Nathan Grundy’s Bloodline

by Catherine J. Link

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3, 4

conclusion

“I’ve got to see Maddy, Calvin,” Nathan said. Calvin was a big man who filled up the doorway. For a moment, Nathan was wondering how the hell he had beaten him so badly. His nose had been broken, both eyes were black, and he had one arm in a sling.

“The only thing you should be saying to me right now is how sorry you are for laying hands on me.”

“I am sorry, Calvin,” Nathan said. “You know I am, but right now I have to talk to Maddy.”

“There is no way I am letting you see my daughter,” he said resolutely, “so you take yourself on outta here.”

“I’ve got something I need to say to her. I need to tell her that I realize now that I can’t marry her. I’m not good enough.”

“Damn right you’re not. Just look at yourself. I never had too much good to say about you, but I never knew you to be a drug addict. What the hell have you been taking?”

“It’s nothing like that, Calvin, I promise you. Please let me see Maddy. Just for a minute.”

“I know an addict when I see one. You’re so out of it right now that you can’t even stand up straight. You smell like you haven’t bathed in a week. You better understand this. You are not seeing my daughter now or ever again.”

“I understand, Calvin,” Nathan said. “And you are more right than you know to protect her. You tell her for me that because I love her, I’m staying away. Please do that for me. Tell her I want her to keep the ring, to remind her of the good times.”

Nathan turned to go back to his truck when he heard Calvin’s voice raised in anger.

“Maddy, you get back in the other room!” he shouted. “You are not going near that bastard ever again.”

The door was closing, but Nathan could hear what was happening in the house. He heard Maddy’s voice pleading, and Calvin shouting at her. He heard the slap when Calvin backhanded Maddy across the face, and he heard her body hit the floor.

An adrenaline surge over took Nathan, a surge so enormous that if he had not begun to move, he would have suffered a major heart attack right then. Unknowingly, he saved his own life when he kicked the door open and attacked Calvin, using his fists on the big man, knocking him to the floor. In a frenzy, he kicked Calvin repeatedly, breaking ribs and shattering the big man’s spleen. Only when his inhuman strength finally flagged did Nathan hear Maddy screaming.

Nathan looked at her, and her screams became sobs. He extended a hand toward her, and she shrank back in terror.

He looked down at Maddy’s father, at the ruined, bloody face. I didn’t come here to do this, he thought. Why did I come?

“I love you,” was all he could think to say before running out the door.

* * *

Driving through the woods was making Russell Thompson nervous. One turn off the main highway and the road dwindled down to a single lane dirt path through thickets.

Little daylight penetrated the old-growth forest. It was just after three in the afternoon, but heavy shadows made him feel as though twilight was nearing. Blighted trees stood out among the healthy. Twisted, lifeless limbs seemed to be beckoning, leading him deeper into eerie woods.

Russell did what he always did when he was anxious: he laughed. Not true, hearty laughter but nervous giggles that would escape from his throat before he could stop them.

He finally saw the trailer, and the sight of it made him sick to his stomach.

Russell had grown up in a single-wide mobile, and memories that he had fought so hard to banish came back in an inescapable flood.

Four brothers and one sister, all living with an alcoholic mother and no father in the middle of nowhere. Their two-acre plot of land was mostly clay, making it nearly impossible to grow anything more than a sickly patch of undersized vegetables. Waiting eagerly for a monthly welfare check, his mother bought everything they owned from yard sales and the St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop sixty miles away. There was no place to shop in the Colonia where he was born and raised in an unincorporated area of New Mexico.

A smart and ambitious youth, Russell knew at an early age that he wanted to be a doctor. He soon realized that the only way he would ever get his hands on enough money to pay for his schooling was by illegal means and, all these years later, he still had the stink of that pathetic single-wide and his criminal past clinging to him, a constant reminder that he had long ago smashed his moral compass beyond repair.

“Damn!” he said, getting out of the car, spitting in the dirt.

“Come on in, Doc,” a voice called. He went to the screen door and looked inside, seeing only darkness. A rank odor hit him in the face, causing him to jerk back.

“Nathan?”

“Door’s open.”

Against his better judgment, Russell went in. He stood near the door, ready to bolt out if he had to; Russell Thompson was frightened. “Did you forget to pay the light bill?”

“Light hurts my eyes. I’d rather do without it, but I’ll turn one on for you.”

“Don’t bother. My eyes will adjust,” Russell said. He could barely make out something moving about in the room, and it didn’t look anything like Nathan. My God! He looks like a primitive. An ape-man.

Nathan was naked. His body was covered with hair, and he was severely hunched over.

“Pardon my nakedness; I can’t stand the feel of clothes any more. What do you think happened here, Doc? Does this have anything to do with the transplant, or did God just smite me?”

“Can we sit?” Russell asked.

“There’s a chair behind you. I need the recliner. It supports my back. We don’t have a lot of time, Doc.”

“Why not?”

“Talk to me, Doc.”

“I’m sorry about all this, truly. I’m not going to lie, Nathan. Nothing makes sense.”

“No, no, no!” Nathan bolted upright in the recliner, ready to spring. “You have got to tell me something. Even if you can’t fix this, and I know you can’t. I’m not a stupid man.”

“I have a theory. Just a theory, mind you,” Russell said, struggling to remain calm. “Of course, this all started with the transplant. I got you an organ that my agent claimed to have bought in South America. There was something odd about the kidney. I knew it the minute I saw it.”

“You better hurry, Doc. They’re coming.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Keep talking, Doc.”

“The kidney, it was beautiful. Larger than normal, and healthy. Looking healthier than a disembodied organ should look, and that’s what made me concerned, but not enough to reject it.

“We had no choice but to use the kidney,” he said with a smile on his lips. “The patient... you... you were on the table, open, with no other options available. We had to proceed.”

Nathan let out a grunt in reply.

“Your changes are severe, Nathan, but not totally unique. I remember a Turkish physician who wrote a paper about Uner Tan Syndrome. It causes sufferers to walk on all fours, with a quadrupedal motion. It’s rare, but it happens.

“Also, did you know that modern humans carry genes from our Neanderthal cousins? Not everyone, of course, but many people do.

“And there are other throwback defects. Hypertrichosis, for example. Excessive hair growth to the point of covering the face and body completely. There are people walking around in the modern world with this condition.”

“You’re rambling, Doc.”

“I’m not really,” Russell said, getting up off the chair.

“I have a theory, Nathan. A goddamn theory!” Russell shouted, sounding a bit hysterical. “I’ve been working on it for years, and you are helping me prove it in a big way.”

Nathan let out another grunt.

“I will do everything I can for you,” Russell said, “but you must understand how important this is. You will be helping scientists around the world gain knowledge of the human gene pool and how to manipulate it. A game-changer, that’s the miracle that you have become, Nathan. You’re a goddamn game-changer.”

Nathan remained silent, trying to think. It took a great effort to think clearly now. His brain was being bombarded by primitive impulses. Hungry, thirsty, tired, angry, and with each impulse came the urge for instant gratification. It took an enormous amount of self-control for him not to be overtaken by these impulses.

“You will come back to the medical center with me, Nathan,” Russell said to him, speaking softly. “I will take care of you. You will be the catalyst for a new era of scientific research. You will not have suffered in vain, I promise you that.”

Russell reached into his jacket pocket and took out the hypodermic needle filled with Librium. He turned Nathan’s arm, searching for a vein beneath the growth of long coarse hair, and began injecting him.

Just then, something startled Russell. An odd sound came from within the depths of a dark corner. He could see little, but he heard the distress calls, bleats and mewing of some unseen creature.

Nathan heard it also and jolted fully aware. Before Russell pulled the needle from his vein, he shoved Russell away, backward. A hard landing knocked the air from Russell’s lungs, and he gasped, scrambling to his feet.

Nathan pulled the needle from his own arm.

“You did this to me, didn’t you? You experimented on me! I was your lab rat!”

“No! Fate did this. To both of us, Nathan! We will be famous, you and I.”

Lumbering like an ape, Nathan rushed toward Russell and shoved him into a wall. Windows broke, and things fell around them. Russell broke free and dashed for the door, but Nathan grabbed him by the arm, nearly yanking it from his shoulder.

Russell was thrown to the floor, and Nathan pounded his chest with open hands, looking for all the world like an enraged gorilla. He roared from deep down in his gut.

Russell’s hands felt about the floor beneath him in a desperate search for a weapon. He felt his fingers being sliced by broken glass and grasped a large shard in a slippery grip. He jammed upward with all his strength, stabbing Nathan in one eye.

Nathan howled. With blood and gore oozing down his face, he turned his rage on Russell again, slashing him from face to belly with his claws. Russell, still armed with the shard of glass, stabbed upward once more, jamming the glass into Nathan’s remaining eye, blinding him.

Nathan backed off in pain, and Russell was able to get to his feet and run. He escaped the trailer just as sheriff’s deputies were pulling up, lights ablaze and sirens screaming.

“He’s crazy!” Russell shouted. “Don’t go in there! He’s gone insane!”

The deputies pulled Russell away from the trailer. His clothing was shredded. He was bleeding from deep gashes on his face and torso. His hands were dripping blood.

“He’s blind,” Russell yelled. “I blinded him during the fight. He’s not armed, but he’s still dangerous.”

More deputies arrived, perhaps ten in all and they carefully approached the trailer.

Looking through the open door, the deputies saw no one. The inside of the trailer had been destroyed, and there was broken glass and pools of blood everywhere, but the mad man was nowhere to be seen. When they entered, they heard a shotgun blast. They ran back outside and took cover.

For Russell, time slowed to a crawl. An ambulance arrived, but he refused to leave. He was desperate to see what had happened to Nathan. Perhaps I can salvage something from all this, he thought.

Hearing a strange sound, an odd mewling cry, not unlike that of a human child, the deputies re-entered the trailer and found Nathan Grundy in the back, lying against an open closet door. Although blind, he had managed to find his shotgun and put it under his chin. On the floor next to his dead body lay a speckled fawn. It bleated at the ape-man and would occasionally nudge him. One of the deputies picked it up gently and carried it outside.

“Was that thing a man?” the deputy asked Russell.

“Yes, he was a man,” Russell said, seeing the fawn. “Was that in there?”

“It was cuddled up next to his body. What was wrong with the guy?”

“He was born with genetic defects. He was, in old-school terms, a throwback. More able to identify with animals than people,” Russell said, staring at the fawn with interest. “I’ll be able to learn more about it when I get his body back to my lab.”

“Sorry, Doc. The body goes to the medical examiner.”

“Yes, then it will come to me,” Russell said, with a sly grin on his bloodied face. “That is part of my agreement when I do transplants of any kind. I do the operation for free, but I have access to patients for the rest of their lives. And I get their bodies for research. If they die, of course.”

“I’ve never heard of an agreement like that,” the deputy said.

“I do important work, deputy. Genetic research,” Russell said smugly. “I’m working on a theory, you see, and it’s a game-changer. A goddamn game-changer.”