You hear me? You get the hell out of" She lunged for him, one hand raised over her head, and Teddy jumped from the bed and two orderlies swooped past him with thick leather belts draped over their shoulders and caught Rachel under the arms and flipped her back onto the bed.
Teddy could feel the shakes in his body, the sweat springing from his pores, and Rachel's voice blew up through the ward:
"You rapist! You cruel fucking rapist! My husband will come and cut your throat open! You hear me? He will cut your fucking head off and we'll drink the blood! We'll bathe ourselves in it, you sick fucking bastard!"
One orderly lay across her chest and the other one grasped her
ankles in a massive hand and they slid the belts through metal slots in
the bedrails and crossed them over Rachel's chest and ankles and
pulled them through slots on the other side, pulled them taut and then slid the flaps through buckles, and the buckles made a snap as they locked, and the orderlies stepped back.
"Rachel," Cawley said, his voice gentle, paternal.
"You're all fucking rapists. Where are my babies? Where are my babies? You give me back my babies, you sick sons-a-bitches! You give me my babies!"
She let loose a scream that rode up Teddy's spine like a bullet, and she surged against her restraints so hard the gurney rails clattered, and Cawley said, "We'll come check on you later, Rachel." She spit at him and Teddy heard it hit the floor and then she screamed again and there was blood on her lip from where she must have bitten it, and Cawley nodded at them and started walking and they fell into step behind him, Teddy looking back over his shoulder to see Rachel watching him, looking him right in the eye as she arched her shoulders off the mattress and the cords in her neck bulged and her lips were slick with blood and spittle as she shrieked at him, shrieked like she'd seen all the century's dead climb through her window and walk toward her bed.
CAWLEY HAD A bar in his office, and he went to it as soon as they entered, crossing to the right, and that's where Teddy lost him for a moment. He vanished behind a film of white gauze, and Teddy thought:
No, not now. Not now, for Christ's sake.
"Where'd you find her?" Teddy said.
"On .the beach near the lighthouse. Skipping stones into the ocean."
Cawley reappeared, but only because Teddy shifted his head to the left as Cawley continued on to the right. As Teddy turned his head, the gauze covered a built-in bookcase and then the window. He rubbed his right eye, hoping against all evidence, but it did no good, and then he felt it along the left side of his head - a canyon filled with lava cut through the skull just below the part in his hair. He'd thought it was Rachel's screams in there, the furious noise, but it was more than that, and the pain erupted like a dozen dagger points pushed slowly into his cranium, and he winced and raised his fingers to his temple. "Marshal?" He looked up to see Cawley on the other side of his desk, a ghostly blur to his left.
"Yeah?" Teddy managed.
"You're deathly pale."
"You okay, boss?" Chuck was beside him suddenly.
"Fine," Teddy managed, and Cawley placed his scotch glass down on the desk, and the sound of it was like a shotgun report. "Sit down," Cawley said.
"I'm okay," Teddy said, but the words made their way down from his brain to his tongue on a sliked ladder.
Cawley's bones cracked like burning wood as he leaned against the desk in front of Teddy. "Migraine?"
Teddy looked up at the blur of him. He would have nodded, but past experience had taught him never to nod during one of these. "Yeah," he managed.
"I could tell by the way you're rubbing your temple."
"Oh."
"You get them often?"
"Half-dozen..." Teddy's mouth dried up and he took a few seconds to work some moisture back into his tongue. "... times a year." "You're lucky," Cawley said. "In one respect anyway."
"How's that?"
"A lot of migraine sufferers get cluster migraines once a week or so." His body made that burning-wood sound again as he came off the desk and Teddy heard him unlock a cabinet.
"What do you get?" he asked Teddy. "Partial vision loss, dry mouth, fire in the head?"
"Bingo."
"All the centuries we've studied the brain, and no one