Raylynn Bennett was probably the only human being in all of Nowhere County who thought the Jabberwock was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
At least she had until E.J. had gone out to Judd Perkins’s farm all by himself, which he shouldn’t have done, which she should not have let him do but she had been distracted and then … Then.
But before that, before the bottom fell out of her whole world, there had been a glorious couple of weeks where every fantasy she had ever dared to dream had come true.
The Monster was gone. Gone.
She had cried when the hope first grabbed hold of her — that if nobody could leave Nowhere County maybe nobody who was outside the county could come back, she had cried. Sobbed.
And E.J. had misunderstood.
He had found her sitting alone in the pharmacy room, perched on the stool she used to get boxes off the top shelf because she wasn’t very tall and neither was E.J. He had found her there after he’d returned from the trip out to see the Jabberwock stretched across the county line, in the van loaded with Malachi and Viola Tackett, Sam, Fish, Abby Clayton, Liam and that woman whose name was Charlie. The one E.J. looked at with the same longing in his gaze she was sure was in her own gaze when she looked at him.
He had opened the door and reached in just to flip off the light that he thought he had accidentally left on, when he saw her. Or maybe heard her.
“Raylynn?”
And she’d tried to hold it in, tried not to cry, but it was too big and she was too full, so she said nothing, just continued to sob quietly.
He had crossed the room to her, smelling vaguely of antiseptic and dog poop, which were not pleasant aromas to other people, but no one else was Raylynn Bennett.
“Hey, there. It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’ll be gone in a little while. Blew in here on a storm and it’ll blow right back out on another one. You’ll see.”
He had put his arm around her shoulders, brotherly affection, and hugged her.
She had only cried the harder because she couldn’t tell him that she wasn’t crying because she was upset by the Jabberwock. She was crying in gratitude for it. The Jabberwock was a fence. Her father was on one side of it and she was on the other. For how long, she didn’t know. But every second it lasted was a joy and wonder too big to hold inside.
He had gone to Clarksville, Indiana — on the other side of the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky — the day before, said he would stay with her older sister Eloise for the night and be back before noon.
She had gone home to the empty house that night from work at the clinic, went from room to room, screaming obscenities at him. So grateful for the solitude, the brief reprieve in her life of torment. She’d been glad of the storm that came up that night, the brief storm everybody thought had caused the Jabberwock. She’d been grateful because it had been so powerful it ripped at the shutters on the house, the ones her father had taken such care to paint and replace for the spring.
It had torn one off on the front of the house and left the other dangling. And after it was over, she’d gone out and ripped the other one off, too. Had to use the claw hammer from his toolbox to pull out the last of the screws that bound the hinge to the wall. Then she had banged the shutters against the house until they were nothing more than torn-up pieces of broken wood.
And every time she beat the shutter against the side of the house or the porch railings she imagined she was slamming it into his ugly face, breaking his nose, bursting his lip. Knocking out his teeth.
Every blow was a blow at her father. And she had slept well that night, as she only slept when he wasn’t home. When he wasn’t likely to appear in the gloom of her room, saying he “needed some loving.’”
She sometimes wondered if he had done the same with her older sister, if that’s why she had run off and got married at sixteen, had moved away to Louisville. But she had never asked, and Daddy had seen to it she didn’t have the same opportunities, scaring away anybody who took the slightest interest in her.
And there were few of those, of course.
She reached down unconsciously and pulled down the sleeve of her blouse that covered the raw red scar patches of psoriasis on her elbows. One good look at those, and the boys didn’t need her father’s threatening looks to keep their distance.
The morning after J-Day when the Jabberwock had deposited the crowd of sick people in the parking lot outside and next door in front of the Dollar General Store, Raylynn had awakened with a surge of hope that maybe, maybe, the Jabberwock was still there. Still on guard. Still keeping her safe.
And it had been.
Every Jabberwock day for a week, she had awakened in fear and only relaxed when she got to work at the clinic and saw the faces of the people for whom the fence of the Jabberwock was not the lifesaver it was to Raylynn.
As one day piled up on top of another after J-Day, she had watched in love and admiration as E.J. stepped up to the plate and did what he didn’t want to do or know how to do or was trained to do.
He’d done it anyway because that was the kind of man he was. And she had loved him more for it every day. And then Judd Perkins had called to say that something was wrong with his Great Pyrenees, Buster, and E.J. had gone to the Perkins farm to tend to the dog. The rabid dog.
E.J. had saved two little girls from certain death in the jaws of the crazed beast. Had sacrificed himself for them. And now he lay on a hospital bed in a makeshift hospital room in the clinic, with his leg a gory wound.
And the rabies virus in his veins.
When Raylynn’d heard Rusty cry out for his mother yesterday afternoon, she’d raced from the front desk to E.J.’s room, where Rusty was trying to hold E.J.’s heaving body on the bed.
Then Sam and Malachi and the others had arrived and she’d hung back, watching in horror from the shadows. The seizure passed. When she’d asked Sam if the seizure had hurt E.J., Sam’d said it hadn’t “done any damage,” but Raylynn knew that for the evasion it was.
They’d all left then. She sat alone with E.J. as he slept. Then he came to and when he did, he’d …
He had asked her …
E.J. had been afraid he might bite her or somebody else and infect them. Then he had broken, cried, begged her not to let him die of rabies.
And she had agreed.
She had promised.
She would keep that promise.
She allowed herself the luxury of tears for a few minutes now, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with the water running in the sink to mask the sound. Then she grabbed hold of herself and stifled the tears, stood and splashed water into her face from the full basin and didn’t even glance at her reflection in the mirror. She hadn’t been able to look at herself in the mirror, look herself in the eye, since she’d promised E.J. yesterday that she would help him die.
She had looked it up in E.J.’s textbooks the day he was bitten, had read everything she could find there about rabies.
It had been the most horrifying tour through hell she could ever have imagined. But the salient point she clung to now, that E.J. had impressed upon her repeatedly, was that the incubation time for the rabies virus could be anywhere from a week to a year! It could take months for the first symptoms to appear. But once symptoms did appear, the end was certain. After the onset of symptoms, the disease was fatal one hundred percent of the time.
The week line-in-the-sand was the jumping-off point. If the antivenom were administered within a week of the bite, before any symptoms developed, the survival rate was better than ninety percent. After that, every day was a crapshoot. Would symptoms appear today? The week was the only guaranteed safety zone, and E.J. had made her promise she would not let him suffer past a week.
She had only a couple of days left to do what she had to do.
Raylynn rubbed her face hard with the towel hanging on the rack, scrubbed at it. Then she turned off the tap and stepped out into the hallway. She could hear Sam’s voice in the breakroom, talking to Thelma Jackson, Malachi and Charlie. Raylynn slipped silently down the hallway past the almost-closed door, past the front of the clinic where there were no patients right now in the waiting room to the big exam room on the end. That’s where Sam hung up what she called her pretending-I’m-a-doctor white lab coat.
Slipping her hand into the pocket of the coat, Raylynn found the bottle of pills. The pills Malachi had given Sam to use to alleviate E.J.’s pain. The don’t-ask-me-where-I-got-this bottle of pure oxycontin.
She quickly unscrewed the lid and dropped two pills out into her palm from the bottle. Stood for a moment thinking, then dropped out one more.
She didn’t know how much it would take for the dose to be fatal, but she couldn’t take so many that Sam would notice they were gone. In a real hospital, where there might possibly be drug-addicted patients or staff, narcotics were locked away. The only locked safe in the Healthy Pets Veterinary Clinic was where E.J. kept his “horse tranquilizer” because he’d read somewhere that there were idiots out there stupid enough to shoot up with it. Sam didn’t use the safe for the oxycontin. She carried a bottle in her pocket and Raylynn could only hope that Sam didn’t know exactly how many pills were in it. After all, it wasn’t a prescription bottle with the number of tablets printed clearly on the label, and Malachi had promised an “unlimited supply” of the drugs, so she didn’t have to keep track — he’d provide more when this bottle ran low.
Raylynn had to find out how many pills it took for a fatal dose. And then, she had to find a way to come by twice that amount. E.J. wouldn’t die alone. When she gave E.J. the pills to end his life, she intended to have a handful of her own to take when he took his.
They would die together.