Chapter One

Malachi Tackett piloted the van with the words “Healthy Pets Veterinary Clinic and Animal Hospital” emblazoned on the side down Sanders Lane in the darkness, winding away from Route 17 North into Persimmon Ridge. He turned right off Main Street onto Wiley Road for a mile or two, then left on Iron Rock Road.

The houses he passed were dark except for the one next door to Howie Witherspoon’s house. Old man Hayes lived there. He was almost deaf and just about blind, and it looked like every light in the house was on. Malachi killed the headlights on the van as he pulled into the Witherspoon driveway behind Howie’s car, that Malachi had parked there last night after he’d used it to take Toby Witherspoon to Sam’s house.

Malachi wasn’t expecting the sudden glare of the security light when he got out of the van. It was obviously hooked to a motion sensor, and he quickly darted into the shadows on the side of the garage, found his way through the dark to the side door, opened it and stepped inside. Closing the door behind him, he felt along the wall for the light switch and flipped it, filling the small, windowless building with the bilious glow from a dusty florescent light bar dangling over an old ski boat that rested on a trailer with two flat tires.

While Toby had waited in his father’s car last night, Malachi had shoved the tarp-shrouded body of Toby’s father under the back of the boat beneath the prop of the Evinrude engine. The dead body of Custard, the little white dog Howie had killed, lay beside it. Malachi’d figured out where to dispose of the corpses as he’d sat in the dark beside E.J.’s bed until Judd Perkins relieved him half an hour ago.

That was the best Malachi could do to delay the inevitable. Get rid of Howie’s body and hide Toby. Sooner or later Malachi’s mother would go looking for Howie, and when she couldn’t find him and Toby, she’d suspect that Malachi was somehow responsible for their disappearance. But she wouldn’t likely go after Charlie without proof Malachi had “lined up against her.” Her favorite son could forestall her wrath for a little while, could bluff. Though playing cat and mouse with Viola Tackett was dangerous business, right now it was the only game in town.

Malachi searched the small building until he found the breaker box and turned off the juice to the outside security light. Then he hauled Howie’s corpse and the body of the dog out to the van and loaded them in the back. He figured to make it to the boarded-up mine entrance just beyond the washed-out bridge on Gopher Hill Road and back to the Middle of Nowhere before dawn.

The sun was cresting the horizon out there on the flat when Malachi turned off Blandford Lane onto Lexington Road and headed down it toward the clinic. In a normal world, he’d be able to see a faint glow of light behind the mountains to the east, could watch the black velvet sky slowly turn navy blue, the color fading to pale blue, extinguishing the stars like blowing out candles on a birthday cake as light moved across the sky. Normal had taken a hike two weeks ago on J-Day. Now there was almost no transition at all between night and morning. The black didn’t fade slowly away. It was black, and then it was navy and then it was blue — bam, bam and bam. Like whoever was operating the dimmer switch on the sun was in a hurry. The stars didn’t blink out one by one. Stars … then no stars. They were all gone between one heartbeat and the next.

And this morning, no-stars was definitely a good thing. Malachi had noticed it on his way to Persimmon Ridge, had almost run E.J.’s van off into a ditch. All the stars were on the same side of the sky! Half the sky was empty blackness, the other half was full of stars, all the same size and as unblinking as a little kid’s night light.

It was so creepy. When Malachi first began to notice all the weirdness-es, he thought he was the only one who saw them, that it wasn’t real, just more entertaining manifestations of his PTSD. He was both relieved and horrified to discover everybody else was seeing the same things he was.

He glanced down at the fuel gauge in the van and groaned. Almost empty. It wouldn’t be long now before there wasn’t a gallon of gasoline to be had for any price anywhere in the county. It was a good thing he’d moved into E.J.’s apartment above the animal hospital and didn’t have to travel all the way out to Killarney every night. And since his mother had stolen the Nower house in Persimmon Ridge, he’d have been stuck out there in Turkey Neck Hollow without a vehicle. Oh, he could have taken one — there was no shortage of abandoned vehicles in Nowhere County, the cars of the people caught outside on J-Day. But Malachi wasn’t a car thief.

There was a case to be made that it wasn’t stealing to take an abandoned car. That was certainly the way his mother looked at it, though she would take whatever car she wanted whether it was abandoned or not. When he’d gone to see her new “digs” last night, there had been a black Corvette parked in the driveway. He’d noticed the car a couple of times since he got back to the county after he was released from the Veterans Administration Hospital in Louisville, thought it belonged to Bud Griffith. Appeared it was Viola’s now — which meant one of his brothers, probably Zach, who obsessed over cars, had taken it for his own just like his mother had taken the house.

Which was one of the reasons Malachi refused to commandeer an abandoned vehicle. It lit up the reason, anyway. When he left the county to join the military he had left behind more than Nowhere County and his family. He had made a decision the first day of boot camp, as he lay in his bunk more exhausted than he thought it was possible for a person to be and survive, that he would shed his skin like a snake and leave everything behind. He would no longer be Malachi Tackett in any way that mattered. He would be the polar opposite of everything his mother was, a total repudiation of the life she had created for him and his brothers and sister. From that moment on, Malachi was brutally honest. An inconvenient honesty that required of him that he admit to the sergeant that he’d nodded off while on guard duty, though no one had seen or reported it. The admission had earned him a week of latrine duty. And that he refused to answer for his bunkmate at roll call when Seabags missed the last bus to the base after a weekend drunk. That kind of fearless honesty had brought with it an unexpected benefit — the respect of his fellow Marines. “Honor” was the character trait valued above all else in the Corps.

His ruthless honesty extended to what he told himself, too. He admitted his own fear in combat, never pretended things were going to work out when he knew for certain that the guano was about to connect with the air conditioning.

Like he knew right now. It was about to get reeeeally ugly in Nowhere County and there was only one way to escape the crap-storm that was about to make landfall. That was to find a road “out.” The place had already been a death trap, with people vanishing without so much as a puff of smoke, their homes aging a hundred years overnight. Now, you could add into the mix the certainty that if the Jabberwock didn’t get you, his mother would. Viola Tackett was a vicious murderer. She would cut down anybody in cold blood — maybe even Malachi if he got in her way. She never let an offense slide.

Somebody had to figure a way to defeat the Jabberwock. If they couldn’t do that, every man, woman and child in Nowhere County was going to die. Sooner rather than later.