Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) Read online

  At the checkpoint, Tonya’s driver Danny rolled his window down. Crisp Appalachian air wafted in as the grizzled police officer leaned down to inspect the four in the car. “No entrance to the public,” the policeman said with a wave of halitosis-scented warmth. “There’s been a Monster transformation. Authorized personnel only.”

  Tonya sighed. She had a hundred things she needed to be doing, most of them far more important than driving out to the Appalachian hills to goggle over a Monster transformation. Nothing to be done about it, though. She turned away and let her people deal with the cop.

  From the front passenger seat, Ralph watched the man with wary hostility. He and Danny were Tonya’s bodyguards, and Ralph was good at wary hostility. He thought Tonya ought to have four bodyguards. Always. Tonya’s household could not afford it.

  Danny gave the officer a small leather folio containing Tonya Biggioni’s FBI-issued identification. The man inspected it and backed away after he read the contents. He handed the folio back through the window with the tips of his index and middle finger, as if he feared contamination, and waved his hand in the general direction of the small road behind him. “Agent Bates is waiting for you up at the scene, ma’am. You folks are cleared to go on through.”

  Tonya rolled her shoulders to ease their ache. Her secretary, Rhonda, noticed and gave an encouraging smile. Tonya took a deep breath of the chilly, pine-scented air, now clear of the odor of tooth decay, and exhaled with a sigh. Her muscles often ached on long car trips and they were hours from Philadelphia. She needed a full body, muscle-straining stretch, but she did not intend to do anything so undignified at a police checkpoint.

  ‘On through’ took them a hundred yards before the narrow drive became too packed with parked vehicles for Tonya’s car to pass. Danny shrugged, found a tiny patch of dirt and parked their car. They exited and walked up the drive. Tonya scrutinized the long line of official vehicles as they passed – police cars, county vehicles, vehicles emblazoned with the insignia of obscure state agencies, unmarked vehicles, even an empty ambulance. Clusters of police and FBI gathered beside their vehicles, smoking their cigarettes and waiting.

  The air was fresh and crisp, the sky a brilliant blue and frost sparkled on the tree branches. Tonya enjoyed the exercise until she overheard one of the local police mutter something about ‘fucking monsters’, and ‘never should have let them out of Quarantine’ in a voice meant to be overheard.

  She didn’t give them the pleasure of a response but Danny bristled with outrage beside her.

  Tonya smelled the crime scene long before she reached it, the ripe stench of violence. About a quarter mile up, the winding drive ended in a small clearing occupied by a clapboard shack of uncertain color and shabby appearance. Decades had passed since the shack’s last painting. Beside her, Rhonda grimaced. She had come from a place much like this and her old memories weren’t good.

  Several men gathered near the front door of the shack as she approached. Tonya picked out Agent Tommy Bates by his height, pale hair, and the ever-present cigarette. Neither he nor the other men seemed bothered by the stench of death surrounding them, but then, their noses were merely normal. Tommy was an old, well, ‘friend’ wasn’t quite the right word, but they had worked together before, and most of the time they had been allies. Many years ago, Tommy’s wife had come down with Transform Sickness. She survived and now lived in a household out on the west coast. Since then, Tommy had gone out of his way to help the victims of the disease. Prejudice against Transforms was rampant and his support and that of others like him was like a bulkhead against a sea of hate.

  “Focus Biggioni,” Tommy said and put out his hand. Tonya took it graciously. Around them, the other men stepped away when Tommy named her a Focus. Tonya flicked her gaze at them and smiled, a little too sardonic to be the purely social smile she owed Tommy.

  Men and women Transforms looked like average human beings, but that wasn’t true for a Focus. Tonya’s major transformation had given her excellent health, the body of an athlete, the charismatic presence of a politician or a movie star and the appearance of a nineteen-year-old, despite her fifty-odd years.

  She used every bit of her Focus transformation benefits to keep her household financially afloat. Money was always a problem.

  “What’s the emergency, Tommy?” Monster transformations happened all the time.

  The other men jumped again at the sound of her voice. It was rich and musical, with undertones that shivered along the spine.

  Tommy was used to her, though, and merely ground his cigarette out under his shoe. “Looks straightforward on the surface. Alice Colson, wife of Clem Colson, caught the Shakes and didn’t realize it. Made a normal transformation. No Focus to stabilize her, of course, so in time she went Monster and attacked one of the men here. Killed him. Clem and the Vinote brothers, Pete and Zach, managed to shoot and kill the former Mrs. Colson before she killed anyone else. However, we’ve got a problem.”

  “A problem?” The heavy air still carried the scent of conflict. Tonya recognized the ozone smell of Monster transformations and dead Monster mixed in with the reek of death. The scents brought back unpleasant memories from when she had been a young Focus.

  Tommy tilted his head toward the house. “Look for it,” he said. “You’ll see it better than I can.”

  Tonya frowned. Tommy didn’t refer to her vision, but to her metasense. She spotted Rhonda and Danny first. They wore the tags Tonya used to mark her household and they shone with the bright glow of Transform health. No problem there. Her metasense found no sign of Ralph. Again, no problem. He was a normal, not a Transform, part of her household because his wife had transformed.

  Farther afield, though, behind the decrepit shack, Tonya spotted another Transform. A woman. She was untagged, not a part of any Focus’s household. She was certainly not a part of Tonya’s household, and so her presence was ill defined. Tonya sensed little else about her.

  There shouldn’t be a Transform here. Transformations didn’t happen in clusters, and the appearance of a second Transform so soon after the death of Alice Colson, especially out here in this sparsely populated country, stretched the bounds of credibility.

  “That is not…” Tonya said, but voices from inside the shack interrupted.

  “Ya cain’t take her,” one rural-voiced male said.

  A second male voice replied firmly and authoritatively. “Sir, it’s state law. Her remains have to be taken to the State Transform Detention Center for autopsy and burial.”

  Trouble. Tonya entered the shack through the broken door and nearly gagged. The air reeked of blood and death, raw on her sensitive nose. She stepped carefully through a wasteland of broken furniture, blood and bullet holes, depressed by the familiar poverty of the tiny hovel. The Monster transformation had taken place inside. The resulting fight had started here, traveled out the back door, and finished outside.

  A flannel shirted man brandished a hunting rifle in his arms at two gray-coated officials. Next to him, a second local watched the confrontation with tight lips and hard eyes.

  Sometimes normals amazed Tonya. She couldn’t fathom how they ignored the fetid odor, but they seemed oblivious.

  “I refuse! Ya cain’t, I won’t let ya,” the first man bellowed with a wave of his rifle. The official who had spoken carefully laid his hand on the other man’s rifle and gently lowered it.

  “We got a family burial ground,” the second local said, his voice softer than his eyes. “Got’a honor the dead, even if Satan cursed ‘em.”

  What a mess! Tonya shook her head and lassoed the eyes of the local with the gun. “It’s the right thing to do, Clem Colson,” she said. “The officials know their job.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Clem said. He lowered the rifle and turned away to hide his tear-stained face.

  The two officials backed away from Tonya, knowledgeable enough to recognize Focus charisma in use. One of them muttered the Lord’s Prayer.

  Tonya pretended not to notice their prejudice. These officials weren’t too far removed from the backwoods themselves and hadn’t lost their suspicion of all things unexplained. The early years of Transform Sickness had generated many superstitions – the mark of the devil and all – and many of those lingered. Science had made great progress in the years since, but rational explanations always traveled slower than fear.

  These officials hadn’t even been the ones who’d survived Alice Colson and her Monster transformation.

  Tonya turned to Tommy Bates, who, along with Rhonda, Danny and Ralph had followed Tonya into the now crowded shack. “Would you be so kind as to introduce me to the woman in question?”

  Tommy nodded and led them out the back door and into a small clearing behind the shack. The gory remains of Alice Colson and her victim were scattered together, making red mud of the packed-dirt yard. More officials and police officers milled about in the sullied red yard, taking notes and pictures, ready to pack up the deceased.

  Tonya noticed a human arm in the morass, still attached to an unrecognizable lump of a body. Not quite human, though – the fingernails had curled to form sharp claws, the first major change for many Monster conversions. Tonya grimaced in aversion, reflexes of long years hunting down Monsters with her household. If Clem and his friends hadn’t shot Alice, the changes to her body and damage to her mind would have accumulated until she had transformed into a true Monster: mad, dangerous and inhuman. Clem and his friend had done a service to the world when they shot the woman.

  While Tonya examined the mangled remains with cold disdain, Rhonda took one look and ran for the edge of the clearing, where she vomited miserably at the foot of a towering ash. “Sorry, ma’am.” She wiped her mouth and avoided looking at the gruesome remains again.

  Danny and Ralph were tougher. They had been with Tonya back when Tonya’s household used to hunt Monsters and they had a lot of experience with scenes like this.

  Tonya turned her attention from the bloody remains and picked her way to the shed on the far side of the clearing. In front of the shed, a woman in chains and shackles sat on a large log and cried. The Transform. Several men, including two policemen, huddled nearby, talking in low voices.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Tonya asked.

  Startled, the men jumped but one of them stepped forward. “Ma’am, please. I’m Dr. Dossett. This woman is about to turn Monster.”

  Not hardly. The sobbing woman’s hands still shook, a sign of the initial transformation and the source of the colloquial name of the disease, ‘the Shakes’. It took two weeks on the average after a woman transformed before she went Monster.

  “Am not,” the sobbing woman said, pain in her voice. She looked up at the new arrivals and lifted her hands to shield her eyes from the sun. She fidgeted, unable to sit still.

  Tonya inhaled in surprise and examined woman again. Light sensitivity, pain and fidgeting were classic signs of a woman Transform about to go Monster.

  “Tommy, can you explain this?”

  Tommy shrugged. “I was hoping you could.”

  Wonderful. Now she knew why Tommy had thought this scene odd enough to justify her attention. Tonya crossed her arms on her chest and considered the woman. If she was about to convert into a Monster now, the smart thing to do was to kill her before she could kill anyone else.

  A Transform, male or female, needed a Focus to stay alive and human. Tonya was a Focus and maintained a household with over three dozen Transform and non-Transform adults and children, but a Focus could only support a few dozen Transforms. Tonya, like any sane Focus, was full up. It was too bad for the woman, but it was too bad for many Transforms.

  However, Focuses did grow in capacity slowly over time and it had been years since Tonya had expanded her household size. She might be able to take on this suffering woman.

  If Tonya failed she could destabilize her entire household, risking the lives of innocents.

  Hard choices. The world was full of them. Tonya decided to take the risk. She knelt, took the woman’s chained hand and made the woman part of her household, using her metacampus to make a small chemical change in the woman.

  “Oh,” the woman said. Despite the shackles on her feet, she dove into Tonya’s arms. Tonya sat on the log and held the woman, rocking her gently. She took careful inventory of herself as she did. No headache, no queasy stomach, no light sensitivity of her own. She did have enough capacity to support this woman.

  Tonya wanted to weep; the doctor had been right. Now that she was part of Tonya’s household, Tonya could sense her juice level. She had been due to become a Monster in six hours. Tonya fixed that in an instant.

  Transform Sickness didn’t normally behave like this. The Shakes had come up with a nasty surprise for them. Again.

  “I think it’s time you unshackled this woman,” Tonya said, meeting the eyes of the doctor and the two policemen beside him. This time, she wielded her charisma like a club. The researchers didn’t know much about how Focus charisma worked, except they theorized it involved chemicals called hormones and pheromones. All Tonya cared about was when she said ‘jump’ in that tone of voice, men did.

  The men freed the woman from her shackles in moments.

  “Hon,” Tonya said to the woman, “what’s your name?”

  The woman sniffled and Danny lent her his handkerchief. She blew her nose and dried her eyes. “Delia. Delia Vinote. Alice’s my sister.” Delia looked like she was in her early twenties, sturdy and not at all like she had recently come down with a deadly disease.

  “Did you have a bad illness in the past month?” Tonya asked.

  “No, no ma’am. You a Focus, ma’am, like on the television?” Delia looked Tonya over and her eyes widened. “You’re the Focus on the TeeVee from Philly!”

  Tonya nodded. She was, alas, a minor local celebrity. Anything to bring in extra money for the household. Prejudice made jobs scarce for Transforms, and so everyone did what they could. The local CBS network affiliate paid her a tiny salary to be their resident expert on Transform Sickness and Transforms. Once or twice a month she had a few minutes on the local news. The exposure generated an astonishing amount of hate mail and death threats, but the money helped and as a Focus she needed the bodyguards anyway. She certainly wasn’t the first Focus who had been attacked in public. Nor would she be the last.

  “No sickness at all?” Tonya asked, eyes on Delia. Tonya could use her years of experience and a Transform trick or two to tell truth from falsehood.

  “No, that was Alice. We thought she had the flu. My hands didn’t start shakin’ ’til after Pete and, and…” Delia glanced over at the remains in the clearing. Her voice trailed off and her eyes teared up again.

  Truth unfortunately. This was bad.

  A person could become a Transform in one of two ways. The first, the normal way, was for a person to catch Transform Sickness. He became sick, he transformed, and he either found a Focus or if the world was kind he died.

  The other way a person could transform was via an induced transformation. On those rare occasions when a woman began a Focus transformation, several women around her would transform as well, with no sickness at all. There were all sorts of good biological reasons for this, which weren’t relevant right now, because no Focus transformations had happened anywhere near here.

  Delia had made an induced transformation anyway.

  Two years ago Lorraine Rizzari, a Focus colleague of Tonya’s, had made an impassioned presentation before the local chapter of the national Focus organization. She asked the Focuses to be on the lookout for obscure cases of induced transformations. Rizzari, then a PhD student, had come to believe atypical induced transformations were possible, and had been looking for evidence to back up her theory. She had theorized that induced transformations were a significant and steadily more common source of transformations and would eventually outnumber those caused by disease.

  Right now, fewer than 4000 Transforms lived in the country. Rizzari’s thesis was that within the next couple of decades, induced transformations would significantly increase and Transforms would number in the tens of millions.

  Her presentation had been dismissed by the powers-that-be, who decided the sporadic reports of induced transformations were mistaken, attributable instead to people who didn’t recognize their symptoms when they caught Transform Sickness the usual way.

  If Rizzari’s theory was correct, the implications were terrifying. The mortality rate from the Shakes was over ninety percent. Deaths would number in the millions. Tonya felt like she was staring the Grim Reaper in the eyes. It made her legs rubbery and stomach sour, for fear of the lives of future generations.

  “Nobody else shows any signs? Any other women around at all?”

  “No, ma’am. Just Alice’n me.”

  Tonya took a deep breath. “Well, Delia, you may not have been sick, but you’re a Transform anyway.”

  “That’s what the doctor said.” Delia paused, wiping the tears from her face with the handkerchief. “I’m scared, ma’am. What’s gonna happen to me?”

  Delia worried that she would become a Monster, Tonya knew. It was a legitimate worry. “I’ve made you one of my Transforms, Delia, and you’ll have to move to my household in Philadelphia. You’ll live with a couple dozen other Transforms. Your husband, too, if he wants.” Big “if”. Fewer things broke up a marriage faster than a transformation. It had cost Tonya her own husband and cut off most contact with her children.

  “What am I gonna do in a city?” Delia said. “I’m just a country girl. I cain’t support myself there.”

  “You can cook, cain’t ya?” Rhonda said. Delia looked up, surprised at the homey sound. Rhonda had slipped back into her native backwoods accent. “We need all types, girl. At least you’ll know how to work, not like some of the laggards I deal with.”

  Delia nodded slowly. “I can cook.”

  Tonya grinned, heartened, and pushed the unnerving memories of Focus Rizzari into the back of her mind where she could worry about them later.