by Stephen King
Was he going to have to carry her on his back? Christ, he hoped not. She had seemed stronger than that, at least at first. It was the reason she had appealed to him so strongly that day in the park. There’s no more truth in advertising, he thought bitterly. How the hell was he qualified to take care of her when he could barely watch out for himself? He’d shown that pretty conclusively after the record had broken for him.
“No, I’m not mad,” he said. “It’s just that. . . you know, I’m not your boss. If you don’t feel like eating, just say so.”
“I told you ... I said I didn’t think I could . .
“The fuck you did.”
She bent her head and looked at her hands and he knew she was struggling to keep from sobbing. For a moment he was angrier than ever, wanting to shout: I’m not your father! I’m not your bigshot banker husband! I’m not going to take care of you! You got thirty years on me, for God’s sake! Then he felt the familiar surge of self-contempt and wondered what the hell could be the matter with him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m an insensitive bastard.”
“No. It’s just that ... all of this is starting to catch up with me. It . . . yesterday that poor man in the park ... I thought: No one is ever going to catch whoever did that and put him in jail. Whoever did it will just go on and do it again and again and again. Like an animal in the jungle. Don’t you see?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can see that.” He had lost his mother and she had lost the man who brought her Mercedes around. But somehow her loss was supposed to be greater. Well, bullshit. It was the pills. They were bumming her out.
“Try not to be angry with me. I’ll do better.”
“You’re fine,” he said, and helped her to her feet. “Come on, now. We’ve got a lot to do. What do you say? Feel up to it?”
“Yes,” she said, but her expression was the same as it had been when he offered her the eggs.
“When we get out of the city you’ll feel better.”
She looked at him nakedly. “Will I?”
“Sure. Sure you will.”
It was a walk that Larry Underwood never forgot. So much had changed, so much was out of joint, that New York now seemed almost a fabled city in a Tolkien story. A man had been hung from the street sign at Fifth and Fifty-third, a placard with the single word LOOTER hung around his neck. There was a cat lying on top of a hexagonal litter basket which still bore advertisements for A Chorus Line. The cat was giving suck to a litter of kittens and enjoying the mid morning sun.
They reached the corner of Fifth and Thirty-ninth shortly after noon, and Larry suggested lunch. There was a deli on the corner, but when he pushed the door open the smell of rotten meat made Rita draw back.
“I better not go in there if I want to save what appetite I have,” she said apologetically.
Larry suspected he could have found plenty of good meat—stuff loaded with preservatives—inside, but he didn’t like leaving her alone on the sidewalk. So they found a bench half a block west and ate dehydrated apple slices, bacon bits, and cheese spread on Ritz crackers.
“Everything tastes better when it sits on a Ritz,” Larry said, doing an Andy Griffith drawl, and Rita giggled.
“This time I was really hungry,” she said, and offered him the Thermos of coffee.
“I’ll catch a Pepsi later on,” he said. The thought of drinking coffee her way made him feel a little ill.
Otherwise, he felt good. Just to be on the move, that felt good. He had told her she would feel better when they got out of New York. It had been something to say. Now, consulting the rising barometer of his own spirits, he guessed that it had also been true. Being in New York was like being in a graveyard where all the dead were not yet quiet. The sooner out, the better. North now, and south in September or October. Boothbay Harbor in the summer, Key Biscayne in the winter. It had a nice ring. Occupied with his thoughts, he didn’t see her grimace of pain as he stood up and shouldered the rifle he had insisted on bringing.
They were moving west now, their shadows behind them—at first as squat as frogs, beginning to lengthen out as the afternoon progressed. They passed the Avenue of the Americas, Seventh Avenue, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth. The streets were crammed and silent, frozen rivers of automobiles in every color, predominated by the yellow of the taxicabs. Many of the cars had become hearses, their decaying drivers still leaning behind the wheels, their passengers slumped as if, weary of the traffic jam, they had fallen asleep. At the intersection of Thirty-ninth and Seventh, they saw a young man wearing cutoff denim shorts and nothing else lying atop a Ding-Dong taxi.
“Is he dead?” Rita asked, and at the sound of her voice the young man sat up, looked around, saw them, and waved. They waved back. The young man lay placidly back down.
It was just after two o’clock when they crossed Eleventh Avenue. He heard a muffled cry of pain behind him and realized Rita was no longer walking on his left.
She was down on one knee, holding her foot. With something like horror, Larry noticed for the first time that she was wearing expensive open-toed sandals, probably in the eighty-dollar range, just the thing for a four-block stroll along Fifth Avenue while window-shopping, but for a long walk—a hike, really—like the one they had been making . . .
The ankle-straps had chafed through her skin. Blood was trickling down her ankles.
“Larry, I’m s—”
He jerked her abruptly to her feet. “What were you thinking about?” he shouted into her face. He felt a moment’s shame at the miserable way she recoiled, but also a mean sort of pleasure. “Did you think you could cab back to your apartment if your feet got tired?”
“I never thought—”
“Well, Christ!” He ran his hands through his hair. “I guess you didn’t. You’re bleeding, Rita. How long has it been hurting?”
Her voice was so low and husky that he had trouble hearing her even in the preternatural silence. “Since . . . well, since about Fifth and Forty-ninth, I guess.”
“Your feet have been hurting you for twenty fucking blocks and you didn’t say anything?”
“I thought ... it might ... go away . . . not hurt anymore . . . I didn’t want to . . .we were making such good time . . . getting out of the city ... I just thought . . .”
“You didn’t think at all,” he said angrily. “How much good time are we going to make with you like this? Your fucking feet look like you got fucking crucified.”
“Don’t swear at me, Larry,” she said, beginning to sob. “Please don’t ... it makes me feel so bad when you . . . please don’t swear at me . . .”
He was in an ecstasy of rage now, and later he would not even be able to understand why the sight of her bleeding feet had blown all his circuits that way. For the moment it didn’t matter. He screamed into her face: “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” The words echoed back from the high-rise apartment buildings, dim and meaningless.
She put her hands over her face and leaned forward, crying. It made him even angrier, and he supposed that part of it was that she really didn’t want to see: she would just as soon put her hands over her face and let him lead her, why not, there had always been someone around to take good care of little Rita. Someone to drive the car, do the marketing, wash out the toilet bowl, do the taxes. So let’s put on some of that gagging-sweet Debussy and put our well-manicured hands over our eyes and leave it all up to Larry. Take care of me, Larry, after seeing what happened to the monster-shouter, I’ve decided I don’t want to see anymore. It’s all rawther sordid for one of my breeding and background.
He yanked her hands away. She cringed and tried to put them over her eyes again.
“Look at me.”
She shook her head.
“Goddammit, you look at me, Rita.”
She finally did in a strange, flinching way, as if thinking he would now go to work on her with his fists as well as his tongue.
“I want to tell you the facts of life because you don’t seem to understand them. The fact is, we may ha
ve to walk twenty or thirty miles. The fact is, if you get infected from those scrapes, you could get blood poisoning and die. The fact is, you’ve got to get your thumb out of your ass and start helping me.”
He had been holding her by the upper arms, and he saw that his thumbs had almost disappeared into her flesh. His anger broke when he saw the red marks that appeared there when he let her go. He stepped away, feeling uncertain again, knowing with sick certainty that he had overreacted. Larry Underwood strikes again. If he was so goddam smart, why hadn’t he checked out her footgear before they started out?
Because that’s her problem, part of him said with surly defensiveness.
No, that wasn’t true. It had been his problem. Because she didn’t know. If he was going to take her with him (and it was only today that he had begun to think how much simpler life would be if he hadn’t), he was just going to have to be responsible for her.
Be damned if I will, the surly voice said.
His mother: You’re a taker, Larry.
The oral hygienist from Fordham, crying out her window after him: I thought you were a nice guy! You ain’t no nice guy!
There’s something left out of you, Larry. You’re a taker.
That's a lie! That is a goddamned LIE!
“Rita,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She sat down on the pavement in her sleeveless blouse and her white deckpants, her hair looking gray and old. She bowed her head and held her hurt feet. She wouldn’t look at him.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I . . . look, I had no right to say those things.” He did, but never mind. If you apologized, things got smoothed over. It was how the world worked.
“Go on, get out of here,” she said. “Don’t let me slow you down.”
“I said I was sorry,” he told her, his voice a trifle petulant. “We’ll get you some new shoes and some white socks. We’ll—”
“We’ll nothing. Go on.”
“Rita, I’m sorry—”
“If you say that one more time, I’ll scream. You’re a shit and your apology is not accepted. Now go on.”
“I said I was—”
She threw her head back and shrieked. He took a step backward, looking around to see if anyone had heard her, to see if maybe a policeman was running over to see what kind of awful thing that young fellow was doing to that old lady who was sitting on the sidewalk with her shoes off. Culture lag, he thought distractedly, what fun it all is.
She stopped screaming and looked at him. She made a flicking gesture with her hand, as if he was a bothersome fly.
“You better stop,” he said, “or I really will leave you.”
She only looked at him. He couldn’t meet her eyes and so dropped his gaze, hating her for making him do that.
“All right,” he said. “Have a good time getting raped and murdered.”
He shouldered the rifle and started off again, now angling left toward the car-packed 495 entrance ramp, sloping down toward the tunnel’s mouth. At the foot of the ramp he saw there had been one hell of a crash; a man driving a Mayflower moving van had tried to butt his way into the main traffic flow and cars were scattered around the van like bowling pins. A burned-out Pinto lay almost beneath the van’s body. The van’s driver hung halfway out of the cab window, head down, arms dangling.
Larry looked around, sure he would see her either walking toward him or standing and accusing him with her eyes. But Rita was gone.
“Fuck you,” he said with nervous resentment. “I tried to apologize.”
For a moment he couldn’t go on; he felt impaled by hundreds of angry dead eyes, staring out at him from all these cars. A line of Dylan occurred to him: ‘7 waited, for you inside of the frozen traffic . . . when you knew I had some other place to be . . . but where are you tonight, sweet Marie?”
Ahead, he could see four lanes of westbound traffic disappearing into the black arch of the tunnel, and with something like real dread he saw that the overhead fluorescent bars inside the Lincoln were out. It would be like going into an automobile graveyard. They would let him get halfway and then they would all begin to stir . . . to come alive ... he would hear car doors clicking open and then softly chunking closed . . . their shuffling footsteps . . .
A light sweat broke on his body. Overhead a bird called raucously and he jumped. You’re being stupid, he told himself. Kid’s stuff, that’s what this is. All you have to do is stay on the pedestrian catwalk and in no time at all you’ll be—
—strangled by the walking dead.
He licked his lips and tried to laugh. It came out badly. He walked five paces toward the place where the ramp joined the highway and then stopped again. To his left was a Caddy, an El Dorado, and a woman with a blackened troll face was staring out at him. Her nose was pressed into a bulb against the glass. Both blood and snot had trickled out onto the window. The man who had been driving the Caddy was slumped over the wheel as if looking for something on the floor. All the Caddy’s windows were rolled up, it would be like a greenhouse in there. If he opened the door the woman would spill out and break open on the pavement like a sack of rotten melons and the smell would be warm and steamy, wet and crawling with decay.
The way it would smell in the tunnel.
Abruptly Larry turned around and trotted back the way he had come, feeling the breeze he was making cool the sweat on his forehead.
“Rita! Rita, listen! I want to—”
The words died as he reached the top of the ramp. Rita was still gone. Thirty-ninth Street dwindled away to a point. He ran from the south sidewalk to the north, squeezing between bumpers and scrambling over hoods almost hot enough to blister his skin. But the north sidewalk was also empty.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and cried: “Rita! Rita!"
His only answer a dead echo: “Rita . . . ita . . . ita . . . ita . .
By four o’clock dark clouds had begun to build over Manhattan and the sound of thunder rolled back and forth between the city’s cliffs. Lightning forked down across the city. The light had become yellow and strange, and Larry didn’t like it. His belly was cramped and when he lit a cigarette it trembled in his hand the way the coffee cup had trembled in Rita’s this morning.
He was sitting at the street end of the access ramp, leaning his back against the lowest bar of the railing. His pack was on his lap, and the .30-.30 was leaning against the railing beside him. He had thought she would get scared and come back, but she hadn’t. Fifteen minutes ago he had given up calling her name. The echoes freaked him out.
Thunder rolled again, close this time. A chilly breeze ran its hand over the back of his shirt, which was pasted to his skin with sweat. He was going to have to get inside somewhere or else stop shitting around and go through that tunnel. If he couldn’t work up the guts to go through, he’d have to spend another night in the city and go over the George Washington Bridge in the morning, and that was 140 blocks north.
He tried to think rationally about the tunnel. There was nothing in there that was going to bite him. He’d forgotten to pick up a good big flashlight—Christ, you never remembered everything—but he did have his butane Bic, and there was a guardrail between the catwalk and the road. No sweat, no strain. Anything else . . . thinking about all those dead people in their cars, for instance . . . that was just panic talking, comic-book stuff, about as sensible as worrying about the boogeyman in the closet. If that’s all you can think about, Larry (he lectured himself), then you’re not going to get along in this brave new world. Not at all. You’re—
A stroke of lightning split the sky almost directly overhead, making him wince. It was followed by a heavy caisson of thunder. He thought randomly, July 1, this is the day you’re supposed to take your sweetie to Coney Island and eat hotdogs by the score. Knock down the three wooden milk-bottles with one ball and win the Kew-pie doll. The fireworks at night—
A cold splash of rain struck the side of his face and then another hit the back of his neck and trickled inside the
collar of his shirt. Dime-sized drops began to hit around him. He stood up, slung the pack over his shoulders, and hoisted the rifle. He was still not sure which way to go—back to Thirty-ninth or into the Lincoln Tunnel. But he had to get undercover somewhere because it was starting to pour.
Thunder broke overhead with a gigantic roar, making him squeal in terror—a sound no different than those made by Cro-Magnon men two million years before.
“You fucking coward,” he said, and trotted down the ramp toward the maw of the tunnel, his head bent forward as the rain began to come harder. It dripped from his hair. He passed the woman with her nose against the El Dorado’s passenger window, trying not to look but catching her out of the tail of his eye just the same. The rain drummed on the car roofs like percussion. It was coming down so hard it bounced back up again, causing a light mist-haze.
Larry stopped for a moment just outside the tunnel, undecided and frightened again. Then it began to hail, and that decided him. The hailstones were big, stinging. Thunder bellowed again.
Okay, he thought. Okay, okay, okay, I’m convinced. He stepped into the Lincoln Tunnel.
It was much blacker inside than he had imagined, somehow. At first the opening behind him cast dim white light ahead and he could see yet more cars, jammed in bumper to bumper (it must have been bad, dying in here, he thought, as claustrophobia wrapped its stealthy banana fingers lovingly around his head and began to squeeze his temples, it must have been really bad, it must have been fucking horrible), and the greenish-white tiles that dressed the upward-curving walls. He could see the pedestrian railing to his right, stretching dimly ahead. On his left, at thirty-or forty-foot intervals, were big support pillars. A sign advised him DO NOT CHANGE LANES. There were dark fluorescents embedded in the tunnel’s roof, and the blank glass eyes of closed-circuit TV cameras. And as he negotiated the first slow, banked curve, bearing gently to the right, the light grew dimmer until all he could see were muted flashes of chrome. After that the light simply ceased to exist at all.