Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  From this position, a man would be sheltered from the view of anyone at the fence, but would still be visible at either end of a firing line that stretched between the shed and the prison. If they’re just on one side, I should be all right,” said Willy. “I’ll see em from the corner of my eye and take cover.”

  “Both sides at the same time?” Clint asked.

  “If they do that, I’ll be for it.”

  “You need help. Backup.”

  “When you say that, Doc, it makes me wish I’d done more churchin in the days of my youth.”

  The old fellow regarded him amiably. Upon arriving at the prison, the only explanation that he had required of Clint was a further assurance that the stand they were making was what Lila would have wanted. Clint had readily given it to Willy, although at this stage he was no longer sure what Lila would have wanted. It seemed like Lila had been gone for years.

  Clint tried to reflect the same amiability—a bit of lighthearted savoir faire in the face of the enemy—but what remained of his sense of humor seemed to have fallen out of the back of Barry Holden’s RV along with Gerda Holden and Garth Flickinger. “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Willy?”

  Willy held up his left hand. The meat of his palm was gouged with scar tissue. “As it happens, a few bits of me are still there.”

  “How did it feel?” Clint asked. “When you were there? You must have lost friends.”

  “Oh, yes,” Willy said. “I lost friends. As to how I felt, mostly just scared. Confused. All the time. Is that how you feel right now?”

  “It is,” Clint admitted. “I never trained for this.”

  They stood there in the milky afternoon light. Clint wondered if Willy sensed what Clint was really feeling—some fear and confusion, that was true, but also excitement. A certain euphoria infused the preparations, the prospect of pouring the frustration and dismay and loss and impossibility of everything into action. Clint could observe it happening to himself, a rush of aggressive adrenalin that was as old as apes.

  He told himself he shouldn’t be thinking that way, and maybe not, but it felt good. It was as if some guy who looked exactly like him, driving a coupe with the top down, had pulled up beside the old Clint at a stoplight, nodded once in recognition, then, at the flip of the green, his doppelganger had planted the accelerator, and the old Clint was watching him roar off. The new Clint had to hurry, because he was on a mission, and being on a mission was good.

  While they were making their way to the rear of the prison, Willy told him about the moths and the fairy footprints he’d seen near Truman Mayweather’s trailer. Millions of moths, it seemed, coating the branches of trees, rolling above the canopy of the woods in swarms. “Was it from her?” Like everyone else, Willy had heard the rumors. “That woman you got?”

  “Yes,” Clint said. “And that’s not even the half of it.”

  Willy said he didn’t doubt it.

  They dragged out a second chair and issued an auto to Billy Wettermore. It had been converted (legally or not Clint didn’t know, nor did he care) to full auto. That put a man on each end of the shed. It wasn’t perfect, just the best they could do.

  10

  Behind the front desk at the sheriff’s station, the body of Linny Mars lay cocooned on the floor with her laptop beside her and still broadcasting that Vine of the falling London Eye. It appeared to Terry that she had slid out of her chair when she finally drifted off to sleep. She was in a heap, partly blocking the hallway that led to the official areas of the facility.

  Kronsky stepped over her and walked down the hallway, in search of the evidence locker. Terry didn’t like that. He called after him, “Hey, you notice the fucking person here? On the floor?”

  “It’s okay, Terry,” Frank said. “We’ll take care of her.”

  They carried Linny to a holding cell and lowered her gently to the mattress. She hadn’t been out for long. The webs were thin across her eyes and mouth. Her lips were twisted up in an expression of delirious happiness—who knew why, maybe just because her struggle to stay awake was over.

  Terry had another drink. He lowered the flask and the wall of the cell rushed at him and he stuck out his hand to stop it. After a moment he was able to push up straight again.

  “I’m worried about you,” Frank said. “You’re—overmedicating.”

  “I’m perfecto.” Terry waved his hand at a moth that was bothering his ear. “Are you happy we’re arming up, Frank? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  Frank gave Terry a long look. It was totally unthreatening, totally blank. He stared at Terry the way that kids looked at television screens—as if they were gone from their bodies.

  “No,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t say I’m too happy. It’s the job, that’s all. The one in front of us.”

  “Do you always tell yourself that before you kick somebody’s ass?” Terry asked, genuinely interested, and was surprised when Frank recoiled, as if from a slap.

  Kronsky was in the waiting room when they came out. He’d found the plastic explosive, also a bundle of dynamite someone had found in a gravel pit near the Griner property and turned in for disposal. Johnny Lee looked disapproving. “This dyno had no business back there, folksies. It gets old and cranky. The C4, now—” He shook it, making Frank wince. “You could run it over with a truck and nothing would happen.”

  “So you want to leave the dynamite?” Terry asked.

  “Jesus, no.” Kronsky looked offended. “I love me some dyno. Always have. Dyno’s what you call old-school. Need to wrap it in a blanket, is all. Or maybe Sleeping Beauty there’s got a nice thick sweater in the closet. Oh, and I’ll need to get some items from the hardware store. I trust the sheriff’s department has an open account?”

  Before Terry and Frank left, they packed a duffel bag with the handguns and ammo that hadn’t been looted, and carried out all the vests and helmets they could rustle up. There wasn’t much, but their posse—really no sense calling it anything else—would bring plenty of armament from home.

  Linny hadn’t left a sweater in the closet, so Johnny Lee had wrapped the dynamite in a couple of towels from the bathroom. He held it to his chest as if carrying an infant.

  “Getting late in the day for any kind of assault,” Frank observed. “If that’s what it comes to.”

  Terry said, “I know. We’ll get the boys out there tonight, make sure everyone knows what’s what and who’s in charge.” He looked pointedly at Frank as he said this. “Requisition a couple schoolbuses from the town motor pool and park them at the intersection of Route 31 and West Lavin, where the roadblock was, so the fellas don’t have to sleep raw. Keep six or eight of em on watch, in a . . . you know . . .” He made a circle in the air.

  Frank helped him out. “A perimeter.”

  “Yeah, that. If we have to go in, we’ll do it tomorrow morning, from the east. We’ll need a couple of bulldozers to bust through. Send Pearl and Treater to pick out a couple from the public works yard. Keys are in the office trailer there.”

  “Good,” Frank said, because it was. He wouldn’t have thought of bulldozers.

  “First thing tomorrow morning, we bulldoze the fences and come at the main building across the parking lot. That way the sun will be in their eyes. Step one, push em deep, away from the doors and windows. Step two, Johnny Lee blows the front doors and we’re inside. Press em to throw down their weapons. At that point, I think they will. Send a few around the far side to make sure they can’t bolt for it.”

  “Makes sense,” Frank said.

  “But first . . .”

  “First?”

  “We talk to Norcross. Tonight. Face to face, if he’s man enough. Offer him a chance to give the woman up before something happens that can’t be taken back.”

  Frank’s eyes expressed what he felt.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Frank, but if he’s a reasonable man, he’ll see it’s the right thing. He’s responsible for more lives than just hers, after all.
”

  “And if he still says no?”

  Terry shrugged. “Then we go in and take her.”

  “No matter what?”

  “That’s right, no matter what.” They went out, and Terry locked the glass double doors of the station behind him.

  11

  Rand Quigley got his toolbox and spent two hours chiseling and hammering out the small wire-reinforced window that was embedded in the concrete wall of the visitors’ room.

  Tig Murphy sat nearby, drinking Coke and smoking a cigarette. The no-smoking reg had been lifted. “If you were an inmate,” he said, “that’d get about five years added to your sentence.”

  “Good thing I’m not an inmate, then, isn’t it?”

  Tig tapped ash on the floor and decided not to say what he was thinking: if being locked in meant you were an inmate, that’s what they were now. “Man, they really built this place, didn’t they?”

  “Uh-huh. Like it was a prison, or something,” Rand said.

  “Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck.”

  When the glass finally fell out, Tig clapped.

  “Thank ya, ladies and gentlemen,” Rand said, doing Elvis. “Thank ya very much.”

  With the window removed, Rand could stand on top of the table they had pulled below as a shooting platform, and stick his weapon through. This was his spot, with clean angles on the parking lot and the front gate.

  “They think we are pussies,” Rand said. “But we are not.”

  “Got that right, Rand-o.”

  Clint poked his head in. “Tig. With me.”

  The two of them walked up the stairs to the raised level of B Wing. This was the prison’s highest point, the only second floor in the structure. There were windows in the cells that faced out on West Lavin. These were stronger even than the window in the visitors’ room—thick, reinforced, and sandwiched between layers of concrete. It was hard to imagine Rand knocking one out of the wall with just hand tools.

  “We can’t defend this end,” Tig said.

  “No,” Clint said, “but it makes a helluva lookout post, and we don’t need to defend it, right? There’s no way through here.”

  That seemed inarguable to Clint, and to Scott Hughes, too, who was relaxing a few cells down the line and listening in. “I’m sure you guys are going to get yourselves killed one way or another, and I won’t be crying any tears when it happens,” he called, “but Shrink Boy’s right. It’d take a bazooka to blow a hole in this wall.”

  12

  On the day two opposing groups of Dooling men armed up, preparing to make war, less than a hundred women were still awake in the Tri-Counties. One was Eve Black; one was Angel Fitzroy; one was Jeanette Sorley.

  Vanessa Lampley was a fourth. Earlier that day, her husband finally nodded off in his armchair, allowing Van to do what she had decided to do. Since she had returned home from the prison after shooting and killing Ree Dempster, Tommy Lampley had tried to stay awake with her as long as he could. Van had been glad for the company. A cooking competition show had done him in, though, lulling him to dreamland with a tutorial on molecular gastronomy. Van waited to make sure he was soundly out before she left. She wasn’t about to assign her husband, ten years her senior, with titanium hips and afflicted by angina, the thankless task of somehow taking care of her body for however many years remained to him. Nor did Van have any interest in becoming the world’s most dismal piece of furniture.

  Tired as she was, she was still light on her feet, and crept from the room without disturbing his thin sleep. In the garage she got her hunting rifle and loaded it. She yanked up the door, fired up the ATV, and rolled out.

  Her plan was simple: cut through the woods to the ridge above the road, breathe in the fresh air, take in the view, jot a note to her husband, and put the barrel under her chin. Goodnight. At least there were no kids to worry about.

  She went slow because she was afraid, weary as she was, of crashing. The ATV’s heavy tires sent every root and rock jolting up her thick arms and deep into her bones. Van didn’t mind. The thin rain was all right, too. Despite the exhaustion—her thoughts crawled—she was intensely aware of every physical sensation. Would it have been better to die without knowing you were going to, like Ree? Van could ask the question, but her brain could not break it down in a way that allowed a satisfactory answer. Any response dissolved before it could form. Why did it feel so bad, that she had shot an inmate who would have killed another inmate if she hadn’t? Why did it feel so bad, just to have done her job? Those answers wouldn’t coalesce, either, couldn’t even begin to.

  Van arrived at the top of the ridge. She shut off the ATV and dismounted. Far away, in the direction of the prison, a haze of black hovered over the dying day, damp residue from the forest fire that had burned itself out. Directly below, the land descended in a long, easy grade. At the base of the grade was a muddy stream, fattening in the rain. Above the stream a few hundred feet away was a hunting cabin with a mossy roof. Smoke scribbles pumped from the stovepipe chimney.

  She patted her pockets and realized that she had completely forgotten paper and something to write with. Van wanted to laugh—suicide really wasn’t that complex, was it?—but a sigh was the best she could manage.

  There was no help for it, and her reasoning ought not to be that hard to figure out. If she were found at all, that was. And if anyone cared. Van unstrapped the rifle from her back.

  The door of the cabin banged open just as she located the barrel against the shelf of her chin.

  “He just better still have that fucking boom-tube,” said a man, his voice carrying crisp and clear, “or he’ll wish that dogcatcher had finished the job on him. Oh, and bring along the scanner. I want to keep up on what the cops are doing.”

  Van lowered her rifle and watched as two men climbed into a shiny Silverado truck and drove away. She was sure she knew them, and looking like they did—a couple of rode-hard and put-away wet woods-rats—it wasn’t from any chamber of commerce awards ceremony. Their names would have come to her immediately if she hadn’t been so sleep-deprived. Her mind felt full of mud. She could still feel the jouncing ATV, even though it was no longer moving. Phantom dots of light went zooming across her vision.

  When the truck was gone, she decided to visit the cabin. There would be something to write on inside, if only the back of a calendar years out of date. “And I’ll need something to pin it to my shirt,” she said.

  Her voice sounded foggy and foreign. The voice of someone else. And there was someone else, standing just beside her. Only when she turned her head, the someone was gone. That was happening more and more: watchers lurking at the farthest reach of her vision. Hallucinations. How long could you stay awake before all rational thought broke down and you lost your mind completely?

  Van remounted her ATV and drove it along the ridge until the land descended and she could switchback along the rutted track that led to the cabin.

  The cabin smelled of beans, beer, fried deermeat, and man-farts. Dishes cluttered the table, the sink was filled with more, and there were clotted pots on the woodburning stove. On the mantel was a picture of a fiercely grinning man with a pick over his shoulder and a countryman’s battered fedora pulled so low on his head that the brim bent the tops of his ears. Looking at the sepia-toned photo, Vanessa realized exactly who it was she had seen, because her father had pointed out the man in that picture to her when she had been no more than twelve. He had been going into the Squeaky Wheel.

  “That is Big Lowell Griner,” Daddy had said, “and I want you to keep clear of him, honey. If he should ever say hello to you, say hello back, ain’t it a nice day, and keep walking.”

  So that’s who those two were: Big Lowell’s no-account boys. Maynard and Little Low Griner, big as life and driving a new pickup when they were supposed to be jugged over in Coughlin, awaiting trial for, among other things, a murder Kitty McDavid had witnessed, and agreed to testify about.

  On a pine-paneled wall of the short corridor that pr
obably led to the cabin’s bedrooms, Van saw a battered notebook hanging from a piece of string. A sheet from that would do just fine for a suicide note, but she suddenly decided she wanted to stay awake and alive at least a little longer.

  She left, glad to escape the stink, and drove her ATV away from the cabin as fast as she dared. After a mile or so, the track emptied into one of Dooling County’s many dirt roads. Dust hung on the left—not much, on account of the drizzle, but enough to tell her which way the fugitives had turned. They had a good lead on her by the time she reached Route 7, but the land here was downsloping and open, which made it easy to see the truck, diminished by distance but clearly headed for town.

  Van slapped herself briskly across each cheek and followed. She was wet through now, but the cold would help her stay awake a little while longer. If she were on the lam from a murder charge, she’d be halfway to Georgia by now. Not these two; they were headed back to town, no doubt to do something nasty, as was their wont. She wanted to know what it was, and maybe stop it.

  Atonement for what she’d had to do to Ree was not out of the question.

  CHAPTER 11

  1

  Fritz Meshaum didn’t want to give up his bazooka, at least not without payment. When May seized him firmly by the shoulders and Low twisted his right arm nearly up to his shoulder blades, however, he changed his mind and lifted a trapdoor in the floor of his ramshackle cabin, revealing the treasure for which the Griner brothers had come.

  Little Low had expected it to be green, like the ones in World War II movies, but Fritz’s bazooka was painted a dusty black, with a long serial number running up the side and some of those funny Russian letters beneath. A scale of rust rimmed the mouth. Lying beside it was a duffel bag containing a dozen shells stenciled with more words in Russian. There were also eight or ten rifles and as many as twenty handguns, most semi-auto. The brothers stuffed a couple in their belts. There was nothing like pistols in a man’s belt to make him feel like he had the right-of-way.