by Ninie Hammon
Malachi Tackett had the drop on everybody over an expanse of vacant concrete without so much as an ant hill for cover. And if the look in his eye was any indication, right now Malachi was crazier than a nuclear waste dump rat.
She noticed Malachi’s nose was bleeding when he pivoted and pointed the rifle at the old man still approaching, leveled and sighted down it.
“Stop right there,” Malachi said. But the tone of his voice was all wrong. It wasn’t an order. He was pleading with the man not to get any closer.
“It’s hard when you see them things, ain’t it — I know,” the old man said and never stopped moving, slowly, inexorably toward where Malachi sheltered on the back side of the vandalized plexiglass. “Hard to know what’s real and what ain’t. Been there, done that, wore the tee shirt plum out, but I still use it as a dust cloth or to polish my boots.”
Malachi said nothing, looked suddenly unsure, which quickly downshifted into disoriented, confused. He was mad, frightened and … he grimaced and Charlie could actually see the reflexive movements of his diaphragm, as if waves of nausea were battering it. He was fighting it, but you could almost feel the explosive need to vomit … she could, anyway. Not half an hour ago she’d felt the same thing.
He somehow managed to keep his mouth resolutely shut, though, remained crouched on one knee up against the vandalized plexiglass of the bus shelter wall.
“Can you listen up to what I’m telling you?” the old man asked, and had moved to within twenty feet of Malachi. “You look here in my eyes, boy.”
Malachi eyes were a frightened rabbit’s, darting back and forth, clearly seeing something nobody else in that parking lot was looking at.
“Boy, you hear me!” There was authority in the old man’s words. “I said … Look. At. Me.” He said each of the words individually, like dropping stones one at a time into a still pond.
Malachi looked at him.
“I don’t know exactly where you been, but you need to come on back now. Come on back here—” Malachi looked away and the old man grabbed his attention again — “Look at me!” — and held on. “Don’t look out there at them other things because they ain’t really there. Look at me. I’m real. I’m here. We in this world together right here, you and me, right now and nothing else you’s seeing is.”
Malachi’s eyes shifted.
Focused.
Saw.
Then he looked around like he’d just opened his eyes after a bad dream and discovered he’d been sleepwalking, wasn’t in his bedroom anymore, maybe wasn’t even in his house. Recognition lit his features and he must have realized where he was. Or maybe where he wasn’t. He carefully set the rifle down on the concrete, turned away from it and threw up.
Chapter Ten
Pete Rutherford was almost sure the young man havin’ a flashback beside the bus shelter in front of the Dollar General Store was Viola Tackett’s youngest — either Obadiah or Malachi. All them boys had Bible names and all he knew for sure was the oldest was Nebuchadnezzar. Seems like he’d heard in the barber shop that one of her boys come home wounded from some war or another he shouldn’t have been fightin’ in the first place.
When Pete came home from the South Pacific years ago, thin as a rail and covered in jungle rot, he’d thought he and his buddies would be the last American soldiers who’d ever have to pack up weapons and go fight somebody somewhere.
So he’d stayed in the military. And they sent him to Korea.
He got out then, way before they could pack him off to Vietnam.
And ‘parently, this young man had been somewhere — he thought he’d heard Rwanda — and he was sure there was more wars lined up behind that one.
Pete was able to hang the right last name on the boy who was now dry heaving while Sam Sheridan held his head. You could deduce that much — them Tacketts and their black hair. But what was he doing in the Dollar General Store parking lot … well, technically in the bus shelter out front, at ten o’clock in the morning on a June Saturday, packing a .22 and clearly having an episode of PTSD? That wasn’t as easy a thing to riddle out.
And the woman with the little girl wearing a head bandage like a princess crown looked like a Ryan, maybe Sylvia’s youngest. Had she come with Sam? Had the Tackett boy come with Sam, too? They’d all three got here somehow, and wasn’t but one car in the lot.
Didn’t seem real likely they’d come together in that old Ford Taurus, but wasn’t no other way they could have got here unless somebody dropped them off. What for? Wasn’t like that shelter was a tour bus destination. Pete had just walked, of course, being as he was the lone resident of the unincorporated township known as the Middle of Nowhere, Kentucky. The little house he’d built with his bare hands … and the bare hands of lots of people he hired to come do the work he didn’t know how to do … sat in the woods across County Road 278 East from the Dollar Store lot.
He was just out walking the stray mutt he’d named Dog after it adopted him, taking his obligatory morning “stroll” — like all them years he walked his route every day hadn’t banked him enough miles so he’d never have to take another step. But Sam’d assigned him the walk as one of a half dozen daily tasks he had to perform “if you want to live ‘til Christmas.”
You ask Pete, him living ‘til Christmas was about as likely as finding an honest politician. Though he was in remission and would stay that way for a right smart while long as he kept taking his treatments. Still … seventy-two years old and the big C. That was a bullet with his name on it. And it was time. He was ready to go. Just one last thing. He needed to say goodbye. So … not today, please Lord. Not today.
Oh, how he wished they hadn’t told Jolene about it. Them medical people had asked him at some point for his next of kin and he’d put down Jo, his only daughter — didn’t have no idea giving them her name meant they’d send her his medical reports! He put a stop to it soon’s he found out, but he was just about sure she’d got the only one that mattered. What she might choose to do about that …
He shaded his eyes with his hand, squinting into the bright morning sunshine, and surveyed the whole empty area. Here was “the crossroads,” the intersection of Route 17 that ran north/south and County Road 278, that ran east/west. Locals called County Road 278 East “Lexington Road” because it did eventually lead to the parkway and Lexington, and that’s where most folks going down it were likely headed. The same road going west was called Danville Pike because Danville in Beaufort County was the next town of any size. He supposed the name switch happened at the crossroads. Route 17 was just “Seventeen.”
The woods came all the way down to the road except for the expanse of parking lot where he now stood. There’d been some attempt at building a strip mall, he supposed, and seemed like it was E.J.’s daddy. The Dollar General Store had set up shop in a building of its own on the west end — with a drive-through on the side that had a machine you could use to vacuum out your car, an air pump to inflate your tires and a water hose.
The animal hospital was the only functioning business, taking up two or three slots in the otherwise empty strip mall next to the Dollar General Store building.
When there had been a bus line running into Nower County, the bus company’d put up a right nice shelter — a long metal bench that sat beneath a wide roof held aloft by four-feet-wide panels of plexiglass on each end, with a lone streetlight hanging from a pole over it. Somebody’d been replacing that bulb because he could see the light from his front porch of a night. Lit up the sign “The Middle of Nowhere” right nice, he thought.
There was four stop signs, though he couldn’t rightly recall ever seeing anybody actually come to a full dead stop at any one of them. You could see two hundred yards in both directions when you pulled up to the intersection and wasn’t like you was gonna be blindsided if you gave it a quick left-right-left and drove on through. He still recalled being warned, as a young and exceedingly naive soldier in London right after the war, that cars in that fair city drov
e down the left side of the road and he would get his “arse run over by a bloody bus” if he didn’t amend his customary left-right-left to right-left-right.
He watched a solitary pickup truck slow down as it passed through on Seventeen. Buford Haywood, who got his hair cut at the Barber Pole on Main Street in the Ridge same’s Pete did. Though Pete still had a right smart head of hair for an old fart, Buford had so few lonely sprigs left in his chrome dome he’d said once he’d named every one of them.
Pete let his gaze follow Buford’s truck, then swung it back toward the young used-to-be-soldier still heaving, leaned against the east wall of the shelter. That’s why he saw it, the only reason he saw it. He just happened to be looking right at the end of the bench on the other side of the shelter when … suddenly somebody was sitting there.
So surprised he stopped breathing, Pete’s walking stick clattered to the warm asphalt out of his suddenly numb fingers.
There was a person — it was Fish — sitting on the end of the bench.
He wasn’t there … wasn’t nobody there. And then he was.
Not there … there.
Holmes Fischer, in a rumpled jacket, pants that appeared to be wet on the bottom like he’d stepped in a puddle or a ditch, was clutching his floppy hat to his chest and staring blankly into space.
Pete let out a cry, he supposed. A grunt. A sound. Something. He made some kind of noise because the young woman with the little girl wearing the crown bandage turned to look at him and Sam lifted her head, too.
Then Sam squeaked a not-quite-a-scream her own self and her hand flew to her mouth.
She’d seen it, too. Well, maybe she hadn’t been looking, as Pete had been, the exact instant Fish appeared on the bench. But she knew there hadn’t been nobody there. Then she heard Pete’s cry, looked up and somebody was there.
Out of nowhere.
Poof.
They both froze, staring in utter disbelief.
Fish sat stock still for a moment, seemed to settle into existence on the bench. Then he leaned over, choking, like he couldn’t breathe.
Chapter Eleven
Charlie jumped back, startled, and gasped. She didn’t scream, though. Sam had screamed, had almost screamed. The old guy — she was pretty sure it was Pete Rutherford — had cried out. So Charlie wasn’t imagining it.
She saw it.
Sam saw it.
Pete Rutherford saw it.
She could tell by their reactions, which were as startled/stunned/disbelieving as hers.
There had been nobody in that bus shelter only seconds ago!
She replayed the video in her head.
She and Merrie had been there, on the other end of the bench, earlier this morning.
Malachi Tackett had been hunkered down beside the shelter dodging bullets nobody was firing a few minutes ago.
Pete Rutherford had come walking across the lot toward the shelter and Sam Sheridan had run to tend to Malachi.
But that was it! There had been nobody else there.
It wasn’t like you could hide a thing like that. It was an empty parking lot. One car was parked in front of the Dollar General Store, either Sam’s or whoever was working there.
There was not a soul in the empty bus shelter. Nobody sitting on the long bench in the shade of a roof supported by two plexiglass walls that bore a quarter of a century’s worth of graffiti. No one was within sniffing range of the pile of cooling puke on the near end where she’d deposited the morning’s toast and coffee.
There was nobody! Except … yes, there was.
An old man in the weather-beaten clothing of a homeless person was there.
Charlie thought the man looked like an older version of Holmes Fischer, her senior English teacher in high school.
Whoever he was — Holmes Fischer or Elvis Presley or Bozo the Clown — he had appeared out of nowhere.
Just suddenly there.
And that, of course, wasn’t possible.
But so was Charlie and Merrie being here.
Her knees suddenly felt like bags of water, unstable, like they might collapse and dump her on her butt on the ground.
She bent to one knee and put her arms around Merrie, ostensibly to comfort the child. In reality, it was a preemptive move to keep from falling. She was using Merrie to hold her upright so she couldn’t faceplant in the parking lot.
How had she and Merrie gotten here?
How?
She had been driving down the winding road through the mountains, the windows down so the wind through the car would drown out the pitiful sound of Merrie’s wailing, which had downshifted from a genuine reaction to actual pain to an emotional response to an opportunity to indulge in theatrics. Her little girl was a drama queen extraordinaire.
Then what?
Charlie remembered … shining black … static.
And the next thing she knew she was sitting on the opposite end of the bench where the homeless man seemed to be … choking, maybe.
He wasn’t heaving, though, as she and Malachi had been, puking their collective guts out.
Not normal nausea. Violent, explosive nausea. Like a mini bomb in your belly, exploding the contents out into the world.
While she knelt frozen in place beside Merrie, Sam got to her feet, left Malachi on all fours, dry-heaving, and went to the man on the bench.
“Mr. Fischer … are you sick?”
It was Holmes Fischer!
He didn’t respond, was clearly in some kind of physical distress but he wasn’t vomiting.
She felt a shadow fall over her and looked up into the pale blue eyes of the old man who’d talked Malachi Tackett off the ledge. It was Pete Rutherford, alright, which meant he was definitely very old but he appeared to be in possession of all his faculties, which he had used skillfully on Malachi Tackett to bring him back to reality.
Reality. Right. Copy that. Reality. And realty was …?
“You got any idea what’s happenin’, ma’am?”
“Not a clue, but …” Her voice was trembly. She got carefully to her feet and looked Pete full in the eyes. Every marble appeared to be firmly in place.
“But I can tell you that … I don’t know how I got here. How Merrie and I got here. I was driving down the road and then …” She was reluctant to talk about the black-light thing. It was impossible to describe because it had been impossible. But that’s what she had seen. All around her was light that was black, and she was afraid to discuss it for fear she’d start hearing the theme song to The Twilight Zone.
“And then … go on. “
“And then the next thing I knew I was sitting there.” She pointed to the other end of the bench from the spot where Sam was trying to talk to the man who had hooked Charlie on fantasy — wizards and goblins and The Lord of the Rings. “And I was throwing up. So sick I …”
“You didn’t drive here?”
“You see a car?” She hadn’t meant to snap. “No, I was driving … and then I wasn’t.” She shook her head and felt a wave of vertigo wash over her. She must have wobbled on her feet because the old man reached out to steady her.
“Might be you need to go over there and sit down.”
“And smell that puke? One whiff of that and I’ll be off to the races again.”
“So you’re saying you don’t know how—”
“I don’t know how I got here and—” In for a penny, in for a pound. “And I’m wondering if I … if I suddenly appeared on that bench like Holmes Fischer just did.”
If she allowed herself to experience the true horror of that statement, it would have knocked her on her butt on the asphalt. Riiiiight, she just … appeared. Wasn’t there and then was. Happened all the time. Why just last week she’d been ice fishing in Antarctica, all bundled up in a parka, and the next thing she knew — badda boom, badda bing — she was in a bikini sipping a Mai Tai on a beach in Tahiti.
She recognized the wall of denial she was frantically building, refusing to see reality by ma
king fun of it. But the alternative was actually seeing reality, acknowledging it … and right now Charlie McClintock could not force her mind to countenance—
Sam screamed. This time, it was a full-bore, no-squeaking shriek.
When Charlie turned toward her, Charlie saw a man in uniform sitting on the bench. He hadn’t been there even a second ago. Had likely appeared so suddenly right beside Sam that he had startled the scream out of her.
Charlie turned back to the old man with the clear blue eyes and couldn’t find the air to speak. From the look on his face, he wouldn’t have heard her if she had.
A whisper on a breath escaped her lips.
“What’s going on here?”
Chapter Twelve
Sam was proud to discover that she wasn’t totally freaking out, in the manner a situation like this clearly called for. She’d been too busy to freak, from the moment Abby Clayton had cried out, “Something’s bad wrong here,” until Holmes Fischer appeared — and he had just appeared. She could tell from the looks on the faces of the others that they’d seen the same thing she had.
First Charlie Ryan … McClintock … and her little girl. And then Malachi.
She came to a full stop then, just like all the drivers who came to those four signs at the crossroads intersection didn’t.
Malachi. She’d heard he was home, but certainly didn’t expect to see him for the first time in — how long? — crouched behind a bus shelter. As soon as he stopped fighting his imaginary battle, he was in the same condition she’d found Charlie — who had said she’d been driving down the road and the next thing she knew she was sitting in a bus shelter puking.
Sam had raced across the lot to Malachi, got down on one knee beside him, but there was nothing she could do. She had only one other time seen someone retching as hard as he was. Charlie McClintock had been vomiting with the same ferocity, like in that movie where the alien burst out of the guy’s stomach. It was like there was something inside Charlie and Malachi, trying to get out and they couldn’t expel it fast enough.