Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) Page 4
“Mrs. Hancock,” Dr. Zielinski said, gently. Now I looked away, abashed.
Reader’s Digest had written about Keaton and Arms once. They were demons who grabbed people like storybook vampires, but they drained juice instead of blood as they killed their victims. I had a vision of myself with giant canine teeth and red droplets hanging from their tips. A lust of a new sort ran through me and I found myself looking at Dr. Zielinski almost in hunger.
“You said Armenigar sucked juice from Transforms like a vampire,” I said. “The Transforms died?”
Dr. Zielinski sighed and scooted his chair backwards a couple of feet. “That isn’t the best way of looking at it. The people you need are Transforms who are already dying because they can’t find a Focus. You’ll make their deaths a lot less unpleasant than they might be otherwise. You don’t suck their blood; you’re not a vampire. You’ll take their juice, a painless process when done by an Arm. Taking their juice prevents them from going into withdrawal or becoming a Monster. As you said, they won’t live through it.”
“I’m not sure that’s something I can do,” I said.
“Your choices are limited, Mrs. Hancock,” Dr. Zielinski said. I heard rattling and squeaking coming down the hall, and smelled food. A kitchen lady wheeled in a metal cart with the breakfasts on it. Doris, her nametag said. She gave me a friendly smile and started transferring the food to my bed table. “It’s a hard decision you face, I know. Yet, if you don’t take juice, you’ll die in withdrawal too.” He took my hand in his and I could feel his strength. “Would it help if I told you that the other Arms have had to deal with the same issue?”
“How did they deal with it?” I asked. I took my hand from his and helped the kitchen lady arrange my bed table. I dug in.
“It’s hard for all of them. Mostly, though, they realize eventually there’s nothing to be gained by refusing to take juice. Transforms without hope of a Focus are brought to Detention Centers like this all the time. They’ll die here with or without you. If you take the juice from them you continue your own life.” He paused and gazed deep into my eyes, as if he was looking for something in my mind. “One other thing: I’m a Doctor and Tommy Bates is an FBI Agent, but we’re also researchers. Any Major Transform case, whether a Sport or a known type like a Focus or an Arm, is so rare as to be a potentially valuable research subject. If you cooperate, you allow us to continue our research efforts on Major Transforms. What we learn about Major Transforms is important, because without them, none of the other Transforms would live. What we learn from you could conceivably save thousands of lives, Mrs. Hancock.”
“Carol,” I said. Dr. Zielinski blinked a couple times and nodded. He made an impressive case, down to earth and inspiring.
“Carol,” he said. “Good to have you on board.”
---
Dr. Zielinski was right about the food. After an absurd six thousand calories I was still ravenously hungry and still over-stressed. I spent the day in the lab. Blood samples, urine samples, x-rays, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, monitors, eyesight. Those I could understand. Tests of strength, reaction time, and flexibility I didn’t understand.
I was no athlete or Jack La Lanne, but remembering my escape from the prisoner bus I did better than I expected. I wondered what I was becoming. Magazines talked a lot about the extra abilities Major Transforms acquired and I’d never heard a scientific explanation for any of them that made sense. It was magic, maybe, or a gift from God or more likely the Devil. I wondered if I would develop those supernatural abilities myself.
Next came more tests I didn’t understand. There were nurses, orderlies, Dr. Zielinski, Dr. Peterson, doctors I didn’t recognize. There was even a psychologist, a Dr. Richard Bentwyler. He had the best psychologist name I ever encountered. I bet no one contracted his first name to Dick! He gave me IQ tests, Rorschach tests, and I spent two hours talking while lying on a couch. I doubted my childhood relationship with my father had anything to do with Transform Sickness, but they were the doctors. I hoped they knew what they were doing.
The tests started after breakfast and continued ‘til seven at night. Half the time they didn’t even stop while I ate.
At least the tests kept me distracted.
Between tests in the afternoon, Agent Bates came by to check up on me as I waited for the next doctor to come through. I sat on an examination table in a cold room with worn linoleum tile and shiny metal instruments. The examination table had metal rings bolted to it, which held heavy canvas straps. I wondered how often they had to strap someone to that table to do their examination.
We talked while I snacked, about his wife, his children and about life in a Focus household. It didn’t sound pretty. He loved his wife but they were nearly estranged. She had gotten stuck in a California Focus household after she transformed. To my amazement, his small government salary was one of the few reliable sources of income her household had.
Agent Bates also filled me in on some of the darker aspects of life as a Transform, part of his recruiting effort. I knew from my husband’s business that it was difficult for a Transform to find a job. I didn’t know people were often fired just because they lived in a Focus household. A known Transform often couldn’t get service in stores and restaurants. Because of this, many Focuses moved their households to large cities for anonymity. However, banks rarely lent money to Focuses and Transforms, which meant they had to pay cash for housing. He also told me how the justice system rarely prosecuted crimes against Transforms.
“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” I said, after he asked me if I had any questions and I had pushed away my plate. The institutional mystery meat in the snack had been tough and overcooked, but tasted delicious anyway. I could have eaten another six servings.
“Yes?”
I explained what Dr. Zielinski had said about where I’d be getting juice. “If my killing someone is supposed to be better than withdrawal, I’d like to see what it is that makes withdrawal so awful. Surely you have a movie of it, or something. They never talk about it on T.V. or in any of the magazines or newspapers I read.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He glanced out the window, but there was little to see past the bars and the thick wire mesh.
“Why not?”
Agent Bates lit a cigarette, a foul unfiltered Camel. “Some things a person is better off not seeing. Withdrawal is horrible. You don’t want to see movies of withdrawal.” He paused. “We show these movies to men who are facing withdrawal themselves to convince them that suicide is a better option.” I shivered, thinking of these men trying to convince some desperate Transform to commit suicide. Was withdrawal bad enough to justify such a thing?
I looked at his sunken eyes, still bleak with old horrors, and didn’t wonder anymore.
“Mr. Bates, if I’m going to kill people I need to be able to live with myself afterwards. I’d like to know.”
He looked at me for a long while, judging me in some studied FBI manner. I looked back at him. My stomach rumbled in the middle, and ruined the effect, but finally he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
I returned to my room after seven and found three bouquets of flowers and a plant waiting for me. Perhaps life wasn’t so bad. Despite all that had happened and all I had done, I still had people who cared for me enough to send flowers. There was a bouquet from the Junior League and one from the church. There was a philodendron from the school and a bouquet from Ann Henley, who was Jeffrey’s second grade teacher and a good friend. There were even cards from several other friends and neighbors. It wasn’t reasonable. I was a murderess. I was a demon. I was a monster. Normal people should not want anything to do with me.
No visitors, though.
Bob Scalini: August 12, 1966 – September 18, 1966
Bob Scalini cowered under the 9th Street bridge in downtown Miami and shivered in fear. He was an ordinary looking man in his early forties, balding, with the soft flabbiness of someone who sat at a desk all da
y. He wasn’t the sort of man who should be wearing filthy clothes and three weeks’ worth of beard, or cowering under a bridge at two thirty in the morning.
He had no idea how or why he had fallen into such a state.
The city was silent. When the occasional car passed overhead, his heart raced in panic and he curled up in pure unvarnished terror.
For three weeks every noise and every human contact brought more terror. He hid under bridges and in abandoned buildings, scrounged food from garbage cans, barely slept at all, and fled from anyone who tried to come near him. He had never experienced terror like this, not even the one time back in the War in Italy when he had been shot at. The terror went on and on, day after terrible day, for three endless weeks.
He didn’t understand why he was filled with such terror.
Four weeks ago he had been a respected engineer, happily married, with four kids. Three weeks ago, he had been a homeless man on the streets, fleeing from everyone and everything.
He had no memory whatsoever of the time in between.
Another car passed overhead, sending a strong enough surge of panic through Bob that he wanted to cry. He couldn’t do anything about the fear. He thought again about approaching a doctor, but even his innocent thoughts filled him with such consuming terror he knew he couldn’t do it.
The panic was the worst, but he had also acquired a craving, a constant hunger for something besides food. Without the craving he wouldn’t be out here in the dangerous night, but his craving drove him despite his fear.
He also saw things that weren’t there, as if he had a new sense.
“The only logical explanation,” Bob said to himself, “is Transform Sickness. How else could I be sensing a Focus and her household?” He had figured this out a week ago, but blocked the discovery out of his mind, the idea itself too terrifying to contemplate.
Not now.
Bob smiled. “I’ve got to be sensing their juice. Nothing else makes sense.”
His smile vanished as he waited for the terror to come. It didn’t.
“The first problem with my logic is that the only Transforms with an extra sense are Focuses, and Focuses are always women.” He did a great deal of talking to himself now, crazy words for crazy thoughts. “The second problem is that the range of a Focus’s juice sense is short, only a hundred yards or so. I can sense juice for miles.” He could nearly sense the entire city of Miami. “I wonder how.”
This new sense wasn’t any form of fictional extra-sensory perception; Bob’s engineering background made him instinctively discard supernatural explanations. The sense faded in and out at range, and the quality of the sense varied with the weather, wind direction, and the presence of electrical power lines. Apparently, his extra sense was something like radio or television, mixed in with a chemical sense like the sense of smell. His explanation bothered the engineer in him. “What’s the transmitter? Transmitters take energy and Focuses aren’t radio stations. Someone would have noticed.” A lack of a scientific explanation didn’t make the phenomenon supernatural, though.
He didn’t remember ever reading anything about the panic. Something was seriously wrong with him, perhaps a nasty psychological malady, but he didn’t even know if there were any psychological maladies like this.
The panic from the car faded and the craving took hold again, stronger than before, a compulsion strong enough to override his fears. His hands shook and his legs would barely hold him, but he forced himself to stand. One step, another step. If he stayed low, surely no one would notice as he walked along the dry creek bed in the middle of the night. He forced himself forward, one quiet step at a time. The mosquitoes swarmed in the thick humidity.
He crept along, watching warily around him with his eyes and ears and with his new sense. Besides the terrifying glow of the Focus and the members of her household, each one printed with an echo of their Focus, he sensed other things.
A strange fog surrounded the Focus’s household. He had found other patches of fog in Miami, around the Miami Transform Clinic and also in a cemetery on the north side of town where a Monster had been buried a few weeks ago. Those patches of fog were gone because Bob had fed on them, as if he had become, ludicrously, a fog vampire.
The fog wasn’t real, though. He only sensed it with his extra sense.
“I’ve got to get closer,” he whispered. The first time he tried to feed on the fog, the patch around the Transform Clinic, he had tried from miles away. The fog had satisfied something basic within him, but afterwards, he decided he had fooled himself. He had no more than tasted it. To feed on the fog he learned he had to get close to it, within a block. It had left him happy and sated.
The Clinic’s fog had been enough to satisfy him for a week. He had cowered in his hidden shelter, talking to himself, leaving only to scavenge food. While hidden, he tried to figure out what happened with this ‘feeding’. None of his many explanations satisfied him.
A week later, the craving became intense enough to force him out again. He found the cemetery and fed, this time getting inside the fog. This trick satisfied his cravings for two weeks. The only fog remaining in Miami hovered around the Focus household. For a proper feeding, he would have to get right up next to that household, inside the fog – but the Focus there terrified him. He couldn’t even consider the possibility that the Focus might sense him, because when he did he found himself paralyzed with fear.
He crept along the path, which led approximately in the right direction.
Ahead of him, something rustled in the brush. Bob hit the ground and buried himself in the weeds. He froze, every sense alert, looking for the source of the sound.
Something inside of him started to work backwards. All of a sudden, his little remnant of juice spewed out in a rush of fog, vomit from the intestines of his soul. He shivered and felt himself start to black out from the terror.
But not quite. He waited, sweating and shivering. Eventually, a small calico cat slipped out from under the underbrush.
A cat.
Bob didn’t allow himself to relax. Possibly some owner was out looking for it. He wondered if the cat might possibly have rabies or some other disease. He looked, but the cat didn’t have a collar.
After a long moment, the cat disappeared back into the brush. Bob waited several minutes. The fog vomit swirled around him, small, but calm and peaceful, only a little different from all the other fog he consumed.
“The hell.” Hunger outweighed his fear that this different fog would poison him and he slowly drew the fog back in. It didn’t seem to hurt him.
Several minutes later, he got up and resumed his journey.
“I’m losing it,” he said. “Not only am I out here at night whispering to myself, but I’m so messed up a cat can panic me enough to sick up on it!” His mind continued to work as his senses watched. The fog was a chemical waste product of juice, he guessed, produced by other Transforms.
“I need more fog,” he said. He thought about the Focus and her household again and nearly curled up in a panicked ball.
Tears leaked from his eyes. The crippling fear left him so wretched and incapable. Without his overwhelming terror he might even be able to cope with the rest of this Transform Sickness business, figure out how to survive, go back to his wife, and live like a human being. Still, he needed the fog. Ten minutes later he managed to ignore his terror and stand.
As he edged carefully through the large drain that carried the creek under Magnolia Street, Bob had a terrifying thought: what if he needed this overwhelming fear to survive? He had transformed into something else. Perhaps there was a real reason for his fear. Many animals lived in fear, shy retiring creatures that startled at noises and attempted to stay hidden. Rabbits, mice, deer. Many other animals. In every one, fear was a survival characteristic.
Perhaps he should learn to use his fear.
Bob wanted to kick himself. For three weeks, he had functioned on instinct and panic. It was far past time to use his head
. He could use this fear. Stay quiet and hidden. Put work into staying safe. When he did need to do something risky, he would think about it, plan, and make it as safe as possible. Use the fear to keep him alert when he exposed himself to danger.
“I have to figure out what’s out there that justifies this kind of fear,” he said. Prey animals that lived in fear had predators that hunted them. That could explain his reactions.
The Focus household would be a good test. It scared the daylights out of him. He would learn to harness his fear to serve him, to get as close as possible to the Focus’s house without risk. If he succeeded, he might be ready to travel. He already realized he would have to leave Miami to find more of his fog.
Yes, he thought to himself, he could learn to use his fear, instead of letting the fear use him.
If some big predator didn’t get him first.
---
The squeak-squeak of his undersized bicycle still bothered him. The bike had been squeaking for the last five hours, since he had pedaled into a pothole near Holopaw. The problem, as always, was fear. The squeaks sounded too loud to Bob. Still, three in the morning was a perfectly safe time to be out riding a bicycle on a country road near Orlando, his destination.
He would have done damn near anything for a shower. The nights were warm and humid in central Florida this time of year and his progress left him drenched in sweat. Worse, for four and a half weeks he had worn the same clothes. He had a significant beard by now, scruffy and filthy, like some sort of backwoods mountain man. Any policeman who saw him would arrest him on the spot or chase him out of town.
At least the bicycle he found in that Miami dump still worked. His night vision was good, but not perfect. He had missed the pothole until he pedaled into it.
This wasn’t the sanest method of travel, but the bicycle was the safest he had been able to come up with. Everything else he thought up involved being trapped in a small space with other people. Terrifying, beyond contemplation. Still, he didn’t have any choice. He had gone too many days without the fog he craved.