“Would anyone believe what’s on the flash drive?”
“Annie certainly would,” Tim said, smiling. “She believes in ghosts, UFOs, walk-ins, you name it.”
Luke didn’t smile back. “Yeah, but she’s a little… you know, woo-woo. Although she’s better now that she’s seeing so much of Mr. Denton.”
Tim’s eyebrows went up. “Drummer? What are you telling me, that they’re dating?”
“I guess so, if that’s what you still call it when the people doing it are old.”
“You read this in her mind?”
Luke smiled a little. “No. I’m back to moving pizza pans and fluttering book pages. She told me.” Luke considered. “And I guess it’s all right that I told you. It’s not like she swore me to secrecy, or anything.”
“I’ll be damned. As to the flash drive… you know how you can pull on a loose thread and unravel an entire sweater? I think the flash drive might be like that. There are kids on it people would recognize. A lot of them. It would start an investigation, and any hopes that lisping guy’s organization might have of re-starting their program would go out the window.”
“I don’t think they can do that, anyway. He might think so, but it’s just more magical thinking. The world has changed a lot since the nineteen-fifties. Listen, I’m going to…” He gestured vaguely toward the house and the garden.
“Sure, you go on.”
Luke started away, not walking, exactly, but trudging with his head down.
Tim almost let him go, then changed his mind. He caught up with Luke and took him by the shoulder. When the boy turned, Tim hugged him. He had hugged Nicky—hell, he had hugged them all, sometimes after they awoke from bad dreams—but this one meant more. This one meant the world, at least to Tim. He wanted to tell Luke that he was brave, maybe the bravest kid ever outside of a boys’ adventure book. He wanted to tell Luke that he was strong and decent and his folks would be proud of him. He wanted to tell Luke that he loved him. But there were no words, and maybe no need of them. Or telepathy.
Sometimes a hug was telepathy.
6
Out back, between the stoop and the garden, was a fine old pin oak. Luke Ellis—once of Minneapolis, Minnesota, once loved by Herb and Eileen Ellis, once a friend of Maureen Alvorson, and Kalisha Benson, and Nick Wilholm, and George Iles—sat down beneath it. He put his forearms on his drawn-up knees and looked out toward what Officer Wendy called the Rollercoaster Hills.
Also once a friend of Avery, he thought. Avery was the one who really got them out. If there was a hero, it wasn’t me. It was the Avester.
Luke took the crumpled cigarette box from his pocket and fished out one of the pieces. He thought about seeing Kalisha for the first time, sitting on the floor with one of these in her mouth. Want one? she had asked. A little sugar might help your state of mind. It always helps mine.
“What do you think, Avester? Will it help my state of mind?”
Luke crunched up the piece of candy. It did help, although he had no idea why; there was certainly nothing scientific about it. He peered into the pack and saw two or three more pieces. He could eat them now, but it might be better to wait.
Better to save some for later.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A few words if you please, Constant Reader, about Russ Dorr.
I met him over forty years ago—well over—in the town of Bridgton, Maine, where he was the single physicians’ assistant in the three-doc medical center. He saw to most of my family’s minor medical problems, everything from stomach flu to the kids’ ear infections. His standard witticism for fever was clear liquids—“just gin and vodka.” He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I wrote novels and short stories, mostly scary ones about psychic phenomena, vampires, and other assorted monsters.
“Sorry, I don’t read stuff like that,” he said, neither of us knowing that he would eventually read everything I wrote, usually in manuscript and often while various works were in progress. Other than my wife, he was the only one who saw my fiction before it was fully dressed and ready for its close-up.
I began to ask him questions, first about medical matters. Russ was the one who told me about how the flu changes from year to year, making each new vaccine obsolete (that was for The Stand ). He gave me a list of exercises to keep the muscles of comatose patients from wasting away (that was for The Dead Zone). He patiently explained how animals contracted rabies, and how the disease progressed (for Cujo).
His remit gradually expanded, and when he retired from medicine, he became my full-time research assistant. We visited the Texas School Book Depository together for 11/22/63—a book I literally could not have written without him—and while I absorbed the gestalt of the place (looking for ghosts… and finding them), Russ took pictures and made measurements. When we went to the Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald was captured, it was Russ who asked what was playing that day (a double feature consisting of Cry of Battle and War is Hell ).
On Under the Dome he gathered reams of information about the micro ecosystem I was trying to create, from the capacity of electricity generators to how long food supplies might last, but the thing he was most proud of came when I asked if he could think of an air supply for my characters—something like SCUBA tanks—that would last for five minutes or so. It was for the climax of the book, and I was stumped. So was Russ, until he was stuck in traffic one day, and took a good look at the cars all around him.
“Tires,” he told me. “Tires have air in them. It would be stale and nasty-tasting, but it would be breathable.” And so, dear readers, tires it was.
Russ’s fingerprints are all over the book you have just read, from the BDNF tests for newborns (yes, it’s a real thing, only a bit fictionalized), to how poison gas could be created from common household products (don’t try this at home, kids). He vetted every line and fact, helping me toward what has always been my goaclass="underline" making the impossible plausible. He was a big, blond, broad-shouldered man who loved a joke and a beer and shooting off bottle rockets on the Fourth of July. He raised two wonderful daughters and saw his wife through her final lingering illness. We worked together, but he was also my friend. We were simpatico. Never had a single argument.
Russ died of kidney failure in the fall of 2018, and I miss him like hell. Sure, when I need information (lately it’s been elevators and first-generation iPhones), but a lot more when I forget he’s gone and think, “Hey, I should give Russ a call or drop him an email, ask what’s going on.” This book is dedicated to my grandsons, because it’s mostly about kids, but it’s Russ I’m thinking about as I put it to bed. It’s very hard to let old friends go.
I miss you, buddy.
Before I quit, Constant Reader, I should thank the usual suspects: Chuck Verrill, my agent; Chris Lotts, who deals with foreign rights and found a dozen different ways to say Do you hear me; Rand Holsten, who does movie deals (lately there’s been a lot of them); and Katie Monaghan, who handles publicity for Scribner. And a huge thank-you to Nan Graham, who edited a book that’s full of many moving parts, parallel timelines, and dozens of characters. She made it a better book. I also need to thank Marsha DeFilippo, Julie Eugley, and Barbara MacIntyre, who take the calls, make the appointments, and give me those vital hours I use each day to write.