The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Five Read online

  “Well. I can’t say I’m not interested. The world, however, is not a perfect place, and some Focuses are not the paragons of reason that you are. How, uh, dark is this Hargrove? Or how enslaved?”

  “She’s Focus Adkins’ star pupil, except that Focus Adkins reports she has moral problems and is too nice to her people. From Focus Adkins point of view. She’s apparently a decent human being, intelligent…oh, and also, young.”

  “The best combination. You have yourself a deal, Tonya.”

  “I was hoping you would say that.”

  The Breaking of Keaton

  (1964)

  Tonya followed her gut, just as she did while Monster hunting. If what she feared had happened, she was ready. The wild-eyed police officers knew nothing. The smell of fear suffused the area. The faint odor of juice, where no juice should be, caught in her nose. The world around her became a whirling nonsense corridor of noise, save for her true path, the one she followed toward her goal.

  She led her team into a neighborhood’s unpaved alley, suburban style, an easement for some power lines, overgrown with waist high grass, the seed pods not yet spread and ready for dispersal.

  The damned Arm ought to be around here close.

  Her nose caught the faint odor of blood.

  Next, the stronger odor of juice mixed with the blood.

  Lastly, she metasensed juice.

  “Got her,” Tonya said, whispering. “Into the next door neighbors’ backyard.” The backyard of a house in the suburbs of Washington, DC. She wouldn’t hole up here if she was an Arm, but if everything had worked out correctly…

  A cat yowled, and ran through the low evergreen bushes. Her bodyguards tensed, but Tonya stayed steady, lost in her sensory kaleidoscope. She waved her team forward, and with them at her side, she walked forward, up to the house. Tonya now smelled fresh blood. Copious amounts of blood.

  “Wait here. There’s nothing you can do to protect me from the Arm,” Tonya said. Her plans had worked. At Suzie’s orders, seconded by Shirley Patterson, she had stalked Keaton like a game animal, strewing baits, treats and traps in front of every path she might take. Tonya’s hirelings, the PIs and the mobsters, hadn’t known their target; they simply harassed someone unknown to them. At Suzie’s orders, she had cornered the Arm and taken away both her support and her sanity, turning her into a ripe flower of opportunity.

  The Arm now waited ready to be picked and stuck in a vase. Tonya’s vase.

  She stopped at the door and hesitated. Horror waited inside. She had directed Dr. Henry Zielinski, long-time friend of the Focuses, into this trap. He would either come out of this owning the Arm (who the Council would then buy from him), or he would come out dead, at Keaton’s hand, his death enslaving Keaton to the Council for all time. A win either way. Whether Dr. Zielinski survived or not was up to him and his multifaceted skills. Ordinarily, she would have given a normal a zero chance of survival, but he was Zielinski, the only normal she would be hesitant to take on in a battle for survival.

  Tonya regretted her actions, but only barely. The Council needed Keaton now, and she had agreed. The damned Nuttylips Rebellion sucked up more Focuses each day. Without an edge, they would die or be enslaved – not only the existing Council members and their backers, but any non-Focus Major Transforms, and also all leading Network members. Such as Dr. Zielinski.

  Dead now, instead of later, appeared more likely, Tonya thought as she surveyed the mayhem inside the small house with her metasense. Recent events had spread the remains of juice around the living room so thick that her metasense functioned almost like vision. The loops hanging from the curtain rods like giant sausages had to be intestines. She would be confessing her sins and saying Hail Marys for years because of her part in this slaughter. She couldn’t say she actually liked Zielinski, but nobody deserved to die in such a way.

  Tonya almost turned away, to flee and attempt to forget this house and its contents. The blood, gore and slaughter were why she had abandoned Monster hunting. The choices she had to make, required to hunt Monsters, still ate at her soul.

  No, though, she hunted Keaton at the Council’s behest. They would bear the greatest responsibility for what happened, not her. She overcame her hesitations, opened the door, and walked in.

  The inside of the small house was an abattoir, a reeking, rotting mess, strewn with gore, and as she feared intestines draped over the doors and furniture. Hank’s portable operating room, his oversized steamer trunk, lay in splinters across the room, surgical tools scattered everywhere. Tonya forced herself not to look for the head associated with the remains.

  “Biggioni.” Keaton’s voice was hoarse and rough, from someone no longer used to speaking. Someone regressed to nearly an animal. “Help. Help me.” Someone nearly turned into an animal because of Tonya’s machinations. Her soul quivered in guilt at her own deeds.

  Was Keaton’s voice begging, or commanding? Tonya wasn’t sure. She didn’t care. She followed the voice, to a bedroom, trying not to step in the gore.

  Whatever she did here would help Keaton, she told herself. Keaton would become a tool of the Council. Tonya would find a way to protect her from the rebellion until the Arm healed, save Keaton’s miserable life, and then employ Keaton to help stop the rebellion before the rebel fires consumed them all and left them in servitude, in the involuntary employ of the Federal government.

  Tonya didn’t have the strength to control a healthy Keaton with her charisma, and her juice skills weren’t remotely up to the job. The only way she knew of to take control of Keaton was to break her, and as with any broken Transform facing an angry Focus, leave her no other path forward.

  When she did such a thing to a recalcitrant Transform, for hire, the other Focuses called her the Wicked Witch of the East. She couldn’t imagine what they would call her if they learned what she was doing here.

  Tonya walked into the juice-fouled bedroom. Keaton sat on the floor. Her lower left leg was missing, and bone showed, below the knee. Shattered, exposed to air. The missing leg was the medical problem Tonya had bargained Dr. Zielinski into coming here to fix. Too bad the price she had offered for this, a visit with Focus Hargrove, had been a chimera to begin with; she had known the Council would never permit any researchers to publish any information about Hargrove’s screwy metasense before she had dangled the offer in front of Dr. Zielinski.

  He should have known better. Too bad his ambitions got in the way of his good judgment…again. Every Ahab had their whale, every Huck Finn their river.

  Keaton looked different than Tonya remembered from their one and only meeting. Her muscles were more symmetrical than before, and her physical presence was much more human. Not fully symmetrical or fully human, though. The Arm had shaved her head, and she held a blonde wig in her hands. She sat among knives and guns spread out on the floor. Tears rolled down the Arm’s face.

  Broken. Defeated. Ripe for the picking. Just as Tonya had ordered.

  Time to pluck.

  She prayed to God nobody would ever find out how she had arranged this – that she was behind the Arm’s insane run of bad luck, which left her wounded, low on juice, and bereft of all her previous companions and thug hirelings.

  Tonya took in the bedroom again, wary of traps and other dangers. Wait! A man lay on the bed in a pool of blood, heart slowly beating. Zielinski!

  Tonya’s self-control relaxed, bringing her closer back to herself from the mental rigors of the Monster hunt. Zielinski, alive? Who the hell did the intestines belong to, then?

  So much for using his death to bind the Arm to the Council for all eternity.

  This changed everything. Of all the appalling and annoying things, secret agent Zielinski had found a way to survive yet another impossible situation. Maybe. Damn his skills! She was a Focus, he was a friend of the Focuses. Since he remained alive, she would have to save him. Despite the nagging suspicion that someone, somewhere, wanted otherwise.

  Dammit, she was a Focus! Saving lives
was what she did! Despite the contrary insinuations some people made.

  Dr. Zielinski looked to be in bad shape. He had a black eye, bled from a cut on his forehead, and one of his arms hung funny. His pants were shredded and showed blood, leaking into the puddle around him. Lots of blood.

  “Fix the doctor,” the Arm said. Trying to be commanding, and failing. So dangerous, so predatory. So utterly broken. “I’ll do whatever you want.” The magic words. Tonya’s heart thrilled. “Please. I’m dying. Don’t let me die.”

  The Arm was at her last wits, just as Tonya planned. Yes!

  “I will help,” Tonya said. The Arm met Tonya’s gaze and fell into Tonya’s charismatic grasp. “For a price.”

  Keaton looked away. She had to realize what was coming. Her subconscious certainly did.

  “Politically, you need to become a Focus,” Tonya said.

  Keaton didn’t answer.

  “You’ve already agreed to stop taking household Transforms.” Keaton nodded. “Right now, it’s just an agreement. We need to make the agreement formal.” Keaton nodded again. “But that isn’t all. From here on out, you need to treat Focuses as your friends and allies, unless proven otherwise.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You’ll be a member of the Focus Network. I’ll be your contact,” Tonya said. “There are Focuses who want to hire you.”

  “Hire me?” Keaton laughed, the insane laugh of the condemned. “What the fuck for?”

  “Intimidation. Espionage. Assassination.”

  “Your group of bleeding-heart biddies wants to hire me to be a monster?”

  Keaton feared worse. She feared enslavement. Torture. Something else, something far worse. The fear ate at the Arm, but unlike with a Focus, the fear edged into the dark corners of the Arm’s mind, priming her to explode in suicidal fury.

  Tonya no longer had enough leverage – with Zielinski alive – to enslave the Arm. Tonya had counted on her guilt, her psychological weakness over her obvious failure of control, to open those cracks in Keaton’s mental defenses for Tonya’s charisma to slip through. Insufficient death, insufficient weakness. How the hell had Zielinski survived, damn it? “Yes. You’ll need to keep in contact with me. Regular contact.” Enough regular contact to allow me to establish some level of ongoing charismatic control over you. “We need to be allies. We’re your sisters; you can help us, and we can help you. You must be a part of our family.” Or I’ll put a .777 through your goddamned skull, Tonya didn’t say.

  Keaton heard quite well what Tonya didn’t say.

  “I’ve seen your Focuses and their pathetic households,” Keaton said, the tears gone from her still raspy voice. “I can make better money robbing Boy Scouts and gas stations.”

  Tonya licked her lips. “We won’t be paying in money. We’ll be paying with information, access to other secretive specialists like Dr. Zielinski, and access to Transform-friendly accountants and lawyers.” Tonya paused, taking in the Arm’s reactions, readying the kicker. “In addition, we’ll be able to arrange for access to clinic Transforms with no hope of finding Focuses.”

  “Fuck,” Keaton said. “Juice?” She shied away from Tonya. Juice was a powerful lever on the Arm, more than even with a household Transform, Tonya realized. “I’d end up as your slave.”

  “Today, perhaps, if I pushed it,” Tonya lied. “I don’t want you as a slave, though.” Couldn’t get her as a slave, not today. Over the long term, maybe things would be different. Suzie wanted her as a slave. The Council did, as well. “Too much danger to my household. Having you as an ally would serve me much better.”

  “You’re a fool.”

  Dr. Zielinski. His voice was a bare croak.

  “Hank!” Tonya rushed to his side, keeping an eye on the Arm. “How bad off are you?”

  He looked over at Keaton, fear in his eyes. “Tell her,” Keaton said, voice low and stony. “She has to learn about the danger.”

  Tonya’s eyes flickered from one to the other. She had no idea what either of them meant, or what motivated this.

  “She thought I might be behind the attack on her, or know who was.” Dr. Zielinski closed his eyes. “She made sure I wasn’t, and didn’t know who.”

  Torture. “When she decided I didn’t have the information she wanted, she promised to pay me for my time and effort.” Time and effort. Hell, there’s a euphemism for torture I’ve never heard before, Tonya thought. Dr. Zielinski pulled his torn shirt aside and showed Tonya some bandages. Keaton had skinned pieces of his arms, one patch on his right arm and two on his left, and dislocated his left shoulder. “Then I tried to operate on her leg.”

  Dr. Zielinski looked away.

  “She suffered a psychotic break,” Dr. Zielinski said. His hold on his own sanity was weak, amid a boiling cauldron of anger. He couldn’t even speak Keaton’s name aloud. “Dr. Mitchell didn’t survive.” Oh, of course. Dr. Zielinski’s replacement for Dr. Kepke. None of his assistants lasted long. None of them had his cast iron gorge or his knack for survival. “I’m not sure how I survived, or what actually happened, but there’s something wrong with my legs, and I feel like I’m about to go into shock.”

  “What do you mean by psychotic break?” Tonya said. The intestinal decorations, perhaps?

  Keaton put her head in her hands and sobbed. Radiating fear of herself, and perhaps a tiny bit of remorse.

  “She loses herself. She can’t talk. She becomes a true monster, in all senses of the word. She ate human flesh.”

  Right now, the Arm wasn’t very Arm-like, destroyed by her own actions and Tonya’s machinations. Destroyed enough to enslave, as the Council wanted?

  Eating human flesh wasn’t enough of a hold. Not when you were already a mass murderer.

  “I don’t remember,” Keaton said, a whisper. “I don’t remember a thing. When I came back to myself, I had the taste of human flesh in my mouth, and a big memory gap. I’ve had these memory gaps before, but, before this, I never knew what happened in them.”

  Time to consolidate the victory. “Okay, Hank, how are we going to do this? Is there any way for you to do the surgery if I hold K…her down?”

  Dr. Zielinski got up on his good elbow, wobbly. “Bandage up my legs.” No kindness, just a preemptory order.

  Keaton moved before Tonya did; the Arm’s hands shook, but she walked just fine on one leg. Well, hopped. Her eyes and Dr. Zielinski’s eyes met, and she moved ever so slowly to the bed, where she slowly ripped an already shredded sheet into new bandages.

  Very very strange, as if the two of them had snake-charmed each other. Both barely kept grip of a towering murderous rage, Dr. Zielinski toward the Arm, Keaton toward her enemies, the ones who had ambushed her. Focus Julius’s thugs. Oh, and all other human life, Tonya suspected. All it would take to push Keaton into another psychotic break would be the backfire of a nearby car.

  Focus Council dictates or not, Tonya made ready to take Keaton’s juice from her and end the Arm’s miserable life. The Arm didn’t have much juice to take. The juice weapon was too slow to keep a sane Keaton in line, but against a mindless psycho? Tonya doubted she would have any problems.

  The Arm wrapped up Dr. Zielinski’s legs, showing care and affection she hadn’t known the Arm possessed. “Some help here, please,” she said. “I need a splint for the Doc’s leg.” Tonya looked around, found a dining room chair to sacrifice, and created a splint the hard way. “He still needs a hospital,” Keaton said, after immobilizing his left leg.

  Tonya nodded. She turned to Dr. Zielinski, caught his eyes and ordered him to stay awake. “Amputation?” Of what was left of the Arm’s ruined leg.

  Dr. Zielinski nodded. “My kit’s in the other room, or what’s left of it.”

  Tonya gathered supplies. If Arms were even close to as tough as Focuses, and threw off diseases anywhere near as well, the condition of Dr. Zielinski’s tools wouldn’t matter.

  “It wasn’t me,” Keaton said. Tonya glanced back; Keaton sat on the bed in the pu
ddle of blood and wrapped her arm around Dr. Zielinski, trying to comfort him. Dr. Zielinski stared straight ahead, shivering, emotions locked down tight. “They…they…they did something to me. The FBI. When they had me as their prisoner and slave. They didn’t get me juice soon enough, once. Even before I passed out, it was worse than anything I’d ever experienced, or experienced after. I…I can’t even face the memories. I don’t even know what it’s fucking called.”

  Dr. Zielinski’s face softened. “Withdrawal. Same as for male Transforms. You came back from this?” After a couple of minutes or so, male Transforms in juice withdrawal took life altering damage; after ten or twenty minutes, they were as good as dead, unrecoverable, even if you gave them back their juice. Mindless vegetables.

  “Two hours,” Keaton said. Tonya’s breath caught. “So they said. I don’t remember the depths of, of…” She let her voice trail off. “I wasn’t myself until they got me juice the second time. But ever since then…it happens. Sometimes. The same state. The memory loss. The absurd violence.”

  Hell. Tonya turned away. A Major Transform in juice withdrawal? She had seen Transforms in withdrawal, and nothing she knew of compared to the horror of a male Transform deep in withdrawal. Satanic horror. Focuses couldn’t go into withdrawal, not really. They could drive themselves to the edge of withdrawal, but Focuses were juice producers. As soon as they knocked themselves out doing so, the juice naturally came back.

  Arms, as juice consumers, were as vulnerable as male Transforms to withdrawal.

  Now there was a lever.

  Even contemplating using such a lever made Tonya’s stomach clench and her soul ache.

  Dr. Zielinski tried to smile, his natural curiosity and empathy warring with his recent eyewitness account of what a mature Major Transform could do in a juice-induced psycho episode. “Do you want to make amends for what you’ve done?”