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

by Ninie Hammon

  Moses Weiss had ventured too close. Too close.

  When Duncan Norman leapt out into nothing, he yanked Malachi off his feet and in an instant of instinct, Malachi reached out and grabbed. It was all he had time to do. It wasn’t enough, couldn’t stop his fall, but he was able to snatch a moment’s hold on the overhanging tree limb he had pushed out of his way when he stepped up beside Duncan. Only for a heartbeat before it was jerked out of his grasp, but it was long enough that Duncan’s forward momentum carried him past Malachi and broke his grip on Malachi’s hand so that he fell away and Malachi fell behind him.

  No longer coupled to Duncan, without the minister’s weight dragging at him, Malachi twisted sideways and he clutched at … everything, grabbed hold of nothing.

  The spot on the mountainside where Duncan Norman had launched himself off the edge was not the smooth rock face of the overlook cliff. At the overlook, the drop was straight down, the vertical cliff face of solid rock was as smooth and flawless as if carved out of the mountain with a chisel in the hand of God. Returning World War II soldiers had commented it reminded them of the White Cliffs of Dover.

  Duncan had dragged Malachi off a cliff, yes, but it was neither completely vertical nor smooth rock. It was a jagged, rugged mountainside, with jutting outcrops, cracks, crags and crevices. Scraggly trees grew near the top, even scragglier bushes grew out of cracks along the slope, and Kudzu vines covered much of it in a thick, green blanket.

  Malachi banged into the protruding edges of jagged rock, crashed through vine-enshrouded bushes — grabbing frantically at anything and everything — catching only handfuls of leaves, scratching his fingers and skinning his knuckles as he bounced downward. It all went by in a flash. He hit a lump on the rock face that gouged pain into his side and he cried out, bounced off it, hit something else, slid rather than fell maybe fifteen feet, then off into nothing again.

  Then he crashed down onto something on his back. Daggers of pain stabbed into his right hip and shoulder and his head slammed backward into the rough surface.

  The world went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Moses Weiss looks out eyes that are not his own.

  They are alien, totally foreign and looking through them is similar to standing inside a tall building and looking out an open window on the world. A window so high it’s above the level of the clouds and what lies below him is mist.

  All that exists out beyond the window is down there where mist shrouds the universe.

  The eyes that are not Moses’s blink. And Moses is suddenly afraid, more afraid than he has ever been in his life. The fear is Moses’s. It belongs to Moses and he owns it, clings to it as the only thing truly his and struggles against all that is not his in this bizarre reality.

  He is furious, but the fury is not his. Except it is, because he can feel the heat of it coursing through his veins. The rage is an emotion so powerful, it blots out all else. Except the fear, the fear that belongs to Moses.

  The rage is not some transient emotion, a reaction to some situation or circumstance. The rage is endemic to his being. Not Moses, the other.

  Yes, Moses is within the other.

  What little of his own mind he still possesses wonders if he has been absorbed, like whatever it was that happened to the people in Nowhere County, and if he has, will he be taken as they were taken to a somewhere that both is and isn’t Nowhere County. A replica. A mirror image, the other side of a looking glass. A construct that occupies the same space but exists in time between seconds — so it is there and not there, two universes separated by less than a heartbeat. Time bent.

  And that should jack up the fear that is his own, within the chest that is not his own. Being absorbed. Taken. Gone. He should be terrified of that, but it seems so far distant from his true terror. Like being in a doctor’s office afraid of getting a shot … when the whole building is on fire and all the exits are blocked and you are going to burn alive, screaming.

  That fear, the one Moses owns, is fear of the other. The other through whose eyes he sees and whose emotions he feels.

  And whose thoughts — tatters and scraps of them — he can hear.

  Kill them, take them all. Chew them up.

  Feed.

  We will feed.

  We will not be hungry.

  Feed. He hears himself say the word out loud, hears the other speak the word into the real world.

  And others of his kind say the word, too. Different voices — some high-pitched like a little child, some rumbling, the grumbling roar of an angry grizzly. Some in the stark-naked terror of a nightmare.

  Moses hears the voices with ears that are not his own as the eyes through which he sees the world are the other’s.

  We will eat — I will eat whatever pleases me. I will feel the blood dripping down my chin, crush the bones with my teeth and suck out the marrow.

  The others murmur agreement, but it is the one, the other, the Moses who is not Moses, the leader by virtue of his malignant loathing hatred and anger that propel them all forward.

  He wants to give pain, he lives to give pain. He wants … payback.

  Yes, payback.

  He will visit on them more pain than all of them have felt — by a factor of ten. He will hear them scream. But he will cut off their screams because he could not scream. By that time, when the pain consumed him, he could no longer make a sound.

  He will not grant them the release of giving voice to their misery. He will keep them silent. As he was silent.

  As all the others were silent, leaving him alone.

  The mist below the high window through which Moses looks begins to clear, and he can see that it is not a high window at all, that the mist was not clouds obscuring the earth far below, but a fine gathering of ground mist that flows out over the forests and meadows from streams. He sees the mist and strains to …

  He wants … Wants!

  Now, the morning mist is edging toward the crack through which he looks and his rage and hatred are replaced by desperate longing.

  He is so thirsty. His mouth is dry, his lips cracked, and the mist is wet.

  He leans his cheek against the cold surface that is one wall of the crack and tries to capture even a few drops of the mist, sticks his tongue out, struggles. But it is beyond his grasp. And he would cry, but he has no tears left.

  And so he rages, hates, imagines taking, hurting, tasting blood. He bangs his fists on the wall beside the crack and his fists are raw from constant banging. He turns and looks back into the darkness behind him. He must feed. He rages at what he cannot have, but he is so hungry.

  Moses!

  His cheek stung and his head snapped to the side. He opened his eyes into a reality not distorted by somebody else’s eyes. He was sitting in the dirt. Dirt on wood. A dirty floor. The hundred-year-old house that wasn’t.

  “Look at me,” Jolene said, “Look me in the eye!”

  “Okay …” He looked Jolene in the eye.

  “You’re back. Sorry I had to slap you, but it was all I knew to do. What happened to you — do you know?”

  He knew, but he couldn’t speak of it. He had been sucked into … and had escaped. No, not escaped. He could never have escaped. There was no escape from that place. The Jabberwock had let him go. But it wasn’t finished with him. Oh, no, it absolutely was not done with Moses Weiss.

  He saw the others exchange a look, knew he ought to say something, but couldn’t imagine what that might be.

  “You fell down, sort of folded up on the floor — do you remember that?” Jolene asked. He shook his head. “You were sitting here with your eyes open, but Moses Weiss had definitely left the building.”

  “Left. Just so. Gone.” Moses shuddered because he understood the fundamental truth of what he was saying.

  “Gone where?” Cotton asked.

  “The thing, the Jabberwock … Too close, got too close. Just so. It sucked me in. I was part of it, in its mind. I saw.” Moses actually shuddered
again. “Inside it.” He shook his head, muttered, more to himself than to the others. “And I am here to report that thing is pissed!”

  A whum, whum, whum sound in his head, keeping time with his heartbeat. Familiar. Something rang his bell. Where …?

  Sergeant McKenna calls out in a loud voice and Malachi struggles to hear him. The obstacle course, the rock wall. Lost his grip. Fell.

  “I said, get up off your butt, Marine. There is no such thing as ‘try.’ You will not try to climb over that wall. You will climb over that wall. You will hit it again and again and again until you’re on the other side or one of us dies of old age.”

  No, not that. His head was full of static, but his body understood that he could not move, that he was on some slanted surface and he must be still. Until his mind caught up with his muscle memory, he would remain frozen. He opened his eyes, the world swam dizzily in front of them so he closed them again.

  A bar in Sarajevo, a drunk coming at him with a bottle of beer raised above his head.

  An IED. It has blown the Armored Personnel Carrier off the road, must have thrown him and Hodgekiss out and now Hodgekiss is dragging him and he has to get his bearings …

  No, not that. He was lying on his back, head below his feet, cold beneath, cold rock. He lifted his head and a wave of dizziness washed over him. The lights blinked out again.

  When Malachi again opens his eyes, he is lying on his back in the transport truck, bouncing along the road toward the airport. His best friend, Charlie Blinkhorn, is leaning over him.

  “I’m sorry, man, but I had to do it. You woulda shot all of ‘em.”

  The man sitting next to him nods toward the front of the truck where the sergeant is sitting beside the driver. “But just one … Sarge is gonna say the guy attacked you and you had no choice but to shoot him.”

  Malachi’s mind is spinning and he is so dizzy he can barely manage to keep his head up. He hears what the man is saying, but the words aren’t yet connecting to reality in his mind.

  The boy. Where is the boy?

  He tries to rise.

  “I got to get back to the boy,” he says, as hands restrain him and push him back down onto the floor. Malachi fights with all his strength, which is no strength at all. His mind is caught in a loop. He has to get to the boy, find him, save him.

  “Let me go. The boy—”

  “Is dead, Malachi,” Blinkhorn tells him. He pauses, sees Malachi still isn’t tracking, and leans close to whisper into his ear. “The one with the sharp stick, he gave Sarge the little boy’s head and told him to give it to you.”

  No, not … he wasn’t in Rwanda.

  This time he concentrated on not opening his eyes and not moving his head, on figuring out what was going on from other senses that wouldn’t send him roiling back into the darkness.

  His fingers could feel cold beneath. He rubbed gently. Rock. He was lying on a stone. Concrete? No, stone. He listened, could hear wind in trees, the distant rumble of artillery fire. No, not rumble. It was a buzz, not a rumble.

  Cicadas. It was the buzz of cicadas in the bushes. He listened. Water running. A river, somewhere near a river. The intake of breath brought with it the smell of crushed greenery, his own fear sweat and … honeysuckle.

  He was in Kentucky. What had hap—?

  Then he remembered. Understanding rocked him and his eyes popped open and he looked around, realized then that the slanted sensation was not a product of having his bell rung. He was lying on a slanted rock. If he moved, sneezed, maybe even if he lifted his head, he could start sliding right down it into … nothing.

  Chapter Thirty

  Stuart watched the old man as he tried to speak, sputtered and muttered, his hands shaking so badly the coffee sloshed in his cup, the coffee he’d said he wanted, then told Jolene “no thank you” when she handed it to him, but nodded and took the cup anyway.

  Stuart was trying very hard not to leap out of his own skin, not to jump up and down and cheer and yell and cry, and fall into a deep sleep for days.

  All of the above at the same time and none of them.

  In truth, he was as rattled and scattered as Moses Weiss. Rattled and scattered — sounded like a short-order cook’s description of how he wanted his eggs. And “smothered,” too. That meant put cheese on them.

  They were alive. ALIVE.

  The word banged around in Stuart’s head and he realized he had a ridiculously silly grin on his face. Well, Jolene looked pretty chipper herself and so did Cotton. Moses had talked to the spirit of the pregnant girl, Becky Sue, had seen flashes of her memory, and she’d said the people of Nowhere County were alive. The three of them had been right. The people who’d vanished out of Nowhere County — the nobody-knew-how-many-thousands of them — had not all died in some cataclysmic event. They were just … gone.

  Where? How? Yeah, he’d get to those questions. They all would.

  They were, after all, the most important questions of their existence, but right now his mind was in what Coach Hawthorne had called “a continuous loop.” You had to control your strength on the football field, somehow manage to go all-out, give it everything you had on every play and still have something left in the tank for the next play. And the next.

  He had to rein in his excitement, focus … but right now, for just a few glorious minutes, he left his joy unchecked, let it run free.

  Charlie and Merrie were alive!

  Okay, he didn’t know that for sure — that the two specific people who mattered most to him in all the world were among the people in Nowhere County who had not yet been gobbled up by the beast Moses had described in disjointed sentences that individually made no sense at all but taken as a whole fit together like an impressionist painting.

  Moses paused to take a sip from the jiggling coffee cup in his hand and some of it dribbled down his chin. He didn’t wipe it away.

  “So you’re saying the Jabberwock — and it is the Jabberwock, that was its name, right?” Cotton didn’t wait for a reply. “It’s a monster of pure evil, driven by absolute hatred and in a state of blind rage.”

  The old man blinked. “That about covers it.”

  “Okay, let’s pull this wagon back up to the barn and load it all over again,” Stuart said.

  “Something your old granny used to say?” Jolene asked. Even Jolene had color in her face now, still favored her injured arm, but no longer looked like — what was it Cotton had said, “death on a cracker.”

  “My old granny wasn’t a shucking-corn kind of grandmother. She worked fourteen hours a day in a sewing factory in Grixdale on the north side of Detroit. I just heard that phrase once in a movie and always wanted to use the line. Let’s go over what we know, what we’ve learned.”

  He ticked the elements off on his fingers as he spoke.

  “We know that wherever everybody is, they can’t leave. They call the barrier—”

  “It’s on the county line, so that makes sense — the Jabberwock’s like a wall on the border keeping everybody captive and on our side wiping away memories of Away-From-Heres when they leave,” Jolene said.

  “Away-From-Heres?” Moses asked, but Stuart blew by him.

  “It looks like a mirage, and when you cross it, you … what?”

  “Are transported into … nowhere,” Moses said.

  “No, to the Middle of Nowhere. It’s a place, the Middle of Nowhere,” Cotton said.

  “And wherever they are, it’s not … right. Not normal, the stars are off,” Stuart said.

  “They’re trying, too, just like we are,” Jolene put in. “Trying to figure this thing out, they all got together in a meeting to put their heads together.”

  “They recognize it, at least some of them do. They know they’re vanishing and they’re trying …” Cotton trailed off.

  That statement drained all the energy out of the room, the power of their joy and excitement, knowing that the people they loved were alive somewhere. They were alive, might still be … no, they w
ere, they still were alive … but they wouldn’t be for long unless they could figure out how to beat this thing, this Jabberwock.

  Jolene spoke. “What have we learned that helps us figure it out? What do we know now that we can use?”

  “Well …” Stuart stretched his tired mind as best he could, willed it to put pieces of the puzzle together. “We know they had a meeting, a crowd of them, to talk, to pool what they knew.” He paused. “What if … what if we could communicate with them, share what we know and what they know?”

  “How?” Cotton asked.

  “I’m just launching this out there, but … okay, there’s somewhere that a lot of people got together.”

  “It had to be in the West Liberty Middle School auditorium, on Main Street in Persimmon Ridge,” Cotton said.

  “So people got together in a group there. Is there any way we could … talk to the group, or people in the group?”

  “Like you did with Charlie in her kitchen?” Jolene asked. “And with the map and the black stickpins.”

  “Write them some kind of message?” Cotton asked. “Paint something on the wall? What are you suggesting?”

  “I have no idea what I’m suggesting. Just thinking that a whole bunch of spirits in one spot … might be able … like Jolene said about the Jabberwock — could it really wipe the minds of hundreds of people? Like that. All we did was communicate with one person at a time — your father and my wife. What if we could try to communicate with a room full of people?”

  “People were in the auditorium for a meeting — it’s not like there are hundreds of people in it all the time,” Jolene said.

  “If they had one meeting, they will have others. If they plan to share information, they’d need to get together to do it. That auditorium … how could we …?”