Free Ticket to Nowhere: Chapter 8
A Stark Mystery
We walked for miles through blackened corn fields. “We” being Rambo Lion, Fred the munchkin, and me, Stark, the bewildered private investigator who’d started chasing a simple case and ended up in the middle of literal Nowhere.
The corn stalks weren’t burnt as I initially thought they were. They were infected by a fungus that ran like black veins up their lengths. After we’d been going for a couple hours I broke one of the husks open and dead, white kernels looking like baby teeth rained down into the dirt.
“Okay, what the hell is going on here?”
I tossed the husk to the ground and folded my arms over my chest to make it clear that I wasn’t going anywhere until the lion and the munchkin got a little more detailed on what I was getting into. Up to that point, all I knew was that Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz had become a wicked witch, and I was supposed to sing to her.
Lion Rambo looked ready to keep up his tough-guy “shut up and walk” act, but a glance from Fred stopped him. He nodded to his diminutive friend and finally handed me one of the cigars I’d been begging for. He gave one to Fred, too, and lit his own.
We stood smoking beneath the malicious Nowhere sun.
