Stephen King - The Tommyknockers

Gardener was standing by the transformer and holding one of the earplugs in his hand. He didn't want to put it in. He felt like a man who's gotten a hefty shock from one particular switch-plate who is compelled to touch that same switch-plate again.

Do I really have to wear this fucker? I changed the screen just by thinking before.

Yes and that's all you can do. You got to wear it, son. I'm sorry.

Incredibly, Gardener's eyelids were growing heavy again. He had to force them up.

I'm afraid it will kill me, he thought at the old man, and then waited, hoping the old man would contradict him. But there was nothing-only the pained eye looking at him, and the dim slisshh-slisshhh-slisshhh of the equipment.

Yeah, it may kill me, and he knows it, too.

Outside, dimly, he could hear the crackle of fire.

The fluttering feeling along the surfaces of his mind stopped. The moths had flown away.

Reluctantly Gardener put the plug in his ear.

Kyle and Hazel relaxed. They looked at each other. There was an identical-and very human-expression in their eyes. The expression of people discovering something just too good to be true.

David Brown? Kyle thought unbelievingly at Hazel. Is that what you

pick up yes he's trying to save the kid, to

to bring him back

back from Altair-4

Then, for a moment overriding the net, came Dick Allison's voice excited and full of sour triumph:

Hot DAMN! I KNEW that kid would come in handy!

For a moment Gardener felt nothing at all. He began to relax, on the edge of a doze again. Then pain hit him in a single awful crunch, a destructive battering ram that would tear his head apart.

“No!” he screamed. His hands went to his temples; beat against them. “No, God no, it hurts too much, Jesus, no!”

Ride with it, son, try to ride with it!

“I can't I can't OH CHRIST MAKE IT STOP!”

This made his shattered ankle feel like a mosquito bite. He was dimly aware that his nose was bleeding and that his mouth was filled with blood.

RIDE WITH IT, SON!

The pain backed off a little. It was replaced with another feeling. This new sensation was horrible, horrible and terrifying.

Once, while in college, he had participated in something called The Great McDonald's Eat-Out. Five frats had fielded “champion eaters.” Gard had been Delta Tau Delta's “champ.” He had been on his sixth Big Mac-not even close to the contest winner's eventual total-and had become suddenly aware that he was very close to total physical overload. He had never felt anything like it in his life. In a gross way it was almost interesting. His midsection felt thundery with food. He did not feel like vomiting; nausea did not exactly describe what it had been like. He saw his stomach as a huge still dirigible lying bloated in still air at his center. He thought he could sense red lights going on in some mental Mission Control Center as various systems tried to deal with this insane load of meat, bread and sauce. He didn't vomit. He walked it off. Very slowly, he walked it off. For hours he had felt like those drawings of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, his stomach stretched and smooth and terribly close to bursting.

Now it was his mind that felt like that, and Jim Gardener understood as coldly and rationally as a trapeze performer who works with no net that he was on the knife-edge of death. But there was another sensation, one which was unrelatable to anything, and for the first time he understood what the Tommyknockers were all about-what moved them; what propelled them onward.

In spite of the pain, which had only retreated, not left, and in spite of that dreadful smooth feeling of being as stuffed as a python which has swallowed a kid, part of him was enjoying this. It was like a drug-an incredibly powerful drug. His brain felt like the engine in the biggest fucking Chrysler ever built, idling on fat gas, waiting for him to drop the car into gear and peel out.

Peel out to where?

Anywhere.

The stars, if he wanted.

Son I'm losing you

That was the old man, sounding more exhausted than ever, and Gardener pulled himself back to the job at hand-the next piece of furniture he had to hop to. Oh, this feeling was drunkenly wonderful, but it was stolen. He forced himself to think again of those leaf-brown shapes locked in all those hammocks. Galley slaves. The old man was powering him; he was drinking the old man like a vampire drinking blood. How long until he was a vampire himself? Like them?

He thought at Hillman: I am with you, old horse.

Ev Hillman closed his one good eye in silent relief. Gard turned to the monitor screen, absently holding the plug in his ear like a newsman on a live remote listening to a question from the anchor back in the studio.

In the closed space of Bobbi's shed, the light began to cycle up again.

listen

They all listened; they were all on a party-line which covered all of Haven, radiating out from a center about two miles from that still-faint smudge of smoke. They were all on the net and they all listened. They accepted no absolute common; Tommyknockers was a name they accepted as casually as any, but they were really interstellar gypsies with no king. Yet in this moment of crisis during the period of regeneration-a period when they were so vulnerable-they were willing to accept the voices of those Gardener called the Shed People. They were, after all, the clearest distillation of them all.

the time has come to close the borders

There was a universal sigh of agreement-a mental sound Ruth McCausland would have recognized: a sound like autumn leaves blown before a November wind.

For the time being, at least, the Shed People had lost all contact with Gardener. They were only content that he was occupied elsewhere. If he meant to go to their ship, the fire would soon be in his way.

The unified voice quickly explained the rota that was to be followed-some of these plans had been made, vaguely, weeks ago-these plans had become more concrete as the Shed People “became.”

Gadgets had been made-haphazardly, it had seemed. But birds flying south as winter approaches may seem haphazard; their migration may even seem so to themselves-just something which felt like as good a way as any to spend the winter months. Want to go to North Carolina, dear? Of course, my love; what a wonderful idea.

So they had built, and sometimes they had killed each other with their new toys, and sometimes they had finished gadgets, looked at them doubtfully, and packed them away somewhere out of sight, since they were no obvious help in their daily round. But some they had toted out to Haven's borders, usually in the trunks of cars or in the backs of trucks, under tarps. One of these gadgets had been the Coke machine which had murdered John Leandro; it had been customized by the late Dave Rutledge, who had once serviced such machines for a living. One had been the Bensohn brush-trimmer which had cut up a storm on Lester Moran. There were duded-up televisions which shot fire; there were smoke-detectors (Gardener had seen some but not all of these on his first visit to the shed) which flew through the air like Frisbees, emitting killing waves of ultrasonic sound; at several locations there were force-barriers. Almost all of these gadgets could be mentally activated with the help of simple electronic devices which were casually dubbed “Callers,” not much different from the device Freeman Moss had used to float the drainage machinery into the woods.

No one thought more about why these gadgets should be placed in a rough perimeter around the town than a bird thinks about flying south or a caterpillar thinks about weaving a cocoon. But of course, this time always came-the time when the borders had to be sealed. This time had come early… but, it seemed, not too early.