Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy (23 page)

Cathy found herself instantly proud of the speech—also feeling that it had been something of an inspiration. Rather than try and dance around the problem, she’d confronted it directly, labeled it precisely. For all the many types she’d met on the slave ship and here on Earth, Cathy didn’t flatter herself as much of a psychologist; but she had learned that often the best defense in the face of attempted emotional manipulation was to draw a line in the sand: Define your space, refuse to let it be violated.

And now she had done so.

Fran seemed to take it all in stride.

“And if I abuse you again, what? You’ll leave?”

Having an open and honest personality, Cathy was susceptible to attack—but also difficult to co-opt.

“I didn’t say that, don’t put words in my mouth. I told you I don’t want to play mind games, that’s all. What you do with that information is up to you.”

“Maybe I can’t help myself.”

“Maybe that’s your whole problem.”

The split second it left her mouth, Cathy regretted the sentence. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, softly.

Fran, though she seemed to have been stung, covered it in a shrug restricted by the straitjacket.

“Nah, don’t be. Maybe I deserved it.” Then, after a beat, she blinked her left eye rapidly. “Dammit.”

“What?”

“Something in my eye. Third time this morning.
Dammit,
I wish I had my hands free!”

Cathy didn’t know if this was a trick or not, but she doubted it. Among other things, it was too blatant, too unrefined, too—well, too stupid to fall for.

“Try to keep your eye open and don’t blink,” Cathy said. “If something’s there, you don’t want it getting trapped under your eyelid.” She rose, crossed to the sink, moistened a paper towel with warm water, then moved to kneel by Fran, saying, “Hold still, now.”

She positioned her thumb on Fran’s cheek and, ever so gently, used her forefinger to hold Fran’s eyelid in place against the bone above the eyeball, widening access to the surface of the eye. She moved in for a close look . . .

Saw it.

Pretty big offender too, as eye irritants went, though she wasn’t quite sure what it was.

“Hold still,” she said again, and, with an expert touch, dabbed once lightly against the eyeball.

She inspected the moist surface of the paper towel.

“Did you get it?” asked Fran, blinking, testing the sensation. “It sure
feels
like you got it!”

“Yes, it’s here,” Cathy replied, her voice toneless as she looked at what she’d removed.

“You make it sound like it’s the proverbial plank,” Fran commented. Cathy didn’t understand the reference, didn’t know the proverb, just recognized the stark shift in Fran’s expression when the actress shifted her gaze to the paper towel and she, too, saw what the object was.

An eyebrow hair.

Third time that morning, Fran had said.

She was losing her facial hair.

The women looked at each other.

Then, in a hoarse whisper, Fran breathed:

“Fe dessa etoe nigebnog.”

Oh, Goddess, it’s starting.

For a moment Cathy thought it was a comment on the eyebrows beginning to fall away—then she realized Fran had been talking about something else altogether, as the actress’s body tensed.

“Scalp itches,” Fran whispered.

Cathy could feel it too, a sympathetic echo on her own scalp, a tingling that started to burn, not unlike the chemical heat from a medicinal ointment.

“God,
I wish I could
scratch
it or
rub
it or
some
thing!”

“Here, let me,” Cathy offered, quickly encircling Fran’s shoulders with one arm, bringing her close, taking her free hand to Fran’s head. She felt presumptuous scratching or rubbing without a specific directive to do so; so she tenderly did what seemed warranted and right—spread her fingers and passed them through Fran’s thick hair like a comb, staying close to the skin.

Something felt odd.

She pulled her hand away.

Clumps of hair came away with it.

She shivered involuntarily, shook the hair off, and looked up to see the appalled expression on Fran’s face.

“I’m starting to look like you,” the actress said quietly, and it sounded like an accusation.

She scuttled about two feet away from Cathy, and then her eyes rolled up so far only the whites were exposed, and she moaned “Oh-
ohhh
-OHHH!” and a violent spasm threw her head back and arched her body. A wave of discomfort hit Cathy, too, but nothing that made her muscles act involuntarily, nothing like what Fran was experiencing; and then there were tremors that rippled through Fran’s body, one, two, more, seemingly countless, and Cathy was about to press the emergency button on her wrist band—

—when everything stopped.

It was as if some invisible being that held Fran in its grip had suddenly just
let go,
and she collapsed limply onto her back.

Her shape looked funny under the straitjacket. Weird around the right collarbone.

Fran moaned softly in pain.

“What is it?” Cathy asked.

“Shoulder,” came the reply in a strained, gasping voice.

It wasn’t a pain that Cathy shared on any sympathetic level, but it seemed apparent enough what had caused it. The spasm had been so brutal it had dislocated Fran’s right shoulder.

“Hold still,” Cathy said, scooting to Fran. Gingerly she rolled Fran over, to expose the straitjacket straps.

“You don’t want to do that,” Fran husked. “Don’t cause yourself trouble. Call for a doctor, I’ll wait.”

“No time,” Cathy said, undoing the buckles. “It’s dislocated. It has to be reset immediately or it’ll swell up. In your condition, I don’t want to chance that.”

The buckles undone, Cathy set about gingerly unwrapping the sleeves from about Fran’s body and even more gingerly maneuvering the straitjacket off, over her arms in short, gentle tugs . . .

The nurse at the fifth floor desk looked up at the monitor just at the point when Cathy was stroking Fran’s head.
Good bedside manner, our Ms. Frankel,
the nurse thought, and turned away from the screen, having noted that things seemed under control.

Which gave her license to make a quick trip to the ladies’ room.

Which left the monitor unobserved and unattended for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

Which was all it took . . .

Fran was sitting up, Cathy positioned behind her. Cathy put one hand on Fran’s right shoulder, the other encircling the top of the arm where bone was supposed to meet socket at the joint.

“Relax now,” Cathy said. “The sensation might be a little jarring, but it shouldn’t hurt. Okay . . . one . . . two . . .”

As if by magic, Fran’s shoulder snapped back into place all by itself, Fran brought her elbow forward, said,
“Three!”
and slammed it back into Cathy’s gut. Cathy went back and bent inward at the same time, in pain, unable to catch her breath; and the next thing she knew, Fran was on top of her, pinning down her shoulders, trying to unfold her legs, the better for Fran to put her knees to Cathy’s chest and
really
nail her guardian to the floor.

“Movement classes,” Fran hissed triumphantly, “tool of the trade. D’you know, if you’re particularly supple, you can actually learn to dislocate your shoulder at will? A gymnastic parlor trick. Who’d’ve thought it would come in handy?”

I should have known,
Cathy thought in the split second after. The shoulder pain was the one she hadn’t sympathetically felt. Because there hadn’t
been
any pain. Oh, the spasms that’d racked Fran’s body had been real enough. But those few seconds immediately
after
. . . It was both amazing and appalling to think that Fran had clearheadedly improvised a plausible ruse out of her own genuine suffering.

Cathy tried to struggle out of Fran’s grasp. Fran reared an arm back quickly and slapped her so hard she heard ringing in her ears.

“That’s
for lying to me!”

“I . . . never . . .” Cathy gasped.

“Your boyfriend
works for the city??!!
You’re here for
Matt Sikes,
I
saw
him at the theatre! As soon as you said it, I knew. I
knew!”

Fran used her full weight to rock up and down on Cathy’s shoulders; Cathy tried to slap at her, but Fran kept her head back, and most of the blows fell short or landed harmlessly on Fran’s arms.

“He wants to keep me down, safe and Slag, just like before!” Fran raged.

“No!” Cathy shouted.

“Give me the code to get out of here or I’ll kill you!”

“NO!”
Cathy roared, and by now her wind was back sufficiently that her legs, bent against her chest, could piston out, and they did, pushing Fran off, sending her reeling back into the sink.

“Kata-be,”
Fran cursed, and Cathy got to her feet as fast as she could.

Fran was preparing to charge, and Cathy held her gaze, bobbing and weaving, back and forth, trying to forestall the inevitable. She had not forgotten her wrist band, nor the alert button. But she didn’t want to press it, not yet. Matt would forgive her if she bailed out, without question; but Matt believed Fran was worth saving; and Cathy, after all this, needed to know that was true. She would never know any such thing, though, if she pressed that button. Steinbach’s cronies would pull her out of here so fast the friction would burn away Fran’s eyebrows before they could finish falling—and Fran would have to take her slim chances alone. Cathy couldn’t let that happen.

And on that altruistic thought, she received Fran’s next attack . . .

. . . as Dr. Steinbach, making his rounds, passed the unoccupied fifth floor desk, looked automatically at the monitor and saw . . .

. . . Fran around Cathy’s waist, ramming her into the wall, as Cathy reflexively grabbed Fran’s hair to pull her head away, push her aside.

But the hair freely gave way, entire locks of it loose in Cathy’s hand, giving her no leverage at all. It was the
sound
of the hair leaving Fran’s head that shocked the actress into a moment of vulnerability, however, or so Cathy thought, because with no other reason for doing so, Fran pushed away, horror-struck, and shouted, “What are you
DOing?
What are you
DOing?”
as her hands went up to feel the damage to her head, and she realized that she was
feeling
a great, patchy bald spot—

—and that unleashed an ululating wail of fear and outrage that grew in volume and rose in pitch . . .

. . . and Steinbach said “Mother of us all!” and yelled for an orderly, whereupon a big, muscle-bound fellow answered the call, and they both went bolting for the cubicle . . .

. . . and Fran came rushing at Cathy fingernails first, slashing. With a survival instinct that came from Cathy knew not where, Cathy ducked, weaved, got behind Fran, and pushed the actress into the wall, head first, where she lost her purchase and body-slammed onto the floor.

And that’s when Cathy raced to grab one of the high-heeled shoes she’d left in the corner. Wielded deftly enough, a hard high heel can do as much damage as a stiletto, albeit more crudely; Cathy was counting on that; and as Fran was getting up, unseeing, she raised the shoe high.

She brought it down on the keypad control by the door, sending a shower of sparks flying.

She had seen, out of the corner of her eye, through the door’s window, the faces of Steinbach and the orderly. She knew they would drag her out of there if she didn’t come willingly; and since the door opened and closed electronically, she’d done the only thing she could think of that might buy her and Fran some more time together:

She sabotaged the lock mechanism.

Or at least she hoped she had . . .

. . . and her wish was granted, for on the other side of the door, Steinbach was punching 3051 frantically, over and over. He had seen what she’d done and blurted, “Jesus, Cathy, have you lost your
mind?”
but the door did not give because for the moment, the lock was well and truly jammed, and Steinbach, still trying the code in what he now knew full well was vain, muttered, “Come on, Cathy, don’t do this to me,” while the orderly waited nervously behind him, having no real purpose, shifting uneasily from foot to foot as inside . . .

. . . Cathy watched Fran trying to rise. And knew that if she was to have any chance here, any hope at
all,
she’d have to do something decisive, and fast, make a statement, set some ground rules—

—and then she knew what it was. Something out of character for her, something she would not like herself much for. But there wasn’t a lot of choice in this room, and she could only work with what she had—

—so she swooped down, grabbed Fran’s hospital gown by the nape of the neck with one hand, pulled up on the material around the waist with the other, and did exactly what she’d done last night, dragged Fran Delaney to the toilet, and put her face in it.

All
the way in, into the water.

And held it there.

Despising herself, disgusted that it had come to this, held it there.

As Fran’s arms uselessly flailed.

The flailing getting weaker.

Held it there.

For five . . .

. . . ten . . .

. . . fifteen . . .

“. . . sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . .”

(through gritted teeth, not even aware she’d begun counting out loud)

“. . . nineteen . . .” seconds

and on
“Twenty!”
she heaved Fran’s body up and flung it down as if it were no more consequential than a rag doll.

Fran landed with a
thumping
sound on her back, spluttering and dazed. There was almost a full minute of coughing, blinking, breath-catching and face-rubbing before she was able to collect herself. When at last she did, she stayed where she was on the floor, looking up at Cathy in astonishment.

“You might’ve
drowned
me,” she said.

Cathy returned the look.

What she thought was:
I would not have drowned you, no.

What she thought was:
But I wonder if, in bonding, I’ve come to share not only your physical pain but your need to lash out, your violence.