The Heart of It All (HeartSick Series Book 1)

by Weston Mitchel

  The Doctor personally designed a handful of tests in the last 56 days specifically directed at finding a kink in her new theory. Anything that would remotely come close to disproving what she thought might be happening inside this boy’s body.

  To be honest though, she had no clue whatsoever about what was going on with Austin Kyle’s blood. After everything she thought of, experimented with, and learned throughout her life, she still had no bloody idea. This fact irked her even more, prodding her backside with more motivation than an actual prodding of her backside with a branding iron glowing red at the tip.

  All she knew is what she saw in her experiments, that his blood was indeed a miracle. The word itself, miracle, didn’t come close though to describing what was really going on. This was no miracle of faith or religion, some con to be played out to dupe the hapless believers into thinking there actually was some all-knowing, all-powerful being in the sky who gives a damn about our daily real world soap opera.

  It was grander than all that, more magnificent than just a miracle of belief. This was a pure miracle of science, which meant it could be explained, not just explained away by referencing a few lines in a two thousand year old story. It was a scientific magic trick. One in which the solution had yet been revealed to the audience, but the solution existed. It was just waiting for the right person to come along and look hard enough, study its ways long enough. She was sure of it, and by God she was going to be this right person, no matter the cost.

  She wasn’t simply doing this so she could be published and peer reviewed. Been there, done that as they say. It wasn’t to create a patent on a new breakthrough pill, done that as well. It wasn’t even to make an obscene amount of money in being the first to find and synthetically replicate an actual cure for something instead of just finding new treatments that would only slow a disease down.

  Catherine Greer already hit the proverbial jackpot so to speak by making a key investment in Viagra at just the right time in the floundering stages of its funding round. Her family had always been wealthy, but that investment made the little rich girl affluent. It also did something else, it made her crave something more.

  What was money worth when you had more than you could ever spend? Being rich became meaningless. Once the financial game was dominated, the truly wealthy only desired one thing, power. It comes in many forms, but the power she desired most was the reason she became a doctor in the first place. She yearned to save lives, what else on earth could be any closer to not just playing God, but actually becoming God.

  A sociopath might say that the exact opposite is true. That taking a life places the nearly unattainable power of God in your hands, but she knew the truth. Taking a life was easy, hell it could be done without even trying. In fact it was done so casually that people killed each other every day accidentally on the way home from work. Anything that could be done on accident couldn’t possibly be attributed to a power.

  Saving a life, on the other hand, was anything but accidental. Never has anyone been texting and driving on the 109 to suddenly look up startled, saying to themselves “Oh shit, I just nearly saved that dude’s life.”

  Nothing on this earth has been studied in greater detail than ways to prolong the life span of the human race. This desire in her made it all the more harder to sit idly by not able to do a damn thing as Cancer ravaged her daughter.

  Maybe that’s why she didn’t, why she couldn’t stick around and watch that happen to her little girl.

  Still her deepest regret by a factor of a million.

  Waiting for today, this moment, for an attempt at making small strides towards something of an amends with the universe and her guilt. She was like a dog waiting on it’s human to throw the ball. She was bursting at the seams with nervous excitement, wanting nothing more than to dive right in.

  So she did just that.

  The first round of tests that Izzy had done on his blood that first week were so generic and scattered across such a wide array of categories that it was hard to pin down exactly what was going on with his blood. She never imagined she would find someone capable of passing a handful of them, much less all of them with such undeniable ease.

  This whole K Prize idea she concocted in order to get people through the door was merely a side project, something to keep swinging at the fastballs flying through the strike zone hoping to get lucky and hit a blooper between the short stops legs on a weird bounce. Noticing that she was hemorrhaging money out of every orifice without so much as a hint of a foul ball, she only downsized the operation instead of gutting it completely, because hey… you never know, right?

  Thinking of this now, it felt as if a small dagger laced with acid had been jammed straight through her chest into her heart. Hey you never know right? Her Kassie used to say this all the time, adding a mammoth, overly dramatic wink at the end. She had never been good at winking. Kassie would always have to throw her whole body into it, snapping her head forward to help disguise the fact that she was still only blinking both eyelids, not winking.

  Kassie was ever the optimistic one, able to pour sunshine through even the darkest clouds of anyone’s rainy day. Maybe that was why her daughter had made the choice she had. Thinking that hey, you never know, right? Crazier things have been known to happen. The most optimistic person having a 1/16th full mentality instead of a 15/16ths empty.

  Still, where did that get her? What good did it do for my bright lil baby?

  Dr. Greer, and her husband at the time, could afford any doctor in the world to make her daughter’s cancer go away. Even still, it wasn’t enough to fly in Doctor’s from China, or fly the family to Brazil in hopes to find evidence of an unsanctioned experimental treatment, a treatment that was aggressive enough to irradiate the cancer taking up residence in her breast, but not aggressive enough to kill the baby now taking up residence in her belly.

  Without treatment the most educated, highest paid guess by a handful of the world’s foremost Oncologists still only gave Kassie a year at most. Six months seemed to be the general consensus though.

  Catherine may not have been strong enough to stick around to watch her daughter choose to die right before her eyes, especially not when a viable option was being left on the table, dozens of options at that. What she couldn’t do for her daughter then, maybe she could somehow make it up by saving someone else’s daughter in the future. Maybe making a world where a soon-to-be mother would never have to make the decision between her life and her baby’s in the process.

  Catherine Greer was never able to understand her daughter’s decision, however tough it may have been. They had learned of her pregnancy only ten days before they received the news of Kassie’s breast cancer. But those ten days, were long enough to cement in Kassie’s mind that she was going to be a mother, and do whatever she could to bring this baby to term.

  Catherine would often mull over this dilemma until her dying breath.

  Maybe if she had been given the prognosis ten days before learning of her pregnancy, maybe she would have chosen treatment. Maybe even started treatment already, too late to go back, leave no room for a decision to be made either way. Maybe she would have beaten it and then gone on to have four or five little rug rats running around calling me grandma or nanny or maybe-

  The maybes never ran out in her mind. Never loosened their grip on her memories, staining even the good ones with a future cut much too short. All she had left to cling on to were the maybes, the what-could-have-beens, the dreams of what the next few months would have entailed if she only stayed, instead of giving up on everything around her when her daughter wouldn’t listen to reason, her husband firmly in Kassie’s corner, like always, making her the stubborn, closed minded callous mom, two against one.

  Her patience gave out three months into the pregnancy, Kassie already bed-ridden, twenty pounds lighter, skin saggy, wrinkled, and purple under her eyes. Catherine couldn’t take it anymore. She gave everything up in one moment that was three months in the maki
ng.

  Catherine packed a few things into a small leather carryall. At two in the morning while her daughter was fidgeting in her bed sleepless because of the dull but fierce pain, her husband snoring in their bed one floor above, she left everything behind. Reasoning to herself that it was justified, she would find a way to help Kassie one way or the other. This didn’t make the guilt weigh any less on her mind at all, but it did keep her moving. She kept telling herself it was her daughter’s doing, her choice not mine.

  Catherine went from scouring the globe to find someone to help her daughter, to searching for the cure herself. If anyone was going to do it, it was going to have to be her.

  Now she was on the brink of doing just that, just eighteen years too late to do any good.

  Just as she was writing off Izzy and that other guy she kept around, whatever his name was, as her little errand bitches, Opie from Mayberry comes to the plate and knocks it right out of the park on his first swing.

  This side project of hers, one of the dozens of different iterations her search had taken over the years, had finally started to bear fruit, leap frogging all of her other irons in the fire, besting every other attempt she had made by leaps and bounds.

  Austin @ Hospital

  The ambulance had only taken a little under eleven minutes to get to the frat house. It could have easily been eleven years that passed in Austin’s mind, holding her in his arms, feeling helpless. Her pulse so weak and thready he wasn’t sure if it was actually there until she would heave in an involuntary ragged breath.

  When she finally did regain consciousness, she still wasn’t in a lucid state, just barely there, barely awake.

  Ashley was kneeling beside them both, holding Mia’s hand, patting it repeating solemnly “It’ll be ok, it’ll be ok, help’s almost here, babydoll,” as if saying it aloud over and over in a shallow prayer would make it become so.

  Brian had been the one to call 9-1-1, rushing outside to wait for the ambulance to guide the paramedics in when they arrived. When they did show up, Brian was in a panicked, hyperactive state trying to motivate the paramedics out of their calmed, no rush demeanor. He led them to Austin and Mia, grabbing Ashley’s hand, helping her off the floor then squeezing her in silence, thankful it wasn’t her but still worried for Mia just the same.

  The house itself was dead silent, making every move by the medics seem to clang out in opposition to the stillness of their surroundings. Only about half of the kids that were there when Mia had fallen were still there. Most took off at the mention of hearing cops and/or an ambulance was on the way. The rest were gazing in a trance at the event in shocked paralysis. A few had the lenses on their smartphones pointed at the girl on the floor, with her boyfriend doing his best to console her.

  That was, at least until Brian knocked the phone out of the nearest wannabe photog, with an accompanying glare that made the phone’s owner just pick it up off the ground and retreat without a word in defiance. The other two phones mysteriously disappeared into a pocket or purse as the privacy violator cowered away.

  The medics got Mia stabilized on the gurney, trundling the mobile bed out of the house and down the steps and loading her into the back of the ambulance with such efficiency it was hard for Austin to stay abreast with the gurney. The paramedics refused to let Austin or Ashley in the back with them since she still wasn’t completely coherent. So the three, including Brian, set off at a torrid pace to get to Ashley’s car so they could try and follow the ambulance to the hospital.

  Austin had no problem this time enduring Ashley’s driving, he welcomed the frenzy in fact. Which in itself, any other day of the week would be something akin to taking a step toward getting over his fear of being in another accident each time he rode in a vehicle. Especially considering Ashley’s frantic driving made each corner and red light the Jeep ran through literally a death defying act. Austin never gave it a moment’s thought, however. His sole focus rested squarely on the situation at hand, Mia.

  13 ½ hours later as Austin sat in the waiting room, his thoughts hadn’t once deviated from Mia and what her condition might be. The same could not be said for the other half of the quartet. Sure they were worried, scared even, but it didn’t seem to weigh on them as heavily as it did on Austin. But everyone has their own way of dealing, there really is no set of guidelines on how to stress out.

  Ashley did seem fairly distraught, at first though. After getting nowhere with the nurses in that first thirty minutes, her and Brian dipped off secretly. Austin figured they went to get a snack or hunt someone down to get any information they could.

  Five minutes later however, Brian came back without Ashley tethered to his side. He handed Austin a Honeybun from a vending machine, sat in the wooden chair upholstered with carpet right beside him and opened the wrapper to his Twix bars.

  “Where’s Ashley?” Austin asked, ripping open the honey bun trying to make sure he used the plastic of the wrapper to hold on to the glazed treat.

  “She said she wanted to find the chapel and say a few prayers for Mia, gonna light a candle or somethin,” he said stretching his feet out in front of him.

  “You’re just gonna let her go by herself? Don’cha you think she wants you there with her, for support?”

  “Nah, what am I s’posed to do, sit there and watch her kneel and talk to her imaginary friend? Besides she told me she wanted to be alone.”

  “Gotcha, well thanks for the honey bun, even if you are going to hell.”

  “Anytime brotha’man. Any news yet?”

  “Nope, not really. I got a candy striper to tell me she was awake but other than that, zilch.”

  “Well hey that’s good, that’s somethin right?”

  “Yeah, it’s something,” Austin replied leaning his head back to rest on the wall, letting out a long tense sigh.

  Ashley returned somewhere around thirty minutes later, with caramel macchiatos for everyone from the Starbuck’s in the hospital. Before she was able to ask any questions Brian popped off and asked “So how was the almighty today? Did he pick up the phone or just let it ring as usual?”

  Brian, still in costume, placed his hands behind his head looking like a supernatural serial killer relaxing in a hammock, not in a cramped and barely cushioned chair. Although still in his coveralls, Ashley had been smart enough to grab a half-length tan trench coat out of her car to cover the more modest parts. A jacket she had used during their last on phase, surprising Brian at the door with nothing on underneath.

  “How was the what?” She said looking at Brian quizzically, then coming to her senses a few seconds later, “Oh! Ha ha, asshole.”

  She sat beside Brian so that she was on the end, poking him in his ribs with her pointer finger on her free hand not holding the coffee. “You know it can’t hurt anything, sure beats sitting here stuffing my face with that ol’ crap that’s been in a machine for who knows how long.”

  Brian filled her in on the only piece of info they had received thus far, that she was awake. Seeming nonplussed, she had taken the news of basically no news rather well. She grabbed Brian by the hand and told Austin “We’ll be back in a bit,” as she led him around the corner and out of sight.

  They wandered off down the corridor together, the events of the evening unfolding as such apparently giving them temporary relationship amnesia. Neither of them holding on to the argument from earlier, only holding on to each other for support.

  Every couple of hours they would sneak off, growing restless from the wait, under the disguise of grabbing a snack or drink, but besides that first honeybun and macchiato, they had failed to actually bring anything back for evidence. One time slipping into an unused room, not resurfacing for close to thirty minutes, no doubt going for a round of playing doctor, it was a hospital after all.

  Austin just sat there, wondering what could possibly be wrong with her that would lead to her fainting like that, pestering any nurse that came within a twenty foot radius of his chair about when he would be a
ble to see her and what was going on. The only kind of information whatsoever, came from the loose lipped candy striper that first hour. Nothing new to staunch the flow of his fear.

  Mia's Ride

  All the while, Mia laid in bed, conscience since minutes before the medics showed up. The fainting spell came on suddenly, and with a fierceness she hadn’t felt before up to that point. When she came out of it though, she had known what happened and been too embarrassed to just get up and pretend everything was fine. Even though she actually came to fairly quickly, her strength took it’s time coming back to form, so even if she wanted to just pop up and get out of there and act like nothing happened, she couldn’t have.

  She had been able to pass it over on Austin, but the paramedics had known almost instantly, which was why they didn’t allow any of her friends to ride along with her. As soon as the doors were closed, Cody, the medic currently sitting by her side checking vitals asked nonchalantly “So, what’s going on girly… Tell me what happened.”

  “I just got tired, a lil quicker than I normally do, I guess,” she answered looking up from underneath the white blanket draped over her on the gurney.

  “Quicker than usual, huh?” He replied not skipping a beat, pushing buttons, bringing a little blue box to life, flashing red numbers until he clipped a blue over-sized clothes pin onto her index finger, “So this has happened before?”

  Under his inquisitive stare she was now more embarrassed than she had been on the floor, tenderly cradled in Austin’s arms.

  “Not the passing out part, no, but I have been having… I don’t know, episodes, spells whatever you wanna call them. I guess.”

  “Okay, okay, so have you had any tests or seen anyone for these episodes?”

  She wanted the questions to stop, she wanted to be dropped off at the next corner so she could just be left alone and not have to talk about it. She knew this wasn’t about to happen and figured the only way to shut him up was to tell him the truth. She had no choice but to finally say the words out loud. For the first time ever.