Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(68)

David started toward the front door, then turned to look up at her. “You’re not scared, are you? You don’t have to be. It’s over.”

Abra only wished it was.

9

Rose the Hat was doing a double shop, because Grampa Flick was feeling poorly again. She saw a few other members of the True in Sam’s, and nodded to them. She stopped awhile in canned goods to talk to Barry the Chink, who had his wife’s list in one hand. Barry was concerned about Flick.

“He’ll bounce back,” Rose said. “You know Grampa.”

Barry grinned. “Tougher’n a boiled owl.”

Rose nodded and got her cart rolling again. “You bet he is.”

Just an ordinary weekday afternoon at the supermarket, and as she took her leave of Barry, she at first mistook what was happening to her for something mundane, maybe low sugar. She was prone to sugar crashes, and usually kept a candybar in her purse. Then she realized someone was inside her head. Someone was looking.

Rose had not risen to her position as head of the True Knot by being indecisive. She halted with her cart pointed toward the meat counter (her planned next stop) and immediately leaped into the conduit some nosy and potentially dangerous person had established. Not a member of the True, she would have known any one of them immediately, but not an ordinary rube, either.

No, this was far from ordinary.

The market swung away and suddenly she was looking out at a mountain range. Not the Rockies, she would have recognized those. These were smaller. The Catskills? The Adirondacks? It could have been either, or some other. As for the looker . . . Rose thought it was a child. Almost certainly a girl, and one she had encountered before.

I have to see what she looks like, then I can find her anytime I want to. I have to get her to look in a mir—

But then a thought as loud as a shotgun blast in a closed room

(NO! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!)

wiped her mind clean and sent her staggering against shelves of canned soups and vegetables. They went cascading to the floor, rolling everywhere. For a moment or two Rose thought she was going to follow them, swooning like the dewy heroine of a romance novel. Then she was back. The girl had broken the connection, and in rather spectacular fashion.

Was her nose bleeding? She wiped it with her fingers and checked. No. Good.

One of the stockboys came rushing up. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

“Fine. Just felt a little faint for a second or two. Probably from the tooth extraction I had yesterday. It’s passed off now. I’ve made a mess, haven’t I? Sorry. Good thing it was cans instead of bottles.”

“No problem, no problem at all. Would you like to come up front and sit down on the taxi bench?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Rose said. And it wasn’t, but she was done shopping for the day. She rolled her cart two aisles over and left it there.

10

She had brought her Tacoma (old but reliable) down from the high-country campground west of Sidewinder, and once she was in the cab, she pulled her phone out of her purse and hit speed dial. It rang at the other end just a single time.

“What’s up, Rosie-girl?” Crow Daddy.

“We’ve got a problem.”

Of course it was also an opportunity. A kid with enough in her boiler to set off a blast like that—to not only detect Rose but send her reeling—wasn’t just a steamhead but the find of the century. She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.

“Talk to me.” All business now.

“A little over two years ago. The kid in Iowa. Remember him?”

“Sure.”

“You also remember me telling you we had a looker?”

“Yeah. East Coast. You thought it was probably a girl.”

“It was a girl, all right. She just found me again. I was in Sam’s, minding my own business, and then all at once there she was.”

“Why, after all this time?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. But we have to have her, Crow. We have to have her.”

“Does she know who you are? Where we are?”

Rose had thought about this while walking to the truck. The intruder hadn’t seen her, of that much she was sure. The kid had been on the inside looking out. As to what she had seen? A supermarket aisle. How many of those were there in America? Probably a million.

“I don’t think so, but that’s not the important part.”

“Then what is?”

“Remember me telling you she was big steam? Huge steam? Well, she’s even bigger than that. When I tried to turn it around on her, she blew me out of her head like I was a piece of milkweed fluff. Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before. I would have said it was impossible.”

“Is she potential True or potential food?”

“I don’t know.” But she did. They needed steam—stored steam—a lot more than they needed fresh recruits. Besides, Rose wanted no one in the True with that much power.

“Okay, how do we find her? Any ideas?”

Rose thought of what she’d seen through the girl’s eyes before she had been so unceremoniously booted back to Sam’s Supermarket in Sidewinder. Not much, but there had been a store . . .

She said, “The kids call it the Lickety-Spliff.”

“Huh?”