Emmy Laybourne - Savage Drift

There’s a humming noise, getting louder, and I see we’re nearing a room where a man is using an industrial floor polisher.

“I’m getting tired,” I say.

“Just a bit more,” she tells me.

I don’t want to go anymore. I want to sleep.

But she keeps walking until we’re right by the guy with the polisher and it’s loud.

She leans into me.

“Don’t sign the consent form,” she says in my ear. “The spinal tap he wants to do, it’s too dangerous for people like you.”

I watch the man moving the polisher in a circle. He looks up and I see him catch Sandy’s eye.

“Dr. Cutlass is a good man, but he’s… he’s lost… perspective. Those spinal taps are not safe for people like you. Other people, yes, maybe. But not Os who’ve been exposed. Not skinny-minnies like you. Got it?”

Chills creep up my spine. I nod.

She turns me and we head back to my room.

“And you didn’t hear it from me.”

I carried Astrid to the car. She winced in the sunlight when I brought her outside.

“Bye!” Rinée said.

“We’re coming back,” I told her and J.J., who stood gaping on the stoop, as Lea helped me to put Astrid in the passenger seat.

“Bye, Ean!” Rinée repeated. Frankly, she seemed happy for us to go.

I drove. Astrid was moaning. The motion of the car was bothering her. Every bump we hit made her cry aloud.

“Please,” I told her, handing her the squeeze bottle of water that Lea had put in the cup holder. “Take a sip. Please.”

She obliged me.

Her hand was trembling violently, going for the bottle.

I got us on the highway, headed north.

“Are you feeling any better?” I asked.

She had her head hanging down, resting her elbows on the dash.

She vomited again, looking up at me with fear in her eyes. Green bile slick on her chin.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s going to be okay.”

She leaned against the window and I hit eighty. If a cop pulled me over, good. Maybe he’d give us an escort.

“Almost there, almost there,” I said. Though I had no idea how far Joplin was or how long it would take us to get there.

“It’s just a flu,” I told her. “They’ll get you fixed right up.”

“My head,” she cried. “It hurts so bad.”

Then she started shaking.

Her head whipped back and she was convulsing, arms flailing.

I cursed and swerved.

“Astrid! Astrid!” I shouted.

I pulled onto the shoulder and the cars screaming past wailed their horns.

I tried to hold her. Was I supposed to put my hand in her mouth to stop her from biting her tongue? I couldn’t remember and then she went limp.

“Astrid? Astrid!” I called to her.

She was unconscious.

A sob wrenched free from my chest.

What to do?

I got out. Tried to flag down a car.

“HELP!” I yelled. “Somebody help me!”

None of them stopped.

Nobody would stop!

Then I saw an Army truck approaching.

It was one, and behind it were others.

I got back in the car, belted myself in, and hit the gas.

The first truck had just passed as I got up to speed.

There were eight or ten big olive-drab trucks in the convoy and a flatbed truck carrying two of the same kind of jeeps we had seen in Roufa’s cargo plane back in Texas.

I honked at them, trying to wave them down, but they sped past me.

In a flash, they were ahead and I was behind. They were leaving me, literally, in the dust.

The last truck was filled with soldiers, and as I honked and waved my hand out the window, begging for them to stop, a soldier smoking a cigarette popped his head out and looked at me.

“Please stop!” I shouted, though of course he couldn’t hear. “I need help! I need help!”

The soldier took his cigarette and flicked it at me. Then started laughing and pulled his head back inside the canvas cover.

My foot slammed on the gas, like it belonged to someone else. I pushed the little Mazda for all it had, 80—85—90, and pulled up next to that last truck.

I saw the soldier in the passenger seat look at me, puzzled, and then I brought the Mazda closer and closer to the truck.

I would push him off the road, into the median. I would get their godforsaken help. I was going to get it.

The truck pulled onto the median and I heard a screech of heavy metal as it braked to a stop.

I slid out behind it, almost ramming it from behind.

Holy almighty, what had I done?

My door was jerked open and a muscle-bound soldier hauled me out by my shirt and slammed me into the car.

“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? You wanna get yourself shot?!”

“My girlfriend and I are wanted by the United States Army Medical Research lab for medical testing,” I said. “We’re turning ourselves in.”

Dr. Cutlass comes to me in the late afternoon.

Every time I see him I’m struck by his hair. It’s always perfect. Wavy and brown, gray at the temples, and the soft curls combed or gelled into place.

He has his minitab and a thick manila folder.

“Josie Miller!” he says, beaming. “I heard you went for a walk.”

He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He wheels over my tray table and takes a sheaf of paperwork from the folder.

“I’ve been in contact with Dr. Quarropas and he’s gathering the information on those kids you mentioned. He said he’d had… was it Hannah?”

He takes a silver pen from his pocket and places it on the tray. Then he shuffles past the first few pages of the form, coming to a page with a “sign here” flag pointing to a line.

“No, Heather. It was Heather. Heather’s in the clinic there and she’s fine. She suffered a concussion and some lacerations, but she’s recovering nicely. I was asking him about the possibility of transferring the kids to a better facility, one closer to here. He’s looking into it.”

The doctor smiles at me, his head bobbing softly. He points to the line.

“Sign right here.”

I look into his eyes.

He can’t hold my gaze and his eyebrow twitches before he looks away.

“I’m not going to sign it,” I say.

“Really?” he says. “Huh. Why’s that?”

“I don’t think it’s safe.”

“A spinal tap? It’s a common, routine procedure. Here, look, I’ll show you.”

He taps an address into his minitab, shows me a Wikipedia article on spinal taps.

I read, dutifully. The article says they are a low-risk procedure.

But Sandy wouldn’t warn me for nothing. She wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble for nothing.

I hand back the minitab and shrug.

“You know what, we haven’t talked about your release,” he says, changing tactics.

I don’t bite.

“I’ve saved the best news for last. I’ve been given clearance to award you a grant of twenty thousand dollars for your participation in this research.”

Wow. Now I know what my signature’s worth. I bet I could drive it up to fifty.