Gwendy’s Final Task

There’s a hollow knock at the door and the muffled voice comes again. Gwendy doesn’t recognize it—in fact, is unable to determine if it’s male or female—but it sounds like someone is saying, “My dog is lost in the hay.” Even in the swirling gray mist of her half-awake stupor, she’s pretty sure that’s not right.

Whoever it is outside the door thumps again, a loud triple-knock this time, and then there’s that same voice. “I went fishing in the bay,” it murmurs, with even more urgency this time around.

Gwendy slips the notebook into her pocket, then gives a single lazy kick and glides across the capsule-shaped cabin. As she reaches out to unlatch the door, it occurs to her that there’s no peephole centered at eye level like there is on her front door back home in Castle Rock. This bothers her for some reason and she hesitates, suddenly afraid. Is this what it feels like to lose your mind?

Holding her breath, she pulls open the heavy white door. Adesh Patel and Gareth Winston are floating above the common room floor, the pair of large viewscreens lapping at the bottom of their boots like dark hungry mouths. Mother Earth, still surrounded by that gauzy haze Gwendy noticed earlier, winks at her from hundreds of miles away and keeps right on spinning.

Adesh, brown eyes wide with concern, swims closer and asks, “Gwendy, are you okay?”

It had been the entomologist’s voice she’d heard calling out from the other side of the cabin door. Winston, bobbing up and down a few feet behind him, looking like a plump marshmallow in his unzipped pressure suit and grinning that I’m better-than-you-and-you-know-it grin of his adds, “Sounds like you were having a whopper of a nightmare, Senator.”

Gwendy speaks a little too cheerfully to come across as entirely convincing. “I’m fine, boys. Just dozed off and took a little catnap. Space travel does that to a girl.”

15

“A PLAGUE … FROM CHINA?” GWENDY stared at the skeleton of a man sitting across from her on the screened-in back porch. “How bad? Will it come here to the States?”

“Everywhere,” Farris answered. “There will be body bags stacked like cordwood outside of hospital loading docks. Funeral homes will bring in fleets of refrigerated trucks once the morgues begin to fill up.”

“What about a vaccine? Won’t we be able to—”

“Enough,” he hissed, flashing a glimpse of decaying teeth. “I told you, I don’t have much time.”

Gwendy leaned back in the wicker porch swing, cinching her robe tight across her chest. I don’t have much time. She thought once again: He’s dying.

“And I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“You, Gwendy Peterson, of all people should know that you always have a choice.” He let out a deep, wavering breath.

And that’s when Gwendy figured it out—what had been nagging at the back of her brain ever since they’d first come outside onto the porch. The temperature in Castle Rock had dropped to single digits on Thanksgiving evening; she and Ryan had heard a weather report on the radio, as they were pulling into the driveway no more than an hour ago. She was shivering and every time she opened her mouth, a fleeting misty cloud appeared in front of her face—fairy breath they used to call it when they were kids—yet when Farris spoke, there was nothing, not even a trace.

“I wouldn’t call it much of a choice,” she said, glancing at the canvas bag resting between her feet. “I’m stuck with the damn thing no matter what I say.”

“But what you choose to do with it is entirely up to you.” He coughed into his hand, and when he pulled it away, she once again noticed a fine spray of blood across his knuckles.

“You said the box was going bad, that it killed the last seven people you entrusted it with. What makes you think I’ll be any different?”

“You’ve always been different.” He held up a slender finger in front of her face. “You’ve always been special.”

“Bullshit,” she said mildly. “It’s a suicide mission and you know it.”

Farris’s cracked lips curled into a gruesome imitation of a smile, and then just as abruptly the smile disappeared. He cocked his head, staring off to the side, listening to something only he could hear.

“Who’s coming?” Gwendy asked. “Where are they from? What do they want?”

“They want the button box.” When he turned around again, it was the Richard Farris she’d first met on a bench in Castle View Park staring back at her—if only in his eyes, which were now strong and clear and focused with intensity. “And they’re very angry. Listen to me carefully.” He leaned forward, bringing with him a whiff of rotting carrion, and before Gwendy could shrink away, he reached over and took her hand in his. She shuddered, staring down at their intertwined fingers, thinking: He doesn’t feel human. He’s not human.