Ted tried to pull free of the guards holding him, but his muscles failed to respond.
“The thing!” he yelled, various body signals announcing he was beginning to panic. The word for the medical device used for injecting liquids through a needle had been wiped from his mind.
The thug was making noise—cursing in a strangled chicken squawk and demanding to be allowed to leave, though he repeatedly hawked up globs of thick blood. The tall male nurse ventured closer in an attempt to examine the Russian’s neck and earned a glancing kick to the side of his head for his trouble. The Russian croaked sounds that could not have been words and threw flailing punches. His eyes were dazed and unfocused, but he was still dangerous. The security detail backed off and let the police take over. In seconds he was facedown on the floor, his hands cuffed behind him. He kept on screaming in that hideous animal cry.
“He’s Russian,” Ted tried to explain to the police, believing that this simple fact would explain so much of what had happened.
“Syringe!” Ted yelled the second the word came to him.
A nurse found it tossed into a corner and held it up. It was broken. Ted gasped and tried to remember why this was important.
Two blue uniformed men took over from the security guards. They sat him in a chair. Nurses, both male and female, were shouting at one another. Ted tried to focus on relaying facts to the cops. Facts had become slippery, sliding through his fingers as he grasped at them.
The police listened to Ted’s story. The broken syringe and the puffy injection mark in his shoulder lent some credence to an otherwise unlikely story.
“I don’t feel well,” he said. “I need a doctor.” He was enormously proud of himself for getting those thoughts out. Forming sentences was a chore. He was tired. Exhausted. And at the same time, he felt on the verge of a panic attack, starting at sudden sounds and riding a whiplash of emotions. As he listened to himself explaining why he had attacked the man in Kenzie’s room, he heard only the gaps and leaps in logic. And he couldn’t seem to care. His voice tapered off and he went silent.
The head nurse and the police finally negotiated a settlement whereby the Russian, under guard, was delivered downstairs to the ER. The cops abandoned Ted in the ICU while the staff worked to determine what unknown substance had been injected into him.
Ted found their discussion increasingly difficult to follow, a fact that should have bothered him a lot more than it did. His world was inundated with gauzy cotton balls that blurred his vision, blocked his hearing, and sapped his energy. Minutes before, he had been wide awake. Now he wanted only to lie down.
“Can you tell us how you’re feeling, Mr. Molloy?” The male nurse’s eyes were filled with anxiety. Ted’s anxiety spiked again.
“Is she okay?” Ted asked. He had some trouble putting the question into words.
“What did he say?” A woman’s voice.
“I didn’t get it. What’s his heart rate now?”
“Soaring.” Another nurse’s voice.
“Jesus, he’s sweating buckets. Where’s Dr. Cox?”
“On her way.”
Ted couldn’t keep the voices straight. He felt as if he had dropped off to sleep for a moment and couldn’t remember or understand anything that was being said—only it kept happening, over and over. Each second was a newly erased blackboard, and the squiggles and lines that appeared made no sense.
“Whoa. Hold him. What is he doing?”
Ted realized he was lying down. Had he just been standing? Why were they all yelling? Faces swirled above him, blurred and indistinct, then suddenly hyperfocused and enlarged as though seen through a glass bubble.
“He’s going into shock. Hey! Mr. Molloy! Stay with me!” It was the male nurse speaking. Yelling, actually.
“It’s a stroke,” another voice said, the speaker quite sure of her instant diagnosis.
One more voice chimed in. “Hypoglycemic shock. Is he diabetic? He needs sugar. Anything sweet.”
Ted’s field of vision was shrinking—or the kindly face of the male nurse was expanding dramatically.
“Drink this. Come on.”
The man gently lifted Ted’s head and forced a plastic cup to his mouth. Warm, watery apple juice. Ted spat it out in an explosive spray of pale gold liquid.
“Goddammit.” The kind-faced man had been replaced by a stern woman. “What’s that?” She tore the Mountain Dew out of his pocket and twisted the cap. Another spray—florescent green this time. Ted wasn’t sure he wanted any right then, but the nurse had become very insistent. It was easier to go along than to fight her off.
And he was surprised at how thirsty he had become. He gulped down the cupful of soda. Someone poured him another. He didn’t really like Mountain Dew. Did they have a . . . ? What was it called? The brown one.
“Root beer,” he said.
“What’d he say?”
“God knows. ‘Super,’ maybe?”
“Good. Keep feeding him the soda. Somebody get another.”
“Where the hell is the doctor?” a particularly upset voice screeched.
“On her way,” a new voice replied from very far away.
Other people arrived and crowded around. Ted heard snatches of the conversation. Two women may have been arguing. The word “insulin” was repeated more than a few times. He was beginning to feel a touch more alert, better able to connect with the world, so he explained that the man he had fought with had punched him outside the elevator at the courthouse. He wasn’t sure why it was important to impart this information at that moment, but he wanted to help. But the words didn’t flow as easily as he imagined them coming out. His tongue seemed to have quadrupled in size and developed a primitive yet independent mind of its own.
“I’m Dr. Cox. You’re going to be okay, Mr. Molloy.” The speaker was a glossy-skinned woman with long thick hair the color of ebony. She was very young.
“I got shot,” he said. No, not shot. Something else. Another word. It didn’t matter. Did it?
“We think you were injected with insulin, but we don’t know how much. The effects may last some time as it works through your system, but the needle did not pierce any major blood vessels. A subcutaneous dose is rarely fatal.”
Rarely. He would have been alarmed, but he was finding that he didn’t care. Everything seemed pointless.
The head nurse pushed her way to his side. “Here. Hard candy. Jolly Ranchers. Keep it in your mouth. Don’t swallow it.”
“He won’t like it,” said a woman’s priggish voice from the back of the crowd.
“Fig Newton,” he said. He hadn’t eaten one in decades, but right then it was the most important thing in the universe.
“What did he say?”
“Here. Here.” The nurse forced a candy through his lips.
Grape. He hated grape. He opened his mouth and let the candy fall out. He needed to get that awful taste out of his mouth. He asked for more soda.
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you’re saying.” It was the woman with the nice hair. She sounded nice. But she was too young to be a doctor. “Drink this and you’ll feel better soon.” The cup came up to his mouth, and he gulped down another eight ounces of Mountain Dew. “Can you eat?”
“No. Please. No.” Ted did not want any more grape disasters forced into his mouth.
“So? Was it a stroke?” Another new voice. Male. Older. The man’s breath smelled of cigarettes and coffee.
“No. Insulin shock. Can I ask you to stand back, please?”
The nice male nurse spoke again. “A lollipop would be perfect.”
The sugar in the soda was kicking in. Ted was beginning to make sense of the voices and what they were saying. He decided that he was going to live. Now was the time to convince the crowd hovering over him. “No more fucking candy!” he yelled. The words were crystal clear and met with two beats of silence.
“I told you not to give him candy,” the hidden woman’s voice chimed in.
The male nurse helped Ted to his feet and guided him to a bed. Ted sat on the edge and stared at the doctor, who seemed to be waiting for him to do something interesting. The world was moving much too fast—then too slow. His bodily chemistry was all askew. As clarity returned, it came with a frenetic rush of desperate energy. Changes came in waves less than seconds apart. As the adrenaline wore off, the caffeine from the soda began to give him a headache and caused an annoying buzz that left him cranky and ready to argue—about anything. And he was hungry. Monstrously hungry. He craved water and lusted for a Gallagher’s cheeseburger. Or that stew Mohammed had been eating.
“Can I get any real food?” he asked.
Shortly, a prepackaged sandwich appeared in front of him. Tuna salad—that tasted mostly of chopped raw onion—on a soggy white roll. It was heavenly. He devoured it in four bites and promptly fell asleep.