Ghost Town: A Novella

by Mark Lukens

  “Come on,” Tony said, his voice rising in anger. He seemed to Beth like a jungle cat ready to pounce on its prey.

  “Who’s Frank?” Tony asked again.

  “Fine,” Eugene said. “You want to know my life story?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I guess it won’t matter now if I tell you,” Eugene said.

  They all waited for him to continue.

  “I’m an accountant,” Eugene told them. “I do some work for the mob. Hide money for them in accounts, launder money for them. Frank is a mob boss who’s a little angry with me right now. He thinks I’ve skimmed some money off the top the last few times.”

  “Did you?” Tony asked.

  “Well, yeah. It was so easy. I didn’t think he would catch me. I didn’t even think he’d really miss it.”

  “So, this guy Frank is after you?” Carla asked.

  “He just wants to talk to me,” Eugene said with a grin.

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “Just talk with a set of knives and a blowtorch.”

  Eugene looked a little sick for a moment, but he didn’t say anything.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” Carla asked Eugene.

  “I packed a suitcase and ran. I have some bank accounts down in Bermuda that I’d been saving for a rainy day. I was at the airport, at a motel waiting for the right time to take a flight out of Vegas. Waiting for it to be safe.”

  “And they found you?”

  “No. Nobody found me. The last thing I remember I was laying on the bed watching some TV. It was late. I had a few beers. I think I fell asleep. Next thing I know I wake up here.”

  Tony looked at Carla. “What are you trying to get at?”

  “There’s some kind of connection between all of us, some reason we are here.”

  “Well, genius, you figure it out yet?”

  “I think so,” Carla said.

  “You feel like letting the rest of us in on it?”

  “What about you, Tony?” Carla turned to him. “We don’t know much about you except that you sniff a lot and you’re in nicotine withdrawal.”

  Tony didn’t say anything.

  “What’s the last thing you remember before waking up here?” she asked him.

  Tony pointed at Beth. “What about her? We don’t know much about her, either.”

  “I talked to her last night,” Carla said quickly before Beth could say anything, and then she continued. “What do you do for a living, Tony?”

  “I’m between jobs right now.”

  “Wife? Kids?”

  “Nope. I’m between women right now, too. You interested?”

  “Hardly,” Carla answered. “What about your family?”

  “We don’t keep in touch.”

  Carla stared at Tony. “If you turned up missing, who would look for you?”

  Tony seemed like he was about to answer, but then he stopped cold. There was a look in his eyes like something had just clicked in his mind, like pieces of a puzzle had just been put into place for him and he could see the whole picture.

  Carla turned to Eugene. “If you turned up missing, everybody would just assume the mob got to you.”

  Carla looked at Beth. “And you would be a beaten housewife that finally got up the courage to run away. Maybe to an underground women’s shelter. Or people would assume that your husband finally went too far and killed you. Hid your body somewhere. The police might even be talking to your husband right now.”

  Beth smiled at the thought of that. “That would be the only good thing to come out of all of this.”

  Carla hitched a thumb towards the double doors that led outside. “And Ray was just a bum. A street person. Who would look for him? Who would even know that he was gone?”

  Eugene nodded as he stared down at the cartoonish rat eating the piece of cheese. “We’re all people who could disappear easily. We would all have good explanations why we would be gone. No one’s going to go out of their way to look for us.”

  Tony nodded at Carla. “What about you?”

  “I’m the teenage runaway. Ran off with a boy. A band. Whatever. There are thousands and thousands of runaways that no one really looks too hard for.” She looked at Tony. “And you might be that guy who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back.”

  “And Adam?” Tony asked.

  Carla shrugged. “A drifter between jobs. Who knows? We didn’t really get a chance to find out much about him.”

  “Or maybe Adam just disappeared,” Eugene said. “People turn up missing every day and they’re never found. There are more disappearances than homicides every year—far more of them. After a while, the police, and their families and friends, they just give up looking for the person.”

  Tony jumped to his feet and sniffed. He paced around the room for a moment in quick, nervous steps. “But that would mean that they know us pretty well. It would mean that they’ve followed us. Watched us. Picked us specifically.”

  Carla shrugged again. “I don’t know.” She looked at Eugene with a sarcastic smile. “I’m just trying to figure out the rules of the game. Right, Eugene?”

  Eugene nodded like he didn’t notice Carla’s sarcasm, or chose not to notice it. “Right. And if this is a game, then there has to be a goal. A prize. A way to win. Every game has one.”

  “Our prize is our lives,” Beth said. “Our freedom.”

  The other three looked at her, and Beth shrank back in her chair just a little, but not as much as she would have before. She could sense a strange feeling inside of her, like she was getting stronger, learning to stand up for herself, to speak out, and not to cower down anymore.

  “I don’t think it’s that vague,” Eugene said in response to Beth’s guess. “I think it’s something more specific.”

  Tony walked from the table to the double doors and peeked out the curtain.

  “So what do we do now?” Carla asked. “Now that we might have figured some things out, what do we do about it? Wait around for them to pick us off one by one? Or starve?”

  “We’ll run out of water before we starve,” Eugene said. “They only gave us so much water. Like there’s a time limit on the game.”

  Tony walked back to the table. Beth watched him—he looked different, like he had come to some kind of realization. He stopped before he got back to the table and stared at them.

  “I think I might know what the prize is,” he told them.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  They all stared at Tony.

  “What do you mean?” Carla asked him.

  “Yesterday, when we were trying to leave, when I was by that barn, I saw something inside through the crack in the doors. I think it was a car.”

  Carla jumped to her feet, her chair scraping back across the wood floor, almost tipping over. “What?!”

  Tony shrugged, and he looked sheepish, almost ashamed. “Yeah. A car. A red one.”

  “And when were you going to tell us this?” Carla spat out. “Or were you planning on keeping this information to yourself?”

  “I wasn’t sure about it,” Tony said quickly. “I only saw the car for a split second and then they started shooting at us. I don’t even know if it runs, so why don’t you just calm your ass down?”

  Eugene put his hands out in a placating gesture, trying to calm Tony and Carla down before they started screaming at each other again. “Okay. Okay, that must be it. It must be something. It has to be there for a reason. At least it’s something we can start with.”

  They were all quiet for a moment, glancing at each other.

  “So, how do we do it?” Beth asked, surprising herself with her boldness at speaking up. She was too tired to care anymore what the others thought of her right now. “How do we get down to that barn? We can’t just walk down there.”

  “The dogs,” Eugene reminded everyone.

  “And whoever was shooting at us from the church,” Beth added.

  Tony nodded. “We could find some kind of weapo
n. Or making something to kill the dogs with. Like some kind of spear.”

  “We’ve already looked around this place,” Carla said. “There’s nothing here.”

  “We could bust up more of that furniture over there,” Tony said as he walked around to the head of the table and sat down. “Sharpen the chair legs down to points.”

  “Sharpen them with what?” Carla said—she did not look like she was anywhere close to forgiving Tony about keeping the car in the barn a secret.

  “What about upstairs?” Tony said, and he looked at Eugene and Beth, trying to avoid Carla’s gaze. “In that closet up there. All that stuff. We didn’t have much of a chance to look through it last night. Maybe we missed something. There could be something in there. If this is a game, then they have to give us something along the way to help, don’t they? Some kind of clues.”

  Gene picked up his toy rat eating the piece of cheese. “Yeah, this is our help.”

  Tony got up and marched towards the stairs.

  “What are you doing?” Carla said.

  “I’m going up there and look around again.” Tony didn’t wait for them; he bounded up the stairs.

  “We should go up there with him,” Eugene said. “I don’t think any of us should be alone right now.”

  They all turned to the stairs when they heard Tony yell down at them from the top of the steps in a panicked voice.

  “You guys need to get up here quick!”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Eugene, Carla, and Beth jumped to their feet and hurried up the stairs. They ran down the hallway, Eugene in the lead. They rushed into the room where they had found the stash in the closet last night.

  Tony stood in front of the open closet door, staring down in disbelief. He backed away from the open doorway so they could all see the closet floor. “Come look at this,” he whispered.

  Eugene hurried over to the closet and stood in front of it, staring down at the empty floor. All of the items they had seen last night were gone. There were no purses, wallets, cell phones, lighters, cigarettes, jewelry, scraps of paper, nothing. The floor looked like it had been swept clean.

  Carla and Beth hovered behind Eugene.

  “No way,” Eugene whispered.

  “All that stuff was really there last night, wasn’t it?” Carla asked.

  Tony paced away towards the window. “Yeah,” he answered. “Or where the hell did I get these?” He pulled out a crushed pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket.

  Carla took a step towards Tony.

  Beth watched Eugene as he entered the closet, about to step inside like he couldn’t believe it was actually empty. And something clicked in her mind. “Eugene, wait!” she yelled.

  But it was too late.

  As soon as Eugene fully planted the weight of his first step down on the closet floor, it collapsed and he fell through the floor with a crash. And then he was gone.

  Tony and Carla rushed back over to the doorway beside Beth and stared down at the gaping, dark hole in the wood floor of the closet.

  “Holy shit!” Tony said, running a hand through his hair over and over again, his eyes bulging in shock. “Holy shit! Holy shit!”

  Carla ventured closer to the closet, closer to the edge of the hole in the floor. The hole was a large neat rectangle in the floor, like the whole floor had just fallen away like a trapdoor. “Eugene!” she yelled down into the hole. “Eugene, answer me!!”

  Tony paced away from Carla and Beth. He kept running his hand through his hair and muttering to himself. “It could’ve been me,” he kept saying to himself. “It could’ve been me down there. It could’ve been me …”

  Beth placed a hand on Carla’s shoulder as she inched even closer to the edge of the hole, ready to yank her back if she needed to. They could hear a slight cracking noise in the floorboards, like the edges of them were beginning to weaken. “Be careful,” she told Carla.

  Carla ignored Beth; her focus was on the yawning black mouth that was the hole in the floor. They couldn’t see anything down in the darkness. “Eugene!! Can you hear me?!”

  They all heard a groan from deep down in the hole. It sounded like it could be Eugene grunting. But Beth heard another noise from down inside the hole, a somewhat familiar noise. It was a clicking and squeaking noise.

  Tony stopped pacing and muttering to himself. He looked at Beth and rushed over to her with a wild look in his eyes.

  It was a look Beth had seen so many times before. She braced herself for the violence that she knew was coming in the next few seconds.

  “You yelled at Eugene before he fell!” Tony screamed at her. “Like you were trying to warn him! Like you knew!”

  Beth shook her head no and stood up in front of Tony. “I just felt … something didn’t seem right …”

  Tony grabbed Beth’s arm in his vice-like grip. He was closer to her now, his face inches away from hers. She could see her husband’s eyes in Tony’s eyes. She swore she could smell her husband’s Jim Beam breath.

  “You knew what was going to happen!” Tony screamed at Beth

  For a split second Beth saw her husband Trace right in front of her, gripping her upper arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. For a second she cowered back like she always did from her husband and braced herself for the punch or slap or kick or bite.

  But then something snapped inside of her. It wasn’t Trace in front of her. It was Tony. She felt a well-spring of sudden courage and anger surge inside of her. It was an anger she’d never felt before, an anger she never knew she could possess. She tore her arm out of Tony’s grip and pushed him back away from her.

  “Yes!” she screamed at Tony. “I knew something was wrong! There was a closet full of shit yesterday, and now it’s all gone! I just thought it could be some kind of trap!”

  Tony stood there, shocked that Beth had pushed him back.

  “And you keep your damn hands off of me,” Beth growled at him.

  Carla ran at them like a linebacker on a quarterback blitz; she was just a blur of motion in Beth’s peripheral vision. She pushed Tony back away from Beth even further. “You touch her again and I swear to God I’ll knock you the fuck out.”

  Tony looked truly shocked as his eyes darted from Carla to Beth and then back to Carla again.

  Carla pointed at the closet. “Right now Eugene’s down there somewhere and he needs our help. We need to figure out a way to get him out!”

  “How the hell are we supposed to do that?” Tony spat out.

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you look for something we could use as a rope?”

  “We searched this whole place and—” Tony began, but his words were cut off by Carla.

  “Look again!”

  Tony was shocked into silence for a moment.

  Carla hurried back to the open closet door and fell down on her hands and knees at the edge of the rectangular hole. “I can’t see shit down there,” she said to herself. And then she screamed down into the opening. “Eugene! Can you hear me?!”

  They were all quiet and still for a moment.

  A few seconds later they heard Eugene’s voice from deep down in the hole. “Yeah. I … I can hear you, Carla.”

  “How far down are you?” Carla yelled down into the hole.

  All three of them were silent and frozen as they waited for Eugene’s answer. “I think I fell at least one story. Maybe two or three. I don’t know.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  They could hear Eugene grunting again, then a high-pitched scream from him. After a moment he spoke again. “My back. It’s … I think I might have broken my back.”

  Carla shook her head in helplessness. “I wish I had some kind of light to shine down there.”

  “I can’t …” Eugene spoke up from the hole and then he screamed again in pain. “My back! I can’t move. I can’t see anything. I can’t tell where I am.”

  “Can you see us up here?” Carla yelled into the hole.

  “No. I can’t see anythin
g down here but darkness.”

  “How is that possible?” Beth whispered.

  Carla looked at Tony. “Go find something to pull him out with!”

  “There isn’t anything. I told you, we’ve been through all of these rooms already.”

  “Then go downstairs and knock on the walls. Try to see if you can tell where he is. Maybe there’s a door or something that we missed.”

  Tony hurried out of the room.

  Carla turned back to the hole in the closet floor.

  Eugene was screaming again.

  “What is it, Eugene?” Carla yelled down into the black hole. “What’s wrong?”

  “Please help me!” Eugene yelled. “There are noises down here. There’s something down here with me!”

  “What is it?” Carla asked. “What does it sound like?”

  But Beth suddenly realized what the clicking and squealing sounds she heard earlier were, and she felt sick to her stomach. The squealing and clicking sounds were louder now, like there were so many more of them now.

  Eugene let out a long wail. “It’s a … a chewing noise!” he screamed. “A clicking noise. Oh God, I think there are rats down here! Lots of them!!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Carla jumped to her feet and looked around the room in a panic, like she might suddenly see something that could help Eugene.

  But there was nothing.

  Eugene continued with non-stop screams and pleas for help. “Oh God! Please! There are tons of rats down here! They’re coming into the room! I can hear them. I … I can’t move!”

  Carla began to cry.

  Tony rushed back into the room. “I can’t find a way into the walls down there. I pounded on the walls, but I can’t hear anything down there.”

  Tony stopped. He could hear Eugene’s screams and cries for help coming from down in the hole. “What happened?”

  “Please, God help me!!” Eugene screamed from the hole.

  “Hold on, Eugene,” Carla yelled down into the hole. “We’re going to try and get you out of there!”