Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two

by Randall Farmer

  Would any of the other Arms…nah. They would see him as Carol’s territory, tag or not. Except Keaton, and while Keaton might be acceptable in an emergency, she remained under Tonya’s care, probably going through hell, conditioned by Tonya using Tonya’s patented Transform taming methods. Tonya’s household was the last place on the planet he wanted to go. She would enslave him, and he would never see the light of day, or Carol, again.

  However, Arm Erica Eissler had tagged him years ago, as a normal. She actively liked him. She also ‘owned’ plenty of Focuses, and he suspected she would pay well for the juice pattern project he kept in his head.

  And in the boxes Gail’s household grunts so nicely packed for him.

  Gail goofed when she didn’t order him to hand over his credit cards.

  ---

  He stopped first in the diner down the road from the Branton. Food, finally. Gail’s people were at least agreeable enough to let him store his belongings at Littleside. They even agreed to take his belongings there, and allowed him to heist all his most necessary project notes in the process. They now resided in his briefcase. He half-expected Gail’s people to keep him in their sight, but they just let him walk off, unaccompanied.

  Walking off proved to be difficult. This crap about being abandoned by his Focus didn’t play well hormonally. The dry mouth and the jittery legs? What the crap was wrong with him? He was walking to a diner, not bracing an Arm.

  Hank ordered a Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes and green beans, a cup of coffee, and sat, thinking. He felt naked. The walk from the converted hotel to the diner half terrorized him.

  The question was ‘why’?

  Now, with food in his belly, he could think. First, although he felt juice cravings he wasn’t in a low juice state, so he remained above 17.5 A new male Transform usually used a minimum of a half point of juice a day. Older, inactive male Transforms used less, about a third of a point a day. Unfortunately, he suspected he used more. Lori set him to the functional optimum, 22.2, immediately after he transformed. Two days ago, though, his juice count had been 20.2, not enough time to reach 20.2 at a half point a day. The numbers came out to just under a point a day, so, worst case, he was already down around 19.0. Unless the élan contamination made him use juice faster. Which could be.

  He could be just above the low juice line right this instant, at 17.6. If so, and if he used a point a day, he would be in withdrawal in just two days. If he didn’t pick up a Focus by then, he would be dead. Very unpleasantly dead.

  That was good for a bunch of panic, all by itself.

  If he started suffering from low juice before he got on an airplane, he wouldn’t make it to Eissler in time.

  Why the panic, though? Naked and half terrorized? He thought only Crows reacted this way.

  Yet, tagged Transforms didn’t run away, now did they. He had never thought to ask ‘why?’ Idiot. Tagged Transforms did run away, but only rarely, and only so they could ask another Focus to take them in. Running away was logically stupid, but hell, gambling in Las Vegas was logically stupid, too. Normal people did far too many logically stupid things every day. So, why not?

  Transform instincts. Focuses always went to get the new Transform and came back with him. Never the other way around. He had always just written this off as an affectation, or courtesy. Wrong. Just another damned Transform secret he, in fifteen years of studying Transform Sickness, hadn’t learned of.

  Could he fight off this instinct?

  He would give it a shot.

  ---

  He didn’t even make it to the ticket counter. The taxi ride to the airport nearly flattened him. He panicked twice in the airport, and finally gave up on trying to buy a ticket. Even with his experience, knowing this was just ‘hormonal’ and ‘in his head’, he couldn’t force himself to buy the ticket. Humbling and galling. Worse, he suspected someone tailed him.

  Hank stood in the wide expanse of O’Hare airport and stewed. People started to edge away from him as well, so far without realizing why. Hank wondered if there was an actual physiological or pheromonal basis behind discrimination against Transforms. He remembered being uncomfortable around Transforms when he first started dealing with them, from a fear of catching TS. Back then, those worries weren’t uncommon, nor illogical. Nobody knew enough about TS back then.

  This was just what he didn’t need to discover and publish – extra, extra read all about it. Transforms stink!

  He grimaced and headed back to the taxi stand, keeping a close eye on the people around him, looking for a tail. Nothing. He spent the trip from O’Hare to Littleside with his head in his hands. How could he beat the hormones messing him up? He couldn’t come up with a trick, and eventually he gave up. Why bother? He could solve all his problems just by begging at Gail’s feet.

  Blowing his brains out would be easier.

  Gail, well, didn’t impress him. She lived on the wrong side of the generation gap. Part of it had to be the old ‘ick, women with power’ nonsense he thought he had cured himself of years ago. The rest was the social attitudes of the young. Gail had them all. Sure, Carol and Lori had toughened Gail up, but instead of producing a properly tough woman acting as an icy glacial force of nature and worthy of respect, they produced a hard-assed young rebel, sassy and forward, practically a bra-burning commie.

  Worse, if he went to see her with his current attitude, she would see through it in an instant, and she would just toss him back on the street to suffer some more until he broke. He would be tons of use broken, right?

  In Littleside, he possessed the names and addresses of all the local Focuses. With his stash, and some time, he should be able to cobble something together. Carol would shit bricks when she found out, but compared to the alternative? Well, he would rather grovel for Carol any day than grovel to Gail. Hell, he would rather be tortured by Carol than grovel to Gail.

  He got out of the cab, amused to see the taillights of a cab pulling away from the Littleside entrance circle as his cab pulled up. His tail. He stalked into Littleside, his home away from home, the place still a madhouse, aiming for Sidney’s office.

  “Hey! Stop!” a guard shouted. Hank turned to the guard and froze. He knew the man standing by the guard and whispering into the guard’s ear. Patient Zero! The man Amy Haggerty thought of as the Cause’s ‘great unknown enemy’! Before Hank could mount even a minimal protest, four guards surrounded him and hauled him off to the public clinic within Littleside. He tried to talk to them as they hauled him through the busy corridors, but they ignored him.

  The Transform ID test took only seconds, and the nurse who administered it wasn’t a nurse he knew. He tried to get them to let him talk to Sidney, but they refused. He tried to tell them about Patient Zero and the threat he posed to Gail and the local Transform community, but they only rolled their eyes, used to the desperate tricks of an untagged Transform. One of them checked his wallet for IDs and found his credit cards under all those different names. A bit of searching later they found his three different passports under three different names, none of them his. After that, they discovered his briefcase full of research materials.

  Five minutes later they bundled up Hank and tossed him in his new home, the Transform detention tanks down in the basement. A nice little cell with exceptionally sturdy bars and no hope of escape.

  Last time he had been in this cell, he had been setting up a Transform man to feed to Carol, for the interrupted draw training. That was worth a shiver.

  The cell remained the same, a depressing place with a gray concrete floor, green concrete walls and chilly hospital sterility. Hank licked his lips and sat on the hard cot, just waiting for the next hormone surge to take him further into whatever madness brewed in his mind. In his memories, he heard Carol scream as he took the Transform, a man just like him, away from her before she finished her draw.

  He hadn’t told Carol it had been as painful for the Transform as it had been for her.

  Now he had time to think of
all the things he should have told a great many people. Patient Zero, the man as the older East Coast Focuses named him, had just found a clever and untraceable way to assassinate him.

  18.0 (12/28/72)

  Hank awoke in the morning to see the backside of a guard walking away from his cell.

  “Hey!”

  The guard ignored him and his further shouts. Hank looked around, and found a tray laden with food on the floor before him. A feast for a king, save that Hank knew the Littleside procedures to every detail, because he had written them. In times of crisis, when short-staffed, they fed the prisoners triple rations at the beginning of the day. This was his breakfast, lunch and dinner.

  Prisoners. No, ‘detained Transforms’. Any licensed clinic could detain any untagged Transform for as long as necessary. Certain obligations went with such detention, such as proper food, medicine, clothing and word given to the Transform community – read Focus Network – about an available Transform needing to be placed. Before the Nixon administration, Federal health officials would place these Transforms. Not anymore. The Nixon administration merged the placement office with the Office of Transform Health and fired thousands of Transform specialists. Instead of placing Transforms, those who remained performed random audits, and if the Focus and household weren’t full up the auditors would levy severe criminal and monetary penalties against the Focus and her household. Because of fear, the outcome stayed the same – new Focuses grabbed all the women Transforms and many of the Transform men. When no new Focuses were building their household? Well, hope was dim, even for the Transform women. The cost of picking up the new Transforms and taking them to their new homes sat on the shoulders of the Focus households, as well, saving the Feds an insignificant amount of money, and forcing the Focus households to pick up the tab. Nine out of ten couldn’t afford it, and the rules about qualifying for AFDC hadn’t changed – only if the household as a whole fell under the poverty line could they apply for AFDC.

  Hank knew he approached the low juice point from the strength of his juice cravings. He knew one secret, though, for prolonging his chances: total inactivity. Lower the heart rate, rest, relax, and do nothing but think. If lucky, he could lower his use rate below one point a day. Any minute now, he expected to go into low juice, which he didn’t look forward to.

  He considered it a point of honor not to utter a word of complaint about his condition. After so many years of telling Focuses and Arms to grit their teeth and learn to live with low juice, his piddly cravings were too minor to bring up. Even to himself.

  He doubted anyone would miss him or find him. With his rapidly altering juice structure, even Gilgamesh wouldn’t recognize him.

  He didn’t go into low juice. However, his bright orange urine smelled of swamp and spoiled cheese. That, he didn’t like. Not for an instant.

  17.4 (12/29/72)

  He woke bathed in sweat, with muscle cramps and a headache. He had an overwhelming juice craving as well, but that backed off when he stood. Hank’s brain felt like mush, and he couldn’t force even a decently half-intelligent thought through the murk.

  Low juice. Sometime in the night, he had passed into a low juice state. Now he would get to experience firsthand what every Focus and Arm went through on a regular basis, and many Transforms under the care of sadistic Focuses went through every day of their existence.

  He found a new day’s worth of food on the floor. Wonderful. He had missed the delivery orderly again, and missed another chance to pass a message to somebody, anybody. If he figured it right, he had three days, give or take, before he went into periwithdrawal. In periwithdrawal, his juice use rate would plummet, but he would be dysfunctional, probably for another day or more before he went into true withdrawal. Not that he would notice, though. For a new Transform, the only difference between periwithdrawal and withdrawal was that in periwithdrawal, a Focus could still save the Transform. A long time Transform would behave differently.

  Including being more useful in low juice. He could barely move to get his breakfast.

  “Owwwh, shit,” he heard, followed by the sound of vomiting. “Dammit!”

  “Hello?” he said. His voice sounded funny to him this morning. He looked around and finally found the source of the other voice, a woman in a cell across the hall, one cell kitty-corner from his. They could only see each other if they stood in the front right corners of their cells, respectively.

  “Sorry,” the woman said. “I didn’t know there was anyone else detained here.”

  A woman Transform, down here? “You shouldn’t be down here,” Hank said.

  “Tell that to me,” she said. “There’s some sort of crisis going on and the Focuses aren’t taking new Transforms. I waited for six days to be picked up, and nothing. Now, this. The creep who threw me into this cell said this was my last day. Guess you’re going to get a treat, mister. I hear that someone who goes Monster puts on a hell of a show.” Men used up their juice and went into withdrawal. Woman produced too much and eventually went Monster. A Focus could move the juice from the woman to the man and save both of them.

  Shit. The conflict with the first Focuses screwed everything up. A fine, intelligent, and well-poised woman Transform was a hot commodity. Focuses came to Littleside from as far as Orlando to pick up top-end Transform women.

  Men, though? Never.

  Guilt weighed on his shoulders, but if he couldn’t save himself, what could he do for the woman?

  “My name’s Henry Zielinski. Call me Hank.” He no longer cared about his identity problems.

  “Kim McDougal,” she said. She walked to the front right corner of her cell, so they could see each other. Young, dammit. Early twenties, jeans, pale red blouse. Bottle blond hair, dark brown eyebrows, a pleasant face that once knew how to smile. “Few weeks ago, I was working my way through school, attending Joliette JC. Then this happened. I knew the symptoms, got myself checked, found this wonderful new clinic to go to, even did the modern thing and sent off my resume to all the local Focuses. Followed every rule in the book. Not a nibble.” She looked him over. “You’re sort of old for a new Transform, aren’t you?”

  Hank leaned against the bars and his head swam. He found it hard to talk to a young woman facing such a needless death. “I’m a doctor, or was a doctor. Worked right here, in Littleside. I got an induced transformation from working around Transforms. Even got tagged, but my Focus vanished in the crisis, didn’t take me along, and now I’m stuck here without a Focus.”

  “That’s got to hurt. Putting your life into helping Transforms, and then left in the lurch like this.”

  Hank nodded. Kim didn’t need to say it, but there was essentially no chance of a Focus randomly picking him up. A Focus needed twice as many women as men to get the juice balance right, and so there were always extra men. Men got put in cells like this for only one reason – to die. The reason Patient Zero made sure he ended up here.

  “A Transform specialist doctor, eh? So you can tell me what the hell is going wrong with me. I can’t believe I’m not already dead, as bad as I feel.”

  “When your juice count goes above twenty-six, you start feeling awful. That probably happened several days ago.”

  Kim nodded.

  “You probably felt like you were dying yesterday. Jittery, over-stimulated, anxious.”

  Kim nodded again.

  “About a half hour before the Monster conversion, you’ll start to feel better. It’s an illusion, though. About five to ten minutes before the physical Monster conversion starts you’ll be hit by incredible pain, cramps, and nausea. You may even start to sweat blood. It’s too late to try and kill yourself then. By that point, the changeover to the Major Transform juice metabolism has started, and under the MTJM regime, it takes much more to kill you than is available.”

  “You’re a real sweetheart, doc. What’s it like for a man? Do you get any warning?”

  “Yes. There’s a pre-withdrawal state known of as periwithdrawal, that has many of
the same symptoms as withdrawal, only lessened. For a new Transform, periwithdrawal is nearly as debilitating as true withdrawal. For someone who’s been a Transform for a while, years, periwithdrawal shares the same symptoms as TS itself. That’s when I know to go slit my wrists.”

  Kim bit her lip. “Cold about this, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t hold back on my account,” Hank said. “At your age, and older, I raged against death with the best of them.” He shrugged. “I’m old, Kim. I’m surprised I lasted this long before transforming, given my long exposure to juice, which is rather poisonous to a normal.” Especially when injected. “My urine is this wonderful bright orange. I doubt I’ll even make it to withdrawal, and, well, with the crisis going, there’s not much I can do about things, either.”

  “Where do you get this knife to slit your wrists with?”

  “Your bed swings up. There’s all sorts of treasures in the chest underneath it.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Kim walked back to her bed, which was out of sight. He heard the squeak of the bed opening. “I can’t believe it. I’ve got all I need for all sorts of different methods of suicide. What’s this, cyanide? What ghoul would put cyanide in with this? That’s not exactly a clean way to die.”

  Hank blushed. The cyanide had been his idea. Something fast and irrevocable for the timid, something unsuitable for abuse as a recreational drug, always a concern of his. “Everyone has a different idea of what they consider best for themselves. Many cannot, even when faced with withdrawal or turning into a Monster.” Worse was the knowledge that although established Transforms could be healed from withdrawal or Monsterhood – by Nobles, under the right circumstances, circumstances that were growing by the month – it was well proven that a brand new Transform couldn’t be brought back, no matter what. For men, this was utterly true, and would always be so, because death from withdrawal didn’t take that long, a week to two weeks. There were hints that Monsters, even Monsters created from new Transforms, could be brought back, but only after several years of Monsterhood.