Once We Were Human

by Randall Allen Farmer

  Part of Tonya’s job was to make sure they didn’t find out, one of the many reasons her negotiations with Keaton were so stressful.

  Tonya heard something crash and break on the other end of the line. “Fucking first Focuses,” Keaton said, referring to the cadre of Focuses who’d arranged the breakout from Quarantine and who were still very important. At least Keaton knew the politics involved. “Is it because those shit-faced whores are afraid of exposure, because they’re afraid you’ll get to much fucking political power, or have they just lost their goddamned minds?” About the only time Keaton didn’t sprinkle her language with obscenities was when she was about to do serious physical harm to a person or needed something badly. Or when she fell into a psychotic rage, in which case she rarely said a thing as she ripped people apart.

  “They’re spooked by the new Arm’s attempted escape and the deaths of those two State Troopers,” Tonya said. “What Suzie said was that this Arm is too dangerous to take a chance on.” Focus Suzie Schrum, the eighth Focus to transform in the United States, ‘retired’ from ‘public’ Focus politics three years ago but served as Tonya’s political boss. Tonya often felt she was little more than Suzie’s mouthpiece. Only about a quarter of the time, though, as Suzie didn’t care about most issues, which made Tonya’s political post bearable. It didn’t help that Tonya’s other major backer, Shirley Patterson, was the leader of the first Focuses. Shirley’s patronage made Tonya’s dealings with the rest of the first Focuses politically tricky.

  “Suzie’s a fucking loon,” Keaton said. Tonya didn’t argue. “Hancock panicked and the idiot Troopers shot each other. The fact that some cops died and Hancock’s still walking is a plus in my book. On the other hand, the scene around the St. Louis Detention Center is hot, crawling with State Police. Some fucking turd-town Mayor’s raised hell or something.”

  “Too high profile for you?”

  “Look bitch, face facts. That’s my face on the damned wanted posters in all the goddamned Post Offices, not yours. I’ve got my own problems to deal with, and I can’t just waltz in and start training some motherfucking baby Arm without attracting the wrong sort of attention.”

  Tonya wiped her face with a handkerchief and took a deep breath to steady herself. “Be patient. You know how this will play out. The locals will quiet down once the FBI takes over security and I’ve already made sure that it’s our FBI people.”

  “You got Bates?”

  “Bates got me.”

  “You got Focus Adkins?”

  First Focus Wini Adkins indirectly ran the Midwest Region and thought of the St. Louis Detention Center as hers. She had been Tonya’s Focus mentor early on; they were still friends. Wini had hired Keaton, through Tonya, several times. “No. She doesn’t want to get involved.”

  “Figures. You got Zielinski?”

  “He got himself.” That damned doctor – Secret Agent Zielinski, her pet name for him – had already been in St. Louis when she had found out about the new Arm. He was nearly as annoying to work with as Keaton.

  “At least that’s something. I’ll just wait, then,” Keaton said. “I’ll check back next month.”

  Tonya tapped a pencil on her desk and counted to ten, backwards. Damn Keaton! “You said that if you waited too long you weren’t sure you’d be able to reach a new Arm and get control of her.” What Stacy had said was if the new Arm was anything like her, after a few months nobody would be able to tell her shit because she would be too full of herself. Tonya sure wouldn’t disagree with that.

  “You get me in then, Tonya. You’re the devious Focus bitch.”

  Tonya’s pencil snapped in her fingers. She threw it across her desk and shook her head, looking over the roster of Network people involved in the Hancock situation. Keaton may have be the most frightening human being Tonya had ever met, able to terrify her even in a telephone conversation, but the stress of dealing with her did keep Tonya on her toes. It helped her think.

  Tonya liked stress. The stress often weighed heavily on her household, but that didn’t bother Tonya. That’s what her household was for. “I think I’ve got an idea,” Tonya said, after looking over her paperwork.

  “Talk to the phone, bitch.”

  Tonya told the Arm about her idea.

  Dr. Henry Zielinski: September 18, 1966

  “Have a seat, Hank,” Special Agent in Charge Paul Gauthier said, snapping his eyes up at Dr. Zielinski as he came into the room. Gauthier went back to ladling sugar into his oversized coffee mug.

  Dr. Zielinski sat at the conference room table and passed up the doughnuts left from the last meeting he had attended six hours ago. A moment later, Dr. Bentwyler sat down beside Zielinski, a pen clenched tightly in his teeth and a sketchpad in his hands. Special Agent Tommy Bates already sat at the end of the table, the ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips. He wore dark circles under his eyes from his travels of the past few days.

  This quickly organized meeting had yanked Dr. Zielinski out of his office with a mere five-minute’s notice. Not that he had been working. The Hancock case already had the bureaucratic paperwork piled high, but he had done enough of that for one day. Instead, he had pushed the piles to the side and taken out his photos and slides. His photography hobby was even defensible as part of his work on Transforms; it helped him spot the physical changes Focuses and Arms accumulated over time. He had gotten academic papers published based on those photos. Before he had started the paperwork, he had made a phone call to one of his Network contacts to fill them in on what was going on. All normal routine.

  The fact someone had flushed Gauthier out from under the floorboards before the shit hit the fan meant the FBI was more serious about this new Arm transformation than normal. Paul Gauthier was the Special Agent in Charge for Transform Affairs. He reported directly to the Assistant Director in charge of the FBI’s Washington headquarters, who reported directly to Director Hoover. Gauthier’s younger brother was a Transform in Focus Elisabeth Holder’s household. It gave Gauthier a more compassionate perspective on Transforms than most.

  Perhaps there was some hope for the Hancock project, despite Dr. Zielinski’s worries. He hated situations where he didn’t have full responsibility over a newly transformed Arm. Not good for the Arm and not good for his career.

  “What brings you here, Paul?” Zielinski asked as Gauthier looked up, ready to speak.

  From long association with the FBI, Dr. Zielinski knew that unless he took control of the meeting he wouldn’t learn anything useful. Gauthier frowned at Dr. Zielinski but answered his question anyway. “It’s been awhile since I’ve worked with either you or Dr. Bentwyler, so I decided to touch base with the two of you before we really got going on this Hancock project.” Gauthier took a long sip of coffee. He was a tall man, just over six feet, athletic despite being in his early fifties. He wore his gray-flecked red hair in a crew cut, and had been out in the sun recently, because his freckles were prominent. Gauthier still drank coffee by the gallon, Dr. Zielinski noted, and his teeth were still coffee stained. “So far, none of my peers or superiors in the FBI has shown any interest in Mrs. Hancock’s transformation. On the other hand, my phone has been ringing off the hook with questions from various important Focuses, including the Network head.” Focus Michelle Claunch, not one of Dr. Zielinski’s favorite people. “There’s some disagreement among the Focuses as to whether we should help Mrs. Hancock or make sure she dies.”

  Nods around the table. The leading Focuses had changed their minds several times on the Arm issue, and the official position of the Focuses this year was to cultivate the Arms. ‘They are our fellow sisters! They could protect us.’ He hadn’t believed the Arms would be able to get along with the Focuses until he had spent some time with the one Arm who’d survived, Stacy Keaton. She had proven him and many others wrong, but her help didn’t keep a sizeable number of Focuses from agitating for Keaton’s death.

 
“You have a plan?” Zielinski asked. Outside, the sun made the day bright, the sum total of what he could tell of the outside world through the barred windows. If this place didn’t have air conditioning it would be unbearable.

  “I have interests,” Gauthier said, as he looked Zielinski over. “I’m counting on you for the plan, Hank.” Gauthier took another swig of coffee. “Since the last time we worked together my main interest in Transforms has changed from placement of new Transforms to the Monster problem.” Zielinski nodded. After the ’64 elections, the Johnson Administration established a department within HEW to support the Transforms (at least with lip service) and to direct research on Transform Sickness (millions of dollars of pork barrel spending, often wasted due to needless duplication and unnecessary bureaucratic overhead). For the last eighteen months Dr. Zielinski had been butting heads with the HEW, who thought they possessed all the answers and didn’t respect his expertise. The FBI had once placed the new Transforms into Focus households due to a historical accident. Not anymore. Gauthier continued: “I’ve given Tommy authorization to hire Mrs. Hancock to help us with the Monster Eradication Program. We don’t like to publicize this, but some large sections of Federal land have gotten so Monster infested we’ve had to close them off to civilians.”

  “I see,” Zielinski said. He hadn’t realized the Monster problem was so bad. “How are you proposing to handle the juice issue?” Arms were juice consumers who got their juice by killing Transforms and the public was understandably squeamish on the subject.

  “The usual,” Gauthier said. All Detention Centers had surplus Transforms, many who chose suicide as opposed to withdrawal or becoming a Monster. Some of these people would go to Mrs. Hancock. It was one thing, though, to provide her with surplus Transforms while she was confined as a ward of the state, another to provide her with surplus Transforms as an employee perk. That would be unprecedented, and Dr. Zielinski couldn’t imagine the legal issues involved. The public outcry wouldn’t be pretty, either. “Unfortunately, as you well know, we can’t work out the details until we have a living Arm on board. We’re going to be counting on you, Hank, to provide us the Arm. Before we can train Mrs. Hancock to be a Monster hunter, she has to survive her initial transformation and stabilize.”

  Dr. Zielinski nodded. It sounded like he might actually get the support he needed to keep Mrs. Hancock alive, which would give him a leg up on his own goals as well. Any support, beyond the normal government ambivalence toward Arms, would be good.

  The history of government involvement with Transforms wasn’t promising; before their escape near the end of the Eisenhower administration, all Transforms had been locked up in Quarantine. The Kennedy and Johnson administration had accepted the Transforms’ escape from Quarantine and implemented plans to integrate the surviving Transforms into local communities, in households led by Focuses. This was fine for Transforms and Focuses but left a gaping policy hole concerning Arms. What came next was anybody’s guess, except in the last presidential election the Republicans pledged to put all the Transforms back in Quarantine ‘to stop this deadly scourge in its tracks’. Zielinski had always voted Republican, but hadn’t been able to force himself to vote in the ’64 elections.

  He didn’t say that if this Arm was anything like the other two who had lasted more than a month, there wasn’t a chance in hell she would agree to hunt Monsters for a living. Two Arms weren’t a large enough sample to be worth even a side comment, though.

  “Although I have my own experiences to draw on regarding Arm transformations, for the Hancock project to succeed we’re going to need the records on Stacy Keaton’s transformation and adjustment period,” Dr. Zielinski said. He had dealt with Stacy Keaton in a few terrifying episodes these past two years, but he hadn’t been able to convince the touchy Arm to reminisce. She was the one Arm he hadn’t been involved with during her initial transformation, and it irked him that she was the only one who survived her transformation and succeeded as an independent Arm. Unfortunately, as a one-woman crime wave, she had soured the public and medical community opinion on Arms, enough to prompt the local officials in Missouri to agitate for Mrs. Hancock’s immediate execution.

  “I wouldn’t mind getting hold of those records myself, but they’re just not available,” Bates said. Gauthier nodded.

  “According to Director Hoover, that episode officially didn’t happen,” Gauthier said. “As you know, we weren’t involved in the Stacy Keaton affair.” “We” being the Network-affiliated pro-Transform FBI Agents. “All I know is that the Assistant Directors involved were asked to retire afterward and that the records were sealed.” Gauthier’s explanation fit Dr. Zielinski’s knowledge on the subject. Keaton had been abused while she had been in the custody of the FBI, likely driven psychotic, and after her escape, she became a criminal to survive, a profound embarrassment to the FBI.

  Dr. Bentwyler looked up, startled. While the rest of them had been jawing, Dr. Bentwyler had been sketching a picture of Mrs. Hancock from memory, Dr. Bentwyler’s equivalent of Dr. Zielinski’s own photography hobby. “You were involved with other Arm transformations besides Rose Desmond?” he asked Dr. Zielinski. The Rose Desmond affair had made the national media. Everyone knew about Dr. Zielinski’s involvement with Rose Desmond.

  Dr. Bentwyler’s official title was Staff Psychologist of the St. Louis Detention Center, but his main purpose here was to act as the Focus Network’s spy. Dr. Zielinski suspected Bentwyler reported directly to Focus Claunch and didn’t envy him one bit. Dr. Zielinski’s Network ‘boss’, Focus Tonya Biggioni, was difficult to deal with, but even she was more reasonable than Focus Claunch.

  Dr. Zielinski nodded. “I consulted on the Julie Bethune case, and after Desmond, on the Francine Sarles case. The last Arm who transformed, Elsie Conger, was also in my care. You wouldn’t have heard anything about Conger. She didn’t even survive to her first juice draw due to severe problems with her initial transformation.” Her death had been unavoidable. The medical community was slowly putting together a set of guidelines on what to do and what not to do with a new Arm. What not to do was a longer list and he had written most of it.

  Dr. Zielinski occasionally wondered if he had made a horrible mistake when he turned his attention to Arms. He had been in medical school during World War II, married young, and in his early career he had been a surgeon. During the Korean War he had been recognized as an exceptional surgeon. After Korea he had moved into academia, taught in several East Coast teaching hospitals, and gained his first academic kudos doing research on improved surgical techniques. By the time he wrangled a plum teaching position at Harvard Medical in ’57, he had already become interested in the epidemiology of Transform Sickness, which became his second successful research specialization. He hadn’t fully specialized in Transform Sickness until after the Quarantine ended and the government started letting new Focuses establish Focus households in the general population. By then, he had already done enough innovative research on Transform Sickness to be considered one of the top six experts in the field.

  There was very little he hadn’t done during the peak of his career. He had put his minor prestige on the line to help those new Focuses get their feet on the ground, and it had helped his career as much as it had helped the Focuses and their households. Since its beginning he had been involved with the Focus Network, the sub-rosa support group the Focuses had put together to help them survive. Paul Gauthier and Tommy Bates had been involved just as long.

  As a new department head at Harvard Medical, he had turned to the knotty question of Armenigar’s Syndrome. At first, the Focuses had been sympathetic toward Arms, willing to take all sorts of risks to help them. The Arms were failed Focuses, right? It was soppy humanitarianism, and he warned the Focuses from the start the Arms were likely something entirely different from what they expected. He had used his reputation to gain full control over the third Arm, Rose Desmond, right
after she transformed. Rose had lived beyond her initial transformation and adjustment period, and he thought he had mastered the subject and secured his reputation forever.

  Then, disaster struck. Early in Rose’s seventh month as an Arm, Dr. Zielinski and Rose tried an experiment. It failed spectacularly. Rose went berserk, killed people, wounded him, and in the end, was shot dead. The media exposed the method he had used to provide Desmond with juice, volunteer unclaimed Transforms from the Transform Clinics, the same as they were going to use to keep Mrs. Hancock alive. The media moralists had drowned out his supporters and the Dean succumbed to pressure and fired him as department head. Rose’s death had broken his heart, but he had long since recovered his dispassion.

  His career hadn’t yet recovered.

  Dr. Zielinski wanted his reputation back. He wanted his standing in the medical community back. To get either, he needed a success. His most obvious prospect for success was to shepherd an Arm through her transformation and adjustment period and graduate her as a free and independent Arm. An Arm who could do good in the world and erase the horrific public perception of Arms created by Stacy Keaton.

  He turned to Gauthier. “If you want Mrs. Hancock to live, give her to me. The Transform Department in Harvard Medical has a much better setup than this place. She’ll be much less exposed to the vicissitudes of life.”

  “There are too many Missouri legal issues,” Gauthier said. “We can’t do that.”

  Dr. Zielinski frowned. “Make them go away and I’ll get you your Arm.”

  Gauthier shook his head. “I’ll look into it, but Stacy Keaton’s made it a lost cause. Until we can first show that Arms aren’t unredeemable killers, we’re not going to catch any legal slack.”

  “Speaking of which, any information we can get on Arm capabilities would be much appreciated,” Tommy said. “The FBI bosses would love to find a way to kill or capture Keaton.”

  “What about our friends?” Dr. Bentwyler said, referring to the Focuses. “They’re not going to be happy if you do that.”

  “If we can present Mrs. Hancock to them as a replacement for Keaton, they’ll be fine,” Gauthier said. “Keaton’s a serial killer, remember. Bringing her to justice for the non-Transforms she’s killed is still our goal.”

  Dr. Zielinski wasn’t so sure about how ‘fine’ the Focuses would be if Keaton got arrested or killed. He knew of at least two leading Focuses who would be livid if either happened. He needed to be careful himself; his own contacts with Keaton were far more extensive than either of the two FBI Agents knew. From the expression on Tommy’s face, Dr. Zielinski suspected the other FBI agent didn’t agree with Gauthier’s assessment. Tommy’s comment about information to help catch Keaton was window dressing, simply for Gauthier’s consumption.

  “In any case, we need Hancock,” Gauthier said. “That’s up to you, Hank. You’re in control of this Arm’s care from now on. Make me a plan. Tell me what you need.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Dr. Zielinski said, and let a small smile creep across his face. He could do this. He was positive he could do this.

  Rover (Interlude)

  He ran through the trees, up and down the rocky hillsides and steeper mountain slopes, chasing the blowing early fall leaves. The pain was gone. Yesterday, he found love, in the form of a Monster. He had loved the Monster to death, fulfilling some need he didn’t understand. Hungry, he had eaten the Monster as well and fallen asleep in a faint.

  Perhaps he slept for more than a day. The day he loved the Monster to death had been hot and sticky. Now, it was cool and crisp and pleasant. He didn’t care. He could move without pain for the first time since he had been a man. All because of the good loving.

  There was only one problem: his man memories were still fading.

  Why worry now? The world was filled with scents and noises and places to run. A world filled with cool breezes and wet earth, with foxes, songbirds, squirrels, chipmunks, hawks, and deer. He knew them all by their scents, which struck him as strange. He ran, along an abandoned trail, and caught another scent. Human.

  He hadn’t lost enough of his human memories to forget that humans might be dangerous.

  He went the other way, farther up into these pine forest hills. Into the mountains whose tops came deliciously close to the clouds themselves. Hours of padding up switchback trails, following power lines, jumping fences. He wondered what he was that he could move this way.

  He stopped under an immense fir and looked himself over. The air smelled safe here under the towering pines, safe enough to stop moving. He no longer had hands. His arms were now legs, his hands elongated, large paws with nasty looking short claws on them. With a little difficulty, he bent himself around to glance at his rear. Yes, he had a tail back there. His waist was narrow, his legs huge and muscular, ending in paws. His dick had grown huge as well, sheathed like a dog’s.

  He was a dog.

  He sure as hell hoped he was a big dog.

  Hours later, the creek he followed plunged over a small waterfall into a pool. The pool was a little thing, a few feet across, edged with mosses and ferns. The sun crept lower in the west, the last of the high clouds having cleared. It would be pleasant tonight, near freezing but not quite. Clear tomorrow; rain the next day and warmer. He just knew.

  He studied his reflection in the pool. Yes, a dog, but not a dog’s head, a man’s head with a snout and floppy dog ears. His gray fur had red highlights.

  He thought dogs were color-blind. Well then, he wasn’t quite a dog.

  Below, he heard a car chugging up the mountain. He ran toward where the noise came from, unable to stop himself.

  Several hundred feet below, a road gently switch backed up the mountain toward a low pass and went on by. Another road came in from the left, several hundred feet lower down. That road paralleled the mountain slope, and ended at the first road in a complicated intersection. He crept down toward the road, anticipating.

  Anticipating fun.

  He hid himself in the overgrown tall grass by the side of the road and waited.

  The next car didn’t come until the sun fell to within its width of the horizon. A small car, a…Mustang. A young woman and her daughter rode inside. After the car passed him, he took off running, barking in pleasure. The hard running exercised all his muscles.

  The woman in the car saw him in her side mirror and screamed, but couldn’t speed up. Not on this twisty road. In fact, soon she would get to the stop sign where this road met the second.

  He caught up with the Mustang at the stop sign.

  Nope. He wasn’t a small dog. He was a large dog, pony sized, taller than the Mustang but not as long. He expected the woman to peel off, drive away, but he sensed something wrong with her. She wouldn’t look at him. He sniffed. Terror.

  “Mommy! Doggy!” the little girl said. She wasn’t terrified.

  He didn’t want to be terrifying. He missed people. He had been a man once. Being around people quieted the ache inside, made him feel like he wasn’t slipping slipping into a world of no words.

  “Hello,” he said. Poorly. He didn’t get the ‘h’ sound right, and the ‘l’s weren’t there at all. In fact, it sounded more like a bark than a ‘hello’.

  The woman squinched her eyes shut and held the steering wheel with corded muscles, unmoving. No fun here. He went around to the other side of the Mustang and tapped his nose on the window.

  “Play?” he asked the girl. Her eyes lit up. This time, his word sounded better, more like ‘blay’ than ‘play’, but much more of a word than a bark.

  The little girl opened the Mustang door and stepped out. She was about eight, and cautious. He bent down to just below his shoulder level and licked her face. “Nice doggy. Where’s your house, doggy? Where’s your collar? How do I know what to call you if I can’t find your dog tag?” Inside the car, her mother started to make strange mewlin
g noises.

  The little girl petted him.

  He shivered in pleasure, the shiver reminding him of something else: sex. His dick grew hard.

  “Name?” he asked the little girl for her name. The word sounded perfect when it came out.

  “I’ll call you Rover,” the little girl said, misunderstanding his question.

  “Rover,” he repeated. A good name, even though when he spoke, the word came out more like ‘robber’ than ‘rover’.

  “You’re like that huge dog in the books for babies I read last year,” the little girl said.

  “Uh huh,” he said.

  The little girl’s mother ran out of the car, screaming like a lunatic. Rover couldn’t resist. He turned away from the little girl and chased her mother down. He nuzzled the woman and screwed her, which didn’t take long.

  After he finished he licked the woman’s face. Nothing. She didn’t have any of the good loving the Monster possessed and he wanted more of. He had just raped the woman, hadn’t he? Quickly, not dog-style. He backed away, scared of himself.

  He couldn’t figure out why he had raped the woman. Had he lost the will to stop even his most miniscule impulses?

  “Bad Rover,” he said. The woman, who had curled up in a ball after he raped her, began to scream again. “Sorry.”

  He turned back to find that the little girl had climbed back inside the car and locked the doors.

  Good for her. Scary things prowled the darkening night.

  He couldn’t think of any way out of his mess. Fun as it was, he couldn’t live this way for long. Hungry again, he scented food in the trunk of the Mustang. He padded back to the Mustang’s trunk.

  No hands. Angry, Rover growled and clawed at the trunk. To his surprise, the trunk gave with a horrid rip and opened awkwardly. Now the little girl screamed as well. “Bad Rover,” he said. His stomach rumbled anyway.

  Other humans would come. That wouldn’t be good. He gobbled food with a few choice bites – they had hamburger! – and fled up the mountain.

  This was no way to live. What was he going to do?

  Carol Hancock: September 19, 1966 – September 22, 1966

  Right after breakfast, Nurse Fitzpatrick told me to get ready for my first exercise session. I shrugged. After three days of tests I didn’t care what they did to me, as long as it was quick. Nurse Fitzpatrick gave me some exercise clothes to wear, out of her infinite stash of institutional clothing, and led me downstairs to where the center’s staff had converted a lounge into a gymnasium. Orderly Cook followed behind, hand on his gun.

  I glanced at the gymnasium and its contents, turned around, and demanded to see Dr. Zielinski. The nurse and the orderly shrugged, and led me off. He had settled into his office, with books on the shelves and diplomas on the wall. Along the wall to the side he had littered a table with a microscope, slides, photographs, a slide rule, dark glass jars filled with chemicals and other equipment I didn’t recognize.

  He glanced up from his paperwork and indicated a chair. “Carol, you have to use the gym and exercise your body. I know you don’t like it, but it’s necessary,” Dr. Zielinski said, before I had time to state my complaint.

  “I don’t have any problem with the bicycle. I don’t have any problem with the treadmill. I’ll do jumping jacks until I’m blue in the face. But that thing in the corner just scares me. I’m not going to lift weights. I don’t want to get all muscle-bound and ugly!”

  “I understand, but exercise is still necessary.” Dr. Zielinski tensed, as if he had gone through this argument before and lost. “Carol, trust me on this. The exercise will be good for you. You’ll only harm yourself by refusing.”

  I glared at him and didn’t say anything.

  He frowned. I thought for a minute he might get angry with me, but he drew a breath and brought himself back under control. I felt foolish about my petty complaint. He was right; he was the expert. My argument was unreasonable. I didn’t care, though. I was not going to lift weights. Only men lifted weights.

  “Alright, Carol. Let me explain why this is important,” Dr. Zielinski said. “Arms are physically oriented Transforms and they grow muscles. You’re already growing muscles, and your muscle growth is responsible for your aches and pains. We can’t stop your muscle growth unless we put you on a starvation diet. If you exercise enough you develop those you need to use. If you don’t, the muscle buildup will happen somewhere else.

  “If the only muscles you use are in your legs, your legs will swell up with muscle, like balloons. Maybe the growth will all go into your jaw muscles, from eating. You’ll develop several inches of muscle buildup on your jaws. It will hurt, too. Your bones can’t adjust to muscle growth of this magnitude in an instant. If you exercise, the muscles will build up evenly. Otherwise, you’ll get uneven muscle buildup and, eventually, death. I understand your viewpoint. Weight work isn’t womanly, not at all. Unfortunately, you can’t think about this from a normal woman’s viewpoint. You’re a Major Transform now.” When Dr. Zielinski got emotionally involved, he really got going.

  I studied the floor, visions of Monsters in my head. The sweat doesn’t bother me, Dr. Zielinski, I wanted to shout. Proper women did not lift weights! Besides, muscular women were ugly and I didn’t have much slack in that department to start with. Not that I’d say anything of the sort to any man.

  “You go back into the gym and do what Mr. Borton tells you, Carol,” Dr. Zielinski said. “Perhaps you’d like to examine some pictures?”

  I went. One of the Arms in his care had died of this muscle buildup problem; I saw her death on his face.

  I understood the effect inadvertent deaths had on a person.

  I went back to the gymnasium, filled with trepidation. Once inside I took in the place, but my fears didn’t recede. Mats, an open area for calisthenics, a treadmill and a stationary bicycle filled half the room. The other half of the room, filled with dumbbells, barbells, weights and strange looking machinery, bothered me a lot. Surely a bunch of equipment shouldn’t make me so fearful?

  The exercise instructor they found for me entered the room from the side, and my breath caught. “Hancock, come here,” Mr. Borton said to me, with a hungry smile. “Call me Larry. I need to take a look at your muscles.”

  I practically ran away on the spot. Mr. Borton was an impressive man, short and perfectly built, his muscles bulging out of his shirt, a caricature of Charles Atlas, or Johnny Weissmuller playing Tarzan. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five.

  Something twisted coiled inside him, though. The others in the center were ordinary people, professionals and such. Mr. Borton came from a prison yard, hard and dangerous. He took up too much space, walked with casual arrogance, and his cold and dead blue eyes never left me. If someone told me he spent his free time murdering children in their beds, I might have believed them. This man agitated even the strange supernatural sense that had shown me the two woman Transforms, back during my first interview with Dr. Peterson.

  Larry came up to me. I took a step back. He stopped, studied me with his cold eyes and I flushed. I took a deep breath and made myself hold still. He wasn’t impressed.

  He poked and prodded me like a doctor, had me raise my arms, spread my legs, bend over. “Not good,” he said, as I tried to hide my uneasiness. “The hypertrophy has already started. The speed you’re gaining your muscles is insane. Far too fast.”

  At least now I knew why the authorities had brought in a person like Larry: he knew how to help Arms. I’d just have to live with the danger and hope the authorities had enough control over him to keep him from doing something awful to me. I wondered how he had managed to meet those other Arms.

  I was too afraid to ask.

  Larry had to show me how to do everything. I guess I expected Jack La Lanne, jumping jacks, calisthenics and such. I felt like an idiot and Larry’s cold contempt didn’t help. He t
old me all about the importance of stretching and warming up, about the latest research on ‘physical development’, and how these strange machines worked the various muscle groups. Borton also went on at length about the benefits of lifting weights. I did my best to appear politely interested instead of suspiciously wary.

  After stretching we exercised. I could foresee myself getting tired of Larry Borton. I did what he told me but I had a hard time putting any passion into my work. My lack of enthusiasm didn’t matter, as Larry had enough drive for both of us. All he had to do was walk close to me and stare, and my nerves would jump. I would work and sweat and exercise until exhausted.

  The exercise session lasted for a very long hour.

  A full-length mirror hung on the left wall of the room. My first uncharitable thought was that Larry put the mirror there to look at himself. No, the point was so I could look at myself. Larry positioned me in front of the mirror, showed me the locations of my muscles, how they appeared when I flexed them, and what I would look like when my muscles developed – as if my muscle development was the most important thing in the world.

  I studied my reflection with bleak depression and wondered if this was the last time I’d ever appear normal. I was thirty-three years old and I’d had three children. I sagged a little, but I was still a size ten. I had a little extra padding on my hips and thighs, my hair was a sort of bland dark blond, I stood too tall and my face was too long. I dressed up well, though, when I put my mind to looking good.

  This occasion didn’t count. I wore an old navy tennis skirt and a loose white shirt, my makeup had worn off and my hair was a mess. I considered my appearance an omen for the future.

  ---

  After I finished the exercises, Agent Bates came to visit.

  “Looks like you’re having all sorts of fun. You done here yet?” Bates asked Larry. The words were friendly but the tone wasn’t. Those two clearly knew but didn’t like each other.

  “Just finishing up, Bates,” Larry said. Almost a growl.

  “Good. Mrs. Hancock, when you’re done, would you come with me, please?”

  Larry had me stretch one last time, muscles bulging as he showed me what to do. I made an unsuccessful attempt to imitate him and fled, relieved to be out of the gymnasium.

  Agent Bates escorted me to the first floor conference room, silent after another desultory attempt to talk me out of watching his film. He had me sit down and as he turned off the lights Dr. Zielinski joined us. “Back in ’58, before the end of the Transform Quarantine, a plant maintenance engineer in the FBI building came down with Transform Sickness. No Focuses had room for him. For religious reasons, suicide wasn’t an option, nor euthanasia, not even any medications. He volunteered to allow his end to be filmed in the name of science.” Bates paused. “I was there. This film covers the last four days of his life. If he and his family hadn’t agreed to withhold food and water from him, he would have taken two weeks to die.”

  I shivered and hugged my torso, but couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. The film started with the man on the floor of a padded cell, in a straitjacket. The man had corded muscles and he bared his teeth in a snarl.

  “He’s in pain, but he’s not in withdrawal yet,” Dr. Zielinski said. “He’s in the worst of the low juice states, what we call periwithdrawal.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the man began to howl, his muscles corded tighter than before. A minute later, blood began to ooze from his skin like sweat. Another minute later, he exploded off the floor and threw himself at the door. I flinched and covered my mouth in sudden terror. I’d never seen anyone move that fast or hit something that hard.

  He bounced back, spat teeth, and did it again. And again. Bloody spittle flew from his mouth, nose and ears, to mix with his bloody sweat. He never stopped. I could only tell the cuts in the film by the changes in his endless screaming as he screamed his throat raw.

  In the end he died thrashing on the floor, his limbs broken, his body puffy and warped as if he was changing as he died.

  I let Dr. Zielinski take me by the elbow and lead me, shaking, to his office two rooms down the hall. Bates followed.

  “His death happened so dramatically because he was confined and didn’t have access to food and water,” Dr. Zielinski said. He had come out from behind his desk and was sitting with Agent Bates and I, as if he was an ordinary human being. The film had ended fifteen minutes ago and supposedly I’d recovered. “A withdrawal psychotic in more normal circumstances is much more like a zombie from a horror movie, mindless, shambling and dangerous to all around him.”

  I finished drying my eyes on Dr. Zielinski’s handkerchief. “Doctor, I don’t understand how this works,” I said. “I know I’m supposed to take juice from someone who’s about to go into withdrawal, but if a Transform runs out of juice how can there be anything for me to take?”

  “A man in withdrawal still has a lot of juice left.”

  I waved my hands. “So if the guy in the movie still had juice, why’d he go into withdrawal?”

  Dr. Zielinski steepled his fingers and paused. “Once a person contracts Transform Sickness, juice permeates his body and becomes an integral part of his metabolism. The large majority of any Transform’s juice is tied up in supporting his life. That’s called his fundamental juice. The rest is supplemental juice. If the supplemental juice is used up, a Transform goes into withdrawal. If the supplemental juice climbs too high, roughly eighty percent of the fundamental juice count, a Transform becomes a Monster. What makes this interesting is that the juice counts in question are different for Transforms, Focuses and Arms.”

  This hadn’t made the Sunday supplements. I leaned forward intently and frowned.

  “Focuses manipulate supplemental juice to keep Transforms alive,” Bates said. “You, as an Arm, can’t sense the difference between the two types of juice.”

  His comment was a stab right at my heart. I didn’t ask to be crippled. I didn’t want the Shakes. Instead of commenting, I pretended I wasn’t some kind of unnatural abomination, only a rational woman whose life hadn’t gone completely out of control.

  I had wondered sometimes during the long sleepless nights what supernatural force had claimed me. I’d always recognized the world contained forces operating in the world beyond the grasp of science. God and the Devil, certainly. Maybe others as well. I tried to believe in those unnamed other forces when I considered my predicament, but honesty made me recognize my rationalization. What force would be responsible for a monstrosity who had to kill other people to survive? What force would drive a psychotic murderer like Stacy Keaton? What force would have a person kill her own child when she was unconscious? Rev. Smalley in Jefferson City had certainly been clear enough when he talked about Transforms. The more I considered, the more I came to suspect I’d slipped into the Devil’s grasp during those three days while I transformed.

  I nodded to Bates in understanding. An Arm was a creature of Satan. When she drew juice from a Transform, she took both types of juice and killed him.

  “Are these different kinds of juice, or are they stored in different locations?” I asked Dr. Zielinski. “Are you sure about all this?”

  Agent Bates startled at my words and pointed to the doc. “He should know. He’s the one who discovered the difference between the two.”

  Dr. Zielinski wasn’t bothered by the praise, the arrogant cuss. “Location. Fundamental juice is spread uniformly throughout the body, while supplemental juice is stored in the lymphatic system and the skin.”

  I didn’t have any more questions, and they let me go back to my room.

  During my afternoon exercise session I could actually observe my muscles as they developed, what my unnerving trainer called an ‘Arm trick’. He pushed me to exhaustion and beyond, the monster.

  That evening, I got a letter from Bill. He tried to sound loving and supportive, but it was easy to read his unexpre
ssed anger. I’d killed his daughter. He didn’t mention Billy and Jeffery. He said he prayed for my soul, as if I had killed our daughter on purpose.

  I had nightmares that night, and for many nights after. I hadn’t realized Arms had near perfect memory until I saw that movie over and over in my mind.

  ---

  Monday, I didn’t get out of bed in the morning. What did I have to look forward to? I would spend the rest of my life trapped in a Transform Detention Center, aching with pain from the exercise, surrounded by armed orderlies, far from my family, death by withdrawal poised over my head like the sword of Damocles.

  They wanted me to kill. I saw myself in the padded room whenever I closed my eyes, and yet I couldn’t imagine killing someone. I was tired, depressed and cranky. I figured I had cause.

  My mother visited me after my afternoon exercise session. “Knock, knock,” she said, and looked in the room with a smile.

  “Oh, Mom!” I stood and gave her a big hug, which elicited an “Ow!” from her. I guess I needed to watch my strength.

  “So, how are you doing?” She stepped back, and looked me over. “You’re getting to be quite the athlete, aren’t you, dear.”

  “Oh, you would not believe.” I told her about the endless exercise sessions. “The sessions help, much to my surprise. At least after the mean trainer here makes me do my stretches. Then he goes and ruins it by making me do all this exhausting exercise. How is…”

  How is everyone doing? The words refused to come out. She had a tissue in my hand even before I knew I was going to cry.

  “We’d best not think about certain things, dear,” she said, and frowned. “Your father isn’t being very adult about this whole business. The fool seems to think you’re at fault, that you could have somehow avoided the Shakes.”

  “Why? How?”

  “Oh, well, hun, you know Old Jeff. Your father’s always had a rather Manichean viewpoint on things. Everything is either all good or all bad. I swear he still thinks Transform Sickness is a mark of the Devil, not a disease. A moral affliction.”

  I turned away. I once thought the same. “I’ve always suspected Transform Sickness was something other than what the doctors said it was. Why did I get it, though?” What was my mortal sin? Mom had no answer for me. I wondered if she thought I had been seeing another man on the side or stealing from the collection plate. Mom had always called me her perfect angel. Clearly, I was an angel no more. We sat for a long moment, until Mom stammered something about the antics of Firestone, their new spaniel-collie mix, and I relaxed.

  Mom and I went on to talk about other family matters, some big get-together her sister Bea had hosted in Dallas that went bad, her favorite flower shop going out of business, that sort of thing. The chatter was a welcome bit of normal life, but it finished sooner than I wanted.

  ---

  The next morning, Tuesday, I didn’t get up on my own. I was even more depressed and had a headache besides. Achy muscles. A sharp pain in my abdomen, under my right lower ribs. The nurse came in and tried to get me out of bed. I ignored her. They sent for Dr. Zielinski.

  Dr. Zielinski sat down in the chair beside my bed. I opened my eyes briefly, closed them again and ignored him. It reminded me briefly of the first morning, when I’d been so hungry, and he had come for the first time. I was still hungry.

  He just sat for several minutes and didn’t say anything. I wallowed in my misery.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Hmm,” he responded, non-committal.

  “I’m hungry and I have a blistering headache and I hurt. I hate the stupid exercises and I hate having armed orderlies always following me around and I’m tired and I don’t want to kill anybody and I hate it. I hate it, hate it, hate it!” I turned over and buried my face into my pillow. Even to myself I sounded like an over-tired two year old.

  “Your problems are because you need juice,” he said.

  “What?” I took my face out of the pillow and looked at him.

  “Your juice level affects your mood. As your juice level falls, you get more depressed and feel worse. When you take juice, you’ll feel much better, and be cheerful and optimistic and generally pleased with life. Unfortunately, you used a lot of juice to heal, after they shot you. Normally, we have over two weeks before a new Arm has to face the need for more juice.”

  His words appalled me. Life was going to get worse. Dr. Zielinski wanted me to kill someone to get over my depression. I couldn’t even visualize the corresponding good side. I buried my face back in the pillow and cried.

  “You can’t survive unless you take juice,” Dr. Zielinski said. “We’re in the process of locating a suitable volunteer. You’re just going to have to be patient.”

  I tried to brush his arm off the bed with a swipe of my hand. He fell backwards as if I had punched him.

  “Carol, you need to get up,” Dr. Zielinski said from the floor, voice firm. “People are depending on you and you have a responsibility.”

  I dragged myself out of bed. Slowly.

  I didn’t function well that day. I hated the exercise session and I was cranky with everyone. When Nurse Callahan did a sloppy job of finding my vein to draw blood, I vented all my pent-up hostility and depression at her.

  “Did you actually go to nursing school?” I said, my voice as cold as ice. “Or did you go and just sleep through the classes?” Everything came out at once and I couldn’t stop my river of vitriol. “No, you used your time trying to get a husband, but you weren’t any good at that either. Now you’re not married and you’re still a lousy nurse. So now, you’re trying to get Mr. Cook to go after you. Except he’s smart enough to figure out that you’re stupid and incompetent, and he’s too smart to want anything to do with a cheap whore like you. How did you manage to get this job, anyway? I would have thought that for something this important they would have gotten competent staff. Or were you just here and they didn’t bother to get rid of you when they brought in people who knew what they were doing?”

  I didn’t have the slightest idea where I’d come up with that hateful garbage. Nurse Callahan just stared at me all through my diatribe, then whispered “No, it’s not like that…” before tears filled her eyes and she fled the room. Tears filled my own eyes, from anger, misery and disgust with what I said. All I’d really known was that she seemed serious when she flirted with Mr. Cook and she didn’t seem to think well of herself. I should have apologized to Nurse Callahan when she came by after lunch to take my blood pressure, but all I did was glare at her, aching from my exercises. She left the room quickly and I never saw her again. I learned later she quit. The story of what I did made the rumor mill among the staff, lowering my already low reputation.

  Mom tried to cheer me up later, but she had no luck. “You’ll just have to work your way through all these changes, dear. I know this has got to be difficult.” She left after I turned away, hiding my tears. The flowers and letters had stopped. I was passing out of people’s memories, a bad dream they didn’t want to think about anymore. After Mom left, I railed at the unfairness of my life and broke two of the flower vases.

  ---

  Wednesday, they didn’t even try to get me out of bed. Two orderlies came in and moved me bodily to a gurney. For the rest of the day they hauled me around, baggage to be tested.

  All day long, my head throbbed and my muscles and joints ached. My stomach was a cavern inside of me. My skin felt raw and every touch was painful. A thick goo coated my teeth; every light was too bright and every noise too loud. Depression descended on me, a curtain in front of my thoughts. I curled my arms over my head and tried to shut everything out.

  Thursday they left me in bed as I pleaded and cursed for relief, not fit for company at all. Later in the morning the orderlies came, hauled me into a room overlooking the entrance to the Detention Center and sat me in a chair facing the barred window. They had to strap me
in to keep me sitting up. We waited as the minutes dragged by in an eternity of torture.

  An eon later, I discovered how different I was. I noticed something coming, something beautiful, pleasant, a soothing touch on my raw nerves, a well-done picture or a pure note. My extra sense picked this up as it came into the Detention Center, similar to what I had sensed in those two Transform women on my first day here, but even more alluring now.

  I turned toward it. Beside me, I heard someone say, “She’s got it.” Someone else said “About 1400 feet. Maybe 1350. Call it 1375. Mark her down for a range of 1375 feet with her metasense. Second best I’ve seen.”

  Metasense? What a word. I smiled and focused in on the beauteous wonder that approached. I tried to go towards it, but couldn’t. Dimly, remembering my restraints, I pulled absent-mindedly at the straps.

  The soothing harmony came closer. I forgot my other senses and focused only on this metasense, the one showing me the beauteous wonder.

  It was in the building; the elevator; closer still. I held my breath, clenching my hands into fists, again and again.

  I liked it.

  Now it was in the room next to me and stopped. I made a little whimpering noise. I wanted it closer.

  “Wait,” someone commanded, a voice I was accustomed to obeying. Dr. Zielinski, I eventually realized. The same voice who called out the distances on my metasense. I tugged again at the straps.

  “Wait.” I heard again.

  Finally, a different voice: “We’re set. Let her go.”

  I thought I would have a choice whether I killed or not. I was a fool back then.

  I was an Arm. Taking juice was never my choice.

  The hands guiding me pushed me against warm flesh, flooded with juice. They laid my hands directly on the skin, and my body thrilled to the touch. The hand of God was upon me, my whole psyche pillowed in warmth.

  “Pull. Draw it into you. Drink down the juice. Pull it into you. Carol, take the juice…”

  I pulled in the juice, just as Zielinski commanded. I had no control. None.

  The juice was ecstasy. The first tiny fragment of juice entering through my hands rang like a glass of pure crystal. My body sang in that pure moment of utter clarity and purpose, the infinite now, that both lasted forever and lasted no time at all, poised at rapture’s edge. However, my initial pleasure was only the prelude. In the next undefined instant, the juice surged into me as a tsunami of purest unadulterated bliss, better than life, better than sex, beyond heaven. Like the flowing of the tide, the juice inexorably drowned my thoughts and words in overwhelming sensation. Love and lust gripped me in swirled union, mixed with wondrous emotions that I, then, could not name. I touched heaven and beheld God. As the juice swept in and through and beyond me it thrilled my body and mind, touching delight in every way imaginable. I pulled and pulled until there was no more, yet still the pleasure went on and on and on. I lost myself and the ecstasy consumed me. That which had been me succumbed to the mindless and exhaustingly vital bewitchment that was the wondrous drawing of the juice, and there had never been anything so perfect in my life.

  I awoke in the afternoon, in my hospital bed in the St. Louis Transform Detention Center. My body thrilled to the lure of sex. Every touch on my body was a stimulus. I ached with need, thrilled with joy, and moaned with pleasure. My nipples were hard with excitement and every nerve in my body longed for a touch. I panted with need and my breath came in ragged gasps.

  I lay alone in my bed. No one would come near me for the rest of the day, not even Mom, who fled after she took one look at me. I rubbed against the bed rails, the headboard, anything. I couldn’t satisfy myself. I wanted more. More. More!

  No one would come near me.

  I groaned in frustration.

  I stared at the ceiling and masturbated over and over. On the eighth day after awakening from my transformation coma, my conversion into an Arm was complete.

  Bob Scalini: September 23, 1966 – September 25, 1966

  Bob curled up in the pile of old blankets under a bent metal counter, nestled into the corner of the kitchen of the burned-out St. Louis restaurant. He was no longer the wild-looking mountain man, thanks to a shave, a bath and the hand washing of his worn clothes.

  To his left, sitting on the blackened floor beside his little nest, he kept two glass milk jugs filled with water. He stashed a ball of soap scraps and a nicked razor in the remains of the cabinet over the sink, with a neatly folded stack of old rags beside them. Two ovens had survived the fire almost intact; he hid the small supply of extra clothes he had collected in the rightmost oven. The left held a loaf and a half of stale bread, three dented cans of Libby’s cut green beans, and a can opener. The can opener was new, rather than old and battered. Bob had spent real money for it.

  Nestled in his cozy cave, Bob watched. More technically, he metasensed.

  Three miles to the south, he metasensed the St. Louis Transform Detention Center. Four and a half miles to the northeast, he metasensed the only Focus household in range, a household that had recently completed a house move. The other Focuses in the St. Louis area were located in distant suburbs, outside of his metasense range.

  He didn’t know the names of either the Focus or the brilliant creature in the Detention Center, so he made up names of his own to call them. The Focus he named Ishtar, after the Babylonian Goddess of fertility and motherhood. The Transform held in the Detention Center had to be a woman, so he named her Tiamat, after the Goddess of death and destruction.

  He laughed to himself about the names. He had hated the Ancient Myths course when he took it in college, but for some reason he had become fond of the Babylonian myths. Enough to remember the names of dozens of Babylonian Gods, though he swore he had forgotten them all before he transformed.

  Ishtar was in with the babies again. He wasn’t sure how many babies the household had, but she always seemed to be holding one. He recognized the motions her arms made as she held a baby, and the easy way she managed the juice when she was content. Sterility was a tragedy for Ishtar. She put the baby down and moved to a different room, unhappy.

  Ishtar needed to get better control of her moods, Bob decided. They were life and death to the people of her household.

  Bob had expected a Focus household to be like any other group of normal people living closely together. He expected fights and squabbles, but they would get along the way people normally did. He figured the household would have a loose organization, led by one of the older men, and the leaders would spend significant energy taking good care of their Focus. A big happy family.

  Too bad he had been wrong.

  The problem was the juice. Ishtar’s concentration often failed, and when it failed her emotions controlled the household’s juice. If she was happy and relaxed and content, the household had a comfortable amount of juice. If she was sad or depressed, she shorted the household’s juice. When she was angry…

  The first time Bob saw Ishtar angry she ripped the juice right out of a woman Transform, and her hapless victim visibly cringed.

  Ishtar’s Transforms both loved and feared her.

  The household’s old place, an ancient hotel, had been worse, rank with some form of old foul dross that reminded him of sludge. The sludge dross hindered Ishtar’s ability to move the juice from one Transform to another, making her and everyone else miserable. The only reason Bob came up with to explain why they hadn’t moved earlier was cost. Bob had tried to consume the plentiful sludge dross, but like eating water and calling it food, the sludge dross was useless.

  Bob metasensed more details than when he had first arrived in St. Louis. He followed the bright hum of the juice as it flowed from the women (who all produced a surplus of juice) to the men (who used more than they produced). The intricate pattern of the juice within the Focus herself and the dimmer juice inside the Transforms was a skeleton that supported it al
l. His metasense even caught the precise shape of bodies, almost good enough to recognize faces and expressions. He followed every breath they took and every move they made. He metasensed them use the toilet, make love to their spouses…and sometimes make love to people who weren’t their spouses. He felt uneasy knowing so much about other people.

  He watched.

  His improved metasense also kept track of Tiamat in her solitary glory in the Detention Center. He was glad they kept Tiamat caged; a couple of days ago she killed a Transform man by taking his juice, in an instant of brutal violence. The dross had flowed from the victim like blood afterwards.

  Bob had never seen someone killed before, not even in the War. The death of the Transform had been swift and brutal, without hesitation, with no hint of any reservations.

  Tiamat was indeed a good name for that one.

  What was wrong with those people? Didn’t they have any conception of what they were doing? Didn’t they realize some monsters were too dangerous to hold? Hell, had they forgotten the story of King Kong?

  Tiamat’s growing inhumanity reminded him of what he was going through as a Crow. He only used a fraction of the juice Tiamat used, though, making his changes only a dim echo of hers. He hadn’t run in fear, now used to Tiamat and her blinding metasensed brilliance, so dangerous and so starkly beautiful. Her radiance held far more allure than Ishtar’s dimmer glow.

  Every evening he went out to sip from the deep sea of dross that seeped away from the Detention Center. It was disconcerting to think of something so wild, so dangerous, as the thing that gave him life. It was also disconcerting to realize Tiamat lived in a place so foul with sludge dross that it made Ishtar’s old hotel home look new and fresh. It couldn’t be good for her, either, and he wondered what so much sludge dross and juice was doing to her.

  He doubted he would ever know.

  ---

  Two days later, he gave up on the wretched Ishtar and her flaws. The dross she and her household produced was too meager to sustain him unless he risked himself to come up right to her house. The more he metasensed her, the less she seemed a Goddess and more a normal human woman trying to do something too hard for her.

  Ishtar’s dross reminded him of yesterday’s oatmeal. Tiamat’s reminded him of pizza with extra cheese oozing off the crust, topped by far too much red pepper. An acquired taste, one Bob quickly learned to appreciate. Tiamat’s dross even seemed more potent than Ishtar’s.

  Tiamat now attracted his full attention. The juice affected Tiamat differently from the way the juice affected him. He took in so little, so slowly, with no great highs and no great lows. By extrapolation from the juice’s effect on him, he figured those great highs and lows were enough to drive Tiamat insane. He sympathized with her, his Goddess of destruction, despite the danger she posed.

  After the sun set, he crept out of the burned out restaurant to take his own dross from Tiamat’s sacrificial alter that was the Detention Center. He crept into the shabby old-industrial part of town south of the city center, a bustling place of warehouses and rail yards during the day, much quieter at night. Occasionally the smell of roasting hops from one of the beer distilleries on the far side of the old-industrial district would waft over, which Bob found homey.

  He sipped from Tiamat’s dross as it imperceptibly oozed to the north, away from the Detention Center. Like some watery lava, the dross flowed away from the Detention Center along a channel set in foul sludgy dross almost too old to sense.

  For several days he had sensed something else in the Detention Center. The ‘something else’ only appeared at the edges of his metasense and disappeared when he focused his attention on it. The ‘something else’ bugged him, and he kept trying to get a better look at it.

  While he sipped dross, concealed in the comforting shadow of a Burlington Northern boxcar, he let his metasense wander…and there it was again. He stopped sipping dross and concentrated his metasense on the flickers.

  Bob froze in utter terror. He shrank back in on himself in some instinctive juice-powered reflex, unable to move.

  This new thing walked across the Detention Center parking lot, got into a car, drove off toward the inner security gate, and then south through the outer security gate. Not, thank heavens, toward him. This new Major Transform wasn’t another Crow or a Focus.

  This Major Transform had found a way to hide from Bob’s metasense. Bob hoped he had just done the same, because he knew this other creature was a predator, perhaps the predator that preyed on Crows. He metasensed the predator drive off into the night, eventually out of his range.

  Relieved, he could move again. His first instinct was to run, run and never look back. Danger! Yet, the predator showed no sign it had noticed him. “What’s a predator like that doing at the Detention Center?” Bob asked himself. “Who did it hunt? What did it hunt? How often did it hunt?”

  The predator felt female to him, and she had a human shape. Her metasense protection prevented him from metasensing anything more. She walked around the Detention Center as if she owned the place, which meant the center unknowingly held a viper to its breast, a trouble-maker. Bob thought, and decided to name the predator ‘Zaltu’, a Goddess of strife.

  He went back to sipping dross.

  Tiamat was a predator as well, he decided. She killed for her juice. Unlike Zaltu, she wasn’t hidden at all, but her metasense glow was similar, if not the same. These Major Transforms could exercise and drive cars and such, so they had to be invisible to society. Evil and dangerous.

  He lived well because he lived off Tiamat’s leavings, but she was a clear threat to humanity. He ought to condemn her completely. He didn’t.

  What did that make him?

  The next day Zaltu returned. Bob found her with little effort, now that he knew how to look. She still showed no sign she knew he even existed.

  He weighed options, and his mouth went dry and his hands shook at the idea of leaving Tiamat’s sea of dross behind. He decided Tiamat’s dross was worth the risk.

  How could he stay, though? Whenever Zaltu appeared to his metasense, Bob froze in terror, hour after hour, cowering in fear.

  He found it difficult to believe he had found two of these predatory women.

  “An experienced Crow probably wouldn’t be this stupid,” Bob said to himself. “But I can’t bear to leave just because of some predator who doesn’t even know I exist.” He couldn’t give up on this sea of dross…and he had never liked to be pushed around.

  He just hoped a third one didn’t show up.