Blown Away (Nowhere, USA Book 6)

by Ninie Hammon

  Like Sam had said yesterday, kneeling on the asphalt beside the unconscious boy, “We have to get out of here.”

  Lives hung in the balance — E.J.’s, Grace Tibbits’s, Pete Rutherford’s, and now Rusty’s. All four of them needed medical care they couldn’t get here. Not to mention the lives of every man, woman and child in Nowhere County, as the Jabberwock prowled the countryside, “absorbing” one after the other of them. It would keep taking people until there was nobody left if they couldn’t figure out what it was and how to beat it.

  They’d been discussing that very thing with Thelma Jackson yesterday when the latest crisis exploded like a mortar shell all around them. First, Skeeter Burkett had brought in a body he’d found in the river downstream from the Scott’s Ridge Overlook. And then Rusty had shown up in the parking lot after his first Jabberwock ride, bringing his friend Douglas Taylor to get medical help because Douglas had been bitten by a rattlesnake.

  All that followed those two bombshells had left them too frazzled and distracted to concentrate. Now, they had to regain their focus to solve the Jabberwock puzzle. A clock was ticking, counting relentlessly down to death for everybody in the county.

  Sam finished one piece of toast and resolutely refused the second, waving it off with a dismissive “Later.” She reached over and took her little boy’s limp hand, squeezed it and turned to the others.

  “Drag some chairs in here and sit down. I’m not leaving Rusty, but we have to talk! I’ve been doing nothing but thinking about the Jabberwock for the past … whatever, all night … and I got nothing. I am no closer to figuring this thing out than we were when Thelma left yesterday afternoon.”

  She looked earnestly from one to the other. “I’m too fried. You guys are going to have to …”

  “There still are things we don’t know and haven’t done yet,” Charlie said and Sam nodded.

  “We need to go back to Charlie’s mother’s house and see if we can get … see if we can talk to the Jabberwock somehow through the chalkboard.” The chalkboard had contained a cryptic message from the beast on Saturday. Charlie’d written “I want to go home” and the monster had responded, “No, stay here and play with me.” They’d intended to go back to her house to see if they could use the blackboard to crank up a conversation with the beast, but then Skeeter had brought in Hayley Norman’s mangled corpse and …

  “We need to have a chat with Fish, too, find out why he blurted out the word Jabberwock after we’d all ridden it for the first time two weeks ago,” said Malachi. “How’d he know the thing’s name, and what else does he know about it that he’s not telling?”

  “All that stuff Thelma left,” Sam said. “It’s still in the breakroom. Notes on what that old woman, the witch’s daughter, told her. That list of names from the Bible. I guess we need to go through it all and … I don’t know what.”

  “I’ll take it home with me. Maybe after Merrie goes to sleep tonight, I can take a look at it. Right now, though, we have to …” Charlie didn’t finish. Said merely, “Liam.”

  Liam had been shot and killed on Saturday, murdered in front of hundreds of witnesses, none of whom would admit to seeing a thing. Today was Tuesday. His body, along with the bodies of a growing number of dead — mostly murdered — people was in one of the refrigerated drawers in the basement of Bascum’s funeral home.

  “I’ve been working on that,” Malachi said. “I talked to a couple of guys who’re willing to dig a grave in the Ridge cemetery.” Located on the outskirts of Persimmon Ridge, the cemetery’s name was inscribed in wrought-iron letters on the archway across the entrance: Cherry Blossom Acres. Nobody’d ever called it that. “I’d a whole lot rather have a casket, even a wooden coffin, but …” Malachi paused. “If I were going to ask anybody to build a coffin, it would have been Reece Tibbits in that woodshed of his. But nobody’s seen him in a couple of days. And his house has …”

  “Aged?” Sam’s voice was barely a whisper. The horror of that still had the power to knock the wind out of them.

  “We will just have to use a plastic body bag. We can lay our hands on those. There are several floating around — at the fire department, the sheriff’s office, Bascum’s. We could get a grave ready and then …”

  “Yeah, then what? We can’t just …” Charlie didn’t finish.

  “No, we won’t. We’ll have … something, some kind of service,” Sam said.

  “Reverend Norman won’t be officiating,” Charlie said, and she turned to Malachi. “My car’s parked out front. Mama’s car.” She reached into the pocket of her jeans, fished out a set of car keys and handed them to him. “You told Rev. Norman you’d pick him up at nine, right?”

  Malachi had, indeed, promised to take the minister out to Scott’s Ridge Overlook, where the minister’s murdered daughter had left the family’s lone remaining car.

  “Didn’t that strike you as … weird?” Charlie said. “The way he asked you to take him out to retrieve his car. I mean — why you?”

  “He said he didn’t want to break down in front of somebody from his congregation,” Malachi said.

  “And you bought that explanation?” Charlie asked.

  “Nope. That’s not the real reason, but what is?” Malachi couldn’t figure it out, just knew he had a “bad feeling about this, Luke” sense about the whole thing. “I’m supposed to pick him up in a few minutes. I’ll come back here when I’m finished and we can figure out … Liam. And maybe take a shot at communicating through that blackboard.”

  “While you’re running your taxi service” — Charlie looked at Sam — “how about I borrow Sam’s car and see if I can track down Fish?”

  “You sure you want to do that?” Sam asked. “Shouldn’t you stay out of sight?”

  “No … I don’t think that’s a good idea. “

  Malachi heard both fear and resolve in Charlie’s voice. He’d seen it played out time and time again — a crisis brought out the best in good people and the worst in bad. The two girls he’d played with as children had both grown up to be strong women, tough. He was proud of them. But his mother had proved to be even more vicious than he’d ever have dreamed. She had threatened to kill Charlie if Malachi bailed on the bargain he’d made with her — and he’d definitely bailed. As soon as his mother figured that out …

  “It seems to me that the best place to hide is in plain sight,” Charlie said. “We’re running a bluff here and I think it looks less suspicious if I just … go on about life.”

  Charlie would be in real danger if his mother found out Malachi had defied her — that’d he’d killed Howie Witherspoon against her express hands-off orders. But Malachi was sure his mother didn’t know that yet, probably hadn’t even missed Howie and certainly didn’t know what’d happened to him. Malachi’d dumped his body in an abandoned mine shaft. Might be nobody would ever find it.

  “Maybe you’re right. Mama will leave Charlie alone as long as I toe the line and as far as she knows, I’m still ‘toe-ing.’” He paused. “And we need all hands on deck.”

  The door to the room suddenly burst open and Merrie came barreling in, “Mommy, Mommy, you gotta come see dis.” She grabbed Charlie’s hand and started dragging her to the door. “Come look. Da puppies-es eyes are open. Dey waking up.”

  Malachi saw Sam’s attention snap back to her son, lying so still on the bed — Rusty, who was not waking up.

  “You guys go do what you have to do and I’ll be here … with Rusty.” Sam had to struggle now to control her emotions.

  Malachi stood, leaned over and put his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “We’ll figure this out. We will. We’ll get Rusty out of here.”

  She smiled up at him, clearly not convinced. But that was okay because he wasn’t either.

  Chapter Three

  Jolene Rutherford sat propped up on the army surplus store cot on the pillows Cotton Jackson had brought back with him from Danville. She suspected it was long past dawn out there on the flat, remembering a childhood l
ived in the shadow of mountains so tall the sun didn’t clear the peaks until ten in the morning. Her pain level was tolerable now, not because of the pillows but because of what else Cotton had brought back along with them.

  Oxycontin, which she’d heard was as easy to get in eastern Kentucky as popcorn at a carnival and apparently she’d heard right. Cotton would only say, “I know a guy who knows a guy,” pointing out that even with mandatory drug testing, the foreman of a factory had to be on the lookout for shift workers who might be using. He’d only had to make a couple of calls, found what he was looking for near the little town of Simpsonville in Drayton County, and then went on into Danville to pick up sterile bandages and surgical tape for Jolene’s wound.

  She could hear the rumble of low voices from the kitchen, where Stuart McClintock and Cotton had gone so she could “get some rest.” They hadn’t said, “sleep,” because nobody in Cotton’s almost-empty house had looked forward to nodding off last night — and greeting the nightmares they’d been sure awaited them.

  Staying awake was better. Not easier — particularly in view of all the sleep they’d lost since they got here — but it was definitely better. She probably could have made out what Stuart and Cotton were saying if she concentrated. But she was feeling just enough of a fuzzy buzz to be unwilling to make the effort. Besides, they were obviously talking about their little adventure with the monsters in Fearsome Hollow late yesterday afternoon — both human and otherwise, and she was worn out with that subject.

  Somebody had shot at them. With a high-powered deer rifle — Cotton was a hunter and he knew the sound, said the damage to her van was consistent with the firepower of such a weapon. Bottom line, somebody’d been trying to kill them.

  Jolene burped out something like a laugh and felt her bandaged arm protest.

  “Oops, sorry ‘bout that,” she told her arm, and realized that she might be higher than she’d thought. Not being a recreational drug user like most everybody in her world, she didn’t know how taking a heavy-duty narcotic was supposed to make you feel. It was indeed a pleasant sensation, she’d grant that, but her quarrelsome bullet wound kept her from floating out into la-la land.

  Bullet wound.

  She’d been shot.

  Shot.

  Okay, maybe she wasn’t as worn out with the subject as she thought, since it kept hitting her in waves of realization like breakers on a rocky beach. With the edges of reality softened by the drug, the memories were fragmented, just pieces, each one jagged and sharp.

  Rain. Then no rain. An umbrella of mist above them. Shadows, black holes ripped in the fabric of the universe.

  The sound, the cry of someone, something in horrible pain.

  She turns the dial, flips a switch and a reverberation all around sounds like a gong inside a bell jar.

  Pressure.

  She can’t breathe.

  Her fingers searching, find wires, pull them out and the pressure stops.

  The van window explodes, pain slices her arm.

  Darkness.

  Jolene! Jolene!

  Someone’s calling her name from a long way off. Her eyes snap open and a black face is peering down at her.

  Stuart McClintock.

  Then Jolene’s memories suddenly snapped into focus, like she’d been taking an eye exam and the optometrist asked, “Is this clearer … or this?”

  There’d been a mighty roaring sound — that memory was vivid, the rumble of wind blowing in the broken-out windows.

  Stuart had lifted Jolene up off the floor and into a sitting position in the back of the van as they careened around corners in their desperate flight away from Gideon and Fearsome Hollow — where someone had been shooting at them. He had unceremoniously yanked open her blouse to get a look at the wound in her upper arm just below her shoulder, the flaming brand on her skin, a hot poker.

  She turned and looked full at it then. Blood was streaming down her arm to her elbow from a … cut probably three inches long across her arm.

  Not a cut!

  A bullet wound. Except the bullet hadn’t punctured, it had just sliced across the skin. Grazed her, as they’d have said if this had been a cowboy movie.

  Stuart poked around on it, then sat back panting, and it was only then she realized he’d been holding his breath.

  “Pull over, Cotton,” he called out, but Cotton paid him no mind, kept the pedal to the metal, speeding down the winding mountain roads. “I said pull over. Before you miss a turn and we fly off the road into … nothing.”

  Cotton neither slowed down nor pulled over.

  “We got to get Jolene to the emergency room!” he said.

  “Not at the risk of life and limb we don’t. It’s not that bad, really.”

  Stuart looked at her and forced a smile. “I guess that’s easy for me to say, but it really doesn’t appear to be life-threatening.” He cried out to Cotton, “This gunshot wound isn’t going to kill her but crashing down a mountainside will. Now, pull over.”

  Cotton slowed, pulled off on the shoulder of the road and stopped. He turned around in the seat and even from her position on the floor in the back, Jolene could see his hands shaking. Yeah, they were way safer sitting here than they were with him driving.

  “You alright — really?” Cotton didn’t wait for an answer but asked Stuart. “You’re saying she’s okay, it’s not bad?”

  She was suddenly cold — not surprising since she was wet, though not soaked to the skin like Stuart and Cotton. But maybe the shakes were more about the blood running down her arm from a gunshot wound than from her wet clothing.

  “Crank the heat,” Stuart told Cotton and he did, which would have been more helpful if the wind wasn’t blowing rain in through the two windows that had been shot out.

  Shot out!

  Gunfire.

  “Who was shooting at us?” she managed to stammer.

  “How would I know?” Stuart said, as he ripped a piece of fabric off the padding she kept wrapped around her equipment when she traveled.

  “Who would want to hurt us?” Cotton asked.

  They batted who and why questions around while Stuart put a makeshift bandage on Jolene’s arm. She winced every time he touched it, couldn’t help it. She was trying as hard as she could to make it seem like the gouged-out wound across her upper arm was no big deal, wanted Stuart and Cotton to think it didn’t hurt at all, wanted them to understand that it wasn’t serious. And it wasn’t, it really wasn’t. But it did hurt. No way around that. It did hurt.

  When it was finally clear not a one of them had a clue why somebody had been shooting at them, or who “somebody” might be, Cotton shifted the focus.

  “We can talk about all this while we drive. We can make the emergency room in twenty minutes.” Twenty minutes with jet packs! Then Jolene realized Cotton was talking about going to Crawford Memorial in Morgantown. On the east side of Nowhere County, the Crawford County hospital was closer than the bigger one in Carlisle in Beaufort County to the north.

  “So are you volunteering to be the one who explains to the police how I got this?” Jolene asked.

  “Police?” Cotton said. “I’m not taking you to the police, I’m taking you to an emergency room.”

  “Where they will call the police.” Stuart said. Clearly, Cotton didn’t get it yet. “They’ll have to, no choice. I don’t know the specifics of the statute in the state of Kentucky, but they’re pretty standard in every state. Hospitals are required by law to report all bullet wounds to the police.”

  “Fine, then, we’ll tell the police that we were … that somebody shot at us while …” Cotton ran out of gas.

  “Well, you see, it’s like this, officer,” Jolene said. “We were using a ghost-zapper on the spirits in Gideon — you know the place where everybody vanished in a puff of smoke a hundred years ago — and suddenly somebody started using us for target practice.”

  “But we have to report—”

  “Like you reported all the missing
people?” Stuart said. “How’d that work out for you?”

  “You saying you think the police would forget—?”

  “If they come here to investigate, yeah, they’ll forget. As a former recipient of a Jabberwock mind wipe, I am here to testify those officers won’t remember a thing!”

  So they’d driven to Cotton’s house instead of to Morgantown, then he’d gone to Drayton County to get the drugs. He’d brought back bandages, tape, pillows, and more Colonel Poc Poc from Danville, but nobody had an appetite.

  And then they talked. And talked. Chased their tails until they all were exhausted. Finally, Jolene begged off and the men made her as comfortable as they could in Cotton’s guest bedroom.

  Where she’d sat all night, struggling not to nod off even though the drug fuzziness was a lead weight on her eyelids. She knew the meanest monsters in the junkyard lived behind her closed eyes.

  Now, at last, it was morning. Somehow, staying awake in the daylight didn’t seem like such a Herculean task. As she sat with her arm throbbing while the men talked about monsters and gunshots, she thought about her phone call to Moses Weiss, and the crazy message she’d left him. It was only now that it occurred to her that Moses might, indeed, have returned her phone call — but nobody’d been here yesterday to answer it. And in Cotton Jackson’s gutted house, there was no answering machine to record a message.

  It was far more likely that Moses had written her off as the lunatic she must have sounded like. If she’d gotten a message like that, she’d have been calling out the dudes in the white coats to haul the caller off to Saint Somebody’s Home for the Bewildered.

  Still … maybe, maybe Moses might help.

  Chapter Four

  Duncan Norman stood at the front window looking out, waiting for Malachi Tackett to pull into the driveway to pick him up. To give him a ride out to Scott’s Ridge so he could get the car Hayley had left there when …