Free Liquid Fear by Scott Nicholson

she call an ambulance? Would she be able to punch the numbers?
    Some of the disorientation left her, the geometry of the room falling more or less into right angles. Her respiration and pulse rate were only slightly above normal.
    Anxiety attack.
    That would explain a lot, except for Chase’s behavior. He had moved with a practiced confidence. Like he’d done it before. Here.
    Could she have done the things he’d suggested?
    No. Don’t give it an inch.
    She didn’t want to think about it. She would call Anita instead of the hospital.
    First, she would fill out the form that would drop Chase Hanson from the class. His painted canvases would soon be gone from the studio, the garish Rothko imitations consigned to a dusty dorm closet until the artist needed them to impress some eager coed. Somebody else to slam bam.
    The rage helped clear her head as she opened the drawer. Lying on top of the shuffled stacks of memos were paper clips, pastel crayons, a solar-powered calculator, and a dull linoleum knife.
    And a ripped square of foil that had once housed a condom.
    Unconsciously, her thighs squeezed together. She lifted the empty wrapper and rubbed a thumb along the serrated edge.
    Not ours. Please let it not be ours.
    Behind it, in the shadows of the drawer, was a plastic pill bottle.
    Burnt orange, for prescription medicine.
    The label bore script as if from a pharmacy but contained no drug store or medical logo. The bold text in the center of the label wasn’t the sort prescribed by a physician: “W. Leng. Take one every 4 hrs. or else.”
    Glancing at the open door, she twisted the cap free. The pills resembled tiny green breath mints. She poured them on the desk. One rolled past the telephone and arced to the floor, where it bounced off the dirty tiles. Wendy retrieved it and then counted them.
    Eight. The bottle was large enough to contain at least fifty of the green pills.
    And they looked disturbingly familiar.
    Oh my God. How many of these have I taken?
    She nudged the pills onto a sheet of paper, funneled them back into the vial, and tucked the container in her pocket. Chase Hanson’s paperwork could wait. Right now, she wanted a look at Anita’s Halcyon prescription, because she had a feeling those pills were also green.
    Every four hours.
    Wendy wondered when she’d last taken her prescribed dose, and what would happen when she failed to take the next.

CHAPTER TEN
     
    Roland reached the West Virginia mountains in early afternoon.
    Whatever the pill was, it hadn’t impaired his driving. In fact, it had helped clear his head, and Cincinnati seemed years away. Sure, it had been crazy taking the pill, but the orange bottle seemed like the only reliable and honest thing in his life.
    The radio offered no reports of a murderer on the loose, but he had no way to tell whether the body had been discovered or simply that murder was no longer major news.
    Despite the rental-car receipts being made out to “David Underwood,” Roland veered off the interstate in Kentucky and stuck to the back roads, crossing the Big Coal River and entering the mountains. His brother, Steve, a dentist in Fort Lauderdale, kept a log cabin there as a summer getaway and had shared a key with Roland.
    “We all need to hide out now and then,” Steve had said, flashing a six-figure smile. Roland figured Steve was talking about entertaining mistresses and fishing for trout, not evading capture for murder.
    But it wasn’t murder , he reasoned, as he eased past a goat farm on the outskirts of Logan, heading up the gravel road that led into a dark hollow of the type praised in old Appalachian folk ballads.
    Or, it may have been murder, but it wasn’t mine.
    He thought of all the cop shows he’d seen. Most of them were built on the simple words “It wasn’t me.” If you believed the fairy tales, nobody ever did it, especially the good guy.
    And despite a blackout, despite blood on his hands, despite a pile of evidence that would make any