Embryo 1: Embryo

by JA Schneider

  And now it hit, duh! Top brass could access the Master Code from any hospital computer! In the chaos of the last few days the obvious hadn’t occurred.

  Okay, so which computer where? Jill frowned. She did not, could not, be seen entering any office. Night staff would be everywhere and nervous tonight, what with the cops and being told to be on their guard. And Stryker’s Inquisition was scheduled for 9 a.m., six hours from now.

  When she’d be thrown out.

  One computer came to mind, and she groaned.

  The one in the morgue.

  Nobody would be down there at this hour. In an awful way, it was perfect.

  She got out of bed, ran a brush through her hair and pulled on her green scrubs. The computer could tell her everything now that she knew what to do.

  She shoved her black memo into her pocket and checked her watch. 3:10 already.

  Hurry.

  In the halls in her scrubs, carrying a worn blue notebook, she strolled past a Pediatrics resident and two tired-looking cops, then pressed for the elevator.

  Moments later the elevator jerked to a stop, depositing Jill in the tunnel. She stepped out and watched nervously as the metal door closed. With a thumping sound the car went back up in its shaft.

  She looked around, unused to this part of the tunnel, mustard-painted, running in both directions and then twisting into darkness. Across from the elevator a red arrow pointing left indicated the morgue and the record room; another pointed right to the boiler room, the laundry, and the custodian department.

  She turned left. Walked for about fifty yards, straining her hearing for the slightest noise. Could anyone be down here? A vagabond or some homicidal maniac lurking? Jill froze for a second, then reminded herself no. One had to be inside the hospital to access the tunnels.

  Although anyone could enter through Emergency…

  She pushed the thought down.

  Overhead, fluorescents buzzed on and off, casting weird, moving shadows on the ceiling. Somewhere behind her the boiler thundered on, and she jumped. “Oh!”

  She ran. The sound of her footsteps pounding the concrete seemed abnormally loud. At the next red arrow she turned right, into a tunnel that seemed narrower, dimmer.

  One more turn and, abruptly, she found herself facing the morgue doors.

  She opened them and stepped into darkness; listened and waited a moment. There was no sound. She fumbled for light switches and turned one on. It lit enough to find her way across this end of the morgue to its office, a long, rectangular room with file cabinets, notebooks shelved above a desk, a phone console, and a computer. The same computer found in every other hospital office.

  Eureka, she thought, trying to ignore the deathly quiet.

  She sat and turned on the computer. So I’m about to meet Ida, she thought.

  Like the cytology technician, she typed in a series of numbers and the OB department code. Then, copying from her memo book, she typed the nine-digit access to her stolen Master Code.

  A green light flashed in the upper right of the screen. Jill held her breath. Suddenly a line of white digital letters marched across the screen.

  “Instructions please,” said digital Ida.

  She was in! Her heart thudded.

  She punched in a request for the subcategory she wanted: Obstetrics, all complications of pregnancy and childbirth, major or minor, going back three years.

  Again she waited. The strange green light changed to yellow and seconds passed. Then the light flashed back to green, and the screen said, Ready.

  For three years ago, a short column of letters and numbers lit the screen. In her memo Jill scribbled “Incidence of complications within normal range.” She printed out the page.

  For two years ago, two and a half columns appeared. Jill’s lips parted. Two and a half columns? She clicked “print,” and a second sheet slid out. She skimmed it, blinking. Put that sheet over the first.

  The most recent year came next. A few letters first, several numbers, and then a white, digital burst of long columns poured onto the page. Jill half rose out of her seat, stupefied. The figures kept coming. She printed again and a first crowded page slipped out, and then another. Jill scanned them both, barely breathing. Some complications were minor, some not…but there was much, much more here than last year.

  The question burned through her: how in God’s name could so much go wrong without anybody noticing?

  Then she realized: blind men with the elephant. No one seeing the big picture because no one was looking for it; no one could look for it - you needed the Master Access code for that. Plus she now knew there was information left out or deleted from reports. Many doctors delivering many babies, tending different pregnancies, working different shifts. Private patients, clinic patients. Minor complications lumped together with major ones; all viewed as unrelated…

  No common thread, as David would say.

  Skimming the most recent printouts, she could see sloppy lumping together…or deliberate lumping together? Something as minor as a vestigial sixth finger on an infant’s hand, which was common and which the doctor would snip off moments after birth, would still be entered into the computer as a birth defect. So how many of the entries in these printouts represented truly minor complications, and how many were about women like Maria Moran and Mary Jo Sayers?

  There was only one way to find out.

  She looked up at the wall, knowing that the record room was on the other side. It was almost four o’clock. Not much time...

  She put her printout pages in her notebook, turned off the small lights she’d used here and in the morgue, and hurried to the record room. She looked around. So many chart numbers to match. Where should she begin?

  Her eye fell on the sign designating the 100s aisle. Start at the beginning, ninny. Do as many as you can.

  She took a long, shaky breath, and hurried into the shadows of the high, looming stacks.

  In another part of the hospital, a telephone rang. It rang again, its tone muted so as not to be heard beyond this room. Before it could ring again, a man’s hand reached to pick it up.

  Stiffly, the man listened. His body tensed as he heard the tinny, jerky voice on the other end.

  “It is Ida who speaks to you. The memory systems of the Hospital Classification of Diseases Adapted wishes to inform you that the obstetrics and gynecology section is being questioned for information at terminal 28. Repeat: the obstetrics and gynecology section memory circuits are now being questioned for essential…”

  The man replaced the receiver. He held up his watch. It was almost four. Two hours until dawn. Time enough to summon help and deal with this matter.

  He punched a number on his cell phone.

  The program Ida, among her other formidable talents, had been coded to tattletale.

  She’d started on the most recent records; had already made her way up and down three aisles. She had skimmed, taken frantic notes, and jammed each chart back into its shelf unless it needed further study.

  In which case, she kept the chart out and carried it. Her pile was getting heavy.

  In the 400s aisle, she lowered the charts to the floor and watched them topple. She dropped to her hands and knees, lay her memo to one side, and began making two separate stacks: one for fetal disorders, one for maternal complications.

  Minutes later, she sat back on her heels and contemplated the two growing piles.

  The fetal disorder one was higher.

  She glanced up, toward the single bank of fluorescents. She debated turning on more lights; decided against it. Her eyes were smarting. She rubbed them and resumed her sorting.

  Let’s see – lacerated bladder and ruptured uterus go here, and harelip and pyloric stenosis go there, and this one with a trisomy 14 abnormality goes…

  Jill stared down at the chart she held. A thin shaft of light angled its way down the aisle, and she shifted her weight so she could see better. There it was, neatly typed and right there on the cover shee
t: a diagnosis of trisomy 14 with a 12-17 translocation.

  The chromosomal abnormality of Maria Moran’s and Mary Jo Sayers’ babies.

  Jill flipped through the pages. The patient’s name was – had been – Jackson. Her full term infant had been an overweight stillborn, and the mother had died of…Jill leafed back to the post op report…of apparent reaction to general anesthesia while undergoing a Caesarean. The delivering doctor’s name was unknown to Jill. He’d finished his residency and left the hospital days before Jill had arrived.

  She copied it all into her blue notebook; pulled out those pages, folded them with her printouts, and stuffed them into her bulging pocket.

  But why didn’t David and the others know about this? Probably because the chart had been carried down here and tucked among thousands by someone who didn’t want it seen. That same person or persons had lumped this case with minor ones on the Master Access code - and the delivering doctor hadn’t seen any pattern. He was happy, done with residency, outta here!

  Jill looked up, staring unseeingly at a shelf lined with old, yellowed charts. Peter Gregson’s astonishment at seeing this abnormality came back to her. A fourth year Pathology resident and he’d never seen it before!

  Drop into OB, she thought, fingering the Jackson chart.

  But who had done the post? And whose idea was it to do a chromosome study? Had Stryker done it as a research project? And what made him suspect, unless…

  A shadow fell across the page she was reading.

  She looked up – and froze.

  The figure standing there was grinning at her.

  A swooning, cold terror took hold of her, gripping her body and locking the legs that wanted to jump up and run.

  “Who are you?” she breathed, shaking. She grabbed her cell phone; auto-dialed David; got to say nothing as the gaunt-faced figure savagely kicked her arm and sent her cell phone flying. His face twisted into a sneer. “Been usin’ the computer, eh?”

  Something familiar about him. She saw his Nikes, black with silver markings.

  The grass man.

  Jill’s heart whammed so hard it was painful to breathe. He knew about the computer?

  Still clutching the Jackson chart she rose unsteadily, took a step backward – and stumbled over a library stool. He seized her by the arm and squeezed so hard that she screamed.

  “Want to know what happens to people who snoop?” he hissed. His eyes glittered in amusement. She saw his free hand move into his pocket and remove a long –

  Cord?

  It looked like a snake as it circled her neck between hands that suddenly squeezed like pincers; as her own hand, shaking uncontrollably, raised up the Jackson chart and delivered a sickening crack to the side of his head.

  He fell to his knees. She saw the line of blood erupt on his temple; saw his face contort in an expression of murderous rage.

  “Fuckin bitch!” He was half up, tottering, then lunging for her.

  She dodged him, crashed into another shelf sending charts flying, and then she ran. Out past the front line of stacks and into the tunnel, racing in mindless terror to the left and the right through branches of twisting passage.

  She stopped, gasping. Where were the arrows?

  She was lost.

  28

  “We’d better take her up,” MacIntyre said.

  Levine looked over his surgical mask at the face of the exhausted patient. Take her upstairs for surgery? The transfer alone would take ten minutes; then they’d have to prep and drape her all over again…

  “She’s in trouble now,” he said. “She wouldn’t make it.”

  A glistening loop of umbilical cord began to ooze out of the birth canal.

  “That’s it!” Levine said. “We’ve got a cord prolapse. Ruthie, get the pack.”

  The nurse named Ruthie Stone was back at Levine’s side in seconds with the Emergency C-Section Pack, which she opened and spread on the stainless steel table.

  With his gloved fingers Levine grasped the umbilical cord and felt for pulsation. For two seconds it was bounding. Then, as if the cord were a hose and someone turned down the water, the pulse grew weak.

  The umbilical cord was being compressed between the baby’s skull and the mother’s bony pelvis.

  Woody Greenberg’s eyes were on the fetal monitor. “Trouble!” he said. “Fetal heart rate’s dropping.”

  Levine’s voice stayed calm. “Carole,” he said to another nurse. “Run in 50 milligrams of Pentothal. And Woody” – the first year resident looked over – “start the Halothane.”

  Seconds later the nurse was injecting Pentothal into the IV tubing; and Woody, having secured a rubber mask to the patient’s face, was spinning open the valve on a green tank. The hiss of gas could be heard.

  Levine moved around to the side of the table. Now MacIntyre’s gloved hand was on the bloody, collapsed cord. He felt the last feeble beat, and then there was nothing.

  MacIntyre’s voice behind his mask sounded husky. “You’ve got one minute to get that kid out, or we’re going to have a dead baby.”

  “I know,” David said. “Start the count.”

  “It’s already four seconds.”

  “Which leaves fifty-six to go,” Levine said.

  He reached for the scalpel.

  She’d gone in a circle.

  Jill huddled against the wall, still clutching the Jackson chart, her heart thudding crazily as she stared at the doors across the way. The morgue again!

  She had to go back in. The morgue had a telephone. The maniac had kicked away her cell phone; only from the morgue could she call for help.

  She heard a footstep. She ducked behind a group of tall oxygen tanks and crouched down. More rapid footsteps; they stopped around the corner. The supply room she’d just passed? She heard the door open, the footsteps enter. Then came the sound of equipment being shoved about.

  Seconds to cross before he came back out.

  She squeezed from the oxygen cylinders and hurried to the morgue doors. Then stopped, paralyzed. A hissing noise from behind made her wheel around.

  Overhead a plume of steam escaped from a joint in the pipes.

  She pushed open the morgue doors and plunged into blackness. Felt her way, ran her free hand along rims of steel tables and then bumped into another table. “Ow!” she breathed, then clapped her hand over her mouth.

  She waited, trembling.

  Nothing.

  Find the phone…

  She still clutched the Jackson chart – her weapon - and felt her pocket for her printouts. They were there.

  Groping blindly, she left the line of steel tables and crossed a wide aisle. Her eyes were adjusting. There was a curious, feeble luminescence emanating from the metal surfaces of the morgue drawers. She could see outlines of things. She passed more drawers and found the wall phone in the back. In a flood of relief she grasped the receiver. Listened for footsteps.

  All was quiet. Maybe too quiet; someone could be outside the door or in the room this very minute…

  She held her breath and listened for breathing.

  Nothing.

  She lifted the receiver and dialed zero.

  “House page.”

  In a hoarse whisper Jill I.D.’d herself and said, “I’m in the morgue. Get the cops down here.”

  “What?”

  Jill tried again.

  “Could you speak louder? It’s really noisy up here.”

  Jill heard footsteps. She hung up and crouched low, holding her breath. The footsteps paused outside the door. On her hands and knees she crept forward, groping her way until she found the base of a heavy desk. She scrambled under and listened. She knew he was standing motionless outside the door. Her heart thudded. What if the door suddenly crashed open and he turned on the lights? With a sick feeling she recalled the autopsy knives.

  The footsteps started up again. Jill blinked in surprise. They were moving away! Their tread was disappearing down the tunnel. Jill stayed under the
desk and counted to five hundred. He was gone. She was almost sure of it.

  But didn’t dare use the phone again. What if he had faked leaving and tiptoed back?

  She stood stiffly and listened. Silence. Groped back to the entrance and opened the door a crack. The tunnel felt empty. Motes of dust under the bulbs hung motionless. But she still feared using the morgue phone.

  And if she went into the tunnel, which way to go? She remembered now: turning right was better lit, more frequented by day, and led to the elevators.

  It was the way he’d expect her to come.

  Turn left then?

  It was darker and she didn’t know the way. She went over the layout of the hospital in her mind. This end of the tunnel continued under the old medical school with branching tunnels all over. It was her only chance.

  Casting one last fearful glance, she ran out.

  It was frightening, walking away from the elevators. The overhead lights were dusty light bulbs in wire cages spaced further and further apart.

  She walked faster, clutching the Jackson chart – her weapon, her evidence.

  For about sixty feet the way was straight, and then branched. There were no signs, but the left way was dark. Jill headed right.

  Following the feeble light bulbs she turned down one tunnel, then another, which abruptly rose up like a ramp and brought her to a round, vaulted passageway. Its single bulb cast a sickly glow. From somewhere came the sound of water dripping.

  Jill looked up at the vault’s hand-hewn stones. Now she knew where she was - under the old medical school. Probably the oldest part of the old med school.

  She looked around. Ahead, a heavy wooden door blocked the way. That was odd; there shouldn’t be any door here. Fire laws decreed that no thoroughfare be blocked throughout the entire medical complex…

  Jill looked uneasily at the closed door.

  She was under the old med school, wasn’t she?

  Cold fear went through her. She wanted to get out of this clammy dungeon! With her chart under her arm she shouldered hard on the door, then fell backward. The door would not budge. Her eyes darted around in sudden fright. Her shove against the door must have dislodged the overhead bulb’s old filament, because suddenly the vault went dark and there erupted around her feet the sound of sickening little claws scurrying. “Cripes! Rats!” Throwing her entire weight against the door, she found herself crashing through.