“What the hell is going on here?” Poole shouted over the bedlam. He’d rushed out of one of the two examining rooms and into the chaotic waiting room. He immediately ran to his receptionist, holding her bleeding nose, and tried to lift her up.
“Just get his ass sedated, Doc,” yelled one of the deputies, battling Willis. The cop managed to smack Willis in the temple with the butt of his Maglite, but it seemed only to stun him. In a moment Willis was at it again, kicking out with both his feet like a wild animal. The deputy struck Good a second time, much harder. Willis went limp, knocked unconscious by the blow. Poole broke for the drug cabinet in the hallway and began rifling the drawers, frantically looking for something he could knock Willis out with.
Willis’ eyes were bloodshot and frightened when he regained consciousness two hours later.
“Willis, are you all right, son?” Dr. Poole asked. It was quiet. The two sheriff’s deputies had stayed behind until they too were called away by another emergency—some kind of riot at the Target on Highway 50. Marvin had assured them he could handle Willis. It seemed as if Timberline had been turned upside down in the matter of a few hours.
Marvin closed the door to the examination room. He’d had to send his receptionist home after bandaging her broken nose. The waiting room was a mess, his patients long gone. The chairs and tables all turned over. The men had struggled with Good a second time, until Poole had finally jabbed Willis with a 25-milligram dose of Haloperidol that had knocked him out almost immediately.
“Are they here yet?” Willis asked, looking up at the doctor.
“Who?” Marvin asked.
Willis started to get up, swinging his feet off the examination table. “What time is it, doctor?”
“Four o’clock,” Marvin said.
“What day?”
“Tuesday.”
“Have they gotten here yet?” Willis asked.
“Who?”
“The things. The things we saw, T.C. and I. Where’s T.C.? T.C. Where is he?”
“T.C.?”
“T.C. McCauley, goddamn it. He saved my life out there,” Willis said. He tried to sit up.
The doctor put his hand on his chest. Poole had cut Willis’ shirt off so that he was naked from the waist up. Good’s shoulders were very pale under the examination room’s harsh fluorescent lights. His jeans had been cut away from his wound, Marvin having cut his pants up the thigh so he could work on the bleeding leg. Willis had a horrible laceration, now stitched up—thirty reddish stitches visible and running from Good’s left knee all the way to his upper thigh. The young man’s face was drawn and ashen from the loss of blood. He seemed to Marvin to have aged ten years.
“I don’t know,” Marvin said. “You had a bad injury from the crash.”
Willis began to laugh. A portion of hair was missing from his scalp. Marvin had cut the tangled bloody hair off the side of Willis’ head, thinking he’d been cut there too. Clumps of hair and shirt covered the floor at Poole’s feet. The doctor glanced down at the mess of hair and bloody clothes. Have to move him to the hospital in Sacramento.
“Kill me, please, Marvin.” Willis said, sitting up. He reached out and grabbed Marvin’s white lab coat, pulling him close, looking at Poole in a way no one had ever looked at the doctor before. Haloperidol dilated Good’s pupils. “I want you to kill me before they get here. I don’t want it to happen to me a third time,” he said. “Not what happened to them, please. I don’t want to be here when they come,” Good pleaded. “I know they’ll come. It happened to Ann and to T.C. I know. Do you understand?”
“When who comes?” Poole said, thinking that Willis had completely lost his mind.
“Them—those things that attacked T.C. and me on the road,” Good said. “I saw what they did. T.C. … he got sick, too. I was bringing him back here to Timberline when we were attacked.”
Marvin heard the phone ring outside in the office. He looked into the young man’s eyes.
“I want you to rest. I’m going to call an ambulance. You’ll have to go to the hospital in Sacramento. You’ve had a bad head injury, too, on top of the nasty cut, I’m afraid.”
Dr. Poole went out to the front office and picked the office landline phone up from the floor. It immediately began to ring.
“Marvin.” The doctor heard his wife’s voice. “Honey, Vivian’s sick. Should I bring her into town? I think it’s that flu you were talking about.” Marvin glanced into the surgery. He saw Good slide off the examination table and stand over a tray of instruments, his back to the doctor.
“What’s wrong with her?” Marvin said. He watched Willis hold himself up, unsteady, using the corner of the examination table to support himself.
“She’s got a fever, a hundred and three,” his wife said.
“I’ll come home. Put her to bed. And stay with her.” Marvin put down the phone. He walked back into the surgery.
Willis turned around and faced him. He had a short stainless-steel scalpel in his hand. He raised it and put the short fat blade against his throat.
“I’m not going to be here when they come,” Willis said. “Do you understand that? I had to kill my own wife. She’d turned into one of those things . . . No one believed me, and now it’s too late.”
“Willis. Please, whatever happened, I can help you,” Marvin said, staring in horror.
“No, you can’t. You’ll see when they get here. You’ll see when it happens to your family.” Willis’ hand trembled violently as he sunk the short blade into his carotid artery.
Poole froze. The two locked eyes. Willis closed his eyes and drew the blade across his throat. A long stain of blood started to run down Good’s neck. Marvin ran to him as he collapsed; he held Willis as the blood pulsated out of both severed arteries.
Willis opened his eyes. He tried to say something to Poole, but the doctor couldn’t hear it. Willis dropped off into unconsciousness. Marvin lowered Willis to the floor and tried to stop the bleeding with his hands, knowing it was impossible, and that Willis would die, and quickly.
Marvin walked under the twinkling green and red Christmas lights hanging over Main Street. Cars moved like metallic bugs partially obscured by the snowstorm. Marvin could feel his blood-soaked sweater stick to his skin where he’d held Willis as he tried in vain to shut the man’s gaping neck wound. His cell phone began to ring as he waited to cross the snow-covered street. Car headlights looked oddly dim, and then became sharper as they approached. Still in shock, he didn’t realize he was leaving bloody footprints on the antique wooden sidewalk. He noticed his Volvo, parked only a few hours before; it seemed much longer now since he’d driven into town. He tried to stay calm, but the agonizing death throes of the young man, as he held him, were played back in a herky-jerky film in his head. Poole forced himself to turn away from what had just happened, but it was as if Good still held him, his convulsive bloody hand holding him close while he died in Marvin’s arms.
Marvin pulled his coat up around his face. He waited for the traffic to pass, then trotted across the street and walked into the Timberline’s sheriff’s office. The doctor was so well known in town, the sheriff’s deputies waved to him as soon as he came in. Then one of the deputies noticed the bloodstain on the doctor’s white sweater and cheek and stopped smiling.