Embryo 1: Embryo

by JA Schneider

  To Sears Arnett said, “Did you get rid of the hominid?”

  “No, just the styrofoam junk – ”

  “Go back and hide it. Let them call it another stolen hominid.”

  “What? Not when I got her, I’m not going. She almost cracked my head open!”

  “There’s been a possible change,” Arnett said. He looked at Jill, silent and frozen-faced. “The important thing is that she’s seen you, isn’t that right? You know that I am very…serious. And Sonny, if there’s any further trouble and I call, I want you here fast. Do you understand? Now off you go, please.”

  Sonny lifted his chin and tucked his thumbs into his belt. “I don’t take orders from nobody.”

  Arnett said pleasantly, “Then you shall get morphine from nobody.”

  Sears gave Jill a murderous look. “Shee-it!” Scowling at Arnett he turned, crossed the floor, and disappeared through the door that led down the museum stairs.

  Jill closed her eyes. Don’t react, she thought. If he gets hostile you’re dead. She opened her eyes; tried to control her voice.

  “You…give him morphine? It’s that easy?”

  “I also pay him. He does other things for me.”

  Such a wonderful young man. Thank you, Vera Crowley.

  Arnett was eyeing her appraisingly. “Of course, not the kind of things I need for my present stage of work…”

  He had walked around and placed himself, arms folded, feet apart, between Jill and the nearer door. “I was so delighted when you showed up and Sonny hadn’t killed you. It has occurred that I could use you.”

  She stared at him blankly. Sank down onto an old chair.

  “Starting today,” he said, “and thanks to your damnably ingenious snooping, I, like the rest of the Genetic Committee, will be under close scrutiny. I won’t be able to come in here every four hours to monitor this fetal life-support system. I would like you to do that for me.” He smiled congenially. “Wouldn’t you prefer that to having to worry about Sonny tracking you down? Think of the irony! You’re the last person anyone would suspect!”

  Jill held her breath. He patted his breast pocket. “Your printout - soon it needn’t even be a secret any more. The astonishment of the medical community will offset any…sacrifices that were made.”

  He bent to check his instruments. Across an oscilloscope screen beeped a green tracing of the fetal heartbeat: a healthy one hundred sixty per minute. He adjusted a knob and straightened.

  “Now about the electrolyte solution,” he resumed. “You must be sure that – ”

  “What sacrifices?” Jill blurted.

  He turned to face her. “Now see here! I thought we would discuss this like – ”

  “But shouldn’t I know if I’m going to help you?” Jill said, a little too sweetly. “Those two teenaged girls, you were referring to them, weren’t you?”

  He scowled, but she could see that he was torn between the habit of secrecy and the desire to brag.

  “Of course not,” he said. “They were prostitutes - trash. They supplied me with amniotic fluid for some tests, that’s all.” Arnett made a half circle around the cylinder and now stood, looking up at the sleeping fetus. Jill could see his face through the silicone. Like all rounded lenses, it distorted the image on the other side. Arnett’s features looked grotesque.

  “Clinic patients, private patients, every female Homo sapiens I could get my hands on,” he said. “The clinic patients were actually best. An unsophisticated bunch. I even had them re-scheduled for when I thought they’d be ovulating.” He threw up his hands. “Such a pity! To have wasted the most perfect protoplasm on requisite test runs. I had inserted the most marvelous DNA. Stocked those little Petri ponds with the most advanced enzymes.” He stopped to brood. “Well, I suppose it was necessary…”

  “Human incubators,” Jill murmured, and her voice cracked. “Only most pregnancies didn’t take, right? Miscarriages, fetal abnormalities, a maternal death here and there…right? The human factor backfired.”

  Jill saw painful images of Maria Moran, tiny Christopher Sayers, Mary Jo…

  Arnett had walked back to his hominids. “Those things are in the past, I am confident, and you can be too.”

  A stillness overtook her, as if all the cards had been dealt. She could quit here, she knew, and probably get out safely. Yet one lunatic part of her mind pushed her to ask one more question…the one that would not rest.

  She rose, and moved in his direction.

  “So,” she said, inhaling. “You must have known all along what became of Mary Jo Sayers.”

  He had moved his gaze to stare moodily out a pair of old French doors near the door Sonny Sears had used, and giving out onto the highly pitched Gothic roof. The sky beyond was turning a lighter shade of gray. Slate shingles glistened, wet with dew.

  Nervously, Jill began to speak faster. “It’s just that she was the only one who disappeared. She hasn’t been found.”

  She saw his back stiffen. Slowly he said, “We became acquainted when she came to interview me on certain aspects of my research. Her feelings about accelerating human evolution were as urgent as my own. She wanted a child like our wonderful fetus here.” He paused for a moment. “She is currently…involved with another phase of the project.”

  Jill stared at him, frowning in surprise.

  “That’s the truth?”

  “That is the truth,” he said firmly.

  Jill half-turned away. “Dr. Arnett, you must realize this is a lot to take in in one go. I haven’t slept. I’ll be back soon – and not alone, you maniac – and you’ll show me what you want me to do.”

  “Alright,” he said.

  She started toward the door, feeling his eyes on her. She could not believe she was moving, and he wasn’t stopping her. Had she actually made it? She had pretended to be impressed, and he had bought it, and he was letting her go so she could run to David and the others as fast as –

  “You never mentioned my hominids,” he called after her.

  She looked back. “Hominids?” Her voice was weak with fatigue.

  “Yes, do I get no praise for them? I had to learn a whole new skill. What do you think of my craftsmanship?”

  The door was a good thirty feet away. It could be locked, she realized. She would have to humor him one last time.

  She came back and stood before the first three figures in the lineup. Under different circumstances she would have laughed. The two stolen ones were professional, but Australopithecus was so amateurishly done it looked almost like a huge, stuffed rat.

  Arnett said, “They get better as you move up the line, don’t you think?” He was leaning casually on the jamb of the French doors.

  Jill nodded uncomfortably and moved on. “Your…Neanderthal man is good,” she said, and thought, Why is he doing this? I’ve seen the source of his vanity; he doesn’t care about this bunch of dummies. Confused, she scanned other mannequins, trying to pinpoint what it was about him that had suddenly changed. Was it the way he stood, affecting casualness yet somehow rigid? Or his eyes, watching her, waiting for…what?

  “Intelligence!” Arnett said. “It’s the hardest thing to depict. That’s why the Cro-Magnon pair gave me the most trouble.” He stood straighter. “Do you think I did a good job on the Cro-Magnons?”

  A ruse. He was using the mannequins as…what? A delaying tactic for Sonny Sears to come back? She looked back for trouble or some new kind of threat…

  There was nothing. In the ticking stillness she moved to the Cro-Magnons. The details were well done: the man with his tool and spear, the woman with her knife and cooking utensils in her clasped hands. And the black, long-haired wig; that was what Jill had remembered vividly.

  She looked again from the man to the woman…and then stopped, her eyes locked on the woman’s face. She went cold. Arnett had been testing her; she knew it now with sickening certainty, just as she knew that under the wig and beneath the thin, doll-like layer of plaster, the distorted feat
ures of Mary Jo Sayers stared grotesquely, tragically out at her.

  The game was over.

  She went rigid with shock and screamed, but not before powerful arms had yanked her savagely off her feet.

  34

  Levine checked Angel’s .38. The cylinder was full, which he expected. He spun it, half-cocked the hammer, checked the safety, slammed the cylinder back into position.

  Then he wondered what to do next.

  As he shoved the gun into his belt, the thought came to him that the weapon had already served a purpose of sorts. It had kept his hands busy, his mind momentarily occupied. The respite had lasted all of a minute. Then the worry came back with a vengeance. He hadn’t found Jill. The trail had led here, and the trail had gone cold here, yet the place pulled at him. She’d been here, dammit! The radiology guy had seen her heading here, and every light was still on, and the two stools and that overturned test tube nagged.

  “Every room has its language,” a Denver cop once told him.

  He paced frantically, poking at equipment, lab tables, opening and closing drawers in Arnett’s desk. Nothing. He cursed, not even knowing what he was looking for. Then something penetrated his frenzy and he stopped, remembering the third thing that had nagged and now finally came: a dirtyish smear on the counter nearest the door.

  Sterile, orderly labs don’t have dirty smears.

  He went back to the counter. It looked like the smear had come from…my God…small, dirty fingertips. The fingertips had been pressing something. Pressing out something?

  And the smear’s color looked like it came from the tunnel.

  David breathed faster.

  The damn counter was long. Lots of cabinets and drawers…but the drawer just under the smear was left open a crack.

  He yanked it out. Found the Jackson chart and the blood on its rim. She had slammed her attacker with it! And kept it with her for what must have been a nightmarish chase because she’d wanted to show it!

  The important page she’d tugged out and David read. Trisomy 14 and a 12-17 translocation.

  My God, he thought. So this was –

  A muffled thud came to him and his head jerked up. It had been a distant sound, as if from the other side of the far wall.

  He looked that way. There wasn’t any other side to that wall. Just Arnett’s bookshelves and the building’s exterior.

  He stepped that way, frowning, straining his hearing. But all was silent again and he suspected that his exhausted mind was imagining things. His eyes smarted from lack of sleep and he felt suddenly too dizzy to think. That sound…had he actually heard it?

  Maybe it had come from the hall? One of the other offices? He turned that way and then – unmistakably – he heard a scream.

  He whirled around, his pulse rocketing. It was in here, somehow but…where?

  “Jill!”

  He scanned the room frantically. Seconds passed; he stood, frozen and listening, waiting for the next sound, and then it came – a muffled struggle, another dull thud from – his head jerked around – from outside the building?

  He ran the length of the lab, then stopped, uncomprehending, staring at the wall of bookshelves. His gaze moved up to linear cracks in an expression of dawning comprehension that barely had time to register before he heard – but just barely – a man’s shout of anger and a girl’s sobbing pleas.

  He heaved books and crashed paraphernalia to the floor, clearing a wide space, palpating with trembling fingers for a hollow place, a way through. The sounds of struggle on the other side were receding, as if someone were being dragged…

  In a frenzy he rapped in a line going straight across, left to right; nothing but masonry behind the wood and then – hollow!

  He now rapped up and down. Big and hollow. He stepped back and flung himself against it with a force that splintered wood and exposed old brick. Part of a door was exposed. He stepped back again, shaking from effort, realizing the door was probably bolted from the other side. His shoulder throbbed.

  Please God, he thought.

  Desperately he looked around him. Nothing to ram it with. He got out his phone, auto-dialed MacIntyre who answered. “Barnett’s lab. Hurry!”

  The next seconds passed like a bomb going off in slow motion. David raised his foot and crashed through the door with a force that left a gaping hole. He tore wildly at shards of splintered wood and then scrambled through.

  He was unaware of the musty smell and rotten floorboards that he raced madly across. One image only burned into his brain with a horror that drove him harder, his feet pounding furiously toward a pair of open French doors with their panes badly shattered.

  Beyond the doors stretched the rising slope of a gabled roof. And struggling near the edge of the roof were two figures. The hulking figure of Clifford Arnett was only inches away from hurling the smaller figure to its death. And the smaller figure was Jill.

  Woody Greenberg hung up the land phone. “Stryker’s almost here,” he said. “The others too. They were called after the attack in the Records room.” Woody shook his head. “Stryker sounded shell-shocked.”

  Tricia peered down at her pile of soggy Kleenex. “Can’t believe this,” she whispered.

  MacIntyre and Woody stared down at their shoes. Tricia cried softly.

  And then Mac’s phone went off.

  He listened, straightening, getting to his feet. “Arnett’s lab!” he said. “Coming!”

  Seconds later they were racing down the hall with MacIntyre calling security as he ran. “I know they’ve been there!” he hollered. “Tell them to go back!”

  He was taller and took the lead with Woody only feet behind. Tricia, doing her best and screaming, “Wait for me!” followed after them as they charged madly down the hall.

  Levine burst through the smashed double doors. Without breaking stride he jumped onto the steep-angled roof, landed off balance with one foot higher than the other, corrected his skid on the slates and then stumbled ahead.

  They were struggling twenty feet away from him, now fifteen, now –

  He saw Arnett shove Jill over the edge.

  His heart stopped. “No!” The he saw Jill’s hands, scraped and bleeding, clinging for life to a wrought-iron gutter. Arnett, crouching, was trying to peel her fingers away.

  “Bastard!” David screamed. The diversion worked. Arnett released his grip and, looking up like a mad animal suddenly cornered, reversed his weight and began to clamber back up the slates.

  Levine let him go. He flung himself forward, pitching headlong onto his belly and sliding down another ten feet to the edge. His left foot hit the gutter and he felt it start to give way. He thought he and Jill were going to plunge, but the gutter held, appeared only bent.

  She was out of his reach.

  “Jill!”

  He inched toward her. She was now barely four feet away. He heard her scream, saw one bloodied hand let go. With a convulsive jerk he pulled himself closer, then heard a cracking noise as the gutter began to pull free. He heard his voice shout her name again; leaned out over the edge, and tried not to look down as his left arm hooked down and under her shoulder. He grabbed tight and pulled, using his other arm for leverage as he struggled upright again – heaving her over the top to safety.

  With a crashing noise, the gutter collapsed and fell away from the building.

  A yard from the edge, Jill lay face down and sobbing. David lifted her to him and cradled her, then heard a noise. Turning he saw Arnett inching his way back down to them. Levine thrust his hands under Jill, getting ready to carry her in a fireman’s lift. Peripherally he saw a quick movement from above, then felt a painful crack on the side of his head.

  Dazed, he looked up. Arnett, his expression gone to demented fury, had thrown a loose slate shingle at him; and, tugging at stony points along the roof’s surface, was about to pull out another.

  Ignoring the warm, spreading stickiness, Levine turned back to Jill. She was struggling to speak. He bent his head closer.
“I can walk,” she said.

  He pulled her up. Pulled one of her arms around his waist and they took a step. He saw the burly arm above them curving again and he shouted “Down!” as another razor-edged slate struck his brow, and he reeled, feeling momentary blackness.

  The second hit was worse. He tried to get up, and stumbled. He struggled to think, but it was as if a curtain of fog had closed over his mind, and all that he knew was blind rage.

  For the first time, he thought of the gun. Angel’s gun, heavy under his belt. Use it! his senses screamed. He saw Arnett fifteen feet above him tugging at another slate. He reached under his white jacket for the gun and his fingers tightened around the grip. And then the reality of that grip brought him to his senses – partway, at least.

  Doctors don’t shoot doctors, he thought.

  I’m going to kill him with my bare hands.

  He did not know where his strength came from. He pulled Jill up further and left her on her hands and knees. “Go!” he yelled. He saw her start to crawl. Then twisted around, possessed by a rage he had never known.

  Arnett saw him coming. He turned, clambered up the roof to the ridge and stood clutching the chimney.

  Slipping on the slick surface, David scrambled toward him. A yard away he stopped in a half crouch. Their eyes met. Arnett’s lips stretched into a mocking grin. David was below him – an easy target. Hanging on to the chimney, Arnett drew back his free arm and made a fist. David ducked, allowed his adversary to swing wildly, then stepped up and punched him hard in the face. The force of the blow drove Arnett backward against the chimney, the side of which crumbled, sending bricks in an avalanche skidding down the roof.

  “Help me! Help me!”

  Struggling to regain his balance, David did not see Arnett lose his footing. By the time his head cleared, Arnett had hurtled downward fifteen feet, grasping at a tile that had momentarily stopped his fall.

  “Help me, damn you!” Arnett screamed; and even now, in this desperate moment, David saw madness blazing from his eyes.

  He looked over to Jill. She was halfway to the French doors, looking down at Arnett in horror.