Gerald's Game - Stephen King [10]
Of course he's not going to die, the Goodwife said nervously. You've hurt him, indeed you have, and you ought to be sorry, but he's not going to die. Nobody is going to die around here.
Gerald's pursed, puckered mouth continued to quiver soundlessly, but he didn't answer her question. One of his hands had gone to his belly; the other had cupped his wounded testes. Now they both rose slowly and settled just above his left nipple. They settled like a pair of pudgy pink birds too tired to fly farther. Jessie could see the shape of a bare foot — her bare foot — rising on her husband's round stomach. It was a bright, accusatory red against his pink flesh.
He was exhaling, or trying to, sending out a dour fog that smelled like rotting onions. That's tidal breath, she thought. The bottom ten per cent of our lungs is reserved for tidal breath, isn't that what they taught us in high school biology? Yes, I think so. Tidal breath, the fabled last gasp of drowners and chokers. Once you expel that, you either faint or . . .
'Gerald!' she cried in a sharp, scolding voice. 'Gerald, breathe!'
His eyes bulged from their sockets like blue marbles stuck in a clod of Play-Doh, and he did manage to drag in a single small sip of air. He used it to speak a final word to her, this man who had sometimes seemed made of words.
' . . . heart . . . '
That was all.
'Gerald!' Now she sounded shocked as well as scolding, an old-maid schoolteacher who has caught the second-grade flirt pulling up her skirt to show the boys the bunnies on her underpants.
'Gerald, stop fooling around and breathe, goddammit!'
Gerald didn't. Instead, his eyes rolled back in their sockets, disclosing yellowish whites. His tongue blew out of his mouth and made a farting sound. A stream of cloudy, orange-tinted urine arced out of his deflated penis and her knees and thighs were doused with feverishly hot droplets. Jessie voiced a long, piercing shriek. This time she was unaware of yanking against the handcuffs, of using them to draw herself as far back from him as possible, awkwardly curling her legs beneath her as she did so.
'Stop it, Gerald! just stop it before you fall off the b — '
Too late. Even if he were still hearing her, which her rational mind doubted, it was too late. His bowed back arched the top half of his body beyond the edge of the bed and gravity took over, Gerald Burlingame, with whom Jessie had once eaten Creamsicles in bed, fell over backward with his knees up and his head down, like a clumsy kid trying to impress his friends during Free Swim at the YMCA pool. The sound of his skull meeting the hardwood floor made her shriek again. It sounded like some enormous egg being cracked against the lip of a stone bowl. She would have given anything not to have heard that.
Then there was silence, broken only by the distant roar of the chainsaw. A large gray rose was opening in the air before Jessie's wide eyes. The petals spread and spread, and when they closed around her again like the dusty wings of huge colorless moths, blocking out everything for awhile, the only clear feeling she had was one of gratitude.
C H A P T E R T W O
She seemed to be in a long, cold hall filled with white fog, a hall that was canted severely to one side like the halls people were always walking down in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and TV shows like The Twilight Zone. She was naked and the cold was really getting to her, making her muscles ache — particularly those of her back and neck and shoulders.
I've got to get out of here or I'll be sick, she thought. I'm already getting cramps from the fog and the damp.
(Although she knew it was not the fog and the damp.)
Also, something's wrong with Gerald. I can't remember exactly what it is, but I think he might he sick.
(Although she knew that sick wasn't exactly the right word.)
But, and this was odd, another part of her really didn't want to escape the tilted, foggy corridor at all. This