by Stephen King
He fumbled out his Bic, held it up, and spun the wheel. The light it provided was pitifully small, feeding his unease rather than assuaging it. Even with the flame turned up all the way it only gave him a circle of visibility about six feet in diameter.
He put it back in his pocket and kept walking, trailing his hand lightly along the railing. There was an echo in here, too, one he liked even less than the one outside. The echo made it sound like someone was behind him . . . stalking him. He stopped several times, head cocked, eyes wide (but blind), listening until the echo had died off. After a bit he began to shuffle so the echo wouldn’t recur.
Some time after that he stopped again and flicked the lighter close to his wristwatch. It was 4:20, but he wasn’t sure what to make of that. In this blackness time seemed to have no objective meaning. Neither did distance, for that matter; how long was the Lincoln Tunnel, anyway? A mile? Two miles? Surely it couldn’t be two miles under the Hudson River. Let’s say a mile. But if a mile was all it was, he should have been at the other end already. If the average man walks four miles an hour, he can walk one mile in fifteen minutes and he’d already been in this stinking hole five minutes longer than that.
“I’m walking a lot slower,” he said, and jumped at the sound of his own voice. The lighter dropped from his hand and clicked onto the catwalk. The echo spoke back, changed into the dangerously jocular voice of an approaching lunatic:
“. . . ot slower . . . lower . . . lower . . .”
“Jesus,” Larry muttered, and the echo whispered back: “zuss . . . zuss . . . zuss . .
He wiped a hand across his face, fighting panic and the urge to give up thought and just run blindly forward. Instead he knelt (his knees popped like pistol shots, frightening him again) and felt around over the miniature topography of the pedestrian catwalk— the chipped valleys in the cement, the ridge of an old cigarette butt, the hill of a tiny tinfoil ball—until at last he happened on his Bic. With an inner sigh he squeezed it tightly in his hand, stood up, and walked on.
Larry was beginning to get himself under control again when his foot struck something stiff and barely yielding. He uttered an inhalatory sort of scream and took two staggering steps backward. He made himself hold steady as he pulled the Bic lighter from his pocket and flicked it. The flame wavered crazily in his trembling grasp.
He had stepped on a soldier’s hand. He was sitting with his back against the tunnel wall, his legs splayed across the walkway, a horrible sentinel left here to bar passage. His glazed eyes stared up at Larry. His lips had fallen away from his teeth and he seemed to be grinning. A switchblade knife was buried in his throat.
The lighter was growing warm in his hand. Larry let it go out. Licking his lips, holding the railing in a deathgrip, he forced himself forward until the toe of his shoe struck the soldier’s hand again. Then he stepped over, making a comically large stride, and a kind of nightmarish certainty came over him. He would hear the scrape of the soldier’s boots as he shifted, and then the soldier would reach out and grab his leg.
In a shuffling sort of run, Larry went another ten paces and then made himself stop, knowing that if he didn’t stop, the panic would win and he would bolt blindly, chased by a terrible regiment of echoes.
When he felt he had himself under some sort of control, he began to walk again. But now it was worse; his toes shrank inside his shoes, afraid that at any second they might come in contact with another body sprawled on the catwalk . . . and soon enough, it happened.
He groaned and fumbled the lighter out again. This time it was much worse. The body his foot had struck was that of an old man in a blue suit. A black silk skullcap had fallen from his balding head into his lap. There was a six-pointed star of beaten silver in his lapel. Beyond him were another half a dozen corpses: two women, a man of middle age, a woman who might have been in her late seventies, two teenage boys.
The lighter was growing too hot to hold any longer. He snapped it off and slipped it back into his pants pocket where it glowed like a warm coal against his leg. Captain Trips hadn’t taken this group off any more than it had taken the soldier back there. He had seen the blood, the torn clothes, the chipped tiles, the bullet holes. They had been gunned down. Larry remembered the rumors that soldiers had blocked off the points of exit. He hadn’t known whether to believe them or not; he had heard so many rumors last week as things were breaking down.
The situation here was easy enough to reconstruct. They had been caught in the tunnel, but they hadn’t been too sick to walk. They got out of their car and began to make their way toward the Jersey side. There had been a command post, machine gun emplacement, something.
Had been? Or was now?
Larry stood sweating, trying to make up his mind. The solid darkness provided the perfect theater screen on which the mind could play out its fantasies. He saw: grim-eyed soldiers in germproof suits crouched behind a machine gun equipped with an infrared peeper-scope, their job to cut down any stragglers who tried to come through the tunnel; a single soldier left behind, a suicide volunteer, wearing infrared goggles and creeping toward him with a knife in his teeth; two soldiers quietly loading a mortar with a single poison gas canister. .
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to go back. He was quite sure that these imaginings were only vapors, and the thought of retracing his steps was just insupportable. Surely the soldiers were now gone. The dead one he’d stepped over seemed to support that. But. . .
What was really troubling him, he supposed, were the bodies directly ahead. They were sprawled all over each other for eight or nine feet. He couldn’t just step over them as he had stepped over the soldier. And if he went off the catwalk to go around them, he risked breaking his leg or his ankle. If he was to go on, he would have to . . . have to walk over them.
Behind him, in the darkness, something moved.
Larry wheeled around, instantly engulfed with fear at that single gritting sound ... a footstep.
“Who’s there?” he shouted, unslinging his rifle.
No answer but the echo. When it faded he heard—or thought he did—the quiet sound of breathing. He stood bug-eyed in the dark, the hairs along the nape of his neck turning into hackles. He held his breath. There was no sound. He was beginning to dismiss it as imagination when the sound came again ... a sliding, quiet footstep.
He fumbled madly for his lighter. The thought that it would make him a target never occurred to him. As he pulled it from his pocket the striker wheel caught on his pants momentarily and the lighter tumbled from his hand. He heard a clink as it struck the railing, and then there was a soft bonk as it struck the hood or trunk of a car below.
The sliding footstep came again, a little closer now, impossible to tell how close. Someone coming to kill him and his terror-locked mind gave him a picture of the soldier with the switchblade in his neck, moving slowly toward him in the dark—
That soft, gritting step again.
Larry remembered the rifle. He threw the butt against his shoulder, and began to fire. The explosions were shatteringly loud in the closed space; he screamed at the sound of them but the scream was lost in the roar. Flashbulb images of tile and frozen lanes of traffic exploded one after another like a string of black and white snapshots as fire licked from the muzzle of the .30-.30. Ricochets whined like banshees. The gun whacked his shoulder again and again until it was numb, until he knew that the force of the recoils had turned him on his feet and he was shooting out over the roadway instead of back along the catwalk. He was still unable to stop. His finger had taken over the function of the brain, and it spasmed mindlessly until the hammer began to fall with a dry and impotent clicking sound.
The echoes rolled back. Bright afterimages hung before his eyes in triple exposures. He was faintly aware of the stench of cordite and of the whining sound he was making deep in his chest.
Still clutching the gun he whirled around again, and now it was not the soldiers in their sterile suits that he saw on the screen of his indoo
r theater but the Morlocks from the Classics Comics version of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, humped and blind creatures coming out of their holes in the ground where engines ran on and on in the bowels of the earth.
He began to struggle across the soft yet stiff barricade of bodies, stumbling, almost falling, clutching the railing, going on. His foot punched through into some dreadful sliminess and there was a gassy, putrid smell that he barely noticed. He went on, gasping.
Then, from behind him, a scream rose in the darkness, freezing him on the spot. It was a desperate, wretched sound, close to the limits of sanity: “Larry! Oh, Larry, for God’s sake—”
It was Rita Blakemoor.
He turned around. There was sobbing now, wild sobbing that filled the place with fresh echoes. For one wild moment he decided to go on anyway, to leave her. She would find her way out eventually, why burden himself with her again? Then he got hold of himself and shouted, “Rita! Stay where you are! Do you hear me?”
The sobbing continued.
He stumbled back across the bodies, trying not to breathe, his face twisted in an expression of grimacing disgust. Then he ran toward her, not sure how far he had to go because of the distorting quality of the echo. In the end he almost fell over her.
“Larry—” She threw herself against him and clutched his neck with a strangler’s force. He could feel her heart skidding along at a breakneck pace under her shirt. “Larry Larry don’t leave me alone here don’t leave me alone in the dark—”
“No.” He held her tightly. “Did I hurt you? Are ... are you shot?”
“No ... I felt the wind . . . one of them went by so close I felt the wind of it . . . and chips . . . tile-chips, I think ... on my face ... cut my face . . .”
“Oh Jesus, Rita, I didn’t know. I was freaking out in here. The dark. And I lost my lighter . . . you should have called. I could have killed you.” The truth of it came home to him. “I could have killed you,” he repeated in stunned revelation.
“I wasn’t sure it was you. I went into an apartment house when you went down the ramp. And you came back and called and I almost . . . but I couldn’t . . . and then two men came after the rain started . . . and I think they were looking for us ... or for me. So I stayed where I was and when they were gone I thought, maybe they’re hiding and looking for me and I didn’t dare go out until I started to think you’d get to the other side and I’d never see you again ... so I ... I.. . Larry, you won’t leave me, will you? You won’t go away?”
“No,” he said.
“I was wrong, what I said, that was wrong, you were right, I should have told you about the sandals, I mean the shoes, I’ll eat when you tell me to ... I... I.. . oooohhhowww—”
“Shh,” he said, holding her. “It’s all right now. All right.” But in his mind he saw himself firing at her in a blind panic, and thought how easily one of those slugs could have smashed an arm or blown out her stomach. Suddenly he had to go to the bathroom very badly and his teeth wanted to chatter. “We’ll go when you feel like you can walk. Take your time.”
“There was a man ... I think it was a man ... I stepped on him, Larry.” She swallowed and her throat clicked. “Oh, I almost screamed then, but I didn’t because I thought it might be one of those men up ahead instead of you. And when you called out . . . the echo ... I couldn’t tell if it was you . . . or . . . or . . .”
“There are more dead people up ahead. Can you stand that?”
“If you’re with me. Please ... if you’re with me.”
“I will be.”
“Let’s go, then. I want to get out of here.” She shuddered convulsively against him. “I never wanted anything so badly in my life.”
They got over the bodies, their arms slung about each other’s necks like drunken chums coming home from a neighborhood tavern. Beyond that they came to a blockage of some sort. It was impossible to see, but after running her hands over it, Rita said it might be a bed standing on end. Together they managed to tip it over the catwalk railing. It crashed onto a car below with a loud, echoing bang that made them both jump and clutch each other. Behind where it had been there were more sprawled bodies, three of them, and Larry guessed that these were the soldiers that had shot down the Jewish family. They got over them and went on, holding hands.
A short time later Rita stopped short.
“What’s the matter?” Larry asked. “Is there something in the way?”
“No. I can see, Larry! It’s the end of the tunnel!”
He blinked and realized that he could see, too. The glow was dim and it had come so gradually that he hadn’t been aware of it until Rita had spoken. He could make out a faint shine on the tiles, and the pale blur of Rita’s face closer by. Looking over to the left he could see the dead river of automobiles.
“Come on,” he said, jubilant.
Sixty paces further along there were more bodies sprawled on the walkway, all soldiers. They stepped over them.
“Why would they only close off New York?” she asked. “Unless maybe . . . Larry, maybe it only happened in New York!”
“I don’t think so,” he said, but felt a touch of irrational hope anyway.
They walked faster. The mouth of the tunnel was ahead of them now. It was blocked by two huge army convoy trucks parked nose to nose. The trucks blotted out much of the daylight; if they hadn’t been there, Larry and Rita would have had some light much further back in the tunnel. There was another sprawl of bodies where the catwalk descended to join the ramp leading outside. They squeezed between the convoy trucks, scrambling over the locked bumpers. Rita didn’t look inside, but Larry did. There was a half-assembled tripod machine gun, boxes of ammunition, and canisters of stuff that looked like teargas. Also, three dead men.
As they came outside, a rain-dampened breeze pressed against them, and its wonderfully fresh smell seemed to make it all worth it. He said so to Rita, and she nodded and put her head against his shoulder for a moment.
“I wouldn’t go through there again for a million dollars,” she said.
“In a few years you’ll be using money for toilet paper,” he said. “Please Don’t Squeeze the Greenbacks.”
“But are you sure—”
“That it wasn’t just New York?” He pointed. “Look.”
The tollbooths were empty. The middle one stood like a sentinel rising from a pile of broken glass. Beyond them, the westbound lanes were empty for as far as they could see, but the eastbound lanes were crowded with silent traffic. There was an untidy pile of bodies in the breakdown lane, and a number of seagulls stood watch over it.
“Oh dear God,” she said weakly.
“There were as many people trying to get into New York as there were trying to get out of it. I don’t know why they bothered blockading the tunnel on the Jersey end. Probably they didn’t, either. Just somebody’s bright idea, busywork—”
But she had sat down on the road and was crying.
“Don’t,” he said, kneeling beside her. The experience in the tunnel was still too fresh for him to feel angry with her. “It’s all right, Rita.”
“What is?” she sobbed. “What is? Just tell me one thing.”
“We’re out, anyway. That’s something. And there’s fresh air. In fact, New Jersey never smelled so good.”
That earned him a wan smile. Larry looked at the scratches on her cheek and temple where the shards of tile had cut her.
“We ought to get you to a drugstore and put some peroxide on those,” he said. “Do you feel up to walking?”
“Yes.” She was looking at him with a dumb gratitude that made him feel uneasy. “And I’ll get some new shoes. Some sneakers. I’ll do just what you tell me, Larry. I want to.”
“I shouted at you because I was upset,” he said quietly. He brushed her hair back and kissed one of the scratches over her right eye. “I’m not such a bad guy,” he added quietly.
“Just don’t leave me.”
He helped her to her feet and slipped an a
rm around her waist. Then they walked slowly toward the tollbooths and slipped through them, New York behind them and across the river.
Chapter 28
There was a small park in the center of Ogunquit, complete with a Civil War cannon and a War Memorial, and after Gus Dins-more died, Frannie Goldsmith went there and sat beside the duck pond, idly throwing stones in and watching the ripples spread in the calm water until they reached the lily pads around the edges and broke up in confusion.
She had begun nursing Gus the day before yesterday, had sat with him through the deliriums, the false signs of recovery, and the final coma—in Gus’s case, mercifully short. He had died at quarter to eight this morning, only an hour and a half ago. He had been rational at the end, but unaware of just how serious his condition was. He had told her longingly that he’d like to have an ice cream soda, the kind his daddy had treated Gus and his brothers to every Fourth of July and again at Labor Day when the fair came to Bangor. But the power was off in Ogunquit by then—it had gone at exactly 9:17 P.M. on the evening of June 28 by the electric clocks—and there was no ice cream to be had in Ogunquit. She had wondered if someone in town might not have a gasoline generator with a freezer hooked up to it on an emergency circuit, and even thought of hunting up Harold Lauder to ask him, but then Gus began to breathe his final whooping, hopeless breaths. That went on for five endless minutes while she held his head up with one hand and a cloth under his mouth with the other to catch the thick expectorations of mucus. Then it was over.
Frannie covered him with a clean sheet and had left him on old Jack Green’s bed, which overlooked the ocean. Then she had come here and since then had been tossing rocks into the pond, not thinking about much of anything. But she unconsciously realized that it was a good kind of not thinking; it wasn’t like that strange apathy that had shrouded her on the day after her father had died. Since then, she had been more and more herself. She had gotten a rosebush down at Nathan’s House of Flowers and had carefully planted it at the foot of Peter’s grave. She thought it would take hold real well, as her father would have said. Her lack of thought now was a kind of rest, after seeing Gils through the last of it. It was nothing like the prelude to madness she had gone through before. That had been like passing through some gray, foul tunnel full of shapes more sensed then seen; it was a tunnel she never wanted to travel again.