The Killer Fix

Chapter 1

It's barely five AM. The chief medical examiner in Kings County starts down the highway from the little seafront town she calls home to the city. She rolls up the windows when the predicted rain starts coming down and peers over the steering wheel as her vision impairs. 

The early morning news report plays on low volume, but the information doesn't reach her. Her mind is on the lifeless body of a teenage girl lying in the morgue waiting for examination. Other than the occasional trucker nothing passes by, not this early. 

The drive up to the city is a tedious one hour long haul in a straight line, with the only view to entertain being the endless pine trees bordering on either side. On good days you can hear the ocean in the distance and get a glimpse of the sunrise overhead, but now it's all clouds and the sound of the downpour getting heavier.

The medical examiner sinks into a steady trance of sixty miles per hour, until something catches her eye between the green on her left. A misty dark blue shape emerging and shuffling onto the road, only to collapse on the wet asphalt. 

A quick pound on the brakes brings the car to a shrieking halt. She breathlessly stares at a dark blue raincoat covering what must be a mad man lying in the beam of her headlights. Her hand shakes as she reaches to open the door and make her way to the front of her car. 

It's strange how all the gruesome murder victims and overdosed street kids appearing on her slabs never fazed her, but this moment while reaching to lift the raincoat sends a chill down her spine. As she raises the wet piece of clothing, she considers the possibility that she's about to encounter her first dead body out in the real world, outside the confines of her carefully sterilized workplace. 

And then the possibility that she herself might be a dead body soon when her heart nearly leaps out of her chest. A hand appears from the raincoat and grabs her. The loud scream about to break from her lungs is halted when she sees the face of the young girl now clinging to her arm. 

'H-help me.' It's all the girl can muster before releasing her arm and losing consciousness. The medical examiner takes what feels like her first breath in the last two minutes as she hears a truck pull up behind her.

∾

That morning Riley Clemens is rushing through the hospital parking lot in a haze of both relief and trepidation. At the sight of her mother, Diana, standing in the first floor hallway, reality dawns on her. Up until that moment it had felt like she was still sleeping. 

'Where's Carrie?' Diana reaches for her as she attempts to mask the heartache that has taken hold. 'Riley...' As she looks into her daughters eyes she can't bring herself to utter much more than that right away. 

It's then that Riley sees her sister through the window of the room on her left, sitting upright in the bed with her legs pulled to her chest, staring blankly into the distance. 

As Riley takes a step towards the window, her panic subsides to a point where she feels downright numb. 'What happened to her?' 

'The doctors think she's been drugged, they're running blood tests right now.' Taking her daughters hand, Diana prepares herself to repeat what the doctors told her only minutes earlier. 'Carrie... doesn't remember anything. Not the last two days, not what happened to her. She doesn't know who we are, or who she is.'

The next two months passed like a series of darkened images moving through a slideshow. It's like Riley was watching them from a distance instead of being in them. Carrie quickly declined into her traumatized state, barely speaking most of the time. After the unworldly amount of drugs uncovered by the blood test passed through her system the initial hysteria she experienced subsided and she turned inwards. Despite being unable to recover her memories she now at least acknowledges her family, but not like she did before.