Gerald's Game - Stephen King [86]
It's flies, toots, okay? The no-bullshit voice now sounded tired and wan. You've heard about the Boys of Summer, haven't you? Well, these are the Flies of Autumn, and their version of the World Series is currently being played on Gerald Burlingame, the noted attorney and handcuff-fetishist.
'Jesus, I gotta get up,' she said in a croaking, husky voice she barely recognized as her own.
What the hell does that mean? she thought, and it was the answer — Not a goddam thing, thanks very much — that finished the job of bringing her back to full wakefulness. She didn't want to be awake, but she had an idea that she had better accept the fact that she was and do as much with it as she could, while she could.
And you probably better start by waking up your hands and arms. If they will wake up, that is.
She looked at her right arm, then turned her head on the rusty armature of her neck (which was only partially asleep) and looked at her left. Jessie realized with sudden shock that she was looking at them in a completely new way — looking at them as she might have looked at pieces of fiirniture in a showroom window. They seemed to have no business with Jessie Burlingame at all, and she supposed there was nothing so odd about that, not really; they were, after all, utterly without feeling. Sensation only started a little below her armpits.
She tried to pull herself up and was dismayed to find the mutiny in her arms had gone further than she had suspected. Not only did they refuse to move her; they refused to move themselves. Her brain's order was totally ignored. She looked up at them again, and they no longer looked like furniture to her. Now they looked like pallid cuts of meat hanging from butchers' hooks, and she let out a hoarse cry of fear and anger.
Never mind, though. The arms weren't happening, at least for the time being, and being mad or afraid or both wasn't going to change that a bit. How about the fingers? If she could curl them around the bedposts, then maybe . . .
. . . or maybe not. Her fingers seemed as useless as her arms. After nearly a full minute of effort, Jessie was rewarded only by a single numb twitch from her right thumb.
'Dear God,' she said in her grating dust-in-the-cracks voice. There was no anger in it now, only fear.
People died in accidents, of course — she supposed she had seen hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of 'death-clips' on the TV news during her lifetime. Body-bags carried away from wrecked cars or winched out of the jungle in Medi-Vac slings, feet sticking out from beneath hastily spread blankets while buildings burned in the background, white-faced, stumble-voiced witnesses pointing to pools of sticky dark stuff in alleys or on barroom floors. She had seen the white-shrouded shape that had been John Belushi toted out of the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles; she had seen aerialist Karl Wallenda lose his balance, fall heavily to the cable he had been trying to cross (it had been strung between two resort hotels, she seemed to remember), clutch it briefly, and then plunge to his death below. The news programs had played that one over and over as if obsessed with it. So she knew people died in accidents, of course she knew it, but until now she had somehow never realized there were people inside those people, people just like her, people who hadn't had the slightest idea they would never eat another cheeseburger, watch another round of Final jeopardy (and please make sure your answer is in the form of a question), or call their best friends to say that penny poker on Thursday night or shopping on Saturday afternoon seemed like a great idea. No more beer, no more kisses, and your fantasy of making love in a hammock during a thunderstorm