Stephen King - Sleeping Beauties

He turned to assist Willy and saw the old man leaning against the building with his head lowered. His breathing was harsh and rapid.

Willy raised his arms. “Hope you’re strong enough to pull me in, Doc, because I ain’t gonna be able to give you much help.”

“Give me your gun first.”

Willy handed up the M4. Clint put it on his desk with his own weapon, atop a stack of Good Report forms. Then he seized Willy’s hands and pulled. The old man was able to help after all, pedaling his workshoes against the building below the window, and he practically flew in. Clint went over on his back. Willy landed on top of him.

“This is what I’d call pretty goddam intimate,” Willy said. His voice was strained, and he looked worse than ever, but he was grinning.

“In that case, you better call me Clint.” He got Willy to his feet, handed him the M4, and grabbed his own gun. “Let’s get our asses down to Evie’s cell.”

“What are we going to do when we get there?”

“I have no idea,” said Clint.

Drew T. Barry couldn’t believe what he was seeing: two women who looked like corpses and Elmore Pearl with his mouth pulled into a yawning cavern. His lower jaw seemed to be lying on his chest.

Pearl staggered away from the creature that held him. He made almost a dozen steps before Maura caught him by the sweat-soaked collar. She drew him against her and stuck a thumb deep into his right eye. There was a pop, like a cork coming out of a bottle. Viscous liquid spilled down Pearl’s cheek, and he went limp.

Kayleigh turned jerkily toward Don Peters, like a wind-up toy with a tired spring. He knew he should run, but an incredible lassitude seemed to have filled him. I have gone to sleep, he reasoned, and this is the world’s worst nightmare. Has to be, because that’s Kayleigh Rawlings. I put that bitch on Bad Report just last month. I’ll let her get me, and that’s when I’ll wake up.

Drew T. Barry, whose life’s work involved imagining the worst things that could happen to people, never considered the old I-must-be-dreaming scenario. This was happening, even though it seemed like something straight out of that show where rotting dead people came back to life, and he had every intention of surviving it. “ Duck! ” he shouted.

Don might not have done so if the plastic explosive hadn’t detonated at that instant on the other side of the prison. It was actually more of a fall than a duck, but it did the job; instead of grasping the soft meat of his face, Kayleigh’s pallid fingers slapped off the hard plastic shell of the football helmet. There was a gunshot, amplified to monstrous levels in the empty gymnasium, and a point-blank round from the Weatherby—a gun that could literally stop an elephant—did the job on Kayleigh. Her throat simply exploded and her head lolled back, all the way back. Her body crumpled.

Maura cast Elmore aside and lurched toward Don, a boogeylady whose hands opened and snapped closed, opened and snapped closed.

“Shoot her!” Don screamed. His bladder let go and warm piddle coursed down his legs, soaking his socks.

Drew T. Barry considered not doing it. Peters was an idiot, a loose cannon, and they might be better off without him. Oh well, he thought, okay. But after this, Mr. Prison Guard, you’re on your own.

He shot Maura Dunbarton in the chest. She flew back to center court, landing beside the late Elmore Pearl. She lay there a moment, then struggled up and started toward Don again, although her top and bottom halves no longer seemed to be working together very well.

“ Shoot her in the head! ” Don screamed. (He seemed to have forgotten that he had a gun himself.) “ Shoot her in the head like you did the other one! ”

“Will you please just shut up,” said Drew T. Barry. He sighted and blew a hole through Maura Dunbarton’s head that vaporized the upper left quadrant of her skull.

“Oh God,” Don gasped. “Oh God, oh God, oh God. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back to town.”

Little as Drew T. Barry liked the pudgy ex-guard, he understood Peters’s impulse to run; even sympathized with it to a degree. But he had not become the most successful insurance man in the Tri-Counties by giving up on a job before it was finished. He grabbed Don by the arm.

“Drew, they were dead ! What if there are more?”

“I don’t see any more, do you?”

“But—”

“Lead the way. We’re going to find the woman we came for.” And out of nowhere, a bit of Drew T. Barry’s high school French recurred to him. “ Cherchez la femme .”

“Churchy what ?”

“Never mind.” Drew T. Barry gestured with his high-powered rifle. Not exactly at Don, but in his general vicinity. “You go first. Thirty feet ahead of me should be good.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Drew T. Barry said, “I believe in insurance.”

While Vanessa Lampley was putting paid to Maynard Griner and Elmore Pearl was undergoing impromptu oral surgery from the reanimated corpse of Maura Dunbarton, Frank Geary was beneath the half-collapsed reception desk, watching as 0:46became 0:45became 0:44. There would be no help from outside, he knew that now. The remaining men out there were either hanging back or gone. If he was going to get past the goddam security station and into the prison proper, he would have to do it on his own. The only alternative was to scurry back outside on his hands and knees and hope the guy behind the bulletproof glass didn’t shoot him in the ass.

He wished none of this had happened. He wished he was cruising one of the pleasant roads of Dooling County in his little truck, looking for someone’s pet raccoon. If a domesticated coon was hungry, you could coax him close enough to use the net with a piece of cheese or hamburger on the end of the long pole Frank called his Treat Stick. That made him think of the shattered desk leg poked into his back. He rolled on his side, grabbed it, and pushed it along the floor. The leg was just long enough to reach the lethal football. Nice to finally catch a break.

“What are you doing?” Tig asked from behind the glass.

Frank didn’t bother answering. If this didn’t work, he was a dead man. He speared the football with the jagged end of the leg. Johnny Lee had assured him that even driving over the stuff wouldn’t cause it to explode, and the stick didn’t set it off. He lifted the desk leg and leaned it just below the window with its ID slot. 0:17became 0:16became 0:15. Tig fired once, and Frank felt the bullet pass just above his knuckles.

“Whoever you are in there, you better get gone,” he said. “Do it while you’ve got the chance.”

Taking his own advice, Frank dove toward the front doors, expecting to take a bullet. But Tig never fired again.

Tig was peering through the glass at the white football stuck on the end of the desk leg like a big piece of gum. He got his first good look at the phone, where 0:04became 0:03. He understood then what it was and what was going to happen. He bolted for the door giving on the prison’s main corridor. His hand was on the knob when the world went white.

Outside the main doors, shadowed from the brightening sun by the remains of the Fleetwood RV—never to take Barry Holden and his family on camping expeditions again—Frank felt the badly mauled building shudder from the latest blast. Glass that had survived the earlier explosions thanks to reinforcing wire belched out in glittering shards.

“Come on!” shouted Frank. “Any of you who are left, come on! We’re taking her right now! ”