He was thankful he didn’t have to see it happen, but hearing the noises was bad enough - Nick’s gasps of pain, mixed with Dani’s moans of pleasure, didn’t leave much to the imagination. It brought Brian back to the previous day, when his own body had been abused by Dr. Elizabeth. Somehow, having to lie there and listen to it happening to his little brother was even worse.
He knew it wasn’t his fault, but he still felt guilty for not being able to warn Nick or protect him from suffering a similar fate. Brian hated being so helpless. It was dehumanizing, having to depend on the depraved people who had hurt both Nick and him for his every basic need. He felt a bit like Pinocchio, but in reverse: a real boy who had been turned into a mere puppet, unable to speak or move any part of his body unless it was being manipulated by someone else. The longer he remained imprisoned inside his paralyzed body, the less human he felt.
When he heard Nick flatline, a frightening thought passed through Brian’s head: If he dies, I don’t want to live. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t imagine a world without Nick in it. It was that he dreaded being left alone in the living Hell his world had become. Please, Frack, he begged, as his eyes flooded with tears. Please don’t leave me like this! I need you!
The tears leaked out from under his eyelids and down down his face as he remembered the promise he had heard Nick make to him not half an hour earlier: “I’m gonna get us both out of here. I’m not sure how yet, but I’ll think of some way to get help. Just hang on, okay?”
No, you hang on! Brian urged him. You have to fight for your life now, Nick! Don’t let them take it from you!
He didn’t understand it. Dani and Dr. Elizabeth had each given Nick drugs to stop his heart, but they were both now trying to get it beating again. He could hear Nick’s bed creaking as they did chest compressions, the Ambu bag deflating every few seconds as they forced air down his throat, the drawers of the crash cart opening and closing as they administered more and more medication. Why? he wondered. Why would they want to bring Nick back after what they had done? Were they trying to play God, trying to prove they could control whether a person lived or died? Or was the point just to torture him?
“Tenth vial’s in,” he heard Dani say, after what felt like forever. “I’ll take over compressions now. You’ve gotta be getting tired.”
“Have at it,” replied Elizabeth. The rhythm of the bed rails rattling was briefly interrupted when they traded places. Then the bed began to creak again, as Dani went back to pushing on Nick’s chest.
Brian’s own heart was pumping even faster than her hands were forcing Nick’s to. He wondered how many minutes they would wait to see if the medication worked. If Nick’s heart didn’t start beating on its own again soon, how long would they keep going before they decided to give up on him?
Perhaps it was Brian’s high heart rate that prompted Elizabeth to approach his bedside. His stomach clenched when he heard her familiar footsteps coming closer, his anxiety increasing tenfold with each click of her heels on the tiled floor.
“You’re a little tachy over here, Mr. Littrell,” she remarked, tugging down the top of his gown so she could listen to his heart with her stethoscope. He wanted to cringe when the cold metal touched his bare chest, but of course, he couldn’t move. Goosebumps erupted on his skin, every hair standing on end. He was tormented by memories of her mounting him, laying her head on his chest, and licking his scar. The thought of her slimy tongue tracing the thin line of tissue left over from his long-since-healed incision made him feel like throwing up again. “Have you been listening to what’s happening to Mr. Carter?”
Of course I have, you freak! Brian wanted to yell at her. I’ve heard everything! But he realized she already knew that. She knew full well he wasn’t brain dead. She hadn’t even bothered to run any real tests on him - whatever results she had pretended to go over with Nick were as fake as the rest of it. Up until today, everything she had told him was a lie.
Elizabeth didn’t seem to be worried about the fact that Brian had heard both her lies and the truth. To him, this meant one of two things: either she didn’t believe he would ever be able to tell anyone about what he had witnessed, or she wasn’t planning to let him live long enough to try.
“Ah… I can see you’re crying,” she said, wiping his tears away with her fingertips. “I can’t say I blame you. Nick’s been clinically dead for almost twenty minutes now. We may not be able to get him back this time.”
Brian’s stomach dropped. No! Please, no, he prayed.
“Would you like to watch the action?” Elizabeth asked, prying open his eyes. As they adjusted to the light, her face came into focus, smiling sadistically as she hovered over him. “Here… let me help you.” Leaving his eyelids raised, she rolled him onto his right side so that he could see across to Nick’s bed. That was when he realized they didn’t just want to torture Nick. They were trying to torture him, too.
The sight of Dani bent over Nick’s lifeless body in nothing but her bra and underwear disgusted Brian. He had never seen such an outwardly beautiful woman with so ugly a soul - if she even had a soul at all. Brian was beginning to doubt that she did.
One thing had become obviously clear to him: he and Nick were not the sick ones - the two women were. He hoped they both burned in Hell for what they had done.
***
While Nick was on the brink of death, his loved ones sat down with the detective who was leading the investigation into his disappearance.
Having ruled them out as potential suspects early on, Detective Overton had promised to keep the other Boys and both wives informed on any new developments in the case. When she called to see if she could come out to the condo that day to talk to them, Howie’s mind immediately jumped to the worst possible reason why.
“Please, just tell me… are they dead? Did you find a body?” he asked, his voice shaking over the phone.
“No,” Detective Overton replied so firmly, he was forced to believe her. “Don’t worry - it’s nothing like that. If anything, it’s good news. We have another lead I’d like to share with you before it gets out to the public.”
“Oh, thank God,” sighed Howie, sagging with relief. “Yes, please, come on over any time. We’ll be here.”
When the detective arrived, the adults all gathered around the dining room table again. Poor Baylee had been forbidden to come downstairs until Detective Overton was gone. “I’ll decide what to share with my son after she leaves,” declared Leighanne, who was obviously still worried about one of them bringing up the topic of fetish pornography in front of her teenager.
“As if he’s not up there listening from the landing right now,” AJ muttered in an undertone as he sat down next to Howie. He rolled his eyes, and Howie smirked, deciding AJ was probably right about Baylee eavesdropping. He would have done the same thing if it had been his dad who was missing.
“So what’s this lead you wanted to tell us about?” Kevin asked, getting down to business right away.
Detective Overton cleared her throat and opened her computer. “We’ve identified the couple from the bar,” she began, showing them a pair of side-by-side photos. At first glance, they appeared to be mug shots, but the fact that the man and woman in them were both smiling suggested they may have been driver’s license photos instead. Looking more closely at the faces, Howie recognized the blonde woman as both “Becky” and “Sarah” from the videos they had watched on the medical fetish site. As for the man…
“Frat Boy Chad!” AJ cried triumphantly, pointing a finger at his photo.
The detective nodded. “We’ve compared them with the actors on the Arresting Beauties website, and they do appear to be the same people. Plus, now we know their real names. Meet Dr. Robin Henault and his wife, Danielle.”
“Danielle?” repeated Leighanne. “Not Danica?”
“It seems she uses Danica as her stage name,” said Detective Overton. “The last name, Logan, was her maiden name before she married and took her husband’s name.”
“Wait… you said ‘doctor.’” AJ’s brow was furrowed. “You telling us Frat Boy Chad’s a fucking doctor? For real??”
“For real,” she replied, her lips curving into a grim smile. “Or, at least, he used to be. He lost his medical license five years ago.”
“Why?” asked Lauren suspiciously.
“Good question,” said the detective. “He was fired from a hospital in Miami after the nurses working in his ward noticed an unusually high number of complications and deaths among his patients. He was never formally charged with a crime, but the state medical board revoked his license for gross negligence.”
Kevin frowned. “Was he killing patients on purpose?”
“Not that anyone has been able to prove,” replied Detective Overton delicately. Howie could tell by her tone that she suspected he had been doing just that. “His wife, Danielle, was employed as a nurse at the same hospital. She resigned from her position after her husband’s dismissal, and they moved to Key West, where she got another nursing job at Lower Keys Medical Center.”
Leighanne gasped. “So she does work there?”
“She did. Not anymore. She was let go in September for allegedly stealing supplies from the hospital.”
“For her little video shoots, probably,” said AJ, and Detective Overton nodded.
“Most likely. My team of investigators was able to trace the Arresting Beauties site to Mr. Henault through a credit card in his name that was used to renew the domain registration. As they were digging deeper into the website, they also found videos appearing to feature several missing women from this area.”
Howie drew in a sharp breath and heard everyone around him do the same. “I saw a story on the news about a missing woman the night Brian disappeared. Do you mean her?”
Detective Overton nodded. “Stephanie Gale is the most recent one, but there have been a string of others over the past year or so. Most of them were reasonably attractive young women on the outskirts of society - drug addicts, prostitutes, illegal immigrants - in other words, the kind of people who either wouldn’t be missed or whose families might be afraid to contact the police,” she explained. “Nick and Brian are much more high profile and male, which doesn’t seem to fit their M.O. But based on the footage from the bar, Robin and Danielle Henault may have been the last two people to see Nick that night, which makes them persons of interest in his disappearance, as well as the others. We’ve secured a warrant to search the Henaults’ home and bring them both in for questioning. My officers are on their way over to their house as we speak.”
Howie sat up a little straighter. “Do you think Nick and Brian are there?” he asked hopefully.
“It’s possible,” the detective replied, although she didn’t sound nearly as optimistic. “Even if we don’t find them there, we may find evidence that will lead us to them.”
“When will we know what they found?” Kevin wondered.
“One of the officers will call me with an update once they have the suspects in custody,” said Detective Overton. “Until then, we just have to wait.”
***
As Dani worked to resuscitate Nick, she thought about Rob.
She had met her husband during a code at the hospital in Miami where they had both worked before moving to Key West. It was the first week of Rob’s internship in emergency medicine. Dani, just twenty-two, was fresh out of college and still learning the ropes herself, having been employed as an ER nurse for only a month. When the elderly patient she was caring for suddenly crashed, the dashing Dr. Henault had been the first to respond. They worked together to administer CPR while they waited for a more experienced physician to come in and intubate the woman. Watching Rob perform deep chest compressions, his biceps bulging through the sleeves of his scrub top as his big hands pushed down forcefully on the patient’s frail chest, Dani was instantly attracted to him. She wondered what it would be like to feel those hands between her breasts, pumping her own chest.
It was a fantasy she kept to herself until they had been dating exclusively for a few months. When she finally confessed what turned her on, Rob was willing and eager to roleplay with her. He loved to be her rescuer, ripping off her shirt to massage her heart, breathing the life back into her through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. They would have sex afterwards, and often, she would return the favor with a blow job.
Soon they began filming these roleplay sessions. At first, the videos were just for their own personal pleasure, but eventually, Dani convinced Rob to start posting them online for the rest of the resus community to enjoy. That was how their website, Arresting Beauties, came to be created.
It was an amateur, low-budget affair until after they had married and moved to Key West, where Dani met Elizabeth while working in the Cardiac Cath Lab at Lower Keys Medical Center. The two women initially bonded over a shared love of the Backstreet Boys, but later learned they had even more in common. As it turned out, Elizabeth had a bit of a medical fetish herself, and when she joined Arresting Beauties, their production value increased dramatically. Elizabeth had inherited a funeral home and a large sum of money after her father passed away, and she invested some of it into transforming part of the defunct funeral parlor into a realistic-looking hospital set for them to film in. They brought her tech-savvy brother, Patrick, on board to produce the videos and maintain the website. Before long, business was booming - for an independent adult entertainment company catering to a small corner of the internet, at least.
The next challenge they faced was creating enough new content to keep their clients coming back for more. At first, Dani, Rob, and Elizabeth had starred in all the videos themselves, rotating the roles of doctor, nurse, and patient. But as the website grew, they began to branch out, hiring different actresses to play the parts. Dani was never fully satisfied with their performances, though - the resuscitation scenes simply didn’t look realistic enough when they had to fake most of the procedures, so as not to hurt any of their actresses. It would be so much better if they could do it for real.
Yes, thought Dani, glancing at Nick’s ashen face as she gave him CPR, it’s definitely more exciting when it’s real. Like Rob, she relished the adrenaline rush of a resuscitation, the god-like power of determining whether a person lived or died beneath her hands. Of course, she and the others didn’t always get to decide - often their “patients” died, despite their best efforts to save them. But they had gotten a lot better at bringing people back to life.
“C’mon, Nick,” she panted, as she continued to pump his chest. He had been without a pulse for the better part of twenty minutes, and though she had administered a large dose of the antidote to the digoxin she’d injected earlier, he hadn’t responded. She was beginning to worry their luck had run out. Maybe this was the time they wouldn’t be able to bring him back.
“It’s been two more minutes. Pause for a rhythm check,” said Elizabeth.
Dani stopped and straightened up, breathing hard as her eyes moved to Nick’s monitor. “Still asystole,” she sighed, watching the waveform flatten out.
Elizabeth frowned, squinting at the screen. “Looks more like fine V-fib to me. Let’s try shocking him with the external paddles. Do you want to do the honors?”
Dani’s heart leapt with excitement. “You bet I do!”
“Charge to two hundred,” Elizabeth advised, as she took over chest compressions.
While the defibrillator was charging, Dani squirted some more conductive gel onto the paddles. She could still feel Nick inside her, the coolness of the gel mixed with the warmth of him making her tingle. A part of her felt bad for betraying Rob, but it was only a small part. After all, Nick had been her free pass - and besides, Rob had betrayed her first by running and leaving her behind. Everything they had built together was beginning to fall apart - but Dani was bound and determined to keep it together for as long as she could.
The defibrillator beeped to signal that it had finished charging. “Clear!” she called, and both Elizabeth and Patrick backed away from the bed.
“Be sure to stay at least ten centimeters away from the pulse generator,” Elizabeth warned, as Dani went to press the paddles to Nick’s chest. She kept the one in her right hand low on the left side of his chest, avoiding the bulge under his collarbone where the ICD had been implanted. She pushed the buttons to administer a shock and watched with pleasure as his body bucked beneath the paddles. Elizabeth immediately went back to pumping his chest as they waited to see if it worked.
As Dani put the paddles back, she looked up and saw Brian staring at her from his bed. The steady drip of Pavulon they had kept flowing through his veins for the past few weeks prevented him from being able to move his facial muscles or any other part of his body, but she could perceive the emotion in his blank expression. His intense blue eyes blazed with hatred towards Elizabeth, Patrick, and her. Behind that, fear for Nick. Because of her, he was losing his brother, his best friend. Feeling those eyes on her even as she looked away made Dani even more desperate to bring Nick back.
She watched the clock, waiting for the two minute mark, when they would pause again to check for a pulse. “C’mon, Nick,” she murmured again, clasping her hands together tightly as Elizabeth continued compressions. “Come on back to us now.”
***
The minutes ticked by as Howie and the others sat around the dining room table with Detective Overton, waiting for one of her officers to call with an update.
The tension in the room was practically tangible. No one was talking now. Howie found the silence unnerving, but he had nothing to say. Not even AJ seemed to be able to come up with a wisecrack to ease their collective anxiety.
When the phone rang, they all jumped. The detective answered it immediately with a crisp, “Overton.” They waited with bated breath, watching her face as she listened to the voice on the other end of the line. “Okay. Keep me posted,” she said finally and hung up.
“Well?” asked Leighanne hopefully, her eyebrows arching high on her forehead. “Did they find them?”
Detective Overton took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Unfortunately, no. The house was empty. We’re going to assign a couple of plain-clothes officers to stake out the place in case they come back, but my colleague said it didn’t look like anyone had been living there in a while.”
Howie didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. Nick and Brian were still missing… but at least they hadn’t been found dead. That meant there was still hope. Yet he had watched enough crime shows to know that the longer they remained missing, the less likely it was that they would be found alive. Despite his best efforts to stay hopeful, Howie couldn’t shake the feeling that their time was running out.
***
After two more minutes, Elizabeth halted the resuscitation efforts to reassess Nick’s heart rhythm.
When the doctor removed her hands from Nick’s chest, Dani watched the wavy line on his monitor flatten and felt herself deflate. But before she could say “Asystole,” it suddenly spiked. She drew in a sharp breath and held it. Was that a beat? The line dipped and went flat for several more seconds before it spiked again.
“Sinus bradycardia,” Elizabeth declared, and Dani let out her breath in a sigh of relief. It seemed luck was still on their side, after all. “Does he have a pulse?”
Pressing two fingers to the radial artery in Nick’s wrist, Dani felt a faint fluttering beneath her fingertips. “It’s pretty weak, but it’s there all right,” she replied.
“Good. Give him point-five of atropine; I want to get his heart rate up.”
“You got it.” Dani opened the top drawer of the crash cart and took out a syringe filled with the drug. As she bent down by Nick’s head to inject it into his central line, she brushed his blond hair back off his forehead and smiled. He was still unconscious, but some of the color was starting to come back into his face. “Welcome back again, Nick,” she whispered into his ear. “You were wonderful.”
***
