Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) đź“–
- Author: Aaron Dunlap
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Book online «Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) 📖». Author Aaron Dunlap
Now a store manager was on the scene, trying to cordon the spectators away from Amy and the med student. I slipped through the crowd and slid on my knees back to Amy’s side. I set the two bottles of water on the floor; I tore open the box of replacement filters and pulled out a single white, plastic water filter cartridge.
The medical student, and everybody whose face I could see, looked at me as if I were crazy. If I had the time, I would have smiled at them.
I pulled my knife back out, set the water filter on the floor, and stabbed into the side of it with the knife. Once through the thin plastic exterior the knife stopped against something dry and sandy. I used a sawing motion and twisted the filter with my other hand to cut the whole top off of the filter and tossed it aside, leaving a kind of makeshift plastic cup in my hand. Inside the cup, and overflowing onto the floor, was a black, slightly crystalline powder with a few plastic-looking, tiny rubbery balls mixed in. I had no idea what the balls were, but the black powder was pure carbon. Activated charcoal.
The med student held Amy’s torso against the floor, someone else held her legs down by the ankles. When the med student realized what I’d done, he let out a slight chuckle.
I poured some of the charcoal onto the floor to make room in the filter cup and topped it off with water from one of the bottles. I covered the top with one hand and shook the filter to get the carbon particles wet, and then poured the sandy sludge right into Amy’s mouth, followed by some water from the bottle. The med student held Amy’s mouth shut and lifted her head slightly. She coughed a few times, but it went down.
“What was that about?” the man holding Amy’s legs down asked.
The med student turned his head toward him and said, “Activated charcoal. It absorbs the poison in the stomach so it isn’t metabolized. Most people get it in tablets.”
“I’m not most people,” I said, standing back up and retreating again. I squeezed through the crowd and headed over to the small, white mini-building that acted as the store’s pharmacy. I looked around for people in white coats, but the room was empty. I turned back around and saw that the pharmacists were all in the midst of the crowd, standing out like grains of salt in a pile of pepper.
“I need Diazepam,” I said from just outside the pharmacy window, loud enough for the pharmacists to hear me. “Or Pavulon.”
The outer ring of the crowd turned toward me, pharmacists included. The oldest of them, a man with graying hair, walk-jogged over to me.
“You need what?” he asked.
“Diazepam,” I repeated.
“For her?”
No, I just remembered I had a prescription to fill and thought I’d do it now while there’s no line. “Yes, for her!”
He looked around, nervous and distraught. “I can’t issue meds without a doctor’s authorization—”
“This is an emergency!” I interrupted.
“Even still. Only a doctor can know what she needs.”
I sighed, then turned around and slid the pharmacy window open a bit wider and jumped onto the counter and dropped into the pharmacy.
“Hey!” the guy said. What was he going to do?
I looked at the shelves, hundreds of white bottles perched at the edges of each shelf. I tried to make some kind of sense out of the ordering of the medications, incorrectly assuming it would all be alphabetical, and after about seventy seconds stumbled upon the Diazepam. I grabbed the whole bottle and hopped back over the counter and pushed past the protesting pharmacist, through the crowd, and back to Amy and the men keeping her down.
I held the bottle out to the med student, the label facing him, and said, “How much?”
He squinted to read the label, looked at Amy, then back at me.
“What are you?” he asked.
“Unique,” I said. “How many pills?”
Sirens slammed against my head in steady intervals as I bounced around the back of an ambulance. It was too bumpy to put in an IV, so they’d strapped Amy in tightly and shot something into her leg and pumped oxygen into her mouth with a clear, plastic… oxygen squeezy thing. I tried not to notice that her shirt had been cut open.
Someone tried to poison me. Amy had taken it instead. Her body was out of her control. Her mind locked in a convulsing prison.
I watched a heart monitor displayed on a screen mounted to the side of the vehicle, lines danced their merry dance. It was then that I realized this was my life now. As much as I tried to run from it, my life will never calm down. Something in the core of me seemed to summon havoc, manifest it all around me. I let go of any hope for a normal life then, and just hoped that my curse wouldn’t spill onto any more of the people close to me. I did not want Amy to die; I couldn’t let her take my bullet.
The ambulance screeched to a halt and the doors burst open, the chaos amplified. White jackets and green scrubs yelled back and forth between blue coats. Everything moved, everybody made noise; I couldn’t track any of it.
“This the poisoning?”
Out of the ambulance.
“Amy Westbourne, 16. Suspected oral strychnine poisoning, muscular spasm, diffuse esophageal spasm.”
Automatic doors.
“Pulse ox 88 and slipping.”
Past a desk.
“Twenty-five of diazepam and unknown dosage activated carbon administered orally at scene. Ten-cc Phenobarbital administered en route.”
Around a corner.
“Trauma three is clear. Any idea how much strychnine was ingested?”
More people show up.
“Get me a line of saline with two milliliters of diazepam and seventy dantrolene.”
Through double doors.
“We need to intubate.”
Past a waiting room, people’s heads drew to the motion.
“No, not with DES. Keep bagging.”
More doors. Curtains and beds everywhere.
“Who’s he, a relative?”
Last set of doors. Even more people.
“Boyfriend, I think.”
“Isn’t this a school day?”
“Sir, do you know how she was poisoned?”
I figured the voice was talking to me so I answered without tracing the source, “She drank from a bottle of tea, said it was bitter. After ten minutes she complained of a headache, after another ten she went lockjaw and dropped.”
“You recognized it as strychnine poisoning and gave her activated carbon and Valium yourself?”
The rolling stretcher stopped beside a bed on wheels. Four of the people floating around her slid Amy from the stretcher to the bed.
I turned to look at who was talking to me, it was a doctor, female, forties. “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, no. There was a guy there, a med student.”
The woman nodded, then turned to a nurse and said what I thought was, “Get Petey down here.” The nurse nodded and went out a set of doors behind her.
Another nurse ran an IV line into Amy’s left arm, another stood over her head and squeezed the plastic bag pumping air into her mouth and nose. A few doctors shouted terse directions back and forth.
“Is she going to be all right?” I asked the doctor who’d been talking to me.
“Don’t know yet,” she said, “we’re pushing anticonvulsants to keep the muscles from spasming, but her lungs aren’t working properly so she’s not getting as much oxygen as she should be. We can’t intubate right now because her throat keeps opening and closing. If that doesn’t stop we may have to perform a tracheotomy, cut a hole into her trachea so we can run air into the lungs.”
The doctor stepped away from me and over to Amy, a flurry of hands moved all around her. Amy just lay there, motionless, like a CPR dummy, until another round of spasms would overpower the effect of the drugs and she would shake and pull at the restraints like she was being electrocuted.
Something in my mind told me to get out of there, like something was wrong. I should call Amy’s dad, I knew, and I should call my mom and make sure she doesn’t touch any of the new food. It was something else, though. Who’s Petey? Get Petey down here, it kept repeating in my head. Do I know a Petey? Or could she have said “P.D.,” the police?
A girl was poisoned with some obscure chemical used almost exclusively to poison people, and I just happened to be able to identify it and know how to treat it. That might look bad. Cops will want to talk to me. They’ll want to know where the strychnine came from, how it got into a bottle of tea that was technically mine. The fact that I was on the shitlist of a Scottish-accented killer who’d used the same poison to kill my principal the night before probably wouldn’t go over too well either. They might also wonder why I wasn’t at school, if that made any difference.
I started to back out through the door we’d come in when I realized that I was clutching Amy’s purse in my hand. I set it down on a small cart of supplies by the door, and slipped out the door into the hall. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, the screen was black. I tried to turn it on, but nothing happened. Shoot, I was supposed to get a new charger for the phone since the original one was in my house. The one that burned down. I headed toward the main waiting room for the ER and found the payphone. I slid my debit card through the phone’s slot and dialed Rubino’s cell number from the business card I was given last Sunday.
Four rings. “Rubino.”
“It’s Baker. You need to come pick me up at Mary Washington Hospital.”
“I, uhh, why?”
“So you can take me to Quantico and so I can put three bullets in Schumer.”
“Okay,” he said, “any particular reason?”
“So he can tell me who the guy is that he hired to take out Comstock,” I said.
“What, did he come after you?” Rubino asked with little concern.
“Someone put strychnine in food delivered to my room. Amy got some of it—”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s in the ER right now, they’re talking about cutting a hole in her throat so she can breathe. Are you going to pick me up or not? I need to get out of here before the police find me and start asking why there was poison in my tea.”
“I can deal with the police, for the hundredth time,” he said. “I can also send Bremer over to your hotel with some uniforms to check on your mom and watch the place.”
“Okay, good,” I said. “He’ll probably try to come after me again when he finds out I’m still walking.”
“All right,” Rubino said, “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
He hung up, I hung up.
I paced around the waiting room while I waited.
Strychnine. Damn it all, someone tried to poison me. Some crazy hitman. What is this? This isn’t normal. A guy my dad worked for
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