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Once We Were Human

  Book One of “The Commander”

  Randall Allen Farmer

  Copyright © 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 by Randall Allen Farmer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, in any form. This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and products depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Once We Were Human

  Book One of “The Commander”

  “Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.” – Joseph Campbell

  Part 1

  A Deeper Sea

  “Although the screaming headlines may proclaim otherwise, the Shakes has been shown to be an actual disease, what doctors now call Transform Sickness. The first scientifically verified report of Transform Sickness occurred only two years ago, but anecdotal evidence of the disease goes back to the second World War. Transform Sickness proved to be a bacterial infection earlier this year, linked to two previously undiscovered strains of bacteria of the Listeria family. Doctors suspect some five to ten percent of the population are carriers of the bacteria and may never get Transform Sickness. The new Listeria strains that trigger Transform Sickness are not transmitted by direct personal contact, but come from tainted food, soil, dust, sewage, and many other sources.” [UPI report (July 30, 1953)]

  Chapter 1

  “Wash your hands before and after touching any uncooked food. Wash your food three times before eating it. Cook all food to 160 degrees or more. Eat any leftover food within 1 day after cooking; always fully reheat any leftover food. Only you can prevent Transform Sickness!” [Department of Agriculture flyer, 1954]

  Carol Hancock: September 12, 1966 – September 16, 1966

  The nightmare seized me and refused to abate, a torment of dead babies, of giant steel balls chasing me in a pinball machine the size of a building, of immense crowds judging every word I spoke. Voices echoed through my terror: my husband Bill, my mother, my eldest daughter Sarah, nurses, doctors, police, others. Each segue led back to the endless pinball game, where death awaited even the tiniest miscue.

  Later, I would wonder what I had been experiencing. The future? The past? Hallucinations? The subconscious mind sometimes figures things out before the conscious mind does. Not that my conscious mind was any great shakes at the time. But still. My subconscious had figured out I had plunged into deep deep shit. Even as I write this as the Commander, a decade later, I still have no idea how. No matter.

  What I thought I knew was bad enough.

  When I screamed myself awake, nothing had changed. Metal cot. Straitjacket. Legs shackled together. A single tiny light bulb on the ceiling, behind a metal cage, bright enough to hurt my eyes.

  I wiggled so I no longer faced the light and looked around. I found myself in a small room, perhaps eight by eight feet across, with cinder block walls and a metal door with no doorknob but with an ominous slot at the bottom.

  The last time I awakened, I’d misplaced my name and screamed my throat raw in panic. I knew my name now: Carol Hancock. Mother and housewife. I couldn’t tell where I was. I didn’t know how long I’d been here. I had no idea why.

  This time, at least, I didn’t panic.

  I had more problems than my location: my body ached, my head spun, and stomach acids gnawed at my insides as if I starved. My clothes, drenched in foul smelly perspiration, failed to protect me from the cold. Neither did the straitjacket I’d somehow acquired. A pressing need I couldn’t satisfy sucked at my soul, a longing deeper than the normal hunger for food. A craving.

  I had to pee. I looked around the room, still squinting because of the bright light, and found the facilities, a metal toilet of brushed stainless steel with no toilet seat. Besides the straitjacket, I wore some kind of coarse hospital gown, rough linen more suited for a drop cloth than someone’s clothing. No panties. The gown wadded up indecently around the strap between my legs. I rolled off the metal cot and stood, more of a production than it should have been. My legs wobbled after two steps and I fell with a clank of metal shackles to the concrete floor. I attempted to stand, but with my legs shackled together and the rest of me constrained by the straightjacket, I only managed to slip across the concrete, a baby who hadn’t learned to crawl.

  “Darn it.” I gathered my strength for another try, each breath deeper than the last. In time, I wiggled myself into the corner formed by the toilet and the wall and pushed myself vertical with my feet. It took me four tries.

  I sat and peed, making a disgusting mess of my gown. I had no idea who might have imprisoned me, but nothing else made sense. I’d never done anything to justify this kind of treatment. I was a white middle class housewife, with a businessman husband, three children, a habit of volunteering for good causes, and a clear conscience. Not at all the sort of person likely to find herself shut away in some awful cell.

  Gaps in my memories lurched me off the toilet; I didn’t remember how I’d gotten here! Tears slid down my face as I made my way back to the cold metal cot, each step an aching sob of misery. After I sat, I turned away from the light and screamed until my throat hurt too much to stand, and the pain forced the screams to fade away into sobs of hopeless misery.

  I jolted awake later, winced and turned away from the light. Someone had slid a tray of food through the ominous slot at the bottom of the door. My gourmet dinner consisted of oatmeal, crackers, and a bowl of milk like you would set out for a cat. I hobbled over and knelt carefully by the tray.

  A roach crawled over the surface of the oatmeal. I grimaced in disgust, but I blew on the roach until it ran away, too hungry to let disgust deter me. I licked up every crumb and drop of my minimal meal, making even more of a mess of my hair and face. The food did little but awaken my ravenous hunger and the other craving for which I had no name. I howled on the floor in agony afterwards.

  Something was dreadfully wrong with me.

  Next time I awoke, I found myself back on the metal cot. The door opened with a clang and I shrank back against the cinder block wall of my cell. A wall of state troopers, dour and angry, stood in a semicircle around the door.

  Each one of them had his gun drawn and pointed at me.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I asked.

  They didn’t answer.

  “Who are you? What am I doing here? What’s going on?”

  Two of the troopers came into the room, grabbed hold of my bound arms and yanked me roughly to my feet.

  “I’m just a housewife. I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  The two troopers dragged me out through their half dozen compatriots, every gun following me as I passed.

  The lights outside my room slammed into me, bright enough to hurt. I squinted my eyes shut and turned away from the fierce brilliance, but the brilliance still burned. I howled at the misery and felt an unfamiliar hard and painful impact on my cheek in response, enough to knock my head sharply to the side and send me lurching into the trooper who held me. Someone hit me, actually hit me. Shock made me open my eyes and I caught a brief, burning glimpse of the wooden handle of a gun retreating backwards away from my cheek.

  I screamed in pain, keening loudly as they pushed me forward. Still, I kept my eyelids cracked open despite the burning, desperate to know. Five steps later I quieted my screams and listened, my hearing now as painfully sensitive as my vision. Between my two senses I recognized my location, the jail in Jefferson City, my home town. After the troopers dragged me up to
ground level I heard the sounds of traffic, the sounds of arguments, and an immediate hush that followed me wherever the guards took me. As best I could without blinding myself, I searched for people I knew and found none. I’d prayed my husband or my friends would come rescue me, but seeing only strangers my hope evaporated into my pain.

  The troopers took me through the jailhouse, part of the county government annex I had known so well during my City Decorations Committee volunteer work four years ago. Off down one of the bare linoleum-floored hallways an argument resolved itself, a verbal spat between a lawyer and some important state trooper. The lawyer argued they had no right to take me, Mrs. Hancock, anywhere without the proper legal niceties. The state trooper didn’t agree.

  Oh. There was something so bad, so horrible, that it caused the authorities to routinely ignore the legalities, something from a few years before the marvelous modern year of 1966. I tried to remember and failed.

  The troopers hustled me out the back entrance into the warm September sun and down the wide stairs to the parking lot, where a bus waited. In the bright sun I couldn’t open my eyes at all, and they streamed with tears. One of the troopers jerked on my arm and pulled me, blind and stumbling, into the bus. Inside, the trooper untied the arms of my straightjacket and chained me by the wrists to a metal stanchion.

  Hiccupping with sporadic sobs, I listened to the troopers around me for several minutes. My tears slowed and I dared crack my eyes open again. I was the only prisoner, outnumbered ten to one by the guards, chained up like Al Capone or Bonny of Bonny and Clyde. The troopers had placed me in a convict bus, one more commonly used to transport chain gangs and other prisoner work gangs to their jobs. The bus had steel mesh across the windows and a strong metal gate between the driver and the seats.

  The men wouldn’t talk to me. One of them actually kicked me in the calf as he passed by me to his spot at the back of the bus. Another murmured, “damned murderess,” to the man next to him. There had to be some mistake. I prayed so.

  The bus drove on for hours. Pain, hunger, tears, loneliness and confusion warred with unfamiliar thoughts that bled through my mind. I cried and cried, beads of salty rain dripping down my cheeks to collect on the point of my chin.

  “God damn it. Quit with the fucking tears already,” one of the state troopers in the back said.

  The trooper across the aisle from me leaned forward. With a sharp motion, he hit me in the stomach with the butt of his rifle. I gasped and cringed backwards as far as I could, crying harder. The trooper laughed. “At least if she’s going to cry, she can have something to cry about.”

  A trooper in the front said, “Hell, Rudy, what did you go do that for? Now she’s never going to shut up.”

  The trooper across from me shrugged. “She wasn’t going to shut up anyway. She’s been crying for the last four damn hours.” He jabbed his rifle butt toward my stomach again and laughed when I cringed.

  The brilliant light faded into evening as the convict bus drove on. The state troopers didn’t relax their vigilance or treat me any better in the cooler twilight.

  “Hey, Snapper, you think she’s a good fuck?”

  The man two rows behind me grinned. “Sure. You gonna go for it, Clete?”

  The first man laughed. “It’s not like she’s going to live long enough to make any trouble over it. I’m just not into dogs.” He punctuated his remark with a kick at my legs. “You can, though. Just bend her over the seat and take her right up…”

  Frisky now, the kicks, blows, and appallingly graphic descriptions of their sick desires didn’t stop for many miles. I’d never even heard of some of the abuses they proposed. Yet, except for the blows and the kicks, they didn’t approach within six feet of me.

  I cringed as far away from them as my bonds would allow and tried to pray, but I failed: furious, not penitent. I raged at God for letting me fall into such misery and I raged at my family for the same.

  The troopers didn’t give me any food, or any water, or tell me my destination.

  Night soothed my eyes; I’d never seen a night like this before. Everything lit up, as if the moon had taken lessons from the sun. I watched through the steel mesh, mesmerized by the vivid night, as the farmland turned to suburb, suburb to city. St. Louis? Likely. We circled around the city proper and headed away, into the land of freight trains and warehouses. The convict bus stopped at a heavy steel gate, backlit by city lights staining the sky. The gate interrupted tall walls with barbed wire on top, the loopy kind of barbed wire all prisons seemed to have. Three guards tended the gate.

  One of the guards entered the bus, checked me over from a distance, refused to answer my questions, and extracted signatures from the boss trooper. The convict bus rolled over pipes, an unlikely cattle guard, and into the compound.

  I expected to see a well-lit state prison, huge and impersonal. Instead, I found a single poorly lit U-shaped building, three stories tall, not large, but surrounded by a brick wall. Along the a quarter mile road to the U-shaped building were concrete slabs, the remains of bulldozed buildings and long unused roads. I frowned, mystified.

  The building had no signs, no markings at all. A few lights shone from ground floor windows, breaking the darkness. An acre of graveyard lay four hundred feet to the side of the road, with hundreds of small identical white crosses, tightly crammed together, as if the graves held cremated remains. I’d seen this a long time ago, not this building, but similar. I dredged my mind, trying to remember.

  Newsreels. Newsreels, while I attended college.

  My God.

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

  They’d taken me to a Transform Detention Center, one of the old ones where they took Transforms to die in the bad old days, before they had discovered Focuses. I thought the authorities had closed down all the Detention Centers.

  I raged for a moment, furious I’d been sent here in a prisoner bus. Transforms were dangerous! What a horrible thing to do to an innocent God-fearing housewife.

  Then I got it. They thought I was a Transform.

  I looked at my handcuffed hands, and, yes, they shook a little. The Shakes was one of the most horrifying diseases known to mankind, nearly as bad as Leprosy and the disease they described once on the Dr. Kildare show. The one that makes your skin fall off. They called this disease the Shakes because your hands shook, at least at the start of it. The proper term for the Shakes was Transform Sickness. You got it and you never recovered. You became something else. Someone else. Transformed.

  This shouldn’t have happened to me! Transform Sickness was one of the ways God worked in the world, the hand of his wrath upon the blatant sinners.

  The Shakes wasn’t supposed to be a death sentence for a woman if diagnosed early enough. I’d learned the truth in Parade magazine and Readers’ Digest: Focus households wanted woman Transforms and regularly took them in. Male Transforms, though, often couldn’t be saved and had to be euthanized or face a death too horrible to describe. Back before World War II euthanasia had been illegal, but because of the horror of the Shakes many state governments had legalized euthanasia, including Missouri. When the end came, male Transforms often went psychotic and tried to kill everyone around them. Women Transforms became Monsters if they weren’t taken in by a Focus, literally demonic monsters. Killing them was a kindness.

  A rare variety of Transform, the Focus, saved other Transforms from death by moving a special Transform-only compound all Transforms had in them, juice, from one Transform to another. Only women transformed into Focuses, and only after spending several days in a coma. However, salvation from becoming a Monster or psychotic didn’t save the Transform from the eternal punishment of sterility, or the other marks of the curse they wore.

  Now, I wasn’t a blatant sinner – or sprouting fur or growing claws. So why bring me here?

  Was I a Focus?

  The bus approached
the brick wall around the u-shaped building and went down a ramp into a bright well-lit basement. Through the cracks in my eyelids, I saw tall concrete pillars, parking spaces, and a roped-off, pock-marked, discolored wall: the shooting gallery, where authorities shot women transforming into Monsters in the bad old days.

  The wall looked freshly washed to me, though.

  The bus rumbled by the wall and stopped.

  We waited.

  Ten minutes later a doctor in a white lab coat, flanked by two well-armed orderlies, came up to the bus. The doctor tapped on the door and the driver opened it. After he walked up the bus steps he held a huddled conversation with the officer. They talked, exchanged paperwork and signed papers. They took a moment to point at me and talked some more.

  Eventually the driver opened the gate into the back part of the bus. The doctor turned to the guards, waved his hands at me and said “Bring her”. He turned and left, ignoring my presence.

  “Hey. Talk to me,” I said. He didn’t. Sudden hot hot anger erased my tears and I slammed the cuffs against the metal pole. “I” slam “Want” slam “Some” slam “Answers!” slam.

  The cuffs broke.

  The Goddamned cuffs broke.

  Rach – rat! went the guns in the guards’ hands. I held my hands in front of me in disbelief. I was a housewife, a town girl. My wrists bled red under the broken cuffs, with actual strips of skin laid open. Oooh! Yuck. The wounds should have been horribly painful, but no. Not too much. They did make me want to throw up when I looked at them, though. My anger melted away along with my blood as it dripped on the metal floor of the bus.

  “Mrs. Hancock?”

  I looked up at the firing squad of terrified state troopers in front of me and wanted to shake my head. The doctor had spoken, on the other side of the guards. He had come back into the bus. The nametag on his white lab coat read ‘Dr. Peterson’.

  “Yes, Dr. Peterson?”

  He slipped back a few feet when I addressed him by name, his face ashen. “These men are going to fire their weapons and kill you unless you allow us to shackle you again, Mrs. Hancock.”

  At least he knew my name.

  “I saw the shooting gallery as we drove in, Doctor. All of a sudden, I feel safer in here than out there. You wouldn’t want to puncture the gas tank shooting up some Monster, would you?” Phooey. I was making things up as I went along.

  “Monster?” the doctor said. “Where’d you get that idea, Mrs. Hancock?”

  “Why else would I be here? Why else would you treat me like this?”

  “Truthfully, Mrs. Hancock, we don’t know what’s going on. None of us has ever even heard of a Transform like you. Unfortunately, you were involved in an apparent homicide.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “When you started your transformation coma, Mrs. Hancock, you took four women with you. You killed them.” The doctor flipped through his papers. “A Mrs. Susan Holtwich.” Paper flip.

  “No,” softly. Transformation coma? Me?

  “A Mrs. Alice Winslow.” Paper flip.

  “No,” agonized, louder. Kill?

  “A Mrs. Beth Farragut.” Paper flip.

  “No,” pain, terror, agony, and louder.

  “and lastly, a Sarah Hancock, a minor, age twel…”

  “You lie!” I screamed teary agony at the top of my lungs and launched myself forward. Guns fired. I ripped the clipboard from the doctor’s hands, ran headlong out the bus door and fell to the concrete. A siren to my left screamed air raid. I got up with barely a pause and ran as fast as I could with the shackles on my legs, faster than I believed possible. Behind me, boots pounded on concrete like a herd of horses. I stopped, looked at my bare feet, and noticed a growing red pool around them.

  My blood.

  I bolted, backtracking to the ramp the bus had used. It didn’t take me long to find it or to realize the futility of escape. The authorities had set up this place for people like me, for horrid monsters who killed their own daughters and their best friends. Instead of an open ramp, I found a floor to ceiling metal mesh net blocking my way. Beyond the mesh net sat a row of steel bars; behind that, another net. I turned right and ran along the edge of the underground garage, searching for another way out.

  I started to slow, lightheaded and weak, overwhelmed by the worsening craving. I reached a corner and had to turn right again, past the shooting gallery. I could smell death there, recent death. The freshest blood on the concrete had spattered on it less than a month ago.

  I had no idea how I knew that.

  It hit me that I had no way out. I was dead. They would kill me if I didn’t bleed to death first. The people who chased me didn’t seem to care.

  I sat behind a pillar, covered in cold sweat and woozy, a narrow stream of blood slowly snaking away from me. Only the state troopers in the truck had shot at me, not the men who chased me. The men who followed me walked and ran differently, though again I had no idea how I knew that.

  I read the doctor’s paperwork. They had my name right. My husband was in custody, for striking a police officer and for four counts of involuntary manslaughter.

  That puzzled me for a moment until I worked it out. The authorities blamed Bill because he hadn’t taken me to a hospital or police station. I’d read about cases like this. I actually considered it appropriate punishment – or had.

  The paperwork listed me as “Transform, unknown variety”. I had killed my daughter along with three other women, probably while they took care of me…

  I flipped back to the first page in sudden shock. There it was: coma onset. I checked the transfer paper remanding me from the custody of the Jefferson City Jail to the St. Louis Transform Detention Center and found the date. I’d been in a coma for three days. Strange. The transformation coma that produced a Focus lasted four or five days. I’d never heard of three.

  Memories flooded back, dim memories of my couch and women caring for me. Some sort of rapture, ascension to heaven, pleasure akin to passionate love with my husband but something else. Then darkness.

  Somehow, I’d killed them all, right there and then.

  The authorities were right. I deserved to die. Transforms were monsters. I was a monster.

  I’d killed my own daughter. I must have recognized my condition. I wasn’t stupid, I knew the symptoms of the Shakes, and I knew to be on the lookout for them.

  However, the Shakes was the curse of God, punishment meted out to sinners and unbelievers. I was neither. In my pride at my sinless life, I must have denied to all that I had the Shakes.

  Well, sinless life no more, if I’d done that. I stood and almost passed out. Tossed the paperwork away. “Go ahead. Shoot,” I said through my tears. I deserved it for what I had done. For being a Transform. They didn’t shoot. “Yaaaaah!”

  I stumbled toward one of them.

  The men were not the state troopers. They were armed hospital orderlies, men with experienced eyes.

  Something hit me with the force of a jackhammer on the back of my head, and down I went.

  ---

  “Hello, Mrs. Hancock? I’m Dr. Peterson.”

  I awoke on the floor of a featureless concrete cell, right next to a six-inch grate in the floor that smelled like a neglected woman’s restroom in an east Texas highway rest stop. In a heat wave. The straightjacket and chains were gone and I wore a hospital gown. I cautiously levered myself into a sitting position.

  The voice came from a speaker set in the ceiling. “Hello. I’m hungry,” I said. It took me a few moments to remember how I got here. I was surprised I was still alive. My annoying craving hadn’t left; I now guessed I wanted juice, the strange life-chemical of Transforms I thought of as the Devil’s soft drink.

  “Now that you’re awake, let’s start out with some information.” Dr. Peterson’s tinny voice from the speaker echoed off the concrete walls. “Technically, y
ou’re a multiple murderess. However, in my medical opinion, you haven’t harmed anyone of your own volition. Thus, if we can come to an agreement, I would like to work with you in a less confined situation. You would have a real hospital bed, receive medical care, and yes, we would feed you. You wouldn’t be tied down.”

  “I’m confined to a Transform Detention Center?” Let it all be a mistake. Please, God. Let it all be a mistake.

  “Yes,” Dr. Peterson said, dashing my hopes and prayers. “Confined for the safety of the surrounding community. Although you’re human now, things can happen quickly to those with Transform Sickness.”

  I took a deep breath and accepted the situation. “Yes, yes, I have the Shakes, if I turn Monster or am about to, you’ll shoot me. Fine. I don’t have a problem with that. Can I have some breakfast?” The horrors in Dr. Peterson’s paperwork evaporated, replaced by numbness.

  “Yes. You should know that all of us in the Transform Detention Center have signed waivers. If we’re taken hostage, the guards here will shoot to kill the person who took us hostage. If we die, so be it.”

  “Hard life.”

  “Hard life, and government hazard pay at two and a half times normal.”

  “Good for you, Dr. Peterson.”

  While I waited, I counted bullet wounds. Four, none through my torso. Five, if you counted the long red welt along my ribcage, a graze. Amazing. I must have been out for weeks to heal so much.

  The secret cell door opened to reveal five orderlies. “Mrs. Hancock? I’m going to push in a tray of food. When you finish eating it, leave it in place, and stand.”

  Looked like dinner, not breakfast, to me, but I didn’t complain. I ate it, a man’s portion, but still felt hungry afterwards. I was used to dieting to keep my figure trim and expected to be hungry after eating. The hunger normally went away after a half hour or so.

  I stood.

  “Mrs. Hancock, you’ve been approved to be a status four prisoner,” the lead orderly said, a tall, thin man with a complexion problem. “You’ll be allowed to walk from room to room, but only when accompanied by four or more orderlies. Two will accompany you in front, two in back. You won’t be restrained.”

  “Okay.”

  “Two of us will now enter the room. Please do not move.”

  I obeyed orders and the orderlies did a complicated dance of positioning, ending up with me between the four of them. The two in front did not put their backs to me, but walked half sideways, half backing down the corridor in front of me. The orderlies pointed guns at me the entire time. They hadn’t mentioned that as part of being a status four prisoner.

  They brought me to see Dr. Peterson.

  Dr. Peterson offered me a chair and I sat. The armed orderlies boxed the room, their guns still aimed at me. The cold men with their guns seemed odd in such an ordinary office.

  “Mrs. Hancock.” Dr. Peterson said to me from behind his oversized wooden desk. “You present us with many problems.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t ask for this to happen.” To my surprise, I was already famished and wobbly. On top of my annoying craving for juice and my stiff joints, hunger made my mind feel like old molasses. It would be impolite to demand another meal so soon, so I decided to tough it out.

  “I understand,” Dr. Peterson said, laying his hands flat on the desk as if it would rise up if he didn’t hold it down. He was in his forties, with dark hair and facial stubble like Nixon. He had a round face and a solemn look of professional competence, which I might have believed more if he hadn’t been so callous in the bus.

  I’d killed my daughter Sarah. My thoughts hurt too much to face, so I turned my mind away from them.

  “As best as we can determine,” Dr. Peterson said, “you contracted Transform Sickness and started to make a Focus transformation. However, something unexpected happened soon after you slipped into a coma, while your friends and daughter were trying to call for an ambulance.”

  “Transform Sickness did something that killed two friends, a neighbor, and my daughter.” A Focus transformation induced transformations in nearby women, but didn’t affect children. Sarah must have been barely old enough.

  Phooey. I didn’t believe my own words and rationalizations.

  “Yes, that’s the right way to look at it. You’re not at fault, Mrs. Hancock, save that under the archaic laws of the state you still might be prosecuted after you’re released from the Detention Center.”

  “What can you do for me here, Dr. Peterson?” I asked.

  “You’re of course familiar with the fact,” Dr. Peterson said. He paused and brought his hands together on his desk to make a little church steeple. “That if a Focus cannot be found for a Transform, he’ll die.”

  I nodded. “Men go into withdrawal and go psychotic, women turn Monster.”

  “We can predict to within the hour, these days, when this is going to happen. A day ahead of time, the authorities take unfortunate unwanted Transforms from a Transform Clinic and ship them here. This Detention Center also deals with the aberrant cases, of which there are plenty. For instance, there are two women Transforms on the third floor who…”

  All of a sudden I knew their location. That’s what had been bothering me. I wanted them, a strange sexual arousal mixed with a deep hunger. I needed them. They could satisfy my mysterious craving.

  “Yesrightthere, Doctor,” I said, turning swiftly and pointing up. We must have been on the ground floor. “Let’s go. I need them.”

  Dr. Peterson blinked at me. “You need them?” He backed away, white as a sheet and breathing rapidly, and slowly rose to stand with his back against a window. Thin stripes of black shadow from the thick metal grate on the outside of the safety glass dappled his white lab coat. Terrified, he slid along the glass to stand next to an armed orderly.

  “I need them. Now,” I said, and hissed.

  “Mrs. Hancock,” Dr. Peterson bellowed. He gathered himself. “You have just been reassigned as a status six prisoner,” he said, with authority. “Bend forward and place your hands on the desk.”

  “Will that get me to those women?”

  “Yes, yes,” Dr. Peterson said. “Absolutely.”

  Sure. Anything to arrange a visit with those two women Transforms. I bent. They shackled me with heavy shackles. When I looked up, Dr. Peterson had left the room.

  I waited and examined my situation, suspicious of Dr. Peterson’s smooth assurance. There were little half-moons cut in the office carpeting. I had noticed them when I came in. The guards had peeled one of them up, revealing an eyebolt embedded in the concrete floor. They had shackled me to it.

  A few minutes later I felt the woman Transforms moving closer to me, arousing my desires. Then, to my appalled anger, they moved farther away. When they left the building, a couple minutes later, I howled in agony and danced around the embedded bolt, pulling furiously at my restraints. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d actually managed to break free; the armed guards watched my manic performance with cold indifference. Eventually, the women went so far away I couldn’t sense them anymore.

  I swung the chain at the floor in a futile display of anger and sat back down in the chair. I cried, furious and miserable with the loss of those two Transforms. They were mine. I needed them.

  Dr. Peterson returned and wove his way in through the guards. “Yes, now that that has been taken care of, Mrs. Hancock, where were we?” he said as he settled in behind his desk again.

  “You bastard,” I said. Hot anger. “You lied to me.”

  “I apologize, but it was necessary. You’re a Major Transform, Mrs. Hancock.”

  “You said I’d failed my Focus transformation.” I said, still livid with anger. Those Transforms had been mine!

  “You did. You’re a Major Transform, but you’re not a Focus.”

  His comment made no sense. To me, Major Transform and Focus were synony
mous. Like Santa Claus and Kris Kringle. It didn’t help that my mind felt like mush.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I,” he said, and artfully raised one and only one eyebrow. His smarmy air of smug superiority galled me. I tensed. “This is outside my area of expertise. However, I have an expert flying in to deal with you who predicted you’d be…what you are. So, other than the fact that I have to keep you shackled up and that you are indeed some form of Major Transform, are there any other questions I can answer?”

  He lied. I wished I’d spotted his lies the first time. I despised doctors and their arrogance, not the least when regarding Transform Sickness. They spouted glib explanations for something far more complicated than they understood. I suspected Transform Sickness was supernatural.

  I broke down in tears as the misery hit me again. I was alone, among cold-blooded men who lied to me and thought nothing of my pain. I wanted my husband and my children. I wanted friends to care for me and my minister to pray for me. Instead, I had a lying doctor who wouldn’t even tell me what little he knew. This wasn’t the world I knew.

  None of the cold guards surrounding me would even pass me the box of tissues. They wouldn’t come that close. Eventually, Dr. Peterson tossed me his suit handkerchief. I caught it (momentary surprise) and bent my head down so I could daub my eyes with the hankie in my shackled hand.

  My weepy behavior stung my own pride. I took a deep breath and did my best to push the tears away. “I have some questions, Dr. Peterson. Where’s my husband and my family? Since it’s been a week, they should have…” I stopped as horror filled Dr. Peterson’s face.

  “Mrs. Hancock. Your coma ended a little more than two days ago. You arrived here last night around nine. You woke up today at two-thirty in the afternoon.”

  I looked at my arm and my once-mangled wrists. The bullet wounds were still red, but that was about it. “Well, whatever I am, I heal like the dickens.”

  “Yes, you do,” Dr. Peterson said. He took off his glasses and searched his pockets for a handkerchief to wipe them with, but of course, I had it.

  “Okey dokey, I can live with that. So, what’s the status of my family?”

  “Your daughter’s funeral was three days ago. Your husband is out on bail but can’t leave Jefferson City. Your father attended the demonstration in Jefferson City, shouting ‘death to monsters’ with the rest of the Monsters Die crowd.” Monsters Die was an activist organization, like the NAACP, but instead of pushing for civil rights for colored people they wanted the Transforms eradicated or confined. “Your mother has been hospitalized in Pilot Grove with exhaustion. Your widowed mother-in-law is staying at your house, taking care…” Dr. Peterson let his voice tail off, because I’d started bawling again.

  Eventually, I stopped. “Until your specialist gets here I think I’d just prefer to be left alone,” I said. Dr. Peterson’s bedside manner repelled me. He sat up more stiffly and pushed his glasses back farther on his nose. “Do you have any of those prisoner cells with any amenities, like those fancy tin cups that prisoners get in the movies? Or am I stuck with concrete slab number six, complete with five inch grate?”

  He grimaced at my sardonic comment. “You’ll be in a locked cell, but one far nicer than you awoke in earlier.”

  I stood, moaned from a set of unexpected phantom pains in my extremities, and waited for the guards to unhook me from the floor. “Another thing. I seem to be famished. Hungry. Can I please have some extra food?”

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Peterson said. “Until our expert arrives, you’re on standard Transform rations.”

  I hadn’t expected my second floor cell to be a reinforced hospital room, single occupancy. The room had all the plugs, valves, sinks and do-hickies of a modern hospital room, plus an electric bed, a nurse call button, a pitcher of ice water, a vase with plastic flowers, and the day’s newspaper. I could hardly believe it was only Wednesday, September fourteenth. I’d probably have cards and flowers by now if I hadn’t killed all my best friends and put my family in jail. An armed orderly stood guard outside my door, which they locked. From the outside.

  The guards hadn’t removed my shackles, but they had done something to them to increase the slack. They gave me a new hospital smock to wear, cut to go around the shackles. I changed and went to the bathroom (down the hall, second left), escorted by armed orderlies. If you ever want a challenge, try going to the bathroom in heavy shackles.

  All alone in my room, my mind turned to better things. My old life. My daughter.

  I cried.

  I was born in Macon, Georgia, a simple town girl, named for my great aunt Carol. My maiden name was Stevens. My father lost his dry goods store in the middle thirties, blamed the Republicans, and moved his family to Missouri. I don’t remember ever having a Deep South buttery molasses accent, but my mother Eunice did, a constant joy to listen to. Ann, my older sister, always fought with Mom, and our younger brother, Jeff, always fought with Dad. I was the good kid, the saintly middle child; I got along with everyone.

  My childhood memories centered on our home in Pilot Grove, Missouri. Dad, or Old Jeff as everyone in town called him, bought himself another dry goods store in the early forties, which later became a combination feed store and small town grocery. I was exceptional in school, and much to the chagrin of my siblings graduated as Valedictorian from Pilot Grove Normal. With Mom’s blessing and Dad’s mute acceptance, I went off to college in the middle of the Korean War. The ivy halls of Iowa State were filled with men when I arrived, ever more so in the following years due to the GI Bill, a tidal wave of older men who had been through World War II, ready to make a new life of their own. Younger men returning from Korea soon joined them. I majored in history and never got a bad grade. My dorm friends and I were all studious, save when we were dating, which we did as a group as often we could.

  In my third year of college, I met Bill Hancock, a new freshman. Wounded in the Korean War, he had finished his long military service career. Bill was five years older than I was, bright, witty, and driven. He knew what he wanted from life. Later, I would realize how much he resembled Dad, not physically, but in attitude and interests. Business was Bill’s life. He liked nothing better than to make a sale and close a deal. He wanted to be more than a salesman, though; he wanted to start a business, build it, and make it successful. Bill was in college to learn how to do so.

  I didn’t finish my junior year at Iowa State. Bill set his sights on me, won my heart, swept me off my feet, and sold me on his vision of the future. Wife. Mother. Homemaker. The works. I was no looker, not even close. I had no sense of fashion and my appearance had never been a top priority. My dream had been to teach at a women’s college somewhere, a dowdy academic spinster. My time in college had shown me one thing, though: I was one of those people who found changing light bulbs a challenge. My family had taken care of me and I never had to learn much about the work-a-day world of houses, cars and gardens. Bill’s presence reminded me that I needed someone to care for me, at least for the physical things of life.

  Mom and Dad approved of Bill, a pleasant surprise, as they had frowned at both my siblings’ choices. He sold them on his dreams as well. A June bride, I had a house of my own by the end of summer, thanks to the vacuum cleaners Bill sold on his summer vacation.

  The next decade flew by fast. Two miscarriages, then Sarah. I learned to cook and keep house, although it became clear after awhile that I needed a maid for certain things. I put work into cooking, though, becoming an excellent cook. After college Bill started up a dry cleaning chain and later took it national. We were never rich but we were never poor, either. I expected to be rich by the time I had grandchildren. We entertained constantly and my cooking expertise was an essential ingredient to the sales made during our parties.

  One of the last things I remembered about my former life was my daughter Sarah’s bi
g birthday party as she turned twelve. She spent the first part of the summer helping me with the Jefferson City Library Volunteers and had won them over with her warm smile. Mom came up from Pilot Grove and she entertained the birthday party with her rich accent and elegant southern charm, telling stories about her childhood as well as stories about her fabled sister Bea, now a fine upstanding and refined Dallas lady.

  If my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me, Sarah had been twelve, Billy was ten, and little Jeffrey was seven. I was Vice-President of the Jefferson City PTA, Chairwoman of the Jefferson City Library Volunteers, and Secretary of the Jefferson City Junior League. Hundreds of people knew me by name. I had dozens of friends. Jane, the second wife of our district’s City Councilman, was one of my closest friends. I was popular, a social success, a good woman.

  Never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever imagine I would find myself a Transform.

  ---

  Breakfast finally came at seven-fifteen in the morning, after I spent a very hungry night pestering the nurses for extra food they couldn’t legally give me. Standard Transform rations were larger than I expected; the breakfast included a large stack of pancakes, four rashers of bacon, a large mug of orange juice, and toast. I finished the meal hungry. I still wore the shackles, and as much of the meal ended up on the floor as in me.

  “Good appetizer,” I said to the nurse. “I’m ready for the main course now.”

  The nurse frowned and shook her head. She didn’t appreciate my humor. “I can’t give you anything more. I shouldn’t have given you anything last night. Dr. Peterson left specific orders. Anything, absolutely anything out of the ordinary, has to be approved by him first. He’ll be coming in this morning, and you can talk to him then. You aren’t going to starve to death in a day.”

  “I’m starving to death right now,” I said, half in jest, still very hungry. The nurse ignored me.

  I checked the clock every five minutes as I waited. At nine-oh-five, I heard footsteps in the hall and several low male voices. I sat up straight as Dr. Peterson stuck his head in my room. He nodded at me and stepped in. Three men followed him, and a woman.

  “Good morning, Carol,” Dr. Peterson said. “I have some people who would like to talk to you. This is Dr. Henry Zielinski, one of the nation’s top researchers in the field of major transformations, and this is Special Agent Bates of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  I nodded to them, though the presence of an FBI agent sent shivers up my spine. Dr. Peterson didn’t introduce the third man, one of the Center’s orderlies, or the woman, a nurse.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Hancock,” Dr. Zielinski said. Dr. Zielinski was medium height and balding, fiftyish, thin, his dark brown hair salted with gray. His deeply creased well-worn face didn’t match his surname; like some older French gentleman he had a narrow face with a high forehead. He projected an air of competence and wore a white lab coat over his starched white shirt, suit pants, vest and expensive Italian silk tie. He spoke with a noticeable New England Yankee accent. “Before we speak, I’d like to look at your chart,” Dr. Zielinski said. Dr. Peterson rushed over to the foot of my bed and, almost fawning, presented Dr. Zielinski with my chart.

  “While Hank here deals with things medical, I’ll start things off,” the FBI man said. “Mrs. Hancock, I’m not here to investigate or harass you. I’m here as your friend.” He turned to Dr. Peterson. “Why don’t we start by removing her shackles? We won’t need them.”

  “Agent Bates, she’s quite dangerous, and…” Dr. Peterson said. Bates interrupted him.

  “I believe we can count on your perimeter security, Dr. Peterson. However, I’ll have to have a few words with your Chief of Security, whoever that is. Later.”

  “Dr. Manigault, the Director of the Center, personally handles all security arrangements,” Dr. Peterson said, agitated.

  “I see.” Bates turned back to me. “In any event, remove the shackles, please.” Dr. Peterson whispered to the orderly, gave him a set of keys, and the shackles were removed. I took a heartfelt breath of relief and rubbed my sore wrists. I smelled bacon on the orderly’s white coat and my stomach rumbled with hunger.

  Dr. Zielinski looked up from my charts. “It states here that she attempted to escape, but doesn’t list the details.”

  “She panicked during the transfer from State authorities to Center authorities,” Dr. Peterson said. He didn’t mention his own role in that debacle. “Two killed, five wounded.”

  I hadn’t known. I was in such trouble…

  “Let me guess,” Dr. Zielinski said. “She panicked, ran through a wall of state troopers, and they tried to shoot her on the way by. They probably hit her, too, but didn’t get in any lucky shots.” He rolled his eyes. This Dr. Zielinski actually rolled his eyes when talking about a situation where two state troopers died and five were wounded. Six wounded, if you counted me. He was so arrogant he was likeable.

  Dr. Peterson silently nodded. Agent Bates shook his head. Dr. Zielinski went back to reading my chart.

  “My wife is a Transform, Mrs. Hancock,” Agent Bates said. Oh. “A Transform woman, in the care of a Focus. I belong to a minority of people who believe that Transforms need protection, not protecting from. I’m here to answer any questions you may have about your new legal status as a Transform, to educate you on how to survive as a Transform, and, if all goes well, to offer you a job, a new career.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. Me, an FBI agent? In cahoots with a bunch of Communists who thought Transforms were ordinary folk, not some kind of unnatural abomination? Insane.

  Mr. Bates was a tall man, about Dr. Zielinski’s age, dressed in a dark blue suit, dark tie and white shirt. He reeked of cigarette smoke. I pegged him at about six foot three, a hundred and seventy pounds. A walking cadaver, complete with sunken cheeks. He had white blonde hair cropped short and it was starting to gray. He spoke with a muted western drawl and his eyes were always on the move.

  “We can talk about this later, once you get more acclimated to your status as a Transform,” Mr. Bates said. “Until then, understand that I’m here to help.”

  “I’m hungry,” I said. If he wanted to help, he could start by getting me food.

  “Mrs. Hancock!” That was from the nurse, Callahan. She must have caught an earful about my behavior last night.

  Dr. Zielinski raised his eyebrows high and turned to Dr. Peterson and the nurse. “You had no way of knowing, but a Transform such as Mrs. Hancock needs a great deal more food than even a Focus. Nurse Callahan, I want you to go down to the kitchen and have them send up three more ‘standard breakfasts’. I want you to come back up here immediately with a full quart bottle of orange juice.” Callahan left without batting an eyelash.

  Three more standard breakfasts. I was in love. Tears leaked slowly out of the corners of my eyes. I cried from the misery of the night before, from pain, fear, hunger and for those I had killed. In a moment, it all came out in wrenching sobs.

  “What’s her juice reading?” Dr. Zielinski said, with a glare at Dr. Peterson. My muzzy mind thought he meant orange juice again, before I realized he meant Transforms’ juice.

  “118, as of yesterday evening.”

  Dr. Zielinski and Agent Bates glanced at each other. “Right,” Bates said. “The healing. This is going to change things. I’ll get right on it.” Dr. Zielinski nodded to him and Bates hurried out.

  I let myself fall back onto the bed, curled up into a fetal position, and wept, face in my hands. I needed Bill, needed him to say he loved me, that everything would be all right.

  Dr. Zielinski quietly sent Dr. Peterson and the orderly out of the room. He sat down by my bed and waited. After a few minutes, my tears diminished into occasional sniffles. Nurse Callahan slipped in, delivered the bottle of orange juice to Dr. Zielinski, and slipped out again.

  “Are you up to drinking some orange juice?” Dr. Zie
linski said, his voice quiet. This started up my tears again, but I sat up and took the bottle from him. I choked on it more than once as I drank, but the orange juice was the best thing I had ever tasted. After I finished I was still ravenous, but did feel better. I felt foolish for drinking the orange juice from the bottle, though. My mother would have said I acted like I was raised in a barn.

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and looked around for a box of Kleenex. Dr. Zielinski reached over to the nightstand next to his chair and handed me the box. He was the first person I’d met who was willing to come close to me. I blew my nose, wiped my eyes, and tried to make myself presentable again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Dr. Zielinski, my voice hoarse from the tears. “I don’t usually look like this. I don’t usually act like this either.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “New Major Transforms are never at their best. Are you still hungry?”

  I nodded. My tears started to leak again.

  Dr. Zielinski nodded. “We’ll do something about that. You’re going to need more food than you’re used to and you’re extra hungry because of your wounds.”

  “This is because I’m a, a…” My voice choked on the word “Monster”.

  “Because you’re an Arm? Yes. Your body is going to be capable doing of a lot more, but this requires more food intake.”

  I shrieked in shock and surprise. “Arm? I’m an Arm?” My voice broke and I started to cry again.

  Arms were some sort of rare new form of Transform. Story was, you became an Arm, you died. Save for a woman named Keaton. She escaped custody to become pretty much the top person on old J. Edger’s ten most wanted list. I thought there was an Arm in Europe and one in Canada who had also lived through their transformations, but I wasn’t sure. Keaton was the law enforcement disaster of the decade, the biggest one-woman crime spree ever, the person responsible for the terms ‘serial killer’ and ‘spree killer’. A true spawn of the Devil, a woman my preacher termed ‘the Antichrist’, her example proved the evil of all Transforms.

  I shivered in sudden cold, afraid of myself.

  “They didn’t tell you? Women suffering from Armenigar’s Syndrome need to buy into their treatment as soon as possible, before irrevocable problems begin,” Dr. Zielinski said.

  “What’s,” sniffle, “Armenigar’s,” sniffle, “Syndrome?” I asked. “You,” sniffle, “said,” sniff, “Arm.”

  “Sorry,” Dr. Zielinski said. “There are a small number of one of a kind transformations we call Sports. Armenigar was the first failed Focus found by the medical community. After Armenigar broke free from her Canadian doctors and juice-sucked four tagged Transforms, the media christened her an Arm, from her name and because of her strength. A couple years later, Mary Chesterson repeated the exact same form of failed Focus transformation and became the second Arm. She later died, but if there have been two, it’s not a Sport but a category of Transform, what we call an Armenigar Syndrome Focus. Her autopsy showed she indeed had a metacampus.”

  “Oh.” Sniffle. ‘Juice-sucked’, he said, as if it was something that happened every day. All Transforms needed juice to survive. Normal women Transforms produced juice, but I already knew I wasn’t a normal woman Transform. I did know the metacampus was the little organ a Focus grew in her brain, which allowed her to magically keep the Transforms in her household alive, but I hadn’t known that Arms had one.

  The good doctor wasn’t even the least bit rattled by my display. He continued as if I hadn’t interrupted. “You’re always going to be a little bit hungry. I’m not going to authorize as much food as you’ll want, but you’ll be eating a lot more than you have been. For now, I’m going to give the order for six thousand calories a day, and we’ll see how that works out.”

  “Six thousand?” I asked. Calories I knew about.

  “Six thousand,” he said. “You’re going to want more than that, perhaps much more. You won’t be able to eat as much as you want, but there’s no reason for you to be totally miserable with hunger, either. You’ll have to forgive the staff, here. Few people know anything at all about major transformations, and even fewer people know anything about Armenigar’s Syndrome.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I rubbed at my wrists again. They still hurt from the long night in shackles.

  “I’ll talk to the Detention Center staff and see if I can convince them to back off. Arms have a bad reputation. Your escape attempt frightened everyone and they over-reacted. I’ve worked with Arms before and they’re not all mindless killers. I should be able to talk the staff down.”

  “Are you going to be staying here? Are you going to be the doctor caring for me?” I asked. I took another drink from the empty bottle. I thought I saw a few drops at the bottom.

  “Yes, I’ll be in charge of your case. For the moment, you’re going to be confined here. Agent Bates and I will stay and help you as long as we can.”

  “So what happens now? What happens to me?”

  He smiled at me. “First you eat breakfast. I’m going to look through your chart in more detail and start arranging your care. I’m also going to start you on an exercise program, as our experience shows that an Arm will be much healthier if she gets a lot of exercise. There will be some folks coming through to run tests on you. You can have visitors occasionally and we can get you magazines, books and other things.”

  That sounded permanent. Fatally permanent.

  “How long do I have to stay here? Will I be tried as a criminal?” I asked.

  “Agent Bates can answer the latter question better than I can,” Dr. Zielinski said, with a smile. “In regard to your other question, well, there haven’t been enough Arm transformations to establish good statistics for how they progress. We’ll just have to take things as they come and hope for the best.”

  Dr. Zielinski didn’t think I’d leave this Detention Center alive. I barely kept my tears from leaking down my cheeks. I’d always wondered about the expression ‘a lump in your throat’ and what it might mean. I found I couldn’t swallow without crying. A lump in my throat.

  I choked out another question. “What am I supposed to do about juice?”

  Dr. Zielinski looked away for an instant.

  “Juice,” I insisted. “Transforms need juice, right? Where do I get it? I don’t see any Focus around here. Where do Arms get juice?”

  “Mrs. Hancock,” Dr. Zielinski said, gently. Now I looked away, abashed.

  Reader’s Digest had written about Keaton and Arms once. They were demons who grabbed people like storybook vampires, but they drained juice instead of blood as they killed their victims. I had a vision of myself with giant canine teeth and red droplets hanging from their tips. A lust of a new sort ran through me and I found myself looking at Dr. Zielinski almost in hunger.

  “You said Armenigar sucked juice from Transforms like a vampire,” I said. “The Transforms died?”

  Dr. Zielinski sighed and scooted his chair backwards a couple of feet. “That isn’t the best way of looking at it. The people you need are Transforms who are already dying because they can’t find a Focus. You’ll make their deaths a lot less unpleasant than they might be otherwise. You don’t suck their blood; you’re not a vampire. You’ll take their juice, a painless process when done by an Arm. Taking their juice prevents them from going into withdrawal or becoming a Monster. As you said, they won’t live through it.”

  “I’m not sure that’s something I can do,” I said.

  “Your choices are limited, Mrs. Hancock,” Dr. Zielinski said. I heard rattling and squeaking coming down the hall, and smelled food. A kitchen lady wheeled in a metal cart with the breakfasts on it. Doris, her nametag said. She gave me a friendly smile and started transferring the food to my bed table. “It’s a hard decision you face, I know. Yet, if you don’t take juice, you’ll die in withdrawal too.” He took my hand in his and I could f
eel his strength. “Would it help if I told you that the other Arms have had to deal with the same issue?”

  “How did they deal with it?” I asked. I took my hand from his and helped the kitchen lady arrange my bed table. I dug in.

  “It’s hard for all of them. Mostly, though, they realize eventually there’s nothing to be gained by refusing to take juice. Transforms without hope of a Focus are brought to Detention Centers like this all the time. They’ll die here with or without you. If you take the juice from them you continue your own life.” He paused and gazed deep into my eyes, as if he was looking for something in my mind. “One other thing: I’m a Doctor and Tommy Bates is an FBI Agent, but we’re also researchers. Any Major Transform case, whether a Sport or a known type like a Focus or an Arm, is so rare as to be a potentially valuable research subject. If you cooperate, you allow us to continue our research efforts on Major Transforms. What we learn about Major Transforms is important, because without them, none of the other Transforms would live. What we learn from you could conceivably save thousands of lives, Mrs. Hancock.”

  “Carol,” I said. Dr. Zielinski blinked a couple times and nodded. He made an impressive case, down to earth and inspiring.

  “Carol,” he said. “Good to have you on board.”

  ---

  Dr. Zielinski was right about the food. After an absurd six thousand calories I was still ravenously hungry and still over-stressed. I spent the day in the lab. Blood samples, urine samples, x-rays, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, monitors, eyesight. Those I could understand. Tests of strength, reaction time, and flexibility I didn’t understand.

  I was no athlete or Jack La Lanne, but remembering my escape from the prisoner bus I did better than I expected. I wondered what I was becoming. Magazines talked a lot about the extra abilities Major Transforms acquired and I’d never heard a scientific explanation for any of them that made sense. It was magic, maybe, or a gift from God or more likely the Devil. I wondered if I would develop those supernatural abilities myself.

  Next came more tests I didn’t understand. There were nurses, orderlies, Dr. Zielinski, Dr. Peterson, doctors I didn’t recognize. There was even a psychologist, a Dr. Richard Bentwyler. He had the best psychologist name I ever encountered. I bet no one contracted his first name to Dick! He gave me IQ tests, Rorschach tests, and I spent two hours talking while lying on a couch. I doubted my childhood relationship with my father had anything to do with Transform Sickness, but they were the doctors. I hoped they knew what they were doing.

  The tests started after breakfast and continued ‘til seven at night. Half the time they didn’t even stop while I ate.

  At least the tests kept me distracted.

  Between tests in the afternoon, Agent Bates came by to check up on me as I waited for the next doctor to come through. I sat on an examination table in a cold room with worn linoleum tile and shiny metal instruments. The examination table had metal rings bolted to it, which held heavy canvas straps. I wondered how often they had to strap someone to that table to do their examination.

  We talked while I snacked, about his wife, his children and about life in a Focus household. It didn’t sound pretty. He loved his wife but they were nearly estranged. She had gotten stuck in a California Focus household after she transformed. To my amazement, his small government salary was one of the few reliable sources of income her household had.

  Agent Bates also filled me in on some of the darker aspects of life as a Transform, part of his recruiting effort. I knew from my husband’s business that it was difficult for a Transform to find a job. I didn’t know people were often fired just because they lived in a Focus household. A known Transform often couldn’t get service in stores and restaurants. Because of this, many Focuses moved their households to large cities for anonymity. However, banks rarely lent money to Focuses and Transforms, which meant they had to pay cash for housing. He also told me how the justice system rarely prosecuted crimes against Transforms.

  “There’s one thing I’d like to know,” I said, after he asked me if I had any questions and I had pushed away my plate. The institutional mystery meat in the snack had been tough and overcooked, but tasted delicious anyway. I could have eaten another six servings.

  “Yes?”

  I explained what Dr. Zielinski had said about where I’d be getting juice. “If my killing someone is supposed to be better than withdrawal, I’d like to see what it is that makes withdrawal so awful. Surely you have a movie of it, or something. They never talk about it on T.V. or in any of the magazines or newspapers I read.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He glanced out the window, but there was little to see past the bars and the thick wire mesh.

  “Why not?”

  Agent Bates lit a cigarette, a foul unfiltered Camel. “Some things a person is better off not seeing. Withdrawal is horrible. You don’t want to see movies of withdrawal.” He paused. “We show these movies to men who are facing withdrawal themselves to convince them that suicide is a better option.” I shivered, thinking of these men trying to convince some desperate Transform to commit suicide. Was withdrawal bad enough to justify such a thing?

  I looked at his sunken eyes, still bleak with old horrors, and didn’t wonder anymore.

  “Mr. Bates, if I’m going to kill people I need to be able to live with myself afterwards. I’d like to know.”

  He looked at me for a long while, judging me in some studied FBI manner. I looked back at him. My stomach rumbled in the middle, and ruined the effect, but finally he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I returned to my room after seven and found three bouquets of flowers and a plant waiting for me. Perhaps life wasn’t so bad. Despite all that had happened and all I had done, I still had people who cared for me enough to send flowers. There was a bouquet from the Junior League and one from the church. There was a philodendron from the school and a bouquet from Ann Henley, who was Jeffrey’s second grade teacher and a good friend. There were even cards from several other friends and neighbors. It wasn’t reasonable. I was a murderess. I was a demon. I was a monster. Normal people should not want anything to do with me.

  No visitors, though.

  Bob Scalini: August 12, 1966 – September 18, 1966

  Bob Scalini cowered under the 9th Street bridge in downtown Miami and shivered in fear. He was an ordinary looking man in his early forties, balding, with the soft flabbiness of someone who sat at a desk all day. He wasn’t the sort of man who should be wearing filthy clothes and three weeks’ worth of beard, or cowering under a bridge at two thirty in the morning.

  He had no idea how or why he had fallen into such a state.

  The city was silent. When the occasional car passed overhead, his heart raced in panic and he curled up in pure unvarnished terror.

  For three weeks every noise and every human contact brought more terror. He hid under bridges and in abandoned buildings, scrounged food from garbage cans, barely slept at all, and fled from anyone who tried to come near him. He had never experienced terror like this, not even the one time back in the War in Italy when he had been shot at. The terror went on and on, day after terrible day, for three endless weeks.

  He didn’t understand why he was filled with such terror.

  Four weeks ago he had been a respected engineer, happily married, with four kids. Three weeks ago, he had been a homeless man on the streets, fleeing from everyone and everything.

  He had no memory whatsoever of the time in between.

  Another car passed overhead, sending a strong enough surge of panic through Bob that he wanted to cry. He couldn’t do anything about the fear. He thought again about approaching a doctor, but even his innocent thoughts filled him with such consuming terror he knew he couldn’t do it.

  The panic was the worst, but he had also acquired a craving, a constant hunger for something besides food. Without the craving h
e wouldn’t be out here in the dangerous night, but his craving drove him despite his fear.

  He also saw things that weren’t there, as if he had a new sense.

  “The only logical explanation,” Bob said to himself, “is Transform Sickness. How else could I be sensing a Focus and her household?” He had figured this out a week ago, but blocked the discovery out of his mind, the idea itself too terrifying to contemplate.

  Not now.

  Bob smiled. “I’ve got to be sensing their juice. Nothing else makes sense.”

  His smile vanished as he waited for the terror to come. It didn’t.

  “The first problem with my logic is that the only Transforms with an extra sense are Focuses, and Focuses are always women.” He did a great deal of talking to himself now, crazy words for crazy thoughts. “The second problem is that the range of a Focus’s juice sense is short, only a hundred yards or so. I can sense juice for miles.” He could nearly sense the entire city of Miami. “I wonder how.”

  This new sense wasn’t any form of fictional extra-sensory perception; Bob’s engineering background made him instinctively discard supernatural explanations. The sense faded in and out at range, and the quality of the sense varied with the weather, wind direction, and the presence of electrical power lines. Apparently, his extra sense was something like radio or television, mixed in with a chemical sense like the sense of smell. His explanation bothered the engineer in him. “What’s the transmitter? Transmitters take energy and Focuses aren’t radio stations. Someone would have noticed.” A lack of a scientific explanation didn’t make the phenomenon supernatural, though.

  He didn’t remember ever reading anything about the panic. Something was seriously wrong with him, perhaps a nasty psychological malady, but he didn’t even know if there were any psychological maladies like this.

  The panic from the car faded and the craving took hold again, stronger than before, a compulsion strong enough to override his fears. His hands shook and his legs would barely hold him, but he forced himself to stand. One step, another step. If he stayed low, surely no one would notice as he walked along the dry creek bed in the middle of the night. He forced himself forward, one quiet step at a time. The mosquitoes swarmed in the thick humidity.

  He crept along, watching warily around him with his eyes and ears and with his new sense. Besides the terrifying glow of the Focus and the members of her household, each one printed with an echo of their Focus, he sensed other things.

  A strange fog surrounded the Focus’s household. He had found other patches of fog in Miami, around the Miami Transform Clinic and also in a cemetery on the north side of town where a Monster had been buried a few weeks ago. Those patches of fog were gone because Bob had fed on them, as if he had become, ludicrously, a fog vampire.

  The fog wasn’t real, though. He only sensed it with his extra sense.

  “I’ve got to get closer,” he whispered. The first time he tried to feed on the fog, the patch around the Transform Clinic, he had tried from miles away. The fog had satisfied something basic within him, but afterwards, he decided he had fooled himself. He had no more than tasted it. To feed on the fog he learned he had to get close to it, within a block. It had left him happy and sated.

  The Clinic’s fog had been enough to satisfy him for a week. He had cowered in his hidden shelter, talking to himself, leaving only to scavenge food. While hidden, he tried to figure out what happened with this ‘feeding’. None of his many explanations satisfied him.

  A week later, the craving became intense enough to force him out again. He found the cemetery and fed, this time getting inside the fog. This trick satisfied his cravings for two weeks. The only fog remaining in Miami hovered around the Focus household. For a proper feeding, he would have to get right up next to that household, inside the fog – but the Focus there terrified him. He couldn’t even consider the possibility that the Focus might sense him, because when he did he found himself paralyzed with fear.

  He crept along the path, which led approximately in the right direction.

  Ahead of him, something rustled in the brush. Bob hit the ground and buried himself in the weeds. He froze, every sense alert, looking for the source of the sound.

  Something inside of him started to work backwards. All of a sudden, his little remnant of juice spewed out in a rush of fog, vomit from the intestines of his soul. He shivered and felt himself start to black out from the terror.

  But not quite. He waited, sweating and shivering. Eventually, a small calico cat slipped out from under the underbrush.

  A cat.

  Bob didn’t allow himself to relax. Possibly some owner was out looking for it. He wondered if the cat might possibly have rabies or some other disease. He looked, but the cat didn’t have a collar.

  After a long moment, the cat disappeared back into the brush. Bob waited several minutes. The fog vomit swirled around him, small, but calm and peaceful, only a little different from all the other fog he consumed.

  “The hell.” Hunger outweighed his fear that this different fog would poison him and he slowly drew the fog back in. It didn’t seem to hurt him.

  Several minutes later, he got up and resumed his journey.

  “I’m losing it,” he said. “Not only am I out here at night whispering to myself, but I’m so messed up a cat can panic me enough to sick up on it!” His mind continued to work as his senses watched. The fog was a chemical waste product of juice, he guessed, produced by other Transforms.

  “I need more fog,” he said. He thought about the Focus and her household again and nearly curled up in a panicked ball.

  Tears leaked from his eyes. The crippling fear left him so wretched and incapable. Without his overwhelming terror he might even be able to cope with the rest of this Transform Sickness business, figure out how to survive, go back to his wife, and live like a human being. Still, he needed the fog. Ten minutes later he managed to ignore his terror and stand.

  As he edged carefully through the large drain that carried the creek under Magnolia Street, Bob had a terrifying thought: what if he needed this overwhelming fear to survive? He had transformed into something else. Perhaps there was a real reason for his fear. Many animals lived in fear, shy retiring creatures that startled at noises and attempted to stay hidden. Rabbits, mice, deer. Many other animals. In every one, fear was a survival characteristic.

  Perhaps he should learn to use his fear.

  Bob wanted to kick himself. For three weeks, he had functioned on instinct and panic. It was far past time to use his head. He could use this fear. Stay quiet and hidden. Put work into staying safe. When he did need to do something risky, he would think about it, plan, and make it as safe as possible. Use the fear to keep him alert when he exposed himself to danger.

  “I have to figure out what’s out there that justifies this kind of fear,” he said. Prey animals that lived in fear had predators that hunted them. That could explain his reactions.

  The Focus household would be a good test. It scared the daylights out of him. He would learn to harness his fear to serve him, to get as close as possible to the Focus’s house without risk. If he succeeded, he might be ready to travel. He already realized he would have to leave Miami to find more of his fog.

  Yes, he thought to himself, he could learn to use his fear, instead of letting the fear use him.

  If some big predator didn’t get him first.

  ---

  The squeak-squeak of his undersized bicycle still bothered him. The bike had been squeaking for the last five hours, since he had pedaled into a pothole near Holopaw. The problem, as always, was fear. The squeaks sounded too loud to Bob. Still, three in the morning was a perfectly safe time to be out riding a bicycle on a country road near Orlando, his destination.

  He would have done damn near anything for a shower. The nights were warm and humid in central Florida this time of yea
r and his progress left him drenched in sweat. Worse, for four and a half weeks he had worn the same clothes. He had a significant beard by now, scruffy and filthy, like some sort of backwoods mountain man. Any policeman who saw him would arrest him on the spot or chase him out of town.

  At least the bicycle he found in that Miami dump still worked. His night vision was good, but not perfect. He had missed the pothole until he pedaled into it.

  This wasn’t the sanest method of travel, but the bicycle was the safest he had been able to come up with. Everything else he thought up involved being trapped in a small space with other people. Terrifying, beyond contemplation. Still, he didn’t have any choice. He had gone too many days without the fog he craved.

  An hour later, he smiled and allowed himself to whistle. The wild scrubland on the left gave way to a suburb. Orlando, finally. He wasn’t tired. When he had started, his legs had pained him from the pedaling. Much to his surprise, the muscle pain had stopped on his third day of travel.

  Five minutes later, the road dead-ended at a main street lined with businesses. He was tired of the exposure, of the danger of being out all night long, night after night.

  From the shadows he carefully took in everything with his eyes, ears and the new sense. A car rumbled by on the main road. Small animals rustled in the brush, amid faint noises from early risers in the nearby homes. They weren’t as scary as they had been a week ago. They left him wary, but not immobilized by terror.

  He sensed none of the fog he desired at all. He did notice the color of the nearest house, startling him. He threw himself off the bicycle and down into the ditch, laying there for a moment with a tight grip on the bicycle. “How could I have missed that before?” he said, his voice tremulous. The siding of the house was a blue tinted off-white. “I can see colors in the dark.” He already knew his eyes and ears worked much better than normal. Six weeks ago he had worn thick glasses.

  The enhanced eyesight and the extra sense he gained hadn’t been his only changes. He had been living on garbage for weeks now. He hadn’t gotten sick despite his exposure to the elements. He choked down food he could never have eaten before. These changes from Transform Sickness still unnerved him.

  He would trade his soul for an engineering manual that described these changes.

  Bob entered the city proper around four in the morning, still filthy with mud from the ditch. He hadn’t sensed any Transform Clinics or Focus households, but he kept going anyway. He didn’t plan to stop until he satisfied his consuming, distracting hunger for fog.

  He cycled the quiet streets past the center of Orlando, through wide boulevards lined with oleander and narrower streets surrounded by darkened businesses. A few glass towers filled downtown, growing up like space-aged marvels among the older brick buildings. Orlando would be wonderful if he sensed some hint of the fog.

  He pedaled down Rosalind, passing Lake Eola, when he sensed something, a dim murky thing at the extreme edge of his range, strong and alive, a glow that faded into the background if he didn’t pay attention. Only his desperate need for fog allowed him to sense it. He stopped and studied. The murky thing didn’t have the hard brilliance of a Focus or the smaller glow of a Transform. He had found something new.

  Bob had a suspicion. He had wondered how he appeared to another like himself. One of his guesses had been something like this.

  The prone figure awoke and looked straight at Bob. From five miles away, the man made eye contact with Bob as if he was across the room. It was another male Major Transform. Bob felt like he was naked in front of a firing squad, filled with instant terror. He turned his bike around and pedaled in the other direction, his heart booming in his chest.

  Bob lost track of the man after a couple of blocks. He didn’t stop, because he had no reason to assume the man’s sense range wasn’t longer than his own.

  “I’m not thinking,” Bob said, minutes later, and stopped his bicycle. He found himself still near the lake, in the shadow of an empty bandstand. The Robert Meyer Hotel was right across the street and a big copper domed church was to the south of that.

  The man didn’t follow him.

  Bob would have liked to keep running. He wasn’t far enough away to be safe. He wouldn’t feel safe until he was out of Orlando completely. Truth was, he couldn’t leave. He needed fog. He wanted to contact another of his kind. Panic wasn’t something he could afford. He had to live with this. Somehow.

  This was one of those calculated risks he dreaded: to use his fear rather than let the fear use him. The situation grabbed him excessively fast, leaving him with no time to get used to the idea. He squeezed the handlebars of the bicycle and whimpered. “This is too hard,” he said to himself. “I can’t deal with this.”

  Bob put his foot on the pedal, then willed the foot back to the ground. He had to be rational and figure things out. Face his panic. The stranger might be able to help.

  If the stranger was like Bob, he was likely scared as well. Bob took a deep breath, steadied his will, and turned the bike around. Slowly, as the sweat of terror joined the sweat from the heat, he went back. Two miles. Two miles, and the man was still there, still prone, still gazing at Bob. Was the man on a bed? Perhaps in a house? Bob stopped. The man didn’t move. Bob came a few feet closer.

  Nothing.

  A few feet closer.

  Still nothing.

  Bob gritted his teeth and pedaled a hundred yards. He stopped, because he couldn’t make himself go closer.

  He waited, long minutes.

  Finally, the other man sat up. Bob panicked and pedaled away, almost falling in his urgency.

  However, he stopped again, fifty feet farther away.

  The man still looked at him. He didn’t move.

  Bob pulled his nerve back together and came back the fifty feet. He waited.

  After long moments, the man stood. He began to walk around a small area, and made odd motions. After several moments of confusion, Bob realized he was getting dressed. To come out.

  Bob’s nerve almost broke again, but he held it, clenching the handlebars of the bike so hard he was afraid he would bend them. However, he didn’t move.

  After a few moments, the man moved farther out, and down. It seemed he was on the second floor of a building. He came out of the building and took a few steps toward Bob.

  Bob took a few steps back.

  The man backed up two steps and squatted down, waiting.

  Bob moved closer again.

  The man moved closer again, and this time Bob did not retreat.

  Bob started his approach approximately five miles from the man. It took almost two hours for Bob and the other man to come close to each other, a cautious dance of advance and retreat. Once, Bob’s nerve broke again and he fled for more than a mile.

  They met in the parking lot of Christ the King Missionary Baptist Church, on the north side of Orlando, at three minutes after seven in the morning. The sun was up but hidden behind the nearby buildings.

  They didn’t come close to each other. The man stopped at one end of the parking lot, and Bob stopped at the other, a hundred feet away. The man sat down on the curb.

  “You can call me Sinclair,” the man said. His voice was soft and non-threatening. Sinclair wore a hat and a suit, decent and clean. Clean-shaven and washed as well. His dark blonde hair was wavy and neatly trimmed. He looked like a normal young man, no more than twenty-five years old. He spoke so quietly no one should have been able to hear him from as far away as Bob was.

  Bob heard him.

  He was the first human being Bob hadn’t run away from in four and a half weeks.

  Bob didn’t sit. He stood by his bike and shivered, ready to bolt at the first sign of threat.

  Sinclair sat quietly. He didn’t move or fidget. After a few minutes, Bob relaxed his grip on the bike.

  Sinclair spoke again, still softly. “I’ve b
een a Transform for two years.” He paused, but when Bob did not panic again, he continued. “Looking at you, I’d guess that you’re new at it.”

  Bob nearly did panic at the man’s observation. He wanted to flee far far away from here.

  Bob stayed where he was. A shivering started, deep within him.

  “It gets better from here,” Sinclair said. Bob looked at Sinclair with the first hope he had felt since his transformation. “The panic will diminish as you learn to know what’s more dangerous and what’s less. As time goes on, you’ll learn how to live with it, how to control it, how to deal with other people. You’ve learned some control already, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m not insane? It isn’t just me?” Bob asked as quietly, his voice hoarse.

  “You’re not insane,” Sinclair said. His voice was a soothing whisper. “You’re a Major Transform, if you haven’t guessed that already.”

  Bob nodded. “What’re the real dangers?” This was the most important question. He had to know the threats. His terror wasn’t gone, but he forced it away from him.

  “Stay away from the authorities. Police, other people who might make you their business. Don’t talk to Focuses or their household Transforms. They know too much. Stay away from doctors and medical people. They could discover too much about you.”

  Bob nodded again. Sinclair’s explanation made sense.

  “Normal people are less risky,” Sinclair said, in his hushed tone. “You can find safe ones, who won’t even know you’re there. Use the fact you can see in the dark to move.”

  A part of Bob wanted him to collapse. Someone, finally, understood what had happened to him! Another part of him remained wary. Never assume, always be on guard.

  The wary part won out. He stayed standing, on the other side of the parking lot.

  “What are we?” Bob asked, desperate.

  “We’re Crows.” Across the parking lot, Sinclair looked sad and sympathetic. “The doctors don’t know about us. The Focuses do, at least some of them, and don’t trust us.”

  “Us?” Bob asked.

  “I don’t know how many of us there are. My guess is a couple of dozen in the entire U.S. Some of the senior Crows, the ones who transformed years ago, think there are nearly as many of us as there are Focuses.” Bob knew there were between a hundred and fifty and two hundred Focuses in the United States. He shivered.

  Sinclair fell silent. A mockingbird trilled in the dawn shadows. “You’re one of us now. The bright thing you can sense is juice. The muted thing you sense is a different kind of juice, something that no one besides Crows knows about. We call it dross, because it’s the waste left behind from juice use. Our bodies turn dross into juice. Always heed your metasense.”

  “Metasense?”

  “That’s the name of a Major Transform’s extra sense. Our metasense can sense farther than a Focus’s. The metasense helps us identify dangers and spot usable dross at a safe distance.”

  Bob didn’t move, but stayed where he was and listened.

  “Learn to control the panic,” Sinclair said. “Learn to deal with people and blend in. Find a way to earn money and to blend in among the normals.”

  “How?” Bob asked. He couldn’t spend money if he had any.

  “I write,” Sinclair said. “Under a pseudonym. I never use my real name anymore. Come up with a name of your own to use. Pseudonyms are safer. Find another way to earn money. I know one Crow who’s an artist. He calls himself Merlin. I know another named Waveguide who collects junk and sells it. His extra watchfulness makes him good at it. Be aware of your surroundings and be on-guard. Your senses are getting better. Be alert to everything around you. Never let yourself get low on juice. Low juice affects your judgment.”

  Bob had figured that out. “How do I find dross?

  “With great care. Avoid the big Transform Detention Centers. The senior Crows claim them and they’ll chase you away. Small town Transform Clinics are good because they’re too small to support even one Crow. The small Clinics are left for the itinerants. Find a stable unclaimed Focus household and force yourself to come close enough to take dross. The closer you get, the better the dross. You can take dross from as far away as you can sense it, but if you’re too far away, it’s just a cheat. Like trying to subsist on the smell of food.”

  Bob shivered. “How do I travel?”

  Sinclair nodded, slowly. “Travel is always hard. Driving will work, but you aren’t ready to drive yet. Trains are safer than most ways, in with people if you can stand it, in a boxcar if you can’t. There are dangerous people you might meet riding boxcars, but you aren’t defenseless.”

  “What?” Bob understood running away. Defense didn’t make sense.

  Sinclair smiled. “Think of a skunk,” he said. “But there’s another danger you should know.” The smile was gone as quickly as it appeared. “I’ve heard rumors about another kind of male Major Transform, something like us, but dangerous. Something else the doctors don’t know about, something halfway between a Monster and a human being. We call them Beast Men. If you ever run into one, stay away from it. They’re powerful and crazy, and can sense you if you get too close. Other dangers exist, as well; Crows occasionally vanish for no known reason. There’s more going on than anyone knows.

  “You’re going to have to go,” Sinclair said. “There’s not enough dross for you to stay in Orlando. But you can spend the day. I have an apartment you can use until tomorrow, with food, a shower and a few spare clothes. I’ll write the address for you. I know of a Focus west of town. I’ve taken most of the dross there, but there should be a bit for you. There’s a freight yard northwest of that.”

  Sinclair stood up and instinctively Bob backed up a few steps. Sinclair began to back away.

  “Wait!” Bob said. He still had questions. He didn’t know what he was doing. He needed help.

  Sinclair turned toward Bob, and the morning sun shone on his face. Sweat beaded on Sinclair’s temples and his eyes had narrowed. It hadn’t occurred to him that Sinclair might also find this hard.

  “What?” Sinclair asked, tense.

  “I…I just wanted to thank you. You didn’t have to do this for me, especially waking up in the middle of the night to help some stranger. This is a tremendous amount of help you’re giving me.”

  Sinclair inclined his head. “Thank you. We’re all we have. You’re doing extremely well for a young Crow. Help some other young Crow sometime.”

  Bob nodded as Sinclair turned and walked away, in his clean suit and businessman’s hat, the illusion of a normal young man going to work. Bob watched him a long time as he went.

  Then he went over to where Sinclair had sat, and found a paper with an address written on it, a key and a ten dollar bill. By that evening, Bob was shaved and showered and looked like a human being again. He suspected he still had a long way to go. Someday, he would re-pay Sinclair.

  ---

  The steady clack, clack of the boxcar thrummed in Bob’s ear. At sixty miles an hour, he relaxed enough to try to get some sleep. Sinclair had been right. Once he got past the terror of boarding, this wasn’t a bad way to travel.

  He had boarded this particular train in a freight yard outside Nashville, around midnight. Nashville hadn’t been bad, but he had only stayed a couple of days. Another Crow already lived in Nashville and he had picked the place clean of dross.

  Bob’s lack of dross left him with an edgy, unsatisfied craving. He had to find a decent source sometime soon, because this constant emptiness was hell. He hoped St. Louis would have something real for him.

  The noise of the countryside around him began to change just before dawn. The train slowed as light began to creep through the cracks in the boxcar door. If his guesses were correct, this should be a rail yard in St. Louis. Bob braced himself; he needed to get out before the train stopped. He didn’t want to sho
w himself to the rail yard workers.

  As he readied himself to leap off the train his metasense picked something up to the west, at extreme range, something he had never seen before.

  It was brilliant.

  He thought Focuses were bright. This was far brighter than a Focus, so bright he couldn’t even sense what it was. The sheer strength of the glow numbed his metasense with terrifying intensity.

  His first instinct was to flee. He looked down at the ground as it sped by and waited for the train to slow further.

  At two miles, he spotted the dross underneath the brightness, more dross than he had ever seen in his admittedly short experience as a Crow. He no longer wanted to flee. He needed it.

  He did worry about the dross source and whether the brilliant Transform could sense him or not. He had no sense of contact such as he shared with Sinclair, though. No sign the Transform had noticed him at all.

  Bob squatted as the train took him past that terrible brightness and out of range again. With a start, he realized the train had almost pulled to a stop. He had to get out now. He opened the boxcar door, jumped from the train, tumbling as he hit the ground, and ran.

  “Hey!” a man shouted behind him, but he continued running.

  Bob never looked back, but ran for the next two miles, along roads lined with factories, mills and warehouses. Then he walked toward where he had sensed the brightness, unable to resist the temptation. Fifteen minutes later, past more mills and factories, he sensed the glow again, an immense sea of dross.

  He sensed carefully all around him. No other Crows. “Maybe they panicked,” Bob said. “Or perhaps this is just too dangerous.”

  Maybe he, too, would be wiser to leave this mystery alone. The sea of dross, larger and deeper than he had ever seen before, could easily be the bait in a trap.

  The temptation was too great. Bob needed that dross. His hands shook at the mere thought of leaving it behind.

  His tongue went dry and an almost sexual anticipatory pleasure coursed through him when he metasensed it. He hadn’t known how bad his craving was for dross until he found this.

  He would stay until some more immediate threat drove him off.

  It would have to be a very large threat.

  Bob suspected he would be here for a long time.