by Jude Hardin
“Are you experiencing any pain?”
“No.”
“Nausea? Dizziness? Any discomfort at all?”
“I need to pee.”
“We’ll take care of that in just a few minutes.”
“You’re not putting a catheter in me.”
She turned and looked at Stottolini.
“You need to cooperate,” he said. “Or this is going to be a very long day.”
“I want to know what’s going on,” I said.
“And if I tell you, then what? You’ll cooperate? I doubt it. It’s best that you don’t know. Just answer the doctor’s questions and let her do what she needs to do.”
“I want to see Anna Parks. I want to know that she’s still alive.”
“We’re taking very good care of Ms. Parks,” Stottolini said. “You’ll just have to trust me on that for now.”
Dr. Penworth removed the sheet from the cart she’d been pushing, revealing a variety of medical supplies. She grabbed a blood pressure cuff, wrapped it around my left arm. She pumped the bulb on the air line and inflated the cuff and pressed the cold bell of her stethoscope against the fold in my arm, and then she worked the little thumbscrew valve, allowing the cuff to deflate slowly. She took my temperature with an oral thermometer, listened to my chest with her stethoscope.
“You’re in very good shape for a man your age,” she said.
“Great. Can I go now? I have things to do.”
Stottolini laughed.
“I’m going to insert your catheter now,” Dr. Penworth said.
I thought about resisting, decided there was no point in it. My hands and feet were tied, and Stottolini was standing less than ten feet away with a pistol.
Bailey Penworth had probably done a thousand catheterizations in the emergency room. It only took her a couple of minutes.
“There,” Stottolini said. “Doesn’t that feel better?”
“Yeah. You should try it sometime.”
“I know all of this must seem very bizarre to you, Mr. Retro, but you need to realize that what we’re doing here is probably going to result in the greatest medical breakthrough in history.”
“You’re insane,” I said. “You think that it’s okay to kidnap people and use them for your experiments? It’s not. It’s not okay. I don’t care how great you think you’re breakthrough is going to be.”
“If you only knew.”
“Then tell me. What difference does it make if I know what’s going on or not? It’s not like I can do anything about it.”
Stottolini took a step forward. He wanted to tell me about the experiments they were performing. I could see it in his face. He was beaming. Apparently he was very proud of the work they were doing, even though it involved using human subjects without their consent.
Dr. Penworth was gathering some phlebotomy supplies from the lower shelf on her cart, getting ready to draw some blood from me.
“Should I tell him?” Stottolini said.
“No,” Dr. Penworth said. “It would be a waste of time. Don’t tell him anything.”
But he did anyway.
13
Brain transplants. That’s what it amounted to, although they weren’t actually removing the organ from one person’s skull and placing it inside another’s. Stottolini explained it to me in layman’s terms. There’s a small part of the brain called the temporal lobe. It’s where self-awareness occurs, along with autobiographical memory—what they sometimes call episodic memory. It’s what makes a person unique. According to Stottolini, cells from a very specific region in the temporal lobe can be extracted with a needle and then replaced with cells from that same region in another person’s temporal lobe. For both bodies to survive, each patient has to be a donor and a recipient. There has to be a swap, at least a partial one. Otherwise, the resultant void in the donor’s brain would result in death within a couple of hours. Originally commissioned for espionage purposes, the procedure had been outlined in a series of notebooks penned back in the 1940s by a neuroscientist named F.T. Blood.
After telling me all that, Stottolini looked over at Dr. Bailey Penworth. She glared back at him disapprovingly, but he kept talking anyway.
“My friend Brighton Penworth stumbled across the notebooks on a trip to Zurich a few years ago,” he said. “He stole them, and he brought them to the United States and showed them to me. Of course I was interested. Skeptical at first, but intrigued nonetheless. The procedure seemed simple enough, but there were dozens of chemical formulas for the liquid suspension—the most crucial part of it all—and it’s not clear in the notebooks which formula is the one that works. The correct formula will keep the cells alive long enough to perform the transplant, and it will also inhibit the recipient’s natural response to reject those cells. So that’s what we’re working on now. We’re still working on the formula for the suspension. But we’re getting close. We’re getting very close. Actually, we thought we had it. Brighton was sure of it. He wanted to experience the procedure for himself, so—and against my advice, I might add—he basically traded brains with Anna Parks.”
“For what purpose?” I said. “To live longer?”
“No, that’s not what this is about,” Stottolini said. “After the procedure, the recipient’s brain ages at an accelerated rate. That’s where F.T. Blood ran into some problems back in the forties. The animals he used in his experiments were showing signs of diminishing cognitive function at a relatively young age. Fortunately, we’ve discovered that those results can be avoided by monitoring certain enzymes in the blood and reversing the procedure before the levels get too low. All we have to do is keep some of the recipient’s original cells in storage.”
Dr. Bailey Penworth brushed a finger across her right cheek. Wiping a tear away, maybe, although the expression on her face hadn’t changed.
“Uncle Brighton’s mind started shutting down before we could successfully perform the reversal,” she said. “We tried, but it was too late.”
“He was in his seventies,” Stottolini said. “That’s probably why it happened so fast.”
“So you killed him?” I said.
“He knew the risks going in. He made it clear, before we performed the procedure, that if anything went wrong, he didn’t want to go on living in a demented state. He was a world renowned scientist, and we knew there would be a lot of publicity surrounding his death, or any sort of disappearance. Publicity that eventually might have given us a lot of trouble. We needed it to seem as though he had died of natural causes, so we took him to the hospital and told them he’d fallen and hit his head. We never expected him to wake up. But he did. That is, the Anna Parks cells that had been transplanted into his temporal lobe woke up.”
“That must have been when he ran into my room at the hospital,” Thrasher said.
“Yes. Which of course was a terrible situation. And quite unfortunate for you, Mr. Thrasher.”
“What about the Brighton Penworth cells that were transplanted into Anna’s temporal lobe?” I said.
“We don’t know yet,” Bailey said. “Ms. Parks slipped into a coma shortly after the procedure was completed. We’re not sure who she’s going to be when she wakes up. If she wakes up. In the meantime, we’re going to keep tweaking the formula for the suspension. It’s what Uncle Brighton would have wanted.”
“If this isn’t about living longer, what is it about?” I said.
Stottolini smiled. “Lovely young Bailey here is on special assignment to The White House. With a little help from a headache-inducing drug and some phony imaging results, the president will soon be advised to undergo a brain biopsy. During the procedure, Bailey will inject some cells from my right temporal lobe into his right temporal lobe. And vice versa, of course. He’ll be in my brain for a while, filling the void, but we’ll keep him sedated in a nearby hotel. I’ll only need a few days to take care of the business I need to take care of as president, and then we’ll reverse the procedure. That is, we’ll inject my cells back into my br
ain. Unfortunately, we can’t allow the president to go on living after I do what I’m going to do, but we’ll make sure that he dies peacefully. Of course we have to get the suspension right for any of this to happen, but like I said, we’re almost there.”
I could only imagine the damage Carlo Stottolini might do while he was in the driver’s seat of the United States of America. He would have complete control of the military, for one thing. It was a horrifying thought.
I supposed they were going to use Thrasher and me for the next round of experiments. It didn’t sound like the greatest medical breakthrough in history to me. It sounded like science fiction. Like some sort of horrible future that needed to be prevented.
When I was a kid, I read numerous novels and comic books about the transfer of one person’s consciousness into another person’s body, but such stories always seemed highly implausible.
And yet here we were.
“I need to draw some blood,” Bailey said. “Then I’m going to take you over to the x-ray room.”
She started wrapping a tourniquet around the upper part of my left arm. Before she could get it tied, I rolled over and bent my knees and pushed her away with the heels of my feet. She fell into the cart, causing it to roll away from her as she landed hard on the floor.
“I’m not going to be part of this,” I said. “You can go ahead and kill me now.”
“I certainly will if I have to,” Stottolini said. “But we’re not murderers. What we’re doing here is eventually going to benefit everyone. Just think of the possibilities.”
I’d been thinking of the possibilities. The procedure would certainly still be useful for espionage purposes. In fact, the agency I used to work for—the agency that was still taking care of me and my estranged family financially—would be very interested in obtaining the instructions for F.T. Blood’s techniques and formulas, especially once everything was perfected. They would pay a large sum of money for something like that. No doubt about it. But in a general sense, such a procedure would never benefit everyone. It would only benefit a few. The ones with big bank accounts and no conscience. The ones who could afford to have their thoughts and memories temporarily loaded into a different body for fun. Like leasing an expensive new sports car for a few days. Or the criminals who would use their new bodies as disguises, simply disposing of them after reversing the procedure. And there was no way it would ever be accepted among the mainstream scientific community. It would always be illegal. A new form of human trafficking. Healthy young people like Anna Parks would be kidnapped and sold to the highest bidder.
“You’re not getting any blood from me,” I said. “And you’re not going to x-ray my skull.”
Stottolini pointed the gun at my face.
“We can sedate you,” he said.
Bailey got up from the floor and started brushing herself off.
“Kill him,” she said. “He’s never going to be anything but trouble for us.”
“Last chance,” Stottolini said to me. “You can either lie there and be still while we get some blood, or—”
Before Stottolini could finish his thought, Thrasher emerged from under the blanket he’d been covered with and climbed off the gurney and lurched forward. All in one swift motion. He was huge. Six-seven or six-eight, two hundred fifty pounds or more. Arms packed with iron cannonballs, shoulders as wide as a car. He grabbed Stottolini’s wrist with one hand and the back of his upper arm with the other and pushed in opposite directions. I heard the elbow snap. It was a sickening sound. Like stepping on a tree branch. The gun skittered to the floor. Bailey went for it, but she wasn’t fast enough. Thrasher beat her to it. He was big, and he was quick. A rare combination. I was impressed. He picked up the pistol and aimed it at her heart and told her to get on the floor.
“Facedown,” he said. “Hands laced together behind your head.”
She complied. Stottolini was lying a few feet away from her, curled up and writhing in pain. His right arm had started to swell already. There was a purplish knot the size of a softball where his elbow used to be.
Thrasher walked over to my gurney and cut the cable ties binding my wrists and ankles with a pair of bandage scissors, and then he grabbed some gloves and a needleless syringe from the supply cart and removed my catheter.
“Thanks,” I said.
I figured Thrasher had gotten the scissors from the cart when I pushed Bailey with my feet. He’d removed his restraints, and he must have disconnected his catheter from the drainage bag at the same time. The bag was still hanging from the gurney.
I walked over to Stottolini and patted him down to make sure he didn’t have any more weapons. I found a cell phone clipped to his belt, and a key ring with maybe two dozen keys on it in his right front pants pocket. And a book of matches. Not just any book of matches. The one with the torn cover I’d gotten from Jack Gilmore at the apartment complex. It had been in the back pocket of my pants. Now it was in the front pocket of Stottolini’s pants. I didn’t know why. Not important at the moment. I patted Bailey down, found some alcohol wipes and a ballpoint pen and a miniature bottle of hand sanitizer. I stood and started to call 911, stopped abruptly when I felt the barrel of the pistol pressed against the back of my neck.
“Drop the phone,” Thrasher said.
14
I dropped the phone.
“I thought we were on the same side,” I said.
“We are. But you can’t call anyone yet.”
“Why not?”
“I need to help Anna. If an ambulance comes, they’ll take her to the hospital and she’ll probably never wake up from the coma. You heard Stottolini. They extracted some extra cells from her temporal lobe. Those cells are stored here somewhere. I need to try to reverse the procedure before Anna goes anywhere. Otherwise, I’ll never get the chance.”
He was right. No doctor with a license to protect was going to inject those cells back into Anna’s brain. And we certainly couldn’t trust Bailey Penworth to do it, which meant that Thrasher was probably the only person on the planet with any sort of qualifications who was willing to take the risk.
“You might end up killing her,” I said.
“That’s true. But I have to try. You can help me, or you can stay here in the cage with these two.”
“I’ll help you,” I said. “But please don’t point that gun at me anymore.”
Thrasher nodded. I pulled the top sheet off of the gurney I’d been lying on and used the scissors to cut it into strips. Carlo Stottolini and Bailey Penworth were still lying on the concrete floor. I used some of the strips to tie Bailey’s wrists and ankles while Thrasher stood by with the pistol. Then I moved over to Stottolini.
He screamed when I forced his wrists together.
“I’m going to kill you,” he shouted. “I’m going to kill you both.”
“No you’re not,” Thrasher said.
He pointed the pistol at Stottolini. I thought he was going to pull the trigger. But he didn’t. Maybe the doctor inside him had battled it out with the ex-convict. The ex-con wanted to eliminate any future threat, but the doctor was incapable of going through with it. The doctor had won. This time.
Thrasher lowered the pistol, clicked the safety on. I finished tying Stottolini’s wrists.
Bailey was sobbing. So young, I thought. So much potential. I almost felt sorry for her. Then I remembered the monstrous things she’d been doing, things she would have continued doing if Thrasher and I hadn’t intervened.
Maybe she sensed the absolute abhorrence I was feeling toward her at that moment.
“I can help you,” she said. “I can show you where everything is, and I can guide you through the procedure.”
“Where can we get some clothes?” I said.
“Look on the bottom shelf of the cart.”
I leaned down and started ferreting through the pile of supplies. There were some surgical scrubs, tops and bottoms, brand new still wrapped in plastic. I found a set of size large for myself, a
nd a set of size double extra large for Thrasher. I pulled my gown off and put the scrubs on. Thrasher did the same, pausing for a moment to find another syringe and remove his own catheter. We were still barefoot, but at least our asses weren’t exposed anymore.
Thrasher lifted Bailey from the floor and set her on the gurney he’d been on. He lowered the head of the mattress so that she was lying flat, and then he raised the rails so that she wouldn’t roll off.
“Let’s go,” he said.
I picked up Stottolini’s phone and put it in my pocket, and then I followed Thrasher and the gurney with Bailey on it out of the cage. I’d tied Stottolini’s wrists and ankles tightly with the strips of cloth from the bed sheet I’d cut. I didn’t think he could get loose, but there was no point in taking any chances. I stopped and secured the gate with the chain and the padlock just to be sure.
Thrasher had been by Anna’s room before, so he knew the way. I followed him through a maze of plywood partitions and doors with numbers on them. From the size of the roof, I figured the warehouse was probably about as big as a super discount store. I wondered why they needed so much space. Future expansion, maybe, although I couldn’t imagine that what they were doing would ever be legal.
Still no electric lights. It had gotten darker over the past few minutes. Maybe it had gotten cloudy outside, or maybe evening was approaching. I asked Thrasher if he had any idea what time it was. He didn’t.
I tapped Bailey on the shoulder.
“Where’s the switch for the overhead lights?” I said.
She didn’t answer. She was crying again. I decided to leave her alone for now. Maybe in a few minutes she would settle down enough to start answering questions. I had plenty, and I figured Thrasher did too.
It took us a couple of minutes to get to Anna’s room. There was a window facing the inside of the warehouse, but the curtains had been drawn on the other side of it. Thrasher tried the door. It was locked. I pulled out the set of keys I’d found in Stottolini’s pocket. It took several tries before I found the one that worked. I opened the door and stepped into the room and switched the light on. Thrasher followed. Anna Parks was lying in bed with her eyes closed. There was a bandage on her head. Stretchy white gauze. A spot of blood about the size of a dime had leaked through over her right ear. She had tubes in her nostrils where oxygen was being delivered from a port in the wall, and tubes in her arms where IV fluids were being delivered from a pump on a pole. A monitor screen mounted on the wall above the bed displayed her blood pressure and heart rate. There was a sink and a faucet in the far left corner of the room and a small refrigerator and a supply cart similar to the one Bailey Penworth had pushed into the cage earlier.
