by Stephen King
"We never used to require one at all," the clerk said, "and we still don't if we know the individual or the organization, you know. But I lost one a couple, three weeks ago. Old man came in and told me he wanted some air. I figured he meant for diving, you know--he was old, but he looked tough enough for it--so I started telling him about Downeast ScubaDive in Bangor. But he said no, he was interested in ground portability. So I rented it to him. I never got it back. Brand-new Bell flat-pack. Two-hundred-dollar piece of equipment."
Leandro looked at the clerk, almost sick with excitement. He felt like a man following arrows deeper and deeper into a frightening but fabulous and totally unexplored cavern.
"You rented this mask? Personally?"
"Well, it was a flat-pack, actually, but yes. My dad and I run the place. He was delivering oxy bottles down to Augusta. I caught hell from him. I don't know if he'll like me renting another Bell, even, but with the deposit I guess it's okay."
"Can you describe the man?"
"Mister, do you feel okay? You look a little white around the--"
"I'm fine. Can you describe the man who rented the flat-pack?"
"Old. Had a tan. He was mostly bald. He was skinny ... stringy, I guess you'd say. Like I say, he looked tough." The clerk thought. "He was driving a Valiant."
"Could you check the day he rented the flat-pack?"
"You a cop?"
"Reporter. Bangor Daily News." Leandro showed the clerk his press card. Now the clerk also began to look excited.
"He do somethin else? Besides rip off our flat-pack, I mean?"
"Could you look up the name and date for me?"
"Sure."
The clerk flipped back through his rental book. He found the entry and turned the book so Leandro could read it. The date was July 26th. The name was scrawled but still legible. Everett Hillman.
"You never reported the loss of the equipment to the police," Leandro said. It was not a question. If a complaint of theft had been lodged against the old geezer to complement his landlady's understandable unhappiness at being stiffed for two weeks' rent, the cops might have taken more interest in how or why Hillman had disappeared ... or where he had disappeared to.
"No, Dad said not to bother. Our insurance doesn't cover the theft of rented equipment, see, and ... well, that's why."
The clerk shrugged and smiled, but the shrug was slightly embarrassed, the smile slightly uneasy, and taken together they told Leandro a lot. He might be a terminal twerp, as David Bright feared, but he was not a stupid one. If they had reported the theft or disappearance of the flat-pack, the insurance company wouldn't cover the loss. But this fellow's father knew some other way they could stick it to the insurance company. But for now all that was very much a secondary consideration.
"Well, thank you for all your help," Leandro said, turning the book back around. "Now, if we could finish up here--"
"Sure, of course." The clerk was obviously happy to leave the subject of insurance behind. "And you won't put any of this in the paper until you check with my father, will you?"
"Absolutely not," Leandro said with a warm sincerity that P. T. Barnum himself would have admired. "Now, if I could just sign the agreement--"
"Right. I'll have to see some ID first, though. I didn't ask the old guy, and I also heard from Dad about that, I can tell you."
"I just showed you my press card."
"I know, but maybe I ought to see some real identification."
Sighing, Leandro pushed his driver's license across the counter.
3
"Slow down, Johnny," David Bright said. But Leandro was standing at an outdoor phone kiosk near the edge of a drive-in-restaurant parking lot. He heard the beginnings of excitement in Bright's voice. He believes me. Son of a bitch, I think he finally believes me!
As he had driven away from Maine Med Supplies and back toward Haven, Leandro's excitement and tension had grown until he thought he might explode if he didn't talk to someone else. And he had to; he recognized that as a responsibility that superseded his desire to get his scoop alone. He had to because he was going back, and something could easily happen to him, and if it did, he wanted to be sure somebody knew what he was onto. And Bright, as insufferable as he could be, was at least utterly honest; he wouldn't double-cross him.
Slow down, yeah, I got to.
He switched the phone to his other ear. The afternoon sun was hot on his neck, but it didn't feel bad at all. He started with the ride to Haven: the incredible jam-up of stations on the radio; the violent nausea; the bloody nose; the lost teeth. He told him about his conversation with the old man in the general store, how empty the place had been, how the whole area could have been wearing a big sign that said GONE FISHIN. He didn't mention his mathematical insights, because he could barely remember having them. Something had happened, but it was now all vague and diffuse in his mind.
Instead, he told Bright that he had gotten the idea that the air in Haven had been poisoned somehow--that there had been a chemical spill or something, or maybe the escape of some natural but deadly gas from inside the earth.
"A gas that improves radio transmissions, Johnny?"
Yes, he knew it was unlikely, he knew all the pieces didn't fit yet, but he had been there and he was sure it was the air that had made him sick. So he had decided to get some portable oxygen and go back.
He related his coincidental discovery that Everett Hillman, whom Bright himself had dismissed as a nutty old man, had been there before him, on exactly the same errand.
"So what do you think?" Leandro said finally.
There was a momentary lag, and then Bright said what Leandro believed to be the sweetest words he had ever heard in his life. "I think you were right all the time, Johnny. Something very weird is happening out there, and I advise you very strongly to stay away."
Leandro closed his eyes for a moment and leaned his head against the side of the telephone. He was smiling. It was a large and blissful smile. Right. Right all the time. Ah, they were good words; fine words; words of balm and beatitude. Right all the time.
"John? Johnny? Are you still there?"
Eyes still closed, still smiling, Leandro said: "I'm here." Just relishing it, David, old man, because I think I have been waiting my entire life for someone to tell me I was right all the time. About something. About anything.
"Stay away. Call the state cops."
"Would you?"
"Fuck, no!"
Leandro laughed. "Well, there you go. I'll be okay. I've got oxygen--"
"According to the guy at the medical-supply place, Hillman did too. He's just as gone."
"I'm going," Leandro repeated. "Whatever's going on in Haven, I'm going to be the first one to see it ... and get pictures of it."
"I don't like it."
"What time is it?" Leandro's own watch had stopped. Which was funny; he was almost sure he'd wound it when he got up that morning.
"Almost two."
"Okay. I'll call in by four. Again at six. Et cetera, until I'm home and dry. If you or somebody there doesn't hear from me every two hours, call the cops."
"Johnny, you sound like a kid playing with matches telling his father if he catches on fire, Dad has permission to put him out."
"You're not my father," Leandro said sharply.
Bright sighed. "Look, Johnny. If it makes any difference, I'm sorry I called you fucking Jimmy Olsen. You were right, isn't that enough? Stay out of Haven."
"Two hours. I want two hours, David. I deserve two hours, goddammit." Leandro hung up the phone.
He started back to his car ... then turned and marched defiantly back to the walk-up window and ordered two cheeseburgers with everything on them. It was the first time in his life he had ever ordered food from one of those places his mother called roadside luncheonettes--only when she said the words she made such places sound like the blackest pits of horror, as in It Came from the Roadside Luncheonette, or Earth vs. the Microbe Monsters.
W
hen they came, the cheeseburgers were hot and wrapped in grease-spotted sheets of waxed paper with the marvelous words DERRYBURGER RANCH printed all over them. He had gobbled the first even before he got back to his Dodge.
"Wonderful," he said, the word muffled to something that sounded like wunnel. "Wonderful, wonderful."
Microbes, do your worst! he thought with almost drunken defiance as he pulled out onto Route 9. He was, of course, unaware that things were changing rapidly in Haven now, and had been ever since noon; the situation in Haven was, in nuclear parlance, critical. Haven had in fact become a separate country, and its borders were now policed.
Not knowing this, Leandro drove on, tearing into his second cheeseburger and regretting only that he hadn't ordered a vanilla shake to go with them.
4
By the time he passed the Troy general store, his euphoria had dissipated, and his former low nervousness had returned--the sky overhead was a clear blue in which a few wispy white clouds floated, but his nerves felt as if there were a thunderstorm on the way. He glanced at the flat-pack on the seat beside him, the gold cup covered with a round of cellophane which read SANI-SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION. In other words, Leandro thought, microbes, keep out.
No cars on the road. No tractors in the fields. No boys walking barefoot along the side of the road with fishing rods. Troy dreamed silent (and, Leandro guessed, toothless) under the August sun.
He kept the radio tuned to WZON, and as he passed the Baptist church, he began to lose the signal in a rising mutter of other voices. Not long after that, his cheeseburgers began to first walk around uneasily in his stomach, and then to jump up and down. He could imagine them squirting grease as they did so. He was very close to the place where he had pulled over on his first effort to get into Haven. He pulled over now without delay--he didn't want the symptoms to get any worse. Those cheeseburgers had been too damned good to lose.
5
With the oxygen mask in place, the queasiness went away at once. That sense of low, gnawing nervousness did not. He caught a glimpse of himself, gold cup bobbing on his mouth and nose, in the rearview mirror and felt a moment of fright--was that him? That man's eyes looked too serious, too intent ... they looked like the eyes of a jet fighter pilot. Leandro didn't want people like David Bright to think he was a twerp, but he wasn't sure he wanted to look that serious.
Too late now. You're in it.
The radio babbled in a hundred voices, maybe a thousand. Leandro turned it off. And there, up ahead, was the Haven town line. Leandro, who knew nothing at all about invisible nylon stockings, drove up to the town-line marker ... and then past it, into Haven, with no trouble at all.
Although the battery situation in Haven was approaching the critical point again, force-fields could have been set up along most of the roads leading into town. But in the frightened confusion over the developing events of the morning, Dick Allison and Newt had made one decision that came to directly affect John Leandro. They wanted Haven closed, but they didn't want anyone to strike an inexplicable barrier in the middle of what appeared to be thin air, turn around, and carry the tale back to the wrong people ...
.... which was everyone else on earth just now.
I don't believe anyone could get that close, Newt said. He and Dick were in Dick's pickup truck, part of a procession of cars and trucks racing out to Bobbi Anderson's place.
I used to think so too, Dick replied. But that was before Hillman .. and Bobbi's sister. No, someone could get in ... but if they do, they'll never get out again.
All right, fine. You're Queen for a Day. Now, can't you drive this fucker any faster?
The texture of both men's thoughts--of the thoughts all around them--was dismayed and furious. At that moment the possible incursion of outsiders into Haven seemed the least of their worries.
"I knew we should have gotten rid of that goddam drunk!" Dick cried out loud, and slammed his fist down on the dashboard. He was wearing no makeup today. His skin, as well as becoming increasingly transparent, had begun to roughen. The center of his face--and Newt's face, and the faces of all of those who had spent time in Bobbi's shed--had begun to swell. To grow decidedly snoutlike.
6
John Leandro of course knew nothing of this--he knew only that the air around him was poisonous--more poisonous than even he would have believed. He had slipped the gold cup down long enough to take a single shallow breath, and the world had immediately begun to fade into dimness. He put the cup back quickly, heart racing, hands cold.
Some two hundred yards past the town-line marker, his Dodge simply died. Most Haven cars and trucks had been customized in such a way as to make them immune to the steadily increasing electromagnetic field thrown off by the ship in the earth over the last two months or so (much of this work was done at Elt Barker's Shell), but Leandro's car had undergone no such treatment.
He sat behind the wheel a moment, staring stupidly down at the red idiot lights. He threw the transmission into Park and turned the key. The motor didn't crank. Hell, the solenoid didn't even click.
Battery cable came off, maybe.
It wasn't a battery cable. If it had been, the OIL and AMP lights wouldn't be glowing. But that was minor. Mostly he knew it wasn't his battery cable just because he knew it.
There were trees along both sides of the road here. The sun through their moving leaves made dappled patterns on the asphalt and white dirt of the soft shoulders. Leandro suddenly felt that eyes were looking out at him from behind trees. This was silly, of course, but the idea was nonetheless very powerful.
Okay, now you have got to get out, and see if you can walk out of the poison belt before your air runs out. The odds get longer every second you sit here giving yourself the creeps.
He tried the ignition key once more. Still nothing.
He got his camera, hooked the strap over his shoulder, and got out. He stood looking uneasily at the woods on the right side of the road. He thought he heard something behind him--a shuffling sound--and whirled quickly, lips pulled up in a dry grin of fear.
Nothing ... nothing he could see.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep ...
Get moving. You're just standing here using up your air.
He opened the door again, leaned in, and got the gun out of the glove compartment. He loaded it, then tried to put it in his right front pocket. It was too big. He was afraid it would fall out and go off if he left it there. He pulled up his new T-shirt, stuck it in his belt, then pulled the shirt down over it.
He looked at the woods again, then bitterly at the car. He could take pictures, he supposed, but what would they show? Nothing but a deserted country road. You could see those all over the state, even at the height of the summer tourist season. The pictures wouldn't convey the lack of woods sounds; the pictures would not show that the air had been poisoned.
There goes your scoop, Johnny. Oh, you'll write plenty of stories about it, and I've got a feeling you'll be telling a lot of network-news filming crews which is your good side, but your picture on the cover of Newsweek? The Pulitzer Prize? Forget it.
Part of him--a more adult part--insisted that was dumb, that half a loaf was better than none, that most of the reporters in the world would kill to get just a slice from this loaf, whatever it turned out to be.
But John Leandro was a man younger than his twenty-four years. When David Bright believed he had seen a generous helping of twerp in Leandro, he hadn't been wrong. There were reasons, of course, but the reasons didn't change the fact. He felt like a rookie who gets a fat pitch during his first at-bat in the majors and hits an opposite-field triple. Not bad ... but in his heart a voice cries out: Hey, God, if you was gonna give me a fat one, why didn't You let me get it all?
Haven Village was less than a mile away. He could walk it in fifteen minutes ... but then he would never get out of the poison belt before the air in the flat-pack ran out, and he knew it.
If only I'd rented two of these goddam things.
> Even if you'd thought of it, you didn't have cash enough to pay the frigging security deposit on two. The question is, Johnny, do you want to die for your scoop or not?
He didn't. If his picture was going to be on the cover of Newsweek, he didn't want there to be a black border around it.
He began to trudge back toward the Troy town line. He got five dozen steps before realizing he could hear engines--a lot of them, very faint.
Something going on over on the other side of town.
Might as well be something happening on the dark side of the moon. Forget it.
With another uneasy glance at the woods, he started walking again. Got another dozen steps and realized he could hear another sound: a low, approaching hum from behind him.
He turned. His jaw dropped. In Haven, most of July had been Municipal Gadget Month. As the "becoming" progressed, most Havenites had lost interest in such things ... but the gadgets were still there, strange white elephants such as the ones Gardener had seen in Bobbi's shed. Many had been pressed into service as border guards. Hazel McCready sat in her townhall office before a bank of earphones, monitoring each briefly in turn. She was furious at being left behind to do this duty while the future of everything hung in the balance out at Bobbi's farm. But now ... someone had entered town after all.
Glad of the diversion, Hazel moved to take care of the intruder.
7
It was the Coke machine which had been in front of Cooder's market. Leandro stood frozen with amazement, watching it approach: a jolly red-and-white rectangle six and a half feet high and four wide. It was slicing rapidly through the air toward him, its bottom about eighteen inches over the road.
I've fallen into an ad, Leandro thought. Some kind of weird ad. In a second or two the door of that thing will open and O. J. Simpson is going to come flying out.
It was a funny idea. Leandro started to laugh. Even as he was laughing, it occurred to him that here was the picture ... oh God, here was the picture, here was a Coca-Cola vending machine floating up a rural stretch of two-lane blacktop!
He grabbed for the Nikon. The Coke machine, humming to itself, banked around Leandro's stalled car and came on. It looked like a madman's hallucination, but the front of the machine proclaimed that, however much one might want to believe the contrary, this was THE REAL THING.
