“Seriously? No way. Her Blood Urea Nitrogen levels are normal. If she’d been on the anti-serum that long, her BUN would be off the charts and her renal functions dead. I’ll run the test again.”
“Okay,” Lola said, trying to stay out of the nurse’s way. She looked around the room for some equipment or something else that she could do to help. Maybe it was all tucked underneath the counter like the microscope.
Charmin extracted about a tablespoon worth of blood from the IV in Janice’s right arm, injected it into a silicon bubble, and then popped the bubble into her mouth as if it were an M&M.
“No,” Lola yelled. “What are you doing? You’ll contaminate yourself.”
“I’ll be fine,” Charmin said with her mouth already full. “I already tested the bubbles integrity with the virus.” She swished the bubble to the other side of her mouth so that it was bulging out her cheek. “Besides, I’m almost done with the test.”
Of all the Shine’s Lola had seen, Charmin’s ability was among the strangest. Her taste-buds could break down a recipe, a blood sample, or anything else to the molecular level. Growing up as an aspiring chef, Lola wondered what made her change to medicine and nursing.
Charmin spit the bubble out into a metal bowl and poured alcohol over it. The bubble dissolved. The virus became sterile. “Nope. Like I said before, the BUN is fine, as are her other hormones and blood markers. And just as before, she’s not a Shine.”
“How can that be?” Lola asked. “You saw what the virus did to her white blood cells. Those things erupted like Mount Saint Helens.”
“Actually, those weren’t her white blood cells,” Charmin said. “They were mine.”
Chapter 5
Jared tied Caroline’s shoes and then looked up into her endless grin. Sometimes he was glad his sixteen-year-old daughter always had the contentment of a giddy child. He wished he could be the same. He’d been stuck in the salt mine for nearly three months without seeing the light of day. After escaping from Indianapolis with his daughter and some of the other Shines, he’d lost his job, and was wanted by the police for arson, although it was Caroline who accidentally set his sister’s home ablaze. Even in the most difficult times her happiness grounded him.
Lola appeared in the doorway.
Caroline started flapping with excitement.
He pecked his daughter on the forehead. “Go. Enjoy your lessons.”
Three months underground surrounded by 20-something-year-old girls was not turning out the way Jared fantasized just a few years ago. Sure they had perfect legs and perky busts, but they were also annoyingly optimistic, in constant hormonal flux, and nearly every one of them was always looking for some kind of secret approval. Jared had sometimes wondered what it was like to be the parent of a ‘normal’ teenager, now he was dying to get away from it.
How much longer would he have to endure this prison? He’d sent a total of four messages to the surface, but he’d received no confirmation, no response. He was wondering if the signal was even able to make it through the earthen walls. They had to come soon. They had to help Caroline.
He thought about trying again when Juliet entered the room.
“Good morning, Jared. Have you met Thierry yet?” She waved the gentlemen into the room.
They hadn’t met in person, but Jared had heard the constant buzz throughout the mine about ‘the new man’ that was just brought in. The way they talked about his looks made it sound like he descended from heaven in a gold gilded chariot, and now that Jared laid eyes on the guy, he’d have to admit Thierry wasn’t half-bad. Jared accepted the newcomer’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too,” Thierry said with a French accent that had to be making the girls swoon.
“Jared, can you give Thierry a tour of the place. Make some introductions. Let him know how the rules work?”
“Will do.”
Juliet walked back towards the infirmary. When she was gone, Thierry asked, “What is this place? Are we the only two guys?”
“Dream come true, isn’t it?”
Thierry shook his head. “It’s more like a nightmare. I’ve only been here an hour, but I’m already feeling like a sweaty piece of eye candy.”
“You’re just this week’s fresh meat,” Jared said. “These girls’ hormones are so enraged, if they brought in Old Saint Nick, they’d be drooling all over him for a week. Once they get used to you, they’ll start treating you like their father, or possibly their brother, in your case. By the way, there are two other men down here, Juliet’s husband and one of the Shine’s grandfathers.”
“Shine? What’s a Shine?”
“You’re kidding? Seattle? Santa Monica? You really don’t know what a Shine is?”
Thierry shook his head.
Jared bit his lower lip. Where had this guy been hiding? The government had plastered the Shines across every network in America. “Have you seen anything weird with these girls?”
Thierry told him about Anvil stopping the assassin and Frenchie turning a bald head into something that belonged on a peacock.
“That’s it. That’s their Shine. Their magical ability. All of these girls are different. Frenchie can control hair, Anvil can turn herself into something harder than granite, and my daughter can conduct heat and evidently start fires or freeze things. ” Jared lifted his arms. “And this here, this is the Shine base. If you haven’t guessed it yet, we’re over a mile deep in the salt mines directly beneath Detroit. There are over a hundred miles of vacant caverns that would take an army to comb through. By the time they found this location, we would be long gone.”
“Why hide?”
“Because the government’s been hunting Shines down, blaming them for terrorist acts, and is flat out afraid of them, ” Jared said as he walked toward the entryway. He had to bite his tongue to keep from mentioning anything else. Caroline was the only person on the planet he dared confide in, and that was only because his autistic daughter couldn’t speak.
“And why are you down her?” Thierry asked.
“Same as you, it sounds like. My daughter needed help, and coming down here was the only option available.”
“Been here long?”
“A little over three months.” Jared took a deep breath of the stale salt air. “That’s a long time to go without the sunshine.”
“You haven’t been out yet? They’re holding you captive?”
“So to speak,” Jared said as he nodded. “Caroline and I could have gone topside a few weeks ago, but she had a setback, got a little excited, and caused the walls to glow like Roman candles. The fires almost brought that part of the mine down.” He gestured toward a hallway where the walls and ceiling were lined with soot.
Jared glanced down the enormous corridor. The great hall stretched into the inky depths to both the east and the west, two supposed exits at opposite ends of Detroit. He’d ventured down the east side with a torch before, but when the shadows consumed every morsel of light, he felt like he was trapped in a coffin. He shook off the claustrophobic thoughts and headed in the opposite direction.
“How long will they hold us here?” Thierry asked. “I’ve got to get some help for my sister.”
“A few days, or weeks, or months. But don’t worry. Charlemaine’s medical skills are as good as they come. If anyone can fix up your sister, it’s her.”
A portion of the worry left Thierry’s face. If he were in Thierry’s shoes, seeing his sister would be his first priority as well.
“Can I see her?” he asked.
“Sure. That’s how I was planning to start our tour.”
***
A few shower curtains were mounted on the far wall. Most of them were stationed next to the bed, but one of them was drawn partially around his sister, as if the plague that she was carrying couldn’t get around, over, and under the plastic fabric.
Thierry took two steps into the room before he noticed Juliet and another girl standing near the sink watching a monitor. He tip
toed to his sister’s bed.
Janice’s tanned skin was pasty and her eye lids looked like they were covering empty sockets. Thierry picked up her cold, frail hand. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
He cradled her hand and placed it to his lips. He kissed her fingers and blew on them trying to give them back their warmth.
Her fingers curled around his.
Thierry glanced up and saw his sister’s eyes flutter. “Janice.”
Her chin inched toward him. Her eyes parted open just enough to know that she was waking.
“Janice.” Thierry threw his arms over his sister. His elbow smashed the IV into her arm.
Janice’s mouth opened wide and she let out a muffled scream.
Thierry jumped back to see what was wrong. The top of the catheter caught on his shirt and the IV-Line ripped out of his sister’s arm. Only a small bit of blood came out with the needle, but underneath her loose clammy skin, dark blood crept down Janice’s forearm. Within just a few seconds the purplish death was halfway to her fingers.
Thierry grabbed the bed sheet and put pressure on the wound. “Help!” he screamed.
Charlemaine, Juliet, and Jared rushed over.
The discoloration consumed her hand and was spreading up her arm. The swelling in her fingers made them look like Vienna sausages.
“Keep pressure on the wound and elevate her arm,” Charlemaine said as the rushed to the cabinet and filled a syringe.
One of the monitors started beeping. Thierry glanced up to see Janice’s blood pressure dropping fast. His sister’s eyes closed and her body went limp.
Charlemaine sprinted back across the room and injected the medication into the inner part of her elbow, just below Thierry’s thumb. Then she opened a bottle and placed a pill underneath Janice’s tongue.
“Come on Bubdy,” Thierry chanted, combining the words of baby and buddy like he did when she was a child. “You can get through his.” He said a quick prayer in Creole and made the sign of the cross while Charlemaine started an IV in the left arm.
The discoloration in Janice’s arm stopped around the clavicle. When Thierry closed his eyes, he could feel her thready pulse. “Come on Bubdy,” he chanted again.
With each chant her pulse got stronger and the beeping of the blood pressure machine faded.
“She’s stabilizing,” Charmin said. “We need to let her rest and recover from the blood loss.”
Thierry rolled up his sleeve.
“She has Type O blood, Thierry. Do you?”
Thierry’s mind raced through the different blood types and then his arm dropped back to his side. He was A-positive. How did his sister end up with Type O?
Charmin glanced at Juliet and then back at Thierry. “Your sister’s a marvel, you know. Her cells aren’t degrading like the rest of ours.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
Charmin nodded. “A very good thing. Even if we could give her a blood transfusion, I don’t know that I would. It could kill the process.”
How could he have been so careless? She was recovering. She was conscious. And now she was barely able to regain a pulse. It was his fault for pulling out the IV, for causing that nasty hemorrhage that almost killed her. And now there was nothing he could do but wait. Thierry’s eyes started to water.
Charmin placed her hand on his shoulder. “I’ll give her something to increase the production of blood cells. But other than that, we’ll have to wait for her to stabilize.” Her ultra-soft touch seemed to calm him as she guided him to a neighboring bed.
Numb and exhausted, Thierry collapsed onto the bed and stared at his sister, waiting for some sign of life. His eyes were heavy and his mind still racing with guilt. He held up a hand as Charmin pulled the curtain around his bed. Charmin stopped short of closing the curtain, leaving the left corner open enough to see his sister’s bed.
Chapter 6
The cool air smelled too clean. Frenchie didn’t recognize the scent, but it had to be bleach or some other antiseptic. The only thing Frenchie was sure of is that it wasn’t the blue barbicide she used to dip her combs and scissors into. Frenchie glanced toward the curtain in the direction of Janice’s bed. The new girl wasn’t supposed to be contagious, but who wanted to risk it? If she did have the plague, life would be cut short.
The paper crinkled as Frenchie scooted to the back of the exam table. She dug her fingertips into the side of the rubber seal that mounted the appendage to her right leg. After gaining a quarter inch of clearance, she shoved her index and middle finger into the gap and tried to pry open enough space to break the suction. Nothing. She grabbed a shoehorn and crammed it into the gap to save her progress. After resting her fingers for a few minutes, she went back to the task, this time working on the seal on the opposite side of her leg.
Three minutes slipped into twenty, until she was rewarded with an unnatural popping sound that could have awakened the dead.
Charmin whipped open the curtain and shoved it to the wall. "Good job, Frenchie. That was a lot faster than last time."
"No thanks to you," Frenchie said. Was this really necessary? Charmin had been sitting behind the curtain twiddling her thumbs for the last thirty minutes. Why didn't she just come and help?
Charmin grabbed a rolling stool and slid over to the table directly in front of Frenchie and her phantom appendage. "How's it feeling? You've been on it longer today than ever before."
The stub was red and swollen. The skin was cracking and dotted with blood. And the hair Frenchie’d grown out to pad the area looked like it needed a lot more than a waxing.
“Ugh. Do you really need to ask? I mean look at it.” Frenchie mentally cut off the hair follicles, but the strands didn’t fall to the floor since they were encrusted with blood and puss.
Charmin’s angel soft hands lifted Frenchie’s thigh as she inspected the wound.
Frenchie leaned back, holding her weight on her hands. She hated these follow-up appointments even more than she’d hated her occasional visits to the GYN. She closed her eyes, waiting for it to be over.
After a few seconds of Charmin’s poking and prodding, Frenchie’s prosthetic leg was placed in a tub of some sort and a cool liquid was poured over it. The ice-cold bubbles tingled, and stung. Frenchie opened her eyes and stared at her leg as the hydrogen peroxide brought forth frothy pink foam that ate away the bacteria and whatever else may have been on the stub.
A few minutes later, Charmin removed her leg from the bath and cleaned it with some gauze. The purple and blue discoloration made Frenchie avert her eyes, bite her lip, and start to hyperventilate.
“You do know that you’re not Superman, right?” Charmin asked. “Because after looking at this thing I would say you’ve been trying to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”
“Hardly. I was in cramped quarters during the stakeout. My leg throbbed at times and threatened to freeze at others, but I didn’t know it would be this bad.”
“It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have cleared you to go.”
Frenchie recalled the FBI agents in the doorway. Sure their weapons no longer worked, but if she hadn’t bound and gagged them when she did, the Shines would’ve had the rest of the raid party to contend with. “No. It’s okay. They needed me.”
Charmin smiled and gave a gentle nod.
Frenchie’s cheeks warmed. It had been a long time since she felt needed by anyone.
Charmin slathered some ointment on the nub and applied a light bandage wrap. “It might be a while until you’re needed again. The calluses on your leg are getting stronger, but they weren’t ready for that kind of impact. Your leg’s going to take a while to heal. I’m afraid you’re going back to the wheelchair.”
As much as Frenchie despised the wheelchair, there was no way she was going to be limping around these tunnels on crutches like a gimp.
The neighboring curtains pulled open. Thierry stood there holding the curtain. His face in a grimace, he shifted his weight from on foot to th
e other. “Men’s room?” he asked, as bits of blush peeked through his stubble and tanned cheeks.
“Come,” Charmin said, pointing toward the entryway.
After his tight little butt danced across the room, Frenchie eyed the wheelchair which was collapsed against the wall next to her bed. The same wheelchair she’d used after the initial amputation. A device she hated and hoped she would never have to get into again.
Balancing on her good leg, she snagged the wheelchair and pulled it bedside. Within a matter of seconds, she unfolded the wheelchair and made sure the wheel-locks were on. She lowered herself onto the rigid frame.
Frenchie wheeled herself across the room. The occasional beeps from Janice’s bedside demanded her attention. She wheeled herself within a few feet and watched the small screen attached to Thierry’s sister.
Heart rate 62, Blood Pressure 80/65, Pulse Oximetry 75%.
Frenchie didn’t know what much of it meant, but the slow rhythmic sound of Janice’s blood pressure and the gentle hiss of the oxygen that passed by her nostrils made Frenchie realize how close the girl was to death.
She stared across the eight foot gap that separated them, wanting to help, but afraid to get closer. She settled for giving Janice a simple hair cut that fell along the contours of her face.
“Thanks. I like what you did with her hair.”
Frenchie didn’t have to turn around. The scent of the cheap over-fragrant shampoo he used and the light French accent was a dead giveaway. Thierry was behind her. No more than a few feet away. Her cheeks warmed. For a half-moment she imagined him wrapping his arms around her. “Is she going to be okay?” Frenchie asked.
“We um. We don’t know. In my heart, I think, yes. But my eyes tell me otherwise.”
“Let’s go with your heart,” Frenchie said, as she spun the wheel chair around. His hair was slicked back and some of the grime that coated him before was still smudged on his face. His dark brown eyes reminded her of a wounded animal. “You look like you could use something to eat,” she said. “I’m heading down to the kitchen, if you want to come?”
Shine: Season One (Shine Season Book 1) Page 110