All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Two) Page 13

  I didn’t plan on being in Buffalo anywhere near long enough for the corpse to stink.

  My dress and coat were blood-spattered and grimy from the ‘office’, but Keaton was no fool. I wore a dark red dress under a black coat, on her orders. The workroom had a water faucet with a four foot hose attached, and I used the hose to daub off the blood and wash up as best as possible.

  I had another dress and coat in my duffel in the car, yet another of Keaton’s contingency plans. Getting to the car, though? Necessary, but difficult. My current attire wouldn’t hold up to close inspection. At least I was in the basement, not somewhere up in office territory. I only had to navigate the ground floor before I got out of here.

  Metasense doesn’t pick up normals, but I had another enhanced sense that would, my hearing. I crept out, waiting until I heard no one nearby. I rushed up the stairwell and found, front of me, a goddamned fire exit.

  “Dumb move, dipshit,” Keaton said, though she wasn’t there. Her intense training and her propensity to give me pain when I didn’t measure up had put her into my mind. I suspected I would be hearing Keaton’s voice in my head for the rest of my life.

  Fire exits triggered alarms, and alarms would bring security guards, firemen and police; Pot Belly’s corpse would most likely be found. I couldn’t take the fire exit. Instead, I went past it and exited to the first floor when the area cleared. I hustled to the front door and out. Nobody even turned my way. I had timed it perfectly.

  There were times that I loved being an Arm, and this was one of them.

  Back at the car, I shook. You were supposed to avoid fights in a juice hunt, but occasional failures in this area were to be expected. Keaton’s juice hunt fights had made her reputation as the spree-killing Antichrist.

  The other reason I shook was my need for juice, and fighting used up juice, one of Keaton’s first lessons. I got in the car and started it, found a quiet back alley and changed clothes.

  Back to the hunt.

  The rest of the afternoon my mind ran on automatic pilot, following the search pattern and ignoring my injuries. Yes, injuries. I didn’t notice them until much later, when the battle lust and adrenaline wore off. The Buffalo snow machine started again, reducing visibility to about two blocks, good cover for my low speed cruising hunt. As long as no one spotted the fact I drove with the windows open to keep my metasense sharp, that is.

  While I drove, I thought of prey Transforms, my juice monkey dominating my mind. I ran through Keaton’s training in my head, trying to distract myself from the need. I went through all of her lessons, using my enhanced Arm memory, starting with weapons and ending with how to have a bad attitude. She hadn’t taught me how to rob a bank, how to fight through a cordon of FBI or police, or why she made so many damned phone calls.

  I still had a lot to learn.

  I drove by the Transform, lost in my reverie, before I realized what I metasensed. I even had the car parked in an alley and was out, armed and dangerous and with my hunting kit in my hands, in the cold and snow, before I stopped and realized that, yes, this Transform didn’t wear a Focus’s tag pattern.

  “Stop. Think. Follow your plan!”

  Keaton’s memory voice tailed off and I began to think. My Transform, a woman, lived in a run-down residential neighborhood. Privacy? I needed to extract my prey from her house. With a woman, I should be able to do that without a weapon. Disposal? I needed to get her into my car and take her somewhere where I could drain her and not be bothered. I had been around the city enough to spot several quiet alleys, and I picked one out as a likely place to use. Diaphragm? Stupid sounding, yes, but once I got my juice I knew I would be too horny to remember.

  I took a deep breath and started to trudge through the snow, my plan in my head. This was it.

  I crouched among the snow-covered bushes in the back yard of the tiny house and focused on my metasense. The woman Transform still wore no Focus tag. The kill lust washed over me in a wave and I shivered in anticipation. I needed her juice and I was so close, so tantalizingly close. My right arm twitched from one of Potbelly’s blows. I ignored the pain.

  A branch from the bush I crouched under shivered with me and dumped a cascade of snow down the back of my neck. I brushed it away and brought my attention back to the real world. I couldn’t afford to lose myself in my glorious beautiful prey.

  Her house was in a colored neighborhood on the north side of Buffalo, a neighborhood of narrow houses built around the turn of the century, tiny yards enclosed by chain link fences. I would stand out dramatically here, except that I was lucky; because of the weather no one in their right mind was out of doors. If I stayed careful, no one would see me.

  The snow had let up and the weather was back to being cold and gray, spiced by the occasional lonely snowflake falling from the sky. No longer normal, the cold didn’t bother me.

  The woman in the house moved slowly, as if she was dead tired or her body hurt her. Those were signs of a Transform with a high juice count, possibly a Transform close to going Monster. I suspected I might be about to get myself a lot of juice.

  I closed my mouth when I realized I panted like a dog.

  Except for this house, there wasn’t any sign of other people nearby. The woman in the house sat down, exhausted, holding what sounded like a crying baby in her arms.

  Time to move.

  I slipped to the back door of the house, moving like a ghost. The door was locked, but the lock was cheap. The thin strip of metal from my hunting kit popped it in an instant. I found myself in a tiny kitchen, barely wide enough for one person to pass through. Worn linoleum peeled back at the edges and faded paint covered the three small cabinets. The Transform sat in the living room, less than fifteen feet away. I approached, focused on my hunt with an inhuman intensity of concentration.

  “Mama!” The voice of a small child in the living room. The crash of a small table falling over followed.

  “That’s enough o’ yo’ misbehavin’, girl,” a woman said. The kill lust washed over me as I sensed my juice, my kill, stand up and haul her daughter off by the wrist. I eased back out of sight as the woman, the child, and the crying baby in her arms all passed by the entrance of the kitchen on the way to the stairs.

  Children. Damn. Keaton expected me to kill children, when necessary. Human morality didn’t apply to Arms, or so she said. I was too damned squeamish, a weakness likely to get me killed.

  Right now, in the grip of the driving desire for juice, I was tempted. Kill the children, kill the mother, make the bodies of all three disappear. All so easy.

  Memories of my own daughter surfaced, though. I had killed her, unknowing, during my Arm transformation. I wouldn’t kill some other woman’s daughter, not this way. The obvious symmetry occurred to me and I smiled: this woman would go Monster soon and likely kill her daughters herself. If I killed the woman for her juice before that happened, I would be paying the woman for her life with the lives of her children.

  “An’ you stay there until I say you can come down.” A door slammed, and the woman clomped slowly down the stairs. The baby in her arms still screamed. I pulled myself out of the grip of my kill lust enough to recognize the odor of a dirty diaper. The woman collapsed back on the couch, shivering and crying as if the exercise with her daughter had cost her the last bit of energy she possessed. I checked her again and verified the lack of a Focus tag.

  I took a short detour on my way into the living room, long enough to make my way up the narrow stairs and jam the door of the bedroom at the top. Behind the door, I heard furious cries. “Mama, I wanna come downstairs! Mama!”

  I smiled as I eased my way back down the stairs. The child wouldn’t attract attention from the neighbors; no child could scream like that without plenty of practice.

  The woman sat miserably on the frayed couch with her crying baby in her arms, unaware of my presence. In a motion too fast for her to see, I took the baby from her arms. She looked up in shock, into the open mouth of my p
istol, only inches from her nose.

  I bellowed, so she could hear me over the screams of her child. “You’ll do exactly what I tell you, won’t you?”

  My Transform, my draw, my juice nodded, sad eyed.

  I fell back into consciousness, unwillingly deposited on the gloomy shores of reality, exiled again from the ecstatic heaven of the juice draw.

  Oh, God, it had been wonderful. The first tingle of pleasure, like the first sip of ambrosia as I started the draw. The waves of ecstasy as the juice came flooding in, overwhelming my senses, stunning my mind. Orgasm, paradise, euphoria. I lost myself in a sea of pleasure and the waves of juice kept coming. I whirled, I drowned, I lost everything but the sensational delight. Lightning shot through my mind, pleasure so intense it was shocking. Even when the draw ended, the pleasure ran through me like echoes bouncing endlessly off the walls of my mind.

  The waves of pleasure faded at last, as all things must. I came enough to myself to remember I was out in the open with a dead body in my arms, and if the authorities found me, they would shoot me on the spot. Reluctantly, regretting the lost wonder of the kill, I let go of my remaining fragment of heaven and let myself slide back into the unwelcome grasp of reality.

  Lust!

  Always the same. Full to overflowing with juice, I was so horny I could pop. I needed to hide the body of my kill and find some man ready for several hours of intense sex.

  Fortunately, men like that weren’t usually too hard to come by.

  I looked around and tried to remember where I was and how I got here. The dirty brick wall of the Lovely Lady Massage Parlor and Modeling Studio loomed inches from the driver’s side door of the car. The narrow and filthy alley remained empty of people. I was safe.

  My kill and I were both jammed in the front seat of my stolen vehicle, and her smooth brown skin already started to cool. I glanced at my watch. I had been out for two hours. A big improvement over my clinic days, when a kill would send me under for more than six hours, but not close to the half-hour Keaton expected of me. I shivered when I thought of Keaton, and quickly turned my mind back to more immediate concerns. I had a body to dispose of and a man to find.

  Heh. I had executed my own hunt, and found my own kill. Again. Maybe I would live to be an old Arm, after all.

  But right now I needed a man.

  You know, at 11:00 on a Monday morning, it’s damned hard to find a man to sleep with. I finally found a cheap hotel, and went after the man behind the counter. It wasn’t a good fit; he wasn’t overwhelmed by passion at my mere presence. On the other hand, I was an opportunity. That was enough for him.

  After I wore the man out, I came down with a bad case of the shakes. Keaton. I needed to return to her, and I didn’t know if she tailed me this time. I needed a plan.

  I always needed a plan.

  Even I suspected, even this early on, that my post-kill plans always turned out to be a teensy bit off.

  No, no matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn’t telekinese the snow.

  I stood in the back lot of the deserted factory and fumed. My idea had been such a good one: since I knew Keaton knew how to read minds, I figured I should be able to figure out what sort of similar supernatural tricks I possessed. I already knew I couldn’t read minds.

  I tried telekinesis, fire summoning, flying, going invisible, demon summoning, body stretching, and all the other obscure supernatural tricks I knew of from reading my kids comic books (just to make sure they weren’t reading smut) and from all the Twilight Zone episodes I had suffered through at the behest of my former husband. Nothing. Nada. Not even the smallest hint I might be able to do anything supernatural, other than what I already knew about, my metasense, my muscle growth and my fast healing. Annoyed, I made a snowball and tossed it unerringly through a broken factory window fifty feet away. I had absolutely nothing new to take to Keaton. Nothing to appease her.

  I gave up in disgust, stalked over to a nearby coffee shop, where I spent the next few hours eating and sipping coffee, trying to figure out how to appease her in a more mundane fashion. The best idea I managed to come up with was abject meekness combined with a good grovel.

  The thought of running never crossed my mind.

  ---

  Keaton had secured us a room at a local Howard Johnson’s. It took me a good ten minutes, sitting in my cold car a quarter mile away, before I gathered the nerve to come in. I hoped she had not followed me on my hunt; the last time she did, her own kill lust had kicked in, followed by an irrational fury that I had taken something she felt should have been hers. I didn’t want to ever repeat that episode.

  I came in anyway. I didn’t have a choice.

  She sat in the cheap motel plastic chair reading Soldier of Fortune, surrounded by two empty bags of chips, five candy bar wrappers (Snickers), and the scattered remains of three different newspapers (Buffalo Evening News, Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Wall Street Journal). She watched the door as I came in, with those hard, flat eyes of hers, as usual showing no signs of humanity. I hit the floor as soon as the door shut behind me. Down on my knees first, I next pressed my face against the sticky motel carpet.

  My shoulders itched with nerves, but the knife didn’t come down. So far, so good.

  Sweat beaded along my sides. I crept closer and laid my mouth against her shoes. Men’s shoes, black leather. Off to the side, just inches from my face, I saw a row of sacks. They held money, or so I smelled. She had done a different kind of hunting today, it seemed.

  She made no sound. She didn’t kick me in the face. I breathed a tiny and well hidden sigh of relief, reassured that she was sane right now, at least as sane as Keaton ever got. No psychotic episode like the last time seemed to be in the offing.

  I proceeded to the next logical step and licked her shoes. She let me. She even laid her hand on my head, and I breathed a real sigh of relief. I also finished the job at hand.

  “Get up,” she said.

  I stood, carefully relaxed and humble, eyes down.

  “Start at the beginning and give me the whole story.”

  I stood at attention and gave it to her, with crisp efficiency and no emotion. Beads of sweat continued to drip down my sides. After I finished, she started on the questioning. She circled me, interrupting my answers, picking holes in my hunting strategy. She called me a fucking asshole too weak to control my own kill lust, a stupid cow with no sense of tactics, a dead body waiting to happen, a fucking moron, and quite a few other things.

  Sweat soaked through the back of my shirt, but I didn’t lose control, and I kept answering questions.

  “The reason you’re so shaky is because you’re well over your juice optimum, which is going to give us weeks of time for training,” Keaton said. She carried an old beat up juice meter in our luggage, and she plugged it in and took a sample of my blood. “This piece of fucking shit says your juice count is between 140 and 142.5, something else you’re going to have to get used to. According to the Doc,” Zielinski “an Arm should go Monster somewhere not too far above 155. You would if you took another kill.”

  I thought about what she said, took stock in myself, and shuddered in disbelief. “Ma’am? This is amazing. I don’t seem to have any juice lust right now.” I could talk about juice without the craving, a new experience for me.

  “Too much juice can mess up your mind nearly as much as low juice. However, scag, Arms have powerful instincts,” Keaton said. “Some of them are stupid beyond belief, while others will save your life. You need to experience them all so you know which ones are which.” She grabbed my hair and met my eyes. “So stop thinking the two of us are useless drug addicts addicted to juice. We’re more than that.”

  “Ma’am,” I said.

  Thank God for high juice. I don’t think I could have managed the ‘Ma’am’ if I had been down on juice.

  In the end, she grunted “Go take a nap” and let me be, Keaton’s version of ‘you did a good job’.

  As always, I tried to
come up with a new plan for handling Keaton after my kill. To some extent, my earlier plans worked. If I did what Keaton wanted, my plans worked well. Subservience, obedience, and degradation encountered no problems from Keaton. My attempts to arrange things so I didn’t live in fear didn’t work as well. Keaton liked my fear.

  This time, to my abject horror, I couldn’t come up with anything new.

  My mind collapsed underneath me, more every day. Keaton carved my mind and soul into small pieces. The madness lurked inside of me, the monster born with my transformation, murderous and twisted, barely contained under ever-thinning skin.

  Now, for the first time, I began to fear what would happen once the buried beast got loose.

  (11)

  “Ma’am, with your permission, I’d like to go hunting early. Solo. I think I’m ready.”

  I knelt before Keaton in the warehouse. I had been good, putting my full effort into her recent lessons, which included work with shotguns and rifles, and mugging, as well as tumbling and gymnastics while on ropes and bars. Her pet doctor even said the muscle nodules in my joints were gone. I still couldn’t mimic a man’s voice, but we found that if I kept my voice at the level of a whisper, people didn’t catch on about my sex.

  “Go,” Keaton said, surprising me, no argument at all. “Hunt in the area around Philly: Wilmington, Trenton, Allentown and Atlantic City. The hunting around Christmas is lousy, but if you’re good, you should be able to find something.” I guessed she wanted me out of the warehouse as much as I did. I suspected that Keaton, like many who didn’t have families, would be depressed around Christmas, and I didn’t want to experience her psychotic depression in person. Also, I hoped for a little time to myself to deal with my own depression. Christmas alone would hurt enough as it was, without Keaton making the holidays worse.

  As Keaton predicted, the hunting was indeed lousy. Four days into the hunt I did find someone, though: a man at home with his wife. On Christmas day. When we went through the hunting scenarios, Keaton had said I would have to kill the spouse in circumstances like these. I had resisted the idea. Still, when the kill lust is on an Arm, the Arm does what she has to do.