Mystic Cowboy(80)

God, she’d only been outside for a minute, two tops, and Nelly was worse. Her body began to twitch, and her eyes were rolled back in her head. “Shit,” Madeline said as she grabbed the towels. If the bleeding didn’t get her first, the dehydration would finish the job. The girl’s eyes fluttered as Madeline turned the water off and draped two towels over her naked body. “It’s okay, honey,” she murmured as she lifted Nelly out. “I’m going to get you in the car, and then I’m going to get you some water, okay?”

“Mmmm.”

Oh, thank God, Madeline thought. She’s still in there.

“Mom’s in the car, honey. I’m taking you right there.” The towels wouldn’t hold for long, but she had to run an IV now. No one could afford seizures, not if she was already this weak.

Madeline laid Nelly out on the backseat. Tara was still crying, but when Nelly made a throaty little whimper, she made a visible effort to pull herself together. “Baby,” she said, sounding almost as shaky as Nelly looked. “Madeline’s here. Madeline’ll fix it.”

“I promise, Nelly,” Madeline added, praying to God it was a promise she would be able to keep. She ran back into the house and grabbed the duffle. Thank heavens she kept the thing stocked for any emergency, even one like this. There was one lonely bag of normal saline in there.

Quickly, she ran the IV, again taking comfort when Nelly managed a small whine. “I know, honey.” She had a couple of smaller gauge IVs back at the clinic, but at least she’d been able to run this one. She turned to Tara and her tone sharpened. “No matter what, you hold this bag over your head, you understand?”

“Yeah.” Tara sounded a little more focused. Good. Anything was better than nothing right now.

And they were off. It wasn’t like there was a tremendous amount of traffic on the rez to begin with, but at three in the morning, there wasn’t another car around for miles. Madeline took the roads at top speed, still wearing the mask and gloves. As she drove, she mapped out her game plan. Nelly would need the anti-diarrhea meds and something to stop her from throwing up—Zofran would be best—and enough electrolytes to fuel an elephant. That had to be first. Tara looked horrible, but neither she nor her mother appeared to be in any real danger.

Danger from what? That was the question she needed the answer to. Tara and her mother had the same basic symptoms everyone else had been having for months, and those symptoms were still consistent with some sort of virus. Nelly had the same symptoms, but magnified to the tenth power. A stomach virus wouldn’t knock out the defenses of a healthy, well-fed child in just over twenty-four hours.

But a bacteria or a parasite might.

“Terry,” she said. Mrs. Tall Trees was the least sick of the three. “Did you all do anything different yesterday? Eat anything different?”

The older woman took a hitched breath and covered her mouth with her hand. Finally, she said, “We just went to the church picnic.”

“What did you eat?”

“Steak.” Her voice wavered at the mention of food. “They had steak. It was a fundraiser for the new school.” Then Terry lurched forward and stuck her head out the window.

Steak. Cattle. Not the flu.

Damn that man. He was right.

The list of things that could do this wasn’t long, but the differences between a campylobacter and a cryptosporidium were crucial. Campylobacter was a bacterium and responded to the right drugs. Cryptosporidium was a parasite that just had to be waited out.

Nelly didn’t have time to wait.

Madeline had a couple of courses of erythromycin at the clinic, and maybe one or two doses of tetracycline. But a lot of these bacteria were resistant, and if it was a parasite, it wouldn’t do any good anyway.

She glanced in the rearview mirror as she crested the last hill. Tara was keeping the IV up by resting her arm over her head, and Nelly wasn’t convulsing. She’d have to chance the antibiotics, she decided. She couldn’t risk Nelly until she got lab results first thing Monday morning.

Monday seemed a hell of a long way off.

She pulled up in front of the door and unlocked the clinic. Where the hell was Clarence? She couldn’t wait on him. “Tara. We have to get her out of here and onto a bed. You have to carry the bag, okay? Can you do that?”

Eyes closed, Tara nodded. And then shook her head no. “I...” She threw her head out the window and vomited. Madeline grimaced. At least Tara kept the bag up, but how the hell was Madeline going to get Nelly out of the car?

And then the most magical sound of all reached her ears.

Hoof beats.

She looked up to see Nobody Bodine flying in low and fast, with Rebel hot on his heels. Appearing out of nowhere in the dark, they looked like two out of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Any other day, she’d be wetting her pants at the sight of dark riders bearing down on her like they were coming in for the kill. Not today. She’d never been so happy to see them in her whole life. Behind them, headlights shone. Jesse, she realized. Three out of four wasn’t bad.