“Nathan, rest. For the sake of your sons, rest. Get well. You’ve got pneumonia. You’re drowning in your own body! Stop trying to fix everything for everyone else. You are only making things worse for yourself! You driving yourself to your death will make it worse for the rest of us, but especially Tony and Brandon! Life isn’t an internal combustion engine! You can’t fix everything!”
They had reached the bed, and Nathan sank toward it like a wrecked ship touching bottom—all broken spars and collapsing rigging. He lay back on the sheets, raising a hand toward Lucy. “But… I’ve… Dave…”
Lucy took Nathan’s hand and put it back on the bed—she clearly wasn’t in the mood for listening. “Nathan, so help me, if you don’t shut up and get on with healing yourself, I’m going to knock you out myself. We got this. I’ve got this. So have Tommy, Donie, and Free. I’ve given them the last of my gold—oh my, that so hurts, saying that—but I have. We’re good to stay here until Dave’s arm is fixed and you’re better. Now shut up and rest!”
But Nathan couldn’t rest; he needed to tell them about the idea he had for Dave’s arm—one that wouldn’t need surgery, and one that would give the bones in his arm time to knit, but the words were stuck in his chest. Kicked down by the cough that burst up on ragged ropes of phlegm.
It was the worst bout of throat-hacking pain he had yet experienced. His neck felt like it was going to split open on all sides and deliver his lungs onto his chest to steam and roil in their own blood. His hands clawed at the bed, his eyes becoming pools of pneumonia-enhanced tears; his head was filling with foam and his nostrils were blocked as surely as if he’d been holding them closed himself.
The breath left him with a thump, his chest banging and groaning. His heart trip-hammering through his torso. Blackness washed up behind his eyes so that Lucy and Dave were rubbed out of his vision as the lack of oxygen, and the pressure of coughing so hard as this, delivered him panicking and crying through the well-mouth of darkness into a deep drop of unconsciousness.
“Hey, honey, you’re home early.” Cyndi appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a cloth. There was a thin dusting of flour on the front of her red sweater. She’d been baking, and Nathan had been able to smell it as soon as he’d walked through the door. The house was warm, and the bright day was spilling its summer light through the windows that fronted the house. Nathan closed the front door on the insect buzzing valley and heeled off his work boots before he could traipse in any oil that might have stuck to them from his morning in the auto shop.
Summer in Glens Falls was hot and beautiful—and so, Nathan thought with an inward smile, was his wife.
“Yeah. Decided I could cope with only half a Saturday today. Free’s working on a couple of things for me, and pretty much pushed me out and home.”
Cyndi came up to Nathan, put her now clean hands on his cheeks, and kissed him long and hard on the mouth. He could smell the warmth of the kitchen on her, the flour and the underlying aroma of her perfume. He hadn’t been expecting the kiss, and took time, as he responded, to make sure Tony wasn’t in the vicinity.
Cyndi broke the kiss, tutted, and then put Nathan’s hands deliberately on her waist. “He’s over at Stanley’s place, playing video games. Nan picked him up at twelve. We have the whole afternoon to ourselves.”
Nathan suddenly got the idea that everything was going to Cyndi’s plan. Tony at his friend’s house five miles away, and Free pushing to get rid of him early for the last two hours…
“You’ve been working me by remote control, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Isn’t that the best way?” She winked and brushed the flour off the front of her sweater with the cloth she held. “We haven’t had any us time for too long, baby. Sometimes it’s worth pulling a few strings to make sure I get you to myself for a few hours. And, after that… there will be cake.”
“Today is just getting better and better.”
Cyndi smiled, threw the cloth onto her shoulder, and frizzed her blonde hair with quick fingers. “So, you shower and I’ll make some icing.”
“You’re the icing,” Nathan said with a smile so wide that the top of his head might have lifted off.
Nathan went to shower as Cyndi went back to the kitchen. The water pressure felt incredible against his skin as he washed the morning’s work from his skin. As he got out of the cubicle and started to rub himself down with a freshly laundered towel, he heard Cyndi jogging up the stairs and heading along the hallway to the bedroom, with a joyous shout that she expected him within the next three minutes or she’d start without him.
Nathan laughed.
Stryker Wilson laughed, too.
Nathan spun around, and Stryker, his old friend from college, was standing in the bathroom—his long, straggly hair, dirty surfer blond, falling onto the shoulders of his heinously busy Hawaiian shirt. Stryker held out Nathan’s bathrobe.
“Looks like you’ve got a hell of an afternoon ahead of you, my friend!” Stryker said as Nathan took the robe and used it, without putting it on, to cover his nakedness.
“Stryker… dude… what are you doing in my bathroom?”
“I honestly don’t know. One minute, I was shooting your missus’ heart out all over the tarmac; next, I was here. God, man, that cake smells delicious, doesn’t it?”
Nathan took a good few seconds to parse out what Stryker had said, and then… “You shot… Cyndi?”
“Yeah, man. Bullet was totally meant for you, but the plucky woman got in the way. Aren’t they adorable when they do that?”
Nathan could smell burning… no, not burning, but something like it… it was a smell he thought he recognized. Not one that, thankfully, he’d had to smell that often, but one, now he identified it in his nostrils, that made him more than uneasy.
Cordite.
Stryker held up a pistol. There was smoke coming from the barrel as if it had just been fired.
“It’s not cordite,” Cyndi said.
Nathan turned, and there she was in the doorway, her blue silk robe hanging around her body. What it revealed was almost as interesting as what it concealed, but Cyndi seemed not at all concerned to see Stryker in the room.
“What?” Nathan asked. “What isn’t cordite?”
“What you can smell after a gun has been fired. Anyone who calls it the smell of cordite doesn’t know what they’re talking about—unless they’re talking historically.” Cyndi walked into the bathroom and took the gun from Stryker’s willing hand. “There’s hasn’t been cordite in gunpowder for seventy years. These days, it’s sawdust soaked in nitroglycerin that you can smell when a gun is fired. Schoolboy error, really.”
Cyndi squinted down the barrel of the pistol, a chunky black 9mm SIG Sauer, cleared the mag, checked it, and then snapped it back in.
Then she did something that Nathan could not comprehend.
Cyndi smiled, turned the gun around and, putting her thumb through the guard, placed the muzzle of the gun on that crinkly piece of skin at the apex of her breasts, the silk of her robe falling open slightly—maintaining her modesty, but revealing the gun placed there in the center of her chest.
“No!” Nathan shouted as he stepped forward waving his hand, hoping to knock the gun away from Cyndi. But his fingers didn’t reach her. Even though he was just two feet away, his arm was not long enough to reach her.
He took another step.
His fingers moved uselessly through the air.
Stryker had moved, and he was behind Cyndi now. His face was set in a grimace, and there was a bullet hole right in the center of his forehead. The ragged wound was open and illuminated, and Nathan could see the damage it had done to Stryker’s inner skull. But it didn’t seem to affect him in any way at all.
In fact, he was still smiling.
In a near blind panic now, Nathan took four more steps forward that should have carried him past Cyndi and Stryker into the shower cubicle… but he was still in front of his wife.
“So, rem
ember, Nate. When you smell the powder. It’s not cordite. It’s nitroglycerine, okay? It’s important to get this stuff right.”
Nathan felt his throat burning in a scream that was threatening to tear apart his head and explode his brain.
“Love you,” Cyndi said, just as Stryker gave a cute little wave from behind her.
Cyndi pulled the trigger.
Nathan screamed, and it was the worst thing he could have done. It was a full minute before he could return his body from the excruciatingly twisted position he’d bent into to simultaneously cough out his insides while stopping himself from rolling from the bed. He snapped out a hand against the headrest and tried to steady himself.
Miriam was sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for Nathan to stop coughing, waiting with tablets and a glass water.
The room was gloomy and the skylight dark, but there was enough light to see that Dave’s bed was empty. The panic and fear Nathan had felt in the dream washed through him.
“Dave… where… is…”
Miriam soothed Nathan’s brow and popped the tablet into his mouth with quick fingers. “Now, don’t you worry about David. He’s fine, up and about and doing well.”
Nathan blinked, the residual upset yo-yoing up and down between his gut and his head.
“But… I have to tell you… I have to stop…”
“You don’t have to stop anyone or anything, Nathan. It’s done. Free made the immobilizer and we fitted it two days ago. Brilliant idea, by the way. Absolutely brilliant.”
Nathan didn’t understand. It had just been morning—seeing the welding sparks above on the turbine had given him the idea. He hadn’t been able to tell anyone, though. Miriam was talking in riddles.
Was he still in the dream? Nathan looked wildly around the infirmary, half expecting to see Cyndi’s corpse at Stryker’s feet in the corner. But other than Miriam, the room was empty.
“What… what are… you talking about?”
Breathing was hard, but it definitely felt easier. The pressure in his head had lessened, too. Lessened to the point where thoughts weren’t lost in a stew of feverish pain.
Miriam stroked Nathan’s cheek and smoothed the rumpled collar of his pajama jacket. “Nathan, the pneumonia hit you extremely hard; in the end, we had to give you antibiotic shots. Lucy, Free, and Donie have been here when they could, sponging you down and keeping you company.”
Nathan had no memory of this at all. It was like someone had cut a huge blank hole right in the middle of his memory.
“Keeping… me company…? How… long have I…?”
“Nathan, you’ve been unconscious, apart from a few minutes here or there, for the last three days.”
8
The news hit him like a steam hammer.
Three days? He’d been out of it for three days?
Sure, he felt like he hadn’t eaten since the world had been made, and his mouth felt claggier than a mud pie cake. His muscles were badly frayed ropes and his eyes felt like they’d been rolled in sand, but still… three days?
“That’s… not…”
“I’m afraid it is, Nathan. You woke up enough and just about dragged Freeson onto the bed with you to tell him about your idea for David. Freeson talked it over with Caleb and Larry, and the three of them made the tube and we fitted it to Dave’s arm two days ago.”
There was nothing in his memory that even came close to explaining any of this news. The fever and the pneumonia had sucked the life out of him. He looked down at his chest, rising and falling in a pair of Paisley-patterned pajamas that he didn’t recognize, and which he certainly hadn’t been wearing the last time he’d been awake.
The bedsheets looked clean and fresh, and there was a hand-drawn card with a smiley face on the bedside table. Someone had drawn a big red truck and a bright yellow sun with the words ‘Get Well Soon Daddy’ across it. He had no recollection of ever being given it by Tony, or by anyone else, for that matter.
The last things he really remembered were the surgery conference, the arcing lights through the skylight, and Lucy shouting at him.
Anything else was lost to him.
The immobilizer idea had come to Nathan as a compromise between radical surgery and doing nothing at all. A hinged metal tube that would go snug around Dave’s arm when the bones had been put accurately into place. Sponge rubber at both ends to stop the edges of the metal from chafing Dave’s skin. The hinge would allow it to be opened periodically so that the wound could be cleaned and the stitches monitored. The arm would be kept in a tight sling against Dave’s chest—immobilized in a secondary way—and all that would save Dave needing to have a major operation that could have exposed him to even great risk of infection and nerve damage.
“It worked… then… the tube?”
“It certainly has for now. You missed your vocation, Nathan. You should have been a doctor! That kind of thinking would have sent you quite a way up the ranks.” Miriam seemed genuinely impressed and pleased enough to compliment him.
Nathan just shook his head. “I can’t remember telling anyone at all about it. Not one thing.”
“Believe me,” Miriam replied, “for the few times you were awake, you couldn’t stop telling us about it. Even after Freeson had made it and we had fitted it to David’s arm, you wouldn’t stop. In the end, we just let you babble on.”
Although the horrific dream about Cyndi and Stryker was still a kernel of horror in the center of his thinking, Nathan allowed himself an incredulous smile.
See, Lucy? I can fix everything!
Tony holding Brandon, with Dave in tow, came to visit Nathan a few hours later in the so-called infirmary. Tony’s face was wide and bright. Brandon gurgled happily and watched Nathan intently as he sat up on the bed.
Dave pointed to his immobilized arm. “Tony keeps asking me when the rest of me will change into Tony Stark,” he said with a grin, ruffling Tony’s hair.
“Iron Man has a nuclear heart, too,” Tony said, tapping Dave’s steel-covered arm.
“Your daddy’s good, but I don’t think he’s that good, and right now, my heart’s doing just fine.”
Dave reached down to the bed with his free hand and shook Nathan’s. “Thanks, man. Really… it’s genius. How did you come up with it?”
“Genuinely… it came… to me… in a… flash.”
It felt good to smile, and it felt even better to see his sons. Tony perched on the edge of the bed, cradling Brandon in his arms. His eyes were brimming with joy and his voice was full of excitement. “Uncle Free took me up one of the turbines, Daddy. They have a ladder all the way up inside…”
That cut through Nathan’s thinking like a wrecking ball. His eyes flicked up to the skylight, to the turbine turning above the building. At almost three hundred feet from earth to blade housing, the windmill was an impressive, and when he really thought about it, scary height. Tony, his Tony, had been up there?
“Wait, you… went all the… way up?”
Tony nodded, wide-eyed, and not at all seeing a problem with the trip he’d made. “It’s okay—there’s a safety line, and I didn’t look down. There’s metal floors every fifty feet. It was amazing. When you get to the top, in the…”—he thought for a moment, trying to get the right word—“the nacelle… there’s a hatch that lifts right up, and you can see the blades and all the world. All of it.”
Nathan didn’t like the sound of that at all. He’d certainly have vetoed the idea if he’d known it was happening, and he resolved to have words with Free as soon as he saw him, but the raw enthusiasm from the boy was infectious. It was the first time since Cyndi had died that the boy from before had peeked out of his shell. Perhaps Nathan should be grateful to ‘Uncle’ Free for helping his boy have what seemed to have been the experience of a lifetime. Nathan knew that, when he’d been Tony’s age, his head had been full of engines and carburetors and axels and timing chains. Mechanics had been his life, mainly because of his daddy before him. And it seemed that, i
f nothing else, his love of machinery had rubbed off on his eldest son.
He just wasn’t so sure of him expressing his love for these machines three hundred feet in the air.
“I stayed in the nacelle while Uncle Free and Larry went out to fix the, uh, adjuster vane… this spinning thing that tells the machinery to turn the blades into the wind. It’s like the old-time windmills, Larry said. But they’re running out of parts, and when a vane goes wrong, they have to go up there and fix it real soon. Because if the blades don’t turn into the wind enough, then the whole thing might blow over! Dad, it was super cool. When you’re better and can climb, can we go again? Please?”
The tumble of words from Tony’s mouth were the most Nathan had heard from his son in months. He didn’t want to transmit his worry about Tony going to the summit of one of the turbines to the boy yet, either, and so all he did was smile and stroke the baby’s head.
Miriam hustled in at that point and sent the visitors on their way. “Your daddy still needs to rest. He’s not out of the woods yet, boys. Come back and see him in the morning.”
Tony was yawning anyway—it was near eleven-thirty at night, and he sleepily kissed Nathan on the cheek and left the room with Dave.
“He’s a good boy,” Miriam said, straightening the sheets around Nathan and tucking him in. “I’ll be in the chair over there if you need anything. Just call.”
Nathan nodded. “Thank you.”
And with that, Miriam tuned off the light.
Three days later, Nathan was fit enough to leave his bed and join the others in the bar for breakfast. Miriam told him not to exert himself. Although the antibiotics had done their job, he was still weak and would be easily tired out.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 58