Once We Were Human

Chapter 3

  “Transform Sickness is manifested differently in men than in women and doesn’t appear at all in children. A person must be past the age of puberty to fall victim to it. Most victims are between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, and it’s extremely uncommon among the elderly. Symptoms of the active phase of Transform Sickness may include shaking hands (from whence the common term “the Shakes” derives), high fever, depression and irritability, joint aches, sensitivity to light, and coma. Ten to fifteen percent of those inflicted with Transform Sickness do not survive the initial active phase of the disease. Five to ten percent of those who do recover are immune to the chronic phase of Transform Sickness. Thus, about eighty percent of those who contract the initial phase of Transform Sickness progress to the chronic phase of Transform Sickness. A person with the chronic phase of Transform Sickness is commonly known of as a ‘Transform’.” [CDC pamphlet, 1956]

  Dr. Henry Zielinski: September 23, 1966

  The phone rang. Dr. Zielinski lay on the hard hotel bed and massaged his temples, trying to banish his headache. He thought he had seen everything with Arms, but Hancock took the cake.

  Carol Hancock, supposedly brilliant, educated and refined, a society leader among women, had regressed to about the social and emotional skill level of a four year old. Even though he treated her with kindness, she still behaved like a superstitious spoiled preschool brat. Her test results said she had a genius IQ, yet she often sounded and acted borderline retarded. The worst new Arm he had seen. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. His leading hypothesis was that she had a new transformation problem, one he hadn’t encountered before. Perhaps she just didn’t like him and was being uncooperative on purpose, which didn’t feel right.

  Whatever the reason, Hancock’s reactions made his project twice as difficult as it should have been at this stage. Dr. Zielinski sighed and rubbed his temples. The phone rang for a second time. He ignored it.

  The St. Louis Transform Detention Center could be, for some unknown reason, just a bad place for Transforms. Focuses complained all the time about certain places ‘going bad’, and although he had never been able to find any physical reason for it, he couldn’t dismiss their complaints. He looked through the Detention Center records and found several other anomalous reactions. Nothing similar to Mrs. Hancock’s reaction, though.

  The phone rang for a third time. He sighed and picked it up, hoping it was his wife.

  No such luck.

  “Tell me about it,” the beautiful voice on the other side of the phone commanded. The voice belonged to Focus Tonya Biggioni, his highest ranking contact within the Focus Network. She was his boss, at least for Transform community issues. He had many bosses, starting with Dr. Josephs, the head of the Transform Research Department at Harvard Medical, Dr. Jeffers in the Communicable Disease Center, Gauthier with the FBI, and a revolving set of National Science Foundation bean counters. Biggioni thought she had a stronger claim than the rest.

  He didn’t argue her claim. Biggioni had enough raw power to turn a normal’s bowels to water – and unlike many of the leading Focuses, she was a decent human being. At least some of the time. When she remembered.

  “If she lasts to her next draw I’ll be surprised, Stalker,” Dr. Zielinski said. Stalker was the name of the Focus’s cat. They had used this ruse several times before, a tip off that he thought someone had bugged his phone. After his conversation with Paul Gauthier, he suspected as much.

  “That bad?”

  “She took a swing at me, even before her first draw. She thinks Transforms are an abomination, Transform capabilities are supernatural, and of all things she’s decided she’s become a minion of Satan.”

  “I see.” Biggioni paused. “Someone we know is interested in Hancock. A certain someone of a similar persuasion that you’ve spent time hanging around with.”

  Hanging by one foot, head down over a fifty-foot drop. Dr. Zielinski broke into a cold sweat at the thought of that person getting personally involved. She was the proverbial bull in the china shop.

  “How interested? Can she help us with, um, our supply problem?” Every time Bates found a surplus Clinic Transform, something would go wrong. Bates blamed bad luck, but Dr. Zielinski suspected enemy interference. Figuring out which of the Arms’ enemies to blame for the seeming jinx was beyond his skill level.

  The woman on the other end of the phone laughed. “Your friend is much more likely to swipe your supply out from under your control before you can get it to your new charge, you know. No, I think she may be interested in trying her hand at training.”

  “You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking.” Dr. Zielinski shivered. That would be like giving the Easter Bunny to Stalin for training. No, more like giving John Glenn to Che Guevara. He had no idea what she could turn Hancock into, if Hancock survived.

  “No joke. The Network concurs, as well.”

  “The Council?”

  Another laugh from Biggioni. “We’re all a little hesitant, but we’re willing to give this a try. For the moment. A vocal minority of Focuses wouldn’t mind at all if your new charge died.”

  He was surprised it was still a minority. “What should I do?”

  “This person of similar persuasion will contact you. I’ve given her your phone number at the hotel. If she doesn’t contact you and you want to talk to her, use your normal contact methods.” Tonya paused, and Dr. Zielinski heard her footsteps as she paced around her Focus household in Philadelphia. “For the moment, I’ve convinced her to be patient, not to go John Wayne on us. She’s muttering about cost. I think to get her to do it our way we’re going to have to provide some, um, incentives.”

  “Jesus wept.”

  “Oh, and Hank…” Tonya paused. Paper rustled in the background, over the phone. “I have a list of three St. Louis Focus households that you might want to visit while you’re in the area. They need reassurance that everything is under control. You know how it is.” They feared an Arm going after the Transforms they protected.

  The Focuses wanted the Arms on their side. Or dead.

  Focus Biggioni’s request would take him away from his more important work with Hancock. He sighed, and thought. Could he afford to annoy Focus Biggioni and say ‘no’? He didn’t receive any grant money from the Network, but when the Network was active on his side, things seemed to work better, especially when dealing with government or academic bureaucracies. The Focus Network had friends in high places these days.

  He could not afford to say ‘no’ if he wanted his reputation and academic career moving again.

  Carol Hancock: September 23, 1966 – September 26, 1966

  The bed was a mess. I found wads of tissues amid the tangled sheets piled on the floor. I was sweating, wet and sticky. The room reeked of sex, despite the fact I was alone and my husband nowhere in sight. I wrapped myself in my robe and went down the hall to the bathroom for a shower. The robe rubbed against my nipples and my loins still ached with need. My mind buzzed and an ocean of juice, drowning and loss still buried whatever reason or rationality I once possessed.

  The orderly followed me to the bathroom an extra two paces farther back than normal. I turned to enter the bathroom, showing him my knee and calf, and looked over my shoulder at him with frankly bedroom eyes. He blushed, I winked.

  Somewhere deep inside me some remnant of sanity screamed, a remnant buried deep beneath layers of lust and sensation. My act was sinful and wrong, but I couldn’t make myself care.

  “I think you should go take your shower, Mrs. Hancock,” Mr. Cook, the orderly, said. Distant and formal. I turned away from him and moaned in frustration. I’d issued many invitations to my little party, but had gotten no takers yet.

  Inside the bathroom I fell against the shut door and groaned my frustration. The morning sun shone brightly through the only unbarred window in this place, a tiny window high ab
ove the commode, but it didn’t cheer me. I took my shower and dreamed about the juice. In the soapy shower, one of my hands brushed against a nipple and sent fire through my body. Another touched between my legs.

  The shower took a lot longer than usual. Even after I finished, it wasn’t enough.

  ---

  “So, Carol, tell me what you’re feeling,” Dr. Bentwyler said. He had me lying on a couch in Dr. Zielinski’s office. Across the room, Dr. Zielinski sat in a chair, a notepad on his knee, his camera on the floor beside him. He had taken several pictures of me, for “immediate post-draw comparisons”, in his words. I was a bit frisky, and they both had to talk me out of stripping.

  “I’m more alive than I’ve ever felt in my life,” I said, my voice lusty.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s like there’s an electric current running through me, lighting me up like a light bulb. I’m alive, alert, and filled with energy! So much that it’s impossible to contain and it’s bursting out at the seams. I can see everything. I’m aware of everything. Every nerve in my body is tingling and the juice inside me is like an orgasm that just goes on and on and on.” I smiled an open invitation to the Staff Psychologist and he blushed.

  “Did you enjoy taking juice, Carol?” Dr. Bentwyler asked, red-faced.

  The memory of taking juice came back to me again. I lost myself again in the ecstasy.

  “Carol?”

  “Oh, yes.” I breathed. “Oh, yes.”

  “Good,” Dr. Bentwyler said. “You can expect to feel quite good for the next two days. This will gradually fade, and you can expect to have about two days of relative normality. You’ll only gradually go back into the depression and irritability that you’ve been experiencing for the last few days.”

  How unfortunate. “How soon do I get more?” I asked, huskily.

  Dr. Zielinski looked up from his notes. “We’re aiming for every ten days. This isn’t something we can completely control, as I’m sure you can understand, so your juice draws will sometimes happen sooner and sometimes happen later.”

  “Can’t you get me juice any earlier than ten days? What if someone becomes available tomorrow? We wouldn’t want them to suffer, now would we?” I spoke the last with a deep throated whisper, as I rolled on my side and stroked my left ankle along the inside of my right leg.

  Dr. Zielinski shook his head. “This is a tricky enough legal situation to begin with. You’ll get another draw when the time’s appropriate. Not before.”

  I sighed a coquettish “Please?”

  “No.”

  Dr. Bentwyler took a deep breath. “I’m sure you can tell that high juice – what you have now – causes an increase in libido. Your libido is excessively high for your juice count. I trust you’re attempting to control it as much as you can, but we all understand the power of juice.”

  I adjusted my blouse under my ample breasts, making them bounce. “Your libido will fade over the next couple of days as your juice count goes down,” Dr. Bentwyler said.

  Dr. Zielinski tapped his foot on the ground. “I’ve already warned the staff what to expect from you, and to behave.”

  “Darn it.”

  “I hate to mention this, but what form of birth control do you prefer to use, Mrs. Hancock?” Dr. Bentwyler said, deadpan.

  “What?” I said, shocked out of my vamping.

  Dr. Bentwyler didn’t respond and waited me out.

  “I would never,” I said with a sniff. “That would be immoral.”

  Both doctors raised their eyebrows. “We don’t know if Arms are as infertile as Focuses,” Dr. Bentwyler said. “We can’t take any chances. Some Focuses transform when they’re pregnant, and several of those pregnancies ended in disaster. You need some form of birth control.”

  Hmm. He expected me to be able to trip someone up. I sat up on the couch, smiled and stretched. With an extra little sensuous wiggle. “Well, okay, how about the Pill?”

  “That won’t work because of the vast changes Major Transforms go through,” Dr. Zielinski said. “I’m going to get you fitted for a diaphragm this afternoon – hmm, no – tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll give you a supply of condoms, in case someone around here…it’s up to you to use them.”

  I nodded again, this time more intelligently. “I understand.” If I was immoral enough to trip up someone besides my husband, I could be immoral enough to use birth control.

  “You can control yourself. Several of the other Arms I worked with learned self-control. Think of something pleasant, such as art.” He had a book of abstract expressionist art under his camera. German abstract expressionists, of all things. The cover was an apocalyptic Kadinsky.

  “I’ll do that,” I said, and grabbed his book. I wasn’t interested, just perverse.

  “Good,” Dr. Bentwyler said. “Do you have any questions about what’s been going on? I understand how difficult this has been for you.”

  I firmly kept my mind on juice. “Can an Arm be trained to tell the difference between fundamental juice and supplemental juice? I mean, there are all those stories floating around about Keaton’s wicked supernatural powers. The stories imply that she trained herself, that Arms can learn new tricks. Hasn’t anyone tried to teach an Arm to take just supplemental juice?”

  Dr. Zielinski hesitated, his face unreadable. “Yes. I’ve tried. Unfortunately, an Arm can’t be taught to sense the difference. However, even if the Arm could sense the difference, think about how difficult it would be for an Arm to learn to take only fundamental juice when she’s down on juice and drawing. How much control did you have?”

  “Um,” I said. “None. What use is the fundamental juice, anyway?”

  “All Transforms benefit from being transformed, and fundamental juice makes the benefits possible.”

  I frowned. “Benefits? Oh. You mean the demonic powers Transforms are said to get.” I’ll admit, I was yanking his chain a bit, but he reacted so nicely whenever I suggested there might be more to Transforms than science could explain.

  “Transforms don’t possess any supernatural powers, Carol,” Dr. Zielinski said, predictably exasperated. “The benefits a Transform gains are not overwhelming and are easily explained by science. Transforms are more heat tolerant, can go without water for about twice as long as a normal person, can function better on starvation rations, and appear to be more acutely aware of their surroundings. This is true of Focuses and Arms as well, of course.”

  ‘Easily explained by science,’ he said. Well, he was entitled to his opinion. “Surely the extra sense I have, what you called a metasense, is supernatural.”

  He gave me a surprised look. “The metasense is primarily an olfactory sense. Smell and taste.”

  Right. Smell and taste let me sense through walls. Not hardly. I shrugged.

  “May I ask where you learned that term?” he asked.

  “You used it when the orderlies wheeled in the Transform. I thought the word sounded neat.”

  He took copious notes for a minute but didn’t explain. I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. He was surprised, not angry. “So, if I wasn’t demon possessed when I took juice, then what was going on? From a scientific point of view, that is.” My voice was sarcastic and wicked.

  “Demon possessed?”

  “I didn’t have any choice in the matter, Dr. Zielinski. I didn’t consciously do anything. I touched the Transform and the juice flowed into me.” I hated not being in control of my actions.

  “Ah. You possess a great many hormones that are unique to Major Transforms. These new hormones and the other purely physical alterations of your transformation work with existing behaviors to create what we term Arm instincts. For Focuses they create Focus instincts. They will shock you upon occasion because of their unfamiliarity but they are not supernatural. These new hormones cause effects similar to the instinctive ‘oh how cute’ feelings most of us get when cuddling a baby
. Your instinctive juice drawing is but one example of an Arm instinct.”

  “Humans don’t have instincts. Only animals have instincts. We have rational minds, instead. That’s what God gave us to separate us from the animals,” I said.

  Dr. Zielinski looked unhappy and didn’t explain further. “Any more questions?”

  I nodded. “When I took the juice there didn’t seem to be anything physical involved. How sure are you that this isn’t supernatural?”

  Dr. Zielinski’s unhappiness deepened. “A thin plate of glass could have stopped your juice draw. Physically, you took less than a drop of water from the man. Just because the quantity is small does not mean that it can’t be measured. Anything else?”

  I shook my head. These fools couldn’t see the supernatural even when it hit them between the eyes.

  “Alright. The techs are waiting for you, Carol. We have a whole series of post-draw tests to perform.” He smiled encouragingly at me. “Things are going just fine.”

  So off I went to do tests and to exercise. I think I managed to make a serious pass at every male technician I saw. Whatever Dr. Zielinski had said to them had been effective, though, as I didn’t have any luck. Borton, the creep, had come up with a yardstick, and prodded me or hit me with it when I got fresh or slacked off my exercises. I didn’t know what to do about it so I ignored it for now.

  Only one of the men, a tech named Mike Artusy, showed any interest. When we were in Lab One for a blood test and no one was looking, he grabbed a fistful of my rear and squeezed. In response, I smiled, moaned and pushed myself up against him. Things didn’t go any farther, as we were in public.

  Sadly, Mike’s shift ended at dinnertime. I didn’t return to my room until after midnight, and I was so frustrated I was tempted to swear again.

  I wanted Bill. I wanted to do what a married woman was supposed to do in this condition.

  Except, I had to admit, I was deluding myself. A night of Bill wouldn’t solve my problems. The lust I felt wasn’t remotely normal. Despite Dr. Zielinski’s reassurance, I recognized the touch of Satan. He wanted my soul and his offer was endless pleasure. If I gave in, I would be his creature, a slave to my own body’s lusts.

  I got up out of my bed and paced the length of the room. I wanted more juice. I needed more juice.

  However, if I let Satan take me I was gone. I had to resist this for the sake of my own soul. No matter how fiercely my body’s needs drove me, I had to reject my weakness. If I didn’t, I’d become nothing more than a mindless demon, a soldier in Satan’s army.

  In the last several days, three magazines had turned up at the Detention Center, each with articles about Stacy Keaton. I suspected the staff was expressing their opinions of me, but I read the articles anyway. She was a brutal monster, mindlessly killing, torturing and raping. The articles recited a litany of her horrors: killing police, killing innocents, torture for the fun of it, and some of the most spectacular atrocities in modern history. Rev. Smalley had called her the antichrist and I couldn’t disagree. Keaton had succumbed to Satan’s call, and now Satan called me.

  I wasn’t going to go. If Satan filled me with lust, then fine, I would resist. No more indiscriminate advances on whichever man came near. No more private masturbation. I was a human being, not a monster. I refused to give into temptation, no matter how alluring.

  I knelt down by my bed, to ask God for his forgiveness and his help. I folded my hands and bowed my head, and almost started to pray.

  Almost, I dared to face God. Almost.

  For long moments, I knelt and gathered my nerve. Yet, every moment I hesitated, I thought more of what I was and what I’d become. I had killed. Worse, I’d enjoyed doing so. I had given my body over to lust. I’d already lost control and fallen into Satan’s grasp.

  Worst of all, I wanted more juice. Even though it meant the death of another human being, I wanted more juice. I needed more juice. Hell, right this instant, I would sell my soul for more juice.

  How could one such as I dare approach God?

  God was not for such as me, a monster who lived on the deaths of other people. God could not forgive that.

  I didn’t pray. I didn’t dare. Instead, I laid my head down on my bed and let the tears come. I told myself that if I regained my self-control, maybe then I might slip from Satan’s grasp. Maybe God would love me again.

  Just control myself. I had to.

  In the morning, my only burning desires were for juice and breakfast and I worked at being as pleasant as possible. I behaved myself, but the damage had already been done. As Nurse Wilson put it, “She has some nerve calling anyone else a cheap whore.”

  Some of my pleasantness paid off. Doris Trotter in the kitchen slipped me an extra waffle. Almost as good, I convinced Allen Patz, one of the other techs, to give me some information about my thrice-daily blood tests. The Doctors were measuring my juice level. He showed me a graph of my juice level since I had come out of my coma. The curve showed a steadily decreasing amount of juice. My juice level shot up all at once when I took the juice, and then started to fall again, quite quickly. Today, of all things, the rate of decrease had slowed to the same as before the juice draw.

  In the evening, Mom came to visit, bringing me the family pictures I’d requested. I apologized for my behavior after my draw.

  “No need to apologize, dear. That nice Dr. Zielinski explained it all to me,” she said, turning away to blush. “I brought Reverend Akins with me. He’s out in the waiting area. He wants to talk to you, but I didn’t want to have him barge in on you.”

  Meaning ‘who knows what my daughter is rubbing up against, so I had better make sure she’s presentable’.

  Reverend Akins had been my childhood preacher, the longtime pastor at Pilot Grove Baptist. I was surprised he would speak to me, first because of how I had fallen from grace, and second because his opinion of me hadn’t been positive.

  “Sure, Mom.” I followed Mom out to the waiting area, followed by one of the armed orderlies. I was polite, as I’d decided to resist my animal tempers, but I didn’t expect this to be pleasant.

  The Reverend waited alone in the waiting area. At the sound of our footsteps he turned. “Hello, Carol. Mrs. Stephens.” He looked uncomfortable.

  “It’s so wonderful of you to come and visit,” I said, polite again. The waiting area was small and the chairs were cheap, standard for this Detention Center. I sat as far away from him as politeness allowed.

  “No problem, especially after I heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  He looked at Mom, who shrugged. “Your own pastor…” He paused. “Reverend Smalley has been insulting you in his sermons.”

  Reverend Smalley firmly believed Transform Sickness was an affliction of sin and the devil, God’s righteous punishment upon the wicked. I had a little trouble with his beliefs; while I might be a minion of Satan now, I had a hard time thinking of myself as having been wicked before I transformed, especially compared to my behavior after I transformed.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I don’t believe in his brand of self-righteous moralism,” Reverend Akins said, pursing his lips. “Or in anything that tempts us to label some other group as more sinful than ourselves. All people stand as sinners before God and all of us stand in need of God’s abundant grace.” Reverend Akins, fortunately, didn’t know how sinful I’d been since my transformation.

  After he made his point clear, we talked of my old church, the people, church politics regarding a little petty theft by the organist, and the lives of a few of my childhood friends who never left Pilot Grove. For a while, I forgot my personal problems.

  “Have you given any thought to what you’re going to do with yourself afterwards?” the Reverend Akins asked, unexpectedly.

  “After what?”

  “After you leave here.”

  I turned away. “Truthfully
, Reverend, I hadn’t given it any thought. My condition isn’t going to go away. There’s no cure for Transform Sickness.”

  Reverend Akins laughed. “You’re alive now, Carol. I know you. You never let anything stop you. There aren’t many girls in Pilot Grove who have the gumption to go to college, even these days.”

  The Reverend had a point. I could be tenacious, a trait I thought he didn’t appreciate. “If I ever get out of here, I’m likely to get thrown in jail.”

  “For what? Being a victim of a disease? I’ve seen the reports. What sort of case would they have? ‘She killed four people while lying in a coma’. Several Focuses have been tried for involuntary Transform Sickness conversions, but there hasn’t yet been a single successful prosecution. Despite the prejudice against Transforms.”

  Focuses often triggered transformations in a few women around them when they made their own transformations. I ignored the question of the guards who shot each other as I ran past them. “Say I can get out,” I said. “I guess I’d go back to being a housewife.” Flee Satan and this miserable place and go back home.

  “Carol,” Mom said, in a familiar exasperated tone of voice. “Could you? Where would you get that juice stuff from?”

  Right. “I have no idea.”

  “Seems to me, there may be another option,” Reverend Akins said. “I read a few of the articles on Arms, seeing as though we had one in the family.” His eyes twinkled. “The accounts I read all mentioned bright lights and voices when people transformed. I was reminded of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Carol, have you given any thought to the idea that you might have just been called by God?”

  “No. No I hadn’t.” The thought was ludicrous, but I did remember my nightmares. In one recurring image, I spoke to a surly crowd. Preaching? Still, the bright light I’d seen had been nothing more than normal light. All Transforms are light sensitive, especially early on.

  Yet the Bible said Paul was blind for three days and did not eat or drink anything. Same as I. As if Paul was a male Major Transform, save there were no such things.

  “It’s worth some thought,” Reverend Akins said, and pressed on. “God’s call can take many forms, and can lead someone into a totally new life.”

  Reborn in Jesus? A juice-sucking killer Arm? “Reverend, Arms have to kill to take juice or they die.” The call came from the other side. I didn’t have any control when I took the man’s juice. Arms were demon possessed.

  I was demon possessed.

  “Carol, over nine out of ten new Transforms die terrible deaths, either by becoming Monsters, dying in juice withdrawal, or being shot in front of a blood-spattered concrete wall like the one they have downstairs in this place,” Reverend Akins said, a preacher’s intensity in his voice. “I know Christians who refuse to work to change this, or even to pray to God to end these horrible deaths, for to them, the spread of the evils associated with Transform Sickness indicates that the end of days is upon us, heralding Jesus’ return. I do not believe this is so. Transform Sickness is just another disease, one of many, and I believe that Arms have a role in the alleviation of this evil. Think about it. I don’t know what role the Arms will play in the healing of this evil, but I know in my heart that you and the other Arms do have a proper role to play. For all I know, you might even be able to subsist on Monsters and men in withdrawal, protecting society from their mindless wrath.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” Dr. Zielinski hadn’t even mentioned it as a possibility. Hah. If it was possible, Dr. Zielinski had tried it. Probably another disaster he didn’t want to talk about. “I don’t know who I am anymore, Reverend. There are times, as an Arm, when I’m no longer in control of myself.”

  Let him conclude I was demon possessed. I couldn’t say it, myself.

  “New Focuses often say the same things,” Reverend Akins said. “I don’t know the medical reasons behind their statements, but they do remind me of something. Do you remember the changes you went through, Carol, when you were thirteen, fourteen and fifteen? I remember.”

  I blushed. “That’s just puberty.”

  “Just?” Reverend Akins laughed. “I remember talking to you, Carol, when you went through puberty. I recall you made a comment, once, about how all of a sudden you thought everyone around you had gotten slow and stupid. Another time you told me how your body kept doing these horrible things to you that you couldn’t control. Do you think being called by God into a higher responsibility as an adult is going to involve less tumultuous changes than puberty?”

  Yes, I had spent some time as a teenager worrying that I’d been possessed by Satan. I hesitated to accept the Reverend’s explanation, as I hadn’t been killing people when I went through puberty, but he had given me some weighty issues to think about. Perhaps Dr. Zielinski was right and it was nothing more than hormones.

  I made polite chitchat and escaped back to my room. I found that although I could put the pictures of Billy and Jeffrey on display on my nightstand, whenever I saw the picture of Sarah I cried. Her picture, along with my husband’s, I put in the front of the Gideon’s Bible that came with the room.

  ---

  The next day was Sunday and I felt normal again for the first time. The aches in my muscles had gotten worse and the craving was a constant burning need, but I was sane enough to reflect on my experiences as an Arm. My life was an out of control roller coaster: the terrible lows, the stupefying highs, so fast, so extreme. The intensity left me breathless. My reasoning was stunned. Even now, my mind tried to cling to that glorious high.

  I told Larry my muscle aches were getting worse, and he had a predictable solution. “We need to work you harder and longer.” He did some paperwork, and starting Wednesday afternoon, my exercise sessions were now two hours long. I wasn’t sure what to do about Larry’s continued use of his yardstick as a prod to keep me exercising hard. For the moment, I decided to do nothing. Larry seemed to know what he was doing, although the results were hard for me to cope with. Amazon woman, indeed. For the first time in my life, I could see muscles all over my body. I had, in Larry’s terms, muscle definition. My body fat was melting away, fast enough to be noticeable on a day-to-day basis.

  Larry also had another tidbit for me, regarding last night’s conversation. “As I was leaving, yesterday, I happened to overhear you talking to your former Minister. Arms can take juice from Monsters and withdrawal victims, but they have problems afterwards.”

  “What sort of problems?” Larry’s knowledge of Arms and their problems was extensive. The other day, he told me the horrible story of the young Arm who had died of muscle hypertrophy, a goad to push me harder on my exercises. The story was one of the reasons I put up with his yardstick.

  “A couple of years ago, a new Arm named Francine Sarles refused to take a second volunteer Transform kill. Instead, she and her doctors tried something risky. Her next kill was a psychotic man in the depths of withdrawal. Francine was able to take the juice but it did something to her mind. Made her psychotic, I guess. Anyway, she killed herself three days later.”

  “Killed herself?”

  “Bullet to the brain. You Arms might think you’re invulnerable and can heal from everything. Not true. There’s a rule I think all Arms need to learn: bullets are faster than juice.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that and went back to my leg presses.

  ---

  On Monday I was a little down, but still mostly normal. The tests were beginning to bother me again. Another blood sample, a little more pain. I wanted to snap at people, but was able to hold back.

  Dr. Zielinski seemed bothered about my muscles. He did a bunch of X-Rays and wasn’t happy with the results.

  “I think we have your exercise time cranked up as far as we can take it for now,” he said, spreading the X-Rays over the metal counter in Lab One. I looked over his shoulder. “We only have one other option. You’
re not going to like it, either, Carol.”

  “What?”

  “Less food. Let’s take things back to 5500 calories.”

  “I’m already hungry all the time, Dr. Zielinski.” My food!

  “You’re putting on muscles too quickly, Carol, some in the wrong places.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. “You give the order, I’ll attempt not to complain too much.”

  “Good.”

  He collected his X-Rays and started out the door. I shook my head. Put my hands on my hips and stared. “How am I supposed to do this, anyway?” I asked. “This ‘being an Arm’? I’m a housewife.”

  Dr. Zielinski turned and looked me over. “I don’t have all the answers, Carol. In many ways, you’re quite similar to the other Arms: they’ve all been intelligent, willful and talented. Not a shrinking violet in the bunch. None of them had extraordinary backgrounds.”

  “But I’m…” I shook my head again. “I’m clueless about medicine, biology and chemistry. I was the sort of girl who got a bookish boy with thick glasses to dissect my frog for me in High School. I don’t know the questions to ask. Darn it, Dr. Zielinski, ‘the big answer’ could walk right in front of me and I wouldn’t be able to tell you.”

  Dr. Zielinski nodded, and unconsciously took off and polished his glasses. “I know that feeling, as do many of the other Major Transforms.”

  “The Arms all died, Dr. Zielinski.”

  “In America, all but one,” he said. I didn’t immediately bring up her name. Neither did he. “Adversity can be overcome. One of the important Focuses I work with transformed at age fifteen, during the Quarantine. Despite her youth and inexperience, she elbowed her way into a leadership role when the Focuses found a way to escape the Quarantine a few years later. She – Focus Claunch – is a bitch and a half.”

  I drew breath to complain about his language, but cut myself short. That hadn’t been an insult. “You’re not saying…” I reddened and let my voice tail off. Dr. Zielinski didn’t answer. “I understand,” I said, a few moments later. “I thought I’ve already been too unladylike.”

  “To your face, Focus Claunch is an elegant classy lady with a wicked sense of humor,” Dr. Zielinski said. “It’s not how she says things, but what she says and when. And who she says them to.”

  “I’m supposed to cope with these darned Arm mood swings and muscle problems by feminine wiles?” I said, and put my hands back on my hips. “I suppose that’s why I’m growing all these muscles.”

  “The problem is, Carol, no one understands what you or the other Arms are growing those muscles for,” Dr. Zielinski said. “Or why Arms have any of their other transformation benefits. There’s no obvious use for an Arm, as there is for a Focus. The biggest thing we need your help for, Carol, is to figure out why Arms exist.”

  “So why do you try to save Arms, then? We’re killers. Keaton is a serial murderer as bad as any in history. The world would be better off if we all died.” I was a minion of Satan. Someone should have killed me while I was still in my transformation coma. “Why do you try so hard to save my life?” I asked, almost plaintively.

  Dr. Zielinski gave me a thoughtful glance and sat back down in the room’s single chair. He waved me to sit and I hoisted myself up on the examining table.

  “Did you ever think there might be a purpose for Arms?” he said.

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Arms are complicated. You have to kill to survive. You have all sorts of extra capabilities: strength, healing, better reaction time, eyesight, and hearing. The list is endless. It doesn’t make sense that something as complicated as an Arm is an accident of nature.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy that,” I said. “But what’s the purpose?”

  He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know. However, Transform Sickness is a huge puzzle and you don’t solve a puzzle by throwing out one of the pieces. More people are dying of the Shakes every year, while we all stare blankly at a collection of puzzle pieces we can’t fit together.” He looked up at me, intently. “I don’t understand what the purpose of an Arm is, but I do know that Arms are a crucial piece of the puzzle. You’re too complex and too powerful to be otherwise. If we do fit the puzzle together and figure out how to make it all work, Arms will be a critical part of the final solution.”

  He shrugged and leaned back, casual again. “So I research Armenigar’s Syndrome and try to help Arms survive.”

  I shivered. I heard what he told me, in his secular, scientific rationality and translated it into terms I understood: Arms were a part of God’s plan and the only reason Arms seemed so evil was that we limited humans couldn’t understand the plan.

  It sounded so good in my head. In my heart, I knew better. I was evil, doing the devil’s work, and fine words wouldn’t change my damnation.

  It did make me think, though.

  I turned away and watched the barred window. I could barely see a courtyard outside, through the bars and mesh and layered glass.

  While I stared silently at the window, Dr. Zielinski slipped out.

  Special Agent Bates stopped by my room on Monday, a couple of hours after my talk with Dr. Zielinski.

  “Mrs. Hancock,” he said. “Have you given any thought to my offer?”

  Offer. Right. Joining the FBI. His crazy idea.

  “Would I be able to go back to my family?” I had to ask.

  “Probably not. As an Arm, you’re too dangerous to be out in the community.” There’s that refrain, again.

  “I’d be locked up? I thought this was employment, not enslavement.”

  Bates turned red. “It would be employment. I can’t guarantee your freedom, at least until you prove yourself. There are political realities to consider, Mrs. Hancock. Arms are not normal people.”

  Not much of a sales pitch. I’d have signed the contract already if Bill had been selling me this deal. “You mean like the fact I acted like an animal when I killed the volunteer Transform? Like the fact I acted like a whore after I took juice? Like I’m cruel and foul-tempered when I’m low on juice?”

  “That’s part of it, Mrs. Hancock.”

  “How about the fact that all I can think of, today, is getting more juice. Getting another volunteer. How I would do anything to get more juice. That sort of political problem? Can you guarantee you’ll have volunteer Transforms ready for me, whenever I need to kill one?” I leaned forward and snarled the last, unhappily.

  “These are just little problems we can work through,” Bates said. “Keep thinking about my offer.”

  “I will,” I said. What I wanted was my normal life back. Nothing else would suffice.

  Tonya Biggioni: September 26, 1966

  “…so this project was assigned to me because of the Arm connection,” Tonya said. “I’m passing the job on to you.”

  No reply from the other end of the phone line; instead, Tonya heard the sound of someone chewing something, most likely a sandwich. Most Focuses would have at least paid Tonya the courtesy of putting down their lunch to talk to her. Not this one.

  Most Focuses didn’t work in an office away from their household, either. This one did. Most Focuses stayed home to run their Transform households. Not this Focus. Actually, this Focus broke a great many of the rules about how Focuses ought to behave.

  What aggravated Tonya was that despite her rule breaking, this Focus was quite successful. If you measured success by the number of Transforms she supported in her household, the most successful ever, period – and her success bought her a tremendous amount of slack in the Transform community. If she wanted to go the celebrity route, the world would kneel at her feet. However, this Focus avoided publicity like the plague.

  “So you drew the short straw and get to deal with me,” the Focus said. “Why don’t you emulate Focus Schrum and just send me the information through the mail???
?

  Tonya tensed, angry. “This is an emergency, Lori.”

  “Yelling at me isn’t going to get it done any faster,” Focus Lori Rizzari said. “You’re not my mother, you know.”

  “You’re the Focus responsible for hunting down Monsters in the Northeast Region,” Tonya said. “The target is a problem Monster. This is your job.”

  Chomp, chomp. “My household and I bag ten times as many Monsters as any of the other Focuses with the same job in the other regions.” Chew, chew. “Don’t give me any grief about my performance. It’s not warranted.”

  Tonya sighed. Rizzari, according to her reports, killed eleven times as many Monsters as the Focuses in the other regions combined. What was worse, Rizzari was the only Focus Tonya knew who would underestimate her success instead of exaggerating.

  Twisting Rizzari’s arm wouldn’t work, either. Several years ago, Rizzari pointed out some information about the Focuses’ formally non-existent male Major Transform counterparts, eliciting an official reprimand. After the senior Focuses drove Rizzari to near insanity by Focus juice-powered mind games, she still gave them the finger. The senior Focuses had to threaten to ruin Rizzari’s household before she did what they wanted.

  Tonya had to admit she didn’t understand Rizzari at all. Focus Schrum was one of the Focuses involved in the reprimand, but as far as Tonya could tell, Rizzari didn’t hold a grudge against Suzie.

  “Lori, I have ‘Monsters Die’ protesters outside my household. They don’t like the idea our people are trying to save a new Arm when there’s this killer dog Monster we’re ignoring.” Truth be told, Tonya didn’t mind the ‘Monsters Die’ group’s anti-Monster work. What bothered her was just their disturbing tendency to label any Transforms who got in their way as ‘Monsters’.

  The problem with hate was that hate was contagious.

  Tonya didn’t like Monsters one bit. She had killed more than a few in her day. She quit for two reasons: first because Monster hunting cost her too many members of her Transform household, and second, because she had grown to enjoy the killing. She didn’t think it healthy for a Focus to enjoy killing.

  “Go outside and use your charisma to convince one of them to throw a brick through one of your windows, then call the cops and get him arrested,” Lori said, amid the mildly disgusting gurgle-gurgle-gurgle sound that announced she was drinking something. Tonya winced. Lori had gone off into what Tonya called Lori-land, where the unreal and unrealistic ruled. Lori had no respect for authority, Transform or otherwise, and her view of political reality was just as skewed. “If you weren’t a Transform celebrity, they wouldn’t even know where you lived.”

  Tonya wanted to throw something. Preferably at Lori. It wouldn’t do any good. “This dog-Monster’s taken up residence on the south side of the Pepacton reservoir in the Catskills of New York. It’s killed five people and dozens of cattle.”

  “In how long?”

  “In what ‘how long’, Lori?”

  “How many head of cattle is this Monster going through in a month?” Rizzari asked. No more sounds of eating; instead came the sound of paper rustling and Lori taking notes.

  Tonya didn’t bother asking Lori why she cared. The answer to that would certainly involve Lori-land. Lori, as an academic, these days an actual Professor, almost by definition was interested in nonsense. “Thirty-seven cattle kills in seven weeks.”

  “Dead, or dead and eaten?”

  “Dead and mostly eaten.”

  “Itch-bay! That’s not typical Monster behavior,” Rizzari said.

  “You’re right,” Tonya said, remembering her and her household’s Monster hunting days. At least she was flexible enough to admit her mistakes and flights of fancy, unlike Lori. If only Tonya could convince Lori to move far away, life would be so much better. “That’s a lot of food for a Monster, especially for a pony-sized dog. What do you think is going on?”

  “I don’t know but I’m going to find out,” Rizzari said. “I’ll get right on it.” Tonya sighed. Rizzari had refused a direct order, and then changed her mind for no good reason at all. Simply because of her curiosity. “Send me all the information you have on it and direct the police working the case to my household. You know the phone number.”

  Click.

  There were times when Tonya thought Rizzari was annoying on purpose. Most of the time, actually.

  Carol Hancock: September 27, 1966 – October 4, 1966

  The craving for juice gnawed demonically on my nerves from the inside. Dr. Zielinski had implied the craving wouldn’t be as bad once I knew what was going on. He was wrong. Knowing made the craving worse.

  On Tuesday morning, I went down to Dr. Zielinski’s office and pleaded for juice. I forgot every promise I made to myself about control and used all my feminine wiles to try to convince him to come up with something. I tried logical argument. I begged, I screamed, I cried. I didn’t care what I looked like, or what he thought of me. I needed juice. He ignored me and sent me off to exercise.

  On Wednesday I tried again, with the same result. I offered him money. I begged. I sat in the chair in his office, shook with need, cried, and pleaded with everything I had, if only he would get me juice. Nothing!

  The only thing that kept me sane on Wednesday was my time in the gymnasium. Larry seemed to understand and pushed me harder than ever. I didn’t care what I did to my body or what muscles I grew. The pain of the excessive exercise kept me from stewing about my low juice.

  On Thursday, they wouldn’t even let me visit Dr. Zielinski, or go exercise. I screamed and clawed at my skin until I drew blood.

  They strapped me down into my bed to keep me from hurting myself.

  On Saturday, nine long days after my first conscious draw, they finally brought me another Transform.

  This time, the Transform came at dawn. They had me in the same room I had been in the first time, strapped into the same chair. Once again, my metasense felt the tingle, saw, heard that glorious energy coming to me. I focused on it, tensed…

  “Wait.”

  The Transform still came toward me. I could wait, if the Transform kept coming. If he stopped, if he made one move in the wrong direction, I was going to go berserk and rip the chair apart. This was my juice. Mine! It was too late for anyone to take him away from me.

  Closer and closer the Transform came, minute by agonizing minute.

  He stopped in the room right next to mine. So close, so very close. I wanted it all. I needed it all. I pulled at the straps. They resisted me yet again.

  That was my juice! I pulled harder. Again, harder still. Something gave around my left wrist. Success! I pulled again, as hard as possible.

  The strap came loose. I pulled against the other straps as I stood. They too began to give. I yanked, and they gave. I ran for the door. People called to me, upset at what I had done. I didn’t care. I brushed past them and through the door into the next room.

  This time he wasn’t drugged. The man lay on a cot, curled up into a fetal position. He was absorbed in his own misery, but he opened his eyes when the door slammed open and I appeared.

  I suspected the man had made a rational decision to sacrifice his life, based on reasoning, sense and the information he had available. It’s a lot harder to be rational, though, when your death is walking toward you. Survival instincts can be a powerful thing. Seeing me, my draw screamed and practically levitated to the far corner of the room.

  “No. No!” he said. “I didn’t mean it. No, no, no!”

  A cacophony of voices pummeled me. “Stop her. Somebody stop her.” “What do we do?” “Carol, come back here. You can’t kill that man.” “Get more orderlies. Where’s Cook?” “Stop her.”

  I ignored the voices and ran past the people before they had time to do more than shout. My victim tried to run past me, so I stepped in front of him and hugged him to me. My right arm crossed over his
upper arm, my chin rested against his neck, my bare legs rubbed against his and I pulled.

  I thought drawing juice couldn’t possibly be as good as I remembered. Nothing could be so pleasurable, so intense, so perfect. I was wrong. The juice was better than the first time. Just as pain can be too intense to remember, so too can pleasure. I learned ecstasy again and let the tide of juice take me beyond the realm of thought.

  This time they strapped me to the bed until my post draw lusts naturally wore off. The only human being who visited during the next two days was Mrs. Calhoun, who fed me and cleaned me up.

  I was a joke, something for the techs to laugh over. I was sure they were. Some woman so horny they had to tie her down to keep her from throwing herself at them? What an excellent story to tell.

  Betrayed and humiliated, furious and frustrated, yet unable to do a single thing about it. Strapped to a bed in this condition was the next worst thing to hell.

  No. It was hell.

  ---

  By Monday morning, I mostly come back into my right mind.

  I burned with embarrassment over the fact I’d been tied down.

  I hurt. My muscles screamed at me. I had a stabbing pain in my left shoulder and the pain in my abdomen had returned, worse than ever.

  The highs and lows of the juice cycle, the terrible cravings, were too much. I was angry. I was lonely.

  Every day, I found myself doing things that made no sense, saying things I didn’t mean to say. I made promises to myself and then the intense needs of the moment would overwhelm me and my promises would disappear as if they had never been. My sanity slipped from my grasp like water through my fingers. I was a child again.

  Dr. Zielinski came personally to release me. I cried when he came through the door. He unbuckled the straps that held me to the bed. I curled into a fetal position. Even my muscles ached.

  “What are we going to do with you, Carol?” he asked me.

  “Please, don’t make me go through that again.” I pleaded through my tears.

  He sighed and shook his head, as if he had never seen an Arm overcome by her body’s needs before. Some Arm expert he was.

  “We’re supplying you with people’s lives because you need juice to live. We can’t supply you with sexual partners. You’re married. I’m sorry, Carol, but you don’t need sex to live.”

  I curled up tighter and cried.

  After breakfast, the orderlies led me to the gymnasium. Larry wasn’t present so I did my stretches and started working on the rowing machine. I hurt. I had trouble with even the simplest exercises.

  Ten minutes after I gave up on the rowing machine, Larry stormed in. “Finally,” he said. “Up. Let’s take a look at you, see how much damage these idiots have done to you.”

  I couldn’t figure out why Larry was so angry until he detailed the muscle problems that had accumulated in the four (and only four) days without my exercise sessions. “We had the hypertrophy licked, dammit,” he said. “Now we’re going to have to start over from scratch.” I cooperated, and the more I worked, the less I ached. The orderlies had to practically drag me away from the gymnasium after two and a half hours of exercise.

  They let me take a shower after my morning exercise session, a mistake if they wanted to keep my libido under control. My lust had not worn out, it had only taken a short vacation.

  The shower was long and enjoyable.

  The rest of the day I was frisky. Flirtatious, not wanton, but making my desires clear. I remembered the time after my last draw I’d tried to fight this, but I couldn’t remember why. In any case, I got a good response from the tech, Mike Artusy, again, but nothing from anyone else.

  That night, my efforts paid off. I had no idea how he got into my room past the around-the-clock armed orderlies guarding my door. But he did.

  About the only sensible thing I remembered to do was to stick the diaphragm in and require him to wear condoms. My first sex as an Arm, with a random lab tech with roaming hands, was wonderful. Unbelievable. Stupendous. My body responded in ways I never knew it could respond. I also made Mike’s body respond in ways he never imagined, or at least not since he was sixteen.

  I should have stopped once he was exhausted but I was lost in my own needs. I found I could make him respond again and again. I used him until he scrabbled away in terror, grabbed his clothes, and fled naked from my room. Even then, I was not satisfied.

  No one said anything about it the following day, though someone had to know. To my relief, the lust had finally faded. Tuesday was the third day after my last draw and my mind and body had finally settled back down.

  How did I think about breaking my marriage vows for the first time? I wasn’t sure. Now that I knew what sex as an Arm was like, though, I had no doubt I could make the indiscretion up to Bill. Sex that good would make up for a lot. I’d just have to be careful not to overdo it. Bill wasn’t a young kid anymore. What I’d done to Mike might give a man Bill’s age a heart attack.

  I couldn’t shake the vague disquiet inside me, as if I had broken more than my marriage vows. There was something deeply immoral about being an Arm. Every day it sucked me farther down into Satan’s abyss. The muscle growth, the killing, the insane quantity of food, the absurd lusts, the emotional roller coaster ride – all these changes harmed my soul.

  No matter what I did, I couldn’t fight Satan’s seductions.

  About two in the afternoon, they brought me to an unfamiliar section of the Transform Detention Center, on the ground floor in the far part of the U. An interview room. The orderlies wouldn’t explain. They had me sit, and shackled my legs to the chair. To a chair someone had bolted to the floor.

  The orderlies left. A few minutes later, a man I had never met entered the room and sat in a chair behind a desk well out of reach. He was a grey haired man in an impeccable suit, in his late fifties, with an old fashioned thin moustache. Fear hid within his exterior expressions, which radiated power. A manager of some sort.

  “Mrs. Hancock, my name is Dr. Harold Manigault, Director of this Detention Center. Pardon me if I don’t shake your hand.”

  “What’s going on, Mr. Director, sir?” From long experience hosting Bill’s many dinners and parties, I knew how to deal with powerful men.

  Manigault gave me the willies, though. Something was wrong with this man.

  “I’ve been authorized to offer you a job.”

  “A job?” After a moment of confused thought, I understood. I was a commodity, a valuable commodity. Carol Hancock, second Arm to survive. People would bid for my services if I kept myself alive. I was flattered. I’d never participated in Bill’s negotiations but I knew how it was done.

  “Yes. The State of Missouri is prepared to offer you the position of Executioner of Unwanted Transforms.”

  “Oh.” Chilled, goose bumps on my arms, I flashed on something Dr. Manigault projected. He had pulled the trigger on many a Transform and enjoyed the killing. I wanted to run. My skin wanted to crawl off my body.

  I was in the presence of evil.

  I had no idea how I knew this, or what to do about it.

  “I have an employment contract for you to sign. Would you like to look it over, Mrs. Hancock?”

  “Yes, I would,” I said, and he slid the contract over the wide desk to me. I picked up the contract and read it over.

  The contract offered a thousand a month, before taxes. I would be traveling constantly, between the main Detention Centers in Springfield, Kansas City and St. Louis, and one I had never heard of, down in the boot heel, near Caruthersville. While in transit, they would hold me ‘in close security’. I would live in whichever Detention Center needed me. The contract was for a single year. The State of Missouri would drop all legal charges against me.

  “The terms may seem onerous, Mrs. Hancock, but the pay is excellent. After the contract is up and you have proven your worth and safety,
the onerous conditions could be altered.”

  “Of course, sir,” I said. I suspected I would see a clause like that one in whatever deal I took. “Sir, as an Arm, I need Transforms for juice at specific intervals. I don’t read anything in this contract regarding that.”

  “That’s out of our hands, Mrs. Hancock. Some months we have as many as ten to deal with, others, well, I’ve seen as few as two.”

  “Two?” I would die. I would go into withdrawal myself.

  “We all have risks in this profession, Mrs. Hancock. The risk of withdrawal will be yours,” Dr. Manigault said, and smiled.

  Lust filled his smile. He had seen withdrawal many times. He enjoyed watching someone die of withdrawal.

  I pushed the contract back to him, queasy. “I’ll take your offer under advisement,” I said. “I want fifteen hundred a month and no more than ten days between kills.” A negotiating position. I was prepared to go as high as twelve days. Perhaps thirteen.

  “Well,” he said. “Unfortunately, Mrs. Hancock, my hands are tied. I cannot alter this contract. You can take it or you can leave it.” Dr Manigault stood, hiding a smile on his face. “Give the offer some thought. You’ll get no better offers.” With that, he left.

  A minute later, an orderly came in and unshackled my legs.

  During my afternoon exercises, Dr. Zielinski stuck his head in the room. I was doing curls with a huge barbell loaded with more weight than most men could lift. “Agent Bates and I are arranging something special for Wednesday, Carol,” he said. “Some physical tests outside the Center. Think you’ll be up for it tomorrow?”

  I slowly lowered the barbell down to rest on my thighs. Outside, he said. I thought for a moment. I was feeling good today. Tomorrow would be worse, but it would be only the fourth day after a draw. “I’m game.”

  “Good,” Dr. Zielinski said, and left.

  Larry relaxed. He hadn’t greeted Dr. Zielinski, and had kept his face turned towards me during the short conversation. “It’s not quitting time, Carol,” he said, with a sharp whack of the yardstick on my rear. “Let’s get a move on it!”

  Mom came into my room right after dinner. She had been out over the weekend. I guessed she didn’t want to visit me right after a draw, and I couldn’t blame her.

  “Bill has been causing problems, dear,” she said, after we had chatted about traffic and one of her friends who was in the hospital in Columbia. My husband?

  “How so?” Bill’s last letter had arrived last Thursday, when I was low on juice. I hadn’t gotten around to answering it yet. He had been his kind and loving self. I made a mental note to answer his letter tonight.

  “He won’t let me visit Billy and Jeffery. I’d hinted at it several times, and nothing, so I finally asked him point blank. He refused.”

  “Whatever is he doing that for?” This didn’t sound like Bill. He was normally very smooth with people.

  “I can’t figure it out, Carol. Do they think I’m carrying the taint of Transform Sickness with me because I visit you? Because I’m your mother?” She paused. “It’s so unfair. They’re my grandchildren, too.”

  “Do you want me to put in a good word for you in the next letter I write? Think it will do any good?”

  Mom’s voice dropped half an octave and moved back to Alabama for a while. “What I’d like you to do is chew your husband out, Carol. This situation is bad enough without him being so rude and unfair about things.”

  Things. Plural. I put two and two together. “Bill got the legal charges against him dropped, didn’t he?”

  Mom nodded, and turned away. I pushed the books on my end table away from the tissue box and offered her a tissue.

  “He could be visiting me, the bastard, and isn’t. How long?”

  “Two weeks.”

  Damn. Since before my first draw. He could have been here and comforted me, loved me, if he had wanted to. Mom blew her nose.

  “He blames me for Sarah’s death, doesn’t he?”

  She nodded.

  I put my head in my hands, tempted to take Sarah’s picture out and hug it. I couldn’t take any more of this. Even my husband thought I was a monster. Mom hadn’t wanted to tell me, and again I didn’t blame her. “Don’t feel bad for me, Mom.”

  “It’s so unfair, Carol! You shouldn’t be suffering through this horrendous disease without Bill’s support. Without the support of anyone in our family except me.”

  “I’d be doing it too, Mom, if I didn’t have Transform Sickness. None of us would give a Transform the time of day. Bill wouldn’t hire a Transform on a bet.” No more than we would give the colored folk or a Jew, or even an Italian immigrant the time of day. Or hire one. What did this say about my other views on things, eh? I didn’t ask to be a Transform. Of course, no one asked to be born colored, or born into the Jewish faith, or for their parents to have immigrated to the United States.

  Certainly, that prejudice wasn’t the sin that had landed me in Satan’s claws. Why, if it was, nearly everyone I knew was similarly doomed.

  “They might be right, Mom. I’m not the woman I once was. I’ve killed, now, twice, of my own free will.”

  “Don’t say that, Carol. It isn’t proper to think about.”

  “I’ve got to, Mom. It’s my life. I hate what I’m forced to do, but it’s my life. Reverend Akins is wrong. If I’ve been called by anyone, the call came from the devil.” These thoughts had occupied my nights ever since Reverend Akins’ visit. The killing, the lusts, the amorality of the juice. I was working on the seven deadly sins one sin at a time, even gluttony.

  “Oh, Carol,” she said, grabbing me, hugging me, crying. “Please don’t think that. Y’all in this Center are doing what you have to do. You don’t have any choice in the matter.”

  “We choose to live, Mom. We choose to live in sin.” I reached for the Gideon’s, for a passage from Paul, which I thought described me to a T. I’d read all of Paul’s writings after Reverend Akins’ visit. Called? Not likely. “I do not understand my own actions,” I quoted. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” I could have read it from memory, but I didn’t want to upset my mother more. No, Christianity was not for Transforms, or at least, not for Arms.

  Mom held me, and cried and cried.

  She left without a word.

  After she left, I opened the Bible again to the front page, where I kept my daughter’s picture; I cried. No loving God could have put me through this horror.

  ---

  Dr. Zielinski came and got me in the morning, wheeling a massive gurney. Dr. Peterson trailed behind him, fretting. “Are you ready to go?”

  I nodded. “Certainly, Dr. Zielinski, Dr. Peterson.”

  “There’s one unfortunate thing that we need to ask of you, though,” Dr. Zielinski said. “Since we’re going to be transporting you out of the Detention Center, Special Agent Bates wants us to be sure of security. He apologizes to you about this, in advance.”

  Oh, wonderful. I knew where this led.

  “We’re going to need to restrict your movement a bit. If you’ll please lay down on the gurney, we’ll transport you.”

  I laid down on the gurney. They chained me by my wrists and ankles, and then wheeled me to an ambulance waiting out front.

  On the way to the ambulance I got to see the sky, for the first time in days. It was early October, the sky was clear and blue, the air, cold and fresh. They covered me with a blanket to keep me from getting cold but I could have done without, simply to experience the wonder
ful fresh air.

  I rode for about an hour and a half in the ambulance. A military truck led the ambulance, and another one followed behind. The trip took far too long with far too little movement. By the time we arrived I was ready to scream in pain.

  We didn’t pass any Transforms on the way, probably a good thing. I might have made a scene.

  We ended up at a military base. They unloaded me from the ambulance at the edge of what appeared to be an obstacle course. Armed soldiers filled the entire area. The air held the scent of metal, wild grass and male sweat. They took me out of the truck but didn’t unchain me. Instead, they left me lying on the gurney at the parking lot edge. The blanket had fallen off when they took me out of the truck and I forced my legs together to keep soldiers from looking up my skirt.

  Agent Bates approached me from the lead truck, followed by Dr. Zielinski, Dr. Peterson and a uniformed man I didn’t recognize. “Mrs. Hancock,” Bates said. “We’re going to free you now. Please don’t make any moves we don’t ask you to, because we’re guests here and these soldiers don’t know you. They’re a little nervous having an Arm on their base and their orders are to shoot if you misbehave.”

  I studied the hundreds of soldiers, and every one of them watched me. Hundreds of soldiers to stop me if I went wild? Unbelievable.

  Agent Bates released me and I stood, attracting a murmuring of voices as they all got a look at me. I overheard every word they said, but I didn’t know why they considered me so interesting. I wore a blouse and skirt, from the stock of institutional clothing the center supplied, with stockings and low pumps. I didn’t think I looked any different from any other woman. I stretched, trying to work out the pain in my muscles without screaming. I was ravenous. More juice would have been good, too.

  The uniformed man, whose name turned out to be Major Collins, spoke up. “I don’t care what you say about her capabilities. She’s not doing this wearing those clothes.”

  Chagrined, my doctors agreed. It was a three-ring circus getting me proper clothes.

  “Carol,” Dr. Zielinski said, once I finished dressing in their ill-fitting khakis. “We need you to run this obstacle course. The results here will give us some important information.”

  I imagined so, for them to go to this much work.

  “Hancock,” Major Collins said. “We have soldiers stationed all along this obstacle course. Don’t even think about trying anything.”

  I didn’t understand their worries. I was a housewife.

  They positioned me at the beginning of the obstacle course. A Corporal stood with a stopwatch, and after studying me for a moment, shouted, “Go!”

  I ran to the first obstacle, a whole series of tires set into the ground all against each other. I stopped, having no idea what to do. Bates muttered curses and got the Corporal to cancel the run. After talking for a few minutes, they directed a Sergeant to walk me through the course. First was the tire section, which I was supposed to run through, putting my feet into the center of each tire. Next was a wooden wall with a rope I was supposed to climb. Next, a rope swinging between two wooden towers, which I was supposed to swing on like Tarzan on a vine. After a tromp through the mud, they had a network of wires I was supposed to crawl underneath on my belly. The course continued after that, so many things to crawl over, under and around, all extremely intimidating. I was supposed to do it as fast as I could, then turn around and run back. The Major was right about the soldiers posted along the course. They were everywhere.

  They set me up again and the second time I ran their obstacle course for them. I didn’t have any trouble running out of breath, which I hadn’t expected. I thought the wall with the rope attached would be difficult, but I grabbed the rope and pulled myself right over, which brought a grin to my face.

  When I returned to the start, I was pleased with myself and much less achy.

  “Six minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” the Corporal with the stopwatch announced.

  The men at the start greeted my return with deafening silence.

  I thought they would be pleased with my performance, but they didn’t look happy at all. Their stone-faced expressions made me uneasy. I worried about what I’d done and where I’d fouled up. I hadn’t gone all out. I’d been nervous about making a fool of myself.

  I looked from face to unhappy face and wondered how to make things right. “Let me run the course again, please,” I said. “I’ll do it a lot better now that I’ve done it once.”

  Special Agent Bates smiled, a vaguely sickly smile. “Yes,” he said. “Why don’t you give it a try, Mrs. Hancock?”

  I ran the obstacle course again. This time I pushed myself. I ran as fast as possible. I practically flew through the tires, over the wall with the rope, and through the other obstacles.

  “Five minutes, twenty-two seconds,” the Corporal said.

  Their stone-faced expressions did not change.

  “Could you stand over there for a few minutes please, Mrs. Hancock?” Agent Bates asked me.

  ‘There’ was a group of a half-dozen soldiers, all with rifles in their arms. I stood. Quietly.

  The observers watched me as I walked over. Major Collins said quietly to the others, “The current record for that course is five minutes, forty-one seconds.”

  Very, very interesting.

  My crew of observers went over to a table about a hundred feet away. They laid down several pieces of paper and began talking quietly, privately. I heard them clearly. I could also read their papers.

  My hearing had always been fine, but never this excellent. My eyes? The only reason I hadn’t worn glasses before I transformed was vanity.

  I expected some improvement, based on the Detention Center tests. I hadn’t expected anything like this, though – but all those tests had been in small rooms, indoors. Not only did I read their papers, I could count the leaves on every tree and practically make out the stitching on the uniform of every soldier here. I saw everything around me that clearly. Perhaps Arms were meant to be outdoors. For the first time, I began to think about my transformation in terms of what I did, instead of what people did to me. The possibilities made me giddy.

  For instance, why hadn’t Agent Bates made me stand farther away? He ordered me over here so I couldn’t overhear their conversation. However, from the results of the hearing tests in the Detention Center, they all knew how acute my hearing had become. Either they didn’t realize what that meant out in the real world or else they didn’t think about my test results at all.

  I decided not to enlighten them. I stood quietly and eavesdropped as they took me apart and tried to figure my future physical improvements. I didn’t understand their guessing until Major Collins put an X on one of the curves, at the three year mark, and said “Keaton”.

  I’d become part of the effort to capture Stacy Keaton.

  They had me run the obstacle course again. They had me go through several small parts of the course separately. They had me run a hundred yard dash several times. They had me run for longer distances. They tested my jumping, height and length. They set up one strange arrangement where they had me run between two lines of soldiers dodging tennis balls they threw at me. I lost count of the number of things I did.

  We stayed at the obstacle course all that beautiful day, and I enjoyed being outdoors enough to joke with Agent Bates and Dr. Zielinski. Not with Dr. Peterson, who seemed unhappy that I was enjoying myself. Once, after I stumbled and fell while trying a Tarzan leap from one rope swing to another rope too far away, several of the soldiers cocked their weapons and pointed them at me. I waved at them, turned to Dr. Zielinski, and said “What are they worried about, anyway? Don’t they know the first rule of Arms, that bullets are faster than juice?”

  Of all things, Dr. Zielinski turned pasty white. “Where did you hear that from, Carol?” he asked, in his most persuasive voice.

  “Oh, that was j
ust something Mr. Borton passed on to me. He knows all sorts of interesting tidbits about Arms.” Dr. Zielinski’s hand shook as he helped me up, but by the time I was standing, he returned to his normal doctoral self.

  “Next time,” he said, “try and hold the rope near the bottom.” The suggestion worked, and then I went on to the next test.

  The tests didn’t stop until after the sun went down. At the end of the day, by the light of a lantern, they fed me one last meal and the soldiers packed in the equipment.

  I felt wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. The day had been magnificent. I’d even almost gotten enough to eat.

  I loved the exercise. I didn’t care that I shouldn’t have been able to do so much, that the juice was making changes in me I did not want. I simply felt too good. I wanted to do it all again. A full day of exercise had done miracles for my mood and had worked out the aches in my muscles.

  It was a beautiful feeling.

  I ate slowly and tried to make the day last. Finally, though, they made me lie back down on the cart, chained me up and took me home.

  I thought a long time about that trip to the obstacle course. I’d done things they hadn’t expected. The obstacle course itself was the most obvious. However, my vision and hearing improvements were similarly interesting. Even my sense of smell had improved.

  Everything I discovered today led to a great many questions about myself, and about Arms in general. I’d never before thought of my transformation as anything but a curse, but now I did. Satan, it seemed, richly rewarded his minions.

  I thought about the day some more, and another thing bothered me: all this extra information from my senses didn’t overwhelm me. I didn’t have any trouble sorting out the various conversations I’d overheard. There really was something supernatural about me. I wondered if the doctors, with all their research, had figured that out.

  I suspected not, or they would not have left me so close to them.

  I decided I didn’t have any real desire to let them know.

  Dr. Henry Zielinski: October 4, 1966

  Stonehams’s Bar was more downscale than Dr. Zielinski normally frequented, and he found himself more nervous about the clientele than the person he had arranged to meet. Which in itself was worth a chuckle. Stoneham’s was filled with working men, shot and beer fellows grousing about their wives, jobs and what they picturesquely termed ‘lack of pussy’. Although Dr. Zielinski had arranged the meeting using his Network phone contacts, the other party had chosen the location and the time.

  He weighed the ‘bar’ or ‘table’ options, and chose a table as far away from the bar as possible. Only a moment later, a man he overlooked stalked over, grabbed a chair and sat down opposite Dr. Zielinski.

  “Long time no see, Hank,” the man said. He was a short muscular guy, clean shaven, with black Marine-cut hair and the bottom of an anchor tattoo peeking out from under his blue shirt sleeve. “Why couldn’t we talk over the phone?” The man’s voice was a deep growl, the sort to instantly awaken a Marine private.

  This was the person Dr. Zielinski had arranged to meet.

  “Because, Larry, we have a few issues to discuss,” Dr. Zielinski said. The disguise was good. Larry didn’t match his normal Detention Center appearance: a little taller, darker skin and features, longer nose and less muscular.

  “Took you long enough, doc,” Larry said, referring to Larry’s other disguise. “You didn’t answer my question.” The last bit he spoke with a hint of threat, not anything beyond normal. Part of Dr. Zielinski’s desire to meet in person in a public location was to prevent the ‘beyond normal’ from taking over. He had enough ‘beyond normal’ in his day job.

  Dr. Zielinski smiled. “The FBI’s wiretapped my phone at the center and, likely, my hotel phone.”

  Larry shrugged. “You’re getting better at finely shading your answers, doc,” Larry said. “But I understand you better as well. Hancock has you spooked, doesn’t she? Spooked and frustrated.”

  A waitress frowned at the weight of her tray as she slammed it down on the table in front of the two men. Zielinski’s order was a beer and a small basket of peanuts. Larry’s order included the biggest steak on the menu, a double order of country fries, a baked potato heaped with butter, cheese and sour cream, two ears of corn-on-the-cob, and a pitcher of water. The waitress kept trying to inch away from Larry, as if he carried some sort of disease. Whatever it was about his companion that bothered the waitress, it didn’t bother Dr. Zielinski.

  “You ordered for me,” Dr. Zielinski said.

  “Of course,” Larry said. He cleared his throat.

  Right. Dr. Zielinski couldn’t allow himself to woolgather. He had to pay close attention to everything Larry said. Or asked. If he didn’t answer Larry’s question, bad things would happen.

  “You’re right. I’m frustrated. Hancock has her own ideas about what Arms and Transforms should be and do, and she’s proven to be difficult to educate,” Dr. Zielinski said.

  “Goes with the territory,” Larry said, rapidly chowing down on the baked potato.

  “The other reason I wanted to talk to you in person is our mutual friend out east. She has her own expectations about this assignment, and in her eyes, we’re not meeting them.” Earlier this evening, Tonya had said ‘If between the two of you, you can’t get this baby Arm to say ‘how high’ when either of you yells ‘jump’, you’re both slacking off.’ Said over the phone, safely from Philadelphia.

  “She has no right to complain,” Larry said. “I agreed to study the situation, nothing else. No promises. I taught Hancock some of the basics, but I’m not impressed with her either. Or your little set up, doc. Do you have any idea how fucked up that center is? It’s like a Focus household gone bad, only ten times worse. I doubt you could get a Focus to come to the Center if you paid her, and that’s saying something. Damned if I know what the place is doing to Hancock but I doubt it’s good.” Larry started in on the steak, slicing through it with unrepressed violence. “I’m not sure I want to work at the Center much longer.”

  “Careful, Larry. You’re scaring people by the way you’re cutting your steak.”

  Larry didn’t reply to Dr. Zielinski’s sotto voice suggestion, but he did cut his steak more sedately.

  “You think there’s a bad juice problem with the Center?” Dr. Zielinski asked. A bad juice problem would support his hypothesis about Hancock’s mental issues.

  “That’s what I said, wasn’t it?”

  Dr. Zielinski sighed, frustrated. Even if this hypothesis was true, he had no way to validate or fix it, and no way to move Carol anywhere else. All he could do was keep an eye on Carol and hope he spotted any effects before they became too serious.

  “What do you think of her, Hank?” Larry asked. “Beyond her stubborn preconceived notions.”

  Dr. Zielinski took a deep breath and decided to take a calculated risk, portraying Hancock’s weakness as a positive. Tonya had ordered him to work on Larry’s ‘lack of interest’ problem. “Actually, she’s much worse than your experience training with her might suggest. She’s a social circuit butterfly. I’m not sure she even went through a tomboy phase when she was a kid. She doesn’t garden, didn’t do any outdoor activities at all. The least pain and she’s practically weeping on the floor.” He paused and examined his companion’s reaction. Blank, utterly blank. Damn. “Each of your peers is different, and our new charge continues the pattern. The biggest difference is her, um, post event lusts, um, which are far beyond what my experiences, and…”

  “All your experiences?”

  Larry’s question referred to an incident when Dr. Zielinski had seen too much. Experienced too much. The events of that day still bothered him. He had stared death in the eyes and gotten death to blink first. Someday, he feared, he would lose one of those gambles. The incident was one of the reasons why he had grown careful in his dealings with all Transforms, and…
>
  “Skag,” Larry said, cutting through Dr. Zielinski’s thoughts. At his frown, Larry smiled a nasty smile. “Was. Mine. Worse?” The tone of that quiet demand emptied the two tables next to theirs. One of the men, in an oil-stained red-plaid shirt, turned toward Larry with the itch to fight in his eyes. Larry flickered a quick look at him. He backed away and fled at a controlled walk.

  Damn. He had gotten distracted. Again. “Yes,” Dr. Zielinski said. “Hancock’s is the worst.” So much for avoiding anything ‘beyond normal’.

  “Hmmm. Anything else?” Larry asked, calmer now and shoveling in the fries.

  “You’ve seen her temper and her muscle development,” Dr. Zielinski said. “Both are outside of the range of my experience.”

  “About fifteen times faster than what I’ve seen,” Larry said, referring to the muscle development. Dr. Zielinski took mental notes, especially concerning this quite informative tidbit. “Any idea why?”

  “My best guess is compensation, because she didn’t have much in the way of muscles to start with, but I’m not sure the explanation is sufficient. We’re giving her a standard diet, nothing out of the ordinary. Normal bowel movements, water consumption, hemoglobin levels, and juice levels. She even grouses to me about the mild physical training you’re putting her through.”

  Larry shook his head. “What’s your opinion about her sanity?”

  “Aside from her reluctance to turn away from religious explanations, her sanity is quite good. Only Desmond was better at this stage of her development.”

  “You think so, eh? Perhaps I will make your new charge an offer. You also need to give her more help. Show some commitment,” Larry said. “Stop being an information hog and tell her about the Transform community. Give her some proper incentive to get off her ass and exercise. She needs to know about the pitfalls involved.”

  “No problem.”

  “She also needs a weapon to defend herself. I think a weapon will calm her. You should get her one.”

  “Me?” Dr. Zielinski asked. Calm her? Larry’s strange statement was again quite informative. “Getting her one sounds like your specialty, not mine. Why don’t you do it?”

  “Look, cocksucker, I’m assigning the risk to you. Here, give her this,” Larry said. He reached down and came up with a knife in an ankle sheath.

  That was quick, Dr. Zielinski thought.

  Larry dropped the knife in Dr. Zielinski’s lap and paused, as if he was sensing something nearby.

  “Well, I’ve got to run,” Larry said. Dr. Zielinski blinked and Larry was gone. Dr. Zielinski tapped his fingers on the knife and wondered how he was supposed to deliver it.

  The waitress came by and gave him the bill. Dr. Zielinski glanced at the tab and grimaced. That had been Larry’s second meal!

  Not only had Larry ordered for Dr. Zielinski, the putative exercise instructor had stiffed him with the check.

  Bob Scalini: October 5, 1966 – October 9, 1966

  Bob hid himself in the alley behind Bellmore’s Steak House, a couple of miles south of downtown St. Louis. The Steak House closed at eleven on Wednesday night, and the staff started cleaning. At about midnight the kitchen garbage usually came out. That’s what Bob wanted.

  The regular garbage came out all evening, the usual selection of half eaten steaks, ground into skins of baked potatoes, shreds of salad, cigarette butts and hunks of bread, all glued together with butter, cheese, grease and various kinds of salad dressing. Bob would eat the regular garbage if he got desperate.

  The kitchen garbage was a different thing entirely, food that had been left uneaten in the kitchen at the end of the evening. The cook at Bellmore’s prided himself on his fresh ingredients. He didn’t keep anything that might not be perfect the next day: whole heads of lettuce, fresh bread, baked potatoes, even salads.

  Best of all was the prime rib. Every Wednesday evening was prime rib night at the Bellmore, and every Wednesday evening they went through racks of prime rib. Each rack had two ends, rich and dark and juicy. They didn’t serve the ends to the customers. They accumulated them to the side. Every Wednesday night at about midnight they threw them out.

  The thought of prime rib made Bob’s mouth water. He waited among the garbage cans across the alley, next to the back door of the Handy Dry Cleaner. It was an overcast October night with a cold north wind, the best time to scavenge. It was too dark to be seen and cold enough to drive most people indoors.

  Not Bob. He wore a heavy flannel shirt, warm enough for a Crow in this weather. A dim light, by the back door of the restaurant, illuminated the path to the garbage cans. The other side of the alley, where Bob hid, was almost black.

  Although Bob focused his sight and hearing on the Bellmore and its staff, he focused his metasense elsewhere. Tiamat’s ‘older sister’ Zaltu had wandered around nearby St. Louis last evening, which had unnerved him. Not hunting him, though. Shopping and bar-hopping. He no longer froze in terror when he metasensed her, but he always moved with more care, always worried, when she appeared.

  The more he studied Tiamat and Zaltu, the less human they seemed. They dispensed life and death as passionate goddesses, primordial, demanding and accepting sacrifices. Bob stopped himself when he began recognizing those kinds of thoughts in his head. Goddesses? Tiamat and Zaltu were only normal humans with Transform Sickness, human and dangerous. He couldn’t afford to think otherwise.

  Every week or so Tiamat’s captors brought her another male Transform nearing withdrawal. He understood. Tiamat’s captors kept her alive on purpose, a lioness in their zoo, fed raw meat to sustain her.

  Bob couldn’t decide if they were crazy or evil. Tiamat could be the predator he feared. On the other hand, Tiamat might hunt the predators that threatened him. Still, her captors’ actions were perverse; keeping her a prisoner and still feeding her Transforms.

  While he pondered Tiamat’s fate, cans rattled at the entrance to the alley. Bob’s heart leapt into his throat as he pulled his attention back to the here and now. Human beings, not twenty feet from him. He smelled them and recognized the acrid stench of filth and alcohol. He remembered the scents – two bad apples, bullies who preyed upon the other street people. How did he let them get so close?

  Bob froze into rigid immobility, heart pounding, sweat pooling in his armpits. He rode his fear, wondering whether it was safer to flee or continue hiding. The taller one, unwashed, grizzled and missing most of his teeth, led the way down the alley. The shorter one, broader, with a mashed nose and one torn ear showing under the flap of his hat, followed.

  Nowhere to run! Lightheaded, Bob attempted to quiet his growing panic. He failed.

  “Yeah, Jimmy. ‘s a good idea. Be a lot a food. I’d like a taste a good meat, all hot ‘n drippin’. It’d be a good…”

  “Shut yer face,” the first one said, not two feet from where Bob crouched, frozen, not breathing. Bob wished he believed in God, because he damned well wanted to pray.

  The first one looked away from his flat-nosed companion, dismissing him with contempt. He turned and his gaze chanced to land where Bob crouched.

  “Hey, whadda we got here?” the man asked. His hand came out toward Bob and his expression got mean. Flat Nose turned to look. Bob stood up, back against the wall behind him. “I think we got somebody what gets to do some sharing. You gonna share with us nice-like, right?”

  Bob stopped breathing. The man had a broken piece of glass in his hand, razor sharp and wrapped at the bottom with duct tape. He poked his weapon toward Bob like lightning. So fast. Homeless street bums, and they were going to kill him for his worthless possessions. All the stark terror came out of him, his uncertain fear of Tiamat and Zaltu as well as the consuming panic at the surprise appearance of these two men. The juice within him roiled and spewed out of him as a violent vomiting of half-digested dross. His dross vomit spread out over most of the length of the alleywa
y.

  Bob sprinted to the other end of the alley, and out. Behind him, the two bums shrieked. He didn’t know what all that half-digested dross had done to them, but he sensed them now with his extra sense. The dross clung to them, dim outlined silhouettes rolling on the ground. They writhed and clawed at themselves.

  Bob ran two hundred yards through the quiet darkness before he convinced himself they would not follow. He stopped in front of the dark windows of the Bookworm Book Store four blocks away. His attackers no longer moved.

  ‘Skunk,’ Sinclair had said. Bob had sicked-up dross like a skunk lifting his tail and spraying. He wasn’t defenseless! Although he still shook in fear, he wanted to laugh giddily. Worried and exposed, he ducked into the nearest alley to hide again. Blocks away, his attackers still writhed on the ground. The sicked-up dross spread out away from them and began to seep through the walls of the buildings.

  The sick-up didn’t metasense like normal dross. He had done something to the sick-up while he had it within him. Dross was everywhere and people didn’t react to it this way. Hell! Crows were goddamned two legged chemical factories.

  Bob slunk back to where his two attackers had fallen. The sick-up seeping toward the Bellmore was enough to poison the place. He couldn’t allow that…he would lose his free meals. Besides, the restaurant staff didn’t deserve to be poisoned. Hidden in the shadows by the entrance to the alley, he gathered the dross back in, as much as possible. He didn’t touch the two men.

  He should, he thought. Rationally, he doubted now they would have killed him. Roughed him up, yes, but not killed him. Probably.

  Maybe.

  The dross hurt them, poisoned them. He wondered if he should draw it off them. He decided not to. Yes, theoretically, they deserved a trial, but he was a street bum, like all their victims. Who cared what happened to street bums? Or Crows? His jaw clenched as his two attackers writhed helplessly on the ground, a vicious anger twisting inside of him.

  A door slammed open, and people called out. The Bellmore kitchen staff must have finally come out with their garbage. They would probably call an ambulance. Bob eased farther away.

  No prime rib tonight.

  His stomach rumbled as he slunk his way through the network of alleys and small streets. He didn’t look forward to a dinner of stale bread.

  Then, to cap his day off, far to the north, at the edge of his range, he sensed a flicker.

  The dim but powerful sign of a Crow.

  Bob laughed. He couldn’t help himself. The only other thing he could have done was cry.

  What a day. Bums had attacked him. He had discovered a way to defend himself with his sick-up. Hell, he had overcome his frozen terror of the Zaltu predator not so many days ago.

  Now another Crow had arrived. This he didn’t need.

  He slid his back down the alley wall until he sat on the ground and shivered.

  ---

  Bob stood by the drinking fountain in Willmore Park, where he came every night to fill his jugs with water. The jungle gym and swing sets loomed like giants in the shadowed darkness. The slide, merry-go-round and the little horses on springs hid farther back. There were benches around him, but his nerves wouldn’t let him sit. The sun wouldn’t rise for several more hours.

  A half-mile north of him, the other Crow still approached.

  He had approached steadily since Bob first metasensed him. This wasn’t one of the shy ones, terrified to come near. Bob felt an urge to run himself in the face of that confidence. Still, the only Crow he had ever talked to had been Sinclair. That had been a long time ago. Bob was lonely and curious.

  He missed the human contact. He missed Gina, his wife.

  He talked to normals these days, but he couldn’t reveal himself to them as a Crow. Not too long ago, he couldn’t even talk to normals. He even had manly urges again, but not toward normal women. Instead, against his will, he found himself attracted to Tiamat. The very thought made him want to retch. Although he missed Gina, her wavy brown hair and little upturned nose, Bob suspected he would no longer find her attractive.

  He hated being a Transform. Yet, for him, it was the only game in town.

  For companionship, he was stuck with this new Crow, whoever he might be.

  In time, he saw a shadow slide past the houses on the other side of the park. The Crow walked slowly and cautiously. Bob stayed hidden, unmoving.

  The Crow came through the gate in the fence and past the playground equipment. Bob saw him clearly, despite the overcast. The other Crow was tall and thin, with short black hair, and looked to be in his early twenties. Bob realized, with a start, that the other Crow’s skin was brown. He was a black man. His clothes were worn but clean. He looked civilized and respectable.

  Bob had no experience dealing with colored folks. They lived other lives in other places. It had been that way his entire life. It was a disconcerting jolt to discover a colored man was one of his own kind. He had no idea how to deal with someone like that.

  Bob was uncomfortably aware of his own unshorn head and the stubble on his chin. He still carried the whiff of garbage.

  The other stopped, about a hundred feet away.

  “I’m Midgard,” the man said. Bob shifted awkwardly and wondered what the man would expect of him.

  Well, for a start, his name. Bob had expected the question to come someday, and had an answer prepared. “I’m Gilgamesh.” Gilgamesh, a mortal man in a land of gods and goddesses, searching the world for the secret of life.

  “I just came here from Kansas City,” Midgard said, not challenging Bob’s name at all. “I sensed a Focus household nearby, but it looks like you haven’t been taking from it?”

  Midgard’s voice had been soft and non-threatening, a whisper only a Crow would notice. Bob made sure his voice was the same.

  “There are other Transforms here, in the St. Louis Transform Detention Center. They generate such a large amount of dross that I had no need of the other.”

  Midgard nodded, thoughtfully. “I can metasense one in the Transform Detention Center. A Monster, I think. I’d like to know more about these creatures,” he said.

  Bob stiffened. To his surprise, he had no urge to keep what he knew about Tiamat and Zaltu a secret. However, what he knew would take too long to explain and he wasn’t prepared to spend long hours dealing with another person.

  Midgard picked up on his unease. “Not now,” he said. “Later. I have things I can tell you.” He stopped and looked at Bob. “I’ve been a Crow for a little over a year,” he said.

  It was a question. “I became a Crow almost three months ago,” Bob said.

  Midgard nodded, approving. “You have very good control for someone only three months past your transformation. Whatever’s in the Center produces more dross than any Focus household I’ve ever sensed. Just the idea of that much dross sitting in one place is dangerous to think about. I’m not sure I could creep close enough to take it.” Bob realized with a shock that the other man had been judging him. It was an uncomfortable sensation.

  He nodded to acknowledge the compliment.

  That did leave the question of why Tiamat’s sea of dross had drawn him in, when it appeared to terrify Midgard. Bob was a Crow. He was supposed to run from danger. He hadn’t run.

  “I’ll live on the north side of town,” Midgard said.

  Bob shook his head. Midgard was the only human contact Bob had. “No, come farther south. I’d welcome the companionship and there’s too much dross there for me.” He wanted to share it – and share the implicit danger of the unknown predator. Midgard’s offer took a load off Bob’s mind. His fear of leaving Tiamat’s dross sea behind made him wonder again if he had gone mad.

  Midgard nodded, and then shook his head. “Sorry. I’ll come south, but I can’t face going anywhere near that Center. I can’t imagine taking any of that dross, at least
not yet. I’ll write my story down on paper for you. I’ll leave it hidden under those bushes over there.” He nodded toward the bushes over on his right. “You can write your story and leave it for me.”

  Bob nodded back. He liked this Midgard person. The fact he was colored didn’t seem to matter. Perhaps skin color didn’t matter if they were both Crows. Perhaps it didn’t matter to normals either.

  Then he shook his head again. Of course it mattered to normals. It was only because they were Crows that things were different.

  He laughed to himself. Crows were black birds. Perhaps they were all black now, on the inside.

  Carol Hancock: October 5, 1966 – October 6, 1966

  The day after the obstacle course was the first day I slapped a nurse. The new nurse, Givens, was the one. I’d finished a morning blood test and Givens wanted me to put my shoes back on. No, I wanted to carry them. They hurt my feet today. She wasn’t being rude or anything, merely insistent. So I slapped her. Nurse Givens bounced off the wall and ran, and I had panicked orderlies with weapons pointed at me, ready to shoot. Cook, of all of them the most familiar with me, kept shouting, “Get down, get down.”

  I got down.

  I had a problem, though. I enjoyed slapping Nurse Givens and I wanted to do it again.

  The slap bought me another visit to the scabrous Dr. Manigault. He sentenced me to half rations and solitary confinement for the rest of the day. He repeated his employment offer. I turned him down again.

  The solitary confinement cell was new to me, somewhere up on the third floor, and the room smelled funny, a sour chemical odor I couldn’t place. The eight feet by ten feet cell had a twelve-foot ceiling, so I felt like I was at the bottom of some odd box. Several water pipes crossed the cell, up by the ceiling, and a metal grating reinforced the drywall. The small sink was set in a tin cabinet, all sharp edges and metal points. The bed, a glorified footlocker, had body bags inside it, along with thick rope, extra sheets, and on top, a knife.

  In case I didn’t get the hint, someone had tied a hangman’s noose on the rope. Dr. Manigault had thrown me into a suicide chamber, the sort of place the Detention Center incarcerated unwanted Transforms while waiting for their inevitable deaths.

  I slammed the bed back down without further thought, enraged.

  At night, I dreamed again of the man in the film. I’d dreamed of him before, in my nightmares, first his withdrawal then myself in withdrawal. This time I came for him with my arms extended, to envelop him and give him death, and he hugged me. I held him to me, I pulled…

  I woke up in the grip of a craving so fierce I shook with it. It was only the fifth day since the last time I had taken juice. The craving shouldn’t have been this powerful yet. I held my pillow tightly, and lay on my side and shivered.

  As I turned in the bed, I realized something else: the dream left me aroused. I thought of that man in withdrawal, the juice he represented and I wanted him. I wanted his juice, I wanted his body, I wanted him inside of me in all ways.

  I was sick. Bad mind sick. My skin itched, as well. I didn’t like this room.

  Every time something good happened, like with the obstacle course, another ten bad things happened. I was so overwhelmed by my emotions I couldn’t think straight anymore. I hated this!

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. I hadn’t needed more than two or three hours of sleep a night since I’d transformed. I daydreamed that one of the staff would come down with Transform Sickness. First thing in the morning, one of the staff would come in and he would be a Transform, filled with juice. Right next to me. I could reach over and drain him dry.

  Sometime just before dawn, I sat straight up in the bed and put my head in my hands. A knife? I scrambled out of bed and looked again in the chest. I hadn’t been mistaken. A knife. Someone had put a goddamned knife in with the suicide equipment.

  I picked up the knife in awe. This was no normal kitchen knife. It was huge, a foot long black steel monstrosity, sharp on both sides at the end, serrated like a kitchen knife on the front side starting half way down, and with a short section of saw-like serrations on the other side opposite the front serrations. The knife came in a hand-tooled custom holster with straps top and bottom, and the holster looked well used. I sniffed the scent of old blood and the heavy odor of its owner, unrecognizable. Much fainter, I smelled the odor of a person I recognized. Dr. Zielinski.

  I’d say the knife was too big for dainty-ol’-me, but I found something comforting about it. I closed the lid on the footlocker bed and sat down to think, the knife cradled in my arms, held baby tight. I thought for a long time.

  I couldn’t make myself believe it was a coincidence that the knife had shown up right after I’d slapped the nurse and right after my trip to the obstacle course. I came up with only one rational conclusion: Dr. Zielinski had given this to me because he thought I needed the knife to defend myself.

  I’d also assumed the Detention Center staff monitored the entire place with closed-circuit television whatnots, but the appearance of this knife here was a good indication they didn’t monitor this room. I was surprised, but then remembered that the Detention Center was a decade old. They hadn’t kept the place up to date.

  I couldn’t figure out how to get the knife out of this room. I couldn’t carry it. They frisked me too often for me to conceal the knife under my clothes. Worse, I ended up half-naked far too regularly during the damned medical tests. I puzzled over the straps attached to the holster and after a while realized they would fit well around someone’s lower leg. That had to be how Dr. Zielinski got the knife in.

  Although, looking at the worn spots on the leather straps, I decided the original owner had big legs. Dr. Zielinski’s lower legs weren’t as thin as mine, but they were still thin. Even at its tightest, I had to put the sheath right below my knee to keep it on my leg.

  I played with the knife and noted its lethal sharpness. Thought about the uses I could make of it. No, this knife was only for emergencies, something to give me a fighting chance if the Detention Center scheduled me for termination, a tool to help me if I needed to escape. Dr. Zielinski had put the knife here because he knew I would end up in this cell if I got in trouble. I couldn’t carry the knife with me but the cell had ample hiding places. I doubted the government had built this this room to serve as a maximum-security holding tank. Storeroom would have been my guess. Therefore, I hid the knife on top of one of the overhead pipes.

  I figured if I wanted to get the knife, I would just slap another nurse.

  I did have one problem, though: I didn’t know the first thing about fighting, with or without a knife. I needed to talk to Dr. Zielinski. I knew not to mention the knife but I could talk to him about his experiences with other Arms. There was a message here I didn’t get.

  I needed to understand that message.

  After a half day of confinement in the suicide cell my muscles were noticeably worse. I couldn’t sit still for long, as immobility made the ache intolerable. When they released me from the suicide cell, I went to see Dr. Zielinski. Instead of giving him an apology for yesterday’s behavior or asking questions about his experiences with other Arms, I lost my temper.

  “This transformation thing is getting worse,” I said, after I sat down. “My body aches and my mind is full of mush. I swear I’m becoming some sort of Monster!”

  “Despite what certain people have said, I can assure you that Arms are not Monsters,” he said, with a barely muted eye roll.

  The arrogant bastard didn’t even take me seriously. “How in the blazes do you know that? I suppose in your infinite wisdom you know everything about me.” I glared at him, angrier by the second.

  “No, I don’t,” he said, steepling his fingers and looking off to the side. “Unlike some who’ve become fixed in their belief and faith, medical researchers find out that they’re wrong every day. That’s how we learn and…”


  Jerk. “So you admit you’re wrong?”

  “When the data are wrong, certainly,” he said, with a small smile on the edges of his lips.

  ‘Data are’? My face grew hot at his utter pomposity, but he didn’t notice. “Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?” he continued, as if he spoke from a canned script.

  “I hurt, damn it!” I said, my voice loud and an octave higher than normal. “I can’t even hold still. Every time I sit still my muscles hurt. My stomach has hurt for two weeks now, my shoulders hurt, and everything just keeps getting worse.”

  “Carol, I understand you’re in some discomfort,” Dr. Zielinski said, nervous now. He watched me with a tight, tense expression. Wary, as if he didn’t trust what I might do. “This is normal. Your body’s undergoing a lot of changes, as you’re not fully an Arm yet. As time goes on, the pain should decrease. Until then, I know…”

  “You don’t know anything.” I was profoundly angry. “You don’t know anything about what I’m enduring.”

  “Carol, I thi…”

  “Shut the hell up! You sit there and tell me you understand what I’m going through, yet you’ve never experienced the pain or the craving. What gives you the right to decide when I get juice and when I don’t?” I shook in anger. The only thing that kept me from more violence was the freshness of the memory of the suicide cell.

  Dr. Zielinski’s face went white. He had the deep breathing and artificial stillness of someone in real danger. He slowly pushed his chair back from his desk to leave his legs clear. Why? Why did he move his right hand inside his suit jacket, near his left shoulder? A gun? Did he think I would pull out that knife of his and stab him?

  I took a deep breath of my own and tried to bring myself under control. I breathed again and counted to ten. Across from me, Dr. Zielinski didn’t move. I counted to ten again, then backwards from fifty.

  “I hurt,” I said, my voice tight with barely controlled anger. “This is not some minor ‘ache’. The pain in my muscles is intense, getting worse every day. The ache today is a lot worse because of the time I spent in solitary. I can’t hold still anymore. You’re a doctor. Do something about this.”

  As I spoke Dr. Zielinski relaxed, just a bit. He nodded when I finished speaking.

  “If a single day without exercise can cause such discomfort, you’re right and we have a problem. If you’re up to it, we can start some tests right now to ascertain how bad your problems have gotten.”

  I nodded. This was what I wanted, that he take my complaints seriously. The anger still smoldered under the surface, though, barely banked, ready to come out and blaze again at my next loss of control.

  Dr. Zielinski ordered a full set of X-rays. They covered my entire body and it took hours to take them all. Afterwards, he consulted with the center’s other doctors and placed several phone calls. Dr. Zielinski didn’t identify the problem, but I didn’t like the frown on his face. He even called in Larry Borton to consult with him about what he saw on the X-Rays.

  It was only after he finished the diagnostic work that he called me into Lab One and told me what changes were in store for me.

  “God dammit. Isn’t there anything real you can do? What kind of quack are you?” I said to Zielinski, after he increased the amount of time I spent with Larry each day up to three two hour sessions and cut my calorie intake to five thousand calories a day. “Where’s the pills? Where’s the surgery? What’s with you about all this diet and exercise crap, anyway?” My voice had lowered into a throaty growl, though I didn’t feel half as menacing as earlier.

  Borton grinned at Dr. Zielinski, one of those ‘I told you so’ grins, I decided. Dr. Zielinski sighed, exasperated with me. Well, I was exasperated with him, too.

  He tapped my aching shoulder with a pencil. “I suppose I could operate and physically remove some of your extra muscles,” he said. I nodded. This sounded at least a little promising. “But you’d have to sign a waiver, Carol.”

  “A waiver?”

  “Because of what’s happened with the other Arms, and because no one’s ever done any sort of procedure like this to any Arms or Focuses, there’s no telling whether the procedure would work. Or if you’d even live through it,” Dr. Zielinski said, a caricature of a mad scientist. “Or whether you’d come out crippled. Or if the removal of these muscles would trigger an even worse muscle growth cycle. Of course, the most likely outcome is that something totally unexpected would happen, such as what happened to the CDC’s Dr. Wilson when he tried to fix a broken leg on a captive Monster he had somehow acquired.”

  “What happened, Hank?” Larry Borton said. He had been standing in the doorway the entire time, laughter in his cold eyes at my discomfort. “You haven’t told me this one.”

  Dr. Zielinski raised a single eyebrow and gave my face a sidelong glance. “The Monster went into some previously unimagined type of juice shock. While Dr. Wilson worked on its broken left leg, the Monster’s limbs broke off from its body at the joints and each of the Monster’s internal organs slithered away on its own,” Dr. Zielinski said, still tapping on my shoulder.

  On my shoulder joint.

  “Which is why I need you to sign a waiver,” Dr. Zielinski said to me.

  At which point I turned, wobbling unsteadily, my anger now abject horror. No experimenting on me, thank you very much! Borton at least covered his face when he laughed, the bastard.

  “Since you now understand why I’m prescribing changes to your diet and exercise schedule, I expect you to start your expanded exercise work immediately, Carol,” Dr. Zielinski said.