Jenny Plague-Bringer(19)
“Busy-ish.” Jenny gestured toward the mannequin. “Just working on this stupid thing. Want to go out for oysters?”
“I’ve got some bad news. There’s something you should probably see.”
“Okay...” Jenny reluctantly followed him out of the room. She didn’t need more bad news. She could already feel their Parisian magic carpet beginning to unravel beneath their feet.
The living room was filled with autumn sunlight from the giant picture window. Seth dropped onto the antique settee, where his laptop was set up on the round oak table in front of him. Jenny sat beside him and snuggled up against him, enjoying the feeling of his hand resting on her hip. Being close to him made her feel safer, even though she would be the one dealing death if anyone attacked them.
“Here we go.” Seth maximized a video to fill the screen, then pressed play.
Melodramatic, echoing music played, clearly trying to be spooky, almost a rip-off of the Twilight Zone theme song. An animated logo popped up: the planet Earth, slowly rotating. The view zoomed out to show that the Earth was actually inside of a snowglobe clutched in a gray three-fingered hand. Lightning struck the Earth, and then the text appeared in glowing letters: Conspiracies of the Unknown.
Jenny laughed and elbowed him. “Seth, you really had me scared, you fuckface.”
“Just keep watching.”
The video showed a man, hugely overweight, with a goatee and thick glasses. He was sitting in what looked like a basement or garage, with a handmade Conspiracies of the Unknown sign tacked to the wall behind him. From the video quality and angle, it was clearly a webcam.
“Hi, everyone. Rudley McGhee here again, with the latest in what they don’t want you to know.”
“Oh, come on,” Jenny said. “Isn’t this the guy who says aliens shot JFK?”
“Blue lizard aliens. Sh, keep watching.”
“I have a Conspiracies of the Unknown special edition for you tonight, now that Beauford finally finished editing the footage.” Another chubby guy, balding on top but with long hair at the back, leaned into the frame and waved. “Move over, Beauford, you’re in the shot! Okay, folks, listen up. What if I told you that there was a little town, right here in the U.S.A., just a regular place like my town or your town, with a Wal-Mart and everything...But in this town, over two hundred people mysteriously disappeared!”
“It’s gnarly crazy,” Beauford said.
“Beauford, you’re still in the frame, home skillet! Ugh. Like I was saying, people, that’s a huge disappearance, all on the same day. That’s right, the same day! And this isn’t some Roanoke Colony thing from three hundred years ago...though I have a theory about that, too...No, this just happened! Like, a year and a half ago!”
“It basically just happened!” Beauford added.
“Dang it, Beauford, this isn’t your show, it’s my show! If you want your own show, go make one with your mom or something!”
“I’ll make a video with your mom!” Beauford snickered. “Maybe I already did.”
“You did not!” Rudley shoved his way up out of his chair, looking enraged. The video skipped, and then it was Rudley in his chair again, sweaty now. Beauford was not in the frame. “So Beauford and I took the Rud-mobile and the Conspira-cam and went to this town to investigate! It’s called Fallen Oak, South Carolina.” He held up a road map. “See it? There it is. Really small, right there. Roll the footage, Beauford!”
“Holy shit,” Jenny said, sitting up straight. Seth wasn’t joking.
“Yep,” Seth replied.
The video cut to Rudley standing between a rusty El Camino and the rotten old “Welcome to Fallen Oak” sign, waving his hand gleefully, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt like a tourist. “We drove all the way from Crawley, West Virginia. Took us ten hours, plus a nap at a rest stop,” Rudley’s voiceover told them. “Beauford’s hemorrhoids were flaring real bad, but we made it.”
The video then showed Rudley standing in what Jenny first thought was a weedy, overgrown field, until the camera zoomed out and she realized it was the Fallen Oak town green in front of the courthouse. It was shocking to see it like that, with weeds high enough to brush the underside of Rudley’s belly. Apparently nobody was bothering to keep it up.
“You see a lot of towns like this, driving around,” Rudley said in the video as he looked at the boarded-up businesses. “You wonder what it was like, when a place like this was really alive. You wonder where everybody came from, and where they went, and why they just left this husk of a town behind like a...like a hermit crab changing shells.”