by Stephen King
“I don’t know what that stuff is. It’s tacky, like sap, and it’s also tough, and yet it’s evidently permeable because she’s breathing through it. It smells—earthy, I guess. And a little waxy. If you pressed me, I’d say it was some kind of a fungus, but it’s not behaving like any fungus I’ve ever seen or heard of.” To even attempt to discuss the situation made Clint feel as if he were climbing up a hill made of pennies. “A biologist could take a sample and put it under a microscope—”
“I’ve been told that it’s a bad idea to remove the stuff.”
Clint clicked his pen, stuck it and the pad back in his coat. “Well, I’m not a biologist, anyway. And since she seems comfortable . . .”
The growth on Kitty’s face was white and gauzy, tight to her skin. It made Clint think of a winding sheet. He could tell that her eyes were shut and he could tell that they were moving in REM. The idea that she was dreaming under the stuff troubled him, although he wasn’t sure why.
Little wisps of the gauzy material unspooled from her limp hands and wrists, wafting out as if breeze-blown, catching onto the waist area of McDavid’s uniform, forming connections. Based on the way the stuff was spreading, Clint extrapolated that it would eventually create a full body covering.
“It looks like a fairy handkerchief.” The warden had her arms crossed. She didn’t appear upset, just thoughtful.
“Fairy handkerchief?”
“Grass spiders make them. You see them in the morning, while it’s still dewy.”
“Oh. Right. I see them in the backyard sometimes.”
They were quiet for a moment, watching the little tendrils of gauzy material. Beneath the coating, Kitty’s eyelids fluttered and shifted. What kind of trip was she on in there? Was she dreaming of scoring? Kitty told him once that she liked the prospect even better than the high—the sweet anticipation. Was she dreaming of cutting herself? Was she dreaming of Lowell Griner, the drug dealer who promised to kill her if she ever talked about his operation? Or was her brain gone, blacked out by the virus (if it was a virus) of which the webbing was the foremost manifestation? Her rolling eyes the neural equivalent of a torn power line shooting off sparks?
“This is fucking scary,” Janice said. “And that’s not a phrase I use lightly.”
Clint was glad Lila was coming. Whatever was going on between them, he wanted to see her face. “I ought to call my son,” Clint said, mostly to himself.
Rand Quigley, the officer on the floor, poked his head in. He darted a quick, uneasy glance at the incapacitated woman with the shrouded face before shifting toward the warden and clearing his throat. “The sheriff’s ETA is twenty or thirty minutes with her prisoner.” He hung there a moment. “Got the word about the double shifts from Blanche, Warden. I’m here as long as you need me.”
“Good man,” she said.
On the walk over Clint had briefly filled Coates in about the woman from the murder scene, and that Lila was bringing her in. The warden, far more concerned about what Michaela had told her, had been uncharacteristically nonchalant about such a breach of protocol. Clint had been relieved by that, but only for a few seconds, because then she’d hit him with everything she knew about Aurora.
Before Clint could ask if she was joking, she’d shown him her iPhone, which was set to the front page of the New York Times: EPIDEMIC howled the twenty-point headline. The corresponding article said that women were forming coatings in their sleep, that they weren’t waking up, that there were mass riots in the western time zones, and fires in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Nothing about bad shit happening if the gauze was removed, Clint noticed. Possibly because that was just a rumor. Possibly because it was true, and the press was trying not to ignite full-scale panic. At this point, who could tell?
“You can call your son in a few minutes, but Clint, this is a big goddam deal. We’ve got six officers on the shift, plus you, me, Blanche in the office, and Dunphy from maintenance. And there are one hundred and fourteen female inmates with one more on the way. Most of the officers, they’re like Quigley, they recognize they’ve got a duty, and I expect they’ll hold tight for a bit. For which I thank God, because I don’t know when we can expect reinforcements, or what they’ll amount to. You see?”
Clint saw.
“All right. To start with, Doc, what do we do about Kitty?”
“We contact the CDC, ask them to send some boys in hazmat suits to come in and take her out, get her examined, but . . .” Clint opened his hands in expression of how pointless that would be. “If this is as widespread as you’ve told me, and the news certainly seems to agree that it is, we’re not going to get any help until there’s help to get, right?”
Coates still had her arms crossed. Clint wondered if she was holding herself to keep from showing the shakes. The idea made him feel simultaneously better and worse.
“And I suppose we can’t expect St. Theresa’s or anyone else to take her off our hands right now, either? They probably have their hands full, too.”
“We should call around, but that’s my expectation,” Clint said. “So let’s lock her up tight, keep her quarantined. We don’t want anyone else getting close to her or touching her even with gloves on. Van can monitor her from the Booth. If anything changes, if she appears distressed, if she wakes up, we’ll come running.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She brushed at the air where a moth was flitting around. “Stupid bug. How do these things get in here? Goddammit. Next item: What about the rest of the population? How do we treat them?”
“What do you mean?” Clint flapped a hand at the moth, but missed. It circled up to the fluorescent bank in the ceiling.
“If they fall asleep . . .” The warden gestured at McDavid.
Clint touched his forehead, half-expecting to find it burning with fever. A demented multiple-choice question came to him.
How do you keep the inmates of a prison awake? Select from the following:
A) Play Metallica over the prison’s public address system on an infinite loop.
B) Give every prisoner a knife and tell them to cut themselves when they start to feel sleepy.
C) Give every prisoner a sack of Dexedrine.
D) All of the above.
E) You don’t.
“There’s medication that can keep people awake, but Janice, I’d say a near majority of the women here are drug addicts. The idea of pumping them all up with what’s basically speed doesn’t strike me as safe or healthy. Anyhow, something like, say, Provigil, it’s not like I could write a prescription for a hundred tablets. I think the pharmacist at Rite Aid would look askance, you know? Bottom line, I don’t see any way to help them. All we can do is keep things as normal as possible and try to tamp down any panic, hope for some kind of explanation or breakthrough in the meantime, and—”
Clint hesitated for a moment before dispensing the euphemism that seemed like the only way to put it and yet totally wrong. “And let nature take her course.” Although this was no form of nature he was familiar with.
She sighed.
They went out into the hall and the warden told Quigley to pass the word: no one was to touch the growth on McDavid.
2
The woodshop inmates ate in the carpentry shed instead of the mess hall, and on nice days they were allowed to have lunch outside in the shade of the building. This one was nice, a thing for which Jeanette Sorley was grateful. She had begun sprouting a headache in the garden while Dr. Norcross was on the phone, and now it was boring deeper, like a steel rod working its way inward from her left temple. The stink of the varnish wasn’t helping. Some fresh outside air might blow the pain away.
At ten minutes of twelve, two Red Tops—trustees—rolled in a table with sandwiches, lemonade, and chocolate pudding cups. At twelve, the buzzer went. Jeanette gave a final twist to the chair leg she was finishing and then flicked off her lathe. Half a dozen inmates did the same. The decibel level dropped. Now the only sound in the room—hot in here already and not ev
en June—was the steady high-pitched whine of the Power Vac, which Ree Dempster was using to clean up the sawdust between the last row of machines and the wall.
“Turn that off, inmate!” Tig Murphy bellowed. He was a newer hire. Like most new hires, he bellowed a lot because he was still unsure of himself. “It’s lunch! Did you not hear the buzzer?”
Ree started, “Officer, I just got this one more little—”
“Off, I said, off!”
“Yes, Officer.”
Ree turned off the Power Vac, and the silence gave Jeanette a shiver of relief. Her hands ached inside her work gloves, her head ached from the stink of the varnish. All she wanted was to go back to good old B-7, where she had aspirin (an approved Green Med, but only a dozen allowed per month). Then maybe she could sleep until B Wing chow at six.
“Line up, hands up,” Officer Murphy chanted. “Line up, hands up, let me see those tools, ladies.”
They lined up. Ree was in front of Jeanette and whispered, “Officer Murphy is kind of fat, isn’t he?”
“Probably been eating cake with Michelle Obama,” Jeanette whispered back, and Ree giggled.
They held up their tools: hand-sanders, screwdrivers, drills, chisels. Jeanette wondered if male inmates would have been allowed access to such potentially dangerous weapons. Especially the screwdrivers. You could kill with a screwdriver, as she well knew. And that’s what the pain in her head felt like: a screwdriver. Pushing in. Finding the soft meat and disarranging it.
“Shall we eat al fresco today, ladies?” Someone had mentioned that Officer Murphy had been a high school teacher until he lost his job when the faculty was downsized. “That means—”
“Outside,” Jeanette mumbled. “That means eating outside.”
Murphy pointed at her. “We have a Rhodes Scholar among us.” But he was smiling a little, so it didn’t sound mean.
The tools were checked off and collected and put into a steel floor chest that was then locked. The furniture crew shuffled to the table, grabbed sandwiches and Dixie cups of drink, and waited for Murphy to do the count. “Ladies, the great outdoors awaits you. Someone grab me a ham and cheese.”
“You got it, cutie,” Angel Fitzroy murmured under her breath. Murphy gave her a sharp glance, which Angel returned with an innocent gaze. Jeanette felt a little sorry for him. But sorry don’t buy no groceries, as her mother used to say. She gave Murphy three months. At most.
The women filed out of the shed, sat down on the grass, and leaned against the wall of the building.
“What’d you get?” Ree asked.
Jeanette peered into the depths of her sandwich. “Chicken.”
“I got tuna. Want to trade?”
Jeanette didn’t care what she had, she wasn’t a bit hungry, so she swapped. She made herself eat, hoping it might make her head feel a little better. She drank the lemonade, which tasted bitter, but when Ree brought her a pudding cup, Jeanette shook her head. Chocolate was a migraine trigger, and if her current headache turned into one of those, she would have to go to the infirmary for a Zomig, which she would only get if Dr. N. was still here. Word had gone around that the regular PAs hadn’t come in.
A cement path ran toward the main prison building, and someone had decorated it with a fading hopscotch grid. A few women got up, found stones, and started to play, chanting rhymes they must have learned as kids. Jeanette thought it was funny, what stuck in a person’s head.
She pounded down the last bite of sandwich with the last swallow of bitter lemonade, leaned back and closed her eyes. Was her head getting a little better? Maybe. In any case, they had another fifteen minutes, at least. She could nap a little . . .
That was when Officer Peters popped out of the carpentry shed like a bouncy little Jack-in-the-box. Or a troll who had been hiding under a rock. He looked at the women playing hopscotch, then at the women sitting against the side of the building. His eyes settled on Jeanette. “Sorley. Get in here. I got a job for you.”
Fucking Peters. He was a tit-squeezer and an ass-patter, always managing to do it in one of the multiple blind spots the cameras couldn’t quite reach. He knew them all. And if you said anything, you were apt to get your tit wrung instead of just squeezed.
“I’m on my lunch break, Officer,” she said, as pleasantly as she could.
“Looks like you’re finished to me. Now get off your duff and come along.”
Murphy looked uncertain, but one rule about working in a women’s prison had been drummed into his head: male officers were not allowed to be one-on-one with any inmate. “Buddy system, Don.”
Color suffused Peters’s cheeks. He was in no mood for ticky-tack from Teach, not after the one-two combination of Coates’s harassment, and the call he’d just received from Blanche McIntyre that he “had” to pull a double because of “the national situation.” Don had checked his phone: “the national situation” was that a bunch of old ladies in a nursing home had a fungus. Coates was out of her mind.
“I don’t want any of her buddies,” Don said. “I just want her.”
He’s going to let it go, Jeanette thought. In this place he’s just a baby. But Murphy surprised her:
“Buddy system,” he repeated. Perhaps Officer Murphy would be able to hack it after all.
Peters considered. The women sitting against the shed were looking at him, and the hopscotch game had stopped. They were inmates, but they were also witnesses.
“Yoo-hoo.” Angel gave a queenly wave. “Oh, yoo-hoo. You know me, Officer Peters, I’m always happy to help.”
It occurred to Don, alarmingly—absurdly—that Fitzroy somehow knew what he had in mind. Of course, she didn’t, she was just trying to be irritating, like every other minute of the day. While he would have liked five minutes alone with that lunatic sometime, he did not care at all for the idea of having his back turned to her for so much as one second.
No, not Fitzroy, not for this.
He pointed at Ree. “You. Dumpster.” Some of the women giggled.
“Dempster,” Ree said, and with actual dignity.
“Dempster, Dumpster, Dimplebutt, I don’t give a fuck. Both of you, come on. Don’t make me ask again, not with the day I’m having.” He glanced at Murphy, the smartass. “See you later, Teacher-gator.”
This provoked more giggles, these of the ass-licking variety. Murphy was new and out of his depth and none of them wanted to be on Officer Peters’s shit list. They weren’t totally stupid, Don thought, the women in this place.
3
Officer Peters marched Jeanette and Ree a quarter of the way down Broadway and halted them outside the common room/visitors’ room, which was deserted with everyone at lunch. Jeanette was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. When Peters opened the door, she didn’t move.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Are you blind, inmate?”
No, she wasn’t blind. She saw the mop bucket with the mop leaning against it, and, on one of the tables, another plastic bucket. This one was full of rags and cleaning products instead of pudding cups.
“This is supposed to be our lunchtime.” Ree was trying for indignant, but the tremor in her voice spoiled it. “Besides, we’ve already got work.”
Peters bent toward her, lips pulled back to show the pegs of his teeth, and Ree shrank back against Jeanette. “You can put it on your TS list and give it to the chaplain later, okay? Right now just get in there, and if you don’t want to go on Bad Report, don’t argue the point. I’m having a shitty day, I’m in an extremely shitty mood, and unless you want me to share the wealth, you better step to it.”
Then, moving to his right to block the sightline of the nearest camera, he grabbed Ree by the back of her smock, hooking his fingers into the elastic strap of her sports bra. He shoved her into the common room. Ree stumbled and grabbed the side of the snack machine to keep from falling.
“Okay, okay!”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, Officer Peters.”
>
“You shouldn’t push us,” Jeanette said. “That’s not right.”
Don Peters rolled his eyes. “Save your lip for someone who cares. Visitation Day tomorrow, and this place looks like a pigsty.”
Not to Jeanette, it didn’t. To her it looked fine. Not that it mattered. If the man in the uniform said it looked like a pigsty, it looked like a pigsty. That was the nature of corrections as it existed in little Dooling County, and probably all over the world.
“You two are going to clean it from top to bottom and stem to stern, and I’m going to make sure you do the job right.”
He pointed to the bucket of cleaning supplies.
“That’s yours, Dumpster. Miss That’s Not Right gets to mop, and I want that floor so clean I could eat my dinner off it.”
I’d like to feed you your dinner off it, Jeanette thought, but she went to the rolling mop bucket. She did not want to go on Bad Report. If that happened, she would very likely not be in this room when her sister arrived with her son to visit her this coming weekend. That was a long bus ride, and how she loved Bobby for never complaining about making it. But her headache was getting worse and all she wanted in this world was her aspirin and a nap.
Ree inspected the cleaning supplies and selected a spray can and a rag.
“You want to sniff that Pledge, Dumpster? Shoot some up your snoot and get high?”
“No,” Ree said.
“You’d like to get high, wouldn’t you?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, Officer Peters.”
Ree began to polish a table. Jeanette filled the mop bucket from the sink in the corner, wet the mop, squeegeed it, and began to do the floor. Through the chainlink fence in front of the prison, she could see West Lavin, where cars filled with free people traveled back and forth, to work, to home, to lunch at Denny’s, to someplace.
“Get over here, Sorley,” Peters said. He was standing between the snack machine and the soda machine, a camera blind spot where inmates sometimes exchanged pills and cigarettes and kisses.