On the other side of the field, they find the shadow of a young person. He’s standing on the side of the road. Jay opens the back door and the kid gets in. Like Jay said, he’s mumbling something under his breath.
Stan turns the car around, and they head back the way they came. At first, everyone is silent, except for the new passenger, Jeff Limerod. He mumbles louder and louder. Jacob thinks that he is trying to be heard over the Nova’s engine.
“What’s he saying?” Stan asks.
“I don’t know for sure,” Jay answers. “All I can make out is redemption and Nescata.”
Stan makes the first turn. Then he leans an ear toward the backseat. Jacob wants to tell him to keep his eyes on the road, but he knows he can’t. Jeff Limerod continues to mumble, but now it sounds more like he is chanting. Jacob can also make out “redemption” and “Nescata,” but he doesn’t really care. He is too interested in what lies ahead.
The last time Jeff Limerod says the words, they are loud and clear. He screams, “The day of redemption draws near, Nescata!”
Stan laughs lightly as he turns back around. But he’s too late. Up ahead, there are two men in front of a pickup truck parked in the middle of the road. They jump up and down and wave their arms.
Jacob hears the girl gasp. He sees Stan jerk the wheel to the left. Jacob jumps from the car. He braces himself to hit the ground. But he does not hit the ground at all. Instead, he’s left standing. He opens his eyes on time to see the Nova fly into the ditch.
Lights seem to go everywhere when the car flips. There is the sound of metal ripping through metal and Jacob thinks the car has hit a barbwire fence. The lights on the car go out.
The two people who had been in front of the truck now move toward the crash. Jacob follows. He stops before he gets there. It’s only shadows that he sees now. But he can see that the car is upside down. He hears their voices.
“Somebody’s moving in the back!”
“Pull them out!”
The two men remove one of the people from the backseat. The person moans loudly, then he says, “Get the girl. Get my girlfriend out.”
The two men take Jay away from the car and then go back. Next, they pull out the girl, who screams. She gets to her feet and pulls away from them. She runs toward where Jacob is standing and past him. The men run after her. Jacob moves toward the car. He thinks he can hear somebody inside. When he gets beside the car, he hears Jeff Limerod clearly.
“Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Jacob looks in the front seat first. Stan is in the windshield. He’s not moving. In the back, Jeff Limerod chants, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Only Limerod’s upper body is visible. His legs seem to be caught under the backseat, and he is hanging upside down. His arms are scrabbling madly around his stomach. With one hand, he pulls a small object above him. With the other, he holds up a lighter. Jacob starts to move but is too late.
There is a loud ringing in his ears. Flames suddenly surround him. But they do not burn, and he is not thrown by the blast. He moves out of the flames and sees that the Nova is engulfed.
“Fuck!” one of the men screams as they come running toward the fire.
“Help the kid!” the other screams.
Jacob looks down the road, where Jay is trying frantically to crawl on his arms away from the fire. The men get to him and pull him further away.
When Jacob turns back to the car he sees yet another man. He’s tall, dressed in white, and completely bald. He’s standing at the edge of the flame. Like Jacob, he's not burned.
Jacob turns back to the road, where Jay and the men who pulled him away from the fire stare at the mess with dazed looks on their faces. But they are not looking at the man in white.
Jacob turns back to the fire. The man in white looks at him and smiles. “I come to take away,” the man says.
#
Jacob came to in the daylight, the anticipation gone again. He was still in his car, and he was still at the side of the road. He sat for a few minutes and wondered if he had gone crazy.
“I don’t know,” he finally said.
He turned the key, and his Escort started right up. He moved toward his parents’ home. Driving down that road, he still felt calm, which was something he didn’t understand. He thought the things he had seen were horrid, especially the man in white that nobody else could see and who seemed to be the only one that could see Jacob. Yet the memories of these things circled in his head without bringing emotion.
#
“Hey big brother, come out here and talk to me,” Jacob heard and came to. He had lain down in his old room when he got back. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep but did anyway. A dream had come, but he couldn’t remember it completely. All he could remember was sitting at a desk in his old high school.
He sat up on the side of the bed. His head spun with drowsiness as he made his way to the door. Tyla was waiting at the dining room table. There was a steaming cup of coffee sitting in front of the chair cattycorner to her.
“Tyla, you’re God-sent.”
She laughed. “No, I just know you’re not worth a damn until you’ve had caffeine.”
Jacob sat down and took a sip of the coffee. The spinning began to slip away, like water down a drain.
“So how long you here for, Jake?”
“Oh, I imagine I’ll be here until late next week.”
“Good! I know a lot of people have been asking about you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You called anyone yet?”
“No. Not yet.”
Tyla smiled. “Same old Jake.”
Jacob shrugged and went back to the coffee.
“Ted Westphal came into the club the other day. I told him you were going to be in town. He’s all excited now. He said Adam Masters was going to be around too and that he’s thinking about putting together a poker game.”
Jacob tried to look excited, but knew his look wasn’t convincing.
Tyla laughed and shook her head. “Anyway, how’s law school coming along?”
“Well, it’s coming. I haven’t flunked anything yet.”
“Do you like it?”
“As much as it can be liked, I guess.”
“Well, at least it got you away from this God-forsaken place.”
She was looking away from him now, and her gaze was spacey.
“Yeah, I guess Nescata had a rough year,” Jacob said.
“Rough year is an understatement. There were so many damn funerals.”
Jacob shook his head. “It seems like every time Mom called me, she was telling me that somebody else had died.”
Tyla didn’t respond. She just kept staring.
“How are you doing?” Jacob asked.
“Oh. I’m okay. It’s just sad. That’s all.” Tears came to her eyes.
“Were you close to any of them?” Jacob asked.
“No. Not especially. None of them were really my age.”
“I guess not.”
“I knew Todd and Gary through you. And I partied with Stan.”
Jacob sat up in his chair. “When did you party with Stan?”
Tyla didn’t seem to notice his excitement. “Oh, just a few times. It was the year before he graduated. I guess I would have been a freshman. He was such a nice guy.” The tears had started down her face by now, but she smiled anyway. “Boy did he ever like to talk about you. You would have thought you were his idol or something.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. You know how people are always telling you the same story over and over when they’re drunk.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we would all be out at the shale pit. He would always come over and talk to me. He would tell me about how when you were a senior you brought him and a bunch of other younger kids out there.”
Jacob almost spilled his coffee when the memory hit.
“He said you were the only one of the older kids to ever do anything like that.”
J
acob got up and moved away from the table. “No way,” he said under his breath.
“What?”
He looked back at Tyla, who now looked confused as well as sad.
“Tyla, I don’t think I was that nice to those kids. I only took them out there once.”
Tyla shrugged.
“I mean. I just don’t want to take too much credit, that’s all. I was just as much of a bastard as any of the other older kids.”
“Okay.” Now she looked away.
Jacob was glad when the phone rang.
Chapter 3
It was dark by the time Jacob arrived at his old friend’s apartment that Friday night. He was the first one there.
“Hey Jake, come on in,” Ted said as he moved to the side.
Jacob walked by Ted and straight to the living room. He stood there for a moment, checking out the place.
“Have a seat, bud. We need to catch up a bit.”
Jacob sat down at the front of a recliner. Ted sat back on an adjacent couch.
“I see you found the place okay.”
Jacob nodded and glimpsed over at Ted. “It wasn’t too hard.”
“Yeah. You really just got to look for the planes when you get close to the city.”
Right after Ted said that, there was the sound of a plane overhead.
“I bet that bothers you when you’re trying to sleep.”
“No, not really. I’ve been around planes for so long now, I don’t think I could sleep unless I heard them.”
“Makes sense.”
“Yeah.”
They were silent for almost a minute. Jacob pretended to be interested in a Seinfeld rerun on the television.
“I don’t know who all’s going to be here,” Ted finally said. “Everyone I invited either lives in or is home visiting Nescata. And that’s about a hour and a half away.”
“Adam will be here, I’m sure.”
“I hope so. He was always good to keep things lively.”
Jacob nodded and continued his feigned interest in the show.
A few minutes later, Ted asked, “So how’s law school?”
“Oh, I guess it’s all right.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Well yeah. Why?”
Ted laughed. “You need beer in you.”
He left, and when he returned he was carrying two open Coronas. He sat one down beside Jacob. “There are plenty more in the fridge. And there’s some Bloody Mary mix and Vodka too. Help yourself.”
Ted left him alone for a little while. It only took Jacob a few minutes to down the first beer. Then he was shocked by how much he could feel it and how good it felt already. He got up immediately and made his way to the kitchen. He took a plastic cup from the cupboard, and then got the Vodka. Standing there, he took two quick shots. Then he mixed himself a strong Bloody Mary.
He went back into the living room and sat down. Ted looked over at him and smiled but didn’t say anything. A few minutes later, Jacob was halfway through the drink. He laughed.
“Wow! We’re sitting in your living room drinking Coronas and Bloody Marys. Doesn’t seem like so long ago we were sneaking around to get beer. And we didn’t even know what a Bloody Mary was.”
Ted laughed. “Yeah. Those were the days.”
Jacob turned in the chair. “You remember the times we had with Shane Tantenmore?”
Ted looked at Jacob and smiled. He quickly downed what was in his bottle. He got up and went for the kitchen, talking as he moved. “Yeah. Those times were nuts.”
Ted returned with two more open beers. He gave one to Jacob and took the other back to the couch.
Jacob turned back toward Ted. “There was that one time. We had just got back from that track meet and met up with him.”
“I remember that well. Shane had stolen those two joints from his dad. We all went up in the old grain elevator to smoke them.”
“Damn, Ted. I don’t think I’ve ever been as stoned as I was on that day.”
Jacob remembered the sensation of being pulled forward, and he remembered how afraid he had been. It was nothing like the buzz forming inside him now—warm and loose.
“Me neither. I still think they were laced.”
“Might have been, knowing Shane.”
“Yeah, he was a fuck-up. But you got to give him one thing, Jacob. If it hadn’t been for him guiding us, I don’t know how we would have gotten out of that damn elevator. We’d probably walked around in the dark until one or both of us found a hole in the floor to fall through.”
“I know what you mean, Ted. Shane was always like that. He wasn’t worth a damn when we were all straight. But when we were stoned, he was our fearless leader.”
“Exactly.” Ted twisted his lips into a half smile and sighed a little.
“It’s too bad what happened to Shane,” Jacob said. “You two were still kind of friends weren’t you?”
“Not really. He stopped over here a few times, but we never went out.”
“Did it bother you when it happened?”
“Ahh, no. He probably would have died soon anyway, the way he was living.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah, he was getting into some pretty heavy shit.”
Jacob wanted to find out more about that, but there was a knock on the door and Ted was up.
“Adam Masters, how the heck are you?”
Adam ducked down and picked up the taller Ted. He carried him a few steps and then put him down. “Form tackle baby! Just like we used to do it!”
Adam extended his hand and Ted took it.
“Why do you want to tackle me? I’m on the same team.”
“I’m not sure. I’d have to see the ring.”
Ted stuck out his left hand. “Right there where it should be.”
Adam stuck out his hand so that the two rings were side by side. They both smiled contently. Adam turned to Jacob.
“And is this linebacker of the state champion Nescata Pride, Jacob Sims?”
Jacob stood up. “How’s it going, Adam?”
Adam moved over and picked him up. “Jacob! Long time no see, baby.” He put Jacob back on his feet and then extended his left hand. “What? No ring?”
Jacob smiled and then lied. “Hey, I don’t want to get it scratched up.” As he said this, he remembered standing on a bridge in Connecticut and throwing it into the water.
“And to think, Jacob, I brought somebody for you to see.”
Jacob turned his head to the door right on time to see her walk in. They made eye contact. She smiled, and he looked away.
“Well, if it ain’t Sonnie Ledbetter,” Ted said.
“Hi, Teddie.”
Jacob looked at her as her attention went to Ted. He thought she hadn’t changed much since high school. She had filled out a little more, but she was still petite, and she still had the same straight blonde hair.
“I found her at the bar,” Adam said.
Sonnie laughed and looked toward Jacob again. This time he was able to look back at her but only for a moment. Then he reached down for his beer.
“So you’re in the family business now,” Ted said to Sonnie.
“Yeah. Dad’s been sick a lot lately. So I’ve been doing a lot of the bartending.”
“Sounds good,” Ted said. “But I’ll be tending the bar tonight. We got beer and Bloody Marys. What will it be?”
“Beer,” Adam said.
“Me too,” Sonnie said.
Adam looked around. “Nice place you got here. They must pay air traffic controllers well.” Adam walked into the dining area and sat down at the card table. “Ahh. The battle ground.”
Jacob followed him and Sonnie followed Jacob. Jacob sat diagonally from Adam and Sonnie diagonally from Jacob.
“I hear you’re in law school now, Jacob,” Sonnie said.
“Yeah. I started last fall.”
“Oh.”
Ted came back from the kitchen and placed three open beers in front of his t
hree guests. Jacob noticed that the beer he already had was near gone and tried to remember how much he had drank already. He wondered if he would end up in the bathroom soon.
Ted sat down and asked, “So how much longer before you’re out of school, Adam?”
“I put my papers in last week.”
“For your masters.”
“No.”
Ted looked shocked. “Not for your Ph.D. We’ve only been out six years. And that should take at least eight.”
“I’m in a hurry. But that’s enough on school for tonight. Right, Jacob.”
“Yeah.”
Adam took the stack of cards from the center of the table. He shuffled them several times. “I hope everyone brought a lot of money.”
Both Sonnie and Jacob pulled handfuls of coins from their pockets. Ted got up again and walked into the kitchen. He brought back a jar full of change. Adam laughed and brought out his own. Everyone pushed a nickel to the center of the table.
“All right,” Adam said. “Playing for chump change. The game is four-card draw, Jacks are wild.” He dealt everyone five cards.
“Ouch!” Ted said, looking over his hand.
“There’s a good poker face,” Adam said. “How many new cards would you like, Ted?”
“I’ll take four.”
Adam flipped four cards to Ted. “Sonnie?
“I’ll have what he’s having.”
Adam laughed and then gave her four new cards.
“Jacob?”
“Four.”
Adam gave Jacob his cards, then said, “You guys are not going to believe this, but the dealer is going to take four.”
Sonnie laughed lightly and then started coughing. “Sorry. I choked on my drink,” she said, coughing between the words.
Jacob went to comfort her, but Ted beat him to it. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Just give me a second.”
“It’s all right, my dear,” Adam said. “Four bad hands is nothing to get that choked up over.”
Sonnie seemed to have it under control now. “It’s not that. It’s just that you called yourself the dealer.”
Adam laughed. “Well, I am what I am.”
Jacob watched as Sonnie looked at all the faces around the table.
Ted left for a minute and came back with a box of tissues. “Here you go. You coughed so hard it made your eyes water.”
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 49
