Chris leapt on top of the man and dug his knees down onto his huge chest. The enhancer shook, but Chris’s body weight at least limited the convulsions enough for him to wrap his fingers around the syringe still stuck in the man’s arm. He pushed down the plunger until he’d evacuated all the liquid inside the hypodermic.
The man continued to twitch, and Chris feared the medicine had done nothing. His stomach twisted in knots as he slid off the bucking patient. The quaking slowed. Chris’s chest heaved, his own heart thumping against his rib cage.
As the EKG resumed its normal rhythm, he sighed in relief. He’d bought himself and the man another few desperate moments of life. But as he turned back to Robin’s unconscious form, panic took him again.
He dove to her side and held her wrist. Her pulse throbbed up against the two fingers he pressed against her. She was still alive. Knocked out, but alive. He wanted to help her, but he didn’t know how. After all, she was the doctor. He gently snuck a hand around the back of her head. A lump met his probing fingers.
That was good, at least. He remembered hearing or reading somewhere that if there was swelling outside the skull, there was a better chance of less swelling inside.
Her brain might’ve escaped a worse injury.
But he couldn’t be sure whether his memory served him well or not. He’d once had a concussion in elementary school when his brother had chased him. Chris, looking back and teasing his brother, slammed straight into a tree. At the time, it was embarrassing and painful; now it made for a great icebreaker story. The emergency room doctors said he needed to remain upright, and he needed to sleep in a sitting position to keep his head sufficiently elevated.
If any brain fluids were building up, they’d need to drain.
Chris straightened Robin’s body up against the wall. He secured her in a sitting position before he left her side to scour through the freezer. There were no ice packs to hold against the nasty knot on her head.
Figuring it was the next best thing, he grabbed a plastic bag full of frozen glass vials. He returned to Robin and crouched by her side. Supporting her head, he placed the bag against the swelling knot. The cold might assuage the injury, but letting whatever the vials held thaw might also damage their contents. They might contain a medicine or therapeutic crucial to saving these patients’ lives—and, in the process, saving his and Robin’s lives.
He had grabbed the bag without giving it a second thought. He’d been more worried about helping Robin and neglected to think about the long-term consequences in his rush to find anything to alleviate her injuries. As the frost melted, the labels of the vials within the plastic could be seen. Chris squinted, reading them. He almost dropped the package when he realized what they were.
Shaking his head, he gaped. The labels displayed the TheraComp logo—the stolen samples of CDXT.
What the hell did these people want with a canine cancer treatment? They must have been desperate.
In any case, Chris no longer worried about ruining them. It didn’t matter if the vectors inside degraded or if the DNA denatured and became ruined. Therapeutics for dogs wouldn’t save the human enhancers dying around him.
Robin blinked. Her pupils dilated then shrank as they adjusted to the light. Chris breathed another sigh of relief, pleased to see her regain consciousness. “Are you okay?”
She pinched her eyes shut and reached one hand behind her head. Her fingers brushed against Chris’s. “God, that’s a huge lump.”
“Yeah. Does it hurt?”
“Of course it hurts.”
“Sorry to state the obvious.”
Robin looked up at the patient in the bed next to them. “You got the sedatives into him?”
“I did,” Chris said. “You want me to keep holding this against your head or are you good?”
Smiling sheepishly, she took the pack of frozen vials. “Oh, I’ve got it. Thanks.” Robin stretched her legs out in front of her. “Damn. I could use an aspirin.”
Chris stood. “Where do you keep them?”
Robin laughed. “The weakest painkiller they have here is Vicodin. Not exactly stocked for the little stuff, and I’m not about to compromise my mental capacities any more than they’ve been compromised already.”
“Fair enough,” Chris said. He reflected on his own tenacity—or lack thereof—when faced with the pounding headaches that seemed to plague him. He could hardly carry on a conversation with one, and he admired Robin’s pluckiness in the face of her own pain, not to mention the increasingly desperate situation they’d found themselves in. “So does that happen often?”
“Me going unconscious? That’s a first.” Robin grinned. The fact she maintained any sense of humor unsettled Chris. Then again, he considered the grim scenarios she had battled daily back in the pediatric oncology unit. Humor must have been a coping mechanism for her. It might have been a lifeline to escape the overbearing depression that would undoubtedly imprison her if she entertained the sad realities she faced both here and at the Medical Center for too long. But her expression grew serious again. “The sarcoma patients tend to convulse more and more often as the cancer spreads and worsens. I think the symptom flares when it’s metastasized into their nervous system.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.” Robin pressed a hand on the wall and steadied herself as she slowly stood.
Chris reached out. “Need a hand?”
She placed a hand in his as she got to her feet.
“So is that how it works?”
Robin tilted her head to the side as she trod over to a chair. She sat and exhaled slowly. “That’s better...how what works?”
“The cancer,” Chris said. “It shows up in the muscles and then moves into the nerves.”
“Strangely, that’s not how it goes in all the patients. About half of them just experience abnormal muscle growth without the convulsions.”
“But the seizures are linked only to the ones with cancer in the nervous system.”
Robin nodded slowly. “From what I observed in the hospital, that’s right.”
Chris took a seat near Robin. He brushed his hands through his hair as he recalled the genetic factors the doctor had shown him from her experimental results. Everything was linked to increased strength in one form or another. Strength enhancements were one of the most popular genies on the street. They could be bought cheap and in all sorts of variations depending on the manufacturer.
In fact, strength mods had been one of Chris’s specialties when he’d worked with Jordan. They’d focused on amplified muscle mass through the increased size of individual muscle cells and the induced proliferation of those cells.
Last year, when he’d become unwittingly embroiled in another genetic enhancement conspiracy, he and Jordan had discovered that he’d been infected with a virus containing genetic data to enhance the nervous system’s control over skeletal muscles. It demonstrated a new way to increase strength without the telltale muscle bulk prevalent in most enhancers.
Though the viruses circulated in Chris’s bloodstream, they hadn’t actually transfected his tissue with the strength enhancements. They were designed to reproduce, not to transfect. His cells and tissues were never genetically altered. He’d never used a genie. “Oh, my God.” He pressed his palms against his temple. “Oh, my God.”
“What?” Robin asked. “What is it?”
“I haven’t been affected like any of them.” Chris indicated the five patients with bulging muscles and mottled red skin. “But the culprit enhancement that did that is definitely in me.” He recalled the enhancer that had died at his feet. The man’s blood had splashed onto him, and he’d been infected with an enhancement still circulating in the man’s bloodstream. But not a single symptom had appeared in him despite his fear that the same nightmarish affliction would destroy his body.
Before Chris’s abduction, before the car chase, Jordan had told him he would be fine. In fact, he’d be more than fine; he’d live longer. If his suspicions
were correct, he now knew what caused the enhancers’ cancers. And if he was right, he might be able to fix it.
“I think I know what’s going on.” He pointed to the bag Robin clutched behind her head. “I’m going to need that back.” He almost laughed aloud at the brutal irony that the canine therapeutics might hold the key to combatting the cancer destroying the enhancers. “You can use just about any other frozen solution in the damn freezer, but I need that one back.”
Chapter 29
Chris handed Robin a half-liter plastic container of frozen cell media. She held it against the back of her head and slouched in the chair.
“Where are the empty syringes again?” he asked.
Without looking up, she pointed to a set of drawers.
Chris dug through them and retrieved a sterile syringe. He pulled out a separately packaged needle from another box.
“What the hell are you doing?” Robin asked as he put the needle onto the luer lock syringe.
“I need a blood sample. Maybe a biopsy, too.” He dabbed at his skin with a cotton swab soaked in rubbing alcohol.
Robin groaned and stood. “Before you go tearing yourself up, let me do it.”
“Are you in good enough shape?”
“I’m the doctor, Chris. No need to baby me.”
“Fine.” He handed over the syringe.
“Sit,” she said. She set the cold pack on the counter and kneaded his arm to find a good vein. After sticking the needle in, she withdrew a sample of blood and then deposited it into a vial. After adding a dose of heparin to keep it from turning into an unusable gummy clot, she put it into the refrigerator.
“You want a biopsy, too?” She arched an eyebrow. “Where and why?”
“Muscle. Any muscle,” he said.
“That’s going to hurt.”
“I know. But we need it. Remember when I came to the emergency room? Well, it turns out, contrary to your results, I was infected. It just took longer to show up. But Jordan told me the DNA introduced to my cells was different than what probably showed up in these patients. He told me I’d live, there was no problem. In fact, my cells would be better for it.”
Robin cocked her head to the side skeptically. “Okay.”
“If my theory is correct, then I think I know what might’ve gotten into me.” He looked at the comatose patients around him. “And what screwed them up.” Despite the morbid circumstances he’d found himself in with Robin, a tingling glimmer of relief started to allay the guilt he’d clung to so tightly. The enhancements leading to the incurable cancer were not of his making.
Uncapping the large biopsy needle, Robin said, “Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong here, but unregulated activity of the telomerase enzyme can lead to uncontrolled cell proliferation, right?”
“Right. If the expression of that protein—the telomerase—in cells isn’t functioning properly, the cells will keep dividing, which can cause tumors.” Robin nodded as she knelt by Chris’s arm. She pointed at his bicep. “This okay?”
“Yeah that’s fine.”
“To your question, yes, overactive telomerase enzymes can lead to cancer. But what we saw in these patients is more than that.”
“I know,” Chris said. He grimaced as Robin stuck the needle into him. It slid into his flesh slowly, the burn running through him as she pulled the trigger to take a tissue sample. He chewed his bottom lip to prevent himself from yelling out and let out a slow exhale. The pain was a small price to pay for confirming what he thought must be true. He’d found the reason behind the entire cancer debacle.
Gritting his teeth, he said, “I think what you’re seeing is the mixing of enhancements. The mutated DNA leading to the cancer is caused by a combination of genies that don’t play nice together when they’re all injected into a person. In other words, anybody who bought these mods thinking they’d live longer with the telomerase enhancements and had already modified their cells with other enhancements for things like strength is at risk of developing this cancer. It’s okay to inject one enhancement or the other by themselves—but mixing the telomerase enhancement with any other gene mod apparently leads to uncontrolled cell growth, causing the cancer in your patients.”
Robin placed the tiny red chunk of tissue from the biopsy needle in another glass vial. “So from what I understand, the FDA normally requires extensive studies to see how different drugs and therapies interact. But in your world of black-market genetics, no one is checking to see what kind of side effects result from mixed enhancements.”
“It’s not my world.” Chris scowled. “But what you’re saying is right.” He wasn’t pleased at her implying that he still maintained ties to the nefarious illegal enhancement market. He’d struggled to extricate himself from the persistent bonds of the crime world that prevented him from leading a normal life. To make matters worse, in the short time he’d known Robin, he’d grown to respect her dedication to her career of helping others, whether they were children in her ward or genie-using thugs suffering from an illness of their own doing. It sickened him to think she might see him as a biotech outlaw and nothing more.
Shaking away the thought, he caught her gaze. “That makes sense though, doesn’t it? It could explain why this disease is only spreading in the enhancer community.”
“I think you might be on to something,” Robin replied. “Now what are we going to do with your samples?”
***
Chris identified the DNA from his muscle biopsy using the genetic sequencing machine. Robin used a centrifuge to spin the blood down at thousands of rotations per minute. The process separated the biological components out, fractionating the whole blood. She carefully pipetted out the different fluid layers.
“Do you remember which layer contained the viral vectors from the sample you and Jordan sequenced?” Robin asked.
Chris nodded and pointed at one of the small plastic tubes containing the buffy coat—the volume was full of white blood cells and platelets, the cells responsible for stopping bleeding. “If it’s still circulating in me, that would be the one.”
The sequencer’s holodisplay blinked green as it completed its processes. Chris scrutinized the results and ran them through a bioinformatics database to identify the genes from the biopsied tissue. Sure enough, he found extraneous genetic material controlling telomerase activity.
“And that’s certainly not supposed to be in a person,” Robin said.
Chris nodded. “Yep. That’s from the enhancement I came into contact with. This has to be our culprit. I bet we’ll find it messes up enhancements targeting cell growth or augmentation in any way—like those used to increase the unnatural replication of muscle cells.”
“Don’t you think it would disturb other enhancements, though? Why just strength enhancements?” Though dark circles etched the skin under her eyelids, curiosity radiated from her eyes.
“Absolutely. It would probably affect other genetic alterations. That’s why you’re seeing this cancer in the nervous system of some of these patients. It’s altering the normal function of those enhancements targeting the nerves.” He scratched his strained forehead. “And here’s the thing. The majority of enhancers use strength enhancements. They’re the most popular type of genie out there. Everybody’s selling them, and you can get them for pretty cheap.”
“Makes sense,” Robin said. “Other than the anticancer therapies I’ve tried, I don’t have anything else in my arsenal to restore normal telomerase function or reverse genetic modifications.”
“That’s okay,” Chris said. “Because it turns out we’ve gotten lucky.” He retrieved the canine genetic therapy samples from the freezer. “At TheraComp, we’ve developed a pretty radical DNA repair system—CDX. It’s designed to excise the damaged DNA leading to cancer—in other words, it will cut out any harmful or unnatural DNA strands.”
“But it’s for dogs, right?”
Chris shrugged. “Yeah. Jordan and I planned to us
e the results of our treatments from the veterinary clinics to move this along to clinical trials in humans. Obviously, we’d have to do a bit of manipulation to use it in people, but that was the goal.”
“It looks like we’ll be accelerating human trials, huh?”
“That we will.”
“As a doctor, I’d be remiss in my obligations if I sat here while you administered some crazy experimental therapy to live human patients.” She furrowed her brow. “Especially without their consent.”
“I understand,” Chris said. “We’ll test it with cell cultures first. And after, let’s see if we can’t get hold of one of those enhancements our friends over there have used.”
“And do what with it exactly?”
Chris nodded solemnly. “I’ll volunteer as the first human test subject.”
Chapter 30
Jordan slumped into a chair in the cavernous laboratory. Leaning across a black counter, Hugh rested with his chin in his palm.
“I think it’s about time we give the detective another ring,” Jordan said.
“You don’t think they’ve already noticed a connection with Integrative Gene Therapies?” Hugh asked.
“No idea.” Jordan dialed Dellaporta’s contact number. “Let’s find out.”
She picked up after two rings. “Thompson. I’ve been wondering if something hadn’t happened to you, too.”
“I’m still very much alive and free. But I take it you haven’t come any closer to finding where Chris is.”
For a moment, she said nothing until she spoke in a hushed voice. “This is an ongoing investigation, Thompson. I can’t give you too much information.”
“So you’ve found something.” He knew she was wrestling with how much she could tell him and how she might help them. While the law and her job bound her to strict silence, he didn’t feel quite the same responsibilities. His sole obligation was to figure out where Chris was. “I’m going to test the waters here and maybe you can tell me if I’m swimming in the right direction. We found a potential connection to the enhancements in several of the UMMC patients. It seems the most common thread is IGT’s involvement, with which our dear Senator Sharp seems to harbor his own connections.”
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 42
