by JA Schneider
EMBRYO 2:
Crosshairs
A Novel
by
J.A. Schneider
PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EMBRYO:
“It is rare that a book can elicit that much emotion so early in the story. I was blown away. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS BOOK!!”
The Kindle Book Review
“After reading EMBRYO, I had to take a breath. This was one of the most intense books I've ever read.”
The Indie Bookshelf
“Readers will absolutely love it!”
Literati Literature Lovers
“Both EMBRYO 2 and the first EMBRYO start from page one & DO.NOT.STOP. The suspense is continuous! Holy hell, what a read!”
The Reading Café
“Top pick! Intensely fascinating and thrilling.”
Mystery Magazine
“The tension is so high in places if I had any nails left I'd have bitten them off.”
Amazon reviewer Emmy Ellis
“When this book is described as a wild ride, that is no understatement! If this were a movie, you would never take your eyes off the screen! The story was non-stop intense, action-packed and completely engaging.”
Bestselling author Valerie Strawmier
“A white-knuckle Medical Thriller! Gripping from the first heart-stopping scene to the last. Jill Raney is sheer determination in doc scrubs, an endearing character capable of beating a system that would like to cover up its wrongs and seal her mouth.”
Bestselling author Mina de Caro
“The writing is superb, the pace intense, the characters fully developed, and the research flawless.”
Bestselling author Gail M. Baugniet
“Never read a Medical Thriller before but LOVED THIS! Scary *&* fascinating!”
Amazon reviewer Beth Wiggins
“What a ride! I literally found myself turning pages until they finally ran out. The action builds up, there is romance and much danger involved. As a physician myself, I saw some very good technical contributions here; it is all quite accurate until the end, where it gets into a bit of sci-fi, but even then, well done and absorbing. Highly recommend, and like somebody else said, would make quite a movie.”
John Ellis, M.D.
PRAISE FOR EMBRYO 2: CROSSHAIRS
“Again, this new thriller deserves so much MORE than the regular 5 star rating!! Embryo 2 is a follow up book to the characters and storyline of EMBRYO, and equally just as good. As I said in my review of the first book, anyone who enjoys a brilliantly paced thriller, with fact and fiction mixed in, will thoroughly enjoy Embryo 2. Read this book after you finish the prequel, and you'll be left breathless!!”
The Kindle Book Review
“Immediately reels you into a whirlwind!”
Readers Favorite
“Holy hell, what a read!! Both this book, and the first EMBRYO, start from page one and DO.NOT.STOP. The suspense is continuous!”
THE READING CAFÉ
“J.A. Schneider has followed up her first suspense-filled medical thriller with this second one which is as good, maybe even better than the first book in the series. It’s a stunner.” The Mystery Gazette
“I read Embryo and 3 days later followed up with Embryo 2. It is a pleasure to recommend both books as exceptional medical thrillers!”
Top Thrillers Magazine
“Doctors as a new detective duo, what a concept! These two strongly-written characters are making a place for themselves among the list of teams in the suspense genre, holding their own against the likes of Tess Gerritson's Rizzoli and Isles; and Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino.”
Bestselling author Gail Baugniet
“I absolutely loved this book! A brilliant follow up to the first Embryo, and I've just learned there's a third in the works! A medical thriller of gripping proportions, I encourage everyone who loves a good psychological thriller to give this series a go!”
Reviewer Andrew Baker
“J.A. Schneider has done it again! After the heart-racing read of Embryo, Embryo 2: Crosshairs, does not fail to disappoint. Fast paced and full of continual intrigue Ms Schneider successfully transports her readers into a realm of medical drama that easily competes with such writers as Crichton and Cook, although Ms Schneider is a far superior writer than the latter author, her concepts and ideas are an easy match for Crichton lovers of medical drama.”
Amazon reviewer Zeana Romanovna
“A sequel to Embryo, this book is just as explosive as the first!” Amazon reviewer Melanie Adkins
“This book had my heart rocketing again, it took a lot to tear me away from my Kindle. There were some truly scary parts in this book (I don't think I'll ever look at a chicken in the same way again!!) The clown ~ arrrgh... I truly dislike clowns and this made me even more certain of that fact!!”
Amazon reviewer Emily Graff
“J.A. Schneider did it again and if I could have given this book a 10 plus rating I would have. To all who have not read this, please do, you will not be disappointed, so do something good for yourself and read this book!”
Amazon reviewer Louann Van Riper
NEW! EMBRYO 3: RANEY & LEVINE, released February 14, 2014
Another doctors-&-cops adrenalin-packed thriller: First, tension enters Jill's & David's relationship over what to do about newborn Jesse. They both love him, but David feels that he'd be safer adopted anonymously. Suddenly their stress turns to horror when they discover that a murderous religious zealot is after both Jesse - whom he calls “devil spawn” - and Jill & David's hospital which he calls “the devil's workshop which must be destroyed!” This time, the whole hospital is threatened... Jill and David join forces with the police in a terrifying race to track down a killer, and to prevent an unthinkable catastrophe.
Publisher Information
Embryo 2: Crosshairs is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, institutions or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 J.A. Schneider.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce or transmit this book, in any part thereof, in any form or by any means whatsoever, whether now existing or devised at a future time, without permission in writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.
For more information about the author, please visit http://jaschneiderauthor.net
To Bob as always, my husband, and an endlessly patient physician who loves explaining medical concepts which I interweave as I write.
EMBRYO 2:
Crosshairs
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
&nb
sp; Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Epilogue
Author's Note
An excerpt from EMBRYO 3
About the Author
1
Her dreams were always the same. She was falling.
His thick hand on her back had urged her ahead, through the dimly lit lab of counters and glassware to his bookshelf wall, where a hidden door creaked open into mustiness. The museum’s old attic, dark. Fear spiked. “Such things I want to show you!” he called, now at the far end lighting a line of forms more human than ape. “Come, come!” But one of the figures, beneath scraggly black hair, came alive and approached her instead, pleading, and she screamed, and his hands, now furious, threw her out the tall window and down the steep slate roof. She clung, crying, to the cracking rain gutter which gave way and she plunged – “Nooo!” – then woke, trembling with her heart pounding, in her bed in her room.
David came awake and raised up to hold her.
“Another one?” he whispered, his voice sleepy.
She pressed her face to him while he held her tighter, feeling her heart hammer between their chest walls. Long moments passed. The trembling eased. Finally she managed, “Yeah, another one.”
“The same?”
A nod.
He groaned softly. Pushed her long dark hair off her brow and kissed her.
Still holding her, he squinted out at the wretched-looking day. Gray, July-steamy and depressing, condensation forming tear-like streaks down the window pane.
The fourth day. Today was it, seclusion over. The hospital had given them three days off to “rest and try to recover”… from this. The real nightmare they’d been through.
Jill peered out too. “Nice day,” she said dryly.
He looked back at her, his face twisting into a little grin. Sarcasm. That was a good sign, wasn’t it?
He’d had one bad night: the dreams, the frantic jerking awake. But yesterday morning he’d lain and realized how glad he was to be alive. How thankful he was that both of them had made it with just a few scrapes. It really was a miracle. The thought had brought him to tears.
For Jill, the nightmare was still happening. He’d gone out for groceries and take-out. She hadn’t wanted to budge. In between showers and changing the bandages on his scalp laceration, she’d wanted just to stay scrunched down in bed with the covers over her head.
“Go away,” she’d say when he lifted their light blanket and peeked under.
“Why?”
“I’m hiding. No one can find me.”
Even in her post-trauma, she could be funny.
Now, gazing out the window with a disgusted look, she was rhyming away about the gloom: “Weary, dreary, bleary, teary…”
A loud buzz made them jump. Cursing, David reached over to turn off the alarm. It was 7:30. The hospital was giving them a relatively easy first day back, even letting them “sleep late.” Starting tomorrow the damned alarm would resume going off earlier. Way earlier.
He reached back to her. “I’ll go in. You stay. They know three days isn’t enough.”
Jill sat up slowly, groaning. “I’m coming.” She inhaled. “It’ll be better if I have my hands busy, remind myself that others suffer too. I’d get more crazy stewing here alone.”
More crazy? He knew she wasn’t serious.
They showered and dressed quickly in their green scrubs.
Moving down the staircase of her shabby brownstone, Jill murmured, “I don’t recognize myself anymore.”
He looked at her.
“When you met me I was such an overcompensating, insecure jerk who just had to be right. Now I’m a quivering mess.”
He smiled as they cleared the vestibule and he opened the front door. “Near death experience can have that effect.”
They had talked long and soulfully about trauma, and the battles we fight in this life. They change us. We’re no longer the person we were. It may take a while, sometimes a longer while, but ultimately we become stronger. More confident and sure of ourselves because we survived.
Jill had hugged him and said that the talks helped, sometimes for hours. But this morning, another nightmare...
“David?”
“Huh?” He’d headed first down the stoop steps.
Then blinked and looked back.
She was standing there. Just standing at the top of the cement steps, gripping the iron railing. “I can’t…”
He frowned and went back up to her.
Her lips were parted. She was breathing shallowly. “I…first noticed it when we were coming down the stairs. Now I can’t…look down. I can’t go down.”
Clinging to the rail she tried one step; in a nauseating swoop saw instead the rain gutter give way and her plunging to her death. She felt faint and her knees buckled.
He caught her up. “Jill, what…?”
But he knew. Right away he knew. Fear of heights. Omigod, it made sense. He saw himself again on the roof, inching down to her on his belly. She was barely four feet away. He heard her scream, saw one bloodied hand let go. Convulsively he’d pulled himself closer, hearing the cracking noise as the gutter began to pull free. He shouted her name, leaning out over the edge, trying not to look down as his left arm hooked under her shoulder. Somehow he’d heaved her over the top to safety.
But she had looked down, knowing she was about to plunge. Even after he’d gotten her back up, she’d lain face down and sobbing on the roof slates a yard from the edge. He remembered the hideous, crashing noise as the gutter collapsed and fell away. He’d lifted her to him and cradled her, hearing wailing police sirens coming, helicopters overhead.
Now, Jill straightened and pulled away a little. “It’s better,” she said, inhaling. And then: “Oh damn.”
She too realized what had happened.
Fear of heights. Temporary? Or would it last longer…
“Oh damn oh damn oh damn…” With her arm tightly in his, she moved shakily down with him to the sidewalk.
David raised his free hand to his still-painful laceration; felt again the blinding crack to his head from the roof slate that SOB had thrown at him.
The nice guy research genius everyone had trusted… God help us, it’s over, isn’t it? All of it?
They walked the few blocks to First Avenue. Across the street, mobbing the hospital entrance, they saw a crowd of people, placards and TV vans.
David groaned.
Thudding helicopter rotors could be heard as the shot caught a broad, white-coated man high on a steep roof throw something down at another man, younger-looking in white pants and jacket. A voiceover cried, “He’s down. No…he’s up! Looks dazed but he’s moving, climbing back up to his assailant-“
“Oh jeez, turn it up!”
Someone in the surgical doctors’ lounge did, and someone else turned off the whirring microwave. Three residents came closer to the TV. They’d been up all night operating; this stopped their bitching. They watched, dry-lipped, as the screen filled with Jill Raney crawling to safety, then David Levine clambering up to his attacker and punching him hard in the face. “Oh God! He’s…” The emotional voiceover stopped, wordless, as the force of Levine’s blow drove the other man hard against the old chimney, which crumbled, sending bricks in an avalanche down the roof.
An intern came out of the shower, a towel around his middle. “I missed it!” he complained.
“You’ve only seen it umpteen times,” one of the three said. “They’ll show it again.”
“They show the second guy yet? The one Levine shot?”
“No. That’s coming.”
The TV was also on in the fifth floor Pathology docs’ lounge. Activity stopped, again, as the research genius-turned-madman lost his footing and skidded down twenty feet. The voiceover was back, describing “the assailant” grasping a low roof slate that had stopped his fall. “He seems to be calling to the man he attacked to come save him!” said the
voice incredulously.
“Let him go, David!” cried a female resident who was in tears.
Each time they saw this, they relived it. To think that this had happened here, at Madison Hospital…to one of us.
David had begun to pick his way back down the roof. “He’s doing it!” the voiceover cried over the thumping chopper rotors. “He’s trying to help his attacker! This is incredible!” A jerky close-up showed blood spreading on David’s white jacket shoulder, and his hand, reaching down to the other man. Then, a shout from a different voice in the chopper, and the shot swung dizzyingly to a higher, fast-approaching second assailant, thin and seedy-looking, his upraised arms carrying a cinder block.
David spun away as the block crashed down. He raised his gun and shot. The second attacker fell on his back on the roof grade, and lay with a bloody hole between his eyes. “Horrible! Just horrible!” the winded voiceover cried, describing the scene and…seconds later, the first attacker screaming and plunging to his death. The camera again swung wildly; barely caught that shot.
A stupid cat food ad came on. The Pathology residents stood, stunned, as they had each time they’d seen this tape, shown obsessively on every network and cable station. It dominated the Internet and was trending on Twitter, for God’s sake.
One resident named Peter Gregson said softly, “I know Jill.”
Others knew David, and one added gravely, “They’re coming back today.”
It didn’t need saying. Everyone knew that Jill and David were scheduled to “return to their Ob/Gyn duties” today. The hospital PR machine had announced it to the world.
Peter said. “I’d need more time. A lot more.”
“Me too,” said the resident who had cried. “This is awful. It’s too soon…”
“Breaking News!” said a female TV anchor interrupting a broadcast. “We’ve just received word that doctors Jill Raney and David Levine have approached Madison Hospital Medical Center, and are trying to get in despite the crowd that’s converged on them. We’ll go now to Suki Hayashi, live at the scene.”
It had started to rain lightly. A pretty reporter holding a mike described the crowd: “Mixed, it seems, between fans, the curious, and over there” – she pointed – “protesters.” The camera panned over hands holding up cell phones and videocams to placards reading IVF IMMORAL! and WE OWE OUR FAMILY TO IVF and ADOPT AN EMBRYO. The people carrying the placards seemed mostly peaceful.