by Ninie Hammon
She had at least reverted to default mothering mode. She felt steady enough on her feet that she reached down and picked Merrie up into her arms.
“We’re gonna get you fixed right up, sweetie pie,” she said and Merrie nodded but said nothing. She no longer had a blank stare, but she wasn’t engaging with the world either.
Sam Sheridan lead the little parade across the Dollar General Store parking lot toward the building with a sign proclaiming Healthy Pets Veterinary Clinic and Animal Hospital.
“You don’t need my help no more and I got to be going,” said the blonde woman. “Gonna be late as it is.”
“I’m good, Abby, thanks. Hug that little one for me.”
The young woman was homely, had the stamp of ancestors who hadn’t been particular about marrying their cousins. But she looked momentarily beautiful, her face wrapped in a joy that some people never achieved in a lifetime. “I shore will.”
She turned and headed toward an old pickup truck parked in front of the Dollar General Store, followed by the teenager, who had not said a word, merely went into the store.
Charlie could tell that Sam had a lot of questions she wanted to ask, but she was wisely not asking any of them. Charlie instantly liked her for that. No, she recovered affection for her from a well long forgotten.
Sam opened the door of the veterinary clinic for Charlie carrying Merrie, and in the reflection in the window on the door Charlie noticed that the sign was still there on the light pole in the parking lot. The words were backwards, but she didn’t need to be able to read it to know what it said.
The Middle of Nowhere.
Chapter Seven
Charlie wasn’t drunk, though that was the go-to explanation for sitting in a public bus shelter at nine o’clock in the morning, puking your guts out.
Helping the bleeding little girl had taken precedence in Sam’s mind over figuring out the level of sobriety of the child’s mother, and there was something wrong with the little girl, too.
She had a wound on her forehead that had been amateurishly bandaged, using only Band-Aids. It was just oozing now, but it appeared to be a typical minimal-damage, maximum-bleeding head wound. The child’s face and her Whitney Houston tee-shirt were bloodstained. Tears had traced twin tracks of clean through the dried blood on her cheeks.
But the thing was, the little girl looked like a zombie. The child should have been sobbing but she wasn’t. She was crying an energy-less cry, like she’d learned how from a manual, and otherwise was mostly unresponsive. She’d been just sitting there, staring sightlessly, crying her robot cry, while her mother made violent retching sounds next to her on the bench.
Both of them seemed to be the kind of dazed you experienced when the airplane you’re on crashes and you’re the only two survivors. But there was no plane, and no vehicle either, for that matter. Which, of course, begged the question: where did they come from and how had they gotten to the bus shelter? The only vehicle in the parking lot of the Dollar General Store was hers. The disengaged teenage checker must have parked behind the building or had been dropped off at work.
The two came back to reality gradually. The little girl’s thousand-yard stare began to fade. The woman started to try to control her vomiting. And none of it had anything to do with Sam’s efforts to get through to them. They were … it was like they were waking up, coming back out from under anesthesia, maybe.
When the woman finally lifted her head, Sam recognized her.
Charlene Ryan. Charlie. She and Sam had graduated from high school together. As far as she could remember, Sam hadn’t seen her since. And never saw much of her in high school. But in elementary school … the two of them had been inseparable, brought their dolls to school every day. They’d sit in the shade, leaning up against the brick wall during recess “playing babies.” Sam wasn’t sure if that was before the era of Barbie dolls, but even if it hadn’t been, it didn’t matter. Both of them wanted to be the mommies of babies — twins and triplets, preferably. The more the merrier.
Charlie was totally disoriented and appeared to be quite sick, but she wasn’t drunk. Sam knew drunk. There was no smell of booze, and besides, she wasn’t the drunk kind of disoriented. She was the trauma kind of disoriented, which again, begged the questions where had she come from, how did she get here and why?
Which all were questions that could wait. The little girl needed somebody to tend to that wound. And E.J. was right here. Oh sure, he was a veterinarian, but he was certainly a proficient surgeon. She could put a butterfly bandage on it and a dressing until Charlie could get the little girl to a hospital, or E.J. could put in stitches.
Abby had begged off. She needed to get to the hospital and it was a long drive. Sam hollered after the teenager as she went back into the Dollar General that she’d be back later to pick up her purchases, but the kid hadn’t even turned around.
“You two just sit and I’ll go talk to E.J.”
There was no one else in the waiting room until Mrs. Throckmorton — who always put Sam in mind of Tweety Bird’s grandmother — came in with her fat Persian cat as Sam was explaining to Raylynn Bennett, the receptionist, what their problem was. Raylynn said E.J. was in with a Rottweiler right now “and you don’t want to interrupt him, but I’ll tell him you’re here.”
Sam came back to sit beside Charlie as Mrs. Throckmorton told Raylynn, “I’ll just take Mittens on back,” and went through the door leading into the interior of the clinic.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said quietly.
“Know what?”
“Anything. I don’t know how … I was driving down the road with my screaming daughter in her car seat on the way to the hospital in Beaufort and then …”
“You were in a wreck? Ran off the road?”
“No, I wasn’t in a …” She stopped, backtracked. “I don’t know what I was in or wasn’t in or … none of this makes sense.” She shuddered. “And why was I so sick?”
She went pale at the word.
“I’ve never felt nausea like that. Like I … my stomach was in a terrible hurry to … it was overwhelming.” She stopped again. “And last I checked, car wrecks don’t usually cause … why was I so sick?”
Sam had a sudden uneasy feeling, fleeting, there and then gone. A sense that something had shifted somewhere, that the seconds that stacked up on the other side of this moment had been knocked off center and would never line up with what had come before.
Raylynn said E.J. could see them and lead them to an examining room where the examining table had a metal, tray-like top rather than the human kind with the miles of white paper in a roll stretching out across it.
“Hey Sam, what can I do for you?” E.J. said, and gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek, then turned to Charlie and her little girl. “Raylynn said you—” She watched recognition spread across his face. “Charlie?”
Until that moment, Sam had not thought about the fact that E.J. seemed older than they were when in fact he was the same age. He’d always been boney, scarecrow skinny, but it was his hair, or the lack of it, that was the issue. He’d started losing it in his early twenties and now all that remained was a soap ring above his ears and a chrome dome. If he’d done the sexy thing and shaved his head to hide it — and chucked the rimless granny glasses parked on his nose — he’d have looked younger. But maybe it was all right with him to slide into middle age in his early 30s.
Charlie smiled a vague smile, still seemed like she wasn’t firing on all her mental cylinders.
“Good to see you, E.J. How are you?” But she didn’t wait for him to answer, just nodded to her little girl. “She fell over a tree branch lying in the driveway and cut her head. And I was on the way to …”
She suddenly seemed about to cry.
“On my way to the emergency room in Beaufort County.”
E.J. was clearly confused.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing—”
“Neither do I!” Charlie was holding on
to her emotions by her fingernails. “I was in the car and the next thing I knew I was sitting in the bus shelter puking my guts out and I have no memory of anything in between!” She stopped. “Except static, a buzzing sound like a dial tone and a black light—” She heard herself. “Black light? Oh dear God I sound like I was abducted by aliens. That’d be funny if it weren’t so …”
Taking a deep, cleansing breath, she said, “Would you please … Sam said you might be willing to look at the cut on Merrie’s head. Maybe clean it or put on a proper bandage or something.”
“Of course I can,” he said in a soothing voice, proper bedside-manner mode, and Sam wondered why a veterinarian needed a bedside manner. Then she thought about the Rottweiler.
E.J. concentrated on the little girl Charlie called “Merrie.”
“Merrie, with an ‘ie’, not Mary,” Charlie explained. “Not that anybody but me knows or cares about the difference. Short for Meredith but I was always going to call her Merrie. As in Meriadoc Brandybuck.”
“And Pippin — I get it.”
And Sam absolutely did remember the characters from the three books they’d read in Mr. Fischer’s high school English class. Most of the class hated The Lord of the Rings but Sam had fallen head over heels in love with the story and the characters, as had Charlie … and Malachi Tackett, too, come to think of it. Sam had even tried to get the other girls on the basketball team to learn how to speak Elvish, so they could talk and the other team wouldn’t understand. That was a bust.
As E.J. worked, Sam studied Charlie without appearing to stare. She hadn’t changed much, was still small, by Sam’s definition of small which meant she was a normal-sized woman, probably five-five, and strikingly beautiful, her features perfectly matched. Sam had read that somewhere, that beauty was about symmetry, that the faces of beautiful people were perfectly symmetrical, eyes the same size and shape, eyebrows matching … things like that. Sam definitely didn’t make the cut under that definition, not with a lone dimple on her right cheek.
Charlie had the same air of confidence she’d had years ago, a standoffishness that had been universally interpreted in high school as snooty. Sam later recognized it for a maturity the others in the class didn’t have until later, when they’d earned it. Sam figured Charlie was that mature in high school because she’d earned it along the way there.
Princess Diana! That was it. Charlie’s thick, shiny brown hair was cut in the same hairstyle as the Princess of Wales. A shaggy short look Sam was sure required the regular ministrations of a hairdresser. But in between those visits, all Charlie — and the princess, of course — had to do was wash their hair and shake their heads and it’d dry perfect. At least that’s what the hairstyle magazines Sam read in the beauty parlor said.
Charlie was dressed casual — jeans and a plaid shirt, untucked. But it was a studied casual look, one that was accomplished by designer jeans, probably a button-down shirt from Macy’s, and the shoes were … what? Ballet shoes? No, something clearly expensive that was made to look like ballet shoes, like Jackie O or Audrey Hepburn would wear. Her nails were perfectly manicured and her only jewelry were diamond stud earrings. Small ones, not ostentatious. Yes sir, Charlie Ryan … McClintock … was a picture of casual elegance. Designed to appear spontaneous, the look was as stylishly calculated as Cinderella’s dress for the ball.
Sam took particular note of the jewelry Charlie wasn’t wearing — a wedding band. No rings at all on her left hand, but a ring on her right hand was weighed down by a rock the size of a raisin.
As soon as E.J. and Charlie were engaged in conversation, Sam felt awkwardly unnecessary and started to back up. “I’ll wait outside.”
“No,” Charlie said, too forcefully and she knew it. “I mean …” She reached out and took Sam’s hand. “Would you stay and …” She looked deeply into Sam’s eyes and it felt like some long unused connection was re-fastened. “Something’s very, very wrong here. You believe that, don’t you?”
That was scary, because some part of Sam did know that what had apparently happened to Charlie didn’t fit neatly between the fence posts of reality. It was off, outside, different in a way that made Sam uncharacteristically uneasy. She felt a chill go down her spine, dripping like ice water from one vertebra to the next.
Even if she hadn’t played dolls with Charlie on the playground every day during recess for years, it would have been clear that the woman standing before her was not mentally unbalanced. Freaked out, yes. Crazy … not so much.
So if she wasn’t nuts, what had happened to her? And for reasons she couldn’t identify, Sam suddenly did not want to know.
Chapter Eight
You’d think that after all he’d been through, the last thing Malachi Tackett would want was a gun in his hand. You’d think that once he got home, got out of uniform, washed away the filth from his body and the horror from his soul, he would swear off all weapons for the rest of his life. You’d think he’d be sickened by the mere sight of one.
But it felt good.
In fact, nothing at all in his whole life felt good except the rifle.
The only times he ever felt the fear begin to ebb away were times like this morning, out before first light, gliding unseen and unheard through the shadows of the trees, from one to the next, waiting for the first of the dawn birdsongs, eyes adjusted to the dark so he could make out which of the lumps on the tree limbs over his head were clumps of leaves and which ones were squirrels.
He had grown up hunting squirrels in these woods. And deer, wild turkeys, the occasional wild boar and all manner of winged creatures from a brace of doves for supper to a fat duck felled from its spot in the V formation rising up off a pond. Some of his best memories had been made here, the early ones, being a little kid caught up in the smell of damp leaves, the sparkle of diamond-studded dew drops on the lacy spiderwebs.
His father had brought him. His brothers had brought him. But he had lived for the day when he didn’t need anybody to accompany him, the day when his father had finally put this .22 rifle in his hands and told him to “skin whatever you git before you bring it home. Yore mama don’t want that mess on her back porch.”
The boy with an unruly shock of black hair the color of the coal under the mountains and eyes as clear blue as the reflection of the sky in the streams winding through the hollows had grown to manhood with a rifle in his hands.
Even now, even after all he’d seen, Malachi didn’t quite feel whole and complete without one. Even after he’d seen the way they were used on human prey.
In truth, most of the Rwandans didn’t use guns. Guns killed victims too quickly and ammo was expensive. They preferred to slaughter with the tools at hand, the machetes from the fields, the hunting knives, clubs with nails in them. When they fell upon a hut and massacred the family, sometimes they just used sticks or rocks to beat the occupants to death.
Malachai’d seldom been witness to the actual killing, but usually showed up while the blood was still flowing from severed limbs, before the hearts stopped beating. He’d drawn the short straw. While his buddies from the Gulf War were packed off to Bosnia, he was one of only a hundred combat troops sent to Rwanda to secure the airport there during “the unrest.” That’s all: just secure the airport. No one expected the sudden grassfire of carnage that erupted around them. The violence was swift and staggering. Between April and July, the Hutu tribe butchered more than 750,000 men, women and children from the Tutsi tribe. Three quarters of a million people in just a hundred days. The American soldiers in Rwanda were not tasked with preventing the carnage. But they saw it. Oh, my yes, they did see it for a fact.
There was a movement in the leaves of a sycamore tree just ahead and Malachi froze. He’d already racked a shell into the chamber and he slowly lifted the barrel of the rifle, put his eye to the X3 power scope and sighted on the squirrel, a fat gray one, perched on a limb sixty feet away. His mama’d told him once “squirrels ain’t nothing but rats with good PR,” and that m
ight be a fact, but he and his brothers had never gone out seeking fat rats for supper.
He hadn’t noticed the dawn light growing. Technically, it wasn’t “dawn” light, since it’d been dawn hours ago out there on the flat. But the sun didn’t crest the top of Beetroot Mountain until right about now and he’d been here waiting for it, watching it cast a glow into the tree shadows. His eyes searched the nearby foliage, looking to see how many of the fat gray squirrel’s cousins had shown up for an acorn breakfast this morning.
He lowered the rifle, took a quiet step toward the tree and then another to get a better angle. Then he lifted the barrel again. He had accidentally banged the rifle against the truck door a few days ago and knocked the adjustable scope off its zero, making all his shots low and to the right. He needed to readjust the scope. Until he got around to it, he compensated for that as he aimed. Another step and … he almost lost his balance, stumbled slightly when his boot connected with something on the ground.
Just a rock.
A round, white rock. About the size of a grapefruit.
And images of the soccer balls filled his head. At least that’s what he’d thought they were at first. But they were too small to be soccer balls and not the right color. They were balls of some kind, though. The floor of the hut was solid with them, side by side so snug up against each other there was no room in between. Who put balls on the ground in …?
Then he got it. Not balls, skulls.
And not adult skulls. These were too small. These were kids.
He hadn’t responded in any way. Nothing. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t puke all over his boots like the captain did. Showed no indication that it wasn’t an everyday occurrence in the life of Corporal Malachi Tackett to see all that remained of a couple of hundred children displayed as household decorations.
He’d seen some of the Rwandan soldiers had teeth necklaces. He didn’t let himself know they were teeth when he saw them. They were just white stones, that’s all. Of course, he knew what they were same as everybody else did, but if you let yourself know a thing like that … really know it as a human being, as a card-carrying member of the human race, the only possible reasonable response was a horror and outrage so monumental it might just rip your whole soul out of your chest.