Free The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Eight by Randall Farmer

unwelcome physical contact.  He tried to pull away from me, but I didn’t let him.  Heat rose between my thighs and added to a hot flush of rising arousal.  I loved this sort of thing.
    “You’re a failure,” I said, my breath hot on his face.  “You’ve screwed up your life, you’ve screwed up your family, and you can’t even do a decent job as a school teacher.  You need to be under orders because you can’t live life on your own.  You aren’t going to find what you need by following something merely human, because nothing human is going to be able to handle a fucked up mess like you.  But you’ve gotten lucky.  I’m far more than human.  Just maybe, if you can qualify, you might be a soldier in the army of the future of humanity.”
    I stroked from his shoulder down the length of his arm, and the lust in me rose to an ache of need. I hadn’t done something this arousing in a long time, even with the extensive recruiting I had been doing since I moved to Houston. I smiled at him, and the sexual heat I concealed behind my smile made it even more unnerving. Even Ricky looked unsettled. Fred smiled his own smile of rising lust, but his was a smaller thing than mine. This type of cruelty was too subtle for him.
    Tom looked at me with a growing uneasiness, and the fear he kept firmly leashed was growing stronger.
    “You’re crazy,” he told me in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t know what the hell you are, but you are fucking crazy.”
    Fred followed my unvoiced signal and silenced him with a kick right on the kidneys.  I let my smile fade and watched Tom as he gasped and sweated and brought the pain under control.  When he looked back at me, all he saw in my eyes was ice.
    “You need to know who you’re working for, human.”  I spoke in a low, cold, inflectionless voice.  “My name is Carol Hancock.”  I ran my hand over his cropped, sponge-like hair and waited.
    A beat, another beat, and his mind made the connection.  I knew when he figured out I was an Arm by the pallor on his face.  My reputation wasn’t a good one, from my days as the California Spree Killer, to the CDC massacre, to Keaton’s bank robbery spree while disguised as me, and my recent occasional trips to the Carolinas to harass the FBI and make them think my territory was somewhere along the southeast Atlantic coast.  I had become a national legend, back from the dead and nastier than ever.
    I ran my hand over him once more and then left him, to learn some important lessons from his guards.  Life would become much more difficult for him by the next time I visited.  The thought sent a flash of heat through me and I had a sudden overwhelming urge to screw Tom Delacort on the spot.  Instead, I left the room, with no one the wiser.
     
    I’ve already said I have a good selection of some nasty sadistic urges rattling around in my head.  Mostly, I tried to keep them under some amount of control.  I picked them up during those months with Keaton right after I made my transformation, when she was breaking my mind and remaking me in her image.  They were something more than the easy cruelty of the predator, and I suspected they were some twisted distortion of what should have been my natural predatory instincts.  The lingering corrupt remnants of my own madness.
    I didn’t give those urges free reign.  Neither did I deny them completely.  They were far too powerful.  Besides, I enjoyed them too much.  Therefore, I exercised some control over myself and restrained my actions.  Over the urges themselves, I had no control at all.
    The urges were black and ugly things, the dark underside of an unhealthy mind.  Power and cruelty and destruction and lust mixed into a vicious stew.  Cruelty aroused me and the rush of power and lust as I hurt and killed gripped me at a level far deeper than my conscious mind.
    However, mine wasn’t an undiscriminating taste, and some kinds of cruelty touched me much more than others.  I