The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Eight (12 page)

“On the other hand, these tall fields of whatever this crap is will make good cover for a stealthy approach,” Keaton said.
  She didn’t recognize cornfields?  Where had Keaton been raised, anyway, Tonya wondered.  “Save for the fact the fields end over a hundred yards from the farmhouse, which is a long way from allowing an easy stealth entry.  Are you trying to get us killed, or captured?”

“Captured
, actually,” Tonya said.

“Oh, fuck, you have a plan. 
Great.  Not only do I have to hobble two miles through some goddamned fucking fields...” Keaton wiggled her not yet fully healed leg, with a special boot she had cobbled together that went up to her knee to cope with the fact one of her legs was significantly shorter than the other. “…we’re doing it to set up some damned Focus mind game trick?”

“That and capture their eyeballs, so Focus
Weiczokowski, her people, and the rest of my people can roll in on vehicles.  My orders are to capture as many of them as possible.” Weiczokowski and her people could handle mundane thuggery, but for anything more than shooting, looking tough and simple bullying, they weren’t worth the air they breathed.  Tonya doubted Esther could outthink a mindless newborn hundred pound dragon Monster.

“To deliver them to the big
shot Focus who found these rebels for you?” Keaton said.  Tonya blinked, surprised Keaton had figured out what was going on.  She gave this a couple of seconds of thought and decided that in these paramilitary matters, Keaton not only had instinctive advantages, but advantages in experience.  If the media and FBI reports were at all correct, Keaton did capers like this at least once a month.

“Her name is Focus Shirley Patterson, and she’s the beh
ind-the-scenes leader of the Breakout Focuses,” Tonya said.  “She’s someone we both need to be on our best behavior for, and be polite.”

“Never heard of her.”

“That’s the way she likes it.”

“How far away is she?”

“Not too far.  Pittsburgh.”

Keaton shrugged.  “Never liked the place.
  Gives me the willies, the same way Denver and Kansas City do.”

Interesting.

“So why aren’t they going to just shoot us and be done with it?”

“Just like when
I’m Monster hunting, I’m going to be using DeYoung’s tricks against her,” Tonya said.  “And, no, you don’t have to worry about them doing the same.  Nobody knows my tricks.  I’ve only ever used them while hunting Monsters.”

Keaton looked her over, and nodded.  “Fine.  You have some fucking tricks.  I assume that’s why I’m disguised as
one of your bodyguards?”

“Uh huh.  I’m going to put a juice pattern on you, to mess up what your juice structure metasenses as
, which will keep DeYoung from realizing she’s going to be facing two Major Transforms.  Don’t fight it off.”  Given Tonya’s at-best minor abilities with juice patterns, it wouldn’t take much.

“Fuuuuck me,” Keaton said, shaking her head.  “What the hell is a juice pattern?”

Tonya explained the basics of juice pattern use as she called forward the rest of her small bodyguard crew, and they, and Keaton, walked off into the cornfield.

---

As predicted, DeYoung’s people grabbed them while they were still trekking through the corn.  Tonya captured their eyes, one at a time, and turned the three DeYoung guards into Tonya’s new bodyguards, convincing them that she and her people had surrendered.  Watch out for repeaters, Polly had said.  Anyone with Focus DeYoung’s skills will have metasense repeaters out around her, extending her metasense range.  Tonya, quite limited with juice patterns, had never heard of repeaters before.  Tonya hadn’t ever progressed far beyond the standard ‘tag the air, then modify the air tag to make the juice outside you do things the way the juice inside you does things’ juice pattern use; using those basics she had taught herself a basic suite of defensive juice patterns.  Mess up metasense.  Keep enemy-produced juice patterns from taking over your mind or your body.  Protect your tags, and the tags of your Transforms.  About a year ago, in one of her and Polly’s arguments about increasing their stature on the Council, Polly had dropped a juice pattern on Tonya that took over Tonya’s body and had her dance, ballerina style, even outside of Polly’s normal hundred-yard Focus metasense range. She told Tonya that until she could protect herself from juice patterns like that, she shouldn’t be doing anything on the Council except saying ‘yes, ma’am’.

“You captured them?  How?” a melodious voice said as they entered the farmhouse
, feet thumping on the wooden floor.  Focus DeYoung, who Tonya still couldn’t metasense.  “Dammit, Jules, she got your people with some damned illusion. Nobody’s that stupid.”

“Ma’am, they’re right here,” Jules
, who Tonya had charismatically grabbed as they entered the farmhouse, said.  Tonya, leading the way, followed the voices and escorted her supposed captors into the tiny farmhouse parlor, then to the right and through the open doorway, framed in chipped paint over stained wood, into the big farmhouse kitchen.

“Yes, we are,” Tonya said.  As Tonya hoped, the surprise of her voice
shocked everyone in the room, including Focus DeYoung, into looking up.  That was all it took for Tonya and her charisma to freeze the four of them in place.

Focus Martine DeYoung was beautiful even for a Focus,
wearing clothes and makeup to accentuate her beauty and her charisma.  She stood about five seven, a willowy woman with straw-blonde hair, cut so that one wave of her hair covered her left eye.  Her one visible eye was a magnetic dark blue, her skin was a blemish-free chalk white, and her carmine nail and toe polish matched her lipstick.  Her charisma was close to Council quality, but what really put the snarl in Tonya’s face was the zoo of juice patterns surrounding the enemy Focus.

DeYoung fought back,
and one of DeYoung’s people slipped out of Tonya’s charismatic hold, partially vanished from sight, and waved his hand at them.  Foul bad juice sprang from nowhere, around Tonya, Keaton and their escorts.

A Crow!  Tonya had never fought
one of the hidden male Major Transforms, but she knew the theories.  She fought off the splitting headache and skin-sliding-off-her-body sensation with her own charisma, and forced out a juice pattern that Polly said would drive away enough of the bad juice to allow a Focus to function again.

As
Tonya squeezed out the juice pattern, Keaton, beside her, fell puking to the ground, as did the mind-addled escorts.  Fisticuffs and wrestling noises erupted behind Tonya, as her three guards ‘un-surrendered’ themselves and went after two of DeYoung’s troops they had passed on the way to the farmhouse kitchen.  DeYoung wiggled free from Tonya’s charismatic hold and summoned up a juice pattern, likely a juice-stripper that would leave Tonya defenseless.

“Lightning,” Tonya said, and bent her charisma.  For all intents and purposes, DeYoung believed she had been struck by lightning. 
DeYoung twitched, and fell, psychosomatic burn blisters appearing on her hands and face, and likely under her clothes as well.  “Stacy!  I need these guards down now!”  Tonya couldn’t maintain her upper end charismatic tricks for long before they depleted her always low juice supply.

Worse, she metasensed, barely, around the Crow attack, that DeYoung was recovering faster than Tonya had ever seen before from this particular trick
of hers.  DeYoung had access to her household juice buffer!  Not full access, but some trick that gave her the equivalent of a straw allowing her to suck juice for personal use from her household juice buffer about an order of magnitude faster than Tonya could manage via willpower alone.

“Fuck,” Keaton said, then exploded of
f the worn painted linoleum kitchen floor, becoming a whirling fighting machine.  Tonya blinked and found Keaton on the ground again, puking, but the only person left standing was Tonya.  DeYoung’s bodyguards littered the kitchen floor, including the charisma-befuddled escorts Tonya had grabbed in the cornfield, all wounded, unconscious and needing medical attention.  Gunfire started outside the farmhouse.  Tommy, her head of security and head of the tiny bodyguard crew Tonya had with her, stuck his head through the kitchen door, and hand signaled trouble.  She waved him off, signaling that he, Robert and Russell should take cover.

“Three more troops coming for orders,” Tonya said, as she knelt down beside DeYoung.  She had to trust Keaton.

Despite Tonya’s hold on DeYoung, tendrils of juice wound themselves around Tonya, another juice pattern from the fallen Focus.  Tonya managed to fight off what she suspected was a charisma use inhibitor with a juice pattern of her own, one she had learned from Polly back before Polly became Council president.  Then she went back to charisma use.  “You’re a failure: you can’t use juice patterns, you can’t see, you can’t feel anything below your elbows or knees,” Tonya said, commanding with her charisma.  “You’re nothing!”

DeYoung’s resistance
ebbed.  Tonya watched and waited, and as she did, the itchy place in the center of her back, shoulder high, suddenly twitched and got goosepimply nervous.

The damned Crow.  Tonya unholstered her pistol and fired, without looking
, at the wall behind her.  The nervous feeling vanished.  The cowardly Crow had fled.

Keaton rolled to the door and tossed her own vomit in the face of the onrushing troops, kicked out with her good leg, and the three troops went down like
bowling pins.  The life force of two of them faded, juice sucked by the Arm, who fell, unconscious.  The third, a normal, drew on the Arm and shot Keaton in the chest, thankfully missing her heart.  Tonya, pistol still in hand, shot the man in the back, where he fell, bleeding out, on the unconscious Arm.

Tonya smiled and turned back to DeYoung, making sure she had DeYoung’s eyes good and tight.  “Heart stop.”

DeYoung’s heart stopped, and panic filled DeYoung’s beautiful face.  “Heart start,” Tonya said, and DeYoung’s heart started.  “Don’t fight off this next order, or I won’t start your heart the next time.”

DeYoung nodded.  “Untag all your Transforms, and dump your juice buffer.”

The former rebel Focus did as ordered.  She screamed and wailed, now powerless.

Outside, the gunfire stopped.  Tonya’s people, and Focus
Weiczokowski and her people, started taking surrenders.  Weiczokowski would get the now untagged Transforms, while Tonya would get DeYoung.

---

“And this is what you want?” Keaton said.  “Me in the back seat with this bitch?”

“I’m exhausted, and can’t hold her with my charisma,” Tonya said.  “And, despite your wounds, you aren’t low on juice.”

“Hell,” Keaton said.  “I’m not sure I’ve ever had this much juice.  It was an accident.”  Tell me you’re not going to punish me for taking tagged Transforms, Keaton thought.  Tonya kept her face blank, but smiled inside.

“In battle, things happen,” Tonya said.  “I’m just glad you didn’t go Monster from taking all that juice.”

“Huh.  Now that would have messed up your fucking plan, wouldn’t it?”

Tonya drove now, with
one of her non-Transforms, Robert Dawson, next to her, in the front seat of the Olds.  Keaton and a bound but not gagged DeYoung sat in the back.  Bad juice rolled off both of them, fouling the air.

Keaton
turned to their captive, and snapped one of DeYoung’s fingers.  “Look at me, bitch!” Keaton said.

“No, no no no.  This can’t be happening!”

“You aren’t going to give me any problems, are you?”

Not likely, not as a bare-ass Focus with low juice and a lot of healing to do.  Keaton had already broken both of DeYoung’s arms.

“No!  Please.  Don’t do this.  Not Patterson.  Don’t take me to Patterson.”

“How does she know?” Keaton said.

Tonya shrugged.

“You’re all slaves,” DeYoung said.  “Enslaved and you don’t know it.”

“Who has me enslaved?” Keaton said.  “Amuse me with your bullshit.  If you keep amusing me so nicely, I won’t hurt you.”  She smiled a nasty smile. ”As much.”  Keaton dislocated another of the Focus’s fingers.  DeYoung screamed.

“She does.” 
DeYoung glanced at Tonya.  “And the first Focuses have her enslaved.  It’s the juice, but not the way you think.”  DeYoung took a set of ragged breaths, and let out a sob.  “Tags and juice patterns are juice, but that’s just one axis.” She spoke quickly, probably hoping to keep Keaton distracted from her tortures.  “There’s ritual juice, too.  They got her” indicating Tonya again “with a ritual of blood and juice, the same way they got Sarah.”  Sarah Teas, a first Focus herself.  “Then there’s the social juice.  The Council controls the social juice, and they’re using it to mind control all of us.”  DeYoung paused, and hacked up some blood.  “The senior Major Transforms, all of them, know all this and they’re hoarding their tricks, keeping y’all weak and enslaved.  They know so much more!  I know this because I’m the Commander, the promised savior.  I died, and came back from the dead, and so I broke free of their slave juice tricks.”  DeYoung sobbed, and her voice lowered to a whisper.  “I’m the Commander, and I’m going to save all of us.”  She began to cry, repeating “I’m the Commander”, over and over as she sobbed.