Sarah Fischer had been pounding on the bathroom door for exactly sixty-three minutes when she finally decided to break it down. She knew the exact time because she'd been checking her phone obsessively, torn between worry for her useless little brother and fury that he was making her late for her second shift at the diner.
Sixty-three minutes of "Daniel, open the fucking door!" Sixty-three minutes of threats and pleading and everything in between.
The apartment was so small that she could hear everything that happened in every room, but the bathroom had gone completely silent twenty minutes ago. No more retching, no more movement, no more of those weird muttering sounds he'd been making. Just... nothing.
And Daniel never shut up. Even when he was high—especially when he was high—he was always talking to himself, rambling about nonsense that made no sense to anyone with half a brain. The silence was what finally convinced her something was seriously wrong.
"Danny?" she called one more time, pressing her ear to the cheap wooden door. "Danny, I swear to God, if you've ODed in there, I'm going to kill you myself."
Still nothing.
Sarah looked at the baseball bat she'd dropped earlier, then at the door. The hinges were already loose—everything in this piece-of-shit apartment was falling apart—and she was stronger than she looked. Fourteen-hour shifts at the factory followed by six-hour shifts at the diner had given her muscles that her slight frame disguised.
Mom would have known what to do, she thought, and immediately pushed the thought away. Mom was three years dead, gunned down outside the grocery store by some punk who thought her purse might have more than the seventeen dollars it actually contained. Thinking about Mom now wouldn't help Daniel, and it sure as hell wouldn't help Sarah figure out how to handle whatever crisis her brother had gotten himself into this time.
She positioned herself in front of the door, took a deep breath, and kicked.
The door splintered inward with a crack that echoed through the small apartment. Sarah stumbled forward with the momentum, caught herself on the doorframe, and looked down to see her worst fears confirmed.
Daniel was on the floor.
But he wasn't just unconscious—he was convulsing. His whole body was rigid, back arched impossibly high, muscles locked in tetanic spasms that made his skinny frame look like a twisted marionette. His eyes had rolled back so far that only the whites were visible, and foam was bubbling from between his clenched teeth.
"Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck," Sarah breathed, dropping to her knees beside him.
She'd seen seizures before. Their mother had epilepsy, a side effect of the head trauma she'd suffered in the car accident when Sarah was twelve. But this was different. This was worse. Mom's seizures had been violent but brief. This looked like Daniel's entire nervous system was trying to tear itself apart.
His skin was burning hot to the touch, fever-bright and slick with sweat that seemed to be pouring out of him faster than should have been possible. When she pressed her hand to his forehead, it was like touching the hood of a car that had been running too long.
Drug overdose, she thought with sick certainty. He finally did it. He finally took too much of whatever shit he's been injecting.
Sarah fumbled for her phone with shaking hands and dialed 911. The convulsions were getting worse, Daniel's body jerking with such violence that she was afraid he was going to bash his head against the toilet or the tub.
"911, what's your emergency?"
"My brother—he's having a seizure, I think it's an overdose—"
"Ma'am, I need you to stay calm. What's your location?"
Sarah rattled off their address, the words tumbling over each other in her panic. "Apartment 4B, hurry, please, he's—Jesus Christ, he's burning up—"
"Paramedics are en route, ETA four minutes. Is he breathing?"
Sarah looked down at Daniel's rigid form. His chest was moving, but wrong—too fast, too shallow, like he was hyperventilating even while unconscious. "Yeah, but barely. He's really hot, like fever hot, and he won't stop—"
Daniel's back arched even higher, and Sarah heard something that made her stomach drop: a low, continuous groaning sound coming from his throat, like his vocal cords were being forced to vibrate by the seizure.
"Ma'am, do not try to restrain him or put anything in his mouth. Clear the area around him of any hard objects he might injure himself on. Make sure his airway stays clear."
Sarah looked around the tiny bathroom. There wasn't much room to clear, but she managed to kick aside a bottle of cheap shampoo and push the small trash can away from his flailing limbs. Daniel's head was dangerously close to the base of the toilet, so she carefully slipped her hand underneath it, cushioning it as best she could.
His skin was getting hotter.
"Something's wrong," she said into the phone, trying to keep her voice steady. "He's burning up. This isn't normal, is it? I mean, seizures don't usually—"
"High fever can be associated with drug overdoses, especially stimulants. The paramedics will be equipped to handle it. Stay on the line with me."
Stimulants. Sarah's heart sank. She'd known Daniel was using something—the needle marks on his arms were impossible to miss—but she'd hoped it was just heroin or something else that would just make him nod off. Stimulants were different. Stimulants could kill you.
Like they killed Dad.
No, that wasn't fair. Dad had killed himself with alcohol years before the meth finally stopped his heart. But the thought was there anyway, the fear that addiction was some kind of genetic curse that was going to claim everyone she'd ever cared about.