The Lab results

It was a little past eight.

Dr Smith sat alone at a long table, swiping across her work tablet with a harsh wave of her index finger. The PDF files contained the test results from Kelly Rayson, bloods, saliva and semen samples had been analysed and the contents dismayed her. She had been working in medicine for twenty-six years, beginning as an over eager med student at John’s Hopkins. She had degrees on her office wall, diplomas in several fields of medicine. She had spent two stints in Africa helping with Ebola and cholera epidemics, had been on the field as disease burnt its way through entire populations and turned them into mush. She had been through dark moments before, plenty of them, but this ...

She was scared, so feverishly scared that it felt surreal. It was an impossible fear that could drive a person mad.

There were certain biological truths that she had understood well as immutable laws of reality. While some animals could change into sequential hermaphrodites, mammals were not among them. Some individuals were born intersex, of course, but true hermaphroditism just didn’t happen. It certainly didn’t happen to women who had spent the previous forty years of life as a biological female with working reproductive organs and a kid to show for it.

But that wasn’t what scared Dr Smith. What scared her was how the cells of Kelly Rayson had so drastically changed. It was a mutation, of sorts, but also something else. It had all the hallmarks of a virus, and that frightened Dr Smith above all else. That opened up a horrible list of possibilities, some of them deadly. At present Kelly seemed healthy, but that could shift in an instant. The virus could progress further, play havoc with her hormones and stop her heart dead.

That brought another fear. She had known Kelly for a few years, and Dr Smith had liked her. She would need to be in a hospital, monitored, interviewed about where she had been in the last several weeks, if she had come into contact with any strange animals or tainted food. There would need to a quarantine, contact tracing…

Oh, she thought, oh no. She had been in close proximity to Kelly, even with gloves. What if the disease was airborne?

The panic almost strangled her, but as her mind often did, she detached and became clinical. She looked at the data. Kelly’s son had been in close contact with her and seemed otherwise fine. Perhaps, it wasn’t easily communicable.

Her phone vibrated loudly on the desk and startled her from her thoughts. She looked at the number. Judith. She picked up, and was appalled by the weakness in her voice as she said, “Hi, Sweetie.”

“You coming home soon, Mom?” Her youngest daughter always spoke with an earnest sweetness that melted everyone she spoke to. “Dad got Chinese. Isn’t your shift done?”

Dr Smith’s swallowed back her worry and **** a little life back into her voice. “Yeah, baby, I’m on my way now. Save me some sweet and sour pork.”

But even as she was out the door of the clinic and in her car, there was a painful twist in Dr Smith’s lower stomach, and cramp in her groin that soon turned into something else…