And do you know what Glen Bateman did then? That nice man who paints the horrible pictures? He went over and kicked that dead man in the face. Harold made a muffled sort of grunt, as if he was the one who had been kicked. Then Glen drew his foot back again.

“No!” Harold yells, but Glen kicked the dead man again just the same. Then he turned around and he was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, but at least his eyes had lost that awful dead-fish look.

“Come on,” he sez, “let’s get out of here. Stu was right. It’s a dead place.”

So we went out, and Stu was sitting with his back to the iron gate in the high wall that ran around the place, and I wanted to… oh go ahead, Frannie, if you can’t tell your diary, who can you tell? I wanted to run to him and kiss him and tell him I was ashamed for all of us not believing him. And ashamed of how all of us had gone on about what a hard time we’d had when the plague was on, and him hardly saying anything when all the time that man had almost killed him.

Oh dear, I’m falling in love with him, I think I’ve got the world’s most crushable crush, if only it wasn’t for Harold I’d take my damn chances!

Anyway (there’s always an anyway, even tho by now my fingers are so numb they are just about falling off), that was when Stu told us for the first time that he wanted to go to Nebraska, that he wanted to check out his dream. He had a stubborn, sort of embarrassed look on his face, as if he knew he was going to have to take some more patronizing shit from Harold, but Harold was too unnerved from our “tour” of the Stovington facility to offer more than token resistance. And even that stopped when Glen said, in a very reticent way, that he had also dreamed of the old woman the night before.

“Of course, it might only be because Stu told us about his dream,” he said, kind of red in the face, “but it was remarkably similar.”

Harold said that of course that was it, but Stu said, “Wait a minute, Harold—I’ve got an idea.”

His idea was that we all take a sheet of paper and write down everything we could remember of our dreams over the last week, then compare notes. This was just scientific enough so that Harold couldn’t grumble too much.

Well, the only dream I’ve had is the one I’ve already written down, and I won’t repeat it. I’ll just say I wrote it down, leaving in the part about my father but leaving out the part about the baby and the coathanger he always has.

The results when we compared our papers were rather amazing.

Harold, Stu, and I had all dreamed about “the dark man,” as I call him. Both Stu & I visualized him as a man in a monk’s robe with no visible features—his face is always in a shadow. Harold’s paper said that he was always standing in a dark doorway, beckoning to him “like a pimp.” Sometimes he could just see his feet and the shine of his eyes “like weasel’s eyes” is how he put it.

Stu and Glen’s dreams of the old woman are very similar. The points of similarity are almost too many to go into (which is my “literary” way of saying my fingers are going numb). Anyway, they both agree she is in Polk County, Nebraska, altho they couldn’t get together on the actual name of the town—Stu says Hollingford Home, Glen says Hemingway Home. Close either way. They both seemed to feel they could find it. (Note Well, diary: My guess is “Hemingford Home.”)

Glen said, “This is really remarkable. We all seem to be sharing an authentic psychic experience.” Harold pooh-poohed, of course, but he looked like he’d been given lots of food for thought. He would only agree to go on the basis of “we have to go somewhere.” We leave in the morning. I’m scared, excited, and mostly happy to be leaving Stovington, which is a death-place. And I’ll take that old woman over the dark man anytime.

Things to Remember: “Hang loose” meant don’t get upset. “Rad” and “gnarly” were ways of saying a thing was good. “No sweat” meant you weren’t worried. To “boogie down” was to have a good time, and lots of people wore T-shirts which said SHIT HAPPENS, which it certainly did… and still does. “I got grease” was a pretty current expression (I first heard it just this year) that meant everything was going well. “Digs,” an old British expression, was just replacing “pad” or “crashpad” as an expression for the place you were living in before the superflu hit. It was very cool to say “I dig your digs.” Stupid, huh? But that was life.

It was just after twelve noon.

Perion had fallen into an exhausted sleep beside Mark, who they had moved carefully into the shade two hours earlier. He was in and out of consciousness, and it was easier on all of them when he was out. He had held against the pain for the remainder of the night, but after daybreak he had finally given in to it and when he was conscious, his screams curdled their blood. They stood looking at each other, helpless. No one had wanted any lunch.

“It’s his appendix,” Glen said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”

“Maybe we ought to try… well, operating on him,” Harold said. He was looking at Glen. “I don’t suppose you…”

“We’d kill him,” Glen said flatly. “You know that, Harold. If we could open him up without having him bleed to death, which we couldn’t, we wouldn’t know his appendix from his pancreas. The stuff in there isn’t labeled, you know.”

“We’ll kill him if we don’t,” Harold said.

“Do you want to try?” Glen asked waspishly. “Sometimes I wonder about you, Harold.”

“I don’t see that you’re being much help in our current situation, either,” Harold said, flushing.

“No, stop, come on,” Stu said. “What good are either of you doing? Unless one of you plans to saw him open with a jackknife, it’s out of the question, anyway.”

“Stu! ” Frannie almost gasped.

“Well?” he asked, and shrugged. “The nearest hospital would be back in Maumee. We could never get him there. I don’t even think we could get him back to the turnpike.”

“You’re right, of course,” Glen muttered, and ran a hand over his sandpapery cheek. “Harold, I apologize. I’m very upset. I knew this sort of thing could happen—pardon me, would happen—but I guess I only knew it in an academic way. This is a lot different than sitting in the old study, blue-skying things.”

Harold muttered an ungrateful acknowledgment and walked off with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. He looked like a sulky, overgrown ten-year-old.

“Why can’t we move him?” Fran asked desperately, looking from Stu to Glen.

“Because of how much his appendix must have swelled by now,” Glen said. “If it bursts, it’s going to dump enough poison into his system to kill ten men.”

Stu nodded. “Peritonitis.”

Frannie’s head whirled. Appendicitis? That was nothing these days. Nothing. Why sometimes, if you were in the hospital for gallstones or something, they would just lift out your appendix on general principles while they still had you open. She remembered that one of her grammar school friends, a boy named Charley Biggers whom everyone had called Biggy, had had his appendix out during the summer between fifth and sixth grades. He was only in the hospital for two or three days. Having your appendix out was just nothing, medically speaking.

Just like having a baby was nothing, medically speaking.

“But if you leave him alone,” she asked, “won’t it burst anyway?”

Stu and Glen looked at each other uncomfortably and said nothing.

“Then you’re just as bad as Harold says!” she burst out wildly. “You’ve got to do something, even if it is with a jackknife! You’ve got to!”

“Why us?” Glen asked angrily. “Why not you? We don’t even have a medical book, for Christ’s sweet sake!”

“But you… he… it can’t happen this way! Having your appendix out is supposed to be nothing! ”