“I love you, David.”

  “I love you too, Manny.”

  The warmth was all around him now, covering him like a blanket. It was different, so different than all of the other times he’d died taking N-Som. There was no fear, no pain, no emotional turmoil. Manny was infused with a deep and calming peace, which welcomed him into the thing he wanted most of all.

  Everlasting rest.

  Emmanuel Tibbets let out a gentle breath, closed his eyes, and went to sleep for the last time.

  “Theena.”

  Bill knelt down next to her, gently taking her hand off the wound.

  “Bill…”

  It was bad. The tear was ragged, ugly. The ax had penetrated the dermis and subcutaneous tissue, neatly severing her external obliques. There was a lot of blood. Deep inside, he caught a glimpse of liver and ascending colon.

  Bill placed her hand back over the injury, keeping pressure on it. Her pulse was weak, but rapid, her skin clammy to the touch. The onset of hypovelemic shock, brought about by massive blood loss. This was turning into a repeat episode of what happened with David in the lobby.

  He wouldn’t fail this time. He wouldn’t let her die.

  “I’ll be back.”

  “Don’t go.”

  Bill ran out of the gym, trying to remember the direction of the lab. He found it by noticing all of the medical supplies Theena had dropped in the doorway. Bill scooped them up; streptokinase, atropine, epinephrine, beryllium, an IV drip and a bag of saline. He then entered the room and picked up the bottle of alcohol and the syringe Theena had used on him, as well as the metal first aid box.

  When he arrived back in the gym, Theena was in V-Fib.

  Bill hung the IV from one of the nearby exercise machines and threaded the needle into her wrist. She wasn’t breathing, and her heart was in chaotic arrhythmia, shaking and trembling in her chest. Bill hit her chest as hard as he could, sending shock waves of pain through his injured shoulder. Then he titled up her head, pinched her nose, and filled her lungs with his breath.

  Into her IV he injected a syringe full of epi. He began chest compressions, both arms rigid, bending her rib cage to force her heart to pump blood. He could only keep it up for thirty seconds before the ripples of agony in his back made him close to passing out. Bill forced his breath into her, and gave another thump on the chest.

  Her pulse was still erratic.

  “God dammit!”

  Bill wouldn’t let it happen. Not again. He couldn’t lose her, too.

  He drew a 500 milligram dose of beryllium, a powerful anti-arrhythmic, into the syringe and injected the bolus in an IV push. After another thirty seconds of CPR, he checked her heart.

  A normal rhythm had returned, but it was too slow, much too slow.

  “I won’t let you die.”

  Bill administered a dose of atropine, and the effect was almost instantaneous. Her heart rate rose dramatically.

  Bill checked her carotid. Pulse still weak. She didn’t have enough blood in her system to raise the pressure. He had to close up that wound.

  In the med kit was a box of single use Ethilon needles, pre-threaded with black monofilament. He tore open a pack and then dumped rubbing alcohol over his hands and a pair of scissors.

  Theena moaned when his fingers entered her. The blood flow had slowed considerably. He tied off four veins, and then gently tucked her ascending colon back into her muscle wall. Then he sutured the subcutaneous tissue back over the oblique, and closed her up with twenty-eight stitches across the epidermis.

  His back was on fire when he finished, his forehead sopping wet. Bill checked her pulse.

  Strong and steady.

  “Bill…”

  Her eyelids fluttered. Bill felt his chest well up, emotion threatening to choke him.

  “Theena.”

  Pain be damned, he bent down and held her. In that single moment, the only thing that mattered in the whole world was the woman in his arms. Alive and breathing.

  He hadn’t let her die.

  Bill gave her a shot of lidocaine near the injury to help with the pain, and then located the elevator card.

  They weren’t completely out of the woods yet. Theena was still in critical condition, and needed to get to a hospital. Plus there was the danger of Rothchilde coming back. Bill needed to get them out of there, along with enough evidence to make sure N-Som was never approved and Rothchilde was implicated to the fullest extent of the law.

  Bill took the elevator to the lobby and used the phone to dial information. He got the number for the Hoffman Estates Police Department. After several minutes of convincing them that he’d already tried the Schaumburg PD and they hadn’t come, they promised to drop by. Bill reminded them to bring an ambulance.

  Then he went back into the bowels of the building to find the N-Som file he’d gotten from Mike Bitner’s place. It seemed like an eternity ago.

  The file was where he’d left it, in the conference room. Inside was enough information to expose the truth about N-Som. Hopefully this, coupled with Theena’s testimony, would be enough to put the DruTech President away for a long time.

  It was the very least the bastard deserved.

  The only drawback to flying by helicopter was the noise. Unless Rothchilde wore one of those ridiculous radio headsets, he had to yell for his pilot, Frederick, to hear him.

  The bird banked left, Rothchilde’s dinner almost leaving his stomach from the maneuver. Below them, streetlights and headlights sparkled like stars, competing with the real deal overhead. The Chicago skyline could be seen in the distance, anchored by the blinking antennae of the Sears Tower and the Hancock Building.

  Rothchilde decided it might be prudent to leave the country for a few weeks. He wasn’t sure how this whole DruTech mess was going to resolve itself. The best scenario had Manny killing Theena and Bill, and then dying himself. But things seldom ended neatly.

  The smart thing would be to send in his own troops and clean the place out—bodies, evidence, everything. Unfortunately, Rothchilde had murdered both of the people he could use to do that, Halloran and Carlos. Their bodies would be found, and Rothchilde wasn’t anxious to answer persistent questions from either the police or the mob.

  So he would go on vacation. Let things settle down. He’d get his lawyers on it, extricate himself from the situation, and get everything back on track. The military contract should still hold up, and he already had some places picked out in Mexico for N-Som production.

  Rothchilde yawned. Before he could do anything, he had to take care of Halloran’s headless corpse, decaying in his office. Messy. Rothchilde tried to think of someone he could call to assist him, someone who would ask no questions. But he didn’t place his trust in many people.

  His servants would to it, if ordered to. They feared him. Maybe he could have them wrap up the body, haul it someplace secluded, and then Rothchilde could kill them, too. No witnesses. The only problem was replacing them; it was so hard to find good help these days.

  Rothchilde rubbed his eyes. Exhaustion seemed to settle on him like a thick blanket. Sleep now wouldn’t be wise. He needed to be alert and focused to deal with everything happening.

  There was N-Som back at the mansion. He hadn’t taken any since the day before, so he was ready for another dose.

  But he didn’t have to wait until he got back home, did he?

  Rothchilde stuck a hand in his pocket and pulled out the capsules Theena had made from Halloran’s brain. He’d killed the captain just a few hours ago, but already the memory of the act was fading.

  Maybe what he needed right now was a refresher.

  He opened the onboard cooler and took out a Perrier. The pill went down easily, bubbles mixing with a pleasant tang of residual blood, and he settled back in his seat, ready to re-experience his first murder from the victim’s point of view.

  Rothchilde closed his eyes, a sweet smile settling on his face. The anticipation was exquisite. Better than the Christmas Eves of youth, waiting for Santa.

  The first effects of N-Som were sensory. Sounds became blurry, touch was muted. Opening the eyes yielded a dark, fuzzy world, which dimmed as the drug took hold, eventually spiraling the user into blackness. Then the dreams began.

  But Rothchilde felt nothing.

  He waited. Normally, he’d have been under by now. Was it taking so long because the sample was fresh? Theena mentioned that she didn’t have all the equipment to make pills at the lab, and so she’d given him a capsule. Did the fresh stuff take a longer time to get into the bloodstream?

  Minutes passed. His smile faded. He began to wonder if the little whore had duped him.

  A moment later, he realized just how duped he had been.

  Albert Rothchilde had forgotten how to breathe.

  He thought he was unconsciously holding his breath at first, tense because the N-Som hadn’t kicked in. But when he tried to inhale, he found that he just couldn’t. His lungs refused to obey.

  His eyes flapped open and he tensed, the first stirrings of panic building inside him. This was impossible. A person just didn’t forget how to breathe. Breathing was automatic. He opened his mouth and sucked in his stomach, trying to fill his lungs. It didn’t work.

  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.

  “The 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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  YOU WILL NEVER NEED TO SLEEP AGAIN!!!!

  The 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.