Chapter 7 Emery
Em? You better not be calling me from your anniversary dinner.”
“Annie!” I shout into the car. “Where are you?”
“I was just about to leave. Is… is everything okay?”
Exhaling a harsh, terrified breath, I look back to where Luca is wrapped in a blanket and lying across my back seat. His skin is pale and he’s disturbingly still.
“I need you to listen to me,” I say, pressing heavily on the gas pedal. “Don’t ask questions, just listen, okay? Are there still gurneys at the loading dock at the back of the building?”
“The ones we use for veterinary emergencies? There should be.” She pauses. “Girl, please do not tell me you stopped for a wounded animal on the way to—”
“What about cameras?” I interrupt, veering around a slow-moving car. “Is it still just the one?”
“As far as I know. They talked about adding more because of the blind spot behind the concrete pillar, but I don’t think they ever did.” She hesitates. “Is there a reason you’re asking me this?”
“I need you to meet me out there. Don’t talk to anyone, just bring your key card—” I look down at my clothes and see my probability dress is covered in Luca’s blood. “And an extra lab coat and meet me outside. When you see me pull in, bring me the gurney.”
“Wha—”
“Just do it, okay? I’m almost there.”
A minute later I come to a screeching stop just shy of the BioNEX loading dock and breathe a sigh of relief when I see Annie silhouetted against the building.
Opening the door, I climb out and kneel next to the car.
Luca still hasn’t moved, and I pull back the blanket and press my palm to his cheek.
It’s cool, but that’s to be expected; Compound Y lowered his body temperature to prevent pallor mortis and protect his brain and vital organ systems. It’s the faint pulse in his throat that I need to confirm, and I find it with my fingers.
The drug is working. It’s keeping his heart beating and his brain firing just enough to maintain respiration and prevent livor mortis.
But a glance at my watch tells me we have less than thirty minutes to get him into the BioVIVE. We’re running out of time.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” I whisper.
I look over my shoulder at the clatter of a gurney on asphalt behind me and stand as Annie nears the car.
“What sweet baby do we have here?” she says, expecting to see an injured animal in my back seat.
When I take a step to the side, she stops, her hands coming to her mouth with a terrified gasp.
“Oh my God. Is that… is that Luca?” Her medical training kicks in and she rushes forward, looking for injuries. “What happened to him?”
“He was hit by a car.”
“Have you called 911?”
Reaching for the gurney, I roll it to the car. “There wasn’t time. Help me get him out.”
Spinning around, she grips my arm. “Emery!”
“He didn’t have a pulse. He died, Annie! Do you understand?”
She goes still, realization slipping over her features in a mixture of horror and heartbreak.
“You… you took it home. Oh my God, Em. Honey. Please tell me you didn’t inject him.
” When I don’t answer, she rakes a hand through her hair, spinning in a half circle, breath coming out sharp and fast. “Holy shit, this is bad. Emery, this is so bad.”
“I need you to help me.”
“You don’t even know if the compound will work!”
Bending, I reach for his hand. “It is working. Feel him. He’s cold!”
Slowly, she does, her fingers coming to rest gently on his palm, before moving to the inside of his wrist, feeling for a pulse. “How long ago.”
“About ten minutes.”
“There’s barely any respiration.”
“I started the protocol within a minute of his last breath. Honey was in respiratory arrest at least five times longer before being injected.”
“She wasn’t bleeding out.”
“Which is why we need to get him inside,” I say with urgency.
“How exactly? We’re just going to roll a body into one of the most secure facilities in the state of California?”
Luckily, I’ve given this some thought. “Security is used to us bringing in veterinary patients at crazy hours.”
“True…” Annie says, her eyes wary with the need to be reassured that we are not, in fact, about to be arrested by a secret army and sent back in time to serve out a life sentence in a Soviet gulag.
“And we know there’ll be a guard at the entrance—probably Carl.” I glance back at Luca again. A paralyzing, strangling fear rises up inside me, and I force myself to push it down. Not yet, I tell myself. I can’t fall apart yet. “And then the BioNEX security clearance.”
“Probably Michelle,” Annie says.
“Which is good,” I tell her, “because she has that giant Stanley cup and always has to pee. You can offer to watch the desk while she goes, and I’ll slip in with Luca.”
“What if she doesn’t have to pee?” Annie asks, voice high and edged with hysteria.
“Then—then, I don’t know. We hit her over the head?”
“Emery.”
“Do you have any other ideas?”
“Fuck. I hate you for this.”
“Don’t worry, I hate me enough for both of us.” Conscious of the angle of the security camera, we heft Luca out of the back seat, grunting with the effort.
Without an ounce of coordination, we manage to get most of him on the gurney, his deadweight landing awkwardly, one arm flopping over the side, his uninjured leg hanging off the other.
My stomach twists as I rearrange his limbs under the blanket; we’ve saved dozens of injured animals, but none of them ever looked as corpselike as Luca does right now.
“Okay,” Annie says, straightening. “Now what?”
“Now we wheel him into the building and act normal.”
“Normal. Right. Oh—” She hands me the lab coat. “Put this on. You’re a mess.”
“Thanks,” I say, slipping it on over my dress. “And if Carl asks, we just tell him it’s a Great Dane.”
Annie is my hero, the most competent person I know, and the one I look up to most, but she does have one flaw: She laughs at the worst possible moments.
I get it; it’s how her brain copes with stress and impossible situations.
Like now, when she bursts into a cackle before snapping her mouth shut again.
Silence hovers between us. “Sorry,” she says.
“I feel a little like I might be hallucinating all of this right now.”
If only.
Together we push the gurney up the ramp and through the loading dock door. I grit my teeth and do my best to look overworked and stressed as we pass the first security camera. It’s not a stretch.
“Please tell me everyone else has left for the day.”
“I was the last one here,” she says.
Well, that’s one thing in our favor. Walking from the back of the building and through the lobby to the second elevator on the left, we wave at Carl behind the broad marble security desk.
“Late night, eh, ladies?” he calls out.
“This is a Great Dane!” Annie says too loudly before letting out another ill-timed laugh.
I glance at her out of the corner of my eye as we keep walking. “Jesus Christ, Annie,” I mumble. “Take it down like a hundred notches.”
“I’m fucking nervous,” she hisses back, pressing her hand to her forehead. “Five years at this place. You’d think I’d be better under pressure.”
We get the gurney into the elevator, and I push the button, my fingerprint silently being read. “Safe to say you’ve never rolled a dead pers—”
An arm reaches in, stopping the doors from closing. “Hey, I had a quick question.”
My stomach lurches as Carl stands there. I can feel Annie’s panic beside me, hot and humid, like a boiling kettle. She stifles another laugh. My heart is a screeching beast.
“We’re actually in quite a hurry,” I say, trying to smile.
“Yeah?” He leans forward, angling to see what’s under the blanket. I can only pray that Luca’s arm hasn’t slipped out again. “Hey, what do you have—”
“A Great Dane,” I interrupt, leaning to catch his eye. “What was your question?”
Distraction seems to work, and he straightens, grinning at us. I’m sure being a night security guard is a lonely job, but my God, Carl, your timing is abysmal.
“I’ve always wondered, why do y’all always use this particular elevator? There are six of them here, but you always go in this one,” he says. “Don’t they all go up to the tenth floor?”
Beside me, Annie swallows audibly. “We like this one best?”
“Sure, but you press the button and this one always comes.”
“Just lucky, I guess!” My voice is high and loud. I feel the window for resuscitation slipping away. “Sorry, Carl, this poor pooch needs our help!”
To my relief, he steps back, hands up in apology. “Sure thing, sorry! Just occurred to me how strange it was that the—”
The doors close and we don’t attempt to stop them. Annie falls back against the wall. “Oh, my God. This is hell. We are in hell.”
The back panel opens. Annie and I steer the gurney down the hall, and we each swipe our security passes, scan our retinas, do every goddamn tiny security maneuver, and mentally I am screaming my face off about how unnecessary this all is.
Isn’t one retinal scan plenty? They never do this much in Mission: Impossible.
I linger back at the final door as Annie slips through, but I’m able to catch a glimpse inside.
Sure enough, Michelle is at the BioNEX security desk and beside her, to my overwhelming relief, is her enormous fifty-ounce Stanley mug.
Purple with a sticker of a giant Stanley stuck to the side that says, ALL OF THIS IS IN ME. Fuck, I hope so, Michelle.
The door swings heavily closed, and I pray to whatever dead scientist is listening that Michelle is still religious about hydration and really needs to pee. She’s great, but sharper than Carl, and would absolutely check under the blanket.
Ten thundering heartbeats later, the door swings open and Annie rushes me inside. “Come on, come on, she’s a fast pee-er.”
She helps me move Luca through and then watches the desk until Michelle returns before joining me in the dark BioNEX corridor, where we begin to sprint. The hallway always seems long, but tonight it’s nearly comically so.
“I’ve had this nightmare before,” I say, gasping for breath as the gurney rolls over the concrete.
“Luca dying?”
“No, like, running somewhere and not actually making any forward progress.”
Annie’s laugh is shrill and bounces off every wall, but then she stumbles beside me. She holds me back with a hand on my upper arm. “Fuck, Emery.”
“What?”
“Robert Pattinson.”
“What about him?” I ask. “Come on, keep pushing.”
“He’ll see us coming in.”
“Which is fine, right? We work here.”
“He registers temperature, though,” she says. “He tracks lab activity by heat maps. And we are not actually bringing in a Great Dane.”
Awareness lands. “Fuck.”
Luca’s core temperature is currently too low to register; Robert Pattinson will register two bodies going in.
But if we’re successful, three people will eventually be moving around the lab.
RPattz the AI wonder might register Reanimated Luca as a human intruder.
And Leonard could see the data log and register that a human subject was placed in the BioVIVE.
We exchange a nervous look.
“What choice do we have?” I ask, and immediately answer my own question: “None. We have no choice.” I glance at my wrist. “And we’re running out of time to get him in the pod.”
With a harsh exhale, Annie pushes hard, steering us to the right and down the short hallway, through a final set of security doors to the automatic entrance to my lab, where the disembodied voice of Robert Pattinson genteelly acknowledges our arrival.
“Good evening, Dr. Martín. Good evening, Dr. Rodriguez.”
“Not now, Rob,” I say, relieved when the doors slide to a close behind us.
As expected, the lab is blissfully empty, and once inside, we break into action.
Annie moves to cold storage to grab A-positive blood—Luca’s blood type—while I move to the BioVIVE pod, setting the parameters.
When she doesn’t appear at my side, I turn to see her still standing by the walk-in refrigerator with bags of blood in her hands.
“Annie, what are you waiting for?”
She’s gone pale. “We can still call an ambulance, Em. It’s not too late.”
I gape at her. “The compound is the only thing keeping him here. We’re running out of time!”
“We can stop. Give him a transfusion. The compound is holding his pulse at 20 bpm. It’ll hold until they get here.”
Panic swells in my throat and I shake my head quickly, feeling tears fall down my cheeks. “No.”
“Sweetie, the odds of this working are slim to none. Every animal we’ve done has had some issues. Honey had to be retrained. Dodger had kidney issues. Scout—”
“I can deal with kidney issues!”
“Emery, it might be worse than that. And if we’re caught, I mean… we will be eaten alive in prison.”
She’s right, I know, somewhere deep inside where rational thought remains, I know. But I also know that if Luca is gone, I won’t ever be the same. The Emery I am today won’t survive. The only words I can think of spill out of me: “If I lose him, you lose me. Do you understand?”
After a long beat and with a resigned breath, Annie nods, then walks over with the blood.
She puts it into the receptacle in the pod, and we carefully undress Luca, being mindful of his injuries.
Other than the damage to his thigh, bruises are beginning to bloom across his torso and chest, a sign of probable internal bleeding.
He has abrasions on his arms and legs, a laceration on the side of his jaw.
His head—and hopefully his brain—seems relatively unscathed.
We lift him, gently settling him onto the BioVIVE pod platform and attaching the sensors and electrodes to his skin and scalp. Annie inserts the pod’s IV into his arm.
I take one more look at his face. His lips are pale, his golden hair falling away from his smooth, ashen forehead. I’m not ready to say goodbye.
So I won’t.
Bending, I kiss his forehead before pushing the Initiate sequence. The observation screens light up with his vitals: Pulse: 18 bpm. Blood pressure: 70/20 mm Hg. Body temperature: 30°C. EEG: Erratic.
I hold my breath as the platform smoothly slides back and connects, the glossy black top gliding into place until Luca is completely contained in the pod. The lights go on; the machine hums to life. Everything seems to be working.
But I don’t know how I’m going to survive the next couple of hours waiting to find out if I’ve lost my husband tonight.