The Giant-Slayer (28 page)

Collosso went jogging up the Great North Road. He took long strides with his arms swinging, so he was wholly in the air between his steps, and when he landed the mountain shook. In moments he was hidden by the bend in the road, but for a long time they could feel him running on and on by the tremors in the earth.

Jimmy got up. Khan and Flanders were just standing there, looking round at the ruin.

The wonderful wagon was just a pile of metal and wood. Where the hundred oxen had been were ninety-nine stains on the road, like so many blotches of red ink. There was only one animal left, and it too stood gazing around, as though even an ox could be dumbfounded.

Jimmy could hardly believe that his great adventure had ended so quickly. There hadn’t even been a battle: not a fight or scrap or ballyhoo. It had taken only seconds for the giant to defeat him.

Finnegan Flanders kicked at a bit of twisted metal. “What do we do now?” he asked.

“I guess we go home,” said Jimmy.

Khan looked down. “I don’t believe I’m hearing right,” he said. “You’re giving up already? You’re throwing down the quiver before you even notch an arrow?”

“What else can we do?” said Jimmy.

“There’s plenty else we can do,” said Khan. “Why, we’re wallowing in things we can do.” He put his quiver on his shoulder. He bent his bow and unhooked the string. “When you go after a mountain bear and the first shot sends him running, what do you do? You go after him, that’s what.”

“But there’s nothing left.”

“Nothing?” Khan swept his arm across the ruined landscape. The tattooed stars flashed on his skin. “We still got one of them shaggy critters, don’t we? We got the horses, and we got the leather and the wheels. Sure, it’s less than we had this morning—no denying it—but it’s a whole heap more than we had a week ago.”

“Yes, I guess that’s right,” said Jimmy, cheering himself.

“In a way, we’re darned lucky,” said Khan. “We got us the best teamster on the Great North Road, don’t we? Reckon he can build us a new wagon quick as you say Jack Flash.”

“Well, now just a minute,” said Finnegan Flanders. He didn’t seem so full of dash and bravery all of a sudden. “I haven’t got my tools.”

“We can make new ones,” said Jimmy. “We can forge them from the metal.”

Khan beamed. “Now you’re thinking.”

“No, no, it won’t work,” said Flanders. He was holding up his hands, and the fringes were shaking on his gauntlets. “It’s impossible.”

“Why?” asked Jimmy.

“Because … well, because …” He sighed horribly. Then, turning toward the moat, he kicked a stone over the edge. “I’m not a teamster at all,” he said. “I don’t know how to build a wagon. I don’t even know how to drive one.”

Jimmy looked up at the man’s sad face. “But you said —”

“A pack of lies,” said Flanders. “Collosso squashed the rancher who had those oxen. He smashed the buildings and flattened the fences. I found the oxen just wandering down the road, so I thought I could herd them to town and sell them. I got that drover to help me. ‘Here, you pull from the front, I’ll push from behind,’ I said, and the poor devil did all the work himself and didn’t even know it.”

Flanders kicked another stone. It rolled over the edge in a little cloud of dust. “Then you came along, the two of you, talking about killing giants and everything. I guess I got kind of swept up in it. I’m sorry.”

It seemed that Khan’s heap of things to do had grown smaller quite quickly. The hunter was smiling about it in a strange way, looking neither angry nor beaten. But for Jimmy, all the new hopefulness that had filled him suddenly trickled away. He sat down in the dirt, his little feet hanging over the edge of Collosso’s moat.

“It’s that witch’s fault,” he said. “She promised it would work. She had a vision.”

It was a strange place for Laurie to stop, with the giant-slayer and Khan disheartened, with Finnegan Flanders
exposed as a fraud. She left the three in a weary group at the side of the road, and said she had to go home.

“What’s wrong?” asked Carolyn.

“I’m tired,” said Laurie. Her mouth was dry, and her head was really aching now. “I think I’m getting a cold. I just want to go home and sleep.”

She left the room, and little Dickie smiled as she looked back from the doorway.

“See ya real soon,” he said.

Laurie Valentine was nearly at Piper’s Pond when her legs gave out. She collapsed on the path, sprawling across the hard cement. Her cry frightened a duck, which rose from the pond with a squawk, its wings a whirl of green and brown.

She crawled toward a bench, thinking that if she could rest there a while she could make it home all right. But then the pain flashed through her, and she closed her eyes and screamed.

It was a nurse who found her, a young woman dawdling on her way to work. She knelt down and looked at Laurie’s eyes. She pressed her fingers on Laurie’s pulse. Then she got up and raced to the hospital doors, shouting, “Help! Somebody help!”

In the respirator room, Carolyn was nearest to the door. She heard the commotion in the hall, the rumble of a gurney’s
wheels, the slapping sound of shoes. She could feel the urgency that was carried along through the corridors, that raced ahead of the running doctors and the nurses.

She saw the gurney hurtle into the room with white-coated figures crowded all around a small body below a sheet—a girl with dark hair. They were holding an oxygen mask over her face.

They whisked her down the row of iron lungs, past Carolyn, past Chip and Dickie. Then they opened the last one—the fourth machine—and slid the girl inside it. They started the motor; the bellows filled and emptied. The bellows whirred and hummed and whooshed.

When the girl was breathing, the doctors moved away. And Dickie, beside them, saw that the girl was Laurie Valentine.

They were all still there: Peter and Ruth in their wheelchairs, James Miner on his treatment board. They had all seen other children arrive, always in a little herd of people, always with a feel of fright and panic.

They had thought it was over now, that polio was beaten. The newspaper headline was still on the wall, saying that it was so. But now Laurie lay in the iron lung, with a tube sticking out of her throat. It was hard to say that she was asleep, but she was certainly not awake. She lay sealed in the metal, with just her head sticking out. And it seemed that that huge machine had been waiting for her all along, sitting silently and still, just waiting for its chance.

On that day, and in the ones to follow, other children were being rushed into other hospitals. There was a problem at the Cutter lab.

A batch of vaccine that was supposed to be dead was really alive. It had been injected into the blood of those children who were first for the vaccination. And it multiplied there, doubling once, doubling again, attacking nerves and muscles.

For Laurie there was nothing. She floated in a void as complete as the one at the edge of her imagined world. She was not aware of darkness nor of light, not of sound, and not of time.

The air whistled through the tube in her neck, in and out, as the machine did her breathing. A nurse had to remove the foam that sometimes filled it.

For the first hour, Miss Freeman sat there, watching over Laurie.

“Where’s her dad?” asked Chip.

“The police are looking for him now,” said the nurse. “I guess he’s a little hard to find today, but I sure wish they’d hurry.”

“Is she going to die?” asked Dickie.

“Let’s not think of that,” said Miss Freeman. “It’s far too early to tell.”

“I don’t want her to die,” said Dickie.

“Of course you don’t. Nobody does,” said Miss Freeman. “And we’re going to do our very best to see that she doesn’t. But for now, Dickie, please think about something else.”

He thought of the story, of Jimmy the giant-slayer, of Khan. It seemed they had been abandoned on the Great
North Road, that they would remain forever there. “Carolyn, you have to finish it,” he said.

“Finish what?” she asked.

“The story.”

“Oh, Dickie, not now,” she said. And Chip, between them, said it wouldn’t be right to go on with the story.

“But you have to,” said Dickie. “You
have
to.”

He sounded so worried, and looked so frightened, that Miss Freeman couldn’t ignore him. “Dickie?” she said. “Why is that story so important to you?”

“Because it’s for real,” he said. “I’m Khan. I really am. And James is the giant-slayer.”

He had tried to explain it all before, and still couldn’t find the words to do it. How could he explain something he couldn’t really understand himself? He said, rather desperately, “If we don’t finish the story, Laurie’s going to die.”

“That’s dumb,” said Carolyn.

“No, it’s not,” said Dickie. “Everything’s real. Like James was born in a lightning storm. And his dad was a miser. Just like Fingal. What about Jessamine? You’re her for sure. And the way Finnegan Flanders knows about wagons. Like Chip knows about cars. He was going to rebuild it, I think.”

“But he’s a phony,” said Carolyn. “If it’s true, why’s he a fake?”

“I don’t know,” said Dickie. He started to list again all the ways that the story had crossed into their lives. He told about his dreams, about the times when he’d known how the story would turn. He said, “She heard the piper.”