by Stephen King
He poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the nightstand and held it to her lips but she thrashed again and almost knocked it from his grasp. He set it back down where it would be in reach if she quieted.
He had never been so bitterly aware of his muteness as the last two days had made him. The Methodist minister, Braceman, had been with her on the twenty-third when Nick came over. He was Bible-reading with her in the living room, but he looked nervous and anxious to get away. Nick could guess why. Her fever had given her a rosy, girlish glow that went jarringly with her bereavement. Perhaps the minister had been anxious to gather up his family and melt away over the fields. News travels fast in a small town, and others had already decided to get out of Shoyo.
Since the time Braceman had left the Baker living room some forty-eight hours ago, everything had turned into a waking nightmare. Mrs. Baker had gotten worse, so much worse that Nick had feared she would die before the sun went down.
Worse, he couldn’t sit with her constantly. He had gone down to the truck stop to get his three prisoners lunch, but Vince Hogan hadn’t been able to eat. He was delirious. Mike Childress and Billy Warner wanted out, but Nick couldn’t bring himself to let them out. It wasn’t fear; he didn’t believe they would waste any time working him over to settle their grievance; they would want to make fast tracks away from Shoyo, like the others. But he had a responsibility. He had made a promise to a man who was now dead. Surely, sooner or later the state patrol would get things in hand and come to take them away.
He found a .45 rolled up in its holster in the bottom drawer of Baker’s desk, and after a few moments of debate he put it on. Looking down and seeing the woodgrip butt of the gun lying against his skinny hip had made him feel ridiculous—but its weight was comforting.
He had opened Vince’s cell on the afternoon of the twenty-third and had put makeshift icepacks on the man’s forehead, chest, and neck. Vince had opened his eyes and looked at Nick with such silent, miserable appeal that Nick wished he could say anything—as he wished it now, two days later, with Mrs. Baker—anything that would give the man a moment’s comfort. Just you’ll be okay or / think the fever's breaking would be enough.
That afternoon he had shuttled back and forth on nearly empty streets, always expecting to find Vince Hogan dead on one end or Jane Baker dead on the other. He looked for Dr. Soames’s car but didn’t see it. That afternoon a few of the shops had still been open, and the Texaco, but he became more and more convinced that the town was emptying out. People were taking paths through the woods, logging roads, maybe even wading up Shoyo Stream, which passed through Smackover and eventually came out in Mount Holly. More would leave after dark.
The sun had just gone down when he arrived at the Baker house to find Jane moving shakily around the kitchen in her bathrobe, brewing tea. She looked at Nick gratefully when he came in, and he saw her fever was gone.
“I want to thank you for watching after me,” she said calmly. “I feel ever so much better. Would you like a cup of tea?” And then she burst into tears.
He went to her, afraid she might faint and fall against the hot stove.
She held his arm to steady herself and laid her head against him, her hair a dark rich flood against the light blue robe.
“Johnny,” she said in the darkening kitchen. “Oh, my poor Johnny.”
If he could speak, Nick thought unhappily. But he could only hold her, guide her across the kitchen to the table.
“The tea—”
He pointed to himself and then made her sit down.
“All right,” she said. “I do feel better. Remarkably so. It’s just that . . . just. . .” She put her hands over her face.
Nick made them hot tea and brought it to the table. They drank for a while without speaking. She held her cup in both hands, like a child. At last she put her cup down and said: “How many in town have this, Nick?”
“I don’t know anymore,” Nick wrote. “It’s pretty bad.”
“Have you seen the doctor?”
“Not since this morning.”
“Am will wear himself out if he’s not careful,” she said. “He’ll be careful, won’t he, Nick? Not to wear himself out?”
Nick nodded and tried a smile.
“What about John’s prisoners? Has the patrol come for them?” “No,” Nick wrote. “Hogan is very sick. I’m doing what I can. The others want me to let them out before Hogan can make them sick.” “Don’t you let them out!” she said with some spirit. “I hope you’re not thinking of it.”
“No,” Nick wrote. “You ought to go back to bed. You need rest.” She smiled at him, and when she moved her head Nick could see the dark smudges under the angles of her jaw—and he wondered uneasily if she was out of the woods yet.
“Yes. I’m going to sleep the clock right around. It seems wrong, somehow, to sleep with John dead ... I can hardly believe he is, you know, I keep stumbling over the idea like something I forgot to put away.” He took her hand and squeezed it. She smiled wanly. “There may be something else to live for, in time. Have you gotten your prisoners their supper, Nick?”
Nick shook his head.
“You ought to. If you drive, why don’t you take John’s car?”
“I can’t drive,” Nick wrote, “but thank you. I’ll just walk down to the truck stop. It isn’t far. & check on you in the morning, if that’s all right.”
“Yes,” she said. “Fine.”
He got up and pointed sternly at the teacup.
“Every drop,” she promised.
He was going out the screen door when he felt her hesitant touch on his arm.
“John—” she said, stopped, and then forced herself to go on. “I hope they . . . took him to the Curtis Mortuary. That’s where John’s folks and mine have always buried out of. Do you think they took him there all right?”
Nick nodded, and the tears brimmed over her cheeks and she began to sob again.
When he left her that night he had gone directly to the truck stop. A CLOSED sign hung crookedly in the window. He had gone around to the house trailer in back, but it was locked and dark. No one answered his knock. Under the circumstances he felt he was justified in a little breaking and entering; there would be enough in Sheriff Baker’s petty cash box to pay any damages.
He hammered in the glass by the restaurant’s lock and let himself in. The place was spooky even with all the lights on; the juke box dark and dead, no one at the bumper-pool table or the electronic hockey game, the booths empty, the stools unoccupied. The hood was over the grille.
Nick went out back and fried some hamburgers on the gas stove and put them in a sack. He added a bottle of milk and half an apple pie that stood under a plastic dome on the counter. Then he went back to the jail, after leaving a note on the counter explaining who had broken in and why.
Vince Hogan was dead. He lay on the floor of his cell amid a clutter of melting ice and wet towels. He had clawed at his neck at the end, as if he had been resisting an invisible strangler. The tips of his fingers were red. Flies were lighting on him and buzzing off. His neck was black and swollen.
“Now will you let us out?” Mike Childress asked. “He’s dead, ya fuckin mutie, are you satisfied? Now he’s got it, too.” He pointed to Billy Warner.
Billy looked terrified. “That’s a lie!” he chanted hysterically. “A lie, a lie, a fuckin lie! That’s a 1—” He began to sneeze suddenly, doubling over with the force of them, expelling a heavy spray of saliva and mucus.
“See?” Mike demanded. “Huh? Ya happy, ya fuckin mutie dimwit? Let me out! You can keep him if you want to, but not me. It’s murder, that’s all it is, cold-blooded murder!”
Nick shook his head, and Mike had a tantrum. He began to throw himself against the bars of his cell, bruising his face, bloodying the knuckles of both hands.
Nick pushed the food through the slots in the bottoms of the cells with the broomhandle. Billy looked at his dully for a moment, then began to eat.
/> Mike threw his glass of milk against the bars. It shattered and milk sprayed everywhere. He slammed his two burgers against the graffiti-covered rear wall of his cell, and one of them stuck grotesquely in a splat of mustard, ketchup, and relish. He jumped up and down on his slice of apple pie, boogying on it. Apple chunks flew every which-way. The white plastic plate splintered.
“I’m on a hunger strike!” he yelled. “Fuckin hunger strike! I won’t eat nothing! You’ll eat my dingle before I eat anything you bring me, you fuckin retard asshole! You’ll—”
Nick turned away and silence immediately descended. He went back out into the office, not knowing what to do, scared. Perhaps he should let them go. If he could drive, he would take them up to Camden himself. But he couldn’t drive. And there was Vince to think about. He couldn’t just let him lie there, drawing flies.
There were two doors opening off the office. One was a coat closet. The other led down a flight of stairs. Nick went down and saw it was a combination cellar and storage room. It was cool down there.
He went back upstairs. Mike was sitting on the floor, morosely picking up squashed apple slices, brushing them off and eating them. He didn’t look up at Nick.
Nick gathered the body up in his arms and tried to lift it. The sick smell coming off the corpse was making his stomach do cartwheels and handstands. Vince was too heavy for him. He looked at the body helplessly for a moment, and became aware that both of the others were now standing at their cell doors, watching with a dreadful fascination. Nick could guess what they were thinking. Vince had been one of them, a friend. He had died like a rat in a trap, with some horrible swelling sickness they didn’t understand. Nick wondered, not for the first time that day, when he would start to sneeze and run a fever and develop those peculiar swellings on his neck.
He laid hold of Vince Hogan’s meaty forearms and dragged him out of the cell. Vince’s head leaned toward him because of the weight on his shoulders, and he seemed to be looking at Nick, wordlessly telling him to be careful, not to joggle him too much.
It took ten minutes to get the big man’s remains down the steep stairs. Panting,. Nick laid him on the concrete under the fluorescents, and then covered him quickly with a frayed army blanket from the cot upstairs.
He tried to sleep then, but sleep only came in the early hours of the morning after June 23 had become the 24th, yesterday. His dreams had always been very vivid, and sometimes he was afraid of them. He rarely had out-and-out nightmares, but more and more often lately they were ominous, giving him the feeling that no one in them was exactly as they seemed, and that the normal world had skewed into a place where babies were sacrificed behind closed blinds and stupendous black machines roared on and on in locked basements.
And, of course, there was the very personal terror—that he would wake up with it himself.
He did sleep a little, and the dream that came was one he had had before recently: the cornfield, the smell of warm growing things, the feel that something—or someone—very good and safe was close. A sense of home. And that began to fade into cold terror as he became aware that something was in the corn, watching him. He thought: Ma, weasel’s got in the henhouse! and awoke to early morning light, sweat standing out on his body.
He put coffee on and went in to check on his two prisoners.
Mike Childress was in tears. Behind him, the hamburger was still stuck on the wall in its drying glue of condiments.
“You satisfied now? I got it too. Ain’t that what you wanted? Listen to me, I sound like a fuckin freight train goin up a hill!”
But Nick’s first concern had been for Billy Warner, who lay comatose on his bunk. His neck was swelled and black, his chest rising in fits and starts.
He hurried back to the office, looked at the telephone, and in a fit of rage and guilt he knocked it off the desk and onto the floor, where it lay meaninglessly at the end of its cord. He turned the hotplate off and ran down the street to the Baker house. He pushed the bell for what seemed an hour before Jane came down, wrapped in her robe. The fever sweat was back on her face. She was not delirious, but her words were slow and slurry and her lips were blistered.
“Nick. Come in. What is it?”
“V. Hogan died last night. Warner’s dying, I think. He’s awful sick. Have you seen Dr.?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t seen anyone.”
She shivered in the light draft, sneezed, and then swayed on her feet. Nick put an arm around her shoulders and led her to a chair. He wrote: “Can you call his office for me?”
“Yes, of course. Bring me the phone, Nick. I seem ... to have had a setback in the night.”
He brought the phone over and she dialed Soames’s number. After she had held the receiver to her ear for more than half a minute, he knew there was going to be no answer.
She tried his home, then the home of his nurse. No answer.
“I’ll try the state patrol,” she said, but put the phone back in the cradle after dialing two numbers. “The long distance is still out of service, I guess. It just goes wah-wah-wah in my ear.” She gave him a pallid smile and then the tears began to flow helplessly. “Poor Nick,” she said. “Poor me. Poor everybody. Could you help me upstairs? I feel so weak, and I can’t catch my breath. I think I’ll be with John soon.” He looked at her, wishing he could speak. “I think I’ll lie down, if you can help me.”
He helped her upstairs, then wrote: “I’ll be back.”
“Thank you, Nick. You’re a good boy . . .” She was already drifting off to sleep.
Nick left the house and stood on the sidewalk, wondering what to do next. If he could drive, he might be able to do something. But . . .
For the next hour and a half of that morning, yesterday morning, Nick knocked on doors and rang bells. There would be someone well, he told himself. He himself felt all right, and surely he could not be the only one. There would be someone, a man, a woman, maybe a teenager with a learner’s permit, and he or she would say: Oh, hey, yes. Lets get them to Camden. We’ll take the station wagon. Or words to that effect.
But his knocking and ringing was answered less than a dozen times. The door would open to the length of a latch-chain, a sick but hopeful face would look out, see Nick, and hope would die. The face would move back and forth in negation, and then the door would shut. If Nick could talk, he would have argued that if they could still walk, they could drive. That if they took his prisoners to Camden, they could go themselves, and there would be a hospital. They would be made well. But he couldn’t speak.
Some asked if he had seen Dr. Soames. One man, in a delirious rage, threw the door of his small ranch-house wide open, staggered out on the porch dressed only in his underpants, and tried to grab Nick. He said he was going to do “what I should have done to you back in Houston.” He seemed to think Nick was someone named Jenner. He lurched back and forth along the porch after Nick like a zombie in a third-rate horror picture. His crotch had swelled terribly; his underpants looked as if someone had stuffed a honeydew melon into them. At last he crashed to the porch and Nick watched him from the lawn below, his heart thumping rapidly. The man shook his fist weakly, then crawled back inside, not bothering to shut the door.
But most of the houses were only silent and cryptic, and at last he could do no more. That dream-sense of ominousness was creeping up on him and it became impossible to dismiss the idea that he was knocking on the doors of tombs, knocking to wake the dead, and that sooner or later the corpses might begin to answer. It didn’t help much to tell himself that most of the houses were already empty, their occupants already fled to Camden or El Dorado or Texarkana.
He went back to the Baker house. Jane Baker was sleeping deeply, her forehead cool. But this time he wasn’t as hopeful.
It was noon. Nick went back to the truck stop, feeling his night’s broken rest now. Baker’s .45 banged his hip. At the truck stop he heated two cans of soup and put them in Thermos jugs. The milk in the fridge still seemed fine, so he too
k a bottle of that, too.
Billy Warner was dead, and when Mike saw Nick, he began to giggle hysterically and point his finger. “Two down and one to go! Two down and one to go! Right? Right?”
Nick carefully pushed the Thermos of soup through the slot with the broomhandle, and then a big glass of milk. Mike began to drink soup directly from the Thermos in small sips. Nick took his own
Thermos and sat down in the hallway. He would take Billy downstairs, but first he would have his lunch. He was hungry. As he drank his soup he looked at Mike thoughtfully.
“You wondering how I am?” Mike asked.
Nick nodded.
“Just the same as when you left this morning. I must have hawked out a pound of snot.” He looked at Nick hopefully. “My mom always said when you hawked snot like that, you was gettin better. Maybe I just got a mild case, huh?”
Nick shrugged. Anything was possible.
“I got the constitution of a brass eagle,” Mike said. “I think it’s nothing. I think I’ll throw it off. Listen, man, let me out. Please. I’m fuckin beggin you now.”
Nick thought about it.
“Hell, you got the gun. I don’t want you for nothing, anyway. I just want to get out of this town. I want to check on my wife first—”
Nick pointed to his left hand, which was bare of rings.
“Yeah, we’re divorced, but she’s still here in town, out on the Ridge Road. I’d like to look in on her. What do you say, man?” Mike was crying. “Give me a chance.”
Nick stood up slowly, went out into the office, and opened the desk drawer. The keys were there. The man’s logic was inexorable; there was no sense in believing that someone was going to come and bail them out of this terrible mess. He got the keys and went back. He held up the one Big John Baker had shown him, with the tag of white tape on it, and tossed them through the bars to Mike Childress.
“Thanks,” Mike babbled. “Oh, thanks. I’m sorry we beat up on you, I swear to God, it was Ray’s idea, me and Vince tried to stop him but he gets drinkin and he gets crazy—” He rattled the key in the lock. Nick stood back, his hand on the gunbutt.