Стивен Кинг - Later

I see them and they know I do. It’s always been that way.

“Ask him where the bomb is,” Liz said. She was speaking from the corner of her mouth, like a spy in a comedy.

A woman with a baby in a Papoose carrier came up the sidewalk. She gave me a distrustful glance, maybe because I looked funny or maybe because I smelled of puke. Maybe both. I was past the point of caring. All I wanted was to do what Liz Dutton had brought me here to do, then get the fuck out. I waited until the woman with the baby went inside.

“Where’s the bomb, Mr. Therriault? The last bomb?”

At first he didn’t reply and I was thinking okay, his brains are blown out, he’s here but he can’t talk, end of story . Then he spoke up. The words didn’t exactly match the movements of his mouth and it came to me that he was talking from somewhere else. Like on a time-delay from hell. That scared the shit out of me. If I’d known that was when something awful came into him and took him over, it would have been even worse. But do I know that? Like for sure? No, but I almost know it.

“I don’t want to tell you.”

That stunned me to silence. I had never gotten such a reply from a dead person before. True, my experience was limited, but up until then I would have said they had to tell you the truth first time, every time.

“What did he say?” Liz asked. Still talking from the corner of her mouth.

I ignored her and spoke to Therriault again. Since there was no one around, I spoke louder, enunciating every word the way you would for a person who was deaf or only had a shaky grasp on English. “Where… is… the last… bomb?”

I also would have said that the dead can’t feel pain, that they are beyond it, and Therriault certainly did not seem to be suffering from the cataclysmic self-inflicted wound in his head, but now his half-bloated face twisted as if I were burning him or stabbing him in the belly instead of just asking him a question.

“Don’t want to tell you!”

“What did he—” Liz began again, but then the lady with the baby came back out. She had a lottery ticket. The baby in the Papoose had a Kit-Kat finger which he was smearing all over his face. Then he looked at the bench where Therriault was sitting and started crying. The mom must have thought her kid was looking at me, because she gave me another glance, mega distrustful this time, and hurried on her way.

“Champ… Jamie, I mean…”

“Shut up,” I said. Then, because my mother would have hated me talking to any grownup like that, “Please.”

I looked back to Therriault. His grimace of pain made his ruined face look more ruined than ever, and all at once I decided I didn’t care. He had maimed enough people to fill a hospital ward, he had killed people, and if the note he’d pinned to his shirt wasn’t a lie, he had died trying to kill even more. I decided I hoped he was suffering.

“Where… is it… you… motherfucker?”

He clasped his hands around his middle, bent over like he had cramps, groaned. Then he gave it up. “King Kullen. The King Kullen Supermarket in Eastport.”

“Why?”

“Seemed right to finish where I started,” he said, and drew a circle in the air with one finger. “Complete the circle.”

“No, why do it at all? Why set all those bombs?”

He smiled, and the way it kind of squelched the bloated side of his face? I still see that, and I’ll never be able to unsee it.

“Because,” he said.

“Because what?”

“Because I felt like it,” he said.

When I told Liz everything Therriault had said, she was excited and nothing else. I could understand that, she wasn’t the one looking at a man who’d pretty much blown off one whole side of his head. She told me she had to go into the store and get some stuff.

“And leave me here with him ?”

“No, go back down the street. Wait by the car. I’ll only be a minute.”

Therriault was sitting there looking at me with the eye that was more or less regular and the one that was all stretched out. I could feel his gaze. It made me think of the time I went to camp and got fleas and had to have this special stinky shampoo like five times before they were all gone.

Shampoo wouldn’t fix the way Therriault made me feel, only getting away from him would do that, so I did what Liz said. I walked as far as the laundromat and looked in at the woman who was still folding clothes. She saw me and gave me a wave. That brought back the little girl with the hole in her throat, and how she had waved to me, and for one horrible moment I thought the laundromat lady was also dead. Only a dead person wouldn’t be folding clothes, they only stood around. Or sat around, like Therriault. So I gave her a return wave. I even tried to smile.

Then I turned back to the store. I told myself it was to see if Liz was coming out yet, but that wasn’t why. I was looking to see if Therriault was still looking at me. He was. He raised one hand, palm up, three fingers tucked into his palm, one finger pointing. He curled it once, then twice. Very slowly. Come here, boy .

I walked back, my legs seeming to move of their own accord. I didn’t want to, but couldn’t seem to help myself.

“She doesn’t care about you,” Kenneth Therriault said. “Not a fig. Not one single fig . She’s using you, boy.”

“Fuck you, we’re saving lives.” There was no one passing by, but even if somebody had been, he or she wouldn’t have heard me. He had stolen all of my voice but a whisper.

“What she’s saving is her job.”

“You don’t know that, you’re just some random psycho.” Still only a whisper, and I felt on the verge of peeing myself.

He didn’t say anything, only grinned. That was his answer. Liz came out. She had one of those cheap plastic bags they gave you in stores like that back then. She looked at the bench, where the ruined man she couldn’t see was sitting, and then at me. “What are you doing here, Cha… Jamie? I told you to go to the car.” And before I could answer, quick and harsh, like I was a perp in a TV cop show interrogation room: “Did he tell you something else?”

That you only care about saving your job , I thought of saying. But maybe I already knew that .

“No,” I said. “I want to go home, Liz.”

“We will. We will. As soon as I do one more thing. Two, actually, I’ve also got to get your mess out of my car.” She put an arm around my shoulders (like a good mom would) and walked me up past the laundromat. I would have waved to the clothes-folding lady again, but her back was turned.

“I set something up. I didn’t really think I’d have a chance to use it, but thanks to you…”

When we were next to her car, she took a flip-phone out of the store bag. It was still in its blister pack. I leaned against the window of a shoe repair place and watched her fiddle with it until she got it working. It was now quarter past four. If Mom went for a drink with Barbara, we could still get back before she came home… but could I keep the afternoon’s adventures to myself? I didn’t know, and right then it didn’t seem that important. I wished Liz could at least have driven around the corner, I thought she could have smelled my puke for that long after what I’d done for her, but she was too wound up. Plus, there was the bomb to consider. I thought of all the movies I’d seen where the clock is counting down to nothing and the hero is wondering whether to cut the red wire or the blue one.

Now she was calling.

“Colton? Yes, this is m… shut up, just listen. It’s time to do your thing. You owe me a favor, a big one, and this is it. I’m going to tell you exactly what to say. Record it, then… shut up, I said!”