All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Two) Page 6

  Function better at my current juice level. She said this as if doing so was easy. I needed juice, dammit. That’s how I would function better.

  “The higher your juice, the faster your number goes down. It takes about two or three days to go from 130 to 120, about four days to go from 120 to 110, about six days to go from 110 to 100, and about eight or nine days to go from 100 to 90. If you’re down at 90 and don’t have a kill available, you should just kill yourself and get it over with, because you’re dead already.”

  Dammit, I needed juice. Even talking about juice was torture.

  “If your kill is a man,” Keaton said, “he’ll be worth fifteen to twenty. The farther along he is, the less he’s worth, because men use up their juice. A woman will be usually be worth about twenty to twenty-five, sometimes a bit more.”

  Keaton finished off her sandwich, licked her fingers, and reached for another Coke. This time the cap hit me right in the eye.

  Those bottle caps weren’t random. I wanted to get angry at her petty sadism, but I didn’t dare.

  “I start to hunt at 115 because if you hunt when you’re below 100 your judgment and capabilities are bad. Below 100, you start looking at desperate measures. Desperate measures means, for instance, flying to another city and killing a Transform waiting at a Clinic for placement in a Focus household. By the way, you won’t do any such thing while you belong to me, unless I say so. I’ll decide if you need any kind of emergency measures. You understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  We passed another Transform, and after a little work I identified the pattern. Tagged by a Focus. He was all alone, and only Keaton’s stare and a low growl kept me in the car. I understood her logic, but I didn’t like it. Not with this juice hunger of mine.

  I had a question. “Ma’am?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Does this work? I mean, do you actually spend most of your time at juice levels that high?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I don’t think I have. I think the Detention Center gave me a lot less juice.”

  “What, you don’t think you need that much juice?” she asked.

  “No, no! Not at all!” Keaton and threats to my juice supply kept me far off balance. “I want lots of juice. I…I mean…I think more juice is good. The Center was wrong. I just…”

  “Shut up.”

  Keaton drove for a while without saying anything. I mentally cursed myself. My lack of juice made me sloppy. What if Keaton decided I didn’t need so much juice? She could, if she wanted to. I needed to be a lot more careful.

  Keaton enjoyed watching me curse myself. She wore a nasty mocking smile for several minutes.

  After a while, Keaton continued her lesson. We drove through the near suburbs now, with small narrow houses and shops at the corners. Mothers with baby carriages strolled the streets and old men gathered to play checkers and talk. “The curve I was telling you about doesn’t always hold, by the way. Some activities use up juice faster than others.”

  She didn’t continue, so I asked the obvious question. “What sorts of things use extra amounts of juice, ma’am?” Besides healing. I already knew about how healing used up juice.

  Keaton shrugged and took another sip of her Coke. “Besides healing, intense exercise and muscle use are the worst culprits. Coping with excess heat and cold also cost, but less. Even your metasense use will cost you some juice, as you discovered this morning.” I nodded. Keaton smiled. “When I beat the shit out of you, it not only hurts, it costs you juice.”

  Damn, she was a mean bitch. Without anything more than words, she could make me feel like she had hit me in the stomach. I almost started to think she might be human during these lessons. Then she came out with something like this and spoiled everything.

  “Even sitting around costs an Arm juice, though not much,” Keaton said. “Metasensing costs a little more than sitting around. What you need to worry about is life-threatening damage. You can survive things a normal wouldn’t dream of, but healing costs juice by the shitload. By the way, nothing I’ve done to you, yet, or what happened to you in the Center, did more than minor damage. Except maybe McIntyre’s blood draining test.”

  We continued to drive. I learned to spot Transforms and identify their tags, and Keaton kept on teaching me. We ate several times, and Keaton stopped at a city park for about a half hour, around noon, to let us stretch.

  In the midst of the afternoon rush hour I spotted another Transform, just a split second before Keaton. I always seemed to be a half second ahead of her. When I spotted the Transform I searched for the pattern. I found something strange about that one, though – I had a lot of trouble identifying the pattern. The pattern refused to come clear.

  Engrossed in my metasense, I barely noticed the car come to a jolting stop. A touch of a knife at my throat brought me back to reality.

  Keaton’s face was right in front of mine, her lips pulled back from her teeth in an animal snarl. I pulled back against the seat, trying to get away from the knife, as panic and adrenaline swept through me, my eyes wide in stark terror.

  “That’s my kill,” Keaton said, her voice hoarse and inhuman. “You touch it and you die.” She forced the knife harder against my throat.

  “No, no,” I said, my voice back to an annoying squeak. Keaton’s breath spread out, hot on my face. Her other hand held my left shoulder, squeezing brutally. She would kill me. Her deadly eyes held murder in them. Nothing human remained in her face. Her eyes were wide, her lips pulled back, and she panted as she ground that knife against my throat.

  “Please…”

  “Get out of the car. Get out of here and get away from my kill or I’ll kill you.”

  “I’m going, ma’am, I’m going…” I said, as my hand fumbled for the door handle. I found it, the door opened, and I tried to slide away. Keaton lifted up the knife. Not much, but enough to allow me to slide out. I eased along the seat and, leaving my coat behind, out of the car and into the far end of the Sears parking lot. About 50 feet away, a woman with two children in tow glanced at us, shoved her children into the car and drove off with a screech of tires. The cars sped past without noticing us.

  I never stopped watching Keaton. I slowly backed away from the car, away from Keaton and away from the kill.

  She told me to get out of here. I should have run away from the car.

  I didn’t.

  Because, there in my metasense, past the Sears and two blocks over, was a good kill. I wanted it. I needed it. We were out here hunting juice for me.

  I backed into a single car parked out here at the far end of the lot and stopped. I still watched Keaton. Keaton stared at me and snarled. I snarled back, a part of me surprised at my audacity.

  Days of stark terror, beatings, and torture from Keaton had taught me to fear her more than anything else I ever imagined. Terror beyond reason overwhelmed me and controlled me. One of the lessons had been ‘you cannot run away from me’. Now, she told me to run. In a split second all her control washed away, superseded by my overwhelming need for juice. I needed this kill. This should be my kill.

  If Keaton wouldn’t let me take juice I would die.

  Keaton moved around in the car, the knife gone from her hand. Now she held a gun. She did something with the bullets, and pointed the gun through the car window at me. She still wore that expression of animal fury, this time mixed with determination.

  I edged around the other parked car and continued to back off, no longer thinking of juice. Facing Keaton with murder in her eyes, my terror of her overwhelmed my need for juice. She ordered me to run, but my instincts told me otherwise. I backed through a gap in the speeding cars to the other side of the street, then around the corner behind the Security First National Bank, until I physically got out of her sight. Only then did I run. I sprinted as fast as possible and I didn’t stop for at least a mile. I hurt when the kill went out of range. I needed a kill. The Transform should have been my kill. No bullets
followed me. Keaton let me go.

  I was in tears when I stopped running, tears of fear and tears of sheer fury. I turned around to face back where I metasensed the kill. The Transform was probably still there. Keaton would be hunting the kill for a while yet, according to what she told me earlier. The kill still lived.

  I didn’t dare go back. I stood and raged and cried, but I didn’t dare go back. Keaton had taken my kill from me, and I couldn’t do anything about what she did but walk.

  I was cold, and miserable, and hungry, and furious.

  And afraid.

  “Excuse me, miss. Can I help?” I turned. A man in a business suit addressed me. He must have seen me running, seen my tears, and he thought he might be able to help. A nice decent human being who wanted to help someone in need.

  God.

  “Get away from me!” I said, rage filling my snarl. He backed away from my aggressive display, eyeing me with care, before he turned and quickly walked away from me.

  What could I do? Keaton stole my kill and I didn’t dare go back. I walked in downtown Philadelphia in the late afternoon. The one thing I wanted, I couldn’t have.

  I walked, not losing my rage. I had to go to Keaton’s warehouse. I had no other home.

  I had no money, no car, no coat and I didn’t even know where I was. Blood ringed my throat where her knife had cut the skin. I wrapped the hair from the wig I was wearing around my neck, and hoped no one would spot this bit of insanity. I don’t know what I looked like, besides being a woman in obvious need of assistance. I walked in the cold without a coat, on foot and in tears, and yet not one person offered to help me after the first man. No one wanted to come near me.

  I walked. I had a good idea that the warehouse was located somewhere on the south east side of the city, down near a river, so I walked that direction. I didn’t encounter any Transforms on my way home. If I did, I would have killed them, whether or not they had a Focus. I didn’t care. I was too angry to care.

  Eventually I ran into MacGregor Street and found my way home. My shoes fit, but they were new, not yet broken in. By the time I got home, four hours later, my feet were blistered and bleeding.

  My rage hadn’t lessened. I had given myself to Keaton in exchange for a chance at life, sold my soul in exchange for a good chance at survival, and I would die anyway. Keaton beat and abused and insulted and humiliated me, and forced me to doing things I hated, and it was all for nothing. Nothing!

  I hoped Keaton screwed up her hunt and got herself killed for it. She hunted my kill. Flush from her last kill, she would get another one, the bitch. That was my kill, mine!

  Inside the warehouse, my mind still swimming with rage, I turned on the lights and got myself food from the refrigerator. I didn’t bother worrying about cooking for Keaton. She could go to hell. She would beat the crap out of me and threaten to kill me. So what? I was dead anyway.

  Maybe I would get lucky, and she would break a fingernail while she beat me.

  I sat in the gym with my back against the wall, and cried. I rocked back and forth, holding my arms around my head.

  I wouldn’t get another kill before I died. Keaton would take every kill that should be mine. I wouldn’t get any more juice. I would get worse and worse and worse until I went into withdrawal and died. If I got lucky, Keaton would kill me before then. She would enjoy it, the bitch.

  I should have stayed at the Detention Center. I would have taken longer to die. They would have given me one more kill. All I wanted was just one more kill.

  Maybe Keaton knew another way to get me juice. Except, I didn’t think so. If she had expected to react as she did when she spotted a kill, she wouldn’t have taken me hunting with her in the first place.

  She said she could help me survive, by teaching me to hunt. She was wrong. She couldn’t help me survive at all.

  When she came home, she would know I wasn’t going to live. She knew everything. She would probably kill me then.

  If Keaton didn’t have some other solution, I was dead. I needed Keaton to come up with some other solution for me. However, there was no other solution, and Keaton didn’t care whether I lived or died anyway.

  Keaton came home after midnight. She opened the garage door, and parked the car inside. She hummed to herself and smiled happily as she rubbed her hands against herself, high as a kite.

  I rushed over to her before she took three steps from the car.

  “I need a kill!” I screamed at her, tears dripping down my face. “You said you would teach me to survive! I need…”

  I didn’t get any farther. I expected her to beat me to the edge of unconsciousness, make me crawl and, eventually, apologize. Or kill me and end my agony. At the moment, I didn’t care what she did.

  Instead, Keaton just gave me a hard look. “Shut up, skag.”

  I shut my mouth with a snap and studied my feet, intimidated yet again.

  “Look at me,” Keaton said.

  I looked. She smiled her sensual smile. She had either just gotten some, or was ready to. I had never before considered Keaton in terms of feminine sexuality. She seemed far too masculine, but I had missed this side of her. The lazy, sensual way she moved, the bedroom eyes, the way she moved her tongue slowly across her full red lips, she would have turned the head of any male.

  The ripe smell of her nearly overwhelmed me, the overpowering odors of sweat and raw sex, mixed with a faint tinge of juice itself. She had taken my kill and squeezed every ounce of enjoyment from it. Despite how my mind burned with fury and the aching need for juice, I stood stock-still and quiet, cowed by Keaton’s presence. If what she told me in the morning was correct, her juice count right then was about 140. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  “Well,” she said. Her voice dripped a husky, bedroom tone. “I think we can say that having you hunt with me doesn’t work.”

  She studied me, still wearing her dreamy smile. “There’s no way that you’re ready to hunt on your own, either. That means we have to do something else about getting you kills, at least for a little while. Something desperate. Hopefully something should come through in the next day or two.”

  She did have another solution! She would keep me alive! I began to cry again.

  “Thank you! Thank…”

  “You owe me dinner, slave,” she said. I didn’t see her move, but an instant later, she held a knife at my throat. “Without the tears, dammit. Low juice or not, Arms don’t cry.”

  My tears vanished and I fixed her a late dinner.

  That night, I lay on a mat in the storage room and attempted to sleep. Keaton had sneered at me for even mentioning a bed, so I supposed I was lucky to have a mat rather than bare concrete floor. Without a blanket, I shivered in the cold. I needed juice so badly I hurt all over.

  Fear ate at me like a chancre. I couldn’t think around it. Keaton terrified me at a level too fundamental for words.

  I barely believed it possible to be so terrified by another person this way. She loomed in my mind, dominating everything. My thoughts refused to turn away from my memories of her. ‘Anything,’ she whispered in my mind. ‘Yes, yes,’ my mind responded. ‘I’ll do anything.’ Eager to do anything she wanted, just to make her happy with me, release me from her terrible gaze.

  Fear like this is dehumanizing. My humanity sloughed off, along with reason, civilization, and free will, until nothing but the animal remained.

  Some part of me understood. Some part of me hated myself for my own weakness. ‘Anything,’ she whispered in my mind, and I responded, shivering, helpless, and desperate to obey.

  I thought I offered my services and my obedience. I thought I made a promise. I misunderstood. Keaton wanted my services and obedience, not because I gave them to her, but because I had no choice. She set about getting her way, and she succeeded. I was a fool. I couldn’t oppose Keaton in anything she wanted.

  Defeat was a bitter companion.

  I had let her make me a murderer. I gave away my dignity,
my humanity, my self-respect. All because I wanted to live.

  I tried to pray. I tried to ask God to help me, to save me from Keaton.

  I couldn’t do it. What might I ask for? Forgiveness? Forgiveness requires repentance, and I knew I would kill again, to get juice.

  I turned away from God because I wanted to live.

  I would do anything to live. I wanted juice. I would do anything for juice…

  Except balk Keaton.

  Low on juice, and cold, and hungry, and low on juice, and miserable, and low on juice, eventually I slept.

  (5)

  Keaton didn’t go out the next morning. She disappeared into her workroom and didn’t leave.

  If Keaton had gone out, I might have spent the morning curled up on the floor, but with Keaton there, I didn’t dare. Eventually, I decided to scrub the kitchen floor. Floor scrubbing didn’t involve any thinking.

  I’m fairly sure I spent a long time scrubbing a tiny section of concrete warehouse floor, and nothing else. I made small whimpering and sobbing noises as I worked. Eventually, I drove Keaton so crazy she came out of her workroom.

  “Get up,” she told me. Of all things, she had me dress up in my mod teenager getup again. Then she handed me a driver’s license. The license featured a picture of me, or at least me in my mod getup. Not my name, though. Instead, Elizabeth O’Neal. She handed me the car keys and said, “Go take the car and get some food.”