Dig

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  The ferry

  “That sonofabitch!” Robyn shouted and slammed her hands against the steering wheel. The drive had been slow. Kelly wasn’t talking. Twice they’d gotten out to move fallen branches off of the road and once she’d almost hit a man who was screaming and throwing things at the vehicle. Progress came at no more than ten miles per hour if and when she found an open patch of land. They had driven through dark places where shadows lurked in the trees, shadows that were neither human nor animal. Through patches of woods and patches of sand and over mounds of gravel.

  When they finally got to the ferry road, Robyn was surprised to find it mostly empty. None of the cars that had crammed into her little town had made it that far. Or perhaps they had turned around and gone the other way. Many tourists didn’t know about it and the locals were all high on evil.

  “Are we there yet?” Kelly said.

  Robyn smiled and looked at her daughter, now in the passenger seat. Both of them burst into nervous laughter. The road ahead of them was clear and it was only a mile to the ferry terminal.

  The speedometer hit forty, then fifty as they rounded the long curve around past the Bald Head Island Ferry and beyond. Robyn slammed on the brakes as the Trailblazer’s headlights reflected on rows of cars. Far less than she expected, but more than she had hoped for. She stopped with her headlights pointed at the posted ferry schedule, white letters on a brown background. It was hours past closing time now. The last scheduled departure from Smithville was 6:15 pm. The clock on the dash of the SUV said 3:14 am.

  At the end of the road near the launch, people were shouting. The crew of the ferry, three men as far as Robyn could see were at the edge of the vessel, arguing back. A walking brow was in place, but the ramp for vehicles to drive across was still up and there was a chain gate pulled across.

  “I don’t have the patience to deal with this shit,” she said. She pressed the button for the flashing lights and they began to flicker red and blue as the two women exited the police SUV.

  “Grab something,” Robyn said as she popped the back hatch.

  They each grabbed a rifle and palmed their handguns. “Follow me,” Robyn said.

  She approached the crowd with Kelly close behind and saw license plates from Virginia and New York and New Jersey and Michigan and any state but North Carolina. That meant they hadn’t been affected by the gas that was leaking out of that hole. Some were looking back at the flashing lights of the police vehicle while most still argued. Faces were nervous, angry, frustrated and scared. Robyn flipped the safety on her 9mm and fired two shots into the air. Everyone ducked and all became quiet.

  “We have to get out of here. People are dying by the truckload back there,” she shouted and pointed back at the town. “We don’t have time to wait around.”

  A younger man, perhaps 30 stepped out of the crowd. He wore blue coveralls, a backwards baseball cap and workboots. His hands were filthy with grease or oil. Smears of the same substance were on his exasperated face. “Ma’am, I’ll tell you like I told the rest of these folks. I ain’t no pilot. We’re just the maintenance crew, checking the ferry. We can’t drive it.”

  “Not legally,” another man added. He stepped off the ramp that led to the boat and approached. He wore the same blue coveralls and boots, but he was older than the first. Early fifties, or maybe hard lived forties.

  “Can you drive it?” Kelly said.

  “When shit started blowing up in town, we called the local pilot and got no answer. Then we called one out of Wilmington and he can’t get to us. Said he was stuck in traffic on highway seventeen. That was over two hours ago. I can’t get his cell phone anymore. After that, I called some old retired boys I know who might could get us out of here. None of them can get to us.”

  “But can you drive it?” Robyn said.

  “Ma’am, I think we’re safe here. We can wait until morning when the next ferry runs down from Fort Fisher. Then we’ll get these people out...safely.”

  The crowd grumbled. Eyes rolled. One man slammed his fist down on the hood of his car.

  “That’s bullshit,” Kelly said.

  “There’s no time,” Robyn said and again pointed back toward the town. “You don’t want that coming here.” Another explosion from over the tree line punctuated her statement. The people groaned and started to argue again.

  “We can leave our vehicles here,” Robyn said. “Everyone here can get on board if we leave the vehicles. Trust me. Please, God, trust me. All of that is coming this way. We just have to get out of here.”

  Another car came down the road behind her, and another behind that. Robyn was almost in tears as the argument continued. She didn’t want to shoot anyone, didn’t know what good it would do and suddenly Rusty’s words make them understand rang in her head. She didn’t know how to do that.

  “Can you start the motor? Can you just get this thing running?” she said to the older man in the coveralls.

  “Yes ma’am, but I ain’t no pilot. My boys here, they’re mechanics. We could hit anything out there. Sink ourselves.” The other two men shook their heads in agreement.

  “It’s a chance we might have to take,” Robyn said. “Have you seen it back there? Folks are committing murder. There are things crawling around that town that I don’t want to talk about. Things I wish I’d never seen.”

  “The skeletons!” a woman’s voice shouted. It was a sane voice.

  “I saw them, too,” another voice said.

  The other people began to chatter and join Robyn’s argument. A young woman knelt and hugged her two toddler children to her chest. Both of them were crying. “I watched my husband kill a stranger,” she said. “Then he killed himself.”

  “Skeletons,” one man said. His words were slurred and he still held the empty bottle of liquor in his hand. “Walking skeletons!”

  “Can you drive it?” Robyn repeated.

  The older mechanic rubbed a hand through his thinning hair and looked to the other two men in coveralls. They shrugged. “I guess so,” the older one said.

  It wasn’t her words that caused the mechanics to hurry people on board, nor was it the guns Robyn and Kelly were half-heartedly wielding. It was the rumble under their feet and the fireball that bloomed over the old Gates house. That hole in the ground blew out fire and debris just like Jamie Banks’ Jack-o-Launcher. All the built-up meanness inside those ten sticks of dynamite had to go somewhere. The noise was deafening and the heat from the explosion reached all the way to the ferry.

  Rusty ripped a scar down the side of that tunnel four hundred feet long and luck was finally on his side. The blast tore into two shafts of water as it went, filling the lower portion of the tunnel with liquid, bursting through the hole within the hole and widening the mouth of that chasm full of screams, demons and leathery-winged creatures. The result was a gaping abscess over two miles deep and five miles wide. The entire town of Smithville was caving in as the sandy earth quickened in the rushing waters. Rock layers collapsed as the planet ate.

  Robyn, Kelly, the three mechanics who were just there for overnight maintenance and some fifty tourists left their vehicles, climbed on the ferry and headed out of the launch as the ground began to cave in the center of downtown Smithville. The vessel bumped into pilings, knocking some over and deflecting off of others. The old mechanic gave it all it could take once the ferry was straightened out.