by Stephen King
“Sure, he’s right,” Sue said glumly. “What else have they got to think? That he went to Far Rockaway to ride the Monster Coaster?” “We were lucky to get away tonight without a big discussion of what’s going on in the west,” Fran said.
Nick wrote: “Sure were. That’s why I want to postpone another big meeting as long as possible. Three weeks, maybe. September 15?”
Sue said, “We can hold off that long if Brad gets the power on.”
“I think he will,” Stu said.
“I’m going home,” Sue told them. “Big day tomorrow. Dayna’s off. I’m going with her as far as Colorado Springs.”
“How did she take it?” Fran asked her.
“Well, she’s a funny sort of girl. She was a jock in college, you know. Tennis and swimming were her biggies, although she played them all. She went to some small community college down in Georgia, but for the first two years she kept on going with her high school boyfriend. He was a big leather jacket type, me Tarzan, you Jane, so get out in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans. Then she got dragged along to a couple of female consciousness meetings by her roomie, who was this big libber type.”
“And as an upshot, she got to be an even bigger libber than the roomie,” Fran guessed.
“First a libber, then a lesbian,” Sue said.
Stu stopped as if thunderstruck. Frannie looked at him with guarded amusement. “Come on, splendor in the grass,” she said. “See if you can’t fix the hinge on your mouth.”
Stu shut his mouth with a snap.
Sue went on: “She dropped both rocks on the caveman boyfriend at the same time, and he came after her with a gun. She disarmed him. She says it was the major turning point of her life. She told me she always knew she was stronger and more agile than he was—she knew it intellectually. But it took doing it to put it in her guts.”
“You sayin she hates men?” Stu asked, looking at Sue closely.
Susan shook her head. “She’s bi now.”
“Bye now?” Stu said doubtfully.
“She’s happy with either sex, Stuart. And I hope you’re not going to start leaning on the committee to institute the blue laws along with thou shalt not kill.”
“I got enough to worry about without worryin about who sleeps with who,” he mumbled, and they all laughed. “I only asked because I don’t want anyone goin into this thing as a crusade. We need eyes over there, not guerrilla fighters.”
“She knows that,” Susan said, and said no more. What else Dayna Jurgens had said was between the two of them, something not even the other members of the committee were to know—as was the fact that Dayna was going west with a ten-inch switchblade strapped to her arm in a spring-loaded clip.
If he’s a big enough dictator, then maybe he’s all that's holding them together. If he was gone, maybe they’d start fighting and squabbling among themselves. It might be the end of them, if he dies. And if I get close to him, Susie, he better have his guardian devil with him.
They’ll kill you, Dayna.
Maybe. Maybe not. It might be worth it just to have the pleasure of watching his guts fall out on the floor.
She could have stopped her, maybe, but she hadn’t tried. She had contented herself with extracting a promise from Dayna that she would stick to the original script unless a near-perfect opportunity came up. To that Dayna had agreed, and Sue didn’t think her friend would get that chance. Flagg would be well guarded.
“Well,” she said to the rest of them. “I’m home to bed. Really. Night, folks.”
She walked off, hands in the pockets of her fatigue jacket.
“She looks older,” Stu said.
Nick wrote and offered the open pad to both of them.
We all do was written there.
Stu was on his way up to the power station the next morning when he saw Susan and Dayna headed down Canyon Boulevard on a pair of cycles. He waved and they pulled over. He thought he had never seen Dayna looking prettier. Her hair was tied behind her with a bright green silk scarf, and she was wearing a rawhide coat open over jeans and a chambray shirt. A bedroll was strapped on behind her. “Stuart!” She said.
Lesbian? he thought doubtfully.
“I understand you’re off on a little trip,” he said.
“For sure. And you never saw me.”
“Nope,” Stu said. “I never did. Have a smoke?”
Dayna took one of Stu’s Marlboros and cupped her hands over his match.
“You be careful, girl.”
“I will.”
“And get back.”
“I hope to.”
They looked at each other in the bright late-summer morning.
“You take care of Frannie, big fella.”
“I will.”
“And go easy on the marshaling.”
“That I know I can do.”
She cast the cigarette away. “What do you say, Suze?”
Susan nodded and put her bike in gear, smiling a strained smile. “Dayna?”
She looked at him, and Stu planted a soft kiss on her mouth.
“Good luck.”
She offered him a slow smile. “You have to do it twice for good luck. Didn’t you know that?”
He kissed her again.
“Frannie’s a lucky woman,” Dayna said. “And you can quote me.” Smiling, not really knowing what to say, Stu stepped back and said nothing at all. Two blocks up, one of the lumbering orange Burial Committee trucks rumbled through the intersection and the moment was broken.
“Let’s go, kid,” Dayna said.
They drove off, and Stu stood on the curbing and watched them.
Sue Stem was back two days later. She had watched Dayna moving west from Colorado Springs, she said, had watched her until she was nothing but a speck that merged with the great still landscape. Then she had cried a little. That first night Sue had made camp at Monument, and had awakened in the small hours, chilled by a low
whining sound that seemed to be coming from a culvert that traveled beneath the farm road she had camped by.
Finally summoning up her courage, she had shined her flash into the corrugated pipe and had discovered a gaunt and shivering six-months puppy. It shied from her touch and she was too big to crawl into the pipe. At last she had gone into the town of Monument, had smashed her way into the local grocery, and had come back in the first cold light of false dawn with a knapsack full of Alpo and Cycle One. That did the trick. The puppy rode back with her, neatly tucked into one of the big BSA saddlebags.
Dick Ellis went into raptures over the puppy. It was an Irish setter bitch, either purebred or so close as to make no difference. When she got older, he was sure Kojak would be glad to make her acquaintance. The news swept the Free Zone, and for that day the subject of Mother Abagail was forgotten in the excitement over the canine Adam and Eve. Susan Stern became something of a heroine, and as far as any of the committee ever knew, no one even thought to wonder what she had been doing in Monument that night, far south of Boulder.
But it was the morning the two of them left Boulder that Stu remembered, watching them ride off toward the Denver-Boulder Turnpike. Because no one in the Zone ever saw Dayna Jurgens again.
Nearly dusk; Venus shining against the sky.
Nick, Ralph, Larry, and Stu sat on the steps of Tom Cullen’s house. Tom was on the lawn, whooping and knocking croquet balls through a set of wickets.
It’s time, Nick wrote.
Speaking low, Stu asked if they would have to hypnotize him again, and Nick shook his head. Ralph called Tom, who came running over, grinning.
“Tommy, it’s time to go,” Ralph said.
Tom’s smile faltered. For the first time he seemed to notice that it was getting dark.
“Go? Now? Laws, no! When it gets dark, Tom goes to bed. M-O-O-N, that spells bed. Tom doesn’t like to be out after dark. Because of the boogies. Tom ... Tom ...” He fell silent, and the others looked at him uneasily. Tom had lapsed into dull silence. He came out
of it. . . but not in the usual way. It was not a sudden reanimation, life flooding back in a rush, but a slow thing, reluctant, almost sad.
“Go west?” he said.
Stu laid a hand on his shoulder. “Yes, Tom. If you can.”
“On the road.”
Ralph made a choked, muttering sound and walked around the house. Tom did not seem to notice. His gaze alternated between Stu and Nick.
“Travel at night. Sleep in the day.” Very slowly, in the dusk, Tom added: “And see the elephant.”
Nick nodded.
Larry brought Tom’s pack up from where it had rested beside the steps. Tom put it on slowly, dreamily.
“You want to be careful, Tom,” Larry said thickly.
“Careful. Laws, yes.”
Stu wondered belatedly if they should have given Tom a one-man tent as well, and rejected it. Tom would get all bollixed up trying to set up even a little tent.
“Nick,” Tom whispered. “Do I really have to do this?”
Nick put an arm around Tom and nodded slowly.
“All right.”
“Just stay on the big four-lane highway, Tom,” Larry said. “The one that says 70. Ralph is going to drive you down to the start of it on his motorcycle.”
“Yes, Ralph.” He paused. Ralph had come back around the house. He was swabbing at his eyes with his bandanna.
“You ready, Tom?” he asked gruffly.
“Nick? Will it still be my house when I get back?”
Nick nodded vigorously.
“Tom loves his house. Laws, yes.”
“We know you do, Tommy.” Stu could feel warm tears in the back of his own throat now.
“All right. I’m ready. Who am I riding with?”
“Me, Tom,” Ralph said. “Down to Route 70, remember?”
Tom nodded and began to walk toward Ralph’s cycle. After a moment Ralph followed him, his big shoulders slumped. Even the feather in his hatband seemed dejected. He climbed on the bike and kicked it alive. A moment later it pulled out onto Broadway and turned east. They stood together, watching them dwindle to a moving silhouette in the purple dusk marked by a moving headlight. Then the light disappeared behind the bulk of the Holiday Twin Drive-in and was gone.
Nick walked away, head down, hands in pockets. Stu tried to join him, but Nick shook his head and motioned him away. Stu went back to Larry.
“That’s that,” Larry said, and Stu nodded gloomily.
“You think we’ll ever see him again, Larry?”
“If we don’t, the seven of us—well, maybe not Fran, she was never for sending him—the rest of us are going to be eating and sleeping with the decision to send him for the rest of our lives. I wish sometimes I’d never heard of the motherfucking Free Zone Committee.”
They looked at Tom’s darkened house in silence for a minute.
“Let’s get out of here,” Larry said suddenly. “The thought of all those stuffed animals . . . all of a sudden I got a grade-A case of the creeps.”
When they left, Nick was still standing on the side lawn of Tom Cullen’s house, his hands in his pockets, his head down.
George Richardson, the new doctor, had set up in the Dakota Ridge Medical Center, because it was close to Boulder City Hospital with its medical equipment, its large supplies of drugs, and its operating rooms.
By August 28 he was pretty much in business, assisted by Laurie Constable and Dick Ellis. Dick had asked leave to quit the world of medicine and had been refused. “You’re doing a fine job here,” Richardson said. “You’ve learned a lot and you’re going to learn more. Besides, there’s just too much for me to do by myself. As it is, we’re going to be out of our minds if we don’t get another doctor in a month or two. So congratulations, Dick, you’re the Zone’s first paramedic. Give him a kiss, Laurie.”
Around eleven o’clock on that late August morning, Fran let herself into the waiting room and looked around curiously and a little nervously.
“Hi, Fran,” Laurie said. “I thought we’d see you sooner or later.”
The door to one of the examining rooms opened and Candy Jones came out, followed by Richardson. Candy was looking doubtfully at a pink bottle in her hand.
“Are you sure that’s what it is?” she asked Richardson doubtfully. “I never got it before.” “Well, you have it now,” George said with a grin. “Don’t forget the starch baths, and stay out of the tall grass after this.”
She smiled ruefully. “Jack’s got it, too. Should he come in?”
“No, but you can make the starch baths a family affair.”
Candy nodded dolefully and then spotted Fran. “Hi, Frannie, how’s the girl?”
“Okay. How’s by you?”
“Terrible.” Candy held up the bottle so Fran could read the word CALADRYL on the label. “Poison ivy. And you couldn’t guess where I got it.” She brightened. “But I bet you can guess where Jack's got it.”
They watched her go with some amusement. Then George said, “Miss Goldsmith, isn’t it? Free Zone Committee. A pleasure.”
She held out her hand to be shaken. “Just Fran, please. Or Frannie.”
“Okay, Frannie. What’s the problem?”
“I’m pregnant,” Fran said. “And pretty damn scared.” And then, with no warning at all, she was in tears.
George put an arm around her shoulders. “Laurie, I’ll want you in about five minutes.”
“All right, Doctor.”
He led her into the examining room.
“Now. Why the tears? Is it Mrs. Wentworth’s twins?”
Frannie nodded miserably.
“It was a difficult delivery, Fran. The mother was a heavy smoker. The babies were lightweights, even for twins. They came in the late evening, very suddenly. I had no opportunity to make a postmortem. Regina Wentworth is being cared for by some of the women who were in our party. She’s been under sedation. I believe—I hope— that she’s going to come out of this. But for now all I can say is that those babies had two strikes against them from the start. The cause of death could have been anything ”
“Including the superflu.”
“Yes. Including that.”
“So we just wait and see.”
“Hell no. I’m going to give you a complete prenatal right now. I’m going to monitor you and any other woman that gets pregnant every step of the way. General Electric used to have a slogan, ‘Progress Is Our Most Important Product.’ In the Zone, babies are our most important product, and they are going to be treated accordingly.”
“But we really don’t know.” “No, we don’t. But be of good cheer, Fran.”
“Yes, all right. I’ll try.”
There was a brief rap at the door and Laurie came in. She handed George a form on a clipboard, and George began to ask Fran questions about her medical history.
“Fine,” George said half an hour later.
Fran raised her eyebrows, thinking for a moment he had mispronounced her name. For no good reason she remembered that until the third grade little Mikey Post from down the street had called her Fan.
“The baby. It’s fine.”
Fran found a Kleenex and held it tightly. “I felt it move ... but that was several days ago. Nothing since then. I was afraid . . .”
“It’s alive, all right, but I really doubt if you felt it move, you know. More likely a little intestinal gas.”
“It was the baby,” Fran said quietly.
“It’s going to move a lot in the future. I’ve got you pegged for early to mid-January. How does that sound?”
“Fine.”
“Are you eating right?”
“Yes. I’m trying very hard.”
“No nausea now?”
“A little at first, but it’s passed.”
“Lovely. Getting plenty of exercise?”
For a nightmare instant she saw herself digging her father’s grave. She blinked the vision away. That had been another life. “Yes, plenty.”
“Have you gained any
weight?”
“About five pounds.”
“That’s all right. You can have another twelve; I’m feeling generous today.”
She grinned. “You’re the doctor.”
“Yes, and I used to be an OB man, so you’re in the right place. Take your doctor’s advice and you’ll go far. Now, concerning bicycles, motorbikes, and mopeds. All of them a no-no after November fifteenth, let’s say. No one’s going to be riding them by then anyway. Too damn cold. Don’t smoke or drink to excess, do you?”
“No.”
“If you want a nightcap once in a while, I think that’s perfectly okay. I’m going to put you on a vitamin supplement, you can pick it up at any drugstore in town—”
Frannie burst into laughter, and George smiled uncertainly.
“Did I say something funny?”
“No. It just came out funny under the circumstances.”
“Yes, I see. Well, at least there won’t be any more complaining about high drug prices, will there? One last thing, Fran. Have you ever been fitted with an inter-uterine device ... an IUD?”
“No, why?” Fran asked, and then she happened to think of her dream: the dark man with his coathanger. She shuddered. “No,” she said again.
“Good. That’s it.” He stood up. “I won’t tell you not to worry—”
“No,” she agreed. The laughter was gone from her eyes. “Don’t do that.”
“But I will ask you to keep it to a minimum. Excess anxiety in the mother can lead to glandular imbalance. And that’s not good for the baby. I don’t like to prescribe tranquilizers for pregnant women, but if you think—”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” Fran said, but going out into the hot midday sunshine, she knew that the entire second half of her pregnancy was going to be haunted by thoughts of Mrs. Wentworth’s vanished twins.
Two evenings later, Nadine Cross stood in the basement of Harold’s house, watching him and feeling uneasy.
When Harold was doing something that didn’t involve having some sort of strange sex with her, he seemed to go away to his own private place where she had no control over him. When he was in that place he seemed cold; more than that, he seemed contemptuous of her and even of himself. The only thing that didn’t change was his hate of Stuart Redman and the others on the committee.