Do No Harm

Award Category
America's blood supply is supposed to be secure. But what would happen if it weren't? If a serial killer decided to hijack the tens of thousands of blood transfusions that occur daily, spreading an illness that killed everyone it touched?

ONE

Joseph was fuming. Absolutely livid as he paced around the hardwood floors of his kitchen in his standard everyday attire of khaki slacks and a button-down shirt. “I should’ve won that award,” the doctor hissed to no one in particular. The kitchen was empty except for him, as was the rest of the house. Joseph lived alone. He preferred it that way. Having someone else always underfoot was messy. Inconvenient. And, more than anything else, it got in the way of his research. “Research that deserved to win!”

The slender, well-dressed man in his mid-forties was yelling now, but he was angry enough to yell. All of his hard work, five years spent in his research lab working on a cure for malaria, and he had nothing to show for it. Sure, Joseph had created an excellent prototype for a vaccine and recently sold it to a large pharmaceutical company for several million dollars. But Joseph didn’t care about the money. He wanted the fame. The respect. He wanted to be known not only in the science community but also the general public as the best infectious disease researcher alive. Joseph was the best. He knew he was the best. Now the rest of the world needed to know it too.

When he finished pacing, the bachelor doctor walked over to the island in the middle of his kitchen and pressed a security code into the keypad located just underneath the granite countertop. Seconds later, a hiss-pop sound let Joseph know that the secret door was unlocked. Swinging open what to an untrained eye was just the end of the kitchen’s island, Joseph ducked his buzz cut, salt-and-pepper colored head and slowly descended the now visible stairs into his private research lab. Originally built as a safe room for his house, Joseph had long ago decided to use the bunker for the research projects that he didn’t want anyone to know about. Financed by the money he made from selling drug prototypes to big pharmaceutical companies, Joseph had another small workspace set up on the second floor of his suburban home that other people were allowed to see, on the off chance he happened to have visitors. But this lab was special. This was Joseph’s sanctuary. This was where he was working on the project that would force people to recognize just how brilliant he truly was.

It wasn’t a new idea, really – the one that Joseph had to make a virus that could kill people. Doctors and researchers put together new viruses all the time. They called them recombinant viruses. Gene therapy techniques were based on the idea. All that was required was a vector (the viral capsid or shell) and the right arrangement of DNA or RNA. That combination of genes would then create proteins to fight against a patient’s disease. When done correctly, miraculous things could happen, like new treatments for skin cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and leukemia.

Or, as Joseph predicted, very dangerous things could happen. It was his plan to take the tried and true method of gene therapy to engineer a virus that would express a deadly protein. The virus would then be delivered to the body through blood transfusions, although Joseph was still figuring out the best way to get access to that much human blood and deliver it to hospitals. This entire project was a big challenge for him . . . the man who had spent the past several decades of his life focused only on helping patients and curing diseases now had to plot and plan and scheme for not only how to make a new, deadly virus but also how to avoid police detection in the process. It was thrilling, this new adventure of his.

As Joseph sat in his secret underground lab, working to find the right combination of vectors and genes to express the exact deadly protein that he wanted, he couldn’t help but get excited about what was to come. Operation Respect, as he had labeled the enterprise, would take a lot of time and effort. Years, perhaps. But it will also be fun, he thought with excitement. Exhausting, a little terrifying probably, but also really, really fun.

****

A full year and a half passed without Joseph making any significant progress on his secret virus. A lesser man, a lesser doctor, might have gotten frustrated and given up. But Joseph had learned from a very young age how to be patient. His parents, a trauma surgeon and a socialite, hadn’t been at all interested in raising their only child. Joseph was convinced that he was only born to satisfy his grandparents’ desire for an heir. So he learned to be patient while waiting for his parents to notice him. Or his nannies to feed him. Or a teacher to walk by and let him out of the locker that he was inevitably shoved into at school. Yes, Joseph was a patient man.

Nevertheless, the scheming doctor hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to make the new proteins do exactly what he wanted them to do . . . every time Joseph thought he was close to having it figured out, something would go wrong. The virus would kill too slowly, or wouldn’t kill at all. Several prototypes killed like Joseph wanted but would have been way too easy for hospitals to detect and treat.

Part of the problem was inherent in the complicated virus-making process itself, but a large portion of Joseph’s troubles were self-imposed. Because he couldn’t just make a killer virus and be done with it. If that was the case, Joseph would have been finished with this research stage of Operation Respect several months ago. No, Joseph’s virus needed to be more than just a killer. It needed to be a silent killer. Untraceable. Indeed, the image that always came to his mind while working late at night in his safe room-turned-lab was that of military fighter jets. Those highly complex, high-functioning airplanes were endowed with stealth capabilities to keep them from being detected on enemy radar. Joseph, for his part, was creating a stealth virus.

“And both my virus and those flashy airplanes will work in the service of our country, won’t they?”

Joseph posed his question to a cage full of little white mice that he was using to test his new viral concoctions. In Joseph’s brilliant yet warped mind, what he was doing – designing a virus that would kill, at minimum, dozens of people – was actually a favor to the United States. The victims of his plan, the ones who would die, were unfortunately just the collateral damage in his creative destruction. “America needs to know how great I am,” the doctor continued confidently. “They need to understand the groundbreaking quality of research of which I am capable. They don’t understand it right now. But they will. And we’ll all be better off once they do.”

****

“It’s ready,” Joseph declared as he inspected the results of his latest test run, nearly two years after he first decided to teach the world a thing or two about respecting him and his medical abilities. “It’s finally ready.” Trial after trial had come up short of what Joseph wanted to create, but now he had finally managed to find the correct combination of vector, gene, and protein. Joseph knew that if this was a professional lab and the project was a new drug, it would need to undergo human trials first before being declared ‘ready.’ But he was working in different circumstances, and mice testing would simply have to do. Joseph had told the guy at the store that he had a pet snake – how else can you explain needing to buy mass quantities of little white mice? He always paid in cash, too. He couldn’t afford to leave any kind of trail.

“Yes, we’re ready,” Joseph said again, talking as if the deadly virus sitting in vials on the table in front of him was another person, a partner in crime. It was much more fun that way. Instead of a weapon, he had a partner. An assistant in Joseph’s bid to finally gain the respect he deserved. No one ever respected him. Not his surgeon father, who thought that doctors who don’t cut aren’t real doctors at all. Not his mother, who was so in awe of his father that Joseph was merely an afterthought. She skipped her son’s medical school graduation to sit in the gallery and watch yet another of Joseph Sr.’s surgeries. No respect. Not the kids at school growing up who always picked on the skinny kid with glasses. No respect. But that would all change soon.

Now I just need the blood, Joseph thought as he stood up from his swivel stool and walked across his secret lab to the small refrigerator in the corner. Opening the door, Joseph inspected the plastic pouches of his own blood that were stored inside. He had donated two pints of his blood to the cause yesterday. Since Joseph was O-negative, or a universal donor, his blood was perfect. It was almost guaranteed to be used.

“But we need more donors, don’t we?” Joseph said as he shut the refrigerator door, walked back over to his work station, and lightly stroked the virus vials reverently. “Not a problem, of course, as long as we do it right. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find some vagrants who nobody will miss. And then we’ll be doing the public yet another favor, won’t we? Yes we will,” Joseph purred to the deadly concoction on the table in front of him. “A few fewer eye sores on the streets.”

The scheming doctor shook his face and shoulders to clear his mind of the thought of dirty, homeless menaces to society. Joseph had absolutely no sympathy for anyone less fortunate than him. “Just natural selection carrying out its work,” he declared as he put the vials containing his virus back in the specialized silver cylinder that kept them fresh and clear of any contamination. Joseph then climbed back up the stairs and entered the code that he needed to exit his secret lair. There was a different code for entering and exiting – just in case someone did manage to find out about the room and get down into it, the homeowner wanted to make sure that they never got to leave.

“Time to find myself some blood,” he announced.

TWO

“You’re not finished yet,” Joseph ordered a day later as he stood over the hole that the man in front of him was digging. Joseph didn’t know his name, his age, or his life story. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. The man wasn’t going to be alive much longer anyway.

“I said keep digging!”

Joseph needed to make sure the hole was deep enough that no one would ever find the body. No body, no murder – right? he thought. Never leave a trail.

The unfortunate victim in the latest part of Joseph’s scheme tried to issue a response, but the duct tape over his mouth prevented the escape of any noise. And the fully loaded 9mm Beretta pistol in Joseph’s hand prevented any other kinds of escape.

“Alright, that’s enough,” the man with the gun concluded. “Climb out of there.”

It was visibly a struggle for the malnourished homeless man to pull himself out of the approximately four foot deep hole that he had spent the past two hours digging. When he finally rose to his feet on the dirt floor of the national park, a gleam entered Joseph’s eyes. The doctor-turned-kidnapper and murderer knew that it was time.

“I couldn’t help but notice,” Joseph began, “that the hat you’re wearing says Iraq War Veteran on it. Are you really a vet or did you just steal the hat?”

The captive nodded his head up and down and pointed to his chest to signal in the affirmative that he had been a soldier.

“Well, thank you for your service,” Joseph continued as he took a black silencer out of what would become his blood box and screwed it onto the Beretta. In addition to spending the past year and a half creating his virus, Joseph had also taken the time to file all of the paperwork and get all of the necessary approval to buy a sound suppressor, commonly known as a silencer. He didn’t want to run the risk of someone hearing the gunshot. “And now,” Joseph continued, “you get to once again be of service to this great country. What do you call it? The ultimate sacrifice?” The doctor grinned. “Because America needs me. They just don’t know it yet. And for them to know it, I need your blood.”

A tear trickled down the cheek of the thirty-one year old Army veteran as he finally came to terms with what was about to happen. I did three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan and never got a scratch. Only to come back to where it’s supposedly safe and be murdered by this psychopath. The man standing before Joseph slowly closed his eyes and took a deep breath to prepare himself for what came next.

“Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, no?” Joseph said gleefully as he smiled, took the safety off, raised the gun in his right hand, and pulled the trigger.

****

Draining blood from a dead body isn’t as easy as one might think. Once the heart stops beating, blood stops flowing through the person’s veins. The drip-drip-drip process of a typical blood donation would normally take hours on a dead person. But Joseph didn’t have hours. He needed to get the blood from his involuntary donor – a process called exsanguination – as quickly as possible so that he could leave the national park before anyone noticed him. He had tried to come up with a fancy, high-tech way of draining his victims’ blood; Joseph had even experimented with a blood sucking machine that resembled the space saver vacuums that are sold on infomercials. But he could never figure out a way to get the blood without bursting all of the blood vessels and veins, so his blood sucking machine idea had to be scrapped.

“And so I’m left with this - the quick and dirty version,” Joseph said aloud. He had already inserted needles into twelve different veins on the military veteran’s body, and was now attaching tubes and empty blood bags to those needles. The doctor then tossed the empty blood bags into the fresh dirt of the grave that his victim just finished digging and slowly pushed the body over the edge of the hole, sitting on top of the corpse so it wouldn’t fall completely over the precipice. With his victim suspended upside-down, gravity worked its magic and the blood bags were full in relatively short order.

“Thank you very much for your generous donation to today’s blood drive,” Joseph said as he pulled the twelfth and final one pint sized medical blood bag back up from the hole and carefully placed the blood in the climate controlled box beside him. “It will be very helpful with our project.”

Joseph then rolled his victim over the edge and watched the body plop down into the large pit in the ground. Picking up the shovel, Joseph filled in the rest of the hole with the same dirt that the homeless veteran had spent the last hours of his life digging out. The man renowned for his life-saving medical research stomped on the fresh earth to flatten it down and then pushed the blood container back and forth a couple of times for good measure, placing sticks and leaves over the spot as a final camouflage.

“Let’s go home, my sweets,” Joseph purred to the bags of blood in the box at his feet. “I have a wonderful virus that I want to introduce you to.”

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