“You thought giving me a dead rabbit’s foot and reminding me of my mother and my dead rabbit would cheer me up?”
“Um… yeah?”
“Christ, Alex. That is the most idiotic, wrongheaded… and sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“So you don’t want the rabbit’s foot?”
“I didn’t say that.” Darla snatched the rabbit’s foot from my hand and tucked it into her pocket.
“You hungry?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I stood and reached down with my good hand to help Darla up. I wrapped my good arm around her waist, and we leaned on each other, walking toward the greenhouse door. “We’re going to get through this.”
“I know. It’s just—every morning I wake up, and I’m sure I still have a hand. Even when I stare at that damn stump, I can feel my hand moving, my fingers flexing.”
“I know.”
“Red’s got to pay for this.”
“He will. Sooner or later, he will.”
Darla and I started working half days. We still needed far more sleep than normal; most of our energy was being spent on healing. Dr. McCarthy stopped by every two or three days for a while, checking our arms and feet, although it wasn’t really necessary—they were doing fine. Maybe the antibiotics had worked, or maybe the boiling tar had killed all the bacteria in our stumps. After about three weeks, the tar on our forearms started to flake off as new skin grew beneath it. The new skin was pink, shiny, and hairless—it looked like it belonged on a newborn piglet, not my arm. One thing you could say for Red—he was precise. He had chopped through our forearms in the exact same place, about an inch from the wrist.
As soon as we could, we started trying to learn how to do everything one-handed. Darla had a rougher time of it than I—she was trying to train her left hand to do jobs she’d used her dominant hand for before.
Some tasks were ridiculously challenging—climbing the ladder to the sniper’s nest, for example. I finally managed it by hooking my left elbow over each rung as I ascended. It was painfully slow, and by the time I reached the platform, I was shaky and sweating. I rested up there for nearly an hour before starting down the ladder—that was worse still.
It was even harder to relearn to shoot. Operating the bolt on the hunting rifle was a problem—the whole rifle would move instead of just the bolt. I had to move my left forearm to the top of the rifle, hold it down, rack the bolt, and then get back into a shooting position. Not exactly fast or efficient. And while I could line up one shot fine, I had no way to control the recoil. My rate of fire wasn’t even a quarter as good as it had been before I lost my hand.
The semi-automatic rifles were easier, but reloading was still a pain. I could either roll the rifle onto its back to give me something to push against when I needed to seat a new magazine, or I could cradle the rifle against my body
It didn’t really matter—I had never been much good with any kind of firearm. And I didn’t take myself or Darla off the watch rotation, despite the difficulty we had climbing the turbine tower. Hurt or not, it didn’t feel right to ask everyone else to do something I wouldn’t do.
Zik’s family pitched in with a mad fervor. They seemed determined to outwork everyone, as if they were terrified we’d kick them out if they didn’t. We finished the third greenhouse and started building a fourth.
All the tar gradually flaked off our stumps, as if it had been a scab, leaving behind a riotous mess of scar tissue, scabs, and new pink skin. Dr. McCarthy debrided the wound, cutting away some of the scabs, while Ed and Max held my arm still. It hurt so intensely that I nearly passed out. Then he stretched out the skin, stitching it up to protect the end of the bone. That hurt too, but not nearly so bad as the debriding.
Our arms healed faster after that. As soon as my arm quit hurting, it started to itch like ten thousand starving fleas were trapped under my skin. The itching was almost worse than the pain. Every now and then, I unwrapped all my coats and sleeves from the stump and plunged it into a snowbank. That stopped the itching—for a few minutes.
About a week later, the itching started to subside, and my thoughts turned to practical matters. A bionic hand was impossible, but could I fight with the stump? How could I make it more useful?
I went looking for Darla and found her standing on a stepladder, trying to string wire one-handed across the rafters in the shell of the greenhouse, cussing softly as she worked.
“You know what we need?” I said to her back.
She startled, hitting her head on a rafter. “Christ! Don’t sneak up on me!”
“We need hooks.”
She stepped off the ladder and turned to face me. “Do you want an eye patch too? Halloween was…” she stopped to think, “six weeks ago.”
I put my good arm around her waist. “If we had hooks instead of stumps, we could climb the ladder in the turbine tower way easier. We could make the hooks the right size to hold a rifle barrel, so we could shoot and reload faster.” What I meant, of course, was that she could build the hooks that size. I had no clue how to even start making a hook.
Darla started to get excited. “I could rig them on a leather cuff, run a strap back to our elbows to keep them on tight.”
“Might even be better than a stump in a fight.”
“Heck, yeah. I could even rig different attachments— how would you like a knife sprouting from the end of your stump?”
“Hmm. I’d probably be wearing the hook whenever I needed the knife. Could you sharpen the outer edge of the hook?”
“Sure. But I’m never going to make out with you again. Knowing our luck, you’d give me a mastectomy by mistake.”
“I’ll take it off,” I said, trying to suppress a giggle.
“I’m putting a ratchet and a socket for screwdriver bits on mine. That’s going to make some stuff so much easier.”
Darla started spending most of her time working on the hooks. That slowed down our greenhouse building some, but it also seemed to banish the last of her lingering funk, so I didn’t object. We were producing more food than we needed anyway.
It took Darla almost two months to finish the hooks. It was more of a job for a blacksmith than an amateur welder, she said. Several early prototypes broke. When she was finally done, my hook was a thing of beauty. A smoothly curved, C-shaped blade, sharpened to a razor’s edge on the outside and rounded off on the inside. Darla’s was ugly by comparison. She only sharpened the point of her hook because of the ungainly ratchet and driver bit attachments welded along its length.
I practiced endlessly, developing modifications of my taekwondo forms to take into account the deadly blade on the end of my left arm. I also spent hours upon hours of mind-numbingly boring practice with the guns—not firing them, just picking them up, aiming, and reloading. I had to be sure I could get the hook in exactly the right spot in the dark, when I was shivering from the cold, and when I was hopped up on adrenaline, which ruined my fine motor control. I got to the point where I could use the hook so well that it was almost as good as my lost hand, at least for shooting. It might be better than a hand in a fight, I mused. I could bring it to bear a lot faster than a belt knife or a gun. In close combat, the first unblocked strike can win the fight, so speed is critical.
Max found me during one of my practice sessions. I was on watch in the sniper’s nest, so I made use of the time with a little drill. I would scan the horizon with the binoculars and pick out a landmark. Then I would close my eyes, spin two or three times, and try to pick up the unloaded rifle and get it aimed at the landmark without reopening my eyes. I was getting pretty good at it too.
I was in the middle of a drill when I heard a knock on the hatch. I stopped and snagged the eye with my hook, dragging the hatch open. Max poked his head up into the sniper’s nest. “What are you doing up here? Sounds like a herd of elephants stomping on the floor.”