The quest was over.
“Help, please,” Lady Death said. Amy beat everyone to the Focus; the Focus handed Amy the Eskimo spear, which continued to display its illusion. In Amy’s hands, it showed a different picture, one containing Monsters as well as Transforms.
“Don’t you dare die on me,” Amy said. “Dammit, Lori, can’t you ever do anything the easy way?”
The fallen Focus snorted. “You oughta see the other guy,” she said, before she fell into a healing trance.
The next thing I experienced was waking up on the plane flight home.
Part Two
That Which Came After
Background Information About Part Two
All of the events in Part Two occur after the novel The Forgefires of God and before the novel No Small Dreams.
Chronicle IV
The Other Side of the Needle (12/25/72 – 12/30/72)
20.2 (12/25/72)
The ambulance siren remained silent, thank God. It seemed like they had turned it on for every small town between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and the noise drove Hank Zielinski crazy. Maybe they turned the siren off because it was Christmas, he thought groggily. Except it had been Christmas all day.
The ambulance bounced over a low curb and Hank’s head swam. It gave him hope that they had finally arrived. The ambulance slowed to a stop and someone opened the back doors. Paramedics came in and started to pull the stretchers out. Cindy Lederer moaned, jolted rudely out of her sleep as they grabbed her gurney and moved her. She was a Sport, one of the stranger ones, and she had blown out both of her knees in the Pittsburgh fight while attempting to fight while too low on juice. When not sleeping, she kept him amused by telling him bowel-clenching tales from the Eskimo Spear quest. He hadn’t realized that the man, a person Hank considered almost to be a personal nemesis, had interfered, almost fatally, in the quest.
Hank was next off the ambulance, and his head swam again as they unloaded him. He relaxed as they trotted him through the cold parking lot and into the building. Littleside Transform Research Center. His home, his baby, a gift to him from Carol Hancock, the Commander. He worked here through layers of false identities, but every person here worked for him. He relaxed, tension disappearing. The paramedics carried him through the familiar corridors into the emergency room.
There in the midst of the chaos, finally, he found one of his: Jeanie Zimmerman, his nurse. Hank sat up and took a deep breath, put his fingers in his mouth and whistled, a sharp, piercing sound. Hank smiled at the whistle’s effect; his whistle drove the Major Transforms crazy, but it worked. Jeanie hustled over.
“Doc!” She flattened him back down on the gurney with one hand and picked up his chart. “Again?” In nearly every one of the Major Transform conflicts since he hired Jeanie, he had come back on a stretcher or gurney. Or skipped out. She was both overprotective of him, and more than a little worried. “Hey, they screwed up your chart, Doc. It says you’re a Transform.”
“Alas, no. I transformed in the Pittsburgh fight.”
Jeanie dropped the chart, put her hands to her mouth, and stood statue-like for a good minute, staring at him in shock. “Help me to my office,” Hank said. “There’s nothing wrong with me save the obvious, and we’re going to need all the beds we can dig up.”
“Okay,” she said, quiet, and helped him stand. “You’re shaky, Doc.”
He was. Unexpectedly. In fact, he was so palsied he could barely walk. Hank went through a mental checklist of other transformation problems he might be having: sensitivity to light (no), headache (no), hearing loss (no), hallucinations (no), irritability (no), fever (unknown, likely), joint aches (no), extreme hunger (no, just normal hunger), juice cravings (no). In fact, the whole body palsy was an uncommon symptom, more commonly associated with meningitis-based transformations than the aftermath of an induced transformation. Shaky hands, the most obvious symptom of the disease that caused transformations, also showed up in many other obscure situations, including low juice.
“You smell funny, Doc,” Jeanie said, as they got out of the elevator.
Damn. He knew that symptom. “Set me up with an IV, check my BP and temp, grab me some food if any is available, and make sure I get lots of liquids.” Kill me and toss me in the morgue if I pass out, he didn’t say.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing too unexpected.” For him. Damn his luck and his history. Not that he should complain. Few researchers into Transform Sickness lived into their 60s. Juice and its byproducts were deadly poisons in large amounts. “Probably some old toxins from the assassination attempt six years ago getting flushed from my system.” He doubted his own simple diagnosis. However, it would take a few days for any major problems to show, by which time Carol and Gilgamesh would be back and willing to do whatever to save him.
Or he would be dead.
Jeanie unlocked his office and got him over to his chair. “You’re going to need blood tests, right?”
He nodded. “Every four hours, at least, to monitor kidney function.” Not that any treatment plans came to mind if his feared problems showed up. There was nothing worse than being a unique case. He would just need to make it up as he went along.
After he sat down, he did feel better. He unlocked his desk and pulled out his will, as well as some of his collated materials on the juice pattern project.
“You’re not going to try and work?” Jeanie said, putting her hands on her hips and staring him down.
“Paperwork only. I promise.” He would use his office couch as a bed, and not for the first time.
“Well, I can grab you a stack of paperwork you would not believe,” Jeanie said. “We’re a little over our worst case estimates.”
“That bad?”
Jeanie nodded. “The boss said ‘if we get chewed up that bad, we’re not coming back, so don’t bother worrying’. But here you guys are, chewed up beyond belief anyway.”
“We won.”
“That’s what everyone says. I can’t for the life of me put it all together, though. Damn, we need you on your feet, Hank. Don’t give me that. You’re staying right here, okay?”
“Don’t worry,” Hank said. “I’m not going anywhere. If things are as bad as you say, you need to go find Connie Yerizarian and ask her to come to my office. The two of us will divvy up responsibilities and sort through the problems.”
Food arrived, sandwiches from their private refrigerator with the extra Arm food supplies. The sandwiches weren’t for the Arms, of course. Jeanie took his BP, temp, and drew blood. She also dropped a foot high stack of paperwork on his desk.
“One hundred point two. One forty over ninety six.” Hank winced at both. The ongoing transformation continued to stress his system. His blood was likely contaminated enough to glow in the dark.
“I need a juice count on me, as well,” Hank said. Shook his head, as his comment sounded so strange to him. For years, he had been on the other side of the needle. Carol would stick him in a bed as soon as she showed up, grab a crack team of Transform specialists to examine him, and make his life quiet and miserable. Until then, he would treat himself.
Then he started wading through Jeanie’s paperwork. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He flipped through the stack, shaking his head. Out came a legal notepad and he started writing lists.
Carol wanted him in Elspeth’s household, but as he documented the carnage, he began to wonder if this was the wisest choice. Inferno had a surplus of openings.
---
Connie Yerizarian stuck her head in the doorway of his office, ducked inside and shut the door behind her, leaning her back on the door with a sigh. As Lori Rizzari’s head of household, Connie held an immense amount of power and responsibility for one so young. Well, perhaps not that young any more, as she would turn thirty later this year, but still… Connie was tall, willowy and blond, appeared Greek except for the hair color but was primarily of Armenian extraction, a stunner when she wanted to be, and the rest of the time, qu
ite talented and invisible. Hank had dealt with Connie as long as he had known Lori, and still didn’t have a handle on the Transform woman. He didn’t dislike her, exactly, but the blood of matriarchs with scarves on their heads and murder in their devious hearts ran strong in this woman, and she had the morals of a housecat in heat, besides. A little over a month ago, he had offered Connie the job of operations manager of Littleside, to be the ranking non-doctor on the staff, but she turned him down, citing the crisis. He promised himself he would offer the position to her again, assuming he remained alive to do so.
“Gaaah!” Connie said, and flopped into his visitor’s chair. “Forget this shit, Hank, we need you out there and working. Twenty-nine of our Transforms are in the midst of psychotic hallucinations, and we’re clueless about how to stop them!”
Hank pushed his own chart over to Connie. She picked it up, read, noted the juice count, and tossed the chart back at him. “Just what we need. You should be tied down to a bed yourself, Hank. With your history…” her voice tailed off in unexpected empathy over his likely less than fifty-fifty chance of survival. Connie was about the only one in Inferno, Lori’s household, save for Lori herself, who called him something other than Doc or Doc Pain. “You think the remains of the old juice in your system are going to make you croak on us?” She had helped treat him in that episode, so long ago.
“That’s a distinct possibility, Connie, and there isn’t a single thing I or anyone else can do about it. Until I go catatonic or nuts, I’m going to be working my tail off to save the rest of you.”
“Shit. With Carol, Lori and Sky gone indefinitely, you being down is the last thing we need. We’ve been fucking decapitated.”
Hank saw spots, and the world turned dark and gray. Carol, Lori and Sky out of the picture? What? What? What? What?
“…on the side of his desk, it’s not from the battle.”
Someone stitched him up. Not for the first time in his life, and not the first time with badly administered topical anesthetic.
“Owhh!” Oh, why didn’t I stay a simple surgeon, he asked himself, for not anywhere near the first time.
“Ah, you’re back among us.”
Zielinski opened his eyes, to see Connie and Dr. Anderson peering down at him. Hank lay flat on his back, on his office couch. The last comment was from Connie.
“Well, that’ll finish this up,” Dr. Anderson said. “I’m not sure about the scarring, though, it’s into some old plastic surgery crap. Anyway, I need to run.” Dr. Anderson ran.
“Help me up,” Hank said. “What happened to me?”
“I mentioned something, and you keeled over in a faint. You hit your cheek on the side of your desk and ripped it open.”
Hank rubbed the wound, a big gaping and now sewn up mess on the orbital below his left eye, and winced. “I’m having far too many anomalous reactions to please me,” he said. “Now. Connie. Tell me what’s happening with Carol, Lori and Sky.”
Connie took Hank’s hands in hers. “They’re okay. However, they got rolled by the Madonna of Montreal and sent on a mission to fetch an old Chimera, Beast, back from the Yukon. They left from the campground north of Pittsburgh without even enough time to tell all us underling types what they wanted us to do.”
“Oh. That makes sense.” It did, actually. He hadn’t thought of that solution to the growing darkness in those three Major Transforms, but the solution was ingenious. He had suggested long vacations, but the three of them wouldn’t listen to him on subjects of that nature. And if they succeeded in their mission, they would come back with an old enough Chimera to make a difference.
He automatically made a note in his mind to talk to Lori about his three versus four Major Transform household notion, and see if she agreed that four was better, when he abruptly realized that Lori was part of the quest. He had no Focus!
No wonder he fainted. He almost fainted, again.
“Connie, there’s a problem,” Hank said. “How do I handle the fact that my Focus has deserted me? I keep wanting to faint.”
“Oh, shit, right. You don’t understand about what really goes on in the head of a Transform, do you? Not for real. Well, I guess you’re going to need to learn good old male Transform 101.”
“Spare me.”
“You? No one’s going to spare you on this, Doc Pain. Not with your sorry excuse of a bedside manner.”
“Me? My bedside manner is…”
The Monster conversion sirens went off.
---
Connie took out her legal pad and began to write. “No Arms.”
“No Arms. No Arm in her right mind is going to come to Chicago while Carol’s out of the country, not without orders,” Hank said. “Not even Amy or Giselle.” The two Arms friendliest to Carol.
He had actually been in on the Monster fight, and collected another set of gashes, this time along his right torso. Another twenty stitches. The result? Confined to a bed and threatened with being strapped down. Not a bad choice, considering.
“No Crows.”
“Not until Gilgamesh shows up. All my Crow contacts are either accounted for and elsewhere, or unaccounted for. Tell me again what Gilgamesh and Gail are doing?”
Connie sighed. “Gail got handed Lori’s old position, head of the Cause, she also acquired Carol’s position as head of the Network, and Carol ordered her to also stand in for her as head of the Arms. Then Gail and Tonya went off to New York to hash out what to do about the Focuses, and they dragged poor ol’ clueless Gilgamesh along with them. She needs to come back here quickly, though, or what’s left of Inferno is going to go down the tubes. Lori told Gail to tag everyone in Inferno and take us into her household.”
“Gail!” Hank said. Shrieked, in his Dr. Wilma Orza voice. “I’ve got to get tagged by Focus Elspeth. There’s no way around it, now.”
“Uh, Hank…” A hint of a sick smile appeared on Connie’s face.
“What?”
“Cathy took Newton and ran back with her household to Salt Lake City.”
Chaos. Unbelievable chaos. He couldn’t help but moan. Connie, improbably, giggled at his reaction.
“How about the Nobles? Do you think you can abuse your Noble contacts and sweet-talk them into helping us protect this place?” Connie said, after she finished giggling.
Hank shook his head. “I was there in the fight. Chimeras can be brought back from some impressive near death experiences, but, dammit, they were using pitchforks and shovels on what remained of the Nobles after the fight. They’re all going to be far worse off than Inferno.” His mind still couldn’t cope. One hundred percent casualties and eleven dead among all the Inferno housemembers involved in the battle. The numbers echoed through his mind. Despite the Madonna’s seniority and power, he still couldn’t believe she possessed the juice to send away a Focus who just lost twenty percent of her household. Insane.
Almost as insane as Carol’s most senior thug, Fred Raindorf, suffering from an induced Monster conversion inside Littleside. Men didn’t go Monster. Women went Monster. Men went into withdrawal. Except Fred. Heaven knew what went wrong with Fred, who didn’t even become a Transform before he went Monster.
His hands began to shake again, and he glared at them until the shaking stopped. The terror of the unknown, while alone. Soon, things would be much worse.
Soon, he would get to cope with Focus Gail Rickenbach as a helpless male Transform. He doubted he would survive the experience.
19.5 (12/26/72)
He didn’t talk himself out of the gurney until mid-morning. Hank walked to his office and found it commandeered and turned into a four patient ward. By the time he tracked down yesterday’s paperwork his gurney had vanished. He took over from the absent Jeanie, grabbed her tiny office and started to work.
He finally completed the Inferno list. Eleven dead, confirming Connie’s count, including four of his closer Inferno acquaintances. The one he had been closest to was Terry Bishop, a normal, and Lori’s favorite normal woman bod
yguard. Bill Fentris, Shelly Darcie, and Deborah Jarrell also perished. None of his old gang in the engineering crew died, although Karen Cooper lost a leg, and Forrest Darcie, Shelly’s husband, transformed. Forrest needed Crow help, and quickly, or he would die, as well. Massive élan contamination.
Massive élan contamination and dross contamination were the main maladies confronting the survivors here in Littleside. According to Zielinski’s notes, the issues varied from mild, such as his own problems, which he realized were more likely due to élan contamination from Pittsburgh than from his old contamination problems from the assassination attempt, to severe. He heard Tom Delacourt, Carol’s security chief, four doors down, hallucinating and raving from élan contamination. He hadn’t transformed, or, at least, not yet.
No one had considered the possibility of Carol being alive and out of the picture.
Time to make some phone calls.
---
“Tonya.”
“Hank here. We’ve got some problems.”
He reached Tonya in Polly’s household with his fourth phone call, after being on hold for a half hour. With Polly Keistermann’s death, Tonya was the ranking Focus in the country. Hank expected she would claim Polly’s old position as President of the Focus Council in a matter of days.
“What sort of problems?”
“No Crows or Nobles. Everyone here has élan and dross contamination. We’ve already had one normal do a Monster conversion from it. A man.”
“Shit. Right, everything’s screwed up because Carol, Sky and Lori got sent off on their quest. Sounds like you’re more messed up than we are. Well, Gail and her entourage just left. They’ll arrive in Chicago tonight or tomorrow some time.”
“Gilgamesh is with them?” Hank asked. Driving. In Gail’s household’s clunkers, the ones unable to cruise at the speed limit.
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