Eat'em (5 page)

Chapter 9

Kempter wipes a trickle of sweat from the side of her neck. Her eyes lock on mine and fill with dread. Her professional career rides on her testimony. A few days prior she told Big Mike about her concern in destroying her life by taking stand. She fears the public’s response. She fears the hatred that’s already filled her social media page. The threats. The defamation. The ridicule. Right now, her expression states it all. She fears me.

“Jodi,” Gomes thumbs the collar of his shirt. “Can you tell us again your relationship to the defendant?”

It must be ninety degrees in the courtroom. The air conditioner spits warm air and dust. We just returned from a recess while some contractor worked to get the room back to its normal freezing temperature. Everyone remains soaked. The room reeks of body odor.

Kempter presses her sleeve to her forehead before finally breaking from my watchful eye. “He took my biology course.” She says to the DA. “He was one of my more interested students. We began to do some extracurricular research which is not uncommon for university students. I pictured him becoming my graduate assistant after he completed his undergraduate work.”

She seems rehearsed. Her mannerisms, gestures, the extra octave in her voice as she compliments me… it comes off as Shakespearean. Mike warned her to be genuine. Her nerves turn her into a caricature of her usual self.

Gomes hovers over her, a vulture preparing to swoop down and eat her alive. “Extracurricular research? Is this how you refer to Jacob’s claims of an unknown virus? This so called ‘infection’?”

“Yes and no. At first Jacob was just inquisitive. He asked vague questions about the behavior of dogs,” she sighs heavily. “From his description, it sounded like he was talking about the behavior of dogs. His story sounded far-fetched.”

Gomes tilts his head and nods for her to continue. When she doesn’t, Gomes presses her. “So, you never requested a blood sample?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“But he did bring you a blood sample?”

“Yes.”

“That didn’t bother you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I teach science.”

Gomes puts his back to the jury. Mike explained Gomes’ method for handling witnesses as equal parts face-time for himself and whoever is on stand. “He’s got one of those trustworthy faces, and he’s counting on you to look like a blubbering fool. Don’t look like a blubbering fool.” Kempter looks like a blubbering fool.

“Do your students often bring you vials of blood?” Gomes asks.

“He didn’t bring me a vial of blood. He brought me a T-shirt.”

Gomes nods. “Do your students often bring you T-shirts covered in blood?”

“It was a small stain.”

“You didn’t think that maybe it was human blood?”

“No,” Kempter says.

“Why not?”

“Because it wasn’t.”

“Are you a forensic scientist, Jodi?”

She shakes her head and licks her teeth, clearly insulted. “I teach forensic scientists.”

“Did you know it wasn’t human blood before you tested it?” With his back to the jury, Gomes gives a look of indignation. He smacks his lips. “Can you tell the difference between human blood and dog blood without a microscope?”

“Yes,” Kempter rolls her eyes and the distain in her voice overflows with sarcasm “that’s one of the many powers I have as a science teacher.”

Their banter goes back and forth as I study the jury. They don’t nod or frown. If anything they look tired. I search their faces for hope, belief, disbelief, anything. All I see is exhaustion.

“The sample he brought was high in white blood cell count,” she emphasizes the word sample. “Other than that, I saw no indicators common in an infection. Lots of white blood cells can be a sign that someone is sick, though. It can be a sign of leukemia. It can also mean nothing. What did surprise me, though, about the sample, was that it wasn’t coagulated. The cells were healthy, moving around.”

Gomes gauges her believability and upstages her. That’s how Mike describes it. He paces away from the jury and once again turns toward them, giving them more face-time. “And you didn’t call the police. Are living blood cells not an indicator that the blood is fresh? Did you not think the blood must have been put on the shirt recently?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it had been four days.”

“And how do you know it had been four days?”

Kempter looks at me again… the fear present, but less apparent. “Jacob brought the shirt to me on a Friday afternoon. I threw it in my desk. It was Labor Day weekend. My class is Monday, Wednesday and Friday. When I looked at the shirt it was Wednesday morning. It had been four days.”

“And the blood looked fresh?”

“It was fresh,” she says. “The cells were alive and well. Aside from a high white count, they seemed preserved… but they had been on a dirty T-shirt in a drawer in my desk. The stain should have been dried out. It wasn’t. So I tested it.”

Gomes nods, playing along. “How did you test it?”

“Looking at it, you wouldn’t think there was much special about it,” Kempter nods at me, “except for its behavior. I figured if there was an invisible infection, maybe I could give it to mice.”

“And was there?” Gomes asks, “An… invisible infection?”

“Well, the first mouse showed no immediate affects,” she explains, turning toward the jury. “I had been running maze experiments with my grad students to test the ability of mice to develop memory. I tested the exposed mouse with the mazes, and the results were typical of most mice. Nothing exceptional. Over the course of a few weeks the mouse was able to learn the maze and completed the maze in faster and faster times. At that point I determined that there was nothing special about the individual mouse and I returned him to the rest of my mice population. That’s when I noticed something peculiar.”

“And that is?”

“The mouse was aggressive,” Kempter furrows her brow as she wipes away sweat on her upper lip. “Just at first. But it clearly bit another mouse. I thought nothing of the event at first. However, to be careful I placed the exposed mouse and the mouse he bit into solitary confinement. The bitten mouse had never been through testing. We were saving it as the control variable. However, when introduced to the maze for the first time, it ran it as if it had already learned the maze. As you can imagine, this compromised our entire dataset. It simply did not make sense for this mouse to know the maze.”

“A coincidence…”

“Objection, your honor!” Mike’s voice cracks as he shouts inches from my ear. “Leading.”

Judge Brentt sustains before Gomes reframes his line of questioning. “Could this have been a coincidence, Dr. Kempter?” the DA continues. “Luck. Not a very large sample size to draw any conclusions from” Gomes implies.

“I thought the same… At first… On a hunch I introduced a third mouse. Also a control variable. This one bitten by the second mouse. It ran the maze even faster… as if it were memorized. All three could do it at the same rate. It was as if the first one had taught the other two. The same for a fourth and a fifth. Each one showed only the most temporary sign of aggression to any non-bitten mouse and each time it seemed the knowledge of the maze passed from one mouse to the next.”

“What are you implying?” Gomes asks.

“It means they learned in tandem,” she says. “It means whatever was in that sample allowed them to communicate as if telepathically. When one mouse learned something, they all learned it. This was very exciting, I began to plan many experiments and papers. I explained my observations to Jacob. I was curious if we would be able to get another sample, however that’s when things became concerning.”

“How did things become concerning, Jodi?” Gomes asks.

“The third mouse died within the week,” she explains matter-of-factly. “A perfectly healthy mouse had deteriorated incredibly quickly. In fact, every mouse bitten after the third mouse seemed to suffer some sort of mental breakdown. They turned feral. They became hostile and they forgot the maze shortly thereafter. Essentially, the blood sample, when introduced to the mice appeared to create a chain. So long as the links in that chain remained unbroken, the mice were smarter, stronger, faster and more agile than normal mice. If a link was removed. If a mouse died. The opposite became true.”

“This is all very interesting, Jodi,” Gomes finishes toying with her. He pauses before asking one final question. “And whom else did you report these findings to?”

She shakes her head, “Nobody.”

Chapter 10

The planetarium reeked of bleach. In spite of the recent
vandalism
, the door remained unlocked and there were no heightened security measures in place. As much as I could tell, the only thing anyone had done in response to the incident was steam clean the floor and expand the cordoned area to include the hallway and bathroom.

A sign announcing the theater’s imminent opening had been taken down from a stanchion in the lobby.

I pushed open the door to the theater. The carpeted stairs squished beneath my feet. Eat’em left a trail of foamy footsteps as he ran to the projector stand. The prints looked a cross between the fossilized feet of a small dinosaur and a humanoid primate. No matter how vivid they appeared to me, I knew nobody else could see them, and I wondered, as I often did, if they were just a hallucination. I wondered if my little demon were some elaborate rouse. Did I imagine the old man? Did I imagine the young woman? If I imagined them, what really happened here?

Eat’em climbed atop the projector stand as my mind wondered.

“It’s gone!” Eat’em grabbed his tail in his tiny hands. He squeezed and twisted it in frustration. “It’s still gone! What cruel joke is this? We come all this way so you may be redeemed for your destructive behavior and present me with this! Nothing, yes! What is this?”

I sloshed down the stairwell. “We’re not here for you, buddy.”

I expected for someone to have gone through great lengths to pick up all the pieces of projector. Most of the fragments still clung to the carpet. But there was no blood. The floor reeked of bleach.

“Why are we here then?” Eat’em sank onto the stand. His body slouched.

“I’m looking for something.”

“YAWN…” He rolled onto his belly and swept his tail back and forth. “I’m already bored, yes. Let’s get ice cream.”

I knelt over the chair the old man collided with days earlier. One of the bolts holding it to the inclined floor was loose. The seat was noticeably looser than the two connected to it. Nothing else had ever been used and still looked pristine.

We headed for the bathroom and I snuck a peak in an industrial trashcan, which held the door open. No splintered mop. The tiled floor squeaked as I ventured into the bathroom.

The urinal no longer leaked, but an Out Of Order sign scribbled on cardboard was taped to the flush handle. My arm tensed as I reached for the stall door. I pushed it open slowly.

“Where’d she go?” My question reverberated in the empty stall.

“Who?” Eat’em asked.

“Who?” I repeated.
Had there been no one.
“The girl!”

“Oh, yeah,” Eat’em wagged his finger at the spot on the floor the blonde laid days ago. “Yeah, she left.”

I sighed, “I realize. I just want to know where she went. What happened?”

Eat’em climbed the sink counter and made an exaggerated Puck-like gesture, sweeping his arm in front of him toward a grand audience of one. “Please allow me to illustrate the scene,” He guided my attention around as he spoke, a true storyteller. “She stood from there…”

“Wait!” I interjected, “She stood up?”

“Yes,” Eat’em pointed toward the theater, “You excused yourself without warning and she stood and exchanged a looooonnnggg stare with Mr. Big. And I’m like, ‘Hey, disgusting right? He didn’t wash his hands!’ But they don’t say anything. I pontificate, ‘Attention ugly human creatures! Did you not see my acquaintance extricate himself from the commode prior to lathering his phalanges?’ I slowed down, yes. I pointed to this sign,” the sign above the sink warned washing hands is the number one way to spread illness and disease. “I said, ‘he is spreading germs right now, people. Learn from his mistakes!’ And then they didn’t say anything again. Boring! So I went to see what you were doing and I say, ‘Grotesque, you didn’t wash your hands.’ Not even you laughed. I even said, ‘Just kidding!’”

I knew I saw her wound shrinking, but I didn’t consider that she might have just gotten up and walked away. Why would she have? Why wouldn’t she have told anyone what happened?

“THEN!” Eat’em clapped his hands, “BANG!!! My favorite thing destroyed in an instant! You had no regard for my feelings, yes! NO! You didn’t ask me, ‘Hey, Eat’em, is it okay if I smash your new thing on ugly number one?’ NO! The human woman was upset too. She stood in the doorway there,” he extended a finger toward the entrance the old man leapt through unaffected by gravity. “She was so mad her proboscis spewed bile. She screamed,‘Noooooo! Not my magical universe containing box!’”

“She didn’t scream,” I could almost make out a phantom of her, watching the muscled behemoth and me collide. How’d I miss her? I never missed anything.

Eat’em picked a nostril with his tail, “No, she didn’t scream. But that’s what she would have screamed! I know that box contains the universe, Jacob! I know it does. I confirmed it with the posters, Jacob! Confirmed, yes! There was the universe, I wanted it, and
you
smashed it! Are you happy now?”

“Wait,” I stopped him, “What did you mean before, when you said her probe-thing spewed bile?”

“UGH…” Eat’em feigned backward, his hands gripped to his pointed ears. “Her nose puked! You never listen… I’m talking about all of the galaxies in a little box waiting for me to explore and you’re still asking about the stupid ugly human woman creature and her stupid nose! What is it with you and women?!”

We went back toward the lobby. “I’ll make it up to you with a bag of Skittles later.”

He huffed, “Well, if you’d have said that sooner.”

The supply closet was the last place I’d been on our previous visit to the planetarium. A few cleaning products were missing, but nothing else had been removed. My attention dropped to the box of gym clothes. Still opened.

I closed the lid and almost turned to leave when I noticed a smudge on the top of the flap. Blood? I pulled the box out from under the shelf and squatted for a closer look. Tucked in the corner I saw fabric of some sort. It was crumpled, hidden behind boxes and junk. It felt moist.

“What in the?” I unraveled it. Dark stains covered almost every square inch of it; still I could make out a large logo in the middle. It read: Deftones.

“Great,” Eat’em belched, “a shirt. Can we go procure the Skittles now? My stomach’s rumbling.”

Before I could turn to leave I noticed something that had fallen behind the box… A wallet. I shoved it in my backpack and left the planetarium.