The Institute

by Stephen King

“What about tomorrow?” he asked as they returned to the elevator.

  “We’ll let tomorrow take care of itself,” Dave said. “It’s the only way to be.”

  Maybe that was true for some, but it was no longer true for Luke. He wished for extra time to go over Maureen’s plan—or to procrastinate, more like it—but he was afraid that his time was almost up.

  Dodgeball had become a daily affair on the Institute’s playground, almost a ritual, and nearly everyone joined in at least for awhile. Luke got in the circle and jostled around with the other dodgers for ten minutes or so before allowing himself to be hit. Instead of joining the throwers, he walked across the asphalt half-court, past Frieda Brown, who was standing by herself and taking foul shots. Luke thought she still had no real idea where she was. He sat down on the gravel with his back against the chainlink fence. At least the bug situation was a little better now. He dropped his hands and swept them idly back and forth at his sides, eyes on the dodgeball game.

  “Want to shoot some?” Frieda asked.

  “Maybe later,” Luke said. He casually reached one hand behind him, felt for the bottom of the fence, and found that yes, Maureen was right; there was a gap where the ground slumped a bit. That slump might have been created by snowmelt in the early spring. Only an inch or two, but it was there. Nobody had bothered to fill it in. Luke’s upturned hand rested on the exposed bottom of the fence, the wire tines pressing into his palm. He waggled his fingertips in the free air outside the Institute for a moment or two, then got up, dusted off his bottom, and asked Frieda if she wanted to play HORSE. She gave him an eager smile that said Yes! Of course! Be my friend!

  It sort of broke his heart.

  19

  Luke had no tests the following day, either, and nobody even bothered taking his vitals. He helped Connie, one of the janitors, carry two mattresses from the elevator to a couple of rooms in the East Wing, got a single lousy token for his trouble (all the janitors were miserly when it came to handing out tokes), and on his way back to his room, he encountered Maureen standing by the ice machine, drinking from the bottle of water she always kept chilling in there. He asked if she needed any help.

  “No, I’m fine.” Then, lowering her voice: “Hendricks and Zeke were talking out front by the flagpole. I saw them. Have they been testing you?”

  “No. Not for two days.”

  “That’s what I thought. This is Friday. You might have until Saturday or Sunday, but I wouldn’t take that chance.” The mixture of worry and compassion he saw on her haggard face terrified him.

  Tonight.

  He didn’t speak the word aloud, only mouthed it with a hand at the side of his face, scratching below his eye. She nodded.

  “Maureen . . . do they know you have . . .” He couldn’t finish, and didn’t have to.

  “They think it’s sciatica.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Hendricks might have an idea, but he doesn’t care. None of them do, as long as I can keep working. Go on now, Luke. I’ll turn your room while you’re at lunch. Look under your mattress when you go to bed. Good luck.” She hesitated. “I wish I could hug you, son.”

  Luke felt his eyes fill up. He hurried away before she could see.

  He ate a big lunch, although he wasn’t particularly hungry. He would do the same at supper. He had a feeling that if this worked, he was going to need all the fuel he could take on.

  That evening at dinner, he and Avery were joined by Frieda, who seemed to have imprinted on Luke. After, they went out to the playground. Luke declined to shoot more hoops with the girl, saying he would spot Avery for awhile on the trampoline.

  One of those red neon words bloomed in Luke’s mind as he watched the Avester jump up and down, doing lackadaisical seat-drops and tummy-bounces.

  Tonight?

  Luke shook his head. “But I need you to sleep in your own room. I’d like to get a full eight hours for once.”

  Avery slid off the trampoline and looked at Luke solemnly. “Don’t tell me what isn’t true because you think someone will see me looking sad and wonder why. I don’t have to look sad.” And he stretched his lips in a hopelessly counterfeit grin.

  Okay. Just don’t fuck up my chance, Avester.

  Come back for me if you can. Please.

  I will.

  The dots were returning, bringing a vivid memory of the immersion tank. Luke thought it was the effort it took to consciously send his thoughts.

  Avery looked at him a moment longer, then ran to the basketball hoop. “Want to play HORSE, Frieda?”

  She looked down on him and gave him a smile. “Kid, I’d beat you like a drum.”

  “Spot me an H and an O, and we’ll see about that.”

  They played as the light began to drain out of the day. Luke crossed the playground and looked back once as Avery—who Harry Cross had once called Luke’s “little bitty buddy”—attempted a hook shot that missed everything. He thought Avery would come down to his room that night at least long enough to retrieve his toothbrush, but he didn’t.

  20

  Luke played a few games of Slap Dash and 100 Balls on his laptop, then brushed his own teeth, undressed to his shorts, and got into bed. He turned off the lamp and reached under his mattress. He might have cut his fingers on the knife Maureen had left him (unlike the plastic ones they got in the caff, this felt like a paring knife with a real blade) if she hadn’t wrapped it in a washcloth. There was something else as well, something he could identify by touch. God knew he’d used plenty of them before coming here. A flash drive. He leaned over in the dark and slipped both items into the pocket of his pants.

  Then came waiting. For awhile kids ran up and down the corridor, maybe playing tag, maybe just grab-assing around. This happened every night now that there were more kids. There were whoops and laughter, followed by exaggerated hushing sounds, followed by more laughter. They were blowing off steam. Blowing off fear. One of tonight’s loudest whoopers was Stevie Whipple, and Luke deduced that Stevie had been into the wine or hard lemonade. There were no stern adults demanding silence; those in charge weren’t interested in enforcing noise-abatement rules or imposing curfews.

  Finally Luke’s part of the residence floor settled down. Now there was just the sound of his own steadily beating heart and the turn of his thoughts as he went over Maureen’s list for the final time.

  Back to the trampoline once you’re out, he reminded himself. Use the knife if you have to. Then a slight turn to the right.

  If he got out.

  He was relieved to find himself eighty per cent determined and only twenty per cent afraid. Even that much fear made no real sense, but Luke supposed it was natural. What drove the determination—what he absolutely knew—was simple and stark: this was his chance, the only one he’d have, and he intended to make the most of it.

  When the corridor outside had been silent for what he judged to be half an hour, Luke got out of bed and grabbed his plastic ice bucket from on top of his TV. He had made up a story for the watchers—if, that was, anyone was actually watching the monitors at this hour, and not just sitting in some lower level surveillance room and playing solitaire.

  This story was about a kid who goes to bed early, then awakens for some reason, maybe a need to pee, maybe because of a nightmare. Anyway, the kid is still more asleep than awake, so he walks down the hall in his underwear. Cameras in dusty bulbs watch him as he goes to the ice machine for a refill. And when he returns with not just a bucket of ice but the scoop as well, they assume the kid’s just too dozey to realize he still has it in his hand. He’ll see it in the morning, lying on his desk or in the bathroom sink, and wonder how it got there.

  In his room again, Luke put some ice in a glass, filled it from the bathroom tap, and drank half of it down. It was good. His mouth and throat were very dry. He left the scoop on the toilet tank and went back to bed. He tossed and turned. He muttered to himself. Maybe the kid in the story he was making up is missing his little bitty buddy. Maybe that’s
why he can’t get back to sleep. And maybe nobody’s watching or listening, but maybe somebody is, and that’s the way he has to play it.

  Finally he turned on the lamp again and got dressed. He went into the bathroom, where there was no surveillance (probably no surveillance) and stuck the scoop down the front of his pants, dropping his Twins tee-shirt over it. If there was video in here, and if someone was monitoring it, he was probably cooked already. There was nothing he could do about that but push on to the next part of his story.

  He left the room and went down the hall to the lounge. Stevie Whipple and some other kid, one of the newbies, were there, lying on the floor fast asleep. Half a dozen Fireball nips, all empty, were scattered around them. Those little bottles represented a lot of tokens. Stevie and his new friend would wake up with hangovers and empty pockets.

  Luke stepped over Stevie and went into the caff. With only the salad bar fluorescents lit, the place was gloomy and a little spooky. He grabbed an apple from the never-empty bowl of fruit and took a bite as he wandered back into the lounge, hoping no one was watching, hoping that if someone was, they would understand the pantomime he was acting out, and buy it. The kid woke up. The kid got ice from the machine and had a nice cold glass of water, but after that he’s more awake than ever, so he goes up to the caff for something to eat. Then the kid thinks, Hey, why not go out to the playground for awhile, get some fresh air. He wouldn’t be the first one to do that; Kalisha said that she and Iris had gone out several times to look at the stars—they were incredibly bright out here with no light pollution to obscure them. Or sometimes, she said, kids used the playground at night to make out. He just hoped no one was out here stargazing or necking tonight.

  There wasn’t, and with no moon the playground was fairly dark, the various pieces of equipment only angular shadows. Without a buddy or two for company, little kids had a tendency to be afraid of the dark. Bigger kids, too, although most wouldn’t admit it.

  Luke strolled across the playground, waiting for one of the less familiar night caretakers to appear and ask him what he was doing out here with that scoop hidden under his shirt. Surely he wasn’t thinking about escape, was he? Because that would be pretty darn wacky!

  “Wacky,” Luke murmured, and sat down with his back to the chainlink fence. “That’s me, a real whackjob.”

  He waited to see if someone would come. No one did. There was only the sound of crickets and the hoot of an owl. There was a camera, but was anybody really monitoring it? There was security, he knew that, but it was sloppy security. He knew that, too. Just how sloppy he would now find out.

  He lifted his shirt and removed the scoop. In his imaginings of this part, he scooped behind his back with his right hand, maybe shifting over to his left when his arm got tired. In reality, this didn’t work very well. He scraped the scoop against the bottom of the chainlink repeatedly, making a noise that sounded very loud in the stillness, and he couldn’t see if he was making any progress.

  This is crazy, he thought.

  Throwing worry about the camera aside, Luke got on his knees and began to dig under the fence, flinging gravel to the right and the left. Time seemed to stretch out. He felt that hours were passing. Was anyone in that surveillance room he’d never seen (but could imagine vividly) starting to wonder why the kid with insomnia hadn’t come back from the playground? Would he or she send someone to check? And say, what if that camera has a night-vision feature, Lukey? What about that?

  He dug. He could feel sweat starting to oil his face, and the bugs working the night shift were homing in on it. He dug. He could smell his armpits. His heart had sped up to a gallop. He felt someone standing behind him, but when he looked over his shoulder, he saw only the gantry of the basketball post standing against the stars.

  Now he had a trench under the bottom of the fence. Shallow, but he had come to the Institute skinny and had lost more weight since then. Maybe—

  But when he lay down and tried to slide under, the fence stopped him. It wasn’t even close.

  Go back in. Go back in and get into bed before they find you and do something horrible to you for trying to get out of here.

  But that wasn’t an option, only cowardice. They were going to do something horrible to him: the movies, the headaches, the Stasi Lights . . . and finally, the drone.

  He dug, gasping now, going back and forth, left and right. The gap between the bottom of the fence and the ground slowly deepened. So stupid of them to have left the surface unpaved on either side of the fence. So stupid not to have run an electrical charge, even a mild one, through the wire. But they hadn’t, and here he was.

  He lay down again, tried again to ease under, and again the bottom of the fence stopped him. But he was close. Luke got on his knees again and dug more, dug faster, left and right, back and forth, to and fro. There was a snapping sound when the scoop’s handle finally let go. Luke tossed the handle aside and went on digging, feeling the edge of the scoop bite into his palms. When he paused to look at them, he saw they were bleeding.

  Got to be this time. Got to be.

  But he still couldn’t . . . quite . . . fit.

  And so back to work with the scoop. Left and right, starboard and larboard. Blood was dripping down his fingers, his hair was sweat-pasted to his forehead, mosquitoes sang in his ears. He put the scoop aside, lay down, and tried again to slide under the fence. The protruding tines pulled his shirt sideways, then bit into his skin, drawing more blood from his shoulderblades. He kept going.

  Halfway under, he stuck. He stared at the gravel, saw the way dust puffed up in tiny swirls below his nostrils as he panted. He had to go back, had to dig deeper yet—maybe only a little. Except when he tried to edge back into the playground, he discovered he couldn’t go that way, either. Not just stuck, caught. He would still be here, trapped under this goddam fucking fence like a rabbit in a trap when the sun came up tomorrow morning.

  The dots started to come back, red and green and purple, emerging from the bottom of the dug-up ground that was only an inch or two from his eyes. They rushed toward him, breaking apart, coming together, spinning and strobing. Claustrophobia squeezed his heart, squeezed his head. His hands throbbed and sang.

  Luke reached out, hooked his fingers into the dirt, and pulled with everything he had. For a moment the dots filled not only his field of vision but his entire brain; he was lost in their light. Then the bottom of the fence seemed to rise a little. That might have been strictly imagination, but he didn’t think so. He heard it creak.

  Maybe thanks to the shots and the tank, I’m a TK-pos now, he thought. Just like George.

  He decided it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that he had begun to move once more.

  The dots subsided. If the bottom of the fence really had risen, it had come back down. Metal prongs scored not just his shoulderblades but his buttocks and thighs. There was an agonizing moment when he stopped again, the fence grasping him greedily, not wanting to let go, but when he turned his head and laid his cheek on the pebbly ground, he could see a bush. It might be in reach. He stretched, came up short, stretched some more, and grasped it. He pulled. The bush began to tear free, but before it could come entirely out of the ground, he was moving again, thrusting with his hips and pushing with his feet. A protruding fence tine gave him a goodbye kiss, drawing a hot line across one calf, and then he wriggled through to the far side of the fence.

  He was out.

  Luke swayed to his knees and cast a wild look back, sure he’d see all the lights coming on—not just in the lounge, but in the hallways and the cafeteria, and in their glow he would see running figures: caretakers with their zap-sticks unholstered and turned up to maximum power.

  There was no one.

  He got to his feet and began to run blindly, the vital next step—orientation—forgotten in his panic. He might have run into the woods and become lost there before reason reasserted itself, except for the sudden scorching pain in his left heel as he came
down on a sharp rock and realized he had lost one of his sneakers in that final desperate lunge.

  Luke returned to the fence, bent, retrieved it, and put it on. His back and buttocks only smarted, but that final cut into his calf had been deeper, and burned like a hot wire. His heartbeat slowed and clear thinking returned. Once you’re out, go level with the trampoline, Avery had said, relaying the second of Maureen’s steps. Put your back to it, then turn right one medium-sized step. That’s your direction. You only have a mile or so to go, and you don’t need to keep in a perfectly straight line, what you’re aiming for is pretty big, but try your best. Later, in bed that night, Avery had said that maybe Luke could use the stars to guide him. He didn’t know about that stuff himself.

  All right, then. Time to go. But there was one other thing he had to do first.

  He reached up to his right ear and felt the small circle embedded there. He remembered someone—maybe Iris, maybe Helen—saying the implant hadn’t hurt her, because her ears were already pierced. Only pierced earrings unscrewed, Luke had seen his mother do it. This one was fixed in place.

  Please God, don’t let me have to use the knife.

  Luke steeled himself, worked his nails under the curved upper edge of the tracker, and pulled. His earlobe stretched, and it hurt, hurt plenty, but the tracker remained fixed. He let go, took two deep breaths (memories of the immersion tank recurring as he did so), and pulled again. Harder. The pain was worse this time, but the tracker remained in place and time was passing. The west residence wing, looking strange from this unfamiliar angle, was still dark and quiet, but for how long?

  He thought about pulling again, but that would only be postponing the inevitable. Maureen had known; it was why she left the paring knife. He took it from his pocket (being careful not to pull out the thumb drive as well) and held it in front of his eyes in the scant starlight. He felt for the sharp edge with the ball of his thumb, then reached across his body with his left hand and pulled down on his earlobe, stretching it as far as it would go, which was not very.