by A. E. Rought
The hit drives the pain from my jaw into my head. Ringing pierces my ears, and the bed spins in dizzy lurches. I slump to my elbows, head bobbing and blood wetting my lips.
“Shoulda done that a long time ago,” he says, his words doubling like echoes in my ears.
“You should,” Alex’s father says, “do what I hired you for. Inject her.”
“Happy to.”
Then Josh straddles me, pinning my arms down with his knees. He takes a loaded syringe from his pocket, pulls off the cap.
“It didn’t have to be like this,” he says in a ridiculously conversational tone. “If you could’ve just learned to like me. But, no…”
A sharp jab in my neck leads to a burning pressure. The heat spreads, into my head to muddle the pain, through my shoulders and into my body singeing my veins. I want to fight, want to throw Josh off me, but my limbs are full of warm sand. My respirations slow, panic flutters in my chest, but the drug slows that down too.
“What didya give them?” Josh asks.
“Fentanyl.” The doctor crosses his arms and watches me with clinical interest. “A narcotic a hundred times stronger than morphine.”
“Sounds like fun…”
“It’s not recreational.”
Before my eyes slip closed Josh leans over me, close enough to smell the toothpaste and coffee on his breath. My eyes struggle to focus. Hate seethes so hot for him it might gag me. Glaring back doesn’t work, my eyelids are so heavy.
“I didn’t just let Daniel fall, bitch. I pushed him.”
Monster! I shriek in my mind.
Then my eyes sag closed. My hearing is the last to go.
“Tie them up,” Doctor Franks orders, “And we’ll take them back to the lab.”
I can’t scream, can’t move, can’t fight them at all, and then the blackfinallywins…
#
The room spins, or I’m spinning. I’m not sure. Light comes from every angle, highlighting the veins in my eyelids, making the vertigo worse. Sharp medicinal smells fill the chilly air. Where am I? I’d been in bed with Alex, then his father and Josh drugged us…
Hard planes at my back refuse movement, and I know instinctively Alex is not beside me. Edgy panic razes my nerves, my racing heart flings the tang of fear through my body. It tastes sour and slick in the back of my throat. My eyelids drag like sandpaper when I force them up. Ceiling, walls, floors—everything is white or metal. Wires and tubes, lights and machines everywhere.
An operating room.
Oh my God. Fight or flight reactions kick in, jerking me up against pain and bonds I can’t see. I’m trapped. Tied to a operating table. An ache thrums in my shoulders and arms, my left hand feels like a ball of puffy heat. I cannot separate them—someone must’ve tied my hands back and beneath a cold metal operating table.
I can’t move enough to gauge where I am, or what’s going on. I catch a shadow of something, or someone past me where I’m able to turn my head. Then my racing heart stumbles. Alex, pale as death, lies on another table a few feet away. Oh, Alex, no! He’s unconscious, a mask over his face, electrodes taped to his temples, chest barely rising only to fall again, monitor leads and IVs in his arm. Shiny wet brown iodine covers his chest.
“Alex!” I scream.
No response.
I wrench against the ropes on my wrists. Heat saws into my skin, the knot gives a little.
“You’re probably wondering where you are,” comes the infuriatingly calm voice of Doctor Franks from over my shoulder. He strides into view, wearing surgical scrubs and gloves and wheeling a cart loaded with wicked-looking instruments. “What do those signs say? ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’? Well, consider this your punishment for weaseling your way into our lives.”
Punishment? This isn’t my fault. He brought this on us all when he got in the way of Daniel’s love for me. Twisting my left hand around, I get a grip on the cords tying my hands. If I could just keep him talking, I can untie myself.
“Why are you doing this?” Damn my voice for shaking like Imterrified.
“Why?” His eyebrow hardly rches. A sneer curls his upper lip. “To get my son back, to restore him into the life I planned for him. Med school, a brilliant wife, eventually his own practice.”
He runs his fingers over the tray of tools, and eyes me critically. The rope gives a little. I need so much more time.
“What are you going to do with me?”
“Conscious donors are so chatty.” He says, like we’re old friends. “What am I going to do? I’m going to eliminate the one thing standing in the way of all that.”
Conscious donor? The fear sharpens, turning a nauseous sour in my gut. Loops in the knot loosen, but I can’t get my fingers hooked in to pull it. My heartbeat echoes in my ears when the psychopath walks the few paces to his son. Don’t hurt him, I plead, kill me, just please God, don’t hurt Alex anymore.
“Since Alex woke up, he hasn’t been right. Wanting nothing to do with the girl I picked for him, more obstinate, more opinionated …”
“Sounds just like Daniel,” I sling at his dad, and work at the ropes on my hands.
“And obsessed.” His jaw clenches, any friendliness gone. “Going on and on about some girl in his dreams.”
“Daniel loved me.” I say, exploiting his weak spot, and working a loop of the knot loose. “Bet you didn’t expect that.”
The jibe works, his face darkens, he paces back and forth. And I pry another section of the knot free.
“Love,” he says, “is not science. It’s not measurable. Not real.” And then he turns to me, face impassive again. “But it is symbolic. I’m going to take the biggest symbol. I’m going to take your heart, Emma Gentry, and give it to my son. Then Alex’ll stop pining after you.”
“He’ll hate you!” My voice is steady despite the fear poisoning me. If my emotions—soul—reside in my flesh, Alex will hate his father forever.
My fingers slip and I lose my grip on the ropes. Despair threatens to engulf me. Then a fire sparks inside. I lost myself to that darkness once. I won’t do it again, not as long as there’s a chance at hope and Alex is alive. I track Doctor Franks’ movements as he fills a syringe with Alex’s formula, types a code on a laptop, and flips a switch.
“What son doesn’t hate his father? That,” he stresses, “is real. And perfectly natural.”
“Nothing in this place is natural.” My voice is level, my mind spins with images of the reanimated animals and the crimes this man committed, against people and nature.
“Maybe not to you,” he says, then rolls the cart closer. “I don’t expect you to understand.” Then he grabs my chin, and forces me to look at Alex, flat on the table. “He is my greatest achievement. I cheated death for him and I will not let some girl, and the emotions of her dead boyfriend, take that away from me.”
Alex isn’t a son, he’s a trophy. There’s no love from his father, only possession. I love Alex. Every bit of my heart confirms it. And I will do anything to be with him.
One last bend in the rope. I work it with careful fingers, while Dr. Franks selects a pair of trauma shears off the table. His expression becomes analytical, removed. The metal is cold as he cuts my shirt up the middle, exposing most of my chest and stomach to the uncaring lights. All business, he reaches for jar and swab, and then a stack of blue paper sheets on the supply cart.
My hopes plummet—the end of the cord is so long, I may not get free in time.
The cold in his eyes and the antiseptic sinks into my gut as he swabs my skin then frames my chest in the surgical messy mats.
“Have to prevent contamination,” he says. His voice has a sing-song tone, like he’s teaching a beginner’s course for psycho surgeons. Anger would be better, anger can be affected—detachment is so much scarier. My fingers tire from worrying the knot, the thread feeding through a teeny bit at a time.
Then Doctor Franks places a stainless steel pan beside me, ice in the bottom and a sealed sterile bag atop the i
ce. Humming to himself, he sets a pair of shears next to it—to cut open the bag, then stuff my heart into the germ-free insides, I’m sure. Terror drives my heart against my ribs, and I wonder if he’ll be displeased with a bruised organ.
The loop shrinks in my hand. Almost there… It slips, slips, slips toward the floor. Then the doctor picks up a scalpel and faces me again.
“No,” I beg. “Please no.”
“Bargaining is one of the stages of grief,” he says matter-of-factly. “It may dismay you to know, I found on using your boyfriend Daniel’s organs, the more alive the donor is, the better success of the transplant. So, I apologize if this hurts…”
The blade is frigid, the burning pain when it cuts into the skin between my breasts is unbelievable. A gasp sucks cold air into my lungs that I let out in a high whine.
And the end of the cord falls free.
Surprise widens Doctor Franks’ eyes when I ram my cast into his throat. One hand clenches on my shoulder, his other opens and the scalpel falls to the floor in a spray of red. Air whistles in his windpipe and it’s not enough. He’s still standing between me and Alex. I claw at his hand, then Doctor Franks shifts his grip and clamps both hands around my throat.
The panic I felt morphs into anger.
Blood courses down my skin when I twist, and bring the cast as high as I can. Heat floods my face, blood trapped by the surgeon’s hands. Then I swing the cast down like a sledgehammer, crashing it into his thin wrists. Something cracks on impact, and Doctor Franks lets out a yelp. Hurt flares in my hand again, but I’m used to it. His chokehold springs open and he stares at his wrist. I must’ve broken bones in him, too.
I swing the cast one more time, up and out, hitting his chin and driving him backward. The focus goes out of his eyes, then they cross and he pitches forward to the floor.
“Weren’t expecting that, either. Were you?”
I wedge a pad of gauze into the cut oozing blood from my chest.
Chill from the floor spreads across the soles of my feet when I slide from the surgical table. I grab a sheet smelling of bleach and wrap it around me. All I can think is to reach Alex, wake him up and escape this hell house.
“Alex,” I sob, stumbling over his father’s outstretched hand. “Alex wake up.”
Nothing.
Medicinal scents waft from the mask when I rip it from his face. I fling a useless gaze at the monitors. The numbers and squiggly lines make no goddamn sense. He could be dying and I wouldn’t know what to do. His shoulders are limp, arms loose when I shake him. Pink flares on his white cheek when I give into desperation and slap him.
Still nothing.
A sob of fear and growl of frustration merge in my throat.
Think, I tell myself. Calm down and think.
His father filled a needle with his formula he has to have once a week, and then typed something into the laptop.
Feet slapping, I run to the table, take up the syringe full of Alex’s life formula and return to him. I slide the needle into the blue vein in the bend of his elbow, depress the plunger slowly, praying with every CC of fluid that I’m saving him and not killing him. I’m dead if he is—I don’t want to live without him. When the needle empties, I step back to the laptop and press Execute on the touch screen.
An immense power draw dims the lights, and buzzes in the air, crawling over my skin like bees and sunburn. Sparks travel the wires leading to the electrodes, and then Alex’s body arches like a bow from the surgical table. The monitors squeal, needles bury in the black, every one of his joint locks, every muscle a cord of steel standing beneath his skin.
I can’t help it. I scream his name and drop to my knees.
The lights return to normal, the monitors to a rhythmic beeping.
“Please, be okay,” I whisper.
The gauze falls from my chest and blood trickles down my skin when I stand. High color flags his pink cheeks, muscles visibly relax, joints loosen. I thread the fingers of my left hand in one of his.
“Wake up, Alex.” I plead, then kiss his lips. “Wake up and say you love me.”
Chapter Thirty
Alex draws a breath through his nose, then a smile crooks his lips. This close, the energy I just poured into him crackles in the air between us. His mismatched, beautiful hazel eyes open and fix on me with the wonder and amazement I’ve grown to cherish.
“I love you,” he says, giving me what I begged for, then follows it with, “What happened?”
Tears of relief burn past my defenses. I don’t know where, or how to hug him with all the wires and tubes, but I want in the worst way to bury my face in the crook of his neck and smell his skin.
“Your dad wanted to rip out my heart and trade it for yours.” I’m not going to lie. His father’s on the floor, my shirt’s cut, I’m bleeding, and he’s vital and tingly on my senses. “I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
My hands flutter over him, one club-like weapon, one useless. Alex rises to sitting, pulls the electrodes from his temples, and then the IVs and tubes out. He flexes his arms, stretches his spine, rolls his neck and shoulders. He looks as healthy as the night of the dance, and as beautifully uncovered scarred perfection as he did last night. His gaze falls to his father, prone on the floor.
“I’m not sure I want to know how you managed that,” he says in a neutral voice.
I waggle my hot pink cast between us. “I figured he broke my bones, I could use the cast to break a couple of his.”
“Karma.” A bitter laugh escapes him as he slings his legs over the side of the table. “There’s scrubs in the end cabinet,” he says, eyes gliding down my body before flicking a gaze at the far wall. “We don’t want you to freeze.”
“You’re not exactly fully clothed...”
I’m so bent on leaving, I didn’t think about the snow. At least he still has his jeans on.
I step over his father toward the cabinets. The counter is stocked with vials of Alex’s necessary formula, plastic wrapped packets of tools, bundles of gauze, and other stuff I don’t recognize. I can’t leave Alex’s life on the shelf, and scoop up as many bottles as I can in my left hand and take them with on my hunt for clothing.
The cabinet is tall as a broom cupboard, and full of tops, pants, lab coats, and boxes of gloves, masks, and paper booties. I take a lab coat, and stuff the vials in a pocket, then pull on a pair of stiff, baby blue scrubs. Blood seeps from the cut in my chest and stains the front of the shirt immediately. Grab another one, I tell myself. The vials clink and jostle in the pocket when I wrap the jacket around them. One slips to the floor, and when I bend to retrieve it, I see motion in the middle of the room.
No. It isn’t even a thought. It’s a violent gut reaction.
“Alex,” I shout before I can get my head around the cupboard door.
Lightning cracks in the side of my head, slammed there by the cabinet door. Once, twice, three times. Strength abandons my legs, I drop to the floor, a jumble of hurt and bones.
“Dad!” Alex bellows. “Leave her alone!”
“I will not!” Doctor Franks plants a foot in my chest, pressing on the cut. A squeaking wheeze rushes from me. Then the white room lurches past my eyes when he shoves me over. “She’s ruined everything. Med school. Hailey. I had it all planned!”
Life freezes, and I see three things at once: His father curls a foot back, readying to unload a kick. Alex vaults the surgical table. And the precious vials fall free of the lab coat.
Then life jumps into high gear. Airborne and arms spread wide, Alex slams into his father. The younger Franks wraps his arms around his dad’s as the force drives them both into cabinet shelves. Medical paraphernalia flies from the shelves, cloaking me and them as they tussle and struggle for control. Throwing my arms over my head, I cower away from the vicious barrage of punches and Alex.
Alex slams Mr. Franks spine-first into the cart of tools. Blades and things go skidding in all directions. Alex’s dad wrenches a hand free and grabs for a n
eedle full of a clear fluid just like the Fentanyl they used on us at his grandparent’s house. A guttural sound rips from Alex, and he spins them both until he can slam his father’s hand against a bank of computers and shake the syringe free.
The computers spark, the monitors all flicker.
Spitting a cuss word, I lunge for the laptop his father had used and yank it from the main frame before the power surge hits. The rest of the electronics in the room go black and silent. Grunts and half-sputtered curses fill the silence.
“I will not let you hurt her,” Alex vows.
His father laughs, a manic sound.
They go down again, Alex sweeping his father’s feet from under him. Vials crack, and sparkling red spills over the white tile floor. Alex’s father scoops up a scalpel, light flashing from the blade before he buries it in his son’s shoulder. A howl of pain blasts the room. Rearing back, Alex lets go long enough to yank the knife free, and then spins it in his palm and drives it home in his father’s ribs. The older man gasps, staring in shock at the injury his son gave him.
“That’s right,” Alex nods. “I’m not yours anymore.”
He steps back, crushing one of the vials of medicine. The room centers on his father, and the air burbling around the scalpel in his chest. His hand shakes when he pulls it out and flings it to the floor.
“Let us go, Dad.” Alex says.
“Let you go?” his father snaps. I keep him in my sights as I gather the last couple formula bottles. The man rises, then slams his hand against a red button. An alarm sirens in the house. “I will never let you go. I made you. I own you!”
Snarling, Alex scoops up the laptop, and slams it into the side of his father’s head.
“Like hell you do.”
Worrying about the valuable information in it, I grabbed the laptop as Doctor Franks staggers backward, and collapses on the damaged monitor bank. He grabs for it, and rips it down with him when he falls. Showers of sparks spray from the severed cords. Instruments clatter beneath him as Alex’s father tries to stand. Alex extends a hand to me, and leads me to the door.
