by Ninie Hammon
The Witch of Gideon
Nowhere, USA Book 5
Ninie Hammon
Copyright © 2021 by Sterling & Stone
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
What to read next
A Note from the Author
StoryStacks Thriller Insider
About the Author
Also By Ninie Hammon
Chapter One
Malachi Tackett piloted the van with the words “Healthy Pets Veterinary Clinic and Animal Hospital” emblazoned on the side down Sanders Lane in the darkness, winding away from Route 17 North into Persimmon Ridge. He turned right off Main Street onto Wiley Road for a mile or two, then left on Iron Rock Road.
The houses he passed were dark except for the one next door to Howie Witherspoon’s house. Old man Hayes lived there. He was almost deaf and just about blind, and it looked like every light in the house was on. Malachi killed the headlights on the van as he pulled into the Witherspoon driveway behind Howie’s car, that Malachi had parked there last night after he’d used it to take Toby Witherspoon to Sam’s house.
Malachi wasn’t expecting the sudden glare of the security light when he got out of the van. It was obviously hooked to a motion sensor, and he quickly darted into the shadows on the side of the garage, found his way through the dark to the side door, opened it and stepped inside. Closing the door behind him, he felt along the wall for the light switch and flipped it, filling the small, windowless building with the bilious glow from a dusty florescent light bar dangling over an old ski boat that rested on a trailer with two flat tires.
While Toby had waited in his father’s car last night, Malachi had shoved the tarp-shrouded body of Toby’s father under the back of the boat beneath the prop of the Evinrude engine. The dead body of Custard, the little white dog Howie had killed, lay beside it. Malachi’d figured out where to dispose of the corpses as he’d sat in the dark beside E.J.’s bed until Judd Perkins relieved him half an hour ago.
That was the best Malachi could do to delay the inevitable. Get rid of Howie’s body and hide Toby. Sooner or later Malachi’s mother would go looking for Howie, and when she couldn’t find him and Toby, she’d suspect that Malachi was somehow responsible for their disappearance. But she wouldn’t likely go after Charlie without proof Malachi had “lined up against her.” Her favorite son could forestall her wrath for a little while, could bluff. Though playing cat and mouse with Viola Tackett was dangerous business, right now it was the only game in town.
Malachi searched the small building until he found the breaker box and turned off the juice to the outside security light. Then he hauled Howie’s corpse and the body of the dog out to the van and loaded them in the back. He figured to make it to the boarded-up mine entrance just beyond the washed-out bridge on Gopher Hill Road and back to the Middle of Nowhere before dawn.
The sun was cresting the horizon out there on the flat when Malachi turned off Blandford Lane onto Lexington Road and headed down it toward the clinic. In a normal world, he’d be able to see a faint glow of light behind the mountains to the east, could watch the black velvet sky slowly turn navy blue, the color fading to pale blue, extinguishing the stars like blowing out candles on a birthday cake as light moved across the sky. Normal had taken a hike two weeks ago on J-Day. Now there was almost no transition at all between night and morning. The black didn’t fade slowly away. It was black, and then it was navy and then it was blue — bam, bam and bam. Like whoever was operating the dimmer switch on the sun was in a hurry. The stars didn’t blink out one by one. Stars … then no stars. They were all gone between one heartbeat and the next.
And this morning, no-stars was definitely a good thing. Malachi had noticed it on his way to Persimmon Ridge, had almost run E.J.’s van off into a ditch. All the stars were on the same side of the sky! Half the sky was empty blackness, the other half was full of stars, all the same size and as unblinking as a little kid’s night light.
It was so creepy. When Malachi first began to notice all the weirdness-es, he thought he was the only one who saw them, that it wasn’t real, just more entertaining manifestations of his PTSD. He was both relieved and horrified to discover everybody else was seeing the same things he was.
He glanced down at the fuel gauge in the van and groaned. Almost empty. It wouldn’t be long now before there wasn’t a gallon of gasoline to be had for any price anywhere in the county. It was a good thing he’d moved into E.J.’s apartment above the animal hospital and didn’t have to travel all the way out to Killarney every night. And since his mother had stolen the Nower house in Persimmon Ridge, he’d have been stuck out there in Turkey Neck Hollow without a vehicle. Oh, he could have taken one — there was no shortage of abandoned vehicles in Nowhere County, the cars of the people caught outside on J-Day. But Malachi wasn’t a car thief.
There was a case to be made that it wasn’t stealing to take an abandoned car. That was certainly the way his mother looked at it, though she would take whatever car she wanted whether it was abandoned or not. When he’d gone to see her new “digs” last night, there had been a black Corvette parked in the driveway. He’d noticed the car a couple of times since he got back to the county after he was released from the Veterans Administration Hospital in Louisville, thought it belonged to Bud Griffith. Appeared it was Viola’s now — which meant one of his brothers, probably Zach, who obsessed over cars, had taken it for his own just like his mother had taken the house.
Which was one of the reasons Malachi refused to commandeer an abandoned vehicle. It lit up the reason, anyway. When he left the county to join the military he had left behind more than Nowhere County and his family. He had made a decision the first day of boot camp, as he lay in his bunk more exhausted than he thought it was possible for a person to be and survive, that he would shed his skin like a snake and leave everything behind. He would no longer be Malachi Tackett in any way that mattered. He would be the polar opposite of everything his mother was, a total repudiation of the life she had created for him and his brothers and sister. From that moment on, Malachi was brutally honest. An inconvenient honesty that required o
f him that he admit to the sergeant that he’d nodded off while on guard duty, though no one had seen or reported it. The admission had earned him a week of latrine duty. And that he refused to answer for his bunkmate at roll call when Seabags missed the last bus to the base after a weekend drunk. That kind of fearless honesty had brought with it an unexpected benefit — the respect of his fellow Marines. “Honor” was the character trait valued above all else in the Corps.
His ruthless honesty extended to what he told himself, too. He admitted his own fear in combat, never pretended things were going to work out when he knew for certain that the guano was about to connect with the air conditioning.
Like he knew right now. It was about to get reeeeally ugly in Nowhere County and there was only one way to escape the crap-storm that was about to make landfall. That was to find a road “out.” The place had already been a death trap, with people vanishing without so much as a puff of smoke, their homes aging a hundred years overnight. Now, you could add into the mix the certainty that if the Jabberwock didn’t get you, his mother would. Viola Tackett was a vicious murderer. She would cut down anybody in cold blood — maybe even Malachi if he got in her way. She never let an offense slide.
Somebody had to figure a way to defeat the Jabberwock. If they couldn’t do that, every man, woman and child in Nowhere County was going to die. Sooner rather than later.
Chapter Two
Maybe Grace Tibbits wasn’t going to die after all. And that was not the good news. What might happen to her instead of dying would be waaaaaay worse.
Grace’s kidneys weren’t dy-ing, of course. They were already dead, long dead, and she’d been doing just fine, thank you very much, on dialysis twice a week in Carlisle. That’s how she and her son Reece had wound up in the Middle of Nowhere on J-Day — him puking his guts out and her with the mother of all nosebleeds. Reece had been taking her to her dialysis appointment when they’d crossed the Beaufort County line, through the mirage that nobody yet knew was there, and ticked off the Jabberwock.
As soon as she stopped dialysis — “taking my kidneys to the car wash” was what she called it — toxins began to build up in her bloodstream. She and everybody else knew what that meant. It was a death sentence. Not immediate death. Unlike some people with non-functioning kidneys, hers still produced urine. So technically, they weren’t totally dead. Being able to pee was a good thing all by itself, even if the kidneys weren’t cleaning the blood that flowed through them. People able to pee lived longer when they got off dialysis. Weeks instead of days. They still died, though, eventually. And not a clean go-to-sleep-and-not-wake-up death either. It sounded pretty grim and she’d already begun experiencing the previews of coming attractions.
She’d aged twenty years in a couple of weeks. Since she started out at seventy-five, she looked like death on a cracker — hollow-eyed, sallow skin, hair falling out. She itched all over. All over. Even under her eyelids and her fingernails. Which was impossible, of course, but tell that to her fingernails and eyelids. Her heartbeat had gone haywire — beat fast, slow and not-at-all in a perky-jerky rhythm that reminded her of the way chickens walked across a barnyard. She was swelling up like a toad from fluid retention, was exhausted by the mere thought of walking the whole twenty feet to the bathroom, though the necessity of doing that had grown steadily less — there was that, at least. She was likely confused and disoriented, too. That was one of the symptoms. But when you were confused, it was hard to tell if you were disoriented. And vice versa. The seizures, coma and death part were coming soon to a kidney-free person near her.
Or maybe not.
Might be she wouldn’t be here to enjoy them. And that was way scarier than the thought of dying. Might be Elizabeth Grace Crenshaw Tibbits would just vanish. Go poof in a puff of smoke and be gone. But even if she was confused and disoriented, she still had enough on the ball to grasp that being gone from here meant being present somewhere else. Everything had to be somewhere. So where was “somewhere else”? Nobody knew the answer to that question, but best guess was the spot wasn’t likely a tour bus destination.
“Audrey,” she called out to her daughter. Except she didn’t call out. She whispered. That was as close as she could get to calling out. “Mary Jo … are the two of you hiding from me again?”
No, that was confusion. Her daughters weren’t little girls anymore, hiding from her while their older brother Reece took the punishment for whatever it was the little imps had done. They were grown women. And Reece … maybe her oldest son would be waiting for her when she got to wherever “not-here” was. He had already vanished.
After he blew a hole in the road, and maybe in the Jabberwock, too. Nobody’d been there to see. Liam Montgomery had called her on Saturday to tell her about it.
She can picture the deputy sheriff with his hat in his hands, worrying it back and forth between them as he speaks.
“Lonnie Monroe was the one called me. Said he heard an explosion out on the road. Dynamite. Him being a miner, he knew the sound. When he went to check it out, he found Reece’s truck parked smack in the middle of the road, and there was a gigantic hole in the road, right under the Jabberwock, not fifty feet away.”
He pauses.
Grace is way more than annoyed at Liam’s reticence. Even before he’d been left as the lone available law enforcement officer in the county, courtesy of the imprisoning Jabberwock, he’d been hard to hold a conversation with. You had to drag the words out of him. And now she senses that his reluctance is based on the fact that he’s bringing bad news. That plants a lump of fear in her belly that sharpens her tone when she speaks.
“Come on, Liam, spit it out. Where’s Reece?”
“That’s the part I don’t know. He wasn’t in his truck.”
“Were the keys in it?”
“Nope, musta put them in his pocket.”
“You saying you think he just walked off? Or somebody went out there and picked him up? That doesn’t make sense. Why would he need a ride if he had the keys …?”
Then she figures it out.
“You think he lost a wrestling match with the Jabberwock, don’t you?”
“That was my first thought, yes.”
Another pause.
“Liam Montgomery, if you don’t stop fiddle-farting around and tell me where my son—”
“I went to the Middle of Nowhere after I got the call from Lonnie, thought maybe Reece’d be there if he’d … rode the Jabberwock. But he wasn’t there. Nobody there had seen him.”
“So he parked his truck, got out and blew a hole in the middle of the road.” She knows what that’s about. He was trying to punch a hole in the Jabberwock so he could take her to dialysis. “And then …?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Tibbits. I called his house several times and nobody answered.”
Grace has been trying to reach Reece, too, but the phone just rings and rings. Which is crazy because even if Reece isn’t home, where is the rest of his family? His wife Cissy is such a little church mouse the Jabberwock just about did the poor thing in. Apparently all she did was sit at home and cry. And she’d raised the girls, Sue Sue and Patty to be afraid of their own shadows so no way had the three of them just up and decided to go on a picnic.
“Well … why’re you wasting time calling me when you don’t even know nothing yet? Go on out to Reece’s house and find him!” She doesn’t like the fear she hears in her voice, the dread of what Liam will find when he goes looking. Or won’t find.
Liam had never come to tell her what he found. She didn’t even know if he’d had a chance to look before he went to Martha Whittiker’s house on account of her being murdered. Maybe he’d gone to Reece’s after that but she didn’t think he woulda had time before the county meeting. And somebody’d shot Liam Montgomery dead at the meeting.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who’d had a motive to shoot the man, and under normal circumstances Grace would have been madder than dammit about that. Ready to l
ead a lynch mob out to Killarney and hang Viola Tackett from the nearest tree. Not now, though. Ever since Grace had gotten her daughter Audrey to take her out to Reece’s house, she’d had bigger fish to fry than suspecting Viola Tackett’d put a hole in Liam Montgomery. Soon’s Grace seen Reece’s house … she’d been scared spit-less, wondering what coulda happened to him and his family.
Hadn’t ever been so scared in her whole life — until right now.
Now, Grace was scared spit-less she was about to find out.
Chapter Three
The Breakfast Club convened in the breakroom/war room of the animal hospital while Merrie played with the kittens and puppies and Sam’s son, Rusty, spent the day with a friend.
Malachi’d had time for a shower and a shave in E.J.’s apartment after he’d dumped the bodies of Howie Witherspoon and the dog into an abandoned mine shaft. He had just settled in with a cup of coffee when Charlie arrived.
“How’s E.J.?” she asked Malachi as soon as she saw him.
“Not good. I’m no doctor … but it appears to me he is getting more ‘not good’ every day.”
“True that,” Sam said from the doorway. “I just checked on him. He still has a fever, so there’s an infection … somewhere. I just can’t figure out where — it’s not in the leg.”
