Sunrise (23 page)

“Other than calling us Mr. and Mrs. Stumpy,” Darla said. “What, are congratulations in order?” Dr. McCarthy asked. “You got married and didn’t invite me to the wedding?” “No . . .” I said.

“Yes . . .” Darla said at almost the same time.

“Sort of,” I amended.

“Well when you figure it out, let me know,” Dr. McCarthy said. “Anyway, your arms . . . I’m not sure.”

Not exactly what you want to hear your doctor saying. “You’ve got burns from the tar Red used to seal your stumps, and normally we’d want the burns to get some air, but if I go mucking around in there trying to get the tar off your skin, I’m afraid I’ll reopen or infect your wounds. Might be best to do nothing.”

“So a bionic hand is out of the question?” I said.

Dr. McCarthy smiled, but his eyes were sad. “Afraid so.” He reached into his old-timey, black leather doctor’s bag and pulled out a bottle of pills, opened it, and counted out ten. “Take one a day each for the next five days.”

“What are they?” I asked as he poured them into my hand.

“Antibiotic. Levaquin.”

I was so startled, I almost dropped the pills. Antibiotics were priceless—I could probably buy twenty weeks’ worth of food with the ten pills in my hand. “Thank you.”

“Mayor’s been buying them. He’s got a source, but he won’t tell me who. I suspect he’s trading with one of the gangs. Medical supplies are about the only thing he’ll trade pork for. And I figure we owe you, even if he doesn’t see it that way.”

“You look at our feet yet?” I asked.

“No. Why?”

“Pretty sure they’re frostbitten. Might be more along the side of my body.” I started taking off my clothing, which was sort of embarrassing given the fact that we were in a one-room longhouse, and I hadn’t really figured out how to undress myself one-handed. But I wanted him to check us both over thoroughly. Frostbite can be deadly.

One of my toes—the little one on my right foot, which had rested against the ground—was completely black and lifeless.

“That toe’s going to have to come off, Alex.”

“Don’t you think I’ve lost enough body parts?”

“Too many. But if I leave that dead toe on there, all the antibiotics in the world won’t help you. You’ll lose the rest of your body parts—all at once.”

I sighed heavily. “Well, get out your hedge clippers, then.”

“I think I’ll use a scalpel, if it’s all the same to you. I’ll need three pans of boiling water and a couple of helpers.” Ed and Max volunteered to help. The four of us lapsed into a tense silence while waiting for the water to boil. When the water was ready and the scalpels sterilized, Dr. McCarthy fumbled around in his medical bag, finally pulling out a leather-wrapped stick.

“I guess you still don’t have any painkillers,” I said. “No. Sorry.” He passed me the stick, and Ed and Max took hold of my leg. I bit down on the stick; the leather was slick and tasted slightly of soap and salt.

When Dr. McCarthy started working his scalpel around my toe, I screamed—I couldn’t help myself. The sound that escaped around the stick sounded more like the trumpet of a tortured swan than anything human. Darla put her hand in mine, and I gripped it fiercely. Then, mercifully, I passed out.

When I awoke, I discovered that Darla had lost two of the toes from her left foot. Dr. McCarthy left us with a long list of things to watch out for around our wounds: redness, streaking, swelling, pus—the usual signs of infection. Darla and I had dealt with it before.

I slept through most of the next five days. Every now and then I would wake and stare at the stump on the end of my left arm. The tar had cracked, and red, burnt skin was visible in the cracks, forming a crazed red-and-black patchwork looking more like an arm that belonged on Sauron the Deceiver than on anything human.

It hurt terribly—far worse than it had at the moment it had been lopped off. Yet I could still feel my missing hand, still tell it to clench and unclench. Doing so sent waves of pain washing up my arm, but I did it anyway, holding up my arm, making my phantom hand form a phantom fist over and over again, relishing the pain in some sick way.

Darla lay next to me. She was always asleep when I woke. I didn’t wake her, didn’t want her to see me staring at my stump, manipulating my invisible fist until the pain made tears run down my face.

I woke one day to an argument. Uncle Paul was sitting on a nearby cot, trying to convince Darla to come help him wire the inside of a heating tank. She kept saying she couldn’t, that one-handed, she’d only get in the way. He told her he didn’t know how to do it, which sounded like

BS to me. Finally Darla sighed and levered herself up out of the cot. I pretended to sleep through the whole thing.

The next morning I woke to Uncle Paul shaking my shoulder. I was deep in a dream about flashing knives, and I lashed out, hitting Uncle Paul in the chest with my stump. The pain was so intense that tears involuntarily poured from my eyes. Uncle Paul either didn’t notice or pretended not to.

“Darla needs you,” he said.

I glanced at the cot beside mine; Darla wasn’t there. “What’s wrong?”

“She’s just sitting in the greenhouse, staring at her stump. She doesn’t say anything or do anything unless I ask her to and tell her directly and exactly what I need. She’s like a robot.”

“We’ve both had a rough week, if you hadn’t noticed.” “Yeah, I noticed. And Darla’s one of the toughest women I’ve ever met. But everyone needs some help sometimes. She needs you.”

I rolled over to face away from him. “I’m tired,” I said, which was true.

I heard Uncle Paul standing up behind me. “Think about it, would you?”

I grunted something noncommittal, and he left. How was I supposed to help Darla when I didn’t even want to get out of bed? How was I even supposed to put on my boots one-handed? How would half a man be useful to anyone, let alone her? I rolled over, heedless of the pain it caused my stump, and tried to get back to sleep.

Chapter 41

I couldn’t sleep. The image of Darla sitting in the greenhouse, flexing her phantom hand, had wormed into my mind and wouldn’t leave. I tossed and turned for more than an hour and then threw the covers off, hunting around for some clothes.

Getting dressed one-handed is ridiculously challenging. Buttons, zippers, drawstrings, shoelaces— all of them are designed to be operated two-handed. I cussed at imaginary clothing designers in the most inventive terms I could think of. Velcro: Why didn’t they make everything with Velcro fasteners? It worked fine for toddlers.

I didn’t go straight to Darla. Instead I talked to Max, Zik, Ben, Alyssa, Anna, and Charlotte, looking for an item I wanted to give to Darla. Wyn had one, and she handed it over gravely, warning me that it didn’t work—it hadn’t brought her sister Emily back.

Darla was on her back on the dirt floor of the underconstruction greenhouse. Her head was turned so she could stare at her stump, and I could see the muscles in her arm tensing and relaxing, over and over.

Uncle Paul was messing with some wire nearby. When he saw me, he smiled and said, “I’m going to go get lunch. Want me to bring you guys something?”

“No,” I replied, “we’ll be along in a bit.” I flopped down alongside Darla as Uncle Paul left the greenhouse. Darla didn’t even look at me.

“I got you a gift,” I said.

Darla didn’t respond, so I pulled out the item Wyn had given me, a lucky rabbit’s foot, and held it in front of Darl’s head, where she couldn’t fail to see it.

“What the hell?” Darla said.

“Well, I thought, you know, the last time you were so . . . anyway, your rabbit, Jack, seemed to pop you out of it, so I thought—”

“You thought giving me a dead rabbit’s foot and reminding me of my mother and my dead rabbit would cheer me up?”

“Um . . . yeah?”

“Christ, Alex. That is the most idiotic, wrongheaded . . . and sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“So you don’t want the rabbit’s foot?”

“I didn’t say that.” Darla snatched the rabbit’s foot from my hand and tucked it into her pocket.

“You hungry?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I stood and reached down with my good hand to help Darla up. I wrapped my good arm around her waist, and we leaned on each other, walking toward the greenhouse door. “We’re going to get through this.”

“I know. It’s just—every morning I wake up, and I’m sure I still have a hand. Even when I stare at that damn stump, I can feel my hand moving, my fingers flexing.”

“I know.”

“Red’s got to pay for this.”

“He will. Sooner or later, he will.”

Darla and I started working half days. We still needed far more sleep than normal; most of our energy was being spent on healing. Dr. McCarthy stopped by every two or three days for a while, checking our arms and feet, although it wasn’t really necessary—they were doing fine. Maybe the antibiotics had worked, or maybe the boiling tar had killed all the bacteria in our stumps. After about three weeks, the tar on our forearms started to flake off as new skin grew beneath it. The new skin was pink, shiny, and hairless—it looked like it belonged on a newborn piglet, not my arm. One thing you could say for Red—he was precise. He had chopped through our forearms in the exact same place, about an inch from the wrist.

As soon as we could, we started trying to learn how to do everything one-handed. Darla had a rougher time of it than I—she was trying to train her left hand to do jobs she’d used her dominant hand for before.

Some tasks were ridiculously challenging—climbing the ladder to the sniper’s nest, for example. I finally managed it by hooking my left elbow over each rung as I ascended. It was painfully slow, and by the time I reached the platform, I was shaky and sweating. I rested up there for nearly an hour before starting down the ladder—that was worse still.

It was even harder to relearn to shoot. Operating the bolt on the hunting rifle was a problem—the whole rifle would move instead of just the bolt. I had to move my left forearm to the top of the rifle, hold it down, rack the bolt, and then get back into a shooting position. Not exactly fast or efficient. And while I could line up one shot fine, I had no way to control the recoil. My rate of fire wasn’t even a quarter as good as it had been before I lost my hand.

The semi-automatic rifles were easier, but reloading was still a pain. I could either roll the rifle onto its back to give me something to push against when I needed to seat a new magazine, or I could cradle the rifle against my body

It didn’t really matter—I had never been much good with any kind of firearm. And I didn’t take myself or Darla off the watch rotation, despite the difficulty we had climbing the turbine tower. Hurt or not, it didn’t feel right to ask everyone else to do something I wouldn’t do.

Zik’s family pitched in with a mad fervor. They seemed determined to outwork everyone, as if they were terrified we’d kick them out if they didn’t. We finished the third greenhouse and started building a fourth.

All the tar gradually flaked off our stumps, as if it had been a scab, leaving behind a riotous mess of scar tissue, scabs, and new pink skin. Dr. McCarthy debrided the wound, cutting away some of the scabs, while Ed and Max held my arm still. It hurt so intensely that I nearly passed out. Then he stretched out the skin, stitching it up to protect the end of the bone. That hurt too, but not nearly so bad as the debriding.

Our arms healed faster after that. As soon as my arm quit hurting, it started to itch like ten thousand starving fleas were trapped under my skin. The itching was almost worse than the pain. Every now and then, I unwrapped all my coats and sleeves from the stump and plunged it into a snowbank. That stopped the itching—for a few minutes.

About a week later, the itching started to subside, and my thoughts turned to practical matters. A bionic hand was impossible, but could I fight with the stump? How could I make it more useful?

I went looking for Darla and found her standing on a stepladder, trying to string wire one-handed across the rafters in the shell of the greenhouse, cussing softly as she worked.

“You know what we need?” I said to her back.

She startled, hitting her head on a rafter. “Christ! Don’t sneak up on me!”

“We need hooks.”

She stepped off the ladder and turned to face me. “Do you want an eye patch too? Halloween was . . .” she stopped to think, “six weeks ago.”

I put my good arm around her waist. “If we had hooks instead of stumps, we could climb the ladder in the turbine tower way easier. We could make the hooks the right size to hold a rifle barrel, so we could shoot and reload faster.” What I meant, of course, was that she could build the hooks that size. I had no clue how to even start making a hook.

Darla started to get excited. “I could rig them on a leather cuff, run a strap back to our elbows to keep them on tight.”

“Might even be better than a stump in a fight.”

“Heck, yeah. I could even rig different attachments— how would you like a knife sprouting from the end of your stump?”

“Hmm. I’d probably be wearing the hook whenever I needed the knife. Could you sharpen the outer edge of the hook?”

“Sure. But I’m never going to make out with you again. Knowing our luck, you’d give me a mastectomy by mistake.”

“I’ll take it off,” I said, trying to suppress a giggle.

“I’m putting a ratchet and a socket for screwdriver bits on mine. That’s going to make some stuff so much easier.”

Darla started spending most of her time working on the hooks. That slowed down our greenhouse building some, but it also seemed to banish the last of her lingering funk, so I didn’t object. We were producing more food than we needed anyway.

It took Darla almost two months to finish the hooks. It was more of a job for a blacksmith than an amateur welder, she said. Several early prototypes broke. When she was finally done, my hook was a thing of beauty. A smoothly curved, C-shaped blade, sharpened to a razor’s edge on the outside and rounded off on the inside. Darla’s was ugly by comparison. She only sharpened the point of her hook because of the ungainly ratchet and driver bit attachments welded along its length.