by Ninie Hammon
“No. I come here first.” Tears began to run down his cheeks.
Roscoe lived on Burnt Stump Road on the south side of Callahan Mountain and Harry lived in Solomon Hollow on the north side. The Middle of Nowhere was the opposite direction, but Roscoe’d come here first. Clearly, he was afraid of what he would find at Harry’s and didn’t want to go alone.
“I’ll help you look for him,” Malachi said, getting to his feet.
Roscoe nodded, relieved, but didn’t say anything. Maybe he couldn’t. He just turned and strode purposefully out of the room.
Malachi spoke quietly, maybe just to himself. “Picking us off, one by one. And eventually …”
Charlie thought of Gideon, looked from Sam to Malachi, and fear passed among them as real as the chill Charlie’d felt breathing out of Abner’s front door.
“I’ll be back in time for the meeting,” Malachi told her and Sam, and then he was gone.
Chapter Nine
After the Breakfast Club adjourned — Malachi to go with Roscoe Tungate to look for Harry and Charlie to take Merrie home for a nap so she wouldn’t be grumpy at tonight’s meeting — all the air drained out of Sam. She felt flat, used up. She needed to go home. Both Judd Perkins and his daughter, Doreen, were caring for E.J. now — well, watching him sleep, anyway. Doreen had surprisingly good first aid skills, had taken a class from the fire department. And Judd … on some basic human level his hulking presence — useless though he might be — was a comfort. Besides, he refused to leave, had sent his daughter and granddaughters home last night after cameo appearances to thank E.J. for saving the children’s lives from the rabid Great Pyrenees that had mauled him. Doreen had returned early this morning, but Judd had remained stalwartly present through the night. Buster had, after all, been Judd’s dog and E.J. had gone out to the Perkins’ farm because Judd had called to report that Buster was “acting funny.”
Sam sighed. Judd might be harder to get rid of than a bad cold, but that was a concern for another time. Right now, Sam was focused on only one thing — going home and spending time with Rusty. She was neglecting the boy, had been ever since J-Day. Had been so busy, with so much to do to care for the Nower County residents trapped by the Jabberwock who were turning to her and E.J. now as the only available sources of medical care.
She absolutely should not have that responsibility. Sam was not qualified, not trained, but she’d done things in the past week she would lose her LPN license for if the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure found out about it.
She didn’t think they would find out, though, and she leapt away from that thought and all that it implied like she’d touched her tongue to hot coffee.
During her training, Sam had worked in the trauma center of the University of Kentucky Medical Center and had waded through gunshot wounds, amputated toes, splinters through the leg and a kid who had somehow gotten a fishhook caught in his jaw.
She had “participated in” the treatment of those — meaning she had observed, watched, helped. Was the person who handed the attending physician the hemostat, or bandaged the wound after the emergency room doctor had sewn up the gash.
But Sam had only watched.
In the past week, she’d been the one using the hemostat to control bleeding on wounds she absolutely should not have attempted to repair. Like E.J.’s. But if she didn’t, who would?
There hadn’t been a huge number of cases. It wasn’t like in a county this size folks were always swallowing AAA batteries — the toddler who’d shown up in the emergency room at UKMC after he did that had died. But whatever it was that happened, stubbed toe or dog mauling, she was it. Now that E.J. was out of commission, she was literally the only medical care there was. The buck stopped at Martha Ann Sheridan, aka Sam, Licensed Practical Nurse, and if she screwed it up there wasn’t anybody to come along behind her and fix it.
Everybody in the county needed her. But so did her twelve-hear-old son! Oh, sure, you’d have to pull his fingernails out to get him to admit it, but Rusty needed his mother’s comfort right now. The world had turned totally upside down. Life as we know it on the planet had taken a hike and Rusty was putting a brave face on it, being a man about it. On the outside. She knew if she scratched very deep she would find a scared little boy.
Sam was determined to go home and spend all afternoon scratching.
But before she could get out the door, Raylynn came to tell her someone was in the waiting room to see her. Raylynn had been instructed to schedule appointments — unless the patient was bleeding or having chest pains, something life threatening — but Raylynn said the girl in the waiting room had refused to go home.
Sitting slumped in a chair by the door was Hayley Norman, dressed fashionably in grunge — army boots with laces untied that looked like small cars on her feet, cargo pants, and a flannel shirt over a shapeless tee-shirt intentionally splotched with stains on the faded brown surface. Her hair was a bird-nest tangle. It was not a flattering look for a girl at least a hundred pounds overweight but style had trumped flattering. Hayley leapt up as soon as she spotted Sam and rushed toward her, obviously armed with arguments and rebuttals to keep from being put off again.
“I know you’re busy and I get that, but I don’t need but a couple of minutes of your time and I have to talk to you, I really do. I have to.”
The girl spewed it out in one long speech, punctuated by the hiccupping breathing that accompanied a little kid’s crying jag. Or a grownup’s desperation.
Taking Hayley by the hand, Sam lead her to a chair and sat down. Hayley was surprised, had likely expected much more resistance than this. It was like shoving as hard as you can on a locked door, and when it’s unlocked you stumble through, off balance.
“What can I help you with, Hayley?”
Hayley looked around, like there might be somebody lurking in a dark corner, eagerly eavesdropping on their conversation. The room was empty.
Still, she asked, “Could we go somewhere … you know, private? What I need to talk about is personal and—”
“There’s nobody here.” Sam’s voice sounded as tired as she felt. “Moving into another empty room where there’s also nobody there won’t be any more private.”
Hayley sat, reluctantly.
“I don’t mean to be abrupt, but it’s been a really long day, and with E.J. …”
“Yeah, I heard everybody talking about how he got bit by a dog that had rabies. But E.J.’s not going to get it, is he? I mean, you can give him something, a shot or something, and he’ll be fine — right? He’s a really nice man, a kind man.” Hayley paused for a beat, her eyes unfocused. “He’s a ‘for real,’ like you.”
“For real?”
“A for-real good person. Not just pretending so he can get bonus points for being nice to the fat girl.”
Sam was surprised by that. Most sixteen-year-olds she knew were … well, sixteen. Crass. Self-centered, self-absorbed. Certainly not as self-aware as Hayley, who also didn’t appear to be bitter or entitled, and didn’t hide behind the chirpy-happy facade that many morbidly obese people used to cover the self-loathing pain that ate at their souls. Hayley Norman was unexpectedly “real” and Sam admired her.
“E.J. will be fine. Now, please tell me how I can help you.”
“Well …” She took a deep breath and spouted what Sam could see was a released speech.
“I know it’s probably not something you normally do, but drastic times call for drastic measures, right? This is an emergency, being stuck here unable to get out, and in an emergency all bets are off. I know—”
“Get to the point, Hayley. What do you want?”
“An abortion.”
Sam shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was. Oh, not that the girl was pregnant. She would gladly stand up before the High Court of Community Standards and Societal Condemnation and testify that it happened — even to “good girls.” What surprised her was the brazen request.
Could I have an abortion, please, and
would you supersize my fries?
Sam managed to keep her voice level and professional when she replied.
“I don’t do abortions.”
“Of course you don’t. I mean, normally you don’t, but you can make an exception in an emergency and this is an emergency. This is a matter of life and death.”
“Is there something wrong — with you? Or the baby? Did your doctor—?”
“Oh, I haven’t been to a doctor! I couldn’t do that, sit in the waiting room and everybody wondering what you’re doing there because you don’t look sick.”
“If you haven’t been to a doctor, how do you know—?”
“I went to a drug store in Lexington when I went up there for the Community Church’s Youth Congress and got a pregnancy test. The little line turned red.”
“Those aren’t always accurate—”
“And then I went to Planned Parenthood and got an examination. They set me up with a doctor to do the abort … the procedure.”
Planned Parenthood. Not Sam Sheridan’s favorite organization. A far better title would be Planned Abortions — you get knocked up, we get you un-knocked-up. They guided all the girls who flowed through their doors, scared teenagers who didn’t know jack, into the willing hands of the abortion mills that scraped the babies out of their bellies and told them everything would be fine, it was just tissue, after all, not a life, a real human, a baby.
“And it’s just, you know, it’s not like it’s a real … person or anything like that. It’s just a bunch of cells, tissue.” Hayley sounded like a parrot. “Because if it was a b—” Her eyes filled instantly with tears and a blink sent them cascading down her round cheeks. “But it’s not. They said it wasn’t. And so did Sugar Bear. It’s just a … a … it’s not a …”
It would have been cruel for Sam to point out that an abortion wouldn’t make Hayley un-pregnant, it would just make her the mother of a dead baby. It was clear Hayley already knew that part. She just wasn’t quite ready to face it yet.
“Hayley, I don’t want there to be any mistaking what I am about to say. Listen up. I do not do abortions.” When Hayley started to interrupt, Sam raised her hand for silence and continued. “Not now. Not ever. Not in an ‘emergency’—”
“You don’t understand. I can’t be pregnant. My father is a minister.”
Who is about to be a grandfather. That’s what Sam wanted to say, but didn’t. Hayley wasn’t finished.
“And Sugar Bear … he gave me the money to pay for the abortion. I was on my way there when I hit the Jabberwock.”
“Sugar Bear?”
“That’s what he told me to call him. It’s a secret that we’re seeing each other.”
Translate that: he’s a married man.
“He gave me the money and then I didn’t get it. He told me to get you to do it and if you don’t …”
“You better figure out something to say to ‘Sugar Bear,’ Hayley. I won’t perform an abortion.” She had to hold up her hand again. “This isn’t a debate, Hayley. The answer is a forever, unequivocal no.”
Sam got to her feet. Hayley sat where she was.
“I’m sorry.” Sam turned toward the door.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Hayley said, not in a dramatic what’ll-I-doooo? sort of way. Sam could hear the pain and fear in her voice and was moved to compassion.
She turned back to the girl and said as kindly as she could. “What’s going to happen is you’re going to have a baby. A baby!” She reached down and patted the teenager’s hand reassuringly. “These things have a way of working out for the best. Really. You’ll see.”
Chapter Ten
Nower County, Kentucky Deputy Sheriff Liam Montgomery found Reece Tibbits’s truck just where Lonnie Monroe’d said it’d be. Lonnie’d got up early to work in the garden he’d decided he’d better plant in his backyard. Farmer’s Almanac said not to plant seeds in the heat of the day so he’d got up before dawn. Lonnie was a laid-off coal miner collecting black lung benefits whose knowledge of horticulture did not extend past mowing his grass when it needed it, snipping off the fuzzy heads of the crop of dandelions that called his yard home and wondering sometimes why there always seemed to be more and more of the little critters.
He’d heard an explosion. Wasn’t a miner anywhere who didn’t recognize that sound. It had come from Lexington Road about half a mile away. Lonnie was curious, but he had to get the planting part right or the seeds wouldn’t never turn into nothing and he was coming around to the belief that it’d be a real good thing to grow food for yourself — what with the Jabberwock and all.
When he’d finally checked on the origin of the sound, he’d called Liam.
“There’s a big hole in the road, right in the middle,” he’d said. “When I went out to have a look-see, wasn’t nobody there, so I dug around in the glove box of the truck. Papers say it belongs to Reece Tibbits. There was a rifle laying there in the road, a 30.06, good-looking deer rifle, just laying there. It must belong to Reece, too. Whenever you find him, you tell him I’m keeping it for him.”
Reece Tibbits had a bit of a reputation as a brawler. He was big and strong; Lonnie Monroe was neither, so he wanted to stay on Reece’s good side.
“Must have left his truck there and decided to ride the Jabberwock to the Middle of Nowhere.”
That was ridiculous. Nobody, well, not anybody with a lick of sense, voluntarily “rode the Jabberwock” anymore. Not after that first day when nobody knew what it was and folks went wandering off into it on their way out of the county, or heard about it and came down to the Middle of Nowhere to see the casualties. Nobody, not even a stupid teenager, would get anywhere near the Jabberwock now, not after what’d happened to Abby Clayton. How she exploded.
Liam had checked with Sam anyway before he drove out here and she’d said she hadn’t seen Reece.
Pulling up behind the truck, Liam got out of the county’s lone remaining cruiser, the one the sheriff had left parked behind the sheriff’s office when he went off on his fishing trip two days before J-Day. He left the bubble light flashing, not that anybody was likely to come barreling down the road and rear-end him. Wasn’t any reason for anybody to come down the road at all, given that it dead-ended right here, closed by the Jabberwock.
So what was Reece Tibbits doing here?
Liam examined the truck. The tailgate was down, so Reece had unloaded something out of the truck bed. Wasn’t hard to guess what that’d been, given the gigantic hole in the road right beneath the Jabberwock. Reece’d come out here with some kind explosive device, determined to blow a hole in the Jabberwock. Liam got it — Reece’s mother was dying because she couldn’t get her dialysis treatments in Carlisle and folks said Reece was losing it.
So where was Reece now? Obviously, his attempt to blast out of the Jabberwock had been unsuccessful. It was still there, shimmering across the road. Liam approached it carefully, the way you’d get close to a cobra in a basket with some dude doing his flute trick to get the snake to rise up out of it. Truth was, he couldn’t get close to the Jabberwock without climbing down into the hole Reece had blasted in the asphalt directly under it.
Liam stood looking at the shimmer. At his own reflection in the shimmer. At how the shimmer didn’t reflect Reece’s truck or Liam’s cruiser behind it, only reflected the sky and clouds … and people. Nothing else.
The keys weren’t in the truck or Liam would have started it and pulled it off onto the shoulder of the road. He checked the fuel gauge — three quarters of a tank. Somebody would come along — likely Lonnie Monroe as soon as Liam left — and siphon that gas out.
Liam got back in his cruiser and made a U-turn in the middle of the road and headed down Lexington Road toward Sugar Bowl Mountain. Reece Tibbits lived outside Bennetville on Cicada Springs Road. Since he’d already checked the Middle of Nowhere and Reece wasn’t there puking his guts up, where was he? And what was Liam going to do when he found him? Arrest him for blowing a hole in the
road? It was, after all, against the law to do a thing like that. But folks were doing a lot of things now that were against the law and Liam couldn’t arrest them all. Or even some of them. What would he do with a prisoner in the county’s tiny jail?
Liam had no idea, had been puzzling over that and the implications of law enforcement in general ever since he’d gone chasing after the speeder with Pennsylvania plates and found himself with a needle inside his skull in the bus shelter in the Middle of Nowhere.
Did he have the authority to arrest people? Now, given … well, everything? Arrest who? People were committing “crimes” all over the place, stealing the gas out of the cars of their neighbors who’d been out of town on J-Day. And stealing whatever else they fancied that was property belonging to people who were as stuck out there as he and all the other nowhere people were stuck in here.
If he didn’t enforce all the laws, how did he decide which ones were really crimes, given the present circumstances? Everybody knew Viola Tackett had stationed her boys at Foodtown — to prevent hoarding, or so she’d said. Liam had no doubt that Viola Tackett, civic-minded citizen that she’d always been, was merely guarding the contents of the store for herself. The only weapon she’d used was intimidation, veiled threats. So did he go out past Killarney to the Tackett household on Gizzard Ridge and arrest the lot of them for terroristic threatening? Not likely.
Who did he arrest, then? The people looting the few remaining downtown businesses in the Ridge? Most of them did it in broad daylight, didn’t bother to wait until dark when most of the streetlights didn’t work. How long would it be before the whole county went dark? Yeah, the electricity was generated in Drayton County by the Rural Electric Coop Corp and was on a grid — he didn’t understand that part — that served a six-county area that included Nower County. So there’d be electricity here until … what happened when the people here stopped paying their electric bills? Surely the RECC would notice eventually and cut off service.