by Ninie Hammon
Shoving the pallet with his foot, he fed out the fifteen feet of rope, used a mop to push it the final three feet and eased the bomb into the mirage. It sat there beside the marble he’d rolled across the asphalt, right dead center of the shimmer, but still visible and stable.
He dropped the rope onto the road, got into his truck, backed up fifty yards from the pallet and parked the pickup crossways in the middle of the road. Then he got out and lifted his rifle off the gun rack in front of the back window. Hunkering down behind his truck bed for protection from any pieces of shrapnel from the exploding oil drum, he rested the rifle barrel on the railing of the truck bed and sighted down it at his makeshift detonator.
He was about to set off a bomb to blow up … nothing.
When the dust from the pulverized asphalt settled out of the air, he was certain, convinced that’s what he would see. Nothing. But a different kind of nothing. No shimmer. No mirage. Nothing.
His bomb would blow a hole in the Jabberwock, rip right through the thing. Then he’d go get his mother and drive her through that hole to Carlisle, where dialysis would clean the toxins out of her blood before they killed her.
He found his hand was steady when he moved his finger inside the trigger guard. Squeeze, don’t pull.
Reece squeezed.
It was long past sunrise somewhere out there on the flat when Charlie McClintock staggered bleary-eyed into her mother’s kitchen and found there a whole new magnitude of awful.
If it hadn’t been for Merrie, she’d have given up on trying to sleep at all last night, would’ve gone back to the Middle of Nowhere to help Sam care for E.J. Not that Sam needed her help. Instead, Charlie had overslept after hours of tossing and turning, trying not to imagine a rabid dog mauling E.J., trying not to hear the tick, tick, tick of the clock that started its countdown when the dog attacked.
Rabies. They had seven, maybe ten days to … to what? To defeat the Jabberwock. And what that might mean she had no idea.
Coffee. Coffee made everything better.
Except it didn’t this morning because as soon as she switched on the coffeemaker, she turned toward the blackboard on the wall … and everything went south after that.
The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the floor with her legs folded beneath her.
Nothing registered in between. No decision to sit down. No “Okay, legs, let’s bend at the knee now so …” Nothing like that. She hadn’t decided to sit down. Her legs had collapsed out from under her.
They’d mutinied, declined to hold her upright — not now, not with yet another something unexplainable displayed for her viewing enjoyment right here in her own kitchen.
No.
No, no, no, no.
Reality refused to budge.
And so she stared at the words chalked in bold strokes in the center of the blackboard.
Not the words her mother had written, words Charlie could not, would not erase. Not “get bird seed” in her mother’s precise cursive in the top left corner.
Other words, big and bold — three of them.
Where are you?
She recognized the handwriting. It was Stuart’s.
How could it possibly be …?
She ground her teeth together. Stuart wanted to know where she was — riiiiiiight. Like he cared where she was! Leaping to her feet, she rushed to the blackboard, picked up the piece of chalk and wrote beneath the three words.
“I’m trapped. It won’t let me go!”
She stared at what she’d written, wondering why her mind had burped out those particular words. She started to write more, describe that she was right here where Stuart had left her. But she didn’t. She looked at the chalkboard through a blur of tears. Of course, Charlie had written the words — last night when she’d come home so tired and distraught she didn’t even remember doing it. Clearly, her exhaustion had weakened her more than she knew, and she flushed in shame at her pathetic effort to make it seem like Stuart gave a rip what happened to her and Merrie. The man had made it abundantly clear that he did not!
She holds the credit card statement in trembling fingers as she dials the number the information operator had given her.
“Marriott, Oahu.”
Not Seattle, working out the details of some big corporate merger. Hawaii.
The man’s voice in her ear is speaking and she struggles to attach meaning to the words.
“… help you?”
“Would you please connect me to the room of … Stuart McClintock.”
There is a pause.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but that room has a call block.”
“Call block?”
“That’s when guests request they not be disturbed by incoming calls.”
“Guests? As in more than one?”
“I can’t give out guest information over the phone—”
“I just want to know if—”
“I’m sorry. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Charlie is desperate. She has to know.
“Do you have children?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Children. Little kids. Do you have any?”
“Ma’am … I think perhaps you need to speak to the manager.”
“Because if you have kids, I can tell them a secret every child in North America would like to know.”
There’s a pause. Maybe she’s hooked him.
“I can tell them what the final book in the Alphabet Gang series is about.”
“The Alphabet Gang?”
Recognition and curiosity.
“I’m the author. C.R.R. Underhill — stands for Charlene Renee Ryan — and the Underhill part is from The Lord of the Rings … the inn in Bree.” She is babbling and she grabs hold of her torrent of words. “The last book in The Alphabet Gang series is about an invisible dragon. I’ll tell you the dragon’s name” — which she hasn’t decided yet — “if you’ll just put me through to Stuart—”
“My kids would kill to know … but I can’t connect you—”
“Please! It’s an emergency. A … medical emergency!”
“—because it wouldn’t do any good. I saw them leave early this morning with the guide from the Palms Sight-Seeing service. Those personalized tours last all day.”
“Them?”
“Mr. and Mrs. McClintock. They were holding hands. So … what’s the dragon’s—”
Charlie hangs up.
Her pathetic effort to comfort herself with Stuart’s caring was just that. Pathetic. Pitiful.
Grabbing the eraser out of the tray, she applied it with force to the blackboard. Careful not to erase “get bird seed,” she wiped out everything else, wiped over and over until every speck of chalk was gone.
Chucking the eraser back into the tray, she didn’t pour herself a cup of coffee from the now-brewed pot. Sam would have coffee at the clinic in the Middle of Nowhere.
Sam spent the night in E.J.’s room, called and arranged for Rusty to stay overnight with a friend.
“Is E.J. going to be alright, Mom?” he’d asked. Rusty liked E.J. Everybody did. The boy had only been three years old when she and E.J. had dated for a month or two before agreeing their relationship had “all the pizazz of kissing your sister.” After that, they were great friends.
“He’s fine right now.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there. What is it?’
Sam tried hard not to lie to her son.
“E.J. wasn’t vaccinated against rabies. So …”
“He’s going to get rabies?” Rusty was horrified.
“No, not necessarily.”
“But you don’t have the medicine he needs, do you? And if the Jabberwock …?”
Yeah, if the Jabberwock …
Sam had managed to persuade Raylynn to go home last night by telling her that she would need her to stay with E.J. tomorrow, and Raylynn needed to get some sleep. The girl showed up right after sunrise.
“Is he going to …?” sh
e’d asked and the fear and concern on her face was touching. It was amazing to Sam that E.J. didn’t know how the teenager felt about him. But maybe he did, just pretended to be clueless because that was less embarrassing than telling a smitten seventeen-year-old that they were not destined to be star-crossed lovers.
“We’re all doing the best we can,” Sam said, which wasn’t an answer but it was all her tired mind could come up with.
Sam hung around the clinic all morning, was reluctant to leave the building … not yet. Judd was still there, too, had stayed the night, wouldn’t leave until he had a chance to talk to E.J. She and Judd talked for a long time and his description of what had happened was the stuff of nightmares.
Sam wanted to have an equally long and detailed conversation about what’d happened in Fearsome Hollow the day before when Charlie, Malachi and the Tungates went looking for Abner. But she’d have to wait. Malachi had left in the wee hours of the morning, used E.J.’s van to go home and “gather up a few things.” He had decided he would “camp out” in E.J.’s apartment in the second floor of the clinic … just to be around if anybody needed him.
His eyes hadn’t looked haunted when he’d been dashing around, fixing things for E.J. In an ironic twist, the Jabberwock was slowly dragging Malachi back from the brink of darkness.
About midmorning, Malachi came in the back door of the clinic at the same time Liam Montgomery came in the front. Liam looked around the waiting room, then asked Sam, “Have you seen Reece Tibbits?”
“No, why?”
“I thought he’d be here — out front, I mean.”
“You mean … took a ride on the Jabberwock?” Malachi asked.
“I think he tried to get out. Leave. I was sure I’d find him here, puking his guts up. So if he’s not here, where did he go?”
“He tried to get out, you mean leave the county?” Malachi said.
“That’s what it sounds like,” Liam said. “Tried to blast his way out. Lonnie Monroe called in and said he’d heard an explosion right after sunrise, but he didn’t go out to see what it was until a little while ago. Found Reece’s truck parked crossways in the middle of Lexington Road on the county line with his rifle lying beside it, like he dropped it. I haven’t been out there yet, thought I’d stop by here first and talk to Reece. Lonnie said it looked like Reece blew a hole in the road.”
“So where’s Reece?” Sam asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Liam said.
Chapter Thirty-Two
A roaring boom hammered Reece Tibbits’s ears and an invisible hand of concussion slapped the side of his truck, shoving it sideways and knocking him backwards off his feet. The rifle flew out of his hand, clattering down on the asphalt beside him.
He lay where he’d fallen, his ears throbbing. Whahm, whahm, whahm. The roar reminded him of the sound he’d heard when he and his mother had been driving to her dialysis appointment in Carlisle on J-Day and crossed the county line.
Black, sparkling light had brightened/darkened the world, a sound like static filled his ears and the next thing he knew he was desperately sick in the Middle of Nowhere. His mother suffered only a nosebleed, and Sam Sheridan soon got that under control, then he watched for hours as his mother pitched in to help the others who had “ridden the Jabberwock” — while he remained too sick even to sit up.
Reece didn’t wake up in the Middle of Nowhere this time. He didn’t lose awareness at all because he was still in the right world where the universe functioned predictably. Getting slowly to his feet, he gaped at the plume of dirt and dust and pulverized asphalt that rose more than a hundred feet in the air, all that remained of an area of roadway big as his garage that had exploded when the bomb went off. He hadn’t really considered the size of the hole the explosion would blow in the road from the force directed downward. The upward force was all that had interested Reece. Upward into the Jabberwock.
He walked toward the plume still settling out of the air, so thick you couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t tell yet if he had done what he’d intended to do.
Then he saw the man standing beside his car on the other side of the Jabberwock. Only there was no shimmering mirage between the two of them. Reece merely stood there, gawking. The look of shocked surprise on his own face likely matched the expression on the face of the man standing beside his open car door, gaping at the falling debris and the hole in the road.
The man was big, muscled, dressed in a suit that he wore like he slept in one, immaculate, red power tie. He was black, with his hair cut close to his head, and he reminded Reece of some movie star, but Reece couldn’t place who it was. The man had obviously been driving down the road when the asphalt exploded in front of him.
Reece almost giggled.
Incoming round!
Now that’d be a surprise — an exploding road.
The guy on the other side was driving a red Lexus — not gaudy red, of course. A subdued, dignified red. Had Fayette County plates, looked like an airport rental. Bet it didn’t have 150 miles on it, just the distance this guy had driven here from Lexington, probably still smelled new inside.
Then his thoughts stopped bouncing off the insides of his skull and stilled, and that’s when he realized he had done it. Reece had blown a hole in the Jabberwock, had punched right though it to the other side. That dude standing beside his car out there on the road could get back behind the wheel and drive right on into Nowhere County — well, could have if there hadn’t been a hole in the road in front of him. That’d be a challenge, which, admittedly, Reece hadn’t given enough consideration. He knew there’d be damage to the road, but this … Well, the guy’d just have to take that shiny new car off-road, that’s all. The tangle of weeds and bushes, briars, thistles and wildflowers — asters, bluebells, monkey flowers and lilies — were like to scratch up that pretty red paint job when he plowed through them, but there was plenty of room on the roadside to drive around the hole.
Mama!
Mama wasn’t going to die after all. He’d saved her. He needed to go now and get her, take her to Carlisle for dialysis. She’d be her old self again by suppertime.
Reece grinned at the surprised man, who’d made no move to do anything except get out of his car and stand there behind the door. Reece reached up his hand to wave, and then the smile on Reece’s face drained away.
Up above the shrinking plume of dust and falling debris was the shimmering surface of a mirage. It was settling back to earth with the dust.
It didn’t look like it had looked before, though. It had a hole in it, but not a jagged one like Reece had blown in the road. The hole was perfectly round, probably twenty feet in diameter, big enough to drive a tank through … except it was shrinking. Like the aperture on a camera, it was closing, still round but getting smaller and smaller.
The hole in the shimmer floating down out of the sky atop the dust cloud wasn’t flat, though. It was protruding, like an outie navel, becoming more and more pointed.
Aimed at Reece.
Then the shimmer began to move toward Reece. Faster and faster, with the hole closing. It took him a second to be afraid. By then, the shimmer had formed a cone shape and was flying at him like an arrow.
Suddenly more than frightened, Reece was terrified. He turned and bolted down the road away from the shimmer — looking over his shoulder, watching the cone of mirage fly through the air at him. He tripped over his own feet, stumbled and fell forward, peeling the skin off the palms of his hands and ripping the knees out of his coveralls when he hit the road — like he did when he was a kid and fell on the sidewalk.
And Mama would kiss it when he went into the house crying. She’d make it well.
Reece flipped over onto his back and the cone was hovering over him, not six feet away. He looked up through the open cone, into the shimmer. Into the Jabberwock.
He saw them then, saw their faces.
And Reece Tibbits began to scream.
Stuart McClintock stare
d in gap-jawed amazement at the man standing on the other side of the gigantic hole in the asphalt where dust and debris were still sifting down out of the sky. The man wore a tee shirt beneath bib overalls and had a streak of white like a lightning bolt in his black hair.
He looked like he was about to wave at Stuart. Instead, he turned and ran away, tripped and face-planted on the road. When he rolled over, he began to scream, an otherworldly shriek that—
Cut off suddenly. Then it was silent. There was no sound at all. There was no man, either. He had vanished.
THE END
The Series Continues…
The adventures of the residents of Nower County , aka Nowhere, USA, continue in Trapped.
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A Note from the Author
Thank you for reading Mad Dog.
If you enjoyed this book, you please consider writing a review on your favorite bookselling site so other readers might enjoy it too. Just a couple of sentences would mean a lot to me.
Thank you!
Ninie Hammon
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About the Author
Ninie Hammon (rhymes with shiny, not skinny) grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, got a BA in English and theatre from Texas Tech University and snagged a job as a newspaper reporter. She didn't know a thing about journalism, but her editor said if she could write he could teach her the rest of it and if she couldn't write the rest of it didn't matter. She hung in there for a 25-year career as a journalist. As soon as she figured out that making up the facts was a whole lot more fun than reporting them, she turned to fiction and never looked back.