The Dead Zone - Stephen King, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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The Dead ZonePROLOGUE1.By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about thebad fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953. In fact, he would havebeen hard put to remember it by the time he graduated from grammar school. Andhis mother and father never knew about it at all.They were skating on a cleared patch of Runaround Pond in Durham. The biggerboys were playing hockey with old taped sticks and using a couple of potatobaskets for goals. The little kids were just farting around the way little kidshave done since time immemorial - their ankles bowing comically in and out,their breath puffing in the frosty twenty-degree air. At one corner of thecleared ice two rubber tires burned sootily, and a few parents sat nearby,watching their children. The age of the snowmobile was still distant and winterfun still consisted of exercising your body rather than a gasoline engine.Johnny had walked down from his house, just over the Pownal line, with hisskates hung over his shoulder. At six, he was a pretty fair skater. Not goodenough to join in the big kids' hockey games yet, but able to skate rings aroundmost of the other first graders, who were always pinwheeling their arms forbalance or sprawling on their butts.Now he skated slowly around the outer edge of the clear patch, wishing he couldgo backward like Timmy Benedix, listening to the ice thud and cracklemysteriously under the snow cover farther out, also listening to the shouts ofthe hockey players, the rumble of a pulp truck crossing the bridge on its way toU.S. Gypsum in Lisbon Falls, the murmur of conversation from the adults. He wasvery glad to be alive on that cold, fair winter day. Nothing was wrong with him,nothing troubled his mind, he wanted nothing ... except to be able to skatebackward, like Timmy Benedix.He skated past the fire and saw that two or three of the grown-ups were passingaround a bottle of booze.'Gimme some of that!' he shouted to Chuck Spier. who was bundled up in a biglumberjack shirt and green flannel snowpants.Chuck grinned at him. 'Get outta here, kid. I hear your mother callin you.'Grinning, six-year old Johnny Smith skated on. And on the road side of theskating area, he saw Timmy Benedix himself coming down the slope, with hisfather behind him.'Timmy!' he shouted. 'Watch this!'He turned around and began to skate clumsily backward. Without realising it, hewas skating into the area of the hockey game.'Hey kid!' someone shouted. 'Get out the way!' Johnny didn't hear. He was doingit I He was skating backward! He had caught the rhythm - all at once. It was ina kind of sway of the legs...He looked down, fascinated, to see what his legs were doing.The big kids' hockey puck, old and scarred and gouged around the edges, buzzedpast him, unseen. One of the big kids, not a very good skater, was chasing itwith what was almost a blind, headlong plunge.Chuck Spier saw it coming. He rose to his feet and shouted, 'Johnny! Watch out!'John raised his head - and the next moment the dumsy skater, all one hundred andsixty pounds of him, crashed into little John Smith at full speed.Johnny went flying, arms out. A bare moment later his head connected with theice and he blacked out.Blacked out ... black i.e... blacked out -.. black ice black. Black.They told him he had blacked out. All he was really sure of was that strangerepeating thought and suddenlylooking up at a circle of faces - scared hockey players, worried adults, curiouslittle kids. Timmy Benedix smirking. Chuck Spier was holding him-Black ice. Black.'What?' Chuck asked. 'Johnny... you okay? You took a hell of a knock.''Black,' Johnny said gutturally. 'Black ice. Don't jump it no more, Chuck.'Chuck looked around, a little scared, then back at Johnny. He touched the largeknot that was rising on the boy's forehead.'I'm sorry,' the clumsey hockey player said. 'I never even saw him. Little kidsare supposed to stay away from the hockey. It's the rules.' He looked arounduncertainly for support.'Johnny?' Chuck said. He didn't like the look of Johnny's eyes. They were darkand faraway, distant and cold. 'Are you okay?''Don't jump it no more,' Johnny said, unaware of what he was saying, thinkingonly of ice - black ice. 'The explosion. The acid.''Think we ought to take him to the doctor?' Chuck asked Bill Gendron. 'He don'tknow what he's sayin?'Give him a minute,' Bill advised.They gave him a minute, and Johnny's head did clear. 'I'm okay,' he muttered.'Lemme up.' Timmy Benedix was still smirking, damn him, Johnny decided he wouldshow Timmy a thing or two. He would be skating rings around Timmy by the end ofthe week ... backward and forward.'You come on over and sit down by the fire for a while,' Chuck said. 'You took ahell of a knock.'Johnny let them help him over to the fire. The smell of melting rubber wasstrong and pungent - making him feel a little sick to his stomach. He had aheadache. He felt the lump over his left eye curiously. It felt as though itstuck out a mile.'Can you remember who you are and everything?' Bill asked.'Sure. Sure I can. I'm okay.''Who's your dad and mom?''Herb and Vera Herb and Vera Smith.'Bill and Chuck looked at each other and shrugged.'I think he's okay,' Chuck said, and then; for the third time, 'but he sure tooka hell of a knock, didn't he? Wow.''Kids,' Bill said, looking fondly out at his eight year old twin girls, skatinghand in hand, and then back at Johnny. 'It probably would have killed agrown-up.'Not a Polack,' Chuck replied, and they both burst out laughing. The bottle ofBushmill's began making its rounds again.Ten minutes later Johnny was back out on the ice, his headache already fading,the knotted bruise standing out on his forehead like a weird brand. By the timehe went home for lunch, he had forgotten all about the fall, and blacking out,in the joy of having discovered how to skate backward.'God's mercy!' Vera Smith said when she saw him. 'How did you get that?''Fell down,' he said, and began to slurp up Campbell's tomato soup.'Are you all right, John?' she asked, touching it gently. 'Sure, Mom.' He was,too except for the occasional bad dreams that came over the course of the nextmonth or so... the bad dreams and a tendency to sometimes get very dozy at timesof the day when he had never been dozy before. And that stopped happening atabout the same time the bad dreams stopped happening.He was all right.In mid-February, Chuck Spier got up one morning and found that the battery ofhis old '48 De Soto was dead. He tried to jump it from his farm truck. As heattached the second damp to the De Soto's battery, it exploded in his face,showering him with fragments and corrosive battery acid. He lost an eye. Verasaid it was God's own mercy he hadn't lost them both. Johnny thought it was aterrible tragedy and went with his father to visit Chuck in the Lewiston GeneralHospital a week after the accident. The sight of Big Chuck lying in thathospital bed, looking oddly wasted and small, had shaken Johnny badly - and thatnight he had dreamed it was him lying there.From time to time in the years afterward, Johnny had hunches - he would knowwhat the next record on the radio was going to be before the DJ played it, thatsort of thing - but he never connected these with his accident on the ice. Bythen he had forgotten it.And the hunches were never that startling, or even very frequent. It was notuntil the night of the county fair and the mask that anything very startlinghappened. Before the second accident.Later, he thought of that often.The thing with the Wheel of Fortune had happened before the second accident.Like a warning from his own childhood2.The travelling salesman crisscrossed Nebraska and Iowa tirelessly under theburning sun in that summer of 1955. He sat behind the wheel of a '53 Mercurysedan that already had better than seventy thousand miles on it. The Merc wasdeveloping a marked wheeze in the valves. He was a big man who still had thelook of a cornfed mid-western boy on him; in that summer of 1955, only fourmonths after his Omaha house-painting business had gone broke, Greg Stilison wasonly twenty-two years old.The trunk and the back seat of the Mercury were filled with cartons, and thecartons were filled with books. Most of them were Bibles. They came in allshapes and sizes. There was your basic item, The American Truth-Way Bible,illustrated with sixteen color plates, bound with airplane glue, for $i .69 andsure to hold together for at least ten months; then for the poorer pocketbookthere was The American TruthWay New Testament for sixty-five cents, with nocolor plates but with the words of Our Lord Jesus printed in red; and for thebig spender there was The American TruthWay Deluxe Word of God for $19.95, boundin imitation white leather, the owner's name to be stenciled in gold leaf on thefront cover, twenty-four color plates, and a section in the middle to note downbirths, marriages, and burials. And the Deluxe Word of God might remain in onepiece for as long as two years. There was also a carton of paperbacks entitledAmerica the Truth Way: The Communist-Jewish Conspiracy Against Our UnitedStates.Greg did better with this paperback, printed on cheap pulp stock, than with allthe Bibles put together. It told all about how the Rothschilds and theRoosevelts and the Greenblatts were taking over the U.S. economy and the U.S.government. There were graphs showing how the Jews related directly to theCommunist-Marxist-...
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