I was dreaming about having sex with the entire cast of Gilligan’s Island and was pleasantly surprised by the Skipper’s flexibility, when some keen instinct made me spring awake.
There was a nurse in the room. I was sure I’d seen her before, but I couldn’t remember her name.
Par for the course for me.
Phin and Jack were asleep, and the nurse was behind Sam’s bed, pushing it out of the room on its wheels.
Sam, strangely, was also sleeping. Even though it was midafternoon.
Even doped up as I was and likely not seeing things clearly, something about this seemed wrong.
“Hey,” I whispered. My voice sounded weird.
The nurse turned, and I noticed a few things at once.
First, she didn’t have a name badge on. Weird.
Second, she had latex gloves on. Weird.
Third, she was taking a syringe out of her scrubs pocket. Weird.
Fourth, she seemed to be all blurry and bendy. Weird.
What the hell was her name?
I wondered if I’d taken a picture of her, but there had been a few members of the staff I’d missed.
“Mr. McGlade. You’re awake.”
“Where are you… taking… where are you taking… Sam?”
It was hard to talk, but I felt myself grin. Whatever opiate I was on kicked like a mule.
“We got Samantha’s Covid-19 test back. She tested positive. We have to isolate her.”
“You… can’t… uh… can’t…” Why was it so hard to speak? “You can’t… without… parents…”
My eyelids fluttered, and I heard myself snoring, which woke me up again.
When I opened my eyes, the nurse was standing over my bed. She had a full syringe and had disconnected my IV line.
“You have quite the constitution, Mr. McGlade. The first dose should have stopped your heart.” She grinned in a scary way. “This time I’ll give you enough to kill an elephant.”
That voice. The soft monotone.
I recognized that voice through my drug haze.
“Blood,” I wheezed.
“I prefer that name. The Destiny Drac is so… small town.”
“Jack…” I tried to yell, but only managed a soft squeak.
“I gave her a lethal overdose. Her husband, too. You’ll all be counted as coronavirus deaths. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic. The hospital is overwhelmed. Bureaucratic mistakes are bound to happen, and very easy to make.”
I lifted my hand, tried to swat her away, but my motor skills were problematic.
She stuck the syringe needle into my catheter.
My breathing slowed to a sputter. I couldn’t fill my lungs. Everything was getting dark.
“Why?” I asked, though it came out more like, “Whaaaaaa…”
“I have a disease. My insides are drying up. I need Samantha.”
“She… a… lil grrrrl…”
“Samantha is going to help me. Her blood will nourish me. Nourish us.”
I reached to the other side of my bed. For the stainless steel bedpan.
It was too big and heavy to lift.
But the stuff in the bedpan wasn’t. That was soft and light and squishy.
Nurse Blood began to depress the syringe plunger, focused on giving me an intentional OD.
I had other ideas.
I smeared her arm with gooey brown, and she recoiled, taking the needle with her.
“You’re an ugly, disgusting man,” she declared, wiping her arm on my blanket.
I made a show of licking my sticky fingers.
The gift brownie from the candy striper tasted as sweet as ever.
The nurse gagged, then got behind Sam’s bed and pushed her out into the hallway. My world going full-tilt blurry, my lungs no longer working, I managed to lean over the side of the bed and reach into the nightstand drawer for my valuables.
My clothes were in there, along with my personal effects.
Wallet. Comb. Condoms. THC edibles and other drugs. A butt plug shaped like Darth Vader’s helmet.
Just the essentials. Including my Narcan spray.
Naloxone. And opioid antagonist.
I never left home without it.
I grabbed the bottle, and as everything faded to death I managed to stick the nozzle up my nose and give it a squirt.
Lucidity came in a rush.
So did the pain.
Since the Narcan binded with and neutralized the drugs in my system, my broken leg felt like it had suddenly caught on fire. I ground my jaws together, reaching for the call button to contact the nurse.
The cord had been taken away.
I tried to yell for help, but all that came out was a cough.
I looked at Jack and couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not.
My pain was about to get worse. Way worse.
I swung my lower body over the side of the bed, then tried to stand on my good leg. My balance was wanky, and I managed to take two big hops, agony beating the shit out of me, and I managed to half-fall/half-dive onto Jack’s bed.
Tears smearing my vision, I stuck the naloxone up her nose and squeezed.
She didn’t react—
—then my BFF jackknifed, sitting up, gasping for air.
But I had more pain to come. I got my foot under me again, hopping toward Phin, my other BFF, but he was further away and I couldn’t stay upright and I fell forward, the percutaneous pins in my leg banging against the floor.
The sensation was indescribable. Like an hors d’oeuvres tray of nerve endings getting their toothpicks played xylophone-style.
Maybe Jackie was right. Maybe my analogies were odd.
I tried to scream, but my lung capacity still wasn’t back to normal, so all that came out was a long hiss.
I pulled myself across the tile, crawling across a hellish painscape of unbearable agony, making it to Phin’s bed, getting my good leg under me, holding on to the side rail just long enough to give him a squirt up the nostril, then collapsing onto my back and sobbing in a very manly, macho way.
Jack laid back down.
Phin turned onto his side, but he didn’t wake up.
They needed more than Narcan.
Dragging my cactus leg behind me, catching my protruding metal pins on every tiny imperfection and crack in the floor, I got back to my nightstand, and my drug stash.
Dopamine was your body’s feel-good drug. Chocolate raised your dopamine levels 1.5 times. Sex, 2 times. Cocaine, alcohol, and weed, 2.5 times.
But there was one drug that gave you such a rush that the government hated it more than any other.
Hello sweet, sweet methamphetamine. Giving a 10x dopamine boost.
I’d traveled to Colorado with the vial of meth hidden in my Darth Vader butt plug, because as a rule TSA didn’t like to handle the butt plugs too much.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a syringe.
Fortunately, this was a hospital. On the wall was a plastic biohazard box, filled with syringes. I crawled toward it, barely able to breathe between the opiate overdose and the wracking sobs of neverending pain, and reached up, busting the sharps hazmat container open, used needles spilling out.
I found one that didn’t look too dirty, and filled it with meth.
Jack got the first dose, and her eyes popped open like morning window shades.
Phin got the second dose, and he sat up, shaking his head like a wet dog.
And the third dose?
I didn’t have a third dose.
I’d selflessly saved my BFFs rather than myself.
I dropped the syringe, then slumped to the floor.
My sobbing stopped, which was good.
It was because my lungs weren’t working right, which was bad.
Sayonara, Harry. You had a pretty good run.
I closed my eyes.
But even with them closed, I saw a bright light.
Always one to hop on a cliché, I floated towards the light. Through a hallway of clouds.
Up ahead, a huge gate.
A pearly gate.
An actual pearly gate. No shit.
And standing in front of it, a dude in a toga, with a beard.
It was surreal.
It was amazing.
It was heaven.
“Jesus Christ,” I swore.
“Yep,” He said. “Wassup, bro?”
“I can’t believe I made it.”
“Well, here you are.”
“I’ve done some bad things.”
“You certainly have. Plus there’s your die-hard atheism.”
“That wasn’t a deal-breaker?” I asked.
“Gotta say, it was a close call. But you saving your friends, that put you over the top.”
“Jack and Phin made it?”
“Alive and well, thanks to you. And meth. When Dad created meth, he got a bad rap. But it raises base dopamine levels by ten times.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Jesus.”
“You made it to paradise, Harrison Harold McGlade. Welcome.”
I shook His holy hand. Which was also a holey hand. Heh heh.
I also noted, with a bit of a shock, that my old hand was back. No more prosthetic limb.
“Cool,” I said.
“I know, right? You’re also your ideal age. Thirty-three. Everyone here is thirty-three.”
“Young enough to be attractive, but old enough to not be annoying.”
“Yep. The perfect age. What do you want to do first? You can talk to other dead people. Have all of your burning questions answered. Relive the favorite moments of your life. Spy on Earth.”
“Can I spy on people in the bathroom?”
“You mean haunt the crapper like a ghost? Of course. You can do anything you can imagine.”
“Are there drugs?” I asked.
Jesus laughed and slapped my shoulder. “Dude, it’s heaven. We got all the best drugs.”
“Sex?”
“Of course. We got the best orgies, too. What did you think heaven was? A bunch of uptight, judgmental goody-goodies, singing gospel hymns? It’s lit up here. Party central, 24/7. You want to join a crack-smoking daisy chain with Cleopatra, Einstein, Jimi Hendrix, and Mae West, while Mozart DJs?”
That was exactly what I wanted. “You betcha. But you knew that already.”
“Of course I did.”
“Thanks, Jesus.”
“Enjoy your eternity, Harry. You deserve it.”
I was about to ask the Messiah to point me to the crack-smoking daisy chain DJed by Mozart, but then I remembered Sam.
“Is Samantha going to be okay?” I asked.
Jesus winced, sucking in air through his teeth. “Unfortunately, no. Without you to help her parents find her, she’s going to be horribly murdered.”
Aw, crap.
“I need to go back,” I told Jesus.
“Are you sure? You barely made it in here. If you go back, you might not make it in again next time. I gotta warn you, Harry. Hell is pretty bad. Only three channels on cable. The weed is subpar. And there’s all that eternal torture.”
“Sorry, Jesus. I gotta go save her. See you later?”
He shrugged.
I opened my eyes, and gazed into the sweet, concerned faces of Jack and Phin, leaning over me.
My BFFs. Bringing me back. Making sure I was okay. Taking care of their boy because they missed me so much and couldn’t live without me.
“McGlade, you jackass!” Jack screamed. “You were supposed to watch Sam!”
I blinked away some death, which was still stuck in my eyes. “Blood took her. She’s the nurse. She tried to kill us all.”
“Who, Harry?” Phin shook me hard enough to whack my head against the floor. “Who’s Blood? Who took Sam?”
“You know I’m not good with names and faces.”
Phin made a fist, which wasn’t a very BFF thing to do. Especially since I just saved his life. And his wife’s life. And left the eternal bliss of heaven to help them out.
“I’m trying her cell,” Jack said.
There was a beeping sound, and Jack hurried over to Sam’s sparkly phone, still on the nightstand.
Jack’s shoulders slumped. “We can’t track her. I’m calling the police.”
Through the haze of pain and near-death experience and my BFFs hating my guts, something tugged at my brain.
Actually, two things tugged at me. One of them having to do with that dream I had. That was the one I still couldn’t put my finger on.
But the other was easy to remember.
“Aliens,” I said. Then I locked eyes with Phin. “I know how to find Sam.”