He shrugs. “Gives me something to do beyond watching empty houses and looking for things to fix so I don’t die of boredom, so really, I should be thanking you for breaking up the monotony.”
“Glad to be of service,” I say dryly.
“But you’re okay?” He gives me a critical look, like I’m a complex math equation he’s trying to figure out. “I know you like to treat your body like an amusement park and all that, but you got drugged with god knows what and woke up in a hole in the ground.”
“It was a cellar,” I interject.
“Was it underground?”
“Yes.”
“Did it have a dirt floor?”
I nod.
“Then it’s a hole in the ground.”
“Fair enough.” I swing my chair in a slow arc. “But I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
I nod.
“And you still have no idea what you were drugged with?”
I shake my head.
His brow furrows, and he turns back to his computer. “Describe it to me. What you noticed, how you felt, whatever you can remember.”
“Honestly, I don’t remember a lot,” I tell him. “I had a few drinks, then I was just chilling and enjoying the music when I started to feel really good. Like everything was awesome and I was on top of the world type of good. That’s when I started losing time, and I only have bits and pieces of my memories until I woke up in the cellar.
“How long after your last drink before you felt it?”
“I’m not sure. I was too out of it to really pay attention to those kinds of details.”
He quickly types something, then studies his screen for a few beats. “Do you think it was more than an hour between your last drink and when you got knocked out, or was it less?”
“More. Definitely more.”
“Was it a gradual high, or did it hit hard and all at once?”
I pause to cycle through the few memories, or at least what I think are memories, that I do have. “It was gradual, then it hit like a brick to the face.”
He hums thoughtfully and taps a few keys. “Was it the same for Damon?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t really talk about that, but it incapacitated us at about the same time. I remember that much.”
“Have you ever heard of Bute? Some people call it One Comma Four.”
“No, never heard of either of them.”
He turns away from his computer, a grim look on his face. “I obviously can’t know for sure without a test to confirm it, but it sounds like you were drugged with something called 1,4-butanediol. It has the same effects as GHB because our bodies literally metabolize it into GHB in our systems. The big difference between Bute and GHB is that the onset is gradual, and it lasts a lot longer. The effects usually start to kick in about twenty or thirty minutes after you take it, but the full effects can take up to two hours to hit. Once they do, it's usually lights out, and that can last anywhere from a few to four hours. Does that sound like what happened?”
“That tracks with what I remember,” I confirm.
“You’re lucky those guys knew what they were doing,” he says, that grim look still on his face. “That’s one of those drugs where the difference in the dose for getting high and ODing is tiny. And you were fine after?”
“Yeah, I mean, it took a while to shake it off, but once I did, I felt fine. I was dehydrated as fuck and starving by the time we got back to our hotel, but that’s it.”
