The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Nine (14 page)

“The first Focuses, and I suspect the first Crows, have a very warped and twisted view of humanity and the future, coming from a warped and twisted view of themselves,” Connie
said.  “Rogue Crow isn’t the only bad apple out there; nor do the first Crows hold a monopoly on twisted and evil schemes.”

I thought of the crazy
Battle Focus training center in the salt mine, and Rogue Crow’s insane Monster-centered replacement for civilization.  I had a horrible thought of a dozen such plots out there, hidden from view, festering and waiting to boil up and cause all sorts of problems.

“I’ll agree to this,” I said.  I
did need a source of training to expand my skill sets.  With the Feds after me, and every police force in every city I visited after me, Connie’s suggestion made sense.

“I as well,” Gilgamesh said.

“Then we’re agreed,” Connie said, and released her hold on me.  I flexed my fingers, and hoped Gilgamesh would be able to keep his panic down.  “One last thing I’m going to demand.  Next time you think of pulling a silly stunt like this, come talk to me first.  The next Focus you drop in on unexpectedly may not be so tolerant.  There are some Focuses out there who would kill you without batting an eye.  I’m not just talking about first Focuses or Council members, either.  Juice capabilities and political capabilities often go hand in hand for Focuses – but not always.”

I nodded.  There were some lessons I could teach Webb about hubris on the issue of security
and a little concept called ‘defense in depth’.  She might not have any overt enemies now, but she damn well should have contingency plans ready, because new enemies weren’t going to send her an engraved home invasion invitation ahead of time.  Strategic preparation – my specialty.  I would save my advice until a quieter moment, though.

“So, how would you two like to come get some more dinner with me?  I’d like to introduce you around
and get my people used to dealing with other Major Transforms.”

“That would be just fine,” Gilgamesh said.  I nodded as well.  By the smell of the food, I suspected I
would also be able to teach Connie’s cooks a few things about proper food preparation, as well.  There was a lot more to the Cause than battles and fighting.

The Future

She screamed herself awake, and nothing had changed.  Cinderblock walls.  Concrete floor.  Metal door with an ominous slot at the bottom.  Dim indirect lighting.  Fur on her arms and legs and torso.  Trash in the corner.  Metal grate in the floor.

The last time she had awakened, she had misplaced her name and screamed her throat raw.  She remembered her name now – Sharon Carreon.  Too much of her former life vanished from her mind as the days rolled by.  The name of her husband.  The appearance of Ellie, her oldest child.

She screamed again, ululating anger.  She still couldn’t speak.  She had lost the ability to speak during the dark time, when her mind had gone and she had grown fur.  This had to be Transform Sickness, but what was she?  She couldn’t be a Monster – the authorities killed Monsters.

Nothing made sense.

She was hungry, always hungry.  When the hunger grew too large, she flew into a rage, and her mind stopped thinking and making memories.  She never remembered what happened when the rage came, and the rage came far too often. 
Even the smallest things would set it off.  Only, she thought she might be getting better.  If she wasn’t mistaken, the rage was coming less and less often.

Someone slid food
through the under-door slot.  Two bananas, a mango, a pear, a small bunch of romaine lettuce and some unknown leaves that tasted good.  She carefully ate all but the center of the pear and the banana skins, and put them in the corner with the trash.  They would rot and attract insects – cockroaches – which she would eat as well.

A loud metallic clank from near the door interrupted her
watchful waiting over the rotting fruit.  No cockroaches yet.  The door cracked open.

Ah.  Cleaning time.  She scampered over to the
open door and went through, not wanting to fight the inevitable.  The way she scampered these days annoyed her, moving on her hands and feet, or, more precisely, knuckles and feet.  Into the other room…where a metal panel slid from the ceiling behind her, closing her off.

Only it wasn’t the other room, but a much smaller room.  This wasn’t hers!  It didn’t smell like her!  This smaller dark and all metal room, smelled like some other creature.

She lost herself in rage.

She came back to herself still in this other, smaller, all-metal room.  Hungry.  The rage made her hungry.  The room rumbled, like a distant earthquake that never ended.  She steadied herself, and forced herself to remember her name.  Sharon.  Sharon…something.

Sobs broke
from her throat, and wouldn’t stop.  Tears followed.  More of her past had gone.  Vanished into the horrors of whatever insanity possessed her.  Beyond the sobs and sadness, she raged inside, raging at God for letting her fall into such horror.

She was on a train, she realized.  On a train, in a metal box.  In her endless sobbing sadness, nothing.  No food.  No water.

She slept, and when she awoke, she found food on the floor, a bunch of bananas, a grocery bag of apples, and of all things, spinach.  A cardboard container, labeled as milk, but with water in it.  She savored all of these as long as she could, but the hunger was too demanding, and she consumed all of them in short order.

She studied her hands in the darkness.  Furry, yes, but not on her palms, and not on her knuckles.  She ran her hands all over her body, as much as she could reach.  Her arms were too long.  Inhuman.  Her hands were too long
, and she no longer stood straight, but hunched over.  Her head was pointy.

She was a chimp, she realized.  A chimpanzee with an oversized head.  She sobbed again, her stomach sick.  She was a Transform, but not something new, as she had hoped – she was a Monster.

The rage didn’t come.  The rage slowly turned, over time, into sadness and deep deep anger.  In the quiet sadness, she remembered her last name – Carreon.  She remembered her husband’s name – Milton.  She remembered her heritage – a quarter Shoshone, of the eastern branch sometimes named the Comanche.  A quarter Mexican, highlands stock, and that was where her mother was born and raised.  Half American, her father’s family, the…dammit, she couldn’t remember her father’s family name, her maiden name.  Her father’s family was typical American mutts with no interest in where they came from or why.  White folk.

Her husband’s family was old stock Spanish settlers from California.  They knew their ancestors back to the 1700s
, and savored every one.

She forced herself to remember, and remember, and remember.  The past was her anchor to her crumbling self.

The train lurched under her, and lurched
again.  Stopped.  Metal scraped, and then squeaked.  Minutes of squeaking, and rolling side to side.  Faint sounds of voices from outside filled her ears.  More clanging, more banging.

With a
thud, the motion stopped.

Was this it
, she wondered.  Would they finally kill her, the way they killed all the Monsters?  She vaguely remembered waiting for death before, in a cell.  Death hadn’t come, but only insanity.  The dark times where she had lost herself.

With a wince-inducing scrape, the metal panel at the end of her small room opened, bringing with it a flood of bright light.  She slunk back, and waited for her eyes to adjust.  The new air, let in with the light, screamed ‘enemy’ to her, and she waited for an attack.

None came.

Other smells did, the smells of humans, and human cooked food, and wet humid forest air.  Not California air.  She knuckle-crept forward, and looked around.

She was at the near end of a six foot long passageway, also metal, leading to an open and lit area.  A large area.  She didn’t like the short passageway, and rushed as fast as she could into the open area.  Metal clanged behind her.

No way back.  She was stuck in this new place.

She examined the large expanse.  Fifteen feet wide, she guessed.  Forty feet long.  Twenty five feet tall, with a corrugated metal roof over half, and over the other, thick bars and an open sky.  The wall behind her was metal, with several doorways of varying sizes.  The walls on the other three sides were cinderblock, and a double-run of cinderblocks angled from the left wall, under the roof, to make a small enclosed semi-private place.  Water dripped from a hidden pipe through a small area on the right wall, and gathered in a raised area, a chipped concrete basin.  The floor was dirt and weeds in the area open to the sky, save for a dug up patch that a foot and a fraction down revealed concrete.  Under the corrugated roof, the floor was bare concrete, covered in thick smelly straw. The smell of enemy came from the bare concrete floor, and some of the straw.

She was alone, though.  A smell was not a real enemy.

She went to the cinderblock alcove and made a nest for herself in the straw, and slept.

Food arrived once a day, from the metal wall.  More than she had seen before, enough to fill her.  No people visited, but she heard people nearby, and she often fell into a rage at their voices.

She worked on remembering.  The aching sobs came often, when something in her mind went missing.  Sometimes she remembered new things, though.  Sad things, like the day her father’s grocery store went broke.

One morning she woke up without the rage.

Its loss was like an empty tooth socket, unnatural.  She grabbed an apple from the morning food pile and hid in her straw nest.  Without the rage, the world was a scary place, leaving her feeling as helpless as an infant.

“Hello.”

A man was in her cinderblock home with her.  She peeked her eyes up out of her nest and looked at him.  He wasn’t a scary looking man.  He was short, dark haired, and reeked of fear.  He was hard to notice; her mind kept trying to forget he was there if she turned away from him.

“You can come out.  I won’t harm you.  My name is Zero.”

This was strange, and his name was strange.  Instinctively, repetitively, she tried to speak and tell him her name, but only a soft cry came out, not words.

This should have sent her into a rage, but it didn’t.  She crept out of her straw nest, and circled the man, fearful.  He only smelled of fear, and only faintly.  How could he have no other scents?

“I’m here to help you.”  He paused, and looked her over.  “You’re more scared of me than I am of you.  Guru Shadow hadn’t told me this would happen.”

Sharon decided this strange man was a Transform.  A Major Transform?  But weren’t they all women?  The man who called himself Zero sat down in a clean area near the metal wall.

She stopped her circling and crept forward; the closer she got to him, the calmer she
became.  He was the reason she had lost the rage!  He had taken it away.  She came up to him, and he held out his arms.  She cuddled up to him and shivered in wonder and another emotion, one she had no name for.  Not love, but something similar.

He was
home
.

He also liked to talk, and as he chatted about this and that and many other things, she made more and more sense of his nonsense words.  A great battle between Transforms in Detroit.  The fall of an evil Crow – and, yes, Crow was the name Zero used to name himself – and the rise of a Transform military leader, an Arm now titled the Commander.
  The place that held her, this place, named the Addison Federal Penitentiary.

His calmness allowed her to think better!

The more he spoke, the more her memories came back to her, the more her mind and her thoughts made sense to her.  Her past – yes, she had realized she had Transform Sickness, but her family’s place in society had been precarious, because her husband was a
union leader
, and she
wasn’t white
, so after writing a cryptic note to her husband and making sure her daughter Ellie had someone to take care of her, she had checked herself into a Transform clinic anonymously.  People who had Transforms in their family often lost their jobs, or worse.  She had to sacrifice her family to save them.

She had taught school.  Junior high Spanish.  She would have preferred to teach chemistry, but, well, prejudice and stereotyping.  She had barely scraped her way through college, and she would have liked a real job in chemistry, but, well,
female
.

This Zero didn’t even think she understood what he was saying to her.  This Guru Shadow person thought it would be weeks and months before she would understand words again.

Hmm.

She could use dried shit as chalk.

She bounded to her feet, scaring poor Zero.  She bounded away, found some well-dried shit, and went back to him.  On the cinderblock wall behind him she wrote, in shaky and large letters, ‘My name is Sharon’.

“Holy shit!” Zero said
, his voice now high and squeaky.  He recovered his aplomb faster than she imagined he would.  “Well, Sharon, I think we’re going to have to get you some writing materials.  Would you like that?”

She nodded and said ‘ook eek’, paused,
and then wrote ‘yes’ on the wall.

---

“My name is Fred Dowling,” the tall honey-blond haired Major Transform said.  “Count Dowling, if I don’t mess this up.  I’m a Noble Chimera.”

Glad to meet you.  I’m Sharon
, she wrote.  She carried the large pad of paper with her at all times, now, and had gone through several pencils.  After some prompting, she had convinced Zero to provide her with inch thick pencils.  They didn’t break as often.

Dowling was a
good-looking man.  In her week with Crow Zero, she had learned much and gotten used to the idea that she was, indeed, a Monster, and that she wouldn’t be able to go back to her family.  Dowling smelled sexy, and made her interested, more interested than she ever remembered being, even when she had been a teenager.  But wouldn’t that be beastiality?  Immoral and forbidden?  She was a beast, now.

She would have to think about the morality of this
.  Later.

Crow Zero said you have something important to say to me
, she wrote.  Something Zero was too scared to say.

Dowling sat down, back against a wall, and she sat down beside him.  “You know you’re a Monster, right?”  She nodded.  “I – we, the Nobles – can turn you back human.  But when we tried this with another recently transformed Monster, she lost her mind
and memories, and had to start her life over.”

Yuck
, she wrote.

“However, when Crow Master Occum did this with
an older Monster, she didn’t lose her mind.  She kept her mind and quickly relearned how to talk.  If you’re willing, we’d like you to stay a Monster for a year or two more, until you grow your Monster metacampus.”

One of the harder lessons Crow Zero had taught her was that she had been a Monster for eight months
, not the few days and weeks she had thought.  The fact she had lost so much time, made so few memories in those eight months, terrified her and sickened her.  She hadn’t written anything for a day after she learned that lesson.

Has this ever worked before?

“No,” Dowling said.  “You’d be the first to be part of a Noble household as a Monster for so long a time.  We know our enemies, the Hunters, do this, but we don’t know how.”