All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Two)

  All Conscience Fled

  (The Good Doctor’s Tales

  ~ Folio Two ~)

  Randall Allen Farmer

  Copyright © 2012 by Randall Allen Farmer

  All Conscience Fled

  (The Good Doctor’s Tales

  ~ Folio Two ~)

  Author’s Introduction

  This short novel covers the early months of Carol Hancock’s apprenticeship with the Arm, Stacy Keaton. Timewise, “All Conscience Fled” occurs between “Once We Were Human” (Book One of the Commander series) and “Now We Are Monsters” (Book Two of the Commander series). As this novel delves into different themes than the main novels of the Commander series, and does not advance the overall story of the Transform community, this short novel is not essential to the story “Now We Are Monsters” tells. It stands alone as its own story.

  The Significance of Folio Two (“All Conscience Fled”)

  by Dr. Henry Zielinski

  “Fuck, Zielinski, I sure hope as hell you have some actual progress on something,” Carol said, barging in without warning. Typical. He wasn’t sure where she had been previously, but she wore a yellow summer dress which made him want to tell her ‘Don’t you know it’s November?’ Up until the last few months, he had seldom seen her in a dress, but he guessed she found them comfortable now. She sat in one of the spare chairs in his Birch building inner sanctum office, an office with an interior view of the private central training area as well as an exterior view of downtown Chicago.

  He repressed his almost instinctive “what ever happened to ‘Hank’?” question – wondering what he had done this time to get on her bad side – but he didn’t need to ask. The problem wasn’t him, but inside Carol, about 8 months along and flooding the Arm with enough unfamiliar hormones to re-float the Titanic. After all these years and all their changes, the last thing he had ever expected would lead him to into a dangerous confrontation with Carol was this.

  “I apologize for the interruption, ma’am,” Hank said. “Nothing momentous, I promise.”

  “I could use something momentous,” Carol said. She spread her legs wide apart, and obscenely itched at her crotch. At least with him, she kept up her old bad habits. “Not ‘Night of Darkness’ momentous, but at least ‘Eskimo spear’ momentous.”

  “Sorry.” Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to be bringing up his questions with Carol. They were all stuck waiting on the FBI to pass along anything about the problem they had slid mostly privately under the FBI’s door. Until the Feds deigned to pass anything back, they were stuck, and snapping at each other more than normal. Still, he doubted he would ever have as quiet a period as this one to brace her on the subject. “I thought you might be interested in a distraction from our latest problem rogue Major Transform.” Someone higher-up was soon going to notice that an ever-growing number of the world’s problems stemmed from rogue Major Transforms. He, and Van, thought the hammer would fall hard when that happened.

  Carol straightened her legs and arched her back, accentuating her oversized belly. Only seven weeks to go, thank heavens. Soon, Zielinski would be counting the days. “Fuuuck, I feel old,” she said. She caught him with a corner eye glance. “Don’t say a thing.”

  “Lips sealed,” he said, and made mental plans to go back to California. Surely that crew of crazies needed more help recovering from the latest mega-disaster. Despite his gut desire to never return to that half of the continent again.

  “So, did I assign you the task of looking into our Dreaming problems, or did I specifically tell you to stay away from them?” Carol shook her head and gazed out of his corner office through rain-streaked windows. He followed with his eyes. The clouds were so low he couldn’t see the ground today from the 27th floor, much less downtown Chicago.

  With practiced ease, from years of dealing with mature Arms, he jotted a note about unexpected hormone interference with the usual perfect Arm memory, blind, without taking his eyes off Carol. “The latter, ma’am.”

  “Okay, so why did you bring me here?”

  Carol put enough Arm predator into her last question make him tingle all over. Time to be careful.

  “I found a discrepancy in your latest round of memoirs,” Hank said, vastly understating the problem. He rolled his typewriter cart to the side and unlocked the file cabinet with Carol’s latest treasure, her memoir covering her student days under Stacy, up to the claiming of Carol’s first Chicago territory. As he retrieved the appropriate section, he marveled again at her elegant cursive script, as well as the underground and unstated competition between her and The Focus over whose cursive was best. He thought this piece of Carol’s memoirs too long; a much better thematic split point would be at the time of Carol’s graduation. “In specific, you skipped from the middle of November of ’66 to the middle of March of ’67, save for a few flashbacks. Given the fact you were the first trained Arm, I’m of…”

  He found a Carol in his face, inches away, radiating annoyed predator. “I left that crap out on purpose.”

  He didn’t back down, or twitch. “May I ask, ma’am, why?”

  She exhaled foul carnivore breath over his face and sat on his desk, her left hand leaning on his right hand. Painful enough to get his attention. The position appeared to be uncomfortable for her, given the eight months along business.

  “No.”

  “Commander, at least let me state my case.”

  “You have no case.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “But you think you do.” Tacit permission.

  He nodded, ignored pain, and carefully progressed. “You have half a dozen advisors telling you we stand the chance of having our current so-called Transform society fall apart before we get organized. Even if we fall, though, and all of us get slaughtered in the process, there will eventually be more Arms. You owe it to them, to posterity, to tell your story of your early days as Stacy’s student.”

  “Slave.”

  Zielinski shrugged. “Still. They don’t need to repeat the mistakes of our early ignorance.”

  “Posterity can lick my, well,” she actually blushed, “perhaps not right this month.” She had to be yanking his chain. That blush couldn’t be real. “You’re thinking we might be able to do something like the Eskimo spear?”

  “I’m thinking memoirs, ma’am, though perhaps duplicated in secret and stashed in sealed containers.” He met Carol’s gaze, flickered his eyes to his slowly collapsing hand, and back. She freed his hand, with no acknowledgement of what she had done. Tricks of that nature were just the price one paid to deal with Arms. “So, why the reticence? Are you worried about the violence, your beastliness? I thought you covered that adequately in…”

  “For someone as in thick with the Arms as you are, you certainly do have your dense moments,” Carol said. She turned away. Hank sensed real emotions at play, now. “I was weak, pathetic, a victim. As I said, a slave. Often, a whining slave. My memoirs became reasonable again only once I got proactive. The section you’re speaking of is a study in Carol Hancock’s impotence.”

  Hank sensed more, so he didn’t respond. He let Carol relive old memories, staring off into space, now in the direction of his Transform research bookcase. “You’ve seen how Keaton treated me back then. You experienced some of the same. I’ve seen your scars. What you don’t know is how I reacted. My weakness and the evil I did are as one. It’s bad, bad enough to perhaps change the way you think of me.”

  He had to look away himself. “We studied the California Spree at Littleside. Williamson thought your actions a pure psychotic break caused by training stress, while I argued the Spree was entirely ratio
nal behavior for an, um, unsocialized Arm.” A rogue Major Transform, he pointedly didn’t say.

  “I did worse,” Carol said, soft. “Not in numbers. I always do worse when the Beast first gets out.”

  He nodded, hiding his feelings. He had feared ‘worse’; the Arms always did worse in private than they did when he was around. “Then this is new, all things we – whomever you release this to – need to know.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Carol said, her back to him now. “I did write it. You can read this section now. You can even release the damned thing, as you’re doing with the stuff Gilgamesh, Gail, I, and the others are providing. But only if you can read this section without losing your cookies. And, if you get it, you can’t intercut this section with any of the other stories. Present it by itself, or not at all.”

  “I agree,” Hank said. His stomach clenched in anti-anticipation, his mind reminding him of all the times his similar deals with Carol and the other Arms had blown up in his face.

  Carol dropped a box of her memoirs on his desk, one he was sure she hadn’t been carrying a moment before. “Read it. I’ll be watching.”

  Hank picked up the box, began to read, and soon began to sweat.

  All Conscience Fled

  (1)

  I trembled with a combination of adrenaline excitement and stark terror as I rode in the front passenger seat of Keaton’s car, passing through the dark streets of St. Louis. A part of me exulted in triumph at my escape, while another part of me recoiled in horror over what I promised to Keaton in order to buy my survival. Triumph? I could organize people, manipulate them and make them do my wishes. Some of the skills involved grew from my old pre-Arm abilities, while others appeared to be tricks I had picked up as an Arm. Horror? I just won my first real fight as an Arm, and I severely wounded an FBI agent who held a gun to my head.

  Still, I had escaped. I thought I was already an Arm.

  Shows you what I knew…

  Keaton parked the car in an unlit alley beside a half collapsed stack of shipping pallets, grabbed her leather jacket and got out of the car.

  “Get out,” she said, her voice flat and emotionless.

  I got. When she used that tone of voice, you obeyed.

  Keaton wore her leather jacket over her dress, a lot more human in appearance with her body-builder muscles covered. She didn’t speak to me, but walked down the alley and into a narrow side street. I followed close at her heels, not wanting to separate myself from her in a dangerous part of this city. I dodged around garbage cans and brushed up against heavy steel doors. Steam rose from the storm sewer holes by the side of the road, and I heard the muted rumbling of distant traffic surrounded me, accented by the distant sounds of car doors opening and closing and people talking. Some place near this lifeless industrial district was still alive after midnight, to my surprise. I had been a small town girl all my life and knew little of cities.

  Keaton stopped in a dark spot between two streetlights, in front of shop window filled with bandage sheers and blood pressure cuffs. I stopped as well, and wondered why a nursing supply store did business here. I followed Keaton’s gaze to a sign over a door that said ‘St. Joseph Hospital’, a block away and across the narrow street. The back entrance. Lights illuminated the interior of the building, and several cars waited for their owners, diagonally parked in the small parking lot along the back of the small hospital.

  “You’re going to kill someone,” Keaton whispered, not bothering to turn to face me.

  My breath caught. Juice? I wanted juice more than anything in the world. I hadn’t had any for five days. I always wanted more.

  “No,” she said, in her flat whisper, still not looking at me. “You’re going to kill a normal.”

  “What?” I said. She had surprised me. In the distance, the siren of an ambulance moaned, pulling into the emergency entranceway on another side of the hospital.

  Keaton turned to me and pushed her face up to mine. “Do you have a hearing problem?” She didn’t yell, and her voice remained a whisper, but she terrified me enough that I involuntarily backed away. She had me by the collar before I as much as flinched.

  “No, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. I just…” I groped for words. I couldn’t believe she wanted me to kill an innocent normal. It didn’t make any sense. “Why, ma’am? What for?”

  Keaton glared at me for a long moment. “You’ll do it because I said so,” she said, her voice ice cold.

  “I can’t kill someone for no reason,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  She let me go, and I scrambled back a couple of steps until I found a wall at my back. “Whatever happened to ‘anything’?” she said.

  “I’ll do whatever you want. I just…” Oh, shit. “Killing people? I’m not…” I stopped my off-balance blather to collect my thoughts. “What would happen if I said no?”

  Keaton cocked an eyebrow at me and smiled a little bit. “I would say you didn’t take long to flunk out.”

  I stared at her in horror. She couldn’t possibly mean what she said…only, oh holy shit, she now held a knife in her hand. A big, ugly knife, black, with a serrated edge at the base on both front and back, twin to the one I carried in that ankle holster thing I once thought Dr. Zielinski had provided. I hadn’t seen her bend down and draw her knife, but she was good at messing with my mind that way.

  She weighed the knife in her hand and studied me with her cold dead eyes. I couldn’t go up to some stranger and kill them in cold blood. Not for no reason at all.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I hesitated.

  Faster than I could react, Keaton came to me, spun me around and slammed my face against the brick wall beside the door of the nursing supply store, her knife at my throat. Slowly, the killing knife went into my throat, slowly, as skin peeled back…

  “I’ll do it!” I said, my voice a girlish scream, my body immobilized by the vice grip of Keaton’s steel arms. Her knife stopped in my neck, blood dripping from the cut down my skin and into my cleavage.

  Keaton chuckled, which surprised a shiver out of me. Her chuckle was a low, husky sound, as pure a note of raw lust as I had ever heard.

  It took me a moment to understand. Then I pissed myself. I knew Keaton was a killer. I knew the violence and killing didn’t bother her.

  I hadn’t known they turned her on.

  Keaton released me. My head snapped forward into the wall and on the rebound I stumbled over the low concrete step, to land on my rear end on the ground. She laughed again, a cruel, mocking sound.

  I checked my throat. The cut went all the way across, but the cut was shallow. I wouldn’t bleed to death. I picked myself up off the ground, carefully stood, and faced Keaton. The manikins in the window of the nursing supply store stared at me with accusing eyes and I dropped my own eyes to the ground.

  Keaton lifted my chin and made me look at her.

  “You’re going to kill someone,” she said, a perfect echo of the first time she said it.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Excuse me? Ma’am?” I said to the nurse, as I came up from where I hid myself between the parked cars. If my voice had been male, I think she would have run. But mine was a female voice, and she wasn’t more than startled. She turned towards me.

  “Hello?” she asked. “Mary?”

  I came toward her, my steps a slow shuffle so as to not point out the shackles still holding my ankles. I was a mess, with scrapes on my arms, legs and face, holes torn in my clothes, and wet blood on my throat. If she got a good look at me, she would scream or run – but the darkness stayed too deep for her to penetrate.

  She wore the white dress and little white hat of a nurse’s uniform under a blue coat, and appeared to be about thirty or so. Her eyes were tired and she walked slowly, worn out from a long day’s work. I wondered if she had children.

  “I was wondering if you could help me with…” and then I eased close enough to reach her. I knew how to kill, I told myself. I had killed multiple t
imes before, taking juice. This was no different. A death was a death.

  I didn’t convince myself. Even so, I pulled out my knife from behind me and stabbed her in the neck.

  I thought she would die when I stabbed her. She didn’t. She didn’t even lose consciousness. She fell to the ground, gurgled, and woozily tried to get up again. I didn’t think she understood what was going on.

  I panicked at the thought of Keaton and what she would do to me if I didn’t finish the job. I clearly didn’t have this knife business mastered; neither this nurse nor Special Agent McIntyre died when I knifed them. I searched around and found a lumpish piece of concrete curb near my feet, big enough to do damage. I picked it up and clocked her in the skull. She moaned and didn’t die. I hit her again, harder. Still alive.

  The third time, her skull cracked open.

  Something fractured inside of me when her skull broke. I think it was my soul.

  The nurse was dead, her head split wide open, and her brains joined the blood that spilled out on the pavement, all over her coat, and all over me. Her little white hat lay on the ground by her cracked head, drowning in a growing pool of blood.

  When I saw the nurse’s brains on the pavement, I threw up all over everywhere. With a little mewl of self-horror, I fell to the ground on all fours beside the corpse, shivering, dry heaving and crying. This was nothing like the fight with Special Agent Patrick McIntyre. This was nothing like the times I had slapped orderlies, nurses or that foolish FBI Agent, Bates, who thought he could save me by offering me a job. No release. No battle lust. I felt nothing but horror.

  “Get up,” Keaton said. I gasped at the sound of her voice and choked as I inhaled some of what had just come out. She stood next to me, but I didn’t notice her movement. I obeyed without thinking. I stood, weak and unsteady on my feet.

  I made it two steps before I threw up again, bent over dry heaves with my eyes clotted with tears. Keaton tapped her foot impatiently on the pavement, anger undiminished.