Blood Born

by Matthew Warner

  “Let go of me.”

  “No. Not until you stop playing games and act normal.”

  I’ve had enough of him. “What’s normal, Eric? I indulge in your stupid little fetish?”

  “Oh, you bitch. . . .”

  His upper lip curled—not far enough to show the sharpened tooth, but enough for her to marvel at the snotty plaque on his teeth and at herself for having kissed it.

  Eric seized her other hand before she could stop him. His eyes, normally soft and filled with an impish blend of cheer and sarcasm, now looked like bits of black glass.

  “Let go of me.”

  Daniella failed to twist out of his grasp. The question exploded across her mind—What’s he gonna do, rape me?—and when she realized the answer might be yes, her whole body went rigid.

  Chapter 2

  A moment after Margaret left her voicemail for her daughter, her smug smile faded. She wondered if she should be worried.

  She knew Daniella and her boyfriend were probably just out joyriding or seeing friends or necking or (God forbid) arguing about whether to use a condom. And Daniella better if I’ve taught her anything. My god, is she really a young woman already?

  But the mother inside her was also alarmed by the rash of missing college students and young professional women over the past couple weeks; four or five of them, at least. The media were covering it with their usual callous aplomb, speculating openly about whether the disappearances were linked. Daniella would be fine since she was out with someone, but Margaret still worried.

  Meanwhile, the computer screen stared at her, waiting to be fed sentences that couldn’t rise through her fog of caffeine withdrawal.

  “Damn this company for making me do this.”

  On the rare occasions when she wrote, it was about things like the resumption of luteinizing hormone pulsatility and hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, written for obscure scientific journals and certainly not for The Washington Post, as this one would be.

  Because here was the bottom line: she knew she’d screwed up by staying here after they’d been bought out by CalPark Holdings & Company, and there was nothing she could do about it now. Daniella was on her way to college in a couple years, her own retirement loomed a short while beyond that, and they simply needed the money.

  “Damn.”

  She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Is that where she’d gone wrong, by becoming too dependent on this place?

  The good ol’ days were over, so there was no point in playing the could’ve/would’ve/should’ve game. There was no point, for instance, in wondering if she should’ve gone to work someplace else after completing her fellowship in reproductive endocrinology and infertility two decades ago. As it was, she’d joined the staff of the ARTful Fertility Clinic of McLean (ART standing for Assisted Reproductive Technologies), a community practice where a lovely old English doctor took her under his wing.

  Nope. Wouldn’t change that part.

  Dr. Giles, a handlebar-mustached man with crooked teeth and hair like a broom’s bristles, taught her more about what it meant to be a doctor than any of her stuffy professors at medical school. With his sense of humor, compassion, and experience (he’d been a colleague of the doctors who delivered the first test-tube baby in 1978), he taught her to love her work and her patients. Somehow, he always found time to shoot the breeze with patients—to ask how their jobs were going and how their kids were doing at school—instead of just trying to process as many as possible in a given hour. He reminded her that patients were people, not meat. Dr. Giles could also slice through corporate red tape in ways she’d never mastered, always badgering the CEO to invest in the latest technologies, exciting Margaret with the sense that they were on the cutting edge of medicine.

  Most importantly, though, her mentor introduced her to his financial planner, Henry, whom she’d later married. And Henry had given her a happy, healthy daughter: Daniella.

  Nope, wouldn’t change that part, either.

  But when Henry died, the milk soured. That same year, Dr. Giles announced his early retirement and moved to a lakeside home in Tampa, Florida, where he befriended a wild alligator. Giles often fed “Mr. Gaytah” with scraps off the backyard grill. This continued until Mr. Gaytah repaid Giles by having him for dessert.

  In the meantime, the pus bag hired by the ARTful Fertility Clinic to replace Giles decided to take a more hands-on approach to intrauterine insemination by replacing donor sperm with his own. The resultant scandal wasn’t quite as high-profile as that of Cecil “the Sperminator” Jacobson, who’d impregnated dozens of patients with his own sperm in the Eighties, but the malpractice suit damaged the clinic enough to send it into a downward financial spiral.

  Finally, the CEO sold out to CalPark Biotech, a subsidiary of a large holdings corporation in California that invested in everything from pharmaceuticals to real estate. CalPark sought to establish an East Coast base of operations for its research into stem cells and germ line therapy. For some reason Margaret never fully fathomed, CalPark thought the bones of a dying fertility clinic was a logical place upon which to build that base.

  Except CalPark didn’t construct the new facility in the attractive office-townhouse complex that had been ARTful’s home—a place landscaped with azalea bushes, a manmade lake, and ancient oaks that bespoke health and stability. Instead, it moved them three miles south to the cold, glass towers of Tyson’s Corner.

  Margaret stood up from her neglected work and closed her door. On the back, she’d hung a poster advertising the grand opening of CalPark Fertility Clinic’s new office. The snakes of a medical caduceus wove obscenely through a corporate logo consisting of the letters C and P.

  She yanked out a trio of darts from the wooden door. Then she stepped back and began to throw them at the poster.

  For a while, things had looked up: CalPark stabilized their finances, gave them more space, and expanded their operations. But then they’d opened their “research” department one floor higher and replaced all of the inviting glass doors to the main hallways with gray metal ones. They’d then locked those doors, necessitating Margaret to carry around a white plastic keycard. It opened everything but the research department’s entrance. She hadn’t seen the inside of that fucking place in four years, and she wasn’t sure the rest of the world had, either. C’mon, now—her laboratory, on the clinic floor, which performed services such as hormonal testing, endured regular inspections from entities like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Why didn’t the research department undergo those inspections?

  “That’s none of your concern,” the medical director had said the first time she asked that question. “For all intents and purposes, just think of the research floor as a separate company.”

  Yeah, that’s where she should’ve bailed. Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve—and now too late.

  One of the darts bounced off the door and fell at her feet. Margaret picked it up and examined it. Overuse had bent the point backward into a blunt hook.

  At first, the research department had complemented the fertility clinic. Its rumored supercomputers and electron microscope added new services to patient care. One example was preimplantation genetic diagnosis (or “PGD”)—the genetic testing of embryos for birth defects such as cystic fibrosis and Down syndrome. Through advanced PGD, they could even tell the sex of an embryo and its hair and eye color—plus locate the genetic markers of intelligence and athletic ability. But patients so far hadn’t requested that level of information, and Margaret doubted the clinic would provide it if they did. That day was coming, however—or so argued the televangelist-turned-author whom Margaret had been assigned to rebut.

  She continued throwing darts until one by one they lay at her feet. They weren’t all blunt; her aim was just off tonight.

  An unaccountable feeling of anxiety was growing within her, making her heart speed up and her head ache. It was like the time she’d been at the grocery store when Henry suffered a series of
grand-mal seizures at the cancer hospice. On that awful morning, she’d found herself unable to place food into her shopping cart without first dropping it. Her butterfingers ceased only when she called to see if everything was all right, and of course it hadn’t been.

  She now peered at her computer and mounds of paper. Was it the writing assignment that was upsetting her? Probably. That, and being here on a Friday night. She knew she’d precipitated this project as punishment for her complaints about the ever-widening sea of internal red tape and about her inability to access the research department. At one point, management promised to send her a replacement white keycard—one that opened everything, including the research department—but of course it never did so.

  In any case, a middle manager in some cubicle in Los Angeles had read her complaints and identified her as someone who could write. Margaret envisioned him—whoever he was—as a pot-bellied, bald-headed little man with sweaty jowls, eyes bloodshot from internet porn, and mustard stains on his tie. His memo to the Powers That Be (re: That Loudmouthed Bitch in Virginia) had no doubt begun, Who cares if we’ve retained a public relations firm to write these types of things? We have a “writer” at our facility in Virginia! Surely she’ll fit it in among her patient-care duties.

  Making it worse was that they’d ordered her to justify PGD, germ line therapy, and somatic genetic enhancement with respect to the Human Genome Project—in other words, research. And that put her into the odd position of defending the work of the very department that had never let her inside its doors.

  “No doubt they have a coffee maker that works,” she said—and with that, she grabbed her stained mug and stormed off toward the elevator. She needed caffeine, dammit. Tonight, with no one here and her nerves clamoring, it seemed like the perfect time for an unscheduled tour of the research department—that is, if she could get through its door.

  It would have been easier to climb the stairs, but Margaret had learned early that those were for fire emergencies only: all but the bottom stairwell door were locked in one direction so that you couldn’t re-enter a floor. Once on the stairs, the only option was to descend to the lobby.

  Margaret gave little thought to this, however, as she entered the elevator. She used the hem of her lab coat to depress the up arrow—a habit she’d acquired at Duke University while studying retroviruses. But she didn’t dwell on this either because she was staring at the coffee mug Daniella gave her for her birthday. On its side, a rainbow rose over grazing cows and proclaimed, “Life begins at 50!” Between “begins at” and “50,” the numbers 30 and 40 were printed and crossed out.

  Mid-life. Maybe that’s why she was so irritated tonight. All this remembrance and introspection—besides being a great way to procrastinate from her assignment—was really the onset of a mid-life crisis. She was realizing that she needed to do something with herself: find a new man, make some friends, possibly leave the corporate monstrosity of CalPark and rediscover her love of medicine. She doubted in a private practice she’d spend so much time battling the faceless authors of employee manuals or being shoehorned into writing PR articles that she didn’t really believe in.

  The elevator doors swished open. Margaret stepped out into a long, silent hallway lit only by every third ceiling light.

  Maybe she was just uneasy about working here late and alone.

  On her left stood the door to the research department: unlabeled and with the eye of a security card reader at its side, its pupil shining with a red dot of laser light. Margaret approached the card reader and pulled her white card from her lab coat. She knew what would happen—it would beep and refuse to open—but she needed to try anyway. She had attempted to enlist the other doctors in her protest against this injustice, but they either said they had already been up here and there wasn’t much to look at, or they didn’t care what the “techies” did so long as it didn’t interfere with the medical practice.

  As Margaret walked the dozen paces to the door, a sensation of warmth rose within her head and along the back of her neck, and flowed down her body.

  Is someone . . . ?

  She whirled, scanning the half-lit hallway.

  No, she was alone—but the unnatural sensations on her skin intensified. The air-conditioned chill of the hallway, so severe it made her nose run, disappeared under the rising heat—heat that she now realized came from her body. She felt a twinge of panic as she considered possibilities: fever from a viral infection? A symptom of the anxiety she’d felt earlier? Maybe the research department was conducting weird experiments with microwaves that—

  “No, you stupid girl, get a hold of yourself.” She unbuttoned her lab coat. “I must be . . .”

  She snorted a laugh.

  Oh my god. I’m having a hot flash. My first hot flash.

  Then she was laughing for real—a loud, tittering sound that she knew annoyed people. She’d taken pains to eradicate that tendency during her residency in order to improve her bedside manner. But sometimes, like a herpes sore, her Amadeus giggle returned in times of stress. Well, so what. She was alone, and she was tired and depressed and now apparently perimenopausal, which explained her moodiness. So fuck it all if she couldn’t—

  The card-reader to the research department beeped of its own accord. The door unlatched.

  Margaret’s hot flash abruptly climbed three degrees. Sweat prickled her neck and upper lip. She battled an urge to flee into the stairwell.

  There’s nothing to be guilty about, she told herself. You haven’t even broken into the research department—yet.

  Still, she hugged the wall when a shadowy form exited into the hallway and fixed its glare upon her.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Eric fastened his mouth onto Daniella’s, his lips as hard as metal. He thrust one of Daniella’s hands onto the bulge in his jeans. She felt the wetness growing there and wondered if she’d asked for this; after all, she hadn’t exactly objected to the hints he’d been dropping all week. Maybe she had been playing games and shouldn’t blame him for being angry.

  “Mmm,” Eric moaned as he kneaded her hand on his crotch. He was squeezing her other wrist so hard that her hand was going numb. “Feel it, baby. Feel it . . .”

  And that’s what did it, that word, baby. She wasn’t his baby, one of his conquests with the warm must-be-ovulating pussies. She wasn’t a baby or a babe or a bitch or anything else besides Daniella. And she didn’t care what she may or may not have done all week. Eric didn’t have the right to—

  She saw the pointed tooth the moment before he descended on her neck.

  “No!” she shouted—and because she couldn’t do anything else, she squeezed the moist bulge in his pants as hard as she could.

  Eric sucked air through his pointy, plaque-laden teeth and bellowed in pain. He pulled Daniella’s hand off his crotch so fast that she slipped free of his grasp completely.

  Daniella smacked him across the face. “Let go of me!”

  Her other hand was free now. She clawed at the door until it opened. Eric snagged the back of her tank top as she scrambled out. It ripped down to her butt.

  “Daniella, come back!”

  She screamed and held the torn remnants of her shirt over her breasts as she ran away. A moment later, she heard him slam the passenger door and start the engine.

  The parking garage elevator would take too long, so she dashed down the stairs. Her screams caught in her throat as she started sobbing.

  On the level below, she yelled for help, but this area was also empty. Eric’s car appeared on the ramp and rocketed toward her. She ran down another level.

  Daniella continued down the stairs. She kept one hand on the railing and the other hugging her shirt to herself. The car’s wheels squealed as Eric turned after her.

  At the next level, Daniella reversed directions and started up again. She wasn’t sure the fake would work and didn’t know what she’d do if Eric got out and ran after her.

  Back on the upper level, she held her brea
th and listened to the car roar past and continue downward.

  When at last Eric was gone, Daniella sat down on the steps and cried for a long time.

  “I’m such a slut. Oh god, I’m such a slut. . . .”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The shadow moved with a feline grace—long-limbed and silent—and for a moment in the dim light, Margaret believed she was looking at some feral animal.

  The dark-skinned scientist (Indian or Mexican, she couldn’t tell) gasped and jumped back when he saw her. “Whoa,” he said and dropped the expandable file he was carrying. Papers spilled onto the floor.

  So much for feline grace, Margaret thought. “Oh, I’m sorry—let me help you.” She squatted and reached for the documents.

  “N-no, no!” He yanked the paper Margaret was holding from her hands. She didn’t even get a chance to see what was on it, the bastard.

  Margaret’s knees creaked as she stood back up and faced him. He was tall and somewhere in his forties—but not too young for her—and had a runner’s lanky build. Hmm, she thought. Tall, dark, and . . . She assessed his prominent cheekbones and the creases around the mouth. Handsome? His face looked like a ventriloquist dummy’s. Well, as long as he can talk . . .

  “What are you doing here?” he said. He looked frightened and hugged the file to his chest. Margaret couldn’t decide if this was endearing or idiotic.

  Frowning, she held up her mug in answer.

  “Oh, yes, you must be headed this way.” The man gestured toward the end of the hall—the other end of the hall—and started walking there.

  Margaret stood in place for a moment, looking forlornly at the research department’s door, before reversing direction to follow him. The man was headed to the suite of administrative offices, which Margaret usually only visited to pick up her pay stub.

  “I’m Dr. Connolly—I mean, Margaret,” she said when she caught up. “And you are?”

  He didn’t even glance at her, still hugging his file. “Nick.”