The Jabberwock

by Ninie Hammon

  Pete let his gaze follow Buford’s truck, then swung it back toward the young used-to-be-soldier still heaving, leaned against the east wall of the shelter. That’s why he saw it, the only reason he saw it. He just happened to be looking right at the end of the bench on the other side of the shelter when … suddenly somebody was sitting there.

  So surprised he stopped breathing, Pete’s walking stick clattered to the warm asphalt out of his suddenly numb fingers.

  There was a person — it was Fish — sitting on the end of the bench.

  He wasn’t there … wasn’t nobody there. And then he was.

  Not there … there.

  Holmes Fischer, in a rumpled jacket, pants that appeared to be wet on the bottom like he’d stepped in a puddle or a ditch, was clutching his floppy hat to his chest and staring blankly into space.

  Pete let out a cry, he supposed. A grunt. A sound. Something. He made some kind of noise because the young woman with the little girl wearing the crown bandage turned to look at him and Sam lifted her head, too.

  Then Sam squeaked a not-quite-a-scream her own self and her hand flew to her mouth.

  She’d seen it, too. Well, maybe she hadn’t been looking, as Pete had been, the exact instant Fish appeared on the bench. But she knew there hadn’t been nobody there. Then she heard Pete’s cry, looked up and somebody was there.

  Out of nowhere.

  Poof.

  They both froze, staring in utter disbelief.

  Fish sat stock still for a moment, seemed to settle into existence on the bench. Then he leaned over, choking, like he couldn’t breathe.

  Chapter Eleven

  Charlie jumped back, startled, and gasped. She didn’t scream, though. Sam had screamed, had almost screamed. The old guy — she was pretty sure it was Pete Rutherford — had cried out. So Charlie wasn’t imagining it.

  She saw it.

  Sam saw it.

  Pete Rutherford saw it.

  She could tell by their reactions, which were as startled/stunned/disbelieving as hers.

  There had been nobody in that bus shelter only seconds ago!

  She replayed the video in her head.

  She and Merrie had been there, on the other end of the bench, earlier this morning.

  Malachi Tackett had been hunkered down beside the shelter dodging bullets nobody was firing a few minutes ago.

  Pete Rutherford had come walking across the lot toward the shelter and Sam Sheridan had run to tend to Malachi.

  But that was it! There had been nobody else there.

  It wasn’t like you could hide a thing like that. It was an empty parking lot. One car was parked in front of the Dollar General Store, either Sam’s or whoever was working there.

  There was not a soul in the empty bus shelter. Nobody sitting on the long bench in the shade of a roof supported by two plexiglass walls that bore a quarter of a century’s worth of graffiti. No one was within sniffing range of the pile of cooling puke on the near end where she’d deposited the morning’s toast and coffee.

  There was nobody! Except … yes, there was.

  An old man in the weather-beaten clothing of a homeless person was there.

  Charlie thought the man looked like an older version of Holmes Fischer, her senior English teacher in high school.

  Whoever he was — Holmes Fischer or Elvis Presley or Bozo the Clown — he had appeared out of nowhere.

  Just suddenly there.

  And that, of course, wasn’t possible.

  But so was Charlie and Merrie being here.

  Her knees suddenly felt like bags of water, unstable, like they might collapse and dump her on her butt on the ground.

  She bent to one knee and put her arms around Merrie, ostensibly to comfort the child. In reality, it was a preemptive move to keep from falling. She was using Merrie to hold her upright so she couldn’t faceplant in the parking lot.

  How had she and Merrie gotten here?

  How?

  She had been driving down the winding road through the mountains, the windows down so the wind through the car would drown out the pitiful sound of Merrie’s wailing, which had downshifted from a genuine reaction to actual pain to an emotional response to an opportunity to indulge in theatrics. Her little girl was a drama queen extraordinaire.

  Then what?

  Charlie remembered … shining black … static.

  And the next thing she knew she was sitting on the opposite end of the bench where the homeless man seemed to be … choking, maybe.

  He wasn’t heaving, though, as she and Malachi had been, puking their collective guts out.

  Not normal nausea. Violent, explosive nausea. Like a mini bomb in your belly, exploding the contents out into the world.

  While she knelt frozen in place beside Merrie, Sam got to her feet, left Malachi on all fours, dry-heaving, and went to the man on the bench.

  “Mr. Fischer … are you sick?”

  It was Holmes Fischer!

  He didn’t respond, was clearly in some kind of physical distress but he wasn’t vomiting.

  She felt a shadow fall over her and looked up into the pale blue eyes of the old man who’d talked Malachi Tackett off the ledge. It was Pete Rutherford, alright, which meant he was definitely very old but he appeared to be in possession of all his faculties, which he had used skillfully on Malachi Tackett to bring him back to reality.

  Reality. Right. Copy that. Reality. And realty was …?

  “You got any idea what’s happenin’, ma’am?”

  “Not a clue, but …” Her voice was trembly. She got carefully to her feet and looked Pete full in the eyes. Every marble appeared to be firmly in place.

  “But I can tell you that … I don’t know how I got here. How Merrie and I got here. I was driving down the road and then …” She was reluctant to talk about the black-light thing. It was impossible to describe because it had been impossible. But that’s what she had seen. All around her was light that was black, and she was afraid to discuss it for fear she’d start hearing the theme song to The Twilight Zone.

  “And then … go on. “

  “And then the next thing I knew I was sitting there.” She pointed to the other end of the bench from the spot where Sam was trying to talk to the man who had hooked Charlie on fantasy — wizards and goblins and The Lord of the Rings. “And I was throwing up. So sick I …”

  “You didn’t drive here?”

  “You see a car?” She hadn’t meant to snap. “No, I was driving … and then I wasn’t.” She shook her head and felt a wave of vertigo wash over her. She must have wobbled on her feet because the old man reached out to steady her.

  “Might be you need to go over there and sit down.”

  “And smell that puke? One whiff of that and I’ll be off to the races again.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t know how—”

  “I don’t know how I got here and—” In for a penny, in for a pound. “And I’m wondering if I … if I suddenly appeared on that bench like Holmes Fischer just did.”

  If she allowed herself to experience the true horror of that statement, it would have knocked her on her butt on the asphalt. Riiiiight, she just … appeared. Wasn’t there and then was. Happened all the time. Why just last week she’d been ice fishing in Antarctica, all bundled up in a parka, and the next thing she knew — badda boom, badda bing — she was in a bikini sipping a Mai Tai on a beach in Tahiti.

  She recognized the wall of denial she was frantically building, refusing to see reality by making fun of it. But the alternative was actually seeing reality, acknowledging it … and right now Charlie McClintock could not force her mind to countenance—

  Sam screamed. This time, it was a full-bore, no-squeaking shriek.

  When Charlie turned toward her, Charlie saw a man in uniform sitting on the bench. He hadn’t been there even a second ago. Had likely appeared so suddenly right beside Sam that he had startled the scream out of her.

  Charlie turned back to the old
man with the clear blue eyes and couldn’t find the air to speak. From the look on his face, he wouldn’t have heard her if she had.

  A whisper on a breath escaped her lips.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Sam was proud to discover that she wasn’t totally freaking out, in the manner a situation like this clearly called for. She’d been too busy to freak, from the moment Abby Clayton had cried out, “Something’s bad wrong here,” until Holmes Fischer appeared — and he had just appeared. She could tell from the looks on the faces of the others that they’d seen the same thing she had.

  First Charlie Ryan … McClintock … and her little girl. And then Malachi.

  She came to a full stop then, just like all the drivers who came to those four signs at the crossroads intersection didn’t.

  Malachi. She’d heard he was home, but certainly didn’t expect to see him for the first time in — how long? — crouched behind a bus shelter dodging bullets nobody was firing. As soon as he stopped fighting his imaginary battle, he was in the same condition she’d found Charlie — who had said she’d been driving down the road and the next thing she knew she was sitting in a bus shelter puking.

  Sam had raced across the lot to Malachi, got down on one knee beside him, but there was nothing she could do. She had only one other time seen someone wrenching as hard as he was. Charlie McClintock had been vomiting with the same ferocity, like in that movie where the alien burst out of the guy’s stomach. It was like there was something inside Charlie and Malachi, trying to get out and they couldn’t expel it fast enough.

  There’d been nothing she could do for Charlie and there was nothing she could do for Malachi. She just held his head like she had done for Rusty so many times when he was little.

  She was in that emotional space when Holmes Fischer appeared … just appeared. She saw him, she’d been looking right at him … well, right at where he wasn’t and then suddenly was. Holmes Fischer, the county’s token homeless drunk. Except he was technically not either. He had places he stayed. And when she thought about it, she realized he always looked disheveled, but he didn’t smell bad, didn’t look like somebody living in a cardboard box under a bridge. So he had somewhere he bathed, somewhere he kept clean clothes. But she didn’t know where that might be.

  Sam wasn’t a doctor. Shoot, she wasn’t even a paramedic. She was a licensed practical nurse who was paid to check in on people who were ill but not sick enough to be hospitalized, people who could stay home if somebody came by to keep an eye on them, take their blood pressure, make sure they were taking their meds properly and basically provide them contact with the outside world, which, in the end, was probably the best medicine she gave any of them.

  But you didn’t have to have a medical degree to see that Holmes Fischer was choking, and would choke to death in only a few minutes if somebody didn’t do something.

  She got up from Malachi’s side, who likely didn’t know she had left because he probably didn’t know she’d ever been there, and ran to the bench in the shelter, kneeling in front of where Holmes Fischer was seated, gasping. No, not gasping. You had to have air to gasp and he seemed to have no air. Seemed to be desperately trying to breathe.

  She had to stifle a little hysterical burst of laughter — Fish was like a fish out of water. But that was what he looked like, like a fish that’d been thrown out of the river onto the shore, his mouth open, gaping, trying to get in air.

  “Mr. Fischer … are you sick?”

  He didn’t respond, but it was clear he couldn’t. Clearly something was stuck in his throat and he couldn’t breathe. She started to lean him over on his side on the bench but he fell that way before she touched him. She was able to grab hold of him and turn him so the momentum of his fall left him lying on his back. One good tug and she had scooted him to the end of the bench with his head dangling off it, opening up his trachea.

  Sam wished she had something, anything to use to disengage whatever was causing the blockage in his throat, but there was nothing for it but to stick her fingers in his mouth …

  And then Liam Montgomery suddenly appeared. Just appeared

  The sight was shocking, surprising, but more than that it scared Martha Ann Sheridan in a way nothing else in her life ever had. This was really happening and her fear was too great to express with something as simple as a scream. You had to experience some kind of ground-zero, basic-humanity fear when you were confronted with a thing that was contrary to the laws of the universe. People didn’t just show up — bang. Not just once. Twice. Two people had just … she wouldn’t use the word “materialize” because that word brought to mind television shows and science fiction movies and this was everyday life in the Dollar General Store parking lot, for crying out loud.

  But he is the greatest of fools, her father would have said, who continues to deny reality when it stands there in front of you, hot and stinking and demanding to be noticed. It was what it was.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Pete Rutherford had been breathing in and out at the good Lord’s pleasure for going on seventy-three years. Not all that time was spent breathing the air of the Kentucky mountains, neither.

  He wasn’t the classic rube like so many of the people who lived in the hollows of Nower County were, so deep up in there sometimes you had to wonder if the sun actually made it there every day. There were people who had never left this county, who had never seen the outside world, what they called “out there on the flat,” people who had never been to the big city, which they would define as Lexington, Kentucky. Fish had got out by virtue of the Second World War, enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, not yet eighteen but lied about his age and they took him anyway. He was one of the soldiers the songs sang about, “How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Parieeee.”

  They’d put him on a train to California, then on a ship to the South Pacific. He had battled flies, jungle rot and Japanese soldiers, had made the close personal acquaintance of terror and loss during what were the formative years of a young man’s life. It’d changed him. It’d changed all of them. Hard to surprise a man who’d watched his buddies get blown into so many pieces there wasn’t enough left to ship home along with the dog tags.

  But Pete Rutherford was surprised now!

  In all his many adventures out there in the wide world and the blessedly quiet no-adventure life he had led in Nower County since then, he had never seen somebody just …

  Just what?

  Just appear.

  There was nobody sitting on that bench. Pete would have sworn, would have taken a pistol in his hand, put it to his temple and announced to the universe that he’d pull the trigger if he was mistaken and there really had been somebody sitting there and he just didn’t happen to notice.

  That wasn’t the way of it. And they was other witnesses besides Pete Rutherford to testify to the reality of what they seen that couldn’t no way in the world be real but was.

  Then Sam screamed again, a real scream, no holds barred and sitting on that bench down from where she was trying to clear out Holmes Fischer’s throat so he could breathe was another somebody who just appeared — Deputy Sheriff Liam Montgomery.

  He looked around, but wasn’t no need. It wasn’t like a police car had pulled into the parking lot and the deputy got out but Pete was tyin’ his shoelaces and just didn’t see it.

  It was like the woman beside him suddenly came to life, like maybe she’d been froze there and suddenly thawed. At the sight of the deputy sheriff, she turned to Pete and asked, “Would you look after Merrie for a few minutes?” Didn’t bother to wait for a reply, just looked down at the little girl and told her, “You’re going to wait here for me. This nice man whose name is …?”

  “Pete,” he said.

  “Pete is going to be right here beside you.” The little girl tuned up to pitch a fit and then her mother said, “I’m going over there, just right there” — she pointed to the bus shelter
— “and you can go with me if you want to but it’s gross. People have been throwing up and—”

  The little girl shook her head violently, the crown bandage flopping about, even took a step backward.

  “Yukky!” she said.

  “Then wait for me.” She looked at Pete and placed the little girl’s hand in his. Then she turned and was crossing the distance to the sheriff’s deputy, who unlike the others was not vomiting. He was just sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. And his nose was bleeding … gushing down his upper lip in a torrent.

  “What’s yore name?” Pete asked the little girl.

  “Merrie.”

  “Oh, like Mary had a little lamb.”

  “No, like Merry Christmas, except with an ‘ie’ instead of a y,” she said, clearly parroting words she’d been taught to say but didn’t understand. She understood what she said next, though. “Why’s everybody throwin’ up?”

  “Guess they ate bad beans,” he said absently, watching Sam turn Fish back onto his side from his back where he lay taking big gulps of air. He started to sit up, Sam pushed him back down and he sat up anyway, shaking his head. Then his nose started to bleed. It was then that it occurred to Pete Rutherford that he didn’t have to be totally useless. He didn’t know more than the rudiments of first aid and couldn’t move fast enough to do anybody any good in a crisis. But there was one thing here that needed doin’ and he was just the man for the job.

  “I need you to help me do something,” he said to little Merrie, whose name was spelled strange, either to be pretentious or for some reason the little girl didn’t understand and nobody else cared about.

  He got the child to fetch the cane he’d dropped and then used it to accomplish a reasonably rapid hobble to the side of the Dollar General Store where the Clean Out Your Car machines were located. He picked up the water hose and turned it on and was rewarded several seconds later with a stream of water that actually had a decent amount of pressure. With Merrie’s help, he uncoiled the hose and hobbled back toward the bus shelter, squirting the water onto the asphalt as he walked, washing away the stinking remains of the contents of several stomachs.