by Ninie Hammon
Judd never looked at E.J., just crossed the barn to the ladder leading to the hay loft and climbed it. The interior of the barn suddenly got brighter when E.J. opened the two bay doors on the loft and sunlight streamed in through them.
E.J. wished he had asked Judd to give him something to lean on for a cane or a crutch, but he hadn’t thought of it at the time. Without it, the only way he could move forward was hopping on his right leg, the jarring motion sending such agony up from his injured leg he almost couldn’t catch his breath.
Gratefully, as he made his way along the wall to the door, he came upon the hoe Judd had used to scoop up E.J.’s vomit, the one he’d pointed out as a useless weapon. Weapon, no; crutch, absolutely. It was just what he needed, with a wide blade on the bottom to grant it stability. E.J. grasped it like a wizard clutching his staff and used it to pull himself along. He would have to move as fast as it was possible to move. The timing on this plan, such as it was, required that he and Judd be in position when they set it in motion.
As soon as Judd spotted Doreen’s car letting the girls out at the road — please, dear God, no, let one of them be sick or the car break down or an avalanche block the road — he was to call out to E.J., then climb down out of the loft and run to where he had rolled the barrel into place to keep Buster from crashing through the hole in the boards. Once Judd was crouched behind the barrel, ready to roll it out of the way, E.J. would push open the bay doors and … yeah, what? How would he get the attention of the dog? He didn’t even know where the animal was, an unasked question that Judd quickly answered.
“Buster’s standing next to the oak by the compost heap. Just standing there, shaking his head.”
Good. That was actually the best possible position for the dog to be for the plan to work. E.J. would push the two big barn doors open — which would instantly draw the dog’s attention. And then yell, jump up and down — okay, not that — but yell until Buster came running. When E.J. turned to run from Buster, Judd would roll the barrel out of the way and crawl out of the barn though the hole. And while E.J. had the dog … occupied, Judd would run to the house for his deer rifle, return and shoot the dog dead.
The keeping the dog occupied part. That was … oh, come on … what it meant was that E.J. had to put up enough of a fight as the dog mauled him to keep the dog interested in the kill. And there was, after all, the Hail Mary.
Buster wouldn’t be able to see Judd crawl out of the hole, and it was inconceivable that inside the barn … dealing with E.J., he would happen to look up and see Judd hauling butt from the side of the barn to the house. And even if he did, with that kind of head start it was possible Judd could beat the dog there.
If that happened. If he killed E.J. instantly, turned and saw Judd and went after him … well, E.J. hoped the back door on Judd’s house was strong enough to stop the charging dog. He’d been inside Judd’s kitchen years ago … he had just gotten back to Nowhere County and opened his office, and Judd’s old coon dog, Molly, had had a litter of puppies under his kitchen table. But Molly refused to nurse them, wouldn’t have anything to do with them, so E.J. had come out to have a look.
He remembered the kitchen smelled of chocolate chip cookies, which Judd’s late wife Mildred had made just because she knew he was coming. E.J.’d made the dog a bed out of a cardboard box, a cozy, den-like enclosure, and snuggled it into a far corner of the kitchen, and when he put Molly’s puppies in it, the dog hopped in and settled right down to nurse.
E.J. tried now to recall the construction of the door, but drew a total blank. Hard to remember an ordinary-looking thing like a door and recall how it was constructed years later. It would just have to hold for a few seconds. The den was right next to the kitchen and the gun rack was on the wall in there. All Judd had to do was—
“They’re here!” Judd cried from his perch in the hay loft, his voice a high-pitched wail of fear and denial. “Oh, dear God, they’re here. She just let them out and they’ve started up the lane.”
Judd crossed the hay loft in like two strides, practically leapt to the barn floor and ran to his position behind the barrel in front of the hole in the wall.
And E.J. reached out and began to push open the barn door.
Julie was like zero fun. Zeee-ro!
All she wanted to do was listen to her stupid music on that stupid iPod. Michelle might as well be by herself because half the time Julie couldn’t even hear her. And when she got in Julie’s face and made hand motions, got her attention, Julie would yank the earbuds out of her ears in irritation and cry:
“What? Can’t you see I’m listening to Bonnie Tyler?”
Michelle had never heard of Bonnie Tyler, didn’t care she was singing. All she wanted was for her sister to pay attention to her when she talked. Was that too much to ask? As a matter of fact, it was.
As they started up the lane to Pawpaw’s house, Julie was even singing along with the band, the words.
“… once upon a time I was falling in love, now I’m only falling apart …”
Did she have any idea how stupid she sounded, like she did that time she had strep throat, her voice all hoarse and gravelly. Julie could barely carry a tune anyway and she was off key. Michelle was taking piano lessons and she knew about things like that.
Had been taking piano lessons. Now she sat home and did nothing because that stupid Jabberwock thing kept her mother from taking her to her lessons in Carlisle. Or soccer practice.
Michelle was afraid of the Jabberwock thing, but she didn’t tell anybody because she didn’t want to sound like a baby. But she had heard the older, bigger kids talking about zombies and the end of the world and aliens and nobody knew what the Jabberwock thing was or when it would go away.
She dreamed about it at night. It was a big, black hairy thing, like a giant hairy worm wrapped all the way around the county, and if you bothered it, it would open its huge mouth, and its breath smelled like rotten eggs, and eat you up and then vomit you back up in the Middle of Nowhere. She’d heard her mother and Mrs. Kramer talking about that, the vomiting part.
And she wanted to talk to Julie about it. Julie always let Michelle get in bed with her when she had a bad dream. And she even once changed the sheets on her bed when Michelle accidentally wet the bed and was so embarrassed, didn’t want her mother to know so Jules had put clean sheets on the bed and put the wet ones in the bottom of the laundry basket where her mother wouldn’t notice them.
But how could she talk about the Jabberwock, or anything else with Julie if all she did was listen to that stupid music with those things in her ears that made her deaf?
“… total eclipse of the heart …”
“Well, fine. Be that way. I’m gonna go play with Buster,” Michelle said, turned and ran up the lane toward the house, crying, “Buuusss-ter. Here, Buster! C’mere, boy.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
E.J. hadn’t had a whole lot of time to consider his decision. As soon as he found out about Michelle and Julie, all the time was gone. They had to do something and this was all E.J. could think to do.
He was going to die anyway. Almost certainly. He’d made it sound more concrete than it really was to Judd because the man might not have gone for the deal if he’d thought E.J. had a chance. And he didn’t have much of one. But there was a tiny ray of hope, an itty bitty beam of sun shining down through the black clouds.
All dosages of all medications were based on averages and extrapolations. The common wisdom was that it required three shots of the rabies vaccine to confer immunity. But who was to say that two wouldn’t be enough in some cases, his case specifically? Who knew? It wasn’t likely, but there was a slender chance.
So he wasn’t, in reality, trading one certain death for another. He was trading a little bit of life, a hope and a prayer, for being ripped apart by a mad dog. He’d seen a Hill Street Blues episode once where this drug dealer who’d rather die than go to prison had acted like he was pulling a gun so the police would have to
open fire. He hadn’t really had a gun, though, and they said he had committed suicide by cop. E.J. supposed it was fitting that a veterinarian chose suicide by dog.
His mind was spinning around so fast, so many thoughts whizzing by he just sat back and marveled at the parade, didn’t make any effort to grab one and think it. He was entertained by the pageantry of the show. That was enough.
Judd cried out then, “They’re here!” He could see them, two sweet little girls walking innocently up a lane into the jaws of a monster. The terror E.J. could hear in the man’s voice was chilling. Judd leapt out of the hay loft and raced to hunker down behind the barrel that covered the hole in the barn wall.
Showtime.
E.J. had to get Buster’s attention … and then submit to being mauled to death by the beast.
Death.
Big concept for such a little word. He didn’t know what he thought about that, dying. What he thought about what came next. After dying. What happened then? Elijah Hamilton, doctor of veterinary medicine, did not have any idea.
But he was about to find out.
The wind blew in through the doors when he began to shove them open, sucked through the barn by the hay loft doors open up above. In the draft, it was surprisingly difficult to shove the doors outward, balanced as he was on a hoe, only putting weight on one leg. He shoved harder. One of the doors slipped out of his hand and shut itself with a loud clunking sound. Buster would hear that, wouldn’t he?
E.J. shoved as hard as he could on the other door, hopping along behind it as it moved slowly forward. Where was the dog?
Judd Perkins had never been more frightened in his life. Not when he’d been in that wreck with gasoline pouring out of the truck and his seatbelt jammed. Not when he tripped and slid down Sugar Bowl Mountain to the cliff and the little tree he grabbed to keep from going over the edge started to pull out of the ground. Not when he and Bill Cochran laid down between the rails on the track while a coal train passed over.
Not even when the doctor told Mildred she had cancer and she cried all the way home and he didn’t know what to say and couldn’t talk at all because he was so scared.
Nothing had been as terrifying as seeing those two little girls get out of the car and start up the lane.
E.J. began to shove open the big barn doors — E.J. was giving his life for two children he barely knew. One day Judd would consider that, but not now.
As soon as E.J. began to open the doors, Judd stood up beside the big whiskey barrel and rolled it out of the way to reveal the broken boards and the hole in the side of the building. He bent down, reached out to—
He never heard a sound, not a growl, nothing. The hole was just filled suddenly with Buster’s massive head, snapping, his teeth only inches from Judd’s hand. Judd leapt back, stumbled, fell on his butt and scooted away from the hole while the dog clawed and snarled, breaking through the boards as it shoved its way in.
Then Judd was up and running. Flying past E.J., he slammed the barn door open crying “Buster!” and pointed back into the barn. Then he barreled full-out across the barnyard making for the back door of the house, expecting any second to feel the teeth of the huge animal buried in his flesh, the force of him pouncing on Judd’s back and knocking him to the ground.
As he reached for the back door handle, he heard a sound, a voice coming from in front of the house.
“Buuusss-ter. Here, Buster! C’mere, boy.”
Michelle.
He had seconds.
E.J. turned and saw the big dog ripping through the wall, clawing its way into the building. He rammed the boards inward, wrenching them out of the way, the old wood snapping and popping as it shattered. His massive head and shoulders exploded through the opening, his body landed in the dirt and he instantly scrambled to his feet.
E.J. pivoted, Literally. He leaned on the hoe and spun his weight around it until he was pointed at the tractor, rumbling as it idled only fifteen feet away.
He didn’t even look back, just yelled.
“Buster, yo Buster. C’mere Buster, come to papa.”
He leapt one step, he was aware of that. But how he made it the remaining distance was a mystery. He heard Buster behind him, maybe a step behind.
Baseball again. He dived forward to slide into home base with the winning run, straining to beat the ball in the air on the way to the catcher’s mitt. With all the force he had in one leg, he leapt, hit the dirt with a bone-jarring whump and skidded on his belly past the inside of the big tractor’s tire.
Buster growled. He had paused. Instead of leaping after E.J., he stood crouched, growling, snarling, still with that head-yanking tic moving his head from side to side.
E.J. slid to a stop.
“Buuus-ter,” E.J. heard a child’s voice cry from somewhere very near the barn. “Where are you, boy?’
The dog turned its massive head that way and began to rise up off his haunches.
Judd raced through his house. Grabbing his rifle off the gun rack in the den with one hand, he didn’t even slow down, just plowed through the living room and out the front door and down the walk out front.
Michelle was about even with the house, running up the driveway on her way toward the barn, crying, “Buster! Buster, where are you?”
Judd slid to a stop, planted his feet wide apart, raised the rifle, put his cheek on the stock and his eye to the sight.
“Michelle, come here to me, right now.” He didn’t turn his head toward her, just yelled, his voice a rumble of what probably sounded like rage.
And just as he feared — just as he knew she would — the child froze. In his peripheral vision, he saw her stop and look at him, confusion and fear stamped on her features.
“Papaw, what’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer, just trained the rifle on the driveway. It was a Browning A-bolt .270 hunting rifle with a Diamondback HP 3-12x42 scope. You put the crosshairs of that scope on a deer and if you knew how to work the rise on it, you could make a shot at seven hundred yards. Judd sighted on a spot as far as he could see up the driveway before the house blocked his view. He pulled in a breath and held it, his finger on the trigger. He began to apply slow pressure, squeezing it, not pulling it.
Judd would only have one shot. And regardless of all the television cop show scenes to the contrary, it was seriously difficult to deliver a fatal wound to a moving target.
E.J. couldn’t rise up off his flat-on-his-belly position, had only inches of clearance. But when he craned his neck to look over his shoulder at the dog behind the tractor maybe six feet away, he could see that it had risen up off its haunches and was turning toward the sound of the little girl’s cry.
It was Michelle, the child with rosy cheeks, a pixie face and a turned-up nose who’d told him the last time he saw her that she could play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the piano.
Noooooo!
Then it came to him — maybe Mildred Perkins whispered it in his ear. In his loudest, most commanding voice, E.J. yelled, “Buster, Hier!”
That was “come” in German.
The dog’s head snapped toward him instantly, robotically. He took a single breath, foam dripping from his mouth, the snarling growl low and deep in his throat, before he leapt at E.J.’s legs where they stuck out beyond the tractor wheel.
And a piece of that beautiful, long white fur caught, snagged.
E.J. turned his face away as the power take-off yanked the dog off its feet and wound his body around and around the shaft, crushing it in seconds, mangling and mauling it until the power take-off finally jammed, and the rumble of the idling tractor and the scream of the piece of straining machinery was all E.J. could hear.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Since hadn’t nobody else noticed it, Pete hadn’t said nothing about it. Might be other folks had figured it out, too, and just didn’t want to say. Or might be he was the only one. It’s not like stargazing was much of a hobby in the mountains, where there was only a thin slice
of sky visible.
Pete had been in Arizona once, driving out across the desert at night, and he had been stunned at the expanse of stars overhead. Not because they was so bright. Most people was shocked when they got out in the open like that that the stars was big as chunks of ice, when wasn’t no city lights or pollution to make them dim. But the stars above Nower County were as bright and twinkling as the ones he’d seen in the desert, it’s just you couldn’t see but a little bitty sliver of them because up in the mountains, you couldn’t see but a little bitty sliver of sky.
It’d been after that trip to Arizona that Pete took notice of the stars he could see from his back porch at night, watched their migration across the piece of sky revealed between Little Bear Mountain and Sugar Bowl Mountain.
But after J-Day, the stars wasn’t right.
At first, he thought he was imagining it, but after a while wasn’t no denying reality. The stars he could see in the sky from his back porch at night were not the same stars he’d been able to see last Christmas, or the Fourth of July or Groundhog Day.
No Milky Way Galaxy, which you could sometimes see with binoculars — and he hadn’t cared enough about looking to buy a telescope. No Big Dipper, Little Dipper, constellations.
The stars in the sky now … they didn’t even look real. There was just random lights. No order, no symmetry, no shapes. No big bright ones next to little-bitty pinprick ones. They was all the same size. And didn’t a one of them twinkle. It was almost like they was an afterthought … oh, wait, there’s supposed to be stars in the sky — here!
Maybe he was the only one who’d noticed that, but folks was starting to talk about the weather. They did notice that. The last storm that had blown through Nower County had been the one the night before the Jabberwock. Folks assumed it was part of the whole Jabberwock nonsense, but Pete and some others — Malachi Tackett, for one — didn’t think one was connected to the other. Folks didn’t want to hear that because if the storm didn’t bring it — what did? It was easier to believe that some freak of nature had brought the calamity upon them — because if it did, well, you could understand freaks of nature. Like some whale born with two heads, maybe, or an ice storm in Oklahoma in July. You might not understand what had caused it, what made it happen, but you could understand that sometimes Mother Nature just got in a bad mood and did strange things.
