He had carried her through the woods, back to her own safe bedroom, and gently laid her down on the bed.

"You're okay, hear?" he told her. "You're okay. Nothing wrong with you now. Go to sleep."

That day, while she fitfully slept, he told her mother she would be out of school. Under the weather, she was. Better in a week, maybe.

The first few hours were bliss. Silence and numbness. She drifted in and out of the room, wandering in the deep recesses of her mind.

It wasn't until the third hour, or close to the fourth, that problems started. She could feel bone, snapped straight through tendon, touching the inside of raw skin -- stretching and scratching veins with splinters of marrow and calcium.

Swaddled in six blankets, she moaned and shivered.

Her brothers came home to an unfamiliar sight: James with tears in her eyes. "Can't you see them?"

"See what, Jay?" Torry asked.

"The colors," James giggled. "Can't you see the colors?"

"I want my supper! I don't see no colors, Jay!"

"Hush your mouth, Remur," Torry said. "I see 'em, Jay."

James smiled. "Pretty, ain't they?"

"Yeah Jay," Torry brushed the damp hair off his sister's forehead. "Real pretty."

She closed her eyes. Shuddered. "I hurt, Torry," she burbled, with a strange smile on her lips. "I hurt so bad."

Nine-one-one didn't take calls from little kids, Torry discovered. "Call back when your parents are home, sweetie," the lady told him, with a firm and final click on the other end of the line.

"How is it now, Rem?"

Remur shrugged. "She says she wants ice cream. She says she's fine."

Torry knelt to his younger brother's level. "Well, she ain't. I need to get help, Rem. I'm going out to the neighbor's. I'll be back in an hour or two."

"The McQuanns? But that'll take you all day!"

"No it won't." Torry grabbed the two dollars left in his lunchbox. "I'll be back before you know it. Why'nt you go feed her some of that ice cream from the fridge?"

Remur grinned. "All by myself?"

"Yessir, all by yourself. You're big enough now, I guess." He ran to the freezer, took down the half-eaten carton of Double Chocolate Chunk, and handed it to Remur. "Be careful not to spill it. And if it starts to melt, put it back in the fridge. Use a chair if you can't reach."

Remur looked down at his new responsibility in awe. "I'll be careful, Torry. I promise."

"Good boy."

It took Torry one and a half hours to reach the small farm of Trevor McQuann. He knocked quietly, then firmly, then loudly, then went to the closest window he could find and threw a rock. Not enough to break, just enough to get attention.

The McQuanns were careful people, Deck had said. "Careful" meaning they kept to themselves, no matter what befell the world outside. Careful people didn't trust the world.

McQuann was holding a gun.

"Please help. My sister's in trouble. Please help," Torry forced himself to keep calm and civil, even though his heart was beating so loud from his run he thought he might burst. "Please help."

"Whassa matter with her, boy?"

"I don't know, sir. She's shaking all over and she's sweating and she can't sit up."

McQuann snorted. "If she was a bitch, she'd be about to give pups," he said. "Get back home, boy. I'll call the police or hospital or whoever'll come. If they'll come. All right?"

Torry nodded. "All right." It would have to do.

He took his time getting back home. *By the time I get back, she'll have gone,* he thought. *By the time I get there, everything will be okay.*

Torry approached home with a wary eye, seeing no helicopters, no ambulances, no red-and-blue flashing lights to indicate an emergency. No lights of any kind, not even in the house. There was a dead silence in the air.

*They left already,* he told himself.

The door was still ajar where he had left it early that afternoon. He pushed it open, hit with a stench of rotting and soap.

"Remur? James?" He didn't quite dare to step through the door just yet. "Mr. Decker? Momma?"

He didn't notice the light was there until it wasn't there anymore. Something had moved under the door to the bedroom. He knocked softly. "James?"

He opened the door.

The blood caught him first. There was only a little bit, on the sheets, but it was red and it was real. His sister was on the floor, on her stomach, leg flayed out at an odd angle.

"I didn't do it, Torry!" Remur cried, tugging on his brother's hand from his place next to James. "She tried to get up and she fell down! She crashed! And she hollered when I tried to move her!"

"Don't worry, Rem. You did all right." Torry knelt beside her, putting a hand to her lips. Still breathing. "Grab a pillow. And the covers over there."

Remur helped build the makeshift bed on the floor. "Is Jaymie gonna die?"

Torry forced out a laugh. "No sir, she is not. Not on our watch." But out of the corner of his eye he saw the dark green bruise on her shin grow dark purple, and the marks on her skinny white neck, and he wondered.

When Momma got home, she laughed softly at the arrangements the boys had made. "My little doctors," she said. "Your sister doesn't need a hospital. Not even a little bit. Mr. Decker told me; she tripped and fell in the woods this morning. She's just playing hookey from school, that's all."

"Can we play hookey too, Momma?" Remur asked. "We helped!"

Torry's wrists started to shake. He felt his hands close into fists.

"No, baby. You'll go to school tomorrow. Torry too. If old James wants to stay home and be a drop-out, she can."

Torry insisted on sleeping on the floor next to James. Deck wasn't home yet and Momma was too worried to enforce her ruling of "no". He took a towel from the hall closet and made himself as comfortable as he could in her room.

"How is it now?" he whispered out into the darkness.

He sat up, and grabbed her foot. It was burning, her skin was burning like it was being boiled, and no one would do anything.

"I hurt, Torry," she mumbled back. "I hurt."

"Then tell them, Jay. Tell them loud." Gritting his teeth against her pain, he placed both hands on top of her shin and pushed.

The house woke to James screaming.

For miles you could hear her wail, louder than the ambulance siren, higher than the whirr of helicopters, stronger than smoke and more merciless than gunshots. Her cry of alarm split Torry's eardrums, for which he received a slight tone deafness and a minor operation in the emergency room -- well-earned in the line of duty, he thought.

James was treated for a compound fracture and was sent home after a day.

Deck didn't come home until the week after that.

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