by Stephen King
“One, then.” He put the shift in reverse … then put it back in park. He leaned out the window, and she realized he wanted a kiss. She gave him a good one with the town whistle blowing across the crisp October air, and he caressed the side of her throat while their mouths were together, a thing that always gave her the shivers and he hardly ever did anymore.
His touch there in the sunshine: she never forgot that, either.
As he rolled down the driveway, she called something after him. He caught part of it but not all. He really was going to have to get his ears checked. Let them fit him with a hearing aid if necessary. Although that would probably be the final thing Randolph and Big Jim needed to kick him out on his aging ass.
Duke braked and leaned out again. “Take care of my what ?”
“Your pacemaker!” she practically screamed. Laughing. Exasperated. Still feeling his hand on her throat, stroking skin that had been smooth and firm—so it seemed to her—only yesterday. Or maybe it had been the day before, when they had listened to KC and the Sunshine Band instead of Jesus Radio.
“Oh, you bet!” he called back, and drove away. The next time she saw him, he was dead.
2
Billy and Wanda Debec never heard the double boom because they were on Route 117, and because they were arguing. The fight had started simply enough, with Wanda observing it was a beautiful day and Billy responding he had a headache and didn’t know why they had to go to the Saturday flea market in Oxford Hills, anyway; it would just be the usual pawed-over crap.
Wanda said that he wouldn’t have a headache if he hadn’t sunk a dozen beers the night before.
Billy asked her if she had counted the cans in the recycling bin (no matter how loaded he got, Billy did his drinking at home and always put the cans in the recycling bin—these things, along with his work as an electrician, were his pride).
She said yes she had, you bet she had. Furthermore—
They got as far as Patel’s Market in Castle Rock, having progressed through You drink too much, Billy and You nag too much, Wanda to My mother told me not to marry you and Why do you have to be such a bitch. This had become a fairly well-worn call-and-response during the last two years of their four-year marriage, but this morning Billy suddenly felt he had reached his limit. He swung into the market’s wide hot-topped parking lot without signaling or slowing, and then back out onto 117 without a single glance into his rearview mirror, let alone over his shoulder. On the road behind him, Nora Robichaud honked. Her best friend, Elsa Andrews, tutted. The two women, both retired nurses, exchanged a glance but not a single word. They had been friends too long for words to be necessary in such situations.
Meanwhile, Wanda asked Billy where he thought he was going.
Billy said back home to take a nap. She could go to the shitfair on her own.
Wanda observed that he had almost hit those two old ladies (said old ladies now dropping behind fast; Nora Robichaud felt that, lacking some damned good reason, speeds over forty miles an hour were the devil’s work).
Billy observed that Wanda both looked and sounded like her mother.
Wanda asked him to elucidate just what he meant by that.
Billy said that both mother and daughter had fat asses and tongues that were hung in the middle and ran on both ends.
Wanda told Billy he was hungover.
Billy told Wanda she was ugly.
It was a full and fair exchange of feelings, and by the time they crossed from Castle Rock into Motton, headed for an invisible barrier that had come into being not long after Wanda had opened this spirited discussion by saying it was a beautiful day, Billy was doing better than sixty, which was almost top end for Wanda’s little Chevy shitbox.
“What’s that smoke?” Wanda asked suddenly, pointing northeast, toward 119.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Did my mother-in-law fart?” This cracked him up and he started laughing.
Wanda Debec realized she had finally had enough. This clarified the world and her future in a way that was almost magical. She was turning to him, the words I want a divorce on the tip of her tongue, when they reached the Motton–Chester’s Mill town line and struck the barrier. The Chevy shitbox was equipped with airbags, but Billy’s did not deploy and Wanda’s didn’t pop out completely. The steering wheel collapsed Billy’s chest; the steering column smashed his heart; he died almost instantly.
Wanda’s head collided with the dashboard, and the sudden, catastrophic relocation of the Chevy’s engine block broke one of her legs (the left) and one of her arms (the right). She was not aware of any pain, only that the horn was blaring, the car was suddenly askew in the middle of the road with its front end smashed almost flat, and her vision had come over all red.
When Nora Robichaud and Elsa Andrews rounded the bend just to the south (they had been animatedly discussing the smoke rising to the northeast for several minutes now, and congratulating themselves on having taken the lesser traveled highway this forenoon), Wanda Debec was dragging herself up the white line on her elbows. Blood gushed down her face, almost obscuring it. She had been half scalped by a piece of the collapsing windshield and a huge flap of skin hung down over her left cheek like a misplaced jowl.
Nora and Elsa looked at each other grimly.
“Shit-my-pajamas,” Nora said, and that was all the talk between them there was. Elsa got out the instant the car stopped and ran to the staggering woman. For an elderly lady (Elsa had just turned seventy), she was remarkably fleet.
Nora left the car idling in park and joined her friend. Together they supported Wanda to Norma’s old but perfectly maintained Mercedes. Wanda’s jacket had gone from brown to a muddy roan color; her hands looked as if she had dipped them in red paint.
“Whe’ Billy?” she asked, and Nora saw that most of the poor woman’s teeth had been knocked out. Three of them were stuck to the front of her bloody jacket. “Whe’ Billy, he arri’? Wha’ happen?”
“Billy’s fine and so are you,” Nora said, then looked a question at Elsa. Elsa nodded and hurried toward the Chevy, now partly obscured by the steam escaping its ruptured radiator. One look through the gaping passenger door, which hung on one hinge, was enough to tell Elsa, who had been a nurse for almost forty years (final employer: Ron Haskell, MD—the MD standing for Medical Doofus), that Billy was not fine at all. The young woman with half her hair hanging upside down beside her head was now a widow.
Elsa returned to the Mercedes and got into the backseat next to the young woman, who had slipped into semiconsciousness. “He’s dead and she will be, too, if you don’t get us to Cathy Russell hurry-up-chop-chop,” she told Nora.
“Hang on, then,” Nora said, and floored it. The Mercedes had a big engine, and it leaped forward. Nora swerved smartly around the Debec Chevrolet and crashed into the invisible barrier while still accelerating. For the first time in twenty years Nora had neglected to fasten her seat belt, and she went out through the windshield, where she broke her neck on the invisible barrier just as Bob Roux had. The young woman shot between the Mercedes’s front bucket seats, out through the shattered windshield, and landed facedown on the hood with her bloodspattered legs splayed. Her feet were bare. Her loafers (bought at the last Oxford Hills flea market she had attended) had come off in the first crash.
Elsa Andrews hit the back of the driver’s seat, then rebounded, dazed but essentially unhurt. Her door stuck at first, but popped open when she put her shoulder against it and rammed. She got out and looked around at the littered wreckage. The puddles of blood. The smashed-up Chevy shitbox, still gently steaming.
“What happened?” she asked. This had also been Wanda’s question, although Elsa didn’t remember that. She stood in a strew of chrome and bloody glass, then put the back of her left hand to her forehead, as if checking for a fever. “What happened? What just happened? Nora? Nora-pie? Where are you, dear?”
Then she saw her friend and uttered a scream of grief and horror. A crow watching from high in a
pine tree on The Mill side of the barrier cawed once, a cry that sounded like a contemptuous snort of laughter.
Elsa’s legs turned rubbery. She backed until her bottom struck the crumpled nose of the Mercedes. “Nora-pie,” she said. “Oh, honey.” Something tickled the back of her neck. She wasn’t sure, but thought it was probably a lock of the wounded girl’s hair. Only now, of course, she was the dead girl.
And poor sweet Nora, with whom she’d sometimes shared illicit nips of gin or vodka in the laundry room at Cathy Russell, the two of them giggling like girls away at camp. Nora’s eyes were open, staring up at the bright midday sun, and her head was cocked at a nasty angle, as if she had died trying to look back over her shoulder and make sure Elsa was all right.
Elsa, who was all right—“just shaken up,” as they’d said of certain lucky survivors back in their ER days—began to cry. She slid down the side of the car (ripping her own coat on a jag of metal) and sat on the asphalt of 117. She was still sitting there and still crying when Barbie and his new friend in the Sea Dogs cap came upon her.
3
Sea Dogs turned out to be Paul Gendron, a car salesman from upstate who had retired to his late parents’ farm in Motton two years before. Barbie learned this and a great deal more about Gendron between their departure from the crash scene on 119 and their discovery of another one—not quite so spectacular but still pretty horrific—at the place where Route 117 crossed into The Mill. Barbie would have been more than willing to shake Gendron’s hand, but such niceties would have to remain on hold until they found the place where the invisible barrier ended.
Ernie Calvert had gotten through to the Air National Guard in Bangor, but had been put on hold before he had a chance to say why he was calling. Meanwhile, approaching sirens heralded the imminent arrival of the local law.
“Just don’t expect the Fire Department,” said the farmer who’d come running across the field with his sons. His name was Alden Dinsmore, and he was still getting his breath back. “They’re over to Castle Rock, burnin down a house for practice. Could have gotten plenty of practice right h—” Then he saw his younger son approaching the place where Barbie’s bloody handprint appeared to be drying on nothing more than sunny air. “Rory, get away from there!”
Rory, agog with curiosity, ignored him. He reached out and knocked on the air just to the right of Barbie’s handprint. But before he did, Barbie saw goosebumps rash out on the kid’s arms below the ragged sleeves of his cut-off Wildcats sweatshirt. There was something there, something that kicked in when you got close. The only place Barbie had ever gotten a similar sensation was close to the big power generator in Avon, Florida, where he’d once taken a girl necking.
The sound of the kid’s fist was like knuckles on the side of a Pyrex casserole dish. It silenced the little babbling crowd of spectators, who had been staring at the burning remains of the pulp-truck (and in some cases taking pictures of it with their cell phones).
“I’ll be dipped in shit,” someone said.
Alden Dinsmore dragged his son away by the ragged collar of his sweatshirt, then whapped him backside of the head as he had the older brother not long before. “Don’t you ever!” Dinsmore cried, shaking the boy. “Don’t you ever, when you don’t know what it is!”
“Pa, it’s like a glass wall! It’s—”
Dinsmore shook him some more. He was still panting, and Barbie feared for his heart. “Don’t you ever !” he repeated, and pushed the kid at his older brother. “Hang onto this fool, Ollie.”
“Yessir,” Ollie said, and smirked at his brother.
Barbie looked toward The Mill. He could now see the approaching flashers of a police car, but far ahead of it—as if escorting the cops by virtue of some higher authority—was a large black vehicle that looked like a rolling coffin: Big Jim Rennie’s Hummer. Barbie’s fading bumps and bruises from the fight in Dipper’s parking lot seemed to give a sympathetic throb at the sight.
Rennie Senior hadn’t been there, of course, but his son had been the prime instigator, and Big Jim had taken care of Junior. If that meant making life in The Mill tough for a certain itinerant short-order cook—tough enough so the short-order cook in question would decide to just haul stakes and leave town—even better.
Barbie didn’t want to be here when Big Jim arrived. Especially not with the cops. Chief Perkins had treated him okay, but the other one—Randolph—had looked at him as if Dale Barbara were a piece of dogshit on a dress shoe.
Barbie turned to Sea Dogs and said: “You interested in taking a little hike? You on your side, me on mine? See how far this thing goes?”
“And get away from here before yonder gasbag arrives?” Gendron had also seen the oncoming Hummer. “My friend, you’re on. East or west?”
4
They went west, toward Route 117, and they didn’t find the end of the barrier, but they saw the wonders it had created when it came down. Tree branches had been sheared off, creating pathways to the sky where previously there had been none. Stumps had been cut in half. And there were feathered corpses everywhere.
“Lotta dead birds,” Gendron said. He resettled his cap on his head with hands that trembled slightly. His face was pale. “Never seen so many.”
“Are you all right?” Barbie asked.
“Physically? Yeah, I think so. Mentally, I feel like I’ve lost my frickin mind. How about you?”
“Same,” Barbie said.
Two miles west of 119, they came to God Creek Road and the body of Bob Roux, lying beside his still-idling tractor. Barbie moved instinctively toward the downed man and once again bumped the barrier … although this time he remembered at the last second and slowed in time to keep from bloodying his nose again.
Gendron knelt and touched the farmer’s grotesquely cocked neck. “Dead.”
“What’s that littered all around him? Those white scraps?”
Gendron picked up the largest piece. “I think it’s one of those computer-music doohickies. Musta broke when he hit the …” He gestured in front of him. “The you-know.”
From the direction of town a whooping began, hoarser and louder than the town whistle had been.
Gendron glanced toward it briefly. “Fire siren,” he said. “Much good it’ll do.”
“FD’s coming from Castle Rock,” Barbie said. “I hear them.”
“Yeah? Your ears are better’n mine, then. Tell me your name again, friend.”
“Dale Barbara. Barbie to my friends.”
“Well, Barbie, what now?”
“Go on, I guess. We can’t do anything for this guy.”
“Nope, can’t even call anyone,” Gendron said gloomily. “Not with my cell back there. Guess you don’t have one?”
Barbie did, but he had left it behind in his now-vacated apartment, along with some socks, shirts, jeans, and underwear. He’d lit out for the territories with nothing but the clothes on his back, because there was nothing from Chester’s Mill he wanted to carry with him. Except a few good memories, and for those he didn’t need a suitcase or even a knapsack.
All this was too complicated to explain to a stranger, so he just shook his head.
There was an old blanket draped over the seat of the Deere. Gendron shut the tractor off, took the blanket, and covered the body.
“I hope he was listenin to somethin he liked when it happened,” Gendron said.
“Yeah,” Barbie said.
“Come on. Let’s get to the end of this whatever-it-is. I want to shake your hand. Might even break down and give you a hug.”
5
Shortly after discovering Roux’s body—they were now very close to the wreck on 117, although neither of them knew it—they came to a little stream. The two men stood there for a moment, each on his own side of the barrier, looking in wonder and silence.
At last Gendron said, “Holy jumped-up God.”
“What does it look like from your side?” Barbie asked. All he could see on his was the water rising and spreading
into the under-growth. It was as if the stream had encountered an invisible dam.
“I don’t know how to describe it. I never seen anything quite like it.” Gendron paused, scratching both cheeks, drawing his already long face down so he looked a little like the screamer in that Edvard Munch painting. “Yes I have. Once. Sorta. When I brought home a couple of goldfish for my daughter’s sixth birthday. Or maybe she was seven that year. I brought em home from the pet store in a plastic bag, and that’s what this looks like—water in the bottom of a plastic bag. Only flat instead of saggin down. The water piles up against that … thing, then trickles off both ways on your side.”
“Is none going through at all?”
Gendron bent down, his hands on his knees, and squinted. “Yeah, some appears to go through. But not very much, just a trickle. And none of the crap the water’s carrying. You know, sticks and leaves and such.”
They pushed on, Gendron on his side and Barbie on his. As yet, neither of them were thinking in terms of inside and outside. It didn’t occur to them that the barrier might not have an end.
6
Then they came to Route 117, where there had been another nasty accident—two cars and at least two fatals that Barbie could be sure of. There was another, he thought, slumped behind the wheel of an old Chevrolet that had been mostly demolished. Only this time there was also a survivor, sitting beside a smashed-up Mercedes-Benz with her head lowered. Paul Gendron rushed to her, while Barbie could only stand and watch. The woman saw Gendron and struggled to rise.
“No, ma’am, not at all, you don’t want to do that,” he said.
“I think I’m fine,” she said. “Just … you know, shaken up.” For some reason this made her laugh, although her face was puffy with tears.
At that moment another car appeared, a slowpoke driven by an old fellow who was leading a parade of three or four other no doubt impatient drivers. He saw the accident and stopped. The cars behind him did, too.