Fallout Read online

  Fallout

  A novel by

  Mark Ethridge

  NewSouth Books

  Montgomery

  Also by Mark Ethridge

  Grievances (2006)

  NewSouth Books

  105 S. Court Street

  Montgomery, AL 36104

  Copyright 2012 by Mark Ethridge. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-60306-161-2

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-162-9

  Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.

  Acknowledgments

  With deep appreciation to Dr. Michael Kaufman and Dr. Debra Wright for enduring my endless questions about medicine and physicians. Any malpractice committed in the writing about medical issues is my own. Special thanks to two wonderful editors, Jeff Kellogg, and Emily Ethridge, on whom I have depended heavily for their insights into language, plots and people.

  To Kay, Mark, and Emily

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  About the Author

  Prologue

  J. P. Holt’s shiv-shaped, candy-apple red Tracker—loaded with an Elite 5X fish-finder, live bait wells and powered by a 115-horse Yamaha that reached hot holes in a hurry—tugged against its anchor line, neatly cleaving the Ohio’s current.

  Holt’s buddy, a human fish finder named Woody Conroy, perched on a swivel seat tying a three-way bottom rig to an oversized rod and reel meant for saltwater fishing. The Ohio was home to dozens of fish species from pike and sturgeon to seven types of bass. But he and Holt were going for the big boys—

  Blue Catfish. They could easily top one hundred pounds.

  Holt had really been looking forward to this. Work had been brutal. He wouldn’t have another chance to get on the river over the next two weeks, not with Old Fashioned River Days coming up. He consulted the 5X’s screen. His calculation about where to drop anchor had been dead on. The drift had left the Tracker directly above one of the deep holes where the Blue Cats sought refuge from the fast-moving waters.

  His phone chirped. He squinted at the screen. Reds win. He popped a beer. I should be happy, he mused. It don’t get no better than this. Isn’t that how the scene goes?

  But happy was not how he felt. “Happy” wouldn’t make the top ten.

  Holt drank while Conroy fished. After thirty minutes and no action, they hoisted anchor. Holt bee-lined the Tracker to his second-favorite spot.

  “Try dead bait this time,” Holt advised. “The stinkier, the better.” Blue Cats were known for their keen sense of smell.

  Conroy baited his hooks with dead minnows and a chunk of putrid chicken. He lowered his line until the sinker hit bottom and waited.

  Not very long.

  “Fish on!” Conroy’s rod bent into a quivering ‘u.’ The Tracker rocked. Holt grabbed the wheel to keep from spilling out of his chair.

  “Lunker!” Conroy yelled.

  Holt was surprised when something big breached the surface. Conroy had a habit of declaring every bite a “lunker”—until the fish was boated. But this time he was right. The thing was at least five feet long.

  Conroy pulled up and reeled in. The monster went deep.

  Holt swiped a gaff but hit nothing but water. He tossed the gaff, grabbed Conroy’s line and drew it in hand-over hand. Conroy reeled slack.

  Holt began to get a bad feeling. Maybe the fish was just worn out, but it wasn’t fighting. In some ways, it didn’t even feel like a fish. The thing was acting like a dead weight.

  When it broke the surface five feet from the boat, they both knew.

  “Timber trout,” Conroy said disgustedly.

  “A damn log,” Holt said. “A log for Woody.” He reached over the gunwale to unsnag the lure. He fell back like he’d been hit in the chest with a rocket.

  Conroy peered over the edge. The log wore jeans and stunk to high heaven.

  Holt stifled nausea and looked again.

  It was easy to see why he had mistaken it for a log. Chunks of flesh dangled from the dark brown torso like sloughed-off bark. Boney fingers poked from bloated hands and arms, like twigs from branches. Holt couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was a man. Conroy’s fishing line was deeply embedded in the pulpy neck.

  The body rolled over in slow motion. The lower half of its face was gone, giving prominence to a solid set of teeth that made the corpse appear to be grinning. The remaining face, including the nostrils, floated languidly in the water, attached only at the left ear.

  To Holt, the skin of the face looked like a slab of white cheese. He shuddered. He knew the image would join the others—the shotgun-in-the-mouth suicide, the car wreck decapitation, that burned thing/man from the plant—that swirled unbidden in his head like bats in his own belfry, at least until obliterated by alcohol. They were all horrible. But this was beyond a doubt the most disgusting thing he had ever seen.

  Holt considered hauling the body into the boat but thought better of it. Holding the fishing line, he started the engine and set off slowly, intending to drag the dead man to shore.

  The rotting flesh released the jig midway. The body returned to the current, yawing as it sunk.

  Holt and Conroy watched until it seemed unlikely to resurface.

  “Looks like he’d been in there a while,” Conroy volunteered.

  Holt nodded, but he wasn’t sure. He’d seen any number of drowning victims—people
like old man McCoy who’d simply filled his pockets with rocks and walked into the river when his feed and seed had gone bust. Those corpses were bleached, always bloated, misshapen.

  Old Cheese Face was different. Different. And awful.

  “You gonna drag the river?” Conroy asked when they had tied up.

  “Not with the overtime budget going to River Days. I’ll put it out on the wire, but for now, Old Cheese Face is going to have to keep on rolling. Probably won’t stop until he gets to Possum Island.”

  Holt picked up the sack with the lunch they had brought but had left uneaten—cheese sandwiches. He doubted he would ever eat cheese again.

  Chapter One

  The sky darkened and the wind built. Cyclones of dead leaves danced through the parking lot of the Winston News. Thunder shook the squat prefab building and rain roared against the metal roof. Editor and Publisher Josh Gibbs, thirty-eight, took scant notice of the storm, even though his powers of observation were seldom off high alert. Tie at half-mast, shirt-sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm, Josh hunched over a low metal table proofing the News’s upcoming edition. He read each story and headline a third time. Then, just to be sure, he read the headlines again, this time aloud.

  Since Josh’s wife’s death, the News had become more than a job. It had become a refuge where he could exert a degree of control over stories and schedules in a world out of control, a place where he could count on the press to run every Thursday at 3 p.m., a place where he always knew what he was doing, and where the newspaper’s relentless demands meant pain was forgotten, temporarily, in the mad crush.

  At big city newspapers, the editor and publisher wrote no stories, sold no ads, did no editing. A few might dash off an occasional—or even regular—Sunday column. But in terms of contributing to content, that was about it. If the editor or the publisher absented himself for a week or two, the newspaper would still publish every day—possibly with even greater efficiency. Subscribers would never notice.

  Not so at a small town weekly. As owner, editor and publisher of the Winston News, not only did Josh oversee advertising sales, printing, production and circulation, he covered meetings, wrote stories, edited the sometimes barely literate copy of the rural correspondents and handled the inevitable complaints about waterlogged papers. If Josh didn’t show up, there wouldn’t be a paper.

  Josh had lived the big city, daily newspaper life once and found it to his liking. He specialized in stories that exposed official corruption or advocated for the powerless against the bureaucracy. Atlanta had been a target-rich environment. He’d attracted some notice. And he’d connected with a young woman there, the daughter of the owner and publisher of the weekly newspaper in a small West Virginia town.

  He was a reporter. Sharon Hardesty sold advertising. He was impressed that she respected journalism. She was amazed he understood the business side. They’d breeched the church-state divide between their departments with secret lunches and cocktails after work, had fallen in love and gotten married. After two years of monthly heartbreak and frustration, they rejoiced with the miracle workers at the Emory University Medical Center and welcomed Katie into their happy family.

  At the paper, Josh had been promoted to the investigative reporting staff—on track for a Pulitzer, he was sure. Until the scandal. Was that the right word? Sharon’s word, “incident,” was too non-descriptive. The paper had labeled it a “mistake” but he still wasn’t prepared to accept it as such. Scandal was right. Whatever else was said about what happened, “scandal” fit.

  In the middle of it all, Sharon’s father died and left her the News. Still stung by what had happened and his subsequent demotion to the night cops beat, Josh suggested that they move with baby Katie to Winston. He’d take over production of the paper.

  Quitting had not been easy. He still kept two buttons stuck to a cork board behind his credenza that the Atlanta staff had given him at a beery, sometimes teary, send-off. The buttons commemorated two of his favorite newsroom sayings. One read, “Rake Muck.” The other, “Question Authority.” But when he left for Winston, Josh understood he was forsaking forever investigative reporting, the hope for a Pulitzer Prize and the chance for journalistic redemption. Just as well. He’d had about all the crusading he could stand.

  An enormous task confronted him at the News. Technology and innovation had been put on hold during the late publisher’s declining years and Josh found himself deeper into computer issues than he ever hoped to be. On the other hand, the work meant there was little time to look back—except, inevitably, when Pulitzers were announced in April and he suffered until the news cycle moved on.

  Socially, the adjustment was easier than he and Sharon had expected. Fueled by new jobs, Winston had started to grow after a century of stagnation. The high school that Katie would soon attend was brand new. Big brick homes owned by executives now perched on the first low ridge that swelled from the flat land. They made friends. The shopping center on the edge of town brought new businesses that proved to be new sources of advertising revenue for the paper.

  They’d run the News together until Sharon got too sick. For the last three years, the job had been his alone.

  With Sharon, the workload had been manageable. They’d even been able to carve out two weeks of vacation—the week in the summer after the special issue that focused on the town’s Old Fashioned River Days festival and at Christmas when the editions were combined into a special year-end review.

  Without Sharon, the workload was crushing. Except for Sunday, which he reserved exclusively for Katie, there was a deadline every day. Monday, correspondents’ copy and editorials; Tuesday, news copy, ad placement and page design; Wednesday, story placement and headline writing; Thursday, proofing, printing and delivery; Friday, ad sales; Saturday, catch up on the business side—the payables and receivables, and the big question: which advertisers he could afford to carry another week before they paid and which he could not. It was an important question. Advertising was not a product like a car or a television that could be repossessed if the buyer failed to pay. On the other hand, it was tough to turn down business as long as there was hope for remuneration.

  The pace was perfect for life after Sharon. It was predictable. He was good at the work. It consumed almost every conscious moment of his life that wasn’t devoted to his daughter, filling some of the emptiness, distracting him from his suffering until bedtime stabbed him in the heart again.

  He looked at the two silver-framed photos on his desk. His beloved Sharon, poolside, smile brighter than the sun, hair pulled into a ponytail, when she was healthy. Katie in her red and black soccer uniform, one foot perched on a ball. When you’re a father raising a thirteen-year-old daughter by yourself, Josh reflected, it helps to have at least one place where you know what you are doing.

  Despite that, he had decided it was time to move on. Weeklies like the News hadn’t yet suffered the circulation and advertising declines of daily newspapers, but who knew how long that would last? Although he wasn’t ready to inform his staff, he’d reached a handshake agreement to sell the News and its commercial printing operation, hoping to close the deal during the summer and relocate to Atlanta in time for Katie to start high school in the fall. He’d asked some of his former colleagues to alert him if they heard about a good deal on a house. He figured the proceeds from the sale of the News would tide him over until he found a job. He was thinking of something in public relations, although appearing before his former colleagues as a supplicant seeking favorable press for a client was going to be awkward.

  Josh noticed with relief that the skies were starting to clear. Calls from readers who’d received wet papers were the worst. First, when they occurred, there were usually a lot of them. Second, he couldn’t do much to fix the problem. Perhaps this week, he’d dodge the wet paper bullet.

  Josh headed for the pressroom. He was pleased to see workers already replacing the confe
rence room’s threadbare carpeting, a long-neglected project he’d authorized so as not to leave a poor impression when representatives of the prospective new owners arrived for due diligence.

  He entered the pressroom and tapped on the shoulder of Jimmy Mayes, a part-Indian whose jet-black ponytail and beaded leather hair tie made him unmistakable from behind.

  “How’s it going?” Josh signed.

  Because the ability to speak and hear was of no advantage in the roar of a newspaper pressroom, and fluency in sign language was essential, press crews often included non-hearing, non-speaking operators. The Winston News was no exception. Mayes gave him two thumbs up. Josh felt the huge Goss Community offset press crank to life. He glanced at the tall oak cabinet with the hand-wound factory floor clock that had belonged to Sharon’s father. Right on time.

  He grabbed one of the first copies off the press and was waiting in front of Winston Middle School at 3:15 p.m. when its massive green front doors sprung open and a flood of blue-jeaned, backpack-laden kids cascaded down the granite steps into an ever-widening pool at the bottom.

  Josh had no problem spotting Katie. Her jeans, blouse, backpack, blonde pony-tail pulled through a baseball cap—all those were within the current fashion norms that teens mysteriously established, communicated and regularly altered. But Katie stood out, literally. At age thirteen, she was five feet, ten inches—almost a head taller than most of the girls and all of the boys. His heart warmed at the sight of her.

  He watched her scan the cars in the middle school pickup line until she spotted the Volvo. She sprinted to it, left arm flailing to balance the heavy pack on her right shoulder.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said as she plopped into the passenger seat and slung her backpack onto the rear floorboard.

  He gave her a kiss on the cheek. Katie squirmed away giggling. “Dad, you’re embarrassing me!”

  Josh laughed. “That’s what dads do. Now, let’s go see Dr. Wright and find out what’s up with your leg.”