hand grips hand
MONDAY, MAY 14 — 9:06 PM
Riri forgets how small the cell is until she walks inside.
It can’t be more than ten feet wide, and maybe six feet deep—in the far right corner is a concrete bed structure which exists more as a table because it’s missing a mattress. She remembers now, briefly, that Renee shredded their mattress in front of them after one of their escape attempts. On the bed, there is a dirty pillow, no sheets (stripped from the kids after another escape attempt), and a tarp-like blanket. In the far left corner, a toilet, and in the near left, a sink. Both are grimy and stink of piss. And in the near right, a bucket, filled with things: McDonald’s toys, mostly.
Beside the little girl, Parker is curled on his side in the three-foot space between the bed and the toilet, vomit spread over the side of his face and over the floor around him. He’s so pale that Riri’d think he’d overdosed if she didn’t know that he never had access to anything, and his eyes are half-closed, only a sliver of white visible.
As Haroun drops his weapon and runs inside the cell, Cassie screams and scrambles away from Parker’s body, diving under the bed. Haroun drops to his knees by Parker, pressing his hands to the boy’s neck, and Riri rushes to his side with her gun still drawn. “Is he…”
“Not yet,” he says, and he pulls open Parker’s eyes. “Might’ve been too much sedative—ah, shit, shit, shit.”
“What?”
“One of his pupils is huge.”
Riri’s still got her gun on him; she doesn’t know why. “What does that mean?”
She knows Haroun did a couple semesters of med school before joining up with Charlie, so he must know something. “It means he’s not doing good. His head… Fuck.” He clearly knows something she doesn’t. “Where’s Charlie?”
“I don’t know,” she says. Her eyes don’t leave the kid on the floor. He hasn’t moved, not a twitch. “He’s—passed out, probably.” She looks from her friend to the kid on the ground. Haroun’s got Parker rolled onto his side and has one hand in his mouth, clearing out his throat, and is peering inside. “Haroun… What’s wrong with him? He’s… He doesn’t look…”
“Go find Charlie.”
“Haroun—”
“Riri, the kid needs a doctor, like right now , so go get him!”
Riri doesn’t have to be told twice. She takes off, out of the cell and down the hallway, and into the breakroom. What the hell happened to Parker? She wasn’t here for his last session with Charlie a couple hours ago, but something must’ve happened. She sprints down the hallway around the corner to the barracks, all so fast that she can hardly feel her legs. Inside, she finds Renee and Charlie sprawled on the floor and smoking something so strong that the whole room reeks of it.
Renee stops laughing when Riri comes in. Charlie’s almost completely passed out, his laugh slurred by whatever he was smoking. He’s not going to be any kind of help.
Out of breath, Riri says, “Parker needs a doctor.”
The woman before her laughs, standing, swaying a bit as she does. Her red hair is tied back in a ponytail. “Sure he does.”
Riri tightens her jaw. “Haroun says it might be the sedatives, or his head, but he’s in the cell with Parker right now, and he says it doesn’t look good—”
Renee fake-pouts. “Haroun says, Haroun says,” she mocks in a whine. “Parker gets a doctor when I say…he gets a doctor. Not on my watch, not on…” She takes a drag, and smoke bubbles at her lips before she blows it out. “...my watch. Your boyfriend needs to learn to let things go, little girl.”
“He’s not my—”
Renee echoes her words in a pitiful fake-whine. “He’s not my boyfriend, he’s not my boyfriend…” She laughs as though she’s just said the funniest thing in the world, and she pats Riri’s shoulder with one hand; her manicure is chipped and long in need of a retouch. “Tell sweet Haroun that Spider-man will be… will be fine. He’ll live.”
“I’m serious—” Renee laughs, and Riri feels the rush from a few seconds before come alive in her. Parker needs a doctor now, not when Renee says he does. Haroun doesn’t have much medical experience, but he has enough, and she could tell from his voice that he was worried about Parker. “Renee, I’m not kidding! You haven’t seen him! We need to get him a doctor! Or get him to a hospital! I saw him on the ground in there, and he did not look good—”
“Riri.” Renee draws out the girl’s name. Riiiiiriiiii. She tilts her head. “So. What would you have us do? Huh? Drag the Parker kid outside so the whole world can see him? The kid’s staying right here, little girl.” She takes another drag of whatever she’s smoking and closes her eyes. “He can heal like the rest of us—nice and slow. He’ll be fine.” She draws out the last word like she did her name: fiiiiiine . “Spider-man, spider-man, friendly neighborhood spider-man…” She laughs again, and she squeezes Riri’s shoulder. “Can you imagine? Itsy-bitsy Peter Parker needs our help. You’re funny, little girl.”
Down the hall, Riri hears Cassie start to wail again, and something in her sparks like a broken lighter. Without a thought, she slaps the joint out of Renee’s hand. “Peter Parker’s gonna be dead if you don’t do something!”
Still smoking, the joint sits on the concrete floor between them.
Renee looks down at the fallen joint, and then back at the teenage girl in front of her. The hand on Riri’s shoulder tightens tenfold. Renee’s not laughing anymore. She swipes her tongue across her teeth and straightens her head, lifting her chin. “Pick it up,” she says, and she sounds suddenly sober.
A beat. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she scoops up the joint and pushes it into the other woman’s hand. She wonders briefly what it’s laced with—what could be causing Renee to act like this—but she knows Renee would be acting like this no matter what she was taking. “I’m sorry,” she says again, even though she knows Renee won’t listen. “I’m sorry.”
MONDAY, MAY 14 — 9:17 PM
Riri goes back to Parker’s cell with a swollen eye, a bloody lip, and a plan.
She’s pissed. If Renee won’t get Parker— Peter— a doctor, then she’s going to have to do it herself.
She can hear Haroun from down the hall. “How much fucking sedation did you give him?” he snaps.
“No more than yesterday, dude, calm down.”
Haroun sounds pissed at the very idea of calming down. “Calm down?”
“Dude, you want someone to blame? Get Jon. He’s the one who got out the hammer…”
She enters the cell furious and empty-handed, and she finds Haroun sitting by the Parker kid’s head. Someone has placed a sweatshirt under his head so that his head and shoulders are elevated slightly, and there’s a bag of clear liquid strung up on a pole, connected to the tube that usually hangs from Parker’s arm. Mateo’s standing over the kid with his arms folded, and there’s a couple more people in the cell, too: Lyle leaned on the doorframe, and Daria’s sitting on the bed.
Lyle turns as she enters. He’s one of the slower ones; he’s a bit of a meth-head, with sores around his mouth, stringy hair, and skin that seems to wrinkle over bone despite his young age. He looks pleasantly surprised to see her, and then— “Uh, Riri, your face…” he starts.
Riri ignores the meth-head and addresses Haroun, who is currently muttering to himself and scrolling on his phone. “Haroun, I need the keys.”
Her friend looks up. Upon seeing Riri’s bloody face, he turns away with a wince and looks down at Parker’s unconscious body once more. He doesn’t look at her again. “Here,” he says, digging into his pocket and tossing Nick's keys. Parker is limp still, but at least she can spot the slow rise and fall of his chest. “Make sure you take someone with you.”
Riri pockets the keys.
She needs someone strong. Mason’s passed out in the barracks with Charlie, so her next-best option is Jon. She can hear their voices further down the hall, in one of the last cells before the door, so she grabs her converse and slips them on before stomping down the hall like she’s Charlie herself.
She doesn’t knock; they don’t have that kind of time. She shoves open the door; inside, Jon and Zhiyuan are smoking and talking quiet, side by side on the bed there. Jon’s arm is around Zhiyuan’s shoulder and Zhiyuan’s leg is over Jon’s. They jump as she enters. “Jon,” she says loudly, and Zhiyuan shifts his leg back to his side of the bed. “I need you. Let’s go.”
Jon chuckles. “Riri, we’re kinda in the middle of something—”
“I don’t care what you’re in the middle of! We gotta go, now .”
Jon huffs, arching a brow, and whispers something to Zhiyuan so low and calm that Riri wants to slap him. “Alright, kid, we’re coming.”
Zhiyuan follows them outside. Zhiyuan coming along wasn’t part of the original plan, but Riri doesn’t have time to explain why she doesn’t need him. She sets the pace, rushing down the mountain so quickly that she trips constantly. Zhiyuan repeatedly asks, “What’s the hurry?” and it only makes her more furious, and she keeps going faster and faster until she’s practically running down the mountainside.
When they finally get to the truck, Zhiyuan gets into the passenger seat and Nick into the back; Riri drives. She always drives, but this time she puts the car into reverse and hits the gas so hard that they almost reverse directly into a tree.
It takes them an hour, total, to get out of the mountains and in the direction of the nearest hospital. In the car ride over, she explains as best she can through gritted teeth. “Parker won’t wake up,” she says. “He won’t wake up, and he needs a doctor, and we’re going to get him one.”
In her rearview mirror, she sees Jon duck his head. “Yeah, sorry,” the older guy says. “That’s kinda my bad.”
That evening, Jon explains, he swung for the head.
Riri heard the crack from across the hall. Wanting to avoid the seven o’clock mess, she’d been in the break room with Zhiyuan, under the buzz of his tattoo needle. He drew a series of robot-themed hearts on her ribcage; it was painful, but the discomfort served to lessen the guilt surging in her at the noises coming from the other room.
She hasn’t heard the rest of the story until this moment. From what Jon tells her, Charlie got out the blowtorch again. He was waving it around as they put him into the chair and Parker had freaked , thrashing and screaming so hysterically that he got one arm free before they could properly lock it into its restraints. With his free hand, he slammed his fist into Jon’s nose; in a moment of pure outrage, Jon picked up Charlie’s hammer and swung— crack!
It knocked the kid out cold.
Parker went completely limp, his body dipping forward in the chair like a puppet with his strings cut, his one free arm dangling by the ground, and Tony had screamed so loud over the phone that Charlie made Scott turn the volume down.
“I shouldn’t’ve done it,” says Jon from the backseat. “It’s just—he hit me in the face, and I got so mad…”
Riri doesn’t care about his excuses.
They find the nearest hospital, one located between a sugarhouse and a cemetery. As they pass the building, Riri pulls off the road with a jerk, the truck bouncing hard enough over the graveled curb, and she slams on the brakes, hard , so abruptly that Jon yells, “Whoa!” from the back and Zhiyuan throws his arm out across Riri’s chest.
For some reason, as the car shrieks to a halt barely an inch from a row of trees, she thinks of Ava.
The car dips diagonally, one wheel on the shoulder and the other three deep in the grass. She unbuckles her seatbelt and shrugs off her jacket; in one motion, she tears her sleeve in half. “Uh, Riri?” starts Zhiyuan. She opens the car door and gets out, and she ignores Zhiyuan’s continued questions. She grabs a handful of dirt from beneath the tires and rubs over her arms, over the side of her swollen face, and in the rips of her jeans. She looses her hair from its bun and shakes her fingers through it, setting fibrils of frizzed hair loose. “Zhiyuan,” she says, as she gets back in the car, “give me your knife.”
He says, “My what?”
She rolls her eyes. “I know you have it.”
Jon fumbles into position above the center console, sneaking his head between her and Zhiyuan’s passenger seat. He’s about as muscled as Captain America, and it does not give him the advantage when it comes to agility. “Wait, what’s the plan?”
She ignores Jon. “Just give me the knife, man.”
Zhiyuan grumbles, but he unstraps the knife at his belt and hands it to her. Riri makes one small cut on her arm, even as the man protests, on the outer part of her upper arm, and the blood takes a moment to swell to the surface. It bubbles over and spills down in slow trickles, which she then takes to rub on her head and on the front of her shirt. There’s not a lot of it, but there’s enough.
From the back: “Riri, what the hell are you doing?”
“Just stay here,” she declares, and she smears more blood on her head. “Be ready. I’m gonna bring someone here, and when they get here…” She leans over to Zhiyuan’s side and opens the glove compartment to a series of unused sedative-filled syringes, all left from Parker’s first abduction. “...sedate them. Just enough to knock them out for like an hour. That’s it. We’re gonna need them.”
Zhiyuan and Jon are looking at each other, exchanging looks that are doubtful enough that she wants to scream at them to shut up. “Riri—“
“I'll be back in a second,” she snaps, and she opens the car door.
MONDAY, MAY 14 — 10:08 PM
I don’t know , Riri said once to Tony Stark as they worked. It seems like you haven’t tried that hard to get free.
Stark looked resigned. I can't try, he said. I can't risk Peter like that.I don’t have the luxury of trying to set him free.
Riri walks right into the medical clinic. “I need a doctor,” she gasps. The limp is fake, but her wince is real. Her face still stings from Renee’s beating. The woman at the front perks up, and Riri barely pays her any mind; she’s not Riri’s target. “Help! I need a doctor!” On one side is a young woman in a lab coat, speaking to a Chinese family in the corner, but Riri ignores her, too. That woman could be a medical student, by the looks of her. On the other side of the waiting room, among a couple rows of chairs, there is a tall man in a lab coat speaking quietly and calmly to a kid with a towel pressed to a bloody arm. Perfect. She rushes forward. “Doctor! Doctor! Help!”
The man looks up and, leaving the kid behind, rushes to her. “I need help in here!” he shouts, and the woman at the desk disappears through a set of double doors. He scans her from head to toe and zeroes in on her swollen face, then on her bloody forehead.
“We were in the car,” she starts, filling her world with as much shock and distress as she can muster, “and we went straight into the tree… My head, I think I hit my head…”
From up close, the doctor looks much more like a real person. His face is close enough to hers that his pores are visible, and around his neck dangles a Star of David. “We? Was there anyone else in the car?”
“My friend, he’s still in the car, I need help…”
It’s then she starts to execute her plan. “Hurry, come on, we have to help him, he was bleeding… I don’t know how long he has!” She pivots and runs back through the clinic doors, fake-limping the whole way.
“Wait!” cries the doctor, rushing after her. “Kid—wait! Hold on! Come back in—”
She takes off, picking up speed; just as she expected, he comes running after her. “The car’s right there, hurry! We don’t have much time, please!”
The doctor makes one glance back at the clinic and, with a look of distinct determination, follows her across the street to the truck.
MONDAY, MAY 14 — 10:15 PM
Riri Williams doesn’t like to think of herself as a bad person. She’s not like Charlie, a psychopathic drug-addled sadist, or Jon, a hyper-aggressive steroid junkie, or even Mason, an anxious junkie with a near-fanatical need to please. All three of them would slice Parker to bits as soon as they were told to.
The rest of them—Riri, Haroun, Nick, Lyle, everyone—aren’t really bad at all, no matter what Peter Parker likes to mutter under his breath. They’re just obeying Charlie, and they use Charlie’s plan as a means to an end: more drugs, food, a place to sleep. It isn’t even truly Charlie’s plan, although he likes to claim otherwise. That guy on the phone—Rod? Ross?—is the one who tells Charlie what to do and provides him with everything he needs, the one who calls every day and demands updates. So, is Charlie really that bad? All he wants is what the Ross guy promises: drugs, and the world peace that will follow. To be seen as someone incredible. Someone powerful. Someone who changed the world. So far, sure, Charlie implemented his plan poorly. But was all the torture at Ross’ instruction or Charlie’s own wishes?
It doesn’t matter. Riri was different. Is different. Until this moment, she never did anything remotely like what Charlie had: torture, kidnapping, murder… Charlie surrounded himself with people who would obey him and hurt them. Riri isn’t like that. Right? She thinks momentarily of Tony Stark. Of his gray hair, his twitching hands, his croaking voice, his pained expression.
No, she’s different. She’s different.
She’s never kidnapped anyone (but she has made sure those people stayed kidnapped). She’s never killed anyone (but she has helped get rid of the body). She’s never tortured anyone (but she has helped hold them down as they screamed).
Maybe she is like him. Maybe she’s getting more and more like Charlie every day she spends in that bunker. Is that why she’s doing this? She’s not like him… Charlie would never help Parker; he would scoff at the idea of bringing a doctor to the kid. But isn’t Charlie doing this for good, too? To have control of the world, to make the weapon for that Ross guy, one that will allow them to have control and to make the world a better place? Charlie wants good for the world, but he’s… He’s not like her. She’s different. She is.
But if helping Parker means hurting someone else… No. She’s doing this for good. To save Peter Parker.
But the question still pulls at her chest: is this something Charlie would do?
Riri drives. She’s usually the driver—everyone else’s usually too high to get behind the wheel, so it’s naturally her job. In the passenger seat, Zhiyuan sits with the empty syringe of sedatives; in the back, Jon cuffs the doctor’s hands behind his back and tapes his mouth shut. “Couldn’t’ve picked someone smaller, Riri?” he complains. “He’s gonna be a bitch carrying back to the bunker.”
“It’s not like there were a whole lot of options,” she shoots back. “We’re in New Hampshire. He was probably the only doctor in the whole place.”
The drive is quiet; the man barely makes a sound in his sleep. “This is a good idea,” says Riri, “right?”
Zhiyuan doesn’t say anything.
Jon carries the man halfway up—about thirty minutes—the mountain before the doctor begins to stir. Then Zhiyuan stabs a needle into the man’s arm, injects, and he goes limp again. Another half-hour passes before they make it to the bunker entrance: an entrance deep in a cave, disguised by a wall of wet moss and vine.
Before they get inside, Riri asks Zhiyuan to wake up the doctor. “I need to talk to him.” Clipped to his coat is a nametag reading Dr. Leonard Skivorski, M.D. Beside it is a photo of him. The doctor looks maybe fifty or so, and in his ID picture he looks younger than forty. At the bottom corner of the ID: Pediatric Surgery.
He’ll do.
Jon pins the doctor still against the cave wall while Zhiyuan rummages through his backpack and finds a syringe, although she’s not sure how clean it is. He presses the piston a little to clear the needle of air bubbles, yanks the doctor’s scrub pants down an inch or two, and plunges the needle directly below his hip. Zhiyuan fixes the man’s pants and takes a step back, and in just a minute or two, the doctor wakes.
He has grayish-blonde hair, a wrinkled face, and a bit of a beer belly. When he opens his eyes, they’re green, and he jerks in Jon’s grip, thrashing. Zhiyuan pulls a gun on him then, pressing it against his nametag. “Be still,” he says, “and listen to the girl.”
She tells the doctor exactly what they need. “So as long as you fix him, and you do what we tell you, we’ll let you go. Got it?”
Frozen by Jon’s arms and the threat of Zhiyuan’s gun, he nods furiously in understanding, eyes still bugged wide, breathing hard through his nose in shallow puffs. He glances at Zhiyuan, and then back to Riri, and his eyes seem only to get wider.
MONDAY, MAY 14 — 11:32 PM
Peter is still not awake.
The doctor stands in the doorway, cuffs gone, a pair of guns directed at his back. Peter’s still flat on the ground, pale and unconscious, but one of his wrists is cuffed to the leg of the bed. At the other end of the bed, another cuff rattles around the far leg, attached to a small white hand leading under the bed. “There’s your patient, Doctor,” says Jon. He pokes the barrel into the man’s labcoat. “Go on.”
Jon’s tone is anything but playful. The room dies with his comment, the mass of people in the room now falling quiet. There are quite a few more spectators than when she left: Mason by the bucket, Daria on the bed between Glenn and Nick, Lyle leaned on Megan in the doorway, and even that tall white girl—Blake? Betty?—is sitting on the floor next to the Lang girl’s cuffed hand.
The room is stuffed full of people—figures. It’s no wonder they’re all so interested; this is the most exciting thing that’s happened in the last month.
Dr. Skivorski hesitates, but he does peer over at the Parker kid. He has a pair of glasses strung around his neck, and the string is wound in multicolored yarn and beaded with small ceramic smiley faces. She forgot; he’s a pediatric surgeon. “What happened to him?” he asks, putting on his glasses.
Riri looks to Haroun, Haroun to Zhiyuan, and Zhiyuan to Jon. His face flushed red, Jon raises his hands in sudden surrender. “How was I supposed to know? I’m not his fucking keeper, man! He’s supposed to heal fast!”
They explain as best they can what happened to him without giving details about him. When they’re done, the doctor’s face sours, and Haroun mentions, “Kid had a seizure while you were gone.”
“How long?” asks the doctor.
“About a minute, like an hour ago. Then another, like ten minutes ago.”
Now that Riri’s thinking about it, that’s probably what freaked out Cassie so much in the first place. Not the fact that he was asleep—but the fact that he seized .
That little girl might’ve saved his life.
He still seems a little rattled, but the epinephrine must have done its job, because he drops to his knees next to the Parker kid with a huff and asks, “Do I get supplies?”
Some of the watching addicts scramble together some supplies for him. He’s already at work, doing some of what Haroun had done when he’d first seen the kid unconscious. Dr. Skivorski takes alcohol swabs from his pockets—Riri already made sure to clear his lab-coat of anything useful: phone, needle driver, pager—and wipes his hands clean. He opens Parker’s mouth, clutches his wrist for a pulse, and tries to get his attention.He goes straight for the head, where bloody scraps of cloth are tied around it.
Dr. Skivorski takes a look at the wound, and finds a reopened gash and an array of messy, split stitches, which he mumbles as he checks. “Who stitched him up? What, is there a doctor around here? ‘Cause he did a crap job.”
They look around. No one stitched him up. No one’s fessing up.
From under the bed, the Lang girl says, “Peter did.” Her voice is a croak; Riri wonders if it’s from screaming Parker’s name.
The doctor blinks, jumping slightly at the sound of a child’s voice. He turns and peers under the bed, then back up at everyone else. “Who the hell is Peter?”
In an almost comic fashion, Zhiyuan and some of the others simultaneously point to the boy laying on the ground.
Dr. Skivorski tilts his head back, and his gray-lined hair falls back. “What the…” he mutters, and then he says it louder, his words pointed at Nick, who seems to be the oldest in the room. “What the hell. You let this kid sew up his own head?”
Nick shrugs, but even he looks a little embarrassed. “It’s not my job, man.”
“And why is he handcuffed to the—what, you geniuses think he’s gonna fight you like this? That he’s gonna pop up and knock you one? Look at him!”
Glenn, massive and muscled, his arm wound in a cast, complains that Parker broke his arm clean in half. “You don’t understand what this kid can do—he’s a fucking menace!”
“Not right now he’s not,” snaps the doctor. The room still reeks of blood and piss. “And the… Is that a little kid under there?”
“Don’t worry about the kid,” snaps Jon, and Riri remembers his gun is still out. “What do you need for Parker?”
“I need medical equipment. Gloves, masks, sutures, scalpels… Anything you have. Is there someplace sterile?”
Daria from the couch: “There’s an operating room in the lower levels.”
Riri looks to her; they mostly stay out of the lower levels. Charlie’s crew is only about a dozen people, two dozen tops, and usually half of them are so high they can barely stand. There are several lower levels, but they’re either full of liquified corpses in black uniforms and more corpses in the same prisoner’s garb they force Parker and the girl into. It’s not a pleasant place.
“What?” she says. “I was curious.”
“Is it sterile?” asks Dr. Skivorski.
“As sterile as you’re gonna get,” responds Daria.
The doctor has now pushed up Parker’s shirt and is visibly cringing at the injuries there. “Fine. Then get me a stretcher.”
Lyle, from the doorway: “I don’t think we have—a—”
“Then find me something that works like one!” he snaps.
Lyle rushes out of the room, and Megan follows.
MONDAY, MAY 14 — 11:44 PM
They take Parker to the operating room on another cell’s mattress.
As the strongest, Nick and Jon do most of the lifting; as they pick it up, Nick says, in subdued surprise, “He’s so light.”
The operating room is on the fourth level from the top, so it’s almost completely silent when they exit the elevator. Once they enter, the relief in the doctor is so obvious that he lets out an audible sigh. “This is perfect,” he starts, before Jon shoves the gun into his back and Dr. Skivorski shuts up.
He doesn't need to do that, Riti knows, because everyone in the room is armed but the doctor. Even Riri’s got a gun lodged in her belt. She can’t live here and not be armed.
“I need a team,” says the doctor, as the men settle Parker onto the open table. “I usually have—at least a couple—”
“How many?” asks Nick. As the oldest of the crew—at around thirty-five—he has somewhat taken charge of the situation, despite the fact that his eyelids are drooping and his words are slightly slurred.
“At least two,” Dr. Skivorski says. “But, uh…” He turns to the group in the room. There are even more now, around a dozen people in the room, all having followed Riri and the rest down to see what the fuss was about.
They are all in the scrub room. Even Parker is there, sprawled unconscious on the mattress. Dr. Skivorski makes Nick and Jon clean up before they carry in the Parker kid, and Riri’s currently helping to strip Parker of his grimy clothes and clean him up. She’s not sure why they need to be this thorough; he’s survived this long with the grime. How sterile does he really need to be?
But the good doctor insists, so they obey. They can’t afford to lose Peter. Again, Dr. Skivorski addresses the room: “Can I get a couple volunteers, please?”
Instead of volunteers, he gets a roomful of confused, shuffling addicts.
“Does anyone have medical experience? Patient experience? Anything?”
They look around at each other like they’ve only just met. Lyle even says, “Uh,” and nothing else. None of them take the lead on volunteering. Jon suggests one of the girls, one who went to a semester or two of college, but she shakes her head and says she was a business major.
Dr. Skivorski nods, finally drying his washed hands, and squints at the messy group of young people. “Okay, if you think you can handle seeing someone be cut open, stay. The rest of you, go.” About half of them file out.
Riri adds, albeit discreetly, “Most of them are probably on something right now, so I don’t know how much help they’ll be.
Dr. Skivorski stands up straight and addresses the dozen-ish addicts. “Okay, how many of you are high right now?”
Every hand goes up.
He makes a tsk sound of disappointment, frowning. “Okay, hands down.”
Fine motor skills aren’t generally a requirement of being part of Charlie’s crew. As Riri and Haroun finish cleaning Parker, he has the remaining few try to write their names and asks them a couple questions. He dismisses a couple more,and is eventually left with Riri, Mateo, and Zhiyuan.
Masked and clean, Nick and Jon carry in a newly scrubbed Parker and place him on the operating table in the center of the room. There are leather-lined cuffs on the table, and they strap him in, three straps across each arm, four over each leg, three over the torso, one over the shoulders. He’s entirely limp still, and his head rocks to the side before they strap it in, too.
The doctor tells Riri, the only one who’s not high, to help him scrub in. All the supplies are still inside the scrub room, left in unlocked cabinets. Dr. Skivorski seems to know exactly what he needs. She helps him tie shut the gown, strap on a mask, and put on a turquoise pair of gloves. “When’s the last time someone was in here?” he asks. “Five years?”
Riri doesn’t know, and she tells him so. “How can you tell?”
He gestures vaguely at the array of protective equipment he’s wearing; “The popular brands of scrubs and PPE, they change over time. I haven’t worn this kind since…2013?”
Riri washes and scrubs in, as do Mateo and Zhiyuan, although not as thoroughly as the doctor did. Jon and Nick stay, guarding the entrance. Mateo and the doctor talk about anesthesia, and they post him by the anesthesia cart; they use the IV in his arm as well as a central line in the groin to deliver extra fluids into his body through his femoral vein. They intubate him—imaging the tube going down Riri’s own throat makes her want to gag, but she buries the feeling—and flood him with fluids, nutrients, and antibiotics.
The combination of medications and fluids seem to help; from its slowed state, the kid’s heart rate goes up on the monitor, and once he’s stable enough they drape his head in sterile cloth, cut open a spot for his head, and the doctor shaves away a lot of his dark hair from the wounded area.
Riri tries not to watch.
They dive straight into the surgery. His heart rate skyrockets on the first incision, and Dr. Skivorski calls for more anesthesia. Riri passes him blades and handles, clamps and syringes, forceps and retractors. “He was hit twice,” says the doctor, as he examines the kid’s head. “The first time was hard enough to fracture the skull, and the second was hard enough to crack it further and bruise the brain. Once the skull is fractured, it has a hard time absorbing a blow, so your boy Jon” —he scoffs— “caused some swelling in this kid's brain. That’s why he won’t wake up.”
Dr. Skivorski works while talking to himself, sometimes humming random Beatles songs as he goes, so Riri says, when he’s halfway through Can’t Buy Me Love , “You seem awfully calm for someone who’s been kidnapped,” she says.
He glances over at her for a second. “I just can’t believe you managed to trick me,” he says. “Fifty-five years on this Earth, and I didn’t stop to think why you hadn’t called 911, or why you just needed me, or why the blood on your head didn’t have a wound.” He shakes his head, and he shakes his head again. “I’ve lived my life. If saving this kid is the way I go out, then… That’s not so bad, is it?” She turns her face away as he digs further into the bloody cavity; to look, she thinks, would make her sick. “I’m sorry,” he says then, as Riri grasps both retractors to give him access to Parker’s wounded skull, “you’re really, really too young for this.” He frowns. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” she says. That seems like the answer the doctor was expecting. She can’t see the lower half of his face under the surgical mask, but his eyes seem to grimace. “And how old is the kid on the table?”
“Sixteen,” she answers.
“And—the little girl, from under the bed?”
“Seven.” The doctor’s eyes focus on Parker’s head, and she finds him suddenly incredibly difficult to read. “My son’s a little older than him,” he says. “He’s going to college next year.”
“Oh, yeah?” says Riri, as though she’s not holding apart the skin of Parker’s head and he’s not digging inside of his brain and clearing clumpy blood clots from a teenager’s injured brain. “Congrats. Where’s he going?”
“NYU. He wants to go premed. He already lives in New York, you know. His mom moved down there to be with him.”
“And you didn’t?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t want to seem overbearing. His mom had custody, anyway. He comes back here for the holidays, and my job’s out here, so…” He smiles with a wince. “Now, I wish I’d gone with them. I’d like to see his face.”
“You will,” Riri assures him. “I swear.”
The doctor shakes his head. “I should’ve gone with them. I should’ve gone with them.” He falls quiet then, mumbling to himself about linear fractures and hematomas and occipital lobes. Riri’s seen thirteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and still she has no idea what he’s talking about.
She once overheard a conversation between Peter and Cassie while leaving the bunker. And then there’s a cassowary , said Cassie, with that excited-kid voice. They look kinda like roosters—but they’re not roosters. They’re blue and black and red and really tall, like an ostrich! They eat a lot of fruit, and they live in Australia like the kangaroos!
That’s pretty cool, Cass, said Peter, sounding incredibly tired. They must not have heard her footsteps, because at that point Riri stood beside their door with one ear pressed to the wall.
And their eggs! Their eggs are big and green and so cool! I think maybe if you cooked them like in Dr. Seuss they would be green, right, Peter? Green eggs and ham? But I asked Jim and he looked it up and he said that it was white and yellow on the inside, like a chicken!
That’s really— Riri heard Parker suddenly gasp— bad leg, Cass, bad leg, off the bad—ah!—leg…
Sorry, said the little girl, sounding genuinely so. I forgot.
It’s…okay, said the teenager. Just give me….a second.
She could hear their breathing as though she was in the room with them. Cassie’s excited breaths turning slow as she must’ve watched Parker try to calm himself—and Parker’s own quick, stilted ones. Okay , he said finally, once his breathing slowed again . Tell me more about these birds.
An excited giggle from Cassie. Yay!—so they can swim and run fast, but it can’t fly…
Riri had Googled ‘cassowary’ later, once Cassie and Peter were fast asleep and she had hidden in one of the other cells with her phone and earbuds and was in between a couple episodes of How Stuff Works . The first video: Why Cassowaries Are the Most Dangerous Bird on the Planet . Cassie had been talking about a killer bird, one that had been known to kill humans with their claws.
But of course, Cassie didn’t know that. Whatever she had seen on TV or read in a chapter book about cassowaries had all been the good stuff.
She was too young to know about killers.
She was too young for all of this.
Riri feels a lime-colored egg sink in the pit of her stomach.
TUESDAY, MAY 15 — 6:50 AM
They work through the night, having to stop every time Parker’s blood pressure got too high. He had a certain knack for burning through every bit of anesthesia Mateo threw at him; each time he started to stir, they had to stop until he was fully under once more. At one point, Mateo falls asleep at the anesthesia cart, and Parker’s eyes start to move beneath their lids—a fluttering—until finally they open to reveal a bleary pair of brown irises. “Mateo!” snaps the doctor. “He’s up!”He looks around, to the ceiling, and side to side, then closes them again. His mouth moves then, as he looks up. He reaches for her; strapped down, his hands don’t do much more than wiggle, but he tries. His mouth moves again, and he mouths something like Mom around the tube in his throat.
Then his eyes close again, like a sleepy toddler’s, and Peter Parker smiles, but he doesn’t manage to say anything else before he’s out again, a new round of anesthesia flooding him.
At last, the doctor sews him up—redraping him, moving on to several slashes that are on the boy’s torso. These are simpler, and don’t require as much anesthesia, so Dr. Skivorksi vauches to bring him back. He mentions that you want to keep someone under for as little as possible; the longer someone’s under anesthesia, the worse you risk complications. “And he’s already been through enough,” he says, “don’t you think?”
They pull up stools—which is of great relief to Riri’s cramping legs—and get to work on his other injuries.
At this point, both Zhiyuan and Mateo have gotten quite twitchy, and have since run off for a fresh hit, and the doctor says they don’t need to come back. It’s just a matter of monitoring him now—and fixing up his lesser injuries—so it’s only Riri and the doctor now. He still needs her extra set of hands.
“What are you doing here?” he says, now that the other two are gone. He pulls a stitch closed. “You’re a kid. You should be in school.”
She shrugs. “That's not the way it works for everyone, you know. I’m not like the Parker kid.”
He glances up at her briefly, and then back down to the sutures in Parker’s belly, where he loops and pulls the thread with his needle driver. “Why do you call him that?” he asks.
“What?”
“Kid,” he echoes. “He’s older than you.”
Riri knows he’s technically a year older than her. She’s never really thought about it. “That’s what Charlie and everybody calls him, I guess.”
“Hm,” he says. “And Charlie, he’s the one in charge?”
On instinct, Riri glances at the door. No Charlie. Just Jon and Nick, guarding the door and smoking. Zhiyuan’s out there, too, talking to Jon. “Yeah,” she says. “You haven’t met him.”
The doctor finishes his sutures and drops his tools, searching over Peter’s body for more wounds. He gets to the leg finally, and he and Riri redrape again, this time revealing his brutalized right leg. “Holy—” he starts, as soon as he sees it.
“That’s his bad leg,” says Riri.
“And who did that?”
She feels almost irritated at his question. “Charlie,” she snaps. “Look, you better stop asking so many questions, or we won’t let you go.”
The doctor stops looking at her. He’s looking at Parker, she notices, but not at his leg—at his face. “They’re not going to let me go, hon.”
She blinks. “What are you—of course they will—we will. I’ll do it myself—we’re gonna let you go. I’ll make sure of it. I told you I would, so I will.”
He’s still looking at Parker. “I’m sure you will,” he says.
As Dr. Skivorski examined Peter’s leg, Riri thought about what he said. More and more as Riri remained a part of this, the more she thought they might never free Parker or Lang or the Lang girl. If they were going to save the world, how could they have people around who knew they had tortured and killed to get there? They weren’t just tools—they were witnesses. And Charlie never liked to have witnesses.
“I’m glad it was me,” says the doctor, as his cap-bound head ducks to Parker’s leg. “The other doctor on duty—she’s getting married in the summer. I’ve lived my life, you know? I got married, I had a kid…” He sighs. “Crap. His knee’s infected. He really did a number on this one. Can you grab the…”
She hands him the vial of antibiotics from the cart.
“Thanks.”
At this moment, he reminds her a little of Stark.
She helped him set up a drape of cloth between Peter and his leg, one that shields his view from the leg, in case he wakes up. “I’ve gotta open it up,” Charlie says. “If this infection sticks around any longer, he’ll get septic.” They do more work on his leg; after some injections of localized anesthesia, the doctor opens it up, and Riri winces at the sight of raw muscle and bone. Dr. Skivorski removes shards of bone one by one, and each clink into the surgical tray beside him.
Sometime as the doctor is sewing up Parker’s leg, the kid starts to stir again. She helps the doctor exchange his gloves for a pair of fresh ones, and they remove his endotracheal tube from his throat by pulling slowly.
At this point Riri’s watch beeps, and she realizes that it’s morning. If she went outside right now, she would see the sun peek through the trees and pass over the mountain peaks. Maybe the deer has started to wake—returning to the spot where her young once lay, sniffing and sniffing and finding only pieces of burnt fur and bloody leaves. The doctor hears it, too, and asks her what time it is—it’s then she remembers the implications of what she’s done. Dr. Skivorski asks her again and this time she does respond. “Almost eight,” she says.
“Hm,” he says. That seems to be his catchphrase. “Okay, let’s see if we can get him up.” They’ve already reversed the anesthesia; they’re only waiting for him to wake. As he does, the doctor’s frown seems only to deepen.
Like before, Parker’s eyes shift beneath their lids, and when they open they’re unfocused and confused. His pupils look better now—of equal size—although tears rise immediately to his eyes. He squeezes them shut, and, after a few more confused glances, tries to talk: a cough is all that comes from him. It becomes a pattern—open eyes, look around, attempt to talk, close eyes again. His eyes don’t focus on a single thing. It’s like he can’t even see them standing beside him.
“Peter? Peter? Can you hear me?” The doctor passes a light over his eyes, and the kid winces, shutting his eyes. “Keep your eyes open for me, okay?” Peter can’t move his head because he’s strapped down, so he can’t prevent the doctor from pulling his eyelids open to keep him from blinking.
The flash of light causes obvious pain, but the doctor does it again to the other eye. “Hm,” he says again. “Peter, can you look at the light?” He shines the light above his head, and then slightly to the left, then to the right.
Parker is still confused, and he’s starting to pull against his restraints, his hands turning to fists and his one not-numbed leg kicking out. There are so many straps holding him down that he barely moves, but he keeps twisting and twisting and twisting , a sound exiting his body in a low whine. “Wait,” he gasps, “please, wait, please …”
The doctor looks wildly uncomfortable. He rolls his stool to Parker’s head and places one hand on the boy’s shoulder; he flinches against his restraints. “Hey, hey,” he says, with a quick removal of his hand. “Peter? You’re safe, you’re safe. My name’s Dr. Skivorski, and I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help.”
“No, please…” he continues, and his heart rate shoots up as he continues to thrash. “ Please! Please, no more, I can’t…” He starts to cough again. “My head… I can’t…”
“Your head’s gonna hurt for a while,” says Dr. Skivorski. “We fixed you up, but you need to take it easy.”
Peter’s eyes glance in every direction, but still they don’t settle on the doctor. “I can’t… What did you do to me? I can't see!”
The doctor looks at Riri. “He wasn’t like this before?” he asks, as Peter mumbles, “Can’t see, can’t see… Oh, God… Charlie, please , please… I can’t…”
She shakes her head. “What did we do?”
The boy continues to flail against the reinforced restraints, a dry scream erupting from him.
“Something’s not right,” says Dr. Skivorski. “His heart rate’s too high, his blood pressure—too high, too. But he’s not… Is he septic? Shock, maybe? No…” He mutters to himself, checking everything—Parker’s urine drainage bag, his response times, just like he did before.
“ Please! ” screams Peter, and he’s sobbing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, Mr. Stark… Help me, please…”
Riri stands entirely useless beside the doctor as he does his work. When he starts repeating, “Come on, Peter…” She hurries over to him, positioning herself at the beside the kid’s stitched torso. The bruises are fucking endless… At the site of Parker’s recently-stitched head, his skin has healed entirely around the stitches. “This is what you meant when you said he heals fast, huh? I thought you were exaggerating, but he… His head… It’s almost entirely healed.” He inspects it further. “That’s incredible. It’s like his body knows exactly where the danger is and focused on healing.” His shoulders drop, just slightly. “So he’s…enhanced?”
Riri is suddenly very, very ashamed. “Yeah.”
”Then what’s happening…? Come on, Peter, work with me…”
She glances up to the monitor, where his temperature reads a cool ninety-six degrees and falling. “Uh, Dr. Skivorski?”
He looks up at her, deep in his inspection of Peter’s head stitches. The kid’s still flailing against his restraints like he’s possessed. She points to the monitor, and he says, “No, no, no—come on, Peter, stay with me.”
There is a sudden cry from Parker: “It burns! It burns, please, I can’t take it, Mr. Stark, help me! ”
“Hold on, Peter, hold on…” He rifles through vial after vial in search of something, and when he finally finds it, he taps a new syringe, inserts and draws liquid, and inserts it into Parker’s femoral catheter.
It takes a minute or two, but at last Parker calms, falling into some kind of fitful, unconscious state. After he passes out, she and the doctor flood him with warm fluids to get his temperature back up, and the doctor sits back in his stool with a sigh.
TUESDAY, MAY 15 — 10:41 AM
It takes another couple hours for Parker to come back to consciousness. Even then, he talks in his sleep, mumbling for people: his parents, his aunt and uncle, someone named Skip, and even for Tony Stark. At some point, he comes to with some lucidity and thrashes so hard that his arms come free; in his half-sedated, half-feverish state, he scrabbles at his restraints with his fingernails, and in one scream of pain, throws his chest through the straps with such power than each one breaks. Before he can break the ones at his legs, the doctor goes to him and grabs his clammy hand with both of his, patting gently over his knuckles. “Peter, listen to me: you’re okay, hon, you’re okay.”
That gets the boy’s attention; his thrashing slows to a standstill. His lower half is still strapped down to the bed, and he tries to sit up but only falls back down. “Uncle Ben?” he whispers. He seems to have more visual acuity than he had a couple hours ago, because he’s focusing entirely on Dr. Skivorski’s face, scanning it as one would a loved one. His voice cracks, and Peter Parker starts to cry. “Uncle Ben… I’m sorry…”
Riri watches their interaction from the other side of the bed. She remembers, then, that Mateo was the one dosing the Parker kid with his daily sedation, and he’s gone now. That must be how he broke through the restraints.
“Is it really you?” says Parker, and he’s squinting. Relief floods her—he must be able to see again.The kid’s eyes are so bloodshot they’re almost almost red. He reaches out for the doctor, his face going slack, repeatedly trying to lift his head; his arms stretch out again, his hands bumping against the doctor’s forearms and taking hold of his scrubs.
The doctor looks back once at Riri before pulling his stool closer to the kid, and he lets the kid hold onto him. “Yeah,” he says, and there’s something in Dr. Skivorski’s voice that Riri can’t detect. “It’s me, Peter. It’s me. I’m here.”
Tears spill from Parker’s bloodshot eyes, but the liquid is pink, as though tainted with blood. His breathing hitches. “Ben—Uncle Ben, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
The doctor gathers the boy into his arms. His scrubs are covered in splatters of various fluids—all of them Parker’s—but Parker doesn’t seem to notice and the doctor doesn’t seem to care. “It’s okay,” whispers the doctor, and he cups the back of the boy’s neck with one hand. “You’re okay. It’s okay, hon.” He holds the boy’s battered boy half-up against himself, trying to still Parker’s heaving chest. “I’m here. I’m here.”
Riri is immovable, frozen solid on her stool by Parker’s legs.
“I couldn’t save you, I couldn’t—” The boy sobs harder. “I didn’t save you… Uncle Ben, I… I… I’m sorry… I should’ve… I…” He’s crying so hard he can’t breathe, so Dr. Skivorski folds his arms around him. The movement is so gentle that it isn’t a hug but more of an embrace, like he’s holding a newborn infant. “I lost you, I lost you… I miss you so, so much… and I… It’s all my… my fault…”
The doctor holds him, and Parker holds him back. He is surprisingly strong for someone so brutally and gravely wounded. “You’re okay,” says the doctor, as Parker’s bruised hands grip into the doctor’s scrubs hard enough to injure. His voice slows, calms, and quiets to a lulled whisper. “It’s not your fault, Peter, it’s not your fault… You were just a kid…”
He says these words with so much surety that Riri thinks for a second that he knows Parker. Then she remembers—Parker is a kid. He’s sixteen. So anything that may have happened before this, any situation where he could have caused someone harm… How could it have been his fault? He’s a kid now, and he was a kid then. What does that mean for her? What is she responsible for? What is her fault?
The kid clings to the doctor like he’s gravity, like the doctor is his last tether to Earth. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry… Do you…” His breathing turns to gasps, like he can’t quite get enough air into himself. “Ben—Ben, please… Do you—do you forgive me?”
Dr. Skivorski doesn’t hesitate. “I forgive you, of course I forgive you, Peter.” The kid cries more, in weary relief, and he loops his arms around the doctor’s chest, hugging him desperately close. “You’ve always been forgiven, hon, always. It’s okay, I’m here, it’s okay, I’m here…”
Peter sobs and sobs and holds him, but he’s exhausted. He only makes it another minute before his sobs calm, melting into gasps and into sighs, and at last he’s passed out again.
Once he’s asleep, for the first time since she met him a month or so ago, Peter Parker seems at peace.