A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (4 page)

One of the guards had left running, off to fetch Dr. Wilson.  The other
carried a chair.  McIntyre pulled it over and sat down, about three feet from me, between me and the steel bars.  The guard took a spot underneath the camera.  He carried his gun in his hand, ready for any emergency.

Idiot.  If I
broke free, his service weapon wouldn’t do him a damned bit of good, except be available for me to take from him.  Little boys, playing at soldiers.

“Feeling comfortable there, Carol?” McIntyre
said, mockery in his voice.  His real business here.  The monitor had just been a spur of the moment observation.  I didn’t bother to answer him.

McIntyre waited a while and then spoke again.  “We c
an make your life here a little more comfortable.  Give us a little cooperation and life can get better for you.  Would you like some food? Maybe a nice steak?  A few candy bars?”

‘Here Fido, be good and we’ll give you a doggie treat.’  He wasn’t wrong: steak and candy bars would be wonderful.  I was ravenous.  My stomach tried to grumble at the thought but my control was better.  I showed no reaction, still cursing to myself over the loss of the monitor.

“We want to run a few tests on you and ask you a few questions,” McIntyre said.  “Give us a little bit and we’ll give you a little bit.  Do you want something besides an IV drip for breakfast?”  McIntyre knew how much I ate from his work with me in St. Louis.  He would offer juice next.

“How about some juice, Carol?  You a little low on juice from all your healing?  You cooperate with us and we’ll give you what you need.”

Just as I predicted.  A desperate part of me wanted me to scream
Yes, yes, give me juice! I’ll do anything!
  My juice monkey sunk its teeth into me and gripped and shook me the way a cat shakes a mouse.  I
had
to have juice.

McIntyre
was trying his weapons to find out what pushed my buttons.  Juice would work, so I needed to hide my reactions from him.  The juice was an addiction as well as a need.  My life depended on my concealing the depths of my juice addiction.  If I convinced him he couldn’t use juice to control me, I bet he would stop trying.  He already understood I needed juice to live, the same way I needed food, water and air.  I needed to convince him not to play games with the juice, because those games would work far too well.

“Grow up, little man,” I said, my voice oozing contempt.  My face gave no hint of the consuming hunger inside of me.

McIntyre frowned, startled at my reaction.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “you think about that for a while.  I’ll come back later, after we’ve taken away all this extra equipment here, and we can talk some more.”

He stood up and made to leave.  I turned my head towards him and the look in my eyes made him catch his breath.  Then I let my smile grow, the slow predator smile that set fear in the hearts of normals.  McIntyre stopped moving and I could see the primitive monkey that lives within all normal humans.  It gibbered in fear inside him, telling him ‘run, run, there is danger here’.  He tried to cover his reaction.  He tried to pretend he didn’t feel the fear, but he did, and he knew I knew.  I smiled wider.

Then I let him go and dismissed him with contempt.  I turned my eyes away from him and spoke into the air.

“If you expect to keep me alive, you need to give me food, water, exercise and juice.  Otherwise I’ll just die and you won’t have anything, not even a fancy trial.  I’m not saying anything else until I talk to my lawyer.”  As if I had a lawyer.  At best, I would get access to a court appointed stooge.

“If you expect any of those, you have to cooperate first.  You hear me, Hancock?” he
said, rattled by the naked predator I had shown him.

I ignored him.

“I want medical tests and information from you.  Otherwise, you’re going to end up as a footnote in some research paper with your body parts preserved in formaldehyde.  You don’t get a lawyer because you’re not in jail.  Currently, you’re being held under medical quarantine at the CDC.”

The CDC?  That meant I was in the CDC-run Virginia Transform Detention Center. 
My first bit of real intel.

I
needed to make a decision as to whether to cooperate or not.  Medical quarantine meant doctors, researchers and their questions.  Not the police and the FBI and their style of question.  At least to begin with.  On the other hand, if I let them think they softened me up, I would be able to play for time while I watched for an opening to escape.

I decided not to answer McIntyre.  I had one more surprise coming.  I still might be able to parley my ‘miraculous’ healed spine into an escape.  McIntyre
kept silent for a long moment.  I heard his anger in his heartbeat and breathing.

He turned to the walking gun rack
who called himself a guard.  “You stay here,” he said. “Don’t touch those bonds.  Dr. Wilson is going to be here in a couple of minutes.  Until then, she stays chained down.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard
said.  McIntyre stalked out.

Agent McIntyre came back a few minutes later, an angry Dr. Wilson in tow.  A couple of aides and the original guard sent out to fetch Dr. Wilson followed.

“This is insane,” Dr. Wilson told McIntyre.  “We need this monitor attached to her if we’re going to save her life and obtain any scientific information regarding her condition. 
She has a severed spine.  She might go into cardiac arrest at any moment.  Remember, Arms are failed Focuses and won’t be able to tolerate anywhere near the damage a Focus can.  Who knows if this Arm still has any mind left at all.”  What utter imbeciles.  They even gave me some important bits of information: the doctors thought I was a dumb Monster and Focuses can survive injuries that would kill a normal.  Assuming the idiot read my St. Louis records, this implied Focuses could survive a lot.  If I played this right, I just might be able to learn more from these yahoos about the medical secrets of Focuses and Transforms than they would learn from me.  Before I escaped.

“Just do what I said, Doctor.”  McIntyre knew better, of course.  He actually rolled his eyes and winked at me, feeling a far closer camaraderie to me than to Dr. Wilson.

I didn’t wink back, but socked his wink away as yet more useful intel.  In some important way, McIntyre had changed from when I last encountered his pustulent ass in St. Louis.

Dr. Wilson’s shoulders slumped.  He did as told, muttering about “supposed to be saving lives”, “gathering information for science”, “nothing but the Monster version of a Focus” and “useless, paranoid fascist”.  When he was finished removing the sensors, he moved the IV from the back of my left hand to the top of my left foot.

They all left, leaving me helpless again, and weaponless.

Henry Zielinski: March 7, 1968

“Henry?  There you are.”

The former Doctor and Professor Henry Zielinski glanced up from his seat in the cabana by the Inferno household pool.  The sleet had let up and a cold north wind howled outside the unheated building, ostensibly locked up for the winter.  He had been thinking, planning, groping with problems far too big for him to deal with.  He often couldn’t think inside Inferno, Focus Rizzari’s household, even in the smaller guest house where he slept at night.  He needed a place of escape.  Normally, crowding didn’t bother him.  He had grown up in a small noisy house and had learned early how to block everything out when reading or studying.  A small noisy house with eight people didn’t compare, though, to the close-quarters bustle of a Focus household with sixty plus men, women and children.

The Focus walked toward him, escorted by Focus Florence Ackermann
, cabana door banging shut behind them.  He waved at Flo and motioned for her and the Focus to come over and sit in one of the small clump of summer lawn chairs gathered in the corner of the otherwise empty building.  Which they were doing anyway.  He kept a smile off his face, as he had been the one who invited Flo to visit the household.  Flo, a half pace behind the Focus, kept her face blank.  She knew she was being manipulated, but didn’t yet understand why.

“You wanted to talk to me?” the Focus said, relaying a message he
had planted with Focus Ackermann.  Tiny flickers of anger surrounded Focus Rizzari’s eyes, a poor contrast to her cheery shorts and halter-top, ludicrous in the sleety weather.

Zielinski shivered just to look at the Focus, who
in addition to her crazy halter-top, also sported remnants of snow and slush on her wet bare feet.  Not a Major Transform show-off, he wore a sensible winter coat, gloves, a hat, and a warm fleece scarf Glory’s mother made for him twenty years ago.  He waved a gloved finger at both Focuses and nervously adjusted his dated and out of style hat.  “I don’t want to bother you with this, Lori, but I think I need to leave.”

A look of anguish and annoyance crossed her face.  Very well done, and he could believe as much of
her anguish as he chose to.  She wanted him to stay, at least today she did.  The Focus pulled a dirty Adirondack chair over for Focus Ackermann, then pulled another over for herself and sat down.

“Come on, Henry, you’re not thinking,” the Focus said, a charismatic yank that
once would have sent him metaphorically sprawling.  “You’re letting Carol’s capture get to you emotionally.  There’s still a price on your head.”

“I’d be something other than human if I didn’t let my emotions get to me regarding Carol,” he said, nicely arch.  “I’m also willing to do something about it.”

Flo sat, gently, closely watching the emotional charged zings batted back and forth between the two of them like a tennis ball in a tennis match.

“Given the mess this is becoming, you, if anyone, need to stay emotionally detached,” Lori said.

Flo frowned.  “Alright, time out, you two!” she said, voice powerful and parental.  Focus Ackermann put on the airs of a happy-go-lucky late teen, but much of her image came from the fact that like all Focuses, she appeared to be nineteen years old.  She was buxom and well padded, had long light auburn hair shot through with light golden streaks, and a fun face, normally highlighted by a big smile.  Not right now, though.

She might play the lightweight, but in reality
, Flo was anything but.  Flo was treasurer for the Northeast Region of the United Focuses of America and a deft wielder of both Focus style charisma and normal charisma.  She and Focus Rizzari had both transformed in 1961.  Zielinski had picked up some of their old history recently; at first, they had despised each other in a natural ‘Brookline Heiress’ vs ‘Lowell Working Class Homebody’ way.  However, after Lori and her household dreamt up the Cause (to save all Transforms from the coming demographic nightmare, where nearly everyone would transform) and Flo had won herself her first UFA political post (regional government and professional liaison, a thankless post no Focus ever wanted) they had at first allied and later become friends.  He met Flo through her first political post, and they had hit it off from the start.  Flo’s current household was located in Wakefield, in an old and small cola bottling plant they were renovating into lofts.  Flo had been the one who had arranged for him to meet Lori, but only after she judged Focus Rizzari civilized enough to deal with him.

He more than occasionally suspected
Flo might have jumped the gun.

“So, tell me what’s going on between you two freaks of nature,” Flo said, a charismatic demand, after both he and the Focus had painfully smiled at each other and tried to relax.

“That’s not anything I want to talk about,” the Focus said, ignoring Flo’s charisma.

Flo
frowned at Zielinski.  “Give,” she said.

“I get on Lori’s nerves.  I’m not really part of Inferno and I
’ve learned too many house secrets,” Zielinski said, saying more than he should.  He had been hiding out in Inferno for almost six months, dodging a hit put out on him by a still unknown faction of first Focuses.  His comment made him feel like he was abusing the work Inferno did to protect him.  “I’d rather leave on my own dime instead of when the ‘protect the household at all costs’ instinct kicks in.”

Lori
turned away.  “Ouch,” she said.  She couldn’t deny a word of what he said.

“Hmm,” Flo said, eyeing Zielinski.  “You may have brought me here to keep Lori from bamboozling you into doing something you d
on’t want to do, but as her friend and ally in the Cause, I’m not going to let you harm the Cause by your actions.”

“I understand,” he said.  He
understood the risks of inviting Flo to interfere.  “Arm Hancock needs my help, if I can give it to her, and all I’m doing here by staying in Inferno is learning too much about what Lori doesn’t want me to know.”

Flo turned to the Focus.  “Lori, the implication here is that Dr. Zielinski isn’t on your household leadership team.  Why not?”  Flo was another who refused to acknowledge
his loss of his medical license due to FBI shenanigans.

The Focus studied the wind
through the frost-etched windowpane and didn’t turn back.  “I tried, but it just doesn’t feel right to put a non-Transform on my leadership team,” she said.  “So much for being the enlightened Focus.”  Zielinski once hoped the Focus’s researcher side had control over her bitch Focus side, but, unfortunately, the reverse turned out to be true.