DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 12, SECTION 15

In half an hour, a very short guy in a track suit and with what I guessed must have been some kind of an eastern European accent appeared with a truckload—yes, literally a truckload—of syringes.

All he wanted in return was "a shot of Ashley Travis," as he put it. He held out his forearm. His flesh was warm and clammy, and his fingers were getting twitchy; he was definitely late stage two. "You have shot of Ashley Travis?" he said. "You give me shot, you have all syringes you want."

Chris used Nikolai and his eagerly extended forearm to teach the bartender how to fill the syringe from the milk carton and inject just a milliliter of the solution into a vein. He didn't need much practice; he was obviously already an expert.

"Give a hit to anyone who asks," Chris instructed. "It's gotta go right into the blood. It's the only way. You can't drink it or anything like that. Stomach bile will kill it. You won't run out, but if you do, here's my number." He wrote it on the chalk board advertising the bar's beer on tap. Then he scrawled FREE TGVx in huge letters across all the beer names. "Congratulations," Chris said to the bar tender, slapping his arm. "You're now the purveyor of a premium quality sexually transmitted disease."

With help from Ian, Lindsay, and Shawn, we filled the camper trailer with box after box of black market  syringes.

The nearest bar was less than a block away.

We had a lot of work to do. It was going to be a long few days. I'd only been in New York for a couple hours, but it had been long enough to know that the city was big. I doubted that I'd get a chance to rest at all for days on end before I finished what I'd planned to do.

By midnight, we'd worked our way south, stopping at every bar we saw, all the way to what was apparently the Lower East Side.

There, once word got out, we had an army of volunteers. While Shawn took Jake to a Barnes and Noble to read to him in the children's section until he fell to sleep, the rest of us split up and gave impromptu, five-minute-long mini-clinics on administering the TGVx solution to bartenders on every other block. Total strangers showed up with extra milk cartons and plastic water dispensers. Soon, bartenders all over the city were passing along gallons of TGVx solution from Brooklyn to the Bronx. One heavily tattooed woman, after unsuccessfully hitting on Ian, ended up printing up pamphlets explaining what TGVx was, and where to find it if you were positive. Another small army of volunteers helped her paste them on lamp posts and subway platforms all over the city.

The problem of wandering stage-threes, though, still loomed.

While Ian was administering a dose of TGVx to an NYU grad student, two woman and one guy, all late-stage threes, suddenly grabbed him from behind and started dragging him into an alley. He'd slept most of the way to New York, and he summoned just enough strength to pull away from their grasp. A crowd of volunteers arrived to push them away while I helped Ian stand.

"We're gonna have to do something about this," Ian said, catching his breath.

He was right. Stage threes, I suddenly noticed, had started to gather in larger numbers in alleyways and abandoned cell phone shops at the periphery of the camper trailer...

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Please VOTE 🌟 before continuing. xxBailey