A/N: Confession time: I borrowed—okay, took—all right, stole this chapter's situation from The Eye II. It just fit so well…
Thursday Night:
Claire took an orange from the turquoise fruit bowl on her counter, peeled it, and ate the segments slowly. The color of the peel was close to the color of her hair; not that she was comparing them.
It was no good. Not the orange itself, it was fine, as sweet and juicy as one could want, but she craved a bowl of ice cream. Coconut ice cream, with chocolate syrup drizzled over it, like a frozen Mounds bar. She wanted it very, very badly.
All that day she had been good about what she ate, not starving herself, but making good food choices. A bowl of raisin bran instead of a big plate of scrambled eggs for breakfast. Rice with lots of vegetables and a piece of fish, not steak, for lunch. An apple in the afternoon. A skinless, boneless chicken breast half for dinner with fresh tomatoes and a small portion of pasta. And now an orange.
Sensible meals, nutritionally balanced, low in fat and carbohydrates, but not so light that she was hungry.
Except that she was. And she wanted ice cream. Empty calories laden with fat and cholesterol, with lots and lots of sugar. The calcium from the milk wouldn't even come close to making up for that.
No.
I want it!
No. It's late.
But this craving won't go away! I want ice cream!
It's 10:48 at night. You can't have it.
Ice cream! Sweet delicious coconut ice cream. Chocolate syrup—and maybe chopped nuts.
More fat. No.
I still want it.
No.
If I don't get some, I'll keep on wanting it. I'll obsess over it. I won't be able to think of anything else.
No.
But if I do get it, then it's done and over with. I can put it behind me. I can just have a portion—even half a portion—and then I won't want it so badly. The first taste is always the best, after all.
One portion, and the rest goes down the sink.
All right!
Her internal battle won—or lost, depending on how one looked at it, she slipped down off the stool and went for her purse. The convenience store was on the next block, and her at-home sweater and drawstring pants would do for such a short outing.
Getting there wasn't the problem. Finding what she wanted wasn't the problem. It was on the way back that she encountered trouble.
She knew a shortcut through the parking lot which separated her complex from the next. Technically it wasn't open to pedestrians, but going around meant adding ten minutes to her walk, while going through…
Going through meant two or three minutes of shadows and strange noises, in a place without security cameras or bright lights. She had walked through there dozens, hundreds of times in the years she had lived there, safely and unbothered.
But tonight was different.
She rounded a corner of the building, and a man stepped out in front of her. "Hi, maybe you can help me. Do you know where I can catch the rail car?" There was nothing special about him; he was medium everything, medium height, medium build—nothing except his eyes, which were bright with excitement.
She recoiled, then controlled herself. "It's right down the block. You can see the sign if you look to the left." Without breaking pace, she tried to sidestep him, but he blocked her path again.
"What about the bus stop? The bus is more convenient for me, actually."
"I think you better find somebody else to help you," she replied, tight-lipped. Casually, she slipped one hand into her purse, feeling for her keys and the pepper spray which shared the key ring.
"Can't you go with me?" he asked, and then he had her in his grasp, one arm around her waist and the other around her neck, holding a rag with the familiar odor of chloroform over her nose and mouth.
She couldn't scream, screaming would mean taking in a deep breath. She held it instead, and fought as she had learned to in self-defense classes, jabbing with her elbows, kicking at his shins, trying to crush his toes.
He didn't seem to notice. She was tall and strong for a woman, but he matched her in height, and outmatched her in weight and strength. Time was on his side, too. Eventually she had to breathe, and the more she fought, the faster that moment came. She had no choice but to breathe in that numbing vapor.
Claire's assailant had done this many times before. He knew better than to relax immediately once she went limp in his grip, and he kept the anesthesia-soaked cloth over her face for several moments longer, ensuring she was unconscious before he dragged her behind a dumpster, a space shielded from direct view.
He had almost let her pass by unmolested, thinking her a teenage boy rather than a tall woman, but then he saw her purse. Whether she was young or old, attractive or ugly, gaunt or obese did not matter to him; his victims had ranged from seventeen to seventy-four. She was a woman, and that was enough. He tugged at her clothing, pulling her sweater off and reached for the knot at her waist.
Then she moved.
Claire came to, and for a moment she did not know where she was. "Claire. I'm sorry, but I have to ask you this. Do you have any diseases such as AIDS or hepatitis?"
"What?" She was sitting in a wheelchair in a hospital emergency room. Focusing on the person who had asked her the question, she realized she knew the woman. Doctor Bethany Bainbridge, who had interned with her at Seattle General. "Why?"
"We need to know what he might have been exposed to." Bethany explained. "Don't worry, we're giving him the full battery of tests, so we know what you've been exposed to."
Claire shook her head and felt wet tendrils of hair against her neck. Looking down, she saw she was wearing a hospital gown over a pair of surgical scrub pants, and an IV snaked down into her arm from a bag of clear liquid above her head. "What—? What happened?"
"She's coming out of shock now." Bethany explained to someone just out of Claire's range of vision. "Like I said, she was running on autopilot."
The 'someone' stepped forward. It was a police officer, one Claire didn't know. "You don't remember?" he asked.
Memories were starting to come to her. There'd been a weird man in the parking lot, and a rag with chloroform.
"Was I raped?" she asked. What a horrible way to get pregnant…
"No." The officer regarded her with curiosity. "You really don't remember, do you? We're pretty sure the guy who grabbed you is a serial rapist we've been looking for for some time. There are about a dozen women who reported being attacked the same way. We're going to have to wait for the DNA evidence, though."
He made that pronouncement and paused, clearly waiting for her to ask. "All right. Why 'though'?"
"Because he doesn't have enough face left to identify. Not in its original condition. It took three people to pull you off him."
An orderly pushed a wheelchair past them. A person sat in it, his—if it was a he—face bandaged like a mummy's, with only the eyes and a slit for the mouth left uncovered. His hands were bandaged as well, and hand-cuffed to the chair's armrests. His head nodded, and he seemed drugged. When his eyes opened and he saw Claire, however, he began to scream—and scream—and scream.
"Hey, don't do that!" exclaimed the orderly, as red spots appeared on the pristine white of the bandages, spreading out into splotches. "You've torn the stitches!" He turned the chair around. "Back to work—Oh, is that her? Ms. Hannibal Lechter?"
"Just take him back to Doctor Simms." Bethany ordered.
"I did that to him?" Claire asked.
"Don't worry," the policeman told her, "You're not in any trouble. It was a clear-cut case of self-defense, and you were under the influence of a drug he administered to you. You're not responsible for your actions. Anyhow, no one's going to blame a pregnant woman for defending herself against an attacker."
"What?" burst from Claire's lips.
"Don't worry," Bethany laid a hand on Claire's shoulder. "You probably don't remember, but that was all you were concerned about when they brought you in. 'Is my baby all right? Did he hurt my baby?', you kept repeating. We had to let you listen to the fetal heartbeat before you'd let us clean you up, and then we took you for an emergency ultrasound, to make sure nothing got torn loose. Not that you were bleeding or anything. By the way, " She handed Claire several blurry ultrasound print-outs. "here you go. Sammie's first baby pictures."
"…I told you about Sammie?"
"Uh-huh. You seem very certain it's going to be a girl, but it's a bit soon to tell. Still, I guess if it's a boy he can be 'Samuel', rather than Samara. Anyhow, you have a normally-developing four-month fetus floating around inside you—what's wrong?"
"I—uh, hadn't told anyone yet."
"Hon, it's only a matter of time before the whole world is going to know you're pregnant just by looking. Now, it's 3:37 in the morning, so you're our guest for the rest of the night. Officer Kandinsky tells me he wants to take your statement, and then I'll send someone to take you to a room. Okay?"
"Okay," Claire replied, mechanically. She answered the officer's questions as best she could, but her mind was elsewhere.
'Seven weeks.'
"Doctor Winslow, are you pregnant?"
"I've found out what's so strange about the DNA structure of that virus. It's partly human."
"If I recall correctly, viruses are like tanks. A virus invades a cell, like a tank invading a factory, and the DNA swarms into the cell, taking over its resources and stuffing it full of its own genes. Then it forces the cell to replicate the virus, which then bursts out in all directions to invade more cells. Now you're saying this virus is loaded with Samara's DNA."
"That's right."
"Does that mean Samara's DNA takes over? Is an infected person going to grow into a Samara-clone?"
'Seven weeks'
"Viruses can't reproduce on their own. They need a living host."
"What would you do for this child if she were living flesh and blood, and you were her guardian?"
A/N: Thank you, Vampyro and Over the moon!