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

by Ninie Hammon

  “What difference does it make how it tastes? It’s not like you can do anything about it now.”

  “Ah, but Pizza Hut still delivers.”

  He smiled at her and she smiled back. That was all, just a moment and it was over. They were still finding their way, seeing how things worked out, taking nothing for granted. That was enough. More than enough.

  Charlie saw Malachi dangle a piece of turkey over Sam’s nose and snatch it away like he was training one of Merrie’s puppies. One of Merrie’s puppies. Charlie shook her head. Stuart had likely wondered how on earth she’d gotten talked into such a thing — and she hadn’t gotten talked into anything. Stuart must have sensed that, because he’d never asked.

  Charlie heard his voice from the other room and stood very still for just a moment, listening. E.J. and Pete had goaded him into telling stories about the Pittsburgh Steelers, not that it took a lot of goading, and she loved the energy she heard in his voice.

  It had hurt so bad to think Stuart had …

  Charlie wouldn’t go there. The Jabberwock had damaged her in so many ways but like everybody else, she’d been in survival mode at the time and just soldiered through. In the months since, however, she suffered something akin to Malachi’s PTSD. She’d wake up with a jolt, tangled in the skeins of a dream about singing a lullaby outside the locked door of the kiln. She’d sometimes be overwhelmed with a wave of despair, the residue of that awful time, and there was no cure but to go and be near Stuart. She didn’t tell him about it, of course, didn’t admit why she’d suddenly found it absolutely necessary to look for a lost whatever right where he happened to be sitting. She thought he knew, though.

  “Merrie, watch where you’re going,” she cried, when the little girl almost bowled E.J. over. Charlie was concerned that he was still so weak, but Sam had been reassuring — said that what he’d been through simply required a long recovery time. The series of rabies shots and his immediate allergic reaction to them had hammered him. In his weakened state, with the obscure staph infection in his leg wound, his blood pressure had tanked and he’d almost died. A full week in the ICU, and another three in the hospital later, he’d emerged rabies free … but looked like a returning prisoner of war. Raylynn had promised she’d come up with yummy deserts to fatten him up.

  Raylynn and E.J.

  Nobody knew quite what to do with that, including the two of them. He was thirty-two years old. She was seventeen, a teenager — in years only, though. In maturity level, Raylynn Bennett was a strong young woman. She’d had the state police waiting at her house when her father came rolling up the driveway in “After.”

  “After” was what they’d all come to call those nightmare crazy days when the Jabberwock disappeared and they all suddenly had to deal with the magnitude of the horror it’d caused.

  The bull had been kicked out of the china shop … but oh, the dishes it had broken in its rampage there.

  And what exactly had “it” been? That depended on who you asked.

  A gaggle of scientists from every known persuasion had descended on Nowhere County when the testimony of literally thousands of people established that yes, there really had been an uncrossable barrier on the county line, and yes, people really had been transported somehow to the Middle of Nowhere when they crossed it.

  Yes, they’d lived for two weeks somewhere — a place where the time was too fast or too slow, the stars were wrong and the weather never changed.

  And yes, it really had appeared — for more than two weeks — that the entire population of the county had vanished.

  And yes, houses really had aged a hundred years overnight.

  Their stories had been corroborated, if corroboration were needed, by the collapsing hulks of the ancient houses that littered the county like empty gum wrappers and by the three piles of cars out in the woods in Fearsome Hollow. A squirrel hunter had happened on them. Pete and Jolene had gone out to see them before the cars got hauled away, said it was quite a sight.

  More than thirty, or so she’d heard, vehicles had been stacked one on top of the other in three gigantic piles. Pickup trucks, farm trucks, cars — the Chrysler Cirrus she’d rented at the airport, and Billy Dan Singleton’s souped up, Nascar-wannabe Chevy. They appeared to be undamaged except, well, being piled up one on top of the other had pretty much totaled them all.

  The legions of law enforcement who descended on the county in the wake of the High Noon Shootout on Main Street had been tripping over each other trying to figure out what had happened, who’d shot whom and why.

  All the legal issues were a pile of spaghetti that would never get completely untangled. For one thing, the Breakfast Club and their friends hadn’t admitted to everything that had happened. Why bother?

  Why drag Toby Witherspoon through some kind of court proceeding about his father’s shooting? The boy had been scooped up by the state Department of Child Protective Services until his grandmother from Louisville had come to claim him.

  Why make Cotton Jackson deal with the legal fallout of killing Shepherd Clayton? Cotton had tossed into the Rolling Fork River the pistol he’d pulled out of his waistband that day, then told the friend in Carlisle from whom he’d borrowed it that he’d lost it, and bought the friend a brand new one. “Somebody” had called Shep’s family, and they found his body in the Gideon Cemetery. He had, after all, been driven crazy by what’d happened. No telling who had shot him.

  There’d been nobody to call about poor old Moses Weiss, though. He had no family they could find. She and Stuart had paid to have him committed to a first-rate nursing home in Lexington, had moved Rose Topple there, too. Every now and then, Cotton or somebody from the Breakfast Club paid them a visit.

  Relatives filed missing person reports on all the “vanished” people — the Tibbitses, the Tungates, Abner Riley, the Potters and all the others. But Charlie knew nobody would ever find Reece or Grace, Harry and Roscoe, or … They were just gone. Absorbed.

  The bottom line in all the investigations was that everything would get swept under some rug somewhere, no matter how big a lump it made.

  All the law enforcement agencies were playing CYA, each blaming the other for why they had never investigated all the reports of “vanished” people. When you were unwilling — and they all were! — to admit that something supernatural had been the cause of all that had happened, it was hopeless to try to unravel it.

  Oh, they did jump on the cases that didn’t involve smoke and mirrors. Viola Tackett had gone down hard. Murder — at least one provable count. Sebastian Nower had watched her shoot Holmes Fischer. Attempted murder — the line of people willing to testify that she’d tried to kill them stretched out for blocks. Grand larceny — she stole a house, for crying out loud. And a laundry list of other charges. Neither she nor Neb — who’d survived the shootout by jumping off the porch and hiding under a parked car — would ever see the light of day outside of prison.

  Unless they did.

  Stuart had warned her and the others not to expect that the criminal justice system was going to provide the justice they all were looking for. Couple the shenanigans of defense attorneys, the disparity of testimony against her, her age and health — the gunshot wound to her shoulder had shattered it, and she’d require multiple surgeries to repair it, would probably never have full use of her arm again. All those factors … Stuart had wanted to be sure Malachi understood that the fat lady might not yet have sung on his mother’s life.

  “The law is whatever the judge says it is,” he had said, using a phrase Charlie’d heard him use dozens of times about other cases. “Juries are fickle. Just about anything is possible.”

  Malachi went back into the laundry room next to the kitchen where he’d snatched the piece of try-it-and-see-what-you-think turkey off the majestic bird he’d set on top of the dryer for want of a better place to put the behemoth foul. He had wanted to get a Superman tee shirt to wear for Thanksgiving, only with the letter T instead of S. T for Turkey Man.
He took his responsibilities in that regard to heart and had spent the better part of the week before Thanksgiving talking to every little old lady up some hollow who was renowned for her cooking skills. He had taken Rusty with him on a couple of those trips, and the boy had seemed perfectly healthy. Intelligent, inquisitive, witty. He was just about the finest twelve-year-old Malachi had ever met, but then his was not exactly an unbiased opinion. Sam hadn’t yet said anything about Malachi to Rusty. There was no hurry. She was determined that everything about the situation among the three of them should evolve slowly and naturally and Malachi trusted her instincts. She’d certainly done a great job parenting so far!

  But he could tell Sam was still concerned about Rusty’s health. He had languished in some state between a coma and simple unconsciousness for a week at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington. Then he had just opened his eyes and looked around, like he’d taken an extra-long nap.

  The doctors didn’t know what to make of the readings they got on their EEGs, CAT scans and other tests. There was absolutely nothing on any test that would explain why Rusty was still unconscious, and when he awakened, the doctors didn’t know why that’d happened either. They had merely sighed in relief and pronounced that he was fine.

  Sam wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t like Rusty had fallen down and hit his head. He had gone through the Jabberwock twice. Only one other person on the planet had taken more than a single ride and Abby had arrived dead in the parking lot of the Middle of Nowhere on her third trip, with a swollen body that exploded.

  Sam knew there didn’t likely exist tests that would determine the damage or lack thereof of an encounter with a supernatural being that was made up of seventeen children who’d died two hundred years ago and an entity created from rage that had fed on the evil in people’s hearts for more than two centuries.

  The Breakfast Club, AKA the Alphabet Gang, had spent hours trying to figure out exactly what had happened in Nower County, Kentucky, between June 3 and June 20, 1995. They were certainly more likely to come up with an explanation that the army of “experts” who swarmed over the county like locusts — because all those dudes were looking for a rational explanation and everybody who’d lived through it knew there wasn’t one.

  Their own discussions of why quickly morphed into discussions of “what if?” It was a lot more fun to get together and listen to Stuart wax eloquent about his grand plan to make Nowhere County the best getaway resort in the East. He’d fallen in love with the place, saw enormous potential. He and Charlie certainly had the financial means to pull it off, and Stuart had been lobbying Malachi to go in together with him to make it happen.

  Who knew? Maybe he and Stuart could actually put Nowhere County on the map — for real.

  “I couldn’t tell, I need more data,” Sam said. He turned to find her standing in the doorway of the laundry room. “Dark meat this time.” Malachi obediently cut off a slice and started to hold it out above her mouth but she snatched it out of his hand. “I don’t do Stupid Pet Tricks.” She popped it into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully.

  “Needs more … something.”

  “Salt? Pepper. Oregano. WD-40?”

  “Something. Give me another piece.”

  He cut one off and handed it to her, and then she pronounced that, “… actually, it may have too much … something.”

  “You’re just messing with my head. Fool with me and you’ll have to find some other patsy to be Turkey Man next Thanksgiving.”

  Next Thanksgiving.

  They stood for a moment, basking in the warmth of that, then Sam went back into the kitchen.

  That evening, he and Sam were together on the back porch of the Nower House, recovering from turkey-induced tryptophan comas. Charlie had insisted on hiring a cleanup crew and Sam hadn’t been too proud to refuse and they could hear the rattle and bang of pots and pans in the kitchen.

  A small creek ran along the edge of the backyard. It was dry in the heat of summer, but it had been an unusually warm and wet fall and the water could be heard babbling over creek pebbles even from the back porch.

  “You’ll be sorry,” Sam was saying. “I have accumulated something like ten miles of Christmas lights and Rusty always insists we put every one somewhere on the house.”

  “I’m almost as good at putting up Christmas lights as I am at …”

  He stopped, looked out past Sam’s shoulder at the creek. At the mist on the creek. She followed his gaze, then looked questioningly back at him.

  “It’s just creek mist,” she said.

  “Don’t you think the weather’s a little too cold for creek mist?”

  Obviously, she hadn’t thought about that.

  “I suppose I could look up the atmospheric conditions that create mist over a body of water, but—”

  “It’s nothing.” He put a smile on his face and turned back to her. “If you’re going to investigate something, see if you can find out how to fry a turkey. I hear that’s the going thing.”

  He put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him and he groaned inwardly at how very good that felt.

  One step at a time. Just one.

  He looked out at the mist and remembered the voice from the mist in Gideon that day. He knew she was thinking about it, too, even though she was pretending she wasn’t.

  This isn’t over. I’m not done …

  It was a chilly night, but it wasn’t that cold and he felt Sam shiver. He shivered, too.

  The End

  What to read next

  Bailey Donahue was supposed to stay dead…

  After witnessing her husband’s murder, Bailey is ripped from her life and decorated away in the Witness Protection Program. Too bad the sleepy town of Shadow Rock was the wrong place to hide

  Get Through The Canvas here

  A Note from the Author

  Thank you for reading Nowhere USA: The Complete Series.

  If you enjoyed this book, you please consider writing a review on your favorite bookselling site so other readers might enjoy it too. Just a couple of sentences would mean a lot to me.

  Thank you!

  Ninie Hammon

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  About the Author

  Ninie Hammon (rhymes with shiny, not skinny) grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, got a BA in English and theatre from Texas Tech University and snagged a job as a newspaper reporter. She didn't know a thing about journalism, but her editor said if she could write he could teach her the rest of it and if she couldn't write the rest of it didn't matter. She hung in there for a 25-year career as a journalist. As soon as she figured out that making up the facts was a whole lot more fun than reporting them, she turned to fiction and never looked back.

  Ninie now writes suspense--every flavor except pistachio: psychological suspense, inspirational suspense, suspense thrillers, paranormal suspense, suspense mysteries.

  In every book she keeps this promise to her Loyal Reader: "I will tell you a story in a distinctive voice you'll always recognize, about people as ordinary as you are--people who have been slammed by something they didn’t sign on for, and now they must fight for their lives. Then smack in the middle of their everyday worlds, those people encounter the unexplainable--and it's always the game-changer."

  Also By Ninie Hammon

  Nowhere, USA

  The Jabberwock

  Mad Dog

  Trapped

  The Hanging Judge

  The Witch of Gideon

  Blown Away

  Nowhere People

  Through The Canvas Series

  Black Water

  Red Web

  Gold Promise

  Blue Tears

  The Unexplainable Collection

  Five Days in May

  Black Sunshine

  The Based on True Stories Collect
ion

  Home Grown

  Sudan

  When Butterflies Cry

  The Knowing Series

  The Knowing

  The Deceiving

  The Reckoning

  The Fault

  Stand-alone Psychological Thrillers

  The Memory Closet

  The Last Safe Place

  Nonfiction/Memoir

  Typin’ ‘Bout My Generation