Obstetrix(4)

There were other people at the gas station; I glimpsed a concerned face, but when Sarah and the man with her laughed apologetically and said, “Yeah, we’re on our way to rehab for her, again,” the face smiled in relief and turned away as the man and Sarah lifted me back into the car, buckled me in again, and drove away.

“That was too close,” the man said. “I thought you said the sedation would last till morning.”

“Well, it did,” Sarah said. “She didn’t get anywhere, did she?”

“Those people might remember us. If word goes out.”

“Unlikely. Anyway, at least this way she can have something to eat.” She turned back toward me. “You want some food? That’s what I was doing while you were trying to make a break for it, getting you some food.” She was affronted, like I was acting ungrateful.

“Is it drugged?” I asked.

“No.”

She had a hot dog, a bag of Bugles, and one of those smoothie drinks that comes in a plastic bottle, which was, in fact, still sealed. And I was extremely hungry. She had water, too, and since that was also in a sealed bottle, I grudgingly drank it.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, when I’d finished eating.

“We need an obstetrician,” Sarah said.

My head was clearing enough now to think of alternate plans that I maybe should have gone with the first time, like stealing someone’s cell phone and calling 911, but not enough to resist when Sarah reached back with another hypodermic syringe and injected something into my thigh.

It had to be more sedative: I wondered where they were getting it, whether it was from a pharmacy or a street dealer of some kind, whether they were calculating dosages or just estimating, whether they had naloxone if they were giving me an opiate … As I worried about whether they would even notice if I stopped breathing, the drug carried me off into a fog and I stopped worrying about anything at all.



* * *



THE BOOK I LIKED to reread at bedtime was one that I had first read in my teens. It was an obscure fantasy novel from 1985 that I’d found at my local library and checked out repeatedly, called The Onyx Dagger. I’d eventually damaged the library copy past repair—entirely by accident, to be clear; I’d had it in my backpack when my thermos came open—and a sympathetic librarian had told me that I might as well keep it. At my mother’s suggestion, I’d put it on top of the refrigerator to dry, leaving it permanently stained but still readable.

That copy had eventually started losing pages, and after some hunting, I’d found a yellowed but otherwise pristine used copy to replace it with. More recently, the author, who’d only ever published a handful of books, put them all up as PDFs with a suggestion that readers could download copies and send her a donation via PayPal. I’d immediately sent her a hundred dollars, converted all the PDFs into EPUB, and put them on my ereader.

The protagonist of The Onyx Dagger was a lost princess who narrowly escaped death when her parents were murdered by a necromancer. She’d disguised herself as a boy for a while, fled into the wilderness with her best friend, made new friends and allies through the purity of her heart and the power of her intense charisma, and finally regained her throne in a climactic battle involving a magic sword, a telepathic cat, and a conveniently timed dragon.

It was everything that made people trash-talk 1980s fantasy, right down to the map at the beginning that had locations like THE ENDLESS FOREST and THE MOUNTAINS OF DESTINY.

In the dim twilight of that endless car trip, I remembered a scene in which Deirdre, the protagonist, had to rescue her best friend Isabelle from a wizard who’d used mind-control powers on her. Isabelle fought Deirdre, but Deirdre knew that Isabelle was in there, that she wanted to be rescued. Please come for me, Deirdre, I thought. I won’t even fight you.



* * *



“WE’RE HERE,” THE MAN said. Brandon; I’d heard Sarah call him Brandon, sometime in the last day or two days or however long we’d been in this minivan. They hadn’t let me wake up again fully enough to eat, and I was thirsty and very hungry. Sarah, bright-faced, pulled open the door and handed me bottled water and a bar of milk chocolate with almonds.

It was cold here; I was probably still in the northern US. The sun was low in the sky, and the air had the sharp note of acrid smoke you get on farms where they burn trash. We’d pulled in through a gate that someone was closing behind us. I thought it looked like a farm gate, the kind used to keep livestock from wandering, not something I couldn’t climb over.

“We’re twenty miles to anywhere much,” Sarah said. “That’s if you pick the right direction from the end of the driveway.”

“You don’t—” My voice was hoarse. I drank more water. “You don’t have neighbors?”

“Not any closer than twenty miles.”

“Let’s show her where she’ll be living,” Brandon said.

Beyond a cluster of trees was a neat little … compound. That was the word that suggested itself to me. Probably they called it something else, like a town or a village. There were rows of little houses, reminiscent of Quonset huts, but with a pointy peak at the center of the roofline rather than just the smooth half circle of corrugated steel. The houses were small, with a couple of larger buildings down at the end of the row. Steel-clad pole barns stood beyond that. I heard a rooster making a ruckus somewhere in that direction.