All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Two) Page 18

  I went back to my thoughts, enjoying the situation far too much. Being an Arm taught me to kill. Being an Arm made me enjoy it. Did being an Arm make me a predator? Did being an Arm make me this much of a predator? I hadn’t been like this in the Detention Center, but I had become a much harder and nastier person since my transformation. Why? Because I was an Arm? Because I was lonely, hungry, and in pain?

  Or did I become lonely, hungry, and in pain because I was an Arm?

  I didn’t understand what emotions coursed through me. I didn’t know what Keaton had done to me, and how much of what she did to me made me as I was now. Right now, I liked what I had become. Loosing my temper felt right.

  I reached over. The man screamed through his gag. He tried to turn his hands away from me, but I moved too fast. I broke a third finger. I nearly vomited and orgasmed and figuratively levitated after what I did.

  Overcome by the intense emotions racing through me, I got up and walked away. I managed to get halfway back to the partitions.

  I stopped, unable to leave this alone. I needed to understand what I was. What crazy shit ran through my mind. What I did here. I turned back to the man.

  He whimpered piteously.

  I crouched back down by the man and watched him. He cringed when I came close.

  I could do anything I wanted to with him. Wasn’t that wrong? Sinful? Hurting people was wrong. Or so I remembered, and believed.

  My belief didn’t make sense. I was stronger. He was in my control. He was mine. Keaton said so. Why shouldn’t I do whatever I wanted? That’s what mine was all about. “The prisoner is yours,” Keaton’s voice echoed in my mind.

  Mine!

  I found myself shaking again, at an intense and pleasurable release triggered by the mine emotion. I hugged my knees and rocked back and forth and watched the man. I wanted to understand. What was this release? I had been searching so long for what it meant to be an Arm, but I had never found it before. Until now, experiencing this overwhelming feeling of ownership.

  Ownership is an emotion normal people don’t have. The word ‘ownership’ didn’t do this new emotion justice. Having him be mine satisfied a need, a hunger, a prerequisite I hadn’t known existed. Mine tasted a bit like a sizzling steak, smelled like sex, and caressed the skin like the finest silk…and led me to the crux of the matter I faced.

  Decent people don’t own people like this.

  Decent people don’t do things like this.

  Decent people are kind and considerate.

  Decent people don’t get in trouble with the law.

  Decent people don’t hunt human beings.

  Decent people don’t torture people.

  Decent people lived by the rules and don’t disturb other people’s lives.

  Well, I hadn’t been a ‘decent person’ for a very long time. Transforms died, so I might live. I made my choice when I didn’t commit suicide in the Detention Center. Inevitably, my choice led me here.

  I was an Arm. Ownership, the feeling of mine, was pure Arm, perhaps the heart of being an Arm. Being an Arm also led me here.

  So…all those rules, all those mothers, grandmothers and preachers saying ‘should’ and ‘ought to’…they weren’t relevant to me. I didn’t have to obey any of them if I didn’t want to.

  I laughed. I was free! I was something else!

  I was the Beast.

  Keaton bowed to me because I killed our last toy without remorse, even if I just followed her orders. The chance to do this without being ordered was her reward, and I would not turn her down.

  I didn’t have to obey normal human rules or respect normal human ideas of sin. I didn’t have to be Carol Hancock the suburban housewife. The Library Volunteers would have to get along without me. Nobody would punish me who didn’t already want to punish me.

  I laughed again. I felt like I had broken free of some invisible cage, for the first time ever. The worn out shell of the old Carol Hancock finally sloughed away. I didn’t care. Nothing remained of her but self-delusion, anyway.

  I am the Beast.

  I looked again at the man in front of me. I would be as cruel to him as I wanted. An intense wave of emotion came over me again…and this time I let myself admit what I felt: the lust of possession. This was my time, no one else’s. My breath caught in my throat as I moved my hand toward the man again, slowly. I smiled at his reaction, at the pleasure streaming through my loins, and I made my hand move ever more slowly, slow enough for him to appreciate my actions all the way down to the depths of his soul.

  Seven and a half months after my transformation into an Arm, I claimed the abyss and made the abyss mine. I spent a long cruel time with this man. I uncaged the Beast, let the Beast engulf me, let the Beast become me.

  When I finished, all conscience fled, I was whole.

  Keaton came back in the small hours of the morning, carrying a ski mask, a large supply of money and the arrogance of an Arm on her shoulders. She found me crouched on the floor next to the ruined body of the man.

  I fell to my knees when she came in. Some remnant of me still expected punishment for my deeds. For my fulfillment. Keaton ignored my fears. She came over to the dead body and walked around it, looking at it from all sides. She prodded the corpse with her foot.

  “Did you enjoy yourself?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Keaton made a satisfied sound. “Finally. Perhaps there’s hope for you, after all.”

  I grunted.

  “Get rid of the body,” she told me. “Clean up this mess. You have a workout to do and you owe me breakfast.”

  I did a different workout this morning. Not physically. I did the same exercises. Keaton still beat me at the end. The workout differed because of my changes. Why? For the first time, Keaton’s actions made sense.

  No, I hadn’t become masochistic.

  I did, though, finally understand. If I claimed the right to hurt someone just because I could, why shouldn’t Keaton claim the same right? She had power over me. She did whatever she wanted to with me.

  Before, though, I considered her cruelty horrible and unfair and unjust. I thought of myself as an innocent victim. I thought of Keaton as incomprehensible and inhuman, her teaching methods incompetent.

  Incomprehensible no longer. I understood how she taught. She was no more inhuman than I was.

  The new outlook helped. Because I understood, I no longer had any reason to drown in panic and self-pity. Understanding freed my mind to think, to cope with an unpleasant but necessary situation. I knew Keaton’s juice level, I understood her expectations, and thus I could predict how much she would hurt me.

  The goal wasn’t to please Keaton, but to please me. Me. Me!

  “So you believe that in the last day you’ve completely and permanently changed into someone different?” Keaton said, after lunch. Her voice mocked me. My palms sweated and my heart pounded. Her intense personal grilling, where even the slightest slip would cost me hours of pain, was a legitimate danger.

  “I’ve been changing for a long time,” I said, quiet and humble. “Last night I finally recognized my changes.”

  She was silent. She waited for me to say more.

  “I started changing the first time I killed someone on my own.” My first successful hunt for juice. “Killing was an accomplishment, but the accomplishment shamed me. Killing was…I don’t know. Even though I didn’t understand at the time, something changed.” Keaton’s eyes narrowed and I stopped.

  I needed to pull myself together. I took a deep breath and tried again. “I don’t understand why I changed, ma’am. I think the change came from the pleasure of the kill. The freedom of being able to kill. I think the change may also have something to do with hunting. I’ve grown used to doing the things I need to in a hunt to make a hunt successful, none of which would have been acceptable in my former life. Also,” this last item was dangerous, but I knew better than to hold back, “I think this might be related to the amount of abuse I’ve been sub
ject to myself, ma’am.”

  Keaton looked at me and leaned back in her chair. Sweat ran down my sides, under my shirt. She grunted, finally, and said, “You’re going far away from here, to…” she paused only a moment, “…California. Do whatever you please. Kill whomever you want to. Torture whomever you want to. Just get this out of your system. I had to. So will you. Find out what your limits are. Find out what you enjoy. Find out what you don’t care for. Just try not to get yourself killed, and,” Keaton’s eyes flashed hot, “don’t bring anybody on your tail when you come back! Do this right, Hancock, and I’ll teach you what you quaintly refer to as my mind reading trick. You have a week.”

  Something had changed in Keaton’s attitude toward me. I didn’t understand what, or why. I left, poring through my memories, trying to decide.

  On the plane flight to California, I figured out the change. This was the first time Keaton had called me by my name in months.

  (19)

  Oh, I loved California. I loved California men, California Transforms, and especially California sports cars with their putative owners dead in the trunk. Free and whole, I had an entire week ahead of me to do nothing more than figure out what I enjoyed. I laughed for the sheer pleasure of laughing. I loved the people and the cars. For now, I owned an entire city, and they were all my prey.

  I drove down Rodeo Drive and smiled, looking for my next target, my next toy.

  I killed people outright. I tortured them to death. I spent hours one evening stalking a man, simply to figure out how terrified I could make him. I maimed people and let them live. I maimed people and left them to die. I found a couple in a small suburban home, broke their arms and legs, and set the house on fire with them inside. I listened to them scream. I committed robbery and muggings and destruction for the pure joy of it. I discovered how a woman can rape a man, for a woman to squint through the eyes of the worst male serial rapist-killers. To experience their motivations and pleasures.

  I let my temper out as I never did before. I couldn’t believe how much I wanted to hurt people. I had been so filled with anger at the world for Transform Sickness, for what I suffered in the Detention Center, anger at my worthless family, anger for my enslavement by Keaton…and I let it all out.

  The power I possessed! The freedom. The warm, dangerous, predatory glow.

  I had a wonderful time.

  I learned a few things about myself. Pure physical destruction for its own sake didn’t give me a thrill. I didn’t particularly enjoy hurting children. A child was anyone aged about twelve or under. The fact that twelve was the age of my daughter Sarah when I last saw her alive didn’t escape me. Thirteen was fine, either sex.

  On the other hand, I discovered I liked to hurt adults. More even than the physical damage, I liked to play with their minds. To control a person, to take their mind in my hand and twist it, to break it, to make them into an entirely different person – all because, for a few minutes, I dropped into their life. This gave me a profound, lingering, sensual pleasure. I still love these games. One of the pleasures in life is to find a person’s tender spots, and by some simple action, or the right words, insert myself under his defenses and plant the seeds of pain, or fear, or madness. Just the right words, at just the right time, can eat at a person, twist them, consume them. Those right words and right time were difficult to find, but when I did, the pleasure was indescribable.

  I learned what I liked in bed. It wasn’t a wholesome set of preferences. What I liked in bed isn’t even legal to show in a porno movie.

  I figured out something else during my destructive rampage. Two days in, I stopped at a grocery store to buy some food to snack on in the car. The store was a busy place, with not enough cashiers and a few long lines. I stood at the end of one line and glared at the person in front of me. I daydreamed as I stood there, thinking of the different ways I could kill her. I thought of how I could hurt her, and what she would look like on the ground, screaming and begging for her life.

  The woman glanced back at me, shifted uncomfortably, and took her cart and stood in a different line.

  The woman ahead of her turned when the first woman moved. I smiled at her, not a good smile. The woman paled, and she, too, moved to a different line.

  Four women stood in line ahead of me, and, one by one, every single one of them moved to a different line.

  The face of the cashier behind the register paled when I approached. She addressed me repeatedly as ‘ma’am’ as she rang up my groceries. I think she expected me to rob her. She was surprised when I handed her money.

  I doubted those women even knew what they reacted to, but I had a good suspicion. I knew Keaton at her most predatory, and people reacted to her just like that.

  I was a predator, without question. I was a predator and all humanity was my prey.

  I lay naked on the bed in the hotel room and smiled. I couldn’t remember being so purely happy ever before in my life.

  I didn’t hate myself. Ever since becoming an Arm, I had hated myself. I despised my cruelty, my sexuality, my uncertain temper. Now, I accepted all of these, and inside me, my perspective changed. I was a predator, a killer, cruel, lustful, and dangerous. I was all of a piece, now, not some helpless victim trying to deny myself.

  I probed mentally for the reflexive guilt. Given all the things I had done this week, I should have felt some remnant of guilt. I should have experienced some twinge of concern for the people whose lives I ruined.

  Nothing. I couldn’t think of those people as anything other than prey. I loved to prey upon them. I needed it. Sometimes the feeling got so intense I shook.

  I expected the rest of my life to be short and bloody. I no longer cared.

  I knew hell awaited me. I no longer cared.

  I finally knew myself. I no longer cared.

  I glanced fondly at the body beside me. He had been good. I had enjoyed every minute of his death.

  He made a mess now, though. The blood pooled in the sheets, and soaked through into the mattress, and spread into a puddle beneath me as well. I ignored it. I already bathed in his blood.

  So did the room. Blood spattered all the walls, and parts of the ceiling. The maid would be in for one hell of a shock when she came in to clean in the morning. That thought made me smile as well.

  However, I needed to get up. I pulled myself loose of the sticky sheets and went off to the shower. Life was good.

  I wondered at the change in myself. I stood in the shower under the warm water, scrubbed myself free of the blood and marveled at my changes. I kept picking at them in my mind, trying to understand the new me.

  On one level, I understood. I had accepted who I was, allowed myself to become the terrible predatory monster trapped within me. However, my acceptance didn’t answer the question of ‘why?’

  I tried to blame the change on my transformation. I tried to blame it on Keaton. The blame didn’t stick. I finally boiled it down to something simple and direct:

  I’m Carol Hancock, and I’m an Arm.

  I finished my shower, toweled myself dry and checked myself in the mirror to verify I was clean of all the blood. I ignored the gross, over-muscled parody of a woman in the mirror. I remained amazed that men would be willing to sleep with something like me. Still, I doubted they noticed my muscles when I stalked them. I overwhelmed them with sheer sexual presence.

  I smiled again and remembered the bloody mark Keaton put on my stomach so long ago. The mark remained in my mind, only now, I decided to think of the bloody mark as a larger thing, grown to cover me, covering every square inch of me.

  The blood of the people I murdered.

  I laughed at the image and picked up my clothes from where I had laid them on the counter, safely away from the blood. It was time for me to go out and be an Arm again.

  I’m Carol Hancock, and I’m an Arm. I’m also a monster, just as the authorities feared.

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

&n
bsp; by Dr. Henry Zielinski

  Hank turned over the last memoir page and sighed. Day had turned to night and the weather had cleared, allowing the city lights of downtown Chicago to shine through his exterior office windows.

  “Nice sigh,” Carol said. He thought she had left, but there she was, sitting in his office’s visitor’s chair. “Good upchuck control as well. You did turn green several times near the end.” She wore the same clothes as before, but he did notice several dark red spots on the lower right side of her dress. He guessed someone had needed chastising, Arm style.

  Hank nodded. “If you’re wondering, no, this section of your memoirs didn’t change the way I think of you. I am more than a little disappointed in Stacy’s behavior, though. From my own experiences with her sadistic outbursts, I would have never predicted her pettiness with you.”

  “Two Arms forced together, without the proper juice connections?” Carol laughed. “You’ll get petty every time, if not worse.” She rubbed her temples, a tell he associated with her examining an exasperating memory. “I’d like to say we’re all past the bouts of petty sadism, but we aren’t. Us Arms are covered with a thin patina of civilization, even under the best of circumstances. We’re warriors and predators, Hank, and we don’t get the size advantages our brother warrior predators get. We can’t afford to be overly civilized.”

  “I will remain optimistic and will agree with your statement if only you append a ‘yet’ on the end of it,” Hank said. Carol glared at him, annoyed at the overly pedantic nature of his comment. “You Major Transforms are still diving headlong into the new and unknown.”

  “Damn straight,” Carol said, patting her bulging abdomen. “If only ‘diving into the new and unknown’ didn’t have such a bad track record for leaving behind broken, ruined or dead Major Transforms, I would feel a lot better.”