Nowhere USA: The Complete Series: A Psychological Thriller series (Nowhere, USA)

by Ninie Hammon

  Except he wouldn’t die that way. Raylynn had promised him she wouldn’t let it happen. She had promised the man she loved that she would save him from dying the death of a mad dog, foaming at the mouth, snapping in vicious insanity at any live thing that came within his reach. She’d promised she’d steal enough Oxycontin to give E.J. so that he would not die a raging manic. He would merely go peacefully to sleep and never wake up.

  She’d told him that, reassured him that she would save him from that fate. But she had not told him that she’d decided to join him in death, because there was no future for Raylynn without him. She had nothing to live for without E.J.

  Raylynn Bennett had come to the end of the road. She would die if the Jabberwock remained. And she would die if it did not.

  Even if the Jabberwock were somehow banished, defeated, or merely blew back out of the county with the same mystery with which it had blown in, Raylynn Bennett’s life would be on a fatal countdown. In a post-Jabberwock world, her father would come home. He would walk back into the house — his house — and expect to take up with life just as he had left it.

  And that would not be.

  Her father would never touch her again.

  Raylynn would kill him before he had a chance.

  She even knew how, had worked it out in her head as she sat beside a sleeping E.J., watching the sheet on his chest rise and fall. She had replayed the fanciful scene in her head so often it was almost a reality.

  Her father would come home. Would walk in the back door, calling for her. She would answer, as she always did, eyes averted because she didn’t want to see the hunger in his eyes when he looked at her.

  She would find a smile to paste on her lips, graciously put off all his questions — and surely he’d be curious about what had happened to Nowhere County! She’d offer to bring him a glass of iced tea, first. He loved super-sweet Southern iced tea, with lots of ice. She’d tell him to take his shoes off, sit back in his recliner and she’d bring it to him.

  The glass would be laced with Oxycontin. Not enough to kill, just enough to render him unconscious. She wanted him awake and aware when she killed him. Then she would duct tape him to the chair, use a whole roll, around and around and around him from his chin to his ankles. When he came to, she would describe for him exactly how she planned to kill him.

  She would hold out the ice pick, describe how she would stick it through his left eye, blinding him, but not killing him. Then she’d demonstrate! He would scream, wail, fight against the coming horror — just like she had wanted to do every time she heard him, smelled him come into her room at night. Then he would watch with his remaining eye as the ice pick came relentlessly toward him. He’d beg, plead, cry maybe. Just like she had begged, pleaded and cried. And his terror would have no more effect on Raylynn than her terror had had on him. She would shove the icepick into his eye! Deeper. And deeper. And deeper. All the way up to the hilt in his eye socket. He would be dead. And she would be executed for premeditated murder.

  Except she wouldn’t. She and E.J. would exit this life on their own terms. E.J. wouldn’t go mad. She wouldn’t be executed. Neither of them would pass out of this world in the grip of some mindless monster as it absorbed them into itself.

  She and E.J. would hold hands, look into each other’s eyes and …

  “You asleep, too?”

  Her head snapped up and she saw that E.J. was looking at her. He was awake and thought he had caught her dozing at his bedside. She hadn’t been dozing, she was always totally awake and aware because the time with him was so precious and so limited.

  She smiled at him.

  “Wrongo, Moose Breath — that’s what you and the others say, but I don’t know what it means.”

  His smile was weak. His voice was airless.

  “From an old television show,” he gasped. She could see the agony in his eyes.

  But it would be over soon.

  “That’s what Rocky the Flying Squirrel would say when Bullwinkle—”

  “I have been stealing pills.”

  She heard herself say the words and wanted to call them back. She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that, had intended …

  Then she saw relief flood his face and she was glad she’d told him, glad she had eased his mind even if it wasn’t the way she’d intended.

  “How did—?”

  She put her finger to his lips.

  “It doesn’t matter how. I managed it, that’s all that matters.” She didn’t want to alarm him, so she’d figured out how she would say what came next so as not to put him on alert.

  “How many Oxycontin pills does it take for a fatal dose?” she asked.

  “I don’t know about the pills I’m taking — don’t know the milligrams. But I’m sure ten or twelve of them taken at once … You have that many?”

  She did have that many, but she did not yet have twice that many. She’d need another day for that.

  “By tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be ready. I can’t take too many at one time or else Sam—”

  “I understand. I … What’s today? I am so drugged up, dopey and with all those nasties swimming around in my veins, I lose track of time.”

  “And time has already lost track of us.” She had told him about the stars on only one side of the sky, and how too-fast time now seemed to be too-slow time. “But if the clocks and calendars are to be believed, it’s Tuesday. And you have—”

  “Seven days after infection … So we’re good.” He was breathing hard from the effort to speak. Still … she loved it when he went into “doctor” mode. He seemed almost like his old self then. “All the extrapolations of how long it takes for the virus to reach a sufficient level to cause symptoms … they’re just educated guesses. Most certainly a little off and possibly a whole lot. Yeah, tomorrow. Wednesday. That’s time. Wait as far as possible just in case … but not too long, not long enough for …”

  “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  “Raylynn. I don’t know how … what to—”

  “Don’t say anything — please! Just lie back and rest. Tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, dreamily.

  “I’m going with you.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I said I’m going with you. When you make your grand exit tomorrow … we’ll go together. I’ll have enough pills saved up for the two of us by then.”

  She was unprepared for the look of horror on his face.

  “No! Raylynn, for God’s sake, what are you talking about? No.”

  He was getting upset, moving around, which was banging his bandaged leg around. She knew the agony it caused him, watch his face twist in pain.

  She felt around in the pocket of her smock and drew out a full bottle of pills, dropped two into her hand and held them out.

  “I know it’s early, but it doesn’t matter now. I can tell it hurts. Take them.”

  “No, I’m not going to take anything to fuzzy my thinking because it’s clear you’re not thinking rationally. One of us has to. What do you mean ‘we will go together’? That’s crazy. Why would you—?”

  “My father has been raping me since I was five years old.”

  She couldn’t breathe. Where had those words come from? Never in her weakest moments did she even consider confessing to E.J. or anybody else what had been happening to her. She intended to take those nightmare images with her to the grave.

  “I am so sorry … I didn’t mean to say that. It’s just—”

  “He will never touch you again. I promise you. Never! But you don’t have to die to escape him.”

  “I’m not just dying to run away from him. I am dying so I can leave the world with you. I don’t want to live in a world without you, E.J. I … I love you.”

  He just looked at her. Then he began to cry. He cried softly, weakly until he went back to sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Time telescoped. Part of the reason was exhaustion, of course. Sam didn’t sleep last ni
ght, sitting up with Rusty. But it was also the intensity of the situation that did screwy things with Sam’s mind. Everything in life had been intense since J-Day, and Sam couldn’t let her mind wander back down the paths of all the horror she’d had to deal with since then. If she did, she would get lost in it and never find her way back.

  She had done everything she could with Essie’s wound. She’d removed the bloody tee shirt, cleaned the area and put a sterile pressure bandage in its place.

  The wound itself was small, no bigger than the end of Sam’s thumb. Whoever had shot her had used a small-caliber gun to do it, and you’d think in a drive-by, a shooter would be wielding some big rifle. But she didn’t let her mind go there, either because she couldn’t wrap her mind around how life had come to the point that a nowhere person would drive down Main Street in Persimmon Ridge and shoot a poor handicapped girl sitting on a porch.

  It had been about Viola, of course. A warning of some kind? Revenge for something she’d done, and Lord knows the line of people who could lay claim to that motive would stretch out so far you couldn’t see the end.

  The blood was still flowing, but not in the amounts that had soaked the tee shirt. Even if the new pressure bandage stopped the bleeding entirely, it wouldn’t save her life. Essie was still bleeding internally, from puncture wounds in her colon, and those wounds were oozing into her abdominal cavity, slowly filling it with blood and fecal material that would poison her whole system.

  And Sam couldn’t do a thing about it.

  She didn’t try to move Essie off the examining room table because there was no other room to put her in, and no Malachi handy to go somewhere and fetch her a bed.

  Malachi.

  Where was Malachi?

  He’d left to pick up Rev. Norman at nine o’clock this morning. Sam had moved on from curious and mildly annoyed to genuine concern. Something had happened, and if her own experience since J-Day was any indication, that something was bad.

  All the somethings were bad.

  Sam left the room only once and went down the hallway to check on the other two patients. Rusty lay as if sleeping on the bed Malachi had “borrowed” from Martha Whittiker’s house. She had to keep herself from reaching out and shaking him, telling him to wake up and get dressed or he’d be late for school.

  Judd Perkins sat with the boy, a big bear of a man on a small chair, looking a little like an elephant sitting on a football.

  “He’s gonna wake up,” Judd told her quietly. “I know you’re scared to death right now, but it’s gonna be fine. I b’lieve that. I really do.”

  She was sure he really did believe it. But that didn’t make it true.

  She stuck her head into E.J.’s room. He was sleeping, too, with Raylynn resolutely at his side. She’d sensed a change in Raylynn in the last day or two. She seemed calmer. More … something like “serene.” She had been so terribly worried about E.J. that she’d been half out of her mind. But then, she’d chilled out. She was as attentive as always, maybe more so, wanted to spend every possible second she could with him, but she didn’t appear to be frantic with worry anymore.

  Maybe she was just too tired to be frantic. The level of exhaustion in everyone Sam knew — walking around on only a few hours of sleep at night, and one horror crisis after another every day — must be like fighting a war. Malachi would relate to that.

  Malachi. Where was Malachi?

  She passed by the waiting room on her way back down the hallway to Essie’s room. Viola had parked all three of her sons there. Neb had on a tee-shirt that was several sizes too big for him and that was saying a lot. She couldn’t imagine where he’d gotten it — perhaps the Dollar General Store, though there was almost nothing left in the building. Not many of the people who’d looted the place, who’d just taken whatever they needed, could wear a shirt that big so maybe that’s why it’d been left behind. Neb sat off by himself, away from the other two, his eyes downcast, looking sightlessly at the floor. Zach and Obie sat side by side, talking quietly. They looked up at her, something like hope in her eyes, when she passed by the waiting room, but she just averted her eyes. Surely, Viola’d made it clear to them that there was nothing to hope for.

  The sound of something like singing came from the exam room where Essie lay, and Sam paused at the door, listening before she went inside.

  “Ahhh-nah, gahma-gahma-gahma, so-so-wissy-wheeee.”

  The voice was Viola’s. The words were nonsense, not sung, really, but chanted in a kind of rhythm that resembled a melody.

  Sam opened the door and quietly stepped inside. Viola was holding her daughter’s hand, had leaned over the girl’s body so her face was close to Essie’s and was chanting the words softly.

  “Gonna be jest fine, baby girl, ain’t nothing gonna hurt you, I won’t let it. Ahhh-nah, gahma-gahma-gahma, so-so-wissy-wheeee. And soon’s you’re feeling better, I’m gonna take you on back home. You don’t like the new house, so we ain’t gonna stay there. You can go back to your own room, sleep in your own bed. Shhhhh. Shhhh, now. Gahma-gahma-gahma, so-so-wissy.”

  Sam approached the table and could see that the girl’s breath had become shallow and ragged, each intake shaky, each exhale a trembling sigh.

  Viola looked up at Sam.

  “Go get the boys. They need to be here.”

  Sam turned and went out to the waiting room and returned with the three Tackett boys. They were grown men, of course, but Sam and everybody else saw them as “the Tackett boys.”

  The exam room was small, and with all the Tacketts there it felt airless. Sam remained by the door as Viola crooked her finger at first one and then the other of her sons.

  “Kiss yore sister,” she told Obie, and he obediently leaned over and kissed her cheek, then stepped away as Zach moved toward the bed. He held out a ratty Barbie doll with scraggly blonde hair. There was something sticky in the doll’s hair. Maybe it was blood.

  “I knowed you’d want this.” Essie’s eyes were unfocused, open but seeing nothing. When she didn’t take the doll, Zach put it down on the table beside her. “Didn’t take me no time at all to go into the Ridge and fetch it back here.”

  Viola frowned at him for that, then said to Essie, “’Member when I got you your Barbie … ‘member that? It was that Christmas when it snowed so deep we couldn’t hardly get the front door open. You was so happy. You ‘member?”

  Viola fit the doll into Essie’s limp fingers.

  Neb hung back. When Viola motioned him forward he just stood, shook his head. Tears were running down his cheeks.

  Before Viola had a chance to summon him a second time, Essie made a gurgling sound in her throat, like she was choking.

  “Now, it’s okay, don’t you never mind nothing,” Viola crooned, “just breathe easy and you gonna be fine, shhh, shhh now, ahhh-nah, gahma-gahma-gahma, so-so-wissy-wheeee. Shhh.”

  Essie let out the breath she’d struggled to draw in and then lay still. The room was silent, no sound of her labored breathing.

  Viola let out a sound then, more like a grunt than a cry, and leaned over and put her cheek against her daughter’s.

  No one moved. The only sound was Viola’s voice, humming the not-melody of the nonsense song.

  Then the door behind them opened and Malachi stepped into the room.

  Sam sucked in a breath when she saw him, but made no sound. He was banged up and scraped up, scratched all over. Looked like he’d been dragged behind a car. There was dried blood on his forehead and down his cheek from a wound where blood had matted his black hair. His hands — fingers were raw, scuffed knuckles bleeding. His left forearm, wrist and the top of his hand were abraded like a kid’s knee when he dumps his bike in the street.

  “Mama?” he asked, clearly unaware of what had happened.

  “She’s gone,” Viola said simply, her voice tear-clotted.

  Malachi crossed the room in two long strides and took Essie’s limp hand, looking in confusion at his mother.

  “Sh
e was shot,” Viola said. And the timber of her voice then was not anguish, the pain of loss or grief. It was barely harnessed rage. “Shot in the belly and she bled to death.”

  “Who …?”

  “I do not know the answer to that question, son,” she said, her words measured. “But I will find out. As God is my witness, I will find out.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Cotton didn’t go directly back home after his conversation with Rose Topple. He made several important stops in Beaufort County first. Neither Jolene nor Stuart spoke when he was finished telling the story that had been told to him by the old woman in the Carlisle nursing home. The three looked from one to the other, sharing their disbelief and shock with their eyes.

  Finally, Jolene found her voice.

  “No wonder those spirits …” She had to grab another breath to continue. “No wonder they were so disturbed, so agitated."

  “You think that’s it, then,” Stuart said, his eyes bloodshot, his face haggard. “The bones. The little girl made peace with the Jabberwock when she gathered them up …”

  “… so maybe we can make peace with it if we do what she couldn’t do,” Cotton said.

  He had thought about it all the way home, and even though his brain was foggy from lack of sleep, it still seemed like the only avenue open to them.

  “And that is?” Jolene said.

  “We bury the bones. Put them in a proper grave, have a service, put up a marker, respect those poor souls.”

  “It’s not just them, though, is it?” Jolene said. “The un-buried ones. There’s something else. Something more.”

  “Something worse,” Stuart said.

  “Yes, I believe there is, but we can only do what we can do. I went to Home Depot and got the tools we’ll need for the job.” But that’s not all Cotton got while he was in Carlisle. He’d stopped by a friend’s house and borrowed another “tool” he prayed they wouldn’t have to use. Tomorrow, we’ll go to Fearsome Hollow and get the bones …”