Brianna swallows the lump in her throat, effectively stirred, much the same as Winona, by Alonzo’s altruistic sentiments. “Well, I better get going.”
Winona stands from the table, taking Brianna’s hand as she leads her to Lon’s room. “He took off out of here in such a hurry yesterday, he forgot his crucifix,” she talks, pulling Brianna along. “You take it and be sure to hook it around his neck the next time you see him. I want him to be protected.” Winona is most dire in her spiritual beliefs.
Brianna waits at the door casing of Lon’s small room while Winona gathers the crucifix, afraid if she actually steps inside she may be compelled to stay, simply to feel close to him. The colorful and elaborate handmade quilt covering his bed reminds her of the days and nights she spent there after her parents’ death, wrapped in its warmth and security.
She recalls Winona sitting up for hours in the rocking chair aside the bed, dutifully tending to her, watching her sleep mostly and constructing a dream catcher to aptly scare away her nightmares. Brianna subconsciously hugs her arms about her middle, wishing she could replace them with Lon’s, the way he held her provided such peaceful rest in the daunting aftermath.
Winona walks to her, lacing the silver chain and pendant around her neck. “You love my son?” She asks, her gentle hands working the clasp about the chain.
“Yes, ma’am,” Brianna whispers, hard-pressed to recall a time when she did not.
“Good,” Winona affirms her suspicion. “Lon helped you through a distressing time, Jolie Blonde.” Winona simultaneously brushes her golden hair back off her shoulders. “Now you help him,” her voice soft but advising. Very much in tune with her son, Winona knows he has grown troubled, even though he makes brave attempts in masking such a fact from her.
“How?” Brianna inquires, desperation evident in her emerald greens.
“You feed him,” Winona speaks figuratively. “My people talk of two wolves. Inside every one of us. One is righteous. The other unkind. Whichever wolf you feed is what you will become. Sometimes when things get dark, we can’t feed ourselves,” she talks of her son’s position. “You feed him now. Love, strength, kindness, shelter. Even if he is resistant to accepting it.” She grins, her philosophy changing from her rooted yesteryear to a present-day nutritional metaphor. “Just like children and their vegetables. Sometimes we lose track of what’s good for us.”
Brianna nods, understanding, her fingers grazing over the crucifix. She wonders if Winona’s mythical oration could actually be grounded in realism, the armoring silver pendant instantly giving her a sense of refuge and closeness to Lon.
“Go. Take care of each other.” Winona releases her after an ardent embrace.
One more stop to make before heading back to LSU in Baton Rouge, Brianna, garbed in her signature all black duds, stealthily approaches the ETNA compound from its woodsy exterior. Her adrenaline pumping after having cut her way in through the back gate, Johnny’s brave words from her first introduction to the creepy, desolate outpost run through her mind—
Stick to the plan. Like you mean it.
“If I were a
blood doctor,”
she rehearses Johnny’s explanation of Dr. Godfrey, “where would I loiter?”
Scanning the maze-like conglomeration of stone buildings, her eyes settle on an artless placard at the back of a building that reads
Laboratory.
She pulls the crucifix hanging at her collarbone up to her lips, bestowing a kiss, beseeching of it Winona’s expressed protection.
Her entrance is met with no resistance as she hears a click akin to that of a lock releasing. The back door opens automatically. “That was way too easy,” she mutters eerily to herself, her gut screaming at her to turn tail and run.
She ignores intuition, walking inside. The door closing behind her, the sound of the lock fastening causes her entire body to jolt upright and stiff.
“Ms. Bentley,” a high-pitched voice greets. There in the shadows of the cold, dark, concrete architecture, Dr. Shaw lurks.
Her fearful eyes and defensive posturing begs of further introduction.
“You didn’t honestly think you were just going to waltz right in undetected, did you?” Dr. Shaw chuckles haughtily. A medical cauterization device in his hand, he walks toward her.
Brianna turns to the door, frantically jerking on the handle, the unforgiving lock constricts her freedom.
Dr. Shaw grabs her by the shoulder, spinning her back around to face him. “You were so desperate to get in,” he denotes, having watched her violate his exterior fence through interior security monitors. “Now you want out?” One evilly arched brow peers down at her.
Her eyes perceptive in their split-second notation of him (a tool she learned in her Criminal Justice major—victims have mere seconds to make mental notes of their perpetrators) she reads his name from his white lab coat. Embroidered in royal blue, there resides the same name that littered her father’s office day planner—
Meeting with Dr. Shaw.
“Killing my parents wasn’t enough?” she expels, insinuating he has the same plan for her.
Dr. Shaw gives in to another baneful chuckle. “Kids these days. You have wild imaginations.” He wrangles her wrist from her side, turning her palm upward, pressing his still idle cauterization tool against the faint beaded-up scar. “Why take your life, when your blood will suffice?”
Brianna’s frenzied glance diverts back and forth from his eyes to the cauterizing tool, the device contradictory to his words is good for closing wounds, to stop them from bleeding.
“In days of old we used to brand our mutants, so we could identify them. Hold them accountable.” He runs the cold metal tip across her scar. “What happened that night at the river?”
“You tell me,” Brianna gulps, her courage rising, referring to the severed brakes on her parents’ car.
He huffs at the accusation. “Seems your boyfriend doesn’t recall anything, either. He cut his hand on a skull, that’s all.” Dr. Shaw’s delivery is mocked with overplayed serendipity, knowing there has to be more to the story given their matching and most peculiar wounds. “If you insist on telling me the same tale, I may have to insist on being much harder on that boyfriend of yours.” Pushing a button on the side of his wireless cauterizer, a tiny scalpel protrudes from the needle tip.
“Huh!” Brianna sucks in a scant breath, pulling back on her arm.
The hand that encompasses hers, nearly twice its size, does not budge. Its fingers aligning on key pressure points, fights her into submission. Dr. Shaw simultaneously bears down with the scalpel on her flesh, retracing and reopening the interlaced scar.
Brianna releases a quiet cry of pain, her body willing and preparing to fight, her mind shuts it down, as interested as the menacing doctor in whether or not her blood will appear normal. A snapshot clicks in her memory of the fluorescent emerald green glow she and Lon could have sworn they witnessed upon their initial piercing contact with the skull.
A trickle of blood runs from her palm to her wrist, fully disappointing the hopeful doctor. It is scarlet and viscous, free from any supernatural properties. He apathetically wads a piece of gauze over the incision.
“Hold pressure for a few minutes,” he instructs, retracting his scalpel and stowing the cauterizer in the pocket of his lab coat.
“Ahem,” a voice calls as it enters across the room. “You didn’t tell me we had company,” Dr. Godfrey follows up in a scolding tone, his eyes near glaring at his contemptible counterpart.
“She’s no company of note,” Dr. Shaw mutters, turning away from Brianna. “Same as the boy.
Normal.”
He returns to his desk closing up shop for the day. “See yourself out, Ms. Bentley. Seeing how you know the way,” he scoffs, still cross at her trespassing.
“Are you Dr. Godfrey?” she asks to the round-faced, spectacle-clad intruder, returning to her mission.
“Yes. I am.” Dr. Godfrey smiles at her kindly, happy with the recognition.
“What do you do to Lon? When he comes to see you?” She continues walking toward him. The short of stature, round-shouldered man seems completely benign.
“We’re not too keen on questions around here, Ms. Bentley?” Dr. Shaw warns. “If you fail to leave, I have no qualms with security escorting you.”
“That’s a difficult question to answer, Brianna,” Dr. Godfrey intercedes, taking great care with her name. He waves off a reprimanding look from Dr. Shaw. “I could more easily show you than try and explain.” He motions her into his blood laboratory, to which she obliges warily. “It can’t hurt to at least test her,” he annotates to his dissociated superior.
“Suit yourself. Waste your time, if you must,” Dr. Shaw admonishes. “Lock up when you’re done,” he further rules his roost, exiting the facility.
Dr. Godfrey shuffles his stooped form, joining Brianna in his small yet highly advanced lab. Respecting her curiosity, he remains quiet, allowing her to familiarize herself with the unusual surroundings. Her head pivots on her shoulders, scanning and noting his equipment, some familiar, some completely foreign.
“I know you were at the river. The night my parents were murdered.” Brianna finally stops glancing about, staring into the wide eyes that peruse her, his bifocals giving them a boost in their magnification.
“What would make you think such?” Dr. Godfrey replies caught off-guard.
“The tire tracks. They were registered to you. Your vehicle.” She crosses her arms defiantly, taking great pride in her and Johnny’s teenage detective ambition.
“Just because it’s registered to me, does not mean I was there. ETNA provides vehicles to all its staff,” he gently defends. “This is my work area. Here. In a lab.” He motions to his most prized trinkets and treasures. “Not at some marsh.”
“My parents’ brakes were cut. The last people to see them were members of my father’s team. Here at ETNA. Funny how that seems to go unnoticed by the local authorities.” Brianna eyes a long, sharp-tipped laboratory tool resembling an icepick that sits on a desk, only an arm’s length away.
Momentarily pondering an episode of one of her favorite television crime dramas, she wonders if she could muster the determination to accurately jam the device into the seemingly harmless hematologist’s jugular. Shaking her head briskly, the malicious idea vanishes.
“I am not a member of ETNA’s team,” Dr. Godfrey replies. Slowly walking to his desk, he picks up the icepick, tucking it safely away into a drawer. “I am an independent contractor. Dr. Shaw called me in about three years ago.”
“To do whatever it is you do to Lon,” she surmises.
“Yes, that is but one of my
many
tasks,” he answers with a breezy chuckle. “Young Lon does not know you’re here, does he?” He recalls past conversations where Lon has been very specific in keeping her out of the mix.
“So…what is it you do to him? And how often?” Brianna diverts his inquiry.
“Well,” Dr. Godfrey claps his hands, rubbing them together briskly, “he comes to see me about every three months. And I run him through a series of tests.”
“Do they hurt? Your tests?” Her hand subconsciously finds its way to Lon’s crucifix, needing to know exactly what it is he bears.
“No. No. No.” Dr. Godfrey waves his hands adamantly in front of his shoulders. “They’re very rudimentary exams. Similar to what you may experience in your yearly physical.”
“If I participate. In your testing. Can you…will you…leave Lon alone?” she barters.
“Seems as though you and young Lon have the same motivation.” Dr. Godfrey looks at her affectionately, having never experienced such a reciprocal appreciation for another. “I can’t promise that kind of an arrangement. That’s Dr. Shaw’s department.” His glance leaves hers for fear he will not be able to hide the most enchanted twinkle in his eye. “But testing you could possibly put an end to all of this, dependent upon what we find.”
“And just what is it you’re looking for?”
“Anything out of the ordinary.” He shrugs his shoulders as if it’s no big deal at all. “Oh my,” he says, noticing the dried blood on the inside of her wrist. “Sit. Sit. Sit.” He offers up the cold metal chair, the same one Lon rests in for his testing. Grabbing some gauze, tape and antibiotic ointment, he tends and dresses the cut to her palm.
“Dr. Shaw’s
testing,”
she mutters at his boorish experimentation.
Dr. Godfrey shakes his head, irked. “Let me assure you, we are two different breeds. My testing is not in the least barbaric, young Brianna.” He proffers her a white pill, pulled from a bottle in his medicine cabinet. “It will help with the pain.”
“No thank you.” She presses her lips together, recalling another episode from her favorite crime drama where a girl in a club accepted a white pill from a man only to wake up locked in the trunk of his car with no recollection of how she got there. “Can we speed this up?” she asks, validating her participation to be tested.
“Oh, yes, yes.” Dr. Godfrey nearly hops up off the floor, excited at the prospect of a new subject. Scrunching up his nose to better hoist his bifocals into position, he fires up his monitors, attaching probes and measuring devices to Brianna’s form.
“You always get so excited about your work?” she asks, feeling as though she resides in the company of a mad scientist.
“Everyone needs a passion,” he says. “I understand you have an affinity for law.” Dr. Godfrey catches the reservation in her glance at the postulation. “You should know everything you do is monitored,” he informs. “Dr. Shaw’s henchmen. You, young Lon and the
daredevil.”
He chuckles with the mention of the fearless Johnny Vito.
“He watches us, does he?” Brianna ponders the fresh information, her wheels churning as to how she—they—may be able to throw him off their trails, perception sometimes a mere illusion of the truth.
“Here.” He hands her the heart rate monitor leads, demonstrating on himself where she should place them beneath her shirt, the modest hematologist keeping in mind her comfort level as well as his own. “If I were a young person concerned with avenging my parents’ death, I would start with the kingpin’s helpmates.” His eyes counsel her from atop his bifocals. “The top brass,” he insinuates Dr. Shaw, “never get their hands dirty.”