Off Season - Jack Ketchum [82]
Sam Shearing had been a very nice man. Caggiano he didn’t know too well, but Shearing, he had been really fine. Even out here they could breed them special sometimes. I need some sleep, he thought. I got to make up the reports. How in the name of god am I gonna be able to do that? How did you write up putting a shotgun to a kid’s nose and blowing her head off? How did you deal rationally with any of it? Savages on the coast of Maine, Governor. Wiped ‘em out to a man. And then some. Jesus.
He took a last look at the girl in back of the ambulance and then got into the prowl car next to Willis. He didn’t know how or when he was going to replace Shearing or who with. For that matter he didn’t know how he’d replace himself. But Willis might do. The boy knew the lay of the land. At least, as well as anybody did.
“Get me out of here,” he said.
5:40 A.M.
It was nearly dawn.
Marjorie listened to the wail of the siren. It seemed very far away to her but she knew that was not so, that it was just outside the ambulance, and that it was for her, to help her. The gunfire, she thought. It’s ruined my ears. She wondered if she was going to hear again. She did not want to be deaf.
There was just a little pain now. The doctors had seen to that. Were they doctors or paramedics? Whoever they were, they had been very gentle with her, very kind, and she thanked them for that, and for getting rid of the terrible pain. It had seemed to her that all the gentleness was gone from the world (when had she felt that? before or after they had shot Nick?), but evidently that was not the case. She could see it in their faces. Even in the faces of the policemen who had carried her here. No policeman had ever looked gentle to her before. It was strange. They had killed Nick without a word and for no reason, and yet she could not hate them. Not now, at least, she thought. She was glad she could not see the house as they pulled away.
Suddenly for a moment she felt afraid again. She cleared her throat with difficulty and spoke to one of the doctors or paramedics, the young one, the one who looked the nicest. Like the siren, her voice sounded faint to her and far away. “Will I sleep now?” she said.
“Not yet,” he told her. “Soon. The injections were only locals. They’ll give you something stronger at the hospital, after they’ve had a chance to look you over.”
“I don’t want to sleep yet,” she said. “You won’t let me, will you?”
He smiled. “I promise.”
She touched the man’s hand. It did not seem to be a strong hand.
She turned her head a little to look out the window. From where she lay, she could see only the slowly brightening sky and the telephone wires that seemed to glide slowly along above her as they drove the smooth new tarmac. The wires were studded with wooden poles, like dark stab wounds in the flesh of morning.
AFTERWORD
by Jack Ketchum
Hope you’ve enjoyed your night-ride along the coast of Maine.
I’ve written about the hopeful genesis of this book and its somewhat dispiriting aftermath several times and discussed it at length in interviews. So I’m going to ignore the former and be brief about the latter and assume that most of you readers of this new edition are pretty much aware of the book’s history and instead, get right down to the heart of the matter—now why did that sound like a pun to me? Is Bob Bloch somewhere in the room?— which is, I think, okay, I plunked down my bucks and not a few of them, so what’s so different about this? What’s the big deal? What’s so all-fired unexpurgated?
It’s pretty much like the paperback.
But it isn’t. Not to me it isn’t.
To date, I have very few regrets as a writer. I regret the last paragraph of She Wakes and hope to change it someday. A particularly graceless line here and there. An occasional bad edit. And that’s about it except for what happened to Off Season.
What happened, exactly, was negotiation.
When Marc Jaffe at Ballantine bought the book it was on the condition that I’d be willing to rewrite. And I was. Of course