by Stephen King
“No,” Sheriff Ashworth said softly. “Ah, no.”
“The staff in Back Half works in what they call long swings. That’s a few months on and a few months off. It has to be that way, because the atmosphere is toxic. But because none of the staff has high BDNF scores, the process works slower on them. Some it hardly seems to affect at all.”
She paused for a sip of water.
“There are two docs who work there almost all of the time, and they’re both losing their minds. I know, because I’ve been there. Housekeepers and janitors have shorter swings between Front Half and Back Half. Same with the cafeteria staff. I know this is a lot to take in, and there’s more, but that’s all I can manage now. I have to go, but I have something to show you, Luke. You and whoever might be watching this with you. It’s hard to look at, but I hope you can, because I risked my life to get it.”
She drew in a trembling breath and tried to smile. Luke began to cry, soundlessly at first.
“Luke, helping you escape was the hardest decision of my life, even with death staring me in the face and hell, I have no doubt, on the other side of death. It was hard because now the boat may sink, and that will be my fault. I had to choose between your life and maybe the lives of the billions of people on earth who depend on the Institute’s work without even knowing it. I chose you over all of them, and may God forgive me.”
The screen went blue. Tag reached for the laptop’s keyboard, but Tim grabbed his hand. “Wait.”
There was a line of static, a stutter of sound, and then a new video began. The camera was moving down a corridor with a thick blue carpet on the floor. There was an intermittent rasping noise, and every now and then the picture was interrupted by darkness that came and went like a shutter.
She’s shooting video, Luke thought. Shooting it through a hole or a rip she made in the pocket of her uniform. That rasping noise is cloth rubbing over the mic.
He doubted if cell phones even worked for making calls in the deep woods of northern Maine, but guessed they were absolutely verboten in the Institute just the same, because the cameras would still work. If Maureen had been caught, she wouldn’t have just had her salary docked or lost her job. She really had risked her life. It made the tears come faster. He felt Officer Gullickson—Wendy—put an arm around him. He leaned gratefully against her side, but he kept his eyes on the laptop screen. Here, finally, was Back Half. Here was what he had escaped. Here was where Avery undoubtedly was now, assuming he was still alive.
The camera passed open double doors on the right. Maureen turned briefly, giving the watchers a view of a screening room with maybe two dozen plush seats. A couple of kids were sitting in there.
“Is that girl smoking?” Wendy asked.
“Yes,” Luke said. “I guess they let them have cigarettes in Back Half, too. The girl is one of my friends. Her name is Iris Stanhope. They took her away before I got out. I wonder if she’s still alive? And if she can still think, if she is?”
The camera swiveled back to the corridor. A couple of other kids passed, looking up at Maureen with no appreciable interest before leaving the frame. A caretaker in a red smock appeared. His voice was muffled by the pocket in which Maureen’s phone was hidden, but the words were understandable: he was asking her if she was glad to be back. Maureen asked him if she looked crazy, and he laughed. He said something about coffee, but the cloth of the pocket was rustling loudly, and Luke couldn’t pick it up.
“Is that a pistol he’s wearing?” Sheriff John asked.
“It’s a zap-stick,” Luke said. “You know, a Taser. There’s a dial on them that ramps up the voltage.”
Frank Potter: “You’re shitting me!”
The camera passed another set of open double doors, this time on the left, went two or three dozen steps further, and then stopped at a door that was closed. Printed on it in red was WARD A. In a low voice, Maureen said, “This is Gorky Park.”
Her hand, clad in a blue latex glove, came into the frame. She was holding a key card. Except for the color, bright orange, it looked to Luke like the one he had stolen, but he had an idea that people who worked in Back Half weren’t so careless with these. Maureen pressed it to the electronic square above the doorknob, there was a buzz, and then she opened the door.
Hell was beyond it.
24
Orphan Annie was a baseball fan, and she usually spent warm summer evenings in her tent, listening to the Fireflies, a minor league team out of Columbia. She was happy when one of their players got sent up to the Rumble Ponies, the Double-A franchise in Binghamton, but she was always sorry to lose them. When the game was over, she might sleep a little, then wake and tune to George Allman’s show, and see what was going on in what George called the Wonderful World of Weird.
Tonight, however, she was curious about the boy who had jumped from the train. She decided to drift on over to the sheriff’s station and see if she could find anything out. They probably wouldn’t let her in the front, but sometimes Frankie Potter or Billy Wicklow came out into the alley, where she kept her air mattress and spare supplies, to have a smoke. They might tell her what the kid’s story was if she asked nice. After all, she had cleaned him up and comforted him some, and that gave her a rooting interest.
A path from her tent near the warehouses ran through the woods on the west side of town. When she went to the alley to spend the night on her air mattress (or inside, if it was chilly—they let her do that now, thanks to helping Tim with his go-slow banner), she followed the path as far as the backside of the Gem, the town’s movie theater, where she had seen many interesting movies as a younger (and slightly saner) woman. Ole Gemmie had been closed for the last fifteen years, and the parking lot behind it was a wilderness of weeds and goldenrod. She usually cut through this and went up the old theater’s crumbling brick flank to the sidewalk. The sheriff’s station and the DuPray Mercantile were on the other side of Main Street, with her alley (so she thought of it) running between them.
This evening, just as she was about to leave the path for the parking lot, she saw a vehicle turn down Pine Street. It was followed by another . . . and another. Three vans, going just about nose to tail. And although twilight was advancing, they didn’t even have their parking lights on. Annie stood in the trees, watching, as they entered the lot she had been about to cross. They turned as if in formation, and stopped in a row, with their noses pointed back toward Pine Street. Almost like they might need to make a quick getaway, she thought.
The doors opened. Some men and women got out. One of the men was wearing a sportcoat and nice-looking trousers with a crease in them. One of the women, older than the others, was wearing a dark red pant suit. Another was wearing a dress with flowers on it. That one had a purse. The other four women didn’t. Most of them were wearing jeans and dark shirts.
Except for the sportcoat man, who just stood back and watched, they moved quickly and purposefully, like folks on a mission. To Annie they looked sort of military, and this impression was confirmed in short order. Two of the men and one of the younger women opened the back doors of the vans. The men took a long steel box from one of them. From the back of another van came holster-belts, which the woman handed around to everyone except for the sportcoat man, another man with short blond hair, and the woman in the flower-dress. The steel box was opened, and from this came a couple of long guns that were not hunting rifles. They were what Annie Ledoux thought of as school shooter guns.
The woman in the flower-dress put a small handgun in her purse. The man beside her stuck a bigger one in his belt at the small of his back, then dropped the tail of his shirt over it. The others holstered up. They looked like a raiding party. Hell, they were a raiding party. Annie didn’t see how they could be anything else.
A normally wired person—one who didn’t get her nightly news from George Allman, for instance—might have merely stared in dismayed confusion, wondering what on earth a bunch of armed men and women might be doing in a sleepy South Caroli
na town where there was only a single bank, and that one locked up for the night. A normally wired person might have whipped out her cell phone and called 911. Annie, however, was not a normally wired person, and she knew exactly what these armed men and women, at least ten of them and maybe more, were up to. They hadn’t come in the black SUVs she would have expected, but they were here for the boy. Of course they were.
Calling 911 to alert the folks in the sheriff’s station wasn’t an option in any case, because she wouldn’t have carried a cell phone even if she’d been able to afford one. Cell phones shot radiation into your head, any fool knew that, and besides, they could track you that way. So Annie continued along the path, running now, until she reached the back of the DuPray Barber Shop two buildings down. A rickety flight of stairs led to the apartment above. Annie climbed them as fast as she could, holding up her serape and the long skirt beneath so she wouldn’t trip and take a tumble. At the top, she hammered on the door until she saw Corbett Denton through the ragged curtain, shuffling toward her with his big belly leading the way. He pushed the curtain aside and peered out, his bald head gleaming beneath the light of the kitchen’s fly-specked overhead globe.
“Annie? What do you want? I’m not giving you anything to eat, if that’s—”
“There’s men,” she said, panting to catch her breath. She could have added there were also women, but just saying men sounded more fearsome, at least to her. “They’re parked behind the Gem!”
“Go away, Annie. I don’t have time for your foolish—”
“There’s a boy! I think those men mean to go to the station and take him away! I think there’s going to be shooting!”
“What the hell are you—”
“Please, Drummer, please! They had machine guns, I think, and that boy, he’s a nice boy!”
He opened the door. “Let me smell your breath.”
She seized him by the front of his pajama shirt. “I haven’t had a drink in ten years! Please, Drummer, they came for the boy!”
He sniffed, frowning now. “No booze. Are you hallucinating?”
“No!”
“You said machine guns. Do you mean automatic rifles, like AR-15s?” Drummer Denton was beginning to look interested.
“Yes! No! I don’t know! But you have guns, I know you do! You should bring them!”
“You’re out of your mind,” he said, and that was when Annie began to cry. Drummer had known her most of his life, had even gone stepping with her a time or two when they were much younger, and he had never seen her cry. She really believed something was going on, and Drummer decided what the hell. He had only been doing what he did every night, which was thinking about the basic stupidity of life.
“All right, let’s go look.”
“And your guns? You’ll bring your guns?”
“Hell no. I said we’re going to look.”
“Drummer, please!”
“Look,” he said. “That’s all I’m willing to do. Take it or leave it.”
With no other choice, Orphan Annie took it.
25
“Oh my dear God, what am I looking at?”
Wendy’s words were muffled, because she had a hand over her mouth. No one answered. They were staring at the screen, Luke as frozen with wonder and horror as the rest.
The back half of Back Half—Ward A, Gorky Park—was a long, high room that looked to Luke like the sort of abandoned factory where shoot-outs always happened at the end of the action movies he and Rolf had liked to watch a thousand years ago, back when he had been a real kid. It was lit by fluorescent bars behind wire mesh that cast shadows and gave the ward an eerie undersea look. There were long, narrow windows covered by heavier mesh. There were no beds, only bare mattresses. Some of these had been pushed into the aisles, a couple were overturned, and one leaned drunkenly against a bare cinderblock wall. It was splotched with yellow gunk that might have been vomit.
A long gutter filled with running water ran alongside one cinderblock wall, where a stenciled motto read YOU ARE SAVIORS! A girl, naked except for a pair of dirty socks, squatted over this gutter with her back against the wall and her hands on her knees. She was defecating. There was that rasping sound as cloth rubbed across the phone in Maureen’s pocket, where it was perhaps taped in place, and the image was momentarily blotted out as the slit the camera was peering through closed. When it opened again, the girl was walking away in a kind of drunken amble, and her shit was being carried down the gutter.
A woman in a brown housekeeper’s uniform was using a Rinsenvac to clean up what might have been more puke, more shit, spilled food, God knew what. She saw Maureen, waved, and said something none of them could pick up, not just because of the Rinsenvac but because Gorky Park was a looneybin of mingled voices and cries. A girl was doing cartwheels down one of the ragged aisles. A boy in dirty underpants with pimples on his face and smeary glasses sliding down his nose walked past. He was yelling “ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya” and hitting the top of his head on every emphasized syllable. Luke remembered Kalisha mentioning a boy with zits and glasses. On his first day at the Institute, that had been. Seems like Petey’s been gone forever, but it was only last week, she had said, and here that boy was. Or what was left of him.
“Littlejohn,” Luke murmured. “I think that’s his name. Pete Littlejohn.”
No one heard him. They were staring at the screen as if hypnotized.
Across from the gutter used for eliminatory purposes was a long trough on steel legs. Two girls and a boy were standing there. The girls were using their hands to scoop some brown gunk into their mouths. Tim, staring at this with disbelief and sickened wonder, thought it looked like Maypo, the cereal of his childhood. The boy was bent over with his face in the stuff, his hands held out at his sides, snapping his fingers. A few other kids just lay on their mattresses, staring up at the ceiling, their faces tattooed with the shadows of the mesh.
As Maureen walked toward the Rinsenvac woman, presumably to take over her job, the picture cut out and the blue screen came back. They waited to see if Maureen would appear again in her wingback chair, perhaps to offer some further explanation, but there was nothing else.
“My God, what was that?” Frank Potter asked.
“The back half of Back Half,” Luke said. He was whiter than ever.
“What kind of people would put children in a—”
“Monsters,” Luke said. He got up, then put a hand to his head and staggered.
Tim grabbed him. “Are you going to faint?”
“No. I don’t know. I need to get outside. I need to breathe some fresh air. It’s like the walls are closing in.”
Tim looked at Sheriff John, who nodded. “Take him out in the alley. See if you can get him right.”
“I’ll come with you,” Wendy said. “You’ll need me to open the door, anyway.”
The door at the far end of the holding area had big white capital letters printed across it: EMERGENCY EXIT ALARM WILL SOUND. Wendy used a key from her ring to turn off the alarm. Tim hit the push-bar with the heel of his hand and used the other to lead Luke, not staggering now but still horribly pale, out into the alley. Tim knew what PTSD was, but had never seen it except on TV. He was seeing it now, in this boy who wouldn’t be old enough to shave for another three years.
“Don’t step on any of Annie’s stuff,” Wendy said. “Especially not her air mattress. She wouldn’t thank you for that.”
Luke didn’t ask what an air mattress, two backpacks, a three-wheeled grocery cart, and a rolled-up sleeping bag were doing in the alley. He walked slowly toward Main Street, taking deep breaths, pausing once to bend over and grip his knees.
“Any better?” Tim asked.
“My friends are going to let them out,” Luke said, still bent over.
“Let who out?” Wendy asked. “Those . . .” She didn’t know how to finish. It didn’t matter, because Luke didn’t seem to hear her.
“I can’t see them, but I know. I don’t understand how I
can, but I do. I think it’s the Avester. Avery, I mean. Kalisha is with him. And Nicky. George. God, they’re so strong! So strong together!”
Luke straightened up and began walking again. As he stopped at the mouth of the alley, Main Street’s six streetlights came on. He looked at Tim and Wendy, amazed. “Did I do that?”
“No, honey,” Wendy said, laughing a little. “It’s just their regular time. Let’s go back inside, now. You need to drink one of Sheriff John’s Cokes.”
She touched his shoulder. Luke shook her off. “Wait.”
A hand-holding couple was crossing the deserted street. The man had short blond hair. The woman was wearing a dress with flowers on it.
26
The power the kids generated dropped when Nicky let go of Kalisha’s and George’s hands, but only a little. Because the others were gathered behind the Ward A door now, and they were providing most of the power.
It’s like a seesaw, Nick thought. As the ability to think goes down, TP and TK goes up. And the ones behind that door have almost no minds left.
That’s right, Avery said. That’s how it works. They’re the battery.
Nicky’s head was clear—absolutely no pain. Looking at the others, he guessed they were the same. Whether the headaches would come back—or when—was impossible to say. For now he was only grateful.
No more need for the sparkler; they were past that now. They were riding the hum.
Nicky bent over the caretakers who had Tased themselves into unconsciousness and started going through their pockets. He found what he was looking for and handed it to Kalisha, who handed it to Avery. “You do it,” she said.
Avery Dixon—who should have been home eating supper with his parents after another hard day of being the smallest boy in his fifth-grade class—took the orange key card and pressed it to the sensor panel. The lock thumped, and the door opened. The residents of Gorky Park were clustered on the other side like sheep huddled together in a storm. They were dirty, mostly undressed, dazed. Several of them were drooling. Petey Littlejohn was going “ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya” as he thumped his head.
