“Oh, shit! Oh, shit!” The man at the top of the stairs turned and ran back up the way he came.
“What’s happening?” a third man’s voice shouted.
“Somebody’s coming out! Holy shit! Get out of the way! Get the fuck out of the way!”
Virginia increased her pace while smelling fresh, cool, night air.
She burst out of the top of the stairs and through the hidden overgrowth concealing the staircase.
“Goddamn!” a man yelled. “Grab her! Get her!”
Virginia screamed, barking at the wolves around her.
She ran toward a gap between two of them. The wolves closed that gap and she ran for another.
“Get her! Boyd! Get her! She’s coming toward you!”
“Shit! She’s crazy!”
The wolves circled her. She spat at them, grabbing tufts of dirt, grass, and loose rock, and throwing them at their slowly closing circle.
A huge one came running from the direction of more lights.
“I’ve got her! I’ve got her! Let me get her!”
She ducked under the man's outstretched arms, but his fingers caught in her hair. She ripped the snagged hair out of her scalp and ran.
“Goddamnit, boys!” another voice shouted. “Grab her before she gets away!”
“I’ve got her!”
She avoided his grasp.
The wolf pack charged after her, circling her again.
Pain shot through her chest and left arm.
She tried to shrug it off.
She had to get away.
The pain toppled her to the ground.
The largest wolf grabbed her legs and shoved her onto her back.
The pain in her chest was blinding her, but she bit and punched at the wolf on top of her.
“Virginia! Virginia, baby!” the wolf shouted, “It’s Darren, baby! It’s Darren!”
Virginia gasped, clutching her shoulder and arm while feebly kicking with her feet.
“Virginia, baby, it’s me!” Darren shouted. “We found you! We found you! It’s going to be okay.”
She couldn’t catch her breath. The pain was killing her.
She screamed a weak scream, a primordial howl.
“Shit! She’s having a heart attack!” a man behind Darren said, “Cindy! Get Cindy! Tell her we need the crash kit! Move!”
A man was shouting her name.
A man was shouting her name.
A man was shouting her name.
A man was pushing her down.
A man was crushing her chest.
A man was shoving her chest.
The wolves made their song.
The moon shown down through the bright shaft above her.
Where was Darren? Where was Dad? Mom?
A man shouted her name.
A man crushed her chest.
The wolves sang.
Turn a Blind Eye
Kelly Griffiths
One ant may be tolerated, two, three.
But they tell their scores of friends with that scent trail thing they do, and you’ve got manifest destiny on your hands.
Some idiot left a half-eaten baloney sandwich on the counter. Fair Pharm’s senior pharmacist was not doing the Mexican Stomping Dance but was disposing of apocalyptic numbers of ants. Sam slammed the fleshy part of his palm down, then wiped the writhing bits into the trash can and pounded some more, repeating the process until only a few stragglers remained. These he pressed with his thumb. They stuck, so he could push-push-push…push-push-push…and then flick the lot of them into the trash.
As he did so, he cursed his newest assistant. The twenty-something tree-hugger’s idea of professional consisted of sweeping his unruly, effeminate locks into a man-bun. There was no doubt it was Ice who left the sandwich. For over twenty years, Sam had been putting up with the brainlessness of his assistants and customers. Pharmacy customers were stupid. Even stupider than Ice, which was saying something.
How can you get a college degree and not foresee the consequences of leaving an unwrapped baloney sandwich on the counter overnight?
Did he need to post a sign? Please Do Not Leave Unwrapped Food on the Counter.
Sam’s favorite moron-proofing sign came from the Caribbean, where things were obviously a little more loosey-goosey. Please Do Not Indiscriminately Relieve Yourself in This Area. That was rich. Sam had a picture taken of himself in front of it while he made as if to unzip his fly.
Sam understood why Styrofoam cups had warnings. It was for morons like Ice. Just because one ordered a hot coffee didn’t mean a warning wasn’t in order. His customers needed warnings. Warning: gravity in effect. Don’t step off bridge. Warning: don’t cross an interstate at dusk wearing grey. Warning: the oral contraceptive should be taken orally.
That actually happened. One of his customers came to him pregnant and pissed as hell. She shook the contraceptives in his face and demanded a refund. After ranging around in her purse, she brandished a white stick and waved that too, nearly smacked him with it. It had two lines and smelled faintly of urine.
Sam tried to reason with her. “No method of birth control is a hundred percent effective, but if you’re taking them at the same time every day—”
She interrupted. “—and it scratches when we have sex. It doesn’t even dissolve right.”
Sam was not good at keeping a straight face.
He was pretty sure she brought the lawsuit against Fair Pharm on the basis of his thigh-slapping, snorty laughter. Pregnancy had little to do with it. But she found a lawyer and sued for pharmacist negligence: inadequate patient instruction on the use of oral contraceptives. Oral. By mouth, stupid.
Stupid people, while annoying, weren’t Sam’s thorniest challenge. Addicts who needed a fix and whose nerves had been commandeered by withdrawal tremors—they weren’t kidding around.
Just last week, Sam faced the black maw of a Smith & Wesson, shaking in time with the jonesing hand training it on him. It was not acceptable that Sam “couldn’t confirm” the prescription, code for we-both-know-you’re-a-junkie. While Sam was held at gunpoint, Ice had cowered in the back, supposedly deaf to the commotion. Ice didn’t have what it took to be a pharmacist. He wasn’t even a suitable lackey. Had Ice been able to perform his job with even a modicum of precision, Sam might indulge in a good mood now and again.
The explosion had been Ice’s fault too, either directly or indirectly, because he never put anything away. Exhibit A: Baloney Sandwich.
The day of the explosion, Sam happened to be in one of his rages. Entirely justified. Even the Almighty got ticked off now and again, and Sam was feeling Sodom-and-Gomorrah over not being able to find a prescription because college-educated pharmacy assistants didn’t know the alphabet. While Mrs. White sighed and shifted her weight in the pick-up window, Sam barged around, slamming drawers and tidying as he searched.
Mrs. White heckled him and stomped off, threatening to be back soon. Sam could just fill a new order, but the point was, he shouldn’t have to. Ice had filled it. And filed it. Just not in the W’s. Maybe it was in the B section. Or in the A section. Both appropriate to describe Mrs. White. Or even—Sam was rifling through the C’s, the word for the female anatomy playing on his lips, when his eye fell on the agate mortar and pestle, a gift from his late wife, Margot. It wasn’t in its usual spot above the sign that read Sam Reeves, Pharmacist on Duty. Someone left it on the pick-up counter beside the hand sanitizer. A $500 piece of equipment, just left there.
“What? Am I your mother?” He swiped the mortar. The pestle inside swiveled, discharging a sharp crackle, and thunder and white light ran him down. The floor and he were instant lovers and the agate mortar and pestle was history, some of it in Sam’s eyes.
Blinking was hell.
Ice materialized and called 911, too slowly. Sam lay on the floor grinding mortar shards further into his cornea.
“Stop rubbing. You’ll make it worse.” Ice tried to pry Sam’s palms from his eyes, but he wr
ithed and kicked and—as a last resort—spit in Ice’s general direction.
Ice backed off.
Sam and Ice had never gotten along. Ice was actually born Samuel Kelvin Stocker, but Fair Pharm already had a Sam, and there wasn’t room for two. Ice’s face was paralyzed in a condescending, yet somehow vacant mask, no matter what he said or how he said it. Sam dubbed him Ice on the first day; it took less than an hour. He meant it to be an insult, even had the name embroidered on all Ice’s lab coats, but it backfired. Women were attracted to Ice’s cool expression. Their comments were along the lines of: Stoics. Anything could be under there. Sam knew there was nothing under there.
“Should we hold his arms down?” Ice asked.
“Touch me and I’ll kill you.” Sam addressed Ice and the do-gooder to whom he spoke.
At that, she stifled a giggle. Ice whispered something Sam couldn’t make out, and the woman laughed again. Ice was flirting. Sam was blind and his brains were on fire and Ice was flirting.
“Ice, I messed my pants. Do you think you could wipe my ass before the squad comes?”
The woman gasped.
“He’s kidding.” Ice didn’t even sniff.
“Who the hell are you?” Sam asked. She sounded too young to be Mrs. White.
“Name’s Mike. You should stop rubbing your eyes, dude.”
Sam choked on his saliva.
The squad came and manhandled him into a gurney and leather cuffs so he’d stop rubbing. A heartless medic pried his eyes and set off a bevy of fireworks in his skull. At the hospital, it took a fantod punctuated with lawsuit threats for the intake nurses to give Sam a shot of morphine. A white lie about his weight got him an extra-large dose from the idiot nurse. It would take one and a half Sams to be the weight he gave. As Sam fell into a morphine slumber, he wondered if she’d be fired for being stupid. He doubted it.
The Fair Pharm exec who visited the next day brought a fruit basket. Sam couldn’t see it. He had to trust him. Trust a Fair Pharm executive. Fat chance.
Had the nitro been anything more than a trace, said the exec, Sam would have had a tombstone but no casket. They would have had to find his DNA in dirt samples out of the bottom of the crater twenty feet below Fair Pharm.
“With luck like that, you should play the lottery. Or maybe not. Can’t figure out if you’re lucky or unlucky.” The exec laughed heartily over Sam’s near annihilation. Then he turned serious and asked a string of guilt-inducing questions. Did Sam keep the medical nitro locked? Did he lend out the key? Did he wash his hands after dispensing? Before? Was he handling the pestle roughly?
“Yes.”
Why?”
“Because nobody puts back their shit. I’m a glorified den mother.”
“Hmmm.” The exec scribbled something. “Your assistant, Ice, stated you were in one of your—moods, was how he phrased it. Is that true?”
“Ice couldn’t slap tomatoes on burgers.”
“So…true, then.”
Sam shot him the bird with both hands. The mummy tape wrapping his eyes prevented him from seeing the exec’s reaction, but he heard an offended exhalation.
“Sorry.” Sam said. “The morphine. Not myself.”
Sam’s loyalty to Fair Pharm was what saved his job. In the ER, he had refused to say how he got injured, which meant Fair Pharm wouldn’t face the wrath of OSHA or a worker’s compensation lawsuit. Once the company realized it was in the clear, the questions stopped. A large planter with smiley balloons arrived. Sam couldn’t see it, but the nurses told him it was lovely. He decided to make it a gift for Margot.
Hopefully, Sam’s eyes would heal before Sunday. That was his day to visit Margot’s grave. Maybe she’d be happy with the planter. Likely not, though. Margot was a tough sell on just about everything. Sam would purse his lips and keep his hands in his pockets until Margot was done. Her tirades were usually about things like Sam neglecting to fold his underwear or the weedy condition of the flower boxes. Had he no pride?
Margot’s grave had no headstone, just a wreath and the flowers Sam brought. The groundskeeper left a body-sized hill of earth and rocks. Sam complained, but the keeper said it had to be that way until the ground settled. Then it would be scraped flush and soft grass planted. That was five months ago he said that.
On the morning of the explosion, Sam had gone to visit her. She was up-in-arms about a few wrinkles in Sam’s khakis. She didn’t understand. Sam had never ironed before. He didn’t even know where the iron was. So he kicked Margot’s mound. Just a little, but when he looked around, the groundskeeper was watching.
That made it easy to tell him off about not leveling the dirt.
Sam’s eyes did heal enough for him to return to work. He puttered around the pharmacy best he could on 20/200. When he got close enough to actually read the name on the wall, he almost lost his shit.
Samuel Kelvin Stocker, Pharmacist on Duty.
Ice? Ice was the pharmacist? Sam was the assistant?
What a sucker punch.
What fuckery.
Sam bungled around, knocking over vials and kicking chair legs. His semi-blindness turned customers into multi-colored blobs. The business end of an addict’s gun barely made Sam blink. Only after the man stomped out, bereft of Xanax, and Ice told Sam in a quivery voice how chill he was about staring down a gun, did Sam realize there was a gun. He thought it a wallet.
As the blobs began to crystalize, Sam knew something was off. It began with Mrs. White. Snarky and wrinkled as ever, she also had a set of pointy, yellow teeth. The top row overhung her lip. Green snot dripped from one of her nostrils, not the yellow-green sort that indicated infection. Nuclear green. Sam could hardly speak to her without grimacing. He kept wiping his own nose to hint her to do likewise. She didn’t. She just got angrier and her teeth got pointier, and the neon rivulet squirmed down her neck and got lost in her wool sweater. All the while, Mrs. White went on about how Sam got his just deserts, and she hoped things would run more smoothly around Fair Pharm from now on.
From now on?
Sam asked Ice how Mrs. White looked to him.
She’d been her crotchety self while Sam was in the hospital, Ice said.
Her teeth. Had Ice noticed anything odd about them?
No, Ice couldn’t say he had.
A person-with-a-substance-dependency (not addict, and no way junkie—Sam got sensitivity coaching) entered the pharmacy. The clerk flagged the prescription as bogus and called Sam over. As head pharmacist, denying the prescription and/or calling the police fell to Ice, but Ice was (of course) nowhere to be found. At first glance, the customer looked almost pretty, as in back-of-a-Harley-don’t-fuck-with-me pretty, but when Sam approached, her eyes became watery swirls of blue and green, like the spinning wheels in Vegas.
“What the hell’s the matter with him?” Harley girl asked the person in line behind her. She meant Sam. When Harley turned, the man behind her would see her eyes. Sam waited for the stunned reaction. None came. The man just shook his head.
Sam had to get it together. He did his best to be firm and coherent while those swirling eyes regarded him. A trail of saliva breeched her painted lips and slithered down her chin. Drips plopped on the counter. She slammed her hands on it and left in a huff. And without a prescription for 75 mg Oxycodone tablets (which only came in denominations of ten).
Even Ice began to take on fearsome qualities. His hair, always unkempt, was in the direst need of brushing, his angled brown locks menaced Sam, especially the beard. Sam internally referred to Ice as Duck Dynasty. It was oh-so-funny until the beard locks transmogrified into little brown arms with tiny hands that groped Sam as they worked side-by-side. No one else could see the hands because of the counter. Sam inched away or pretended to need something across the store. He’d ask someone to go get something from Ice, just to see if they would scream. No one did.
The trial date for Stupid Pregnant Girl finally came. Sam wore his best suit, the one he wore for Margot’s funeral. He
even ironed his shirt, but not very well. The judge had a Jesus-like aura and a kindly face, though he spoke sternly. The Fair Pharm lawyer had scales and an alligator tooth. Sam did his best not to shrink back or scream. Stupid Pregnant Girl’s enormous buck teeth made her look eight years old, though Sam knew her to be twenty-seven. People everywhere were…mutilated was how Sam described it, but only to himself. The bailiff had devil horns protruding from his bald head. It was absurd, his whalesque paunch and sidearm and shiny black shoes. Sam couldn’t stifle his gasp when the bailiff turned, and a shiny black arrowhead tail writhed along the floor behind him.
The judge asked if Sam was okay. A crown of thorns materialized on the judge’s head.
Sam rubbed his eyes. Still there.
Somehow, Sam made it through the trial. Stupid Pregnant Girl was awarded an obscene settlement, and new protocol for prescription pick-up would be enacted. Something along the lines of Styrofoam cups. Caution: Contents Hot.
Take the oral medication by putting it into your mouth.
Sam shuffled out of the courthouse and entered the first bar he found. Sherriff Street, it was called. Fetid beer assaulted his nose, but he pushed through and asked for a vodka martini with Balkan.
“Must’ve been some day,” said the bartender. “We don’t carry anything that strong. How about Grey Goose? No upcharge.” His eyes were rather like an owl’s, and his belly was a stainless-steel beer keg whose scuffs and dents said it had seen better days.
Sam threw it back and ordered another.
The sixth one was the charm. He could no longer see straight.
He called an Uber, but the driver was a spider. Two of the eight hairy legs kept creeping toward the back seat. Sam swatted them away. Each time, the mustached driver frowned into his rearview mirror. He suddenly stopped the car and told Sam to get out, so he stumbled the rest of the way to Margot’s, which, thankfully, was only a mile or so.
The Half That You See Page 6
