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  “He really loves her,” Luke said.

  Yes, Tim thought, and so do you.

  But Luke wasn’t the first boy to find himself odd man out in a lovers’ triangle, and he wouldn’t be the last. And was lovers the right word? Luke was brilliant, but he was also twelve. His feelings for Kalisha would pass like a fever, although it would be useless to tell him that. He would remember, though, just as Tim remembered the girl he’d been crazy about at twelve (she had been sixteen, and light-years beyond him). Just as Kalisha would remember Nicky, the handsome one who had fought.

  “She loves you, too,” Wendy said softly, and put a light squeeze on the back of Luke’s sunburned neck.

  “Not the same way,” Luke said glumly, but then he smiled. “What the hell, life goes on.”

  “You better get the car,” Tim said to Wendy. “That bus won’t wait.”

  She got the car. Luke rode down to the mailbox with her, then stood with Kalisha. They waved as the car pulled away. Nicky’s hand came out the window and waved back. Then they were gone. In Nick’s right front pocket—the one that was hardest for some bus station sharpie to pick—was seventy dollars in cash and a phone card. In his shoe was a key.

  Luke and Kalisha walked up the driveway together. Halfway there, Kalisha put her hands to her face and started to cry. Tim started to go down, then thought better of it. This was Luke’s job. And he did it, putting his arms around her. Because she was taller, she rested her head on his head, rather than on his shoulder.

  Tim heard the hum, now nothing but a low whisper. They were talking, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying, and that was all right. It wasn’t for him.

  4

  Two weeks later, it was Kalisha’s turn to go, not to the bus station in Brunswick but the one in Greenville. She would arrive in Chicago late the following day, and call her sister in Houston from the Navy Pier. Wendy had gifted her with a small beaded purse. In it was seventy dollars and a phone card. There was a key, identical to Nicky’s, in one of her sneakers. The money and phone card could be stolen; the key, never.

  She hugged Tim hard. “That’s not enough thanks for what you did, but I don’t have anything else.”

  “It’s enough,” Tim said.

  “I hope the world doesn’t end because of us.”

  “I’m going to tell you this one last time, Sha—if someone pushes the big red button, it won’t be you.”

  She smiled wanly. “When we were together at the end, we had a big red button to end all big red buttons. And it felt good to push it. That’s what haunts me. How good it felt.”

  “But that’s over.”

  “Yes. It’s all going away, and I’m glad. No one should have power like that, especially not kids.”

  Tim thought that some of the people who could push the big red button were kids, in mind if not in body, but didn’t say so. She was facing an unknown and uncertain future, and that was scary enough.

  Kalisha turned to Luke and reached into her new purse. “I’ve got something for you. I had it in my pocket when we left the Institute, and didn’t realize it. I want you to have it.”

  What she gave him was a crumpled cigarette box. On the front was a cowboy twirling a lariat. Above him was the brand, ROUND-UP CANDY CIGARETTES. Below him was SMOKE JUST LIKE DADDY!

  “There’s only some pieces left,” she said. “Busted up and probably stale, too, but—”

  Luke began to cry. This time it was Kalisha who put her arms around him.

  “Don’t, honey,” she said. “Don’t. Please. You want to break my heart?”

  5

  When Kalisha and Wendy were gone, Tim asked Luke if he wanted to play chess. The boy shook his head. “I think I might just go out back for awhile, and sit under that big tree. I feel empty inside. I never felt so empty.”

  Tim nodded. “You’ll fill up again. Trust me.”

  “I guess I’ll have to. Tim, do you think any of them will have to use those keys?”

  “No.”

  The keys would open a safety deposit box in a Charleston bank. What Maureen Alvorson had given Luke was inside. If anything happened to any of the kids who had now left Catawba Farm—or to Luke, Wendy, or Tim—one of them would come to Charleston and open the box. Maybe all of them would come, if any of the bond forged in the Institute remained.

  “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.

  September 23, 2018

  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—“j
ust 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 goal: 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.

  Last but hardly least, thanks to my kids—Naomi, Joe, and Owen—and to my wife. If I may borrow from George R. R. Martin, she is my sun and stars.

  February 17, 2019

  More from the Author

  The Outsider

  It

  Pet Sematary

  Doctor Sleep

  Mr. Mercedes

  Different Seasons

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © SHANE LEONARD

  STEPHEN KING is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Elevation; The Outsider; Sleeping Beauties (co-written with his son Owen King); and the Bill Hodges Trilogy—Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch. He is the recipient of the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award and the 2014 National Medal of Arts. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

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