by Stephen King
“Reed Barrows and Vern Rangle, yesterday. She and Jared are both gone. Place is empty.”
“The boy, too,” Frank said thoughtfully. “Babysitting her somewhere, maybe? Could have been the shrink’s idea. He ain’t dumb, I’ll give him that.”
Terry didn’t reply. Part of him thought having another nip was a bad idea, but part of him thought one more couldn’t hurt. He fished the flask out of his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and offered it to Frank first, which was only polite, since it was his.
Frank smiled and shook his head. “Not while I’m driving, amigo.”
Five minutes later, as they were passing the Olympia Diner (the sign out front no longer attempted to entice passersby with the promise of egg pie; now it read PRAY FOR OUR WOMEN), something the headshrinker had said over the intercom came to Frank. Since Hicks walked off on Friday morning, I’m the only administrative officer this prison’s got.
His big hands clamped down on the wheel, and the cruiser swerved. Terry, who had been dozing, snapped awake. “What?”
“Nothing,” Frank said.
Thinking about Hicks. Wondering what Hicks knew. Wondering what Hicks had seen. But for now, he would keep these questions to himself.
“Everything’s fine, Sheriff. Everything’s fine.”
6
What pissed Evie off about the video game were the blue stars. Multi-colored triangles, stars, and fiery orbs rained down the screen. You needed a string of four fiery orbs in order to explode one sparkling blue star. Other shapes flashed and disappeared if you linked up chains of them, but the sparkling blue stars were apparently made of some almost adamantine material that only the incendiary force of the fiery orbs could shatter. The name of the game was, for no rationale that Evie could grasp, Boom Town.
She was on Level 15, teetering on extinction. A pink star appeared, then a yellow triangle, and then—finally, thank fuck!—a fiery orb, which Evie tried to slide left to a stack of three fiery orbs that she’d already amassed alongside a blue star that was clogging up that area of her screen. But then came a green death-triangle, and that was all she wrote.
“SORRY! YOU DIED!” proclaimed a flashing message.
Evie groaned and flipped Hicks’s phone onto the far end of her cot. She wanted as much distance as possible between herself and the wicked thing. Eventually, of course, it was going to suck her back in. Evie had seen dinosaurs; she had looked down upon the great forests of America from the eyes of a passenger pigeon. She had surfed into Cleopatra’s sarcophagus atop a flume of desert sand and caressed the glorious queen’s dead face with beetle legs. A playwright, a clever Englishman, had written an amusing, if not entirely accurate, speech about Eve once. She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes / In shape no bigger than an agate-stone / On the fore-finger of an alderman, / Drawn with a team of little atomies / Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep . . .
As an enchanted being, she should be able to do better than Level 15 of Boom Town.
“You know, Jeanette, they say the natural world is cruel and stupid, but that little machine . . . that little machine is a very good argument in and of itself that technology is a lot worse. Technology is, I would say, the actual Boom Town.”
7
Jeanette was nearby, pacing the short A Wing corridor. She was now, it seemed, the head trustee. She was also the only trustee, but Jeanette had paid attention during the career counseling sessions about post-prison life—when composing your resume it was incumbent upon you to make the most of your achievements and to let the person who was doing the hiring decide what was and was not significant. The title was hers.
While the four remaining officers walked B and C wings and kept an eye on the prison’s perimeter, Dr. Norcross had asked if she would mind keeping an eye on the other two inmates whenever he had to step out.
“Sure,” said Jeanette. “I’m not busy. Seems like furniture shop got canceled.”
It was good to have work; it kept her mind occupied.
She shuffled forward. In front of her, the triple-plated, wire-gridded window in the west wall showed a gray morning. There was standing water on the running track and the fields looked marshy.
“I never liked video games,” Jeanette said. It had taken her awhile to construct her response to Evie. She had been awake for ninety-six hours.
“More proof of your excellent character, my dear,” Evie said.
Angel, in the neighboring cell, now entered the discussion. “Excellent character? Jeanette? Shee-yit. She kilt her fuckin husband, you know. Stabbed him. Didn’t even use a knife, like a normal person would. Done it with a screwdriver, ain’t that right, Jeanette?” Rapper Angel was gone; Redneck Angel was back. Jeanette figured she was too tired to make rhymes. That was good. On balance, Redneck Angel was less annoying and more (Jeanette struggled for the word) . . . more authentic.
“I do know that, Angel. And I give her credit for it.”
“Wish she’d let me kill you,” Angel said. “I think I’d get to your juggler with my teeth. I think I would.” She made a humming noise. “Know I would.”
“Would you like to have a turn with the phone, Angel? Jeanette, if I give you the phone through the tray slot, will you give it to Angel?” Evie’s tone was conciliatory.
There was talk that the beautiful woman in the soft cell was either a sorceress or a demon. Moths had poured from her mouth; Jeanette had seen them. Whatever Evie was, it seemed that she wasn’t immune to Angel’s taunts.
“I bet I could make you swallow that phone,” Angel said.
“Bet you couldn’t,” said Evie.
“Could.”
Jeanette stopped at the window in the wall, placed her hand against the glass, and let herself lean there. She didn’t want to fantasize about sleep, and couldn’t stop fantasizing about it.
Of course there were prisons even in sleep; Jeanette had on many occasions waited to be let out of a dream cell, as bored as all the times she waited in her actual life to be let out of her actual cell. But sleep was also a beach, and the waves cleaned it up every night, all the footprints and bonfires and sand castles and beer cans and scraps of trash; those cleansing waves washed most every trace into the depths. Sleep was also Bobby. He had met her in a forest that had grown over the ruins of the bad old world and everything was better.
Would Ree be in her sleep, her dreams? Damian was in there, so why not Ree? Or was the sleep that came with the cocoons dreamless?
Jeanette remembered, some days, waking up feeling so young and strong and healthy. “I’m ready to whip my weight in wildcats!” she sometimes told Bobby when he was just little. She couldn’t imagine feeling that way now, or ever again.
When he was a newborn, Bobby had given her some hard nights. “What do you want?” she would ask him. He just cried and cried. She imagined that he hadn’t actually known what he wanted, but hoped maybe his mother might, and fix it for him. That was the hurtful part of motherhood, not being able to fix what you couldn’t understand.
Jeanette wondered if she even could sleep now. What if she had broken her sleep-bone? Sleep-muscle? Sleep-tendon? Her eyes felt terribly dry. Her tongue felt like it was too big. Why didn’t she give in?
Simple. Because she didn’t want to.
She had given in to Damian and she had given in to drugs and her life had gone exactly the way everyone said it would go. She wasn’t giving in to this. This wasn’t going how they expected it to go.
She counted to sixty, got lost in the forties, returned to one and the second time made it up to a hundred. She shoots, she scores. Let’s go to the videotape! What was that guy’s name, the let’s-go-to-the-videotape guy? Dr. Norcross would remember.
Jeanette was facing the east wall, where the metal door of the shower gave on the delousing area. She walked toward the door, right-left, right-left. A man crouched on the floor, pinching buds into a cigarette paper. Behind her, Angel was explaining to Evie how she’d peel off her skin, how she’d dig out her eyes, fry t
hem up with some ramps and eat them, ramps’d flavor up any rotten morsel. And on from there, more bibble-babble, tone and accent, angry-angry-angry, country-country-country. At this point, unless Jeanette really focused, conversation—pretty much anything anyone said—was low volume radiogab. She kept expecting to hear an 800 number.
“You know, Angel, I don’t think I will be sharing my Boom Town video game with you, after all,” Evie said, and Jeanette went right-left, right-left, locking on the differently colored notices on the bulletin board by the Kwell dispenser, the words too bleary to read but knowing that they were lists of church services, AA meetings, crafts classes, and reminders of rules. On one piece of paper, a girl elf was dancing over the words I’M ON GOOD REPORT! Jeanette shuffled to a stop and flashed a look at the spot where the man had been squatting. There was no one.
“Hello? Hey! Where’d you go?”
“Jeanette? Are you all right?”
“Uh-huh.” Jeanette glanced back at Evie’s cell door. The strange woman stood at the bars. She wore a melancholy expression, a well-of-course expression, like you did when you had a hope that you knew wasn’t too realistic, and sure enough, life did what life did with unrealistic hopes. It was the face babies made after a cat scratched them and right before they cried.
“I just thought I—saw someone.”
“You’re beginning to hallucinate. That’s what happens when you don’t sleep. You should go to sleep, Jeanette. It’ll be safer for you if you’re asleep when the men come.”
Jeanette shook her head. “I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t. You’ll sleep, and then you’ll wake up somewhere else.” Evie’s face lit. “And you’ll be free.”
When it came to Evie, Jeanette couldn’t think straight. She seemed crazy, but not crazy like anyone else Jeanette had met in Dooling Correctional. Some insane people were so close to blowing up you could almost hear them tick. Angel was like that. Evie seemed like something else, and not just because of the moths; Evie seemed inspired.
“What do you know about free?”
“I know everything about free,” said Evie. “Shall I give you an example?”
“If you want.” Jeanette risked another look at the spot where the man had been sitting. No one was there. No one.
“You find creatures in the dark of the earth, far below the rubble of the mountaintops that the coal-men have chopped flat, eyeless creatures, that are freer than you have ever been. Because they live as they want to, Jeanette. They are fulfilled in their darkness. They are everything they want to be.” Evie repeated this last, emphasizing it. “They are everything they want to be.”
Jeanette pictured herself in a warm darkness far beneath the earth’s surface. Minerals glittered around her in constellations. She felt small and secure.
Something tickled her cheek. She opened her eyes, brushed at the strand of web that had started to curl up from her skin. She wobbled on her feet. She hadn’t even realized she’d closed her eyes. In front of her, not halfway across the room, was the wall—bulletin board, door to the shower, Kwell dispenser, cement blocks. Jeanette took a step, then another.
There was the man. He was back, now smoking the joint he had rolled. Jeanette wasn’t going to look at him. She wasn’t giving in. She was going to touch the wall, and then she was going to turn around and walk to the other wall, and she wasn’t giving in. Jeanette Sorley wasn’t ready to be enshrouded yet.
I can go awhile, she thought. I can go awhile. You just watch me.
8
All the regular cruisers were taken, so Don Peters and the kid he was partnered with scoured the grid of suburban streets just south of the high school in Don’s Dodge Ram. It had no official insignia, which was disappointing (Don planned to see about that later, maybe get some stick-on letters from the hardware store), but there was a battery-powered bubble light on the dashboard, revolving slowly, and he was wearing his prison officer’s uniform. The kid didn’t have any kind of uniform, of course, just a plain blue shirt with a badge on it, but the Glock on his hip carried all the additional authority he needed.
Eric Blass was only seventeen, technically four years too young to be in law enforcement. Don thought the kid had the right stuff, though. He’d been a Life Scout with a merit badge in target shooting before giving up the Scouting program the year before. (“Too many pussies,” Blass had said, to which Don replied, “Copy that, Junior.”) Besides, the kid was funny. He had invented a game to speed the hours. It was called Zombie Chicks. Don had the left side of the street, since he was driving; Eric had the right. It was five points for old chicks, ten points for middle-aged chicks, fifteen points for kiddie chicks (hardly any of those left by Saturday, none at all today), and twenty points for hotties. Blass was currently up, eighty to fifty-five, only as they turned onto St. George Street, that was about to change.
“Hottie on the left at two o’clock,” Don said. “That puts me up to seventy-five. Closing in on you, Junior.”
The kid, riding shotgun, leaned forward to scrutinize the youngish woman stumbling along the sidewalk in spandex shorts and a sports bra. Her head was down, her sweaty hair swinging back and forth in clumps. Maybe she was trying to run, but the best she could manage was a half-assed, weaving jog.
“Saggy tits and saggy ass,” Eric said. “If that’s what you call a hottie, I pity you.”
“Oh, jeez, pack your bags, we’re goin on a guilt trip.” Don cackled. “Fine, since we can’t see the face, how about I call it fifteen?”
“Works for me,” Eric said. “Give her a honk.”
As they rolled slowly by the staggering woman, Don laid on the horn. The woman’s head jerked up (the face was not too bad, actually, except for the big purple circles under her hollowed-out eyes), and she stumbled. Her left foot caught on her right ankle and she sprawled on the pavement.
“She’s down!” Eric yelled. “Chick goes down!” He craned to look over his shoulder. “But wait, she’s getting up! Not even waiting for the eight-count!” He began to toot the Rocky theme through flapping lips.
Don glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the woman rising shakily to her feet. Her knees were scraped, and blood was trickling down her shins. He thought she might give them the finger—the teenager they’d blasted shortly after their shift began had done that—but the zombie chick didn’t even look around, just went staggering off toward downtown.
Don said, “Did you see the look on her face?”
“Priceless,” Eric said, and raised his palm.
Don high-fived him.
They had a list of streets to be canvased, tucked into a notebook where they wrote down the addresses of houses containing sleeping women, plus their names and some form of ID. If the houses were locked, they were allowed to break in, which was fun at first. Don enjoyed washing his hands with different kinds of soap in different kinds of bathrooms, and the variety of styles and colors of panties in the underwear drawers of the women of Dooling was a subject that had long called for his study. Cheap thrills wore out, though. It wasn’t real action. Without an ass to fill them out, panties got old fast. When you came right down to it, he and Junior were little more than census-takers.
“This is Ellendale Street, right?” Don said, as he pulled the Ram to a curb.
“Roger that, El Commandante. All three blocks of it.”
“Well, let’s get walking, partner. Check out some bitch-bags and write down some names.” But before Don could open the driver’s side door, Eric grabbed his arm. The newbie was looking toward a patch of waste ground between Ellendale and the high school.
“You want to have some fun, boss?”
“Always up for fun,” Don said. “It’s my middle name. What have you got in mind?”
“You burned one yet?”
“A cocoon? No.” Don had seen footage on the news, though, a cell phone video of a couple of guys in hockey masks putting a match to one. The news called guys like that “Blowtorch Brigades.” The cocoon in th
e video had gone up like a campfire wetted down with gasoline. Whoosh!
“Have you?”
“Nope,” Eric said, “but I heard they, you know, really burn like crazy.”
“What are you thinking?”
“There’s an old homeless babe who lives over there.” Eric pointed. “If you want to call that living, that is. No good to herself or anyone else. We could give her a hotfoot. Just to see what it’s like, you know. It’s not like anybody would miss her.” Eric suddenly looked uneasy. “Of course, if you don’t want to . . .”
“I don’t know if I do or not,” Don said. This was a lie. He wanted to, all right. Just thinking about it had gotten him a little horny. “Let’s check her out, then decide. We can do Ellendale later.”
They got out of the truck and headed for the weed-choked acre of ground where Old Essie kept her den. Don had a Zippo lighter. He took it from his pocket and began to click it open and shut, open and shut.
CHAPTER 2
1
The women started out just calling it “the new place,” because it wasn’t really Dooling anymore—not the Dooling they’d known, at least. Later, as they began to realize they might be here for the long haul, it became Our Place.
The name stuck.
2
The meat tasted strongly of the lighter fluid it took to ignite the ancient charcoal from Mrs. Ransom’s basement, but they ate the entire shank that Lila had hacked from the body of the bobcat she’d shot with her service revolver and dragged out of the fetid swimming pool.
“We are sick puppies,” said Molly on that first night, licking the grease from her fingers and grabbing another chunk. Being a sick puppy didn’t seem to sit too badly with her.
“Got that right, m’darlin,” her grandmother said, “but I’m damned if this isn’t half-decent eatin. Grab me another piece, Missus Sheriff.”