As Edgar tossed and turned in his bed, he was tormented with flashbacks of the battlefield. The blasts of mortar shells exploded all around the ATV as it sped down the Kabul street. The death rattles of the civilians on the road chased after the vehicle as a gazelle trying to escape the encroaching jaws of a lion.
Edgar could not remember if he were chasing someone or running from someone else; all he knew was that he had to go faster! He was driving the vehicle with a cavern of empty spaces around him in the empty seats where the rest of his unit should have been. As he glanced away from the road at the barren bucket to his right and the bench behind him, he was surprised to find that they were no longer empty. The passenger seat was filled with a little Afghan girl holding a pink bear. Both of them we half-singed and blackened. The right half of her face was covered in burns. The left half of her bear was all but disintegrated. “Why didn’t you help me?” she implored in a voice cracking from the tears streaming down her face.
Before he could answer, the now occupied back seat behind her chimed in with “Because he doesn’t care.” The bloodied face of his bunk mate stated matter-of-factly as the stump which used to be his left leg glistened in the noon-day sunlight. As the shock of the improbable spectacle of gore rushed in on his focus, he turned his eyes back to the road just in time to the see the lacerated body of his wife slam into the windshield.
The jolt jarred him out of his slumber to have his blood-shot eyes focus on the alarm clock. The blocky, red numbers related the time of “3:47” in the morning. He collapsed back into an exhausted heap on his bed as he tried to slow his quickened heartbeat. Sleep would remain an elusive foe to him for another night. As he stared unblinkingly at the ceiling of his one-bedroom apartment, the sun climbed the sky to become morning. To him, it seemed as though the hours melted away with the length of a single breath. The day began without his permission.
Edgar stood up for the first time that morning. As the weight of his body became supported by his appendages, a jolt of pain shot through his right leg. As the crackles of electricity highlighted the nerve-endings around his shrapnel, he shifted his weight to his other leg. The pain subsided a bit as he limped to the bathroom. As he pissed into the toilet bowl, from his stance hunched supporting himself with this right hand on the wall behind it, the pounding in his bladder slowly subsided. Finally, it was gone entirely. He hobbled over to the sink and began his daily, morning grooming regimen. He grabbed his toothbrush, wet it under the flowing faucet, covered the tip with the toothpaste, and began the back-and-forth motion in his mouth. His mind still tried to shake off the last vestiges of his nightmare as his hand was distracted with the muscle-memory of his mundane activity. His army-appointed therapist would have a field day with his dream at his mandated weekly counseling session if Edgar decided to tell him about it. He might even look up from his crossword puzzle this time.
He spit the remnants of toothpaste out of his mouth and into the sink. He cupped his hands together to form a bowl and filled it under the flowing water. He brought his hands up to his mouth and pursed his lips to splash the water upon his teeth. He swished it around for a moment and spit again into the sink. He smacked his lips a single time to re-acquire a feeling a familiarity in his mouth. He shut off the faucet. As he hobbled to the doorway, his bare feet pressed against the cold tile that was slightly slimy from the morning condensation. He walked to the bathtub, turned the nozzle to hot, and pulled it out from the wall. It roared on with a resounding swish. He pulled the flange on the top of the spigot to divert the water to begin flowing through the showerhead. He leaned against the wall near the shower to help to support his weight as he waited for the icy liquid to find some warmth. He closed his eyes and was unpleasantly surprised with a dream flashback assaulting his personal theatre. He snapped his eyes open quickly as if changing the channel.
He was greeted with a small amount of steam accompanying the new water that rushed from the faucet. He took his boxers off, which were the only thing that he ever wore to bed, and tossed them into the open hamper a few feet behind him. He stepped into the tub and pulled the curtain shut behind him. He didn’t really feel like cleaning himself as he had taken a shower before bed last night. He merely wanted to feel the hot water gushing over him quelling the pain in his leg. As it trickled over the scar tissue, now only a couple of months old, he felt the muscles around his shrapnel release their tight grasp.
He positioned his leg underneath the shower head, and he allowed the semi-scalding water to cascade across his flesh. The heat hurt for the briefest of moments before he could feel it catalyzing the relief of the muscular tension. He stood there for five solid minutes allowing the water to do its work. Then, he proceeded to turn the shower off, grab the half-clean towel from the shower adjacent towel-rack, and he wiped it across his moistened flesh taking care to be gentler with his leg than the rest of his body. Once dry enough, he threw the towel into the same hamper as before, and he gingerly proceeded back into the bedroom stark naked.
***
Benedict awoke to another day staring at the ceiling of the undisclosed room where he had been kept for the last six months. Though his mentality was calm, physically, he felt stressed. For reasons only known to the military doctors who “treated” him every day, he felt as though his body was about to go off of the rails. He had more energy than he could remember ever possessing before, but he somehow felt tired as well. It was like putting a motor into a chassis that was not designed to handle to the power it produced. Although his heartbeat was steady, he felt as though it were racing, and his energy level was of near manic proportions. While his reason for being in this room six months ago had been clear and certain, as the days dwindled, he found it fogging over and the meaning becoming just as hazy.
“How are we feeling today?” the intercom croaked at him.
“I’m feeling a bit tired,” Benedict related despite him circling the room as though he were a hummingbird looking for his next nectar fix.
“Well, that’s to be expected with the metabolic booster we gave to you yesterday. The affects should taper off as your body adjusts to it. How did you sleep?”
“Um, I couldn’t really fall asleep for a long time. My mind was racing. Eventually, I just collapsed onto my bed. But, I had some bad dreams which didn’t really make any sense.”
“Why do you say that?” Doctor Payne asked.
“I can’t really remember them, but I think that I was on a battlefield. But, I never saw any combat when I was in Afghanistan.”
“What did you do when you were there?”
“Well, I was the chaplain in our unit, and I served on an army base about 30 miles from the front line. We had the occasional threat, but we never saw any combat.”
“Curious. Well, why don’t you clean yourself up, and we’ll have the orderly bring you some breakfast.” With that, the intercom audibly turned off.
Benedict proceeded over to the sink and began to brush his teeth. After he had used the toothpaste-laden brush on them for about 2 minutes, he held it under the stream before returning it to the holder. As he was about to reach for the brush, his had frozen in mid-air almost as though he forget how to put water in the glass to swish around as he had done without fail, every morning, for the last six months. His motion restarted again after a moment, and he instead cupped his hands into a bowl which he filled from the running faucet. He proceeded to bring that to his lips and swished the water in his mouth before spitting it into the sink.
From the control room, Dr. Payne clicked on the keyboard to bring up the video feed of Benedict sleeping the night before. He began to play it from time index 22:05. It played it at normal speed, and it showed him as even more energetic than now. He was jogging in place. As he advanced the play speed, he was able to see him do minor acrobatics all around his cell in an attempt to work off the additional energy his body had producing from the former day’s injections.
Dr. Payne would advance the tape to a certain point later. He would then return it to normal speed for a moment to verify what he thought he saw on the accelerated playback. He passed to 22:45: He was doing jumping jacks. At 22:55, he was doing sit-ups. Nearing 01:32 hours, he moved onto doing Pilates on the edge of the bed. 02:46 recorded a session of pushups while doing a handstand. It wasn’t until 03:47 hours that he collapsed onto the bed and gave into the sheer exhaustion. Dr. Payne picked up his digital recorder to speak a note into it as he wrote into his pad. “Patient exhibits a dramatically increased energy level over the former subjects at this stage in the trial. I suspect that this is a result of his inception of the process not beginning due to a traumatic injury as with the others. He’s the only subject to have lived to this point, and while his most recent adrenal panel is a bit concerning, it’s just at the top of the expected range at this point, so with any luck, it should taper off from here, and his adrenals should stabilize. Normally, I’d give him a light sedative to counteract the effects, but the other data is so positive that I don’t want to adulterate the process because I fear that it would crash the favorable blood chemistry I’m seeing. If it doesn’t stabilize on its own, then I’ll administer a mild sedative this evening.” He turned the recorder off and scribbled in his notes, “Patient fell asleep at 03:47 hours.”
***
As Edgar tied his tie while looking into the bedroom mirror, he tried to ignore the pain which was slowly creeping back into his leg. His physical therapist kept threatening to get him a cane, but Edgar kept refusing. He was a soldier, so pain was as much a familiar friend as an eminent enemy. He had learned to take comfort in his lack of comfort.
He grabbed the keys to his studio apartment and sauntered out the door locking it behind him. “Well, time to make the long trek to work,” he said to no one in particular. He stood up straight, took a slow, deep breath, and took three steps across the hall to his office door which he unlocked with the only other key on his key ring and opened the door. His landlord gave him a good deal since he took both, previously unrented units off of his hands. His office was rather different from his apartment. Although both spaces were the same square footage, his office used to be a rental office that had fallen into disuse with some renovations that had been made to the building a couple years back. The landlord was just storing some old boxes and things there. So, Edgar just put them in the closet which he had had no need for, and he got the second unit at a discounted rate since before the owner had been making no money off of it. It suited his needs perfectly as it was a rectangle with a partition splitting the overall allotments of space at a 60-40 ratio. He used the 40%, which had the door connecting to the hallway, for a waiting room, and the remaining 60%, which only connected to the waiting room door and a window with a fire escape, comprised his office.
He just got off of his last case. It was pretty standard private detective fair; a rich, jealous husband wanted photographic evidence that his trophy wife had been stepping out on him to use for the prenup in the ensuing divorce proceedings. He hated taking jobs like that, but it kept him in Keurig cups. As he walked over to the machine to the side of the receptionist desk in the waiting room, he prepared a new cup for himself. While it’s the stereotype that most ex-marines turned private eyes have a coke problem, Edgar was looking for a support group to assist him with his 5 mugs a day java habit. He opened the mini fridge underneath the Keurig, and he grabbed the half-gallon cream container to mix into his coffee. As he stirred the liquids together to form the solution to his cloudy mental state, in every sense of the term, he heard the mail slot flap open, and the daily paper flopped onto the ground just inside his office door. He took a moment to favor his first sip of coffee of the day, and he stumbled over to the door, bent down, and retrieved the periodical before opening the adjoining door to his office.
He sat in his chair, grabbed a day-old donut from the box his receptionist had bought the day before that had found a home on his desk, put his feet up to the right of it, and he began to thumb through it until he reached the first section most relevant to his skill set: The Obituaries. He had been skimming through them every morning for the past 2 years, and he had become fluent in the antonyms and euphemisms they use to distract from the horrors of human nature. “Survived by” meant “Now dead for any number of reasons;” “…years young” after the numerical age translated as “This person was over 50.” It was a learning curve to translate the information and wait for it to align to the circumstances he needed for a potential job. Basically, they were as follows: younger than 40; rich, or at least not poor; and lacking a clear cause of death. Those three pillars had formed the basis for most of his unusual cases in the last 18 months. Whenever he saw one that fit the criteria, he circled it with his big, red felt tip for later follow up. This morning it was slim pickings. By the time he got to the end of the section, he had only circled two potential jobs, and they were both a bit shakier on the details than he preferred.
He moved on to the “Missing Persons” section in the hopes of a more solid lead. The first was a standard missing 16-year-old girl. The ad said that her parents hadn’t seen her in about two weeks. From the font of the text and the general size of the ad itself, it could be deduced that her parents had some money to spend. From the picture attached to the ad, Edgar could tell that she seemed the “go away to Cabo for a while with my boyfriend and not tell my suffocating parents about it” socialite type. Still, Edgar circled it for later just in case she fell to the beginning or end of the Bell Curve distribution. As he sat at his desk perusing through the rest of the classifieds, he heard the mail slot shoving something else onto the floor of his reception area. It was far more rapid than the typical delivery, and he could hear hurried footsteps following the package drop off faintly getting softer for about 30 seconds. He looked at the clock on the wall. Standard mail delivery was at about 2 pm every day; the analog, antique hour and minute hands of the clock pointed at the Roman Numerals for 10 and 6. The mail was about 3 and a half hours early.
He set his paper aside, and hobbled back through the adjoining door and bent down to pick up the delivery. It was a large, manila envelope which was sealed with a red string in the figure-8 winding fashion. It was much heavier than normal information packets for jobs, and it bulged in the center. He stumbled back into his office with it as he inspected it for any sort of marks to identify its origin. He found none. All he saw were the words “Detective Edgar Reyes” scrawled in big, black, capital letters on the front. He sat back down at his desk, laid it front way down, and began to unwind the red-string forming the figure-8 seal.
***
As Benedict ran on the treadmill, all of the electrodes the doctors had attached to him slid slightly with the excessive amount of sweat he was generating. He realized that he should feel more tired than he did but just barely. Mostly, his mind was blank and focusing on running. His musculature was not increased significantly over what it had been six month prior, but it was far more toned. Before, jogging even one mile would have tired him. Now, he had run 3 on the treadmill over the last half an hour, and he wasn’t even winded. He felt just as in control of his breathing now as he had been when he stepped onto it. He got lost in the scene on the screen in front of him. He had never been among the most intelligent of people, but he was no mental slouch either. Still, the digitized road on the screen with all of the pixelated plants on either side of the “path” felt more serene to him than they had before. Behind the two-way mirror, Dr. Payne’s demeanor was considerably more animated.
“This is amazing!” he exclaimed to Doctor Connors. “His metabolic rate has not only stabilized; it has increased 22% in the last hour. The coordination of his peripheral nervous system has increased at least that much. There’s even a slight increase in his muscle mass. Have we gotten back the latest DNA analysis, yet?”
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“None of the previously activated genetic markers for his muscular dystrophy are present. The treatment has arrested the artificially triggered gene sequences.”
“What are you saying?”
“According to these test results, we have all but cured his muscular dystrophy.”
Although he was largely in a self-congratulatory frame of mind, that “all but” proved to the be the lone fly in the ointment of his otherwise unadulterated mindset. “What do you mean ‘all but’?”
“Well,” continued Dr. Connors, “I am a little concerned about his latest adrenal panel.”
“Why?” he asked staring at Benedict through the glass still admiring his own work.
“The levels are a little on the high side. And, he seems to be running a low-grade fever.”
“Is there anything else to suggest an infection of some sort?”
“No. His white count is still nominal.”
“Well, we’ll keep an eye on it, but run a blood culture just to be on the safe side. I wouldn’t want a pesky infection to ruin my good mood.”
“Or, the patient’s health, right doctor?”
Suddenly remembering to feign empathy. “Of course. Naturally, that’s what I meant.”
“Right,” Connors agreed in a defaulting, sycophantic manner.
“Run a blood panel, and once you confirm that there is no infection, administer another dosage of the serum.”
“But, sir, it’s a day early.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that. But, I want to capitalize on this momentum.”
“But we run the risk of an adverse reaction if we go passed the established dosage. All the other patients couldn’t handle even a small adjustment beyond the standard.”
“Dammit, Connors, haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘Fortune favors the bold’? Do you think that Watson and Crick were wringing their hands this much when they charted the shape of the DNA double helix? We’re on the verge of curing muscular dystrophy here. Let’s throw some caution to the wind and get something done.” He could tell that Connors was still middling, so he decided to swing for the fences. “Look if there’s any hint of an adverse reaction, then we’ll go cold turkey until his body stabilizes.” Connors still didn’t look convinced. Payne wrapped his left arm around Connor’s shoulder, held his right arm up, used his thumb and remaining fingers to frame half of a letter box in the air, and goaded “‘Payne and Connors’ would look good side-by-side on a Nobel Prize don’t you think?”
Connors eyes lit up in a second of daydreaming, before he left, hurriedly, to run the blood panel. Dr. Payne stared at Benedict through the glass the way a farmer stares at a pig he had raised from birth to take to the county fair for all of the accolades that he felt he deserved. He gazed unblinkingly at the ignorant Benedict through the mirror, and he said to the room “You’re going to run me right into the record books aren’t you?” He thought he was alone, but Connors caught it just before the door closed silently to leave Payne alone with his own ego. Connors paused on the other side of the door as his moral compass tried to find true north again, but he felt as though the vane were in the eye of a particularly ferocious tempest. He sighed as he trudged down the hall nearly certain he was about to make a mistake.
Benedict continued running blissfully ignorant to the turmoil and megalomania of his doctors, respectively. His energy seemed boundless. As the seat beaded off his skin, his breathing rate was as steady as a metronome. His form was perfectly fluid. Usually, he would be astonished with his own physical aptitude, but he had no such opinions of himself. Right now, al that mattered to him was the run. The treadmill was specially designed to keep the runner at a particular pace, but it also allowed him/her to exceed the set pace if they wanted to manually override it by merely running faster. Benedict found the pace set by the doctors a bit limiting, so he blew passed it without even realizing it. The telemetry was readable on the machine’s panel as much as on the computer sitting to the side of Dr. Payne. While he had not quite reached Olympic levels yet, he was still consistently outpacing the programs by about 23% of the maximum with little to no extra effort on his part. All he knew was that after being cramped up in his room for the last 12 hours, it felt good to get his muscles moving again.
***
As Edgar sat at his desk, a sudden wave of fatigue overwhelmed him. His head slowly began to dip as if it were seeking a pillow that was painfully absent. He felt it lurch forward as if his forehead and the desk were magnetically attracted to one another. His eyelids drooped like he couldn’t remember how to keep them open. His spine curved like the question mark resting at the end of the sentence “Can I fall asleep here?” He slapped himself across the face. He chugged the coffee which he normally sipped methodically as he combed through the paper. He got up and opened the window to allow a bracing gust of cold air to invade the otherwise incubator-like temperature of his office. All of these measures served to adjust the thermostat of his energy level from a sudden 2 to a straining 3. The manila envelope that had previously intrigued him lay all but forgotten on his desk. It was as though some unseen force were sapping the energy away from his adrenal glands as quickly as it was produced. He had gotten maybe 4 solid hours of sleep last night, but he had been able to function much better than this on as much in the past. He stood in front of the old, tattered leather couch in his office attempting to do jumping jacks in an effort to counteract the enervating effect.
After the first pathetic display of physical weakness, his arms, which hadn’t even made it all the way over his head to meet, fell dead to his side as though they had just been shot with sleeping darts. His knees slammed together, and the house of cards that had been his torso fell back into the comforting embrace of the old leather. He was unconscious, abducted by the silky vespers of sleep, before the rest of his body could finish collapsing on the sofa into the shape of slumber. As he began snoring, he began to dream that he was jogging through a forest. But, it didn’t look right in a way on which he couldn’t quite put his mental finger. The forest’s texture somehow seemed…artificial.
Mindlessly, he continued to run. For a moment, he thought that there might have been someone jogging next to him. He looked to his left to see another figure keeping pace with his gait. He looked at his face and found an obfuscated familiarity that puzzled him. He was wholly certain he knew the person beside him, but at the same time, he was completely unfamiliar to him. Suddenly, the figure was about two steps in front of him, so he couldn’t make out his face clearly. As Edgar increased his speed to try and catch up with him, the other man did the same. He always kept just out of reach. He called out to him in the hopes of getting his attention. “Hey.” The other jogger didn’t seem to notice. Finally, he gave it all he could and burst forth with his last bit of energy. At last, he caught up to him, and he extended his left hand to grab his right shoulder and spin him around to see his face. As he did so, the other man lost his foothold on the solid, and he transformed into a billow of colored smoke that dissipated into thin air.
With that, Edgar’s eyes popped back open. He half-expected it to be several hours later, but after checking the analog clock on the wall behind his desk with the roman numeral numbers, he determined that it had, in fact, only been about 30 minutes since exhaustion had overwhelmed him. He stood up, raised onto his tiptoes, stretched his arms wide (forming a “Y” shape with his body,) let out a titanic yawp to reacquaint his vocal cords with producing sound, rubbed the sleep from both eyes with his hands, and almost immediately shifted his weight to his left leg as the pain reared its ugly head yet again. All of his former fatigue had left him. He felt moderately energized again. As his mind went back to the dream remnants that were still active in his memory, he knew that he should have felt creeped out, but he found that mental response was a distant second to the abject curiosity with which he was wrestling. He had never been the type to invest much in the “dreams have a deeper meaning” school of thought, but, in his bones, he knew that this dream was unusual in every sense of the term.
The oddest thing about it was how vividly he could recall it. Every detail was framed in his mind as perfectly as if it were still happening right in front of his eyes. Normally, dreams had a half-life in his mind for the amount of time it took him to reach the toilet, but this was clinging on in his memory with crystal clarity. The dream he had had the night before, though jarring, was already fogged over by the hum drum details of his morning. He just shrugged. He spoke to himself, “Maybe if I get back to work, it’ll be gone by lunch,” he lied to himself. He glanced back in the direction of his desk, and he saw the mysterious envelope beckoning him for a distraction that he sorely wanted. “Oh, right.” He ran back to his desk chair, sat down, and re-started the process of opening the seemingly endless twists and turns of the red string’s figure-8 clasp.
***
As Benedict continued on the treadmill, his steady pace became a simple mechanization. There was very little thought on his part as to how to continue. Physically, his form began to resemble that of an oil-derrick one might see by the side of the road on a long, car trip. It was an unwavering, unrelenting, unconscious process that his body was maintaining. It was less that he was willing his legs to move as his legs were willing him to remain vertical so that they could fulfill the entire purpose of their own existence. The flawless circular motion of his limbs as the left flowed into the stride of the right was a level of seamless function that Olympic athletes trained their entire lives to achieve. He felt as though he could outrun any gazelle on the planet effortlessly. And, despite how much his speed had increased, he felt no degradation of his energy at all.
Dr. Payne was watching his vitals on the screen, and they had the constant quality of a string of dominoes. One action flowed into the next as if poetry in motion. His heart rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygenation level were all stable in the mid-range of their values. The lone outlier was his temperature. His was elevated. It was not enough to concern the doctor, but it was enough to notice. The screen beeped as it raised another tenth of a degree as Dr. Payne was monitoring the bio-feedback data. He pushed the button for the intercom. “Hey Benedict, how are you feeling right now?”
With no loss of breath, Benedict responded “I’m feeling fine, doc.”
Trying not to trigger the placebo effect about his elevated temperature, but not unsure how else to ask, “Are you sure there’s not anything that is feeling at all different?”
“No. But, it is a little chilly in here now that you mention it.”
“You don’t say? Well, we’ll look into turning the heat up for you a bit. You just keep at it with the treadmill, and Dr. Connors should be in there any moment to talk a blood sample.”
“Sure thing.”
Dr. Payne picked up his recorder, held the microphone to his mouth, clicked the red “Record” button, and began speaking. “The patient is exhibiting an elevated temperature. I’ve sent Dr. Connors to do a blood culture and rule out any infections. Other than that, his vitals are impressively stable.”
As Payne was staring at the biofeedback on the screen, an alarm went off, and Benedict’s temperature jumped a full degree in the blink of an eye. He stumbled off of the treadmill and was showing a need to catch his breath as he put his hands on his knees and hunched down. Dr. Connors entered the room to see him in his now, doubled-over state. His sweating had amped up from “slight morning dew on the forehead” to “caught in rainstorm” levels. His breathing became more labored. Connors stepped up to help him.
The intercom clicked in again. “Doctor Connors, his temperature has spiked. Get him on the bed and cool him down.”
“Benedict, are you all right?” He helped him to the examination bed that was in the back of the room. Benedict laid back and kept trying to catch up to his breath. Connors put his hand on Benedict’s forehead. “You’re burning up.” Immediately, he opened a drawer built into the bed Benedict was laying on, and he pulled out a cooling pack. He squeezed it tightly in the center to break the internal partition between the two reactants, and he set it on his forehead. He did it a few more times and set one on each limb and his torso. As he placed the last bag, he noticed that there were beads of sweat forming upon his own forehead as well. The thermostat on the wall opposite of the two-way mirror, which displayed the room’s temperature in big, blue, three-inch high, digital letters, read “83° F.” He looked back to Benedict, “how are you feeling now?”
“I’m feeling awfully cold,” he related as best he could through the intense shivering. “And, I fell king of funny, too.”
Before Connors could think to pose any questions regarding his statement, both Connors and Payne noted the thermostat on the wall raised to read “84° F.” In perfect lock step, Payne watched the biofeedback monitor beep that Benedict’s temperature spiked again. It now read “101° F.” As the correlation dawned on him, he checked the other vitals to see that there was no change. “Fascinating,” he said aloud as his eyes stared fixedly at the screen.
Just then, Benedict felt the muscles throughout his entire body tense, his back arched on the bed, and he closed his eyes straining against a wave of intense pain that wracked his entire form. As Connors saw what he concluded could only be an optical illusion of the air around Benedict distorting, the thermostat jumped a full five degrees to read “89° F.” Payne’s biofeedback monitor screen jumped to read “106° F.” Benedict screamed, a blast of intense heat radiated from his body in a circular shock wave accompanied by an intense white light. Connors had to mask his eyes with his hand as he squinted and looked on to feel a radial blast heating everything in the room with detonation of warmth. Benedict screamed, his body collapsed on the bed, and he passed out.
Although Connors was not harmed, he did feel a wave of heat hit him before dissipating harmlessly. The lightbulb above his head was not so resilient, and it broke shrouding the room in darkness except for the illuminated letters of the thermostat. It now read “96° F.” Payne’s eyes went from it, as spied through the mirror, back to the monitor in front of him. Benedict’s temperature had dropped back down to read “99° F.” Payne breathed a sigh of relief as he noted the other vitals were still entirely stable. Connors looked through the surrounding darkness in the direction of the two-way mirror, and said to Payne in a matter-of-fact tone “Is that a big enough hint for you?” Payne picked up the phone, pushed the button to activate the PA function, and said “Can we get maintenance to exam room 3 for a light bulb replacement, please?”
***
As Edgar finally unwound the last turn of the red string on the manila envelope, he threw the unattached end to the side of the locking anchors. He opened the flap to reveal the contents within. He held the bottom of the envelope with his left hand as he sifted through the contents with his right. He could hardly fit his fingers in between the cramped papers to see what they were. After struggling with it for about 30 seconds, he relented and spilled the contents of the envelope out onto his desk to pay them a more thorough scrutiny. As he sifted through them, he saw that there was an abundance of information. A lot of it was medical data in the form of records, medical examination reports, and a scientific paper charting the progress of some medical experiment. There were x-rays, analyses of metabolic function tests, the chemical charts for an unfamiliar drug, and a file folder with a name scrawled onto a sticker attached to the tab that read “Valentine, Benedict.” His eyes widened as he heard himself saying to the room “Benny?”
He poured over information with a newfound determination. He studied the chemical structure of this drug as carefully as he could. He understood it about as well as he expected to given that the extent of his chemical understanding was having gotten a “C+” in high school chemistry. It might as well have been written in hieroglyphics for all the sense he could make of it. But, at the top of the page, he noted the name of the compound scrawled in big, red letters: “Zevoroxin C.” He had never heard of it before, but he knew someone who might know something about it.
It just so happened that he met a real egghead a few cases back by the name of Tobias Welch who was always experimenting with some new chemical compound in a “less-than-legal” sense. But, this was no ordinary guy. He had two PhDs in chemistry and mechanical engineering. Edgar had worked a job involving some corporate espionage at his lab a few months back, and Edgar kept his number just in case of something like this came up. He grabbed his cell phone and clicked his name next to which he had written the note “Chemistry Egghead.”
Tobias picked up his own phone to see the name “Edgar Reyes” next to which he had made the note “Detective.” Finding anything outside his sphere of understanding intensely interesting, he was delighted to answer the call with “Tobias Welch.”
“Hey Mr. Welch, this is Detective Edgar Reyes. Did you have a minute?”
“I was just in the middle of writing up some notes, but I have a minute. What can I help you with?”
“Well, that’s just it. I don’t know exactly what it is I’m looking at here. I have a case file in front of me with a chemical compound listed in it that I’ve never heard of before. Did you have some time later to meet up with me so I can pic your brain about it? Say, I’ll meet you at 5 o’clock for a beer somewhere.”
He was overly excited by the impromptu social invitation which he was not prone to receiving, but he tried to hide it behind a thin veneer of calm. “Um, 5 o’clock? Sure, that should be fine. Where did you have in mind?”
“How about Shaw’s over on 8th street?”
He pretended to check his all-too-bare social calendar before responding, “Yeah, that should work. Did you want me to bring anything?” He failed to realize that this was not a picnic to which he might be required to bring an appetizer as per social convention.
A little weirded out by the question, but willing to play along since he needed the benefit of his expertise, he merely responded, “No, just that big brain of yours for me to pick should do.”
“Okay, sure thing. I’ll see you at 5,” and he hung up before the opportunity dissolved as many had before due to the social ineptitude that his genius afforded him.
Edgar was about to say something else, but before he could get it out, the line fell silent. He found the abrupt cessation of conversation so surprising that what he had intended to say fell right out of his own head. “Charming as ever,” he said to himself before he put his own phone down again to continue studying the rest of the file contents sprawled upon his desk. He put all of the chemical diagrams aside for Tobias as he tried to find anything pertaining to the patient directly. “What have you gotten yourself into this time, Benny?”