Page 65 of Girl, Undone
Instead, he lay bound and helpless.Chains secured him to a table.Beside him, an array of metallic fear gleamed under the sparse light - a small, surgical-grade table stood there, and its surface boasted a collection of needles and syringes.
And there, within arm's reach of the needles, sat a cell phone.Its screen was connected to a call.
Flashes of days previous flickered before her inner eye with the intensity of a strobe light, illuminating moments she had misinterpreted, conversations whose meanings had been lost in the translation.
Derek Graham was not her killer.
He was the victim.
Ella's brain stalled because this didn't make sense.Derek's deepest fear, according to his neighbor, was drugs, because drugs killed his son.
This scene wasn’t that.This was a surgery suite.A table of syringes and vials of clear liquid.Why?
Her eyes fell on the phone again.The call was still active.Her call.
Then ice-cold logic crashed down on her.
Every time I see a needle, I remember that you can do everything right and still lose.
She’d been baited.
This scene wasn’t a test of Derek’s fears.
It was a test of hers.
Each breath was a struggle against the ride of panic that threatened to drown her.The sight of Derek Graham, chained and helpless.The table of needles, syringes.This scene was designed to invoke her own fear.
Confronted with a strange echo of the past, the room began to spin.It bled into a nightmare that Derek might not escape.She was no doctor, nor had she ever administered injections to anyone.
‘Derek,’ Ella cried as she rushed over to the bound victim.His body lay sprawled across the table.The chains seemed a cruel surplus to his weakened state and bound him to his metal prison without any chance of breaking free.
She found the pulse at his neck.It was clammy and pallid, but beneath her fingertips, there pulsed the faint but unmistakable rhythm of life.
‘Derek!Can you hear me?’
The victim managed to shake his head, then it lolled in the direction of the needles.‘Drugs.Morphine.’
Ella fished for her phone, punched in her distress signal number, and hitsend.Backup and medics would be en route to her location immediately, but judging by Derek’s heart rate, his nervous system was on the verge of shutting down within minutes.
‘Morphine.He said..it will keep me alive.’
The syringes beside her were harbingers of a traumatic past that Ella had fought hard to bury.But this was not then, and if she had to push through her worst fear to save this man’s life, then it was an easy decision.Derek didn’t deserve to be a pawn in this psychopath’s game, and Ella’s phobia wasn’t going to be the barrier between a life lost and a life saved.
‘Derek, hold on.Keep breathing.Stay with me.’
Ella swept Derek for cuts, bruises, strangulation marks, anything that might give her an insight into his condition, but there were no visible gashes and no signs of blood beneath his white shirt.Derek’s ragged breaths and the foam accumulating around his mouth drew Ella to one conclusion – poison.
Ella turned to the three syringes beside her.Each contained a slender vial of clear liquid.With no medical expertise, injecting Derek with any of them was a gamble.All she had was memories of watching her dad do this 27 years ago – but what were the specifics?Isolate the vein, inject ten milligrams every six hours, but was it a different drug?They were drugs with unpronounceable names, but she remembered morphine being a part of the concoction.Even so, would morphine even help here?If Derek had been poisoned, what effect would morphine have?She thought of stimulants and depressants, and how one could counterbalance the other in the right circumstances.If Derek had been injected with a stimulant or convulsant, morphine could help relax the muscles and combat seizures or nervous system shutdowns.
She had to try, because the alternative was to watch Derek die.
Ella grabbed the first syringe with one hand, Derek’s wrist with the other.The world dissolved, and she was four years old again, peering from behind a doorframe.The glint of the afternoon sun on a needle.Her father’s steady hand.Her mother’s thin, bruised arm, offered up without a fight.
No time for memories or phobias now.The man on the table was real flesh and blood.
The dilemma of dosage gnawed at her.The whole syringe?All three?The questions swirled.All she knew was that one dosage of morphine could stop the pain, but too much could send Derek straight to the grave.The clear liquid gave away no secrets, offering no hint of its nature or potency.
She needed to focus, to get this right, or there’d be just as much blood on her hands as her unsub’s.
