I stepped out of the car, in the asphalt alleyway, among the garbage cans and loading docks, the lights from the cop car strobing neon in the darkness. The cop, about fifty years old and balding, was man enough for me. I moved towards him with love on my mind.
I was too stoned; I should still be non-functional, back in the car. If the cop gave me just fifteen more minutes, I would have been able to cope.
The cop was too smart for his own good. He took a good look at my face, managed to discount my wig, and turned pale as death. He knew who I was. He scrambled backwards and pulled out his gun.
Stoned, I ignored the gun. Intent on seducing him, I weaved back and forth hypnotically as I approached. When he shot me, the bullet went through my ribs instead of my heart.
The searing agony restored me to my senses. Fueled by an adrenaline panic, I got to that cop before he got the second shot off, knocked the gun out of his hands and broke his neck. I skidded to the ground beside him and lost consciousness again.
When I returned to the land of the conscious I found myself flat on my back, lightheaded, with my torso hurting like hell. I had trouble breathing and a nasty whistling noise came from my chest.
I was in real trouble. I didn’t know whether the flashing in front of my eyes came from the cop car or a reaction to my own wound. I heard voices on the cop’s radio in his car. They would soon realize he was in trouble and send someone to investigate.
I tried to move, and failed. Horrible fears ran through my head: paralysis, juice withdrawal, some unknown Transform change, religious curses, and all sorts of crazy ideas.
Why didn’t the cop warn me before he shot? Oh, right, cops didn’t bother giving warnings to monsters.
Every breath burned, and I never seemed to get enough air.
I tried to fight off the panic. I was helpless. Dying. Alone. Worse, anyone who found me would be more likely to kill me than to save me. Given all the blood, they likely wouldn’t rape me. Unfortunately.
Sometimes my body’s responses were just flat out ridiculous.
I lay on the ground and watched the stars twinkle above me, changing colors with the changes in the lights from the cop car. There wasn’t a thing I could do besides watch the sky.
After five minutes of stargazing, the whistling noise stopped. I tried to move, and succeeded. My chest still hurt like hell, and my breathing wasn’t right, but being able to move helped ease the panic.
Slowly and carefully I raised myself to my feet. Lightheaded, any motion risked tumbling me to the pavement, or opening up whatever hole had closed in my chest.
I needed to get out of here; I just killed a cop. Every cop in Raleigh would be after me in a matter of minutes, and I was in no shape for a car chase or a fight. I practically felt my juice level plummeting from the wound. I was dead. There was no way I would survive this.
I leaned up against the cop car and took several deep breaths, attempting to calm my latest panic. I started out with a high juice level. The voices on the police radio didn’t sound panicked; dispatch didn’t yet realize they needed to send backup. I healed, just like normal. Keaton caused worse pain than this at least once a week, often more.
No need to panic. Really. Keaton with a dental pick was a reason to panic.
I needed to get out of here, go to ground, and get myself patched up enough to make it back to Keaton. I needed to make it back to Keaton clean. She wouldn’t be happy if I rolled back inside the warehouse with cops on my tail.
I returned to my stolen car, a ’64 Volkswagen Beetle belonging to my kill. Not as inconspicuous as I would like, but better than a police car. I sat down in the driver’s seat, and the relief of sitting was so intense I almost fell out of the car.
Money. I needed money. Whatever I did to get out of this mess would likely require money, and I had only about $20. In my current condition I would have a hard time getting any more.
I focused my willpower and got up again. Slowly, carefully, in steps not more than a few inches each, I made my way to the body of the cop. I pawed through his clothes and found his wallet. I grabbed it and made my slow painful way back to the Beetle. While I walked, I overheard the police dispatcher calling for backup.
I started up the car and drove away. No time to waste, now.
Driving proved to be a disaster. I did well to keep the car on the road. I’m sure I ruined the gears on the poor Beetle. Heaven knows what speed I drove.
I drove, haphazardly, back to my real car. I planned on getting myself patched up and driving back to Philadelphia, the same way I got here. Four blocks from my real car, I realized my plan wouldn’t work. The cops would connect this Beetle to my real car if I just drove up and switched. Keaton would kill me.
I needed to get functional again. I couldn’t do anything until then. I was driving around, covered in blood, with a dead body in the front seat of my car.
What a mess.
I ended up ditching the Beetle in the ocean, laden down with bricks, with my kill in the trunk. Hopefully, the fish and the like would do their thing quickly enough for the Arm-kill evidence to go away. I stole some clothes from a clothesline and hitched rides to recover my real car, in Raleigh. I ended up returning to Keaton a day late and a dollar short.
Of all things, she thought my story was hilarious.
The next day I realized why. This had to be how her hunts often ended.
(14)
The FBI still attempted to track the both of us. Occasionally the papers printed stories on the subject, usually after I slipped up and left evidence behind me. They printed several stories after I killed the cop. The media portrayed Keaton and me both as a kind of Monster. More intelligent than the average Monster, yes, but still Monsters. The media even convinced themselves mature Arms couldn’t talk, I guess because neither Keaton nor I were much into bluster or banter.
Depressing.
I spent a lot of time that winter depressed. Happy to be a woman, I hadn’t seen anything wrong with the normal arrangement of things. Men were stronger. Men might fight, but civilized women didn’t get into physical fights. Men ran the outside world, and women ran the home. Men took the lead in matters of romance.
Leaving the normal arrangements behind made me think. I couldn’t think of myself as even a woman anymore. I could even pass as a man, if I didn’t have to talk.
I didn’t want to be male, though. I wanted to be a woman. I believed men were supposed to care for women. I thought this was right and natural. I enjoyed having Bill care for me.
Those were my thoughts. My emotions told a different story. Emotionally, I no longer wanted to have a man care for me. No, I wanted to want a man to care for me. I wanted to be the person I once was.
Keaton, of course, thought I was a complete asshole.
I started to bring in decent amounts of money, at least from my perspective. Keaton sneered at my successes. I earned money mostly by muggings, picking pockets, and burglary. Occasionally Keaton would take me with her on an armed robbery, but not often, because of my voice problem. I couldn’t do armed robbery on my own.
Keaton’s endlessly creative abuse continued as well. She wasn’t happy unless her power over me was galling me like a raw wound. She wanted me to be uncomfortable.
On the other side of the coin, I started to acquire some real abilities to deal with her. If I took her juice level into account, her reactions and expectations became predictable. High on juice, she expected me to be strong and smart and capable. She expected only a little groveling, and more like normal human respect. When she abused me, she expected me to be able to deal with it.
When she got low on juice, she wanted slavish subservience. She wanted a much higher level of groveling, and she considered any obvious displays of competence to be uppity and rude. When she abused me, she wanted me to crack like an egg.
Since she was perfectly capable of reading my feelings and reactions, she knew when I faked them. She insisted my reactions be real, which made it a hell of a lot h
arder to react the way she wanted me to.
I gradually continued to put myself back together. Under her constant pressure to tear me down, I built up, one brick at a time, a core of myself able to deal with the abuse.
I wasn’t a normal woman in an abusive relationship. As an Arm, I had the advantage of my kills. No matter what she did to me, no matter how she tore me down, every week to ten days I got a kill. With every kill, I pulled myself together a little bit more. I thought well of myself. I remembered my good points, my competencies. Every time I got a kill, I healed my mind from some of the damage she did to me.
I didn’t pull myself together much, and a good thing I didn’t. She didn’t want me to be whole. If I had achieved too much success at pulling myself together, she would have killed me.
Despite my winter blahs, I started to take better care of myself. One day I decided to do something with the storeroom. I had lived in the storeroom for months, my living space still no more than a random collection of boxes and a mat, with my few things piled on top of them. I spent an entire afternoon cleaning it up. I organized things, straightened out the boxes, and cleaned up my own mess. I stacked the boxes so they formed several shelves for me to use, and arranged my magazines and newspapers neatly on them. I washed my mat, put the mat up against the wall, and folded my blanket at the foot.
I felt like I finally had a space of my own. Bliss, utter bliss.
Keaton disapproved. She frowned when she realized what I had done, but she didn’t make any comments. I didn’t understand her reaction. I suspected, though, that she didn’t like what I had done because I did, and she didn’t want me to be happy.
Since she didn’t say anything, I didn’t undo my efforts. I continued to keep my room clean, and I kept looking for ways to make it better. I couldn’t buy anything for it myself, but I hinted to Ed that I wouldn’t mind a few gifts. I helped him out by giving him suggestions. Soon, I had an elegant glass bowl and bouquet of silk flowers in a milk glass vase. I enjoyed them all out of proportion to their value.
One day, when Keaton was low on juice and I was out avoiding her, I came home to find out she had trashed my place. The silk flowers were gone, and so were all my newspapers and magazines. She even took my hunting maps. The glass bowl and vase were shattered into a million pieces all across the floor. The mat was back in its place in the gym, and she had cut my blanket to ribbons. The boxes? Knocked over and the contents scattered.
The destruction hurt far more than I would have thought. I came out of the room as shattered as the glass.
Keaton waited for me, wearing a twisted smile and carrying a blood-soaked belt. I looked at her and I hated her. I hated her smile and her cruelty, and more than that, I hated the fear she created in my gut and the complete helplessness she forced on me.
God damn, she was a sadistic bitch.
She didn’t like me having a nice peaceful corner to myself.
I hit the floor and started groveling despite my hate, because it gave me some small chance she might go easy on me.
Damn it! What did she want from me? I gave her everything she wanted and she destroyed my room in return. Her destruction hurt.
Damn her! I wanted to cry with frustrated fury. I cowered on the floor, and couldn’t stop the cringe as she came near.
She didn’t speak. Her hand moved, the belt snaked out and the pain started.
It was a bad one, that time.
(15)
A week after we first started throwing baseballs Keaton decided to go up on the bars. The frigid February wind rattled the big metal doors. She caught a baseball I had thrown, and she back-flipped up to a bar about waist-high behind her.
I was appalled. I had a hard enough time on the ground. I couldn’t possibly do it in mid-air.
She didn’t ask me, though. She just went up on the bars herself. I stayed on the ground as she went higher and higher into the maze of bars. She threw the baseballs at me from above, and I threw them back up to her, and she just kept moving. This was one of those awesome and terrifying experiences where I got to see how much better than I Keaton was.
Or at least, until she fell.
She was up near the ceiling, about twenty feet above the floor. I threw the baseball slightly low and to the left, trying to make the catch hard for her. She twisted for the baseball, her right foot left the bar, and she went over.
To me, she fell as if in slow motion. She tumbled as she fell, and she would have hit the floor on her head, except that she twisted herself in mid-air, and instead came down flat on her back with a dull thump.
She didn’t move.
I fled. I ran into the kitchen, and from the kitchen into the bathroom, and found myself standing in the farthest corner of the shower stall. My heart raced in dead panic.
I struggled to bring myself under control. I couldn’t afford to panic. Breathe, I told myself. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Calm the heart. Thump and thump and thump and thump…
Minutes passed before I brought myself under control. Every time I thought of Keaton lying in the gym, my heart rate would shoot up and I would panic again.
What was I going to do? She was going to kill me. I made the throw that made her slip, and she would kill me for this. I needed to do something.
How badly was she hurt? If she weren’t too badly hurt, maybe she would go easy on me.
What if she was badly hurt? She might be in real trouble and needing my help. She would kill me when she got better.
What if she was dying? My heart leapt up in sudden hope. Let her die. I wanted her death so badly, but I didn’t believe she would die. Nothing so mean would die that easily.
If she died, how would I live?
I made myself move from the shower stall to the toilet. This took an effort of will. Then I made myself open the bathroom door. This proved even harder.
Through the open bathroom door I heard her heartbeat. She still lived.
How badly was she hurt? Perhaps I should go out there and finish the job. Or save her. I didn’t hear her moving.
Perhaps I could go slice the bitch’s throat while she lay helpless on the concrete floor. Or I could win her undying gratitude by saving her worthless psychotic life.
I didn’t move. I sat on the icy toilet seat and listened for motion.
After a long time, I heard a little scraping noise from the gym. Keaton. I gripped the knob of the bathroom door and battled down the panic.
Another little scraping noise followed. Keaton. Pulling herself together. I needed to do something. I couldn’t just hide in the bathroom. I either had to kill her or help her.
Something in the Arm inside me spun in circles, confused beyond confused and more messed up than ever.
Ten minutes later, I gathered my wits and courage, and finally left the bathroom. I slid toward Keaton and the gym, but stopped at the gym entrance when I caught the ozone scent of burned juice.
Burning juice was a Keaton trick she used only in emergencies, to make herself faster and stronger. I didn’t know how to burn juice, and Keaton didn’t have any way of teaching me how. She just ‘did it’, which helped me not at all. “Skag, I can’t believe all the ways you’re flawed. Can’t burn juice, can’t mimic a man’s voice, can’t do acrobatics worth shit,” she would say. If Keaton burned too much juice, though, she would send herself into withdrawal. According to her, she could do so, but only by going against her instincts.
Keaton burned juice to heal herself. A new trick, or at least new to me.
I eased forward to peek at her. Keaton lay on the floor, thirty feet away under the bars. She turned her head in my direction.
Those eyes. Nothing human remained in her eyes. I shivered when I saw them and my knees went weak. Raw. Animal. Predator. Her pure psychotic self. Her eyes held more power in them than I would ever have in my life.
I couldn’t kill those eyes. I couldn’t even go near.
I sank to my knees in the entryway. My instincts took over, and
I sank down further and touched my head to the floor.
“Get out,” she said.
I ran. I ran all the way around her, never coming closer to her than the walls of the warehouse. I fled through the warehouse door into the frozen February wind, and didn’t come back for three days.
I should have stayed away longer. Keaton burned a lot of juice to heal herself from the fall, and she hadn’t hunted down a kill yet. She was low on juice, cranky and irritable, and my mere presence bothered her. I made myself carefully subservient and tried to stay out of her way.
She never said anything about the fall. She never said a word about the way I reacted to the fall.
Two days after I came back, she got a kill. The next night she went after me. She started riding me about my attitude, and, soon moved on to the beating.
Whenever she started riding me about my attitude, it always meant the same thing. She wanted me to do some serious groveling. I gave it to her. When she started on the beating, I went into my best submission routine. Boot-licking, neck exposed, fear smell, every submission reaction in my repertoire.
My behavior satisfied her. She eased off on the beating and left me alone. I think she just wanted to re-establish who was boss.
To her, her fall was a failure of the highest magnitude.
(16)
The day I made my big mistake was the day after I found a kill in Boston. Boston bothered the hell out of me: a Focus household with far too many Transforms in residence, signs of other Transforms I couldn’t recognize, and, dammit, the feeling I was always being watched. Still, I found myself a kill, a good one.
I next found myself a man to entertain me.
The next day I was still gloriously high and Keaton didn’t expect me back in Philly until the following morning. So I did one man the next morning, and after the bars opened, I went out trolling for another, amusing myself by starting arguments with men, looking for a nice aggressive man to service me. I found one, a real bruiser.
All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Two) Page 16