Chapter 2
The first sensation that hit Olivia was panic, but she quickly
fought that and got herself under control.
She hurried over to the bed and put a hand on the man’s shoulder,
shaking him.
“Wake up,” she urged him.
“Come on, open your eyes for me.”
The man did not move. Leaning
close to him, Olivia was relieved to find that he was breathing, although his
breathing was coming in slow, shallow gasps.
Knowing what she had to do, Olivia grabbed the phone on the night
table next to his bed and punched in 911.
When an operator answered, she hurriedly explained as best she could
what was going on. The operator
immediately dispatched an ambulance and assured Olivia that it was on its way.
Olivia stayed in the phone a few minutes longer with the operator
before finally hanging up. She turned
her attention back to the man. His
eyelids were halfway opened, but his eyes were rolled back in his head so that
only the whites were showing. A foamy
substance was squeezing out of the corners of his mouth, and the sight of him
scared her to death. What had happened
to him?
Suddenly, the man’s hands clenched into fists, and his whole body
began to convulse as he went into a seizure.
Struggling to keep calm, Olivia flung open a door leading from the man’s
room, hoping it was a bathroom. It was,
luckily, and she hurried into it to grab a washcloth to put in his mouth so
that he would not bite his tongue, something she had heard to do with someone
who was having a seizure.
But when Olivia got into the bathroom, she stopped dead in her
tracks. The bathroom looked normal
enough, except for the medicine cabinet hanging over the sink. The door to it was wide open, and the
shelves inside were in complete disorder, with a few bottles knocked every
which way. But there were only a few
inside, and the rest of the cabinet was empty.
And suddenly, Olivia knew what was wrong with him.
Forgetting about the washcloth, she raced back into the
bedroom. Luckily, the man’s seizure had
stopped already, and he was lying back on the bed in a heap, unconscious.
Olivia looked all around the room for empty medicine bottles, but
found none. Knowing there was nothing
else she could to for to help the man at that time, she hurried down the stairs
to continue searching.
One of the first places she looked was the kitchen, and that
proved to be the jackpot. There on the
counter was a wide selection of pill bottles.
Many were empty, some only half gone.
But there were so many bottles there, Olivia knew the man must have
taken many pills.
Suddenly, one of the orange prescription bottles rolled off the
counter and fell onto the floor, spilling out a few left-behind capsules. As Olivia bent to pick the bottle up, she
caught site of the label. It was for
the anti-depressant Prozac, and the name on the label read…
“Nickolas Carter?” Olivia said aloud, staring down at the small
bottle in her hand. As in THE Nick
Carter, of the Backstreet Boys? she thought incredulously. Her mouth dropped open, and she raced back upstairs
to the bedroom. Staring hard at the man
on the bed, she realized the truth. She
was looking down at Nick Carter.
He looked so much different from how he did in pictures and on
TV. His skin was deathly white, his
blonde hair matted down, his blue eyes rolled back into his head. He looked nothing like the Nick Carter she
knew of. But this was him; this was the
real Nick Carter. And he was dying.
Suddenly, Olivia heard an ambulance’s siren nearing the house, and
she hurried outside onto the front porch in time to see an ambulance pulling up
into the driveway. The siren was shut
off, as three paramedics hopped out of the vehicle. They hurried towards the porch, wheeling a
stretcher with them.
“This way,” Olivia said breathlessly, leading them into the house
and upstairs to the bedroom. “He’s
overdosed on pills,” she explained, as the paramedics immediately hovered over
the unconscious man.
“What all did he take?” one female paramedic asked Olivia.
“There’s a bunch of bottles downstairs in the kitchen that I think
he used, but I’m not sure how much of each kind he took,” she explained.
“Okay, you go get those bottles and put them in a bag for us so we
can take them to the hospital with us,” she instructed Olivia. Olivia nodded and ran back downstairs. She rooted through several drawers in the
kitchen before finally finding a box of big Ziploc bags. She pulled two bags out and dumped the pill
bottles into them.
It was only a few minutes before the paramedics were bringing Nick
downstairs on the stretcher. Olivia saw
with horror that he had stopped breathing, for one paramedic was straddling him
on the stretcher, performing CPR, while another was bagging him to get air into
his lungs. She suddenly wished she did
not have as much medical knowledge as she did, because what she did not know
would not hurt her. Unfortunately, she
knew the truth, that at this point, Nick Carter’s odds of surviving were very
slim.
***
