Lightning

shot, the loss of blood, the shock and all. He shouldn't have been moved, you know."
    "I had no choice. Will he come out of it?"
    "Probably. In this case a coma is the body's way of shutting down to conserve energy, facilitate healing. He's not lost as much blood as it appears; he's got a good pulse, so this probably won't last long. When you see his shirt and lab coat soaked like that, you think he's bled quarts, but he hasn't. Not that it was a spoonful, either. He's had a bad time of it. But no major blood vessels were torn, or he'd be in worse shape. Still, he should be in a hospital."
    "We've already been through that," Laura said impatiently. "We can't go to a hospital."
    "What bank did you rob?" the physician asked teasingly, but with noticeably less twinkle in his eyes than there had been when he had made his other little jokes.
    While he waited for the pictures to develop, he had cleaned the wound, flooded it with iodine, dusted it with antibiotic powder, and prepared a bandage. Now he got a needle, another implement she could not identify, and heavy thread from a cabinet and put them on a stainless-steel tray that he had hung on the side of the examination table. The wounded man lay there, unconscious, propped on his right side with the help of several foam pillows.
    "What're you doing?" Laura asked.
    "Those holes are fairly large, especially the exit wound. If you insist on endangering his life by keeping him out of a hospital, then the least I can do is throw a few stitches in him."
    "Well, all right, but be quick about it."
    "You expect G-men to break down the door any minute?"
    "Worse than that," she said. "Far worse than that."
    Since they had arrived at Brenkshaw's, she had been expecting a sudden, night-shattering display of lightning, thunder like the giant hooves of apocalyptic horsemen, and the arrival of more well-armed time travelers. Fifteen minutes ago, as the doctor had been X-raying her guardian's chest, she'd thought she heard thunder so distant that it was barely audible. She hurried to the nearest window to search the sky for far-off lightning, but she saw none through the breaks in the trees, perhaps because the sky over San Bernardino already had a ruddy glow from city lights or perhaps because she had not heard thunder in the first place. She had finally decided that she might have heard a jet passing overhead and, in her panic, had misinterpreted it as a more distant sound.
    Brenkshaw stitched up his patient, snipped the thread—"sutures will dissolve"—and bound the bandages in place with wide adhesive tape that he repeatedly wound around the guardian's chest and back.
    The air had a pungent, medicinal smell that made Laura slightly ill, but it did not bother Chris. He sat in the corner, happily working on another Tootsie Pop.
    While waiting for the X-rays, Brenkshaw also had administered an injection of penicillin. Now he went to the tall, white, metal cabinets along the far wall and poured capsules from a large jar into a pill bottle, then from another large jar into a second small bottle. "I keep some basic drugs here, sell them to poorer patients at cost so they don't have to go broke at the pharmacy."
    "What're these?" Laura asked when he returned to the examination table, where she stood, and gave her the two small plastic bottles.
    "More penicillin in this one. Three a day, with meals—if he can take meals. I
think
he'll come around soon. If he doesn't he'll begin to dehydrate, and he'll need intravenous fluid. Can't give him liquid by mouth when he's in a coma—he'd choke. This other is a painkiller. Only when needed, and no more than two a day."
    "Give me more of these. In fact give me your whole supply." She pointed to two quart jars that contained hundreds of both capsules.
    "He won't need that much of either one. He—"
    "No, I'm sure he won't," she said, "but I don't know what the hell other problems we're going to have. We may need both penicillin and painkillers for me—or my boy."
    Brenkshaw stared at her for a long moment. "What in the name of God have you gotten into? It's like something in one of your books."
    "Just give me—" Laura stopped, stunned by what he had said. "Like something in one of my books?
In one of my books
! Oh, my God, you know who I am."
    "Of course. I've known almost from the moment I saw you on the porch. I read thrillers, as I said, and although your books aren't strictly in that genre, they're very suspenseful, so I read them, too, and