by Stephen King
Pete Ordway raised a Garand rifle. “I could put a bullet in you, ma’am, and stop your mouth. Tempted to do it.”
“Put it down, Pete.” Frank could feel this thing dancing on the edge of control. Here were men with guns faced with a seemingly insoluble problem. To them, the easiest way to deal with it would be to shoot it to pieces. He knew this because he felt it himself.
“Norcross? Have your people stand aside. I want a good look at her.”
Clint stepped back, one arm around Willy Burke to hold him up and one hand laced through Jared’s fingers. Michaela flanked Jared on the other side. Angel stood defiantly in front of the soft cell for a moment, shielding Evie with her body, but when Michaela took her hand and pulled gently, Angel gave in and stood beside her.
“Better not hurt her,” Angel said. Her voice was trembling; tears stood in her eyes. “Just better not, you bastards. She’s a fuckin goddess.”
Frank took three steps forward, not knowing or caring if his remaining men followed. He looked at Evie so long and hard that Clint turned to look himself.
The greenery that had twined in her hair was gone. Her naked body was beautiful, but in no way extraordinary. Her pubic hair was a dark triangle above the joining of her thighs.
“What the fuck,” Carson Struthers said. “Wasn’t she—just—green?”
“It’s—nice to finally make your acquaintance in person, ma’am,” Frank said.
“Thank you,” said Evie. Bold nakedness not withstanding, she sounded as shy as a schoolgirl. Her eyes were downcast. “Do you like it, Frank, putting animals in cages?”
“I only cage those that need to be caged,” said Frank, and for the first time in days, he really smiled. If there was one thing he knew, it was that wild went two ways—the danger a wild animal presented to others, and the danger that others presented to a wild animal. In general, he cared more about keeping the animals safe from the people. “And I’ve come to let you out of yours. I want to take you to doctors who can examine you. Would you allow me to do that?”
“I think not,” Evie said. “They would find nothing, and change nothing. Remember the story of the golden goose? When the men cut it open, there was nothing inside but guts.”
Frank sighed and shook his head.
He doesn’t believe her because he doesn’t want to believe her, Clint thought. Because he can’t afford to believe her. Not after all he’s done.
“Ma’am—”
“Why don’t you call me Evie,” she said. “I don’t like this formality. I thought we had a lovely little rapport when we talked on the phone, Frank.” But her eyes were still downcast. Clint wondered what was in them that she had to hide. Doubt about her mission here? That was probably wishful thinking, but possible—hadn’t Jesus Christ himself prayed to have the cup taken from his lips? As, he supposed, Frank wished that scientists at the CDC would take the cup from his. That they would look at Evie’s scans and bloodwork and DNA and say aha.
“Evie it is,” Frank said. “This inmate . . .” He tilted his head toward Angel, who was staring at him with wrath. “She says that you’re a goddess. Is that true?”
“No,” Evie said.
At Clint’s side, Willy began to cough and rub the left side of his chest.
“This other woman . . .” This time the tilt went toward Michaela. “She says you’re a supernatural being. And—” Frank didn’t like to say it aloud, to get close to the fury that it could lead to, but he had to. “—you knew things about me that you couldn’t have known.”
“Plus she can float!” Jared blurted. “You may have noticed that? She levitated! I saw it! We all did!”
Evie looked at Michaela. “You’re wrong about me, you know. I am a woman, and in most ways like any other. Like the ones these men love. Although love is a dangerous word when it comes from men. Quite often they don’t mean the same thing as women do when they say it. Sometimes they mean they’ll kill for it. Sometimes when they say it they don’t mean much of anything. Which, of course, most women come to know. Some with resignation, many with sorrow.”
“When a man says he loves you, that means he wants to get his pecker up inside your pants,” Angel put in helpfully.
Evie returned her attention to Frank and the men standing behind him. “The women you want to save, are at this very moment living their lives in another place. Happy lives, by and large, although of course most miss their little boys and some miss their husbands and fathers. I won’t say they never behave badly, they are far from saints, but for the most part, they’re in harmony. In that world, Frank, no one ever pulls your daughter’s favorite shirt, shouts in her face, embarrasses her, or terrifies her by putting his fist through the wall.”
“They’re alive?” Carson Struthers asked. “Do you swear it, woman? Do you swear to God?”
“Yes,” Evie said. “I swear to your god and every god.”
“How do we get them back, then?”
“Not by poking me or prodding me or taking my blood. Those things wouldn’t work, even if I were to allow them.”
“What will?”
Evie spread her arms wide. Her eyes flickered, the pupils expanding to black diamonds, the irises roiling from pale green to brilliant amber, turning to cat’s eyes. “Kill me,” she said. “Kill me and they’ll awake. Every woman on earth. I swear this is true.”
Like a man in a dream, Frank raised his rifle.
4
Clint stepped in front of Evie.
“No, Dad, no!” Jared screamed.
Clint took no notice. “She’s lying, Geary. She wants you to kill her. Not all of her—I think part of her has changed her mind—but it’s what she came here to do. What she was sent here to do.”
“Next you’ll be saying she wants to be hung on a cross,” Pete Ordway said. “Stand aside, Doc.”
Clint didn’t. “It’s a test. If we pass it, there’s a chance. If we don’t, if you do what she expects you to do, the door closes. This will be a world of men until all the men are gone.”
He thought of the fights he’d had growing up, battling not for milkshakes, not really, but just for a little sun and space—a little room to fucking breathe. To grow. He thought of Shannon, his old friend, who had depended on him to pull her out of that purgatory as much as he had depended on her. He had done so to the best of his ability, and she had remembered. Why else would she have given her daughter his last name? But he still owed a debt. To Shannon, for being a friend. To Lila, for being a friend and his wife and his son’s mother. And those who were with him, here in front of Evie’s cell? They also had women to whom they owed debts—yes, even Angel. It was time to pay off.
The fight he’d wanted was over. Clint was punched out and he hadn’t won a thing.
Not yet.
He held his hands out to either side, palms up, and beckoned. Evie’s last defenders came and stood in a line in front of her cell, even Willy, who appeared on the verge of passing out. Jared stood next to Clint, and Clint put a hand on his son’s neck. Then, very slowly, he picked up the M4. He handed it to Michaela, whose mother slept in a cocoon not far from where they now stood.
“Listen to me, Frank. Evie’s told us that if you don’t kill her, if you just let her go, there’s a chance the women can come back.”
“He’s lying,” Evie said, but now that he couldn’t see her, Frank heard something in her voice that gave him pause. It sounded like anguish.
“Enough bullshit,” Pete Ordway said, and spat on the floor. “We lost a lot of good men getting this far. Let’s just take her. We can decide what comes next later.”
Clint lifted Willy’s rifle. He did so reluctantly, but he did it.
Michaela turned to Evie. “Whoever sent you here thinks this is how men solve all their problems. Isn’t that right?”
Evie made no reply. Michaela had an idea that the remarkable creature in the soft cell was being torn in ways she had never expected when she appeared in the woods above that rusted trailer.
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She turned back to the armed men, now halfway down the corridor. Their guns were pointed. At this range, their bullets would shred the little group in front of the strange woman.
Michaela raised her weapon. “It doesn’t have to go this way. Show her it doesn’t have to.”
“Which means doing what?” Frank asked.
“It means letting her go back to where she came from,” Clint said.
“Not on your life,” said Drew T. Barry, and that was when Willy Burke’s knees buckled and he went down, no longer breathing.
5
Frank handed his rifle to Ordway. “He needs CPR. I took the course last summer—”
Clint pointed his rifle at Frank’s chest. “No.”
Frank stared at him. “Man, are you crazy?”
“Step back,” Michaela said, pointing her own gun at Frank. She didn’t know what Clint was doing, but she had an idea he was playing the last card in his hand. In our hand, she thought.
“Let’s shoot em all,” Carson Struthers said. He sounded near hysterics. “That devil-woman, too.”
“Stand down,” Frank said. And, to Clint: “You’re just going to let him die? What would that prove?”
“Evie can save him,” Clint said. “Can’t you, Evie?”
The woman in the cell said nothing. Her head was lowered, her hair obscuring her face.
“Geary—if she saves him, will you let her go?”
“That old cocksucker’s fakin!” Carson Struthers shouted. “It’s all a set-up they planned!”
Frank began, “Can I just check if—?”
“Okay, yes,” Clint said. “But be quick. Brain damage starts after three minutes, and I don’t know if even a supernatural being could reverse that.”
Frank hurried to Willy, dropped to one knee, and put his fingers to the old man’s throat. He looked up at Clint. “His clock’s stopped. I should start CPR.”
“A minute ago, you were ready to kill him,” Reed Barrows grumbled.
Officer Treat, who thought he had witnessed some shit in Afghanistan, groaned. “I don’t understand any of this. Just tell me what it’s going to take to get my kid back and I’ll do it.” To whom, exactly, this statement was directed, was unclear.
“No CPR.” Clint turned to Evie, who stood with her head down. Which, he thought, was good, because she couldn’t help seeing the man on the floor.
“This is Willy Burke,” said Clint. “His country told him to serve, and he served. These days he goes out with the volunteer fire department to fight brushfires in the spring. They do it without pay. He helps at every bean supper the Ladies’ Aid puts on for indigent families the state is too chintzy to support. He coaches Pop Warner football in the fall.”
“He was a good coach, too,” Jared said. His voice was thick with tears.
Clint continued. “He took care of his sister for ten years when she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. He fed her, he brought her back when she took it into her head to wander, he changed her shitty diapers. He came out here to defend you because he wanted to do the right thing by you and by his conscience. He never hurt a woman in his life. Now he’s dying. Maybe you’ll let him. After all, he’s just another man, right?”
Someone was coughing on the smoke drifting down Broadway. For a moment there was no other sound, then Evie Black shrieked. Lights burst in their overhead cages. Cell doors that had been locked slammed open and then banged shut in a sound that was like iron hands applauding. Several of the men in Frank’s group screamed, one of them in a pitch so high that he sounded like a little girl of six or seven.
Ordway turned and ran. His footfalls echoed through the cinderblock halls.
“Pick him up,” Evie said. Her cell door had opened with the others. If, that was, it had ever been locked in the first place. Clint had no doubt that she could have left whenever she wished at any time during the last week. The rats had only been part of her theater.
Clint and Jared Norcross lifted Willy’s limp form. He was heavy, but Evie took him as if he were no more than a bag of goosefeathers.
“You played on my heart,” she said to Clint. “That was a cruel thing to do, Dr. Norcross.” Her face was solemn, but he thought that he saw a glint of amusement in her eyes. Maybe even merriment. She encircled Willy’s considerable waistline with her left arm and placed her right hand on the matted, sweat-soaked hair at the back of the old man’s head. Then she pressed her mouth to his.
Willy shuddered all over. His arms lifted to encircle Evie’s back. For a moment the old man and the young woman remained in a deep embrace. Then she let him go and stood back. “How do you feel, Willy?”
“Damn good,” Willy Burke said. He sat up.
“My God,” Reed Barrows said. “He looks twenty years younger.”
“I ain’t been kissed like that since I was in high school,” said Willy. “If ever. Ma’am, I think you saved my life. I thank you for that, but I think the kiss was even better.”
Evie began to smile. “I’m glad you enjoyed it. I rather liked it myself, although it wasn’t as good as beating Boom Town.”
Clint’s blood was no longer up; exhaustion and Evie’s latest miracle had cooled it. He looked on the rage he had felt so recently like a man looking at a stranger who has broken into his house and cluttered the kitchen while making himself an extravagant and gluttonous breakfast. He felt sad and regretful and terribly tired. He wished he could just go home, sit beside his wife, share space with her, and not have to say a word.
“Geary,” Clint said.
Frank was slow to look at him, like a man shaking off a daze.
“Let her go. It’s the only way.”
“Maybe, but even that’s not sure, is it?”
“No,” Clint agreed. “What in this fucked-up life is?”
Angel spoke up then. “Bad times and good times,” she said. “Bad times and good. All the rest is just horseshit in the barn.”
“I thought it would take at least until Thursday, but . . .” Evie laughed, a sound like tinkling bells. “I forgot how fast men can move when they set their minds to a thing.”
“Sure,” Michaela said. “Just think of the Manhattan Project.”
6
At ten minutes past eight on that fine morning, a line of six vehicles drove down West Lavin Road, while behind them the prison smoldered like a discarded cigar butt in an ashtray. They turned onto Ball’s Hill Road. Unit Two led the way with its flashers turning slowly. Frank was behind the wheel. Clint was in the shotgun seat. Behind them sat Evie Black, exactly where she had been sitting after Lila arrested her. Then she had been half-naked. On this return trip, she was wearing a Dooling Correctional red top.
“How we’re ever going to explain this to the state police, I don’t know,” Frank said. “Lot of men dead, lot of men wounded.”
“Right now everyone’s got their hands full with Aurora,” Clint said, “and probably half of them aren’t even showing up. When all the women come back—if they come back—no one will care.”
From behind them, Evie spoke quietly. “The mothers will. The wives. The daughters. Who do you think cleans up the battlefields after the shooting stops?”
7
Unit Two stopped in the lane leading to Truman Mayweather’s trailer, where yellow CRIME SCENE tape still fluttered. The other vehicles—two more police cruisers, two civilian cars, and Carson Struthers’s pickup truck—pulled up behind them. “Now what?” Clint asked.
“Now we’ll see,” Evie said. “If one of these men doesn’t change his mind and shoot me after all, that is.”
“That won’t happen,” Clint replied, not nearly as confident as he sounded.
Doors slammed. For the moment, the trio in Unit Two sat where they were.
“Tell me something, Evie,” Frank said. “If you’re just the emissary, who’s in charge of this rodeo? Some . . . I don’t know . . . life force? Big Mama Earth, maybe, hitting the reset button?”
“Do you mean the
Great Lesbian in the sky?” Evie asked. “A short, heavyset deity wearing a mauve pantsuit and sensible shoes? Isn’t that the image most men get when they think a woman is trying to run their lives?”
“I don’t know.” Frank felt listless, done up. He missed his daughter. He even missed Elaine. He didn’t know what had happened to his anger. It was like his pocket had torn, and it had fallen out somewhere along the way. “What comes to mind when you think about men, smartass?”
“Guns,” she said. “Clint, there appear to be no doorhandles back here.”
“Don’t let that stop you,” he said.
She didn’t. One of the back doors opened, and Evie Black stepped out. Clint and Frank joined her, one on each side, and Clint was reminded of the Bible classes he’d been forced to attend at one foster home or another: Jesus on the cross, with the disbelieving bad guy on one side and the good thief on the other—the one who would, according to the dying messiah, shortly join him in paradise. Clint remembered thinking that the poor guy probably would have settled for parole and a chicken dinner.
“I don’t know what force sent me here,” she said. “I only know I was called, and—”
“You came,” Clint finished.
“Yes. And now I’ll go back.”
“What do we do?” asked Frank.
Evie turned to him, and she was no longer smiling. “You’ll do the job usually reserved for women. You’ll wait.” She drew in a deep breath. “Oh, the air smells so fresh after that prison.”
She walked past the clustered men as if they weren’t there, and took Angel by the shoulders. Angel looked up at her with shining eyes. “You did well,” Evie said, “and I thank you from my heart.”
Angel blurted, “I love you, Evie!”
“I love you, too,” said Evie, and kissed her lips.