by Stephen King
“No, I’m not that way,” Luke protested. “I just meant—”
“Ease up. I know what you meant, but it’s not brains he’s lacking. Not exactly. TP as strong as he’s got might not be a good thing. When you don’t know what people are thinking, you have to start early when it comes to . . . mmm . . .”
“Picking up cues?”
“Yeah, that. Ordinary people have to survive by looking at faces, and judging the tone of voice they’re hearing as well as the words. It’s like growing teeth, so you can chew something tough. This poor little shit is like Thumper in that Disney cartoon. Any teeth he’s got aren’t good for much more than grass. Does that make sense?”
Luke said it did.
Kalisha sighed. “The Institute’s a bad place for a Thumper, but maybe it doesn’t matter, since we all go to Back Half eventually.”
“How much TP has he got—compared, say, to you?”
“A ton more. They have this thing they measure—BDNF. I saw it on Dr. Hendricks’s laptop one time, and I think it’s a big deal, maybe the biggest. You’re the brainiac, do you know what that is?”
Luke didn’t, but intended to find out. If they didn’t take his computer away first, that was.
“Whatever it is, this kid’s must be over the moon. I talked to him! It was real telepathy!”
“But you must have been around other TPs, even if it’s rarer than TK. Maybe not in the outside world, but here, for sure.”
“You don’t get it. Maybe you can’t. That’s like listening to a stereo with the sound turned way down, or listening to people talk out on the patio while you’re in the kitchen with the dishwasher running. Sometimes it’s not there at all, just falls completely out of the mix. This was the real deal, like in a science fiction movie. You have to take care of him after I’m gone, Luke. He’s a goddam Thumper, and it’s no surprise he doesn’t act his age. He’s had an easy cruise up to now.”
What resonated with Luke was after I’m gone. “You . . . has anyone said anything to you about going to Back Half? Maureen, maybe?”
“No one needs to. I didn’t get a single one of their bullshit tests yesterday. No shots, either. That’s a sure sign. Nick’s going, too. George and Iris may be here a little longer.”
She gently gripped the back of Luke’s neck, producing another of those tingles.
“I’m gonna be your sister for a minute, Luke, your soul sister, so listen to me. If the only thing you like about Punk Rock Girl is how she wiggles when she walks, keep it that way. It’s bad to get too involved with people here. It fucks you up when they go away, and they all do. But you need to take care of this one for as long as you can. When I think of Tony or Zeke or that bitch Winona hitting Avery, it makes me want to cry.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Luke said, “but I hope you’ll be here a lot longer. I’d miss you.”
“Thanks, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
They sat quiet for awhile. Luke supposed he would have to go soon, but he didn’t want to yet. He wasn’t ready to be alone.
“I think I can help Maureen.” He spoke in a low voice, hardly moving his lips. “With those credit card bills. But I’d have to talk to her.”
Her eyes opened wide at that and she smiled. “Really? That would be great.” Now she put her lips to his ear, causing fresh shivers. He was afraid to look at his arms, in case they had broken out in goosebumps. “Make it soon. She’s got her week off coming up in a day or two.” Now she placed her hand, oh God, high up on his leg, territory Luke’s mother did not even visit these days. “After she comes back, she’s somewhere else for three weeks. You might see her in the halls, or in the break room, but that’s all. She won’t talk about it even where it’s safe to talk, so it just about has to be Back Half.”
She removed her lips from his ear and her hand from his thigh, leaving Luke to wish fervently that she had other secrets to impart.
“Go on back to your room,” she said, and the little gleam in her eye made him think she was not unaware of the effect she’d had on him. “Try to catch some winks.”
7
He awoke from deep and dreamless sleep to loud knocking on his door. He sat up, looking around wildly, wondering if he had overslept on a school day.
The door opened, and a smiling face peered in at him. It was Gladys, the woman who’d taken him to get chipped. The one who had told him he was here to serve. “Peekaboo!” she trilled. “Rise and shine! You missed breakfast, but I brought you orange juice. You can drink it while we walk. It’s fresh squeezed!”
Luke saw the green power light on his new laptop. It had gone to sleep, but if Gladys came in and pushed one of the keys to check on what he’d been surfing (he wouldn’t put it past her), she would see H. G. Wells’s invisible man with his wrapped head and dark glasses. She wouldn’t know what it was, might think it was just some kind of sci-fi or mystery site, but she probably made reports. If so, they’d go to someone above her pay grade. Someone who was supposed to be curious.
“Can I have a minute to put on some pants?”
“Thirty seconds. Don’t let this oj get warm, now.” She gave him a roguish wink and closed the door.
Luke leaped from bed, put on his jeans, grabbed a tee-shirt, and woke up the laptop to check the time. He was amazed to see it was nine o’clock. He never slept that late. For a moment he wondered if they’d put something in his food, but if that was the case, he wouldn’t have awakened in the middle of the night.
It’s shock, he thought. I’m still trying to process this thing—get my head around it.
He killed the computer, knowing any efforts he made to hide Mr. Griffin would mean nothing if they were monitoring his searches. And if they were mirroring his computer, they’d already know he’d found a way to access the New York Times. Of course if you started thinking that way, everything was futile. Which was probably exactly how the Minions of Sigsby wanted him to think—him and every other kid kept prisoner in here.
If they knew, they’d already have taken the computer away, he told himself. And if they were mirroring my box, wouldn’t they know the wrong name is on the welcome screen?
That seemed to make sense, but maybe they were just giving him more rope. That was paranoid, but the situation was paranoid.
When Gladys opened the door again, he was sitting on the bed and putting on his sneakers. “Good job!” she cried, as if Luke were a three-year-old who had just managed to dress himself for the first time. Luke was liking her less and less, but when she gave him the juice, he gulped it down.
8
This time when she waved her card, she told the elevator to take them to C-Level. “Gosh, what a pretty day!” she exclaimed as the car began to descend. This seemed to be her standard conversation opener.
Luke glanced at her hands. “I see you’re wearing a wedding ring. Do you have kids, Gladys?”
Her smile became cautious. “That’s between me, myself, and I.”
“I just wondered if you did, how you’d like them locked up in a place like this.”
“C,” said the soft female voice. “This is C.”
No smile on Gladys’s face as she escorted him out, holding his arm a little tighter than absolutely necessary.
“I also wondered how you live with yourself. Guess that’s a little personal, huh?”
“Enough, Luke. I brought you juice. I didn’t have to do that.”
“And what would you say to your kids, if anyone found out what’s going on here? If it got, you know, on the news. How would you explain it to them?”
She walked faster, almost hauling him along, but there was no anger on her face; if there had been, he would at least have had the dubious comfort of knowing he’d gotten through to her. But no. There was only blankness. It was a doll’s face.
They stopped at C-17. The shelves were loaded with medical and computer equipment. There was a padded chair that looked like a movie theater seat, and behind it, mounted on a steel post, was so
mething that looked like a projector. At least there were no straps on the arms of the chair.
A tech was waiting for them—ZEKE, according to the nametag on his blue top. Luke knew the name. Maureen had said he was one of the mean ones.
“Hey there, Luke,” Zeke said. “Are you feeling serene?”
Unsure of how to reply, Luke shrugged.
“Not going to make trouble? That’s what I’m getting at, sport.”
“No. No trouble.”
“Good to hear.”
Zeke opened a bottle filled with blue liquid. There was a sharp whiff of alcohol, and Zeke produced a thermometer that looked at least a foot long. Surely not, but—
“Drop trou and bend over that chair, Luke. Forearms on the seat.”
“Not with . . .”
Not with Gladys here, he meant to say, but the door to C-17 was closed. Gladys was gone. Maybe to preserve my modesty, Luke thought, but probably because she had enough of my shit. Which would have cheered him up if not for the glass rod which would soon, he felt sure, be exploring previously unplumbed depths of his anatomy. It looked like the kind of thermometer a vet might use to take a horse’s temperature.
“Not with what?” He wagged the thermometer back and forth like a majorette’s baton. “Not with this? Sorry, sport, gotta be. Orders from headquarters, you know.”
“Wouldn’t a fever strip be easier?” Luke said. “I bet you could get one at CVS for a buck and a half. Even less with your discount car—”
“Save your wise mouth for your friends. Drop trou and bend over the chair, or I’ll do it for you. And you won’t like it.”
Luke walked slowly to the chair, unbuttoned his pants, slid them down, bent over.
“Oh yay, there’s that full moon!” Zeke stood in front of him. He had the thermometer in one hand and a jar of Vaseline in the other. He dipped the thermometer into the jar and brought it out. A glob of jelly dangled from the end. To Luke it looked like the punchline of a dirty joke. “See? Plenty of lube. Won’t hurt a bit. Just relax your cheeks, and remind yourself that as long as you don’t feel both of my hands on you, your backside virginity remains intact.”
He circled behind Luke, who stood bent over with his forearms on the seat of the chair and his butt pushed out. He could smell his sweat, strong and rank. He tried to remind himself that he wasn’t the first kid to get this treatment in the Institute. It helped a little . . . but really, not all that much. The room was loaded with high-tech equipment, and this man was preparing to take his temperature in the lowest-tech way imaginable. Why?
To break me down, Luke thought. To make sure I understand that I’m a guinea pig, and when you have guinea pigs, you can get the data you want any old way you want. And maybe they don’t even want this particular piece of data. Maybe it’s just a way of saying If we can stick this up your ass, what else can we stick up there? Answer: Anything we feel like.
“Suspense is killing you, isn’t it?” Zeke said from behind him, and the son of a bitch was laughing.
9
After the indignity of the thermometer, which seemed to go on for a long time, Zeke took his blood pressure, put an O2 monitor on his finger, and checked his height and weight. He looked down Luke’s throat and up his nose. He noted down the results, humming as he did it. By then Gladys was back in the room, drinking from a coffee mug with daisies on it and smiling her fake smile.
“Time for a shot, Lukey-boy,” Zeke said. “Not going to give me any trouble, are you?”
Luke shook his head. The only thing he wanted right now was to go back to his room and wipe the Vaseline out of his butt. He had nothing to be ashamed of, but he felt ashamed, anyway. Demeaned.
Zeke gave him an injection. There was no heat this time. This time there was nothing but a little pain, there and gone.
Zeke looked at his watch, lips moving as he counted off seconds. Luke did the same, only without moving his lips. He’d gotten to thirty when Zeke lowered his arm. “Any nausea?”
Luke shook his head.
“Got a metallic taste in your mouth?”
The only thing Luke could taste was the residue of the orange juice. “No.”
“Okay, good. Now look at the wall. See any dots? Or maybe they look bigger, like circles.”
Luke shook his head.
“You’re telling the truth, sport, right?”
“Right. No dots. No circles.”
Zeke looked into his eyes for several seconds (Luke thought of asking him if he saw any dots in there, and restrained himself ). Then he straightened up, made a show of dusting his palms together, and turned to Gladys. “Go on, get him out of here. Dr. Evans will want him this afternoon for the eye thing.” He gestured at the projector gadget. “Four PM.”
Luke thought about asking what the eye thing was, but he didn’t really care. He was hungry, that didn’t seem to change no matter what they did to him (at least so far), but what he wanted more than food was to clean himself up. He felt—only the British word adequately described it—buggered.
“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Gladys asked him as they rode up in the elevator. “A lot of fuss about nothing.” Luke thought of asking her if she would have felt it was a lot of fuss about nothing if it had been her ass. Nicky might have said it, but he wasn’t Nicky.
She gave him the fake smile he was finding ever more horrible. “You’re learning to behave, and that’s wonderful. Here’s a token. In fact, take two. I’m feeling generous today.”
He took them.
Later, standing in the shower with his head bent and water running through his hair, he cried some more. He was like Helen in at least one way; he wanted all this to be a dream. He would have given anything, maybe his very soul, if he could wake up to sunlight lying across his bed like a second coverlet and smell frying bacon downstairs. The tears finally dried up, and he began to feel something other than sorrow and loss—something harder. A kind of bedrock, previously unknown to him. It was a relief to know it was there.
This was no dream, it was really happening, and to get out of here no longer seemed enough. That hard thing wanted more. It wanted to expose the whole kidnapping, child-torturing bunch of them, from Mrs. Sigsby all the way down to Gladys with her plastic smiles and Zeke with his slimy rectal thermometer. To bring the Institute down on their heads, as Samson had brought the temple of Dagon down on the Philistines. He knew this was no more than the resentful, impotent fantasy of a twelve-year-old kid, but he wanted it, just the same, and if there was any way he could do it, he would.
As his father liked to say, it was good to have goals. They could bring you through tough times.
10
By the time he got to the caff, it was empty except for a janitor (FRED, his nametag said) mopping the floor. It was still too early for lunch, but there was a bowl of fruit—oranges, apples, grapes, and a couple of bananas—on a table at the front. Luke took an apple, then went out to the vending machines and used one of his tokens to get a bag of popcorn. Breakfast of champions, he thought. Mom would have a cow.
He took his food into the lounge area and looked out at the playground. George and Iris were sitting at one of the picnic tables, playing checkers. Avery was on the trampoline, taking mildly cautious bounces. There was no sign of Nicky or Helen.
“I think that’s the worst food combo I ever saw,” Kalisha said.
He jumped, spilling some of his popcorn out of the bag and onto the floor. “Jeepers, scare a person, why don’t you?”
“Sorry.” She squatted, picked up the few spilled pieces of popcorn, and tossed them into her mouth.
“Off the floor?” Luke asked. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Five-second rule.”
“According to the National Health Service—that’s in England—the five-second rule is a myth. Total bullshit.”
“Does being a genius mean you have a mission to spoil everyone’s illusions?”
“No, I just—”
She smil
ed and stood up. “Yankin your chain, Luke. The Chicken Pox Chick is just yankin your chain. You okay?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get the rectal?”
“Yes. Let’s not talk about it.”
“Heard that. Want to play cribbage until lunch? If you don’t know how to play, I can teach you.”
“I know how, but I don’t want to. Think I’ll go back to my room for awhile.”
“Consider your situation?”
“Something like that. See you at lunch.”
“When the ding-dong goes,” she said. “It’s a date. Cheer up, little hero, and gimme five.”
She raised her hand, and Luke saw something pinched between her thumb and index finger. He pressed his white palm to her brown one, and the folded scrap of paper passed from her hand to his.
“Seeya, boy.” She headed for the playground.
Back in his room, Luke lay down on his bed, turned on his side to face the wall, and unfolded the square of paper. Kalisha’s printing was tiny and very neat.
Meet Maureen by the ice machine near Avery’s room ASAP. Flush this.
He crumpled the paper, went into the bathroom, and dropped the note into the bowl as he lowered his pants. He felt ridiculous doing this, like a kid playing spy; at the same time he didn’t feel ridiculous at all. He would have loved to believe there was at least no surveillance in la maison du chier, but he didn’t quite believe it.
The ice machine. Where Maureen had spoken to him yesterday. That was sort of interesting. According to Kalisha, there were several places in Front Half where the audio surveillance worked poorly or not at all, but Maureen seemed to favor that one. Maybe because there was no video surveillance there. Maybe it was where she felt safest, possibly because the ice machine was so noisy. And maybe he was judging on too little evidence.
He thought about going to the Star Tribune before meeting Maureen, and sat down at his computer. He even went as far as Mr. Griffin, but there he stopped. Did he really want to know? To perhaps find out these bastards, these monsters, were lying, and his parents were dead? Going to the Trib to check would be a little like a guy wagering his life’s savings on one spin of the roulette wheel.