The Dead Zone

by Stephen King

Blacked out . . . black ice . . . blacked out . . . black ice . . . black. Black.

“Black,” Johnny said gutturally. “Black ice. Don’t jump it no more, Chuck.”

“Don’t jump it no more,” Johnny said, unaware of what he was saying, thinking only of ice—black ice. “The explosion. The acid.”

“I think he’s okay,” Chuck said, and then, for the third time, “but he sure took a hell of a knock, didn’t he? Wow.” “Kids,” Bill said, looking fondly out at his eight-year-old twin girls, skating hand in hand, and then back at Johnny. “It probably would have killed a grown-up.”

was, too—except for the occasional bad dreams that came over the course of the next month or so . . . the bad dreams and a tendency to sometimes get very dozy at times of the day when he had never been dozy before. And that stopped happening at about the same time the bad dreams stopped happening.

The sight of Big Chuck lying in that hospital bed, looking oddly wasted and small, had shaken Johnny badly—and that night he had dreamed it was him lying there.

From time to time in the years afterward, Johnny had hunches—he would know what the next record on the radio was going to be before the DJ played it, that sort of thing—but he never connected these with his accident on the ice. By then he had forgotten

“You’re riding the middle trip, right, fella?” Johnny looked down at the eight quarters stacked on the board, and then he began to rub his forehead again, as if he felt the beginnings of a headache.

You just can’t hide . . . from Jekyll and Hyde, she thought incoherently.

Johnny sighed. “Once in a while I get feelings, that’s all. For as long as I can remember, since I was just a little kid. And I’ve always been good at finding things people have lost.

“Rubber,” he said slowly. “Burning rubber. And cold. And ice. Black ice. Those things were in the back of my mind. God knows why. And a bad feeling. Like to beware.”

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.

Well, they ate a bad hot dog called Vietnam and it gave them ptomaine.

Johnny Smith stayed there a long, long time.

He felt pity for her. For the last ten years his wife had been walking somewhere in a gray area between devotion to her Baptist faith and what he considered to be a mild religious mania.

Five years later, more tumors had necessitated a radical hysterectomy. That was when it had really begun for her, a deep religious feeling strangely coupled with other beliefs. She avidly read pamphlets on Atlantis, spaceships from heaven, races of “pure Christians” who might live in the bowels of the earth. She read Fate magazine almost as frequently as the Bible, often using one to illuminate the other.

“Please,” Sarah said. “How bad is it? Can we hope?” Before Herb could answer, Vera spoke up. Her voice was a dry bolt of certified doom: “There’s hope in God, Missy.” Sarah saw the apprehensive flicker in Herb’s eyes and thought: He thinks it’s driven her crazy. And maybe it has.

The killer was slick.

He didn’t have to worry about the clothespin. Because he was slick.

Sarah was aware of all these things in a vague way, like voices from another room where some incomprehensible party went on and on.

Herb took her in, loved her as best he could—and life went on. Johnny had been in his coma for two years.

“God knows why the unbeliever mocks and the heathen rages,” she said. That blank light was in her eyes.

“Here I am,” Johnny Smith croaked to no one at all.

can’t see the street sign, it’s in the dead zone, like the rowboat, like the picnic table on the lawn.

her name is JOHANNA BORENTZ and late at night alone now she sometimes thinks in the ticking darkness: “THE BOY IS SAFE.”)

He was out buying . . . buying . . . don’t know. It’s in the dead zone.”

The tired, nervous young man who had answered the reporters’ questions seemed also to be gone. There was a half-smile on Johnny’s lips, but there was nothing warm about it. The blue of his eyes had darkened. They had grown cold and distant.

And another one, a plain, black topcoat, that had turned him cold with terror and robbed him of his appetite. The man who owned this coat was going mad. So far he had kept up appearances—not even his wife suspected—but his vision of the world was being slowly darkened by a series of increasingly paranoid fantasies. Touching that coat had been like touching a writhing coil of snakes.

The crowd had that plump, righteous, and slightly constipated look that seems the exclusive province of businessmen who belong to the GOP.

The child in the skin laughs, but he is also growling and biting, because that is the game . . . I think this Stillson knows that game, too.

Above the disquiet, which now lay like an emotional floor to his other feelings, Johnny felt predominantly a wild mix of horror and hilarity. He had a dreamlike sense of having somehow entered one of those paintings where steam engines are coming out of brick fireplaces or clockfaces are lying limply over tree limbs.

Brownshirts, Johnny thought, sitting down. Brownshirts is all they are.

Johnny felt the familiar compact coldness come over him, the trance feeling. The sensation that nothing mattered except to know.

There was nowhere to run and perfect knowledge ran him down, plastered him as flat as a sheet of paper while that night-running train raced over him.

(as the blue filter began to creep in)

(the blue filter is deepening, covering things, blotting them out bit by bit, merciful blue filter, Stillson’s face is behind the blue . . . and the yellow . . . the yellow like tiger-stripes)

“The tiger,” Johnny muttered thickly. “The tiger’s behind the blue. Behind the yellow.”

That sense of destruction—God! It had been everything!

But what were the images? What were they exactly? They were hazy, impossible to see except in vague outline, because there was always that puzzling blue filter between, the blue filter that was sometimes cut by those yellow markings like tiger stripes.

The only clear image in these dream-replays came near the end: the screams of the dying, the smell of the dead. And a single tiger padding through miles of twisted metal, fused glass, and scorched earth. This tiger was always laughing, and it seemed to be carrying something in its mouth—something blue and yellow and dripping blood.

The hurly burly’s done, the election’s lost and won.

“There are no lightning rods up there,” Roger Chatsworth said thoughtfully. “No lightning rods at all.”