by Stephen King
He put his head down again and crawled into the hall. The house was taking very heavy fire now. He knew he should take the rifle and go upstairs, he would have a better angle on them from up there, could maybe drive them back from their car to cover in the houses across the street. But he didn’t dare go that far from the master fuse and the storage battery. The TV people might come at any time.
The front door was full of bullet holes, the dark brown varnish splintered back to show the raw wood underneath. He crawled into the kitchen. All the windows were broken in here and broken glass littered the linoleum. A chance shot had knocked the coffeepot from the stove and it lay overturned in a puddle of brown goo. He crouched below the window for a moment, then bounced up and emptied the Magnum into the V-parked cars. Immediately fire intensified on the kitchen. Two bullet holes appeared in the white enamel of the refrigerator and another struck the Southern Comfort bottle on the counter. It exploded, spraying glass and southern hospitality everywhere.
Crawling back to the living room he felt something like a bee sting in the fleshy part of his tight thigh just below the buttocks, and when he clapped his hand to it, his fingers came away bloody.
He lay behind the chair and reloaded the Magnum. Reloaded the Weatherbee. Poked his head up and ducked back down, wincing, at the ferocity of fire that came at him, bullets striking the couch and the wall and the TV, making the quilt shimmy. Poked his head up again and fined at the police cars parked across the street. Blew in one window. And saw-
At the top of the street, a white station wagon and a white Ford van. Written in blue letters on the sides of both was:
WHLM NEWSBEAT
CHANNEL 9
Panting, he crawled back to the window that looked out on the Upslingers’ side yard. The news vehicles were crawling slowly and dubiously down Crestallen Street. Suddenly a new police car shot around them and blocked them off, tires smoking. An arm dressed in blue shot out of the cruiser’s back window and began waving the newsmobiles off.
A bullet struck the windowsill and jumped into the room at an angle.
He crawled back to the easy chair, holding the Magnum in his bloody right hand and screamed: “Fenner!”
The fire slackened a little.
“Fenner!” he screamed again.
“Hold on!” Fenner yelled. “Stop! Stop a minute!”
There were a few isolated pops, then nothing.
“What do you want?” Fenner called.
“The news people! Down behind those cars on the other side of the street! I want to talk to them!”
There was a long, contemplative pause.
“No!” Fenner yelled.
“I’ll stop shooting if I can talk to them!” That much was true, he thought, looking at the battery.
“No!” Fenner yelled again.
Bastard, he thought helplessly. Is it that important to you? You and Ordner and the rest of you bureaucratic bastards?
The firing began again, tentatively at first, then gaining strength. Then, incredibly, a man in a plaid shirt and blue jeans was running down the sidewalk, holding a pistol-grip camera in one hand.
“I heard that!” the man in the plaid shirt yelled. “I heard every word! I’ll get your name, fella! He offered to stop shooting and you-”
A policeman hit him with a waist-high flying tackle and the man in the plaid shirt crunched to the sidewalk. His movie camera flew into the gutter and a moment later three bullets shattered it into winking pieces. A clockspring of unexposed film unwound lazily from the remains. Then the fire flagged again, uncertainly.
“Fenner, let them set up!” he hollered. His throat felt raw and badly used, like the rest of him. His hand hurt and a deep, throbbing ache had begun to emanate outward from his thigh.
“Come out first!” Fenner yelled back. “We’ll let you tell your side of it!”
Rage washed over him in a red wave at this barefaced lie. “GODDAMMIT, I’ve GOTA BIG GUN HERE AND I’ll START SHOOTING AT GAS TANKS YOU SHITBIRD AND THERE’ll BE A FUCKING BARBECUE WHEN I GET DONE!”
Shocked silence.
Then, cautiously, Fenner said: “What do you want?”
“Send that guy you tackled in here! Let the camera crew set up!”
“Absolutely not! We’re not giving you a hostage to play games with all day!”
A cop ran over to the listing green sedan bent low and disappeared behind it. There was a consultation.
A new voice yelled: “There’s thirty men behind your house, guy! They’ve got shotguns! Come out or I’ll send them in!” Time to play his one ratty trump. “You better not! The whole house is wired with explosive. Look at this!”
He held the red alligator clip up in the window.
“Can you see it?”
“You’re bluffing!” the voice called back confidently.
“If I hook this up to the car battery beside me on the floor, everything goes!”
Silence. More consultation.
“Hey!” someone yelled. “Hey, get that guy!” He poked his head up to look and here came the man in the plaid shirt and jeans, right out into the street, no protection, either heroically sure of his own profession or crazy. He had long black hair that fell almost to his collar and a thin dark moustache.
Two cops started to charge around the V-parked cruisers and thought better of it when he put a shot over their heads.
“Jesus Christ what a snafu!” somebody cried out in shrill disgust.
The man in the plaid shirt was on his lawn now, kicking up snow-bursts. Something buzzed by his ear, followed by a report, and he realized he was still looking over the chair. He heard the front door being tried, and then the man in the plaid shirt was hammering on it.
He scrambled across the floor, which was now spotted with grit and plaster that had been knocked out of the walls. His right leg hurt like a bastard and when he looked down he saw his pants leg was bloody from thigh to knee. He turned the lock in the chewed-up door and released the bolt from its catch.
“Okay!” he said, and the man in the plaid shirt burst in.
Up close he didn’t look scared although he was panting hard. There was a scrape on his cheek from where the policeman had tackled him, and the left arm of his shirt was ripped. When the man in the plaid shirt was inside he scrambled back into the living room, picked up the rifle, and fired twice blindly over the top of the chair. Then he turned around. The man in the plaid shirt was standing in the doorway, looking incredibly calm. He had taken a large notebook out of his back pocket.
“All right, man,” he said. “What shit goes down?”
“What’s your name?”
“Dave Albert.”
“Has that white van got more film equipment in it?”
“Yes.”
“Go to the window. Tell the police to let a camera crew set up on the Quinns’ lawn. That’s the house across the street. Tell them if it isn’t done in five minutes, you got trouble.”
“Do I?”
“Sure.”
Albert laughed. “You don’t look like you could kill time, fella.”
“Tell them.”
Albert walked to the shattered living room window and stood framed there for a second, obviously relishing the moment.
“He says for my camera crew to set up across the street!” he yelled. “He say’s he’s going to kill me if you don’t let them!”
“No!” Fenner yelled back furiously. “No, no, n-”
Somebody muzzled him. Silence for a beat.
“All right!” This was the voice that had accused him of bluffing about the explosive. “Will you let two of our men go up and get them?”
He thought it over and nodded at the reporter.
“Yes!” Albert called.
There was a pause, and then two uniformed policemen trotted self-consciously up toward where the news van waited, its engine smugly idling. In the meantime two more cruisers had pulled up, and by leaning far to the right he could see that the downhill end of Crest
allen Street West had been blocked off. A large crowd of people was standing behind the yellow crash barriers.
“Okay,” Albert said, sitting down. “We got a minute. What do you want? A plane?”
“Plane?” he echoed stupidly.
Albert flapped his arms, still holding his notebook. “Fly away, man. Just FLYYYYY away.”
“Oh.” He nodded to show that he understood. “No, I don’t want a plane.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want,” he said carefully, “to be just twenty with a lot of decisions to make over again.” He saw the look in Albert’s eyes and said, “I know I can’t. I’m not that crazy.”
“You’re shot.”
“Yes.”
“Is that what you said it is?” He was pointing at the master fuse and the battery.
“Yes. The main fuse goes to all the rooms in the house. Also the garage.”
“Where did you get the explosive?” Albert’s voice was amiable but his eyes were alert.
“Found it in my Christmas stocking.”
He laughed. “Say, that’s not bad. I’m going to use that in my story.”
“Fine. When you go back out, tell all the policemen that they better move away.”
“Are you going to blow yourself up?” Albert asked. He looked interested, nothing more.
“I am contemplating it.”
“You know what, fellow? You’ve seen too many movies.”
“I don’t go to the movies much anymore. I did see The Exorcist, though. I wish I hadn’t. How are your movie guys coming out there?”
Albert peered out the window. “Pretty good. We’ve got another minute. Your name is Dawes?”
“Did they tell you that?”
Albert laughed contemptuously. “They wouldn’t tell me if I had cancer. I read it on the doorbell. Would you mind telling me why you’re doing all this?”
“Not at all. It’s roadwork.”
“The extension?” Albert’s eyes glowed brighter. He began to scribble in his book.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“They took your house?”
“They tried. I’m going to take it.”
Albert wrote it down, then snapped his book closed and stuffed it into his back pocket again. “That’s pretty stupid, Mr. Dawes. Do you mind my saying that? Why don’t you just come out of here with me?”
“You’ve got an exclusive,” he said tiredly. “What are you trying for, the Pulitzer Prize?”
“I’d take it if they offered it.” He smiled brightly and then sobered. “Come on, Mr. Dawes. Come on out. I’ll see that your side gets told. I’ll see-”
“There is no side.”
Albert frowned. “What was that?”
“I have no side. That’s why I’m doing this.” He peered over the chair and looked into a telephoto lens, mounted on a tripod that was sunk into the snow of the Quinns’ lawn. “Go on now. Tell them to go away.”
“Are you really going to pull the string?”
“I really don’t know.”
Albert walked to the living nom door and then turned around. “Do I know you from somewhere? Why do I keep feeling like I know you?”
He shook his head. He thought he had never seen Albert before in his life.
Watching the newsman walk back across his lawn, slightly at an angle so the camera across the street would get his good side, he wondered what Olivia was doing at that precise second.
He waited fifteen minutes. Their fire had intensified, but no one charged at the back of the house. The main purpose of the fire seemed to be to cover their retreat into the houses across the street. The camera crew remained where it was for a while, grinding impassively away, and then the white Econoline van drove up onto the Quinns’ side lawn and the man behind the camera folded the tripod, took it behind the truck, and began to film again.
Something black and tubular whizzed through the air, landed on his lawn about midway between the house and the sidewalk, and began to spurt gas. The wind caught it and carried it off down the street in tattered rifts. A second shell landed short, and then he heard one dunk on the roof. He caught a whiff of that one as it fell into the snow covering Mary’s begonias. His nose and eyes filled with crocodile tears.
He scurried across the living room on his hands and knees again, hoping to God he had said nothing to that newsman, Albert, that could be misconstrued as profound. There was no good place to make your stand in the world. Look at Johnny Walker, dying in a meaningless intersection smashup. What had he died for, so that the sheets could go through? Or that woman in the supermarket. The fucking you got was never worth the screwing you took.
He turned on the stereo and the stereo still worked. The Rolling Stones album was still on the turntable and he put on the last cut, missing the right groove the first time when a bullet smacked into the quilt covering the Zenith TV with a thud.
When he had it right, the last bars of “Monkey Man” fading into nothingness, he scurried back to the overturned chair and threw the rifle out the window. He picked up the Magnum and threw that out after it. Good-bye, Nick Adams.
“You can’t always get what you want,” the stereo sang, and he knew that to be a fact. But that didn’t stop you from wanting it. A tear gas canister arched through the window, struck the wall over the couch, and exploded in white smoke.
“But if you try something, you might find,
You get what you need.”
Well, let’s just see, Fred. He grasped the red alligator clip in his hand. Let’s see if I get what I need.
“Okay,” he muttered, and jammed the red clip on the negative pole of the battery.
He closed his eyes and his last thought was that the world was not exploding around him but inside him, and while the explosion was cataclysmic, it was not larger than, say, a good-sized walnut.
Then white.
EPILOGUE
The WHLM newsteam won a Pultizer Prize for their coverage of what they called “Dawes’ Last Stand” on the evening news, and for a half-hour documentary presented three weeks later. The documentary was called “Roadwork” and it examined the necessity-or lack of it-for the 784 extension. The documentary pointed out that one reason the road was being built had nothing to do with traffic patterns or commuter convenience or anything else of such a practical sort. The municipality had to build so many miles of road per year or begin losing federal money on all interstate construction. And so the city had chosen to build. The documentary also pointed out that the city was quietly beginning a litigation against the widow of Barton George Dawes to recover as much of their money as was recoverable. In the wake of the outcry the city dropped its suit.
Still photographs of the wreckage ran on the AP wire and most of the newspapers in the country carried them. In Las Vegas, a young girl who had only recently enrolled in a business school saw the photographs while on her lunch hour and fainted.
Despite the pictures and the words, the extension went ahead and was completed eighteen months later, ahead of schedule. By that time most of the people in the city had forgotten the “Roadwork” documentary, and the city’s news force, including Pulitzer winner David Albert, had gone on to other stories and crusades. But few people who had been watching the original newsclip broadcast on the evening news ever forgot that; they remembered even after the facts surrounding it grew blurry in their minds.
That news clip showed a plain white suburban house, sort of a ranch house with an asphalt driveway to the right leading to a one-car garage. A nice-looking house, but totally ordinary. Not a house you’d crane to look at if you happened to be on a Sunday drive. But in the news footage the picture window is shattered. Two guns, a rifle and a pistol, come flying out of it to lie in the snow. For one second you see the hand that has flung them, the fingers held limply up like the hand of a drowning man. You see white smoke blowing around the house, Mace or teargas or something. And then there is a huge belch of orange flame and all the walls of the house see
m to bulge out in an impossible cartoon convexity and there is a huge detonation and the camera shakes a little, as if in horror. Peripherally the viewer is aware that the garage has been destroyed in a single ripping blast. For a second it seems (and slow motion replays prove that the eye’s split-second impression is correct) that the roof of the house has lifted off its eaves like a Saturn rocket. Then the entire house blows outward and upward, shingles flying, hunks of wood lofted into the air and then returning to earth, something that looks like a quilt twisting lazily in the air like a magic carpet as debris rattle to the ground in a thudding, contrapuntal drum roll.
There is stillness.
Then the shocked, tear-streaming face of Mary Dawes fills the screen; she is looking with drugged and horrified bewilderment at the forest of microphones being thrust into her face, and we have been brought safely back to human things once more.
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