Lloyd Henreid (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
babyfacedkiller) wrote2014-10-02 09:52 pm
babyfacedkiller) wrote2014-10-02 09:52 pm
Entry tags:
Bits o' Canon - Pre-Vegas
About an hour later a sign came up on their right: BURRACK 6.
"Burlap?" Lloyd said foggily.
"Burrack," Poke said, and began twisting the Connie's wheel so that the car made big graceful loops back and forth across the road. "Whoop! Whoop!"
"You want to stop there? I'm hungry, man."
"You're always hungry."
"Fuck you. When I get stoned, I get the munchies."
"You can munch my nine-inch hogleg, how's that? Whoop! Whoop!"
"Seriously, Poke. Let's stop."
---
Lloyd put the wire stock of the Schmeisser against his shoulder and fired a burst at the ceiling. The two hanging lightbulbs shattered like bombs. The man in the cowboy clothes began to turn around.
"Just hold still and nobody'll get hurt!" Lloyd shouted, and Poke immediately made him a liar by blowing a hole through the woman looking at the sauces. She flew out of her shoes.
"Holy gee, Poke!" Lloyd hollered. "You didn't have to-" "Pokerized her, ole buddy!" Poke yelled. "She'll never watch Jerry Falwell again! Whoop! Whoop!"
The man in the cowboy clothes kept turning. He was holding his smokes in his left hand. The harsh light falling through the show window and the screen door pricked out bright stars on the dark lenses of his sunglasses. There was a .45 revolver tucked into his belt, and now he plucked it out unhurriedly as Lloyd and Poke were staring at the dead woman. He aimed, fired, and the left side of Poke's face suddenly disappeared in a spray of blood and tissue and teeth.
"Shot!" Poke screamed, dropping the .357 and flailing backward. His flailing hands raked potato chips and taco chips and Cheez Doodles onto the splintery wooden floor. "Shot me, Lloyd! Look out! Shot me! Shot me!" He hit the screen door and it slammed open and Poke sat down hard on the porch outside, pulling one of the aged door hinges loose.
Lloyd, stunned, fired more in reflex than in self-defense. The Schmeisser's roar filled the room. Cans flew. Bottles crashed, spilling catsup, pickles, olives. The glass front of the Pepsi cooler jingled inward. Bottles of Dr. Pepper and Jolt and Orange Crush exploded like clay pigeons. Foam ran everywhere. The man in the cowboy clothes, cool, calm, and collected, fired his piece again. Lloyd felt rather than heard the bullet as it droned by nearly close enough to part hair. He raked the Schmeisser across the room, from left to right.
The man in the SHELL cap dropped behind the counter with such suddenness that an observer might have thought a trapdoor had been sprung on him. A gumball machine disintegrated. Red, blue, and green chews rolled everywhere. The glass bottles on the counter exploded. One of them had contained pickled eggs; another, pickled pigs' feet. Immediately the room was filled with the sharp odor of vinegar.
The Scheisser put three bullet holes in the cowboy's khaki shirt and most of his innards exited from the back to splatter all over Spuds MacKenzie. The cowboy went down, still clutching his .45 in one hand and his deck of Luckies in the other.
Lloyd, bullshit with fear, continued to fire. The machinepistol was growing hot in his hands. A box filled with returnable soda bottles tinkled and fell over. A calendar girl wearing hotpants took a bullet hole in one magical peachcolored thigh. A rack of paperbacks with no covers crashed over. Then the Schmeisser was empty, and the new silence was deafening. The smell of gunpowder was heavy and rank.
---
"Why do jails always smell so pissy?" Lloyd asked, just to make conversation.
"I mean, even the places where no guys are locked up, it smells pissy. Do you guys maybe do your wee-wees in the corners?" He snickered at the thought, which was really pretty comical.
"Shut up, killer," the guard with the cold said.
"You don't look so good," Lloyd said. "You ought to be home in bed."
"Shut up," the other said.
Lloyd shut up. That's what happened when you tried to talk to these guys. It was his experience that the class of prison corrections officers had no class.
"Hi, scumbag," the door-guard said.
"How ya doin, fuckface?" Lloyd responded smartly. There was nothing like a little friendly repartee to freshen you up. Two days in the joint and he could feel that old stir-stupor coming on him already. "You're gonna lose a tooth for that," the door-guard said. "Exactly one, count it, one tooth."
"Hey, now, listen, you can't-"
"Yes I can. There are guys on the yard who would kill their dear old mothers for two cartons of Chesterfields, scumbucket. Would you care to try for two teeth?"
Lloyd was silent.
"That's okay, then," the door-guard said. "Just one tooth. You fellas can take him in."
---
"Will you shut up, Sylvester?" Devins inquired in that soft, intense voice, and Lloyd shut. In his sudden fear he had forgotten the cheers for him in Maximum, and even the unsettling possibility that he might lose a tooth. He suddenly had a vision of Tweety Bird running a number on Sylvester the Cat. Only in his mind, Tweety wasn't bopping that dumb ole puddy-tat over the head with a mallet or sticking a mousetrap in front of his questing paw; what Lloyd saw was Sylvester strapped into Old Sparky while the parakeet perched on a stool by a big switch. He could even see the guard's cap on Tweety's little yellow head.
This was not a particularly amusing picture.
---
Mathers's knee came up squarely in Lloyd's crotch, and blinding pain exploded there, so excruciating that he could not even scream. He collapsed in a hunching, writhing pile, clutching his testicles, which felt crushed. The world was a reddish fog of agony.
After a while, who knew how long, he was able to look up. Mathers was still looking at him, and his bald head was still gleaming. The guards were pointedly looking elsewhere: Lloyd moaned and writhed, tears squirting out of his eyes, a redhot ball of lead in his belly.
"Nothing personal," Mathers said sincerely. "Just business, you understand. Myself, I hope you make out. That Markham law's a bitch."
He strode away and Lloyd saw the door-guard standing atop the ramp in the truck-loading bay on the other side of the exercise yard. His thumbs were hooked in his Sam Browne belt and he was grinning at Lloyd. When he saw he had Lloyd's complete, undivided attention, the door-guard shot him the bird with the middle fingers of both hands. Mathers strolled over to the wall, and the door-guard threw him a pack of Tareytons. Mathers put them in his breast pocket, sketched a salute, and walked away. Lloyd lay on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest, hands clutching his cramping belly, and Devins's words echoed in his brain: It's a tough old world, Lloyd, it's a tough old world.
Right.
---
But he kept remembering the rabbit. He couldn't help it. He had won the rabbit and a cage to keep him in at a school raffle. His daddy didn't want him to keep it, but Lloyd had somehow persuaded him that he would take care of it and feed it out of his own allowance. He loved that rabbit, and he did take care of it.
At first. The trouble was, things slipped his mind after a while. It had always been that way. And one day while he was swinging idly in the tire that hung from the sickly maple behind their scraggy little house in Marathon, Pennsylvania, he had suddenly sat bolt upright, thinking of that rabbit. He hadn't thought of his rabbit in . . . well, in better than two weeks. It had just completely slipped his mind.
He ran to the little shed tacked onto the barn, and it had been summer just like it was now, and when he stepped into that shed, the bland smell of the rabbit had struck him in the face like a big old roundhouse slap. The fur he had liked so much to stroke was matted and dirty. White maggots crawled busily in the sockets that had once held his rabbit's pretty pink eyes. The rabbit's paws were ragged and bloody. He tried to tell himself that the paws were bloody because it had tried to scratch its way out of the cage, and that was undoubtedly how it had happened, but some sick, dark part of his mind spoke up in a whisper and said that maybe the rabbit, in the final extremity of its hunger, had tried to eat itself.
Lloyd had taken the rabbit away, dug a deep hole, and buried it, still in its cage. His father had never asked him about the rabbit, might even have forgotten that his boy had a rabbit-Lloyd was not terribly bright, but he was a mental giant when stacked up against his daddy-but Lloyd had never forgotten. Always plagued by vivid dreams, the death of the rabbit had occasioned a series of terrible nightmares. And now the vision of the rabbit returned as he sat on his bunk with his knees drawn up to his chest, telling himself that someone would come, someone would surely come and let him go free. He didn't have this Captain Trips flu; he was just hungry. Like his rabbit had been hungry. Just like that.
Sometime after midnight he had fallen asleep, and this morning he had begun to work on the leg of his bunk. And now, looking at his bloody fingers, he thought with fresh horror about the paws of that long-ago rabbit, to whom he had meant no harm.
---
"Huh!" Lloyd grunted, and swung the leg. It squashed the rat against Trask's leg, and Trask fell off his bunk with a stiff thump. The rat lay on its side, dazed, aspirating weakly. There were beads of blood in its whiskers. Its rear legs were moving, as if its ratty little brain was telling it to run somewhere but along the spinal cord the signals were getting all scrambled up. Lloyd hit it again and killed it.
"There you are, you cheap fuck," Lloyd said. He put the cotleg down and wandered back to his bunk. He was hot and scared and felt like crying. He looked back over his shoulder and cried: "How do you like rat hell, you scuzzy little cocksucker?"
"Mother!" the voice cried happily in answer. "Moootherrr!"
"Shut up!" Lloyd screamed. `I ain't your mother! Your mother's in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana!"
"Mother?" the voice said, now full of weak doubt. Then it fell silent.
Lloyd began to weep. As he cried he rubbed his eyes with his fists like a small boy. He wanted a steak sandwich, he wanted to talk to his lawyer, he wanted to get out of here.
---
In the last three days, Lloyd had vaguely begun to grasp the symbolic, talismanic power of THE KEY. THE KEY was your reward for playing by the rules. If you didn't, they could lock you up. It was no different than the Go to jail card in Monopoly. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And with THE KEY went certain prerogatives. They could take away ten years of your life, or twenty, or forty. They could hire people like Mathers to beat on you. They could even take away your life in the electric chair.
But having THE KEY didn't give them the right to go away and leave you locked up to starve. It didn't give them the right to force you into eating a dead rat and to try to eat the dry ticking of your mattress. It didn't give them the right to leave you in a spot where you might just have to eat the man in the next cell to stay alive (if you can get ahold of him, that is-doo-dah, doo-dah).
There were certain things you just couldn't do to people. Having THE KEY only took you so far and no farther. They had left him here to die a horrible death when they could have let him out. He wasn't a mad dog killer who was going to waste the first person he saw, in spite of what the papers had said. Small shit was the worst he had ever gotten into before meeting Poke. So he hated, and the hate commanded him to live . . . or at least to try. For a while it seemed to him that the hate and the determination to go on living were useless things, because all of those who had THE KEY had succumbed to the flu. They were beyond the reach of his vengeance. Then, little by little, as he grew hungrier, he realized that the flu wouldn't kill them. It would kill the losers like him; it would kill Mathers but not that scumbag screw who had hired Mathers because the screw had THE KEY. It wasn't going to kill the governor or the warden-the guard who said the warden was sick had obviously been a fucking liar. It wasn't going to kill the parole officers, the county sheriffs, or the FBI agents. The flu would not touch those who had THE KEY. It wouldn't dare. But Lloyd would touch them. If he lived long enough to get out of here, he would touch them plenty.
---
"I'm going to make you my right-hand man, Lloyd. Going to put you right up there with Saint Peter. When I open this door, I'm going to slip the keys to the kingdom right into your hand. What a deal, right?"
"Yeah," Lloyd whispered, growing frightened again. It was almost full dark now. Flagg was little more than a dark shape, but his eyes were still perfectly visible. They seemed to glow in the dark like the eyes of a lynx, one to the left of the bar that ended in the lockbox, one to the -right. Lloyd felt terror, but something else as well: a kind of religious ecstasy. A pleasure. The pleasure of being chosen. The feeling that he had somehow won through . . . to something.
"You'd like to get even with the people who left you here, isn't that right?"
"Boy, that sure is," Lloyd said, forgetting his terror momentarily. It was swallowed up by a starving, sinewy anger.
"Not just those people, but everyone who would do a thing like that," Flagg suggested. "It's a type of person, isn't it? To a certain type of person, a man like you is nothing but garbage. Because they are high up. They don't think a person like you has a right to live."
"That's just right," Lloyd said. His great hunger had suddenly been changed into a different kind of hunger. It had changed just as surely as the black stone had changed into the silver key. This man had expressed all the complex things he had felt in just a handful of sentences. It wasn't just the gate-guard he wanted to get even with-why, here's the wise-ass pusbag, what's the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say?-because the gate-guard wasn't the one. The gate-guard had had THE KEY, all right, but the gate-guard had not made THE KEY.
Someone had given it to him. The warden, Lloyd supposed, but the warden hadn't made THE KEY, either. Lloyd wanted to find the makers and forgers. They would be immune to the flu, and he had business with them. Oh yes, and it was good business.
"You know what the Bible says about people like that?" Flagg asked quietly.
"It says the exalted shall be abased and the mighty shall be brought low and the stiffnecked shall be broken. And you know what it says about people like you, Lloyd? It says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And it says blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God."
Lloyd was nodding. Nodding and crying. For a moment it seemed that a blazing corona had formed around Flagg's head, a light so bright that if Lloyd looked at it for long it would burn his eyes to cinders. Then it was gone . . . if it had ever been there at all, and it must not have been, because Lloyd had not even lost his night vision.
"Now you aren't very bright," Flagg said, "but you are the first. And I have the feeling you might be very loyal. You and I, Lloyd,. we're going to go far. It's a good time for people like us. Everything is starting up for us. All I need is your word."
"W-word?"
"That we're going to stick together, you and me. No denials. No falling asleep on guard duty. There will be others very soon-they're on their way west already-but for now, there's just us. I'll give you the key if you give me your promise."
"I . . . promise," Lloyd said, and the words seemed to hang in the air, vibrating strangely. He listened to that vibration, his head cocked to one side, and he could almost see those two words, glowing as darkly as the aurora borealis reflected in a dead man's eye.
Then he forgot about them as the tumblers made their half-turns inside the lockbox. The next moment the lockbox fell at Flagg's feet, tendrils of smoke seeping from it.
"You're free, Lloyd. Come on out."
Unbelieving, Lloyd touched the bars hesitantly, as if they might burn him; and indeed, they did seem warm. But when he pushed, the door slid back easily and soundlessly. He stared at his savior, those burning eyes.
Something was placed in his hand. The key.
"It's yours now, Lloyd."
"Mine?"
Flagg grabbed Lloyd's fingers and closed them around it . . . and Lloyd felt it move in his hand,, felt it change. He uttered a hoarse cry and his fingers sprang open. The key was gone and in its place was the black stone with the red flaw. He held it up, wondering, and turned it this way and that. Now the red flaw looked like a key, now like a skull, now like a bloody, half-closed eye again.
"Mine," Lloyd answered himself. This time he closed his hand with no help, holding the stone savagely tight.
"Shall we get some dinner?" Flagg asked. "We've got a lot of driving to do tonight."
"Dinner," Lloyd said. "All right."
"There's such a lot to do," Flagg said happily. "And we're going to move very fast." They walked toward the stairs together, past the dead men in their cells. When Lloyd stumbled in weakness, Flagg seized his arm above the elbow and bore him up. Lloyd turned and looked into that grinning face with something more than gratitude. He looked at Flagg with something like love.
"Burlap?" Lloyd said foggily.
"Burrack," Poke said, and began twisting the Connie's wheel so that the car made big graceful loops back and forth across the road. "Whoop! Whoop!"
"You want to stop there? I'm hungry, man."
"You're always hungry."
"Fuck you. When I get stoned, I get the munchies."
"You can munch my nine-inch hogleg, how's that? Whoop! Whoop!"
"Seriously, Poke. Let's stop."
---
Lloyd put the wire stock of the Schmeisser against his shoulder and fired a burst at the ceiling. The two hanging lightbulbs shattered like bombs. The man in the cowboy clothes began to turn around.
"Just hold still and nobody'll get hurt!" Lloyd shouted, and Poke immediately made him a liar by blowing a hole through the woman looking at the sauces. She flew out of her shoes.
"Holy gee, Poke!" Lloyd hollered. "You didn't have to-" "Pokerized her, ole buddy!" Poke yelled. "She'll never watch Jerry Falwell again! Whoop! Whoop!"
The man in the cowboy clothes kept turning. He was holding his smokes in his left hand. The harsh light falling through the show window and the screen door pricked out bright stars on the dark lenses of his sunglasses. There was a .45 revolver tucked into his belt, and now he plucked it out unhurriedly as Lloyd and Poke were staring at the dead woman. He aimed, fired, and the left side of Poke's face suddenly disappeared in a spray of blood and tissue and teeth.
"Shot!" Poke screamed, dropping the .357 and flailing backward. His flailing hands raked potato chips and taco chips and Cheez Doodles onto the splintery wooden floor. "Shot me, Lloyd! Look out! Shot me! Shot me!" He hit the screen door and it slammed open and Poke sat down hard on the porch outside, pulling one of the aged door hinges loose.
Lloyd, stunned, fired more in reflex than in self-defense. The Schmeisser's roar filled the room. Cans flew. Bottles crashed, spilling catsup, pickles, olives. The glass front of the Pepsi cooler jingled inward. Bottles of Dr. Pepper and Jolt and Orange Crush exploded like clay pigeons. Foam ran everywhere. The man in the cowboy clothes, cool, calm, and collected, fired his piece again. Lloyd felt rather than heard the bullet as it droned by nearly close enough to part hair. He raked the Schmeisser across the room, from left to right.
The man in the SHELL cap dropped behind the counter with such suddenness that an observer might have thought a trapdoor had been sprung on him. A gumball machine disintegrated. Red, blue, and green chews rolled everywhere. The glass bottles on the counter exploded. One of them had contained pickled eggs; another, pickled pigs' feet. Immediately the room was filled with the sharp odor of vinegar.
The Scheisser put three bullet holes in the cowboy's khaki shirt and most of his innards exited from the back to splatter all over Spuds MacKenzie. The cowboy went down, still clutching his .45 in one hand and his deck of Luckies in the other.
Lloyd, bullshit with fear, continued to fire. The machinepistol was growing hot in his hands. A box filled with returnable soda bottles tinkled and fell over. A calendar girl wearing hotpants took a bullet hole in one magical peachcolored thigh. A rack of paperbacks with no covers crashed over. Then the Schmeisser was empty, and the new silence was deafening. The smell of gunpowder was heavy and rank.
---
"Why do jails always smell so pissy?" Lloyd asked, just to make conversation.
"I mean, even the places where no guys are locked up, it smells pissy. Do you guys maybe do your wee-wees in the corners?" He snickered at the thought, which was really pretty comical.
"Shut up, killer," the guard with the cold said.
"You don't look so good," Lloyd said. "You ought to be home in bed."
"Shut up," the other said.
Lloyd shut up. That's what happened when you tried to talk to these guys. It was his experience that the class of prison corrections officers had no class.
"Hi, scumbag," the door-guard said.
"How ya doin, fuckface?" Lloyd responded smartly. There was nothing like a little friendly repartee to freshen you up. Two days in the joint and he could feel that old stir-stupor coming on him already. "You're gonna lose a tooth for that," the door-guard said. "Exactly one, count it, one tooth."
"Hey, now, listen, you can't-"
"Yes I can. There are guys on the yard who would kill their dear old mothers for two cartons of Chesterfields, scumbucket. Would you care to try for two teeth?"
Lloyd was silent.
"That's okay, then," the door-guard said. "Just one tooth. You fellas can take him in."
---
"Will you shut up, Sylvester?" Devins inquired in that soft, intense voice, and Lloyd shut. In his sudden fear he had forgotten the cheers for him in Maximum, and even the unsettling possibility that he might lose a tooth. He suddenly had a vision of Tweety Bird running a number on Sylvester the Cat. Only in his mind, Tweety wasn't bopping that dumb ole puddy-tat over the head with a mallet or sticking a mousetrap in front of his questing paw; what Lloyd saw was Sylvester strapped into Old Sparky while the parakeet perched on a stool by a big switch. He could even see the guard's cap on Tweety's little yellow head.
This was not a particularly amusing picture.
---
Mathers's knee came up squarely in Lloyd's crotch, and blinding pain exploded there, so excruciating that he could not even scream. He collapsed in a hunching, writhing pile, clutching his testicles, which felt crushed. The world was a reddish fog of agony.
After a while, who knew how long, he was able to look up. Mathers was still looking at him, and his bald head was still gleaming. The guards were pointedly looking elsewhere: Lloyd moaned and writhed, tears squirting out of his eyes, a redhot ball of lead in his belly.
"Nothing personal," Mathers said sincerely. "Just business, you understand. Myself, I hope you make out. That Markham law's a bitch."
He strode away and Lloyd saw the door-guard standing atop the ramp in the truck-loading bay on the other side of the exercise yard. His thumbs were hooked in his Sam Browne belt and he was grinning at Lloyd. When he saw he had Lloyd's complete, undivided attention, the door-guard shot him the bird with the middle fingers of both hands. Mathers strolled over to the wall, and the door-guard threw him a pack of Tareytons. Mathers put them in his breast pocket, sketched a salute, and walked away. Lloyd lay on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest, hands clutching his cramping belly, and Devins's words echoed in his brain: It's a tough old world, Lloyd, it's a tough old world.
Right.
---
But he kept remembering the rabbit. He couldn't help it. He had won the rabbit and a cage to keep him in at a school raffle. His daddy didn't want him to keep it, but Lloyd had somehow persuaded him that he would take care of it and feed it out of his own allowance. He loved that rabbit, and he did take care of it.
At first. The trouble was, things slipped his mind after a while. It had always been that way. And one day while he was swinging idly in the tire that hung from the sickly maple behind their scraggy little house in Marathon, Pennsylvania, he had suddenly sat bolt upright, thinking of that rabbit. He hadn't thought of his rabbit in . . . well, in better than two weeks. It had just completely slipped his mind.
He ran to the little shed tacked onto the barn, and it had been summer just like it was now, and when he stepped into that shed, the bland smell of the rabbit had struck him in the face like a big old roundhouse slap. The fur he had liked so much to stroke was matted and dirty. White maggots crawled busily in the sockets that had once held his rabbit's pretty pink eyes. The rabbit's paws were ragged and bloody. He tried to tell himself that the paws were bloody because it had tried to scratch its way out of the cage, and that was undoubtedly how it had happened, but some sick, dark part of his mind spoke up in a whisper and said that maybe the rabbit, in the final extremity of its hunger, had tried to eat itself.
Lloyd had taken the rabbit away, dug a deep hole, and buried it, still in its cage. His father had never asked him about the rabbit, might even have forgotten that his boy had a rabbit-Lloyd was not terribly bright, but he was a mental giant when stacked up against his daddy-but Lloyd had never forgotten. Always plagued by vivid dreams, the death of the rabbit had occasioned a series of terrible nightmares. And now the vision of the rabbit returned as he sat on his bunk with his knees drawn up to his chest, telling himself that someone would come, someone would surely come and let him go free. He didn't have this Captain Trips flu; he was just hungry. Like his rabbit had been hungry. Just like that.
Sometime after midnight he had fallen asleep, and this morning he had begun to work on the leg of his bunk. And now, looking at his bloody fingers, he thought with fresh horror about the paws of that long-ago rabbit, to whom he had meant no harm.
---
"Huh!" Lloyd grunted, and swung the leg. It squashed the rat against Trask's leg, and Trask fell off his bunk with a stiff thump. The rat lay on its side, dazed, aspirating weakly. There were beads of blood in its whiskers. Its rear legs were moving, as if its ratty little brain was telling it to run somewhere but along the spinal cord the signals were getting all scrambled up. Lloyd hit it again and killed it.
"There you are, you cheap fuck," Lloyd said. He put the cotleg down and wandered back to his bunk. He was hot and scared and felt like crying. He looked back over his shoulder and cried: "How do you like rat hell, you scuzzy little cocksucker?"
"Mother!" the voice cried happily in answer. "Moootherrr!"
"Shut up!" Lloyd screamed. `I ain't your mother! Your mother's in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana!"
"Mother?" the voice said, now full of weak doubt. Then it fell silent.
Lloyd began to weep. As he cried he rubbed his eyes with his fists like a small boy. He wanted a steak sandwich, he wanted to talk to his lawyer, he wanted to get out of here.
---
In the last three days, Lloyd had vaguely begun to grasp the symbolic, talismanic power of THE KEY. THE KEY was your reward for playing by the rules. If you didn't, they could lock you up. It was no different than the Go to jail card in Monopoly. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And with THE KEY went certain prerogatives. They could take away ten years of your life, or twenty, or forty. They could hire people like Mathers to beat on you. They could even take away your life in the electric chair.
But having THE KEY didn't give them the right to go away and leave you locked up to starve. It didn't give them the right to force you into eating a dead rat and to try to eat the dry ticking of your mattress. It didn't give them the right to leave you in a spot where you might just have to eat the man in the next cell to stay alive (if you can get ahold of him, that is-doo-dah, doo-dah).
There were certain things you just couldn't do to people. Having THE KEY only took you so far and no farther. They had left him here to die a horrible death when they could have let him out. He wasn't a mad dog killer who was going to waste the first person he saw, in spite of what the papers had said. Small shit was the worst he had ever gotten into before meeting Poke. So he hated, and the hate commanded him to live . . . or at least to try. For a while it seemed to him that the hate and the determination to go on living were useless things, because all of those who had THE KEY had succumbed to the flu. They were beyond the reach of his vengeance. Then, little by little, as he grew hungrier, he realized that the flu wouldn't kill them. It would kill the losers like him; it would kill Mathers but not that scumbag screw who had hired Mathers because the screw had THE KEY. It wasn't going to kill the governor or the warden-the guard who said the warden was sick had obviously been a fucking liar. It wasn't going to kill the parole officers, the county sheriffs, or the FBI agents. The flu would not touch those who had THE KEY. It wouldn't dare. But Lloyd would touch them. If he lived long enough to get out of here, he would touch them plenty.
---
"I'm going to make you my right-hand man, Lloyd. Going to put you right up there with Saint Peter. When I open this door, I'm going to slip the keys to the kingdom right into your hand. What a deal, right?"
"Yeah," Lloyd whispered, growing frightened again. It was almost full dark now. Flagg was little more than a dark shape, but his eyes were still perfectly visible. They seemed to glow in the dark like the eyes of a lynx, one to the left of the bar that ended in the lockbox, one to the -right. Lloyd felt terror, but something else as well: a kind of religious ecstasy. A pleasure. The pleasure of being chosen. The feeling that he had somehow won through . . . to something.
"You'd like to get even with the people who left you here, isn't that right?"
"Boy, that sure is," Lloyd said, forgetting his terror momentarily. It was swallowed up by a starving, sinewy anger.
"Not just those people, but everyone who would do a thing like that," Flagg suggested. "It's a type of person, isn't it? To a certain type of person, a man like you is nothing but garbage. Because they are high up. They don't think a person like you has a right to live."
"That's just right," Lloyd said. His great hunger had suddenly been changed into a different kind of hunger. It had changed just as surely as the black stone had changed into the silver key. This man had expressed all the complex things he had felt in just a handful of sentences. It wasn't just the gate-guard he wanted to get even with-why, here's the wise-ass pusbag, what's the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say?-because the gate-guard wasn't the one. The gate-guard had had THE KEY, all right, but the gate-guard had not made THE KEY.
Someone had given it to him. The warden, Lloyd supposed, but the warden hadn't made THE KEY, either. Lloyd wanted to find the makers and forgers. They would be immune to the flu, and he had business with them. Oh yes, and it was good business.
"You know what the Bible says about people like that?" Flagg asked quietly.
"It says the exalted shall be abased and the mighty shall be brought low and the stiffnecked shall be broken. And you know what it says about people like you, Lloyd? It says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And it says blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God."
Lloyd was nodding. Nodding and crying. For a moment it seemed that a blazing corona had formed around Flagg's head, a light so bright that if Lloyd looked at it for long it would burn his eyes to cinders. Then it was gone . . . if it had ever been there at all, and it must not have been, because Lloyd had not even lost his night vision.
"Now you aren't very bright," Flagg said, "but you are the first. And I have the feeling you might be very loyal. You and I, Lloyd,. we're going to go far. It's a good time for people like us. Everything is starting up for us. All I need is your word."
"W-word?"
"That we're going to stick together, you and me. No denials. No falling asleep on guard duty. There will be others very soon-they're on their way west already-but for now, there's just us. I'll give you the key if you give me your promise."
"I . . . promise," Lloyd said, and the words seemed to hang in the air, vibrating strangely. He listened to that vibration, his head cocked to one side, and he could almost see those two words, glowing as darkly as the aurora borealis reflected in a dead man's eye.
Then he forgot about them as the tumblers made their half-turns inside the lockbox. The next moment the lockbox fell at Flagg's feet, tendrils of smoke seeping from it.
"You're free, Lloyd. Come on out."
Unbelieving, Lloyd touched the bars hesitantly, as if they might burn him; and indeed, they did seem warm. But when he pushed, the door slid back easily and soundlessly. He stared at his savior, those burning eyes.
Something was placed in his hand. The key.
"It's yours now, Lloyd."
"Mine?"
Flagg grabbed Lloyd's fingers and closed them around it . . . and Lloyd felt it move in his hand,, felt it change. He uttered a hoarse cry and his fingers sprang open. The key was gone and in its place was the black stone with the red flaw. He held it up, wondering, and turned it this way and that. Now the red flaw looked like a key, now like a skull, now like a bloody, half-closed eye again.
"Mine," Lloyd answered himself. This time he closed his hand with no help, holding the stone savagely tight.
"Shall we get some dinner?" Flagg asked. "We've got a lot of driving to do tonight."
"Dinner," Lloyd said. "All right."
"There's such a lot to do," Flagg said happily. "And we're going to move very fast." They walked toward the stairs together, past the dead men in their cells. When Lloyd stumbled in weakness, Flagg seized his arm above the elbow and bore him up. Lloyd turned and looked into that grinning face with something more than gratitude. He looked at Flagg with something like love.