Shelby- injections ending

“It’s not every day that you witness an unmarried couple stay with each other for seventeen years,” Ron said to her after a while.
Sometimes not even married couples stay together for that long. Over 50,000 couples in New York alone split up each year, which is a lot when you think about it.
“Lust can drive men to do many things, Dr. Collins,” She replied, looking at her hands, “I think it’s sad that my mother’s fate ended up the way it did. She’d be able to lie next to a man she loved every night with a clean conscience had she chosen my real dad.”
“Well, she did lie with him didn’t she?” He asked.
“Sadly yes,” Cayluh replied, “It was after Christopher and my mother got married though. They spent a week long honeymoon in Hawaii and the minute it was over, Christopher received a page demanding he come back to work. So while my mother sat at home, hours went by until he came home. Sadly, every day after that was the same way. Over another year of devotion to him, my mom discovered some things about Christopher. He wanted children more than anything else in the world. She did not because it would ruin her figure. What my mother didn’t know is what he wanted most was something he could never have because of a genetic disorder. He was the only one in his family to get it directly.
“Another sad thing is my mother ‘miraculously’ got pregnant and I popped out nine months later. A shock to everyone I might add. My grandmother almost had a heart-attack.”
“Because they thought your father had successfully produced a child?” Ron asked.
“No, because my mom actually went full term rather than get an abortion. Christopher wouldn’t let her do the latter.”
“Why not?”
“He thought that I was his child. Oh, you can just imagine the excitement he felt when he found out my mom was pregnant.”
“Does he dream about that, too?” He asked.
“No,” She replied, smiling a bit, “When my mom called up her mother, Grandma raced down here before Christopher even knew and filmed his reaction to the happy news. I watch the video a lot.”
“Why is that?” Ron asked, noticing sadness in her last sentence.
Cayluh looked out the window again, “I think that the only time my,” she lifted up her fingers for air-quotes, “Dad ever felt any sort of love towards me is when I was still in my mothers stomach. Through those months, my mother’s mom lived with them, filming from time to time. Christopher was always by mom’s side, rubbing her stomach in affection and telling her how much he loved her and how great of a miracle it was.”
“That’s nice of him,” Ron said, wishing he could be that way with Sophie.
What Cayluh noticed and what he didn’t is that his tone went quickly from curious to remorseful. In the silence that followed, he couldn’t remember a time ever touching Sophie while she was pregnant except for when she carried the first baby. Sophie felt his distance, too but in an understanding way, she accepted it. It all of a sudden seemed strange to him how such a small, un-born thing that usually brings couples together, could push them apart so quickly. In nine, short months, the little person growing inside of Sophie had taken their relationship from loving and warm to cold and anxious.
Cayluh sensed the subject was getting touchy, “We can talk about something else if you want to doctor.”
“No,” Ron said hastily, ripping away from his thoughts, “I want to know more. When did he figure out that you weren’t his?”
She hesitated, afraid of pushing his boundaries, “When I was born, a head of brown, thick locks shocked him. That‘s when he knew. There was just no chance that she could get pregnant from an infertile man and have strange genetics that neither side of the family possessed. All were blonde and cold looking creatures whereas I’m not.”
Cayluh thought back to that memory Christopher shared with her un-knowingly. Not a day went by when he looked at her with affection. He never touched her hair in a fatherly way or picked her up off the ground when she tripped. All her life, Cayluh assumed that’s how all fathers acted, cold and distant. Only when she went to Lisa’s house for the first time in second grade did she realize how wrong she was. Welcomed with a package of Oreo’s, a jar of peanut butter and the sight of Lisa’s father placing a kiss on her head confused little Cayluh and filled her with a longing, dreadful emotion.
“Why does your daddy treat you like that?” Cayluh asked Lisa one day in third grade.
“Like what?” Lisa replied, smothering an Oreo with peanut butter.
She stuffed the sticky treat inside of her mouth and smacked to release her tongue from the goo that plastered it to her jaws. To Cayluh, she looked like a fish out of water.
“He gives you kisses and cookies and takes you to the park on Saturdays and tells you that he loves you,” Cayluh replied.
“That’s what daddies are supposed to do silly,” Lisa said, scraping the filling out from between another cookie with her teeth once she had swallowed the previous one.
Lisa thought little of what Cayluh was saying.
“Don’t you want any more?” She spoke again, offering Cayluh the package.
“No,” Cayluh said, deep in sadness and confusion, “My tummy hurts.”
When Christopher picked her up that day, Cayluh sat buckled down onto the front seat in a usual silence staring out the window. While her mouth said nothing, her mind screamed questions at her father. It’s a shame that he couldn’t hear her. If he could, he would have heard a desperate child crying out for love that she was foreign to. He would have heard a small girl crying out for her daddy, something that he couldn’t give her. He would have felt the desire to treat her like his own child, and even though he never could, he would have tried. Christopher would have felt the pain and desperation she experienced every time she saw Mr. May put Lisa up on his shoulders or make her laugh at the smallest things. He would have heard her asking “why?” continuously. Could he give her the proper answer? One a toddler could understand?
While he focused to look through the snow that burst against the windows, her silence told him nothing and he did not ask.
“Beside the way I look, I act nothing like them. I guess that‘s beside the point though I need to hurry though because we have little time left and my story is far from being over,” Cayluh said, looking up from her retention.
“Do finish then please,” Ron replied, pulling his arm out to get the sleeve edge higher on his wrist.
Ink and white dress shirts did not mix well.
Cayluh paused and gathered all of her thoughts together before she spoke. This was going to be hard to explain and all the more difficult to grasp.
“You’ve heard of the Special Forces?” She asked Ron as he scribble down more things, “That branch of the military where soldiers do amazing things that require only the most special training, hence the name?”
“Yes,” He replied.
“Well, there’s one more separate branch in there that no one really knows about called ‘Testing and Analysis’ where scientists come up with many weird things to try an enhance human power,” She paused again while he wrote this down, “A large number of special doctors worked for hours at a time for many years to usually only come up with one concoction of failure. Shortcomings that resulted in a waste of money as well as soldiers. Many were paralyzed by these ‘drugs’ that came in a series of injections and some even resulted in death. Depending on what it was, men could wait months at a time with nothing and then unexpectedly the side effects kick in. They took the best of each branch and tested different things on them all at the same time. A Navy Seal named Jacob White was given a serum that was supposed to raise his white blood count as well as platelets and clotting proteins to make wounds heal faster. This was just a simple test, something that they thought would never go wrong. Nothing did go wrong because nothing happened. They tested everything like where it could have gone and why it didn’t work and after many blood tests, they could find nothing. Eventually they deemed it a failure and the file was tucked away.
“The next man in line was William Amoretto, a pilot in the air force. These injections were supposed to enhance his fight or flight response, making him extremely powerful, strong and quick to think and react. Again, a failure followed. James Beaufort, a Coast Guard was another experiment along with Mitchell Harris who was in the Army. Both yet another failure. For some reason, they saved what seemed like the most impossible for my father. This injection was one that was supposed to expand the info bits of the mind to a point where they pulsed out sonar waves. Like bats, sound would come back to them that was supposed to be in the form of thoughts. Immediately, a person could be so overcome with such thoughts that they feel as though they are one with the person whose head they are reading from. I know from experience that it takes many years to get your mind used to deciphering the thoughts and getting sucked into a person‘s body. It took many years to get the muscles of my info bits strong enough to get used to pumping out waves in steady amounts and when to know enough is enough.
“This series of injections was, to the scientists, the most important. With the use of brain-transmitted sonar waves, the doctors thought that, if a success came from this one, secrets would be revealed of terrorists and other enemies conspiring against the country. This one took the longest to ‘perfect’. Although the other ones were hard to make as well, scientists slaved over this serum more than any of the fellow chemicals, feeling as though it’d be the end of war and death of the innocent.
“Much to their disappointment, all were unsuccessful. There seemed to be nothing close to achievement or anything to show for the years of hard work and money these scientists put into creating the experimental drugs. Unfortunately, they skipped one very important test which seems very insufficient and stupid to me for such experienced men.”
“And what test would that be?” Ron asked, leaning on the edge of the chair.
“DNA samples. See, at the beginning they did that to test for different diseases, but they found it unnecessary to re-test when the lab rats were set free. Had they done these tests, they would have found a glitch in the comparison between the old and new DNA strands. They would have found out that these serums did not affect the carrier at all but rather laced itself permanently into his gene structure,” She said.
“So, whatever they gave to your dad has now been passed onto you?” Ron asked.
Could something like this really be possible? How could they have been working on such a huge project for so long and none of it being released to the public? Did brain waves really have a way of working like that? Could info bits reach to that big of a size that they have a mind of their own? A heart and voice as well?
“Yes, and a little will probably be passed on to my children and their children’s children,” Cayluh replied.
The doc leaned back in his chair as he felt shock and disbelief settle into his stomach. It was remarkable. She knew way too much to be lying about this.
“How did they manage to grow the info bits that big though? There’s no possible way--”
“I have no idea,” she replied, “These men were genius chemists that could probably cure cancer and AIDS if they really worked on it. I saw a lot of chemical formulas floating around in their heads all the time. They dreamed about them. These injections haunted them for years. They all sensed that they missed something, one small little thing, but could never place what it was or admit to it. Dr. Reno even went back to check and I have a feeling that she’ll figure it out eventually. I’m not sure when that will be or how she’ll react, but I guess I’ll find out one day.”
“Do you know whether the other experiments had children as well?” Ron asked.
“I know that Commander White is living happily in Nevada with his wife and three kids. He was on the news a few days ago for receiving a purple heart. He’s going to retire soon, before his oldest goes to high school.” She replied.
“And the other three?”
“No idea. They must have,” Cayluh smiled, “All were very handsome.”
A silence followed yet again. A long one. The silence was comfortable this time. Cayluh was back to her painting, Ron wrapping his brain around this and the possibility of it all. Science really was amazing. Although it made him kind of mad that after all this time they couldn’t have come up with a cure for really special diseases, it boggled his mind that they had been able to conjure up something as advanced as this. So many great minds coming together and making a discovery that’s actually useful. Not one that involved two years of questioning why pregnant women didn’t fall over when they stood up.
Then he remembered something.
“So what ever happened after you got sent to the principal’s office?” He asked.
She looked up, “Huh?”
“When you were shooting everyone with an invisible gun and got sent to Principal Trakis’ office?”
“Oh! I forgot that I never finished that story,” She laughed.
“I went to principal’s office. I always hated defying teachers because they were, after all, adults and way more experienced than I. Therefore, I always respected and tried to stay out of trouble as much as I could. When I showed up and Principal Trakis’ though, he out of nowhere he started lecturing me on my behavior and how ever since the beginning of this year, it’s become unacceptable. ‘What happened to the good Cayluh?’ he asked, ‘The one who always brought ham and cheese sandwiches her ninth grade year and was excited about school?’ I can’t quote every little thing he said but that’s basically what took up the first twenty minutes of our visit. I don’t remember ever not being excited about school though. I liked getting out of the house for ten hours every day. It was refreshing. The funny thing is that I said nothing the entire time and just listened, silently disagreeing in my head and correcting him on grammar mistakes. Then my hands started shaking again.
“’Oh God,’ were the first words that ran through my mind, ‘Again?’ Never had it happened twice in one day which scared me. What was happening? Trying to make my eyes calm as I looked into his, I sat on my fingers, palm against the seat of the chair. The agony of waiting in expectancy didn’t last long. The transition happened a lot sooner than the last one and the ink splotch spread like a wild-fire over my vision.
“Each wing in our school is painted a different color including the bathrooms, walls, lockers, and everything else you can think of. Desks, chairs you name it. Very elementary I know, but in this situation it helped out. The English wing was painted entirely green making it simple to pinpoint where I was at. I was in the bathroom by my homeroom, looking into the blue eyes of a stranger in my gym class. A girl who used to not be such a stranger to me. One that I helped with a science project almost two years ago. What was she doing in here? I thought. I mean she wasn’t doing anything. Usually girls go into the bathroom to fix their hair and make-up but Lisa was just staring. Her mind told me many things though. In the purse that her left hand rested protectively on, was a small vial of un-nameable drugs all mixed together. She planned on taking the whole thing, not knowing how much was even in the vial. Neither did I or the girl that sold it to her. What the idiot dealer also didn’t know is that mixing drugs, no matter what the dosage, could be lethal.”
Cayluh’s voice became dry sounding when she said lethal.
“Lisa’s black purse was on the green commode beside her, the fluorescent lights making her look ill, giving a pale tint to her skin and greenish circles underneath her eyes. I watched, nestled in her mind as she picked up that purse and rummaged through it. I felt panic when she couldn’t find what she was looking for and then relief when her fingers closed around a cold glass cylinder. A sigh escaped her lips as she pulled out a small glass vial and syringe encased in a plastic bag. Was she a first time user? I asked myself, still in her mind. If so, how could I have not been able to tell? Weren’t best friends supposed to be like kindred spirits or something? They could tell when a friend was in serious trouble, isn’t that how it worked?
“She set the purse slowly on the counter of the sink. Reluctance. What was she doing? I thought again, fear making my heart beat in my body almost four hundred feet away from the bathroom. She stared into the mirror again, Just do it Lisa. Just do it. She was reassuring herself? Amanda said it’d be fun. You’ll never know until you try. You need a distraction anyway. I couldn’t believe this. She picked up the paraphernalia and wiped the tip off with her shirt.”
Ron stared in amazement at Cayluh. She was up off of her chair now, the emotion pouring down her face reflected in the way she was speaking. Her eyes were focused on something behind him and pure pain was scribbled all over her face. The memory had possessed her.
“I wanted so bad to jump from her head and shake her, tell her to stop. Tell her that she didn’t need to. I longed to kill Amanda for telling her that load of bull, especially since she knew Lisa was gullible, almost as if she was trying to kill her. Instead, I sat there, watching in horror as she whispered to herself, trying to sound convincing. It was then that I remembered the pain she was going through. Her father had died just a month ago from an allergic reaction to some drugs he took,” Cayluh paused to wipe her face and nose, “And his smiling face flashed through her thoughts probably twenty times in five seconds. It always went from grinning and healthy, the man I remember, to color-less and decayed, worms gnawing through his flesh. The image made me want to puke as well as the thought that Lisa had sunk this low to escape her sorrows.
“So, while looking in the mirror, she tied off her arm with an elastic band while I silently screamed at her to stop. You don’t need this Lisa, I shouted, I can help you if you just talk to me again. She listened to her pulse for a moment, memorizing it‘s loud beat, but my voice was could not be heard. No matter how much I pushed or willed, she would not listen to me and would not to let me go back to my body. I refused to let my screaming subside even though it was impossible if she could hear me and mistake me for her conscience. Even when I felt my hands attached to my body cover my eyes, as if it would help, I screamed. Lisa couldn’t do this to herself. Especially because the amount in that vial seemed like a lot more than a normal dose.
“The plunge of the needle was sharp. She shoved it in right at the crook of her elbow and slowly pushed the rich drug into a large blue vein that ran down her arm. Then she waited.” Cayluh paused again.
Her hands were trembling, but not in the “snap” way. Soft shakes, fearful shakes, remorseful shakes, shivers of a painful memory destroying a person from the inside out. Her green eyes were spewing tears and heart was beating loud enough for Ron to hear. He was paralyzed. There was no way she could be faking this. His pen stopped scribbling. When the scratch of the ballpoint was halted, there was complete silence in the room. The CD that had once spun quickly around in the boom box earlier had been played through and stopped some time ago. Only then did Ron notice how burdening the quiet was. The extinguished sound lurked in the air for what seemed like years when Cayluh finally spoke again.
“Then one heart beat after another grew softer and softer,” She put a hand over where the heart would be and tapped out how slow the tempo was, her finger taking more and more time to tap with every strike.
“Her breathing slowed down to where it hardly felt like she was inhaling. Indescribable pleasure and heat enveloped her after a few minutes. She had never felt so happy in her life and even I have to admit that it felt unrealistically delicious. All fear, anguish, and feeling simply evaporated into a mask of ecstasy. Her eyes fluttered and she let out a noisy sigh, a happy middle between a breath heaving out of your body and a moan. A moan that came from somewhere deep within her. This mixture was magic, a potion to halt all that causes you trouble in a temporary and deceiving state. Shivers ran up her spine from how good this trip felt, better than anything she’d ever experience. The bliss was so over-powering that she didn’t even notice her stomach give a strange flip and acidic material filling her mouth.
“The burn of the stomach acid was so vague and dull compared to everything else that even as death closed around her, the happiness remained. This close to perfect alleviation did not fail her at all as she was pulled by Death to wade in that black abyss. Just try it, he told her as she went knee-deep, lungs not seeming to work as well as they did a few minutes ago. Waist deep, brain’s scream for oxygen was muffled by the ring of elation pulsing in her veins, killing her. Shoulder deep and she succumbed to Death‘s temptation. The minute her head went beneath that inky pool, I snapped back.
“I was Cayluh again, lying on Principal Trakis’ floor. He was looking down at me, a look that was flooding over with fear. What are you doing? He asked me as I got up. My mind registered its surroundings slower than I‘d imagined it to. I was in the Principal’s office because of Mrs. Trakiss, who was in no relation to Principal Trakis because I had snapped into a psycho killer’s body. Principal Trakis’ passive-aggressive behavior is extremely annoying. I should point this out to him just to piss him off. Lisa may be dying in the bathroom,” Cayluh paused, refusing to let her voice crack.
“I had to have been out for a while, screaming and flailing around on the thin carpeting that blanketed the cramped quarters. Looking back, I kind of feel bad for the teachers who had to deal with my nonsense. I was not thinking of that at all at the time though. The only thing I could think of was Lisa and her small frame crumpled on the floor. So I picked up my feet and ran as fast as I could to the English wing bathroom, Principal Trakis huffing and puffing behind me as he tried to keep up. A blur of colors went by me but I still felt like I could not pass them fast enough. My legs were burning and lungs heaving in desperation, yet it seemed like no distance was being covered at all. Kind of like running through water.
“The red of the math wing floated slowly by me, as well as the yellow for science and purple for history. Even when the green came into view I did not slow down, trying to force my legs to go faster, faster, faster, even if it meant running them off of my body. My feet flew over the floor in a panicked flurry. It felt like a lifetime had gone by before I finally felt my hands press against the green plastic door of the bathroom. When it swung open, the stench of vomit met my nose and made my eyes water immediately. It was over-powering, as if she’d puked up every content in her body and it was decaying fast as lightening on the tile. I couldn’t see Lisa clearly. The smell was horrible. Her head was faced toward the ceiling and vomit was streaming out the sides of her blue mouth, caking the corner of her lips.
“I took in the sight of her slowly. Through the blur of tears that were now the result of sadness and not the smell, I saw the black lump on the tile. Despite the puke streaming through the cracks of the floor, she looked peaceful and there was a small smile on her face. A fog settled around her as I registered that she would never walk through the halls again. Lisa would never graduate high school and be the art teacher she dreamed of being as a career. She would never smile again, laugh again, or be there for me to look at and wonder why she never spoke to me after that one last incident. I would never have the chance to ask. I would never have peaceful dreams with her in them. I would never see her again.
“Blinking, I rushed over to her, dropping to my knees over her body. I picked up her limp wrist and checked for a pulse, nothing. I shoved my finger into her carotid artery, no beat beneath her skin. So I reached my finger into her mouth and tried getting all the vomit out, wiping her lips with my jacket. When most of it was clean, from what I could tell, I pressed my mouth down on hers and urged her to breathe. In the background I heard Principal Trakis talking urgently to someone, probably by phone. I pressed up on her ribs where some guys hit to knock the wind out of each other and continued this process. Only when the medics showed up, after how long I do not know, did I know it was hopeless. Lisa was dead.”
Ron looked up at Cayluh, her face dripping with affliction and misery. Slowly, he set his pen down and walked over to her. She looked up at him and wrapped her arms around his torso before he could move first. There was desperation in the way she clung to him. The anguish and frustration she’d kept pent up for so many years was finally breaking through. Tears seeped into the fibers of a 300 dollar suit and sobs shook the both of them. He didn’t care though. Was this how it’d be when his un-born baby girl turned seventeen? Would she long to be wrapped up like this by him when she went through heartache?
Cayluh wondered why she was blubbering so bad. She had shed few tears for Lisa’s death and wasn’t even invited to her funeral. It didn’t make sense for the story to end in such a woeful state.
The embrace didn’t last long. It only took a few minutes for her to calm down. After that short time had gone by, she was close to being back to normal and sitting back in her chair. Leaning again over the canvas, Ron picked up his notepad again and scribbled down the last few events. Cayluh was hunched back over again, the brush caressing the tough material of the paper.
“I’ve been working on this since yesterday,” she said, her voice a little scratchy from exhaustion, “Tell me what you think.”
After a few final, long strokes, she rolled the painting up and put it in a metal case, not showing him her final masterpiece. He took the container and she looked up at him.
“Whatever you do with all that you wrote is not up to me, but just know one thing,” she said, walking back to the easel and pushing the strangling man off of it to the floor, “I will always know what you’re up to.”
Her back was to him now, a signal that he was allowed to exit. Turning around, he left the room in a solemn state, his life not feeling as though it was changed forever. His feet hit the carpet stairs softly as he descended, admiring the detail of the home again. Everything was so orderly and neat as a pin, it was remarkable. Even though the cleanliness could make a person feel nauseated at times. The weather outside was lovely. Leaves of gold and honey were floating from the arms of trees out of sync, but in and underlying harmony. He stepped onto the back porch and looked to where his car was parked. There was a chill tingeing the air. Autumn was on its way. New changes were coming. An awaited life was yet to be lived.
The car sat there lonely. The gravel crunched beneath him as he walked to the vehicle. Opening the car door, he revved the engine and turned the heat on. Placing his briefcase and gift from Cayluh on the passenger seat, he gripped the steering wheel preparing to drive home. His feet didn’t seem to be receiving the messages from his mind though for they stood as still as stone. His fingertips tingled with curiosity as he reached over and pulled the canvas from the protective case. Unrolling it from the bindings, he looked in awe at Cayluh’s masterpiece.
There were drops of rain spotting the picture everywhere. Each of those drops had small little details in them that added definition and a unique quality to the piece. The color those beads of perspiration lay upon was a deep purple, the endless abyss of night-time. While this color and artistic ability might hypnotize a looker alone, it’s the person that was in that canvas that put Ron in a trance.
Sophie was off to the right corner of the painting, brown curls wildly framing her heart-shaped face and cheeks pink with a cold flush. Blue eyes were wide with innocence and rosy lips plump, awaiting a kiss. The eyes were what reeled him in though. Every little glint was exactly how they’d been that night before he went to college, every beautiful fleck of underlying tones that made the ocean in her eyes. Love swelled in his heart.
At that moment, happiness flooded a gray soul with color and for the first time in a little less than a year, he could not wait