by Stephen King
“Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful,” it whispered in a cracked and dying voice. “It’s soooo dark—”
Stu screamed and tried to pull free. The grinning thing from the darkness held on, talking and grinning and chuckling. Blood or bile was trickling from the corners of its mouth. Stu kicked at the hand holding his ankle, then stomped it. The face hanging in the darkness of the stairwell disappeared. There was a series of thudding crashes . . . and then the screams began. Of pain or of rage, Stu could not tell. He didn’t care. He battered against the outside door with his shoulder. It banged open and he tottered out, pinwheeling his arms to keep his balance. He lost it anyway and fell down on the cement path.
He sat up slowly, almost warily. Behind him, the screams had stopped. A cool evening breeze touched his face, dried the sweat on his brow. He saw with something very like wonder that there was grass, and flowerbeds. Night had never smelled as fragrantly sweet as this. A crescent moon rode the sky. Stu turned his face up to it thankfully, and then walked across the lawn toward the road which led to the town of Stovington below. The grass was dressed with dewfall. He could hear wind whispering in the pines.
“I’m alive,” Stu Redman said to the night. He began to cry. “I’m alive, thank God I’m alive, thank You, God, thank You, God, thank You—”
Tottering a little, he began to walk down the road.
Chapter 24
Dust blew straight across the Texas scrubland, and at twilight it created a translucent curtain that made the town of Arnette seem like a ghost-image. Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco sign had blown down and lay in the middle of the road. Someone had left the gas on in Norm Bruett’s house and the day before a spark from the air conditioner had blown the whole place sky-high, rattling lumber and shingles and Fisher-Price toys all over Laurel Street. On Main Street, dogs and soldiers lay dead together in the gutter. In Randy’s Sooperette a man in pj’s lay draped over the meat counter, his arms hanging down. One of the dogs now lying in the gutter had been at this man’s face before losing its appetite. Cats did not catch the flu and dozens of them wove in and out of the twilit stillness like smoky shades. From several houses the sound of television snow ran on and on. A random shutter banged back and forth. A red wagon, old and faded and rusty, the words SPEEDAWAY EXPRESS barely legible on its sides, stood in the middle of Durgin Street in front of the Indian Head Tavern. There were a number of returnable beer and soda bottles in the wagon. On Logan Lane, in Arnette’s best neighborhood, wind chimes played on the porch of Tony Leominster’s house. Tony’s Scout stood in the driveway, its windows open. A family of squirrels had nested in the back seat. The sun deserted Arnette and the town grew dark under the wing of the night. The town was, except for the chirr and whisper of small animals and the tinkle of Tony Leominster’s wind chimes, silent. And silent. And silent.
Chapter 25
Someone had left the door open between Maximum Security and the cellblock beyond it; the steel-walled length of corridor acted as a natural amplifier, blowing up the steady, monotonous hollering that had been going on all morning to monster size, making it echo and re-echo until Lloyd Henreid thought that, between the cries and the very natural fear that he felt, he would go utterly and completely bugshit.
“Mother ” the hoarse, echoing cry came. “Mootherr!”
Lloyd was sitting crosslegged on the floor of his cell. Both of his hands were slimed with blood. The light blue cotton shirt of his prison uniform was smeared with blood because he kept wiping his hands dry on it so he could get a better purchase. It was ten o’clock in the morning, June 29. Around seven this morning he had noticed that the front right leg of his bunk was loose, and since then he had been trying to unthread the bolts that held it to the floor and to the underside of the bedframe. He was trying to do this with only his fingers for tools, and he had actually gotten five of the six bolts. As a result his fingers now looked like a spongy mess of raw hamburger. The sixth bolt was the one that had turned out to be the bitch-kitty, but he was beginning to think he might actually get it. Beyond that, he hadn’t allowed himself to think. The only way to keep back brute panic was not to think.
“Mootherrr—”
He leaped to his feet, drops of blood from his wounded, throbbing fingers splattering on the floor, and shoved his face out into the corridor as far as he could, eyes bulging furiously, hands gripping the bars.
“Shut up, cock-knocker!” he screamed. “Shut up, ya drivin me fuckin batshit!”
There was a long pause. Lloyd savored the silence as he had once savored a piping hot Quarter Pounder With Cheese from McD’s. Silence is golden, he had always thought that was a stupid saying, but it sure had its points.
"MOOOOTHERRRR—” The voice came drifting up the steel throat of the holding cells again, as mournful as a foghorn.
“Jesus,” Lloyd muttered. “Holy Jesus. SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP, YA FUCKIN DIMWIT!”
“MOOOOOOOTHERRRRRRRRR—”
Lloyd turned back to the leg of his bunk and attacked it savagely, wishing again that there was something in the cell to pry with, trying to ignore the throbbing in his fingers and the panic in his mind. He tried to remember exactly when he had seen his lawyer last—things like that grew hazy very soon in Lloyd’s mind, which retained a chronology of past events about as well as a sieve retains water. Three days ago. Yes. The day after that prick Mathers had socked him in the balls. Two guards had taken him down to the conference room again and Shockley was still on the door and Shockley had greeted him Why, here's the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pus-bag, got anything smart to say? And then Shockley had opened his mouth and sneezed right into Lloyd’s face, spraying him with thick spit. There’s some cold germs for you, pusbag, everybody else has got one from the warden on down, and I believe in share the wealth. In America even scummy douchebags like you should be able to catch a cold. Then they had taken him in, and the lawyer had given him some pretty good news. The judge who was supposed to hear Lloyd’s case was flat on his back with the flu. Two other judges were also ill, so the remaining benchwarmers were swamped. Maybe they could get a postponement. Keep your fingers crossed, the lawyer had said. Lloyd hadn’t seen him since then and now, thinking back on it, he remembered that the lawyer had had a runny nose himself and—
“Owwwooo Jesus!”
He slipped the fingers of his right hand into his mouth and tasted warm blood. But that frigging bolt had given a little bit, and that meant he was going to get it for sure. Even the mother-shouter down there at the end of the hall could no longer bother him ... at least not so badly. He was going to get it. After that he would just have to wait and see what happened. He sat with his fingers in his mouth, giving them a rest. When this was done, he’d rip his shirt into strips and bandage them.
“Mother?”
“I know what you can do with your mother,” Lloyd muttered.
That night, after he had talked to his lawyer for the last time, they had begun taking sick prisoners out, carrying them out, not to put too fine a point on it, because they weren’t taking anyone that wasn’t far gone. The man in the cell on Lloyd’s right, Trask, had pointed out that most of the guards sounded pretty snotty themselves. Maybe we can get something outta this, Trask said. What? Lloyd had asked. I dunno, Trask said. He was a skinny man with a long bloodhound face who was in Maximum Security while awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Postponements, he said. I dunno.
Trask had six joints under the thin mattress of his bunk, and he gave four of them to one of the screws who still seemed okay to tell him what was going on outside. The guard said people were leaving Phoenix, bound for anyplace. There was a lot of sickness, and people were croaking faster than a horse could trot. The government said a vaccine was going to be available soon, but most people seemed to think that was crap. A lot of the radio stations from California were broadcasting really terrible things about martial law and army blockades and rumors of people dying by the ten
s of thousands. The guard said he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the longhaired com-symp pervos had done it by putting something into the water.
The guard said he was feeling fine himself, but he was going to get the Christ out just as soon as his shift was over. He had heard the army was going to roadblock US 17 and I-10 and US 80 by tomorrow morning, and he was going to load up his wife and kid and all the food he could get his hands on and stay up in the mountains until it all blew over. He had a cabin up there, the guard said, and if anyone tried to get within thirty yards of it, he would put a bullet in his head.
The next morning Trask had a runny nose and said he felt feverish. He had been nearly gibbering with panic, Lloyd remembered as he sucked his fingers. Trask had yelled at every guard that passed to get him the fuck out before he got really sick or something. The guards never even looked at him, or at any of the other prisoners, who were now as restless as underfed lions in zoo cages. That was when Lloyd started to feel scared. Usually there were as many as twenty different screws on the floor at any given time. So how come he had only seen four or five different faces on the other side of the bars?
That day, the twenty-seventh, Lloyd had begun eating only half of the meals that were thrust through the bars at him, and saving the other half—precious little—under his bunk mattress.
Yesterday Trask had gone into sudden convulsions. His face had turned as black as the ace of spades and he had died. Lloyd had looked longingly at Trask’s half-eaten lunch, but he had no way to reach it. Yesterday afternoon there had still been a few guards on the floor, but they weren’t carrying anyone down to the infirmary, no matter how sick. Maybe they were dying down in the infirmary, too, and the warden decided to stop wasting the effort. No one came to remove Trask’s body.
Lloyd napped late yesterday afternoon. When he woke, the Maximum Security corridors were empty. No supper had been served. Now the place really did sound like the lion house at the zoo. Lloyd wasn’t imaginative enough to wonder how much more savage it would have sounded if Maximum Security had been filled to its capacity. He had no idea how many were still alive and lively enough to yell for their supper, but the echoes made it sound like more. All Lloyd knew for sure was that Trask was gathering flies on his right, and the cell on his left was empty. The former occupant, a young, jive-talking black guy who had tried to mug an old lady and had killed her instead, had been taken to the infirmary days back. Across the way he could see two empty cells and the dangling feet of a man who was in for killing his wife and his brother-in-law during a penny Pokeno game. The Pokeno Killer, as he had been called, had apparently opted out with his belt, or, if they had taken that, his own pair of pants.
Later that night, after the lights had come on automatically, Lloyd had eaten some of the beans he had saved from two days ago. They tasted horrible but he ate them anyway. He washed them down with water from the toilet bowl and then crawled up on his bunk and clasped his knees against his chest, cursing Poke for getting him into such a mess. It was all Poke’s fault. On his own, Lloyd never would have been ambitious enough to get into more than smalltime trouble.
Little by little, the roaring for food had quieted down, and Lloyd suspected he wasn’t the only one who had been squirreling away some insurance. But he didn’t have much. If he had really believed this was going to happen, he would have put away more. There was something in the back of his mind that he didn’t want to see. It was as if there was a set of flapping drapes in the back of his mind, with something behind them. You could only see the bony, skeletal feet below the hem of the drapes. That’s all you wanted to see. Because the feet belonged to a nodding, emaciated corpse, and his name was STARVATION.
“Oh no,” Lloyd said. “Someone’s gonna come. Sure they are. Just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket.”
But he kept remembering the rabbit. He couldn’t help it. He had won the rabbit and a cage to keep him in at a school raffle. His daddy didn’t want him to keep it, but Lloyd had somehow persuaded him that he would take care of it and feed it out of his own allowance. He loved that rabbit, and he did take care of it. But the trouble was, things slipped his mind after a while. It had always been that way. And one day while he was swinging idly in the tire that hung from the sickly maple behind their scraggy little house in Marathon, Pennsylvania, he had suddenly sat bolt upright, thinking of that rabbit. He hadn’t thought of his rabbit in . . . well, in better than two weeks. It had just completely slipped his mind.
He ran to the little shed tacked onto the barn, and it had been summer just like it was now, and when he stepped into that shed, the bland smell of the rabbit had struck him in the face. The fur he’d liked so much to stroke was matted and dirty. White maggots crawled busily in the sockets that had once held his rabbit’s pretty pink eyes. The rabbit’s paws were ragged and bloody. He tried to tell himself that the paws were bloody because it had tried to scratch its way out of the cage, and that was undoubtedly how it had happened, but some sick, dark part of his mind spoke up in a whisper and said that maybe the rabbit, in the final extremity of its hunger, had tried to eat itself.
Lloyd had taken the rabbit away, dug a deep hole, and buried it, still in its cage. His father had never asked him about the rabbit, might even have forgotten that his boy had a rabbit—Lloyd was not terribly bright, but he was a mental giant when stacked up against his daddy—but Lloyd had never forgotten. Always plagued by vivid dreams, the death of the rabbit had occasioned a series of horrible nightmares. And now the vision of the rabbit returned as he sat on his bunk with his knees drawn up to his chest, telling himself that someone would come, someone would surely come and let him go free. He didn’t have this Captain Trips flu; he was just hungry. Like his rabbit had been hungry. Just like that.
Sometime after midnight he had fallen asleep, and this morning he had begun to work on the leg of his bunk. And now, looking at his bloody fingers, he thought with fresh horror about the paws of that long-ago rabbit, to whom he had meant no harm.
By one o’clock on the afternoon of June 29, he had the cotleg free. At the end the bolt had given with stupid ease and the leg had clanged to the floor of his cell and he had just looked at it, wondering what in God’s name he had wanted it for in the first place. It was about three feet long.
He took it to the front of the cell and began to hammer furiously against the blued-steel bars. “Hey!” he yelled, as the clanging bar gave off its deep, gonglike notes. “Hey, I want out! I want to get the fuck out of here, understand? Hey, goddammit, hey!”
He stopped and listened as the echoes faded. For a moment there was total silence and then from the holding cellblock came the rapturous, hoarse answer: “Mother! Down here, Mother! I’m down here!”
“Jeeesus/” Lloyd cried, and threw the cotleg into the comer. He had struggled for hours, practically destroyed his fingers, just so he could wake that asshole up.
He sat on his bunk, lifted the mattress, and took out a piece of rough bread. He debated adding a handful of dates, told himself he should save them, and snatched them up anyway. He ate them one by one, grimacing, saving the bread for last to take that slimy, fruity taste out of his mouth.
When it was gone, he walked aimlessly to the right side of his cell. He looked down and stifled a cry of revulsion. Trask was sprawled half on his cot and half off it, and his pantslegs had pulled up a little. His ankles were bare above the prison slippers they gave you to wear. A large, sleek rat was lunching on Trask’s leg. Its repulsive pink tail was neatly coiled around its gray body.
Lloyd walked to the other comer of his own cell and picked up the cotleg. He went back and stood for a moment, wondering if the rat would see him and decide to go off where the company wasn’t quite so lively. But the rat’s back was to him, and as far as Lloyd could tell, the rat didn’t even know he was there. Lloyd measured the distance with his eye and decided the cotleg would reach admirably.
“Huh!” Lloyd grunted, and swung the leg. It squashed the rat against Tras
k’s leg, and Trask fell off his bunk with a stiff thump. The rat lay on its side, dazed, aspirating weakly. There were beads of blood in its whiskers. Its rear legs were moving, as if its ratty little brain was telling it to run somewhere but along the spinal cord the signals were getting all scrambled up. Lloyd hit it again and killed it.
“There you are, you cheap fuck,” Lloyd said. He put the cotleg down and wandered back to his bunk. He was hot and scared and felt like crying. He looked back over his shoulder and cried: “How do you like rat hell, you scuzzy little cocksucker?”
“Mother!” the voice cried happily in answer. “Moootherrrr!”
"Shut up!” Lloyd screamed. ‘7 ain’t your mother! Your mother’s in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana!”
“Mother?” the voice said, now full of weak doubt. Then it fell silent.
Lloyd began to weep. As he cried he rubbed his eyes with his fists like a small boy. He wanted a steak sandwich, he wanted to talk to his lawyer, he wanted to get out of here.
When he woke up again it was 5 P.M. and Maximum Security was dead quiet. Blearily, Lloyd got off his cot, which now leaned drunkenly toward the spot where one of its supports had been taken away. He got the cotleg, steeled himself for the cries of Mother! and began hammering on the bars like a farm cook calling the hired hands in for a big country supper. Supper. Now there was a word, had there ever been a finer? Ham steaks and potatoes with red-eye gravy and fresh new peas and milk with Hershey’s chocolate syrup to dump in it. And a great big ol4 dish of strawberry ice cream for dessert. No, there had never been a word to match supper.
“Hey, ain’t nobody there?” Lloyd cried, his voice breaking.
No answer. Not even a cry of Mother. At this point, he might have welcomed it. Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.