Neil McMahon - Revolution No.9

“Come on, buddy,” Monks said. “You need this. Attaboy.” Mandrake sputtered, but swallowed. Monks kept the water coming until his head twisted aside.

“This must be a pretty neat place to live, huh?” Monks said. “Up here in the forest? I bet there’s deer that come around.” His hands drifted gently over Mandrake’s body as he spoke, absorbing information about his condition. The boy’s eyes had opened a little while he was drinking the water, but then closed again.

“You know, what those deer really like is bread,” Monks said. “That’s a good way to make friends with them. You want to try feeding them tomorrow?”

No response. Monks reached under the covers and felt the diaper. It was wet. There was a box of Huggies beside the bed, another bizarre touch in this rustic scene. He pulled off the wet one, tossed it into a slops bucket, and got two fresh ones, using one to dry Mandrake and putting the other on him. It took Monks a moment to figure out the self-adhesive strapping arrangement. Back in the days when his own kids were in diapers, his wife had mostly used the washable kind.

His mouth twisted. He had been trying not to think about Glenn.

He covered Mandrake up and walked across the room to a crude wooden chair. The cable dragged behind him on the floor.

Monks had been dredging up everything that he could find in his memory about diabetes. It was a condition he encountered frequently in the ER, but usually as a complication or a contributing factor to the presenting ailment. He had diagnosed it enough times in children to recognize it tonight. And he seen plenty of people come into the ER deathly ill from it-usually because they hadn’t taken their insulin, or had ignored dietary rules. He knew that it was easy for diabetics to get very sick very fast, and much harder for them to pull back out.

But extended treatment of diabetes lay in the realm of specialists-internists, endocrinologists, and pediatricians. Even under ideal conditions, in a hospital setting, he wouldn’t have considered himself qualified, let alone in a situation like this. And without the all-important lab workups to measure blood sugar and electrolytes, he felt as helpless as a soldier going naked into battle.

He was sure that he was looking at juvenile-onset diabetes, technically known as “Type 1,” or “insulin-dependent” diabetes mellitus-usually called IDDM. Patients who did not get insulin died.

And there were other complications. Mandrake’s dehydration was advanced. He was drinking as much water as he could, but the sugar in his urine was carrying out even more than he could take in. Soon he wouldn’t be able to drink enough to keep up. That would bring on a coma and, eventually, death.

He was also losing potassium, which had its own spectrum of ugly side effects, including paralysis and respiratory failure. That, too, could be fatal.

Then there was a rarer nightmare, but perhaps the worst of all, and one seen most often in kids-cerebral edema. The brain swelled, compressing the brain stem, and causing death within a few hours. It was treatable if caught in time, but that required sophisticated equipment.

Monks had no accurate way to measure how close Mandrake was to a crisis, either. But his gut told him that even if he had insulin, even if he could deal with all those factors and stabilize the boy’s condition, it would only be for a matter of days. And something as simple as a cold or an infection could quickly destroy the precarious balance.

He was staring at Mandrake in the room’s dim light when he heard the lodge’s door open, then footsteps cross the main room. The old wooden floor telegraphed the sounds, a series of creaks and hollow thumps.

Monks moved quietly to the bedroom doorway and peered through the hanging blanket. The newcomer was Marguerite, apparently done with Captain America. She was kneeling at the fireplace, setting a metal cook pan on the glowing coals.

She stood, shoved her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, and paced, her head bowed as if in concentration. After half a minute, she went to the table and poured a glass of wine. She drank it down in a few fierce swallows, then poured another.

It seemed that she was troubled.

Monks went back to his chair. A few minutes later, he heard her footsteps approach the bedroom. She stepped into the doorway, carrying a tray with a covered plate and a mug. But she did not come in. It occurred to Monks that she was staying beyond the radius of his fetter, as if he were a vicious dog.

“I warmed you up some food,” she said.

He hadn’t eaten since lunch, and the savory smell of roasted meat started his belly growling. But he was not yet ready to succumb. It added to the mean edge he was harboring toward his captors.

“You don’t feel strange about serving dinner to somebody who’s chained to the floor?” he said.

“Look, this wasn’t my idea.” She kept her head half turned away, as if to hide behind the long hair that covered the side of her face.

“That’s what the Nazi camp guards claimed after World War Two. Watch a movie called Night and Fog sometime.”

“You don’t understand, man,” she said, dropping back into the defensive mode that he had seen earlier.

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Freeboot’s not like other people.”

“I understand that.”

“I mean-he doesn’t go by the same rules.”

Monks thought about pointing out that people who made up their own rules tended to be called “felons,” but he decided to back off-not out of compassion, but in the hopes that he might be able to win her confidence and use it to his advantage.

“You’re the only one here who seems to give a damn about him,” he said, nodding toward Mandrake.

“It’s not that they don’t care. It’s just that everybody’s…wrapped up in other stuff.”

“So I’ve gathered,” Monks said.

Monks got the water cup and sat on the bed, coaxing Mandrake to drink. Marguerite hesitated a little longer, then walked in and set the tray on the table.

“If you want to crash, I can take over that,” she said.

“I’m all right for now.”

She went to the doorway, but lingered, one hand resting against the jamb.

“I couldn’t believe what you did back there,” she said. “Tasting pee.”

“Practicing medicine’s not always pretty.”

“It freaked Freeboot out totally,” she said. “It was like you read his mind. He’s terrified of diabetes. He had an uncle who went blind. The doctors didn’t help him any.”

Monks registered the information. That probably figured into why Freeboot had reacted so strongly.

“Sometimes there’s nothing that can be done,” Monks said.

It took him another minute to get an adequate amount of water into the little boy. Marguerite was quiet, and he thought she had gone, but when he stood up, she was outside the doorway, watching. She beckoned to him with a timid wave.

“Could that happen to Mandrake?” she asked quietly. “Going blind?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Monks said. “Unless he gets to a hospital, he’s not going to live anywhere near that long.”

Twenty minutes later, the blanket was pulled roughly aside again. Monks was surprised-he hadn’t heard footsteps approach this time. Freeboot strode into the room with a small duffel bag full of stuff, which he dumped on the table. He was still barefoot.

“Here’s your insulin,” he said triumphantly.

Monks was surprised by this, too. After the couple of hours of driving on back roads, he had assumed that the nearest town big enough for an all-night pharmacy would be a long round trip.

He got up from his chair to look. There were two bottles of insulin, both manufactured by Eli Lilly. One was Humulin RU-100-regular insulin, 100-units-per-milliliter strength. The other was longer-acting Humulin NPH. There were also a handheld glucose meter and strips for measuring blood sugar, disposable lancets for drawing the blood drops-and packets of Monoject 1-cc syringes, available only by prescription.