The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Eight Read online

  I had been so casual when I started out, and I never realized how important the wound in him was. Because of the wound, I had something real to offer him. In serving me, I gave him the purpose he needed so badly, but I hadn’t realized I had a wound to mirror his. Bobby. My need for a safe lover and confidant had proven as massive as Tom’s need for a life cause. I wasn’t his aloof officer. I became his Arm, and Eissler’s chilling words about underlings sleeping with Arms to make them happy had snuck up on me and caught me like a hunting fox on a rabbit.

  He was so beautiful. I never before understood how beautiful brown skin might be. I never thought I would fall for a black man. He was gorgeous, with the maturity of years. His older body was definitely better than some kid’s more perfect body, I decided. The scars added character, and I was definitely seeing more attractiveness to brown as a skin color. He was even a decent lover, considerate and knowing. I had been gentle with him, less intense than I might have been, in consideration for his health.

  He showed the wear of those weeks in the cell. His face was gaunt, and he tired too easily. I hoped I hadn’t done anything to his body he couldn’t heal from. I had watched my guards, but Fred pushed the limits, and wear and exhaustion made Tom vulnerable. He wasn’t twenty any more. I decided I had better take him to Zielinski tomorrow and have him checked out.

  I still marveled over the change in his mind. Even though I had been responsible for his changes, they seemed like a miracle. All that effort, and it had worked. I stroked him again, and thought about the work I had for him to do, and how happy the work would make him. A purpose in his life again.

  The narrow sliver of moon set, and the room fell into the shadowed darkness of starlight. I thought about my own experience, when Keaton had done to me what I had done to Tom. I shivered as I wondered what Keaton thought she had been doing to my mind. She certainly had had some goal, probably several. I doubted I understood even now all that Keaton had done to me. I shook the thoughts away. I knew I was in some part Keaton’s creation, Keaton’s mirror. I knew she had grown to love me, in her own twisted way. I was who I was, and I could do nothing about Stacy Keaton.

  The Aftermath of the Disastrous November Meeting

  (Carol’s POV) [additions]

  Operating on Carol

  “After I stitch up your abdomen, other than your hands and whatever’s going on with your face, your remaining wounds are just bruises and lacerations,” Hank said, worry wrinkles around his eyes. “I can bandage them up, but they’re relatively minor, and they’ll heal on their own.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a definition of minor wound, doctor,” Tom said.

  Both Hank and I ignored him. Hank and Tom had been working on their originally testy relationship over the past month. They were both Korean War vets, and both well experienced with annoying officers and the all-day all-night demands. They had settled into a Master Sergeant and Captain-because-I’m-a-doctor relationship. I had even caught them shooting the breeze over the quirks of my command style, once. They were going to work well together, a good thing, because I damned well didn’t need them working out dominance issues in a crisis.

  Zielinski sewed up my gut, and then pulled out the bandages and a small, blunt-nosed cutting tool. He took almost an hour to clip the fishhooks and bandage the cuts. Tom paced restlessly until I snapped at him, and sent him out for food.

  After Hank finished the fishhooks, it was time to do my hands. First, I had to recover my control, during which Tom came back with three sacks of hamburgers and some French fries from a local diner. I ate two of the sacks of food, Tom carefully feeding me each bite. After I ate, I made a clumsy attempt to use the toilet, and ran out of ways to put off the surgery.

  I sat on the bed and stared bleakly at my mangled hands.

  “Ma’am, are you ready?” Zielinski said.

  I smiled and shook my head. “Hell, no. But every minute just makes things worse, doesn’t it?” I wished badly for a chance to hunt down a kill first. This would be a hell of a lot easier if my juice count was high.

  Hank nodded from his seat on the flimsy chair. “The bones are knitting with your hands closed. We’re going to have to break them.”

  “Alright. Let’s get this over with. You’re going to need to tie me down. I won’t be able to hold my shit together while you’re working on me.”

  Hank nodded again. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Doctor,” Tom said, his voice soft and cold, “exactly what kind of operation are you planning, here?”

  Hank glanced over at Tom, sad concern on his face. “Her hands are healing as they are,” he said. “The longer we let them heal, the harder they’ll be to fix. I’d like to do this in a fully equipped facility, but the truth is, the facility doesn’t make much difference for an Arm. She won’t become infected and I brought everything else I need with me. So we do this now, and here, because it’s most important we do this quickly.”

  “What about anesthetic, and a nurse to monitor her condition? You can’t tell me you’ve got that kind of setup in your bag.”

  “I’m immune to anesthetic, Tom,” I said, as gentle as I could. “I’d probably kill the nurse, too.”

  “So you’re going to break her hands again and reset them without anesthetic?”

  Hank nodded.

  “Fuck!” Tom threw his hands in the air with appalled frustration. I did notice he was less appalled than he might have been. Much as he didn’t like it, the soldier in him understood this kind of decision.

  “If this was the first time I’d performed this sort of procedure, I wouldn’t have the cavalier attitude you see, Tom,” Hank said. “This is, I believe, number nine.” Well, then. That was two of Keaton’s I didn’t know about. “Understand, pain that would break our minds is but an annoyance for an Arm. In the greater spectrum of Arm annoyances, mind you. The procedure won’t be pleasant, but…”

  I turned to Hank to interrupt his likely half hour discourse on pain. “Did you bring something for me to bite on?”

  “Yes. Just a second,” he said, rooting around in his bag. I worried about the thin hotel walls. I didn’t think anyone was in the room next to us now, but there had been earlier, and there probably would be again soon.

  “You’re probably going to need to gag me, too,” I said.

  “Fuck,” Tom said, again. Hank nodded as he extracted several well-chewed bits of broom handle from his bag.

  “If we’re going to tie you, we need something strong to tie you to,” he said.

  I glanced around the room for something to use, and wasn’t impressed. The furniture was flimsy and old, and I suspected even a normal could break them if they wanted.

  “The bed frame?”

  “Heist up the mattress and let’s look,” I said. I dragged myself off the bed and over to the second cheap chair. It creaked when I sat down. The bed frame turned out to be made of strong steel. Probably smart, given the sort of things that went on in the beds of this place.

  “This will do,” I said. I wasn’t going to be able to bend the frame unless I burned juice I didn’t have.

  “How are you going to hold it down?” Tom asked. “The frame weighs less than a hundred pounds. You’ll be able to swing the frame around even if you’re tied to it.” I visualized Hank trying to fix my hands while I flailed with a bed frame attached to my arm. I would probably kill somebody that way. The thought filled me with a driving kill lust, but I knew better, and pushed the lust down.

  I should have thought of the problem myself. Low juice made me slow.

  We all looked at each other, stumped.

  “Well, if we tied you along your full length, it would hold you,” Hank said.

  “No. Come up with something else.” I wasn’t going to permit that sort of restraint. I could feel the pounding of a headache starting, along with everything else.

  Tom glanced around. “What about the bathroom door? If we lay the door over the frame and you lay on top of that, you won’t
be able to swing the bed frame.”

  I thought about his suggestion. Slowly.

  “How strong is the door?” Hank asked. Tom knocked on it.

  “The door’s hollow, but not too cheap.”

  Hank shrugged. “That might work. If we put the door over the bottom crosspiece, it might hold. Lying on top of it, you won’t have good leverage.”

  I stared at the metal bed frame bleakly. The damned thing was already starting to look like a torture device. This was going to be as bad the second time around as it had been the first time. I heard Keaton’s sadistic laughter in my mind and knew she had planned this. She would probably want to hear all the details of this later. The thought of her still brought the raw edge of terror.

  “All right, get the door off its hinges. Let’s get this over with.” Nothing was going to get any better if I put this off. My stomach churned uneasily, and I really wanted to kill something.

  Getting Carol Juice

  “No,” I said. “We’ll drive home from here, not fly. I need to hunt.”

  “Carol,” Zielinski said, and then corrected himself to “ma’am,” but by then Tom had cut him off.

  “How can you hunt with your hands injured?” he said.

  “I can’t,” I said. “You’re going to have to help me.” My vision narrowed, and I had to control a shiver of juice lust. The mention of hunting washed through me like a wave of hot blood, and brought forward all the reactions of the hunt.

  “Boss! Carol!” I heard whispered shouts in my ear as Tom tried to bring me back to myself, and I realized I had closed off my other senses to focus on my metasense, futilely searching for Transforms in timeworn baby Arm fashion. I shivered again, more obviously.

  “I need juice.” The words slipped out of my mouth without my volition.

  “Tom,” Hank said, with his command voice. “She’s dangerous.” Tom inched back from me on the bed.

  “You’re going to help me,” I said. “You’re right. I’m dangerous. I wouldn’t ever bring you along on something like this unless I had to. The tag should protect you.” In the background, a machine started up, and then beeped about a minute later.

  “Shit. Ninety-four!” Hank said. Okay. The cat was definitely out of the bag.

  “All right,” Tom said. “What do we have to do?”

  Such willingness. So priceless. He was a treasure like nothing I had ever possessed before. Having my two most valuable treasures, Tom and Hank, together and undefended so close to Keaton’s territory, irrationally scared me. I cursed my crippled hands, as if they might help if Keaton decided to go after either of them.

  I sat up and hitched myself backwards until I was leaning against the headboard.

  “We’re going to search through the busiest sections of every major city we come to,” I said, and my nerves tingled with the tension of the kill lust, ache and anticipation and need. “A half mile spaced regular pattern. When I find a potential kill, or their trace, I’m going to need a private location, I’m going to need skin contact with the kill, and I’m going to be unconscious for about a half-hour afterwards.”

  Tom nodded. “Got it.”

  “I’m going to be dangerous. The juice lust supersedes just about everything when I’m hunting. I’m not very rational.”

  I caught Hank’s expression, just as he managed to avoid rolling his eyes. He didn’t think I was all that rational even in the best of times.

  “I need juice,” I said, to Tom, because Hank already knew. “With a kill in my sights, I’ll be willing to kill anything and everything that gets in my way. Make sure this doesn’t include you, you understand?”

  He nodded again. “Uh huh.”

  “Don’t give me any grief when I’m on the hunt. Obey my orders exactly. My temper is going to be shot, and I’m going to want nothing so bad as to kill someone, Transform or not.”

  “I hear you,” he said. “How does this work?”

  “You’ll drive while I search. Once I find someone, what I do depends on the situation. We won’t be in Houston, so I’m not going to need to be quite as careful as I would be back home, but this still needs to be kept quiet. You two will wear gloves. We will leave no witnesses.”

  “Ma’am,” Zielinski said. He didn’t like the idea of helping me hunt. “How do you ensure no witnesses?”

  “You mean no living witnesses, ma’am. Don’t you?” said Tom. His words did not make Hank any happier. Truthfully, neither of them was happy at the thought of killing innocent victims, in cold blood, just to get me juice.

  “I’m not asking you to kill,” I told them. “I’ll do the killing. Don’t stand in my way, though, and don’t try to stop me.” Killing was hard for them, and a pleasure for me. Of course I would do the killing.

  “One caveat, though,” I said. “If I decide to kill children, you can try to turn me away. Come up with other options. Be careful, and don’t push too hard. But come up with another way if you can.” In the grip of juice lust, even children became just an obstacle to be disposed of. I would rather not wake up afterwards, however, with the knowledge that I had murdered children to buy my juice.

  Tom glanced over at Hank, unhappy. Hank stared at his hands. He had something to say, but he would get to it in his own sweet time. He always did.

  “What else?” Tom said, after a moment.

  “Afterwards, I’ll be out for a while.” I looked at him sideways. “After I wake up, we’ll need to find a motel room.” This would be his first time to see me right after a kill. Always previously, I had been too careful of him.

  “Ah, ma’am?” he said, looking at my injuries. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, but he kept his doubts.

  “Ma’am,” Zielinski said. “I brought your diaphragm with me.” All carefully concerned for my welfare. Responsible, as a doctor should be. He must have put a lot of work into planning what I might need. His black bag, food for me, and now this.

  The last was a miss. I shook my head.

  “I don’t need it,” I said. “I haven’t used one since before the CDC.”

  Hank raised his eyebrows with a pained expression, and restrained himself before he asked why I hadn’t bothered to tell him this before.

  He did have a point, actually. He was my doctor, and a Transform Sickness researcher. He did have a need to know things like this. I just hadn’t thought about it.

  “I didn’t have enough initiative to use it right after the CDC,” I said. “And then after I’d gone without for a few months, I didn’t bother going back to using it. I haven’t used it since.” The damned diaphragm was a pain in the ass, and sex was a lot more fun without the bother. Given Transform women, with the spectacular exception of Lori, were infertile, I had a hard time taking the need for birth control too seriously.

  Hank took notes. Yes, his goddamned notepad was in his black bag, as well.

  “This isn’t the first time this has happened, is it?” Tom said, pinning down Hank once we got on the road. “You knew, even before we got to her.”

  “It’s happened before,” Hank said. “This is the worst since she finished her apprenticeship.”

  “Why?” Tom turned to me. “Why does Keaton do this? From someone as powerful as you described, why bother?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a matter of preference. She enjoys dishing out pain.” I paused. “As much as I enjoy sex.”

  Tom let out a pained whistle. “So how long does this thing between you and your boss go on?”

  I shrugged, and didn’t answer for a long moment. “That’s a good question.”

  He frowned, catching something odd in my tone.

  “What are you saying?” he said.

  “What am I saying? Not anything.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Certainly I’m not thinking anything, not when Keaton can read my thoughts on my face. Do you understand, Tom? I’m not thinking anything at all.”

  “Fuck,” he said. Hank, beside Tom in the front seat, turned
around to study me. Transform doublethink. Hank was a master at this game, as were many of the top Focus bitches. He hadn’t realized how good I had gotten at doublethink.

  “All I see are a few things, obvious things. She has her secrets. Well, so do I. I have a few things I do really well, possibly better than she does. And things change.” I stared at Tom intently, willing him to understand me.

  “How much trouble are you in if Keaton realizes you’re thinking like this?” he said.

  “Thinking like what?” I asked. “All I do is observe a few things. I don’t even dare think about – whatever it is I’m not thinking about. What more can she want? She probably knows I observe things, and she probably laughs that I don’t dare think about them, and revels in her power.”

  “But things change,” he said, his voice a low whisper.

  “Shhh,” I said. “Don’t think about this.”

  “Fuck.”

  Two Commanders

  During the Latter Stages of the Mind Scrape (1)

  “A tenth?” Carol asked, disbelieving. The session had progressed to details and speculation by late in the third day. Carol had called Stacy and relayed the information about Patterson, Schrum and Adkins. Tonya got to overhear Stacy telling Carol that Sky had already checked over the older Arm and pronounced her free of Patterson tags. For the Arms, this tagging business appeared to be both life and death as well as a major point of honor. A tag meant dominance to them. How Arm. “We have only a tenth of the capabilities we can easily train?”

  “Yes, though this may be an underestimate,” Tonya said. She did not attempt to hide her exhaustion. Night had fallen hours ago, and only Hank had bothered to turn on a lamp, so Carol’s living room was a lair of shadows. Tonya hadn’t spotted the Crow for hours. She had taken a shower in the early evening, so at least she didn’t stink any more. She wasn’t sure how the others had tolerated the stench as long as they had.