Eat'em Read online

  Eat’em perked up at the mention of Leibniz. He trotted up my side until he perched on my shoulder again. “Leibniz first, then she goes away, yes!”

  I followed Dixie out of the library. The philosopher seemed as good a topic as any. Anything that could keep my mind off the missing planetarium employee and keep Eat’em quiet for a few minutes I’d meet with open arms.

  Still the first week of school, the class was primarily a meet and greet, with a silly name game as a way to introduce ourselves to our lab partners for the semester. Professor Kempter noticed my name not on the roster and almost sent me packing, but instead offered to let me continue the class if I went and added the course “with immediacy.” With Dixie pressing to be my lab partner, I couldn’t say no.

  Using the letters of our first names we had to come up with words that described ourselves. It went around the room with people using the same words over and over with little variety. It got to me:

  “Just” – I believed in fairness. Justice.

  “Arlington” – I was born in Arlington, Virginia… and, of course, I’m in Arlington now.

  “Caring” – I don’t know… Maybe “Copout” would be better. Everyone else seemed to be caring, so I guess I’m caring too.

  “Obstacle” – Sure. Why not?

  “Brave” – I must have sounded like an idiot. No more than anyone else.

  “Daring, Intelligent, eXtraverted, Impressive, Earthy.”

  “Hey!” Eat’em stood stoic on the large black table that made up our desk. It was fitted with built-in sinks and Bunsen burners. Eat’em pricked up and growled at Dixie. “She skipped me! Yes! Ugh… Jacob. You got to get rid of her. I hate her so much, yes. My name is Eat’em! Energy, Amp, Throttle, Emerge, Monster!” It might have sounded deep had he not just been listing the brands of his favorite energy drinks.

  We continued around the room, learning how we were all a bunch of sweet, caring individuals and then we played a few more nauseating games to set everyone’s names to heart.

  After the grade school introduction, Kempter finally handed out the curriculum. It contained a range of material grouped by macro and microbiological studies. A month would be devoted to each of three fields, the last of which interested me most: Bacteria, virus, and parasitic infections.

  I told Dixie I would see her soon and watched her out of the lab. Part of me wanted to follow her, but I knew I couldn’t wait two months to speak to Professor Kempter about what was on my mind.

  “Professor,” I waited as the last student made his way out the door. “Mind if I ask you something?”

  Kempter had a narrow face on a large body. A mug shot would make her look much smaller than she really was. Still, she looked pretty and young for a college teacher, maybe in her late twenties or early thirties. Her brow furrowed as she looked up at me, almost as if she were disappointed in my presence. “I usually only take questions from my students, Jacob, but since you promised to fix the issue, I’ll make an exception. What is your question?”

  “It’s about bacterias.”

  “Bacteria,” she corrected me. “Yes, we’ll discuss bacteria and viruses in the last chapter. You’ve got a while.”

  Eat’em peed in the drain of the eyewash station at the corner of the room. He shouted over his shoulder, “Let’s go! I’m scheduled for a battle to the death with a bottle of syrup.”

  I hesitated. With the planetarium incident still fairly fresh in my mind, I didn’t want to say something incriminating. Then again, for all anyone knew it was merely an act of vandalism. Still, I felt I ran the risk of saying too much, that maybe she knew more than the paper suggested. “I’ve taken interest in the subject recently. I saw, uh, I saw an animal acting a little strangely and uh…”

  “Strangely how?” Kempter puckered her lips, her face pinched in curiosity.

  “Well,” I relaxed, “I guess it seemed to recognize me. Like, it should have just ignored me, but it didn’t. Instead it looked at me as if it’d seen me before.”

  “An animal?”

  “Yeah,” I scratched my brow, “a dog. I mean, had it been a person, he might have said I looked familiar. That’s the look it gave. And it attacked me.”

  “The dog.”

  “Yes,” I said, “the dog.”

  Kempter sighed. “Sounds like a regular dog to me. Maybe it liked your scent.”

  “When. Did. You. Get. Attacked. By. A. Dog?” Eat’em called out while banging his head against the door.

  “I guess,” I said. “I just figured it might be infected with something. It wasn’t a wild dog, it seemed domesticated, but it was very aggressive. It bit someone. A girl. It looked bad…”

  “Yeah, bad,” Dr. Kempter interrupted me. “Did you call 911 or animal control? Where did this happen?”

  Scrambling for words, trying to describe the assailant as a dog had dug me a hole I didn’t plan on talking my way out of. “Well, no… I didn’t call anyone. It happened so fast, the dog chased me away from the girl. I was able to beat the dog away with a tree limb. I figured the dog was sick. I went to, uh, check on the girl, but she was gone. I guess she must have healed quickly. I don’t know who the girl was or if she went to the hospital or where she went or anything. The whole thing seemed weird, you know.”

  “Doesn’t sound like any bacteria or infection I’ve ever heard of. Rabies maybe? Was the dog frothing at the mouth?” I shook my head no. Kempter threw her paperwork into a satchel and shoed me toward the door. She checked some equipment under the desks and went to turn out the lights. “What do you mean when you say the girl healed quickly? How much time passed between the bite and her disappearing? ”

  “Minutes,” I said. “Seconds. I mean, I didn’t get a great look at it, but it seemed like a bad bite. Not something you could just walk away from, but there was no sign of her. She was gone.”

  We stepped into the hallway. Kempter’s berry-shaped frame filled the doorway as she passed through. “Sounds a little fantastic to me, Jacob.”

  “What if it was an infection? How would you tell?” I felt like a complete buffoon. “What if it’s a virus that hasn’t been discovered yet? Is there any way to know something is infected by looking at them?”

  “Like the dog?” she asked. “What kind of dog was it?”

  Eat’em shouted, “A CHIHUAHUA!” and I repeated the word, regretting it immediately. “Chihuahua.”

  “Sounds like a vicious Chihuahua,” Kempter smiled.

  Eat’em laughed and I shook my head shamefully, “It was.”

  “Well, Jacob, it wouldn’t be too difficult to tell you if your friend was bit by a super-powered Chihuahua,” She shoed me once more, leading me backward. “I just need a blood sample and if that dog is really that aggressive…” She paused. “Someone should catch it and put it down. Man-eating Chihuahuas running around… it’s dangerous.”

  With a facetious “Stay safe” Kempter hurried off, moving faster than her beach ball body should have allowed.

  Chapter 9

  Kempter wipes a trickle of sweat from the side of her neck. Her eyes lock on mine and fill with dread. Her professional career rides on her testimony. A few days prior she told Big Mike about her concern in destroying her life by taking stand. She fears the public’s response. She fears the hatred that’s already filled her social media page. The threats. The defamation. The ridicule. Right now, her expression states it all. She fears me.

  “Jodi,” Gomes thumbs the collar of his shirt. “Can you tell us again your relationship to the defendant?”

  It must be ninety degrees in the courtroom. The air conditioner spits warm air and dust. We just returned from a recess while some contractor worked to get the room back to its normal freezing temperature. Everyone remains soaked. The room reeks of body odor.

  Kempter presses her sleeve to her forehead before finally breaking from my watchful eye. “He took my biology course.” She says to the DA. “He was one of my more interested students. We began to do some extra
curricular research which is not uncommon for university students. I pictured him becoming my graduate assistant after he completed his undergraduate work.”

  She seems rehearsed. Her mannerisms, gestures, the extra octave in her voice as she compliments me… it comes off as Shakespearean. Mike warned her to be genuine. Her nerves turn her into a caricature of her usual self.

  Gomes hovers over her, a vulture preparing to swoop down and eat her alive. “Extracurricular research? Is this how you refer to Jacob’s claims of an unknown virus? This so called ‘infection’?”

  “Yes and no. At first Jacob was just inquisitive. He asked vague questions about the behavior of dogs,” she sighs heavily. “From his description, it sounded like he was talking about the behavior of dogs. His story sounded far-fetched.”

  Gomes tilts his head and nods for her to continue. When she doesn’t, Gomes presses her. “So, you never requested a blood sample?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But he did bring you a blood sample?”

  “Yes.”

  “That didn’t bother you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I teach science.”

  Gomes puts his back to the jury. Mike explained Gomes’ method for handling witnesses as equal parts face-time for himself and whoever is on stand. “He’s got one of those trustworthy faces, and he’s counting on you to look like a blubbering fool. Don’t look like a blubbering fool.” Kempter looks like a blubbering fool.

  “Do your students often bring you vials of blood?” Gomes asks.

  “He didn’t bring me a vial of blood. He brought me a T-shirt.”

  Gomes nods. “Do your students often bring you T-shirts covered in blood?”

  “It was a small stain.”

  “You didn’t think that maybe it was human blood?”

  “No,” Kempter says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it wasn’t.”

  “Are you a forensic scientist, Jodi?”

  She shakes her head and licks her teeth, clearly insulted. “I teach forensic scientists.”

  “Did you know it wasn’t human blood before you tested it?” With his back to the jury, Gomes gives a look of indignation. He smacks his lips. “Can you tell the difference between human blood and dog blood without a microscope?”

  “Yes,” Kempter rolls her eyes and the distain in her voice overflows with sarcasm “that’s one of the many powers I have as a science teacher.”

  Their banter goes back and forth as I study the jury. They don’t nod or frown. If anything they look tired. I search their faces for hope, belief, disbelief, anything. All I see is exhaustion.

  “The sample he brought was high in white blood cell count,” she emphasizes the word sample. “Other than that, I saw no indicators common in an infection. Lots of white blood cells can be a sign that someone is sick, though. It can be a sign of leukemia. It can also mean nothing. What did surprise me, though, about the sample, was that it wasn’t coagulated. The cells were healthy, moving around.”

  Gomes gauges her believability and upstages her. That’s how Mike describes it. He paces away from the jury and once again turns toward them, giving them more face-time. “And you didn’t call the police. Are living blood cells not an indicator that the blood is fresh? Did you not think the blood must have been put on the shirt recently?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it had been four days.”

  “And how do you know it had been four days?”

  Kempter looks at me again… the fear present, but less apparent. “Jacob brought the shirt to me on a Friday afternoon. I threw it in my desk. It was Labor Day weekend. My class is Monday, Wednesday and Friday. When I looked at the shirt it was Wednesday morning. It had been four days.”

  “And the blood looked fresh?”

  “It was fresh,” she says. “The cells were alive and well. Aside from a high white count, they seemed preserved… but they had been on a dirty T-shirt in a drawer in my desk. The stain should have been dried out. It wasn’t. So I tested it.”

  Gomes nods, playing along. “How did you test it?”

  “Looking at it, you wouldn’t think there was much special about it,” Kempter nods at me, “except for its behavior. I figured if there was an invisible infection, maybe I could give it to mice.”

  “And was there?” Gomes asks, “An… invisible infection?”

  “Well, the first mouse showed no immediate affects,” she explains, turning toward the jury. “I had been running maze experiments with my grad students to test the ability of mice to develop memory. I tested the exposed mouse with the mazes, and the results were typical of most mice. Nothing exceptional. Over the course of a few weeks the mouse was able to learn the maze and completed the maze in faster and faster times. At that point I determined that there was nothing special about the individual mouse and I returned him to the rest of my mice population. That’s when I noticed something peculiar.”

  “And that is?”

  “The mouse was aggressive,” Kempter furrows her brow as she wipes away sweat on her upper lip. “Just at first. But it clearly bit another mouse. I thought nothing of the event at first. However, to be careful I placed the exposed mouse and the mouse he bit into solitary confinement. The bitten mouse had never been through testing. We were saving it as the control variable. However, when introduced to the maze for the first time, it ran it as if it had already learned the maze. As you can imagine, this compromised our entire dataset. It simply did not make sense for this mouse to know the maze.”

  “A coincidence…”

  “Objection, your honor!” Mike’s voice cracks as he shouts inches from my ear. “Leading.”

  Judge Brentt sustains before Gomes reframes his line of questioning. “Could this have been a coincidence, Dr. Kempter?” the DA continues. “Luck. Not a very large sample size to draw any conclusions from” Gomes implies.

  “I thought the same… At first… On a hunch I introduced a third mouse. Also a control variable. This one bitten by the second mouse. It ran the maze even faster… as if it were memorized. All three could do it at the same rate. It was as if the first one had taught the other two. The same for a fourth and a fifth. Each one showed only the most temporary sign of aggression to any non-bitten mouse and each time it seemed the knowledge of the maze passed from one mouse to the next.”

  “What are you implying?” Gomes asks.

  “It means they learned in tandem,” she says. “It means whatever was in that sample allowed them to communicate as if telepathically. When one mouse learned something, they all learned it. This was very exciting, I began to plan many experiments and papers. I explained my observations to Jacob. I was curious if we would be able to get another sample, however that’s when things became concerning.”

  “How did things become concerning, Jodi?” Gomes asks.

  “The third mouse died within the week,” she explains matter-of-factly. “A perfectly healthy mouse had deteriorated incredibly quickly. In fact, every mouse bitten after the third mouse seemed to suffer some sort of mental breakdown. They turned feral. They became hostile and they forgot the maze shortly thereafter. Essentially, the blood sample, when introduced to the mice appeared to create a chain. So long as the links in that chain remained unbroken, the mice were smarter, stronger, faster and more agile than normal mice. If a link was removed. If a mouse died. The opposite became true.”

  “This is all very interesting, Jodi,” Gomes finishes toying with her. He pauses before asking one final question. “And whom else did you report these findings to?”

  She shakes her head, “Nobody.”

  Chapter 10

  The planetarium reeked of bleach. In spite of the recent vandalism, the door remained unlocked and there were no heightened security measures in place. As much as I could tell, the only thing anyone had done in response to the incident was steam clean the floor and expand the cordoned are
a to include the hallway and bathroom.

  A sign announcing the theater’s imminent opening had been taken down from a stanchion in the lobby.

  I pushed open the door to the theater. The carpeted stairs squished beneath my feet. Eat’em left a trail of foamy footsteps as he ran to the projector stand. The prints looked a cross between the fossilized feet of a small dinosaur and a humanoid primate. No matter how vivid they appeared to me, I knew nobody else could see them, and I wondered, as I often did, if they were just a hallucination. I wondered if my little demon were some elaborate rouse. Did I imagine the old man? Did I imagine the young woman? If I imagined them, what really happened here?

  Eat’em climbed atop the projector stand as my mind wondered.

  “It’s gone!” Eat’em grabbed his tail in his tiny hands. He squeezed and twisted it in frustration. “It’s still gone! What cruel joke is this? We come all this way so you may be redeemed for your destructive behavior and present me with this! Nothing, yes! What is this?”

  I sloshed down the stairwell. “We’re not here for you, buddy.”

  I expected for someone to have gone through great lengths to pick up all the pieces of projector. Most of the fragments still clung to the carpet. But there was no blood. The floor reeked of bleach.

  “Why are we here then?” Eat’em sank onto the stand. His body slouched.

  “I’m looking for something.”

  “YAWN…” He rolled onto his belly and swept his tail back and forth. “I’m already bored, yes. Let’s get ice cream.”

  I knelt over the chair the old man collided with days earlier. One of the bolts holding it to the inclined floor was loose. The seat was noticeably looser than the two connected to it. Nothing else had ever been used and still looked pristine.

  We headed for the bathroom and I snuck a peak in an industrial trashcan, which held the door open. No splintered mop. The tiled floor squeaked as I ventured into the bathroom.