The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series) (10 page)

When they got back to the farm, Brandon had leaped out of the truck and headed straight for the field behind the house, talking a mile a minute about his plans for the soil, the fruit, the livestock. Gary had gone to walk with him, listening as his son explained how they would need to buy another plot and started listing the supplies they’d need from Mike. His enthusiasm was contagious; before long, Gary was staying up late going over his finances, looking for some way to fund Brandon’s plan. The farm had offered up a living that seemed to somehow span the gap between meager and comfortable for what felt like far too long. He knew in his heart that Kai’s sacrifice had been too great, and Brandon’s debt was a heavy burden on his future; he hoped to provide an easier future for his younger son and daughter. Now and again, the memory of his wife walking out the front door would surface briefly. He did what he could to ignore it and its implications.

A few weeks had gone by before he had been able to come up with a feasible option for financing, and by that time, Brandon’s mood had changed considerably. His exuberance had evolved into a nervous energy, and he began spending more time inside, searching the Internet for job opportunities or watching television with a foggy look on his face. He was quieter at dinner, either staring off into space or totally engrossed in his plate.

A little over a month after the shift in attitude, Gary really started to worry. He had left to go pick up some supplies from Mike, but forgot his checkbook at the house and had to turn around. He remembered pulling into the driveway and jogging into the house: Kai was out back, working in the barn, and Paul had taken Sarah to the beach; Brandon had still been asleep when Gary left. Just as he grabbed his checkbook off the kitchen table, something crashed loudly to the floor upstairs, making him jump. After calling for Brandon and getting no reply, he had hurried upstairs to find his son standing in the middle of his room, trembling with fury, his laptop lying on its side against the badly damaged wall. Twenty minutes passed before he was able to calm Brandon down enough to get a coherent answer out of him, and the only explanation he had offered was exhaustion.

Two days after the laptop incident, Gary was sitting at his desk when the phone rang. He answered, and a quiet voice had informed him that his son was in trouble.

“Who’s in trouble?” he had asked, tensing.

Briefly, he heard papers rustling, and the voice answered, “Brandon Kavida.”

He considered this for a moment, then asked, “Where are you calling from?”

“California,” the quiet voice responded, and then began to explain that Brandon was involved in some sort of drug trial that could potentially cause him a significant amount of harm.

“Are you seeing behavioral changes? Issues with memory, energy, motor function?”

“Well, I—”

“Next will be listlessness, punctuated by bouts of extreme frustration or anger. He may even lash out at his family. Your other children . . .” the voice pressed on.

Gary was silent for a moment. “I think I’m finished with this conversation,” he said finally and hung up. Later that week, a package had been delivered to his home. Inside he found a file of photocopied pages with what looked like Brandon’s handwriting detailing his “recent struggles with depression,” along with several waivers, each more than three pages long. The papers were dated July 23 of that year.

The package also contained a DVD, which he watched on his laptop. The footage looked as though it was from security cameras and showed Brandon in what appeared to be a doctor’s office. Gary watched with a knot in his stomach as his son sat in a room giving blood samples, conversing politely with the nurse. The screen changed to show Brandon being led into another room, where he stood and spoke with a young man in a white lab coat for a few minutes before he picked up a small container and stuck it in his nose. Then the screen changed again; the black-and-white footage from the security cameras was replaced by color images shot by some sort of handheld device. The camera was moving down a dim hallway toward a steel door with a viewing window in it. Just before it reached the door, a loud male voice called out, “Hey, you! Aren’t you done for the night?” Whoever was filming lowered the camera, and then Gary heard the same quiet voice from the phone call answer, “Yeah, I just left something in the lab. Frank was nice enough to let me come get it.” Gary furrowed his brow as he realized the speaker was a woman; the fact had not occurred to him before.

The male voice said, “Well, have a good night. See you back here bright and early!” Then footsteps echoed down the hall, and the camera was lifted again to face the door. A hand emerged on-screen to swipe a card through a keypad, and a small beep sounded, followed by a loud click. The quiet voice took an audible deep breath and pushed the door open.

The camera entered a silent, still room. The person filming took two short steps in and cleared her throat. In reaction to the small sound, the room exploded in a cacophony of howls and snarls; she panned the camera around to show caged animals hurling themselves against the metal bars, slavering and snapping their jaws. Just barely audible over the horrific din came the sound of the woman’s voice. She said, “These animals were the result of the first trials of the nanotech medication your son has taken. They’re scheduled to be destroyed tonight, along with all related research.”

Three weeks later, sitting in seat 24B flying at an elevation of thirty-five thousand feet, he wondered what kind of trouble he was charging toward.

“Damn it!” Kai yelled. Somewhere on the floor of the truck cab, his cell phone was ringing again. He tried to ignore the cheery jingle as he blew through the intersection at Kamehameha Highway, keeping his eyes on the squat blue building nestled at the base of the mountain. Horns blared behind him, but he was still two miles away from the emergency room, and Brandon was beginning to slump forward in his seat.

Kai reached over and squeezed Brandon’s shoulder. No reaction. Pressing his hand against his brother’s cheek, he could feel the skin was cold and clammy. The tiny hairs on Brandon’s face stood up against his palm. He had stopped screaming only a few minutes earlier, his body suddenly going limp in the seat. Kai could barely hear the hoarse whimpers in his brother’s throat over the protesting engine he had recently pushed past its limit.

“Brandon?” he asked as gently as he could. “You still with me?”

There was no reply. Brandon’s lips were now almost white, moving slightly and flecked with foam. Kai took the left turn onto ’Ulukahiki Street at full speed, and Brandon’s frame crumpled against his door. Another hard left into the parking lot, and Kai slammed on the brakes beneath the sheltered ER entrance. A young mother carrying her son yelled something from the sidewalk, startled. Cradling his arm, the boy glanced up with a pained look on his face. Kai scrambled out of the passenger seat, deaf to the mother’s complaining voice. He thought that he was shouting for help, but the faces looking out of the waiting room window looked more curious than responsive. Several people boosted themselves up on the arms of their chairs to get a better look.

He reached Brandon’s door and hauled him out, groaning slightly under the deadweight. The stench of blood and the mess of the fight hit him full in the face; he reeled for a second under its impact, bile rising in his throat. The bitter stink of asphalt underscored the metallic tang of his brother’s blood. Stumbling forward, Kai wondered why no one was helping him. Finally he saw three sets of scrubs and a gurney behind them emerging through the automatic door, and Brandon was being lifted off his back and laid on the white sheet.

“What happened?” asked one of the nurses loudly.

Kai blinked a few times as they peeled Brandon’s eyelids back and waved tiny flashlights in front of them, checked his pulse, and murmured generic reassurances.

“He was attacked . . . ,” he replied as his knees wobbled under him and he sank to the concrete. They wheeled the gurney back through the doors, and the loud nurse called for someone to see about the guy outside. Kai sat on the concrete, trying to force his brain to respond to the things going on around him, until a pair of blue scrubs stood in his field of vision and a hand was laid on his shoulder.

“You’re going to be okay. Can you come with me?” asked a voice. “Tell me what happened. Does he have any allergies? What’s your relation to him?”

“Trent bit him,” he mumbled, stumbling to his feet. The ER doors slid open in front of them, sending a whoosh of hospital air swirling into his face. He smelled the sickly sweet pine antiseptic over the warm, fetid odor of sickness, but most of all, he still smelled Brandon’s blood. And then the realization crept slowly into his mind—they had taken Brandon. Everything rocketed forward into full speed; he snapped his head up and spun, looking for the gurney. Through a tiny rectangle window in a door behind the check-in desk, he saw Brandon shivering hard on a white sheet. Three nurses trotted along beside his gurney, steering him through another set of doors into another sterile-looking hallway.

“Paging Dr. Lau to the ER,” a muffled voice snapped from a speaker in the ceiling. Something in Kai’s stomach loosened at the sound of the name. Karen Lau had been their family doctor for years, had delivered him and his siblings, had set Paul’s arm the first time he broke it skimboarding, had stitched Sarah’s leg when she cut it on some coral. She ran a quiet clinic nearer to their farm as well, and they often opted to visit her with routine health questions rather than see a doctor in Honolulu. Her face appeared briefly in the hallway behind Brandon’s disappearing gurney. She was sweeping her hair into a bun as she moved into place behind the nurses, then leaned over his brother as the sliding doors shut behind them.

“You said he was attacked?” pressed the nurse in blue scrubs. She was a wide Hawaiian woman with pinched eyes and clenched hands. Her eyes remained on the clipboard she held in front of her as she waited.

“Yeah,” Kai replied. He was startled to hear his own voice. “Yeah, a guy I know attacked us both, and bit Brandon.”

The nurse frowned. “A guy? Not an animal?” she asked, her tone skeptical.

“No, a guy,” he answered firmly.

She took a few notes and mumbled something about having to file a police report. For an instant, Kai considered the implications of police involvement; there would be questions about why they were at the house, Trent’s business, Kai’s relationship to him. He swept those thoughts aside and focused fully on the nurse.

“Does he have any allergies to any medication?”

“Ceclor,” Kai answered automatically.

“What’s the reaction?”

“Hives.”

“Okay. I need you to go out and move your truck real quick, and then come back in here and finish up with me. You’re blocking the entrance,” she directed.

Kai looked over his shoulder, disoriented. His truck was parked haphazardly in the circular drive, almost on the sidewalk in front of the doors leading into the ER. Farther out on the approaching road, an ambulance turned the corner, its lights flashing. The first shreds of siren wafted through the door, mingling with the evening news anchor intoning from the TV in the corner of the room. Kai realized abruptly that most everyone in the waiting room behind him was staring at the screen with rapt attention. A tight-lipped blonde reporter had been carefully positioned on a main street in Honolulu to show smoke billowing up from a hotel’s beachside deck, and throngs of tourists and oglers standing nearby with cell phones and cameras out. The caption on the screen beneath her read “Outbreaks of Violence on Oahu Raising Concerns.”

“Residents have expressed anxiety over the lack of police response to emergency calls, but local law enforcement insists that it is doing all it can to answer in a timely manner according to the severity of the incident. We have been given no firm details on the number of incidents that have been reported to authorities, but in my interviews with the public today, there has been a tangible air of nervousness.”

The camera cut to film of an older woman standing in front of an equally worn-down house; her eyes were red with crying, her face pale as she explained in a halting voice how two men had assaulted her husband as he mowed their front lawn.

Kai hadn’t realized the nurse was waiting for him to reply until she tapped him on the shoulder and repeated her request.

“Sure. Sorry,” he answered lamely.

He trudged past the waiting room, out onto the sidewalk. It had started to rain again, and the clouds moved quickly toward the coast. It was strange to walk, he thought. It felt slow, like he was a shuffling old man with nowhere to go. Rounding the truck, he bumped against the headlight, setting one hand on the hood to steady himself. The metal was slick with moisture, and he retracted his hand quickly, wiping it against his pant leg. Finally, he climbed into the cab and started the engine, frowning when he realized he had left the keys in the ignition.

He pulled out of the drive just as the ambulance came screaming into the lot, taking the place of his truck near the ER door. Searching for a parking spot, he left the heater on full blast, hoping somehow it would thaw him out and set him working again. He hung a right into a vacant spot and put the truck in park. The windshield on the passenger side was splattered with blood—Brandon’s blood—and he felt his pulse begin pounding in his neck again. Somewhere, miles behind him, Trent was still lying on the street in front of his house, his face a bloody pulp, his body unmoving. Kai covered his face with his hands as the weight of the afternoon crashed down on him.

The cell phone jingle from beneath his seat jarred him, irritation snapping through him, hitting his fingertips and rocketing back to the pit of his stomach. He fished on the floorboards for a second, his hand finally closing around his phone. The screen read SARAH.

“Sarah. I’m sorry; Brandon’s hurt. I’m at the ER with him right now. Don’t worry—he’s in with Dr. Lau—but I’m probably going to be here for a while . . .” He trailed off, surprised at her lack of response.