The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series) (27 page)

Whether it was a sense of vulnerability or intuition that made her glance behind, she couldn’t be sure; she swung her head around to check the gate almost involuntarily, and let out a choked scream, clutching at Heather’s arm. Two more figures moved stealthily in the dark, closing the gap from an alley across the street to the impound lot with steady loping gaits.

And then everything was happening at once. The yipping that had terrified her inside the station was suddenly all around her, wails and barks like those of animals but still too human filled the air; Heather was up and running, her hand clamped down on Sarah’s wrist like a vise, dragging her into the open; Mike was shouting for them to run, and an engine roared to life; footsteps and slavering mouths closed in on them as they ran into the open lane and straight for the sedan; headlights ripped open the dark, illuminating two more figures outside the fence, sprinting for the gate.

Then they were at the passenger door of the sedan, Heather shoving her into the vehicle so hard she hit her head against the frame and bit her tongue, but there was no time to cry out; the door slammed behind them just as the first of their would-be attackers leaped into view and lunged at the handle. Heather slammed her palm down on the lock and screamed as the maniac outside hooked a bloodied hand around the handle, but the car was already lurching forward. The one at the door disappeared suddenly with a yelp of pain, and the car heaved grotesquely, swinging into the clear lane. Mike’s teeth were gritted as he slammed his foot down onto the gas, accelerating down the narrow lane toward the gate, where three more figures appeared; he was yelling for the girls to hang on as they shot toward their attackers, who faced them without fear, mouths open, and bloodied, horrific wounds on their arms and faces.

“Hang on!” he bellowed.

Two fell beneath the sedan’s wheels, and the third was thrown forward onto the hood, his face slamming with appalling force into the windshield, sending spidery cracks shooting across the glass; the car listed like a boat in heavy seas, throwing Sarah forward onto the gearshift. She could feel the power go out of the car, and the sound of the engine changed, becoming a whine of frustration rather than a purposeful growl. The man on the mangled hood slid away from the windshield, his blood smearing a glistening streak behind him.

“It’s in neutral!” Mike shouted as he grabbed Sarah’s arm and tried to drag her up onto the seat. She cried out in pain, her knee wedged impossibly between the seats. As they struggled to free her, the man on the hood pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, slipping grotesquely as he clambered forward, lips pulled back into a terrifying snarl, revealing bloodied gums and broken teeth. Within seconds he was kneeling in front of the glass that separated them, pounding his fists against it. As Sarah wrenched her leg free and shoved her body away from the shifter, she realized Mike had maneuvered the rifle off his back and had it pressed against the windshield.

Involuntarily, she looked at their would-be attacker. The sound of the rifle firing rocked her, and then she heard nothing but a tinny ringing sound. And so it was strange to see the glass shatter and the man on the hood collapse into an unmoving heap, with his face and part of his neck blown away. A rough hand pushed her back into the seat and yanked the belt over her chest; she looked up and saw Mike, stone-faced, buckling her in. The rifle sat beside him, muzzle up. She frowned. Shouldn’t it be smoking?

A muffled voice that could have only been Mike’s penetrated through the ringing silence; it was strained with urgency. The car was back in drive, and they shot forward toward the gate, the ruined body sliding off the hood after a few seconds. To their right, a few more figures were sprinting through the darkness, drawn to the headlights. Next to her, Heather shook her head back and forth a few times and pulled the rifle across Sarah’s lap toward her. But they were out into the open street before any other figure got close, streaking away into the night.

It took a few moments for her to realize she was holding her breath; as she gulped for air, she heard her own heart beating in her ears and the haggard sound of her lungs expanding. Heather’s comforting voice sounded very far away as she spoke, placing her face directly in front of Sarah’s and mouthing the words, “Are you okay?” She nodded, unsure of the truth. She had been terrified . . . but the moment that the rifle went off, it was as if someone had turned off the sound during a scary movie. Nothing that happened after that point seemed real, despite the fact that the hood of the car was a mess of blood and hair, covered in dents and crumpled near the front. And she could feel the night air as it whistled through the grisly hole that the shot had punched through the windshield.

Finally she curled up into a ball against the older girl, a wild tangle of emotions. She was confused and scared, but she found that she was also embarrassed by her fear. For a few moments back at the lot, she had felt competent; now, as she realized that she had lost both her composure and her pistol, her face flushed red-hot.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I lost my gun,” she said, holding out her empty hand. Her voice was a loud, muffled echo inside her brain.

Heather shook her head to indicate it didn’t matter and wrapped her in her arms.

Rather than look out the cracked and bloodied window, she closed her eyes and leaned her head against Heather’s shoulder, a sudden exhaustion overpowering her and pulling her down into unconsciousness.

~

“What do you mean it’s gone?”

Thad was sitting on his stool, his shoulders hunched forward, his body betraying the fatigue he was doing his best to hide. Karen Lau watched him as his eyebrows and lips pinched together, as if he were considering a better way to explain. She reminded herself that he had been at the hospital for a full fifteen hours longer than she had, and he spent most of that time hunched over a microscope or staring at a computer screen.

With a long exhale, Thad shifted his weight and turned to look back at the display screen.

“Well . . . whatever it was that was killing the viruses has either been eradicated or has mutated in some way that makes it ineffective. I can’t think of any reason why that might have happened, though. Did you give him any kind of antibiotics?”

Karen nodded. “Just penicillin, because of the wounds. His brother reported some were bites, from another person who attacked him.”

Thad’s furrowed brow rose slightly at that, but he collected himself and continued, eyes still on the screen.

“There are no white blood cells present in either sample. The original pathogen wiped them all out.”

“I wonder if that will change,” she murmured, more to herself than anything. It was almost unheard of to encounter a patient with a completely depleted white blood cell count; with autoimmune diseases like leukemia, the cells produced in the bone marrow were simply immature or abnormal. And in those situations, the cells would overreproduce, crowding out healthy cells. She considered aplastic anemia, but it seemed unlikely: the red cells would also be nearly nonexistent as well if that were what they were dealing with. She let out a small sound of discontent, and Thad turned to look at her.

“It seems likely,” he answered her previous question. “We’d be looking at a complete suppression of the marrow stem cells in order to keep the white cells from being produced. Maybe we could get another sample in a few hours?”

Karen nodded again.

“Any luck with the pharm company?” she asked.

The smug smile that spread across his face made her chuckle. He scooted his stool over to another desk and pulled out one of the reference books. Flipping open to a dog-eared page, he offered the book to her, tapping a paragraph near the top. She took the book and found a friendly-faced woman wearing a lab coat smiling at her from the left-hand side of the page, an introductory paragraph to the right. Karen skimmed the words quickly.

Argo (NYSE: ARG) leads the industry in product research and development geared toward the protection and improvement of human life. We are committed to serving as a responsible corporate citizen, as well as to stockholders, employees, customers, suppliers, and the communities in which we live and work. Our guiding philosophies are centered in these goals and are great contributors to our success.

“They were running a clinical trial here and on Kauai,” Thad told her. “From what I can tell, they started three months ago and were set to wrap the first round this week. You remember Serophim?”

She raised an eyebrow. The drug name sounded familiar, but she wasn’t sure. Thad reminded her of the antidepressant that had been in the pipeline a few years earlier. Argo made the claim that the drug would first work as a synthetic serotonin, increasing the brain’s reaction to favorable stimuli and feelings of happiness. Over time, it was meant to forge neural pathways that the depressed patient’s brain lacked, increasing the neurotransmitter’s natural presence and production in the brain. As it became more widely used, the serious side effects began to emerge: patients found their moods more difficult to control and anticipate, and reported feeling irritable, angry, and occasionally violent. After prolonged use, patients’ natural serotonin levels would drop, and they needed higher doses of the Serophim to regulate their mood, sleep, and appetite. Many experienced weight gain in addition to their other symptoms. Serophim was quickly taken off the market for additional research.

“They’ve revamped it?” she asked, surprised. She thought she remembered at least one class action lawsuit over the rampant side effects.

Thad made a face. “It’s hard to say. There’s not a lot of info out there; but I did some digging on the hospital network, and I found this article.” He tapped a few buttons to bring his computer monitor to life, then clicked on a link. The screen changed to show a headline that read “
NANOPARTICLE-BASED DEPRESSION TREATMENT MOVES ONE STEP CLOSER.
” She leaned in over his shoulder so she could read the short piece.

By the time she was done, her mouth was hanging open.

“Nanotechnology?” was all she could say.

Thad nodded. “They found a way to use it as a drug delivery method. It’s like extended release tablets, but magnified times a hundred. One dose stays in the system for a few weeks, even a month, delivering the drug in highly accurate doses.”

She looked up at him, confused.

“The technology is self-regulating, and the nanites are meant to be programmed like microscopic computers. They’re given a series of commands, which they execute. At least as far as we can tell,” he said in answer to her questioning look.

“As far as we can tell?” she repeated back to him. She slid a stool over to him and sat down; it was getting difficult to concentrate on standing.

“Well, it’s such an emerging market. I mean, I don’t even know that much about it. I’ve heard they’re used for self-cleaning glass, but really that’s about it. There’s been some rumblings about cancer treatments, but it’s so far off . . .”

They stared at the screen together, the blue orbit around the company name rotating slowly as they both mulled over the implications. Karen was the first to speak.

“So . . . they use microscopic, preprogrammed computers to deliver and regulate medication . . . synthetic serotonin, in a form that has been known to have difficult side effects. To what end?”

Thad didn’t take his eyes off the screen as he responded, “Well, from what I can infer from the article, the nanites allow for a counterdrug to be introduced to offset overmedication. Serotonin is biochemically manufactured from tryptophan . . . so maybe that’s where some of those side effects were coming from. The listlessness, the mood swings, increased appetite . . . I don’t know, it’s hard to say. But if they could use something to correct those effects, they’d have a very powerful, very effective, and very convenient antidepressant to market.”

Karen suddenly felt very out of her depth, and that made her uncomfortable. Without any meaningful experience with the drug and no real knowledge of nanotechnology, how could she decide if this drug trial had anything to do with Brandon’s symptoms? Suddenly, a thought occurred to her, and she stood up abruptly.

“What?” Thad asked, watching her intently.

“That girl—the mugging victim. Her blood behaves the same as Brandon’s, right?” She didn’t wait for Thad to answer. “She was attacked too, and some of those wounds might have been bites. She got violent before, and then went into cardiac arrest, just like he did. But she . . .”

Karen let the sentence trail off. It still seemed impossible to her that the girl had no beating heart and yet was alive and breathing; the only thing that seemed more impossible was that she would have forgotten such an event, and yet that had happened too.

Across from her, Thad sat waiting for her to finish her sentence. He looked curious, but guarded. He knew better than to push. Karen took a deep breath and blinked slowly, trying to clear her head. Finally, she met Thad’s gaze so that she could gauge his reaction.

“Her heart stopped. We were getting the paddles charged when the power went out. The generators kicked in, and I was waiting for the charge to build, but . . . her pulse came back.”

As she had suspected, his eyes narrowed under a now furrowed brow.

“Her pulse came back,” he repeated quietly.

Karen nodded.

“But her heart was still stopped,” she finished slowly.

His face was unreadable for a long time as he sat, staring into space, considering this new information. Even as she said it, it sounded completely ridiculous. But it had happened, she told herself with a sudden, ferocious urge to defend her own experience. Somehow the girl’s blood was pumping without her heart.

At that moment, the tumblers fell into place, and Karen gasped as the picture clarified itself in her mind.

“Thad . . . the blood is moving without a heartbeat,” she said, her voice filled with meaning. And sure enough, the connection was clearly made in his mind too, his eyes focusing back on her and his mouth opening just slightly.