Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  The dozer blade hit the middle of the fence with a rattling crash. The links bowed inward before the whole section tore free of the ground and flopped back against the second layer of fence across the median. Ghosts of teargas broke across the front of the bulldozer as it ground forward, bashing against the second fence with the tangled fragment of the first. The inner fence buckled and collapsed, the bulldozer jouncing over the debris. It continued across the smoke-filled parking lot, a length of fencing stuck shrieking under its nose.

  The second and third bulldozers followed the first through the gap.

  A brown shoe, visible behind the rear left corner of the first bulldozer, appeared in Willy’s sight. He fired. A man shouted and fell out from behind the bulldozer, one pinwheeling arm casting off a shotgun. It was a banty-legged little guy wearing a gas mask and a vest. (Willy wouldn’t have known it was Pudge Marone, saloonkeeper of the Squeaky Wheel, even if Pudge’s face had been visible. Willy hadn’t drunk in bars, not for years.) While the man’s torso was covered, his legs and arms were not, and that was just fine because Willy did not want to kill anyone if he could help it. He shot again, not quite where he wanted, but close enough, and the .223-caliber bullet, expressed by an M4 assault rifle that had been the property of the Dooling Sheriff’s Department until the previous day, blew off Pudge Marone’s thumb.

  An arm reached out from behind the bulldozer to assist the prone man, an understandable and perhaps commendable attempt, though definitely unwise. The arm in question belonged to retired Deputy Nate McGee, who, having lost over a hundred dollars playing dice on the tarmac of Route 31 the previous evening, had soothed himself with a pair of false thoughts: one, that if he’d known for certain that Mrs. McGee might some day reawaken, he wouldn’t have bet at all; and two, that at least he had used up his bad luck for the week. Not so. Willy shot a third time, catching the elbow of the reaching arm. There was another shout and McGee tumbled from behind the bulldozer. Willy squeezed off four more quick shots, testing the steel plate that had been mounted over the bulldozer’s grill, and heard them zing off uselessly.

  Frank leaned out from the cover of the first bulldozer with a pistol and fired a series of rapid shots at Willy. In 1968 Willy might have been able to judge by the angle of Geary’s arm that his aim would be way off, and thus stayed in position and taken him out, but 1968 was fifty years ago, and getting shot at was something you lost your coziness with pretty swiftly. Willy and Clint scooted to cover.

  As Jack Albertson’s bulldozer rolled through the tangles of teargas and black smoke, straight on for the RV and the front doors, the debris under its nose grinding, the second bulldozer, driven by Coach Wittstock, barreled through the hole in the fence.

  Like Albertson before him and Carson Struthers behind him, Coach Wittstock’s blade was raised for protection. He could hear the shots, could hear the shouts, but he couldn’t see Nate McGee clutching his elbow on the ground in front of him, and when the bulldozer rolled over the disabled man, Coach Wittstock assumed it was just one of the burned tires that the machine’s crawlers were climbing.

  He whooped. He was breaking through just like he taught his linebackers to do, reckless and relentless!

  From his vantage at the window in the visitors’ room, Rand waited to fire on the first bulldozer until it was halfway between the gatehouse and the front doors. His shots struck plating here and there, ricocheting off without effect.

  Pete Ordway, the Wittstock boys, and Dan “Treater” Treat, under cover of the second bulldozer, found themselves confronted with the crushed corpse of Nate McGee. The dead man’s gas mask was full of blood and his torso had burst out around the straps of his vest. Gore sprayed up from the crawler treads; shreds of skin flapped like streamers. Rupe Wittstock screamed and leaped away from the mess, clearing himself of the viscera, but putting himself in Rand’s line of fire.

  Rand’s first shot missed his target’s head by an inch, the second by half an inch. Rand swore at himself and put his third shot square in the middle of the man’s back. The slug lodged itself in the bulletproof vest the target was wearing and bowed him over. He threw his arms skyward like a fan in a stadium doing the Wave. Rand shot a fourth time, lower. It hit the target in the buttocks and sent him sprawling.

  Deputy Treat was not fazed. Treater, only a year late of the 82nd Airborne, still possessed the relative comfort with being shot at that Willy Burke had lost long ago. He hopped off Dozer Two without a second thought. (He was relieved, in fact, to settle into military mode. Action was a break from the untenable reality of his daughter, Alice, at that second propped at her play table in their apartment, wrapped up in white fibers, when she ought to have just been getting up for another day of second grade. And it was a break from the thought of his year-old son, currently in a makeshift daycare run by men.) Free of cover, Treat returned suppression fire with an M4 he’d recovered on Route 31.

  At the window, Rand dropped to his knees on the table he had been standing atop. Concrete fragments rained down his neck and back.

  Treater hoisted Rupe Wittstock and pulled him to safety behind a stack of smoldering tires.

  Dozer One crashed into the rear end of the Fleetwood RV, slamming its hood against the front doors of the prison in an explosion of glass.

  5

  Jared sat on the floor of the laundry room while Michaela piled sheets around him, constructing a mound to hide him. “I feel stupid,” Jared said.

  “You don’t look stupid,” Michaela said, which wasn’t true. She fluttered a sheet above his head.

  “I feel like a pussy.”

  Michaela hated that word. Even as she heard more shots ring out, it touched a nerve. A pussy was supposed to be soft, and although Michaela possessed one, there was nothing particularly soft about the rest of her. Janice Coates had not raised her to be a softie. She flipped up the sheet and gave Jared a hard—but not too hard—slap across the cheek.

  “Hey!” He put a hand to his face.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Say what?”

  “Don’t say pussy when it means weak. If your mother didn’t teach you better than that, she should have.” Michaela dropped the sheet over his face.

  6

  “It is a fucking crime that someone is not filming this for fucking reality TV,” Low said. Eye to the scope of the bazooka, he had seen the second bulldozer squash the poor sucker who had fallen in front of the treads, seen the Rambo guy jump out from behind the second dozer, start blasting, and rescue another guy. He then witnessed—not without a mixture of wonder and glee—the first bulldozer as it smashed the RV into an accordion in front of the prison doors. It was a stellar conflict, and it was only going to get better once they spiced the soup with three or four bazooka shells.

  “When do we do our thing?” May asked.

  “Soon as the cops have wore themselves out a bit more.”

  “How are we going to be sure we got Kitty, Low? That place must be full of slags in cocoons.”

  Low didn’t appreciate his brother’s last minute naysaying. “We probably won’t be absolutely sure, May, but we are going to fire all these shells, and blow the fuck out of the place, so I like our chances. To a certain extent, I suppose we’re just going to have to hope for the best. Now are we going to enjoy this or not? Or would you rather that I do all the shooting?”

  “Come on, Low, I didn’t say that,” protested May. “Be fair.”

  7

  On Level 32 of Boom Town, little pink spiders began to invade Evie’s field of stars, triangles, and burning orbs. The spiders doused the orbs and turned them into the irritating sparkling blue stars that clogged up all the works—booger. In A Wing, the sound of the gunfire echoed piercingly. Evie was undisturbed; she had seen and heard men killing on numerous occasions. The pink spiders did bother her, though.

  “So evil,” she said to no one, sliding her colorful shapes around, searching for connections. Evie was extremely relaxed; as she played with the phone, sh
e floated on her back a couple of centimeters above the cot.

  8

  Bushes twitched on the opposite side of the north fence, directly across from Billy Wettermore’s position in the alley behind the garden shed. He unleashed a dozen rounds into the mass of greenery where the twitch had come from. The bushes shook and trembled.

  Drew T. Barry, a crafty insurance man who always kept to the most risk-averse course, wasn’t anywhere near Billy’s line of fire. Instead, with the prudence that not only made him Dooling’s first stop for all your indemnification needs but also an excellent deer hunter, willing to take his time to get an ideal shot, he had halted the other two men—Pearl and Peters—in the woods behind the prison gymnasium. Peters had told him that the rear door to the prison was on the west wall of the gym. The reaction produced by the rock that Drew had thrown into the brush close to that spot had told them a lot: yes, there must be a door, and yes, it was definitely defended.

  “Deputy?” Drew T. Barry asked.

  They were crouched behind an oak. Fifteen feet or so ahead of them, bits of leaf were still drifting down from where the gunfire had torn up the foliage. To judge by the sound, the shooter was perhaps thirty or forty yards beyond the interior fence, near the wall of the prison.

  “What?” Don Peters replied. Sweat streaked his flushed face. He had been lugging the duffel bag with their masks and the bolt cutters.

  “Not you, the real deputy,” Drew T. Barry said.

  “Yeah?” Pearl nodded at him.

  “If I kill this guy shooting here, there’s no chance of prosecution? Are you sure Geary and Coombs will swear we acted in the legal performance of our duties?”

  “Yup. Scout’s honor.” Elmore Pearl raised his hand in the salute of his childhood, first three fingers raised, pinky held down by his thumb.

  Peters hocked some phlegm. “You need me to hustle back and fetch you a notary, Drew?”

  Drew T. Barry ignored this witless jibe, told them to stay put, and started backtracking into the woods, taking the northern incline in quick, quiet steps, his Weatherby rifle strapped to his back.

  9

  With the bulldozer halted, Frank continued to aim at the southwest corner of the prison, ready to pick off the rifleman there if he showed his face. The shooting had rattled him; had made it all real. He felt nauseated by the blood and the bodies on the ground, obscured and revealed as the clouds of teargas shifted in the wind, but his determination was still strong. He felt horror but no remorse. His life was Nana’s life, which made the risk acceptable. So he told himself.

  Kronsky joined him. “Hurry,” Frank said. “The sooner this is over, the better.”

  “You got a point there, Mister Man,” Kronsky said, on one knee with his backpack on the ground. He unzipped the pack, removed the bundle of dynamite, and snipped off three-quarters of the fuse.

  The armored door of the bulldozer swung open. Jack Albertson climbed down, carrying his old service weapon, a .38.

  “Cover us from yonder shitbird down the way,” Kronsky said to Albertson, pointing in the direction of Willy Burke’s position. Then Kronsky turned to Frank. “Come on, and you’d best high-step it.”

  The two men hustled along the northwest wall of the prison, ducking low. Beneath the cutout window that was one of the defenders’ firing points, Kronsky stopped. He had the dynamite in his right hand and a blue plastic lighter in the other. The defender’s rifle barrel that had been there before poked back out.

  “Grab that thing,” he said to Frank.

  Frank didn’t question the order, just reached up and closed his left hand around the metal tube. He jerked it out of the grip of the man inside. He heard a muffled curse. Kronsky flicked his lighter, lit the shortened fuse on the bundle, and casually tossed it, hook-shot-style, up and through the hole. Frank released the rifle and hit the ground.

  Three seconds later there was a thundercrack. Smoke and chunks of bloody flesh flew from the cutout window.

  10

  The earth trembled and gave an outraged roar.

  Clint, shoulder to shoulder with Willy Burke at the west wall, saw a tidal wave of teargas curl from the parking lot, swept along by whatever had just exploded. Chimes rang through his skull and his joints vibrated. Beneath the noise, all he could think was that things were not going as well as he had hoped. These guys were going to kill Evie and all the rest of them. His fault, his failing. The pistol that he had been carrying around, ridiculously—never once in their fifteen years of marriage had he taken up Lila’s invitation to go to the gun range with her—had nevertheless slid into his hand, begging to be fired.

  He leaned around Willy Burke, scanned the pile-up at the front doors, and locked on the figure standing at the rear of the first bulldozer. This man was staring at the cloud of dust boiling from Rand Quigley’s window, which had been—like everything else this morning—exploded out of its former normal shape.

  (Jack Albertson had not expected the blast. It startled him and he dropped his guard to look. While the chaos did not upset him—as a miner in his youth, one who had survived a good many rumbles in the earth, his nerves were cool—it did perplex him. What was wrong with these folks, that they would prefer a shootout to surrendering some damned wild woman to the law? In his view, the world got crazier and crazier with each passing year. His personal Waterloo had been Lila Norcross’s election as Dooling’s sheriff. A skirt in the sheriff’s office! It didn’t get much more ludicrous than that. Jack Albertson had put in his retirement papers there and then, and returned home to enjoy his lifelong bachelorhood in peace.)

  Clint’s arm lifted the pistol, the gunsight found the man behind the bulldozer, and Clint’s finger pulled the trigger. The shot was followed by a succulent pop, the sound of a bullet punching through the faceplate of the man’s gas mask. Clint saw the head snap back and the body crumple.

  Ah, Jesus, he thought. That was probably someone I knew.

  “Come on,” Willy cried, hauling him away to the rear door. Clint went, his legs doing what they needed to do. It had been easier than he might have guessed to kill someone. Which only made it worse.

  CHAPTER 14

  1

  When Jeanette opened her eyes, a fox was lying down outside the door to Evie’s cell. Its snout rested on the fissured cement floor, from which ridges of green moss sprouted.

  “Tunnel,” Jeanette said to herself. Something about a tunnel. She said to the fox, “Did I go through one? I don’t remember, if I did. Are you from Evie?”

  It didn’t answer, as she had almost expected it might. (In dreams animals could talk, and this felt like a dream . . . yet at the same time didn’t.) The fox only yawned, looked at her slyly, and pushed itself to its feet.

  A Wing was empty, and a hole gaped in the wall. Beams of morning sunlight poured through. There was frost on the chunks of broken cement, beading and liquefying as the temperature rose.

  Jeanette thought, I feel awake again. I believe I am awake.

  The fox made a mewling noise and trotted to the hole. It glanced at Jeanette, mewled a second time, and went through, and was swallowed by the light.

  2

  She gingerly picked her way through the hole, stooping under the sharp edges of gashed cement, and found herself in a field of knee-high weeds and dead sunflowers. The morning light made Jeanette squint. Her feet crunched frozen undergrowth and the cool air raised gooseflesh under the thin fabric of her uniform.

  The strong sensations of fresh air and sunshine awakened her completely. Her old body, exhausted by trauma and stress and lack of sleep, was a skin that had been shucked. Jeanette felt new.

  The fox cut briskly through the grass, taking her past the east side of the prison toward Route 31. Jeanette had to walk fast to keep up as her eyes adjusted to the sharp daylight. She flashed a glance at the prison: naked brambles choked the walls; the rusted hump of a bulldozer and an RV were jammed against the front of the building, also thick with brambles; extravagant clumps of yello
w grass sprouted from cracks and gashes in the parking lot; other rusted vehicles were stranded across the tarmac. Jeanette looked in the opposite direction. The fences were down—she could see flattened chainlink glinting among the weeds. Although Jeanette couldn’t make sense of the how or the why, she immediately absorbed the what. This was Dooling Correctional, but the world had spun on for years.

  Her guide continued up from the ditch that edged Route 31, crossed the cracked and disintegrating road, and entered the blue-green dark of the rising woods on the other side. As the fox ascended, his orange brush bobbed and flashed in the dimness.

  Jeanette ran across the road, keeping her eye on the flicking tail. One of her sneakers skated in a patch of damp, and she had to snatch for a branch to keep from losing her feet. The freshness of the air—tree sap and composting leaves and wet earth—burned down her throat and into her chest. She was out of prison, and a memory of playing Monopoly as a girl surfaced: Get Out of Jail Free! This wondrous new reality excised the square of forest from time itself, and made it an island beyond reach—of industrial cleaners, of orders, of jangling keys, of cellmate snores and farts, of cellmate crying, of cellmate sex, of cell doors banging shut—where she was the sole ruler; Queen Jeanette, evermore. It was sweet, sweeter even than she’d fantasized, to be free.

  But then:

  “Bobby.” She whispered it to herself. That was the name she had to remember, had to bring with her, so she would not be tempted to stay.