Chapter 4
Finn
––––––––
At seven in the morning, Everstill was calm and silent. That kind of quiet that feels unnatural. Finn stepped onto the porch of the house he'd claimed upon his arrival in town and looked down the street.
Everything looked the same.
He headed toward the general store. Each step of his boots echoed off the empty buildings. A few men were already awake, going through their routines like ghosts trapped in bodies that refused to die.
When he reached the store, he pushed the door open and exhaled slowly. The shelves had been restocked. Every can was lined up so the label faced the aisle. Every bag of flour was tightly sealed. Every crate of produce was fresh from a garden that didn't exist in Everstill.
No one knew how the supplies came. There were no trucks. No deliveries. No people hauling boxes through the door.
The supplies were just...there. He wasn't sure how often they came, but they never went without food.
For the town of Everstill, it was as if the world reset itself while they slept.
Finn grabbed a pack of coffee grounds and set it on the counter. Moe walked out of the back room with Levi. The two split with Levi going to the cash register and removing a notebook.
"That it?" Levi swept his long hair back, picked up a pen, and clicked the top.
"Yeah."
Levi wrote down the information. There was no money in Everstill. The bank was empty. Unlike the food and supplies that showed up, money hadn't dropped out of the sky.
For as long as he remembered, Copper had those who worked in the store keep a tally of everything each person took home. For the sole purpose of making rationing easier if supplies ran out. But the food always showed up. The soap, toilet paper, and personal items were always available.
When electrical problems arose, Rex had the experience to fix them. The supplies he needed would arrive just like the groceries. Brett managed the gas station. While there were a few motorcycles in use, there were no cars, but there were lawn mowers, generators, and chainsaws.
Every man had a job. It was what made life bearable and kept the town running.
Moe stepped around him. "Did you see anyone deliver the goods?"
"Nope. Last night was the same as always," Finn said.
Despite everyone wanting to know who supplied the town, none of the men could stay awake or keep watch out the window. In fact, at night, he forgot all about the questions that came up during the day.
Moe grunted. "Doesn't make it less strange because there's no evidence about how everything shows up."
Finn picked up the can and stepped back outside. The sun was rising now, casting long shadows across the street. Boone and Vaughn were already out front of the old courthouse, pushing rusted lawnmowers across the patchy grass.
Boone lifted a hand in greeting. "Morning."
Finn nodded. "You two drew the short straw today?"
"Grass keeps growing," Vaughn said, wiping sweat from his brow. "Copper keeps bitching about it needing cut."
Finn didn't say what they were all thinking. The grass never got a chance to grow because they mowed it every day.
The food showed up, the gas station had premium unleaded, and the houses never fell apart. The world here existed to keep them alive.
Existing. But not living.
Finn walked home, opened the coffee, and made a cup. Then he strolled back outside and peered at the road.
The asphalt stretched out in front of him, straight and narrow, disappearing into a ripple of heat. A fucking mirage.
Taking his drink, he followed the road and stopped at the line where an inch-wide crack ran all the way across the street.
The place where the world bent.
He studied the air, the wind, and how the light shifted if he stared long enough. He had been doing this every day since the girl arrived. Before that, he accepted the rules of this place. Now, he wanted answers.
He crouched, pressing his palm to the asphalt. It was warmed by the sun.
He stood again, scanning the horizon. There were no clouds. The wind was calm. The road looked like any other road in any other town.
Except every man brought to Everstill knew there was nothing normal about living here.
He'd walked out of prison and into this place without meaning to. One moment, he'd been free, and the next, he was caught in a warped world that didn't age right and was trapped in some fucked-up dimension they couldn't escape.
And then a girl wandered in, making him wonder how she could walk back and forth through a tear in reality that he and the others could not penetrate.
Most of the men had already forgotten her visit. But he hadn't.
Behind him, footsteps approached. Without looking, he knew it as Moe. It was always Moe. Every day while Moe took his breaks at the store, he'd come out here and pepper Finn with all his questions.
"You're out here again," Moe said.
The inability to remember one day from another plagued them all.
But for some reason, when Kallie visited, he began retaining more information.
It was easy to slip back into the routine of doing the same thing day after day, so he forced himself to remember one thing about the day to carry on to the next.
It didn't always work, but he tried.
Finn squinted. "Just wandering."
His job was to roam the town, looking for anything that needed work and keeping track of the others.
"You think that girl's coming back?"
"No."
Moe looked in the distance. "You sound sure, but none of us know who can enter the rift."
"I do, and it won't be her."
"How do you know?"
Finn finally looked at him. "Because she's not like us. Every man in Everstill crossed a line he can't uncross. Not because someone decided we were unredeemable, but because we decided it ourselves long before Everstill found us."
Moe studied him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "Maybe so. But things don't happen here without a reason."
He grunted. Ever since the girl had stepped into this world, something in him had shifted.
It wasn't only a feeling she left behind in him. He'd started dreaming again. Dreams of roads that led somewhere. Dreams of warm sunlight that made him sweat. Dreams of a girl with wide eyes, freckles across her nose, and a brave little chin.
He was afraid to admit to Moe that he now questioned his comfortable existence.
He stared down the road, the one he never rode, the one none of them could escape through.
The road that had let her in.
Most of all, since Kallie visited, Finn wondered if the outside world still existed for him.
Or if she was the only real thing he'd get to see for the rest of his life.