by Ninie Hammon
A warning would have done no good, of course, but Sam had been right in suggesting they could get the word out on the phone, neighbors calling neighbors. It was testimony to the hardy nature of the county’s bird population that the ones perched on phone lines didn’t get fried by the friction of all the calls suddenly going through the wires.
Word of the phenomenon spread like a grass fire. When people heard, they did one of three things. They blew it off and went on with whatever they’d been doing. They raced out to their nearest juncture with the county line to prove that it was just some made-up story that didn’t have no truth at all in it. Or they showed up as gawkers and looky-loos at the Middle of Nowhere crossroads, wanting to see the “popping into existence” part with their very own eyes.
Those were the ones that got under Charlie’s skin. Rubber-neckers. Many — not all of them, but a lot — were the kind of people who stood below some poor soul out on a ledge and yelled, “Jump!” They had come to see the show and when she looked at their faces she could find not a speck of compassion for their neighbors. They’d spent their lives rubbing elbows with the sufferers, but in Nower County there appeared to be a sizable chunk of humanity who knew little more about their neighbors than their names — and whatever piece of juicy gossip happened to be attached to their family history.
There was an onslaught of teenage boys for a while who’d wanted to “take a ride on the Jabberwock” as soon as they heard. Since the phenomenon was clearly a fluke, some freak of nature that wouldn’t last long, the teenagers were determined not to miss the excitement while it lasted. A group of half a dozen of them had raced out to the county line somewhere and dispatched the driver’s girlfriend to the Middle of Nowhere to pick them up so they could all go out and ride in again.
When she arrived, her boyfriend’s buddies were sick as dogs. Vomiting. Nose bleeds. And all the shine went completely off the pumpkin for the poor girl when she found her Studley Do-Right boyfriend suffering from bloody diarrhea. When word about that got out, the number of teenage “incoming” fell off markedly, though the number of gawkers in the Middle of Nowhere continued to grow at a steady rate, as folks decided it was safer to come see what had happened to other people before subjecting themselves to the effects of the weird, shimmering mirage that encircled the whole county.
At some point, Malachi had started “requisitioning” clean clothing and other supplies from the Dollar General Store. The owner, Howie Witherspoon, was nowhere to be found. The teenage checker who had not one time ventured out into the parking lot put up little resistance, particularly after Sam handed her a credit card and said she’d pay for whatever they used. Charlie knew Sam didn’t have that kind of money to throw away. Charlie did, of course, but her credit cards were in her purse in the airport rental car … wherever that was. Eventually, the checker just walked out, left the door open. Maybe she locked up the register … or not.
Pete Rutherford put himself in charge of what he called the Yuk Squad.
“I don’t get no credit for being self-sacrificing,” he said. “I got almost no sense of smell no more. It was a shame at first not to be able to smell bacon fryin’ or coffee brewin’ or the air after a spring rain. Went and bought myself some baby powder, dusted it all over my hands, put them over my nose. Nothing. I liked to a cried.” He looked out over the parking lot. “But it’s definitely an advantage right now.”
Sam was soon overwhelmed with trying to care for all the desperately sick people. Their maladies ranged from projectile vomiting, nosebleeds, bleeding ears, confusion, disorientation, temporary loss of hearing and/or vision to migraine headaches and bloody diarrhea. The symptoms and their severity differed dramatically from person to person — for no apparent reason, with no pattern they could discern.
Two healthy teenage boys and a farmer named Judd Phillips, who was as strong as — and built like — a bull, had been totally incapacitated for more than two hours, too sick with vomiting and headaches to move. But five-year-old Timmy Bessinger, whose mother was taking him to a dentist appointment, had gotten off with mild disorientation and a kind of blank stare that lasted for about half an hour — much like Merrie’s.
Seventy-nine-year-old Grace Tibbits showed up with her son Reece, who was taking her to Carlisle for her twice-a-week appointment for dialysis.
It hit Charlie then, and she saw it sink in with the others, too, that being locked up within the boundaries of Nowhere County had better be a brief, unexplainable phenomena. It needed to vanish back to wherever it had come from soon, because if it hung around, there’d be severe consequences — and not just in missed dental appointments or a foiled trip to Walmart.
While Reece lay incapacitated by a splitting headache and a bloody nose, Grace recovered from vomiting quickly enough that she piled in beside Sam and Charlie tending to the “wounded,” brushing off Sam’s urging to sit down and take it easy with, “Don’t be ridiculous, child, I’m in better shape than ninety percent of the people for a hundred yards in every direction.”
Sam caught Charlie’s eye when she saw Grace, nodded toward Pete Rutherford and whispered, “Pete takes weekly chemotherapy treatments in Lexington. Cancer. He’s in remission now. But if he stops taking the treatments …”
When Abner Riley recovered his vision, he hung around to help. Abner had a cleft palate and at some time in his life, somebody — and probably not a doctor — had sewn up the split lip part of the condition but left the rest. He had been an orderly in the hospital in the Ridge before it closed and was on his way to work in the hospital in Carlisle.
Thelma Jackson got her nosebleed under control pretty quickly and she stayed, too. Even taller than Sam, Thelma had been a high school history teacher — back when the Ridge had a high school — whose hobby was genealogy. Hers was one of only a handful of black families in the county. Her husband, Cotton, had played football for the University of Kentucky years ago and now commuted to Lexington six days a week to work as a foreman in a sewing machine factory. She was glad he hadn’t been with her … the Jabberwock and all. He had high blood pressure.
Other people stayed, too. A few. Rodney Sentry, a pig farmer. Roberta Callison, who raised chickens and sold eggs at a roadside stand. It didn’t escape Charlie’s notice, and it didn’t surprise her, either, that the ones who stayed to help out were generally folks who had managed to make life work somehow in Nowhere County. The majority of the people transported by the Jabberwock to the parking lot were like most of the rest of the population of the county — they lived on government checks and food stamps, expected a handout and felt entitled to it.
As the day wore on, it became clear that the delivery truck that didn’t show up that morning to deliver disposable diapers to the Dollar General Store had been a harbinger of things to come. The rural mail carriers didn’t show. Rodney Sentry’d been waiting for delivery of a hog he’d bought from a farmer in Drayton County. Since the fellow didn’t answer the phone, Rodney’d decided to go see what’d happened to him. Roscoe Tungate and his twin brother, Harry — as alike as two ears of corn picked out of an Iowa cornfield — were waiting for their cousin to bring them four cases of beer from Lexington, and when he didn’t show up … the list went on and on.
Clearly, the Jabberwock gate to the world was locked on both sides.
Nobody could leave. Nobody could come in, either.
Abby Clayton had taken that understanding hard. She’d been counting on somebody to swoop in and rescue her so she could go get her baby. Charlie felt sorry for the young woman, even though if looks could kill, Charlie would have been pushing up daisies, courtesy of the daggers Abby was firing at her. It was unnerving, but about the middle of the afternoon, she noticed that Abby was nowhere to be seen. Someone must have given her a ride home.
In truth, there was really nothing anybody could do to help the people who’d lost a battle with the Jabberwock. All Sam, Charlie, Malachi, E.J., Liam, Pete, Grace, the Tungate brothers and the handful of others could
do was get them cleaned up — as best they could — and keep the place hosed down — as best they could — and make them as comfortable as possible until the symptoms abated on their own.
Liam had summoned the volunteer fire department and they’d come roaring out of the Ridge, lights flashing and siren screaming. They likely didn’t get an opportunity to do that very often and they took advantage of the thrill whenever they could. They were, after all, volunteers, summoned by beepers from the fields where they were milking cows, the backyard where they were hanging clothes on the line or the fry kitchen at A Salt and Battery, the fish and chips place in Twig. They operated the dilapidated equipment that would be used until it fell apart, and then so would the department because there were no funds to replace it. They had arrived and hooked a hose to the fire hydrant behind the Dollar General Store, and then helped to keep the parking lot and the bus shelter hosed down and as sanitary as possible. Luckily the strip mall had been built on a hill and the water off the lot ran down the nearby ditch and into the creek and was carried away.
At the peak of the festivities in the parking lot, Charlie did a rough head count and figured there were probably fifty people there — on a scale from just arrived and desperately sick all the way through to borrowing E.J.’s phone to summon transportation back home.
It was a rowdy crowd — angry, confused, sick and scared. And mountain people weren’t accustomed to exercising much control over how they expressed themselves.
Women screamed and sobbed. Men yelled and cursed. Everybody demanded to know what was going on and nobody had any answers for them.
By late afternoon, the crowd had thinned out considerably — partly because there were fewer and fewer “incoming,” courtesy of the telephone grapevine, which had first broadcast notice of the Jabberwock, and was now communicating the dire consequence of challenging the beast. And partly because those who came to see the “appearing” were fewer and didn’t tend to stay as long. Maybe it was the stink. Charlie was just about used to it, but still when the breeze blew uphill from the creek it was ghastly.
That many people, that sick … it wasn’t a scene most folks would choose to hang around and examine for very long.
It was early evening when Charlie heard Sam cry out, “Oh, Abby, no!” She turned to see Sam kneeling beside a figure on her hands and knees heaving, blood spewing from her nose, clearly an “incoming.” It was Abby Clayton.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Malachi Tackett looked out over the Dollar Store parking lot as the last rays of the sun fired out over the top of Little Bear Mountain to the west. “Sunset” for mountain people was a gradual thing, a lengthening of shadows in the valleys and hollows as the sun dipped below the horizon out there on the flat.
The sounds of low voices. Someone being violently sick. Somebody else crying and a general moaning sound that seemed to come from everybody and nobody at the same time.
Not a whole lot different from a battlefield. Except nobody here was dying.
And he hadn’t killed any of them.
He wasn’t sure when it’d started, when the outline had formed. Boot Camp? When he shipped out? After the first exchange of gunfire? The first dead body? The first massacre? It was suddenly just there, a black edge, a frame that encased his reality, that surrounded his world from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning until whatever happened that day was done. Like somebody had outlined the life of Malachi Tackett in black Magic Marker. Sometimes the frame closed in on him, somehow got thicker and thicker until the world that existed outside of it was small, a little circle, like looking at reality through a pipe.
And then the pipe would slam shut altogether, and when he opened his eyes he would be somewhere else entirely.
Now the frame was gone.
He didn’t remember when it’d left, either. He’d been too busy to notice, but it was definitely gone.
Oh, everything else was still there, lined up for his inspection like recruits on the parade ground. The paranoia. But it wasn’t paranoia until you came home. Until then, everybody really was trying to kill you.
Or how he worked out in his head how he’d get out of every situation he found himself in. Walking to the mailbox with Mama … how he could leap over that hedge and make a run for the tree.
Or how he could drop the mailman — the guy in a mailman’s uniform — grab his satchel with the bomb inside and throw it over the fence.
So many of the gifts that keep on giving he’d brought home with him from the war were still very much in evidence, thank you very much. But the frame was gone.
The black line did not surround the parking lot of the Dollar General Store in the Middle of Nowhere on that June Saturday night in 1995 and that was a thing of profound mystery and wonder for Lance Corporal— No! Not corporal. Just Malachi. Plain old Malachi Tackett.
He looked out at a world without a frame and was awed by its absence and by … how much less threatening an unframed world was.
The air smelled vaguely of vomit, though the fire brigade had done a yeoman’s job of keeping the parking lot cleared of yuk, under the direction of Pete Rutherford who ruled it with an iron hand, making it clear, to Malachi at least, that the man had served in the military, had directed men there, had certainly sent them into battle to die.
And maybe understood.
He had, after all, talked Malachi back into reality when he believed he was pinned down by … as he crouched behind a bus shelter in a parking lot in rural Kentucky, his mind reverberating inside his skull like a ball in an oil drum.
He’d have a conversation with Pete when … after …
Malachi smiled, knew it was inappropriate but reveled in its inappropriateness. Malachi didn’t give a rat fart about the Jabberwock. It didn’t matter to him what it was. And he was probably the only person — out of the hundreds of people who’d experienced the phenomena in one form or another today — who didn’t care. It seemed to him so insignificant in the grand scheme of things. In a world where hundreds of thousands of innocent people were butchered, hacked apart, their bodies piled up and left to stink by the side of the road … in a world where things like that were such a daily occurrence that nobody even noticed, an impossible phenomenon like the Jabberwock was no big deal at all.
He still felt a little lightheaded, had put nothing back in his stomach since he’d violently expelled its contents hours ago, but he also attributed some of the wooziness to the thing, the event, that started in the shadow of Bald Ridge and propelled him to a parking lot twenty-three miles away in …
How long had it taken?
That was something nobody’d thought to investigate, though he was sure every possible bit of minutia relating to the phenomena would be talked and examined and taken apart and dissected ad nauseam when it was over.
“I feel like I’ve got a hangover,” said Liam Montgomery, who’d stepped up unnoticed beside Malachi.
Malachi jumped. Just jumped, though. Like anybody would. No over-reaction.
“Me, too. Like there’s a …”
“Buzzing behind my eyes.”
“Yeah, like that. Coming off a drunk.”
“I’ve never felt a pain like that needle in my head, though, not ever before in my life, and I’d just about die to keep from ever feeling it again.” Liam seemed very young then, and Malachi noticed that the deputy was probably five years younger than he was, which made him mid-twenties.
“Meaning you have no desire to step again through the mirror of the Jabber—”
That’s when they both heard Sam cry, “Oh, Abby, no,” heard the poor woman retching violently and knew that Abby Clayton had ridden the bronco a second time.
Sam held Abby Clayton’s head while she heaved and retched, her body wracked by contractions in her diaphragm as strong as labor pains.
The girl was vomiting blood, too, and Sam had only seen one other person all day who’d done that — Betty Hannaker. She’d been on her way to Walmart to buy a plunge
r because her toilet was stopped up. And Betty’d only vomited a small amount of blood. Abby was vomiting nothing but blood after she’d expelled her stomach contents.
And her nose was bleeding, too.
If this had been a normal world and this had been anywhere in the same UPS delivery zone as a normal day, Sam would have dialed 911 and had Abby transported immediately to the hospital by ambulance.
She froze for a moment, a cold chill making its way down her back, dripping like ice water from one vertebra to the next.
That was a perfect word picture of the state of the world in Nowhere County Kentucky on June 3, 1995.
When you dialed 911, nobody answered.
Malachi came up beside Charlie, nodded to Abby and pointed out the obvious. “She didn’t get a ride home after all.”
She noticed as she spoke to him that his eyes had cleared. The effects of the Jabberwock had mostly worn off for him, but he also seemed more engaged with reality than he’d been before. In fact, he’d seemed to become more “normal” as the nightmare day went on.
While Charlie was getting wrapped tighter and tighter, Malachi Tackett was relaxing.
Charlie went to Sam and put her hand on her shoulder and she looked up, glanced pointedly down at Abby and shrugged her shoulders.
“How about I go get a wet cloth for you to—”
At the sound of Charlie’s voice, Abby’s head jerked up, spewing a fine spray of blood over Charlie’s pants and shoes, the ones from the Dollar Store which she’d changed into because her jeans and Italian leather ballet flats had gotten to such a state they were unsalvageable. She’d have to burn them.