The world had taken on a kind of surreal glow by the time Sam and Charlie got back to the veterinary clinic from Persimmon Ridge, where Sam had told the Normans their only child was dead.
It seemed to take forever to get to the Middle of Nowhere, like the drive was thirty miles instead of six.
Thelma Jackson was gone. Though Sam still had questions for her, she was glad she didn’t have to ask them right now because her mind felt like it was wrapped in cotton. Charlie took Merrie back to Sam’s to get a quick lunch and a “mini-nap” before her shift with E.J. Sam just … went on autopilot. She went into the building, donned her white yep-I’m-a-doctor-alright lab coat, checked on E.J., under the watchful eye of Doreen Jaggers, and surveyed the empty waiting room, profoundly grateful there were no patients waiting.
When she went into the breakroom, she was surprised to find Malachi, sipping a cup of road tar. She was sure he’d ask how it had gone with the Normans, which she didn’t want to talk about, and then he’d want to discuss what Thelma’d told them. And she didn’t want to talk about that either.
She sat down but was spared both discussions.
Pete Rutherford didn’t knock on the door, he just burst into the room.
“Sam, you got to come quick. It’s bad.”
An incoming, of course. Someone had either accidentally or purposefully challenged the Jabberwock and was now out there in the parking lot paying the price for that mistake. And they all were bad.
Pete hung there for another beat. There was more.
“It’s two kids. And one of ‘em’s Rusty.”
That was absurd, of course. Pete was mistaken.
Sam thought that thought and fifty more of them in the second it took her to rise out of her seat.
It couldn’t be Rusty. Rusty was on the other side of Twig, spending the afternoon with his friend Douglas Taylor.
And Rusty wouldn’t run afoul of the Jabberwock. Sam had made sure he wouldn’t. She knew enough about kids in general and her son in particular to know that once news about the Jabberwock got out, he would be filled to bursting with curiosity about the it. Duh. Of course he would. He was resourceful enough to find some way to satisfy his curiosity. Better that she be there when he did. Because twelve-year-old boys were invincible, they were bulletproof, they were going to live a thousand years. Danger? Pfffffft. Never gave it a thought, or if they did, they certainly didn’t let on that they did.
So she took Rusty out to the other side of the North Fork River on Wiley Road to the county line and showed him the Jabberwock, told him about her ride on the beast, from the Danville Pike county border with Beaufort County to the Middle of Nowhere. And, gross as it was, she had taken him with her to the Middle of Nowhere and let him see for himself what happened to the people who tangled with the beast. Sam also told Rusty in brutal detail what had happened to Abby Clayton.
No way would that kid have gone through the Jabberwock. No way.
She kept telling herself that as she ran out the door and across the parking lot to the bus shelter. That’s where she stopped telling herself, when she saw the unmistakable reddish-brown hair on the young boy who was vomiting so violently he was spraying blood out his nose.
But it was the boy beside him that stopped Sam in her tracks. Printed on his forehead were the words: rattlesnake bite. Not that she’d needed an explanation.
Rusty saw her then, or at least became aware of her presence and managed to force words through and around the heaving.
“Big one. Timber rattler.”
The boy was Douglas Taylor and he was, indeed, in bad shape. His whole left arm was swollen to twice its size, all the way to the shoulder. His hand had turned an angry purple color, with two oozing indentions on the back of it. And he was bleeding. His nose was an open spigot of blood that would have drowned him if Pete hadn’t had the presence of mind to roll him onto his side. The nosebleed was courtesy of the Jabberwock. Everything else was courtesy of a timber rattlesnake.
She knelt and took hold of the wrist on his right hand. His pulse was rapid and thready, his face as white as a sack of flour, he was sweating and gasping for breath.
She looked up at Pete, who had come back out behind her. He knelt on the ground on the other side of Douglas, while she heard Rusty heaving and heaving behind her. She looked into Pete’s eyes.
“Do you have any—?” he asked.
“Antivenom? No.”
The survival rate for rattlesnake bites was higher than ninety percent — if the victim received antivenin within two hours after the bite. Sam didn’t know how much time had elapsed since Douglas had been bitten, but it hardly mattered. Without the antivenin, there was really nothing she could do.
“How did he end up in the Jabberwock?” Pete asked and Sam instantly understood. She turned toward Rusty and froze in place like a statue. Malachi had come out of the building behind her and Pete. He had apparently lifted/helped Rusty up onto the bus shelter bench and was sitting beside the boy, holding his head as he heaved.
Malachi saw her staring, misread the stunned look on her face.
“He’s fine,” he said, then nodded toward Douglas. “Wrote rattlesnake bite on his forehead because he knew somebody on the other end would need to know that. He did it on purpose, rode the Jabberwock to get his friend help.”
Malachi was right of, course. Rusty had gone through all that … and it didn’t matter. If Sam had been standing beside Douglas when he got bit she could have done no more for him than she could right now.
Without antivenom … there wasn’t a thing she could do to save the boy’s life. And from the look of him, it wasn’t likely to last much longer.
“Call his mother,” Sam instructed Raylynn, who stood beside where Pete knelt. “Her name’s Claire … not Taylor … McFarland. If you can’t find that number, call Little Elmer Jones. He lives down the road, so do the Callaways. She needs to get here as fast as she can.
What she didn’t say was, “so she can say goodbye to her son.”