Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(53)

Coach Johnson said that was the plan, and Brad walked off with his glove trailing from one hand. Usually he jogged—they all did—but today he didn’t feel like it. His head still ached, and now his legs did, too. He disappeared into the corn behind the bleachers, meaning to take a shortcut back to the farm, two miles away. When he emerged onto Town Road D, brushing silk from his hair with a slow and dreamy hand, a midsize WanderKing was idling on the gravel. Standing beside it, smiling, was Barry the Chink.

“Well, there you are,” Barry said.

“Who are you?”

“A friend. Hop in. I’ll take you home.”

“Sure,” Brad said. Feeling the way he did, a ride would be fine. He scratched at the red spot on his arm. “You’re Barry Smith. You’re a friend. I’ll hop in and you’ll take me home.”

He stepped into the RV. The door closed. The WanderKing drove away.

By the next day the whole county would be mobilized in a hunt for the Adair All-Stars’ centerfielder and best hitter. A State Police spokesman asked residents to report any strange cars or vans. There were many such reports, but they all came to nothing. And although the three RVs carrying the finders were much bigger than vans (and Rose the Hat’s was truly huge), nobody reported them. They were the RV People, after all, and traveling together. Brad was just . . . gone.

Like thousands of other unfortunate children, he had been swallowed up, seemingly in a single bite.


9

They took him north to an abandoned ethanol-processing plant that was miles from the nearest farmhouse. Crow carried the boy out of Rose’s EarthCruiser and laid him gently on the ground. Brad was bound with duct tape and weeping. As the True Knot gathered around him (like mourners over an open grave), he said, “Please take me home. I’ll never tell.”

Rose dropped to one knee beside him and sighed. “I would if I could, son, but I can’t.”

His eyes found Barry. “You said you were one of the good guys! I heard you! You said so!”

“Sorry, pal.” Barry didn’t look sorry. What he looked was hungry. “It’s not personal.”

Brad shifted his eyes back to Rose. “Are you going to hurt me? Please don’t hurt me.”

Of course they were going to hurt him. It was regrettable, but pain purified steam, and the True had to eat. Lobsters also felt pain when they were dropped into pots of boiling water, but that didn’t stop the rubes from doing it. Food was food, and survival was survival.

Rose put her hands behind her back. Into one of these, Greedy G placed a knife. It was short but very sharp. Rose smiled down at the boy and said, “As little as possible.”

The boy lasted a long time. He screamed until his vocal cords ruptured and his cries became husky barks. At one point, Rose paused and looked around. Her hands, long and strong, wore bloody red gloves.

“Something?” Crow asked.

“We’ll talk later,” Rose said, and went back to work. The light of a dozen flashlights had turned a piece of ground behind the ethanol plant into a makeshift operating theater.

Brad Trevor whispered, “Please kill me.”

Rose the Hat gave him a comforting smile. “Soon.”

But it wasn’t.

Those husky barks recommenced, and eventually they turned to steam.

At dawn, they buried the boy’s body. Then they moved on.





CHAPTER SIX

WEIRD RADIO


1

It hadn’t happened in at least three years, but some things you don’t forget. Like when your child begins screaming in the middle of the night. Lucy was on her own because David was attending a two-day conference in Boston, but she knew if he’d been there, he would have raced her down the hall to Abra’s room. He hadn’t forgotten, either.

Their daughter was sitting up in bed, her face pale, her hair standing out in a sleep-scruff all around her head, her eyes wide and staring blankly into space. The sheet—all she needed to sleep under during warm weather—had been pulled free and was balled up around her like a crazy cocoon.

Lucy sat beside her and put an arm around Abra’s shoulders. It was like hugging stone. This was the worst part, before she came all the way out of it. Being ripped from sleep by your daughter’s screams was terrifying, but the nonresponsiveness was worse. Between the ages of five and seven, these night terrors had been fairly common, and Lucy was always afraid that sooner or later the child’s mind would break under the strain. She would continue to breathe, but her eyes would never unlock from whatever world it was that she saw and they couldn’t.

It won’t happen, David had assured her, and John Dalton had doubled down on that. Kids are resilient. If she’s not showing any lingering after-effects—withdrawal, isolation, obsessional behavior, bedwetting—you’re probably okay.

But it wasn’t okay for children to wake themselves, shrieking, from nightmares. It wasn’t okay that sometimes wild piano chords sounded from downstairs in the aftermath, or that the faucets in the bathroom at the end of the hall might turn themselves on, or that the light over Abra’s bed sometimes blew out when she or David flipped the switch.

Then her invisible friend had come, and intervals between nightmares had grown longer. Eventually they stopped. Until tonight. Not that it was night anymore, exactly; Lucy could see the first faint glow on the eastern horizon, and thank God for that.