Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “That’s a start, May, but it’s not enough. We need to clean up even better while everything is still fucked up. A clean sweep, so to speak.”

  Maynard finished his beer, pitched the can away. “How do we do that?”

  “We burn down the Dooling Sheriff’s Department to start with. That’ll take care of the evidence,” Lowell explained. “That’s big numero uno.”

  His brother’s slack-faced expression of puzzlement suggested elaboration was necessary.

  “Our drugs, May. They got everthing in the bust. We burn those up, they got nothing solid.” Lowell could envision it—just wonderful. He had never known how much he wanted to obliterate a police station. “Then, just to make sure we’ve got our t’s crossed, we make a visit to the prison up there and deal with Kitty McDavid.” Low sawed a finger across his unshaven neck to show his brother exactly how that deal would go down.

  “Aw, she’s probly asleep.”

  Low had considered this. “What if the scientists figure out how to wake them all up?”

  “Maybe her memory will be wiped out even if they do. You know, amnesia, like on Days of Our Lives.”

  “And what if it’s not, May? When does anything work out as convenient as that? The McDavid cunt can put us away for the rest of our lives. That ain’t even the important thing. She snitched, that’s the important thing. She needs to go for that, wakin or sleepin.”

  “You really think we can get to her?” asked Maynard.

  In truth, Lowell didn’t know, but he thought they had a shot. Fortune favored the brave—he’d seen that in a movie, or maybe on a TV show. And what better chance would they have? Practically half the world was asleep, and the rest of it was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. “Come on. Clock’s ticking, May. No time like the present. Plus, it’ll be dark soon. Always a better time to move around.”

  “Where do we go first?” Maynard asked.

  Lowell didn’t hesitate. “To see Fritz.”

  Fritz Meshaum had done some engine and detailing work for Lowell Griner, and had also moved some blow. In exchange, Lowell had connected the Kraut with a few gunrunners. Fritz, besides being a stellar mechanic and an excellent detailer, had a bee in his hat about the federal government, so he was always eager for opportunities to enhance his personal arsenal of heavy weaponry. When the inevitable day came that the FBI decided to capture all of the nation’s shanty-dwelling asshole mechanics and ship them off to Guantánamo, Fritz would have to defend himself, and to the death, if need be. Each time Lowell saw him, Fritzie had to show off one cannon or another, and brag about how well it could vaporize someone. (The hilarious part: it was widely rumored that Fritz had been beaten within an inch of his life by a dogcatcher. He was tough, was li’l Fritz.) The last time Lowell had seen him, the bearded gnome had gleefully displayed his latest toy: an actual goddam bazooka. Russian surplus.

  Low needed to get into the women’s prison to assassinate a snitch. That was the sort of mission where a bazooka could actually come in handy.

  3

  Jared and Gerda Holden had not known each other well—Gerda was in her first year of middle school and Jared was in high school—but he knew her from dinners when the two families got together. Sometimes they played video games in the basement, and Jared always let her win a couple. A lot of bad had happened since the Aurora outbreak, but this was the first time Jared had seen a person shot.

  “She must be dead, right, Dad?” He and Clint were in the bathroom of the administrative wing. Some of Gerda’s blood had splattered Jared’s face and shirt. “From the fall on top of the shot?”

  “I don’t know,” Clint said. He was leaning against the tiled wall.

  His son, patting water from his face with a paper towel, found Clint’s eyes in the mirror over the sink.

  “Probably,” Clint said. “Yes. Based on what you’ve told me happened, she’s almost certainly dead.”

  “And the guy, too? The doctor? Flickinger?”

  “Yes. Him, too, probably.”

  “All because of this woman? This Evie person?”

  “Yes,” Clint said. “Because of her. We have to keep her safe. From the police and from anyone else. I know it seems crazy. She could be the key to understanding what’s happened, the key to turning it around, and—just trust me, okay, Jared?”

  “Okay, Dad. But one of the guards, that Rand guy, he said she’s, like—magic?”

  “I can’t explain what she is, Jared,” he said.

  Although he was trying to sound calm, Clint was livid—with himself, with Geary, with Evie. That bullet could have hit Jared. Could have blinded him. Left him comatose. Killed him. Clint had not beaten up his old friend Jason in the Burtells’ yard so that his own son could die before him; he had not shared beds with kids who pissed themselves in their sleep for that; he had not left behind Marcus and Shannon and all the others for that; and he had not worked his way through college or medical school for it.

  Shannon had told him, all those years before, that if he just hung on and kept from killing anyone, he would make it out. But to make it out of the current situation, they might have to kill people. He might have to kill people. The idea did not upset Clint as much as he would have expected. The situation changed, and the prizes changed, but maybe, at bottom, it was the same deal: if you wanted the milkshake, you’d better be ready to fight.

  “What?” asked Jared.

  Clint cocked his head.

  “You look,” his son said, “Sort of tense.”

  “Just tired.” He touched Jared’s shoulder and excused himself. He needed to make sure everyone was placed.

  4

  There was no need to say I told you so.

  Terry caught Frank’s eye as they stepped away from the group around the bodies. “You were right,” Terry said. He produced the flask. Frank thought about stopping him, didn’t. The acting sheriff took a healthy swallow. “You were right all the way down the line. We’ll have to take her.”

  “You sure?” Frank said it as if he himself wasn’t.

  “Are you kidding? Look at this goddam mess! Vern dead, girl there did it, she’s shot to pieces and dead, too. Lawyer’s skull caved in. Think he might have lived for awhile, but he’s sure dead now. Other guy, driver’s license says he’s an MD named Flickinger—”

  “Him too? Really?” If so, it was too bad. Flickinger had been a mess, but he’d had enough soul left in him to try to help Nana.

  “And that’s not the worst part. Norcross and the Black woman and the rest of them have got serious armaments now, most everything high-powered that we could have used to make them stand down.”

  “Do we know who was with them?” Frank asked. “Who was behind the wheel of that RV when they hauled ass out of here?”

  Terry tipped the flask again, but there was nothing left inside. He swore and kicked a chunk of broken macadam.

  Frank waited.

  “Codger named Willy Burke.” Terry Coombs breathed out between his teeth. “Cleaned up his act in the last fifteen or twenty years, does a lot of community stuff, but he’s still a poacher. Used to be a moonshiner, too, back when he was young. Maybe he still is. Vet. Can handle himself. Lila always gave him the right-of-way, felt like it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to try and get him for something. And I guess she liked him.” He inhaled. “I felt the same.”

  “All right.” Frank had decided to keep Black’s phone call to himself. It had infuriated him so much, in fact, that he would have been hardpressed to recount the details of the conversation. One part had stayed with him, though, and tugged at his sleeve: how the woman had praised him for protecting his daughter at the hospital. How could she have known about that? Eve Black had been in the jail that morning. It kept coming back to him and he kept pushing it away. As with the moths that had burst from the lit fragment of Nana’s cocoon, Frank could not fathom an explanation. He could only see that Eve Black had meant to tweak him—and she had succeeded. But he didn’t belie
ve she understood what tweaking him meant.

  In any case, Terry was back on track—he didn’t need any extra motivation. “You want me to start putting together a group? I’m willing, if that’s your pleasure.”

  Although pleasure had nothing to do with it, Terry seconded the motion.

  5

  The prison defenders hurriedly removed the tires from the various cars and trucks in the parking lot. There were about forty vehicles altogether, counting the prison vans. Billy Wettermore and Rand Quigley rolled the tires out and arranged them in pyramids of three in the dead space between the inner and outer fences, then doused them in gasoline. The petrol stench quickly overwhelmed the ambient odor of damp, charred wood from the still-smoldering fire in the woods. They left the tires on Scott Hughes’s truck but parked it crossways right behind the interior gate, as an extra barrier.

  “Scott loves that truck,” Rand said to Tig.

  “You want to put yours there instead?” Tig asked.

  “Hell no,” said Rand. “Are you crazy?”

  The only vehicle they left untouched was Barry Holden’s RV, situated in the handicap space by the cement path to the Intake doors.

  6

  Minus Vern Rangle, Roger Elway, and the department’s female officers, all of whom had been confirmed as asleep during Frank’s cataloging operation, seven deputies remained from Sheriff Lila Norcross’s duty roster: Terry Coombs, Pete Ordway, Elmore Pearl, Dan “Treater” Treat, Rupe Wittstock, Will Wittstock, and Reed Barrows. It was a solid group, in Terry’s opinion. They were all force veterans of at least a year, and Pearl and Treater had both served in Afghanistan.

  The three retired deputies—Jack Albertson, Mick Napolitano, and Nate McGee—made ten.

  Don Peters, Eric Blass, and Frank Geary made lucky thirteen.

  Frank quickly martialed a half-dozen other volunteers including Coach JT Wittstock, father of the deputies who shared his surname, and the defense-first coach of the Dooling High School varsity football team; Pudge Marone, bartender at the Squeaky Wheel, who brought along his Remington shotgun from beneath the bar; Drew T. Barry of Drew T. Barry Indemnity Company, by-the-book insurance agent and prize-winning deer hunter; Carson “Country Strong” Struthers, Pudge’s brother-in-law, who had fought to a 10-1 Golden Gloves record before his doctor told him he had to quit while he still had some brain left; and two town board members, Bert Miller and Steve Pickering, both of whom, like Drew T. Barry, knew their way around a deer stand. That was nineteen, and once they were informed that the woman inside the prison might have information related to the sleeping sickness, maybe even knowledge of a cure, every single one was eager to serve.

  7

  Terry was pleased, but wanted an even twenty. The sight of Vern Rangle’s bleached-out face and torn neck was something he would never be able to forget. He could feel it the way he could feel Geary, silent as a shadow, following everything he did, judging every choice he made.

  But never mind. The only way out was through: through Norcross to Eve Black, and through the Black woman to the end of this nightmare. Terry didn’t know what would happen when they got to her, but he knew it would be the end. Once the end came, he could work at blurring the memory of Vern Rangle’s bloodless face. Not to mention the faces of his wife and daughter, which no longer exactly existed. Seriously drinking his brain into submission, in other words. He was aware that Frank had been encouraging him to use the booze, and so what? So fucking what?

  Don Peters had been tasked with calling around to the male officers on Dooling Correctional’s roll, and it didn’t take him long to figure out that Norcross had four officers on duty, max. One of those, Wettermore, was a swish, and another, Murphy, had been a history teacher. Throw in the Black woman and the old coot, Burke, plus maybe a couple or three others they didn’t know about just to be generous, and that meant they were up against less than a dozen, few if any of whom could be expected to stand fast if things got hot, no matter how much armament they had acquired.

  Terry and Frank stopped at the liquor store on Main Street. It was open, and busy.

  “She didn’t love me anyway!” one fool announced to the entire store, waving a bottle of gin. He smelled like a polecat.

  The shelves were largely empty, but Terry found two pints of gin, and paid with money that would soon be worthless, he supposed, if this terrible fuck-up went on. He filled the flask with one pint, carried the other in a paper bag, and walked with Frank to a nearby alley. It opened into a courtyard piled with garbage bags and rain-softened cardboard boxes. Johnny Lee Kronsky’s scuffed apartment door was here, at ground level, between two windows with plastic sheeting for glass.

  Kronsky, a mythic figure in this part of West Virginia, answered and spied the bottle in the bag. “Those who come bearing gifts may enter,” he said and took the bottle.

  There was only one chair in the living room. Kronsky claimed it for himself. He drank half the pint in two ginormous swallows, his Adam’s apple rolling like a bobber at the end of a hooked line, paying no attention to Terry or Frank. A muted television sat on a stand, showing footage of several cocooned women floating on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. They looked like weird life rafts.

  What if a shark decided to bite one? Terry wondered. He guessed that if that happened, the shark might be in for a surprise.

  What did any of it mean? What was the point?

  Terry decided the point might be gin. He got out Frank’s flask and had a tug.

  “Those women are from the big plane that crashed,” Johnny Lee said. “Interesting that they float like that, isn’t it? The stuff must be mighty light. Like kapok, or something.”

  “Look at them all,” Terry marveled.

  “Yes, yes, quite a sight.” Johnny Lee smacked his lips. He was a licensed private investigator, but not the kind that checked up on cheating spouses or solved mysteries. Until 2014, he had worked for Ulysses Energy Solutions, the coal company, cycling through their various operations, posing as a miner and listening for rumors of union organizing, working to undercut leaders who seemed particularly effective. A company dog, in other words.

  Then had come trouble. A right smart of trouble, one could say. There was a cave-in. Kronsky had been the man handling the explosives. The three miners who had been buried under the rock had been talking loudly about holding a vote. Almost as damning, one had been wearing a tee-shirt with the face of Woody Guthrie on it. Lawyers hired by Ulysses had prevented the levying of charges—a tragic accident, they successfully argued before the grand jury—but Kronsky had been forced into retirement.

  That was why Johnny Lee had come home to Dooling, where he had been born. Now, in his ideally located apartment—right around the corner from the liquor store—he was in the process of drinking himself to death. Each month, a check from UES arrived via Federal Express. A woman Terry knew at the bank told him that the notation on the stub was always the same: FEES. Whatever his FEES amounted to wasn’t a fortune, as the crummy apartment proved, but Kronsky managed on it. The whole story was familiar to Terry because hardly a month passed that the police weren’t called out to the man’s apartment by a neighbor who had heard breaking glass—a rock or a brick thrown through one of Kronsky’s windows, undoubtedly by union spooks. Johnny Lee never called himself. He had let it be known that he was not overly concerned—J. L. Kronsky didn’t give Shit One about the union.

  One afternoon not long before the Aurora outbreak, when Terry had been partnered with Lila in Unit One, the conversation had turned to Kronsky. She said, “Eventually some disaffected miner—probably a relative of one of the guys Kronsky got killed—is going to blow his head off, and the miserable son of a bitch will probably be glad to go.”

  8

  “There’s a situation at the prison,” Terry said.

  “There’s a situation everywhere, Mister Man.” Kronsky had a beaten face, pouched and haggard, and dark eyes.

  “Forget everywhere,” Frank said. “We’re here.”<
br />
  “I don’t give a tin shit where you are,” Johnny Lee said, and polished off the pint.

  “We might need to blow something up,” Terry said.

  Barry Holden and his station-robbing friends had taken a lot of firepower, but had missed the Griner brothers’ bump of C4. “You know how to work with plastic, don’t you?”

  “Could be I do,” Kronsky said. “What’s in it for me, Mister Man?”

  Terry calculated. “I tell you what. Pudge Marone from the Squeak is with us, and I think he’ll let you run an endless tab for the rest of your life.” Which Terry guessed wouldn’t be long.

  “Hm,” Johnny Lee said.

  “And of course, it’s also a chance to do your town a great service.”

  “Dooling can go fuck itself,” Johnny Lee Kronsky said, “but still—why not? Just why the fuck not?”

  That gave them twenty.

  9

  Dooling Correctional did not have guard towers. It had a flat tarpaper roof, piped with vents, ducts, and exhaust stems. There wasn’t much in the way of cover beyond a half-foot of brick edging. After assessing this roof, Willy Burke told Clint he liked the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perspective of the entire perimeter, but he liked his balls even more. “Nothing up here that could stop a bullet, see. How about that shed there?” The old man pointed down below.

  Although labeled EQUIPMENT SHED on the prison blueprints, it was your basic catch-all, containing the riding lawnmower that inmates (trustworthy ones) used to groom the softball field, plus gardening tools, sports equipment, and stacks of moldering newspapers and magazines bound with twine. Most importantly, it was built of cement blocks.

  They had a closer look. Clint dragged a chair out behind the shed and Willy had a seat there beneath the overhang of the shed’s roof.