Annie shuddered. “I only had it done once. Last year, when Romy sent me to that place. Had these people all dressed in blue. Wouldn’t talk to me, just told me to get on the table and shut up. They gave me something to breathe, and after that, I just remember waking up. All skinny again. Empty . . .”
“Was it a girl?”
Annie sighed. “I don’t know. They put me in the car and sent me back to him.” Annie released Molly’s hand, and her withdrawal seemed more than just physical. She had retreated into some private compartment. A place for just her and her baby.
“Molly,” said Annie, after a long silence. “You know you can’t stay here much longer.” The words, spoken so softly, delivered a stunning blow.
Molly turned on her side to face Annie. “What did I do wrong? Tell me what I did wrong.”
“Nothing. It just can’t keep going on this way.”
“Why not? I’ll do more. I’ll do whatever you—”
“Molly, I said you could stay for a few days. It’s been over two weeks. Honey, I like you and all, but Mr. Lorenzo, he came up to see me today. Complained that I had someone living here with me. Says that’s not in our rental agreement. So I can’t let you stay. It’s small enough, with you and me here. When my baby comes—”
“That won’t be for another month.”
“Molly.” Annie’s voice had steadied. Turned unyielding. “You have to find your own place to live. I can’t keep you here.”
Molly turned her back to Annie. I thought we could be a family: You and your baby. Me and mine. No men, no assholes.
“Molly? You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You understand, don’t you?”
Molly gave a weary shrug of one shoulder. “I guess.”
“It’s not like right away. You can take a few days, figure out where you’re going. Maybe you could try calling your mama again.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s bound to take you back. She’s your mama.”
When there was no reply, Annie reached over and slung an arm around Molly’s waist. The warmth of the other woman’s body, the other woman’s swollen belly pressing against her back, filled Molly with such a sense of longing that she couldn’t resist the impulse. Turning to face Annie, she wrapped her arms around Annie’s waist and pulled her close, felt their bellies press together like ripening fruit. And suddenly she wished that she was in Annie’s womb, that she was the child who would find its home in Annie’s arms.
“Let me stay,” she whispered. “Please let me stay.”
Firmly Annie pushed away Molly’s hands. “You can’t. I’m sorry, Molly, but you can’t.” She turned and scooted to the far side of the bed. “Now good night.”
Molly lay very still. What did I say? What did I do wrong? Please, I’ll do whatever you want me to do. Just tell me what it is! She knew Annie was not sleeping; the darkness between them was too charged with tension. She sensed that Annie was coiled up as tightly as she was.
But neither one of them spoke.
The sound of groaning awakened her. At first Molly was confused by the last shreds of her dream. A baby floating in a pond, making strange noises. Frog noises. Then she opened her eyes, and it was still night and she was in Annie’s bed. A light was shining under the bathroom door.
“Annie?” she said but heard no answer.
She rolled over and closed her eyes, trying to shut out that disturbing sliver of light.
A thump jolted her fully awake.
She sat up and squinted at the bathroom. “Annie?” Hearing no reply, she climbed out of bed and went to knock on the door. “Are you okay?” She turned the knob and pushed, but the door wouldn’t open; something was blocking it. She pushed harder and felt the barrier give way slightly, allowing the door to open. She peered through the crack, at first not understanding what she saw.
A rivulet of blood on the floor.
“Annie!” she cried. Pushing with all her strength, she finally managed to open the door wide enough to squeeze through. She found Annie crumpled in the corner, her shoulder wedged against the door, her cheap nightgown gathered above her waist. Blood was splattered across the toilet seat, and the water in the bowl was a silky crimson. A warm stream suddenly gushed out from between Annie’s thighs and lapped at Molly’s bare toes.
In horror, she backed away and collided with the sink.
Oh God, oh God, oh God.
Though Annie wasn’t moving, her belly was; it was squirming, the bare skin bunching into a tight ball of flesh.
More blood gushed out, streaming across the linoleum. The warmth of the blood trickled around her chilled feet, shaking Molly out of her trance. She forced herself to step through the crimson pool, to cross to Annie’s coiled-up body. She had to move her out from behind the door. She grasped Annie’s arm and pulled, but her feet kept slipping in the blood. Annie made a noise, a high, soft whine, like the hiss of air escaping from a balloon. Molly pulled harder, finally managing to drag Annie a few feet across the linoleum. Now she placed her feet against the door jamb and, using that as an anchor, heaved at Annie’s body.
Annie slid out of the bathroom.
She grabbed both arms now and pulled her completely through the doorway. Then she turned on the bedroom lights.
Annie was still breathing, but her eyes were rolled back, and her face was white.
Molly ran out of the flat and down the stairs. She pounded on the door of the ground-floor apartment. “Help me!” she cried. “Please, help me!” No one answered.
She ran out of the building, to the pay telephone on the street, and dialed 911.
“Emergency operator.”
“I need an ambulance! She’s bleeding—”
“Your name and address?”
“My name’s Molly Picker. I don’t know the address. I think I’m on Charter Street—”
“What’s the cross street?”
“I can’t see it! She’s going to die—”
“Do you know the nearest address number?”
Molly turned and frantically scanned the building. “1076! I see a 1076.”
“Where is the victim? What is her condition?”
“She’s in the upstairs apartment—she’s bleeding all over the floor—”
“Ma’am, I’m dispatching an ambulance now. If you’ll wait on the line—”
Fuck this, thought Molly. She left the phone hanging and ran back into the building.
Annie was lying where she’d left her on the bedroom floor. Her eyes were open but unfocused and glassy.
“Please, you have to stay awake.” Molly grasped Annie’s hand, but there was no answering squeeze. No warmth at all. She stared at the chest, saw it expand in a shallow breath. Keep breathing. Please keep breathing.
Then another movement caught her eye. Annie’s abdomen seemed to swell upward, as though some alien creature inside her body was straining to burst free. A gush of blood spilled out from between her thighs.
So did something else. Something pink.
The baby.
Molly knelt between Annie’s knees and eased the thighs apart. Fresh blood, mixed with water, dribbled out around the protruding arm. At least Molly thought it was an arm. Then she saw there were no fingers, no hand, just that glistening pink flipper writhing slowly back and forth.
There was another contraction, a final gush of blood and fluid as the flipper slid out, followed by the rest of the body. Molly jerked backward, shrieking.
It was not a baby.
But it was alive and moving, the two flippers writhing in agonal struggles. It had no other limbs, just those two pink stubs waving from a single mass of raw flesh attached to an umbilical cord. She could see clumps of hair, coarse and black, a protruding tooth, and a single eye, unblinking, lash-less. Blue. The flippers were thrashing, and the whole organism began to move with almost purposeful direction, like an amoeba swimming in a pool of blood.
Sobbing, Molly scrambled on hands and knees as far aw
ay 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 still open and staring at her.
Another gush of blood, 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.”
“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 actor-paramedics 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 glistening, 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 wouldn’t 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 Annie’s 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. Sheehan stared, transfixed by that luscious rear-end view. Only 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.”