THE NEXUS
BY
Gary Martin
This book is a work of fiction, names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright 2020 Gary Martin
All rights reserved.
ALSO, BY THE AUTHOR:
THE COMING OF DARK: A supernatural/psychological thriller
THE DARK STRAIN (Book 2 of the dark series)
(A supernatural, superhero type story)
THE ENTITY
(Supernatural, Horror, Thriller, Suspence).
THE OLD MAN AND THE GIRL
(A Christian drama)
THE DOORWAY: A middle grade series.
Other world: book 1 of The doorway.
Night Stalkers: book 2 of The doorway.
The Wizard: book 3 of The doorway.
THE DOORWAY TRILOGY: All 3 books in one.
Author website: http://www.gmmartinbooks.com
PROLOGUE
“No. No. Stay away! Ughhh. No!”
He was out of breath and had to stop a moment to prop his weight against the trunk of a sturdy pine. He looked about anxiously but saw nothing lurking in the darker reaches of the forest.
He wasn’t sure how he got here. The only thing he knew for sure was that it was after him and if he paused here too long it would catch him.
He wasn’t sure what it was, whether it was beast or man, or a combination of both. What he knew with certainty was that it was a killer and that it wouldn’t hesitate a moment to snatch the life from him.
This thing, whatever it was had traveled a very long distance to get here, just as he had done so many years ago. He knew this but didn’t know how he knew this. He was nothing like this… monster.
Then he saw it. It was scrambling through the underbrush, its eyes darting in one direction then the other. It was searching for him. Though he didn’t think it saw him it was moving progressively closer. It wouldn’t be long before its eyes would stumble upon him.
He couldn’t wait here any longer. He was easy prey just standing here leaning against the tree. He pushed off the tree and began running again.
He wasn’t as fast as he was at first. His rest was too brief. He was still badly winded, and his legs felt like bags of cement. It caught him almost right away, leaping upon his back driving him face-first into the hard ground.
“Ahhh! Ahhh!”
He pushed, squirmed, and twisted trying to roll over onto his back. At the same time, he expected to feel the death blow smashing into him at any moment.
Then it was shaking him. Which made no sense at all. What was it trying to do to him? Why was it simply shaking him and not making more of an effort to kill him?
Suddenly the ground beneath him began to vibrate and break apart. To crumble and dissipate into so much air. At once he was on his back. His eyes sprung open. He was staring up at a set of big blue eyes. A woman looked down at him with a mixture of concern and irritation. It was his wife, Becky.
“Wake up,” she said. “You’re dreaming.
He groaned and sat up. “I’m awake,” he mumbled. He looked about the room to confirm where he was. “Had another one of those damn nightmares,” he said.
She sat down on the bed beside him. Mostly she looked worried, but he could see a spark of anger, or perhaps exasperation, that she was trying to cover up. “Do you want to talk about it,” she asked with little enthusiasm.
“Not really. It was pretty much the same as the others. I’m beginning to think it’s a sign of sorts. A premonition perhaps.”
“Of what?” she said. Her voice was low but infused with anger. “That you’re going to be killed by some monster?! Oh please, Sam, I’m tired of hearing about all these crazy ideas of yours.” She walked away shaking her head.
He watched her leave the bedroom and disappear into the living room then wiped the sleep from his eyes and made his way into the kitchen. At the refrigerator, he removed a bottle of water. He drank nearly half of it before bringing it down from his lips.
He jokingly guessed that a good nightmare made one thirsty. Or, maybe it was all the running he had done while he was trapped in it.
Despite the nightmare, he felt rested. It was rare for him to nap in the daytime, but the problems he was facing—real or imagined—had stressed him to the point of exhaustion. Even the fitful sleep was better than nothing.
He wondered if these nightmares were due to him stopping the medication, he had been on for so many years. He had begun to believe that he didn’t need it anymore. The hives, the swellings, the extreme shortness of breath had slowly abated over time. But it could be that this was a new symptom of the old problem.
Becky thought that he had been taking the medication because of allergies. In a sense she was right. It was, however, a much more serious malady than she was aware of.
He looked down at his watch. He needed to leave soon if he wanted to make it back before dark. As if she had read his mind Becky entered the kitchen. “You still going to town?”
“Yeah. I figure it would be good for the mayor to make an appearance. See if there are any more changes. Want to come?”
“No, thank you. I’d rather watch television than listen to the rambles of a bunch of boring people.”
“Those boring people are my constituents.”
“Well, being mayor is your thing, not mine.”
He nodded knowingly. “Okay. I’ll be back in a little while.” He gave her a quick kiss on the lips.
“Don’t go making a fool out of yourself with all these crazy notions of yours.”
“I’ll try,” he said with a slight grin.
“And be careful.” That was her way of saying, ‘I love you.’
“I will,” he answered. That was his way of saying, ‘I love you, too.”
He thought about their relationship as he drove toward town. He wondered how they had managed to stay together after nearly twenty years of marriage. They had virtually nothing in common anymore.
There’s was a whirlwind courtship. In the beginning, just being together was enough. The sex was great, and they both enjoyed the movies, the eating out, and all types of entertainment. For a long time, they seemed to have an ideal union.
The problem started when he became discontented with simply making a living. A living that consisted solely of feeding their own selfish lust for life. They hadn’t had children so there was no one else to take care of but themselves.
Before they had married Becky had told him that she couldn’t have children. A few years before they had met, she had been involved in a terrible car accident. She had almost died. She was a fighter though and pulled through. Unfortunately, the accident had left her infertile. Secretly, he was glad. If she had been able to have babies, and had wanted them, he probably couldn’t have given her any. That might have led to a lot of questions that he wasn’t ready to answer.
His discontent led him to make more noble pursuits. His accounting business, though highly profitable, wasn’t doing the trick. He wanted to work for the people. To help the community. To feel as though he were needed. Respected. Important.
He started off doing charity work. After a year or so of that, he was elected as a councilman. Not long after that, he moved up to the mayor’s seat (which wasn’t so hard to do considering the town was small and only one man was running against him).
He finally felt fulfilled. He had the power to do some good and he was doing it. This was where he wanted to be. Unfortunately, Becky didn’t share his enthusiasm.
They began to drift apart. Becky’s life had revolved around the many ways to entertain herself, but not by herself. It wasn’t the same
without Sam by her side. Now she spent too much time alone, bored and thinking too much. She had considered following in his pursuits but couldn’t muster up the type of passion he had. She was all for helping people and the community if she could do it at a distance. Say with a little funds now and then. The up-close and personal stuff was not for her. She still loved Sam but felt like his altruistic work was driving them further away from each other.
He pulled into a parking space and shut off the engine. He sat there a moment to take in a couple of deep breaths to try to settle the thoughts that were bouncing around in his head.
A soft breeze blew against his back as he began to stroll down the old, battered sidewalk that cuts through the heart of Nexus. He stopped occasionally to browse the stores that were still open this time of the evening. Like most of the stores in the small towns across America, they closed around six or seven on a weekday.
His interest in the stores was not so much what they had to sell but who was selling. At one time he knew all the owners and most of the employees. Not anymore. Most had left town suddenly, bought out by one or more of the new arrivals. That was what bothered him. It was all the new faces in town. Why were they coming here? The town hadn’t changed in years. No oil or precious metals had been discovered in these parts. So why the sudden interest in a little town like Nexus? Why are they buying up businesses? Why were they buying up the town?”
He stepped into a tiny sports bar called Carson’s Bar and Grill. It was owned and run by a longtime friend of his.
“Good evening, Sam,” a booming voice rose from across the room. It came from a tall, thin man standing behind the small, half-moon shaped bar. With the short, gray hair and the leathery face, he looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, though he had just turned forty-five.
Only three patrons were at the bar. They were sitting mesmerized on barstools watching a baseball game on the forty-two-inch flat-screen television set mounted on the wall to the left of the bartender. There were four round tables on either side of the room. Three tables were occupied on the right and two on the left.
Sam Ryker headed straight down the middle toward the bartender standing behind the counter.
“Kerry Carson,” Sam said, climbing up to a barstool. “You doing okay?”
He smiled broadly. “Eh, pretty good.” He stopped short as if he were about to say more but decided against it.
“Don’t tell me. You got an offer.”
“Yeah,” he answered, somewhat hesitantly. “A pretty good one too.”
“From one of our new residents?”
“Yep.”
“You going to take it?”
“I don’t know how I can turn it down. This guy is offering me good money for both my business and my house.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as strange? Somebody just walks into this little piss-ant town and offers you good money for not only your business but your house?”
“Maybe. But I can’t turn down that much money.”
Sam was silent a moment. “So, I guess that means you’ll be moving out of town.”
“I’ve been thinking of moving for quite a while now. There’s a lot more money to be made in a bigger city. And, until recently with this splurge of new people, there were more people leaving town than coming in.”
“So, doesn’t this new population shift strike you as strange?”
“Maybe. I mean I get the feeling that a lot of these newcomers know each other though they won’t admit it. But who cares?”
“There’s something going on here,” Sam said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I have a bad feeling about it.” He had some rather disturbing thoughts concerning what was going on but wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge them.
A man at one of the tables off to Sam’s right suddenly stood up and removed a cell phone from out of his pocket. He headed to the front door.
Sam turned to watch him leave.
“You okay, Sam?” Kerry asked.
He twisted back around. “Yeah. I’m just a little tense I guess.”
“How ‘bout a little something to help take the edge off? This is a bar, you know.”
Sam forced a smile. “A beer sounds good.”
“Sure thing. Got a name to that beer?”
“Coors Light.”
“Coming up.”
“In a glass,” he added as an afterthought.
Kerry sat a bottle of beer and a tall, frosted glass mug down in front of him.
“Could it be that this Jenson fellow has a part in some of these worries you’re having?”
Sam poured the contents of the bottle of beer into the mug before speaking. “Guess you’ve heard he wants my job.”
“I heard that he’s considering it. But don’t you have to be a resident for a few years before he can be mayor?”
“Two years. He’ll make that by election time.”
“So? You still got the votes. Even if all the new residents go for this Jensen guy you’ve got enough support from longtime residents to put you in.”
Sam took a big swallow of beer. “For now. But it’s not so much about me losing my mayor seat I simply don’t think he should be mayor. I don’t trust him. There’s too many questions about his past.”
“You checked him out?”
“Not at first. Shortly after Morris Senicutt went to Washington to take his senate seat, I noticed that someone had moved into his mansion. I hadn’t realized that it was up for sale and was simply curious to meet the person who had bought it. The new owner happened to be Byron Jensen.”
“And did he do something to arouse your suspicion?”
“Not too much. I mean he has an entourage of people who hang around him like they think he’s the messiah. That was a little curious. But talking to him I found him pleasant and quite charismatic. At that point, I wasn’t sure what to think. He told me that he had made his money in the import/export business. Real good money, in fact. But as the business grew, he found himself working late nights and most weekends. Eventually, it amassed a toll on his personal life. His wife wound up leaving him for his best friend. Not long after that he nearly had a nervous breakdown. He claims that that was his wake-up call. He decided to sell his business—for a very good profit I might add—and settle down somewhere where life was a lot slower. Nexus was the place he chose.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“Sure. For a long time, I thought nothing of it. But a couple of months ago when I heard that he was considering taking my job I figured it was time for me to be a little more thorough. So, I checked him out via the internet.”
“You did?” he asked surprised.
“Yes. What I found were several people of the same name, but none of them fit his description. The same thing with his business. Absolutely nothing. I checked Facebook and a few other social sites. Again, nothing. It was as if he didn’t exist.”
“Well, I wouldn’t put too much stock in that. The internet is not all-knowing.”
“Yeah,” Sam answered. He took another swallow of beer then set the glass down in front of him. “That’s why I called a friend of mine in the bureau. I asked that he look into this guy’s history.”
“By bureau, you mean the FBI?”
“Yes.”
“I got to say, Sam, that sounds a little crazy. What did this FBI guy say about it.”
“He said he was swamped right now but would get to it when he could.”
“You didn’t have to do that. You know if this guy starts running for mayor the local paper is bound to start their own investigation. That would be just a normal procedure.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah, but they wouldn’t be as thorough.” He drank the last of his beer.
“How ‘bout another one?”
“No. I’m driving tonight.” He stood up. “I’ll see you around, Kerry.” He turned and headed to the door.
The sun had already settled behind the old, single-story courthouse across the street when he started back do
wn the sidewalk to his pickup truck. He gazed up at the slate-gray sky. Dark clouds were beginning to gather. Rain was in the forecast. It looked to be coming soon.
Sam felt a sudden trace of nervousness running the length of his body. He breathed heavily.
It wasn’t the thought of the impending storm that bothered him. He only lived twenty minutes away. He should be able to make it safely home before the rain came. No. It was something else. A foreboding. A feeling that malevolent eyes were watching him. He quickly looked about half expecting to see someone staring back at him. There was no one.
He suddenly wanted to be home as quickly as possible, ensconced safely behind walls, and doors, and windows.
The drive was mostly uneventful. By the time he had passed the halfway point, he had begun to relax quite a bit. He was beginning to think that he had indeed allowed himself to overthink things. Not paranoia, no. Just overthinking.
When something heavy landed in the back of the truck the fear came rushing back to him. At once he looked up at the rear-view mirror, but at first only saw the road retreating behind him into darkening shadows. Then, all at once, a face pressed against the back window of his truck.
It wasn’t a human face. Not like any he had ever seen. The face was big with slanted, dark, cat-like eyes.
The glass shattered behind him and for the briefest moment, he felt the rock-hard fist slam into the back of his head. Then it all went blank.
The truck veered off the paved road just as his face hit the steering wheel. It clipped a tall, thick pine tree on the passenger’s side as it careened down an embankment. It traveled nearly seventy feet bouncing and sliding on the uneven terrain before crashing headfirst into a towering oak tree.
CHAPTER 1 ONE YEAR LATER
The summer sun hung at the edge of the western sky like a swollen orange pumpkin. When he saw the sun, it was as if he were seeing it for the first time. With an apprehension that he did not quite understand he realized that in an hour or less the sun would be fading from view pulling with it the familiar sheet of Stone-gray sky. A precursor of the night that would ensue.
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