All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Two) Read online

  The rest of the day I cleaned and cooked. I worked for a long time on the bathroom, and with my cleaning, the bath mat and the covers, made it almost decent. The tablecloth and the silk flowers over the bare Formica table improved the kitchen. I dared to make the bed in Keaton’s bedroom, and cleaned up the dropped clothes and towels. I needed to find a Laundromat. A lot of dirty laundry sat in piles.

  I baked the ham during the early afternoon and set it out to cool afterwards. Ham was useful for many meals, and I thought it might be a good idea to have a cooked ham available. For dinner, I had several thick slices of ham, a big pan of lasagna, a carrot salad, and garlic bread. I put several apples in a bowl on the table, also, just in case. Everything was ready ten minutes before 6:00.

  I couldn’t help but think about my day. Worrying about Keaton. What if she objected to the things I bought for myself?

  The receipts! I hadn’t thought about saving them. They were in the trash inside of their bags. After biting down panic, I rooted through the trash and dug them out. Looking around, I realized I had trash building up everywhere. Panic grabbed me again, for I didn’t know how to get rid of it. I doubted I would be able to put it out in trashcans for the garbage truck to pick up. I wondered how Keaton handled it. I wondered what Keaton did, out all day. I went back to worrying about dinner. Keaton was late. I put the garlic bread back in the oven to keep warm.

  My stomach continued to churn as I worried about the things I might have done better. Perhaps I needed to spend more of my time cleaning, and less worrying about food. I didn’t touch the gym area. The storage area was a mess and cried out to be organized. I wasted too many hours shopping, because I had to make all those bus trips. All those wasted hours…

  Keaton came in at about 6:30. Fortunately, dinner was still in acceptable shape. The ham was cold to begin with, and the lasagna retained its heat well. I had put the garlic bread back in the oven and left everything else out, ready to eat. I pulled the garlic bread out when I heard the garage door open, and Keaton came into the kitchen as I poured the milk. My heart rate went stratospheric but I managed not to spill the milk.

  I held my breath and waited nervously for her reaction. I couldn’t tell for certain, and I might have imagined it, but I thought she was pleasantly surprised.

  In any case, she let me eat with her at the now more pleasant table. She had no cause to complain about the amount of food. I learned my lesson the night before. I stayed meek and polite, careful to serve myself only after Keaton took what she wanted.

  During the dinner, she grilled me on my day, where I had gone, what I did, what I bought. I showed her my receipts, and she didn’t object to the things I bought for myself.

  Finally, she asked, “So, did you think about running away?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. I expected the question. I had no intention of admitting even a hint of disobedience.

  The change that came over Keaton was amazing and terrifying. One second she was her normal self, the next she was death incarnate, staring at me as if I was her dinner. Yet, she didn’t move a single muscle. I barely avoided peeing on myself in terror.

  Her trick must be supernatural, no matter what she said.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I won’t do it anymore! Please don’t hurt me! I’m sorry!” I dropped to the floor in a full grovel, crawling toward her feet. I had learned. She liked a good grovel. I watched her face carefully.

  Keaton simply raised one eyebrow at me. “You will never lie to me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. She could read minds! I kept forgetting about her supernatural capabilities! Keaton ignored my reaction and went back to dinner.

  After a moment, I went back to the table. If I stayed on the floor, groveling, I would miss dinner. I wasn’t any safer on the floor, anyway.

  “So, did you think about running away?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, my voice a mere whisper.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I shivered. “I was in the parking lot of the grocery store. I thought about getting on the bus and just going the other direction.”

  “So, why didn’t you run?”

  What sort of answer did she want?

  Keaton noticed my hesitation. “I know when you lie to me,” she said. “I know when you’re trying to evade me. You can’t hide anything from me. When I ask you a question you will answer me completely and truthfully, no matter how painful that may be.

  “Answer the question.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and followed with no pause. “I was afraid.”

  Keaton waited.

  I stared down into my lasagna. “I was afraid of you. I didn’t think I could really get away. I thought that you would come after me. I couldn’t cope with whatever you would do to me then. I don’t know how to survive.” I flickered my gaze over to her when I finished speaking, wondering if the double meaning of the last would come back to haunt me. Keaton smiled. My face flushed and I lowered my gaze to my plate.

  “Did you think about going into my office?”

  “Office?” Oh. Her office. The glare she gave me earlier today when forbidding me her office stuck with me. I got the shivers just thinking about it. “No, ma’am.” Keaton’s quick shifts in direction started to get to me. I never was able to guess where she would go next.

  She let me eat the rest of my dinner in relative peace.

  The evening’s exercise session was long, tedious and painful, but despite what Keaton did to me I didn’t cry, not even once.

  I took my victories, small as they were, wherever I could get them.

  The next day, early in the morning, we went to an innocuous looking medical building on the west side of town, to visit Keaton’s doctor. Both of us wore disguises, Keaton as a man in workman’s clothing, and me in my yellow dress. We used the back door. The doctor waited for us in his office. His name was Dr. David Hesrith and he was decidedly nervous. Keaton led us to an examining room.

  I hesitated before I followed Keaton into the clinical cruelty of that room. I hadn’t realized how powerfully the memories of the Detention Center would affect me. They easily pierced through the terror I felt of Keaton.

  I only hesitated for a moment. Whatever tortures awaited me here, Keaton’s was worse.

  Keaton ignored my hesitation, arrogantly confident that I would follow her, whatever my fears.

  “I need her checked out,” Keaton said, to the doctor. The doctor had to be what passed as a local expert in Transform Sickness. One of Keaton’s people.

  Obeying Keaton, I sat on the examining table. The doctor checked me out. Keaton didn’t leave the room during the examination and Dr. Hesrith didn’t ask her to.

  “I assume you’re Carol Hancock?” Dr. Hesrith asked me, trying to ignore Keaton. He was medium height, with dark curly hair and a Jewish nose. He was about forty-five, and he circled clinically with a defeated hollowness in his eyes.

  I nodded, watching Keaton out of the corner of my eye. “Yes.”

  “Well then, I don’t suppose you would undress and let me examine you?” He glanced over at Keaton while he talked to me. Keaton sat in his chair, with her ankles crossed and extended out in front of her and her arms crossed over her chest. She didn’t respond.

  I undressed down to my underwear and the doctor started his examination. He drew a breath when he spotted the damage I carried, but after a quick glance at Keaton he didn’t say a word. Instead, he ran through a subset of the tests I had gotten regularly at the Detention Center. He took X-Rays using the machine in his office. He took a blood sample and ran a blood test, using a small lab in the back corner of the cluttered room.

  During my last month at the Center, no one told me the results of any of the tests. Dr. Hesrith, less sadistic, gave a running commentary on everything he discovered. I found out that my blood pressure was 132/56, my temperature was 99.2, and my pulse was 45, which he considered normal. Each result differed significantly from my last public test re
sults.

  He studied my X-Rays at length and grunted unhappily. “There’s definitely a problem with muscle hypertrophy.” He turned to Keaton. His voice held a hint of a cringe. “There are signs of advanced nodule development in the joints. As you are familiar with, ma’am, this is a life-threatening condition, but I can’t make any prognosis without knowing her history. If you bring her in a week from now, I can see how the condition progresses, but without her chart, that’s the best I can do.”

  Keaton grunted, reached under her chair and pulled out several thick manila folders. She extended them to Dr. Hesrith.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Dr. Hesrith said, astonished. He took the folders and started leafing through them. He didn’t do anything but grunt and turn pages for a long time.

  Keaton had gotten my current chart. I had no idea how, but somehow she had snatched my chart.

  Did she think of everything?

  Eventually Dr. Hesrith turned back to Keaton. “I can’t really tell anything definitive from this. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t gotten notably worse since the last entry. I can’t say that she’s gotten better either. The condition needs to be monitored. We’ll know more in another week.”

  The doctor bandaged up my ribs. Keaton ordered him to fit me for another diaphragm. Finally, I put my clothes back on. He got the results of my blood test. My juice level was 102, much lower than I liked. We left without any pleasantries or bill paying.

  When we returned to the warehouse Keaton exercised me to exhaustion.

  (4)

  Patience. Terror. Hunger. Pain. My constant companions kept me company as I sat in the passenger seat of the car and sweated fear.

  “You need to learn to hunt and find your own kills, cow. For a new Arm, finding kills is a tough thing to do, and risky,” Keaton said, Charles Atlas in a dress and wig. She handled her car with casual ease as she drove us around her home city of Philadelphia on this late November day. The sun peeked over rooftops, rising slowly into a cloudless sky, and the day promised to be sunny and beautiful. Keaton might not have a care in the world, but I huddled against the door in petrified anxiety, as far away from her as possible. Outside the car, people walked the sidewalks on their way to work, oblivious to the two killers who drove by.

  Keaton continued. “Before you can hunt, though, we need to cover some basics. I’m taking you to a place where you’re going to sense a whole group of Transforms. Pay attention, skag, this is important.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Keaton drove on through the early morning traffic as if I didn’t exist.

  A few minutes later, we pulled down a side street and slowed. Up ahead, through brownstone buildings and a couple old tenements, I metasensed Transforms, not just one Transform, but over a dozen. Among all these Transforms I metasensed a bright one, stronger than all of the others. The bright Transform overwhelmed them, and overwhelmed me. Its beauty almost made me swoon.

  I caught my breath, closed my eyes and absorbed the fantastic beauty. The little ones moved around the big one, the big one moved itself, all in endless beautiful patterns. As we came closer, I lost myself in wonder, a wonder strong enough to drive all the pain, the terror and the sheer hell of Keaton’s exercise sessions right out of my head. I had never metasensed anything like this before. This must be a Focus and her household. I hadn’t imagined that they would be so beautiful. I eased the car door open; Transforms were my prey and I always wanted more juice. There they were. There I went.

  Keaton touched my arm and shook her head. I closed the car door, surprised I possessed the control to do so. I never had such control before. Transforms and their juice were to me like human blood around a baby vampire, but this was no story, and when Keaton said ‘jump’, I jumped before I asked ‘how far’.

  “Look for the pattern, dipshit,” Keaton said, her voice quiet. “See how the pattern of the loud one is replicated in the others?” Lost in that wonder, even Keaton’s attention didn’t panic me.

  Beauty. I never imagined the world held such beauty.

  I looked for the pattern, and after a short wondrous study, I found it. Each of the small ones was a small replica of the larger one. The pattern wasn’t the same, as if they were copied pictures with the colors changed, or a series of notes in a different key, and they didn’t replicate the entire complexity of the big one, but each little one echoed a piece of the large one. My realization only made the experience more wondrous.

  How could the world of Transforms contain such beauty? We were God’s cursed.

  “It’s a trap,” Keaton said, a few minutes later. Dawn hadn’t yet come to the shadowed side street between the multistory buildings, and her face remained as dark as her soul.

  I turned to her and didn’t respond. Nothing so beautiful should be a trap.

  “Yes, this is a Focus household. The loud one’s the Focus. There are all those Transforms full of juice, and you can’t touch any of them. You know what would happen if you killed one of those Transforms?” Her demeanor remained ice cold, but a roughness suffused her voice, and I wondered if the wondrous beauty affected even her.

  No. Not possible.

  I shook my head in response to her question.

  “The Focus would instantly metasense what you’d done, that an Arm had killed one of her own, because nothing else looks like that. You’d be out cold with post-kill reaction, and an entire household of people would know an Arm had just killed one of their people. You would never wake up again. That’s the surest way of getting yourself killed I know of. You never touch a Transform within range of his Focus.”

  Logic. She expected logic and reason out of me when faced with juice, the immutable addiction of all Arms. Such logic was beyond my belief.

  “You also don’t touch the Focus. A Focus is as much a Major Transform as any Arm. Any Focus worth the name will kill you if you even think of attacking her, especially considering what a pathetic waste of an Arm you are.” The roughness vanished from Keaton’s voice as she spoke of business, returning to her normal cold and impersonal self.

  “This Focus’s household holds more Transforms than the ones right here,” Keaton said, watching me to make sure I understood her. “Some of them are at work in the city. You need to leave them alone, too. Any Transform with a Focus has a pattern imprinted on him, the Focus tag, and you have to be able to recognize the Focus tag before you can hunt. You must avoid Transforms with Focuses. They’re too hot. Whether it’s true or not, think of all Focuses as our friends and allies. Got that, dog?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I had a question, but I remained leery about asking questions without permission.

  “Ask,” she said.

  “Um,” I said, disconcerted again by her supernatural mind reading trick. “Why wasn’t I overwhelmed by juice lust, ma’am?” Prey Transforms always overwhelmed me, before. A simple tap on the arm and a terrifying Keaton glare shouldn’t be enough to bring me to my senses.

  “Arm instincts,” Keaton said. “The more Transforms you can metasense, the easier you can control your need for juice. Don’t depend on the reaction, though. The closer you get to a Transform and the lower you are on juice, the more trouble you’ll have fighting off the need.”

  “Won’t the Focus sense us out here? If we can sense her, can’t she sense us?”

  “Not unless we get within her range, which is only a quarter of ours.”

  Disturbing. Her answer didn’t fit with what I understood, that the victims of Armenigar’s Syndrome were failed Focuses. If we were failed Focuses, why did our metasense have a significantly longer range? While I cogitated, she drove the car a half block farther, out into daylight, and stopped by a small park. A few trees, a few benches, and a small merry-go-round decorated the park. In the early morning cold, the place was empty of people. The Focus’s household, hidden behind two pine trees, remained within my metasense range. “Get out of the car.”

  “Ma’am?”

  She glared, and I recognized this glare.
This was one of her tests. I got out of the car.

  Out of the warehouse, my metasense sprang into sharper focus. I could practically taste the juice on those Transforms. I found myself edging toward the household, despite Keaton’s orders. Whatever control I had inside the car evaporated out here.

  “I’m not going to let you out to hunt unless you can master this,” Keaton said. I turned back to her and found a handgun in her hand, a Monster-hunter’s special, an absurd .75 caliber weapon. The Monster gun’s kick would break the wrist of anyone unprepared for it.

  My mind heard Keaton’s voice but my juice lust refused to listen. There had to be a way to fight this. I tried sheer willpower, and it worked. I forced my way back to Keaton’s side.

  She laughed, quietly, and didn’t put down the sidearm. “How many Focuses are in the United States, shithead?” Keaton asked.

  “Just under two hundred, ma’am,” I answered. I edged eight feet closer to the Transform household while I answered. All it took to thwart my willpower was one stupid rote knowledge question.

  “You need something more than gritting your teeth, cunt, to solve this problem,” Keaton said. “Be a real shame to have to waste you because you couldn’t solve something so trivial.”

  Trivial for her, with her three years of experience as an Arm. Not for me. I angled over to the trunk of the pine tree and held on, tight. The pull was magnetic. The pattern of the juice in the Transforms hypnotized me. I wanted to go among them and feed.

  Sweat dripped down my face. I felt Keaton’s Monster-stopper pointed at my back.

  “How do you fight it, ma’am?” I asked.

  “I don’t have to.”

  Useless. I hugged the tree and futilely thought.

  “Come on, I don’t have all day,” Keaton said, her voice a low growl. “Even a pathetic worthless ass-wipe like you should be able to find a way to master this fucking piece of shit lesson. Of all the…”

  Fucking. My mind flickered over to my second favorite pastime after taking juice, and I noticed my interest in this household of Transforms diminished. The mind of an Arm is a wondrous thing; my memory is perfect, back to my first moments as an Arm. I had plenty of pleasurable moments to choose from. I examined the lot of them, starting with a memory of the pleasure of drawing juice.