The Heart of It All (HeartSick Series Book 1)

by Weston Mitchel

  To Izzy the room went hazy, then tilted, and slanted before it went away altogether.

  Female Bond Villain

  Dr. Catherine Greer ended up taking about 45 minutes longer than she thought she would have needed in order to gather up the rest of the supplies from her place, the lab and a couple of different 24 hour pharmacies, about ten miles apart from each other. She paid for the few pieces she didn’t already have in her possession with cash, wanting nothing to be traced back to her in the event something went wrong with any part of this plan.

  Catherine already had a demolition crew armed with several pieces of heavy equipment scheduled to flatten what used to be this pathetic excuse for a neighborhood mechanic/gas station first thing Monday morning. So whether or not she drained Austin out slowly over the course of the weekend or tapped him like a keg at a frat party that’s killed by midnight tonight, her problem would be all but solved come mid-day Monday.

  Blaine had been almost useless as a lab tech before she had to let him go last month, but putting her in touch with his uncle when Catherine was in the developing stages of this plan was more than worth the few paychecks she signed for him. Blaine’s uncle, Steven Hodges, owned a small construction company that was in dire straits. So a lot of cash and few questions later the remaining problem of how to get rid of everything had a new solution.

  It apparently had been a good thing that it took Catherine longer than expected to get back her basement of blood. Had she not, she might have already been tending to Austin, when her two little intruders showed up. Since she was late however, she had been able to creep down the steps undetected and play out the options in her head of just what she was going to do now.

  Outside, as Dr. Greer saw Izzy’s car in front of the gas station her first thought wasn’t why is she here, or even the more innocent I thought she was in California still. The first and only thing that had popped into her mind was How the hell am I going to get rid of her car?

  When Catherine came to the conclusion that were two people down below instead of just Izzy, she almost said the hell with it and took off. Just leave everything where it was and not stop until she ran out of road somewhere in Brazil. There was too much at stake now however, to just run off and leave everything behind again.

  Then as she made it closer to the steps leading down to the bottom level she picked up on the commotion and the fact that the two weren’t together but actually fighting each other. Since they were busy, entangled in sparks and blows, Catherine was able to peek at who the other intruder was without being seen.

  Brian? How the hell am I going to deal with that huge chunk of dumbass.

  Just as she finished that thought, Dr. Greer saw him go to the ground like a sack of oranges.

  Damn, Iz. Maybe I need to worry about you more than I thought.

  Catherine popped her head back up from the crouched position she had been in trying to watch the downstairs debacle unfold without being found out.

  After a few seconds passed she took another peek and saw that Izzy had her back to her and the stairs and was fussing with the machine. Dr. Greer crept down the last few steps and was readying to pounce.

  She had one more syringe full of Ketamine in her coat pocket, kept just in case Austin was able to metabolize the first injection faster than normal due to his blood’s special skill.

  The Doctor rose her hand with the syringe high above, thumb on the plunger and was about to lunge at her lab assistant, but then Izzy moved to the side and around to the back of the machine cart she had just been in front of. At first, Catherine thought she had been found out, but realized Izzy’s focus had been solely on something on the ground in front of her.

  Shoving the needle back into her pocket, saving it for whoever else might show up, Catherine ran full tilt at Izzy with her forearms out in front of her instead. Dr. Greer’s shitty impression of a battering ram, worked perfectly. Her arms had been crossed in front of her, jutting her bony arms and elbows straight out into Izzy’s lower back.

  Izzy had been bent over picking up her phone when Catherine struck so she was already leaning forward, head and shoulders angled to the ground. It wouldn’t have taken much of a blow to knock Izzy over in that position so when the full impact of Dr. Greer’s momentum carried over to Izzy, it sent her flying. Not far, just a few feet, but it was enough. Izzy’s head went careening straight into the corner of the metal tool chest.

  Maybe 15 years ago the impact of her fall wouldn’t have been so devastating. Maybe the cart would have rolled back a bit when Izzy’s head crashed into it, lessening the total force of the impact altogether. With the wheels rusted up and locked for over 7 years now though, it was like running head first in to the corner of cinder block wall. Izzy hadn’t been knocked completely unconscious, but it was close. Dr. Greer could hear her making small noises of groans and murmurs on the ground.

  Catherine Greer took this moment to take in her surroundings, furiously contemplating what her next move should be. She walked over to the other lump of humanity on the ground, laughing along the way.

  “I guess I owe you a bit of gratitude, Isabelle. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to deal with this ignorant son of a bitch that’s been screwing my daughter,” she said.

  Dr. Greer then walked closer to where Brian was slumped on the ground.

  “By the way,” she said then kicked him in the ribs unknowingly right where Izzy had shocked him before, adding “that’s for screwing my daughter.”

  Dr. Greer was satisfied after the vicious kick that Brian was still out cold, since he neither tried to deflect it, nor did it cause a reaction out of him after being kicked. She then took her time walking towards Austin, arms crossed, talking aloud to the room.

  “You know when I first found out what this little dipshit’s blood could do,” she said giving the wheelchair a tinier version of the kick Brian just received, “I knew he had been given to me for a reason.”

  Dr. Greer was now at the machine on the cart, fiddling with a knob then grabbing at some of the supplies on a tray next to it.

  “Whether it was just fate or destiny or the hand of God,” she said then guffawed and changed her mind.

  “Well okay not God. No I think we all can agree on this one, huh? That God had nothing to do with this. If so, then why would He have let my daughter,” Catherine flinched as she said daughter.

  “My first daughter, Kassie… Mia’s beautiful mother who-” Catherine stop right there, staring off in to the darkness of the unlit part of the basement, losing track of where she was taking this train of thought.

  “Anyway, whether it was fate or what ever you want to call it that led Mr. Kyle here to my doors, it was all for a reason,” Catherine said wiping a non-existent tear away from the corner of her eye. “That reason being so that I could redeem myself, redeem my life and career and all while saving my little grandbaby Mia in the process,” she finished.

  Dr. Greer pushed up the long white sleeve of her lab coat, and readied an injection site on her left forearm with her right hand. She then gathered up the tubing that was coming out of the side of the machine, this was the tube that normally would run the blood back into the patient after it had been cleaned of waste for dialysis.

  Dr. Greer had it setup to pump the blood into a different patient, herself. Originally Mia was going to be the first to receive Austin’s blood, but that had been before any hiccups to her plan had surfaced. She thought it would be smart to protect herself first in order to be around to save Mia later.

  Isn’t that always what the ditz says on a plane, secure the oxygen mask on yourself before helping the child next to you? Certainly can’t help anybody if your not around to do the helping.

  Dr. Greer knew she would have to push the speed of the transfusion up a bit to get it done before these loser’s were able to gain their senses. She also knew it would hurt, but knew it was nothing compared to the pain her daughter had endured, or the pain Mia was enduring right now so she cranked
it up to full speed before injecting the needle attached to the end of the tube into her vein.

  She turned to Austin in the chair and spoke out to him, almost lovingly in a weird and morbid way, “I’m sorry it has to be like this Austin, but Mia can’t have two heroes in her life. There can only be one.”

  Dr. Greer saw that one of the straps on his wrists had been undone.

  Isabelle must have done it before I took care of her.

  She took a step closer, gingerly so as not to tangle the tube that was feeding into her arm now, and continued talking to Austin, “Besides, now that you know your giving up your life in order to save Mia’s, it’s a bit more romantic no? Kind of makes you her hero doesn’t it? Maybe that will help you somehow where ever it is you’ll be going after this.”

  Dr. Greer bent over to refasten the buckle attached to the leather cuff.

  Moving Pile of Clothes

  Isabelle Ramirez had never been the violent type, never been in a fight her whole life, never even played any contact sports growing up. She was the kind that always had her nose in a book, a tinkerer of do it yourself science experiments and all things chemistry.

  So the last few minutes that passed in her life had been quite the opposite of the entire 24 years that preceded them. First her attack on Brian, and now on the ground, her head reeling and spinning with that coppery, metallic taste of blood in her mouth that she had read about hundreds of times, was a complete and total shock to her system. She almost felt like she was her cousin Marta, Uncle Gerry’s daughter.

  Marta had always been the first to jump into a fight, grab a fist full of hair or drag her nails across some poor girl’s face who didn’t know what they were getting into calling Marta out in front of their giggling, pimply faced friends.

  Izzy actually wished Maria was here, as she tried and failed several times to push herself up off the ground.

  She would’ve already had us out the door, on the way to tape a bag of frozen peas to her fist to calm the swelling knuckles.

  Maria wasn’t here however, and Izzy would have to figure this one out on her own if she was going to make it out of Crazytown anytime soon.

  Izzy still wasn’t able to gather the strength needed to sit up, but her ears began to ring less with each heartbeat that reverberated in her head like she was inside a bass drum getting pounded every second and a half.

  She was beginning to make out the sounds of someone talking. She could only hear one voice though, like that person was having a conversation with themself.

  Along with the ringing in her ears subsiding, she was starting to get a little more control of the spinning room each time she opened her bleary eyes. Izzy could see the person she was pretty sure that had done this to her, moving closer to her, stopping at the big boxy thing in front of her fiddling with stuff on top of it. Izzy was pretty sure she knew who that lady was, from her voice, and from her outline of a lab coat and pony tail, but couldn’t think of the name that was at the tip of her mind’s tongue.

  Even though it was frustrating trying to get the name to stick in her mind, she forgot all about it when the room stopped moving completely. The frustration even turned to excitement. Izzy then got more excited, but for a different reason entirely, when what looked like a pile of clothes started moving off in the distance behind the lady who wouldn’t shut up.

  Izzy’s eyes grew wide, and her heart thumped louder in her head as she saw this moving pile of clothes stand up. She could just make out through a shimmer of moonlight someone standing, and pulling something from behind their back, then pointing whatever it was that had been whipped out directly at Izzy herself.

  Or maybe not.

  Izzy wasn’t actually able to tell if the person was pointing it at her or the talking mouth in front of her at the cart. Izzy was damn near in a straight line, right behind the chatty Doctor in a lab coat.

  Doctor? That feels right. Wait, I know that woman, she’s a… Doctor… Dr…… something, damn it.

  Gag a Maggot

  Brian nearly pissed all over himself when he saw that little Hispanic girl from the K Prize leap out from behind a four foot tall tool chest and throw some metal pipe thing at his face, nearly. This place was creepy enough, what with Austin tied to a wheelchair hooked up to some spooky looking blood sucking thing in a dark as snatch basement. Then throw in a feisty little Latina popping out from the shadows and you could sell tickets as a haunted house attraction and do pretty well for yourself.

  The pipe thing to the face hurt, but nowhere near as much as that pinching of his ribs that took the air out of his lungs and the light out of his eyes.

  Damn, that girl must have some type of lobster claws for hands.

  That was the last thought he could remember before being kicked in same spot he had just been given the purple nurple from hell in. Except it wasn’t purple, that he could remember. He recalled seeing a flash of blue coming at him right before the pinching began.

  What does she have? Big ass, blue nails or something, like the chick version of Wolverine? Damn, that actually sounds pretty cool.

  Brian wanted nothing more than to jump up and start tearing the room apart like the Incredible Hulk but knew he would be best served to lay still, and play dead so to speak.

  So he did. He just laid there, listening to that crazy Doctor go on about her daughters and Mia and Austin and damn does she ever shut up, she would make a good Bond villain.

  As he laid there waiting, he could start to feel a pain in his jaw growing from a small bud of soreness into a fully blossomed weed stalk of excruciating misery in mere seconds of his being awake. The weird thing was that it was on the left side of his face, when he could sworn the pipe thing had been thrown at the right side of his face. As he moved his tongue around his mouth he could feel several loose teeth on the left side, top and bottom, guess I was wrong, bitch must have thrown it at the left.

  In between thoughts of his fear of seeing a dentist, to his likeness of pain killers that would soon follow the appointment, he creaked an eye open at the Doctor flapping her gums between him and what he was now thinking of as that cute little Spanish wolverine chick.

  He could see the Doctor turning her back to him as she fiddled with the straps on Austin’s chair and Brian thought to himself, Now or never.

  Brian did his best version of the cute thing that pinched him with sharp blue nails and popped up from the ground, which was harder than he thought it would be, with stiff rigid muscles and what felt like something the size of a fist throbbing in his mouth.

  Once he was fully upright he reached behind him into his waistband where he had his M&P 9mm secreted this whole time. Of course, the small amount of pain originating from him awkwardly laying on top of the pistol under the lower part of his back didn’t matter at all compared to everything else that now hurt.

  Brian clicked the safety off, this time making damn sure he didn’t forget about it. He placed his trigger finger on the guard waiting for her to see him and stand fully erect to make a bigger target. As he waited, one second, two seconds, he noticed something, or someone, moving on the ground just behind and a little caddy corner to the Doctor.

  Brian’s eyes focused on the movement, realizing it was his tiny tornado of hair and blue nails that was on the ground, in pain just like he had been, and this for some reason pissed him off even more.

  Without saying a word or waiting for the Doctor to notice him, he let his finger slide off the guard and pull the trigger setting into motion the next set of strange events.

  Brian had closed his eyes in anticipation of the coming boom, which made the gun drop just slightly, but enough to move his aim from chest to lower torso. The gun rang out like a bomb in the small enclosure, the bullet speeding it’s way through the soft tissue about an inch inside and just above Dr. Greer’s love handle.

  The bullet went straight through Dr. Greer and into the receptacle of the machine that had been drawing Austin’s blood. It looked to Brian like it had been mad
e of glass, but it must have been made from some type of plastic because it didn’t shatter like glass. It did however, break into several pieces though, causing the blood to flow out like the flood of blood down the stairs in The Shining.

  All of the blood that was sucked out of Austin, minus the small bit that had already been infused into Dr. Greer, was now covering the cart and floor and the feet of the Doctor herself. The blood was now spreading out in an ever growing pool as more dripped down from the machine and top shelf of the cart. The machine was still somehow doing it’s job not noticing that it no longer had a place to hold the blood. It just continued right along pumping blood out of Austin, forcing little spits of red into the air.

  Austin had now lost more than 30% of his total volume and was losing more every second that passed with the machine still working. Izzy crawled from where she was to the wall a couple feet behind the machine and pulled the plug from the wall, killing the hum and the blood spritzing at once.

  While Izzy was busying herself with crawling, Dr. Greer hadn’t seemed to notice the new hole through her side. Instead, she was only fixated on the ever growing puddle of blood at her feet that was now soaking up into her pants as she knelt in the middle of it. Dr. Greer started raking at it with her hands being used like fleshy shovels on their sides, trying to pool the blood in front of her, hysterically trying to capture every drop that had fallen to the ground.

  Dr. Greer then pulled the now useless tube out of her arm, before the machine could pump air into her veins. She then began to gather some of the blood from the reservoir she was able to pool in front of her and rubbed it into her injection site. After doing this she moved to using her hands like ladles, scooping it into her mouth, ingesting it anyway she could think of.