The Pills

[Harakiri]

ACT 1: THE INSOMNIAC

 

Jack Locke opened his eyes and let them adjust to the dim light of the bedroom. His wife was turned facing the wall opposite, snoring quietly. He didn't want to get up and disturb her, the old second-hand mattress he inherited from his grandparents would more than likely creak so loud he would wake the neighbors.

He reached for the orange tube that stood on his bedside table beside the alarm clock. The digital read-out displayed in blood-red that it was 2:38 A.M.

Jack pushed the cap down (Damn safety precautions for those damn kids, he thought) and twisted the lid off.

He tilted the prescription bottle just enough for two white pills to fall into his hand. He shoved them in his mouth, swallowed, replaced the lid on the tube, put it on the bedside table, and waited, eyes closed, for the sleep to hit him.

It never did.

 

At 7:15 the alarm burst from the clock, the shrillest beeps anyone could imagine.

Jack Locke turned it off and turned back to the spot on the ceiling he had been staring at the past four hours. He was sweating profusely, his eyes burnt like the pits of hell.

The sleep pills had not worked.

Jack's insomnia had been a problem for a while now, but the pills had always put him to sleep. If anything, all the pills had done that night was tighten his chest and turn him into a bipedal furnace.

He had just gotten the pills the day before, maybe they had changed the ingredients in the pills after discovering a new, better ingredient. Maybe the new guy at the pharmacy had screwed his prescription up, thrown in the wrong pills.It had happened to his friend Todd who went to sleep after taking head-ache pills and woke up an hour later with a head-ache and a giant erection.

Jack went to the bedroom's adjoining bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, his forehead was plastered with sweat. His wife-beater stuck to his body.

"Damn, you're one ugly mug." Jack muttered to his reflection.

He took a cold shower. A long one at that.

When he got out he waltzed to the bedroom closet naked and pulled on a T-shirt and camo-style shorts and went downstairs to the kitchen.

It was sunny outside, beautiful. The birds were chirping and the wind blew gently through the trees. The windows were open and it felt nice.

The coffee pot was full and Jack dumped some of the hot liquid into his Mickey Mouse mug. He took a large sip of the coffee. It burnt his tongue wonderfully.

His chest still hurt but he sat down at the kitchen table and stared out at the backyard, felt the breeze against his face.

 

That evening he took the pills again after checking the label and making sure the pills looked correct.

Everything was in order. He might just be having a fever, an allergy of some sort. Maybe the reason he had not slept last night was the fact he was dozing in and out of the dream world, maybe when he took the pills it had been a dream.

He put the pills in his hand.

The pills went down.

He instantly fell asleep.

And woke up in such pain it was almost indescribable.

 

11:30.

11:31.

11:32.

He clutched at his chest, wriggled about in pain.

And then it got worse.

His wife tried to hold him down but he was too powerful. He flung about like a beached fish.

She pulled him off the bed and dragged him into the bathroom. She flung him into the bathtub, clothes and all, and turned the cold water on.

Jack started to calm, but the pain...

"I...I'm having a heart attack." Jack managed to blurt out.

What the hell is that? Why am I in so much pain?

Jack noticed the dark shape standing over him turn it's head, it's eyes red, bright.

A demon?

No. No, he was good, he was a good Christian. Why would Satan come for him?

The darkness overtook him and he lay in the shower, passed out until the ambulance came and the medics put him on a stretched and carried him out. His wife stopped them and handed the lead man the orange tube.

 

ACT 2: THE DARK WORLD

He woke up in a dark, unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar bed. The pain was still there, his heart felt as if it were being squeezed by Mr. Universe. His palms were bleeding, his nails had torn into them pretty good. He needed some bandages.

The blood was staining the sheets and his sweat was turning them yellow.

All around him, he saw dark shapes. He couldn't tell if they were people or animals. They all were stooped though, broken.

And then, as if on cue, all of the shadows turned toward Jack, red eyes staring hungrily at him.

"You can't take me Satan! God is with me!" Jack flailed his arms, searching for the cross he wore on a chain around his neck. It wasn't there.

The shapes came closer and closer, then started coming together, growing into one large mass.

Jack screamed as another form entered his view, this one upright, wearing some sort of hat, a fedora maybe. The figure had no glowing eyes, and seemed...different from the other shadows.

"Poisoned." Said a voice from nowhere, probably from the new shadow. Jack could not tell if the voice was that of a man or woman. "You're lucky you haven't died. You're on the verge though."

He was hallucinating. He had not slept for days, this was probably some sort of delusion, everything had to be.

Then the lights turned on and the doctor ran in, grabbed Jack's arm.

"He's having a seizure! Get me some [bleep]ing help!"

Jack didn't hear a word of that. He was too busy listening to conversations no one else could hear.

"The verge." A voice whispered.

"Archer." Came another voice.

Whatever his hallucinations were talking about, they were hallucinations. None of this mattered. What mattered was that pin[puncture] of light at the center of his vision. What mattered was getting out of this dark hold and back to Earth, to his wife, his life.

Jack envisioned that pin[puncture] of light getting larger, encapsulating him, becoming life.

Jack was never asleep, but when the darkness disappeared he was back in the hospital bed, four doctors grabbing him, dabbing at his lips where foam was gushing forth.

Jack screamed out of pain and because he felt the need. "HOLY [cabbage]!"

The doctors screamed as well.

"How the hell did he get out of a seizure that fast? No [bleep]ing way!"

"JESUS CHRIST IN HEAVEN!"

Jack gasped for air but his chest was tighter than ever.

"Poison." Jack said, not understanding why,

"Poison?" One of the doctors asked.

"The pills...where are they?" Jack gasped for air.

A doctor left the room and came back a moment later with the tube. "Sleeping pills? Twice a day? No, you don't need these!"

"Twice...a day? No wonder I couldn't...sleep...."

"Huh?"

Jack inhaled sharply again. "Check...poison."

"Get this to in-house poison control!" The doctor handed it to a nurse running in in exchange for some damp washcloths.

"Yes Dr. Hale." The nurse ran out of the room.

"Poison? Who the hell would poison a retired machinist?"

"Tylenol...scare." Jack managed to say.

One of the doctor's eyes went wide. "Poisoning just to poison? Just to kill?" The doctors looked at their colleague questioningly. "It's why there are safety stoppers on the top of medicine. Not to keep kids out but to keep out random people wishing to tamper with the medicine in-store, such as a poisoner. There was this guy fifteen years ago who just ran around putting poison into random bottles of Tylenol just for the hell of it and ended up killing plenty of people."

"But this was a prescription...from a pharmacy!" A doctor exclaimed.

"You're telling me there could not be a crooked pharmacist in the world?"

"What would he gain?"

"What does anyone gain from killing a random person?"

Jack felt his chest turning to lead. He couldn't exhale or inhale. He couldn't see at all. Everything was becoming a blur.

"Jesus, we're losing him. The poison..."

"Why the [bleep] aren't we treating him for poison?"

"Because we don't know what kind it is! We don't know where the toxin is targeting! It's a slow toxin too! I've never seen a poison take more than a day to kill a man, but this has been thirty-six hours!"

Jack couldn't breathe. He couldn't hear correctly, see correctly.

Poison.

Don't know what kind.

Can't save him.

Dead.

Damn.

 

ACT 3: CAUSE OF DEATH

"It was very weak, the neurotoxin was cobra venom mixed with a little bleach is all we know at the moment. The pills had very little on them, which is why he couldn't smell the bleach and why the poison had not killed him faster. It could really screw with a person's systems apparently. Your husband had a weak heart too, which helped the toxin. He must have been a smoker."

Jack's wife nodded her head and cried. She cried even harder at the finality of the doctor's next words:

"I'm sorry Mrs. Locke, but your husband is dead. The police are going to the pharmacy right now to arrest the killer."

More tears.

And the tears would continue for days to come.

 

"The poison is amazing. It is perfectly balanced. It was created to wreck havoc on the bodies internal systems and then strike the heart. The toxin apparently [bleep]ed with the victims brain. Then it went for the heart. He was supposed to take four of the sleep pills, two at a time, three hours before bed and then right as he lay down. He only took them once a day though, didn't follow the instructions. So the poison on the pills didn't screw with him as bad as it could. If he had more it would disperse to the digestive system, the excretory system. This guy would have been beyond repair. He would have been so broken..."

"What about the seizure?"

"The toxin was [bleep]ing with his brain; more than likely that is what caused the seizure."

"So it was just bleach and venom?"

"Trace amounts of other things, but I have to send it to someone else to figure those out."

"Your thoughts?"

"This is one badass poison that we wouldn't want in the wrong hands."

"Already was."

"Oh well, hopefully he didn't send the recipe to a friend."

 

The police cuffed the short, balding man and took him to one of the twelve Crown Victoria's surrounding the place.

 

"Why'd you do it."

"As a test."

"Why Jack Locke?"

"It said on his record he was a smoker, a very, very heavy smoker at that. I wanted to test the poison on him, wait to see his name in the obituaries and see if it really worked."

"What did you want to see in the obituary?"

"That every part of his body was shut down, no way to trace the cause of death because everything was so screwed up."

"What is the poison made from?"

"Well, that's between me and my boss."

"What?" The police man asked before his head exploded.

The killer laughed as well before his head burst like a watermelon full of C4.

The open bars at the very top of the interrogation room were six inches across and six inches down. Just enough for the sniper to get rid of the two in the room.

 

 

 

END

 

 

 

 

Monthly horror writing contests make me want to write horror. I can't say I think this is my best work, but I think it's alright. It moves too fast, as opposed to too slow, which wouldn't be as good as it being too fast.

Who is Archer, what is the Verge, who is the sniper? I'll solve those questions through the monthly horror writing contest I am doing on another website, this is May's and it is on tampered medicine. Ultimately, I think it is pretty good for something I wrote over the course of four hours while simultaneously paying attention to my teachers. Anybody with any criticisms or such are welcome to tell me. I took a lot of liberties with the poison and what it is comprised of. And the Tylenol scare is real, not a plot device.

I posted this for the contest and I've been told it's reminiscent of Hitchcock, but since I've never read Hitchcock, I have no idea what the guy was talking about. Hopefully the few people who read this will enjoy it since it is my second attempt at real world horror and my first attempt in two years.

[Nexaduro]

A wonderful thriller! Reminds me of "The Lottery" and "The Veldt." Just two silly little things I wanted to say:

 

"When he got out he waltzed to the bedroom closet naked and pulled on a T-shirt and camo-style shorts and went downstairs to the kitchen."

He's not wearing any underwear, then?

 

"Jack screamed as another form entered his view, this one upright, wearing some sort of hat, a fedora maybe."

Eh, Nightmare on Elm Street much?

[Guest Mrmegakirby]

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