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“You can't smoke in here,” she says to Saudade, who is lying contentedly on top of a pile of cardboard and bubble wrap. “Smoke destroys paintings. And you're going to set off the alarms.”

Saudade lets the ash from his cigarette fall into his cupped palm and takes another long drag with that powerfully insulting half smile that seems to be his default expression. The natural arrangement of his features. His posture as he lies on the cardboard pile gives Hannah Linus the strange sensation that his penis is watching her. Saudade's penis, as she sees it now, is like a curled-up animal resting after the sexual act while still keeping an eye on her. Hannah Linus often gets that same feeling from the penises of men she has just had sex with. She can't say it's a feeling she particularly likes. Saudade's penis isn't exactly the same color as the rest of his body. Saudade's skin is a toasted color reminiscent of dark bread and fishermen under the sun, while his penis is a sickly color that makes one think of skinless animals slithering out of their shell.

Hannah Linus begins to dress. Turning her back to Saudade. Her naked body provides the perfect complement to her dressed body. Not a gram of fat. Muscular without becoming masculine. With strong legs and a thin waist and breasts belligerently projected aloft. It's the essentially pointy nature of her breasts and their upward orientation that give them their ballistic air. An atavistic piece of weaponry.

“That was stupid,” she says, putting on the skirt of her business suit. “A very unfortunate episode. I'd appreciate you leaving through the fire exit and never coming back to this gallery. I don't want my employees losing respect for me. If you want to buy a painting, do it by telephone.” She stretches out her arms to close her bra hooks behind her back. Then she shrugs her shoulders. “Although frankly, perhaps you should spend your money on something else.”

His silence makes her turn her head toward the place where he's lying on his cardboard bed. There is something strange about his cardboard bed. Something not so much ridiculous or grotesque as genuinely disturbing. Something that makes her think of naked saints and martyrological images. Saudade's penis stretches idly and stands to look at her face-to-face. Hannah Linus halts in the middle of putting on her blouse. In some part of the storeroom the click of an automatic device is heard. Hannah Linus surprises herself by taking a couple of hesitant steps toward Saudade. His penis watches her, amused. She kneels down slowly. Above her head a fine rain falls from the fire alarm's sprinkler system.

WONDERFUL WORLD

By Stephen King

CHAPTER 17

Chuck Kimball opened the door to the kitchen, stuck his head out cautiously and finally went into the backyard. He closed the door behind him and went across the yard toward the shed, trying to act naturally.

Underneath his Red Sox cap he wore a double layer of asbestos. He had folded the layers of asbestos from the blinds and the false ceiling and now, as he walked through the yard trying to keep his nerves from betraying him, a part of the inner lining of his cap stuck out through the back. He was lucky that They didn't always see so well. But the asbestos couldn't protect him forever.

He made it to the door of the shed. He tried not to look over his shoulder as he put the key into the lock and unbolted the door. He opened the screen door covered in asbestos and then removed the steel bar that blocked the inside lock. The assholes could smell his fear, he told himself. And just as he reminded himself he regretted having thought it, because a shiver ran down his back, from his neck to his tailbone.

Once he was inside the shed, he took a look around him. Everything was just as he had left it a few hours earlier, he told himself as a way to keep calm. The computer was carefully unplugged and covered with strips of asbestos, just like the radio station. After what happened the week before, he was perfectly aware that They could somehow get into computers and make them work even though they weren't connected to the Internet or even plugged in. They probably already had control of the entire network, just like the television channels and all the rest.

He walked up to the calendar and tore off the January 10 page. It had been exactly six days and ten hours since his last, terrifying phone call with his son. How much time did he have left? The minivan was almost ready to make the trip south. The entire top had been lined with a layer of asbestos and then upholstered. The false bottom beneath the seats was almost finished and included a compartment for provisions, a tank for potable water and a hiding place for weapons and ammunition. The satellite positioning system, even though it would probably be useful given the circumstances, had been taken out due to the risks it involved.

He checked his watch. Two hours until nightfall. It would be best to leave once it got dark. A few final touches and everything would be ready. On the outside, the car looked like a regular family minivan. With the Red Sox' mascot hanging above the glove compartment and swinging its bat in its hands. The back of the minivan was still missing a little paint where it had hit Clarissa's car.

He had planned to make the trip without stops of any kind. That could be a problem, since he had had another sleepless night working on getting the car ready. And that morning he had barely been able to get to sleep as he hugged his shotgun tightly under the twisted sheets. He still had several tablets of Adderall and a whole box of Ritalin from his raid on the pharmacy but, at the rate he was going, the Dexedrine wasn't going to last him more than a couple of days. It was funny that, in spite of everything, his gradual relapse into the worst habits of his Black Year was now the least of his problems.

He opened the door of the minivan and sat in the driver's seat. He lit a cigarette, and as he exhaled a cloud of smoke with his eyes half closed he took the stereo equipment out of the glove compartment. He cut the cables with wire cutters and then, using a bowie knife, he began to take out the part that was built into the dashboard. Even though he had no intention of turning it on throughout the whole trip, the radio was too big of a risk.

He hadn't thought of an explanation to give the police if they stopped him on the highway. That was another one of the trip's dangers. The very idea of talking to the police was terrifying, since Chuck wasn't entirely sure whether They could read his mind or not. The way They acted seemed to suggest that all of their minds were interconnected, but there was no way of knowing if They also had access to the thoughts of those who were apparently immune, like him.

He threw the remains of the car stereo into the barrel and sprinkled them with gasoline. He was about to toss his cigarette butt in, too, when a noise stopped him short. At first he couldn't identify it. It was an intermittent, insistent buzzing. Hard to pinpoint because of the asbestos lining on the shed that acted as soundproofing. Suddenly he froze. What else could that be except the doorbell? The bell to his house! For a moment that seemed to stretch into an eternity, he remained still in front of the barrel with the cigarette butt in his hand. He couldn't move at all. Meanwhile, the bell kept ringing with terrifying insistence. He had no idea how long it had been ringing when he finally approached the window of the shed with trembling legs.

He moved the curtain aside just three-quarters of an inch and looked out, his brow furrowed, at the slight, chubby woman illuminated by his porch light. It was Mrs. Kopinski. She had a plate in one hand covered with some sort of tea towel and her other hand was ringing the bell again and again.

Her face was the most terrifying part.

A completely blank face. That just looked straight ahead without blinking. Like all of Their faces when They don't realize anyone is watching them. Faces that make you think of unplugged machines.

Chuck lifted up one of the shed's back windows very carefully so as not to make any noise. He thanked God he had oiled all the windows less than three months earlier, when he returned to his empty house after they released him from the clinic. He had decided to use those kinds of domestic tasks as an exercise to improve his discipline. He went out through the window and hopped over the fence into the Carringtons' yard. Less than two weeks earlier, before all the animals in the neighborhood disappeared, he wouldn't have been able to do that without his neighbors' two retrievers attacking him.

He crawled along the fence, taking care not to be seen from the porch, although he knew that the porch light was now right between him and Mrs. Kopinski or whatever was now occupying Mrs. Kopinski's body. Then he set off running through the trees and a minute later appeared walking along the sidewalk. His face was covered in sweat and he had two dark, round stains under his arms, besides which his heart was beating like mad from the tension and the Dexedrine, but he trusted that the layer of asbestos in his cap would protect him as much as possible.

“Mrs. Kopinski!” he said in the most cheerful tone he could muster when his steps became audible from the porch and Mrs. Kopinski turned with an alert look on her face. “What brings you here at this time of the day?”

He was even ashamed himself of how artificial that had sounded. Mrs. Kopinski, however, merely traced one of those smiles. Those impossibly enthusiastic and cheerful smiles that now surrounded him every time he went out. Yet, whatever was going on was something different. He tried to gauge how long it had taken him to get out of the shed, go around the Carringtons' property and show up on the corner. Mrs. Kopinski that thing that looked devilishly like Mrs. Kopinski had had her finger on his doorbell for at least fifteen minutes. This wasn't one of Their routine visits. Something was going on. Maybe something in his behavior had tipped them off. Chuck didn't manage to hold back a shiver.

“I brought you a nice piece of Mrs. Kopinski's own meat loaf, Charles,” said that thing in front of his door, with the same impossibly cheerful smile. “That's why I've come. Mr. Kopinski didn't finish his and I have to watch my weight.” She let out a sinister cackle. “And I thought of you, son. Lately you look skinny. And we don't want skinny folks in the neighborhood.” Her expression suddenly changed. Still smiling, something in her gaze turned threatening. “We don't want scruffy folks in the neighborhood.”

In some place in the back of his mind, Chuck couldn't help noticing the irony in that. Before things began to change and everyone around him started acting like characters in a Frank Capra movie, Mrs. Kopinski had always gone out of her way to make her dislike for his family, and for him in particular, quite clear. Whether by telling off Ollie, with that crowing voice of hers, every time he went out into the backyard to play basketball, or by muttering under her breath and shaking her head crabbily when she passed him or Teri in the mall, the old harpy made her feelings for the whole family quite clear. And it goes without saying that she would have cut off both her arms before bringing him a leftover piece of meat loaf.

Chuck went up the porch steps, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and took the plate with the piece of meat loaf that the woman held out to him.

“You shouldn't have,” said Chuck in an unconvincing tone, growing more and more alarmed by the presence on his porch. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Mr. Kopinski waving from one of the windows of the house across the street. “But I do appreciate it, of course.”

There was a moment of tense silence, much more tense if one stopped to think what might be going on. Chuck cleared his throat and opened the screen door.