Chapter 7
Brandon’s Pov
I looked at her in astonishment, expecting her to rectify whatever joke she was narrating. But all she did was glance down, embarrassed, and began fiddling with her hands, avoiding eye contact.
But I halted for a moment, recalling the beginning of her story. I believe I overheard her claim to be a Harvard graduate if I am not mistaken. Were they pre-loaded with idiocy, or was she cut from a different cloth altogether?
I moved closer to her without thinking, and she turned to look at me. I could tell she was expecting a hug as she leaned in, but I burst out laughing, much to her surprise. I laughed so loudly that if anyone was passing by on the highway, they could have heard my laughter. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I coughed violently; my chest ached, but that did not bother me.
I couldn’t recall the last time I laughed that hard; it had been long. The woman next to me was the dumbest person on the planet. I couldn’t even put it down to love or say she was head over heels in love. If it were the case, many more women would have jumped off bridges.
She tried to move away from me, but I clung to her fiercely.
“You said we should share our stories, not laugh at each other,” she murmured, her arms folded and her gaze averted. However, I couldn’t stop myself from laughing and apologizing.
“Wait a minute, how could you have been taking birth control pills and not realized it?” I inquired, but she merely averted her gaze. I thought she was going to cry, but she held it together.
“Come on, Thalia, even your body could have signaled you. And fourteen-year-olds have seen what a pill or vitamin looks like?” Between giggles, I inquired.
“Alright. I’m stup*d and dumb, is that what you want me to say?” She screamed at me as she pushed me, causing the bridge to move. It was already dark, and the tremors froze us both as I stopped laughing, our hearts racing simultaneously.
The truth was that we were cowards. The bridge came to a halt, and I was the first to speak.
“Thalia, dumb or stup*d people have several cells still operating in their brains, while you on the other side have zero cells,”
Without saying anything, she scoffed and gazed at me..
“Just curious as to why your father failed to diagnose your stup*dity? He would have never left his business in your name, would he?” I posed.
“Are you going to tell me your story?” she demanded, taking a deep breath in.
“Brainless girl, we’re in for a long night already. After I tell you about my terrible life, you can laugh and grill me,” I replied.
She groaned and responded, “Well, to be honest, I have all my cells intact; take me to any biotech company and I will run it, even invent,” she laughed.
To be honest, I was starting to love her company; no one had ever piqued my interest and piqued my curiosity as she had. Her folly was mind-boggling.
I asked her out of the blue, “Do you still love him?” I could tell she wasn’t expecting me to become serious in an
instant.
“I’d say I despise him, yet everything is my fault. That’s why I’m killing myself rather than killing him,” she responded. We sat in silence, I had a lot of questions but refrained from asking.
I swallowed my saliva and began my story “My name is Brandon, Brandon Frazer,” I said but she remained silent and did not react to my name. “I mean, Brandon Frazer, thee Fraser” I stated again.
She shifted her gaze to me, perplexed. She was not only brain dead, but she appeared to be from the stone age where the Internet and social media were not in existence.
“Do you even have any slightest idea who I am?” I asked furiously, I took off my hoodie. It was dark, but at least my beautiful hair would give her a hint. But, to my dismay, she refused with a nod of her head. I clenched my teeth and continued with my sad and pathetic life.
Brandon Fraser was my name, and I was the world’s richest man under thirty. Of course, I inherited it all, but unlike the idiot next to me, I tripled it. My parents perished in a car accident when I was eighteen, and I was an only child.
My father raised me in such a way that I was always ready to take over. In university, I had to step up and work hard. Many people feared I wasn’t ready to take over the world’s largest transportation network, but I proved them wrong.
Mandel Logistics was the largest regulator of distribution and transportation companies in the country, and we controlled the entire transportation network. There were four modes of transportation: land, air, rail, and road. Every transportation company was registered under us, and we devoured the ones that tried to be independent through back doors. On top of it, we had our fleets of ships, planes, and trucks doubling our profits.
I also branched out from transportation into supplying raw garment materials. If you wanted something, you had to go to the neck, as my father used to say. We sold to every fashion house, designer company, and distributor. We made millions to billions of dollars in months, if not weeks.
I built a billion-dollar empire from the million dollar firm my father left me. Everything and everyone was under my control. Politicians, criminals, and women were just a few examples. With just one word, I could bring our country’s economy to a halt. Many people attempted to take away my power or set me up, but they were unsuccessful
However, like with any corporation, transportation of imports and exports required a regulatory body, which I and my associates provided.
I was on top of the world, living high on Booze, clubbing, and drugs while lurking in plain sight. I had a woman for each day of the week, and I named them after the days I spent with them.
I didn’t like sleeping with the same girl twice a month. They all queued up to have a taste of me; my bed abilities were well known, and every female who had the opportunity lived to tell the tale.
I never went without a new woman on any given day. They were all eager to partake in the sex party lifestyle. It was all about the or*asmus, extended periods of drug-induced body pleasure.
I would buy and experiment with whatever sex drug my cars heard of, and we would have sex parties from Friday to Sunday at daybreak. We would replace any girl who couldn’t take it with a single phone call. We had girls on standby in case of any setbacks.
Nothing mattered because the only thing that we cared about was getting high and having fun at the same time. It became the order of the day and we saw nothing wrong with it; after all, we didn’t force anything or do anything illegal. It was my money, and I could brew it wherever I pleased.
But, aside from my party life existence, I was a responsible citizen who always paid his taxes on time, practiced community social responsibility, and donated to every charitable organization my ears heard of.
Every acquaintance or visitor who came to my door with a sad story received a handout without hesitation. My name was on everyone’s lips, and I was adored, at least that was what I was made to believe.
However, as I approached my twenty-sixth birthday, I began to organize my life and cut back on my parting. I needed a wife or anything that would provide me with an heir. What was the point of possessing the world if there wasn’t an heir to hand it over to?
However, a week before my twenty-sixth birthday, disaster struck. I awoke exhausted, assuming it was from my weekend party, but when I headed to my sink, large clots of blood poured out my mouth.
I ignored it and went to work, and that was the last encounter of my previous life. My secretary claimed that I passed out at the door of my office and awoke two weeks later.
I couldn’t recognize myself. In the mirror, my handsome face that attracted women was a pile of grey and paleness. Worse, the physicians didn’t know what was happening to me; they were just as clueless as I was.
They made so many mistakes in diagnosing me that one treatment sent me into a two-week coma. They had previously diagnosed me with Waldenstrom Macroglobulinemia, a type of uncommon white-cell malignancy.
Where the bone marrow generates too many aberrant white blood cells, which crowd out healthy blood cells, resulting in cancer. The aberrant white blood cells create a protein that builds up in the blood, obstructing circulation and resulting in illness.
But they were mistaken; the chemo they started giving me started altering my red blood cells by triggering the production of a protein that coated red blood cells, leading to the earlier mutant white cells assaulting the red cells.
They changed their stance and diagnosed me with Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia (AHA) where a person generated molecules that cause their own body to destroy red blood cells (RBCs), resulting in anemia (low hemoglobin), although my hemoglobin was normal.
While my bone marrow was busy making a lot of white cells, I was also making a lot of red blood cells to replace the ones that had been killed. How that was possible, they had no idea.
I hired all of the world’s greatest scientists and offered them all of the money in the world if they could solve the enigma. However, whatever they did backfire and worsened the problem.
They first removed the spleen in the hopes that a new one would take over the task of removing the damaged RBCs, but it was unable to keep up the mutation.
Chapter 7
They next transplanted the complete bone marrow, which was the source of all blood cells, but that just accelerated the mutation. It was as though the cells were being given a fresh environment to mutate and attack each other in.
They had no idea where the mutated white cells or the proteins coating the RBCs were originating from..
We were back to square one, with no idea why various cells were attacking one another or why certain cells were surviving the attack.
Lastly, they tried transplanting the heart, but the cells moved and began multiplying in the heart, just as they had in the bone marrow. That’s when hell started because the heart pumped blood to all of the body’s or*ans.
The lungs were severely damaged, which is why I got clots every time I coughed. All of the transplants I had over the course of a year simply served to spread the infection to every or*an in my body.
Every option I’d tried ended in tragedy. I had fired so many brilliant doctors and scientists that I lost track of. Sadly, all of my “friends” stopped visiting me. They must have grown impatient waiting for my recovery, but then again. I wasn’t giving them the lavish lifestyle that I used to. I became a pile of boring grey mess.
They couldn’t milk me any longer since I was devoting all of my funds to discovering a cure. I realized I’d never had friends, and I’d never woken up with fresh flowers alongside my bed like normal sick people.
My secretary’s last flowers had begun to dry but I instructed the nurse not to remove them. They reminded me that my life was a lie and that every smile I had ever received was a ruse to get my money. All my life I had surrounded myself with fake people, vultures that only used me for the status I provided.
Even the women that lined up to pleasure me disappeared. Rumors were that I had something contagious that scientists could not figure out.
They did not want to catch it even if it meant losing contact with me. Or me dying alone. I guess my money could not keep them. The money that could not save me ironically.
All of the or*an transplants came at the expense of people who needed it more than I did. People who would have. lived for decades if I hadn’t cut the line because of my financial status.
I guess I was being punished for my sins by the big man upstairs. No Rich man can buy life. That was my lesson. I was diagnosed with an incurable, unknown disease that was a combination of cancer and anemia but without symptoms.
The scientists were forced to name it after me, Brendan Fraser Autoimmune Macroglobulinemia BFAM.
I became resentful, and hospitals became my home, but I had to return home because I could not stand the scent. I desired a peaceful death. The pointless condition was taking its toll on me, and the doctors could only conclude that the new cells could no longer keep up with the mutation.
After hearing that the experts had failed and that I was dying, there were numerous requests for me to hand over or sell my company.
Visitors began to flood my home, there were slews of lawyers approaching me, requesting that I sign a will or liquidate my business. Charity organizations, politicians, and business rivals all rushed to offer fake prayers, but I chased them
all away.
There I was all alone in a house that used to host hundreds of people dying, a cylinder of oxygen and a blood transfusion pack attached, watching myself deteriorate. I called my doctors, It had already been two years with no hope. They finally gave me a number, I had only a month to live.
I fired them all since they were useless to me, and I started counting down the days until my death. I had unlimited funds but no time to search for a cure or treatment. Time had abandoned me, leaving me to languish in my illness. alone.
But in the previous year, I had often considered killing myself; I was determined not to let fate prevail, but I never had the courage until I heard about the one-month deadline. That was my motivation for scaling the bridge: to beat the clock and determine my fate.
“So, Thalia, would you rather wait until you were a pile of bones and die painfully slowly or would you jump and die quickly, beating the clock?” I inquired of her.
