TWELVE
Walton had heard the call from the helicopter pilot and using the two patrol cars, their headlights illuminated a landing pad in a parking lot not far from the city limits sign. And the invisible line that separated life from death.
Walton hurriedly briefed Mayfield on the walk from the 'copter.
If Mayfield was startled, he did not show it. “Gene stepped inside this line?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And when he did, his walkie-talkie stopped working?”
“Yes, sir.”
Walton stopped the parade of cops just inside the safe line.
“Gene!” Mayfield called. “You're a fool!”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you're also a very brave man.”
“If I'm so brave, how come my knees are knocking together, Captain?”
Mayfield smiled. No one had noticed that the Captain of Nebraska Highway Patrol was dressed in urban combat gear, from his bloused boots to the battle harness and the Uzi slung over his shoulder. He turned to a lieutenant.
“Take care of things, Norton.” Then he walked to a patrol car, cranked it up, and drove over the line, joining his sergeant.
“Now, who's the fool, Captain?” Davidson asked, as Mayfield got out of the car.
“I suppose that will remain to be seen, Gene.” He looked at Holland. “Uncle Marty.”
“Bobtail. That was a stupid stunt you just pulled, boy. You can't get out.” His dentures clacked and clicked and whistled.
“First store we come to, I'm gonna get you some Poli-Grip, Uncle Marty. That clacking is gonna drive us all crazy.”
“We don't have the time for that, boy. Me and Doc got to go in my truck. And don't ask me why; you wouldn't understand.”
“I don't understand
any
of this!”
“You will.”
“I'll take your word for that. Coming in, we saw a lot of flames over at the fairgrounds Can you explain that, Uncle Marty, Doc?”
Doc Reynolds took it. “That was probably Martin Holland using his gift to defend his little group.”
“His ... gift?”
“He has a third eye. Some call it the insight. He's only just discovered the power. Don't get in his way when he's using it.”
“I will, ah, do my best to avoid this ... third eye.” Wherever he keeps it, Mayfield thought.
“He keeps it in his mind, smart-ass,” Doc told the man. “And watch what you think. He can look into your head as easily as I can.”
“I'm gonna kill that son of a bitch!” a woman hollered. “You just watch me.”
Heads turned and most of the eyes widened in horror as a naked woman, minus one arm and one leg came clopping up the street. She had tied a stick of stove wood around the stump of the missing leg. She also had a meat cleaver buried right in the middle of her head.
And carried another meat cleaver in her one remaining hand.
“Ruth Horton,” Doc said, as the woman clopped and staggered over to them.
Mayfield and Davidson stepped closer to the patrol car as the woman staggered up against the rusted old pickup truck.
“Ruth,” Doc said. “You'll be wanting a ride to the fairgrounds, I suppose?”
“Absolutely right!” she bellowed. Her flesh was unnaturally white in the gloom.
“Climb in!” Holland told her. “In the back.”
Doc looked at him. “Thank you for that, at least.”
Ruth fell into the bed of the truck.
The two old men, each on the opposite sides of the line of life and death, moved toward the truck.
“Wait a minute!” Mayfield found his voice. “What about us?”
“My suggestion is that you stand clear until it's over,” Doc told him. “One way or the other. 'Course, that's up to you boys.”
The old men got into the truck and Holland fired it off. Blue smoke poured and the truck went sparking and lurching and rattle-banging off in the general direction of the fairgrounds.
The sergeant looked at the captain. “Do we follow them?”
“Can we get out of the fairgrounds area?”
“According to Doc, we can.”
“Let's prowl the town for a few minutes. This Martin Holland fellow seems to be holding his own over there. Besides, I still don't know what we're up against. You?”
“You got part of it right, Captain.”
* * *
Mark, unknown to the adults, had made a side trip to the sportsmen's section of a pavilion during their search for Frenchy. There he had picked up a crossbow and a leather quiver filled with bolts. He had given them to Amy for safekeeping and forgotten about it. Now he remembered.
“The crossbowâwhat'd you do with it, Amy?” he whispered.
She pointed. “Laid it right over there.”
“Get it for me. I don't want to leave this position.”
The girl was back in half a minute, handing the powerful weapon to her boyfriend. “What are you going to do, Mark? Do you think you can kill that awful man with an arrow?”
“No. But we're being set up. Some men are slipping up on us. On Nabo's left side. One of them is Dr. Tressalt. I think. Get Jeanne off to one side. Tell her about Dr. Tressalt and then take Rich as far to the other side of the circle as you can get him. You know why.”
“I don't want to leave you, Mark.”
“Go on, Amy,” he said gently, then kissed her. “I don't want Rich to see me kill his dad.” If I can do it, that is, the boy thought.
The girl reluctantly moved away.
Mark set the bow-string and cranked it back until he could not turn the crank another turn. He set the bolt in place.
“Mr. Mayor!” Nabo called. “Are you there, friend?”
“I'm here,” Martin spoke just loud enough to be heard. “But I'm sure not your friend.”
“What a pity that you hold such hate in your heart.”
“Yeah, I'm all torn up about it, Nabo.”
The man in black laughed in the still fiery night; the smell of burning tires and human flesh was strong by the fence line.
“Can you kill him, Martin?” Ned whispered.
“No. I don't think so, Ned. I don't know if anything can kill him.” Martin's eyes were fixed on Nabo. He had not noticed the men slipping up, edging closer in the tall grass. “What do you want, Nabo?”
“More than a modicum of civility on your part would be much appreciated, Mayor.”
“Sorry for my bluntness, Nabo.” Martin's tone overflowed with sarcasm. “You might say that I've been under a bit of stress lately.”
“Your apology is noted and accepted.” Then he surprised them all by saying, “You've won a few rounds, you know?”
“No, I didn't know that at all.”
“Well, it's a small victory, to be sure. Your little ... group has managed to demoralize the townspeople. You've really taken a toll this night.”
“Music to my ears.”
“No doubt. But you still can't get out of town. For that matter,” he added with acid-like bitterness in his voice, leaving no doubt in Martin's mind abot his truthfulness, “neither can I.”
“And? . ...”
“Compromise.”
“Make a deal with the devil? I don't think so, Nabo.”
“Hear me out, Martin. Don't be too hasty with your rejection. I alone know what can happen. You don't.”
Martin waited.
“I'm taking your silence as an indication that you will at least hear me out. That's good. Are you a gambler?”
“I enjoy a friendly game of penny-ante poker, yes.”
Nabo cursed under his breath. The man was definitely a goody-two-shoes type. But he knew that there had to be a fatal flaw somewhere within him. The trick was in finding it.
“We're both winners in this game. You realize that, don't you, Martin?”
“No, I don't. Get to the point.”
Gary had slipped closer, very much in range of Mark's crossbow. Still, he waited, the crossbow at the ready.
“Forget the wager, then,” Nabo's tone held a note of weariness. “You obviously are no sport.”
Mark lifted the crossbow to his shoulder.
“Let me tell you a truth, Martin,” Nabo spoke. “I can destroy this town. The only reason I don't do that is because I have no desire to live among rubble and ruin.”
“You're telling me that you are trapped in here just as we are?”
His sigh was audible over the distance. “Yes, Martin, this is what I'm saying.”
“And this ... condition could go on forever?”
“That is correct.”
“I find that unacceptable.”
“I thought you might.”
Martin thought about that for a moment. “How?”
“How ... what?”
“How can that be?”
“Because you are not. Let me explain. Your scientists, when they spoke of time warps, were closer to the truth than even they realized. You're not really in a warp, but that will suffice.”
“A whole town cannot just ... vanish, Nabo.”
“The town has not vanished. You have not vanished. But your soul is gone. Your being. Your molecular make-up has been altered. Are you beginning to understand?”
“You might say that those beings still present outside of this warp are merely our clones,” Ed spoke from the edge of the circle.
“Ah!” Nabo's voice held a note of satisfaction. “The young man is not one hundred percent accurate, but he is very close. Yes. That will do. Thank you, young man.”
“We are the souls and those that should remain visible are merely shells, Mr. Holland,” Ed added it up.
“Oh, I do so enjoy an intelligent mortal!” Nabo cried. “Especially one so young. How would you like to be the most famous scientist in all the world, young man?”
“I only have to make a deal with the devil, right?” Ed asked.
“Crudely put, young man. But... yes.”
“Sorry. But I'm not interested.”
Janet spotted Gary in the dim light from the fading fires and the midway. The doctor was in the middle of his metamorphosis, his face that of a horrible beast. Janet screamed just as Mark triggered the crossbow. His aim was true, the bolt taking the creature directly in the center of his chest. The transformation continued as death began flapping its wings and cawing the demon home.
Nabo looked with disgust in his eyes at the thrashing doctor with a bloody bolt piercing his chest, driving deep into the black heart. He cut his lens covered eyes to the boy with the crossbow in his hands.
Mark had cranked the string in place and inserted another bolt, holding the stock to his shoulder, his finger on the trigger.
“They were too impatient,” Nabo said with a sigh. “We could have had it all. But they could not contain themselves.” He cut his eyes to Martin. “You won't deal, you won't gamble, and you won't compromise?”
“That's the size of it, Nabo.” Behind him, Frenchy was trying to comfort the sobbing Janet.
“Well ... I'll still beat you, Mr. Mayor. But it will be a hollow victory for me.” He half turned, then once more faced Martin. “You're quite a man, Martin. As a matter of fact, each person in your group is quite unique. Unfortunately for me.”
He turned and walked slowly into the gloom. Then, once again, he paused and turned around. “You know where you and your group must meet me to bring an end to this, don't you?”
“I've had a feeling about that,” Martin called. He pointed to the midway.
“That is correct, friend. Fun for one and all.” He laughed in the night. “The carnival is in town.”
THIRTEEN
Mayfield slowed and stopped in the middle of the street. “Look over there.” He pointed. “Couple sitting on the front porch. Let's walk over and see what they have to say.”
Davidson reluctantly nodded his head and both men got out of the car. They carried their weapons slung and set on full automatic. The middle-aged man and woman watched them approach. They said nothing. Mayfield and Davidson both noticed that the man and woman's eyes were very strange looking. They were both dressed in formal wear. Very outdated formal wear.
“Good evening,” Mayfield said.
“Hubert and I are going to the prom in a few minutes,” the woman replied.
“The ... prom?” Mayfield asked.
“Yes,” the woman said.
Hubert grinned. He looked like an idiot, sitting on the porch dresed in white sport coat that he could not button across his big belly. He had taken house paint and painted his shoes white. A pink carnationâmade of paperâwas pinned onto his lapel. His trousers were black. The woman was dressed in a formal that looked as though it had been packed away in a trunk for thirty years. Her hair was done up in '50s style.
“Ah ...” Mayfield cleared his throat. “Isn't it a bit late to go to the prom?”
“Not at all,” Hubert replied. “Some friends are coming to pick us up at 9:15. Oh! There they are now.”
Both troopers looked around. No other car in sight. They glanced at their watches. Blinked when the hands read 9:15. But both knew it was a lot later than that. More like 11:30.
“Aren't you boys going to the prom?” she asked. “Don't you have dates?”
“Ah ... no!” Davidson told her. “We... ah, have to work. Yeah, that's it.”
“What a drag. Totally uncool. Bye now.”
Hubert did a bop step on the sidewalk while the woman was engaged in conversation with somebody, or something, that neither cop could see.
“Well, pooh on you!” the woman said. “We'll just walk to the gym. Come, Hubert.”
Both cops heard the sounds of a car pulling away, tires squalling on the pavement. Music from the 1950s was filling the air. But there was no other car in sight.
“Holy mackerel!” Mayfield found his voice.
“What next, Captain?”
“Follow them. But I have a hunch I know where they're going.”
“To the fairgrounds?”
Mayfield nodded his head. “Yeah. Come on. Let's go find Frenchy.”
* * *
“What's the matter, Dad?” Mark asked, walking up to his father. “You have a funny look on your face.”
“Nabo lied. Again.” The others gathered around.
Frenchy said, “The midway is deserted. Where has everybody gone? And what do you mean, Nabo lied?”
“The man who jumped off the ferris wheel, the woman who died with that dart in her head. The men Doc Reynolds killed and those I killed. Those men and women who burned to death just a few moments ago ...”
“All right. What about them?” Dick asked.
“We may be locked inside this ... whatever it is surrounding the town ... but we're all very much human and intact. You can't kill a soul by fire or with a club or knife or gun. Nabo lied.”
The calliope began playing a tune from out of the 1950s, “Johnny B. Goode.” Jeanne pointed to the midway.
“They're dancing over there!”
“If you call that dancing,” Mark said.
“What is that silly stuff?” Amy asked.
“It's called the bop,” Martin informed the young people.
“Gross!” Jeanne offered her opinion.
“Totally primitive,” Susan said.
Martin looked at Don. “You got anything to add to that, boy?”
Don wisely played the diplomat. “I always sort of liked it, myself.”
Dick chuckled. “I told you the boy was no fool, Martin.”
“Now that I think some on it,” Ned said, “I agree with you, Martin.” He held up a cut finger. “I snagged my finger on a broken bottle not twenty minutes ago. That's real blood. So we're real, whole people.”
“But he must have told us all that for some reason,” Janet said, her voice soft in the night. She had not looked at the body of her dead husband once since Mark had put the crossbow bolt through his heart.
“Either that or the man, creature, whatever he is, is a pathological liar,” Dick offered. “But I'll wager he had his reasons for lying... and convincingly, too.”
The calliope was belching out “Shake Rattle & Roll,” and the midway was rocking.
Rich had just returned from a visit to the van, checking on his little brother. Gary was asleep, covered with a coat that Balo, or someone, had found. Balo had smiled at him, saying nothing.
“Rich,” Martin said, facing the boy. “While this Nabo tells one lie after another, a few things he said were true. One is, we can't get out. Two, this battle is for our survival. Three, it's going to take place on that midway over there.” He pointed. “And that is where some of us have to go. I'd feel better if you were back at the van with your brother. What do you say?”
The boy didn't want to appear a coward, but back at the van seemed like a darn good place to be. As long as he could sit up front with that pretty Balo and the snake stayed in the back with Gary. The boy swallowed hard, remembering that Balo was
dead!
“Sounds good to me, Mr. Holland.”
“Fine. How about you girls?” But he also knew by the set of their chins they weren't about to leave the group.
They shook their heads.
Martin had to make one more try, for their safety and for his peace of mind. He knew, or at least felt, that once they got on that midway, there would be no turning back for any of them. And Martin did not have even the foggiest notion what any of them might be facing. “Girls, I can't tell you, any of you, what we're going to be up against over there. It may very well end up to be every person for themselves. Probably will turn out that way. I wish you'd reconsider.”
They stood firm.
Martin looked at Dick. The man minutely shrugged his shoulders.
“Martin!” the loudspeakers blared. “Oh, Martin! Come to the midway, Martin. Let's have some fun.”
Martin looked at the group. “Frenchy, Mark, Amy, Ned, Janet, Don. You're with me. We'll go in from that end.” He pointed. “Dick, you take the other group. I have no idea what we're going to find there. I know only that we can't live like this. Time has stopped. So let's join hands and ask Reverend Alridge to say a prayer for us.”
“I'm afraid my thoughts are not very Christian at this moment, Martin. Peace and love and all that,” the pastor said.
“I don't intend to go on that midway promoting peace and love, Ned,” Martin told him and the group. “I intend to go in there with every intention of killing just as many people as it takes to bring this thing to its conclusion.”
* * *
“How you doin' back there, Ruth?” DocReynolds stuck his head out of the window and hollered when Holland finally managed to bring the pickup to a halt. Sort of hard to do with no brakes.
The woman with a meat cleaver stuck in her head waved the meat cleaver in her good hand. “I'll get out of here, Doc. I don't know why Matt did this to me. I don't know why I'm not dead. I don't know what it's going to take for me to find peace, but whatever it is, I know it's here. And I know I've got to help your boy.” She lurched off toward the brightly lighted fairgrounds, her stovewood leg clopping on the pavement.
“Impossible,” Doc muttered. He looked at Holland. “And for that matter, so are you.”
On the midway, the young man who had taken a header off the ferris wheel moved his hand and opened his eyelids, exposing empty sockets where his eyes had burst on impact. He did not try to rise.
The woman with the darts in her body moved behind the concession. Sat up, her back against a support post of the tent-covered concession. She opened dead eyes.
Just outside of town, several hundred dogs and cats, all of them horribly maimed, crushed heads and entrails dragging the ground, had gathered. The leader, a big German shepherd with one side of his head caved in from the deliberate impacting of Karl Steele's pickup truck tire, looked around him. He sensed it was not yet time. But very close. When it was over, they would have had their revenge and then could go to that special place, set aside for animals who had suffered cruelly at the hands of man. And there they could find relief from their pain and find what they had always wanted: someone to love them. For they did not understand why some humans would deliberately hurt them.
For several minutes, both Davidson and Mayfield had sat in the parked patrol car, silent, each with his own private thoughts.
“It isn't our fight, Captain,” Davidson finally broke the silence.
“Looks like we've been sharing the same thoughts, Gene. Or orders,” he added.
“Orders, Captain? From who?”
“I don't know, Gene. But I can make a guess and so can you. But this isn't our fight; you're right about that.”
“Frenchy? ...”
“That bothers me. But she voluntarily requested to come off of leave, didn't she?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as she did, she was ordered to stay and investigate whatever was happening here in Holland.”
The men were parked outside the fairgrounds. They had spotted no one with a gun and no one that even looked like a guard. What they had seen were hundreds of people, the men dressed in out-of-date jackets and the women dressed in bursting-at-the-seams old formal gowns streaming into the fairgrounds.
Captain Mayfield made up his mind. He pointed toward the front gate. “We stay out of there until we hear gunshots or see violence.”
They both heard the rattle-bang of the old pickup truck. Without looking around, both knew the leathery, bony old man would be behind the wheel, grinning his death-smile and waving at them as he passed, the old doctor on the seat beside him.
As the truck passed, they noticed the naked lady with the meat cleaver in her head was missing.
“If she was real at all,” Mayfield muttered. “If any of this is real.”
“You didn't stand in the middle of that dark evil place, Captain,” Davidson reminded him. “If you had, you'd know it was real.”
Mayfield sensed his sergeant's words were true and he was very glad to have missed Davidson's experience. He nodded his head and spoke very softly. “Yes. I know it's real, Gene.”
* * *
The women embraced and the men shook hands. None of them felt it was a bit overly dramatic. They all sensed that some of the group would not survive, although none of them said it aloud.
“Our new friends are watching us,” Frenchy whispered.
Martin turned in the direction of her eyes. JoJo, the Dog Man, and Baboo were standing in the shadows, looking at the group.
“We will assist you in a small way,” Baboo said. “The only way that we can. You are all approaching the climax of this ... game. You are all standing very close to death. Be very careful on the midway, and keep in mind that simply because you see something, that does not mean it is what it appears to be. We can tell you no more than that.”
In unison, they stepped back into the night and vanished.
Weapons were checked, nerves were steeled, and eye contact was, for the most part, avoided. The music on the midway had slowed, with NaboâMartin assumed it was Nabo playing the calliopeâdoing a slow 1950s hit. The group could just make out the people on the midway slow-dancing.
The group walked toward the midway.