Supervolcano: All Fall Down

Someone had got shot near Dover-Foxcroft in spite of a DayGlo vest. He’d lived. Officially, it was listed as an accident. Unofficially. . People said the guy who’d plugged him didn’t get along with him. Still as near a stranger as made no difference even if he’d been here more than two years, Rob didn’t know about that one way or the other.

More motion, this time straight ahead. Damned if that wasn’t a bull moose, sure as the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt. Rob did his best to impersonate a bright orange pine sapling. The moose dug at the snow with a big splayed hoof. Not much grass had come up during this abbreviated sortasummer. Rob would have bet the moose’d come up empty. And he would have lost the bet, too, because it lowered its dewlapped head and started pulling up whatever it had found.

“Yeah, you go ahead and chow down.” Rob’s mouth silently shaped the words. Fog gusted from his lips. If he’d worn glasses, it might have screwed him up. Not a sound came out to spook the moose. Slowly, smoothly, he raised the rifle to his shoulder.

A gunshot.

Next thing he knew, he was lying in the snow. He couldn’t figure out how he’d got there. He didn’t hurt or anything-and then, all of a sudden, he did. Quite a bit, as a matter of fact. “Fuck!” he said, in lieu of howling like a wolf. No wolves in Maine yet, or none anybody knew about, anyhow. From how far up in Canada would they have to come? However far it was, they hadn’t got here.

And Rob had other things to worry about. It felt as if one of those wolves that weren’t here was gnawing on his left leg. He wondered if he wanted to look down. If that bullet had shattered tib and fib, they were liable to have to take the leg off. A cripple in the Ice Age-just what I always wanted to be.

Blood on the snow, more of it every second. It steamed like his breath. Breath, blood-both showed life going out. He hiked up his jeans and his long johns. Each had a neat piece bitten out.

His stomach lurched when he saw that his leg had a piece bitten out, too. But then he realized the wound was a groove. It had got the muscle on the inside of his calf, but it hadn’t-he didn’t think it had-smashed the bones to smithereens. He yanked a hanky out of his pocket and packed the bleeding gouge with it. Not exactly sterile, but he’d worry about that later. Little by little, he realized he’d probably be around to worry about it.

The other hunter lumbered over to him. The moose was long gone. “Dude! What happened?” the other guy said brilliantly.

“Some dumb asshole went and shot me,” Rob answered. “The fuck you think happened?” His wits began to work again, after a fashion. “You got anything I can use to hold this bandage in place?”

“Sure do.” The other hunter pulled a fat rubber band out of his trouser pocket. What he was doing with it in there, God only knew. Rob took it gratefully any which way. In the war, he would have dusted the wound with sulfa powder. He would have done it now, too, if only he’d had any.

Another man came up. “I’m so sorry! I was aiming for the moose.” He had to be the guy who’d nailed Rob.

“Yeah, well, you got some long pig here,” Rob said. The local only stared at him, so he had no idea what long pig was. Clueless git, Rob thought. Aloud, he went on, “Look, I don’t think it’s too bad. Can you guys get me back into Guilford and let them patch me up?”

He had one good leg. The hunters made animated crutches. The fellow who’d shot him turned out to be Ralph O’Brian, who worked at the Shell station down the street from the Trebor Mansion Inn when he had anything to do there. “I’m so goddamn embarrassed,” he said. “I never done nothing like that before, swear to Jesus I didn’t.”

“Believe me, once is twice too often,” Rob said through clenched teeth. The leg hurt like a mad son of a bitch now, and sparklers of pain burned him whenever it touched the ground or bumped O’Brian, who was on that side of him. He would be, Rob thought. It didn’t hurt enough to make him want to pass out or anything. He rather wished it would have.

They were almost back to town when they came upon a middle-aged woman hauling a big sack of rice to her outlying house on a sled. In a matter of moments, the rice was off the sled and Rob was on it. The woman put the sack on her back and trudged away.

The clinic did what it could for Guilford. There was a real hospital in Dover-Foxcroft-a little one, but still. Rob hoped he wouldn’t have to go there. At the clinic, Dr. Bhattacharya said, “Oh dear me! How did this happen?” The small brown man sounded like somebody who did tech support from Mumbai.

“Damn Venezuelans are giving the moose AKs,” Rob answered, deadpan.

For a split second, the doctor took him seriously. Then he snorted through his bushy mustache. “You are probably not at death’s door,” he said in his lilting English, sending Rob a dirty look.

“Good,” Rob said. “What really happened was-”

“I’m a crappy shot,” O’Brian broke in.

“Yeah, well, listen, Mr. Crappy Shot, go on over to the school and let Lindsey know what happened to me, okay? And stop at the Mansion Inn and tell the guys, too,” Rob said. Ralph O’Brian nodded and scurried away, seeming relieved at the excuse to be gone.

Dr. Bhattacharya brandished a needle. Rob wished he had an excuse to get the hell out of there, too. “I will give you the local anesthetic,” the doc said. “It will sting, then you will grow numb. Then I will clean the wound and I will suture it. You will experience some pain when the local anesthetic wears off. I will give you pills for it. They will help less than you wish they would. I will also give you antibiotics.”

“Have any more good news?” In spite of the way Rob’s leg was yelling at him, he felt the needle go in and the sting of the local. He felt them several times, in fact, because Dr. Bhattacharya stuck him again and again. Then, blessedly, he stopped feeling anything south of his knee. The doctor went to work.

When he finished, he said, “Let me see if we have a set of crutches that will fit you. Your height is. .?”

“I’m six-one,” Rob answered. Using crutches through snow didn’t sound like something he much wanted to do. The alternative seemed to be staying right here till he healed, though. Crutches, then, if they had them.

Dr. Bhattacharya pulled a pair from a closet, shook his head, and put them back. “Too short,” he muttered, and tried again. The next set he found made him nod. “Yes, these will do.” He used set screws to adjust their length. “Six feet one, you said.”

“Uh-huh.”

“See how you do here, then.”

Rob tried. He’d used crutches before, but that sprained ankle was half a lifetime ago now. The knack didn’t come right back. He swung himself across the linoleum of the clinic floor. Dr. Bhattacharya gave him a vial of Vicodin and one of amoxycillin.

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Somebody said that. Who? He couldn’t remember. If it was true, he’d just gained some serious strength points. And, if he could make it back to the Trebor Mansion Inn without breaking his other leg or his neck, he’d pick up some more.

Then the local would wear off. He wasn’t looking forward to that, even with drugs in his anorak pocket. Maybe it would make him stronger, too. Somehow, he couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for finding out.

Lindsey rushed in just before he was going to leave the clinic. “I got Marya to cover my class for me,” she panted. “Ralph said you got shot! My God!”

“Ralph said I got shot?” Rob echoed. Something in the way that was phrased made him go on “Did he say who shot me?”

“No. Who?”

“He did.”

Her face was a study-disbelief, amazement, and rage chasing one another across her features. “I’ll murder him!” she said when her mouth stopped hanging open.

“Don’t,” Rob said wearily. “It was just one of those stupid things. It wasn’t like he meant to do it-and I’m not too badly damaged, anyway.”

“For a gunshot wound, it is very minimal,” Dr. Bhattacharya agreed.

“For a gunshot wound,” Lindsey said. “Not for any other kind of wound.” The doctor didn’t tell her she was wrong.

“Would you break trail for me while I go back to the Inn?” Rob asked her. “That’d help.”

“Come to my place instead,” she said. “It’s closer, and you won’t have to climb stairs and a ladder to get to