Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) Read online

  Once We Were Human

  Book One of “The Commander”

  Randall Allen Farmer

  Copyright © 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 by Randall Allen Farmer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, in any form. This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and products depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Once We Were Human

  Book One of “The Commander”

  “Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.” – Joseph Campbell

  Part 1

  A Deeper Sea

  “Although the screaming headlines may proclaim otherwise, the Shakes has been shown to be an actual disease, what doctors now call Transform Sickness. The first scientifically verified report of Transform Sickness occurred only two years ago, but anecdotal evidence of the disease goes back to the second World War. Transform Sickness proved to be a bacterial infection earlier this year, linked to two previously undiscovered strains of bacteria of the Listeria family. Doctors suspect some five to ten percent of the population are carriers of the bacteria and may never get Transform Sickness. The new Listeria strains that trigger Transform Sickness are not transmitted by direct personal contact, but come from tainted food, soil, dust, sewage, and many other sources.” [UPI report (July 30, 1953)]

  Chapter 1

  “Wash your hands before and after touching any uncooked food. Wash your food three times before eating it. Cook all food to 160 degrees or more. Eat any leftover food within 1 day after cooking; always fully reheat any leftover food. Only you can prevent Transform Sickness!” [Department of Agriculture flyer, 1954]

  Carol Hancock: September 12, 1966 – September 16, 1966

  The nightmare seized me and refused to abate, a torment of dead babies, of giant steel balls chasing me in a pinball machine the size of a building, of immense crowds judging every word I spoke. Voices echoed through my terror: my husband Bill, my mother, my eldest daughter Sarah, nurses, doctors, police, others. Each segue led back to the endless pinball game, where death awaited even the tiniest miscue.

  Later, I would wonder what I had been experiencing. The future? The past? Hallucinations? The subconscious mind sometimes figures things out before the conscious mind does. Not that my conscious mind was any great shakes at the time. But still. My subconscious had figured out I had plunged into deep deep shit. Even as I write this as the Commander, a decade later, I still have no idea how. No matter.

  What I thought I knew was bad enough.

  When I screamed myself awake, nothing had changed. Metal cot. Straitjacket. Legs shackled together. A single tiny light bulb on the ceiling, behind a metal cage, bright enough to hurt my eyes.

  I wiggled so I no longer faced the light and looked around. I found myself in a small room, perhaps eight by eight feet across, with cinder block walls and a metal door with no doorknob but with an ominous slot at the bottom.

  The last time I awakened, I’d misplaced my name and screamed my throat raw in panic. I knew my name now: Carol Hancock. Mother and housewife. I couldn’t tell where I was. I didn’t know how long I’d been here. I had no idea why.

  This time, at least, I didn’t panic.

  I had more problems than my location: my body ached, my head spun, and stomach acids gnawed at my insides as if I starved. My clothes, drenched in foul smelly perspiration, failed to protect me from the cold. Neither did the straitjacket I’d somehow acquired. A pressing need I couldn’t satisfy sucked at my soul, a longing deeper than the normal hunger for food. A craving.

  I had to pee. I looked around the room, still squinting because of the bright light, and found the facilities, a metal toilet of brushed stainless steel with no toilet seat. Besides the straitjacket, I wore some kind of coarse hospital gown, rough linen more suited for a drop cloth than someone’s clothing. No panties. The gown wadded up indecently around the strap between my legs. I rolled off the metal cot and stood, more of a production than it should have been. My legs wobbled after two steps and I fell with a clank of metal shackles to the concrete floor. I attempted to stand, but with my legs shackled together and the rest of me constrained by the straightjacket, I only managed to slip across the concrete, a baby who hadn’t learned to crawl.

  “Darn it.” I gathered my strength for another try, each breath deeper than the last. In time, I wiggled myself into the corner formed by the toilet and the wall and pushed myself vertical with my feet. It took me four tries.

  I sat and peed, making a disgusting mess of my gown. I had no idea who might have imprisoned me, but nothing else made sense. I’d never done anything to justify this kind of treatment. I was a white middle class housewife, with a businessman husband, three children, a habit of volunteering for good causes, and a clear conscience. Not at all the sort of person likely to find herself shut away in some awful cell.

  Gaps in my memories lurched me off the toilet; I didn’t remember how I’d gotten here! Tears slid down my face as I made my way back to the cold metal cot, each step an aching sob of misery. After I sat, I turned away from the light and screamed until my throat hurt too much to stand, and the pain forced the screams to fade away into sobs of hopeless misery.

  I jolted awake later, winced and turned away from the light. Someone had slid a tray of food through the ominous slot at the bottom of the door. My gourmet dinner consisted of oatmeal, crackers, and a bowl of milk like you would set out for a cat. I hobbled over and knelt carefully by the tray.

  A roach crawled over the surface of the oatmeal. I grimaced in disgust, but I blew on the roach until it ran away, too hungry to let disgust deter me. I licked up every crumb and drop of my minimal meal, making even more of a mess of my hair and face. The food did little but awaken my ravenous hunger and the other craving for which I had no name. I howled on the floor in agony afterwards.

  Something was dreadfully wrong with me.

  Next time I awoke, I found myself back on the metal cot. The door opened with a clang and I shrank back against the cinder block wall of my cell. A wall of state troopers, dour and angry, stood in a semicircle around the door.

  Each one of them had his gun drawn and pointed at me.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I asked.

  They didn’t answer.

  “Who are you? What am I doing here? What’s going on?”

  Two of the troopers came into the room, grabbed hold of my bound arms and yanked me roughly to my feet.

  “I’m just a housewife. I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  The two troopers dragged me out through their half dozen compatriots, every gun following me as I passed.

  The lights outside my room slammed into me, bright enough to hurt. I squinted my eyes shut and turned away from the fierce brilliance, but the brilliance still burned. I howled at the misery and felt an unfamiliar hard and painful impact on my cheek in response, enough to knock my head sharply to the side and send me lurching into the trooper who held me. Someone hit me, actually hit me. Shock made me open my eyes and I caught a brief, burning glimpse of the wooden handle of a gun retreating backwards away from my cheek.

  I screamed in pain, keening loudly as they pushed me forward. Still, I kept my eyelids cracked open despite the burning, desperate to know. Five steps later I quieted my screams and listened, my hearing now as painfully sensitive as my vision. Between my two senses I recognized my location, the jail in Jefferson City, my home town. After the troopers dragged
me up to ground level I heard the sounds of traffic, the sounds of arguments, and an immediate hush that followed me wherever the guards took me. As best I could without blinding myself, I searched for people I knew and found none. I’d prayed my husband or my friends would come rescue me, but seeing only strangers my hope evaporated into my pain.

  The troopers took me through the jailhouse, part of the county government annex I had known so well during my City Decorations Committee volunteer work four years ago. Off down one of the bare linoleum-floored hallways an argument resolved itself, a verbal spat between a lawyer and some important state trooper. The lawyer argued they had no right to take me, Mrs. Hancock, anywhere without the proper legal niceties. The state trooper didn’t agree.

  Oh. There was something so bad, so horrible, that it caused the authorities to routinely ignore the legalities, something from a few years before the marvelous modern year of 1966. I tried to remember and failed.

  The troopers hustled me out the back entrance into the warm September sun and down the wide stairs to the parking lot, where a bus waited. In the bright sun I couldn’t open my eyes at all, and they streamed with tears. One of the troopers jerked on my arm and pulled me, blind and stumbling, into the bus. Inside, the trooper untied the arms of my straightjacket and chained me by the wrists to a metal stanchion.

  Hiccupping with sporadic sobs, I listened to the troopers around me for several minutes. My tears slowed and I dared crack my eyes open again. I was the only prisoner, outnumbered ten to one by the guards, chained up like Al Capone or Bonny of Bonny and Clyde. The troopers had placed me in a convict bus, one more commonly used to transport chain gangs and other prisoner work gangs to their jobs. The bus had steel mesh across the windows and a strong metal gate between the driver and the seats.

  The men wouldn’t talk to me. One of them actually kicked me in the calf as he passed by me to his spot at the back of the bus. Another murmured, “damned murderess,” to the man next to him. There had to be some mistake. I prayed so.

  The bus drove on for hours. Pain, hunger, tears, loneliness and confusion warred with unfamiliar thoughts that bled through my mind. I cried and cried, beads of salty rain dripping down my cheeks to collect on the point of my chin.

  “God damn it. Quit with the fucking tears already,” one of the state troopers in the back said.

  The trooper across the aisle from me leaned forward. With a sharp motion, he hit me in the stomach with the butt of his rifle. I gasped and cringed backwards as far as I could, crying harder. The trooper laughed. “At least if she’s going to cry, she can have something to cry about.”

  A trooper in the front said, “Hell, Rudy, what did you go do that for? Now she’s never going to shut up.”

  The trooper across from me shrugged. “She wasn’t going to shut up anyway. She’s been crying for the last four damn hours.” He jabbed his rifle butt toward my stomach again and laughed when I cringed.

  The brilliant light faded into evening as the convict bus drove on. The state troopers didn’t relax their vigilance or treat me any better in the cooler twilight.

  “Hey, Snapper, you think she’s a good fuck?”

  The man two rows behind me grinned. “Sure. You gonna go for it, Clete?”

  The first man laughed. “It’s not like she’s going to live long enough to make any trouble over it. I’m just not into dogs.” He punctuated his remark with a kick at my legs. “You can, though. Just bend her over the seat and take her right up…”

  Frisky now, the kicks, blows, and appallingly graphic descriptions of their sick desires didn’t stop for many miles. I’d never even heard of some of the abuses they proposed. Yet, except for the blows and the kicks, they didn’t approach within six feet of me.

  I cringed as far away from them as my bonds would allow and tried to pray, but I failed: furious, not penitent. I raged at God for letting me fall into such misery and I raged at my family for the same.

  The troopers didn’t give me any food, or any water, or tell me my destination.

  Night soothed my eyes; I’d never seen a night like this before. Everything lit up, as if the moon had taken lessons from the sun. I watched through the steel mesh, mesmerized by the vivid night, as the farmland turned to suburb, suburb to city. St. Louis? Likely. We circled around the city proper and headed away, into the land of freight trains and warehouses. The convict bus stopped at a heavy steel gate, backlit by city lights staining the sky. The gate interrupted tall walls with barbed wire on top, the loopy kind of barbed wire all prisons seemed to have. Three guards tended the gate.

  One of the guards entered the bus, checked me over from a distance, refused to answer my questions, and extracted signatures from the boss trooper. The convict bus rolled over pipes, an unlikely cattle guard, and into the compound.

  I expected to see a well-lit state prison, huge and impersonal. Instead, I found a single poorly lit U-shaped building, three stories tall, not large, but surrounded by a brick wall. Along the a quarter mile road to the U-shaped building were concrete slabs, the remains of bulldozed buildings and long unused roads. I frowned, mystified.

  The building had no signs, no markings at all. A few lights shone from ground floor windows, breaking the darkness. An acre of graveyard lay four hundred feet to the side of the road, with hundreds of small identical white crosses, tightly crammed together, as if the graves held cremated remains. I’d seen this a long time ago, not this building, but similar. I dredged my mind, trying to remember.

  Newsreels. Newsreels, while I attended college.

  My God.

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

  They’d taken me to a Transform Detention Center, one of the old ones where they took Transforms to die in the bad old days, before they had discovered Focuses. I thought the authorities had closed down all the Detention Centers.

  I raged for a moment, furious I’d been sent here in a prisoner bus. Transforms were dangerous! What a horrible thing to do to an innocent God-fearing housewife.

  Then I got it. They thought I was a Transform.

  I looked at my handcuffed hands, and, yes, they shook a little. The Shakes was one of the most horrifying diseases known to mankind, nearly as bad as Leprosy and the disease they described once on the Dr. Kildare show. The one that makes your skin fall off. They called this disease the Shakes because your hands shook, at least at the start of it. The proper term for the Shakes was Transform Sickness. You got it and you never recovered. You became something else. Someone else. Transformed.

  This shouldn’t have happened to me! Transform Sickness was one of the ways God worked in the world, the hand of his wrath upon the blatant sinners.

  The Shakes wasn’t supposed to be a death sentence for a woman if diagnosed early enough. I’d learned the truth in Parade magazine and Readers’ Digest: Focus households wanted woman Transforms and regularly took them in. Male Transforms, though, often couldn’t be saved and had to be euthanized or face a death too horrible to describe. Back before World War II euthanasia had been illegal, but because of the horror of the Shakes many state governments had legalized euthanasia, including Missouri. When the end came, male Transforms often went psychotic and tried to kill everyone around them. Women Transforms became Monsters if they weren’t taken in by a Focus, literally demonic monsters. Killing them was a kindness.

  A rare variety of Transform, the Focus, saved other Transforms from death by moving a special Transform-only compound all Transforms had in them, juice, from one Transform to another. Only women transformed into Focuses, and only after spending several days in a coma. However, salvation from becoming a Monster or psychotic didn’t save the Transform from the eternal punishment of sterility, or the other marks of the curse they wore.

  Now, I wasn’t a blatant sinner – or sprouting fur or growing claws. So why bring me here?

  Was I a Focus?

  The bus approached the brick wall around the u-shaped building and went down a ramp into a bright well-lit basem
ent. Through the cracks in my eyelids, I saw tall concrete pillars, parking spaces, and a roped-off, pock-marked, discolored wall: the shooting gallery, where authorities shot women transforming into Monsters in the bad old days.

  The wall looked freshly washed to me, though.

  The bus rumbled by the wall and stopped.

  We waited.

  Ten minutes later a doctor in a white lab coat, flanked by two well-armed orderlies, came up to the bus. The doctor tapped on the door and the driver opened it. After he walked up the bus steps he held a huddled conversation with the officer. They talked, exchanged paperwork and signed papers. They took a moment to point at me and talked some more.

  Eventually the driver opened the gate into the back part of the bus. The doctor turned to the guards, waved his hands at me and said “Bring her”. He turned and left, ignoring my presence.

  “Hey. Talk to me,” I said. He didn’t. Sudden hot hot anger erased my tears and I slammed the cuffs against the metal pole. “I” slam “Want” slam “Some” slam “Answers!” slam.

  The cuffs broke.

  The Goddamned cuffs broke.

  Rach – rat! went the guns in the guards’ hands. I held my hands in front of me in disbelief. I was a housewife, a town girl. My wrists bled red under the broken cuffs, with actual strips of skin laid open. Oooh! Yuck. The wounds should have been horribly painful, but no. Not too much. They did make me want to throw up when I looked at them, though. My anger melted away along with my blood as it dripped on the metal floor of the bus.

  “Mrs. Hancock?”

  I looked up at the firing squad of terrified state troopers in front of me and wanted to shake my head. The doctor had spoken, on the other side of the guards. He had come back into the bus. The nametag on his white lab coat read ‘Dr. Peterson’.