by Ben Farthing
The idea was somehow more sickening, that her parents and their friends were most easily manipulated by that sort of hate and blame. “It felt like it was leaving, though. Did you feel you that? Maybe this is all almost over.”
Kate shook her head. “It’s leaving, but when it does, it’ll be worse than anything that’s happened yet.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” Cessy said. “If it got what it wanted, it wouldn’t care enough to destroy anything.”
Kate cleared her throat, winced at the pain. “I felt it before Jackson dragged me out. I got stuck in its mind again. It’s reached into our world, and when it snaps back out, it’ll cause destructive chaos.”
“Why wouldn’t it just leave?” Jackson asked. “It got what it wanted. Tricked everyone into loving it, killed anyone who got in the way, and then snatched away the tasty ones.”
“It is just leaving,” Kate said. “Look.” She loosened the laces in her tennis shoe, pulled one loop wide so the lace flopped down onto the forest floor before circling back to the eyelet. “The worm didn’t stick its head or tail into Hamlin, just a section of its body.”
“Does it have a head or tail?” Cessy remembered her glimpse into its mind, how she’d felt infinite.
“If it does,” Kate said, “they’re farther away than we could ever comprehend.” She pushed the shoelace into the dead leaves, dirt, and twigs on the ground. “And the length of its body that you saw in the cavern, it’s a tiny fraction of what’s come through into Hamlin. It’s dug through town all over. Looped under roads and through houses. I saw it in five or six places when I was looking into it.”
“I saw it in a couple,” Cessy said. “Gordon’s kiln. Mom and Dad’s basement.”
Kate looked like she wanted to talk about their parents, but she held off. “So it’s mixed in with the town like my shoelace is with these leaves. It’s got a single point where it entered--the cavern--and a single point where it’s leaving. When it’s done and leaves Hamlin behind, it’ll snap tight between the two.”
She tugged her shoelace tight. The loop snapped back to the shoe, kicking up dirt and leaves. A tiny dust cloud blossomed.
“That’ll be Hamlin,” Kate said. “Ripped apart.”
“Like an earthquake?” Jackson asked.
“An earthquake that kicks up a storm of all the otherworldly chaos that we’ve seen around here. Space not making sense, darkness you can touch, those little perforations sliding through everything.”
“How do you know all this?” Cessy asked. “So much detail?”
Kate coughed. “How much did you learn from one time getting too close to the worm? That it’s massive, maybe endless? That it’s indifferent, but it was drawing close to Hamlin and figured, what the hell, let’s stop for a snack. That it’s done this before?”
“Not that last part,” Cessy said.
“Still,” Kate said. “All that from one time. I’ve been in there three days.”
Jackson, who’d been sitting with his face buried in his hands, looked up. “Did you see how to kill it?”
“I don’t even know if it feels pain. Let alone whether it can die. We can’t kill it.” Kate looked at Cessy. “That’s why we’ve got to get everyone out of Hamlin.”
Her cracked voice and shaking lip shattered Cessy’s heart. This was her baby sister. She’d almost lost her, because she was too selfish to check in after Kate missed lunch. And because Kate hadn’t trusted her with the problem. But now, dirty, bruised, and traumatized, Kate had survived. Nothing mattered but getting Kate out of Hamlin, and out of harm’s way. Everyone else in the town had either sat back and let it happen, or actively participated. Even Mom and Dad. Cessy couldn’t waste time trying to save them without lowering her chance of saving Kate. She could feel guilty about it after Kate was safe.
“You have a car, right?” Kate said. “We’ll warn as many people as we can.”
“No,” said Cessy.
The ground shook beneath their feet.
53
The minor earthquake was enough to trigger a rapid-fire snapping of branches. A tree fell across the trail uphill from them. Pebbles bounced the down the mountain. Dirt smacked Cessy’s face.
“What do you mean, no?” Kate stood, wobbled.
Cessy jumped up to steady her little sister. She stumbled herself, then caught her.
The earth stopped shaking.
“Let’s talk about the earthquake,” Cessy suggested.
“No. I said let’s go get Mom and Dad. You told me no.”
Jackson came over to help support Kate. She shrugged him off, almost toppling the frail, broken young man. He backed off. “Pick a direction. We can’t stay up here.”
“Do you know what I’ve been through to find you? I’m not helping you limp right back into danger.” Cessy pointed up along the mountain’s ridge. “Home is that way.”
Kate pulled away from Cessy. She held out her arms for balance, and walked downhill. “I’m getting Mom and Dad. And anyone else who’ll come.”
Cessy hurried to stay at Kate’s side. “We all just felt the ground shake. This is West Virginia. There’s no earthquakes.” She stamped her foot. “That thing below us is on the move.”
“That’s what I’m telling you. It’s going to destroy Hamlin.”
“Then we should leave.”
Cessy looked back to Jackson for support. He followed, but whichever direction he supported going, he was too tapped out to argue. He jogged down the hill to be on Kate’s other side.
Kate whirled on Cessy. Downhill momentum nearly toppled her, until Cessy and Jackson caught her. “You think you’ve been through so much? What about me? I’ve been in Hamlin over a week! And unlike you, I have friends here. I did, anyways. You came here to help me, and I’m grateful for it. I never doubted you would. But I came here to help Hamlin. And our parents.”
“Mom and Dad are in on it! They’re gobbling up Locker’s hateful rhetoric. They don’t even need the Maple Table to tone it down for them anymore.”
“You don’t think I know that? That’s why I avoided them when I got here. I went in that mine, hoping to shut down the broadcast long enough to get Mom and Dad out. But I’ll get them out either way. I’m not abandoning them now.”
Kate hiked down the trail. Cessy exhaled and then pursued. Pine needles whipped at her cheeks. Her one sock foot stepped on a tiny pinecone.
Another earthquake, this one deep and slow. Tree trunks vibrated. Jackson flinched away from a shaking rhododendron bush.
Kate ignored it to keep walking. Cessy rushed to keep up.
“We’re marching through insanity. Do you not feel that? It’s moving.”
Her sister tightened her lips. Her cheeks were pale. The fast pace was taking its tole.
“I already tried talking to Mom,” Cessy said. “Before I understood what was going on, and after I realized you’d gone into the mine. They won’t listen to reason.”
Kate’s chest heaved. She spoke through gasping breaths. “You probably got angry. You know how they get when they think you’re angry. Like you’re to blame for everything wrong with the world. I can talk to them.”
“That’s what I’m saying! These broadcasts tapped into those worst parts of them. And they embraced it. You’re not going to talk them out of it in one conversation.”
“I have to try! Those are my parents.”
Cessy felt her sister’s inner battle. She wanted to solve this conundrum for her baby sister, to free her from this stress. Then Kate would only have the nightmare she’d endured the last three days.
Kate tripped over a root. She fell forward, caught herself with open palms on a buried boulder. Blood smeared. She hissed in pain.
Cessy was at her side in an instant. “Are you alright? Is it just your hands? Did you twist an ankle or anything?”
“Ah, that stings.” Kate squeezed her eyes shut.
Cessy exhaled. “I’m sorry.”
“I tripped, not your fault.”
“I mean I’m sorry I didn’t call when you skipped lunch last week.” Cessy offered her hand. “If I’d realized you were gone earlier, maybe I’d have found you sooner.”
Kate reached up and Cessy pulled her up.
“I wouldn’t have answered. I wanted to come back to Hamlin and sweet talk everyone into telling me what was going on. They remember who I was before I moved to the big city and went all social justice warrior.” She laughed at her mockery of herself.
Jackson said, “No one would ever think Kate Timms was vermin. That’s why I called you. And because I knew you’d help.”
“Cessy Timms, on the other hand,” said Kate. “I’m surprised they didn’t try to feed you to the worm the day you arrived.”
Kate resumed her downhill march.
“Sheriff Miller did,” Cessy said. “He tried to hang me where Marissa Davies hung herself.”
“Crazy asshole,” Kate said. “That wasn’t your fault.”
“My college shrink agreed with you. Either way, I’ve dealt with it. I’m the girl who bullied a future suicide victim. Can’t change that. But I’m also the woman who’s put away dozens of criminals.”
Kate nodded. “Good. Now be the woman who saves her parents.”
Back to this. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Cessy asked. “You could have told me that Jackson needed help, and that’s where you were going, but you wanted me to stay home because Hamlin hates me.”
“You would have flipped out the second you heard Jackson’s name,” Kate said. “How did you know I’d gone to Hamlin?”
“I heard your voicemails from Jackson.”
“Those were pretty vague. Why did you think I’d come?”
Cessy bit her lip. “To help him. But I thought he was lying, and he’d try to win you back,” she admitted. “And maybe hurt you if you turned him down.”
“What?” laughed Jackson.
“See?” Kate said. “You would have tried to stop me.”
“I’m trying to apologize,” Cessy said. “You didn’t come to me for help. I’m your big sister. Shit, Kate, I’m a cop. If there was a weird mystery in Hamlin, I was the obvious person to bring along. But you didn’t trust me. Whatever your reason, I’m saying sorry. When we get back to D.C., I’ll try to do better at whatever it is. For right now, I just want to get you out of Hamlin.”
Kate looked hurt. “I didn’t leave you out of this because I don’t trust you.”
“So you do trust me?”
Kate lowered her voice so Jackson wouldn’t hear. “I thought I did. What you did in that mine surprised me.”
It hit Cessy like a knife to the gut. She’d been Kate’s protector. She felt betrayed. Or maybe like a betrayer. “Jackson was letting himself be brainwashed. I snapped him out of it.”
“You did it in a terrible way.”
“Please, let’s discuss this back in D.C. Let’s turn around, and hike out of here.”
“Have some compassion.”
Compassion was a luxury Cessy had sacrificed when she determined to rescue Kate. But at the same, it was what she craved from Kate, and what she wanted Kate to see in her.
Cessy patted the revolver at her side. Five rounds. “This time, you’ll do the talking.”
54
Cessy and Jackson had to support Kate for the last half-mile of the hike to the parking lot. Blisters were developing on her heel without her shoe, and the imbalanced step reignited the pain in her knee.
The sun was high in the sky, piercing straight down through the treetops. The morning cool was gone. Summer afternoon heat was building.
Cessy grabbed two water bottles from the 4Runner. Kate chugged the first one, vomited, then sipped on the next. Cessy helped her into the front seat.
Jackson stood at the edge of the gravel lot, head tilted as he stared up the mountain in to the woods. “Something’s happening.”
A low pattering buzz filled the hillside. Cessy shut Kate’s door and ran to her own. “Come on!” she yelled to Jackson.
Jackson slowly stepped backwards toward the truck, his attention stuck uphill.
The pattering buzz erupted into a tormentuous downpour. Above the trees, dark specs bounced into the air.
Jackson sprinted to the truck.
Tree trunks cracked.
A landslide roared down the mountain. Cessy threw the truck into gear, let Jackson hop in the back, then tore off out of the parking lot. Gravel rattled her wheel wells.
In the rearview mirror, a dusty storm of rocks and toppled trees slid over the parking lot. Cessy floored the accelerator. The truck’s engine scraped and complained. She drove them perpendicular to the landslide. Metallic tings assaulted the side of the truck.
They died off, and the roar behind them died down.
Cessy stopped the truck, rolled down her window, and listened.
“Don’t stop here,” Jackson said.
She shushed him.
Whispering wind and whistling birds filled the air. The creaking of trees.
“The worm’s leaving,” Kate said. “It’ll whip through the whole town on its way out.”
“Shh,” Cessy reiterated.
Softer, beneath those sounds of nature, sirens.
“Do you hear that?” asked Jackson.
Kate leaned out her own open window.
They looked downhill, through the trees. The forest cut off their view.
“Is EMS still running?” Kate asked. “Or the fire department?”
“Those are police sirens,” Cessy said.
Jackson scratched nervously at his wounded leg. “I told you Sheriff Miller had a way of showing back up.”
“That’s not him.” Cessy shook her head. “There’s at least three sirens.”
“The deputies are taken or dead,” Kate said.
“Then it’s the state troopers.” Cessy pressed on the accelerator. “Let’s go say hi.”
55
The pedals were cool through Cessy’s sock. She rode the brake down the mountainside.
The upside of going to Mom and Dad’s house was that she had spare shoes in the overnight bag she’d left there.
Kate leaned back in the front seat, sipping on water and eating trail mix. “Did you call the state police?”
In the backseat, Jackson used water and tissues to clean the dirt off his bruised leg. “Not since before I called you. They wouldn’t listen.”
“I called my partner yesterday,” Cessy said. “Told him everything I knew at that point--which wasn’t much. He told me not to go back to Mom and Dad’s. Then Hamlin lost cell service. Landis must have got worried.”
They drove out of the forest, into the fields between the town and the mountains.
The sirens grew louder. Cessy looked over her shoulder up Black Gold Peak. The tip of the mountain was still green with trees, but a swath around halfway up was the brownish red of fallen trees and dirt. A bulge in the center reminded Cessy of when her yard had been invaded by moles.
Below the empty patch, in the still-standing forest, trees and boulders had carved thin paths downhill.
“We should avoid the cops,” Jackson said. “Lockler brainwashed Sheriff Miller. Probably did the same to the state troopers.”
“According to your dad,” Cessy said, “Sheriff Miller and our parents practically invited Lockler here. We can trust these cops.”
“Still a risk,” Jackson said. “Let’s get your parents, and get out of here.”
Kate sat up. “Not just our parents. Anyone who’ll listen.”
“Either way,” Jackson said, “you break the tie. Do we avoid the state troopers or go talk to them?”
“It’s not a vote,” Cessy said. “It’s my car. I’m the one with fifteen years’ experience handling emergency situations.”
“Let’s talk to the troopers,” Kate said. “We’ve got to help as many people as we can.”
“The ayes have it,” Cessy said. It’d be a huge boon to have some real cops helping. She’d s
how Kate that they had things under control, and then they’d get out of Hamlin.
Jackson grumbled.
They were silent as they drove past Jackson’s collapsed house.
Into town, where Mud River Road turned into Main Street. Past Tapjacks Diner, which had a bustling lunch crowd, the only sign of life in Hamlin. Despite the earthquake and landslide, the patrons ate their lunch, undisturbed by the outside world.
The sirens echoed from the downtown cross streets, over by the grocery store, and up towards either Rag Hill or the Church of the Morningstar.
A West Virginia State Police cruiser was parked in front of the police station, next to a Chevy truck with Virginia plates. Landis.
Cessy parked.
“I’ll keep an eye on the car,” Jackson said.
Cessy and Kate got out.
The sun warmed Cessy’s grimy skin. The cement sidewalk was hot under her shoeless foot. Maybe they should have gone to Mom and Dad’s first.
Kate held her hands out for balance, but stayed up on her own. She pointed to the revolver on Cessy’s hip. “You wearing that inside?”
“Oh, good point.” Cessy took her badge from her back pocket and clipped it onto her belt.
Kate rolled her eyes.
Except for the sirens a mile distant, Hamlin was quiet. Black Gold Peak stayed still.
They walked up the wooden porch steps that had once belonged to the Company Store.
From inside, male voices argued, while Lockler’s staticky broadcast formed the auditory backdrop.
Cessy and Kate walked inside.
56
Inside the office, the AC pumped hard. The air chilled Cessy after being outside.
A radio sat on a windowsill. It filled the room with Lockler’s ranting.
Behind the desk, Betty the receptionist and dispatcher stared intently at her computer. Mascara smeared down her young cheeks. She put extreme effort into ignoring the two men arguing near her.
The first, a state trooper Cessy didn’t recognize. His insignia named him a sergeant. His weathered face put him a few years older than Cessy.
