49

At some point, my brain shut down. I didn’t think so much as hallucinate. My body continued to plunge forward, but my mind drifted away to parts unknown. I was in church again, seated beside Mama, while Daddy stomped and raved and reached for another serpent. I was with Lester, sitting by Ghost Creek, drinking shine we’d swiped from Herschel Knott. I was with Mary, the last time we’d hiked in the mountains together, a thunderstorm fast approaching, her hand, small and urgent, in mine. She’d whispered in my ear that we should find a place to ride it out, and her tongue had curled and her breath had heaved on the word ride, and damned if I didn’t know exactly what she wanted. We found the cave, and we found a moment or two that would forever be a part of me, and I hoped a part of her.

These memories and a thousand more came and went like gnats, worrying me for a few moments before dying away only to be replaced by the next ones.

When I came to the train tracks, I stumbled across them and fell face down on the other side, skidding down the rocky embankment along the tracks. I wiped blood off my elbows and noted the rips in my pants before touching my pocket to make sure that the DVD was still there, intact, and then I rose and kept walking, a zombie whose brain had been reduced to a single goal.

Following the tracks across the river.

*   *   *

I reached the train trestle at dusk, when the river below me had turned to its blackest pitch. I saw the moon reflected in its glassy surface, and my body wavered as I approached the midpoint of the trestle. Lack of fluids had made me unsteady on my feet, and for a brief second I lost my footing and lurched out toward the side of the tracks just the way I’d dreamed. I saw the black water, rising, reaching out for me.

But I managed to regain my footing and step away from the edge, leaning my weight back, centering myself despite the shotgun blast of pain in my hip.

I’m halfway home, I thought. Even as I thought it, I realized it didn’t really make much sense. Home was in the mountains. Home was with Mary. I was only going to watch a DVD.

I nearly fell again but managed to only drop to one knee. I pulled myself back up and stumbled forward. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a train coming. The trestle began to vibrate.

When I made it to the other side, I went to the first trailer I could find and pounded on the door. An old man answered and held out his hands to steady me. “Deja,” I said.

*   *   *

“Mr. Earl,” she said, “drink some water.”

She was holding out a plastic cup, one of those extra-extra-large ones you can get at the gas station. She pressed it to my lips, and I drank in the cool liquid.

Nothing had ever tasted better.

A few sips later, I felt more like myself.

We were sitting in her trailer on the couch. Her mother stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the den, watching us.

“You were shot,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” For some reason that was the only thing I could think to say.

“I tried to call the sheriff, but apparently everything in Riley is shut down because of that idiot’s rally.”

I nodded. “Yeah, they planned it that way.”

“Deja said you’re looking for the woman who disappeared.”

“Yes.”

“That’s all I need to hear. We want to help however we can. Is your wound okay?”

“I think so. Please tell me you have a DVD player.”

“A what?” Deja said.

“God, you’re kidding me. A DVD player. It plays a DVD.”

She shook her head. “You mean one of those disc drive things?”

“We have one,” Deja’s mother said. “It’s on my laptop. Hold on and I’ll get it.”

“Thank you.” I turned to Deja. “Can I use your phone?”

She handed me her cell phone.

I thought for a moment, trying to decide who to call first. I started to dial 911 but stopped after pressing nine. What good would it do to alert Patterson, which would be exactly what the dispatch would do?

I deleted nine and started over, dialing Ronnie’s number.

Please, please, please answer.

“Hello,” Ronnie said. He didn’t sound drunk or high, just ornery, like a man thankful for a phone call just because he’d been too long without somebody to argue with.

“It’s Earl.”

“Earl? Are you shitting me? You okay? I been trying to call you all day. I even walked over to see if the blind bastard had heard from you, and—”

“Shut up and listen.”

“Okay.”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Sure. Except…”

“Except what?”

“I’m in downtown Riley, and it’s a mess here. I hope you don’t need me to go nowhere.”

“That’s exactly what I need. Get in your truck and start driving toward the cornfield. Keep your phone on you. I’m going to call you again when I know more. If you get here and you haven’t heard from me yet, just keep coming. Head straight for the middle of the cornfield, and don’t stop no matter what. You got it?”

“What’s going on, Earl? Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I ain’t heard from you and … I don’t know. I thought you might be dead.”

“No, I’m okay. Just remember what I said. All the way to the middle of the cornfield. Drive hard and fast, Ronnie.”

I ended the call as Deja’s mother handed me the laptop. It was powered on, and all I had to do was slip the disc in the drive located on the side. I waited as it loaded.

The DVD started at the beginning, so I clicked the slider at the bottom and moved it ahead about a third of the way.

There he was—Old Nathaniel, or someone dressed like him—parting the dense stalks with a knife. The camera zoomed in on the knife. The reflection of the full moon was imprinted on the flat side of the silver blade. The corn opened up.

“Mr. Earl?”

“Hold on.”

“You need to eat something.”

I turned away from the screen and saw that Deja was holding a plate of ham and eggs. “Mama just made it.”

I nodded and took the plate, eating greedily as I watched Old Nathaniel weave through the cornstalks in a seemingly random pattern. When he exited the corn, he was in the trees. The camera followed him from behind. It was shaky, poorly executed, but there was a rawness about the moment, a tension that I couldn’t deny.

That tension reached a boiling point when the camera left Old Nathaniel and zoomed ahead through the woods. There were two people walking down a trail. One of them held a gun. The other one—

The other one was Mary.

They stopped, and Johnny Waters turned around, looking directly at the camera, but the light went out on the camera almost instantly, and the screen went dark. I heard jostling and then a scream.

The scream came from Johnny.

“Who are you?” Mary said.

“You can call me Nate,” a modulated voice said.

The camera came back on and the cameraman ran to catch up, pausing just long enough to run the camera over Johnny, lying near the stream.

Someone grunted, and the camera flew back up—too fast, for a second everything was blurry—but when it finally did come back into focus, it showed Mary punching Old Nathaniel in the stomach. He bent over, huffing with pain. She started to run, but the man holding the camera spoke.

“Stop,” he said.

Mary turned and looked directly at the camera. I didn’t believe I’d ever been more proud of an individual in my entire life. Her look was defiant and unafraid.

“You going to shoot me?” she said. “Go ahead.” Then she turned and started to walk away. She didn’t get far before Old Nathaniel grabbed her, lifted her up like she was a sack of groceries, and tossed her into the air. Mary—she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten soaking wet—landed hard against a tree trunk. She slid to the ground and lay there for a moment. Old Nathaniel walked over and said something I couldn’t hear, most likely because his mic had already come off in the earlier struggle. Then he kicked her.

He picked her up and slung her lifeless body over his shoulder.

I swallowed. She was still alive. She was just out, I told myself. She was tough. Tougher than anybody I’d ever known, thank God.

The camera followed them as Old Nathaniel carried her back toward the cornfield.

“Shit,” Deja said. “Was that real?”

“I’m afraid it was.”

“It’s your girlfriend.”

It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway. “Yeah, Mary Hawkins.”

“Where’s he taking her?”

“That’s what I’m hoping to find out.”

We watched, barely breathing as he moved deeper and deeper into the high stalks. Soon, he was dwarfed by them, and they seemed like cornstalks from a dream, instead of reality. I wondered if some special effect had been added to make them taller.

He came to a wall so thick with stalks that there appeared to be no seam, no way through. It was a dead end. He laid Mary down and pulled out his knife. He inserted it into the wall, creating a seam, using his other hand to separate the stalks.

He pulled them apart as wide as he could and turned back to Mary, taking her arm and dragging her through. The stalks closed, leaving the cameraman on the other side.

There was a cut, then the film resumed in a clearing, high stalks all around, a circular wall. Mary lay on the ground and Old Nathaniel stood beside a small metal hatch in the ground. The camera moved slowly closer until it was positioned directly over the hatch. Someone had painted the same symbol here as the one on the stickers—two axe handles and a skull. Old Nathaniel opened the hatch, and it groaned loudly.

At first, it looked like something electric inside. Whatever it was seemed to glow like starlight. But as the camera sharpened its focus, I could see that the glow came from gleaming white skulls. At least a half dozen of them, maybe more.

At the lip of the opening, I could make out the top of a metal ladder. Old Nathaniel climbed down until he was standing at the bottom among the skulls. Then he reached back up and found Mary’s arm. He dragged her headfirst into the hole.

When he emerged a few minutes later, he stood over the hole, looking down. The last shot before he closed the hatch was of Mary, lying among the skulls.

Then the scene went dark.