Deadly Design (9780698173613) (27 page)

S
omeday, I want to wake up in my own bed. It's not a lot to ask. I don't need to be rich or famous. I just want my head to rest against my own pillow. I want to open my eyes and see
Call of Duty
posters on the walls. I want my own blanket. I want to hear the washing machine churning in the laundry room and the buzz of the dryer when the clothes are done. And I won't be annoyed like I used to be when those sounds woke me up. Instead, I'll call out to my mom, and she'll push the door open and smile at me because I'm home.

I'm not home. I can hear hospital-intercom voices from the hallway. I can feel the thin mattress beneath my body and tubes sticking into me. I'm scared to open my eyes. Scared of where I'll find myself. I feel dampness at the corners of my eyes, then feel tears moving down my temples. There is a hand, and it wipes at the tears. It moves to my hair, combing through it like when I was little and had a stomachache or awoke from a bad dream. The tears come faster, and I force my eyes to open.

Mom. She's here. She's staring down at me, and Dad's standing behind her. They're both smiling, both leaning over me, trying gently to embrace me.

As they move away, I see someone else on the other side of me, and I don't believe it. I can't believe it. She can't really be here.

Cami leans over and lightly kisses my forehead.

I try to speak, but my throat hurts and nothing comes out.

“It's okay,” Mom says, holding my hand tightly in hers.

“Don't try to talk,” Dad says. “You've been on a ventilator, so your throat's pretty tender. But you're all right.” He smiles. “You're all right.”

I can hear the sounds that have become too familiar to me. The beeping and hissing and humming of machines.

I look at my dad. At his brown eyes and his balding round head. He's my dad. That's all there is to it. And Mom. Her eyes are red from crying, and her face has grown thinner since the last time I saw her. But she's my mom. My only mom. I look at my parents, and even though I can't talk, they know what I'm asking.

“You have a new heart,” Dad says. “And you're seventeen and two days old. You're going to be okay.”

A nurse appears behind my mom, and she's putting something into the IV bag. I want to stop her because I don't know who she is, and I don't trust her, but a warmth comes over me, spreading through my body, and as I fight to keep my eyes open for just one second longer, I see Cami again standing at the foot of the bed.

• • •

It's dark in the room. The lights are turned off except for the lone fluorescent bulb glowing on the headboard. I hear all the sounds again, but they don't bother me. Just like the technology in the lab helped to form me, these humming, beeping machines are helping me stay alive.

“Belated happy birthday, buddy. You've been out for a while. I put you in a bit of mini coma. Just needed your body to have a chance to heal.”

Dr. Rubenstein is sitting in a chair next to my bed.

“You did it,” I say, giving him a drowsy smile.

He looks good. The awkward layers of his hair are combed, and he's dressed like a real doctor. He's not wearing a white coat, but his black suit jacket over his gray shirt looks good. “We did it. Actually, more like you did it. You saved yourself.”

“You saved me,” I say, because he did. I'd be dead if it weren't for him.

He bites at his lower lip, while he looks for the right words. “The ghost heart wasn't ready. You getting shot sped things up a bit, and we couldn't wait.”

Shot. That's right. I got shot. I remember that now. And I remember . . . “Claudia's dead,” I say. “And Matt.”

“And Claudia's two henchmen. You got one of them, and one of my guys got the other.”

“I hit one of them?” I ask, and I don't remember. I remember seeing Matt's head snapping backward. I remember the sound of gunfire, and I remember pulling the trigger over and over again, until I don't remember anything else.

“Where did you get the heart?” I ask, and I'm not sure I want to know, because she was related to me. She was my biological aunt. What if Rubenstein—

“It's not hers,” he says quickly. “No way I'd use her heart. I might cut it out and burn it in my chiminea, but I sure as hell wouldn't put it in you.”

My heart, my new heart that never belonged to Claudia Bartholomew, settles in my chest a little.

“Whose, then?”

“Turns out your buddy Matt happened to have type-O blood, which means he's a universal donor—he could donate to anyone with any blood type. You're just lucky I put that tracking device in you when I was stitching up your incisions. If it weren't for that, you would have bled out or gotten shot again. As soon you left the premises, an alarm sounded, and we tracked you. Matt was barely alive, but we were able to stabilize him long enough to get to the hospital and take his heart.”

Rubenstein puts down the railing on the bed and leans forward against the mattress. “Do you know who those people were, besides Claudia?”

I shake my head.

“One was Dr. Jessica Dunlap, Claudia's most trusted associate. The man was Dr. Henry Boggs. Besides a doctor, he's pretty much her business manager. He handled her investors, grants. The three of them were like the three heads of the Hydra that was never going to stop hunting you down.”

I look up at the ceiling, at the shadows cast against it.

“I don't think she would have trusted anyone else with the secret of what's inside you. That means nobody but you and I know.”

I feel his hand against my arm. I feel him squeeze it, because even though we haven't known each other long, there is a bond between us.

“You can go home, Kyle. You can live your life.”

“What about the police?”

“The police believe that Dr. Bartholomew and her colleagues were in Chicago to pick up a patient; however, they were unable to discover the identity of that patient. They believe that on the way to the hospital, they were carjacked, probably for drugs. The ambulance had been ransacked, medications were missing—the weapons used in the killings were never found.”

“What about Rosemary? Is Jerry okay?”

“Jerry's fine.” Rubenstein looks down and for the first time since I've known him, he seems at a loss for words. He clears his throat. “There was a break-in. Jerry was assaulted in the parking lot. He takes a breath. “The murderer took Jerry's security badge and gained entrance to the facility. He was startled by one of the staff, shot her, then in a panic, fled. Motive was, again, most likely drugs.”

“I'm sorry.”

Rubenstein attempts a smile and squeezes my arm.

“Thank you.” I say the words, but they're not enough. I'm not just thanking him for my life, but for all that life will mean. All the holidays with my parents, the family dinners and conversations and being able to watch them get older because now they'll want to live to watch me grow up. To see what I make out of my life. And I know that at some point, I'll have to tell them that there's a reason I look twenty when I'm forty. But we'll save that for later. Much later. “You saved my life. I owe you big time.”

His lips suck in against his teeth, his eyes narrowing in a sort of guilty child's expression. “You, my friend, don't owe me anything,” he says. “But you should know that I, um. . . . will be going away for a while. But don't worry. You're in very good hands here. Another week of recovery, and you'll be ready to go back to Kansas.”

“Where are you going?”

“Let's just say the regulations for experimentation aren't quite as stringent in some countries as they are here.”

“But . . .”

He lifts a hand, trying to keep my new heart from galloping out of my chest. “I have no intention of following through with Edward Bartholomew's plan. I promise.”

“But you said you destroyed the other part of his research, the longevity sequence part.”

He grimaces and looks away from a moment. “I did. I couldn't take the chance of anyone finding it. So I deleted the files and smashed the drive they were on. I even burned all his written notes.”

“But . . .” I start for him.

His eyes meet mine. “I read through them quite carefully before destroying them. I mean, I had to. As a doctor, as a researcher, it would have been totally improper, irresponsible to destroy such research without knowing what I was destroying first.”

He settles against the back of the chair, his face moving away from the dim light above my bed.

“You have an eidetic memory,” I say, because it makes perfect sense. It's easy to destroy a map to the fountain of youth if you have a photographic memory and the map is stored forever in your brain.

“I'm not going to do anything evil with it,” he says. “I promise I'm not going to sell it to the highest bidder. But I think I might know a way to replicate the sequence and deliver it into a person using a ribonucleic acid virus. I just have to find, or create, the right virus to deliver it. Then it replicates itself into the host DNA. I think I'm the perfect research subject to test it on.” He leans forward, into the light. “You remember when I talked about us going to the Bahamas?”

“Yeah.”

“Screw the tropics. How about we go to Mars?” He stands, his lanky body, unable to contain the excitement rushing through it. “I'm serious, Kyle. Think about how smart we could be in two hundred years. Imagine what we could learn, what we could achieve. The problems we could solve. Screw Edward's plan to kill off everyone because of overpopulation. We'll find a different way, a better way. Maybe we'll even give everybody a chance to live a long, productive, youthful life, and they'll be able to because we'll have made colonies on the moon and Mars, and we'll create giant space stations. I know that you haven't realized your full potential yet. You haven't even begun to, but people like us, we can lead the direction the world's going in. It's going to be amazing!”

He sits back down, and he's breathing rapidly like he's just run through the corridors of that space station his mind is envisioning.

“Think what we can do, Kyle.” His eyes are so luminous. “It'd be wrong to waste our intelligence, to waste the opportunity we've been given.”

I think of my intelligence, the intelligence that came from a piece of Edward Bartholomew's DNA. I don't want it. I don't want any part of him inside of me, but I can't exorcise it like some demon.

“Have fun,” I say, bringing a disappointed frown to Rubenstein's face.

“You'll change your mind,” he says, standing and pushing the chair away from the bed. “You're just seventeen. You've got lots of time, lots of it, to figure things out. And don't worry, I'll know how to find you when you do.”

I scoff. “You mean you'll be watching me?” My heart, Matt's heart, erupts on the monitor. “Is the fucking GPS still inside me?” I try to get up, to get at him, but the pain stops me. “You've inherited his experiment, and it's never going to end, is it, because there's still a subject left. Me.”

“And what a wonderful subject you'll be. I can't wait to see you come into your own. Connor only had eighteen years to be perfect. What will you be like in a hundred?”

“Do what you want. Live a million years. But leave me alone. Leave me the fuck alone!”

“You'll change your mind,” he says, standing up and smiling down at me. “Once you've matured a little, you'll be glad to be a part of science, of discovering the possibilities.”

I think about Cami and the night we were at Luigi's restaurant when she told me I needed to “mature,” to “ripen.”

Rubenstein is walking toward the door.

“I'm not very mature.”

He turns and looks at me. Then I flip him the bird.

I
t's early, really early. The cemetery is about twenty miles out in the country, and during the drive, Cami's fallen back to sleep.

I ease the door of the Jeep open and quietly get out. I'm so glad to have the Jeep back, and Cami's glad to have Emma back. After coming home for Christmas, Emma decided to stay. We swapped vehicles again, and while I don't totally hate the Smart car anymore, I love the Jeep. I love sitting where Connor sat, and sometimes when I'm holding the steering wheel, I feel like his hands are beside mine, guiding me because he doesn't want me to get into an accident. He wants me to live my life.

The sun's up, brightening the dark green leaves on the trees growing amongst the graves. I walk past the old tombstones first. Some date back over a hundred and fifty years. They're made of limestone instead of marble, and the dates and names are barely visible. No one puts flowers on those graves. There's no one left to—no one still alive who remembers who these people were.

I follow the path to the newer section of the cemetery, where there are lots flowers, mostly plastic, sitting on the various graves. There are large marble stones with pictures of husbands and wives. A few with only one spouse pictured because the other one is still alive. And solitary stones. One grave has a cradle etched beside the name of the child who lived only a few months. Instead of flowers, a teddy bear leans against the gray marble headstone. Connor's grave is in the last row next to an open wheat field. There's a photograph of him inset between the dates of when he was born and when he died. It's his senior picture. He's wearing a baby blue button-down shirt, but it isn't buttoned all the way up. His hair has that perfect “yeah, I get up in the morning looking like this” appearance. He's standing outside, the sun at his back, and anyone would envy him. Anyone would think the world was his.

“Happy birthday,” I say. “Mom and Dad will be out later, but I wanted to give you something first, on my own. It's not wrapped, but . . .” I place the controller Connor gave me one year ago today in the grass just below his picture.

“Kind of cheap, I know—giving you back what you gave me. Truth is, I don't play anymore. Well, I play a little bit with Josh. Kid's getting pretty good, too, but I'm not going to let him become like I was. I'm going to make sure he gets out in the world. Me and Jimmy, we're co-coaching his soccer league. And don't give me that shit that I don't know anything about soccer, because I already know that, but it's kids kicking the ball around outside—how hard can it be? And Jimmy, he's taking it really seriously, reading books on it and Googling plays. I didn't even know they had plays in soccer.”

Two robins chase each other across the grass, then disappear, one after the other, into the thick leaves of a maple tree.

“I want you to know how much that night we stayed up playing meant to me. It was the greatest game of my life, and since I know I'll never top that, I don't need the controller anymore. And guess who got a four-point-seven this semester? Yep. I actually started trying, but no sports. I can't deal with those dickhead coaches. I have been running, though. You were right about me liking it. I think Matt likes it too. Okay, I know that sounds totally effed up, but sometimes when I'm running, I get this weird feeling in my chest like his heart likes it. He was a really fit guy, and it's not like he could run the same after he lost his leg, so . . .”

I shake my head because I can't believe how much things can change in just one year.

“I wish . . .” My eyes start to burn like they always do when I come to visit Connor. “I wish I'd looked at you like Mom and Dad and Cami look at me. It's kind of creepy in a way”—I laugh—“but it's also awesome.”

I look around at the various graves, each one the resting place for a person, for a human being with a name and a face and fears and aspirations. I wonder how many of them died without knowing how much they were loved.

I guess that's just how people are. We take for granted that we'll always have the chance to tell someone what they mean to us. We take for granted that nothing is going to happen to them, and so we all walk around not realizing how much
we're
loved. How much
we're
valued.

I almost died. Connor did die. Now my parents embrace me with their eyes. They hug me and kiss me, and I know without any doubt how much I'm loved. But the truth is, they don't love me any more than they did this time last year or the year before, or the year before. We've just all learned to show it now. To not take anything for granted.

“Happy birthday, Connor,” I say, hoping he can hear me. Hoping that he knows what I never told him.

I look out at the open field. The wheat's starting to lighten from green to gold, the rising sun illuminating it. In the breeze, it rolls like waves on the ocean. A hand touches my back, startling me.

“Why didn't you wake me up?” Cami says, wrapping her arms around my waist.

“You looked too peaceful. I couldn't.”

She lets go of me and scans the graves that seem to go on and on just like the stalks of wheat in the field. “We'll never take life for granted, will we?” she says, grabbing my hand and pressing it against her lips.

“Not a second of it.” I pull her to me and start to kiss her, but stop. I don't think Connor would mind us kissing on his grave. I know he's happy for me. But still. He can't kiss Emma. Cami seems to understand, and she leans her head against my shoulder.

“Happy birthday, Connor,” she says. “We miss you.”

She looks at me, sees the tears in my eyes, and gives me an understanding smile. But she doesn't understand. These tears aren't for Connor. They're for me, because one day I might be standing here young and healthy and Cami will be . . .

Maybe Rubenstein was right when he said I'd come around. He's got people watching me. Not all the time like Bartholomew had, but I see them every once in a while; strangers stand out in small towns. And I recognize the way they suddenly avert their eyes when I look at them. I could tell one of them that I'm ready. That I'm a hundred percent onboard with whatever his plans are. But first I have one request. Change Cami. If he's really figured out how to give himself immortality, then give it to her, too. And then give it to Josh, because she won't be able to stand seeing him get older. And Josh will want it for his someday girlfriend, and we'll all want it for Jimmy and for our parents and then where would it stop?

“Do you have any idea how much I love you?” I tell her, and the sympathy in her eyes turns to concern.

“Are you all right?” The grip of her hand tightening around mine. “You're healthy, right? You'd tell me if you weren't?”

Her deep brown eyes fill with fear.

“I fine. I'm going to be around for very long time.” I stare at her, marveling at the way the morning light brings out tiny strands of auburn in her hair. I look into her eyes, and what could possibly be wrong?

I'm alive.

I pull her toward me and hold her as I think about those who didn't survive.

I wish all the years Edward Bartholomew gave me could be turned into a birthday cake for Connor. I'd resurrect him and all the others, and we'd slice the years up—every person— every superior—getting an equal number. Maybe they wouldn't divide up to be that many, but it wouldn't matter, because we'd make sure they were good years. The best.

I love the thought of all of us together having a party. Triagon could play the piano, and Hannah could dance. Amber could fix up her hair and wear a gorgeous dress, and we'd line up to kiss her, because . . . well, who wouldn't?

Cami pulls away, and she must see the slight smile on my face. “What are you thinking about?”

I smile back, because right now I'm young and she's young, and really, no one knows how much time they're going to have. And if there's one thing I know Connor would like to tell me, it's live. Just live. And I intend to. And I'll hold on to Cami as tightly as I can, because there's one thing I know for sure: it's going to be one hell of a ride.