Part 14 (1/2)

Mariko crouched in front of the toilet bowl, buried her face between her knees and cried there in the bathroom, her body convulsing in unison with her sobs.

It was not long before rejection set in.

Mariko was taken to the ICU right away. She clearly remembered Doctor Yos.h.i.+zumi's expression of disbelief that day.

”Why didn't you take your medicines?” he asked, but the question fell on deaf ears.

”I did take them.”

Yos.h.i.+zumi was unconvinced.

”If you had, then you wouldn't be here right now.”

”I took them just like you said.”

”You shouldn't lie, Mariko. You're not well. Why did you do this? Didn't I tell you to take your meds every day? Didn't I warn you?”

Yos.h.i.+zumi's voice was tinged with despair. He'd probably tried his best not to sound that way, but Mariko didn't miss the tone.

”We're going to have to take it out now.”

After all they'd gone through, it had come to this.

Yos.h.i.+zumi, Mariko, and her father discussed a plan of action, though Yos.h.i.+zumi did most of the talking. He sat in front of Mariko's bed, looking at her pitifully, more, it seemed to her, for his own sake than hers. Her father reacted to each of the doctor's words with utter disbelief.

I ruined my father's kidney, Mariko thought. She was afraid to imagine what he must have been thinking, but she couldn't keep terrible guesses from running rampant in her brain.

Her father was naturally upset. His own child had rejected a most selfless sacrifice. She had been on her way to a normal life again, but had thrown away her only chance to get there, through her own negligence. Mariko was sure her father thought she was beyond saving.

Yos.h.i.+zumi must have shared the sentiment. After all the hards.h.i.+ps they faced, and despite having gone through all the necessary steps, she had repaid their diligent work with intolerable foolishness. Mariko was sure the doctor thought she was hopeless.

She was sure.

Mariko closed her eyes. The faint humming sound had faded into silence.

Hot air from outside permeated the hospital room, making it difficult for her to fall asleep. The bed creaked faintly as she turned onto her side.

She thought of school.

She had no desire to return there. The laughter of those two boys was still trapped in her ears. If she did go back, it was only a matter of time before she became an object of ridicule again. It was an unbearable thought. If this was how people were going to treat her, then living a life of dialysis was, to her, the more favorable option.

The next morning, a nurse came in carrying a white bag filled with packages of immuno-suppressants.

Mariko wondered what would happen if she didn't take them. She would only need to pretend to swallow them and hide them in the back of her mouth. Then, when the nurse was not looking, she could spit them out and stuff them under her pillow. No one would suspect a thing.

Then again, the doctor was sure to notice something eventually.

In the heat, her thoughts soon grew vague and disjointed. As she drifted between wakefulness and sleep, she imagined scenes from the near future when this transplant would end in failure.

Just then, she heard an indistinct noise.

Her ears perked up in alarm. She stopped breathing and listened for nearly a minute, but heard nothing.

Just a figment of her imagination.

She breathed a sigh of relief and looked at the window. A street fight threw jet black lines on her face mimicking the blind that was lowered between them.

She always had the same dream here of some unknown ent.i.ty walking slowly with determined footsteps, her room as its goal. She wouldn't be able to run away. Her body was always paralyzed, her heart pounding close to bursting. And then her kidney would announce itself by moving around, enthralled by the strange presence approaching her door.

The footsteps always stopped just outside the hospital room. Before long, the doork.n.o.b would begin to turn.

She always woke up just as the door was about to open.

But Mariko knew who the footsteps belonged to.

The donor.

The corpse from whom she had stolen a vital organ had come to reclaim it.

She was reminded of a strange little comic book she once read long before her kidney problems even began. A friend had bought it for her. Mariko didn't remember the author's name or the tide and could only vaguely recall the story, but she still remembered clearly the shock of reading it. It had made her afraid to even go to the bathroom alone.

The story centered around a young girl who was paralyzed after falling down a flight of stairs. All the doctors judged her dead from the fall. Even though she was fully conscious and aware of her surroundings, her total lack of bodily control hindered her from telling them that she was still alive.

The girl was brought into the operating room and designated as a heart donor. She tried desperately to make everyone notice she was alive, to no avail, and had to watch as her heart was cut out.

But after the girl was buried, her grudge became insatiable. Wanting nothing more than to take back what was rightfully hers, she resurrected herself from the grave.

After that, Mariko remembered only that at the end of the story, the zombie girl tracked down the recipient and gouged out her heart.

The girl was drawn with horrifying features and the image had always stuck in the back of Mariko's mind. When she'd first heard about the kidney donation, the comic was the first thing that had come to her mind.

She still had no idea what kind of person her donor had been. Though she asked the nurse about it repeatedly, she was always given the same indirect answer.

Maybe her donor actually wasn't dead. Maybe she was still conscious like the girl in the comic and wanted somehow to let Mariko know she was alive. Doctor Yos.h.i.+zumi had gone ahead with the operation in spite of her terrible helplessness, and had taken the kidney, leaving the donor no choice but to wander in search of vengeance.

The footsteps in her dream could belong to no one else. Sooner or later, the zombie would come to seize its kidney from Mariko's body. It would tear open a hole in her side and run away with the prize in its hands and malicious words upon its lips. Someday, the door would open.

Then she would die a horrible, b.l.o.o.d.y death on that very bed.

13.

The hot days pressed on, but Tos.h.i.+aki continued to work without pause. The ventilation system in his office left something to be desired, while the air conditioning in the cultivation and machinery rooms gave him new reason to be conducting experiments. It certainly beat out lazing away in his sauna-like apartment.

Eve 1's replication had gone on uninhibited. Since adding clofibrate, a peroxisome proliferator, the speed of division had risen.

Eve 1 had clearly taken well to the induction. Even so, Tos.h.i.+aki's curiosity was far from satisfied. Clofibrate was just one peroxisome proliferator, and other variants could yield an even higher rate of division.