The Deadlock Trilogy Box Set

by P. T. Hylton

  “Half mile out,” Ned said from the passenger seat.

  Carlos glanced at Trevor in the rear view mirror. “So you ready for us to pull back the curtain and show you how we leave town?”

  “Yeah, I’m ready.” Trevor hoped his voice sounded more confident to them than it did in his own ears. Trevor, like every other civilian in Rook Mountain, had no idea how the RESpys left town safely. It was a violation of Regulation 9 to even ask.

  Carlos pointed toward the dashboard. It took Trevor a moment to figure out what the RESpy wanted him to see. A wooden block was mounted on the dashboard. The block was about an inch tall, and it was painted the same color as the rest of the vehicle’s interior.

  Ned gave the wooden block a little pat. “As long as we have this thing, it’s like we haven’t left town.”

  Trevor licked his lips, trying to find the courage to ask a follow-up question. After a lifetime of being taught not to talk about the strange goings-on in Rook Mountain, this was no easy task. “How does it work?”

  “You know that box Zed made? This is like a smaller version. It keeps the Unfeathered away. But it only protects a very small area. Take a few steps away from the car and it’ll be lunch time for the Birdies.”

  A device that kept the Unfeathered away? And it was portable? Unbidden, visions of the open road flashed in Trevor’s mind.

  As if reading his thoughts, Ned said, “A few years ago, we had a RESPy named Walter Quinn who thought one of these wooden blocks was his permanent ticket out of town. He jumped in a RESPy vehicle and hit the road. Zed waited until Quinn was a good seventy miles out, and then he shut off the wooden block. Quinn’s bones are out near Abingdon, Virginia. Still in the driver’s seat of his car. The Unfeathered smashed in the windows and ate him where he sat.”

  “How’d Zed shut it off?”

  Ned shrugged. “However Zed does what he does. Anyway, last week when Zed’s box was broken these blocks stopped working too. Thank God Zed came back and put things right.”

  “This is it,” Carlos said.

  Trevor felt his heart pounding in his chest. He saw the white line on the road getting closer and closer as the car sped forward. Then they were on top of it. Past it.

  And suddenly it was dark. The stars sparkled overhead with a brilliant clarity.

  Trevor looked out the windows at the landscape around him. He took a deep, slow breath to see how it felt. “Why is it dark?”

  He looked up and saw Ned looking back at him in the rear view mirror, a smirk on his face. “It’s always dark out here.”

  The trees flickered past as the van tore down the empty highway. Trevor had expected to see the Unfeathered everywhere, but he didn’t see any of the creatures. Everything looked desolate and empty.

  “Where are the Unfeathered?” Trevor asked.

  “They’re around,” Carlos said. “Mostly holed up in the woods. But they’d be here fast enough if we didn’t have our device running. They’d catch our scent and be on us right quick.”

  “Is that how they sense us? They smell us?”

  “How the hell should we know? They just do. Close your mouth and open your eyes. You might see a thing or two.”

  Trevor turned back to the window and watched the trees roll by.

  He had his first glimpse of something strange a few minutes later. Near the side of the road, a bird, the normal feathered kind, hung motionless in the air. It was like a snapshot, a picture of a bird in flight. He saw it in the beams of the car’s headlights as they approached, and it disappeared from sight as they sped past it.

  “Did you see that?” Trevor asked. “That bird was, like, frozen in the air.”

  Carlos grinned. “Yeah, we’ve seen that one a time or two.”

  They drove on, over bridges and past trees. A few times they passed cars abandoned in the middle of the road. Ned seemed to know when these cars were coming up and he easily avoided them. Neither he nor Carlos commented on the vehicles.

  Trevor couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. “Have these cars been here a long time?”

  “Yep,” Ned said.

  “What happened to the drivers?”

  Carlos and Ned exchanged a glance and grinned at each other like kids on the way to a surprise party. “What do you think happened to them?”

  Trevor opened his mouth to say he had no idea, but then stopped. There was a pretty good chance that had been a rhetorical question.

  They drove in tense silence for a few minutes. When Carlos spoke again, Trevor almost yelped in surprise.

  “Usually we would be driving a much larger vehicle. One of the semi trucks. Or a flatbed. We have a tanker truck we use for collecting fuel. It’s nonstop. You should know that if you are thinking about becoming a RESPy. It’s amazing how much one little town consumes in a week. After a while, it gets so you see every person in Rook Mountain as just another bottomless pit of consumption. We bust our asses hauling everything we can into the town, but it is never enough. It never ends.”

  Trevor resisted the urge to speak again and waited for Carlos to continue.

  “So, like I say, we would usually use something much bigger. We like to use the van for these ride alongs. The whole thing seems a little more real in a van. Our mission today is simple. Halloween is coming and the town needs candy. We're going to pick up a few boxes. Elizabethton still has some we can tap into.”

  “Really?” Trevor asked. He had expected something grander, more vital than candy.

  “Yep. Just a few boxes of candy. Walk before you can run, my man. Plus, can you imagine all the pissed off parents if we ran out of candy rations on Halloween? There would be a riot, an actual riot.” Carlos looked back at Trevor and grinned. “So when you look at it that way, we’re saving lives here.”

  The van sped past another car stopped in the road. As they approached, Trevor looked through the window and what he saw almost made him scream.

  “Holy shit!” Trevor said. “There’s a person in that car!”

  “Yep,” Ned said.

  “We have to help him! The Unfeathered could be here any minute!”

  Carlos chuckled. “The Unfeathered only like the living and the breathing, and that guy ain’t either. Not exactly, anyway.”

  Five minutes later, the van pulled into the parking lot of a CVS pharmacy. Ned spun the car around, threw it in reverse, and backed up almost to the door.

  There were only five cars in the parking lot, and two of the cars had people inside them. Motionless people. It was like looking at a photograph.

  “Okay kid, listen up,” Carlos said. “This is where it goes from a sightseeing trip to real dangerous work. We're going in that CVS to round up some candy. The minute we step outside this van, we are fair game for the Unfeathered. We should be okay inside with the doors shut, but we have to bust ass for the few moments we are outside. Got it?”

  “What’s with the people?” Trevor asked. “The people in the cars.”

  “We'll show you inside,” Ned said. He pulled out a pistol and looked at it. “Get out your weapon and switch off the safety.”

  They had given Trevor a pistol for the trip. It felt heavy in Trevor’s hands. He clicked off the safety.

  “Okay, hands on the door handles,” Carlos said. “When I count to three, we run like hell for the door. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” Trevor said.

  “Good. One. Two. Three.”

  The three men threw open their car doors and leapt out of the vehicle. Ned and Carlos left their car doors wide open, so Trevor followed their lead. He had only taken three steps before he heard the sound of the Unfeathered singing in the distance. It was far off, but he heard another, closer voice join in the song.

  Trevor pumped his legs and swung his arms, sprinting after the two RESPys. In front of him, Ned reached the door, still sprinting, and slammed into it. The door banged open, and Carlos and Trevor hustled inside before it clapped shut.

  Carlos’s eyes scanned the parking lot, then the s
ky.

  “We good?” Ned asked.

  “Yeah. We’re clear.” He turned to Trevor. “We should be safe in here. The Birdies don’t usually start smashing into buildings for a few hours. We don’t want to be in here all day, but we will have long enough to get the job done.”

  “You mean getting the candy?” Trevor asked.

  Ned smiled. “That too. But that’s not our main job. The real reason we are here is you. Zed says that it’s time for you to know about the outside world, so we're here to show you.” Ned nodded his head toward Trevor’s left.

  Trevor turned, and what he saw made the breath catch in his throat. A woman was standing behind the cash register. A man stood in front of the checkout counter. Neither of them was moving. The checkout lady had a Baby Ruth candy bar in her hand, poised over the scanner. Her mouth was half open as if she was speaking.

  Trevor walked slowly toward them. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Technically? Nothing’s wrong with them. They’re just paused.” Carlos took a few steps toward the frozen people.

  “It’s like this everywhere,” Ned said. “Johnson City. Bristol. I’ve been as far as Charlotte fulfilling some special orders, and it’s the same thing everywhere. Everywhere but Rook Mountain.”

  Trevor reached his hand out toward the man in front of the counter. His hand hovered a few inches from the man’s face.

  “Go ahead,” Carlos said. He rapped on the man’s cheek with his knuckle, producing a strange thud. “You can’t hurt them. I mean, you really can’t. You could take a chainsaw to their necks and it wouldn’t so much as scratch them.”

  “Sure can take their stuff, though,” Ned said. He reached into the man’s back pocket and pulled out a wallet. He let go of the wallet and it snapped back into the man’s pocket like it was attached to a bungee cord. “Well, for a second anyway. Stuff doesn’t want to move. It goes back to the way we found it the second we let it go. Until we get it in the van.”

  Trevor put his hand on the man’s cheek. It was hard as stone. “But what happened? What did this to them?”

  “Well, the way Zed tells it,” Carlos said, “nothing happened to them. They are perfectly fine. It’s us in Rook Mountain that got screwed up.”

  “Zed says Rook Mountain got knocked out of time,” Ned said. “It’s like we are in a hole in time. We are living in between one moment and the next. Technically, it’s still 2014. For the rest of the world anyway.”

  Trevor turned a slow circle, scanning the paused world around him. He’d been living in the same moment for the last eight years?

  “When we put stuff from out here into the van, it gets unpaused,” Carlos said. “It joins Rook Mountain time. It’s like we are pulling the stuff into the hole with us.”

  “What about people?” Trevor asked. “What happens if you put a person in the van?”

  Carlos shook his head. “Doesn’t work like that. People can’t be moved. They are too strongly tethered to their timeline. It only works for inanimate objects.”

  “And liquids are even easier, for some reason,” added Ned. “They become unpaused as soon as they get within a few feet of the van.”

  Trevor looked up sharply as something occurred to him. “If we get too far away from the van, do we get paused?”

  “No,” Carlos said. “Whatever happened to lock us out of time seems to be permanent.”

  Trevor blinked hard. His head was spinning. “What about the Unfeathered? How do they fit in?”

  Carlos sighed. “We really aren’t sure. But our best guess is that this ‘time between times’ is their territory. Normally they're the only ones who live here. That's why they're so hostile to us. They see us as invaders.”

  “Listen, Trevor,” Ned said. “We know this is a lot to take in. Zed will sit down with you when we get back and answer all of your questions. Take a minute to look around and let it sink in. We’ll handle the candy.”

  Trevor nodded absently. While Carlos and Ned carried armloads of boxes of candy from the store to the car, Trevor wandered. He found a few other customers and workers, all frozen in the moment. There was a little girl in aisle eight who couldn’t have been more than four years old. She was dressed in pajamas, and she gripped her mother’s hand. The other hand was by her face, the index finger buried in her nose. It was so bizarre and unreal that Trevor wanted to cry. Imagine being frozen for all time with your finger up your nose.

  But from her perspective, she wasn’t frozen, was she? For her, this one second would click to the next without any pause. Trevor, his family, maybe even his future kids, would all live and die while that little girl picked her nose.

  “Yo, Trevor, you ready?”

  Trevor headed to the front of the store.

  Carlos put his hand on Trevor’s shoulder. “Listen kid, you're in the club now. The people of Rook Mountain don’t know this and they can’t know it.”

  “Why not?” Trevor asked.

  Carlos frowned. “Sometimes it’s easier to think that something is wrong with the rest of the world rather than thinking something is wrong with you.”

  Ned peeked out through the glass door. “I count six Unfeathered circling. Pretty high up, but they’ll dive quickly enough when we head out.”

  “Okay,” Carlos said. He looked at Trevor. “You ready?”

  “Yes,” Trevor said.

  2.

  Frank sat on a metal folding chair in a hot little room that smelled of Lysol. His sweaty hands were chained to the table. Even with the nice carpet and colorful paint job, the room reminded him of the office where Becky Raymond had offered to release him from jail. It had seemed like a sweet deal at the time, but in retrospect he should have told her to go to hell.

  The last three days had been dark times for Frank, and things didn’t look to be lightening up anytime soon. He’d been hauled up in front of the whole town and called a traitor. It wasn’t the first time he had faced public wrath. After he killed Brett there had been a lot of outrage. Unemployed redneck kills upstanding working man with two daughters. That was the way the media spun it. There had been a lot of calling for the death penalty. People longing aloud for the days of swift public hangings.

  But the thing three days ago had been different. Frank wasn’t a scapegoat people could get angry with to forget their own problems; instead, Frank was being called out as the source of their problems. The death toll was still uncertain, but it was twenty-five at a minimum. Not to mention all the people whose homes had been destroyed. The town had been like a seething pack of animals. They wanted his blood. Zed could have come up with anything and the town would have agreed as long as it involved Frank’s death. Crucifixion or flaying or beheading, none of it seemed off the table.

  But Zed had been thinking long term, and for once Frank was grateful for that fact. It might have satisfied the town to give Frank a flashy death, but Regulation 19 would take care of the Frank problem. Regulation 19 said that Zed or the selectmen could, at their discretion, enact a special punishment for any regulation breaker. A punishment Zed called ‘The Away’.

  Zed and his Board of Zed Heads had just been given nearly limitless power, though no one realized it quite yet.

  Maybe Frank should have tried harder. Maybe he should have denied everything. Not that it would have helped. The people were eating out of Zed’s hand. But Frank could have tried. The one thing that kept his mouth shut during his public non-trial was that, on some level, he agreed with Zed. The whole thing was his fault.

  The door opened and Zed walked in, an easy smile on his face. He was dressed in khakis and a brightly colored t-shirt. He slid into the chair across from Frank.

  “Morning! They treating you okay?”

  Frank nodded slowly. “Yeah, I guess. All things considered.”

  Zed’s smile widened a little. “That’ll change. It may seem hard to believe, but these are the good times compared to what’s coming. I’m almost done building the device. Tomorrow’s the big day.”
r />   Frank tried to ignore the man’s comments. “So how does this work? This erasing me from existence thing.”

  “Ah!” Zed held up a single finger, “I’m glad you asked. It’s kind of beautiful in its own way.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small object. Frank recognized it immediately. It was another Cassandra lock. How many of them did the guy have? “Time is like a lock with a bolt none of us can move. It seems unbreakable. Try to fight it and it doesn’t matter. It carries us along and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  He tugged on the Cassandra lock to demonstrate the futility of opening it.

  “It won’t open. We don’t have the key.”

  “You’re saying it’s a deadlock,” Frank said. “That’s the term for a bolted lock that can only be opened with a key. Like the kind of lock they use on prison doors.”

  “A deadlock. I like that.” Zed looked pleased. “It’s impossible to open this giant lock we call time. Unless you know exactly where to apply pressure.” Zed twisted the Cassandra lock and it opened with a snap.

  Frank raised his eyebrow. “You’re telling me you unlocked time?”

  Zed laughed a surprisingly high-pitched laugh. “No, not at all! I’m not as sophisticated as all that. I’m much more childish. I like to poke holes in things. I poke little holes in space so that my friends and I can transport ourselves around town. I poke holes in people’s minds so I can see what’s inside. And, in a very limited way, I poke holes in time.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The smile never seemed to leave Zed’s face. “Frank, you’re not a stupid man, so don’t ask stupid questions. The town of Rook Mountain is in one of these holes in time. I made a nice little hole for us to live in. Tomorrow I’m going to poke another hole, a hole within a hole, one might say, and I’m going to drop you into it. You won’t die, not right away. But you will live out the rest of your abbreviated life alone and frightened in a place you can’t hope to understand. It’s not a nice place you are going, Frank. Trust me, I’ve dipped my toe in those waters and I don’t plan to return.”

  Frank felt a chill pass through him. It was as if he were seeing Zed for the first time. Zed wasn’t merely a creepy, opportunistic man with some impressive parlor tricks; Zed was something truly evil.