“So, what I suggest is that over the next, say, two to four months, you get your hormone levels checked daily. We have some home test kits I can get for you, but you’ll need to come in for bloodwork and a sonogram once a week, all right? Just for those couple of months or so.”
“Okay,” Mare said. “Bloodwork. Sonogram. Sure.”
“Depending on what we find, we’ll make more decisions from there. You might need to have the extra ovary removed. You might not. We don’t know. But we’ll find out, all right? Then we’ll reassess.”
“So no cancer?” Sean asked.
“Nope. Everything looks fantastic. Like I said, she has the reproductive organs of a pubescent teenager. They’re about as close to perfect as they come.”
Sean and Mare looked at each other, both grinning in joy and relief. He leaned over to kiss her, and she kissed him back, still grinning against his lips.
It’s a miracle!
Hathstone stood. “Oh! One more thing. Since we’re trying to assess the impact of suddenly adding two ovaries, I’d rather you didn’t get pregnant until we know what’s going on. Can’t put you on the pill or implants, it’d make the tests inaccurate, and I’d rather not put an IUD in such a new uterus. I strongly suggest condoms along with a spermicide
and
a diaphragm. No babies, okay? Not yet.”
“But I, we…” Mare looked at Sean, then the doctor, then back to Sean. “We really can get pregnant?”
“As long as his swimmers don’t get lost, sure. You can have all the babies you want. Just try not to until after we’ve completed the tests.” He winked. “Might ruin my chances to get published in
The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology
.”
Hathstone fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to Mare. “Great to meet you folks,” he said, shaking their hands. “Do you have any other questions before I go?”
Mare stared at the card as if it were magical.
“I think we’re good,” Sean said, still grinning. He stood and shook the doctor’s hand again. “Thank you.”
“You bet.” He leaned in and squinted at Sean’s battered face. “Better get that cheek looked at before it turns septic.”
He patted Sean’s upper arm then turned to go. “You kids have fun, but stock up on condoms first.”
“We will,” Sean called after him. He turned back to Mare to see her clamber out of bed and rush to him. She threw herself into his embrace and, laughing despite the pain, he spun her around and kissed her.
Mare’s all right! Better than all right!
“We can have babies!” She squealed, giddy. “Oh, babe, what fantastic news!”
Sean couldn’t agree more.
Too excited to sit still, Mare buzzed around the room to gather her things and get dressed while Sean eased back into the chair to await her release papers. “Once we’re out of here, we’re going right down to emergency,” she said as she pulled on her pants. “So help me, we’re not leaving this hospital until—“
Mare turned, falling silent as the news switched to coverage of banker Jeffrey Howard being arrested on charges of kidnapping and murder for hire while his victims had been treated and released from a local hospital.
“Oh my God,” Mare said, taking a step toward Sean but her gaze still riveted on the TV. She reached for his hand. “Todd’s daughter? Mindy?”
“Least they caught him. And Mindy and Hailey are okay.”
She turned to face him, lower lip curled in, while behind her the news turned to exploding cancer deaths that were expected to impact billions worldwide.
“I’m celebrating a stupid new uterus and all this bad stuff’s happening. People are
dying
,” she said, searching his eyes. “Millions, maybe billions of people. What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing,” he assured her as he stood again and drew her close. “You’re perfect. You’ve always been perfect.” He closed his eyes as he relished the bliss of her in his arms.
He thought of the spore sickness, the dying, the no longer dead, and of their future children and what sort of unknown world they’d be born into. With a sudden population decrease, would it be plagued by rampant disease and fear, or brightened with hope and prosperity?
At last he said, “The future’s never been certain. Good or bad, as long as we’re together, we’ll make it through just fine.”
About the Author
Tamara Jones started her academic career as a science geek, earned a degree in art, and now writes full time. She’s an avid quilter as well as a wife, mother, and cat wrangler. Despite the gruesome and often violent nature of her work, Tam’s easygoing and friendly. Not sick and twisted at all. Honest! Visit her online at
www.tamara-jones.net
.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Bill, Laura, and LittleMiss for all of their support, patience, and indulgences as I worked through this novel. Next, I want to thank my agent, Laura Bradford, and editor, Don D’Auria, for their guidance in bringing Sean’s story to print. Also, a huge, humble thank you to Sam Arnold, Stephen Bagley, Kat BarronMiller, Lisa Blair, Wendy Blanton, Tom Burns, Joely Sue Burkhart, Shirley Damsgaard, Jon Dearman, Kat Fireblade, Margaret Fisk, Gemma Godwin, Alison Kent, Joyce Kopecky, Tina Kulesa, Elle Lassiter, Michele Maakestad, Darren Magedy, AR Miller, Josh Rode, Jean Schara, Maripat Sluyter, and Tori Swanson for reading, bouncing story ideas around, and generally putting up with me. You guys rock! I’d like to add another thank you to everyone who donated photos for the artwork.
Lastly, I want to thank the Boone County Sheriff’s Office and Iowa State University fungi expert Thomas C. Harington for willingly answering all of my ‘what if’ questions, even the crazy ones. If there are mistakes, they’re because I didn’t know what else to ask.
#GoSpore
There’s a killer on the road…
White Knuckle
© 2015 Eric Red
He’s a big rig truck driver who goes by the CB handle White Knuckle, and he’s Jack the Ripper on eighteen wheels. For thirty years he has murdered hundreds of women in unimaginable ways, imprisoning them in a secret compartment in his truck, abducting them in one state and dumping their dead bodies across the country.
Dedicated FBI agent Sharon Ormsby is on a mission to hunt down and stop White Knuckle. She goes undercover as a truck driver with a helpful long hauler named Rudy in a cross-country pursuit that will ultimately bring her face-to-face with White Knuckle in a pedal-to-the-metal, high-octane climax on a highway to Hell.
Enjoy the following excerpt for
White Knuckle:
Carrie was wide-awake all right.
The rearview mirror burned blinding white as four headlamps of two big rigs fast approached, one in the left passing lane and one in the right truck lane. The eighteen-wheelers surged forward and bellowed past her, rocking her vehicle back and forth in the wet hurricane of their afterblows. The nurse whimpered and gritted her teeth against the terrible noise of the rampaging diesels rushing by, sandwiching her car between a hundred and forty tons of wheeled steel. She decelerated to aid in their departure ahead, shaking like a leaf as she did so. Within moments they were red-jeweled pinpricks of taillights twinkling out in the watery darkness up the road.
Blacktop and broken white lines unfurled.
Thwap. Thwap. Thwap.
Her mouth seriously smarted.
A greenish blob floated out of the inky murk ahead in the windshield. Reflective words became discernable. “Johnstown. Next exit.” She passed the sign.
Fifteen minutes would bring her to her exit.
Twenty minutes and she’d be pulling into her driveway.
A few minutes later, she’d be safe in bed.
Please God, just get me home.
Mouth hurts.
The radio.
Turn it on.
Static.
Flip up the dial
. Static. Static. More static.
Ugh. Turn the thing off.
Thwap. Thwap. Thwap.
The blackness ahead was melting like oil in the smear of the windshield wipers. A glance into her mirrors showed only darkness behind.
Twinkle.
Headlights.
Coming on fast.
Two big saucer eye headlamps inflated in her back windshield, filling her car with stark illumination that violated her safe confines like a kind of rape. The front grill was vaguely outlined and resembled a grinning demon.
Oh c’mon, just get past me,
she thought. The rig must have had its high beams on because her rear and side view mirrors were a white-out of blinding triangular reflection that made it impossible for her to see or move her eyes anywhere.
Just get past me!
The trembling thunder and low register vibration of the tractor-trailer shuddered her vehicle as it hauled itself up alongside on the right. Carrie held on to the steering wheel for dear life, waiting for the truck to pass.
But it didn’t.
The monster eighteen-wheeler, a towering shadow silhouette on the passenger side, just hung there—as if it sensed her anxiety on some animal predatory level and was toying with her. It had slowed to her speed as she was nose to nose with the cab. She decelerated to get behind the speeding big rig.
Its taillights flared and hellish red light inflamed the inside of her car.
The truck had slowed, too.
Neck and neck again.
OK, fine!
The nurse stepped on the gas and her Prius shot ahead up the unfurling blacktop and broken white lines of the highway that was now empty except for she and her seventy-ton unwelcome companion. Carrie felt her car hydroplane on the unsafe wet tarmac and she struggled to wrest the vehicle back under control.
A throaty diesel engine roared behind her and the cough of smokestacks, jutting up like twin chromium steer horns on the cab in the sopping back windshield, belched smoke that sinisterly wreathed the truck. It heaved forward, easily pulling up alongside her again and now she was scared.
Carrie threw an anxious glance at the cab and driver door window of the big rig keeping pace beside her. Through her rain speckled passenger’s window an empty seat away, she could see nothing but the lower edge of the driver’s window. There was a shadowy silhouette of a head with a cap on the trucker inside. A light went on inside the cockpit of the flanking truck, and now she could make out that the blurry oval of his face was Caucasian and male. The rain on the window glass made his distorted features look like melted candle wax. Fear jolted her body like sparking jumper cables and she decelerated down to 30 mph, but without missing a beat, in a hydraulic hiss of brakes, the truck slowed too, so that his window and the face beyond hovered over hers. The driver was looking at her, staring at her—she could feel it, if not see it, beyond the walls of glass and rain.
Suddenly a bright light exploded in her car, lighting her up and she heard herself scream. It was coming from an industrial flashlight the stalking trucker shone out his window, aiming it right in her face. Terror flared as she realized he was trying to make her out. Then, just as quick, the flashlight switched off.
And the tractor-trailer edged inwards to impact the side of her car!
CRANNN-NNNG!
Now Carrie screamed and screamed, releasing the steering wheel. The truck veered like a gigantic rattlesnake and hit her passenger side again. Metal buckled and glass cracked as she skidded out of control, sideways. She was going to die. He was going to kill her.
But why?
Seizing control of the rotating steering wheel, she wrestled it into alignment with both white-knuckled fists and somehow kept her wits enough to steer into the skid, regaining traction as she pumped the brakes and slowed as fast as she dared, coming to a near standstill on the shoulder of the fast lane.
The eighteen-wheeler could not stop as fast and didn’t try, just plunged on ahead. As her little vehicle came to rest on the bad side of the road, Carrie watched the red taillights recede up the highway. The maniac was picking up speed and getting the hell out of there, his lethal prank over. No question, he was speeding off and that must mean she was safe. The truck was gone, thank God and blessed Jesus.
Sitting, sobbing and shaking behind the wheel, the nurse found her jeans were soaking and at first thought it was rain but then realized she’d pissed herself. Was still emptying her bladder all over the vinyl car seat. Her breath and heart were sledgehammering in her chest as she sat paralyzed and alone. The inside of her car stank of urine.
The front and back windshields were black as melting onyx in the muddy rain. The highway was otherwise deserted, and it was just her. Carrie couldn’t move, frozen in place with indecision. No way she was going to get back on the road after that close shave, even though the exit was a mile away. The mad trucker might be waiting for her. But she couldn’t stay here, could she? What to do.
Gotta do something,
her mind raced. What?
Fumbling her cell phone out of her purse, the nurse punched in “911.”
The phone rang. “Police emergency.” A man’s voice.
“H-H-H—”
“Ma’am, this is police emergency. I can’t understand you.”
Shit, her mouth wasn’t working.
Use your words
, like her mother always told her as a child.
“Ma’am, this is an emergency line. Are you hurt?”
Once Carrie spat out the first syllable, she couldn’t stop talking. “Help me, please! A big truck just ran me off the road! He smashed into my car on purpose! Tried to kill me! Help! Please! Send the cops!”
“Where are you now?’
“I’m in my car. I’m on the 80 about a mile north of the Johnstown exit.” Good, her RN training was coming back to her and she was lucid and articulate. It was going to be all right.
Give the 911 dispatcher the information. Be calm.
“My name is Carrie Brown. I’m a nurse at County General and I was driving home from my shift and this big rig just came up on me and knocked me off the road.” She heard the sound of a keyboard tapping on the other end of the line as the 911 dispatcher took down her information.
“Are you injured?”
“No, just shaken up.”
“Stay in your car, Ms. Brown. Lock your doors. Do not leave your vehicle. We have a Highway Patrol unit in Johnstown and he is on his way.”
A flare of headlights in her windshield came from the oncoming lanes on the other side of the road and her brief rush of expectant relief that it was the authorities turned into a chill as she saw it was yet another truck, hurtling in the opposite direction. Then there was red glow in her car as the big rig disappeared behind her and all was dark again.
“Can you hear me, ma’am?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, yes. Stay in the car. Lock the doors.” She pressed the master plunger lock button and heard the locks on all four doors all drop with a soft
thunk
. “Don’t worry, I’m not getting out.”
“We have a unit on his way. Should be there in ten minutes.”
“Thank you.”
“Sit tight.”
The call disconnected. Carrie put the phone in her pants pocket. She lay in her own water on the driver’s seat, gasping for breath. The body heat of her wild fear was fogging up the windows. Outside, the night highway was desolate and empty, barely visible in the thrashing sheets of torrential rain. Blackness embraced her. The nurse waited, counting the seconds, then switched on her blinkers. A yellow pulsing glimmer broke the black void outside that was broken only by her headlights, which seemed so weak. Wiping snot from her face with her shirtsleeve, she smelt the acrid tang of her pee filling the car and permitted herself the luxury of embarrassment worrying about the state trooper discovering her in this condition. That was the least of her problems, she decided. As the moments passed, listening to the
thwap thwap thwap
of the wipers and the
click click click
of her blinkers, she grew restless and felt her skin crawl, trapped in her car like she was out on the great big scary empty Interstate. Fear spread.
Then stygian darkness brightened.
Two white pinpricks to her rear.
Somehow, Carrie knew two things right away.
It was not a police car.
And the trucker was back.