by Stephen King
“Why won’t somebody answer me? Isn’t this America?”
“Can’t somebody shut her up?” Chris Ortega had grumbled from the back of the plane.
One of the army men had forced a glass of milk on her and after that Lila did shut up. She spent the rest of the ride looking out the window at the countryside passing far below, and Stu guessed there had been more than milk in that glass.
When they touched down, there had been four Cadillac limousines waiting for them. The Amette folks got into three of them, and their army escort had gotten into the fourth. Stu guessed that those good old boys with no wedding rings—or close relatives, probably—were now somewhere right in this building.
The red light went on over his door. When the compressor or whatever it was had stopped, a man in one of the white space-suits stepped through. Dr. Denninger. He was young. He had black hair, olive skin, sharp features, and a mealy mouth.
“Patty Greer says you gave her some trouble,” Denninger’s chest-speaker said as he clopped over to Stu. “She’s quite upset.”
“No need for her to be,” Stu said easily. It was hard to sound easy, but he felt it was important to hide his fear from this man. Denninger looked and acted like the kind of man who would ride his help and bullyrag them around but lickspittle up to his superiors like an egg-suck dog. That kind of man could be pushed a ways if he thought you held the whip hand. But if he smelled fear on you, he would hand you the same old cake: a thin icing of “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more” on top and a lot of contempt for stupid civilians who wanted to know more than what was good for them underneath.
“I want some answers,” Stu said.
“I’m sorry, but—”
“If you want me to co-operate, give me some answers.”
“In time you will be—”
“I can make it hard for you.”
“We know that,” Denninger said peevishly. “I simply don’t have the authority to tell you anything, Mr. Redman. I know very little myself.”
“I guess you’ve been testing my blood. All those needles.”
“That’s right,” Denninger said warily.
“What for?”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know myself.” The peevish tone was back again, and Stu was inclined to believe him. He was nothing but a glorified technician on this job, and he didn’t like it much.
“They put my home town under quarantine.”
“I know nothing about that.” But Denninger cut his eyes away from Stu’s and this time Stu thought he was lying.
“How come I haven’t seen anything about it?” He pointed to the TV set bolted to the wall.
“I beg your pardon?”
“When they roadblock off a town and put bobwire around it, that’s news,” Stu said.
“Mr. Redman, if you’ll only let Patty take your blood pressure—” “No,” Stu said. “If you want any more from me, you better send two big strong men to get it. And no matter how many you send, I’m gonna try to rip some holes in those germ-suits. They don’t look all that strong, you know it?”
He made a playful grab at Denninger’s suit, and Denninger skipped backward and nearly fell over. The speaker of his intercom emitted a terrified squawk and there was a stir behind the double glass.
“I guess you could knock me out, but that’d mix up your tests, wouldn’t it?”
“Mr. Redman, you’re not being reasonable!” Denninger answered. He was keeping a prudent distance away. “Your lack of co-operation may do your country a grave disservice. Do you understand me?” “No,” Stu said. “Right now it looks to me like it’s my country doing me a grave disservice. It’s got me locked up in a hospital room in Georgia with a buttermouth little pissant doctor who doesn’t know enough to shit or go blind. So you get your ass out of here and send somebody in to talk to me or send enough boys to take what you need by force. I’ll fight em, you can count on that.”
He sat perfectly still in his chair after Denninger left. The nurse didn’t come back. Two strong orderlies did not appear to take his blood pressure by force. For the time being they were leaving him to stew in his own juices.
He got up and turned on the TV and watched it unseeingly. His fear was big inside him, a runaway elephant. For two days he had been waiting to start sneezing, coughing, hawking black phlegm and spitting it into the commode. He wondered about the others, people he had known all his life, and wondered if any of them were as bad off as Campion had been. He thought of the dead woman and her baby in that old Chev, and he kept seeing Lila Bruett’s face on the woman and little Cheryl Hodges’s face on the baby.
The TV squawked and crackled. His heart beat slowly in his chest. Faintly, he could hear the sound of an air purifier sighing air into the room. He felt his fear twisting and turning inside him beneath his poker face. Sometimes it was big and panicky, trampling everything: the elephant. Sometimes it was small and gnawing, ripping with sharp teeth: the rat. It was always with him.
But it was forty hours before they sent him a man who would talk.
Chapter 8
On June 18, five hours after he had talked to his cousin Bill Hapscomb, Joe Bob Brentwood pulled down a speeder on Texas Highway 40 about twenty-five miles east of Braintree. The speeder was Harry Trent of Braintree, an insurance man. He had been doing sixty-five miles per in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. Joe Bob gave him a speeding ticket. Trent accepted it humbly and then amused Joe Bob by trying to sell him insurance on his house and his life. Joe Bob felt fine; dying was the last thing on his mind. Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons.
Harry, a gregarious man who liked his job, passed the sickness to more than forty people during that day and the next. How many those forty passed it to is impossible to say—you might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
On June 19, the day Larry Underwood came home to New York and the day that Frannie Goldsmith told her father about her impending Little Stranger, Harry Trent stopped at an east Texas cafe called Babe’s Kwik-Eat for lunch. He had the cheeseburger platter and a piece of Babe’s delicious strawberry pie for dessert. He had a slight cold, an allergy cold, maybe, and he kept sneezing and having to spit. In the course of the meal he infected Babe, the dishwasher, the two truckers in the comer booth, the man who came in to deliver bread, the man who came in to change the records on the juke, and the sweet thang that waited his table. He left her a dollar tip that was crawling with death.
On his way out, a station wagon pulled in. There was a roofrack on top, and the wagon was piled high with kids and luggage. The wagon had New York plates and the driver, who rolled down his window to ask Harry how to get to US 21 going north, had a New
York accent. Harry gave the New York fellow very explicit directions on how to get to Highway 21. He also gave him the sickness.
The New Yorker was Edward M. Norris, lieutenant of police, detective squad, in a New York precinct. This was his first real vacation in five years. He and his family had had a really fine time. The kids had been in seventh heaven at Disney World in Orlando, and the whole family would be dead by the second day of July.
The Norris family had a kwik-eat at Babe’s, and then followed Harry Trent’s admirable directions to Highway 21. Ed and his wife Trish marveled over southern hospitality while the three kids colored in the back seat.
That night they stayed in a Eustice, Oklahoma, travel court. Ed and Trish infected the clerk. The kids, Marsha, Stanley, and Hector, infected the kids they played with on the tourist court’s playground —kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee.
Trish woke Ed up in the early morning hours to tell him that Heck, the baby, was sick. He had an ugly, rasping cough and was running a fever. It sounded to her like the croup. Ed Norris groaned and told her to give the kid some aspirin. If the kid’s goddam croup could only have held off another four or five days, he could have
had it in his very own house and Ed would have been left with the memory of a perfect vacation. He could hear the poor kid through the connecting door, hacking away like a hound dog.
Trish expected that Hector’s symptoms would abate in the morning—croup was a lying-down sickness—but by noon of the twentieth, she admitted to herself that it wasn’t happening. The aspirin wasn’t controlling the fever; poor Heck was just glassy-eyed with it. His cough had taken on a booming note she didn’t like, and his respiration sounded labored and phlegmy. Whatever it was, Marsha seemed to be coming down with it, too, and Trish had a nasty little tickle in the back of her throat that was making her cough, although so far it was a light cough that she could smother in a small hankie.
“We’ve got to get Heck to a doctor,” she said finally.
Ed pulled into a service station and checked the map paper-clipped to the station wagon’s sun-visor. They were in Hammer Crossing, Kansas. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we can at least find a doctor who’ll give us a referral.”
He finally found a doctor in Polliston who would look at Hector if they could get him there by three. Polliston was off their route, twenty miles west of Hammer Crossing, but now the important thing was Hector. Ed was getting very worried about the boy.
They were waiting in the outer office of Dr. Brenden Sweeney by two in the afternoon. By then Ed was sneezing, too. Sweeney’s waiting room was full; they didn’t get in to see him until nearly four o’clock. Trish couldn’t rouse Heck to more than a sludgy semiconsciousness, and she felt feverish herself. Only Stan Norris, age nine, still felt good enough to fidget.
During their wait in Sweeney’s office they communicated the sickness to more than twenty-five people, including a matronly woman who just came in to pay her bill before going on to pass the disease to her entire bridge club.
This matronly woman was Mrs. Robert Bradford, Sarah Bradford to the bridge club, Cookie to her husband and close friends. Sarah played well that night, possibly because her partner was Angela Dupray, her best friend. They seemed to enjoy a happy kind of telepathy. They won all three rubbers resoundingly, making a gland slam during the last. For Sarah, the only fly in the ointment was that she seemed to be coming down with a slight cold. It wasn’t fair, coming so soon on the heels of the last one.
She and Angela went out for a quiet drink in a cocktail bar after the party broke up at ten. Angela was in no hurry to get home. It was David’s turn to have the weekly poker game at their house, and she just wouldn’t be able to sleep with all that noise going on . . . unless she had a little self-prescribed sedative first, which in her case would be two sloe gin fizzes.
Sarah had a Ward 8 and the two women rehashed the bridge game. In the meantime they managed to infect everyone in the Polliston cocktail bar, including two young men drinking beer nearby. They were on their way to California—just as Larry Underwood and his friend Rudy Schwartz had once gone—to seek their fortunes. A friend of theirs had promised them jobs with a moving company. The next day they headed west, spreading the disease, which came to be known on the West Coast as Captain Trips, as they went.
Chapter 9
They set on him sometime after dusk, while he was walking up the shoulder of US Route 27, which was called Main Street a mile back, where it passed through town. A mile or two up he had been planning to turn west on 63, which would have taken him to the turnpike and the start of his long trip north. His senses had been dulled, maybe, by the two beers he had just downed, but he had known something was wrong. He was just getting around to remembering the four or five heavyset townies down at the far end of the bar when they broke cover and ran at him.
Nick put up the best fight he could, decking one of them and bloodying another’s nose—breaking it, too, by the sound. For one or two hopeful moments he thought there was actually a chance that he might win. The fact that he fought without making any sound at all was unnerving them a little. They were soft, maybe they had done this before with no trouble, and they certainly hadn’t expected a fight from this skinny kid with the knapsack.
Then one of them caught him just over the chin, shredding his lower lip with a signet ring, and the warm taste of blood gushed into his mouth. He stumbled backward and someone pinned his arms. He struggled wildly and got one hand free just as a fist looped down into his face like a runaway moon and closed his right eye. He saw stars and felt his consciousness start to diffuse, drifting away to parts unknown.
Scared, he struggled harder. The man with the signet ring was back in front of him now and Nick, afraid of being cut again, kicked him in the belly. Signet Ring’s breath went out of him and he doubled over, making a series of breathless whoofing sounds, like a terrier with laryngitis.
The others closed in. To Nick they were only shapes now, beefy men—good old boys, they called themselves—in gray shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show their big sunfreckled biceps. They wore blocky workshoes. Tangles of oily hair fell over their brows. In the last fading light of day all of this began to seem like a malign dream. Blood ran in his open eye. The knapsack was tom from his back. Blows rained down on him and he became a boneless, jittering puppet on a fraying string. Consciousness would not quite desert him. The only sounds were their out-of-breath gasps as they pistoned their fists into him and the liquid twitter of a nightjar in the deep stand of pine close by.
Signet Ring had staggered to his feet. “Hold im by the har,” he said.
His arms were grasped. Somebody else twined both hands into Nick’s springy black hair.
“Why don’t he yell out?” one of the others asked, agitated. “Why don’t he yell out, Ray?”
“I tole you not to use any names,” Signet Ring said. “I don’t give a fuck why. I’m gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me. Goddam dirty-fighter, that’s what he is.”
The fist looped down. Nick jerked his head aside and the ring furrowed his cheek.
“Hold im,” Ray said.
The fist looped down and Nick’s nose became a squashed and dripping tomato. His breath clogged to a snuffle. Consciousness was down to a narrow pencil beam. His mouth dropped open and he scooped in night air. The nightjar sang again, sweet and solus.
“Hold im,” Ray said. “Hold im, goddammit.”
The fist looped down. Two of his front teeth shattered as the signet ring snowplowed through them. It was an agony he couldn’t scream about. His legs unhinged and he sagged, held like a grainsack now by the hands behind him.
“Ray, that’s enough! You wanna kill im?”
“Hold im. Sucker kicked me. I’m gonna mess im up.”
Then lights were splashing down the road, which was bordered here by underbrush and interlaced with huge old pines.
“Oh Jesus—”
“Dump im, dump im!”
That was Ray’s voice, but Ray was no longer in front of him. Nick was dimly grateful, but most of what little consciousness he had left was taken up with the agony in his mouth. He could taste flecks of his teeth on his tongue.
Hands pushed him, propelling him out into the center of the road. Oncoming circles of light pinned him there like an actor on a stage. Brakes screamed. Nick pinwheeled his arms and tried to make his legs go but his legs wouldn’t oblige; they had given him up for dead. He collapsed on the composition surface and the screaming sound of the brakes filled the world and he waited numbly to be run over. At least it would put an end to the pain in his mouth.
Then a splatter of pebbles struck his cheek and he was looking at a tire which had come to a stop less than a foot from his face. He could see a small white rock embedded between two of the treads like a coin held between a pair of knuckles.
Piece of quartz, he thought disjointedly, and passed out.
When Nick came to, he was lying on a bunk. It was a hard one, but in the last three years or so he had lain on harder. He struggled his eyes open with great effort. They seemed gummed shut and the right one, the one that had been hit by the runaway moon, would only come to halfmas
t.
He was looking at a cracked gray cement ceiling. Pipes wrapped in insulation zigzagged beneath it. Bisecting his field of vision was a chain. He raised his head slightly, sending a monstrous bolt of pain through it, and saw another chain running from the outside foot of the bunk to a bolt in the wall.
He turned his head to the left (another bolt of pain, this one not quite so killing) and saw a rough concrete wall. Cracks ran through it. It had been extensively written on. Some of the writing was new, some old, most of it illiterate. THIS PLACE HAS BUGS. LOUIS DRAGONSKY, 1977. I LIKE IT IN MY ASSHOLE. DTS CAN BE FUN. I STILL LOVE YOU SUZANNE. THIS PLACE SUX. JERRY. CLYDE D. FRED 1971. There were pictures of large dangling penises, gigantic breasts, crudely drawn vaginas. It all gave Nick a sense of place. He was in a jail cell.
Carefully, he propped himself on his elbows, let his feet (clad in paper slippers) drop over the edge of the cot, and then swung up to a sitting position. The large economy-size pain rocked his head again and his backbone gave out an alarming creak. His stomach rolled alarmingly in his gut, and a fainting kind of nausea seized him, the most dismaying and unmanning kind, the kind that makes you feel like crying out to God to make it stop.
Instead of crying out—he couldn’t have done that—Nick leaned over his knees, one hand on each cheek, and waited for it to pass. After a while, it did. He could feel the Band-Aids that had been placed over the furrow on his cheek, and by wrinkling that side of his face a couple of times he decided that some sawbones had sunk a couple of stitches in there.
He looked around. He was in a small cell shaped like a Saltines box stood on end. Beyond the end of the cot was a barred door. Beside the cot was the toilet. Behind and above him—he saw this by craning his stiff neck very, very carefully—was a small barred window.
After he had sat on the edge of the cot long enough to feel sure he wasn’t going to pass out, he hooked the shapeless gray pajama pants he was wearing down around his knees, squatted on the can, and urinated for what seemed at least an hour. When he was finished he stood up, holding onto the edge of the cot like an old man. He looked apprehensively into the "bowl for signs of blood, but his urine had been clear. He flushed it away.
