Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) Read online

  “Yes, Dr. Peterson?”

  He slipped back a few feet when I addressed him by name, his face ashen. “These men are going to fire their weapons and kill you unless you allow us to shackle you again, Mrs. Hancock.”

  At least he knew my name.

  “I saw the shooting gallery as we drove in, Doctor. All of a sudden, I feel safer in here than out there. You wouldn’t want to puncture the gas tank shooting up some Monster, would you?” Phooey. I was making things up as I went along.

  “Monster?” the doctor said. “Where’d you get that idea, Mrs. Hancock?”

  “Why else would I be here? Why else would you treat me like this?”

  “Truthfully, Mrs. Hancock, we don’t know what’s going on. None of us has ever even heard of a Transform like you. Unfortunately, you were involved in an apparent homicide.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “When you started your transformation coma, Mrs. Hancock, you took four women with you. You killed them.” The doctor flipped through his papers. “A Mrs. Susan Holtwich.” Paper flip.

  “No,” softly. Transformation coma? Me?

  “A Mrs. Alice Winslow.” Paper flip.

  “No,” agonized, louder. Kill?

  “A Mrs. Beth Farragut.” Paper flip.

  “No,” pain, terror, agony, and louder.

  “and lastly, a Sarah Hancock, a minor, age twel…”

  “You lie!” I screamed teary agony at the top of my lungs and launched myself forward. Guns fired. I ripped the clipboard from the doctor’s hands, ran headlong out the bus door and fell to the concrete. A siren to my left screamed air raid. I got up with barely a pause and ran as fast as I could with the shackles on my legs, faster than I believed possible. Behind me, boots pounded on concrete like a herd of horses. I stopped, looked at my bare feet, and noticed a growing red pool around them.

  My blood.

  I bolted, backtracking to the ramp the bus had used. It didn’t take me long to find it or to realize the futility of escape. The authorities had set up this place for people like me, for horrid monsters who killed their own daughters and their best friends. Instead of an open ramp, I found a floor to ceiling metal mesh net blocking my way. Beyond the mesh net sat a row of steel bars; behind that, another net. I turned right and ran along the edge of the underground garage, searching for another way out.

  I started to slow, lightheaded and weak, overwhelmed by the worsening craving. I reached a corner and had to turn right again, past the shooting gallery. I could smell death there, recent death. The freshest blood on the concrete had spattered on it less than a month ago.

  I had no idea how I knew that.

  It hit me that I had no way out. I was dead. They would kill me if I didn’t bleed to death first. The people who chased me didn’t seem to care.

  I sat behind a pillar, covered in cold sweat and woozy, a narrow stream of blood slowly snaking away from me. Only the state troopers in the truck had shot at me, not the men who chased me. The men who followed me walked and ran differently, though again I had no idea how I knew that.

  I read the doctor’s paperwork. They had my name right. My husband was in custody, for striking a police officer and for four counts of involuntary manslaughter.

  That puzzled me for a moment until I worked it out. The authorities blamed Bill because he hadn’t taken me to a hospital or police station. I’d read about cases like this. I actually considered it appropriate punishment – or had.

  The paperwork listed me as “Transform, unknown variety”. I had killed my daughter along with three other women, probably while they took care of me…

  I flipped back to the first page in sudden shock. There it was: coma onset. I checked the transfer paper remanding me from the custody of the Jefferson City Jail to the St. Louis Transform Detention Center and found the date. I’d been in a coma for three days. Strange. The transformation coma that produced a Focus lasted four or five days. I’d never heard of three.

  Memories flooded back, dim memories of my couch and women caring for me. Some sort of rapture, ascension to heaven, pleasure akin to passionate love with my husband but something else. Then darkness.

  Somehow, I’d killed them all, right there and then.

  The authorities were right. I deserved to die. Transforms were monsters. I was a monster.

  I’d killed my own daughter. I must have recognized my condition. I wasn’t stupid, I knew the symptoms of the Shakes, and I knew to be on the lookout for them.

  However, the Shakes was the curse of God, punishment meted out to sinners and unbelievers. I was neither. In my pride at my sinless life, I must have denied to all that I had the Shakes.

  Well, sinless life no more, if I’d done that. I stood and almost passed out. Tossed the paperwork away. “Go ahead. Shoot,” I said through my tears. I deserved it for what I had done. For being a Transform. They didn’t shoot. “Yaaaaah!”

  I stumbled toward one of them.

  The men were not the state troopers. They were armed hospital orderlies, men with experienced eyes.

  Something hit me with the force of a jackhammer on the back of my head, and down I went.

  ---

  “Hello, Mrs. Hancock? I’m Dr. Peterson.”

  I awoke on the floor of a featureless concrete cell, right next to a six-inch grate in the floor that smelled like a neglected woman’s restroom in an east Texas highway rest stop. In a heat wave. The straightjacket and chains were gone and I wore a hospital gown. I cautiously levered myself into a sitting position.

  The voice came from a speaker set in the ceiling. “Hello. I’m hungry,” I said. It took me a few moments to remember how I got here. I was surprised I was still alive. My annoying craving hadn’t left; I now guessed I wanted juice, the strange life-chemical of Transforms I thought of as the Devil’s soft drink.

  “Now that you’re awake, let’s start out with some information.” Dr. Peterson’s tinny voice from the speaker echoed off the concrete walls. “Technically, you’re a multiple murderess. However, in my medical opinion, you haven’t harmed anyone of your own volition. Thus, if we can come to an agreement, I would like to work with you in a less confined situation. You would have a real hospital bed, receive medical care, and yes, we would feed you. You wouldn’t be tied down.”

  “I’m confined to a Transform Detention Center?” Let it all be a mistake. Please, God. Let it all be a mistake.

  “Yes,” Dr. Peterson said, dashing my hopes and prayers. “Confined for the safety of the surrounding community. Although you’re human now, things can happen quickly to those with Transform Sickness.”

  I took a deep breath and accepted the situation. “Yes, yes, I have the Shakes, if I turn Monster or am about to, you’ll shoot me. Fine. I don’t have a problem with that. Can I have some breakfast?” The horrors in Dr. Peterson’s paperwork evaporated, replaced by numbness.

  “Yes. You should know that all of us in the Transform Detention Center have signed waivers. If we’re taken hostage, the guards here will shoot to kill the person who took us hostage. If we die, so be it.”

  “Hard life.”

  “Hard life, and government hazard pay at two and a half times normal.”

  “Good for you, Dr. Peterson.”

  While I waited, I counted bullet wounds. Four, none through my torso. Five, if you counted the long red welt along my ribcage, a graze. Amazing. I must have been out for weeks to heal so much.

  The secret cell door opened to reveal five orderlies. “Mrs. Hancock? I’m going to push in a tray of food. When you finish eating it, leave it in place, and stand.”

  Looked like dinner, not breakfast, to me, but I didn’t complain. I ate it, a man’s portion, but still felt hungry afterwards. I was used to dieting to keep my figure trim and expected to be hungry after eating. The hunger normally went away after a half hour or so.

  I stood.

  “Mrs. Hancock, you’ve been approved to be a status four prisoner,” the lead orderly said
, a tall, thin man with a complexion problem. “You’ll be allowed to walk from room to room, but only when accompanied by four or more orderlies. Two will accompany you in front, two in back. You won’t be restrained.”

  “Okay.”

  “Two of us will now enter the room. Please do not move.”

  I obeyed orders and the orderlies did a complicated dance of positioning, ending up with me between the four of them. The two in front did not put their backs to me, but walked half sideways, half backing down the corridor in front of me. The orderlies pointed guns at me the entire time. They hadn’t mentioned that as part of being a status four prisoner.

  They brought me to see Dr. Peterson.

  Dr. Peterson offered me a chair and I sat. The armed orderlies boxed the room, their guns still aimed at me. The cold men with their guns seemed odd in such an ordinary office.

  “Mrs. Hancock.” Dr. Peterson said to me from behind his oversized wooden desk. “You present us with many problems.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t ask for this to happen.” To my surprise, I was already famished and wobbly. On top of my annoying craving for juice and my stiff joints, hunger made my mind feel like old molasses. It would be impolite to demand another meal so soon, so I decided to tough it out.

  “I understand,” Dr. Peterson said, laying his hands flat on the desk as if it would rise up if he didn’t hold it down. He was in his forties, with dark hair and facial stubble like Nixon. He had a round face and a solemn look of professional competence, which I might have believed more if he hadn’t been so callous in the bus.

  I’d killed my daughter Sarah. My thoughts hurt too much to face, so I turned my mind away from them.

  “As best as we can determine,” Dr. Peterson said, “you contracted Transform Sickness and started to make a Focus transformation. However, something unexpected happened soon after you slipped into a coma, while your friends and daughter were trying to call for an ambulance.”

  “Transform Sickness did something that killed two friends, a neighbor, and my daughter.” A Focus transformation induced transformations in nearby women, but didn’t affect children. Sarah must have been barely old enough.

  Phooey. I didn’t believe my own words and rationalizations.

  “Yes, that’s the right way to look at it. You’re not at fault, Mrs. Hancock, save that under the archaic laws of the state you still might be prosecuted after you’re released from the Detention Center.”

  “What can you do for me here, Dr. Peterson?” I asked.

  “You’re of course familiar with the fact,” Dr. Peterson said. He paused and brought his hands together on his desk to make a little church steeple. “That if a Focus cannot be found for a Transform, he’ll die.”

  I nodded. “Men go into withdrawal and go psychotic, women turn Monster.”

  “We can predict to within the hour, these days, when this is going to happen. A day ahead of time, the authorities take unfortunate unwanted Transforms from a Transform Clinic and ship them here. This Detention Center also deals with the aberrant cases, of which there are plenty. For instance, there are two women Transforms on the third floor who…”

  All of a sudden I knew their location. That’s what had been bothering me. I wanted them, a strange sexual arousal mixed with a deep hunger. I needed them. They could satisfy my mysterious craving.

  “Yesrightthere, Doctor,” I said, turning swiftly and pointing up. We must have been on the ground floor. “Let’s go. I need them.”

  Dr. Peterson blinked at me. “You need them?” He backed away, white as a sheet and breathing rapidly, and slowly rose to stand with his back against a window. Thin stripes of black shadow from the thick metal grate on the outside of the safety glass dappled his white lab coat. Terrified, he slid along the glass to stand next to an armed orderly.

  “I need them. Now,” I said, and hissed.

  “Mrs. Hancock,” Dr. Peterson bellowed. He gathered himself. “You have just been reassigned as a status six prisoner,” he said, with authority. “Bend forward and place your hands on the desk.”

  “Will that get me to those women?”

  “Yes, yes,” Dr. Peterson said. “Absolutely.”

  Sure. Anything to arrange a visit with those two women Transforms. I bent. They shackled me with heavy shackles. When I looked up, Dr. Peterson had left the room.

  I waited and examined my situation, suspicious of Dr. Peterson’s smooth assurance. There were little half-moons cut in the office carpeting. I had noticed them when I came in. The guards had peeled one of them up, revealing an eyebolt embedded in the concrete floor. They had shackled me to it.

  A few minutes later I felt the woman Transforms moving closer to me, arousing my desires. Then, to my appalled anger, they moved farther away. When they left the building, a couple minutes later, I howled in agony and danced around the embedded bolt, pulling furiously at my restraints. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d actually managed to break free; the armed guards watched my manic performance with cold indifference. Eventually, the women went so far away I couldn’t sense them anymore.

  I swung the chain at the floor in a futile display of anger and sat back down in the chair. I cried, furious and miserable with the loss of those two Transforms. They were mine. I needed them.

  Dr. Peterson returned and wove his way in through the guards. “Yes, now that that has been taken care of, Mrs. Hancock, where were we?” he said as he settled in behind his desk again.

  “You bastard,” I said. Hot anger. “You lied to me.”

  “I apologize, but it was necessary. You’re a Major Transform, Mrs. Hancock.”

  “You said I’d failed my Focus transformation.” I said, still livid with anger. Those Transforms had been mine!

  “You did. You’re a Major Transform, but you’re not a Focus.”

  His comment made no sense. To me, Major Transform and Focus were synonymous. Like Santa Claus and Kris Kringle. It didn’t help that my mind felt like mush.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I,” he said, and artfully raised one and only one eyebrow. His smarmy air of smug superiority galled me. I tensed. “This is outside my area of expertise. However, I have an expert flying in to deal with you who predicted you’d be…what you are. So, other than the fact that I have to keep you shackled up and that you are indeed some form of Major Transform, are there any other questions I can answer?”

  He lied. I wished I’d spotted his lies the first time. I despised doctors and their arrogance, not the least when regarding Transform Sickness. They spouted glib explanations for something far more complicated than they understood. I suspected Transform Sickness was supernatural.

  I broke down in tears as the misery hit me again. I was alone, among cold-blooded men who lied to me and thought nothing of my pain. I wanted my husband and my children. I wanted friends to care for me and my minister to pray for me. Instead, I had a lying doctor who wouldn’t even tell me what little he knew. This wasn’t the world I knew.

  None of the cold guards surrounding me would even pass me the box of tissues. They wouldn’t come that close. Eventually, Dr. Peterson tossed me his suit handkerchief. I caught it (momentary surprise) and bent my head down so I could daub my eyes with the hankie in my shackled hand.

  My weepy behavior stung my own pride. I took a deep breath and did my best to push the tears away. “I have some questions, Dr. Peterson. Where’s my husband and my family? Since it’s been a week, they should have…” I stopped as horror filled Dr. Peterson’s face.

  “Mrs. Hancock. Your coma ended a little more than two days ago. You arrived here last night around nine. You woke up today at two-thirty in the afternoon.”

  I looked at my arm and my once-mangled wrists. The bullet wounds were still red, but that was about it. “Well, whatever I am, I heal like the dickens.”

  “Yes, you do,” Dr. Peterson said. He took off his glasses and searched his pockets for a handkerchief to wipe them
with, but of course, I had it.

  “Okey dokey, I can live with that. So, what’s the status of my family?”

  “Your daughter’s funeral was three days ago. Your husband is out on bail but can’t leave Jefferson City. Your father attended the demonstration in Jefferson City, shouting ‘death to monsters’ with the rest of the Monsters Die crowd.” Monsters Die was an activist organization, like the NAACP, but instead of pushing for civil rights for colored people they wanted the Transforms eradicated or confined. “Your mother has been hospitalized in Pilot Grove with exhaustion. Your widowed mother-in-law is staying at your house, taking care…” Dr. Peterson let his voice tail off, because I’d started bawling again.

  Eventually, I stopped. “Until your specialist gets here I think I’d just prefer to be left alone,” I said. Dr. Peterson’s bedside manner repelled me. He sat up more stiffly and pushed his glasses back farther on his nose. “Do you have any of those prisoner cells with any amenities, like those fancy tin cups that prisoners get in the movies? Or am I stuck with concrete slab number six, complete with five inch grate?”

  He grimaced at my sardonic comment. “You’ll be in a locked cell, but one far nicer than you awoke in earlier.”

  I stood, moaned from a set of unexpected phantom pains in my extremities, and waited for the guards to unhook me from the floor. “Another thing. I seem to be famished. Hungry. Can I please have some extra food?”

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Peterson said. “Until our expert arrives, you’re on standard Transform rations.”

  I hadn’t expected my second floor cell to be a reinforced hospital room, single occupancy. The room had all the plugs, valves, sinks and do-hickies of a modern hospital room, plus an electric bed, a nurse call button, a pitcher of ice water, a vase with plastic flowers, and the day’s newspaper. I could hardly believe it was only Wednesday, September fourteenth. I’d probably have cards and flowers by now if I hadn’t killed all my best friends and put my family in jail. An armed orderly stood guard outside my door, which they locked. From the outside.