Then the real rain came down like a waterfall, together with more lightning and thunder and wind, to the point where I could do absolutely nothing until it slackened off for a moment.
I crawled forward, keeping low because of all the lightning. I couldn't see much. The blinding rain was sheeting down so hard now that it stung my hands and face. I was looking for Carol, but instead I put a hand into a warm, sticky mess. I recoiled, even as the rain quickly rinsed my hand. The major, abroad in the night and enveloped in his madness, had decapitated his own son.
"Cam?"
"Keep calling," I shouted over all the racket. "I can't see you."
"Here," she said, and I finally found her in the maelstrom, lying flat on the ground as I had been, trying to become one with the earth. We clung to each other for a moment, and then she asked what had happened. I told her, and she shuddered.
I realized I could no longer hear the sounds of dogs fighting, although the rain was getting heavier again. They could be ten feet away and I might not hear them. I started to call for them but then thought better of it. If the Dobes had driven them off, my calls would bring the worst kind of trouble right to us.
I asked Carol if she was hurt. I had to shout into her ear over the storm's incredible racket. I thought I heard her say the word "okay," so I gathered her up and we started to climb back up. I headed on a diagonal across the embankment, aiming for the ruins of the bridge fortifications. It was the only shelter around, and we needed to get off this damned lightning patch. Carol probably had no idea of what I was trying to do, but she wasn't going to leave me just then.
We were only about thirty feet away from the bridge abutment when all of a sudden I felt rather than heard a deep humming in the ground and sensed all the hair on my body start to stand up. That's when I realized we were crawling over steel. They'd apparently left the last thirty feet of track buried in the ground, and we were straddling it on our hands and knees.
"'Bye," I said to Carol, or tried to, anyway, and then the world turned bright white again and all the noise finally stopped.
I awoke with my face in water. Not my whole face, just one side. I smelled wet dog, opened the one nonsubmerged eye, and stared into Kitty's teeth. Then I realized she was tugging me along the ground while another dog, who I assumed was Frick and not one of the killer Dobes, was pulling on my sleeve in the same general direction. It felt like I was being dragged through a big puddle until I realized, mostly from the smell, that I was on the edge of the Dan River. My vision was back to its orange glow phase again, but the storm had gone silent. In fact, the whole world had gone silent.
I tried to stop the dogs and get loose, but none of my muscles would do anything other than quiver. And hurt. I felt like I'd been slammed onto the ground by the entire front line of the Green Bay Packers. My mouth hurt. My teeth hurt. The fillings in my teeth hurt. My joints felt like they had been detached and then reattached with barbed wire. There was a terrible taste in my mouth, and my tongue was swollen into the size of a balled-up sock. The sock hurt.
Then there were lots of lights, which I finally realized were flashlights. A man's face appeared in my cone of orange vision. He was talking. I couldn't hear a thing, and I still couldn't move. The dogs backed off, and then people took over the dragging.
I closed my eyes and thought of Carol, of how nice it had been during our time together, and how nice it would be if we could just climb into a big warm bed and sleep off this terrible, brain-ringing hangover.
Which is pretty much where I woke up. It was a nice warm bed, unfortunately sans Carol Pollard, but it would do. The first thing I noticed was that my vision was no longer tinted orange. I thought I could hear a low, murmuring noise, but it was overwhelmed with a ringing sound. My left wrist hurt where there had been something stuck in my arm, probably an IV. Or maybe that's where the lightning had gone in. I focused this time and saw that it was, in fact, a handydandy IV. I felt wonderful, actually. Warm. Lucid. Content.
"Goo-o-o-d morning," an unreasonably happy voice warbled next to the bed. "And how are we feeling this morning?"
I turned my head to focus on what turned out to be a nurse. Turning the head may have been a mistake, based on the audible crackle of my neck vertebrae. Nurse Tweety Bird saw me frown, made an adjustment on the pretty plastic bag above my head, smiled at me like the angel she was, and then I was away again to Never-Never Land. Wonderful.
The next time I woke up, Nurse Tweety had been replaced by Sheriff Walker. Lousy trade. I thought he might have a twin, but then they solidified into my good buddy, the High Shareef of Rockwell County in all his uniformed glory.
"You warble and I'll scream," I said.
"Okay," he said. "We hereby declare this a warble-free zone."
The "we" part bothered me for a moment, but then my head cleared.
I remembered. Where was Never-Never Land when I needed it? He saw me break through.
"Ah," he said, "there you are."
"Where's Carol?" I asked.
"Resting comfortably, not far away. You remember what happened?"
I looked over his shoulder at the bright blue day outside.
"Rain. Thunder. Lightning. I remember the lightning."
"I'll bet you do," he said with a grin.
"Am I in trouble?" I asked.
"Physically? No. At least the guys in the white coats don't think so. You laid hands and glands on God's halo and were treated accordingly."
"I remember that," I said. "Jesus H. Christ."
"Yes, the believers think he's a full partner."
"God'll git you for that," I said. "How's Carol, really?"
"Sedated. Burns on her hands and knees, just like you."
I looked at my hands. I hadn't noticed them before. That's because the palms were swathed in white bandages. Now that I was finally paying them attention, they jointly rewarded me with a lance of serious pain in full stereo. I think I whimpered.
"There were rails there," I said. "They were supposed to have picked up all that shit after the war."
"Apparently it was a union job," he said with a straight face.
I closed my eyes for just a minute. An hour later he was back, with two paper cups of coffee. I praised him for being a gentleman and a scholar and gratefully sipped some truly obnoxious yet wonderful black coffee. It was hard, with the bandages.
"We're trying to figure out the headless m-f up there on the tracks."
It took me a moment, but then I remembered that huge horse and the rider with that equally huge cavalry saber. "The major arrived," I said. "Saw the overseer being menaced by a masked Yankee agent. Jumped his horse over that embankment and took said m-f's head right off."
"You're kidding."
"I'm not, and it's worse than you think." I reminded him about Callendar's true relationship to the family at Laurel Grove. That rocked him back a little.
"He killed his own son?"
"No," I said. "Technically, yes, of course, but actually? He saw the overseer being menaced by a stranger with a gun, doubtless an enemy agent, and he acted to defend the Honor of the Glorious Cause."
"Holy shit."
"Exactly," I said. "You need to go sweat those Auntie Bellums. Find out what the fuck this was really all about. It couldn't have anything to do with some bogus will from the dusty past."
He sat back in his chair. My head was clearing fast, and I realized he was well and truly shocked by what I'd told him.
"I want to see Carol," I said.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure. I got her into this mess."
"Okay," he said. "This IV thing seems to have wheels."