Stockholm Syndrome

by Melissa Yi

  His neck looked stringy because the sternocleidomastoid muscles heaved for breath. He was panicking.

  I remembered a surgical resident remarking, “It’s terrible to watch a child who can’t breathe. It’s worse than someone bleeding to death.” The surgeon agreed.

  Bastard glanced at me. I was still trying to keep my head down and pointed away from him, both deferential and advertising that I was not a threat or a witness, no siree, with the placenta as a barrier between us.

  Still wheezing, he aimed the gun at me. His hand trembled, but out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw his finger flex on the trigger.

  CHAPTER 29

  First I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt like that famous photo from Vietnam taken at the exact moment where one officer shot another man’s brains out.

  The bullet didn’t come.

  I was still breathing.

  For a second, I kept my eyelids sealed. I didn’t want to trigger this guy off. Ha ha, another bad pun. Freudian slips worked in mysterious ways.

  What if my last thought was a bad pun?

  I shifted my head to the right and peeked at Tucker then. I refused to go out of the world thinking stupid thoughts. I’d rather my last view was of him.

  He met my eyes head on.

  I caught my breath. I don’t think he’d ever meant more to me than at this exact moment. Both of us freaked out, sweaty, on the edge of execution—didn’t matter. Only he mattered.

  I didn’t think I could carve the yearning out of my eyes, so I didn’t try.

  He stared back at me the same way.

  Neither of us said a word.

  Still wheezing, Bastard walked right up to Tucker with his gun hand up. He didn’t stop walking until that arm reached across the foot of the bed, diagonally across my chest, so his gun pressed against Tucker’s sternum.

  I yelped. I know it sounds girly. I couldn’t help that, or the little voice squeaking out of my throat that said, “Stop!”

  Bastard kept the gun braced against Tucker’s chest while he fumbled in the front right pocket of his black jeans. He was using his left hand, so he looked awkward, like he was either doing an ironic white boy dance or trying to dislocate his own shoulder.

  “Shit. Come. Help me. With this. Bitch,” he wheezed.

  I broke away from Tucker’s side, literally letting Bastard come between us, but you know how they say money talks? Forget that. Firearms talk. They order. They compel.

  On the upside, mein Kommandant was still panting. I shifted the placenta on my left hip—the three of us were too close for me to dare put it down, although I would have liked to bonk Bastard on the head with it, like in a movie—and slowly stretched the free fingers on my right hand toward his inhaler.

  I have to say, even though I hated this guy and wished he would fall unconscious so that we could step over his body on our way out the door, my insides twitched.

  Any wrong move, and he could kill Tucker. Just like that.

  I wanted to kill Bastard.

  (Do no harm.)

  Harm the motherfucker.

  While I leaned forward, the placenta wobbled in the steel bowl, slopping toward him.

  “Stop. It!” he wheezed, but he was struggling. The medically-trained part of my brain automatically noted the ruddiness in his face and the veins bulging in his neck before I remembered to jerk my eyes southward.

  Too late. I’d memorized his eyes already, angry brown orbs scanning the room, but I got a flash-quick impression of them glaring from underneath low-set, bushy eyebrows and a rapidly retreating hairline, partially disguised by him shaving his hair close to the skull.

  Otherwise, a potato face that I wouldn’t have considered threatening if I’d stood next to him on the subway, although I might’ve noticed his hooked nose and weak pink lips. He’d already been hit by five o’clock shadow, and I have to say, he was kind of dark-skinned for someone who liked to holler the N-word.

  In other words, his face had seared itself into my retinas. I was now officially a dead woman.

  Bastard’s left hand curled into a fist while his right hand pressed the gun into Tucker’s chest so hard that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he managed to indent the bone.

  It must have hurt, but Tucker maintained an eerie rock-like silence.

  And then Bastard’s hands began to shake.

  Holy Christ. I snapped, “Don’t worry! I’ve almost got it!” as I dug the inhaler out of his pocket, my fingers slipping in haste.

  Bastard’s left hand shot out and clenched my right wrist in a death grip.

  I needed stoic lessons from Tucker. I gasped and instinctively twisted away in the same second that he snatched the puffer.

  The placenta wobbled in its bowl before it plopped out toward Bastard’s crotch.

  “Shit!” He twisted away from me and Tucker, backpedaling a beat too late.

  The placenta thumped on the ground between our feet. It didn’t score a direct hit on either of us, but tiny drops of blood fountained out on impact, spraying our shoes and legs.

  He screamed and started to kick it away before he computed that he didn’t want to make any contact with a potentially Ebola-laden organ, so at the last second, he tried to kick past it.

  That just made him overbalance on to his ass, squeezing off a bullet as he dropped.

  The sound, so close to me, in the confines of this tiny room, deafened me for a second.

  Nothing hurt.

  The shot echo reverberated in my clotted ears, but no part of my body screamed with pain or drenched the linoleum with blood.

  It took me a second to calculate that I had not been hit.

  But maybe someone else had.

  The first thing that penetrated my ears was the sound of Manouchka wailing.

  I slowly turned to my right, toward my man, dreading what I might find.

  CHAPTER 30

  Tucker was lying on the floor. On his stomach.

  I hit the ground beside him. I didn’t care what Bastard did to me.

  I didn’t care that my shoes were slipping on the fresh placenta juice and trying to stick to the partially coagulated gore.

  I didn’t care that a bullet might slam into my skull any second.

  I didn’t care that Manouchka’s screaming pierced my half-deafened ears. If she was screaming, she was alive.

  I did care that the baby screeched his tiny, piercing newborn cry. See above.

  Vaguely, I realized that I was screaming too. It didn’t matter.

  I hit the ground on my knees. The tile floor smacked into my patellas, and it felt good. I wanted to feel the pain.

  I reached for his shoulders, to roll him over and start CPR. Maybe I should check for bullet holes first, but I grabbed him.

  And then Tucker rose up on his elbows and hissed, “Hope!”

  I stared at him. It took me a second to realize that he was alive and talking to me. Those brown eyes, the whites tinged with red and circled with exhaustion—he was alive. Blinking.

  His mouth was moving.

  He was talking with no obvious difficulty.

  I scanned his body, checking for wounds. He was smeared in blood, but maybe it was from the floor.

  Tucker grabbed my shoulders and threw me down on the ground with him.

  I let him. For a second, I stopped thinking about anything or anyone else. I was just so goddamn happy that he was okay that I lay on the bloody floor with him, the tile chilling me through my scrubs, my glasses knocked askew, my stethoscope tumbling off my shoulders, and he said, “I love you. Never forget that. Okay?”

  “Never,” I said, and I kissed him like I’d never kissed anyone before. One single, desperate, end of the world kiss, his mouth branding mine with heat and pressure that blotted out any other thought or sound, before something rammed into Tucker’s body.

  His entire body shuddered with the impact, but he clamped down on to my body to protect me.

  I ripped my mouth away from his while I tried to
figure out what was happening. Bastard loomed above us, his boot smashing into Tucker’s ribs again, hard enough that he probably broke two of them at once.

  Tucker grunted and tried to roll us both under the bed. I was still in shock, so I resisted for a moment, and this time Bastard’s boot caught my side.

  Son of a bitch. He might be wearing cheap black boots, but he wielded enough force behind them to knock me breathless.

  I couldn’t cry. I just gasped for breath.

  Tucker folded himself around me, encasing me like human armor, while Bastard said, “Get up. You stupid. Fucking. Doctors. Or I’ll start shooting you. In. The. Crotch.”

  What a bizarre thing to say.

  Tucker didn’t move. I could feel, even without him speaking, that he would not desert me willingly. But I didn’t want him to get shot. And the way we were wrapped together, Bastard could easily kill both of us with a single bullet, if it penetrated deep enough.

  I said, “I love you.” Then I twisted my shoulders, signalling that he should let me go.

  Tucker didn’t move.

  He smelled good, you know? You wouldn’t think it would be possible, with us sweating at gunpoint, delivering babies and rolling around in blood and amniotic fluid. But underneath all that, he still smelled a bit like lemon soap and himself. I let myself close my eyes and inhale that tiny hint of Tucker before Bastard said, “I’m counting to three. One.”

  Like we were children. But I ignored Bastard’s madness so I could talk to my man. “Please, Tucker.” This wasn’t how I wanted us to die. The in-his-arms part was good, but not the assassination-in-front-of-a-mother-and-newborn part.

  “Two.”

  I started struggling. Tucker was bigger than me. He’s not a big guy, maybe five foot ten and an average muscular build, but let’s face it. He could win a wrestling contest with me any day. And he was still holding me down.

  I started to panic. Like, if Tucker clung to me and refused to let go, pinning me down, weighing me down, so even if I wanted to obey Bastard, he’d shoot us both (in the crotch!) to punish us for not getting up, but I couldn’t get up—

  —and then Tucker levered himself up on his knees, but kept a hand on my chest while he maneuvered his legs on either side of my torso, still guarding me. He muttered, “I love you” in my ear before he turned around to face Bastard himself.

  Tucker had sat up without any problem. I noticed that, with the hind part of my brain, still cataloguing any possibility of injury. He rose to his feet quickly, smoothly, placing his body between me and Bastard.

  He hadn’t been shot. Yet.

  My first instinct was to try and block him back. You know that game where you put one hand out, and he puts his palm on the top of your hand, and you put your other hand on top of his, repeat, making a tower of hands, until you end up just whapping each other and laughing?

  I wanted to do that, running ahead of him, but then he’d run ahead of me, and on and on. No laughing.

  As soon as I moved, Bastard’s eyes and gun flicked to me, so I hesitated on my knees, while Tucker’s breath hissed out between his teeth.

  We couldn’t both be heroes. That might kill us.

  But I’m not used to anyone else sticking around when the shit hits the fan. Before this, at the eleventh hour, I’ve always faced down the murderers solo. I’ve gotten used to risking my own life, but I wanted Tucker to get out of here and make beautiful babies. Preferably with me.

  I still wanted a dark-haired baby with Ryan, too. That hadn’t changed.

  But right here, right now, I wanted to do the rescuing.

  David warbled a teeny newborn cry.

  I spared him and his mother a glance. Manouchka watched us with wide, terrified eyes. No obvious bleeding or signs of difficulty breathing. I didn’t think she’d been shot.

  I couldn’t make out David’s form. Then I realized that not only did she keep him cradled in her arms, as I’d expected, but she’d covered him up with a pillow.

  Strange. A bullet would pierce a pillow. But maybe she was thinking Out of sight, out of mind.

  Or maybe she wasn’t thinking.

  Please, please don’t smother your baby, Manouchka.

  David was sobbing, so he still had air, but I twitched and tried to tell her with my eyes, Let him out!

  Bastard wheezed. I flashed toward him automatically. He spotted me from behind his puffer—no use pretending I wouldn’t identify him now—and took a quick shot of Ventolin with one hand while his other trained the gun at my face.

  He inhaled the Ventolin, nice and easy. Calmer now that he could breathe. And definitely not amused. “You rolling. Around. In Ebola now, bitch?”

  Speaking in longer phrases now, too, I realized with the automated segment of my brain, the doctor part that kept on working, even when the rest of me was frozen with fear and this-can’t-be-happening.

  “We’re all contaminated,” I said. There was no point in denying it. Maybe he’d be so grossed out that he’d let us go.

  He nodded and took another hit of Ventolin. He was mulling it over. I wondered if he’d hurl us out in the hall like human garbage. That would be the best solution.

  The intercom crackled, and Olivia’s disembodied voice cut through the room, “Are you all right?”

  “I didn’t hit anyone,” said Bastard, slowly and clearly. “But I will, if you don’t do exactly what I say.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Bastard sounded different now. More confident, like he’d made up his mind about something.

  Tucker’s shoulders twitched. He’d noticed it, too.

  Bastard went on. He was slightly short of breath, cutting off the ends of his words, but he didn’t sound like he was in the midst of a fatal asthma attack. “I’ve got one bitch here they say has Ebola. Get her and her kid out of here.”

  “We can do that,” said Olivia, in a neutral voice.

  My heart thumped. That was better than I’d imagined. He was kicking Manouchka and David out! And maybe me and Tucker, since we were marinated in blood too…

  “I’m going to shove ’em out. But if you try and bust in here, I’ll kill the two doctors. First the boy, then the girl.”

  My heart screamed, even as my brain registered, Well, at least we know what order we’d die in. That’s something.

  Tucker took a half step forward before Bastard pointed the pistol (or whatever it was) in his face, and Tucker backed off.

  None of us wanted to die. I was still grinding my knees into the floor.

  At least Manouchka and the baby could escape. I glanced at her, but she was staring at Bastard like she could absorb his every word through her eyes. I got the feeling that she wouldn’t dare believe in freedom until she’d slammed and locked St. Joe’s outer doors behind her.

  “That’s the first thing,” said Bastard.

  “You’re releasing Manouchka Beauzile and her baby. We will not interfere. We’re awaiting further instructions,” said Olivia in the same even tone. I definitely got the feeling that she was a professional.

  I’d wondered where the police were. Everything in Montreal was disintegrating—last month, a nurse was in a hospital elevator when a cable snapped and it plunged several stories, miraculously leaving her unharmed; parents were visiting a school when a pane of glass fell out of a window and nearly hit them; and one poor woman was eating sushi with her fiancé to celebrate her birthday when part of a building sheared off and pulverized her.

  But we do have a police force. Hell, I’ve got two of their phone numbers. Maybe one of them had texted me, and I could answer if I could just convince Bastard to let me pull out my phone laden with Ryan messages.

  But I didn’t dare. I needed to spend my favour tokens with extreme vigilance, and even though I would dearly love to hear from my dearly beloveds, my main priority was survival. A phone is not survival.

  Maybe the professionals had silently massed outside. Maybe they’d storm the room.

  I liked that idea, except the pa
rt where hostages usually get caught in the crossfire. I’ve heard that most hostages die at Get Out of Jail Dead time.

  For the most part, hostage-taking is pretty banal to look at. Just a lot of sitting around getting pistol-whipped. But when someone’s trying to get in or out, hoo boy. That’s when the bodies start flying.

  I voted for Bastard just getting rid of our contaminated selves.

  Bastard snapped, “Where’s Casey?”

  “Casey Assim,” said Olivia. Even over the intercom, her tone was not quite a question.

  “I know what her name is, bitch. Where is she?”

  “We’re setting all available personnel on task, sir.”

  “You mean you don’t have her yet? You just sitting there with your thumbs up your butts?” Saliva sprayed out of his mouth. I flinched.

  Bastard didn’t notice. “What am I paying your taxes for?”

  I had to bite the inside of my lip and keep my teeth pressed into the tender mucous membranes to stop any other sort of reaction. If this guy worked and paid legitimate taxes, I’d lick that placenta.

  Olivia continued, “We just need some more information, sir. What’s her birthday?”

  I chewed my lip. The skin was flaking, and my throat ached. I needed a drink, but I had no idea when or if I’d ever get to touch water again.

  “Her birthday.” Bastard flung his arms wide. I winced again, watching the gun, which he held tightly in his right hand. It splayed out toward the exit door before he brought it back to his side. Yay. His side was a marked improvement over one of our heads or hearts. “Why, you want to buy her a present?”

  Even I had to wonder what they were playing at. It did seem like basic information they should have unearthed a long time ago.

  “It’s part of how we identify the patients, sir.”

  “What, you can’t find her? You want me to come out and get her myself? I can do that!” He lifted his gun once more, aiming it at Manouchka and David. “You want me to start blowing these people away until you figure out how to bring me my woman? I can do that.”

  My God.

  Manouchka huddled over David, half-knocking over the pillow, while I sprang to my feet and tried to bar Bastard from his side of the bed, but Manouchka twisted away from me, too.