by Ninie Hammon
Sam was on her knees. She didn’t remember how she’d gotten there, must simply have slid out of the chair beside Rusty’s bed. She was holding his limp hand, had her forehead pressed against it as she prayed.
Sam had never been what she’d have described as a “religious” person. In truth, those kinds of people, the sanctimonious ones who were far more interested in your behavior than the nature of your heart, were the reason she hadn’t gone to church for years. Oh, she was a Christian, understood Christianity well enough to grasp that Jesus himself didn’t like sanctimonious people either.
As soon as Rusty was old enough for it to matter, she had choked back her dislike of religiosity and took the boy to church every Sunday.
She had always prayed, but never saw it as an activity separate from the rest of her life. Like, now I’ll go to the grocery store, now I’ll do the laundry, now I’ll pray. It was a part of all the activities, a part of who she was, as essential and elemental as breathing. She talked to God in her head almost constantly, and out loud when she drove along the mountain roads on her way from one patient who lived so far out in the boondocks, the sun only shone there once a week, to another patient who lived equally far out in the sticks on the other side of the county.
That was one of the many reasons Sam loved her job. The enforced solitude of traveling from one patient to another, the beauty all around her on the hillsides, the creeks and the wildflowers. She’d listen to the radio — country music. Or to her Walkman, on which she’d loaded classical music. Or she’d pray out loud, talking to the God of the universe as casually as she had spoken to her own father, who had adored her in the same unconditional way she knew God loved her.
And loved Rusty.
She had prayed for God to spare the boy almost non-stop since she had knelt by his side on the asphalt in front of the clinic, and saw how terribly the boy had been hurt. He had been shot. Shot. She always yanked her mind away from the knowing of that, the reality of it, or she would be filled with such rage she … But when she veered away from that thought, she was always served up the image of the blood dripping out of his ear.
At the end of the day, that was the injury that mattered.
He could have brain damage.
Abby Clayton had had a stroke after she rode the Jabberwock a second time. The stroke had sent her off into a madness that almost cost Merrie and Malachi their lives.
Clearly, Rusty had suffered a traumatic brain injury of some sort. You could call it a stroke or a brain bleed or … didn’t matter the label. Rusty needed a neurologist — now. He needed …
What he couldn’t get as long as the Jabberwock imprisoned the county.
So now Sam knelt beside his bed, not just begging God to heal him, as she had begged with every inhalation and exhalation of breath for the past … how long? A lifetime. Now, she begged God to protect him and to protect her and the Breakfast Club. To protect them and intervene on their behalf.
She begged God to help them … kill the monster and release its prisoners — to release Rusty. She begged God to spare her son and all the other children of God in the county that the Jabberwock was systematically murdering.
“Please …” The word escaped in a strangled whisper. “Help us. Show us how to … just help. Help us and heal my son.”
Our son.
Malachi’s son.
There was no room anywhere inside Sam right now to process the enormity of the events of the past hour. The revelation. She’d told Malachi he was Rusty’s father. Finally, told him. And what that might mean …
Didn’t matter beans right now. The only thing that mattered was that Rusty open his eyes, that he get well. And she didn’t believe he had a chance at that unless she and the others could defeat the monster.
Pete’d said he’d “see to the boy if …” He hadn’t needed to say “if you don’t come back.” And if that if happened, everybody in the county would die.
So she prayed for all that. No words needed. She heard herself make some kind of sound that was like a moan, a pain so deep and profound it could not be expressed. And that was her prayer.
“Sam.”
Malachi’s voice. He hadn’t come into the room, just called her name from the door.
“We need to go now.”
She lifted her chin and gently kissed the little boy’s hand she clutched so tightly in her own. Then she got to her feet. A little kiss, light, on his forehead. Twelve-year-old boys did not need their mothers fawning all over them. Rusty would have called that just-shoot-me embarrassing.
She turned then, didn’t dare linger looking at him or she would not have been able to leave. Malachi reached out his hand to her. She crossed the room and took it, walked out and didn’t look back.
Viola’d cleaned Essie up best as she could last night, but there was still an odor. Dead bodies stank, wasn’t no way around that and all the scrubbing with good-smelling soap wouldn’t erase that. They needed to get Essie in the ground soon. Well, not in the ground, in her rightful burial place.
The boys had got the spot all cleaned out for her in the Mason family crypt early this morning. Of course, Viola’d have the name changed. Wouldn’t say Mason no more on the outside. It would say Tackett. And she’d add more caskets, have places prepared there for her and all her kin, their final resting place—
But might be there’d be no time for them to be laid out together. Might be they would be took by the Jabberwock before—
No! That wasn’t gonna be the way of it. She’d thought it all through, figured it all out — them houses that had aged, they’d been the houses of people who wasn’t as strong as Viola Tackett. Grace Tibbits … Abner Riley … the Tungates … they was weak. They was prey, but Viola Tackett and her clan was predators. The Jabberwock would recognize that, being a predator its own self. It’d respect her and hers. To her way of thinking, the Jabberwock was just culling the herd of weaklings, stragglers. Wasn’t nothing to be gained by pondering who it would take and who it would leave. There’d still be plenty of people around to do for Viola Tackett. That was all that mattered.
Now wasn’t the time to think on all that. Right now, she had to stay focused, had to do the next thing. That’s how you got by in this life, you just done the next thing and her next thing was finding out who had shot down her baby girl. And punishing them. She hadn’t decided yet how she’s gonna kill whoever it was had done it. It’d be a slow death, though, not no bullet in the head. The how of it would depend on who it was. Figuring the best way to kill a person, the most awfullest way, kinda depended on who the person was.
Viola wished it was as easy to keep somebody alive as it was to kill them. She’d been thinking about that as she lay awake in the dark last night, Essie’s body just beginning to smell bad in the next room. All night long, she’d seen a single image in her head. A little boy’s face. Rusty Sheridan. No, rightful, that boy was Rusty Tackett. He was Malachi’s git, plain to see, was amazing she hadn’t never seen it before but that was a thing you didn’t notice unless things was just right. The boy lying there with his eyes closed like he was, looking just like Malachi’d looked as a twelve-year-old asleep.
Rusty Sheridan wasn’t asleep, though. He was unconscious. And might be that boy wouldn’t never wake up.
The pain that thought shot through her heart surprised her. And she took it out and examined it.
What if he didn’t wake up? What if he died?
Well … if he did, he did. Wasn’t nothing Viola Tackett could do about it one way or another. So she had best just concern herself with what she could do if he did wake up. When he did wake up. What was Viola Tackett gonna do about the fact that the young man with not-red hair — whose mama had raised him well — was Viola Tackett’s seed?
Viola wasn’t quite sure about that, about exactly what she’d do. She only knew one thing for certain. That boy belonged to Viola Tackett. He had her lineage. Was as fine a boy as his father’d been. But his father had gone down his own pa
th and wasn’t no way Viola was gonna let a thing like that happen a second time. Rusty … Tackett would become everything his father shoulda been but wasn’t. Viola wouldn’t allow that boy to grow up wild and disrespectful as his father’d done. She’d been too easy on Malachi, had been so taken by what a fine boy he’d been that she hadn’t been tough enough on him. Hadn’t made him toe the line, so he’d grow up obedient like his brothers done. She wouldn’t make that mistake with Rusty. No sir, she would see to it that boy was disciplined right and …
Sam.
What about Sam?
Shoot, Viola’d just about forgot about Sam. She was his mother, after all, and it wasn’t likely Sam Sheridan would take it well that Viola Tackett intended to take over the raising of her son.
Well, it’d be a shame, but it was clear Viola would just have to put Sam Sheridan down. She would hate to do a thing like that, she surely would, but wasn’t nothing in the world going to stand between Viola Tackett and her heir. And Sam would interfere — wouldn’t be able to help herself.
Viola would have to get rid of Sam. The sooner the better, too, since the boy needed to find out who he was, what his rightful place was in the world, who was his kin and how he was supposed to behave toward them as was his family now.
In fact, might be the best plan to take the bull by the horns and do the deed soon as she could. Yeah, she would have to wait until the boy woke up, but he would wake up soon. The more Viola thought about it the more certain she was of that. The boy would wake up and soon’s he did, Viola would take over the raising of him.
It made sense, would likely be best all around if she put Sam down ‘fore the boy woke up, do it the same time she did that Charlie woman, the mother of the little half-breed kid, the butt-in-sky woman who’d dared to cross Viola Tackett in front of people. She should have killed the woman right then and there, would have, too, if it hadn’t been for Malachi.
Malachi. Ah, yes. Malachi. The best of her git. What a fine man he had grown up to be. What a pure D shame it was going to be when she had to put him out of the family. Oh, she couldn’t kill him. Not her boy, not Malachi. But it was clear he had defied her. He’d done something to Howie Witherspoon after she had expressly forbidden it. She didn’t know what or when or where. She would find out, of course, soon’s she had time. She would find out the whole tale, starting with Sarah Throckmorton and the snot-nosed kid of Howie’s, Toby. She’d get the truth out of them, and then do what she had to do.
She’d kill Charlie and Sam at the same time. Just made sense to do it that way. The little half-breed girl, too. She’d get his brothers to keep Malachi out of the way, probably have to rope and hogtie him to get him to behave while she done the business she had to do. With the women out of the way, she’d spell out the lay of the land for Malachi. He’d had his chance to join up with her and live a life of absolute power in his own little kingdom. He’d give that up and wasn’t no second chances at a thing like that. She’d tell him he was out. Period. He could go do whatever it suited him to do but she didn’t want to have nothing more to do with him.
And if he ever crossed her again … well … she sighed at the thought, she’d just have to put him down, too.
Chapter Twelve
The old man sat quietly where Malachi had parked him in the waiting room. He was now wearing an adult diaper, so maybe they’d be spared yet another pair of wet pants.
Of course, it might be that none of the three of them would come back alive from Fearsome Hollow, in which case Moses Weiss’s soiled diaper would become somebody else’s problem besides Malachi’s.
Malachi.
She’d told him.
The staggering enormity of that left her too breathless to think.
Malachi knew he was Rusty’s father. How many times had she conjured up images of what it would be like when he did. Because she knew she’d have to tell him someday. He had a right to know. And so did Rusty. But it just never seemed to be the right time.
Malachi had come home on leave occasionally when he was in the military. Sam would catch sight of him on the street or in a store. Once, she literally bumped into him coming out of the bank in Carlisle. She’d dropped her bank papers and purse in stunned surprise and he’d thought he’d knocked them out of her hands. He got down on his knees in front of her, scrambling to pick up all the papers, apologizing profusely. She had been so tongue-tied, she couldn’t manage anything more articulate than an inane, “Oh, hi, Malachi. How’ve you been?”
And one after the other, time ticked away the years.
When she’d heard he’d been injured, had left the military for good and had returned to Fearsome Hollow, she knew she had to do it soon. She couldn’t let him drift back out of the county and maybe not return again for five years. No, it had to be now. But then … she’d seen him crouching in the bus shelter in the Middle of Nowhere, fighting a battle with enemies that didn’t exist. And after that, there’d been no …
Malachi knew.
Waves of emotion flowed over her at the mere word. He knew!
Now, she’d have to tell Rusty and she didn’t know how the boy would …
She couldn’t tell Rusty, might never be able to tell her son who his father was. All that — everything — was riding on what happened in Fearsome Hollow today.
She suddenly turned to Charlie.
“It’s just like you wrote. The three intrepid friends — the Alphabet Gang — going off together to slay a dragon.”
Then she saw it and stopped in her tracks. They were crossing the waiting room to the front door of the clinic when Sam’s eye fell on the blackboard that had “magically” appeared, moved from the kitchen in Charlie’s mother’s house at the foot of Little Bear Mountain to the lobby of the vet clinic in the Middle of Nowhere.
Only they’d decided maybe it wasn’t by magic. Perhaps the people who were looking for them — Pete’s daughter Jolene, Thelma Jackson’s husband, Cotton and Charlie’s husband Stuart — had brought it here, for what purpose they didn’t know.
Charlie must have seen it then, too, because she gasped and a little cry escaped her throat.
“What …?” Malachi began, then followed the looks of the two women to the blackboard.
There was a bare spot in the center of the flower Merrie had drawn on the chalkboard. The image had been erased there and in that spot somebody had written the words, “Daddy loves you, pumpkin.”
“Stuart,” Charlie cried and ran to the words, putting out a trembling hand.
But how … when?
“It wasn’t there before, earlier this morning,” Charlie said, awed, her fingers almost caressing the chalk on the blackboard. “When I came in this morning, it was just the flower.”
Then she looked from one to the other. “It’s Stuart’s handwriting and he wrote it this morning.”
She looked around, as if she half-expected to see the man standing in the shadows of the room.
“He was here this morning.”
“If he was, if he could write on the board, why—?” Malachi began.
“He was here. He saw the picture and knew Merrie drew it.”
“But if he could … if they could write on the blackboard and we could see it, why didn’t they …?”
Malachi’s voice trailed off. He might have figured it out, too, but it was Sam who tacked words on the reality.
“Maybe he did. They did. Maybe there was something written on the blackboard and—”
Charlie finished the sentence in awed understanding. “But Merrie erased what they wrote. She found the blackboard and erased it — my mother’s ‘buy bird seed’ and whatever else was on it. So she’d have room to draw a picture ‘big as the sky.’”
“That’d make sense,” Sam said. “They put the blackboard here to communicate with us, but whatever they wrote, we never saw. Merrie erased it.”
“They were here this morning. And Mr. Weiss said they were going …”
They all paused to look at the man
seated in the lobby, staring mindlessly out in front of him. He had stopped babbling. Sometimes he’d say a sentence or two. Single words. Mostly he just sat and stared. Sam had the awful sense that if she could look inside his mind, what she would see there was a burned-out crater. A hole. The lifeless expanse of scorched earth left behind when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The man’s mind was gone, had been fried away. By the Jabberwock.
“They must have stopped by here on their way to Fearsome Hollow. They’re going to ‘face down the monster on Main Street in Gideon’ today. High noon.”
Stuart McClintock, Cotton Jackson and Jolene Rutherford were walking into the jaws of the Jabberwock, the monster the three of them were about to confront at the same time. Sam shivered.
Then a different emotion surged up in Sam’s chest. An emotion that felt empowering instead of debilitating. Sam felt anger. Rage.
How dare this monster wreak havoc on the lives of thousands of people. Imprisoning them, killing them, adsorbing them, making them crazy. How dare—?
She realized her hands had balled into fists at her sides, the way they had done when she’d spotted Claire McFarland advancing on them with a shotgun. The shotgun she had used to shoot Rusty.
All the insanity — all the deaths. It was the Jabberwock’s fault, all of it.
The Jabberwock had to be stopped.
It had to end. Here, today.
She would reach out and rip the face off the monster, so she could get Rusty and E.J. the medical care they needed. She would kill it with her bare hands if she had to.
Or it would kill her.
Fish did what fish do. He swam. No, floated. Up, up, up like a bubble to the surface.
He opened his eyes. Sunlight speared into them and he squeezed them shut. He knew the drill, of course. Knew when you’d passed out drunk, the return to reality always involved squinting eyes and—
His eyes popped open and he gasped. No, he hadn’t passed out, he’d … what? Tripped, fallen. He’d been running, trying to find help.