Life Blood Part 44

I settled my feet onto the floor with a surge of determination, and that was when I sensed I was in a different place from where I'd . . .

Where--!

I gazed around in the dark, then reached out and felt something on a table beside the bed. It was a clay bowl full of wax. What . . . a candle. And next to it I touched a plain book of matches. My hand was trembling from the pain in my groin, but I managed to light the candle, a flickering glow.

My wrist.w.a.tch was lying nearby on the table. Someone must have taken it off and placed it there. I picked it up and held it by the candle, and for a moment I was confused by the seconds ticking off. Then I realized the time was . . . How could that be! It read 4:57 A.M. Had I been out for hours?

I gasped, then raised the candle and gazed around. The walls were brown stone--or maybe they just looked like stone. Yes, now I recognized it.

I was in the fibergla.s.s-walled operating room I'd seen on Alex G.o.ddard's closed-circuit monitor.

What was I doing in here?

My arm brushed against the table and I felt an odd sensation. Glancing down, I realized there was a Band-Aid on the inside of my left wrist.

What was that about? Earlier he'd taken blood from my right arm, but then he'd just swabbed it, so why this bandage? And what in h.e.l.l was I doing in an operating room? I hadn't agreed to any procedures. Did he come back for a second--?

Or . . . that was what he'd done. He'd injected me with an IV drug. The bizarre vision I'd had was his cover for some perverse invasion of my body. My G.o.d, I'd been unconscious since yesterday afternoon. During all that time, what could he have done to me?

I was fist-clenching furious. Looking around the "operating room," I wanted to rip the place apart.

When I tried to stand, I realized my groin was tender and sore as h.e.l.l, all across my panty-line, only somewhere deep, deep inside, in my reproductive . . . It was like after he'd given me those shots up at Quetzal Manor. I checked and saw no red needle-punctures this time, but the pain was much worse. That sick b.u.t.terfly-jaguar dream was no dream.

I'd been raped by . . . The b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

I pushed aside the pain, edged across to the door, and tested it.

Unlocked. Good. Go find the SOB right now. Tear his head off.

I pulled back the door, took a deep breath, and checked out the hallway.

Whoa! How did they get here? In the dim light I made out two uniformed Army privates down at the end near the slatted windows, dozing in folding metal chairs, their AK-47's propped against the plaster wall.

Why were they here? Just a cool, breezy place to hang out? Or were they in place to guard me?

The breeze was causing the candle's flame to cast flickering shadows across the hall, so I quickly re-closed the door.

Now what? I was trembling as I returned the candle bowl to the table and sat down on the bed. Soldiers with guns were outside my room at five in the morning. In the farthest end of Guatemala. What was I going to do?

I gazed around at the "stone" walls and tried to think. My mind still felt clouded from whatever drug he'd given me, but it was beginning to . . .

Wait. I saw Alex G.o.ddard come into this very room with embryos from the lab, which is connected by the steel door to his office. . . .

Where there was a phone.

Time to call the emba.s.sy, get some help to get the h.e.l.l out of here.

I sat there thinking. All right. I'd need to wait an hour or so--now I'd get some low-level flunkie stuck with the graveyard shift--but there was something I was d.a.m.ned well going to do immediately. With the lab right next door, I could try to find out why G.o.ddard had just performed medical rape on me. There had to be some connection.

According to him, the lab was for "plant research." But if that was all he was doing, why was the Army here? Right outside my door? I felt a pump of adrenaline that made me forget all about my pain. Before I got the h.e.l.l out of _Baalum_, I was going to know what he was really up to here.

G.o.d, I feel miserable. I really hurt. All the more reason . . .

I took the candle, stood up, and moved to the opposite wall to begin looking for an opening in the fibergla.s.s "stone." It appeared to have been made from impressions from the room atop the pyramid, rows and rows of those little cartoon-face glyphs, mixed in with bas-reliefs, but there had to be a door somewhere. I'd seen him walk right through it. As I ran my hand along the surface, I was struck by how their hardness felt like stone. But it couldn't be.

What was I looking for? There certainly were no doork.n.o.bs. I came across a hard crack, next to the bas-relief of a feather-festooned warrior, but as I slid my hand down, it ended and again there was more rough "stone." Solid.

d.a.m.n. I stood back and studied the wall with my candle. He'd come in from the left, which would be about . . .

I moved over and started again. This time my fingernail caught in a crevice that ran directly down to the floor. Then I discovered another, about two and a half feet farther along. It had to be the door.

I felt along the side, wondering how to open it, till I noticed that one of the little "stone" glyphs gave way when I pressed it. When I put my hand against it harder and rotated it, the panel clicked backward, then swung inward. Yes!

And there it was: the lab, CRT screens above the incubators, gas chromatograph in the corner. This, according to him, was where he tested the rainforest plants the shamans and midwives brought in. But what about what he'd just done to _me_?

I was still worried about the Army guys outside, but I walked in, trying to be as quiet as I could. The first thing I did was head for the row of black boxes above the bench. Those, I a.s.sumed, were being used to maintain a micro-environment for incubating plant specimens.

And sure enough, the dimly lit windows revealed rows and rows of petri dishes. They were clear, with circular indentations in the center. . . .

But wait a minute. Those weren't just any old lab dishes. And no plant extracts were in them either, just clear liquid. That was odd, very fishy.

I stood there puzzling, and then I remembered seeing pictures of lab dishes like these being used for artificially fertilized embryos. At the beginning, freshly extracted human ova are placed in an incubator for several hours, afloat in a medium that replicates the inside of a female Fallopian tube, to mature them in preparation for fertilization.

G.o.ddard had said something about tests on the blastocyst, the first cellular material created after fertilization. So was he using actual fetuses? My G.o.d. I felt like I was starting to know, or guess, a lot more than he wanted me to.

My thoughts were churning as I looked up and studied the video screens above the boxes. It took a moment, but then I figured out the petri dishes and their chemicals had been placed in the incubators between 4:00 P.M. and 7:30 P.M. Last evening. What--?

I started counting. They were in racks, stacked, in sets of

four by four. Let's see. Five in this incubator, five in the next, five in the . . . There were over two hundred dishes in all!

Impossible. I looked down at them again, feeling a chill. Nothing seemed to be in them yet, at least as far as I could tell, but then human eggs are microscopic. So if ova were . . .

When he supposedly was doing that _in vitro _on the Mayan woman, was he actually extracting eggs?

Get serious. That was not where they came from.

By then I was well along the Kubler-Ross scale, past denial and closing in on anger, but still . . . so many! How could they all--

I turned and examined the row of plastic-covered jugs at the back of the lab, lined up, six in all. Now I had to know what was in them.

I was still shaky, but I steadied myself, walked over, pulled back the plastic, and touched one. It was deathly cold, sweating in the moist air. When I flipped open its Frisbee-sized top, I saw a faint wisp of vapor emerge into the twilight of the room . . .

Then it dawned on me. Of course. They were cryo-storage containers.

He'd need them to preserve fertilized eggs, embryos.

I lifted off the inside cover and placed it carefully onto the bench, where it immediately turned white, steaming with mist. Then I noticed a tiny metal rod hooked over the side of the opening. When I pulled it up, it turned out to be attached to a porous metal cylinder containing rows of gla.s.s tubes.

What's . . .?

Feeling like I was deep in a medical fourth dimension, I took out one of the freezing tubes. It was notched and marked with a code labeled along the side: "BL -1 la," "BL -1 lb," "BL-1 lc," and so it went, all the way to "g." But nothing was there.

I began checking the other tubes. They all were empty too. So why was he freezing empty containers?

Go with the simple answer. He's getting them ready for new embryos.