“Come on,” Gary Albright said.
Gregor Demarkian had sat down in the chair behind his desk and started to look thoughtful. Gary had no idea what he was finding to look thoughtful about. He hated hearing his own ideas coming out of Franklin Hale’s mouth. When Franklin said them, they sounded ignorant and belligerent. They sounded like the kind of thing somebody would say after he’d decided that he’d failed and there was nothing he could do about it.
“Come on,” Gary said again.
And then, for an instant, he thought of Sarah and Lily and Michael at home. A man wasn’t worth anything as a man if he didn’t do what he did for the people who waited for him at home, if he didn’t protect them and help them and keep them safe from just that prowling lion. It sounded wrong when Franklin said it, but it was not wrong; it was absolutely right. It was what each and every man had to do with his life, and what each and every person had to make sure he did not forget.
There really was a prowling lion loose in the world, and in the last few weeks it had come to Snow Hill and lain right down in the middle of Main Street.
3
Annie-Vic could not remember, later, how she first realized that she could now open and close her eyes at will. There was a time when she could not, and there was a time when she could, but that was all she was sure about. It felt good, being able to do this thing, even though it was a very small thing. She thought it probably meant that she would be able to do more and more in the days to come. This was something of a relief. She wouldn’t admit it if she ever found herself able to talk again, but there had been a part of her that was very worried. There was a part of her that had begun to think that she was dead, and that this was what death was like. Death was being trapped in a body that would not move anymore.
Annie-Vic blinked. Then she blinked again. The thoughts about death had been less than intelligent, she thought. If she had been dead, she would not have been in the hospital. She was very glad that neither Lisa nor Cameron was interested in taking the tubes out of her. They could have killed her, any time they wanted. She wouldn’t have been able to stop them. Now that she could make her eyelids move up and down, there seemed to be something different about her sight, too. For most of the last however long it had been—she had no idea of the time that had gone by; she had no idea if she had been like this for hours or days or weeks or months or even years—anyway, her sight had been different. When her eyes were open she had “seen” things, but the seeing was different than this, than normal seeing, which is what she had now. The room was too bright, that was the first thing she noticed. All the lights were on, and they glared.
She tried moving her eyes to the right, not really expecting anything to happen, and was both surprised and elated when the project worked. It worked when she tried moving them to the left, too. She tried moving her head, or thought she did, but that did not work—not quite. Before, when she had tried to move her head, nothing had happened at all. It hadn’t moved and she hadn’t felt anything. Now when she tried, she felt as if she was pushing against a boulder or as if her head was secured to the bed with restraints. She was fairly sure it wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. It felt like something. It really felt like something.
She tried taking a deep breath. She tried drawing a great ocean of air into her lungs and letting it out very slowly. That worked, too. She could control how fast and how slowly the air went in and out of her. She could feel the air in her lungs and the lack of it when she forced it out. She thought of all the times in her life when she thought she was about to die, about the prisoner of war camp, about a whitewater rafting trip in Colorado when the kayak had flipped over in the water and she hadn’t been able to make it turn up. Death was not going to be what she had always expected it to be. Death was also not going to be anytime soon.
She heard the door to the room open and felt someone come in. It was the nurse, and she was wearing those white rubber-soled shoes that never made any noise. Annie-Vic tried to move her head, but that still wouldn’t work. She tried to move her arms, but that was completely hopeless. The nurse, the young one who always wore a loose violet tunic with little flowers on it, came over to the bed and picked up the chart.
Annie-Vic looked at the woman. The woman did not look at her. Annie-Vic looked for some time longer, and after a while the woman did look up, the way they do when they sense they are being watched. Annie-Vic stared straight into the woman’s eyes, and then looked away, and then looked back again.
It was like watching a delayed-action sequence in a movie. The nurse went very still and then moved in, closer, staring into Annie-Vic’s eyes. Annie-Vic looked away and then looked back again. She looked at the ceiling and then looked back. She looked in the other direction and then looked back.