Life Support (28 page)

Sobbing, Molly scrambled on hands and knees as far away as she could get. She pressed herself into a corner and watched in disbelief as the thing struggled to live. The paddle-arms began to twitch in erratic seizurelike spasms. The body had ceased its amoebic gliding and was only quivering now. When at last the flippers fell still, and the flesh stopped twitching, that eye was stilt open and staring at her.

Another gush of rlood, and the placenta slid out.

Molly buried her face against her knees and curled into a ball.

As though from a great distance, she heard a whining sound. Then, a moment later, someone was banging at the door.

"Paramedics! Hello? Did someone call an ambulance?"

"Help her," whispered Molly. In a sob, louder, "Help her!"

The door opened and two uniformed men burst into the flat. They stared at Annie's body, and then their gazes followed the glistening trail of blood leading from between her thighs.

"Holy shit," one of them said. "What the hell is that thing?"

The other man knelt beside Annie. "She's not breathing. Ambubag�" There was a whoosh as one of the men squeezed air through a mask into Annie's lungs.

"No pulse. I'm not getting a pulse."

"Okay, go! One-one thousand, two-one thousand . . ."

Molly watched them, but none of it seemed real to her. It was a movie, a TV show. It was not Annie but an actress playing dead. The needle was not really going into her arm. The blood on the floor was ketchup. And the thing�the thing lying a few feet away from her . . .

"Still not getting a pulse�"

"Flatline EKG."

"Pupils? "

"Fixed."

"Shit, don't stop."

A radio crackled. "City Hospital."

"This is Unit Nineteen," said the paramedic. "We have a white female in her twenties, looks like massive vaginal hemorrhage�possible abortion attempt. Blood looks fresh. No respirations, no pulse, pupils fixed and midposition. We have an IV line, Ringer's lactate. Flatline on EKG. We are now doing CPR, without response. Should we call it?"

"Not yet."

"But she's flatline�"

"Stabilize and transport."

The paramedic shut off the radio and looked at his partner. "Stabilize what?"

"Just get her tubed and moved."

S t ,...

' I "What about the . . . thing?"

"Hell, I'm not touching that."

Molly was still watching that TV show with ketchup blood. She saw the tube go down actress-Annie's throat. Saw the actorparamedics lift her onto a rolling stretcher and continue pumping on her chest.

One of the men glanced at Molly. "We're taking her to City Hospital," he said. "What's the patient's name?"

"What?"

"Her name!"

"Annie. I don't know her last name."

"Look, don't leave the apartment. Did you hear me? You have to stay right here."

"Why?"

"The police will be coming to talk to you. Don't leave."

"Annie�what about Annie?"

"You check with City Hospital later. She'll be there."

Molly listened to them carry the stretcher down the stairs. She heard the wheels clatter out the front door, and the single whoop of the siren as the ambulance pulled away.

The police will be here to talk to you.

The words finally sank in. She didn't want to talk to the police.

They would ask for her name and then they would find out she'd been arrested last year for soliciting a cop. Romy had bailed her out, had given her a few good slaps for being such an idiot.

The police will say it's my fault. Somehow, this will all be my fault.

She rose, shaking, to her feet. The thing was still lying there, still g'^istening, but the blue eye had turned dry and dull. She stepped around it, avoiding the puddles of blood, and crossed to the dresser.

There was money in the top drawer�Annie's money�but Annie wouldnnt be needing it now. That much Molly had understood from the paramedics.

Annie was dead.

She pulled out a wad of twenty-dollar bills. Then she quickly dressed in AnnieXs clothes, a pair of stretch pants with an elastic belly, a giant T-shirt with Oh, Baby! printed across the chest. Black sneakers. She pulled on Annie's giant raincoat, stuffed the cash in her purse, and fled the apartment.

She was on the other side of the street when she saw the police car pull up in front of the building, its blue dome light twirling. Two cops entered the building. Seconds later, she saw their silhouettes move past Annie's upstairs window.

They were looking at the thing. Wondering what it was.

One of the cops crossed to the window and glanced outside.

Molly slipped around the corner and began to run. She kept running until she was out of breath, until she was stumbling. She ducked into a doorway and sank onto the front step. Her heart was skipping, she could feel it flutter in her throat.

The sky was starting to get light.

She huddled on that front stoop until morning came and a man emerged through the front door and told her to move on. So she did.

A few blocks away, she stopped at a pay phone to call City Hospital. "I want to find out about my friend," she said. "An ambulance brought her in."

"Your friend's name?"

"Annie. They took her from the apartment�they said she wasn't breathing�"

"May I ask if you're a relative?"

"No, I'm just�I mean�" Molly froze, staring at a police car driving by. It seemed to slow down as it passed Molly, then continued up the street.

"Hello, Ma'am? Could I have your name?"

Molly hung up. The police car had turned the corner and was now out of sight.

She left the phone booth and swiftly walked away.

Detective Roy Sheehan settled his ample behind onto the stool next to Dvorak's lab bench and asked, "Okay, so what's a prion?"

Dvorak looked up from the microscope, refocusing his eyes on the cop.

"What?"

"I just been talking to your girl, Lisa."

Of course you have, thought Dvorak. Despite Dvorak's advice, Sheehan had been making regular visits to the morgue for several days now, his real purpose not to view dead bodies but to ogle a live one.

"Real smart girl, by the way," said Sheehan. "Anyway, she says this Creutzfeldt-Jakob thing�am I saying it right�it's caused by something called a prion."

"That's correct."

"So can people catch it? Is it, like, floating around in the air?"

Dvorak looked down at his finger, where the cut had recently healed.

"You can't catch it in the usual sense."

"Toby Harper's saying there's an epidemic in the making."

Dvorak shook his head. "I've spoken to both CDC and the Department of Public Health. They say there's no reason for concern. That hormone protocol Wallenberg's testing is perfectly safe. And Public Health can't find any violations at the Brant Hill facility."

"So why's Dr. Harper up in arms against Brant Hill?"

Dvorak paused. Reluctantly he said, "She's under a lot of pressure right now. She faces a possible lawsuit over that patient of hers who vanished. And Dr. Brace's death shook her up pretty badly. When everything goes wrong in our lives, it's natural to look around for someone�or something�to blame." He reached for a different slide and inserted it under the lens. "I think Toby's been stressed out for a very long time."

"You heard what happened to her mother?"

Again Dvorak hesitated. "Yes," he said quietly. "Toby called me yesterday."

"She did? You two are still talking?"

"Why shouldn't we? She needs a friend right now, Roy."

"There may be criminal charges filed. Alpren says it looks like elder abuse. The nanny blames Dr. Harper. Dr. Harper blames the nanny."

Dvorak bent his head back to the microscope. "The mother had an intracerebral bleed. That's not necessarily abuse. It doesn't make either one of them a granny basher."

"But there are bruises on the legs."

"The elderly often bruise themselves. Their vision's not so good.

They run into coffee tables."

Sheehan grunted. "You're sure doing your best to defend her." "I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt."

"But she is wrong about this so-called epidemic?"

"Yes, she's wrong about that. Catching CJD isn't like catching the flu.

It's transmitted in only a few specific ways."

"Like eating mad cows?"

"The U.S. herd doesn't have mad cow disease."

"But people here do come down with the human version."

"Creutzfeldt-Jakob occurs in one in a million people, with no obvious history of exposure."

Both men glanced up as the object of Sheehan's affection strolled into the lab, flashed them both a smile, and bent over to open a small specimen refrigerator. Sheeharl stared, transfixed by that luscious rear-end view. C)my when Lisa straightened and walked out again did Sheehan seem able to draw another breath.

"Is that natural?" he murmured.

"Is what natural?"

"That hair. Is she a real blond?"

"I really wouldn't know," said Dvorak, and he focused his gaze back on the microscope slide.

"There's one way to find out, you know," said Sheehan.

"Ask her?"

"You check out the hair no one sees."

Dvorak leaned back and squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Did you have something else to ask me, Roy?"

"Oh. Oh, yeah. I've heard about viruses, and I've heard about bacteria.

But what the hell's a prion?"

Resignedly Dvorak turned off the microscope lamp. "A prion," he said, "isn't what we'd normally call a living thing. Unlike a virus, it has neither DNA nor RNA. In other words, it has no genetic material�or what we think of as genetic material. It's an abnormal cellular protein. It can transform the host's proteins into the same abnormal form."

"But it can't be caught like the flu."

"No. It has to be introduced by direct tissue exposure, like brain or spinal cord implants. Or by extractions from neural tissue, like growth hormone. For example, you can catch it from contaminated brain electrodes."

"Those English people got it from eating beef."

"Okay, it's also possible to catch it by eating infected meat. That's how cannibals get it."

Sheehan's eyebrows shot up. "Now this starts to get interesting. What's this about cannibals?"

"Roy, this is completely irrelevant�"

"No, I wanna hear this. What about cannibals?"

Dvorak sighed. "There've been villages in New Guinea where eating human flesh is part of a sacred ritual. The only people who caught CJD were the women and children."

"Why only women and kids?"

"The men got the choicest cuts�the meat of the corpse. The muscle. The women and kids had to be satisfied with the parts no one else wanted.

The brain." He watched for a disgusted reaction on Sheehan's face, but the cop only leaned closer. In some ways, he was like a cannibal himself, eager to devour the most appalling morsels of information.

"So eating a human brain would do it," said Sheehan.

"An infected human brain."

"Can you tell it's infected by looking at it?"

"No, it's a microscopic diagnosis. And this is a stupid conversation."

"It's the big city, Doc. Weirder stuff happens. We get reports of vampires, werewolves�"

"People who think they're werewolves."

"Who knows? All this crazy cult shit going on these days."

"I hardly think there's some cannibalistic cult at Brant Hill."

Sheehan glanced down as his beeper went off. "Excuse me," he said and left to make the call.

Now I can Jinally get some work done, thought Dvorak.

A moment later, though, Sheehan returned. "I'm headed out to the North End. Think maybe you should come see this one."

uWhat is it? A homicide?"

"They're not sure." Sheehan paused. "They're not even sure it's human."

l T The smell of blood, cloying and metallic, had wafted even into the hallway. Dvorak nodded to the patroknan standing watch, ducked under the police tape, and stepped into the flat. Sheehan and his partner, Jack Moore, were already inside, as was the CSU crew. Moore was squatting by something near the corner. Dvorak didn't cross toward him right away but held back near the doorway, his gaze carefully scanning the floor.

It was yellow and white linoleum, in a pattern of random squares with a ratty throw rug by the bed. Blood was still drying on the floor near the bathroom�a great deal of blood. There were smear marks, as though something had been dragged across the floor, as well as a confusing collage of bloody shoeprints. He also saw the distinct imprints of bare feet, small ones, tracking toward the dresser, then fading out.

He looked at the walls and saw no arterial splatter. In fact, there was very little splatter at all, just that congealing lake. Whoever .

had bled in this room had done so while lying quietly on the floor, and not in a panicked frenzy.

"Doc," said Moore. "Come and look at this."

"You got shots of these footprints already?"

"Yeah, those are from the EMTs. It's all been photographed and videotaped. Just step around that way. Watch out for that set of footprints there."

Dvorak stepped carefully around the imprints of the bare feet and circled around to where Moore and Sheehan were squatting.

"What do you think?" said Moore, moving aside to let Dvorak see what lay on the floor.

'.Jesus."

"That was our reaction, too. So what is it?"

Dvorak didn't know what to say. Slowly he dropped down for a closer look.

His first impression was that it was a leftover Halloween gag, a one-eyed, flesh-colored monster fashioned from rubber and nightmares.

Then he saw the streaks of blood drying on its surface, and the fragment of attached placenta, connected by an umbilical cord. This thing was not made of rubber, but flesh.

He pulled on a pair of gloves and gingerly touched the surface of the Thing. It felt like real skin�cold, but yielding. The single eye was a pale blue, with a rudimentary flap of skin for an eyelid, but no lashes.

Below it were two small holes, like nostrils, then an open cleft. The mouth? He could scarcely identify any normal anatomy on this lump of flesh. Tufts of hair sprang out at crazy angles. And�dear Godzwas that a tooth poking out by the flipper?