In the Deathroom (27)

“Shit, not again!” Heinz cried in a shrill near-scream; in a movie it might have been funny. “Grab him, Ramón!” Escobar yelled in Spanish. He tried to stand up and struck the table so hard with his meaty thighs that it rose up and thumped back down. The woman didn’t move, and Fletcher thought: She suspects. I don’t think she even knows it yet, but she’s smarter than Escobar, smarter by a mile, and she suspects.

Was this true? With his eyes rolled up he could see only a ghost of her, not enough to really know if it was or not . . . but he knew. What did it matter? Things had been set in motion, and now they would play out. They would play out very fast.

“Ramón!” Escobar shouted. “Don’t let him fall on the floor, you idiot! Don’t let him swallow his t—” Ramón bent over and grabbed Fletcher’s shaking shoulders, perhaps wanting to get Fletcher’s head back, perhaps wanting to make sure Fletcher’s tongue was still safely unswallowed (a person couldn’t swallow his own tongue, not unless it was cut off; Ramón clearly did not watch ER). Whatever he wanted didn’t matter. When his face was where Fletcher could get at it, Fletcher struck the burning end of the Marlboro in Ramón’s eye.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (26)

He put the cigarette between his lips. Escobar leaned further forward and snapped back the cover of his gold-plated lighter. He flicked the wheel. The lighter produced a flame. Fletcher was aware of Heinz’s infernal machine humming like an old radio, the kind with tubes in the back. He was aware of the woman he had come to think of, without a trace of humor, as the Bride of Frankenstein, looking at him the way the Coyote in the cartoons looked at the Road Runner. He was aware of his heart beating, of the remembered circular feel of the cigarette in his mouth—“a tube of singular delight,” some playwright or other had called it—and of the beat of his heart, incredibly slow. Last month he’d been called upon to make an after-luncheon speech at the Club Internacional, where all the foreign press geeks hung out, and his heart had beat faster then.

Here it was, and so what? Even the blind found their way through this; even his sister had, there by the river.

Fletcher bent to the flame. The end of the Marlboro caught fire and glowed red. Fletcher drew deep, and it was easy to start coughing; after three years without a cigarette, it would have been harder not to cough. He sat back in the chair and added a harsh, gagging growl to the cough. He began to shake all over, throwing his elbows out, jerking his head to the left, drumming his feet. Best of all, he recalled an old childhood talent and rolled his eyes up to the whites. During none of this did he let go of the cigarette.

Fletcher had never seen an actual epileptic fit, although he vaguely remembered Patty Duke throwing one in The Miracle Worker. He had no way of knowing if he was doing what epileptics actually did, but he hoped that the unexpected death of Tomás Herrera would help them to overlook any false notes in his own act.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (25)

“Everywhere. You can’t just swoop down and grab them. There might still be a dozen at Ortiz.” Fletcher knew that wasn’t so.

“And Núñez?” she asked. “Is El Cóndor at Ortiz?”
She knew better. “He’s in the jungle. Last I knew, he was in Belén Province.” This was a lie. Núñez had been in Cristóbal, a suburb of the capital city, when Fletcher last saw him. He was probably still there. But if Escobar and the woman had known that, there would have been no need of this interrogation. And why would they believe Núñez would trust Fletcher with his whereabouts, anyway?

In a country like this, where Escobar and Heinz and the Bride of Frankenstein were only three of your enemies, why would you trust a Yankee newspaper reporter with your address? Loco! Why was the Yankee newspaperman involved at all? But they had stopped wondering about that, at least for now.

“Who does he talk to in the city?” the woman asked. “Not who he fucks, who he talks to.” This was the point where he had to move, if he was going to. The truth was no longer safe and they might know a lie. “There’s a man . . .” he started, then paused. “Could I have that cigarette now?”

“Mr. Fletcher! But of course!” Escobar was for a moment the concerned dinner-party host. Fletcher did not think this was playacting. Escobar picked up the red-and-white pack—the kind of pack any free man or woman could buy at any newsstand like the one Fletcher remembered on Forty-third Street—and shook out a cigarette. Fletcher took it, knowing he might be dead before it burned all the way down to the filter, no longer a part of this earth. He felt nothing, only the fading twitch of the muscles in his left arm and a funny baked taste in his fillings on that side of his mouth.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (24)

“Do we have your attention, Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher nodded.

“Why do you want to protect this man Núñez?” Escobar asked.“Why do you want to suffer to protect this man? He takes the cocaine. If he wins his revolution he will proclaim himself President for Life and sell the cocaine to your country. He will go to mass on Sunday and fuck his coke-whores the rest of the week. In the end who wins? Maybe the Communists. Maybe United Fruit. Not the people.” Escobar spoke low. His eyes were soft. “Help us, Mr. Fletcher. Of your own free will. Don’t make us make you help us. Don’t make us pull on your string.” He looked up at Fletcher from beneath his single bushy eyebrow. He looked up with his soft cocker spaniel eyes. “You can still be on that plane to Miami. On the way you like a drink, yes?”

“Yes,” Fletcher said. “I’ll help you.”
“Ah, good.” Escobar smiled, then looked at the woman.
“Does he have rockets?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Many?”
“At least sixty.”
“Russian?”

“Some are. Others came in crates with Israeli markings, but the writing on the missiles themselves looks Japanese.”
She nodded, seeming satisfied. Escobar beamed. “Where are they?”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (23)

“For awhile,” said the Bride of Frankenstein. “Only for awhile.” Escobar was nodding. “Only for awhile. A matter of days, perhaps hours. Is of no concern. What matters is we give you a bit of rope, see if you make a noose . . . and you do.”

Fletcher sat up straight in the chair again. Ramón had retreated a step or two. Fletcher looked at the back of his left hand and saw a small smudge there, like the one on the side of Tomás’s dead face in the photograph. And there was Heinz who had killed Fletcher’s friend, standing beside his machine with his hands folded in front of him, smiling and perhaps thinking about the paper he would write, words and graphs and little pictures labeled Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 and, for all Fletcher knew, Fig. 994.

“Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher looked at Escobar and straightened the fingers of his left hand. The muscles of that arm were still twitching, but the twitch was subsiding. He thought that when the time came, he would be able touse the arm. And if Ramón shot him, so what? Let Heinz see if his machine could raise the dead.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (22)

Heinz looked transported. “Yes! And you see, he has wet himself! Not much, just a little, but yes . . . and Mr. Fletcher—” “Stand aside,” the Bride of Frankenstein said. “Don’t be an ass. Let us take care of our business.”

“And that was only one-quarter power,” Heinz said in a tone of awed confidentiality, and then he stood aside and refolded his hands in front of him.

“Mr. Fletcher, you been bad,” Escobar said reproachfully. He took the stub of his cigarette from his mouth, examined it, threw it on the floor.

The cigarette, Fletcher thought. The cigarette, yes. The shock had seriously insulted his arm—the muscles were still twitching and he could see blood in his cupped palm—but it seemed to have revitalized his brain, refreshed it. Of course that was what shock treatments were supposed to do.

“No . . . I want to help . . .” But Escobar was shaking his head. “We know Núñez will come to the city. We know on the way he will take the radio station if he can . . . and he probably can.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (21)

There was a snapping sound, very thin, like a twig, and Fletcher’s left hand closed into a fist so tight his nails cut into his palm. A kind of dancing sickness raced up from his wrist to his forearm to his flopping elbow and finally to his shoulder, the side of his neck, and to his gums. He could even feel the shock in his teeth on that side, or in the fillings. A grunt escaped him. He bit his tongue and shot sideways in the chair. The gun was gone from his ear and Ramón caught him. If he hadn’t, Fletcher would have fallen on the gray tile floor.

The stylus was withdrawn. Where it had touched, between the second and third knuckles of the third finger of his left hand, there was a small hot spot. It was the only real pain, although his arm still tingled and the muscles still jumped. Yet it was horrible, being shocked like that. Fletcher felt he would seriously consider shooting his own mother to avoid another touch of the little steel dildo. An atavism, Heinz had called it. Someday he hoped to write a paper.

Heinz’s face loomed down, lips pulled back and teeth revealed in an idiotic grin, eyes alight. “How do you describe it?” he cried. “Now, while the experience is still fresh, how do you describe it?” “Like dying,” Fletcher said in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (20)

“Hold out your hand, Mr. Fletcher,” Escobar said, and he was smiling around his cigarette again. “Right hand,” Heinz said. He held the stylus by its black rubber grip like a pencil, and his machine was humming.

Fletcher gripped the arm of the chair with his right hand. He was no longer sure if he was acting or not—the line between acting and panic was gone.

“Do it,” the woman said. Her hands were folded on the table; she leaned forward over them. There was a point of light in each of her pupils, turning her dark eyes into nailheads. “Do it or I can’t account for the consequences.”

Fletcher began to loosen his fingers on the chair arm, but before he could get the hand up, Heinz darted forward and poked the tip of the blunt stylus against the back of Fletcher’s left hand. That had probably been his target all along—certainly it was closer to where Heinz stood.

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In the Deathroom (19)

Smiling, Heinz turned to his machine and flicked a switch. There was a hum, the kind that comes from an old-fashioned radio when it’s warming up, and three green lights came on.

“No,” Fletcher said, trying to get to his feet, thinking that he did panic very well, and why not? He was panicked, or almost panicked. Certainly the idea of Heinz touching him anywhere with that stainless steel dildo for pygmies was terrifying. But there was another part of him, very cold and calculating, that knew he would have to take at least one shock. He wasn’t aware of anything so coherent as a plan, but he had to take at least one shock. Mr. Maybe I Can insisted that this was so.

Escobar nodded to Ramón.
“You can’t do this, I’m an American citizen and I work for The New York Times, people know where I am.”

A heavy hand pressed down on his left shoulder, pushing him back into the chair. At the same moment, the barrel of a pistol went deep into his right ear. The pain was so sudden that bright dots appeared before Fletcher’s eyes, dancing frantically. He screamed, and the sound seemed muffled. Because one ear was plugged, of course—one ear was plugged.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

In the Deathroom (18)

Of course rooms like this tended to be soundproofed, for obvious reasons, but even if he got up the stairs and out the door and onto the street, that was only the beginning. And Mr. Even If I Do would be running with him the whole way, for however long his run lasted.

The thing was, neither Mr. Maybe They Will or Mr. Even If I Docould help him; they were only distractions, lies his increasingly frantic mind tried to tell itself. Men like him did not talk themselves out of rooms like this. He might as well try inventing a third sub- Fletcher, Mr. Maybe I Can, and go for it. He had nothing to lose. He only had to make sure they didn’t know he knew that.

Escobar and the Bride of Frankenstein drew apart. Escobar put his cigarette back in his mouth and smiled sadly at Fletcher. “Amigo, you are lying.”

“No,” he said. “Why would I lie? Don’t you think I want to get out of here?”

“We have no idea why you would lie,” said the woman with the narrow blade of a face. “We have no idea why you would choose to aid Núñez in the first place. Some have suggested American naiveté, and I have no doubt that played its part, but that cannot be all. It doesn’t matter. I believe a demonstration is in order. Heinz?”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual