by Ninie Hammon
She began backing out of the room, then let her fear loose, couldn’t hold onto it a second longer. She turned and bolted away from the pitiful map, had to get out of the house that was her father’s where she wasn’t welcome.
She grabbed the doorknob of the front door that had just slammed.
The door wouldn’t open. It was locked.
The world got screwy for Jolene Rutherford after that.
When she tried to piece the sequence of events together as she sat in the Dollar General Store parking lot hyperventilating, not really sure how she had gotten there, she couldn’t put things in chronological order.
Forcing herself to stop gasping — it had felt like she was suffocating in there — she gripped the steering wheel so tight her fingers turned white. Gritted her teeth.
Calm. Down.
Breathe.
Just breathe!
In.
Out. Exhale slowly.
And as normal sensations, normal thoughts, common sense, and reality reasserted themselves, Jolene Rutherford could not believe she was sitting here like this.
She had come home to see her father. He wasn’t home. She went inside, saw a map he had drawn and then … left.
How had circumstances so simple and innocent grown into such gothic proportions? How had the whole thing degenerated into such fear? Not fear, terror.
Because that was the killer, the coup de grâce, the whole enchilada. Jolene, the vampire slayer, okay the ghost hunter, had been scared spit-less. The whole time she was in her father’s house, from the moment she shoved the door into the room and stepped inside.
The unlocked door. It had been unlocked.
So why was it locked when she tried to leave? When she was scrambling, scratching to get it open, her trembling fingers unable to operate the simple deadbolt mechanism to—
Deadbolt.
A door handle lock could conceivably engage if the door were slammed hard enough. Conceivably. Unlikely, but possible. But a deadbolt? The door slammed and the deadbolt engaged. That was insane, impossible.
But it had happened.
It had … hadn’t it?
“Okay, stop it.”
She said the words aloud and as she did she realized her throat was raw and then she remembered screaming, so loud and long that it had made her hoarse.
Nothing that was happening right now made any sense!
Another car pulled into the parking lot, a red Lexus, and she registered again that the place was certainly empty as Dollar General Store parking lots went. There were two men in the car. Both black, one young and good-looking, the other old and … familiar, somehow. They didn’t pull into one of the many open, unoccupied spaces in front of the door. The car pulled up beside her and the old man who was on the passenger side rolled down his window.
“Lo there,” he said.
“Hello,” she said tentatively. There was something about him she recognized. “Mr. … Jackson? Is that you, Mr. Jackson? Remember me, Jolene Rutherford? I was in your freshman math class.”
“Jolene, why yes. How are you?”
“How am I?” She blurted out a bleat of inappropriate laughter and noted that a knowing look passed between the two men.
“I came to visit my father but he wasn’t home.”
“Neither is anybody else in Nower County,” Mr. Jackson said.
Chapter Five
Stuart McClintock and Cotton Jackson pulled to a stop on County Road 278 at the crossroads in the Middle of Nowhere. Lack of sleep had dumped a truckload of gravel in Stuart’s eyes. He’d gotten very little the night before he arrived in Nowhere County and almost none last night on the lumpy cot at Cotton’s house. Neither of them had gone back to bed after awful nightmares jarred them awake in the middle of the night, so they’d set out early this morning. Cotton had said he wanted to take a look at the hole Reece Tibbits had blown in the road, but now that sightseeing tour was shoved to the back burner. There was a van parked in front of the Dollar General Store. The words emblazoned on the side of the van would have peaked Stuart’s curiosity no matter where the vehicle had been parked. But here in the Middle of Nowhere? And now — when the whole of Nower County was MIA — well, Stuart heard the theme song from The Twilight Zone begin to play softly in his head.
“If You’ve Got It, Haunt It,” the words proclaimed, the title of the hit reality television show about … paranormal activity. Ghost hunting.
He and Cotton exchanged a look, and Stuart wordlessly turned off the road and into the parking lot, pulled into the parking space beside the van and Cotton rolled down his window.
The driver of the van was “Jolene,” the host of the show, who just happened to be, oh by the way, a former student of Cotton’s.
Stuart listened to their conversation, marveling that the woman who had the highest-rated reality television show on the air actually hailed from Nower County, Kentucky. And so did the woman who had written — arguably — the most famous series of children’s books since Harry Potter. Both from this one place, this one forgettable nowhere place. How likely was a thing like that?
He was considering that and missed the conversational cue.
“Ahem,” said Cotton, too loud. “And this is Stuart McClintock. He is married to Charlie Ryan; do you remember her?”
“I remember the name. Her mother taught ceramics classes, didn’t she? She was five years younger than me so I was out of high school before she started.” This was the point where you extended your hand, only that was impossible when people in separate cars were introduced. She settled for, “Good to meet you, Mr. McClintock.”
“Stuart.”
“Okay, Stuart.”
Stuart cut to the chase.
“Your father isn’t home, you said? Is that right?”
“Right … not home. I’m … waiting for him.”
“In the Dollar Store parking lot?” Stuart asked, and got what he was looking for, the startle, the shock covered up. He was proud of himself that he’d caught it. A professional con artist like Jolene would have had lots of practice hiding her emotional responses and body language from other people.
“Well, I came here because …”
“You suddenly felt an insatiable desire for a RC Cola and a moon pie?” Cotton offered.
Jolene smiled. “Well, true, I haven’t had either one of those in a long time.”
“You get back here often to see your father?” Stuart asked.
“No, actually I don’t. Haven’t been here in years.”
She’d closed up when he asked that, sensitive subject. He got that. He’d rather not have to dig up the reason it’d taken him two weeks to go looking for Charlie and Merrie. Nobody wanted to discuss emotional wounds with strangers.
“It was nice to meet you, gentlemen,” Jolene said, clearly about to end the conversation as if she were going back to her father’s house to wait for him.
Stuart thought about how he had felt in Charlie’s house, the closeness, the not-enough-air, the sense of you’re-not-welcome-here that had driven him away. You don’t suppose …
“You’re not going back to your father’s house to wait for him, are you?” He asked the question direct and blunt, like he’d drop an unexpected question on a hostile witness on the stand, watched her eyes. She squinted. Bingo, he’d hit a nerve.
“Actually, I’m thinking about going back at least as far as Richmond and getting a room. I drove through the night to get here and—”
“You blew by what Cotton said when we drove up. Let me repeat it for you. You said your father wasn’t home and Cotton said, ‘neither is anybody else in Nower County.’ Aren’t you curious what he meant by that?”
“What’s there to mean? That’s like saying there’s an idiot in Congress and somebody pointing out there’s nobody in Congress who isn’t. Just something you say.”
“He meant it.” Stuart strained out all emotion from the statement. “There really isn’t anybody in Nower County.”
&n
bsp; Of course, she had no idea what he was talking about. How could they possibly … the same way Cotton had convinced him — a picture was worth a thousand words. He gave the older man a nudge and he took the handoff like a pro.
“Jolene, would you mind doing an old man a favor?”
You could see she was ready to be shed of them both, but he’d put her on the spot.
“I’d be glad to help you if I can, Mr. Jackson.”
“It’s Cotton, not ‘Mr. Jackson.’”
“Not sure I’ll be able to call my math teacher by his first name, but I’ll give it a shot. What can I do for you?”
“Take a little ride with me.” He held up his hand to ward off a protest before she had time to raise it. “I promise it won’t take half an hour. We’re just going to drive into the Ridge and back. You can leave your van here.”
“But what for? Why—?”
“Just humor me, will you? Please. I’m an old man, getting older by the minute. If I recall, it was your class of students that started the aging process. Nobody was interested in tackling calculus at fifteen when they intended to drop out of school at sixteen.” He paused. “If I recall, math wasn’t your strong suit, either.”
She gave a weak smile. “Busted. I never was much for facts and figures.” Stuart could see she was stalling, trying to think up some excuse to decline Cotton’s request, and apparently coming up empty.
“Please …”
“Okay, sure, I will take a little ride with you if you’ll promise me one thing?”
“Anything.”
“No math problems.”
“Actually, we are solving a problem of sorts, but it isn’t mathematical.”
Cotton opened his door, got out and offered her his seat to ride shotgun.
Stuart was silent as they drove along, not really listening to the banal conversation between Cotton and Jolene, wondering how a woman like her would take the realization that … as Shakespeare put it, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Jolene Rutherford wasn’t a pretty woman, but she managed to make the best of what she had to work with. Thick eyebrows over large brown eyes that protruded just a little, not the bug-eyed look of people with thyroid problems, just enough to be noticeable. Her nose was thin and sharp, severe, but her wide mouth and full lips granted it some reprieve. All the features individually should have been granted a “pretty” designation, but put them all together and the whole was somehow less than the sum of the parts, thinking mathematically.
Cotton was pointing out houses to her as they drove along. One old house after another.
“I don’t remember that many ancient — wait a minute.” They had just passed a falling-down shack and she turned around to look at it as they pulled away. “That’s not an old house; well, not as old as it looks. Maxine Bailey and I hung out together in high school and her father built that house. They moved in when we were juniors. How on earth did it age that much in less than a couple of decades?”
“They all have,” Cotton said.
“All have what?”
“All the houses, the old ones. Two weeks ago they were just like your remember the Bailey family’s house.”
Clearly, she wasn’t tracking.
“Let’s say they haven’t been old long,” Stuart said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know you don’t,” Cotton said. “But you will.”
They drove into the Ridge, down the empty streets, past Peetree’s Hardware where the front door still stood open. You could see into the building through it, and through the plate glass windows on some of the other buildings, could see there was nothing inside. No people, nothing.
Stuart watched Jolene’s face change from curiosity to surprise, to concern, saw she was edging toward freaking out.
“Where is … everybody?” She tried to make the question light and emotionless but couldn’t pull it off. “They all go to a party and we weren’t invited?”
“I doubt they’re at a party,” Stuart said. “Wherever they went, I doubt it was by invitation.”
Jolene turned to him, shot a look at Cotton in the backseat, then let her apprehension come out as anger.
“What’s with all the creepy veiled references? What are you guys selling?”
“Pull in here,” Cotton instructed Stuart, indicating one of the multitude of empty spaces on the street in front of Willingham’s Drug Store. “Let’s have a soda and talk about it.”
Without giving her time to protest, he got out of the car and started toward the door that Stuart could see was slightly ajar.
“I’ve come here several times in the past couple weeks. Left some paper cups. There’s no ice cream in the freezer, but the wall spigots still work so you can have a soft drink.”
He held the door open for her and after a moment’s hesitation, she went in. Stuart followed.
The soda counter was still there, as were the stools attached to the floor. Otherwise, the building was empty, no shelves, no merchandise, nothing. There were wall shelves which should have been jammed with women’s foofy products.
Maybelline, L’Oréal, Cover Girl — the signs remained but there was nothing on the shelves beneath them. Or on the shelves where there would have been heating pads, greeting cards, candy, vitamins, cold remedies or insoles.
Looked like the business had conducted an extremely successful going-out-of-business sale … “everything must go!”
A stack of paper cups sat on the counter and Cotton picked up one, stepped to a spigot on the back wall and began to fill it with liquid.
“Machine doesn’t work or I’d make you a root beer float with that soft serve stuff that doesn’t have a speck of anything organic in it, dairy or otherwise. Just some kind of petroleum product.”
She had had it.
“Alright, what is going on? Stop the word games, the knowing looks, the veiled references, the spooky hints. Why did you bring me here?”
“A picture’s worth a thousand words,” Stuart said simply.
“Only way we’d ever convince you that everybody in Nower County really has vanished is to show you. You’d never have believed us if we’d just told you.”
“Vanished?”
Stuart noticed that he and Cotton were nodding their heads like bobblehead dolls and he stopped.
“Have a seat,” Cotton said, indicating one of the floor-mounted stools. She sat — reluctantly.
“I flew in yesterday from Chicago to Lexington and rented that car.” Stuart nodded toward the Lexus parked out front. “I came to find my wife, Charlie, and my little girl.” He was surprised that his voice was suddenly tear-clotted. “She’s three. Her name’s Merrie. Not Mary, as in Mary had a little lamb, but Merrie, like the hobbit from Lord of the Rings.” He stopped, gathered himself. “But they weren’t here. Just like your father, and Cotton’s wife, Thelma, and every other man, woman and child in Nower County … they have vanished.”
Chapter Six
Malachi woke up in the woods, aware from the soreness in his bones, the dew on his chest and the twigs in his hair that he had spent the night there. He sat bolt upright and almost clocked himself with a broken-off branch of the tree he’d slept under. He squinted, got a good look at it and groaned. A fruitless mulberry tree — better described as a big, homely weed, a gawky hunk of poor-quality wood and ugly leaves, that always kept on hand a supply of dead limbs ready to drop on people, cars or roadside utility lines.
It was fitting that he’d spent the night beneath its unlovely boughs.
He had better sense than to shake his head to clear it, just eased back down onto the ground lumpy with the ugly tree’s protruding roots and looked up at a sky not far gone past dawn.
Though it was clear he’d spent the night in the woods, what wasn’t clear was why he’d taken refuge here. Searching through the scattered random-firing synapses of his mind, he looked for what he had been doing befor
e his life, mind and body had been hijacked by PTSD and transported somewhere else as surely — though with less of a hangover afterward — as the Jabberwock did those who dared to try to leave Nowhere County.
He sat up slowly this time, looked around. He had been digging in the rubble of a house … The image of two identical faces formed before him. The Tungate brothers. He had been helping Roscoe Tungate search for his brother Harry, who was … gone. Gone in the same way Abner Riley had been gone.
So where was Roscoe?
Why had Malachi gone running off into the woods?
He didn’t remember why specifically, only knew that he’d spent the past … however many hours, fighting ghosts in imaginary battles in the woods of Kentucky, that he’d believed were the rainforests of Rwanda.
When he was supposed to be attending the county meeting with Charlie and Sam. He had been selected to deliver the message.
“You do it, Malachi,” one of them had said — either Sam or Charlie. “People won’t try to shoot the messenger if you do it.”
And the message was simple and bleak: get your heads out of your backsides, people, and recognize that your chief problem is NOT surviving somehow inside the Jabberwock bubble until it blows away. The Jabberwock has even more heinous plans than keeping a terrarium of humans in Nowhere County. Unless we figure out what this thing is and how to get rid of it, the Jabberwock is going to take us all — one by one — absorb us or whatever it is the beast does to people like Roscoe Tungate and Abner Riley. If we don’t figure it out, we will vanish. If we don’t figure it out quick, E.J. will die of rabies.
He had missed the meeting.
He was sure either Sam or Charlie had taken over for him. He owed them an apology and an explanation — that he had finally stumbled into it, the black hole in his memories he’d been avoiding ever since he left Rwanda. He knew now what had happened there, how he’d gotten the leg wound that had ended his military career. He had spent the night in the woods reliving that horror. The replay had brought its own kind of healing, if that’s what you wanted to call it. He had been running from the memory of a horror he had been unable to prevent. A savage brutality he’d been powerless to oppose. Understanding that was both a comfort and a new kind of awful.