Cotton Jackson slowed as he approached four-way stop at the intersection of Route 17 with County Road 278, where the Dollar General Store and a bus shelter were on his left beneath a sign that said the Middle of Nowhere. He didn’t intend to stop. Nobody stopped there; slowed down maybe, but didn’t stop. You weren’t likely to get t-boned because you could see down the cross road for half a mile in both directions.
What Cotton saw barreling down County Road 278 was a red car, maybe a Lexus. He stopped then, sat there. The speed that vehicle was traveling, there was no way for it to stop at the sign, even though it was clear Cotton was waiting to cross the intersection.
Cotton was certain the car would blow through the sign and keep going. But it didn’t. It appeared that as soon as the driver noticed Cotton, he began to try to stop — a process that didn’t succeed in halting the car until it was well past the sign and thirty feet down the road beyond it.
The backup lights turned on, but the car didn’t back up the way it’d come. The back end swung around, pointing the car toward where Cotton was stopped at the sign. Then the car — it was, indeed, a Lexus — slowly approached until the driver’s window was next to his.
The man driving it was a black man, but at that moment he looked ghostly pale, and only another black man would notice the difference. The window powered down. Cotton’s was already down. The man started to speak and couldn’t seem to form words. He looked really familiar, but Cotton couldn’t place him.
“You’re the first person I’ve seen since I got here. There’s not another car on the road, no people. It’s like … like everybody in the whole county vanished.”
“They did.”
Cotton watched reactions wash across the man’s face. Shock. Disbelief. Horror. And then a kind of relief. When he spoke again, there was more life in his words.
“Where’d they go?”
“I got no idea.”
The man took a second to absorb that, then said, “My name’s Stuart McClintock and—”
That’s where Cotton had seen the guy’s face! Of course. Cotton Jackson was a diehard Pittsburgh Steelers fan! He could quote every one of Stuart McClintock’s stats: grew up on the streets of Detroit, recruited from some inner-city high school by every Division One college football program east of the Mississippi River. Legendary running back for the University of Michigan. Heisman Trophy winner his senior year. First-round draft pick by the Pittsburg Steelers. McClintock had had a bright future before a career-ending knee injury during his third season sent him out to “get on with his life’s work,” as Coach Chuck Noll put it, instead of to the Super Bowl. Cotton thought he’d heard McClintock went to law school.
“—you don’t know me, but—”
“Oh, I know you, alright. I bleed black and gold!”
The man offered the scraps of a smile before he continued. “Look, I’d like to talk, to ask … I was wondering if—”
Cotton was sure he didn’t usually have so much trouble putting words together. But then, discovering that everything you thought you knew about the functioning of the universe didn’t mean diddly squat would rattle anybody.
“Can we go somewhere? I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee—”
“There’s nowhere to go for coffee. Nobody here to serve it.”
Even that small statement rocked McClintock and Cotton realized he wasn’t displaying a whole lot of sympathy and empathy for this stranger — famous football player that he was — who was just finding out what had knocked Cotton on his keister almost two weeks ago.
“Why don’t you follow me to my house. I live on Chimney Rock Pike in Bugtussle Hollow. It’s not far. Not a whole lot there, but I did get a table and a couple of chairs to go with my camping gear out of the U-Store-It. And a coffee pot. I’ll make you a cup. Of course, by the time I’m finished talking, you’re going to need something a whole lot more potent than coffee. A stiff drink. Strong enough to dissolve the swizzle stick.”
An hour and two full pots of coffee later, Cotton sat back and surveyed the young man seated across the table from him. Stuart McClintock had told Cotton an outrageous, impossible story, one Cotton was certain the man would never have breathed a word about to anybody else on the planet. Knew the breakers would fire in McClintock’s head at how “crazy” he sounded and he’d tell himself it hadn’t really happened, loud enough and long enough to mostly convince himself that it hadn’t. Mostly.
But there’d been no disbelief on Cotton’s face when he began his halting account, and as Cotton merely nodded, he spoke more and more freely. The explosion. The vanishing man. The cold. The appearing/disappearing words.
“Her mother’s house was bone empty — not a stick of furniture in it — so how could she have been living there?” Then he’d looked around but hadn’t yet asked Cotton why he had so little furniture. But he had wanted to know if Cotton would mind if he opened a window, though, that the room was “stuffy” — so he felt that part, too.
Well, now it was Cotton’s turn.