It's Medical

It's E for now, but I might change the rating if things get dicey, later. No nitpicks please--this chapter's a bit rough, and I haven't decided yet if I want to keep going or not. And yes, if I keep going it will get romance-y.

What was I doing in the back of an ambulance tied to a dining room chair? I was still trying to figure that one out.

“Kid,” the guy said, leaning against the wall with a book held open in his hands. “Kid, this is really simple. You tell us where Camden Rainier is, and we let you go. C’mon, seriously! Mister is gonna be mad if it turns out the stupid little girl won’t talk.”

“I’m not stupid,” I snapped, trying to be brave like all those action movie stars, “and I’m not a little girl. Why do you want to know, anyways?”

He went back to reading his book, like he couldn’t hear me. Who’s Camden Rainier, then, you ask? Camden Rainier is my bestbestbest friend, my one true love, and possibly the most adorable eighteen-year-old super-genius geek since, I don’t know, Einstein. Was he cute? I’ve only ever seen pictures of him as a crazy old guy.

And anyways, I wasn’t going to tell these weirdo freak fake paramedics where he was, or who, even if they knew already. “Where are we going?” I asked, when I felt I might die in the ominous silence. He looked at me over the top of his book, and I noticed for the first time that his eyes were a cold, deep black, like long-dead coals.

“Somewhere so awful it would make your skin crawl just to hear the name,” he said, totally serious, and then, as he was going back to his book, smirked a little, so the whole moment was ruined.

“I don’t know where he is!” I lied, when the silence got stuffy once more.

“Don’t you,” the guy said, this time not even bothering to look up. “Because if you end up changing your story when we hand you over to Mr. Doc, I’ll make sure everyone knows you’re not just an idiot, but also a disgusting liar.”

Bump-bump, went the ambulance, like it was pitching in some remark of its own. I frowned, staring down at my bare feet. I was going to kill the whole world if this stupid fiasco messed up my birthday party planned for the next day…

Birthday party. I froze, my hands curling into fists behind me—my cell was still in my pocket, and if I could just sneak it out, somehow, without the weirdo seeing, and somehow managed to dial 9-1-1, I might manage to get out of this. Wow, what kind of incompetent kidnappers didn’t search their prisoners’ pockets? Somehow, the thought gave me a bit of hope.

“We’re almost there,” the guy said suddenly, and I started, jerked out of my wild thoughts. “Just—don’t move, okay?” He chuckled to himself at his super clever joke, and then went back to the book. A bit of grey-and-black hair fell into his eyes as the ambulance bumped around, and I wondered off-task how someone who looked thirty at the oldest could possibly have hair like that.

Forget it, Eve, I scolded, biting my lip—an anxious little habit. You don’t have time for that. Fortunately my wrists were unusually thin, and also my guard was way into his dumb book, so I wriggled my hands out of the ropes, waited a second, and then reached surreptitiously into my right jacket pocket. Waited again, made sure his coal-black eyes were moving quickly across the pages, and then flipped open the phone, thankful it wasn’t the sort of cell that made blip-bleep noises when you dialed a number. Even though I couldn’t hear, I knew that in a second someone would pick up and say, Nine-one-one, what is your emergency? or something like that. So gathering up every last bit of air I could get into my lungs, I counted one, two, three—

And then I screamed. Screamed so loud you could probably hear it out in China, screamed as the book feel from my guard’s startled hands, screamed as the back doors of ambulance flew open—I swear, it went on forever, almost.

Something hit the back of my head, something horribly hard, and finally my voice faded away, and I fell forward, away into a dark, shadowy unconsciousness not much better than reality.