The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four Read online

  Around her she metasensed the ever-present glow of her household, sleeping in the cramped confines of their current home. Even sleeping, their juice flowed through her, with a constant thrum of energy as natural as breathing.

  All sleeping except Martha, who shuffled half-asleep in the kitchen, making an early morning breakfast for her Focus and the other early risers in Tonya’s household. After putting her office in order, Tonya went to join her.

  “I have your breakfast, ma’am,” Martha said, when she appeared. Tonya nodded. A Focus was always hungry. Because their current house was crawling with bad juice from age and from Keaton’s recent visit, she made extra sure that the juice flowed properly to Martha. Transform women were juice producers rather than consumers, and so Focuses tended to over-draw their women to keep the Focus’s juice buffer – the source of juice for everyone else in the household – high. All Transforms liked high juice, at least up to a certain point. Cooking was Martha’s household job and it wouldn’t do to short her while she worked. Tonya fought the juice to make it flow properly, and hoped she would be able to make it through the day without another juice headache she couldn’t shake.

  Tonya sighed as she sat, alone at the large table, tired, worn down by the weight of the responsibilities on her shoulders. The weight had landed there when she transformed in 1958, and grew worse every year as she took on more political responsibilities in the Council and the Focus Network. The lives of the twenty-nine Transforms in her household, their seventeen spouses and their eleven school-age children weighed the most, though.

  Rizzari would be a pain in the ass today.

  Shot Eichenzeit walked into the dining area to grab a bite to eat before his pre-dawn run, just as Tonya finished off her first plate of pancakes and sausage.

  ‘Shot’ was short for ‘One-shot’, a reference to his skill with a rifle. His unfortunate real name was Horst, an especially unfortunate name back for a young soldier in World War II. He picked up the ‘Shot’ nickname in the war, and kept it during his twenty years as an Army Ranger.

  Shot was a blocky man, in his early forties, all bone and iron-hard muscle. He came to greet his Focus.

  “Ma’am,” he said, standing straight. Tonya always suspected he had the urge to salute. She nodded back.

  “Can you do me a favor, Shot?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Tonya liked Shot. She liked his competence and his efficient willingness to do what she asked of him. She also liked the respect he gave her for her capabilities as a person, not just as a Focus. She felt like he had judged her once, as he judged any superior officer, and that she had passed.

  Tonya smiled to herself. It was funny to have one of her own people judge her on her personal competence in something besides being a juice jockey and a politician.

  She did like Shot.

  “I’m going to need Johnny today. Could you get him up and take him with you? Get him started on the day?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Shot said, without hesitation. As he turned to go wake Johnny, he frowned. He thought Johnny was a flaming asshole.

  Tonya shared his opinion. Johnny was a half-competent crook with an attitude problem, as well as a Transform. Her job? Straightening him out.

  A Focus household wasn’t like the rest of the outside world. Too many people lived too close together, with no privacy, always living inside everyone else’s skin. Someone who wouldn’t get along made life hell for everyone else, a hell without any easy escape. Johnny had no desire to get along, he refused to do any work to contribute to the household, he harassed the other people in the household and he refused to obey his Focus. His original Focus had tried to reform him, and thought she made progress, until he started stealing small items from the other members of the household and selling his loot at pawnshops. She gave up, pleading for help from the Council.

  Help, alas, named Tonya. The Focuses called her the Wicked Witch of the East and told each other stories about the horrors she perpetrated. However, when they found themselves with a problem Transform, they turned to Tonya. The Council had even made it official, another of the many responsibilities wearing her down. Therefore, she taught Johnny a few new social skills, a long, slow process. When she finished he would be a productive, livable member of a household. The household would be happier. Johnny himself would be happier. Tonya would be happy, too. Johnny would be gone.

  She did the adjusting pro bono. His original Focus had been too new to cope with him and too poor to pay her fee. Typical.

  Ten minutes later, Johnny staggered up, looking half-awake and sullen. He stood just under six feet and lean, in a gangly sort of way. He slouched. Shot stood five feet back with his arms folded.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Johnny forced out. He had learned a little courtesy, a hard lesson for him.

  Tonya looked up from the last of her pancakes.

  “You’re going to help serve at my meeting with Focus Rizzari today,” she told him. “You’ll be polite and respectful to Focus Rizzari, serve food and drinks whenever necessary, and stay in the kitchen until you’re called for. Delia will be running the kitchen and the cooks as normal, so you do what she tells you. Do you understand?”

  Johnny drew a breath to protest the job. Tonya drew his juice down in threat, to the thin line between discomfort and pain. He thought better of his protest and shut his mouth.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, after a pause. Tonya let the juice flow back into him.

  Twenty-eight other Transforms in her household, and every one of them would treasure this task. Focus Rizzari wasn’t a Council member, but she was the Vice President of the Northeast Region, and held in high esteem by many of the Transforms because of the cause she followed. More people transformed every day. Many feared that soon there would be too many. Focus Rizzari was one of the few Focuses willing to work to prepare for that day and her cause attracted quite a few Transforms, enough so she had a waiting list of Transforms willing to join her household. Several in Tonya’s own household, much to her chagrin. Nearly any of the Transforms in her household would welcome the chance to help with Focus Rizzari’s visit. Johnny considered the job an insult. Tonya wanted to smack him.

  He would learn to be a proper household member if she had to beat it into him. She suspected this would be a very long lesson.

  She turned to Shot. “Shot, you’ll do bodyguard duty.” Even in her home, a Focus always had a bodyguard. Often, several.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And why don’t you take Johnny with you and get him a little exercise? It’ll be good for him.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” This time Shot smiled.

  Johnny glanced at Shot and his ferret face fell.

  Shot led Johnny to the front door of the house then took off at a slow jog along the broken sidewalk in front of their old converted townhomes. Tonya followed, expecting the worst. Johnny followed Shot slowly, feet dragging. Fifty feet from the front door he slowing to a walk.

  Tonya frowned at Johnny’s display. She pulled his juice out of him, a lot of it, more than eighty percent of his supplemental juice and way over the line into pain. Her stripping hit him like a sledgehammer and he stumbled to his knees.

  “No,” he said, a whimper. He turned and looked back to where she stood, watching at the window, but Tonya kept her face like stone. After a moment, Johnny pulled himself painfully to his feet. He hugged himself tight and tears leaked from his eyes. He glanced at her resentfully, his wounded eyes protesting the unfairness of her actions. She was mean to him. It wasn’t fair. He didn’t deserve this. She could see him thinking ‘bitch’, but he didn’t have enough nerve to speak.

  Tonya had seen it all before. She ignored it. Unmoved, she kept his juice torturously low.

  Finally, the lesson sunk in. He turned and moved forward toward Shot, one slow step at a time.

  She kept the juice down.

  Miserable, he went faster, lifting his feet up into a real jog. When he finally began the run, T
onya let the juice flow back into him.

  Shot had stopped when Johnny fell and watched the tableau in silence, his face pale. Tonya realized she had slipped. In her anger at Johnny, she clipped Shot when she drew Johnny’s juice down. She clipped Shot by four points, a little less than forty percent, enough to seriously hurt when the drop came that fast. She pushed the juice back into him, and then a little bit more in apology. He glanced at her, startled. She smiled back at him and nodded.

  She would have to watch herself when Focus Rizzari showed. Such novice sloppiness was unconscionable.

  “Pick up your feet, asshole. I’ve seen little girls go faster than you. Move it!” Shot said, as the pair moved away. Johnny would be in for a rough run.

  Carol Out Hunting

  [Carol Hancock POV]

  The Midwest Regional Warehouse of Sears & Roebuck was a busy place at 3 PM in the middle of November. Appliances, furniture, and clothes lived there, along with toys, tools, dishes and bed linens. Trucks came and left the loading docks in a never-ending stream, and an army of men worked to keep the goods moving – unloading, transferring, sorting, loading again, as the crates and boxes came in from the manufacturers and left again for the stores.

  I had hunted all night, curled up in an abandoned tenement for an hour of sleep just after dawn, and continued hunting into the new day. I found my target while I patrolled in my car. Now, on foot, I checked him out.

  The world would not miss Danny Clegg.

  Danny nudged the prongs of the forklift forward under the palette holding the Kenmore washing machine. He worked as a loading dock man, competent save for his low juice problems. I sympathized. This time, he ran the forklift in too fast and slightly off angle. The forklift hit with a jar and knocked the palette back a good foot, twisting under the Whirlpool and knocking everything off kilter.

  “Danny, you asshole! What the fuck are you doing?” his shift boss said. Danny cursed, slammed the shift into reverse and backed up to do it again.

  Danny was starting to get the sweats. He was a strong man, just a hair over six feet, short hair, with the tough corded muscles of someone who used them all day. I read him as mid-twenties, draftable but lucky so far. He wore a faded corduroy jacket, almost worn through at the elbows, and kept his cigarettes in his chest pocket. He had gotten the Shakes some time back, and when he toughed it out and the disease passed, he thought he was home free. No doctors for him, thank you very much.

  Too bad he hadn’t defeated the disease. Without me, your friendly neighborhood Arm, on the job, Danny would go into withdrawal in a day or two, become a psycho and make the news in a very special way. A strong bruiser like Danny, as a psycho in juice withdrawal, had a chance of killing more innocents on his short run to hell than I had in my entire career as an Arm.

  More likely, though, he would just get himself killed by running out into traffic. Urban life was no place for a mindless psycho.

  After Danny finished moving the washing machine, Danny’s boss called him over to where he stood, arms crossed, by the GE refrigerators. His boss was an old cuss, mid-forties, with no patience with screw-ups. Danny got a look at his boss’s expression and his face fell. He climbed slowly down from the lift, woozy from low juice.

  “Sorry about that,” he mumbled, looking away from his boss. Over past the refrigerators, the super’s desk sat under a pile of papers. October’s Playboy bunny watched from her position above the desk, legs spread and lips eternally puckered. Danny suspected his boss would fire him. See where a little fear of the big nasty medicine men will get you, if you don’t go get tested when you get sick?

  Danny was dead, no matter what, because it was too late for him to get placed with a Focus. He just didn’t know this.

  “Go home, Danny,” his boss said, cutting Danny some slack he didn’t deserve. “Shift’s over. Do a little better tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, man.” Danny found his winter hat on its hook back by the super’s desk and his lunch pail on the shelf above it. The outside air hit him with a frigid blast as he left the comparative warmth of the warehouse, starting him shivering. He pulled the flaps down on his hat and soldiered on.

  Danny didn’t look for threats as he made his way to his car, two thirds of the way down the long warehouse. Why should he? It was 3:00 on a sunny late fall afternoon, the lot was fenced, and Danny wasn’t the sort of man a sane person would threaten. He simply opened his car door and got in, sliding over the tear in the seat and the duct tape that held the seat together. He paused only long enough to light his cigarette before starting the car and heading home.

  He didn’t know I was in the back seat until he felt the belt around his neck. I cinched the belt tight and he passed out immediately. I pushed him out of the driver’s seat and took over driving, all while keeping the belt around his neck.

  I found myself a secluded spot and gave Danny a one-way ticket to heaven, saving forklift boy from the agony of withdrawal and a guaranteed spot in hell.

  I climbed off the body and got up. As I did, forklift-boy’s death spasm boner brushed the lower part of my abdomen, and I shuddered at the surge of sensation. Ruthlessly, I forced the sensations down. I wasn’t into screwing corpses, and I wouldn’t start now. I needed to find someone soon, though, or I would crawl out of my skin.

  I smiled, happy to be a free Arm.

  Gilgamesh Collates Crow Research

  Gilgamesh sat at his kitchen table and wrote. He filled page after page of the yellow legal pad, putting together the notes collected from Shadow. Notes and potential articles written by Wire, Sinclair, Ezekiel and Tolstoy. Gilgamesh missed the camaraderie of the time he had spent in Philadelphia. No Crows lived in Chicago with him. He missed them so much, especially Wire and Tolstoy, because they were dead and gone, never to speak to him again. Killed by a pair of Beast Men named Enkidu and Grendel.

  After letting his project sit for weeks, he had started to type. His project was a synthesis of everything his Crow friends, living and dead, had produced on the subject of Transforms. Many weeks of typing later, he finished.

  He wasn’t impressed with his writing.

  When Sinclair wrote, his work was lyrical and engaging. He wrote stories and short vignettes, allowing you to feel the lives of those Focuses and normal men and women with Transform Sickness. He could even make a reader see into the heart of an Arm. Ezekiel wrote philosophy. Thought provoking, insightful, at times inspiring. Gilgamesh had incorporated as much of their styles as he had the talent to copy into his work.

  Tolstoy had been able to pick a single question and delve into it until the question answered itself. Tolstoy had been the one responsible for the terminology to describe what the Crows saw with their metasense. Wire had critiqued. He had been able to look at the work everyone else did and spot the holes and rough spots. Then he would either add to their work, or make constructive suggestions that led the writer to new insights and understanding. Gilgamesh thought that might be the best skill of all. Gilgamesh tried to incorporate both Tolstoy’s technical fireworks and Wire’s critiques into his magnum opus. He failed. He wasn’t good enough. Everything Gilgamesh touched of theirs turned into Gilgamesh’s own style, the engineering manual. Not at all the glorious artistry of the other Crows. Dry, cerebral, and far too practical.

  Gilgamesh dedicated his book, ‘On Transforms’, to Tolstoy and Wire. He looked it over again, and sighed. Too long. Meandering. Too dry. Too real world. On the other hand, he had produced what he had wished for when he just started out as a Crow – an engineering manual on how to live as a Transform.

  To ease the pain of his long daunting book, Gilgamesh had produced a summary précis. He looked it over, and smiled.

  On Transforms

  1.0 Gender-based differentiation of Major Transforms

  Metacampus functionality falls along gender lines.

  Male - Crows, Beast Men

  Absorb dross and convert it to juice internally. Beast Men may be able to absorb juice directly, as well.


  Range – both Crows and Beast Men can sense juice to a distance of 5 miles

  Sensitivity – male Major Transforms are able to sense both juice and dross, as well as the details of juice allocation (fundamental and supplemental juice), and Focus tagging. Cannot sense others of their own kind very well.

  Speed – slow manipulation of juice and dross.

  Manipulation – Crows can physically manipulate dross, a byproduct of their absorption capabilities. This manipulation has several uses, including the creation of artwork. Beast Men manipulate juice internally, powering their slow changes of shape. Whether this is under their conscious control or not is an open question.

  Female - Focuses, Arms

  Absorb juice directly. Focuses create supplemental juice (as do woman Transforms) in small quantities.

  Range – a quarter mile for Arms and three hundred feet for Focuses

  Sensitivity – unable to sense Major Transforms save at very short range. Unable to sense some details of juice allocation. Unable to sense dross.

  Speed – much faster juice manipulation than either Crows or Beast Men. Arms and the best Focuses are able to transfer juice in an instant.

  Manipulation – the Focus is capable of extensive manipulation of juice, a capability found in no other Transform. Clearly, the Focus metacampus is entirely directed to this capability, at the expense of all juice use. Arms manipulate juice internally, powering their combat capabilities. The Arm metacampus appears to be vastly under-utilized. They likely have additional juice manipulation capabilities they have not yet identified.