The Good Doctor's Tales Folio One Read online

  The Good Doctor’s Tales

  ~ Folio One ~

  Randall Allen Farmer

  Copyright © 2011, 2012 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.

  The Good Doctor’s Tales

  ~ Folio One ~

  Author’s Introduction

  This novella length document is a collection of short pieces, stand-alone and otherwise, related to “Once We Were Human” (Book One of the Commander series). As with the extra features common to DVDs, the various parts of “The Good Doctor’s Tales” are not essential to the story “Once We Were Human” tells; instead, they add to it.

  Hank Meets Stacy Keaton

  (1964)

  Dr. Henry Zielinski swiped off shaving cream, half way through his stubble, when he heard a loud knock. “Enter,” he said, peering around the door jam. His lead post-doc student and current aide, Dr. Frank Kepke, stuck his head into Hank’s small apartment in the onsite housing wing of the Bakersfield Transform Research Complex.

  “Hank, there’s some sort of problem,” Frank said, eyes wide. “They need us in the lab right now.”

  Shit. Hank took a few more quick passes at his face with his razor, splashed water, grabbed a tie and his suit coat, slipped from his slippers into his shoes, and started to run. The lab, a converted Monster pen and the only place secure enough in this research complex to hold a failed Focus suffering from Armenigar’s Syndrome, held Francine Sarles. Building 201.

  Life at the Complex had become routine for Dr. Henry Zielinski during the fourth week of his visit. As one of the staff doctors, he lived in their high security campus and didn’t have to worry about a hotel room or car rental. Now this.

  “What’s the word?” Hank asked, pausing in the lobby for only a moment to prop his feet alternately on the benches and tie his shoes. The scent of pancakes and breakfast sausage floated in from the kitchen down the hall, but breakfast would have to wait.

  “They didn’t say.” ‘They’ was the obnoxious Dr. Dana Reddicks, the local doctor in charge of the Sarles case. Frank considered Dr. Reddicks an idiot and Hank concurred. Experimental Transform research was both dangerous and difficult, especially with newly transformed victims of Transform Sickness. Dr. Reddicks called himself a ‘Transform GP’, though he knew little about new Transforms. If he was an expert on anything at all it was Monster extermination.

  The complex stretched out over a mile and a half, a full quarter mile wide, and the living quarters were nearly a half mile from Building 201. Even in the cool of the morning, Hank worked up a sweat by the time he reached the lab, where a Bakersfield Police Department vehicle crunched to a halt in front of 201. He winced and wondered what Sarles had done now. The woman was nothing but trouble, persnickety and constantly complaining about nearly everything.

  As Hank approached Building 201, he found Dr. White out front, arguing vigorously with one of the local security officers. Dr. White was another call-in, a national expert on Focus transformations based out of the Baylor School of Medicine. Hank didn’t see their third visiting doctor and Transform expert, Riddlehauser. A late riser, he was likely still asleep.

  “Well, if Dr. Reddicks is busy, let’s get hold of Director Johnson,” Dr. White said. The security officer shrugged, stepped back inside 201 to the vacant reception desk and dialed the phone. Dr. White, Frank and Hank followed him, close enough to hear his conversation. The security officer jawboned with the switchboard operator for a moment before turning to mutter into the phone, probably talking to the BTRC Director. Dr. White stood up straighter before he hung up the phone.

  “You doctors can all go in, I guess,” the security officer said. He opened the heavy locked access door for them.

  Hank rushed in and down the wide hall, followed by Doctors White and Kepke. When Hank smelled the stench of blood, ozone and the vaguely burned-lime-smell of altered juice, he stopped and let his two colleagues rush ahead. He knew what happened; viewing the results wouldn’t change a thing. A horrible gripping sadness weighed him down, his eyes almost tearing, the third time he had gone through this particular little ritual. Three points defined a plane, and Hank wasn’t happy to be on it. Up ahead, Dr. Kepke let off a string of curses, and suddenly feeling all of his 47 years, Hank began a slow walk.

  Sarles’ room was a mess, as was Sarles. The new Transform had somehow found some way to kill herself, and blood and other gore spattered across the bed, dresser, and floor, and collected in a pool around the body sprawled by the side of the bed. A couple of detectives poked through the contents of the dresser and Dr. Reddicks squatted next to the fallen Transform, pushing and prodding. When he saw Dr. Zielinski, he stood and walked over, ignoring Kepke and White.

  “As far as I can tell, Zielinski, Francine slit her wrists, slit her throat, and tried to stab herself in the heart. From the looks of it, she didn’t find her heart. In any case, just like with Focuses, those wounds weren’t enough to kill her, so our failed Focus stove her head in,” Dr. Reddicks said, a bit green of face and quite angry at the deceased.

  Hank studied the situation and the limb positions. He knew how tough Focuses were, and after the Rose Desmond episode, he knew the Armenigar’s Syndrome Focuses shared that toughness. Stove her head in, indeed! “If you flip over her body, you’ll find a pistol, my guess a .45 filched from the guards. She pitched forward after she shot herself, that’s what’s confusing you, why some of her brains are on the dresser.” The burnt juice stench overwhelmed the pistol discharge smell.

  Kepke and White turned and walked away, holding their mouths. Dr. Reddicks glared at Dr. Zielinski, did as Hank suggested, and found the weapon. One of the two police detectives gave Hank the stare, which he interpreted as the usual ‘you arrogant SOB’ look. Hank saw that often in his life, and he ignored it and went to work. He had a job to do and would save his grief until later.

  “I think you annoyed Reddicks, Hank, when you refused to stand in front of the cameras and tell the press what went wrong,” Dr. Kepke said. Fully packed and with suitcases at their feet, they waited at the main entrance for the taxi to take them to the Bakersfield airport to catch a puddle jumper to Los Angeles. There they would pick up a transcontinental 707 to take them back to Boston, their home base. The cool morning had been replaced by hot California afternoon, and beads of sweat dripped slowly down Hank’s sides.

  “He made it quite clear he owned the Sarles case,” Hank said. “Let him explain his mistakes.” Hank wasn’t happy with how this case had worked out. He was the national expert in Armenigar’s Syndrome, an expertise bought quite painfully over the last several years. The case he owned, Rose Desmond’s case, had been the one where the patient lasted the longest. Despite his success, he lacked the political pull necessary to take over the Sarles case, much to Sarles’ detriment. Dr. Reddicks had ignored several of his recommendations, and he had implored Dr. Reddicks to restrain Francine after their latest experiment failed. Dr. Reddicks ignored Zielinski’s recommendation, and now Francine was gone.

  The outcome could have been much worse. She could have gone psychotic and tried to kill the lot of them.

  “Do you think Francine would have recovered, given time?” Dr. Krause asked. Krause’s normal youthful ebullience had returned, save for an occasional twitch of the muscles under his left eye, picked up new this trip. He sat down on his largest suitcase and stretched his legs in front of him.

  “These failed Focuses are all juice consumers, Frank,” Dr
. Zielinski said. “She would have used up the bad juice she took in time. Francine had agreed that if this attempt didn’t work she would be willing to try another Transform volunteer. The added juice would have fixed her.”

  The Transform volunteers didn’t survive the failed Focus juice draw process, though. Francine had drawn juice once from a volunteer, and afterwards, she said she liked it too much. Whatever that meant. “The pleasure of a juice draw is a danger to my morality,” she had said. “I won’t do it again, unless I have absolutely no other choice.”

  Volunteers. There weren’t enough Focuses to support nine out of ten new Transforms; without a Focus new woman Transforms transformed into Monsters and new male Transforms ran out of juice and hideously died. Despite these facts, Francine had come up with moral problems with killing volunteer Transforms. Typical weak-kneed woman, unable to accept that the Transform volunteers would perish anyway, regardless of her actions.

  Frank grunted and turned away. He thought Hank’s suggestion to restrain Francine cruel and inhumane, and he had expressed his opinion to Hank on the subject in private. Hank tsked to himself. Frank didn’t have a good feel for how Transforms differed from normal humanity. Transforms required harsher measures than normal humans; one of Hank’s Focus patients broke his arm two years ago just by grabbing it and squeezing. Sure, most Focuses weren’t manual laborers, as Focus Abernathy had been, but Hank suspected all the various Major Transforms – the Focuses, failed Focuses and other Sports – were more inhuman than most folks realized. In all ways.

  He and Francine had devised a test to find out if she could draw juice from a psychotic and unsalvageable male Transform already suffering from juice withdrawal. Francine successfully drew the psychotic’s juice, but afterwards boils and rashes erupted all over her body. The only positive news the persnickety woman reported was that the draw hadn’t been pleasurable.

  Unfortunately, two days ago, Francine decided she was going insane and turning into a Monster. She threatened suicide, but Dr. Reddicks refused to restrain her. He had given up on listening to Hank’s advice.

  The taxi driver pulled up and loaded their bags while the two doctors helped themselves into the back of the taxi. Dr. Kepke instructed the driver to take them to the airport and they took off.

  After they cleared the research center security, Hank got a glimpse of the taxi driver’s license photo hanging from the rear view mirror. Several things clicked in his mind, and his heart started pounding in anxious fear. At the first stop sign outside the complex he reached across Dr. Kepke, opened the car door and pushed the younger doctor out.

  Hank attempted to follow, but a hand with the strength of iron reached back, grabbed him and pulled him back in as the taxi motored off. He tried to wiggle free, but the driver, whose license picture didn’t match his face, threw Hank across the back bench. Hank slammed his head on the window and cursed. He didn’t black out from the pain, but he did pitch forward, hold his head in his hands and moan.

  “Huh,” the taxi driver said. “You might be worth talking to after all, being the first motherfucker to crack one of my disguises.”

  Hank moaned again in pain and grabbed at the door handle at his side, willing to give escape a shot even while the taxi accelerated to over sixty miles an hour. His vision blurred and his hands shook as he made the attempt.

  No luck. The taxi driver grabbed him again, this time yanking him, painfully and awkwardly, into the front seat. After banging him against the door and the dashboard several more times, the taxi driver pulled to the side of the state highway and bound his hands behind him with his own tie. “Any more of that shit and I will kill you, cocksucker,” he said.

  Dr. Zielinski’s body felt like one large bruise, an unfamiliar experience. He was a doctor, a surgeon originally before he got interested in research, not at all a bruiser. He had been in better shape when younger, but in the past few years, his responsibilities as a teaching doctor and professor at the Harvard Medical School had limited his tennis playing time. His long angular face accentuated his receding hairline, and he suspected he would soon resemble the faded photographs of his maternal grandfather, the expat Belgian merchant marine sailor Pierre Reynold. He struggled to right his body into a sitting position, with his feet in the seat well instead of twisted underneath him.

  “What do you want from me?” Hank asked, his voice reduced to a low croak from his now bruised sternum.

  “Shut up,” the taxi driver said, slapping his face. His head snapped back and hit the door jam, more pain. The driver turned and growled at him, and Hank’s feet scrabbled in terror. The driver’s gaze reminded him a predatory Monster, and triggered an unreasoning terror that clenched the bowels and slackened the muscles. Shit! Was this who he thought it was? He forced himself quiet and futilely tried to control his staccato breathing and heartbeat. The taxi driver continued to stare at him, locking him in place with those death-inhabited eyes, able to drive without having to watch the road.

  They drove for fifteen minutes before turning off the highway just outside of Bakersfield and driving into a tiny subdivision. The taxi driver soon pulled into the gravel driveway of a new-ish small suburban house, one with no garage and a ‘for sale’ sign out front. The driver dragged Hank out of the car, forced him forward up to the front door, and tossed him inside, to bang against the wall and fall on the dusty wooden floor of a vacant living room. The house smelled of recent death and garbage.

  “Do you know who I am?” the hugely muscled taxi driver said, squatting over Hank and twisting him around to face her. He met the eyes of the predator and forced down panic. The driver wore a loose fitting long sleeve checked shirt, dirty brown pants, and stood but five feet tall.

  “Stacy Keaton,” Hank said. Despite appearances she was a woman, an extremely dangerous woman he would have given nearly anything in his life to meet…under much more controlled circumstances.

  She backhanded him again, this time breaking his nose. His head hit the wall behind him with another bang and blood leaked down his suit coat. “Show some respect, you motherfucking quack. The proper responses are ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am’.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hank said, automatically. “So you are really a failed Focus, ma’am? I didn’t believe the FBI reports. With the problems I’ve had trying to keep failed Focuses alive, I was sure they were mistaken and you were a Sport, one of the one-of-a-kind Major Tra…”

  She slapped him again. “Shut up, dammit! I don’t want to have to kill you, you sodden piece of shit. I want your help, but I don’t want you yammering away at me.”

  The banter was fun, in its own fatalistic way. From what he knew about Keaton, she had killed absolutely everyone she encountered in the nine months she had spent free of Federal captivity. Her death toll included several doctors, and he figured he didn’t have any chance at getting out of this one alive. “What sort of medical help do you want?” Keaton almost backhanded him again, but caught herself. Instead, she sat down, very close to him. His heart rate skyrocketed and he tried to inch away, but he had nowhere to go. Tendrils of panic threaded into his mind and he wrenched at his tied arms, instinctively trying to put them between him and Keaton. The failed Focus wanted him humbled before she killed him. Damn if he would give her that pleasure.

  “You’re insane, aren’t you?” Keaton asked, hungry, almost nose to nose with him.

  Insane? “Depressed over Francine Sarles’ death, perhaps, ma’am,” he said.

  “Your marriage sucks, Zielinski. Let me guess, you haven’t fucked your wife since you killed off Rose Desmond. Right?”

  How the crap had she figured that out? He shook his head, but Keaton got closer, almost forehead to forehead. Her razor eyes cut into his soul, rousing total and utter terror. Waiting. “Yes, ma’am, you’re right,” Hank forced out.

  “I’m an Arm,” she said. Arm? Now he remembered. ‘Arm’ was what the newspapers nicknamed the Armenigar’s Syndrome Focuses, ever since Focus celebrity Bigg
ioni ran her fool mouth enough to attract far too much media attention.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Arm it was.

  “I keep killing the people who I want to help me,” Keaton said. “You’re going to tell me why and help me figure a way around this problem, or I’m going to kill you, too.”

  He didn’t believe it for a moment; the lie was all over her face. He blinked as she twitched a backhand blow at him strong enough to break his neck, unhappy that he could read her as easy as she read him.

  However, the answer to her question was obvious to him, given his experience with failed…Arms. He didn’t know how explain it to her, though.

  “Tell me anyway,” she said.

  Hell, she read him like a book, much better than he read her! That wasn’t fair! Dammit, he had spent years perfecting his ability to cover up his reactions with Focuses, and…

  “So you deal with the Focuses, too?”

  Might as well talk. He could die like a mouse, or die like a lion, but dead was dead and he preferred lions. “Several years ago I discovered the difference between supplemental juice and fundamental juice, ma’am. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but until Desmond’s death, I’d actually been nominated for a Nobel.”

  Of all things, Keaton’s face softened to reveal the real human woman behind the psychotic killer mask. She kissed him and started to rip his clothes off. “Oh, arrogance,” she said. “Utter and complete arrogance. I love it.”

  Why now, why me? Hank thought, caught up in the moment, despite his wishes on the subject.

  “Ran down some prey in LA just before I came to nab you,” Keaton said, her momentary humanity entirely gone from her face and eyes, becoming a predator of a different sort. “Always makes me horny. Now, shut up and fuck.”

  “So, you never told me what my problem is,” Keaton said, hours afterwards. She fucked like a nineteen year old male and had given his privates a workout unlike anything he had ever experienced before, arousing him whether he wanted to or not.