Gwendy’s Final Task

“Proprietors who pull the levers too frequently to get the chocolates or the dollars raise red flags. I knew that was happening with the Vachon woman, and I was disappointed, but I thought I had more time to find another proprietor. I was wrong. When I reached her, she had already pushed one of the other buttons. Probably just to take the pressure off for a little while, poor woman.”

Gwendy felt cold all over. The hair on the back of her neck stirred. “Which one?”

“Light green.”

“When?” Her first thought was of the Fukushima disaster, when a tsunami caused a Japanese nuclear reactor to melt down. But Fukushima was at least seven years ago, maybe more.

“Near the end of this October. I don’t blame her. She held on as long as she could. Even while her thumb was on that light green button, trying to overcome a compulsion too strong to resist, she was thinking, Please, no explosion. Please no earthquake. Please, no volcano or tidal wave.”

“You heard this in your head. Telepathically.”

“When someone touches one of the buttons, even the lightest caress, I go online, so to speak. But I was far away, on other business. I got there as quickly as I could, and I was in time to stop her before she could push the one you call the Cancer Button, but I was too late to stop her from pushing the Asia button.”

He ran a hand through his thinning hair, knocking his little round hat askew, making him look like someone in an old-time musical about to start tap-dancing.

“This was just four weeks ago.”

Gwendy spun her mind back, trying to think of a disaster that had occurred in one of the Asian countries during that timespan. She was sure there’d been plenty of tragedy and death, but she couldn’t think of a mega-disaster strong enough to displace Donald Trump from the lead story on the evening news.

“Maybe I should know, but I don’t,” she said. “An oil refinery explosion? Maybe a nerve gas attack?” Knowing either would be too small. Things like the red button handled the small stuff.

Jonestown, for instance.

“It could have been much, much worse,” Farris said. “She held back as well as she could, and against mighty forces from the black side of the board. But it’s bad enough. Only two people have died so far, one of them the owner of what in Wuhan Province is called a wet market. That’s a place where—”

“Where meat is sold, I know that.” She leaned forward. “Are you talking about a sickness, Mr. Farris? Something like MERS or SARS?”

“I’m talking a plague. Only two dead now, but many more are sick. Some are carrying the disease and don’t even know it. The Chinese government isn’t sure yet, but they suspect. When they do know, they’ll try to cover it up. As a result it’s going to spread. It’s going to be very, very bad.”

“What can I do?”

“That’s what I’m going to tell you. And I’ll help, if I can.”

“But you’re—”

She doesn’t want to finish, but he does it for her. “Dying? Oh yes, I suppose I am. But do you know what that means?”

Gwendy shook her head, for a moment thinking of her mother, and a night when they looked up at the stars.

Farris smiled. “Neither do I, dear girl. Neither do I.”

14

WHEN GWENDY PETERSON WAS a young girl, she and her best friend Olive Kepnes played a game called “Mermaids” at the Castle Rock Community Pool. They waded side-by-side into the shallow end until the water, chilly even in August, reached the middle of their chests. Then they took turns sitting on the bottom while the other girl remained standing and recited a series of secret, made-up words. Once her breath gave out and she resurfaced, the underwater girl—the Mermaid—would try to guess what had been said. There were no winners or losers in this game. It was simply for fun.

When Gwendy opens her eyes to the bright overhead lights, the memory notebook pinned against her chest by one tightly clenched fist, Olive Kepnes and this long-ago game is the first thought that pops into her head. The voice coming from the other side of the shiny white door, no more than a half dozen feet away, sounds distant and garbled, like she’s hearing it from underwater.

She lifts her head and looks around, her eyes settling on the black and silver Keurig coffee maker. She blinks at it in confusion. She knows she’s on a rocket ship traveling through space, she remembers that much, but what in the blue blazes is a coffee machine doing there?

She tries to sit up, and experiences a flash of ice-cold panic when she discovers the restraints holding her in place, and then an immediate flood of relief when she realizes she must have dozed off in her bunk. She unbuckles the harness and floats upward from the narrow mattress. Just like Tinkerbell, she thinks in a moment of pure amazement.