by JA Schneider
EMBRYO 3:
Raney & Levine
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
Publisher Information
Embryo 3: Raney & Levine 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 © 2014 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 3:
Raney & Levine
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
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Author's Note
About the Author
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 cours
e 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.
Wo
rriedly, 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.