"Nag, nag, nag," Henry says, but he's smiling as he opens his beer. He goes to the telephone and dials Jack's number.
On the seat of the Dodge Ram parked in front of 1 Nailhouse Row, Jack's cell phone comes to life. This time there's no one in the cab to be annoyed by its tiny but penetrating tweet.
"The cellular customer you are trying to reach is currently not answering. Please try your call again later."
Henry hangs up, goes back to the doorway, and pushes another button on the panel there. The voices that deliver the time and temperature are all versions of his own, but he's programmed a random shuffle pattern into the gadget, so he never knows which one he's going to get. This time it's the Wisconsin Rat, screaming crazily into the sunny air-conditioned silence of his house, which has never felt so far from town as it does today:
"Time's four twenty-two P.M.! Outside temperature's eighty-two! Inside temperature's seventy! What the hell do you care? What the hell does anyone care? Chew it up, eat it up, wash it down, it aaall — "
— comes out the same place. Right. Henry thumbs the button again, silencing the Rat's trademark cry. How did it get late so fast? God, wasn't it just noon? For that matter, wasn't he just young, twenty years old and so full of spunk it was practically coming out of his ears? What —
That sigh comes again, derailing his mostly self-mocking train of thought. A sigh? Really? More likely just the air conditioner's compressor, cutting off. He can tell himself that, anyway.
He can tell himself that if he wants to.
"Is anyone here?" Henry asks. There is a tremble in his voice that he hates, an old man's palsied quaver. "Is anyone in the house with me?"
For a terrible second he is almost afraid something will answer. Nothing does — of course nothing does — and he swallows half the can of beer in three long gulps. He decides he'll go back into the living room and read for a little while. Maybe Jack will call. Maybe he'll get himself a little more under control once he has a little fresh alcohol in his system.
And maybe the world will end in the next five minutes, he thinks. That way you'll never have to deal with the voice on those damned tapes waiting in the studio. Those damned tapes lying there on the soundboard like unexploded bombs.
Henry walks slowly back down the hall to the living room with one hand held out before him, telling himself he's not afraid, not a bit afraid of touching his wife's dead face.
Jack Sawyer has seen a lot, he's traveled to places where you can't rent from Avis and the water tastes like wine, but he's never encountered anything like Mouse Baumann's leg. Or, rather, the pestilential, apocalyptic horror show that was Mouse Baumann's leg. Jack's first impulse once he's got himself back under something like control is to upbraid Doc for taking off Mouse's pants. Jack keeps thinking of sausages, and how the casing forces them to keep their shape even after the fry pan's sizzling on a red-hot burner. This is an undoubtedly stupid comparison, primo stupido, but the human mind under pressure puts on some pretty odd jinks and jumps.
There's still the shape of a leg there — sort of — but the flesh has spread away from the bone. The skin is almost completely gone, melted to a runny substance that looks like a mixture of milk and bacon fat. The interwoven mat of muscle beneath what remains of the skin is sagging and undergoing the same cataclysmic metamorphosis. The infected leg is in a kind of undisciplined motion as the solid becomes liquid and the liquid sizzles relentlessly into the couch upon which Mouse is lying. Along with the almost insupportable stench of decay, Jack can smell scorching cloth and melting fabric.
Poking out of this spreading, vaguely leglike mess is a foot that looks remarkably undamaged. If I wanted to, I could pull it right off . . . just like a squash off a vine. The thought gets to him in a way the sight of the grievously wounded leg hasn't quite been able to, and for a moment Jack can only bow his head, gagging and trying not to vomit down the front of his shirt.
What perhaps saves him is a hand on his back. It's Beezer, offering what comfort he can. The rowdy color has completely left the Beez's face. He looks like a motorcyclist come back from the grave in an urban myth.