FOUR: "Resurrection of the Lost"
Angela's eyes fluttered open several hours later. She was very weak, her muscles feeling like lead. It took her several minutes to be able to focus her eyes and even longer before she could attempt to sit up. Once she accomplished that, she started to take in her surroundings. She was in what looked like a hospital room, though one without a window. She had been laying in a standard hospital bed and was dressed in a hospital gown. She was nude underneath.
What had happened? Had she been rescued from -- from what? Then the memories came flooding back to her, carried on a wave of grief and shock and horror. Robert's body and the bed covered in blood. The arrow through Carl's head, his abdomen and groin caked in drying brown gunk. Brenda, Lisa and ... oh God, Mark! Tears came gushing out of Angela's eyes as she remembered his body twisting, then crashing into the glass. The slow-motion replay of his fall out the window hammered at her emotions. She grabbed her head and shook it, willing the image to stop, but she only managed to push it into the background. She had to do something to keep herself occupied, so she tried to stand up. Her legs almost gave out when she got her feet on the floor, but after a few moments of disorientation she was able to start walking. As she moved around, trying to get her circulation going again, Angela realized that the room lacked a lot of the accommodations and features of a proper hospital room, so she was pretty certain she was still in the mansion, or at least still in the hands of that bastard, Hammond.
There was a door ahead of her and one on her right, which led to a bathroom. Realizing she hadn't peed for quite a long time and that she desperately needed to, Angela took advantage of that door. She sat down on the stool and tried not to think of anything as she relieved herself of at least one annoying problem. Feeling much better she stood up, but caught herself just before flushing the toilet, realizing that the sound of the water flowing through the pipes and the typical high-pitched whine of the tank refilling might alert her captor that she was awake. After she finished, Angela decided to look for her clothes and other articles, just in case he had left them, but no such luck. The closet was empty: no clothes, no bags and, of course, no stun gun. Hammond was insane, but he wasn't stupid. God what she wouldn't have given for at least a pair of panties. She didn't feel like tackling a mad scientist in her birthday suit and what amounted to a paper apron.
Despite her fear that Hammond might have locked her in, the door opened without resistance. Angela looked around carefully before stepping out. It definitely wasn't a proper hospital. None she had ever been in had a patient room attached directly to the operating theater. That would tend to disconcert the patient. The room contained several tables and two examination benches, one of which seemed to have been set up for a gynecological exam. A horrible thought crossed Angela's mind.
"What did he do to me while I was unconscious?" she whispered to herself.
Her hand went instinctively to her sex and she probed herself carefully. She had felt a little sore when she went to the bathroom, but she thought that was because of her lovemaking with Mark earlier in the morning (she tried not to bring up the memories just then, but it was very difficult). Perhaps it was something else. There was something of a dull ache further up inside her body, like what she might have experienced from a pelvic exam. Had Hammond taken a pap smear or had he done something worse? Had he raped her? No, a rapist would want his victim awake so he could experience her terror. What had he done to her? Panic began to rear its head, but Angela fought to keep it down. She went on to explore the room and hopefully find a way out.
On one wall of the room was a large window, which seemed to offer a view of the operating room from some kind of control center, like in a TV or music studio. It didn't seem like a standard operating room observation area because that would be up on the second floor. The 'control' room was full of monitors and computer terminals and Angela wondered about something, so she looked around the operating room. Yes, there were a number of cameras placed around the walls, as well as some free-standing ones on tripods in one corner. Angela shuddered to think that Hammond might be watching her at that very moment, though, of course, there was no one in the control area.
The far side of the room seemed to double as a lab, with numerous pieces of equipment for testing and analyzing samples. There was a high-power Macintosh on one table and displayed on its screen was a 3D-like graphic of Angela's nude body! Horrified, but somehow curious, she seized the mouse and rotated the image. It showed her body in very graphic detail, down to the scar on her stomach from her appendectomy fifteen years earlier. It also showed, much to her disgust, a graphic representation of her sex organs.
It was as if Hammond had placed a camera inside her vagina and scanned her birth canal all the way up to her cervix. But when the travelogue of her genitals passed into her womb, Angela's disgust turned to fascinated revulsion. That bastard had used one of those micro-video probes to enter her uterus! Her hand went to her groin, clutching the area just above her pubic hair, and she shuddered at the thought of that device being inside her. The image showed the wrinkled walls of her womb and even ventured part way down both fallopian tubes. While the thought of having been invaded in such a way outraged her, Angela also found herself intrigued by the beauty of her reproductive system. Perhaps it was tied back to her pregnancy fantasy with Mark, but there was something arousing about seeing the forming place of her potential children. The memory of Mark brought her back to reality and Angela looked in the computer for more information about what Dr. Hammond was up to.
Within a minute she found another part of the answer: a series of reports about her health. Most of them, she realized, were from her personal physician back at school. Hammond must have gotten them from Dr. Yates at University Hospital over the InterNet. Highlighted in red, apparently by Hammond, were the results of her latest blood screen, as well as those of the pelvic exam and HIV and Hepatitis B & C tests she had had done only a month before. There was also a note appended to the last report that read:
Thank you for your inquiry concerning Angela Smith. I agree, she has all the skills needed for a good hospital nurse, as well as the compassion and discretion required by such an environment. Since you were able to provide a confidentiality-release statement from Miss Smith, I am forwarding to you a copy of her Mental Health Assessment. As you can see, Angela has no record of any kind of mental illness and the Nursing Review Committee recently found her to be competent and emotionally suitable for her line of work. I personally find her to be charming and an eager worker who strives beyond the requirements of her duties.
I wasn't aware that Angela had applied to MedPark, but she certainly deserves to work in such a prestigious medical facility. I hope you can offer her a position. If I can be of any further assistance, Dr. Burgoyne, please feel free to contact me.
Sincerely yours,
E. B. Yates, MD
ECS University Hospital
What was this madman up to? Why was he so interested in her medical and psych profiles?
One last file turned up. It seemed to be the results of tests Hammond performed on her while she was unconscious:
PROBABILITY OF CURRENT PREGNANCY 0.8%
VIABILITY OF REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM Excellent
OVULATION STATUS Ovulating
"Good thing Mark used a condom last night," she said to herself, then regretted it.
Angela stood up. She had to find a way out of this place. She spotted a door to the left of the lab area and passed into what looked like a storage area. There didn't seem any other way out of it, but she seemed drawn to a large metal door with a pull handle on it. There was a window, which she peered into. It was a refrigerated storage area, but the evidence of that isn't what caught Angela's attention. It was the two gurneys left side by side in the middle of the room that did. They were both covered by sheets, but it was obvious that there was something underneath those sheets. A voice inside her head told her not to go in there. It was Mark's voice, trying to protect her even in death, but she had to go in. She had to know.
The door pulled open and a rush of mist and cool air hit Angela in the face. She left the door open and walked toward the gurneys. Her gown did nothing to protect her from the cold and she shivered. Her nipples stiffened in the chill air and her feet felt like ice. Suddenly, much sooner than she wanted to be, she was standing next to the left-hand table. Now she could see greater confirmation of what she hadn't wanted to believe. There were bodies underneath those sheets and they were, by obvious evidence, female bodies. The one she was next to seemed to be greatly endowed compared to the other, which made her next move only slightly less difficult. She lifted the sheet.
It was Lisa.
Angela stifled a cry as she saw the large, circular wound between her friend's once-attractive breasts, the same ones she had seen moving sensually the night before when Lisa had been offered to her by Carl for a night of passion and experimentation. Part of Angela regretted not taking the opportunity to express her feelings for Lisa because now it was too late. The cold air made it difficult for any tears to form, but Angela was no less grieved by the senselessness of her friend's death. She reached out and took Lisa's cold and stiffening right hand, squeezing as she had done the night before, hoping that the beautiful young blonde would understand her sorrow, wherever she was now.
Angela's eyes fell on the next gurney, the next body. She tried so hard to steel herself for the moment, but nothing could prepare her for the grief that overwhelmed her when she threw back the sheet covering the corpse of her best friend, Brenda Xu. Until the very moment she saw her face, Angela had hoped that Hammond's words the night before, about having her two friends, might have at least held hope for Brenda. Obviously they were more important to his purposes dead.
The sight of Bren's dead eyes and the horrible, deep slit across her throat, revealing the open ends of blood vessels and her windpipe, made Angela so sick she couldn't fight off the wave of nausea that swept over her. She turned away and doubled over, heaving and crying, but not managing to purge much of anything. It had been too long since she had eaten.
After a few minutes of fighting off the grief and trying to compose herself again, Angela turned back to the body and took the left hand. It was cold, but not as stiff as Lisa's had been. She held and caressed it, looking into the beautiful almond eyes that she had been so fond of, eyes that had been so full of life and happiness, love and wisdom. Tears now rolled from Angela's chin and fell on Brenda's breasts. She leaned over, caressing her roommate's hair, and softly kissed her cold forehead.
"I love you, Bren," she whispered and then rested her cheek against Brenda's.
Angela stood up a few moments later, not wanting to let go of the hand, but forcing herself to. She placed the arm back at Brenda's side, took one long look at her and then faced the door.
"I'll get you for this, Dr. Hammond. I swear to God that you won't get away with taking everything I loved away from me."
As she reached down to pull the sheet back over the body, Angela noticed a small cut on Brenda's lower abdomen, just a little ways above and to the right of her pubic mound. She had never seen it before and, upon closer examination, she figured that it was recent for there wasn't any sign of healing. I must have been made after she died. Curious about this, she walked back to Lisa's body and pulled the sheet down to reveal her matted, golden triangle. There was a cut identical to the one on Brenda's body in the same relative place. Trying to remain objective and pushing down her emotions, Angela bent over to look more closely at the incision. The mystery only seemed to deepen as she began to realize the significance of the location.
"What is he doing it for?" she asked herself aloud.
