Activated

Through all of this, the one thing I'd never felt was helpless. I conned my way into bank records, broke a guy's arm without caring, slipped into a double-locked hotel door, and escaped a slow-moving car drifting through oncoming traffic; and through all of it, the only fear I felt was that it wouldn't be enough. I'd never feared that there was just nothing I could do. Never felt my heart beat echo in my own ears and my breathing stutter because something was just out of my hands.

My hands were gripped around the back of Amy's neck and her arm as she lay on the cold, cement floor of a Costco Warehouse. Her muscles twitched rhythmically as her eyes darted in all directions. A few feet away a man was half-screaming into his cell phone about a girl having a seizure, or something, in the middle of the store. The guy tried to repeat instructions and questions from the 911 operator, but he made a poor proxy and I couldn't concentrate on anything except the girl in my arms. The only language I could process was the, "No, no, no" playing on repeat throughout my skull and escaping as whispers from my lips.

What was going on? I had no idea. My mind raced in circles but couldn't stop on anything. Sixteen year olds don't have seizures. People don't die when you care enough about them.

A slight panic was spreading outward from my position like ripples on the surface of a sea of self-concerned shoppers. What's all the commotion? Is someone hurt? My god, she's just a kid. Is she on drugs? Is there a doctor? Does the coupon for applesauce apply if I buy the three-pack or is it just for single jars?

After the first concerto of dread finished in my mind and the encore was about to begin, a guy who didn't seem much older than myself filtered through the forming crowd and knelt on the floor across from me. He said some words I didn't hear, pulled up his sleeves, and put one hand on Amy's chest. What kind of pervert, I thought. I tried to focus my consciousness onto something nearby I could bludgeon him to death with. He repeated the same words, but they were again lost to the thick soup my brain had turned into. I had a knife. I could flick it open and swing it up into the base of his jaw. The blade wouldn't reach his brain, but it would get him the hell away.

"I said, is she a diabetic?" he said again, much louder this time.

The volume seemed to trump my hysteria. My thoughts pulled together slightly.

"Are you a doctor?" I asked in one quick breath.
"I'm a medical student," he said, dismissively. "Do you know this girl? Is she a diabetic?"
I tried to process the words. "Diabetic. I don't think so. Medical student?"
"I'm a third-year. I started my internship at the hospital a month ago," he said, leaning in and putting his ear near Amy's mouth. "This looks like hypoglycemia. Insulin shock. You don't know if she's diabetic? Has she eaten or drank anything yet today?"
Diabetic. Diabetic. The word hung for a moment before I remembered what it even meant. "I haven't seen her take insulin or anything before," I said.

I let go of her arm with one hand and grabbed a hand, looked at the tips of her fingers. I didn't see any puncture marks. I pulled the sleeves of her shirts up to look at her arms, saw no needle marks or scabs. There were a few long, very narrow scab-looking scars on her bicep in a neat row. Was she a cutter? Did she ever mention that?

"I said did she eat anything to drink? If she's hypoglycemic she has to get a certain amount of sugar. These spasms are severe."

I tried to remember. The only thing I remembered her having was that bottle of tea back at the hotel, but she didn't have much because she said it was bitter. Bitter. Something about that tickled on the back of my brain. Bitter. The groceries. What was it? My mind was trying to tell me something. Why is my mind trying to tell me something? That doesn't make sense. I am my mind. What does it know that I don't? Well, besides all those handy ways to kill people...

"Wait," I said, then let my mouth hang open. Amy had stopped spasming for a moment. They seemed to come and go.
"What?" the guy said.

Something was seeping into my mind, my real mind, but it was coming slow. Ways to kill people. How did they say Comstock died? Spasm something. Where did that tea come from? Somebody usually had to sign for the groceries when they were delivered. This morning they were just sitting there after I'd left the shopping-list on the doorknob the night before. Bitter tea. Plastic bottle. Comstock. What was all of it? The lady said Comstock may have been dosed with VX nerve gas or something else. Can you put nerve gas in tea? Is it bitter? Shouldn't nerve gas be a gas? What was the other thing? Damn it. It started with S.

"Strychnine," I said at last, in a low, somber voice.
"Strychnine?" the med student said, incredulously. "What about it?"
"She might have been poisoned. Do you know what strychnine is?"
"Yeah," he said, "it's poison. How could she have--"

Amy started spasming again. The muscles in her chest and back seemed to heave against each other. The medical examiner said most people die by breaking their own back.

"Oh god," the guy said, looking down at her.
"What?" I asked.
"This is going to be bad."
I swallowed.

He looked up, tried to pick out the guy in the crowd who had called 911. He was still on the phone, seemingly narrating the events.
"Is that still 911?" the med student asked the narrator.
The man said yes.
"Tell them to inform the ambulance dispatch that it's strychnine poisoning. They'll probably want to prep the ER for her arrival."
The man nodded slowly.

I looked back at Amy. Besides the twitching, she looked almost peaceful. Not yet, I thought.

"So it's poison," I said, "can't we just induce vomiting?"
The med student placed a hand on her throat. "No," he said, "I don't think so."
"You don't think so?"
"No, I mean. If the throat muscles are in spasm, reverse peristalsis is impossible. She would choke on the vomit." He sounded like he was reciting study notes from memory.
"What can we do, then?"
"Wait," he said. "And try to stop her from snapping her spine. Strychnine activates all the skeletal muscle tissue at the same time, her muscles are flexing against each other at once. If they ever get into a contrary rhythm, they could tear themselves apart or break her bones."

"There are couches over there," I said, "we could move her off the floor."
He thought about it, then said, "No, motion can make the spasms get worse." He turned around and asked the crowd, in general, to go fetch a pillow. A few people scampered away.

Wait? Wait. Amy was lying there on the floor, her body turning against her and we just wait?

The med student repositioned himself and pressed one hand against Amy's chest and the other against her stomach, like he was pushing her into the ground. he told me to hold her legs, but the words bounced right of me. I had an idea, but I didn't understand it. For a moment I wondered if I had slipped into the other me, but I didn't care.

"I'll be right back," I said as I stood up and ran through the circle of onlookers and down the aisles of the store.

I ran full speed, bobbing my head in all directions like a robin to look down the aisles as I passed them. Office supplies. Desk chairs. Clocks. Kitchen knives. Water filters. There. I stopped in my tracks and doubled back, cutting through the aisle and stopping in front of the home water filtering pitchers. I grabbed a box of replacement filters, and then started running again. Winter jackets. Toothbrushes. Shovels. Car batteries. Books. DVDs. Wine. Cakes. Raw meat. Fresh shrimp. Produce. Bottled water. I stopped again, pulled my knife out and cut away the plastic wrapping from a large case of bottled water. I grabbed two bottles, replaced my knife, and headed back to the pharmacy area. I slipped through the crowd and slid on my knees back to Amy's side. The two bottles I set on the floor, the box of replacement filters I tore open and produced a single plastic, tube-ish water filter.

The medical student, and everybody whose face I could see, looked at me like I was crazy. If I had the time, I would have smiled.

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 was holding Amy's torso against the floor still, someone else was holding her legs down by the ankles. When the med student realized what I'd done, he let out a slight laugh.

I poured some of the charcoal onto the floor to make some room in the filter-cup and topped it off with water from one of the bottles. I covered the top and shook the filter to get the carbon particles all wet, then poured the sandy sludge right into Amy's mouth, followed by some water. She coughed a few times, but it went down.

"What the hell 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 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 Valium."

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 this would be a cool time to fill it. "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?"