Transforms ran out of juice and hideously died. Despite these facts, Francine had come up with moral problems with killing volunteer Transforms. Typical weak-kneed woman, unable to accept that the Transform volunteers would perish anyway, regardless of her actions.
Frank grunted and turned away. He thought Hank’s suggestion to restrain Francine cruel and inhumane, and he had expressed his opinion to Hank on the subject in private. Hank tsked to himself. Frank didn’t have a good feel for how Transforms differed from normal humanity. Transforms required harsher measures than normal humans; one of Hank’s Focus patients broke his arm two years ago just by grabbing it and squeezing. Sure, most Focuses weren’t manual laborers, as Focus Abernathy had been, but Hank suspected all the various Major Transforms – the Focuses, failed Focuses and other Sports – were more inhuman than most folks realized. In all ways.
He and Francine had devised a test to find out if she could draw juice from a psychotic and unsalvageable male Transform already suffering from juice withdrawal. Francine successfully drew the psychotic’s juice, but afterwards boils and rashes erupted all over her body. The only positive news the persnickety woman reported was that the draw hadn’t been pleasurable.
Unfortunately, two days ago, Francine decided she was going insane and turning into a Monster. She threatened suicide, but Dr. Reddicks refused to restrain her. He had given up on listening to Hank’s advice.
The taxi driver pulled up and loaded their bags while the two doctors helped themselves into the back of the taxi. Dr. Kepke instructed the driver to take them to the airport and they took off.
After they cleared the research center security, Hank got a glimpse of the taxi driver’s license photo hanging from the rear view mirror. Several things clicked in his mind, and his heart started pounding in anxious fear. At the first stop sign outside the complex he reached across Dr. Kepke, opened the car door and pushed the younger doctor out.
Hank attempted to follow, but a hand with the strength of iron reached back, grabbed him and pulled him back in as the taxi motored off. He tried to wiggle free, but the driver, whose license picture didn’t match his face, threw Hank across the back bench. Hank slammed his head on the window and cursed. He didn’t black out from the pain, but he did pitch forward, hold his head in his hands and moan.
“Huh,” the taxi driver said. “You might be worth talking to after all, being the first motherfucker to crack one of my disguises.”
Hank moaned again in pain and grabbed at the door handle at his side, willing to give escape a shot even while the taxi accelerated to over sixty miles an hour. His vision blurred and his hands shook as he made the attempt.
No luck. The taxi driver grabbed him again, this time yanking him, painfully and awkwardly, into the front seat. After banging him against the door and the dashboard several more times, the taxi driver pulled to the side of the state highway and bound his hands behind him with his own tie. “Any more of that shit and I will kill you, cocksucker,” he said.
Dr. Zielinski’s body felt like one large bruise, an unfamiliar experience. He was a doctor, a surgeon originally before he got interested in research, not at all a bruiser. He had been in better shape when younger, but in the past few years, his responsibilities as a teaching doctor and professor at the Harvard Medical School had limited his tennis playing time. His long angular face accentuated his receding hairline, and he suspected he would soon resemble the faded photographs of his maternal grandfather, the expat Belgian merchant marine sailor Pierre Reynold. He struggled to right his body into a sitting position, with his feet in the seat well instead of twisted underneath him.
“What do you want from me?” Hank asked, his voice reduced to a low croak from his now bruised sternum.
“Shut up,” the taxi driver said, slapping his face. His head snapped back and hit the door jam, more pain. The driver turned and growled at him, and Hank’s feet scrabbled in terror. The driver’s gaze reminded him a predatory Monster, and triggered an unreasoning terror that clenched the bowels and slackened the muscles. Shit! Was this who he thought it was? He forced himself quiet and futilely tried to control his staccato breathing and heartbeat. The taxi driver continued to stare at him, locking him in place with those death-inhabited eyes, able to drive without having to watch the road.
They drove for fifteen minutes before turning off the highway just outside of Bakersfield and driving into a tiny subdivision. The taxi driver soon pulled into the gravel driveway of a new-ish small suburban house, one with no garage and a ‘for sale’ sign out front. The driver dragged Hank out of the car, forced him forward up to the front door, and tossed him inside, to bang against the wall and fall on the dusty wooden floor of a vacant living room. The house smelled of recent death and garbage.
“Do you know who I am?” the hugely muscled taxi driver said, squatting over Hank and twisting him around to face her. He met the eyes of the predator and forced down panic. The driver wore a loose fitting long sleeve checked shirt, dirty brown pants, and stood but five feet tall.
“Stacy Keaton,” Hank said. Despite appearances she was a woman, an extremely dangerous woman he would have given nearly anything in his life to meet…under much more controlled circumstances.
She backhanded him again, this time breaking his nose. His head hit the wall behind him with another bang and blood leaked down his suit coat. “Show some respect, you motherfucking quack. The proper responses are ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am’.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hank said, automatically. “So you are really a failed Focus, ma’am? I didn’t believe the FBI reports. With the problems I’ve had trying to keep failed Focuses alive, I was sure they were mistaken and you were a Sport, one of the one-of-a-kind Major Tra…”
She slapped him again. “Shut up, dammit! I don’t want to have to kill you, you sodden piece of shit. I want your help, but I don’t want you yammering away at me.”
The banter was fun, in its own fatalistic way. From what he knew about Keaton, she had killed absolutely everyone she encountered in the nine months she had spent free of Federal captivity. Her death toll included several doctors, and he figured he didn’t have any chance at getting out of this one alive. “What sort of medical help do you want?” Keaton almost backhanded him again, but caught herself. Instead, she sat down, very close to him. His heart rate skyrocketed and he tried to inch away, but he had nowhere to go. Tendrils of panic threaded into his mind and he wrenched at his tied arms, instinctively trying to put them between him and Keaton. The failed Focus wanted him humbled before she killed him. Damn if he would give her that pleasure.
“You’re insane, aren’t you?” Keaton asked, hungry, almost nose to nose with him.
Insane? “Depressed over Francine Sarles’ death, perhaps, ma’am,” he said.
“Your marriage sucks, Zielinski. Let me guess, you haven’t fucked your wife since you killed off Rose Desmond. Right?”
How the crap had she figured that out? He shook his head, but Keaton got closer, almost forehead to forehead. Her razor eyes cut into his soul, rousing total and utter terror. Waiting. “Yes, ma’am, you’re right,” Hank forced out.
“I’m an Arm,” she said. Arm? Now he remembered. ‘Arm’ was what the newspapers nicknamed the Armenigar’s Syndrome Focuses, ever since Focus celebrity Biggioni ran her fool mouth enough to attract far too much media attention.
“Yes, ma’am.” Arm it was.
“I keep killing the people who I want to help me,” Keaton said. “You’re going to tell me why and help me figure a way around this problem, or I’m going to kill you, too.”
He didn’t believe it for a moment; the lie was all over her face. He blinked as she twitched a backhand blow at him strong enough to break his neck, unhappy that he could read her as easy as she read him.
However, the answer to her question was obvious to him, given his experience with failed…Arms. He didn’t know how explain it to her, th
ough.
“Tell me anyway,” she said.
Hell, she read him like a book, much better than he read her! That wasn’t fair! Dammit, he had spent years perfecting his ability to cover up his reactions with Focuses, and…
“So you deal with the Focuses, too?”
Might as well talk. He could die like a mouse, or die like a lion, but dead was dead and he preferred lions. “Several years ago I discovered the difference between supplemental juice and fundamental juice, ma’am. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but until Desmond’s death, I’d actually been nominated for a Nobel.”
Of all things, Keaton’s face softened to reveal the real human woman behind the psychotic killer mask. She kissed him and started to rip his clothes off. “Oh, arrogance,” she said. “Utter and complete arrogance. I love it.”
Why now, why me? Hank thought, caught up in the moment, despite his wishes on the subject.
“Ran down some prey in LA just before I came to nab you,” Keaton said, her momentary humanity entirely gone from her face and eyes, becoming a predator of a different sort. “Always makes me horny. Now, shut up and fuck.”
“So, you never told me what my problem is,” Keaton said, hours afterwards. She fucked like a nineteen year old male and had given his privates a