Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  3

  Two men crouched in the space between the nose of Barry Holden’s Fleetwood and the front doors of the prison.

  “You want to do the honors?” Tig asked Clint.

  Clint wasn’t sure it was an honor, but said okay and lit the match. He placed it against the trail of gas that Tig and Rand had laid earlier.

  The trail flamed, snaking from the front doors across the apron of the parking lot and under the interior fence. In the grass median that separated this fence from the second, outer fence, the piles of doused tires first smoldered and then began to flicker. Soon, the firelight had cut away much of the darkness at the perimeter of the prison. Curls of filthy smoke began to rise.

  Clint and Tig went back inside.

  4

  In the darkened officers’ break room, Michaela used a flashlight to sift the drawers. She found a pack of Bicycles, and asked Jared to play War with her. Everyone else, save the three remaining wakeful prisoners, was on watch. Michaela needed something to occupy herself. It was around ten PM on Monday night. Way back last Thursday morning, she had awoken at six sharp and gone running. Feeling frisky, feeling fine.

  “Can’t,” Jared said.

  “What?” Michaela asked.

  “Super busy,” he said, and gave a twitchy grin. “Thinking about stuff I should have done, and didn’t. And how my dad and mom should have waited to be mad at each other. Also about how my girlfriend—she wasn’t really my girlfriend, but sort of—fell asleep while I was holding her.” He repeated, “Super busy.”

  If Jared Norcross needed mothering, Michaela was the wrong person. The world had been out of tilt since Thursday, but as long as she’d been around Garth Flickinger, Michaela had been able to treat it almost like a lark, a bender. She would not have expected to miss him so much. His stoner good cheer was the only thing that made sense once the world went wacky.

  She said, “I’m afraid, too. You’d be crazy not to be afraid.”

  “I just . . .” He trailed off.

  He didn’t understand it, what the others around the prison had said about the woman, that she had powers, and that this Michaela, the warden’s reporter daughter, had supposedly received a magic kiss from the special prisoner that had given her new energy. He didn’t understand what had come over his father. All he understood was that people had started to die.

  As Michaela had guessed, Jared missed his mother, but he wasn’t angling for a substitute. There was no replacing Lila.

  “We’re the good guys, right?” Jared asked.

  “I don’t know,” Michaela admitted. “But I’m positive we’re not the bad guys.”

  “That’s something,” Jared said.

  “Come on, let’s play cards.”

  Jared swiped a hand across his eyes. “What the hell, okay. I’m a champ at War.” He came over to the café table in the middle of the break room.

  “Do you want a Coke or something?”

  He nodded, but neither of them had change for the machine. They went to the warden’s office, emptied out Janice Coates’s huge knit handbag, and crouched on the floor, sifting for silver through the receipts and notes and ChapSticks and cigarettes. Jared asked Michaela what she was smiling about.

  “My mom’s handbag,” said Michaela. “She’s a prison warden, but she’s got, like, this hippie monstrosity for a bag.”

  “Oh.” Jared chuckled. “But what’s a warden’s handbag supposed to look like, do you think?”

  “Something held together with chains or handcuffs.”

  “Kinky!”

  “Don’t be a child, Jared.”

  There was more than enough change for two Cokes. Before they went back to the break room, Michaela kissed the cocoon that held her mother.

  War usually lasted forever, but Michaela beat Jared in the first game in less than ten minutes.

  “Damn. War is hell,” he said.

  They played again, and again, and again, not talking much, just flipping cards in the dark. Michaela kept winning.

  5

  Terry dozed in a camp chair a few yards behind the roadblock. He was dreaming about his wife. She had opened a diner. They were serving empty plates. “But Rita, this isn’t anything,” he said, and handed his plate back to her. Rita handed it right back. This went on for what seemed like years. Back and forth with the empty plate. Terry grew increasingly frustrated. Rita, never speaking, grinned at him like she had a secret. Outside the windows of the diner, the seasons were shuffling past like photographs through one of those old View-Masters—winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring—

  He opened his eyes and Bert Miller was standing over him.

  Terry’s first waking thought was not of the dream, but of earlier that night, at the fence, Clint Norcross calling him out about the booze, humiliating him in front of the other two. The irritation of the dream mixed with shame, and Terry fully comprehended that he was not the man for the sheriff’s job. Let Frank Geary have it if he wanted it so bad. And let Clint Norcross have Frank Geary if he wanted to deal with a sober man.

  Camp lights were set up everywhere. Men stood in groups, rifles hung from straps over their shoulders, laughing and smoking, eating food from crinkly plastic MRE packages. God only knew where they’d come from. A few guys knelt on the pavement, shooting dice. Jack Albertson was using a power drill on one of the bulldozers, rigging an iron plate over the window.

  Selectman Bert Miller wanted to know if there was a fire extinguisher. “Coach Wittstock’s got asthma and the smoke from those assholes’ tire fires is drifting over here.”

  “Sure,” Terry said, and pointed to a nearby cruiser. “In the trunk.”

  “Thanks, Sheriff.” The selectman went to fetch the extinguisher. There was a cheer from the dicing men as somebody made a hard point.

  Terry lurched up from the camp chair and oriented himself toward the parked cruisers. As he walked, he unbuckled his gunbelt and let it fall into the grass. Fuck this shit, he thought. Just fuck it.

  In his pocket were the keys to Unit Four.

  6

  From his seat on the driver’s side of the animal control pickup, Frank observed the acting sheriff’s silent resignation.

  You did that, Frank, Elaine said from beside him. Aren’t you proud?

  “He did it to himself,” Frank said. “I didn’t tie him down and put a funnel in his mouth. I pity him, because he wasn’t man enough for the job, but I also envy him, because he gets to quit.”

  But not you, Elaine said.

  “No,” he agreed. “I’m in it to the end. Because of Nana.”

  You’re obsessed with her, Frank. Nana-Nana-Nana. You refused to hear anything Norcross said, because she’s all you can think of. Can you not wait at least a little longer?

  “No.” Because the men were here, and they were primed and ready to go.

  What if that woman is leading you by the nose?

  A fat moth sat on the pickup’s wiper blades. He flicked the wand for the blades to clear it off. Then he started the engine and drove away, but unlike Terry, he intended to return.

  First, he stopped at the house on Smith to check on Elaine and Nana in the basement. They were as he had left them, hidden away behind a shelving unit and tucked beneath sheets. He told Nana’s body that he loved her. He told Elaine’s body that he was sorry that they could never seem to agree. He meant it, too, although the fact that she continued to scold him, even in her unnatural sleep, was extremely irritating.

  He relocked the basement door. In the driveway, by the headlights of his pickup, he noticed a pool had collected in the large pothole that he had planned to fix soon. Sediments of green and brown and white and blue sifted around in the water. It was the remains of Nana’s chalked drawing of the tree, washed away by the rain.

  When Frank reached downtown Dooling, the bank clock read 12:04 AM. Tuesday had arrived.

  As he passed the Zoney’s convenience store, Frank noticed that someone had smashed out the plate glass windows.


  The Municipal Building was still smoking. It surprised him that Norcross would allow his cohorts to blow up his wife’s place of work. But men were different now, it seemed—even doctors like Norcross. More like they used to be, maybe.

  In the park across the street, a man was, for no apparent reason, using a cutter to work on the verdigris-stained trousers of the statue of the top-hatted first mayor. Sparks fountained up, doubling in the tinted slot of the man’s welding helmet. Farther along, another man, a la Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, was hanging off a lamp post, but he had his cock in his hand and he was pissing on the pavement and bellowing some fucked-up sea chanty: “The captain’s in his cabin, lads, drinking ale and brandy! Sailors in the whorehouse, where all the tarts are handy! Way, haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe!”

  The order that had existed, and which Frank and Terry had tried to shore up over the last few chaotic days, was collapsing. It was, he supposed, a savage kind of mourning. It might end, or it might be building to a worldwide cataclysm. Who knew?

  This is where you should be, Frank, Elaine said.

  “No,” he told her.

  He parked behind his office. Each day he’d found half an hour to stop in here. He fed his strays in their cages and left a bowl of Alpo for the one that was his special pet, his office-dog. There was a mess in the holding area each time he came, and they were restless, shivering and whimpering and howling, because he usually was only able to walk them once a day, if that, and of the eight animals, probably only a couple had ever been housetrained to begin with.

  He considered putting them down. If something happened to him, they would almost certainly starve; it wasn’t likely a Good Samaritan would come along and take care of them. The possibility of simply releasing them did not cross his mind. You didn’t let dogs run wild.

  A fantasy sketched itself in Frank’s mind’s eye: coming in the next day with Nana, letting her help feed and walk them. She always liked to do that. He knew she would love his office-dog, a sleepy-eyed beagle-cocker mix with a stoic manner. She would love the way his head drooped down over his paws like a kid slumped over a desk, forced to listen to some never-ending school lecture. Elaine didn’t like dogs, but no matter what happened, that no longer made a difference. One way or another, he and Elaine were through, and if Nana wanted a dog, it could stay with Frank.

  Frank walked them on triple leashes. When he finished, he wrote a note—PLEASE CHECK ON THE ANIMALS. MAKE SURE THEY HAVE FOOD AND WATER. GRAY-WHITE PITBULL MIX IN #7 IS SKITTISH APPROACH CAREFULLY. PLEASE DON’T STEAL ANYTHING, THIS IS A GOVERNMENT OFFICE.—and fastened it to the outside door with duct tape. He stroked the office-dog’s ears for a couple of minutes. “Look at you,” he said. “Just look at you.”

  When he returned to his pickup and headed back to the roadblock, the bank clock read 1:11 AM. He’d start prepping everyone for the assault at four thirty. Dawn would come two hours later.

  7

  Across the prison athletic fields, on the far side of the fence, two men with bandannas over their mouths were using fire extinguishers to put out the tire fires. The extinguisher spray glowed phosphorescent through the night vision scope and the men were limned in yellow. Billy Wettermore didn’t recognize the larger man, but the smaller one he knew well. “Yonder dingleberry in the straw hat is Selectman Miller. Bert Miller,” Billy said to Willy Burke.

  There was ironic personal history here. While attending Dooling High, Billy Wettermore had, as a National Honor Society student, interned in the selectman’s office. There he had been forced to silently attend to Bert Miller’s frequent thoughts on homosexuality.

  “It’s a mutation,” Selectman Miller explained, and he dreamed of stopping it. “If you could wipe out all the gays in an instant, Billy, perhaps you could stop the mutation from spreading, but then again, much as we might not like to admit it, they’re human, too, aren’t they?”

  A lot had happened in the intervening decade-plus. Billy was a country boy and stubborn, and when he quit college he had returned to his Appalachian home town in spite of the politics. Around here his preference for men seemed to be the first thing on everyone’s mind. This being almost two decades into the twenty-first century, that was damned annoying to Billy, not that he would ever show it, because that would be giving folks something they didn’t deserve to have.

  However, the thought of putting a bullet in the dirt right in front of Bert Miller and making him drop a big old bigoted shit in his pants was extremely tempting. “I’m going to give him a jump, get him away from our tires, Willy.”

  “No.” This came not from Willy Burke, but from behind him.

  Norcross had materialized from the propped-open door at the rear of the prison. In the dimness, there was barely anything to his face except for the shine on the rims of his glasses.

  “No?” Billy said.

  “No.” Clint was rubbing the thumb of his left hand across the knuckles of his right. “Put one in his leg. Drop him.”

  “Seriously?” Billy had shot game, but never a man.

  Willy Burke made a kind of humming sound through his nose. “Bullet in the leg can kill a man, Doc.”

  Clint nodded his head to show he understood. “We have to hold this place. Do it, Billy. Shoot him in the leg. That’ll be one less and it’ll show them we’re not playing games here.”

  “All right,” Billy said.

  He dropped his eye down to the scope. Selectman Miller, big as a billboard, crisscrossed by the two layers of chainlink, was fanning himself with his straw hat, the extinguisher set on the grass beside him. The crosshairs settled on Miller’s left knee. Billy was glad his target was such an asshole, but he hated to do it anyway.

  He triggered.

  8

  Evie’s rules were:

  1) Stay undercover and no killing until daylight!

  2) Cut open the cocoons enclosing Kayleigh and Maura!

  3) Enjoy life!

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” Angel said. “But are you sure Maura an Kay won’t kill me while I’m enjoyin life?”

  “Pretty sure,” Evie said.

  “Good enough,” Angel said.

  “Open her cell,” Evie said, and a line of rats emerged from the hole by the shower alcove. The first one stopped at the base of Angel’s cell door. The second climbed atop the first, the third atop the second. A tower formed, gray rat body stacked on gray rat body like hideous ice cream scoops. Evie gasped when she felt the bottom rat suffocate. “Oh, Mother,” she said. “I am so, so sorry.”

  “Look at this wonderful circus shit here.” Angel was entranced. “You could make money at this, sister, you know it?”

  The topmost rat was the smallest, still a pup. It squeezed into the keyhole and Evie controlled its tiny paws, searching through the mechanisms, investing it with a strength that no rat had ever possessed before. The cell door opened.

  Angel fetched a couple of towels from the shower, fluffed them up, laid them on the bunk, and draped a blanket over them. She closed the cell door behind her. If anyone looked in, it would appear that she had finally lost the fight and fallen asleep.

  She started up the corridor, headed for C Wing, where most of the cocooned sleepers now resided.

  “Goodbye, Angel,” Evie called.

  “Yeah,” Angel said. “See ya.” She hesitated with her hand on the door. “You hear screamin somewhere far off?”

  Evie did. It was, she knew, Selectman Bert Miller, blatting about the bullet wound in his leg. His wailing carried inside the prison through the ventilation ducts. Angel didn’t need to concern herself with that.

  “Don’t worry,” Evie said. “It’s just a man.”

  “Oh,” Angel said, and left.

  9

  Jeanette had been sitting against the wall across from the cells during Angel and Evie’s conversation, listening and observing. Now she turned to Damian, years dead and buried over a hundred miles away, and yet also sitting beside her. He had a clutchhead screwdr
iver in his thigh and he was bleeding onto the floor, although the blood didn’t feel like anything to Jeanette, not even wet. Which was strange, because she was sitting in a pool of it.

  “Did you see that?” she asked. “Those rats?”

  “Yeah,” Damian said. His tone went high-pitched and squeaky, his imitation of her voice. “I see those ratsies, Jeanie baby.”

  Ugh, Jeanette thought. He had been all right when he first reappeared in her life, but now he was becoming irritable.

  “There’s rats just like that chew on my corpse because of how you killed me, Jeanie baby.”

  “I’m sorry.” She touched her face. It felt like she was crying, but her face was dry. Jeanette scratched at her forehead, digging the nails in, trying to find some pain. She hated being crazy.

  “Come on. Check it out.” Damian moved over, bringing his face up close. “They chewed me right down to the marrow.” His eyes were black sockets; the rats had eaten the eyeballs. Jeanette didn’t want to look, wanted to close her own eyes, but if she did, she knew sleep would be waiting.

  “What kind of a mother lets her son’s daddy be done by like this? Kills him and lets the rats chew on him like he was a goddam Butterfinger?”

  “Jeanette,” Evie said. “Hey. Over here.”

  “Never mind that bitch, Jeanie,” Damian said. A rat pup fell out of his mouth as he spoke. It landed in Jeanette’s lap. She screamed and slapped at it, but it wasn’t there. “I need your attention. Eyes on me, moron.”

  Evie said, “I’m glad you stayed awake, Jeanette. I’m glad you didn’t listen to me. Something’s happening on the other side and—well, I thought I’d be happy about it, but maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. On the off-chance this thing goes on long enough, I’d like for there to be a fair hearing.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jeanette’s throat ached. Her everything ached.