by Stephen King
Alexander Peter Bayer yawned.
“Sorry, Lila. He doesn’t talk to cops.” Tiffany had sidled up beside her in the corner of the living room.
“That so?”
“We teach em young around here,” Tiffany said.
Since their adventure they’d become odd friends. Lila liked how Tiffany rode around town on her horses, wearing her white cowboy hat, insisting that children come over and stroke the animals’ necks, and see how soft and warm they were.
2
One day, with nothing better to do, Lila and Tiffany searched the Dooling YMCA, not knowing exactly what they were looking for, only knowing it was one of the few places that hadn’t been investigated. They found plenty of stuff, some of it interesting, but nothing they really needed. There was toilet paper, but supplies of that in the Shopwell were still plentiful. There were also cartons of liquid soap, but over the years it had hardened into pink bricks. The pool had dried up; nothing remained but a faint, astringent odor of chlorine.
The men’s locker room was damp and dank; luxuriant growths of mold—green, black, yellow—spanned the walls. A varmint’s mummified corpse lay at the far end of the room, its legs stiff in the air, its face frozen in a savage death-gape, lips stretched away from rows of sharp teeth. Lila and Tiffany stood for a moment in silent contemplation of the first urinal in a row of six.
“Perfectly preserved,” said Lila.
Tiffany gave her a quizzical look. “That?” Pointing at the varmint.
“No. This.” Lila patted the top of the urinal, her wedding ring clicking against the porcelain. “We’ll want it for our museum. We can call it the Museum of Lost Men.”
“Ha,” Tiffany said. “Tell you what, this is a scary fuckin place. And believe me, that is sayin something because I have toured some real dungeons. I mean, I could write you a guidebook of the sweaty, drafty, fucked-up meth caves of Appalachia, but this is truly unpleasant. I knew men’s locker rooms were creepy places, but this is worse than I could ever have imagined.”
“It was probably better before it got old,” Lila said . . . but she wondered.
They used hammers and chisels to break the combination locks off the lockers. Lila found stopped watches, wallets full of useless green paper and useless plastic rectangles, dead smart phones thus rendered stupid, key rings, moth-eaten trousers, and a caved-in basketball. Tiffany’s haul wasn’t much better: an almost full box of Tic Tacs and a faded photograph of a bald man with a hairy chest standing on a beach with his little laughing daughter perched on his shoulders.
“Florida, I bet,” Tiffany said. “That’s where they go if they got the scratch.”
“Probably.” The photo made Lila think of her own son, which she increasingly felt was counterproductive—not that she could keep from doing it. Mary had filled her in on Clint, stalling to keep the officers at the prison, and Jared, hiding their bodies (our other bodies, she thought) in the attic of the show house up the street. Would she hear any more about either of them? A couple of other women had appeared since Mary, but none of them knew anything about her two guys, and why would they? Jared and Clint were on a spaceship and the spaceship was getting farther and farther away, so many light years, and eventually they’d slip from the galaxy entirely and that would be the end. Finito. When should she begin to mourn them? Had she already started?
“Aw,” said Tiffany. “Don’t.”
“What?”
But Tiffany had read her face somehow, seen right through to the hopelessness and the muddle. “Don’t let it get you.” Lila returned the photo to its locker and shut the door.
In the gymnasium upstairs, Tiffany challenged her to a game of H-O-R-S-E. The prize was the almost full box of Tic Tacs. They pumped up the basketball. Neither of them had any talent for the game. Clint’s daughter who had turned out to not be his daughter would have dispatched them both with ease. Tiffany shot everything granny-style, underhanded, which Lila found annoyingly girly but also cute. When she had her coat off, you could see her pregnant stomach protrude, a bulb at Tiffany’s waist.
“Why Dooling? Why us? Those are the questions, wouldn’t you say?” Lila trotted after the basketball. Tiffany had shot it into the dusty bleachers to the right of the court. “I’ve got a theory.”
“You do? Let’s have it.”
Lila hurled the basketball from the bleachers. It missed the basket by a couple of car lengths and bounced into the second row of the opposite set of bleachers.
“That was pathetic,” Tiffany said.
“You’re one to talk.”
“I’ll admit that.”
“We’ve got a couple of doctors and a few nurses. We’ve got a veterinarian. We’ve got a bunch of teachers. Kayleigh knew her way around a circuit, and although she’s gone, Magda isn’t bad. We’ve got a carpenter. We’ve got a couple of musicians. We’ve got a sociologist who’s already writing a book about the new society.”
“Yeah, and when it’s done, Molly can print it with her berry-juice ink.” Tiffany snickered.
“We’ve got that retired engineering professor from the university. We’ve got seamstresses and gardeners and cooks out the ying-yang. The book club ladies are running an encounter group so women can talk about the stuff they miss, and get out some of the sadness and grief. We’ve even got a horse whisperer. See?”
Tiffany retrieved the basketball. “See what?”
“We’re all we need,” Lila said. She had descended from the bleachers and stood with her arms crossed at the baseline of the court. “That’s why we were chosen. Every basic skill we need to survive is here.”
“Okay. Maybe. Could be. Sounds about right to me.” Tiffany took off her cowboy hat and fanned herself with it. She was plainly amused. “You are such a cop. Solving the mysteries.”
Lila wasn’t done, though. “So how do we keep things going? We’ve already got our first baby. And how many pregnant women are there? A dozen? Eight?”
“Could be as many as ten. That enough to jump-start a new world, you think, when half of em’s apt to be girls?”
“I don’t know.” Lila was riffing now, her face feeling hot as ideas came to her, “But it’s a start, and I bet you there’s cold storage facilities with generators that were programmed to run and run and are still running. You’d have to go to a city to find one, I’d guess, but I bet you could. And there would be frozen sperm samples there. And that would be enough to get a world—a new world—going.”
Tiffany stuck her hat on the back of her head and thumped the basketball off the floor a couple of times. “New world, huh?”
“She could have planned it this way. The woman. Eve. So we could start over again without men, at least at the beginning,” Lila said.
“Garden of Eden with no Adam, huh? Okay, Sheriff, let me ask you a question.”
“Sure.”
“Is it a good plan? What that woman’s set up for us?”
A fair question, Lila thought. The inhabitants of Our Place had discussed Eve Black endlessly; the rumors that had started in the old world had been carried into the new world; it was a rare Meeting when her name (if it was her name) did not come up. She was an extension, and a possible answer to the original questions, the great How and Why of their situation. They discussed the likelihood that she was something more than a woman—more than human—and there was increasing unity in the belief that she was the source of everything that had happened.
On the one hand, Lila mourned the lives that had been lost—Millie, Nell, Kayleigh, Jessica Elway before them, and how many others—as well as the histories and existences from which those that still lived had been separated. Their men and boys were gone. Yet most—Lila definitely among them—could not deny the renewal before them: Tiffany Jones with full cheeks and clean hair and a second heartbeat. In the old world, there were men who had hurt Tiff, and badly. In the old world, there were men who burned women, thus incinerating them in both realities. Blowtorch Brigades, Mary said they were being call
ed. There were bad women and there were bad men; if anyone could claim the right to make that statement, Lila, who had arrested plenty of both, felt that she could. But men fought more; they killed more. That was one way in which the sexes had never been equal; they were not equally dangerous.
So, yes, Lila thought it was probably a good plan. Merciless, but very good. A world re-started by women had a chance to be safer and fairer. And yet . . .
“I don’t know.” Lila couldn’t say that an existence without her son was better. She could conceptualize the idea, but she couldn’t articulate it without feeling like a traitor to both Jared and to her old life.
Tiffany nodded. “How about this, then: can you shoot backwards?” She turned away from the basket, bent her knees low, and flipped the ball over her head. It went up, caromed off the corner of the square, caught the rim—and fell off, bounce, bounce, bounce, so close.
3
An ocher gush belched from the tap. A pipe clanked loudly against another pipe. The brownish flow sputtered, stopped, and then, hallelujah, clean water began to pour into the sink.
“Well,” said Magda Dubcek to the small assembly around the work-sink set against the wall of the water treatment plant. “Dere it is.”
“Incredible,” said Janice Coates.
“Nah. Pressure, gravity, not so complex. We be careful, turn on one neighborhood each at a time. Slow but steady win the race.”
Lila, thinking of the ancient note from Magda’s son Anton, undoubtedly a dope and a cocksman, but pretty damn sharp about the ways of water in his own right, abruptly hugged the old lady.
“Oh,” said Magda, “all right. Thanks.”
The water echoed in the long room of the Dooling County Water District plant, hushing them all. In silence, the women took turns passing their hands though the fresh stream.
4
One of the things everyone missed was the ability to just jump in a car and drive somewhere, instead of walking and getting blisters. The cars were still there, some in pretty good shape from being parked in garages, and at least some of the batteries they found in storage still held juice. The real problem was gasoline. Every drop had oxidized during the in-between period.
“We’ll have to refine some,” the retired engineering professor explained at a committee meeting. Not more than a hundred and fifty miles distant, in Kentucky, there were storage wells and refineries that might be re-started with work and luck. They immediately began to plan another journey; they assigned tasks and selected volunteers. Lila scanned the women in the room for signs of misgivings. There were none. Among the faces, she took special note of Celia Frode, the only survivor of the exploration party. Celia nodded along with the rest of them. “Put me on that list,” Celia said. “I’ll go. Feel a need to put on my rambling shoes.”
It would be risky, but they would be more careful this time. And they would not flinch.
5
When they got to the second floor of the demo house, Tiffany announced that she wasn’t climbing the ladder to the attic. “I’ll wait here.”
“If you’re not coming up, why’d you come at all?” Lila asked. “You’re not that pregnant.”
“I was hoping you’d give me some of your Tic Tacs, ringer. And I’m plenty pregnant enough, believe me.” Lila had won H-O-R-S-E and the mints.
“Here.” She tossed the box to Tiffany, and climbed up the ladder.
The Pine Hills show house had, ironically, proved to be better constructed than almost every other structure on Tremaine, including Lila’s own. Although dim—small windows smudged by the passage of seasons—the attic was dry. Lila paced the space, her footfalls drawing puffs of dust from the floor. Mary had said that this was the one where she and Lila and Mrs. Ransom were, back there, wherever back there was. She wanted to feel herself, to feel her son.
She didn’t feel anything.
At one end of the attic, a moth was batting against one of the dirty windows. Lila walked over to release it. The window was stuck. Lila heard creaking as, behind her, Tiffany climbed the ladder. She moved Lila aside, took out a pocket knife, worked the point around the edges, and the window went up. The moth escaped and flew away.
Below, there was snow on the overgrown lawns, on the busted-up street, on her dead cruiser in Mrs. Ransom’s driveway. Tiffany’s horses were poking their noses around, nickering about whatever it was that horses nickered about, switching their tails. Lila could see past her own house, past the pool that she had never wanted and that Anton had tended, and past the elm tree that he had left her the note about. An orange animal trotted from the shadowy edge of the pine woods that backed the neighborhood. It was a fox. Even at this distance the luster of its winter coat was evident. How had it got to be winter so soon?
Tiffany stood in the middle of the attic. It was dry, but also cold, especially with the window open. She held out the box of Tic Tacs for Lila to take back. “I wanted to eat them all, but it would’ve been wrong. I’ve given up my life of crime.”
Lila smiled and put them back in her own pocket. “I declare you rehabilitated.”
The women stood about a foot apart, looking at each other, breathing steam. Tiffany pulled off her hat and dropped it on the floor.
“If you think that’s a joke, it’s not. I don’t wanna take anything from you, Lila. I don’t wanna take anything from anybody.”
“What do you want?” asked Lila.
“My very own life. Baby and a place and stuff. People that love me.”
Lila closed her eyes. She’d had all those things. She couldn’t feel Jared, couldn’t feel Clint, but she could remember them, could remember her very own life. It hurt, those memories. They made shapes in the snow, like the angels they’d made as children, but those shapes became fuzzier every day. God, she was lonesome.
“That’s not so much,” Lila said, and reopened her eyes.
“It seems like a lot to me.” Tiffany reached out and drew Lila’s face to hers.
6
The fox trotted away from the Pine Hills development, across Tremaine Street, and into the thick stands of winter wheat that had grown up on the far side. He was hunting for the smell of hibernating ground squirrels. The fox loved ground squirrels—Crunchy! Juicy!—and on this side of the Tree, unbothered for so long by human habitation, they had grown careless.
After a half hour’s search he discovered a little family of them in a dug-out chamber. They never awoke, even as he was crushing them between his teeth. “So tasty!” he said to himself.
The fox went on, entering the deep woods, making for the Tree. He paused briefly to explore an abandoned house. He pissed on a pile of books scattered on the floor and nosed fruitlessly around in a closet full of rotting linens. In the kitchen of the house there was food in the refrigerator that smelled deliciously spoiled, but his attempts to bump the door ajar accomplished nothing.
“Let me in there,” the fox demanded of the fridge, just in case it was only pretending to be a dead thing.
The fridge loomed, unresponsive.
A copperhead slid out from under the woodstove on the far side of the kitchen. “Why are you glowing?” it asked the fox. Other animals had commented on this phenomenon and were wary of it. The fox saw it himself when he looked into still water and saw his reflection. A gold light clung to him. It was Her mark.
“I’ve had some good fortune,” the fox said.
The copperhead wriggled its tongue at him. “Come here. Let me bite you.”
The fox ran from the cabin. Various birds heckled him as he loped beneath the canopy of gnarled and tangled bare branches, but their petty jibes meant nothing to the fox, whose belly was full and whose coat was thick as a bear’s.
When he emerged into the clearing, the Tree was there, the centerpiece of a leafy, steaming oasis in the fields of snow. His paws crossed over from the cold ground to the rich, warm summer loam that was the Tree’s forever bed. The Tree’s branches were layered and blended in countless greens and beside
the passage in the bole, the white tiger, flicking its great tail, watched him approach with sleepy eyes.
“Don’t mind me,” said the fox, “just passing through.” He darted by, into the black hole, and out the opposite side.
CHAPTER 7
1
Don Peters and Eric Blass had yet to be relieved at the West Lavin roadblock when a banged-up Mercedes SL600 came trundling toward them from the prison. Don was standing in the weeds, shaking off after a leak. He zipped up in a hurry and returned to the pickup that served as their cruiser. Eric was standing in the road with his gun drawn.
“Stow the cannon, Junior,” Don said, and Eric holstered his Glock.
The driver of the Mercedes, a curly-haired man with a florid face, pulled to an obedient stop when Don raised his hand. Sitting beside him was a good-looking woman. Make that astoundingly good-looking, especially after all the zombie chicks he and Eric had seen the last few days. Also, she was familiar.
“License and registration,” Don said. He had no orders to look at drivers’ IDs, but it was what cops said when they made a stop. Watch this, Junior, he thought. See how a man does it.
The driver handed over his license; the woman rooted around in the glove compartment and found the registration. The man was Garth Flickinger, MD. From Dooling, with a listed residence in the town’s fanciest neighborhood, over on Briar.
“Mind telling me what you were doing up at the prison?”
“That was my idea, Officer,” the woman said. God, she was good-looking. No bags under this bitch’s eyes. Don wondered what she’d been taking to keep her so bushy-tailed. “I’m Michaela Morgan. From NewsAmerica?”
Eric exclaimed, “I knew I recognized you!”
It meant jack shit to Don, who didn’t watch network news, let alone the blah-blah crap they put out 24/7 on the cable, but he remembered where he’d seen her. “Right! The Squeaky Wheel. You were drinking there!”