by Stephen King
I am a loser, he thought. That Beck song, it must have been written with me in mind. It was three against one, but still—I am such a loser.
He began to limp home, because home was where you went when you were hurt and beaten.
CHAPTER 10
1
Until 1997, St. Theresa’s had been a butt-ugly cinderblock building that looked more like an urban housing project than a hospital. Then, after an outcry had arisen over the leveling of Speck and Lookout mountains to get at the coal deposits beneath, the Rauberson Coal Company had endowed an ambitious expansion. The local paper, run by a liberal Democrat—a phrase synonymous with communist, for most of the Republican electorate—called this “no better than hush money.” Most of the people in the Tri-Counties just appreciated it. Why, customers at Bigbee’s Barber Shop had been heard to say, it’s even got a helicopter landing pad!
On most weekday afternoons, the two parking lots—a small one in front of the Urgent Care wing, a larger one in front of the hospital proper—were half-full at most. When Frank Geary turned into Hospital Drive on this afternoon, both were loaded, and the turnaround in front of the main entrance was also jammed. He saw a Prius with its trunk-lid crumpled from where it had been struck by the Jeep Cherokee that had pulled in behind it. Broken taillight glass shone on the pavement like drops of blood.
Frank didn’t hesitate. They were in Elaine’s Subaru Outback, and he bounced it over the curb and onto the lawn, which was empty (at least so far) save for the statue of St. Theresa that had graced the lobby of the old hospital, and the flagpole, where the Stars and Stripes flew above the state flag, with its two miners flanking what looked like a gravestone.
Under any other conditions, Elaine would have given him the rough side of her tongue, which could be rough indeed: What are you doing? Are you crazy? This car isn’t paid off! Today she said nothing. She was cradling Nana in her arms, rocking her as she had when Nana was a baby, feverish with teething. The gunk covering their daughter’s face trailed down to her tee-shirt (her favorite, the one she wore when she was feeling a little blue, the one Frank had stretched eons ago, that morning) like the strands of some skeevy old prospector’s beard. It was hideous. All Frank wanted in the world was to rip it away, but the memory of Kinswoman Brightleaf restrained him. When Elaine tried to touch it on their gallop across town, he had snapped “Don’t!” and she had yanked her hand back. Twice he had asked if Nana was breathing. Elaine said she was, she could see that awful white stuff going in and out like a bellows, but that wasn’t good enough for Frank. He had to reach out his right hand and put it on Nana’s chest and make sure for himself.
He brought the Outback to a grass-spraying halt and raced around to the passenger side. He hoisted Nana and they started toward Urgent Care, Elaine running ahead. Frank felt a momentary pang as he saw the side-zipper of her slacks was open, revealing a glimpse of her pink underwear. Elaine, who under ordinary circumstances was so perfectly put together—tucked and plucked, smoothed down, mixed and matched to a fare-thee-well.
She stopped so abruptly he almost ran into her. A large crowd was milling in front of the Urgent Care doors. She uttered a strange, horse-like whinny that was part frustration and part anger. “We’ll never get in!”
Frank could see the Urgent Care lobby was already filled to capacity. A mad image flashed through his mind: shoppers racing into Walmart on Black Friday.
“Main lobby, El. It’s bigger. We can get in there.”
Elaine wheeled in that direction at once, almost bowling him over. Frank chugged after her, panting a little now. He was in good shape, but Nana seemed to weigh more than the eighty pounds she had registered at her last physical. They couldn’t get into the main lobby, either. There was no crowd in front of the doors, and Frank had a moment of hope, but the lobby itself was packed. The foyer was as deep as they could penetrate.
“Let us through!” Elaine yelled, pounding the shoulder of a husky woman in a pink housedress. “It’s our daughter! Our daughter has got a growth!”
The woman in the pink dress seemed to do no more than flex one of those linebacker shoulders, but that was enough to send El staggering backward. “You ain’t the only one, sister,” she said, and Frank glimpsed the stroller in front of the husky woman. He couldn’t see the face of the child inside, and didn’t need to. The limply splayed legs and one small, trailing foot—clad in a pink sock with Hello Kitty on it—were enough.
Somewhere ahead, beyond the milling people, a man’s voice bellowed, “If you are here because you read Internet reports of an antidote or a vaccine, go home! Those reports are false! There is no antidote and no vaccine at this time! Let me repeat, THERE IS NO ANTIDOTE OR VACCINE AT THIS TIME!”
Cries of dismay greeted this, but no one left. More people were already crowding in behind them, rapidly filling the foyer.
Elaine turned, her face sweaty, her eyes wide and frantic and sheened with tears. “The Women’s Center! We can take her there!”
She pushed her way through the scrum, head down, arms out and flailing at the people in her way. Frank followed with Nana in his arms. One of her feet lightly bumped against a man holding a teenager with long blond hair and no visible face.
“Watch it, buddy,” the man said. “We’re all in this together.”
“Watch it yourself,” Frank snarled, and forced his way back into the open air, his mind once more flashing like a computer with a defective circuit.
m y k i d m y k i d m y k i d
Because right now, nothing mattered but Nana. Nothing on God’s green earth. He would do what he needed to do to make her better. He would dedicate his life to making her better. If that was crazy, he didn’t want to be sane.
Elaine was already crossing the lawn. There was a woman sitting with her back against the flagpole now, holding a baby to her breasts and keening. This was a noise Frank was familiar with; it was the sound a dog made with its foot caught and broken in a trap. She held the baby out to Frank as he passed, and he could see white filaments trailing from the back of its covered head. “Help us!” she cried. “Please, mister, help us!”
Frank made no reply. His eyes were fixed on Elaine’s back. She was heading for one of the buildings on the far side of Hospital Drive. WOMEN’S CENTER, read the white-on-blue sign in front. OBSTETRICS AND GYNECOLOGY, DRS. ERIN EISENBERG, JOLIE SURATT, GEORGIA PEEKINS. There were a few people with cocooned family members sitting in front of the doors, but only a few. This was a good idea. Elaine actually had them pretty often when she took time off from her busy schedule of busting his ass—only why were they sitting? That was odd.
“Hurry!” she said. “Hurry up, Frank!”
“I’m hurrying . . . as fast as . . . I can.” Panting hard now.
She was looking past him. “Some of them saw us! We have to stay ahead!”
Frank looked over his shoulder. A ragged scrum was charging across the lawn, past the beached Outback. The ones who only had babies or small children were in the lead.
Gasping for breath, he staggered up the walk behind Elaine. The caul over Nana’s face fluttered in the breeze.
“Won’t do you no good,” said a woman leaning against the side of the building. She looked and sounded exhausted. Her legs were spread so she could hold her own little girl, one about Nana’s age, against her.
“What?” Elaine asked. “What are you talking about?”
Frank read the sign posted on the inside of the door: CLOSED DUE TO AURORA EMERGENCY.
Stupid chick doctors, he thought as Elaine grabbed the doorhandle and yanked. Stupid selfish chick doctors. You should be open due to the Aurora emergency.
“They probably got kids of their own,” said the woman holding the little girl. There were dark brown circles beneath her eyes. “Can’t blame them, I guess.”
I blame them, Frank thought. I blame the shit out of them.
Elaine turned to him. “What do we do now? Where can we go?”
Before he c
ould reply, the mob from Urgent Care arrived. A geezer with a kid slung over his shoulder grainsack-style—a granddaughter, maybe—thrust Elaine roughly away from the door so he could try it himself.
What happened next had a kind of speedy inevitability. The man reached beneath his untucked shirt, pulled a pistol from his belt, aimed it at the door, and pulled the trigger. The report was deafening, even in the open air. Glass blew inward.
“Who’s closed now?” the geezer cried in a high, cracked voice. A fleck of the blasted glass had come back at him, embedding itself in his cheek. “Who’s closed now, ya shits?”
He raised the gun to fire again. People drew back. A man holding a sleeping girl in a corduroy romper tripped over the outstretched legs of the woman leaning against the building. He put out his hands to break his fall, dropping his burden. The sleeping girl fell to the pavement with a thud. As her father went down beside her, one of his hands tore straight through the caul covering the face of the sitting woman’s daughter. There was no pause; the child’s eyes flew open and she sat up ramrod straight. Her face was a goblin’s mask of hate and fury. She dropped her mouth to the man’s hand, chomped down on his fingers, and writhed forward, snake-like, from her mother’s grasp so she could dig her thumb into the man’s right cheek and her fingers into his left eye.
The geezer turned and aimed his gun—a long-barreled revolver that looked like an antique to Frank—at the writhing, snarling child.
“No!” the mother cried, attempting to shield her daughter. “No, not my baby!”
Frank turned to protect his own daughter, and drove one foot backward into the geezer’s crotch. The geezer gasped and tottered backward. Frank kicked his gun away. The people who had run over here from Urgent Care were now fleeing in all directions. Frank had sent the geezer stumbling into the foyer of the Women’s Center, where he overbalanced and sprawled amid the littered glass. His hands and face were bleeding. The man’s granddaughter lay facedown (what face, Frank thought).
Elaine seized Frank’s shoulder. “Come on! This is crazy! We need to go!”
Frank ignored her. The little girl was still clawing at the man who had inadvertently woken her from her unnatural sleep. She had torn open the flesh under his right eye, and the eyeball bulged out, the cornea filling with blood. Frank couldn’t help the guy, not with Nana in his arms, but the man didn’t need help. He seized the little girl with one hand and hurled her away.
“No! Oh, no!” the girl’s mother cried, and scrambled after her daughter.
The man fixed on Frank and spoke in a matter-of-fact voice. “I think that child blinded me in one of my eyes.”
This is a nightmare, Frank thought. It must be.
Elaine was yanking at him. “We need to go! Frank, we have to!”
Frank followed her toward the Outback, plodding now. As he passed the woman who had been leaning against the side of the Women’s Center, he saw that the little girl’s caul was re-knitting itself over her face with amazing speed. Her eyes had closed. The expression of fury disappeared. A look of untroubled serenity took its place. Then she was gone, buried in white fluff. The child’s mother picked her up, cradled her, and began to kiss her bloody fingers.
Elaine was almost back to the car, yelling for him to keep up. Frank broke into a shambling run.
2
At the kitchen counter, Jared collapsed onto one of the bar seats and dry-swallowed a couple of aspirin from the bottle that his mother left beside the loose change dish. There was a note on the counter from Anton Dubcek about the elm trees in the backyard and the name of a tree surgeon he recommended. Jared stared at this piece of paper. What manner of surgery could one perform on a tree? Who taught Anton Dubcek, who presented as a near imbecile, how to spell, and to do so in such nice, clear handwriting? And wasn’t he the pool guy? But he knew about trees, too? Would the state and health of the Norcross family yard ever be a matter of any significance again? Was Anton still going to clean pools if all the women in the world were asleep? Well, fuck, why wouldn’t he? Guys liked to swim, too.
Jared ground his dirty fists into his eye sockets and took deep breaths. He needed to get it together, get showered, get changed. He needed to talk to his parents. He needed to talk to Mary.
The house phone went off, the sound strange and unfamiliar. It hardly ever rang except in election years.
Jared reached for it, and of course he knocked it from the cradle and onto the tile on the other side of the counter. The handset broke apart, the backing popping loose with a plastic snap, and the batteries scattered across the floor.
He picked his way across the living room, supporting himself on furniture as he went, and grabbed up the other phone from the occasional table beside the armchair. “Hello?”
“Jared?”
“None other.” He sat in the leather armchair with a groan of relief. “How’s it going, Dad?” No sooner had he asked it than it struck him what a dumb question that was.
“Are you okay? I’ve been calling your cell phone. Why didn’t you answer?”
His father’s voice was tight, which wasn’t all that surprising. Things probably weren’t too super at the prison. It was, after all, a women’s prison. Jared had no intention of letting his father worry about him. The ostensible reason for this choice was something anyone ought to be able to understand: in the middle of an unprecedented crisis, his father didn’t need anything else on his plate. The true reason, barely submerged, was that he was ashamed. He’d gotten his ass kicked by Eric Blass, his phone had been destroyed, and before limping his way home, he’d lain in the ditch and sobbed. It wasn’t something he wanted to talk to his dad about. He didn’t want anyone telling him it was all right, because it wasn’t. And he didn’t want to be asked how he felt about it. How did he feel? Shitty pretty well covered it.
“I fell down the steps at school.” He cleared his throat. “I wasn’t watching where I was going. Broke my phone in the process. That’s why you couldn’t get through. I’m sorry. I think it’s still under warranty, though. I’ll go over to the Verizon place myself and—”
“Are you hurt?”
“I twisted my knee pretty good, actually.”
“That’s all? You didn’t hurt anything besides your knee? Tell me the truth.”
Jared wondered if his father knew something. What if someone had seen? It made his stomach hurt to consider. He knew what his father would say if he knew; he’d say he loved him and that he hadn’t done anything wrong; he’d say it was the other guys who had done something wrong. And yes, he would want to be sure Jared was in touch with his feelings.
“Of course that’s all. Why would I lie?”
“I’m not accusing you, Jere, I only wanted to be sure. I’m just relieved to finally have you on the phone, hear your voice. Things are bad. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I heard the news.” More than that, he’d seen the news: Old Essie in the lean-to, the gossamer white mask welded to her face.
“Have you talked to Mary?”
“Not since before lunch.” He said he planned to check in with her shortly.
“Good.” His father explained that he wasn’t sure when he’d be home, that Lila was on call, and Jared should stay put. “If this situation doesn’t resolve quickly, it’s going to get weird out there. Lock the doors, keep the phone handy.”
“Yeah, sure, Dad, I’ll be safe, but do you really need to stay any longer?” How to put it was tricky. It seemed somehow in bad taste, to point out the simple math; it was akin to saying aloud that a dying person was dying. “I mean, all the inmates at the prison are women. So . . . they’re just going to fall asleep . . . right?” There was a little crack at the end of the last word that Jared hoped his father hadn’t caught.
Another question—And what about Mom?—formed in his mouth, but Jared didn’t think he could get it out without crying.
“I’m sorry, Jared,” Clint said after a few seconds of dead line. “I can’t leave yet. I’d like to,
but the staff is shorthanded. I’ll be home as soon as I can, though. I promise.” Then, perhaps sensing the question that Jared had been thinking, he added, “And so will your mom. I love you. Be safe and stay put. Call me right away if you need me.”
Jared sucked up all the anxiety that seemed to be centered at the back of his throat and managed a goodbye.
He closed his eyes and took deep breaths. No more crying. He needed to get out of his filthy, torn clothes, take a shower. That would make things at least a little better. Jared levered himself to his feet and limped toward the stairs. A rhythmic thumping echoed from outside, followed by a rickety tin clatter.
Through the windowed panel at the top of the front door, he could see across the street. The last occupied house on the street belonged to Mrs. Ransom, a seventy-something woman who ran a baking and sweets business out of her home, benefitting from Dooling’s lack of zoning laws. It was a neat, pale green house, set off by window boxes alive with merry clusters of spring flowers. Mrs. Ransom was sitting in a plastic lawn chair in the driveway, sipping a Coke. A girl of ten or eleven—a granddaughter surely, Jared thought he’d seen her over there before—was bouncing a basketball on the pavement, taking shots at the freestanding basketball hoop at the side of the driveway.
Brown ponytail swinging out of the gap at the back of a dark baseball cap, the girl dribbled around in a circle, cut one way then another, evading invisible defenders, and pulled up for a mid-range jumper. Her feet weren’t quite set and the shot went high. The ball hit the top of the backboard and ricocheted up, the crooked spin carrying it away into the next yard, a weed-and-hay-strewn expanse in front of the first of their development’s unoccupied houses.
She went to retrieve her ball, crunching across the hay. The ball had rolled up near the porch of the empty house, which was all bare wood, windows with the brand stickers still plastered against the glass. The girl stopped and gazed up at the structure. Jared tried to guess what she might be thinking. That it was sad, the house with no family? Or spooky? Or that it would be fun to play in, to dribble around in the bare halls? Shoot pretend lay-ups in the kitchen?
