by Stephen King
Mrs. Sigsby slammed a hand down on her desk. “Don’t try that with me, missy! If you’ve got something to say—”
Stackhouse held his hand up again. He knelt in front of Frieda. Tall as he was, they still weren’t eye to eye, but close. “What do you want, Frieda? To go home? I’m telling you straight out, that can’t happen.”
Frieda almost laughed. Want to go home? To her el dopo mother, with her succession of el dopo boyfriends? The last one had wanted her to show him her breasts, so he could see “how fast she was developing.”
“I don’t want that.”
“Okay then, what?”
“I want to stay here.”
“That’s a rather unusual request.”
“But I don’t want the needle sticks, and I don’t want any more tests, and I don’t want to go to Back Half. Ever. I want to stay here and grow up to be a caretaker like Gladys or Winona. Or a tech like Tony and Evan. Or I could even learn to cook and be a chef like Chef Doug.”
Stackhouse looked over the girl’s shoulder to see if Mrs. Sigsby was as amazed by this as he was. She appeared to be.
“Let’s say that . . . um . . . permanent residency could be arranged,” he said. “Let’s say it will be arranged, if your information is good and we catch him.”
“Catching him can’t be part of the deal, because it’s not fair. Catching him is your job. Just if my information is good. And it is.”
He looked over Frieda’s shoulder again at Mrs. Sigsby. Who nodded slightly.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s a deal. Now spill it.”
She gave him a sly smile, and he thought about slapping it off her face. Only for a moment, but it was a serious thought. “And I want fifty tokens.”
“No.”
“Forty, then.”
“Twenty,” Mrs. Sigsby said from behind her. “And only if your information is good.”
Frieda considered it. “All right. Only how do I know if you’ll keep your promises?”
“You’ll have to trust us,” Mrs. Sigsby said.
Frieda sighed. “I guess so.”
Stackhouse: “No more dickering. If you have something to say, then say it.”
“He got off the river before Prekile. He got off at some red steps.” She hesitated, then gave up the rest. The important part. “There was a train station at the top of the steps. That’s where he went. The train station.”
19
After Frieda was sent back to her room with her tokens (and with a threat that all promises would be off if she spoke a single word about what had transpired in Mrs. Sigsby’s office to anyone), Stackhouse called down to the computer room. Andy Fellowes had come in from the village and spelled Felicia Richardson. Stackhouse told Fellowes what he wanted, and asked if he could get it without alerting anyone. Fellowes said he could, but would need a few minutes.
“Make it a very few,” Stackhouse said. He hung up and used his box phone to call Rafe Pullman and John Walsh, his two security men who were standing by.
“Shouldn’t you get one of our pet cops to go down there to the trainyard instead?” Mrs. Sigsby asked when he finished the call. Two members of the Dennison River Bend Police were stringers for the Institute, which amounted to twenty per cent of the entire force. “Wouldn’t that be quicker?”
“Quicker but maybe not safer. I don’t want knowledge of this shit-show to go any further than it already has unless and until it becomes absolutely necessary.”
“But if he got on a train, he could be anywhere!”
“We don’t know that he was even there. The girl could have been bullshitting.”
“I don’t think she was.”
“You didn’t think Dixon was.”
It was true—and embarrassing—but she stayed on message. The situation was far too serious to do anything else. “Point taken, Trevor. But if he’d stayed in a town that small, he’d have been spotted hours ago!”
“Maybe not. He’s one smart kid. He might have gone to ground somewhere.”
“But a train is the most likely, and you know it.”
The phone rang again. They both went for it. Stackhouse won.
“Yes, Andy. You did? Good, give it to me.” He grabbed a notepad and jotted on it rapidly. She leaned over his shoulder to read.
4297 at 10 AM.
16 at 2:30 PM.
77 at 5 PM.
He circled 4297 at 10 AM, asked for its destination, then jotted Port, Ports, Stur. “What time was that train due into Sturbridge?”
He jotted 4–5 PM on the pad. Mrs. Sigsby looked at it with dismay. She knew what Trevor was thinking: the boy would have wanted to get as far away as possible before leaving the train—assuming he had been on it. That would be Sturbridge, and even if the train had pulled in late, it would have arrived at least five hours ago.
“Thanks, Andy,” Stackhouse said. “Sturbridge is in Western Mass, right?”
He listened, nodding.
“Okay, so it’s on the turnpike, but it’s still got to be a pretty small port of call. Maybe it’s a switching point. Can you find out if that train, or any part of it, goes on from there? Maybe with a different engine, or something?”
He listened.
“No, just a hunch. If he stowed away on that train, Sturbridge might not be far enough for him to feel comfortable. He might want to keep running. It’s what I’d do in his place. Check it out and get back to me ASAP.”
He hung up. “Andy got the info off the station website,” he said. “No problem. Isn’t that amazing? Everything’s on the Internet these days.”
“Not us,” she said.
“Not yet,” he countered.
“What now?”
“We wait for Rafe and John.”
They did so. The witching hour came and went. At just past twelve-thirty, the phone on her desk rang. Mrs. Sigsby beat him to it this time, barked her name, then listened, nodding along.
“All right. All understood. Now go on up to the train station . . . depot . . . yard . . . whatever they call it . . . and see if anyone is still . . . oh. All right. Thank you.”
She hung up and turned to Stackhouse.
“That was your security force.” This was delivered with some sarcasm, since Stackhouse’s security force tonight consisted of just two men in their fifties and neither in wonderful physical shape. “The Brown girl had it right. They found the stairs, they found shoe prints, they even found a couple of bloody fingermarks, about halfway up the stairs. Rafe theorizes that Ellis either stopped there to rest, or maybe to re-tie his shoes. They’re using flashlights, but John says they could probably find more signs once it’s daylight.” She paused. “And they checked the station. No one there, not even a night watchman.”
Although the room was air conditioned to a pleasant seventy-two degrees, Stackhouse armed sweat from his forehead. “This is bad, Julia, but we still might be able to contain it without using that.” He pointed to the bottom drawer of her desk, where the Zero Phone was waiting. “Of course if he went to the cops in Sturbridge, our situation becomes a lot shakier. And he’s had five hours to do it.”
“Even if he did get off there he might not’ve,” she said.
“Why wouldn’t he? He doesn’t know he’s on the hook for killing his parents. How could he, when he doesn’t know they’re dead?”
“Even if he doesn’t know, he suspects. He’s very bright, Trevor, it won’t do for you to forget that. If I were him, you know the first thing I’d do if I did get off a train in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, at . . .” She looked at the pad. “. . . at four or five in the afternoon? I’d beat feet to the library and get on the Internet. Get current with events back home.”
This time they both looked at the locked drawer.
Stackhouse said, “Okay, we need to take this wider. I don’t like it, but there’s really no choice. Let’s find out who we’ve got in the vicinity of Sturbridge. See if he’s shown up there.”
Mrs. Sigsby sat down at her desk to put that in mo
tion, but the phone rang even as she reached for it. She listened briefly, then handed it to Stackhouse.
It was Andy Fellowes. He had been busy. There was a night-crew at Sturbridge, it seemed, and when Fellowes represented himself as an inventory manager for Downeast Freight, checking on a shipment of live lobsters that might have gone astray, the graveyard shift stationmaster was happy to help out. No, no live lobsters offloaded at Sturbridge. And yes, most of 4297 went on from there, only with a much more powerful engine pulling it. It became Train 9956, running south to Richmond, Wilmington, DuPray, Brunswick, Tampa, and finally Miami.
Stackhouse jotted all this down, then asked about the two towns he didn’t know.
“DuPray’s in South Carolina,” Fellowes told him. “Just a whistlestop—you know, six sticks and nine hicks—but it’s a connecting point for trains coming in from the west. They have a bunch of warehouses there. Probably why the town even exists. Brunswick’s in Georgia. It’s quite a bit bigger. I imagine they load in a fair amount of produce and seafood there.”
Stackhouse hung up and looked at Mrs. Sigsby. “Let’s assume—”
“Assume,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “A word that makes an ass out of you and—”
“Stow it.”
No one else could have spoken to Mrs. Sigsby in such an abrupt way (not to mention so rudely), but no one else was allowed to call her by her first name, either. Stackhouse began to pace, his bald head gleaming under the lights. Sometimes she wondered if he really did wax it.
“What do we have in this facility?” he asked. “I’ll tell you. Forty or so employees in Front Half and another two dozen in Back Half, not counting Heckle and Jeckle. Because we keep our wagons in a tight circle. We have to, but that doesn’t help us tonight. There’s a phone in that drawer that would get us all kinds of high-powered help, but if we use it, our lives will change, and not for the better.”
“If we have to use that phone, we might not have lives,” Mrs. Sigsby said.
He ignored this. “We have stringers nationwide, a good information network that includes low-level cops and medical people, hotel employees, news reporters on small-town weeklies, and retirees who have lots of time to spend scanning Internet sites. We also have two extraction teams at our disposal and a Challenger aircraft that can get them to practically anywhere fast. And we have our brains, Julia, our brains. He’s a chess player, the caretakers used to see him out there playing with Wilholm all the time, but this is real-world chess, and that’s a game he’s never played before. So let’s assume.”
“All right.”
“We’ll get a stringer to check with the police in Sturbridge. Same story we floated in Presque Isle—our guy says he thinks he saw a kid who might have been Ellis. We better do the same check in Portland and Portsmouth, although I don’t believe for a minute he would have gotten off so soon. Sturbridge is much more likely, but I think our guy will draw a blank there, too.”
“Are you sure that’s not just wishful thinking?”
“Oh, I’m wishing my ass off. But if he’s thinking as well as running, it makes sense.”
“When Train 4297 became Train 9956, he stayed on. That’s your assumption.”
“Yes. 9956 stops in Richmond at approximately 2 AM. We need someone, preferably several someones, watching that train. Same with Wilmington, where it stops between 5 AM and 6. But you know what? I don’t think he’ll get off at either place.”
“You think he’s going to ride it to the end of the line.” Trevor, she thought, you keep climbing higher and higher on the assumption tree, and each branch is thinner than the last.
But what else was there, now that the kid was gone? If she had to use the Zero Phone, she would be told they should have been prepared for something like this. It was easy to say, but how could anyone have foreseen a twelve-year-old child desperate enough to saw off his own earlobe to get rid of the tracker? Or a housekeeper willing to aid and abet him? Next she would be told the Institute staff had gotten lazy and complacent . . . and what would she say to that?
“—the line.”
She came back to the here and now, and asked him to repeat.
“I said he won’t necessarily ride it to the end of the line. A kid as smart as this one will know we’d put people there, if we figured out the train part. I don’t think he’ll want to get off in any metro area, either. Especially not in Richmond, a strange city in the middle of the night. Wilmington’s possible—it’s smaller, and it’ll be daylight when 9956 gets there—but I’m leaning toward one of the whistlestops. I think either DuPray, South Carolina, or Brunswick, Georgia. Assuming he’s on that train at all.”
“He might not even know where it was going once it left Sturbridge. In which case he might ride it all the way.”
“If he’s in with a bunch of tagged freight, he knows.”
Mrs. Sigsby realized it had been years since she had been this afraid. Maybe she had never been this afraid. Were they assuming or just guessing? And if the latter, was it likely they could make this many good ones in a row? But it was all they had, so she nodded. “If he gets off at one of the smaller stops, we could send an extraction team to take him back. God, Trevor, that would be ideal.”
“Two teams. Opal and Ruby Red. Ruby’s the same team that brought him in. That would have a nice roundness, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Sigsby sighed. “I wish we could be positive he got on that train.”
“I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure, and that’ll have to do.” Stackhouse gave her a smile. “Get on the phone. Wake some people up. Start with Richmond. Nationwide we must pay these guys and gals what, a million a year? Let’s make some of them earn their money.”
Thirty minutes later, Mrs. Sigsby set the phone back into its cradle. “If he’s in Sturbridge, he must be hiding in a culvert or an abandoned house or something—the police don’t have him, there’d be something about it on their scanners if they did. We’ll have people in both Richmond and Wilmington with eyes on that train when it’s there, and they’ve got a good cover story.”
“I heard. Nicely done, Julia.”
She lifted a weary hand to acknowledge this. “Sighting earns a substantial bonus, and there will be an even more substantial bonus—more like a windfall—if our people should see a chance to grab the boy and take him to a safe house for pickup. Not likely in Richmond, both of our people there are just John Q. Citizens, but one of the guys in Wilmington is a cop. Pray that it happens there.”
“What about DuPray and Brunswick?”
“We’ll have two people watching in Brunswick, the pastor of a nearby Methodist church and his wife. Only one in DuPray, but the guy actually lives there. He owns the town’s only motel.”
20
Luke was in the immersion tank again. Zeke was holding him down, and the Stasi Lights were swirling in front of him. They were also inside his head, which was ten times worse. He was going to drown looking at them.
At first he thought the screaming he heard when he flailed his way back to consciousness was coming from him, and wondered how he could possibly make such an ungodly racket underwater. Then he remembered that he was in a boxcar, the boxcar was part of a moving train, and it was slowing down fast. The screeching was steel wheels on steel rails.
The colored dots remained for a moment or two, then faded. The boxcar was pitch black. He tried to stretch his cramped muscles and discovered he was hemmed in. Three or four of the outboard motor cartons had fallen over. He wanted to believe he’d done that thrashing around in his nightmare, but he thought he might have done it with his mind, while in the grip of those damned lights. Once upon a time the limit of his mind-power was pushing pizza pans off restaurant tables or fluttering the pages of a book, but times had changed. He had changed. Just how much he didn’t know, and didn’t want to.
The train slowed more and began rumbling over switching points. Luke was aware that he was in a fair amount of distress. His body wasn’t on red alert, not yet, but it had
definitely reached Code Yellow. He was hungry, and that was bad, but his thirst made his empty belly seem minor in comparison. He remembered sliding down the riverbank to where the S.S. Pokey had been tethered, and how he had splashed the cold water over his face and scooped it into his mouth. He would give anything for a drink of that river water now. He ran his tongue over his lips, but it wasn’t much help; his tongue was also pretty dry.
The train came to a stop, and Luke stacked the boxes again, working by feel. They were heavy, but he managed. He had no idea where he was, because in Sturbridge the door of the Southway Express box had been shut all the way. He went back to his hidey-hole behind the boxes and small engine equipment and waited, feeling miserable.
He was dozing again in spite of his hunger, thirst, full bladder, and throbbing ear, when the door of the boxcar rattled open, letting in a flood of moonlight. At least it seemed like a flood to Luke after the pure dark he’d found himself in when he woke. A truck was backing up to the door, and a guy was hollering.
“Come on . . . little more . . . easy . . . little more . . . ho!”
The truck’s engine switched off. There was the sound of its cargo door rattling up, and then a man jumped into the boxcar. Luke could smell coffee, and his belly rumbled, surely loud enough for the man to hear. But no—when he peeked out between a lawn tractor and a riding lawnmower, he saw the guy, dressed in work fatigues, was wearing earbuds.
Another man joined him and set down a square battery light which was—thankfully—aimed at the door and not in Luke’s direction. They laid down a steel ramp and began to dolly crates from the truck to the boxcar. Each was stamped KOHLER, THIS SIDE UP, and USE CAUTION. So wherever this was, it wasn’t the end of the line.
The men paused after loading ten or twelve of the crates and ate doughnuts from a paper sack. It took everything Luke had—thoughts of Zeke holding him down in the tank, thoughts of the Wilcox twins, thoughts of Kalisha and Nicky and God knew how many others depending on him—to keep from breaking cover and begging those men for a bite, just one bite. He might have done it anyway, had one of them not said something that froze him in place.