Embryo 3: Raney & Levine

by JA Schneider

  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 SPAW
N 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.

  Jill and David kept staring at the blank screen.

  “I can’t breathe,” Jill said.

  Neither of the other two answered. David leaned forward with his fist pressed to his mouth. Hutch stared sorrowfully at the thing on his desk.

  “I had to tell you this,” he said.

  “Right, absolutely,” David said softly, looking up.

  At that moment there was a knock on the door, and Allie Dodd stuck her head in. Sort of like a frightened kitten peeking around a corner.

  She smiled a bit timidly at Jill and David, then said to Hutch, “Well, I’m done. Caught up and didn’t throw up.”

  He grinned, invited her in, and introduced her. She blinked at the poncho and camouflage jacket and said, “Oh! You’re them? Oh…wow.”

  David cracked a little grin, and Jill smiled sympathetically. “We heard about what happened. You’re brave to have stuck out the day.”

  Allie sank to the chair David pulled out for her, and blew air out her cheeks. “Thanks,” she said, a little dispiritedly. She was pretty, with short, curling brown hair, but her hands clutched each other nervously. “I’m really not brave,” she sighed. “Today’s stress on top of the usual, plus…sleep? What’s that?”

  They nodded in sympathetic agreement, and Allie studied them. David’s face was strong and kind, but Jill looked as vulnerable as she felt. It was as if Jill’s big, emotional eyes were already reading her.

  “How did med school go for you?” Allie asked.

  “Very hard,” Jill said. “I had extra problems. Big ones.”

  “So how’d you get through it?”

  “Dunno. Just kept trudging, I guess.”

  Allie straightened. Anxiety lightens if you find a kindred spirit. “Could I talk to you sometime? I so need…” She floundered and raised her hands helplessly.

  “Sure, call me, please.” Jill gave Allie her cell number. “Leave a voicemail if I’m in a delivery or something. I’ll get back to you.”

  Allie thanked her. Smiled more easily at David and rose, looking out the window at the lights in the ambulance bay. “Is it safe to go out?” she said facetiously. “The yowlers seem to have gone.”

  Jill gave an unhappy shrug. “Any excitement over Jesse sets off the crazies.”

  “New excitement,” David said half-heartedly. “After last time it died down for three months, didn’t it?”

  A ray of hope lifted them all, feebly.

  David’s cell phone buzzed. He answered, listened, and said, “Okay. We’re coming.”

  6

  Red and blue lights flashed in the chill blue dusk. Beep beep as the ambulance backed up to the ER dock.

  They ran, caught up as EMTs unloaded the gurney, got on both sides of it and helped push it through the double sliding doors into Emergency. The patient was female, unconscious, high-bellied, and her head and face were bloodied. One EMT, holding up the IV, yelled, “seven months pregnant, belly trauma, no fetal heartbeat. Maternal pulse elevated at 140, BP 90 over 50 and dropping, respiration 24, severe head trauma, probable skull fracture.”

  As they switched the patient to an ER bed, Sam MacIntyre, second-year resident and good friend, came running into the cubicle. “Where ya been? Woody’s coming, we’ve been – oh jeez,” he said as he saw the patient.

  David yanked off his camouflage jacket. “Looks bad,” he said. “BP just dropped in a minute to 85/45, means she’s bleeding out in her belly. We gotta transfuse her.” He watched two nurses work fast, one getting the woman’s jacket off and starting an IV line, the other taping on a new nasal oxygen tube. He sent the second nurse for f
our units of whole blood and looked back to Sam.

  “You know what to do, stat complete blood count, type and cross match four units, bleeding and clotting screen. Call neurosurgery too, there may be a subdural.” To the nurse cutting the patient’s sweater he said, “Save her clothes. Bag ‘em like for a rape,” and to Jill regulating the oxygen tank, “No time to change into scrubs, just wash and gloves.”

  “ID’s in her purse, name’s Jenna Walsh, age twenty-seven,” said the nurse cutting the sweater - and then she screamed. Stepped back with her gloved hands to her face as a snake slid out, fell to the floor, and slithered jerkily over her shoe.

  Shock froze Jill’ vision. Her heart dropped.

  “Oh shit.” David knelt and caught the snake writhing under an instrument table. It was weak and bleeding; offered little resistance. He yanked a plastic liner out of a wastebasket, put the snake into it, spun the bag closed and handed it to the gasping nurse.

  “C’mon, Ruthie. He’s half dead anyway.” David pulled off his latex gloves. “Keep this with the clothes and punch some holes in it. We’ll be right back.”

  Barely a minute, it took them to scrub up to their elbows in a near scrub room. “A real snake?” Jill bleated. “Is this the same creep?”

  “What are the odds?” David blasted water. “Yeah, it’s a real garter snake like the fake one. This one was injured like something tore through its-”

  “I hate snakes! I’m terrified of them!”

  Back at the cubicle entrance Woody Greenberg, first-year resident, nearly collided with them. He was wiry with brown curly hair and always spoke in a rush. “We just saw Jesse, Sam always hogs him, he yawned, he’s so precious…oh…”

  He looked in at Sam looking up, removing his stethoscope. “No fetal heartbeat,” he said gravely. “Child’s gone.” MacIntyre was a big guy, usually a smart mouth who liked to goof around, but his expression now was stricken. “Look at this,” he said. “Just look at this.”