The Plant Installment V
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The Plant by Stephen King part five of a novel in progress philtrum press Bangor, Maine Copyright © 2000 byStephen King.All rightsreserved. ✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯ FROM THE DISPATCHES OF IRON-GUTS HECKSLER Apr 1 81 0600 hrs Pk Ave So NYC City successfully infiltrated. Objective in view. Not this very moment of course. My current location=alley behind Smiler’s Market, corner Pk & 32nd. Workplace of Designated Jew almost directly across from my bivouac. Disguised as “Crazy Guitar Gertie” and worked like a charm. No gun but good knife in plastic bag #1 of “homeless person” crap. 2 foremen of the Antichrist working at Satan’s House of Zenith showed up 1730 hours yesterday afternoon. One (code name ROGER DODGER) went into market. Bought garlic by smell. Supposed to improve sex-life, HA!! Other (code name JOHN THE BAPTIST) waited outside. Back to me. Could have killed him with no problem. One quick slash. Jugular and carotid. Old commando move. This old dog remembers all his old tricks. Didn’t, of course. Must wait for Designated Jew. If others stay out of my way, they may live. If they don’t, they will certainly die. No prisoners. BAPTIST gave me two dollars. Cheapskate! Best plan still seems to wait until week- end (i.e. Apr 4-5) and then infiltrate building. Lie low inside until Monday 135 morning (i.e. Apr 6). Of course D.J. may come along before then but cow- ards travel in packs. Will do you no good D.J. In the end, your meat is mine, HA! “Beaches are sandy, some shores are rocky, I’m going to venti- late, A Designated Mockie.” More dreams of CARLOS (code name DES- IGNATED SPIC). I think he is close. Wish I had a picture. Must be crafty. Guitar & wig=good props. DAY OF THE GENERAL instead of DAY OF THE JACKAL, HA!! Guitar needs new strings. Still play pretty well & still sing “like a bird in a tree.” Got suppositories. Dropped load. Can think more clearly in spite of brain-killing transmissions. Must now play waiting game. Not the first time. Over and out. 136 From The New York Times, April 1, 1981 Page B-1, National Report COMMUTER CRASH KILLS 7 IN R.I. piston engines. The make has an excellent safety record overall, and the aircraft which By James Whitney crashed had less than 9000 hours on its clock, Special to The Times according to Ocean State Airways President George Ferguson. Officials from the Civil CENTRAL FALLS, RHODE ISLAND: A Aeronautics Board (CAB) and the Federal Cessna 404 Titan commuter airplane owned Aviation Administration (FAA) have launched and operated by Ocean State Airways crashed a joint investigation of the crash. shortly after takeoff from Barker Field in this Killed in the accident, the first in Ocean small Rhode Island city yesterday afternoon, State’s four-year history, were John Chester- killing both pilots and all five passengers. ton, the pilot, and Avery Goldstein, the co- Ocean State Airways has been running shut- pilot, both of Pawtucket. Robert Weiner, Tina tle flights to New York City’s LaGuardia Barfield, and Dallas Mayr have been identified since 1977. OCA Flight 14 was airborne for as three of the downed aircraft’s five passen- less than two minutes when it crashed in a gers. The identities of the other two, thought to vacant lot only a quarter of a mile from its have been husband and wife, have been with- takeoff point. Witnesses said the aircraft held pending notification of next of kin. banked low over a warehouse, narrowly miss- Ocean State Airways is most commonly ing the roof, just before going down. used by passengers connecting with larger “Whatever was wrong must have gone airlines operating out of LaGuardia Airport. wrong right away,” said Myron Howe, who According to Mr. Ferguson, OSA has sus- was cutting weeds between Barker Field’s pended operations at least until the end of the two runways when the accident occurred. week and perhaps longer. “I’m devastated by “He got upstairs and then he tried to come on this,” he said. “I’ve flown that particular craft back. I heard one engine cut out, then the many times, and would have sworn there other. I saw both props were dead. He missed wasn’t a safer plane in the skies, large or the warehouse, and he missed the access small. I flew it down from Boston myself on road, but then he went in hard.” Monday, and everything was fine with it then. Preliminary reports indicate no mainte- I don’t have any idea what could have caused nance problems with the C404, which is pow- both engines to shut down the way they did. ered by two 375 horsepower turbo-charged One, possibly, but not both.” 137 From John Kenton’s diary April 1, 1981 There’s an old Chinese curse which goes, “May you live in interesting times.” I think it must have been especially aimed at folks who keep diaries (and if they follow Roger’s edict, that number will soon be increased by three: Bill Gelb, Sandra Jackson, and Herb “Give Me The World And Let Me Boss It” Porter). I sat here in my little home office—which is actually just a corner of the kitchen to which I have added a shelf and a bright light—pounding the keys of my typewriter for nearly five hours last night. Won’t be that long tonight; among other things, I have a manuscript to read. And I am going to read it, I think. The dozen or so pages I got through on my way home have pretty well convinced me that this is the one I’ve been looking for all along, without even really knowing it. But at least one person of my recent acquaintance won’t be reading it. Not even if it’s as great as Great Expectations. (Not that it will be; I have to keep reminding myself that I work at Zenith House, not Random House.) Poor woman. I don’t know if she was telling the exact truth about wanting to do us a Good Turn, but even if she was lying through her teeth, no one should have to die like that, dropped out of the sky and crushed to death in a burning steel tube. I arrived at work even earlier today, wanting to check the mail room. OUIJA says stop wasting your time, she told me. The one you’re looking for is in the purple box on the bottom shelf. Way in the corner. I wanted to check that corner even before I put on the coffee. And to get another look at Zenith the ivy, while I was down there. At first I thought I’d beaten Roger this time, because there was no clack- clack from his typewriter. But the light was on, and when I peeked in the 138 open door of his office, there he was, just sitting behind his desk and look- ing out at the street. “Morning, boss,” I said. I thought he’d be ready and raring to go, but he just sat there in a semi-slump, pale and disheveled, as if he’d spent the whole night tossing and turning. “I told you not to encourage her,” he said without turning from the window. I walked over and looked out. The old lady with the guitar, the wild white hair, and the sign about letting Jesus grow in your heart was over there in front of Smiler’s again. I couldn’t hear what she was singing, at least. There was that much. “You look like you had a tough night,” I said. “Tougher morning. You seen the Times?” I had, as a matter of fact—the front page, anyway. There was the usual report on Reagan’s condition, the usual stuff about unrest in the mideast, the usual corruption-in-government story, and the usual bottom-of-the-page command to support the Fresh Air Fund. Nothing that struck me as of any immediate concern. Nevertheless, I felt a little stirring of the hairs on the back of my neck. The Times was sitting folded over in the OUT half of Roger’s IN/OUT basket. I took it. “First page of the B section,” he said, still looking out the window. At the bum, presumably...or do you call a female of the species a bumette? I turned to the National Report and saw a picture of an airplane—what was left of one, anyway—in a weedy field littered with cast-off engine parts. In the background, a bunch of people were standing behind a cyclone fence and gawking. I scanned the headline and knew at once. “Barfield?” I asked. “Barfield,” he agreed. “Christ!” “Christ had nothing to do with it.” I scanned the piece without really reading it, just looking for her name. 139 And there she was: Tina Barfield of Central Falls, source of that old adage “if you play around the buzz-saw too long, sooner or later someone is gonna get cut.” Or burned alive in a Cessna Titan, she should have added. “She said she’d be safe from Carlos if she did a genuine Good Turn,” Roger said. “That might lead some to deduce that what she did us was just the opposite.” “I believed her about that,” I said. I think I was telling the truth, but whether I was or wasn’t, I didn’t want Roger deciding to uproot the ivy grow- ing in Riddley’s closet because of what had happened to Tina Barfield.