by Stephen King
“Hey, you didn’t see a kid running around, did you?”
“What?” Through a mouthful of doughnut.
“A kid, a kid. When you went up to take the engineer that Thermos.”
“What would a kid be doing out here? It’s two-thirty in the morning.”
“Aw, some guy asked me when I went to get the doughnuts. Said his brother-in-law called him from up in Massachusetts, woke him out of a sound sleep and asked him to check the train station. The Massachusetts guy’s kid ran away. Said he was always talking about hopping a freight out to California.”
“That’s on the other side of the country.”
“I know that. You know that. Would a kid know that?”
“If he’s any good in school, he’d know Richmond is a fuck of a long way from Los Angeles.”
“Yeah, but it’s also a junction point. The guy said he might be on this train, then get off and try to hop one going west.”
“Well, I didn’t see any kid.”
“The guy said his brother-in-law would pay a reward.”
“It could be a million dollars, Billy, and I still couldn’t see any kid unless a kid was there to see.”
If my belly rumbles again, I’m finished, Luke thought. Deep-fried. Nuked.
From outside, someone shouted: “Billy! Duane! Twenty minutes, boys, finish up!”
Billy and Duane loaded a few more Kohler crates into the boxcar, then rolled their ramp back into the truck and drove away. Luke had time to catch a glimpse of a city skyline—what city he didn’t know—and then a man in overalls and a railroad cap came along and ran the Southway door shut . . . but this time not all the way. Luke guessed there was a sticky place in the track. Another five minutes passed before the train jerked into motion again, slowly at first, clicking over points and crossings, then picking up speed.
Some guy calling himself some other guy’s brother-in-law.
Said he was always talking about hopping a freight.
They knew he was gone, and even if they found the Pokey downstream from Dennison River Bend, they hadn’t been fooled. They must have made Maureen talk. Or Avery. The thought of them torturing the information out of the Avester was too horrible to contemplate, and Luke pushed it away. If they had people watching for him to get off here, they’d have people waiting at the next stop, too, and by then it might be daylight. They might not want to cause trouble, might just observe and report, but it was possible they’d try to take him prisoner. Depending on how many people were around, of course. And how desperate they were. That, too.
I might have outsmarted myself by taking the train, Luke thought, but what else could I do? They weren’t supposed to find out so fast.
In the meantime, there was one discomfort of which he could rid himself. Holding to the seat of a riding lawnmower to keep his balance, he unscrewed the fuel cap of a John Deere rototiller, opened his fly, and pissed what felt like two gallons into the empty gas tank. Not a nice thing to do, an extremely mean trick on whoever ended up with the rototiller, but these were extraordinary circumstances. He put the gas cap back on and screwed it tight. Then he sat down on the seat of the riding lawnmower, put his hands over his empty belly, and closed his eyes.
Think about your ear, he told himself. Think about the scratches on your back, too. Think about how bad those things hurt and you’ll forget all about being hungry and thirsty.
It worked until it didn’t. What crept in were images of kids leaving their rooms and going down to the caff for breakfast a few hours from now. Luke was helpless to dispel images of pitchers filled with orange juice, and the bubbler filled with red Hawaiian Punch. He wished he was there right now. He’d drink a glass of each, then load up his plate with scrambled eggs and bacon from the steam table.
You don’t wish you were there. Wishing that would be crazy.
Nevertheless, part of him did.
He opened his eyes to get rid of the images. The one of the orange juice pitchers was stubborn, it didn’t want to go . . . and then he saw something in the empty space between the new crates and the small engine gizmos. At first he thought it was a trick of the moonlight coming through the partly opened boxcar door, or an outright hallucination, but when he blinked his eyes twice and it was still there, he got off the seat of the mower and crawled to it. To his right, moon-washed fields flashed past the boxcar door. Leaving Dennison River Bend, Luke had drunk in all that he saw with wonder and fascination, but he had no eyes for the outside world now. He could only look at what was on the floor of the boxcar: doughnut crumbs.
And one piece that was bigger than a crumb.
He picked that one up first. To get the smaller ones, he wet a thumb and picked them up that way. Afraid of losing the smallest into the cracks in the boxcar floor, he bent over, stuck out his tongue, and licked them up.
21
It was Mrs. Sigsby’s turn to catch some sleep on the couch in the inner room, and Stackhouse had closed the door so neither phone—the landline or his box phone—would disturb her. Fellowes called from the computer room at ten to three.
“9956 has left Richmond,” he said. “No sign of the boy.”
Stackhouse sighed and rubbed at his chin, feeling the rasp of stubble there. “Okay.”
“Shame we can’t just have that train pulled over on a siding and searched. Settle the question of whether or not he’s on there once and for all.”
“It’s a shame everyone in the world isn’t in a big circle, singing ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ What time does it get to Wilmington?”
“Should be there by six. Earlier, if they make up some time.”
“How many guys have we got there?”
“Two now, another on his way from Goldsboro.”
“They know better than to get intense, right? Intense people rouse suspicions.”
“I think they’ll be fine. It’s a good story. Runaway boy, concerned folks.”
“You better hope they’re fine. Tell me how it goes.”
Dr. Hendricks came into the office without bothering to knock. There were circles under his eyes, his clothes were wrinkled, and his hair was standing up in a steel-gray ruff. “Any word?”
“Not yet.”
“Where’s Mrs. Sigsby?”
“Getting some badly needed rest.” Stackhouse leaned back in her chair and stretched. “The Dixon boy hasn’t had the tank, has he?”
“Of course not.” Donkey Kong looked vaguely offended at the very idea. “He’s not a pink. Farthest thing from one. To risk damaging a BDNF as high as his would be insane. Or to risk extending his abilities. Which would be unlikely but not impossible. Sigsby would have my head.”
“She won’t and he goes in it today,” Stackhouse said. “Dunk that little motherfucker until he thinks he’s dead, then dunk him some more.”
“Are you serious? He’s valuable property! One of the highest TP-positives we’ve had in years!”
“I don’t care if he can walk on water and shoot electricity out of his asshole when he farts. He helped Ellis get away. Have the Greek do it as soon as he comes back on duty. He loves putting them in the tank. Tell Zeke not to kill him, I do understand his value, but I want him to have an experience he’ll remember for as long as he can remember. Then take him to Back Half.”
“But Mrs. Sigsby—”
“Mrs. Sigsby agrees completely.”
Both men swung around. She was standing in the door between the office and her private quarters. Stackhouse’s first thought was that she looked as if she had seen a ghost, but that wasn’t quite right. She looked as if she were a ghost.
“Do it just the way he told you, Dan. If it damages his BDNF, so be it. He needs to pay.”
22
The train jerked into motion again, and Luke thought of some other song his grandma used to sing. Was it the one about the Midnight Special? He couldn’t remember. The doughnut crumbs had done nothing but sharpen his hunger and increase his thirst. His mouth was a desert, his tongue a sand dune w
ithin. He dozed, but couldn’t sleep. Time passed, he had no idea how much, but eventually pre-dawn light began to filter into the car.
Luke crawled over the swaying floor to the partially open door of the boxcar and peered out. There were trees, mostly straggly, second-growth pines, small towns, fields, then more trees. The train charged across a trestle, and he looked down at the river below with longing eyes. This time it wasn’t a song that came to mind but Coleridge. Water, water everywhere, Luke thought, the boxcar boards did shrink. Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink.
Probably polluted anyway, he told himself, and knew he would drink from it even if it was. Until his belly was bulging. Puking it up would be a pleasure because then he could drink more.
Just before the sun came up, red and hot, he began to smell salt in the air. Instead of farms, the buildings sliding past were now mostly warehouses and old brick factories with their windows boarded up. Cranes reared against the brightening sky. Planes were taking off not far away. For awhile the train ran beside a four-lane road. Luke saw people in cars with nothing to worry about but a day’s work. Now he could smell mudflats, dead fish, or both.
I would eat a dead fish if it wasn’t all maggoty, he thought. Maybe even if it was. According to National Geographic, maggots are a good source of organic protein.
The train began slowing, and Luke retreated to his hiding place. There were more thumps and bumps as his car went over points and crossings. At last it came to a stop.
It was an early hour, but this was a busy place, even so. Luke heard trucks. He heard men laughing and talking. A boombox or truck radio was playing Kanye, bass like a heartbeat first swelling, then fading. An engine went by on some other track, leaving behind a stink of diesel. There were several tremendous jerks as cars were coupled or uncoupled from Luke’s train. Men shouted in Spanish, and Luke picked out some of the profanities: puta mierda, hijo de puta, chupapollas.
More time went by. It felt like an hour, but might only have been fifteen minutes. At last another truck backed up to the Southway Express box. A guy in overalls rolled the door all the way open. Luke peered out from between a rototiller and a lawn tractor. The guy jumped into the boxcar, and another steel ramp was laid between the truck and the box. This time there were four men in the crew, two black, two white, all big and tatted out. They were laughing and talking in deep southern accents, which made them sound to Luke like the country singers on BUZ’N 102 back home in Minneapolis.
One of the white guys said he’d gone dancing last night with the wife of one of the black guys. The black guy pretended to hit him, and the white guy pretended to stagger backward, sitting down on the pile of outboard motor cartons Luke had recently re-stacked.
“Come on, come on,” said the other white guy. “I want my breffus.”
So do I, Luke thought. Oh man, so do I.
When they began loading the Kohler crates into the truck, Luke thought it was like a movie of the last stop, only run in reverse. That made him think of the movies Avery said the kids had to watch in Back Half, and that made the dots start to come back again—big juicy ones. The boxcar door jerked on its track, as if it meant to shut itself.
“Whoa!” the second black guy said. “Who’s out there?” He looked. “Huh. Nobody.”
“Boogeyman,” said the black guy who had pretended to smack the white guy. “Come on, come on, let’s get it done. Stationmaster say this bitch is runnin late.”
Still not the end of the line, Luke thought. I won’t be in here until I starve to death, there’s that, but only because I’ll die of thirst first. He knew from his reading that a person could go for at least three days without water before lapsing into the unconsciousness that preceded death, but it didn’t seem that way to him now.
The four-man crew loaded all but two of the big crates into their truck. Luke waited for them to start on the small engine stuff, which was when they would discover him, but instead of doing that, they ran their ramp back into the truck and yanked its pull-down door shut.
“You guys go on,” one of the white guys said. He was the one who’d joked about going dancing with the black guy’s wife. “I gotta visit the caboose shithouse. See a man about a dog.”
“Come on, Mattie, squeeze it a little.”
“Can’t,” the white guy said. “This one’s so big I’m gonna have to climb down off’n it.”
The truck started up and drove away. There were a few moments of quiet, and then the white guy, Mattie, climbed back into the boxcar, biceps flexing in his sleeveless tee. Luke’s once-upon-a-time best friend Rolf Destin would have said the guns are fully loaded.
“Okay, outlaw. I seen you when I sat down on those boxes. You can come out now.”
23
For a moment Luke stayed where he was, thinking that if he remained perfectly still and perfectly silent, the man would decide he’d been mistaken and go away. But that was childish thinking, and he was no longer a child. Not even close. So he crept out and tried to stand, but his legs were stiff and his head was light. He would have fallen over if the white guy hadn’t grabbed him.
“Holy shit, kid, who tore your ear off?”
Luke tried to speak. At first nothing came out but a croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I had some trouble. Sir, do you have anything to eat? Or drink? I’m awfully hungry and thirsty.”
Still not taking his eyes from Luke’s mutilated ear, the white guy—Mattie—reached into his pocket and brought out half a roll of Life Savers. Luke grabbed it, tore away the paper, and tossed four into his mouth. He would have said all his saliva was gone, re-absorbed by his thirsty body, but more squirted, as if from invisible jets, and the sugar hit his head like a bomb. The dots flared briefly into existence, racing across the white guy’s face. Mattie looked around, as if he had sensed someone coming up behind him, then redirected his attention to Luke.
“When’s the last time you ate?”
“Don’t know,” Luke said. “Can’t exactly remember.”
“How long you been on the train?”
“About a day.” That had to be right, but it seemed much longer.
“All the way from Yankeeland, right?”
“Yes.” Maine was about as Yankeeland as you could get, Luke thought.
Mattie pointed at Luke’s ear. “Who done that? Was it your dad? Stepdad?”
Luke stared at him, alarmed. “Who . . . how did you get that idea?” But even in his current state, the answer was obvious. “Someone’s looking for me. It was the same at the last place the train stopped. How many are there? What did they say? That I ran away from home?”
“That’s it. Your uncle. He brought a couple of friends, and one’s a cop from Wrightsville Beach. They didn’t say why, but yeah, they said you ran away from up in Massachusetts. And if someone done that, I get it.”
That one of the waiting men was a cop scared Luke badly. “I got on in Maine, not Massachusetts, and my dad is dead. My mom, too. Everything they say is a lie.”
The white guy considered this. “So who done that to your ear, outlaw? Some foster home asshole?”
That was not so far from the truth, Luke thought. Yes, he had been in a kind of foster home, and yes, it had been run by assholes. “It’s complicated. Just . . . sir . . . if those men see me, they’ll take me away. Maybe they couldn’t do that if they didn’t have a cop with them, but they do. They’ll take me back to where this happened.” He pointed to his ear. “Please don’t tell. Please just let me stay on the train.”
Mattie scratched his head. “I don’t know about that. You’re a kid, and you’re a mess.”
“I’ll look a whole lot worse if those men take me.”
Believe that, he thought with all his force. Believe that, believe that.
“Well, I don’t know,” Mattie repeated. “Although I didn’t much care for the look of those three, tell you the God’s honest. They seemed kinda nervy, even the cop. Also, you’re lookin at a guy who run from home three tim
es before I finally made it. First time I was about your age.”
Luke said nothing. Mattie was headed in the right direction, at least.
“Where you going? Do you even know?”
“Someplace where I can get some food and some water and think,” Luke said. “I need to think, because nobody’s going to want to believe the story I’ve got to tell. Especially not coming from a kid.”
“Mattie!” someone shouted. “Come on, man! Unless you want a free trip to South Carolina!”
“Kid, were you kidnapped?”
“Yes,” Luke said, and began to cry. “And those men . . . the one who says he’s my uncle, and the cop . . .”
“MATTIE! Wipe your ass and come ON!”
“I’m telling the truth,” Luke said simply. “If you want to help me, let me go.”
“Well, shit.” Mattie spat over the side of the boxcar. “Seems wrong, but that ear of yours . . . those men, you’re sure they’re bad guys?”
“The worst,” Luke said. He was actually ahead of the worst ones, but whether or not he was able to stay there depended on what this man decided to do.
“Do you even know where you are now?”
Luke shook his head.
“This is Wilmington. Train’s gonna stop in Georgia, then at Tampa, and finish up its run in Miami. If people are looking for you, APB or AMBER Alert or whatever they call it, they’ll be looking in all those places. But the next place it stops is just a shit-splat on the map. You might—”
“Mattie, where the fuck are you?” Much closer now. “Stop fuckin around. We gotta sign out.”
Mattie gave Luke another dubious look.
“Please,” Luke said. “They put me in a tank. Almost drowned me. I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true.”
Footsteps crunched on gravel, approaching. Mattie jumped down and trundled the boxcar door three-quarters of the way closed. Luke crawled back into his nest behind the small engine gear.