Free Lisey’s Story by Stephen King Page A

puffickly huh-yooge batch, making his way through the crowd with a lot of help from his meaty elbows. He squats beside her and his knees pop. Louder than Blondie’s pistol, Lisey thinks. He’s got a walkie-talkie in one hand. He speaks slowly and carefully, as though to a distressed child. “I’ve called the campus infirmary, Mrs. Landon. They are rolling their ambulance, which will take your husband to Nashville Memorial. Do you understand me?”
    She does, and her gratitude (the cop has made up the dollar short he owed and a few more, in Lisey’s opinion) is almost as deep as the pity she feels for her husband, lying on the simmering pavement and trembling like a distempered dog. She nods, weeping the first of what will be many tears before she gets Scott back to Maine—not on a Delta flight but in a private plane and with a private nurse on board, and with another ambulance and another private nurse to meet them at the Portland Jetport’s Civil Aviation terminal. Now she turns back to the Lemke girl and says, “He’s burning up—is there ice, honey? Can you think of anywhere that there might be ice? Anywhere at all?”
    She says this without much hope, and is therefore amazed when Lisa Lemke nods at once. “There’s a snack center with a Coke machine right over there.” She points in the direction of Nelson Hall, which Lisey can’t see. All she can see is a crowding forest of bare legs, some hairy, some smooth, some tanned, some sunburned. She realizes they’re completely hemmed in, that she’s tending her fallen husband in a slot the shape of a large vitamin pill or cold capsule, and feels a touch of crowd-panic. Is the word for that agoraphobia? Scott would know.
    â€œIf you can get him some ice, please do,” Lisey says. “And hurry.” She turns to the campus security cop, who appears to be taking Scott’s pulse—a completely useless activity, in Lisey’s opinion. Right now it’s down to either alive or dead. “Can you make them move back?” she asks. Almost pleads. “It’s so hot, and—”
    Before she can finish he’s up like Jack from his box, yelling “Move itback! Let this girl through! Move it back and let this girl through! Let him breathe, folks, what do you say?”
    The crowd shuffles back . . . very reluctantly, it seems to Lisey. They don’t want to miss any of the blood, it seems to her.
    The heat bakes up from the pavement. She has half-expected to get used to it, the way you get used to a hot shower, but that isn’t happening. She listens for the howl of the approaching ambulance and hears nothing. Then she does. She hears Scott, saying her name. Croaking her name. At the same time he twitches at the side of the sweat-soaked shell top she’s wearing (her bra now stands out against the silk as stark as a swollen tattoo). She looks down and sees something she doesn’t like at all. Scott is smiling. The blood has coated his lips a rich candy red, top to bottom, side to side, and the smile actually looks more like the grin of a clown. No one loves a clown at midnight, she thinks, and wonders where that came from. It will only be at some point during the long and mostly sleepless night ahead of her, listening to what will seem like every dog in Nashville bark at the hot August moon, that she’ll remember it was the epigram of Scott’s third novel, the only one both she and the critics hated, the one that made them rich. Empty Devils.
    Scott continues to twitch at her blue silk top, his eyes still so brilliant and fevery in their blackening sockets. He has something to say, and—reluctantly—she leans down to hear it. He pulls air in a little at a time, in half-gasps. It is a noisy, frightening process. The smell of blood is even stronger up close. Nasty. A mineral smell.
    It’s death. It’s the smell of death.
    As if to ratify this,