Surfacing briefly in the three o’clock darkness of the living room, her body floating on a foam of dread, the dream already tattering and unraveling, leaving behind it only a sense of doom like the rancid aftertaste of some rotten meal. She thought, in that moment of half-sleeping and half-waking:
Then she slept again, this time dreamlessly, and when she woke the next morning she didn’t remember the dream at all. But when she thought of the baby in her belly, a feeling of fierce protectiveness swept over her all at once, a feeling that perplexed her and frightened her a little with its depth and strength.
Chapter 29
That same evening, as Larry Underwood slept with Rita Blakemoor and as Frannie Goldsmith slept alone, dreaming her peculiarly ominous dream, Stuart Redman was waiting for Elder. He had been waiting for three days—and this evening Elder did not disappoint him.
At just past noon on the twenty-fourth, Elder and two male nurses had come and taken away the television. The nurses had removed it while Elder stood by, holding his revolver (neatly wrapped in a Baggie) on Stu. But by then Stu hadn’t wanted or needed the TV—it was just putting out a lot of confused shit anyway. All he had to do was stand at his barred window and look out at the town on the river below. Like the man on the record said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Smoke was no longer billowing from the stacks of the textile mill. The gaudy stripes and eddies of dye in the river had dissipated and the water ran clear and clean again. Most of the cars, glittering and toylike from this distance, had left the mill’s parking lot and hadn’t come back. By yesterday, the twenty-sixth, there had been only a few cars still moving on the turnpike, and those few had to weave between the stalls like skiers in a slalom race. No wreckers had come to remove the abandoned vehicles.
The downtown area was spread out below him like a relief map, and it seemed totally deserted. The town clock, which had chimed off the hours of his imprisonment here, had not tolled since nine this morning, when the little tune that preceded the striking had sounded draggy and weird, like a tune played underwater by a drowned music box. There had been a fire at what looked like a roadside cafe or maybe a general store just outside of town. It had burned merry hell all this afternoon, black smoke etched against the blue sky, but no fire engines had come to put it out. If the building hadn’t been set in the middle of an asphalt parking lot, Stu supposed that half the town might have gone up. Tonight the ruins were still smoldering in spite of an afternoon spat of rain.
Stu supposed that Elder’s final orders were to kill him—why not? He would only be one more corpse, and he knew their little secret. They had been unable to find a cure or to discover how his bodily makeup varied from all those who had succumbed. The thought that there would be precious few left he could tell their secret to had probably never even entered their computations. He was a loose thread held hostage by a bunch of tight assholes.
Stu was sure that a hero in a television program or a novel could have thought of a way to escape, hell, even some people in real life, but he wasn’t one of them. In the end he had decided with a certain panicky resignation that the only thing to do would be to wait for Elder and just try to be ready.
Elder was the clearest sign that this installation had been breached by what the help sometimes called “Blue” and sometimes the “superflu.” The nurses called him Dr. Elder, but he was no doctor. He was in his mid-fifties, hard-eyed and humorless. None of the doctors before Elder had felt a need to hold a gun on him. Elder scared Stu because there would be no reasoning or pleading with such a man. Elder was waiting for orders. When they came, he would carry them out. He was a spear-carrier, the army version of a Mafia button-man, and it would never occur to him to question his orders in the light of ongoing events.
Three years ago Stu had gotten a book called
The thing he remembered most from that book was a phrase: “going tharn,” or just “tharn.” He understood it at once, because he had seen plenty of tharn animals, and run down a few on the highway. An animal which had gone tharn would crouch in the middle of the road, its ears flattened, watching as a car rushed toward it, unable to move from the certain oncoming death. A deer could be driven tharn simply by shining a flashlight in its eyes. Loud music would do it to a raccoon, and constant tapping on its cage would do it to a parrot.
Elder made Stu feel like that. He would look into Elder’s flat blue eyes and feel all the will drain out of him. Elder probably wouldn’t even need the pistol to dispose of him. Elder probably had had courses in karate, savate, and general dirty tricks. What could he possibly do against a man like that? Just thinking about Elder made his will to even try to want to drain away. Tharn. It was a good word for a bad state of mind.
The red light went on over the door at just past 10 P.M., and Stu felt light perspiration break on his arms and face. It was this way every time the red light went on, because one of these times Elder would be alone. He would be alone because he wouldn’t want witnesses. There would be a furnace somewhere to cremate plague victims. Elder would bundle him into it. Snip. No more loose ends.
Elder stepped through the door. Alone.
Stu was sitting on his hospital bed, one hand resting on the back of his chair. At the sight of Elder he felt the familiar sickening drop in his belly. He felt the familiar urge to spill out a flood of loose, pleading words, in spite of his knowledge that such pleas would avail him nothing. There was no mercy in the face behind the white-suit’s transparent visor.
Now everything seemed very clear to him, very colorful, very slow. He could almost hear his eyes rolling in their bed of lubrication as he followed Elder’s progress into the room. He was a big man, stocky, and his white-suit was stretched too tight over him. The hole at the end of the pistol he held looked tunnel-size.
“How are you feeling?” Elder asked, and even through the tinny speaker Stu could hear the nasal quality of Elder’s voice. Elder was sick.
“Just the same,” Stu said, surprised at the evenness of his voice. “Say, when do I get out of here?”
“Very soon now,” Elder said. He was pointing the gun in Stu’s general direction, not precisely at him, but not precisely away, either. He uttered a muffled sneeze. “You don’t talk much, do you?”
Stu shrugged.
“I like that in a man,” Elder said. “Your big talkers, they’re your whimperers and whiners and belly-achers. I just got the word on you about twenty minutes ago, Mr. Redman. They’re not such hot orders, but I think you’ll do okay.”
“What orders?”
“Well, I’ve been ordered to—”
Stu’s eyes flicked past Elder’s shoulder, toward the high, riveted sill of the airlock door. “Christ Jesus!” he exclaimed. “That’s a fucking rat, what kind of place are you running with rats in it?”
Elder turned, and for a moment Stu was almost too surprised by the unexpected success of his ruse to go on. Then he slid off the bed and grasped the back of his chair in both hands as Elder began to pivot toward him again. Elder’s eyes were wide and suddenly alarmed. Stu lifted the chair over his head and stepped forward, swinging it down, getting every ounce of his one-eighty behind it.
“Get back there!” Elder cried. “Don’t—”
The chair crashed down on his right arm. The gun went off, disintegrating the Baggie, and the bullet screamed off the floor. Then the gun fell to the carpet, where it discharged again.
Stu was afraid he could count on only one more blow with the chair before Elder fully recovered himself. He determined to make it a good one. He brought it around in a high hard arc, a Henry Aaron home run swing. Elder tried to get his broken right arm up and couldn’t. The legs of the chair crashed into the hood of the white-suit. The plastic faceplate splintered in Elder’s eyes and nose. He screamed and fell backward.
