So this afternoon she drank a whole bottle of crème de menthe and then got sick and threw up in the bathroom and then went to bed and lit a cigarette and fell asleep and burned the house down and she didn't have to think about it anymore, ever. The wind had freshened, and she also burned down most of Clewiston. No great loss.
Arthur Stimson lived in Reno, Nevada. On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, after swimming in Lake Tahoe, he stepped on a rusty nail. The wound turned gangrenous. He diagnosed the trouble by smell and tried to amputate his foot. Halfway through the operation he fainted and died of shock and blood loss in the lobby of Toby Harrah's gambling casino, where he had attempted the operation.
In Swanville, Maine, a ten-year-old girl named Candice Moran fell off her bike and died of a fractured skull.
Milton Craslow, a rancher in Harding County, New Mexico, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died half an hour later.
In Milltown, Kentucky, Judy Horton was quite pleased with events. Judy was seventeen years old and pretty. Two years before, she had made two serious mistakes: she had allowed herself to get pregnant, and she had allowed her parents to talk her into marrying the boy responsible, a four-eyes engineering student from the state university. At fifteen she had been flattered just to be asked out by a college man (even if he was only a freshman) and for the life of her she couldn't remember why she had allowed Waldo-Waldo Horton, what a yuck name-to "work his will" on her. And if she was going to be knocked up, why did it have to be him? Judy had also allowed Steve Phillips and Mark Collins to "work their will" on her; they were both on the Milltown High football team (the Milltown Cougars, to be exact, fight-fight-fight-fight-for-the-dear-blue-and-white) and she was a cheerleader. If it hadn't been for yucky old Waldo Horton, she would have made head cheerleader her junior year, easy. And, getting back to the point, either Steve or Mark would have made more acceptable husbands. They both had broad shoulders and Mark had stone bitchin shoulder-length blond hair. But it was Waldo, it could have been no one but Waldo. All she had to do was look in her diary and do the arithmetic. And after the baby came she wouldn't have even had to do that. It looked just like him. Yucky.
So for two long years she had struggled along, through a variety of crummy jobs in fast food restaurants and motels, while Waldo went to school. It got so she hated Waldo's school most of all, even more than the baby and Waldo himself. If he wanted a family so bad, why couldn't he get out and work? She had. But her parents and his wouldn't allow it. Alone, Judy could have sweet-talked him into it (she would have gotten him to promise before she let him touch her in bed), but all four of the in-laws had their noses in things all the time. Oh Judy, things will be so much better when Waldo has a good job. Oh Judy, things would look so much brighter if you'd go to church more often. Oh Judy, eat shit and keep smiling until you get it down. Until you get it all down.
Then the superflu had come along and had solved all her problems. Her parents had died, her little boy Petie had died (that was sort of sad, but she got over it in a couple of days), then Waldo's parents had died, and finally Waldo himself had died and she was free. The thought that she herself might die had never crossed her mind, and of course she didn't.
They had been living in a large and rambling apartment house in downtown Milltown. One of the features of the place that sold Waldo on it (Judy, of course, didn't have a say) was a large walk-in meat freezer in the basement. They had taken the apartment in September of 1988, and their apartment was on the third floor, and who always seemed to get stuck taking the roast and the hamburger down to the freezer? Three guesses and the first two don't count. Waldo and Petie had died at home. By that time you couldn't get hospital service unless you were a bigwig and the mortuaries were swamped (creepy old places anyway, Judy wouldn't go near one on a bet), but the power was still on. So she had taken them downstairs and put them in the freezer.
The power had gone off in Milltown three days ago, but it was still fairly cool down there. Judy knew because she went down to look at their dead bodies three or four times a day. She told herself she was just checking. What else could it be? Surely she wasn't gloating?
She went down on the afternoon of July 2 and forgot to put the rubber wedge under the freezer door. The door swung shut behind her and latched. It was then that she noticed, after two years of coming and going down here, that there was no inside knob on the freezer door. By then it was too warm to freeze, but not too cold to starve. So Judy Horton died in the company of her son and husband after all.
Jim Lee of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, hooked up all the electrical outlets in his house to a gasoline generator and then electrocuted himself trying to start it up.
Richard Hoggins was a young black man who had lived his entire life in Detroit, Michigan. He had been addicted to the fine white powder he called "hehrawn" for the last five years. During the actual superflu epidemic, he had gone through extreme withdrawal as all the pushers and users he knew died or fled.
On this bright summer afternoon he was sitting on a littered stoop, drinking a warm 7-Up and wishing he had a pop, just a small, minor skinpop.
He began to think about Allie McFarlane, and something he had heard about Allie on the streets, just before the shit hit the fan. People were saying that Allie, who was about the third-biggest in Detroit, had just gotten a fine shipment. Everybody was going to get well. None of that brown shit. China White, all kinds of the stuff.
Richie didn't know for sure where McFarlane would keep a big order like that-it wasn't healthy to know about such things-but he had heard it said at different times in passing that if the cops ever got a search-writ for the Grosse Pointe house that Allie had bought for his great-uncle, Allie would go away until the new moon turned to gold.
Richie decided to take a walk up to Grosse Pointe. After all, there was nothing better to do.
He got the Lake Shore Drive address of one Erin D. McFarlane from the Detroit phone book and walked out there. It was almost dark by the time he made it and his feet hurt. He was no longer trying to tell himself that this was just a casual stroll; he wanted to shoot and he wanted to bad.
There was a gray fieldstone wall around the estate and Richie went over it like a black shadow, cutting his hands on the broken glass embedded in the top. When he broke a window to gain entry, a burglar alarm went off, causing him to flee halfway down the lawn before he remembered there were no cops to answer. He came back, jittery and slicked with sweat.
The main power was off, and there were easily twenty rooms in the fucking place. He'd have to wait until tomorrow to look properly, and it would still take three weeks to dump the place upside down in the proper way. And the stuff probably wasn't even here. Christ. Richie felt sick despair wave through him. But he would at least look in the obvious places.
And in the upstairs bathroom, he found a dozen large plastic bags bulging with white powder. They were in the toilet tank, that old standby. Richie stared at them, sick with desire, dimly thinking that Allie must have been greasing all the right people if he could afford to leave a stash like this in a fucking toilet tank. There was enough dope here to last one man sixteen centuries.
He took one bag into the master bedroom and broke it open on the bedspread. His hands trembled as he got his works out and cooked up. It never occurred to him to wonder how much this stuff was cut. On the street the heaviest hit Richie had ever taken was 12 percent pure, and that had put him into a sleep so deep it was nearly a coma. He hadn't even nodded. Just bang and off he went, outta the blue and into the black.
He injected himself above the elbow and pushed the plunger of his spike home. The stuff was almost 96 percent pure. It hit his bloodstream like a highballing freight and Richie fell down on the bags of heroin, flouring the front of his shirt with it. He was dead six minutes later.
No great loss.
Chapter 39
Lloyd Henreid was down on his knees. He was humming and grinning. Every now and then he would forget what he had been humming and the grin would fade and he would sob a little bit, and then he would forget he was crying and go on humming. The song he was humming was "Camptown Races." Every now and then, instead of humming or sobbing, he would whisper "Doo-dah, doo-dah" under his breath. The holding cellblock was utterly quiet except for the humming, the sobbing, the occasional doo-dah, and the soft scrape of the cotleg as Lloyd fumbled with it. He was trying to turn Trask's body around so he could get at the leg. Please, waiter, bring me some more of that cole slaw and another leg.
Lloyd looked like a man who had embarked upon a radical crash diet. His prison coverall hung on his body like a limp sail. The last meal served in the holding cellblock had been lunch eight days ago. Lloyd's skin was stretched tightly across his face, limning every curve and angle of the skull beneath. His eyes were bright and glittering. His lips had drawn back from his teeth. He had an oddly piebald look, because his hair had begun to fall out in clumps. He looked crazy.
"Doo-dah, doo-dah," Lloyd whispered as he fished with his cotleg. Once upon a time he hadn't known why he had bothered hurting his fingers to unscrew the damn thing. Once upon a time he had thought he had known what real hunger was. That hunger had been nothing but a slight edge to the appetite when compared with this.