“I have access to maybe a few hundred,” Cal said. “More, if I tell my parents what’s going on.”
“If you do that,” Dana said, “we should all say good-bye to you first, because we won’t ever see you again. They won’t have a clue how to help you, but they sure as hell won’t listen to us. I guarantee it.” Her expression was dark. “No. We need to handle this ourselves.”
“But you said that Destiny costs five grand a hit,” Garrett pointed out. “And we have, what? Three hundred bucks?”
For a moment, as Dana looked at him, there was so much grim determination in her face that I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she announced that she was going to go rob a bank to get the money Cal needed.
Instead, she stood up, and one sleeve at a time, she removed her bomber jacket and tossed it onto the floor. Then, with one swift movement, she reached into her waistband and pulled out a knife. And she sliced the inside of her forearm, just above her wrist—just enough to draw a thin line of blood.
“What’d you do that for?” Garrett all but shrieked.
Dana didn’t flinch. Instead, she turned to Cal and held out her arm. “I have what you need,” she told him. “It’s inside of me.”
Cal’s eyes filled with tears as he gazed up at her. “I can’t make you do that,” he whispered.
“You can’t stop me either, Scoot,” Dana replied. “I’m done losing the people in my life who mean something to me. I’m through with that. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Cal shook his head as he gazed up into her eyes, but she didn’t back down so he finally nodded.
Morgan broke the silence. “Good luck with that.”
Dana knew he was being sarcastic, but she chose to pretend his words were sincere. “We’ll need all the luck we can get, thanks. And we won’t turn down help, if it’s offered. So…are you offering?”
“Noooo!” Morgan laughed as he said the word. “I’m outta here.”
I laughed, too, because he was a terrible liar. “No, you’re not,” I said. It was the wrong approach, because he immediately bristled.
“Oh yes, I am,” he said.
“Well, I appreciate the help you’ve given us so far,” Dana said. “We’ll pay you what we owe when we can. Have a safe trip back to Adventure City.” Just like that, she dismissed him, turning to me and Garrett. “You two head over to Garrett’s dad’s office. I think it’s a good idea for Calvin to have a medical scan. I’m pretty sure we can figure out the equipment on our own.”
She turned to tell Cal directly, “It’s smart to get a baseline at the very least.” Back to Garrett and me. I was watching Morgan and he was just shaking his head. “But I also want you to do as much research as you can on the Destiny detox process, see if we have access to the rest of the equipment we’ll need. If we’re going to do this—”
Cal made a noise.
“I said if, Cal,” Dana repeated. “It’s only an if, but if we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right. Oh, and while you’re at it, Sky, see if you can’t use Dr. Dick’s computer to track down Jilly’s family—give ’em a call to find out WTF.”
“Got it,” I said, gesturing for Garrett to follow me.
But Morgan blocked our path. “Oh, gods, yes,” he said. “All right. I’m offering my assistance, sweet baby Jesus help me.”
Dana smiled, and it was beautiful. “Thank you,” she said graciously. “Go with Garrett and Skylar then. Cal and I will be in touch as soon as we can.”
“Wait, where are you guys going?” Garrett asked. It was kind of amazing that he didn’t know—that he hadn’t figured it out. But then again, this crazy world was still new to him.
So Dana spelled it out. “Harrisburg,” she said. “We need to pick up some lab supplies—things that Garrett’s dad probably won’t have in his office.” She looked down at the cut on her arm, and I watched it disappear as she swiftly used her G-T healing powers to mend herself. “If Rochelle can cook her own Destiny in a closet, then so can I. I had a look at her setup. Remember back when people were cooking meth at home, in soda bottles?”
I didn’t, but Cal and Milo both nodded. “That was seriously a thing?” I asked.
“Yep,” Dana said. “Cooking D is easier and way less dangerous. For the cook, that is—but not for the blood ‘donor.’” She made air quotes. “There’s a big difference between Rochelle’s lab and mine. I’m not stealing some innocent’s blood to cook Destiny.” She lifted her chin in defiance. “I’m going to use my own.”
————
Garrett had been shaking his head back and forth since we’d gotten back into his car. Fifteen minutes later, as we turned onto the private road that led to his dad’s castle-like beach house, he was still shaking his head.
“A Destiny lab. In the trunk of Calvin’s car,” he mumbled. “Un-friggin-real.”
“It’s not at all like a meth lab,” Morgan tried to reassure him from his seat up front. I’d let him ride shotgun. “The ingredients aren’t combustible.”
I leaned forward. “It won’t blow up,” I translated.
“I know what combustible means,” Garrett said, glancing at me in his rearview mirror. “But the main ingredient is blood. One, gross. And (B) doesn’t that make Destiny addicts kinda like vampires? Feeding off innocent little girls?”
Clearly, Garrett had paid attention when Cal had spouted some of his theories. I sighed as he continued, “Also, I read that D-addicts are hard to kill, because not only does the drug heal their injuries, but they don’t feel the damage, so you have to go big. Cut off their heads. Sound familiar? I wonder if a wooden stake through the heart would do the trick.”
“Probably,” Morgan said. “Because the splinters would get in the way of the addict’s ability to close up the hole in the organ. But a double pop to the head with a nine millimeter would also cause irreparable and immediate damage to the brain—and that’s really what you want to aim for. The head. I’ve seen jokering addicts take bullets to the chest and keep wreaking havoc right up to the nanosecond that they bleed out. But crush their skulls…?”
“Good to know,” Garrett said.
“I can’t believe we’re talking about this seriously,” I said. “Crush their skulls?”
“As a Greater-Than,” Morgan told me, “with a known bounty hunter on your trail, you should be aware that in order to incapacitate you, your John Doe will go for your head. A solid blow to knock you out, so you can’t use your powers against him. And if he accidentally hits you too hard and kills you, no biggie. You’ve still got all that blood inside you. A quick exsanguination, dump your body in a landfill…”
“Gee, thanks for that image,” I said.
“Always protect your head,” he told me as Garrett pulled into the long driveway that led to the house.
Lately, Garrett had been managing to drive like a responsible human being—but when we reached the circular end to the drive, he sped up and peeled into his parking space with a squeal of tires. No matter how many improvements he made on the real-human-boy front, there was always a little bit of douche-ness lingering in the background.
“Wow,” Morgan said, and I wasn’t sure if the G-T was reacting to Garrett’s abrupt and ridiculous impression of a stunt driver or the gargantuan mansion.
“We just renovated,” Garrett said as he led us not to the front door, but to a second entrance back around the garage. A sign said: “Dr. Richard Hathaway.” “Dad moved his medical office out here to lower overhead, because why not, right? That’s why we painted the parking space lines on this part of the driveway—because now his patients come here to get nipped and tucked.”
There was a keypad lock on that door, and he quickly typed in a code, then flipped on the lights as he led the way into a small waiting room decorated in classic Florida seashore—blues and aquas and whites, with tail-walking dolphins aple
nty. Instead of a receptionist’s desk, there was an in-wall computer, complete with keyboard, with a sign saying “Virtual Check-In” beneath it. There was another door, also with a keypad lock, and Garrett quickly opened that for us, too.
“Dad’s genius-smart, but sometimes he can really pull a dumb move. His password is my name, all caps. Might as well have made the password password.”
He turned on more lights as we followed him into a pristinely empty hallway. There were two open doorways, and a third door that was closed with another of those keypad locks. Garrett pointed to the open door on the right.
“Dad’s office,” Garrett said, and Morgan and I looked in to see a room paneled in rich, dark wood. Windows looking out onto the ocean lined one wall. Bookcases covered two other walls, extending from floor to cathedral ceiling. A library ladder on wheels leaned against the edge of one of the bookcases.
A huge desk that held an expensive-looking computer was in the middle of the room, and I recognized it from the first—and last—time I’d been in Garrett’s house, a few months back when he’d thrown a huge party. I’d attended with Calvin and Dana and Milo, hoping to literally sniff out a connection between Garrett’s dad and the local Destiny drug ring. Of course, we’d come up cold, because although the douche was strong in both Hathaways, neither was involved with the bad guys.
Frankly, it was kinda crazy. So much had changed in the months since that party. And although he wasn’t a bad guy, I would never have imagined that Garrett would find his way onto our official team of good guys. And yet here we were.
“The exam room’s over here,” Garrett said, pulling our attention back to the other open door as he reached in to turn on the overhead lights.
That room was a pretty standard medical examination room. It held a padded table with one of those rolls of paper on the end. There was a little footstool in front of it, to assist the shorter patients. A sink was in the corner with a set of cabinets above it. A stool on wheels was tucked under a desk, and another chair sat in the corner. A plastic case for a box of nitrile gloves was attached to the wall, along with a very large flat-screen TV.
“You said your father had a medical scanner,” Morgan said as he opened the cabinets above the sink. Inside were bandages and gauze, and more boxes of those gloves.
“It’s on wheels. It must be locked in the new operating room.” Garrett led us back into the hall, toward that closed door. It was metallic and reminiscent of the door to a fridge rather than a room. Beside it, on the wall, was another keypad. “This one’s garrett, all lowercase.” There was silence for a moment, then the keypad lit up green, and the door beeped.
Garrett opened it. A swoosh of cold air came rushing out, then we all stepped inside.
“Whoa!” I exclaimed. The room’s automatic sensory lights clicked on, illuminating the area. It was like stepping into a legitimate hospital operating room. There was a shining metal operating table, along with an array of fancy, high-tech equipment and computers of all shapes and sizes, including, yes, a medical scanner on wheels. Complicated-looking illustrations of bisected humans lined the walls—along with several ginormous computer screens. The floor shone with an intimidating sterility.
For a moment, I pictured Calvin laid out on the table while Dana leaned over him and ordered me to pass the scalpel. I was suddenly very glad Morgan had offered to help.
“Relax,” Morgan murmured to me. “The detox procedure is relatively noninvasive. No cutting Calvin open anyway. We’ll use various drugs and electrical currents to stop and then try to restart his heart.”
“Try?” I asked, but Morgan had already turned away.
“So, here’s the deal,” Garrett announced. “You guys can use anything you want, but you have to clean up afterward. And…? No stealing anything.”
I grunted. “Yeah. You know me and my nasty bedpan-stealing habit.”
“I’m just saying,” Garrett replied defensively.
Morgan was looking at the scanner. I knew what it was even though I hadn’t seen one up close all that often. I rarely went to the doctor because I didn’t get sick. My annual checkups were all done by my mom’s doctor friend—I called her Dr. Susan. And she didn’t use a scanner, preferring the old-fashioned methods for taking blood pressure and pulse.
But I’d seen enough medical shows on TV to know that a scanner gave doctors easy access to those vital stats as well as far more intricate info like imaging of internal organs and X-rays of lungs and bones. The biggest bonus was that the scanner analyzed blood without breaking the patient’s skin.
Medical scanners also—according to Dana—revealed telling information about neural integration. In other words, if you were a Greater-Than, and you were scanned, your G-T-ness would show, provided your doctor knew what to look for.
And, huh. As I stood there, watching Morgan drool on Dr. Hathaway’s state-of-the-art scanner, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t an accident that my personal doctor was a non-scanner-using “friend of the family.” I suddenly remembered how upset—crazy upset—my mother had been when I’d been rushed to the ER after a bad car accident. The doctor there had scanned me again and again, amazed that I’d walked away from the wreck without a scratch. This was back when we’d lived in Connecticut, right before we moved to Florida…
Huh.
But announcing I think my mother might have known I was a G-T long before I knew it myself wasn’t going to help us save Calvin. Here and now we had better things to discuss. Like, “How does it work, the Destiny detox? And what did you mean, we’d try to restart Calvin’s heart?”
Morgan glanced up at me as he moved from the scanner to the operating table, where he checked what looked like a series of leather restraints, probably there to make sure the patient didn’t roll off mid-procedure. “We’re going to need more than this,” he said. “Chains. In case he changes his mind or gets scared.”
“Because chaining people who are scared helps them…how?” I asked.
“If he leaves, mid-procedure, he’ll die,” Morgan said bluntly. “The concept—how the detox works—is pretty basic. It uses the theory that as a D-addict dies, as he or she is actually physically dying, their body burns off all of the Destiny in its system, in kind of a hail-Mary self-healing move to try to stay alive.”
I was following him, but he glanced over to see Garrett frowning so he said, “Picture a Destiny addict. Rochelle. Say she starts to joker while she’s at the mall, so she goes on a rampage, and she’s just going crazy and people are dying because she’s flinging them around, off the balconies. Right? And the SWAT team shows up, and they shoot her, right in the chest, and she goes down. She’s bleeding—she’s basically got a hole in her body. But the Destiny in her bloodstream kicks in with its self-healing abilities—kind of the way Cal got injected and can suddenly walk?”
Garrett nodded.
“So the drug is working to rebuild Rochelle’s damaged tissues and organs and blood vessels,” Morgan continued, “but the injury is too severe. Still, the Destiny won’t give up and it works and it works and it works. And she’s still moving around, too, and maybe even accessing some additional powers—like maybe she can breathe fire—which uses up even more of the drug. Everything’s accelerating—it happens really fast when you throw a catastrophic injury into the mix. And suddenly, there’s no more Destiny in her system. She’s burned it all off, but boom, then she’s dead, because she’s got a bullet hole in her chest, which is something that can’t be fixed with a snap of your fingers.”
Morgan turned back to me. “Autopsies done on former addicts revealed that more often than not, there’s absolutely no trace of the drug in their bloodstream. That’s one of the reasons why the people who are lobbying to legalize Destiny claim it’s not dangerous. Yeah, the users died, but how could D be the cause of death if they weren’t using it when they died? All other drugs and toxins leave a trace. B
ut not Destiny.
“So what we’re going to do with Calvin,” he continued, “is strap him down and stop his heart. The Destiny in his system will kick into overdrive, trying to fix something it can’t possibly fix. We use the scanner to monitor the level of D in his blood, and as soon as it’s down to zero, we’ll zap him with electricity and, hopefully, restart his heart.”
“So we’ll kill him,” I said, to make sure Garrett understood, “so to speak, but then we’ll bring him back to life.”
“Hopefully.” Garrett had caught that word, too.
“There are no guarantees,” Morgan told us somberly. “The odds are not good. But we’ll try our best.” And then he added the words I was hoping not to hear: “And the worst-case scenario is far less bad than it would be if Cal jokered and died on his own terms. This worse-case scenario only needs one body bag, as opposed to half a dozen.”
Garrett exhaled hard. “I don’t know, dudes, I’m not sure I’d agree to do it, if I were Cal.”
“Good thing you’re not Cal then,” I said, except I was thinking I’m not sure I would either.
————
Morgan continued to explore the OR, while Garrett and I went into his dad’s office to access his computer—to attempt to break into his National Medical Database account.
When I touched the mouse, the screen came to life, so I sat down in the big leather chair behind the ginormous wooden desk. Garrett leaned over my shoulder. “Check his browser history. He never clears it. It’s like he just doesn’t care.”
“Or maybe he just doesn’t watch any porn,” I suggested. And there it was—a bookmark for the NMDB. I clicked it open and a sign-in box popped up. The user name was filled in, DocHath, but the box beneath, marked Password, was empty. Inside of it, the blinking icon waited for me to type.
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