Embryo 1: Embryo

by JA Schneider

  Warily, David began to pick his way downward. The fog was lifting from his mind. He heard more wailing police sirens coming. There was a helicopter overhead. You’ll get your due process, you bastard, he thought; and just as he came close enough to hunch down and extend a hand, he heard Jill scream.

  Glancing up, he saw new horror on her face. She was looking behind him, at a point higher on the roof.

  He heard a sudden snap and a hideous scream as Arnett slid plunging to his death.

  There was no time to look back. Behind Jill MacIntyre burst through the French doors yelling “Over there!”

  He already had his gun out. He had seen the fast-approaching Sonny Sears with his upraised arms carrying a cinder block.

  David spun away and raised his gun. He fired only once.

  Sonny Sears fell, rolled over once on the roof grade and then lay, watching the sky with two sightless eyes – and a gusher of a bullet hole between them.

  35

  She was aware of hands, most of all.

  David’s first, gripping her as they stumbled their way back. Then other familiar hands, reaching, helping her through the window. From a hazy distance she saw their faces: Tricia, whimpering encouragement; Woody, his voice blurred as he pressed the inside of her wrist; MacIntyre, a hand on her back, telling someone to run for something which she could not make out.

  She just clung to David.

  “It’s all right”, he whispered. “It’s all over.” He stood with his arms around her. She was shaking violently.

  Someone came running with gauze and alcohol swabs.

  Jill heard Tricia’s voice, very gentle. “You’ve got to let go, hon.”

  She released her grip, pulled back, and looked at David. Bright blood ran from his temple down the side of his face. “Ohh.” Her eyes filled with tears. He grinned weakly at her. “We’ll have matching scars.”

  They got him to sink into a chair. Tricia began sponging his wound.

  “Ow, that hurts!”

  “You make a lousy patient,” she said.

  Jill sank next to him on an overturned box. She clung to his hand with both of hers.

  Cops were rushing in. Staff members too in scrubs and white coats. Their expressions pretty much matched as they peered at the darkened room and the door – now gaping wood splinters and brick rubble. A cop said, “I was standing right next to it,” and someone else said, “Arnett? My God!” Voices came over – “They’re okay?” – then milled in horror or gaped at the hominids.

  No one had yet seen the cylinder and its sleeping fetus, forty feet away in darkness.

  Police took statements from Jill and David. As Jill spoke, haltingly, she remembered something.

  “Woody?” she called. He was at the French doors, peering down at the police activity around Arnett’s body.

  Minutes later he handed her the printouts from the body’s breast pocket. Tricia retrieved the Jackson chart from Arnett’s counter. MacIntyre taped a second gauze square to the side of David’s head.

  Jill opened the four printout sheets and smoothed them on her lap.

  Stammering slightly, stopping often to catch her breath, she described Arnett’s experiments: farming embryos, using women’s bodies as human incubators for his DNA-treated super embryos.

  A sergeant scribbled, shaking his head sickly.

  “Mostly clinic patients for that approach,” Jill went on. “He did private artificial inseminations too.” She spread the printouts. “These show the jump in morbidity for this year. His implantations mostly turned out badly in different ways; that’s why no one saw a pattern.”

  Tricia put her hand to her mouth.

  David reached to Jill for the papers and read them. Under his arm he held the Jackson chart.

  Jill told about the two murdered women, their amniotic fluid used for experiments. “Yes, just experiments,” she told the stunned sergeant. A plainclothes cop had arrived; was scribbling too. They traded unbelieving looks.

  Finally she told of the fetus floating in the cylinder, and saw eyes go, squinting, toward the other end of the attic. From this distance the array surrounding the darkened cylinder looked like any jumble of small machines.

  David looked up from the printouts. He wore the look of a man just let off a plunging elevator. “I couldn’t believe her,” he said guiltily. “I just couldn’t – ”

  “Nobody figured it out!” She leaned to him. “Not Stryker, not Simpson or Rosenberg, nobody! Arnett was too – ”

  “She’s right, David.”

  Jill looked. Above her stood William Stryker, his face ashen.

  “Oh, Dr. Stryker…”

  “Jill,” he said. He seemed awkward, at a loss for words. Then: “Thank God you’re alive. Please…accept my apology.”

  She stood to face him, her mouth slightly open. “I…” Words failed her too. She saw that he had thrown on a pair of old pants and a shirt that looked yanked out of the laundry. He looked suddenly older, thinner in his clothes. She felt a sudden surge of sympathy for him. All along this tight-lipped authoritarian had been…was it afraid? For his still-controversial program which could be torpedoed by one breath of scandal…which hundreds of infertile couples were still desperately depending on for help?

  She looked from Stryker to other faces; and to David. “There’s more,” she said. “I found Mary Jo Sayers.”

  She led them to Cro-Magnon woman. One minute was enough. They turned away, one by one, each face pale, sorrowful.

  “Monster,” Stryker said between his teeth. His face reddened; his eyes turned red-rimmed and burned. “That monster!”

  Other sickened voices rose in the room. David, staring shell shocked at Mary Jo, felt a sudden, crying need to be released from so much tragedy. Low-voiced, he asked Jill, “You said there’s a fetus?”

  As they started toward the cylinder, David with his arm around Jill, Detective Gregory Pappas arrived, conferred briefly with the two cops who had taken statements, then turned to Jill with a tired, fatherly smile.

  “How’s the patient?” he asked.

  “Okay.” She smiled faintly. “We’re both okay.”

  Pappas looked around. “I hear there’s a weird experiment?”

  The cylinder had been discovered. Someone had turned on that set of lights. “Ooh,” from the small crowd gathered around it, and more people pushing close. As Pappas and the others moved forward the lower, pinkly illuminated half of the cylinder became visible.

  Pappas’ jaw dropped. “A baby?”

  “A fetus,” Jill said. “Five months old, four months from birth.”

  Pappas and David both stared. The tiny floating human’s knees were drawn up, and the hands, tucked into miniscule fists, were tucked in over the face.

  “Fertilized in a Petri dish,” Jill said quietly. “Nourished since four days – ”

  “Louder!” came a voice from the rear. “Can’t hear back here.”

  She turned. Saw residents, interns, nurses, and policemen wanting to hear what she was saying. She glanced at Levine, who nodded encouragingly.

  “This child, this fetus,” she said in a louder voice, “was fertilized in a Petri dish. Just sperm and egg brought together. Since four days after conception he’s been nourished in this…tank which you see here. The tank contains amniotic fluid.”

  She paused self-consciously.

  “And?” bellowed a different voice.

  Jill coughed. David was peering intently into the cylinder.

  “Well,” she said. “The author of this experiment claims to have succeeded in, ah, altering the child’s human heredity. Various strains of DNA have been implanted…to - so claims the author - make him longer-lived, resistant to all diseases, and possess an extraordinarily high intelligence.”

  Incredulous silence from the medical staff. A young cop said, “Depraved indifference, assault and battery, and that’s just for starters.”

  Stryker, his face dull with fury, turned to the cop. “Experimentation w
ith unknowing human subjects is not only against the law, it’s an abomination against all of mankind, a betrayal of every code of medical ethics…”

  He stopped, and took off his spectacles to wipe his eyes. They all felt what he did: the rotten apple theory. One ruthless scientist, driven by ambition, had destroyed so much…

  “Excuse me,” said Stryker.

  He made his way out of the crowd and went to stand by the broken French doors. Through the window could be seen the first faint pink of dawn.

  “S’cuse us!” He had to step aside for the cops moving Sonny Sears’ body though on a stretcher.

  David motioned to Pappas. “That one too,” he said, pointing to Cro-Magnon woman.

  Pappas looked. David explained, and watched the detective’s face drain of color.

  “You’ll give me details in the statement?” Pappas said thickly.

  “Every sordid one,” David said.

  Hospital personnel, still shaking their heads, began slowly filing out.

  And in another five minutes, most of the police and the two stretchers bearing their gruesome dead had gone.

  Pappas finished scribbling his notes and with a wave to Jill headed for the door. He stopped short when he heard Woody’s “Hey, you gotta see this!”

  From the few who remained, a surge of excitement swept the room. Stryker, still at the window, glanced balefully back to them.

  “Do you believe this?” said Tricia as Jill turned. David, MacIntyre and the others were staring into the cylinder as if mesmerized.

  Jill looked. And then she looked again.

  The fetus was moving. At first he made a small kicking motion; then, raising his tiny fists, he began to rub his eyes.

  David’s voice was awed. “He looks like any baby waking up.”

  The fetus stretched, rubbed his eyes again…and then opened them.

  “Ohhh,” said a chorus of voices.

  Blinking, the tiny babe looked out, sleepily at first. Then, opening his eyes wider, he seemed to realize he had company –

  Because he smiled.

  The young doctors erupted into exclamations of surprise and delight. And, seeing their reactions, the fetus grinned more widely – beamed, in fact; his toothless, tiny mouth open in an expression of impish and exquisite delight.

  Woody waved at him. “Hi, cutie!”

  And then the most astounding thing of all: a tiny hand went up, fluttered ineffectively, bumped against the glass and tried again. It was the most human and instinctive of reactions, a gesture intrinsic to every human from time immemorial. The fetus was trying to wave. Was waving now, both hands going at once in an infant-like, floppy wave, but the communication was there. The communication was there!

  “It’s not possible.”

  They turned, saw that Stryker had left the window and was approaching. His expression was dumbfounded.

  “It isn’t possible!” His voice rose as he laid both hands on the glass and peered in. “A five-month fetus isn’t…developed enough to communicate…have command of body movements…his nervous system doesn’t reach…until after…”

  He was sputtering. Thirty-five years of training and experience told him that what he was seeing was impossible.

  The fetus had spotted him. Was grinning at him!

  Stryker, relaxing for the first time in what was probably years, smiled back.

  David knocked gently on the glass, his face miming the kitchy-coo antics of a new parent. “Can we bring him downstairs?” he asked. Saw Stryker’s look and said, “Why not? It must get lonely up here. How ‘bout putting him in the nursery or, for that matter, the doctors’ lounge.”

  “Awe-some,” MacIntyre said. “A month from now I’ll be teaching him the shuffle, the jerk – ”

  Jill grinned. “Salsa?”

  “I can make party balloons,” Woody said.

  “Mozart’s Requiem,” Stryker said. “It’s powerful.”

  David said, “He’s in his own sterile environment. We’d just have to move this other stuff down with him,” he added, looking around at the cluster of machines.

  Stryker seemed to warm to the idea. “Well, we can’t leave him up here.”

  Jill laid her head on David’s shoulder.

  “Do you ever think,” she murmured, “that in some awful, terrible, round-about way, good can sometimes come from evil?”

  David hesitated. “Can I have some time to think about that?”

  She smiled up at him. “All you want and more.”

  His eyes crinkled and he pulled her closer. They both looked back at the fetus, who was now very busy making swimming motions.

  “He’s going to do fine,” David said.

  Stryker smiled. The others nodded and smiled agreement.

  Behind them, the light in the window was growing bright. The sun had come up, and a new day had begun.

  Author’s Note

  Hello and thank you for reading. I truly hope you enjoyed this book. Art in any form is the ability to make you feel. Have I done that? Not done that?

  If you have the time to write a review, let me know and I will thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Goodreads would also help others decide if they would enjoy the book.

  Please visit my Fan Page on Facebook and say hello

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  Here’s my Twitter handle too:

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  More books are in the works, so please sign up for my Newsletter at http://jaschneiderauthor.net You’ll be the first to know when new books are available, and more.

  Thanks again!

  ~ Joyce

  Read on for an excerpt from

  EMBRYO 2: Crosshairs

  by J.A. Schneider

  Order it today!

  http://jaschneiderauthor.net

  1

  Her dreams were always the same. She was falling.

  His thick hand on her back had urged her ahead, through the dimly lit lab of counters and glassware to his bookshelf wall, where a hidden door creaked open into mustiness. The museum’s old attic, dark. Fear spiked. “Such things I want to show you!” he called, now at the far end lighting a line of forms more human than ape. “Come, come!” But one of the figures, beneath scraggly black hair, came alive and approached her instead, pleading, and she screamed, and his hands, now furious, threw her out the tall window and down the steep slate roof. She clung, crying, to the cracking rain gutter which gave way and she plunged – “Nooo!” – then woke, trembling with her heart pounding, in her bed in her room.

  David came awake and raised up to hold her.

  “Another one?” he whispered, his voice sleepy.

  She pressed her face to him while he held her tighter, feeling her heart hammer between their chest walls. Long moments passed. The trembling eased. Finally she managed, “Yeah, another one.”

  “The same?”

  A nod.

  He groaned softly. Pushed her long dark hair off her brow and kissed her.

  Still holding her, he squinted out at the wretched-looking day. Gray, July-steamy and depressing, condensation forming tear-like streaks down the window pane.

  The fourth day. Today was it, seclusion over. The hospital had given them three days off to “rest and try to recover”… from this. The real nightmare they’d been through.

  Jill peered out too. “Nice day,” she said dryly.

  He looked back at her, his face twisting into a little grin. Sarcasm. That was a good sign, wasn’t it?

  He’d had one bad night: the dreams, the frantic jerking awake. But yesterday morning he’d lain and realized how glad he was to be alive. How thankful he was that both of them had made it with just a few scrapes. It really was a miracle. The thought had brought him to tears.

  For Jill, the nightmare was still happening. He’d gone out for groceries and take-out. She hadn’t wanted to budge. In between showers and changing the bandages on his scalp lac
eration, she’d wanted just to stay scrunched down in bed with the covers over her head.

  “Go away,” she’d say when he lifted their light blanket and peeked under.

  “Why?”

  “I’m hiding. No one can find me.”

  Even in her post-trauma, she could be funny.

  Now, gazing out the window with a disgusted look, she was rhyming away about the gloom: “Weary, dreary, bleary, teary…”

  A loud buzz made them jump. Cursing, David reached over to turn off the alarm. It was 7:30. The hospital was giving them a relatively easy first day back, even letting them “sleep late.” Starting tomorrow the damned alarm would resume going off earlier. Way earlier.

  He reached back to her. “I’ll go in. You stay. They know three days isn’t enough.”

  Jill sat up slowly, groaning. “I’m coming.” She inhaled. “It’ll be better if I have my hands busy, remind myself that others suffer too. I’d get more crazy stewing here alone.”

  More crazy? He knew she wasn’t serious.

  They showered and dressed quickly in their green scrubs.

  Moving down the staircase of her shabby brownstone, Jill murmured, “I don’t recognize myself anymore.”

  He looked at her.

  “When you met me I was such an overcompensating, insecure jerk who just had to be right. Now I’m a quivering mess.”

  He smiled as they cleared the vestibule and he opened the front door. “Near death experience can have that effect.”

  They had talked long and soulfully about trauma, and the battles we fight in this life. They change us. We’re no longer the person we were. It may take a while, sometimes a longer while, but ultimately we become stronger. More confident and sure of ourselves because we survived.

  Jill had hugged him and said that the talks helped, sometimes for hours. But this morning, another nightmare...

  “David?”

  “Huh?” He’d headed first down the stoop steps.

  Then blinked and looked back.

  She was standing there. Just standing at the top of the cement steps, gripping the iron railing. “I can’t…”