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

by Ninie Hammon

  It wasn’t until E.J. was resting comfortably again that Sam’s hands began to shake. Malachi noticed, but said nothing. Just stepped quietly up to her and put his arm around her shoulders. She wanted so badly to turn into his embrace, throw her arms around him and burst into tears. She didn’t, couldn’t. If she let go of her grip on her emotions, relaxed, she would totally fall apart. And right now, as pitiful and ineffectual as she was, she was still the only person in the whole county with any medical training at all. E.J. needed her to hold it together.

  “I’ve done … everything I can,” she said, and was surprised that her voice wasn’t shaking in rhythm with her hands. “Let’s let him rest.”

  The puppy feeding was complete so Rusty and Merrie went out into the waiting room with Merrie pleading, “Again, again! Read it again,” clutching her battered copy of Where the Wild Things Are to her chest. Raylynn took up the post at E.J.’s bedside.

  “He’s alright now, isn’t he?” she asked. “The seizure didn’t hurt him, I mean — did it?”

  The concern on her face, the fear in her voice, wasn’t lost on Sam and she could see the others picked up on it, too. If they hadn’t already figured it out, they knew now how the teenage girl felt about E.J.

  “The seizure did no damage,” Sam said, delicately tiptoeing around saying “he’s fine” because he wasn’t.

  “Can we …?” Malachi had been standing by the door, unnoticed. “I think we still have things to talk about.”

  Sam nodded. Charlie met their eyes. “Give me a minute to take Merrie to the bathroom or she’ll sit listening to Rusty read the story until she pees her pants.”

  Sam and Malachi went together into the breakroom, and Sam dutifully began to make coffee — mostly so she could keep her back turned to Malachi.

  “I was watching you with E.J. We’re all lucky to have you here.”

  She flat out could not do that.

  With her back still turned to him, she cried out, “Malachi Tackett, if you ever say anything like that again, I will … I will …” She managed to stifle a sob, sensed his movement toward her and held up a restraining hand without turning. “Don’t. Just don’t. I am hanging on by my cuticles here and I …”

  “I get it,” he said. “Message received. I’m good.”

  And it was like Malachi’d been a stove with heat pulsing off it and he’d reached up and turned off the flame. He did something — maybe it was a thing he’d learned in the military, not in military training but a thing he had learned being a soldier, in combat, having to keep his own focus while the world was falling apart around him. He just pulled back behind some kind of barrier, a self-made wall, and operated from beyond it — where there was no emotional attachment to what was going on in the world around him.

  Oh, how Sam wished he could teach her that trick.

  Charlie came into the room.

  “The ‘wild things’ are Merrie’s spirit animals,” she said. She looked at Sam. “Is Rusty alright with all this?”

  “He’s a tough kid.”

  “He’s a good kid. You must be very proud of him.”

  Sam steeled herself, grabbed hold of every ounce of emotional strength she had, waiting … hoping Malachi wouldn’t …

  And he didn’t. Malachi said nothing. And if he had … if he’d added praise for her son to the “you’re doing a good job” remark, Sam would have completely lost it. He didn’t. She didn’t. And the moment passed.

  “Let’s make sure we’re all singing from the same sheet of music,” Malachi said, not looking at either of them as Sam set cups of coffee in front of them on the table. “I know that my mother is … I know she killed Liam.” He spoke with no more emotion than the recorded message on an answering machine telling you to leave your phone number after the beep. She knew he was down deep in himself, launching the words up into the world from someplace cold and dark. “She murdered Liam.” He took a breath. “He’s not … the first man she’s killed. And … there’s not a thing we can do about it.”

  Sam wasn’t expecting that part, but apparently Charlie was because she added, “So there’s no sense in trying.”

  They both were right, of course. There was no way to prove what they knew to be true and nothing to be done about it if they could. Until … unless …

  “The only thing we can do about Liam, and the only thing we can do to help E.J. …”

  “And the only way we can manage not to vanish ourselves is to figure out what’s happening and find a way to stop it, and the only way to do that is for everybody to come clean.” Malachi turned to Charlie. “So what’s this about the Jabberwock trying to communicate with you? How? And what’s it saying?”

  “The how is by … what’s it called … ghost writing.”

  Sam wasn’t tracking.

  “When words appear and you didn’t put them there.” It was clear she did not want to go on. “Yesterday … there were words written in chalk on the blackboard in my mother’s kitchen. I thought at the time they were in my”— a heartbeat pause that spoke volumes — “husband’s handwriting, but I convinced myself that I had done it myself and just didn’t remember.”

  Charlie’s husband.

  The three of them had been up to their necks in all things Jabberwock for the past two weeks and there hadn’t been a lot of emotional capital left over to spend on catching up on each other’s lives. But in snatches of time here and there, the girls had tried. Sam had shared the short list of the near-misses in her singularly unimpressive love life since high school — including the pilot of the StatFlight helicopter from the University of Kentucky Medical Center who’d actually tried to seduce her while they were in the air.

  Sam didn’t have to share what’d happened to Jimbo Mattingly, her “steady” boyfriend all through school, though their relationship had blinked on and off like a Joe’s Beer Joint sign their senior year. Everyone knew what’d happened to Jimbo. He’d died a hero three weeks after graduation when he’d saved the life of the son of Steven Beshear, the state attorney general, after a fiery crash on the interstate. Four-year-old Andy Beshear had escaped uninjured; Jimbo had died of third-degree burns the next day.

  Charlie had never shared what had happened to her husband and Sam had never asked. Watching Charlie’s face now, it was obvious she was reluctant to put down a drawbridge across that moat, but she had no choice.

  “I didn’t say anything about it yesterday because if I had, then that would have opened up a subject I didn’t want to talk about. A painful subject. My husband … his name is Stuart …”

  And she had to pause after that to get her emotions in check before she could continue. It couldn’t have been more plain if a red sign had started flashing on Charlie’s forehead. She loved her husband but things were not going well between them.

  “Stuart and I are … separated. It’s not a pretty story but I am still willing to share it with you if you’re interested. Right now, though, it’s not the point. The point is that … I think he, at least I thought he … but there’s no way it could possibly …”

  “How about we agree right here and now that nothing is off the table on the weirdness scale,” Malachi said. “We have to stop self-editing, assuming that what we saw or thought or felt was too bizarre to be real. In this Looney Tune world, nothing’s impossible.”

  Charlie took a breath. “Okay, I don’t believe now that I just wrote on the chalkboard and then didn’t remember I’d done it. Besides, the words were not in my handwriting. They were in Stuart’s.”

  “What did he say?”

  “‘Where are you?’”

  There was silence.

  “Which … would be a reasonable thing to ask … if you were looking for somebody,” Sam said.

  “When I saw the words, I was so shocked that I … I picked up the piece of chalk and wrote the first thing that came into my head: ‘I’m trapped. It won’t let me go.’ Then I felt spectacularly foolish and erased all of it.”

  “Boy,
oh boy, oh boy,” Sam said, “does this open up a can of worms.”

  “There are more worms than you know,” Charlie said. “Last night, I … when I got home, I went into the kitchen and — it was just an impulse — I wrote ‘I want to go home!’ on the blackboard.”

  She stopped. Sam absolutely did not want to know what happened next, but Malachi did, “And then …?”

  “Words appeared under what I’d written. Not all of it at once — one letter at a time … like I was watching somebody write them.”

  “Stuart?”

  “Absolutely not Stuart. Not his handwriting, not even in cursive. Block letters, all caps. The chalk marks looked like … somebody was pressing down hard.”

  “What did the words say?”

  “‘No. Stay here and play with me.’”

  The room went dead silent.

  Sam finally found her voice. “But who …?” Malachi just looked at her and she answered her own question. “The Jabberwock.”

  “It’s all a game.” Malachi’s voice was equal parts dismay and wonder. “Some stupid game!”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Charlie cried, then held up her hand before Malachi could admonish her that sense was no longer sense. “I know, I know—” Then she suddenly looked even more horrified. “The missing people, the ones who vanished — it took them to play a game?”

  “Why them?” Sam asked. “Abner, Roscoe, Harry — why those people?”

  “Random,” Malachi said. “Luck of the draw. Spin the bottle.”

  “Let me get this straight … you think the Jabberwock came here and imprisoned the county so he could randomly grab people to play some kind of game? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “You got a better explanation?”

  “But … what’s the game?” Sam felt her throat tighten as she said it.

  “Better question — what are the rules?” Malachi said. “Because we have to win!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Stuart watched Jolene move with practiced ease setting up equipment and he knew it wasn’t his imagination that the longer they remained in the house, the more the sense of unwelcome grew. He seemed to be having trouble breathing, like there wasn’t quite enough oxygen in the air. He couldn’t tell if the others felt the same way. Cotton’s shoulders were hunched, like he was hunkering down for a blow. On Jolene’s face was a mixture of fear and excitement. He suspected that each of them was drawing strength from the presence of the others, that their experience would have been infinitely worse if they had come to the house alone.

  Cotton was fascinated by the map, which gave him something to focus on to take his mind off the growing … oppression in the room. Even Stuart could tell the map was something truly amazing. The detail was stunning. Clearly it had taken Jolene’s father years to create it.

  “There’s Sharptop Mountain,” Cotton said to himself, tracing a line with his finger across the map to an icon that indicated Sawmill Hollow. “I never realized it was that close to Sawmill.” He looked at Stuart. “Mountain roads are like a mound of spaghetti, winding around wherever a creek has made a path through the hollows. Even if you’ve lived here your whole life, you kind of lose track of where things are — as the crow flies — in relation to other things.”

  Stuart noticed a pile of multicolored stickpins in a box and thought of the blackboard in Charlie’s mother’s kitchen, how he’d written on it and Charlie had responded. She had responded. She had. It wasn’t his imagination.

  Without thinking it through, he picked up a handful of stickpins, selecting only the black ones, and began sticking them into the map. Starting on the left, he placed a pin on the “a,” the “r” and the “e” in the words “CArson SpRings LanE.” Moving right, he placed a pin in the “y” and the “o” in the words WileY ROad.

  Cotton took note of what he was doing but said nothing, just watched. When he was finished, Cotton asked, “Think it’ll work, do you?”

  Stuart wanted to believe it was possible. “No.”

  “It’s showtime,” Jolene announced, pushing a strand of hair that kept falling in her eyes back behind her ear. “You guys ready for me to flip the switches?”

  As if in response to her question, there was a low rumble from outside. Thunder. Just thunder. There was a storm building. Nothing sinister about that. But Stuart saw the other two look around as if they didn’t like the grumbling sound any more than he did.

  “You don’t have to do anything … say anything?” Cotton asked.

  She chuckled. “If we were on the air, I’d have all manner of things to say, adjustments to make to the equipment, while I told you what to expect the meters to show. What the readings would be in a “normal” room and what might … not likely but might show in the event we had company.”

  She suddenly seemed nervous and turned back to the equipment.

  “This may be the first time I’ve ever used this stuff in an effort to see what really is in a room.”

  He watched her move from one piece of equipment to another flipping switches. She didn’t even have to turn it all on before company showed up.

  Pete Rutherford stopped at his back door and looked at his watch, then looked at the thermometer that hung on the wall beside the screen.

  “Seventy-six degrees,” he told Dog, who looked from the thermometer to Pete and back at the thermometer, just like he knew what Pete was saying. “Right on schedule. It’s ten o’clock and it’s seventy-six degrees. Every day since J-Day …” He let it go. He wasn’t telling Dog nothing the dog didn’t already know.

  In the bright sunshine, he squinted up from beneath his bushy eyebrows at the pristine sky and said in mock surprise, “And would you look at that. Why … there’s not a single cloud. Imagine that.”

  He shook his head as he leaned over to remove the leash from Dog’s collar. The dog sat still while he did it. They had an agreement, him and the dog. The dog would pretend that he couldn’t get out of the leash, and therefore it was a good idea to put it on him when they went for a walk, and Pete would pretend he didn’t know the dog could wiggle free from the thing in a New York minute.

  “Ain’t seen a cloud in the sky in so long I’m beginning to forget what one looks like.” Dog understood. He listened with equal interest in the evenings when the dark blue of the sky turned black after the sun finally set out there on the flat, if indeed, there was an out there … and a real sun. Then Pete railed against the random lights — equal size and shape and none of them twinkled — that now occupied the slice of sky above the hollow, replacing the constellations, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia and all the others that were Pete’s friends. Gone.

  “It’s all been gobbled up by the dadgum Jabberwock,” he told Dog, said it defiant-like. If the Jabberwock thought he was gonna cow Pete Rutherford with a fake sky and thermostat temperatures, he had one or two more thinks coming. Might be Pete would disappear — like Abner and Reece Tibbits and Harry Tungate. Go poof in a puff of smoke or whatever form it took when you was “gobbled up by the Jabberwock.” If that was the case, fine by Pete. Wasn’t no way he was gonna see another Christmas anyway — even if he followed every one of Sam Sheridan’s live-until-Christmas rules — so wasn’t no never mind to him one way or the other.

  He paused, allowed himself to think the thought that’d been buzzing around the outsides of his mind for a right smart while now. The big C … it’d been in remission long’s he was taking them chemotherapy drugs in Carlisle twice a week. But soon’s he quit going there for treatments …

  He’d first noticed it a week after J-Day. The ache deep in his belly was back. He ignored it, told himself, and Dog — he’d took to telling that little animal everything — that it was just something he’d eaten disagreed with him. That he’d be fine after a strong dose of that nasty pink stuff — Pepto-Bismol. ‘Cept he wasn’t fine. The ache remained. He kinda pictured it in his mind like a little bitty piece of charcoal, size of a marble deep in his belly. A cherry red piece of charcoal,
like something fell out past the grate from a fire when you was banking it in the wintertime.

  That marble … it was getting bigger. Oh, not growing up big as a tennis ball overnight or nothing like that. But it was growing. The thing, the … the cancer was growing. Them treatments had kept it the same size, didn’t get rid of it or nothing magical as that, but they held it at bay, one little dandelion in the grass. Now, wasn’t nothing keeping it from taking over the whole yard, and that’s what it’d do. Them oncologists said it’d metastasize, like blowing on the puffball on the top of the dandelion, it’d fly out into his bloodstream and plant little seeds everywhere.

  Might be going poof in a puff of smoke, courtesy of the Jabberwock’d be an easier way to go than all them little fires that was at that moment lighting up all over him.

  No, that wasn’t the way of it. If Pete Rutherford was gonna step outta this world, he’d do it natural-like, not absorbed by some sparkly mirage thing.

  “Bring it!” he called out to the phenomenon that was everywhere and nowhere, that had locked up a couple thousand people and was systematically … what? Digesting them? “Go on, take your best shot.”

  Nothing happened. Least not yet.

  Pete did wonder, though, if when the Jabberwock come for him at last if it’d leave Dog be. He hoped so. That old dog deserved a better end to his life than the one the Jabberwock had in store for the Nowhere people.

  Chapter Twelve

  Stuart and Jolene felt it the same time Cotton did. The heavy atmosphere in the room got suddenly heavier — felt like the room had too much in it, too many people, too many … somethings. It felt like they were jammed into a phone booth in London, all three of them at the same time. Not a spacious British phone booth, a Manhattan phone booth that’d be a tight squeeze for Superman all by himself.