No Time to Die (33 page)

H
er body undulated in the sea. It swayed with the waves, rising and falling, a rag doll in the froth. Seaweed clung to the dark tangle of her hair. Facedown, she floated on the crest of a swell, then plummeted with the breaker. Her slender limbs splayed out, strangers to pain. She was nothing now but a marionette at the mercy of the tide. White foam engulfed her body and carried it express to the shore.

It washed up on the beach. The tide receded. Her cheek lay against the sand, her eyes swollen closed. Her mouth hung open. Salt water trickled out.

The first person to notice was a little boy digging for crabs. He scooted over and squatted in front of her face.

“Time for wakey,” he said. He planted his chubby thumb and forefinger on her eyelid, pried it open, and gazed into her unseeing pupil.

“Wakey,” he said, frowning. He poked her limp arm. Nothing happened.

He started to cry. A woman jogged toward him but stopped short.

Then she screamed.

Two ambulances arrived at the same time. A pair of emergency medical techs jumped out of the first one and raced to her body, where a crowd of about ten sunbathers had gathered. Some were taking turns trying to deliver chest compressions while others stood to block the nearby children from view. The second ambulance waited at the curb; its purpose was to preserve the organs of a corpse for harvesting and donation in case attempts at resuscitation failed. With Key West's popular opt-out program, everyone who died in the city was assumed to be a consenting donor unless indication was given otherwise.

As the two EMTs approached the body, they saw right away that her skin was waterlogged and turning bluish. Frothy salt water spewed out of her mouth as if from an erratic hose.

“Out of the way,” the older one commanded. His voice carried an air of authority that matched his jaded expression. The younger tech followed on his heels with a case of equipment slung over his shoulder. He looked to be in his late twenties, about the same age as the drowned woman.

The crowd parted and stepped back.

The first EMT dropped to his knees and grabbed her wrist. No pulse. He flung her disheveled hair off her face and opened her eyelids. Despite the bright morning sunlight, her pupils were fixed and dilated.

The younger tech urgently placed defibrillator pads on her body and attempted to shock her heart. When nothing happened, he switched to giving her chest compressions, hard and fast, about one hundred per minute. Salt water tainted with blood kept dribbling out of her mouth.

“She's flatlined,” the older tech said after two minutes. “We should just declare her.”

The other man kept on pushing, though his arms were tiring. “No, let's—give her a—chance,” he sputtered. “She's so young.”

His colleague looked skeptical, but nodded. “Let's switch, you do the line.”

The young tech rolled off her chest and tried to inject a peripheral line with epinephrine into her arm, but her skin was so mottled that he couldn't find the vein. He cursed under his breath and moved on to the next last-ditch step.

As the first man continued to deliver fast compressions, grunting and sweating, the other hauled a canister of oxygen and a plastic breathing tube out of the supply bag. Using an L-shaped laryngoscope, he pushed up the roof of her mouth to see down into her throat.

That was when he noticed a piece of what looked like neoprene black cloth lodged inside her cheek.
That's weird,
he thought, and tried to pull it out, but it wouldn't easily dislodge, so he bypassed it. Her throat was extremely swollen and he had to work hard to shove the breathing tube all the way in.

“Should I just put the epinephrine down the tube?” he asked.

“You know—there's—controversy about that,” the other man huffed, still doing compressions. “It doesn't—necessarily—help survival.”

“What does she have to lose?”

He seized the drug and pushed 2 mg into her tube. Then he connected her to the oxygen tank, and the men switched positions again so neither tired for too long.

Every two or three minutes, they switched, while one checked her pulse on her neck, her groin. Nothing. Her skin was now a frightening shade of blue.

After twenty-one minutes, the older man pushed on her chest for the last time and rolled off her, sweating profusely.

“We should just stop, I don't know why you want to save the world all the time.”

The young man glared, but didn't rush to perform any further compressions. “She had her whole life ahead of her.”

It didn't help that she was beautiful: he imagined how her cascade of black hair might have draped across her tanned shoulders, how her green eyes might have lit up when she laughed. She had the athletic figure of a swimmer—flat abs, toned biceps, defined calves. With a body like that, he wondered how she could have succumbed to the waves, even in high tide. Some things would forever be a mystery.

“We have to accept it. She's gone. I'm calling it.” The older tech glanced at his watch. “Time of death: 10:12
A.M.
”

A few of the onlookers turned away. One made the sign of a cross over his chest and bowed his head.

The young EMT sighed and radioed to the waiting ambulance to come claim her body. Then he removed her breathing tube and packed up all the equipment. He tried to think of the bright side: a young, otherwise healthy person was a prime candidate for cadaver organ donation; as many as fifty lives could be saved or improved from her body alone.

Within seconds, two bored-looking EMTs arrived with a stretcher and nodded at the pair who had failed.

“We can take it from here. Thanks.”

They lifted her corpse and strapped it in, wasting no time hauling it to their own ambulance. As they tipped the stretcher to load it, her drying hair fell over the edge and glinted in the sun.

Inside an elderly doctor was waiting. He beckoned at the EMTs to hurry. They scrambled in after loading the stretcher, just as the doctor pulled the door shut behind them. Exhilaration radiated from his flushed cheeks, but his demeanor was steady.

He was the famed—some would say infamous—Dr. Horatio Quinn, who had vanished from the public eye seven years prior. Now approaching eighty, his back was stooped, his arthritic fingers gnarled, his white brows permanently furrowed. But behind his tortoiseshell glasses shone an insatiable hunger for truth that kept him as young as the first day he ever walked into a lab.

He placed one hand on the woman's lifeless forehead and smiled.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “close the blinds. This is when the fun begins.”

Dr. Quinn lifted a corner of the rubber floor pad and pressed his index finger on a tiny sensor. Together, he and the two EMTs turned to stare at a blank white area on the wall a few inches below the ceiling, near the head of the corpse. They heard a click, followed by a whirring sound. Then four cracks materialized in the shape of a square about two feet across and two feet wide. It was a door. The edges popped out and slid to the left, revealing a secret compartment in the depths.

“Never gets old,” muttered Chris, the tech with the best poker face around.

His new apprentice, Theo, rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

The doctor reached inside the hole and extracted an automatic CPR device—a small round machine the size of a helmet. He put it on the dead woman's sternum, securing it around her chest with a band pulled tight. Right away the machine started to deliver perfect chest compressions to the highest standards of timing and force—with no chance of tiring. Next, the doctor opened her mouth and inserted a laryngoscope with an attached camera so he could visualize her trachea.

He frowned; a piece of shredded black cloth was stuck between her teeth and cheek. It had a fraying string wrapped around her tooth.
What the hell is that,
he thought. He yanked it out and flicked it away, then slipped in a breathing tube connected to a ventilator and a portable oxygen tank. He set the CPR device at ten breaths per minute.

“Game on,” he whispered near her ear.

At the same time, while Ty connected her arm to a standard blood pressure cuff, Chris retrieved a black circular pad from the secret hole. It looked like an eye patch, but with a narrow blue tube connecting to a digital display: it was a cerebral oximeter that used near-infrared light to measure the amount of oxygen getting to her brain. He stuck it on her forehead above her right eye. The display quickly lit up with a red number: 5 percent.

“Why is it still so low?” Theo asked at her left side. “Shouldn't it be coming up already?”

“It will.” Dr. Quinn was standing at her head, twisting his frail body to reach up into the hole. “You'll see.”

What he took out next looked like a red gun, but with a long needle in place of a barrel
.
It was an in-traosseous device that could shoot drugs directly into bone, bypassing veins.

“My favorite toy,” he declared. He leaned over the corpse, pressed the gun against her left shoulder, and fired. It recoiled as a pin lodged itself in her bone. He shot three more pins—one into her other shoulder and two just below each knee. The techs watched with a mixture of awe and envy at his precision. Then he attached a line into each pin that would serve as a conduit for the drugs.

Chris and Theo moved aside in the cramped space as Quinn positioned himself next to her left shoulder. “Now,” he said with relish, “for the moment of truth. I want the X101 first.”

“Got it.” Chris handed him a tube of chilled clear fluid that had been stored in a container inside the hole.

Dr. Quinn cradled it in his hands with the affection of a father. It was his life's work in a vial—the culmination of decades, the reason he had once been celebrated and then viciously destroyed, accused of intellectual theft by a jealous colleague, driven out of research, driven almost to suicide. If not for the Network's rescue seven years ago, he might very well have been as dead as the corpse before him.

He had designed the drug to exploit the critical time between a person's death and the death of brain cells—roughly a four-to-eight-hour window, maybe even longer. But by injecting an inhibitor of the calpain enzyme—the signal to brain cells that it was time to die—the process could be slowed down, the window expanded, and the brain temporarily protected from damage. One dose of X101 had bought an additional ten hours of brain cell preservation in animal trials, and now at last, he was secretly testing it in humans.

He injected a single dose into the woman's left shoulder. Working quickly, the other men addressed her remaining lines: Chris injected her right shoulder with an icy slurry of water to chill her down rapidly from the inside out. Into her left knee, Theo injected an experimental solution filled with billions of mi-croglobules of fat, each of which contained a dose of oxygen. When released into her body, it would provide a welcome gush to her brain and other organs. In the last line, her right knee, the doctor injected one final trial drug, this one developed by his colleagues within the Network: coenzyme Q. It was meant to protect mitochondria, the energy-producing part of brain cells, from decaying.

All the while Theo got to work using the ultrasound machine installed in the ambulance to locate her carotid artery in her neck, then he inserted a thick catheter with two separate tracks, pushing it down near her heart.

“Nice work, Theo,” the doctor commented.

He took over and connected the catheter to a portable machine called an ECMO that pumped blood in a loop outside the body, infusing it with oxygen and cleansing it of carbon dioxide, before cycling it back into the dead woman.

At the same time, Chris inserted a catheter into her groin to start a drip of epinephrine to bring up her blood pressure.

“Hey!” Theo exclaimed, pointing at the cerebral oximeter on her forehead. “It's already up to forty-five percent.”

“Told you,” the doctor said. “But it's still got a ways to go. We want it at seventy percent. Now ice her.”

Maneuvering around the stretcher in the tight space, Theo reached into the secret hole and loaded his arms with nearly a dozen artificial ice packs. Together, he and Chris covered her arms, legs, and stomach to cool her down quickly from the outside, in addition to the inside. A thermometer indicated that her current temperature was 95 degrees, but the ice would bring it down to 70. Cold was key: it slowed down decay, snatching back time from the impending claws of irreversible death.

“Excellent, gentlemen,” the doctor announced. “Let's hit the road.”

Chris hopped out and took his place up front in the driver's seat. The curtains remained closed, the sirens off. As the ambulance started to roll out of the beach's parking lot, Dr. Quinn fitted an EEG skullcap over her head to measure her brain waves. The monitor lit up with a low, sustained beep.

Theo's freckled nose wrinkled. “Shit. She's still totally flatlined.”

“Because we shut her down,” the doctor said. “We've hibernated her.”

The engine whirred and the ambulance sped up. He and Tyler settled into straight-backed seats with their knees butting up against the stretcher, holding the black straps dangling from the ceiling. With each turn, the woman's head lolled from side to side. Her bluish lips were slack around the breathing tube and her puffy eyelids were sealed shut.

Dr. Quinn inched aside a curtain to peek outside. He saw the hospital and morgue pass by, a cluster of old beige buildings as desperately outdated as the medicine that was practiced there.

“What about her organs?” Theo asked. “Isn't the hospital waiting on the body?”

“Not for long. Chris should be calling it in now—he'll tell the morgue that we were able to resuscitate her after all, and he'll tell the hospital that her organs were too damaged for donation. Drug addiction or some excuse.”

Theo smirked. “Way to honor the dead.”

“The trick is to get her lost in the system. The hospital will think we're taking her to the morgue and vice versa. Trust me, once organs are out of the question, no one cares about a corpse.”

“What about her family?”

“We don't know who she is—yet. Let's hope we get the chance to find out.”