by Pike, JJ
“No biggie,” as Aggie would say, “we can do that in our sleep with both hands tied behind our back.”
“No, Aggmeister, just one hand now, darling.”
Alice rapped on the dashboard. “You’re mumbling and moaning. Is it getting worse?”
It was.
“No. I’m tired is all.”
“Are you sure?” She looked at him quickly then turned back to the road. She needed to concentrate on driving, not obsess about him. Every few hundred yards they had to maneuver around another abandoned car or a pothole or some roadkill. He couldn’t allow her to get distracted.
“I’m fine. I’ll tell you if I’m not.” He had a phantom limb. That limb was giving him grief. There was nothing Alice could do about it. The less she knew, the better off they’d both be.
“We could treat it with painkillers, but that doesn’t always work. I’ve got enough sleeping pills to take down a herd of cattle. You can take one every six hours and we’ll be fine. Sleep until we get home. Really. Let’s knock you out so you don’t have to go through this…”
“I told you, I’m fine.” All he wanted was for her to leave him alone. Could he say that?
No.
No need to be unkind, even if it was the truth and they’d always said they preferred the truth above all things.
It was different now.
The world was folding in on itself. Manhattan had been eaten by flaming waves. He’d lost his son in the confusion. Ugh. Where was Paul? Was he okay? Had he made it back home? He owed that kid an apology. He hadn’t been in his right mind when he’d taken off into the roiling clouds of dust and debris that were the remnants of the West Side.
Paul would be okay. He was a smart boy. If it had been Petra who’d gotten left alone in Manhattan it would have been a different matter. She was the emo one of the twins. Paul was brave and bold, but smart about it. He’d have realized that his deranged dad had been hit by falling masonry and temporarily lost his mind; then he’d turn around and go home so he could help the girls hold down the fort.
Thinking about something other than the throbbing, bloody stump that was bandaged to his chest helped manage the pain.
Keep doing that, Bill. Think about something other than a serrated edge biting through muscle and tendon and gristle and bone. Think about your kids. Think about all the things you’re going to do when you get home. Whatever time you’ve got left, and it can’t be long, has to be spent with them doing normal, everyday things so they know how much you love them and how much you loved being their dad.
He hadn’t talked to his daughters in days. Maybe weeks? He had no idea how long he’d been slipping in and out of consciousness. What he did know was that he didn’t want to do that anymore. If he was going to die, he wanted to do it with both eyes open, looking at the woman he loved. And, if he was lucky—very, very, very lucky—he’d make it all the way home and die with his children around him.
But he was going to die, that much was evident.
No one survived this kind of pain.
His phantom limb was only 1 of 800 different kinds of agony he’d experienced since he’d woken up in a helicopter. That wasn’t a dream, right? He’d been in a chopper when Manhattan fell?
The memories came and went like an old school slideshow, each picture a tiny fragment of his past, but still capturing the essence of the moment. Clown cars meant the circus with his dad; the roller coaster meant a day at Elitch’s with Mom; the Mustang meant the mountains with his brothers; the horse trailer meant Aggie had proven herself again by doing what needed to be done without complaint.
The fact that he remembered the distant past was good, even if the memories came in micro-bytes, rather than whole movies. Perhaps not remembering much about the last few days was good, too. There’d been a hospital ward that felt more like a small guest room in a stately home; a doctor with needles the size of the Empire State Building; a short man with red hair who crept into his room and told him he was going to die like the “melted man” downstairs.
That couldn’t be a real memory. He’d been jacked up on painkillers, which meant his mind was playing tricks on him. His psychedelic dreams and dun, grey reality wove around each other in a complicated DNA-like structure. It mattered which was which. He wanted to be present for the end of his life.
“Take a pill. For me, if not for yourself.” Alice was like a broken record. “It’ll be better for both of us if you sleep. We’re going to be off-roading more than we’re on-roading and I don’t want you to have to feel every blade of grass…”
Bill smiled. Alice’s grasp of the English language was close to perfect, but he loved the little slips she made, even as she did everything in her power not to sound like she was from Guatemala. The accent would never give her away. She’d lost that years ago. But words like “on-roading” while logical, especially given the context, marked her as a foreigner.
“No painkillers. No sleeping pills. I want to be here, with you,” he said. “If I drift off to sleep and moan a bit, you can wake me up. I want to be awake when we get home, not groggy.”
They hit a pothole. It was about the size of a small mango, but the bounce landed like a 45 pound sack of coal being dropped on his arm from the top of Lady Liberty.
The hot pokers came first. Then violent, frantic stabbing pains. Followed by throbbing that reverberated throughout his torso. Then more pokers. And finally, a tympanum of knitting needles, all sharpened to a point and jabbed into his stump by the malicious redheaded man who wanted him to die, die, die.
Bill leaned forward and heaved.
Alice was right there with a bag.
Sheesh, parenting makes multitaskers of us all, he thought. Where’d she get a sick bag like that? It had a ring that held the baggie open and everything. She must have had it prepped already. How like her. Had he been vomiting for long? Had she been catching him and righting him and cleaning him up?
He heaved again. Concentrate on the bag with the custom-built O-ring that held the mouth of the bag open. Aggie would think it was cool. Or was she too old for that, now? Would it be something to show Midge?
He only managed dry heaves brought on by the pain, no actual vomit.
When his stomach quieted down he flicked open the glove compartment. Alice wasn’t kidding. She had a whole pharmacy stashed in there.
“What’s the one that will dial the pain down from a 5 to a 2? I don’t want the horse pills. I just want it to be manageable.” That was the ninth lie he’d told her in under an hour. His pain was at least a 30 out of 10.
But she didn’t need to know that.
The prescriptions were all for someone called Charles Sullivan III. There wasn’t a painkiller he hadn’t tried. Codeine, Oxy, Vicodin, Dilaudid, Norco. He even had drugs to treat ADHD: methylphenidate, Focalin, Adderall, and Vyvanse. The supply seemed endless. What kind of injuries and ailments could one man have that called for all these bottles?
Ibuprofen wasn’t nearly enough, but oxy was too much. Was there something in-between? He kept rummaging through the bottles. Tramadol. That was juuuuuuuuuuuuuust right, as he and Midge would say. Juuuuuuuuuuust right. He popped two and swallowed hard. Didn’t even bother reading the label. What did it matter if they were micrograms, milligrams, or kilograms? It mattered. Of course it mattered. But the pain made him sweat so hard he was sticking to the seat and his brain had turned into a gelatinous lump of tasered meat that wasn’t capable of keeping a single, coherent line of thought. He needed to tamp down the spasms so he could be of some use. He wasn’t even a navigator, just a passenger, and that would never do.
Bill Everlee wasn’t afraid of a challenge. He’d done the hardest thing, long ago: made himself a stay-at-home dad, long before it was fashionable. If he could do that—when his friends told him he was nuts, and his brothers mocked him for letting Alice “wear the pants,” while he simultaneously faced his own fears about his effectiveness as their full-time caregiver—he could do anything. Even slay pain
that would take down a buffalo. No. Two buffalo. They hit another ridge in the road. Make that three buffalo.
Think about something other than the pain.
He’d been an active participant in all his children’s activities and proud of it. The twins were almost grown by the time he took first chair at the parenting wheel. Shoot, was he mixing his metaphors? That was Alice’s job, not his. He laughed. The drugs had taken the edge off. That was fast. But all good. The electric spasms had inched down to branding-iron levels, which was almost in the acceptable range.
Where was I? That’s right. I stepped up and did what had to be done when Alice…
No, best not think about that time.
He twisted in his seat, trying not to move his arm. Whoever had designed seatbelts didn’t know much about being a newly made one-armed bandit. He contemplated removing the belt. The car would ding her disapproval and Alice would give him grief. She was quiet for now. Best not give her anything to fret about.
The kids. Think about the kids and all the excellent things you’ve done together.
The twins had been teenagers, off doing teenager-y things when he donned the Mr. Mom hat, but Aggie and Midge had had his full attention. He’d taught them to hunt and fish and handle a gun. They could take care of themselves. They were going to be okay. There was no way the witch who lived in the gingerbread house was going to catch them and eat them.
The clammy toad and the halfling prince danced with the red shoes and the mermaid’s tail until Rapunzel let down her hair and hoisted them all to safety. When the prince finally tumbled into the tower he wasn’t a prince, but the wickedest witch of them all, hunched and wizened, covered in carbuncles, twisting her hands over each other and cackling. Bill backed up against the wall, his children behind him, begging for mercy. He scanned the room. He could kick over the nightstand and grab the lamp. It was filled with the holy oil Genghis Khan had requested and would fry the witch where she stood.
“Not Genghis, Daddy. Marco Polo didn’t give the oil to Genghis. He gave it to his son…”
“Midge, grab the sheets. Let’s make a fire. Let’s burn the witch.”
The witch’s screeching filled the tower as it dissolved into bats, flapping about their heads, making them all squeal and dive for cover.
“Honey?” Alice touched his good arm, but his bad arm—the one that was missing—sang out in pain. “You’re screaming in your sleep.”
He’d only taken a couple of tramadol and he’d been out almost as soon as he swallowed them.
“What did you take?”
Bill didn’t answer. She was going to keep nagging at him. He couldn’t bear it. His nerves were raw and his temper close to the surface. He wanted to be left alone.
“Whatever it was, you need more. Or something stronger. Here…” She pulled the car over to the side of the road. She could have stopped in the middle. No one else was driving in either direction. She retrieved a bag from the back.
The dogs were on alert, panting harder, whining to be let out.
“Not now, Mouse. Settle down.”
Alice cracked open her bag and pulled out a patch.
Bill’s eyes weren’t deceiving him. She’d gone for fentanyl. That would put him to sleep for sure. “No.”
“You’re not thinking straight, my love.”
“And you’re not listening. I want to be awake.”
She sighed and looked away. “We’re still hundreds of miles from home. If the news reports are anything to go by the roads are insane.”
“I don’t care. Hear me, Alice. I mean it. I want to be awake.”
“Show me what you’ve got in your hand.”
Bill opened his fist. He hadn’t even known the bottle was still there.
“That’s not going to cut it. You’ve undergone a major trauma. Be sensible…”
“It’s my damned body,” he shouted.
Alice reared back. He’d never done that before. He wasn’t a shouter. He was a thinker and a talker—not afraid to argue his point—but he’d never needed to shout before. They agreed on everything. All they had to do was talk.
Until now.
It took her two seconds to compose herself and come back twice as loud. “What if one of the kids had lost an arm or a leg? Would you let them be this idiotic? No.” She peeled back the cover on the fentanyl patch. “You’d tell them to suck it up and do as they were told. You’re acting like a spoiled child.”
“I’m acting like a spoiled child? Well, you’re being a bully.”
Alice rolled up his sleeve and—gingerly, gently, with the lightest of touches—stuck the patch in the middle of his good arm, right above his elbow. He twisted his hand at the wrist, but you can’t touch your elbow using the hand that’s on the same arm. There was simply no way to get to the patch without taking his stump out of the sling and scraping at his other arm and that was unthinkable.
“I know what I’m doing,” she said. She pulled the car back onto the road. “Sleep. When you’re yourself again, we’ll talk.”
Un-fricking-believable. Had she just done an end run around him?
“Take it off,” he said. “TAKE IT OFF.”
Alice didn’t reply.
Oh, NOW she was silent? Now, when he was ready to talk she was giving him the blank stare and closed lips?
Lips. Right. Ha! He didn’t have a hand, but he did have lips and teeth.
Teeth.
The tramadol—or whatever they’d given him at the mansion where the little man lived—was still coursing through his brain making him fuzzy as hell.
He shook his head. She liked dogs now? He could be a dog. He snarled and growled, baring his teeth.
That’s right. That’s where he was going.
He had teeth.
He could bite it off. Then she’d see how serious he was. He rubbed his face into his elbow and tried to grab the edge of the patch with his incisors. It was harder than he thought it was going to be. Not something he’d practiced before.
Getting out of a blindfold: yes.
Removing a gag when your hands were tied behind your back: sure.
Loosening ropes: done it a million times.
Getting out of the trunk of a car: easy-peasy.
Escaping a burning building: got that one down.
But pulling a fentanyl patch off your elbow when your wife is doing her best imitation of a witch and forcing you to sleep when you want to do something useful before you die?: not part of the curriculum.
The thought that fentanyl didn’t enter the bloodstream that fast bubbled up from Bill’s frothy, confused memory banks. Why was he groggy, when he was barely dosed? He brought the bottle in his hand close to his face. Did he know what tramadol looked like? She could have switched everything around and he’d never know.
There was a tank, two Humvees, and a vehicle he didn’t recognize hauling a howitzer coming right at them.
Bill passed out with his teeth in the crook of his elbow as the army bore down on them.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency when I was a graduate student at Oxford University.” Michael Rayton was the essence of grace under pressure. No one should be that laid back and languid. His affect wasn’t doing him any favors. He was making himself look guilty by trying that bit too hard to look relaxed. He was under interrogation and he knew it. He should have come at this with a degree of respect and seriousness. As it was, Jo felt like he was mocking them.
She wished there were a fast-forward button. He’d have his cover down pat. The deep back-history was going to be stuff he’d repeated hundreds of time. She wanted to skip ahead to the part where he started talking about his time in China.
She knew better.
In spite of his smiles, this was a moment of great stress for Rayton. He’d been denied access to the science team for days, accused of industrial espionage by his superiors, and had to run to catch his ride out of an industrial plant which was imploding.
The first words out of his mouth had been, “I got it wrong. We need to starve MELT, not feed it.”
He had some cockamamie story about conducting field experiments, but it sounded like a load of bunkum to Jo. Nevertheless, she had to listen to the whole thing over again to see if he contradicted himself or tried to sell any part of his story any harder (or softer) than any other part.
In the background, on the other end of the video feed, Sandra Walt, interrogator extraordinaire would be listening carefully. Once they got to a secure location she’d spend time with Rayton alone. Jo rolled her eyes. In the movie version of that conversation the agents would play out a “good cop, bad cop” routine in a dimly lit cell with knives and waterboards at the ready. That wasn’t how interrogations were conducted. They were legal, monitored, and relatively boring to the uninitiated.
