Nower County, Kentucky Deputy Sheriff Liam Montgomery found Reece Tibbits’s truck just where Lonnie Monroe’d said it’d be. Lonnie’d got up early to work in the garden he’d decided he’d better plant in his backyard. Farmer’s Almanac said not to plant seeds in the heat of the day so he’d got up before dawn. Lonnie was a laid-off coal miner collecting black lung benefits whose knowledge of horticulture did not extend past mowing his grass when it needed it, snipping off the fuzzy heads of the crop of dandelions that called his yard home and wondering sometimes why there always seemed to be more and more of the little critters.
He’d heard an explosion. Wasn’t a miner anywhere who didn’t recognize that sound. It had come from Lexington Road about half a mile away. Lonnie was curious, but he had to get the planting part right or the seeds wouldn’t never turn into nothing and he was coming around to the belief that it’d be a real good thing to grow food for yourself — what with the Jabberwock and all.
When he’d finally checked on the origin of the sound, he’d called Liam.
“There’s a big hole in the road, right in the middle,” he’d said. “When I went out to have a look-see, wasn’t nobody there, so I dug around in the glove box of the truck. Papers say it belongs to Reece Tibbits. There was a rifle laying there in the road, a 30.06, good-looking deer rifle, just laying there. It must belong to Reece, too. Whenever you find him, you tell him I’m keeping it for him.”
Reece Tibbits had a bit of a reputation as a brawler. He was big and strong; Lonnie Monroe was neither, so he wanted to stay on Reece’s good side.
“Must have left his truck there and decided to ride the Jabberwock to the Middle of Nowhere.”
That was ridiculous. Nobody, well, not anybody with a lick of sense, voluntarily “rode the Jabberwock” anymore. Not after that first day when nobody knew what it was and folks went wandering off into it on their way out of the county, or heard about it and came down to the Middle of Nowhere to see the casualties. Nobody, not even a stupid teenager, would get anywhere near the Jabberwock now, not after what’d happened to Abby Clayton. How she exploded.
Liam had checked with Sam anyway before he drove out here and she’d said she hadn’t seen Reece.
Pulling up behind the truck, Liam got out of the county’s lone remaining cruiser, the one the sheriff had left parked behind the sheriff’s office when he went off on his fishing trip two days before J-Day. He left the bubble light flashing, not that anybody was likely to come barreling down the road and rear-end him. Wasn’t any reason for anybody to come down the road at all, given that it dead-ended right here, closed by the Jabberwock.
So what was Reece Tibbits doing here?
Liam examined the truck. The tailgate was down, so Reece had unloaded something out of the truck bed. Wasn’t hard to guess what that’d been, given the gigantic hole in the road right beneath the Jabberwock. Reece’d come out here with some kind explosive device, determined to blow a hole in the Jabberwock. Liam got it — Reece’s mother was dying because she couldn’t get her dialysis treatments in Carlisle and folks said Reece was losing it.
So where was Reece now? Obviously, his attempt to blast out of the Jabberwock had been unsuccessful. It was still there, shimmering across the road. Liam approached it carefully, the way you’d get close to a cobra in a basket with some dude doing his flute trick to get the snake to rise up out of it. Truth was, he couldn’t get close to the Jabberwock without climbing down into the hole Reece had blasted in the asphalt directly under it.
Liam stood looking at the shimmer. At his own reflection in the shimmer. At how the shimmer didn’t reflect Reece’s truck or Liam’s cruiser behind it, only reflected the sky and clouds … and people. Nothing else.
The keys weren’t in the truck or Liam would have started it and pulled it off onto the shoulder of the road. He checked the fuel gauge — three quarters of a tank. Somebody would come along — likely Lonnie Monroe as soon as Liam left — and siphon that gas out.
Liam got back in his cruiser and made a U-turn in the middle of the road and headed down Lexington Road toward Sugar Bowl Mountain. Reece Tibbits lived outside Bennetville on Cicada Springs Road. Since he’d already checked the Middle of Nowhere and Reece wasn’t there puking his guts up, where was he? And what was Liam going to do when he found him? Arrest him for blowing a hole in the road? It was, after all, against the law to do a thing like that. But folks were doing a lot of things now that were against the law and Liam couldn’t arrest them all. Or even some of them. What would he do with a prisoner in the county’s tiny jail?
Liam had no idea, had been puzzling over that and the implications of law enforcement in general ever since he’d gone chasing after the speeder with Pennsylvania plates and found himself with a needle inside his skull in the bus shelter in the Middle of Nowhere.
Did he have the authority to arrest people? Now, given … well, everything? Arrest who? People were committing “crimes” all over the place, stealing the gas out of the cars of their neighbors who’d been out of town on J-Day. And stealing whatever else they fancied that was property belonging to people who were as stuck out there as he and all the other nowhere people were stuck in here.
If he didn’t enforce all the laws, how did he decide which ones were really crimes, given the present circumstances? Everybody knew Viola Tackett had stationed her boys at Foodtown — to prevent hoarding, or so she’d said. Liam had no doubt that Viola Tackett, civic-minded citizen that she’d always been, was merely guarding the contents of the store for herself. The only weapon she’d used was intimidation, veiled threats. So did he go out past Killarney to the Tackett household on Gizzard Ridge and arrest the lot of them for terroristic threatening? Not likely.
Who did he arrest, then? The people looting the few remaining downtown businesses in the Ridge? Most of them did it in broad daylight, didn’t bother to wait until dark when most of the streetlights didn’t work. How long would it be before the whole county went dark? Yeah, the electricity was generated in Drayton County by the Rural Electric Coop Corp and was on a grid — he didn’t understand that part — that served a six-county area that included Nower County. So there’d be electricity here until … what happened when the people here stopped paying their electric bills? Surely the RECC would notice eventually and cut off service.
People stayed clear of the businesses whose owners were still here, though. Mostly. But somebody — teenagers, perhaps — had broken into Lester Peetree’s hardware store, vandalized the place and took all the guns and ammunition. Candy and soft drinks, too. What did teenagers plan to do with the weaponry — if it had, indeed, been teenagers who took it? Should Liam be out there trying to find out? And what if somebody got so desperate for a rocking chair or a footstool or a lampshade that they showed up at Stovall’s Used Furniture Store with a gun and demanded that Joe Stovall hand one over? There probably weren’t half a dozen people in the whole county who didn’t have access to some kind of firearm. So what if somebody used a weapon to steal something? Armed robbery wasn’t a crime you could let slide.
Liam probably hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since J-Day. Not so much stewing over what was happening, but worried sick about what he was supposed to do about it. Then he’d let it go and accepted that he’d just have to figure it out as he went along. One thing at a time. That was the best Liam could do until the county meeting tonight. He had invested a lot of emotional capital in the meeting and desperately wanted to believe that something would come of it.
Figuring folks might not show up if “the law” called a meeting, Liam convinced Sebastian Nower to call it. The great-great grandson of the county’s founder was a bombastic blowhard who loved nothing more than the sound of his own voice. If he got the upper hand, he’d do all the talking, fight to the death to make sure things were done whatever way he wanted them done, and then preen around importantly, finally given the respect due him for his stellar genetics and lineage.
Liam couldn’t let that happen.
It had taken two weeks’ worth of soul searching for Liam to come around to an understanding of the new nature of the universe and his own place in it. He believed dire circumstances made great men. There was lots of historic proof of that — like Alvin York, that World War I soldier from a farm in Tennessee who killed all those Germans, or that Texas soldier, Audie Murphy, who became a movie star. Men who stepped forward when the need arose and made a difference. Liam Montgomery was determined to be that man in Nower County. Somebody had to step into the leadership vacuum that existed here, somebody willing to make the hard calls and suffer the consequences of his decisions. He believed the county’s 3,500 residents were teetering on the brink of chaos. And he genuinely believed that was the county population, no matter what Viola Tackett said, though, granted, they certainly hadn’t all been inside the county’s borders when the Jabberwock locked the doors. Out of all those people, Liam Montgomery was the only person who could lay claim to legitimate authority.
He would man up when the time came, take charge.
Oh, it wasn’t like Liam was looking forward to what lay ahead, but he could clearly see his duty and he would perform it to his dying breath. He wasn’t looking forward to questioning Reece Tibbits, either, didn’t have any idea what he’d do with the man once he had. The only thing he was certain of was that the doing of it was his responsibility. If Liam didn’t take charge, who would?