No Pressure

by Elle Keaton

  The steering wheel of his little car was the only thing keeping him from breaking into a million pieces. It was his lifeline. He couldn’t even listen to music; it made him angry if the song was happy and ready to drown if the song was sad.

  He drove carefully along the narrow county road. Even though winter solstice had passed, thirty extra seconds of light a day did not make much difference until March. Streetlights along this road were sparse; he was having to count on his navigation system to find the address and not accidentally send him down an unknown rural driveway in the middle of winter. Joey was terrified.

  The patient voice of the navigation app flooded the quiet inside his car. In six hundred feet he needed to turn left; the address would be on his left. As he obeyed, his headlights caught a glimpse of a single-story ranch-style home typical of the area, built when some far-thinking developers hoped urban growth in the 1980s would extend this far from Skagit. It hadn’t.

  He pulled to a stop behind a massive SUV, the kind he’d only seen in movies like Men in Black or the Bourne series. Small, insignificant, terrified he would never see his family again, he turned off his car, sitting until his headlights turned off automatically, leaving him in complete darkness. He reached up and turned off the dome light so it wouldn’t come on when he opened the door. Those were the instructions.

  His eyes quickly adjusted to the dark; unfortunately, the front door opened almost immediately. Even though there were no porch lights, he saw the figure standing in the doorway motioning for him to get out of the safety of the car and come inside.

  Mom. Xena. Mom. Xena.

  Joey obeyed, grabbing the paper bag sitting on the passenger seat. The plastic bottles and syringes inside rustled against each other when he picked it up. The bag weighed next to nothing, yet he could hardly hold onto it. It fell out of his hold on the way to the front door, slapping the asphalt driveway with a papery rattle. The man waiting for him sucked in a breath but said nothing while Joey picked it up. When Joey reached the dread portal the waiting man grabbed the bag and Joey, dragging him inside. The door slammed behind them.

  The immediate, rancid stench of sickness very nearly overwhelmed him. He had to clamp his hand over his nose and mouth to avoid vomiting all over the entryway. The guy seemed to understand, letting him stop for a few seconds before directing him to a stairway heading down into more darkness.

  Joey did not want to walk down those stairs. Whatever was waiting there for him was not a good thing. All the reasons he ever thought of for the vapid heroine to not go into the basement of that vacant cabin in the woods crowded into his mind. The one who checked the weird noise or smell was the first to die. Everyone knew that. He giggled hysterically. The man’s already firm grip tightened painfully on his neck.

  With the man behind him, Joey had no choice. He moved forward, down the short staircase to what was probably a daylight basement. He was steered to the right and another door opened. This room, a den or rec room maybe, had been outfitted with blackout curtains so the low light from several floor lamps would not escape and give away the inhabitants’ presence. The rank smell of infection was even more pronounced in this room.

  Joey’s eyes were immediately drawn to a blanket-covered figure lying on a pullout couch. Someone had done a very poor job of bandaging a wound on the left side of the man’s face. Joey still wanted to gag. The smell of pus and other rot was overcoming his ability to calm his stomach. As a nurse, he was inured to blood, bile, any number of bodily excretions. This was nothing he had experienced before.

  “Feex him,” a gruff, foreign-sounding voice said.

  Fuck.

  The wounded man arched up off the couch, his face contorted, a frozen, monstrous countenance. He was grunting, spittle flowing from his lips, but his mouth wasn’t open. His screams of pain were trapped inside his body. Mostly.

  Joey didn’t need to be a medical doctor to recognize textbook symptoms of tetanus. Textbook, because he’d never seen it this advanced before.

  “He needs to go to the hospital,” he said in a small, frightened voice.

  “No hospital.” The second man in the room spoke for the first time. He was bigger and older than the man who had brought Joey downstairs. In the low light, he also looked like something out of a cheap horror flick. Life had not been kind to him. A jagged scar cut across his nose and under his right eye. His eyes were deep set, eyebrows hanging over them like cliffs, and his lips were thin around his small mouth. He looked like he had been formed from whatever genetic leftovers lay around. “You will fix him. Your family will stay safe.” The threat was very clear.

  Joey tried to focus on what he needed to do to help this man. It was hard to think over the man’s grunts and the fear Joey was swimming in. He had never treated, or even admitted, someone for tetanus. It wasn’t entirely unheard of; much of the insular Dutch farming community transplanted from Holland to Skagit did not believe in, or practice, modern medical care. Once a year or so a case would make it to St. Joe’s, but Joey had never been involved with those patients. He did know that the man on the couch should be admitted for treatment immediately.

  He had to put his mom and Xena aside. If he let his concern for their safety overwhelm him, he wouldn’t be able to begin the task of trying to help this person. He doubted he could save the man, but maybe he could make his passing easier. As calmly as possible, he took off his coat and mittens. Mittens his mom had made for him. They were horribly knobby, and she’d run out of yarn about two-thirds of the way through so they were finished in a slightly different shade then she’d started with. They were ugly, and Joey loved them.

  It was obvious that someone had been doing research on what was needed for the patient; that was why Joey was here. In the dim room he couldn’t see the red streaks, a classic indication of tetanus, but when he lifted the bandage he could see the wound had not been properly cleaned. An attempt had been made but infection had set in regardless. The man may have been in too much pain to allow his friends to provide the aid he needed. Tetanus must have set in from soil being ground into the open wound.

  Joey loaded a syringe and tapped it, then motioned for both men to hold the patient down while he injected the tetanus vaccine into his upper arm. The last thing he needed was the man having a seizure and snapping the needle off in his flesh. The vaccine would probably do nothing anyway. Vaccines needed to be administered before infection, not after.

  As he worked in the semi-darkness he tried not to think about all he knew about tetanus. About who these people were and why they had chosen him to assist them. He tried not to think about why the man required medical help but couldn’t be taken to the local hospital. Joey tried not to think at all.

  Ten

  “So, the cute nurse, huh?” The voice from behind Buck scared the living daylights out of him. He nearly dropped the coffee mug he’d been holding while waiting for his slower-than-molasses machine to get to the good part.

  “What? What are you talking about?” he sputtered.

  “I was all drugged up yesterday, but that didn’t stop me from noticing how you watched him.” Miguel replied in a lazy drawl.

  “I, uh…” Buck’s face was hot, his body itchy with embarrassment and other unnamable emotions. At least emotions he was unwilling to name.

  “You know you’re my friend, right? You must, because for some reason you’re letting me stay in your house and don’t ask questions about my situation, which I appreciate.”

  Buck turned around to stare at Miguel, speechless. The guy looked like crap, his dark, almost black, hair squished up on one side of his head and standing straight out on the other side. He’d managed to change out of his coverall and into some sweats but didn’t have a shirt on. He probably couldn’t get one on over the sling cradling his injured hand close to his chest. Miguel wasn’t nearly as tall as Buck. He was wiry, almost skinny, and a heavy pelt of dark hair ran from his pecs to his navel, where it became a trail leading further down. Buck wasn’t rem
otely attracted to him even when he didn’t look like something the dog had unburied.

  “Do you need help getting a shirt on?” he asked.

  “That’s all you got for me? Fine.” Miguel handed Buck the T-shirt he’d been holding in his good hand.

  “I’ve got a button-down you can wear for now.”

  “I’m gonna look like an ape in anything you loan me, Bucky.” Buck grimaced. True.

  Buck never discussed his sex life with anyone. There had never been anything to discuss. In high school while his few friends were having crushes, falling in love, dating, Buck had never experienced any of it. He’d wanted to have the same kind of connection his friends seemed to have, but it never manifested. He had always felt unfinished, less than. Something was wrong with him.

  He knew he couldn’t be gay, because first, his dad would be disappointed in him. Of course, that was a moot point now, his dad having taken his opinions along with him to the grave. His mother had moved away from Skagit soon after her husband died, claiming there was nothing to keep her there anymore. Leaving Buck to wonder what he was to her. She’d moved to Atlanta to be closer to her sister and nieces. Buck had felt abandoned. Still, that meant there was no family close by to judge him over his sexual identity. His mom, in typical Southern fashion, had waited until there were two weeks left in his senior year to trap him in the kitchen with a quick, “It’s okay that you never had a girlfriend in high school; it will happen.”

  That little talk had been one of the only times Buck felt truly angry at his mother. Mostly they just lived in the same house, planets orbiting the sun that had been his father. So Buck had forged ahead, gone to tech school, taken over the shop, taken in Miguel, and just existed.

  Until the day he’d seen Joey at the ER. His heart, which had been indifferent up until then, had started to pound so hard he had felt light-headed. This was what being struck by lightning must feel like. His scalp had even tingled and sweat formed on his brow, probably making him look like he was coming down with the flu.

  Before then, he had forgotten about Joey. Buck had watched him from the sidelines for the two years they went to high school together, until Joey graduated and left Skagit. The next two years for Buck had been him trying to keep his head above water, working at his dad’s shop, and, finally, burying his dad the summer after graduation.

  His dad dying hadn’t been a surprise, even though Fritz had kept the diagnosis from Buck and his wife until it was too late to try chemo or anything that might have slowed the relentless march of cancer through his body. Buck had kind of understood why Fritz might feel that the best thing to do was to “let nature take its course,” as the man had said it often enough while he lived, but to Buck the decision had felt selfish. Fritz had not stopped to think about the effects on his wife of twenty years or his son, barely eighteen.

  And now he had stood here too long to turn the conversation in another, safer, direction. Away from Buck and his buried feelings for Joey.

  “I need to go open the shop. Oleg’s waiting. Make yourself comfortable, please.”

  “Oleg.” Miguel snorted. “You need a better backup than that guy.”

  Buck did, but for the next couple of weeks Oleg was going to have to do. If Buck could get him to commit to it.

  Eleven

  Joey rubbed his eyes again, pinching himself to stay awake. He had already had so much coffee that some of the other staff had noticed and were teasing him about it. By the time he had gotten back to his mom’s it had been way past midnight and he’d had to punch the clock at seven that morning. He was running on adrenaline, caffeine, and pure unadulterated fear.

  The men had let him leave but he had to return after his shift, bringing more supplies (“or else” implied). He couldn’t say anything. Joey wouldn’t know until he returned if any of the things he had tried helped the patient. He still didn’t know who the men were. He knew he wished they hadn’t chosen him to try and help their…friend? Boss? Joey didn’t know.

  The tetanus had to have originated from wounds on the man’s face. The man had either never had a tetanus shot, or it had been a long time. The men seemed to have Eastern European accents, but lots of people in the Skagit area were from that region. The first wave of immigrants, in the 1850s, had been from Holland; the second, during the 1970s, had been from Vietnam and other places in war-torn Southeast Asia. The most recent wave of immigrants hailed from the former Soviet Union.

  Joey’s shift at the hospital was another nightmare. He usually worked in the ER, but if they were slow he floated to different units. Today it seemed that every pregnant woman in Skagit was in labor or giving birth. There was no way he would be getting off at three-thirty. Probably not until seven. His stomach, already sore, cramped further at the thought of driving out to Bow again. Later than he had told the men he would be.

  Usually he enjoyed these random shifts in the mother-infant unit, but today the pants and screams he could hear from various rooms had him on edge. He kept having to detour around anxious new fathers and families in the hallway, no matter how many times he told them to wait in the birthing room or the fancy family waiting room. He’d snapped at the charge nurse when she assigned him to two different mothers in labor. His day was stretching into infinity and he saw no way of getting out of it. Fear for his mother’s safety loomed larger and larger until finally he had to excuse himself to the staff restroom to throw up. Since he hadn’t been able to eat, coffee was all that burned its way up his esophagus.

  When he left the stall Julie, the charge nurse, was leaning against the counter next to the sink.

  “What was that, James?”

  Joey searched for an excuse but his dumb brain couldn’t come up with anything.

  “Are you sick? I know you don’t like vagina, but I don’t recall it ever making you actually vomit before.”

  “Ha fucking ha, Julie. No, I’m not sick, but my stomach is bothering me.” Then he realized he’d blown the perfect excuse to leave early. A life of crime was not in the cards for him.

  When he finally got to his car at seven-thirty, three hours later than he’d said he would return to see about the patient, the engine made a hideous groaning-grinding sound when he turned the key, before falling terribly silent. Nothing he did got a response, not even praying. Popping the hood, he stood helplessly staring at the wires and hoses that normally made the engine work. He was so fucked.

  Twelve

  An unknown number flashed across Buck’s cell-phone screen. Normally he would’ve let it go—it was after business hours, after all—but he’d do almost anything for an excuse to turn away from the wreckage of the “easy” repair Oleg had been working on. All day.

  Only one day, and Buck already couldn’t wait for Miguel to be back at work. Buck was starting to think maybe Oleg had picked up a drug habit or been knocked in the head one too many times.

  “Buck here.”

  “Uh, hey, Buck.” A voice he couldn’t quite place gushed words at him. “My car, it won’t start, and I really need it to start. Like, right now.” The voice was verging on complete panic.

  “Okay, first, who is this?”

  “Joey, Joey James. Canyouhelpmeout?”

  Joey was stranded in the hospital parking lot.

  Of course Buck would help him.

  He sent Oleg home before the guy could do any more damage. Buck was just going to have to plan on six weeks of twelve-hour days. Had Oleg done shoddy work before? Buck didn’t think so; the guy had worked for his dad, too, and he’d suffered no fools.

  He packed up for the day and grabbed the keys to the shop car he and Miguel used mostly to pick up parts around town. Buck popped Sheila into gear and headed toward St. Joe’s. Seemed he had been there an awful lot recently.

  If possible, Joey looked worse than he had the day before. Buck admitted (to himself) that he was perhaps not the most observant of guys. Even so, he was sure Joey normally took more care with his appearance. In high school Buck remembered
his hair being pretty much perfect at all times.

  Joey’s hair was anything but perfect now. It was unkempt, lank, obviously unwashed. He hadn’t changed out of his scrubs, just thrown a coat on over them before coming out to the parking lot where he found his car no longer amongst the living.

  Buck didn’t even have to try starting the car to know there was no way Joey would be driving it tonight. The hood was up; all he had to do was lean over a bit to see where the timing belt had split and then gotten caught up in the drive shaft.

  “Well?”

  “I shoulda brought the tow truck instead of the shop car. Sorry, I just grabbed my keys.” Buck turned so he was facing Joey, not the wreckage of the engine. “You have a broken timing belt. And it looks like when it frayed it got caught in…” The way Joey was looking at him, as if he would break into pieces at any moment, Buck finished with, “Well, it won’t be running anytime soon. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?!” Joey was ashen. He had been pale before, but now there was literally no color in his face. “What am I going to do?” His whisper was so quiet Buck almost didn’t hear it.

  Buck’s heart seized; the one he had only just discovered did beat with a distinct rhythm. “What do you need?” he heard himself asking.

  “I’m so late already. I know we don’t know each other, but…can I borrow your car? Just for a little while. There’s something I need to do. By myself.”

  Buck stared at Joey, knowing in his heart Joey was not being entirely open with him, but he couldn’t ignore the desperation rolling off Joey in waves. Who was he to judge?

  “Please,” Joey repeated.