The Heart of It All (HeartSick Series Book 1)

by Weston Mitchel

  “True but that ol’ lady also said if we have the yada yada that they are looking for, they will call us back, means a lot more money. Not exactly sure how much but she made it seem like a good sized chunk of change.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  “I can’t remember it was some long boring mumbo jumbo bullshit but it prolly won’t matter…” Brian looked away as he finished, “they haven’t… called any one back yet she said… just us noobs comin in.”

  “Great, might as well go scratch some lotto tickets,” Austin said sardonically, “So a hundred bucks, that’s your big financial rescue?”

  “Chill bro, as the great philosopher Bill Nye the Science Guy always says, the longest journey starts with but a single step. So here we are, takin a damn step,” Brian says this while turning toward Austin, placing his hand on his shoulder like he just bestowed an enormous wisdom upon his blind follower.

  “Besides its 2016, time of the independent woman, they can pay for themselves here and there,” Brian said moving his hand as if he was swatting at an invisible fly, letting Austin know that that was no big hurdle to overcome.

  “Nope, sorry,not happening. If we take them out, we pay, end of story,” Austin rebutted crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back, letting Brian know that was the end of that discussion.

  I may not be following most of your advice pop, but at least that one stuck.

  Austin remembered back when he was about to leave the house to go on his first date, his dad reaching into his wallet, handing him a fifty and saying “Tonight is on me, bud. Number one rule on any date, or at least rule 1A, the guy always pays. Even if all you can afford to do is split a roadside taco, that’s what you do. Got it?” His dad said pointing a finger playfully while looking him dead in the eye.

  “Yeah, Dad, I got it. Thanks pop,” Austin said as they did their not-so-secret handshake. Austin putting his fist into his dad’s raised hand for a high five, then vice versa with his dad pounding knuckles into Austin’s open palm followed by both of them waving their fingers and making the flashback noise from Wayne’s World.

  It started years before when Austin went to pound fists with his dad after they beat his mom and sister in a game of Rummikub. His dad didn’t know exactly what that was at the time, so he went in for the awkward high five to a closed fist.

  Since they were guys that basically became their way of saying I love you.

  Austin remembered as he was reaching for the car door handle his dad said “And Remember Aus” this came out sounding like Oz, “make g-”.

  Austin cut him off before he could finish and replied annoyingly like only a teenager who has heard the spiel time and time again can “Yeah, I know Dad, make good decisions. I got that too, I promise.”

  “Ok, Ok,” raising his hands into the air in the I surrender position, “I get it, you got it. Now go have fun.” His hands turned downward and started fanning a non-existent flame shooing Austin into the car.

  As the door slammed shut Dad yelled through the window at him, about to head to his own car to cover a night shift for some extra overtime, “Hey, don’t be scared to bring back some change… and be a gentleman for cryin out loud.”

  Austin most assuredly would have been polite, nervous, and everything else a boy would be on his first date. But he never got the chance, never even made to Sarah Ingram’s house to pick her up and take her to the movies. In fact the next time he got the chance to see his dad, or anyone else for that matter really, wasn’t until almost half of a week later, staring up at his worried face from a hospital bed.

  Brian's Type Test

  Summer, 2 Years Ago - Luckwell, Texas

  Austin pulled away from the house on the way to pick up Sarah Ingram, for their first date together. It was his first date ever, her tenth. Sarah was a girl that he didn’t think even knew he existed, until the last day of school. At the end of the day, in his last period English class. When she signed his yearbook.

  She closed it, gave it back to him with a wink and walked out of the class without looking back. At least he didn’t think she had looked back, Austin hadn’t necessarily been looking that high as her hips swung her away.

  As soon as she was out of sight he hurriedly cracked open the book looking furiously for what she wrote. Not in the back… Not in the front either… Austin leafed through each page until he got to the I’s.

  There it was. Around her picture she had drawn a heart and a long arrow to the right side of the page. Written vertically down the length of the edge was “Call Me” with a smiley face and her number.

  At first he thought for sure she most likely put this in everyone’s yearbook. Sarah Ingram was one of the most popular girls in school, which meant she was super social. Somehow her friends on Facebook outnumbered his by a multiple of ten and he was basically friends with all fifty of the kids his age in town, on Facebook anyway.

  That night staring at her picture with the heart around it, he felt confident enough that the heart frame was meant only for him. He picked up his nuts and guts then picked up his phone and called her. At least, that’s what he wanted to do. He was confident but not that confident.

  So he texted her, and for the next six days they texted pretty much non-stop. Even a few phone calls, and face-times thrown in for good measure.

  Tonight was the first time they were going to see each other since school let out, and to say he was nervous would be understatement of the millennium. On the way to her house now, instead of paying attention to the road and where his car was drifting towards, he was lost in thought.

  Trying to come up with what he was going to say if her dad answered the door. He was pretty sure that her dad would either be sharpening a knife or cleaning out a gun like the dads always do in the movies.

  Austin was mentally rehearsing putting his hand out to shake the probable war- face-painted commando’s hand and tell him how respectful he planned on being to his daughter tonight.

  Austin was thinking this as his car hurdled through a red light.

  Present Day - Austin, Texas

  “Walters!” a young Hispanic woman wearing a lab coat yelled out into the lobby with a clipboard in her hands. “Brian Walters!”

  “Yo, right here,” Brian replied raising his right hand high into the air then pointing down at his head, poking his pointer finger in and out of his fist like a flashing neon sign.

  “Ok, good. Please follow me sir,” the lady said.

  Brian stood up and looked back and forth several times between Austin and the nurse with a growing sense of dread in his eyes.

  I think he’s scared to go alone.

  “Excuse me, Nurse, is it ok if we go in together, Im scared of needles so it would help having him there, I think?” Austin asked bailing out Brian from having to do so.

  Brian closed his eyes just for a split second, let out a held breath and silently mouthed the words “thank you” to Austin facing away from the nurse.

  “Oh, I’m not a nurse, just a lab tech, you can call me Izzy. But yeah that’s not a problem, I have your info right here too, but first,” she said looking at the clipboard on top, holding the black ball point pen to the paper she then asked “Mr. Walters you didn’t check which blood type you have on here, so which is it?” She stood there staring at him awaiting his answer.

  “I didn’t check anything cuz I have no idea what my type is. Figured since ya’ll were taking it, you could figure it out on your own.”

  “Well, the tests and experiments we’re doing are type specific, so we typically like to know before we go in. But it’s no big deal just follow me and we can take a sample real quick and find out.”

  The lab tech smiled and turned on her heels, briskly walking down the corridor towards her part of the building. Even though she was in heels, the boys almost had to jog in order to keep up.

  She led them to a small room with a doctor’s examination chair, and in the middle of the chair was a wide swath of white sanita
ry paper covering it from the headrest to where your knees hang off the edge. Brian sat on this with his feet on the slide out foot stool, while Austin sat in a wooden chair beside him.

  On the other side of Austin was what seemed to be the tech’s desk, with a small flat screen monitor and keyboard on top. She tickled the keys with her finger tips for a few seconds then hopped up, grabbed the blood pressure stand and rolled it over to Brian. He pushed the sleeve of his shirt up a tad as she wrapped the cuff around his bicep.

  “Your pressure is up a bit, judging from the stale burnt aroma wafting off you, might wanna think about quitting smoking sooner rather than later. If you wanna be around to play with your grandkids, that is.”

  “Thanks mom, I’ll get right on that.” Brian said squinting his eyes and giving a double nod of sarcastic acquiescence.

  “Whatever, suit yourself,” She says still smiling, not taking the bait. He isn’t the first smart ass she has had to deal with since she signed on with the foundation. He wasn’t even the first one she talked to today. There were only three lab techs that worked on the team, along with the doctor who ran the experiment. Blaine, the smart ass extraordinaire, and herself worked the day shift basically as the “gopher twins,” as Blaine liked to call them.

  “Ya know, go for this, go for that, Blaine go get the results, Izzy go for a lunch run.” Blaine said this to her their first week, and they had covertly referred to themselves as the gopher twins ever since.

  Blaine wasn’t far from the truth though, the doc liked to handle all “the important stuff” on her own, doling out the mundane and trivial to herself and Blaine. Then you had the mysterious third tech, who was supposedly on night shifts. They barely talked to one another since the first day Blaine and Izzy started.

  She heard rumors from some of the other people that worked at the Blood Center, who weren’t involved in this experimental project, about a mass exodus the week before the two of them started. Debbie, the lady at the front desk, was the queen of gossip at The Center. If you wanted to know who was sleeping with who, or who had a bitter office feud brewing, or even just wanted to hear some drama about some people you had never heard of, then just follow her into the break room and sit down, close your mouth, and open your ears.

  Izzy’s boss, Doctor Greer, kept late hours so it was good there was someone on the night shift, but neither Blaine nor Izzy knew exactly what she did. They were the ones that dealt with all the paperwork, took samples and setup the paid volunteers, and extracted the blood. It was even Izzy’s idea to make the flyers and her and Blaine were the ones who papered the area thoroughly thinking they would be flooded with people.

  Only to have a few people trickle in every week. Here they were six weeks into their internship and only 25 new applicants to show for it. The doc had been doing this for years and consequently had hundreds of donors from all over the states but still hadn’t found what they were looking for.

  “Ok, you will feel a little pinch but a tough guy like you should be able to handle it,” Isabelle tells Brian as she inserts the needle and draws out a bit more than a thimble full of blood. She pulls the thick needle out and says “see, easy peasy.”

  Brian however never once looked at her or the needle or the side of the room she was standing on during the exchange. He kept his head turned toward the opposite wall with eyes jammed shut.

  Izzy looked down at the other clipboard, turns to Austin and says, “says on yours that you’re AB positive, you sure about that? Or should I take a sample from you as well real quick?”

  “Oh, I am pretty sure.” He replies with a curt smile, while his mind travels back through time to a few years prior, waking up in a hospital room.

  Chicago Part 2

  Chicago, Illinois

  Jessica Monroe almost wasn’t able to hold on long enough to make it to the hospital. If one were able to talk to the paramedics that had arrived at the scene first, they would have said they didn’t think she would even make it halfway, maybe not even into the ambulance itself. She lost so much blood by the time they arrived on scene it was difficult to properly stabilize her.

  The paramedics weren’t sure what her name was, she had never been lucid at any point on the way to the trauma unit at Mercy Hospital. They still wouldn’t if it hadn’t been for Jessica’s mom hunting them down weeks later to thank them. As a matter of fact they had almost thought her mom had the wrong paramedics at first. They were certain there was no way that school girl with the gunshot wounds picked up from Harrison High would have survived after they passed her off to the nurses.

  The nurses themselves believed that it was too late for the pretty girl with the long curly dark hair by the time they got her as well. They were professionals though, saw worse odds every day. So they set to work right away knowing if she had any hope of pulling through, it would be up to them to get her there.

  First cleaning out the wounds swiftly but steadily, then reapplying a compress to staunch the blood flow as much as they could, then needed to go straight to the blood transfusion. While waiting on the Doctor to come in and bless the nurses with his support, they were also waiting for preliminary testing to come back to tell them which type of blood to transfuse her body with.

  Normally, if the patient had been in stable condition on arrival they could afford the time to wait for the results to come back before moving on to the transfusion. This was time that Jessica did not have. The head nurse, Alison Jameson, known only as Nurse Ally to anyone that steps foot inside Mercy, already had five pints of O negative on hand ready to go after getting the status of the patient from the medics while they were on the way to the hospital. O negative is known as the universal donor when it comes to blood type.

  This allowed Ally to start the transfusion almost immediately upon arrival. If they would have had to wait for the type test to come back before starting the transfusion, the girl on the gurney in front of her would have most likely died while Ally watched the clock tick. Jessica was already in the fight of her life, her lips a light shade of blue that definitely wasn’t from her lipstick, and her gums almost white and translucent instead of a healthy pink.

  It was a good thing they didn’t have to wait, because by the time the actual results did come back, they had already blown through 4 pints of O negative, with no sign of the hemorrhaging letting up anytime soon.

  The tests came back saying her type was A negative, which just happened to be the second rarest blood type in the world, only AB negative was more uncommon. Sometimes it was better to have a rare blood type. Since it was so rare, that meant that fewer people would need it, and sometimes the hospital’s supply would stay relatively well stocked.

  Lately, however, there seemed to be a run on all of the blood types, rare and common alike. There had been a giant eight car pile-up yesterday with quite a few serious cases. Mostly though, it was due to all of the gang violence that had been breaking out over the last few weeks in the Humboldt area. With school still a few days away from being let out for the summer, the weather had apparently already believed it was the middle of July, bringing heat waves especially early for this time of year.

  Nothing brings out the crazies like a good ol’ heat wave. Her mother used to say that hot days turned the warm blood pumping through idiot’s veins into boiling hot, which in turn made tempers easier to flare up. The ones who were already quick to anger became volcanoes looking for any reason to erupt.

  Ally knew she would most likely be out of luck to get as much A negative down here from the blood cooler as this girl was going to need, so she told her aide Felicia whom she was sending back to the cooler for more blood, to “bring however much A neg you can get your hands on as well as O neg to make up the difference.”

  The nurse who was sent on the errand came hustling back with the bags cradled in her arms. She brought back three pints of A negative, the last of it, and another five pints of O neg.

  Turning the corner into the room, Ally saw her and said “Thanks Fe
licia, but you can probably send the O neg back now, this little girl decided she was done bleeding out.”

  Felicia’s shoulders hunched over and her head tilted down looking deflated like a balloon that had been poked with a push pin, but instead of popping, all the air just slowly leaked out.

  “But, I was barely gone a minute. Damn it!” Felicia, whose disappointment turned to a quiet rage, threw down the plastic containers of blood forcefully on to the stainless steel counter-top beside the bed. Doing so gentle enough as to not rip a hole in them and continued, “She just looks so damn much like my cousin, I was really hoping we could save her.”

  “Oh she’s not dead hun, she just stopped hemorrhaging finally. We got a tough one here.”

  “Seriously? She was leaking like the friggin Titanic when I left. What happened?”

  A rare smile eked its way across Ally’s face as she patted Jessica’s shin and said “I dunno what to tell you, she soaked up that fifth pint like it was a glass of Cabernet, and voila her wounds finally clotted.”

  Felicia ripped away the blanket that was now covering Jessica’s torso like she was in Oz looking for the man behind the curtain. To her astonishment Ally was right. She even prodded around the wound to see if there was any leakage around the site.

  “Look, it’s dry as a bone.” Felicia said amazed.

  “I think our girl here just decided she wanted to live so she told her body what to do,” Ally said stepping on the pedal of the red bin that tossed open the lid, then threw a clump of towels soaked in blood inside it. She turned back to Felicia and said “Now, stop poking her and let’s get these wounds dressed up. Poor girl still has a ways to go before she’s completely outta the woods.”

  Phoenix Part 2

  Phoenix, Arizona

  Samuel Ybarra walked in to his appointment at the Madison Cancer Research Center roughly 30 minutes early. When he scheduled this appointment at the end of his last one, his daughter hadn’t officially made the tennis team. So there were no practices or tournaments or pep rallies to schedule around. Now that Layla was on the team, this was a daily occurrence. He had hoped by showing up early he would be able to get out in time to make it to the first pep rally that was actually going to mention her by name.