by Stephen King
Frank leaped forward, reached through the fence, seized Norcross by the throat, and choked him until his eyeballs first bulged, then dropped out to dangle on his cheeks . . . but only in his mind. He waited.
Terry considered, then spat in the dirt. “Fuck you, Clint. You’re no real doctor.”
And when he raised the flask and took another long, defiant swallow, Frank raised an inward cheer. By tomorrow, Acting Sheriff Coombs would be in the bag. Then he, Frank, would take over. There would be no seventy-two hours, and he didn’t care if Eve Black was a witch, a fairy princess, or the Red Queen of Wonderland. Everything he needed to know about Eve Black had been in that one short phone call.
Stop this, he had told her—almost begged her—when she called him on her stolen cell. Let the women go.
You’ll have to kill me first, the woman had replied.
Which was what Frank intended to do. If it brought the women back? Happy ending. If not? Revenge for taking away the only person in his life who mattered. Either way? Problem solved.
7
Just as Van Lampley reached her stalled ATV—with no idea what to do next—a kid tore past on one of those bikes with the apehanger handlebars. He was making enough speed to blow his hair back from his forehead, and he wore an expression of stark, bug-eyed terror. It could have been caused by any one of a dozen things, the way the world was now, but Van had no doubt what had lit a fire under the boy. It wasn’t an intuition; it was a rock-solid certainty.
“Kid!” she shouted. “Kid, where are they?”
Kent Daley paid her no mind, only pedaled faster. He was thinking about the old homeless woman they had been goofing with. They never should have done it. This was God, paying them back. Paying him back. He pedaled faster still.
8
Although Maynard Griner had left the halls of academe while still in the eighth grade (and those halls had been delighted to see him go), he was good with machinery; when his younger brother passed him the bazooka and one of the shells, May handled them as if he had been doing so all his life. He examined the shell’s high-explosive tip, the wire that ran down the side of the thing, and the fins at the base. He grunted, nodded, and aligned the shell’s fins with the grooves inside the tube. It slid in easy-peasy. He pointed to a lever above the trigger and below the black plastic inventory tag. “Pull that back. Should lock her in.”
Low did, and heard a click. “Is that it, May?”
“Should be, as long as Fritz put in a fresh battery. I believe it’s a lectric charge that fires the rocket.”
“If he didn’t, I’ll go on back there and ramguzzle him,” Low said. His eyes were sparkling as he faced Drew T. Barry’s plate glass window and rested the bazooka on his shoulder in the best war-movie style. “Stand clear, brother!”
The battery in the trigger housing turned out to be just fine. There was a hollow whoosh. Exhaust shot from the tube. The display window blew out into the street, and before either man had time to draw a breath, the front of the sheriff’s station exploded. Chunks of sand-colored brick and shards of glass rained down on the street.
“Hoooo-EEEE!” May slapped his brother on the back. “Did you see that, brother?”
“I did,” Low replied. An alarm was braying somewhere deep inside the wounded station. Men were running to look. The front of the building was now a gaping mouth filled with broken teeth. They could see flames inside, and paperwork fluttering around like singed birds. “Reload me.”
May aligned the fins of a second shell and latched it tight. “All set!” May was hopping with excitement. This was more fun than the time they’d thrown a package of dynamite into the trout tank up at Tupelo Crossing.
“Fire in the hole!” Low shouted, and pulled the bazooka’s trigger. The shell flew across the street on a trail of smoke. The men who had come out to gawk saw it and either turned tail or hit the deck. The second explosion gutted the center of the building. Linny’s cocoon had survived the first blast, but not this second one. Moths flew up from where she had been, and caught fire.
“Let me have a turn!” May held out his hands for the bazooka.
“No, we need to get out of here,” Low said. “But you’ll get your chance, brother. That I promise.”
“When? Where?”
“Up to the prison.”
9
Van Lampley stood by her ATV, stunned. She had seen the first contrail cross Main Street, and knew what it meant even before the blast. Those son-of-a-bitching Griner brothers had gotten an RPG launcher or something like it from Fritz Meshaum. As the smoke from the second blast began to clear, she could see flames licking out from holes that had been windows. One of the triple doors was lying in the street, twisted into a corkscrew of chromed steel. The others were nowhere to be seen.
Woe to anyone who was in there, she thought.
Red Platt, one of the salesmen at Dooling Kia, came swaying and staggering toward her. Blood was sheeting down the right side of his face, and his lower lip no longer looked completely attached—although with all the blood, it was hard to tell.
“What was that?” Red shouted in a cracked voice. Shards of glass glittered in his thinning hair. “What the fuck was that?”
“The work of two swinging dicks who need a broomhandle stuck in their spokes before they hurt anyone else,” Van said. “You ought to get patched up, Red.”
She walked toward the Shell station, feeling like herself for the first time in days. She knew it wouldn’t last, but while it did, she intended to ride the adrenalin. The gas station was open, but unattended. Van found a ten-gallon can in the garage bay, filled it at one of the pumps, and left a twenty on the counter beside the cash register. The world might be ending, but she had been raised to pay her bills.
She toted the can back to her ATV, filled the tank, and headed out of town in the direction the Griner brothers had come from.
10
Kent Daley was having a very bad night, and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. He had no more than turned off Route 31 and accelerated toward the buses blocking West Lavin Road when he was clotheslined off his bike and driven to the ground. His head hit the asphalt and bright lights flashed in front of his eyes. When they cleared, he saw the muzzle of a rifle three inches from his face.
“Shit fire!” exclaimed Reed Barrows, the deputy who had taken Kent down. Reed had been placed at the southwest point of Terry’s compass rose. He put his gun down and hauled Kent up by the front of his shirt. “I know you, you’re the kid who was putting firecrackers in mailboxes last year.”
Men were running toward them from the new and improved roadblock, Frank Geary in the lead. Terry Coombs brought up the rear, weaving slightly. They knew what had happened in town; there had already been a dozen calls on a dozen cell phones, and they could easily see the fire burning in the middle of Dooling from this high vantage point. Most of them wanted to go tear-assing back, but Terry, fearing it was a diversion to get the woman out, had ordered them to hold their positions.
“What are you doing out here, Daley?” Reed asked. “You could have gotten yourself shot.”
“I’ve got a message,” Kent said, rubbing the back of his head. It wasn’t bleeding, but a large knot was forming there. “It’s for Terry or Frank, or both of them.”
“What the fuck’s going on?” Don Peters asked. He had donned a football helmet at some point; his close-set eyes, deep in the shadow of the forehead shield, looked like those of a small and hungry bird. “Who’s this?”
Frank pushed Don aside and dropped to one knee beside the kid. “I’m Frank,” he said. “What’s the message?”
Terry also took a knee. His breath was redolent of booze. “Come on, son. Take a beep death . . . deep breath . . . and pull yourself together.”
Kent groped among his scattered thoughts. “That woman in the prison there, the special one, she’s got friends in town. Lots of them. Two of them grabbed me. They said to tell you to stop what you’re doing and go away, or the police st
ation will only be the first thing to go.”
Frank’s lips stretched in a smile that came nowhere near his eyes. He turned to Terry. “So what do you think, Sheriff? Are we going to be good boys and go away?”
Little Low was no Mensa candidate himself, but he possessed a degree of cunning that had kept the Griner operation afloat for almost six years before he and his brother had finally been brought down. (Low blamed his generous nature; they had let the McDavid cunt, who was hardly a ten, hang around and she had repaid them by becoming a snitch.) He had an instinctive grasp of human psychology in general and male psychology in particular. When you told men they oughtn’t to do a thing, that was what they did.
Terry didn’t hesitate. “Not going away. Going in at sunrise. Let them blow up the whole goddam town.”
The men who had gathered around raised a cheer so hoarse and so savage that Kent Daley flinched. What he wanted more than anything was to take his sore head home, lock all the doors, and go to sleep.
11
So far, the adrenalin was holding out; Van hammered on Fritz Meshaum’s door hard enough to rattle it in its frame. A long-fingered hand that looked as if it had too many knuckles pulled aside a filthy curtain. A stubble-spackled face peered out. A moment later, the door opened. Fritz opened his mouth, but Van seized him and began to shake him like a terrier with a rat before he could utter a word.
“What did you sell them, you scrawny little shitepoke? Was it a rocket launcher? It was, wasn’t it? How much did those bastards pay you so they could blow a hole in the middle of downtown?”
By then they were inside, Van roughly steering Fritz across his cluttered living room. He beat feebly at one of her shoulders with his left hand; the other arm was bound in a makeshift sling that looked as if it had been made from a bedsheet.
“Quit it!” Fritz shouted. “Quit it, woman, I already had my damn arm dislocated by them two cretins!”
Van shoved him down in a filthy armchair with a stack of old skin magazines beside it. “Talk.”
“It wasn’t a rocket launcher, it was a vintage Russian bazooka, coulda sold it for six, seven thousand dollars at one of those parkin lot gun sales up in Wheeling, and those two country-fried fuckers stole it!”
“Well, of course you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Van was panting.
“It’s the truth.” Fritz looked at her more closely, his eyes sliding from her round face to her big breasts to her wide hips, then back up again. “You’re the first woman I’ve seen in two days. How long you been awake?”
“Since last Thursday morning.”
“Holy moly, that must be a record.”
“Not even close.” Van had Googled it. “Never mind that. Those boys just blew up the sheriff’s station.”
“I heard a hell of a bang,” admitted Fritz. “Guess that bazooka works pretty good.”
“Oh, it worked fine,” Van said. “I don’t suppose you’d know where they’re going next.”
“Nope, not a clue.” Fritz began to grin, exposing teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in a good long while, if ever. “But I could find out.”
“How?”
“Damn fools looked right at it, and when I told em it was an inventory tag, they believed me!” His laugh sounded like a file scraping on a rusty hinge.
“What are you talking about?”
“GPS tracker. I put em on all my high-end items, case they get stolen. Which that bazooka was. I can track it on my phone.”
“Which you will give me,” Van said, and held out her hand.
Fritz looked up at her, his eyes a sly and watery blue under wrinkled lids. “If you get my bazooka, will you give it back before you go to sleep?”
“No,” Van said, “but I won’t give you a broken arm to go with the one they dislocated. How’s that?”
The little man chuckled and said, “All righty, but it’s just cause I got a soft spot for wide women.”
If she had felt more like herself Van might’ve had to beat the shit out of him for a comment like that—it wouldn’t be hard and it would be public service—but in her exhaustion, she hardly considered it. “Come on, then.”
Fritz pushed up from the couch. “Phone’s on the kitchen table.” She backed up, keeping the rifle on him.
He led her down a short, dark hall and into the kitchen. There was a stench of ash that made Van gag. “What have you been cooking?”
“Candy,” Fritz said. He thumped down at a linoleum-topped table.
“Candy?” It didn’t smell like any candy she knew of. Gray scraps, like bits of burned newspaper, were scattered around the floor.
“Candy’s my wife,” he said. “Now deceased. Lit the mouthy old bag up with a kitchen match. Never realized she had such a spark.” His black and brown teeth were revealed in a ferocious grin. “Get it? Spark?”
No avoiding it now. Tired or not, she was going to have to put a hurting on the vile bastard. That was Van’s first thought. The second was, there was no cell phone on the linoleum-topped table.
A gun banged and the air went out of Van. She thumped against the refrigerator and down to the floor. Blood spilled from a bullet wound at her hip. The rifle she had been holding had flown from her hands. Smoke curled from around the edge of the eating table directly in front of her. She spotted the barrel then; the pistol that Meshaum had strapped underneath the tabletop.
Fritz pulled it free of the duct tape that had held it, stood, and came around the table. “Never can be too careful. Keep a loaded gun in every room.” He squatted down beside her and jammed the barrel of a pistol against her forehead. His breath smelled like tobacco and meat. “This one was my opa’s. What you think about that, you fat pig?”
She didn’t think much of it, and didn’t have to. Van Lampley’s right arm—the arm that had put down Hallie “Wrecker” O’Meara in the championship match of the 2010 Ohio Valley Women’s 35–45 Year-Old Division, and snapped one of Erin Makepeace’s elbow ligaments in 2011 to repeat—was like a spring trap. Her right hand swung up, catching Fritz Meshaum’s wrist and squeezing with fingers made of steel, jerking down so violently that he was pitched forward on top of her. The antique pistol went off, putting a bullet into the floor between Van’s arm and side. Bile rose in her throat as the weight of his body pressed into her wound, but she kept twisting his wrist, and at that angle all he could do was fire into the floor again before the gun slipped from his hand. Bones popped. Ligaments twanged. Fritz screamed. He bit her hand, but she just turned harder on his wrist, and began to methodically punch him in the back of the head with her left fist, driving down with the diamond of her engagement ring.
“Okay, okay! Uncle! Fuckin uncle! I give!” screamed Fritz Meshaum. “That’s enough!”
But Van did not think so. Her bicep flexed and the tattoo of the headstone—YOUR PRIDE—swelled.
She kept twisting with one hand and punching with the other.
CHAPTER 12
1
On the prison’s last night, the weather cleared and the rain clouds of the day were blown south by a steady wind, leaving the sky to the stars and inviting the animals to stick their heads up, and sniff, and converse. No seventy-two hours. No second thoughts. A change was coming tomorrow. The animals felt it the way they felt oncoming thunderstorms.
2
Hunkered beside his partner in the rearmost seat of one of the schoolbuses that had been requisitioned to block Route 31, Eric Blass listened to Don Peters’s snores. Any vague remorse Eric had felt about burning Old Essie had been assuaged by the fading of the day. If no one ever noticed she was gone, what did she count for, really?
Rand Quigley, a far more thoughtful man than most gave him credit for, was also hunkered down. His spot was in a plastic chair in the visitors’ room. In his lap he had overturned the toddler-sized toy car from the family area. It had been a source of disappointment for as long as Rand could remember; the kids of the inmates climbed in it and pushed forward, but got frustrated because they could
n’t turn. The problem was a broken axle. Rand had fetched a tube of epoxy from his toolbox and glued the break, and now he tied the pieces together to set with a bowline knot of twine. That he might be in his last hours did not elude Officer Quigley. It comforted him to do something useful with whatever time might be left.
On the wooded knoll above the prison, Maynard Griner stared up at the stars, and fantasized about shooting them out with Fritz’s bazooka. If you could do that, would they pop like light bulbs? Had anyone—scientists, maybe—poked a hole in space? Did aliens on other planets ever think about shooting out stars with bazookas or death-rays?
Lowell, propped against the trunk of a cedar, commanded his brother, who was flat on his back, to wipe his mouth; the light of the stars, sent out billions of years ago, glimmered on Maynard’s drool. Low’s mood was sour. He did not like to wait, but it was not in their best interest to unload with the artillery until the cops made their move. The mosquitoes were biting and some hemorrhoid of an owl had been screeching since sundown. Valium would have improved his spirits greatly. Even some Nyquil would have been helpful. If Big Lowell’s grave had been nearby, Little Lowell would not have hesitated to dig up the rotting corpse and relieve it of that bottle of Rebel Yell.
Down below, the T-shaped structure of the prison lay pinned in the harsh radiance that shone from the light towers. On three sides, woods surrounded the dell in which the building stood. There was an open field to the east, running up to the high ground where Low and May were camped. That field was, Low thought, an excellent firing lane. Nothing at all to impede the flight of a high-explosive bazooka shell. When the time came, it was going to be awesome.
