by Stephen King
“Yes.” But for the nonce she only stood there, biting her lower lip.
“What is it?”
Her hand went to her stomach and rubbed there, as if it ached or griped her. He thought she would speak, but she shook her head and said, “Nothing.”
“I don’t believe that. Why do you rub your belly? Are you hurt? Were you hurt when we stopped?”
She took her hand off her tunic as if the flesh just south of her navel had grown hot. “No. I’m fine.”
“Are you?”
Susannah seemed to think this over very carefully. “We’ll talk,” she said at last. “We’ll palaver, if you like that better. But you were right before, Roland-this isn’t the place or time.”
“All four of us, or just you and me and Eddie?”
“Just you and me, Roland,” she said, and poked the stump of her leg through the loop. “Just one hen and one rooster, at least to start with. Now lower away, if you please.”
He did, frowning down at her, hoping with all his heart that his first idea-the one that had come to mind as soon as he saw that restlessly rubbing hand-was wrong. Because she had been in the speaking ring, and the demon that denned there had had its way with her while Jake was trying to cross between the worlds. Sometimes-often-demonic contact changed things.
Never for the better, in Roland’s experience.
He pulled his rope back up after Eddie had caught Susannah around the waist and helped her to the platform. The gunslinger walked forward to one of the piers which had torn through the train’s bullet snout, fashioning the rope’s end into a shake-loop as he went. He tossed this over the pier, snubbed it (being careful not to twitch the rope to the left), and then lowered himself to the platform himself, bent at the waist and leaving boot-tracks on Blaine’s pink side.
“Too bad to lose the rope and harness,” Eddie remarked when Roland was beside them.
“I ain’t sorry about that harness,” Susannah said. “I’d rather crawl along the pavement until I got chewin-gum all the way up my arms to the elbows.”
“We haven’t lost anything,” Roland said. He snugged his hand into the rawhide foot-loop and snapped it hard to the left. The rope slithered down from the pier, Roland gathering it in almost as fast as it came down.
“Neat trick!” Jake said.
“Eat! Rick!” Oy agreed.
“Cort?” Eddie asked.
“Cort,” Roland agreed, smiling.
“The drill instructor from hell,” Eddie said. “Better you than me, Roland. Better you than me.”
4
As they walked toward the doors leading into the station, that low, liquid warbling sound began again. Roland was amused to see all three of his cohorts wrinkle their noses and pull down the comers of their mouths at the same time; it made them look like blood family as well as ka-tet. Susannah pointed toward the park. The signs looming over the “trees were wavering slightly, the way things did in a heat-haze.
“Is that from the thinny?” Jake asked.
Roland nodded.
“Will we be able to get around it?”
“Yes. Thinnies are dangerous in much the way that swamps full of quicksand and saligs are dangerous. Do you know those things?”
“We know quicksand,” Jake said. “And if saligs are long green things with big teeth, we know them, too.”
“That’s what they are.”
Susannah turned to look back at Blaine one last time. “No silly questions and no silly games. The book was right about that.” From Blaine she turned her eyes to Roland. “What about Beryl Evans, the woman who wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? Do you think she’s part of this? That we might even meet her? I’d like to thank her. Eddie figured it out, but-”
“It’s possible, I suppose,” Roland said, “but on measure, I think not. My world is like a huge ship that sank near enough shore for most of the wreckage to wash up on the beach. Much of what we find is fascinating, some of it may be useful, if ka allows, but all of it is still wreckage. Senseless wreckage.” He looked around. “Like this place, I think.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it wrecked,” Eddie said. “Look at the paint on the station-it’s a little rusty from the gutters up under the eaves, but it hasn’t peeled anywhere that I can see.” He stood in front of the doors and ran his fingers down one of the glass panels. They left four clear tracks behind. “Dust and plenty of it, but no cracks. I’d say that this building has been left unmaintained at most since… the start of the summer, maybe?”
He looked at Roland, who shrugged and nodded. He was listening with only half an ear and paying attention with only half a mind. The rest of him was fixed upon two things: the warble of the thinny, and keeping away the memories that wanted to swamp him.
“But Lud had been going to wrack and ruin for centuries” Susannah said. “This place… it may or may not be Topeka, but what it really looks like to me is one of those creepy little towns on The Twilight Zone. You boys probably don’t remember that one, but-”
“Yes, I do,” Eddie and Jake said in perfect unison, then looked at each other and laughed. Eddie stuck out his hand and Jake slapped it.
“They still show the reruns,” Jake said.
“Yeah, all the time,” Eddie added. “Usually sponsored by bankruptcy lawyers who look like shorthair terriers. And you’re right. This place isn’t like Lud. Why would it be? It’s not in the same world as Lud. I don’t know where we crossed over, but-” He pointed again at the blue Interstate 70 shield, as if that proved his case beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“If it’s Topeka, where are the people?” Susannah asked.
Eddie shrugged and raised his hands-who knows?
Jake put his forehead against the glass of the center door, cupped his hands to the sides of his face, and peered in. He looked for several seconds, then saw something that made him pull back fast. “Oh-oh,” he said. “No wonder the town’s so quiet.”
Roland stepped up behind Jake and peered in over the boy’s head, cupping his own hands to reduce his reflection. The gunslinger drew two conclusions before even looking at what Jake had seen. The first was that although this was most assuredly a train station, it wasn’t really a Blame station… not a cradle. The other was that the station did indeed belong to Eddie’s, Jake’s, and Susannah’s world… but perhaps not to their where.
It’s the thinny. We’ll have to be careful.
Two corpses were leaning together on one of the long benches that filled most of the room; but for their hanging, wrinkled faces and black hands, they might have been revellers who had fallen asleep in the station after an arduous party and missed the last train home. On the wall behind them was a board marked departures, with the names of cities and towns and baronies marching down it in a line. denver, read one. wichita, read another. omaha, read a third. Roland had once known a one-eyed gambler named Omaha; he had died with a knife in his throat at a Watch Me table. He had stepped into the clearing at the end of the path with his head thrown back, and his last breath had sprayed blood all the way up to the ceiling. Hanging down from the ceiling of this room (which Roland’s stupid and laggard mind insisted on thinking of as a stage rest, as if this were a stop along some half-forgotten road like the one that had brought him to Tull) was a beautiful four-sided clock. Its hands had stopped at 4:14, and Roland supposed they would never move again. It was a sad thought… but this was a sad world. He could not see any other dead people, but experience suggested that where there were two dead, there were likely four more dead somewhere out of sight. Or four dozen.
“Should we go in?” Eddie asked.
“Why?” the gunslinger countered. “We have no business here; it doesn’t lie along the Path of the Beam.”
“You’d make a great tour-guide,” Eddie said sourly.” 'Keep up, everyone, and please don’t go wandering off into the-'”
Jake interrupted with a request Roland didn’t understand. “Do either of you guys have a quarter?” The boy was looking at Eddie and Susan
nah. Beside him was a square metal box. Written on it in blue was:
The Topeka Capital-Journal covers Kansas like no other! Your hometown paper! Read it every day!
Eddie shook his head, amused. “Lost all my change at some point. Probably climbing a tree, just before you joined us, in an all-out effort to avoid becoming snack-food for a robot bear. Sorry.”
“Wait a minute… wait a minute… “Susannah had her purse open and was rummaging through it in a way that made Roland grin broadly in spite of all his preoccupations. It was so damned womanly, somehow. She turned over crumpled Kleenex, shook them to make sure there was nothing caught inside, fished out a compact, looked at it, dropped it back, came up with a comb, dropped that back-
She was too absorbed to look up as Roland strode past her, drawing his gun from the docker’s clutch he had built her as he went. He fired a single time. Susannah let out a little scream, dropping her purse and slapping at the empty holster high up under her left breast.
“Honky, you scared the livin Jesus out of me!”
“Take better care of your gun, Susannah, or the next time someone takes it from you, the hole may be between your eyes instead of in a… what is it, Jake? A news-telling device of some kind? Or does it hold paper?”
“Both.” Jake looked startled. Oy had withdrawn halfway down the platform and was looking at Roland mistrustfully. Jake poked his finger at the bullet-hole in the center of the newspaper box’s locking device. A little curl of smoke was drifting from it.
“Go on,” Roland said. “Open it.”
Jake pulled the handle. It resisted for a moment, then a piece of metal clunked down somewhere inside, and the door opened. The box itself was empty; the sign on the back wall read when all papers are gone, please take display copy. Jake worked it out of its wire holder, and they all gathered round.
“What in God’s name…?” Susannah’s whisper was both horrified and accusing. “What does it mean? What in God’s name happened^”
Below the newspaper’s name, taking up most of the front page’s top half, were screaming black letters:
“CAPTAIN TRIPS” SUPERFLU RAGES UNCHECKED
Govt. Leaders May Have Fled Country
Topeka Hospitals Jammed with Sick, Dying
Millions Pray for Cure
“Read it aloud,” Roland said. “The letters are in your speech, I cannot make them all out, and I would know this story very well.”
Jake looked at Eddie, who nodded impatiently.
Jake unfolded the newspaper, revealing a dot-picture (Roland had seen pictures of this type; they were called “fottergrafs”) which shocked them all: it showed a lakeside city with its skyline in flames. cleveland fires burn unchecked, the caption beneath read.
“Read, kid!” Eddie told him. Susannah said nothing; she was already reading the story-the only one on the front page-over his shoulder. Jake cleared his throat as if it were suddenly dry, and began.
5
“The byline says John Corcoran, plus staff and AP reports. That means a lot of different people worked on it, Roland. Okay. Here goes. 'America’s greatest crisis-and the world’s, perhaps-deepened overnight as the so-called superflu, known as Tube-Neck in the Midwest and Captain Trips in California, continues to spread.
“Although the death-toll can only be estimated, medical experts say the total at this point is horrible beyond comprehension: twenty to thirty million dead in the continental U.S. alone is the estimate given by Dr. Morris Hackford of Topeka’s St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center. Bodies are being burned from Los Angeles, California, to Boston, Massachusetts, in crematoria, factory furnaces, and at landfill sites.
“Here in Topeka, the bereaved who are still well enough and strong enough to do so are urged to take their dead to one of three sites: the disposal plant north of Oakland Billard Park; the pit area at Heartland Park Race Track; the landfill on Southeast Sixty-first Street, east of Forbes Field. Landfill users should approach by Berryton Road; California has been blocked by car wrecks and at least one downed Air Force transport plane, sources tell us.”
Jake glanced up at his friends with frightened eyes, looked behind him at the silent railway station, then looked back down at the newspaper.
“Dr. April Montoya of the Stormont-Vail Regional Medical Center points out that the death-toll, horrifying as it is, constitutes only part of this terrible story. “For every person who has died so far as a result of this new flu-strain,” Montoya said, “there are another six who are lying ill in their homes, perhaps as many as a dozen. And, so far as we have been able to determine, the recovery rate is zero.” Coughing, she then told this reporter: “Speaking personally, I’m not making any plans for the weekend.”
“In other local developments:
“All commercial flights out of Forbes and Phillip Billard have been cancelled.
“All Amtrak rail travel has been suspended, not just in Topeka but across all of Kansas. The Gage Boulevard Amtrak station has been closed until further notice.
“All Topeka schools have also been closed until further notice. This includes Districts 437, 345, 450 (Shawnee Heights), 372, and 501 (metro Topeka). Topeka Lutheran and Topeka Technical College are also closed, as is KU at Lawrence.
“Topekans must expect brownouts and perhaps blackouts in the days and weeks ahead. Kansas Power and Light has announced a ‘slow shutdown’ of the Kaw River Nuclear Plant in Wamego. Although no one in KawNuke’s Office of Public Relations answered this newspaper’s calls, a recorded announcement cautions that there is no plant emergency, that this is a safety measure only. KawNuke will return to on-line status, the announcement concludes, ‘when the current crisis is past.’ Any comfort afforded by this statement is in large part negated by the recorded statement’s final words, which are not ‘Goodbye’ or ‘Thank you for calling’ but ‘God will help us through our time of trial.’”
Jake paused, following the story to the next page, where there were more pictures: a burned-out panel truck overturned on the steps of the Kansas Museum of Natural History; traffic on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge stalled bumper to bumper; piles of corpses in Times Square. One body, Susannah saw, had been hung from a lamppost, and that brought back nightmarish memories of the run for the Cradle of Lud she and Eddie had made after parting from the gunslinger; memories of Luster and Winston and Jeeves and Maud. When the god-drums started up this time, it was Spanker’s stone what came out of the hat, Maud had said. We set him to dance. Except, of course, what she’d meant was that they had set him to hang. As they had hung some folks, it seemed, back home in little old New York. When things got weird enough, someone always found a lynchrope, it seemed.
Echoes. Everything echoed now. They bounced back and forth from one world to the other, not fading as ordinary echoes did but growing and becoming more terrible. Like the god-drums, Susannah thought, and shuddered.
“In national developments,” Jake read, “conviction continues to grow that, after denying the superflu’s existence during its early days, when quarantine measures might still have had some effect, national leaders have fled to underground retreats which were created as brain-trust shelters in case of nuclear war. Vice-President Bush and key members of the Reagan cabinet have not been seen during the last forty-eight hours. Reagan himself has not been seen since Sunday morning, when he attended prayer services at Green Valley Methodist Church in San Simeon.”
“They have gone to the bunkers like Hitler and the rest of the Nazi sewer-rats at the end of World War II,” said Rep. Steve Sloan. When asked if he had any objection to being quoted by name, Kansas’s first-term representative, a Republican, laughed and said: “Why should I? I’ve got a real fine case myself. I’ll be so much dust in the wind come this time next week.”
“Fires, most likely set, continue to ravage Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute.
“A gigantic explosion centered near Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium was apparently not nuclear in nature, as was first feared, bu
t occurred as the result of a natural gas buildup caused by unsupervised…”
Jake let the paper drop from his hands. A gust of wind caught it and blew it the length of the platform, the few folded sheets separating as they went. Oy stretched his neck and snagged one of these as it went by. He trotted toward Jake with it in his mouth, as obedient as a dog with a stick.
“No, Oy, I don’t want it,” Jake said. He sounded ill and very young.
“At least we know where all the folks are,” Susannah said, bending and taking the paper from Oy. It was the last two pages. They were crammed with obituaries printed in the tiniest type she had ever seen. No pictures, no causes of death, no announcement of burial services. Just this one died, beloved of so-and-so, that one died, beloved of Jill-n-Joe, t'other one died, beloved of them-and-those. All in that tiny, not-quite-even type. It was the jaggedness of the type which convinced her it was all real.
But how hard they tried to honor their dead, even at the end, she thought, and a lump rose in her throat. How hard they tried.
She folded the quarto together and looked on the back-the last page of the Capital-Journal. It showed a picture of Jesus Christ, eyes sad, hands outstretched, forehead marked from his crown of thorns. Below it, three stark words in huge type:
PRAY FOR US
She looked up at Eddie, eyes accusing. Then she handed him the newspaper, one brown finger tapping the date at the top. It was June 24, 1986. Eddie had been drawn into the gunslinger’s world a year later.
He held it for a long time, fingers slipping back and forth across the date, as if the passage of his finger would somehow cause it to change. Then he looked up at them and shook his head. “No. I can’t explain this town, this paper, or the dead people in that station, but I can set you straight about one thing-everything was fine in New York when I left. Wasn’t it, Roland?”
The gunslinger looked a trifle sour. “Nothing in your city seemed very fine to me, but the people who lived there did not seem to be survivors of such a plague as this, no.”