by Stephen King
“What’s the other possibility?”
“That we may finish the job of destroying ourselves,” Bateman said calmly. “Not right away, because we’re all too scattered. But man is a gregarious, social animal, and eventually we’ll get back together. Most of the societies that form are apt to be primitive dictatorships run by little Caesars unless we’re very lucky. A few may be enlightened, democratic communities, and I’ll tell you exactly what the necessary requirement for that kind of society in the 1980s and ’90s is going to be: a community with enough technical people in it to get the lights back on.”
Stu sipped his beer. “Think so?”
“Sure. Now let me give you a hypothetical situation, Mr. Stuart Redman from east Texas. Suppose we have Community A in Boston and Community B in Utica, New York. Society A is in good shape. They are living on Beacon Hill in the lap of luxury because one of their members is an electrical technician. This man knows just enough to get the Beacon Hill power plant running again. It would mostly be a matter of knowing which switches to pull when the plant went into an automatic shutdown. So in Boston, the juice is flowing. There’s heat against the cold, light so you can read at night, refrigeration so you can have your scotch on the rocks like a civilized man. In fact, life is pretty damn near idyllic. No pollution, drug problem, race problem, shortage problem. No money or barter problem, because all the goods, if not the services, are out on display and there are enough of them to last a radically reduced society for three centuries.
“But Community B, up there in Utica. There’s no one to run the power plant. It’s going to take a long time for them to figure out how to make it go again. In the meantime, they’re cold at night, they’re eating out of cans, they’re miserable. A strongman takes over. They’re glad to have him because they’re confused and cold and sick. He sends someone to Boston with a request, will they send their technician up to Utica to help them get their power plant going
again? The alternative is a long and dangerous move south for the winter. So what does Community A do when they get this message?”
“Send the guy?” Stu asked.
“Christ, no! He might be held against his will, in fact it would be extremely likely. In the post-flu world, technological know-how is going to replace gold as the most perfect medium of exchange. And in those terms, Society A is rich and Society B is poor. So what does Society B do?”
“I guess they go south,” Stu said. “Maybe even to east Texas.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they threaten the Boston people with a nuclear warhead.”
“Right,” Stu said. “They can’t get their power plant going, but they can explode an A-bomb.”
Bateman said. “If I had the bomb, I’d simply pile several crates of dynamite around it and try to detonate it that way . . . would that work?”
“Dogged if I know.”
“Even if it didn’t, there are plenty of conventional weapons around. That’s the point. All of that stuff is lying around, waiting to be picked up. And if Communities A and B both have pet technicians, they might work up some kind of rusty nuclear exchange over religion, or territoriality or some paltry ideological difference. Just think, instead of six or seven world nuclear powers, we may end up with sixty or seventy of them right here in the continental United States.”
A silence fell between them. Far off they could hear Kojak barking in the woods as the day turned on its noontime axis.
“You know,” Bateman said finally, “I’m fundamentally a cheerful man. Maybe because I have a low threshold of satisfaction. Eccentric but cheerful, that’s me. The only bane of my life has been my dreams. Ever since boyhood I’ve been plagued by amazingly vivid dreams. A lot of them have been nasty. As a youngster it was trolls under bridges that reached up and grabbed my foot or a witch that turned me into a bird. Do you ever have bad dreams, Stu?”
“Sometimes,” Stu said, thinking of Elder, and how Elder lurched after him in his nightmares, and of the corridors that never ended but only switched back on themselves, lit by cold fluorescents and filled with echoes.
“Just lately, I’ve had an extremely bad dream. It recurs. It’s like no other dream I’ve ever had, but somehow it’s like all of them. As if . . . as if it were the sum of all bad dreams. And I wake up feeling bad, as if it wasn’t a dream at all, but a vision. I know how crazy that must sound.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a man,” Bateman said quietly. “At least, I think it’s a man. He’s standing on the roof of a high building, or maybe it’s a cliff that he’s on. It’s near sunset, but he’s looking the other way, east. Sometimes he seems to be wearing bluejeans and a denim jacket, but more often he’s in a robe with a cowl. I can never see his face, but I can see his eyes. He has red eyes. And I have a feeling that he’s looking for me—and that sooner or later he will find me. It’s more than a feeling, it’s a premonition. Sooner or later he will find me or I will be forced to go to him . . . and that will be the death of me.”
“That’s when you wake up?”
“Yes.” They watched Kojak come trotting back, and Bateman patted him while Kojak nosed in the aluminum dish and cleaned up the last of the poundcake.
“Well, it’s just a dream, I suppose,” Bateman said. He stood up. “If I were being psychoanalyzed, I suppose the shrink would say the dream expresses my unconscious fear of some leader or leaders who will start the whole thing going again. Maybe a fear of technology in general. But this dream ... it preys on me, Stu.”
Stu said nothing. .
“Well, I want to get back,” Bateman said briskly. “I’m halfway drunk already, and I believe there will be thundershowers this afternoon.” He walked to the back of the clearing and rummaged there. A few moments later he came back with a wheelbarrow. He screwed the piano stool down to its lowest elevation, put it in, added his palette, the picnic cooler, and balanced precariously on top of everything else, his mediocre painting.
“You wheeled that all the way out here?” Stu asked.
“I wheeled it until I saw something I wanted to paint. I go different ways on different days. It’s good exercise. If you’re going east, why don’t you come back to Woodsville and spend the night at my house? We can take turns wheeling the barrow, and I’ve got yet another sixpack of beer cooling in yonder stream. That ought to get us home in style.”
“I accept,” Stu said.
“Good man. I’ll probably talk all the way home. You are in the arms of the Garrulous Professor, East Texas. When I bore you, just tell me to shut up. I won’t be offended.”
“I like to listen,” Stu said.
“Then you are one of God’s chosen. Let’s go.”
So they walked on down 302, one of them wheeling the barrow while the other drank a beer. No matter which was which, Bateman talked, an endless monologue that jumped from topic to topic with hardly a pause. Kojak bounced alongside. Stu would listen for a while, then his thoughts would trail off for a while, following their own tangents, and then his mind would come back. He was disquieted by Bateman’s picture of a hundred little enclaves of people, some of them militaristic, living in a country where thousands of doomsday weapons had been left around like a child’s set of blocks. But oddly, the thing his mind kept returning to was Glen Bateman’s dream, the man with no face on top of the high building—or the cliff-edge—the man with the red eyes, his back to the setting sun, looking restlessly to the east.
He woke up sometime before midnight, bathed in sweat, afraid he had screamed. But in the next room, Glen Bateman’s breathing was slow and regular, undisturbed, and in the hallway he could see Kojak sleeping with his head on his paws. Everything was picked out in moonlight so bright it was surreal.
When he woke, Stu had been up on his elbows, and now he lowered himself back to the damp sheet and put an arm over his eyes, not wanting to remember the dream but helpless to avoid it.
He had been in Stovington again. Elder was dead. Everyone was dead. The place was an echoing tomb. He
was the only one alive, and he couldn’t find the way out. At first he tried to control his panic. Walk, don't run, he told himself over and over, but soon he would have to run. His stride was becoming quicker and quicker, and the urge to look back over his shoulder and make sure that it was only the echoes behind him was becoming insuperable.
He walked past closed office doors with names written in black on milky frosted glass. Past an overturned Gurney. Past the body of a nurse with her white skirt rucked up to her thighs, her blackened, grimacing face staring at the cold white inverted icecube trays that were the ceiling fluorescents.
At last he began to run.
Faster, faster, the doors slipping by him and gone, his feet pounding on the linoleum. Orange arrows oozing on white cinderblock. Signs. At first they seemed right: RADIOLOGY and CORRIDOR B TO LABS and DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT VALID PASS. And then he was in another part of the installation, a part he had never seen and had never been meant to see. The paint on these walls had begun to peel and flake. Some of the fluorescents were out; others buzzed like flies caught in a screen. Some of the frosted glass office windows were shattered, and through the stellated holes he had been able to see wreckage and bodies in terrible positions of pain. There was blood. These people had not died of the flu. These people had been murdered. Their bodies had sustained punctures and gunshots and traumas. Their eyes bulged and stared.
He plunged down a stopped escalator and into a long dark tunnel lined with tile. At the other end there were more offices, but now the doors were painted dead black. The arrows were bright red. The fluorescents buzzed and flickered. The signs read THIS WAY TO COBALT URNS and LASER ARMORY and SIDEWINDER MISSILES and PLAGUE ROOM. Then, sobbing with relief, he saw an arrow pointing around a right-angled turn, and the single blessed word above it: EXIT.
He went around the corner and the door was standing open. Beyond it was the sweet, fragrant night. He plunged toward the door and then, stepping into it, a man in jeans and a denim jacket. Stu skidded to a stop, a scream locked in his throat like rusty iron. As the man stepped into the glow of the flickering fluorescents, Stu saw that there was only a cold black shadow where his face should have been, a blackness punched by two soulless red eyes. No soul, but a sense of humor. There was that; a kind of dancing, lunatic glee.
The dark man put out his hands, and Stu saw that they were dripping blood.
“Heaven and earth,” the dark man whispered from that empty hole where his face should have been. “All of heaven and earth.”
Stu had awakened.
Now Kojak moaned and growled softly in the hall. His paws twitched in his sleep, and Stu supposed that even dogs dreamed. It was a perfectly natural thing, dreaming, even an occasional nightmare.
But it was. a long time before he could get back to sleep.
Chapter 30
Lloyd Henreid was down on his knees. He was humming and grinning. Every now and then he would forget what he had been humming and the grin would fade and he would sob a little bit, and then he would forget he was crying and go on humming. The song he was humming was “Camptown Races.” Every now and then, instead of humming or sobbing, he would whisper “Doo-dah, doo-dah” under his breath. The holding cellblock was utterly quiet except for the humming, the sobbing, the occasional doo-dah, and the soft scrape of the cotleg as Lloyd fumbled with it. He was trying to turn Trask’s body around so he could get at the leg. Please, waiter, bring me some more of that cole slaw and another leg.
Lloyd looked like a man who had embarked upon a radical crash diet. His prison coverall hung on his body like a limp sail. The last meal served in the holding cellblock had been lunch eight days ago. Lloyd’s skin was stretched tightly across his face, limning every curve and angle of the skull beneath. He looked crazy.
“Doo-dah, doo-dah,” Lloyd whispered as he fished with his cotleg. Once upon a time he hadn’t known why he had bothered hurting his fingers to unscrew the damn thing. Once upon a time he had thought he had known what real hunger was. That hunger had been nothing but a slight edge to the appetite when compared with this.
“Ride around all night . . . ride around all day . . . doodah . . .”
The cotleg snagged the cuff of Trask’s pantsleg and then pulled free. Lloyd put his head down and sobbed like a child. Behind him, tossed indifferently in one comer, was the skeleton of the rat he had killed in Trask’s cell on June 29, five days ago. The rat’s long pink tail was still attached to the skeleton. Lloyd had tried repeatedly to eat the tail but it was too tough. Almost all the water in the toilet bowl was gone despite his efforts to conserve it. The cell was filled with the reek of urine; he had been peeing out into the corridor so not to contaminate his water supply.
He had eaten the food he had squirreled away too fast. He knew that now. He had thought someone would come. He hadn’t been able to believe—
He didn’t want to eat Trask. The thought of eating Trask was horrible. Just last night he had managed to slap one of his slippers over a cockroach and had eaten it alive; he had felt it scuttering madly around inside his mouth just before his teeth had crunched it in two. Actually, it hadn’t been half bad, much more tasty than the rat. No, he didn’t want to eat Trask. He didn’t want to be a cannibal. It was like the rat. He would get Trask over within reaching distance . . . but just in case. Just in case. He had heard a man could go a long time without food as long as he had water.
(not much water but I won’t think about that now not just now no not just now)
He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to starve. He was too full of hate.
The hate had built up at a fairly leisurely pace over the last three days, growing with his hunger. He supposed that, if his long-dead pet rabbit had been capable of thought, it would have hated him in the same way. Lloyd’s hate had coalesced around a simple imagistic concept, and this concept was THE KEY.
He was locked in. Once upon a time it had seemed right that he should be. He was one of the bad guys. Not a really bad guy; Poke had been the really bad guy. Small shit was the worst he would have done without Poke. Still, he shared a certain amount of the blame. He supposed he deserved to take a fall, do a little time. It wasn’t something you volunteered for, but when they had you cold they gave you the bullet and you ate it. Like he had told the lawyer, he thought he deserved about twenty for his part in the “tri-state kill-spree.” Not the electric chair, Christ, no. The thought of Lloyd Henreid riding the lightning was just ... it was crazy.
But they had THE KEY, that was the thing. They could lock you up and do what they wanted with you.
In the last three days, Lloyd had vaguely begun to grasp the symbolic, talismanic power of THE KEY. THE KEY was your reward for playing by the rules. If you didn’t, they could lock you up. It was no different than the Go to Jail card in Monopoly. And with THE KEY went certain prerogatives. They could take away ten years of your life, or twenty, or forty. They could hire people like Mathers to beat on you. They could even take away your life in the electric chair.
But having THE KEY didn’t give them the right to go away and leave you locked up to starve. It didn’t give them the right to force you into eating a dead rat and to try to eat the dry ticking of your mattress.
There were certain things you just couldn’t do to people. Having THE KEY only took you so far and no further. They had left him here to die a horrible death when they could have let him out, he wasn’t a mad dog killer who was going to waste the first person he saw, in spite of what the papers had said. Small shit was the worst he had ever gotten into before meeting Poke.
So he hated. For a while it had seemed to him that the hate was a useless thing, because all of those who had THE KEY had succumbed to the flu. They were beyond the reach of his vengeance. Then, little by little, as he grew hungrier, he realized that the flu wouldn’t kill them. It would kill the losers like him; it would kill Mathers but not that scumbag screw who had hired Mathers because the screw had THE KEY. It wasn’t going to kill th
e governor or the warden—the guard who said the warden was sick had obviously been a fucking liar. It wasn’t going to kill the POs, the county sheriffs, or the FBI agents. The flu wouldn’t be able to touch those who had THE KEY. But Lloyd would touch them. If he lived long enough to get out of here, he would touch them plenty.
The cotleg snagged in Trask’s cuff again.
“Come on,” Lloyd whispered. “Come on. Come on over here . . . camptown ladies sing dis song ... all doodah day.”
Trask’s body slid slowly, stiffly, along the floor of his cell. No fisherman ever played a bonita more carefully or with greater wile than Lloyd played Trask. Once Trask’s trousers ripped and Lloyd had to hook on in a new place. But at last his foot was close enough so that Lloyd could reach through the bars and grab it ... if he wanted to.
“Nothing personal,” he whispered to Trask. He touched Trask’s leg. He caressed it. “Nothing personal, I ain’t going to eat you, old buddy. Not less I have to.”
He was not even aware that he was salivating.
Lloyd heard someone in the ashy afterglow of dusk, and at first the sound was so far away and so strange—the clash of metal on metal—that he thought he must be dreaming it. The waking and sleeping states had become very similar to him now; he crossed back and forth across that boundary almost without knowing it.
But then the voice came and he snapped upright on his cot, his eyes flaring wide, huge and lambent in his starved face. The voice came floating down the corridors from God knew how far up in the Administration Wing:
“Hooooo-hoooo! Anybody home?”
And, strangely, Lloyd’s first thought was: Don’t answer. Maybe he’ll go away.
“Anybody home? Going once, going twice? . . . Okay, I’m on my way, just about to shake the dust of Phoenix from my boots—”
At that, Lloyd’s paralysis broke. He catapulted off the cot, snatched up the cotleg, and began to beat it frantically on the bars; the vibrations raced up the metal and shivered in the bones of his clenched fist.