Chapter Seven

Logan kept a lot of things in his car that he'd never actually had a use for but thought might come in handy some day. The bolt cutters that Max had used to cut the damned dog chain off of Alec's ankle was one of those things.

So when they arrived at Sam Carr's clinic, and Sam met them in the basement with a nurse and gurney, at least that one visible sign of his torture was already gone. But the rest still remained.

They'd known it was bad, but the dim light in the basement, and the darkness of the park and car had hidden a lot from them. So when Joshua placed Alec gently on the gurney and stepped back, the three of them got their first real look at Alec's condition.

Max had known that Alec was pale, but she hadn't realized just how little color his skin had until he was lying there, uncovered, with the fluorescent lights shining down on him. Bruises stood out in stark contrast to his skin, varying shades of deep blue and purple mixed with some fading yellow that mottled his arms, chest and face. There were more of the small puncture wounds than Max had seen in the basement. All of them were swollen with dried blood caked around them, and some of them looked infected. With the chain removed, the damage that had been done to the skin underneath was plainly visible, and his ankle was covered in ragged, angry, torn flesh that oozed blood. The fever-flush on his cheeks had spread down his neck and flared out across his chest.

But the worst was the blood and pus that were running so freely from his side. The bandage, which had already been soaked through when they'd found him, was almost dripping with it. And the blood stain that Max had seen on his jeans spread out across his abdomen and almost all the way to his knee.

She saw it all in a matter of seconds, because that was all the time she had before Sam and his nurse were running toward the elevator, pushing Alec between them.

Max drew a shaky breath and let it out slowly, then brought her hand to her mouth. Now that the rush to get Alec to medical attention was over, she felt completely drained. Her knees were so weak and shaking so badly that she was surprised she hadn't fallen over.

Logan saw her having trouble and reached his hand out to steady her. She flinched, and he stopped, pulling his hand back to point at her instead and saying, "Joshua."

She felt Joshua's strong hand on her back, and she drew as much strength and comfort from it as she did from the look in Logan's eyes, the look that said he wanted nothing more than to wrap her in his arms and hold her. And she wished, really wished, that he could, because she wanted that as much as he did.

"All right, little fella?" Joshua asked.

"Yeah," she said with a nod of her head. "Yeah, big fella. I'm good."

"We should get upstairs," Logan said softly.

Max nodded again and headed for the elevator. Logan turned to walk beside her, and Joshua followed behind.

"No," Max said gently as she turned around. "Joshua, you can't... you have to go home now."

"But, Alec..."

"Upstairs people, Joshua," she explained. "Lots of them. The only reason no one said anything down here is because they were too worried about Alec, but if you go upstairs with us..."

Joshua dropped his head and stared at his feet. "Screaming and crying and running away."

"Yeah," Max answered sadly. "Lots of it."

She was still holding the jackets they'd wrapped Alec in to try and keep him warm, and that included Alec's own. She reached into the pocket quickly and pulled out his cell phone.

"Take this with you," she said as she handed it to Joshua. "When it rings, you push that green button right there. We'll call you every time something changes, okay? You'll always know."

Joshua nodded without speaking again, then turned to walk out of the clinic.

"Be careful going home," Logan called.

Max watched until Joshua disappeared from view, and then turned back to Logan. "You remember that feeling I had the last time we were here?"

"You didn't know, Max," Logan said. "There's no way you could have known what was happening to him."

"Three days!" she cried out, then bit back her anger and took a deep breath. "They had him for three days, torturing him and cutting him up and... I didn't even know he was missing, Logan. I didn't even notice that he was gone."

"You didn't know." Logan's voice was soft and gentle, and far more forgiving than she deserved.

"I should have," she said. "How did I not notice? If it hadn't been for Cindy, I still wouldn't know anything was wrong."

"But you do," Logan pointed out. "And we found him."

"Not soon enough." She turned sharply and walked toward the elevator again.

"He'll make it through this, Max."

"That's not the point!" She pushed the call button angrily. "The point is that I should have known. I should have known something was wrong when he left Crash without telling anyone. And I did... I did know. I just didn't want to bother with him."

"Max, stop."

"What happened to him is on me," she said. The elevator doors opened and she stepped in with Logan right behind her. "And I'll never forgive myself for it."

Two hours had come and gone since Joshua had pulled Alec out of the back of Logan's car, and they didn't know any more than they had then.

Logan's phone had rung a half an hour after they arrived, and he'd stepped away to answer it. Max hadn't followed him. Fifteen minutes after that, a man she didn't know had walked into the hallway where they were sitting, carrying a cooler. He handed it to Logan, Logan handed him an envelope, and then he left.

Logan had taken the cooler to one of the nurses at the desk across the hall from them, and Max hadn't seen it since.

"One less thing for Alec to worry about," was all he said as he sat back down.

Max had just finished her latest round of pacing and settled down in her chair when the door to Alec's room opened. She was back on her feet and standing at attention before Sam had stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him.

"He needs a hospital."

Logan shook his head quickly. "That's not possible, Sam. You know that."

Sam took a deep breath and sighed. "I don't know if I can help him here, Logan. Do you have any idea how sick he is?"

"He shouldn't still be sick," Max said. "He's an X5. All you should have to do is patch him up a little bit and let his immune system do the rest."

"That's the problem," Sam said. "It's not working."

"What's not working?" Max asked.

"His immune system. Have you ever seen an X5, or any Transgenic, get an infection that bad, Max?"

"No," she answered slowly. "Because the stem cells..."

"He doesn't have any."

Max shook her head vehemently. "No. That's not possible. Of course he has them. He was born with them!"

"I've tested his blood three times now. When you first got here, I couldn't see any on the slide at all. An hour ago, I saw one. Just now, I saw three."

"So they're replicating?" Logan asked. "Like Zack's nanocytes did?"

"There was a machine!" Max said, remembering what she'd seen at the funeral home. "In the room where they... operated... on him. It had all these tubes, and it looked like it was full of blood."

Sam nodded slowly. "That's got to be the machine Zack told us about. So they hooked Alec up to it and scrubbed his blood the way they did Zack's. Only since there were no nanocytes to scrub out..."

"It took his stem cells," Max finished. The full gravity of the situation finally hit her, and she fell back into her chair again.

"What does that mean, exactly?" Logan asked.

Sam glanced at Max briefly before answering. "It means that for all intents and purposes, right now, Alec has no immune system to speak of. And he's got a raging systemic infection that started from that incision."

Max closed her eyes and shook her head. She'd known he was sick. It had been impossible to look at him and not see how sick he was. But she'd never imagined that his body wouldn't be able to fight it the way it was designed to. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

"What else is wrong with him?"

"Max..."

"Just tell us, Sam," Logan said. "Please."

"Okay," Sam said with a nod. "You might want to sit down, Logan. Because this is going to take a while."

Logan pulled a chair out from the wall, turned it to face Sam and Max, and sat down.

"Starting at the top. The kidney removal 'surgery.' It was done sloppily, but by someone who's apparently no stranger to doing it. The incision was sutured correctly initially, but there were problems with it after the fact. At some point, Alec managed to rip most of his surface stitches out, and a few of the internal ones, as well."

"He stood up and tried to walk out of there," Max said softly.

"That would do it," Sam answered. "No one ever bothered to put them back. So he's been slowly oozing blood ever since then. When did you say his kidney was removed, Logan?"

"We don't know for sure," Logan said. "All we know is that they started advertising it on Saturday. Eyes Only was alerted to it yesterday."

"That works with what that incision looks like. I'd say it was probably removed some time on Saturday."

Max didn't speak, just listened and rubbed her forehead repeatedly.

"The good news, if there is such a thing, is that we've gotten the bleeding stopped. We also drained as much infection as we could out of the incision and left it open. It'll keep draining as long as it needs to. So that's one problem that we have managed to fix."

"Well, that's something positive," Logan said under his breath.

"And I wish I could tell you that it's all uphill from here, but that is far from his only problem."

Max's shoulders slumped even more.

"The bleeding has dropped his blood volume, which has dropped his blood pressure. It's dangerously low right now. And the fact that so much of what's circulating is infected isn't helping. He needs blood, but I'm not willing to risk using any that didn't come from an X5 donor, and not just because getting some stem cells back would increase his odds tremendously," Sam said. "Max, you could..."

"No!" she interrupted. "The virus, and Logan..."

Sam nodded his head. "I was going to say, you could give him a transfusion. If you didn't have that virus in your system. I'm not worried about the danger to Logan, because I think Alec would learn to deal with that the same way you have, but because as sick as he is, I'm worried that putting that virus in his bloodstream just might kill him. So, do you know any other X5s that you can get here?"

"There's no one," Max muttered. "The only other X5 I know a location for is Zack..."

"And Zack's obviously out," Logan finished. "Since he doesn't know what he is."

Sam sighed. "Then, honestly, at this point? I'd rather that he not be given any blood at all. I can't stress enough just how weak he is right now, and I can't in good conscience risk making him sicker by giving him blood that his body might reject. His blood volume is low, but I have to assume that he was given blood during the surgery. They gave him enough to keep him from bleeding to death, and they did manage not to kill him with a type mismatch, which is something to be grateful for, but there's no way of knowing how old that blood was, where it came from, how it was stored, whether it was screened..."

"You mean they might have given him contaminated blood?" Logan asked. "Could that be where the infection came from?"

Sam shrugged. "It's possible that it's making it worse, certainly. I mean, we all know that the X5 body is designed to work in a very specific way, and if any one system gets knocked out of whack, there's a huge chance of cascading failure to all the other systems. Amateur surgery with inadequate anesthesia, no sterilization procedures, potentially contaminated blood, none of the stem cells that he's supposed to have, resulting in a malfunctioning immune system – it's a recipe for disaster, and it's only going to get worse."

"That's an understatement," Max muttered.

"We're giving him fluids, to try and bring his volume back up. But his body has been through a tremendous trauma, and the stress placed on his other organs is devastating. There's no easy way to say this..."

"There hasn't been an easy way to say any of it," Logan said. "Why start now?"

Sam nodded and continued. "His other kidney is showing early signs of failure. And the more fluids we give him, the worse it's going to get."

"Can't you just put his back in?" Logan asked. "I gave it to the nurse..."

Sam shook his head. "We've got it in stasis, to preserve it, and I'm hoping I can get a surgeon friend of mine over here to put it back, but right now, he wouldn't survive the surgery. His blood volume's too low, his blood pressure's too low, and his fever is too high."

"How high?" Max asked.

"Right now? One-oh-eight. That's seven degrees above normal, the equivalent of a one-oh-five fever in a normal human. And it's rising with every minute that infection goes unchecked. We've got him on the strongest antibiotics we have, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. It might be slowing it down, but it's not reversing it, that's for sure. And with all the different drugs already in his system, I'm worried about giving him anything to bring it down."

Max sat back in her chair and leaned her head back against the wall.

"I don't know what he was given when, but there's a mixture of narcotics in his blood that reads like a pharmacology manual, and I don't know how they got their hands on any of it. Versed, morphine, fentanyl, propofol, midazolam, sevoflurane, ketamine, Rohypnol, GHB... it's like they just gave him some of everything they had, with no real reasoning behind it."

"It would have been hard to knock him out, and harder to keep him that way," Max said. "Amped-up metabolism. Drugs burn through our systems faster." She sat up straight in her chair as a thought occurred to her. "He could have been awake for it!"

"If what you say is true, it's definitely possible," Sam said. "But if he was awake, he'd have passed out from the pain long before they actually started taking the kidney out."

"Our pain tolerance is..."

"I don't care how high it is, Max. We're talking pain that is far beyond what you can even imagine. There's no way his mind could have dealt with it. It would have shut down."

"I can't believe this," Max whispered.

"That's the major things," Sam said. "Minor things: the puncture wounds on his torso. I don't know exactly what caused them, but it was something small and sharp, maybe ice picks or possibly small nails. Those are all cleaned, and a couple of the deeper ones are bandaged. His feet were cut up pretty badly, but we cleaned and bandaged them, as well. The same with the cuts and scrapes around his ankle. The bruises on his chest and face are surface damage only. There's no underlying internal injuries, no internal bleeding, and no sign of any damage to his ribs. No broken bones, and no head injuries."

"Thank God for small favors," Logan said. He'd leaned forward in his chair, and was holding his head in his hands the way Max had done earlier.

Max turned to Sam, and could tell from his face that there was something else. Logan noticed the silence and looked up, glancing from Max to Sam and back again. He picked up on it, too.

"What, Sam?" he asked. "What aren't you telling us?"

Sam put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, rubbing his hands back and forth nervously. "He was tortured. You both know that." Max and Logan nodded in unison. "The GHB in his blood... it wasn't a very large amount, but that drug metabolizes out of a normal human in a matter of hours. Which means he'd been given some not long before you got there. You said that they'd been there with him until you got there?"

Max and Logan nodded.

"Then they probably used it to make sure he'd stay put and be quiet until they got back. I'm going to have to say that he was given such a large dose that his body was having trouble getting rid of it all."

Sam took a shaky breath, and Max found herself wishing that he'd just spit it out already.

"GHB and Rohypnol both have a street use, which I'm sure you're both aware of." Again, they nodded their heads. "So, I checked. And there is every indication that Alec has had intercourse in the past seventy-two hours."

Max closed her eyes.

"Sam, that's... he wouldn't. He couldn't! I mean... could he?"

"If it happened before the surgery, while he was drugged but not seriously injured? As part of the torture? There's no reason why not. And some of the drugs in his system make me think that..."

"Man or woman?" Max asked without opening her eyes.

A few second of silence followed, punctuated only by Logan coughing.

"All of the genetic material we've recovered has been female."

Max opened her eyes and looked over at Logan. There'd been a girl with them when they'd left the funeral home, the same one Max had seen talking to Alec at Crash two weeks earlier.

"But there is actually some good news in there. He's been given so many mind-altering drugs in the past three days that he probably won't remember any of it. If I'm right, and it was ketamine they used to get him out of the bar in the first place, he probably won't remember anything that happened after that."

"Yes, he will," Max said. "We're designed to resist drugs like that. That's why they had to give him so much. It would've kept wearing off. He'll remember everything that happened unless he was unconscious."

Again, the hallway was silent as each of them contemplated what they'd learned and wondered how the hell it had all happened in only three days. It was Logan that finally spoke a few moments later.

"What's his prognosis, Sam? Honestly?"

"Honestly? I can't really give you one. If his body was functioning the way it's supposed to, right now I'd be sending him home. But it's not. And with all the different systems involved, I don't know when, or even if, it will again. If he had his full amount of stem cells..."

"You said they're replicating," Max said. "They're coming back."

Sam nodded again. "Yes, they are. But Max, I can't promise you that they'll replicate fast enough to do any good before that infection kills him. Or before his blood pressure bottoms out. Or before he goes into renal failure. Or before the fever..."

"So it's a race," Max said. "Between how fast his body can fix itself and how fast it can die?"

"I'm amazed he's made it this far. A normal human in his condition would have died hours ago, at the latest. He's fighting hard, but he's got another twelve hours to go," Sam said. He pushed himself up out of the chair and looked down at them both. "I wish I could give you better news, I do. But all I've got for you right now... if he makes it through the next twelve hours, he's got a chance." He put his hand on Max's shoulder and squeezed it lightly. "I'm sorry, Max."

Max nodded as she watched him walk away.

She stood and walked toward Alec's room, but made herself stop at the window rather than follow Sam inside. She could see Alec there in the bed, still pale, still flushed, with a clean, white bandage on his side, an oxygen mask over his face, surrounded by machines and monitors, with tubes and wires running every which way. She heard Logan's soft footsteps behind her, felt him step up beside her. Together they stood there, watching over Alec.

And it wasn't lost on Max that if she had been doing that on Friday night, neither of them would have had to do it then.