Carla gasped, horrified. Her knees shook, trembling so hard it was almost impossible to stand. She grabbed Lisa’s arm, clutching it like a lifeline. Icy fingers of fear skated down her spine as her mouth went bone dry, her jaw slack.
“Stay quiet,” Lisa murmured. “He can handle this, but you don’t want to distract him.”
Carla could only nod, eyes glued to Jackson.
He crept slowly about the room, gaze fixated on the cobra. “Shh. Don’t worry, sweetie. We’ll get you back home soon. Stay easy, now. Easy.”
As the cobra slithered along the floor, Jackson crouched down, positioning himself so that he could approach her a little behind but also to the side. He waved his left hand toward the cobra, getting her to focus on the movement. Then, with his right hand, he struck lightning fast, wrapping his fingers at the base of the cobra’s head.
“Get the hook.”
Kelly raced to obey Jackson’s instruction, returning to pick up the heavy lower body of the cobra while Jackson retained his grip on the head. Together they brought the cobra over to the stainless steel table.
As if nothing had happened, they continued on with the collection process, Jackson guiding the cobra’s head to the vessel and waiting patiently while she bit down and excreted the venom. Once finished, they returned her to the holding container and Kelly latched the lid tight.
Little by little Carla released Lisa’s arm as her frantic heartbeat settled back to a normal rhythm. She closed her eyes, letting out a heavy sigh as her shoulders slumped.
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Rarely.” Lisa shook her head. “And if it does, Jackson knows what to do. As you just saw.”
“Yeah.” Faint trembles shook her voice. “As I just saw.” And hopefully would never have to see again.
Inside the observation room, Jackson spoke to Kelly. The researcher smiled up at him with adoration in her eyes, like a student to a favored teacher. She asked him something and Jackson nodded. Carla wondered what they were talking about, noting with irritation the ugly head of jealously rearing up. She turned away from the window.
“What’s next?” she asked Lisa, forcing enthusiasm. “I’ll show you what we do with the venom, and then go over sterilization procedures with you. We need to prepare the room and equipment for the next extraction.”
Lisa led Carla out of the adjoining room and into the larger one. Kelly and Jackson were both already gone, having exited the room via a separate door.
“They’re taking the cobras back into the enclosure,” Lisa explained. “They won’t extract from those ten for at least a week. Jackson doesn’t like to overtax them.”
She led Carla over to where the collection vessel was still mounted on the table and picked up a glass test tube filled with a viscous yellow substance.
“This is the raw venom,” Lisa said, holding the container before Carla. “Take a look.”
Carla flinched but peered at the tube nevertheless, balling her hands into fists by her side to stop the shaking. “It doesn’t look like there’s very much of it. I thought there’d be more, especially since he extracted from ten snakes.”
“Actually, for the amount of venom delivered in a single discharge,” Lisa said, leading Carla out of the room and back into the main lab, “the king cobra is among the leaders. Take this statistic: we store the venom in sterile fifty milliliter containers. Care to take a guess how many extractions it takes to get fifty milliliters of raw venom?”
Carla thought for a moment. Fifty milliliters. That wasn’t much. She thought back to one of the favorite times of her life, when her parents had taken them all to Paris. She’d fallen in love with the city on site and became determined to know absolutely everything about it, including how the metric system worked. If Parisians used it, then Carla would, too. She recalled it being right around thirty milliliters in an ounce, so fifty would be a bit more than an ounce and a half. She looked again at the small pool of venom collected in the bottom of the test tube.
“Maybe fifteen?” she guessed.
“Not bad,” Lisa said, admiration in her voice. “But you’re a little high. It’s usually between seven and ten.”
“Wow, so you get around seven milliliters with each extraction?”
“Yes, right around there. And that also tells you something about how potent the venom is, because a single bite from a king cobra can kill an elephant, and they don’t always even expel all their venom in one bite.”
Amazing. In spite of her fear, Carla began to see how someone could want to study these fascinating creatures. It also put a knot of nerves in her stomach when she thought about Jackson working with the cobras and doing the extractions.
Lisa had stopped walking and stood in front of what looked almost like a large square radio sitting on top of a table, with knobs in the front and a lid that opened on top, like where the CD tray might be. But it was definitely not a radio.
“This is the centrifuge,” Lisa explained. “We’ll put our test tube in this machine and let it run. It’ll spin out all the impurities in the venom.”
She opened the top of the device and set the test tube inside of it in a fitted container, then capped the tube.
“Impurities?”
“Mainly blood cells,” Lisa said, closing the lid and pressing buttons on the front of the machine to start it. “But sometimes there can also be tiny bits of tooth fragments in there as well. Once the centrifuge has done its thing, the impurities will have spun to the bottom of the test tube and we can extract the purified venom and discard the rest.”
The machine whirled to life and Lisa glanced at her watch. “How about we grab some coffee?”
“Perfect.” Lisa had read Carla’s mind. Now that the excitement of the extractions was over, a stifled yawn reminded her she hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. Not that it wasn’t worth it.
They walked out the door and headed for the cafe. Outside, activity was brisk. Several researchers and other employees of the lab were moving quickly about, walking to and fro, as if their tasks were more numerous than time in the day allowed.
“What’s going on?” Carla asked, glancing around. “We’ve got a shipment coming in today.”
“Shipment?”
“Of cobras. There’s a small zoo in south central Florida that recently closed down and the owners were looking to relocate the animals. They actually had five king cobras, and Jackson’s taking them all. They’re being delivered today.”
Despite the contents of the pending delivery, Carla was not immune to the buzz of excitement around them. She chuckled at her realization.
“I can’t believe I’m excited, too,” she said in response to Lisa’s questioning look. “It feels like a new baby’s arriving.”
Lisa laughed. “You’re right; it does. We actually don’t get many cobras this way. Usually new additions to the enclosure are through hatchlings from the snakes we already have. It’ll be fun to have some new kids around.”
“Kids?”
“The snakes we’re getting are all only a year or two old, so in king cobra terms yeah, they’re still kids.” They turned the corner as they headed for the caf, Lisa laughing again at Carla’s expression. “Listen, trust me on this one. You stick around here long enough and you find yourself really and truly caring for the snakes.” Carla adamantly shook her head. “Not me. Never.”
“Never say never,” Lisa warned as they headed into the cafeteria. “You’ll get hooked, just wait and see.”
Carla didn’t answer. She’d sooner get hooked on a daily tooth extraction than hooked on king cobras, despite her momentary concern for Mariah the pregnant snake. That was just, well, maternal instincts. Like what many women have.
In a way, she envied Lisa’s passion, her conviction that she’d found exactly what she wanted to do in life and pursued the dream. She’d never had the same passion, at least not yet. She thought maybe she’d find it at work but truthfully, although she threw herself into it as best as she could, she knew from listening to Lisa that her passion for her own work wasn’t the same.
But she’d find what she wanted in Paris, she was sure of it, and she clung to that certainty like a lifeline. Truth was, if she didn’t end up finding meaning and purpose in Paris…what then?
She stepped behind Lisa in the line, taking the largest cup available and filling it with thick, black French roast, a dollop of cream and several spoonfuls of sugar. Her stomach grumbled as she spotted nirvana among the available pastries. Apple crumb cake.
She unapologetically took the biggest possible piece. Nothing like carbs and caffeine to shake away sleep debt.
She followed Lisa to an empty table. It was the time of morning beyond the normal breakfast hour but still too early for lunch, so they practically had the place to themselves.
“Looks good,” Lisa said, eyeing Carla’s cake as she sipped her coffee.
“It is,” Carla replied. “Have some. Please. You’ll save me from eating the entire thing by myself.”
Carla cut off a sizeable piece for Lisa and placed it on a napkin. They ate in silence for a moment and then Lisa said, “You know, you haven’t been here very long, but I just want to say I really like having you around.”
Carla’s heart went mushy, but she couldn’t help teasing her new friend. “Wow, cake really has an effect on you,” she grinned, eyes sparkling.
Lisa laughed but insisted she was serious. “I mean it,” she said. “We don’t usually have people who are fun and interesting around here. The interns are often kind of duds. They’re either super smart researchers who don’t know what it means to kid around, or they’re arrogant corporate know-it-alls who rub Jackson and the rest of us the wrong way the minute they open their mouths and begin talking about low hanging fruit. Whatever that means.”
Carla smiled. Talking to someone outside her normal world was refreshing. But then she thought of that morning and of someone else who didn’t appear to be as big a fan of hers as Lisa was.
“I don’t think Kelly has the same positive feeling toward me.”
“Oh, don’t worry about her.” Lisa swished her hand in the air as if shooing away an irritating fly. “She’s all right once you get to know her. She just has kind of an edge.”
“You think? She practically ignored me the whole time I was there.”
“Well…” Reluctance shaded her friend’s voice.
Carla looked up from her cake. “What? Is there something I should know?”
Lisa set down her cup and let out a small sigh, as if she’d come to a difficult decision. “Look, it’s like I told you before. Whatever’s going on between you and Jackson is between you and Jackson. I don’t want to know and frankly, it’s none of my business. But the thing is, with Kelly…” Lisa shrugged. “She likes Jackson, probably more than she should. Kelly doesn’t come from money. She had to work her way up to get where she is, and she worked damn hard. It was tough for her to come up with the money for college, but she did it any way she could. Still, she couldn’t afford to attend any of the top schools, so even though she has the degree she doesn’t have the pedigree, if you know what I mean.”
Carla nodded. The same thing was true in the business world. Simply getting your MBA wasn’t enough; where you’d earned it also counted. Plenty.
“But if you know anything about Jackson,” Lisa continued, “he doesn’t put a lot of stock into superficial stuff. What counts for him is passion, heart, and love for what you’re doing. And if you can show that through your work, it doesn’t matter to him where you’ve done it. So he took Kelly on as a student intern and she’s been here ever since. And because of what he did for her, I think there’s kind of a hero worship thing going on with Kelly toward Jackson. She absolutely idolizes him.”
Carla recalled the way Kelly lit up when Jackson walked into the extraction room, like a teenager seeing a movie star.
Lisa sipped her coffee, thinking. “As far as I know, Jackson’s been straight with her that he’s not interested in a relationship. But she’s a girl who’s overcome a lot, so one bit of initial resistance isn’t going to matter to her.”