by Stephen King
“Sounds like someone at the station’s got a full diaper,” Rangle observed cheerfully, moving thoughtlessly along with the lawyer’s guidance. “Where we going?”
Where they were going was away from the RV so that, one, Rangle didn’t see Willy Burke sliding into the driver’s seat and, two, to give the Fleetwood room to go forward without running anyone over. Barry couldn’t tell the officer that, though. A concept that he had endeavored to impress upon his girls was that the law was impersonal; it wasn’t about your feelings, it was about your argument. If you could partition yourself off from personal preference entirely, that was for the best. You wanted, really, to remove your skin, and assume the skin of your client, while at the same time hanging onto your brain.
(Gerda, who had been asked on a date by a high school boy—just a sophomore, but still much too old for her—had recently tried to get her father to take her on as a pro bono client to argue to her mother that she was old enough to go to the movies with the guy. This had been exceptionally clever of Gerda, but Barry had recused himself on the grounds of their familial relationship. Also because, as her father, he had no intention of letting her go anywhere with a boy who was almost fifteen and probably got hard every time the wind blew. If Cary Benson wanted to spend time with her that badly, he’d said, then Cary could buy her an ice cream sundae at the Dairy Treet right here in town. And in broad daylight.)
What Barry had chosen not to express to Gerda was the sticky provision of the utterly culpable. Sometimes you pulled on your client’s skin only to find that they—you—were astoundingly, hopelessly, no-way-to-even-pretend guilty as original sin. When this situation arose, the only sensible tactic was to distract and disrupt, litigate minutiae, gum up the wheels and delay. With luck, you might wear the opposition down until they offered you an advantageous deal just to be rid of you, or better yet, irritate or flummox them into screwing up their case altogether.
With that in mind, he improvised with the most dumbfounding question he could come up with on short notice:
“Listen, Vern. Wanted to take you aside and ask you something.”
“Okay . . .”
Barry leaned forward confidentially. “Are you circumcised?”
Rain sprinkles dotted the surface of Vern Rangle’s glasses, obscuring his eyes. Barry heard the engine of the RV turn over, heard the clunk as Willy put it into drive, but the cop paid no mind. The circumcision question had put him in mental vapor lock.
“Gee, Mr. Holden . . .” Vern absently shook out a handkerchief and began to refold it. “. . . kinda personal, you know.”
Behind them there was a thud and the whinge of metal grinding against metal.
Meanwhile, Reed Barrows had scooted into the driver’s side of the cruiser to take Terry’s call, but the mic slipped out of his damp hand. The seconds that elapsed while he bent to retrieve it from the footwell and untangle the cord were important because that got Willy Burke settled in driving mode.
“Roger, this is Unit Three. Barrows speaking, over,” Reed said once he had the mic again.
Out the window, he saw the RV swerving around the front of the cruiser to the gravel shoulder and grassy embankment on the southbound half of the road. This vision didn’t alarm Reed; it perplexed him. Why was Barry Holden moving his RV? Or was Vern moving it so someone else could get by? That didn’t make sense. They needed to sort out the shyster and his Fleetwood before they dealt with anyone else who wanted to drive through.
Terry Coombs’s voice blared over the radio. “Arrest Barry Holden and confiscate his vehicle! He’s got a pile of stolen guns and he’s headed for the prison! You hear me—”
The front end of the RV bumped the front end of the cruiser, the mic jumped out of Reed’s hand a second time, and his view through the windshield swung away as if on hinges.
“Hey!”
2
In the back of the RV, Jared lost his balance. He fell off the couch and onto the guns. “You okay?” Garth asked. The doctor had kept his feet by pressing his back against the counter of the kitchenette and grabbing the sink.
“Yeah.”
“Thanks for asking about me!” Michaela had managed to stay on the couch, but she’d fallen over onto her side.
Garth realized that he adored Mickey. She had sand, as the old timers liked to say. He wouldn’t change a thing about her. Her nose and everything else was as close to flawless as you could get. “I didn’t have to, Mickey,” he replied. “I know you’re okay because you’ll always be okay.”
3
The RV rolled slowly along, hugging the sloping roadside at a tilted angle and doing about fifteen miles an hour, shoving the cruiser aside. Metal squalled against metal. Vern gaped and spun to Barry. The lawyer had pissed right down his leg. Vern therefore slugged Barry in the eye and dumped him flat on his rear end.
“Stop the RV!” bellowed Reed from the open door of the shifting cruiser. “Shoot the tires!”
Vern drew his service weapon.
The RV broke loose from the cruiser and began to pick up speed. It was at a two o’clock angle as it moved off the shoulder, now headed back for the center of the road. Vern, aiming for the right rear tire, triggered too quickly. His shot went way high, puncturing a piece of the RV’s wall. The vehicle was about fifty yards distant. Once it gained the road, it would be gone. Vern took a moment to reset and aimed again, properly, focusing again on the rear right tire . . . and fired into the air as Barry Holden tackled him to the ground.
4
Jared, on the floor, his back poked in half a dozen places by gunsights and gun barrels, was deafened by the blast. He could somehow feel the screaming around him—the woman, Michaela? Flickinger?—but he couldn’t hear it. His eyes found a hole in the wall: the bullet had made an opening like a burst firecracker top. His hands, flat on the floor of the RV, felt the wheels moving below, gaining speed, thrumming on the hardtop.
Flickinger still had his feet. He was braced at the kitchen counter. Nope, it wasn’t Flickinger who was screaming.
Jared looked where the doctor was looking.
The cocooned figures lay on the couch. A bloody cavity had opened at the sternum of the third in the row, the oldest of the girls, Gerda. She stood up from the couch, and staggered forward. She was the one that was screaming. Jared saw that she was moving at Michaela, who was huddled at the end of the parallel couch. The girl’s arms were raised, torn loose from the webbing that had held them fast to her torso, and the impression of the open, howling mouth under the material was vivid. Moths spilled from the hole in her sternum.
Flickinger caught Gerda. She spun, and her hands clawed at his throat as they wobbled in a circle, and went tripping over the guns on the floor. The two bodies crashed against the rear door. The latch snapped, the door flew open, and they fell out, followed by a rush of moths, and a stream of guns and bullets.
5
Evie moaned.
“What?” Angel asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh,” Evie said. “Nothing.”
“Liar,” Jeanette said. She was still slumped in the shower alcove. Angel had to hand it to Jeanette: she was almost as stubborn as Angel herself.
“That’s the sound you make when people die.” Jeanette inhaled. She cocked her head and addressed an invisible person. “That’s the sound she makes when people die, Damian.”
“I guess that’s true, Jeanette,” Evie said. “I guess I do that.”
“That’s what I said. Didn’t I, Damian?”
“You’re seein shit, Jeanette,” Angel said.
Jeanette’s gaze stayed on the empty air. “Moths came from her mouth, Angel. She’s got moths in her. Now let me alone—I’m trying to have a conversation with my husband.”
Evie excused herself. “I need to make a call.”
6
Reed heard Vern’s shot as he hurled himself over the police cruiser’s console and jerked open the passenger door. He glimpsed the rear end of the RV as it lumbered over bey
ond the slope, its back door flapping back and forth.
Two bodies lay in the road. Reed unholstered his service weapon and ran toward them. Past the bodies there was a trail of three or four assault rifles and a few handfuls of ammunition scattered among them.
When he reached the bodies, he stopped. Blood and gray matter painted the pavement around the skull of the prone man who was nearest. Reed had seen his share of corpses, but the mess here was notable, maybe a prize-winner. In the course of his fall, the guy’s glasses had flipped up to rest on the fringe of his curly hair. The arrangement of the glasses gave him a perversely warm and casual look, a teacherly aspect, as he lay dead in the road with his brains splattered on the asphalt.
A few steps further on, a female was sprawled on her side in the position that Reed himself often adopted when he was on the couch watching television. Her mask of webbing had been scraped away by contact with the road, and the skin that remained was tattered. From what was left of the face and of her body, Reed could determine that she was young, but not much more than that. A bullet had torn a large wound in her chest. The girl’s blood flowed onto the damp pavement.
Sneakers slapped against the pavement behind Reed. “Gerda!” someone screamed. “Gerda!”
Reed turned and Barry Holden rushed past him, falling to his knees by the body of his daughter.
Vern Rangle, nose bloodied, staggered up the road after Holden, bellowing that he’d circumcise him, the fucker.
What a hill of shit: a smeared guy, a dead girl, a howling attorney, Vern Rangle with his blood up, guns and ammo in the road. Reed was relieved that Lila Norcross was not currently serving as sheriff because he would not have wanted to even begin to attempt to explain to her how it had happened.
Reed grabbed for Vern a second too late, catching just a piece of fabric at his shoulder. Vern shook him off and swatted the butt end of his pistol across the back of Barry Holden’s head. There was an ugly cracking noise, like a breaking branch, and a gout of blood. Barry Holden tumbled face-first onto the ground beside his daughter. Vern squatted beside the unconscious lawyer and began to hit him again and again with the butt of his gun. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! You broke my nose, you b—”
The young woman who should have been dead and wasn’t grasped Vern’s jaw, wrapped her fingers over his lower teeth, and jerked him down to her level. Her head lifted and her mouth snapped wide and she buried her teeth in Vern’s throat. Reed’s partner began to whack at her with the pistol butt. It didn’t faze her. Arterial blood pumped out around her lips.
Reed remembered his own weapon. He raised it and shot. The bullet entered through the young woman’s eye and her body went loose, but her mouth remained locked on Vern’s throat. She appeared to be drinking his blood.
On his knees, Reed dug his fingers into the hot and slippery mess where the young woman’s teeth were clamped to his partner’s throat. He hauled and pulled, feeling tongue and enamel. Vern swung at her once more, ineffectually, his gun flying from his relaxing hand and bouncing away. Then he collapsed.
7
Last in a three-cruiser caravan, Frank drove alone. Everyone had their sirens going. Ordway and Terry were at the fore, followed by Peters and Peters’s sidekick, Blass. Aloneness was not something that Frank sought, but it seemed to find him. Why was that? Elaine had taken Nana and left him alone. Oscar Silver had gone off the road and left him alone. It was grim. It had made him grim. Maybe that was how it had to be, though—how he had to be—to do what he had to do.
But could he do what he had to do? Things were going wrong. Reed Barrows had radioed that shots had been fired and there was an officer down. Frank believed he was ready to kill for his daughter; he was certain that he was ready to die for her. What occurred to him now, though, was that he was not the only one who was willing to take mortal risks. Norcross’s people had stolen police armaments and broken through a barricade. Whatever their reasons, they were determined. It worried Frank that they should be so determined, that their reasons should be such an enigma. What was driving them? What was it between Eve Black and Norcross?
His cell phone rang. The caravan was speeding north on Ball’s Hill. Frank pulled the phone from his pocket. “Geary.”
“Frank, this is Eve Black.” She spoke a shade above a whisper, and her voice had a husky, flirty quality.
“It is, is it? Nice to meet you.”
“I’m calling you from my new cell phone. I didn’t have one, so Lore Hicks gifted me his. Wasn’t that chivalrous of him? By the way, you might as well slow down. No need to risk an accident. The RV got away. There’s just four dead people and Reed Barrows.”
“How do you know that?”
“Trust me, I know. Clint was surprised it was so easy to pull off the heist. I was, too, to be honest. We had a good laugh. I thought you were a little more on top of things. My mistake.”
“You should give yourself up, Ms. Black.” Frank concentrated on measuring his words. On keeping the redness that wanted to overtake his mind at bay. “Or you should give this—thing up. Whatever it is. You should do that before anyone gets hurt.”
“Oh, we’re pretty well past the getting-hurt stage. Judge Silver, for instance, got a lot more than hurt. As did Dr. Flickinger, who actually wasn’t such a bad fellow when his head was clear. We’re in the mass extinction stage.”
Frank choked the wheel of the cruiser. “What the fuck are you?”
“I could ask you the same question, but I know what you’d say: ‘I am the Good Father.’ Because with you it’s all Nana-Nana-Nana, isn’t it? The protective daddy. Have you thought even once about all the other women, and what you might be doing to them? What you might be putting at risk?”
“How do you know about my daughter?”
“It’s my business to know. There’s an old blues song that goes, ‘Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself.’ You need to widen your perspective, Frank.”
What I need, Frank Geary thought, is my hands around your throat. “What do you want?”
“I want you to man up! I want you to man the fuck up and make this interesting! I want your precious Nana to be able to go to school and say, ‘My daddy isn’t just a civil servant who catches feral cats, and he isn’t just a guy who punches walls or pulls on my favorite shirt or yells at Mom when things aren’t going his way. He’s also the man who stopped that wicked old fairy who put all the women to sleep.’ ”
“Leave my daughter out of it, you bitch.”
The teasing note evaporated from her voice. “When you protected her at the hospital, that was brave. I admired it. I admired you. I truly did. I know you love her, and that’s no small thing. I know, in your way, all you want is the best for her. And that makes me love you a tiny bit, even though you’re part of the problem.”
Ahead, the first two vehicles were pulling to a stop beside Reed Barrows’s dented cruiser. Frank could see Barrows walking to meet them. Further on, he could see the bodies in the road.
“Stop this,” said Frank. “Let them go. Let the women go. Not just my wife and daughter, all of them.”
Evie said, “You’ll have to kill me first.”
8
Angel asked who was this Frank that Evie had been talking to.
“He’s the dragonslayer,” Evie said. “I just needed to make sure that he wasn’t going to allow himself to be distracted by unicorns.”
“You are so fuckin crazy.” Angel whistled.
Evie wasn’t, but it wasn’t an issue to debate with Angel—who, anyway, was entitled to her opinion.
CHAPTER 9
1
The fox comes to Lila in a dream. She knows it’s a dream because the fox can talk.
“Hey, babe,” he says as he pads into the bedroom of the house on St. George Street she’s now sharing with Tiffany, Janice Coates, and two of the docs from the Women’s Center—Erin Eisenberg and Jolie Suratt. (Erin and Jolie are unmarried. The third Women’s Center doctor, Georgia Peekins, lives on the
other side of town, with two daughters who sorely miss their big brother.) Another reason to know this is a dream is that she’s alone in the room. The other twin bed, where Tiffany sleeps, is empty and neatly made up.
The fox puts its cunning forepaws—white rather than red, as if he has walked through fresh paint to get here—on the quilt that covers her.
“What do you want?” Lila asks.
“To show you the way back,” the fox says. “But only if you want to go.”
2
When Lila opened her eyes, it was morning. Tiffany was in the other bed where she belonged, the blankets pushed down to her knees, her belly a half-moon above the boxer shorts she slept in. She was over seven months now.
Instead of going to the kitchen to brew up a nasty-tasting mess of the chicory that served them as coffee in this version of Dooling, Lila went straight down the hall and opened the front door to a pleasant spring morning. (Time passed with such slippery limberness here; watches kept ordinary time, but there was really nothing ordinary about it.) The fox was there as she’d known it would be, sitting on the weed-choked slate path with its brush of a tail curled neatly around its paws. It regarded Lila with bright interest.
“Hey, babe,” Lila said. The fox cocked its head and seemed to smile. Then it trotted down the path to the broken street and sat again. Watching her. Waiting.
Lila went to wake Tiffany up.
3
In the end, seventeen residents of Our Place followed the fox in six of the solar-powered golf carts, a caravan trundling slowly out of town and then along what had been Route 31 toward Ball’s Hill. Tiffany rode in the lead cart along with Janice and Lila, grousing the whole way about not being allowed to ride her horse. This had been nixed by Erin and Jolie, who were concerned about the strength of Tiff’s contractions when she still had six or eight weeks to go. This much they had told the mom-to-be herself. What they hadn’t passed on (although Lila and Janice knew) were their worries for the baby, which had been conceived while Tiffany was still using drugs on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis.