Nick waited until he got tired and then pushed the food through the slots in the bottoms of the cells with the broomhandle. Billy Warner looked at him dully for a moment, then began to eat.
Mike threw his glass of milk against the bars. It shattered and milk sprayed everywhere. He slammed his two burgers against the graffiti-covered rear wall of his cell. One of them stuck in a splat of mustard, ketchup, and relish that was grotesquely cheery, like a Jackson Pollock painting. He jumped up and down on his slice of apple pie, boogying on it. Apple chunks flew every which way. The white plastic plate splintered.
"I'm on a hunger strike!" he yelled. "Fuckin hunger strike! I won't eat nothing! You'll eat my dingle before I eat anything you bring me, you f**kin deaf-mute retard ass**le! You'll - "
Nick turned away and silence immediately descended. He went back out into the office, not knowing what to do, scared. If he could drive, he would take them up to Camden himself. But he couldn't drive. And there was Vince to think about. He couldn't just let him lie there, drawing flies.
There were two doors opening off the office. One was a coat closet. The other led down a flight of stairs. Nick went down and saw it was a combination cellar and storage room. It was cool down there. It would do, at least for a while.
He went back upstairs. Mike was sitting on the floor, morosely picking up squashed apple slices, brushing them off and eating them. He didn't look up at Nick.
Nick gathered the body up in his arms and tried to lift it. The sick smell coming off the corpse was making his stomach do cartwheels and handstands. Vince was too heavy for him. He looked at the body helplessly for a moment, and became aware that both of the others were now standing at their cell doors, watching with a dreadful fascination. Nick could guess what they were thinking. Vince had been one of them, a whiny gasbag, maybe, but someone they hung with, just the same. He had died like a rat in a trap with some horrible swelling sickness they didn't understand. Nick wondered, not for the first time that day, when he would start to sneeze and run a fever and develop those peculiar swellings on his neck.
He laid hold of Vince Hogan's meaty forearms and dragged him out of the cell. Vince's head leaned toward him because of the weight on his shoulders, and he seemed to be looking at Nick, wordlessly telling him to be careful, not to joggle him too much.
It took ten minutes to get the big man's remains down the steep stairs. Panting, Nick laid him on the concrete under the fluorescents, and then covered him quickly with a frayed army blanket from the cot in his cell.
He tried to sleep then, but sleep only came in the early hours of the morning after June twenty-third had become the twenty-fourth, yesterday. His dreams had always been very vivid, and sometimes he was afraid of them. He rarely had out-and-out nightmares, but more and more often lately they were ominous, giving him the feeling that no one in them was exactly as they seemed, and that the normal world had skewed into a place where babies were sacrificed behind closed blinds and stupendous black machines roared on and on in locked basements.
And, of course, there was the very personal terror - that he would wake up with it himself.
He did sleep a little, and the dream that came was one he had had before recently: the cornfield, the smell of warm growing things, the feel that something - or someone - very good and safe was close. A sense of home. And that began to fade into cold terror as he became aware that something was in the corn, watching him. He thought: Ma, weasel's got in the henhouse! and awoke to early morning light, sweat standing out on his body.
He put coffee on and went in to check on his two prisoners.
Mike Childress was in tears. Behind him, the hamburger was still stuck on the wall in its drying glue of condiments.
"You satisfied now? I got it too. Ain't that what you wanted? Ain't that your revenge? Listen to me, I sound like a f**kin freight train goin up a hill!"
But Nick's first concern had been for Billy Warner, who lay comatose on his bunk. His neck was swelled and black, his chest rising in fits and starts.
He hurried back to the office, looked at the telephone, and in a fit of rage and guilt he knocked it off the desk and onto the floor, where it lay meaninglessly at the end of its cord. He turned the hotplate off and ran down the street to the Baker house. He pushed the bell for what seemed an hour before Jane came down, wrapped in her robe. The fever-sweat was back on her face. She was not delirious, but her words were slow and slurry and her lips were blistered.
"Nick. Come in. What is it?"
"V. Hogan died last night. Warner's dying, I think. He's awful sick. Have you seen Dr. Soames?"
She shook her head, shivered in the light draft, sneezed, and then swayed on her feet. Nick put an arm around her shoulders and led her to a chair. He wrote: "Can you call his office for me?"