Quality DNA

by Beth Martin

  There didn’t seem to be anyone else inside the house. She went down the stairs and cut through the living room and kitchen, exiting out the back door.

  Her coworkers’ cars all had fingerprint locks. All of them except for Aiden’s combustion car. Even though it was locked, the top was down and she simply climbed over the door to get in. She had previously seen him pull the keys out from under the sun visor, and sure enough, they fell from the visor when she checked. She shoved the key in the ignition and the engine roared to life.

  Driving this vehicle was a bit different than a normal electric car. The accelerator and brakes responded differently. When she pressed the right pedal, the car lurched forward. The brakes were less responsive, and she had to jam the left pedal to get the car to stop. Instead of reversing out of the drive, she pressed full on the gas. Clumps of dirt and grass flew up behind her and the tires squealed against the wet earth as the wheels spun. Finally, the tires gripped the ground and she drove around the farmhouse through the lawn to get to the road in front.

  She should go to the FBI. They needed to know about the Genome Database and how AQD planned to shut down every device. But first, she needed to get stitched up. The nearest hospital was the same one where Annette had given birth, Santa Teresa. Irene had a general sense of where it was, and drove straight there.

  Not worried about parking, she pulled right up to the ER drop off and left the red combustion car idling in the ambulance bay. She hadn’t looked at her wound the entire time she was driving. Red had soaked through the cloth and dripped onto her pants and the tan leather seat of the car.

  She found standing up and getting out of the car to be harder than normal. The center of her vision turned dark, and she started seeing stars. She paused while shaking her head back and forth. She wasn’t fainting. Not right now. The automated doors to the ER opened and she stumbled inside. Blood was dripping down her leg and onto the cool linoleum floor. She didn’t care. She was almost there.

  The nurse at the reception desk saw Irene come in and immediately grabbed a wheelchair and brought it over to her.

  “What happened?” he asked as she settled in the chair. She pressed her hand against the blanket.

  “I was stabbed,” she said.

  Her nurse called out, “Get Dr. Brown. Female patient, mid-thirties, lower abdominal stab wound, may need an OR.”

  A woman in a white lab coat ran up to Irene’s side as she was being pushed down the hall. “What happened?” she asked.

  “I got stabbed,” she said, each word an effort. She had to catch her breath even to talk. “By a piece of glass… from a window.” Her vision was turning dark again, and she hung her head, willing her sight to return.

  “Are you in pain?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Alright. We’re going to get you in a bed and get you comfortable and I’ll take a look at the wound. If it’s a clean cut, then we’ll just wash it out, do some stitches, and you’ll be good to go.”

  Irene tried to nod, but it was too much effort. The nurse helped her climb onto a hospital bed and then removed the makeshift quilt bandage. As soon as the quilt was off, he pressed his gloved hand against the wound. “It’s pretty deep,” he whispered to Dr. Brown.

  “Keep applying pressure. I’ll book an OR.”

  There was a flurry of activity around Irene’s bed. Another nurse entered and started an IV before an anesthesiologist came in and explained the risks of general anesthesia. A third nurse approached her with forms. The last nurse didn’t even bother explaining what the forms were for, and just said, “Please sign these.”

  The anesthesiologist placed a mask over Irene’s mouth and instructed her to count backwards from ten. She made it all the way to eight.

  twenty

  Irene woke back up to a stabbing pain in her pelvis, much worse than the initial pain of being stabbed. After the nurses gave her enough pain meds to make her loopy, she was situated in a shared room for recovery.

  “How are you feeling?” Dr Brown asked.

  “Okay, I guess,” Irene said.

  “Your cut was pretty deep, all the way through the subcutaneous layer and muscle, hitting your right ovary. You had lost a lot of blood and needed a transfusion of two liters.” She thumbed through Irene’s file on a large hand-held screen. “You’ll be glad to know I was able to save the ovary.” Irene wondered why the doctor didn’t find it odd that a woman who had a both ovaries removed as a teen suddenly had one. Perhaps there had been an oversight in her medical records.

  Dr Brown continued, “I noticed you didn’t have a birth control implant, so I did need to give you one.” Irene looked down at her left arm. Halfway between her shoulder and elbow was a neon bandaid with Pokey Panda on it. It felt fitting.

  “If you feel up to it,” Dr. Brown said, “the police are here to ask you about what happened. Would you like me to send them in?”

  “Sure,” Irene said.

  A few minutes after the doctor left, two detectives came in and introduced themselves.

  “I’m Detective Harvey Small and this here is my partner, Doris Jenkins,” the male detective said in a rough voice. The man was short and rotund while the female detective was tall and solid. They both wore tan trench coats which were damp with rain.

  “Could you please state your name for the record?” Dorris asked, placing a small voice recorder on the table next to Irene’s bed. A little red light illuminated from the top to signal it was recording. Irene wondered why the detective would use such archaic technology when a device would have sufficed.

  “Irene Crow.”

  “Can you tell us what happened to you?”

  “I was stabbed.”

  “Could you start from the beginning?” Dorris asked.

  “I don’t know if I should talk about it,” Irene said. “I was working a case as an asset for the FBI.

  “I didn’t hear nothing from the FBI,” Harvey said. “Did you?”

  Dorris answered, “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “I was infiltrating AQD,” Irene offered.

  “Never heard of it,” Harvey said.

  Doris gave Harvey a warning glance, before turning back to Irene. “What matters right now is that we get your statement while it’s all still fresh in your mind. So, start from the beginning and tell us exactly what happened.”

  Irene thought for a moment before speaking. “I was taking a walk downtown, looking for ‘now hiring’ signs in shops. I went down an alleyway as a shortcut and got attacked. He had a broken beer bottle and used it to stab me.”

  “Did you recognize your attacker?” Dorris asked.

  “No,” Irene said firmly.

  “Do you think you could describe him?”

  “It was dark,” Irene said. Harvey crossed his arms and grunted loudly.

  Dorris sat in the chair next to the bed. “What happened next?”

  “I came here,” Irene said, looking from one detective to the other.

  “How’d you get the muscle car?” Harvey asked.

  Irene hoped she’d be able to keep the details of her lie straight. “It was parked street side with the keys in it.”

  “Is there anything else you remember? Any little detail could help us find the man who did this to you.” Dorris said.

  Irene’s mind replayed the scene from her bedroom prison, Aiden’s limp body on the hardwood floor, his blood pooling outward. Jamie would want to know he was dead, and Irene felt it was her responsibility to give Jamie the news. “No, nothing,” she said. “Has anyone called my wife?”

  Harvey let out a laugh. “Where’ve you been? Under a rock?”

  “Excuse me?” Irene said.

  Doris looked puzzled as well. “All devices went haywire a couple days ago, don’t you remember?”

  “Oh right.” It was too late. The database was gone. That must have been why the doctor hadn’t looked up her medical records using her DNA.

  “If you need to get in touch, you can
still use a landline,” Dorris said, handing Irene a paper business card. Irene accepted the card and laid back on her pillows. The detectives excused themselves and left the room.

  She examined the small card in her hand. Dorris Jenkins’s contact information was a string of ten digits. Irene tried to think if she had ever seen the numbers for Jamie’s contact info.

  “Tell me you got him.” Annette said, barging into the room. She wore an odd contraption strapped to her front which held a peacefully sleeping Ophelia.

  A sick feeling tore through Irene’s chest. She had killed a man. Even though she had hated him and by all means he deserved what he got, the fact that she had ended his life made her nauseous. She nodded weakly, tears stinging at her eyes.

  Annette came over and sat on the edge of her bed. “Damn, Irene, you are one tough chick. I’m going to have the writers at Certain Media start drafting a script for a movie based on all this shit.”

  Irene gave a half smile. “Please, don’t. This is all a little too real for me right now.”

  “Don’t worry,” Annette said, patting her hand. “They’ll go full artistic license on your life and make the climax a giant war between the Social Department and a team of aliens.”

  Irene chuckled at the idea, but the motion caused the pain to knife through her healing wound. She stopped and held her arms against her bandaged abdomen, trying to ease the pain. “Please, don’t make me laugh.”

  Annette just smiled in return.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “Elijah’s friend Doris was able to track you.” Irene recalled the woman with blond dreads who had gleefully demonstrated how to destroy a device. “I would have come sooner, but she couldn’t find your signal until just moments before you came to the hospital.”

  It figured that the farmhouse would somehow block her asset card. She was glad she had done something instead of waiting for the FBI.

  “I’ve been at the hospital every day since Charlie was born. Clara keeps bringing him in for imaginary emergencies. Last night, she brought him to the ER because he wouldn’t stop crying. It was just gas.” She leaned down and kissed her own baby on the head.

  Irene guessed Charlie was the name of Annette’s new nephew.

  Annette stood up. “I’ve got to go. My best friend’s ex-wife is having an event, so I need to get Ophelia set up at the babysitter’s.”

  Irene winced at the mention of Jamie.

  “Too soon?” Annette asked.

  Irene nodded.

  “I’ll be back. I’m getting you a cell phone, and you better fucking hold onto it this time. No blowing it up or throwing it in a body of water.”

  Irene smiled, remembering this time not to laugh. “No promises.”

  Annette left, leaving Irene alone again.

  ··OOO··

  Irene poked at her dinner. Dr. Brown wanted her to wait a day before eating any solids, so on her tray was a bowl of broth, a cup of gelatin, a hot mug of tea, and some juice. She poked a finger at the gelatin, and it wobbled in response. Even though she didn’t feel hungry, she knew she needed to eat something.

  “Irene?”

  Irene’s heart jumped. The curtain between the two beds was drawn to give her some privacy, so the visitor in her room wasn’t able to see her.

  “Back here,” she said. She tried to pat down her unruly curls and quickly tidy up her blanket.

  “Irene,” Jamie said again, stepping up from behind the curtain. She looked stunning wearing a fitted gray dress with her hair tied up in a bun. She walked up to the side of the bed and reached down to hold Irene’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, tears rolling down her face.

  “Me too,” Irene said, tears forming in her eyes as well. “I need to tell you something, about Aiden.”

  “I already know,” Jamie said, wiping her tears away with her hand before returning it to Irene’s. “They told us at the AQD meeting just now that he died of a brain aneurysm.”

  Irene nodded her head. She was okay with Jamie believing that. “Shouldn’t you be at your opening?”

  Jamie smiled. “I’m the artist. I can be a little late if I choose. I wanted to come see you first.”

  Irene crinkled her face, the tears pouring out even more.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” Jamie said. “Would you move back in?”

  She looked down at her tray. The gelatin was now completely still. “I can’t,” she said.

  “Just until you get back on your feet. You’ll lose your job with AQD shutting down.”

  “I can’t pretend it didn’t happen,” Irene said, searching Jamie’s eyes. “We can’t go back to the way it was.”

  Jamie sat down on the edge of the bed. “I know. I don’t expect us to. I’ll move into the studio. I won’t be able to afford the apartment on my own for much longer without a roommate.”

  After four years of marriage, it seemed almost humorous for Irene to downgrade her wife to roommate. “Okay,” she agreed. “You should get to your show.”

  “Right,” Jamie said, standing up. “I need to head out.” She walked away from the bed to the curtain, then paused, turning back to Irene. “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too” Irene whispered. As Jamie left, Irene wondered if she would ever get the baby she so desperately desired. She hoped so.

  Acknoledgements

  Thank you so much for reading Quality DNA. I would greatly appreciate it if you would leave a review to let me and others know what you thought about my book. Make sure to join my mailing list to keep up-to-date on new releases and upcoming novels.

  I want to thank everyone who made this book possible. I had the help of some awesome beta readers who straightened out many of the technical details. Many thanks to my editor, Josiah Davis, for really making this novel shine. Also, thanks to Nathan Shumate and the crew at CoverCritics.com who were able to take my original cover idea from mediocre to great.

  My biggest thanks goes to you, my readers. You’re the ones who have made my dreams of being an author come true.