Song of Susannah - Stephen King [93]
They’re my eyes. She hijacked them, that’s all.
Another TV screen showed Mia arriving in the elevator lobby, examining the buttons, and then pushing the one marked with the DOWN arrow. We’re off to see the midwife, Susannah thought, looking grimly up at the screen, and then barked a short, humorless laugh. Oh, we’re off to see the midwife, the wonderful midwife of Oz. Because because because because be-CAUZZZ…Because of the wonderful things she does!
Here were the dials she’d reset at some considerable inconvenience—hell, pain. EMOTIONAL TEMP still at 72. The toggle-switch marked CHAP still turned to ASLEEP, and in the monitor above it the chap thus still in black-and-white like everything else: no sign of those disquieting blue eyes. The absurd LABOR FORCE oven-dial was still at 2, but she saw that most of the lights which had been amber the last time she’d been in this room had now turned red. There were more cracks in the floor and the ancient dead soldier in the corner had lost his head: the increasingly heavy vibration of the machinery had toppled the skull from the top of its spine, and it now laughed up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.
The needle on the SUSANNAH-MIO readout had reached the end of the yellow zone; as Susannah watched, it edged into the red. Danger, danger, Diem and Nhu are dead. Papa Doc Duvalier is dead. Jackie Kennedy is dead.
She tried the controls one after another, confirming what she already knew: they were locked in place. Mia might not have been able to change the settings in the first place, but locking things up once those settings were to her liking? That much she had been able to do.
There was a crackle and squall from the overhead speakers, loud enough to make her jump. Then, coming to her through heavy bursts of static, Eddie’s voice.
“Suze!…ay!…Ear me? Burn…ay! Do it before…ever…posed…id! Do you hear me?”
On the screen she thought of as Mia-Vision, the doors of the central elevator car opened. The hijacking mommybitch got on. Susannah barely noticed. She snatched up the microphone and pushed the toggle-switch on the side. “Eddie!” she shouted. “I’m in 1999! The girls walk around with their bellies showing and their bra-straps—” Christ, what was she blathering on about? She made a mighty effort to sweep her mind clear.
“Eddie, I don’t understand you! Say it again, sugar!”
For a moment there was nothing but more static, plus the occasional spooky wail of feedback. She was about to try the mike again when Eddie’s voice returned, this time a little clearer.
“Burn up…day! Jake…Pere Cal…hold on! Burn…before she…to wherever she…have the kid! If you…knowledge!”
“I hear you, I acknowledge that much!” she cried. She was clutching the silver mike so tightly that it trembled in her grasp. “I’m in 1999! June of 1999! But I’m not understanding you as well as I need to, sug! Say again, and tell me if you’re all right!”
But Eddie was gone.
After calling for him half a dozen times and getting nothing but that blur of static, she set the microphone down again and tried to figure out what he had been trying to tell her. Trying also to set aside her joy just in knowing that Eddie could still try to tell her anything.
“Burn up day,” she said. That part, at least, had come through loud and clear. “Burn up the day. As in kill some time.” She thought that almost had to be right. Eddie wanted Susannah to slow Mia down. Maybe because Jake and Pere Callahan were coming? About that part she wasn’t so sure, and she didn’t much like it, anyway. Jake was a gunslinger, all right, but he was also only a kid. And Susannah had an idea that the Dixie Pig was full of very nasty people.
Meanwhile, on Mia-Vision, the elevator doors were opening again. The hijacking mommy-bitch had reached the lobby. For the time being Susannah put Eddie, Jake, and Pere Callahan out of her mind. She was recalling how Mia had refused to come forward, even when their Susannah-Mio legs were threatening