Population Zero
Ray Nayler

Ray Nayler was born in Quebec, Canada. He has
lived most of his short life in California. His work has
been published in such magazines as The Berkeley
Fiction Review, Deathrealm and The Edge. He has fiction
upcoming in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
Crimewave and Hardboiled, among others.
Mr. Nayler is currently residing in Toronto, where
he is doing research for a suspense novel. He can be
reached at like_the_rabbit@hotmail.com
©Copyright 2001
Ray Nayler

Hadley pitched the first shovel-load of dirt down on me, and I
started to cry. There was a pause, and I could hear the scrape of the
shovel on the dirt, and the sound of insects in the cornfields, and
then Hadley gave out a long sigh. I couldn’t see him over the edge of
the grave he’d dug for me, but I could imagine the expression on his
face-fake-concerned, the corners of his mouth pulling up just slightly.
All I could see from the bottom of the grave were stalks of corn all
around me, stabbing the black sky, and a sliver of moon. Hadley’s
voice drifted down to me.
“Go on and scream, boy, if it makes you feel better. There ain’t
anyone to hear it anyway.”
I was crying as quiet as I could. I‘d told myself I wouldn’t, but
there is only so much a man can take. I hadn’t cried when I woke up
to find myself trussed up in the back of his truck, I hadn’t cried when
he dragged me out into the field, and I hadn’t cried when he shoved
me into the grave. But that dirt hitting me in the chest-that was my
limit. Maybe it gave him some joy to hear me, if he could. He
laughed, and the worst thing about his laugh was that it was the
same as it was when Cora had brought me home with her. Burying a
man alive didn’t change the tone of his laugh at all . . .
• • •
You’d be surprised how quickly what you think of as Modern
America disappears, after you pull off the interstate.
I had my reasons for pulling off. I was in the middle of nowhere
when my car started dying. I spent a hundred miles listening to the
engine getting worse, and watching the heat gauge go up and up
before I even reached a town. If you could call what I came to a
town, that is.
First I passed a silver water-tower with “Statlerville” fading on the
metal.
Then came a grain silo, collapsed across a field of lumpen earth.
After another limping minute, I was in the town proper.
The cluster of red brick buildings huddled against each other, as if
afraid of the wide, flat nothing around them. Every window not
boarded up was broken. The marquis of the Statlerville Theater lay
halfway in the street, the plastic letters of its display scattered on the
weedy pavement. I cruised through slow, looking for a gas station. I
found it-two antique pumps rusting in the hot sun at the end of
what used to be Main Street. The Phillips 66 sign had been taken
down and leaned, bleaching to nothing, against the wall of the
station. The Ford’s engine chugged and coughed. Wisps of smoke
reeking of radiator fluid seeped from beneath the hood. With a final
rasp, the engine died. Every idiot light on the dashboard glared at
me. My white T-shirt was soaked with sweat and clung to my skin. I
rolled the window down and the silence outside came in. I lay my
head on the steering wheel.
“What do they do-just let these places dry up and blow away?”
A pop sounded under the hood of the Ford, followed by the
spattering of fluid washing the pavement.
• • •
I sat on my suitcase under the shade of the gas station overhang,
smoking and thinking and listening to the whirring of the insects all
around. After a while, the sky started going purple, and the sun
sank behind the station. The air remained hot as ever. I had a
decent plan for how to get myself out of the mess I was in. All I
needed to carry it out was one halfwit farmer cruising through. But
in the hours that I’d spent sitting there, I’d heard and seen nothing
human.
Statlerville. Population zero.
I got to thinking about the town, and the way it might have been
a long time ago, with kids going in and out of the theater with their
ponytailed dates on a Friday night, and old hayseeds crouched over
coffees in the now-boarded-up diner. A quiet place, little more than
a built-up street along the main road, mostly supported by the
people who came through on the highway. Then, they slapped the
interstate in a hundred miles over. First the diner had died, maybe,
and the store, and people had started to move away. The stubborn
ones had stayed, for a year or five years, until the gas station and
the theater went, and the drugstore. Eventually even the stubborn 
ones had to call it quits. And one day, the last house turned out its
lights for good.
Thinking about the little ghost-town passed the time, and it kept
my mind off of other things, like what lay behind me, and how I
was going to get away.
Headlights appeared, far back on the long, straight road, lighting
up the dying frame houses at the edge of town. I stood up and
walked out into the road, with my suitcase. I stood dead center in
the middle of the pavement and watched the two coins of light
grow until they were beams. It was an old farm truck. It rattled to a
stop twenty feet or so from me, engine idling.
The driver’s side door clicked open. Someone got out, crossing
into the lights.
She was small from far off, and she got smaller and smaller the
closer she came. By the time she was standing in front of me, she
was no more than four foot ten. She had blonde hair pulled back in
a ponytail. The filaments that had escaped stuck up around her
head and glowed in the headlights.
“Trouble?”
My plan was all shot to pieces. I just couldn’t do it. She grinned
up at me. There was a little gap between her front teeth. I guess
she was what you might call cute, but that wasn’t what I would call
her. She looked like a little porcelain doll. It gave me a chill.
“My car died. I thought there would be a station out here
somewhere, where I could get some help. But there’s nothing. I was
hoping maybe I could catch a ride to the next town over. I feel
awful, putting you out, but . . .”
She waved a tiny hand at me. “Don’t worry about anything. I’ll
take you home to Papa, and he’ll get your car running in the
morning. You must not be from around here.”
“How can you tell?”
“The ‘next town over’ is the same as this one. Half the county is
the same. And it’s a big county.” She made a friendly grab for my
suitcase, but I picked it up first. “Give it a few more years, and all
of it will be like this.”
I followed her back to the truck.
“Why aren’t you gone?”
She shrugged. I climbed in the passenger seat, and she climbed
on top of a phone book on the other side, so she could see out the
Chevy’s windshield.
“I am gone-I go to school in Albuquerque. I’m just back here for
the summer, to relax. And Papa-well, Papa’s just stubborn, that’s all.”
The truck rattled through the town the way I had come in,
making a sharp turn after the last building and rocking down a dirt
road. The headlights marked off distance on the telephone poles to
one side. 
“I’m Fred, by the way.” I stuck out my hand.
She laughed. “Cora.”
Her hand was a cool little sliver in my palm.
“You mind if I smoke?”
She glanced at me. “Have an extra?”
“‘Course I do.” I lit it and handed it to her. Her nail scraped
against my thumb and gave me a little jolt.
“How did you get all the way out here?”
“I guess I got lost. I meant to see the country by the back roadsyou
know, see how it really is. I started in California, and stayed off
the big superslabs as much as I could, just sort of tooling along. I’m
not in any hurry.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“Sort of, but I wanted to be alone. My wife left me a while ago,
and I didn’t have anywhere to go. I had some time off of work . . .
well, to tell you the truth, I was laid off, and I had some money
saved up. I just decided to do some driving through Real America.
To clear my head.”
She laughed again. “It’s funny, you know?”
“What is?”
“People always talk about small towns as if they were the ‘Real
America.’ But of course they aren’t. Real America is a big suburb,
stuffed with strip malls and tract-homes.” She waved a hand at the
darkened fields around us. The headlights shuffled across
symmetrical rows of corn. “This is just a graveyard.”
I laughed and told her she was right. I kept looking at the side of
her face. She seemed perfectly comfortable with me, not in the least
bit afraid of the stranger who had suddenly appeared in the middle
of the street. She yanked the truck off the dirt road and onto
another, that bumped and rocked to a small, sharp-roofed house
surrounded by shade-trees. There was a light on in the front
window. We stopped in the dirt circle that was the yard, beside
another, Chevy truck.
She killed the engine.
“Let’s play a joke on Papa.”
“What kind of joke?”
“I was just coming home from school, right now. He knows I’m
coming, and I was supposed to bring my boyfriend with me. The
only thing is, my boyfriend busted up with me a week ago, and I
never told Papa. He doesn’t have any idea what he looks like, or
well, what I’m saying is, why don’t you just pretend that you’re
him?” her eyes flashed and she hooked a hand around my wrist.
“It’ll be funny, and we can tell him the truth right after dinner, if
you want. Mama will bust a gut laughing about it when I tell her
later.”
“She isn’t home?” 
She shook her head. “No. She’s in the hospital. Cancer of the soft
palate.” She set it without a trace of feeling, the way a doctor
would. “She used to play jokes on Papa all the time, when she was
well. Once she baked him a pie full of potatoes instead of apples,
and he ate a whole slice before . . .”
I cut her off. “Of course I’ll do it. You saved my life, after all.”
“Well, I don’t know about that . . .”
She had a duffel bag in the bed of the truck, and I slung it over
my shoulder. I let her carry the suitcase. We went up the front steps
arm-in-arm. It’s a funny thing; when you’ve got one up on
someone, you never imagine they might have two up on you.
• • •
Hadley was a big man, with a handshake that almost broke the
bones in my hand, and an easy smile. His laugh filled up the little
kitchen where we had dinner. He’d made venison meat-pies, from
deer he’d shot himself. He grinned at me across the table.
“You want to hear a joke?”
“Oh, Papa.”
He shushed Cora with his hands. The smile lines in his face
deepened. “There’s this traveling salesman whose car breaks down
out in Kansas-way out on the back roads, where there’s nobody.
The sun starts going down, and he’s scared, because it’s cold, and
there hasn’t been a car in hours.” He winked at me. “But all of a
sudden, he sees this pair of headlights on the highway. Pretty soon
he can see that it’s a truck. The truck-a farm truck-stops for him.
The salesman is relieved. He asks the farmer if he can drive him
over to the next town. ‘Nossir,’ says the farmer. ‘It’s much too late
for that. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll take you on home with me and
then drive you over in the morning.’
“Now, that’s fine with the salesman, who knows he won’t be
getting any better offers that night. So he drives on home with the
farmer. And as they’re walking up the front steps the farmer turns to
our salesman and says to him ‘Now, there’s only one problem. I’ve
only got two beds in the house-mine, which you ain’t sleepin’ in,
and the other. You can sleep in the other, but you’ll have to share it
with my 16-year old son.’
“’Son!’ says the Salesman . . . ‘Son! Why, that’s just my luck-first
my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and now I’m stuck
in the wrong damn joke!’”
That joke got me laughing so hard I almost choked on my
venison. Hadley laughed as loud and long as I did. Cora just sat
there and glared at the two of us good-naturedly, like we were a
couple of dumb kids. When I finally stopped I had tears in my eyes,
and I wiped at them with my napkin. 
Hadley grinned at me. “There’s nothing like a good joke to help
the digestion, now is there?”
“No Sir,” I said. “There sure isn’t.”
Dinner went on like that, and pretty soon I was wishing that I
really was Cora’s boyfriend, and Hadley was going to be my fatherin-
law. It seemed like a pretty good life. But once I started thinking
about the way things might be, I thought about my recent past, and
what I was running from, and what could happen to me if I didn’t
get out of here. That took the fun out of it. I had to struggle to
make small-talk with Hadley.
“So what do you do for a living out here? Is the farm enough?”
Hadley shook his head, and for a moment the long grooves in his
face seemed to darken, like cracks opening up in his skin.
“No, the farm hasn’t been enough for a long, long time. I was
lucky though . . . I made a few good investments over the years.
Futures, mostly. Odds and ends.”
“Any tips?”
He chuckled. The lines went back to the way they were before.
“Oh, this and that. You know how it is. Wouldn’t want to give away
any of my secrets.”
Cora cleared our plates. On her way past me, she bent over and
kissed me, hard, on the mouth. I was so surprised I almost showed
it. But after years of practice, you can take anything in stride.
Underneath, I was burning up-but I smiled at the back of her head
as she walked to the sink.
Hadley caught the smile. “You weren’t what I expected Cora to be
bringing home.”
“Really?”
“Nope. You’re better than any of the other ones. I can tell by the
way you laugh. None of the others had a sense of humor about
anything at all.”
I could still feel Cora’s lips on mine.
“Well thank you, Sir.”
Hadley stuck out his hand. “Well, son, it was good to meet you.
But it’s been a long day, and I have a few things to clear up in my
office, then I’m off to bed.” He ground the bones of my hand
together and went out. After a moment I heard him walking up the
stairs.
I walked over to Cora and spun her by her shoulder, almost
making her drop the plate she was holding.
“What is this?” I hissed. “You haven’t even told him about the car
or anything. By the time you deliver the punch-line of this joke,
he’ll be so mad he’s likely to make a meat pie out of me.”
Her face came just about halfway up my chest. Her eyes were
wide, and all of a sudden they started to fill with tears, and she
sagged against me. 
“I’m sorry. I . . . I never mean to go too far . . . that is, I . . . you
see . . .”
“Hey, hey . . .” I had my arms around her, sort of keeping her up.
“There’s no need to get emotional.”
She looked up at me. “It’s just that . . . I didn’t want him to find
out who you are, Brandon.”
I staggered back from her, dropping into one of the chairs at the
table. She came over to me. With me sitting, our eyes were about
level.
“I heard it all on the radio. They know about you. They gave out
a description, and they have the license number of your car and the
make. They know your name, too. They’re looking for you
everywhere. The other one . . .”
“Glen. Glen Rodriguez. He got shot coming out of the bank.”
“He’s dead.”
But he managed to spill my name to them first, I thought.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she whispered. “I had just heard about it,
and then, not five minutes later, there you were, standing in the
middle of the road. And I thought ‘here’s my chance. I’ll take him
back to Papa and we can collect the reward. He’ll never even know
I’m anything but a dumb little hick girl.”
“But . . .”
She practically slapped me in the mouth with her hand, shutting
me up.
“But then . . . when we were in the car . . . something happened.
And even though you were lying to me, you seemed . . . I don’t
know. I . . . did you mind it so much when I kissed you?”
I shook my head, and she did it again. This time I had longer to
think about it, and I kissed her back. I held on to her arms and
kissed her hard, and while I was doing it I got one hand down into
the pocket of her jeans and took the truck keys away from her. I
stuck them in my pocket. Then I pushed her away.
“What do we do?” I asked.
She looked very serious. There was something about her face that
made her look silly when she was serious, the way that Shirley
Temple looked silly.
“Here’s what I was thinking: tomorrow morning, I’ll tell papa that
I want to take you to see mother in the hospital. We’ll get in the
truck and drive to town. We’ll hide your car back in the fields
behind the gas station where nobody will find it. That’ll give us
enough time to get pretty far away from here. You can keep your
head down in the truck. I’ll drive. They won’t be looking for me.
When we’re far enough away, I can call papa and tell him I’m all
right. I’ll tell him we eloped, or something like that.”
I nodded my head in all the right places. She stopped, almost
breathless, and stared earnestly at me. 
“Does that sound like a decent plan?”
“Why do you want to help me?”
She swung her arm in a half-circle. “Wouldn’t you want out of this
dump?”
In answer, I grabbed her and sat her up on the table. “Of course I
would. But only if I had you with me.”
Her eyes actually brimmed up with tears. “I’m with you.”
“Then we’ll leave in the morning.”
• • •
Cora got me bedded down on the couch in the living room, and
fussed over me until I kissed her again and sent her off to bed. I
stuck my suitcase underneath the couch. There was close to a
hundred grand in there, although I hadn’t really stopped to count it,
and I didn’t feel like losing it after I’d worked so hard to get it. I
thought about Glen, and the only thing I could really remember
about him was that he would knock on the dashboard three times
every time he went through a yellow light.
There was a crash of thunder, and the sky opened up on the little
house. Lightning flashed through the curtains. Hadley and Cora
were both upstairs. I listened to the thunder blasting across that
empty little town and all those abandoned fields. Cora might get the
idea to come down here and sleep with me, to seal our bargain,
and if she did think to do it, I figured she would start right when
the storm started. So, I waited. After five minutes or so, I crept
across the living room and opened the door, timing it with a good
peal of thunder so nobody in the house would hear its hinges
squeal. I closed the door behind me and stood on the porch. I had
a case of nerves, and my hands were shaking. I set my suitcase way
off to one side, where nobody would see it if they came out, and
smoked a cigarette, figuring that if they caught me out there
smoking-well, I was just smoking, that was all. There wasn’t
anything wrong in that. It was raining so hard that you could
barely see the two trucks, twenty feet away or so. Then, halfway
through the cigarette, I remembered that the storm might end any
minute, and my whole escape plan would be screwed up. They
would hear an engine start a hundred miles away, without the rain
and the thunder to cover up the sound. I picked up the case and
went to Cora’s truck. I got the keys out of my pocket, fumbled, and
dropped them in the mud.
I bent over to pick them up. I guess that’s when he hit me. That
is, I know he hit me then, I just don’t remember it at all.
• • •
I woke up when the truck took a nice hard jounce, and my head
smacked against the bed. It took me a few minutes to realize where
I was. I couldn’t see much. I was trussed up with my feet and
hands tied behind my back, face down against the metal of the
truck bed. My head felt like it was made of broken, jagged bits of
metal, all scraping and twisting against each other. I turned to one
side, painfully, and caught a glimpse of corn-rows rushing past. I
couldn’t see who was driving the truck.
The truck ground to a stop. The door of the cab opened, then
slammed shut. Hadley looked in at me over the side of the bed.
“Well, Brandon. You’re in a hell of a fix, aren’t you?”
I just sort of lay there, looking at him. He knew who I was, too.
Hell, everyone knew who I was.
“Nothing to say?”
He walked around to the back of the truck and opened the gate.
Then he leaned over, yanked on my legs, and pulled me all the way
out of the truck. I tried to bite him when one of his hands got
close. He dropped me on the ground like a bag of cement.
He squatted down beside me.
“You lied to me, Brandon.”
“Look, you can take the fucking money. I don’t care about the
money, just . . .”
“But that’s all right, because I lied to you too. You see, for one
thing, this farm does make a little money. Enough to go broke on,
anyway, but . . .”
“Look! I just . . .”
“Shut up.” He said it very calmly, still smiling. I noticed a first
molar missing, back on one side. “Really, I don’t make my money
from the farm. I make it on the internet. Maybe you’ve heard of it,
Brandon. It’s the big web that runs through everything, and all you
need is a phone line. And you know what? They even have phones
way out here in Statlerville.”
“Population Two,” I mumbled.
He laughed, that same good-natured laugh. “Population zero.
We’re county.”
He grabbed my feet again, and started dragging me across the
dirt. And while he was dragging me, he talked, just exactly the way
he had when we were sitting across the dinner table from one
another. “So now I spend most of my time piddling around on the
net. I run a few of those porno sites, and I sell some crap online
that the Amish make and ship out here. Sleigh Bells and Christmas
wreaths and little frogs made out of cow dung that you can fertilize
your garden with. Junk, but there’s people out all over the world
who just eat it up. Mostly in California, of course. They love it out
there. It makes them feel like they’re living out in the countryside.”
I could see where he was dragging me-a hole gouged out in the 
corn-field, its edges slick with mud.
“Wait. You don’t . . .”
With a yank he swung me over the edge and dropped me. I
landed face-up at the bottom. My shoulder dislocated with a loud
pop, and I gritted my teeth against the scream that tried to escape
me.
Hadley’s shadowed face peered down at me.
“Then you come along. I watched you escape, in a way. I
watched it all happen on the net. I read all the postings of your
story, and saw your face on a dozen websites, and listened to them
talk about you on the web radio stations. And do you know what’s
funny?”
He paused, as if expecting me to answer. I said nothing.
“What’s funny is that you’re more old-fashioned than I am. Still
sticking a gun in someone’s face to make a buck. Don’t you feel
silly, still being in that line of work?”
“Please . . .” I knew it wouldn’t do any good to beg, but I
couldn’t help it. “Please don’t do this.”
He kept talking, as if I hadn’t said anything at all.
“I dug this hole for a big new irrigation pump I was gonna put in
for these fields out here. But I think I’ll let them go fallow next year.
And maybe I’ll never plant again. I’m getting too old for it. And it
isn’t like I’ll be needing the money, now.”
• • •
“You crying down there, boy? There ain’t nothing to cry about,
now. If I was you, I would just . . .”
His voice trailed off. I heard the sound of an engine approaching,
up there, and the slam of a car door.
I heard Hadley’s voice again, quieter now. “What the hell are you
doing out here? I told you to . . .”
A shotgun blast exploded in the air, followed by the rushing flap of
startled birds taking flight. There was a small moment of silence, and
then an awful gurgling and choking. Someone had been shot in the
throat.
“Cora?” I called from my hole.
There was only the sound of that engine running. I screamed
louder.
“Cora? Did you get him, Cora? Cora! Get me out of here, and we
can go.”
Hadley’s body slid down into the pit and landed hard on top of
me. His dead face fell against my chest.
I started screaming when the second shovel-load of dirt cascaded
down on top of the two of us.
I don’t remember when I stopped screaming.
But I suppose I must have.