I couldn’t even decide which emotions to process. Rage or fear? Was I being threatened, or warned? He looked so solemn, so matter of fact, that it felt more like those scenes in procedural cop shows where they notify next of kin. I settled on indignant. “Ek-fuckin-scuse me?”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense, young man,” he added, seemingly unaffected by my response. “And it’s not personal. Everyone in this town is going to die in this town. Some already have. You can talk to them later if you like.”
“…ok, glazing over the subtle necromancy reference, I feel like I’m missing, oh, every possible context,” I said, with every possible drip of sarcasm. “Look, sheriff, I haven’t been in “Sheolton” more than an hour, and already I can’t leave, I’m being told I’m going to die in this Pleasantville shithole, and now there are zombies?”
“Zombies? No. That’d be easy. Look, I… fuck. Ok, I’m not usually the one that gives this spiel when it has to be given, but the person who does is… not available today. She’s usually much better with words and the like. Hell, I’m not even really a Sheriff, outside of this town. I was Chief of Security at some ritzy inner-city art museum. But I knew how to direct people with guns, and set up a perimeter, and all that jazz, so now I get the big squeaky leather chair.” He sighed, took his hat off, and ran a hand through his hair, which was significantly less impressive than his mustache. “Alright, let me start at what I’m pretty sure is the top.”
“Please do,” I interjected, with maybe a little more snark than was necessary.
He ignored me with what was surely a lifetime of practice. “Sheolton is a town of maybe… four or five hundred people? That number grows, slowly, although I wish it wouldn’t. See, nobody that finds this place has ever found a way out. God knows how and why it pops up where it does. Last guy that dropped in here was a rather polite old Canadian man. Now we got you, who… where you from again?”
“America. More specifically, the Pacific Northwest.”
He nodded. “Right, some two, three thousand miles from the last guy. Hell, we got a Kiwi here runs the grocery store. The town pops up when and where it wants to, and god help anyone that runs across it. It’s a roach motel for people and… well, we’ll get to that.”
“So it just eats you and moves on? Do not pass Go, etcetera?”
“Pretty fuckin’ much. No idea how long it’s been doin’ it, either. And it doesn’t discriminate. We got folks from Africa, Russia, England, Brazil… it just goes where it wants to. Throws itself in the way of some unsuspecting so-and-so, and moves on. Never takes more than one person at a time though, and I suspect it doesn’t always find someone to take before it migrates. I should say a lot of this is guesswork, as we can only see half the picture from here, and far as I know, nobody from the outside has ever heard of the place.
“There’s probably a bunch of obvious questions floatin’ around your head, so let me see if I can knock some of them out. Yes, we’ve tried reaching the outside. No, phones do not work. Can’t exactly set up a cell phone tower here. We have walkies, thanks to… ok, that’s a ‘later’ subject, too. We… kind of have internet? Sometimes? There’s a cafe halfway across town that has a satellite internet setup, which only works some of the time. The running theory is that, even though we’re completely cut off from the outside world, we still share the same sky. I don’t know shit about it, but sometimes we have it, and sometimes we don’t. Most of the time we don’t.
“So how do people get food here? Farms. Two big ones, run by one big family. We got fresh meat, fruits, vegetables, and son I hope you like corn. Some other in-town food suppliers too, but that’s not important. You’re not gonna starve here. Yes, we have a place for you to sleep. Yes, there’s clothes, toiletries, all that good stuff. As much as that means to anyone, now. Yes, people have tried to leave. Doesn’t work out to well. Some routes just aren’t available, others are… significantly more defiant.
“Look,” Sykes said finally. “I could sit here and wag chin at you all day about this place, but more likely than not you won’t believe a word of it till you experience it for yourself. Nothing like seein’ to believe. Let’s start with the evidence room,” he added, and stood up.
I still didn’t know whether to believe any, if not all, of his story, but I got the distinct impression that sitting in this chair pouting and/or panicking wasn’t going to get me very far. “Fine,” I said stubbornly. “Let’s see what ‘evidence’ you have that I’ve dropped into the world’s more boring Narnia.”
I was surprised to see that got a chuckle out of him. “Son, ain’t nothing boring about Sheolton.” Without elaborating further, he held open the office door and gestured for me to go first. Closing the door behind him, he waved a hand for me to follow, and took me further into the building. The hall took a turn, and we came across a sturdy steel door with the word “Evidence” engraved on it, somewhat sloppily, below a metal sliding porthole. Obviously not a professional job. Again, he held the door open to a particularly pitch-black room, and gestured for me to go first.
I stepped into the “Evidence Room” only to discover, as Sykes turned on a light behind me, that it was an ordinary holding cell, with a flat-rack bed held up by chains and the bare minimum of a toilet. I turned around and got as far as “What the fu-“ before I noticed the sheriff had his gun out.
“Sorry, kid, but seein’ is believin’,” he said apologetically, as if that explained anything. Right before he shot me in the thigh.
I don’t know what surprised me first. The noise, or the pain. I mean, I know sound travels faster than a bullet, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you which one my brain decided to register first. I can tell you, however, that when it did register the pain, it clamped onto it like alligator jaws and dug in.
I’d never been shot before. Hurt? Yeah. But never have I ever had a bullet in me. I was on the ground before I realized I had a reason to be there. I’ll save you the unpleasantries, but there was a lot of screaming and swearing on my end. After I’d got most of the screaming out of the way, and was left to frantically panting and gripping my leg, Sykes explained, “Sorry about this. You won’t believe most of anything in this town till you’ve died in it at least once. If you’re wonderin’ ‘Why the leg?’, it’s cause most people tend to write off a bullet to the brain as a fever dream when they wake up the first time. You’ll bleed out in about a minute and a half, and lose consciousness faster, but you’ll remember. That’s the important part. When you’ll wake up, you’ll be ready for the rest.” He’d already made his way to the door, and closed it behind him as he finished talking. The little porthole slid open, and I could see his eyes. “I’ll stay with you till you’re done, but I can’t guarantee I’ll be here when you wake up. Hopefully Parker will be. She can explain things much better than me. Hope you like big words.”
‘Hope you like big words’? What a stupid thing to say to a dying-
-–
I did wake up, much later, as it happens. So much later that I was surprised to see the sun coming up. It took me a moment to realize that the room I’d died in hadn’t had a window. Then another moment to realize I FUCKING DIED. I sat bolt upright in what I was slowly realizing was a rather comfortable bed. I examined myself for a minute, and found no evidence of having been a corpse recently, besides a hole in my pant leg surrounded by an ominous red stain. No wound, nothing. Apparently this town doesn’t resurrect your pants. Although I did notice that I was handcuffed to the bed frame on one side.
I’d awoken in a cozy little hotel room, one bed, dresser with a tv on it, and a chair in the corner, which I noticed was currently occupied by a short, skinny girl who seemed to have fallen out of a Spencer’s straight into the room. “Mornin’ dead boy. Sleep good?” shy asked with a wry smile.
I was in the middle of preparing a witty retort when I realized that I hadn’t actually slept. I’d been shot, passed out, woke up here. Nothing in between. I mean nothing. Like it was a slide show.
“Bit of a trip, right? You’d think there’d be a light, or a big gap in your memory or something? Nope, just wax off, wax on. Name’s Parker. Sickles- Sykes to you -probably mentioned me. I’m usually the welcoming committee for people in our ‘demographic’, as he puts it,” she held out a hand to shake.
I leaned sideways to greet her, then felt a tug as the cuff pulled my left arm. She leaned the rest of the way, gave me a firm handshake, and nodded at the restraints. That wry, cheshire-like smile never left her face.”Yeah, sorry about that. Not everyone reacts to waking up from a bullet the same way, and I’m all small and frail~” she explained, with a sense of mock innocence. “But nah, seriously, most people do a lot more freaking out. I’d say good on you, but you’ve only been awake a minute or two, and are more likely than not, in shock. So that’s gonna stay there for a hot minute.”
It was at this point that I realized I had a headache. I wasn’t sure if it was the emotional whiplash from death to Parker, or just everyting catching up with me, but I found myself clutching my head.
“You’re dehydrated,” Parker explained, and threw me a bottle of water. I was going to ask where she got it when I noticed the small package of them at her feet. “Terminal blood loss will do that. This place will bring you back, but it doesn’t give a shit about your electrolytes. Drink. You’re gonna need it.”
I tried to say ‘thank you’, but my throat was dry and raspy. I simply responded with a head nod, and proceeded to down the bottle. The headache didn’t go away, but my throat felt much better. Enough to talk. “Ok, so, town that eats people and won’t let you die. Let’s say I, uh, believe that now. The sheriff kept hinting that there was a lot more to this town than just the George Romero Cut of Groundhog Day. What the fuck did I drive into?”
Still, that weird knowing smile. She tilted her head. “Alright, let’s give it a minute and get you hydrated, then make sure you’re not just gonna snap and try to stuff me into an air vent or something. Then, I’ll give you the grand tour.”
Five minutes later, after two more bottles of water and a handcuff key, Parker was ushering me out of the hotel room into the hall. “This way, my dear. I have such sights to show you.”