For the first time in his life, E.J. Stephenson had a full appreciation of the suffering of drug addicts. He got it, understood the almost irresistible yearning. Even though he had taken only a few doses of oxycontin — and had been in legitimate need of the drug — that warm, lips tingling, utopian sense of wellbeing it produced was as seductive as a beautiful woman. It was like sex in a lot of ways, in fact. It was as elemental and fundamental as that. The human need, yearning, aching desire was as powerful as the sex drive of an adolescent boy looking at a Playboy magazine.
Sam had kept him pretty “doped up,” and he was grateful for that, for the relief it provided him from the agony of his leg. But the relief was short-lived. He would usually doze off after Sam gave him one of the little white pills, and when he awoke, the ache had returned to his leg. As the drug wore off, the pain ratcheted up like dialing up the light on a dimmer switch.
He was only able to think clearly in that narrow window of time right after he woke up. The pain was a mere throbbing ache from his knee to his ankle, with spiked throbbing up into his groin. It was bearable and his mind was clear. When the drug made him so dopey, he was unable to find any meaning in his thoughts nor any desire to care. And when the pain was at its zenith, that last few minutes before his next dose of oxi, he was so distracted by the agony that thought was impossible.
He had never known pain like that. Had made it through life mostly uninjured. He had gotten a nasty gash on his arm when he was a senior in high school. It had required thirteen stitches to close and had gotten infected later, which meant he had to go back to the doctor to re-open the wound — hurt like a firebrand — and clean it out. He’d broken a toe slamming it into the leg of the dresser when he was in college. It had turned purple and he had hobbled around for weeks, his friends making fun of the limp and his stubbed toe. And there was the horse bite that had broken a finger.
But there was nothing in E.J.’s life history that would have prepared him for how bad his leg hurt. On a scale of one to ten it was a seventy-five. It was sickening, the agony turned his stomach. Sam had wisely limited his intake to clear liquids because she knew he would not be able to keep much of anything else down.
But during that clear-thinking window — between fuzzy LaLa Land and an agony he did not know could be endured by human beings, in that window of time, he thought about the fact that he was going to die of rabies.
For a while, he had tried unsuccessfully to delude himself into the belief that the lone shot he had taken more than a decade ago would provide him the protection he needed. But he never had been very good at self-deception — not even when he was a kid and had such a crush on Charlie Ryan, McClintock, and that he sometimes imagined she had the hots for him, too.
Not.
Unless he could get the anti-rabies shot in … he wasn’t sure how much time had passed since he had been mauled, but he didn’t think it’d been twenty-four hours yet. Maybe it had, he didn’t know. But that deadline would pass soon enough with no first injection, unless the Jabberwock cooperated in a way that right now didn’t seem likely, blew back out of here like it had blown in. He didn’t believe that would happen. Had reached the same conclusion as Malachi, though they had only discussed it briefly. This wasn’t a natural phenomenon or the corruption of a natural phenomenon or the outer extreme of some naturally occurring force on earth. This was other. Outside. It could conceivably back off and leave Nowhere County alone, but E.J. didn’t believe that was the game plan. The Jabberwock wasn’t going anywhere. And neither was E.J. or anybody else.
No vaccine … rabies.
He had seen a couple of rabid animals during his medical training. A fox and a cat. It was an awful experience. The fox had had dumb rabies. The kind that Buster, unfortunately, did not have. Of the two types of rabies, dumb rabies was the most prevalent. An animal with dumb rabies was just disoriented, became unable to walk, to move at all. Eventually, their jaws locked up so they drooled, and then they had a seizure, sometimes more than one, and died.
The cat had had furious rabies, like Buster. It attacked the walls of its cage, trying to chew its way out, broke off its teeth and tore up its mouth but didn’t notice or care. Toward the end, it began attacking its own backside, chewed off its own tail and then ran around in circles trying to catch the bleeding stump that was always one step out of its grasp.
It had multiple seizures before it died.
That was coming soon to a theater near E.J.
He thought back on those last moments, with his leg a gushing gory wound he couldn’t think beyond, of diving under the power take-off and getting Buster to follow him. Then the world had grayed out. But he had caught sight of Judd’s face when Judd found him. The look of horror was imprinted on the back side of E.J.’s brain to reappear there for as long as he lived. Which apparently wouldn’t be long. The dog had been mangled by the power take-off so badly it was unrecognizable as a dog, its huge body wrapped around and around the spinning shaft, crushed, stretched out of its skin, all its bones broken. E.J. didn’t know if the horror on Judd’s face was for the dog or for him.
But the PTO had at least spared Buster the final stages of the disease, the locked jaw and seizures. In humans that stage also featured an unreasoning fear of water, hence the name hydrophobia. Crushed beyond recognition was a horrible way to die, but it had been quick.
And E.J. began to wonder if it would be possible for him to do what Buster had done. Sign out, leave the game before the curtain fell. Was there some way for him to … die without having to suffer through the horror of rabies to do it?
Would one of his friends slip him a lethal dose of oxycontin? So he could plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is, and then ride off into the sunset on a pink cloud of drug-induced euphoria.
Sounded a lot better than foaming at the mouth and seizures.
Would one of them be willing to do it, to provide him an escape before the rabies took his mind, will and body and rendered him incapable of escape? If so, which one?
Sam?
Charlie?
Malachi?
Who should he ask?