The Good Doctor's Tales Folio One Read online

  “The, um, Arms I’ve worked with, ma’am, get extremely hostile when their juice gets low.”

  “My juice level couldn’t have been low,” Keaton said. “I wasn’t seeing spots or shaking yet.” She still had him pinned underneath her and his bare shoulders were now as bruised as the rest of his body from the wooden floor. She hadn’t bothered to undress; she just unzipped her fly and lowered her trousers a few inches before screwing him silly.

  Hank winced. This was the first time he had held a medical consultation while stark naked and staring up at his patient. Not optimal conditions. Sweat dripped down her not particularly clean face.

  “What! Give Me The Answer,” Keaton demanded. She gave him another ‘I-am-death’ stare. He didn’t panic, now marginally used to them.

  “When I meant low juice, I meant below your optimums, whatever they are. What you were describing is the edge of withdrawal, much worse than a normal low juice situation, ma’am.”

  Keaton nodded.

  “How do I learn?”

  Shit. Should he? Keaton would kill him, regardless. Unlike the failed…Arms he worked with, she had given in to her built-in anger and violence, stripped herself of her humanity and become little more than a walking juice hunter. A juice predator, of all the damned unexpected things. Was this what all fail…Arms were supposed to be?

  Was it at all moral to help someone like this? The Focus Network, his backers, blamed Keaton for the deaths of several household Transforms. They wanted her dead.

  “Yes, of course I have several groups trying to kill me. How do I learn?”

  Would bargaining work? Not openly, Hank decided. “I have a way, a piece of medical equipment,” he said. Keaton glared at him. “Not on me.”

  “Huh.” She was still not happy he could read her. “Let’s go find this miracle of yours,” Keaton said. “After I exercise and get some food.”

  Keaton grabbed him and got into his face. “Look, you idiot, I can’t go in there! That’s a Transform Clinic!” They had been driving for two hours, to get to the nearest place Hank knew had the equipment he needed – not counting the Bakersfield Transform Research Center, of course. Their trip had taken them to the outskirts of Los Angeles, in particular, to the San Fernando Transform Clinic. About once an hour, Keaton stopped the taxi and did a short bit of stretching and exercising. Now they parked a block away from the clinic, in front of a closed corner grocery.

  “This time of the night, there shouldn’t be any Transforms around,” Hank said. “Are there?” Keaton threw him across the car, not as hard as earlier, but enough to shake him up. He knew too well how long the metasense range of a fai…an Arm was.

  “No Transforms. There are guards, though.”

  “Ma’am, I am a Doctor.” Albeit a beat up doctor with a broken nose stuffed with gauze. Would he be able to convince anyone of his bona fides? “My credentials will get me into any Transform Clinic in the country.”

  Keaton lowered her eyebrows and stared, questioning. Hank handed the Arm his FBI and CDC badges. She glanced at them and tossed them back.

  “You’re going to take me in there legit?”

  “It will work.” Trust me. I’m the arrogant doctor, remember? “You don’t much look like your wanted posters, you know.”

  Keaton glared. “I don’t trust doctors,” she said, very quietly. “Doctors are the enemy. I kill doctors!”

  Hank took a deep breath, treading into another of these I’m-dead-already-it-doesn’t-matter-what-I-say moments. “I’m a doctor, ma’am.”

  “You’re a researcher and you’d damned well better not forget it.” Exasperated, a ‘this is stupid, kill him and get it over with’ look covered her face. She momentarily winced and put her head in her hands.

  Hank waited her out.

  “Forget about what I just said,” Keaton muttered, a minute later. “Let’s do it.”

  “Rough yourself up a little to match my appearance,” Hank said. The Arm pulled out a canvas bag from the rear seat and extracted a few tools. She scruffed up her clothes and gave herself a shiner. She was a wizard with disguise makeup, her only noticeable post-human capability.

  He walked them into the Clinic, presented his credentials and spun a story about an auto accident and a male Transform who needed medical attention with his commanding Doctor voice. The guard’s gaze stayed entirely on Zielinski, as if Keaton didn’t even exist.

  “This,” Hank said, after they commandeered an examination room and he wheeled in the item in question, “Is a TI 1228 juice analyzer.” The small television-sized device had two meters and a dozen knobs, switches and buttons. Keaton frowned.

  “How is this piece of shit going to help?” Keaton asked, leaning close to Hank, dangerous.

  “It will tell you what your juice reading is. How much juice you have in you. If you take juice readings on yourself at various points in your juice cycle, you can learn to estimate your own juice numbers.”

  Keaton pulled him close to her, nose to nose again, and lifted him off the floor with one hand. Damn her strength! “I don’t know how to operate shit like this. I was a fucking housewife before my transformation, dammit!”

  “I’ll teach you, ma’am,” Hank said, attempting to fight off Keaton’s danger aura. “I’ve worked with other, um, Arms, and I’m positive you’ll be able to learn to use this.”

  “Huh.” Keaton dropped Hank, picked up the device and put it on her shoulder sack of cement style. “Let’s go.”

  What the hell? “You’re not going to just walk out of here like that, are you, ma’am?”

  “I trusted you. Now you have to trust me,” she said, and grinned at him. Again, her humanity momentarily showed through her killer mask. She grabbed the back of Hank’s collar and walked him out of the examination room, down the hallway the opposite direction from the guard, and to an emergency exit. She studied it for a moment, let go of Hank, reached up and ripped the set of wires connecting the emergency exit to the fire alarms. Snarling, she grabbed Hank again, pushed open the exit door and started walking.

  “What about your car?”

  “We’re not going out front to where the guard can see us, now are we? Besides, did you think I bought that taxi or something? I’ll just steal another.”

  “Ma’am, you are currently at 121,” Hank said. They had returned to the vacant house and Hank had the machine set up in the empty living room. He had spent the last hour going over the device, showing Keaton how to set it up and use it. What buttons to push, how to twiddle the knobs and read the meters to get a null current, and finally how to get a juice reading. “Don’t pay too much attention to the actual number. This device is primitive and its precision is to only two and a half points.”

  Keaton nodded, and took a reading on herself. This time it came out to 122. “As I said, it is imprecise. It will need…”

  “Shut up, I want to think,” Keaton said.

  Hank stopped talking. He didn’t want to aggravate the Arm any more than he had to, now that his usefulness was about shot. From the stories he had read he expected her to be a walking arsenal, but she carried only two knives and a pistol. In fact, she seemed unfamiliar with firearms in general; she fiddled with her pistol in an amateurish manner.

  Keaton paced the room, did some stretches and followed with some push-ups.

  “Get in the car,” she said, her voice low and angry. He did as she told him, and watched as she loaded the TI into the trunk, along with a box of notes, clothes and makeup. As they drove away from the house, he noticed it was on fire. She didn’t want to leave any evidence behind.

  She stopped them in downtown Bakersfield, a block north of the bus depot. “Get out,” she said. “I’ll contact you later.”

  “Ma’am?” He looked at her and saw black anger rippling over her face.

  “Don’t make me have to tell you again, Zielinski. Get out of the car and just stand there.”

  Hank popped open the passenger’s side door and exited the car, stepp
ed back, and stood, following the Arm’s orders. He looked away, his thoughts turning to his loved ones. He had exhausted his plans and his body, was now bone tired and ready to collapse from Keaton’s abuse. She was going to shoot him and drive off.

  He had no desire to watch her shoot him.

  Keaton surprised him, stepping on the gas and driving off. He looked up and realized what had happened only after she drove around the corner and her car vanished out of sight.

  Why had she been so angry right then? What thoughts had been going through her head?

  Hank found a bench to sit on and put his head in his hands. Focuses and their bodyguards had treated him roughly in the past, but he had never been on a roller coaster ride like this. He waited for the panic and hysterics to start. They didn’t. Instead, he got an inspiration. He walked over to the corner drug store, just opening for the day, bought a pad of paper and a pen, and started to write down what he could remember about Keaton’s condition. Her right biceps was fifty percent larger than her left biceps. Stacy Keaton had some severe muscle problems, now didn’t she…

  A wry grin crossed Hank’s face. You know, he thought to himself, this was sort of fun, wasn’t it?

  Tonya Biggioni Meets Stacy Keaton

  (1964)

  Just after the first shots sprayed into their group and their cars, Tommy grabbed Tonya and wrestled her to the broken asphalt of the rest stop parking lot. Automatic weapon fire from multiple weapons, from too far away to be fully successful. The weapons fire came from a dark blue station wagon, rolling to a stop eighty feet behind them, where the driveway into the rest stop widened into parking spaces for cars on one side and truck and busses on the other. Most of the occupants of the attacking car shot forwards at Tonya and her group, but at least one shot backwards at another car following behind. This second car didn’t slow. It passed the station wagon at freeway speed and kept going on its own while the driver rolled out of the driver’s side door onto the pavement, managed to miss the 2 parked cars of Tonya’s entourage, and finally veered off into the trees about 50 feet before the rest stop driveway rejoined the freeway, where it hit a sturdy pine with a thunderous crash.

  Tonya had been lost in internal reverie when the shooting started, repeatedly going over the recently concluded East Region Executive Committee. She had decided they should drive home after the meeting instead of finding a motel for the night, and she hadn’t expected any trouble at all, especially in a random rest stop north of New York City just before midnight. Besides Tommy Landis, her other three bodyguards were Greg Marzuka and Todd Batten, both Transforms, and Robert Dawson, a normal. Todd and Robert, although new at bodyguarding, did have the benefit of Tommy’s training. Tonya hoped it would suffice.

  Todd had a head on his shoulders. All her bodyguards carried pistols, but they stored their long guns in the trunk of the Ford. After the speeding station wagon containing the shooters rolled to a stop short of them, Todd crouched over between the cars, popped the trunk, tossed out the duffel with their long guns, and unzipped it. Robert and Greg crawled over, grabbed rifles, and shot at their attackers, who had taken cover behind their car. Today, Tonya found the loud concussion of the Monster-stopping rounds in the rifles to be a welcome noise.

  Tonya stayed down and extended her metasense, cursing her initial reverie. She picked out one male Transform among the enemy shooters, but she didn’t recognize his Focus tag. Someone had obscured his tag, an advanced Focus trick long forbidden by the Focus Council. The person who bailed from the now ruined trailing car also metasensed as a Transform, but indistinct and obscure, nothing like Tonya had metasensed before. Tonya had three wounded among her people, all from the initial barrage: Todd, Honey Landis, and Janet Paugh. Janet had fallen behind the Ford with her left leg shattered above the knee, protected from the shooting. Honey bled heavily from her shoulder, chest and hip, and managed to duck between the two cars before she fell. Todd had taken a shot in the abdomen when he went for the guns and fell to his knees once he returned to cover. He grabbed one of the guns from the bag anyway and tried to aim it over the car to return fire. Tonya kept all three of them well pumped and hoped it would be enough. Transforms were tough and often survived bullet wounds a normal would not, but only if their Focus was quick with the juice support and the bullet wounds not too severe. Transforms weren’t invulnerable, not even close.

  The firing stopped.

  Her people hadn’t fired more than a few shots, too few to have killed their attackers. Tommy helped Tonya to her feet, while she tried to understand what happened to the fight. “What’s going on?” she asked, confused.

  “I…”

  Something streaked by, running, close, in among Tonya’s people. A Monster perhaps? Tonya had never seen a Monster run so fast. She found herself elbowed to the ground, hard, with Tommy on top. The space on the pavement where Janet had laid was now empty except for her blood. The unknown Transform had grabbed Janet; Tonya followed Janet with her metasense as the Monster-like creature carried her into the woman’s rest room.

  “Careful,” Tonya said to Tommy. “That…” Sudden pain slammed into Tonya, unexpected pain from Janet, felt through the metasense link. For an instant, she found herself linked to the unknown Transform. She tried to act, to support Janet, but the attack ended before she could react. Tonya screamed. The unknown Transform had killed Janet and the pain of her death ripped through Tonya like horror, like death, like someone had grabbed hold of her soul and ripped it out of her. Tonya grabbed her hair and pulled as she writhed on the ground fighting for control over herself. Fighting for control over the juice. She instinctively shorted all her Transforms, including her wounded, and she had to force the juice back into them quickly before they died.

  “No one move or talk,” Tonya ordered between pants. She tried to gather her mind and her metasense, and figure out what happened. Nothing in the fight made sense to her; it started and stopped far too quickly. This was even worse than the chaos of a botched Monster hunt, and she leaned on her Monster hunting expertise to pull herself out of her panic.

  No one moved. No one spoke. No one was alive at the rest stop except Tonya’s people and the Transform in the rest room, and the area was silent as death. Several minutes later, Tonya finally quieted her mind and rapidly beating heart.

  “Tommy,” she said into the silence.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Janet’s dead. The unknown Transform took her into the woman’s rest room and killed her.” Tonya took a deep breath and sat up. “Whatever it is, it’s still in the bathroom.” Still in the bathroom and still very dangerous.

  Tonya concentrated her metasense and studied. After a half minute, she resolved the unknown in the bathroom as a Major Transform, just like herself. A woman? The unknown looked male when he had run by, but the unknown was a woman.

  “What happened to the people shooting at us?” Tonya asked. A few feet away, Todd started to moan, in pain from his wounds, edging toward shock. This was his first combat wound; with the overt danger over and his adrenaline dissipated, he was feeling it. Despite Tonya’s juice support.

  “They’re dead,” Tommy said. “We got one, maybe two of the six, but the unknown who took Janet went right after them and killed them. Killed them trivially.”

  “Went after them? How?”

  “Ran right into them. Bleeding from all sorts of wounds and still ran right at them. Looked like knife-work to me, Mom,” Tommy said.

  Knife-work. Against a station wagon filled with an assassination squad? “They shot her and she still did that?”

  “‘Her’? The thing was a woman? A Monster?”

  “Yes,” Tonya said. The creature still didn’t move. Wounded, maybe? But that didn’t explain why she had taken Janet and killed her. Oh. Tonya began to understand. “But not an ordinary Monster. Our unknown is a failed Focus, the serial killer Stacy Keaton most likely.”

  “An Arm?” Tommy said, a dark grin now covering his face. “Let’s go in and k
ill her.” He knew positive press and public relations when it stared him in the face.

  “In an enclosed area, when she can move so fast? No way, Tommy. Think Monster hunting rules,” Tonya said. She decided she felt well enough to stand and carefully rose to her feet, leaning on Tommy’s extended right arm.

  “Right. Never go into an enclosed area with a Monster.” Tommy thought for a moment. “With her speed, we can’t take her. We don’t have enough people.”

  “We can’t run, either,” Tonya said, taking stock of their vehicles. One casual sniff told the tale. “We have six people, five flat tires, and one leaky gas tank.”

  Tommy looked around. “There’s cover over there,” he said, pointing to a four foot tall mound crowned by a set of bushes, about fifty yards away and across the driveway from the rest room.

  Tonya nodded and got a tight grip on her emotions. It would be easy for her to make this personal and go all-out after this Arm Monster, regardless of how many of her people the Arm killed defending herself. She knew better to let her emotions guide her in a hot situation. Monster hunting had taught her better; mixing her emotions with the professional needs of being a leader never worked. She would hate herself later for her cold heartlessness, but only in private. “We have another option. The Council wants to get in contact with Keaton, figure out a way to keep her from killing household Transforms, and turn her into an ally.” Just another woman Transform who should join with the Council in sisterly solidarity.

  Tommy stared at her as if she had grown bat ears. “You’re not thinking of going in there, are you? Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “She killed Janet,” Tommy said.

  “She’s a Major Transform.” A Major Transform who killed Transforms for their juice, something Tonya had figured out, but the Council did not yet believe. However, more than enough unsupported Transforms existed who were going to die anyway. Keaton didn’t need to poach household Transforms to survive. Stopping Keaton’s poaching would save household lives.