Neighbors and Needles

Chapter 5: Neighbors and Needles

Her apartment had never felt so small.

Ethan stood in the center of the living room with his hands in his coat pockets, surveying the bookshelves and the secondhand sofa as if he were appraising a crime scene. Brielle perched on the edge of an armchair, knees together, wearing a gentle, tragic expression. Dr. Halloran set his leather bag on the coffee table, directly beside the folded blanket, and snapped it open with a click that echoed through the room.

Nora sat on the sofa and folded her hands in her lap. In her coat pocket, the phone was recording. Its tiny red light was a pinpoint of courage.

"Miss Whitaker." Dr. Halloran settled into the chair opposite with an old man's groan. "I would like to begin by saying that you are not in any trouble. Ethan tells me you have recently been experiencing some, shall we say, unusual thoughts."

"Which thoughts?" Nora asked pleasantly.

"That some sort of catastrophe is coming."

"Oh, that." She smiled. "Doctor, would you tell me something first? What is in the vial?"

He did not blink. "I beg your pardon?"

"The glass vial in your bag. Under the blanket. Clear liquid, rubber stopper. What is it?"

Brielle's eyes flicked to Ethan. Ethan's jaw tightened.

"A mild sedative," Dr. Halloran said smoothly. "Entirely standard. It is only to help you rest, Miss Whitaker. You have been under tremendous stress."

"Which sedative?"

"A benzodiazepine."

"Which one? Midazolam? Lorazepam? What dose? Is it intramuscular or intravenous?" Nora kept her tone mild, interested, the voice of a student asking a lecturer for clarification. She had volunteered at a free clinic for two years. She knew the names, and she knew what kind of doctor did not want to say them. "And have I consented to receive it?"

"Nora," Ethan said sharply. "You are being difficult."

"I am being careful." She turned her head toward him, and for the first time in two lifetimes she let him see her eyes without softening. "You brought a stranger with a syringe into my home at night. I think I am allowed one question."

The silence was thick. Ethan's pupils were very black.

[Insight: Ethan Cole, threat level rising. Dr. Halloran, discomfort increasing. Brielle Hart, impatience rising.]

"The doctor is here for your own good," Brielle said, and the sweetness in her voice cracked like thin ice. "Why must you make everything so hard? Just let him look at you. Then we can all go home."

"Brielle." Nora said her stepsister's name quietly. "Do you remember the hospital? The week Mama died?"

Brielle's face went still.

"You stood in the corridor and told me not to be dramatic," Nora said. "You said grief was a kind of selfishness. I thought it was the cruelest thing anyone had ever said to me." She tilted her head. "I was wrong. I just had not met the rest of you yet."

"Enough." Ethan took one stride forward and caught her wrist, hard enough to bruise. "You are coming with us. Dr. Halloran, now."

The doctor reached into his bag.

[Warning. Physical threat imminent. Recommendation: scream.]

Nora filled her lungs and screamed.

It was not a delicate scream. It was the full body shriek of a woman who had died once already and had no intention of doing it twice. The sound ripped through the apartment and out into the hall, rattled the glass in the windows, and sent Brielle shrinking back with her hands over her ears.

Ethan clapped a palm over Nora's mouth. "Shut up, shut up, shut up."

And the front door slammed open so hard it hit the wall.

A woman stood in the doorway wearing paramedic blues and a half eaten sandwich. She was five foot three, with a thick black braid and forearms like a boxer, and she held a heavy steel flashlight in one raised fist like a club.

"Take your hand off her," said Maya Torres, "or I will break it."

[Insight: Maya Torres. Trust toward Host: ninety one. Threat to Host: none.]

Nora nearly sobbed with relief.

Ethan froze. "This is a private matter. Please step out."

"Funny." Maya's eyes went to the open black bag on the coffee table, then to the glass vial in Dr. Halloran's hand. "Because I am a licensed paramedic, and that looks to me like a vial of midazolam, and you are holding it over a conscious woman who is screaming no."

Dr. Halloran dropped the vial back into the bag as if it had burned him. "There has been a misunderstanding."

"Then you will not mind if I call nine one one and have them sort it out." Maya pulled out her phone with her free hand, thumbed the screen, and began recording. "Go ahead. Say your name and your license number for the camera. I will wait."

Nobody moved.

"Sir," Maya said, pleasantly. "Your name."

The doctor looked at Ethan. Ethan looked at the phone. And Nora watched, with a dark, quiet satisfaction, as the three of them recalculated. A noisy neighbor. A witness. A recording. A paramedic, of all things.

*You planned for everything,* she thought. *Except the woman across the hall.*

"We are leaving," Gordon's son said at last. His voice had gone brittle and flat. He released Nora's wrist and straightened his coat. "Nora needs rest. When she is thinking clearly, she will understand that we were only trying to help."

"I understand perfectly," Nora said.

Brielle was already at the door, pink cheeked and furious. She paused on the threshold, and for one terrible second, her sweet mask slid completely away. The face underneath was small and hard and bright with hatred.

"You are going to regret this," she whispered.

"Probably," Nora said. "But not as much as you will."

They left. Dr. Halloran scurried after them, clutching his bag to his chest. Maya kicked the door shut behind them and slid the chain into place.

Then she turned around, set her flashlight on the bookshelf with a shaking hand, and said, "What on earth was that."

* * *

Maya turned the key twice on the chain, then checked it again. Her hands were still shaking. "I should have called the police. I should call them now."

"And say what?" Nora sat down on the arm of the sofa, because her legs had stopped working. "That a family friend and a doctor visited me and left? You heard them. They will say I was upset and they were worried. Gordon Cole has lawyers on retainer who bill more in an hour than I earn in a week."

"I recorded him. The doctor. The vial."

"I know. Keep it safe." Nora pushed up her sleeve. A ring of angry red marks circled her wrist where Ethan's fingers had been. Maya made a small furious sound, went to the freezer, and returned with a bag of frozen peas.

"Hold that," she said. "Do not argue."

Something glinted on the carpet beside the coffee table. Maya bent and picked it up with two fingers. A small cream colored card, stiff and expensive, that must have slipped from the doctor's jacket in his hurry.

*Alan Halloran, M.D. Consulting Physician. Haven Ridge Residential Wellness.*

Nora stopped breathing.

"What?" Maya said. "What is it?"

*Haven Ridge.*

She had heard those two words in her last life from Ethan's mother, in a hundred small and casual remarks, as though it were the name of a lovely country club. She had stood outside its gates. She had begged at them. She had never thought to ask what the name was for, or when it had been chosen, or who had begun building it long before the world began to end.

"It is their shelter," she said. "The Coles. That is what they call it."

Maya turned the card over. "Then why would a doctor from their shelter bring a sedative to your apartment?"

"Because," said Nora slowly, "they did not plan to leave me behind. They planned to take me with them."

The words hung in the small bright kitchen.

"I think they have always planned it," she said. "Ever since before they asked me to marry him."

* * *

It took an hour, a pot of tea, and four tries before Nora found the words.

They sat on the kitchen floor with their backs against the cabinets, because Maya said she needed something solid. Across the hall in her own apartment, her little brother Theo was asleep, a quiet eight year old with thick glasses who built castles out of cereal boxes and asked the best questions Nora had ever heard from anyone. Maya had set her phone's baby monitor beside her on the tile, and its soft static hummed between their knees.

Nora told her about the dust cloud. The Coles. The government's silence. She told it in a calm, flat voice, as though she were reading a report. She did not mention dying. She did not mention the system. She was not sure that Maya would survive the second half of the story.

When she finished, Maya stared at the opposite wall for a long time.

"Six days," she said finally.

"Six days."

"You are telling me the sky is going to turn red and people are going to..." She stopped. Rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. "Nora. I love you. You know I do. But I have been a paramedic for nine years, and I have seen people say very convincing things at three in the morning. A dust cloud. A secret memo. A man with a syringe." Her voice caught. "It sounds like a movie."

"I know."

"If it were anyone else, I would be on the phone with a crisis line."

"I know." Nora drew her knees up. "I have no proof you could hold in your hands, Maya. But I can give you a test."

"A test."

"Tomorrow. At twelve oh seven in the afternoon." Her throat tightened. She remembered it so clearly. The Wednesday of the first tremor, the long rolling shiver beneath the city, the cracked windows of the public library, the pigeons exploding off the rooftops all at once. In the last life, it had been the first sign anyone took seriously, and by then it was already too late. "There will be an earthquake. Small, only a few seconds. It will crack the glass in the old library on Fifth. Pigeons will fly off every rooftop. Be outside, away from the buildings. Take Theo."

Maya studied her face for a long moment. "And if it does not happen?"

"Then you can call the crisis line," Nora said. "And I will thank you for it."

Silence. Maya's expression flickered, doubt and fear and a kind of terrified hope, and then settled into the hard, practical look of a woman who had pulled people from burning cars.

"Twelve oh seven," she said. "Tomorrow."

"Yes."

"Fine." Maya got to her feet and held out a hand. "I will take the day off. And Nora?"

"Yes?"

"If you are right." Maya's mouth twisted. "I am going to need a very long hug and a very large drink."

Nora laughed, a wet and broken sound, and took her hand.

It was nearly eleven when Maya finally left. Nora locked the door behind her, slid the chain home, and sagged against the wood with her eyes closed. For the first time since waking in this timeline, something warm moved in her chest. Not hope, exactly. But its first cousin.

[Ding. Task update: A trustworthy ally has been secured. Reward: Lifeline Storage Space expanded by two cubic meters.]

"Thank you," she whispered, to the system, to the dark, to whoever had paid for this.

She was reaching for the light switch when her phone buzzed against her palm.

It was not a call. It was a notification from the cheap motion activated camera she had installed that morning in her storage unit on Delancey Road, a twenty dollar security gadget with a battery that was meant to last a week.

*Motion detected. Unit 118.*

She opened the feed with cold fingers.

The grainy night vision image showed the unit's steel door rolled halfway up. A flashlight beam swept across the stacked crates. Three men in dark clothing moved through the narrow space, tearing at the plastic wrap on the pallets, slitting open bags of rice. One of them hauled a crate of antibiotics off a shelf and passed it to another.

And the first man turned toward the camera to pick up a roll of duct tape.

He wore black fingerless gloves. As he raised his right hand, the glove slid back from his wrist, and a thin pale scar caught the flashlight's glare, curved like a fishhook across the back of his hand.

Nora's lungs stopped.

She knew that scar. She had seen it three weeks into the end of the world, glinting in the red fog at the gates of Haven Ridge, while the man who wore it counted three crates of medicine and dragged her away by the wrists.

[Warning. Host vitals critical. Recommendation: breathe.]

On the tiny screen, the scarred man looked straight into the lens and smiled.

Then he reached up, and the feed went black.