by Stephen King
“Well, I’ll get in touch with the others and tell em what you said, anyway,” Hap said. “Much obliged.”
Joe Bob stood up. “Sure. Just keep my name out of it. I sure wouldn’t want to lose my job. Your buddies don’t need to know who tipped you, do they?”
“No,” Hap said, and Vic echoed it.
As Joe Bob went to the door, Hap said a little apologetically: “That’s five even for gas, Joe Bob. I hate to charge you, but with things the way they are—”
“That’s okay.” Joe Bob handed him a credit card. “State’s payin. And I got my credit slip to show why I was here.”
While Hap was filling out the slip he sneezed twice.
“You want to watch that,” Joe Bob said. “Nothin any worse than a summer cold.”
“Don’t I know it,” Hap said.
Suddenly, from behind them, Vic said: “Maybe it ain’t a cold.” They turned to him. Vic looked frightened.
“I woke up this morning sneezing and hacking away like sixty,” Vic said. “Had a mean headache, too. It’s gone back some, but I’m still full of snot. Maybe we’re coming down with it. What that Campion had. What he died of.”
Hap looked at him for a long time, and as he was about to put forward all his reasons why it couldn’t be, he sneezed again.
Joe Bob looked at them both gravely for a moment and then said, “You know, it might not be such a bad idea to close the station, Hap. Just for today.”
Hap looked at him, scared, and tried to remember what all his reasons had been. He couldn’t think of a one. All he could remember was that he had also awakened with a headache and a runny nose. Well, everyone caught a cold once in a while. But before that guy Campion had shown up, he had been fine. Just fine.
The three Hodges kids were six, four, and eighteen months. The two youngest were taking naps, and the oldest was out back digging a hole. Lila Bruett was in the living room, watching “The Doctors.” She hoped Sally wouldn’t return until it was over. Ralph had bought a big color TV when times had been better in Arnette, and Lila loved to watch the afternoon stories in color. Everything was so much prettier.
She drew on her cigarette and then let the smoke out in spasms as a racking cough seized her. She went into the kitchen and spat the mouthful of crap she had brought up down the drain. She had gotten up with the cough, and all day it had felt like someone was tickling the back of her throat with a feather.
She went back to the living room after taking a peek out the pantry window to make sure Bert Hodges was okay. A commercial was on now, two dancing bottles of toilet bowl cleaner. Lila let her eyes drift around the room and wished her own house looked this nice. Sally’s hobby was doing paint-by-the-numbers pictures of Christ, and they were all over the living room in nice frames. She especially liked the big one of the Last Supper mounted in back of the TV; it had come with sixty different oil colors, Sally had told her, and it took almost three months to finish. It was a real work of art.
Just as “The Doctors” came back on, baby Cheryl started to cry, a whooping, ugly yell that was broken by bursts of coughing.
Lila put out her cigarette and hurried into the bedroom. Eva, the four-year-old, was still fast asleep, but Cheryl was lying on her back in her crib, and her face was going an alarming purple color. Her cries began to sound strangled.
Lila, who was not afraid of the croup after seeing both of her own through bouts with it, picked her up by the heels and swatted her firmly on the back. She had no idea if Dr. Spock recommended this sort of treatment or not, because she had never read him. It worked nicely on Baby Cheryl. She emitted a froggy croak and suddenly spat an amazing wad of yellow phlegm out onto the floor.
“Better?” Lila asked.
“Yeth,” said Baby Cheryl. She was almost asleep again.
Lila wiped up the mess with a Kleenex. She couldn’t remember ever having seen a baby cough up so much snot all at once.
She sat down in front of “The Doctors” again, frowning. She lit another cigarette, sneezed over the first puff, and then began to cough.
CHAPTER 4
It was an hour past nightfall.
Starkey sat alone at a long table, sifting through sheets of yellow flimsy. Their contents dismayed him. He had been serving his country for thirty-six years, beginning as a scared West Point plebe. He had won medals. He had spoken with Presidents, had offered them advice, and on occasion his advice had been taken. He had been through dark moments before, plenty of them, but this . . .
He was scared, so deeply scared he hardly dared admit it to himself. It was the kind of fear that could drive you mad.
On impulse he got up and went to the wall where the five blank TV monitors looked into the room. As he got up his knee bumped the table, causing one of the sheets of flimsy to fall off the edge. It seesawed lazily down through the mechanically purified air and landed on the tile, half in the table’s shadow and half out. Someone standing over it and looking down would have seen this:
OT CONFIRMED
SEEMS REASONABLY
STRAIN CODED 848-AB
CAMPION, (W.) SALLY
ANTIGEN SHIFT AND MUTATION.
HIGH RISK/EXCESS MORTALITY
AND COMMUNICABILITY ESTIMATED
REPEAT 99.4%. ATLANTA PLAGUE CENTER
UNDERSTANDS. TOP SECRET BLUE FOLDER.
ENDS.
P-T-2223 1 2A
Starkey pushed a button under the middle screen and the picture flashed on with the unnerving suddenness of solid-state components.
It showed the western California desert, looking east. It was desolate, made even more eerie by the reddish tinge of infrared photography.
It’s out there, straight ahead, Starkey thought. Project Blue.
The fright tried to wash over him again. He reached into his pocket and brought out a pink and yellow capsule. What his daughter would call a “downer.” Names didn’t matter; results did. He dry-swallowed it, his hard, unseamed face wrinkling for a moment as it went down.
Project Blue.
He looked at the other blank monitors, and then punched up pictures on all of them. 4 and 5 showed labs. 4 was physics, 5 was viral biology. The vi-bi lab was full of animal cages, mostly for guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys, and a few dogs. All of them appeared to be sleeping. In the physics lab a small centrifuge was still turning around and around. Starkey had complained about that. He had complained bitterly. There was something spooky about that centrifuge going around and around while Dr. Ezwick lay dead on the floor nearby, sprawled out like a scarecrow that had tipped over in a high wind.
They had explained to him that the centrifuge was on the same circuit as the lights, and if they turned off the centrifuge the lights would go, too. And the cameras down there were not equipped for infrared. Starkey understood. Some more brass might come down from Washington and want to look at the dead Nobel Prize winner who was lying four hundred feet under the desert less than a mile away. If we turn off the centrifuge, we turn off the professor. Elementary. What his daughter would have called a “Catch-22.”
He took another “downer” and looked into monitor 2. This was the one he didn’t like. He didn’t like the man with his face in the soup. Suppose someone walked up to you and said: You will spend eternity with your phiz in a bowl of soup. It’s like the old pie-in-the-face routine, it stops being funny when it starts being you.
Monitor 2 showed the Project Blue cafeteria. The accident had occurred almost perfectly between shifts, and the cafeteria had been only lightly populated. He supposed it hadn’t mattered much to them, whether they had died in the cafeteria or in their bedrooms or their labs. Still, the man with his face in the soup . . .
A man and a woman in blue coveralls were crumpled at the foot of the candy machine. A man in a white coverall lay beside the Seeburg jukebox. At the tables themselves were nine men and fourteen women, some of them slumped beside Hostess Twinkies, some with spilled cups of Coke and Bubble-Up still clutched in their stiff hands. And, at th
e second table, near the end, there was a man who had been identified as Frank D. Bruce with his face in a bowl of what seemed to be Campbell’s Chunky Sirloin soup.
The first monitor showed only a digital clock. Until June 13, all the numbers on that clock had been green. Now they had turned bright red. They had stopped. The figures read 06:13:80:02:37:16.
June 13, 1980. Thirty-seven minutes past two o’clock in the morning. And sixteen seconds.
From behind him came a brief burring noise.
Starkey turned off the monitors one by one and then turned around. He saw the sheet of flimsy on the floor and put it back on the table.
“Come.”
It was Carsleigh. He looked grave and his skin was a slaty color. More bad news, Starkey thought serenely. Someone else has taken a long high dive into a cold bowl of Chunky Sirloin soup.
“Hi, Len,” he said quietly.
Len Carsleigh nodded. “Billy. This . . . Christ, I don’t know how to tell you.”
“I think one word at a time might go best, soldier.”
“Those men who handled Campion’s body are through their prelims at Atlanta, and the news isn’t good.”
“All of them?”
“Five for sure. There’s one—his name is Stuart Redman—who’s negative so far. But as far as we can tell, Campion himself was negative for over fifty hours.”
“If only Campion hadn’t run,” Starkey said. “That was sloppy security, Len. Very sloppy.”
Carsleigh nodded.
“Go on.”
“Amette has been quarantined. We’ve isolated at least sixteen cases of constantly shifting A-Prime flu there so far. And those are just the overt ones.”
“The news media?”
“So far, no problem. They believe it’s anthrax.”
“What else?”
“One very serious problem. We have a Texas highway patrolman named Joseph Robert Brentwood. His cousin owns the gas station where Campion touched down. He dropped by yesterday morning to tell Hapscomb the health people were coming. We picked Brentwood up three hours ago and he’s en route to Atlanta now. In the meantime he’s been patrolling half of east Texas. God knows how many people he’s been in contact with.”
“Oh, shit,” Starkey said, and was appalled by the watery weakness in his voice and the skin-crawl that had started near the base of his testicles and was now working up into his belly. 99.4% communicability, he thought. It played insanely over and over in his mind. And that meant 99.4% excess mortality, because the human body couldn’t produce the antibodies necessary to stop a constantly shifting antigen virus. Every time the body did produce the right antibody, the virus simply shifted. For the same reason a vaccine was going to be almost impossible to create.
99.4%.
“Christ,” he said. “That’s it?”
“Well—”
“Go on. Finish.”
Softly, then, Carsleigh said: “Hammer’s dead, Billy. Suicide. He shot himself in the eye with his service pistol. The Project Blue specs were on his desk. I guess he thought leaving them there was easier than writing a suicide note.”
Starkey closed his eyes. Vic Hammer was . . . had been ... his son-in-law. How was he supposed to tell Cynthia about this? I’m sorry, Cindy. Vic took a high dive into a cold bowl of soup today. Here, have a “downer.” You see, there was a goof. Somebody made a mistake with a box. Somebody else forgot to pull a switch that would have sealed off the base. The lag was only twenty-three seconds, but it was enough. The box is known in the trade as a “sniffer.” It’s made in Portland, Oregon, Defense Department contract 164480966. The boxes are put together by female technicians, and they’re put together circuit by circuit so none of them really know what they’re doing. One of them was maybe thinking about what to make for supper, and whoever was supposed to check her work was maybe thinking about trading the family car. Anyway, Cindy, the last coincidence was that a man at the number four security post, a man named Campion, saw the numbers go red. He got his family and ran. He drove through the main gate just twenty-three seconds before the sirens started going off. Anyway, Cindy, what I’m trying to say is that this was a chain of coincidence on the order of winning the Irish Sweepstakes. None of it was Vic’s fault. But he was the head of the project, and he saw the situation start to escalate, and then—
“Thanks, Len,” he said.
“Billy, would you like—”
“I’ll be up in ten minutes. I want you to schedule a general staff meeting fifteen minutes from now. If they’re in bed, kick em out.” “Yes, sir.”
“And Len . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad you were the one who told me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Carsleigh left. Starkey glanced at his watch, then walked over to the monitors set into the wall. He turned on 2, put his hands behind his back, and stared thoughtfully into Project Blue’s silent cafeteria.
CHAPTER 5
Larry Underwood pulled around the comer and found a parking space big enough for the Datsun Z between a fire hydrant and somebody’s trash can that had fallen into the gutter. There was something unpleasant in the trash can and Larry tried to tell himself that he really hadn’t seen the stiffening dead cat and the rat gnawing at its white-furred belly. The rat was gone so fast from the sweep of his headlights that it really might not have been there. The cat, however, was fixed in stasis. And, he supposed, killing the Z’s engine, if you believed in one you had to believe in the other. Didn’t they say that Paris had the biggest rat population in the world? All those old sewers. But New York did well, too. And if he remembered his misspent youth well enough, not all the rats in New York City went on four legs. And what the hell was he doing parked in front of this decaying brownstone, thinking about rats, anyway?
Five days ago, on June 14, he had been in sunny southern California, home of hopheads, freak religions, the only c/w nightclubs in the world with gogo dancers, and Disneyland. This morning at quarter of four he had arrived on the shore of the other ocean, paying his toll to go across the Triborough Bridge. A sullen drizzle had been falling. Only in New York can an early summer drizzle seem so unrepentantly sullen. Larry could see the drops accreting on the Z’s windshield now, as intimations of dawn began to creep into the eastern sky.
Dear New York, I’ve come home. Maybe the Yankees were in town. That might make the trip worthwhile. Take the subway up to the newly refurbished stadium, drink beer, eat hotdogs, and watch the Yankees wallop the piss out of Cleveland or Boston . . .
His thoughts drifted off and when he wandered back to them he saw that the light had gotten much stronger. The dashboard clock read 6:05. He had been dozing. The rat was back, he saw. The rat had dug himself quite a hole in that dead cat’s guts. Larry’s empty stomach did a slow forward roll. He considered beeping the horn to scare it away for good, but the sleeping brownstones with their empty garbage cans standing sentinel duty daunted him.
He slouched lower in the bucket seat so he wouldn’t have to watch the rat eating breakfast. Just a bite, my good man, and then back to the subway system. Going out to Yankee Stadium this evening? Perhaps I’ll see you, old chum. Although I really doubt that you’ll see me.
The front of the building had been defaced with spray can slogans, cryptic and ominous: CHICO 116, ZORRO 93, LITTLE ABIE # 1! When he had been a boy, before his father died, this had been a good neighborhood. Two stone dogs had guarded the steps leading up to the double doors. A year before he took off for the coast, vandals had demolished the one on the right from the forepaws up. Now they were both gone entirely, except for one rear paw of the left dog. The body it had been called into creation to support was gone, perhaps decorating some Puerto Rican junkie’s crashpad. Maybe ZORRO 93 or LITTLE ABIE $ 1! had taken it. Maybe the rats had carried it away to some deserted subway tunnel one dark night. For all he knew, maybe they had taken his mother along, too. He supposed he should at least climb the steps and make sure her name was still there under
the Apartment 15 mailbox, but he was too tired.
No, he would just sit here and nod off, trusting to the last residue of the reds in his system to wake him up around seven. Then he would go see if his mother still lived here. Maybe it would be best if she was gone. Maybe then he wouldn’t even bother with the Yankees. Maybe he would just check into the Biltmore, sleep for three days, and then head back into the golden west. In this light, in this drizzle, with his legs and head still throbbing from the bringdown, New York looked like a dead whore.
His mind began to drift away again, mulling over the last nine weeks or so, still trying to find some sort of key that would make everything clear and explain how you could butt yourself against stone walls for six long years, playing the clubs, making the demo tapes, doing sessions, the whole thing, and then suddenly make it in nine weeks. Trying to get that straight in your mind was like trying to swallow a doorknob. There had to be an answer, he thought, an explanation that would allow him to reject the ugly notion that the whole thing had been a whim, a simple twist of fate, in Dylan’s words.
He dozed deeper, arms crossed on his chest, going over it and over it, and mixed up through all of it was this new thing, like a low and sinister counterpoint, one note at the threshold of audibility played on a synthesizer, heard in a migrainy sort of way that acted on you like a premonition: the rat, digging into the dead cat’s body, munch, munch, just looking for something tasty here. It’s the law of the jungle, my man, if you’re in the trees you got to swing . . .
It had really started eighteen months ago. He had been playing with the Tattered Remnants in a Berkeley club, and a man from Columbia had called. Not a biggie, just another toiler in the vinyl vineyards. Neil Diamond was thinking of recording one of his songs, a tune called “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”
Diamond was doing an album, all his own stuff except for an old Buddy Holly tune, “Peggy Sue Got Married,” and maybe this Larry Underwood tune. The question was, would Larry like to come up and cut a demo of the tune, and then sit in on the session? Diamond wanted a second acoustic guitar, and he liked the tune a lot.