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

Tonya’s smile widened as she thought about Arm charisma, which is what she had just experienced.  Drill s
ergeant charisma.  Excellent for combat operations.  If she successfully forged an alliance with Keaton, she would have a Major Transform as part of her household security team.

“Got them, ma’am,”
Todd said, from the roof.  “Forty or so, well-armed, and I believe with a Focus among them.”

Forty.  So, Tonya thought.  Who was going to end up the trapper and who the trappee?  Forty was more than she thought Focus Julius could muster for an attack.  About double Tonya’s best estimate.

This didn’t bode well.  Perhaps her impolite, taunting and threatening phone call – to induce Julius to attack – hadn’t been such a bright idea.  Yet, unless Julius broke the implicit no-violence ‘truce’, the Council would continue to lose their nerve, and continue to postpone, indefinitely, the necessary full-scale assault on Julius’s household.

Tonya put her hand on the brick facade of the row house, taking a moment to breathe deeply and steady herself for combat. 
Just like hunting Monsters.  Only this time, the Monster was a Focus and her troops, and the kill zone would be the entryway to her own home.

“Set it up for internal defense Blue,” Tonya said, gathering her armed me
n, who were streaming out of the other row houses into the bright sun.  “Everyone else, into the safe rooms.”

Blue was a gamble, but as with all things Focus, the politics of the fight was important.  The
attackers had to shoot first.

“You will surrender, now,” Focus Julius said.  Tonya ignored Julius’s charisma easily.

Despite how
off
Julius’s Transforms felt, and their numbers, Tonya was starting to think her household had a chance.  Julius didn’t know a thing about combat tactics.  She and about twenty of her people filled the entryway of Tonya’s row house, six of them ringed tightly around the short Focus.  Tonya and her people were set up on the doors out of the entryway, half of her shooters kneeling and the rest standing behind them.  Only nine shooters, including Tonya.

“Isn’t going to happen,” Tonya said.  “Coming here was foolish, bitch.  Lay down your weapons, now.”  Her charisma should be strong enough to
affect Julius’s soldiers.  What was Julius thinking?  There wasn’t a normal among her troops inside Tonya’s row house, and only three in her entire group.  How could she support so many male Transforms?  They all wore Julius’s tags.

Tonya metasensed Julius flinch, but Tonya’s charisma didn’t affect the soldiers.  This matched the rumors Tonya had
heard, but found hard to believe, that Julius’s male Transforms were charisma-resistant.

“So be it,” Julius said.

The rebel first Focus hand-signaled, invisible to Tonya’s eyes but not to her metasense.  As Julius signaled, Tonya yanked on her people’s juice, Tonya’s signal to fall back.  A moment later, Julius’s troops fired at empty air.

Two juice yanks.  Tonya’s people fired, carefully, ducking in and out of
contact with the invaders as they did so.  Two of Julius’s people fell.

“Back,” Tonya said.  Of her people, only Roger
Ebbs, a normal, was wounded, but right now she was stalling for time.

Pop pop pop.  From outside the row house.  Three
of Julius’s Transforms outside the house winked out of Tonya’s metasense.  Head shots.  Tonya grinned, feral.  Yes!  Keaton.  Tonya had no idea where Keaton was set up, likely across the street, but another of her gambles had paid off.

Screaming chaos from Julius’s people drowned out the ongoing gunfire outside, as Julius’s troops opened up inside Tonya’s row house, spraying gunfire everywhere,
panicked and wild.  Tonya winced as a partly spent bullet that had passed through an interior wall hit her.  Blood spurted from Bobby Harper’s upper right arm as well, a bad hit.  Danny, a house medic as well as bodyguard, helped drag Bobby out of the combat area and tended his wound.

Outside the row house
Keaton continued to fire, as one by one, enemy Transforms vanished from Tonya’s metasense.  Tonya followed the surviving enemy Transforms with her metasense as they gave up on the assault and fled in open panic.  Her people, following the Blue plan, had been waiting for this, and pushed forward with a counterattack.  She followed, hoping to engage Julius and end the rebellion here, but Julius had already fled.  Three more of the attackers fell, inside the row house, before the back end of the invading squad exited the too-narrow-for-easy-flight doorway, all three still alive, at least for now.

Outside, two more of the enemy Transforms
fell, gunshot wounds to their lower bodies, hit far more times than it would take to stop them.  Well, she had told the Arm that enemy tagged Transforms were legitimate juice-suck targets.  She did wonder how she was going to explain this to her people.

Sirens wailed, approaching, as Julius and her people ran
in panic out of Tonya’s metasense range.  Before the police arrived, the two wounded but not dead Transforms in the street vanished from Tonya’s metasense range as well, physically dragged away…in the other direction.  Yes, Keaton was going to have a feast.

Tonya had won the battle, but not the
war.  Julius had escaped Tonya’s trap.

---

“You’re better at bamboozling the police than I realized,” Hank said.  They had commandeered the kitchen of the row house Hank lived in for the autopsy.  Needless to say, her people had cleared out, save for her bodyguards and the two wounded captives.  Martha, who considered this kitchen hers, was already grumbling.

Tonya had only lost two people in the gunfight, Robert
Culver, a Transform, and Marco Wilson, a normal, married to Althea, one of her Transforms.  Four others had wounds bad enough to need Hank’s full attention.  She hadn’t let herself grieve yet, using her own charisma to damp down her emotions.  “Find anything yet?” Tonya said.  She wanted answers to the rebel Transforms’ charisma resistance.

“Nope,” Hank said.  He had bunkered down with her non-fighters in the row house where she had him stashed, and her people said he had been the least panicked of them all, and had, in his wheelchair, helped cover a door.  “This is going to get a little messy,” he said.  “A circular saw isn’t a bone saw.  I’m not making any guarantees that I won’t screw this up.”

“Go to.”

The saw, and a hammer and chisel, did their jobs in Hank’s steady hands, and after a messy five minutes, he had the brain open
, and blood dripping off the commandeered kitchen worktable down to the floor.  Another two minutes passed before Hank let out a whistle.

“I’ve never seen this before,” he said, after Tonya came up.

Neither had she, though as far as autopsies went, this was the first she had participated in on a human.  She had expected the gore to bother her, at least a little, but it didn’t.  The Monsters she had seen autopsied must have been human enough inside to inure her.  “Those are withdrawal scars,” she said, inspecting the bloody exposed brain.  “But I’ve never seen them in a pattern like…wait.”

Goosebumps covered her body, in sudden fear.  She closed her eyes and metasensed the captives.  Yes.  Dammit!

“Tonya?”

“A second,” she said, gathering her thoughts.  Everything became clear
to her: the Julius rebellion, Julius’ absurd number of male Transforms, and their previously unexplained charisma resistance.  “Focus Schrum’s people metasense the same, but I’d never realized before why.  This was done to them on purpose.”

“I don’t understand,” Hank said.

“Suzie’s people have similar scarring, at least as far as I can metasense.  Unlike any other Focus I know of, she regularly punishes her people by taking them down into withdrawal for a few seconds.  She says that if you do it right, you can change someone’s personality, and how they react to the juice, and she’s offered to teach me the trick several times.  I’ve seen her do this.”  Her withdrawal-dipping trick hadn’t been a pretty sight.  Tonya thought herself a hard woman, but the day she saw Suzie Schrum do the withdrawal-dipping to one of her own people, Tonya had learned how soft she was.

“Directed withdrawal scarring,” Hank said, now radiating high anger and fear.  She had never sensed him angry, before.  Outwardly, he hid
his emotions well.

“I turned down her offer, Hank,” Tonya said
, quickly.  “Human beings shouldn’t be able to do this to one another.  It’s just wrong.”

Hank nodded.
  He paused, thinking, and slowly relaxing.  “If we posit that directed withdrawal scarring can change a Transform, than this explains all the troubling aspects of the fight you described.”  He wanted to wring his blood soaked hands together, but just as he was about to, he stopped.  Too messy.

Tonya used h
er charisma to buoy Hank, who probably hadn’t stood this long since his injury.  “I believe it does, but I’d like to hear your explanation to see if matches up with mine.”

“Her soldiers weren
’t full members of her household, but people grabbed from Clinics to serve as shooters.  Cannon fodder.  Expendables.  They are made to obey and fight by the withdrawal scarring.  I can explain the charisma resistance the same way – by burning their empathy out of their minds.  That’s how Focus charisma works, I strongly suspect, by engaging the hormonal and neural pathways associated with empathy.”  He paused and took a deep breath, difficult with a corpse and open brain in front of them.  “This is what Julius wants with her rebellion – freedom for Focuses to do
this crap
to their people.  The only thing I can’t figure out is what drove her to this level of inhumanity.”  She had never heard Hank open up before, on any topic of Transform morality.  She had wondered where his limits were, or even if he had any.  She was glad to find his limits near her own.

“Ignore the why,” Tonya said.  “The ‘how’ here is
critically important, something we can use.  Stooping this low is a serious mistake on Julius’ part.  Do you understand?”

Hank blinked, and turned to her.  “It’s a political lever,” he said, as she said the exact same words.

“How do you feel about presenting this to the Council?” Tonya said.  They had to act, and act fast.  It wouldn’t take Julius and her crony Focuses long to figure out why the attack on Tonya’s place went wrong.  Keaton, still not recovered and still not experienced enough to know how to escape from a multi-Focus manhunt, would have a life expectancy measured in weeks.  Since Julius had escaped Tonya’s trap, Tonya’s life expectancy wasn’t much longer unless she could get the Council’s backing to do something to stop Julius.  Next time, Julius would show up with several households of her South Region cronies and overwhelm Tonya and her people.

Using Keaton this way was only a one shot trick.

“Only if you agree to let me go, afterwards.”

“I can agree to that.”

Grilled Zielinski
(1964)

Not
even one of the South Region Focuses attended the emergency Focus Council meeting, though Focus Claunch did proxy her vote to Polly and send her condolences.  Scary politics, and nerve-wracking.

Hank wondered what had been going through his mind to make him think that attending a Council meeting, especially on this subject, would be either sane, conducive to his health, helpful to his career, or even helpful to any of the Focuses he normally dealt with.  None of whom were here.

Too many of the wrong sort of Focuses attended the meeting in the half-empty warehouse, three in particular who weren’t on the Council: Focuses Donna Fingleman, Suzie Schrum, and Wini Adkins.  Both Fingleman and Adkins looked at him with unabashed hatred, while Suzie eyed him hungrily.

He should have come disguised.  With a false name.  He suspected Tonya’s charisma had gotten to him, and he hadn’t even noticed.  Dammit, he
had thought he was better than this.

He found himself standing while the Focuses sat in wooden folding chairs in an irregular circle around him.  Various reheated snacks filled scattered card tables, but the odor of them was lost in the
chemical smell of some sort of oil-based product in stacked drums that filled the other half of the warehouse.

“Dr. Zielinski, did you witness the attack?” Focus
Keisterman asked.  He turned to face her.  She, the Council president, was a classic doctor and researcher hating Focus, one he had dealt with only once before.  He had left the year-ago meeting shaking and vowing to stay out of Focus politics for good.  The force of her gaze was powerful enough to make his hands shake, again, and his voice quaver.

“Parts of it,” he said.  “I was in the next door building, helping defend the non-combatants.”

“From a wheelchair?”  The Focuses tittered, sabotaging his control and making him doubt his own memories.  Group Focus charisma.  He wasn’t sure if any of these strong-willed Focuses understood the power of their group charisma, to him far more potent than a simple linear sum would indicate.

“I am familiar with firearms, madam President,” he said.  “Nor
am I psychologically thrown by combat.”

Focus Sanderson leaned over to Focus Elspeth and audibly whispered “Trust Tonya to drag one of her mad scientists
into this mess.”  Sanderson’s comment set off a whispered wave of Focus backbiting that Focus Keisterman had to glare into submission before she could continue.