Deadly Design (9780698173613) (24 page)

“I
s he a drug addict?” the old lady asks for the second time.

“No. He has a fever. He had his appendix out a few weeks ago. I think he has an infection.”

“Then we should take him to a doctor.”

“He wants to go to a pharmacy.”

“Because he's a drug addict,” the old lady says loudly, like she wants me to know she has me figured out. “We're not taking him home with us. He'll rummage through my medicine cabinet and take all my pills.”

“We just need to take him to a pharmacy,” the girl says, her voice strained like she's trying not to get into a fight with her grandmother before they even make it home.

“Sorry for the trouble,” I manage to say from the backseat. “I really appreciate the ride.”

“Where are your parents?” the old lady asks, her voice even louder.

“It's a long story,” I say.
And I'm in no shape to tell it right now,
I want to add. “I'll call them soon, I promise.”

We stop at a traffic light, and she turns to look at me. Her face is round, her hair is dyed pitch-black. She's wearing bright red lipstick, and with her white complexion, she looks like a senior citizen who's gone Goth. Her mouth twitches a little.

“There's a pharmacy on the next corner. I'll drop you off if you promise to call your folks and quit using drugs.”

I'd laugh if I didn't hurt so much. “I promise.”

We pull into a pharmacy parking lot. The girl gets out of the front seat, comes around to the back, and helps me out.

“I'll walk you in,” she says, and I realize that I don't know her name. I also realize that, at this moment, I don't care.

“It's okay,” I say, lifting my arms in a ta-da motion to show her I can make it inside on my own. “Thank you. Really,” I say, and my eyes start to tear because of the pain and because of Virginia and Gene and now this girl who's so nice and is so plain and ordinary, and to me, that seems so extraordinary and wonderful, because being superior sucks.

She gives me a smile, but doesn't get back in the car. Not immediately. Not until she knows I can make it inside on my own.

Thank God the doors are automatic.

The clerk at the front register is chewing away at a piece of gum as she rings up a giant package of toilet paper. She looks at me.

“Pharmacy counter?” I ask.

She stops chewing, her mouth hanging open as she points toward the back of the store.

I turn down an aisle of Thanksgiving decorations. A woman looks at me, her eyes widening at the sight of me while the little boy next to her points at me. Do I look that bad? They're gawking like I'm the infected guy who's about to start the zombie apocalypse. I look to where the boy is pointing. My jacket is hanging open, and there is a dark spot in the middle of Gene's light blue T-shirt. Blood. I lift the shirt and see where one of the freshest incisions has managed to tear open.

“Oh my God,” the woman gasps.

I pull my shirt back down. “It's okay,” I say, not wanting to scare the little kid any worse. “Just need some Tylenol, maybe a Band-Aid.”

I continue past the ceramic turkeys and fake autumn flowers. I make it through the cold medicine aisle and then to the pharmacy counter.

There's no one there, so I ring the bell, and a man with short red hair and a crisp white jacket appears. “Can I help you?” he says, his polite smile dropping from his face when he looks at me. “Are you all right?”

“Just need a prescription. Can you call my doctor?”

“Sure,” he says. “What's his name?”

I take the piece of paper out of my pocket, set it on the counter, and write my birthday next to it. “This is his name, phone number, and my birth date. My name is Kyle McAdams.”

“What's the medication?”

“Just say it's for my heart,” I say, trying to look at him, but my sight is starting to blur.

“You should sit down,” he says. “There are chairs over there.”

“Thanks.” I'm not sure where
over there
is, but I move toward the wall and when I feel something solid sticking out, gently lower myself down into it.

I can just hear him talking as my head falls against the back of the chair. I hear him say “emergency,” and at first I want to get up and run because maybe he's calling Dr. Bartholomew. But she's in Saint Louis. At least, I think she is. And I'm in Chicago.

“I need to talk to the doctor,” I hear him say, his voice elevated by frustration. “I don't want to talk to his nurse. I need to talk to him. This is an emergency. His patient is here, and he looks like he might not be Dr. Rubenstein's patient for much longer. Kyle McAdams. . . . He just said heart medicine. That's it.”

It hurts. I remember my mom having gallbladder surgery a few years ago and them giving her a morphine drip to control the pain. She had one incision. Just one. I have . . . I don't know how many I have, and one of them is seeping blood not just into the shirt I'm wearing, but now I can feel warm liquid on my skin.

The door next to me opens. I force my eyelids to part.

“He's on his way,” the man, who is still slightly out of focus, says. “Dr. Rubenstein. He said he'll be in here in about fifteen minutes. Do you need anything? I should get you some water or maybe orange juice. Are you hypoglycemic? Diabetic? You look really bad.”

I smile. “I bet I look good for a guy who was in a coma this time yesterday.”

“A coma? Like, a medically induced coma?”

“Bitch induced,” I say, and I think I can almost make out a smile on his face.

“I've been in a few of those,” he says, trying to make light but still sounding concerned. “Maybe I should call an ambulance.”

“No!” I almost come out of the chair and for a split second, my vision improves. “No ambulance. Not unless Dr. Rubenstein calls one. You said he's coming?”

“Yeah. He's on his way.”

I think I'm nodding, but I'm not sure. Then I close my eyes and let my arms fold protectively over my torso. No more cutting on me. No more.

“K
yle!”

I feel a hand against my forehead, then against my neck, like someone's trying to see if I'm still alive. I wonder if I am.

“Get me a stethoscope,” I hear someone say, a man. “I'll pay for one, just get it, and a blood pressure cuff.”

I force my head upright. There's a man hovering over me. “Rubenstein?”

“Yep,” he says. “I've been looking for you, Kyle McAdams. I thought you fell off the face of the earth. I don't suppose that bitch Bartholomew had anything to do with that.”

The pharmacist hands him a box, and he slides something out of it. He slips it under my shirt, and he must see the incisions because it takes a moment for him to press the cold metal against my chest. He listens, moving the cold metal around, but it feels good, almost soothing.

“She do this?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Call my office. Tell them to send an ambulance here. A discreet ambulance.”

“Discreet?” the pharmacist asks.

“They'll know what I mean. Just make the call.”

“Do you have it?” I ask. Knowing he must. He has to have it, or he wouldn't know who I am. He wouldn't have been looking for me.

“I do. I've been trying to find you, so you better not die.”

He is young. How old did Matt say he was? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? His straight brown hair is cut at odd angles, like maybe he'd gone to one of those schools where they train hair cutters and he'd gotten one who was off their meds.

“You're not going to die, are you, Kyle,” he says, not like he's asking me, but telling me. I want to believe him. I want to trust him. Virginia and Gene helped me. Even the girl on the bus, a complete stranger, helped me. They were all complete strangers, really, and I trusted them, but can I trust him?

I don't have a choice.

His clean-shaven, boyish face grins. “I tell you what,” he says, leaning in close to me. “How about I save your life, then we fly to the Bahamas. We'll stand on the beach holding up a poster that says ‘Fuck you, Bartholomew.' We'll take a selfie and send it to her. What do you think of that?”

I can see it in my mind. Me and this man I don't know, standing barefoot in the sand, wearing gaudy floral shirts and Bermuda shorts. We both have one hand on the sign, and we're both tanned and healthy. “Fuck you, Bartholomew.” And then everything goes black.

“T
ime to wake up, Kyle.”

I hear the voice, but I don't want to answer it. I want to sleep. I just want to keep my eyes closed and drift.

“Kyle,” he says again. “You've been out long enough, buddy. You need food. I suppose I can stick in a feeding tube.”

I open my eyes.

“I thought that'd get your attention.” It's Dr. Rubenstein.
The
Dr. Rubenstein, the one who has the research that can save me. He'd said that, hadn't he? He said he can save me.

I try to move, try to clear my head more. There's a heart monitor on my finger and an IV in my arm. I can hear the continuous beeping of a machine keeping track of my vitals, and I feel the blood pressure cuff tighten around my arm.

“You really scared me. Your temperature was a hundred and three when we got you here. You had a bad infection where Dr. Bartholomew had been playing tic-tac-toe with her scalpel.”

“You know her?”

Dr. Rubenstein wheels the chair he's sitting in closer to my bed. It's one of those adjustable chairs, and he's got it positioned so that the seat is higher than my bed. He's tall and lanky, and his long legs dangle. “Before I met her brother, I interned under her at Johns Hopkins. She rode my ass like crazy, and not because she wanted to push me. I mean, she did want to push me, right out the door. She thought I was a snot-nosed brat with acne. No way did she think I deserved to be there. She didn't care if my IQ was a bazillion, which it is, by the way. God, it would be so sweet if I could call her up and tell her who her sociopath of a brother gave his research to. He sure didn't give it to her. Nope. He gave it to the little twit she can't stand. But it's mutual, because I can't stand her. She beats me out of every research grant I apply for. She may be petite, but she's got big pockets and a lot of influential people shoved into them.”

“She doesn't know where I am, right?”

He shakes his head. I can't get over how young he is. He does not look like a doctor. He's not even dressed like a doctor. He's wearing jeans and a faded Superman T-shirt.

“It's casual Friday,” he says, noticing me taking in his attire. “And the shirt kind of makes a statement, don't you think?” He jumps from the chair and puts both hands on his waist, his chin lifted. “No?” He looks at me out the corners of his eyes while he holds the pose. “Fair enough. I guess if I were really Superman, I could get a girlfriend. But even though I'm tall and devastatingly average in the looks department—no girlfriend. I bet there's nothing you would love more than to hear all about my lack of social interactions with the opposite sex. Or not.”

He sits on the edge of my bed.

“Kyle McAdams, in the flesh.” He shakes his head, and I think I can detect a few of the scars left over from one of those bouts of acne he was talking about. “God, I am so stoked that you're here!”

“You said you can save me.”

He pinches his lips between his teeth. “I did say that, didn't I? Of course, you were bleeding and feverish. Maybe you misunderstood? Not that I can't save you; it's just that it's not, like, a hundred percent guarantee that I can save you. It's more like sixty-forty. The sixty in your favor, so that's good.”

“What do you mean?”

He runs his hands through the jagged layers of his hair and stands, then starts pacing. “Did I mention that I have ADD? A lot of brilliant people do, or at least, they get diagnosed with it because their brains are always going, always racing from one thing to another, and so they drive their teachers crazy and end up medicated, which really sucks because it dumbs them down. We'd probably have a cure for cancer by now if we'd just let the neurons fire away in our brains instead of saying, ‘Here, kid, take this because we'd rather deal with passive zombies in the classroom than miniature hyper Einsteins.'”

I stare at him, and he stares back, almost like we're having a contest to see who will blink first.

“Can I save you?” he finally says. “Here's the deal.” He hops back on the chair and rolls it forward until his legs hit against the bed. “You need a new heart. Your entire DNA has a sequence plugged into it that basically tells your heart to turn off, just like flipping a light switch. Your heart has that same DNA in it, but if you had a different heart, one that had DNA without that sequence, it wouldn't be able to communicate when the rest of your body tried to turn it off. It's like telling a Spanish person to do something, but you tell them in French.
No comprende.
He can't do it because he doesn't know what the hell you're saying.

“Problem is getting you a heart. It's not like we can go through the usual channels. For one, all the tests would show that your heart is perfectly healthy, so no way they'd put you on a list for a donor heart. Plus, people wait months for hearts and never get them. We could kill someone. God knows there are plenty of cold homeless veterans on the streets. I could offer one a cheeseburger laced with a really big dose of sedative. Whisk him back here. Take out his heart, and bam!” He grins, then immediately frowns. “But murder isn't exactly my style. Doesn't go with the shirt.” He points to the Superman logo. “However, what does go with it is my bazillion IQ.” He grins again. “I have already started growing you a heart.”

“Growing?”

“Yep. Claudia's been growing kidneys and bladders for some time. And since I hate her, and since it's the right thing to do for the sake of humanity”—he rolls his eyes—“I've been working on growing hearts. Specifically, one for you.”

The long, narrow young face, with dark eyes framed by equally dark, dramatic brows, stares at me with such intensity, I want to look away, but I can't.

“Ever since I found out about you, I've wanted to
do
something to save you.” he says. “You are . . .” He struggles to find the right words. “You're the real Superman. Or you could be. And I'm not just talking about the whole living-for-centuries thing, and yes, I know about all that. It was right there in his research, but I deleted that part. I mean, talk about tempting. Immortality would be so awesome, but really, while the guy was a nutcase, he did have a point about the whole overpopulation thing. I could open that Pandora's box.” He gestures like he's pushing a button on a computer and makes a popping noise with his mouth. “I made the part of his research that could make people be AARP members for like . . . ever, go bye-bye. But the rest of it, the part where he designed you and the others, I kept all that. I mean, holy shit, that's exciting. The potential in you is so freaking amazing. Do you want to know how he did it?”

The blood pressure cuff starts squeezing my arm again, and that's good. I need the physical sensation. I don't hurt anymore. I'm not dizzy or even that tired, but my head is starting to spin just the same, trying to keep up with the guy who's giving me a sixty-forty chance to survive.

“You have multiple parents,” he says, still amazed. “It's true. Nine of them. He used genetic information from eight different donors to create you. One, may I inform you, who won a silver medal in the Olympics.”

“But how's that possible?”

“The Human Genome project mapped out all the genetic codes for various attributes and diseases. He used genetic material from different women, from their eggs. He took out the parts he wanted and basically plugged them into you—well, into your mother's egg. Instead of one mother and one father, you have Mom, Dad, and Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom. There's kind of some bad news about the dad part.”

He looks at me like he's not sure if he should finish.

“Go ahead,” I say, because it's time—time to lay it all out there. Time to know everything.

He sighs. “You have to remember, the guy was a total narcissist. Most brilliant, overly intelligent people are. Edward Bartholomew—yeah. Totally. Now, supposedly he was rendered sterile from all the chemo and crap he went through as a kid, but he used his own stem cells to create sperm. He had to use
his
own bone marrow to do that. Can you imagine . . .” He lifts his hands like he's about to stab a large needle into his own hip to harvest his bone marrow. He must feel my impatience because he stops midstab. “I digress. But science is so damn amazing, and he basically . . .” Rubenstein grimaces and grasps at his hair with both hands. “He used his own sperm to create you, not your father's, or who you think of as your father,” he says very quickly.

I want to kill Edward Bartholomew. I want to build a fucking time machine, so that I can go back to that day in his condo and choke the fucking life out of him!

“Interestingly enough,” Rubenstein says, “that makes Dr. Claudia Bartholomew your aunt.”

“No! No fucking way!”

“Calm down,” he says. “You don't want me to have to sedate you, do you?” He checks my vital signs on the display screen next to my bed.

“I know who my parents are,” I say calmly, because I don't want to get knocked out again, and because I do know who they are.

“Look on the bright side. He was really intelligent, which means so are you. The whole having the pharmacist call me and ask for heart medication, that was brilliant. You have no idea what your potential is, especially if you end up living for a few hundred years. Think of the knowledge you could obtain. Things I can't even imagine. That's why I really don't want you to die. You're the only one left, and the potential inside you is so amazing!”

“Can you take the sequence out? Change it so that I'll live a normal number of years, if the new heart works, that is?”

He looks horrified, shocked. He even turns around to look behind him like maybe I'm talking to someone else, about something else, because who wouldn't want to live for hundreds of years?

“You're kidding, right?” He laughs. “Seriously. I mean . . .” He pulls at his hair, as if he actually wants to rip it out. “Do you have any idea how brilliant, fucking . . . Einsteinish this sequence is? Yes, I destroyed his research about it, but I did glance at it just little bit before I hit the big Delete button. This sequence is like . . .” He searches for the right words. “You won't age. You'll be a hundred and fifty, swimming laps and shooting hoops and having sex with twenty-year-olds!” Suddenly he looks troubled. “Okay, that means you'd being having sex with someone who could potentially be the same age as your great-great-great-grandchildren. That's a little creepy, but not as creepy as Mick Jagger doing it with a twenty-year-old, because you won't look like the Crypt Keeper. You'll look like you—now. Young and healthy and vibrant. Who wouldn't want that?”

“Me.” I think about Connor. He got eighteen years. Not a day more. Amber didn't even get that. Why should I live for hundreds of years? Why would I want to live without Cami? How could I watch her grow old in front of me and not be able to grow old with her? All I want to do is get better. All I want to do is live so I can take her on dates, real dates, not watching movies in the living room. I want to marry her, and it doesn't matter that I'm saying that when I'm only sixteen, because I'm not sixteen. After everything I've been through, I'm already ancient, and I don't want to live forever.

Dr. Rubenstein sighs. “Sorry, kid. No can do. I can give you a new heart. That will take care of the whole killing-you sequence, but the genetic sequence for longevity controls the neurons in your brain. I can't give you a new one of those. If you want to die, we can forgo the heart transplant. You can call your folks, your friends, girlfriends, and you can all spend what time you have left together. Let's see, that's what . . . three weeks at most.” He sighs. “Three weeks or three hundred years. Your call. Of course, remember, the whole heart thing isn't a given. Maybe we try it and let fate make the call.”

“You said there was a sixty-forty chance that the new heart will work.”

“This is all experimental. We know how to clone stem cells into heart tissue but not into outright hearts. I've been experimenting with ghost hearts—where you remove a heart from someone who obviously doesn't need it anymore. It's
washed
to strip away the cells, leaving a sort of heart skeleton, or what we call a ghost heart. Now, ideally, you then use stem cells from the person needing the heart, and eventually those stem cells turn into heart tissue. Then you have a heart that is a genetic match for the person needing it. This is great because then the recipient doesn't have to take medications to prevent rejection. But this won't work with you because you need a heart with different DNA. We can use a ghost heart made with stem cells from another person. It won't be a genetic match, so you may have to stay on antirejection drugs until we can figure out another option. This will buy us time, and quite a bit of it if all goes well. But it's tricky. I've got a great transplant team, but ghost hearts are new, and new means risk.”

My head sinks into my pillow.

“These are all uncertainties, but . . . if anybody can save you, I can. I do not want you to die.”

“I don't want to die.”

“Then we're agreed. You need to get stronger. I want you healthy when the heart's ready, and hopefully, it will be before the switch gets flipped. I'll work on the heart, and you rest. Then we'll see what happens.”

“How long have I been here?” I ask.

“Two days.”

More time lost. More fucking time just gone.

“I'm going to save you,” he says, and I can't help but think of the promises Dr. Claudia Bartholomew made me right before she put me in a coma and started hacking away.

“Why did he give his research to you?” I ask.

He smiles. “You're super intelligent. You tell me.”

I look at the baby-faced genius. “I can think of two reasons—no—three.”