“Stop—Stop—!” Arius came to a trembling halt, hand outstretched to catch himself against the trunk of a tree. He collapsed gasping onto the muddy ground at its roots. He was shaking as he tugged the material of the hospital gown over his knees. It was coming off his shoulder, bleeding through with sweat. Arius’s muddy shoes disappeared under his folded legs, and he dropped his head against the bark at his back.
Gabriel paced back over to him, panting heavily. “Arius. Arius, we have to keep going. They could be looking for us.” He folded forward, dropping his hands to his knees.
“No. No, are you crazy!?” Arius lifted glaring eyes to the boy standing above him. “What the fuck was that, Gabriel? What the fuck was it!?”
Gabriel cast a glance over his shoulder. No sign was visible of anyone who might be following them, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of a stalked prey. Swatting away a mosquito, he dropped exhaustedly onto a fallen log. “They gave you an opioid, Arius. They…” His voice fell breathless for a moment. Searching the trees like a better explanation might be written somewhere on the bark, he bit his lip. “They were overdosing you on an opioid...”
Arius sucked in a wretched gasp and wiped a stream of sweat off the side of his face. “Are you serious? Are you fucking serious?”
“We have to find the highway and call the police,” Gabriel said quietly.
“No. No, absolutely not.” Arius’s dark, frowning eyes flashed up at the older boy. His arm shot out in a furious gesture back toward the clinic. “You broke a fucking door, Gabriel, you broke a fucking door, I thought you were fucking serious!”
“I—I am serious!” The light, dangerous feeling of another wave of adrenaline swept over Gabriel. I don’t know, I don’t know what happened, his mind insisted fearfully. They were nurses and doctors in a research organization. Schooled, trained, and certified medical professionals of the highest tier. How could they make a mistake like that?
“Oh, so the people who have kept me alive for nineteen years randomly decided to kill me?” Arius’s sarcasm was a poor mask on his panicked rage. He hiccupped on a sharp inhale. “Put me down with a damn horse tranquilizer?” Arius tilted his head slightly, eyes shutting against his frantic breaths.
The 21 tattooed on that boy’s neck became boldly visible in the dim light filtering in through the tree branches above. Gabriel’s vision blurred on it. “I…don’t know what happened,” he admitted in a faint voice. “But the nurse gave you carfenanil, and I told three different people what had happened, and nobody wanted to do anything about it. They tried to tranquilize me. Then, back in the room, your nurse could see your vital signs…” Gabriel’s shoulders went tense again. He sucked in a quick breath and shook his head. “And did nothing. She was going to reconnect your IV. She told you in the first place she wasn’t sedating you. She blatantly lied, she did exactly the opposite of intuitive medical procedure—She should have given you an overdose reversal drug, and instead, she tried to keep giving you the opioid.”
“I would fucking tranquilize you.” Arius’s eyes were seething as they lifted to Gabriel’s face again.
“You were in cardiac arrest!” Gabriel gasped. Vivid images of that small clinic room suddenly flashed through his head, leaving him fearful for a moment that he was about to black out. Arius had been dead. No pulse, no breath. If it had taken Gabriel so much as a minute longer to get back to that room, Arius would have been beyond reviving.
It finally seemed to sink in a little on Arius, the gravity of Gabriel’s statement. Those dark brown eyes watched the twenty-two-year-old in silence for several seconds. “H-How…How did…” The offended edge was gone from his voice.
“Good thing I know CPR, right?” Gabriel smiled faintly, the urge to say something humorful only a ditch effort at keeping his composure.
“Who were they shooting at?” Arius whispered.
Gabriel’s eyes lowered to the wet, leaf-covered earth below his own dirty shoes. “I don’t know.” The three words were also a whisper.
Arius lifted a hand in a weak gesture. “You didn’t…do something to make them mad? There’s…no part of the story you aren’t telling me?”
“Arius, what would I have done to warrant them shooting at me?”
“Was it a real bullet?” Arius’s voice sank into a hushed breath.
Images of that hole in the side of his mother’s SUV flashed through Gabriel’s mind, and he swallowed.
“I know,” Arius whispered, eyes lowering quickly. “You…You pulled me out of the way like…like a reflex. I don’t even know…” He broke off, and a harsh tremor ran through him. “I don’t even know if I would have been hit, but…you really thought I would be.”
Gabriel’s jaw flexed in silence. He watched the nineteen-year-old for a long moment.
“What about Mom? Amana and Monica?” Arius’s eyes did not lift from the ground. He seemed to know the answer already.
“I don’t know,” Gabriel whispered. “For now…For now, we have to find the highway and call the police.”
It was strange. Strange how, amid Gabriel’s panic and exhaustion, he found his thoughts quietly settling on Arius’s face. Dark strands of hair stuck to that sweat-soaked visage like wet raven feathers. The way those beautiful dark eyes stared emptily at the ground. Those soft lips, parted to allow heavy breaths to pass.
Gabriel found himself absently running the back of his hand across his own lips. His eyes darted along Arius’s tattooed neck and exposed shoulder, then shifted away. “And find you some clothes,” he added in a mumble.
They sat there panting for a while longer. Then, when Gabriel thought Arius had somewhat caught his breath, he walked over and offered the nineteen-year-old his hand. That pale, sweaty face lifted toward him, and Arius cautiously gripped Gabriel’s arm and pulled himself upright. “Hang in there,” Gabriel whispered. “We’ll find the highway and get help.”
Neither of them had phones. The clinic strictly confiscated any electronic devices at the entrance. Arius’s phone was in the SUV, and Gabriel’s was in a basket behind the check-in desk. Without the GPS on his phone, Gabriel did his best to gauge where the highway might be based on the approximate direction he believed they had been running in.
“A mile. Maybe two,” Gabriel found himself telling Arius. But his calculation came closer to five or six.
The forest seemed endless, clouds of mosquitos and suffocating southern heat dragging out their slow progress still further. Trying to keep his direction as straight as possible while maneuvering through the trees, Gabriel’s mind began to race. It could take them hours to find help. It would take even longer to get help headed back to the clinic. If the clinic security had been shooting at Arius and Gabriel, there was no telling what they might do to Gabriel’s mother, to Monica, to Amana. What if they had given Amana carfentanil, too? Monica, the only person who would be in the room with Amana the whole time, wouldn’t know any better. It would have looked like Amana merely fell asleep. If her nurse had switched off her patient monitor, just as Arius’s nurse had, Monica would not notice anything was amiss until it was too late.
Maybe Mom was in there with them, Gabriel told himself. She wasn’t in the car or the waiting area, so maybe she went into Amana’s room. Mom would have noticed. And he didn’t know that Arius had been given a fatal dose of carfentanil for a normal person. It was still possible there had been a mistake, someone’s medication had been mixed up, that dose would have been fine for the person it was intended for. And yet—they had administered carfentanil, an animal sedative. And the fact that no one had listened to Gabriel when he told three different staff members that his brother was receiving a transfusion of the wrong medication did not support the possibility of an innocent mistake. I should have read the concentration and milliliter information on the vial. I could look it up, estimate how much a normal person would have been given, figure out if—
Gabriel’s thoughts were abruptly interrupted when Arius, walking a few feet behind him, tripped and fell. The teenager was already recoiling from his fall and preparing to get up again when Gabriel hurried over. Again, Gabriel offered his hand and helped Arius up. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” The statement was little more than a breath, Arius’s trembling hands moving to brush dirt and dead leaves from his arms. His eyes flashed up at Gabriel for a moment. That face looked anything but fine.
Gabriel glanced the nineteen-year-old down, attention settling for a moment on how much of Arius’s figure showed right through the sweat-soaked hospital gown he was wearing.
“Stop,” Arius muttered. He gave Gabriel a piercing glare, the look unhindered by how exhausted and sickly he surely felt. Softly tanned fingers lifted to his shoulder, and he made a one-handed attempt at fastening the snaps on the gown.
Gabriel watched the muscles in that exposed shoulder shift before his eyes flashed up to Arius’s hand. Without thinking twice, he snatched the boy’s wrist. “Sh-Shit, your IV is bleeding.”
Arius’s fingers moved slightly in Gabriel’s grip, and the nineteen-year-old let out a weak sigh. There was dark red seeping out from under the tape holding Arius’s IV tube in place.
“You landed on your hands, didn’t you?” Gabriel questioned, glancing at the fallen branch Arius had tripped on.
“I—I guess.” His shoulders lifted in an uncertain shrug.
“Shit,” Gabriel repeated. “Walk beside me, okay?” He gradually released Arius’s wrist, and they started again in the direction of the highway. Silence held between them for several minutes. “Arius, I should give you my shirt.” Gabriel stopped for a moment, hands moving to the hem of his shirt.
But Arius slapped Gabriel on the arm. “No, I don’t want your shirt, you absolute douche.”
In spite of himself, Gabriel smiled faintly. “Don’t fall again, okay?”
A weak smile touched the corners of Arius’s lips, but he seemed too exhausted to respond to Gabriel’s sarcasm.
I need to get him to a hospital, Gabriel knew. His eyes lifted to scan the distance ahead. Nothing but trees were visible. Time felt like it was ticking by faster than Gabriel’s pounding heartbeat.
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