Life Support (38 page)

Springer medical library . . . something here on Medline you have to see. Please, please call me back. . .

The pain came on like a fist crushing her abdomen, squeezing so tight it choked off any groan. Eyes closed, teeth gritted, Molly closed her hands into fists and strained against the wrist straps. Only when the contraction had ended did she release a whimper of relief. She had not expected childbirth to be so silent. She had imagined herself screaming, and loudly too, had assumed that pain was a noisy affair. But when it came, when she felt the first ripples of another contraction, and then the seizing up of her womb, she bore it without uttering a sound, wanting not to scream but simply to curl up and hide in the dark.

But they would not leave her alone.

There were two of them, both dressed in blue surgical gowns, only their eyes visible in the narrow gap between mask and cap. A man and a woman.

Neither one spoke to Molly, to them, she was an object, a dumb animal on the table, her thighs spread, her legs strapped on elevated leg rests.

At last the contraction eased, and as the haze of pain cleared, Molly became aware, once again, of her surroundings. The lights, like three blinding suns shining overhead. The hard gleam of the IV pole. The plastic tube that had been threaded into her vein.

"Please," she said. "It hurts. It hurts so much . . ."

They ignored her. The woman's attention was focused on the bottle dripping into the IV, the man's on Molly's parted thighs. Had l he worn even the vaguest expression of lust, Molly would have felt some measure of control, some measure of power. But she saw no desire in his gaze.

Another contraction began to build. She jerked on the wrist straps, straining to curl up on her side, pain suddenly translating to fury.

Enraged, she jerked back and forth, and the table shook with the rattle of steel.

"The IV's not going to last," said the woman. "Can't we put her under?"

The man answered, "We'll lose the contractions. No anesthesia."

"Let me go!" screamed Molly.

"I don't want to put up with this noise," said the woman.

"Then dial up the Pitocin and let's get the goddamn thing expelled." He bent forward, his gloved fingers probing between Molly's thighs.

"Let . . . me . . . go!" gasped Molly, her voice suddenly dying as the wave of pain broke and washed over her. The insertion of the man's fingers at that moment intensified the agony, and she closed her eyes, tears trickling down her face.

"Cervix is fully dilated," the man said. "Almost there."

Molly's head lurched forward, and she gave an anguished grunt.

"Good, she's bearing down. Do it. Come on, girl. Push."

Molly forced out the words, "Fuck you."

"Push, goddamn it, or we'll have to get it out some other way."

"Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . ."

The woman slapped Molly across the face, the blow so brutal Molly's head snapped sideways. For a few seconds she lay stunned and mute, her cheek ringing, her vision dimmed. The pain of the contraction faded away. She felt hot liquid seep from her vagina, heard it drip, drip onto the paper drape beneath her buttocks. Then her vision cleared and she focused again on the man. And realized that what she saw in his face was expectation. Impatience.

They are waiting to take my baby.

"Increase the Pitocin," said the man. "Let's finish this."

The woman flicked up the dial on the IV, and a moment later, Molly felt another contraction begin to build, this one accelerating so fast and so hard it shocked her by its violence. Her head lffled off the table, face straining toward her chest as she pushed. Blood gushed from between her legs, she heard it splatter the surgical drape.

"Push. Come on, push!" the woman commanded.

The pain crescendoed to unbearable heights. Molly gasped in a deep breath, and again strained. Her vision blackened. New pain suddenly exploded in her head. She heard herself cry out, but the sound was foreign to her, like the shriek of a dying animal.

"That's it. Come on, come on . . . ," said the man.

She pushed one last time, and felt the agony between her legs suddenly give way to the pain of tearing flesh.

And then, mercifully, it was over.

Groggy, clammy with sweat, she could neither move nor utter a sound.

Perhaps she fell asleep�she wasn't sure. She knew only that time had passed and there was movement in the room. The sound of splashing water, a cabinet clanging shut. It took great effort, but slowly she opened her eyes.

At first the glare of light was all she saw, the trio of bright suns shining directly overhead. Then she focused on the blurred image of the man, standing near her opened thighs, and on what he was holding in his hands.

It had hair, coarse black tufts of it clotted with blood. The flesh was pink and formless, like a clump of butchered meat lying limp in the man's gloved hands. It moved. Only a quiver at first, then a violent shudder, the flesh balling up, the hair stiffening like the fur of a startled cat.

"Primitive muscle function," said the man. "And we still have rudimentary follicular and dentate structures. Haven't eliminated the appendages yet, either."

"Saline bath's ready."

"Are we all set up next door?"

"Our patient's positioned on the table. We just need the tissue."

"Let me get a weight on this." The man rose and lay the clump of flesh on a table scale not far from Molly's head.

Molly stared. A single eye, lidless, soulless, stared back at her.

Her scream shattered into a thousand piercing echoes. Again and again she screamed, her horror swelling with the sound of her own voice.

"We have to shut her up!" the woman said. "The patient might hear it!"

The man clapped a rubber mask over Molly's mouth and nose, and Molly caught a whiff of noxious gas. She jerked her face away. He grabbed her by the jaw and tried to force her to hold still, to breathe in the fumes. Molly caught the man's little finger in her teeth and bit down like a panicked animal. The man shrieked.

A blow slammed into Molly's temple with such force a hundred bright lights seemed to explode in her head.

"Bitch! Fucking bitch!" the man gasped.

"My God, your finger�"

"The syringe. Get the syringe!"

"What?"

"The potassium. Do it now."

Slowly Molly opened her eyes. She saw the woman standing over her, holding a syringe and needle. She saw the needle pierce the rubber dam on the IV line.

What felt like a line of fire slowly burned its way up Molly's arm. In pain, she cried out and tried to pull free, but the strap held her wrist in place.

"All of it," the man snapped. "Give her the whole fucking thing."

The woman nodded. She squeezed down on the syringe.

The count was extraordinary. Embedded in swirls of fetal brain tissue were at least thirty-three separate pituitary glands, more than any previous embryonic implant had produced. The cells appeared healthy and disease free under the microscope, and the girl's blood tests had all been normal. They could not allow any infections to be transmitted.

They had made that mistake with their first group of recipients, when they'd used intact fetuses harvested from the hired wombs of women in a poor Mexican village. A village where the cattle were already dying.

This tissue had been grown from a genetically altered embryo started in his own lab. He knew it was clean.

Dr. Gideon Yarborough dissected out three of the glands and dropped them into a vial of trypsin warmed to thirty-seven degrees Centigrade. The rest of the fetus�if one could call the clump of flesh a fetus�was rinsed and placed in a jar of buffered Hanks' balanced salt solution. It bobbed in the liquid, and the blue eye surfaced, staring up at him. There was no functioning brain behind that eye, and no soul, nevertheless it gave Yarborough the willies. He covered the jar and set it aside. Later, he would harvest the remaining pituitaries. It was a valuable crop, there would be enough to implant ten patients.

Twenty minutes had passed.

He rinsed the vial containing the three pituitaries with salt solution.

By now the trypsin had broken up the tissue and turbid liquid swirled in the vial, which no longer contained solid pituitaries but individual cells in suspension. The building blocks of a new master gland. Gently he aspirated the suspension into a syringe, then he carried it into the next room, where his assistant was waiting for nim.

The patient, lightly sedated with Valium, lay on the table. A seventy-eight-year-old man in satisfactory health who'd been feeling his age. Who wanted his youth back and was willing to pay for it, willing to endure a minor measure of discomfort for a chance at rejuvenation.

Now the man lay with his head aligned in a Todd-Wells stereotaxic frame, his skull fixed in place. The amplified image taken by an X-ray tube was projected onto a fifteen-inch television. On the screen was a view of the sella turcica, the small bony well containing the patient's aging pituitary gland.

Yarborough sprayed a local anesthetic into the man's right nostril and swabbed it with cocaine solution. Then he inserted a long needle up the right nostril and injected more anesthetic into the mucous membrane.

The patient gave a murmur of discomfort.

"I'm just numbing up the area, Mr. Luft. You're doing fine." He handed the syringe of anesthetic to his assistant.

And picked up the drill.

It had a simple twist bit, almost needle-fine. He inserted this up the nostril. With the image on the screen to guide him, Yarborough began to drill through bone, the bit whining through the floor of the sphenoid bone. As it broke through the other side, piercing the dura propria, the membrane lining the pituitary, the patient gave a sharp cry, his muscles tensing.

"It's all right, Mr. Luft. That's the worst part of it. The pain should last only a few seconds."

As he predicted, the patient slowly relaxed, his discomfort passing.

Piercing the dura always caused that brief jolt of pain in the forehead.

It did not worry Yarborough.

His assistant handed him the syringe containing the cell suspension.

Through the newly drilled hole in the sphenoid bone, Yarborough introduced the needle tip. Gently he injected the syringe contents into the sella turcica. He pictured the cells swirling into their new home, growing, multiplying into healthy new colonies. Cell factories pumping out the hormones of a young brain. Hormones Mr. Luft himself could no longer produce.

He withdrew the needle. There was no bleeding, a good, clean procedure.

"It went perfectly fine," he told the patient. "Now we're going to remove the head frame. We'll have you lie here for a half hour or so while we watch your blood pressure."

"That's it?"

"It's all done. You sailed through with flying colors." He nodded to his assistant. "I'll stay and watch him. I'll call the van when he's ready to go back to Brant Hill."

"What do we do about..." His assistant glanced toward the door. Toward the other room.

Yarborough stripped off his gloves. "I'll take care of that too, Monica. You go back to the house and deal with the other problem."

I The thermometer on the wall registered thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

Toby huddled in a corner, her knees bent to her chest, a plastic sheet draped over her shoulders. It was a corpse's shroud, and the smell of Formalin permeated the fabric. At first it had repelled her, and she had felt nauseated by the thought of stripping the sheet off one of the dead bodies for her own use. But then she'd started shaking from the cold and she knew she had no choice. It was the only way to conserve body heat.

But it wasn't enough to keep her alive. Hours had passed, and her hands and feet had lost all feeling. At least her arm had stopped aching. But she was having trouble thinking, her mental processes slowed to the point where she could not focus on anything except staying awake.

Soon, though, she lost the will to manage even that.

Gradually her head sagged to the floor and her limbs fell limp. Twice she shook herself awake and found she was lying on her side and that the lights were still shining. After that, she slept.

And dreamed. Not in images, but in sounds. There were two people speaking�a man and Jane Nolan�their voices distorted, metallic. She felt herself floating through black liquid, felt a welcome rush of warmth against her face.

Then she was falling.

She jerked awake to find herself lying on her side in darkness. There was a carpet beneath her cheek. A faint blade of light cut through the shadows and a door squealed shut. She tried to move but found she could not, her hands were bound together behind her back. Her feet felt numb and useless. She heard another door shut, and then the sound of a car engine starting up.

A man said, "Shouldn't you latch the gate?"

The answering voice was Jane Nolan's, "I've tied up the dog. He won't get out. Let's just go."

They began to drive up a bumpy road. The road from the house, thought Toby. Where were they taking her?

A sudden jolt of the van slammed her left shoulder against the floor, and she almost cried out in pain. She was lying on her injured arm, and the merciful numbness from the cold room was now wearing off. With a burst of effort she twisted and managed to roll onto her back, but she now found herself wedged up against something cold and rubbery.

Light had begun to filter through the darkness from streetlamps and passing cars. She turned her head to see what she had bumped up against and found herself staring into the face of one of the corpses.

I Toby's shocked gasp drew the attention of her captors. The man said, "Hey, she's awake."

"Just keep driving," said Jane. "I'll tape her mouth." She unbuckled her seat belt and crawled to the rear of the van. There she knelt beside Toby and fumbled in the semidarkness with a roll of surgical tape.

"Didn't think we'd have to hear from you again."

Toby strained to free her hands but could not loosen the bonds. "My mother�you hurt my mother�"

"It's your fault, you know," said Jane, peeling off a strip of tape.