Peril (19 page)

Sill, finding donors was a huge obstacle.

Reeves reasoned women in distress wouldn't mind a monetary contribution to give him what he needed. When they presented for medical treatment at his newly opened clinic, he merely offered them compensation for what he asked. Unfortunately, it took hundreds of screenings to find the right one. Then an alternative crossed his mind. Why not increase his chances dramatically of ensuring a possible donor by looking for a relative? That should solve the pesky matching problem.

Scott was the first one to receive a perfect donor match. And the graft had performed miraculously. Everything Reeves dreamed came to fruition. Doctored neural cells could increase memory. Make it superior to what God—if you chose to call him that—created.

He'd heard once that God laughs when people name his laws after themselves. Well, was God laughing at Thomas Reeves now, or in awe of his work like everyone else?

The phone rang, drawing him out of his reverie.

A quick explanation from the clinic's charge nurse summarized the situation. The on-call doctor had fallen ill in the middle of a procedure. They were at risk of losing the donor unless someone filled in. Could Reeves come immediately?

Above all, he didn't want to lose the graft. Months of work and screening would go down the drain. Once the graft was obtained, it took several weeks to doctor the cells before he could transplant them. He bathed them in a mire of salt and sugar solution along with his special witch's brew. That would enable those neural cells to fuse into the recipient's brain by sinking their hungry tentacles into the patient's hippocampus.

He grabbed his lab coat and headed for the back stairs. Having an all-inclusive facility had been his plan from the beginning. It was less of a risk for the graft if his team harvested it, kept it in the same place, and then transplanted it a few weeks later.

Nearing the harvest suite, he knocked softly on the door and heard the permission of the lead clinic nurse to enter. He hadn't yet participated on this end of the protocol and couldn't say that he was all that anxious to do so now. Still, stardom, as well as science, necessitated sacrifice. Taking risks made a person rise from ordinary.

The patient appeared to be sleeping, but some trauma must have befallen her because normally the patient was awake during the retrieval process. Her face was red and blotchy, and thick black smudges down her
cheeks alluded to makeup pulled down by tears. Another nurse held oxygen to her face. The quiet beeping of the patient's ECG monitor echoed her sedated heartbeat.

“Why is she unresponsive?” Reeves asked.

“We had to sedate her.”

“What for?” Reeves unbuttoned his lab coat and laid it neatly on the Corian countertop.

“She caught sight of the ultrasound images. Was nearly up off the table before we could get the drug into her.”

“She did consent for the procedure, correct?”

“Yes, absolutely. I have her signed form in the chart. Most don't want to see the images, but she became insistent. Then hysterical.”

Reeves pulled the ultrasound machine closer and made a few sweeping passes over the patient's belly with the transducer. “What in heaven's name went on in here? The specimen's left arm is clean off. The blood in the cavity is making it hard to see.”

The nurse looked at him, her eyes wide at his dismay. Not a look of abject horror but incredulousness over his comment. “It's not unusual for that to happen when we're trying to get to the part that you want.”

He positioned the transducer and introduced the surgical element into the amniotic sack near the base of the donor's skull. Suddenly, there was a flash of movement across the screen.

The donor had repositioned itself and was now grasping his instrument with the hand that remained.

Acid clawed up Reeves's throat.

It's not possible.

In response to the vacuous hole in his gut that seemed to be yanking his intestines into it, his face broke out in a sweat. He blinked rapidly against the image and pulled the metal sheath out and set it aside, wiping his forehead with the back of his gloved hand.

He swallowed heavily against the bile his stomach was now forcing up his esophagus.

“Dr. Reeves, are you okay?”

He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He nodded in the affirmative against what his thoughts were telling him. Against what his scientific, logical mind refused to accept as his heart screamed in terror.

Localizing pain was a higher brain function. Something they looked
for in trauma patients to know if they were lightening neurologically. Physically crossing the midline of the body to remove a painful stimulus, actually latching on to it, meant more than just the brain stem lived. The brain's cortex was alive. The part of the brain that science claimed was the cell layer that gave a person their
humanness
.

“Dr. Reeves, we better finish. You'll lose the graft if the donor bleeds out.”

“Of course.”

Reeves introduced the sheath again and adjusted the angle on the transducer. Aiming the instrument at the base of the neck, he drew it back to puncture the base of the skull. The donor rolled
toward
it, and again, with its available hand, tried to
push
it away.

Reeves stood quickly, knocking over the gray stool as he threw the sonogram transducer onto the machine, thick warm gel splattering up to the screen, and again he set the instrument aside.

He then turned and vomited into the sink.

Chapter 23

0545, Saturday, August 11

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING
frightening about the beginning of that day. Morgan Adams perceived it in her spirit—a rift between the peacefulness she longed to experience once again and the unsteady undercurrent that disturbed her heart. It began the moment she buckled her seatbelt to drive to work.

It was a palpable warning, a portend of what the next twelve hours would bring, like being alerted to road conditions on a hazardous weather day.

Today would be wrought with black ice. Some would navigate hairpin turns well. Others would pitch over the guardrail and land impaled on pine trees.

Her gut ached.
Maybe I'm coming down with something
. Morgan traced her fingers over the face of her cell phone where it sat in her cup holder. She contemplated the wisdom of calling in sick thirty minutes before her shift was scheduled to begin—especially since she was today's charge nurse.

She backed out of the garage but stopped her vehicle in the driveway and watched the heavy door clunk down the tracks. When it settled, angry caws of black-bodied crows smothered the joyful chirping of chickadees as they fluttered about the trees. Morgan gripped the steering wheel and briefly considered pulling her car back into the garage, closing the door behind her, and leaving the engine running.

If her husband had not still been asleep, she might have been too weak to deny the attractiveness of that option. Surely, all this trepidation was related to it being the anniversary of
that
day. Three months since her daughter died. The face of her phone brightened as it displayed a text from her mother. Tensions were still high between them.

You have to go to work.

A statement. Not a question. Even in their disagreement, did her mother sense her weary heart? Had Morgan's pain pulled her mother from the comfort of her bed hours before she normally rose?

Why? What are you doing up so early?

For Seth. He'll need you today.

Why today?

Morgan's body felt heavy with the thought of surviving the next thirteen hours. Her short, clipped, unpainted nail clicked against the phone's frame.

She texted back.
Lisa doesn't trust me. She thinks I'll hurt him.

The cursor blinked back in mocking silence.

Morgan, please. Go. It will help to be where she was.

Her heartbeat touched up a notch as her fingers tingled against the cool glass. Strange. Her mother was usually the one to support her feelings and let her cave in to the depression when it overtook her. Better to rest than push it, particularly when Morgan was ill herself. She tightened her right hand over her left lower forearm and felt the pulsatile flow of her blood as it rushed through her dialysis shunt.

Morgan?

Gritting her teeth, she jabbed at the phone's face.
I'm going!

Those first moments of walking into the pediatric ICU heightened the dread in her soul. There was a flow of energy that came from a mingling of wounded souls that would speak right to her nurse's intuition, whispering soft secrets of which child threatened to sever the binds of the physical body to pursue the freedom of the ethereal one.

That's how it felt as soon as she swiped her badge over the access reader and crossed the threshold into the secured unit.

Someone was about to die.

After she entered the staff lounge, Morgan plopped her heavy tote on the table, remnants from the night shift dinner break still present. She grabbed the empty food containers and stuffed them into the overflowing trash can. From her bag she pulled a set of scissors and hemostats, two black pens, and a calculator for determining drug dosages.

Morgan secured her bag in her locker and made her way to the nurses'
station. The night charge nurse, Phillip, approached her. She looked over the counter to the wide space that held the unit's twenty beds.

“Man, I'm glad you're here.”

His normally combed, sandy-blond locks stuck up in tufts of pulled anxiety.

Looks like last night was stressful.

“What's happening?” Morgan asked out loud.

“Well, for one, we got two admissions. A thirteen-year-old female, victim in a motor vehicle collision. Bad head injury. She was the only survivor and right now she's just hanging on. ICPs have been high so they put her in a pentobarb coma. And we had to intubate an eighteen-year-old male. Asthmatic.”

“That's never good,” Morgan added.

“Don't I know it. He's already popped a lung. So chest tube, vent . . . medically paralyzed and sedated.”

When Morgan had left the unit a couple of days ago, they'd had two patients.

“How's Seth?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Hangin' in there. They plan on bringing him out of the hypothermia today. We've been weaning down his sedation through the night. The problem child has been the one you affectionately call
little miss sweetheart
. Bree.”

Morgan's heart skipped a few beats. “What happened?”

“She looks a lot worse. Cap refill is bad. Blood pressure kept falling through the night. Had to go up on her vasopressors. Cardiology is worried she won't make it to transplant.”

Morgan grabbed either end of her stethoscope with her hands and pulled the tubing into her taut neck muscles. “Why not? She's not even on a vent yet.”

“Won't be long until she is. It's her blood type and her size that are the problem. She has the rarest kind and she's barely twenty-four months. An adult heart is not going to fit into her chest.”

Morgan's stomach sank. Though she knew the truth, hearing it was like setting it in a granite marker. The uphill climb for families as they waited for organs was emotionally draining. She knew that from experience.

Eyeing Seth's corner of the unit, she was relieved that her sister-in-law hadn't arrived yet. “Who's on today?”

“Lucy, Trudy, and Izabel.”

A decent mix.

Trudy was a seasoned nurse. That meant she was knowledgeable, but at times set in her ways—something that often annoyed her much younger coworkers. “Okay, let's close the unit and start report. Get this day going.”

From the bank of windows that faced the nurses' station, two police cars at the main entrance caught Morgan's eye. The hospital was L-shaped, so from the PICU's end position on the seventh floor, it gave easy view of the front drive. A police presence wasn't unusual except that it was early in the morning, there was more than one car, and they weren't in the ambulance bay, where they were more prone to park. Usually at this hour people were already under arrest, in lock-up, and sleeping off the previous night's misguided activities.