The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Three Read online

I tapped my fingers on the handlebars as I dodged a stack of collapsed cardboard boxes. I came up with two possibilities. One possibility was that her gut reactions were still too different from mine for me to understand her. Perhaps the territory thing was all in my head, and Keaton’s gifting me of official territories was a ruse to keep me in line. Possible, but I didn’t believe it in this case. There had been too many occasions where I had aggravated the hell out of her by infringing on her turf. Why didn’t she kill me just for being another Arm? Why did she agree to teach me?

  She must have some rational reason, one strong enough to override her natural impulse to kill me. Being an information source covered the ‘acceptable but annoying ally’ aspects of the problem, but not the turf issues.

  The turf emotions meant a lot to me as an Arm. I remembered an incident, from before my California trip, when Keaton destroyed my little nest, after I fixed up my storeroom to be a proper home. I had broken down and cried for hours, physically sick from the loss of my turf.

  I lived on Keaton’s turf; I shared her turf, but I didn’t think Arms shared well. If at all. I wished I knew how much it would take to push her over the edge from this forced sharing. I touched my throat and shivered. Damn, I could die so easily.

  What factors had I overlooked? They must be important, something absurdly important to a more mature Arm. But what?

  I thought about what she taught me. What set off her paranoia the most.

  Doctors and researchers.

  Focuses.

  The Feds.

  The Chimeras.

  Monsters.

  Pittsburgh.

  There were demons out there haunting her, hunting her. Somehow, the existence of other Arms was part of her long-term survival plan. The hunting and haunting was strong enough, hazardous enough and dangerous enough, at the deep-down Arm instinct level, to offset the territory issues.

  My answer satisfied me. My realization also scared the crap out of me (at the deep-down Arm instinct level, of course), enough to make me almost want to cuddle up with Keaton. We Arms had some strong instinctive reactions when faced with an external enemy.

  Instincts might be fine, but I had a real and rational problem with all of this: to be a part of Keaton’s long-term plans, I needed to survive her.

  I reached Ed’s apartment. I left my bicycle in Ed’s parking place, took my car, and drove to a different grocery store. I didn’t want to run into Ed; I wasn’t ready to face the fact I cheated on him with Bobby. Oh, and if you think my problem here was shame, you don’t understand Arms. My problem was yet another new Arm instinct, the one now telling me ‘since you have replaced Ed with Bobby at the relationship level, you must clean up your backtrail and kill Ed’.

  Goddamned Arm instincts. As long as I didn’t see Ed today, I wouldn’t be forced to kill him. Gah.

  I forced myself back into the world of rational thought: I needed a way to survive Keaton until I graduated.

  So: what lay behind her psychotic rages?

  History, of course. History she wouldn’t tell me anything about.

  She must have met this demon or demons of hers.

  Well, then, what would set me off?

  The most obvious answer: losing to a demon.

  Perhaps the Pittsburgh demon had injured her mind. The demon had to be a Transform. Were there more types of Transforms than people knew about? Hidden Transform masters?

  Given the crap they spewed about Keaton and me? Eminently believable.

  Keaton returned three hours after I got back and she had a man with her. He was a young man in a business suit, medium height, just a little heavier than lean, and with the barest hint of muscles starting to go soft. His dark hair appeared to have once been carefully styled, and he smelled of alcohol. Keaton had him gagged, with his hands tied behind him. She hauled him out of the car and threw him to the floor.

  I came running with the shackles as soon as I realized she had brought home a new toy, and stood waiting for instructions. Keaton gave me a cold glance, a glance holding an aura of deadly danger. Then she tilted her head slightly to indicate the squat rack.

  The toy attempted to rise from his knees to his feet, punctuating his efforts with muffled sounds of protest and confusion. He didn’t understand what he now faced. He didn’t understand who I was and why I wore a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

  I picked him up and dumped him over by the squat rack. Before he reacted or tried to escape, I shackled his right leg to the rack. The rack itself was bolted to the concrete floor, so he wouldn’t be going anywhere. The man screamed ineffectual protest through his gag.

  I had a problem. Toys were for torture, not necessarily to the death, but the squat rack meant ‘public’. Keaton hadn’t put me in this position since I loosed my Beast.

  I found the idea disturbing, not the torture, but the ‘in public’. The thought of Keaton watching me just seemed, well, invasive. This was private. Like sex. Or taking a kill. I didn’t want Keaton intruding on those pleasures any more than I wanted her in bed with me when I fucked.

  Of course, I couldn’t do a damn thing about this. I couldn’t ever do anything about what Keaton wanted.

  I did wonder at the changes in myself. A few months ago, I hadn’t considered my kill to be a private thing. I did, now.

  I stood up and faced Keaton, after I shackled the man to the squat rack. Her expression remained cold and judgmental. I wondered how much of my thoughts she read. Probably too much.

  I stood, attentive, as she came toward me.

  “Make him afraid.”

  I did so, following Keaton’s orders. He scrabbled back from us in terror.

  She did something dismissive with her predator effect, and the fear left him. She leaned toward me. “Tell me what he’s thinking.”

  “Ma’am?” I said. I glanced at our victim and shook my head. “He’s scared and trying to escape. A part of him suspects he’s drunk and hallucinating. He thinks you’re a man and I’m your slavegirl. He…”

  Keaton grabbed me by my ear and led me into the kitchen.

  She sat.

  I sat.

  “This is going to be hard,” she said. “But it’s important, and for you, I suspect very important. I want you to do your thing with him in a way I can understand.”

  Oh, crap. This sounded like an invitation for a pain orgy. My pain.

  Perhaps I should have taken longer to master Keaton’s mind reading and people-controlling lessons.

  I guess I had showed off a bit much.

  “Ma’am, how do you want me to do this?”

  “Joe is yours. Learn him. Use all your senses as an Arm. Think about what you’re doing as you do it, so you can explain what you did later.”

  No profanity. Keaton was deadly serious. Keaton must have tried to duplicate what I did with Bobby, and failed.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. This, I realized, was a test of my worth. What use is your groundbreaker, if you can’t understand what the groundbreaker is doing? My ass was on the line here. If I didn’t satisfy Keaton’s unstated needs, I would pay for my failure with pain.

  “By the way,” she said, an exasperated parent lecturing a dense ten year old, “keep Joe out there alive for several days. This is a wonderful opportunity for you to be of some worth to me for once, and earn my good will. Don’t waste it.”

  I had a problem, though.

  “Ma’am, I’m low on juice. I need to hunt,” I said.

  “Damn. How low are you?” she asked.

  “I think about 107.” Keaton blinked, hostile. “Uh, below 110, as best I can determine. Please, ma’am?” I needed juice, but Keaton had no patience with my weaknesses. I went down to my knees on the floor, desperate.

  Keaton watched me thoughtfully. “107 isn’t that low. You can restrain yourself a little bit.” A low whimper tried to come from my throat. I forced it back down.

  “Ma’am,” I said.

  “You can hunt Newark tomorrow night. You can hunt Baltimore the
following night. You stay here during the days and work with Joe. By the time you finish with Baltimore, we will have gotten about as much as we’re going to get out of Joe, and you can kill him and get serious about hunting.”

  Damn. Three days at my current burn rate would put me below 100.

  I glanced at Keaton’s cold hard face. I thought about what argument I might use, about how I might react if an Arm underling of mine pushed the way I wanted to push, and blanched. Yes, I needed the juice. No, she wasn’t punishing me. I had already tried every bit of groveling and pleading I could come up with without going overboard. I stated my case; she made her decision. This was Monster Arms again. In her typical sadistic fashion, she was giving me another lesson on how to function with low juice. I understood the logic, but her lesson irked the crap out of me anyway.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, trying to control the shaking in my voice and my body’s stubborn refusal to ignore my intellectual acceptance of her lesson. “I’ll get right on it.”

  She watched me. I didn’t move and I didn’t say anything more.

  “Fine,” she said, after a long wait. “Go play with your new toy. I’ll be watching.”

  My task for the rest of the night was looking after Joe in the gym, while observing him. He fell asleep about ten. I couldn’t figure out if he was too tired for fear to keep him awake, or he had simply passed out in terror. He lay on the cold floor by the squat rack and snored.

  I studied him with all my senses, and with my mind. I didn’t get much, not with him splayed out on the concrete floor in half-drunken exhaustion. Wrinkled suit coat, mussed once elegant hair, drool leaking out of his mouth around his gag. This helpless victim, this exemplary example of humanity, was mine for the next several days, and I was supposed do to what? Duplicate my success with Bobby? Blech.

  I put my hand up to my temple and rubbed. The low-juice headache throbbed with a grinding ache and interfered with my thinking. I wanted to be out hunting.

  Keaton rattled around in the kitchen, getting herself a late supper from the supplies I left in the refrigerator. I wondered if there would be anything left for me.

  What tack should I use with the toy? I couldn’t be the predator. Keaton would have my ass. I could try to get him to trust me. If I got him to relax and let his defenses down, I would be able to do all sorts of things with him.

  I left the toy to fetch some supplies. I briefly touched one knee to the floor as I came near Keaton in the kitchen. She didn’t do more than watch me.

  I took my supplies back to Joe and woke him up. He woke up with a grunt and tried to speak through his gag and couldn’t. He came awake with a start.

  “I have some things for you,” I told him, speaking in a whisper.

  He made muffled sounds through his gag.

  “Shhh,” I said, my voice still low. “You need to be quieter.”

  He stopped trying to talk through his gag and gazed at me with hope in his eyes.

  “Here,” I said. “I brought a mat for you to sleep on, and a blanket. And a bucket. I also brought some apple juice. But I have to take your gag off for you to drink it, and I can only do that if you promise to keep quiet.”

  He nodded, cocked his head toward the bucket and grunted.

  I gave him the bucket. Which left the problem of how to use it. With his hands tied behind his back, he couldn’t manage his pants by himself. I ended up having to help him, embarrassing him mightily. I kept my smile inside.

  After several minutes of awkward fooling around with his clothes, I helped him put himself back together again. I picked up the bottle of apple juice and held it in front of him.

  “Do you want some?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “You know you can’t make any noise. Or cause any trouble. If you do, she’ll come back.” I heard a muffled snort from Keaton in the kitchen, too quiet for Joe to hear.

  “Do you promise to keep quiet?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Okay.” I put the juice down and untied his gag.

  The first thing he tried to do was talk, the idiot. He whispered, thinking Keaton wouldn’t be able to hear his voice. “What’s going on here? What…”

  I put a finger on his lips and stopped him.

  “Nothing,” I said. “No talking at all.”

  He stopped talking and drank the juice. When he finished, he mouthed a silent ‘thank you’.

  I put the gag back on him, put the blanket over him and left him to sleep.

  I was bullshitting the man the entire time, of course. He was my toy. I could have untied his hands, ungagged him, and even talked with him. I could have given him more than one mat to sleep on, or a thicker blanket, or any of a number of other things to make him more comfortable.

  Doing so would have been counter-productive. I didn’t want him to be comfortable. The more frightened and uncomfortable he was, the more he would appreciate whatever tiny kindnesses I chose to give him. When I spoke to him, I didn’t use a flat voice, a conspiratorial voice, or even a seductive voice. I used a sexually repressed voice, a put-upon-by-my-lord-and-master voice, one that fit with the Catholic schoolgirl uniforms I wore. He would trust me and depend on me in no time.

  It doesn’t matter what’s really happening. It only matters what a person thinks is happening.

  After I put Joe to bed, I got some late dinner for myself. I cleaned up the kitchen until Keaton interrupted me by turning out the lights. I went to bed and thought about my plans with Joe.

  I always tried to keep myself distracted and occupied with other things when low on juice. Always, eventually, I would fail.

  Low on juice, in the dark, with Keaton only yards away, the demons always came. My head pounded and my body ached and I couldn’t get comfortable. The juice monkey tore through all my defenses and I couldn’t keep the fears away. Keaton might kill me any time she wanted to, and nothing in the world could stop her.

  She would kill me, someday, in one of her psychotic rages. One day she wouldn’t stop at cutting my throat; she would finish the job and behead me. She would pickle my head in formaldehyde to serve as a reminder to the next Arm she decided to own.

  I shivered, and tossed on my cold mat.

  I needed juice. I needed it. My head pounded with need for it. I swore the blanket felt rougher than before. My skin sensitivity was kicking in.

  Tomorrow would be worse. I needed the juice. The craving burned inside of me. When I closed my eyes, I saw my previous kills waiting for me. Waiting to supply me with the ecstasy. I felt the surge as the juice washed through me, burning me with the intense, overwhelming thrill.

  Another shiver went through my body and I rolled over.

  If I didn’t stop thrashing, Keaton would get pissed.

  She would kill me some day. Catholic schoolgirl uniform or not, official hunting territories or not, I still squatted on her turf. She would kill me.

  Maybe she was lying in her bed, listening to me thrash, and planning how she would kill me. I nurtured no illusions she would be gentle. She would want to extract as much pleasure from me as possible. She could make me last for days. That was probably why she wouldn’t let me hunt. The abuse always hurt more when I was low on juice. She would want to be as cruel as possible.

  I took a breath and told myself to calm down. I wasn’t thinking rationally. I went through these fears every time I got low on juice.

  I took a deep breath and tried to blank out my mind. I concentrated on my breathing. Out in the gym, I heard Joe snoring again. I heard Keaton’s breathing. Awake.

  Between Joe and me, we kept her awake and pissed.

  Don’t think about it, I told myself. Just keep still. Think about breathing.

  The past intruded again. Odds were I screwed up when I declared my independence and negotiated for a graduation requirement. I should have stayed broken, humble and stupid.

  I was always stupid. Whatever I tried to do on my own was stupid. I never got anything right. I screwed up my
hunting. I couldn’t even do robberies because I couldn’t get my voice to sound like a man’s. I screwed up anything and everything I did. Keaton should have killed me already…

  Damn, low juice is a bitch.

  Breathe. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. In. Out…

  Keaton left the warehouse at about 8:00 in the morning. She had me blindfold Joe when we did our exercises, but otherwise we ignored him. I didn’t turn my attention back to him until Keaton left. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. I didn’t need any low juice stupid mistakes. Damn, but I wanted to be out hunting.

  Joe still wore the blindfold. His heart beat fast and hard as he heard my steps coming toward him. His body went stiff and alert, his breathing faster than normal. Once I removed the blindfold and he recognized me, he relaxed and his heart slowed.

  He feared Keaton. He didn’t fear me.

  Fine. I would have more luck reading him if he didn’t keep his defenses up around me.

  “Mph. Mm-mm-gmph,” he said through his gag.

  Well, I did need to talk with him. I squatted down by him and took the gag off. His stench almost knocked me over, the smell of old alcohol and dried sweat a fog around him. He didn’t smell like fun. The reek made me annoyed.

  “What’s going on here? What are you people doing to me? Who was that man? You can’t just kidnap me! Who are you? Why are dressed like a little schoolgirl?”

  “Joe, calm down…”

  “I’m not going to calm down! You crazies kidnapped me! Hasn’t anyone ever told you morons you can’t just pick people up off the street and carry them off? Untie me, and get me loose of this chain.”

  I sat back on a weight bench a few feet away from him and didn’t respond.

  “Untie me, I said! You and your boss are in a lot of trouble for this. The police arrest people for kidnapping. If you untie me and let me go, it’ll go much easier for you. You weren’t involved in the kidnapping. If you let me go now, you probably aren’t in any trouble at all. It’s just your boss who’ll be in trouble. You don’t have to let your boss get you in trouble, too.