Cured (13 page)

“But
I
do, and Bowen does. Trust me.” He claps his hand on my shoulder. “I'll find them again.”

After what feels like hours of walking, we pass the last neighborhood and start going up into the foothills at the base of the mountains. I stop and let my exhausted body sag.

Kevin stops a few paces ahead of me. “Do you need a break?”

I shake my head. “No. I'm fine.” It's a total lie. My bones feel like rubber trying to support lead muscles, but I'm not going to tell him that.

Kevin reaches into his pants pocket. “Here.” He holds something out, and I lift my hand, palm up. He places a small round thing in my hand.

I squeeze and feel a hard lump wrapped in paper. “What is it?”

“Bubblegum.”

I gasp and bring it to my nose, inhaling.

“Unwrap it first!”

I pull the two paper ends and the gum spins out of the wrapper. I pop it into my mouth and a surge of joy mixed with nostalgia fills me as I'm taken back to autumn nights trick-or-treating with my brothers. I love bubblegum. It is as hard as a rock, but after a minute of gnawing on it, the sugar bursts into my mouth and down my throat and seems to zoom into my body.

Reenergized, I take a step forward, and Kevin takes my hand. His hand swallows mine in warmth and he starts gently pulling me uphill. “What are you doing?” I ask, twisting my hand away from him.

“Helping you.” He takes my hand again and pulls me. It feels awkward, having a guy hold my hand, and makes my heart beat a little bit faster than it already is. But I'm too tired to fight it. Our feet snap the twigs and branches that litter the ground—a constant reminder that everything is dead. After a while, the bubblegum loses its sweetness and turns tough in my mouth. I spit it out and keep pressing forward, letting Kevin help pull me uphill.

When the moon has moved over half the sky, Kevin squeezes my hand. “We're almost there.”

I blink my grainy eyes and look around. I don't know where
there
is, but it doesn't look like we're almost anywhere. We're struggling up the side of a shrub- and tree-skeleton-covered slope. Well, I'm struggling. Kevin's not. Even though he's wearing my backpack
and
pulling on my hand, he acts like we're out on a happy little hike, about to have a picnic.

I stop walking and let my eyes close, and the world seems to spin around me. My jaw softens, my breathing slows, and my brain fills with dark cotton.

“Jack,” Kevin whispers. I peel open my heavy eyelids. He's standing right in front of me, his face mere inches from mine. I jump and take a step back, pulling my hand from his. “I think you were asleep,” he says. “We're almost there. I promise. Come on.”

He takes my hand again and pulls me into a dense copse of some kind of dead bushes that scratch my arms and catch on my clothes. If I had long hair, the thorns would be catching in the tangles. No brittle branches snap beneath our feet, and it occurs to me that the ground has been cleared of loose tinder, whether for firewood or to make it silent, I can't say. But it makes me wonder about this Kevin person I'm blindly following. He's smart. He's a survivor. He's a fast runner. And he could take me down in two seconds, tired or not.

He leads me to a small shrub and bends, pulling it out of the ground. I blink and try to see more clearly what he is doing. No, he's not uprooting a dead shrub, he's lifted a perfect square of ground with a dead shrub attached to it, revealing a dark hole a little wider than a car tire. He steps into the hole and disappears, as if the darkness has gobbled him up. I peer into the sphere of black.

“What is this?” I whisper, eyeing the rungs of a ladder that lead into the darkness.

“A fortified structure,” Kevin says, his voice coiling up from the darkness. “It's quite cozy. In fact, it's my home.”

I look around. I'm more than halfway up the foothills, in a totally secluded area. What if he's leading me into a trap? What if there are ten men hiding below, waiting for me? What if Kevin's a murderer? I clasp my head in my hands and try to silence the what-ifs.

“Jack.” His voice carries right up to me.

“What?”

“I know what you're thinking.”

I doubt it.

“Have your gun out if that makes you feel better. I swear you're going to be safe down here.”

Okay, so he does know what I'm thinking. I study the surrounding terrain again. Fresh sweat breaks out on the bridge of my nose and I feel like I might vomit. Not that there's anything in my stomach—the oysters are long digested. I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do. But what other choice do I have?

I take a deep breath, take my gun from my belt, and then step into darkness.

The best hiding place is one that doesn't seem to exist. If I go down, I will never be found. I hope that is a good thing.

I pull the square piece of earth shut above me. With every step down, my muscles wind tighter, so by the time I reach the bottom of the ladder, I feel like a jack-in-the-box, ready to burst, and my palms are so damp I can hardly hold my gun.

My feet touch down on packed dirt, and cool air coats my face with sticky dampness. I turn and face a doorway spilling out orange light and step through onto a clean cement floor. My mouth falls open.

“Good thing there aren't any flies down here. You would be catching your dinner,” Kevin says, followed by a laugh. He is standing beside the door—beside me. He puts his index finger under my chin and snaps my mouth shut. It falls back open.

With his uninjured arm, Kevin moves me a little deeper inside and then steps out the door and starts up the ladder.

“I shut the top,” I say without taking my eyes from his home.

“I'm going to lock it.” His feet thump on the ladder.

I am standing in a large room lit by two sputtering kerosene lamps. There's a worn brown tweed sofa against one wall, with two brown leather chairs facing it, and a coffee table between them. A red threadbare rug is laid out on the cement floor under the table. But the most shocking thing is the sculptures. Wire sculptures. A rabbit and a frog made of yards and yards of barbed wire perch on the coffee table, staring at each other. Wire cowboy boots and a wire saddle hang from the wall. And then there are hands, lots and lots of hands, in all positions—clenched into fists, fingers splayed, clasped in prayer, holding wire flowers.

On the far side of the room is a wooden chair with the chest and torso of a wire man sitting in it. Beside the chair is a box filled with tools—wire cutters, pliers, a blowtorch, a metal file. And next to that is a closed door.

“So, what do you think?”

With a jolt I realize I've let my guard down, and Kevin is standing right behind me with his hands in his pants pockets. Still holding my gun, I turn and study him by the light of the lamps. His hair is a couple of shades darker than copper and touches his shoulders, and his eyes are the color of the sky at sunrise. I tilt my head to the side. It is the first good look I've gotten of him, and I'm surprised to discover there's something familiar about him. Maybe it's because I've been in his presence
for a few hours and, whether I've actually seen his face or not, I've sort of gotten to know him.

He takes his hands out of his pockets and gently pries my gun from my icy fingers. Without a word, he removes the magazine and then hands both pieces back to me. “I'm not going to hurt you, so you don't need to keep that loaded down here.”

I nod and holster the gun, and tuck the magazine with nineteen bullets into my pants pocket. “Did you make all of these?”

His eyes light up. “Yeah. When I was a kid, my grandpa took me to a museum in Denver that had a woman and child sculpted out of barbed wire. I wanted to be a sculptor when I grew up. I get lonely down here sometimes and needed something to do to keep myself busy, so I figured I might as well learn how to sculpt with wire. One day I'll get brave and finish him.” He nods at the torso. “Or try sculpting a face. If I live long enough.” He grimaces and looks at his cut arm. “Now, if you don't mind, I need you to fix this.” Skepticism plain in his furrowed brow, he looks at me. “You really do know how to suture, right?” I nod. “In that case, follow me.”

He picks up my backpack and both kerosene lamps and leads me through the door at the far end of the room—beside the wire torso.

Another shock waits on the other side. I walk into a kitchen, complete with a small table and two chairs, two burners, a sink, a small stove, and a microwave. Metal cupboards line the walls on my left and my right, and I can't help myself. I walk up to a cupboard and open it. Shock number four: it is packed with giant labeled cans of food.
Flour. Beans. Red wheat. Dehydrated onions.
Dehydrated eggs. Powdered butter. Buttermilk pancake mix. Baby formula
. I reach for the pancake mix and practically weep. It is full!

Kevin clears his throat and I put the canister back. He's standing by the sink, a first-aid kit in his hands. “You have to pump the water in, but there's an endless supply, so use what you need. The waste water is pumped into an underground stream and flushed out.”

I nod. “Take off your shirt.” The words make my cheeks flame, so I turn to the sink and start pumping the water handle. Water flows from the faucet and I scrub my hands with a small cake of white soap. Next, I open the bottom right pocket on my tackle vest and remove a small plastic bag. Beside me, Kevin begins unbuttoning his shirt, once a shade of blue but now more of a tan. By the light of the lamps, everything about him is a faded shade of brown. He looks like a sepia photograph of the old West.

Easing his shirt off, he drops it into the empty sink, but when he tries to loosen the fabric bandage from his arm, sweat breaks out on his face and the air hisses between his teeth. I take a closer look at his wound and my stomach turns. I've seen a lot of wounds. I've doctored a lot of wounds under my father's supervision. I wish my father were here right now because the fabric bandage has gotten stuck in the coagulated blood.

I take my knife from my belt and flip out the blade. Kevin studies me with wary eyes but doesn't say anything as I slice the excess fabric from the bandage. “Maybe if we soak the fabric, it will come off more easily.”

He nods and leans into the sink. I pump the water for him.
When he's thoroughly drenched the wound, he moves a chair from the small table to the side of the counter and sits. Very gently, I attempt to peel the dripping fabric from his flesh while he studies my face.

“So, how'd you learn to do this?” He talks to me like we're old friends.

“My dad's an oral surgeon. He's been teaching me how to do this type of thing since I was . . .” I close my mouth. Since I was about thirteen, which is a year older than I am pretending to be.

“Since you were what?”

I glance up at him and start to tuck my hair behind my ears … until I remember I don't have hair to tuck. Nervous habits are hard to break. “Old enough to learn how to do it,” I say, and gently tug at the fabric.

Kevin groans. “You're killing me, Jack.”

“Sorry.”

“Hold on.” He pinches the bandage between his finger and thumb. “You know the easiest way to remove a sticky Band-Aid?” In one swift yank he rips the fabric from his skin. His scream explodes into the room. I can picture the sound filling the other room, rushing up the ladder, and bursting out into the night like a beacon for every living thing within five miles. I clasp my hands over his mouth and hold the sound in. Tears stream down his cheeks and wash over my fingers, but he stops screaming and whimpers instead. Slowly, I let go.

“For the love of . . .” He wipes his eyes and sniffles. “These aren't tears. I am not crying,” he gasps. “My eyes are just dripping from the shock of that.”

My face does something that it hasn't done in days and days, maybe even months. The edges of my mouth quirk up. Just a little bit. Kevin notices and smiles back even though he's gone pale and tears are still dripping from his eyes. “Apparently the featherweight likes pain.”

“As long as it's someone else's.” Even my voice has a smile in it, and something tiny and warm flickers inside me for a moment, before fading back to darkness.

I clean his freshly bleeding wound, douse it with antiseptic from the first-aid kit, and then open the small packet I took from my vest—a curved suture needle with a long strand of thread attached. “This is really going to hurt without you being numbed.”

“I figured,” Kevin says, grimacing and leaning away from his wound. He grips the back of the chair with his right hand. “Ready.”

I pinch the wound closed and ease the half-moon needle into his skin, looping it underneath the cut and through the skin on the other side. Kevin gasps and squeezes his eyes shut. There's a lot of fresh blood, so after each stitch I wipe the wound with the wet bandage. The cut is long, about two inches. It takes me several minutes to sew it together. Kevin doesn't say a thing, just groans through gritted teeth and keeps his face averted while I work. When I'm done, I tie off the thread and slather the wound with more antiseptic.

“All done,” I say.

Kevin, face ashen and damp with sweat, takes a look at his swollen, bloody wound. “Not bad.” He stands and puts his face in the sink. “How about you give me a little water.”

I push the water lever and he lets the icy flow cover his face.
After a few seconds he stands up out of the water and looks at me. “Turn around and let me see your neck.”

I do what he says. He leans in close and his breath brushes over the soft skin behind my ears. Gently, he folds down the collar of my tackle vest and I shiver at his touch. “I need you to take this thing off.”

“No!” I turn to face him and wrap my arms over my chest. Heat scorches its way up my neck, over my ears, and sears my face. “It hardly even hurts. It can't be that bad,” I blurt.