Mad Stacks: Story Collection Box Set

by Scott Nicholson

  “Best to know about the ways of the world,” Grampap said. “That way, there ain’t no surprises.”

  “Hush up,” Momma said, putting the turkey on the table.

  They ate until they were full, and Willard had a second piece of cobbler. Daddy had given him a buck knife for Christmas, but he’d tucked it under the Christmas tree so Sue Beth would think it was from Santa Claus. While Sue Beth helped Momma with the dishes, Willard went outside with Daddy to stock the tinderbox. The snow was light but hard, but the wind was kicking and taking the fun out of it.

  “Daddy, what happened to Clancy Wheeler?” Willard asked, rubbing his hands together. The wood was like blocks of ice.

  “Nothing that I know of.”

  “Did you make a poppet out of him?”

  “Them old ways is best forgot,” Daddy said. “No good ever comes out of them.”

  “Well, if somebody deserves it, you ought to be able to make them pay for bad things.”

  “Trouble is, folks ain’t so smart when it comes to deciding good and bad.”

  “If Clancy stole your fishing pole, he done bad.”

  Daddy knocked the rotted bark off a frozen oak limb. “Grampap’s been talking, huh?”

  “It come up about poppets.”

  “Well, Clancy was known to have what we used to call ‘sticky fingers.’ Couldn’t let go of things, even if they wasn’t his.”

  “And you made a poppet?”

  “I took some hairs out of his baseball cap. He was always one to be losing hairs.”

  “Fingers too, by the looks of it.”

  “When you lay a spell, the punishment fits the crime. He had sticky fingers, all right. Got ‘em stuck in a saw blade three weeks later.”

  “Seems fair to me.”

  Daddy pushed the nub of his arm against the door. “Maybe so, but poppet spells have a way of coming back on you. Now come on in and forget all that foolishness.”

  Willard couldn’t forget, though. By the time the chores were done, Sue Beth was sitting cross-legged on the floor, yawning and rubbing her eyes. Grampap had already gone to bed. Momma was doing some knitting by the fireplace, taking her turn in the recliner. Daddy settled in with a lawnmower carburetor at the kitchen table. The radio was switched on, piping in some holiday hymns, but it was all organ music and no words so Willard couldn’t tell one from another.

  “Go on to bed, honey,” Momma said to Sue Beth.

  “But, Mommy—”

  “Don’t ‘But Mommy’ me. Get on.”

  Sue Beth hugged her dolly to her chest and walked under the clothesline, her stocking trailing behind her on the floor. “Can I take my candy?”

  “Sure, but don’t put none in your mouth,” Momma said. “You’re liable to choke.”

  “I won’t.”

  The house was quiet for a while, with Daddy not cussing too much over the stubborn parts, and Momma settled in with a shawl she planned to sell at the church bazaar. Willard mostly just stared into the fire, thinking about fingers and apple-head poppets and how sticky butterscotch got after you sucked on it awhile.

  “Sure was a good Christmas, wasn’t it?” Momma said to Willard.

  “Do you like your set of dish towels?” he asked. He’d saved up enough to buy four of them at the Dollar General, but only two of them matched.

  “That was real sweet,” she said.

  “When I get big, I’ll buy you a whole matching set, plus some place mats to go with it,” he said.

  “Don’t be talking uppity,” Daddy said. “Makes it sound like you ain’t content with your lot.”

  “Well, the paper mill said they’d pick back up in the spring,” Momma said, with a tired smile. “Things will get better then.”

  “I ain’t counting on that,” Daddy said. “Soon as this weather clears, I’ll be looking into carpentry work.”

  Willard didn’t say anything. For a few years, rich folks had been building big old mansions on the top of the ridges, but all the best spots were taken, and plenty of carpenters were drawing unemployment. Daddy said he wasn’t taking no government handouts, and Willard figured that was too bad because the kids of unemployed carpenters had been getting fancy electronic toys, and all Willard had was an orange and a knife. He kept the orange out of sight in case Daddy asked him if he’d slice it five ways so everybody could get a taste.

  “Well, Merry Christmas, everybody,” Momma said, like that was the answer to everything.

  “I’m tired,” Willard said. “Reckon I’ll turn in.”

  “Don’t wake up your sister,” Daddy said. “You know how she gets.”

  “Thanks for the knife,” he said. “And the orange.”

  Willard kept the door cracked so he wouldn’t have to turn on the light. Daddy had built a wooden-frame bunk bed for them, and Sue Beth was asleep on the bottom bunk. Willard hid his orange on the shelf behind a baseball glove and a jar of marbles. Maybe if it dried up, it would make a nice head for a doll, but maybe that only worked with apples. He undressed, feeling the hard knot of candy in his pocket. The air was cold on his naked legs.

  “Sue Beth,” he whispered.

  She snorted a little but didn’t answer. The apple-head dolly was tucked beneath her arm, along with the sock full of candy. A couple of wrappers were stuck under her cheek. She’d been eating in bed.

  He gripped the stocking and tried to ease it out from under her arm, figuring the chocolate would melt if she slept with it. He was doing her a favor, that was all. He wondered if she’d counted all the pieces. He’d just have a couple and then put the wrappers in bed with her, and she’d figure she must have eaten them while she was falling asleep.

  But he’d only slid the sock a few inches before she stirred and tugged the sock to her chest, wrapping her little arm tight around it in a big hug. She must have gotten it mixed up with the dolly, because the dolly rolled away against her pillow, the shriveled apple looking like Grampap in the darkness. Maybe a little family resemblance helped the poppet magic.

  He gave the sock one more try, but she stirred and fluttered her eyes. She rolled over until she was mostly on top of it, and he didn’t see any way to get to it without waking her up.

  He took the knife from his pocket and unfolded it. The blade was sharp. Daddy was handy with a file and a whet stone. It only took a little effort to snip a couple of strands of Sue Beth’s hair.

  Willard tied them to them to the apple-head doll. He wondered if you were supposed to say a spell or something. Grampap and Daddy hadn’t mentioned it. Let the punishment fit the crime.

  He took the piece of candy from his pocket, unwrapped it, and shoved it into the biggest hole in the dried-apple face. He tossed the wrapper onto Sue Beth’s pillow and then laid the dolly beside her on the bed.

  In the living room, the Christmas hymns were still going. He climbed onto the top bunk, wishing he had some pajamas. The blankets were chilly, but he’d shiver them warm soon enough. Willard fell asleep thinking of all that candy, and how it would soon be his, and how he’d take it to bed with him and sneak pieces into his mouth as he fell asleep.

  Something like that, it was bound to give you sweet dreams.

  The End

  Missing Pieces Table of Contents

  Master Table of Contents

  ###

  FALLOW

  By Scott Nicholson

  Denyse Hammen eyed the bent stretch of fence and sized it up for sturdiness.

  The withered plot of dirt on the other side promised a slightly slower death than that afforded by starvation. The shriveled, gray rags poking from the ground suggested a deformed row of turnips. Sickly corn stalks leaned, tassels too dry and corrupt to attract pollinating critters. A crucified tomato plant hung with knobby, green balls dangling, blossom-end rot painting them half black.

  “My kingdom for a horse,” Denyse said to herself. “Because I’d eat the son of a bitch.”

  She wracked the top strand of barbed wire, putting her foot on the bottom
strand and leveraging a gap. Ducking inside, she tangled her hair, and a few strands came out at the roots. Compared to sick, bald people she’d seen streaming out of the city, she didn’t mind losing a little of herself. Besides, malnutrition might do what the bombs or the fallout hadn’t accomplished—human extinction.

  They were all getting to the end, some faster than others. Denyse planned on being among the last. She’d suffered some lingering nausea, her kidneys didn’t work too well, and the sores on her arms failed to heal despite the salve she’d picked up from looted stores. Her feet hurt, despite the top-of-the-line North Face hiking boots she’d copped from a corpse in Wilkesboro.

  But she could rest here and scrounge up a meal to boot. The garden had been tended, and someone had obviously set up a temporary home here. Since the bombs, all homes were temporary. But those who claimed a piece of ground in the timid new world were wont to protect it with firearms.

  Once on the other side of the fence, she edged around the tilled earth. On the road, she’d heard of booby-trapped stores and houses, and figured a source of fresh nutrition was more valuable than real estate now, given the population decline.

  Thing about bombs, they blow a free economy all to hell. So much for the farm welfare system.

  Even if she had money, nobody would take it. Especially here in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, which were rumored to be the outpost of the paranoid and strange. She understood the appeal of high ground—it was easier to see your enemies coming. And it also offered the tactical advantage of being far removed from the population centers.

  The mountains were where you came for a slow death, and if you were already living here when the bombs fell, then you had even more reason to distrust outsiders. And she was a flatlander through and through.

  Denyse, a sales rep for a medical supply company, had been doling out samples at a Piedmont hospital when the news came. She’d abandoned her car to the streets, realizing the highways would remain as clogged as the arteries of a Dixie fast food cook. The daycare center was only a few blocks over, and by the time she arrived, the radio was blaring the destruction of New York and Washington, D.C.

  Los Angeles and Chicago hung in there until she reached the outskirts of town, and the Research Triangle Park, home of many of the firms most likely to come up with new treatments for radiation poisoning, was a smoking hole before sundown. Little Randolph wailed as she trudged mile after mile, scarcely resting, and sensing the poisonous and invisible wave that would soon be settling over the sky.

  She shaded her eyes now against the sinking sun, early September painting the leaves in gold and burgundy. The Appalachian slopes, the oldest in the world, had somehow resisted the worst of the decay, as if being forged in the furnace of the world’s creation had tempered the peaks against any future calamity. Once one of the world’s most biologically diverse regions, it was now stunted with the bleached bones of trees. The fauna was dying, the ridges taking on the harsh aspect of desert terrain.

  A tractor with flat tires and a rusty hay rake clawing out from its rear was parked in the weeds along the fence. A shed, constructed of locust poles and covered with tin roofing, stood at the far end of the garden, which was about the size of a baseball infield. A frayed dress hung on a pole, a mockery of a scarecrow made all the more obscene because birds had been among the first casualties of the fallout. A dried, orange winter squash was speared on the pole to suggest a head, though the impromptu jack-o’-lantern had remained featureless.

  Denyse, who had a .38 revolver tucked in the back of her waistband, decided to try a neighborly approach. “Anybody here?” she called.

  The wind answered, and the draped dress twitched.

  She approached the shed, peering between the rough-hewn boards. Since the collapse of virtually every system that required cooperation and mutual incentive, fuel was limited to fire and whatever petroleum product could be bartered, stolen, or seized. The larger, more organized groups had formed around urban centers where warlords held sway until their lieutenants decided to make their own brief play for the throne. For women like Denyse, the barter system had become as simple as it had been in the cave-dwelling days—meat for meat.

  She’d endured a couple of months as a time-share in the world’s oldest profession. The warlords had dominion over the retail sectors and therefore the canned goods and provisions, and Denyse figured little Randolph still deserved the best opportunity she could give him. If that meant taking off her clothes and closing her eyes while some stinking stranger grunted away on top of her, she figured it was just part of the new order. As Randolph’s lips lost enthusiasm for her nipples and he became thin and pale, Denyse increased her protein intake and did whatever it took to get vitamins and vegetables.

  Once Randolph died, she buried him, secured the revolver, and made her way west where the red sunset made the mountains appear backlit by a lake of fire; a lake long promised by Baptist ministers who now weren’t so eager to go around claiming “I told you so.” Smart-alecks and sages had no place in God’s precious, new Gomorrah.

  Denyse circumvented the shed, careful to watch the edge of the forest. There was no thread of smoke to indicate a campfire or chimney. She couldn’t imagine anyone leaving a garden unattended, and a pitchfork and hoe leaned against the warped walls of the shed as if they had been rested only minutes before. The shed itself contained nothing more than a pile of rotted, burlap sacks and a few horseshoes nailed to the wall. She was about to help herself to some of the produce when the wind aroused a fluttering in the eaves. A tiny, curled figure fell from a gap under the tin. Denyse retrieved it, wondering which era it was from: Before or Since.

  It was a corn husk doll. A dried, shrunken apple was stitched to the “dress” with a piece of fishing line. The apple’s flesh had been gouged, making eyes, a nose, and mouth that had twisted into eerie deformities as the fruit dried. The simple doll made her think of Randolph, and her eyes misted before she flung the doll to the ground, the apple popping free and rolling across the dirt.

  “Screw the children,” she said. “Only a sadist would make a child walk through this hell.”

  She collected one of the more integrated sacks and went to the garden. She used the hoe to clear away some stringy potato vine, and pulled a few wrinkled tubers from the soil. The dirt was black and had a soft texture, obviously tended with care. With the sudden decline of the gasoline era, acquiring fertilizer wasn’t as simple as a drive down to the local feed store. Someone had not only tended the plants but invested time in preparing the garden across the seasons.

  The cabbages were small, about the size of infants’ heads, and she collected two of them. She didn’t want to be greedy but she also couldn’t count on finding an abandoned store or canning shed later. And she didn’t think she could knock down a squirrel with the .38, even if she were willing to risk wasting the last of her four bullets. She plucked a fistful of turnip greens and stuffed them inside her frayed, canvas satchel. Denyse was reaching for the beets when the sickly moan came from the forest.

  Sick child.

  She’d heard plenty such cries, misery and pain and disease and anger and sadness rolled into a chorus that swept across the tainted land. Randolph had gone from four-alarm shrieks of distress to a soft, gurgling whimper as the last breaths faded.

  The moan came again, and she slipped the bag closed, securing the revolver. Sick children posed no threat, but sick adults became desperate. She negotiated the fence again, on the other side this time, and entered under the hushed canopy of forest. The sun filtered through in a jewelry box of sparkles, and a creek ran with a merry laugh that seemed a mockery of the poison it carried.

  The moan shifted and went higher in tone, running in musical counterpoint to the flowing water. Denyse, who had played the clarinet as a high schooler back in Before, no longer cared for melody and harmony. The song had changed into a funeral dirge and every coda ended with the gasp of a contaminated lung.

  “Who’s there?
” she asked, stooping inside a thicket of scrub and rhododendron whose browned flowers cast the musk of dead rot.

  The moan became a bleat, and she entered a clearing of flattened grass. A slick newborn goat wobbled on its forelegs, trying to lift itself. A larger goat, no doubt its mother judging by the gruesome trail of bloody placenta strung across the weeds, lay on her side, ribs rising and falling slightly. The momma goat’s eyes were glazed and focused on an unseen horizon, a look Denyse had come to know well—the thousand-yard stare of death.

  The little kid bleated and rose, back legs trembling, the matted stump of tail wiggling back and forth. It staggered toward its mother and collapsed at the swollen udder, latching its dark-red lips onto a nipple. Unsatisfied with the supply, it backed off and bumped the bag of milk a few times with its forehead, and then settled in for a suck. The momma goat appeared to give one last contented sigh and expired. The oblivious kid drew sustenance, not knowing the warm fount would soon be dry.

  “Damn, little goat,” Denyse said. “Starving is no way to die.”

  Yet, compared to what she’d witnessed since the fallout festival, maybe starving was as good a way to go as any. Beat slow homicide, leukemia, gang rape, intestinal cancer, an erratic thyroid gland, or food poisoning. Besides, the kid didn’t have to die a meaningless death.

  She drew the six-inch blade from her satchel. The momma goat’s meat was no doubt tainted, but the kid might be fairly clean, if the mother’s liver had provided a sponge to absorb the nastier poisons. Then again, radiation was insidious, and it was probable that Denyse’s roentgen count was higher than the kid’s.

  “Hey, little guy,” she said, hunching and tiptoeing across the grass. The kid kept on with its suckling, a contented burring coming from its throat. One stroke across the throat. Painless. Then she could use one of her last few matches to build a fire and—

  As she knelt by the animal, it twitched, finally aware that a large moving shape loomed over it. Instinct caused it to freeze but it didn’t have the muscle control to flee. Besides, its role model was doing the bottle fly belly flop and in no condition to teach its new charge the proper way to run like hell.