The Vines by Shelley Nolden (ebook and pdf reader .TXT) 📕

“About that lightning: you shouldn’t be up here. It’s not safe.”

“It won’t kill me.”

“Statistically speaking, that’s true. But it could.”

“No. It won’t.” She shifted to look at him. “Usually, during electrical storms, I climb the taller smokestack. You can’t see it, but I built a platform within its crown.”

His eyes widened. “That’s ridiculous. No offense.”

Cora sighed. “I can’t believe I have to explain this to a Gettler.” She drummed her fingers against her frayed khakis. “The lightning won’t kill me. Neither will any other act of nature. Through all these years, the island’s kept me alive for a reason. Whatever greater force is at work here, it has a purpose for me. It’s given me a gift that someday will save countless others. If I die, the gift dies with me.”

“Where I come from, that’s called a ‘Jesus complex.’”

“Actually,” she said, clutching her necklace, “to the contrary, I know that I’m just another one of God’s children. I have to believe that He’ll reward my devotion by cleansing me. After the right virologists figure out how to use my blood to cure others.”

Despite the madness of her claims, Finn had a sinking feeling that she was connected to his family’s research.

If he gave any indication that he was aware of their mission, his chances of getting off this roof alive would plummet. He pointed at the jagged top of the flue. “Were you up there when it was struck?”

She shook her head. “That day, it was your . . . But someday, once the right man—not a Gettler—has figured out how to harvest and replicate my antibodies, it will be me that lightning strikes.” She looked up. “Then I’ll see Maeve and my mother again, and meet my father.”

“You think God will let you stroll through his pearly gates if you kill me?”

She folded her hands. “There’ll be plenty of time to atone for that sin.” In the dim light from the city, her blue eyes looked like ice blocks.

Reflexively, he pulled his knees to his chest, and the chain jangled. “If my dad didn’t give you those scars, then who did?”

“The other men in your family.” She ran her finger across one of the displaced bricks. “By far, Rollie’s always been the kindest. But he, too, has used me. And treated me like I’m their property.” She rapped the brick against another, then tossed it aside. “I’m their human guinea pig. Did you know George Bernard Shaw coined that phrase?”

“No, though it doesn’t surprise me. My mom’s a big fan.”

“He’s one of my favorite writers,” Cora continued, “and not just because he was a vivisectionist.” Thunder crackled almost directly overhead, yet she didn’t flinch. “Unfortunately, that movement didn’t benefit me. For the past hundred and five years, four generations of your family have been experimenting on me.”

Laughter erupted from his closed lips. The release felt good, so he let it flow until he had to catch his breath. “That’s impossible.”

“I wish that were the case.”

“There’s no way you’re that old.”

“Thus, your family’s obsession.” She checked the spy hole behind her, then tilted her head from side to side, as if carrying on an internal debate.

Fearful that whatever Rollie and Kristian had done to her had driven her mad, Finn waited for her attention to return to him.

With a heavy sigh, she stood up.

“I supposed it’s nothing he hasn’t already seen,” she said aloud but to herself—or the island.

Her gloved hands shaking, she removed her scalpel pouch and messenger bag and set them beside her.

“Please, don’t,” he begged.

Facing away from him, she unbuttoned her pants and let them fall to her ankles.

He ducked his chin, but his reaction hadn’t been fast enough: he’d already glimpsed pale, sinewy thighs below her tank-top hem. “Why are you doing this?”

“You wanted proof,” she said, her voice muffled by her shirt as it passed over her head.

This felt wrong, even more so than when he’d come upon her showering. Yet the awareness of this naked woman before him made his groin throb. He sensed that she wouldn’t redress until he’d looked, so he raised his gaze.

She’d removed her tank top.

Her torso resembled the scarred earth of a battlefield.

Looking him square in the eyes, she touched her midsection. “Dr. Otto Gettler, pancreatic tissue removal, 1907.” Her hand moved upward. “Dr. Ulrich Gettler, lung tissue transplantation, 1950.” She fingered the base of her throat. “This one, too, Dr. Ulrich Gettler, thyroid tissue sample, 1982.”

She ran her finger along a horizontal scar below her belly button. Trembling, she bit her knuckle and looked to the sky.

If she started to cry, he didn’t know what he would do.

Her attention snapped back to him, and she pointed to her lower lumbar. “Dr. Kristian Gettler, spinal tap, 2000.”

Finn gasped.

“Your father’s not aware of that one,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “Kristian bought my silence.”

Blackness swallowed her; he thought he must have passed out. Then everything flashed white. Rumbling filled his ears, and he shook his head to clear his vision. She was pointing at a series of scars on her thigh. “Dr. Ulrich Gettler, bacterial battery, 1936.”

His esophagus heaved, and he clamped his hand over the N-95. This had to be a sick nightmare. Maybe he was still asleep in the cell. No, he couldn’t have dreamed this up.

“Put your clothes back on, please.”

“Why? You can’t handle what your family’s done to me?”

It can’t possibly be true. Yet the memory of one of Sylvia’s old poems suggested otherwise. As a teenager, he’d found it in her desk drawer. So disturbing, the verses had stayed with him. He’d asked her why she’d written about men hurting a scarred woman. Sylvia had answered that it was a metaphor relating to the women’s rights movement.

Now Finn wished he could dismiss those stanzas as coincidence. The history she was describing didn’t jibe with an effort to generate and harvest “super” antibodies. Either she was lying about the source of those scars, or he knew far less about the true nature of his family’s