Excerpt for Dr. Johnston’s fiction novel, “The American Revolution of 2020” due out in 2010.
“We’re completely surrounded! They’re trying to blockade the clinic…”
“What?” the eighteen-year-old college beauty sitting on the exam table responded. “Has this ever happened before?” she said, glancing worriedly at the only window in the room as the sound of the chatter outside grew louder. She pulled her thin hospital gown tighter against her skin, shivering more from anxiety than from the chilly air protruding from the vent above her.
“Not as long as I’ve been here.” The nurse tried to comfort her with a pat on the thigh. “Don’t worry, the police will start arresting them and then they’ll disperse.”
The patient’s eyes grew dim and the nurse could tell that the medicine was kicking in. In stepped a dark-skinned man in green scrubs pushing a waste-high machine on wheels. “Ah, there’s the physician now.”
“Hello, ma’am,” the physician greeted the sedated patient with his thick foreign accent. He rolled the machine beside the exam table and a nurse followed the doctor into the room holding a clipboard. “This’ll be over in a few minutes.” The nurse plugged the machine into and electric outlet, flipped a switch, and the machine jolted to life with a hum.
“Will it hurt?” the freshman brunette slurred, her speech affected by the medication.
“You’ll only feel a little bit of pressure.”
“No, will it hurt the baby?”
The nurse and the physician stared at each other for a moment and the doctor ordered her: “Two more Versed and fifty Demerol,” he said as he donned the rubber gloves the nurse handed him.
“Will it hurt the baby?”
“It’s just a blob of tissue, Jessica,” Dr. E informed her as he inserted a plastic speculum into her to visualize her cervix. “It can’t think, it can’t feel anything…”
Dr. E was startled by what sounded like gunfire in the distance. “What the…” He jumped out of his stool and headed to the window. He saw federal agents and camouflage-clothed soldiers arresting and loading protesters into several buses that had arrived. But he could not see where the gunfire had originated. Several of the soldiers began to raise their weapons and turn their attention to the west down the road.
The nurse joined the abortionist by the window when he cursed and returned to the patient. “Come on!” he barked as he donned fresh sterile gloves. “The FBI and the military will do their job, let’s do ours!”
“Yes, sir.”
As Dr. E reached for a pair of pincher forceps on the table of instruments, the singing outside of the clinic grew loud and bothersome. Dr. E tried to remain focused on his duties: “You’ll feel a little pinch, ma’am,” he understated before he grasped the lower lip of her cervix with the forceps.
“Oww!” Jessica complained in a slow drawl.
“One more milligram of Versed,” the physician ordered as he began to insert steel rods into her cervix, beginning with the small rod, and then moving to larger and larger rods, to gradually dilate the cervix. He slid out a shelf from the top of the exam table between the patient’s legs to catch any blood that dripped out of the cervix. He grabbed the suction device attached to the wheeled machine, inserted the suction device into Jessica’s dilated cervix, and she roused from her somnolent state to let out a gravelly moan.
Suddenly, the cheering and shouting from the protesters outside grew very loud. Dr. E was suspicious so he went to the window to glance outside. He felt confident that most of the protesters would freely depart when faced with arrest but he was shocked to discover that those who had been handcuffed and detained on the yellow school buses were getting off the buses and getting back on his property! The soldiers on the sidewalk did not appear to try to prevent them.
Dr. E was furious! He unlocked the window and opened it about six inches. He parted the blinds and shouted at the soldiers on the sidewalk, “What in the world are you doing?” His shouting startled Jessica and the nurse. Jessica turned to the doctor and saw him gazing out the window through the parted blinds.
The hundreds of protesters blockading the clinic turned to the abortionist and began to shout reproofs at him, and he hastily shut the window and the blinds. He stomped back to the patient. “Let’s get this over with!”
Momentarily, Dr. E heard some yelling coming from the hallway outside.
At first, the words were not discernable. Then he heard, “Dr. E! Dr. E!”
The abortionist handed the suction device to the nurse and bemoaned the fact that he had not given enough sedative to the last patient. He stood up and prepared to exit the room, predicting that he would have to restrain an unruly, emotional patient in the hallway.
Just as he reached for the doorknob, it opened, and in stepped the unshaven Austin’s sheriff, sixty pounds heavier than when he was a six foot six heavyweight boxing champion. “Dr. Eladomidachi?” Sheriff Matt Wellington asked in a deep bellowing voice as he slowly stepped through the partially ajar door.
“Yes?” the doctor said with a confused look on his face.
“Have you completed this abortion?”
“Uh, no. Why?”
“Well, then for this,” Sheriff Wellington said, reaching inside and turning off the abortion suction machine, “you’ll be charged with attempted murder. Those patients,” he turned, pointed down the hall and ordered his deputies in the hallway, “are to be cuffed and taken to the hospital, along with the records. For those abortions,” the sheriff turned and faced the doctor, “you may face charges of first degree murder.”
“You have got to be kidding me?” Dr. E balked, his foreign accent becoming more prominent with the rise in his adrenaline.
Sheriff Wellington took one look at the patient on the table and raised his voice, “Get the squad in here!” The officer just outside the room made a call on his radio for the emergency medical team to make their way to room eight.
“This is my patient and I’m in the middle of a procedure!” Dr. E insisted. “This is a violation of my rights and the rights of this patient…”
“I’m the chief law enforcement officer in the city of Austin, and I’m placing you under arrest.”
“Under arrest?”
The sheriff glanced at the stunned nurse, who anxiously gripped the clipboard. “Arrest all the staff as murder accomplices!” he said in a voice loud enough to be heard by the officers in the hallway. “The murder weapon is in here.”
“This procedure is perfectly legal! A federal panel of three judges ruled the Texas Life Bill unconstitutional this morning!”
“The state of Texas is going to prosecute you anyway! Where’s that squad?” the sheriff shouted toward the hallway.
“No!” Dr. E screamed as he reached under his scrub top and unholstered a 38 caliber pistol. He raised it and leveled it at the sheriff’s chest. Sheriff Wellington’s eyes widened and he put up his hands as the doctor prepared to shoot. The doctor pulled the trigger and the bullet struck the sheriff’s left shoulder. The force of the bullet striking his bone slammed him against the wall, splattering blood onto a mirror. He grunted in pain then darted from the room just as a second bullet whizzed above his head.
The two deputies in the hallway unholstered their weapons and prepared to fire. Dr. E ducked behind the exam table just as Jessica tried to sit up. He grabbed her by the hair with one hand, put the tip of his handgun at her temple, and dragged her off the table till she was standing in front of him. She screamed in terror as Dr. E shouted out orders.
“Get me the FBI in here or I’ll kill her!”
The two deputies lowered their weapons. “Don’t shoot her…”
“The FBI! They’re just outside. I want an FBI escort out of Texas, now!”
“Okay, just take it easy…”
When Dr. E pulled out his handgun, the nurse had crawled behind the suction machine to hide. Dr. E saw her and ordered her, “Shut the door!” When she was slow to move, he screamed it louder, and pointed the gun at her. “Shut it now!” The nurse quickly obeyed.
The adrenaline rush Jessica was experiencing soon overcame any affect the medicine was having on her. When she realized that the gun was no longer pointed at her head, she stomped on the doctor’s right foot, thrust her head forward, then whipped it backwards and struck his nose. His body cringed in excruciating pain and he dropped the gun. It landed by the foot of the exam table. Jessica lunged for it and the physician pushed her forward. Her body slammed against the table and she fell hard to the ground.
The deputies heard the struggle and peaked in the door. When they saw the physician had been disarmed, they leveled their 45 calibur handguns at him. “Freeze! Put your hands in the air!” He instantly complied.
Jessica reached for the physician’s pistol and that’s when she saw it: a three-inch fetus leg laid beside the gun. Her body was expelling her mutilated baby. The leg was perfectly formed – she could count five little toes. She opened her mouth in horror and screamed at the top of her lungs! At first, the deputies thought she was gravely injured, but when she grabbed the pistol, rose to her feet, and aimed the gun at the abortionist, they froze.
“Whoa!” one of the deputies called out to from the doorway. “Put it down, girl!”
She turned and aimed the gun at them briefly. “He was going to kill me, and he killed my baby!”
“Just put it down, sweetheart.” One of the deputies noticed the river of blood that was pouring down her leg, apparently from the incomplete abortion. “Put it down and we’ll get you to a real doctor.”
“No! Get me a preacher!”
“You don’t want to do this,” one of the deputies pleaded with her.
“I need a preacher now!” she said as she slammed the door shut.
Sheriff Wellington had been leaning against the wall in the hallway, diaphoretic with pain, applying pressure to his shoulder wound to try and stop the bleeding.
The two deputies turned to him for guidance. “What do we do?”
“Get her a preacher!”
“Why does she want a…”
“Just do it!”
One of the deputies rushed from the room and, momentarily, came back with a thin man with a goatee wearing a muddy orange U.T. cap. The deputy had briefed him on the situation as he knelt down and prayed a brief prayer for the injured sheriff. The preacher slowly rose, opened the door, and poked his head into the room as the officers kept guard down the hall beside their injured boss. He quickly assessed the situation. The dark-skinned physician’s face was covered with blood from a broken nose. He leaned against the wall in the corner of the room with his hands raised, a look of terror on his face as he begged for his life. A young woman in a thin hospital gown tied loosly in the back pointed a 38 revolver at the abortionist. She trembled as she stood is a pool of her own blood. Her face was as white as the tile floor.
“Are you a preacher?” the woman glanced at him quickly while keeping her aim on the abortionist.
“Yes. My name is David Jameson.” His heart was pounding from the surge of rapturous joy at the closing of the last-child-killing center in the state of Texas, but when he – the most wanted man in America according to the FBI - had been beckoned near by policemen outside into the clinic, he became dizzy with a mixture of fear and anticipation for whatever adventure God had in store for him. But as he watched this diaphoretic young woman aim the pistol at the abortionist, his heart found a new reason to pound wildly inside his chest as if it were a cat trapped in a bag.
“Will God forgive me if I kill him?” she asked without turning her gaze from her target.
When the preacher hesitated to answer, she turned to him and warned him, “I’ve got four bullets in this gun, one for each person in this room! So don’t try anything funny. Just answer the question!”
David’s thin frame, premature thinning hair, and nasal voice had never been the stuff of confidence. He was thrust into a storm of warring politics and raging violence apart from any choice of his own. All He wanted was the unhindered presence and favor of God in his life and in his country. All he wanted was for his children to be free. But God wanted him to be the bridge of heaven over the pit of hell.
She raised her voice to a high-pitched shrill, the gun shaking in her trembling grasp: “Will God forgive me if I kill him?!”
Four months earlier…
“What?” the eighteen-year-old college beauty sitting on the exam table responded. “Has this ever happened before?” she said, glancing worriedly at the only window in the room as the sound of the chatter outside grew louder. She pulled her thin hospital gown tighter against her skin, shivering more from anxiety than from the chilly air protruding from the vent above her.
“Not as long as I’ve been here.” The nurse tried to comfort her with a pat on the thigh. “Don’t worry, the police will start arresting them and then they’ll disperse.”
The patient’s eyes grew dim and the nurse could tell that the medicine was kicking in. In stepped a dark-skinned man in green scrubs pushing a waste-high machine on wheels. “Ah, there’s the physician now.”
“Hello, ma’am,” the physician greeted the sedated patient with his thick foreign accent. He rolled the machine beside the exam table and a nurse followed the doctor into the room holding a clipboard. “This’ll be over in a few minutes.” The nurse plugged the machine into and electric outlet, flipped a switch, and the machine jolted to life with a hum.
“Will it hurt?” the freshman brunette slurred, her speech affected by the medication.
“You’ll only feel a little bit of pressure.”
“No, will it hurt the baby?”
The nurse and the physician stared at each other for a moment and the doctor ordered her: “Two more Versed and fifty Demerol,” he said as he donned the rubber gloves the nurse handed him.
“Will it hurt the baby?”
“It’s just a blob of tissue, Jessica,” Dr. E informed her as he inserted a plastic speculum into her to visualize her cervix. “It can’t think, it can’t feel anything…”
Dr. E was startled by what sounded like gunfire in the distance. “What the…” He jumped out of his stool and headed to the window. He saw federal agents and camouflage-clothed soldiers arresting and loading protesters into several buses that had arrived. But he could not see where the gunfire had originated. Several of the soldiers began to raise their weapons and turn their attention to the west down the road.
The nurse joined the abortionist by the window when he cursed and returned to the patient. “Come on!” he barked as he donned fresh sterile gloves. “The FBI and the military will do their job, let’s do ours!”
“Yes, sir.”
As Dr. E reached for a pair of pincher forceps on the table of instruments, the singing outside of the clinic grew loud and bothersome. Dr. E tried to remain focused on his duties: “You’ll feel a little pinch, ma’am,” he understated before he grasped the lower lip of her cervix with the forceps.
“Oww!” Jessica complained in a slow drawl.
“One more milligram of Versed,” the physician ordered as he began to insert steel rods into her cervix, beginning with the small rod, and then moving to larger and larger rods, to gradually dilate the cervix. He slid out a shelf from the top of the exam table between the patient’s legs to catch any blood that dripped out of the cervix. He grabbed the suction device attached to the wheeled machine, inserted the suction device into Jessica’s dilated cervix, and she roused from her somnolent state to let out a gravelly moan.
Suddenly, the cheering and shouting from the protesters outside grew very loud. Dr. E was suspicious so he went to the window to glance outside. He felt confident that most of the protesters would freely depart when faced with arrest but he was shocked to discover that those who had been handcuffed and detained on the yellow school buses were getting off the buses and getting back on his property! The soldiers on the sidewalk did not appear to try to prevent them.
Dr. E was furious! He unlocked the window and opened it about six inches. He parted the blinds and shouted at the soldiers on the sidewalk, “What in the world are you doing?” His shouting startled Jessica and the nurse. Jessica turned to the doctor and saw him gazing out the window through the parted blinds.
The hundreds of protesters blockading the clinic turned to the abortionist and began to shout reproofs at him, and he hastily shut the window and the blinds. He stomped back to the patient. “Let’s get this over with!”
Momentarily, Dr. E heard some yelling coming from the hallway outside.
At first, the words were not discernable. Then he heard, “Dr. E! Dr. E!”
The abortionist handed the suction device to the nurse and bemoaned the fact that he had not given enough sedative to the last patient. He stood up and prepared to exit the room, predicting that he would have to restrain an unruly, emotional patient in the hallway.
Just as he reached for the doorknob, it opened, and in stepped the unshaven Austin’s sheriff, sixty pounds heavier than when he was a six foot six heavyweight boxing champion. “Dr. Eladomidachi?” Sheriff Matt Wellington asked in a deep bellowing voice as he slowly stepped through the partially ajar door.
“Yes?” the doctor said with a confused look on his face.
“Have you completed this abortion?”
“Uh, no. Why?”
“Well, then for this,” Sheriff Wellington said, reaching inside and turning off the abortion suction machine, “you’ll be charged with attempted murder. Those patients,” he turned, pointed down the hall and ordered his deputies in the hallway, “are to be cuffed and taken to the hospital, along with the records. For those abortions,” the sheriff turned and faced the doctor, “you may face charges of first degree murder.”
“You have got to be kidding me?” Dr. E balked, his foreign accent becoming more prominent with the rise in his adrenaline.
Sheriff Wellington took one look at the patient on the table and raised his voice, “Get the squad in here!” The officer just outside the room made a call on his radio for the emergency medical team to make their way to room eight.
“This is my patient and I’m in the middle of a procedure!” Dr. E insisted. “This is a violation of my rights and the rights of this patient…”
“I’m the chief law enforcement officer in the city of Austin, and I’m placing you under arrest.”
“Under arrest?”
The sheriff glanced at the stunned nurse, who anxiously gripped the clipboard. “Arrest all the staff as murder accomplices!” he said in a voice loud enough to be heard by the officers in the hallway. “The murder weapon is in here.”
“This procedure is perfectly legal! A federal panel of three judges ruled the Texas Life Bill unconstitutional this morning!”
“The state of Texas is going to prosecute you anyway! Where’s that squad?” the sheriff shouted toward the hallway.
“No!” Dr. E screamed as he reached under his scrub top and unholstered a 38 caliber pistol. He raised it and leveled it at the sheriff’s chest. Sheriff Wellington’s eyes widened and he put up his hands as the doctor prepared to shoot. The doctor pulled the trigger and the bullet struck the sheriff’s left shoulder. The force of the bullet striking his bone slammed him against the wall, splattering blood onto a mirror. He grunted in pain then darted from the room just as a second bullet whizzed above his head.
The two deputies in the hallway unholstered their weapons and prepared to fire. Dr. E ducked behind the exam table just as Jessica tried to sit up. He grabbed her by the hair with one hand, put the tip of his handgun at her temple, and dragged her off the table till she was standing in front of him. She screamed in terror as Dr. E shouted out orders.
“Get me the FBI in here or I’ll kill her!”
The two deputies lowered their weapons. “Don’t shoot her…”
“The FBI! They’re just outside. I want an FBI escort out of Texas, now!”
“Okay, just take it easy…”
When Dr. E pulled out his handgun, the nurse had crawled behind the suction machine to hide. Dr. E saw her and ordered her, “Shut the door!” When she was slow to move, he screamed it louder, and pointed the gun at her. “Shut it now!” The nurse quickly obeyed.
The adrenaline rush Jessica was experiencing soon overcame any affect the medicine was having on her. When she realized that the gun was no longer pointed at her head, she stomped on the doctor’s right foot, thrust her head forward, then whipped it backwards and struck his nose. His body cringed in excruciating pain and he dropped the gun. It landed by the foot of the exam table. Jessica lunged for it and the physician pushed her forward. Her body slammed against the table and she fell hard to the ground.
The deputies heard the struggle and peaked in the door. When they saw the physician had been disarmed, they leveled their 45 calibur handguns at him. “Freeze! Put your hands in the air!” He instantly complied.
Jessica reached for the physician’s pistol and that’s when she saw it: a three-inch fetus leg laid beside the gun. Her body was expelling her mutilated baby. The leg was perfectly formed – she could count five little toes. She opened her mouth in horror and screamed at the top of her lungs! At first, the deputies thought she was gravely injured, but when she grabbed the pistol, rose to her feet, and aimed the gun at the abortionist, they froze.
“Whoa!” one of the deputies called out to from the doorway. “Put it down, girl!”
She turned and aimed the gun at them briefly. “He was going to kill me, and he killed my baby!”
“Just put it down, sweetheart.” One of the deputies noticed the river of blood that was pouring down her leg, apparently from the incomplete abortion. “Put it down and we’ll get you to a real doctor.”
“No! Get me a preacher!”
“You don’t want to do this,” one of the deputies pleaded with her.
“I need a preacher now!” she said as she slammed the door shut.
Sheriff Wellington had been leaning against the wall in the hallway, diaphoretic with pain, applying pressure to his shoulder wound to try and stop the bleeding.
The two deputies turned to him for guidance. “What do we do?”
“Get her a preacher!”
“Why does she want a…”
“Just do it!”
One of the deputies rushed from the room and, momentarily, came back with a thin man with a goatee wearing a muddy orange U.T. cap. The deputy had briefed him on the situation as he knelt down and prayed a brief prayer for the injured sheriff. The preacher slowly rose, opened the door, and poked his head into the room as the officers kept guard down the hall beside their injured boss. He quickly assessed the situation. The dark-skinned physician’s face was covered with blood from a broken nose. He leaned against the wall in the corner of the room with his hands raised, a look of terror on his face as he begged for his life. A young woman in a thin hospital gown tied loosly in the back pointed a 38 revolver at the abortionist. She trembled as she stood is a pool of her own blood. Her face was as white as the tile floor.
“Are you a preacher?” the woman glanced at him quickly while keeping her aim on the abortionist.
“Yes. My name is David Jameson.” His heart was pounding from the surge of rapturous joy at the closing of the last-child-killing center in the state of Texas, but when he – the most wanted man in America according to the FBI - had been beckoned near by policemen outside into the clinic, he became dizzy with a mixture of fear and anticipation for whatever adventure God had in store for him. But as he watched this diaphoretic young woman aim the pistol at the abortionist, his heart found a new reason to pound wildly inside his chest as if it were a cat trapped in a bag.
“Will God forgive me if I kill him?” she asked without turning her gaze from her target.
When the preacher hesitated to answer, she turned to him and warned him, “I’ve got four bullets in this gun, one for each person in this room! So don’t try anything funny. Just answer the question!”
David’s thin frame, premature thinning hair, and nasal voice had never been the stuff of confidence. He was thrust into a storm of warring politics and raging violence apart from any choice of his own. All He wanted was the unhindered presence and favor of God in his life and in his country. All he wanted was for his children to be free. But God wanted him to be the bridge of heaven over the pit of hell.
She raised her voice to a high-pitched shrill, the gun shaking in her trembling grasp: “Will God forgive me if I kill him?!”
Four months earlier…