by T. C. Clover
stop!”
Her pleas were drowned out by the screams of other passengers that were clueless to her plight. The roller coaster began a second lap and Litz placed her hands over her ears and closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear the sight of her best friend in the world being bounced around like a ragdoll when she needed urgent care. All the distraught adolescent could do was scream and rock back and forth in denial of the horrid event.
When the screaming didn’t ease her pain, she lashed out with raw aggression at the safety bar. The teenager felt as though her arm muscles were on fire when she began to pound and scratch the steel that held her in place. There were jagged areas where the metal had been welded, which delivered some nasty cuts to her hands and forearms.
By the time she heard the air brakes bring the roller coaster to a halt, Litz was attacking her restraints like a laboratory animal. Her head shook back and forth like an attack dog that had been abused and caged all night. When the ride operator removed the restraints, she allowed herself to be bathed in the darkness of reality.
“Help her! Help her! Help her!” Litz repeated as she stood up too fast and fell on her right side, knocking her head against the safety bar. “She needs, she needs…she needs help!” The panicked youth stuttered with uncontrollable terror. “I-I think…no breathing. There’s no breathing.” The teenager pleaded with her eyes shut tight to block out everything around her.
“Call the paramedics and get an ambulance!” The ride operator shouted to her colleagues at a nearby attraction as she attempted to get Martha to respond. “Can you hear me? What is your name? Ma’am, can you hear me?”
Litz opened her eyes and felt like she was going to vomit. Her mother’s head was tilted back against the seat of the roller coaster and the ride operator was tapping her on the right cheek. A group of bystanders had gathered on the platform behind the operator, and they gazed at the unconscious female with expressions of shock. Litz felt like her insides were being raked apart with gravel, and she turned away from their ignorant faces. Many of the bystanders had their mouths agape, and some showed genuine concern, but more than half seemed to be grateful that this wasn’t happening to them.
“Get them out of here! Make them go!” Litz began to bawl and twisted further away from the horror on her right side. “Are you going to give her CPR? Please give her CPR!” She pleaded with the ride operator in a passionate tone.
“I don’t want to move her, sweetheart; the problem might be with her spine.” The casino employee stated with a hopeless gaze. “The paramedics should be here soon.”
“Oh my God, mom!” The teenager began to wail as she reached out and grabbed her mother’s limp left hand. “We’ve got seven more months! You need to be here. We’ve got seven more months!” She repeated and shuffled about in the cramped car as her right hand began to tremble.
“Is she breathing?” A twenty-eight-year-old paramedic asked as he ushered the ride operator out of the way. “Have these people get back; they don’t need to be here. Sweetheart, does your mother have any medical issues that you can tell me about?” The man inquired as he pushed a pair of sunglasses close to the bridge of his nose.
Litz looked up at the skinny paramedic and admired the soft brown curls of hair on his head. He seemed to be speaking to her in a dream, and she could barely understand what he was saying.
“She’s in shock,” the paramedic said as he turned his attention away from Litz and back to Martha, “let’s get her out of the car and start performing CPR.”
The ride operator and paramedic were careful to remove Martha from the roller coaster. They set her body down on the concrete platform, and the man began to breathe into her mouth and perform chest compressions in an alternating pattern.
Litz stood up in the roller coaster car and vomited all over the front of the unit. She felt dizzy, and her arms were shaking in a fit of unfiltered horror. A few small streams of blood had run down her arms, and she used her coveralls to wipe it away. There were pieces of food mixed with stomach acid that dripped from her mouth, but she didn’t care about her appearance. The young woman felt such a terrible pain in her stomach that she was forced to crawl out of the car onto the concrete platform. When she was free of the roller coaster, Litz remained on all fours, watching the paramedic perform CPR.
The world had become a blur of things that she didn’t want to accept. Litz began to think about how long it had been since her mother stopped breathing and her stomach jolted with a series of dry heaves.
After several minutes of resuscitation efforts, a team of senior paramedics arrived from an ambulance. They performed tests for vital signs after using a defibrillator and applied a breathing bag to Martha’s mouth, but she remained unresponsive.
Litz cowered against the concrete when the paramedics put the paddles on her mother’s chest and applied electrical current to her heart. Every muscle in her body was convulsing, and the look in her eyes was beyond wild.
“Okay, we need to stop,” a thirty-eight-year-old paramedic said when he looked at Martha’s driver license. “She’s forty-four years old and has a cyanide implant. It looks like someone screwed up and set it for June instead of January.”
“No, no, she has seven months left,” Litz pleaded as she scrambled across the concrete toward her mother’s body. “She has seven months left with me!”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but she’s gone,” a senior paramedic said, placing his hand on the grieving girl’s shoulder. “The moment that cyanide implant went off, she was gone. That’s what they’re designed to do. I’m sure she didn’t feel any pain.”
Litz stood up and pressed her right hand hard against her forehead. She felt confused and betrayed by the group of strangers that were watching her actions. The grief-stricken teen returned to the roller coaster car out of compulsion and hung her head inside where her mother had been sitting. She spotted the green stuffed frog on the rubber flooring of the unit and grabbed it with a voracious swipe of her right hand.
When the reality of her mother’s death struck, she curled up in the fetal position on the cement with the frog pressed to her abdomen. Although the four strangers seemed desensitized to the tragedy at their feet, they let the forsaken youth mourn in silence. Litz put her head down and tried to muster some strength to honor the memory of her mother. In her despair, she vowed to dedicate her life to preventing this from happening to others.
PRESENT DAY
Litz walked into the bathroom of the low-quality hotel with the glass eye in her right hand. She washed it off under the faucet and was careful to put it back into its socket. Her stomach was burning with wounds reopened by the disappearance of her friend Oslo.
The callous woman looked at the glass eye in the mirror and marveled at what a fantastic job the doctors had done in matching the color of her real eye. She recalled her tumultuous journey from the boarding school and the leap she took off of the seventy-five-foot cliff into a large pine tree. Although the branches had caught her body and prevented a deadly fall, one of them struck her in the right eye and created a permanent disability. Fortunately, she had been too high on cocaine to feel much of the sting.
Litz looked down at a bottle of blonde hair bleach on the bathroom counter with a wicked smirk. She remembered escaping from a boarding school in Utah and luring a perverted drug dealer into giving her a ride in his Chevrolet Corvette. The television star snorted aloud as she thought of the stupid look on his face when he saw her pulling away from the gas station. Litz surmised that he must not have been much of a drug dealer, failing to recognize that a runaway would steal his car at the first opportunity.
“You know what, Oslo, I’ve decided that you’re not going to die,” Litz announced to the empty hotel room as she scooped up the bottle of hair bleach. “In fact, nobody
that I ever cared about will die again. I’m implementing a strict no death policy and plan to live that way for the rest of my long life. So, what do you think of my hair? Do you think I would be cute as a blonde? Oh, Oslo, of course you’d have something snarky to say. Well, look at your hair, it isn’t much better. I know that you don’t have access to a shower or money, but that’s hardly a viable excuse.”
The lonely woman continued talking with her friend as she turned on the shower and began to moisten her long brunette hair.
XIV. Bridge of Bodies
Richard awoke and rubbed his eyes as he looked at the scarlet numbers illuminated on his alarm clock. It was 3:45 am, and the video editor sat up in bed, trying to confirm that he heard someone rummaging through the kitchen. The television star shook his head with doubt and considered that this was probably a dream. There were enough security staff in the loft and lower building that even a government agent would have trouble getting into the penthouse.
The disturbance got worse as Richard heard what sounded like tools or pieces of metal slamming about in the penthouse. He scratched his chest during a moment of denial and then jumped out of bed like a man on a mission. It took less than fifteen seconds to traverse from his bedroom through the dark hallway,