by Bryan Smith
Jessica moved a step closer, aimed the .38’s barrel at the space between his eyes again.“Say you’re sorry.”
His face was a study in confusion for a moment, then his head bobbed repeatedly, nodding several times in a vigorous gesture of assent. “Yeah. Jesus. Shit. I’m sorry, girl. Oh, fuck, I am so fucking sorry. Please don’t kill me. Please…”
Jessica’s face remained expressionless as she said, “I accept your apology.”
Hoke abruptly ceased his blubbering. He frowned at her.“You do?”
“Yes.” The barest of smiles glazed the corners of her mouth.“But unlike God, I am not merciful. I’m going to kill you now, Hoke.”
“What?” The word was a thunderous exclamation of disbelief. The man’s features twisted in an expression that evoked feelings of betrayal, as if she’d just breached the terms of some unspoken covenant formed between them in these last moments. On some level, he’d really believed she would spare him in exchange for a simple apology. “But you can’t do that. You can’t. It’s…it’s…wrong!”
She thumbed back the .38’s hammer again.“Say goodbye, Hoke.”
“You can’t do this.” He changed tactics now, attempted to reason with her rather than plead for his life. “You can’t get away with it. People will look for me. The cops will come after you.”
Her smile broadened some. “Oh, but they won’t. I never gave you my full name. None of your friends know me or even saw me. I didn’t tell anybody about you. I found you on craigslist and called from a public phone. There’s nothing to connect you and me, Hoke. Face it, I’m gonna get away with this. You’re going to rot out here in the middle of nowhere, and I’ll go on with my life.”
He spluttered. “But…but…the car! The Falcon! They—”
“I’ll have to ditch the car, of course. After I get back to Nashville and wipe it down.”
Fresh tears spilled down his cheeks. His chest heaved. He continued to plead at her with his eyes, but he didn’t say anything. He was out of arguments. Maybe out of hope. She looked at his legs, watched for a coiling of calf muscles indicating a last-ditch lunge for the gun. But his whole body remained slack, frozen in a posture of defeat. He bowed his head, a penitent awaiting the final deadly blessing of the bullet.
The .38’s barrel was aimed at the crown of his skull now.
This is it, she thought.
Do it.
She drew in a deep breath.
Held it a moment.
And began to apply pressure to the trigger.
The snapping of a twig jerked her gaze away from Hoke. Her head snapped to the left and then to the right. She saw nothing. She backed carefully away from Hoke and turned in a slow circle to survey the edges of the clearing. Still nothing.
The sound came again. Louder this time. Definitely the snapping of a twig. Someone or something moving around out there. Animal or human. Some deep-down instinct told her the latter. It was something to do with a perceived deliberateness in the movements.
“Who’s out there?” Her voice emerged thin and reedy, projecting fear and confusion rather than the strength she’d wanted to show. “Come on out and show yourself!”
Hoke was checking out the edges of the clearing, too. His expression had changed. It didn’t exactly project hope now, but some of the terror had drained from his features. “You heard the lady!” he shouted in a hoarse voice.“The bitch means to kill me. Do something, goddammit!”
Jessica continued to spin in a slow circle. A chill went up her spine. She still didn’t see anything, but she experienced that creepy, precognitive awareness one feels when being surreptitiously observed by unseen eyes. Dammit. There shouldn’t be anyone out here. The area around Dandridge was supposed to be deserted for miles. The woods here bordered neighboring town Hopkins Bend, but she’d been sure no one from there would wander this close to the blighted ghost town. No one with any sense ever wanted to go near Dandridge, where, if you believed the government’s story, terrorists had exploded a dirty bomb years earlier.
After several more silent moments elapsed, she allowed herself the hope that she’d only imagined an unseen human presence. It was understandable, of course. Her nerves were on edge. And despite her resolve, she was frightened out of her wits. She wasn’t a killer by nature. This was admittedly an extreme thing she was doing. She meant to see it through, but that didn’t mean she was unaffected by the prospect of taking a human life. It would haunt her the rest of her life, despite the righteousness of her position. Little things like auditory hallucinations and other faulty perceptions were to be expected, given the circumstances.
Something moved beyond the line of trees, a flicker of white passing through shadows.
Startled, Jessica squeezed the .38’s trigger. The bullet hit something alive. There was a cry of pain, followed by the heavy thump of a body hitting the ground. Another sound behind her spun her around, but this time her finger froze on the trigger as she saw a man step into the clearing.
A man, but not a normal man.
Too big, and with a face like something out of a nightmare.
Jessica could only stare at him.
Hoke let out a low whistle and said, “I think I done shit my shorts, sugar.”
The sound of snapping twigs came again.
More nightmares stepped into the clearing.
Jessica’s knees began to shake. The gun felt heavier in her hands now. She began to move backward, but heard another sound of snapping twigs behind her. She stopped moving. A hopeless thought streaked through her consciousness. I’m surrounded. She gave a moment’s consideration to putting the .38’s barrel in her mouth and pulling the trigger. Suicide was certainly a better option than whatever these monstrosities had in mind for her.
The first one through the trees moved a step closer to her. He wore only faded and tattered overalls over a body roughly the size of a houseboat. Something vaguely like an elephant’s trunk dominated the center of his jowly face, where a nose should have been. One eye socket was much larger than the other. A bulbous red eye protruded from it. The trunk twitched in her direction. Jessica’s stomach churned. A big double-barreled shotgun was propped on the man’s shoulder. He grinned at her, showing her a mouth full of rotting teeth.
He began to lift the shotgun off his shoulder.
No time to think.
Jessica glanced left, glanced right.
Saw the only possible way to go.
And took off running.
The shotgun boomed behind her.
CHAPTER THREE
“We’re gonna have to stop here.”
Pete Miller slowed theVW Jetta and cranked the steering wheel slowly to the right, easing into the gravel-strewn parking lot. He pulled to a stop next to a gas pump that looked like a relic from another age. It had spinning rotary numbers rather than the digital displays he was used to seeing. There was no slot for a credit or debit card.
“Welcome to 1970.” He made a sound of annoyance. “Guess I’ll have to go inside.”
Megan Phillips looked up from the paperback novel she’d been reading—a lurid-looking thing called City Infernal—and squinted at him from the passenger seat. “Inside? Why?”
Pete rolled his eyes and hooked a thumb at the antique gas pump. “Because apparently we passed through some kind of time warp a few miles back. Fuck. I hope these rednecks take credit cards.”
“Don’t you have any cash?”
He shrugged.“Didn’t think I’d need any for a while.”
“Maybe you should hit up their ATM while you’re in there.”
Pete showed her a deadpan expression. “Oh. Yeah. Right. And while I’m at it, I’ll grab us each a chilled latte and a copy of the New York Times.”
Megan wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her attention had returned to the apparently fascinating book. He watched her lick her lips and turn a page. She scrunched down in her seat and brought the book closer to her face. She said,“Sounds good, honey.”
Pete
looked at her. He loved her. He really did. Or maybe it was just lust mixed up with a serious case of like. But that was splitting hairs. He was genuinely fond of her, both for her lithe, supple little body and her fun personality. They’d been dating for seven mostly drama-free months, which was some kind of record in his experience. They had yet to have that first big fight, which he’d found normally occurred somewhere within the first two to three months of a relationship. The girl was beyond easygoing. She had achieved a state of mellowness so rarefied, it was almost Zen-like. The disagreements they did have were minor and were usually resolved in a matter of minutes. Pete liked to remind himself of this in moments like these. Yes, she could be a bit slow on the uptake, but otherwise she was fucking perfect.
He leaned over for a kiss and said, “Be back in a snap, baby.”
She lifted her face for the kiss and smiled after he planted an enthusiastic one on her soft, bee-stung lips. “Hurry back.”
He grinned.“You know it.”
He got out of the car, threw the door shut, and started walking toward the little general store. He knew it was a general store thanks to the sign in the window to the left of the front door. It read, in carefully printed black block lettering against a white background, HOPKINS BEND GENERAL STORE.
A bell rang as he pushed through the door into the store’s musty interior. Two men playing cards at a rickety wooden table glanced up as he came in. They regarded him with hollow, unreadable expressions for an uncomfortable moment. One of the men spat on the floor. What the hell? Was that some kind of colorfully rustic judgment of his character? Hard to tell. Not that he cared what these rubes thought. He was just passing through on his way to another grand adventure in his young, prosperous life. They, on the other hand, would spend the remainder of their dreary days rotting away in this nothing little Podunk town. You sort of had to feel sorry for the poor, ignorant sons of bitches. He shoved his sunglasses up over his forehead and flashed them his best winning smile before moving farther into the store.
Another man sat behind a counter at the far end of the store. An enormously fat man, wearing a faded and sweat-stained red T-shirt that looked ready to give beneath the strain of his vastly protruding belly and red-wood-sized biceps. He had a jowly, florid face. A fat lower lip pooched out as he slowly flipped through the pages of a magazine. He wore a weathered cap with a slogan emblazoned above the bill: AMERICAN BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD.
Pete thought, Bubba the Hutt.
He then made a mental note to keep the observation to himself.
The store itself consisted of two aisles stocked with food and household items, as well as a cooler stocked with only the cheapest American beer. A scan of the selection indicated even Budweiser would be thought a luxury in these parts. Another cooler next to the counter was stocked with little cardboard bait tubs. He considered buying one to gross out Megan, then recognized the impulse as pure insanity. But perhaps he could pick up some other memento of their backwoods detour. Something they could chuckle over years later as they regaled their children with tales of their adventures en route to the big outdoor music festival in Tennessee.
Whoa. Wait.
Children?
Where had that thought come from? At twenty-three, he was still too young to be thinking such things. Hell, he was still practically a kid himself. He figured he had another five to ten years before he could seriously start to think about settling down. Megan was fun for now. And how. He liked her to pieces. But she wasn’t wife material. She was someone to have fun with while he was young. A girl he would recall with a sort of sweet nostalgia in later years, but without regret for the loss. His eventual wife would have to be someone smarter and more down-to-earth. Someone…not fun. His brow creased as he thought these things. His mind had gone around a dark corner without his even realizing it, and he wasn’t happy about it.
As an antidote, he thought of Megan naked and laughing as he licked whipped cream off her breasts at that motel in Kentucky the night before.
He grinned.
Mission accomplished.
The dark thoughts banished, he stepped up to the counter and cleared his throat.
The big redneck didn’t look at him.“What ya want?”
The man’s thick drawl was barely intelligible and added to his growing distaste for the man. He looked and sounded like something dredged up from the bottom of a swamp. Pete’s conscience spoke up then, telling him that there was more than one kind of prejudice. The people in Hopkins Bend lived a different kind of life from the one he knew in Minnesota, where he and Megan lived on the outskirts of the Twin Cities. But different didn’t necessarily equate with bad. Or wrong.
It was just…different.
But knowing this mattered very little. The man unsettled him. The store unsettled him. The scowling card players unsettled him. This was alien territory. He didn’t belong here. He knew it, and the other men in the store knew it. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to be gone from this place. He considered leaving then and there. But the Jetta was very low on fuel, and he wasn’t sure how far away the next gas station was.
Just get it done, he thought. Get it done and get the hell on out.
The man looked up from his magazine. There was a disturbing flatness in his dark eyes.“Well, boy?”
Pete cleared his throat again. “I, uh…need to fill up at your pump out there.”
The man’s jaw muscles moved almost imperceptibly. He was chewing something. Gum or a wad of tobacco. Pete figured the odds favored the latter.“Pump’s broke.”
Pete frowned.“Oh. Well. Okay, then. Um…could you maybe tell me how far to the next gas station?”
The corners of the man’s mouth dimpled and lifted slightly, forming the ugliest smile Pete Miller had ever seen. A smile to make nuns and young mothers wake up screaming in the middle of the night. “Don’t matter none.”
“Is that—” Pete’s frown deepened.“I’m sorry…what did you say?”
The big man reached beneath the counter, groped for something, found it, and stood up. Pete gulped at the sight of the pump-action shotgun and felt his knees turn to jelly as the man aimed it at his stomach. He raised his hands before him and began to back away from the counter. He kept moving until the men from the card table intercepted him, each seizing an elbow and wrestling him to the dirty floor.
Pete thrashed with all his might against the men holding him down. He saw the man with the shotgun emerge from behind the counter and walk past them to the front door. The wooden floor groaned beneath his heavy tread. Pete’s mind reeled. Thoughts for his own safety were temporarily forgotten. He couldn’t let these bastards get to Megan. The very thought made him want to scream. It was funny, the kind of things a man could suddenly know in the midst of intense crisis. He would throw his life down for Megan, do anything he could to save her. He loved her. Oh, Jesus, how he loved her.
He screamed, and one of the men clamped a sweaty palm over his mouth. Pete bit down on the fleshy curve of the man’s thumb and wrenched his head backward as the man’s hand came away from his mouth. The big man was at the front door now. Pete expected to see him step through it and return in a few moments with a shrieking Megan.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, he flipped the sign on the door around to read CLOSED. Then he pulled a shade down over the door and moved to the windows, where he did the same.
Then he locked the door.
And Pete realized something.
He’d never told these men he had a traveling companion. And, if his guess was correct, a cursory glance outside would show an apparently empty VW Jetta parked at the pump. Because Megan would be scrunched way down in her seat, absorbed in the story she was reading and utterly oblivious to what was happening inside the store.
For the moment, she was safe.
But that wouldn’t last forever. He had to think of a way out of this fucked-up situation before these animals caught wind of Megan’s presence. But what
could he do? He began to hyperventilate as his mind scrambled for elusive answers. Then he heard the plod of the big man’s booted feet coming back across the wooden floor. A moment later, one of those feet pressed heavily into the small of his back.
The man cleared his throat phlegmatically.
And spat.
Pete winced as moisture splashed against the back of his neck.
His voice emerged as a whine. “Why are you doing this?”
A rumbling sound emerged from the big man’s chest. It might have been an asthmatic laugh. And then he said, “Say good night, bitch.”
And that was all Pete Miller knew for a while.
The stock of the shotgun crashed against the crown of his skull.
CHAPTER FOUR
They lived in a ramshackle cabin out in the woods,same as most of the rest of their kin. The wilderness surrounding Hopkins Bend was dotted with similar cabins, many of them more than a hundred years old. A few were even said to date to the time of the War of Northern Aggression, or earlier. Some of the oldest structures had rotted down to almost nothing. Abigail Maynard was thankful the roof of their own cabin sagged only slightly. No one would ever mistake the Maynard domicile for some goddamn Beverly Hills mansion, but it was sturdier than most. And the Maynard clan was relatively prosperous by local standards. There was always plenty of food on the table and jugs of homemade whiskey to drink.
A young, towheaded Maynard boy came running through the open front door of the cabin as Abby rocked restlessly in her chair and stared at the dark, cracked screen of a television that hadn’t worked in almost ten years. The boy, a skinny little runt of about twelve, ran past her, shouting,“Grandma! Grandma!”
The boy’s voice grew fainter as he slammed through two more doors en route to the kitchen. The boy was Daniel. Abigail tried to remember whether he was one of the several birthed by her older sister, Ruth. Ruth had been dead a bit more than a year, the victim of some mysterious wasting disease. That had been a sad goddamn thing, her passing, but at least big sis had done her part in continuing the family line. Abby thought a moment, striving to keep the various bloodlines straight. Ruth had given them Daniel, John, Andy, Wilma, Angelina, Michael, and…let’s see…oh, yes, and Jack and Carl, the twins.