Chapter 2
The town square had already taken on an ominous silence. A few drunkards wandered the streets, tucked under advertisements and awnings. Aside from those random vagrants, the town seemed an ideal sanctuary for the undead. A ghost town in all its glory.
Jeremiah approached Willow’s lone medical facility and leapt from his horse, mounting the stairs to Doc Turner’s place two at a time. He plowed through the front door, which rattled miserably on its hinges, the small sectional glass panes threatening to shatter. “Doc,” he bellowed. The secretarial portion of the office, located directly to the right of the building’s entrance, was empty, “Doc!”
Doctor Benjamin Turner rounded a corner at the far end of the hallway and shouted, “Jeremiah Belmont? Is that you?”
“It’s me Doc! It’s Johnny! Horse bucked him. He went flying! Whole damn leg is ripped and twisted up like a French whore’s braid. Bones poking out everywhere,” his voice quivered as he screamed, frantic, panicked, a child again. He desperately wanted to appear calm: cool and collected as Jonathan would have been. Johnny was always cool when the kitchen heated up, but here he was, the same nervous wreck he’d faced in reflections his entire life. Sometimes he hated himself.
The Doctor moved slowly through the building of his practice, slinking into the secretarial region of the building, rounding his desk, beckoning for Jeremiah to follow. His office offered a strange sense of comfort. Books lined triple tier shelves behind the doctor’s desk, and along the walls. A candle’s flame flickered, threatened to find premature extinguish and leapt back to life in a high flame of orange and blue. “Okay, okay… relax Jeremiah. Tell me, slowly, exactly what happened and where Jonathan is.”
Jeremiah reached into his deepest inner recesses and found a small measure of composure, soothed by the rich atmosphere the room afforded. He was anything but relaxed, but he was in better shape than the moment he’d nearly taken the doctor’s door off its hinges. Still shaking, envisioning the strangely shiny white points and edges of Jonathan’s split bone, he braced himself to tell his tale.
Five anxious minutes later and Jeremiah had relayed his rendition of the early evening’s accounts, which amounted to a whole lot of pain and terrible torment, but beyond that, nothing too outlandish. Certainly not life threatening. It was an accident really, a terrible, terrible accident, but other than that, nothing screamed foul play. At least not to Jeremiah who now sat in the warmth of the small medical facility just adequately fit to service a town of 400. He was far away from the intolerable discomfort Jonathan was enduring at that very moment, but that didn’t mean he’d forgotten it. That was hardly the case, and while he enjoyed the soothing sensation of the doctor’s burning candle and homely decor, he still quivered. And he still pleaded, “Please Doctor Turner, we’ve got to help him as soon as we can. Really doc, he’s in terrible shape!”
Doctor Turner nodded his head in understanding, but offered a displeased visage to counter. “I’ve got to set a bone Jeremiah. Mrs. Spool broke her wrist today, which is what I was attending to when you arrived.” He noted the displeasure in Jeremiah’s demeanor. “Give me five more ticks and we’ll go get Jonathan out of trouble.”
“But we need to go Doc!” Jeremiah’s frustration teetered on anger.
“Calm down son. I understand your frustration, I really do. And as I said, it won’t take me but five minutes to finish up with Mrs. Spool. The longer we bicker here, the longer it’s going to take to get to your brother. So sit down, try to stay calm. Based on the injuries you’ve described to me, I don’t think your brother is in danger of losing his life. I’m sure he’s in a world of pain, but he’ll live, we’ll get him back here… and then we’ll fix him up.” He gazed at Jeremiah, who exhibited a clearly mounting exasperation, but relented all the same. He nodded his head and thought, no danger of losing his life… you better be right Doc.
“Thomas!” The doctor bellowed moments before a small man with a thick beard entered the room. “Prepare the horse and the flatbed. Jon Belmont’s gotten himself hurt outside of town. We’ve got to get him back here as soon as I’ve sent Mrs. Spool home.”
“But what about Mrs. Spool sir, can you finish the set without me?”
“Of course I can Thomas. I’ve done this a thousand times, and a thousand more before you were ever so much as a twinkle in your mother’s eye. Now put a rush on it. I’d like to have Jon back here within the hour.”
Thomas nodded in understanding and moved with a respectful urgency. Thomas had always been a pleasurable man who shared frequent pleasantries with the Belmont brothers: long discussions in the local pub had built a trust between the three, and Thomas had clearly not forgotten his kinship with the two.
The Belmont Brothers: Binds - Part 1 Page 2