“You’re talking about the Arm Pet nonsense from last summer?” Gail said. “I took care of that.” She had gotten in the face of any Focus who tried to shun Wendy as an ‘Arm pet’, including Beth. Focus Beth Hargrove didn’t take it well, and Gail’s forcefulness strained their friendship, but they had mostly patched things up. Gail’s loud defense of Wendy and the other Focuses similarly labeled, had turned Focus Adkins, the local boss-Focus, against Gail, again, at least until Gail negotiated her way into a sit down meeting with Focus Adkins. ‘It’s easy to make fun of people who don’t do things the way you do, but do you want to be following a social fad that clearly originated in the West Region, likely something dreamt up by your enemies? People are trying to hurt your Focus.’ Gail won the argument, barely, though she suspected Focus Adkins hadn’t been pleased with Gail’s aggressiveness. After their talk, Focus Adkins hadn’t done or said anything in public to support the shunned Focuses, but she did stop making ‘Arm pet’ comments and business went back to usual.
“I love you and you’re a wonderful person, Gail, but it’s like you have the word ‘naïve’ tattooed on your forehead,” Wendy said. “You won the public fight, but in doing so, you drove the attack underground. You made it worse. They never stopped harassing me, and it’s never stopped getting worse.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Gail said. How did she miss that? Oh, of course. The public ‘Arm pet’ shaming had been a near-unanimous Focus movement; what followed had to have been a small networked movement by the diehard attackers. By Focuses who already avoided Gail like the plague she was. The ones who constantly sneered at her and shunned her because of her public Transform Rights agitation. The ones smart enough to avoid her when her temper was up and her charisma was on.
“I owed you too much already, and what was there to fight? Whispers, innuendo, fouled contracts, and anonymous thug attacks? I thought I could handle it. You do, all the time, as part of your Transform Rights work.”
Damnation! Wendy’s aggressive independence streak often got in the way of her good sense. “Wendy, I couldn’t have handled it if I got dropped into it, cold.” Wendy frowned. She had picked up too much of Stacy’s iron spine. Fuuuck. “Why today? Why tonight?”
“Because they won.” Wendy crossed her arms and glowered at Gail, daring her to push any further, an obvious threat. Gail’s attempt to calm her via charisma broke on the shoals of Wendy’s pain. “Do you want to help? We need it. We need to be out of here by sunrise or all hell’s going to fall in on us.”
“Sure.” She would help, and continue to dig at Wendy’s secrets as she did. Wendy’s pain made her heart ache. Why would Wendy leave? Where was Arm Keaton, and why wasn’t she here?
Gail got Sylvie to phone home and roust some more warm bodies to help in the moving.
After only a half hour of toting boxes and suitcases, Gail spotted the anomaly she suspected – a woman Transform, wearing metasense fuzzing shields, someone Gail didn’t recognize. Gail found Wendy back in the trailers, the beat-up ancient trailers her people found, rescued, and fixed up to live in. A trailer park nicely protected by fifteen foot tall stacks of car parts.
“Okay, Wendy, who’s that?” Gail said, and pointed.
“Oh, you mean Nancy?” Wendy said. “The idiot patrol is after her, and I’ve been giving her shelter. She’s not coming with us.” And this had nothing to do with whatever happened tonight? Riiiight.
Wendy paused and studied Gail for a moment. She doubted, too. “Let me introduce you to her.”
Strange.
Gail motioned and Wendy led her into one of the larger trailers, where the woman packed chipped plates into cardboard boxes. “Nancy, this is Focus Rickenbach, the one I told you about.”
Nancy blanched when she saw Gail and backed up against a plywood cabinet. “No, no, no.” Nancy sounded almost as if she was in pain, but Gail sensed no wounds on the strange waif-like Transform. “Why’s she here?”
“You said you were staying here, despite how dangerous it was,” Wendy said.
“I need to stay in Detroit,” Nancy said. Her voice descended into low whines. “I shouldn’t be here in your household. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ever gotten you involved. I should be hiding in a culvert.” Waif-like, but with the paper-thin skin of an Arm. She just didn’t have the muscles to go with the feature. She was beautiful in a child-like way, with straight light brown hair you wanted to run your hands through, set off by piercing green eyes.
Gail studied Nancy with her metasense, curious. The woman’s mind was different; she possessed a metacampus but not a metamygdala, and several other of her inner brain parts were misshapen and abnormal. A Sport, and with her beauty, a Focus variant. Nothing else made sense.
Sports were interesting. Sports needed investigating. Curiosity?
Curiosity was never dangerous.
Wendy eyed Gail, waiting. Gail didn’t react. Wendy wanted Gail to offer to take Nancy in. “She can’t be involved,” Nancy said. “That would ruin everything.”
“Who’s after you?” Gail asked.
Neither Nancy nor Wendy answered.
“What sort of Sport are you?” Gail asked. “What can you do?”
Nancy’s eyes opened wide, and now she radiated terror.
“Gail, if you want to help, could you do me a favor and take Nancy in after I leave,” Wendy said, her intransigence finally cracking a little.
“I would be glad to. Giving Nancy a place to crash wouldn’t be a problem at all,” Gail said. She paused, ever so much the Focus. Shadows grew behind Nancy and Wendy from the light Gail occasionally projected when she got all Focus-y. “Only if someone here starts answering my questions, though.”
Nancy shook. “I. I. I. You need to promise me you won’t be dragged into this.”
“What is ‘this’?” Gail asked. She turned to Wendy, who took a half step back from Gail’s charismatic display. “Did you need to make this promise?”
“Nope,” Wendy said. “Just that I wouldn’t tell any of the VIPs she was here.” Wendy smiled, which appeared strange on her grim and currently grimy face. “In our terms, but not Nancy’s, she’s on a quest, as if she’s one of the Nobles.”
“Oh,” Gail said. Nobles and their quests. Strange to see someone so sensible and female caught in one of the male hallucinations. “Voices in the night, visions while you sleep, that sort of thing?”
Nancy turned red and nodded.
“You’re not the Madonna of Montreal, by any chance?”
“No, no, no.” The name was no secret to Nancy. She appeared to be about to faint.
“I can promise not to follow you on your quest,” Gail said. That was an easy promise to make, because of her household responsibilities. It might take work to master her curiosity, but she had done it before. Occasionally.
“Okay,” Nancy said. “I guess.”
“You need to leave,” Wendy said. Her vehicles were almost all packed up.
“You need to tell me more about what’s going on,” Gail said. She would stand in front of Wendy’s caravan, if she needed to. “What triggered this?”
Wendy shook her head for a moment, before wilting under Gail’s charismatic onslaught. “The Arm pet shunning never stopped, Gail.” Gail waited; Wendy had told her this already. “We’re out of money, we’re under attack, and Joyce told me the Focus Network was done dealing with me.” Joyce was the normal woman who coordinated the Focus Network outreach program in the tri-state area. She worked for the Midwest Region Council rep, Esther Weiczokowski and the Focus in charge of the national Focus Network, Michelle Claunch. “That’s as much as it’s safe to say.” Wendy paused, and looked away. “Gail,” she said, her voice filled with tears. “Tell Stacy this wasn’t her fault. Tell Stacy that if I stayed I would be putting her in danger.”
“I can do that,” Gail said. Not that she believed the latter, or that Stacy would be the least bothered by any such thing. Still, Wendy’s pain brought tears to Gail’s eyes.
>
“Oh, and we’re setting the place on fire behind us,” Wendy said. “There’s no going back for us.”
Gail nodded. How very Wendy. Wendy turned and stalked off, without saying goodbye to Nancy or a word of thanks to Gail.
Gail and her people got back in their vehicles and left, the early morning twilight lit by flames behind them.
---
“They called me before,” Nancy said. “I listened. It almost killed me.”
Nancy sat between Sylvie and Gail in the back seat of Kurt’s sedan. Kurt and Van sat in the front seat. Gail had moved Vic, her bodyguard, into another car. None of them thought Nancy would or could be any problem for any of them. Nancy didn’t carry weapons and the short thin woman was frail as a snowflake. The big black circles of worry around her eyes made Gail suspect she would die of stress before she mustered up a threat to anyone else.
“So, why Detroit?”
“Other people,” she said. “Other people will hear the call and go with me.”
“How long has this been going on? When were you first called?”
“’68. I started hearing this call after I got back from my first trip into the Canadian wilds, but until earlier this year, I could ignore it.” Nancy shook her head. “The Transform VIPs don’t like the idea that there are things out there that can call people. I’ve been on the run, off and on, since February. They want to lock me away and throw away the key. Prevent me from answering the call. Or kill me.”
Gail wasn’t herself at all happy with the idea of ‘things out there that could call people’, but given her many obscure experiences as a Focus, another bit of unexpected strangeness didn’t surprise her.
“All the Transform VIPs?”
“All except the one you mentioned.” The Madonna of Montreal. “She’s my only supporter, if she’s real. I’ve never met her. Only in my head. Only…”
“Only what?”
“She told me to go to Detroit and see if that helped me resist the call, and it did, but then she told me to stay away from you.”
Gail snorted. “I think her warning’s expired now,” she said, and told Nancy about the nightmare that woke her up this morning. Nancy’s face turned an interesting shade of albino white and her chin started to quiver. “Besides, I’m sure I can help you, especially if you start telling me more about yourself and what’s going on. For one thing, I can help you practice your metasense shields. They leak.” Nancy’s wild eyes grew wilder. “To me. If you can shield from my metasense, you’ll be a lot better off at hiding from everyone else. Oh, and we can disguise you and make you look like someone else entirely, and make you some fake IDs, and all sorts of things like that.” Her household had lots and lots of practice – and training from Arm Keaton.
Nancy froze, just blinking slowly and radiating ever more fear.
“Gail, slow down,” Sylvie said. Sylvie patted Nancy’s arm, attempting to comfort the strange Sport. Nancy twitched and backed away from Sylvie. “Don’t forget that nobody outside our household knows what we can do. Nancy here likely thought she’s been sold down the river to ‘the strange Hippie Focus’s household of useless drug-addled crazies’.” Nancy nodded. “Fortunately or unfortunately, Nancy, we’re actually the Transform equivalent of Ida Tarbell or Nellie Bly. Just breathe deeply and try not to think too much about what’s going on around you while you acclimate.”
“Who?” Nancy said, not recognizing the names of either famous reporter.
Dan Freeman: October 8, 1971
“Look, I’m sorry about this.” Shit yes. Really. Truly. Truly screwed, too. Not that I would ever be able to pay Matt back, but that’s what big brothers were for.
Matt, by the luck of being the only one available, got the job of ferrying me from South Bend to Detroit. Pissed off mightily by the duty, too, and not talking. One of his multi-hour glowers. Sensitive guy, unless he was on the offense.
Matt didn’t answer. I didn’t exactly expect him to answer, but my talking and his not answering was part of the game. We had done variants of this most of our lives. Initiate something? Him? Like maybe if someone cut off his leg he might consider asking for help before he died, but probably not for something as minor as a foot.
“Mind if I put on some music?” Matt’s car was a piece of shit. None of us Freemans were worth spit as auto mechanics, and we couldn’t haggle a good deal either. Still, he had conned a girlfriend into getting a boyfriend of one of her friends to install an 8 track, though ‘install’ was perhaps an exaggeration. The damn thing sat on top of the dashboard, fastened by a bent coat hanger. Wires strewed everywhere, but at least it worked. Mostly. The speakers took up precious seat well space, and I thanked God I was short. Not for the first time, either. Although I was worried. I had, I swore, grown almost an inch after I transformed.
“Be my guest, Dan.” Yup. Matt was pissed. You could tell by the DAAAAAAAn intonation in his voice. When he wasn’t pissed, Matt was oblique and curt, and my name came out more like d’n. I shuffled through his crap music collection, and finally found something at least mildly current, some Stones from two years ago. I shoved it in, nothing came out. No noise. Sort of a clack-clack-clack.
“Tape’s gone,” I said. 8 tracks were like that. Lucky to get ten good listenings outa one before it crapped out. Of course, to get the ten, you needed to avoid leaving it in your car out in the hot sun. Matt’s car spent a lot of time in the hot sun while he worked his summer job at the stamping place down the road in Fort Wayne. Being as though I was already screwed royally, I didn’t say a thing. Matt didn’t say a damn thing, either.
Dammit. I stared out the window at the corn stubble, and the occasional bare wheat field, and sighed. My fucking life was utterly totally completely ruined, and my brother was pissed about having to drive me to Detroit and wouldn’t talk. Life in the Freeman family circus. Hell, Mom couldn’t drive any more, at least more than about five miles from home, without getting lost. Docs couldn’t figure what was wrong with her, save that Dad thought it was the dementia that ran in Mom’s family getting an early start. None of them got past sixty-five without doing the drool routine. I suppose I shouldn’t be so harsh, ‘cause I got the same genetics or whatever. Save for the fact that my life had been turned into dog food and I doubted I would live that long anyway, I would be doin’ the drool myself if I lived to be that old. Dad, well, he considered sixteen to be the age of adulthood. “Get a job,” was his answer to everything.
So, Dad, what do I do now that the Army bounced my newly transformed ass for ‘medical reasons’?
Get a job.
Dad, I’m choking on a piece of chicken!
Get a job.
Hell. At least I would be getting out of Goshen. Man, I hated that town. Not worth crap, unless you wanted to farm and dodge the Amish in your ‘rod.
“Stupidest name I ever heard,” Matt said. From someone else, you would assume the comment was a non-sequitur, but my goofball older brother often restarted long-dead conversations. This one we dropped after I got my ass kicked out of the South Bend Transform Clinic.
“Hey, lay off about the name. It wasn’t my choice.” I should have been glad Matt was coming out of his funk enough to insult me. Of course, if I pissed him off some more, he would turtle, concentrate on driving the tollway and ignore me. He might even turn on the radio and listen to country music. Not that he liked it. Just ‘cause it would piss me off.
“Goldilocks. Goldilocks. Goldilocks,” Matt said. “Somewhere out there is a sick researcher, Dan, to come up with a name like that. Could be worse.” He paused. “They could follow the linguistic pattern set with the original Transform naming conventions and term you a ‘male Goldilocks’.”
Bastard. I looked away. “Actually, Dan. They do. In this brochure.”
“Brochure? They have brochures for whatever Transform puke you are? I thought being a Goldilocks was rare.” College educated asshole. Matt was big on logic and science and crap like that. He wanted to be an engineer. S
till in college, he avoided the draft by slowly slogging his way through grad school. I wasn’t sure his grand scheme to be a well-paid electrical engineer was worth squat, but with the draft obviously on its way out in the next few years, I was sure he would find a way to muddle through. Matty the Crappy always did.
I ended up drafted instead of spending my life hefting boxes down at the A&P. The Army was better, offering me many jobs I could do well. My life improvements ended, though, when the fuckin’ Transform Sickness showed up. The fuckin’ death sentence of the modern world. Nearly as many people died of TS as died in auto accidents these days. Worse, by transforming I was joining a diseased criminal underclass. Down in southern Indiana where they talk as if they oughta be somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, their preachers still preached their hellfire and brimstone about TS. God’s curse to the sinners and all. Well, I suppose I just about counted, but only if you counted that the first time in my life I missed Church was because I was stuck in basic.
I got out the brochure and read parts of it to my annoying brother. Screwy. I swore I had the once-read brochure already memorized. The TS made me smarter? This, I couldn’t believe. “The brochure’s entitled ‘What to do if the Clinic Doctor tells you that you are a Sport’.”
“Sport? What does that mean?” Matt said, teeth gritting annoyed.
“Must be some medical term, college boy.” Matt gritted his teeth harder. He hated it when people assumed that since he spent his entire life in college, he knew absolutely everything about anything. Of course, since he hated it, people regularly ragged on him about it. “Means one of a kind, or near one of a kind.” How did I know that? It was obvious, right?
“Unfortunately, ahem, male Goldilocks aren’t exactly Sports. They don’t make brochures for us, the way they do for Transforms, Focuses and Arms, because, it appears, male Goldilockses don’t go scragging people by the dozens or anything else dramatic. We aren’t Major Transforms.”
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