Chapter 3 - Trapped Alive
The world around me seemed to fracture into razor-sharp pieces.
The room blurred. The humming of the laboratory machines roared in my ears like a jet engine. I leaned over the stainless-steel sink and dry-heaved, my lungs burning, my vision swimming in crimson.
*Two years.*
Every evening I had sat by Verónica’s bed. I had read her poetry. I had wept against her shoulder, telling her that if she was tired, she could let go. I had kissed her forehead while Salgado stood beside me, nodding with that benevolent, fatherly empathy, adjusting the clear plastic tubing that ran straight into her central line.
She had heard every single word. She had felt my tears on her skin. She had tried with every atom of her soul to scream, to squeeze my hand, to blink, while that poison held her pinned beneath the ice of her own frozen nervous system.
“Alejandro!” Morales’s sharp bark broke through the ringing in my ears. He shook my shoulder with surprising strength. “Lose your mind tomorrow. If you collapse now, she dies tonight.”
I dragged air into my chest, wiping cold sweat from my forehead. “How long does it stay in the system?”
“The synthetic lipid formulation is engineered to maintain a constant serum concentration,” Morales said, tapping the analysis printout. “Every injection resets the clock for approximately forty-eight to seventy-two hours. If Salgado realizes the vial was confiscated rather than merely lost, he will not wait. He will administer a massive clearing dose to induce fatal cardiac arrest and call it organ failure. In her medical state, no corner coroner would ever challenge the death certificate.”
“I have to get her out,” I said, checking my watch. It was 3:15 AM.
“You can’t just walk into San Gabriel with a shotgun, Alejandro,” Morales warned. “The clinic employs private armed security. Half the local precinct is on their payroll. You need an antidote, and you need a distraction.”
“Is there an antidote?”
Morales pulled off his spectacles and rubbed his tired eyes. “Pyridoxine—high-dose Vitamin B6—along with dimercaptosuccinic acid and an aggressive continuous hemodiafiltration protocol can displace the neurotoxin. But it will take days of intensive, specialized care. You cannot take her to another public hospital. They will flag her transfer in the registry, and whoever is funding this will know within the hour.”
“Rodolfo,” I spat out the name like broken glass.
“Your partner?” Morales raised an eyebrow.
I pulled out my phone and accessed the encrypted corporate ledger of *Cárdenas & Montalvo*. Three years ago, before Verónica’s accident, her family had entrusted us with the title deeds to the Cuernavaca valley corridor—four hundred hectares of prime agricultural land slated for federal highway development. The land wasn't owned by our joint corporation; it was held in a private, sole-signatory family trust under Verónica’s name.
Under the trust bylaws written by her late father, if Verónica was medically certified as permanently incapacitated for a continuous period of twenty-four months, full power of attorney automatically transferred to the corporation's executive board.
To Rodolfo Cárdenas.
I checked the calendar on my phone screen.
Tomorrow was the twenty-fourth-month mark. At noon, the probate judge was scheduled to sign the final declaration of irreversible vegetative state right in the hospital conference room.
Rodolfo didn’t want Verónica dead two years ago; a sudden death would have triggered an automatic estate audit and split the trust among distant heirs. He needed her alive, legally incompetent, and entirely voiceless until the statutory window closed. Once the land was transferred to the corporation tomorrow, Verónica was nothing more than an expensive, dangerous liability.
“They were never trying to cure her,” I whispered, looking down at Maya, who was watching me with silent, ancient eyes. “They were waiting for the clock to run out. Tomorrow at noon, they get the land. Tomorrow night, Verónica ‘peacefully slips away.’”
“Then we have eight hours,” Morales said, reaching into a locked cabinet beneath his bench and pulling out a heavy black leather medical bag. “I have enough intravenous pyridoxine and detoxifying binders to begin displacing the toxin. But you have to extract her from Suite 312 before sunrise.”
“How?” I asked.
A small voice piped up from the corner of the lab.
May you like
“The laundry trucks,” Maya said, wiping mustard from the corner of her mouth. “They come when the sky turns gray. The back gate opens for the white sheets. That’s how the men took the big drums in.”
***
