Chapter 56: Past Events of the Town

Chapter 56: Chapter 56: Past Events of the Town

Chapter 56: Past Events of the Town

Axel Vance looked through the windshield as Seth’s box truck rolled deeper into Newt, Texas. Most of the stores along the main road were closed, their windows buried beneath layers of dust, while several storefronts had broken glass that nobody had bothered replacing. The few pedestrians outside kept their heads down and walked quickly, though almost every one of them gave the unfamiliar truck a wary glance.

"This place must’ve been doing pretty well once," Lionel Cosgrove said as he leaned against the window and studied the abandoned buildings. "It’s bigger than the town I grew up around, so how did it end up like this?" Axel had noticed the same thing long before they reached the center of town.

"We passed several abandoned ranches coming in," Axel replied. "The fences were falling apart, equipment was rusting in the fields, and some places looked like they’d been empty for years. Something happened here besides ordinary bad business."

Dr. Seth Brundle unfolded the road map across the steering wheel while they stopped at an intersection. "Newt used to depend heavily on ranching and small family operations, but larger mechanized businesses gradually took over most of the market." He tapped the town on the map and added, "Places that couldn’t modernize or compete started dying off."

Lionel frowned. "Then why didn’t they buy better equipment and modernize?" Seth gave him a dry look and said money was only part of the problem, because many older local families had resisted changing the way they had worked for generations. "Once a town starts losing jobs and young people leave, buying expensive machinery doesn’t magically fix everything."

Seth glanced toward the nearly empty sidewalk and shrugged. "The people still here are probably the ones too stubborn to abandon the place." Axel nodded without commenting, though he suspected Newt’s decline involved more than economic stubbornness. The uneasy way the locals watched outsiders felt too personal for that.

Seth suddenly pointed through the windshield. "We’re getting low on gas, and there’s a station up ahead." Axel saw a surprisingly large gas station beside the highway, complete with several pumps and an attached general store big enough to serve most of the surrounding rural area.

The truck rolled beside a pump and stopped. Before anyone got out, Seth glanced toward Axel and Lionel. "Just be careful. Rural Texas has plenty of people who take firearms and trespassing very seriously."

Axel looked at him in amusement. "Try not to insult an entire state before we’ve even bought gas." Seth defended himself by claiming stereotypes usually originated from repeated behavior, which he called an extremely crude form of statistics. Axel shook his head and decided arguing social science with a physicist responsible for teleportation research was not worth the effort.

Lionel stayed outside to fill the truck while Axel and Seth entered the store. A small bell chimed above the glass door, and both men immediately noticed the old man sitting behind the counter. His cloudy eyes remained fixed on them with enough intensity that Axel wondered if customers normally had to pass an interrogation before buying bottled water.

Axel walked closer and asked, "Something wrong, sir?" The old man’s weathered face barely moved as he replied in a hoarse voice, "This isn’t a tourist town. What are strangers like you doing in Newt?"

"We’re passing through on business and need gas and supplies," Axel answered. The old man gave a humorless laugh and muttered that outsiders always claimed they were only passing through. "A group of young people said the same thing years ago, and by the time it was over, people were dead and this town never really recovered."

Axel’s interest immediately sharpened. Strange local deaths were exactly the kind of conversation that had repeatedly led him into supernatural cases, and he had learned not to ignore them. "What happened?"

The old man’s entire personality changed.

His eyes brightened, and he dragged a stool toward the counter. "Finally, somebody asks instead of grabbing beer and leaving." Axel immediately realized he might have made a terrible mistake.

The story began with several young outsiders traveling through rural Texas. According to the old man, one young woman eventually escaped from a farmhouse after encountering the Sawyer family, whose crimes had remained hidden outside town for years. Her survival brought law enforcement to the property and exposed enough of what had happened there to make Newt furious.

The old man leaned forward as his excitement increased. "Sheriff Hooper wanted the law to handle it, but people around here weren’t interested in waiting after hearing what those Sawyers had done." An armed group led by influential local Burt Hartman surrounded the Sawyer property before the situation could be resolved peacefully.

Axel already disliked where the story was going.

"They burned the house?" he asked.

The old man slapped one hand against the counter. "Burned it straight to the ground! Folks brought rifles, gasoline, whatever they had, and once the shooting started, that whole damn place went up." He proudly added that he had been among the townspeople present during the vigilante attack, though Axel suspected age and nostalgia had improved the old man’s role considerably.

The event matched the kind of ending Axel expected from a Texas horror story. The law had barely arrived before angry townspeople decided to become judge, jury, and executioner, leaving the Sawyer property in flames. According to the old man, most people believed the entire murderous family died there.

That immediately killed most of Axel’s excitement.

If the killers had been wiped out and their home burned years earlier, there probably was not much left for him to investigate. He had briefly imagined finding another supernatural threat he could use to gain experience, only for the old man’s story to apparently end with the locals solving the problem themselves.

Axel started looking for a polite way to escape.

Unfortunately, the old man had only been warming up.

Within minutes, the conversation moved from the Sawyer fire to last year’s ranch yields, then to how many puppies a neighbor’s dog had produced, and finally to increasingly unbelievable stories about the old man’s hunting trips. Axel listened with a fixed smile while his patience slowly died.

He was beginning to understand why the store was empty.

Just as Axel considered volunteering to inspect the restroom simply to escape, the bell above the entrance chimed again. Two young men and two young women stepped inside, drawing the old man’s attention away from Axel long enough for him to breathe freely.

The dark-haired woman leading the group immediately stood out. She looked to be in her early twenties and wore jeans with a simple T-shirt, while striking blue eyes contrasted sharply with her dark hair. Axel noticed nothing supernatural about her at first glance, though something about the group told him they were outsiders too.

Behind her came her boyfriend Ryan, along with her friend Nikki and Kenny. Axel did not know their names yet, but their relaxed clothes and road-trip supplies made it obvious they had not grown up in this decaying town. In another time, their arrival in Newt would have belonged to an entirely different horror story.

The old man immediately stopped talking.

His cheerful storyteller expression disappeared as though somebody had flipped a switch, and he returned to silently watching the newcomers from behind the register. Axel took advantage of his freedom and quickly moved toward the shelves before the old man could begin another forty-minute story.

The store was better stocked than the surrounding town suggested. Axel picked up bottled water, packaged food, and a few local snacks while Seth wandered between aisles checking their remaining supplies. After several minutes, Seth approached with the road map still folded beneath one arm.

"I checked our route again," Seth said quietly. "This is the last decent-sized town before we start getting into the more isolated stretches toward New Mexico. It’s getting late, so I’d rather sleep somewhere with walls than spend another night folded inside that truck."

Axel immediately agreed. Fighting supernatural creatures was one thing, but voluntarily sleeping upright next to Lionel’s emergency food cooler was unnecessary suffering. They returned toward the counter with their supplies.

"Any motel around here?" Axel asked the old man.

The old man shook his head. "Not anymore. Newt hasn’t had enough travelers to keep a proper motel running in years." He suggested finding a local willing to rent them a room for the night instead.

The four young travelers had reached the counter at roughly the same time. Nikki overheard the conversation and nudged the dark-haired woman beside her. "Heather, that place you inherited is huge, isn’t it? You could make a little money off the extra rooms."

The dark-haired woman hesitated.

Her name was Heather Miller, and she had only recently learned that she was adopted after receiving word that her grandmother Verna Carson had died and left her a large estate in Newt. She had come to Texas with Ryan, Nikki, and Kenny to see the inheritance for herself, unaware of how closely her family history was tied to the town’s darkest secret.

Heather considered Nikki’s suggestion before stepping toward Axel. "Excuse me, I heard you’re looking for somewhere to stay." Her tone carried a little nervousness, but she seemed sincere.

Axel turned and met her blue eyes. "That’s right. Just for tonight."

"I inherited a pretty big house outside town, and there are more empty bedrooms than we could ever use." Heather paused before adding, "If you don’t mind staying in a private home, you could rent a few rooms from me. I won’t charge much."

Seth immediately looked toward Axel.

After hours of driving, neither man was eager to keep searching.

"That sounds perfect," Axel said. "I’m Axel Vance, this is Seth Brundle, and the guy outside trying to bankrupt us at the gas pump is Lionel Cosgrove."

Heather gave a small smile. "Heather."

She nodded toward the parking lot. "Just follow our car when we leave. The house isn’t far from here."

Axel glanced briefly toward the old man behind the register.

For some reason, the moment Heather introduced herself, the old man’s expression had become unusually difficult to read.

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