Contagious

Perry drank. “You got something you got to do?”

“I’m doing it,” Dew said. “Margaret asked that we stay here a little longer, give you a chance to rest. So until we leave, getting you to be more cooperative is kind of my main job.”

Perry looked at the chair. Dew wasn’t sure, but he thought the kid turned a little red. Like he was embarra.s.sed or something.

“You, uh...,” Perry said. “You want to... sit down and... shoot the s.h.i.+t?”

Perry offered the bottle again. Dew took it, sat down and had another long swig.

UNKIE DONNY HAS HAD BETTER DAYS

Donald Jewell, or “Unkie Donny,” as Chelsea liked to call him, did not feel good. Perhaps it was more accurate to say that he felt like a tainted can of boiled elephant a.s.s.

The fever had picked up steam. It came nicely packaged with an overall ache, as well as annoying shooting pains in his left arm. Far worse was that Betty seemed just as sick. She was slumped in the pa.s.senger seat, head against the window, eyes closed. And she was sweating.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Someone was following him.

He couldn’t be sure who it was; there were so many cars on the highway. But he’d seen cars behind him, the same cars, several times. Who was it? What did they want?

He’d been on the road for over two hours. He had at least six to go, more like eight or nine if the weather didn’t let up. Freezing rain made driving a royal b.i.t.c.h. All the traffic on I-75 moved along at forty-five miles an hour. At least up north, people knew how to drive in winter: it was a safe bet that the cars in the ditch belonged to downstaters or people from Ohio.

He was hot, he was sleepy, the conditions were c.r.a.p—not a good combination when his whole life sat in the pa.s.senger seat next to him.

Who was following him? Who?

Donald pulled off the highway into a rest stop near Bay City. He exited slowly, seeing which cars behind him did the same. None did. They must have known he was onto them.

Or maybe he was acting crazy.... No one was following him. That was just nuts.

He pulled up to the rest stop building and parked gently, so

Since he was here, maybe he could just get some sleep. He shouldn’t be driving when he felt like this. What if he fell asleep at the wheel?

He quietly opened the door and headed to the trunk, shoulders hunched against the frigid, driving rain. He stopped halfway, face scrunching in pain and head twitching to the left until his ear touched his shoulder. Another shooting pain, this one a real doozy. It faded slowly. By the time it was gone, Donald’s jacket was nearly soaked. He cursed his brother for making him sick, then opened the trunk and pulled out a sleeping bag.

Darting back into the car, he removed his wet coat before spreading half of the sleeping bag on his daughter. He spread the other half on himself, coughed, blew his nose, cursed his brother one more time, then laid his head against the headrest.

Just an hour or two, a quick nap while the storm blew over and the snowplows cleared the highways, and then they’d be back on the road.

Inside Donny’s body, things were rapidly s.h.i.+fting from f.u.c.king Bad to Even f.u.c.king Worse.

The problem began with his telomeres. What is a telomere? Picture the little plastic bits on the end of your shoelaces. Imagine each time you tie your shoes, you have to clip off a little bit of that plastic part to get it to go through the lace holes. After you’ve done this enough times, the plastic tip is gone and the shoelace starts to unravel. Once the laces unravel enough, it’s impossible to tie your shoes, and you walk around looking like a goober.

Telomeres are the DNA equivalent of those plastic shoelace bits. When your cells divide via mitosis, the chromosomes of those cells also divide. One set of chromosomes divides to become two half-sets. Your body duplicates each half-set, and one cell becomes two daughter cells.

Simple enough, but there’s a catch.

When your chromosomes split, it’s like a zipper splitting into two parts. Enzymes flood the newly divided chromosome and fill in the missing zipper halves, one little zipper tooth at a time. Problem is, the zipper teeth can’t reach all the way to the end—there has to be a little cap there, and that cap is the last bit of the repet.i.tive telomere. On the next cell division, that last bit of telomere is discarded just like the snipped bit of the plastic shoelace.

If cells with shortened telomeres continue to divide, bad stuff can happen. The cell might enter into apoptosis (the natural kind, not the triangle-induced chain-reaction kind). Worse, damage to a critical gene might make the cell cancerous. This can happen in skin cells, muscle cells, lung cells... and even stem cells.

When a stem cell splits into two daughter cells, it uses a process called differentiation to make one daughter cell another stem cell, while the other becomes any number of good things—muscle, bone, nerve cells, whatever. Stem cells are just funky that way. But as they divide, they suffer the same telomere reduction as any other cell.

As you get older and cells continue to divide, those telomeres shorten and problems become more likely. We have a simple word for this phenomenon: aging. Cells with telomeres that are too short stop dividing and stop replenis.h.i.+ng themselves. This is why your skin gets thin when you age, because the cells stop replicating as effectively—they have used up their telomeres during your preceeding years of life.

Or to think of it in simpler terms, a copy of a copy of a copy can get pretty messed up.