by Stephen King
“The families of Krista Countryman and Keith Frias have been flooded with condolences as a result of a story this station ran not long ago,” Jack said in his grouchy Andy Rooney voice. “Their decision to terminate their lives when they could no longer live with unending and unmitigated pain has reignited the debate on the ethics of suicide. It also reminded us—unfortunately—of the coward who caused that unending, unmitigated pain, a monster named Brady Wilson Hartsfield.”
That’s me, Brady thought happily. When they even give your middle name, you know you’re an authentic boogeyman.
“If there is a life after this one,” Jack said (out-of-control Andy Rooney brows drawing together, jowls flapping), “Brady Wilson Hartsfield will pay the full price for his crimes when he gets there. In the meantime, let us consider the silver lining in this dark cloud of woe, because there really is one.
“A year after his cowardly killing spree at City Center, Brady Wilson Hartsfield attempted an even more heinous crime. He smuggled a large quantity of plastic explosive into a concert at Mingo Auditorium, with the intent to murder thousands of teens who were there to have a good time. In this he was thwarted by retired detective William Hodges and a brave woman named Holly Gibney, who smashed the homicidal loser’s skull before he could detonate …”
Here Brady lost the thread. Some woman named Holly Gibney had been the one to smash him in the head and almost kill him? Who the fuck was Holly Gibney? And why had no one ever told him this in the five years since she’d turned his lights out and landed him in this room? How was that possible?
Very easily, he decided. When the coverage was fresh, he’d been in a coma. Later on, he thought, I just assumed it was either Hodges or his nigger lawnboy.
He would look Gibney up on the Web when he got a chance, but she wasn’t the important thing. She was part of the past. The future was a splendid idea that had come to him as his best inventions always had: whole and complete, needing only a few modifications along the way to make it perfect.
He powered up his Zappit, found Z-Boy (currently handing out magazines to patients waiting in OB/GYN), and sent him to the library computer. Once he was seated in front of the screen, Brady shoved him out of the driver’s seat and took control, hunched over and squinting at the monitor with Al Brooks’s nearsighted eyes. On a website called Bankruptcy Assets 2015, he found the list of all the stuff Sunrise Solutions had left behind. There was junk from a dozen different companies, listed alphabetically. Zappit was the last, but as far as Brady was concerned, far from least. Heading the list of their assets was 45,872 Zappit Commanders, suggested retail price $189.99. They were being sold in lots of four hundred, eight hundred, and one thousand. Below, in red, was the caveat that part of the shipment was defective, “but most are in perfect working condition.”
Brady’s excitement had Library Al’s old heart laboring. His hands left the keyboard and curled into fists. Getting more of the City Center survivors to commit suicide paled in comparison to the grand idea that now possessed him: finishing what he had tried to do that night at the Mingo. He could see himself writing to Hodges from beneath the Blue Umbrella: You think you stopped me? Think again.
How wonderful that would be!
He was pretty sure Babineau had more than enough money to buy a Zappit console for everyone who had been there that night, but since Brady would have to handle his targets one at a time, it wouldn’t do to go overboard.
He had Z-Boy bring Babineau to him. Babineau didn’t want to come. He was afraid of Brady now, which Brady found delicious.
“You’re going to be buying some goods,” Brady said.
“Buying some goods.” Docile. No longer afraid. Babineau had entered Room 217, but it was now Dr. Z standing slump-shouldered in front of Brady’s chair.
“Yes. You’ll want to put money in a new account. I think we’ll call it Gamez Unlimited. That’s Gamez with a Z.”
“With a Z. Like me.” The head of the Kiner Neurology Department managed a small, vacuous smile.
“Very good. Let’s say a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You’ll also be setting Freddi Linklatter up in a new and bigger apartment. So she can receive the goods you buy, and then work on them. She’s going to be a busy girl.”
“I’ll be setting her up in a new and bigger apartment so—”
“Just shut up and listen. She’ll be needing some more equipment, too.”
Brady leaned forward. He could see a bright future ahead, one where Brady Wilson Hartsfield was crowned the winner years after the Det.-Ret. thought the game had ended.
“The most important piece of equipment is called a repeater.”
HEADS AND SKINS
1
It’s not pain that wakes Freddi, but her bladder. It feels like it’s bursting. Getting out of bed is a major operation. Her head is banging, and it feels like she’s wearing a plaster cast on her chest. It doesn’t hurt too much, mostly it’s just stiff and so heavy. Each breath is a clean-and-jerk.
The bathroom looks like something out of a slasher movie, and she closes her eyes as soon as she sits on the john so she won’t have to look at all the blood. So lucky to be alive, she thinks as something that feels like ten gallons of pee rushes out of her. Just so goddam lucky. And why am I in the center of this clusterfuck? Because I took him that picture. My mother was right, no good deed goes unpunished.
But if there was ever a time for clear thinking it’s now, and she has to admit to herself that taking Brady the picture wasn’t what has led her to this place, sitting in her bloody bathroom with a knot on her head and a gunshot wound in her chest. It was going back that had done that, and she’d gone back because she was being paid to do so—fifty dollars a visit. Which made her sort of a call girl, she supposed.
You know what all this is about. You could tell yourself you only knew when you peeked at the thumb drive Dr. Z brought you, the one that activates the creepy website, but you knew when you were installing updates on all those Zappits, didn’t you? A regular assembly line of them, forty or fifty a day, until all the ones that weren’t defective were loaded landmines. Over five hundred. You knew it was Brady all along, and Brady Hartsfield is crazy.
She yanks up her pants, flushes, and leaves the bathroom. The light coming in the living room window is muted, but it still hurts her eyes. She squints, sees it’s starting to snow, and shuffles to the kitchen, working for every breath. Her fridge is mostly stocked with cartons of leftover Chinese, but there’s a couple of cans of Red Bull in the door shelf. She grabs one, chugs half, and feels a bit better. It’s probably a psychological effect, but she’ll take it.
What am I going to do? What in the name of God? Is there any way out of this mess?
She goes into her computer room, shuffling a little faster now, and refreshes her screen. She googles her way to zeetheend, hoping she’ll get the cartoon man swinging his cartoon pickaxe, and her heart sinks when the picture filling the screen shows a candlelit funeral parlor, instead—exactly what she saw when she booted up the thumb drive and looked at the starter screen, instead of just importing the whole thing blind, as instructed. That dopey Blue Oyster Cult song is playing.
She scrolls past the messages below the coffin, each one swelling and fading like slow heartbeats (AN END TO PAIN, AN END TO FEAR) and clicks on POST A COMMENT. Freddi doesn’t know how long this electronic poison pill has been active, but long enough for it to have generated hundreds of comments already.
Bedarkened77: This dares to speak the truth!
AliceAlways401: I wish I had the guts, things are so bad at home now.
VerbanaThe Monkey: Bear the pain, people, suicide is gutless!!!
KittycatGreeneyes: No, suicide is PAINLESS, it brings on many changes.
Verbana the Monkey isn’t the only naysayer, but Freddi doesn’t have to scroll through all the comments to see that he (or she) is very much in the minority. This is going to spread like the flu, Freddi thinks.
No, more like ebola.
She looks up at the repeater just in time to see 171 FOUND tick up to 172. Word about the number-fish is spreading fast, and by tonight almost all of the rigged Zappits will be active. The demo screen hypnotizes them, makes them receptive. To what? Well, to the idea that they should visit zeetheend, for one thing. Or maybe the Zappit People won’t even have to go there. Maybe they’ll just highside it. Will people obey a hypnotic command to off themselves? Surely not, right?
Right?
Freddi doesn’t dare risk killing the repeater for fear of a return visit from Brady, but the website?
“You’re going down, motherfucker,” she says, and begins to rattle away at her keyboard.
Less than thirty seconds later, she’s staring with disbelief at a message on her screen: THIS FUNCTION IS NOT ALLOWED. She reaches out to try again, then stops. For all she knows, another go at the website may nuke all her stuff—not just her computer equipment, but her credit cards, her bank account, her cell phone, even her fucking driver’s license. If anyone knows how to program such evil shit, it’s Brady.
Fuck. I have to get out of here.
She’ll throw some clothes in a suitcase, call a cab, go to the bank, and draw out everything she’s got. There might be as much as four thousand dollars. (In her heart, she knows it’s more like three.) From the bank to the bus station. The snow swirling outside her window is supposed to be the beginning of a big storm, and that may preclude a quick getaway, but if she has to wait a few hours at the station, she will. Hell, if she has to sleep there, she will. This is all Brady. He’s set up an elaborate Jonestown protocol of which the rigged Zappits are only a part, and she helped him do it. Freddi has no idea if it will work, and she doesn’t intend to wait around to find out. She’s sorry for the people who might be sucked in by the Zappits, or tipped into attempting suicide by that fucking zeetheend website instead of just thinking about it, but she has to take care of numero uno. There’s no one else to do it.
Freddi makes her way back to the bedroom as rapidly as she can. She gets her old Samsonite from the closet, and then oxygen depletion caused by shallow breathing and too much excitement turns her legs to rubber. She makes it to the bed, sits on it, and lowers her head.
Easy does it, she thinks. Get your breath back. One thing at a time.
Only, thanks to her foolish effort to crash the website, she doesn’t know how much time she has, and when “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” begins to play from the top of her dresser, she utters a little scream. Freddi doesn’t want to answer her phone, but gets up, anyway. Sometimes it’s better to know.
2
The snow remains light until Brady gets off the interstate at Exit 7, but on State Road 79—he’s out in the boondocks now—it starts to come down a little harder. The tar is still bare and wet, but the snow will start to accumulate on it soon enough, and he’s still forty miles from where he intends to hole up and get busy.
Lake Charles, he thinks. Where the real fun begins.
That’s when Babineau’s laptop awakens and chimes three times—an alert Brady programmed into it. Because safe is always better than sorry. He has no time to pull over, not when he’s racing this goddam storm, but he can’t afford not to. Ahead on the right is a boarded-up building with two metal girls in rusting bikinis on the roof, holding up a sign reading PORNO PALACE and XXX and WE DARE TO BARE. In the middle of the dirt parking lot—which the snow is now starting to sugarcoat—there’s a For Sale sign.
Brady pulls in, shifts to park, and opens the laptop. The message on the screen puts a significant crack right down the middle of his good mood.
11:04 AM: UNAUTHORIZED ATTEMPT TO MODIFY/CANCEL ZEETHEEND.COM DENIED
SITE ACTIVE
He opens the Malibu’s glove compartment and there is Al Brooks’s battered cell phone, right where he always kept it. A good thing, too, because Brady forgot to bring Babineau’s.
So sue me, he thinks. You can’t remember everything, and I’ve been busy.
He doesn’t bother going to Contacts, just dials Freddi’s number from memory. She hasn’t changed it since the old Discount Electronix days.
3
When Hodges excuses himself to use the bathroom, Jerome waits until he’s out the door, then goes to Holly, who’s standing at the window and watching the snow fall. It’s still light here in the city, the flakes dancing in the air and seeming to defy gravity. Holly once more has her arms crossed over her chest so she can grip her shoulders.
“How bad is he?” Jerome asks in a low voice. “Because he doesn’t look good.”
“It’s pancreatic cancer, Jerome. How good does anyone look with that?”
“Can he get through the day, do you think? Because he wants to, and I really think he could use some closure on this.”
“Closure on Hartsfield, you mean. Brady fracking Hartsfield. Even though he’s fracking dead.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“I think it’s bad.” She turns to him and forces herself to meet his eyes, a thing that always makes her feel stripped bare. “Do you see the way he keeps putting his hand against his side?”
Jerome nods.
“He’s been doing that for weeks now and calling it indigestion. He only went to the doctor because I nagged him into it. And when he found out what was wrong, he tried to lie.”
“You didn’t answer the question. Can he get through the day?”
“I think so. I hope so. Because you’re right, he needs this. Only we have to stick with him. Both of us.” She releases one shoulder so she can grip his wrist. “Promise me, Jerome. No sending the skinny girl home so the boys can play in the treehouse by themselves.”
He pries her hand loose and gives it a squeeze. “Don’t worry, Hollyberry. No one’s breaking up the band.”
4
“Hello? Is that you, Dr. Z?”
Brady has no time to play games with her. The snow is thickening every second, and Z-Boy’s crappy old Malibu, with no snow tires and over a hundred thousand miles on the clock, will be no match for the storm once it really gets whooping. Under other circumstances, he’d want to know how she’s even alive, but since he has no intention of turning back and rectifying that situation, it’s a moot question.
“You know who it is, and I know what you tried to do. Try it again and I’ll send in the men who are watching the building. You’re lucky to be alive, Freddi. I wouldn’t tempt fate a second time.”
“I’m sorry.” Almost whispering. This is not the fuck-you-and-fuck-your-mother riot grrrl Brady worked with on the Cyber Patrol. Yet she’s not entirely broken, or she wouldn’t have tried messing with the computer gear.
“Have you told anyone?”
“No!” She sounds horrified at the thought. Horrified is good.
“Will you?”
“No!”
“That’s the right answer, because if you do, I’ll know. You’re under surveillance, Freddi. Remember it.”
He ends the call without waiting for a reply, more furious with her for being alive than for what she tried to do. Will she believe that fictitious men are watching the building, even though he left her for dead? He thinks so. She’s had dealings with both Dr. Z and Z-Boy; who knows how many other drones he might have at his command?
In any case, there’s nothing else he can do about it now. Brady has a long, long history of blaming others for his problems, and now he blames Freddi for not dying when she was supposed to.
He drops the Malibu’s gearshift into drive and steps on the gas. The tires spin in the thin carpet of snow covering the defunct Porno Palace’s parking lot, but catch once they get on the state road again, where the formerly brown soft shoulders are now turning white. Brady eases Z-Boy’s car up to sixty. That will soon be too fast for conditions, but he’ll hold the needle there as long as he can.
5
Finders Keepers shares the seventh-floor bathrooms with the travel agency, but right now Hodges has the men’s to himself, for which he is grateful.
He’s bent over one of the sinks, right hand gripping the washbasin’s rim, left pressed to his side. His belt is still unbuckled, and his pants are sinking past his hips under the weight of the stuff in his pockets: change, keys, wallet, phone.
He came in here to take a shit, an ordinary excretory function he’s been performing all his life, but when he started to strain, the left half of his midsection went nuclear. It makes his previous pain seem like a bunch of warm-up notes before the full concert begins, and if it’s this bad now, he dreads to think what may lie ahead.
No, he thinks, dread is the wrong word. Terror is the right one. For the first time in my life, I’m terrified of the future, where I see everything that I am or ever was first submerged, then erased. If the pain itself doesn’t do it, the heavier drugs they give me to stifle it will.
Now he understands why pancreatic is called the stealth cancer, and why it’s almost always deadly. It lurks, building up its troops and sending out secret emissaries to the lungs, the lymph nodes, the bones, and the brain. Then it blitzkriegs, not understanding, in its stupid rapacity, that victory can only bring its own death.
Hodges thinks, Except maybe that’s what it wants. Maybe it’s self-hating, born with a desire not to murder the host but to kill itself. Which makes cancer the real suicide prince.
He brings up a long, resounding burp, and that makes him feel a little better, who knows why. It won’t last long, but he’ll take any measure of relief he can get. He shakes out three of his painkillers (already they make him think of shooting a popgun at a charging elephant) and swallows them with water from the tap. Then he splashes more cold water on his face, trying to bring up a little color. When that doesn’t work, he slaps himself briskly—two hard ones on each cheek. Holly and Jerome must not know how bad it’s gotten. He was promised this day and he means to take every minute of it. All the way to midnight, if necessary.
