by Ninie Hammon
So where was Reece now? Obviously, his attempt to blast out of the Jabberwock had been unsuccessful. It was still there, shimmering across the road. Liam approached it carefully, the way you’d get close to a cobra in a basket with some dude doing his flute trick to get the snake to rise up out of it. Truth was, he couldn’t get close to the Jabberwock without climbing down into the hole Reece had blasted in the asphalt directly under it.
Liam stood looking at the shimmer. At his own reflection in the shimmer. At how the shimmer didn’t reflect Reece’s truck or Liam’s cruiser behind it, only reflected the sky and clouds … and people. Nothing else.
The keys weren’t in the truck or Liam would have started it and pulled it off onto the shoulder of the road. He checked the fuel gauge — three quarters of a tank. Somebody would come along — likely Lonnie Monroe as soon as Liam left — and siphon that gas out.
Liam got back in his cruiser and made a U-turn in the middle of the road and headed down Lexington Road toward Sugar Bowl Mountain. Reece Tibbits lived outside Bennetville on Cicada Springs Road. Since he’d already checked the Middle of Nowhere and Reece wasn’t there puking his guts up, where was he? And what was Liam going to do when he found him? Arrest him for blowing a hole in the road? It was, after all, against the law to do a thing like that. But folks were doing a lot of things now that were against the law and Liam couldn’t arrest them all. Or even some of them. What would he do with a prisoner in the county’s tiny jail?
Liam had no idea, had been puzzling over that and the implications of law enforcement in general ever since he’d gone chasing after the speeder with Pennsylvania plates and found himself with a needle inside his skull in the bus shelter in the Middle of Nowhere.
Did he have the authority to arrest people? Now, given … well, everything? Arrest who? People were committing “crimes” all over the place, stealing the gas out of the cars of their neighbors who’d been out of town on J-Day. And stealing whatever else they fancied that was property belonging to people who were as stuck out there as he and all the other nowhere people were stuck in here.
If he didn’t enforce all the laws, how did he decide which ones were really crimes, given the present circumstances? Everybody knew Viola Tackett had stationed her boys at Foodtown — to prevent hoarding, or so she’d said. Liam had no doubt that Viola Tackett, civic-minded citizen that she’d always been, was merely guarding the contents of the store for herself. The only weapon she’d used was intimidation, veiled threats. So did he go out past Killarney to the Tackett household on Gizzard Ridge and arrest the lot of them for terroristic threatening? Not likely.
Who did he arrest, then? The people looting the few remaining downtown businesses in the Ridge? Most of them did it in broad daylight, didn’t bother to wait until dark when most of the streetlights didn’t work. How long would it be before the whole county went dark? Yeah, the electricity was generated in Drayton County by the Rural Electric Coop Corp and was on a grid — he didn’t understand that part — that served a six-county area that included Nower County. So there’d be electricity here until … what happened when the people here stopped paying their electric bills? Surely the RECC would notice eventually and cut off service.
People stayed clear of the businesses whose owners were still here, though. Mostly. But somebody — teenagers, perhaps — had broken into Lester Peetree’s hardware store, vandalized the place and took all the guns and ammunition. Candy and soft drinks, too. What did teenagers plan to do with the weaponry — if it had, indeed, been teenagers who took it? Should Liam be out there trying to find out? And what if somebody got so desperate for a rocking chair or a footstool or a lampshade that they showed up at Stovall’s Used Furniture Store with a gun and demanded that Joe Stovall hand one over? There probably weren’t half a dozen people in the whole county who didn’t have access to some kind of firearm. So what if somebody used a weapon to steal something? Armed robbery wasn’t a crime you could let slide.
Liam probably hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since J-Day. Not so much stewing over what was happening, but worried sick about what he was supposed to do about it. Then he’d let it go and accepted that he’d just have to figure it out as he went along. One thing at a time. That was the best Liam could do until the county meeting tonight. He had invested a lot of emotional capital in the meeting and desperately wanted to believe that something would come of it.
Figuring folks might not show up if “the law” called a meeting, Liam convinced Sebastian Nower to call it. The great-great grandson of the county’s founder was a bombastic blowhard who loved nothing more than the sound of his own voice. If he got the upper hand, he’d do all the talking, fight to the death to make sure things were done whatever way he wanted them done, and then preen around importantly, finally given the respect due him for his stellar genetics and lineage.
Liam couldn’t let that happen.
It had taken two weeks’ worth of soul searching for Liam to come around to an understanding of the new nature of the universe and his own place in it. He believed dire circumstances made great men. There was lots of historic proof of that — like Alvin York, that World War I soldier from a farm in Tennessee who killed all those Germans, or that Texas soldier, Audie Murphy, who became a movie star. Men who stepped forward when the need arose and made a difference. Liam Montgomery was determined to be that man in Nower County. Somebody had to step into the leadership vacuum that existed here, somebody willing to make the hard calls and suffer the consequences of his decisions. He believed the county’s 3,500 residents were teetering on the brink of chaos. And he genuinely believed that was the county population, no matter what Viola Tackett said, though, granted, they certainly hadn’t all been inside the county’s borders when the Jabberwock locked the doors. Out of all those people, Liam Montgomery was the only person who could lay claim to legitimate authority.
He would man up when the time came, take charge.
Oh, it wasn’t like Liam was looking forward to what lay ahead, but he could clearly see his duty and he would perform it to his dying breath. He wasn’t looking forward to questioning Reece Tibbits, either, didn’t have any idea what he’d do with the man once he had. The only thing he was certain of was that the doing of it was his responsibility. If Liam didn’t take charge, who would?
Chapter Eleven
The old black man seated across the table from Stuart hadn’t lost even half a step in his mental fitness, was sharp, articulate — a bit stiff and unyielding, but that was to be expected, given that he’d never met Stuart. And Stuart tried to keep reminding himself that he was … what was it Charlie had called it? Oh yeah, Stuart was from “Away from Here,” which made him and everything he said suspect. But Cotton Jackson didn’t strike Stuart as that clannish. Maybe he was just reserved because the subject matter called for reserve. For skepticism. Should be taken with a dump-truck load of salt.
Stuart McClintock had never spoken nor listened to anything as lock-me-up-with-the-rest-of-the-looney-tunes-in-Saint-Somebody’s-Home-for-the-Bewildered-and-swallow-the-key as what was said in that kitchen that day.
The kitchen was in a tidy brick house with a manicured yard and rose bushes growing in rich profusion around the porch. When Stuart leaned over to smell one of the blossoms, Cotton said merely, “Thelma,” and there was such longing in the single word it broke Stuart’s heart.
The kitchen that was almost bare — a table, chairs, coffee pot, and four cups in an otherwise empty cabinet. There was no furniture in the dining room or den, which Stuart could see from the kitchen, just bare hardwood floors, not even so much as a throw rug.
It looked just like Charlie’s mother’s house had looked.
There were pictures on the walls, though, and even from where he stood in the kitchen, Stuart could tell that the shots were of a family of three — mother, father and a little boy — who grew up in other pictures into a handsome man in a uniform. The standard “soldier” picture hung above the
mantle, blown up huge, with medals arranged beside it in the frame. It had the look of a memorial, so Stuart didn’t ask.
Stuart took off his suit jacket and draped it over the back of the chair, unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rolled them up to his elbows while Cotton made coffee. After he’d served Stuart the promised cup — Stuart took it with cream and sugar but was reluctant to ask because he suspected Cotton didn’t have any of either — Cotton began the conversation by answering a question Stuart hadn’t asked.
“Because I was my parents’ eleventh child and my father’s response to finding out my mother was pregnant with me was, ‘I don’t cotton to having another mouth to feed.’”
Then the old man described coming home on Sunday afternoon, June 4, exhausted from a short night of sleep, looking forward to a hot meal and a soft bed. He’d tried several times to call and tell his wife what time to expect him, but she didn’t answer. Which was odd, but he let it go.
“I felt something … strange when I pulled into the driveway. I felt … frightened. And that was crazy, but I couldn’t help it. I felt … afraid.”
Stuart thought about how he’d felt earlier sitting in the driveway of Charlie’s mother’s house.
“Her car wasn’t in the driveway, but I figured she’d just put it into the garage. Thelma wasn’t home. Wasn’t … anywhere. And the house was bare … nothing in it, no furniture, clothes, dishes, duct tape, pillow cases, drain cleaner … nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
He was so horrified and mystified and terrified that he …
“Ran around like a chicken with my head cut off.”
He thoroughly searched the premises for Thelma — the house, the yard, the garage, the little patch of garden behind the garage, the attic and basement, and started trying to call family members, neighbors … anybody. Nobody answered. The phones just rang and rang. Obviously there was something wrong with the lines, some kind of outage.
So he got back into his car and went looking for Thelma.
And discovered that not only was Thelma missing, so was everybody else in the county. He went to house after house and found them all empty — furniture and belongings gone, no cars in the driveways, nobody home.
When he’d completed his story, Stuart blurted out the first thing that came to his mind — “that’s the craziest tale I ever heard” — and immediately regretted being blunt and rude.
Cotton didn’t seem to be offended, just stood, took Stuart’s coffee cup and turned to the sink where there were already a couple of dirty plates and some silverware.
“We got a dishwasher.” He nodded toward the appliance under the countertop. “Wanna know how spoiled I am? I never learned how to run the thing, so …”
He gestured toward the sink.
“I went to Walmart in Carlisle for what I absolutely had to have” — nodded toward the card table and folding chairs — “thought I got everything, but forgot to get a dish drainer.”
Rinsing the cup and spoon, he set them in the sink beside the other dishes, then turned toward the door.
“The man you described, the guy who blew a hole in the road and then went poof and vanished—” Stuart winced at the reference, but it was indeed what he had said. Actually, the man had done a two-fer, had appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared into nowhere. “I know a man named Reece Tibbits, who had to be the guy you saw. He lives on Sugar Bowl Mountain off Cicada Springs Road with his wife, Cissy, and daughters — Sue-Sue and … Patty, I think. How about we go pay them a visit?”
Cotton drove. In an era when everybody else in the world was ditching their gas-guzzlers for Hondas and Toyotas, Cotton Jackson drove a 1993 Chrysler Concorde. Big and roomy. As they wound around through the mountains, Stuart would have been hopelessly lost if Cotton hadn’t provided a running-commentary geography lesson.
Chimney Rock Pike to Elkhorn Road to CR 278 W, then onto Barber’s Mill Road, the road where Charlie’s mother’s house was located, only they turned south on it instead of north. That led to Gallagher Station Road and they turned right on it onto Cicada Springs Road.
Cotton stopped at every house they passed. Went to the door and knocked. Called out, looked in the yard and in the outbuildings.
Nothing.
Nobody.
One after another.
When they pulled into the driveway of an old house that was literally falling down, the roof had collapsed on the back and the chimney had fallen over into the yard, Cotton just sat, looking at it.
“This is Reece Tibbits’s place,” he said.
Stuart must have misunderstood what Cotton’d told him because he’d thought they were going to the place the Tibbits guy and his family lived, not some house maybe his grandparents grew up in. Stuart started to ask questions, but Cotton’s face silenced him. The man looked not only troubled, but enlightened, a guy who had just solved a mystery, had figured out where the next lightning bolt was going to strike — but realized he was standing on the spot.
Though he was convinced by the parade of empty houses that the whole population of the county had … well, at least they were not there, Stuart wasn’t ready yet to own “vanished.”
Cotton didn’t stop anymore at every house they passed as they left the “weathered estate” of the Reece Tibbits family and drove back through the Middle of Nowhere where he’d met Cotton and on into an actual small town Cotton said had once been “incorporated,” though Stuart didn’t know what that meant. The name of the town was Persimmon Ridge. It was a ghost town. No one on the street. The stores closed. Not boarded up, just closed. Like somebody would come back in after their lunch break and open them for business. Stuart rubbernecked at all the emptiness, his grip on what he considered “reality” growing looser by the second.
They passed a store with a sign that identified it as Peetree’s Hardware Store and Cotton pulled up in front of it and stopped briefly.
“Front door’s closed,” he said. “No cut fingers.”
Stuart was by this time so stunned, had had the breath so totally knocked out of him that he didn’t even ask what Cotton was talking about.
They hadn’t stopped at the handful of houses they’d passed on the way to Persimmon Ridge that were just as old as the Tibbits place, relics nobody’d lived in for years, generations. Cotton had identified them as they passed, though. “That’s the Johnson place,” he had said of a pile of rotted timber that hadn’t been a habitable abode in half a century. Or simply, “The Pruitts.”
When they passed a couple of businesses in Persimmon Ridge that were in the same condition as the Tibbits’s “estate,” Stuart was curious, found it hard to fathom how the businesses in the small town that might not look thriving but were still at least serviceable, could be shoulder to shoulder on the street with dilapidated relics. Why hadn’t the town or the nearby business owners gotten rid of the shacks?
When he asked, Cotton gave him a look that Stuart was beginning to interpret as: “You ready for this?” He wasn’t, but pushed forward.
“Why have they been left standing?”
“Because this time yesterday, or last week or Arbor Day, they weren’t relics. They looked just like the buildings around them. They weren’t … old.”
Now that was insanity.
“They weren’t old? How does a building suddenly get … old? And why?”
“I don’t have any idea, but I’m developing a theory. You seeing Reece out there this morning, vanishing out of the middle of the road, got me thinking.” He pulled into an empty parking space beside a whole street full of empty parking spaces and turned to look at Stuart. “I drove past Reece Tibbits’s house yesterday.” He said the words slowly, reluctantly. “It was … just your basic little three-bedroom clapboard house. Paint was beginning to peel but not bad. Grass needed mowing. It was just like all the others we’ve passed today … nobody was home. But now …”
Stuart suddenly understood.
“Are you telling me that falling-down shack on Cicada Sprin
gs Road was Reece Tibbits’s home? I thought you’d taken me to see where his grandmother was born or something.”
“Yesterday it was … just a house. Today it’s … aged a century. And Reece vanished this morning. I’m wondering … what’s the connection?”
Stuart was still a step behind, trying to wrap his mind around it, that the falling-down ruin he’d seen a little while ago had been a normal house twenty-four hours ago, a place somebody lived. Except, well, nobody did.
He couldn’t see any connection, but he let it go, let it all go, no longer able to contain the biggest question of all, the one that’d been buzzing around in his head since he met Cotton.
“Why didn’t you tell anybody about this, Cotton? Why didn’t you report it to the police? A whole county full of people — how many is that?” Cotton just shrugged, his mind clearly somewhere else. “Okay, a thousand people, let’s say it’s a thousand people, two thousand — and they’re gone. Why didn’t you call the authorities?”
Cotton gave him a look that was almost sad, like he knew what he was about to say was not going to received well.
“I did report it, Stuart. To every state agency I could find and tried to get the federal government involved.”
“And …?”
“And nothing. They didn’t do a thing.”
“Why not?”
Stuart’s mind was spinning.
Cotton said nothing, then held up his finger, the way you do to say, “Wait, I have just one more thing.”
“But before I show you, I want you to do something for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Cotton reached past Stuart and dug around in the glove box of his car, and pulled out a piece of paper — actually, it was the envelope to use to mail in your fine for a parking ticket — and a pen. He handed the paper to Stuart.
Stuart thought about what he’d written on the chalkboard in Charlie’s kitchen, what had happened next, and clenched his teeth, bulging out the muscle in his jaw.
