by Stephen King
The cell door opened and Mike stepped out. “I meant it,” he said. “All I want to do is get out of this town.” He sidled past Nick, a grin twitching at his lips. Then he bolted through the door between the small cell-block and the office. Nick followed just in time to see the office door closing behind him.
Nick went outside. Mike was standing on the curb, his hand on a parking meter, looking at the empty street.
“My God,” he whispered, and turned his stunned face to look at Nick. “All this? All this?”
Nick nodded, his hand still on the gunbutt.
Mike started to say something and it turned into a coughing spasm. He covered his mouth, then wiped his lips.
“I’m getting to Christ out of here,” he said. “You’re wise, you’ll do the same thing, mutie. This is like the black death, or somethin.”
Nick shrugged, and Mike started down the sidewalk. He moved faster and faster until he was nearly running. Nick watched him until he was out of sight, and then went back inside. He never saw Mike again. His heart felt lighter, and he was suddenly sure that he had done the right thing. He lay down on the cot and went to sleep almost at once.
He slept all afternoon on the blanketless couch and awoke sweaty but feeling a little better. Thunderstorms were beating the hills, but none had come to Shoyo that night.
At dusk he walked down Main Street to Paulie’s Radio & TV and committed another of his apologetic breakins. He left a note by the cash register and lugged a Sony portable back to the jail. He turned it on and flipped through the channels. The CBS affiliate was broadcasting a sign which read MICROWAVE RELAY DIFFICULTY PLEASE STAY TUNED. The ABC station was showing “I Love Lucy,” and the NBC feed was a rerun episode in a current series about a perky young girl trying to be a mechanic on the stock-car circuit. The Texarkana station, an independent specializing mostly in old movies, game shows, and the PTL Club, was off the air.
Nick snapped it off, went down to the truck-stop, and fixed enough soup and sandwiches for two. He thought there was something eerie about the way all the streetlights still came on, stretching out both ways along Main Street in spotlit pools of white light. He put the food in a hamper, and on the way to Jane Baker’s house three or four dogs, obviously unfed and ravenous, advanced on him in a pack, drawn by the smell from the hamper. Nick drew the .45 but couldn’t summon up the heart to use it until one of the dogs was getting ready to bite him. Then he pulled the trigger and the bullet whined off the cement five feet in front of him, leaving a silvery streak of lead. The sound of the report did not come to him, but he felt the dull thud of vibration. The dogs broke and ran.
Jane was asleep, her forehead and cheeks hot, her breathing slow and labored. She looked dreadfully wasted to Nick. He got a cold washcloth and wiped her face. He left her share of food on the night table, and then went down into the living room and turned on the Bakers’ TV, a big console color job.
CBS didn’t come on all night. NBC kept to a regular broadcast schedule, but the picture on the ABC affiliate kept going hazy, sometimes fading out to snow and then snapping back suddenly. The ABC channel showed only old syndication programs, as if its line to the network had been severed. It didn’t matter. What Nick was waiting for was the news.
When it came on, he was dumbfounded. The “superflu epidemic,” as it was now being called, was the lead story, but the newscasters on both stations said it was being brought under control. A flu vaccine had been developed at the Atlanta Center for Disease Control, and you could get the shot from your doctor by early the following week. Outbreaks were reportedly serious in New York, San Francisco, L.A., and London, but all were being contained. In some areas, the newscaster went on, public gatherings had been canceled temporarily.
In Shoyo, Nick thought, the entire town had been canceled. Who was kidding who?
The newscaster concluded by saying that travel to most of the large city areas was still restricted, but the restrictions would be lifted as soon as the vaccine was in general release. He then went on to a plane crash in Michigan and some congressional reactions to the Supreme Court’s gay-rights decision.
Nick turned off the TV and went out onto the Bakers’ porch. There was a glider and he sat down in it. The back-and-forth motion was soothing, and he couldn’t hear the rusty squeak that John Baker had kept forgetting to oil. He watched fireflies as they hemmed irregular seams in the dark. Lightning flashed dully inside the clouds on the horizon, making them look as if they held fireflies of their own, monster fireflies the size of dinosaurs. The night was sticky and close.
Because television was a completely visual medium for Nick, he had noticed something about the news broadcast that others might have missed. There had been no film-clips, none at all. There had been no baseball scores, maybe because no ball-games had been played. A vague weather report and no weather map showing the highs and lows—it was as if the U. S. Bureau of Meteorology had closed up shop. For all Nick knew to the contrary, they had.
Both newscasters had seemed nervous and upset. One of them had a cold; he had coughed once on mike and had excused himself. Both newscasters had kept cutting their eyes to the left and right of the camera they were facing ... as if someone was in the studio with them, someone who was there to make sure they got it right.
That was the night of June 24, and he slept raggedly on the Bakers’ front porch, and his dreams were very bad. And now, on the afternoon of the following day, he was officiating at the death of Jane Baker, this fine woman . . . and he couldn’t say a word to comfort her.
Nick put his forehead against the glass of the window that looked out on the deserted, sunstruck town, and cried his tears of fear and sorrow. He was afraid to look behind him, because her harsh struggle to breathe had ended.
Now, except for the beat of his own heart, not heard but felt in his temples, this bedroom was as silent as the rest of Shoyo, Arkansas.
Chapter 20
In Duluth a man in khaki shorts and sandals walked up and down Piedmont Avenue with a large smear of ash on his forehead and a hand-lettered sandwich board hanging over his scrawny shoulders.
The front read:
THE TIME OF THE DISAPPEARANCE IS HERE
CHRIST THE LORD RETURNETH SOON
PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD!
The back read:
BEHOLD THE HEARTS OF THE SINNERS WERE BROKEN THE GREAT SHALL BE ABASED AND THE ABASED MADE
GREAT
THE EVIL DAYS ARE AT HAND
WOE TO THEE O ZION
Four young men in motorcycle jackets, all of them with bad coughs and runny noses, set upon the man in the khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board. Then they fled, one of them calling back hysterically over his shoulder: “Teach you to scare people! Teach you to scare people, you half-baked freak!”
The highest-rated morning program in Springfield, Missouri, was KLFT’s morning phone-in show, “Speak Your Piece,” with Ray Flowers. He had six phone lines into his studio booth, and on the morning of June 26, he was the only KLFT employee to show up for work. He was aware of what was going on in the world outside and it scared him. In the last week or so, it seemed to Ray that everyone he knew had come down sick. There were no troops in Springfield, but he had heard that the National Guard had been called into K.C. and St. Louis to “stop the spread of panic” and “prevent looting.” Ray Flowers himself felt fine. He looked thoughtfully at his equipment— phones, time-delay device, racks of commercials on cassettes (“If your toilet overflows And you don't know just what goes Call for the man with the big steel hose/Call your Kleen-Owt Man!”), and of course, the mike.
He lit a cigarette, went to the studio door and locked it. Went into his booth and locked that. He turned off the canned music that had been playing from a tape reel, turned on his own theme music, and then settled in at the microphone.
“Hi, y’all,” he said, “this is Ray Flowers on ‘Speak Your Piece,’ and this morning I guess there’s only one thing to call about
, isn’t there? You can call it tube-neck or superflu or Captain Trips, but it all means the same thing. I’ve heard some horror stories about the army clamping down on everything, and if you want to talk about that, I’m ready to listen. It’s still a free country, right? And since I’m here by myself this morning, we’re going to do things just a little bit differently. I’ve got the time-delay turned off, and I think we can dispense with the commercials. If the Springfield you’re seeing is anything like the one I’m seeing from the KLFT windows, no one feels much like shopping, anyway.
“So if you’re so’s to be up and around, as my mother used to say, let’s get going. Our toll-free numbers are 656-8600 and 656-8601. If you get a busy, just be patient. Remember, I’m doing it all myself.”
There was an army unit in Carthage, fifty miles from Springfield, and a twenty-man patrol was dispatched to take care of Ray Flowers. Two men refused the order. They were shot on the spot.
In the hour it took them to get to Springfield, Ray Flowers took calls from: a doctor who said people were dying like flies and who thought the government was lying through its teeth about a vaccine; a hospital nurse who confirmed that bodies were being removed from Kansas City hospitals by the truckload; a delirious woman who claimed it was flying saucers from outer space; a farmer who said that an army squad with two payloaders had just finished digging a hell of a long ditch in a field near Route 71 south of Kansas City; half a dozen others with their own stories to tell.
Then there was a crashing sound on the outer studio door. “Open up!” a muffled voice cried. “Open up in the name of the United States!”
Ray looked at his watch. Quarter of twelve.
“Well,” he said, “it looks like the Marines have landed. But we’ll just keep taking calls, shall w—”
There was a rattle of automatic rifle fire, and the knob of the studio door fell to the rug. Blue smoke drifted out of the ragged hole. The door was shouldered inward and half a dozen soldiers, wearing respirators and full battle-dress, burst in.
“Several soldiers have just broken into the outer office,” Ray said. “They’re fully armed . . . they look like they’re ready to start a mop-up operation in France thirty-six years ago. Except for the respirators on their faces . . .”
“Shut it down!” a heavy-set man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves yelled. He loomed outside the broadcast booth’s glass walls and gestured with his rifle.
“I think not!” Ray called back. He felt very cold, and when he fumbled his cigarette out of his ashtray he saw that his fingers were trembling. “This station is licensed by the FCC and I’m—”
“I’m revokin ya fuckin license! Now shut down!”
“I think not,” Ray said again, and turned back to his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have been ordered to shut down and I have refused the order, quite properly, I think. These men are acting like Nazis, not American soldiers. I am not—”
“Last chance!” The sergeant brought his gun up.
“Sergeant,” one of the soldiers by the door said. “I don’t think you can just—”
“If that man says anything else, waste him,” the sergeant said.
“I think they’re going to shoot me,” Ray Flowers said, and the next moment the glass of his broadcast booth blew inward and he fell over his control panel. From somewhere there came a terrific feedback whine that spiraled up and up. The sergeant fired his entire clip into the control panel and the feedback cut off. The lights on the switchboard continued to blink.
“Okay,” the sergeant said, turning around. “I want to get back to Carthage by one o’clock and I don’t—”
Three of his men fired simultaneously, one of them with a recoil-less rifle that fired seventy gas-tipped slugs per second. The sergeant did a jigging, shuffling death-dance and then fell backward through the shattered remains of the broadcast booth’s glass wall. One leg spasmed and his combat boot kicked shards of glass from the frame.
A pfc, pimples standing out in stark relief on his whey-colored face, burst into tears. The others only stood in stunned disbelief. The smell of cordite was heavy and sickening in the air.
“We scragged him!” the pfc cried hysterically. “Holy God, we done scragged Sergeant Buchan!”
No one replied. Their faces were still dazed and uncomprehending, although later they would only wish they had done it sooner. All of this was some deadly game, but it wasn’t their game.
The phone, which Ray Flowers had put in the amplifier cradle just before he died, gave out a series of squawks.
“Ray? You there, Ray?” The voice was tired, nasal. “I listen to your program all the time, me and my husband both, and we just wanted to say keep up the good work and don’t let them bully you. Okay, Ray? Ray? . . . Ray? . . .”
In Boulder, Colorado, a rumor that the U. S. Meteorological Air Testing Center was really a biological warfare installation began to spread. The rumor was repeated on the air by a semidelirious Denver FM disc jockey. By 11 P.M. on the night of June 26, a vast, lemminglike exodus from Boulder had begun. A company of soldiers was sent out from Denver-Arvada to stop them, but it was like sending a man with a whisk-broom to clean out the Augean stables. Better than eleven thousand civilians—sick, scared, and with no other thought but to put as many miles between themselves and the Air Testing Center as possible—rolled over them. Thousands of other Boulderites fled to other points of the compass.
At quarter past eleven a shattering explosion lit the night at the Air Testing Center’s location on Broadway. A young radical named Desmond Ramage had planted better than sixteen pounds of plastique, originally earmarked for various midwestem courthouses and state legislatures, in the ATC lobby. The explosive was great; the timer was cruddy. Ramage was vaporized along with all sorts of harmless weather equipment and particle-for-particle pollution-measuring gadgets.
Meanwhile, the exodus from Boulder went on.
Chapter 21
Larry Underwood sat on a bench in Central Park on the morning of June 27, looking into the menagerie. Behind him, Fifth Avenue was crazily jammed with cars, all of them silent now, their owners dead or fled. Further down Fifth, many of the posh shops were smoking rubble.
From where Larry sat he could see a lion, an antelope, a zebra, and some sort of monkey. All but the monkey were dead. They had not died of the flu, Larry judged; they had gotten no food or water for God knew how long, and that had killed them. All but the monkey, and in the three hours that Larry had been sitting here, the monkey had only moved four or five times. The monkey had been smart enough to outwit starvation or death by thirst—so far—but it surely had a good case of superflu. That was one monkey who was hurtin for certain. It was a hard old world.
To his right, the clock with all the animals chimed the hour of eleven. The clockwork figures which had once delighted all children now played to an empty house. The bear tooted his horn, a clockwork monkey who would never get sick (but who might eventually run down) played a tambourine, the elephant beat his drum with his trunk. Heavy tunes, baby, heavy fucking tunes. End of the World Suite Arranged for Clockwork Figures.
After a bit the clock silenced and he could hear the hoarse shouting again, now mercifully faint with distance. The monster-shouter was now off to Larry’s left, perhaps in the Heckscher Playground. Maybe he would fall into the wading pool there and drown.
“Monsters coming!” the faint, hoarse voice cried. The overcast had broken this morning, and the day was bright and hot. A bee cruised past Larry’s nose, circled one of the nearby flowerbeds, and made a three-point landing on a peony. From the menagerie came
the soothing, soporific drone of the flies as they landed on the dead animals.
“Monsters coming now!” the monster-shouter called. The monster-shouter was a tall man in his middle sixties, Larry judged. He had first heard the monster-shouter the night before, which he had spent in the Sherry-Netherland. With night lying over the unnaturally quiet city, the faint, howling voice had seemed
sonorous and dark, the voice of a lunatic Jeremiah floating through the streets of Manhattan, echoing, rebounding, distorting. Larry, lying sleepless in a queen-sized double with every light in the suite blazing, had become irrationally convinced that the monster-shouter was coming for him, seeking him out, the way the creatures of his frequent bad dreams sometimes did. For a long time it had seemed that the voice was drawing ever closer—Monsters coming! Monsters on the way! They’re in the suburbs!—and Larry became convinced that the suite’s door, which he had triple-locked, would burst inward and that the monster-shouter would be there . . . not a human being at all but a gigantic troll-thing with the head of a dog and saucer-sized fly eyes and champing teeth.
But this morning Larry had seen him in the park and it was only a crazy old man wearing corduroy pants and zoris and horn-rimmed glasses with one bow taped. Larry had tried to speak to him and the monster-shouter had run in terror, crying back over his shoulder that the monsters would be in the streets at any moment. He had tripped over an ankle-high wire fence and went sprawling on one of the bike-paths, his glasses flying off but not shattering. Larry had gone to him, but before he could get there, the monster-shouter had scooped up his glasses and was gone toward the mall, crying his endless warning. So Larry’s opinion of him had swung from extreme terror to utter boredom and mild annoyance in the space of twelve hours.
There were other people in the park, and Larry had spoken to a few. They were all pretty much the same, and Larry supposed that he himself wasn’t much different; they were dazed, their speech disjointed, they seemed helpless to stop reaching for your sleeve with their hands as they talked. They had stories to tell. All the stories were the same. Their friends and relatives were dead or dying. There had been shooting in the streets, there had been the big fire on Fifth Avenue, was it true that Tiffany’s was gone, could that be true? Who was going to clean up? Who was going to collect the garbage? Should they get out of New York? They had heard that troops were guarding all the points of egress. One woman was terrified that the rats were going to rise up out of the subways and inherit the earth, reminding Larry uneasily of his own thoughts on the day he had first returned to New York. A young man munching Fritos from a gigantic bag told Larry conversationally that he was going to fulfill a lifetime ambition. He was going to Yankee Stadium, run around the outfield naked, and then masturbate on home plate. “Chance of a lifetime, man,” he told Larry, winked with both eyes, and then wandered off, eating Fritos.