The Dead Zone

1.

Hospital to hospital, Johnny thought dreamily, flying gently along on the small blue pill he had taken just be-fore he and Sam left the EMMC and climbed into Sam's '75 El Dorado. Hospital to hospital, person to person, station to station.

In a queer, secret way, he enjoyed the trip - it was his first time out of the hospital in almost five years. The night was clear, the Milky Way sprawled across the sky in an unwinding clockspring of light, a half-moon followed them over the dark tree line as they fled south through Palmyra, Newport, Pittsfield, Benton, Clinton. The car whispered along in near total silence. Low music, Haydn, issued from the four speakers of the stereo tape player.

Came to one hospital in the Cleaves Mills Rescue Squad ambulance, went to another in a Cadillac, he thought. He didn't let it bother him. It was just enough to ride, to float along on the track, to let the problem of his mother, his new ability, and the people who wanted to pry into his soul (He asked for it ... just don't touch me, huh?) rest in a temporary limbo. Weizak didn't talk. Occasionally he hummed snatches of the music.

Johnny watched the stars. He watched the turnpike, nearly deserted this late. It unrolled ceaselessly in front of them. They went through the tollgate at Augusta and Weizak took a time-and-toll ticket. Then they went on again - Gardener, Sabbatus, Lewiston.

Nearly five years, longer than some convicted murderers spend in the slam.

He slept.

Dreamed.

'Johnny,' his mother said in his dream. 'Johnny, make me better, make me well.' She was in a beggar's rags. She was crawling toward him over cobblestones. Her face was white. Thin blood ran from her knees. White lice squirmed in her thin hair. She held shaking hands out to him. 'It's the power of God working in you,' she said. 'It's a great responsibility, Johnny. A great trust. You must be worthy.'

He took her hands, closed his own over them, and said, 'Spirits, depart from this woman.'

She stood up. 'Healed!' she cried in a voice that was filled with a strange and terrible triumph. 'Healed! My son has healed me! His work is great upon the earth!'

He tried to protest, to tell her that he didn't want to do great works, or heal, or speak in tongues, to divine the future, or find those things that had been lost. He tried to tell her, but his tongue wouldn't obey the command of his brain. Then she was past him, striding off down the cobbled street, her posture cringing and servile but somehow arrogant at the same time; her voice belled like a clarion: 'Saved! Savior! Saved! Savior!'

And to his horror he saw that there had been thousands of others behind her, maybe millions, all of them maimed or deformed or in terror. The stout lady reporter was there, needing to know who the Democrats would nominate for the presidency in 1976; there was a death-eyed farmer in biballs with a picture of his son, a smiling young man in Air Force blues, who had been reported MIA over Hanoi in 1972, he needed to know if his son was dead or alive; a young woman who looked like Sarah with tears on her smooth cheeks, holding up a baby with a hydrocephalic head on which blue veins were traced like runes of doom; an old man with his fingers turned into clubs by arthritis; others. They stretched for miles, they would wait patiently, they would kill him with their mute, bludgeoning need.

'Saved!' His mother's voice carried back imperatively. 'Savior! Saved! Saved!'

He tried to tell them that he could neither heal nor save, but before he could open his mouth to make the denial, the first had laid hands on him and was shaking him.

The shaking was real enough. It was Weizak's hand on his arm. Bright orange light filled the car, turning the interior as bright as day it was nightmare light, turning Sam's kind face into the face of a hobgoblin. For a moment he thought the nightmare was still going on and then he saw the light was coming from parking-lot lamps. They had changed those, too, apparently, while he was in his coma. From hard white to a weird orange that lay on the skin like paint.

'Where are we?' he asked thickly.

'The hospital,' Sam said. 'Cumberland General.'

'Oh. All right.'

He sat up. The dream seemed to slide off him in fragments, still littering the floor of his mind like something broken and not yet swept up.

'Are you ready to go in?'

'Yes,' Johnny said.

They crossed the parking lot amid the soft creak of summer crickets in the woods. Fireflies stitched through the darkness. The image of his mother was very much on him - but not so much that he was unable to enjoy the soft and fragrant smell of the night and the feel of the faint breeze against his skin. There was time to enjoy the health of the night, and the feeling of health coming inside him. In the context of why he was here, the thought seemed almost obscene - but only almost. And it wouldn't go away.

2.

Herb came down the hallway to meet them, and Johnny saw that his father was wearing old pants, shoes with no socks, and his pajama shirt. It told Johnny a lot about the suddenness with which it had come. It told him more than he wanted to know.

'Son,' he said. He looked smaller, somehow. He tried to say more and couldn't. Johnny hugged him and Herb burst into tears. He sobbed against Johnny's shirt.

'Daddy,' he said. 'That's all right, Daddy, that's all right.'

His father put his arms on Johnny's shoulders and wept. Weizak turned away and began to inspect the pictures on the walls, indifferent water colors by local artists.

Herb began to recover himself. He swiped his arm across his eyes and said, 'Look at me, still in my pi top. I had time to change before the ambulance came. I guess I never thought of it. Must be getting senile.'

'No, you're not.'

'Well.' He shrugged. 'Your doctor friend brought you down? That was nice of you, Dr. Weizak.'

Sam shrugged. 'It was nothing.'

Johnny and his father walked toward the small waiting room and sat down. 'Daddy, is she...'

'She's sinking,' Herb said. He seemed calmer now. 'Conscious, but sinking. She's been asking for you,

Johnny. I think she's been holding on for you.'

'My fault,' Johnny said. 'All this is my-...'

The pain in his ear startled him, and he stared at his father, astonished. Herb had seized his ear and twisted it firmly. So much for the role reversal of having his father cry in his arms. The old twist-the-ear trick had been a punishment Herb had reserved for the gravest of errors. Johnny couldn't remember having his ear twisted since he was thirteen, and had gotten fooling around with their old Rambler. He had inadvertently pushed in the clutch and the old car had rumbled silently downhill to crash into their back shed.

'Don't you ever say that,' Herb said.

'Jeez Dad!'

Herb let go, a little smile lurking just below the corners of his mouth. 'Forgot all about the old twist-the-ear, huh? Probably thought I had, too. No such luck, Johnny.'

Johnny stared at his father, still dumbfounded.

'Don't you ever blame yourself.'

'But she was watching that damned...

'News, yes. She was ecstatic, she was thrilled ... then she was on the floor, her poor old mouth opening and closing like she was a fish out of water.' Herb leaned closer to his son. 'The doctor won't come right out and tell me, but he asked me about "heroic measures". I told him none of that stuff. She committed her own kind of sin, Johnny. She presumed to know the mind of God. So don't you ever blame yourself for her mistake.' Fresh tears glinted in his eyes. His voice roughened. 'God knows I spent my life loving her and it got hard in the late going. Maybe this is just the best thing.'

'Can I see her?'

'Yes, she's at the end of the hall, Room ~ They're expecting you, and so is she. Just one thing, Johnny. Agree with anything and everything she might say. Don't... let her die thinking it was all for nothing.'

'No.' He paused. 'Are you coming with me?'

'Not now. Maybe later.'

Johnny nodded and walked up the hall. The lights were turned down low for the nighttime. The brief moment in the soft, kind summer night seemed far away now, but his nightmare in the car seemed very close.

Room 35. VERA HELEN SMITH, the little card on the door read. Had he known her middle name was Helen? It seemed he must have, although he couldn't remember. But he could remember other things: her bringing him an ice-cream bar wrapped in her handkerchief one bright summer day at Old Orchard Beach, smiling and gay. He and his mother and father playing rummy for matches - later, after the religion business began to deepen its hold on her, she wouldn't have cards in the house, not even to play cribbage with. He remembered the day the bee had stung him and he ran to her, bawling his head off, and she had kissed the swelling and pulled out the stinger with tweezers and then had wrapped the wound in a strip of cloth that had been dipped in baking soda.

He pushed the door open and went in. She was a vague hump in the bed and Johnny thought, That's what I looked like. A nurse was taking her pulse; she turned when the door opened and the dim hall lights flashed on her spectacles.

'Are you Mrs. Smith's son?'

'Yes.'

'Johnny?' The voice rose from the hump in the bed, dry and hollow, rattling with death as a few pebbles will rattle in an empty gourd. The voice - God help him -made his skin crawl. He moved closer. Her face was twisted into a snarling mask on the left-hand side. The hand on the counterpane was a claw. Stroke, he thought. What the old people call a shock. Yes. That's better. That's what she looks like. Like she's had a bad shock.

'Is that you, John?'

'It's me, Ma.'

'Johnny? Is that you?'

'Yes, Ma.'

He came closer yet, and forced himself to take the bony claw.

'I want my Johnny,' she said querulously.

The nurse shot him a pitying look, and he found him-self wanting to smash his fist through it.

'Would you leave us alone?' he asked.

'I really shouldn't while...'

'Come on, she's my mother and I want some time alone with her,' Johnny said. 'What about it?'

'Well...'

'Bring me my juice, Dad!' his mother cried hoarsely. 'Feel like I could drink a quart!'

'Would you get out of here?' he cried at the nurse. He was filled with a terrible sorrow of which he could not even find the focus. It seemed like a whirlpool going down into darkness.

The nurse left.

'Ma,' he said, sitting beside her. That weird feeling of doubled time, of reversal, would not leave him. How many times had she sat over his bed like this, perhaps holding his dry hand and talking to him? He recalled the timeless period when the room had seemed so close to him - seen through a gauzy placental membrane, his mother's face bending over him, thundering senseless sounds slowly into his upturned face.

'Ma,' he said again, and kissed the hook that had replaced her hand.

'Gimme those nails, I can do that,' she said. Her left eye seemed frozen in its orbit; the other rolled wildly. It was the eye of a gutshot horse. 'I want Johnny.'

'Ma, I'm here.'

'John-ny! John-ny! JOHN-NY!'

'Ma,' he said, afraid the nurse would come back.

'You ...' She broke off and her head turned toward him a little. 'Bend over here where I can see,' she whispered.

He did as she asked.

'You came,' she said. 'Thank you. Thank you.' Tears began to ooze from the good eye. The bad one, the one on the side of her face that had been frozen by the shock, stared indifferently upward.

'Sure I came.'

'I saw you,' she whispered. 'What a power God has given you, Johnny! Didn't I tell you? Didn't I say it was so?'

'Yes, you did.'

'He has a job for you,' she said. 'Don't run from him, Johnny. Don't hide away in a cave like Elijah or make him send a big fish to swallow you up. Don't do that, John.'

'No. I won't.' He held her claw-hand. His head throbbed.

'Not the potter but the potter's clay, John. Remember.'

'All right.'

'Remember that!' she said stridently, and he thought, She's going back into nonsense land. But she didn't; at least she went no further into nonsense land than she had been since he came out of his coma.

'Heed the still, small voice when it comes,' she said.

'Yes, Ma. I will.'

Her head turned a tiny bit on the pillow, and - was she smiling?

'You think I'm crazy, I guess.' She twisted her head a little more, so she could look directly at him. 'But that doesn't matter. You'll know the voice when it comes. It'll tell you what to do. It told Jeremiah and Daniel and Amos and Abraham. It'll come to you. It'll tell you. And when it does, Johnny... do your duty.'

'Okay, Ma.'

'What a power,' she murmured. Her voice was growing furry and indistinct. 'What a power God has given you... I knew ... I always knew...' Her voice trailed off. The good eye closed. The other stared blankly forward.

Johnny sat with her another five minutes, then got up to leave. His hand was on the doorknob and he was easing the door open when her dry, rattling voice came again, chilling him with its implacable, positive command.

'Do your duty, John.'

'Yes, Ma.'

It was the last time he ever spoke to her. She died at five minutes past eight on the morning of August 20. Somewhere north of them, Walt and Sarah Hazlett were having a discussion about Johnny that was almost an argument, and somewhere south of them, Greg Stillson was cutting himself some prime asshole.