Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “In Derby Town, in Derby Town, my brother had a fit; in Derby Town, in Derby Town, my sister’s full of bumpty-bump, bumpty-b—”

  Almost too late, she realized she was off the road and running into the underbrush, bound for a steep slope down which her cruiser would roll at least three times before reaching the bottom. She stood both feet on the brake and stopped with the front end of the car hanging over that gravelly drop. She threw the gearshift into park, and as she did, she felt tendrils of something brush gently against her cheeks. She tore at them, had time to see one melting away even as it lay across her palm, then shouldered open her door and tried to get out. Her harness was still on, and it yanked her back.

  She opened the clasp, got out, and stood taking deep breaths of the air, which was finally cooling. She slapped herself across the face once, then twice.

  “Close one,” she said. Far below, one of the little creeks—cricks, in the local patois—that fed the Ball River went flowing and chuckling east. “That was a close one, Lila Jean.”

  Too close. She would fall asleep eventually, she knew that, and the white crap would spin itself out of her skin and enclose her when she did, but she would not let that happen until she had kissed and hugged her son at least one more time. That was a dead-red promise.

  She got back behind the wheel and grabbed her mic. “Unit Four, this is Unit One. Come back?”

  Nothing at first, and she was about to repeat when Terry Coombs replied. “One, this is Four.” He sounded wrong, somehow. As if he had a cold.

  “Four, have you checked the drugstores?”

  “Yeah. Two looted, one on fire. FD is on the scene, so it won’t spread. I guess that’s one good thing. The pharmacist at the CVS was shot dead, and we think there’s at least one body inside the Rite Aid. That’s the one that’s burning. FD doesn’t know how many vics for sure.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Sorry, Sheriff. It’s true.”

  No, not as if he had a cold—as if he’d been crying.

  “Terry? What is it? Something else is wrong.”

  “Went home,” he said. “Found Rita covered in that cocoon crap. She nodded off at the table, just like she always does before I come home from my shift. Grab fifteen or twenty minutes for herself. I warned her not to, and she said she wouldn’t, and then I zipped home to see how she was doing and—”

  Now he did begin to cry.

  “So I put her in bed and I came back out to check the drugstores, like you said. What else could I do? I tried calling my daughter and there’s no answer in her room. Rita tried calling, too, early, a bunch of times.” Diana Coombs was a freshman in college at USC. Her father made a gaspy, watery sound. “Most of the West Coast women are asleep, never woke up. I hoped maybe she was up all night, studying or something, partying even, but . . . I know she’s not, Lila.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong.”

  Terry ignored this. “But hey, they’re breathing, right? All the women and girls are still breathing. So maybe . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Is Roger with you?”

  “No. I spoke with him, though. He found Jessica covered with it. Head to toe. Must have gone to sleep naked, because she looks like a mummy in one of those old horror movies. Baby, too. Right there in the crib, wrapped up, same as the ones they’ve been showing on television. Roger lost it. He was bawling and howling his damn head off. I tried to get him to come with me, but he wouldn’t.”

  This made Lila unreasonably angry, probably because she was so goddam wrung out herself. If she wasn’t allowed to give up, then no one else was, either. “It’ll be night soon, and we’re going to need every cop we’ve got.”

  “I told him that—”

  “I’ll go get Roger. Meet me at the station, Terry. Tell everyone you can reach to join us. Seven o’clock.”

  “Why?”

  Even with the world going to hell in a handbasket, Lila would not put that out over the air—but they were going to break into the evidence locker and have a nice little drug party—uppers only.

  “Just be there.”

  “I don’t think Roger will come.”

  “He will, even if I have to handcuff him.”

  She backed away from the drop she’d almost gone over and headed into town. She was using her lightbar, but still paused at every intersection. Because with everything that was happening, jackpot lights might not be enough. By the time she reached Richland Lane, where Roger and Jessica Elway lived, that damned little earworm was going through her head again: In Derby Town, in Derby Town, when your daddy’s got an itch . . .

  A Datsun trundled slowly across her path, ignoring both her flashing lights and the four-way stop at the intersection. On an ordinary day, she would have been on the careless son of a bitch like white on rice. If she hadn’t been fighting sleep, she might even have noticed the bumper sticker on the back deck—WHAT’S SO FUNNY ABOUT PEACE, LOVE, AND UNDERSTANDING—and identified it as belonging to Mrs. Ransom, who lived just up the street and a little way down from where all those unoccupied houses were. Had she been wide awake, she surely would have recognized the driver as her son and the passenger beside him as Mary Pak, the girl he was so crazy about.

  But it wasn’t an ordinary day, and she was far from wide awake, so she continued onward to the Elway house on Richland Lane, where she found herself in the next act of that day’s continuing nightmare.

  2

  Jared Norcross had an earworm of his own, but it had nothing to do with Derby Town, where the streets were made of glass. It was coincidence, serendipity, predestination, fate. Pick one or pick none, it was probably all the same to the universe. Coincidence, serendipity, predestination, fa—

  “You blew that stop sign,” Mary said, temporarily breaking the spell. “And I saw a cop.”

  “Don’t tell me that,” Jared said. He was upright behind the wheel, sweating, his speeding heart sending bolts of pain directly to his hurt knee. He could still flex the knee, which made him believe he hadn’t actually torn anything, just sprained it, but it was badly swollen and aching. The idea of getting bagged by a cop when he had no legal right to drive, at least not without a licensed driver beside him, was a nasty one. His mother had told him time and again that the worst thing for her, as sheriff, would be if he got picked up for anything illegal—anything, even so much as walking out of Fenton’s Newsstand with a candy bar he’d forgotten to pay for. “And believe me,” Lila’d said, “if it’s the worst thing for me, I’ll make it the worst thing for you.”

  Mrs. Ransom’s granddaughter, Molly, was perched on her knees in the backseat, looking out the rear window. “No problem,” she reported. “Five-oh went right across.”

  Jared relaxed a little, but he still couldn’t believe he was doing this. Less than half an hour ago he had been at home, waiting for the next word from one of his parents. Then he called Mary. Who started shouting at him before he could get three words beyond hello.

  “Where are you? I’ve been trying to get you for years!”

  “You have?” This might not be too bad. A girl didn’t shout like that unless she cared, did she? “My cell phone’s broken.”

  “Well, get over here! I need help!”

  “What do you need? What’s wrong?”

  “You know what’s wrong! Everything, if you’re a girl!” She caught her breath and brought it down a notch. “I need a ride to Shopwell. If my dad were here I’d ask him, but he’s in Boston for work, and he’s trying to get home, but that doesn’t do us any good right now.”

  Shopwell was the town’s big supermarket, but it was on the far side of town. He had adopted his most reasonable, adult voice. “Dooling Grocery is a lot closer to where you are, Mary. I know it doesn’t have the best selection—”

  “Will you listen?”

  He fell silent, scared by the controlled hysteria in her voice.

  “It has to be Shopwell because there’s this woman who works there in the produce section. A lot of the kids know abo
ut her. She sells . . . study aids.”

  “Are you talking about speed?”

  Silence.

  “Mary, that stuff is illegal.”

  “I don’t care! My mom’s okay for now, but my little sister’s only twelve, her bedtime’s at nine, and she’s usually a zombie even before then.”

  And there’s you, Jared had thought.

  “Plus there’s me. I don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want to go into a cocoon. I’m scared to fucking death.”

  “I get that,” Jared said.

  “Oh no you don’t. You’re a guy. No guy can understand.” She drew in a deep, wet breath. “Never mind. I don’t know why I waited to hear from you. I’ll call Eric.”

  “Don’t do that,” Jared said, panicked. “I’ll come and get you.”

  “You will? Really?” Oh God, the gratitude. It had weakened his knees.

  “Yes.”

  “Your parents won’t mind?”

  “No,” Jared said, which wasn’t precisely untrue. How could they mind if he never told them? They probably would have minded a lot, of course—even putting aside, you know, the world crisis—because Jared didn’t have a driver’s license. He would have had it if he hadn’t bumped a trashcan while trying to parallel park during his first test. Up to then, everything had been going fine.

  Had Jared given Mary the impression that he had actually passed the test? Well, only insofar as that Jared had told her he had. Dammit! The lie had seemed harmless at the time. It seemed so dorky to have failed the test. He was scheduled to take it again next month, and since he didn’t have his own car anyway, she’d never know. That had been his logic. Somehow Jared didn’t think driver’s license exams were going to be a priority in Dooling County for awhile. Or anywhere.

  “How long will it take you to get here?”

  “Fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most. Just wait for me.”

  It was only after he hung up that he realized how far ahead of himself he’d gotten. Not only did he have no driver’s license, he had no car. His father had taken the Prius to the prison, and his mom’s Toyota was parked behind the sheriff’s station. In terms of vehicles, the Norcross cupboard was bare. Either he had to borrow some wheels, or he had to call Mary back and tell her to let Eric drive her, after all. The former alternative seemed unlikely, but after all that had gone on this afternoon, the latter was unthinkable.

  That was when the doorbell had rung.

  Coincidence, serendipity, predestination, fate.

  3

  Mrs. Ransom had been hunched over a hospital cane and wearing a cruel-looking metal brace on her right leg. Seeing her thus made Jared, even in his current predicament, feel that he had been taking his own sprained knee far too seriously.

  “I saw you come home,” Mrs. Ransom said. “Jared, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jared, a boy who would have remembered his manners even on the sinking Titanic, held out his hand, scraped from his earlier run through the underbrush.

  Mrs. Ransom smiled and shook her head. “I better not. Arthritis. And you must excuse me if I skip the amenities, which I ordinarily would never do, but time is of the essence this evening, it seems. Young man, do you have a driver’s license?”

  Jared found himself remembering some movie where the suave villain had said, You can only hang me once. “Yes, but I don’t have a car.”

  “That is not a problem. I have one. It’s a Datsun, old but in excellent repair. I drive it seldom these days, because of my arthritis. Also, my leg brace makes it difficult to operate the pedals. I make my customers pick up from the house. They’re usually okay with that—oh, never mind. It’s not relevant, is it? Jared—I need a favor.”

  Jared was quite sure he knew what the requested favor was going to be.

  “I sleep badly these days under the best of circumstances, and since my granddaughter came to stay with me while my son and daughter-in-law work out their . . . their differences . . . I’ve hardly slept at all. I have gone in debt to sleep, you might say, and in spite of all my painful ailments, I believe that tonight that debt may be called in. Unless, that is . . .” She raised her cane so she could scratch the spot between her eyebrows. “Oh, this is hard. I am ordinarily a private person, a decorous person, not one to spill my problems on a complete stranger, but I saw you arrive home and I thought . . . I thought perhaps . . .”

  “You thought I might know someone, be able to get something that would help you stay awake a little while longer.” He spoke it as a statement, not a question, thinking coincidence, serendipity, predestination, fate.

  Mrs. Ransom’s eyes had widened. “Oh, no! Not at all! I know someone. At least I think I do. All I’ve ever purchased from her is marijuana—it helps my arthritis and my glaucoma—but I do believe she sells other things. And it isn’t just me. There’s Molly to think about. My granddaughter. She’s as lively as a flea right now, but by ten o’clock she’ll be—”

  “Getting soupy,” Jared said, thinking of Mary’s sister.

  “Yes. Will you help me? The woman’s name is Norma Bradshaw. She works at the Shopwell store, on the other side of town. In the produce section.”

  4

  Now here he was, driving to Shopwell on his permit with one traffic violation—a blown stop sign—already to his credit, and the lives of two people in his inexperienced hands. Mary he had been counting on; ten-year-old Molly Ransom not so much. She had already been sitting in the elderly Datsun’s backseat when Jared assisted her grandmother back to the house, and Mrs. Ransom insisted that he take the girl. Getting out of the house “would help keep the poor mite’s juices flowing.” The news reports said that there was unrest in the cities, but Mrs. Ransom wasn’t the least bit concerned about sending her granddaughter on an errand in little old Dooling.

  Jared was in no position to refuse an extra passenger. The car belonged to the old lady, after all, and if he refused in spite of that, it might raise that pertinent question again—he was a licensed driver, wasn’t he? Mrs. Ransom might let him go even if he admitted the truth, she was pretty desperate, but he didn’t want to take the risk.

  They were at last approaching the supermarket, thank God. Molly was sitting down again with her seatbelt fastened, but she had a motor mouth, and it was currently in high gear. So far Jared and Mary had learned that Molly’s best friend was Olive, and Olive could be a puke when she didn’t get her own way, it was like her superpower, except who would even want it, and Molly’s parents were seeing a marritch counselor, and Gram smoked special medicine because it helped her eyes and her arthritis, and she had a great big smoker thing with an American eagle on it, and usually smoking was bad, but it was different for Gram, although Molly wasn’t supposed to talk about that, because then people might think smoking that wasn’t okay—

  “Molly,” Mary said, “do you ever shut up?”

  “Usually just when I’m sleeping,” Molly said.

  “I don’t want you to go to sleep, but your thoughts are a little overwhelming. Also, you should stop breathing your grandmother’s pot smoke. It’s not good for you.”

  “Fine.” Molly folded her arms across her chest. “Can I just ask one thing, Miss Bossy Mary?”

  “I suppose,” Mary said. Her hair, usually pulled back smoothly and tied in a ponytail, was loose on her shoulders. Jared thought she looked beautiful.

  “Are you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?”

  Mary looked at Jared, and opened her mouth to say something. Before she could, he dared to take one hand off the wheel and point ahead at a huge parking lot bathed in a bowl of halogen light. It was crammed with cars.

  “Shopwell ahoy.”

  5

  “This is crazy,” Mary said.

  “Crazy-crazy,” Molly agreed.

  Jared parked on the grass at the far end of the Shopwell lot. That was probably another violation, but not one that would count for much when the lot itself was a demo derby. Cars sped recklessly up and down the few lanes that were
still clear, honking at shoppers who were wheeling full carts. As they surveyed the scene, two carts collided and the men pushing them started yelling at each other.

  “Maybe you better stay in the car, Molly.”

  “No way.” She seized Jared’s hand. “You’re not leaving me. Either of you. Please. My mother left me in a parking lot once and—”

  “Come on, then,” Mary said. She pointed to one of the middle lanes. “Let’s go that way. Less chance of getting run down.”

  The three of them weaved through a snarl of abandoned automobiles. They had just passed one of these orphans when a Dodge Ram pickup backed out of its space and struck it, driving it backward until there was enough room to escape. The Ram roared past them, its newly dented tailgate flapping like a loose jaw.

  Inside, Shopwell was pandemonium. Voices babbled. Voices roared. There were screams and the sound of breaking glass. Men were yelling. As they hung back beside the stacks of shopping baskets and the few remaining carts, a skinny man in a suit coat and tie went sprinting past, pushing a cart full of Red Bull, Blast-O Cola, and Monster Energy drinks. Chasing after him was a burly guy in jeans and a tee-shirt, stomping in motorcycle boots.

  “You can’t have all of those!” Motorcycle Boots shouted.

  “First come, first serve!” Suitcoat and Tie shouted back without turning. “First come, first ser—”

  He tried a hard right into Aisle 7 (Pet Food and Paper Products), but weight and momentum carried his overloaded cart into a display of dog cookies. They went flying. Motorcycle Boots was on the cart at once, grabbing six-packs of energy drink. When Suitcoat and Tie tried to reclaim his cart, Boots shoved him. Suitcoat went down.

  Jared looked at Mary. “Where’s Produce? I’ve never been in here before.”

  “Over there, I think.” She pointed to the left.

  He carried Molly on his back, stepping over Suitcoat, who was propped on one hand and rubbing his head with the other.

  “The guy was crazy,” he said to Jared. “All that over some energy drinks.”