Deficiency

by Andrew Neiderman

"What should we do?" the policeman asked.

  "I need some more light."

  The patrolman brought his flashlight and reached in and over her to flip on the interior light. The illumination highlighted all the swelling in the woman's face and neck, as well as on her chest, breasts, and stomach. She looked as if she had been attacked by a hive of bees.

  "I didn't see that before," the patrolman said. "Maybe she was stung."

  "Were you stung? Axe you allergic to bees?" Terri asked quickly. The young woman managed to shake her head. Her eyelids were trembling with her effort to keep them open as her gasping grew more desperate.

  "He," Terri thought she whispered.

  "Do you have any oxygen in your car?" Terri asked the policeman. He nodded and hurried back to get it as well as a blanket. Terri fit the mask over the woman's face, took her pulse again and then her blood pressure. Everything was worse.

  Suddenly she went into a violent convulsion. Terri moved quickly to keep her tongue from going back in her throat. The woman's body was shaking so vigorously, the vehicle seemed to be swaying.

  "Holy Jesus!" the young patrolman cried and actually stepped back as if he expected the woman would explode. Terri held on, trying her best to comfort her.

  A few moments later, the woman stopped convulsing and her whole body sunk in Terri's arms.

  Terri felt for a pulse and then moved back slowly. The woman's head fell to her right side. She looked as if she had just fallen asleep.

  Terri ripped away the blanket and began to administer CPR. She worked frantically over her, pumping, blowing air, pumping, and then, exhausted from the vain effort, stopped and sat back.

  "Is she all right?" the patrolman asked.

  It seemed like such a ridiculous question. Terri almost laughed.

  "No. She's expired," Terri replied and closed her bag. She hated using that word. It sounded like she was talking about a parking meter and not a human being, but it was the word the medical community employed, more, in her opinion, to make it easier for themselves than the loved ones waiting for news.

  "Expired? She's dead?"

  "I'm afraid so," Terri said looking at her bag. Inside, she had prednisolone, specifically for serious insect stings. She could have injected it, but there had been so little time. If this woman died of an insect bite and she hadn't done that... her thoughts trailed off.

  The patrolman stood there with his hands on his hips, looking in and shaking his head. Then, as if remembering he was a law enforcement officer, he tapped Terri gently on the shoulder.

  "Better not touch anything in the car," he said. "We don't know the situation yet. It's strange, to say the least, for her to be totally naked." Terri nodded and stepped out. The patrolman began to search around the vehicle. She watched him with a strangely detached curiosity. She was actually feeling numb, in a daze herself. Two young women had died in her presence within a week's time. One dying almost immediately after she had touched her, and now this one dying in her arms. Maybe I'm cursed, she thought. Of course she realized this was a very small community, especially during the off-season. The chances of knowing about or confronting a serious situation were very high. This woman, too, looked familiar, but her features were distorted.

  The patrolman carefully searched the glove compartment and stood back with his flashlight to read the documents.

  "Who was she?"

  "Kristin Martin," he said. "It's a Loch Sheldrake address." Terri shook her head. At least she didn't know this woman personally.

  "There's a paycheck stub in here from Diana's Restaurant," he added.

  "I know it," she said. Great veal Parmesan, she thought, and then shook her head at how ridiculous the mind could be at times like this.

  He opened the rear door and directed his flashlight over the seat and the clothes. He shook his head at how everything was strewn about and then noted the panties were torn.

  "It looks like a rape to me," he muttered loud enough for Terri to hear. "Think she had some sort of a reaction to that?"

  Terri shook her head.

  "No. This is too much to blame on emotional trauma. We'll have to wait to see the exact cause of death. We need to know the level of blood alcohol and what other possible poisonous element is in her."

  She returned to her own vehicle and sat staring at the dead woman's SUV. She thought about calling Curt on his cell phone, but then imagined him saying something cold like she should have followed him home. Then she would not have confronted this nor been a part of it. She thought about calling Hyman, but she hated the idea of sounding as if she was in a panic, even though to be truthful she was. She was a doctor. She was supposed to be able to confront and handle situations like this and remain cool, efficient, effective. All she could think of was some idiot saying her reactions were a result of her being a woman and that's why men were better suited to the profession.

  She decided to call no one.

  Fifteen minutes later, another patrol car arrived and then the ambulance, its bubble light swinging like a multicolored light bulb on the end of a string, ripping through the darkness, slicing trees and bushes and waking the sleeping birds, who rose from branches and like chips of shadows dissolved into the night.

  SIX

  He returned to the chair facing the pond and sat quietly, relaxed. The sky was clearing. A westerly wind was pushing the low out. Tomorrow would be another spectacular day. He felt reinvigorated. He always did after a good feed. Early tomorrow, right around the rising of the sun, he would be out jogging again, filling his lungs with fresh air, feeling his blood being pumped into every extremity, restoring cells, replenishing.

  These country roads were wonderful for a morning run. He had noted that as soon as he had driven into the area. As always, his senses would be heightened the morning after. He would be able to smell every plant, every wildflower and hear insects crawling as well as the flapping of bird wings. The anticipation was so great, he almost felt like doing it now.

  Lately, however, the wonderful after-effects of a good feed were not lasting as long as they used to last. He found his needs developing faster and his hunger growing more and more intense. He was far more impatient during the process than he remembered and barely went through any foreplay anymore. It was almost going right for the kill with no delicious preparations. The sexual aspects were nearly eliminated.

  All this was evidenced by his choosing a victim too soon after the previous one and too close in actual proximity. He knew this was not intelligent, but there were forces at work in him now that were overpowering. He would admit it to no one, not that there was anyone to whom he could confide, but he was a little frightened of himself these days, frightened of his loss of control. Control over everything was what gave him a sense of himself, an identity. It provided him with his radiating self-confidence, what he thought was his attractive arrogance, the magnetism that drew women to him, often despite themselves. Few that he could recall put up much resistance, and even those that had, capitulated soon enough. Suddenly he recalled a woman back in New York City, a magazine editor who almost got away. She called his romancing condescending. She distrusted compliments and began with the assumption every man was a predator. Well, of course he was. How to disguise it well or make it look insignificant was his problem to solve. In the end he pretended to agree, to confess, and to throw himself upon her mercy. She liked that, and she remained within his reach.

  So many of them had been so similar in their composition. It was often like paint by numbers, but occasionally, there was a real challenge, someone like the editor who for one reason or another had the potential to escape. None had up until now. He took pride in that and it didn't seem to matter that he had no one with whom to share it. Companionship, friendship, society itself was a vague concept, a shadow that hovered out there somewhere along with all the other shadows, none so dark and distant as the one that surrounded his birth. Once again he wondered. Did he have a birth? Did he have parents? Siblings?

&n
bsp; Was there someone else out there who was like him? Who even knew about him?

  Often when his instincts were as sharp as they were after a feed, he sensed that he was being pursued, but by what or by whom he did not know. Asleep, he would waken suddenly with a jolt and lift his head from the pillow to listen. He was like a dog, disturbed by sounds no ordinary human could hear or like a wild creature alarmed by that evasive sixth sense, that mysterious animal power mankind had lost through civilization and evolution. If it was still within them, the women especially would know to run from him. Fortunately for him, it was not, or it was too dormant to ever be awoken.

  Some, however, were trying to rediscover or restore it or something akin to it. He had read about and even met people who talked about positive and negative energy forces around them. It wasn't something tangible, but they claimed they could sense it. They were right of course, but they had no idea how right they were. One woman (he could no longer remember her name or even her face) told him she deliberately avoided people who were full of negativity. They were a threat to her own happiness and well-being, she said.

  For a while he thought she would sense the danger to her that was in him, but she didn't have that much ability, none of them had. They were on the right track, but they had a long way to go and in his opinion, they would never reacquire what had been lost. It was too late for them. The truth was they were becoming less and less of what they were created to be. Their technologies, their artificiality, their virtual reality, all of it was quickly turning them into just another part of the machinery they were creating. Pure beings like himself would be so rare, one could search the globe and produce only a handful, he concluded with that delicious arrogance he so enjoyed.

  From what well he drew all this wisdom, he did not know, and although that didn't bother him, he was becoming increasingly concerned about the loss of some memory. He used to be able to recall events that had occurred a year or so ago, and then it became less than a year, months, until now, he was having trouble bringing up vivid recollections of events that had occurred less than six months ago. It was only after a good feed, like the one tonight, that he was able to remember what he had done in the immediate past.

  He gazed over the pond into the moonlit darkness that wrapped shadows about the naked trees and wondered if he was not becoming a shadow himself. Was that his final destiny, to disappear into the night and be unable to touch, to feel, to smell, taste, or hear anything? He could almost see himself looking back at himself in this chair, looking back with a deep longing, an ache that turned into a primeval howl heard only by the wildest, yet untouched creatures that roamed the rim of civilization.

  Who am I? he wondered and it occurred to him that he had not wondered or cared about that very much until just recently. Who could he ask? Who would know? The answer hung out there. He sensed it.

  He turned quickly and looked back to the road that led up to the tourist house, a narrow, pitted, and cracked rope of macadam that snaked through the woods, up from this hamlet of Loch Sheldrake, another little community that went into hibernation after Labor Day with most of the shop owners drawing the curtains on their front windows and the ones who remained looking like cemetery caretakers gazing vacantly at the highway of the dead.

  There was a lake, of course, one with an amusing history if he was to believe some of the old timers he had met at a local bar. They told him bodies were still being discovered under the water, bodies deposited years and years ago by ruthless gangsters who had an organization notoriously known as Murder Incorporated.

  What a funny idea, he thought. Did it enjoy the benefits of a corporation? He asked one of the nearly toothless balding men if it was an S-corp or a C-corp. They looked at him as if he was crazy, and then he laughed.

  "Laugh all you want," one of them said angrily, "but this is a place with history."

  Okay, he thought. I'll add to your history.

  He continued to stare at the road that ran by the tourist house. Someone or something was coming, he thought. It was as vague a thought as usual at first, but it grew stronger, more insistent. He took a deep breath. He wouldn't be able to remain here much longer. He would have to move on to new territory. That angered him. He didn't like feeling he was the prey, he was being pursued. He didn't like running from anything. His pride was too grand for such a concept. Everything and anything should be running from him.

  Yet, the instinct to survive would not be silenced and was far more muscular than his pride. Like it or not, he would eventually obey and he would move on. Defiantly, he vowed he would stay as long as he could.

  He gazed back over the pond where now the moonlight turned the surface into a yellowish white layer that looked like ice. He thought that was wonderful, but then a thin, slithering gauzelike cloud slipped between the moon and the earth and cut a shadow over the jeweled water. He wanted to shake his fist at it and scare it off. He felt that powerful, but it moved on at its own pace and left him like some ingrate raging at the world he had been given.

  All this was interrupted by the real sound of an automobile crunching the gravel drive that led up to the tourist house. The police car did not have its bubble light on, but it looked ominous enough to cause him to rise and move quickly into the darkness. Was this the danger he had sensed?

  He watched two patrolmen and a third man in a sports jacket and tie emerge and walk to the front entrance of the tourist house. He knew the old lady was already asleep and would not be answering the door so quickly.

  He watched them knock, wait, and then try the door. It was open so they entered. He drew closer to the house, close enough to look through a side window and see the lights go on in the sitting room. The old lady wearing a dull brown robe turned to the three men and listened. Then she brought her hands to her face and the one in the sports jacket put his arm around her shoulders and guided her to the sofa.

  What was going on? he wondered.

  SEVEN

  Terri filled in a report for the police. The officers who arrived afterward wanted to know what she thought killed the woman.

  "It's too soon to tell. The edema she suffered could have a number of causes, including kidney disease or some form of poisoning. It could also be the result of severe allergic reaction," she added. "We'll have to wait for the autopsy." The hard disc in her computerlike memory suggested another probable cause, but she rejected it instantly. She was tempted to follow the ambulance to the hospital, but then thought, what for? There was nothing left to do for this woman except invade her body and search for the story of her death. Instead, she went home and decided to take a hot shower. She knew of a Jewish custom that required people who had been to funerals to wash their hands before they entered their homes. It was so silly, a superstition that suggested death was on your hands and you could bring it into your home and infect your loved ones. And yet, she had to get the feeling off her. She had to wash away the morbid air, the memory of that cold glint that had come quickly into the young woman's eyes. Could it be that she did touch death, even for an instant? Did it pause to gloat and run itself through her just once, causing her to shudder and causing her heart to stop and then start?

  You doctors, it said disdainfully, you think you will defeat me with yourchemicals and your electronics, but in the end, you will always bow your headsat the vain attempts, at the failures. I play with you. I let you think you havestaved me off, driven me back, and then I return, perhaps through a differentavenue, around some corner you did not anticipate, and I pluck the victory outof your hands repeatedly.

  But keep trying. I so enjoy the contest.

  She shook her head at her own imagination and made herself a cup of warm milk. I'm a twenty-first century physician and I rely on my grandmother's old remedies. It made her smile and she needed to smile just now. She sat at her kitchenette and thought about her grandmother, about the nights they sat and talked when she was only a little girl. She had a way of weaving her stories, her past, into a tapestry that enthr
alled, educated, and at times even frightened Terri a little, especially when she described the hardships. Her grandmother had been through very difficult times when she had arrived in America at the age of only five, holding onto her widowed mother's hand.

  Her mother had agreed to come to America to marry a man she had never really met, a butcher in Brooklyn who had lost his wife to breast cancer and who had three sons to raise and no patience for it. All she had done was speak to him on the phone and look at some pictures. It was a way of solving her own desperate situation, for her husband had left her nothing and times were very hard in Budapest for a woman alone with a child.

  How could people have been so selfless? Terri wondered when she thought about her great-grandmother. How could they be willing to make such great sacrifices and from what well of optimism did they draw so much hope after suffering so much tragedy and turmoil? Were people stronger back then? Were we now with all our miraculous medicine and wonderful technology really a weaker species? Were we rapidly letting go of the values that gave us the power to survive spiritually as well as physically?

  I hate being this heavy and philosophical, she thought. I hate it, but it always happens after something terrible like this. It's as if death was there periodically to remind us how vulnerable we were and how silly we were putting any value on anything material. Everything we owned, possessed, would belong to someone else in one form or another some day. Our homes, our clothes, our cars, even our very money. It all might take some other form, be destroyed in one way and then used to build something else, but it would not be ours forever. Even our bones would not be ours.

  What was ours then?

  What did we take with us?

  Should a doctor be so philosophical? Was it a weakness, something that would blind her at an inopportune time? Did Hyman ever stop and have thoughts like these?

  There was a time when science and religion were antagonists, when doctors were thought to be challenging the will of God. There were sects like Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses who still believed in these old ideas. I am a doctor, she thought as if she was speaking before an assembly of such people. I have been educated and given the skills to repair and cure our bodies, not to defy God, but to do His bidding, to be a servant. Why else did He give us the ability and the desire to pursue?