Gwendy's Final Task (Gwendy's Button Box Trilogy)

by Stephen King

What she knew about Derry wasn’t good. It was a dark and dreary town with a violent history. There were an unsettling number of child murders and disappearances lurking in its past, as well as detailed documentation of strange sightings and weird goings-on.

her father claimed

that Derry was haunted.

But even she was shocked—and angered—by the treatment she received upon her subsequent visit to Derry.

she replied. “I’m running.”

the election was less than a year away and early polls had Gwendy Peterson lagging by almost twelve points.

but she began walking a daily three-and-a-half-mile route, usually in the frigid hours just after dawn when the streets were silent and still.

the button box waited.

and it occurred to her that perhaps what the button box wanted most of all was a voluntary act of madness and mass destruction from its most faithful guardian. Talk about a win—the win of all wins—for the bad guys. And exactly who were the bad guys?

Gwendy was certain that the button box was responsible for taking Ryan away from her. A life for a life, she thought. It saved my mother and took my lover. The goddamn box had always been like that—it preferred to keep things square.

Stapleton knows from experience that four weeks of training, no matter how rigidly organized, just isn’t enough time.

“It’s the middle of the night on Mars, and almost two hundred degrees below zero.” She lowers the iPad to her lap. “Makes Maine feel like a beach in the Bahamas.”

“There was a fire at your house, Gwendy. Your neighbor spotted the smoke and called 911. The fire department was able to catch it early. The majority of the damage was limited to your garage and back porch. There was some additional water damage to the kitchen and family room.”

one of weakness—to whomever it was searching for the button box. And that’s the last thing she wants to do. It’s not a coincidence, she thinks on her way back down to level three. The fire started in the garage and it spread from there. After all these years, they’re getting closer.

honor the dead by serving the living,

“God works in mysterious ways, Gwendy. I don’t understand why this is happening any more than you do, but we have to put our faith in the Lord’s hands.”

It’s because of the button box. I was only a stupid kid, but I took and I took and I took. And now it’s the box’s turn.”

written documentation that proved Paul Magowan had not only had a year-long dalliance with a young woman from his local church but that he’d also paid—using illegal campaign funds, no less—for her to abort their unborn child.

The tiny piece of chocolate had been in the shape of an ostrich.

And then she’d thought: If you’re monitoring this, Farris, you can kiss my bony white ass.

It had been almost seven years now, but not having Ryan waiting for her back at home left Gwendy feeling forlorn and adrift.

Charlotte Morgan

Charlotte Morgan became the older sister Gwendy had always wished for.

It was the first time she’d laid eyes on it in almost twenty-five years. She could hear Richard Farris’s voice whisper inside her head: Don’t touch the button box or even take it out of the canvas bag unless absolutely necessary.

“The red button is the least dangerous by far, but it’s still a loaded gun. As I found out when all those people drank the Kool-Aid back in 1978.”

“A bad outbreak of coronavirus. It’s killing a lot of people and the government ordered a lockdown that will last at least until the middle of May. And they are not fucking around. Show up on the street and you’re apt to get arrested.”

No matter how careful you were, no matter how good your intentions, the button box always extracted its due. In blood.

the chocolate high used to last much longer. Days instead of hours.

it’s been more than twenty-five years since she last ate one, so how much does she really remember?

and scrolls until she finds an email from Norris Ridgewick. It’s shorter than the insurance letter, but just barely.

Something just happened when she took Gareth Winston’s hand.

“It means that the people who designed the station saw the movie,” Sam says. “Maybe as children. To them, this is how space stations are supposed to look.”

Where is the button box? Is

What if she forgot to bring it?

They must not know what’s wrong with me until the mission is accomplished. After that it won’t matter what they know.

Her second thought is that it’s big.

maybe Simon and Garfunkel. Like in a mall or a supermarket,

Gareth doesn’t join in.

“Gwendy, you’ll want to check out the weather deck. It’s small, but it has tons of equipment and its own telescope. Bern, your lab is next to Adesh’s bug suite in Spoke 5.”

“You all have the run of the place, except for Spoke 9. That one is currently Chinese territory.”

“He said your cabin door was ajar and he found it floating in the corridor.

Kathy doesn’t reply at first. She looks uncomfortable. “That’s the plan, but plans sometimes change. Several people have been talking to me, including—”

“Senator, is there anything you want to tell us?”

it was a Brain Freeze, and she’d been having a lot of them lately—walking around looking for her car keys while she had them in her hand, deciding to throw a frozen dinner in the microwave for lunch and finding herself looking for the fridge in the living room, more than once getting up from a nap when she didn’t remember lying down.

She began to cry. “Dear God, what’s wrong with me?”

She even knew when it had started: after pushing the red button to give Charlotte Morgan a demonstration of how dangerous the button box was, and how important it was for the two of them to keep it a dead secret between them until it could be disposed of in the ultimate dumping ground.

They all knew or suspected, it seemed. Everyone on board.

but they did know that Gwendy was slated for a spacewalk on Day 7, and when she went out she would be in possession of a small rocket, six feet long and four feet in diameter. No more than a drone, really, only it was powered by a tiny nuclear engine that could keep it driving onward and outward for perhaps as long as two hundred years. After that it would continue forever on pure inertia.

“Okay, here it is. Norman Ambrose is our top go-to shrink.

This is a process we teach to patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but also to recovering stroke victims. Don’t push. Don’t hunt. Your mind knows what you want, but it needs to take a detour, and detours take time.”