The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four (6 page)

The pain stopped and he sat back up.  All ninety pounds
of Dahlia Woo was gone.

Tails (continued)
(1964)

He needed a plan to ditch these tails, Hank decided. 
Following Dahlia Woo’s old advice, he needed help.  He leafed through his
contacts in his mind, and found only two within a reasonable driving distance:
Focus Schrum in White Plains and Focus Abernathy in Long Hill, to the northwest
of Bridgeport.  Of the two, he trusted Focus Abernathy more – in specific, he
trusted her often-stated desire to stay out of Focus politics.  Focus Schrum,
one of the leading Focuses, bothered him more than he liked to admit.  She
wasn’t the overall leader of the Focuses, and given her personality, she could
easily take umbrage at his uninvited appearance, or be the Focus behind the
current Focus faction fight, on the side of the ones tailing him.

Focus Abernathy it was.  To get to her place, though, he
would have to backtrack a bit, as he had passed the Bridgeport exit ten minutes
ago.

His main worry was that whoever was tailing him was
using more than two vehicles.  A four-car box tail would be a bitch to lose,
and enough of a threat that Focus Abernathy would have his hide if he brought
that many people on his tail to her place.

He tried to remember all the ways you could elude a
tail, something better than driving the wrong way down a freeway.  The old
lessons came back.  Slowly. 
Do illogical things (
it makes the tailing
vehicles stand out
).  Run red lights.  Drive the wrong way down one-way
streets.  After rounding a blind curve, make a bootlegger’s turn and double
back.  Get out into the wide-open country, where sightlines are long and tails
become obvious.  Go through alleys, dirt roads, parking lots, and people’s
lawns.  Take a freeway exit without warning, cutting across as many lanes of
traffic as you can.

He decided to do the latter, after he spotted the next
exit, to Fairfield, give its one-mile warning.  He took the exit with a sudden
twist of the steering wheel, at the last possible instant.  His Mercedes
handled the cut well, and his swerve didn’t cause an accident, although the car
to his right honked at him on the way by. 

On the back roads to Long Hill, he smiled when he realized
only one vehicle still tailed him, hanging nearly a half mile back.

“You’re being tailed?” Focus Abernathy said.  “You?” 
She had come down the driveway on foot, to find out whom her two outer guards
had detained.  She wore overalls, a bandana, and smelled of manure.

He nodded.  “There they are,” he said, spotting the
wood-toned Chrysler Town and Country wagon through the bushes that lined the
road edge ditch.  He suspected the brains of the outfit had to be in the other
car, the one he had lost with his quick freeway exit.  Tailing him, here,
wasn’t very bright of them.

They spotted Hank’s vehicle, parked a mere ten feet up
Focus Abernathy’s driveway and slowed.  Hank had parked his Mercedes at the end
of the driveway on purpose, both to attract the attention of the tail, to
attract Focus Abernathy’s bodyguards’ attention, and to block the driveway in
such a way that to go around his car the unknowns would have to cross the
ditch.

“Two of them are Transforms,” Focus Abernathy said. 
“Focus DeYoung’s stooges.  I recognize the tag from when DeYoung visited last
month, when she tried to get me to turn coat on Suzie.”

Focus Abernathy’s loose lips answered a half dozen
questions Hank had futilely asked several other Focuses.  Most Focuses wouldn’t
have recognized the owner of another Tansform’s tag, but Focus Abernathy had
the power and the talent.  Now if only she had brains too, she would be a top
end Focus.

The vehicle sped up, and both Hank and Focus Abernathy
ducked down behind Hank’s Mercedes.  “That’ll teach’m,” Focus Abernathy said,
chuckling her old farmwoman best, as the Chrysler sped on by.

“You didn’t,” Hank said, secretly pleased.  Things were
looking up.  The opposition, this ‘Focus DeYoung’, wasn’t even a Focus he had
ever heard of.  She had to be from somewhere other than the Northeast Region,
and both young and stupid.  Focus Suzie Schrum was opposing Focus DeYoung, and
thus ostensibly on his side in this.

More accurately, he was on their side.  Politics often
got in the way of his research and his ability to help Focuses and their
households.

“Uh huh, Hank,” Focus Abernathy said.  “I untagged the
sons of bitches.”

Focus Schrum was going to owe Focus Abernathy for saving
Hank’s bacon, as well as counting coup on the opposition.  Focus Abernathy knew
this quite well, enough to scratch a smile across her dour face.

---

Hank drove by the address in Queens once, careful.  As
advertised, the place was a small run down vacant warehouse.  He found no cars
parked out front, so after checking yet again to make sure he had lost the
tails, he circled around back.  Someone had cleared an obvious path across a
truck parking area, removing the weeds growing through the asphalt.  The path
led to an open truck-sized doorway.  He caught a flicker of movement from
inside, a hand wave he interpreted as ‘get the hell inside before anyone sees
you’.  Keaton, he guessed.  He rolled inside the warehouse and turned off his Mercedes.

Keaton opened the car door, yanked him out, and sat him
painfully on the concrete floor.  While he sat she rifled through his car,
inspecting his teaching materials, every other second swiveling her head out
the doorway.  A half minute later she walked away, grabbed a walkie-talkie from
her belt, and held a whispered conversation.  At the end, she said “Fuck” and
slammed shut the warehouse door.

“Zielinski, the Focus Bitch said you could help me.  She
promised you would be able to help me.  So far, one strike.”  She stalked back,
lifted him up, and held a knife to his right eye.  “You’d better hope you can
help me and my medical issues for real, or it’s strike two and I’m going to cut
out your eye and feed it to my guard dogs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.  He didn’t hear any guard dogs. 
He had no idea what she meant about strike one, either.  Somehow, he had
already disappointed her.  “I’m ready right now, ma’am.”

“Do it, motherfucker,” she said.  Her voice was raspy,
as if she had been shouting for hours.  As he gathered his materials, he
studied her as best he could out of the corner of his eyes.  She looked worn,
not wounded.  Hassled and annoyed.  Twitchy and paranoid.  Her hair was a wig
and she was dressed as a female factory worker.  Smudges covered her face, she
had an M-16 slung over her right shoulder, and as she walked she clanked, or
her small backpack clanked.  Extra ammo.  A great deal of extra ammo.

What, did she expect he would visit a potentially
hostile Arm armed?

At least she was past her pawnshop pistol phase.

As he set up the mirrors, the easels and a small TV
table for his notes, an armed man walked out of the shadows toward them.  Hank
froze, but Keaton didn’t.  She signaled with one finger, and the man followed, to
stand beside Hank’s Mercedes.  Blocking the driver’s side door of the
Mercedes.  He, too, carried a walkie-talkie, and proved Hank’s guess about
Keaton hiring other thugs correct when he talked to one of them on the
walkie-talkie.

“Ma’am,” he said.  “You aren’t the first Arm to suffer
from these particular muscle issues.  I can help.”

“Fine.  Give me the magic pill or injection and get the
hell out of here,” Keaton said.

“It’s not that simple, ma’am.”

She strode up to him and looked him in the eye.  “How
so?”  He didn’t know how she did so, but she, at just over five feet tall, was
about the most intimidating human being he had ever met, and he had met some
real winners in his day.

Was this the Arm equivalent of the Focus lie-detector
trick?  If so, she needed practice.  “It’s based on knowledge, and you can cure
yourself with an appropriate change in diet and exercise.”

Keaton relaxed.  “Huh.”  She looked at his set up.  “Who
the fuck are these idiots?

“The picture on the left is a standard male muscle
anatomy chart,” he said.  “Male, because, well, they don’t make any female
anatomy charts with the right muscle proportions.  On the center easel is a
blown up and annotated photograph of Focus Abernathy” who wouldn’t have been at
all amused to find out he had this with him today, when he visited “and the
next easel over has a blown up and annotated photograph of a more recently
transformed Focus who goes by the name of Mother.”  Mother wore considerably
more clothes.  Focus Abernathy had been willing to strip down to her panties
and bra, quite proud of the way she looked.  He hadn’t gotten Mother to reveal
more than her arms and legs.

“Huh again,” Keaton said.  “I hadn’t realized the
Focuses got the same shit body changes I have.”  She walked over to the
Abernathy poster and pointed to the ankles and wrists, then turned to the
standard anatomy poster.  “Joe the normal here’s muscles are different.”

So much for his long prepared lecture.  Damn, but the
Arms were good at this sort of thing.  He had Doctors with twenty years of
experience miss these subtle changes until he showed them.  Twice.  “Not the
muscles, but the attachment points, where the muscle tendons attach to the
bones,” he said.  They tended all to be uniformly wider, and closer to the central
joints, which increased reaction times at the cost of reduced leverage and
strength.

“This one,” Keaton said, pointing at the Abernathy
poster, “has more changes than this one.”  Pointing at the Mother poster.  Fully
engaged, her bad mood vanished.

“Five years versus two years as a Focus,” Hank said. 
“Your changes are happening much faster, ma’am, because you’re an Arm and have
a much higher juice count.”  He watched her as she studied the diagrams.  “The
relevance of this to your problem is thus: all Major Transforms subtly remake
their bodies.  The problem with your painful joints is due to this remaking
process going haywire.  I found this hard to believe when I first discovered
this issue, but you’re growing muscle tissue inside your joints, what I term
muscle nodules.”

“Huh,” Keaton said.  She circled around him and stuck
her head over his right shoulder.  Disquieting.  “Who had this problem before? 
One of your earlier Arm failures?”

Hank nodded.  “Rose Desmond developed them in her
wrists, and the Focus on the far right, Mother, developed them in her hips.” 
He went on to explain Mother’s unique medical history, the only Focus ever to
transform while suffering from early onset dementia.  Until her mind
redeveloped, she couldn’t walk, and had been confined to a wheelchair.

“Wrists, though?” Keaton asked, about Desmond.

“Rose liked to run, and did no other exercise until
after her wrist problems started.”

“So, somehow, I’m exercising the wrong muscles,” Keaton
said.

“Yes.  To find out what, I’m going to need you to strip
down, ma’am, and…”

Keaton flung him to the hard concrete warehouse floor
and put her right foot on his chest.  “Motherfucking pervert.”

Hank closed his eyes for a moment, attempting to catalog
all the pains and aches caused by the toss to the concrete.  Left shoulder and
hip.  Back of his head.  Left hand and wrist.  He looked up at Keaton in fear. 
Inhuman anger spread over her face, her nostrils flared, her blue-grey eyes
cold daggers as she continued to press down on his chest with her foot.  He readied
several arguments, but decided waiting out the Arm would be safer.

“So you’re a real doctor, not just some fancy
researcher?” Keaton said, barely a question.

“I served as a general practitioner and surgeon in the
Korean War, a surgeon after the war, and after I began to work with the
Transforms, I’ve done an extensive amount of GP work.”  Just the facts.  No
emotions.  Not with Keaton about to go Arm berserk on him.

“Fine,” she said.  She took her foot off his chest. 
“Get up.” 

Yes, there was an Arm equivalent of the Focus lie
detector trick, and Arms got it sometime after six months as an Arm, as Rose had
never showed any sign of it.  Keaton must have had it in his earlier encounter
with her, but he hadn’t noticed. 

He stood.  She disrobed down to her panties and bra.  He
stopped in astonishment and gazed, spellbound, at her body.  Amazing.  She
showed nearly as many muscles as his anatomy diagram, her skin almost
translucent in its thinness.  Every exterior muscle showed precise definition,
her veins standing out so much he could count her pulse as he watched.  “This
level of Arm development is new to me, ma’am,” he said, slowly, almost
reverently.  “If you don’t mind, I would like to take a picture of…”

“Will it help me?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“No head,” Keaton said.  She smiled, happy at his
awestruck reaction to her near naked body, and took the Abernathy poster,
flipped it around and covered her head.  He took his pictures.  “You really are
fascinated by us Arms, aren’t you, Doc.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.  “Arms are my calling, and, I
believe, a level of human perfection beyond that of even the Focuses.”  Her Arm
beauty, all those precisely sculpted muscles, would be a lot more striking if
her muscle development wasn’t so asymmetric.  “If you would, ma’am, I would
like to show you, in the mirror, where your problems lie.”

She complied, eager now.  He suspected, deep in the back
of her mind, she thought of herself as a monster, not as a woman or as a Major
Transform.  The fact he saw her differently helped immensely.  He suspected,
now, that Keaton was able to read him better than just ‘truth’ or ‘lies’.  To
some small degree, she was able to discern his deeper emotions, at least enough
to sense his true wonder at her mature Arm body-form.

“As you can see, ma’am, the muscles on the left side of
your body are visually smaller than those on the right.”  He measured around
her biceps, lower arm, calf and thigh, carefully wrote down the measurements,
and shared them with Keaton.  Her left thigh was only an inch less in
circumference than her right thigh, but her left arm was an amazing 3.2 inches
smaller around the biceps than her right arm.  She, it appeared, was very right
handed.  “Humans, including Major Transforms, have 640 different skeletal
muscles.  I wasn’t able to find any documentation on how one might exercise
each of those 640, but I do have a portfolio of information I’ve obtained from
bodybuilders and Olympic weightlifting programs covering their training
regimens.”