Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney Page B

came down on the back of his thumb, and for a moment, Jim Norton just stood there, his mouth hanging open in shock. He had just enough time to ask himself why in the hell he’d been so careless when the pain flooded in and his whole body convulsed.
    A strangled cry of pain escaped his throat.
    He dropped the hammer and squeezed his injured thumb in his right hand, his body jittering like a man who has never had to piss so badly in all his life but has to wait just a little while longer.
    “Fuck!” he yelled.
    And yelling made something click inside him. His eyes sprang open. The pain was still there, but the rude blunt shock of it had abruptly given way to anger. He was breathing very fast, panting really, purple blotches swimming at the corners of his vision.
    “Goddamn holy fucking shit!” he yelled, and kicked the wall so hard a thin curtain of dirt sifted down from the windowsill.
    He stood there, hurting. The hammer was at his feet and he gave it an angry kick.
    “Piece of shit,” he muttered.
    Still clutching his injured thumb, he closed his eyes and focused on his breathing, trying to get it under control.
    “Daddy?”
    He opened his eyes. Madison was standing in the doorway, looking at him, her expression one of worry underscored by a note of fear.
    “I hit my thumb with the hammer,” he said.
    She stepped out onto the porch. “Oh no.” She reached for his hand. “Are you okay?”
    What does it fucking look like? he nearly said, but caught the words before they had a chance to come out. That wouldn’t do. Hurt as he was, it was hardly an excuse to lash out at her. God knows they’d done plenty of that over the last eleven days as it was.
    With a great deal of effort he said, “No, sweetheart, I hit it pretty good. Do Daddy a favor, would you? Go get me a rag or something from inside.”
    She looked at his hurt thumb. A thin trickle of blood was seeping out between his fingers and running down the inside of his wrist. She nodded.
    “Okay, Daddy.”
    Madison ran inside the house, and when she was gone, Jim took his right hand away and looked at the thumb. It was a mess. A small crescent-shaped cut had formed right below the web where the thumb met the hand, and within the curve of the crescent he could see the negative impression of the hammer’s nicked head. The left side of the cut was deeper, and bright red blood was flowing freely from it.
    Tentatively, he tried to move the thumb, and right away felt like somebody had jammed a live electrical cord into his wrist.
    “Okay,” he said. “Not gonna do that again.”
    Fuck , he thought, probably broken. That’s just great. We got a big-ass storm on the way and I go and break my fucking hand. Lot of fucking good I’m gonna be.
    He wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, and when he looked up again, Madison was running out the door with the tackle box they were using for their first-aid kit in her hands.
    She put it on the porch next to his feet, then took his huge hand in her small ones.
    “Easy,” he said, wincing. “I think it’s broken.”
    He tried to pull it back, but Madison held on firmly. She made a clucking noise and kept on examining his hand, turning it this way and that.
    Jim Norton chewed his fingernails, always had and probably always would, no matter how much Eleanor complained about it. As a result, his fingernails always had a ragged, unkempt look. He wasn’t especially self-conscious about it, no more than a smoker is about smoking, but it did make it difficult to pry open the tabs on Coke cans or pick coins off a counter. Eleanor would sometimes see him struggling and she’d make the same clucking noise Madison was making now. It was an impatient, Here, let me do it gesture, and as he stood, watching his daughter examine his injury, he realized how very much she was beginning to look like her mother.
    “It’s not broken.” She said it flatly, like a pronouncement.
    “Feels broken.”
    “It’s not. Just