by Will Hobbs
The coroner went away. I fought to get up. I tried to scream.
The squeak was returning. The coroner reappeared rolling a metal tray loaded with rattling instruments.
Daddy Carver leaned over, bathing me in his hideous breath. As he pulled the sheet free of my chest, I could see every blood vessel in his hideous eyes, huge like the eyes of a praying mantis. His hands, too, rubbing back and forth, were like the hands of a mantis.
The coroner pulled on latex gloves, then turned for his instruments. His praying mantis hands reappeared, scalpel in his right, clamp in his left. He leaned in, ready to make the first incision. This was the moment I had always jolted myself out of my nightmare.
Try as I might, I couldn’t make it happen. There was no leaving the nightmare. This was no dream. This was really happening, and here came the scalpel…
“Hey, Dad!” It was Max’s voice.
“What is it, son? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“We just got a line on Attila!”
The coroner turned away from my line of vision. “Oh?”
The coroner put down his instruments and went to the door. I could only hear pieces of the conversation. Max and Buzz were saying something about Attila having been seen down at Hot Springs, or Minnekahta Junction, or both.
Attila was missing, I got that much. I heard their father, all stressed, say that the autopsy could wait until tomorrow. He was going to head down to Hot Springs as fast as he could in his truck, and the boys were to head to Minnekahta Junction in Cal’s Mercury. Thank goodness old man Carver was incredibly attached to that dog.
I couldn’t tell what all was going on, but this much I understood: Quinn and the Carver boys had figured out how to derail the autopsy. Quinn was trying to give me a stay of execution at least until my dad got back.
A short time later—time was hard to measure—Quinn was at my side again, with Buzz and Max.
“You’re out of here,” Quinn whispered.
24
It’s Not All That Great
WITH QUINN AND CAL posted as sentries, Buzz and Max loaded me onto a stretcher and whisked me out the back door of the morgue. I couldn’t see a thing on account of the blanket they’d tossed over me, but I could hear what was going on. They were stuffing me into the trunk of Cal’s 1970 Spoiler. As stiff as I was, they had a hard time of it.
The four of them piled into the Mercury and we headed off. Where were they going to hide me, and then what? From the trunk, everything they were saying was too garbled to make out. Had Quinn reached the professor? Had he even remembered he was going to give it another try?
I started rattling around something awful. We’d left the pavement and were onto a gravel road. When the road got even worse, all washboarded, the car started fishtailing. Cal barely slowed down.
Finally we were climbing, and Cal had to gear it down. We kept climbing. Eventually we came to a stop. Complaining about the dust, my body snatchers piled out of the car and threw open the trunk. I got the idea the stretcher poles had kept them from closing the windows.
Buzz and Max manhandled me onto the stretcher. I could see the sweet blue of the sky again. They put me down under an old ponderosa pine. I could smell the vanilla scent of the bark. High above, a squirrel leaped from branch to branch.
“So, how far’s this cave?” Max growled.
“Not that far,” Quinn replied.
“Better not be. You got a name for it?”
“The Halls of the Dead.”
“Seriously?” asked Buzz.
“Seriously.”
“Sounds like that’s where Brady belongs. You ready to lift, Max?”
“Might as well start working out—football practice starts Monday. Hear that, Brady? If I get a hernia, I’m gonna kill you, ha, ha! Ready, Buzz—one, two, three, lift!”
Up I went and off through the trees, the twins huffing and grunting and complaining every step of the way. If you think this is bad, I wanted to say, wait until we get to the burned-out patch with the wind-downed timber.
Eventually we did get to the burn, and to my surprise they rose to the challenge. Getting me over every fallen tree took an incredible effort. I saw a lot of crazy angles. It was a sunny day, and the sweat was pouring off Buzz’s head. “Feels like he weighs a ton!” he exclaimed.
“That’s what they always say about dead guys,” Max grunted.
Quinn offered to help spell the big boys with the stretcher, but they declined. At last I was no longer pitching up and down like a crab boat on the Bering Sea. “We’re getting close,” Quinn announced. He had the twins rest where they could sight on the face of Crazy Horse through the fork of the big ponderosa. The Carver boys talked about the time they’d been up on Crazy Horse’s arm, and that blew me away. Maybe they’d secretly admired Crazy Horse all along.
They got going again, and at last they set me down in front of the Halls of the Dead. That’s when I lost it. They were going to stash me inside there and walk away. They got all nervous and somber, which scared me even worse. Did any of these guys, even Quinn, actually believe I was alive?
They tried a couple of times to slide me into the cave on the stretcher. Then they grabbed hold of me, just pushed and pulled and dragged me through on my belly. They lugged me onto that first steep slope all strewn with loose rock and flipped me onto my back. The twins were panting like draft horses pulling three tons of bricks in a heat wave. “Call it good?” Buzz said.
“No way,” Max grunted to my surprise. “The coyotes would smell him. We have to get Brady out of their reach.”
“Good point. Coyotes are carrion eaters. That wouldn’t be pretty.”
Easy on the gruesome, I thought.
“I know just the place,” Quinn said. Buzz and Max laid out the stretcher and rolled me onto it, facedown. At least I was on the stretcher again. They lifted me up, and down the slope we went. When we got as far as the passage with the low ceiling, the twins said they’d had enough. They set me down. I thought for sure this was the end of the line. Then they asked what the cave was like up ahead. Quinn told them we weren’t very far from the Palace of the Dead King.
They really liked the name. “That’s where we’re taking him,” Max announced. “I mean, that’s perfect.”
“Yeah,” Buzz added, “Brady will be the dead king.”
On they went through their tunnel of pain. Whenever they bumped their heads—nobody had thought to bring helmets—Max and Buzz hollered like they’d been murdered. Both were bleeding, it sounded like, but they joked about it being a tune-up for football and kept going.
“Awesome,” I heard Silent Cal call from ahead. Cal and Quinn had the lights.
“What’s awesome?” grunted Buzz, heaving for breath.
“Drop your load and take a look.”
The twins set me down and went to see. I heard their gasps and knew they were looking into the Palace of the Dead King.
With what had to be their last reserves of brute strength, Max and Buzz stretchered me down through the giant boulders and into the Palace. Quinn directed them to the throne, the slab of limestone where we’d eaten our peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. They rolled me off the stretcher onto the throne, face up, thank goodness. The twins peered down at me, getting more somber than ever.
Quinn came close and got all broken up, like this was good-bye. The tears flowed until he pulled himself away.
I wondered if Quinn was going to say a few words or something, but he never got that far. Off to the side, Silent Cal was yelling something about Attila. I tried to sort through the confusion as the other three ran in that direction, lights bouncing off the walls.
I pieced it together from the amazing things they were saying. The war dog was lying there dead in the Palace of the Dead King. Not only that, but Fred was right next to his face, like he’d dropped Fred as he collapsed. I heard all that and this also: Attila’s eyes were open.
My mind raced to fill in some gaps. I hadn’t known how long Attil
a had been missing, but now it was obvious. He’d been missing ever since Destructo hurled Fred into the woods. I’d been assuming that either the Carvers or Quinn had found the meteorite, but neither had. With his speed and superior sense of smell, Attila had gotten there first. He must have snatched Fred and run straight to the cave. For some reason he thought that’s where Fred belonged.
“How’d Attila know about your cave?” Max asked.
“Because he came in here with us,” Quinn replied. “I know, we should have told you. Hey, wait a second, you guys, maybe your dog isn’t dead.”
“What are you talking about?” the Carver boys said at once.
“He might just be dormant, same as Brady. Let me try to explain. Remember when Attila first ran off with Fred…”
“Fred?”
“That’s our name for the meteorite. Far Roaming Earth Diver.”
“O-kay…,” Max said dubiously. “Go on.”
“Attila had Fred in his mouth. And so did Brady, sort of, the night the meteorite crashed through his roof. He drooled all over it in his sleep. He told me so.”
“O-kay…”
“That’s how Brady got the Mars bacteria into his system. Well, Attila dropped in his tracks only a matter of hours after Brady did. The time between when the two of them dropped is probably the exact amount of time between when the two of them got infected with Fred’s microbes.”
“So maybe Attila’s only dormant!” Buzz cried.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, but you know what else? The professor is in danger of coming down with it, too, and real soon.”
“Why him?”
“Spit! He could’ve got the microbes into his mouth, too. He spit on the nub off Fred’s bottom!”
Cal busted out laughing. The twins joined in.
Quinn hadn’t been listening to how ridiculous all of this sounded. “I’m serious, you guys! We’ve got to warn the professor!”
After a brief discussion as to whether or not to leave me with a flashlight—they decided against it—they took off. They left me and Attila to our terrors in the absolute darkness while they ran across the mountainside, jumped in Cal’s muscle car, and sped toward Hill City to warn the professor. I could only hope that Cal wasn’t going to fishtail his Mercury off the mountain and leave them all mangled five hundred feet down some boulder-strewn ravine.
There I was, flat on my back in the pitch dark for who knows how long, trying not to go stark, raving insane. At long last I detected light, then voices. The voices were those of Quinn, Cal, and the twins. But then I heard another one, and it had an English accent. They’d brought the professor.
They circled around me, lying there on the dead king’s limestone slab. The professor leaned close and studied me intently. I could see his forest of ear hair and those few wisps of gray floating above his head.
Talk to me, I thought, and he did. “I don’t know if you can hear me, Brady, but wouldn’t it be splendid if you were merely in suspended animation?”
It’s not all that great, I wanted to tell him.
“Hey, Professor,” Quinn said. “What if Brady actually is dormant instead of dead? Could he stay dormant for millions of years, like the Martian microbes?”
“By no means, I would think. The human body is hugely complex and fragile. To begin with, it couldn’t survive total dehydration.”
“So, if Brady’s dormant, how long does he have to live?”
“Days at most, would be my guess. Only a few days.”
The professor leaned closer yet. “Brady, my lad, I’ve brought along a little something to squirt up your nose.”
From his pocket, the professor took out a small squeeze bottle of what looked like nose spray. “It’s not cold medicine,” the scientist explained loudly, as if he was talking to a deaf person. “I’m only using the container.”
“What is it, Dr. Rip?” inquired Buzz.
“An antidote, I hope. It killed the Martian bacteria under my microscope after a broad-spectrum antibiotic had failed. I’ve been experimenting around the clock, ever since I started to develop some disturbing symptoms myself, including numbness in my extremities.”
“What’s the antidote?” Quinn asked.
“Acetic acid—common vinegar. Here goes, Brady, a snort in each nostril. Good luck, my lad!”
With that the professor shot a mighty stream into one of my nostrils and then the other. I didn’t feel a thing. I waited for something to happen. The slightest result would have been nice.
Nothing happened, nothing at all.
Having almost no sense of time, I couldn’t tell how long they waited for the vinegar to take effect. All too soon they were talking about leaving. On top of that, the Carvers were arguing about who Fred belonged to. “He’s valuable, and he’s ours,” Max insisted. “We had a contest and Attila got to him first. Attila’s our dog, so that settles it.”
The professor heaved a sigh. “How do I make you understand? Take a look at poor Brady. I’m afraid my own infection is also rather far along—I’m getting worse as I speak. Fred’s no prize. I only wish he were. Fred’s a menace. I should have been much more cautious when his microbes came to life in my office. I deluded myself into thinking that the odds on them being harmful were extremely slim. It was irresponsible of me. Long odds need to be respected.”
“Like getting killed by a falling tortoise,” Quinn quipped. “Life is full of surprises.”
“Indeed,” said the professor. “I knew better.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about no falling tortoises,” said Max irritably, “and I still don’t see why we should be worried. It’s the spit, right, that sets it off?”
“Apparently so,” Dr. Ripley agreed.
“Well then, no spit, no problem. We just want to sell the sucker.”
“Oh, no!” the professor cried. “That’s the last thing you should do. You have no idea what havoc might be unleashed. Listen closely to what I’m about to say. With even a slight mutation, Fred’s germs might well become highly contagious. With airline travel and all, the disease that felled Brady would spread around the globe in a matter of days. Having no immunities, most if not all of humanity would perish. Billions dead, lads, including most likely yourselves.”
Along about then I began to feel a tingling sensation in my fingertips, the tips of my toes, even the tips of my ears and my nose. Hope soared. Was I beginning to come out of the dormancy?
“And if I die,” the professor was saying, “or go dormant, as the case may be, you must never allow Fred to leave this cave. Not for money, not for scientific study, and not for your government—they might be tempted to weaponize him for germ warfare. Not for anything or anybody.”
“Just leave him in the cave?” It was Silent Cal’s voice.
“Immersed in water, preferably. My experiments indicate that Fred’s bacteria, for whatever reason, are neutralized by ordinary H2O.”
After a long pause, Cal called for a huddle with his younger brothers, and off they went to talk it over. I heard the professor spraying the vinegar up his own nose. “You never know,” he remarked to Quinn with little hope.
When the Carver boys came back, Max stood tall and cleared his voice. “Nobody should get Fred,” he announced. “Let’s flush him, like Dr. Rip said.”
“I know where,” Quinn volunteered.
The final resting place Quinn suggested caught their imagination. Off the five of them went to drown the space traveler in the Abyss of Hades.
By the time I saw their lights returning, I was sitting upright on the slab. I was good to go.
The sight of me stopped Quinn in his tracks. “Brady’s alive!” he cried. The professor was staring at me like he couldn’t believe his eyes.
They were crazy-happy to see me, not only Quinn and the professor but all three of the Carvers. All of our bad history was, well, history.
The professor marched over to Attila and squirted the remaining vinegar up his nose. We waited for the w
ar dog to rise from his dormancy. Sure enough, he did.
25
How It All Came Out
AS WE EMERGED FROM the cave, we realized we had a problem. What were we going to tell the outside world, including our families?
We had a lot of explaining to do.
The more we batted it around, the more obvious it became that if we told the whole story, if news of Fred and what he had done to me got out, somebody would come after us to get to the space traveler. His final resting place might not be so final after all.
“Simplicity is the key,” the professor suggested. “The simpler our explanation, the better. How do we account for Brady being alive without revealing his dormancy and the microbes that made it happen?”
It was the Carver boys who came up with the solution, which turned out to be simple. They knew from their dad about true stories of people being declared dead in the hospital, only to wake up in the morgue. It had happened a bunch of times around the country and the world. Their father would buy this explanation for what had happened with me.
Max had it all figured out. “Here’s our story, guys. While we were searching for Attila, Brady woke up and let himself out of the building.”
“Beautiful,” Buzz declared.
“I know, but I’m not done. We succeeded in finding Attila down in Minnekahta Junction. Meanwhile, Brady was walking home from the morgue. On our way back into town, we found him walking down the street in Custer. What do you think, professor?”
“Brilliant. It’s a shame that a greater good has us fabricating a story, but under these extraordinary circumstances I believe it’s the right thing to do. The hospital will be embarrassed to find out that Brady’s asthma attack wasn’t fatal, but they’ll be glad they were mistaken.”
There was one more thing. Fred’s whereabouts needed to be accounted for. Some people around town had already heard about him. We put our heads together and decided he was still on the bottom of Pactola Lake. Nobody but us knew any different.