Chapter Four: One Bad Decision
Verne sat on his Juvechrome for almost a week. He didn't tell anybody about the stuff and ignored the many messages he got online asking for follow-ups on his treatments. Every day, he got another ten or twelve pounds of dry ice and kept his metal cannister of drug stockpiled on the dry ice, in a cooler, in his mini-fridge. The only ones who knew about the heist were him and Hector – he didn't even tell Lisa. He wanted to tell her, but he also didn't want to make her an accessory to whatever crime stealing thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands) of dollars worth of drug counted for. What's worse, he was stressed ragged and sure that the Juvechrome Clinic was onto them. On Friday, he returned from work and Hector wasn't around (which he usually was). Verne messaged him and got nothing. Then, fifteen minutes later, the Juvechrome guy showed up at his door.
"Hi," the man said. He had the smile of a Mormon missionary and his unmarked dark-tinted van was idling across the street. "Are you Mr. Vera?"
"What's this about?" Verne asked, placing his foot at the base of the door to block it.
"Just a follow-up, sir. You are Mr. Verne Vera?" The man stood on his tiptoes to peek over Verne's head.
Verne stepped out of the apartment, the door clicking locked behind him. "Look, can you just tell me what you want? I'm kind of in the middle of something..."
"Nothing to worry about, sir. I just need to confirm that you're Verne Vera before I can hand you this packet..."
"Is this a subpoena?"
"What? No!" The man seemed genuinely taken aback by the question.
"Okay, fine. I'm Verne Vera. Hand it over."
The Juvechrome guy did so, handing him a medium-sized packet containing perhaps fifty pages of documents and several small items that Verne couldn't identify with a casual probing. The man looked like he was about to ask to come inside again, but Verne crossed his arms and gave him a look that made it clear that this wasn't happening. The man retreated to his van and immediately got on the phone with somebody. Shit. They knew. That had to be it. His hand started twitching. Double-shit.
Verne rushed inside, dumped the packet out on the coffee table, and inspected the contents: a thick questionnaire/feedback packet marked 'Confidential', a few flyers, a very nice pen, a USB drive, and a reusable straw with the company's logo. Nothing overtly suspicious but, he supposed, any of those little goodies might be a surveillance device. Should he throw them out? Or would that be even more suspicious? His other hand twitched... both hands were twitching now. Triple-shit.
Verne stormed over to his mini-fridge, retrieved the cannister of Juvechrome, and unbottled the thing. It was smaller than he'd thought, about 10 milliliters of strikingly vermillion stuff, opaque like liquid satin and slightly differentiated with streaks of lighter and darker color. It looked a bit like blood, though no blood had ever possessed quite that shade of not-quite-red. It was ice-cold but still liquid, and Verne clenched it in a spasming hand, torn between dumping the stuff out and taking it. He decided it was worth the risk – even if he got in trouble for it, even if he went to prison, this might be his one and only chance at full-strength Juvechrome.
Verne rummaged through his disordered but well-stocked first-aid kit, retrieving a 10 ml syringe and cracking its wrapper open. Then he unsealed the Juvechrome, carefully sucked up every drop and ejected the air bubbles, losing a single tiny drop of the intensely-colored stuff. What remained was almost exactly 10 ml... how much of it to use? Verne had no idea. He found a vein, stuck the needle in, hesitated for a second, his thumb quivering over the plunger, and then injected the whole syringe, sucking in air and grimacing as fiery burning streaked up his arm, swirling about his shoulder and chest before dissipating into a full-body tingle that wasn't entirely unpleasant.
When he was done, Verne tossed the syringe into the waste bucket and collapsed onto his beanbag chair, unconsciously cradling the empty metal thermos that had held the Juvechrome vial against his chest. He stared into space, wondering whether he'd made the right decision, and only then realized that there was something flat and plastic scrunched up in the thermos. He removed it, squinting to read the tiny print on the plastic-wrapped booklet: Juvechrome C Preparation Instructions, it read. Verne tore the plastic open and unfolded the instruction manual:
This vial contains approximately 10.0 ml of our patented Juvechrome C (vitality solution) concentrate. To prepare Juvechrome C for administration, mix with equal parts Juvechrome B (sedative solution).
- For Juvechrome Standard treatments, add 0.01 ml (10 ul) of B and C to 500 ml sterile saline no more than 30 minutes before start of treatment.
- For Juvechrome Deluxe treatments, add 0.1 ml (100 ul) of B and 0.02 ml (20 ul) of C to 500 ml sterile saline no more than 30 minutes before start of treatment.
Verne read and reread the instructions with mounting disbelief. He'd just dosed himself with 100 full-doses of Juvechrome Deluxe or 1000 full doses of Standard... That was $3,000,000 worth of Deluxe and, presumably, way too much for anybody to take in one go. He was fucked. He was totally fucked.
V: <Hey, guys,> he posted,
V: <I've been trying some different treatments lately, as you all know. I recently messed up with one of my drugs. Looking for a medical opinion: if I accidentally took 100-1000 times the effective dose of a drug, am I gonna die? I'm seriously freaking out rn.>
DK: <Haha oh wow ur fucked,> DrkugKommando posted almost immediately.
DK: <Nice knowing u>
A few minutes later, DocTomorrow, ever the voice of reason, posted:
D: <You're not necessarily 'fucked', depending on the drug. Some drugs have a lethal dose way over 100 or even 1000 times the effective dose. Some, but not many. You want to look for a number called the 'therapeutic index' of the drug, if that's available. That tells you how any times the effective dose is toxic and/or lethal. People have taken over 10,000 times the effective dose of LSD and lived to tell the tale. With other drugs, like phenylbarbital, the ratio is around 2-3 and 100 times the effective dose will definitely kill you. I recommend that you get yourself to the ER immediately and tell them what you've dosed yourself with. Stay safe, TrueVerne!>
That was informative, but didn't help much. What was the therapeutic ratio of Juvechrome? Had he just taken dozens of lethal doses of the stuff, or was he just super-medicated? Verne held his phone in his hand, looking at DocTomorrow's post and wondering what in the hell he should do. Go to the ER? Call 9-1-1? In either case, they'd figure out he'd stolen a few million dollars worth of Juvechrome, and then he was in a world of trouble. But that was better than dying, right?
He went into the bathroom, took a few big gulps of tap water, and splashed some water on his face. He felt fine... not great, mind you, but he'd been pretty stressed out even before taking the Juvechrome. Maybe it was just nerves. Maybe the stuff was just a dumb supplement and didn't even do anything. It would be like overdosing on vitamins. Then again, the sedative solution had definitely been effective, so presumably the 'vitality' solution was similarly potent. His phone buzzed.
<Verne, please tell me you're bullshitting. Do you mean to tell us you got your hands on a fuckton of Juvechrome and mainlined the whole thing? Even u aren't that stupid,> Josef Sensei had just posted.
<Pics or it didn't happen.>
Verne wasn't about to implicate himself, so no pics were forthcoming. He sat on the toilet, his head sinking into his hands, his heart thudding in his chest. Then the pain started.
It was a dull, throbbing pain that started in his belly, right above his navel, and radiated out, spreading to his chest, to his groin, slowly spreading toward his neck and limbs. Verne's guts wrenched with pain and he retched, but no vomit came out.
"Mlaugh," was the sound he made, loud enough to echo against the bathroom tiles. It would have sounded funny if he didn't feel like he was dying.
The pain ebbed for a moment and Verne stood. Then it suddenly spiked and he collapsed into the bathtub, his pants around his ankles, writhing and moaning at the deeply uncomfortable, deeply visceral pain. He couldn't keep his breath. He knew he was dying. He was... passed out. Darkness overtook him.
+++++
"Shit! Dude! Yo, Verne! You dead on me?"
"Hmm?"
Verne felt cold. He felt tired and sore, like a fire had just gutted out his insides. But he also felt alive, so there was that. He was resting on something hard and curved, and he was being jostled around. He opened his eyes, squinted into the light, and slowly resolved the features of Hector's face, bound as it was by his little strip of a beard.
"Huah?" He tried to say 'what', but it came out like that. He swallowed bitter bile. "What?"
"Jesus fuck, dude. I thought you were dead," Hector said. "I came in here to take a shit and found you passed out in the tub with your pants around your ankles and maybe not breathing."
Verne moved to cover himself and realized that he wasn't just half-naked in the tub. He'd vomited and shit himself... not a normal shit, but some black, stinking, tar-like stuff smeared around the tub. He pulled up his boxers and struggled to his feet. He felt empty, ravenous.
"Fuck..." he looked at his hands – aside from being smeared with vomit-shit stuff, they were fine. No hint of any tremor. But his head felt like hell. "Can you wait for me to shower and clean up in here? I..." he looked to Hector and decided that, if anybody could know, he could. He'd been in on the heist, after all. "I took all of the Juvechrome, and I think it fucked me up... I thought I was gonna die."
Hector nodded, his eyes growing wide. "All of it? Damn, man... I sold some of my stock... directions said to take like ten or twenty migs of the stuff in saline. You're pale as shit, bro. Clean yourself up – my deuce can wait."
Verne stripped out of his soiled clothes in the shower, rinsed himself thoroughly, and then scrubbed the bathroom down, hoping he was now out of the woods, symptom-wise. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought he looked different. Thinner, and maybe younger. He was only twenty-one, though – he didn't want to be younger. He didn't want to think about what a mega-dose of Juvechrome might do if the Deluxe would knock off ten to fifteen years and he'd taken a hundred times that... was it possible to de-age somebody to before adulthood? Was that even how it worked? He looked younger, but not that young – his skin was smoother, his stubble vanished, but his eyes were sunken and it looked like he hadn't eaten in a week. He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded out into the living room, noting that his ribs were clearly visible along his chest.
"It's all yours, man," he told Hector.
It was almost one in the morning – he'd been out for hours. And he was starving. After getting dressed, Verne rummaged through the refrigerator, spying some lean, pink-red ground beef. He couldn't remember whether he or Hector had bought it... if it was Hector's he'd pay him back. Verne shaped two big patties of the stuff and almost ate it raw – he was that hungry, and somehow the raw meat looked appealing. But, he realized, that would be disgusting. He warmed a pan and seared the outside to brown perfection, keeping the heat high so as to leave the interior warm but red. Then he ate both patties with a smearing of savory steak sauce – no bun, no other seasoning. He'd meant to leave one for Hector, but no dice. He wolfed them both down, savoring the soft, slightly bloody interior... normally, he couldn't stand anything approaching that ultra-rare, especially on ground meat.
"Damn, are you all right?" Hector asked.
Verne nodded, wiping the grease and juices from his mouth, his belly churning with his meal. All of a sudden, he felt jittery. "I'm going for a walk around. Want to come?"
Hector shrugged, which meant yes, if only out of concern for Verne.
"I seriously thought you were dead, bro," Hector said.
"Sorry about that," Verne said. "Like I said, I took way too much of the Juvechrome. I guess it's not deadly in super dose. Lucky me."
"Yeah, lucky," Hector said. "I sold some of mine to those bitches who wanted it. It knocked them on their asses like it was heroin. I took like twenty migs of the stuff and added it to saline, like the directions said… twenty migs made about five mils of stuff."
"I think you got different stuff. There are two mixtures, the B and the C, and I think you got the B, which acts like a sedative, and I got C... whatever the fuck that does. I wouldn't way overdose on a sedative or opioid. That probably will kill you. Fuck... but I'm pissed off at myself."
They walked through the Weeks neighborhood, the strip of slightly dilapidated city between the more upscale university housing and street-level bodegas over in East Weeks and the scary-at-night low-rises and rusted industrial parks of Longstreet. Despite his earlier near-death experience, Verne felt especially alert, if still a bit empty and gutted by the experience. He felt the summer air flutter against his face. His vision felt sharper, like he was picking out more in the dark, noticing more movement and more detail, whether it was the alley cats circling in courtship across the street or the undercover police car rolling down Gavel Avenue.
The night was warm, a muggy southern summer night, but with a pleasant breeze pushing in from the sea, with katydids and cicadas singing in the city's eponymous palmetto trees. It had rained a few days earlier, and so the mosquitos were also out in force, especially when they walked past the open space at St. Anne's Cemetery. Normally, mosquitos bugged the hell out of Verne, but they were taking it easy tonight. Not so for Hector, whom they didn't usually prefer – every fifteen or twenty seconds, he swatted at one on his arm or neck, splatting maybe half of them. Verne even caught the meaty, metallic whiff of blood as Hector flicked a squashed mosquito off his arm. His senses were very sharp tonight.
+++++
The cemetery smelled of fresh soil and mulberries and the willow trees had grown low enough that the tips of their branches brushed against some of the gravestones. Verne had gone in there at night a few times as a teenager for games of truth or dare, but he'd always found it a pleasant enough place. Mostly, he'd gone because the older kids in the group usually brought booze or weed.
"Mind if I make a drop?" Hector asked. He patted at the baggie in his cargo pocket.
"Of course not," Verne said.
"It's in Longstreet."
Verne shrugged. Longstreet wasn't that dangerous. Sure, people sometimes got shot there, but that was usually over stuff a lot more consequential than two ounces of weed. An Escalade thumping bass slowed and rolled a window down, its driver leaning out to call out:
"Hey, you lookin for something?"
"We're good, man," Hector said, and they kept walking. Hector glanced sidelong at Verne. "Why are you pissed?"
"What?"
"You said you were pissed at yourself. Mind if I ask why? If I was you, I'd be thanking God just to be alive... so what gives?"
Verne snorted, his face drawing up into a sneer. "I just shot up with like... way more than I'll ever make in my life worth of Juvechrome C. That could have lasted me and Lisa for years. I probably just blew my only shot at treating my NVC..."
"We can always get more..."
"We can't. I'm pretty sure they're on to us – I mean a place like that has got to have security cameras. Frankly, I'm amazed they haven't sicced the police on us, but I bet they've got their reasons. There was a guy from Juvechrome this afternoon... he came up to the apartment and was getting nosy, and it was all suspicious as fuck. He had an unmarked van with, like, a bunch of electronics, so they might be surveilling the place."
"Fuck, bro," Hector said. He jogged up to a stoop, buzzed the doorbell, and slid a baggie under the door mat, pocketing the little stash of money he found there. "I guess I should hide my Juvechrome stuff, huh?"
"Probably," Verne agreed.
They made their way back to the apartment, the moon hanging high overhead. Once they were back out of Longstreet, the city was silent and asleep aside from the chorus of insects and the hush of the breeze through the trees. Verne paced back to his room, not tired in the least, and lay back on his beanbag chair, sniffing at the cushion. It smelled faintly of weed and Lisa's perfume – familiar and reassuring smells. His stomach grumbled, but he decided to wait until the restaurants opened… a restaurant that served rare, red meat – he'd devoured all that they had in the apartment.
V: <Not dead yet,> he posted online.
V: <The stuff I took fucked with me and I passed out in the bathtub, but I think I'm out of the woods. Can anybody suggest a useful detox strategy?>
Nobody responded immediately – nobody else was awake. The folks in Europe would be, but they only made about 10% of his online groups. Verne didn't feel tired in the least, browsing online and idly flipping through his medical imaging textbook, but he must have dozed off nonetheless, because he snapped to attention at 6 am when his phone buzzed. It was a message from his mother:
A: <Don't forget the memorial today. See you at church 8 am.>
Shit. He'd completely forgotten. Verne got his suit out - he'd forgotten to get it dry-cleaned, of course. So he febreezed it, steamed it in the shower, and then ironed out the remaining wrinkles. There were no visible stains and the odor of previous wearings was only noticeable at less than in inch from the fabric. It would have to do. He put it on, getting his tie right on the third try, and looked at himself in the mirror...
His suit didn't fit. Everything was too big, like he'd lost twenty pounds and an inch or two in height. He felt a sinking sensation in his stomach – the Juvechrome was doing something to him. What, exactly, he couldn't guess, though his first paranoid thought was that it was going to de-age him into a little kid. It made sense... he didn't look younger, not exactly, but his skin was smooth, without a hint of stubble, and his limbs felt scrawny. He didn't have time to measure his height, but he must have been shorter. His shoes were at least a size or two too big and the cuff of his pants legs draped over them. Oh well – he'd worry about it after church. If he didn't make it to church and the Juvechrome didn't kill him, his parents would.
Natalie got magic for a foot of height, I wonder what Verne will get
Cool vampire stuff for about half that?
@OvidLemma f*ck yes mate
nice looks like its time for some new clothes :3 and lucky he didn't just die from taking the active stuff in that amount
I'm guessing it's diluted that far to avoid the effects he's going to experience
Yes, it's normally far, far more diluted. The diluted serum can provide some benefits without turning people into vampires. It's the mixture of the juvechrome with Verne's illness that lead to the extreme changes he's undergoing here.
@OvidLemma interesting mix of ideas
@nekomimi
The vampires are using low dose Juvechrome to turn the city's most influential people into their unwitting thralls.
@OvidLemma ohhhh that makes sense
@OvidLemma I hate myself for being an insatiably curious moron and reading that
@SpectralAssassin Sorry!