Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

A helicopter with a red cross and MERCY HOSPITAL stenciled on the side is landing in the street. Chet Ondowsky’s hair swirls in the wash of the rotors, and he raises his voice to be heard.

“I want to see if I can do anything to help! This is terrible, just a terrible tragedy! Back to you in New York!”

Lester Holt returns, looking upset. “Be safe, Chet. Folks, we’re going to return you to your regularly scheduled programming, but we’ll continue to update you on this developing situation at NBC Breaking News on your—”

Holly uses the remote and kills the TV. She has lost her taste for make-believe justice, at least for today. She keeps thinking of that limp form in the arms of the man wearing the yellow vest. One shoe off, one shoe on, she thinks. Deedle-deedle-dumpling, my son John. Will she watch the news tonight? She supposes she will. Won’t want to, but won’t be able to help herself. She’ll have to know how many casualties. And how many are children.

Pete surprises her by taking her hand. Usually she still doesn’t like to be touched, but right now his hand feels good holding hers.

“I want you to remember something,” he says.

She turns to him. Pete is grave.

“You and Bill stopped something much worse than this from happening,” he says. “That crackpot fuck Brady Hartsfield could have killed hundreds at the rock concert he tried to blow up. Maybe thousands.”

“And Jerome,” she says in a low voice. “Jerome was there, too.”

“Yep. You, Bill, and Jerome. The Three Musketeers. That you could stop. And did. But stopping this one—” Pete nods to the TV. “That was someone else’s responsibility.”

At seven o’clock Holly is still in the office, going over invoices that don’t really need her attention. She managed to resist turning on the office TV and watching Lester Holt at six-thirty, but she doesn’t want to go home just yet. That morning she had been looking forward to a nice veggie dinner from Mr. Chow, which she would eat while watching Pretty Poison , a vastly overlooked thriller from 1968 starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld, but tonight she doesn’t want poison, pretty or otherwise. She has been poisoned by the news from Pennsylvania, and still might not be able to resist turning on CNN. That would gift her with hours of tossing and turning until two or even three in the morning.

Like most people in the media-soaked twenty-first century, Holly has become inured to the violence men (it’s still mostly men) do to each other in the name of religion or politics—those ghosts—but what happened at that suburban middle school is too much like what almost happened at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex, where Brady Hartsfield tried to blow up a few thousand kids, and what did happen at City Center, where he plowed a Mercedes sedan into a crowd of job-seekers, killing… she doesn’t remember how many. She doesn’t want to remember.

She is putting away the files—she has to go home sometime, after all—when she hears the elevator again. She waits to see if it will go past the fifth floor, but it stops. Probably Jerome, but she still opens the second drawer of her desk and loosely grips the can there. It has two buttons. One blares an earsplitting horn. The other dispenses pepper spray.

It’s him. She lets go of the IntruderGuard and closes the drawer. She marvels (and not for the first time since he came back from Harvard) at how tall and handsome he’s become. She dislikes that fur around his mouth, what he calls “the goat,” but would never tell him so. Tonight his usual energetic walk is slow and a little slumped. He gives her a perfunctory “Yo, Hollyberry,” and drops into the chair that in business hours is reserved for clients.

Usually she would admonish him about how much she dislikes that childish nickname—it’s their form of call-and-response—but not tonight. They are friends, and because she’s a person who has never had many, Holly tries her best to deserve the ones she has. “You look very tired.”

“Long drive. Heard the news about the school? It’s all over the sat radio.”

“I was watching John Law when they broke in. Since then I’ve been avoiding it. How bad?”

“They’re saying twenty-seven dead so far, twenty-three of them kids between twelve and fourteen. But it’ll go higher. There are still a few kids and two teachers they haven’t been able to account for, and a dozen or so in critical condition. It’s worse than Parkland. Make you think of Brady Hartsfield?”

“Of course.”

“Yeah, me too. The ones he got at City Center and the ones he could have gotten if we’d been just a few minutes slower that night at the ’Round Here concert. I try not to think about that, tell myself we won that one, because when my mind goes to it I get the willies.”

Holly knows all about the willies. She has them often.

Jerome rubs a hand slowly down one cheek and in the quiet she can hear the scritch-scritch of his fingers on the day’s new bristles. “Sophomore year at Harvard I took a philosophy course. Did I ever mention that to you?”

Holly shakes her head.

“It was called—” Jerome makes finger-quotes. “—‘The Problem of Evil.’ In it, we talked a lot about concepts called inside evil and outside evil. We… Holly, you okay?”

“Yes,” she says, and she is… but at the mention of outside evil, her mind immediately turns to the monster she and Ralph tracked to his final lair. The monster had gone under many names and worn many faces, but she had always thought of him simply as the outsider, and the outsider had been as evil as they come. She’s never told Jerome about what happened in the cave known as the Marysville Hole, although she supposes he knows something pretty dire went on there—a lot more than made it into the newspapers.

He’s looking at her uncertainly. “Go on,” she tells him. “This is very interesting to me.” It’s the truth.

“Well… the class consensus was there’s outside evil if you believe in outside good—”

“God,” Holly says.

“Yes. Then you can believe there really are demons, and exorcism is a valid response to them, there really are malevolent spirits—”

“Ghosts,” Holly says.

“Right. Not to mention curses that really work, and witches, and dybbuks , and who knows what else. But in college, all that stuff pretty much gets laughed out of court. God Himself mostly gets laughed out of court.”

“Or Herself,” Holly says primly.

“Yeah, whatever, if God doesn’t exist, I guess the pronouns don’t matter. So that leaves inside evil. Moron stuff. Guys who beat their children to death, serial killers like Brady fucking Hartsfield, ethnic cleansing, genocide, 9/11, mass shootings, terrorist attacks like the one today.”

“Is that what they’re saying?” Holly asks. “A terrorist attack, maybe ISIS?”

“That’s what they’re assuming , but no one’s claimed responsibility yet.”

Now his other hand on his other cheek, scritch-scritch, and are those tears in Jerome’s eyes? She thinks they are, and if he cries, she will, too, she won’t be able to help it. Sadness is catching, and how poopy is that?

“But see, here’s the deal about inside and outside evil, Holly— I don’t think there’s any difference . Do you?”

She considers everything she knows, and everything she’s been through with this young man, and Bill, and Ralph Anderson. “No,” she says. “I don’t.”

“I think it’s a bird,” Jerome says. “A big bird, all frowsy and frosty gray. It flies here, there, and everywhere. It flew into Brady Hartsfield’s head. It flew into the head of the guy who shot all those people in Las Vegas. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, they got the bird. Hitler. Pol Pot. It flies into their heads, and when the wetwork’s done, it flies away again. I’d like to catch that bird.” He clenches his hands and looks at her and yes, those are tears. “Catch it and wring its fucking neck.”