Stephen King - Sleeping Beauties

“Not on your life,” said Drew T. Barry, and that was when Willy Burke’s knees buckled and he went down, no longer breathing.

Frank handed his rifle to Ordway. “He needs CPR. I took the course last summer—”

Clint pointed his rifle at Frank’s chest. “No.”

Frank stared at him. “Man, are you crazy?”

“Step back,” Michaela said, pointing her own gun at Frank. She didn’t know what Clint was doing, but she had an idea he was playing the last card in his hand. In our hand, she thought.

“Let’s shoot em all,” Carson Struthers said. He sounded near hysterics. “That devil-woman, too.”

“Stand down ,” Frank said. And, to Clint: “You’re just going to let him die? What would that prove?”

“Evie can save him,” Clint said. “Can’t you, Evie?”

The woman in the cell said nothing. Her head was lowered, her hair obscuring her face.

“Geary—if she saves him, will you let her go?”

“That old cocksucker’s fakin!” Carson Struthers shouted. “It’s all a set-up they planned!”

Frank began, “Can I just check if—?”

“Okay, yes,” Clint said. “But be quick. Brain damage starts after three minutes, and I don’t know if even a supernatural being could reverse that.”

Frank hurried to Willy, dropped to one knee, and put his fingers to the old man’s throat. He looked up at Clint. “His clock’s stopped. I should start CPR.”

“A minute ago, you were ready to kill him,” Reed Barrows grumbled.

Officer Treat, who thought he had witnessed some shit in Afghanistan, groaned. “I don’t understand any of this. Just tell me what it’s going to take to get my kid back and I’ll do it.” To whom, exactly, this statement was directed, was unclear.

“No CPR.” Clint turned to Evie, who stood with her head down. Which, he thought, was good, because she couldn’t help seeing the man on the floor.

“This is Willy Burke,” said Clint. “His country told him to serve, and he served. These days he goes out with the volunteer fire department to fight brushfires in the spring. They do it without pay. He helps at every bean supper the Ladies’ Aid puts on for indigent families the state is too chintzy to support. He coaches Pop Warner football in the fall.”

“He was a good coach, too,” Jared said. His voice was thick with tears.

Clint continued. “He took care of his sister for ten years when she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. He fed her, he brought her back when she took it into her head to wander, he changed her shitty diapers. He came out here to defend you because he wanted to do the right thing by you and by his conscience. He never hurt a woman in his life. Now he’s dying. Maybe you’ll let him. After all, he’s just another man, right?”

Someone was coughing on the smoke drifting down Broadway. For a moment there was no other sound, then Evie Black shrieked. Lights burst in their overhead cages. Cell doors that had been locked slammed open and then banged shut in a sound that was like iron hands applauding. Several of the men in Frank’s group screamed, one of them in a pitch so high that he sounded like a little girl of six or seven.

Ordway turned and ran. His footfalls echoed through the cinderblock halls.

“Pick him up,” Evie said. Her cell door had opened with the others. If, that was, it had ever been locked in the first place. Clint had no doubt that she could have left whenever she wished at any time during the last week. The rats had only been part of her theater.

Clint and Jared Norcross lifted Willy’s limp form. He was heavy, but Evie took him as if he were no more than a bag of goosefeathers.

“You played on my heart,” she said to Clint. “That was a cruel thing to do, Dr. Norcross.” Her face was solemn, but he thought that he saw a glint of amusement in her eyes. Maybe even merriment. She encircled Willy’s considerable waistline with her left arm and placed her right hand on the matted, sweat-soaked hair at the back of the old man’s head. Then she pressed her mouth to his.

Willy shuddered all over. His arms lifted to encircle Evie’s back. For a moment the old man and the young woman remained in a deep embrace. Then she let him go and stood back. “How do you feel, Willy?”

“Damn good,” Willy Burke said. He sat up.

“My God,” Reed Barrows said. “He looks twenty years younger.”

“I ain’t been kissed like that since I was in high school,” said Willy. “If ever. Ma’am, I think you saved my life. I thank you for that, but I think the kiss was even better.”

Evie began to smile. “I’m glad you enjoyed it. I rather liked it myself, although it wasn’t as good as beating Boom Town .”

Clint’s blood was no longer up; exhaustion and Evie’s latest miracle had cooled it. He looked on the rage he had felt so recently like a man looking at a stranger who has broken into his house and cluttered the kitchen while making himself an extravagant and gluttonous breakfast. He felt sad and regretful and terribly tired. He wished he could just go home, sit beside his wife, share space with her, and not have to say a word.

“Geary,” Clint said.

Frank was slow to look at him, like a man shaking off a daze.

“Let her go. It’s the only way.”

“Maybe, but even that’s not sure, is it?”

“No,” Clint agreed. “What in this fucked-up life is?”

Angel spoke up then. “Bad times and good times,” she said. “Bad times and good. All the rest is just horseshit in the barn.”

“I thought it would take at least until Thursday, but…” Evie laughed, a sound like tinkling bells. “I forgot how fast men can move when they set their minds to a thing.”

“Sure,” Michaela said. “Just think of the Manhattan Project.”

At ten minutes past eight on that fine morning, a line of six vehicles drove down West Lavin Road, while behind them the prison smoldered like a discarded cigar butt in an ashtray. They turned onto Ball’s Hill Road. Unit Two led the way with its flashers turning slowly. Frank was behind the wheel. Clint was in the shotgun seat. Behind them sat Evie Black, exactly where she had been sitting after Lila arrested her. Then she had been half-naked. On this return trip, she was wearing a Dooling Correctional red top.

“How we’re ever going to explain this to the state police, I don’t know,” Frank said. “Lot of men dead, lot of men wounded.”

“Right now everyone’s got their hands full with Aurora,” Clint said, “and probably half of them aren’t even showing up. When all the women come back— if they come back—no one will care.”

From behind them, Evie spoke quietly. “The mothers will. The wives. The daughters. Who do you think cleans up the battlefields after the shooting stops?”

Unit Two stopped in the lane leading to Truman Mayweather’s trailer, where yellow CRIME SCENEtape still fluttered. The other vehicles—two more police cruisers, two civilian cars, and Carson Struthers’s pickup truck—pulled up behind them. “Now what?” Clint asked.

“Now we’ll see,” Evie said. “If one of these men doesn’t change his mind and shoot me after all, that is.”

“That won’t happen,” Clint replied, not nearly as confident as he sounded.

Doors slammed. For the moment, the trio in Unit Two sat where they were.

“Tell me something, Evie,” Frank said. “If you’re just the emissary, who’s in charge of this rodeo? Some… I don’t know… life force? Big Mama Earth, maybe, hitting the reset button?”

“Do you mean the Great Lesbian in the sky?” Evie asked. “A short, heavyset deity wearing a mauve pantsuit and sensible shoes? Isn’t that the image most men get when they think a woman is trying to run their lives?”