Raney & Levine

by J. A. Schneider

  Her belly was so heavy, but she scrabbled forward, on her left side mostly, her elbow and knee helping her to push herself. She was inching closer. Just yards ahead, she saw people on the sidewalk. Traffic out there, horns blaring.

  “Help,” Jenna cried in a feeble rasp. No good, too weak. They’d never hear her.

  It was moving, the thing her attacker had put under her sweater. It was writhing and snapping against her chest as if it, too, was trying to escape. Oh God…

  Whimpering in horror, with her head hurting more, she struggled past a green Dumpster.

  Then her vision blurred, and something sharp sliced through her left palm. She cried out and tried to focus on her hand, dripping red from a glinting glass shard.

  “Noo…” Shaking, on both elbows, she tried to pull out the shard, but her vision dimmed further, and suddenly it was hard to breathe. She heaved her shoulders up, her mouth open, and managed to pull in a gasp.

  “Help!” she cried again with her last strength, her voice ragged and desperate.

  She thought she saw someone glance her way, but a second later her vision quit. The alley around her flipped, and a high, queer ringing started in her ears. She gave up. Lay her head down on cold ground, struggling to breathe.

  There was a shout, and another shout. She was dimly aware of sudden footsteps around her, hands on her, voices shouting “9-1-1!” and “ambulance!”

  A gentle voice, bending close. “Who did this to you?”

  “Don’t…know.” Her gasp was inaudible. The ground beneath her swung crazily. Her eyes opened but she couldn’t see. All was black.

  “Can you describe your attacker?” The voice came closer to her face. Strong hands cupped her cheeks.

  “Didn’t see…” she managed.

  “You didn’t see your attacker?”

  “No. Came from…behind.”

  From far away she heard other voices.

  “No sign of rape.”

  “Found her purse, doesn’t look like robbery. Name’s Jenna Walsh.”

  “Jeezus! Oh God, what’s this under her sweater?”

  “Holy hell. Don’t touch, it’s evidence. Looks half dead anyway.”

  Please…get it…off…me…

  Her shoulders heaved desperately from air hunger. Her eyes squeezed in pain, her head hurting worse. Was that a siren she heard? Or the ringing in her ears? She felt hurried hands lifting her, voices babbling, a mask with new, cool oxygen placed over her mouth and nose.

  So kind, the people helping her.

  She wanted to tell them to be careful, oh please save yourselves, there’s a bomb in my head.

  It’s going to go off…

  4

  In Jill’s on call room, he leaned against the closed door with his arms folded tightly.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Changing into jeans.” She had her pants around her knees.

  “What for? Your scrubs look like running pants.”

  Jill looked down. It was true, the navy scrubs both of them wore didn’t look like scrubs. Okay, they’d do. She pulled her scrub bottoms back up.

  “Who says I’m running anywhere?” She whipped over to her chest of drawers for oversized sunglasses. Peeked into the mirror at her intense, big green eyes as she put the glasses on, then pulled on a baseball cap low.

  “You look like a female Unabomber.”

  “That zealot’s hollering about Jesse! Outta my way.”

  She made for the door. He stopped her, putting both hands on her slender shoulders. “Lemme go!” She squirmed angrily, getting nowhere.

  “Maybe it’s the ones yelling with signs you don’t have to worry about,” he said, grappling with her. “Oof! Please stop. There’ll be plain clothes cops in the crowd, security cams-”

  “I want his ugly pic on my phone.”

  “We’re back on duty in twenty minutes.”

  “It’s enough!” She yanked away and stomped around the little room. Her hands raised helplessly and tears came, she couldn’t help it. “Okay, I’m a mess.” She pulled the glasses off and swiped angrily at her glistening cheeks. “I’m just…worried about Jesse. What’s going to happen to him?”

  “I’m worried too.” David’s voice softened. He left the door, exhaling, and took her in his arms. She slumped, melted into his hug, and felt comforted…for seconds. Then pulled away and resumed her stomping.

  And last night’s argument.

  “I found him and I love him,” she said.

  “He’s not a puppy.” David sank onto the chair by the bed and leaned forward tiredly. Their argument last night had lasted till one and they’d had to get up at six. Upset, neither had fallen right to sleep.

  “The problem,” he said slowly, “is us. We’re magnets for weirdos. Our faces have sold tabloids, blanketed the media. If you…” A hesitation. “…or we adopted him it would mark him for life, make him a target for every bully and whack job. If we went into hiding we’d still be recognizable, and he’d be tagged as that…freakazoid kid like July’s killer called him. Have you forgotten?

  “How could I?” She’d stopped, breathing hard, and stood glaring at the closed door.

  David stared unhappily at the floor. “Picture Jesse at age five, or fifteen. How will he feel knowing he was conceived in a lab and grown in a fish tank? That’s what mean kids will call it. Assuming religious nuts like your pal out there - who call him evil - don’t do worse to him.” A resigned gesture. “But if he gets adopted and grows up anonymously… Ow! What are you doing? My arm doesn’t bend that way.”

  She was pulling off his white jacket. “It’s chilly out,” she said, tossing it onto the bed, getting his camouflage jacket from a hook on the wall and pushing it to his chest.

  “Put this on. We can argue about the big thing later. For now it makes me crazy to hear any child called evil - a baby, for God’s sake! Don’t you just want to see? What if the cops and cameras miss something?”

  “They won’t.” David patted the bed. “Let’s just lie down for twenty minutes. Maybe we won’t get called right away and we can - ow, my arm doesn’t bend that way.”

  She was yanking on a sleeve of his camouflage jacket, and he let out a resigned breath. Jill was Jill, he knew. Relentless yet vulnerable, worried about everyone, and eerily smart. Saw and sensed things that others didn’t. Got into trouble too, sometimes bad trouble. Could be headed for a shouting match out there.

  He pulled on his other sleeve and a Denver Broncos cap.

  “No,” she said. “The whole world knows you’re from Denver.”

  He muttered something under his breath and switched to a Yankees cap.

  She wriggled into a long, striped poncho and pulled her shades and cap back on. Minutes later they exited the hospital not via the ambulance bay, but from its teeming front entrance.

  They blended. Passed TV vans and busy reporters, approached the rear of the crowd and edged into it midway. Excited spectators pushed against the yellow barriers cops had up to protect the E.R. entrance.

  The Zealot had taken a position away from other signs, stiff-backed to his stretch of barrier, facing the jammed sidewalk and yelling into his megaphone. He had wild, graying dark hair and was on the scrawny side. Mid forties maybe, red-faced and in a tan jacket. Sounded even angrier than before, probably because onlookers were hassling him.

  “That child up there is evil!” he hollered, pointing. “He has no soul! He isn’t even eligible for baptism!”

  “You go take a bath,” someone said, heading back to the pro-IVF signs.

  “Skip the bath,” someone else said. “Go to hell!”

  The crowd cheered. Zealot glared, redder-faced, just furious. Jill and David got out their cameraphones and snapped pictures.

  “Doesn’t God love all children?” asked a woman. Another woman in a sari cried, “What about Hindu children?” And a gray-haired man said, “What would you do with that baby if you got hold of him?”

  “That’s no baby! He�
��s the spawn of the devil! The world must be saved from him!” Zealot turned and jabbed his finger up to the hospital. “AND the devil’s workshop that created him!”

  His wheeling hand brushed a woman, whose husband had had it and lunged at the guy, raising his fist. It was caught by two uniformed cops protecting the peace and the First Amendment. They calmed the couple, who left muttering and shaking their heads. Gawkers came and left. Watched the Zealot like they’d watch any New York sidewalk performance, then edged away to watch the reporters, the cheering IVFers, or the SAVE AN EMBRYO bunch.

  Seeing people leave infuriated Zealot even more.

  “So you are in league with the devil?” he shouted at a departing back, eyes bulging in fury as he got the finger. “And you and you?”

  Jill leaned uneasily to David. “The hospital is the devil’s workshop?”

  “Maybe just obstetrics,” he said absently. She looked quizzically at him, then followed his gaze to one of the onlookers, a wiry man, maybe forty, with long, curling dark hair in a brown corduroy jacket. He was the only one really listening to Zealot, his intent, small-featured face taking in every word. The corners of his small mouth turned up as Zealot dealt with his detractors, turned down when Zealot went overboard.

  “Is that a fan or do they know each other?” David said low. He snapped a picture. Jill subtly snapped several. “Maybe both,” she whispered, watching as the wiry man stepped forward, smiling, to talk to Zealot; then smiled again as a young blond woman, very soccer mom, came forward too to hand Zealot a pamphlet, which he looked positively thrilled to autograph.

  They snapped Soccer Mom too, got her in profile as she turned and saw them. Checked out their faces, their navy scrub pants, and edged closer.

  “I’m a cop,” she said low.

  Jill was surprised. “Oh! What’s your name?”

  “Keri Blasco.”

  “What’s the pamphlet?”

  “Picked it up in a church. Stay cool.”

  She spoke quickly and moved away, joined two men in plain clothes at the edge of the sidewalk.

  “She wore leather gloves,” David said. “Handled her pamphlet by its edges.”

  Jill nodded. Experience with their murderous stalker last July had taught them about fingerprints. “Professional.”

  She was watching the man in the corduroy jacket. He seemed to be trying to persuade Zealot it was time to leave, even took the megaphone from him. Zealot frowned and resisted at first, then finally looked tired and gave in. Together they gathered up Zealot’s things and headed out, onto the sidewalk and toward the downtown subway.

  “I’d so like to follow them,” Jill said.

  David checked the time. “We have to get back.”

  Jill’s phone buzzed. She answered, and for a second her face lit. “Hey!”

  She listened. Then frowned.

  “Be right there.”

  5

  She hugged Hutch, her lab professor not so long ago. He and David knew each other and shook hands. David had gone to a different med school.

  Carl Hutchins never changed. He still wore a colorful bow tie (today, blue paisley) with an oxford shirt under his lab coat, and his office was its usual debris of piled-high journals and specimens in jars. His desk was encircled by stacks of folders, and in front of the folders was…a snake. A coiled black snake.

  “Relax,” Hutch said. “It’s fake.”

  Jill dropped into a chair. “Gaa-a, I even hate fake snakes.”

  David picked up the snake and stood turning it in his hands. Hutch told them what had happened. The whole anatomy lab horror-struck by a snake seeming to jump out of a cadaver. Said he’d called the cops who’d come, two uniforms who took a report and pronounced it a crude prank, at worst desecration of a human body.

  “Criminal mischief or a class B misdemeanor, whatever that means,” Hutch said with a grimace. “But I’m worried. It could be something else. I called hospital security after the cops left.”

  “What’s with the six heads sewn on?” David said.

  “That’s what bothers me. Have a seat.” Hutch took the snake back, laid it coiled on his desk and stared at it unhappily. His eyes blinked nervously behind his wire rims.

  “I see this a lot,” he said. “Seven-headed snakes scrawled on graffiti - not that the kids have any idea what it means.” He shook his head. “If this hadn’t happened today, I’d be maybe less worried. Security said the same.”

  They looked at him.

  He glanced out the window. It was nearly dusk. Reporters had left and the crowd with their signs was dispersing. Lights had come on in the emergency bay.

  Exhaling, he looked back and pulled open a lower drawer.

  “Y’know what was my hardest part of growing up?” he said, pulling out an old clothbound Bible. “It wasn’t life in the projects. It was my grandmother, a mean ol’ polecat who actually left the Baptist Church because she thought they’d become too liberal. She’d hit me and scream at me because I was studying science…devil teachings, she called it. And called me The Beast.”

  His brow arched at Jill and David. Two blank expressions.

  Then he opened to a Bible page he’d bookmarked, and read out loud. “Revelations, Chapter thirteen, verse one: ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’”

  Silence. Then Jill said quietly, “Oh damn.”

  “My feelings exactly.” Hutch put the bible down. “It bothered me before I saw a sign in that crowd reading SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.”

  “We saw it,” David said. “Just came from there.”

  “Ah. That loon yelling into his megaphone? With today being Madison’s big announcement…the baby…”

  “We call him Jesse,” Jill said. Her heart was thudding.

  David reached for the snake and resumed studying it.

  “Weird,” he said. “It’s just a fake garter snake. They’re harmless. You can probably get fake snakes anywhere, toy and science stores…online. So why not something scarier like a rattler? Or a real garter snake?”

  Hutch raised his shoulders. “Afraid a real one would’ve climbed out?” He switched his gaze to Jill and smiled a little. “I had an uncle named Jesse. It’s a great name. Means ‘gift of God’ in Hebrew.”

  She smiled tightly; wiped her suddenly clammy hands on her scrub pants. “I just…liked it, then googled it and found out what it meant.”

  Her glance brushed the snake David held. “So…” She shuddered. “Is this someone’s disgusting joke? Or a horrible scary message? We thought we were done with horrible scary.”

  Hutch picked up his remote and turned on cable TV. Floods in Malaysia. He watched for a second, tapped his finger, lowered the sound. Looked back to see David fingering the snake’s attached fake snake heads.

  “Someone went to a lot of trouble.” David brought the gruesome thing closer to Hutch. “Each of these is sliced off an inch behind the head and sewn on with black thread. It must have been hard sewing through this rubber.”

  Hutch nodded, taking the snake back, recoiling it on his desk. “Too much work for your ordinary cruel joke. This could be a message. That’s why I called you. I still hear of Baptists and fundamentalists who are violently against IVF, and Jesse’s sure taken it further.”

  David said, “There were some angry Catholics out there too.”

  A heavy sigh. “Two extremes of what should have been one faith,” Hutch said. “Can’t believe Jesus had any of this in mind. He just wanted to heal.”

  “Every religion has its extremists,” David said thoughtfully. Then frowned. “Who could have gained entrance to the lab?”

  On the TV, a bridge collapse in Ohio. Hutch glanced over at it, still keeping the sound down, then turned back, looking tired.

  “Lots of people,” he said. “Besides the med students, there’s now physician assistants, EMTs in training and our maintenance people. Residents come too to restudy
at all hours.” Hutch gestured with a hand. “Put on a white coat and you blend. Who pays attention at two in the morning?”

  Cable news finally caught his attention. There, no surprise, was coverage of the conference with Madison Memorial Hospital officials. Willard Simpson, Acting Chief of the hospital’s Genetic Research Committee, was at the center of other white coats lining a table with microphones.

  Hutch turned up the sound.

  “He’s just a baby,” bespectacled Simpson was saying, his round, heavy features trying not to frown. “A normal baby with normal development, no sign whatsoever of anything different about him.” Babble babble from some reporters, and thin, scholarly Bill Rosenberg next to Simpson said, “No, we don’t know how this was done. We are studying the, ah, deceased Doctor Arnett’s notes, but they are…incomplete.”

  Reporters shouted more questions. Was this the wave of the future? Were women going to choose this method of having babies now that they had a choice?

  “Again,” droned Bill Rosenberg, sounding too professorial to be interesting. “We don’t entirely know how this was done. Further studies will have to be-”

  A male voiceover interrupted, taking us now to the taped-earlier crowd, panning signs and faces – “excited, emotional, some angry” - then stopping on “this frightening SPAWN OF THE DEVIL sign,” zooming in for an even more shocking close up. Megaphone Man railed and hollered. A shot then caught his awful sign at an upward angle, with the hospital’s fifth floor in its background, “the neonatal unit where this miraculous child is now…”

  Jill muttered, “Draw a map, why don’t ya.”

  Then came file footage of David fighting on a steep old roof with now-in-hell Clifford Arnett, then footage of Jill and David, after three days of recovery from their trauma, approaching the hospital last July, then a tight close up of “Doctor Raney’s lovely, anguished face.”

  “Enough,” Hutch said, turning off the TV.