by KJ Kalis
Kat took a deep breath and pulled a mug out of the kitchen cabinet, her body moving on autopilot, her nerves buzzing. “Does the Chief feel like this is connected to Daniel and Chelsea?”
Van nodded, “And there’s more. About an hour ago, a young woman, a nurse, didn’t show up for work. They have her on videotape parking her car in the lot, but she never made it into the building.”
Kat’s mind ran ahead of her. Two more people missing? How was that possible? “What does the Chief want us to do?”
“He wants us to help the department before more people die…”
10
Joseph sat in the shop, looking at his two newest subjects. They were both asleep at the moment, the dose of Versed he used to bring Rebecca Blake back to the shop not having worn off yet. Ben had yelled so loudly when he arrived that he gave him another dose. He needed peace and quiet to prepare for the work ahead. Yelling and crying didn’t help his concentration at all.
Joseph took a deep breath and looked at his notes. Getting Rebecca to come to the shop hadn’t been terribly difficult. He’d been watching her for weeks, after seeing both she and Ben at a blood drive hosted by the college. They were perfect candidates for his next experiment.
As soon as he left the staff meeting at the college, he raced over to the hospital knowing that Rebecca’s next shift started at six o’clock. She worked twelve hours at a time as most nurses did. A brief review of her social media profiles told him nearly everything he needed to know about her.
He had about twenty minutes to wait before she would show up for work, he knew, glancing at his watch. He’d been watching her from the parking lot on and off for the last few weeks, between his own work schedule and the first experiments, trying to gauge how early she arrived. She averaged between eighteen and twenty-three minutes before her shift.
Finding Rebecca and Ben had been fortuitous. A month before, the college had sponsored a blood drive. They had asked for faculty volunteers, and Joseph was more than happy to offer his time, given his talents in the medical field. Though the Red Cross didn’t ask him to do anything other than help check people in, it turned out to be a wonderful opportunity to recruit participants. That’s where he had met both Ben and Rebecca. Thinking back on it, he smiled.
At the check-in desk, his job was to gather people’s pertinent information, ask them to fill out a registration card and their medical history. “Do you know your blood type?” was one of the questions he was supposed to ask.
During the first couple of hours, everyone that he met was a type O donor. In actuality, Joseph realized he had completely forgotten about the idea for this particular experiment until Ben arrived. He recognized him from the Statler building, where they both worked. Ben didn’t seem to know him, though. “Do you know what blood type you are?” Joseph asked, filling out the paperwork so Ben could donate.
“A.”
Joseph knew that there were four different blood types, A, B, AB, and O. Finding someone who was had an A blood type was rare. “Oh, I’m sure the nursing staff will be delighted that you are here.”
Ben nodded. “I know. They are always glad to see me. I try to donate as much as I can so I can help others.”
Rebecca was five people in line behind Ben. “Do you know your blood type?” Joseph asked.
“I’m a B.”
The paperwork required for blood donation had two parts to the form. Joseph tore off the top and handed it to the person who was donating and stuck the other portion in the file in front of him. He glanced around the room. The nurses and other volunteers were busy attending to the donors. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, turning on the camera. Moving his hands slowly, he pulled Ben and Rebecca’s paperwork into his lap, taking pictures of each of them before replacing them in the file.
Once he had their information, it was easy to figure out how he could recruit them for his next experiment. He stayed at work a few late nights and watched Ben do his work, hearing him sing under his breath as he mopped the hallways. It was as if he’d been given a gift right in his backyard. He took it as a sign that his medical experiments were important, even critical to the future of humanity.
Rebecca was a little more difficult to track down. She lived in an apartment complex built on the other side of the Sauk Valley. Once he found her social media profiles, putting the information together had been easy.
Joseph stared at her now, lying asleep on the bed, hooked up to an IV. His stomach clenched into a small knot, remembering the excitement he had felt when he saw her car pull into the parking lot. “Creature of habit, you are,” he mumbled to himself when he saw her car turn into an empty spot. She always parked in approximately the same location, toward the back of the hospital parking lot. He imagined she had a fitness tracker and was trying to get her steps, or at least that was the story he told himself.
The moment that he saw her pull her car into the spot he started his engine, pulled out of the spot where he was parked and drove towards her, cutting off the distance between where she was and the front door of the hospital. He jumped out of his sedan running around the front of his car, “You’ve got to help me! Please!”
Joseph could tell that he had startled her, her eyes wide. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s my wife, she’s in the back seat. She can’t breathe!”
Joseph hoped that Rebecca’s training would kick in and she would try to render aid before running to the front door of the hospital. Rebecca ran to the back door of his car and started to lean over. He reached for the handle, pulled the door open and quickly injected her with Versed, a strong sedative, right through the fabric of her shirt. She didn’t have a chance to say anything. As her eyes rolled back in her head, Joseph gently guided her body onto the back seat. He closed the door, picked up her bag, and set it on his front seat.
On the way back to the shop, he kept checking in the rearview mirror and reaching back to feel her pulse. Every time he felt her warm skin, his own tingled. The idea that he had a second subject for his experiment thrilled him. Now there were two…
Sitting in front of them, Joseph weighed when to start his experiment. He could let them sleep through the night, giving each of them another dose of sedative, or he could go ahead and start. He tapped the end of the pen on the pages of his notebook, thinking. If he went ahead and started the experiment, he would need to plan to be up all night long, watching and observing them for changes in their condition.
On the other hand, he could wait until the morning, after he’d had a good night's sleep and had eaten his breakfast. There was no class the next day, at least for him. He had sent both of his classes home with projects to do and gave them the day off from his lectures.
Joseph squinted his eyes. As with most experiments, he didn’t know how long it would take for him to see results. Based on his research for this trial, the initial reaction could take as little as a few minutes or as long as an hour. But that’s not what he was interested in, what he was interested in was what would happen after the reaction started.
He stood up and walked to the workbench positioned along the side wall, opening the small refrigerator that was humming quietly in the background. Inside, he saw two units of his own blood, ready for use. On the workbench to his right, there was a blue surgical towel that was covering some of his equipment. He removed it, grabbing a syringe and a vial of Romazicon. He walked back toward Ben and Rebecca, tilting the vial upside down and inserting the syringe. Pulling back on the stopper, he loaded a dose that would work for both Ben and Rebecca, pushing the needle into the port on Ben’s IV first, and then into Rebecca’s. Within a moment, they had both started to stir.
Joseph paused for a second, wondering if he should gag them. Ben had proven to be quite the yeller, and although no one could hear him from where they were, it was distracting. Joseph tilted his head to the side, considering his options. If he gagged them, it might impact their oxygen levels or their ability to tell him about their symptom
s. That wasn’t a variable he had calculated. Something as small as a change in oxygenation could require him to repeat his experiment to get clean results. That wasn’t acceptable.
He walked back to the bench, setting the tray of the equipment he would need onto his rolling cart, the same cart he had used to insert Ben’s catheter. Would he need one for Rebecca? He wasn’t sure since she wouldn’t be with him for as long.
He rolled the cart behind their beds, so they couldn’t see what he was doing. Revealing it to them as it went was part of the fun, he realized. He smiled to himself. The sheets rustled. Ben was awake. “Welcome back. Ben, meet Rebecca. Rebecca, meet Ben. Although, I think you have actually met each other before.”
There was silence from both of them. Joseph could only hear a little bit of sobbing coming from Rebecca. “Oh, please don’t cry. It won’t change anything, and it will just make things harder on you.” He checked the spacing between the two beds, making sure that they were close enough together for the lines to reach. He moved her bed back a few inches closer to Ben’s. “There,” he said. “Now, we are ready to begin.”
Joseph grabbed Ben’s arm and inserted a needle into a vein near the inside of his right elbow, affixing the needle in place with a piece of tape. He did the same to Rebecca’s left arm. In Ben’s right hand he inserted another needle with a port and taped that one down as well. He repeated the same process on Rebecca’s left hand. He stepped back to survey his work. They hadn’t even started, and he was already excited by the results. Just to have the two subjects in his shop, ready for the experiment to begin, was more excitement than he could stand. A shiver ran through his body. He walked back to his chair for a moment, studying his notes. He closed the journal and walked back between the beds. “Now, both of you are going to be part of a very important experiment about blood types.” He took the line that was inserted in Ben’s right elbow and attached it to the port on Rebecca’s left hand. He did the opposite between Rebecca and Ben, the plastic IV lines making the shape of an X between the beds. As soon as they were connected, bright crimson blood flowed between the two, sending Ben’s type A blood into Rebecca’s type B body. The reverse happened from Rebecca’s arm to Ben’s hand.
Rebecca’s eyes were wild, “What blood type are you?” she whispered to Ben.
Before he could answer, Joseph interrupted. “Ben is type A, Rebecca.” He waited for a moment, wondering how long it would take her to figure out the experiment she was involved in. In mere seconds, he could see the dread cross her face.
“But I’m type B. That could kill us!”
Joseph didn’t answer for a moment, enjoying the feeling of being complete control. He sat down at his observation post stationed at the foot of their beds, noting the time his experiment had started. “One moment, please. I just need to make some notes for this experiment. Please let me know if you start to feel any symptoms, any at all.” He wrote for a few minutes, savoring the idea that at least Rebecca knew what was happening to her.
Joseph took longer than necessary to write his notes. There wasn’t much to detail, not at this early stage of the experiment, but he enjoyed the fact that the only sound in the room beyond some stifled whimpers from Rebecca was the scratch of his pen on the thick, ecru paper of his journal. As a nurse, he was sure that Rebecca understood the magnitude of what was going on with them. Blood types could be like oil and water. Some of them worked for everyone, some of them didn’t. People with type O blood were considered universal donors. But mixing the wrong blood types together could cause serious damage to the body.
On the edge of the page Joseph was working on, he scrawled the words kidney failure, blood clotting, low blood pressure, and death. These were the most common signs of incorrect blood typing.
Even though he knew that medical science had corrected much of the issues with blood typing, he was working on a larger concept. What if there was a global pandemic that caused a massive shortage in the blood supply? If people were already afraid about their basic health, they certainly wouldn’t donate blood. If that was the case, Joseph reasoned, then millions of people could die from lack of blood supply. Now, if Joseph could figure out a way to allow everyone to donate to everyone else, then that problem would be resolved. He would be lauded in the medical community. As he underlined the terms on the side of his page, he realized that a good solution to this problem could even win him the Nobel prize. He smiled to himself and glanced up at Rebecca and Ben. Ben still hadn’t opened his eyes, his head turned away, beads of sweat on his forehead. Rebecca faced the opposite direction, tears rolling down her face, tears she couldn’t wipe away because of the restraints.
Joseph got up, checked his watch, and pulled on a set of blue latex gloves. Ten minutes had passed, enough time for the first dose of the tainted blood to enter their two systems. It was now time for stage two. He walked behind their beds, and quickly removed the crisscrossed lines between the two of them, stopping the flow of blood and capping the lines and the ports. He would go back to using those later. Rebecca turned to him, “What are you doing?”
“Well, you didn’t think I was just going to kill you, did you?”
Rebecca didn’t say anything, her face wet from tears, black circles from the shock of being taken smudged under her eyes.
“That’s okay, Rebecca. This is a difficult situation to understand. Please know that your participation is key to the saving of mankind.” Joseph didn’t say any more. He went over to the workbench and got a blood pressure cuff and quickly took both of their readings, noting them in his book. After that was done, he went over to the refrigerator he had installed in his shop and pulled out two bags of blood. He lifted them up to the light, massaging the contents. It looked like regular blood, crimson red in a high-quality medical bag with an IV line already attached. But it was much more than that. The blood was his own. He had filled the bags four weeks apart, according to commonly prescribed blood donation practices. Added to it, was a cocktail of other medications he hoped would prevent any reaction from a faulty blood transfusion. Since the most common side effects of incorrect blood typing was blood clots and low blood pressure, he had injected medications into the bags that would handle both of those problems. Why other physicians hadn’t thought of this before, he just wasn’t sure. It seemed like a reasonable solution to him. But, as with any medical experiment, it was just that – an experiment. Part of the fun was seeing what would happen. Joseph pursed his lips. He knew there was a good chance it would work, but there was also a chance that it wouldn’t. These medical experiments he was conducting were speculative at best. But the work, no matter what the medical board said, needed to be done.
Joseph carried the two bags of blood over to the small stainless-steel table that was just behind the IV poles attached to Rebecca and Ben’s beds. Ben still hadn’t moved. Rebecca craned her neck to see what he was doing but was silent.
As Joseph lifted the first bag of blood onto the IV pole, he felt a sense of satisfaction surge inside of him. People would take note of his work. He knew it. It was just a matter of time…
11
Kat woke up tired. More tired than she had been in a long time. She rolled to the side of the bed, dangling her legs down over the edge, rolling her ankles. Standing up, she felt a little bit dizzy. It was from being up too late. As she walked to the bathroom, she thought about the night before.
After Van had gotten a call from the Sauk Valley Police Chief asking them to help on the investigation, Kat and Van had sat down in front of their laptops, to try to gather some background information. The Chief had told them to stop by the department in the morning, that he would talk to Detective Dawson personally to ensure he would be cooperative. Brushing her teeth, Kat wasn’t sure that would be the case. Over the years, she had become a pretty good judge of character. Based on what she’d experienced at the murder scene a few days before, she highly doubted that Dawson would be interested in helping them, no matter what the chief said. She shook her he
ad as she spit toothpaste out into the sink, the mint swirling through her sinuses, helping to wake her up.
Kat had been involved with people like Dawson before. They were people who were rigid and unbending. Why, Kat was never sure, but she knew they had their reasons. What people like Dawson failed to recognize was that they made everyone else’s life much, much harder.
Kat crept out of the bedroom, not wanting to wake Van up. He had been up even later than she was, but that was typical. As she padded down into the kitchen, she found Tyrant sitting by the back door, waiting to go out. Kat opened Dillon’s crate and managed to get a collar and leash on him before he wriggled away.
The air outside was cool and crisp, not that it would stay that way. Late summer in the area of California where they lived had some cool nights because of the elevation but then would rapidly warm up during the day. She shivered a little, whether from the cool air or knowing what the day held in front of her, she wasn’t sure.
By the time she got back into the kitchen with the dogs, Jack was already there. He was rummaging through his backpack, shoving some papers into a folder, “How’s the puppy?”
“Fine,” she said, her mind elsewhere. “Listen, Jack. About the next couple of days…”
“I know. Be careful, keep my eyes open.”
Kat put the puppy down on the ground, suddenly angry. “Jack, I need you to pay attention to me right now. This is a serious situation. Two people are already dead, and two more have been taken.” A surge of regret passed over her. She didn’t like to yell at Jack – it wasn’t like her, but she was stressed. She glanced up at him. He hadn’t moved.
“Two more people have been taken?” The words came out of Jack’s mouth slowly, as if he were trying to process their meaning as he went.
