Riders on the Storm

Chapter 4

The store clerk burst through the double glass doors. He was a thirtysomething black man in white sneakers and a brown attendant’s apron.

“Christ woman, that was my truck!” His eyes flashed to Roger’s stump, where the knob of bloody-white bone winked beneath the fluorescent lights and seemed to say, “Hi there.”

He swallowed dryly. “Jesus—what happened?”

“He did lunch with something scaly,” she grunted. “Come on.”

He took up Roger’s left arm and together the three entered the building.

Gasps and shocked profanities accompanied their passage through the room, and a crowd of figures clustered about them like a frenzied Washington press corps.

“We got it, man. We got it ...” the clerk said.

They carried him on their shoulders to the little, pristine men’s room, and the clerk held him aloft while Savanna lowered the lid of the toilet. They eased him down onto its smooth, ivory-colored surface. Savanna turned on the water and let it flow between her fingers until it was hot.

“Got a first-aid kit in the office,” the clerk said, and left the room.

The toilet was right next to the basin. Savanna drew up Roger’s arm and began running hot water down over the stump. She wasn’t at all sure this was the correct thing to do, cleansing this severe a wound as if it were a skinned knee, but with an animal bite—and with no help on the way—who knew what kind of infection might spring up, or how fast. Especially with a lizard, or an emu, or whatever the hell it had been. Christ. Could there be poison, even?

Red water started swirling down the drain. Roger sat gazing at the opposite wall blankly, like a zombie. Savanna pumped soap onto her fingertips and rubbed it into his wound. She flushed it out with more clear water. Pink froth spiraled in the basin.

A moment later the clerk returned with bandages, gauze, and a plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol. He sat them on the blood-spotted Formica next to the sink. Savanna ripped open one of the packages and blotted Roger’s wound dry with a sterile pad. “Did you call for help?” she asked the clerk.

He shook his head. “Lines are down. Been down for some time. Nothin’ on the radio, either.”

“We caught a little heading in ...” Savanna said. She pumped more soap from the dispenser and rubbed it between her crimsoned hands, then rinsed them off. “Part of the Emergency Broadcast System, just the tone.”

Roger stirred beside her, working his jaws open and closed like a grounded fish. Savanna looked up at the clerk in the mirror. “Whose station wagon is that out ...”

He was shaking his head. “There’s water in the distributor. All that rain earlier ...”

She nodded, considering life-flight by Harley unacceptable. “Best to wait for everything to blow over and get an ambulance, probably.” She twisted the taps and the water trickled to a stop. “We’re going to need some kind of suture, don’t you think?”

“Tourniquet will do,” he said. “There’s not enough skin around the wound to work with, and we’d need a curved needle.”

He paused, staring below her gaze. “Don’t forget to take care of yourself, now. Seems the same bee stung him stung you, too.”

She noticed her reflection in the mirror above the basin, and was shocked at sight of her own breasts straining against her bra. Then her gaze dropped to the laceration just beneath them.

She sneered. “Poor little bastard was about half-starved, I guess.”

She leaned over and kissed Roger delicately on the forehead. His parched lips kissed at the air once, twice. She looked at his twisted, dull-eyed face as a mother would look at her ailing son, and reached up to stroke his hair with a pale, wet hand.

“Roger, honey, try to relax.”

He nodded feebly.

And after a while, it seemed he’d fallen asleep. She turned to the clerk and nodded toward her husband. “Can you hold him?”

The middle-aged black man stared at her apprehensively, then squeezed in beside her and gripped Roger’s bad arm gently but firmly in both hands.

Having no idea if it was the right thing to do or absolutely the wrong thing, Savanna drew up Roger’s tattered brachial artery and began tying it into a simple knot. It slipped and squirmed between her fingers like a string of moist spaghetti as she worked. Roger felt a tugging sensation and opened his eyes, glancing sidelong at Savanna as she finished up. He noticed how white her face was, how empty her eyes were, and was scared for her. She rinsed her hands again as he watched, then twisted the cap from the bottle of alcohol. He grimaced and turned away.

He tried to sleep as Savanna began pouring alcohol over his stump. And as he did so, he counted bird-like lizard creatures hopping over a fence in time.

IV | Waiting

The store was mostly calm with soft muttering. Except for the occasional (but increasingly raucous) outbursts from the bikers, and the dim sound of static from the radio on the counter—which had been tuned to the approximate band at which Roger and Savanna had briefly caught the E.B.S. earlier—things had tentatively settled in.

The clerk sat with one of the stranded customers, in one of the bright-yellow booths which were laid out in a row along the long window at the front of the store, discussing the weather and the riots, gesturing from time to time with a can of 7-UP in his hand. The customer across from him was a lean, older man in western attire. He wore a big cowboy hat, a big, shiny belt-buckle (the name Roy B. in sterling silver), big boots—the whole Garth Brooks thing. He was smoking a cigarette and sipping coffee from a paper cup, nodding a lot.

The customer’s wife, a portly woman named Clara, had talked with Savanna awhile before wandering off toward the video games. Now she was blasting asteroids and apparently enjoying the hell out of it. Savanna, meanwhile, had stolen away to the booth that was farthest from everything.

It was partly because of the bikers. They’d congregated around the magazine rack with several cases of beer (without communications to the outside, the clerk had been reluctant to hassle them), and were leafing through the biker mags and swimsuit catalogs, having themselves a little hurricane party. They were downing the beer at an ungodly clip and, much worse, were beginning to show more than a little interest in Savanna. One of them noticed her looking their way now, and waggled his tongue at her. Her arms tingled with gooseflesh and she shivered all over, in spite of the oversized Ozark smock the clerk had fetched for her from one of the back rooms. She turned away.

Outside, the hailstorm had gone to snow once again. But rather than taking on the chrome-white hue usually associated with a snow flurry, the sky had grown strangely dark, as if night had fallen. Snowflakes the size of hockey pucks glided down from the dull-orange glow of the arc-lights, sticking to the window beside her like lint. She hardly noticed them. She was staring at the window, not through it, at the reflection of herself and the store’s bright interior, the shelves stocked with soup cans like an Andy Warhol print turned to wallpaper. She puffed on her Marlboro nervously, seeing the snow but not seeing it.

Roger was still sleeping. He’d passed out shortly after she’d begun pouring the alcohol over his stump. Savanna reviewed what had transpired since ...

She’d finished the operation by securing a sterile pad over the stump and then wrapping the whole affair, except for the tourniquet, in a length of brown bandage.

Finally, they’d equipped him with a crude sling made of pantyhose—in the interest of keeping blood-flow to the wound at a minimum (by keeping his arm bent and his wrist as elevated as possible), while still allowing for mobility if the phone lines came back on any time soon. Unresolved, however, had been how to get a painkiller into him now that he’d passed out.

One of the customers waiting out the storm, a big-boned but nonetheless pretty woman (who had since introduced herself as Clara Bonner), had been watching from the bathroom door and offered her assistance. Savanna had politely but frankly told her there was little she or anybody could really do. But as it turned out, there’d been plenty she could do. She was a diabetic, she’d said, and had a package of clean needles right in her purse.

So they’d looted the medicine rack for Tylenol capsules and made a neat little pyramid of boxes on the counter next to Roger. Then Savanna had stood clear and watched as Clara broke open three of the capsules and emptied their powdery contents into a glass of bottled water. She’d dipped a fresh needle into the solution and pulled up the plunger, filling it with Tylenol, and had then administered the shot to Roger’s arm like a practiced nurse.

Perhaps, Clara had said, when Roger woke, the throbbing of his wound might just be a little more bearable. Savanna had thanked her with teary eyes and an emotional hug.

The clerk had found a folding cot behind the walk-in cooler—he’d told her the store had closed down some months back to have its fuel tanks dug up and refitted, and that he supposed the cot was a legacy of that “damn fool rent-a-cop” they’d brought in from Seattle to pull the night-watch—and they’d laid him out on it in the manager’s cramped office. Then she’d kissed her husband’s forehead and switched off the light, and came out here to help monitor the situation ...

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