by Ninie Hammon
It was a good, simple plan, but it hinged on using her mother’s car for the day without her mother knowing she’d done it. Her mother would be at the nursing home with her grandmother in Carlisle from the time Daddy dropped her off on his way to work at the church until he picked her up after work. That was more than nine hours. Hayley had plenty of time to get to Lexington and then … they said it didn’t take long, just a few minutes. Then she had to stay there for a while. But she had plenty of time. She just had to make sure her mother didn’t know she’d driven the car. And she had that all figured out. Everything was on the list.
First — drive at least ten miles under the speed limit. No more than ten miles because she’d seen on television cop shows that it was suspicious if somebody was driving too slow and she couldn’t get pulled over. Absolutely could not get pulled over.
Second. Watch out for other drivers because they’re all idiots and she absolutely could not get into a fender bender. She would park a long way from the building. The hospital complex had a gigantic parking lot and she’d park way on the back row where there weren’t any cars so she wouldn’t get a ding on her door or scratch the paint somehow.
She would get back in plenty of time so the engine wouldn’t be hot.
She would put only as much gas in the tank as she used — at that gas station in Lexington where nobody would know her. She couldn’t do anything about the mileage, but she was certain her mother had no idea what the mileage was.
They’d told her that after the procedure she needed to have somebody there to drive her home and she had assured them, oh yes, she had somebody. Her boyfriend would be there. Right. Boyfriend. He’d be there. Riiiiiiiight. But she’d had to tell them that or they wouldn’t give her the appointment. Well, she’d just tell them something had come up and he couldn’t come get her, convince them that she was fine, not woozy or groggy or anything so she could drive herself. She even had an extreme plan. If they wouldn’t let her just walk out, she’d pretend to go to that bathroom on the second floor in the Women’s Pavilion that had a door leading into it from two different hallways. She’d go in one, out the other and book it to her car. What were they going to do? Call the police? It wasn’t against the law to get up and walk out of a hospital on your own after an outpatient procedure.
Procedure.
That’s what it was. Hayley never used the A-word. Not since Sugar Bear had told her she had to get one, said the word in a cold, unemotional way like she’d only be getting her toenails clipped.
It was just a procedure.
She adjusted the side mirror and caught sight of her face and almost didn’t recognize the girl with the haunted look in her eyes, the fear written on her face. Once she got through with today, Hayley Norman would not be afraid anymore. She’d just move on, go forward from here a better and wiser human being.
She patted her purse, made sure for the umpteenth billionth time that everything was there — the envelop with the money in it and her identification. The hospital required a picture ID. She hadn’t had a driver’s license for very long so the picture was recent.
And the money.
She let out a shaky breath. Didn’t want to acknowledge that she was glad this was about to be over. It had stopped being exciting and fun to sneak around. He was no longer sexy and interesting. The older man image … it shifted in her mind. The definition was no longer “mature and confident, a man, not some teenage boy with acne.” Now, older man meant he was old. He was her father’s age and now he seemed like it. Particularly after she told him. His features had sagged, just sagged, and he had looked ancient.
She pulled the car out of the driveway and turned left on Hanover Street. Took the long way around to Lexington Road, then headed out. It wouldn’t be long now. By this time tomorrow, this would all be just a bad—
The world suddenly turned black, shiny, sparkling black and Hayley’s head filled with buzzing static.
Eight adults and one little girl walked slowly down the roadside, watching the reflection of their approach in a mirage-like shimmer in the middle of the road.
Charlie was out front, holding Merrie’s hand. She’d have made the child stay in the van but she was in no emotional shape to endure a tantrum. Yeah, okay, the little girl was spoiled.
“I see me,” Merrie cried and if Charlie hadn’t been holding tight to her hand she’d have raced ahead to the mirror.
“Well I’ll be …” Viola didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. They were all staring gap-jawed at the apparition before them.
It wasn’t really the mirror Fish had described, or the one Charlie had conjured up in her head based on his description. She thought he was claiming there was a literal mirror in the middle of the road, but that you couldn’t see what was holding it there or the edges of it. That’s not what she saw now.
It looked like a mirage, shimmering like it was undulating with heat waves in the desert. But it was clearer than a mirage. As they approached, their images were as defined as if they’d been looking into a clear pool. There was nothing “holding it” because it was a mirage, which didn’t need duct tape to affix it. And you couldn’t see the edges of it because there were no edges. It stretched across the road over the shoulder and down the embankment on the right into a puddle beside the road where a stand of cattails had grown up six feet tall.
The mirage crossed the road into the other lane, too, off the roadside there and into the trees that came down to a fence.
“Look in the background,” Sam said. Charlie did, studied it for a moment and then she got it.
E.J. saw what she was referring to and leaned/fell backward onto the hood of the van.
The mirage reflected them clearly, but it reflected nothing behind them. The background was just a mirrored image of blue sky, with a thin veneer of white clouds.
E.J. turned, went back to the van, started the engine and pulled it up ten feet or so, stopped and got back out. It didn’t matter. The van should have been parked in front of its mirror image, but it wasn’t. Nothing was reflected in the mirage except the people standing in front of it.
Liam reached down and picked up a rock and tossed it at the mirage. It landed on the highway a few feet beyond the mirage and bounced.
“Looks like it’s definitely just us,” Fish said, “just people.” He pointed up into the sky.
A flock of hundreds of starlings, a whirling kaleidoscopic of ever-changing patterns, was flying in an impossible wingtip-to-wingtip formation above them. The flock turned 180 degrees on a dime and executed a figure-eight movement that brought them swooping low over the nearby trees … and right into Beaufort County. The group stood silent for perhaps a minute, trying to absorb the implications as they watched the birds cavort back and forth across the invisible boundary.
“I don’t understand any of this,” cried Abby, hysteria close to the surface. “What is this thing? And where’s my truck? I gotta go get my baby.”
“I don’t know what this is, ma’am,” Liam said, trying to claim the role of responsibility a deputy sheriff should have had in the situation, “but I’m sure we’ll figure it out—”
“Horse hockey,” snapped Viola Tackett. “You figure something out when it ain’t working like it’s supposed to. You figure out what’s wrong so’s you can fix it. This here ain’t something that ain’t working right. This here is … it’s a whole new something.”
Abby straightened her back and turned on Charlie.
“What’d you do?”
Charlie was too surprised to speak.
“It was you done it. Had to be. You come from away-from-here, and soon’s you showed up everything started goin’ wrong. You messed up something,” Abby said and gestured at the mirage. “Or brought somethin’ with you.”
Ahhhh, yes. Away-From-Here. The all-encompassing description of every place that wasn’t Nowhere County. Any person from there was instantly suspect. If you couldn’t trace your lineage back three, four generations, you absolutely wer
e not to be trusted. Most of that kind of insular tribalism had faded away, but it was the historical canvas on which all their lives had been painted. And among the people who lived deep “back in the hollers,” you didn’t have to scratch very deep to find it.
“I was born here,” Charlie said, and managed not to sound defensive. “Charlene Ryan. My mother was Sylvia Ryan — she taught ceramics classes.” She paused for a beat before pressing resolutely on. “I’m a nowhere person same as you.”
Everyone standing there had been born in Nowhere County.
Abby blew by her response, misunderstanding spreading across her face.
“Yeah, it was you, alright. You done somethin’. Well, you got to un-do it. Whatever it was, you got to make it go away because I gotta go get my baby.”
“This isn’t Mrs. McClintock’s fault,” Liam told Abby and placed his hand on her shoulder. Abby slapped it away, her eyes narrowed in anger.
“Well, whatever you done ain’t gonna stop me!” She spit the words at Charlie. “I ain’t gonna stand here jawin’. I’m gonna go get my baby. I got to nurse him because he’s hungry.” She patted a small bulge in the hip pocket of her jeans. “I got promises to keep and long’s I’m breathin’ I ain’t gonna break them. If I gotta walk, I’ll walk. I’ll hitch a ride. I stick my thumb out, somebody’ll pick me up.”
She took a couple of steps before Sam grabbed her arm.
“You can’t, Abby. You’re still shaking. You can barely stand up. You haven’t recovered from … if you try to go through there …”
Sam looked like she’d lost the juice to complete the statement they all knew she was trying to make.
“You’ll wind up in the bus shelter,” said Malachi Tackett. “You won’t step through that mirage to the other side like the rock did. You’ll appear in the Middle of Nowhere.” He paused. “Sick as a dog.”
“That’s crazy! It ain’t right … something’s not … I’m gonna go get my boy.” She started back toward the mirage.
“Wait, Abby,” Sam said. “Let me go first.” And before anybody could stop her, Sam stepped forward and walked into her own reflection in the mirage.
And vanished.
Chapter Twenty
It was dark, but the dark was light and that didn’t make sense but it was true. The dark was shining, illuminating the emptiness like a candle in a well. The sound was overwhelming, maddening, deafening, horrifying, felt like it was drilling into her ears, her nose, into any opening into her body and would explode out of it from the inside.
It was like static but not, more the one-note tone of a phone when you picked up the receiver — overlaid by a ragged edge of jittery sound.
Standing in the road, she had felt the warm spring sunshine on her face. Then the darkness.
Now her face was in shadow. Both the sunshine and the dark were gone and she was suddenly more desperately sick than she had ever been in her life. Her eyes flew open, she saw a smear of reality … asphalt, someone standing in front of her … Pete Rutherford and his dog … and then she was vomiting.
She vomited more ferociously than she thought it was possible for the human body to eject stomach contents. It exploded out her mouth and her nose, tore through her throat with such force and violence it scraped the tissue raw.
The pain of the nausea in her guts was indescribable, a horror sensation that only emptying herself out would relieve, and she joined forces with her internal organs in an effort to throw up everything … everything, couldn’t get the vomit out fast enough, gasped and heaved and gasped and was aware of nothing but the sick feeling and the pressure to relieve it.
And the sound of someone beside her, a girl on the bench, sobbing, whimpering, “I can’t see. Help me, I can’t hear.”
When the van marked Dr. Elijah Hamilton, DVM, pulled back into the parking lot twenty minutes later, Sam was still shaky, didn’t trust herself to stand. Those who’d been with her at the county line piled out of the vehicle and Charlie rushed to her side, concern and relief fighting for purchase on her face.
“You’re … are you …?”
Sam couldn’t help noting who didn’t approach or ask if she was alright, showed no concern at all. So let it be written, so let it be done.
Liam had Abby by the arm, holding her upright but restraining her, too, and she struggled weakly to get free.
“Lemme go. I ain’t done nothing. Let me go get my baby.”
“Case you ain’t been payin’ attention, missy, tryin’ to go get your baby’s only gonna land you right back here.” Viola Tackett called them as she saw them. “And if I’s to guess, I’d say you’ll likely to be in worse shape than you was the first time you showed up.”
Abby lost it. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes and screamed, “What’s happening?”
“Yes, please … what’s happening? Where’s my car?”
The question came from the girl who’d been sitting beside Sam. Hayley Norman, a morbidly obese teenager, fifteen or sixteen, the daughter of the Reverend Duncan Norman. When she’d arrived, she’d been blind and deaf, but that only lasted a couple of minutes, and she had been babbling about her car ever since she’d regained her sight and hearing.
The asphalt beneath Sam’s shoes was wet where Pete Rutherford had rinsed it off, but the smell of vomit lingered.
“Try to leave the county and you wind up here … somehow,” offered Liam. “Doesn’t appear to matter where you cross the county line.” They had obviously talked in the van about what had happened to them, compared notes, still he looked around for confirmation he didn’t need. It was obvious the people standing around him had not all been in the same place when … whatever happened happened. The only common thread that sewed their circumstances together was the county line.
There’d obviously been discussion of the why on the way back, too. There were no limits to the possibilities because it was impossible. Sam figured it was most likely some absurdly rare meteorological phenomena related to the freak storm that had blown through the county last night.
“This is crazy,” Abby shrieked. “I gotta gooo. My Cody’s waiting for me to come get him.” She turned to Charlie, not angry anymore, pleading. “Make it go away, this Jabberwock. I’m begging you. Make it go away, please.”
“Where’s my car?” Hayley asked, still disoriented. “My mother doesn’t know I took it. I was gonna be back before …”
“They’s gonna be other people here,” Pete Rutherford said. “If … whatever this is … if this Jabberwock thing keeps happening, people are going to keep showing up here. I’d say it ain’t gonna be long before they’s a considerable number of sick, hurtin’ people in this parking lot.”
“What’s the population of Nower County?” Charlie asked. Nobody answered. She looked around. “You mean nobody knows how many people live here?”
“I suspect it’d be more accurate to say nobody cares,” Viola said.
“It’s not as simple as it sounds.” Sam tried to explain. “Nower doesn’t have county government, no incorporated towns, so our numbers get lumped in with the surrounding counties in statistics. The circuit judge has jurisdiction in four counties and Nower’s one of them. I work for the state health department in Nower, Beaufort and Drayton Counties. Our Congressional District is six counties … you see?”
“A guess, then,” Charlie said. “An estimate.”
“Two thousand people,” E.J. said.
“It’s more than that,” Pete said. “More like three thousand … maybe thirty-five hundred.”
“Thirty-five hundred people in Nower County!” Viola scoffed. “What rocks is all them people hidin’ under? If they’s even a thousand people live here I’m my own grandpa.”
“The tax rolls aren’t accurate because so many people don’t pay taxes,” Liam said. “But last time I looked, there was four tho—”
“Don’t nobody but me care what’s happenin’?” Abby cried, looking from one to the other. “It don’t matter how many of us
they is, can’t none of us leave and” — she turned on Charlie — “it’s her fault. Somebody make her fix it!”
“Pete’s right,” Liam said, ignoring the outburst and trying to circle the conversation back to Pete’s concern. Liam was trying to sound official, hard to do with the front of his shirt stiff from dried blood and a dribble still edging down his lip from his left nostril. “We need to report this.”
“To …?” Viola Tackett asked.
“The State Police Post in—”
“I don’t think you can call out of the county,” E.J. said. “I called Jeb Pruitt in Twig early this morning and got through fine. But then I tried to call Lexington, three or four different numbers — where we order antibiotics, places like that, and got nothing, not even a busy signal.”
“Local people, then. We need to warn—”
“How?” Pete Rutherford asked. There was no radio station in Nowhere County.
“We need to tell people not to—”
“Not to what?” Viola said. “Not to try to leave the county?” She bleated a chuckle. “Run that up the flagpole and see how many folks you can get to salute.” She shook her finger at an imaginary somebody, “‘Ya’ll need to stay home now, because if you don’t, you’ll wind up puking your guts out at the Dollar General Store.’ Who you think’s gonna believe a thing like that?”
“I still think we have to try,” Sam said, speaking for the first time, her normally deep voice an octave lower because she was hoarse. “A phone tree. We could spread the word that way. Edith Wilkerson’s got a big prayer circle and we could …” Even as she said it, she realized it would be sticking a finger in the dike. “It’s just that after going through …” She actually shuddered. “There are people in this county — old, sick — who might not survive the Jabberwock.”
“I need to call in,” Liam said. The sheriff was likely out of the county, fishing. He went fishing every weekend at Lake Cumberland. But maybe the other deputies were at home. Liam’s radio was in his cruiser, so he started toward the Dollar Store. “I’ll borrow a phone.”