HANNAH (GENETIC APOCALYPSE Book 4)

by Boyd Craven Jr.

  “Yeah. Sure. I doubt my husband Terry will have any problem with that either. We just need to know what we’re dealing with here, and so far, you’re the only one talking any sense. We’ve had just about enough of Dr. Cho and his staff here. I think we’re out of here today or tomorrow. Is there any way that you can come to our house to do it?” she asks.

  Excellent response chickie.

  “Of course! That would be perfect, actually,” I say.

  “Can you give me your phone number, so I can talk to Terry tonight when he gets out of work and maybe call you tomorrow?”

  “For sure,” I tell her, writing my cell number down on the back of my business card. “Why don’t you give me your digits too, just in case? I don’t wanna lose you guys!” She writes hers on the back of another of my cards. I say my good-byes and head back to my room to type out my report to Rusty, of the events so far. Plus, I can’t wait to call Dr. Greene and tell him how well his advice has worked!

  3

  Terry Edan:

  Saturday evening, June 19, 2021

  Genesys Regional Medical Center

  I finish my shift at the Fenton Walsanto store and head straight to the hospital to check on Cathy and Scott. I am exhausted, both physically and mentally. I can barely sleep at night, alone in our quiet house. My brain just keeps racing around, replaying everything that’s happened. What’s wrong with Scott? Will some government agency quarantine him or something? Is whatever he’s got contagious? What about the crap that the nurses whisper about him being like those dead terrorists, or those green chickens on TV? What kind of life is he going to have, being so different? Being green kinda makes one stand out in a crowd…

  I tap lightly on the door as I enter the room. “Hi sweetie, how are you? And how’s our boy?” I ask, quietly.

  “Hey Terry. We’re fine. Just tired of being here. I think it’s time we busted out,” Cathy says, with an evil little grin.

  “Really? Is Dr. Cho gonna release him?” I ask.

  “No, but a lot happened today. A young woman came to see us. She’s a forensic geneticist from Clemson University, in South Carolina…”

  “So does she know what’s wrong with Scott?” I break in.

  “Well, she explained her theory to me on how she thinks this came about. She and her team have been studying animals and birds that have this. They understand this in animals, but apparently Scott is the first human to be born with it. She just totally made sense to me. She wants to talk to you too, but I told her it’d be best if she came to the house to do that. Dr. Cho doesn’t like her much. He seems to think she’s full of crap. He can’t explain what’s up with Scott. Nada. Zilch. Yet, he wants to send me home and keep Scott here, for more testing.”

  “Bull shit! That’s not happening,” I blurt out.

  “That’s what I told him too,” she says. “Nobody’s poking and prodding our boy any more. I got him to agree that this is something genetic and not something viral. That geneticist Hannah had told me that earlier, but I didn’t let him in on that little secret. Then, I insisted that since Scott’s not contagious or anything, and perfectly healthy, that I want to take him home. He got his panties all in a knot and stomped off, but came back a few minutes later with the paperwork releasing me. He also had a paper for me to sign that said it was against his better judgement to release Scott, but if I sign it, we can take him home now. What do you think?”

  “Oh hell yeah!” I say. “We’re not leaving him here for one second without us being here. Where do we sign?”

  Cathy hands me the paper to read. It’s standard mumbo-jumbo about holding the hospital harmless and holding Dr. Cho harmless, blah, blah, blah, if we remove Scott from his care at this time. I sign it and hand it back to Cathy to sign. I take it to the nurse’s station and tell them that we’re ready to leave. She makes a face, but signs it, and gives me a copy. She tells me to go get the car and to pull it up under the canopy out front. She says they’ll have them both down there in about ten minutes.

  ~

  I’ve been sitting here in the car, under the canopy for about 20 minutes. I’m about ready to go looking for Cathy, when a TV news van pulls up right behind me, and the crew begins piling out.

  ‘We’ve been set-up!’ I think.

  Right then of course, here comes some nurse pushing Cathy and Scott in a wheelchair. I jump out of the car and race them to her. “Back off! Get that camera out of her face! No pictures!” I yell. Scott begins to cry. Cathy has his face covered up; in fact, she has him entirely covered with a light blanket.

  The news team won’t listen. They keep asking questions one after another, “Is it true that your baby is green ma’am?” “How’s about a picture?” “The public wants to know!”

  That’s all I can take of this crap. I put my arms out and clothes-line the whole damn bunch of them. All of them go back a few steps; the woman shoving the microphone in Cathy’s face goes on her ass, and a guy drops a really expensive looking camera on the cement. “Get in the car babe!” I say, helping her up quickly right into the front seat, while still holding Scott in her arms. I drive to the far side of the parking lot, where we buckle ourselves in. I don’t have the baby car-seat with me, but it’s only a few miles of backroads for us to get home. Away we go! I can see the news crew interviewing that blasted nurse in the rear-view mirror as we leave.

  ‘At least they aren’t chasing us,’ I think.

  “What the hell was that?” Cathy asks through her tears.

  “The first of many of those scenes, if we don’t keep him out of sight,” I tell her. “People are cruel as hell. We’re gonna have to do some serious thinking about just exactly who we let know about Scott for the moment, or we’re gonna have to deal with that crap every day.” The thought of that doesn’t interest me at all.

  4

  Hannah:

  Sunday, June 20, 2021

  Edan Residence

  I was surprised to hear from Cathy Edan last night. She called me to tell me that they were home already, and explained how things had gone down. I wasn’t happy to hear about the news crew thingy, but I wasn’t surprised. I’d make sure to put that in my report for Rusty. She’d invited me to come out to their house this morning. She’d talked with her husband, she said, and they both wanted to understand everything that they could about Scott’s condition. She gave me the address for the house next to their driveway for my GPS. She said that they had a long, curved, two-track driveway back to their house, so their address would show up down the street.

  As I pull up next to the other two cars at the end of the long drive, a tall man with a pistol on his waist walks up to the driver’s window. “Hannah Withers?” he asks.

  “Yes, are you Terry?”

  “Sure am. Come on inside. Just making sure it wasn’t news people,” he explains.

  “It’s beautiful back here. It feels like somewhere way out in the country, but it’s right in the city,” I say. “What a unique piece of property!” Looking around me, the only gap I can see in the lush greenness is the one just wide enough for the drive to curve through, and I can’t see or hear the street from here. There’s no lawn that I can see. Instead there’s some kind of field plants. “What’s this?” I ask, pointing to it.

  “Pasture mix. A little bit of everything that our animals can eat,” he explains. “No sense wasting good ground on a lawn that nobody can see.”

  ‘Very cool idea.’

  We walk up to a long, southern facing covered porch, and in the front door. Cathy is sitting there with Scott in her arms in a rocking chair. ‘Awww’. “Hi again!” I whisper, not wanting to disturb Scott.

  “Oh, you don’t have to whisper. We’re not gonna go that route. We want Scott to adjust to normal noises and activities around here. We decided that way before he was born,” Cathy tells me. “Sit your stuff down and have a seat.”

  “So somebody ratted you out leaving the hospital, huh? That really stinks. I hope they enjoyed their two seconds
of fame, doing that,” I say, still being quieter than my usual voice.

  Cathy laughed. “You should have seen the look on their faces when Terry pushed them all back out of my face! One of the guys fell into the lady with the microphone and the high heels, and down they went! Ahhh… I hope they didn’t get hurt, but if they did, they deserved it,” she says, with a big ole smile on.

  I was telling Terry how cool I think your place is,” I say. I’m like a city girl, so I don’t know the first thing about it, but I like the quiet. A lot!”

  “Thanks. Little did we know that privacy was going to be so important to us back when we bought it. We really couldn’t ask for a better place to be out of sight.

  “So, I told Terry everything that you explained to me yesterday at the hospital. Some of it’s a little fuzzy in my head, because I was so surprised to hear an explanation for this finally. Did you say that you expect a lot more children to be born this way?” she asks.

  “Oh, yeah. Like most of them,” I tell her.

  “We both work for Walsanto,” Terry says. “People seem to think that the green chickens that were on TV got that way from eating the corn that our seed division invented. Is that what happened to Scott, somehow?”

  ‘Man, talk about getting right to the point! How do I want to answer this?’

  “You know, one of the most important things in my life, is discovering the truth about things. Lying about anything directly counter-acts that, but try to understand that if I were to mention specific company or people’s names, I could get into serious trouble. I’m going to be fully honest with you about the science, because I think you deserve that, but I’m going to have to let you make your own assumptions on whose fault anything is. Ok?”

  “Fair enough,” Terry said. “I can live with that. I’m pretty sure I already know the answer to that anyhow.”

  “Cool then. My team and I became involved in this anomaly, at the request of… someone, who paid for us to prove or disprove that some particular chickens had produced green, featherless offspring because of eating some particular corn. We were eventually able to prove that that was indeed the reason. Later, we learned that it could just as easily be caused by birds or animals eating certain wheat or oats too. Next, we proved that other animals that ate those birds or animals or their eggs or drank their milk also got it…”

  “So, if birds and animals can get it, people can too, right?” Terry asks.

  “That’s our theory, yes. There’s living proof of it, right there,” I tell him, pointing at Scott.

  Terry’s head drops. A tear runs down his cheek. “So because some asshole put something in our food, without telling us, this happens to our baby?” He begins to really cry now. “How is anyone supposed to know what food is safe and what food isn’t? This has to be illegal!” he cries.

  “Actually Terry, it’s not,” I tell him.

  “What? But how can that be? Just look at what they’ve done to him!” Terry shouts.

  “I know, I know,” I say. “The USDA says that ‘they’ don’t have to tell us on our food labels which ones contain GMO’s and which ones don’t. Personally, I hate that. Never in my worst nightmares did I ever think it would come to this though. Nobody did. It should be impossible, but here we are.” I open the larger of my two brief cases I’d carried in. “For exactly the reason that you state, that nobody has any way to know, I’ve invented a simple test that shows which foods and other products contain this particular GMO, and which ones don’t.” I hand Terry a test kit. I get one out for me as well, and open it up. “I don’t eat meat, but I drink milk, eat eggs and love bread.” I swab the top of my tongue, so he can see how I do it, and see the results. The white fiber pad on the end of the paper match-stick in my hand, turns a very light green color instantly. “See? I have it too, a little bit.” I move the swab around over the diagram on the cover of the kit until the color on the pad matches the color on the diagram. My color is in between 5% and 10%. “That means my body is less than 10% involved. Get it?”

  “Yeah!” Terry says, while copying exactly what I had done, but to himself. His looks to be just about the same as mine. He hands one to Cathy and says, “You too babe.” Hers turns a much darker color of green. I move over closer to them, so I can see better. Her color is just below 60%.

  “Oh no!” Cathy cries, “why’s mine so much worse than yours?” she asks Terry. “We eat exactly the same exact things!”

  “Now do Scott,” I say, handing her another match-stick. She swabs the baby’s mouth. It comes out really dark green. She hands it to Terry, who holds it next to the diagram. “100%,” he says.

  “Scott is a hybrid,” I tell them. “Part plant, part human. How much of each, I don’t know yet. Cathy, your color is higher than Terry’s because you carried Scott inside you. Now do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand now, but that’s not Scott’s fault,” she sobs.

  “No way is it his fault,” I agree.

  “So what does this mean? Am I changing into… the same as Scott then? Am I going to die? Is Scott going to die from it?” Terry wraps his arms around both of them. They both look at me for an answer. Scott cries.

  “We don’t know what exactly it means yet. That’s why I’m here. I want to help you guys in any way I can, and I want to learn whatever I can about what it does mean. Do you believe me?” I ask.

  They both nod their heads. “Yes, of course. We need all the help we can get, and we’d love to help you learn about it, so you can help other people,” Cathy says.

  “Thank-you!” I say, and I hug her too.

  ~

  Cathy and I spend the next couple of hours testing everything that we can around their house with the swabs. Terry stays with Scott. I show Cathy how to test dry things by wetting the swab with water first. I’ve already done that with most of the household items they have, back at the lab, but we do them again for her benefit. I explain that the obvious things will be corn, wheat and oats themselves, but that there is a whole myriad of things that they are ingredients of. Like a slice of bread. It creates a hint of green on the pad. A drop of milk? A hint of green. We crack an egg out of the fridge… perfectly white.

  “Where do you get your eggs?” I ask.

  “We have our own hens out back,” she answers.

  “What do you feed them?”

  “Actually, they eat mostly from our property, but they’ll gladly eat the rabbit’s pellets if they get the chance. After we saw those green chickens on TV and people were claiming it was from the feed, we dumped all of our chicken scratch right then, into the trash.”

  “Interesting,” I remark. “Keep doing what you’re doing, because apparently they are safe! I’d keep that information to myself, if I were you.”

  We test one of their chickens. White. We test one of their rabbits. White. We test various plants and weeds around their property. All white. Back in the house, I have her test the bar soap in the shower. A hint of green. Tooth paste. White. Tooth brush. A hint of green. On and on we go, testing. I show her that anything that contains corn syrup tests ‘a hint of green’. Corn syrup is added to everything from soda to canned goods as a sweetener. It’s in condiments like catsup, mustard and mayonnaise. Pretty much all snack foods and chips have it.

  “Terry tests really low compared to most people, like I do,” I tell Cathy. It must be because you guys raise your own meat, fed with your own feed that doesn’t contain corn, wheat or oats. My downfall is bread and tortillas in the wraps that I eat. I’ve had to change the way I eat, trying to stay at a low percentage, so when we get a reversal figured out, I can use it on myself.”

  “I’m not going to be able to do that, am I?” she asks.

  “Probably not, the way it looks right now,” I answer, “but it looks like Terry will be able to, if you test everything before he eats it, and keep him low. If we come up with a way for people at your levels, you’ll be the first to know about it.”

  “Absolutely! Where can w
e buy some of these test kits?” she asks.

  “Well, I’m gonna leave you everything I brought with me, because they won’t be available until the 1st of September in stores. Then you’ll be able to get them right where you work, probably. Can I ask you not to show these to like anyone before September 1st? Once again, I’d probably get in serious trouble.”

  “You have my word,” she says. “You can count on Terry too, and I’ll make sure of that.”

  “So, is it alright for me to contact you regularly about this for updates or to share whatever we’ve learned?” I ask.

  “You bet! You can call me or even come here whenever you want Hannah. You have a friend in me now!”

  “Do you have Skype?” I ask.

  “Sure,” she answered.

  “That’ll make this easier then,” I say, handing her a sheet of paper with that list of tests that Dr. Greene had suggested, and my explanation of each. “Will you swab test these things and have Terry video them for me, for our research?”

  “Of course,” she promises.

  “Then I guess I’d better slide,” I tell her. I don’t want to keep her away from Scott and Terry any longer. “I’ll be in touch.”

  5

  Rusty Whitman:

  Monday, June 21, 2021

  Washington, DC

  I’m reading the email report that I just received from Hannah, minutes ago. I am absolutely delighted with the fact that she actually made it into the Edan’s home. It also sounds like she’s made a friend. She must get that from her mother. Catherine could make friends with anyone. She’d had a gift for that.

  It doesn’t surprise me that Dr. Cho gave Hannah a hard time. She was there to steal his thunder, right out from underneath him. I’ll bet that he’d had illusions of his face on TV and magazine covers everywhere with that little green child.