I saw his cheer was a sham. The hollows under his eyes were gray, and as he came close, I smelled both cigarettes and alcohol.

  “Hello! Hello!” he said. “We have some excellent deals here. What kind of car are…” His voice, which started out so hearty, faded off once his eyes turned to Keaton.

  He approached Keaton, of course. Keaton was dressed as a man and wore a suit. I stood meekly behind her, the proverbial downtrodden wife.

  When the salesman approached, Keaton turned towards him. I didn’t know what she did. A glint in her eye, perhaps, the twist of her smile, the way she moved her body…and everything about her screamed predator. She would kill in a heartbeat. She was dangerous.

  The man saw the predator. He stopped moving towards us, and quickly glanced around, as if looking for an escape route or for help. He expected Keaton would rob him, and maybe shoot him in the process.

  He came towards us anyway. “I’m Roger Ailcroft. Glad to have you here. What can I do for you?” he said. The false cheerfulness was now even more false. He extended his hand to Keaton.

  Keaton just looked at his hand. After a few seconds, he put his hand down. Keaton shifted slightly, as if she stalked him. The man became more nervous. He held his suit coat close to his body.

  “I, uh, what kind of car…” His eyes checked all around him.

  Keaton cut him off. “I want the most reliable car you have.”

  “Uh, yes. That would be this Chevy right over here. A ’59, but it runs like a dream. Beautiful car. Best car on the lot.” He led us to a blue Chevrolet, about twenty feet away. He didn’t turn his back to Keaton, so he went practically backward the entire distance.

  The car didn’t appear to be anything special. The price, painted in large white letters on the windshield, said $529. More expensive than most of the cars on the lot.

  Keaton took a quick glance at the car. “Get the keys,” she said.

  “Uh,” he said, hesitating. Keaton pulled out her wallet and took out a large stack of twenties. She began to count them out in her hand.

  “Uh, right,” the salesman said. “I’ll get the keys. They’re back in the office. I’ll be right back.”

  He moved towards the shack as he spoke. Keaton followed him, I followed Keaton, and we all went into the shack. The door banged behind us, didn’t latch, and banged again. The floor creaked and the walls rattled because of the wind.

  The man unlocked a metal cabinet, and took out a set of keys. Keaton took them from his hand.

  “Hey!” he said. Then he thought better of it, and didn’t say anything more.

  Keaton put the keys in her pocket and then held her stack of twenties in front of her. Slowly, she peeled off one twenty after another. She watched the salesman, and the salesman watched the money. She counted out ten twenties. Then she stopped.

  The salesman grimaced. “I can’t… The car…$400. I can go down to $400.”

  Keaton put away the rest of her twenties. She took her stack of ten twenty dollar bills, and she spread them in a fan in her hand and watched the salesman. She smiled a bit.

  The salesman reached for the money. Keaton smiled wider and let the money fall to the floor. As the salesman scrambled to pick up the money, Keaton walked out the door. I followed Keaton to the Chevy, Keaton got in the car, and we drove off.

  I hunted. I drove up and down the streets of central Los Angeles in the blue Chevy, the price newly wiped off the windshield. The Chevy did indeed run.

  I hunted alone, silent. Keaton gave me the name and location of the Best Western we would use, and told me not to go there until I finished hunting the territory.

  I had never been a particularly talented driver. Hunting made my driving worse. I found using my eyes to drive and my metasense to hunt a difficult combination. If I got into an acc
ident, Keaton would beat me. Bad.

  Hunting proved to be a nerve-wracking experience with no Keaton watching over me. Only her memory controlled me. Relative freedom, and the siren call of relative freedom let me think again. To hunt successfully, I needed to be able to do this on my own. Raised in a cage and fed clinic kills and volunteer Transforms, I felt like a caged wolf dropped out in the wilds of Los Angeles. Even the expected nervousness from the new situation made me nervous.

  I wasn’t low on juice, but just thinking about a kill brought on the craving. I needed to succeed. If I succeeded, I got juice. If I screwed up, Keaton would carve me into hamburger.

  I drove up and down the streets, following the map in my head. I seldom had to reference the gridded-up paper map beside me.

  I found an office building with three Transforms. I pulled the car to the side of the road and checked them out. All three of them had the same pattern. They all belonged to the same Focus. I let them go and drove on.

  I hunted all day and well into the night. Keaton had given me money for food, and I stopped when I couldn’t stand the hunger. I found seven tagged Transforms from three different Focuses. I found no untagged Transforms.

  At midnight, I pulled in to the Best Western, beside Keaton’s rental. She had left her room number written on a paper on the dashboard.

  I craved juice, my muscles screamed in agony, and I was hungry. Keaton let me into the room, and my mind turned off again, as I became again Keaton’s robot Arm.

  Keaton did with me what Keaton always did.

  Sometime later, Keaton took me out to the Cleveland Nature Preserve to run. We ran for two solid hours, interspersed with pushups and handstands and pull-ups on tree branches. Two hours passed before I worked out the aches from the long day in the car. I appreciated my Arm enhancements that let me get by with so little sleep.

  The next day I repeated the hunting exercise in San Francisco. I didn’t eat, except when I had to. I didn’t exercise at all. I didn’t concentrate on anything but the hunt.