Decoration Day by Vic Kerry Page A

wouldn’t be much good, but anything was better than being eaten by the purple light. The car rolled faster. He sailed past the church, taking the curve toward town so fast the tires squealed. The road flattened out, and the car coasted down Main Street and slowed as the slope of the street leveled off. He stood on the brakes. The car stopped. He looked at his phone, hoping that he might finally, just by luck, have signal so he could call 911. The phone was dead.
    David tried to turn the engine over. It wouldn’t make a noise. He knew the cause. The battery was drained. The same thing must have happened to his cell phone. The purple light had absorbed the energy. Something strange was going on. He was going to find out what.
    No cars moved down the street. The whole town looked as uninhabited as it had on the Sunday he found the place. David walked toward the hub of town. He saw the old gas station on the other side of the creek. No cars sat at the pumps, but the tanker he’d passed on Sunday sat beside the building. The wind began to blow. The air felt chilly and damp. Not surprising since a fine mist still floated in the air.
    David turned to look back up the mountain road. He expected to see the light following him. Instead, the slick black ribbon disappeared around a curve. His broken-down car looked at him from the shoulder. Despair began to fill him up. Only his car gave him any real independence he could have in the town. Without it, David knew that he was at the will of Alistair Marsh and the other elders. He had been beginning to trust Marsh until he met Hester. She changed his mind. Her candor made him think things were being hidden from him.
    The old woman must have been faster than he thought she could be. He hadn’t spotted her on the road as he barreled back down the mountain. Perhaps she’d fallen off into the ravine. Something more sinister came to David’s mind. Marsh might have eliminated her. For some reason, David felt Marsh and the elders were capable of such things.
    His ponderings bounced around in his mind, sending his thoughts down one tangent after the other until he was lost in a tangle of speculation and conjecture as harrowing as the forested mountains that surrounded Innsboro. He was so lost in these thoughts that he didn’t notice walking through town and into the library. The dusty smell of old books snapped him back to the present. He looked around the room. His intent had been to find the town library, if it had one. It seemed that his feet brought him there on autopilot.
    A small circulation desk took up the space in the middle of the floor. The walls were lined with bookshelves. The only space between the shelves was for the windows, which seemed to provide the ambient light in the room. A few tables with chairs littered the floor. Lamps with green glass shades sat on the tables to provide further light. David stepped deeper inside. No librarian greeted him. The whole place seemed as though no one had been there in a while. He ran his finger through a thin layer of dust on the circulation desk.
    “Hello,” David yelled.
    His call echoed off the walls. Nothing moved in the place. He needed help to find exactly what he sought. A map or atlas might be the best place to start. If he could find another way out of town, he might be able to access the Internet.
    David wandered around the main room until he found the card catalog. In most libraries he had been to lately, a computer database made this piece of furniture obsolete. He hadn’t seen a single computer in the place, not even an antiquated one. For that matter, the library appeared devoid of any modern machines. The place felt stuck in some other time.
    That was it. The idea popped in his head like a lightbulb burning out. The whole town seemed trapped in a time warp. Marsh’s old Lincoln and the absence of modern necessities or the Internet or cell phones testified to this. Now that he gave his attention to the thought, even