No one ever called him runt, Greg Stillson thought, and his headache worsened. Oh, he was going to have to be careful.
'Gimme that!' the kid shouted. Greg was holding the shirt out, pinched together in two fingers at the neck, ready to drop it when it got too hot. 'Gimme that, you ass**le! That's mine! That's...'
Greg planted his hand in the middle of the kid's bare chest and shoved him as hard as he could - which was hard indeed. The kid went flying across the room, the anger dissolving into total shock, and - at last - what Greg needed to see: fear.
He dropped the shirt on the tile floor, picked up the kid's Pepsi, and poured what was left in the bottle onto the smouldering T-shirt. It hissed balefully.
The kid was getting up slowly, his back pressed against the wall. Greg caught his eyes with his own. The kid's eyes were br6wn and very, very wide.
'We're going to reach an understanding,' Greg said, and the words seemed distant to him, behind the sick thud in his head. 'We're going to have a little seminar right here in this back room about just who's the ass**le. you got my meaning? We're gonna reach some conclusions. Isn't that what you college boys like to do? Reach conclusions?'
The kid drew breath in hitches. He wet his lips, seemed about to speak, and then he yelled: 'Help!'
'Yeah, you need help, all right,' Greg said. 'I'm going to give you some, too.'
'You're crazy,' George Harvey's nephew said, and then yelled again, louder: 'HELP!'
'I may be,' Greg said. 'Sure. But what we got to find out, Sonny, is who the prime ass**le is. See what I mean?'
He looked down at the Pepsi bottle in his hand, and suddenly he swung it savagely against the corner of the steel cabinet. It shattered, and when the kid saw the scatter of glass on the floor and the jagged neck in Greg's hand pointing toward him, he screamed. The crotch of his jeans, faded almost white, suddenly darkened. His face went the color of old parchment. And as Greg walked toward him, gritting glass under the workboots he wore summer and winter, he cringed against the wall.
'When I go out on the street, I wear a white shirt,' Greg said. He was grinning, showing white teeth. 'Sometimes a tie. When you go out on the street, you wear some rag with a filthy saying on it. So who's the ass**le, kiddo?'
George Harvey's nephew whined something. His bulging eyes never left the spears of glass jutting from the bottle neck in Greg's hand.
'I'm standing here high and dry,' Greg said, coming a little closer, 'and you got piss running down both legs into your shoes. So who's the ass**le?'
He began to jab the bottle neck lightly toward the kid's bare and sweaty midriff, and George Harvey's nephew began to cry. This was the sort of kid that was tearing the country in two, Greg thought. The thick wine of fury buzzed and coursed in his head. Stinking yellow-belly crybaby ass**les like this.
Ah, but don't hurt him - don't kick over the apple cart -'I sound like a human being,' Greg said, 'and you sound like a pig in a grease-pit, boy. So who's the ass-hole?'
He jabbed with the bottle again: one of the jagged glass points dimpled the kid's skin just below the right nipple and brought a tiny bead of blood. The kid howled.
'I'm talking to you,' Greg said. 'You better answer up, same as you'd answer up one of your professors. Who's the ass**le?'
The kid sniveled but made no coherent sound.
'You answer up if you want to pass this exam,' Greg said. 'I'll let your guts loose all over this floor, boy.' And in that instant, he meant it. He couldn't look directly at this welling drop of blood; it would send him crazy if he did, George Harvey's nephew or not. 'Who's the ass**le?'
'Me,' the kid said, and began to sob like a small child afraid of the bogeyman, the Allamagoosalum that waits behind the closet door in the dead hours of the night.
Greg smiled. The headache thumped and flared. 'Well, that's pretty good, you know. That's a start. But it's not quite good enough. I want you to say, "I'm an ass**le."'
'I'm an ass**le,' the kid said, still sobbing. Snot flowed from his nose and hung there in a runner. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.
'Now I want you to say, "I'm a prime ass**le."'
'I... I'm a prime ass**le.'
'Now you just say one more thing and maybe we can be done here. You say, "Thank you for burning up that dirty shirt, Mayor Stilison."
The kid was eager now. The kid saw his way clear. 'Thanks for burning up that dirty shirt.'
In a flash, Greg ran one of the jagged points from left to right across the kid's soft belly, bringing a line of blood. He barely broke the skin, but the kid howled as if all the devils of hell were behind him.
'You forgot to say "Mayor Stillson",' Greg said, and just like that it broke. The headache gave one more massive beat right between his eyes and was gone. He looked down stupidly at the bottle neck in his hand and could barely remember how it had gotten there. Stupid damn thing. He had almost thrown everything away over one numbnuts kid.