Authors: J.A. Konrath
Disturb (26 page)
Had Rothchilde known anything about anatomy, he might have noticed that Theena hadn’t harvested the parts of Halloran’s brain normally used for N-Som production. Instead she’d gone deeper down, into the brain stem, and taken sections of the medulla oblongata.
These fibrous neurons housed a very primitive part of the brain; the reflex centers. They controlled a person’s swallowing, sneezing, heartbeat, blood pressure, and breathing.
Just as a regular dose of N-Som overrode a person’s thoughts, this refined dose was overriding Rothchilde’s instinctive knowledge of how to breathe.
Rothchilde began to see red. His lungs screamed at him, begging for air, but his brain was full of reflex neurons that had frozen in death.
His heart stopped next, in mid beat. The pressure in his chest was excruciating. Every nerve cell in his body fired, sending out distress signals to the brain in the form of pain. Rothchilde’s brain responded by ordering the release of adrenaline, which did nothing but heighten his awareness of his terrible situation.
Rothchilde thrashed in his chair. Every muscle in his body burned, starving for oxygen. Black spots mingled with the red in his vision. He tried to scream, but nothing came out.
The pilot, Frederick, couldn’t have done anything even if he’d left the controls. All of Rothchilde’s systems were crashing. The reflex center of Rothchilde’s brain was convinced it was dead, and it was just following orders.
Rothchilde went rigid as he was seized by a spasm of pure agony. He voided his bowels and bladder. His vital organs began to shut down. Rothchilde was helpless, and aware that he was helpless, and the frantic struggle for breath coupled with the body-wracking pain was more than his mind could handle.
The neurons in his head all fired at once, and during that microsecond they burned into him an eternity of torture without escape.
He was no longer rational at this point, or he might have seen the irony. He had, after all, wanted to experience Halloran’s death.
Frederick began emergency landing procedures, but there was no hurry.
The president of American Products was dead long before they touched the ground.
“T
he ambulance is on the way, Theena.”
Theena didn’t respond. She looked terrible. Her face was pale, waxy, and her jowls seemed deflated, hanging limply on her face. But her pulse was strong, and she was awake and aware.
Bill touched her cheek. “Are you thirsty?”
She shook her head.
Eventually, Bill would have to go upstairs. He wanted to be there to greet the authorities. But he still had reservations about leaving Theena alone. He’d started her on a streptokinase drip to prevent blood clots from clogging her heart. It was a risky move, considering her injury, but that was looking surprisingly well.
“Where are we?” Her voice was hoarse, low.
“DruTech, the lower levels. In the gym.”
Her eyes swept the room, coming to rest on Manny. The ax was still buried in his back.
“Manny’s dead.”
“I’m sorry, Theena. I didn’t have any choice.”
Theena’s shoulders began to shake. She was too dehydrated to form tears, but she cried just the same. Bill held her, sharing some of her grief.
He hadn’t wanted to kill Manny, but at the same time he knew it was the right thing to do. Not only did it save Theena, but in a strange sort of way it had saved Manny as well. Bill hoped the man was finally at peace.
“I’m going to check on the cops. Will you be okay for a few minutes?”
Theena didn’t answer. She just stared at the puddle of her own blood, congealing on the floor.
Bill kissed her forehead, then got to his feet and grabbed the N-Som file. The rubber band broke, spilling papers all over the gym floor.
He bent over, the pain flaring in his shoulder, and began to gather them up. Every single sheet was important. This was more than just proof N-Som was dangerous. This was evidence of murders. Many murders.
His hand closed around one of Manny’s CT scans, a three dimensional picture of his brain. It was labeled Day 45. There was so much scar tissue it was surprising he had lived up to that point.
Bill examined the picture closer, reading the handwriting on the margin. His stomach clenched.
This wasn’t Manny’s scan.
He searched through the papers until he found the log. Written in Dr. Nikos’s hand. A day-by-day account of the second clinical test subject. Someone else, besides Manny, who’d been taking N-Som and hadn’t slept in over one thousand hours. Someone else, whose brain was just as fried.
Bill heard movement behind him. He spun around, his head swimming, shocked beyond words. How could this be so? How could he have missed this? He remembered when he first met Theena, her telling him about another test subject.
“Theena…”
She stood over him, her face oddly calm. Her eyes were distant, unrecognizable.
“My name isn’t Theena.”
And then she hit him with the ax.
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T
he book you’re now reading has never been conventionally published.
Let me backtrack a little.
In 1999 I landed a literary agent with a technothriller novel called
Origin
, about the United States government keeping Satan in an underground research facility in New Mexico.
Origin
was my seventh novel, and arguably the first I’d written that was any good. The other six never got published, though they did garner me more than 400 rejections. Apparently
Origin
wasn’t good enough either, because it was rejected by damn near every editor in New York.
Undaunted, I wrote another technothriller, blending in elements of science, mystery, and humor.
The List
, in my opinion, was better than
Origin.
Not only was it trendy, tying in closely to the work being done on the Human Genome Project, but it had more heart than its predecessor.
It didn’t sell either.
I decided my problem was mixing genres. Since there’s no
Thriller-Humor-Horror-Sci-Fi
section in bookstores, I needed to write something that fit easily within an established genre.
I chose a medical thriller, in the style of Robin Cook and Michael Palmer. No humor this time. Just a by-the-numbers, straightforward, homogenous thriller, with an everyman hero trapped in a terrible situation that quickly spirals out of control.
The book was called
Disturb.
My agent hated it, probably because it had no humor in it, and she never sent it out. So
Disturb
remains my only book that has never been rejected.
After
Disturb
, I wisely chose to put the humor back into my narratives, and wrote
Whiskey Sour
. I’ve been writing Jack Daniels thrillers ever since.
When I started having some success with the Jack books, I looked back on my earlier novels and decided to offer
Disturb
,
Origin,
and
The List
as free downloads on JAKonrath.com.
The reader response took me by surprise. The books have been downloaded thousands of times each. I’m humbled and flattered by the attention my failures have gotten, and have answered quite a bit of email about them. The question people most often ask is, “When will these be published?”
I still don’t have an answer to that.
Origin, The List, Disturb,
and my short story collection
55 Proof
aren’t available in bookstores, or libraries, or anywhere other than JAKonrath.com and Amazon Kindle. They don’t have ISBN numbers. They haven’t been catalogued by the Library of Congress. They haven’t been professionally typeset, or edited. But fans, collectors, and completests have asked for them, so here they are.
Disturb
is my red-headed stepchild. While I love the main concept, and many of the scenes and ideas, there isn’t much of me in the book. If anyone wondered what a JA Konrath thriller would look like stripped of its humor, this is it. Many years later, I wrote another book without any humor in it. I used the pseudonym Jack Kilborn, and the book was a horror novel called
Afraid.
I hope you enjoyed
Disturb
, and would love to hear what you thought. I wrote this back in 2002, and recently in the news there has been talk of pharmaceutical companies working on the same thing that I postulated five years ago. Let’s all hope they aren’t as unethical as the scientists in
Disturb.
Also, as an added bonus, following this afterword is a horrid little story I wrote a while back, but didn’t include in
55 Proof
, called
Dear Diary
.
Joe Konrath
April, 2009
JA Konrath’s Works Available on Nook
Click here for more J.A. Konrath ebooks on Nook
Sept 15
Dear Diary,
First day of school! I hope this doesn’t turn into a repeat of last year, when Sue Ellen Derbin and Margaret “Superbitch” Dupont decided to try and kick me off of Pom-Pons. When I think about all those things they said about me it makes me soooo mad! Who cares if my parents never had a lot of money or anything, and so what if I don’t have any stupid designer clothes, I’m still a better person than them. They were so jealous of my blonde hair and blue eyes and my heritage. I hated those phonies soooo much!!! It’s so nice they don’t bother me anymore.