No, he needed to keep this diagnosis between himself and Jordan. No one else needed to know he too was infected with a genetic anomaly ticking off the seconds before his own violent death.
For his sake and for the others in the medical center, he would carry this burden alone as he worked to reverse the genetic damage caused by these shoddy and potentially contagious enhancements.
Chapter 13
Chris entered the lobby of the University of Maryland’s Medical Center, and the sounds of laughing voices and cheery music greeted him. Holoprojections of teddy bears danced along the walls. Rows of massive, flowering potted plants made the place appear like the love child of a gaudy hotel and a greenhouse.
A coffee shop built into the lobby appeared strikingly similar to the Gourmet Bean he frequented several blocks over. Unlike the Gourmet Bean, a few of the patrons here wore plastic bands around their wrists to signify their temporary residency at the hospital.
Chris strolled past the café and up to the reception desk. A line of people waited to speak with an actual human attendant, so he chose a holoattendant.
“Good afternoon. Would you please provide identification?” A nebulous voice spoke from the blue projection.
Chris held up his comm card, and the holoprojection blinked green.
“Welcome, Christopher Morgan. You are scheduled to meet with Dr. Robin Haynes. You are requested to wait in the lobby. She has been notified of your arrival and will be here shortly.”
His palms grew clammy in anticipation, and he sat on a bench near one of the smaller ferns away from the coffee shop. It was difficult to tell this building housed people suffering from disease and trauma. The lobby appeared ironically and unnervingly cheerful. The enthusiastically stubborn façade masked the real struggles and heartbreak in the whitewashed rooms and surgical suites on other floors. Secluded by white curtains and locked doors, the dead and dying lay hidden away upstairs.
Glancing at the coffee shop, Chris decided maybe he did need a dose of caffeine. His nerves were frayed, and his thoughts had taken a morbid detour.
“Chris Morgan,” an out-of-breath voice called. Haynes marched toward him. The tail of her white coat billowed behind her. Dark bags hung under her brown eyes, and a messy ponytail held her hair. Yet beneath it all, there was an unmistakable beauty in her striking features. “Thank you for coming.”
She handed him a badge, and Chris took it. “What’s this?”
“It gives you access to the hospital as a researcher.”
“But we haven’t even agreed to anything with the Review Board.”
“We don’t have time for bureaucratic nonsense. I prefer to save patients’ lives now and apologize later.” She gestured for him to follow her through the crowded lobby. “Besides, they don’t need to know we already started research with you before we get their approval.”
Chris raised an eyebrow as he kept up with her rapid pace. “And what if we don’t get it?”
“Look, as long as you find a fix, we can worry about it later.”
He opened his mouth to protest, to ask what happened if he didn’t figure it out, but decided against it. Surely she knew the consequences. And he agreed with what lay unspoken between them: It would be better to assume they would find a way to treat these people and himself. Besides, if his work failed, he had nothing to lose. The legal and ethical ramifications of unapproved research presented a minor concern when his failure would likely result in his death.
His heart sank at his impending sickness. How long would it be before he started showing symptoms, before his skin bruised and tumors metastasized through his body?
Damn it. He should’ve grabbed a coffee.
“Dr. Haynes!” A man in a baggy sweatshirt stopped them. He wore a wide smile and gripped the hand of child. She appeared no older than five or six, her hair nothing more than a few fluttering wisps.
Haynes beamed at the man. Her haggardness seemed to dissipate. “Mr. Wilson. Good to see you all up and about.”
“Thank you so much,” he said, taking her hand. He shook it vigorously. His eyes gleamed with wetness. “I owe you so much.”
Reaching down, Haynes gave the girl’s shoulder a brief squeeze. “She’s the one that did all the work.” She crouched by her side. “You remember what we do to cancer?”
The girl nodded and offered a sheepish grin. She held up her small fists as though she were a miniature Muhammad Ali. “One, two. Outta here.”
Haynes stood. “It was nice to see you all.” She feigned a scowl. “But don’t you come back, you hear?”
The girl’s brow creased in little wrinkles. “Oh, we won’t.”
As Haynes led Chris away, her face drooped back into her serious and tired expression. She offered no explanation of what had just transpired. He couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the overworked doctor, and he admired the way she could transform herself at a moment’s notice for her patient.
She scanned her badge across an elevator keypad, and the doors slid open. A quick flick of her wrist, and the holodisplay reported their destination: the adult oncology unit.
“Can you tell me why a pediatric oncologist is so interested in a supposedly contagious cancer spreading among enhancers?” Chris asked.
“Just because I’m in peds doesn’t mean I don’t care about people past the age of eighteen.”
“Sorry, I’m not trying to imply anything negative. I haven’t slept for almost thirty-six hours, and I’m confused as hell.”
The elevator chirped as they passed each floor.
“Me, too.” Haynes exhaled and shook her head. “Me, too.”
She steered him through a corridor bustling with nurses and doctors. They dodged slow-moving family members and other visitors conversing in low voices as they meandered between waiting areas and patient rooms. At the end of one hallway, a couple of black-suited men stood sentinel outside a door.
Chris indicated the two men with a nod. “What’s going on there?”
“Patient confidentiality, remember?” Haynes raised an eyebrow before turning her eyes forward through the corridor again.
“Some patient,” Chris said. “That looked like Secret Service or something.” He dodged a maintenance man pushing a large cart toward the suits.
“We get high-profile individuals through here.”
“Interesting. If they’re in Baltimore, why not just go to Hopkins?”
Haynes stopped and glowered. “Are you serious? What is it with people and their false sense of name recognition signifying better treatment?” Her face flushed red. “Our oncology research and medical care are top notch.”
Chris, eyes wide, waved his hands. “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I know exactly what you’re saying. People always chided me for not going to a higher-ranked school for my PhD, as if being in the top twenty according to reputation isn’t enough.”
The scarlet hue slowly drained from Haynes’s face, but her frown remained.
“Sorry, I’d blame it on my exhaustion,” Chris said, “but sometimes I stick my foot in my mouth and—”
Haynes held up a finger to silence him. “Quit while you’re ahead.” She nodded down the hall toward an open door. “I’ve got a couple others we’re going to meet with to bring you up to speed.”
They entered the room, and Haynes shut the door behind them. Shelves filled with actual hardback books lined the walls. In the center, three other white coats sat around a table.
“Everyone, this is Dr. Christopher Morgan, a researcher in genetic therapeutics.”
Chris held up a hand in a cursory greeting.
“Chris, this is Dr. Naomi Harrington, our hematologist.” She indicated a doctor with a sharp face and narrow eyes. “And Dr. Garrett Fletcher and Dr. Stewart Morris are both oncologists.” Two white coats, one with a trimmed beard and the other with an expression of tiredness to mirror Haynes’s, nodded.
“Thanks for coming in, D
r. Morgan,” Harrington said. “We’ve been running around in circles trying to find external researchers willing to help these cases.”
“Please, just call me Chris,” he said. “And I’m glad to be of assistance.”
Morris gestured over the holodisplay in the middle of the table. The blue light glowed to life before them. “Let’s jump right to business, shall we? Time is of the essence.”
Images of tissue samples projected in front of them. “Here’s the nitty-gritty.” Morris motioned to make the cells appear larger. “We’re looking at a type of cancer with unparalleled proliferative properties.”
Fletcher nodded and pointed at several dark nodules. “As you can see here and here, there is evidence of enormous tumorigenesis in this sample.”
Chris squinted, recognizing the long, striated shapes of the cells. “This is all skeletal muscle, right?” These were the cells making up the muscles used for voluntary movement, like the biceps, quadriceps, and pectoralis muscles.
Harrington, the hematologist, nodded and took control of the holodisplay with a wave of her hand. “Yes. In many of the patients, we’re actually seeing metastasis of tumor-causing cells in smooth muscle and cardiac tissues, too.”
“Which must lead to the vessel rupture and bleeding,” Chris said. “Right?”
“You’ve got it.” Harrington nodded. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Morris tugged at his beard. “All our traditional treatments”—he counted on his fingers— “nanothermo, targeted drug delivery, chemo, radiation. None have any definitive effects on these patients.”
Fletcher’s eyebrows rose in dismay. “At best, we’ve been able to prolong their lives. But, according to eyewitness reports gathered by the police and the results from the medical examiners, people who don’t get access to these treatments end up dying within days.” His hands shook as he emphasized the word again. “Days. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Chris’s heart sank, and a pit formed in his stomach. Dizziness started to overtake him until he gripped the arms of his chair. Days. That’s all he probably had left. It didn’t sound as if admitting to these medical professionals that he’d soon be suffering the same fate would help him in any way. The best they could do was chain him up to a bed and pump his body full of drugs, chemicals, radiation, and nanoparticles as he waited to die. He gulped and rubbed his eyes. “And you all have no idea what this is?”
“Actually,” Fletcher said, “we have found a similar type of cancer.”
Chris’s brow furrowed as he leaned forward.
Morris nodded. “Rhabdomyosarcoma.”
“It’s a sarcoma formed from cells as they develop into skeletal muscles,” Fletcher said.
“Wait.” Chris held up his index finger. “It develops from cells differentiating into muscle tissues?”
“Right,” Harrington said. She brushed a hand through her hair and left it on the nape of her neck. “It’s primarily a disease affecting children, since they’re the ones with developing muscles. It’s extraordinarily rare in adults.”
Chris shot a glance at Haynes.
She shrugged. “Now you see why a pediatric oncologist is involved?”
“So, pardon my ignorance,” Chris said, “but why the hell are you the only ones in the world trying to figure out what in God’s name is going on?”
Morris laughed. “You think we’re doing this on our own? No, we’re not that arrogant. We’ve sent tissue samples to colleagues in a variety of institutes and labs. We have working relationships with cancer research groups all over the world. And they haven’t found a thing.”
“No one has any idea what we’re dealing with,” Haynes said, her expression dour. “Remember how I mentioned the CDC was involved?”
Chris nodded.
“Well, according to them, cancer is not contagious, and they see no evidence of any type of communicable disease. So they said they can’t really help us. They took a few biopsies from us, but they’ve been at a dead end, too.”
“And you all think I can somehow fix this?” Chris asked.
“No, not really. But what choice do we have?” Harrington shrugged. “The more eyes we have on this problem, the higher likelihood we have of someone figuring out the missing link here.”
“All right, Robin, are you going to give him the rest of the tour? I need to get back to my patients,” Fletcher said.
Haynes waved them off. “Yes, I’ve got it from here.”
The other three doctors left. Now that he was alone with Robin, the room somehow seemed even smaller. The bookshelves loomed over Chris and appeared ready to tumble and crash down on him. Everything seemed to be falling apart around him—and within him.
“We’ve got paperwork to fill out before I give you a couple samples you can take. Once we get IRB approval, I’ll have a courier deliver the rest today.”
“It sounds like we don’t have any time to waste,” Chris said. It was a drastic understatement.
“Right,” Robin said. She spoke in a low voice. “So instead of waiting on approval, I’m also finishing up several genetic sequencing experiments on the patients. Hopefully they’ll give you insight into this issue and better guide you toward a therapy. But it goes without saying that you’ll need to keep quiet and refrain from telling anyone that I’m giving this data to you before we receive word back from the IRB.”
“Absolutely,” Chris said. His comm card buzzed in his pocket, and he slipped it out. Another call from Veronica. “Sorry,” he said to Robin. He shot Veronica a quick reply saying he was busy.
As Robin led him back down the corridor, he received another message: “I know you were arrested. What’s going on? Are you in trouble again?”
Just another storm cloud over an already-black sky. He wondered how she’d found out about his arrest so soon. Had he missed the story being spread in the media? The news streams would pounce on this.
Robin turned to him as he tapped out a message to Veronica. He stopped as she opened her mouth to speak.
An enormous crash interrupted her. They both turned to the door where the black suits stood.
The door flew from its hinges, and an explosion ripped through the air. Fire rolled toward them. A concussive force lifted Chris and Robin from the floor. He slammed against a wall, and Haynes smashed into him. She fell, limp, across his body.
Alarms, shrieks, and yells filled the corridor. The smoke and the smell of burned plastic stung Chris’s nostrils. Pain ripped through his head. He blinked as his vision grew dark.
His last thought turned to his unsent reply to Veronica: “I’m fine.”
Chapter 14
Chris’s ears rang as he struggled to open his eyes. A haze of gray soot and smoke permeated the halls. He tried to lift himself up, but something pressed him down.
Robin. She lay unconscious across his legs, her eyes closed, her skin pale. Panic swept through him, and pain throbbed in his skull. His thoughts were muddled. He fought through it, grasping for her wrist, desperate to ensure she still lived. He pushed through the fog clouding his mind. She might’ve been hurt, and moving her too much would worsen her injuries. Gingerly, he supported her head to prevent exacerbating any neck or spine damage.
To his right, legs pounded through the wreckage. He yelled out but couldn’t hear his own voice. People burst through the confusion to help the victims.
The responders were dressed in scrubs but wore masks. They scooped up Haynes and ran, dragging her behind them. The maintenance man who had pushed a cart into the guarded room of the apparent VIP joined up with the two masked individuals, and they disappeared around a bend in the hallway.
Chris propped one foot up and rose to a knee. The agony burning in his skull screamed as he pushed himself up. Grabbing the smooth hand railing along the wall, he braced himself as another wave of pain exploded in his head. He tried to move down the hall and stepped over shards of equipment. His foot caught on the arm of a broken chair. A hand grabbed his leg.
He stopped and looked down at a nurse. Briefly, he thought she should be helping the other survivors. But a glance explained why that would not be happening. A splintered piece of wood protruded from her thigh.
Dropping down beside her, Chris pushed through his own pain. He tore off his collared shirt and tied the sleeve around her leg above the wound. He tightened it until the blood pumping out of her leg slowed.
The ringing in his ears faded, replaced by the shrieking alarms and a cacophony of voices crying, yelling, and moaning. He slumped next to the nurse. From his vantage point, he saw the outstretched arms of one of the black-suited sentries. His limbs lay limp and unmoving. A white coat ran toward the man and the door from which the blast had originated.
It was Morris. He was yelling something. It took a moment before the muddled words coalesced.
“The senator!” Morris waved his hands frantically. “They killed Sharp!”
So much for patient privacy. Chris lifted up one knee again. He grabbed the hall railing to steady himself, but the pain boiling in his skull brought him to the floor. Darkness enveloped him once more.
***
“Hey, Morgan. You awake?”
Chris blinked. A face materialized in front of him. “Veronica?”
She cocked her head. “You okay? It’s me, Dellaporta.”
Rubbing his eyes, he groaned as he straightened up. He lay in a hospital bed, surrounded by an assortment of monitors. Their mere presence worried him. An IV tube pumped saline solution and, he guessed, painkillers into his bloodstream. Clipped to his finger, a plastic device tracked his pulse. His entire body throbbed in a dull ache, but his head pounded with only a fraction of the intensity from before.
“Shit,” Chris said. “Man, I feel out of it.”
The pain, the explosion. All the images flashed through his mind.
His eyes widened. “How many...are people...”
Dellaporta grimaced. “At least four people died.”
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 33