Page 48 of Fear
“Half an hour. Tops. I promise. We just need some stuff. “You need some stuff that I can’t get, but I’ll buy other stuff for you anyway.
Tobias nodded. “I’m s-sorry,” he said in a small voice. “So sorry.”
Jake couldn’t respond to that. Didn’t trust his voice not to break. He might have felt better if he were in some kind of physical pain instead of whatever the hell kind of pain this was. He turned and left.
As the front door closed on his heels and he locked it automatically, it occurred to him that he’d been doing a lot of leaving lately. Despite how he knew that Tobias had no one else, and he was near-hopeless without Jake right now, he couldn’t shake the thought that maybe that was for the best.
The local all-night supermarket wasn’t that far away, and Jake cut minutes off the usual time. Yeah, he was speeding. Yeah, it was eleven p.m. on a Monday and no one was around.
He parked the Eldorado messily close to the front and jogged in. The staff glanced at him and then away, unconcerned.
Not until he was standing in the middle of the soup aisle with his arms full of things—white bread, NyQuil, Kleenex—did it hit home that he didn’t have the first fucking idea what he should be doing. He couldn’t even think back to when he’d been sick, because Hawthornes didn’t get sick.
Okay, not quite true. But he hadn’t gotten sick much as a kid, and when he had, Leon had just . . .
Fuck it, sometimes Leon had just been there, and times like that he hadn’t been Leon, he was Dad, and Dad had been perfect. Like he’d always known how to figure out the focus-object for a ghost or how to sneak up on a swamp monster, he just knew how to make Jake feel better. He had been there, with nasty cough syrup and hamburgers and the conviction that because Jake had always followed his orders, he would obey now when Leon told him Get your strength up. When Leon had said, “You’ll be fine, Jake,” it wasn’t a reassurance or a platitude. It was an order and the truth, and Jake knew it would be true just because his dad was saying it.
Other times Leon hadn’t been there, and Jake had just curled up on whatever bed, cot, mattress, or couch there was in their latest motel, apartment, hovel, or cabin, and slept until he could breathe again.
But now Jake was all that Tobias had, and he couldn’t waste time having some kind of mopey existential crisis in the middle of the fucking grocery store when Tobias needed him.
Jake bought six things of the wateriest chicken noodle soup he could find, plus some more cough drops. He had to shove the last can in his pocket, and the late-night cashier glared at him at checkout, probably convinced he was shoplifting whole turkeys in some pocket yet untapped. She asked him whether he wanted paper or plastic, and it didn’t sound like an offer, so he bagged his purchases himself and hurried out.
Carrying the stupid plastic bag was easier than holding everything in his arms. Jake couldn’t count the disasters that could have befallen Tobias while he was gone (falling out of bed, fever spiking, choking on vomit, just dead), and he tried not to think of them as he sped all the way home. It was probably dangerous the way the road blurred in front of him, swamped in images of Tobias shivering, Tobias coughing, Tobias unconscious or worse, but he didn’t fucking care. He had to get there and stop it, everything that was rapidly becoming his worst fear.
It was a kind of panic clogging his veins, his heart beating far too fast for the short trip from the grocery store to the apartment, and Jake thought that it would only get worse until he could see Tobias safe again.
He brought the Eldorado to a stop in the parking lot, and he realized that now, in order to make sure that Tobias was safe, he had to go inside. Suddenly, it was hard to put his hand on the door and push himself out of the car.
Jake leaned his forehead on the steering wheel and sucked in one deep breath after another, trying to get a grip on himself. He had to leave the safe shell of the Eldorado. He had to walk up those stairs with his stupid little cans of soup and help feed Tobias because he didn’t know how Tobias would get through this without him. Granted, he didn’t know how Tobias would get through it even with him, but Jake was the best option he had. Even though Jake didn’t know if he could hold it together long enough to do any good. Not when every time Tobias flinched away from him, it drove home the reminder that Tobias had no reason to trust him, and Jake was fucking this whole thing up, and how could he fix that? How could he survive not fixing that?
A huge part of Jake could not bear to go back inside to face Tobias’s fear with the knowledge that at least part of that terror was completely justified. But, eventually, the rest of him—the part convinced Tobias could die at any second, and the part who refused to ever walk away—got him out of the Eldorado, up those stairs, and through the door to where Tobias, and all he meant, waited for him.
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Jake sat on the side of Tobias’s bed and pushed a few damp hairs off his forehead.
Tobias had slept most of the day after drinking another mug of broth that morning. Jake figured that was good, even though Tobias’s temperature was still pretty high. He worried, but at least Tobias hadn’t been coughing as badly (though maybe that was normal, seeing as he’d been sleeping almost constantly), and he hadn’t vomited in nearly twenty-four hours.
Jake had tried to research Tobias’s symptoms online (the method worked for mutant spider bites after all, so it had to have some answers about whatever the hell Tobias had), but he’d ended up cracking and calling the local doctor’s clinic, just to see if he could get some general advice and a sense if this was serious or not. The nurse he spoke to was pretty nice—she didn’t ask any invasive questions that pinged his hunter radar, though she urged him to bring Tobias in. But she’d said it sounded like a run-of-the-mill viral infection that should disappear after a few days, and Jake should only worry if the fever spiked or continued for more than forty-eight hours. Jake thanked her, hung up, and tried to feel relieved. He’d gotten a professional opinion, after all. He tried not to think about how the nurse had no idea Tobias had been a FREACS inmate for most of his life. If this was something he had caught there, it might not be a run-of-the mill virus. And if he’d contracted the cough after they left, there was no guarantee that his skin-on-bones frame could fight it off.
So Jake had gone back to his vigil at Tobias’s bedside, watching him toss and turn with labored, gasping breaths. He wasn’t sleeping easily, but Jake hoped the little rest he got would help.
He wiped Tobias’s forehead again with a cool washcloth, then sighed and picked up the thermometer on Tobias’s bedside table, alongside the wide array of medicine he’d set out, Tobias’s two full water glasses, and a couple of dishes of broth that Tobias hadn’t eaten. He’d been judging Tobias’s fever roughly by the heat radiating from his forehead, but that wasn’t really accurate if Jake had to watch for spikes and couldn’t rely on his own nerves to judge what was too hot.
“Hey, Toby.” He brushed his thumb over the corner of Tobias’s mouth. “I need you to open up for me. Just for a sec.”
Tobias moaned, twisting onto his other side with his eyes screwed shut, but Jake persisted. Eventually, his coaxing opened Tobias’s mouth enough to slip the thermometer between his lips.
He didn’t like how still Tobias went the second the metal instrument touched his tongue, as though the thermometer held him immobile. Resting his hand on Tobias’s neck, Jake could feel the rapid pulse beneath his fingertips, but he couldn’t remember if it had been any slower just before.
When the thermometer beeped and Jake withdrew it—100.8 degrees, okay, that was a start of a decline—Tobias’s lips parted, and he panted hard before rolling onto his face with a heartbreaking, agonized whimper, so wretched that Jake felt it physically go through him like a wendigo’s claws.
“Hey, hey, Toby,” he said, leaning close and rubbing his back. “You okay? Something hurt? Talk to me, man.”
Tobias didn’t answer. His hands were scrabbling uselessly at the sheets, and his breath was even more labored. It sounded almost like he was on the edge of another collapse.
Repeating Tobias’s name, a litany as desperate and earnest as an exorcism (and not helping, fuck, Tobias wasn’t responding at all), Jake maneuvered Tobias onto his side so he wasn’t mashing his face into the pillow, giving him room to breathe, room to move. Maybe just so he could be doing something while Tobias—still mostly delirious—panicked right in front of him for reasons he didn’t understand.
Tobias sobbed, a broken and hopeless sound, and shrank away from Jake’s touch, drawing his arms and knees to his chest in a ball. “No, no, please, Jake—please don’t—I’m sorry, I’ll be better, just please don’t—”
