Page 70 of Freak
This was the time to hand responsibility over to people who knew him. She’d done all she could for him. Now she needed to find her own man.
“Make sure nothing touches his back.” Holding out the half-empty bottle of cider to Nacto, she added, “If he can, let him swallow more of this. It’s the only real pain relief we’ve got, I think. That’s all I can do, I’m sorry. I need to find Mel.”
The look Nacto gave her as he took the bottle from her hand made something pop in her chest, and worry flooded through her.
“I’m sorry, hon. Mel’s down.”
“Down? What do you mean? Where? What doesdownmean?!”
Nacto didn’t answer with words. Instead, he put his arm around her and turned her to face the fire, and the bloodied battlefield around it. “I don’t know, I just heard he was down. I think the Missouri van has him—there.”
Abigail grabbed her skirt in both hands and ran.
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~oOo~
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The last time Abigailhad sat in a hospital waiting room, she’d been waiting for doctors to confirm what she’d already known: her grandmother was gone.
Abigail had been twenty-six years old and just settling into the idea that her future would be like her past: she and Granny Kate alone in the hills, each other and their little gathering of livestock as their main companions. She’d never had a strong desire for a different life, but as a young woman she’d hoped for romance, thought maybe someday a nice man would move in and they’d start a new generation. By twenty-six, she’d accepted that there weren’t enough nice men within the small circle of her days, at least not enough who noticed her.
That morning, she’d been surprised to wake to a silent house, and fully shocked to descend to the kitchen and find it empty. By the time she reached her grandmother’s closed door, Abigail knew what she’d find on the other side: the physical remnants of a finished life. Though everything had been fine the day before, Granny nearing eighty but spry and full of life, Abigail knew, and her heart had broken before she turned the knob.
She’d been both right and wrong. Granny lay in her bed, stiff and silent, but not cold. One side of her face had lost all its tone and form, and a rivulet of saliva slid down the velvet skin of her cheek to a large wet spot on the pillow. When Abigail pressed her fingers to the side of Granny’s neck, she felt a faint beat, fast and erratic, and Granny made a tiny, wavering whimper.
In her head, Abigail knew it was too late. She also knew that her grandmother was deeply suspicious of the modern world and especially of hospitals. Not doctors, per se, but hospitals, full of strange machines and warehoused people. In her head, Abigail knew what her grandmother would want: to be left in her own bed, to be allowed to go when her body stopped. She knew she should pull up the old rocking chair from the corner, sit by her grandmother’s side, hold her hand, and let her go.
But in her heart, Abigail saw her grandmother, the only person who’d ever truly cared for her in her life. Her only parent, her only friend, her only companion to share a conversation with, to seek advice from, to tell her hopes and dreams and fears to. In her heart, Abigail couldn’t face a life without her Granny Kate. A life completely alone. So she’d gone to the phone and dialed 911.
She’d been sitting in this very waiting room—redecorated but still the same—when a doctor who knew neither Abigail or her grandmother sat beside her and told her a truth she’d already known. Granny Kate had had a massive stroke, likely not long after she’d retired the night before, and they had not been able to save her.
Abigail had not laid eyes on Granny Kate since the ambulance doors had closed with her inside it. She hadn’t said goodbye, because she’d been fighting against the need to.
Since that day, Abigail had told herself and anyone else to whom she’d ever had cause to speak of it, that Granny Kate had died where she’d lived, exactly how she’d always wanted: in her bed, in her sleep. She didn’t think she could live alone all her days with the truth.
She’d told herself the easier story so often and for so long that it had become the only truth she knew.
Until this night. Until now, when she sat on a different chair in the same room and waited to know if the only other person she’d ever been able to call hers would leave her, too.
Now she remembered what she’d done. Her selfishness. Her useless, impotent selfishness.
Tonight, though, she was where she belonged, and so was Mel. He was in bad trouble, and she didn’t know if he’d live, but she was confident he’d want to get this help.
He’d been shot twice, in the belly and in the side of the neck. He’d lost gouts of blood, and he’d been grey and unconscious when Bart and Dom had put him in the back of the van, lying on a similar kind of stretcher as the one bearing the burned man named Mane.
She hadn’t been able to ride in the back with him because Saxon lay on another stretcher beside Mel. Saxon had been stabbed multiple times.
Other people, including other members of the three Horde charters, had been injured enough to need the hospital as well. Kellen Frey had a broken arm or dislocated shoulder, she wasn’t sure. Badger had a nasty gash across his face. Showdown needed stitches and had a concussion. Men in SoCal or Montana kuttes she didn’t know had also limped or been wheeled or carried into the ER. And a few townspeople, too. At least a dozen folks, all told, had needed more than a first-aid kit to recover from the night.
It was all awful. Just truly, shockingly awful. Abigail was terrified for Mel. And for herself. She was worried about all the hurt people, about the tension that had sparked such internecine violence, about what it would mean for Signal Bend and the Night Horde. Fear and worry roiled in her belly and turned its contents to a painful froth.
But there was something else she felt, something that made the rest of it bearable, despite its bitter horror.
She wasn’t alone.
This waiting room teemed with people she knew, or at least who were there for the same reason she was: people who were sharing the same horrors of the same night. Night Horde patches, Signal Bend residents, family members, friends, men and women, a few children, all of them talking in clusters or pacing with stress or sitting in quiet fretfulness. Despite the violence they’d perpetrated on each other only hours before, the different charters of the Night Horde were mingled calmly now, seemingly allied again, the way she’d heard happened among big families sometimes—the making up after a blowout among bonded people.
