by Ninie Hammon
But a Jabberwock independent of the storm was a Jabberwock independent of all understanding. If a thing wasn’t some “natural” occurrence gone inexplicably haywire, then it was — what? An un-natural occurrence. An event totally outside the laws and functioning of the universe. There was nowhere in the mind to put a thing like that. It was way too scary to think about, so nobody did, or if they did, they kept it to themselves.
To Pete’s way of seeing it, the weather was as artificial as the stars in the sky
The skies above were always blue. Key word: always. No clouds. As in not a single cloud in two full weeks. And the temperature. This was the first couple of weeks of June in the mountains — the weather and the temperature had ought to be all over the map. Cool and breezy one day, rainy the next, frying pan hot a couple of days later.
Nope.
The temperature had not gotten below sixty-five degrees or above eighty-five since J-Day. He hadn’t been keeping track that exactly, but he bet if he did he’d find out it was always the same temperature at noon every day. And at midnight. And every hour in between.
Dog nudged his leg, angling for a scratch behind the ears. And a treat, of course. Until he met Pete, Dog probably hadn’t never in his life gotten a doggie treat. Pete had gone into Foodtown yesterday for his meager supply of groceries … dispensed under the watchful eye of Oscar Manning, who acted like he absolutely did not want to sell anybody anything. Sell the wrong things in the wrong amounts to the wrong people was to run afoul of the Tackett clan and nobody wanted that.
The dog treats he’d bought had fallen out of the bag onto the car floorboard and Pete didn’t remember them until now. So Pete went out to the car to get Dog one. He couldn’t find them. Maybe he’d stuck them in the glove box. He opened it up, scratched around and his hand came to rest on the map that was now the official map of Nower County, Kentucky, so he pulled it out and shrugged his shoulders at Dog.
“They’re somewhere. I am a very old man, getting older by the second, but I’ll find them.” He went into the house and tossed the map on the kitchen table. He’d take a look at it after he found Dog’s treats, which would have to wait until after Dog’s walk — which was really Pete’s walk “so he could live until Christmas.” Riiiiiight.
Pete fixed Dog’s leash to his collar and started down his lane to the road and had just got to the parking lot when Dylan Shaw showed up. Pete didn’t see all of it. He’d been looking away when the boy suddenly appeared. What caught his eye was movement, and he turned to see a kid in a dirty tee-shirt and jeans, hair wild, running dead out away from the bus shelter toward the Dollar General Store.
Just running. When Pete realized the boy was going to—
It was too late by then. The kid hit the wall of the building at a dead run, smacked into it and fell back on the ground, limp as a dishrag.
The kid’s face was smashed. His nose appeared to be lying on his right cheek. He’d busted his mouth, both lips, and had likely loosened some teeth if he hadn’t knocked a couple out entirely.
When Pete reached the body, he was surprised to see that the kid wasn’t knocked out. He was lying on his back with his eyes wide open, pupils dilated so it appeared there was no color at all around them. Black holes in white eyeballs. And the eyes were jerking around the way Dog’s did when he was asleep and dreaming about chasing rabbits.
Possibly, what Pete was seeing was the result of the kid’s encounter with the Jabberwock. And that was likely part of it. But Pete suspected the boy had slammed into the Jabberwock with the same ferocity and force he’d slammed into that wall — running wildly in response to some inner imperative, crossing over a rainbow bridge that didn’t have nothing to do with black sparkling light and static.
Chapter Thirty
Sam hadn’t been pacing while Charlie, Malachi and the Tungate brothers were gone. She definitely would have if she’d had time, might have been biting her fingernails, too. What was happening to them out there in Fearsome Hollow? Where was Abner?
But E.J. blew out of the clinic right before they left and he had not yet come back, so she had the whole operation to herself. It wasn’t like it was some busy emergency room in a downtown New York hospital or anything like that, but there was a dribble of people with minor injuries or illnesses. And animals, too! This was, after all, a veterinary clinic.
When the four of them finally got back from Fearsome Hollow, they looked like death on a cracker.
All Sam got were snippets …
“… house was old, had aged a hundred years …”
“… picked the car up and moved it …”
“… Charlie yelled at it …”
“… whispers … voices …”
Before she had time to herd the four of them out of the hallway into the breakroom so she could interrogate them, Raylynn told her there was a patient in the waiting room asking for her.
“It’s Hayley Norman,” Raylynn said. “She won’t tell me what’s wrong, won’t talk to anybody but you.”
Hayley Norman was the daughter of Duncan Norman, a preacher who pastored maybe a dozen tiny Pentecostal congregations in hollows all over the mountains. The biggest one in Nowhere County was Praying Hands Pentecostal Church in Wiley, a little community north of The Ridge, and it would have been crowded if more than twenty people showed up for a service. The Jabberwock had deposited Hayley in the Middle of Nowhere on J-Day temporarily unable to see or hear, and desperate to find her mother’s vanished car.
Merrie spotted Charlie in the hall and raced to her mother, begging as she came, “Can I have a puppy, Mommy? Pleeeeeeease. I already picked, named him Santa Claus.”
“Why …?”
“‘Cause he got big claws.”
Sam told Raylynn, “Tell Hayley I’ll—”
That’s as far as Sam got before Judd Perkins burst through the front door of the animal hospital, shirtless, his face the color of whipping cream. He ran through the waiting room into the hall, looking around frantically, found Sam, and began to babble.
“You got to see to him, he’s hurt bad!”
“He who?”
“E.J.” Judd grabbed Sam’s hand and began dragging her outside. “Buster got him, mauled his leg bad.”
“Buster?” Sam had been to Judd’s house often when Mildred was sick and the big white Great Pyrenees was as gentle as a lamb.
Judd was driving E.J.’s van. Judd’s two granddaughters were in the front and he had E.J. loaded up in the back.
“Buster’s rabid.” Then Judd amended it. “Was rabid. He’s dead.”
The two little girls sitting wide-eyed in the front seat made no effort to get out of the van.
Sam ran around to the back and climbed up into the van. E.J. was lying on the floor in the back, delirious from pain, his leg wrapped in blood-soaked, makeshift bandages with the belt tourniquet just below the knee.
“Oh, E.J.,” was all Sam could say.
Judd grabbed her arm and whispered urgently in her ear. “That ain’t the worst of it. He ain’t vaccinated.”
“What? E.J. isn’t—”
“He told me, said he didn’t take them shots, couldn’t, said it'd take too long to explain why not but he for sure didn't take them. ” The enormity of that revelation slammed into Sam’s chest like a wrecking ball. Judd had to be mistaken, but she didn’t have time to worry about it now.
Malachi and Judd carried E.J. into the animal hospital. They passed the waiting room where Sam saw Hayley Norman standing in the doorway staring. She instructed Raylynn to tell Hayley to come back some other day, and guided the men into the examining room on the end, the one that had a big metal tray instead of a cushioned table to lay him on. In the past couple of weeks, they’d done the best they could to convert it into an examining room for humans and it was better than nothing.
E.J. was moaning, barely conscious.
“Can you give him something for the pain?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t have any painkillers.
I’m not certified to administer narcotics, and even if I was, I’ve got better sense than to carry stuff like that around. If the druggies knew I had anything stronger than aspirin, I wouldn’t make it out of my driveway before somebody knocked me over the head and stole it.”
Sam turned to Judd. Malachi had left the room.
“How long has this tourniquet been on?”
“He said it was okay up to two hours and it ain’t been that long. A hour, maybe. No mor’n that.”
Sam shot Charlie a look that said, “I need help.” Charlie merely nodded and shooed everyone else out of the room.
E.J. grabbed Sam’s hand, yanked her down to him to speak because he had little air. “The girls, Michelle and Julie, they’re alright, aren’t they? I thought I saw them, but I’m … I might have imagined—”
“Michelle and Julie Shepperson were riding in the front seat of your van when Judd pulled in with you. Far as I could tell, there wasn’t a scratch on either one of them. Now you lie back. I’m going to do what I can, which isn’t much.”
E.J. collapsed back onto the table. He was clearly about to go into shock and she had to work fast. She suddenly thought and looked at Charlie.
“Please tell me you don’t faint at the sight of blood!”
“I don’t faint at the sight of blood. I’m good to go, just tell me what to do.”
Handing her a pair of scissors, she said, “Cut off the leg of his pants.”
Sam quickly put on gloves, then loosened the tourniquet on E.J.’s leg — didn’t release all the pressure — and the gory wound farther down his leg immediately swelled with blood. She let it bleed for a few seconds, making sure the blood flow was still good. Then she pulled the tourniquet tight again and went to work on the wound. It was a nightmare injury. She was proud of Charlie, though. She got a good look at it, the awful jagged tissue where the dog had literally bitten a hunk of flesh out of E.J.’s calf. Charlie didn’t flinch.
Sam hollered over her shoulder to Raylynn, who was standing in the doorway, having handed Merrie off to Mrs. Throckmorton to go play with the kittens. “More sterile bandages, more pads.” Sam had no idea how to close a wound that big. Shoot, she’d let E.J. sew up the little cut on Merrie’s forehead, which was nothing more than a fading white mark now, because he was better at that kind of thing than she was. E.J. needed emergency surgery — by a trauma surgeon, a good one. And a vascular surgeon. Who knew what else — they’d have decided the specialties they needed when he was evaluated at the trauma center.
No trauma center here. No surgeons — trauma or any other kind. No emergency surgery to repair …
She remembered the oath, the one doctors were supposed to take. “First, do no harm.”
She could screw something up big time if she attempted any procedure she wasn’t qualified to do. What she could do — all she could do — was clean the wound thoroughly, disinfect it. Do everything she was trained to do to avoid infection. Then she would pack it to stop the bleeding, bandage it properly and … that would have to do for now. There’d be other decisions to make about what came next, but now wasn’t the time to make them.
She worked fast and efficiently, with Charlie falling into the assistant role like a surgical nurse — well, except she didn’t know the names of the instruments, responded to a mere, “the pincher-looking things.” Once Sam had done what she could to deaden the area with Novocain and relieve some of the pain, E.J. had relaxed some, was breathing better.
“You know how to take a blood pressure?” Sam asked Charlie.
“How hard can it be? Tell me what to do.”
E.J.’s pulse was rapid and thready — to be expected. His pressure was low, also to be expected. But he was not, as far as Sam could determine, in hypovolemic shock from loss of blood. She was just finishing up when Malachi appeared in the doorway as if on cue.
“I got a hospital bed outside. Where you want me to put it?” She just gawked at him. “Roscoe Tungate’s wife, Miriam. She had one at the end. He went and got it.”
“That room down the hall, the storage room. Clean it out so—” But Malachi was already moving.
E.J. had IV fluids for humans … somewhere. He’d mentioned not long ago that he’d stopped using generic products in favor of veterinary specific products — said he had a bunch of the generic left over. She’d get Raylynn to find it. Sam had in her kit the proper needle for a human.
Malachi appeared at the door again, summoned by magic.
“Room’s ready.”
The exam table had wheels and they rolled it down the hall with E.J. aboard.
The hospital room was … a hospital room. The storage room that’d been stacked high with … everything, was now pin-neat with a hospital bed and a side table and a straight-backed chair. The floor was wet, had just been mopped. When Malachi and Judd helped E.J. from the rolling table to the bed, he cried out in pain and Malachi spoke softly into Sam’s ear. “It won’t be long. I’ve sent for pain meds. Oxycontin.”
“How—?”
“Don’t ask. Just know I can lay hands on all you need.”
The oxy came. Sam gave E.J. two pills and would follow that up with another two in an hour if he needed it. Watching the pain ease out of his face was glorious.
E.J. looked past Sam to Malachi standing in the doorway, gave him a thumbs up. “Good drugs, man.” Malachi returned the thumbs up and E.J. closed his eyes. He was soon asleep. Sam wouldn’t leave E.J.’s side until he was breathing regular and slow. Then she let Raylynn sit in the chair at his bedside, but still wouldn’t leave the room.
She did go to the doorway to stand with Malachi and Charlie.
“I sent the Sheppersons home,” Malachi said. Doreen had shown up at some point, and the girls wanted to see E.J. “I told them maybe tomorrow.” He nodded with his chin toward the waiting room. “Judd refused to leave. He’ll be here until … said he just wanted to be close by.” Malachi produced the scraps of a smile. “He did send Doreen to his house to get him a shirt, though.”
Sam didn’t even want to say the words. “Judd told me that—”
“E.J. isn’t vaccinated,” Malachi finished for her. “Told me the same thing.”
“What?” Charlie was horrified. “Even I’ve been vaccinated for rabies, had to get a shot to get a visa into Guatemala.”
Sam looked at her questioningly.
“Book research. How can a veterinarian not—?”
“You can ask him when he wakes up,” Malachi said. “All I know is what Judd told me, that E.J. was adamant, said he was going to get rabies … and die from it. That’s part of the reason he did what he did.”
After Malachi finished telling them the story, the three stood in the doorway, watching E.J. sleep, shocked into silence.
“I served with a lot of guys like E.J.,” Malachi said softly. “Guys who don’t know they’re brave until they have to be.”
Charlie tacked words on the obvious.
“The clock’s ticking now. If the Jabberwock doesn’t … If we can’t get medicine for E.J. in—” She turned to Sam. “How long? How long does he have?”
“He should have gotten the first shot within twenty-four hours, but … I’ll look in the medical books E.J. got from Brian O’Conner to be sure, but … as soon as he develops symptoms, that’s it. After that, there’s nothing that can be done.”
“How long?” Malachi asked.
“Oh, in rare cases, the virus can incubate for up to two years before—”
“How long?” Malachi said the words slowly, individually.
“A week. Ten days. Depends on how big a dose of virus … he got a big dose.”
“That’s it, then,” Charlie said. “We’ve got a week to figure out how to get out of Nowhere County … or E.J. dies.”
Chapter Thirty-One
When he’d arrived at the county line shortly after sunrise, Reece Tibbits had stood for a time fifty feet inside Nowhere County, looking at the shimmering mirage that hung over the h
ighway and disappeared away from it in both directions as far as he could see. A lot of folks had real strong emotions about the Jabberwock, hated the thing that kept them all prisoner day after day. Reece didn’t have any feelings about it one way or the other. It was a just a thing. How could you get your nose all out of joint about a thing? It’d be like hating a door knob or getting mad at the fender on his truck.
Reece spent half an hour throwing things through the Jabberwock. Rocks, tree branches, clods of dirt, a screwdriver and the rubber work boot he carried in the truck, the one with the hole in it. Everything passed through as if it were, indeed, a mirage. So he let down the tailgate on his pickup truck, climbed up into the bed and carefully unloaded his barrel bomb onto the wheeled pallet. It was heavy. He could have used a hand loading and unloading it even though he was as strong as a bull. But Reece didn’t want to share his plan with anybody. Shoot, if word got out, he mighta had an audience out here this morning to watch the Jabberwock get blown to kingdom come.
He scooted the pallet across the asphalt toward the mirage. The rope was to ensure he didn’t accidentally step too close and get sucked through the Jabberwock and deposited in the bus shelter. He had never in his life been so sick and he would just about rather die than repeat the experience.
