Chapter 9
“Because of the effect of juice on the mood and activity level of a Transform, the Focus possesses a special responsibility and power over the life of her Transforms. Because the range over which a Focus can sense and manipulate juice is rather short (around the length of a football field), Transforms must live together in a household and be available to their Focus at regular times during the day so that the Focus can either move juice to them or from them. It is in the best interests of all to accommodate such needs. As a reminder, although the prosecution of this as a crime is rare, it is illegal to discriminate against Transforms in hiring matters. We trust you will deal appropriately with this issue.” [Department of Labor circular, 1965]
Dr. Henry Zielinski: November 11, 1966
The volunteer’s name was Jeff Johnson. Dr. Zielinski had heard of his problems, but hadn’t expected to meet him, especially in a situation like this.
“They had to sedate me to bring me, but I’m okay now. Really, Dr. Zielinski. I don’t have any real options guaranteeing survival. Seventeen Focuses have verified the problem, and the Network officially notified me I won’t even be allowed to submit…” Jeff stopped talking, and sniffed. Dr. Zielinski gave him space for his own thoughts and stared at the worn wallpaper of the motel room.
According to the rumors Dr. Zielinski had heard, and the documentation he had received from Focus Rizzari, Jeff was an anomalous male Transform who Focuses couldn’t support for more than a month. His personality wasn’t the problem. Instead, Jeff was a male Transform Sport, and his particular variation made Focuses nauseous and drove them to constant tears or rages when they tried to support him. Jeff had been through many households, from the weakest Focuses to the strongest, and had the same effect on all of them. No Focuses would take him anymore, and Jeff faced death by withdrawal or suicide. What he was volunteering for, here, was a million to one chance at life…and a painless death, if the million to one chance didn’t pan out.
The two of them waited in the shabby motel room, each huddled in their own thoughts.
“What’s taking so long?” Jeff said, about an hour later. “I’d like to get this over with.”
“I expect she’s making sure this isn’t a trap.”
More waiting. Minutes passed, and Dr. Zielinski closed his eyes to rest. The cheap motel clock ticked through another fourteen minutes.
Jeff exploded off the bed, panic on his face. He scrabbled to a corner of the room and cowered.
Dr. Zielinski fully awoke and turned around. Stacy Keaton stood by the door, as always short, muscular, and dangerous. He hadn’t heard her enter.
He stood and half bowed his head to the Arm. “Very good. I’ll leave you two alone…”
“No,” Keaton said. Dr. Zielinski stopped his first step in mid stride, color leeching from his face.
“No?”
“This is your bright idea, bucko. If this goes bad, I want to make sure you’re here to receive your proper reward.”
Dr. Zielinski gulped. “But you’re going to…”
“Screw him silly. So? What, you’re embarrassed? Take notes, then, dammit. There’s nothing here you haven’t seen or done before.”
Keaton smiled as she came closer and chucked him under his chin. “You’re cute when you turn red, you know.” Keaton was as unpredictable as always. His thoughts raced with the million ways this scenario could go wrong, many of them ending with an Arm in a psychotic rage. He would rather be nearly anywhere else than here.
“I still…”
Keaton crossed her arms, cold, controlled, even more terrifying than her usual in-his-face I-am-death pose. “I’m tired of your schemes, Hank.”
Something unnervingly final rattled through her statement. Dr. Zielinski’s stomach churned. If she decided she wanted to kill him, he couldn’t do a single thing do about it. He opened his mouth to say something, but Keaton’s cold expression dissuaded him.
“You try to have it both ways,” she said. “Inside with Transforms who have no choice but to risk their pathetic lives, and outside, safe to take notes, write papers, and embellish your reputation. Frankly, you piss me off with your fucking ‘Doctor God’ bullshit. Forget it. Not this time. You leave, I’ll entertain myself, and then I’ll leave. I won’t lift a finger to help Hancock. You’ll never see me again, and you’ll never see Hancock again either, unless she comes by someday as a blood-drenched by-her-own bootstraps Arm seeking to clean up a loose end on her back trail.”
Dr. Zielinski didn’t back away or flee, but standing still took an intense effort of will. In his entire history of dealing with Keaton, he had only seen her like this once: cold, controlled, and with something she wanted to say. The other time he had seen her like this he had just given her the line about not having to act on her instincts, in the process saving the life of Focus Biggioni. He hadn’t walked out of that confrontation; instead, he had been carted out on a stretcher. He had a bad feeling he wouldn’t walk out of this confrontation, either. “I’m not pushing you, Stacy. Nor am I going to argue that you should hold to your word. You have the power here to do whatever you want.” He sucked air, wondering if his next statement would get him killed. He had to say his piece, though. “But I’m not going to cooperate, ma’am, unless I know why.”
“Why?” Danger appeared in a rush, the mad killer, the predator, standing with her face only inches below his. He hadn’t seen her move. Her voice grew deeper and the threat in it sawed on his nerves. “I’m fucking tired of you lying to yourself, Hank. You want to save the world from Transform Sickness? Okay, fine, better you than me, but goddammit commit yourself to it.” Dr. Zielinski staggered back, as his heart skipped a long beat at the word ‘commit’. Like in the grip of an eagle, squeezed tight, he was unable to breathe.
“Forget about ‘I’ll save the world but only if I can increase my reputation in the process’ half-assed bullshit,” Keaton continued. Her breath was hot on his face, rotted wind from a just-opened crypt. “Either you’re in or you’re out. It can’t be both. That’s one lie.” He forced himself to take a step back, but Keaton followed forward. With a caressed whisper of leather, Keaton reached behind her neck and brought out one of her foot long combat knives, and held it in front of Dr. Zielinski’s face. “You’re not doing any of these Arms a damned bit of good playing safe. When the going got rough and the FBI nasties moved in, did you find some way to stop them and save Hancock from their sadistic games? No, you just sat back, took notes, and congratulated yourself about the horrible risks you thought you were taking. You think you’re a hero. You’re not. That’s the second lie.”
The heel of Dr. Zielinski’s backpedaling right foot touched wall, followed by his shoulder blades. Pressed against the wall, a specimen between the slide cover and the slide, he had nowhere to go. The black steel of Keaton’s knife touched the angle of his jaw, on the left side. His heart beat pit-pit-pit-pit, fast enough to terrify him all by itself. Her eyes inescapable, her nostrils wide as she drank in his terror, Keaton thrust her body against his in a cruel mockery of lust. “The third lie is so dumb I’m shocked you haven’t caught on. The day is coming soon where the only way you’ll be able to save your precious reputation is to sell out the Arms to the FBI and the Focuses. You keep telling yourself you’re so damned good at manipulating people that you can skate past this problem without harming anyone in the process. It’s not going to work, and everything you’ve done is going to go down the toilet.” She backed away a half pace, still eye to eye with him. “It’s all bullshit, Hank. Bullshit.” She slashed her knife with each word, each slash a frisson of echoing fear from him, but the knife didn’t touch him. He flashed back to a two-year-old memory of Keaton half beheading a police officer in Cincinnati, ending with him drenched in blood. The stench of blood filled the air.
What Keaton said might be true, but her words were all still misdirection, he realized. Even so, he didn’t dare
respond. He clenched his hands together in front of him to quiet their shaking, and the pain and muscle tension steadied him enough to speak. Keaton was good at terrifying people, and he sometimes wondered if she knew how exceptionally good she was. It took all his willpower and tricks to force a reply. He lowered his gaze to her feet. Feet were safe. No one could threaten an Arm if all he looked at was the Arm’s feet. “There’s more going on here than just my witnessing this test, isn’t there, Stacy?” he asked, his voice unsteady and ready to break with each syllable spoken.
If Keaton got enraged and killed him over his impertinence, well, so be it. He refused to let Keaton bully him into something without knowing why.
“Yes, you arrogant piece of shit, but you’re not cooperating,” Keaton growled. The Arm stuck one of her impossibly muscular fingers in Hank’s chest and pushed him back against the wall, a push for each word that followed. “You’re not even safe enough for me to tell you what’s going on.” The anger crept away from Keaton, replaced by frustration.
He relaxed a little. Progress. He might live through this. “You need my help, and you expect danger.”
Keaton’s face became stone. “Yes.”
He had a good idea where this was going. “I’m going to have to lie to the FBI and Focuses.”
“Yes to the first. On the second, even I’m not sure.”
Hell and damnation. To his surprise, he found himself at a loss for words.
“So, Hank, how much is it worth to you to save an Arm for real? For the first time.” Keaton paused, and got back in his face when he didn’t answer immediately. “Are you in or are you out?”
Dr. Zielinski thought and tried to quiet the Arm-induced terror that shook his legs and churned his stomach. What did he risk if he went along with Keaton? His career? Certainly. The FBI or a few Focuses could destroy his career whenever they wanted to. He avoided those dangers by being useful. His scientific reputation? Much more difficult to affect, but possible. He doubted it was worth the work. His life? Yes, even that, though Keaton was a far bigger danger in that regard.
His self-respect, though? Could he live with himself if Hancock died because he didn’t have the guts to save her? The more he thought about it, the more he felt Keaton might be right. He never backed off from the more reasonable physical risks of dealing with Arms, only the more foolhardy ones, but he had backed off from risks to his reputation. Even minor ones. He played all the angles, played things safe. What kind of person did his choices make him?
A coward. Keaton’s point. He couldn’t find it within himself to disagree with her analysis.
He was well on his way to becoming one of the myriad of spineless doctors who swarmed around the Transforms, more concerned with helping themselves than helping the Transforms. It galled him that it had taken a mass murdering psychotic Arm to make him understand.
Keaton could force his cooperation if she wanted to and kill him afterwards to eliminate the risk to her security. That she didn’t said something about how much she valued him. His help had to be worth something; a hell of a thing to base his life on, given whom he was dealing with.
Knowing what he knew now, he would never be able to look at himself in the mirror if he didn’t ante up.
So he decided to ante up.
“I’m in, ma’am,” he said. The FBI and the Focuses might destroy him, but he would make them work. He might still pull it out, but he wouldn’t take the Arms down with him trying to do so.
She studied him for a moment. “Good enough for now.”
“I’ll sit over there,” Dr. Zielinski said, pointing to a cheap motel chair at the far end of the room. He would rather be farther, but at least it was something.
“You,” Keaton said, turning to Jeff. “Can you even talk?”
Jeff shook his head, still shivering in terror. Dr. Zielinski’s confrontation with Keaton hadn’t been good for this Transform, not at all.
She smiled a one-sided smile. “I guess we’ll get right down to business, then.” Dr. Zielinski didn’t see her cross the room, but she stood by Jeff now. She ran her hands over his shoulders, gentle hands, calming him like a horse trainer might calm a skittish horse. As his breathing settled she came closer, holding and touching him, gentle caresses, not at all like the Keaton Dr. Zielinski thought he knew. Soon, Jeff’s breathing became rapid once again.
Dr. Zielinski took notes.
“Jeff here’s a lot better than your usual volunteers, Hank,” Keaton said as she held Jeff in her arms. Jeff didn’t seem to notice her words. Dr. Zielinski guessed the Arm’s interest was enough to distract any man. “You ever pay any attention to the bullshit they feed the volunteers? Those ‘surplus Transforms’ sign all those waivers because they think they’re going to get access to all sorts of experimental drugs and crap. Or the big whompum pain killers so it doesn’t hurt when they kill themselves. This is the first time I’ve actually met a volunteer who knew ahead of time that he was going to be fed to an Arm. That’s why they all freak out, you know. That’s the sort of deceit that’s corrupted the medical community and has the Focuses refusing to cooperate with you. Pure arrogance.”
Dr. Zielinski turned away, his thoughts dark. It was one thing to catch that sort of grief from innocents and outsiders, it was another to hear a serial killer telling him the medical community was as evil as she was.
He had nothing to say on the subject, though. Keaton was correct. Her lesson? This is what life’s like on the other side of the needle, you fucking quack.
“So, do you think this will work?” Jeff said several minutes later, finally tamed by Keaton’s rough charisma. “Can this reverse my transformation?”
They were naked, now, snuggling on the motel bed. The expression on Keaton’s face was priceless. So filled with wonder and joy. Dr. Zielinski had never seen an Arm like this. Never.
“We’ll find out, now won’t we,” Keaton said, her voice husky with a great many desires. She covered Jeff’s mouth with hers, and the two of them passed beyond words. Dr. Zielinski found he could not look away. There was something riveting about what Keaton was doing, far beyond normal seduction and sex. Juice had to be involved, somehow, but Dr. Zielinski couldn’t say how. Focus Rizzari’s term, ‘post-human morality’, stuck itself in his mind and would not go away.
Keaton was beautiful like this, naked and seductive. Her grotesque muscles seemed natural, her movements graceful, her body feminine, some dark goddess of life and death and sex. She worked her allure into the primitive parts of the mind that had never learned thought and reason. The room was hot with passions civilized men kept leashed, the air thick with the smell of it.
He shouldn’t be here. This was too powerful and too private. He could feel only an echo of the passions gripping the two lovers, but even so, his body was hot, his clothes binding, and he had to struggle to control his breathing. He couldn’t believe his own arousal, or its depth. No amount of willpower let him look away.
Beautiful, sensual, this was something more than merely human sex. The act consumed the both of them, and him as well. Two bodies entwined, finding passion normal humans only dreamed of. Panting breaths, moans of lust and desire, screams of passion and pleasure. The goddess and the mortal man, re-enacting some ancient fertility rite, to seed the earth and bring the rains.
The act took Keaton twenty-seven minutes, a long, long time for an Arm draw, but she had been practicing. Jeff spent the entire time in the grip of lust and pleasure, and so did she. When she finished, Keaton gently rolled to the side, off Jeff, and lay on her back staring at the ceiling. She remained conscious, the byproduct of such an extended draw and the reason she had been practicing it.
Dr. Zielinski wiped the sweat from his face and stood to check on Jeff, to find out if their chancy attempt had worked.
“Back off,” Keaton said. Dr. Zielinski obeyed, and sat back down.
“Ma’am?”
“He died. He was alive and sane right to the end, dammit. I thought I had it!” Keaton slammed her fist down on the bed, and her sweat-slick body and Jeff’s corpse bounced. “Why didn’t this work, Hank?”
Dead. Twenty-seven minutes of gripping rapture, and she had been killing Jeff the entire time. Dr. Zielinski still looked at her and saw the lover, the goddess. His body wanted her at the same time his mind recoiled in horror. Neither response was good, not here, not now. Keaton wanted analysis, the cold clinical Dr. Zielinski, to interpret for her. Unfortunately, his analytical skills lay buried under layers of primal emotion and a rock hard erection.
If she invited him to join her in her bed, he would go.
“You felt the pleasure of drawing juice the entire time?” he said finally, hoping he at least presented the illusion of impersonal logic.
“Yes, dammit. Logically, he should have been dead two minutes in.” She turned to look at Jeff’s body beside her, and the expression of loss on her hard face forced Dr. Zielinski to turn away.
Two minutes. That’s what Dr. Zielinski had predicted. “I only have guesses and hypotheses, ma’am.”
“Spit them out.” If he hadn’t seen the expression of loss on her face, he might have believed the cold tone of her voice.
“We don’t know, biochemically, how Arms draw juice, ma’am. There’s no physical vacuum cleaner attached to your body. Logically, unsupported by evidence, the Arm must take over her victim’s body and essentially order the body of the victim to cooperate with the draw procedure and give you his juice.”
“Order?”
“Hormones and pheromones.”
Keaton nodded, still lying on the bed next to Jeff’s corpse. They had talked many times about hormones and pheromones with regard to her metasense and Tonya’s charisma. “Yah. Continue.”
“Following this chain of logic, what must have happened was that you kept him alive during the procedure.”
“Huh.” ‘Yes you idiot’ in ‘Keaton’.
Keaton thought for a moment, and her face softened. He had never seen that expression on her face before. She rolled over, kissed Jeff’s corpse on the forehead, and gently arranged his body into a peaceful resting pose. “More.” So gentle. This wasn’t the Keaton he knew, certainly not the Keaton who confronted him a half hour ago. She was one of the least sentimental people he had ever met.
“If this wild chain of logic is true, what you did implies a great many possibilities for what else Arms could do with their capabilities.” To be able to control the physical processes of another human being in such an intimate fashion was a vast and untapped capability.
“Disquieting.” Keaton didn’t look away from Jeff. She might be interested in potential opportunities later. Not now. “It was a blessed sacrament. A holy sacrifice. I got more juice out of him than I’ve ever gotten from a draw before. I’m not drained or woozy. I’m not horny either, so don’t you be getting fresh on me, Hank.”
That was a relief. Mostly. Now, if he could hold his gorge… A holy sacrament, she said. Such a close combination of sex and death was an abomination, and she called what she did a holy sacrament. One would have to be a goddess to consider something like this in such a fashion. Dr. Zielinski certainly wasn’t equipped for such emotions.
Such gentleness. No understanding he had of Arms included such gentleness. Or respect for a normal human. Or sentimentality. Or any form of mysticism. His entire carefully developed image of Arms collapsed into pieces. He had thought they were intelligent Monsters, useful, but not complex. Now, he had no idea what they were, except that it couldn’t be simple.
“I’d almost say this was a virgin sacrifice, save for the role reversal,” Keaton said. “Never heard of anything like it, though.”
Hank had, spurred on by Ann Chiron’s hopeless hypothesis. He remembered old myths of Goddesses and their lovers, who always died as the price of loving their Goddesses. Myths. Even the thought unnerved him. Utterly non-scientific, specious and misleading. He put those notions far back into his mind. He had to.
“Goddammit, Hank, don’t you go puking on me. Give me a hand here; we need to sanitize this place. The last thing I want to be doing is handing the fucking Feds any clues to work with.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He stood and went over to lend Keaton a hand with the cleanup. Her order came from the Arm he knew. Much easier to deal with. He would save his true reactions for later.
“Distract me. Ask your goddamned questions,” Keaton said, handing him a body bag.
She knew him too well. “What’s the problem with springing Hancock from the Detention Center?” Hank asked. Keaton should be able to do get in and out of the Detention Center in her sleep.
“Patrelle and McIntyre have fifty FBI agents holed up in some nearby fleabag hotel, lying doggo, doing nothing but waiting and watching,” Keaton said, folding the body into the body bag. “They’ve set a trap for me. I can’t discount the possibility that they’ve turned Hancock and that she’ll betray me to them if I show my face. Nope, she has to break herself out before I’ll touch her. Secondly, some Focus bitch farther up the food chain than Tonya fucking Biggioni wants Hancock dead.” Dr. Zielinski nodded. “I see you already knew. Had problems getting this volunteer, eh? Did you do this yourself or with the help of a Focus?”
“A Focus named Lorraine Rizzari.”
“The rebel? The one who believes in ‘Crows’? She’s a major pain in Tonya’s posterior, which says a lot of good things about her.” Dr. Zielinski nodded again. “I need you to hand deliver a message to Hancock.”
Visiting the Detention Center would be suicidal. He hadn’t promised to jump on his sword if he could find another way out, though. “I take it, ma’am, that you don’t trust the Focuses in the Network to pass the message along without tipping the killer Focus?”
“Huh.”
“What if I could pass the message along without involving any of the Focuses?”
Keaton slung the now filled body bag over her shoulder and motioned for Dr. Zielinski to follow her. “Acceptable. That way, I don’t have to break you out of jail later. However, Hank, no more of your Network phone calls until this is over. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.” There went his trust factor with the Focuses. He had the sensation this was a bad thing. Suddenly, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to follow Keaton’s order. Hell, he had a nearly unstoppable urge to make a phone call now.
Some damned Focus must have got him bad with her charisma. Wouldn’t be the first time. “Ma’am?”
“I see it. Fucking goddamned Focuses. Look at me.” He did. Keaton’s eyes were alive with bowel-clenching fire. “No more Network phone calls until this is over, or I’ll skin you alive for a fucking week!” It wasn’t an empty threat. He had seen her do nearly as bad when she was low on juice.
Hank’s bladder let loose and he fell back, limp as tissue paper.
“That ought to do it, ma’am,” he said, from where he had collapsed on the ground. He hadn’t had that reaction to Keaton for several years. Her aura of danger had been worse than when she pushed him into committing to the Transform cause. No answer, though.
Keaton was gone, as was the corpse. He must have been out for longer than he realized. For a moment, he thought about phone calls, remembering her orders, and he shivered in terror. Nope, no phones for a while.
She had left him the note to deliver to Hancock, though.
Carol Hancock: November 12, 1966
I rested on my footlocker-bed in the suicide cell and recovered from Patrelle and McIntyre’s goddamned test of the day, which had involved blindfolds, electrical shocks and a maze. I’d gotten another draw only three days ago, but the first fingers of miserable craving already worked themselves into my mind. I still hadn’t met the famous Patrelle, or even heard his voice, but I could tell when he was near. The FBI people’s posture stiffene
d and they became precise in everything they did.
By now, I had the entire Detention Center laid out in my mind, like a 3-D floor plan. I knew when the FBI people showed up and left. After Patrelle had taken over the FBI had dropped their round-the-clock surveillance. I suspected Patrelle didn’t think I was nearly the threat that McIntyre did. I knew when each of my friends among the staff showed up and left. I had the guards schedules memorized, as well as their rounds, and, mostly, who they reported to and when.
I found it unsettling to be able to keep all this in my head. Save for when I was low on juice, I didn’t have any problems with that sort of mental game. It was as useful as it was disturbing, because I had come up with a problem in my escape. The Detention Center had guards on the grounds all night long. Three at a minimum, and I couldn’t find any path out of this place, once I exited the building, that didn’t leave me in sight of one of them.
However, based on my conversations with Mike Artusy and Fred Parrish, I had found out the night guards did have a tendency to slack off. Fred had even complained about the night guards occasionally gambling and drinking, giving me hope.
What was I that I could keep this all in my head?
That night, as the guards escorted me to my nightly shower, I let my robe gape. “Like what you see, Mike?”
Artusy smiled and didn’t say anything. He’d seen my assets before. I leaned in close to him. “You want to take some pictures? Impress your friends? I’ll pose,” I said. This place had a darkroom, and Artusy knew how to use it.
“In the buff?”
I nodded.
He gave me a sidelong look…and also a sidelong look at the door guard. “What do you want?” He knew me well.
“My family pictures and the Gideon’s Bible from my old room. Several oversized steak dinners, a television and a radio,” I said. “Oh, and some new books. I’m bored.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Of course. But that’s my demand,” I said. My demand wouldn’t be accepted, all a part of my plan.
He snorted. “I’ll get you your Bible and pictures, no problem no charge. How about an extra dinner for the other?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Come up with a better offer than that and I’ll pose for the pictures,” I said, and went into the bathroom for my shower.
I bet myself I would be able to string Artusy along indefinitely.
In my mental plan of my escape, those photos of me would fit in perfectly.
Gilgamesh: November 14, 1966
Gilgamesh scrounged for his dinner in the back of a Big Boy in Mehlville, a suburban town about six miles south of the Detention Center, and thought his dark thoughts. Midnight had passed. He had been back in the St. Louis area for six days and he still hadn’t been able to force himself to confront Echo.
Tonight, it rained. Yesterday as well. He had picked through a dump near Mehlville to find new clothing; his old set of pants had grown so mud-caked he couldn’t bear to wear them anymore, and his last shirt had split up the back. His ‘new’ clothes had already soaked through, his pants muddy up to the knees.
He no longer panicked when he thought about confronting Echo. He had even tried, once, to come near the other Crow. He had gotten as far as the Detention Center, but after picking up a metasense twinge of Echo far to the north, he had backed off.
For the first few days, the huge amount of dross he carried left him logy and half-sedated, as if he had too many beers. When that passed, he swore he was more intelligent than normal.
“So low juice makes you dumb,” Gilgamesh said, wiping the rain from his face. He had been talking to himself a lot in the past few days. “Still, even a moderate amount of Arm-produced dross is better than…”
He stopped talking, as he picked up something with his metasense, a Major Transform in a car at the far end of his range, about six miles south of him on the interstate. The car interfered with his ability to tell what kind of Major Transform and so he started to run, the soggy remains of a couple of hamburgers in his hand to eat later. The damned Big Boy was right off the interstate.
He didn’t stop running for a half mile. By then, the car with the Major Transform had reached Mehlville.
To Gilgamesh’s terror, the car took the Mehlville exit. He froze in his hiding place, a small patch of uncleared scrubland between a cluster of recently built homes and a fallow hayfield. The car turned west – away from Gilgamesh, much to Gilgamesh’s relief – but didn’t go far. A half mile from the interstate, the unknown Transform drove into the driveway of a house with a ‘For Sale’ sign out front that Gilgamesh recognized. He had checked it out himself a few days ago when he scouted for a lair, and rejected the place as too risky.
When the car door opened and Gilgamesh finally sensed the Transform clearly, his heart jumped. Zaltu. She yanked the ‘for sale’ sign from the front of the house, tossed it in the back yard, broke into the house, opened the garage and drove the car inside. She dragged what looked like a large set of weights from the back of the car and started a workout routine in the garage.
Gilgamesh burrowed deeper under a bush. He was less than a mile from Zaltu and she still hadn’t reacted to his presence. He really was invisible to Arms. Either that, or as with the Focuses, the Arms’ metasense range was quite short.
It wasn’t anything he wanted to test.
After two hours of exercise, Zaltu took a shower and ate some food she retrieved from the car.
Gilgamesh waited and tried to ignore the cold wet as the leaves of the bush dribbled rainwater on his head. He swore Zaltu put on makeup. No, the last was a wig, he decided. She had put on a disguise.
Three hours after she arrived at the house, Zaltu tossed her weights back in her car, got in and sped north, toward the Detention Center. She was about to spring Tiamat and walk into Echo’s trap, Gilgamesh realized.
He was too far away to help and had no way to get closer in enough time to be useful. Damn!
He had to get creative.
Inspiration came in the form of a grocery supply truck. The teamsters had finished unloading its last load and the truck headed up Lemay Ferry Road, back toward St. Louis and the Detention Center. While the truck idled at a light, Gilgamesh took a deep breath, told himself the truck was almost the same thing as a boxcar, and ran. His legs wobbled and his eyes dripped tears, but he had no time for panic if he wanted to save his goddess of destruction. He quickly opened the back doors barely wide enough to let him through, and slipped in. He slammed the door shut behind him as the truck began moving again.
The empty truck smelled like old spilled milk. Gilgamesh huddled in the front corner with his arms around his knees and took deep breaths, trying to calm his panicked nerves. He had a lot more work to do to stop Echo and he couldn’t afford to fall apart before any confrontations happened.
The grocery truck passed within a mile of the Detention Center. Gilgamesh slipped out into an industrial wasteland of gravel pits, grain silos, and giant mounds of bulk freight. He walked north, nothing more than another street bum, as Zaltu circled the Detention Center twice. She came within a mile of him once (he froze, but she still didn’t metasense him) before driving to the warehouse district south of the Detention Center.
She stopped and got out of her car. Gilgamesh froze again. To his north, he metasensed Echo coming south on a bicycle, at the edge of his range. Last time, he hadn’t been able to metasense Echo until he got within a quarter mile of the other Crow. He wondered if his new ability to sense was a feature of his gift from Thomas the Dreamer.
Sweat beaded on his forehead and his legs turned wobbly.
Zaltu checked out the various warehouses, made her decision and broke into one. She wandered around inside it for five minutes, while Echo continued to pedal south.
Abruptly, four miles from the Detention Center, Echo turned and pedaled back to the north, much faster this time. For a moment,
Gilgamesh couldn’t understand. He thought through what had happened and decided Echo had only now picked up Zaltu on his metasense. Gilgamesh smiled.
The smile lasted perhaps a minute. Zaltu exited the warehouse, ran back to her car so swiftly she left a faint dross trail, drove the car back to the warehouse and stopped. She opened one of the large warehouse doors and drove the car inside.
Then nothing. She rested.
Gilgamesh thought through the sequence and decided Zaltu wasn’t going to break Tiamat out from the Detention Center. Instead, she was waiting for someone else to break Tiamat out. Or, more improbably, for Tiamat to break herself out. Given Zaltu waited less than four hundred feet from the south border of the Detention Center, it led him to believe her metasense range was indeed tiny.
After Zaltu rested she hauled out her weights and exercised again. Then she climbed up to the warehouse roof and built herself a small outpost. From her hidden vantage point, she could watch the entire Detention Center. Once she finished her nest, she froze in place and didn’t move a muscle for the next hour.
“Now what?” Gilgamesh whispered to himself. Perhaps he didn’t have to do anything. Perhaps Zaltu’s presence would be enough to keep Echo away from the Detention Center, far enough away so Echo couldn’t betray Tiamat if she escaped.
Gilgamesh worked out times in his head. If he could pick up Echo six miles away, and Echo pedaled his bicycle twice as fast as Gilgamesh ran, Gilgamesh would be able to get close to Zaltu before Echo got to him if Gilgamesh was three miles away from Zaltu.
However, if Echo used a car…
Gilgamesh decided to hole up on the far side of the Detention Center, two miles from Zaltu. Save for her exercises every couple of hours, Zaltu waited, motionless, for the rest of the night.
Carol Hancock: November 14, 1966
Doris’s face was stern the morning of the fourteenth, and the plates on the tray jiggled as she lowered it to the table. She wouldn’t meet my eyes as I carefully took the bowl of oatmeal, plate of eggs, bacon and toast, fruit bowl and glasses of orange juice and milk from it and sat them in front of me.
I found the note under the big plate, and was a long one, at least in comparison. As usual, I didn’t read it until I reached the exercise room.
Carol
I’ve been thinking about your ongoing muscle problems, and I have the solution you’ve been asking for. Do all these with low reps and heavy weights: first, 5 sets each of medium-grip barbell bench presses, medium-grip incline barbell bench presses, close-grip barbell bench presses, wide-grip front lat pull downs, bent-over dumbbell rowing, standing medium-grip easy-curl-bar biceps curls, heel-high sit ups, and flat bench leg pull-ins. On each set, use a 10-3-3-3-3 rep pattern, save for the last two, where you do 50 per set. Start this within three days and you can escape your problems. I’ll be awaiting your results. If you tire while doing these exercises, imagine the alternatives.
Larry Borton
Keaton! She had decided to help me! I wanted to cheer, but instead I puzzled out the hidden message. It took me a while, because five days past my last draw my mind had turned to mush. Rephrased, it said ‘I have the solution you’ve been asking for. Escape within three days. I’m waiting. Do not disappoint me this time.’ The suggested exercises were a devious joke and a surprise; I hadn’t expected Keaton to have a sense of humor. If I did exercises as she suggested, I would turn into a muscle-bound freak like her.
At lunch, I gave Doris a short note: ‘Party tomorrow afternoon’. I gave some special instructions to Mike Artusy for that night, as well.
Dr. Henry Zielinski: November 14, 1966
“Zielinski.” He picked up the phone as if it was about to bite him. After Keaton’s orders, even incoming phone calls had become unnerving. He knew he shouldn’t complain. All those years spent skating disaster thrown away, because he had chosen to dive into this disaster headfirst.
“Hi, this is Lori. We’re on for tomorrow night. Everything ready?”
Dr. Zielinski winced. “Yes.” With Tommy Bates’ help, he had managed to recruit forty men with Monster hunting experience. In the process, Dr. Zielinski had called in every favor owed to him and now owed favors to quite a few people he would rather not owe anything.
“Good enough. See you tomorrow evening.”
Hank hung up the phone and looked at his calendar. He and Glory were supposed go to a cocktail party at the Stephens’ tomorrow night. He had an afternoon class to cancel, as well as a meeting with Dr. Conyers. He suspected he would miss most of what he had scheduled for the next day as well.
On his desk was the official probation notice. He had once dreamed of regaining his old position as department head. Now, in a few short weeks, he found himself on probation at Harvard Medical.
His Harvard Medical superiors wouldn’t appreciate tomorrow night’s jaunt, either.
He called Glory. At least phone calls to his wife didn’t cause him mental conniptions, an observation he dutifully noted down in his special notebook of information to trade to Keaton. He doubted the Arm knew she could be so selective. “Dear, I’m afraid something’s come up and I’m going to have to go out of town tomorrow. I don’t know when I’m going to be coming home, either. I might be away for a couple of days.”
“It’s that Focus again, isn’t it?” Glory asked. He hadn’t been able to avoid explaining his new work with Focus Rizzari.
“It’s not what you think,” Dr. Zielinski said. “I’m on Transform business, and…”
“It’s always Transform business, Hank,” Glory said. “Your work is too dangerous for you. Too dangerous for your family, but you won’t listen.” Click. Dial tone.
He winced, rubbed his temples and told the department secretary to call Tommy Bates and tell him to be ready tomorrow. He couldn’t call anyone about Transform business, even Bates.
He had already made his decision during his conversation with Keaton. Transforms first.
No matter he knew he couldn’t handle everything life tossed at him, because of his decision.
No matter the cost.
Once We Were Human Page 12