by Stephen King
A vaccine!
A cure!
“—planted evidence! Like I’d want anything to do with some husband murderer who—”
“Shut up a minute.”
For a wonder, Don did so. He stared up into the taller man’s face with booze-shiny eyes.
“How many guards at the prison right now?”
“Officers is what we call em, and I dunno for sure. Not many, with everything so screwed up. Depends on who’s coming and who’s going, too.” He squinted while he did the math—not a pretty sight. “Maybe seven. Eight if you count Hicks, nine if you add in Mr. Shrinky Dink, but those two ain’t worth a fart in a high wind.”
“What about the warden?”
Don’s eyes shifted away from Frank’s. “I’m pretty sure she went to sleep.”
“Okay, and how many of the ones on duty now are female?”
“When I left, just Van Lampley and Millie Olson. Oh, and Blanche McIntyre might still be there, but she’s just Coatsie’s secretary, and she’s like a hundred and one.”
“Which leaves mighty few, even counting Hicks and Norcross. And you know something else? The sheriff is also a woman, and if she’s able to keep order another three hours, I’d be amazed. I’d be amazed if she’s even awake in another three hours.” Under sober circumstances, these were thoughts that Frank would have kept to himself—he certainly wouldn’t have shared them with an excitable twerp like Don Peters.
Don, computing, ran his tongue around his lips. This was another unattractive visual. “What are you thinking?”
“That Dooling is going to need a new sheriff soon. And the new sheriff would be perfectly within his rights to remove a prisoner from Correctional. Especially one that hasn’t been tried for anything, let alone convicted.”
“You think you might apply for the job?” Don asked.
As if to underline the question, a couple of gunshots went off somewhere in the night. And there was that pervasive smell of smoke. Who was seeing to that? Anyone?
“I’m pretty sure Terry Coombs is the senior man,” Frank said. The senior man currently so deep in his cups he was on the verge of getting underneath them, but Frank didn’t say that. He was exhausted and high, but he finally realized he needed to be careful what he let out.
“He’s going to need help picking up the slack, though. I’d certainly put my name forward if he needed a deputy.”
“I like that idea,” said Don. “Might throw my name in the hat, too. Looks like I’ll need a job. We should talk to him about going up there and getting that woman right away, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Frank said. In an ideal world, he didn’t think he’d let Don Peters wash out a dog cage, but because of his knowledge of the prison, they might need him. “Once we all get some sleep and sober up.”
“Well all right, let me give you my cell number,” Don said. “And let me know what you and Terry are thinking.” He took out the pen and notebook he used to write up cunts who gave him trouble and needed to go on Bad Report.
3
Not long after the first reports of Aurora, rates of male suicide ticked upward sharply, doubling, then later tripling and quadrupling. Men killed themselves loudly, jumping from the tops of buildings or putting guns into their mouths, and men killed themselves quietly, taking pills, closing garage doors and sitting in their running cars. A retired schoolteacher named Eliot Ainsley called a radio show in Sydney, Australia, to explain his intentions and his thinking before he cut his wrists and went to lie down alongside his sleeping wife. “I just can’t see the point of continuing on without the gals,” the retired teacher informed the disc jockey. “And it’s occurred to me that perhaps this is a test, of our love for them, of our devotion for them. You understand, don’t you, mate?” The disc jockey replied that he did not understand, that he thought Eliot Ainsley had “lost his fookin mind”—but a great many men did. These suicides were known by various names, but the one that became part of the common usage was coined in Japan. These were the Sleeping Husbands, men who hoped to join their wives and daughters, wherever they had gone.
(Vain hope. No men were allowed on the other side of the Tree.)
4
Clint was aware that both his wife and son were staring at him. It was painful to look at Lila, and even more so to look at Jared, who wore an expression of complete bewilderment. Clint saw fear in Jared’s face, too. His parents’ marriage, a thing so seemingly secure that he had taken it for granted, appeared to be dissolving right before his eyes.
Over on the couch was a little girl cocooned in milky fibers. On the floor beside the girl was an infant, snug in a laundry basket. The infant in the basket didn’t look like an infant, however. It looked like something that a spider had wrapped up for a future snack.
“Bump, lock, clap-clap,” Lila said, though she no longer sounded like she cared all that much. “I saw her do it. Stop pretending, Clint. Stop lying.”
We need some sleep, Clint thought, Lila most of all. But not until this sitcom idiocy was resolved. If it could be, and there might be a way. His first thought was of his phone, but the screen wasn’t big enough for what he wanted.
“Jared, the Internet’s still up, right?”
“Last time I checked.”
“Get your laptop.”
“Why?”
“Just get it, okay?”
“Have I really got a sister?”
“No.”
Lila’s head had begun to droop, but now she brought it up. “Yes.”
“Get your laptop.”
Jared went to get it. Lila’s head was sinking again. Clint patted first one of her cheeks, then the other. “Lila. Lila!”
Her head rose again. “Right here. Don’t touch me.”
“Have you got any more of that stuff you and Linny took?”
She fumbled in her breast pocket and brought out a contact lens case. She popped up one of the plastic compartments. Inside was a little powder. She glanced at him.
“It’s strong,” she said. “I might claw your eyes out. Cocoon or no cocoon. I’m sad, but I’m also extremely pissed.”
“I’ll chance it. Go on.”
She bent, closed one nostril, and snorted the powder up the other. Then she sat back, eyes wide. “Tell me, Clint, was Shannon Parks a good lay? I thought I was, but she must have been better, if you had to go hot-dogging back to her when we were only married a year or so.”
Jared returned, his closed face saying I didn’t hear that last part, and set his laptop down in front of his father. He was careful to maintain a separation from Clint when he did it. Et tu, Brute?
Clint powered up Jared’s Mac, went on Firefox, and searched for “Sheila Norcross Coughlin basketball.” The story came up. And the picture of the girl named Sheila Norcross. It was a damned good head and shoulders shot, showing her in her basketball jersey. Her pretty face was flushed with on-court hustle. She was smiling. Clint studied the picture for almost thirty seconds. Then, without a word, he turned the laptop so Jared could look. His son did so with a tight mouth and his fists clenched. Then they slowly relaxed. He looked at Lila, more bewildered than ever. “Mom . . . if there’s a resemblance, I don’t see it. She doesn’t look anything like me. Or dad.”
Lila’s eyes, already wide from the fresh ingestion of magic powder, widened even more. She uttered a harsh caw of a laugh. “Jared, please, don’t. Just don’t. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Jared winced as if he had been slapped, and for an awful moment Clint was on the verge of hauling off on his wife of seventeen years. What stopped him was another look at the photo of the smiling girl. Because if you wanted to find it, there was a faint resemblance, whether Jared saw it or not: the long jaw, the high forehead, and the dimples that punctuated the corners of her smile. None of these features really matched Clint’s own, but he could see how they suggested an association.
I love your dimples, Lila had sometimes told Clint when they were first married.
Often in bed, after making love. Touching them with her fingers. All men should have dimples.
He could have told her what he now believed, because he thought he understood everything. But there might be another way. It was four in the morning, an hour when almost everyone in the Tri-Counties would ordinarily have been sleeping, but this was no ordinary night. If his old friend from the foster system wasn’t in a cocoon, she would be able to take a call. The only question was whether or not he could reach her. He considered his cell, then went to the phone hanging on the wall instead. He got the buzz of an active line; so far, so good.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Lila asked.
He didn’t answer, simply dialed 0. After six rings he was afraid no one was going to answer, which would hardly be surprising, but then a weary female voice said, “Yeah? What?”
Clint very much doubted if that was the way Shenandoah Telecom instructed its operators to respond to customer calls, but he was simply grateful to get a human voice. “Operator, my name is Clinton Norcross, from Dooling, and I badly need some help.”
“Tell you what, I doubt that,” she responded in a drawl that could (and probably did) come straight from the toolies of Bridger County. “It’s the women need help tonight.”
“It’s a woman I need to reach. Her name is Shannon Parks. In Coughlin.” If she was listed at all. Single women often went the unlisted route. “Can you look for me?”
“You could dial 611 for that information. Or check y’damn computer.”
“Please. Help me if you can.”
There was a long silence. The connection hadn’t been broken, but suppose she’d gone to sleep on him?
At last the operator said, “I have an S. L. Parks on Maple Street in Coughlin. That the lady you’re looking for?”
It almost had to be. He grabbed the pencil hanging from the memo board so hard it snapped the string. “Thank you, operator. Thank you so much. Can you give me the number?”
The operator did, then broke the connection.
“I won’t believe her, even if you get her!” Lila cried. “She’ll lie for you!”
Clint dialed the number without replying, and didn’t even have time to hold his breath. It was picked up halfway through the first ring. “I’m still awake, Amber,” Shannon Parks said. “Thanks for call—”
“It’s not Amber, Shan,” Clint said. His legs suddenly felt weak, and he leaned against the refrigerator. “It’s Clint Norcross.”
5
The Internet is a bright house standing above a dark cellar with a dirt floor. Falsehoods sprout like mushrooms in that cellar. Some are tasty; many are poisonous. The falsehood that began in Cupertino—which was stated as absolute fact—was one of the latter. In a Facebook post titled AURORA TRUTH, a man who claimed to be a doctor wrote the following:
AURORA WARNING: URGENT!
By Dr. Philip P. Verdrusca
A team of biologists and epidemiologists at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center have determined that the cocoons surrounding women afflicted with the Aurora Sleeping Sickness are responsible for the spread of the disease. The respiration of those afflicted passes through the cocoon and becomes a transmission vector. This vector is highly contagious!
The only way to stop the spread of Aurora is to burn the cocoons and the sleeping women inside! Do this immediately! You will give your loved ones the rest they long for in their semiconscious state, and stop the spread of this pestilence.
Do it for the sake of the women who are still awake!
SAVE THEM!!!
There was no doctor named Philip Verdrusca on the staff of the Kaiser Permanente facility, or at any of its adjuncts. This fact was quickly posted on TV and online, along with rebuttals from dozens of reputable doctors, and the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Cupertino Hoax became the lead story on the news networks as the sun rose over the East Coast of America. But the horse was out of the barn, and Lila Norcross could have predicted what followed. In fact, she had predicted it. While people might hope for the best, Lila, closing in on twenty years in a blue uniform, knew that what they believed was the worst. In a terrified world, false news was king.
By the time dawn rose in the midwestern states, Blowtorch Brigades were roaming cities and towns all over America and the world beyond. Cocooned women were hauled to dumps and fields and stadium lawns, where they went up in gouts of fire.
The work of “Philip P. Verdrusca” had already begun as Clint explained the Norcross family’s current situation to Shannon, and then silently extended the telephone to his wife.
6
At first Lila said nothing, only looked mistrustfully at her husband. He nodded to her as if she had spoken, and took his son gently by the arm. “Come on,” he said. “Give her some privacy.”
In the living room, on the TV, the Public Access woman continued doing beadwork—would do so, it seemed, even unto the end of the world—but the sound was mercifully muted.
“You’re not that girl’s father, are you, Dad?”
“No,” Clint said. “I am not.”
“But how could she have known the Cool Shake we used to do in Little League?”
Clint sat down on the couch with a sigh. Jared sat beside him. “Like mother like daughter, they say, and Shan Parks was also a basketball player, although never in high school or on an AAU team. She wasn’t into anything where they made you take a number or run through paper hoops at pep rallies. That wasn’t her style. She stuck to playground pickup games. Boys and girls together.”
Jared was fascinated. “Did you play?”
“A little, for fun, but I was no good. She could blow by me any old time she wanted, because she had a ton of game. Only she didn’t have to, because we never played against each other. We were always on the same team.” In all ways, he thought. It wasn’t just how we rolled, it was how we survived. Survival was the real milkshake, the one we both fought for. “Shan invented the Cool Shake, Jere. She taught it to me, and I taught it to you boys when I was coaching.”
“That girl you knew invented the Shake?” Jared sounded awed, as if Shannon had pioneered not a handshake but molecular biology. It made Jared seem so terribly young. Which of course he was.
“Yep.”
The rest he didn’t want to say to Jared, because it would sound wildly conceited, but he hoped Shannon was telling his wife now. He thought she would, because Shannon would know both women could be erased from the world in a matter of days, or even hours. That made telling the truth imperative, if not necessarily easier.
Shan had been his best friend, and they had been lovers, but only for a few months. She had been in love with him—head over heels. That was the truth. Clint knew it now, and he supposed in the deepest corner of his heart he had known it then and chosen to ignore it because he didn’t feel the same, and couldn’t let himself feel the same. Shannon had given him the lift he needed, and he would always owe her for that, but he had not wanted to spend his life with her, had never even considered it. What they had was the bald matter of survival—his survival and hers. Shannon belonged to a life where he had been hurt and scarred and almost broken. She had convinced him to stay on the path. Once he was on it, Clint needed to keep going. She would have to find someone to help her, but it couldn’t be him, and was that cruel? Was that selfish? Yes to both.
Years after they parted, she had met a guy and got pregnant. What Clint believed was that the father of Shannon’s daughter was a man who looked a little like the boy she had been in love with as a teenager. She had borne a child who carried a tiny bit of that resemblance.
Lila came into the living room at a slow plod and stood between the couch and the TV. She looked around as if unsure where she was.
Clint said “Honey?” and Jared said “Mom?” at the same time.
She smiled wanly. “It seems that I have some apologizing to do.”
“The only thing you have to apologize for is not coming to me with this sooner,” Clint sa
id. “For letting it fester. I’m just glad I could get hold of her. Is she still on the line?” He nodded toward the kitchen.
“No,” Lila said. “Oh, she wanted to talk to you, but I hung up on her. Not very nice, but I guess I’m still getting some residual vibration from my jealous bone. Besides, a lot of this is her fault. Giving her daughter your name . . .” She shook her head. “Idiocy. God, I’m tired.”
You had no problem taking my name, or giving it to your son, Clint thought, and not without resentment.
“The real father was some guy she met at the bar where she used to waitress. All she ever knew about him was his name, and who knows if he gave her his real one. In the story Parks told the kid, it’s you, except you died in a car crash during the pregnancy. Not that the girl will ever know any better.”
“She went to sleep?” Jared asked.
“Two hours ago,” Lila said. “Parks is only staying awake herself because of her best friend, Amber somebody. Who’s also a single mother. They practically grow on trees around here, don’t they? Everywhere, I guess. Never mind. Let me finish this stupid little story, shall I? She moved to Coughlin for a fresh start shortly after the baby was born. Claims she didn’t know you were anywhere in the area, which I don’t believe for a second. My name is in the Herald every goddam week, and as you yourself pointed out, there are no other Norcrosses in the area. She knew, all right. She’s still hoping you can work something out someday, I’d bet anything on it.” Lila’s jaws cracked open in a huge yawn.
Clint considered this ragingly unfair, and had to remind himself that Lila—raised in a comfortable middle-class home, with cheery parents and siblings out of an old 1970s sitcom—could not comprehend the nine flavors of hell he and Shannon had been through. Yes, the naming business had been neurotic behavior, no argument, but there was one thing Lila either didn’t see or didn’t want to see: Shannon had been living only a hundred and fifty miles away, and had never tried to make contact. He could tell himself it was because she’d never known he was close, but as Lila had pointed out, that was farfetched.
