Lullaby: Nightmareland Volume Two (Nightmareland Chronicles Book 2) by Barnett Daniel

Author:Barnett, Daniel [Barnett, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

John did own gloves, as a matter of fact. They were heavy and black, their fingers bendable but solid, as if packed with some sort of rubbery steel. Mariah found them in one of his bags as she tore apart the trunk looking for a first aid kit. She cast them aside—fat lot of good they would do him now—and kept up her whirlwind until she turned up a small white box. At least she thought the box was white. It was hard to see anything with the stars and moon shut off and her smoke-raw eyes filled with burning tears. Up in the front of the truck she heard John rasping under his breath, singing about those same stars and moon in a broken, tuneless lullaby —good night, good night— and his arm was bleeding so bad, she’d never seen bleeding so bad, not even when she jammed the champagne flute into Rick Lot’s ear canal, and where the fuck were the stupid fucking stitches? The box had bandages and Neosporin, petroleum jelly and hydrogen peroxide, all useful things but not what she needed. Had John hit an artery when he shoved his arm through the window? She hoped not. If he’d hit an artery, she wasn’t sure there was anything she could do, short of holding him and rocking him down to the sleep his tired body so desperately wanted. She slammed the box shut and tossed it out of the truck bed. It was as if a space in her head had been cleared; giving up on the stitches allowed her to see what had been sitting right in front of her all along, tucked in the corner with a few other stray tools.

It was a crude yellow thing, caked in sawdust from some odd job. Roofing? Flooring? She didn’t know what John had used it for, but she bet he had damn well never used it for this. Mariah picked up the staple gun and hopped out into the dirt where she’d thrown the first aid kit. She left it there, would come back for it later (if John was lucky enough to have a later). Her tongue lay on the floor of her mouth like a dirty welcome mat. She could taste her sickness, smell it; the flavors of the night were smoke and vomit.

And blood.

That too.

John turned his head toward Mariah as she approached his open door, but she could not tell if he saw her. His pupils were big, unfocused. She was relieved to see that his eyes had not turned up to their whites, like the eyes of the sleeping family in the car. His broad, sweating chest filled with breath and let it out oh so slowly. She’d taken off his shirt and cinched it above his right elbow. Below that, his flesh was opened into weeping fissures, the largest and deepest of which zigzagged the length of his forearm.

“He moaned when I hit the radio,” John mumbled. “He moaned like Nicholas moaned on the branch.

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