Stephen King - The Plant

Carlos looks at Sandra's desk, which is a cluttery, paper-strewn mess. Scissors? A letter-opener? Even a damned nail-file? Anything— Good Demeter, what's that?

Lying beside her blotter, partly obscured by a framed photo of Sandra and Dina taken on their trip to Nova Scotia two years before, is a large silver object which looks like a gunshell. Sandra, her mind full of books and plants and manuscripts and tales of elderly Rhode Island zombies, has forgotten to put the gunshell in her purse when she left on Friday afternoon. Also, it's now easy for her to forget: the plant has given her a new sense of security and well-being. This object no longer seems so vital to her.

It's vital to Carlos, though.

Carlos has spotted Sandra's Rainy Night Friend.

“What's the matter, Aunt Sandra?” Dina asks. A moment before they were been walking down the boardwalk together, eating the delicious grilled franks you can only get at Cony. Then Sandra stopped, gasped, and put a hand to her stomach. “Is your hotdog no good?”

“It's fine,” Sandra said, although a sudden pain had, in fact, just ripped through her belly. It wasn't the kind of pain she associated with food-poisoning, but she turned and deposited the remainder of her dog in a trash barrel just the same. She was no longer hungry.

“Then what is it?”

It was a voice in her head, calling. But if she told Dina that, her niece would probably think she was crazy. Especially if she told her it was a green voice.

“I don't know,” Sandra said, “but maybe I ought to take you home, hon. If I'm going to get sick, I don't want to get caught all the way out here.”

John Kenton has been scrambling eggs in his little kitchen, whistling “Chim-Chim-Chiree” from Mary Poppins as he stirs with his whisk. The pain comes like lightning out of a blue sky, ripping across his middle, there and gone.

He cries out and jerks backward, the whisk pulling the frypan off the stove and splattering half-congealed eggs on the linoleum. Both the eggs and the pan miss his bare feet, which could almost qualify as a miracle.

The office, he thinks. I have to get to the office. Something's gone wrong. And then his head suddenly fills with sound and he screams.

Roger Wade is already headed for the door of his apartment when the unearthly yowl of Sandra's Rainy Day Friend fills his head, threatening to burst it open from the inside out. He drops to his knees like a man who's had a heart attack, holding his head and uttering screams he can't hear.

On the edge of the Sheep's Meadow, the little cluster of Saturday morning gamblers watch the fleeing man with bemused surprise. He was cleaning them out, righteously and in record time. Then, suddenly, he gave a scream and lurched to his feet, first clutching his gut and then slamming the heels of his hands against his ears, as if assaulted by some monstrous sound. As if to confirm this, he had gasped “Oh God, turn it off!” Then he fled, staggering from side to side like a drunk.

“What's up with him?” one of the crap-artists asked.

“I don't know,” said another, “but I know one thing: he left the gelt.”

For a moment they simply look at the untidy pile of bills beside Bill Gelb's vacated spot. Then, quite spontaneously, the six of them begin to applaud.

In his seat by the window, Riddley is asleep and dreaming of other, younger days. He is dreaming, in fact, of 1961. In his dream, he and Maddy are walking to school hand in hand beneath a brilliant November sky. Together they chant their old favorite, which they made up themselves: “Whammer-jammer-Alabammer! Beetle Bailey, Katzenjammer! Gi'me back my goddam hammer! Whammer-jammer-Alabammer!” Then they giggle.

It is a good day. The Cuban stuff, which scared everybody near bout to death, is over. Rid has drawn a pitcher, and he thinks Mrs. Ellis will ask him to show it to the rest of the kinnygarden. Mrs. Ellis likes his pitchers.

Then, suddenly, Maddy stops. From the north comes a rising rumble. She looks at him solemnly. “Those are the bombers,” she says. “Hit happened. Hit's World War Three.”

“Naw,” Riddley says. “Hit's over. The Roosians backed down. Kennedy scared em honest. Bald Roosian fella told his boats to turn around and go home. Mama said so.”

“Mama's crazy,” Maddy replies. “She sleeps on the riverbank. She sleeps with the copperhaids.”

And as if to prove it, the Blackwater air-raid siren goes off, deafening him—

Riddley straightens up and stares out at New Jersey: stares, in fact, at the exact swampy wasteland he will that night be visiting.

The man across the aisle looks up from his paperback book. “Are you all right, sir?” he asks.

Riddley cannot hear him. The air-raid siren has followed him out of his dream. It is filling his head, bursting his brains.

Then, suddenly, it cuts off. When the man across the aisle asks his question again, this time with real concern, Riddley hears him.

“Yes, thanks,” he says in a voice that's almost steady. In his head, the old rhyme beats: Whammer-jammer-Alabammer. “I'm fine.”

But some folks are not, he thinks. Some folks most definitely are not.

In 1970, a large number of American brass were celebrating at a Saigon bar and whorehouse called Haiphong Charlie's. Word had come down from Washington that the war would certainly continue for at least another year, and these career soldiers, who had gotten the ass-kicking of their lives over the last twenty months or so and wanted payback more than they wanted life itself, were raising the roof. The miracle was that something in the bomb the anonymous waiter planted was defective, and instead of spraying the whole room with nails and screws, it only sprayed those soldiers who happened to be near the stage, where it had been hidden in a flower arrangement. One of those unfortunates was Anthony Hecksler's aide-de-camp. Poor sonofabitch lost both hands and one eye while he was doing the frug or the Watusi or one of those.

Hecksler himself was on the edge of the room, talking with Westy Westmoreland, and although a number of nails flew between them—both men heard their whining passage—neither suffered so much as a nicked earlobe. But the sound of the explosion in that small room was enormous. Iron-Guts hadn't minded being spared the screams of the wounded, but it had been nine full days before his hearing began to come back. He had about given that sensation up for dead when it finally returned home (and still for a week or so every conversation had been like a transatlantic phone call in the nineteen-twenties). His ears have been sensitive to loud noises ever since.

Which is why, when Carlos yanks the pull-ring in the center of the silver thing, setting off the high-decibel siren, Iron-Guts recoils with a harsh grunt of surprise and pain—”AHHH?”—and puts his hands to his ears.

All at once the knife is pointing at the ceiling instead of at Carlos, and Carlos doesn't hesitate to take advantage. Badly hurt as he is, as surprised as he is, he's never gone more than half a step over the edge of panic. He knows there are only two ways out of this office, and that the five-story drop from the windows behind him is unacceptable. It must be the door, and that means he must deal with The General.