Vicious

by Schwab, V. E.

  Fade right into death without noticing.

  This was wrong wrong wrong … but that voice was drifting off, replaced by a spreading, sinking—

  It could work.

  He forced the thought through the dulling panic. It could work, and if it did work, he wanted the chance to hold the power, the evidence, the proof. He wanted to be the proof. Without it, this was Eli’s monster, and he was merely the wall off which Eli bounced his ideas. With it, he was the monster, essential, inextricable from Eli’s theories. He tried counting tiles, but he couldn’t keep track. Even though his heart was straining, his thoughts seeped in like syrup, new ones pouring through before the old had left. Numbers began to overlap, to blur. Everything began to blur. His fingertips felt numb in a worrying way. Not cold exactly, but as if his body were beginning to draw its energy in, to shut down, starting with the smallest parts. The nausea faded, too, at least. Only the rushing pulse warned him that his body was failing.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Eli, leaning forward in a chair he’d pulled up to the bed. He hadn’t had a drink, but his eyes were shining, dancing with light. He didn’t look worried. He didn’t seem afraid. Then again, he wasn’t the one about to die.

  Victor’s mouth felt wrong. He had to focus too hard to form the words.

  “Not great,” he managed.

  They’d settled for a good old-fashioned overdose for several reasons. If it failed, it would be the easiest to explain. Also, Eli could wait to call it in until they’d entered a crisis zone. Reaching the hospital too early meant it wouldn’t be a near death experience, just a very unpleasant one.

  The numbness was eating its way through Victor’s body. Up his limbs, through his head.

  His heart skipped, then slammed forward in a disconcerting way.

  Eli was talking again, low and urgent.

  Each time Victor blinked it got harder to open his eyes again. And then, for a moment, fear crackled through him. Fear of dying. Fear of Eli. Fear of everything that could happen. Fear of nothing happening. It was so sudden and so strong.

  But soon the numbness ate that, too.

  His heart skipped again and there was a space where pain should have been, but he’d had too much to drink to feel it. He closed his eyes to focus on fighting back but all the darkness did was eat him up. He could hear Eli speaking, and it must have been important because he was raising his voice in a way he never did, but Victor was sinking, straight through his skin and the bed and the floor, right down into black.

  XII

  TWO DAYS AGO

  THE ESQUIRE HOTEL

  VICTOR heard something break, and looked down to find he’d clutched his drink too tightly, and shattered the glass. He was gripping shards, ribbons of red running down over his fingers. He opened his fist, and the broken glass tumbled over the banister into the hotel restaurant’s shrubbery seven stories below. He looked down at the fragments still embedded in his palm.

  He didn’t feel them.

  Victor went inside and stood at the sink, picking the largest shards of glass out of his skin, watching the fragments glitter in the stainless steel basin. He felt clumsy, numb, unable to get the smaller pieces out, so he closed his eyes, took a low breath, and began to let the pain back in. Soon his hand burned, his palm painted with a dull ache that helped him determine where the lingering glass was embedded. He finished extricating the pieces, and stood staring at his bloodied palm, shallow waves of pain rippling up his wrist.

  ExtraOrdinary.

  The word that started—ruined, changed—everything.

  He frowned, turning up his nerves the way one would a dial. The pain sharpened, spread to a pins-and-needles prickle radiating out from his palm, down his fingers and up his wrist. He turned the dial up again and winced as the pins-and-needles became a blanket of pain across his body, not dull but sharp as knives. Victor’s hands began to shake but he continued, twisting the dial in his mind until he was burning, breaking, shattering.

  His knees buckled, and he caught himself on the counter with a bloody hand. The pain switched off like a blown fuse, leaving Victor dark. He steadied himself. He was still bleeding, and he knew he should get the medical kit they’d brought up from the car for Sydney; not for the first time, Victor wished he could trade abilities with Eli.

  But first he wiped the blood from the counter, and poured himself another drink.

  XIII

  TEN YEARS AGO

  LOCKLAND MEDICAL CENTER

  OUT of nothing came pain.

  Not the pain Victor would later learn to know and hold and use, but the simple, too-human pain of a poorly executed overdose.

  Pain and dark, which became pain and color, and then pain and glaring hospital lights.

  Eli was sitting in a chair by Victor’s bed, just as he had been in the apartment. Only now there were no bottles, no pills. Just beeping machines and thin sheets and the worst headache Victor Vale had ever experienced, including the summer he decided to raid his parents’ special collections while they were on a European tour. Eli’s head was down, his fingers clasped loosely the way they were when he prayed. Victor wondered if that’s what he was doing now, praying, and wished he would stop.

  “You didn’t wait long enough,” he whispered when he was sure Eli wasn’t busy with God.

  Eli looked up. “You stopped breathing. You almost flatlined.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Eli, rubbing his eyes. “I couldn’t…”

  Victor sagged back into the bed. He supposed he should be thankful. Erring too early was better than erring too late. Still. He dug his fingernail under one of the censors on his chest. If it had worked, would he feel different? Would the machines go crazy? Would the fluorescent lights shatter? Would the bed catch fire?

  “How do you feel?” asked Eli.

  “Like ass, Cardale,” snapped Victor, and Eli winced, more from the use of that last name than the tone. Three drinks in, high on the wave of discovery, before the pills kicked in, they’d decided that when they were done, Eli would go by Ever instead of Cardale, because it sounded cooler, and in the comics heroes had important, often alliterative names. So what if neither one of them had been able to think of any examples? In that moment, it seemed to matter. For once Victor had the natural advantage, and even though it was the smallest, most inconsequential kind of thing, the way a name fell from the tongue, he liked having something Eli didn’t. Something Eli wanted. And maybe Eli didn’t really care, maybe he was just trying to keep Victor conscious, but he still looked stung when Victor called him Cardale, and right now that was enough.

  “I’ve been thinking,” started Eli, leaning forward. There was a barely contained energy to his limbs. He twisted his hands. His legs bounced a little in his chair. Victor tried to focus on what Eli was saying with his mouth, not his body. “Next time, I think—”

  He stopped when a woman in the doorway cleared her throat. She wasn’t a doctor—no coat—but a small nametag over her heart identified her as something worse.

  “Victor? My name is Melanie Pierce. I’m the resident psychologist here at Lockland Medical.”

  Eli’s back was to her, and his eyes narrowed on Victor, warning. He waved at Eli dismissively, both to tell him to get out and to confirm that he wouldn’t say anything. They’d come this far. Eli rose and mumbled something about going to call Angie. He closed the door behind him.

  “Victor.” Ms. Pierce said his name in that slow, cooing way, running a hand over her mousy brown hair. It was big in that middle-aged, Southern way. Her accent was unplaceable but her tone was clearly patronizing. “The staff here told me that your emergency contacts couldn’t be reached.”

  What he thought was thank god. What he said was, “My parents, right? They’re on tour.”

  “Well, in these circumstances, it’s important for you to know that—”

  “I didn’t try to kill myself.” Partial lie.

  An indulgent twitch of her lip
s.

  “I just partied a little too hard.” Total lie.

  A lean of her head. Her hair never moved.

  “Lockland’s pretty high stress. I needed a break.” Truth.

  Ms. Pierce sighed. “I believe you,” she said. Lie. “But when we release you—”

  “When is when?”

  She pursed her lips. “We are obligated to keep you here for seventy-two hours.”

  “I have class.”

  “You need time.”

  “I need to go to class.”

  “It’s not up for discussion.”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”

  Her voice had tightened into something less friendly, more honest, impatient, normal.

  “Then why don’t you tell me what you were doing.”

  “Making a mistake,” said Victor.

  “We all make mistakes,” she said, and he felt ill. He didn’t know if it was an aftereffect of the overdose, or just her prepackaged therapy. His head fell back against the pillow. He closed his eyes but she kept talking. “When we release you, I’m going to recommend that you meet with Lockland’s counselor.”

  Victor groaned. Counselor Peter Mark. A man with two first names, no sense of humor, and a sweat gland issue.

  “That’s really not necessary,” he mumbled. Between his parents, he’d had enough involuntary therapy to last several lifetimes.

  Ms. Pierce’s patronizing look returned. “I feel it is.”

  “If I agree to it, will you release me now?”

  “If you don’t agree to it, Lockland will not welcome you back. You’ll be here for seventy-two hours, and during that time you’ll be meeting with me.”

  He spent the next several hours planning how to kill someone else—Ms. Pierce, specifically—instead of himself. Maybe, if he told her, she’d see that as progress, but he doubted it.

  XIV

  TWO DAYS AGO

  THE ESQUIRE HOTEL

  THE drink dangled precariously from Victor’s freshly bandaged hand as he paced. No matter how many times he made it from one wall of the hotel room to the other and back, the restlessness refused to ebb. Instead, it seemed to charge him, a mental static crackling in his head as he moved. The urge to scream or thrash or pitch his new drink against the wall came on suddenly, and he closed his eyes, and forced his legs to do the one thing they didn’t want to do: stop.

  Victor stood perfectly still, trying to swallow the energy and chaos and electricity and find in its place stillness.

  In prison, he’d had moments like this, this same shade of panic peaking like a wave before crashing over him. End this, the darkness had hissed, tempted. How many days had he resisted the urge to reach out, not with his hands but with this thing inside him, and ruin everything? Everyone?

  But he couldn’t afford to. Not then, not now. The only way he’d even made it out of isolation was by convincing the staff, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was normal, powerless, no threat, or at least no more of a threat than the other 463 inmates. But in those cell-locked moments of darkness, the urge to break everyone around him became crippling. Break them all, and just walk out.

  Now, just as then, he folded in, doing his best to forget he even had a power to wield against others, a whim as sharp as glass. Now, just as then, he ordered his body and mind to still, to calm. And now, just as then, when he closed his eyes and searched for silence, a word rose up to meet him, a reminder of why he couldn’t afford to break, a challenge, a name.

  Eli.

  XV

  TEN YEARS AGO

  LOCKLAND MEDICAL CENTER

  ELI slumped into the hospital chair beside Victor’s bed, dropping a backpack to the laminate floor beside him. Victor himself had just finished his last session with the resident psych, Ms. Pierce, in which they had explored his relationship with his parents, of whom Ms. Pierce was—unsurprisingly—a fan. Pierce left the session with the promise of a signed book and the sense that they’d made serious progress. Victor left the session with a headache and a note to meet with Lockland’s counselor a minimum of three times. He’d negotiated his seventy-two-hour sentence down to forty in exchange for that signed book. Now he was waging battle with the hospital bracelet, unable to pry it off. Eli leaned forward, produced a pocket knife, and snapped the strange paper-plastic-hybrid material. Victor rubbed his wrist and stood, then winced. Nearly dying, it turned out, had not been pleasant. Everything hurt in a dull, constant way.

  “Ready to get out of here?” asked Eli, shouldering his backpack.

  “God yes,” said Victor. “What’s in the bag?”

  Eli smiled. “I’ve been thinking,” he said as they wound through the sterile halls, “about my turn.”

  Victor’s chest tightened. “Hmm?”

  “This was indeed a learning experience,” said Eli. Victor muttered something unkind, but Eli continued. “Booze was a bad idea. As were painkillers. Pain and fear are inextricable from panic, and panic aids in the production of adrenaline and other fight or flight chemicals. As you know.”

  Victor’s brow creased. Yeah, as he knew. Not that his drunken self had cared.

  “There are only a certain number of situations,” continued Eli as they passed through a pair of automatic glass doors and into the cold day, “where we can introduce both enough panic and enough control. The two are in most cases mutually exclusive. Or at least, they don’t have much overlap. The more control, the less need to panic, etc. etc.”

  “But what’s in the bag?”

  They reached the car, and Eli tossed the item in question into the backseat.

  “Everything we need.” Eli’s smile spread. “Well. Everything but the ice.”

  * * *

  IN fact, “everything we need” amounted to a dozen epinephrine pens, more commonly known as EpiPens, and twice as many one-use warming pads, the kind hunters keep in their boots and football fans in their gloves during winter games. Eli grabbed three of the pens and lined them up on the kitchen table beside the stack of warmers, and then stepped back, casting one sweeping motion over it as if offering Victor a feast. Half a dozen bags of ice leaned against the sink, small rivers of cold condensation wetting the floor. They’d stopped for it on the way home.

  “You swiped this?” asked Victor, lifting a pen.

  “Borrowed in the name of science,” countered Eli as he took up a hand warmer and turned it over to examine the removable plastic coating on the back that served as an activation mechanism. “I’ve been shadowing at Lockland Med since freshman year. They didn’t even blink.”

  Victor’s head was pounding again.

  “Tonight?” he asked, not for the first time since Eli had explained his plan.

  “Tonight,” confirmed Eli, plucking the pen from Victor’s grip. “I considered dissolving the epinephrine directly into saline and having you administer it intravenously, since that would give a more reliable distribution, but it’s slower than the EpiPens, and dependent on better circulation. Besides, given the nature of the setup, I thought we’d be better off with a more user-friendly option.”

  Victor considered the supplies. The EpiPen would be the easy part, the compressions more difficult and more damaging. Victor had CPR training, and an intuitive understanding of the body, but it was still a risk. Neither pre-med clusters nor innate skill could truly prepare a student for what they were trying to do. Killing something was easy. Bringing it back to life took more than measurement and medicine. It was like cooking, not baking. Baking took a sense of order. Cooking took a flare, a little art, a little luck. This kind of cooking took a lot of luck.

  Eli took up two more EpiPens, and arranged the three in his palm. Victor’s gaze wandered from the pens to the warmers to the ice. Such simple tools. Could it be that easy?

  Eli said something. Victor dragged his attention back.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s getting late,” Eli said again, gesturing beyond the bags of ice to the window behind the sink, where
light was bleeding rapidly out of the sky. “Better get set up.”

  * * *

  VICTOR ran his fingers through the ice water, and recoiled. Beside him, Eli slit the last bag open, watching it rupture and spill ice into the tub. With the first few bags, the ice had crackled and broken and half dissolved, but soon the water in the bath was cold enough to keep the cubes from melting. Victor retreated to the sink and leaned against it, the three EpiPens brushing his hand.

  They’d talked through the order of operations several times by now. Victor’s fingers trembled faintly. He gripped the lip of the counter to still them as Eli tugged off his jeans, his sweater, and finally his shirt, exposing a series of faded scars that hatched his back. They were old, worn to little more than shadows, and Victor had seen them before, but never asked. Now, as he faced the very real possibility that this would be the last conversation he’d ever have with his friend, curiosity got the better of him. He tried to shape the question, but it wasn’t necessary, because Eli answered without prompting.

  “My father did it, when I was a kid,” he said softly. Victor held his breath. In more than two years, Eli had never once mentioned his parents. “He was a minister.” There was a far-off quality to his voice, and Victor couldn’t help but notice the was. Past tense. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you that.”

  Victor didn’t know what to say, so he said the most useless word in the world. “Sorry.”

  Eli turned away, and shrugged his shoulders, the scars on his back warping with the gesture. “It all worked out.”