The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Six (10 page)

Brick froze in place.  “The Commander?  That idiot DeYoung?  She’s an enemy Focus, a captive of the bitch in Pittsburgh.”

“No, not her,” the Duke said.  He turned to Sellers.  “Viscount, this one’s yours.  All I can see in the sky on this subject is that you’re right.”

Sellers sat on his haunches, stifling his happy wagging tail, and attempted to ignore the city lights and distant automobile noises.  “Someone important appeared to me a few months ago in my long-vision,” Sellers said.  “A military person, an organizer, one of us.  Earlier this month, this person was reborn somehow, and Master Occum knew from my description I was talking about the legendary Commander.  I hadn’t heard of any legends of this nature before, and I got Master Occum to tell me the whole story.  I think he suspects he knows who this Commander is, but he’s of the opinion we’re not ready to meet the Commander, yet.  We’re not good enough.”

“You’ve got to be mistaken,” Brick said, a tense bark.  “It can’t be her.”

“Her?” the Duke said.  “You know the Commander?”

“
I thought I did, but if this is true, no, I don’t,” Brick said.  “I’m going to have to think about this, though.  This is nearly too appalling for words.  You can’t be right.”  He turned to them.  “Thank you for inviting me along on this mission, but I have to leave.”

“The pleasure was all ours.  Take care,” the Duke said.  Brick trotted off, to the south, not to either the Inferno palace or to the parked motorcycle.

“Come on, my friends,” the Duke said.  “Let’s go find out why Master Occum is so upset.”

Talking With Dynamo

The Bakersfield Transform Research Complex was located just to the north of Bakersfield, on the site of an old airport, decommissioned after WW II, and used for a few years as a civilian airport before the Federal Government claimed the place for its current use.  Gilgamesh parked his car in town and walked the rest of the way,
sweating through his shirt under the hot mid-morning sun and lost in thought.

He missed Tiamat, and to be so close but not be able to visit hurt.  He tried not to think about his Arm too much, because his memories made him both cranky and sad.  All the time he had spent comforting her had grown on him.  He just hoped his love for her didn’t mess up his judgment.  He worried that Lori’s reaction to him, and his to her, occurred because they both missed Carol.

Dynamo wasn’t a senior Crow, but old enough to have claimed the entire research complex.  This puzzled Gilgamesh greatly, until he realized how few Transforms lived in the place.  He wondered whether the Research Complex did more than lab work anymore.  Typical Fed stupidity about Transforms – an official Transform Research Complex with almost no Transforms in residence.

One was Dynamo, who lived there.

Following Dynamo’s instructions on how to get around the complex’s security, Gilgamesh tracked down Dynamo to a small two-story building that looked suspiciously like a small laboratory.  Gilgamesh snuck in; once inside, Dynamo came to get him.

Dynamo wore a suit with a lab coat over it.

“Gilgamesh,” Gilgamesh said, a bit put out and wondering if Dynamo wore a disguise or actually worked here, and if the authorities here knew he was a Crow.

“I’m glad you could make it,” Dynamo said.  Dynamo was Oriental, five eight, medium build, with a thick mop of black hair as unruly as Gilgamesh’s.  “Sorry I couldn’t mention my particulars in my letters.  Guru Chevalier forbids it.”

From what Gilgamesh had learned, in his travels in California, Chevalier forbade a great many things.  That particular senior Crow was far too much into ‘forbidding’ for Gilgamesh’s tastes.

“I understand.  So, if I may indulge my curiosity, is this a disguise or are you an employee?”

“Let’s go back to my lab and I’ll explain everything.”

Said the spider to the fly?  He didn’t pick up any sense of danger from Dynamo, though.  Just the normal Crow twitchies about labs and Feds.

Dynamo’s lab was a chemistry lab, on the small side, filled with lab equipment Gilgamesh didn’t recognize.  “I got my PhD five years before I transformed, and when I transformed I’d been working for three years as a research chemist at Chevron, in Los Angeles.  I work here under my original identity, adding in a four year long sabbatical for a ‘nervous breakdown’.”

“One might call being a young Crow a nervous breakdown,” Gilgamesh said.  He half winked.  “If one were being kind.  Don’t you have any trouble with Focuses?”

“In this place?  After the quarantine breakout, I doubt there’s an established Focus who would come here.  The Transform living quarters are solid tar.”

Tar.  Guru Innocence terminology.  Yet Dynamo looked to Guru Chevalier.  At times Crow politics made Gilgamesh’s brain hurt nearly as much as Focus politics.

“They must send new Focuses here, though.”

Dynamo nodded.  “I pity the poor new Focuses stuck in this place and make sure they’re told to get themselves and their people out on long walks away from their living quarters,” Dynamo said.  “Truthfully, new Focuses are trivial to fool.  I haven’t met one yet who’s figured out that I’m a Crow.”  He paused.  “Have a seat.  I hear you want to learn more about Crow life.  I, for one, want to hear more about your rotten egg tricks.”  Gilgamesh wanted to beat his head on the wall.  They weren’t ‘tricks’, they were weapons, dammit.

They talked.  He learned (again) about the California Crows and the Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Utah Crows not getting along, and the Northwestern Crows (as they were called) having a reputation as being unfriendly and unsociable.

“I’ve spent a lot of time on the East Coast and Midwest, and many of the Crows out that way are greatly worried about a series of local Crow kidnappings.  Any Crow kidnappings out here?”

“Not a one,” Dynamo said.  “The most interesting thing recently was the Arm who lives out here, the Skinner, managed to capture and torture some crazy young Crow for a few months before he barely escaped with his life.”

“I hadn’t heard the story,” Gilgamesh said.  He couldn’t help but laugh.  Dynamo, disquieted, skittered away for a moment.  “I’m not being callous.  I was the ‘crazy young Crow’.  I wasn’t physically detained, but lured in to help the Arm.  I didn’t escape, either; we came to an amicable agreement once I’d finished helping the Arm finish her project.  Although to convince you I haven’t totally lost my mind, I must say there were quite a few moments when I worked with the Skinner that I feared she would take too much of a liking to me and never let me go.”

Dynamo vanished; Gilgamesh picked him up several labs down.  “Excuse me, I just had a sudden case of the runs,” Dynamo whispered, barely audible.  Gilgamesh practiced patience and reflected on terminology differences.  The ‘sudden case of the runs’ was local Crow slang for fleeing in panic.  “I can see why you were prompted to develop your rotten egg tricks if you get into scrapes on a regular basis.”

“How far have you gotten with the rotten eggs?” Gilgamesh said.  The question calmed Dynamo down, and he soon returned to work through the technical details of rotten eggs and their effects.  Dynamo had figured out how to make them from Gilgamesh’s letters, but he made the eggs differently, and his lasted for nearly a week.  Gilgamesh traded all his accumulated stash of rotten egg effects to get Dynamo to cough up the details of how he managed the extended duration.

After Gilgamesh left, bemused again about the horrible reputation he had picked up in California, he wondered if he would ever make any progress on his real mission.

After the Addi
[Carol’s POV]

By the time
we passed Albany, the sun had risen and my mood improved a bit.  Nothing had blown up yet and I had ample roads to choose from, safer somehow.  Everyone in the car knew I remained on edge, not in a talking mood.  They had made a few attempts at conversation, early on, but I responded only with barks, and so, now, not a one of them would say a thing to me, or to each other.

Out of the Adirondacks,
and onto the winding rural roads west of Albany, I tried to figure out what my instincts were telling me.  I thought of several things.

The first thing
bothering me was the cellmate of Zielinski’s I had left behind.  He had seen through my disguise and recognized me as the killer Arm I am.  He wasn’t a Transform, thug, or doctor, and yet he approved of me at a visceral level.  I burned a fraction of a point of juice to help my mind figure out why this bothered me and came up with the insight that he had to be a member of the Focus Network, one of their non-Transform friends.  I would have loved to go back and chat with him.  My curiosity had definitely been piqued and I hated not being able to satisfy my curiosity.  More instincts.

The second thing bothering me was the captive tagged Transform, a short blocky guy about my height.  American Indian?  Half-oriental and half-mulatto?  Whatever his ancestry, he was one hell of an exotic looking American.  I
swore he wore a Rizzari tag, but the tag was wrong, off far more than I ever remembered for a Focus tag.  He wouldn’t calm down, and he refused to believe me when I told him I didn’t poach on tagged Transforms, Keaton rule number one.  I did warn him not to bump into me.  An accident might happen.  I had drawn a Monster’s juice by accident once, and though I had lived through the experience, the Monster hadn’t.

He didn’t appreciate
my comment one bit.  He got all Crow-skittish on me, forcing me to glare him into submission.  I did wonder if he was a Crow, playing tricks on me, but if so, why did he let me take him captive?  Why hadn’t he sicked-up on me?

Hell.  I hated having to burn juice to come up with words to understand my own instinctive questions.

My third problem was Zielinski.  I wanted to kill him on the spot, and my emotions didn’t make any sense at all.  Keaton had given me the mission to rescue him and I knew he would help fix me, so my deadly anger had to be wrong.  He didn’t smell right or look right and didn’t jog my memory properly.  He was supposed to be mine.  Part of the problem had to be that I couldn’t read him worth shit.  Another part of the problem came from the fact he appeared to be a decade older than when I last saw him, only six months ago.  He also felt dangerous to me, so I kept his hands bound.

Fred spent a long time watching me
and an equally long time watching Zielinski and Sam.  Fred I understood.  At least I understood
something
in this mess.  He took it on himself to manage my two captives at the stops, only one untied at a time.  He escorted them to the bathrooms when we stopped, held their arms and steered them when we picked up food, and manhandled them with a rough cruelty mixed with occasional abuse.  Occasionally he would look over at me as if looking for my approval.

Zielinski was a little too old and fragile to take th
is kind of abuse, so I stopped the worst.  I didn’t interfere with the little things.  Zielinski never said a word, and took the abuse in stoic silence.  Sam looked ready to kill Fred, especially when I didn’t look at Sam directly.  He remained cautious, though.

While in New York and Pennsylvania I stayed off of the freeways and toll ways, and drove on the old US highway system through numerous stupid small towns hardly worth spit.  In Ohio, we picked up the Interstates and things sped up.  Sam asked if I needed to stop and exercise, and I said “No”, which disturbed him.  My driving speed disturbed him as well, but it also disturbed Zielinski.  Speed limits were for sissies.

We stopped in Knoxville to eat and spend the night.  I spent some time in a gym and we left again the next morning.  I
first wanted to leave Zielinski with Fred and room with Sam, but I began to doubt my own control around Sam.  Some tiny part of me whispered ‘he’s a tagged Transform.  Prey.  No one will miss him if you take his juice’; another part whispered ‘that’s not a real tag and his bad juice wouldn’t be good to take’.  When confused, ignore the subject and hope it goes away.  I did love the way he remained so terrified.  Terrified of me and of something else besides.  Himself?  Not much of a talker, but when he spoke, he spoke with a Canadian accent.

I finally
decided Sam did wear a Rizzari tag, degraded because of some bad juice Sam had picked up somewhere.  How, though, had one of her Transforms ended up in prison?  Focuses couldn’t support a Transform in prison.  Was the bad juice in him the reason why he got tossed in prison?  Even more confusing, Sam’s juice level never seemed to change.  Strangest thing I ever metasensed.

On the other hand,
as time went on, he grew more terrified of me.  I hadn’t done a thing to him, save enjoy his fear.  Perhaps he sensed my enjoyment.  However, sensing my enjoyment would take a Crow and Sam didn’t metasense like a Crow, so he couldn’t be one.

Second, even after
my wonderful visit to the gym, my anger at Zielinski remained.  What in the hell was wrong with me?  He didn’t provoke me, and remained passive and deferential.  He had to be angry, exasperated, uncomfortable, or something, but he didn’t show a thing.  My anger didn’t make sense.  Nor my ongoing juice lust for Sam.

Dam
mit, I was acting like a baby Arm a month past my transformation.  What happened to my self-control?  The rule was: don’t take tagged Transforms. Real simple, no wiggle room.  I had personal experience with the cost of breaking that particular rule, and didn’t have any urge whatsoever to explore the costs of such a mistake, again.  Once was enough, thank you very much.  Therefore, I roomed with Zielinski.  He tried to talk to me once or twice, but I didn’t want to talk with him.

The next morning,
before we left the hotel room, I grabbed Zielinski and glared at him.  I still wanted to kill him.  However, I couldn’t figure out
why
I wanted to kill Zielinski.  My memory fugued to the St. Louis Transform Detention Center, when I had been a brand new Arm, ignorant and helpless.  I begged him for juice.  He had me strapped to a bed for a bone marrow test.  I remembered being chained, low on juice, waiting for withdrawal in a padded room.  No, that happened later.

I
had hunted Zielinski down, and now he was my prey.  He hadn’t come back to me, like he should have, but I had him now.  Keaton hadn’t forbidden me to kill him.  No, she had, by ordering me to go free him.  Yes, but she hadn’t said I couldn’t hurt him.  No, he was already mine…

…so what was I doing?

God dammit, I knew this was stupid. Keaton had no sympathy for idiocy like this, and the price she would exact would be a passage through hell.  Wearing her tag meant Keaton would no longer torture me casually – but for punishment…

The torture would be worth it.
Any price would be worth it. I
needed
Zielinski’s blood on my hands.

“Get in the car,” I said.  “Now.”

He didn’t argue, and did as told.  Good thing.  If he hadn’t, I would have started in on him that instant.