Datasets:
BlinAI
/
Testo

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
 Community
1
text
stringlengths
0
4.23k
Nick was gone. Tom woke up and found himself standing in the deserted drugstore by the prescription counter. Standing on the glass were four bottles of pills. Tom stared at them for a long time and then gathered them up.
Tom came back at four in the morning, his shoulders frosted with sleet. Outside, it was letting up, and there was a thin clean line of dawn in the east. Kojak barked an ecstatic welcome, and Stu moaned and woke up. Tom knelt beside him. “Stu?”
“Tom? Hard to breathe.”
“I’ve got medicine, Stu. Nick showed me. You take it and get rid of that infection. You have to take one right now.” From the bag he had brought in, Tom produced the four bottles of pills and a tall bottle of Gatorade. Nick had been wrong about the juice. There was plenty of bottled juice in the Green River Superette.
Stu looked at the pills, holding them closely to his eyes. “Tom, where did you get these?”
“In the drugstore. Nick gave them to me.”
“No, really.”
“Really! Really! You have to take the penicillin first to see if that works. Which one says penicillin?”
“This one does… but Tom…”
“No. You have to. Nick said so. And you have to walk.”
“I can’t walk. I got a bust leg. And I’m sick.” Stu’s voice became sulky, petulant. It was a sickroom voice.
“You have to. Or I’ll drag you,” Tom said.
Stu lost his tenuous grip on reality. Tom put one of the penicillin capsules in his mouth, and Stu reflex-swallowed it with Gatorade to keep from choking. He began to cough wretchedly anyway, and Tom pounded him on the back as if he were burping a baby. Then he hauled Stu to his good foot by main force and began to dra...
“Please God,” Tom said. “Please God, please God.”
Stu cried out: “I know where I can get her a washboard, Glen! That music store has em! I seen one in the window!”
“Please God,” Tom panted. Stu’s head lolled on his shoulder. It felt as hot as a furnace. His splinted leg dragged uselessly.
Boulder had never seemed so far away as it did on that dismal morning.
Stu’s struggle with pneumonia lasted two weeks. He drank quarts of Gatorade, V-8, Welch’s grape juice, and various brands of orange drink. He rarely knew what he was drinking. His urine was strong and acidic. He messed himself like a baby, and like a baby’s his stools were yellow and loose and totally blameless. Tom ke...
The penicillin produced an ugly red rash after two days, and Tom switched to the ampicillin. That was better. On October 7 Tom awoke in the morning to find Stu sleeping more deeply than he had in days. His entire body was soaked with sweat, but his forehead was cool. The fever had snapped in the night. For the next two...
He relapsed on October 11, and Tom was terribly afraid it was the end. But the fever did not go as high, and his respiration never got as thick and labored as it had been on those terrifying early mornings of the fifth and the sixth.
On October 13 Tom awoke from a dazed nap in one of the lobby chairs to find Stu sitting up and looking around. “Tom,” he whispered. “I’m alive.”
“Yes,” Tom said joyfully. “Laws, yes!”
“I’m hungry. Could you rustle up some soup, Tom? With noodles in it, maybe?”
By the eighteenth his strength had begun to come back a little. He was able to get around the lobby for five minutes at a time on the crutches Tom brought him from the drugstore. There was a steady, maddening itch from his broken leg as the bones began to knit themselves together. On October 20 he went outside for the ...
The day was warm and sunny, but with an undertone of coolness. In Boulder it might still be mid-fall, the aspens turning gold, but here winter was almost close enough to touch. He could see small patches of frozen, granulated snow in shadowed areas the sun never touched.
“I don’t know, Tom,” he said. “I think we can get over to Grand Junction, but after that I just don’t know. There’s going to be a lot of snow in the mountains. And I don’t dare move for a while, anyway. I’ve got to get my go back.”
“How long before your go comes back, Stu?”
“I don’t know, Tom. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
Stu was determined not to move too quickly, not to push it—he had been close enough to death to relish his recovery. He wanted it to be as complete as it could be. They moved out of the hotel lobby into a pair of connecting rooms down the first-floor hall. The room across the way became Kojak’s temporary doghouse. Stu’...
Nonetheless, he set to work exercising it, trying to tone it up. Bringing the leg back to even 75 percent efficiency was going to be a long process, but so far as he could tell, he had a whole winter to do it in.
On October 28 Green River was dusted with nearly five inches of snow.
“If we don’t make our move soon,” Stu told Tom as they looked out at the snow, “we’ll be spending the whole damn winter in the Utah Hotel.”
The next day they drove the Plymouth down to the gas station on the outskirts of town. Pausing often to rest and using Tom for the heavy work, they changed the balding back tires for a pair of studded snows. Stu considered taking a four-wheel drive, and had finally decided, quite irrationally, that they should stick wi...
They reached Grand Junction at noon on November 2, with not much more than three hours to spare, as it turned out. The skies had been lead-gray all the forenoon, and as they turned down the main street, the first spits of snow began to skate across the Plymouth’s hood. They had seen brief flurries half a dozen times en...
“Pick your spot,” Stu said. “We may be here for a while.”
Tom pointed. “There! The motel with the star on it!”
The motel with the star on it was the Grand Junction Holiday Inn. Below the sign and the beckoning star was a marquee, and written on it in large red letters was: ELCOME TO GR ND JUNC ON’S SUMMERF ST ‘90! JUNE 12 – JU Y 4TH!
“Okay,” Stu said. “Holiday Inn it is.”
He pulled in and killed the Plymouth’s engine, and so far as either of them knew, it never ran again. By two that afternoon, the spits and spats of snow had developed into a thick white curtain that fell soundlessly and seemingly endlessly. By four o’clock the light wind had turned into a gale, driving the snow before ...
“Jeezly crow,” Tom whispered. “We’re snowed in, ain’t we, Stu?”
Stu nodded.
“How can we get back to Boulder in this?”
“We wait for spring,” Stu said.
“That long?” Tom looked distressed, and Stu put an arm around the big man-boy’s shoulders.
“The time will pass,” he said, but even then he was not sure either of them would be able to wait that long.
Stu had been moaning and gasping in the darkness for some time. At last he gave a cry loud enough to wake himself up and came out of the dream to his Holiday Inn motel room up on his elbows, staring wide-eyed at nothing. He let out a long, shivery sigh and fumbled for the lamp by the bed table. He had clicked it twice ...
The dream again. The Frannie dream. The nightmare.
It was always the same. Frannie in pain, her face bathed in sweat. Richardson was between her legs, and Laurie Constable was standing nearby to assist him. Fran’s feet were up in stainless-steel stirrups…
Push, Frannie. Bear down. You’re doing fine.
But looking at George’s somber eyes over the top of his mask, Stu knew that Frannie wasn’t doing fine at all. Something was wrong. Laurie sponged off her sweaty face and pushed back her hair from her forehead.