“No,” Chris said. “Do you have a way for us to get out of here?”
“Kind of.” Jordan offered a hand to help Veronica exit while they stooped to avoid the hail of gunfire. Once she cleared the mangled car, they hoisted Sharp’s body behind her.
A salvo of bullets ricocheted off the vehicle. Jordan traded a few shots, and Chris climbed over the front seat to the rear. Robin followed, and they slipped out of the car and into the trees.
“Run,” Jordan said, pointing back through the woods. “My car’s that way. I’ll catch up.” He fired a couple rounds to keep the braver grunts from approaching too close.
Bullets tore through the foliage and smashed against bark. Wood splintered and flew. Robin wound between the tree trunks, following Veronica with Sharp across her back. Chris ran beside her. She kept her eyes forward, dodging the tangle of roots and brush below, leaping over fallen trees.
Then Chris stumbled and rolled across the ground. Holding his leg, he let out a cry.
Thinking he’d tripped, Robin dove next to him. “Are you okay?”
The crack of gunfire continued.
He grimaced. Blood trickled between his fingers where he clamped them around his calf. “Shot.”
“Come on,” she said, slinging one of his arms over her shoulder. “We’ve got to move.”
They hobbled along and plunged deeper into the forest. Veronica had left a trail over the crushed underbrush, and the woods became thicker.
“We don’t have much time,” Jordan said. He’d already caught up to them.
Robin worried they were moving too slowly but carried on, refusing to look back.
Voices pierced the forest, chasing after them.
“My car’s just beyond that clearing, next to the service road.” Jordan pointed forward.
They broke from the tree line and into a small field filled with tall grass and wildflowers. Robin spotted the car on the opposite side of the meadow. A brief wave of relief flashed through her.
But the reprieve was short lived.
“Stop right there!” A voice cried. Clad all in black, several bodies rose from the green and gold waves of tall grass and aimed their assault rifles at the disheveled group.
Chapter 41
Chris froze. He waited for the barrage of bullets to tear through his flesh. He squeezed Robin’s shoulder, and she leaned into him, a final embrace before it all ended.
“Lie down right there,” the voice barked again.
They all fell to the ground amid the dirt and tangled roots at the edge of the woods. The long grass rustled as the gunmen moved toward them.
“These are the targets,” a familiar voice said.
An immediate wave of relief spread through Chris as if he’d taken a plunge in the cool Atlantic after a fifteen-mile hike under the unrelenting summer sun. Brown hair pulled back into a tight bun and jaw set, Dellaporta stood over him. She wore a bulletproof vest and held a pistol in her right hand.
As he began to move, she said, “Stay down.”
More men rushed past her, clad in SWAT gear. They flitted through the grass to the edge of the woods and used the trees as cover.
As the lackeys from the facility came trickling through, one SWAT team member flashed hand signals to his group.
“Weapons down,” the leader said. “Weapons down!”
A couple of the gunmen yelped in surprise. One fired on the SWAT team, but two well-placed shots knocked him back. The rest threw their guns to the ground and put their hands up. The SWAT team moved through the trees, training their rifles toward the direction from where Chris and the group had run. “All clear.”
“Tie them up,” the SWAT leader said. The squad members bounced among the would-be attackers, zip-tying the wrists of the men and women who had given chase. Once the henchmen were rounded up, the SWAT team dashed through the woods toward Tallicor. A couple stayed behind to secure the area.
Dellaporta crouched next to Chris. “Morgan, you continue to make my job difficult.”
Pain coursed up his calf as the adrenaline faded. “It would’ve been nice to have a heads-up. Apparently, those assholes knew you were coming. They were already riled up before we tried to get out.”
She glanced at Jordan.
“I told you,” he said. “They wouldn’t have had a clue I was breaking in if you hadn’t given them a heads-up.”
“I thought we acted too fast for any leaks,” she said. “Damn it.” Her eyes gazed on Chris’s wound before landing on Senator Sharp. She pulled out her comm card. “We need medical personnel here immediately.” She slid the card back into her pocket and pointed at the car Jordan claimed to have arrived in. “We found an incapacitated man in that car. You wouldn’t happen to know who he is, would you?”
Jordan donned a bewildered expression and winked at Chris. “Beats me. Maybe one of those Tallicor thugs wanted to get away for a quick nap.” Dellaporta rolled her eyes, and he knelt by Chris. “You hanging in there?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he said. Pain shot up his leg as he drew himself up into a sitting position. The slight agony seemed a small price to pay for his escape. He glanced around at Robin, Veronica, and Jordan. All had survived. A small price indeed.
“Move your hand away and let me take a look at it,” Robin said.
Chris did as she said. “How about you, Jordan?”
“I barely made it to the party, my man. Bouncers didn’t let me in.”
Her brow scrunched, Robin gingerly examined the wound. “I’m sure it hurts, but it doesn’t look like it hit so much as a tibial artery.” She patted his knee and jumped over him to check on Sharp and Veronica.
“Good to know. Thanks,” Chris said, gritting his teeth. “What the hell are you doing out here, Jordan? You lost your damn mind?”
“Just trying to save your ass.”
Chris winced as another wave of pain emanated from his calf. A group of paramedics descended on them. A couple set to cleaning his wound as the rest surrounded Veronica and Sharp.
His heart fell. Sharp may have been given the genetic treatment, but the cancerous cells still coursed through Veronica, their genes mutated by the fatal cocktail of strength and telomerase enhancements.
Limping, he rushed to her side, but the paramedics pushed him back. “We need space here,” one said as he began to examine the wound in Veronica’s shoulder from Robin’s impromptu surgical removal of the tracking chip.
“What’s wrong?” Robin asked Chris.
“The treatment,” he said and pointed at Veronica. “We still need to help her. What if all our work in the lab is destroyed back there?”
She grabbed Chris’s shoulder with one hand and reached into her pocket with the other. She revealed two small vials nestled in her palm. “I saved it. We’ve got a whole hospital full of people to save. I wasn’t about to leave anything behind after we treated Sharp.”
He exhaled as a wave of relief washed over him at the sight of those two seemingly innocuous ampoules. Sweat soaked his back, and he could feel the dirt caked to his skin and clothes. Throbs of pain pulsated from his wound, but none of it could stop him from pulling Robin into an embrace. She pressed her warm cheek to his.
After several long seconds, she leaned back enough to catch his eyes. “Besides, I didn’t want to reinvent the entire treatment using your canine therapies again. I’ve already spent enough time in the lab with you. Maybe we can find time to do something that doesn’t involve syringes, gene sequencing, and lab benches.”
It wasn’t a promise. It certainly wasn’t an implied date night filled with dinner, drinks, and dancing like he’d fantasized about in the lab. But the mere idea of seeing her again, of being with her, set his heart pounding. He grinned. “Sounds great to me.” A tremendous understatement, he thought. “I’m going to need a quick shower first, I think.”
Yet another understatement.
***
He had grown tired of the chemical smell of sterility pervading the hospit
al. With the Institutional Review Board’s approval and FDA Emergency Exemption granted for HDXT, Chris had worked tirelessly with Jordan and Hugh to produce enough stock of the genetic therapy to combat the cancer. He’d personally delivered the vials to Robin, and she’d administered them to the patients.
“Each day, more are showing up,” she said, gesturing toward the rooms in the trauma ward serving as the makeshift oncology unit. Repairs were still underway to reverse the damage done by the bombing.
“It’s no different at Mercy or Hopkins,” Chris said, running his hands through his hair. “Plus, we’ve got orders everywhere from DC, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago. All hospitals. It’s going to take weeks before we can catch up to all the orders for HDXT.” And he figured it might be as long before he and Robin made good on their agreement to see each other outside work. They had no time for dinner or a drink or even a short walk beyond the confines of a hospital or research laboratory.
Robin wrapped her fingers around his wrist. “At least the numbers of people coming in are lower each day, and there should be even less now that Tallicor’s out of the picture. I think what’s most important now is that people hear there’s an actual treatment. They’re no longer afraid of the legal consequences for being an enhancer—they just want to live.”
They walked from the small sitting area where Chris had waited for her earlier.
“We released our first patients today,” she said. “They went home, cancer free. We’re going to be keeping a close eye on them, but there were no more traces of the mutated genes causing the uncontrolled proliferation. The excision treatment has worked on almost everyone.”
Chris raised an eyebrow. “Who isn’t responding?”
“You know I can’t tell you specifics.”
“Right,” he said. “HIPAA compliance, patient privacy. All that jazz.”
Robin nodded. She stopped in front of a doorway and waited for two nurses to pass. Leaning in, she spoke in a low voice. “I’m worried the therapy isn’t working in certain people.”
“I don’t understand how that could be,” Chris said. “For your sake, let’s hypothetically say we’re talking about the senator.” Sharp had still made no public appearances since the reports first hit the news streams about his “rescue” from the Tallicor facilities, and Dellaporta, frustrated by the lack of progress, had expressed her interest in “having a brief chat” with the politician to Chris. “Most patients in the same stages Sharp endured are already improving.”
“Heck, most people are on their way out of the hospital,” Robin added.
“But there hasn’t been so much as a leak in the news streams to indicate the senator’s better.” He rubbed his chin. “So if someone like him were sick, someone who’s had their fair share of HDXT, I can’t even begin to guess why it’s not taking.”
“Neither can I,” Robin said, knocking on the door next to them.
A voice answered within, and they entered. “Come in.” Veronica lay on the hospital bed, a blanket pulled up to her chin. “Good to see you both.”
Chris sat on the hard plastic chair near her bedside.
Robin drew up her comm card, and Veronica’s medical files projected from it. Eyes wide, she read the projections. Her mouth dropped as she glanced between Chris and Veronica.
“What’s wrong?” Veronica said. She coughed.
“That’s impossible. Hold on.” Robin scrolled through the results again. “The cancer still appears to be malignant...and more of your cells are expressing the mutated genes.”
Chris’s heart skipped a beat. “You gave her HDXT, though.”
“Right,” Robin said. “I don’t understand why she’s not responding. It’s just her and—” She stopped herself.
“Senator Sharp,” Chris finished. Unlike her, he was free to speculate on the identity of the other patient who he suspected had not been cured.
Veronica smiled. It was that same toothy grin he was once attracted by. But now he almost seethed. He couldn’t comprehend why she didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. She’d always been too optimistic, too cheerful.
Or maybe, he realized, he’d just been too pessimistic, too dour.
She patted the spot on her arm where Robin had dug out the tracking chip. “At least this healed nicely.”
“Of course,” Chris said. “Your Sustain dealt with that. I mean, that organ can heal pretty much anything simple. But this cancer isn’t so simple. It’s not like it’s an infection or a clot or something.”
Robin’s face drained of color. Her eyes glazed over. “The Sustain.” Her gaze returned, darting between Chris and Veronica. “We’ve got to remove it.”
“Why?” Veronica asked.
Chris’s brow creased with confusion. But then everything clicked into place. It all made sense now. The artificial organ that had saved Veronica’s life after she’d been tortured, after she almost bled to death, was now killing her.
No, he thought, not exactly killing her but letting her die.
“HDXT is injected into the bloodstream,” he said. “It consists of tiny particles filled with therapeutic proteins to eliminate problematic genes, but they aren’t making it to your cells.”
“Right.” Robin placed a hand on Veronica’s shoulder. “But the particles must make it to the cancerous cells to start the healing process. HDXT avoids a normal person’s immune system. Unfortunately, yours isn’t normal because of the LyfeGen Sustain. One of its functions is improving the effectiveness of a person’s innate and acquired immune systems.”
Chris figured the senator faced the same dilemma. Sharp was a wealthy man. Almost anyone who could afford one had undergone a Sustain implantation. Who wouldn’t want the added benefit of a medical therapy to keep you free of clotted arteries, most cancers, and, of course, wrinkles?
“Your Sustain is sending modified white blood cells to round up and eliminate the particles intended to save your life,” Robin continued, shaking her head.
“It’s supposed to give people near immortality,” Chris added, “but right now, it’s blocking the life-saving treatments you need.”
“Exactly,” Robin said, a pleading look in her eyes. “Do you think we can modify the particles to be more effective, to avoid the Sustain’s bolstered immune response?”
Chris drew his eyebrows together and contemplated the question. The LyfeGen Sustain had taken decades to develop, necessitated a team of scientists and engineers, and the financial backing of governmental organizations and a major corporation. He and Robin had developed HDXT in a matter of days, but in doing so, Chris had exhausted the limits of his prowess in bioengineering. “If I had more time, if I had months to work at it, I might be able to develop a new treatment to thwart the Sustain. But I’m afraid it wouldn’t be soon enough. The Sustain’s too powerful.”
“If I didn’t have a Sustain, I’d recover with no problem?” Veronica asked.
Chris glanced at Robin. She pursed her lips but gave an assenting nod. “I think so,” she said.
“It’s okay. Take it out. I never wanted to live forever anyway.”
Robin grabbed the handrail of Veronica’s bed. “You can always get another Sustain. Taking it out ruins it, but there’s nothing preventing you from ordering another.”
“I think I’m about done with people cutting me up and turning me into a lab experiment,” Veronica said. “I’ll have to think about it.”
Robin walked to the exit and paused. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll schedule the surgery, and we can get this thing out of you.”
“The sooner, the better.” Veronica brushed her hands through her short hair.
After Robin left, Chris pulled up a chair next to Veronica’s bed. He took a deep breath, steeling himself for what he planned to say next. It pained him to see her barely escaping death again, and he knew too well that he bore the sole responsibility for putting her in this position. He might’ve proven his products hadn’t caused the cancer destroying so many un
wary enhancers, but before him lay a person whose ordeals he had caused. “I’ve said this before, but I can never say it enough. I’m sorry. I screwed up, I put you through hell, and it’s my fault—I should’ve listened to you before I ever got into the enhancement business.”
Veronica’s lips drew taught, and she pinched her eyes closed. She exhaled. “Yeah, you should’ve listened to me.”
“Do you think you can ever find it in yourself to forgive me?”
“That’s a question I don’t know if I’m equipped to answer now.”
“I understand.” Chris felt sick. He wanted her to say everything would be okay, that she would let bygones be bygones. But his wants could not distort the reality of his choices and of Veronica’s emotional and physical duress. “If you never forgive me, if you never want to speak to me again, I’ll understand. I wish I could do something to take it all back, to have continued working as a scientist cozy in a company lab and never tried peddling my crap on the streets.”
Veronica huffed. “No amount of regret will change what’s happened. Try to move on with your life, do something better with it. Develop your HDXT and start helping enhancers. It’s the least you can do.”
“You’re right, of course.” Chris wrung his hands together. “What are you going to do?”
“I plan on dancing again. I think my body can handle it.”
“Still here in Baltimore?”
Veronica shook her head. “New York. As soon as Baltimore PD gives me the clear and I’m out of this hospital, I’m moving in with my sister.”
“Glad to hear it. I know you’ll be great, but Baltimore’s going to be a little less of the Charm City losing one of its great artists.”
“Quit it,” Veronica said, her brow creased. A smile crept across her face. “I appreciate the flattery, but I’m ready to get out of here. This city, the memories, everything’s too oppressive for me. Whatever I was before all of this, I’m not the same person now, and my art has suffered for it.”
“I know what you mean.” Chris shared the sentiment. He’d barely extricated himself from Baltimore’s dark underbelly of biotech, and the experience had left its irrevocable marks on his psyche. But now he had his work with Robin to look forward to along with the growth of his fledgling company with Jordan. Instead of letting Baltimore change him, maybe he could, in whatever small way, help change the city. “And you’re right, moving forward is about the best thing we can do.”
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 50