Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(92)

You are going to pay for that, princess. You just messed in with the wrong bitch.

A shape was moving toward her. Rose had settled on the top step of her RV, but now she stood up, tense, ready for anything. Then the shape got closer and she saw it was Crow. He was dressed in pajama bottoms and slippers.

“Rose, I think you better—” He stopped. “What the hell happened to your hand?”

“Never mind my f**king hand,” she snapped. “What are you doing here at two in the morning? Especially when you knew I was apt to be busy?”

“It’s Grampa Flick,” Crow said. “Apron Annie says he’s dying.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THOME 25

1

Instead of pine-scented air freshener and Alcazar cigars, Grampa Flick’s Fleetwood this morning smelled of shit, disease, and death. It was also crowded. There were at least a dozen members of the True Knot present, some gathered around the old man’s bed, many more sitting or standing in the living room, drinking coffee. The rest were outside. Everyone looked stunned and uneasy. The True wasn’t used to death among their own.

“Clear out,” Rose said. “Crow and Nut—you stay.”

“Look at him,” Petty the Chink said in a trembling voice. “Them spots! And ’e’s cycling like crazy, Rose! Oh, this is ’orrible!”

“Go on,” Rose said. She spoke gently and gave Petty a comforting squeeze on the shoulder when what she felt like doing was kicking her fat Cockney ass right out the door. She was a lazy gossip, good for nothing but warming Barry’s bed, and probably not very good at that. Rose guessed that nagging was more Petty’s specialty. When she wasn’t scared out of her mind, that is.

“Come on, folks,” Crow said. “If he is going to die, he doesn’t need to do it with an audience.”

“He’ll pull through,” Harpman Sam said. “Tougher’n a boiled owl, that’s Grampa Flick.” But he put his arm around Baba the Russian, who looked devastated, and hugged her tight against him for a moment.

They got moving, some taking a last look back over their shoulders before going down the steps to join the others. When it was just the three of them, Rose approached the bed.

Grampa Flick stared up at her without seeing her. His lips had pulled back from his gums. Great patches of his fine white hair had fallen out on the pillowcase, giving him the look of a distempered dog. His eyes were huge and wet and filled with pain. He was na**d except for a pair of boxer shorts, and his scrawny body was stippled with red marks that looked like pimples or insect bites.

She turned to Walnut and said, “What in hell are those?”

“Koplik’s spots,” he said. “That’s what they look like to me, anyway. Although Koplik’s are usually just inside the mouth.”

“Talk English.”

Nut ran his hands through his thinning hair. “I think he’s got the measles.”

Rose gaped in shock, then barked laughter. She didn’t want to stand here listening to this shit; she wanted some aspirin for her hand, which sent out a pain-pulse with every beat of her heart. She kept thinking about how the hands of cartoon characters looked when they got whopped with a mallet. “We don’t catch rube diseases!”

“Well . . . we never used to.”

She stared at him furiously. She wanted her hat, she felt na**d without it, but it was back in the EarthCruiser.

Nut said, “I can only tell you what I see, which is red measles, also known as rubeola.”

A rube disease called rubeola. How too f**king perfect.

“That is just . . . horseshit!”

He flinched, and why not? She sounded strident even to herself, but . . . ah, Jesus God, measles? The oldest member of the True Knot dying of a childhood disease even children didn’t catch anymore?

“That baseball-playing kid from Iowa had a few spots on him, but I never thought . . . because yeah, it’s like you say. We don’t catch their diseases.”

“He was years ago!”

“I know. All I can think is that it was in the steam, and it kind of hibernated. There are diseases that do that, you know. Lie passive, sometimes for years, then break out.”

“Maybe with rubes!” She kept coming back to that.

Walnut only shook his head.

“If Gramp’s got it, why don’t we all have it? Because those childhood diseases—chicken pox, measles, mumps—run through rube kids like shit through a goose. It doesn’t make sense.” Then she turned to Crow Daddy and promptly contradicted herself. “What the f**k were you thinking when you let a bunch of them in to stand around and breathe his air?”

Crow just shrugged, his eyes never leaving the shivering old man on the bed. Crow’s narrow, handsome face was pensive.

“Things change,” Nut said. “Just because we had immunity to rube diseases fifty or a hundred years ago doesn’t mean we have it now. For all we know, this could be part of a natural process.”

“Are you telling me there’s anything natural about that?” She pointed to Grampa Flick.

“A single case doesn’t make an epidemic,” Nut said, “and it could be something else. But if this happens again, we’ll have to put whoever it happens to in complete quarantine.”

“Would it help?”