The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Eight (8 page)

My urges were
nasty, dangerous and unhealthy, to me as well as to my victims.  I couldn’t explain this to my unconscious, though, and really, I didn’t want to.  In short, of all the things that I might be doing, I couldn’t imagine anything more arousing than what I did to Tom Delacort.  The heat rose in me just thinking about it, and him, as he lay in his makeshift cell, starting the long, slow destruction that would make him mine.

I kept control while I was with him, but
I wasn’t able to control my urges afterwards.

“Get Darryl to my house,” I said.  Ricky jumped to obey.

All of my robbery team spent time in my bed when I wanted them to.  This was both a privilege and a price.  I made my bed extremely pleasant for them, but I was too intense for a man to take in more than small doses.  I got too far under their defenses when I spent time in bed with them.

Such
was the theory.  In practice, I found I enjoyed some of the men more than others and spent far more time with those.  I treated each one differently depending on their personality.  What I did to Fred might be called pleasure only by a mind as twisted as his, and I had never slept with Darryl at all.  Always before, I wanted a white man.

Not today.  Today, I thought of Tom Delacort and I wanted a brown body in my bed.  I smiled my tight, hot smile, and knew Darryl was going to have the shock of his life.

It was the dead of night before I shook free of
Darryl and my other responsibilities and got back to my masterpiece.  Tom’s cell was a three-sided thing, and a reinforced chain link fence formed the fourth side.  There was a hallway outside, and I had set up a one-way window across the hallway, carefully lit to allow me to watch him invisibly.

I watched him for hours, as the unceasing bright light shone down on him
, and he tried to sleep and failed.  Every half hour or so, his guards rattled by and harassed him.  Soon, his body would lose all sense of day and night.

I shivered with anticipation and dreamed dreams of what I would do with him.  So carefully, so precise.  To tear through his defenses just enough to let me in, and allow me to remake him.  No more damage than necessary, because he was going to be mine.

Tom Delacort was going to be my masterpiece.  My actions would be surgical and exact. In the coming days, I would spend every spare moment watching Tom, when I wasn’t having my discussions with him.  This wouldn’t be a fast process, but would go far faster than in the hands of some normal.  As the days passed, I planned to tune my actions and my guard’s behavior to the task.

To do the job right I would have to live and breathe Tom Delacort, to
the point where he occupied my thoughts when I worked and my fantasies when I was in bed.

I studied.

I went to see Keaton a little more than a week in with Tom.
  The days had been hell for him.  After twenty years in the Army, he knew what I was doing to him.  He didn’t understand how he could be falling apart so fast, however.  He couldn’t understand how I could feel his weaknesses through my skin, hear them in his heartbeat, and taste them in his sweat.  As the days went by and I endlessly watched him, I knew him the same way I knew myself.  I knew when each crack formed and I was there, prying the crack wider.  His mind unraveled underneath him, and he couldn’t stop the process.

Obsessed, I was.

I
spent long hours with Tom.  I ran him through confession sessions, where we would delve into the deep places of his mind and bring his flaws and failures into the light of day.  We discussed his every weakness and mistake, in depth and in detail, repeatedly.  I made the sessions all the more painful and effective by the inhuman accuracy I used to read his thoughts.

I never let Tom see even a hint of my raging emotions, because never, in no circumstance, was I going to screw this up.
Darryl saw a lot of me during this period, and as the days passed he became so stressed and unhinged I had to take him off guard duty. He loved the attention, but in the way a person loves a drug as it kills him. I told myself that I shouldn’t use him like this, but when the heat was on me, he was the only one who would satisfy. I hoped he would last until I finished recruiting Tom.

One day about two and a half weeks in, when hunger and sleep deprivation had worn him too far down to oppose my digging, I remembered those days in Keaton’s warehouse back in Philadelphia, when she would do the same to me. When she ripped my defenses apart in tiny sadistic bites. I felt a chill, but I ignored it. I had business here, and I would not fail with Tom.

I took Tom down through a spiral of decay.
Little things like sleep deprivation, hunger or pain forced him into little accommodations. Obvious, logical, intelligent accommodations, like obeying orders when the alternative was a boot in the kidneys. Or tiny weaknesses brought on by normal human reactions like fear or exhaustion. But those accommodations did a little damage to his will and his self-respect, and so gave me leverage for the next time, just a little lower, just a little farther down, all the while the constant misery and mockery and cruelty of his guards wore at his defenses like a file on wood. He grew to need those long conversations with me as his only connection to human sanity.

He knew what I was doing.
How I destroyed everything he had, and how I left him only one way out. My way. To believe the dream I offered him. He tried to fight me, but of course, all he had was his conscious mind to work with.  I held his unconscious, his emotions and all those vast depths of the human mind beyond his control. Therefore, he fought, and lost, and hated himself for his failure, and his weakness, and the desperate animal he became.

The last tiny supports in Tom’s mind collapsed three weeks in, leaving him adrift in a sea of madness.  He no longer believed anything good about himself.  Nothing of his previous beliefs made sense; he had lost trust in everything he had once known.  He couldn’t even convince himself he was human any more.

The human mind cannot stand such stress.  Just as a drowning man will grab hold of any hand that presents itself, so too will the drowning mind.

I drank his agony down like the finest wine.  Ambrosia and the tantalizing sips of passion.  This wasn’t the hot quickie of the swift recruitment, over in a few hours, which I did nearly every day, following Keaton’s orders.  This was long and slow, obsessive foreplay, stretching out for weeks.  Tom became the measure of my life, the entire power of an Arm working on a focused purpose.  Little tendrils of pleasure and need wove their way through the cracks of my soul like roots of some deadly ivy through fractured rock.  Thoughts of him ruled me as much as thoughts of me ruled him.

Folly.  I stood by, helpless and enthralled as the ivy wound its way deeper, until
I wasn’t able to remove these changes without destroying myself.

I dove into his recruitment willingly, allowing
Tom to drown out the pain in the rest of my life.  Lori still refused to talk to me.  Gilgamesh hadn’t returned from Boston, trying and still failing to talk Lori around.  I had tried to entice Sky to Houston, but he still hadn’t perfected his metasense shielding, which we badly needed for so many reasons.  Hank fought paperwork and organizational duties and lost, unable to squeeze more than a few short hours of research into each week, all spent on me.

Tom became my life.

In the end I extended my hand to Tom.  He reached out and took it.  The truth I offered, he believed.  The path to approval and self-respect I offered, he took that, too.  If serving me would please me, then he would do so gladly, and salve the terrible pain in his soul with my approval.

I was gentle with him after his acceptance, and sent Fred off to trouble some other part of reality.  I told Tom exactly what he needed to do, and he did so eagerly, desperately, fleeing the insanity snarling at his heels.  We talked philosophy; this time he soaked up the philosophy like a sponge, listening, thinking and analyzing.  He fleshed out the gaps I left, creatively building a philosophy
to believe in.  He ripped apart his failures from his old life and was eager to start anew.  He believed me when I said he belonged under orders.  We talked about honor, and duty, and the importance of being committed to a cause greater than yourself.  I gave him whole books on Transform Sickness, as well as reams of information from Zielinski.  He devoured them.

I let a little of my emotions show through and he began to understand my pleasure.

On the 24
th
of September of 1968, after a month of my efforts, Tom Delacort knelt at my feet, surrounded by my men.  He swore fealty to me, the ceremony cribbed straight out of an old medieval history book.  A knight swearing loyalty to his lord, and he meant every word.  He formally committed himself to me, and took my tag.  The juice moved.  As with Zielinski, Tom was mine down to the uttermost depths of his soul.  I took his oath and as I stared down at him, just as with Zielinski, I realized I loved him.

Finally, though it seemed like years, we came to my house and I brought him to my bedroom in this night I owned.

I lay in my bed
, letting the late summer air conditioning noises fill my mind. Tom slept in my arms, exhausted and peaceful. I laid my hand on his brown, weathered cheek and shivered.  What idiocy had possessed me to rip open my heart? What utterly fucked up thing in my head drove me to take chances like this? Or rip off the comfortable scar shielding me from the dangerous emotions?

I
had been so casual when I started out, and I never realized how important the wound in him was. Because of the wound, I had something real to offer him. In serving me, I gave him the purpose he needed so badly, but I hadn’t realized I had a wound to mirror his.  Bobby.  My need for a safe lover and confidant had proven as massive as Tom’s need for a life cause.  I wasn’t his aloof officer.  I became his
Arm
, and Eissler’s chilling words about underlings sleeping with Arms to make them happy had snuck up on me and caught me like a hunting fox on a rabbit.

He was so beautiful.
I never before understood how beautiful brown skin might be. I never thought I would fall for a black man. He was gorgeous, with the maturity of years. His older body was definitely better than some kid’s more perfect body, I decided.  The scars added character, and I was definitely seeing more attractiveness to brown as a skin color.  He was even a decent lover, considerate and knowing. I had been gentle with him, less intense than I might have been, in consideration for his health.

He showed the wear of those weeks in the cell.
His face was gaunt, and he tired too easily.  I hoped I hadn’t done anything to his body he couldn’t heal from. I had watched my guards, but Fred pushed the limits, and wear and exhaustion made Tom vulnerable. He wasn’t twenty any more. I decided I had better take him to Zielinski tomorrow and have him checked out.

I still marveled over the change in his mind.
Even though I had been responsible for his changes, they seemed like a miracle. All that effort, and it had worked. I stroked him again, and thought about the work I had for him to do, and how happy the work would make him. A purpose in his life again.

The narrow sliver of moon set, and the room fell into the shadowed darkness of starlight.
I thought about my own experience, when Keaton had done to me what I had done to Tom. I shivered as I wondered what Keaton thought she had been doing to my mind. She certainly had had some goal, probably several. I doubted I understood even now all that Keaton had done to me.  I shook the thoughts away. I knew I was in some part Keaton’s creation, Keaton’s mirror. I knew she had grown to love me, in her own twisted way.  I was who I was, and I could do nothing about Stacy Keaton.

The Aftermath of the Disastrous November Meeting
(Carol’s POV) [additions]

Operating on Carol

“After I stitch up your abdomen, other than your hands and whatever’s going on with your face, your remaining wounds are just bruises and lacerations,” Hank said, worry wrinkles around his eyes.  “I can bandage them up, but they’re relatively minor, and they’ll heal on their own.”

“You’ve got a hell of a definition of minor wound, doctor
,” Tom said.

Both Hank and I ignored him.  Hank and Tom had been working on their originally testy relationship over the past month.  They were both Korean War vets, and both well experienced with annoying officers and the all-day all-night demands.  They
had settled into a Master Sergeant and Captain-because-I’m-a-doctor relationship.  I had even caught them shooting the breeze over the quirks of my command style, once.  They were going to work well together, a good thing, because I damned well didn’t need them working out dominance issues in a crisis.

Zielinski
sewed up my gut, and then pulled out the bandages and a small, blunt-nosed cutting tool.  He took almost an hour to clip the fishhooks and bandage the cuts.  Tom paced restlessly until I snapped at him, and sent him out for food.

After
Hank finished the fishhooks, it was time to do my hands.  First, I had to recover my control, during which Tom came back with three sacks of hamburgers and some French fries from a local diner.  I ate two of the sacks of food, Tom carefully feeding me each bite.  After I ate, I made a clumsy attempt to use the toilet, and ran out of ways to put off the surgery.

I sat on the bed and
stared bleakly at my mangled hands.

“Ma’am, are you ready?” Zielinski
said.

I smiled
and shook my head.  “Hell, no.  But every minute just makes things worse, doesn’t it?”  I wished badly for a chance to hunt down a kill first.  This would be a hell of a lot easier if my juice count was high.

Hank nodded from his seat on the flimsy chair.  “The bones are knitting with your hands closed.  We’re going to have to break
them.”

“Alright.  Let’s get t
his over with.  You’re going to need to tie me down.  I won’t be able to hold my shit together while you’re working on me.”

Hank nodded again.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Doctor,” Tom said, his voice soft and cold, “exactly what kind of operation are you planning, here?”

Hank
glanced over at Tom, sad concern on his face.  “Her hands are healing as they are,” he said.  “The longer we let them heal, the harder they’ll be to fix.  I’d like to do this in a fully equipped facility, but the truth is, the facility doesn’t make much difference for an Arm.  She won’t become infected and I brought everything else I need with me.  So we do this now, and here, because it’s most important we do this quickly.”

“What about anesthetic
, and a nurse to monitor her condition?  You can’t tell me you’ve got that kind of setup in your bag.”

“I’m immune to anesthetic, Tom,” I said, as gentle as I could.  “I’d probably kill the nurse, too.”

“So you’re going to break her hands again and reset them
without anesthetic
?”

Hank nodded.

“Fuck!” Tom threw his hands in the air with appalled frustration.  I did notice he was less appalled than he might have been.  Much as he didn’t like it, the soldier in him understood this kind of decision.

“If this was the first time I’d performed this sort of procedure, I wouldn’t have the cavalier attitude you see, Tom,” Hank said.  “This is, I believe, number nine.”  Well, then.  That was two of Keaton’s I didn’t know about.  “Understand, pain that would break our minds is but a
n annoyance for an Arm.  In the greater spectrum of Arm annoyances, mind you.  The procedure won’t be pleasant, but…”

I turned to Hank to interrupt his likely half hour discourse on pain.  “Did you bring something for me to bite on?”

“Yes.  Just a second,” he said, rooting around in his bag.  I worried about the thin hotel walls.  I didn’t think anyone was in the room next to us now, but there had been earlier, and there probably would be again soon.

“You’re probably going to need to gag me, too,” I said.

“Fuck,” Tom said, again.  Hank nodded as he extracted several well-chewed bits of broom handle from his bag.

“If we’re going to tie you, we need something strong to tie you to,” he said.

I glanced around the room for something to use, and wasn’t impressed.  The furniture was flimsy and old, and I suspected even a normal could break them if they wanted.

“The bed frame?”

“Heist up the mattress and let’s look,” I said.  I dragged myself off the bed and over to the second cheap chair.  It creaked when I sat down.  The bed frame turned out to be made of strong steel.  Probably smart, given the sort of things that went on in the beds of this place.

“Th
is will do,” I said.  I wasn’t going to be able to bend the frame unless I burned juice I didn’t have.

“How are you going to hold
it down?” Tom asked.  “The frame weighs less than a hundred pounds. You’ll be able to swing the frame around even if you’re tied to it.”  I visualized Hank trying to fix my hands while I flailed with a bed frame attached to my arm.  I would probably kill somebody that way.  The thought filled me with a driving kill lust, but I knew better, and pushed the lust down.

I should have thought of th
e problem myself.  Low juice made me slow.

We all looked at each other, stumped.

“Well, if we tied you along your full length, it would hold you,” Hank said.

“No.  Come up with something else.”  I wasn’t going to permit that sort of restraint.  I could feel the pounding of a headache starting, along with everything else.

Tom glanced around.  “What about the bathroom door? If we lay the door over the frame and you lay on top of that, you won’t be able to swing the bed frame.”

I thought about
his suggestion.  Slowly.

“How strong is th
e door?” Hank asked.  Tom knocked on it.

“
The door’s hollow, but not too cheap.”

Hank shrugged.  “
That might work.  If we put the door over the bottom crosspiece, it might hold.  Lying on top of it, you won’t have good leverage.”

I stared at the metal bed frame bleakly. 
The damned thing was already starting to look like a torture device.  This was going to be as bad the second time around as it had been the first time.  I heard Keaton’s sadistic laughter in my mind and knew she had planned this.  She would probably want to hear all the details of this later.  The thought of her still brought the raw edge of terror.

“All right, get t
he door off its hinges.  Let’s get this over with.”  Nothing was going to get any better if I put this off.  My stomach churned uneasily, and I really wanted to kill something.

Getting Carol Juice

“No,” I said.  “We’ll drive home from here, not fly.  I need to hunt.”

“Carol,” Zielinski said, and then corrected himself to “ma’am,” but by then Tom had cut him off.

“How can you hunt with your hands
injured?” he said.

“I can’t,” I said.  “You’re going to have to help me.”  My vision narrowed, and I had to control a shiver of
juice lust.  The mention of hunting washed through me like a wave of hot blood, and brought forward all the reactions of the hunt.

“Boss!
Carol!”  I heard whispered shouts in my ear as Tom tried to bring me back to myself, and I realized I had closed off my other senses to focus on my metasense, futilely searching for Transforms in timeworn baby Arm fashion.  I shivered again, more obviously.

“I need
juice.” The words slipped out of my mouth without my volition.

“Tom,” Hank said, with his command voice.  “She’s dangerous.”  Tom inched back from me on the bed.

“You’re going to help me,” I said.  “You’re right.  I’m dangerous.  I wouldn’t ever bring you along on something like this unless I had to.  The tag should protect you.”  In the background, a machine started up, and then beeped about a minute later.

“Shit.  Ninety-four!” Hank said.  Okay.  The cat was definitely out of the bag.

“All right,” Tom said.  “What do we have to do?”

Such willingness.  So priceless.  He was a treasure like nothing I
had ever possessed before.  Having my two most valuable treasures, Tom and Hank, together and undefended so close to Keaton’s territory, irrationally scared me.  I cursed my crippled hands, as if they might help if Keaton decided to go after either of them.

I sat up and hitched myself backwards until I was leaning against the headboard.

“We’re going to search through the busiest sections of every major city we come to,” I said, and my nerves tingled with the tension of the kill lust, ache and anticipation and need.  “A half mile spaced regular pattern.  When I find a potential kill, or their trace, I’m going to need a private location, I’m going to need skin contact with the kill, and I’m going to be unconscious for about a half-hour afterwards.”

Tom nodded.  “Got it.”

“I’m going to be dangerous.  The juice lust supersedes just about everything when I’m hunting.  I’m not very rational.”

I caught Hank’s expression, just as he managed to avoid rolling his eyes.  He didn’t think I was all that rational even in the best of times.

“I
need
juice,” I said, to Tom, because Hank already knew.  “With a kill in my sights, I’ll be willing to kill anything and everything that gets in my way.  Make sure this doesn’t include you, you understand?”

He nodded again.  “
Uh huh.”

“
Don’t give me
any
grief when I’m on the hunt.  Obey my orders exactly.  My temper is going to be shot, and I’m going to want nothing so bad as to kill someone, Transform or not.”

“I hear you,” he said.  “How does this work?”

“You’ll drive while I search.  Once I find someone, what I do depends on the situation.  We won’t be in Houston, so I’m not going to need to be quite as careful as I would be back home, but this still needs to be kept quiet.  You two will wear gloves.  We will leave no witnesses.”

“Ma’am,” Zielinski said.  He didn’t like the idea of helping me hunt.  “How do you ensure no witnesses?”

“You mean no living witnesses, ma’am.  Don’t you?” said Tom.  His words did not make Hank any happier.  Truthfully, neither of them was happy at the thought of killing innocent victims, in cold blood, just to get me juice.

“I’m not asking you to kill,” I told them.  “
I’ll do the killing.  Don’t stand in my way, though, and don’t try to stop me.”  Killing was hard for them, and a pleasure for me.  Of course I would do the killing.

“
One caveat, though,” I said.  “If I decide to kill children, you can try to turn me away.  Come up with other options.  Be careful, and don’t push too hard.  But come up with another way if you can.”  In the grip of juice lust, even children became just an obstacle to be disposed of.  I would rather not wake up afterwards, however, with the knowledge that I had murdered children to buy my juice.

Tom
glanced over at Hank, unhappy.  Hank stared at his hands.  He had something to say, but he would get to it in his own sweet time.  He always did.

“What else?” Tom
said, after a moment.

“Afterwards, I’ll be out for a while.”
I looked at him sideways.  “After I wake up, we’ll need to find a motel room.”  This would be his first time to see me right after a kill.  Always previously, I had been too careful of him.

“Ah, ma’am?” he said, looking at my injuries.  “Are you sure that’s wise?”

“Don’t worry,” I said, but he kept his doubts.

“Ma’am,” Zielinski said.  “I brought your diaphragm with me.”  All carefully concerned for my welfare.  Responsible, as a doctor should be.  He must have put a lot of work into planning what I might need.  His black bag, food for me, and now this.

The last was a miss.  I shook my head.

“I don’t need it,” I said.  “I haven’t used one since
before the CDC.”

Hank raised his eyebrows with a pained expression, and restrained himself before he asked why I hadn’t bothered to tell him this before.

He did have a point, actually.  He was my doctor, and a Transform Sickness researcher.  He did have a need to know things like this.  I just hadn’t thought about it.

“I didn’t have enough initiative to use it right after the CDC,” I
said.  “And then after I’d gone without for a few months, I didn’t bother going back to using it.  I haven’t used it since.”  The damned diaphragm was a pain in the ass, and sex was a lot more fun without the bother.  Given Transform women, with the spectacular exception of Lori, were infertile, I had a hard time taking the need for birth control too seriously.