Blood Legacy: The Story of Ryan (12 page)

Susan awoke, her head on the console in front of her. She panicked for a moment, thinking she had forgotten Jason, then remembered that Neda had picked him up hours ago. She stared groggily at the clock, mentally ticking away the hours she had been asleep. She glanced through the window at the prone figure. She might as well have gone home.

She left her lab, nodding to a security guard who was making his rounds in the hallway. She plucked self-consciously at her hair, wondering what it looked like after her lengthy nap. She went into the women’s lounge and washed her face. The hair was not as bad as she expected.

She dried her hands and tossed the paper towel into the trash. She walked the length of the hallway a few times to get the blood flowing, then ran her security card through the reader and re-entered the lab.

The control booth door whispered closed behind her as she sat down heavily in her chair. She leaned forward to pick up her glass of water, an act she would not complete. 

Her hand hovered in the air, grasping a phantom glass of water, its image reflected in the glass separating the console room from the sterile room. But it was not the reflection of her hand that Susan Ryerson was staring at, but rather what was in the room beyond it.

The woman was standing upright, naked, facing away from the window. She was easily six feet tall with broad shoulders and a muscular back. The back tapered to a slim waist and slim hips in an almost boyish figure. It was easily one of the most beautiful physiques Susan Ryerson had ever seen.

The woman moved with a lithe, animal-like grace and seemed unconcerned with her nudity. She gazed down at the EKG with mild interest, then removed the electrodes from her torso and draped them over the machine.

The woman turned and for the first time Susan looked into her eyes. They were an indeterminate color and harbored a look of devilish amusement. Susan felt her heart begin to pound violently. It seemed almost as if the woman could sense this because her amusement increased.

Susan froze as the figure began to come toward her. The woman covered the distance in a few strides and leaped. Susan ducked as the human projectile came hurtling through the window. Susan sprawled onto the floor to escape the spray of glass.  Shards flew everywhere as the woman landed in a graceful crouch.

The woman stood upright, no injury apparent from her violent exit. With little more than a glance down at Susan, she began moving toward the door. She was halfway there when the MRI image of herself on the wall caught her eye. She paused, examining the picture with obvious interest. She then shrugged, the gesture more of an impression than a physical act, and was gone.

Susan stared up in shock from her position on the floor. It took her a moment to regain her senses and scramble to her feet. She slipped on the glass fragments, struggling for balance, then ran to the door.

The hallway was empty.

She ran to the elevator, but the lights indicated it was motionless on another floor. She ran to the end of the hallway, but there was no sign of the woman. She ran to the other end and it, too, was empty.

There was nowhere the woman could have gone, and yet she had disappeared.

Susan walked slowly back into her lab. She surveyed the damage to the observation cubicle in a daze.

How could she just disappear? How could a patient in a pronounced vegetative state with life-threatening injuries just get up, smash through two inches of glass, and then just disappear?

Susan turned back toward the hallway, as if to find reason there. It seemed impossible that no alarm had been sounded, that no one had spotted a nude, six-foot woman fleeing on-foot from her research lab.

Susan turned back to the carnage in front of her. The ultimate medical find of her lifetime just smashed its way out of the equivalent of a maximum-security wing. She stared at the shattered glass, at the MRI image, at the computer that blinked at her. She had no idea what to do.

The security guard wandered down the hallway. He thought he heard a noise ahead of him, but as he peered into the darkness, he saw nothing. He walked beneath low hanging pipes and ducked out of habit, even though he was not tall enough to strike his head.

The woman was a study of concentration, balanced on the pipes above the security guard’s head. Her body was stretched out to its full length and appeared to almost levitate in the air, supported only by her grip on the pipes beneath her. Her forearms were corded and the strain on the shoulder muscles was obvious, but her face was serene. Once certain the man was gone, she swung down from the pipes, landing like a jungle cat.

In an instant, she was through the service entrance and gone.

The Mercedes convertible was exactly where she had left it. She glanced upward at the skyscraper she had leaped out of weeks earlier. The top floor was scaffolded and boarded shut, the signs of fire damage still evident.

The woman shrugged and leaned down to remove the soft, protective cover on the car. She punched in a security code on the door lock. Once inside the vehicle, she pulled the ignition key from the glove box and fired the engine to life.

As the engine warmed, she pressed a button and the convertible top smoothly retracted into the rear of the vehicle. Even though it was completely dark, she removed a pair of sunglasses from the glove box and put them on. She leaned forward and thoughtfully selected a song on the CD player, then put the car in gear and pulled smoothly away from the curb. The convertible’s tires made crunching noises in the newly fallen snow.

Susan slumped down onto her Queen Anne sofa. She was not normally one to slump, but the three glasses of wine she had consumed aided her in her lack of decorum.

Her thoughts were no clearer for the wine, but they had been so unclear to begin with she didn’t see the harm.

The woman was gone. The patient who could not possibly be alive had gotten up, smashed through a two-inch thick glass window, and then just disappeared. The woman with the internal anatomy and blood profile of something from another planet had just casually exited both her hospital and her life.

Susan sighed, eyeing the remaining wine in the bottle. Mr. Earl circled her uncertainly, sensing her distress. He finally determined she needed him and leaped up onto her lap, purring. Susan stroked the cat, settling for the softness of his fur over the draw of the remaining wine, her thoughts distant from both.

She heard a commotion at the front door and then Jason came tearing around the corner. He was in mid-leap when he saw the glass of wine she was holding. He came to a screeching halt.

“Mom,” he said with disapproval, “you’re not supposed to have juice on the couch.”

Susan suppressed a smile as Neda rounded the corner behind him. The matron took in the wineglass and nearly empty wine bottle. “Here,” the older woman said, grasping the wine glass, “I’ll take that.”

With her hands free, Susan pulled Jason onto her lap. She hugged him tightly, wishing his warmth could wash away the disappointment and confusion inside her. Neda glanced at the few remaining drops in the wine bottle, then went to boil some coffee. It was not like the young doctor to drink in the middle of the afternoon.

Jason sensed her distress as well. “What’s wrong, mom?”

Susan sighed, “Oh, nothing, munchkin. I just had a long day at work.”

Jason’s countenance suddenly darkened. “The lady didn’t die, did she?”

Neda froze in the doorway at the young boy’s words, and Susan quickly responded. “Oh no. She didn’t die.” She stopped. Her inebriation made her want to disclose more than she normally would and she could not hide her disbelief. “She just left.”

Jason wrinkled his brow, but decided this was an appropriate outcome.  He was still somewhat concerned. “Oh, okay. So she was all right then?”

Susan could picture the woman standing upright in the lab, her physique rivaled only by that of Michelangelo’s David. “Oh, I think she was quite all right.”

Neda listened quietly in the doorway. By the young doctor’s tone of voice, it was evident there was much she was not saying. She hurried to make the coffee.

CHAPTER 13

SUSAN STEPPED FROM HER CAR DOOR, wincing at the bite of the cold. It had been three months since the first snow of the season, and the weather had been frigid ever since. She shut the car door behind her and began moving carefully up the slippery walk towards the hospital doors. Although her proximity to the emergency room would lessen the danger of a fall, it would not make it any less painful, nor any less embarrassing.

Susan’s attention drifted away from her struggle to negotiate the slushy terrain. Three months, she thought to herself, three months since the golden-haired woman had disappeared. Ninety days, during which Susan Ryersons’s career had changed forever. The hospital doors slid open silently upon her approach and she entered the building with a heavy sigh.

She walked down the hallway of the hospital, her focus on the elevator ahead of her. Safe passage was denied, however, when Stanley Meyers, the hospital’s chief administrator, stepped into her path.

“Susan,” he said, attempting to convey warmth, “let me be the first to offer my congratulations.”

The attempt to convey warmth was not entirely successful, but Susan smiled politely and grasped his hand anyway. “Thank you, Stanley, I appreciate your support.”

Stanley
nodded. “I’ve always been in your corner, Susan.” He leaned forward, giving the impression of shared confidence. “Even a few months back when accounting was in an uproar over some of your ‘expenditures,’ I told them to give you free reign. And look what it brought me.”

Susan smiled politely, removing her hand from his. She highly doubted this version of events, but accepted it anyway. He stepped back, beaming. “You won’t believe the number of phone calls we’ve received since your publication.”

Susan nodded.  “I can only imagine.”

Stanley
leaned closer, lowering his voice in confidence. “Of course, they all want to know how you did it. But you were smart not to publish that portion of your research. Can’t let everyone know our secrets, eh?”

Susan nodded uncomfortably and Stanley continued. “I think ‘Newsweek’ magazine will be running a story on your discovery. This may be one of those medical stories that make the jump from medical journal to popular press. And we all know what that means.”

Susan nodded, her discomfort now overwhelming. Yes, that meant big money for the hospital. She extricated herself from Stanley Meyers and continued on to the elevator under his beaming gaze. Her focus on escape caused her to miss David Goldstein’s baleful eye, who watched the exchange from the gift shop.

Once in her lab she shut the door quickly behind her, leaning against it as if to shut out the outside world. She had never felt like such a fraud.

Three months ago, after the woman had disappeared, Susan had been at a loss. She had no direction or inspiration in her work and was nearly in despair when she finally decided to continue her analysis on the woman’s remaining blood samples.

The implications of the chemical make-up of the blood had been too much to resist.  Longevity, immunity, strength, energy, all would be affected by the chemical “imbalances” that existed in the woman’s system. Susan would never publish anything about the woman’s anatomy because it was too unbelievable, not to mention she had no proof. But the possibilities within the blood sample were irresistible.

Susan had never stated in the peer-reviewed journal article that she had balanced the L-gulonolactone enzyme within the blood, but of course everyone assumed she had. As Stanley had so aptly put it, it was expected for her to hide the details of her methodology. The biotechnical community was already salivating at the prospect of genetic engineering that would allow humans to produce their own Vitamin C. No researcher in her right mind would publish the process describing how to do so.

Susan moved into the console room. But she hadn’t designed a process; she had simply described what had been in the woman’s system, and only a very small part of it at that. Susan tried to rationalize her actions, to tell herself that the potential benefits to humankind far outweighed any procedural ambiguity in the article.

But the rationalization weighed heavily on Susan as she gazed through the replacement window into the sterile, empty room. She wondered uneasily if she were not selling her soul to the devil, one small piece at a time.