Episode 12: Mr. Body Beautiful
Part 3
The bright lights of the infirmary faded as the yellow Beetle flew into the black cavern of K’s left nostril. With a soft bump, Nick felt the tires hit the ground. Next, he heard a harsh, metallic scraping sound, which he attributed to Red’s tweezers releasing the car from their grip. He twisted around in his seat to see her humongous hand retreating from the hole through which they had entered. By the time he turned back around to face forward again, the car’s automatic headlights had come on, adjusting to the sudden darkness. Nick’s jaw dropped as he took a look around.
“Wow…”
If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought they were parked inside a large, pink cave. The walls were smooth, shiny, and reddish in color. They were covered in narrow black spikes, which Nick realized were K’s nose hairs. He had even more than Di-Crapio did. Clinging to them here and there were big clumps of lumpy beige gunk.
“What is that stuff?” he started to ask, and then it hit him. “Uh-oh…”
“Boogers!” Jay and Styx both cried as they stared out the windshield. “Aghhh!”
“Clearly K doesn’t pick his nose often enough,” said Nick, snickering as he snapped a picture with his phone, which had been in his back pocket when he was shrunk.
Jay looked over at him with disgust. “Does that mean you do pick your nose?”
Nick shrugged. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“Dude… remind me never to touch anything he’s touched without thoroughly disinfecting it first,” Styx said to Jay, who gave an emphatic nod of agreement.
But Nick wasn’t embarrassed. Obviously he was the only one in the car being honest about his bad habits. Then he remembered that two of his favorite Carter Girls could hear everything they were saying through Pearl’s three-way communication feed. He glanced down at the computer screen embedded in the dashboard to see Red Jewel giggling with her hand over her mouth on one side while Pearl shook her head on the other. Now she really wouldn’t want him to put his hands on anything in her lab, including her.
“Well… I guess we should get a move on,” said Jay, turning the key in the ignition to start the car’s engine. “The sooner we find and deactivate the bomb, the sooner we can get the hell out of here. Bug, do your stuff!” As the engine sprang to life, he shifted into drive and moved his foot to the accelerator.
Nick expected to feel the car roll forward, but nothing happened.
Frowning, Jay pushed the pedal to the floor. The engine revved. The tires squealed. But still, the car remained in place.
“Did you forget to take off the parking brake?” Nick asked, looking down between the two front seats. But no, the parking brake was pushed all the way down in the off position.
“No… I think we’re stuck.” Jay’s eyes darted from Nick to Styx in the back seat. “One of you is gonna have to get out and see what’s going on.”
“Well, since I can’t even get out of this small-ass car without one of you getting out first, it needs to be Nick,” said Styx.
“Fine,” Nick agreed without an argument. Secretly, he was excited to explore K’s nasal cavity on foot.
“That’s the spirit, Carter!” Jay cheered him on. “Take chances. Make mistakes. Get messy!”
“But maybe don’t make mistakes on this mission.” Pearl’s voice crackled through the car’s speaker. “Otherwise, K will kill you — if you don’t kill him first.”
“I’ll try not to,” Nick promised. “But God ‘nose’ I’m probably gonna get messy poking around this place!”
The others groaned when they caught his terrible pun. “Car-ter!”
He just laughed as he reached for the door handle to let himself out. It was hard to push the door open. A powerful wind whistled through the cavern, changing direction every few seconds as K inhaled and exhaled.
As soon as Nick climbed out of the car, his feet sank into what felt like mud. Looking down, he realized he was standing knee-deep in K’s mucus. He tried to lift his right foot, then his left, but the yellowish slime was too thick. He couldn’t move!
“Hey, Jay!” he called. “I’m stuck!”
Jay rolled down the window. “What?”
“I said I’m stuck! The car, too!” Now he knew why they weren’t going anywhere. All four tires were totally submerged. The mucus seemed to be slowly sucking up the small Beetle.
Unbuckling, Jay crawled across the front seat and stuck his head out the window. He looked down, then up at Nick again. “Damn. That is disgusting.”
“I know, dude; now get me out!
“Okay, I’ll try — but it’s ‘snot’ going to be easy!”
Styx shook his head. “Will you two stop it with the stupid puns?! At my old job, we never joked around while we worked.”
“Well, your old job sounds boring,” Nick snapped at his shadow agent. “Red? Pearl? A little help here, please?”
Through the open window, he could hear the two Carter Girls discussing the best course of action. “I could try to loosen the car with my tweezers,” Red said, “but Nick’s too tiny. I can’t even see him with my naked eye; I’m worried I would crush him!”
“Don’t worry,” replied Pearl. “I have a solution! Just put the car in hovercraft mode and use it to pull Nick out.”
“It’s a hovercraft, too?!” Nick cried. “Pearly, have I told you lately that I love you?”
The camera caught the faint blush that flooded Pearl’s cheeks, but she brushed his sentiments aside. “Of course it’s a hovercraft!”
“No, it’s a Buggercraft!” he quipped.
Even as she rolled her eyes at him, Pearl couldn’t hide her smile. “Just hit the round button that looks like a fan, Jay, and you can blow this joint.”
“You mean, ‘blow this nose,’” said Nick with a grin.
Everyone groaned again. “Car-ter!”
Jay found the button Pearl had described on the dashboard console. “I thought this controlled the air conditioning,” he said, chuckling as he pushed it.
Nick heard a dull humming sound and watched in amazement as a big propeller popped out of a panel in the back of the Beetle and began to spin. Slowly, the car rose out of the slime.
“Here, grab my hand!” Jay called, reaching out to Nick. Nick took hold of his arm with both hands as the car hovered just above the layer of mucus. “Hang on tight!” Jay tried to accelerate again, and this time, the car lurched forward, jerking Nick right out of his flippers.
“My flippers!” he shouted as he floated barefoot across the surface of the snot. “I lost my flippers!”
“Forget the flippers! Get in here!” Jay helped hoist Nick through the open window. They both slumped back into their seats, breathing hard.
“Now my feet are all sticky,” Nick whined, wiping them off on Pearl’s floor mat.
Jay ignored him. “We’re free from the phlegm! Thanks, Pearl! Red, where are we heading next?”
“First, you’ll follow this passage all the way back to the pharynx, which is the part of the throat behind the nasal cavity,” Red explained, pointing it out on a diagram she had pulled from one of her medical textbooks. She held it up to the camera so they could see the path she had drawn as she plotted their course from K’s nostril to his heart. “The pharynx carries food to the esophagus and air to the trachea. It contains a flap called the epiglottis, which closes during swallowing to prevent food from going down the wrong pipe. When you come to the epiglottis, you’ll want to pass through the open flap, which will take you to the trachea. Otherwise, you’ll go down the esophagus and end up in K’s stomach instead.”
“In other words, don’t miss our exit,” said Jay with a nervous chuckle. “Thanks for being our GPS.”
Red smiled. “Happy to help navigate.”
“Good thing someone ‘nose’ where we’re going!” Nick chimed in gleefully.
“Give it up, Carter; it wasn’t funny the first two times,” he heard Leo complain, but Red and Lancy still laughed.
“At least some people like my jokes, which is more than I can say about yours, Lame-onardo!” he called back. “Maybe when we’re done here, we can go inside you to look for your sense of humor. But I guess we would fail at that mission; we’d never find it because it doesn’t exist!”
“Aw, leave him alone, Nick,” Jay chided gently. “Let’s just stay focused on this mission, alright? I’m gonna need your full attention to make sure we don’t miss that flap Red was talking about. Can you keep an eye out for me?”
Nick nodded. “Of course.”
“Great. Seatbelts, everyone!” With a click, Jay refastened his belt, and Nick followed suit. “To the trachea!”
***
Standing in front of the infirmary’s video screen with her arms crossed, Red Jewel watched nervously as the Beetle made its way to the back of K’s throat. Pearl had added another feed from a camera mounted on the front of her car, so they could all see what Jay’s team saw inside K. To Red, it looked like the view she had during laparoscopic procedures, when she inserted a long cable with a camera on the end through a small opening to explore the body without creating a large incision. She was in control then. But this time, she felt helpless. All she could do from her current vantage point was watch and wait.
She alternated between observing the mission’s progress and monitoring her patient. K’s vital signs remained stable as he rested in a state of semiconsciousness. She kept an especially close eye on his heart rate and respiration, ready to intervene if he showed signs of distress. Depending on how long the mission took, he might need another dose of the sedative to keep him from waking up, but too much could cause him to stop breathing.
“How’s Kevin doing?” Brian asked. He kept his voice casual, but she could hear the quaver of concern in it. Of course he was worried — they all were, but this was K’s cousin. He had known him all his life. The fear of losing him had to be weighing even heavier on The Rok than on the rest of them.
Red glanced up at the bedside monitor, noting the numbers on it. All were within the normal range. “He’s good,” she replied firmly, watching the cardiac waveform, which showed K’s heart beating in a regular sinus rhythm. “So far, everything’s going according to plan.”
Brian nodded, his lips pressed into a tight smile. “Let’s pray it stays that way.”
***
Nick held his breath during the perilous descent down K’s nasal passage. He hated the bouncy feeling of turbulence created by air collecting under Pearl’s car-turned-hovercraft. It was almost as bad as flying.
He inhaled sharply as a gust of wind seemed to grab the tiny vehicle, flinging it upwards like a pizza chef tossing dough. He felt his butt fly off his seat when the Buggercraft suddenly dropped again, his lap belt catching him hard across the middle.
He heard Jay chuckle. “You okay, Carter? You’re awfully quiet over there all of a sudden.”
Nick let out a nervous laugh. “Yeah… all good.” His heart hammered in his throat. He swallowed hard and hitched in another deep breath. “Yeah, I’m free… free falling,” he sang softly, both to help himself calm down and because he knew Jay would expect nothing less of him.
“Keep your eyes peeled for that flap Red told us about,” Jay warned him.
“It should be coming up ahead of you,” Red advised as the steep tunnel they had been traveling down seemed to level out.
Nick looked around, expecting to see some sort of doorway in the shiny, pink walls of the cavern, but there was nothing.
“Wait,” said Styx suddenly, leaning forward and poking his head between the two front seats. “Is that it up there?” He pointed through the windshield.
Following the trajectory of his finger, Nick spotted a flesh-colored protrusion that looked like it could be some kind of trap door installed in the ceiling. It was positioned over the mouth of a dark tunnel, which seemed to have been built on top of a ledge. Beneath the ledge was a second tunnel, even darker and narrower than the one above it.
Red’s face filled her side of the screen as she leaned closer to the monitor in her infirmary, studying the video feed from the front of the Bug. “That’s it,” she confirmed.
“But which one do we take?” Nick asked, eyeing the two tunnels. One had to be the esophagus, the other the trachea, but he couldn’t tell which was which.
“You want the one on top,” said Red, to his relief. It was the wider of the two.
But his relief was short-lived. As they approached the tunnels, Nick saw the trapdoor start to lower over the entrance to the trachea. “Floor it!” he shouted.
Jay slammed his foot down on the accelerator, and the Bug shot forward like a bullet, bounding up and over the ledge.
“Must go faster… must go faster,” Styx chanted from the back seat as they raced toward the rapidly shrinking opening.
Nick closed his eyes and tried to brace himself for a collision, but the car ducked under the door just in time. When he opened his eyes again, they were inside the pitch-black tunnel, brightened only by the beams of their headlights. He let out the breath he had been holding in a shaky sigh, his whole body trembling.
“Whew… that was close.” Even Jay sounded rattled that time.
“You must have triggered the swallowing reflex,” said Red. “K’s body thought you were food.”
“Well, I am quite the snack — right, Jewel?” Nick joked, feeling more relaxed now that they were out of harm’s way and, for the time being, back on solid ground.
“Not now, Nick, we’re working!” she hissed, her cheeks blushing bright pink.
“He’s right, though,” he heard Lancy say in the background. “I’d like to nibble on that delicious piece of–”
“THAT’S ENOUGH, LANCY!” Nick said loudly, drowning out the rest of Lancy’s sentence. He felt his own face flush.
On the other side of the split-screen, Brian raised his eyebrows at Pearl. “Don’t y’all have a sexual harassment policy in your workplace?”
She sighed. “It’s not enforced as much as it should be.”
As the Bug made its way down the long tube, Nick looked around. The walls of this tunnel had a different texture than the cavity they’d been in before. They were ribbed with ridges, like the bendable part of a drinking straw. It was even more blustery inside. He could hear the wind whistling through the tunnel and feel it rocking the car, blowing them forward whenever K breathed in and backward when he breathed out.
“Which way, Red?” asked Jay when they came to a fork in the road. The wide tunnel split into two smaller tunnels, one veering off to the right, the other to the left.
“Whichever one you want,” the doctor replied. “They’re both bronchial tubes, which lead to the lungs. It doesn’t matter which lung you go into; you can get to the bloodstream through either one.”
Jay glanced at Nick. “What do you think?”
He shrugged. “Right feels… right.”
“I was gonna go left, but okay. Right it is.” Jay turned the wheel toward Nick, taking them into the right bronchial tube.
This smaller tunnel seemed to narrow the further they traveled down it. To Nick, it felt like the walls were closing in on them. He started seeing openings in them as the tunnel branched off in different directions. “All the vampires… walking through the valley,” he sang softly, “move west… down… Ventura Boulevard. And all the bad… boys… are standing in the shadows… and the good… girls… are home with broken hearts…”
“You’re getting into the bronchioles now,” said Red. “You can follow any of them to the alveoli, the air sacs where oxygen gets absorbed into the blood.”
Just when Nick began to worry that they would get stuck in the increasingly tight space, the tunnel suddenly opened up into a spacious, spherical room. “Whoa!” he gasped, gazing around the chamber. The curved walls were pink and cushiony. He wanted to jump out of the car and hurl himself into one to see if he bounced back off it.
Styx leaned forward to get a better look through the windshield. “Where are we?”
Nick could hear the wind howling louder than ever outside his window. “I think this is K’s lung,” he said, listening to the whoosh of air.
Jay snickered. “Think he’d kill me if I had a smoke in here? I sure could use one right about now.”
Nick laughed, too. “He definitely would if we don’t end up killing him first. But we’re so tiny, I doubt one cigarette would do much damage.”
Pearl’s voice came through the speakers: “Jay, if you light a cigarette in my car, I’ll kill you before K gets the chance.”
“Don’t worry, Pearl; I don’t have any with me anyway. I left my pack in your lab, in the pocket of my pants,” he said with a sigh. “Ah well… might as well keep going. How are we gonna get out of here, anyway?”
“The walls of the alveoli are really thin. You should be able to go right through them to get to the capillaries on the other side,” replied Red.
“Go through the walls?” Jay repeated. “Wow… we’re gonna be like Harry Potter going to Platform Nine and Three Quarters!”
“Oh god…” Leo groaned. “Not another Harry Potter reference.”
Red giggled. “Best do it at a bit of a run, if you’re nervous,” she said in a passable British accent.
“But don’t forget to put my baby in submarine mode before you get into the bloodstream,” added Pearl.
“Which button do I push for that?”
“The one with the music note on it.”
“Oh.” Jay chuckled. “I thought that was for the radio. Why a music note?”
“Push it, and you’ll find out,” was Pearl’s mysterious reply.
Jay sucked in a deep breath. “Here goes nothing. Bug, do your stuff!” Gripping the wheel tightly, he pushed the pedal to the floor and sped toward the pink wall. A second before they reached it, he punched the button as Nick closed his eyes, preparing for a crash.
But the crash never came. The car passed through the wall as if it were made of paper, and as it emerged on the other side, a Beatles song began to play.
“In the town where I was born
lived a man who sailed to sea.
And he told us of his life
in the land of submarines.
So we sailed on to the sun,
‘til we found the sea of green.
And we lived beneath the waves
in our yellow submarine…”
“Pearly! Yes!” Nick shouted, punching his fist in the air as his eyes flew open. He found himself in a completely different world. The car hurtled through a thin tube that reminded him of a water slide. The enclosed walls were pale purple, almost translucent, though they were traveling too fast for him to see anything through them. In front of them was a line of what looked like red innertubes, moving single file through the tube. “Wow… the bloodstream!”
But that wasn’t all: Pearl’s Beetle had been transformed, too. Looking out his window, he saw fins protruding from where the wheels had been. A periscope had lowered itself from a panel in the ceiling between the two front seats. The other end must have popped up out of the roof, for when Nick put his eye to the lens, he could see above it. Two more propellers were turning where there used to be taillights, powering the yellow submarine — no, Bugmarine — through the capillary.
“This is pretty amazing, Pearl,” Jay agreed.
“So is this view!” said Red, her eyes growing larger as she gazed at her screen. “Are you guys seeing this?” The blood vessel gradually widened, allowing more and more particles to pass through it at once. “Red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets… Isn’t it beautiful?”
Nick laughed. “Only you would be this mesmerized by blood.”
Beside her, Leo made a face. “I’m fine with it as long as it stays inside the body.”
“Aww, are you a little squeamish, Di-Crapio?” Nick teased him. “Maybe you should sit the rest of this one out.” He hated the thought of that guy hanging around Red. It was bad enough that he’d already dug his hooks into Diamond.
“I’m fine with you staying inside K’s body, too, Carter,” Leo fired back.
“That’s enough!” shouted Jay, sounding remarkably like K. “Quit bickering! We need to concentrate. We’re in the circulatory system now, which means we should be coming to his heart soon — right, Red?”
“That’s right,” she confirmed. “You’re heading there now with the newly-oxygenated blood cells. You’ll enter the left atrium and pass through the mitral valve into the left ventricle, which will pump you back out into the aorta. Then you’ll circulate through K’s body before coming back to his heart, but this time on the right side. That’s where–”
The rest of her words were drowned out by an ominous drumming sound, which grew louder and louder with each passing second. Lub-dub… lub-DUB… LUB-DUB…
Nick looked at Jay. “Do you hear that?”
He nodded. “The heart…”
Styx stuck his head between their seats to get a better look as the three of them stared out the windshield, waiting. Nick held his breath as they approached K’s heart. From their vantage point, all they could see was a dark, gaping hole at the end of the tube they were traveling through. Each heartbeat was deafening; they could hear nothing else. The current seemed to be picking up, carrying them faster and faster the closer they got to the heart.
As they passed through the hole, Nick caught a glimpse of a cavernous chamber. But before he could get a good look, the submarine was suddenly pitched forward. He heard Jay and Styx scream as he felt himself flying backward against his seat.
Ahead, he saw another opening, only this one was covered by two large doors that closed like a pair of snapping jaws. As they hurtled toward it, completely out of Jay’s control, the doors opened wide. Nick cringed, expecting them to close again before the amphibious car could clear them, but they stayed open long enough for the Bug to be sucked through. A split second later, they slammed shut, narrowly missing the propellers.
As they entered the next chamber, the whole vehicle vibrated with the force of another heartbeat, which sounded like a sonic boom and felt like an earthquake. The current shifted, and the Bugmarine rolled sideways as it was swept out of the chamber through a different hole. Nick closed his eyes and clung to his seat, silently praying for it to be over. He felt like he was on a rollercoaster ride straight to Hell.
Finally, the turbulence calmed, and the current slowed down, the thunderous heartbeats fading as the car drifted further away from the heart. Nick opened his eyes and peeked at Jay, who was pale white and looked like he wanted to throw up. “Everyone alright?” he asked, glancing back at Styx, who appeared just as shaken.
They both nodded. “That was way worse than I thought it would be,” Jay admitted.
“What happened?” asked Pearl, frowning. “Your camera feed cut out for a second.”
“They just passed through the left side of the heart,” said Red. “It looked like a rough ride.”
“That’s an understatement,” Nick replied, forcing a shaky laugh. “It felt like we were caught in a hurricane!”
“How the hell are we supposed to deactivate a bomb in there?” Jay demanded. “Even if we could get to it, there’s no way we would be able to do that kind of intricate work in those conditions. I couldn’t tell which way was up or down, let alone which wire to cut. This is a fucking disaster!”
Nick wasn’t used to hearing Jay sound so defeated. He was always so confident and cool-headed, even in a crisis. It was one of the qualities that made him a good agent and leader. If Jay didn’t think they could do it, the mission was doomed.
That meant K was doomed, too.
***
Red Jewel’s mind raced as her eyes darted around the room, from the nervous faces of her friends on the video screen to the motionless body of her boss on the bed. It was hard to wrap her head around the fact that Nick, Jay, and Styx were circulating through K’s bloodstream, even though she was the one who had navigated them there.
Ever since Pearl had suggested using the shrink ray, Red had been so focused on plotting a course to K’s heart that she hadn’t stopped to consider how difficult it would be for them to disarm the bomb embedded inside it while it was beating. In hindsight, it seemed obvious that the turbulence created by each contraction of the heart would be too intense to work in. Why hadn’t she thought of that before?
Jay was right: This was a disaster.
Lancy was all in a dither. “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?!” he cried frantically, flapping his hands as he paced in his pink-striped pinafore.
Red felt her face heat up as her own heart began to hammer against her ribs. Through the pounding of blood in her ears, she heard Pearl say, “Couldn’t you slow down K’s heart rate, Red? That would give them more time between beats to get their bearings. They could use the Bug’s built-in grappling hook to anchor themselves to the heart and…”
Red nodded slowly as she considered the plan. “I could, but it would only buy them an extra second or so — not enough time to reach the bomb.” She could only think of one way to get around the problem, but it was so drastic, she was afraid to suggest it as a possible solution.
“You have to stop his heart.”
It was Brian who said what she had been thinking. Pearl’s eyes widened as she jerked her head toward him. On the other side of the split-screen, Nick and Jay reacted the same way. Red looked around the infirmary: judging by their expressions, Leo, Lancy, and Archie were just as stunned.
“They do it in open-heart surgery, right?” Brian continued. His face was somber, his voice surprisingly calm. “Stop the heart so they can repair it… then restart it.”
Red nodded. “That’s right,” she replied, her mind racing again. “But that requires the use of cardiopulmonary bypass — a heart-lung machine to keep oxygenated blood circulating while the heart is still. We don’t have that kind of equipment here, nor the personnel needed to run it. This is an infirmary, not an operating room.”
“Could you call the hospital?” Jay suggested. “Have them do it?”
She considered this option. Himitsu Takana had a secret arrangement with the closest trauma center, which had agreed to accept and treat critical cases that she was incapable of handling on her own, no questions asked. But they had never had to use it, and she wasn’t sure now was the best time to start. They wouldn’t just be putting K’s life in a different pair of hands; they would also be putting an entire hospital full of innocent people in the line of fire. If something went wrong, and the bomb exploded… Red shook her head. They couldn’t take that kind of risk. But she didn’t see how they would succeed without some degree of danger.
“There’s another way,” she said reluctantly. “We could induce cardiac arrest without bypass, but it won’t give you much more time — a few minutes at most. Would that be enough time to take out the bomb?”
Slowly, Pearl nodded. “It’ll be tight, but I think we could work within that window. We know where the bomb is, and once we have eyes on it, it shouldn’t take long to defuse it. What do you think, Jay?”
He hesitated. “I dunno… maybe I should just go to Vegas and turn myself in to Rough. That’s what he really wants, right?”
“No way, dude,” said Nick, shaking his head. “You’re not gonna give him what he wants. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, which is exactly what he and Drums are. They’re trying to terrorize us. We can’t let them get away with it.”
“I hate to admit it, but… I agree with Carter,” said Leo. Red saw Nick raise his eyebrows, mirroring her own shocked expression. “If K wanted you to go to Vegas, he would have sent you himself. We have to follow his orders and finish this mission the way he wanted us to. Sure, Red’s plan sounds risky, but we’re all a bunch of risk-takers, aren’t we? We wouldn’t be here right now if we weren’t. So I say we go for it.”
“You just wanna see me die, don’t you, Di-Crapio?” Nick muttered, rolling his eyes.
“It’s not you I’m worried about,” Red admitted. “It’s K. Without circulation, his brain will be deprived of oxygen. It only takes four minutes without oxygen for permanent brain damage to occur, followed by death.”
Nick’s eyes widened. “So… what you’re saying is… we’ve only got four minutes to save the world?”
She shrugged. “To save K, anyway.”
“Well, what are we waiting for? Time is wasting!”
“Hang on a second,” said Jay, holding up his hand. “K hasn’t consented to this.”
“He can’t consent; he’s unconscious,” Leo inserted matter-of-factly.
“I know, but nobody said anything about stopping his heart before he was sedated. If we can’t wake him up to ask him what he wants, then we should at least ask his next of kin for consent. Which, I guess in this case, would be his cousin, The Rok. What do you say?”
Brian’s steely blue eyes stared straight at the screen. “I say we do it.”
***