Embryo 2: Crosshairs

by JA Schneider

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  Read on for an excerpt from

  EMBRYO 3: RANEY & LEVINE

  by J.A. Schneider

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  1

  “Dead bodies ahead.”

  Allie Dodd cringed. She considered herself a strong woman, but yesterday’s first day in the anatomy lab nearly undid her. She was still feeling queasy.

  She’d been a chemistry major, had so far avoided most of the squishy bits of biology in her education. But this was it. Dissecting cadavers time, day two. She followed her group through the short hall, her fists clenched in her scrub pockets, trying to focus on last week’s no-sweat class lectures. Welcome to your first course of your first term of your first year of medical school. Here are your new books and surgical tools. This is how you hold a scalpel. Watch these videos. Choose three lab partners.

  Hearing about an experience isn’t the same as actually doing it. Ha, no kidding!

  Now, someone ahead opened the double-swinging doors, and Allie followed into the big white room of thirty dead bodies. She shuddered. The first thing that hit her, like yesterday, was the acrid sick smell of embalming fluid. Pleeese don’t let me humiliate myself. The next thing was the room’s chill. She’d worn an old sweatshirt under her scrubs. Rubbed goose pimples on her arms, felt herself already turning green.

  But stayed steady, tried to anyway, when one of her lab partners named Jay Fleming called to her from their appointed cadaver. The dear boy was one of those eager beaver types, “stoked to be starting!” Already latex-gloved, pulling back the cadaver’s black tarpaulin and peeking under the gauze wrapped around the body’s head.

  “C’mon, Allie, you’ll get used to it,” he said a bit impatiently; and her second partner, wise guy Aaron Smith, made it worse by saying, “Just don’t faint into the bucket.”

  The bucket. Oh why’d he have to say that? Don’t look, don’t look…

  She couldn’t help it. Allie’s eyes dropped to the damned thing. Her stomach rolled at the orange biohazard bucket under the table to catch falling pieces of human skin and fat. There was already mush in it from yesterday.

  The room spun. Was full of orange bio-buckets under every table.

  “She’s not gonna faint,” snapped Allie’s third partner, Tara Wicks, who shot her a warning look: Don’t let them call us wimps.

  All three of them were already at work. Allie steeled herself and got to it. Don’t be stupid, she thought. This was so important, wasn’t it? The chance to learn about the human body without the pressure of life and death? Her hand shook as her scalpel made its first cut. And then another. Maybe this wasn’t so bad, she thought, trying to calm. In a way the cadaver didn’t even seem like a real person, though she knew it had been a man. But now the skin was hard and rubbery, and a weird color of brownish-pinkish-grey.

  Yesterday they’d made their first cuts in the standard H-shape. The first one from left to right at the top of the chest, under the clavicle; the next straight down the midline to below the ribcage; and the last horizontally under the bottom of the ribcage. They’d wait a bit before lifting the ribs. Allie was still holding her breath, but working was starting to make her feel better. She was doing it! Holding a scalpel and helping to dissect! Cutting through skin flaps, seeing muscles, nerves and blood vessels, vaguely hearing Tara mutter dammit, they’d gotten a fat one, had the extra work of cutting through layers of icky fat.

  “Time to raise the hood,” Jay Fleming said. He put his gloved fingers into the bottom incision they’d made yesterday, and started to lift the ribs.

  “Need the cutter,” he said, and Aaron fired up the bone saw; cut through the bigger ribs.

  The saw’s screech and the smell of bones being cut was awful. Allie’s chin dropped down. Yesterday’s nausea was back, big time, rising in her gorge.

  Peripherally she saw Jay lift the ribs, and peer with Aaron and Tara into the thoracic cavity. For a half second, stunned silence.

  Then, screaming.

  “Holy shit!” and “Oh Jeeezus!” as all three leaped back from the table.

  Wha…?

  Allie peered in. Terror blurred her vision as the snake, twisted into a knot between the heart and lungs, sprang from the corpse, slid down to the table and then to the floor.

  More screaming, yelling. Scrubs at adjoining tables saw and froze in horror. Allie sank to the floor, clutching her belly. The snake was only feet away. Black and semi-coiled by the next table’s wheel.

  She was aware of Tara kneeling to her, clutching her arm, and Jay too on her other side with Aaron over him yelling something, but it was too late, the vomit came. Allie lurched for the bio-bucket and heaved. Cried too, wept bitterly. Some sicko had shown up her weakness, her lack of nerve. She’d never last here. All those years of studying and struggling and losing sleep, and she was finished, done…

  They were calling to her but she didn’t hear. She was crying her eyes out, and retching again.

  He came at a fast walk. Faster than his overweight old bones usually moved, because this didn’t look like the usual newbie hurler, they were all yelling.

  One of them had the vile thing and was holding it up. Black and twisting, about three feet long. Revolted faces searched his as student Aaron Smith carefully handed it to him.

  “Son of a bitch,” breathed Carl Hutchins, M.D., PhD. Well this beat anything he’d seen in his thirty years of teaching anatomy. He held the snake with both gloved hands, his face grim.

  Then his gaze fell to the miserable young woman, dry heaving now. Allie Dodd, her name was. He always took care to learn their names.

  Gripping the snake in one hand and adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses, he knelt – painfully, oh, the knees – put his free arm around her, and lay the damned thing on the floor where she could see it.

  “It’s okay, Allie,” he comforted. “It’s fake. Made of rubber. Someone’s cruel prank.” He pounded the snake with his fist, and it bounced.

  Her face was pale, clammy, and the back of her scrub suit was drenched in sweat. But he’d seen her in orientation. She was a spirited, determined girl.

  One more dry heave. Then she looked up, still clinging to the bucket like a life preserver, and peeked worriedly at the snake. “Rubber?” she managed.

  “Yeah. Someone’s disgusting…joke.” Hutch hoped none of them crowding anxiously around caught the hesitation in his voice.

  Only, Jay Fleming was bending over him and scowling at the snake. “So bleeping real looking,” he said. “Cripes, what’s those other things near its head? They look like worms. One, two, three…jeez, six of ‘em.”

  “Rubber worms,” Hutch said evasively. He didn’t want to scare them with what he was thinking.

  Jay reached to pat Allie’s arm. She was sitting straighter on the floor, but looking crushed, just mortified. “C’mon Al, it’s okay. I puked into a fetal pig once. They made me hose it down.”

  Her swollen eyes peered up at him. Glanced at Professor Hutchins, then back to Jay.

  “You hadda hose it down?”

  “Yeah. And I puked again!”

  She grinned feebly, and scrubs around them laughed. Yuks erupted over personal episodes of losing it.

  “Okay, okay, back to work,” Hutch said, giving Allie’s shoulder a final encouraging squeeze. He picked up the wretched snake and rose with difficulty, one hand gripping the stainless steel table with his knees screaming in pain. Aaron Smith helped him.

  Allie pulled herself up too. Shakily.

  “Want to take a break?” Hutch asked her. “Grab a shower?”

  She gave a wan
yes and thanked him, saying she’d be back ASAP.

  “That’s the spirit,” Hutch said, watching her go, watching the others file back to their tables and get to work.

  Now he could fret.

  He carried the snake to the tall window, and fingered it. It looked so real: black, semi-coiled, the skin scaly with three light stripes along its length. Hutch pulled at it, stretched it, coiled it tightly.

  Then put it coiled onto the wide sill and let go. It sprang open, seemed to dart, as they’d described it jerking from the cadaver.

  And the rubber worms sewn near its head weren’t worms at all.

  They were fake baby snakes.

  Which made it a seven-headed snake.

  He’d grown up in the projects; had had some crazy raving Baptists in his family. Was this what he feared? Or a cruel prank based on it? He picked up the snake again, held it up to the late afternoon light. Someone had gone to trouble sewing on the baby snakes’ heads. Black thread, and what had to have been an upholstery needle, something like that, to push through the rubber.

  Worriedly, Hutch looked out the window. The anatomy lab was on the first floor of the med school, across the wide Emergency entrance with its ambulances, police cars, and – today – a crowd pressing against the police line guarding the hospital entrance. TV vans lined the avenue behind the reporters, cheering advocates, and protesters.

  It was the protesters who bothered him. Today was a big day for the hospital, and people had come running. The crowd bristled with signs and placards.

  One of the signs, garish and jostling furiously, read SPAWN OF THE DEVIL. Its owner had a megaphone and was yelling into it, arguing too with those near him.

  The sign troubled Hutch.

  It troubled him bad.

  2

  Do stalkers ever quit?

  Jill Raney saw the frightening sign too. From where she stood, holding Jesse in his blue blanket by the neonatal window, she peered down at the jumping placard. SPAWN OF THE DEVIL, it screamed in angry, painted letters dripping red.

  Today was the day of Madison Memorial’s big announcement. That Jesse was here, born, and oh, such frenzy down there by the entrance. A photo of Jesse with a smiling nurse holding him was all over cyberspace and the world’s papers.

  Jill had dreaded this day.

  He weighed barely eight pounds. Hard to believe he was the cause of the chaos five floors below. He slept happily, his tiny fist curled to his cheek as the reporters, gawkers, thrilled advocates, and hollering protesters surged behind the cop line holding them back.

  “Déjà vu, huh?” David came to whisper over Jill’s shoulder. He sounded tired. Tense too.

  Jill didn’t answer. She was feeling bad, almost crying bad. Her eyes welled and the corners of her mouth turned down as she thought, I love this baby. She had named him Jesse, and for now that’s what they were calling him.

  For now… The words came back to her, and she felt a worse downpress of pain. Guilt too, and a trembly feeling of being terribly alone.

  Last night she and David had their first argument.

  It was four o’clock on the second Monday in October. Sixteen days after they’d lifted Jesse, wet with amniotic-like fluid, from the silicone cylinder a crazy genius had created for him to serve as a man-made uterus. The media was going nuts because today, after two plus weeks of monitoring him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, world-famous Madison Memorial Hospital was showing him to the world. This miracle child who wasn’t just any IVF baby, started in a Petri dish and transferred to a woman’s body.

  No, Jesse was the astonishing fetus Jill had discovered last July in a hidden lab, in what at first blink had looked like a rounded fish tank. ARTIFICIAL WOMB, blared headlines as the news hit; DESIGNER BABY, EMBRYO FARM and BRAVE NEW WORLD. Creepy blurry pictures of him, floating in his cylinder at six months gestation, were snapped by staff rushing in to the nearly dark attic where Jill had found him.

  And almost died. David too. They were both almost killed.

  She blinked; for an instant saw herself again bloodied and screaming and David hauling her back to safety. Trauma had bonded them, fast. Had it happened too fast?

  She still felt tense with him, but the awful sign below made her speak.

  “See that one?” she said faintly, tipping her chin down to the crowd, to the SPAWN OF THE DEVIL sign.

  The guy holding the sign had his megaphone turned up; through the glass they could hear him screaming “…the arrogance of taking the place of the Creator! That child up there is evil!”

  David let out a breath. “Yep,” he said softly. “Nice, huh? Just one religious nut.”

  She turned her head toward him. “About last night…”

  “It’s okay. We’ll talk later.”

  He stepped closer, nuzzled the back of her neck. She had her long, dark hair up in a ponytail. His white-jacketed chest warmed her back in its thin scrub top. She closed her eyes for a second.

  Then looked out again, hugging Jesse.

  “The cops are taping?”

  “You know it. And hospital security.”

  It didn’t comfort her. Last July an army of cops and security hadn’t kept a killer from Jesse. After that crisis came three months of relative quiet…and now, suddenly, the scene down there was back…like last July’s sweltering crowds when Jesse’s discovery lit its first firestorm. Had people saved their same signs? THANK YOU MADISON MEMORIAL FOR OUR FAMILY jostled next to IVF IMMORAL, and ADOPT AN EMBRYO. The only difference now was, the leaves were turning. It was autumn and the days were shorter. Jill raised her gaze. Beyond the surging mess of disagreeing humanity glowed the first bright dabs of gold and orange, tinted even brighter by the setting sun…

  “Doctor Levine?”

  “Damn,” David whispered. “How many more?”

  “Never ending,” she groaned back.

  He touched her arm and went back to today’s bunch of researchers, white-coated and intense, grouped scribbling and conferring around Jesse’s empty isolette. Three days ago the hospital had started allowing excited researchers in in small groups. Jill and David were obstetricians, not pediatricians, but the hospital had assigned them to speak with researchers because they’d seen and interacted with this child since three months before his birth.

  Just two hours each afternoon, but it was getting old. The same astonished questions asked and answered, over and over. Couldn’t they just all wait for the hospital’s Chief of Pediatrics et al to write their damn paper and get it online?

  No. They begged and besieged, just had to see the babe. Poke him and prod him and study his normal chart notes for themselves. Miraculous! Lungs…heart…every organ and neurological response normal! Gestated nine months outside a woman’s body!

  Jill glanced briefly back at them. Today, three neonatologists from Texas, a pediatric neurologist from Boston, and a pediatric hematologist from London.

  Drone…drone… Jill tuned them out. Tuned out David too, answering the same bleeping questions as yesterday and the day before. She was back to looking out the window, thinking not for the first time that he was a much nicer person. She was rash and impatient. He was an explainer, a patient teacher who rarely had to show his tough side…which was why he was OB’s third year resident charged with teaching younger residents and Jill’s fellow interns.

  He was her boss, they slept together, and she loved him…say it…but it led to some interesting minor wrangling.

  Not that last night was minor.

  “I want to adopt him!” trilled the blond pediatric neurologist (“Corinne! Call me Reenie!”), who wore too much perfume. Jill made a face that no one saw, then heard an annoyed, “Git in line.”

  Tricia!

  Chubby-cheeked, bespectacled Tricia Donovan, fellow intern and Jill’s best friend since med school, had just entered the NICU from the connecting regular nursery; was heading for Jill and waving to David.

  His handsome face split into a grin. “Hey Trish! How’d the del
ivery go? The twins throw you?”

  “Nah. Sam caught one and I caught the other. Slid right down da chute.”

  David grinned again and went back to the white coats. Tricia, reaching Jill, whispered, “Admiring the mad cow herd down there?”

  “There’s a sign-”

  “Saw it. Came to check your fever chart. What’s Jesse doing out of bed?”

  “Blondie back there used a cold stethoscope on him. He started screaming. I scooped him out and calmed him down.”

  “Lemme guess. She researches and writes papers more than she handles babies.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She has donkey teeth.”

  David’s voice was starting to sound hoarse, so Tricia turned to answer the next question for him.

  “Yaaas, Jesse grinned and waved at us at twenty-four weeks gestation. Or flopped his hands, I guess you’d call it.” She stepped closer to them, flopping her hands to show how hands flopped. “Did something like a wave.”

  “You saw him too?” asked one of the Texas neonatologists, a thin, older man behind thick glasses.

  “Several of us visited him regularly.” Tricia glanced at Jill, approaching too with Jesse. “When he wasn’t asleep, we’d hug his cylinder and goof around and play music for him. He likes Beethoven.”

  “Beethoven,” Texas repeated solemnly.

  Jill said, “We tried the Stones, Clapton, ‘Twist and Shout.’ They made him agitated. But Beethoven - he’d do swimmy, dancing little motions to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, um-”

  “Third Movement,” Tricia said. “We just stumbled onto it. It’s really happy music.” She switched tacks. “What’s really amazing is, till now we – all of us – have only been able to see fetuses in ultrasounds. This little guy we really watched develop. Other staff members did too.”

  “You took pictures?” a Texas white coat asked.

  “Yes,” Jill said. “They’re in that folder we gave you. They’re not being released to the media, but they’ll be in a paper the OB and Pediatrics Departments are preparing together.” She started to put still-sleeping Jesse into his isolette.