joshua ginsberg
the final dose
“You are not a criminal,” Ellen said to herself after checking to make sure that the location tracking on her smartphone was turned off and stepping around the back of the small strip mall looking for the door marked APH, which she assumed was an abbreviation for Abbington Pet Health. Most of the snow had melted and the temperature had risen briefly into the forties, but still her hands shook as she pulled them up into the sleeves of her heavy, grey jacket. The hood was pulled over her head and a scarf further occulted her face. She tucked a lock of auburn hair that had come loose back behind her ear.
She wouldn’t be here if she didn’t need it. She just didn’t know where else to go for it.
Her hazel eyes made a final quick scan of the parking lot to make sure there weren’t any familiar vehicles, then she waded through the slush, hugging the brick outer wall like a shadow. She stifled a cough – she was getting sick again. It seemed like hardly a week passed anymore that either her, her husband, Peter, her soon to be five-year-old son Devon, or some combination of the three of them weren’t sick with something. She didn’t remember it being so when she was a kid, but childhood memories, she knew, could be unreliable.
Carefully avoiding puddles while keeping her head down and her face out of view of the mounted CCTV cameras posted behind the bank, the liquor store and other shops that made up Centennial Plaza, she came to the one she was looking for – painted pale green with the letters in yellow, the combination of which made her think of phlegm and bile. Illness colors.
She fingered the roll of bills in her pocket like a protective charm and took a deep breath, then rapped hard on the door three times. While she waited, the events of the past week replayed rapidly in her mind. How it started when Dr. Liu, her son’s pediatrician, had read in her an anguish, a need, that he had seen all too many times before. He had taken her hand gently and said quietly that he knew someone who could get her the help she needed, and gave her a card with just the name Joyce and a number on it. She thanked him and wiped her eyes before they gave away how anxious she was.
Ellen had barely gotten Devon and herself through the front door before she went out onto their back patio to place the call.
“This is Joyce,” a man’s voice answered on the second ring. Startled by this small, unexpected turn, for a split-second Ellen considered saying she had the wrong number and hanging up, but if she did, she realized, she would be back to square one. The pressing, urgent need that weighed on her day and night still unmet.
“H-hi Joyce, my name is, well actually maybe I should say that. I was given your card by Dr. Liu…”
“Yeah, I know.” He said it kindly, and that took off a little bit of the edge and awkward discomfort. “Look, you’re not alone. We all have needs, right. Things we can’t exactly get at the local big box pharmacy, yeah? I can send someone to meet you on Wednesday at two pm in the frozen food aisle of the Giant grocery store on Dresher Road. Does that work for you?”
She thought about it for a moment. Wednesday. It was her work from home day, and she had a team meeting with the rest of her human resources colleagues, but she could take a late lunch to make the appointment. “Yes. I can be there.”
“Good. Wear something red, if you don’t mind, and be careful. Also, please delete this number from your phone and destroy that card you were given too.”
Ellen did as she was told, scrubbed the number from her phone’s memory and then lit the card on fire and watched until it blackened nearly to her fingers before she dropped it on the ground, stamped it out and went back inside to start dinner. When Peter arrived around six, he leaned in planted a kiss on Ellen’s neck, just under her the edge of her cheekbone.
“I’m working on it,” she whispered, responding to the silent question in his burnt umber eyes.
In the days leading up to her rendezvous at the grocery store, she was distracted and jumpy, convinced that every half-heard whisper from behind the door of every conference room was about her and what she was doing. Her imagination twisted glances from fellow workers into scowls. But she managed to keep it together and finally the day came.
With Peter at work and Devon at school, her meetings for the day completed, she put on a red ballcap, pulled her ponytail through the opening at the back, and left for the Giant, located just fifteen minutes away. Traffic was light and the lot out front of the store was less than a third full. She parked, entered through the sliding doors and took one of the green plastic handheld baskets rather than a full-sized shopping cart, which she thought might look strange when she came to the checkout lanes with it empty or nearly so. She plucked a few items at random from the shelves – crackers, two soup cans, a cereal that no one in her household ate, and made her way casually toward the frozen foods section.
The store was nearly vacant of shoppers. She stopped where the frozen food portion of the aisle switched to dairy products and waited in front of a full section of nothing but containers of unpasteurized milk. The labels announced it as “Arkay’s Own” and judging from the quantity in which is was stocked, not even the recent recall of this brand’s products in some two dozen states had diminished consumer demand. From each of the labels, the same smiling, older, white-haired man stared out at her with pale blue eyes the same color as his ascot. The printing of the labels had made the color of his skin seem an unnatural, garish shade of orange, and she turned to face away from the milk cartons. Still, she felt the discomforting sightless gaze of all those frosty eyes on her back, watching her. Judging her actions.
At last, a tall, thin girl who looked like she could be in her mid-twenties came striding towards her. She paused next to her, opened one of the refrigerated doors, and dropped a piece of paper on the tiled floor.
“Call on Friday between ten am and two pm. Ask for Drake and say you were referred by Amanda. Amanda has a Siberian Husky. Boys are Havanese. Girls are Shih Tzus. Got it?”
“Wait, what?”
“Repeat what I just told you.”
Ellen repeated the information, first to the stranger and then several times more, silently to herself. She reached down and picked up a card much like the one Dr. Liu had given her. This one was for a nearby veterinarian’s office called Abbington Pet Health. She looked at the address and tried to connect it with the name, feeling somewhat sure that she’d passed by it before, in a small shopping center.
When Ellen looked back up from the card, to ask the other woman, she was already gone. The phrase “in the wind” came to her from some espionage movie she must have seen with Peter, and she shivered.
If the days preceding her meeting at the grocery store had been challenging, the tension only mounted over the next day and half. Even Peter noticed how she flinched with every clatter of silverware and plate, how she jumped at every shadow outside the house.
“It’ll be over soon,” he said softly, but even his best attempts at reassurance failed to loosen the stiff knots in Ellen’s back and shoulders.
Just after the stroke of ten on Friday she called the number. A woman picked up before the second ring.
“Abbington Pet Health, how can we help you today?”
“I… um, I was hoping to talk to Drake? I was referred by Amanda.”
“This is Drake. And let’s see Amanda had, what, a bearded dragon I think?”
“N-no. Amanda has a husky.”
“Ahh, right. So, maybe you can tell me what sort of a pet you have?”
“I have… a Havanese who is turning five next month…” From there, Ellen launched into the specifics of what she was seeking.
“Just got a shipment in this morning. Can you pick up tonight?”
“Yes,” Ellen exclaimed, not bothering to hide her elation.
“Six forty-five. Don’t be late. Come around to the back door – it’ll be marked APH.”
“Thank you, yes. That’s perfect. Thanks.”
There was a pause.
“There’s the matter of payment, of course.”
“Right, payment. Of course,” Ellen had forgotten about that.
The woman, Drake, stated a number that made Ellen nearly choke on the coffee she had been sipping.
“That’s… U.S. dollars?” she asked.
“Yeah. Cash only. Is that okay?”
It was considerably more than she had guessed. Almost twice as much, but she could take it out of the family savings.
“Honestly that’s… that’s a lot more than I expected.”
Drake sighed. “This batch is from Canada, and it keeps getting harder to get it across the border. Harder means more expensive too.”
“No, I understand. That’s fine. I’ll be there.”
The cost had been like a splash of cold water over Ellen, and as it soaked in, so too did the jitters and fears. Thankfully she had only the rest of the day to contend with.
Which brought her back to the present, as the door creaked open and a band of yellow light sliced with surgical precision through the dirty snow and mud. A woman with grey hair tied back in a bun wearing scrubs and a disposable mask appeared at the entrance.
“You’re here for the two-year-old shih tzu?”
“No. I’m… the Havanese turning five.”
The woman, who Ellen assumed was Drake, held out her hand for the money. Ellen hesitated suddenly. What if it didn’t work? What if it was a trick, or a trap?
“This is… I mean, you’re sure it’s okay?”
“If you thought your Havanese would be safer without it, would either of us be here?”
Ellen considered it, but only for a fleeting moment. “That’s fair. You’re right.” She handed over the wad of bills, and Drake handed her a white paper bag.
Ellen looked inside – there was a plastic bag with a disposable syringe and a small bottle of liquid. She closed the bag and tucked it into one of the deep pockets inside her jacket. She nodded, whispered a thank you, and returned to her car.
She drove home and did not open the white bag again until she parked and the garage door closed securely behind her.
She read the label on the small bottle and felt all the tension of the last several days evaporate. Exhaustion filled in the space left by anxiety. They would administer it tonight, on Devon’s bed. Ellen would distract him with stuffed animals while Peter injected him with his fifth and final dose of TDaP vaccination. Then the nightmare would be over, and she could feel like a good, responsible and law-abiding parent again. For a little while, at least. Until they had to start thinking about obtaining an MMR shot.
She wouldn’t be here if she didn’t need it. She just didn’t know where else to go for it.
Her hazel eyes made a final quick scan of the parking lot to make sure there weren’t any familiar vehicles, then she waded through the slush, hugging the brick outer wall like a shadow. She stifled a cough – she was getting sick again. It seemed like hardly a week passed anymore that either her, her husband, Peter, her soon to be five-year-old son Devon, or some combination of the three of them weren’t sick with something. She didn’t remember it being so when she was a kid, but childhood memories, she knew, could be unreliable.
Carefully avoiding puddles while keeping her head down and her face out of view of the mounted CCTV cameras posted behind the bank, the liquor store and other shops that made up Centennial Plaza, she came to the one she was looking for – painted pale green with the letters in yellow, the combination of which made her think of phlegm and bile. Illness colors.
She fingered the roll of bills in her pocket like a protective charm and took a deep breath, then rapped hard on the door three times. While she waited, the events of the past week replayed rapidly in her mind. How it started when Dr. Liu, her son’s pediatrician, had read in her an anguish, a need, that he had seen all too many times before. He had taken her hand gently and said quietly that he knew someone who could get her the help she needed, and gave her a card with just the name Joyce and a number on it. She thanked him and wiped her eyes before they gave away how anxious she was.
Ellen had barely gotten Devon and herself through the front door before she went out onto their back patio to place the call.
“This is Joyce,” a man’s voice answered on the second ring. Startled by this small, unexpected turn, for a split-second Ellen considered saying she had the wrong number and hanging up, but if she did, she realized, she would be back to square one. The pressing, urgent need that weighed on her day and night still unmet.
“H-hi Joyce, my name is, well actually maybe I should say that. I was given your card by Dr. Liu…”
“Yeah, I know.” He said it kindly, and that took off a little bit of the edge and awkward discomfort. “Look, you’re not alone. We all have needs, right. Things we can’t exactly get at the local big box pharmacy, yeah? I can send someone to meet you on Wednesday at two pm in the frozen food aisle of the Giant grocery store on Dresher Road. Does that work for you?”
She thought about it for a moment. Wednesday. It was her work from home day, and she had a team meeting with the rest of her human resources colleagues, but she could take a late lunch to make the appointment. “Yes. I can be there.”
“Good. Wear something red, if you don’t mind, and be careful. Also, please delete this number from your phone and destroy that card you were given too.”
Ellen did as she was told, scrubbed the number from her phone’s memory and then lit the card on fire and watched until it blackened nearly to her fingers before she dropped it on the ground, stamped it out and went back inside to start dinner. When Peter arrived around six, he leaned in planted a kiss on Ellen’s neck, just under her the edge of her cheekbone.
“I’m working on it,” she whispered, responding to the silent question in his burnt umber eyes.
In the days leading up to her rendezvous at the grocery store, she was distracted and jumpy, convinced that every half-heard whisper from behind the door of every conference room was about her and what she was doing. Her imagination twisted glances from fellow workers into scowls. But she managed to keep it together and finally the day came.
With Peter at work and Devon at school, her meetings for the day completed, she put on a red ballcap, pulled her ponytail through the opening at the back, and left for the Giant, located just fifteen minutes away. Traffic was light and the lot out front of the store was less than a third full. She parked, entered through the sliding doors and took one of the green plastic handheld baskets rather than a full-sized shopping cart, which she thought might look strange when she came to the checkout lanes with it empty or nearly so. She plucked a few items at random from the shelves – crackers, two soup cans, a cereal that no one in her household ate, and made her way casually toward the frozen foods section.
The store was nearly vacant of shoppers. She stopped where the frozen food portion of the aisle switched to dairy products and waited in front of a full section of nothing but containers of unpasteurized milk. The labels announced it as “Arkay’s Own” and judging from the quantity in which is was stocked, not even the recent recall of this brand’s products in some two dozen states had diminished consumer demand. From each of the labels, the same smiling, older, white-haired man stared out at her with pale blue eyes the same color as his ascot. The printing of the labels had made the color of his skin seem an unnatural, garish shade of orange, and she turned to face away from the milk cartons. Still, she felt the discomforting sightless gaze of all those frosty eyes on her back, watching her. Judging her actions.
At last, a tall, thin girl who looked like she could be in her mid-twenties came striding towards her. She paused next to her, opened one of the refrigerated doors, and dropped a piece of paper on the tiled floor.
“Call on Friday between ten am and two pm. Ask for Drake and say you were referred by Amanda. Amanda has a Siberian Husky. Boys are Havanese. Girls are Shih Tzus. Got it?”
“Wait, what?”
“Repeat what I just told you.”
Ellen repeated the information, first to the stranger and then several times more, silently to herself. She reached down and picked up a card much like the one Dr. Liu had given her. This one was for a nearby veterinarian’s office called Abbington Pet Health. She looked at the address and tried to connect it with the name, feeling somewhat sure that she’d passed by it before, in a small shopping center.
When Ellen looked back up from the card, to ask the other woman, she was already gone. The phrase “in the wind” came to her from some espionage movie she must have seen with Peter, and she shivered.
If the days preceding her meeting at the grocery store had been challenging, the tension only mounted over the next day and half. Even Peter noticed how she flinched with every clatter of silverware and plate, how she jumped at every shadow outside the house.
“It’ll be over soon,” he said softly, but even his best attempts at reassurance failed to loosen the stiff knots in Ellen’s back and shoulders.
Just after the stroke of ten on Friday she called the number. A woman picked up before the second ring.
“Abbington Pet Health, how can we help you today?”
“I… um, I was hoping to talk to Drake? I was referred by Amanda.”
“This is Drake. And let’s see Amanda had, what, a bearded dragon I think?”
“N-no. Amanda has a husky.”
“Ahh, right. So, maybe you can tell me what sort of a pet you have?”
“I have… a Havanese who is turning five next month…” From there, Ellen launched into the specifics of what she was seeking.
“Just got a shipment in this morning. Can you pick up tonight?”
“Yes,” Ellen exclaimed, not bothering to hide her elation.
“Six forty-five. Don’t be late. Come around to the back door – it’ll be marked APH.”
“Thank you, yes. That’s perfect. Thanks.”
There was a pause.
“There’s the matter of payment, of course.”
“Right, payment. Of course,” Ellen had forgotten about that.
The woman, Drake, stated a number that made Ellen nearly choke on the coffee she had been sipping.
“That’s… U.S. dollars?” she asked.
“Yeah. Cash only. Is that okay?”
It was considerably more than she had guessed. Almost twice as much, but she could take it out of the family savings.
“Honestly that’s… that’s a lot more than I expected.”
Drake sighed. “This batch is from Canada, and it keeps getting harder to get it across the border. Harder means more expensive too.”
“No, I understand. That’s fine. I’ll be there.”
The cost had been like a splash of cold water over Ellen, and as it soaked in, so too did the jitters and fears. Thankfully she had only the rest of the day to contend with.
Which brought her back to the present, as the door creaked open and a band of yellow light sliced with surgical precision through the dirty snow and mud. A woman with grey hair tied back in a bun wearing scrubs and a disposable mask appeared at the entrance.
“You’re here for the two-year-old shih tzu?”
“No. I’m… the Havanese turning five.”
The woman, who Ellen assumed was Drake, held out her hand for the money. Ellen hesitated suddenly. What if it didn’t work? What if it was a trick, or a trap?
“This is… I mean, you’re sure it’s okay?”
“If you thought your Havanese would be safer without it, would either of us be here?”
Ellen considered it, but only for a fleeting moment. “That’s fair. You’re right.” She handed over the wad of bills, and Drake handed her a white paper bag.
Ellen looked inside – there was a plastic bag with a disposable syringe and a small bottle of liquid. She closed the bag and tucked it into one of the deep pockets inside her jacket. She nodded, whispered a thank you, and returned to her car.
She drove home and did not open the white bag again until she parked and the garage door closed securely behind her.
She read the label on the small bottle and felt all the tension of the last several days evaporate. Exhaustion filled in the space left by anxiety. They would administer it tonight, on Devon’s bed. Ellen would distract him with stuffed animals while Peter injected him with his fifth and final dose of TDaP vaccination. Then the nightmare would be over, and she could feel like a good, responsible and law-abiding parent again. For a little while, at least. Until they had to start thinking about obtaining an MMR shot.
Joshua Ginsberg is the author of five non-fiction books on the subjects of off-beat travel, local history and haunted locations, including Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure and Haunted Orlando. His work has appeared on the Nosleep Podcast, in anthologies such as the award-winning Fumptruck, and in publications including Apex Magazine, Spooky, Crepuscular, Black Hare Press, Trembling with Fear and Flash Phantoms. He lives in Tampa with his wife, Jen, and their Shih Tzu, Tinker Bell.
Find him online:
Website: www.secrettampabay.com
Patreon: www.patreon.com/authorjoshuaginsberg
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorjoshuaginsberg/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secrettampabay/
Find him online:
Website: www.secrettampabay.com
Patreon: www.patreon.com/authorjoshuaginsberg
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorjoshuaginsberg/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secrettampabay/
