Enhancement (Black Market DNA Book 1) Read online

  Enhancement

  Black Market DNA, Volume 1

  Anthony J Melchiorri

  Published by Thunderbird Media, 2014.

  Enhancement (Black Market DNA)

  Copyright © 2014 by Anthony J. Melchiorri. All rights reserved.

  First Edition: September 2014

  http://AnthonyJMelchiorri.com

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5010-5079-4

  ISBN-10: 1-5010-5079-6

  Cover Design: Paramita Bhattacharjee

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic

  form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted

  materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this

  author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business

  establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE | Fulton, Maryland | October, 2058

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  Thank you for reading.

  Other Black Market DNA Books

  Also by Anthony J Melchiorri

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fulton, Maryland

  October, 2058

  Curled into a ball on the cold concrete floor, Christopher Morgan thrashed about in pain. He yelled out as two prisoners plunged knives into his sides. Wrapping one arm tight around his abdomen, he swung his other at the men in a desperate attempt to bat their knives away. Blood trickled out between the fingers he’d pressed to his side, and his arms shook. Pain struck like lightning, over and over again, coursing through muscle and skin. His gurgling cries joined the shouting voices exploding and echoing against the prison’s walls.

  With two outstretched arms, a hulking bear of a man tackled Chris’s attackers. The three men rolled in a wild tumbleweed of slashing appendages.

  Chris writhed in agony. He needed to run, to escape, but he coughed up blood as he drew himself up to one knee. Bright white lights seemed to flash before his eyes as he tried to yell out, his voice catching in the blood bubbling in his throat.

  Choking and coughing, he crumpled to the floor.

  Red lights reflected on solid steel prison doors. Distant voices called out, “Lockdown! Back to your cells! Lockdown!” A squad of men clad in black riot armor rushed into the frenetic mass of prisoners.

  Like a disturbed beehive, the rioting inmates fought and screamed. One raised a shiv already wet with blood. “Come and get it, you pigs!” He rushed the guards, and a dozen other prisoners joined the charge. Climbing over riot shields and swinging shanks, they crashed against the guards.

  Chris cowered. His nerves screamed, and he shivered in fright. He scooted backward and leaned up against a concrete column, pressing one palm against it to steady himself.

  A gruff voice barked at him, “Are you okay?”

  Cuts marred the man’s face, but Chris recognized Lash’s perpetually bloodshot eyes.

  Blood covered Lash’s arms. It matted his black hair to his mahogany skin. For a brief moment, the strobe of the emergency lights over his body made him appear ephemeral, ghostly. The man’s attempt to protect Chris sparked a glimmer of hope in him despite the chaos.

  He might yet survive.

  “Lash?” He coughed until his thick red saliva dropped onto the front of his already crimson-stained shirt.

  “Man, you ain’t doing great. They’re all dead but you.”

  Chris coughed again. “Who?”

  Lash looked away, back at the mass of guards and prisoners, his fists clenched and arms cocked back defensively. Despite the aggressive stance, Chris thought he could see a glimmer of fear in the hulking man’s eyes.

  He reached out to Lash’s tensed arm. “Who?”

  Lash pulled his veiny arm away. Chris watched him scan the crowd. Most of the prisoners had been sequestered by the guards to a corner of B-4. The rest of the convicts had retreated to their cells. Still, they hurled curses at the guards through their small, barred windows.

  Chris struggled to stand and pulled himself up as Lash eyed him warily.

  “Don’t you go anywhere, man.” Lash inched back. “Gotta keep my eye on you.”

  The two attackers that had plunged their makeshift knives into Chris’s side lay motionless just a couple yards from Lash. Chris watched their bodies for any sign of life or a renewed attack.

  His vision going hazy, his body going numb, he blinked. He couldn’t succumb to shock. He needed to stay aware, alive. He needed medical attention. Using the column to support himself, he stood up straight again. “Help!”

  “Sit down,” Lash said. “You’re going to kill yourself.”

  When Chris ignored him, Lash pushed him down hard with one bloodied hand. Lash’s hand dug into his shoulder and he felt a pop of a new, jolting pain. He could not resist the force behind the other prisoner’s effortless movement. The man didn’t even look at him as Chris slammed against the ground. “Stay put until the white coats get here.”

  Waves of pain traveled down from where Lash had crushed his shoulder and through his aching sides. The fellow convict seemed to want Chris alive, but the man could underestimate his own godlike strength and kill him with a grip like that.

  Banging their batons on the cell doors, guards ran along the catwalks to quiet the prisoners. Just yards away from Chris and Lash, a brilliant flash of white light from a stunner felled the last batch of rioting prisoners. Agonized cries accompanied the thuds of men seizing and falling to the ground.

  “That’s just fugging cruel, man!” a man barked from a cell. “Did you see what those fuggers did?”

  Besides Chris’s attackers, several bodies sprawled across the ground in unnaturally bent positions, as if they had been hit by a semi truck.

  Lash still stood protectively over him.

  “Thanks,” Chris said.

  Lash laughed, a deep, disturbing growl, but didn’t turn around. He appeared no more relaxed, though the mobbing had been put down.

  Chris frowned. “Why are you laughing?” He coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Blood smeared acros
s it.

  “Shit,” Lash said. “I ain’t saved your ass yet.” He turned around. “You’re bleeding like a mother.”

  Chris let his eyes close. “A mother?”

  “Open your eyes, man. Don’t die on me.”

  “I won’t,” he said. He tried to obey Lash, but Chris’s vision faded. His sides throbbed. Raised voices, clanging metal, coppery scents, flashing lights, and cold cement blended together in a muddy confusion of sensations. “I promise.”

  White coats headed toward him. Two guards grabbed Lash’s arms and bent his wrists behind him. They secured the inmate and pushed him to his knees. He didn’t struggle. Three white coats bent over Chris. “Open your eyes. Open your eyes. Keep ’em open.”

  He smiled. Maybe. He thought he laughed, too. They stabbed something into his arm, and something else squeezed his sides.

  “Don’t let him die,” Lash said. His expression seemed to be one of concern. Worry; sympathy, maybe. Something that looked unnatural on the inmate’s face.

  Chris watched Lash while the white coats barked at him and moved him to a stretcher. Lash stared hard, mouthing quiet, incomprehensible words. His eyes glistened as the two guards escorted Lash back to his cell.

  “Open your eyes. Keep ’em open. Stay with us.”

  His vision wavered and he tried to focus on those words. His life had been saved. He wanted to live. Pain, exhaustion, and loss of blood weighed on him and pressed his eyelids closed.

  ***

  A steady beep persisted in a slow rhythm. It echoed in Chris’s ears. His arms felt stiff and his head pounded. Brilliant orange light blinded him. As his pupils adjusted, he recognized the source of the light through his blurred sight.

  A window. Outside.

  The sunset filtered in through small, wire-reinforced windows and illuminated the dust particles floating in the air. A white sheet clung around his body in a tight mold. As his vision returned, so did a slight pain in his sides.

  He squinted out the window. He’d never had such a view from his prison cell on B-block.

  Of course. The riots. He winced as he recalled the intense pain that had coursed through him with each stab. He remembered Lash’s strange heroism and how the white coats had rushed in during his final conscious moments. They had brought him here.

  He lifted one arm and brought his hand up toward his chest. No searing pain like before. Just an uncomfortable soreness as though he had slept on his arm and it was now recovering from numbness. Restored blood flow rejuvenated his sense of touch with a prickling sensation. The sheets, pressed and stiff, felt almost luxurious compared to the scratchy synthetic-blend blanket in his cell bed.

  Forming a tent with his arm, he peered under the sheet at his bandaged body. No dried blood stained the white dressings on his sides. He wondered how long he had been unconscious, how long he had been healing.

  “You awake?”

  Chris rotated his head to the right. Long black hair framed a woman’s oval face. A real woman. His heart beat quicker and he fought to calm himself. “Yes.”

  “Great. Should be a day or two before we send you back to your cell.” The white coat’s voice was dry, monotonous. No waste of bedside manner on a prisoner.

  “What happened down there?”

  “Damned if I know. I don’t concern myself with inmate squabbles.”

  “What the hell happened to me?” Chris probed the stiff patches against his skin.

  The doctor examined a holoprojection on her comm card. “You suffered internal bleeding, hemorrhaging, but applying air-blown fiber anticoagulants fixed that right up. Same stuff we used on your dermal lacerations. Those fibers will itch like crazy as your skin heals. It’s going to be tempting, but don’t scratch that stuff until it falls off. Like a scab, you understand?”

  Chris nodded. He understood all of it. The intricacies of the blood-clotting agents and wound-healing technologies paled in comparison to the more complex genetic enhancements he’d worked on prior to prison.

  “Also, you’ve got subcutaneous hemorrhaging in both eyes. Nothing to be alarmed about. The redness will clear up in a day or two.”

  “It’ll be a like a bruise, right?”

  “Yep,” she said. “You’ve taken a couple of punches before?”

  Chris didn’t respond. Extreme pressure had popped a blood vessel the last time he’d suffered a subcutaneous hemorrhage. Looked and sounded far worse than what it actually was. The “extreme pressure” had been caused by vomiting after a night of heavy drinking. Would’ve been far better to have been punched.

  “There’s a cup of water on the bedside tray.”

  “If I need something, is there a nurse call button?”

  The white coat scoffed. “Real comedian, aren’t you?”

  “Relax, doc. He’s a newbie,” a raspy voice said. “I can make ya laugh, though. Tickle ya in all the right places.”

  The white coat rolled her eyes. She exhaled, ignoring the other patient.

  For the first time, Chris turned to see a row of beds parallel with his. A scarred, middle-aged man lay in the next bed. Where hair should be, tattoos wrapped around his bald head. Chris vaguely recognized the fellow inmate. The inked man resided in B-block but not in B-4 with Chris or else he would’ve known the inmate’s name, would have seen him in the cafeteria or the gym, at least. Maybe the library. On second thought, this fellow didn’t appear to be a frequent reader.

  “If I’m going to be here for a couple of days, can I at least get a book?” Chris asked.

  The white coat raised an eyebrow and walked away. The scarred man watched her until she turned the corner. He whistled.

  “I’d stab myself to get another look at that one.” The man made a vulgar gesture with one hand, and a grin revealed the mismatched set of yellowed teeth in his splotchy gums.

  Chris tried to adjust the bed to a sitting position. The bed’s electric motor whirred and emitted a jarring squeak.

  The tattooed inmate laughed. “Only the finest for Hotel Fulton.”

  Pulling himself upright and grunting, Chris leaned against the whitewashed stone walls behind him. “Can you tell me what happened out there?”

  “Kurt.”

  “What?”

  The tattooed man grinned again. “The name’s Kurt, from B-5, man. Ain’t you got any manners?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m Chris. B-4.”

  “No shit.” Kurt’s grin disappeared.

  Chris shrugged. “What’s it to you?”

  “I mean, I recognize you. You’re one of the new guys.”

  “Been here for almost eight months. Hardly new.”

  Kurt glowered. “You won’t be new when you’ve been here for five years, or sixteen and a half, like me. You should know that, man.” His chest puffed up and his chin stuck out. He sounded almost proud of his prison residency.

  Chris looked back out the window.

  “Your name was one of them on the list,” Kurt said.

  “The list? What list?”

  “I don’t know, man. I wasn’t supposed to see it.” Kurt frowned. “Shit, I probably shouldn’t even be saying nothing about it to you.” He chuckled. “I got a big mouth, that I do.”

  Intrigue filled Chris with a thousand desperate questions clamoring for his attention. “Why was I on the list? Who else was on it?”

  “I don’t know, man,” Kurt said, his voice sharp. He turned away. “I shouldn’t have said nothing. Besides, there’s gotta be another Chris in B-4. Maybe it ain’t you. Ain’t an uncommon name.”

  “There isn’t. I’m the only one.”

  “Sorry, man,” Kurt said. “Even a newbie should know better. Say too much, they cut your throat. Maybe you said something you wasn’t supposed to.”

  Chris recalled his past several months in the prison, racking his brain for anything he had done to offend anyone or endanger his life. He had mostly spent his time reading books from the library when he wasn’t working on the circuit-board assembly li
ne making his fifty cents an hour or scribbling in his paper journals.

  Maybe he’d pissed someone off on the outside. But he’d never ratted anyone out. In fact, he’d been convicted because someone had ratted on him. He’d gone down for manufacturing and distributing off-label genetic enhancements without knowing who had given him to the authorities.

  Everyone from competitive athletes to thuggish gang members had been customers of his black-market enhancements. The money was good. But, like any high-risk, high-reward endeavor, his business had come with a price—one that had nearly cost him his life.

  Kurt fiddled with a silver coin. It spun between his fingers as it vanished and reappeared. He saw Chris watching him and grinned. “Just started sleight-of-hand tricks with coins. Inspired by Shadow.”

  “Shadow?”

  “You know. American Gods. Neil Gaiman.” Kurt turned back to the coin. He watched it flip in and out of his own hand.

  Maybe Chris would’ve seen the man in the library after all. Too quick to judge. “Shadow say you gotta learn something in prison.”

  Guided by Kurt’s gaze, Chris watched the coin flip between the inmate’s fingers until it vanished. Kurt turned and looked alarmed until he presented it in his left hand. “It’s all about misguiding your audience.” A smile spread across his tattooed face again. “You a God-fearing man?”

  “Not really.”

  The coin spun between Kurt’s fingers again, back and forth, until he palmed it. He opened his hand and rotated his empty palm. “You might wanna pick a religion. Just because you didn’t die this time don’t mean they gave up. Gotta make yourself right with your god, make peace with yourself if you gonna die for something.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  As a couple of stern-faced corrections officers escorted Chris back to his cell, he peered into the other barred windows of his fellow inmates. He caught Lash’s eyes, red and intense, through one window. Lash met his gaze but made no gesture of recognition, no greeting or acknowledgment. Haunted by Kurt’s words, Chris wondered if Lash was a god. Or maybe an angel sent down by a protective god. He could not fathom any logical reason why the man would have protected him.

  Before the attack, he had never looked at Lash with anything but fear and avoidance. He never spoke to the man, since he was too afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. Lash seemed like a vicious dragon, coiled in muscle, ready to strike out when threatened.