by Ninie Hammon
“I bet it ain’t far up here to the cut,” Harry said.
“The cut?” Malachi asked.
“Abner warned me about it, said that hard rain we got the second week of May, the creek come up, took a chunk out of one side of the road. You got to be careful not to drive right off into it.” He paused. “Creek’s down now … you’d drop thirty feet.”
They exchanged horrified looks.
“Everybody got their seatbelts fastened?” Malachi asked.
Somehow, Charlie didn’t think seatbelts would be any protection in this circumstance.
This was not the first time in his life that Elijah Hamilton, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, had been bitten by an animal. He had no idea how many times. He’d never kept track. Cats, dogs. A horse bit him once and broke his finger. Roger Henderson in Crawford County raised alpacas and one of them came very close to biting off E.J.’s ear. All manner of beasts and fowl, both domestic and exotic. An animal bite was, after all, what had convinced him to become a vet in the first place. It had not been the savaging of a rabid Great Pyrenees the size of a cougar. It had been a mouse. A white mouse.
He’d begged, pleaded, whined, maybe even wailed, until his parents finally gave in and allowed him to purchase a mouse from the pet store on Harrodsburg Road in Lexington. He routinely hung out in the pet store. His father went to a weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting — steadfastly earning chips year after year — in the basement of the church across the street. E.J. always tagged along so he could go to the pet store and wander among the cages of exotic birds and reptiles, as well as yapping puppies and big-eyed, please-take-me-home kittens. E.J.’d never been allowed to have a cat or dog because his mother was allergic. Ten minutes in the presence of any creature with fur and his mother’s eyes swelled shut.
It was during one of his visits to the pet store that he’d met Herman. Herman was a white mouse. One of a whole herd of them. He’d asked the owner of the pet store at the time if “herd” was the collective noun for mice and the man had just looked at him. But he knew it couldn’t be something like school, or flock or swarm — nothing as weird as gang or murder, and he wanted to know what to call them. The mice lived in a big cage at the back of the store. E.J. suspected, though he never asked because he absolutely did not want to know, that the pet store provided lab mice to the University of Kentucky for all manner of medical research.
The first time E.J. pecked on the side of the glass enclosure, Herman came running, put his little pink paws on the glass, his wiggly little nose sniffing as if he could really smell E.J. on the other side. E.J. got down nose-to-nose with the little beastie, looking into his tiny marble eyes.
That was not a particularly significant encounter, but the next time E.J. went into the store, Herman disengaged himself from the group of mice by the food bowl and came running to the glass where E.J. was tapping. He thought it was the same mouse as before. It was hard to tell one white mouse from another in a glass cage with several dozen. He did note, this time, that this particular little mouse had a black spot in the center of his front left paw.
When E.J. returned to the store the next week, he went directly to the glass enclosure of white mice and one of them peeled away from the pack and came running to the glass. When he put his paws up on the glass, E.J. saw the little black spot.
That’s when he’d started browbeating his parents to let him have Herman as a pet. It took weeks, and every time E.J. returned to the store, he was afraid Herman wouldn’t be among the mice in the cage, and the thought of the cute little dude with the wiggly nose and marble eyes being dissected by some first-year biology student turned his stomach.
His parents finally gave in, his father accompanied him into the store to purchase the little creature and E.J. carried him home in the tiny cage the pet store owner had provided. E.J. took the little mouse into the bathroom, the smallest room in the house where there was nowhere for him to run or hide, and lifted the warm little mouse out of the cage.
Herman wiggled his nose at E.J. And then bit him.
The mouse sunk its tiny sharp teeth into the end of E.J.’s thumb and a drop of blood showed there instantly. E.J. leapt back and dropped the little creature into the sink, where the sides were too steep and slick for it to climb out. It just sat there, looking at him with its head cocked to the side.
E.J. would never have told his parents about the bite but his father walked in while his thumb was still bleeding and his mother went totally postal. It was rabid, she knew it, she never wanted E.J. to have the filthily little thing, yada, yada, yada. She wanted to kill Herman. His father wanted to take him back to the pet store and talk to the owner, find out if E.J. really would need to take rabies shots. When he did, the owner just smiled, said mice often “nip” at their owners, almost as a sign of affection. The beast absolutely did not have rabies. Could not have rabies. He’d had the mouse for almost a month and the incubation period was ten days to two weeks, so if there’d been anything wrong with it, the disease would have shown by now.
E.J.’s mother demanded the death penalty for Herman anyway, and no amount of pleading, crying and wailing on E.J.’s part could change her mind. He hadn’t watched his father kill Herman in the garage, but was looking when he came out holding Herman by the tail and walked out toward the trash cans behind the house.
As soon as his father returned to the house, E.J. sneaked out and found Herman’s body, harboring the fantasy that he’d find the mouse alive and be able to nurse it back to health. Herman was lying on top of the latest deposit of plastic bag. He lifted the mouse gently, noted the blood coming from his mouth — refused to notice that his shape wasn’t right, meaning his father had stomped … The body was still warm but he wasn’t breathing. E.J. stood there holding it as it cooled off, wishing for all the world that there was something he could do to save his little friend. Then he made a little grave for it in the backyard and buried it.
E.J. didn’t exactly decide that day to become a vet, but as he got older he never even considered any other profession.
As E.J. sat with his back against the wall of Judd’s barn, the agony from his savaged leg literally taking his breath away, his mind flashed to Herman. But only briefly, then the image was gone, replaced by the image of Buster, his head wagging from side to side, foam dripping from his open mouth.
You see, the problem was that Buster wasn’t the only one who hadn’t gotten his rabies vaccination booster shot. Neither had E.J.
Rabies vaccine was routinely given to people at high risk of exposure to the disease. Veterinarians topped that list. As did other animal handlers, and spelunkers because bats were the primary reservoir of rabies in the animal world. Pre-exposure protection required three doses of rabies vaccine. That’s how E.J. knew the shots weren’t administered in the stomach. He’d gotten his first in the arm, and when a rash developed around the site, he got the next one in his hip. Changing the location of the shot made no difference. Within an hour after the injection, E.J. got really sick. Maybe even sicker than all the people who’d ridden the Jabberwock to the Middle of Nowhere. Multiple symptoms. Blinding headaches, nausea so severe he was finally dry-heaving blood, so dizzy he couldn’t walk. The agonizing joint pain he experienced gave him a permanent compassion for old people with arthritis, and he spiked a fever of 102 degrees.
His doctor said that clearly E.J. was allergic to some component of the vaccine and would very likely have a severe reaction to the third pre-exposure shot — as if what he’d already experienced wasn’t severe enough.
“It could result in Guillain-Barre syndrome,” the doctor said and that’d gotten E.J.’s attention. Guillain-Barre left you paralyzed for weeks, months … sometimes years.
When the doctor recommended that E.J. not take the shot, E.J. was all over that. After all, if he were exposed to the virus, he could then submit to the four-shot regimen of the vaccine and the additional rabies immune globulin (RIG) shot and suffer through whatever reaction it caused. It
’d be worth it then, since an allergic reaction — however severe — would still be a small price to pay for not getting rabies! The post-exposure regime of shots had a success rate of 99.9 percent.
The same percentage of people, as a matter of fact, who died if they got rabies.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Judd wanted to do more for E.J., but there didn’t seem to be anything more he could do. He wasn’t gonna bleed to death and Buster couldn’t get at them long’s they stayed in here.
But that part about the vaccination. He wanted to ask E.J. more about it, ‘cause surely he misunderstood what he’d said, that he hadn’t got his own booster. Veterinarians always kept up their shots — E.J. wasn’t an idiot. He musta heard him wrong.
“Who knows you’re out here, would be like to come looking for you when you don’t come back?” he asked.
E.J. looked at him, squinted, and then reached up and felt around, apparently just missing his glasses.
“Nobody. Tried calling. You didn’t pick up. Blew out of the office to come see what was the matter with Buster and didn’t stop to tell anybody where I was going.” He had trouble talking. The pain had to be incredible.
“I guess that’s good. Ain’t no way to warn them, don’t want nobody else walking up here like you done, right into …”
And then all the air was sucked out of the room. His chest was suddenly so constricted, Judd felt like he was trying to breathe through a straw.
“It ain’t … no, today ain’t … oh, dear God in heaven, it is!” He literally cried out the rest. “It’s Friday. I’s so caught up in what was wrong with Buster, I didn’t even think … Oh, god. Oh dear God.”
“Judd, what’s wrong?”
“Julie and Michelle. They’re … they might be coming over …”
“Doreen’s girls?”
“Sometimes on Fridays, she brings them by and drops them at the end of the lane to hang out with me while she goes to a cooking class. Eula Mae Reynolds, lives on Cicada Springs Road out by Bennettville, has been teaching her and some of her friends how to make homemade bread and rolls and pie crusts and the like, started right after Christmas.”
He couldn’t think. His mind was suddenly whirling in such a cyclone of fear he was afraid he was about to vomit, too.
“She lets them girls out at the lane …” He couldn’t finish the sentence because he couldn’t finish the thought.
Judd began to pace, back and forth, taking his hat off and wiping his brow and putting it back on and—
E.J. said something Judd didn’t hear and he repeated himself.
“Sometimes? You said sometimes. Not every Friday.”
Judd grabbed hold of the thought like a drowning man going under for the third time.
“No, not every Friday. Depends. Sometimes, Eula Mae has something else to do, but if she don’t cancel, Doreen drops the girls off here. It’s on the way. Of course, with everything that’s been … the Jabberwock and all, ain’t nothing for sure.”
“How do you know when she …?”
“She always calls first, to tell me they’re coming. She’d call.”
“And when you don’t answer, she won’t drop them—”
“No, she’ll leave me a message on the machine. She’s done that a couple of times. Cause I might be out in the field where I couldn’t hear the phone. She knows I’m always home, don’t never go nowhere …”
Judd could not keep his thoughts in order. They were skittering around so fast, and the terror he felt grew as the thoughts spun faster and faster.
“Oh dear God, dear God.”
“Judd, focus!” He looked at the young man sitting on the floor at his feet and tried to do what he said, but he couldn’t grab the thoughts.
“… time will they come?”
Judd looked at his watch and thought his heart might rip out of his chest and drop there on the floor in front of him.
“It’s one-fifteen!” Judd didn’t even recognize his own voice. “Doreen has to be at Eula Mae’s at two and it don’t take but about ten minutes to get there from here. So she drops the girls off between one-thirty and a quarter of two.”
He had to stop for breath because all that he’d had in his lungs was gone. “That’s only … only fifteen minutes from now.”
“If they’re coming, and you don’t know that. Judd, listen to me, you don’t know that.”
Judd stood still, staring down at E.J.
His whole world dropped out from under him, left dangling by a thread over all the burning fires of hell itself.
“The phone rang. After I got stuck in here, before you showed up, the phone rang.”
“You don’t know it was …”
“I don’t know anything except I got to kill that dog!” He had to kill Buster. Somehow, some way. “I got to get my rifle and put that dog down.”
He actually took a step toward the door before E.J. stopped him.
“Judd, you can’t go out there. Buster will kill you if you do.”
“I got to get my gun,” he repeated. That’s what he had to do. He had to go get his gun and—
“Judd, listen to me!” E.J. reached over and grabbed the leg of Judd’s pants. “Get down here, look at me.”
Judd dropped to his knees beside E.J.
“You have to stay here or Buster will rip you apart like that goose.”
“But I got to—”
“You will be dead! Buster will kill you, and then when the girls get here, he will kill them—”
“Noooo,” Judd screamed, actually screamed. He shook his head, flinging out of it imagined images of two little girls walking up the lane and Buster, standing there, waiting for them, his white fur stained with E.J.’s blood. And Judd’s.
“You won’t do the girls any good dead.”
“But I can’t just do nothing—”
“Of course not. We’ll think of something, but we have to do that, Judd. Are you with me? Are you tracking? We have to think now, plan what to do.”
Judd looked into the intense eyes of the young man who sat in the dirt.
“Get hold of yourself, man, we have to make a plan.”
“Yes, a plan.” Judd said the words before he really connected any meaning to them. But then he did. E.J. was right. They had only a few minutes to figure out something, to come up with some way to kill Buster before—
“And we’re not even sure they’re coming,” E.J. said. “Hold onto that thought, Judd.”
Judd tried, he really did. But somewhere down in the bowels of who he was, his gut, his soul, he knew they were coming. With an absolute certainty that owed nothing at all to reality, Judd knew those two little girls would come walking up that lane in fifteen or twenty minutes. Somehow, he had to kill Buster before they did.
“You have to calm down, Judd. Think. What have we got to fight with?”
“My guns are in the house on the gun rack. I was trying to think what I could use in here, trying to figure.”
He looked around the barn. There was almost nothing in it.
There was no pitchfork, though there was a hay loft with bay doors that opened out toward the house.
“I got that.” He pointed to a hoe.
There was no machete, but there was a tire iron, could be used as a club. He saw E.J.’s eyes go to the tractor.
“We could get on the tractor and—”
“I done thought of that, thought about driving out the door, or just crashing through the door, try to run over him, or run from him, get to the house for my gun. But that dog’s quick as lightening. Even wobbly like he is, I couldn’t run over him. He’s used to dodging away from the tractor’s wheels. He’ll jump right up on the thing. Ain’t no cage, nothing to stop him. He’d be all over me.”
“What’s attached to the tractor?”
“The PTO shaft’s hooked up but ain’t nothin’ on it.”
PTO stood for power take-off, an eight-foot metal rod about six inches in diameter sticking out of the back o
f the tractor a couple of feet off the ground. It was what attached the tractor to the farm equipment — bush hogs, hay balers, harrows, manure spreaders — that didn’t have engines. They got power for their moving parts from the tractor by way of the power take-off shaft. As soon as you cranked the tractor, the PTO shaft would begin to spin, whirling around at the speed of the tractor’s engine, something like nine times per second, so fast it was just a blur. Ralph Swanson got his shirt sleeve caught in one and it yanked his arm clean off.
Judd knew E.J. was trying to figure some way to use the tractor to kill the dog, but none of the pieces of equipment that had blades or knives — tillers, discs, cultivators — were hooked up. And even if they hadn’t been sitting in the shed beside the barn, no way was Buster stupid enough to just stand there and let you run over him.
The tractor’d be no use. They’d have to find some other way to kill him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“How are we moving?” Charlie’s voice sounded very small.
Nobody answered. They didn’t have to.
The mist. Even without reference points outside the windows, it was clear the car was moving forward. They all felt it. Charlie had her foot on the brake, pushed all the way to the floor as if somehow she could stop the car’s forward motion.
The car kept moving, farther and farther from the spot where Charlie’d stopped to avoid driving through the mist. It seemed to Charlie that the car was moving forward faster than it had been at first. How did you judge speed when you could see nothing? But it seemed … no it was, the car was moving faster and faster, gaining speed with every second.
The shapes were still whirling around and around the car in the milky white, impossibly dark and sparkling at the same time, but the wailing and whispering had grown faint as soon as they heard the thump.
The tone of the faint wails and whispers had changed from angry back to sad and forlorn. Charlie tried following just one of the shapes with her eyes, studying just one instead of all of them, hoping to make out some kind of detail. But now they were floating around the car too fast for that. Spinning around and around as the car hurled forward faster and faster.
