Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  She dressed, and left the house. She had no particular destination in mind, but wasn’t entirely surprised when she saw the shattered hulk of the Municipal Building ahead of her; she had spent most of her adult life working there. It was a kind of magnetic north, even though there was nothing there now, really, to see. A fire of some sort had done the damage—started by a lightning strike, maybe, or faulty wiring. The side of the building that had contained Lila’s office was blackened rubble, while years of weather had swept through the broken walls and windows and done its work on the other half, making the drywall soft for mold, blowing in debris that had gathered in layers across the floors.

  So it surprised Lila to see someone sitting on the granite steps. The steps were about all the old building had going for it anymore.

  As she drew closer, the figure stood and approached her.

  “Lila?” Although full of uncertainty and thick with recently shed tears, the voice was familiar. “Lila, is it you?”

  New women appeared only rarely now, and if this was to be the last, there could be no better. Lila ran to her, embraced her, kissed her on both cheeks. “Linny! Oh God, it’s so good to see you!”

  Linny Mars hugged her back with panicky force, then held her away so she could look at Lila’s face. Making sure. Lila understood perfectly and remained still. But Linny was smiling, and the tears on her cheeks were good ones. It felt to Lila as if some divine scale had been balanced—Tiffany’s departure on one side, Linny’s arrival on the other.

  “How long have you been sitting there?” Lila asked at last.

  “I don’t know,” said Linny. “An hour, maybe two. I saw the moon go down. I . . . I didn’t know where else to go. I was in the office, looking at my laptop, and then . . . how did I get here? Where is here?”

  “It’s complicated,” Lila replied, and as she led Linny back to the steps, it occurred to her that this was a thing women said often, men almost never. “In a sense, you’re still in the office, only in one of the cocoons. Or at least, that’s what we think.”

  “Are we dead? Ghosts? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No. This is a real place.” Lila hadn’t been completely sure of this at first, but now she was. Familiarity might or might not breed contempt, but it certainly bred belief.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “At least eight months. Maybe more. Time moves faster on this side of—well, whatever it is that we’re on. I’d guess that over there—where you’ve come from—it’s not even been a full week since Aurora started, right?”

  “Five days. I think.” Linny sat back down.

  Lila felt like a woman who has been long abroad, and was eager for news of home. “Tell me what’s happening in Dooling.”

  Linny squinted at Lila and then gestured at the street. “But this is Dooling, isn’t it? Only it looks kind of cracked up.”

  “We’re working on that,” Lila said. “Tell me what was going on when you left. Have you heard from Clint? Do you know anything about Jared?” That was unlikely, but she had to ask.

  “I can’t tell you much,” Linny said, “because the last two days all I could think about was staying awake. I kept taking those drugs in the evidence room, the ones from the Griner brothers bust, but by the end they were hardly working at all. And there was weird stuff. People coming and going. Yelling. Somebody new in charge. I think his name was Dave.”

  “Dave who?” It was all Lila could do to keep from shaking her dispatcher.

  Linny frowned down at her hands, concentrating, trying to remember.

  “Not Dave,” she said at last. “Frank. A big guy. He was wearing a uniform, not a cop’s uniform, but then he changed it for a cop’s uniform. Frank Gearhart, maybe?”

  “Do you mean Frank Geary? The animal control officer?”

  “Yes,” Linny said. “Geary, that’s right. Boy, he’s intense. A man on a mission.”

  Lila didn’t know what to make of the Geary news. She remembered interviewing him for the job that had gone to Dan Treat. Geary had been impressive in person—quick, confident—but his record as an animal control officer had troubled her. He’d been way too free with citations, and received too many complaints.

  “What about Terry? He’s the senior officer, he should have taken my place.”

  “Drunk,” Linny said. “A couple of the other deputies were laughing about it.”

  “What do you—”

  Linny raised her hand to stop her. “But then right before I fell asleep, some men came in and said Terry wanted the guns from the armament room because of a woman up at the prison. The one who talked to me was that public defender guy, the one you say reminds you of Will Gardner on The Good Wife.”

  “Barry Holden?” Lila didn’t get it. The woman up at the prison was undoubtedly Evie Black, and Barry had helped Lila get Evie in a cell at Correctional, but why would he—

  “Yes, him. And some others were with him. One was a woman. Warden Coates’s daughter, I think.”

  “That can’t be,” Lila said. “She works in DC.”

  “Well, maybe it was someone else. By then it was like I was in a deep fog. But I remember Don Peters, because of how he tried to feel me up on New Year’s Eve last year at the Squeaky Wheel.”

  “Peters from the prison? He was with Barry?”

  “No, Peters came after. He was furious when he found out some of the guns were gone. ‘They got all of the good ones,’ he said, I remember that, and there was a kid with him and that kid said . . . he said . . .” Linny looked at Lila with enormous eyes. “He said, ‘What if they’re taking them to Norcross, up at the prison? How will we get the bitch out then?’ ”

  In her mind Lila pictured a tug-of-war rope, with Evie Black as the knot in the middle that would mean victory for one side or the other.

  “What else do you remember? Think, Linny, this is important!” Although what could she, Lila, do about it, even if it was?

  “Nothing,” Linny said. “After Peters and the young guy went running out, I fell asleep. And woke up here.” She looked around doubtfully, still not sure that there was a here. “Lila?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Is there anything to eat? I guess I really must not be dead, because I’m starving.”

  “Sure,” Lila said, helping the other woman to her feet. “Scrambled eggs and toast, how does that sound?”

  “Like heaven. I feel like I could eat half a dozen eggs and have room left over for pancakes.”

  But as it turned out, Linnette Mars never got breakfast; she had, in fact, eaten her last meal the day before (two cherry Pop-Tarts microwaved in the sheriff’s station break room). As the two women turned onto St. George Street, Lila felt Linny’s hand melt away in her own. She caught just a glimpse of Linny from the corner of her eye, looking startled. Then there was nothing left but a cloud of moths, rising into the morning sky.

  CHAPTER 10

  1

  There could be no telling, Lowell Griner Sr. used to say, where a deep seam of coal might begin. “Sometimes a single chisel’s worth of difference is all there is tween the shit and the Shinola,” was how he put it. This pearl had dropped from the old crank’s lips, around about the time when many of the Tri-Counties’ best miners had been marching through the fucked-up, fucked-over boonies of Southeast Asia, getting jungle rot and smoking heroin-laced fatties. This was a conflict the elder Griner had missed, given a lack of two toes on his right foot and one finger on his left hand.

  Few men who ever walked the green earth spoke more nonsense than the late Lowell Griner Sr.—he had also believed in UFOs, vengeful spirits of the woods, and had taken as gold the empty promises of the coal companies. Big Lowell Griner, he was called, perhaps in honor of that old Jimmy Dean song about Big John. Big Low had rested snug in his coffin for ten years now, along with a full bottle of Rebel Yell and a pair of lungs that were as black as the bituminate he mined.

  His son Lowell Jr. (naturally known as Little Low) had recalled his
father’s words with rueful amusement after Sheriff Lila Norcross nipped him and his older brother Maynard with ten kilos of cocaine, a pharmacy’s worth of speed, and all of their guns. It had certainly appeared that the seam of their luck had come to an abrupt end, the Shinola magically turning to shit the moment the sheriff’s team used the department’s bull-ram on the kitchen door of the old family manse, a creekside farmhouse for which the term tumbledown was too grand.

  Though Little Low (who actually stood an inch over six feet and weighed in at two-forty) was not sorry about anything that he had done, he was extremely sorry that it had all not lasted longer. In the weeks that he and Maynard had spent locked up in the county jail in Coughlin awaiting transfer, he had whiled away most of his free time dreaming on the fun they’d had: the sports cars they’d drag-raced, the fine houses they’d crashed in, the girls they’d screwed, and the numerous slobs they’d stomped, outsiders who’d tried horning in on the Griner patch and had ended up buried in the hills. For the better part of five years they’d been serious players, up and down the Blue Ridge. It had been a hell of a hot ride, but now it seemed to have turned cold.

  They were, in fact, fucked in every orifice. The cops had the drugs, had the weapons, had Kitty McDavid to say that she had witnessed Lowell exchanging packets of cash for bundles of coke with their cartel connection on multiple occasions, and that she had seen him shoot that Alabama fool who had tried to pass them counterfeit bills. The cops even had the bump of C4 that they had socked away for the Fourth of July. (The plan had been to put it under a silo and see if they could get the motherfucker to lift off like one of those Cape Carnival rockets.) As good as the ride had been, Lowell wasn’t sure how long re-running the memories could sustain him. Thinking of those memories growing thin and then falling apart was a downer.

  When they ran out, Little Low thought he would probably just have to kill himself. He wasn’t afraid of that. What he was afraid of was choking on boredom in some cell the way Big Low, confined to a wheelchair and sucking on Yell and bottled oxygen for the last few years of his life, had choked to death on his own snot. Maynard, quarter-wit that he was, would probably be fine for a few decades in prison. That wasn’t Little Lowell Griner Jr., though. He wasn’t interested in playing out a junk hand just to stay in the game.

  Then, as they were awaiting a pre-trial conference, the shit had turned back into Shinola. God bless Aurora, the vehicle of their deliverance.

  Said deliverance had arrived last Thursday afternoon, the day the sleeping sickness had come to Appalachia. Lowell and Maynard were shackled to a bench outside a meeting room at the Coughlin courthouse. Both the prosecutor and their lawyer should have arrived an hour earlier.

  “What the fuck,” announced the prick from the Coughlin Police Department who was keeping an eye on them. “This is stupid. I don’t get paid enough to babysit you murdering peckerwoods all day. I’m going to see what the judge wants to do.”

  Through the reinforced glass opposite their bench, Lowell could see that Judge Wainer, the only one of the three officials who had seen fit to show up for the hearing, had lowered her head between her arms and dropped off for a little snooze. Neither of the brothers had, at this point, any idea about Aurora. Nor had the prick cop.

  “Hope she bites his head off for wakin her up,” Maynard had remarked.

  This was not exactly what happened when the horrified officer tore away the mask of webbing that had grown over the Honorable Judge Regina Alberta Wainer’s face, but it was, as the saying went, close enough for government work.

  Lowell and Maynard, chain-locked to the bench, saw it all through the reinforced glass. It was awesome. The judge, no more than five-one in heels, rose up righteous and smote the cop, say hallelujah, in the chest with a gold-tipped fountain pen. That put the bastard on the carpet and she pressed the advantage, scooping up her nearby gavel and beating his face in before he had chance to fart sideways or holler Your Honor, I object. Then Judge Wainer tossed aside her gory gavel, sat down again, lowered her head back to her crossed arms, and resumed snoozing.

  “Brother, did you see that?” Maynard asked.

  “I did.”

  Maynard had shaken his head, making the unwashed clots of his long hair fly. “That was amazin. I be dog.”

  “Court is fucking adjourned,” Lowell agreed.

  Maynard—firstborn but named for an uncle when his parents felt sure the baby would die before the sun went down on his natal day—had a caveman beard and wide dull eyes. Even when he was dropping fists on some poor sonofabitch, he tended to look dumbfounded. “What do we do now?”

  What they did was bang around until they broke the arms of the bench they were shackled to, and enter the conference room, laying a trail of shattered wood behind them. Careful not to disturb the sleeping Judge Wainer—the webbing was spinning around her head, thickening again—they nicked the cop’s keys and unlocked themselves. The brothers also requisitioned the dead prick’s gun, his Taser, and the keys to his GMC pickup.

  “Look at this spider shit,” Maynard whispered, gesturing at the judge’s new coating.

  “No time,” Little Low said.

  A door at the end of the hall—opened with the prick’s pass card—led to a second hall. As they passed the open door of a staff room, not a single one of the dozen-plus men and women inside—cops, secretaries, lawyers—paid them any mind. They were all focused on NewsAmerica, where bizarre and horrific footage showed some Amish chick on a table rearing up and biting the nose off a man attending to her.

  At the end of this second hall was an exit into the parking lot. Lowell and Maynard strolled out into bright sunshine and free air, big as life and happy as hound dogs in a barking contest. The dead cop’s GMC was parked nearby, and in the center console was a goodly supply of shitkicking music. The Brothers Griner agreed on Brooks and Dunn, followed by Alan Jackson, who was a good old boy for sure.

  They boot-scooted their way to a nearby campground and parked the Jimmy-Mac behind a forest ranger outpost that had been closed in a round of cutbacks years before. The lock on the outpost door popped with one shove. A woman’s uniform hung in the closet. Luckily, she had been a large lady, and at Lowell’s command, Maynard squeezed into it. Dressed as such, it was easy to convince the driver of a Chevy Silverado in the campground parking lot to step away for a word.

  “Is there something wrong with my camping permit?” Silverado Man asked Maynard. “This disease news has got me all turned around, I’ll tell you what. I mean, whoever heard of such a thing?” Then, with a glance at the tag on Maynard’s chest: “Say, how’d you get the name Susan?”

  Little Low gave this question the answer it deserved by stepping out from behind a tree and using a junk of firewood to split Silverado Man’s skull. He was approximately Lowell’s height and weight. After Low dressed in Silverado Man’s clothes, the brothers wrapped the body in a tarp and put it in the back of their new vehicle. They transferred the dead cop’s music and drove to a hunting cabin that they had stocked for a rainy day long before. On the way, they burned through the rest of the CDs, agreeing that this James McMurtry fellow was probably a communist, but Hank III was the total package.

  Once at the cabin, they alternated between the radio and the police scanner they kept there, hoping to glean intelligence concerning the police response to their escape.

  Initially, Lowell found the complete inattention to said escape unnerving. By the second day, however, the snowballing events of the Aurora phenomenon—which explained the lady judge’s rough treatment of the Coughlin cop and the crap on her face—were so encompassing and cataclysmic that Lowell’s apprehension evaporated. Who had time for two country outlaws amid mass riots, plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns, and people incinerating chicks in their sleep?

  2

  On Monday, as Frank Geary was planning his assault on the women’s prison, Lowell was reclining on the moldy couch in the hunting cabin, gnawing on deer jerky and visualizing their own next
moves. Though the authorities were currently in disarray, they would be reestablished in some form or another before long. Moreover, if things turned out the way they appeared to be headed, those authorities would likely be all-rooster, which meant that it would be the Wild West—hang em now, hang em high, ask questions later. The Griner brothers wouldn’t stay forgotten forever, and when they were remembered, the jackboots would be polished and primed to kick ass.

  The news on the radio had initially caused Maynard to fall into gloom. “Is this the end of fuckin, Lowell?” he’d asked.

  A little blue at the thought himself, Low had replied that they’d think of something . . . as if there might be some alternative. He was thinking of some old song about how birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.

  His older brother’s mood had improved, however, at the discovery of a jigsaw puzzle in a cabinet. Now Maynard, in his camo underwear, on his knees by the coffee table, was drinking a Schlitz and working away on it. The puzzle showed Krazy Kat with his finger in a socket, getting electrocuted. Maynard enjoyed puzzles as long as they weren’t too hard. (This was another reason why Lowell had felt good about his brother’s possible prison future. They had a shit-ton of puzzles in prison.) The picture of Krazy Kat in the center was pretty much done, but the pale green wall surrounding the figure was giving May fits. He complained it all looked the same, which was cheating.

  “We need to clean up,” Lowell announced.

  “I told you,” Maynard said, “I put that old boy’s head inside a hollow log and dropped the rest of him down a hole.” (Low’s older brother broke down bodies the way other folks broke down turkeys. It was eccentric, but it seemed to bring May satisfaction.)