Phoenix Heart

by Carolyn Nash

I turned to Chuck. He was watching the way her body shifted under the thin black silk. “Oh, no,” I whispered, “You’re not one of them, are you?”

  “One of who?”

  I eyed him. “The quivering males who faint at the sight of Caren Granzella.”

  “Oh, shut up,” he hissed.

  Dr. Richards turned to us. “Last one out lock up.”

  The puppeteers jerked our strings and all three of us nodded.

  They started out the door. “Chuck, be sure to cut the power on the scintillation counter.”

  “Sure Andrew.”

  “Lance, don’t leave the fume hood fan on again.”

  His head bobbed up and down, his eyes locked on the way Ms. Granzella’s dress draped down to the small of her back.

  Dr. Richards looked at me. “Good night, Melinda.”

  “Good night.”

  As I looked at the two of them, perfectly gorgeous together, heading out for some fabulous night on the town to rub elbows with movie stars and politicians the last of my Andrew Richards romantic fancies crashed down around my feet.

  Ms. Granzella looked back at me just as they went out the door.

  “I thought you said your name was Melanie.”

  I smiled. “I must have been wrong.”

  She looked a little puzzled, then shrugged her pretty shoulders and smiled. “Oh,” she said as she disappeared around the corner.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Cockroaches?”

  “Yes, Ms. Brenner, cockroaches.”

  “We’re going to dissect live cockroaches?”

  “Yes, Ms. Brenner, very much alive. Now, if I might continue?” Chuck lifted one eyebrow.

  He gave me a pompous look, sniffed once, and then continued. I just grinned. He may have not had the good sense to overlook Cheryl’s charm, intelligence, and beauty, but I still liked him. He was so willing to make an ass of himself, it would be hard not to. In the three weeks since I’d first walked into the lab, I’d come to know him well. Not only did we work together, he was responsible for those of us who were working as teaching assistants for the first year undergrad biology lab. Every Wednesday he briefed us on what we would teach the thirty-odd students in the next week’s lab sections.

  “These are South Pacific cockroaches, imported at great expense, so that you might enlighten your freshman lab students on the wonders of cockroach biochemistry. Each cockroach is between two-and-one-half and three inches long.”

  “What?” This came from my left. It was Cathy Greggers, and she was definitely looking a shade paler than when she had come in. Not that I could attest to the fact that I wasn’t also taking on a nice shade of green.

  Chuck just smiled. “I’m sorry, I’ll speak up. Two-and-one-half to three inches long,” he said loudly. The brat. “You will take them from the aquarium, place them in a covered petri dish, refrigerate them, and when the cold makes them dormant, slice open their abdomen...”

  He was loving this!

  “…and peel the sections of the carapace aside. The first thing you will notice is a substance looking remarkably like marshmallow cream.”

  We all groaned at that one. Chuck naturally fixed on me. “You had a comment Melanie?”

  “A question actually. I was wondering, Chuck... Sir, when this lab is scheduled?”

  “Why, next week, Melanie.”

  “Oh, dear! I’m afraid, sir, that I’m going to have to miss it.”

  “And why is that, Ms. Brenner?”

  “Well,” I said, as I tried to look humble and modest, “after the LIMOUSINE picks me up at my apartment on Friday, I’m flying FIRST CLASS, to beautiful SAN FRANCISCO for an entire week of luxurious living, and I won’t be able to stay here and dissect live cockroaches. I guess there’s no need to tell you how absolutely crushed I am.”

  “You bum!” he cried. “How do you rate?”

  “Clean living, prayer, eating wheat germ every day.”

  “But did you clear it with your faculty advisors?”

  A voice came from the back of the room. “She cleared it.”

  “But Andrew! She’s only a first year. I don’t think you should allow her and I’d just like to say that I would be more than willing to fill in for her in San Francisco while she stays here and learns all about the origins of marshmallow cream.”

  “Chuck, there’s no question that we’d all prefer to see you gone for a week rather than Ms. Brennan.”

  “Brenner,” I whispered.

  “But, I think you’ve got a paper you owe me?”

  “It’s almost done.”

  “And a presentation on the immune system on Tuesday?”

  “Details, details.”

  The rest of the group was smiling at the two of them. I wasn’t. With Andrew Richards near, I mostly concentrated on getting oxygen in and out past the pulse hammering in my throat. I knew without a doubt now that I had not a chance in hell with this guy. I understood that he barely knew I lived and breathed on planet Earth. Even so, every time he got near me my heart triggered like it had a direct link to an Andrew Richards proximity detector (patent pending).

  “Don’t listen to this guy. You have a great time in San Francisco.”

  He stood next to me, looking down. I looked up past Bullseye and Dr. Richards’ left ear. “Thank you,” I said wittily.

  “Now, if Chuck here has finished boring all of you.”

  “Boring!” Chuck snorted. “They live to listen to me.”

  “There is a seminar starting in ten minutes in the first floor biochem conference room. I would suggest...”

  “Read that as ‘order,’” Chuck said.

  “...you all might want to attend.”

  We all started gathering our notebooks and papers and I managed to reach the door first, duck down the hall to the restroom, lock myself in a stall, and give myself a good talking to about hero worship at the ripe age of twenty-four.

  * * * *

  The limo was to pick me up at two on Friday, so early Friday morning I walked from my apartment to the lab to make certain I’d left everything turned off that was supposed to be off, and everything turned on that was supposed to be on. Somehow at about three a.m., while tossing back and forth, I knew that I’d managed to get it all backwards--the ons were off and the offs, on. Unable to sleep anyway, when the sky started to lighten a little after six o’clock, I headed out on the five-block walk to the University grounds. It was a beautiful October morning, one of my favorite times: cool, but not cold, the leaves turning, the air smelling fresher than it ever did during the hot smoggy days of summer. Except for a solitary jogger who lifted a hand and panted through grinning teeth in my direction as he passed, I had the streets to myself, and smiled while I walked in the pearly morning light, marveling that I did indeed walk these streets, streets which led to a University that I had dreamed for so long to enter. The hard work in classes four nights a week, Saturdays, and summers for four years had paid off.

  And here it was, the morning of my trip. Two weeks at the bank, three weeks of classes, and now a week of solitary pleasure in rich decadence in the city by the Bay.

  Solitary.

  My smile began to fade, I could feel it, and I tried to grab hold, force it to stay, tried to snag onto the feeling of happiness, but I knew happiness could slip away quicker than a minnow through a three-year-old’s fingers.

  Solitary.

  The trip had been for two. The coming week was the only one I could reasonably miss and it was the one week Cheryl couldn’t get away from work.

  And I, at twenty-four, could come up with no one else.

  In everything else I was so competent, dealing with all and sundry like an adult—paying the rent, fixing the bathroom sink, making sure my car insurance was paid up, getting the grades in school—handling it all, relishing the feeling of independence and competence. Hey, look at me and hear me roar.

  And just about the time I’m surfing up there, cresting the wave of my life, riding high, it’s tim
e for the jaws to broach through the blueness below, open wide, clench together, and jerk me under.

  Oh, yeah, Melanie. You’re independent. Hey, girl, you gotta be. Nobody would have you.

  “Shut up,” I whispered and walked on, head down. Someday it will happen. Someone will come.

  Oh right. Not even your best friend believes that.

  I walked faster, forcing that voice away, the caustic, cutting voice that had plagued me in one way or another since I was eight.

  I looked up, having almost walked past the path that wound through the elms to the Biology Building. I ducked up it, through the trees. A short, blond-haired man was just coming out of the back door of the building as I walked up and I managed to catch the door before it slammed shut, grateful not to have to walk all the way around to the front entrance. I headed up the stairs, working fiercely to recapture the happiness of only five minutes before. By the time I’d run up to the third floor, I thought I had a chance. And then, no more than three steps up toward the fourth floor, a rumbling roar followed by a sharp jerk flowed over the stairs. Small chunks of plaster flaked off the walls and ceiling and fell at my feet, and a mixture of excitement and fear washed up from the pit of my stomach. I froze, holding onto the railing, but nothing followed the initial shake, and I started to smile, knowing that once more we’d escaped The Big One—the earthquake that would eventually drop LA into the ocean. And I was grateful not only for the escape, but for the good shaking it had given me. Nothing like an earthquake to help you forget petty problems. I grinned and ran up the last few steps.

  The grin vanished when I opened the door onto the fourth floor hallway. The chemical smell of burning rubber stung my nose and eyes. Black smoke billowed out the last door at the end of the hall—the door to 413—and as I stepped out onto the linoleum, the first klaxon fire alarm sounded.

  “Chuck,” I whispered in horror, then, “Dr. Richards!”

  I ran down the hall toward the smoke. “Chuck! Dr. Richards!” I screamed, not knowing whether anyone would be there so early, but knowing that most mornings they were there by no later than seven. I slid up to the doorway, falling down on my knees as the smoke poured out the top of the doorway.

  “Andrew! Chuck!” I shouted again, but the only sound that answered my cry was the pinging of metal expanding in the heat and the cracking of shattering glassware.

  “Is anyone in there?” I shouted again just as the overhead sprinklers came on. Water sizzled into steam as it hit hot metal; I heard pops like small firecrackers as cold water hit heated glass. Billowing steam turned the black smoke grey and pushed a cloud of choking heat out the door.

  I coughed, trying to blink the sting out of my eyes, and it occurred to me suddenly that the last place in the world I should be was next to a room full of flammable chemicals being rapidly consumed by flames. I duck-walked back from the door, panic blossoming, knowing that it would be this instant that the bottles of ethanol stored under the work bench just on the other side of the wall would choose to explode, that a natural gas line would rupture, driving the wall down on top of me. I took no more than two crouching steps back when, just after one long whining shriek of the fire alarm, I heard the sound of a low human cry come from inside the lab. I froze.

  “Chuck!” I yelled. “Andrew? Is someone in there?”

  I squatted, breathing shallowly, trying to choke the coughs back, but I heard nothing but the drip of water, the sizzle as it turned to steam, the crackle of a fire still burning somewhere in the room, the popping of metal being heated by the flames and cooled by the sprinklers, and the periodic, ear-shattering klaxon echoing up and down the hall.

  I only thought I heard a cry. Not human. Metal expanding, wood cracking.

  Over the sound of the fire I heard sirens, faint with distance, so far away that I knew they would come too late. The sprinklers were working on the fire, but the smoke flowing along the ceiling of the hallway over my head had dropped far lower in the lab and would choke whoever lay within long before the rescuers could arrive.

  Like it’ll choke you, idiot. Run! Get away!

  That inner voice rang so clearly that I actually backed another step toward the stairwell.

  It’s not your responsibility! Leave them!

  “Shut up,” I whispered.

  I took several deep breaths, then one giant one and held it as I crawled into the room on hands and knees. Rubble and glass jabbed into the skin of my palms. Water soaked my knees and showered over my back and dripped down each side of my neck. It quickly soaked my hair so that it swung in dark lanks, falling into my eyes, helping the smoke to blind me. I swept outward with my hands as I crawled forward, pushing wet glass and pieces of wood shelving out of my path, praying all the while that the wetness soaking through the knees of my jeans came only from the sprinklers, and not from acid or caustic that had once been in bottles now lying shattered. I heard the crackle of flames to my left, out of the reach of the sprinklers, and saw black smoke continuing to pour out from under the central lab counter. I remembered cardboard cartons of something under there, but couldn’t for the life of me remember what lay inside.

  Solvents! Poison! Radioactive waste!

  Lab coats hung on pegs and I reached up, snagged one and used it to sweep ahead of me. I snagged another, already soaking wet from the sprinklers, and held it to my streaming eyes. I crouched low, trying to look under the smoke into the room. Charred books, broken beakers and bottles, test tube racks, smoldering rubber tubing, and unidentifiable chunks of metal and machinery lay scattered over the floor. A section near the center of the main lab counter looked as if a giant hammer had come up under it, shattering the thick, black material, fracturing it into chunks which had been flung aside. One heavy chunk had landed on top of a water bath, and driven it down into the linoleum. Smoke and steam rose toward the ceiling from the area beneath the counter where sets of file drawers had once stood. Charred black metal twisted outward like some bizarre otherworldly sculpture. The remains of lab notebooks and files smoked and burned though the sprinklers were making some headway at putting out the flames. I blinked against the smoke, squinting, scanning frantically, but nowhere in the disaster could I see a sign of anything human.

  By no means a deep sea diver, by this time my lungs had begun to pump reflexively, trying to force me to open my mouth and suck in the hot, swirling grey fog. I fought it as long as I could. The sprinklers still sprayed from the ceiling and the water dripped down my face, making it a little easier to see as it cleared and cooled the air. I took a cautious breath through the material of the wet lab coat, and though I coughed sharply at the burn of it, I found I could breathe, although with difficulty.

  “Chuck! Andrew!” I called again, but it came out as a tiny croak and caused a coughing fit. I crawled forward, knowing that only seconds had gone by, feeling that I’d been in this burning room for most of my life; the chore of trying to breathe through the heavy wet material of the coat making my chest ache. Down the aisle I clambered gingerly over a three-by-five foot section of the black counter lying jammed at an angle. Or I thought jammed. Just as I reached the top edge, it slammed downward, my weight having caused a bottle under it to shatter. I almost screamed with the suddenness of it, believing for an awful second that the floor beneath me had given way.

  I crawled on, becoming more frantic, certain that I’d pursued a fool’s errand, that I was the worst kind of idiot to crawl into a burning room. I scaled shelves wedged between two counters, skirted the test-tube centrifuge that had fallen with them. I wiped at my eyes, hearing the sirens now climbing the hill toward the university, blinked rapidly, and looked up to see the bottom of a cowboy boot jutting out from behind the end of the lab bench near the back wall. I crawled frantically toward it, willing that boot to move, scared now not that I wouldn’t find someone, but that I had. The legs came into view, then a lab coat streaked with red and black, the water causing the colors to run into each other, and then a white face, shiny with the w
ater sprinkling down on it, looking even paler against the brilliant streak of red slashed across the forehead.

  “Lance,” I choked out.

  He stirred slightly and moaned, and I thanked God so vehemently that I’m sure she must have blinked twice and turned her head to see what all the commotion was about.

  I crawled up beside him. “Lance,” I said.

  He groaned and his eyelids fluttered, but didn’t open.

  “Oh shit,” I whispered.

  His breathing rasped in and out. He tried to cough and cried out, a cry like the one I’d heard from the door.

  I opened his lab coat and winced. The explosion had blown something against him, burning his shirt and skin, and slicing him in a half dozen places. None of the cuts looked serious, but his chest on the right side was a deep red and looked slightly concave, like whatever had hit him had been too heavy for the ribs below to withstand the force.

  But it wasn’t the broken ribs that were going to kill him. When I pulled the coat back across him, I saw that it had a new, large blood stain. It was then that I saw his arm on the other side, twisted up next to him, still lying on the jagged point of the broken flask that had sliced the forearm and the arteries leading down to the wrist. Blood pumped from the cut, flowing over the glass, and pooling with the water on the floor.

  I crawled over his legs, gingerly lifted his arm off the glass, trying frantically to remember the lesson on pressure points and bleeding from my first aid class taken too long ago. I used the glass to slit the lab coat and quickly tore a bandage and tied it around the cut, but within seconds the blood had soaked through. I pressed on the inside of his upper arm as hard as I could while I tore another strip of cloth and with one hand and my knee, tied a tourniquet just below his elbow and twisted it tight. I sat back on my heels, coughing, blinking at the burning tears coming not only from the smoke, but from the panic I felt that I was probably killing him, that I couldn’t deal with this kind of thing, who the hell was I to be crawling into a fire like some idiot girl scout, and where the hell was the fire department anyway.