'What is this about Ma'am?'
'I need him to call in a prescription for the morning after pill to my local pharmacy.'
'Oh. Well, that shouldn't be a problem. Is there a reason why?
'
'Okay, Dora. Give me a minute please.' Dora found herself on hold for a couple of minutes before the nurse came back on and said, 'Dora, are you still using the Medi-cap on Fourth Street?'
'Yes, that would be fine.' only after she answered did the woman realize what the receptionist had really been asking was, 'Do you want me to have the prescription sent somewhere they do not know you?'
'Doctor Edmundson will call in the prescription now; it should be waiting for you at the pharmacy when you get there. He would like to see you and discuss an alternative form of birth control if you think this might be an ongoing problem.'
'What? Oh, no…well, maybe. I will think about my options and set something up later.' Dora said, though she had no such intentions.
Saying her goodbye, Dora moved downstairs and into the kitchen to start the coffee. She made a point of not turning on the news; she'd had enough of that miserable stuff last night. Puttering about she started some toast and took out a couple of brown organic eggs, which, according to the package, had been laid by happy free- range chickens.
'I wonder how happy they are to have their eggs stolen?' she said aloud.
The silence was getting to her, as it usually did, buckling in on her determination not to watch television she was reaching for the remote and ended up dropping an egg onto the tile floor.
'Dammit!' She set the remote down and cleaned up one of the happy chicken's eggs before turning back to her breakfast. Any thoughts of turning on the television were erased in her haste to finish preparing her eggs, coffee and toast. After she cleaned up, she got dressed, grabbed her purse and headed into the garage, where her burnt orange Mazda 7 awaited.
Sliding behind the seat she hit the garage door button, then turned the car over and started to back out of her driveway. When she hit the street she clicked the door shut and was momentarily startle by a loud buzzing siren. The tornado alarms when going off. The woman looked around suspiciously; nope, not a cloud in the sky. Dora figured they must be testing the system. Shrugging she headed for the pharmacy a few miles away, singing along to Lady Gaga's latest; that singer only got better as she got older, in Dora's opinion. As she drove out of her gated community, she did not notice the gray suited man crouched in the doorway of the first house inside the community's borders. The man, now walking with nary a shuffle to his steps, watched the woman drive away with a hungry look in his eyes.
The first indication the woman had that something was seriously wrong was when she approached a traffic signal, it was blinking red in all directions and there was no traffic from any other direction, very unusual for this intersection at this time of day. Shrugging the woman drove on through to the next intersection, thinking it was going to be a long drive if she had to stop at every corner.
She managed to get up to forty five miles per hour when she saw the police officer pull out behind her. As she saw his lights turn on she was distracted by what was going on in behind of her and she did not see the lady in rumpled clothing rushing off the slight incline with a tire rim. The woman did not see the rim thrown into the air and did not see it smash into her windshield. Turning her gaze back to the front of the car once she heard the impact Dora could not see out of her window. The windshield was bowed inwards, and she immediately swerved sideways and hit the steep curb at forty miles per hour. She didn't see the fence she blew through at thirty three and finally she also did not see the one hundred and twenty one year old oak tree that her car smashed into at twenty seven miles an hour, though she did hear it.
The air bag deployed, her life was saved, yet she still impacted with enough force to convince the police men following her that she was beyond saving. The police car stopped, a male and a female officer sprang out of the side doors, drew their firearms and shot the bag lady four times, the male officer approached the bag lady's still twitching form and fired once into her head. Both officers, looking grim, started to approach the crashed Mazda. Before they got there, their radios went wild with calls, demanding them to come quickly, there were officers down. They simultaneously headed back to their patrol car, hardly casting a guilty glance towards the Mazda as they did so.
Chapter 2
The woman was not dead; far from it she was barely injured at all. Her nose had been bloodied by the deployment of the air bag, her neck had suffered bruised ligaments, tendons and muscles, more commonly known as whiplash and she had been stunned briefly into unconsciousness.
When she came around Dora was groggy and scared, her nose had bled an awful lot and her neck hurt horribly. Looking out of her broken side window she saw the bag lady's body in the middle of the street. The woman mistakenly thought she had only been out a few seconds, she also thought she may have run the bag lady over before hitting the tree.
Guilt overwhelmed her and she reached for her door handled to go and see if the other woman was okay. The door was stuck and would not open. She looked around for her cell phone and, finding it on the floor of the passenger side, barely within reach, she put a call into the police. It rang twelve times before a dispatcher answered. She told him she had an accident and she thought maybe she had run over a bag lady. The dispatcher told her to go home, get indoors and not to go out again.
Dora was confused, 'You don't understand, I ran someone over, I can't get out of my car and they are just lying in the street, you have to send someone to help, there is blood all over my car!'
'Are you injured?'
'I think so, I can move, I just can't get my door open. The window is broken out.'
'Can you start your car?'
'What? Ugh, let me try.' The engine would not turn over, 'No it won't start.'
'You need to get to a safe place, your home if you can reach it, can you make it home?'
'I don't understand! I had an accident. I might have killed a lady! And you are telling me to go home? Don't I have to wait for the police?'
'Lady,' a voice sighed on the other end of the line, 'Look lady, you heard about the curfew right? You are not supposed to be out; you were supposed to stay in your house. I am telling you, no ordering you, to go home and barricade the doors. Leave the bag lady in the street or sidewalk, do not approach her. Do not wait for the police to arrive, do not stop until you get home and above all do not talk to anyone who looks odd on your way back home.'
The woman realized something more was wrong here than she had thought, 'Curfew? No…I…' her voice lowered to a mere whisper, 'Is it…is it the terrorists? Are they here in Kansas City too? Like Denver?'
The exasperated man on the other end of the line said, 'Yeah, yeah, it is lady, they are running around Kansas City now, okay? They have a drug that make people all crazy, like maniacs you've got to stay away from other people, get home and don't answer the door! Can you do that? Tell me who you are and where you live, if we can send an officer around to check on you later we will. Okay?'
Dora gave her name and address to the dispatcher, who seemed please to get off the line with her. After hanging up she looked out the smashed window of her side door. It was covered in small pieces of broken glass. More blood dripped from her nose as she tried to force her door open. Her head felt like hell, she was getting frantic trying to force the door and no one was coming to help her!
She looked across the width of the car to the other door, it seemed like it was an insurmountable distance away. Dora leaned over and tried to reach the inside door handle. A dull pain shot through her neck. She took her hand off of her face and used it to support her neck and continued to try and open her passenger side door. Eventually she just lay down over the seat, then looked up and pitifully clawed at the door with one hand. It
