Beyond the Ember Star, Chapter 9
The slaying of the last wolf had meant the end to the peace-of-mind he always seemed to enjoy in combat. The world was flooding back upon him in a fury, distorted into pain by his heightened senses. His head was an echo-chamber. There was a ringing—no a buzzing—in his head. He heard his boots crunching through the frosted snow, into the frozen green-brown stubble, and then scraping across the frozen ground beneath. These sounds came to him as if blared be amplifiers in his ears even as this very same information was being sent through his body in the form of vibrations. He could also feel himself drifting across the rotating sphere they called Earth like an iron filing upon a spinning magnet.
What’s happening hillbilly? Maybe it was losing the fingers. The whole time-travel thing works on your aura and that has been diminished by the loss of your fingers. No, I can still feel them.
He looked down at his throbbing left hand to assure himself that his fingers were still there, if merely shredded remnants. His stomach sunk as he realized that his entire pinkie and most of his ring-finger were gone from his left hand. He stopped and shoved the bleeding stump into the snowpack.
Maybe the throbbing is what is echoing in your head. Stay here. Stay cool .
Relax. Don’t panic. Better men than you have lost parts and remained whole.
A voice came to him like a crack of whispered thunder through the clouded haze of his thoughts, “Yo Jay-Bone, you okay Brother?”
He could not speak, but someone had to lead. He raised his right hand for silence and rose slowly, the world spinning, the wild moon glaring down, wolves howling somewhere behind.
Maybe all of those needles and pills Eddie put into you are making you sick.
Push on dummy. Stop thinking, it’s killing me.
Like a Mad Dog
When he came to the world was quiet except for the echoing footsteps in his head and the labored heavily salivated breathing of some animal that was drooling down the front of his vest. It was nearly dawn when a slight soft hand touched his right hand and a kind whispered voice—that did not seen so loud now—came to him in the crisp morning breeze, “Yo Jay-Bone, you sick man, been slatherin’ like a mad dog. Take a knee.”
Remembering that this voice had encouraged him once, he went to his left knee and buried the throbbing stump of his hand into the snowpack.
“Yo Jay-Bone, you bad-off son. It almost light en we unda a tree by a hillside. Lez lay up here. I’ll hold one of your swords while you sleep—Afro Samurai gotz nothin’ on me my brother. I got yo back son, sleep.”
He thought he heard the whimpering of puppies as he nodded off.
No, those are Miss Ann’s lap dogs. You are back on her couch dummy. This was all just a dream. You’ll be waking up to noodles stroganoff by lunchtime hillbilly.
One of the dogs—Johnny Cash he thought—curled up in the bend between his knees and elbows and licked his face. Then even the hint of dawn was gone as he was received by the silent darkness that always seemed to wait within.
Note
In his stress-induced panic, it seems that Jay’s less than ideal medic injected him with lethal levels of morphine, which in the darkness and confusion, he mistook for antibiotics. Fortunately—or not, depending on your perspective—the patient’s high order physiology proved as robust as his low order psychology.
-B. H.
