E.R.

Sirens slammed against my head in steady intervals as I bounced around the back of an ambulance. It was too bumpy to put in an IV, so they'd strapped Amy in tightly and shot something into her leg and pumped oxygen into her mouth with a clear, plastic... oxygen squeezy thing. I was trying not to notice that her shirt had been cut open.

Someone had tried to poison me. Amy had taken it instead. Her body was out of her control. Her mind locked in a convulsing prison.

I watched a heart monitor displayed on a screen mounted to the side of the vehicle, lines danced their merry dance. It was then that I realized this was my life now. As much as I tried to run from it, nothing was ever going to calm down. Something in the core of me seemed to summon havoc, manifest it all around me. I let go of any hope for a normal life then, and just hoped that my curse wouldn't spill onto any more of the people close to me. I did not want Amy to die, I couldn't let her take my bullet.

The ambulance screeched to a halt and the doors burst open, the chaos amplifying. White jackets and green scrubs yelled back and forth between blue coats. Everything was moving, everybody was making noise; I couldn't track any of it.

"This the poisoning?"

Out of the ambulance.

"Amy Westborne, 16. Suspected oral strychnine poisoning, muscular spasm, diffuse esophageal spasm."

Automatic doors.

"Pulse ox 88 and slipping."

Past a desk.

"Twenty-five of diazepam and unknown dosage activated carbon administered orally at scene. Ten-cc phenobarbital administered en route."

Around a corner.

"Trauma three is clear. Any idea how much strychnine was ingested?"

More people show up.

"Get me a line of saline with two milliliters of diazepam and seventy dantrolene."

Through double doors.

"We need to intubate."

Past a waiting room, people's heads drawn to the motion.

"No, not with DES. Keep bagging."

More doors. Curtains and beds everywhere.

"Who's he, a relative?"

Last set of doors. Even more people.

"Boyfriend, I think."

"Sir, do you know how she was poisoned?"
I figured the voice was talking to me so I answered without tracing the source, "She drank from a bottle of tea, said it was bitter. After ten minutes she complained of a headache, after another ten she went lockjaw and dropped."
"You recognized it as strychnine poisoning and gave her activated carbon and valium yourself?"

The rolling stretcher stopped beside a bed on wheels. Four of the people floating around her slid Amy from the stretcher to the bed.

I turned to look at who was talking to me, it was a doctor, female, forties. "Yeah," I said. "I mean, no. There was a guy there, a med student."
The woman nodded, then turned to a nurse and said what I thought was, "Get Petey down here." The nurse nodded and went out a set of doors behind her.

Another nurse was running an IV line into Amy's left arm, another standing over her head and squeezing the plastic bag pumping air into her mouth and nose. A few doctors shouted terse directions back and forth.
"Is she going to be alright?" I asked the doctor who'd been talking to me.
"Don't know yet," she said, "we're pushing anticonvulsants to keep the muscles from spasming, but her lungs aren't working properly so she's not getting as much oxygen as she should be. We can't run an orotracheal tube right now because her throat keeps opening and closing. If that doesn't stop we may have to perform a tracheotomy, cut a hole into her trachea so we can run air into the lungs."

The doctor stepped away from me and over to Amy, a flurry of hands moving all around her. Amy just lay there, motionless, like a CPR dummy. Something in my mind was telling me to get out of there, like something was wrong. I should call Amy's dad, I knew, and I should call my mom and make sure she doesn't touch any of the new food. It was something else, though. Who's Petey? Get Petey down here, it kept repeating in my head. Do I know a Petey? Or could she have said "PD," the police?

A girl was poisoned with some obscure chemical, and I just happened to be able to identify it and know how to treat it. That might look bad. Cops would want to talk to me. They'd want to know where the strychnine had come from, how it got into a bottle of tea that was technically mine. The fact that I was on the shitlist of a Scottish-accented killer who'd used the same poison to kill my principal the night before probably wouldn't go over too well. They might also wonder why I wasn't at school, if that made any difference.

I started to back out through the door we'd come in when I realized that I was clutching Amy's purse in my hand. I set it down on a small cart of supplies by the door, and slipped out the door into the hall. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, the screen was black. I tried to turn it on, but nothing happened. Shoot, I was supposed to get a new charger for the phone since the original one was in my house. The one that burned down. I headed toward the main waiting room for the ER and found the payphone. I slid my debit card through the phone's slot and dialed Rubino's cell number from the business card I was given last Sunday.

Four rings. "Rubino."
"It's Baker. You need to come pick me up at Mary Washington Hospital."
"I, uhh, why?"
"So you can take me to Quantico and so I can put three bullets in Schumer."
"Ok," he said, "any particular reason?"
"So he can tell me who the guy is that he hired to take out Comstock," I said.
"What, did he come after you?" Rubino asked with little concern.
"Someone put strychnine in food delivered to my room. Amy got some of it,---"
"Your little girl pal?"
"She's in the ER right now, they're talking about cutting a hole in her throat so she can breathe. Are you going to pick me up or not? I need to get out of here before the police find me and start asking why there was poison in my tea."
"I can deal with the police, for the hundredth time," he said. "I can also send Bremer over to your hotel with some uniforms to check on your mom and watch the place."
"Ok, good," I said. "He'll probably try to come after me again when he finds out I'm still walking."
"Alright," Rubino said, "I'll be there in a few minutes."
He hung up, I hung up.

I paced around the waiting room while I waited.

Strychnine. Damn it all, someone tried to poison me. Some crazy hitman. What is this? This isn't normal. A guy my dad worked for hired a hitman to take out my pretend school principal because he screwed up in hiring a hitman, and now the hitman is upset that Amy stabbed him, or upset because I'm the one who actually killed the first hitman? This, all because I'm the product of some insane program to build pre-programmed soldiers from scratch? I felt like my head was about to explode. I'd been awake for over 24 hours now and my brain felt like mush. Amy was laying on a slab in the ER unable to breathe for herself, my dad was dead, my ankle still kind of hurt from when I'd kicked out the back window of a stupid little European car in Austria, I hadn't eaten anything all day, and my house had recently exploded.

I wanted to go find Schumer, dragging the wrath of a holy hellstorm behind me. I wanted to make this all go away, make him tell me what's going on, make him call off the hitmen and put my life back together. I knew that wouldn't happen, but I'd be satisfied with a bit of revenge.

Rubino finally came in through the main ER entrance, spotted me, and walked toward me.
"Congratulations," he said, "it looks like you did manage to piss of a hitman."
"Looks like," I said with my arms crossed, trying to contain my roaring stomach and ignore the screaming madness in my head.
"I suppose it will be no surprise to you that the lab report came back on Nathan Comstock, and the cause of death was, in fact..."
"Strychnine," I said.
"You bet," Rubino said. He looked around for a moment, then asked, "how's the girl?"
"I don't know," I said, truthfully, "I'm afraid to go in there. Plus, the police will have questions I can't answer."
"Alright kiddo," he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. "Let's go face the music."

My dad used to call me "kiddo".