Chapter Eight

Tamara wiped the mud on her hands off on the hips of her pants, closing her eyes and breathing as deeply as her sore chest could afford her.

“Ma’am? Can I help you?” The shop owner tying his apron around his waist asked from his storefront.

Tamara opened her eyes and didn’t bother to hide the pain and exhaustion that showed in them. “I’m afraid it’s past that now.”

He shrugged and walked back into his store, leaving her alone to slump down into the bench under the window.

You’re stronger than this, she told herself. They’re children; they can’t bring you this far down. You can’t let them.

She massaged her temples, trying to coax rational, coherent thought back into her mind. She had had a plan; she needed to get back to it.

Standing up slowly, she collected herself into the tall, graceful creature she felt like on her good days. There was no way to cure her appearance of its hopelessly disheveled nature, but she brushed the excess dust off her clothes flattened her vest against her stomach. She reached inside of herself and searched for the memory of her sister and the strength that it granted her. She crossed the street to the pharmacy and entered through the tall glass door.

No bell sounded when the door opened, and when it shut, the room around her was silent. No one stood behind the counter, and the dust particles hanging in the streams of sunlight were the only other disturbance of the store’s utter stillness. Tamara walked quickly and quietly to the counter and peered through the door into the backroom. The door to the back alley was open there and there was no person to be seen. Taking her chance, she jumped the counter dove into the storeroom aisles. She knew what she was searching for, or at least she would know it when she saw it. There was a name for the pills she needed, but she didn’t know it. She had seen them before in a container on her sister’s bedside table during the last few terrible months.

Suddenly, she heard the back alley door close and footsteps tromp carelessly across the cement floor towards the counter. Knowing she was hidden from view between two near-walls of pills and pillboxes, Tamara, though shaken, continued her search. After what seemed like long minutes, she came to a clear canister with hundreds of tiny pink and green pills inside. The address on the prescription label was several towns away. Tamara carefully removed the canister from the shelf, looking around for any others of its kind and finding none. She placed the pills into her side pouch, careful not to let them shake around in their container, then slowly made her way to the back door. The doorknob was big and brass and heavily rusted, so Tamara steeled herself for she was afraid would turn out to be a chase.

Taking hold of the cold handle, she tried to turn it, but met impassible resistance. She turned harder. The rust fought her. She bit her lip and gave a final heavy turn with her wrist. The handle gave a creak, earsplitting in the otherwise-silent storeroom, and budged only slightly. Tamara, her forehead sweating now, winced as she heard the druggist’s stool swivel around. She looked around at him, her eyes wide with fear at what she knew had to come next.

“Hey!” he yelled, springing to his feet. “What do you think you’re doing back here?”

Tamara pulled a palm-sized package wrapped in tissue out of her pouch and held it out in front of her. A blue haze began to thicken around it. The druggist stopped walking abruptly and instinctively put his hand out.

“Don’t!” he yelled. “The medicines! They’ll turn to poison! You’ll kill hundreds of people!”

“You can’t know that I was here,” she said, her voice shaking slightly, but her face set.

“I swear I won’t tell anyone,” he said. “You can silence me how ever you want, just please don’t drop that mushroom.”

Her hand with the package stuck straight out in front of her, threatening to turn over and let the package fall. “This is all I have,” she said. “You can’t know I was here.”

He shook his head frantically, pleading with her with his eyes, his hands, his words, whatever he could. She blinked and turned her hand over like lightning.

As the package fell and the tissue came unwrapped, the druggist ran and dove to catch it, but he fell short by mere inches. Before he hit the ground, Tamara had leapt around him and sprinted back into the front room. She looked back in time to see the package, now slightly unwrapped to reveal a small mushroom whose cap had come off, emitting long strings of thick blue gas that immediately some of which began to spread out over the whole room, while one wrapped itself like a strand of rope around the druggist’s neck. Tamara stood transfixed, watching his hands grope and claw at the impenetrable force constricting his air. She finally pulled herself away as the wandering strands seeped their way under the caps of the pill canisters and the druggist’s eyes began to bulge.