by Ninie Hammon
What could she do? Once they got to the county line and Abby realized Charlie had no magical sword to use on the Jabberwock, what would Abby do?
No, more important, what would Charlie do? She would have no choice but to jump Abby, wrest the rifle out of her hands and then …
Then what?
Threaten to shoot her if she didn’t tell where the key was? Abby would know that was a bluff. What else could she do? How could she make Abby give her the key to the kiln?
The airless kiln where her baby lay in the darkness.
The scream on hairy black legs tried to crawl up the back of her throat and threatened to leap out of her mouth but she fought it back.
She prayed Merrie was still asleep. That she hadn’t awakened and found herself in the dark, the absolute darkness of a cave or a coal mine. Alone and in the dark, oh please no! Not her little Merrie.
She sucked in a sob at the thought.
“Makes you sad, don’t it — thinking ‘bout your baby a hurtin’.”
“Abby, you’re hurt, can’t you see that? The Jabberwock made you sick and—”
“I ain’t too sick to go get my boy. He needs his mama.”
She had the rifle pointed at Charlie. It would be a simple thing to slam it aside, dive for Abby, or turn the car sharply. Or …
Whatever Charlie did, she couldn’t injure Abby or Charlie would never find the key.
It wasn’t a very big key. She had noticed the keyring hanging on the nail in the garage yesterday when she had gone there looking for duct tape to seal up a box. There was also a house key on the chain, both keys attached to a dirty old rabbit’s foot. Abby could have done anything with them. What if she’d just locked the door and then flung the keys as hard as she could out into the darkness? How would they ever find them in time? The clock was ticking.
Tick. Tick.
Merrie was in there in the dark.
Stop it!
Think.
The nearest place where the county line crossed the road was on Route 17 North. Barber’s Mill Road connected to 17 about halfway between the county line and the Middle of Nowhere. As she recalled, there was not a Welcome to Nowhere County sign, just a simple state sign that said Entering Beaufort County. She had to be sure not to blow past that sign, so she slowed down.
The road curved to the left about fifty feet after the sign, where the Rolling Fork River snuggled up beside it on the right, rushing dark water flowing north back into Beaufort County. Every time the river flooded, which had been every spring of Charlie’s life, traffic bound for Beaufort County was diverted to Route 17 North because the river banks were steep here, the river flowing by twenty or thirty feet below the level of the road.
She began to slow the car. She couldn’t take a chance on blowing past the sign and wind up with Abby in the Dollar General Store parking lot, violently sick. The shape Abby was in, another trip through might kill her and then how would they ever find the key?
“Up there,” Abby said, gesturing with her chin toward the Beaufort County sign, its iridescent lettering glowing in the headlights. “Stop there.”
Charlie pulled off the road stopped and put the car in park.
Now that they were no longer moving, the headlights caught the shimmer of something in the road about fifty feet ahead, the shiny mirage, the face of the Jabberwock.
“Abby …”
“Get out.”
“You can’t shoot me. How will you get out if you kill me?”
“Ain’t gonna kill you outright, just shoot your knees out, one at a time, then … This here’s a .22. If I’m careful, I can shoot you a dozen times without killing you. That’ll take a while, though, and yore little girl ain’t got that kind of time.”
Abby had it all figured out. She gestured with the gun barrel and Charlie opened the door and stepped out. She noticed the blood on the car seat where Abby had been sitting. It wasn’t a whole lot of blood, but she’d been bleeding a small amount for a very long time. Her nose wasn’t bleeding now, but red tears streamed down her cheeks. How long would it be before she passed out from the loss of blood?
“Go on now.”
The river flowed by in the darkness off to the right. Charlie could hear it bubbling.
“You go on up there to that thing and do … do whatever it is you gotta do. Pull out that invisible sword you got, and cut off its head.”
Charlie walked slowly toward the Jabberwock, trying to decide what to do. How to convince, or trick, or overpower or …
It occurred to Charlie then, for the first time, that she would die here, that she was living the last few minutes of her life. Abby would be furious when Charlie didn’t, couldn’t, make the monster go away. She might shoot her dead right here in the middle of the road. And if she did, Merrie would die, too.
No, Charlie had to think of … something.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sam’s heart leapt into her throat when they rounded the final bend and her headlights illuminated a car pulled off on the shoulder of the road on the river side and two figures standing in front of it in the spill of the headlights. Only two.
“Where’s Merrie?” Sam wondered aloud.
“In the car, I guess. Asleep in the backseat or something. Look, are sure you want to do this?” Malachi asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Okay, then, just remember to stay out of my way. Approach her slowly and I’ll do the same on the other side, so she can’t keep the gun on both of us at the same time. But she’ll try. She’ll swing it back and forth. I’ll catch her when she swings.”
Sam nodded, her heart hammering in her ears so loud she hoped she’d heard all he said to her. She pulled her Taurus to a stop behind the Honda Legend belonging to Sam’s mother. Charlie was standing in the middle of the road dressed in a terrycloth bathrobe, and a bloody, ragged Abby stood just off the asphalt in the dirt. Though she appeared barely able to stand, her grip on Malachi’s rifle seemed firm and she had it pointed at Charlie.
Sam got out on the driver’s side, hanging back. Stood there in the darkness, ridiculously aware of the chirping crickets, the honk of tree frogs and the damp smell of the reeds around the river. Malachi got out on the passenger side and walked directly toward the two figures in the road.
“What’re you doin’ here?” Abby cried. “You go on along and leave us be.”
“She put Merrie in the kiln, locked her in there,” Charlie cried, but that couldn’t be right. Sam had misunderstood, hadn’t heard right. Charlie couldn’t possibly mean—
“That littlun’s gonna stay there till she dies ‘less you all go away. Leave now!”
Sam hadn’t misunderstood! Oh, dear god …
“Abby, we just want to talk—
Abby leveled the rifle full at Malachi.
“I will shoot you down like a mad dog if you take one more step.”
The level of rage, malice and total insanity was horrifying. Malachi stopped.
Showtime.
Sam called out to Abby from where she stood. Sam’d turned off the headlights of her car, so she was in shadow standing beside the driver’s door.
“Abby, she doesn’t have to kill the Jabberwock. You don’t have to go to Lexington to get Cody. He’s here.”
She took another couple of steps to bring herself even with Charlie’s car, but she was careful not to step out into the spill of the headlights.
Abby gasped, the gun faltered.
“What’re you sayin’ ‘bout my Cody?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Sam saw Malachi move toward Abby, but Abby quickly recovered, leveled the rifle at his chest.
“I guess you’re tired of living, cause I’m gonna put a bullet—”
“Shep brought him,” Sam interrupted. “Took him to your house but you weren’t there. He asked me to take care of the baby while he looked for you. He’s out right now, searching for you.”
“Shep?”
Sam stepped up then, not into the spi
ll of the lights but out from the shadows to beside the left front tire.
“Abby, don’t you want to hold your baby?”
Sam cradled a baby-sized bundle in her arms, wrapped in the ratty afghan she always carried in her backseat. She nuzzled her face into the blanket and kissed the concealed face of the doll wrapped inside.
“Cody?”
The longing in Abby’s voice would have broken Sam’s heart if she weren’t standing there about to shoot Malachi.
“The kiln’s full of stuff — there’s only a little air and Abby hid the key,” Charlie cried. “Don’t give her the baby until she tells me where the key is.”
Even when Charlie spoke, Abby kept the gun pointed at Malachi. If she kept it trained on him, Sam would have to be the one to jump her. She could do it. Abby was a little bitty thing. Sam had six inches and thirty pounds on her.
“You bring me my boy!” Abby said.
“Don’t!” Charlie said. “Not until she—”
“You shut up, witch,” Abby cried. Her attention was focused on Charlie but the rifle was still aimed at Malachi. “All of this is your fault.” To Sam, she said, “I want my Cody, you bring him on—”
“How’re you going to hold a gun and Cody at the same time?” Malachi asked.
“He’s hungry,” Sam said. “Cody’s got his little fist wrapped around my finger and he’s sucking on the end of it. You need to nurse him.”
She took the words like a blow, almost staggered forward.
“Where’s the key?” Charlie demanded. “No key, no baby!”
“I got the key right here in my pocket.” Abby ducked her chin and indicated the pocket on the front of the filthy, bloody, ragged Mickey Mouse smock from the Dollar Store. “Danglin’ on that old rabbit’s foot fob with that other little bitty key and that big ole door key that likely don’t open nothing.” There was a lump in the pocket. That was it, then. Now, they just had to get the gun away from her without anybody getting hurt.
“You bring him here right now.”
Sam walked slowly, cutting her eyes to Malachi, who was maybe twenty feet away from Abby with the rifle aimed at his chest. Sam nodded to him almost imperceptibly.
Then Charlie started toward Abby.
“I said, no key, no baby,” she said. “Give me the key!”
“No!” Abby backed up a step, started to turn the gun toward Charlie, but didn’t, just told Sam, “I done told you once — give me my baby right now!” When Sam didn’t move, Abby cocked her head to the side, almost sounded like a little kid. “You don’t think I’m serious, do you? Guess I need to prove it.”
She turned her attention back toward Malachi and put her eye to the sight on the rifle. Without a moment’s hesitation, she shot him.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The sound of the gunshot shattered the cricket warmth of the night like a bomb. There was a heartbeat of silence then, before Malachi crumpled to the ground. Sam screamed and rushed to where he lay on his side on the road. She probably didn’t even notice that she had dropped the bundle on the road.
Abby noticed!
Charlie watched horror wash over Abby’s face when she thought Sam’d dropped her baby … then saw the horror morph into rage when the doll rolled out of a ragged afghan onto the pavement. Abby turned, racking another shell into the chamber as she aimed the weapon at Sam. Charlie charged. She dived through the air, catching Abby around the midsection like a tackle going after a running back heading into the end zone. The rifle went off, the shot blasting out into the night as she landed on top of Abby, tried for a grip on the rifle but felt a bump, instead, not really painful, just stunning, a blow to the head like she’d stood up from leaning into the refrigerator and whacked her head on the freezer door she’d left open above her.
The world stopped being real for a heartbeat or two, while pain rushed to replace the numb spot on her temple and she felt herself tumbling onto her right side, her cheek scraping across the rough asphalt.
The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a second or two, but that was all Abby’d needed. The rifle she’d slammed into the side of Charlie’s head was now pinned between them. She let go of it, wiggled out from under Charlie’s body and was gone.
Charlie came back to herself in time to see the bloody scrub shirt vanish out of the spill of headlights down the embankment toward the river. She staggered to her feet, only three or four strides behind Abby, and ran — dizzy — after her. At the edge of the road, she hit a wall of black. She’d been staring into the car headlights and the darkness beyond them was a wall of tar. She plunged forward anyway, lost her balance and fell forward and slid on her belly halfway down the riverbank, through bushes that caught on the terrycloth of her bathrobe and briars that grabbed at her hair and face.
It was totally dark — like the inside of the kiln! The thought froze Charlie’s breath as she struggled to her feet, squinting into the black in front of her, trying to get her feet under her so she could keep going.
Staggering forward another couple of steps, she broke free of an oleander bush she’d tangled with and crossed a clear space two or three more steps. Her feet splashed into water. Any farther and she’d be in the river, and Abby was in front of her, which meant she already was.
“Charlie!” she heard Sam’s voice calling from above her. “Charlie, are you down there?”
She looked back up the hill at the black silhouette standing at the top of the ridge, light glowing all around her, then she turned her face back to the darkness of the river in front of her. She was too late. Abby was out there somewhere in the dark water and Charlie had absolutely no hope of finding her. Surely she’d already been washed downstream the thirty or forty feet to the Jabberwock. She was gone, and if Charlie wasn’t careful, the current would carry her there, too. And she couldn’t let herself be grabbed right now, land disoriented and desperately sick in a bus shelter. She had to get to Merrie. Had to get her out of that kiln.
And the woman with the key to the kiln in her pocket had just ridden the Jabberwock to the Dollar General Store parking lot in the Middle of Nowhere.
Sam had heard about people who froze, just suddenly couldn’t move. But it had never happened to her until she heard the gunshot and turned to see Malachi Tackett grab his chest and crumple to the road.
She couldn’t move. Froze as solid as a hood ornament.
Except she didn’t.
While her mind was processing the fact that she was frozen, the rest of her body was obeying the messages she was sending. She screamed, heard herself make a sound like a scream. And the next thing she knew she was kneeling beside Malachi, seeing the blood on the back of his shirt and some part of her brain processing that and being glad about it.
She had no memory, no sense of movement, no spatial history in her muscles to explain how she could have been standing beside the car one instant and the next leaning over Malachi, with absolutely no passage of time in between.
As she turned him over from his side to his back she heard another gunshot, but that was out there where the world was doing its thing, but Sam Sheridan was all about and only about one thing. Malachi Tackett. She took hold of the halves of his button-down shirt and ripped downward, sending buttons pinging off like shrapnel into the night.
Abby’d had the gun trained on Malachi’s chest. She’d fired at a range of only twenty feet. But either her aim was off or Malachi had started to move out of the way a fraction of a second before she pulled the trigger because when Sam lifted up his tee shirt she saw that the bullet wound was not in the top left quadrant of his chest. It was in the lower left quadrant a little higher than his navel and far out on the edge. That was the entry wound. There’d been an exit wound on his back that Sam’d seen and recorded the information for use later, which meant the bullet had entered his left side, cut a path through his body about two inches below the skin and exited out the back. It might have ricocheted off a rib in its progress through his body but she didn’t th
ink the angle was right for that. What else she didn’t think was that the injury was life-threatening. A bullet wound in that spot could not have entered and exited through any vital organs. Though painful and bleeding like a spigot, it was what they called in all the cop movies “a flesh wound.”
She ripped the front half of his shirt off from the shoulder seam, thinking as she did that it took a lot of strength to rip fabric like that, but it was another piece of information she filed for future perusal. She yanked the arm hole seam apart and pulled the piece of fabric down the side seam and off into her hand. Then she ripped the piece of cloth into two halves. She wadded up one piece and jammed it into the hole in his side on the front, deep into the hole, heard him groan but didn’t care. Then she rolled him onto his side and did the same thing with the exit wound on his back.
Then she took a breath. Possibly the first one she’d taken since she knelt beside him, which had to have been less than a minute ago. Then she leapt up, raced to her car, yanked open the back passenger side door — please let it be here, please, oh please let it still be there! — and felt around in the dark footwell and under the front — there! The ACE bandage that’d fallen out of the small plastic tub she used to carry supplies — stethoscope, thermometer, blood pressure cuff — when she was working had fallen out of the tub when she was unloading it on Friday afternoon and she had meant to go back and get it.
She heard his voice as she was running back to kneel beside him, had probably been hearing it the whole time she’d been crouched there, but had not until now attended to the sound. Which, of course, was words and it took her a moment to shift her brain into the mode that translated words into meanings.
“… all right? Where is she?” he asked.
