Ghost Town: A Novella

by Mark Lukens

  Beth looked around at the large attic they were inside of.

  “Make sure you walk on the rafters,” Tony told them when he stood up in front of the window.

  Beth looked down at the lines of wood amid the sea of pink insulation. The trusses stretched up above them to the peak of the roof.

  Carla pointed at a light on the other side of the gloomy attic. “I think there’s an opening over there. See the light coming through?”

  Tony didn’t answer. “This isn’t right,” he said as he looked around.

  “What’s wrong?” Carla asked as she turned back to Tony.

  “Look at all this insulation. Look at these rafters and trusses. This isn’t old wood. It’s newer wood.” He touched the wood. “It’s solid. This isn’t an old ghost town. It’s been built recently, like within the last ten years or so. But the outside has been made to look like a ghost town.”

  Tony walked across one of the joists and touched some wires running throughout the rafters. “These are electrical wires here. And those are fiber optic cables over there.”

  “What’s that mean?” Carla asked. “Like cameras.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “This place, all of these buildings must be set up with cameras in the rooms. They’ve been watching us the whole time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Let’s just get going,” Carla said.

  Tony didn’t argue.

  The three made their way carefully across the joists, holding on to the rafters where they could.

  After crossing the floor of joists and rows of pink insulation, they came to an access door that was wide open, letting a shaft of light pour up into the attic. Carla, who reached the door first, didn’t hesitate—she glanced back at Tony, but she didn’t wait for permission; she dropped down to her stomach, lying flat on the floor of joists and insulation as best she could and poked her head down into the hole and looked around for a minute.

  Tony and Beth huddled near her, waiting.

  “What’s down there?” Tony finally asked her.

  Carla took another moment looking around, and then she pushed herself up and twisted around so that she was sitting on the edge of the opening, her legs dangling down into the room below.

  “Nothing,” Carla finally answered Tony. “It’s just an empty room.”

  Again, Carla didn’t wait for permission or a discussion of what they should do. She reached out to the other side of the rectangular opening and grabbed on to it, then she let her legs drop out from beneath her until she was dangling in the air of the room below, then she let herself go and dropped down to the floor below with a soft thud.

  Tony looked at Beth. “You’re next. Just like she did it.”

  Beth nodded, but then she looked down through the rectangle access hole at Carla below them in the room. Carla was staring at something across the room that was out of Beth’s view. And Carla looked a little confused by what she was seeing.

  “What’s that?” Carla said more to herself than to Beth or Tony. She walked towards whatever she was looking at.

  “Carla,” Beth hissed down at her. “What are you doing? Wait for us.”

  Carla didn’t answer. She just walked away and now Beth couldn’t see her anymore from her sitting position on the edge of the access hole.

  “What’s going on down there?” Tony asked Beth. He looked like he was ready to push her out of the way if he needed to and jump down into the room below them.

  “I don’t know,” Beth answered, already getting herself into position to drop down to the floor below. And then she froze as a thought entered her mind.

  Seashells … shells …

  She looked at Tony with horror. “Oh God, I think I know what the shells in Carla’s pocket are supposed to mean.”

  “What?” Tony barked out.

  But Beth didn’t answer; she didn’t have time to talk to him about it. She let herself drop down to the floor with a crash. There was no need to be quiet now, she knew that now. She hadn’t landed as gracefully as Carla had, and she fell over onto her side, rolling away from the access hole, sure that Tony was going to crash down on top of her in the next few seconds.

  Tony landed on the floor near her with a thud just as Beth got to her feet.

  They both turned and saw Carla at the other side of the room reaching her hand out towards a door that was slightly ajar.

  “Do you guys hear that?” Carla asked them as she pulled the door open. “It sounds like … like a baby crying.”

  “Carla, wait!!” Beth screamed.

  But Carla didn’t wait. She opened the door and she was thrown back from a shotgun blast. She flew backwards a few feet and landed on her back with a crash that reverberated through the wood floor. Her face was gone: all that was left behind was a red gory mess with black hair pasted around the edges of it. The only recognizable feature of what used to be her face was her open mouth, but her jaw seemed to be opened too wide and shifted way too far to one side, barely hanging on to the lower half of her face anymore. There was a spray of blood on the wood floorboards beyond her head and her arms and legs were splayed out and lifeless.

  Beth and Tony ran over to Carla.

  Beth dropped down beside Carla, trying to help. But there was nothing she could do; Carla’s death had been instantaneous. A pool of blood was widening underneath her head, neck, and shoulders, the blood seeping down into the cracks between the floorboards.

  “She’s gone,” Tony said from behind Beth.

  Beth fought back the tears and nodded. She got to her feet and looked at Tony.

  Tony stared at the wide open doorway where a shotgun hung, suspended by an intricate web of ropes attached to the ceiling. Twine wrapped around the trigger of the shotgun ran to the inside door handle of the door Carla had just opened.

  Tony looked at Beth. “You said shells right before you jumped down into this room. How did you know?”

  Beth shook her head no and wiped away at her tears. “I don’t know. I just figured it out at the last second. Shells. Shotgun shells.”

  She stared at Tony and she saw the suspicion in his eyes.

  “Why didn’t she wait for us?” Tony finally asked.

  “She heard something behind this door.”

  “What?”

  “I think she said it was a baby crying.”

  Tony stared at Beth for a moment, and then he looked back at the shotgun hanging in front of the door.

  “I didn’t hear anything, did you?” Tony asked Beth.

  “No,” Beth said.

  Tony glanced around. “You hear anything now?”

  Beth shook her head no.

  “The shotgun’s already gone off,” Tony said. “It won’t go off again. But there could be other traps in there.”

  Beth nodded and inhaled deeply. She wiped her eyes dry. She hadn’t wanted Carla to die. A grim thought crossed her mind: why couldn’t it have been Tony instead of Carla?

  She pushed the thought away as she watched Tony for a few seconds.

  “I guess this is our only way out of here,” Tony said as he hesitated in front of the door. He glanced around the room. There were two windows that looked out onto the street below, but nothing else. He looked up at the access hole in the ceiling.

  “We need to keep going,” he said and sniffed before entering the small room with the shotgun hanging in front of the doorway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Beth followed Tony into the small room with the shotgun hanging in it. They ducked underneath the weapon, and worked their way around the ropes and twine hanging from the gun to the ceiling and back down to the door that they had just entered through. Besides the shotgun, the room was totally empty—the only other feature in the room was another door set in the far wall. And this door was closed.

  Beth walked right to the door and was about to open it, but Tony’s words stopped her.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  “I don’t think it’s a trap,” she sa
id and opened the door quickly.

  Nothing happened when Beth opened the door. Beyond the open door there was a hallway that led off to the right, which ended in a set of wood steps that led down into the darkness.

  Beth stepped out into the hallway and started walking. Tony followed Beth down the hall and then down the steps. Their footsteps echoed eerily in the long, narrow stairwell.

  Beth wasn’t sure why she believed there weren’t any more traps in this building, but she knew it somehow. There seemed to be something surfacing in her memory, like it had when they’d first reached the ghost town, but the memories were closer now, almost visible. But there was still something she was missing, some important piece of the puzzle that she needed to figure out very quickly if they were going to survive.

  After descending the last few steps down onto the first floor, Beth and Tony waited a moment, looking around at the room they were in. It looked like it might have been a general store in the Old West at one point—but now they knew that everything here was just a fake, like a set in a movie.

  Near the bank of dirty windows and front door at the far end of the room was a long counter with an old-fashioned cash register on top of it. There were old bins made of wood, most of which were empty, situated around the large room. A few of the bins were filled with debris—mostly junk: scraps of wood, cloth, twisted pieces of rusty metal. Along the walls were built-in shelves that were draped with cobwebs and dust.

  Beth walked straight through the room, past the wood bins scattered throughout the floor, past the long counter, and right towards the door.

  Tony fell in behind her and followed her.

  They both stood by the door which had a large glass window in it. The glass was dirty and seemed to be tinted, but they could see the barn right across the street. The free-standing barn was the last building on the other side of the street, and it was set back slightly from the other line of buildings. This General Store they were in was the last building on this side of the street.

  “I don’t see the dogs anywhere,” Tony finally said.

  “They’ll come back down to the street eventually,” Beth said. And her voice didn’t sound like her own anymore. It was stronger and more confident now. She’d been through Hell now, and she was stronger because of it.

  “I think we should make a run for the barn right now,” Tony said.

  “Didn’t those barn doors have a chain and lock on them before?”

  “Yeah,” Tony answered, staring at the barn again. “But they’re gone now.”

  Beth thought about Carla’s certainty that they were being herded the whole time. The lock and chain was gone from the barn now. Whoever these people were, they wanted them to go into that barn just like they had wanted them to go into the hotel when they first got here. They wanted them to enter the barn and claim their prize.

  Tony didn’t wait for Beth. He opened the glass door and stepped outside onto the wood deck which had a wooden awning over it. He was tense, ready to run back inside if he needed to.

  Beth followed Tony outside. She wasn’t as tense as he was because she had already figured out that the dogs weren’t going to come running down the street now and no one was going to shoot at them from the church.

  Because they had reached the end of the game—these people, whoever they were, wanted them to see what was inside that barn.

  Beth stepped off the wood deck and walked across the dirt road that served as the only street in this forgotten town. Tony fell in step beside her. He glanced around like he was looking for dogs and shooters, but then he watched her. It seemed to Beth like he had figured out the answer on his own, too—like he had come to the same sort of realization she had. But he was keeping it to himself.

  They reached the large double doors of the barn and each of them grabbed a giant metal door handle and pushed the door back. The doors slid open easily, like they had been greased recently and had been well-maintained even though they looked old and dilapidated on the surface.

  They stood in the open doorway for a moment.

  Tony stared in awe and took a step inside in the barn.

  But Beth was frozen in place as she stared in shock at the 1969 red Ford Mustang. It was parked in the middle of the barn; the nose of the car pointed at the barn doors like it was ready to be driven right out of this barn, and right out of this ghost town.

  “This can’t be right,” Beth whispered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Beth walked towards the red Mustang as Tony ran over to the driver’s door. He was about to reach for the door handle, but he drew his hand back, suddenly suspicious that it might be a trap.

  Tony looked at Beth as she walked towards Tony on legs that felt like jelly.

  “Come look at this,” Tony told her.

  Beth stood right beside Tony and stared at the car.

  “The keys are on the seat,” Tony said in a low voice like someone might be listening to them. “You think it’s a trap?”

  Beth shook her head no in confusion. “I don’t know, but something is—”

  Before Beth could complete her sentence, Tony grabbed her and threw her against the driver’s door.

  Beth, too surprised to react, bounced off the car door and fell to the dirt floor of the barn.

  Tony stared down at her with a mean smile. “I guess it’s safe.”

  Beth struggled to get back to her feet. “Wait a minute, Tony.”

  As she stood back up, Tony punched her in the stomach. She doubled over as pain exploded throughout her mid-section and her breath escaped her lungs for a moment. She fell backwards over a small bale of hay with a dirty tarp covering part of it.

  Tony opened the Mustang’s door and grabbed the keys off the seat. He was about to get in the car, but he looked back at Beth. “Sorry, honey. I’m pretty sure there can only be one winner in this game, and it’s going to be me.”

  Tony sat down inside the car and stuck the key into the ignition. The engine roared to life. He slammed the door shut and revved the engine for a moment. It sounded so loud in the barn.

  Beth struggled to sit back up, trying to shake the cobwebs out of her brain, trying to move past the pain. “Wait, Tony,” she said again, but he couldn’t hear her over the engine. “The toy horse you have. It’s a Mustang.”

  The back tires of the Mustang spun on the dirt floor of the barn for a moment, spitting up rooster tails of dust and dirt into the air, and then the tires caught traction and the car bolted out of the barn through the wide-open double doors.

  Beth got to her feet and took a few steps towards the open door. She watched the Mustang spin around in the dirt street, kicking up a cloud of dust. She could see Tony inside the car whooping with delight.

  She walked to one of the double doors and leaned against it as she watched the Mustang drive away towards the church, about to speed past the building and out towards the desert hills in the distance.

  And then the engine of the Mustang stalled and the Mustang coasted forward in silence. Even from where she was, Beth could see Tony beating on the driver’s door glass, trying to get out of the car, but it was like the door was stuck or locked. He looked wild with fear, like he finally realized that he was sitting in the final trap.

  Two seconds later the Mustang exploded. The car’s rear end lifted up three feet off the ground and then slammed back down. The hood of the car blew up into the blue sky amid a fireball and mushroom cloud of black smoke. The hood spun in the air, over and over again, before crashing down onto the decorative area in front of the white church.

  The car sat at the edge of town, between the last building and the church. It was burning now like a bon fire, the flames crackling in the desert heat, the black smoke spiraling up into the sky.

  Beth slid down the barn door and plopped down onto the dirt. She felt close to passing out. She saw something out of the corner of her eye. Someone had opened the front door of the church and stepped out into the daylight. Even from where she sat beside
the barn door, Beth could tell that the person wasn’t holding a rifle or any other type of weapon that she could see.

  The person walked down the walkway of the church and out into the open area of dirt, past the burning car, and right towards the barn—right towards Beth.

  Beth sat in the sand by the barn door. She stared through half-closed eyes up at the woman who stood in front of her.

  And now Beth knew that the game was over. The woman who stood in front of her was herself—she looked up into her own face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Beth’s eyes popped open and she sat up quickly, too quickly, because the pain in her stomach knifed through her insides. She held a hand on her stomach, waiting for the pain to pass.

  Then she looked around at the bedroom she was in.

  It was her bedroom.

  She was back in her own bedroom, lying in the middle of the unmade bed. She looked at the end table with the lamp on it next to the bed. The small table was cluttered with empty plastic water bottles just like the ones she had drank from in the ghost town. Right next to the water bottles was a handful of Fireball candies and some crumpled cellophane wrappers.

  At the foot of the bed, the old TV was on with the sound turned almost all the way down, but she could still hear what the men in the black-and-white movie were saying. In the movie there were three gangsters about to shoot a man in the middle of a desert. The man pleaded for his life, begging Frank not to shoot him, begging Frank to give him another chance.

  Beth swung her feet over the side of the bed and sat there on the edge for a moment. She touched her stomach and ribs gingerly. They felt damaged, but maybe not broken. It hurt a little to breathe, but not too badly.

  She sat still for a moment and let her eyes roam over the walls of her and her husband’s bedroom. Her eyes stopped on a painting in a frame that she had bought at a flea market years ago. It was a painting of an old ghost town with the sun setting behind it. Trace hated the picture, but he let her hang it in the bedroom.