Maya's Child

Chapter Five

Frank's lanky frame seems out of place in Goodal's expansive

office. Slowly, he begins to tell the Chief what he has learned in his
investigation. The conclusions he has come to are quite amazing,
dramatic, and quite unexpected. Frank had met Juliana a time or two,
before the Chief had split with his wife (they hadn't gotten divorced
yet; he just wouldn't live with her anymore) and they had a few dinner
parties to which he had been invited. She had seemed like a nice
enough girl then, very pretty and a bit shy, but he had reason to
believe that she had gotten wilder as she got older, smoking weed,
hanging out with boys, even studying witchcraft. There were several
very interesting items they had found in the garage room in which it
was believed the incident had occurred. There were still trying to
figure out exactly what had happened before she disappeared. The
evidence was confused and confusing. It just didn't make any sense.
Which was why Frank had been put on the case; he had developed a
reputation, which he ascribed to his meticulous research methods, for
solving the unsolvable cases.
Supporting the wild talk he told the Chief, he had collected
various news articles from around the country. Sam found much of it
hard to believe, especially the part of these stories having anything to
do with his daughter. As Frank continues to speak a rising horror
slowly builds in the pit of his stomach and he begins to believe.... and
to doubt anything he had thought he know about the daughter he had
raised as his own. With it being a totally closed adoption the Goodals
had never met the mother; they had assumed the adoption agency
knew who she was. As it turned out, the Goodals were wrong.
“You see, Chief, it was almost funny how I figured this part of it
out. I run damn near halfway across the country chasing down your
little girl, and when I seemed to run into someone as knew something,
if they said they recognized her, it wasn't never in a good way. As I
looked further, and dug deeper, I found almost twenty damn years of
reports and news articles mentioning brutal, unexplained, confusing
crime scenes in which casual observers reported seeing a young
female, long brown hair, hurrying away from the scenes. They say she
looked nervous though how she had no blood on her, I don't know. All
the witnesses claimed they didn't know her, she wasn't from around
wherever they were, nobody who saw her at all these places even
knew her damn name. Nobody really recognized her till I showed them
the pictures of your daughter. Got a lot of 'uh huh, that's the girl' and
you won't believe what authoritays had found when they went up in
them there buildings that girl had left.”
At that, Frank pulled a yellow letter sleeve out of his briefcase
and retrieved the pictures. About fifty in all, Frank spread them across
the desk. Everything in the pictures in place except for the torn
bodies. Bloody fragments of what once had been men. Or women.
You couldn't tell from the pictures. In some you could actually see into
the victims. But what you could see didn't make any sense. How was
this amount of damage done? It was enough to make the Chief
nauseous just looking at them.
“And Juliana is involved in this how?” The Chief's incredulous
question struck right to the heart of the issue.
“Well, Chief... Sam... that's a little harder to explain, but I've got
a working hypothesis. With these pictures, and what we know we
found in your garage, I've come to the conclusion that this woman is
your daughter's natural mother. The resemblance is just too strong.
We even got a couple of partial glimpses of her from store cameras
and whatnot and she looks just like Juliana! And now, this is where it
gets really weird. I did a lot of research to get the intel I did and I got
sworn to secrecy, other than you, on a whole bunch of the info I did
get. There are some big boys with their asses majorly on the line with
this one, and nobody wants the whole works to get gummed up.”
“Now, what in the hell are you talking about now? Come on
Sergeant, get to the point. How is all this getting us closer to finding
my daughter?” Sam's face had turned bright red, betraying a hint of
Irish in his ancestry, and a penchant for getting worked up when he is
upset.
“OK, Chief, I'll tell you as much as I was able to piece together.
It's kinda spotty, but it's the best information I could find. Seems that
something like thirty years ago either our own government or one of
the larger biochemical companies came up with the idea of creating a
perfect human being. The genetically restructured the D-N-A, changed
the strand thing in some unknown way, possibly using alien D-N-A
(though no one would really admit to that part) and took a normal
fertilized human ova, or egg, if you prefer, removed the genetic
structure already there, and implanted this new strand of D-N-A.”
Franks speech sounds forced, pressured, like he's trying to fit a novel
into the space of a conversation.
“They knew, apparently, that this wouldn't be an ordinary human
child. The implanted the egg into a surrogate mother and waited.
Guess the incubation period was rather short... only about seven
months till the baby was born.
Now the scientists involved had apparently tried to make this
child, this thing, incapable of breeding by removing the part of the D-
N-A structure believed to be involved in human fertility and tweaked
the genetics to make it almost impervious to germs and bacterium and
whatnot. The had also stimulated the part of the strand they believe
to be involved in ESP and psychic phenomena. They had guessed and
'tweaked' a number of genes that they thought would create a true
telepath.”
“And how does Juliana tie into this? You just said this thing
wasn't make to reproduce. How can this have anything to do with
her?” The Chief sounds impatient, his scowl getting worse by the
minute.
“Hold your horses, sir, I was just getting to that. You're right,
they thought it wouldn't be able to breed but there was a side effect no
one could have ever expected. This thing reproduces asexually. When
the time is 'right' it simply begins to grow a child, a carbon copy of
itself. No father, so no genes to change anything in the genetic
structure of the child. And when this thing got old enough, the
assumption was that it would have its own baby.
It looks female and (it took a lot of arm twisting to get this bit)
apparently they called the first one Maya. The problem wasn't
apparent for quite awhile, as there was no sign the researchers could
look to that would have warned them of this. She had her first child at
about sixteen or seventeen, as soon as her body could support it. The
strange thing is that she at first appeared to be a normal little girl,
quite bright, though not appearing to possess any of the abilities they
had been hoping for. There didn't seem to be anything unusual about
her as a baby until they X-rayed and ultrasounded her. There were
some definite differences, like an unusually large heart, capable of
pumping up to thirty percent more blood through her body than the
average child. Second, the child's reproductive organs had some
strange structures, though, until she had her first baby, they had no
idea what it meant. “ At this, Frank pauses and sips his now lukewarm
coffee before resuming, “She possessed structures in her reproductive
areas that they had never seen before in nature; they matched no
description of an organ that any of the doctors involved had ever seen
or heard of.”
Frank takes a breath, looking away from Chief Goodal briefly,
having known before this conversation started that this was not going
to be easy. Now that he was past most of the history part of what he
had to tell the Chief, he knows that now is going to be the hardest part,
explaining exactly how Juliana fit into all this.
“Well, what happened to the girl? I still don't quite see how this
Maya could have anything to do with Juliana. You said this happened
over thirty years ago!” The Chief seems exasperated, desperate to
know what is going on. “And how is this getting closer to finding my
baby?”
 “Getting to that, sir. First, Maya, the girl, grew up. Then about
the time she hit puberty, she started complaining of smells. Smells
and her head hurting. At first, the doctors thought that maybe they
had inadvertently given her some form of late onset epilepsy, due the
the smell thing, apparently a common symptom of seizure disorders.
Only problem was they couldn't find any trace of what was causing the
smells or the headaches she was reporting. Her blood work came back
normal and she appeared to be healthy. Gradually, as nothing more
seemed to happen, they almost dismissed these symptoms as some
form of hypochondria or an allergic reaction to something in her
environment.
Nobody really noticed that she was gaining weight. Several
months into this period one of the researchers, scientists, whatever...
had an idea nobody had thought of yet. He ran his own test, obtaining
a sample of Maya's blood from Maya herself as she lay lost inside a
pain-induced fog. The test was positive. Maya was pregnant.” Frank
pauses here, partly because he feels uncomfortable going on, and
partly because of the look in Sam Goodal's eyes.
“Tell me, something, Chief. How much do you know about
Juliana's biological mother?” The question hits the Chief like a falling
silo.
“Nothing. We never found out anything. The way the adoption
agency acted, we thought maybe she had died in childbirth or
something.”
“Well, I've found out that neither the adoption agency you went
through nor the hospital she was first in know anything either. She
was found on the steps of the hospital, laid in a small basket, swaddled
in blankets. She wasn't crying, just watching everything around her.
And... nobody knows who put her there.”
“The people I talked to said that the baby's genetic structure was
identical to Maya's. Not even as much difference as you see with
identical twins. After the birth, Maya appeared to blossom. And was it
they had wondered if she had any psychic abilities? Now there was no
doubt.
Apparently, among her universe of one, Maya was to be
unmatched. The woman, no longer a child, seemed to gain an
uncanny awareness of exactly what was going on around her. Where
before she had been happy to interact with the researchers, acting as
if all the time they were there, that it was perfectly normal to grow up
inside their facility, as if she was not aware that there was a world
outside their walls. Then came the baby. After that came the blood.
Two of the pictures I have are from the facility, although I have still
been unable to positively identify exactly what facility it was. I got
pictures, but no one would fess up where it was. The few people who
have been willing to talk to me at all refuse to divulge anything that
whoever financed this thing could interpret in any way as a breach of
their required confidentiality contracts. After the 'attack' Maya was
locked up. It was presumed that the attack had something to do with a
mother protecting its offspring, though any attempt at figuring out
Maya's thought processes led nowhere. She didn't seem to think like a
human at all anymore. Very primal, I've been told.
Her baby was raised and observed the same as Maya had been.
Gradually, as things calmed down, the researchers decided that the
danger was past and that Maya could be let out to involve herself in
the care of her child, for which she had been asking for months. She
was let out and three years after her first child was born, Maya had her
second, this one also an identical 'clone' of herself. Then, after another
series of unexplainable mutilations (this pictures here)” Frank points to
a series of photos that have more blood than Sam has ever seen in a
photo, “she disappeared, with the infant, though she doesn't appear to
have been able to get the other child out. Whoever did this probably
still has the other child, though she would be in possibly her late teens,
early twenties by now.”
“What do you mean, she just disappeared?” The Chief, having
become fully involved in the story, felt that this story might sound
crazy, but was becoming increasingly interesting. He shudders at the
implication involving his daughter, though.
“By disappeared, I mean, disappeared, never heard from again,
except for sightings leaving the scenes of some rather bizarre crime
scenes, presumably still at large, possibly, oh, hell, from what I've been
told, probably even has some kind of elaborate master plan. This one
is extremely wily and very smart.” Frank hesitates to say what he
knows he has to. “Chief Goodal, sir, I regret to have to tell you that I
believe that your daughter, Juliana, is that baby, was that infant, that
Maya escaped with and that you have been living with a time bomb
right under your nose.”
“I believe it was your daughter that was left on those hospital
steps by this monster. If she is Maya's child, you need to warn your
wife. You may both be in danger.”