Embryo 2: Crosshairs

by JA Schneider

  “He’s there,” Pappas breathed, watching David crouch carefully before the crumbled bricks.

  Jill, watching, had her fist pressed to her mouth as David’s gloved hands moved aside first one brick, then another, and then tugged at cement. It didn’t budge. He shifted his position, pulling the rope taut, and tugged harder.

  Brand joined Pappas and Ray, tightening their hold on the rope.

  And Jill caught herself looking down. Saw herself thrown from the window again, and skidding, plunging, …

  Then, blinking, she just…took hold of herself. She had survived, hadn’t she? They had both survived, and were back here, and the safety rope around David was secure with strong, good men holding it firm. She stepped away from the window and took a deep breath, and deeper still, nearly holding it with her heart bursting as David pried free a cement chunk, gave a hoot, and headed back to them.

  Then he was in, handing the ten-inch chunk to the cops who put it into a plastic bag.

  “Oh-h…!” Jill brushed a glass shard off his shoulder and hugged him so hard for so many seconds that the others couldn’t get at the knot around his waist. They just stood and grinned.

  Pappas said, “You had to be someplace by ten? Hope it wasn’t important.”

  They both checked their watches. It was 10:17.

  “Nah,” Jill said, her eyes shining at David and her skin flushed with relief. “This ruled.”

  15

  Buck Loki watched Jill approach, come even closer, then walk right past him.

  Ignored him again, the bitch.

  Impassively, he hit his computer’s back button and watched again, letting his tape run this time. There she was, approaching him again, turning away slightly as somebody jostled her, then starting to come even closer…just feet away pushing through the grinning, shouting crowd of idiots with cameras.

  There! The close-up of her accepting red roses from that loser, smiling her fake-sweet, almost timid thanks, with no hint that she was really a Destroyer Bitch.

  Buck took a slug of his soda and sneered, watching Levine – the real bastard - scowl at the rose guy and make her move faster. Smug, self-important celebrity he was now! Ignoring the cameras like some goddamn famous actor, his arm around her, pushing her through the wall of cops into the hospital where they thought they’d be safe - oh big, funny joke!

  Buck put his soda back on his deli table. He shouldn’t be here now and had to get back, but he had a need to see them, the pair who’d destroyed him. It was either that or explode…his rage was so ready to blow. At least watching his tape helped him let off some steam, restrain himself a bit longer.

  He sat in the rear of the half-full place with his back to the wall. Under his hoodie he wore his baseball cap pulled low, headphones, and his fake, black-frame geek glasses. Frowny serious he must look, not that anybody ever looked at anybody. He kept his face buried in his computer so no one would know…

  …that he wasn’t really Buck Loki.

  He was just one of those normal-seeming guys who could fool anyone. Liked the name Buck…just because. Had chosen Loki as his secret last name because Loki was his favorite supervillain, the hideous Norse god who was a shape shifter; could change into different people, even into creatures like a fly, a horse, a fish, or an old woman.

  Loki could convert himself into anyone; he was the ultimate trickster god. As a kid getting kicked around, Buck had loved Loki even before he found that comic books had started using him. Movies too, damn them. Loki was his.

  Buck clicked and scrolled in his computer, this time enjoying the picture he’d taken of that little bitch Lainey after he’d done her. He cocked his head, admiring the Rorschach shape of the blood as it spread from her face-down body. The blood-shape was a bird of prey in profile. He liked that. Shit, if he had taped the blood instead of just taken a hurried picture, its red blotch would have spread more, sharpened the bird’s piercing beak, raised its red wings as if in flight.

  Humming softly, tunelessly, he replayed in his mind the scene of Lainey by the door to her apartment house. Saw her face again, her hesitant smile become trusting when she saw his janitor outfit. “No, I’m not Meredith, I’m Lainey,” she’d said to his affable greeting – and then held the door open for him!

  How easy it is to trick people. Just act nicey-nice; no one can guess what’s behind the mask.

  Suddenly, the television over the front counter was blaring a face. Buck raised his eyes. Stared. The sight made him furious again.

  It was a mug shot of Sonny Sears, a sour, scrawny punk the voiceover described as “a convicted felon who’d served prison time for drug dealing, shot dead in self defense by Dr. David Levine on that tragic and terrible early dawn.”

  Deli employees and patrons were looking up at the screen. Seeing again the footage of the shootout on the roof, hearing the screaming voiceover of the news chopper. Look at their faces! After so many days still rapt! Revolted by the punk and oh so loving the heroes!

  Buck’s rage tore at his chest. He wanted to run across the street to that damned hospital and do them now.

  But he couldn’t…yet. There was a bit more work to do.

  Getting the doctors you want isn’t easy like shooting up a mall or a movie theater. They’re almost never in the same place. He’d even asked yesterday, in a different outfit at the clinic nurses’ desk, and it was “Oh, Dr. Levine’s been called away, and Dr. Raney’s not scheduled down here until…no wait, that’s been changed…”

  Buck had to follow his plan.

  Soon, he told himself. Maybe tomorrow?

  Calming a little, he put his fun tape and Lainey pic inside a folder named “PlumbingMisc.” Then he tucked the folder into his hard drive.

  Patience, he thought, gritting his teeth. Soon he would destroy those who had destroyed him, who had taken his whole life away.

  Oh yes…and the third one. In a way, the one he was most angry at.

  Back outside, ducking into an alley, Buck Loki stashed his hoodie, geek glasses, headphones, and computer into his gym bag. Then he assumed his nice-guy mask, left the alley, and crossed the street.

  16

  The hand was so incredibly tiny. A bit bloodied, the 21-week-old fetus reached his miniscule fingers out from inside the bloated uterus, and actually clasped the doctor’s gloved finger. Didn’t seem to want to let go.

  Jill and David’s late entrance momentarily swept light across the screen’s picture, but no one turned. Lit notebooks in every seat kept up their soft, tap-tap note taking. A voice, electronically amplified, floated out over the renewed semi dark of the amphitheater.

  “The year was 1999,” intoned the voice of Dr. William Stryker, chief of Madison’s Obstetrics and Gynecology Department, who stood to one side leaning on a dimly illuminated lectern. “Fetal surgery then was a bold and controversial undertaking. Today, years after this little guy’s “Hand of Hope” picture…that’s what it’s called...this amazing procedure has been widely performed on fetuses around the world.”

  The overhead, narrow beam stayed on the picture longer than most. Interns, residents, and med students had time to stop typing and gaze at the tiny, determined hand. Reaching from the small cut in its mother’s uterus, it was still a hand like any other. Bent wrist, fingers curved and grasping the doctor’s huge-seeming finger, knuckles white from exertion, thumb closing around its fingers. It definitely wanted to hang on.

  “In utero surgery,” Stryker’s voice said quietly at his podium. “More highly advanced today, and even more miraculous.”

  David had seen this picture before; Jill hadn’t, leaned forward and gazed in awe. They had taken two unobtrusive aisle seats in the last row.

  Both were still breathing heavily. To get from the museum/Sturdevandt fourth floor they’d had to sprint through a connecting tunnel, two adjoining buildings, and up five flights of stairs because the elevators were slow.

  Stryker flicked on his arrow beam, which he pointed at the screen. “Notice how sm
all the uterine cut is,” he said, “and how minimal the blood loss. This, of course, depends entirely on your surgical technique.”

  An overhead beam moved, and the tiny hand was replaced by an ultrasound image showing the umbilical cord inserting into the placenta. Notebooks typed softly.

  “You must first check the sonogram for the placenta position,” said Stryker. His voice seemed slow, tired. Jill remembered the first time she’d ever seen him, here on that podium. His tall, silver-haired figure had stood erect, authoritarian and…intimidating. Now he just slowly read from his notes, a weary man looking up just to glance at the screen, then looking down again.

  He looked ill. Jill felt terrible. He had devoted his life to this hospital and its research, and hadn’t been the bad guy after all. Clifford Arnett had destroyed so much.

  She sighed heavily and leaned back. David sank lower in his seat, and put his head on her shoulder.

  “You usually open the abdomen via a midline vertical incision, and then you open the uterus…again, I emphasize, keeping your cut as small as possible.”

  The overhead beam moved again, and again, showing those steps of the surgery.

  Stryker’s voice seemed to get slower. The images flickered hypnotically.

  “You may be able to work on the fetus in the uterus, but if not, bring the fetus out, taking care to keep the umbilical cord intact. Then do your procedure, put everything back in place, and repair all incisions.”

  Images flicked and flicked, showing surgical repair steps.

  Jill sank a little lower in her seat. David catnapped on her shoulder.

  The voice droned: “Heart defects…spinal bifida… urinary tract anomalies… cystic pulmonary abnormality…”

  Jill closed her eyes for what she thought was just a second. Gone was the adrenalin expended in the museum attic, and on the sprint to get here. The amphitheater was dark, the upholstered seats were comfy, and Stryker’s voice was lulling. Hard to believe he had once intimidated. So hard…

  Suddenly the overhead lights were on. Too damn bright! Someone was tapping Jill’s knee.

  “Wha…?”

  It was a medical student, seated in front of her. “He’s talking about you,” the smiling girl whispered. Other med students seated with her eyed Jill and David quizzically.

  “…our dark night is over,” Stryker was saying, “thanks to the selflessness of our two courageous staff members. You’ve seen them in the news, you know who they are.”

  “Who who is?” David mumbled, coming awake.

  “…what’s most extraordinary is that more patients than ever have called to inquire about our fertility clinic, its advanced procedures in IVF and in preventing disease in utero.” Stryker suddenly seemed more alive. “Couples with a family history of muscular dystrophy, Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, the list goes on, and our work goes on.”

  He looked out at his audience, most of whom had turned to find and look admiringly at Jill and David, who were now awake, thankfully…

  Because Stryker’s gaze had just found them, way in the back, and smiled out at them.

  They smiled sleepily back.

  “This is embarrassing,” David muttered.

  The conference was over. They got up and tried to make their way out, despite the small crowd closing in and fussing over them. They smiled again; murmured polite nothings back. In the foyer, outside the double-swinging doors, converged a bigger crowd of admirers.

  “Gonna write a book?” asked one med student.

  “You’re a movie!” beamed another.

  “David, my mother has a crush on you!”

  More polite nothings.

  The crowd soon thinned, having duties to rush to. Sam MacIntyre, Woody Greenberg, and Tricia Donovan had pushed their way to them, and now they all walked the hall.

  Tricia was talking away and making a face at a squished Pop Tart she’d pulled from her pocket. “I saw you two come in late. Where were you?”

  “Getting high,” Jill said.

  Sam was complaining about having just gotten called for a delivery. Woody was trying to rush him, fretting aloud about the cephalopelvic disproportion they’d seen yesterday on the sonogram, asking David to help if they needed it.

  “May need a Caesarean, I’ll scrub in,” David said; and Sam bitched, “I should’ve napped during that conference. I know that stuff.”

  They were all waiting for the elevator when Woody finally noticed something different.

  “David?” he said. “How come you’re wearing jeans?”

  17

  With an hour to spare before clinic duty, Jill and Tricia watched the Caesarean through the glass of the gallery above the O.R. Jim Holloway and another first year resident watched too, plus Ramu Chitkara, Charlie Ortega, and a scattering of med students.

  Evan Blair was among them.

  “Nice incision,” he announced to no one.

  He got a few snide glances but no answers; wanted attention, so he spoke again. “How does he do it? The incision was small, the kid was a wide-load breech, and he just turned it around and pulled it out. Levine is so good.”

  Jill said coldly, “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  Blair turned from a few seats away to smile at her. He was thirty-three, tallish, and well built with brown hair. His manner turned apologetic. “Please tell him too I’m so sorry about that Curry misfiling.”

  “Tell him yourself.”

  “I did. I mean, I left a message on his voicemail. Expected a harangue but he didn’t call back.”

  “He’s busy.” Jill avoided his gaze; kept her eyes on the operation below. “Call him back and apologize.”

  From behind Blair Jim Holloway leaned forward and said, “David saved your butt, asshole. Curry’s still being transfused;” and Tricia next to Jill scowled, “Another resident would have had you decapitated. Thrown out.”

  Blair stared at Tricia and said nothing, his expression flicking from defensive to resentment and then to…humiliated.

  There was an empty seat on Jill’s other side and he moved to it, ignoring Tricia’s glare.

  “I’ll call David again if I don’t see him.” Blair’s earnest gaze tried to get Jill to look at him. No dice. Very frustrating. She was intently watching David suture the new mother’s uterus.

  “I realize, no excuse,” Blair said low and helplessly. “But what really happened was, Kassie Doyle told me she was coming back to the night shift. I could’ve sworn she said starting last night, and when three deliveries came in all at once, I went to help with one of them.”

  “Ours,” Charlie Ortega said begrudgingly behind him. Like Ramu next to him, he was both listening and intently watching the surgery. They were all still pretty troubled by the screw up. A patient’s well being had been compromised.

  Jill finally looked at Blair, frowning. “But that delivery was Curry.”

  Blair looked desperate. “I know, she lost a lot of blood - but I thought Kassie was on the job. After the delivery, I must have been blitzed. Lemme tell you, when I fall asleep, I don’t fall asleep, I just lose consciousness.” He shook his head, gestured despondently with both hands.

  Jill saw the scornful looks he got.

  Sometimes, in spite of herself, she felt sorry for Evan Blair. He’d had it hard, belonged nowhere, was a just-for-now nurse with few nurse friends struggling through med school. He reputedly didn’t socialize much, if at all, not counting his off and on girlfriends who lived temporarily with him, and then left. “No time for me,” she’d heard one say.

  Mainly, he seemed to be bitter. From what little Jill knew of him, he had spent his whole life working at menial jobs so he could study. He was way more advanced than most med students – which didn’t make him popular with them - had spent every spare minute in his MCAT books, had even done extra research for advance credit, but still sometimes got called, to his face, “hey, almost an intern!” It all seemed to make him angrier, even more ambitious.

  One of the med stude
nts, leaning toward him, said sarcastically, “Hey Evan, I didn’t see you at the ‘Hand of Hope’ Grand Rounds.”

  He turned to her, annoyed. “I saw that one in my third year. I know that stuff.”

  A typical interaction.

  Jill was uncomfortable with the angry vibe around them; found herself finally giving Blair a tight smile. “I did a lot of extras in my third year too,” she told him. “By my fourth year I felt so impatient to get on with it.”

  Tricia leaned past Jill to Blair. “She was brilliant,” she whispered fake-conspiratorially, “but she didn’t flaunt it.”

  Blair looked at her, disconsolate. “Well, I’m…not as nice,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning down.

  That touched Jill. In the O.R. below, they had wiped clean the new little squawler, weighed him, and wrapped him in a little blue blanket. The Caesarean was done, the new mom wheeled into recovery, and David stood talking, smiling with the anesthesiologist.

  She looked back at Blair, thinking: fair is fair; maybe ease the chip on his shoulder? “Hey,” she said. “I had it easier, financially…”

  “Yeah, I heard about your hot shot prosecutor mother.”

  Jill let that go; bit back the old pain. “My mother was an assistant D.A. They get paid bupkis, she never got out of that rut and was unhappy about it…but no, I wasn’t poor.” She hesitated, watched Blair’s expression soften a little, then added kindly, “You’ve worked damned hard in your life, Evan.”

  “From aged twelve,” he said bitterly. “Mowed lawns, shoveled driveways and then horse shit at Belmont where my old man blew what little we had…” He was looking down at David and the anesthesiologist, who was now grinning, making football-tossing motions. No sign that David had HI D preying on his mind. Jill swallowed hard. They both must have seemed so carefree…

  The others were leaving the gallery. Tricia leaned and said, “The clinic, Jill. We gotta go.”

  They got up, and Blair tagged after them.