Wild (7 page)

“How did you even get this far on your own?” I tried to calm myself down while I breathed in her scent.

“With difficulty.” She grinned.

I sat her down onto the couch and poured her a large glass of water. She gulped it down. She shivered and the sight of her hardening nipples pressing through her t-shirt sent a shockwave through my loins. As much as I wanted to continue looking at her, I knew I had to cover her up. I got my bathrobe from the closet and helped her put it on. She nearly disappeared in it looking extremely cute.

“Thanks.”

“I guess I’m going to have to get you some clothes.”

“Oh, I have clothes.”

I threw her a questioning look.

“Just not here, of course. My suitcases are at Transbay Terminal.”

 “So, you’ve just arrived in the City.” No wonder she knew nobody here.

“No, actually I was just leaving.”

Leaving?

I wanted to scream. She was leaving and I would have no chance of seeing her again once she left my house? My whole world seemed to collapse. If she was planning to leave San Francisco, there was even less reason for me to let her leave my house. Didn’t she understand that I couldn’t let her leave the City? I had to keep her here. I pulled myself together, and took in some much needed air.

“So, where to?” I tried to make my question sound as casual as possible, and I was sure I failed miserably at it.

“Des Moines.”

“Oh. So, you were just visiting?” She was a tourist.

“No, actually I’ve been living here for almost a year, but …”

“You don’t like San Francisco?” I probed. Why would she want to leave this great city? I had not been able to.

“No, no, it’s not that. I love it, but it’s really expensive to live here and I couldn’t get a job that paid enough.” She looked devastated.

I felt like saying she didn’t need a job, I could take care of her and she could stay, but she would have probably wondered what kind of creepy pervert I was and shrieked away from me.

I didn’t know what to say so I pointed at her empty glass.

“More water?”

She nodded. As I poured her another glass I tried to distract her.

“It looks like you’re feeling better. I think the serum has worked its way through your body. How is the pain?”

“Throbbing.”

 “I’ll give you some more morphine,” I volunteered. I didn’t want her to feel any pain.

“No, I’d rather not.”

“No charge,” I joked.

She smiled lightly. “No, it’s just it makes me so drowsy and I want to be awake.”

“Let me give you some regular painkillers then. But I want to draw your blood first.”

She gave me an inquisitive look.

“I need to do a blood test to see if whatever they gave you has been eliminated.”

“Okay, sure.”

As I prepared to draw her blood I wondered why she was still so trusting. I had all reason to believe her blood was clean again. I had been working on the vaccine for quite some time and my data showed me it was effective – at least on my mice, and me.

It also seemed she was not in shock. She bore none of the usual symptoms of shock and was relatively cheerful. Yet she was still in the home of a stranger, one who had held her in his arms for longer than was necessary, one who had touched her whenever he could get away with it, one who harbored thoughts involving her naked body in his arms. A stranger who didn’t want to let her leave, now even less than ever.

I wondered whether she remembered me holding her tight when the pain had struck her. I could still feel her body clinging to me, and this thought alone filled me with desire. It was better not to think of it.

“Do you want me to get you your suitcases so that you can wear your own clothes?” I suggested.

“That’s very nice of you, but I don’t really want to impose any more than I already am.”

“No imposition at all, unless you prefer running around in a t-shirt,” I tried myself at another joke.

She blushed and I realized I had gone too far.

Idiot! Now you’ve made her aware that she’s basically half-naked! You’re going to scare her!
Why couldn’t I just have kept my mouth shut for once? Why did I have to be funny?

She was obviously looking for words to hurl back at me for my insensitive remark, but I didn’t want her to get a chance.

“I’ll get the suitcases later today. Will that be ok?”

She nodded.

I concentrated on drawing her blood and didn’t look at her face again, worried she would be angry with me, or worse, frightened.

I saw the locker key on the coffee table and put it into my pocket. Then I lifted the tray with the instruments and the blood and got up from the couch.

“I’ll go analyze this in the lab. I’ll be a little while. Do you need anything before I go downstairs?”

I didn’t look directly at her.

“No, I’m fine.” Had she launched insults at me it couldn’t have been any worse. When a woman said
fine,
I knew from experience she meant anything but fine. I had blown it. She hated me.

Without another word I went downstairs and hoped my work would distract me for a few hours.

5. Annette’s Discoveries

He couldn’t get away from me fast enough. I was sure as soon as he had analyzed the blood and it was all clear, he would find an excuse to get rid of me. No wonder he was so eager to get my suitcases for me. The sooner I was dressed the sooner … I couldn’t finish the thought. I was getting to be too much of a bother for him. I could tell he had been annoyed with me when he had found me on the kitchen floor.

He probably had women lined up wanting to date him. I suddenly realized that today was Saturday. What if he had a date for tonight? What handsome and successful man didn’t?

And he was handsome, sexy, kind, and probably quite successful as a doctor. His place certainly looked like it was state of the art when in came to fixtures and furnishings. I knew a thing or two about these things as an avid Home and Garden TV viewer. The concrete floor wasn’t my taste, but I knew it was in. I loved the kitchen and his top of the line appliances. I wondered whether he cooked much, considering his kitchen was basically restaurant quality.

I had also been surprised about the fabulous bathroom. It lacked a bathtub, but I knew men preferred showers and the magnificent shower certainly made up for the lack of a tub. The shower was tiled from top to bottom with a stone I didn’t recognize. It had different hues of greens. The counter with the large sink was made of white marble which I thought had gone out of fashion lately, but I still liked it.

There was lots of indirect lighting in his entire apartment. It was cleverly done in a way to simulate natural light, because except for the large skylight over the living room, there was not a single window in his place. He didn’t strike me as somebody who didn’t like light, so his choice of abode was somewhat strange.

There were other odd things I had noticed in my short time at his place. When I had gotten up to try to get something to drink, I had opened the fridge. It was filled with raw steaks, at least a couple dozen of them. The smell of the raw meat was probably what had made me dizzy.

There was virtually nothing else in the fridge. Was he planning a BBQ for the weekend?

He was certainly not an ordinary guy. I counted myself very lucky that he had been the one who had found me after the attack, after the creature had scared off my assailant.

The creature – I had suppressed the memory of it. I remembered very little of it. At first as it had pulled the man off me, I had gotten a glimpse of the claws. They had resembled those of a big cat, such as a mountain lion. I knew, because I had seen many big cats in my life. In fact I had worked at the zoo in Des Moines at the big cat enclosure.

However, the claws hadn’t looked entirely as being those of an animal. They had had some human qualities which was the reason I had been startled. I remembered how I had looked up and past my attacker’s head where two amber colored eyes had flickered at me.

I remembered it had felt like the eyes had locked with mine, as if the creature had held my gaze. There had been something human in those amber animal eyes. From my time in the zoo I had come to realize that certain animals seemed as if they looked at humans trying to talk to them.

It was ludicrous, of course. Animals didn’t talk, but I had the feeling they wanted to communicate. I had had the same feeling when I had stared into the creature’s eyes. It was as if it had wanted to tell me something. I hadn’t been afraid, I had been mesmerized.

I wondered whether I had imagined it all. If some wild creature was on the loose in San Francisco, surely the media would have reported something. But I couldn’t recall having seen anything on the news. Maybe my attacker had made a report, which certainly was very unlikely given he probably wasn’t the kind who went to the police. But it was worth a shot.

A large screen TV was positioned opposite the couch where I was still sitting, and several remote controls lay on the coffee table. How many remote controls did it take to switch on a TV? I reached for one and pressed the
on
button.

As soon as I heard the sound above me I realized I had picked the wrong one. I looked up and metal blinds started to pull across the skylight.

Oops! Wrong remote!

I quickly pressed the same button again and immediately the blinds started retracting until they were hidden and the skylight was unobstructed again.

I chose the next remote control and was lucky. The TV came on instantly. It was in black and white. What channel was it on?
I wasn’t interested in some back-and-while classic movie. It looked creepy enough: the movie showed a room with a wall full of cages. I looked closer.  The cages were filled with mice.

Frankenstein?

I looked at the remote trying to figure out how to change the channel. I found the familiar up and down arrows and pressed one of them. I looked at the picture again. It was still the same movie, only now the camera angle was different. Was the movie showing on two different channels?

I stared at the screen again. The door to the room opened and a man in a white lab coat came in. I pressed one of the arrows again to change to the next channel and stopped cold. Pressing the down arrow had changed the camera angle yet again, only this time it was pointed directly at the face of the man in the while lab coat: Vince.

I wasn’t watching a movie, I was watching Vince through his home security system. He was downstairs in his lab.

At first I wanted to switch off the screen, but my curiosity was stronger. Why did he have such an elaborate security system in his home? What was he hiding?

As I watched him take a mouse out of its cage and take it to the lab bench I wondered whether I had gotten in too deep. What if I was at the house of some mad psycho scientist? What if when he was done with the mice he needed some human to experiment on?

And then it struck me. What if he had already experimented on me? I had no idea what he had injected me with and I had been stupid enough not to resist at all. I remembered the intense pain I had felt when he had injected me with his
serum
and started to panic. What was it supposed to do? Was it going to eventually paralyze me so that I couldn’t leave, or was it some sort of date-rape drug which would make me completely incapable of putting up a fight? What had he done? Why had I let it happen? How stupid was I?

Putting on his charm and pretending to be the nice guy was probably all an act. Hadn’t I already seen a glimpse of his real face when he had acted so strangely when questioning me about the clinical trial? He had looked agitated as if he had barely been able to get his temper under control.

And then, when he had returned minutes later and had suddenly looked all calm and normal again, wasn’t that a sign he was unstable, maybe schizophrenic?

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

 I wanted to scream. What if he was a serial killer?

Was there a serial killer on the loose in San Francisco? I scanned my memory for any news articles I had read in the past few weeks, but nothing jumped out.

There had been the strange story of the Austrian girl who had been kidnapped by a man and kept in his basement for over ten years. Nobody had even suspected anything. But that was in Europe. What if he was a copycat?

My throat was suddenly dry and I had trouble swallowing. He had asked me whether there was anybody he could contact for me. I had volunteered that I had nobody. He knew that nobody would come looking for me. How could I have been so stupid?

I was panicking now.  I pressed the power button of the remote and the screen went blank. I didn’t want to watch any longer. I needed to think clearly and figure out a way of how to get out of the situation I was in.

I tried to familiarize myself with the apartment as much as possible. How could I escape? I couldn’t outrun him, not with my injured leg. I wouldn’t even make it to the door, let alone through it.

Besides, I had no idea where I was. Was I still in the City or was this place outside of San Francisco, maybe in a wooded area? How far would I have to go to find help?

I couldn’t believe that only hours ago I had been so infatuated with him. Maybe I had been in shock. But now I could see clearly. I had to get away.

Nothing made sense anymore.

“Annette.”

I shrieked as I heard his voice behind me. I hadn’t heard him come back up.

I looked at him and he seemed to be taken aback by my reaction.

“I didn’t mean to startle you.” His voice was smooth again. Ah, how he could turn on the charm! He looked dead sexy in his khaki pants and t-shirt. I noticed how muscular his arms were, and how broad his chest was and knew instantly that if he wanted to hold me down I would have no chance in hell of fighting him, not even if I wasn’t injured.

He seemed to notice my pained expression. He stretched out his open hand.

“I’m sorry, I forgot the painkillers I’ve promised you.” He handed me two white pills.