Dust to Dust
BOOKS BY JAMES M. THOMPSON
The Elijah Pike Vampire Chronicles
Night Blood
Dark Blood
Immortal Blood
Tainted Blood
Thrillers
Dark Moon Rising
The Anthrax Protocol
Dust to Dust
DUST TO DUST
JAMES M. THOMPSON
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2017 James M. Thompson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-3732-2
First electronic edition: May 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3733-9
ISBN-10: 0-7860-3733-4
This book is dedicated first and foremost
to Terri A. Thompson, my rock.
Others who give me daily inspiration are Brent Williams,
Travis Thompson, Darren Thompson,
Hunter Thompson, and Donovan Thompson.
CHAPTER 1
Dr. Kaitlyn Williams, known to almost everyone as Kat, stared at her computer screen through bleary, bloodshot eyes. As she studied the chemical formulae that crawled across the screen like mating worms, she unconsciously rubbed at the back of her neck, which was beginning to go into spasms from her long hours in front of the computer. She had been working without a break for the past thirty-six hours and was finding it hard to concentrate, but she was determined to finish collating the serum formulae before she quit.
Finally, after another hour of manipulating the formulae on the computer, she had the relative concentrations of chemicals correct and was ready to proceed. Almost unconsciously, she muttered a brief prayer, “Let this be the one!”
She punched the PRINT button on the machine, and the computer printed out the amounts of each chemical to be added to the serum.
Kat took the printout and mixed the serum according to the specifications she had worked out. Holding the bottle of clear liquid up to the light, she whispered, “I need some magic here.” She thought for a moment, and then she wrote the name she had decided on for the serum on the bottle.
With a sigh of fatigue, she went over to the stack of wire cages and took the one labeled BLUE GROUP down and carried it to a table in the middle of the lab. There were twenty-four rats in the cage. Twelve of them had daubs of blue dye on their backs while the other twelve were unmarked.
One by one, she took the twelve blue-dyed rats out of the cage and injected them with five milliliters of clear liquid from the vial she had labeled NEURACTIVASE. When she was finished, she put the cage back on the shelf and stumbled wearily to her desk.
She sat there for a moment, elbows on the desk with her head in her hands. She was bone tired and desperately needed some sleep. With a supreme effort, she raised her head and looked at the clock on the wall. Eleven thirty-five. She glanced out the window to see if it was night or day, so exhausted she couldn’t remember if she’d been at work for twelve hours or twenty-four—darkness, unrelieved by stars or moon.
She realized she’d been working steadily for almost a day and a night. She frowned, thinking this was stupid. She was too tired to think straight and was bound to make a fatal mistake in her calculations at this rate.
She glanced to the side of her desk, where her Scottish terrier, Angus, was softly snoring in his bed. Trying to remember when she’d last taken him outside to do his business on the small patches of grass on the edge of the laboratory parking lot, she reached down and gently scratched his ears. His muzzle hair was almost totally white with advancing age, and she felt a momentary pang of guilt that lately she hadn’t been giving him much quality time, being so involved in her research.
He stirred and cut his dark brown eyes up at her, then moaned softly in pleasure at her touch. “Damn, big fellow,” she cooed. “I’ll try to do better . . . okay?”
He rolled over onto his back with his feet in the air, asking for a tummy rub, one of his favorite things to experience.
She complied and after a few moments spent rubbing his stomach, she reached into her left-hand desk drawer and took out a Greenie. “Here you go, Angus. This’ll make your teeth feel better.”
It almost broke her heart to see him try to stand up, weaving and struggling until he could get his feet under him, moaning softly with pain from his arthritic hips.
Once he got to his feet, he took the Greenie from her hand, being very careful to fold his lips over his teeth lest he accidentally bite her.
With the Greenie sticking out of the side of his mouth like a big green cigar, he circled three times and flopped back down on the pillow in his bed, chewing contentedly.
“Well,” Kat said, “I guess you don’t have to potty right now, big fellow.”
She took another moment trying to decide whether she had the energy to drive home, before she thought, What the hell? There’s nothing waiting for me there. She glanced at Angus, patted his head once again, and whispered, “Everything I love is here with me.” She laid her head on her crossed arms and was almost instantly asleep.
* * *
Kat started awake, the smell of coffee making her mouth water. She almost cried out loud at the pain in her neck and back as she tried to straighten from her position slumped over her desk.
“Hey, Doc, you okay?”
Kat slowly turned her head at the question and winced as the movement brought fresh pain. Kevin Paxton, her lab assistant, was watching her with a worried look on his face. He was tall, a shade over six feet, with a lean bo
dy and straw-blond hair in a crew cut. Even though he was only in his third year as a grad student at the University of Houston studying organic chemistry, he was thirty years old, due to spending some time in the military. Kat loved to tease him, telling him he looked about twenty years old.
Kat ran her hands over her face before answering, “Yeah, Kevin, I’m okay. What day is it, anyway?”
Kevin shook his head, frowning. “It’s Monday, Dr. Williams. Did you spend the whole weekend here, again?”
Kat motioned toward the Keurig coffeemaker on the bench in the corner. “Uh-huh. I guess the time just got away from me.”
Kevin walked to the coffeemaker and said over his shoulder, “You know that’s not good for your health, Dr. Williams.” He twirled the carousel containing the K-Cups of coffee and asked, “You want the regular Breakfast Blend or something more potent?”
She shook her head, still trying to come fully awake. “I think I’d better have the high-octane stuff, Kevin.”
He pulled out a K-Cup and said, “Folgers Lively Colombian it is, then,” and he proceeded to fill her custom cup with the dark, aromatic blend. When the coffeemaker hissed, signaling it was done, he took the coffee and moved to hand it to her with a handful of sugar packets.
Kat emptied four packets into her coffee and stirred it with her ballpoint pen. She took a deep drink. “Ah, breakfast.” She tried to smile but her lips stuck to her teeth, reminding her she needed to brush her teeth and wash her face.
Kevin pointed at the words printed on the cup:
STRESS. The body’s reaction when the mind overrules its natural inclination to smash the living shit out of some asshole who really needs it.
“You need to heed those words, Doc, or the stress you’re putting on yourself is gonna kill you.”
Kat grinned and reread the slogan, smacking her lips at the heavenly taste of Kevin’s coffee. “Come on, Kev, quit being a mother hen and set the new batch of rats up to run the maze while I freshen up, then we’ll run ’em to get some control times recorded, right after I take Angus out for his morning call to duty.”
He held up both hands, palms out. “Don’t worry, I’ve already taken him and he was a very good boy, doing both one and two for me without any trouble at all.”
“Well, I’ll just get his breakfast.”
“Been there, done that. Look at him . . . he’s all set.”
She glanced over at his bed and saw Angus fast asleep and snoring peacefully, his full tummy pooching out. She turned and grinned at Kevin. “You’re too good to me, Kevin.”
Kevin shook his head and mumbled as he turned and walked off, “And you’re gonna be the death of me, Kat,” using her first name when he talked to himself, though he’d never quite dared to call her Kat to her face. In fact, he had a terrible crush on Kat and sometimes wished she’d look at him as less of an assistant and more as a man, a man who loved and adored her.
He went to the rats’ cages, hoping he’d managed to keep his adoration of her out of his expression. It wouldn’t do for her to realize what a crush he had on her . . . it might taint their working relationship. Hell, it might even get him fired, and then he wouldn’t be able to see her every day.
As he pulled the rats from their cages, his face burned as he pictured them together in a romantic setting. After all, she wasn’t that much older than him, he reasoned. He glanced over at her as she drank her coffee. Though she was in her early forties, she looked much younger. She was attractive, with a pretty, unlined face, long auburn hair usually worn in a twist while at work, and had hazel-green eyes and rosy cheeks . . . at least she did when she hadn’t been working for forty hours straight, Kevin thought.
* * *
Half an hour later, freshly scrubbed and feeling much more human after showering and brushing her teeth in the women’s locker room, Kat prepared to run both the rats she had injected with the NeurActivase and the uninjected, or control, rats through a maze. She needed to make sure that the formula had not impaired the performance of the injected rats, but she fully expected there to be no difference in the two groups’ maze times. After all, none of the chemicals she’d combined into her formula were in and of themselves dangerous or toxic to rats, so there should be no danger of the formula inhibiting the rats’ performance.
In fact, if anything, the formula should improve the rats’ ability to run the maze, if only slightly.
She sat at her desk and stared out the window at the early morning sunshine, drinking another cup of coffee and thinking while Kevin set up the experiment.
Almost three years had passed since she had begun working at the BioTech research facility. Her initial interest had been in the field of traumatic spinal injuries, damage to the central nervous system of such an extent that it left the patient completely paralyzed. The repair and regeneration of that tissue was not a new field of research, but little progress had been made in it.
The National Institutes of Health was funding her research with a series of grants, administered through BioTech. The enormous number of spinal and central nervous system injuries that occurred in the Vietnam and Middle East wars had finally convinced the government more needed to be done to find some way to rehabilitate these veterans. The government’s interest was not merely humanitarian. Disability payments and medical expenses on these permanently disabled vets were costing the treasury hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Kat became interested in the problem when, during her naval residency in neurosurgery, she had operated on several Iraqi War casualties and was unable to do more than just patch their wounds, unable to significantly alter their paralysis or significantly improve their rehabilitation from traumatic brain injuries. Her daily interaction with the young men—boys, really—and their families so affected her that she eventually became depressed and discouraged with the practice of neurosurgery. When her negative attitude began to affect her confidence and the quality of her surgical skills, she decided to quit neurosurgery when her tour of duty was up, in favor of the less-rewarding but also less emotionally traumatic field of research.
She knew that helping these young men and others like them would only come with advances in neurochemistry and not from more useless surgery.
BioTech was a seven-story building a few blocks from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Within its huge, horseshoe-shaped building, there were literally hundreds of laboratories and animal compounds, where everything from super-secret germ and chemical warfare experiments to testing of the latest experimental medical formulations were carried out.
The building was under the joint control of a syndicate of wealthy investors and Baylor professors who oversaw the research grants from the government. But the scientists working there were, for the most part, non-university employees hired specifically for the various and sundry experiments they worked on. It was not unusual for one scientist not to know, or even care, what was going on in the lab next to his.
With her usual thoroughness and eye for detail, Kat systematically pulled together every scintilla of information on the subject of traumatic spinal injuries and their treatment, both nationally and internationally. She found that very little cooperation existed in the field and there was work being duplicated in one area while being done at cross-purposes in others. She slowly collected her material and categorized it into the useless, the promising, and the highly experimental. With that as a foundation, she began to build an ambitious project using her own research as her stones and mortar.
For over a year she struggled along, attempting to find some sort of neuron “glue” that would cause the damaged nerve tissue to reconnect. The problem was that central nervous system cells, those of the brain and spinal cord, do not multiply after birth, and they do not regenerate or heal themselves after injury. She experimented with dozens of substances and enzymes and organic and inorganic chemicals in her serum, concentrating on those that had had some history of success.
She tried using the GM-1 Gangli
osides to enhance the functional recovery of damaged or aging neurons and added Imuran to suppress the body’s formation of the antibodies that caused the destruction of injured neurons and thus inhibited the healing process.
She added calcium channel–blocking compounds to prevent the influx of calcium into the injured neurons, and she eventually added a thyrotropin-releasing hormone to enhance the body’s natural ability to heal and replace injured tissue. But her efforts to develop a serum that would act as a bonding agent for the damaged neurons were short-lived and ineffective. Then, in the past month, she ran across some little-known research suggesting the brain contained a reservoir of undeveloped mystery neuron cells, the cause of their existence and their purpose being unknown and unexplained.
Working from that thesis, she decided to experiment with adding fetal nervous system tissue of unborn rats to her serum. The undifferentiated fetal neural tissue would, she hoped, be forced to change into the host animal’s own neural tissue, replacing and repairing its own damaged nerves and brain cells and, hopefully, stimulating the undeveloped mystery neurons.
The shipment of fetal rat brains had arrived the previous week, and she had spent the last three days in a marathon work session to separate out the pure brain proteins from the fetal tissue in hopes that the tissue would contain some stimulatory protein or substance that would cause the dormant tissue in the adult rat brains to begin to grow and divide, or at least heal itself when injured.
If the new serum did not impair the rats’ performance, her next step was to cut the spinal cords of the test animals, leaving them paralyzed. She would then see if the serum caused the spinal cord injuries to heal and cure the paralysis.