The Dead Zone(34)

'Come on back, chicken!' Norm called, and made a series of high gobbling sounds.

Charlie didn't rise to the bait. There was no sign of him now, but the path descended steeply as it went down toward the brook. Norm gobbled again and shifted irresolutely from one foot to the other. These were Charlie's woods, not his. Charlie's territory. Norm loved a good snowball fight when he was winning, but he didn't really want to go down there if Charlie was lying in ambush for him with half a dozen good hard slushballs all ready to go.

Nonetheless he had taken half a dozen steps down the path when a high, breathless scream rose from below.

Norm Lawson went as cold as the snow his green gum-rubber boots were planted in. The two snowballs he had been holding dropped from his hands and plopped to the ground. The scream rose again, so thin it was barely audible.

Jeepers-creepers, he went and fell in the brook, Norm thought, and that broke the paralysis of his fear. He ran down the path, slipping and sliding, falling right on his can once. His heartbeat roared in his ears. Part of his mind saw him fishing Charlie from the brook just before he went down for the third time and getting written up in Boys' Life as a hero.

Three-quarters of the way down the slope the path dog-legged, and when he got around the corner he saw that Charlie Norton hadn't fallen in Strimmer's Brook after all. He was standing at the place where the path levelled out, and he was staring at something in the melting snow. His hood had fallen back and his face was nearly as white as the snow itself. As Norm approached, he uttered that horrible gasping out-of-breath scream again.

'What is it?' Norm asked, approaching. 'Charlie, what's wrong?'

Charlie turned to him, his eyes huge, his mouth gaping. He tried to speak but nothing came out of his mouth but two inarticulate grunts and a silver cord of saliva. He pointed instead.

Norm came closer and looked. Suddenly all the strength went out of his legs and he sat down hard. The world swam around him.

Protruding from the melting snow were two legs clad in blue jeans. There was a loafer on one foot, but the other was bare, white, and defenseless. One arm stuck out of the snow, and the hand at the end of it seemed to plead for a rescue that had never come. The rest of the body was still mercifully hidden.

Charlie and Norm had discovered the body of seventeen-year old Carol Dunbarger, the fourth victim of the Castle Rock Strangler.

It had been almost two years since he had last killed, and the people of Castle Rock (Strimmer's Brook formed the southern borderline between the towns of Castle Rock and Otisfield) had begun to relax, thinking the nightmare was finally over.

It wasn't.

Chapter Six

1.

Eleven days after the discovery of the Dunbarger girl's body, a sleet-and-ice storm struck northern New England. On the sixth floor of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, everything was running just a little bit late in consequence. A lot of the staff had run into problems getting to work, and those that made it found themselves running hard just to stay even.

It was after nine am when one of the aides, a young woman named Allison Conover, brought Mr. Starret his light breakfast. Mr. Starret was recovering from a heart attack and was 'doing his sixteen' in intensive care - a sixteen-day stay following a coronary was standard operating procedure. Mr. Starret was doing nicely. He was in room 619, and he had told his wife privately that the biggest incentive to his recovery was the prospect of getting away from the living corpse in the room's second bed. The steady whisper of the poor guy's respirator made it hard to sleep, he told her. After a while it got so you didn't know if you wanted it to go on whispering or stop. Stop dead, so to speak.

The TV was on when Allison came in. Mr. Starret was sitting up in bed with his control button in one hand. 'Today' had ended, and Mr. Starret had not yet decided to blank out 'My Back Yard', the cartoon show that followed it. That would have left him alone with the sound of Johnny's respirator.

'I'd about given up on you this morning,' Mr. Starret said, looking at his breakfast tray of orange juice, plain yoghurt, and wheat flakes with no great joy. What he really craved was two cholesterol-filled eggs, fried over easy and sweating butter, with five slices of bacon on the side, not too crisp. The sort of fare that had, in fact, landed him here in the first place. At least according to his doctor - the birdbrain.

'The going's bad outside,' Allison said shortly. Six patients had already told her they had about given up on her this morning, and the line was getting old. Allison was a pleasant girl, but this morning she was feeling harried.

'Oh, sorry,' Mr. Starret said humbly. 'Pretty slippery on the roads, is it?'

'It sure is,' Allison said, thawing slightly. 'If I didn't have my husband's four-wheel drive today, I never would have made it.'

Mr. Starret pushed the button that raised his bed so he could eat his breakfast comfortably. The electric motor that raised and lowered it was small but loud. The TV was still quite loud - Mr. Starret was a little deaf, and as he had told his wife, the guy in the other bed had never complained about a little extra volume. Never asked to see what was on the other channel either. He supposed a joke like that was in pretty poor taste, but when you'd had a heart attack and wound up in intensive care sharing a room with a human vegetable, you either learned a little black humor or you went crazy.

Allison raised her voice a little to be heard over the whining motor and the TV as she finished setting up Mr. Starret's tray. 'There were cars off the road all up and down State Street hill.'