Blood Harvest

by Michael Weinberger

  “Okay, stand on the other side of the desk.”

  Steve looked and felt confused, but he complied with his friend’s request. Chris typed something on the keyboard then leaned back in the chair. The desk chair was high backed and had padded armrests Chris stroked his palms across. Taking in another deep breath he closed his eyes and let out a jittery exhale.

  Steve frowned, his mind screaming to ask questions, but he recognized Chris’ intensity and attributed whatever was going on with Chris to be the result of the exhaustion he must be feeling.

  “All right. Everything seems to be ready.” Chris looked up at Steve. “I could go into some long thesis about the whole theory I have, but I think it’s better to show you my theory and the basis for what I believe might be happening.”

  Chris reached for the keyboard as Steve asked, “How can I see the computer if I am facing the back of the screen?”

  Chris looked up at Steve as if to say something reassuring but the words caught in his throat and his hand shot away from the keyboard.

  “WHOA!” Chris reached over to the desk and picked up a pair of dark goggles. “I’m sorry, I almost forgot these. I guess I’m more tired than I realized.”

  Steve looked at the goggles as Chris held them out to him.

  “What?”

  “Put them on.”

  The goggles were oversized, round and rather silly looking. Steve looked at Chris skeptically.

  “Why?”

  “For protection; you’re going to need them.”

  Since Chris only had the one pair, Steve grew even more skeptical. Apparently Chris was not going to don a similar pair.

  Chris bounced the goggles in his hand impatiently.

  “C’mon! The sooner you put these on, the sooner I can get some rest,” Chris urged.

  With obvious disapproval, Steve took the goggles from Chris and placed the lenses over his eyes, cinching the elastic strap that gave the eyewear a sealed fit on his head.

  Steve turned to Chris who was looking at the goggles on Steve’s head.

  “What?”

  “I wish I had a camera,” Chris snickered. Thinking Chris had just pulled a prank on him, Steve raised a hand to remove the glasses.

  “Don’t!” Chris commanded with all seriousness. “I’m sorry I ribbed you. You really do need those.” Steve was losing his patience, “For what Chris?”

  “For what I am about to show you.” All humor had drained away and Chris now had a pleading look on his face. Steve dropped his hand to his side.

  “Thanks.” Chris sighed. “Okay, when I hit the enter button a program I designed will run and, if everything works as I suspect, you’ll have a real idea of what may be going on.”

  Steve waited as Chris began to shiver.

  “Steve,” Chris said, “don’t panic, everything will be fine.”

  Without further warning Chris depressed the “enter” key and sat back in the chair. The lights in the room went out which left Steve in an unusual amount of darkness given the glasses he was wearing. A moment of amazement passed through Steve’s mind as he realized Chris had placed the lighting system of the laboratory under the remote control of his laptop.

  “Chris what..?”

  “Just wait. Trust me.” Chris’ voice came eerily out of the darkness.

  Steve could hear the disc drive on the laptop began to hum as the program Chris had prepared sprang to life. The glow of whatever was on the computer screen cast the only illumination in the room and onto Chris’ face. Steve could see Chris watching the screen with unblinking concentration. A few seconds went by and Steve found himself holding his breath in anticipation, of what, he didn’t know. Then, without noise, a series of strobe like flashes lit the room as efficiently as any discothèque special effect. The flashes continued and Steve watched as Chris’ face was lit with every flash. Steve noticed a change on Chris’ face. Chris began to look sleepy and was having trouble looking at the screen. He wavered slightly in his chair and Steve thought he might fall asleep any moment.

  After about twenty seconds the program ended. The flashing lights ceased and the lights of the lab switched back on. Steve looked around the room as he removed his glasses and tossed them on a nearby chair.

  “So what was I supposed to…” Steve gasped and bolted toward Chris who was violently convulsing in the chair. His eyes were rolled back into his head and white frothy foam was oozing from his mouth. Every muscle in his body seemed to spasm and release with an immeasurable ferocity.

  Steve screamed for help as he tried to gently lay Chris on the linoleum floor. Hearing his calls for help, nurses and orderlies sprang to life; some rushing to Steve while others went for a physician.

  “Chris!”

  Desperately he tried to control the spasms his friend was experiencing while a gurgling sound discharged from Chris’ throat. Suddenly, the leather rod Chris had placed on the table made sense to him. He turned to the table and grabbed the rod from the desktop. He pried open Chris’ mouth and inserted the rod between Chris’ teeth like a horse’s bit. Steve could feel hands pulling him up from the floor. He was about to resist when he realized it was the various health care professionals trying to move him away so they could get to work on Chris. Steve was led away from the lab and told to wait in one of the generic waiting rooms. He sat worrying for nearly an hour before a nurse walked into the waiting room.

  “Excuse me, are you Steve?”

  Steve didn’t know how the nurse knew his name but his concern for Chris took precedence over his “why do you ask and who wants to know” mentality.

  “Yes?”

  “I need to ask you a few questions about your brother.”

  “My…brother,” Steve repeated out loud, pausing at the insanity of the statement. Then he guessed what was going on and hoped his words hadn’t sounded like a question. Instead of giving the nurse a chance to ponder his confusion he distracted her with another question. “How is he?”

  “He’s stable and coherent. How long do the attacks normally last?”

  Steve had no idea what was going on, but he played along.

  “Not very long.”

  “You don’t time them?”

  “I’m not always with him.”

  The nurse frowned but continued undaunted.

  “How long has it been since his last episode?”

  Steve knew he hadn’t answered the first question to the nurse’s satisfaction so he tried to seem casual about his answer, as if this wasn’t an unusual occurrence.

  “I honestly can’t remember the last time this happened.” Steve smiled to himself as he realized that Chris would have liked that answer.

  The nurse found this to be encouraging.

  “Well, it’s a good thing the episodes aren’t frequent. By all indications he’s just fine; a little tired from the ordeal, but none the worse for wear. I’ll need to get a full medical history from your brother at some point, but for now he’s awake and asking for you. The doctor would like to keep him overnight for observation, would that be acceptable?”

  “What did…uh…my brother have to say about that?”

  “He refused.” The nurse looked a bit annoyed when she mentioned Chris’ response.

  “Well, I’ll talk to him about it, but I think the final decision will be his. That is if he’s going to be all right.”

  “Yes, yes he’s fine. The doctor gave him a muscle relaxant and a mild sedative along with a prescription for Neurontin, so he shouldn’t be driving.”

  “Uh, of course.” He couldn’t take it anymore and had to ask the obvious question. “Do you know why this happened to him?”

  The nurse looked sympathetically at him.

  “No, I know it’s hard. I had a cousin with epilepsy and there didn’t seem to be any specific rhyme or reason for her episodes either. She’d just tell everybody that if an attack occurred they should stand back and let her thrash about. She’d come out of it in a few minutes and be fine. Tired, but fine.”<
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  Steve was so taken aback by what he was hearing all he could do was nod his head as the nurse led him to the room where Chris had been taken. What was going on?

  Chris wasn’t an epileptic.

  Was he?

  Chapter 34

  As the nurse walked Steve to Chris’ hospital room, Alpha came running around the corner and nearly scared the nurse into cardiac arrest.

  “It’s okay, he’s with me.”

  The nurse looked at Alpha with some concern, “I’m sorry, but the patient has only asked to see his brother.”

  Alpha looked confused, “Brother?”

  Steve immediately spoke up, “They have rules that only family members are allowed to see certain patients who’ve been admitted.” Steve turned to the nurse as he removed his police badge from his belt, “Listen ma’am, I don’t mean to throw my weight around, but this man is part of an investigation and it is very important he be included on the visitation list.”

  The nurse started to protest but Steve cut her off, “He’s harmless…really.”

  The nurse looked at Alpha then shrugged her shoulders and said, “He’s your brother, so as long as he doesn’t object then I guess I won’t either.”

  The nurse walked off mumbling as Steve and Alpha walked into Chris’ room.

  “Hey, look whose come to see me,” Chris said weakly as Steve and Alpha entered the semi-private hospital room. “What? No flowers?”

  Steve didn’t smile or take heart at the comment, although out of the corner of his eye he thought he could see Alpha suppressing a grin, which was more than a little out of character for him.

  Returning his attention to Chris, “How do you feel?”

  Chris could see the mood Steve was in and became serious. “Pretty weak; but none the worse for wear. They say the first episode is the worst so…”

  Steve kept glaring at him until Chris spoke in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “See if the guy in the other bed is out.”

  Alpha moved to the other bed and checked the patient lying supine and motionless. Alpha moved to the foot of the bed and checked the chart. After studying the front page for a few moments Alpha said, “The man is heavily sedated and probably won’t wake up for a few hours.”

  Nodding, Chris began his explanations. “ Okay, so I guess you have a lot of questions and are wondering about what really happened. Let me ask you first. Have you ever seen those little plaques outside of nightclubs or certain amusement park rides warning people with epilepsy about strobe lights?”

  “Yeah, so what? What was this? Chris, I know you don’t have epilepsy.”

  Chris nodded, “Actually, you don’t really know that.”

  “So you do have epilepsy?” Alpha asked.

  “No.” Chris was shaking his head now. “It’s just that epilepsy can come on at any point in life.”

  “But that’s not what happened to you,” Steve volunteered.

  “No, but it is possible to start having seizures in adulthood.”

  “Chris what does this have to do with…”

  Chris continued, “You know, I had a cousin who, one time…”

  “Chris!” Steve called out in exasperation.

  In a very exasperated and affected tone Steve drawled, “Would you please try to focus.”

  Reluctantly, Chris conceded. “All right. Jeez Steve, you’re no fun anymore.”

  Steve placed his thumb and first finger on opposite sides of his nasal bone and squeezed into the headache his now alleged brother was giving him.

  Chris composed himself and continued. “What I meant was that epilepsy isn’t a specific disease or dysfunction which occurs at a certain time in your life. Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere and most of the time no one knows why.”

  “And your point is?” Steve said with impatience.

  “You saw the program I was running back at the lab. Even with the dark glasses covering your eyes, you must have seen the series of flashing lights coming from the computer screen.”

  Steve nodded.

  “Okay, as I said earlier, I don’t have epilepsy; however, I was looking at the lab work of the victims from the strip club who were in stasis and couldn’t find any foreign substances in their blood or systems that could account for the state they were in. It occurred to me that perhaps the microbe or chemical causing the problem had been metabolized by the body or it was undetectable with current technology.”

  Steve and Alpha were totally entranced and hanging on to Chris’ every word like boy scouts listening to their first ghost story around a campfire.

  “We were using some pretty high tech equipment in the lab, but we still couldn’t find any traces,” Chris continued. “Then I thought, what if we were looking for the wrong thing altogether.”

  Chris looked at Steve and Alpha to let the words sink in.

  “We just assumed it was some kind of chemical or biological agent, but what if it wasn’t a microbe or chemical. What if it was some other common denominator directly affecting the brain? Nightclubs in general are dark places with various neon and strobe lights, loud music and fog machines. I considered what kind of person would be least suited for that environment. For some reason, I remembered the little plaques in front of some of my favorite amusement parks. Immediately epilepsy jumped to the top of the list.”

  Chris paused to reach for a glass of water, which he sipped before continuing.

  “If a person with a particular type of epilepsy walked into one of these places, he or she would probably drop with a seizure in a matter of seconds as a result of the flashing lights. The drop could be as quick as what happened to all of those people at The Inferno and at the Glitter Gulch.”

  Steve and Alpha silently took in all the information.

  “There’s a flaw in your theory,” Steve volunteered.

  “I bet you’re going to say something to the effect of ‘why would two clubs be packed full of non-epileptics, all of whom spontaneously suffer epileptic seizures at the same time?’”

  Steve nodded, “That and the fact that this ‘stasis’ they are in doesn’t resemble an ‘epileptic seizure.’”

  “Right. That’s what I was testing. Obviously, all who were affected in the clubs couldn’t have been epileptics so I began to wonder if it were possible to induce a seizure in a non-epileptic with the proper strobe light stimulation.”

  Steve interrupted Chris: “I hate to be the one to say it, but I only know epilepsy as a person having a seizure. Could we slow down a minute and get an explanation about what it is?”

  Chris smiled as he explained, “Epilepsy is a group of disorders characterized by unprovoked and recurrent seizures. These are caused by sudden, transient disturbances of electrical activity in the brain disrupting normal neurological functioning. The symptoms are dependent on the type of epilepsy and the location of the disturbance in the brain. Loss of consciousness, loss of motor function, psychic disturbances, or aberrant sensory phenomenon can all be symptoms of epilepsy.”

  Alpha leaned over to Steve and spoke conspiratorially, “My mind has never truly accepted the technology of this world. What did he say?”

  “I think if he had spoken in English it would translate into ‘something causes a break in the brain’s ability to communicate with the body and a seizure, or other symptom, is the result’.”

  “A little basic but that’s the general idea.”

  “So where do the flashing lights come in?” Steve asked.

  “The reaction to the flashing lights is a type of epilepsy called Reflex Epilepsy, in which seizures are triggered by an individual’s sensitivity to sensory stimulation in the environment. The most common form of this is photosensitive epilepsy; in other words, seizures caused by exposure to intense or fluctuating levels of light. People who suffer from this condition have seizures triggered by flashing lights or rapidly alternating light and dark patterns. A flickering fluorescent light, the flicker of sunlight while driving past standing trees, certain video
games, or flashing strobe lights can trigger seizures in photosensitive people. In these cases the herky-jerky type seizure can occur, but there’s also a type of seizure called an Absence Seizure. In this case the person shuts down and stares off into space.”

  Steve contemplated this “absence seizure” since it sounded like what was happening to the victims of both The Inferno and the Glitter Gulch.

  “But you said you don’t have epilepsy.”

  “That’s true. What I wanted to do was test whether I could induce a seizure in a non-epileptic by stimulating the nervous system with a specific pattern of strobe light flashes. And, as you saw first hand, I was successful.”

  The full weight of what happened in the lab to his friend came crashing down on Steve with an impact akin to having a piano dropped on his head.

  “You actually caused yourself to have one of these reflex epileptic seizures?!? Are you insane!?!”

  Steve was beyond furious with Chris’ recklessness.

  Holding his hands up in a submissive gesture, Chris answered, “It’s not like I could have asked for a volunteer and we didn’t have time for any other alternatives.”

  “You seriously endangered yourself, not to mention me!”

  “The polarized sunglasses with blue lenses I had you wear are a widely known as adequate protection from this type of photosensitive seizure. You were never in any danger.”

  Alpha seemed to be keeping a more rational temperament than Steve. He calmly asked, “What causes epilepsy?”

  Glad to change the subject, Chris answered Alpha, “Sometimes various diseases or syndromes resulting in brain damage can cause the condition.”

  As Chris spoke Steve riveted his attention to his friend and a grave look of concern crossed his face. Noticing Steve’s reaction, Chris continued, “No, I didn’t cause any permanent brain damage by conducting my little experiment.”