Towns

Chuck Worm was a journalist by trade, and a nostalgist by passion. He wrote articles extolling the wonders of national zeitgeist. His research took him across the country and back, which was how he had first heard about the modern ghost town, or Dead Towns. Talk of Dead Towns circulated through the Truck Oasis circuit, and since he always drove, due to his fear of flying, he had heard plenty of stories. And so he had pitched the story idea to his Editor: He would find one of these Dead Towns, for they were not on any map, and he would chronicle its history. He would create a sort of obituary to serve for the communities that had become obsolete and, ultimately, forgotten…. Dead Towns were said to spot the Midwest like freckles on a face. At first the tales of the Towns, abandoned and left to rot, reminded him of “The Children of the Corn.” But the more he learned about them, the more he came to understand that nothing that walked between the rows was to blame for the communities’ demises. In fact, it was the children who had left first, forced to find jobs elsewhere in the population centers. When the freeways began to completely bypass the small towns, business dwindled. The electric car negated the need for fuel stops and so there became no reason to invest in anything off of the main thoroughfares. And the corporate farms bought up nearly all of the farmland, and farmed it with unmanned implements. The towns got older and eventually died out. Those who refused to join the exodus grew old and died in their homes,

waiting for a revivification that never came…. He had taken to the road, driving westward from Chicago on Interstate 90. He stopped at every Truck Oasis, and had bought coffee for any driver who would help to point him in the right direction. At first, his idea had been a surface piece. It was simply going to be an exposition of these Dead Towns: a name, a few photos, and perhaps an intriguing nugget of history. The more he heard from the truckers, however, the more the vision of his article changed. He realized that the existence of the Dead Towns was not special. They were nothing new. Society moves on, and inevitably leaves things behind. It was simple survival of the fittest. To tell that story would be to beat a dead, albeit slightly different, horse. What piqued Worm’s interest were the macabre tales that he was told involving the Dead Towns. It seemed that every truck driver had a story that he was hesitant to share. Not that the validity was drawn into question, but because of its content. Worm was told tales of lost travelers disappearing. Tales of murder. Even one tale of cannibalism…. ‘So to hear Bruin tell the story is one thing, but I’ll do my best.’ The truck driver sat behind the steaming mug of coffee. Her hair was limp under a stocking cap, even though it was the middle of June. She wore coveralls with no sleeves and her brawny arms were painted with indecipherable tattoos. Her dark, close-set eyes never broke contact

with Worm’s. ‘Really, if ya want the whole story, ya gotta find Bruin. Course, I couldn’t find him even if I was looking for him. Ya know? ‘Anyway, so it’s a dark and stormy night. No, really… those storms come up on ya quick out here on the plains. And anyway, Bruin’s just pulling offa the freeway and into an Oasis when—BAM!’ Her hand smacked the table, causing Worm to spill coffee onto his lap ‘BAM! His rig is blindsided by this little two-door thing. Bruin said he couldn’t tell ya where it came from, though maybe from outta the fields, but it hit his rig and there it died. Following protocol, he gets out and approaches the car. He checked for flames or smoke, but didn’t find none. So he opens the passenger door. And holy hell, he says, there’s blood everywhere. I mean, to hear him tell it, Everywhere. Like it pours outta the car onto his boots, ya know? A-and some kid or something is wailing in the back seat and there’s the driver, Bruin ain’t sure if it’s a man or a woman, slumped over the steering wheel not moving. ‘So Bruin, still following protocol, asks if the driver’s okay. But he don’t get no response. And the kid in the back is screaming to beat the band, so he turns to the back and tells the kid ya gotta shuddup. But the kid he keeps on screaming and the driver ain’t moving none either, so Bruin gets back into his rig and gets on the horn. He calls up the sheriff and says they gotta get down there. There’s blood everywhere and somebody is probably dead and the other is dying.

‘So Bruin gets off the horn with the sheriff and he goes back to the car. But this time, ya see, he goes to the driver’s side. And he opens that door. Well, sure enough, he can hear the driver breathing, but just barely, so he starts pulling the body outta the car. All a sudden the body starts screaming even louder than the kid in the back, but actual words. Bruin said the body was a man and he was screaming about his wife. “They’re gonna eat my wife,” he says, “they’re gonna eat my wife!” So Bruin pulls the man all the way out and sees that the blood is covering him, but not coming from him. And the man keeps screaming about his wife. So Bruin, he smacks him across the face, real hard, like to clear him up, ya know? And the man stops screaming, he’s so stunned that he just got hit. ‘And Bruin asks him where the wife is. The man says that it’s her in the back seat. And Bruin tells the man that the sheriff is on his way, just hold tight. And Bruin looks back into the car and looks at the wife in the back seat. She’s got blood coming out of her from all places, but she’s not screaming any more, ya see? So Bruin, he looks closer and he sees that, and I swear this on my dead mother’s grave, the wife, she’s missing both of her arms. Cut clean off, Bruin says.’ The driver paused and finished her coffee in one large gulp. ‘And?’ Worm couldn’t find anything more intelligent to say. ‘And that’s it. The sheriff, he shows up. But the wife she’s dead from losing too much blood. And the man, well he’s in such shock that

he can’t even say his own name. So Bruin, he followed protocol and handed the accident off, so he gets back into his rig and continues onto the Oasis. That’s it.’ ‘But cannibals? How do you know it was cannibals? That’s the stuff of movies, not reality.’ ‘Look mister, I appreciate the cup of coffee, but I’m not pulling yer leg here. This ain’t no Hills Have Eyes, or whatever them movies about the cannibal mutants was called. This is the real thing. Some nice couple got themselves lost on a lollygag drive offa the freeway. They ran themselves into some folks who was hard up for food. That’s that. Desperate people don’t follow no ethics code. They do what they gotta do to survive.’ ‘And it was a Dead Town where these people ran into their troubles?’ The driver stood up from the table and pulled her stocking cap over her ears, ‘Mister, ain’t ya been listening? Dead Towns are evil places. All the good went and left years ago. Nothing but bad news. I’d recommend ya stay away from them, even if yer doing a story.’ She turned and walked out of the Oasis, leaving Worm alone in the booth…. Even with stories like Bruin’s, Worm was hesitant to believe that Dead Towns were anything more than their name implied, a dead town. Worm had heard enough untrue stories from truckers to know that road-lore was to drivers what tales of Paul Bunyan were to lumberjacks.

The truckers’ stories, true or false, did do one thing: they fueled his desire to find a Dead Town and to find if there was at least one grain of fact buried beneath all of the fiction.

Eventually the network of highways had led Worm into the heart of Iowa. He had been driving for five days but had yet to come across any solid evidence of a Dead Town. His fervor was beginning to wane and he questioned whether or not his quarry even existed. His vision grew blurry from scenery passing by his periphery day and night. His ears rang with the sound of tires on the road. On a whim he had decided to take one of the few non-Oasis exits he had driven past. The off ramp had put him onto a crumbling asphalt road set between two corporate cornfields. The road was walled in on either side by high chain-link fences. On each fence, at five-mile intervals, were signs warning of high electric current. The car’s stereo scrolled from one end of the bandwidth to the other over and over again, but there was no radio signal to be found. Worm had enjoyed the silence and allowed himself a view of the country that he had never seen before. The waist-high corn looked viridian against the pale yellow of the early morning sky. Even the bumps and cracks in the road were a welcome change from the monotony of the freeway. Then the asphalt had disappeared and the road had turned to a loose gravel spotted with weeds and grasses.

Worm had increased his speed then, fearing that his car would sink in the soft gravel, and great plumes of dust churned up behind his car. He had been driving on the gravel for miles, and was beginning to fear that the road would simply go on forever into the horizon, when the road came to a T intersection. To the right, the road simply ended and was swallowed by rogue shoots of corn that grew outside of the fence. To the left, however, the road became asphalt once more. He had taken a left turn.

The left turn had led him to his current location, which seemed to be on the main street of a small town. He was parked on the curb in front of a convenience store and was the only car on the street. Worm was ecstatic. This town appeared to be the object of his search: a Dead Town. The weeds in the sidewalk on both sides of the street were long with neglect. The windows of the storefronts were almost opaque from thick films of dust. Worm sat in the car and rubbed his hands together with excitement. He reached into his bag on the passenger seat and rummaged for his camera. Finding it, he opened the car door and stepped out into the Dead Town. The midday sun, along with the hot, dry air of Central Iowa, felt stifling compared to the cool interior of the car. He rolled up the sleeves and undid the top two buttons of his shirt as he looked up and down the street. The town was deserted, but nothing was looted.

Nothing was vandalized. Aside from the lack of upkeep, the town was in good condition. He began to walk up the street, and away from his car, taking pictures as he went. The air was mostly still, with an occasional gust of hot wind. The silence of the town was unnerving. There were no birds chirping. There was no drone of the locusts like he had expected to find. The only sounds were the clicking of the camera’s shutter and the echo of his footfalls as he walked. He paused in the street as a chill ran the length of his spine. He had a brief feeling like he was being watched, but he tried to let it pass, chalking it up as a byproduct of the stories he had been told. But the feeling didn’t shake. So he began to sing, needing something to break the stillness, ‘Sunny days, sweeping the clouds away—‘ Something moved behind him. Moved slowly. Rattled. He stopped singing and held his breath. He turned, putting his hands out before him. Several dry leaves scraped along the pavement, having fallen from one of the many trees that lined the street, and were stirred by a slight breeze. Worm laughed at himself for being so jumpy and wiped his hands, clammy with anticipation, on his pants. He turned back in the direction he had been headed and

continued walking. He began to sing again. It was the same song as before. It had always been that song ever since he was a child, ‘On my way, to where the air is clean…’ Singing took his mind off of the nervousness and he was able to think about where he was. Worm could not comprehend how the entire population could have just gone away. He felt like an explorer from a future generation, someone who had stumbled upon a relic of an ancient civilization. Where had they all gone? Did they leave together or in groups? Had they all left, or had some stayed back only to die here? He mused over these questions as he rounded the corner of the block. Something caught his gaze on the sidewalk ahead. It was a dark form, no bigger than a loaf of bread. With the camera’s zoom he could make out fur, but he wasn’t sure what sort of animal it was. In any case, it was the first sign of life he had seen since leaving the last Truck Oasis. He strode over to the form, 'Can you tell me how to get, how to get…' It was a dead cat. It lay on its side with its head curled towards its stomach and hind paws. It was a black cat with a white stomach, but he could see that the stomach seemed to have a different color as well. Worm prodded at the cat with his shoe. It was still soft, a recent kill. But he was unsure how it died, so he pushed at the head with his foot. What he saw made him wretch.

The stomach fur was bloodied and matted. The cat had been eviscerated, sliced open from stem to sternum. It was a clean slash, one cut. Worm stepped back and looked around him nervously. What had done this to the cat? Who had done this to the cat? The cut was too neat to have been done by an animal. It looked as though it had been done with a blade. Could the stories be true? Was there malevolence in these Dead Towns? Looking around once more, Worm decided to return to his car. He sang at a faster pace now, repeating verse after verse. He moved quicker and no longer regarded the vacant buildings and desolate environment with wonder. Now they filled him with suspicious apprehension. With fright. He reached his car without incident. But before he climbed in, he saw something that he hadn’t seen before. There was a light coming from within the convenience store. Not an overhead light, but a source of illumination strong enough to make the dust on the window glow. He was confused and frightened, but also curious. Why was there a light on in this abandoned town? How is it still burning after all of these years? He told himself that he had just missed seeing it earlier, that there was an obvious explanation for it. His mind swarmed with conflicting thoughts even as his feet carried him to the door.

It’s probably locked, he thought. It wasn’t. A bell tinkled as he entered, startling him. But, as before with the leaves, Worm laughed at himself for being so jumpy. It was dark inside of the convenience store and his eyes were having trouble adjusting from the brightness of day on the other side of the glass. The light was a soft, ambient glow that came from the back of the dark store. It looked like a bluish-white blur as his eyes focused. The store was divided into aisles by sturdy shelves mounted on fiberboard partitions. The shelves were all empty. As he made his way into the store, he could tell that the glow took up the entire back wall. He realized it must be the fluorescent lights within the glass-doored coolers. His eyes finally focused, and he shivered despite the heat. The coolers, unlike the rest of the store’s shelves, weren’t empty. The coolers were filled with dolls. Dolls. Worm had the feeling of being watched, and he glanced nervously about the store, but there was nothing. His stare returned to the rows upon rows of dolls. It was just one type of doll, the same doll, over and over again. An undressed cloth body with plastic limbs and head. The hair and face were painted on, but the eyes were glass. And these eyes stared coldly outward from behind the cooler doors.

The hair on the back of Worm’s neck stood on end and his arms were spotted with goose bumps. Involuntary tremors shook up and down his body. He was being watched. He wasn’t alone. He could feel it. Worm stopped breathing and strained to hear any sound that wasn’t his own. From somewhere behind him came the sound of labored breathing. Oh God, he thought. Perspiration beaded on his face. Cold sweat ran under his arms and down his sides. His throat was parched as he forced himself to swallow. He clenched his sweaty hands into fists. He turned slowly. There was nothing in sight. The store looked as empty as when he had entered it, but it didn’t feel empty. The labored breathing continued. A shuffling came from the other side of the partition to his left. It was a sound like feet dragging on a gritty surface. The breathing continued. He whimpered under his breath and said, ‘H-hello?’ There was no response. The shuffling stopped, but the breathing

continued. It panted heavily. Raspingly. Worm’s legs felt like they were set in stone. He could not move at all. ‘H-hello?’ he asked again. Again no response, and again the breathing continued. The shuffling started again. That noise was the impetus Worm needed, and he felt his legs move beneath him. His pants grew hot and wet as he ran down the aisle, away from the dolls and shuffling noises, and out of the store. He did not look back once as he ran to his car. Without hesitation, he climbed into the car. He fumbled the keys into the ignition, and the car started with the first turn. He accelerated away in a squeal of rubber. He spun the car in a u-turn at in the middle of the empty road and drove out the way he had come in. He didn’t look into the rearview mirror until corn was on both sides of his car and the road had returned to gravel. But when he did glance in the mirror, he failed to notice the doll in the middle of the back seat, staring blankly ahead with its glass eyes.