by Stephen King
“Oh bullshit, you don’t know if that’s true!” Jordan shouted. Clay realized it was the first time the kid had spoken since they’d passed the Gaiten town limits.
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” the man said, “but they can do some very weird and powerful shit. You gotta buy that for a dollar. They say they’ll leave us alone if we leave them alone… and you alone. We say fine.”
“If you believe anything they say—or think at you—then you’re an idiot,” Alice said.
The man faced forward, raised his hand in the air, shook it in a combined fuck-off/bye-bye gesture, and said no more.
The four of them watched the shopping-cart people out of sight, then gazed at each other across the picnic table with its intaglios of old initials.
“So now we know,” Tom said. “We’re outcasts.”
“Maybe not if the phone people want us to go where the rest of the—what did he call them?—the rest of the normies are going,” Clay said. “Maybe we’re something else.”
“What?” Alice asked.
Clay had an idea, but he didn’t like to put it into words. Not at midnight. “Right now I’m more interested in Kent Pond,” he said. “I want—I need to see if I can find my wife and son.”
“It’s not very likely that they’re still there, is it?” Tom asked in his low, kind voice. “I mean, no matter which way things went for them, normal or phoner, they’ve probably moved on.”
“If they’re all right, they will have left word,” Clay said. “In any case, it’s a place to go.”
And until they got there and that part of it was done, he wouldn’t have to consider why the Raggedy Man would send them to a place of safety if the people there hated and feared them.
Or how, if the phone people knew about it, Kashwak No-Fo could be safe at all.
6
They were edging slowly east toward Route 19, a highway that would take them across the state line and into Maine, but they didn’t make it that night. All the roads in this part of New Hampshire seemed to pass through the small city of Rochester, and Rochester had burned to the ground. The fire’s core was still alive, putting out an almost radioactive glow. Alice took over, leading them around the worst of the fiery ruins in a half-circle to the west. Several times they saw KASHWAK=NO-FO scrawled on the sidewalks; once spray-painted on the side of a U.S. mailbox.
“That’s a bazillion-dollar fine and life in prison at Guantanamo Bay,” Tom said with a wan smile.
Their course eventually took them through the vast parking lot of the Rochester Mall. Long before they reached it, they could hear the over-amplified sound of an uninspired New Age jazz trio playing the sort of stuff Clay thought of as music to shop by. The parking lot was buried in drifts of moldering trash; the remaining cars stood up to their hubcaps in litter. They could smell the blown and fleshy reek of dead bodies on the breeze.
“Flock here somewhere,” Tom commented.
It was in the cemetery next to the mall. Their course was going to take them south and west of it, but when they left the mall parking lot, they were close enough to see the red eyes of the boomboxes through the trees.
“Maybe we ought to do em up,” Alice proposed suddenly as they stepped back onto North Main Street. “There must be a propane truck that isn’t working around here somewhere.”
“Yeah, baby!” Jordan said. He raised his fists to the sides of his head and shook them, looking really alive for the first time since leaving Cheatham Lodge. “For the Head!”
“I think not,” Tom said.
“Afraid of trying their patience?” Clay asked. He was surprised to find himself actually sort of in favor of Alice’s crazy idea. That torching another flock was a crazy idea he had no doubt, but…
He thought, I might do it just became that’s the absolute worst version of “Misty” I’ve ever heard in my life. Twist my fuckin arm.
“Not that,” Tom said. He seemed to be thinking. “Do you see that street there?” He was pointing to an avenue that ran between the mall and the cemetery. It was choked with stalled cars. Almost all of them were pointed away from the mall. Clay found it all too easy to imagine those cars full of people trying to get home after the Pulse. People who would want to know what was happening, and if their families were all right. They would have reached for their car phones, their cell phones, without a second thought.
“What about it?” he asked.
“Let us stroll down there a little way,” Tom said. “Very carefully.”
“What did you see, Tom?”
“I’d rather not say. Maybe nothing. Keep off the sidewalk, stay under the trees. And that was one hell of a traffic jam. There’ll be bodies.”
There were dozens rotting their way back into the great scheme of things between Twombley Street and the West Side Cemetery. “Misty” had given way to a cough-syrup rendition of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” by the time they reached the edge of the trees, and they could again see the red eyes of the boombox power lamps. Then Clay saw something else and stopped. “Jesus,” he whispered. Tom nodded.
“What?” Jordan whispered. “What?”
Alice said nothing, but Clay could tell by the direction she was looking and the defeated slump of her shoulders that she’d seen what he had. There were men with rifles standing a perimeter guard around the cemetery. Clay took Jordan’s head, turned it, and saw the boy’s shoulders also slump.
“Let’s go,” the kid whispered. “The smell’s making me sick.”
7
In Melrose Corner, about four miles north of Rochester (they could still see its red glow waxing and waning on the southern horizon), they came to another picnic area, this one with a little stone firepit as well as picnic tables. Clay, Tom, and Jordan picked up dry wood. Alice, who claimed to have been a Girl Scout, proved her skills by making a neat little fire and then heating three cans of what she called “hobo beans.” As they ate, two little parties of pilgrims passed them by. Both looked; no one in either group waved or spoke.
When the wolf in his belly had quieted a little, Clay said, “You saw those guys, Tom? All the way from the mall parking lot? I’m thinking of changing your name to Hawkeye.”
Tom shook his head. “It was pure luck. That and the light from Rochester. You know, the embers?”
Clay nodded. They all did.
“I happened to look over at that cemetery at just the right time and the right angle and saw the shine on a couple of rifle-barrels. I told myself it couldn’t be what it looked like, that it was probably iron fence-palings, or something, but…” Tom sighed, looked at the rest of his beans, then put them aside. “There you have it.”
“They were phone-crazies, maybe,” Jordan said, but he didn’t believe it. Clay could hear it in his voice.
“Phone-crazies don’t do the night shift,” Alice said.
“Maybe they need less sleep now,” Jordan said. “Maybe that’s part of their new programming.”
Hearing him talk that way, as if the phone people were organic computers in some kind of upload cycle, never failed to give Clay a chill.
“They don’t do rifles, either, Jordan,” Tom said. “They don’t need them.”
“So now they’ve got a few collaborators taking care of them while they get their beauty rest,” Alice said. There was brittle contempt on top of her voice, tears just beneath. “I hope they rot in hell.”
Clay said nothing, but he found himself thinking of the people they had met earlier that night, the ones with the shopping carts—the fear and loathing in the voice of the man who had called them the Gaiten bunch. He might as well have called us the Dillinger gang, Clay thought. And then he thought, I don’t think of them as the phone-crazies anymore; now I think of them as the phone-people. Why is that? The thought that followed was even more uncomfortable: When does a collaborator stop being a collaborator? The answer, it seemed to him, was when the collaborators became the clear majority. Then the ones who weren’t collaborators became…
Well, if you were a romantic, you called those people “the underground.” If you weren’t a romantic, you called them fugitives.
Or maybe just criminals.
They pushed on to the village of Hayes Station and stayed the night at a tumbledown motel called Whispering Pines. It was within sight of a sign reading ROUTE 19, 7 MI SANFORD THE BERWICKS KENT POND. They didn’t leave their shoes outside the doors of the units they chose.
There no longer seemed any need of that.
8
He was standing on a platform in the middle of that damned field again, somehow immobilized, the object of every eye. On the horizon was the skeletal shape with the blinking red light on top. The place was bigger than Foxboro. His friends were lined up with him, but now they weren’t alone. Similar platforms ran the length of the open area. On Tom’s left stood a pregnant woman in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt with cutoff sleeves. On Clay’s right was an elderly gent—not in the Head’s league, but getting there—with graying hair pulled back in a ponytail and a frightened frown on his horsey, intelligent face. Beyond him was a younger man wearing a battered Miami Dolphins cap.
Clay saw people that he knew among the thousands and wasn’t surprised—wasn’t that how things always went in dreams? One minute you were phone-booth-cramming with your first-grade teacher; a minute later you were making out with all three members of Destiny’s Child on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.
Destiny’s Child wasn’t in this dream, but Clay saw the naked young man who had been jabbing the car aerials (now dressed in chinos and a clean white T-shirt), and the guy with the packsack who had called Alice little ma’am, and the limping grandmotherly type. She pointed to Clay and his friends, who were more or less on the fifty-yard line, then spoke to the woman next to her… who was, Clay observed without surprise, Mr. Scottoni’s pregnant daughter-in-law. That’s the Gaiten bunch, the limping grandmotherly type said, and Mr. Scottoni’s pregnant daughter-in-law lifted her full upper lip in a sneer.
Help me! called the woman on the platform next to Tom’s. It was Mr. Scottoni’s daughter-in-law she was calling to. I want to have my baby the same as you! Help me!
You should have thought of that while there was still time, Mr. Scottoni’s daughter-in-law replied, and Clay realized, as he had in the other dream, that no one was actually talking. This was telepathy.
The Raggedy Man began making his way up the line, putting a hand over the head of each person he came to. He did this as Tom had over the Head’s grave: palm extended, fingers curled in. Clay could see some sort of ID bracelet flashing on the Raggedy Man’s wrist, maybe one of those medical-alert things, and realized there was power here—the light-towers were blazing. He saw something else, as well. The reason the Raggedy Man could reach above their heads even though they were standing on platforms was because the Raggedy Man wasn’t on the ground. He was walking, but on four feet of thin air.
“Ecce homo—insanus,” he said. “Ecce femina—insana.” And each time the crowd roared back “DON’T TOUCH!” in a single voice, both the phone-people and the normies. Because now there was no difference. In Clay’s dream they were the same.
He awoke in the late afternoon, huddled in a ball and clutching a flat motel pillow. He went outside and saw Alice and Jordan sitting on the curb between the parking lot and the units. Alice had her arm around Jordan. His head was on her shoulder and his arm was around her waist. His hair was sticking up in back. Clay sat down with them. Beyond them, the highway leading to Route 19 and Maine was deserted except for a Federal Express truck sitting dead on the white line with its back doors standing open, and a crashed motorcycle.
Clay sat down with them. “Did you—”
“Ecce puer, insanus,” Jordan said, without lifting his head from Alice’s shoulder. “That’s me.”
“And I’m the femina,” Alice said. “Clay, is there some sort of humongous football stadium in Kashwak? Because if there is, I’m not going near the place.”
A door closed behind them. Footsteps approached. “Me either,” Tom said, sitting down with them. “I have many issues—I’d be the first to admit it—but a death-wish has never been one of them.”
“I’m not positive, but I don’t think there’s much more than an elementary school up there,” Clay said. “The high school kids probably get bused to Tashmore.”
“It’s a virtual stadium,” Jordan said.
“Huh?” Tom said. “You mean like in a computer game?”
“I mean like in a computer.” Jordan lifted his head, still staring at the empty road leading to Sanford, the Berwicks, and Kent Pond. “Never mind that, I don’t care about that. If they won’t touch us—the phone-people, the normal people—who will touch us?” Clay had never seen such adult pain in a child’s eyes. “Who will touch us?”
No one answered.
“Will the Raggedy Man touch us?” Jordan asked, his voice rising a little. “Will the Raggedy Man touch us? Maybe. Because he’s watching, I feel him watching.”
“Jordan, you’re getting carried away,” Clay said, but the idea had a certain weird interior logic. If they were being sent this dream—the dream of the platforms—then maybe he was watching. You didn’t mail a letter if you didn’t have an address.
“I don’t want to go to Kashwak,” Alice said. “I don’t care if it’s a no-phone zone or not. I’d rather go to… to Idaho.”
“I’m going to Kent Pond before I go to Kashwak or Idaho or anywhere,” Clay said. “I can be there in two nights’ walk. I wish you guys would come, but if you don’t want to—or can’t—I’ll understand.”
“The man needs closure, let’s get him some,” Tom said. “After that, we can figure out what comes next. Unless someone’s got another idea.”
No one did.
10
Route 19 was totally clear on both sides for short stretches, sometimes up to a quarter of a mile, and that encouraged sprinters. This was the term Jordan coined for the semi-suicidal dragsters who would go roaring past at high speeds, usually in the middle of the road, always with their high beams glaring.
Clay and the others would see the approaching lights and get off the pavement in a hurry, right off the shoulder and into the weeds if they had spotted wrecks or stalls up ahead. Jordan took to calling these “sprinter-reefs.” The sprinter would blow past, the people inside frequently whooping (and almost certainly liquored up). If there was only one stall—a small sprinter-reef—the driver would most likely elect to weave around it. If the road was completely blocked, he might still try to go around, but he and his passengers were more apt to simply abandon their vehicle and resume their eastward course on foot until they found something else that looked worth sprinting in—which was to say, something fast and temporarily amusing. Clay imagined their course as a series of jerks… but then, most of the sprinters were jerks, just one more pain in the ass in what had become a pain-in-the-ass world. That seemed true of Gunner, as well.
He was the fourth sprinter of their first night on Highway 19, spotting them standing at the side of the road in the flare of his headlights. Spotting Alice. He leaned out, dark hair streaming back from his face, and yelled “Suck my rod, you teenybop bitch!” as he slammed by in a black Cadillac Escalade. His passengers cheered and waved. Someone shouted “Tell huh!” To Clay it sounded like absolute ecstasy expressed in a South Boston accent.
“Charming” was Alice’s only comment.
“Some people have no—” Tom began, but before he could tell them what some people didn’t have, there was a scream of tires from the dark not far ahead, followed by a loud, hollow bang and the tinkle of glass.
“Jesus-fuck,” Clay said, and began to run. Before he had gotten twenty yards, Alice blew past him. “Slow down, they might be dangerous!” he shouted.
Alice held up one of the automatic pistols so Clay could see it and ran on, soon outdistancing him completely.
Tom caught up with Clay, already working for breath. Jorda
n, running beside him, could have been in a rocking chair.
“What… are we going… to do… if they’re badly hurt?” Tom asked. “Call… an ambulance?”
“I don’t know,” Clay said, but he was thinking of how Alice had held up one of the automatic pistols. He knew.
11
They caught up with her around the next curve of the highway. She was standing behind the Escalade. It was lying on its side with the airbags deployed. The tale of the accident wasn’t hard to read. The Escalade had come steaming around the blind curve at maybe sixty miles an hour and had encountered an abandoned milk tanker dead ahead. The driver, jerk or not, had done well to avoid being totaled. He was walking around the battered SUV in a dazed circle, pushing his hair away from his face. Blood gushed from his nose and a cut in his forehead. Clay walked to the Escalade, sneakers gritting on pebbles of Saf-T-Glas, and looked inside. It was empty. He shone his light around and saw blood on the steering wheel, nowhere else. The passengers had been lively enough to exit the wreck, and all but one had fled the scene, probably out of simple reflex. The one who had stuck with the driver was a shrimpy little postadolescent with bad acne scars, buck teeth, and long, dirty red hair. His steady line of jabber reminded Clay of the little dog who idolized Spike in the Warner Bros, cartoons.
“Ah you all right, Gunnah?” he asked. Clay presumed this was how you pronounced Gunner in Southie. “Holy shit, you’re bleedin like a mutha. Fuckin-A, I thought we was dead.” Then, to Clay: “Whuttajw lookin at?”
“Shut up,” Clay said—and, under the circumstances, not unkindly. The redhead pointed at Clay, then turned to his bleeding friend. “This is one of em, Gunnah! This is a bunch of em!”
“Shut up, Harold,” Gunner said. Not kindly at all. Then he looked at Clay, Tom, Alice, and Jordan.
“Let me do something about your forehead,” Alice said. She had reholstered her gun and taken off her pack. Now she was rummaging through it. “I’ve got Band-Aids and gauze pads. Also hydrogen peroxide, which will sting, but better a little sting than an infection, am I right?”
