I know why she’s telling me this, Luke thought.
“How I wound up at the Institute… that story’s too long for a tired, sick woman to go into. Someone came to see me, leave it at that. Not Mrs. Sigsby, Luke, and not Mr. Stackhouse. Not a government man, either. He was old. He said he was a recruiter. He asked me if I wanted a job when my tour was over. Easy work, he said, but only for a person who could keep her lip buttoned. I’d been thinking about re-upping, but this sounded better. Because the man said I’d be helping my country a lot more than I ever could in sandland. So I took the job, and when they put me in housekeeping, I was okay with that. I knew what they were doing, but at first I was okay with that, too, because I knew why. Good for me, because the Institute is like what they say about the mafia—once you’re in, you can’t get out. When I came up short on money to pay my husband’s bills, and when I started to be afraid the vultures would take the money I’d saved for my boy, I asked for the job I’d been doing downrange, and Mrs. Sigsby and Mr. Stackhouse let me try.”
“Tattling,” Luke murmured.
“It was easy, like slipping on an old pair of shoes. I was there for twelve years, but only snitched the last sixteen months or so, and by the end I was starting to feel bad about what I was doing, and I’m not just talking about the snitching part. I got desensitized in what we called the black houses, and I stayed desensitized in the Institute, but eventually that started to wear off, the way a wax shine will wear off a car if you don’t put on a fresh coat every now and then. They’re just kids, you know, and kids want to trust a grownup who’s kind and sympathetic. It wasn’t as if they had ever blown anybody up. They were the ones who got blown up, them and their families. But maybe I would have kept on with it, anyway. If I’m going to be honest—and it’s too late to be anything else—I guess I probably would have. But then I got sick, and I met you, Luke. You helped me, but that’s not why I helped you. Not the only reason, anyway, and not the main reason. I saw how smart you were, way beyond any of the other kids, way beyond the people who stole you away. I knew they didn’t care about your fine mind, or your little sense of humor, or how you were willing to help an old sick bag like me, even though you knew it might get you in trouble. To them you were just another cog in the machine, to be used until it wore out. In the end you would have gone the way of all the others. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands, going all the way back to the beginning.”
“Is she crazy?” George Burkett asked.
“Shut up!” Ashworth said. He was leaning forward over his belly, eyes fixed on the screen.
Maureen had stopped to take a drink of water and then to rub her eyes, which were sunk deep in their hollows of flesh. Sick eyes. Sad eyes. Dying eyes, Luke thought, staring eternity right in the face.
“It was still a hard decision, and not just because of what they might do to me or to you, Luke. It was hard because if you do get away, if they don’t catch you in the woods or in Dennison River Bend, and if you can find someone to believe you… if you get past all those ifs, you might be able to drag what’s been going on here for fifty or sixty years out into the open. Bring it all down on their heads.”
Like Samson in the temple, Luke thought.
She leaned forward, looking directly into the lens. Directly at him.
“And that might mean the end of the world.”
21
The westering sun turned the railroad tracks running close to State Route 92 into pinkish-red lines of fire, and seemed to spotlight the sign just ahead:
Denny Williams pulled the lead van onto the dirt shoulder. The others followed. He spoke to those in his own van—Mrs. Sigsby, Dr. Evans, Michelle Robertson—then went to the other two. “Radios off, earpieces out. We don’t know what frequencies the locals or the Staties might be listening to. Cell phones off. This is now a sealed operation and will remain so until we are back at the airfield.”
He returned to the lead van, got back behind the wheel, and turned to Mrs. Sigsby. “All good, ma’am?”
“All good.”
“I am here under protest,” Dr. Evans said again.
“Shut up,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Denny? Let’s go.”
They rolled into Fairlee County. There were barns and fields and stands of pine on one side of the road; railroad tracks and more trees on the other. The town itself was now just two miles away.
22
Corinne Rawson was standing in front of the screening room, shooting the shit with Jake “the Snake” Howland and Phil “the Pill” Chaffitz. Abused as a child by both her father and two of her four older brothers, Corinne had never had a problem with her work in Back Half. She knew the kiddos called her Corinne the Slapper, and that was okay. She had been slapped plenty in the Reno trailer park where she had grown up, and the way she looked at it, what goes around comes around. Plus, it was for a good cause. What you called your basic win-win situation.
Of course there were drawbacks to working in Back Half. For one thing, your head got jammed up with too much information. She knew that Phil wanted to fuck her and Jake didn’t because Jake only liked women with double-wide racks in front and extra junk in the trunk. And she knew that they knew she didn’t want anything to do with either of them, at least not in that way; since the age of seventeen, she had batted strictly for the other side.
Telepathy always sounded great in stories and movies, but it was annoying as fuck in real life. It came with the hum, which was a drawback. And it was cumulative, which was a major drawback. The housekeepers and janitors swapped back and forth between Front Half and Back Half, which helped, but the red caretakers worked here and nowhere else. There were two teams, Alpha and Beta. Each worked four months on, then had four months off. Corinne was almost at the end of her current four-month swing. She would spend a week or two decompressing in the adjacent staff village, recovering her essential self, and then would go to her little house in New Jersey, where she lived with Andrea, who believed her partner worked in a top-secret military project. Top-secret it was; military it was not.
The low-level telepathy would fade during her time in the village, and by the time she got back to Andrea, it would be gone. Then, a few days into her next swing, it would start to creep back. If she had been able to feel sympathy (a sensibility that had been mostly beaten out of her by the age of thirteen), she would have felt it for Dr. Hallas and Dr. James. They were here almost all of the time, which meant they were almost constantly exposed to the hum, and you could see what it was doing to them. She knew that Dr. Hendricks, the Institute’s chief medical officer, gave the Back Half docs injections that were supposed to limit the constant erosion, but there was a big difference between limiting a thing and halting it.
Horace Keller, a red caretaker with whom she was friendly, called Heckle and Jeckle high-functioning crazies. He said that eventually one or both of them would freak out, and then the topsiders would have to find fresh medical talent. That was nothing to Corinne. Her job was to make sure the kids ate when they were supposed to eat, went into their rooms when they were supposed to go to their rooms (what they did in there was also no concern of hers), attended the movies on movie nights, and didn’t get out of line. When they did, she slapped them down.