by Stephen King
“It was an accident,” Janice said.
Lila bent down, scooped a handful of dirt, and tossed it on the shrouded figure in the hole. “The cops always say that after they shoot some poor black man or woman or child.”
“She had a gun.”
“She didn’t mean to use it. She came to save the Tree.”
“I know,” said Janice. She patted Lila’s shoulder. “But you didn’t. Remember that.”
A thick branch of the Tree moaned and cracked, smashing to the ground with an explosion of leaves.
“I’d give anything to take it back,” Lila said. She wasn’t crying. For now, tears were beyond her. “I’d give my soul.”
“I think it’s time to go,” said Michaela. “While we still can.” She took her mother’s hand and drew her into the Tree.
6
For a handful of minutes, Lila was the last woman in Our Place. She did not ponder this wonder, however. She had decided to be practical, starting right now. Her focus was on the dirt, on the shovel, and on filling the grave. Only when the work was done did she enter the dark of the Tree and cross over. She went without looking back. Doing that, she felt, would break her fragile heart.
PART THREE
IN THE MORNING
The maid is not dead, but sleepeth.
—Matthew 9:24
1
To most people in the weeks after the women awoke, the world seemed a bit like some dismal thrift store boardgame: there were pieces missing, not necessarily the important pieces, but definitely some you’d like to have had. You sensed, at the very least, certain cards that might have helped you to victory were absent.
Grief was everywhere, like a disfigurement. But what did you do when you lost a wife, or a daughter, or your husband? Unless you were like Terry Coombs—and some were—you lived with the loss and went on playing the game.
Pudge Marone, bartender and owner of the Squeak, had lost a piece of himself and learned to live with it. His right thumb now ended below the knuckle. It took him awhile to lose the habit of reaching for beer taps with that hand, but he made do. Then, he received an offer for the building from a guy who wanted to open a TGI Fridays franchise. Pudge told himself the Squeaky Wheel would never have recovered from Aurora anyway, and the payday was not bad.
Certain people—Don Peters, for instance—were not missed much at all. They were so completely forgotten it was like they never existed. The wreck of the Peters property was sold at auction.
Johnny Lee Kronsky’s few possessions were bagged up with the trash, but his grim apartment remains unoccupied to this day.
Van had left the door open when she left Fritz Meshaum’s house that last day of Aurora, and after he had been dead a day or two, the turkey vultures came in and helped themselves to the free buffet. Smaller birds came inside to harvest Fritz’s wiry red beard for nesting materials. Eventually, an enterprising bear dragged the carcass outside. In time, insects polished his skeleton clean, and the sun bleached his overalls white. Nature made use of him and, as was her way, managed to make something beautiful: a bone sculpture.
When Magda Dubcek learned what had happened to Anton—the blood on her bedroom carpet told most of the story—she bitterly regretted her vote to come back. “What a mistake I have made,” she said to herself too many times to count, over too many rum and cokes to count. To Magda, her Anton wasn’t a piece, or two pieces, or three pieces; to her, he was the whole game. Blanche McIntyre tried to get Magda involved in volunteering—there were so many children who had lost a parent and needed help—and she invited her to join the book club, but Magda wasn’t interested. “There is no happy ending for me here,” she said. On long, sleepless nights, she drank and watched Boardwalk Empire. When she finished that one, she moved on to The Sopranos. She filled the empty hours with stories of mean men doing mean things.
2
For Blanche, there was a happy ending.
She awoke in Dorothy’s apartment, on the floor where she had fallen asleep a few days before, and peeled herself out of the remains of her decaying cocoon. Her friends were there, too, likewise coming around and tearing themselves free. But one thing was different: Andy Jones. The baby was not in Blanche’s arms, as he had been when she entered the Tree. He was asleep in a crude crib made of woven twigs on the floor nearby.
“Holy shit,” Dorothy said. “The kid! Yippee!”
Blanche took it as a sign. Tiffany Jones Daycare was built on the site of a home that had burned down during Aurora. The project was financed from Blanche’s retirement fund, and from that of her new boyfriend (which, in Willy Burke’s case, had been accruing without interest in the lining of his yellowed mattress since 1973), and from many community donations. In the wake of Aurora, it seemed that many more people were charitably inclined than had previously been the case. The Norcross family was particularly generous, in spite of their difficulties. On the sign outside, below Tiffany’s name, was a picture of a crib made of woven twigs.
Blanche and her staff accepted any child between the ages of one month and four years, regardless of the parents’ (or parent’s) ability to pay. After Aurora, it was small community operations like Blanche’s, in large part funded and staffed by men, that began the movement that led to the establishment of a universal childcare program. Many men seemed to understand that a rebalancing was necessary.
They had, after all, been warned.
Blanche thought once or twice of the novel they had met to talk about on that last night before everything changed: the story of a girl who told a lie that changed many lives. Blanche often considered the penance that weighed so heavily on that girl’s life. She, Blanche, did not feel that she owed any such penance. She was a decent person, had been a decent person all along, a hard worker and a good friend. She had always been good to the inmates of the prison. The daycare was not about atonement. It was about decency. It was natural, obvious, and essential. If the boardgame was missing pieces, it was sometimes—often, even—possible to make new ones.
Blanche had met Willy when he showed up at the door of the daycare, then still undergoing renovations, with a wad of fifty-dollar bills.
“What’s this now?” she asked.
“My share,” he said.
Except it wasn’t. Mere money wasn’t enough. If he wanted to share, he’d have to do his share.
“Kids crap so much,” Willy observed to Blanche one evening after they had been courting for awhile.
She was standing by her Prius, waiting for him to finish dragging two straining, translucent bags of used diapers to the bed of his truck. They would be washed at Tiny Tot Laundry in Maylock. Blanche had no intention of filling a landfill with used Pampers. Willy had lost weight and bought new suspenders. Blanche had thought he was cute before, but now, with his beard trimmed (and those pesky eyebrows), he was downright handsome.
“If you die on me, Willy,” said Blanche, “we’re going to have fun with the obituary. ‘Willy Burke died doing what he loved. Transporting poopy diapers across a parking lot.’ ” She blew him a kiss.
3
Jared Norcross volunteered at Tiffany Jones Daycare the following summer, and part-time during his senior year. He liked helping out. The kids were sort of demented—they made dirt castles and licked walls and rolled in puddles, and that was just when they were happy—but he was endlessly fascinated, like so many before him, at the easy way the boys and the girls played together. So what changed later on? Why did they suddenly split into largely separate playgroups almost as soon as they began organized school? Was it chemical? Genetic? Jared didn’t accept that. People were more complex; people had root systems, and their root systems had root systems. He had an inkling that in college he might like to study child behavior and eventually become a psychiatrist, like his father.
These thoughts comforted Jared and distracted him when he needed distracting, which was, during that period of his life, almost all the time. His parents’ marriage was breaking up, and Mary was d
ating Molly Ransom’s older cousin, a lacrosse star at a high school in the next county. He had seen them together once, Mary and her guy. They had been sitting at a picnic table outside an ice cream parlor, feeding each other ice cream cones. It could only have been more horrible if they were having sex.
Molly bird-dogged him once, heading out of his house. “What’s going on, dude? Mary and Jeff are coming over. You want to hang with us?” The little girl had braces now, and it seemed like she’d grown about seven feet. Soon the boys who didn’t want to play with her after school would be chasing her for maybe a kiss.
“I wish I could,” Jared said.
“So why can’t you?” Molly asked.
“Broken heart,” Jared said, and winked. “I know you’ll never love me, Molly.”
“Oh, please, get a life,” she said, and rolled her eyes.
Sometimes Jared’s steps carried him past the empty house where he’d hidden Mary and Molly and Mom. He and Mary had been a sweet team, he thought—but she had put all that firmly into the past. “It’s just a whole different world now, you know,” Mary had told him, as if that was any consolation, or explained anything at all. Jared told himself that she had no idea what she was missing, but decided—gloomily—that she probably wasn’t missing anything.
4
Cocoons, it turned out, could float.
Three women, passengers on the flight that had crashed in the Atlantic Ocean, awoke in their webs on a rocky beach in Nova Scotia. Their cocoons were wet, but the women inside them were dry. They walked to an empty rescue station and called directory assistance for help.
This item was relegated to the back pages of newspapers and webzines, if reported at all. In the shadow of that year’s major miracle, such minor ones were of little interest.
5
To find one’s husband dead inside an exhaust-filled garage was a terrible way to return home.
Rita Coombs had some bad moments after that: despair, terror of a single life, and of course her own sleepless nights when it seemed the next day would never come. Terry had been steady, smart, and genial. That he had bogged down in a depression so hideous and encompassing that he had taken his own life was hard to square with her experience of the man who had been her partner and the father of her child. She wept until she was sure all the tears were gone . . . and then more tears came.
A fellow named Geary visited her one afternoon to offer his condolences. Rita knew—though there were conflicting stories, and a desire to protect everyone involved had thrown a hush over the details of the event—that it was Geary who had directed the attack on the prison, but his manner was soft-spoken and kind. He insisted she call him Frank.
“What happened to my husband, Frank?”
Frank Geary said that he believed Terry just couldn’t bear it. “Everything was out of hand and he knew it. But he couldn’t stop it. The only thing he could stop was himself.”
She gathered herself and asked one of the questions that plagued her on her sleepless nights. “Mr. Geary . . . my husband . . . he had a little bit of a drinking problem. Did he . . . was he . . .”
“Sober the whole time,” Frank said. He raised his ringless left hand. “My word on it. Hand to God.”
6
Aurora’s mass outbreaks of violence and property damage, plus the disappearance of so many women, resulted in massive restructuring of the insurance industry nationwide and worldwide. Drew T. Barry, and the team at Drew T. Barry Indemnity, rode it out as well as any company in America, and managed to facilitate life insurance settlements for both Nate McGee’s widow and Eric Blass’s parents. Since both had died in the midst of an unauthorized assault on a penal institution, this had been no small feat, but Drew T. Barry was no mean insurance agent.
It was less difficult to achieve remuneration for the relatives, near and distant, of the Honorable Oscar Silver, Barry and Gerda Holden, Linny Mars, Officer Vern Rangle, Dr. Garth Flickinger, Officer Rand Quigley, Officer Tig Murphy, and Officer Billy Wettermore, all of whom, it could be legitimately claimed, had died under circumstances covered by their respective policies. Not that the various resolutions weren’t a long and involved process. It was the work of years, work that would see Drew T. Barry’s hair turn salty and his skin turn gray, and in the midst of it, during early mornings of emails and late nights of filings, Drew T. Barry lost his taste for hunting. It seemed decadent in juxtaposition to the seriousness of his work on behalf of the abandoned and the aggrieved. He’d sit in a stand, and see, on the other end of his scope, a deer with a ten-point rack wander through the mist, and think to himself, Act of God Insurance. Does that buck have Act of God Insurance? Because to a deer, that’s what getting shot must be, right? Will his children be taken care of? Can a dead buck with good insurance make a little dough? Of course not, the idea was even more ridiculous than the pun. So he sold his Weatherby, and even tried to become a vegetarian, although that didn’t work out so well. Sometimes, after a day in the existential toils of the insurance biz, a man needed a pork chop.
Loss changes you. Sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes it’s good. Either way, you eat your goddam pork chop and go on.
7
Due to the absence of identification, Lowell and Maynard Griner were buried in unmarked graves. Much later, when the Aurora craziness began to subside (not that it ever did, entirely), their fingerprints were matched with the extensive sheets on file and the brothers were officially declared dead. It was doubted by many, however, especially by folk who lived out in the brakes and hollers. Rumors abounded that Little Low and Maynard had made themselves a home in the shaft of an abandoned wildcat mine, that they were running Acapulco Gold further south under assumed names, that they drove the hills in a jacked-up midnight black Ford F-150 with a severed boar’s head chained to the grill and Hank Williams Jr. blasting from the stereo. An award-winning author, a man who had lived in Appalachia as a young man and fled as soon as he turned eighteen, heard some of the legends from his relatives, and used them as the basis of a children’s picture book titled The Bad Stupid Brothers. In the picture book, they end up as miserable toads in Poopy Swamp.
8
The stream that the Bright Ones cult had dammed near their compound in Hatch, New Mexico, broke, and the waters ripped the community’s buildings from their foundations. When the waters receded, the desert moved in; sand covered up the few discarded weapons that had been overlooked by the feds; a few pages of their new nation’s Constitution, which declared their dominion over the lands and waters they had seized and their rights to bear arms, and the United States federal government’s lack of standing to demand they pay their share of taxes, were speared on cactus needles. A graduate student studying botany, hiking to collect specimens of native desert plants, discovered several of these spiked pages.
“Thank you, God!” she cried and snatched them off the cactus. The graduate student’s stomach was bothering her. She hustled off the mountain path, defecated, and used the providential papers to wipe herself.
9
To continue the march to her thirty-year pension, Van Lampley took a job at the women’s prison in Curly, which was where the vast majority of Dooling’s surviving prisoners were shifted. Celia Frode ended up there, though not for long (paroled), and so did Claudia Stephenson.
They were, by and large, a rough bunch at Curly Correctional—lots of tightly wired girls, lots of tough women with felony priors—but Van was up to it. One day a white girl with faux gold teeth, cornrows, and a forehead tattoo (it said EMPTY in bleeding letters) asked Van how she got the limp. The inmate’s sneer was both piggy and jovial.
“I kicked a little too much ass,” Van said, a harmless lie. She had kicked exactly the right amount of ass. The officer rolled up her sleeve to show the tattoo on her mighty left bicep: YOUR PRIDE, etched on the gravestone with the wee arm. She turned the other way and rolled up the other sleeve. On her equally impressive right bicep another gravestone had been inked. ALL YOUR FUCKING PRIDE was e
tched on this one.
“Okay,” the tough girl said, losing the sneer. “You’re cool.”
“You better believe it,” Van said. “Now move along.”
Sometimes Van prayed with Claudia, now the ordained Reverend Stephenson. They prayed for forgiveness for their sins. They prayed for Ree’s soul. They prayed for Jeanette’s soul. They prayed for the babies and the mothers. They prayed for whatever needed praying on.
“What was she, Claudia?” Van asked once.
“It’s not what she was, Vanessa,” said Reverend Stephenson. “It’s what we are.”
“And what would that be?”
The reverend was stern—very unlike the old Claudia, who would not say boo to a goose. “Resolved to be better. Resolved to be stronger. Ready to do whatever we have to do.”
10
It would have killed her, the cervical cancer that had been brewing in Janice Coates, but the clock on the other side of the Tree had slowed its growth somehow. Also, her daughter had seen it on the other side of the Tree. Michaela took her mother to an oncologist two days after the women awoke, and the warden was receiving chemotherapy two days after that. Janice acquiesced to Michaela’s demand that she step down from her position immediately, allowing Michaela to make all the arrangements, to take care of her, to order her to the doctor, to bed, and to take her meds on a regular basis. Michaela also made sure her mother stopped smoking.
In Michaela’s humble opinion, cancer was horseshit. She had lost her father at a young age, and she was still working through some of the emotional horseshit that had come with that. But horseshit abounded. Horseshit was something you had to shovel pretty much non-stop if you were a woman, and if you were a woman in television, you had to shovel it double-time. Michaela could shovel it triple-time. She had not driven home from DC, rammed a bad biker’s vintage ride, stayed awake for days smoking Garth Flickinger’s meth, and survived a gruesome armed conflict in order to succumb to any variety of horseshit whatsoever, even if that horseshit was a disease that actually belonged to her mother.