by Stephen King
Something—someone—filled with dark life and hideous good cheer was under there, and it would be more than her life was worth to pull that tablecloth back, but she . . . couldn’t. . . stop her feet.
Her hand reached out, floated over the tablecloth—and snatched it back.
He was grinning, but she couldn’t see his face. A wave of frigid cold blasting up at her from that awful grin. No, she couldn’t see his face, but she could see the gift this terrible apparition had brought for her unborn baby: a twisted coathanger.
She fled, fled from the room, from the dream, coming up, surfacing briefly—
Surfacing briefly in the three o’clock darkness of the living room, her body floating on a foam of dread, the dream already tattering and unraveling, leaving behind it only a sense of doom like the rancid aftertaste of some rotten meal. She thought, in that moment of half-sleeping and half-waking: Him, it’s him, the Walking Dude, the man with no face.
Then she slept again, this time dreamlessly, and when she woke the next morning she didn’t remember the dream at all. But when she thought of the baby in her belly, a feeling of fierce protectiveness swept over her all at once, a feeling that perplexed her and frightened her a little with its depth and strength.
Chapter 23
That same evening, as Larry Underwood slept with Rita Blakemoor and as Frannie Goldsmith slept alone, dreaming her peculiarly ominous dream, Stuart Redman was waiting for Elder. He had been waiting for three days—and this evening Elder did not disappoint him.
At just past noon on the twenty-fourth, Elder and two male nurses had come and taken away the television. The nurses had removed it while Elder stood by, holding his revolver (neatly wrapped in a Baggie) on Stu. But by then Stu hadn’t needed the TV—it was just putting out a lot of confused shit anyway. All he had to do was stand at his barred window and look out at the town on the river below.
Smoke was no longer billowing from the stacks of the textile mill. The gaudy pools of dye runoff in the river had dissipated. Most of the cars, glittering and toylike from this distance, had left the mill’s parking lot and hadn’t come back. By yesterday, the twenty-sixth, there were only a few cars still moving on the turnpike, and those few had to weave between the stalls like skiers in a slalom race. No wreckers had come to remove the stopped vehicles.
The downtown area was spread out below him like a relief map, and it seemed totally deserted. The town clock, which had chimed off the hours of his imprisonment here, had not tolled since nine this morning, when the little tune that preceded the striking had sounded draggy and rundown. There had been a fire at what looked like a roadside cafe or maybe a general store just outside of town. It had burned merry hell all this afternoon, black smoke etched against the blue sky, but no fire engines had come to put it out. If the building hadn’t been set in the middle of an asphalt parking lot, Stu supposed that half the town might have gone up. Tonight the ruins were still smoldering in spite of an afternoon spat of rain.
Stu supposed that Elder’s final orders were to kill him—why not? He would only be one more corpse, and he knew their little secret. They had been unable to find a cure or to discover how his bodily makeup varied from all those who had succumbed. The thought that there would be precious few left he could tell their secret to had probably never even entered their computations. He was a loose thread.
Stu was sure that a hero in a television program or a novel could have thought of a way to escape, even some people in real life, but he wasn’t one of them. In the end he had decided with a certain panicky resignation that the only thing to do would be to wait for Elder and just try to be ready.
Elder was the clearest sign that this installation had been breached by what they sometimes called “Blue” and sometimes the “superflu.” The nurses called him Dr. Elder, but he was no doctor. He was in his mid-fifties, hard-eyed and humorless. None of the doctors before Elder had felt a need to hold a gun on him. Elder scared Stu because there would be no reasoning or pleading with such a man. Elder was waiting for orders. When they came, he would carry them out. He was a spear-carrier, the army version of a Mafia button-man, and it would never occur to him to question his orders in the light of ongoing events.
Three years ago a friend of Stu’s had recommended a book called Watership Down, and although Stu didn’t read much, one weekend was so boring and rainy that he had taken it out of the library, hoping it would be a story about mutiny at sea. The thing turned out to be about rabbits, for Christ’s sake. The stupidest, most cowardly animals on God’s earth . . . except the guy who wrote that book made them seem different. You really cared about them. It was a pretty damn good story, and Stu, who read at a snail’s pace, finished it that same weekend.
The thing he remembered most from that book was a phrase: “going tham,” or just “tham.” He understood it at once, because he had seen plenty of tham animals, and run down a few on the highway. A tharn animal would crouch in the middle of the road, its ears flattened, watching as a car rushed toward it, unable to move from the certain oncoming death. Elder made Stu feel like that. He would look into Elder’s flat blue eyes and feel all the will drain out of him. Elder probably wouldn’t even need the pistol to dispose of him. Elder probably had had courses in karate, savate, and general dirty tricks. What could he possibly do against a man like that? Just thinking about Elder made his will to even try want to drain away. Tharn. It was a good word for a bad state of mind.
The red light went on over the door at just past 10 P.M., and Stu felt light perspiration break on his arms and face. It was this way every time the red light went on, because one of these times Elder would be alone. Because he wouldn’t want witnesses. There would be a furnace somewhere to cremate plague victims. Elder would bundle him into it. Snip. No more loose end.
Elder stepped through the door. Alone.
Stu was sitting on his hospital bed, one hand resting on the back of his chair. At the sight of Elder he felt the familiar sickening drop in his belly. He felt the familiar urge to spill out a flood of loose, pleading words, in spite of his knowledge that such pleas would avail him nothing. There was no mercy in that face.
Now everything seemed very clear to him, very colorful, very slow. He could almost hear his eyes rolling in their bed of lubrication as he followed Elder’s progress into the room. He was a big man, stocky, and his white-suit was stretched too tight over him. The hole at the end of the pistol he held looked tunnel-size.
“How are you feeling?” Elder asked, and even through the tinny speaker Stu could hear the nasal quality of Elder’s voice. Elder was sick.
“Just the same,” Stu said, surprised at the evenness of his voice. “Say, when do I get out of here?”
“Very soon now,” Elder said. He sneezed. “You don’t talk much, do you?”
Stu shrugged.
“I like that in a man,” Elder said. “Your big talkers, they’re your whimperers and whiners and belly-achers. I just got the word on you about twenty minutes ago, Mr. Redman. They’re not such hot orders, but I think you’ll do okay.”
“What orders?”
“Well, I’ve been ordered to—”
Stu’s eyes flicked past Elder’s shoulder, toward the high, riveted sill of the airlock door. “Christ Jesus!” he exclaimed. “That’s a fucking rat, what kind of a place are you running with rats in it?”
Elder turned, and for a moment Stu was almost too surprised by the unexpected success of his ruse to go on. Then he slid off the bed and grasped the back of his chair in both hands as Elder began to pivot toward him again. Elder’s eyes were wide and suddenly alarmed. Stu lifted the chair over his head and stepped forward, swinging it down, getting every ounce of his one-eighty behind it.
“Get back there!” Elder cried. “Don’t—”
The chair crashed down on his right arm. The gun went off, disintegrating the Baggie, and the bullet screamed off the floor. Then the gun fell to the carpet, where it discharged again.
Stu
was afraid he could count on only one more blow with the chair before Elder fully recovered himself. He determined to make it a good one. He brought it around in a high hard arc, a Henry Aaron home run swing. Elder tried to get his broken right arm up and couldn’t. The legs of the chair crashed into the hood of the white-suit. The plastic faceplate splintered into Elder’s eyes and nose. He screamed and fell backward.
He rolled onto all fours and scrambled for the gun lying on the carpet. Stu swung the chair one last time, bringing it down on the back of Elder’s head. Elder collapsed. Panting, Stu reached down and grabbed the gun. He stepped away, pointing it at the prone body, but Elder didn’t move.
Stu was trembling all over, and suddenly the need to get out of there was so strong that he almost bolted blindly through the airlock door and into whatever lay beyond. He had been locked up for over a week, and all he wanted now was to breathe fresh air and then get far, far away from this terrible place.
But it had to be done carefully.
Stu walked to the airlock, stepped in, and pushed a button marked CYCLE. An air-pump went on, ran briefly, and the outer door opened. Beyond it was a small room with a desk. On the desk was a thin stack of medical charts . . . and his clothes. The ones he had been wearing on the airplane from Braintree to Atlanta. The cold finger of dread touched him again. Those things would have gone into the crematorium with him, no doubt. His charts, his clothes. So long, Stuart Redman. Stuart Redman would have become an unperson. In fact—
There was a slight noise behind him and Stu turned around fast. Elder was staggering toward him, crouched over, his hands swinging loosely. A jagged splinter of plastic was lodged in one oozing eye. Elder was smiling.
“Don’t move,” Stu said. He pointed the gun, steadying it with both hands—and still the barrel jittered.
Elder gave no sign that he had heard. He kept coming.
Wincing, Stu pulled the trigger. The pistol bucked in his hands and Elder stopped. The smile had turned into a grimace, as if he had been struck with a sudden gas pain. There was now a small hole in the breast of his white-suit. For a moment he stood, swaying, and then he crashed forward. For a moment Stu could only stare at him, frozen, and then he blundered into the room where his personal effects were piled on the desk.
He tried the door at the far end of the office, and it opened. Beyond the door was a hallway lit by muted fluorescents. Halfway down to the elevator bank, an abandoned Gurney cart stood by what was probably the nurses’ station. He could hear faint groaning. Someone was coughing, a harsh, ratcheting sound that seemed to have no end.
He went back into the room, gathered his clothes up, and put them under one arm. Then he went out, closed the door behind him, and started down the hall. His hand was sweating against the grip of Elder’s gun. When he reached the Gurney he looked behind him, unnerved by the silence and the emptiness. The cougher had stopped. Stu kept expecting to see Elder creeping or crawling after him, intent on carrying out his final directive. He found himself longing for the closed and known dimensions of his room.
The groaning began again, louder this time. At the elevators another corridor ran at right angles to this one, and leaning against the wall was a man Stu recognized as one of his nurses. His face was swelled and blackened, his chest rising and falling in quick spurts. As Stu looked at him, he began to groan again. Behind him, curled in a fetal position, was a dead man. Further down the hall there were another three bodies, one of them female. The male nurse—Vic, Stu remembered, his name is Vic—began to cough again.
“Jesus,” Vic said. “Jesus, what are you doing out? You’re not supposed to be out.”
“Elder came to take care of me and I took care of him instead,” Stu said. “I was lucky he was sick.”
“Sweet bleeding Jesus, you better believe you was lucky,” Vic said, and another coughing fit, this one weaker, tore loose from his chest. “That hurts, man, you wouldn’t believe how that hurts. What a fuckup this got to be. Bleeding Christ ”
“Listen, can I do anything for you?” Stu asked awkwardly.
“If you’re serious, you can put that gun in my ear and pull the trigger. I’m ripping myself to pieces inside.” He began to cough again, and then to groan helplessly.
But Stu couldn’t do that, and as Vic’s hollow groans continued, Stu’s nerve broke. He ran for the elevators, away from that blackish face like the moon in partial eclipse, half-expecting Vic to call after him in that strident and helplessly righteous voice that the sick always seem to use when they need something from the well. But Vic only went on groaning and that was somehow worse.
The elevator door had shut and the car was already moving downward when it occurred to Stu that it might be booby-trapped. That would be just their speed. Poison gas, maybe, or a cutout circuit that would disengage the cables and send the elevator careering down the shaft to crash at the bottom. He stepped into the middle of the car and looked around nervously for hidden vents or loopholes. Claustrophobia caressed him with a rubber hand and suddenly the elevator seemed no more than telephone-booth-size, then coffin-size. Premature burial, anyone?
He reached out a finger to push the STOP button, and then wondered what good that would do if he was between floors. Before he could answer the question, the elevator slid to a smooth, normal stop.
What if there are men with guns out there?
But the only sentinel when the door slid back was a dead woman in a nurse’s uniform. She was curled up in a fetal position by a door marked LADIES.
Stu stared at her so long that the door began to slide shut again. He put his arm out and the door bounced obediently back. He stepped out. The hallway led dow'n to a T-junction and he walked toward it, taking a wide berth of the dead nurse.
There was a noise behind him and he whirled, bringing the gun up, but it was only the elevator door sliding shut for the second time. He looked at it for a moment, swallowed hard, then walked on. The rubber hand was back, playing tunes on the base of his spine, telling him to hell with this walk-don’t-run bit, let’s get out quick before someone . . . something . . . can get us. The echoes of his footfalls in this semidark corridor of the administration wing was too much like macabre company—Come to play, Stuart? Very good. Doors with frosted glass panels marched past him, each with its own tale to tell: DR. SLOANE. RECORDS AND TRANSCRIPTS. MR. BALLINGER. MICROFILM. COPYFILE. MRS. WIGGS. Perhaps of the cabbage patch, Stu thought.
There was a drinking fountain at the T-junction, but the warm, no chlorinated taste of the water made his stomach turn. There was no exit to his left; a sign on the tile wall with an orange arrow beneath read LIBRARY WING. The corridor seemed to stretch away for miles down that way. Some fifty yards down was the body of a man in a white-suit, like some strange animal cast up on a beach.
His control was getting bad. This place was much, much bigger than he had first assumed. Not that he’d had a right to assume much of anything from what he’d seen when he was admitted—which had been two halls, one elevator, and one room. Now he guessed it to be the size of a largish metropolitan hospital. He remembered taking Norma, his wife, to a big hospital in Houston when they diagnosed the cancer. Everyplace you went in there they had little maps on the walls with little arrows pointing at a dot. The words written on each arrow said: YOU ARE HERE. They put those up so people wouldn’t get lost. Like he was now. Lost. He could stumble around for hours, his footfalls echoing and rebounding, coming across corpses strewn here and there like prizes in a ghastly treasure hunt.
“Don’t go tham now, you’re almost home free,” he said, and his words echoed back, flat and strange. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud, and that made it worse.
He turned to the right, setting his back to the library wing, walked past more offices, came to another corridor, and turned down that. He began to look behind himself frequently, assuring himself that no one—Elder, maybe—was following him, but unable to believe it. The hallway ended in a closed door that said RADIOLOGY. A hand-lettered sign h
ung on the knob: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE RANDALL.
Stu went back and peered around the corner and back where he had come from. The dead body in the white-suit was tiny with distance now, hardly more than a speck, but seeing it there so changeless and eternal made him want to run away as fast as he could.
He turned right, setting his back to it again. Twenty yards further up, the corridor branched into another T-junction. Stu turned right and went past more offices. The corridor ended at the microbiology lab. In one of the lab karels a young man clad in jockey shorts lay sprawled over his desk. He was comatose, and bleeding from the nose and mouth. His breath rattled in and out with a sound like October wind in dead cornhusks.
And then Stu did begin to run, turning from one corridor to another, becoming more and more convinced that there was no way out, at least not from this level. The echo of his footfalls chased him, as if either Elder or Vic had lived just long enough to put a squad of MPs on his trail. Then another fancy crowded that out, one he somehow associated with the queer dreams he had been having the last few nights. The idea grew so strong that he became afraid to turn around, afraid that if he did he would see a white-suited figure striding after him, a white-suited figure with no face but only blackness behind the Plexiglas plate. Some dreadful apparition, a hit-man from beyond sane time and space.
Panting, Stu rounded a comer, sprinted ten feet before he realized the corridor was a dead end, and crashed into a door with a sign over it. The sign read EXIT.
He pushed at the bar, convinced it would be locked, but the door opened easily. He went down four steps to another door. To the left of this landing, more stairs went down into thick darkness. The top half of the second door was clear glass reinforced with crisscrossed safety wire. Beyond it was only the night, the beautiful mellow summer night, and all the freedom a man ever dreamed of.
Stu was still staring out, transfixed, when the hand slipped out of the darkness the stairs descended into and grasped his ankle. A gasp tore at Stu’s throat like a thorn. He looked around, his belly a freezing floe of ice, and beheld a bloody, grinning face upturned in the darkness.