Mr. Bates. If I’m supposed to kill these people, I think I need to know.”
He accepted my answer and led me into the conference room. He had me sit down and as he turned off the lights, Dr. Zielinski joined us. “Back in ’58, just before end of the Transform Quarantine, a plant maintenance engineer in the FBI building came down with Transform Sickness. No Focuses had room for him. For religious reasons, suicide wasn’t an option, nor euthanasia, or even any medications. He volunteered to allow his end to be filmed in the name of science.” Bates paused. “I was there. This film covers the last four days of his life. If he and his family hadn’t agreed to withhold food and water from him, he would have taken two weeks to die.”
Cranky and tired from the exercise, I wanted to gnash my teeth. I still hoped this was all a mistake: there weren’t any Transforms, I wasn’t a Transform, I wasn’t an Arm.
Dr. Zielinski motioned for Agent Bates to deal with the projector, and sat down beside me.
I shivered and hugged my torso, but couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. The film started with a straightjacketed man on the floor of a padded cell, curled up in a fetal position. The man had corded muscles and he bared his teeth in a snarl. His agony moved me. I wanted to take his pain away.
“He’s in pain, but he’s not in withdrawal yet,” Dr. Zielinski said. “He’s in the worst of the low juice states, what we call periwithdrawal.”
Occasionally, the man would jerk spasmodically. In between, he made little desperate mewling noises. He was the most miserable creature I had seen since my three-year-old Billy came down with the flu on top of Chicken Pox. All this from low juice?
As I watched, I remembered reading how Focuses didn’t have to worry about their dangerous Transforms because they could ‘strip them down to low juice’ if they needed. Looking at this man, I realized how nasty a weapon the Focuses possessed. No, Focuses weren’t helpless at all.
Five minutes into the film the man began to howl, his muscles corded tighter than before. My empathy for the man vanished, replaced by disgust. I turned away for a moment at the slap-in-the-face reality of the man’s plight. This juice deprivation might happen to me, and I didn’t want it to.
“He’s in withdrawal now,” Dr. Zielinski said, as cold and clinical as ever, as if he sat in my living room with a cup of tea in his hand, discussing the weather. “Because of media inaccuracies, most people think a man goes into withdrawal when he runs out of juice. In reality, a male Transform goes into withdrawal when he doesn’t have enough juice to function.”
I nodded. “He has juice left?” I asked, as calm and rational as I could fake. “Is this juice I can use?”
“He does have juice left, but some of his remaining juice has turned into a poison, not only for him, but for any Arm foolish enough to try and take juice from him. Eventually, once he’s consumed about a third of his remaining juice, so much of his juice will be poison that he will have poisoned his brain, and he’ll die. It takes about two weeks if he has adequate food and water. Much of this man’s agony is from thirst and hunger.”
As Dr. Zielinski spoke the man stiffened. He held this pose, every muscle in his body clenched, for about a minute. Then he thrashed uncontrollably, screamed and blood began to ooze from his man’s skin like sweat. A few seconds later he exploded off the floor and threw himself at the door. His body slammed up against it with unbelievable force. I flinched and covered my mouth in sudden terror. I’d never seen anyone move so fast or hit something that hard. No man who had any care for himself at all could throw himself at an immovable object in such a fashion.
The blow against the door knocked him to the floor, but he never stopped screaming. He thrashed on the floor for a moment, got to his feet, and threw himself at the door as hard as he had done the first time, this time spraying teeth left and right. He continued to scream. Bloody spittle flew from his mouth and smeared his face, mixing with his bloody sweat. Within just a few minutes he screamed his throat raw, his voice a ragged remnant of its original. Bruises covered his face and head, and he bled from his ears. Heaven knew what the rest of his body looked like.
He never stopped. After several more minutes blood sprayed out with his screams. His face grew so covered with cuts and bruises and blood that after a while I couldn’t discern its real shape. His left shoulder was out of position, as if he dislocated it, or broke it, and the hospital pants became wet after he lost bladder control. The horribly mangled screaming never stopped, just went on and on. He never stopped thrashing, throwing himself at the door or at the walls.
The people who made the film thoughtfully spliced together sections from all four days, but they thankfully removed most of the man’s suffering. By the end, even his body didn’t look human. Many of his bones were broken, and blood poured from all his orifices. He still screamed and threw himself at the door. On broken legs, with the bones sticking out through his pants, he still struggled to make those legs force him at the door.
When he died, he died thrashing, making hoarse gargling noises as close to a scream as he could force his body to make. His body was puffy and warped, as if it changed around him as he died.
Agent Bates had his handkerchief out, drying his eyes at the end. Dr. Zielinski stood and turned on the lights. He appeared to be unaffected by the film. I guessed he must have seen worse.
I hadn’t. I tasted vomit in my throat as tears streaked down my face. Even the most horrific Hollywood horror movies I had seen in a theater or drive in hadn’t moved me this much.
I let Dr. Zielinski take me by the elbow and lead me, shaking, to his office two rooms down the hall.
Arms Die
(Carol Hancock POV)
“So how did she die? Mary Chesterson. If it wasn’t from remorse for killing her friends.”
Dr. Zielinski nodded and accepted the change of subject. He looked at me silently from behind his desk for a moment, twisting a pen in his hands.
“Mary transformed, becoming the first Arm in the United States. No one knew what happened during her transformation; to the Doctors she appeared to be a failed Focus, similar to many others in that era. They understood she was different because her Focus attendants died during her transformation. She got put in quarantine with a group of Focuses and their households, and killed two household Transforms by draining their juice, surprising everyone. Mary’s actions convinced the doctors she consumed juice, which they found almost unbelievable. The authorities confined her, then when she used up her juice she went into withdrawal, surprising them again – they had no idea a Major Transform could even go into withdrawal. To save her life, they brought in one of the quarantined Focuses, Lucy Peoples, to try and move juice to Mary. Their attempt failed when Mary attacked Peoples while in withdrawal and took her juice, killing her. Focus Peoples possessed the usual Focus complement of juice, enough to drive an Arm into Monsterhood, but Mary remained human. However, after she took Focus Peoples’ juice, Mary fell into a coma, and she awoke a week later with a shattered mind. She killed herself a day later.”
“Oh. No wonder Dr. Peterson reacted so strongly, when I asked if I might get juice from a Focus.”
Dr. Zielinski didn’t say anything. He just watched me, perhaps wondering whether I now wanted to kill a Focus. I twisted the shackle around my right wrist, fidgeting restlessly.
“The second? How did she die?” I asked, making myself let go of the chain. I wondered how many of these Arms he had cared for. It had to be a high number for the authorities to consider him an Arm expert.
Dr. Zielinski saw where I was going. He leaned forward at his desk, still holding the pen. “Carol, don’t take this too hard,” he said. “We’ve been learning a lot with every Arm transformation. There’s no reason you have to suffer the same fate as the others.”
“What happened to her?” I asked, again.
Dr. Zielinski sighed. “Her name was June Bethune. The head of the team caring for her
, Dr. White, believed the juice Chesterson took from the household Transforms poisoned her, causing her to go into withdrawal later. He thought if Bethune didn’t get any juice from any Transforms, she would stabilize, as she was a Major Transform. June went into withdrawal and died instantly, unlike Chesterson, who lingered in withdrawal for hours without dying. I disagreed with Dr. White theories and got shut out of the decision making.”
“The third?”
“Rose Desmond?” he asked. I nodded, having heard her name before. “I was in charge of her care, and she lived for six months after her transformation.”
My eyes opened wide. “Then it’s possible I can live through this?”
“Possible, but not probable,” Dr. Zielinski said. “Rose cooperated with us extensively. By the end she had taught herself enough science to be able to read and understand many of the scientific papers written about Transforms, despite having been just a High School graduate, albeit her rural school’s valedictorian. Nearly everything positive I understand about Arm development comes from my time with her.” I saw it in his eyes. He loved Rose Desmond; she had become a daughter to him.
I decided I had better get more cooperative if I wanted to live.
“Her muscles developed far slower than yours, as did her hungers.