The Dead Zone

by Stephen King

He’s looking at that wheel the way a little boy would look at his own private ant colony,

That phantom smell of rubber burning . . . the sense of partially reliving something that had happened to him when he was very small . . . and that feeling of bad luck coming to balance off the good was still with him.

What the hell’s wrong with these kids, anyway?” Well, they ate a bad hot dog called Vietnam and it gave them ptomaine. A guy named Lyndon Johnson sold it to them. So they went to this other guy, see, and they said, “Jesus, mister, I’m sick as hell.” And this other guy, his name was Nixon, he said, “I know how to fix that. Have a few more hot dogs.” And that’s what’s wrong with the youth of America.

there had been a young man from Liverpool, England, who had been struck by a grappling hook while working on the docks and had remained in a coma for fourteen years before expiring. Little by little this brawny young dock-walloper had severed his connections with the world, wasting away, losing his hair, optic nerves degenerating into oatmeal behind his closed eyes, body gradually drawing up into a fetal position as his ligaments shortened. He had reversed time, had become a fetus again, swimming in the placental waters of coma as his brain degenerated. An autopsy following his death had shown that the folds and convolutions of his cerebrum had smoothed out, leaving the frontal and prefrontal lobes almost utterly smooth and blank.

But when you think, think about this: some things are better not seen, and some things are better lost than found.”

He is a mechanic of the brain. He has cut it to pieces with his scalpel and found no soul. Therefore there is none. Like the Russian astronauts who circled the earth and did not see God. It is the empiricism of the mechanic, and a mechanic is only a child with superior motor control.

The dream seemed to slide off him in fragments, still littering the floor of his mind like something broken and not yet swept up.

She committed her own kind of sin, Johnny. She presumed to know the mind of God.

‘The man who senses the wind of change should build not a windbreak but a windmill.’

But the people didn’t elect buffoons to Washington. Well—hardly ever.

Building windmills instead of windbreaks . . . the sky’s the limit.

God’s a real sport. He’s such a sport that he fixed up a funny comic-opera world where a bunch of glass Christmas tree globes could outlive you. Neat world, and a really first-class God in charge of it.

“It’s been my experience that ninety-five percent of the people who walk the earth are simply inert, Johnny. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are the people who do what they say they can do.

Stillson had apparently discovered one of the great hidden muscles of principle which move the earth: if those who receive will not pay, those who have not often will, for no good reason at all. It may be the same principle that assures the politicians there will always be enough young men to feed the war machine.

He is going to become president and he is going to start a war—or cause one through simple mismanagement of the office, which amounts to the same thing.