by Stephen King
"Who does he talk to in the city?" the woman asked. "Not who he fucks, who he talks to."
This was the point where he had to move, if he was going to. The truth was no longer safe and they might know a lie.
"There's a man . . ." he started, then paused. "Could I have that cigarette now?"
"Mr. Fletcher! But of course!" Escobar was for a moment the concerned dinner-party host. Fletcher did not think this was playacting. Escobar picked up the red-and-white pack--the kind of pack any free man or woman could buy at any newsstand like the one Fletcher remembered on Forty-third Street--and shook out a cigarette. Fletcher took it, knowing he might be dead before it burned all the way down to the filter, no longer a part of this earth. He felt nothing, only the fading twitch of the muscles in his left arm and a funny baked taste in his fillings on that side of his mouth.
He put the cigarette between his lips. Escobar leaned further forward and snapped back the cover of his gold-plated lighter. He flicked the wheel. The lighter produced a flame. Fletcher was aware of Heinz's infernal machine humming like an old radio, the kind with tubes in the back. He was aware of the woman he had come to think of, without a trace of humor, as the Bride of Frankenstein, looking at him the way the Coyote in the cartoons looked at the Road Runner. He was aware of his heart beating, of the remembered circular feel of the cigarette in his mouth--"a tube of singular delight," some playwright or other had called it--and of the beat of his heart, incredibly slow. Last month he'd been called upon to make an after-luncheon speech at the Club Internacional, where all the foreign press geeks hung out, and his heart had beat faster then.
Here it was, and so what? Even the blind found their way through this; even his sister had, there by the river.
Fletcher bent to the flame. The end of the Marlboro caught fire and glowed red. Fletcher drew deep, and it was easy to start coughing; after three years without a cigarette, it would have been harder not to cough. He sat back in the chair and added a harsh, gagging growl to the cough. He began to shake all over, throwing his elbows out, jerking his head to the left, drumming his feet. Best of all, he recalled an old childhood talent and rolled his eyes up to the whites. During none of this did he let go of the cigarette.
Fletcher had never seen an actual epileptic fit, although he vaguely remembered Patty Duke throwing one in The Miracle Worker. He had no way of knowing if he was doing what epileptics actually did, but he hoped that the unexpected death of Tomas Herrera would help them to overlook any false notes in his own act.
"Shit, not again!" Heinz cried in a shrill near-scream; in a movie it might have been funny.
"Grab him, Ramon!" Escobar yelled in Spanish. He tried to stand up and struck the table so hard with his meaty thighs that it rose up and thumped back down. The woman didn't move, and Fletcher thought: She suspects. I don't think she even knows it yet, but she's smarter than Escobar, smarter by a mile, and she suspects.
Was this true? With his eyes rolled up he could see only a ghost of her, not enough to really know if it was or not . . . but he knew. What did it matter? Things had been set in motion, and now they would play out. They would play out very fast.
"Ramon!" Escobar shouted. "Don't let him fall on the floor, you idiot! Don't let him swallow his t--"
Ramon bent over and grabbed Fletcher's shaking shoulders, perhaps wanting to get Fletcher's head back, perhaps wanting to make sure Fletcher's tongue was still safely unswallowed (a person couldn't swallow his own tongue, not unless it was cut off; Ramon clearly did not watch ER). Whatever he wanted didn't matter. When his face was where Fletcher could get at it, Fletcher struck the burning end of the Marlboro in Ramon's eye.
Ramon shrieked and jerked backward. His right hand rose toward his face, where the still-burning cigarette hung askew in the socket of his eye, but his left hand remained on Fletcher's shoulder. It was now tightened down to a clamp, and when he stepped back, Ramon pulled Fletcher's chair over. Fletcher spilled out of it, rolled over, and got to his feet.
Heinz was screaming something, words, maybe, but to Fletcher he sounded like a girl of about ten screaming at the sight of a singing idol--one of the Hansons, perhaps. Escobar wasn't making any noise at all and that was bad.
Fletcher didn't look back at the table. He didn't have to look to know that Escobar was coming for him. Instead he shot both hands forward, grabbed the butt of Ramon's revolver, and pulled it from its holster. Fletcher didn't think Ramon ever knew it was gone. He was screaming a flood of Spanish and pawing at his face. He struck the cigarette but instead of coming free it broke off, the burning end still stuck in his eye.
Fletcher turned. Escobar was there, already around the end of the long table, coming for him with his fat hands out. Escobar no longer looked like a fellow who sometimes did the TV weather and talked about high bressure.
"Get that Yankee son of a bitch!" the woman spat.
Fletcher kicked the overturned chair into Escobar's path and Escobar tripped on it. As he went down, Fletcher stuck the gun out, still held in both hands, and shot it into the top of Escobar's head. Escobar's hair jumped. Gouts of blood burst from his nose and mouth and from the underside of his chin, where the bullet came out. Escobar fell flat on his bleeding face. His feet drummed on the gray tile floor. The smell of shit rose from his dying body.
The woman was no longer in her chair, but she had no intention of approaching Fletcher. She ran for the door, fleet as a deer in her dark shapeless dress. Ramon, still bellowing, was between Fletcher and the woman. And he was reaching for Fletcher, wanting to grab him by the neck, throttle him.
Fletcher shot him twice, once in the chest and once in the face. The face-shot tore off most of Ramon's nose and right cheek, but the big man in the brown uniform came on just the same, roaring, the cigarette still dangling from his eye, his big sausage fingers, a silver ring on one of them, opening and closing.
Ramon stumbled over Escobar just as Escobar had stumbled over the chair. Fletcher had a moment to think of a famous cartoon that shows fish in a line, each with his mouth open to eat the next one down in size. The Food Chain, that drawing was called.
Ramon, facedown and with two bullets in him, reached out and clamped a hand on Fletcher's ankle. Fletcher tore free, staggered, and fired a fourth shot into the ceiling when he did. Dust sifted down. There was a strong smell of gunsmoke in the room now. Fletcher looked at the door. The woman was still there, yanking at the doorknob with one hand and fumbling at the turn-lock with the other hand, but she couldn't open the door. If she'd been able to, she'd have already done it. She'd be all the way down the hall by now, and screaming bloody murder up the stairs.
"Hey," Fletcher said. He felt like an ordinary guy who goes to his Thursday-night bowling league and rolls a 300 game. "Hey, you bitch, look at me."
She turned and put her palms flat against the door, as if she were holding it up. There was still a little nailhead of light in each of her eyes. She began to tell him he mustn't hurt her. She started in Spanish, hesitated, then began to say the same thing in English. "You mustn't hurt me in any way, Mr. Fletcher, I am the only one who can guarantee your safe conduct from here, and I swear I will on my solemn oath, but you must not hurt me."
From behind them, Heinz was keening like a child in love or terror. Now that Fletcher was close to the woman--the woman standing against the door of the deathroom with her hands pressed flat against its metal surface--he could smell some bittersweet perfume. Her eyes were shaped like almonds. Her hair streamed back above the top of her head. We're not just fucking around, she had told him, and Fletcher thought: Neither am I.
The woman saw the news of her death in his eyes and began to talk faster, pressing her butt and back and palms harder and harder against the metal door as she talked. It was as if she believed she could somehow melt herself through the door and come out whole on the other side if she just pushed hard enough. She had papers, she said, papers in his name, and she would give him these papers. She also had money, a great de
al of money, also gold; there was a Swiss bank account which he could access by computer from her home. It occurred to Fletcher that in the end there might only be one way to tell the thugs from the patriots: when they saw their own death rising in your eyes like water, patriots made speeches. The thugs, on the other hand, gave you the number of their Swiss bank account and offered to put you on-line.
"Shut up," Fletcher said. Unless this room was very well insulated indeed, a dozen ordinary troops from upstairs were probably on their way now. He had no means of standing them off, but this one was not going to get away.
She shut up, still standing against the door, pressing it with her palms. Still with the nailheads in her eyes. How old was she? Fletcher wondered. Sixty-five? And how many had she killed in this room, or rooms like it? How many had she ordered killed?
"Listen to me," Fletcher said. "Are you listening?"
What she was undoubtedly listening for were the sounds of approaching rescue. In your dreams, Fletcher thought.
"The weatherman there said that El Condor uses cocaine, that he's a Communist butt-boy, a whore for United Fruit, who knows what else. Maybe he's some of those things, maybe none. I don't know or care. What I know about, what I care about, was he was never in charge of the ordinaries patrolling the Caya River in the summer of 1994. Nunez was in New York then. At NYU. So he wasn't part of the bunch that found the nuns on retreat from La Caya. They put three of the nuns' heads up on sticks, there by the water's edge. The one in the middle was my sister."
Fletcher shot her twice and then Ramon's gun clicked empty. Two was enough. The woman went sliding down the door, her bright eyes never leaving Fletcher's. You were the one who was supposed to die, those eyes said. I don't understand this, you were the one who was supposed to die. Her hand clawed at her throat once, twice, then was still. Her eyes remained on his a moment longer, the bright eyes of an ancient mariner with a whale of a tale to tell, and then her head fell forward.
Fletcher turned around and began walking toward Heinz with Ramon's gun held out. As he walked he realized that his right shoe was gone. He looked at Ramon, who was still lying facedown in a spreading pool of blood. Ramon still had hold of Fletcher's loafer. He was like a dying weasel that refuses to let go of a chicken. Fletcher stopped long enough to put it on.
Heinz turned as if to run, and Fletcher waggled the gun at him. The gun was empty but Heinz didn't seem to know that. And maybe he remembered there was nowhere to run anyway, not here in the deathroom. He stopped moving and only stared at the oncoming gun and the oncoming man behind it. Heinz was crying. "One step back," Fletcher said, and, still crying, Heinz took one step back.
Fletcher stopped in front of Heinz's machine. What was the word Heinz had used? Atavism, wasn't it?
The machine on the trolley looked much too simple for a man of Heinz's intelligence--three dials, one switch marked ON and OFF (now in the OFF position), and a rheostat which had been turned so the white line on it pointed to roughly eleven o'clock. The needles on the dials all lay flat on their zeroes.
Fletcher picked up the stylus and held it out to Heinz. Heinz made a wet sound, shook his head, and took another step backward. His face would lift and pull together in a kind of grief-struck sneer, then loosen again. His forehead was wet with sweat, his cheeks with tears. This second backward step took him almost beneath one of the caged lights, and his shadow puddled around his feet.
"Take it or I'll kill you," Fletcher said. "And if you take another step backward I'll kill you." He had no time for this and it felt wrong in any case, but Fletcher could not stop himself. He kept seeing that picture of Tomas, the open eyes, the little scorched mark like a powder burn.
Sobbing, Heinz took the blunt fountain-pen-shaped object, careful to hold it only by the rubber insulated sleeve.
"Put it in your mouth," Fletcher said. "Suck on it like it was a lollipop."
"No!" Heinz cried in a weepy voice. He shook his head and water flew off his face. His face was still going through its contortions: cramp and release, cramp and release. There was a green bubble of snot at the entrance to one of his nostrils; it expanded and contracted with Heinz's rapid breathing but didn't break. Fletcher had never seen anything quite like it. "No, you can't make me!"
But Heinz knew Fletcher could. The Bride of Frankenstein might not have believed it, and Escobar likely hadn't had time to believe it, but Heinz knew he had no more right of refusal. He was in Tomas Herrera's position, in Fletcher's position. In one way that was revenge enough, but in another way it wasn't. Knowing was an idea. Ideas were no good in here. In here seeing was believing.
"Put it in your mouth or I'll shoot you in the head," Fletcher said, and shoved the empty gun at Heinz's face. Heinz recoiled with a wail of terror. And now Fletcher heard his own voice drop, become confidential, become sincere. In a way it reminded him of Escobar's voice. We are havin an area of low bressure, he thought. We are havin the steenkin rain-showers. "I'm not going to shock you if you just do it and hurry up. But I need you to know what it feels like."
Heinz stared at Fletcher. His eyes were blue and red-rimmed, swimming with tears. He didn't believe Fletcher, of course, what Fletcher was saying made no sense, but Heinz very clearly wanted to believe it anyway, because, sense or nonsense, Fletcher was holding out the possibility of life. He just needed to be pushed a single step further.
Fletcher smiled. "Do it for your research."
Heinz was convinced--not completely, but enough to believe Fletcher could be Mr. Maybe He Will after all. He put the steel rod into his mouth. His bulging eyes stared at Fletcher. Below them and above the jutting stylus--which looked not like a lollipop but an old-fashioned fever thermometer--that green bubble of snot swelled and retreated, swelled and retreated. Still pointing the gun at Heinz, Fletcher flicked the switch on the control panel from OFF to ON and gave the rheostat a hard turn. The white line on the knob went from eleven in the morning to five in the afternoon.
Heinz might have had time to spit the stylus out, but shock caused him to clamp his lips down on the stainless steel barrel instead. The snapping sound was louder this time, like a small branch instead of a twig. Heinz's lips pressed down even tighter. The green mucus bubble in his nostril popped. So did one of his eyes. Heinz's entire body seemed to vibrate inside his clothes. His hands were bent at the wrists, the long fingers splayed. His cheeks went from white to pale gray to a darkish purple. Smoke began to pour out of his nose. His other eye popped out on his cheek. Above the dislocated eyes there were now two raw sockets that stared at Fletcher with surprise. One of Heinz's cheeks either tore open or melted. A quantity of smoke and a strong odor of burned meat came out through the hole, and Fletcher observed small flames, orange and blue. Heinz's mouth was on fire. His tongue was burning like a rug.
Fletcher's fingers were still on the rheostat. He turned it all the way back to the left, then flicked the switch to OFF. The needles, which had swung all the way to the +50 marks on their little dials, immediately fell dead again. The moment the electricity left him, Heinz crashed to the gray tile floor, trailing smoke from his mouth as he went. The stylus fell free, and Fletcher saw there were little pieces of Heinz's lips on it. Fletcher's gorge gave a salty, burping lurch, and he closed his throat against it. He didn't have time to vomit over what he had done to Heinz; he might consider vomiting at a later time. Still, he lingered a moment longer, leaning over to look at Heinz's smoking mouth and dislocated eyes. "How do you describe it?" he asked the corpse. "Now, while the experience is still fresh? What, nothing to say?"
Fletcher turned and hurried across the room, detouring around Ramon, who was still alive and moaning. He sounded like a man having a bad dream.
He remembered that the door was locked. Ramon had locked it; the key would be on the ring hanging at Ramon's belt. Fletcher went back to the guard, knelt beside him, and tore the ring off his belt. When he did, Ramon groped out and seized Fletcher by the ankle again. Fletcher was still holding the gun. He rapped t
he butt down on the top of Ramon's head. For a moment the hand on his ankle gripped even tighter, and then it let go.
Fletcher started to get up and then thought, Bullets. He must have more. The gun's empty. His next thought was that he didn't need no steenkin bullets, Ramon's gun had done all that it could for him. Shooting outside this room would bring the ordinaries like flies.
Even so, Fletcher felt along Ramon's belt, opening the little leather snap pouches until he found a speed-loader. He used it to fill up the gun. He didn't know if he could actually bring himself to shoot ordinaries who were only men like Tomas, men with families to feed, but he could shoot officers and he could save at least one bullet for himself. He would very likely not be able to get out of the building--that would be like rolling a second 300 game in a row--but he would never be brought back to this room again, and set in the chair next to Heinz's machine.
He pushed the Bride of Frankenstein away from the door with his foot. Her eyes glared dully at the ceiling. Fletcher was coming more and more to understand that he had survived and these others had not. They were cooling off. On their skin, galaxies of bacteria had already begun to die. These were bad thoughts to be having in the basement of the Ministry of Information, bad thoughts to be in the head of a man who had become--perhaps only for a little while, more likely forever--a desaparecido. Still, he couldn't help having them.
The third key opened the door. Fletcher stuck his head out into the hall--cinder-block walls, green on the bottom half and a dirty cream-white on the top half, like the walls of an old school corridor. Faded red lino on the floor. No one was in the hall. About thirty feet down to the left, a small brown dog lay asleep against the wall. His feet were twitching. Fletcher didn't know if the dog was dreaming about chasing or being chased, but he didn't think he would be asleep at all if the gunshots--or Heinz's screaming--had been very loud out here. If I ever get back, he thought, I'll write that soundproofing is the great triumph of dictatorship. I'll tell the world. Of course I probably won't get back, those stairs down to the right are probably as close to Forty-third Street as I'm ever going to get, but--