Nowhere USA: The Complete Series: A Psychological Thriller series (Nowhere, USA)

by Ninie Hammon

  “Get away from me!” Abby snarled, coughing blood, her voice ragged.

  “I’m sor—”

  “Don’t you touch me, you witch.” Her words were garbled because she was forcing sound through vocal cords while her esophagus was responding to a greater imperative to vomit. “You brung it down on us—”

  She couldn’t finish then, her throat clogged with vomit and blood and she lowered her head and spewed it on the ground. Charlie backed away, reading a look of sympathy in Sam’s eyes.

  A hand on her shoulder patted kindly and she turned to see the benevolent wrinkled face of Pete Rutherford.

  “Ain’t no thang, sugar,” he said, his accent comforting in a way she didn’t bother to pick at. “It’s just the Jabberwock.”

  Right. Everything that was wrong with her whole world and with the lives of everyone for twenty-five miles in every direction lay at the feet of the impossible phenomena of the Jabberwock.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It got dark, but still people came. Willingly or otherwise, they came.

  Charlie had felt fatigue settling around her like a shroud for the past hour or so, a kind of tired unlike any she’d ever felt before. Maybe part of it an aftermath of the Jabberwock, because she still felt “off’ somehow, had ever since she’d sat on the bench of the bus shelter at nine o’clock this morning. Correction, yesterday morning. It was long past midnight now.

  Yesterday morning had been a lifetime ago.

  Not a metaphorical description of the passage of time.

  Literal.

  It really had been a lifetime ago, and once she had the chance to consider all the ramifications of that, she would likely go nuttier than a squirrel turd. Squirrel turd? Where did that come from? The acclaimed children’s author C.R.R. Underhill would never have thought a thing like … just let it go.

  She was just beginning to consider “what now?” What do you do after a day like this? Tell the gang how much fun you’ve had and let’s do this again sometime real soon, and collect her daughter and go …

  Yeah. Go … how? In truth, her mother’s house wasn’t very far away. Maybe a couple of miles as the crow flies, up over Little Bear Mountain and down the other side. The house was snuggled up against the mountain so tight there was hardly any room for a backyard. But Barber’s Mill Road was like all the other small roads in the county, it meandered through the hollows and around the mountains. It went west from her house around the base of Little Bear and connected with Danville Pike a couple of miles west of the Middle of Nowhere.

  And she no longer had a car. No, actually, she did have a car — her mother’s that was parked in the driveway where Merrie had tripped over the downed tree limb. A 1991 Honda Legend. Ever-practical Mama.

  What Charlie didn’t have anymore was the rental car. The 1995 Chrysler Cirrus she had rented at the Lexington Airport. Well, right now it didn’t seem likely she was going to be returning the car by the deadline. She’d have to pay a late charge. Bummer.

  “Maybe it’s time you went home,” said a voice from behind her and she turned to see Sam surveying the ruins around them. Sam had already dispatched Pete, telling him several hours ago to leave if he “wanted to live until Christmas,” which was obviously some kind of private joke.

  “You got a little girl to put to bed.”

  Merrie McClintock was very likely the only human being in the whole of Nowhere County who’d had a great day. The receptionist in E.J.’s clinic claimed the child as her “assistant,” and Merrie had spent the day with the animals. She’d played with the kittens and the puppies, helped feed the Labrador retriever who’d stayed the night after having an infected toe surgically removed. And with Mrs. Throckmorton, who had brought her cat into the clinic while Sam was still sitting in the waiting room there. The cat, whose name was Mittens, had been scheduled to have hairball surgery this afternoon, but that didn’t happen. Mrs. Throckmorton had stayed on at the clinic, becoming Merrie’s new best friend as the they hung out together. Every time Charlie went to check on her, Raylynn Bennett and Mrs. Throckmorton had waved her away with “she’s fine.” Every time Merrie saw her mother, she’d looked stricken, fearing that Charlie intended to take her away from her private menagerie.

  But as evening turned to night, even the little powerhouse ran out of gas. Raylynn had settled her with a blanket and a couple of kittens on the wide bench in the reception area and she’d gone to sleep in seconds.

  “What about you?”

  “Do I have a little girl to put to bed? No. Or if I do, I don’t remember where I left her.”

  “I mean what about you going home. You’re bound to be more tired than I am.”

  Malachi stepped up as they were talking.

  “Sounds like we’re playing ‘Can you top this,’” he said. “If we are, I’m here to report that I think I had the gold medal winner from the Olympic projectile vomiting team. That guy could—”

  He must have seen the looks on their faces and faltered.

  “I’m sorry.” He sounded very tired indeed then. “Black humor. It’s a way of coping. And …” There was the suggestion, just the suggestion of a smile then. “If my actions at the bus shelter this morning, defending the bench against all enemies both foreign and domestic, is any indication, I’m no expert when it comes to coping skills.”

  Sam did smile; it was wan, but it was genuine. “I’ll be glad to run you home. Rusty’s at a friend’s house and he’s spending the night.”

  Rusty must be Sam’s little boy. Charlie didn’t even know Sam had one, and a husband, too, maybe, for that matter. There hadn’t been a whole lot of time for idle chit-chat.

  Harry Tungate approached, worry etched in his face alongside the fatigue.

  “Anybody seen Abby?” They shook their heads. “She’s gone, and dollars to doughnuts she got somebody to take her to the county line.”

  Sam looked stricken. “She can’t! She was so sick. We have to …”

  “No telling who she caught a ride with,” said Malachi.

  Sam turned to Charlie.

  “I need to get you and Merrie home and get back here. Abby’s not going to be in good shape when she shows up.”

  Sam waited with Malachi outside E.J.’s office door while Charlie went in to get Merrie. Just standing there with him, not saying anything, should have been awkward, but they were both too tired and wrung out for awkward. They’d battled the Jabberwock today and the dragon took no prisoners.

  In the lights the fire department had set up in the parking lot, they could see that the number of people showing up had finally dwindled to a trickle, either because it was so late or because word had spread that riding the Jabberwock was not like riding a rollercoaster, even if the resultant puking your guts up afterward was a similar effect.

  “What is the Jabberwock, Malachi?” Sam said, and instantly hated the pathetic, little-girl quality in her voice. She hadn’t planned to say anything.

  “I think the general consensus is some kind of bizarre meteorological phenomena blown in by the storm last night.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “No.”

  That surprised her.

  “You don’t? Then what do you think?” He didn’t reply, just looked out past her at the parking lot. “Is it going to go away, vanish just like it appeared?”

  He looked at her then, really looked at her for maybe the first time all day. The scrutiny brought instant color to her cheeks that the darkness blessedly covered.

  “You’re scared, aren’t you?”

  She hadn’t been expecting the question.

  “Shows, huh?”

  He put his hand on her arm, a companionable gesture.

  “Look around. If you’re not scared right now, you are definitely not paying attention.”

  “I think—” Sam began, but the door opened and Charlie appeared, carrying a sleeping Merrie, so she stopped talking.

  “Don’t worry about waking her up,” Charlie said.
“We could drag her behind the car all the way home and it wouldn’t wake her up. And that’s on a day when she actually got to take two naps, which she didn’t today. She could sleep through a nuclear attack.”

  Charlie turned to Malachi.

  “E.J.’s looking for you to give you a key to the building, doesn’t want to lock away your rifle.”

  Malachi had set his rifle inside E.J.’s reception area, behind the front door, when the group was loading up for the trip to the county line where Sam’d gotten her own ride on the Jabberwock.

  The three just stood there then. Not knowing what to say and too tired to say it if they’d known. “Tomorrow …” Charlie began, and then fell silent.

  “… will bring whatever it brings,” Malachi said. “We’ll deal with it.”

  “I have a car … Mom’s car. The car the Jabberwock ate was a rental. I’ll come back in the morning if …”

  Again the words died, but they were unnecessary. If the world righted itself, the three of them might not see each other at all tomorrow … or ever again, for that matter. They’d just pick up where they’d left off and go on with their lives.

  If it didn’t … they’d all three be back.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Abby lay in the darkness, curled in a ball, in pain everywhere but nowhere in particular. It hadn’t worked, the last attempt to leave, to get past the county line. Buddy and Mary Jo Cawdrey had brung her out. They lived up in the holler behind her granny’s house and they was good folks and they’d been glad to give her a ride. Didn’t neither one of them get there by way of the Jabberwock, so they wasn’t sick, and Abby said she’s just going out to the line to meet Ralph, her older brother, who was gonna pick her up there.

  It hadn’t been a very convincing lie but they never asked how come he was fetching her way out there, and it didn’t matter if she’d talked them into it or no. If they hadn’t took her, somebody else would have. She’d a walked if she’d had to. She’d a crawled.

  The Cawdreys was smoking weed — offered her some, but she said no, that she was nursing. Or should have been.

  While Buddy and Mary Jo giggled in the front seat of their little Chevy Chevette, Abby sat in the backseat readin’ what she’d wrote up in that little notepad she always carried in her hip pocket. Her promises to God. Wasn’t strictly true that she was readin’ it, not with her eyes, anyway. Her pants had got wet, had blood and vomit on them, and she’d changed into Dollar Store hospital scrubs hours ago. But when she’d tried to pull that notebook outa her wet jeans, it’d come apart in her hand. Didn’t matter. She didn’t need them pieces of paper. She could read it with her memory and with her heart. She had ever word memorized.

  They all started the same way: “God, if you’ll let my baby live, I’ll …” And the biggest one of all, the most important one was she’d swore she’d take good care of Cody, that she wouldn’t never let no harm come to him. Now he was lyin’ in a bassinet in a hospital up Lexington, crying, hungry, and she wasn’t there to do for him like she’d swore she would be.

  She was here, behind the bus shelter, lying in the dark, hurting everywhere, but she was glad of it. She understood that she’d had to go back through that third time so the Jabberwock could talk to her, whisper in her ear.

  Hadn’t nobody seen her yet, lying all scrunched up in the shadows. They’d set up lights so bright they blinded you so you couldn’t see what was in the dark. She lay there listening to that Ryan woman, that witch, talk about her little girl.

  The other reason hadn’t nobody noticed her all curled up there was because she was quiet, she wasn’t moanin’ or screamin’ or cryin’ or puking and the like. And she knew why that was, too, why she wasn’t sick. She understood everything because the Jabberwock had explained it all to her.

  Somewhere in her registered a needle point of pain in the center of her skull that if she’d let herself notice it, it would have hurt so bad she’d a died right there from the hurt of it. Some other part registered that her joints hurt, her elbows and hips and knees. Ached like that time she’d sprained her ankle and it’d swole up big as a cantaloupe. Every one of her joints felt like that now, but she didn’t let herself know those things, because she’d been given a gift and if she let herself know about how her body was hurting, she couldn’t do what she had to do.

  She was curled up in a fetal position because that’s the way her arms and legs was bent when she come back and she didn’t have the strength yet to uncurl herself.

  Her face felt funny, numb kind of, and she couldn’t see good out her left eye. Her nose was bleedin’. Her left ear was bleeding, too. Dripping off her face and down her neck to stain the Mickey Mouse scrubs she’d changed into after she puked on what she’d been wearing. Them scrubs was wet between her legs, too. She was bleeding … there, where Cody’d come out. She’d quit bleeding there while he was still in the intensive care unit and hadn’t got her period since. They said it was ‘cause she was nursing … well, pumping. The bleedin’ there now didn’t have nothing to do with her period, though. But it wasn’t no thang.

  Didn’t nothin’ matter except what the Jabberwock itself had said, a monster with eyes of flames, terrible-er than any nightmare. She liked to a died just being up close, it stinkin’ like a rotting corpse, so close she could hear it whispering to itself, all them screechy voices that tore up her insides and made her ears bleed with the sound of silent screaming.

  Mostly, it talked in that monster language Fish’d used in the backseat of the van — slighy toves that gyred and gimbled in the wabe — like that. ‘Bout horror creatures — a Jubjub bird and a mome rath.

  That’s why Fish knew its name, because Fish was one of them, a bandersnatch, maybe. He’d knowed what was going on all along, but didn’t matter now because she’d heard the Jabberwock say the witch from out there on the flat was why it was here. Said it’d been waiting for her, wanting her to come and play, her and the others.

  And it’d stay here ‘til she paid some attention to it. Like a dog waiting for a treat. A day, a week, a month.

  But Abby’s Cody wasn’t gonna wait no week for his mommy to come get him!

  Then Abby’d membered what Fish had said, about cutting the Jabberwock’s head off with that sword. That vorpal sword.

  That woman bein’ a witch and all, you know she had a sword. All them magical creatures had swords and staffs and capes and the like. And soon’s Abby figured that part out, she knew what to do. Abby would make that witch woman kill the Jabberwock with that sword. She would hurt that woman and that little girl of hers if she refused. She’d kill that child, if she had to. That mother didn’t deserve no child when she was keeping Abby from hers.

  Abby promised in her heart to make the witch slay the monster with flaming eyes — or die in the tryin’ of it.

  “Look over here,” someone said, and she knew they’d seen her. Maybe they’d help her up, help her uncurl her arms and legs. She didn’t care if they had to break her arms to get them free, she had to stand up. She had to walk. She had to hurry. She had a long way to go and her baby boy was hungry.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  When Sam pulled back into the Dollar General Store parking lot after she took Charlie home, she saw Malachi deep in conversation with Thelma Jackson and some man she couldn’t place. He was one of the Tungate boys from Solomon Hollow, she thought, had been one of the few folks who’d shown up out of curiosity, then stayed on to help out. Then Malachi turned and went into E.J.’s office.

  Thelma hit her with the news as she was getting out of her car.

  “Abby came back through.”

  And she was dead, that’s what Sam thought. She’d got so sick she … she’d bled to death … internal bleeding or …

  “Where is she?”

  “We don’t know,” said the Tungate who ran the butcher shop in Foodtown … Roscoe. “She was here and then she wasn’t.”

  “You mean she came back through the Jabberwock and then got up and wa
lked away?” Sam was incredulous.

  “I don’t know about the walking part,” Roscoe said. “Shape she was in, I’d have been stunned to see her stand up. But she musta because she ain’t here.”

  “Tell me what—”

  “About an hour ago, I seen her laying on the ground behind the bus shelter, all doubled up in a ball, looked like a pill bug. I don’t know how long she’d been a laying there, just a little thing curled up in the shadow not making a sound. Malachi was busy helping Liam load that Bennett fella into a car. That man weighs three hundred if he weighs an ounce, so Liam went along with his wife to help her get him up the front porch steps. I went to see could I help Abby but she didn’t want no help, just held up her hand, wanted me to pull her up.”

  Roscoe took a breath.

  “Course she was a mess, maybe had a stroke or something. Her mouth was kind of droopy on the left side and her eyelid was hanging down like. But wasn’t like she was paralyzed or nothing. She could move. Slow. But most everybody here’s been slow at first, comin’ back from it.”

  Thelma tired of the snail’s-pace progress of the story.

  “She stood up, said she needed to go home and would we find somebody to take her. But there was nobody here who’d have been willing take that girl home and just leave her there all by herself in the shape she was in.”

  “She was bleeding bad,” Roscoe put in. “Not bad like she was gonna bleed to death or nothin’. Just bad because it was comin’ outa … lotsa places. Her nose and her ears. Even her eyes. And … other places. She needed a doctor, or you — somebody to see to her.”

  Malachi came out of E.J.’s office and strode with purpose toward them. Something about his body language spelled trouble.

  “She’s not there,” he said.

  “She wanted to go into E.J.’s office to go to the bathroom,” Thelma said, “so she went in and she never came back out.”