#willablues

The fluorescent lights were insufferable. Her boots squeaked on the grimy tiles all the way back to the pharmacy. She paused to see if she could see Livy, but there was no sign of her.  

Kelly opened the door at her knock and mumbled quickly, “Keep your head down,” which was enough to get a sudden assessment of whatever was going on behind the counter.  

Lyn set her stuff on the counter, acknowledging Caleb and Rich with half-hearted congeniality. She adjusted her bow, taking extra care before she faced Hunter. 

He was standing in the back with the phone pinned against his shoulder, counting metformin- or at least trying to but instead just sort of waving the spatula around with the inflection of what he was saying- stretching the cord out halfway across the filling counter.  

He had the voice, the detached, empty sort of voice Hunter got when his temper was particularly volatile, and she was quite sure whoever he was talking to would at least need to hesitate before getting the courage to ever call a Willablues again.  

She stepped over to the stack of leaflets on the counter and silently went to start filling, startling when Hunter’s spatula slapped audibly against the back of her hand. She looked over in vexed shock, rubbing at the spot where it struck, although it didn’t hurt more than surprise her. 

Hunter didn’t look at her, instead tapping the tip of the spatula against a different stack of leaflets. 

She reached for the top one tentatively, almost afraid she’d get hit again, but he let her take it. She made a frustrated noise deep enough in her throat that he wouldn’t hear it and went to get the Warfarin requested on the bottom corner.  

Caleb noticed the exchange and smiled sadly in solidarity as she brushed past him. She shrugged.  

Kelly’s advice proved the best of the evening. Keep your head down, Lyn repeated to herself over and over again. Hunter’s ever-present aura had gone toxic, filling up the whole store with some Agent Orange Adjacent feeling that couldn’t be escaped.  

Keep your head down. 

Lyn didn’t ask for help. She didn’t try to make small talk. She didn’t let a lull in customers giver the opportunity to fuck around with Kelly. For the most part, if she had questions, she would bug Caleb and Rich, and they were all the happier to answer, sans the time Hunter had gotten to her first and yanked the card from her hand to get it in the system before she’d even finished her sentence. It made her stomach hurt. 

She was halfway through emptying Rich’s bins of verified and bagged prescriptions when a man came up to the register. “Give me just a sec,” she murmured absently, finishing sorting the bags into their assigned bins the exact way Hunter did it and no one else. When she finally finished, she nodded satisfactorily and turned back to the register. 

“Hey! How can I-“ Lyn looked up from the keyboard and into the barrel of a gun. “Oh God.” 

It was concealed inside his jacket, so no one could see it but her. The man didn’t give his name but smiled congenially, as if he wasn’t actively threatening to blow her brain out. “Hi. I’m here to pick up some oxycodone.” 

“Right,” she mumbled, oxygen to her head cutting out suddenly and every bit of it expelled from her lungs. “I’m… I’m just an intern. Let me… let me get someone who can help you.” 

She took a shaky step back, horrified that she might trip over her own feet.  

“Stay where I can see you,” he amended, smiling still.  

 “Right,” She looked to the back desperately, hoping that someone might notice the shakiness in her voice. She didn’t even know what to do in this sort of thing. It was like her brain had shut off entirely and the only solution she could come up with was the one she wanted the least. 

“Hunter…?” 

She couldn’t see him from where he stood, back at the filling counter, but he didn’t answer.  

“Hunter,” she tried again, just a bit louder. “Hunter.” 

Rich looked up but seemed to acknowledge that it was Hunter’s attention she wanted and called his name another time for her.  

“HUNTER!” Lyn gasped.  

“FUCK!” Hunter threw his spatula to the counter with a loud clatter. “What, Lyn? What the fuck do you need?” 

“Come here please,” she mumbled.  

Hunter came to her, rubbing his face beneath his glasses in exasperation. “What?” 

“I’m sorry,” she murmured earnestly.  

He must’ve noticed the distress in her demeanor because the annoyance shifted to something else negative but unreadable. He looked toward the patient, eyes getting helplessly wide at the weapon now pointed right at him.  

“Oh,” he mumbled dumbly. There was a moment as he looked around, clearly thinking of some solution.  

“Lyn, get behind me,” he said finally.  

It happened naturally. She stepped back at the same moment he stepped around her so they could properly switch places.  

“What do you want?” Hunter asked levelly.  

“Oxycodone.” 

“Yeah. Okay. Lyn, there’s some on the shelves over by the file drawers. On the other side of the sink. Do you know where I mean?” 

Lyn looked where he directed, to the place that Oxycodone very much was not. “Yeah,” she said softly.  

“It’s in the safe, isn’t it?” asked the man. “It will take a minute to fill, won’t it?” 

Hunter nodded quickly, understanding the significance. “Rich already got it out. I just filled some. It’s on the counter.” 

“Should I get it?” 

“Yes. It’s just where I told you. Other side of the sink.” 

Lyn was trembling. She walked carefully, so she didn’t positively faint, and she didn’t think, so the positively didn’t cry. There was no Oxycodone by the sink. There had never been Oxycodone by the sink. When she looked over to the filling counter, she could see a bottle of Oxycodone that was out.  

Regardless, Hunter had been too insistent in his instructions, especially wrong instructions, to ignore them. Clearly, he knew something that she didn’t.  

She climbed over a warfarin bucket and pushed some cardboard boxes out of the way to look around the cabinet by the sink, exactly as Hunter had said. At first, she couldn’t see anything. The only thing they kept back there was the boxes of files required by the DEA. She never had any reason to go over there or to touch any of it; hardly anyone did, not even Missy. 

Still, she looked for what he might be talking about. She didn’t dare risk a glance back at him, although she wasn’t sure if that was because it would harm her courage or his.  

She didn’t find anything, and in a last-ditch effort to not get shot, she groped blindly along the edge of the cabinet until she caught something. 

Oh! Oh! There was something there. A little metal circle, and right in the middle of it, a smaller, quarter-sized plastic circle. A button. 

She pressed it. 

Nothing happened immediately. There were no sirens that went off or red lights flashing, like she thought might happen.  

Hunter, who had been babbling nervously, paused only a second, then continued on. Caleb, turned from the window to look at her, then looked back over his shoulder at the man at the counter, and immediately hit the monitor off. 

Rich’s computer- the one she could see from her place behind the shelves and unfortunately, the slowest and most lag-prone computer in the pharmacy- finally reacted. A red ribbon danced along the top of the screen, and everything locked suddenly to a sad gray screen with a warning she couldn’t read presented upon it. 

And right above it, was a five-minute countdown that had only made it to 4:53. 

She climbed out of the storage pile, walking deliberately to the filling counter and looked where the Oxycodone was meant to be. It was better to give it up than get shot, her teachers had said. Give them what they want. She checked the bottles on the counter. The Adderall was out, and some pentobarbital, but no Oxycodone. She swallowed thickly. 

“I can’t find it,” Lyn called to Hunter. “Are you sure you didn’t use the whole bottle?” 

She kept her voice as level as she could and going over to him. It was bad enough that she’d gotten him right there stalling at gunpoint, she wasn’t going to make him suffer it alone. 

The countdown on Hunter’s computer was at 4:17. 

“You’re right,” he nodded again. “The bottle was almost out, wasn’t it? I did use the rest of it. What would I do without you? Rich, can you get me some Percocet 10’s from the safe?” 

“Oxycodone,” the gunman interrupted. 

“Same thing,” Hunter mumbled absently. 

3:38. 

“Yeah,” Rich said, not really moving. He just stood there.  

Kelly came up from the back. She peered around Rich, the same white shade that Lyn was sure she herself was. Her hands were shaking, and she looked desperately like she wanted to say something, but nothing came out.  

She startled Rich, when he realized she was there, and shocked him back into moving, quickly getting to the safe and punching in the code. The noise of the keypad was deafening in the eerie stillness of everyone present. 

2:57. 

“The safe won’t open for five minutes,” Rich said. 

Hunter relayed this. 

“I’ll wait,” said the gunman. 

The drive through chime chirped angrily. Caleb reached for the phone slowly, resting it back on the cradle, like that would help them somehow.  

2:26. 

“What does that mean?” Lyn wanted to ask. “Two minutes, twenty seconds until what?” Instead, she did whatever she could not to breathe. She was pretty sure she knew anyway. Or at least hoped. Let it be two minutes until the cops show up. 

The next minute was the longest minute of her life. Her arms ached from where she held them, too afraid to rest them at her sides and draw attention back onto her. 

The chime went off again and again, seemingly getting more and more impatient, the way it does when a big truck rests on the sensor. With each one, it seemed to get deeper and more macabre, like haunted some prelude to dies irae.  

A woman came up to the counter just behind the gunman. It was clear she hadn’t noticed what was happening, trying to get a show to work for her sticky toddler.  

“Fuck,” Hunter mumbled.  

“Ma’am,” Lyn dared. “We’re about to go on break. We can’t help you right now, you’ll have to come back.” 

She looked up, shoulders huffing in exasperation. “What?! Your lunch is at 1:30! I checked the website.” 

“We have some extenuating circumstances,” Caleb offered.  

The countdown was at 0:59.  

“Ma’am,” Hunter persisted. “You really want to come back later.” 

She groaned in frustration, spitting back an “Okay, fine,” before taking her son by the hand and heading back through the store.  

0:43.  

Lyn was just behind Hunter, so the gunman couldn’t really see her, but knew where she was. She used the blind spot to get Kelly’s attention, glancing deliberately at the countdown to get across her question.  

Kelly held the answer up on her fingers.  

911 

0:28.  

Lyn could hear sirens. The wailing was getting closer and louder with every second, and Hunter twitched impatiently.  

They were so close. No one had been shot, nothing had been handed over the counter, if they could just... 

The gunman could hear the sirens too. He looked away for just a minute, and back toward the front doors of the stores and the wall of windows lit up with flashing blue and red. 

Hunter moved before anyone. He shifted to grab Lyn by the shoulders, daring to turn his back on the shooter long enough to throw her to the ground.  

In a matter of milliseconds, the gunman whipped back around, pulling the gun from the confines of his shirt and firing it off against where the pair had been standing just seconds before.  

Lyn’s head hit the floor and bounced, so hard her sight flashed white with pain. Hunter’s whole hulking frame landed right on top of her and knocked every bit of air from her chest so she couldn’t so much as scream. Kelly screamed instead and leapt beneath the counter and Caleb dropped to his knees.  

The bullet ricocheted off the bins and burrowed into the wood of the cabinet just next to the till. Plastic shattered at the impact and went flying off in shards. The prescription at the front of the bin was cracked and little white pills came spilling from the torn bag and clattered silently against the floor.  

Lyn closed her eyes as tight as she could, tears finally making it to her, and tried to remember to breathe, overly aware of every inch of Hunter’s shaking body holding her down.  

There was screaming, and fighting, and more roaring sirens, and an overall ridiculous amount of noise that Lyn could barely hear through her pounding pulse. The cops had gotten in, it seemed, and things were getting sorted, and she was going to leave that up to them.  

Hunter lifted his head from her stomach, elbows braced on either side of her hips so his hands could link behind his neck. He asked, “Are you okay?” but the chaos stole the sound. 

“I’m scared,” Lyn whispered.  

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.” 

Lyn blinked heavily. Her head lolled to the side exhaustedly and rested against Hunter’s warm shoulder. 

He tipped his head against hers.  

She crossed her ankles and watched her feet swing over the asphalt, disappear under the ambulance, and come back again. The pattern was good; easy to watch and low energy.  

The EMTs said she had a concussion. She really wasn’t prepared to get body-slammed, and her head had taken most of the fall. Hunter, thank God, hadn’t seemed to torn up about it. Surely, he recognized a concussion was better than a gunshot wound. 

He was okay, for the most part. The EMT had joked that Lyn had been a good landing. 

Kelly and Caleb and Rich were in different ambulance bays, so she didn’t know what was happening with them. They had tried to take Hunter with them but something, whether it was her doing or his, had convinced them to keep them together, and she was immensely glad of it. 

Hunter was a jerk, nine times out of ten, but it could be counted on. He was constant. Consistent. Stable. The world was spinning around her, and she could grab Hunter and find some sort of balance.  

“Don’t go to sleep,” he whispered. “’s bad for your head.” 

“That’s a myth,” she mumbled back. “’s fine.” 

“I don’t think so.” 

“It is. I write about concussions all the time; I would know this.” 

“Okay.” 

He must’ve been tired, not to keep arguing that he was right. Instead, he muttered, “I should go check on Kelly.” 

Part of Lyn wanted desperately to protest, afraid that without him to lean on, she’d fall right out of the ambulance and face-down on the road, but the other piece of her knew he would never be satisfied until he had talked to Kelly, and probably Caleb while he was at it, and the two of them deserved a little bit of Hunter’s composure too. 

She sighed and lifted her head. “Please come back.” 

“I will.” 

He wadded up the shock blanket at he pushed himself to his feet and it slipped from his shoulders and set it next to her. He patted it awkwardly, then her leg, forcing a meant-to-seem reassuring smile. She returned it weakly. 

Hunter may have been gone for minutes, or hours, or just seconds, and she would never be sure. She swung her ankles and hummed to herself and tried very hard not to think about the way her hands shook at the sight of a gun. 

“Dylan!” 

She blinked slowly again, trying to find the caller. She knew who it was, would know the voice in death especially paired with her full name, and leaned forward a little to find her. 

“Mom!”  

Her mother took hold of her, pulling her face into her chest and holding it there like it would protect her from everything, sobbing all the while about “How worried she’d been!” and “Thank heavens, you’re alive!” and “You’re never going back!” among other things. Lyn nodded softly, nearly falling asleep against the softness of her shirt and the familiarity of the smell. She felt very much like a small child again and wanted someone to carry her to bed.  

“Are you okay?” Her dad asked, somehow appearing behind her mom, and all Lyn could think of for a moment was how different the question looked on his mouth than it had on Hunter’s. 

Eventually, she realized it was a question and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. ‘m sleepy.” 

“I just can’t believe... of all the pharmacies in the world!”  

“I think I need to talk to the police,” Lyn said, the thought having just occurred to her because she couldn’t follow her mother’s train of thought. “They’re gonna interrogate me, right?” 

“No, you’re not the criminal,” Her dad corrected. “You’ll have to give a statement. I’ll ask about it.” 

“Okay,” she agreed, not comprehending what it meant, except that she didn’t need to worry about it anymore. 

“What did the EMTs say? What’s hurt? What have you taken?” 

“Concussion,” she echoed absently. “Tylenol. No NSAIDs.” 

“Concussion! How did you get a concussion?! Did he hit you?!” 

“Hunter did it,” she said simply. 

“What?!” 

Lyn didn’t recognize what was wrong until she realized the context- or lack thereof- of the statement. She relayed what happened, in very short, very simple sentences.  

“I told you he was a good friend,” she concluded after a minute, even though her mother had never doubted the fact. It felt nice to confirm it aloud anyway. 

She blinked some more, all sluggish and robotic, until finally she opened her eyes, and Hunter was back. 

“Hi!” 

“Hey,” he muttered, smoothing back her hair. “How’s it going?” 

She shrugged. “Basic day in the shitshow. At least I didn’t have to put Select Health on something.” 

He smiled despite himself.  

“Mom, this is... this is Hunter.” 

“Oh!” She cried, instantly grabbing him and nearly crushing him in a hug. “Oh, thank you!” 

He looked at Lyn, eyes all wide with panic, and she giggled that he was more expressive about that than the actual firearm.  

“I really can’t thank you enough. If something had happened to her! Oh, I can’t even think about it.” 

“She’s a little bruised up,” he admitted sheepishly. “I, uh, didn’t think that one through completely.” 

“’s okay,” Lyn mumbled. “I’m okay.” 

“They said you can go home. I’ll throw you a bone and let you leave early.” 

She giggled again- that was the only way to explain the strange, giddy sound that came from her mouth. “What about... everybody else? Who’s gonna finish deletes?” 

“We’re closing the pharmacy for the rest of the day. Everybody’s going home. But I’ll leave the deletes out until you can come back and finish them.” It was clear that he was teasing, but she found comfort in it anyway. 

“Okay.”  

Kelly, accompanied by her parents, was getting into a car. Caleb’s wife came running through the parking lot for him. No one came for Hunter. 

“What are you gonna do? Is your sister coming?” 

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, my sister’s coming.” 

“I can’t tell if you're lying.” 

He chuckled. “I’ll be fine, Lyn.” 

She frowned; eyebrows knit together. “My head hurts really bad, which is the only reason I don’t argue with you about it. Just promise me you won’t drive home.” 

“I won’t. Promise,” He mumbled earnestly. 

She examined his face for any trace of a lie, finally reaching over to pat his cheek in confirmation. “Okay. Be safe.” 

Lyn jumped from the ambulance bay and started walking, somewhat shakily toward her father, who was deep in conversation with an officer. She still had to give her statement, which must’ve been why she ended up standing there a good deal longer.  

Hunter watched for just a minute, finally ducking out between ambulances to where his car was still sitting. It was cold when he got in, even though it wasn’t that cold at all, and it sounded strange when he turned it on. His hand rested against the gearshift, as if he was ready to shift it to Drive, but he couldn’t seem to bring himself to do it. 

He promised. 

The phone was heavy in his hand, and his head was heavy in exhaustion. He leaned his head against the steering wheel and called. 

“Hunter...? 

“Hey, yeah, it’s me. I’m... can you...” he sighed. “I’m at Willablues. Can you come get me?” 

“Yeah... did something happen? Are you okay?” 

“There was... an incident. I’m not clear to drive.” 

“Yeah, I’ll come. You sure you’re okay?”