The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four by Randall Farmer Read Free Book Online

ran.
     
    Bobby lay on the bare mattress that lay on the floor of
my room, wrapped tight in a blanket and shivering.  His breathing sounded like
a train engine and his skin burned hot to my touch.  He didn’t respond to me.  I
rolled him over and he didn’t even wake up.  He just lay there with his mouth
slack and the fever burning in him and his breath wheezing in his chest.
    Hell.
    I looked at him.  His condition hit me like a lump of
lead in my stomach when I realized how sick he was.  I might lose him.  The
blood drained out of my face and real fear settled in my gut.
    I couldn’t lose Bobby.  My hands shook and I got dizzy.  I
thought I could do anything I wanted to with him, with never a cost to pay.  I
never thought about how much a threat to Bobby might hurt me .  Bobby was
my safe prey.  Losing him would turn my whole world upside down.  I depended on
him to be there to assuage my loneliness.  I needed him.  He was mine .
    I had let him in under my defenses.  I had let myself
care for him.  Now he slipped away, pulling my heart out by the roots.  He was
weak.  He was helpless.  He held my heart in a grip like iron.
    He wouldn’t die if I found a way to save him.
    I bent down and scooped him up, blanket and all,
grateful for my enhanced strength.  His head lolled against me, dirty locks of
hair falling against my coat.  I cradled him tenderly against my chest.  He
shivered harder when I picked him up, but he didn’t wake up.  The heat from him
hit me the same way an open hot oven would.
    He needed a hospital.  I didn’t know what he had or how
bad the illness was, but I needed a doctor to fix it.  They would make him well
or I would carve their intestines out with a spoon.  I would break their every
bone one by one and crush them until they were dust.  Bobby was mine .
    I jogged back through the house with Bobby in my arms,
careful not to bump his head.  He whimpered when I got him outside to the
driveway and the rain hit him.  His shivering grew so strong I thought I might lose
him right here.  I took the driveway at a run, held him with one hand for the
brief moment I needed to open the garage door, and slammed the garage door open. 
The garage door slammed all the way up from the force I used to open it,
bounced, and tried to come back down again.  I caught the door, pushed it back,
opened the back door of that old Buick and laid Bobby carefully inside my still
warm car.
    I pulled the car out of the garage and raced for the
hospital.
     
    I didn’t get home again until nearly twelve hours later.
 Bobby never woke up.  Pneumonia, the doctors said.  They promised to do ‘the
best they could’.  Reading them hurt me – they thought Bobby would most likely die.
 I stayed for hours anyway, terrifying the doctors and nurses, waiting
helplessly by Bobby’s bed.  I only left when my aching body started to
complain, forcing me to spend some time at Pete’s gym.
    I came in through the kitchen door from the garage and
looked over the usual mess.  Bobby and I were slobs.  It was a good thing that
the house was so cold, or the bugs would rule.  Bobby was supposed to keep
everything clean, his job, but I couldn’t exactly be irritated with Bobby now.  Not
when he was in the process of dying.
    Such a cold, cheerless place.  It reminded me of
Keaton’s warehouse, last winter.
    Cold.
    Frigid, in fact.
    “It’s a good thing that the house is so cold, or the bugs
would rule,” I muttered to myself.
    I didn’t notice the cold unless I was on the low end of
low juice.  My enhanced body adapted to the cold and the cold didn’t bother me.
 I had lived for almost a year in an unheated warehouse with Keaton and I
scarcely paid attention to the cold any more.  The house had a gas heater, but
I had never bothered to have the damned thing lit.  Too much of a hassle, too
large of a chance of an accident.
    Hmm.  I scraped some ancient paint off the old round
thermostat in the