David Nickle - Eutopia

Andrew smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

Then Jason’s expression, something in the tilt of his shoulders, shifted. He finally looked Andrew in the eye.

“No,” he said. “You got no reason to thank me, sending you off alone to die.” He took a look back at the hospital. “Hang Sam Green. I’m going with you.”

Andrew put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “No,” he said. “You made an agreement—a promise. You go too, attention will come back to Sam Green, who’ll suffer for no reason other than doing a fellow a good turn. I’ll be fine.”

“You won’t be,” said Jason.

“You don’t have a say.” Andrew made himself smile, and lied. “I’m feeling much improved, anyhow. That knife and the food will be a help, and I can remember the way back to Bonner’s Ferry fine. You go back to your aunt, and keep your mouth closed, and lie low for awhile. Like Sam Green said to.”

Jason didn’t answer. He turned away and tromped back through the underbrush. Andrew watched him as he headed past the quarantine, paused to look at it for only a second, and returned to the hospital and his aunt. By the time the boy was inside, the smile was not even a memory on Andrew Waggoner’s face.

With a grimace, he pushed himself up off the log, gathered the things that Jason had brought for him, and headed into the dark sanctity of the woods.

Aunt Germaine was waiting for Jason as he came through the door to their rooms at the hospital. A single candle burned in a dish beside her. She held a small envelope between two fingers of her right hand, tapping the edge of the envelope against the palm of her left like the blade of an axe. Those eyeglasses made her expression inscrutable.

“Good evening, Aunt.”

“Nephew,” she said, nodding sternly. “Been busy?”

Jason felt something fall in his gut—something that had stayed put through the whole adventure of stealing medical supplies and clothes and what else he could find, and sneaking Dr. Waggoner out the back. Through it all, he had attributed the ease of it all to improbable luck. Now, all he could think of was how improbable it was that he’d get away with the escape—how vastly improbable. Aunt Germaine knew of his conspiracy, and he felt like a bandit, caught in the act.

He looked away from her. Germaine leaned forward. “Nephew,” she said, her voice low, “I am trying to protect you. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” said Jason. He felt very small then. Were he a couple of months younger, he thought he might’ve started to cry.

“Well,” she said, “then why do you feel the need to go to another?”

“You mean—” Jason felt as though it were all going to spill out. Aunt Germaine—who, if Sam Green were to be believed, was at the very core of this plan to murder Andrew Waggoner… she had Jason in a corner. She had him figured out. Her next words would surely be about Sam Green, he thought.

“I mean that dreadful girl,” she said. “Ruth Harper.”

Jason gawked, and Aunt Germaine took his expression as something else. She held the envelope, and pulled a card from it. “Do not play the innocent, Nephew,” she said. “This came for you whilst you were gallivanting—no doubt signed after you had met.” She tossed the card on the floor in front of Jason. Perplexed, he bent down to pick it up.

It was written in a fine script on paper so thick it almost felt like cloth. It was addressed to Jason Thistledown . It requested the Pleasure of Your Company at a Celebration of Spring in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Garrison Harper this Sunday the Thirtieth of April , following Worship . It was signed, Miss Ruth Harper .

He took a long, even breath, then looked up and met Aunt Germaine’s gaze.

“First I heard of this, Aunt,” he said. But all he could think of was his improbably good fortune.

Just as Sam Green said they might, men came to the hospital in the evening. They wore ghost-white cloaks over their shoulders, and white hoods like pillowcases over their heads. There were five of them and they all strode purposefully to the front of the hospital, up the steps and in through the waiting room like Hussars.

One of them hollered: “Where is the nigger rapist?” which brought the duty nurse as far as the door to the clinic (she fled back into the depths of the hospital when she saw who was there) and set the newborn infant sleeping not far in a room with his mama yowling.

They were not perturbed by the sound of a crying baby, not these men. They did not even look to each other as they pushed through into the corridor beyond, up four floors to the very top of the hospital—to the floor with a few private rooms for the important ones, where nurses and doctors had not been for some hours.

Although there were many rooms upstairs, there was only one occupied now, and the men in white went straight to that one. The one with the rifle pushed open the door. He held up the gun, aimed it at the form in the bed, and stood still. One of the sheets with a club nodded at him, went to the foot of the bed and raised his club over his head. The sheet with crossed arms shifted, looked one to the other, like he was trying to suss some secret communication between the two of them. The rifleman motioned with the barrel of his rifle and the club fell, with murderous force.

“Fuck,” said the rifleman. He raised his rifle and strode over to the bed. “Fuck,” he said again, as he pulled the covers aside and saw naught but a stack of pillows artfully arranged.

“He was warned,” said another sheet. “Nigger got warned, now he’s off.”

“Treachery,” said a third.

And: “Blasphemy,” said the one with his arms hid.

“Don’t overstate matters,” the rifleman said. But his hands shook. He gripped the stock of the rifle harder, until the shaking stopped.

“I’m not going to fight you,” Andrew Waggoner said. He raised his hands palm out to display the splintered arm to full effect. The hill man holding the rifle nodded. He was a tall, black-haired fellow with a patchy beard over a thick chin, gangly but for disproportionately wide shoulders.

“You ain’t gonna fight,” he said. “You ain’t gonna run, neither.”

“I won’t do that either.”

“Well get up.”

Andrew lowered his good hand and propped himself up with it against the bare rock. He drew his feet under himself and stood. He had been resting on the lichen-covered shelf of rock, partway up a steepening slope he’d spent the early part of the morning scaling. It should not have been a difficult climb, and—reflecting back on it with the perfect wisdom that comes to a man staring down the barrel of a rifle—Andrew thought it was not a necessary one either.

But Andrew’s exhausted mind had fixed on the idea that he could find the riverbank he had lost the day before by climbing above the tree-line and looking for it; and his exhausted body had made that walk up the slope of a hill into an ascent of a mountain. He was thinking about opening the doctor’s bag, sticking himself with a syringe full of morphine, letting it work its magic, when the man with the rifle came upon him.

“I am up,” said Andrew. “Now tell me what you want.”

“You the nigger doctor,” said the hill man. He glanced down at the bag, which Andrew had not gotten around to opening when he came. “From the log town. You got your doctoring fixings there. ’M I right?”

“Dr. Andrew Waggoner,” he said. “Yes. I’m the doctor.”

“Pick it up,” said the hill man. “I’ll get the other one. You come now. Got work for you.”