by Ninie Hammon
“You direct me to your house while Trooper McMichael does some looking around, finds some neighbors who might be able to tell us what happened.”
“There aren’t any neighbors to tell you what happened because whatever it is, it happened to them, too.”
But Cotton sees the disbelief and slumps back in the seat.
“You’ll see. Let your buddy go looking. You’ll see.”
The remainder of the afternoon begins to telescope, like Cotton’s at one end of a dark tunnel, the nightmare dream of running toward a light that remains uniformly out in front of you.
Trooper Tomlinson looks around Cotton’s bare house without comment, just goes out to sit on the porch and wait for his partner. McMichael shows up at Cotton’s house an hour later, tells Tomlinson that he could find nobody. That he went into the town of Persimmon Ridge, a little unincorporated wide-spot-in-the-road, and no one was there, either.
“Houses that weren’t locked, I went inside. Four of them. They were all … empty. Bare. No furniture. Nothing.”
Cotton can see the officers are spooked. Good. They need to be spooked. Spooked is the absolutely appropriate response to what is happening.
Trooper McMichael must have radioed the state police post because a third Kentucky State Police patrol car rolls up in Cotton’s driveway. The officer in it confers with the other officers.
“Mr. Jackson,” says Trooper Tomlinson, “we’re going to do some more investigating but I’ll have to ask you to remain here.” He held up the keys to Cotton’s Chrysler. “I’ll return these when we come back.”
So Cotton stays home, so emotionally wrung out now he is incapable of hysteria. He sits on his porch, trying to figure out what the officers will do, who they will call, what other agencies they will get involved. The three of them have been taking notes on little jot-down pads, to enter into some kind of official reports when they get back to the post, he supposed.
How do you fill out a missing person’s report on a whole county?
By late afternoon, the three officers are again congregated in Cotton’s driveway beside the two patrol vehicles. They’re no longer skeptical, no longer believe he is a candidate for the Kentucky Home for the Bewildered. They get it now. They believe. Clearly, they don’t understand any more about what’s going on than he does, but they are all, finally, singing from the same sheet of music.
“We need to talk to the captain — all three of us together,” Trooper Tomlinson says, and Cotton doesn’t have to ask why. “It’s up to him what happens next.” Tomlinson has become a human being since he first ushered Cotton into the back of his cruiser hours ago. Not just a human being — a scared one.
“We’ll make our reports, and …” His voice trails off. “And then I don’t know what will happen. I’ve … we’ve never seen anything like—”
He lets it go, tells Cotton to expect their return as well as the arrival of who knows what other resources, agencies, what not. Shoot, maybe they’ll send in the National Guard — how much manpower do you need to look for a whole county full of people?
Though by now, Cotton doesn’t think the people are … somewhere, all being held captive by … He has come around to the belief that what happened to them happened all at once to all of them. And there are no explanations of what that could possibly be that don’t involve aliens or psychic phenomena or … he doesn’t know what.
The troopers get in their vehicles and drive away.
And they never come back.
Chapter Fourteen
After Sam Sheridan told Hayley she would not perform an abortion, Hayley went out to her car and bawled. Correction — her father’s car. The Jabberwock had eaten her mother’s car and that had caused a kerfuffle of major proportions.
She’d come up with the only lie she could think of at the time. Not very plausible or believable, but the available evidence was inarguable. She’d just decided to go for a drive, she’d said, wanted to get out of the house, didn’t look where she was going, didn’t intend to leave the county but … bada boom, bada bing, the Jabberwock.
She hadn’t been able to track Sam Sheridan down and ask for her help until now because she’d been grounded, not allowed to go anywhere for two weeks. Everybody in the whole county was already grounded, so that made Hayley doubled-grounded.
How other families were dealing with the incredible impossibility that wrecked all their lives was a mystery to Hayley. She only knew what was going on at her house. Her mother cried almost all the time, and her father had retreated into a sulking, angry silence — a reaction she had never seen in him. She thought she understood. It wasn’t like the Jabberwock was a character out of the Old Testament. One of the prophets, maybe — Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Jabberwock, Isaiah … something like that. Or maybe Jesus had met the Jabberwock beside the Sea of Galilee, and she had missed that part altogether. Truth was, her father was beside himself because he could not fit the reality of the world out there with what he knew about God. Did God cause it? At the very least, he had allowed it. And her father’s beseeching prayers to the contrary, God wasn’t heeding requests to get rid of it, either.
She genuinely pitied her father. How did a man like that fit it all into his head?
Maybe everybody was responding like her father — sulking and angry. She wouldn’t know. She had nobody to ask. She didn’t have any friends. Oh, there were a handful of other teenagers in the youth groups in her father’s various little congregations who’d have claimed Hayley as their friend because being friendly to the fat girl was the Christian thing to do. But they weren’t real friends. When she’d stared gap-jawed at the red line on the pregnancy test indicator, had burst so suddenly and abruptly into tears that she caused a nosebleed, she didn’t have a soul to confide in. Not one girlfriend to call who would commiserate, empathize. In fact, the girls she knew would be genuinely surprised Hayley had gotten pregnant at all because, well, a certain behavior was required to initiate that particular physical outcome, and who’d want to do that with Hayley Norman?
Hayley sat in the parking lot of the Dollar General Store, where she’d parked so nobody would see the car at the veterinary clinic that people knew had been transformed into a people clinic. If somebody saw her car there and told her father, what would she do?
Now that seemed like a pitiful consideration, cast into shadow by the bigger reality that Sam Sheridan would not help. Sam had said no, she wouldn’t get rid of the baby—
Hayley stopped breathing. Froze in place like an ice sculpture.
The baby.
She’d never said that before, never thought that thought before. Maybe it was because Sam refused to call the abortion “getting rid of tissue.”
No, that wasn’t why. She’d called it a baby for another reason that had been growing inside her as surely as the … the baby. The realization that she was carrying a baby, a human being. A little girl or a little boy that was much more than a mass of tissues to be scraped out of her uterus. Hayley had somebody’s life in her hands, and it looked like she wasn’t going to be able to … to kill it.
She was so staggered by her own thoughts it was like somebody had slapped her in the face. Kill it? Like getting an abortion was killing something. No, someone.
But it was. And once the blinders of abject terror fell off Hayley’s eyes she knew that, had known it all along but wouldn’t admit it.
She had come to it, the end of all things, sitting in the parking lot of the Dollar General Store that still smelled, would likely always smell, just a little like puke.
No more options. She couldn’t get an abortion. Which meant that she couldn’t get un-pregnant.
She would have to … have the baby.
Waves of terror-nausea washed over her.
She would have to tell her parents. Her father. Admit that she had …
He would ground her for the rest of her life. At that thought she bleated out a burst of laughter that wasn’t appropriate to her current circumstances and y
et …
Ground her for the rest of her life? She was pregnant, was going to have a baby. Not being allowed to go to the movies — which she couldn’t now anyway — or out riding around with friends — who had never really wanted her along with them in the first place — seemed a paltry punishment.
But one other implication of “grounded for the rest of her life” that she now had to consider was the fact that if she couldn’t leave the house, she couldn’t see Sugar Bear.
Sugar Bear.
He’d wanted her to get an abortion because that was the only way they could keep seeing each other.
Not only would she have to tell her father, she would have to tell Sugar Bear. He had responded with something like terror when she’d told him she was pregnant. He’d almost seemed more afraid than she was. When he’d recovered his composure, he’d told her that he was afraid he’d never be able to see her again and he couldn’t stand that thought. He’d said she had to get an abortion, offered no other alternative. Now that she couldn’t … what would he do?
And when her father demanded to know who was the father of the baby, as he surely would do, what could she say? She couldn’t admit it was … Sugar Bear. The nuclear explosion that would cause would lay waste to her whole family … and Sugar Bear’s. It was absolutely unthinkable. She would simply have to refuse to identify the father.
Refuse.
Hayley had never, not once in her sixteen years, displayed outright defiance to her father’s wishes. She had done all manner of things he had told her not to do, of course, not the least of which was having sex! But she had never looked the man in the eye and refused to do what he wanted.
How could she …?
How could she tell Sugar Bear, and she would have to tell him before she told her parents. Once she told her parents, her life as she had known it was over. She would never have another chance to see Sugar Bear.
Yeah, with her rolls of belly fat beneath a wardrobe of oversized tee-shirts for disguise, it would be easier for her to hide a pregnancy than for girls like Megan Callison, who reminded Hayley of the scrawny chickens Megan’s mother’d been hauling in the back of her pickup when she rode the Jabberwock on J-Day. Or skinny-minny Chastity Manning, whose father owned Foodtown. Chastity. Right. She was a backseat warrior — had flat-backed there with every boy in a three-county area. But eventually, there would be no hiding Hayley’s pregnancy and if her father figured it out before she had a chance to tell him …
She’d call Sugar Bear as soon as she got home. She could meet him tonight because her parents were going to some kind of county meeting at West Liberty Middle School in the Ridge and wouldn’t be home. Since the Jabberwock, he was a lot easier to reach, no longer feared that his wife might answer the phone when Hayley called. He had told her the day he had given her the envelope full of money that his wife was suspicious, had been “snooping around” — whatever that meant — was asking questions, putting him on the spot. But his wife had been out of town on J-Day, so she was no longer a problem.
Sugar Bear had to be first. Then her parents. She’d call Sugar Bear as soon as she got home and tell him they had to talk — tonight while her parents were at that county meeting. When her parents got home from the meeting, she’d tell them.
Tell them what?
She sat very still.
And what would she say to Sugar Bear?
A totally new thought began to form, tiny … like maybe just a few cells.
She’d tell him the truth. Reality. She’d tell him she was going to have a baby … and she intended to keep it.
Chapter Fifteen
“Never came back?” Stuart was incredulous. “How … what …?”
“Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?” Cotton pointed out the back side of the Welcome to NoWherE County sign coming up on their right and directed Stuart to pull over on the side of the road. “Stuart, you are about to find out why they didn’t come back.”
Cotton gestured down the road leading into Beaufort County. “There’s a little convenience store about two miles from here. I want you to drive us there. I’m not going to say anything else. Just drive there and stop, and then … everything will make sense.”
Stuart doubted seriously that there was any sense to be made of any of it, but he did as he was instructed because he didn’t know what else to do. He pulled the red Lexus back onto the road and kept driving.
The Jiffy Shop where Stuart pulled in a few minutes later had propane gas canisters for sale on one side of the front door and bagged ice from a machine for sale on the other. A man came out of the store as Stuart pulled up. Bib overalls, filthy tee-shirt underneath, jaw swollen by a plug of tobacco, barefoot. Barefoot! Surely he and the guy who blew a hole in the road had been extras in the same movie — Deliverance. A sign advertising that Kentucky Lottery tickets were for sale inside proclaimed, “Somebody’s got to win. Might as well be you.”
Stuart felt a little strange, almost like he’d just awakened after a nap, thoughts jumbled, wasn’t sure why he’d stopped — he was thirsty. Yeah, that was it. He’d stopped for a soft drink.
When Stuart came out of the Jiffy Shop with a soft drink, he found an older black man leaning up against the hood of the Lexus. He had no change to give the man and certainly didn’t have time for panhandlers right now. He had to find some other route into Nower County because the road from Lexington had a hole in it the size of a Sherman Tank. And the man who blew the hole … no, not going there.
“Stuart,” the man said.
“How do you know my name?” Stuart asked. And as he examined the old man closer he realized that he didn’t look like a panhandler. But how did he know Stuart’s name?
“I’m Cotton Jackson,” the man said, but didn’t extend his hand as if he were introducing himself.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Jackson?”
The man pointed to Stuart’s shirt pocket. “You can take that piece of paper out of your pocket and read it.”
“What piece of—”
When he patted his pocket there was, indeed, a piece of paper in it. How’d this guy …? Stuart was instantly suspicious.
“Look, I don’t know who you are or what you want, but—”
“Mr. McClintock, you are looking for your wife and your little girl so you’re in a hurry.” Stuart’s shock must have shown on his face.
“How—?”
“Just read what’s on the paper,” the man said. “Read it … and then we’ll talk.”
Stuart took the piece of paper out of his pocket. There were words written on the back of it — a DMV envelop to use for a mail-in parking fine. He looked at the words. They were in his own handwriting, but they made no sense.
“All the houses are empty. There’s nobody here, everyone has vanished,” the first sentence said.
Stuart’s head snapped up and he looked in shocked surprise at the old man, whose expression hadn’t changed.
“I wrote words on a blackboard and then other words appeared beneath them. Then all the words vanished.”
Stuart was so shocked he couldn’t speak. How … why …?
“Mr. McClintock, if you’d just give me a ride …” He pointed in the direction the woman at the register said was Nower County. “It’s not but a couple of miles and you’re going that way anyway. Do that, and I’ll explain how we met each other.”
Stuart was suspicious, wary of getting in the car with this man who obviously was a couple of sandwiches shy of a full picnic. But he didn’t look … dangerous.
“I’m not armed,” the man said, as if he’d read Stuart’s mind. He lifted his jacket out to show pockets, turned so Stuart could see he had nothing concealed down the back of his pants. “You’re a great big football player and I’m a wimpy old man. What harm can it do?”
Stuart was consumed with curiosity, and totally confused, so he gestured to the passenger side door.
“Get in. It’ll be interesting to hear what you have to say.”
; “You have no idea how interesting."
A few minutes later, Stuart pointed at the Welcome to Nower County sign just up ahead.
“My wife told me about that, how teenagers added the H and the E and nobody changed it because it seemed to fit.”
“Charlie told you,” the man said as they passed the sign.
“Yeah, Charlie. How do you know …?”
And then Stuart knew.
It was all there, everything that had been … gone.
What in the world …?
He was suddenly terrified, as terrified as he’d been when the Tibbits guy blew up the road. And then vanished. As terrified as he’d been in Charlie’s kitchen watching words disappear off a blackboard – his words and hers, too. They were her words! Weren't they?
“You best pull over, son,” Cotton said, and he could see from the concern on the man’s face that he had registered Stuart’s emotional state.
Stuart managed to pilot the car onto the shoulder of the road. Then he leapt out of it, put his hands on his knees and vomited violently into the dirt. The nausea had hammered him without warning, a horrifying clenching in his gut that wouldn’t let up until he had emptied out all the contents. And even then, he continued to reflexively dry-heave.
When it was finally over, he staggered back against the car, gasping for breath.
“You might feel better if you get back in and close the door,” Cotton said from the front seat. “Smelling that won’t do anything for your stomach and it’s sure not doing anything for mine.”
Stuart got into the car, closed the door, put the car in gear and drove fifty or sixty feet before stopping again. Then sat for a few minutes, panting.
“You knew this would happen. That was what the note was about.”
“I didn’t know that this specifically would happen, that you’d even forget who I was, that you’d get sick, but I knew something like it would, pieced it together.”
