The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Nine Read online

  Unlike with Gail, this Focus already had me by my heart. I trust I held my stone face together as I read the truth, at least from Lori’s perspective.

  “Ma’am, I’ve promised not to speak of this unless you agree not to pass it on to anyone else.”

  I dropped silently to the floor and looked at Keaton, who looked back at me. We had an impromptu face message confab, her position being ‘you make the call, it’s your Focus’ and mine being ‘you’re the boss, this one’s yours’. “We agree,” Keaton said.

  “Focus Keistermann helped me access my household juice buffer for my personal use. You know Focuses can’t normally tap into their household’s juice supply. Well, I used the juice in my buffer to heal myself to where my healing trance could handle my wounds. I can’t use the trick now, ma’am, in a stressful situation, but I’ll have the juice pattern mastered by the end of the month. That’s the reason I’m Polly’s apprentice.”

  “Why keep this under wraps?” Keaton said.

  “Supposedly, ma’am, only Focuses who are very talented at juice manipulation can learn this trick. It’s also morally dangerous, ma’am. The household juice is what keeps our male Transforms alive and functional.”

  “Tonya needs to know about this,” Keaton said.

  “She knows about it, ma’am, but Polly doesn’t trust her enough to teach her.”

  “Polly Keistermann doesn’t trust Biggioni!?” Shit. I felt like I had hit a whole new level of complexity in Focus politics.

  “Focus,” slap, “I find this hard to believe,” Keaton said. “Why did you say you were dead, Focus?”

  “According to both Gilgamesh and Polly, my heart, brain and juice systems had all ceased to function. My juice had destabilized and was melting away, in what Gilgamesh termed a ‘dross explosion’. Even the juice metabolism had ceased, ma’am. Polly used a little trick of hers to restabilize my juice. After she did so, she gave me access to my household’s juice buffer.”

  Dross explosion? I had seen that sort of thing several times, after I finished off Chimeras. I didn’t think Major Transforms came back from that. Polly’s so called ‘little trick’ wasn’t little at all.

  “In any event, you’re thinking incorrectly about your bodyguards,” Keaton said, slapping Lori to drag her out of her death horror. “You know what you can do that duplicates their skills. What can they do that you can’t?”

  “Nothing, ma’am, and…”

  Whack. Whack. “Think!”

  Lori thought, and finally surrendered to the truth. “They’re more eyes. They’re advice from another point of view. They’re more weapons.” Whack. “Ma’am. I’ve been blind.”

  “Yes. Literally.”

  “Ma’am, can I ask what this set up is useful for besides raw torture?”

  I showed her my little treasure, my cabana set-up allowing me to conjure a torture chamber out of thin air, whenever I needed one. My pride and joy was my perfect replica of the reinforced metal gurney the FBI had used on me at the start of my CDC captivity. We had my favorite tools here, as well as Keaton’s.

  “Yes, Focus. You’re going to use your charisma to stop us from torturing you,” Keaton said. This was a little too brutal for me, regarding a person I loved. Yet, it was necessary. She needed her charisma pushed as far as Transforms could push it.

  “You’re ordering me to abuse your minds, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” I said. I also suspected Keaton had maneuvered me into this as a test, to make sure I hadn’t lost my edge. Love should never override an Arm’s mission or good sense.

  “I don’t want to do this, ma’am. It’s wrong.”

  “We’ll provide incentive,” I said. It had taken me more than a year to realize Lori almost never used her charisma, and her only target seemed to be Tonya, and perhaps some of the other northeast region Focuses. If she was going to stand up to Keistermann and Biggioni, and keep them from walking off with the Cause, she needed her charisma trained up as much as we Arms needed our resistance to it trained up.

  “Do you mind if I scream, ma’am?”

  “No,” Keaton said, her voice sugary and hungry. “Feel free.”

  We started by hyper-extending Lori’s joints and irritating the tendons holding them together. Lori was a control freak, and the mere helplessness of being under our control filled her screams with panic. We took turns torturing her, first me, then Keaton. It didn’t take her long to control her panic and figure out how to stop one of us at a time. Lori’s control methods were a combination of voice and chemicals, ‘pheromones’, she called them.

  Next, we went on to Lori’s fingernails, Keaton’s favorite fetish. This time, both of us worked on Lori at once.

  “Stop both of us,” I said. I was pleased at how my voice echoed across the oversized pool cabana. Good acoustics – and worth the hours it had taken me to arrange.

  It took a while, but we provided ample recovery time for Lori between torture sessions. Eventually, she got that, too.

  “Now you get Hancock to stop torturing you while I order her to continue.” Seriously, you can’t expect Keaton to go this long without abusing me. I would rather not describe how painful this was to my psyche.

  “Now order us to let you free.”

  The last one took work. Instead of torturing Lori, Keaton and I were resting, lost in our own thoughts. Lori had to break us out of our torpor with her charisma to get us to free her.

  “Good,” I said when we finished, and surprised her by strapping her down again. “Now we’ll work on pain management,” I said. “Tonya was beyond torture. She could cut off pain, or if she was feeling perverse, enjoy it or channel it into anger. You need to learn how as well, Focus.”

  Lori laughed. “Tonya is a twit. I learned to cut off pain before I grew up and got my current household… IeeeeE!”

  If you are ever in a position where I’m torturing you, don’t laugh at me. Sets me off every time. I used my long knife on her the exact same way I used it on Tonya, save this time I placed it next to the aorta, so each heartbeat scraped the knife against the aorta. After what we had put Lori through, little of her native supplementary juice remained. She was in actual danger. Well, not counting the fact she could make off with my juice any time she wanted, the bitch…

  “This is what you did to Tonya, ma’am?”

  I nodded. Lori had the same nerves of steel that Tonya did.

  “Remove the knife, now!”

  I did so without thinking. When Lori put her darkness and her anger into her charisma, it was utterly unstoppable.

  Keaton tapped her fingernails on the metal frame of the gurney. I shared her frustration. “I think I finally see how to partially block your control. You’re going to have to go through this again. I order you to feel the pain and scream nicely for us, Focus.”

  The psychological sessions were much longer. Lori’s imagined sins were numerous, as were her incessant lies to herself. She was no more a Buddhist than I was. She was nothing more than a lapsed Catholic with a far eastern fetish.

  She loved her birth family, right? Not exactly. She used them, and their guilt and shame over her transformation, to extract money whenever her household ran short. She had used her charisma on them so often they had become resistant.

  She did everything possible for the Transform community, right? Not even close. She lied to other Focuses about her tricks. She lied about Inferno’s capabilities. She lied to her household as part of her household management techniques. Worst of all, she lied to Zielinski about nearly everything (about which I extracted my fair share of psychological pain), which was the stupidest of the lot.

  She did all she could for her household, right? No, she left them alone for days on end, ignored them when she came home, walled herself off from them as much as possible. “Defeats the juice magnet effect. I don’t have to turn them into juice zombies and move juice for no purpose save to rebalance things.” Don’t you love them? I asked. Yes, as ‘the household’. No, do you love them ind
ividually? No, she finally admitted, they were just friends, mostly not too irritating. Not even Ann, Tim, Connie or Sadie? Or Tina?

  My question got to her. Yes, Tim and Connie she could do without, but Ann and Sadie had wormed their way into her cold heart. Tina and the two high ranking Inferno normals, Terry and Dr. Bob, she loved as a Focus. Talking about Tina’s death even brought a bit of dampness to her eyes.

  I called Lori on the overblown intellectual reputation of her household; some of the things she had bragged to me about her household were just not true. “Ma’am, it’s misdirection,” she said.

  “Explain.”

  “We’re hiding in plain sight,” Lori said. Keaton leaned back on the kitchen wall, silent and observant. To up the stress, I was making Lori cook for us, in my kitchen. I had predicted she would be a walking kitchen disaster, a la Haggerty, but she wasn’t. Turned out she often took midnight cooking shifts. “We’re a household of artists, intellectual malcontents and starry eyed dreamers, wedded to idealistic and excessively individualistic philosophies, barely led by a pathetic dominated Focus. We’re no threat at all. We’ll even take in some of your useless troublemaking Transforms, Focus X.” Lori laughed, and stuck the mushroom-stuffed rolled roast into the oven. “We don’t advertise the fact Inferno’s an army, our household is as disciplined as a Dictator Focus’s household, or the fact I spend most of my time researching practical aspects of Transform life.”

  I shook my head. “Your household reeks of pseudo-intellectual bullshit.” I found the wrongly-named ‘apocalypse clock’ of theirs the worst, but it was only one of many.

  Lori plucked my objection out of my head as she began to work on a Béarnaise sauce. “That’s Dr. Bob’s influence; he built and named the apocalypse clock, and he’s into elaborate puns.” I didn’t respond, but did look over her shoulder at her saucemaking, excessively predatory. She stirred nervously as I watched. “He knows full well the dual meaning of the word ‘apocalypse’, ma’am. Not only does the apocalypse point represent the moment in time where induced transformations become unstoppable and threaten disaster, it also represents the last point in time where we would be able to reveal the true capabilities of the Transforms and Major Transforms to the public in time to give us a chance to stave off the fall of civilization.” Okay, they weren’t poseurs, they were being dicks.

  “It’s stupid to mislead your allies and keep secrets from them, Focus,” Keaton said, echoing my thoughts on the subject.

  “I apologize, ma’am,” Lori said. “You’re right, of course. We in Inferno are still adjusting to the idea we have allies.”

  Lori thought she was dark. We went down her list of criminalities. She had never killed a human in cold blood. She had killed Monsters by the score (someday I had to hear those stories!), and like Tonya she had picked up an innate resistance to the Arm predator from the experience. Not enough to resist two of us, though. She had killed a household Transform whose mind had broken and attacked her, she had killed a clinic Transform who went into withdrawal psychoses during the tagging process (he attacked her). She had killed a guard in my rescue, but this was because he was about to shoot her and the others in the group. And there was what she did to Focus Katie Anderson and her Transforms, another act of self-defense. Oh, how the other Focuses were going to fear her and despise her! She worried so, even for using her Focus capabilities to defend herself.

  “To earn enough of our respect to be our leader, you’re going to have to do better,” I said. “You’re an ice queen, Focus. You’re a passionless eunuch.”

  “Not when Crows are around, ma’am.”

  Slap. “I was getting to that. When there are Crows around, you’re shameless. You’d sleep with any Crow who walked across your doorstep, I’ll bet.”

  “So?” Slap. She had gotten a lot more defiant in the psychological sessions than she had been when we started.

  “You’re inconsistent. Everyone you deal with, you deal with inconsistently. The net effect is to make nearly everyone pissed off at you. This is as hard on you as it is on those you’re linked to. Consider Zielinski. How long did you know him before you realized he preferred to go by ‘Hank’?”

  She wept for the first time. She had never before seen herself from the outside and she didn’t like what she was seeing. “I offered him shelter, but ended up chasing him out of my house by treating him as any other normal, ma’am. Just another researcher.”

  “Right. Like Eleanor Roosevelt was just another president’s wife,” Keaton said. “Can’t you do anything right? Are you as inept as you look?”

  “I’m an academic! I…”

  “Mere academics can’t wave their hands and kill Focuses and Transforms. You realize, Focus, that you’ve killed more Focuses and tagged Transforms than us two mass murdering Arms? Combined?”

  More yowling from Lori. The truth hurt. Literally.

  “What are you doing?” Lori said, panic seeping into her voice again. Still naked, but now with a kitchen knife in her hands. With her feet hobbled by chains.

  Keaton picked Lori up, and walked (hopped) her through a cabana doorway, to where Keaton had our murderous serial rapist chained to the ceiling. Keaton let out the chains, releasing him to kneel piteously on the floor. He sobbed and begged. He had burn marks over much of his body, and numerous wounds too brutal to describe. A recently humbled student Arm Bass had been playing with him, and had managed not to kill him – Bass definitely had promise as a top-notch interrogator. Keaton and I went back to the doorway.

  “Kill him, Lori. In cold blood. Understand murder for once,” Keaton said. “You can see him for what he is. Watch his reactions. Serial rapist. Occasional murderer. Accountant. Notice the lack of reaction to ‘accountant’. He isn’t an accountant.”

  “Kill him with the juice attack,” I said. “Or your knife. Your choice.”

  She dropped the knife, put her head in her hands and sobbed.

  I walked forward, whispered in her ear. “I’ll loosen the chains some more on this guy. Look at his dick. Long and twisted. You aren’t going anywhere. Kill him. Or don’t and as punishment for disobeying an order, we’ll let him rape you – and then it will be too late to kill him, because we won’t let you stop him.”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you think the first Focuses won’t be able to see this weakness in you, and exploit it? ‘Oh, she can’t kill in cold blood, not even those who clearly deserve to die’.” I paused, mocking. “Or don’t you trust the Transform point of view on death.”

  “My baby is still in its first trimester, ma’am. The level of juice use she’s already seen is far too dangerous; anything more excessive will likely make her into a Monster. I’ll have to abort. That’s murder. Murder of an innocent. I pledged to not murder again.” Keaton and I had pushed Lori to the edge of madness, and insanity filled her voice. As with Tom, we had to unfreeze her before we could change her.

  “No. Untake your pledge. Otherwise, we might as well surrender to the first Focuses.”

  “What are our limits, ma’am? As Transforms?”

  “We decide.”

  Lori sighed. “I like killing, ma’am. I like the power.”

  “So do I, Focus.”

  “I’ll make a terrible world empress.”

  “You won’t get to be world empress working by yourself, and all your friends like the killing and the power, as well,” I said. “Even Tonya. We aren’t the good guys in white hats. Not yet, perhaps not ever. We’re the better guys.” Quoting Keaton. “You know what Tonya had to do to herself to get on the Council.” She killed herself. Twice.

  She nodded. “Toughening me up is the same thing the first Focuses were doing to Tonya and Polly.”

  “No,” Keaton said. “They were breaking them. The first Focuses took Tonya and Polly apart to see who they were, broke them according to their own twisted specifications, and left them broken. The scars are evident on both of them, years later.”

  “That’s just tactic
s and strategy, though, their means to their end,” I said. “The first Focuses real evil is in turning their backs on the Transform community.”

  “We aren’t breaking you, Focus,” Keaton said. “We are punishing you as you wish to be punished. We’re disciplining you as you need to be disciplined.” And toughening her up, as she had intimated. Keaton and I knew what it took to make the tough decisions. An Arm who couldn’t make tough decisions couldn’t survive. Lori wasn’t getting everything – she hadn’t started out as an ambulatory hunger for juice as an Arm did – but she wouldn’t be lying to herself any more. At least not anywhere near as much.

  “I may already be broken, the same as Tonya and Polly,” Lori said, eyeing the normal man. Keaton signaled for her to elaborate. “During the incident where Focus Schrum did the withdrawal scarring, Focus Adkins, I believe, changed my supplemental juice into Monster juice. They were trying to destroy me as a Focus, and it almost worked, save that Occum and I came up with a fix. That’s where I picked up my blood lust, ma’am.”

  “You might consider what you have as ‘blood lust’, but from my perspective, an Arm’s perspective, you’re just a bit temperamental,” Keaton said, and laughed. “An Arm must control far worse, and be willing to act on it against a necessary target, without going berserk and killing everyone in the area.”

  Lori paused and thought, her eyes fixed on our serial rapist. I wondered if we would need to let Lori go on a killing spree, to get her awakened urges out of her system, the same way all of us Arms – including Haggerty – had needed. Knowing Lori’s proclivities, Boston’s supply of serial rapists might soon end up well depleted.

  “You’re saying I will likely have to kill, or order the deaths of the first Focuses, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What if I like killing too much? I think, ma’am, I already do.”