Table of Contents
Beware the Wheel of Fortune....
THE DEAD ZONE
Johnny, the small boy who skated at breakneck speed into an accident that for one horrifying moment plunged him into ... the dead zone.
Johnny Smith, the small-town schoolteacher who spun the wheel of fortune and won a trip into ... the dead zone.
John Smith, who awakened from a seemingly interminable coma with an accursed power: the power to see the future and the terrible fate awaiting mankind in ... the dead zone.
Powerful tension holds the reader to the story like a pin to a magnet.
The Houston Post
WORKS BY STEPHEN KING
NOVELS
Carrie
Salems Lot
The Shining
The Stand
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
Cujo
THE DARK TOWER I:
The Gunslinger
Christine
Pet Sematary
Cycle of the Werewolf
The Talisman
(with Peter Straub)
It
The Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
The Tommyknockers
THE DARK TOWER II:
The Drawing
of the Three
THE DARK TOWER III:
The Waste Lands
The Dark Half
Needful Things
Geralds Game
Dolores Claiborne
Insomnia
Rose Madder
Desperation
The Green Mile
THE DARK TOWER IV:
Wizard and Glass
Bag of Bones
The Girl Who Loved Tom
Gordon
Dreamcatcher
Black House
(with Peter Straub)
From a Buick 8
AS RICHARD BACHMAN
Rage
The Long Walk
Roadwork
The Running Man
Thinner
The Regulators
COLLECTIONS
Night Shift
Different Seasons
Skeleton Crew
Four Past Midnight
Nightmares and
Dreamscapes
Hearts in Atlantis
Everythings Eventual
NONFICTION
Danse Macabre
On Writing
SCREENPLAYS
Creepshow
Cats Eye
Silver Bullet
Maximum Overdrive
Pet Sematary
Golden Years
Sleepwalkers
The Stand
The Shining
Rose Red
Storm of the Century
AUTHORS NOTE
What follows is a work of fiction. All of the major characters are made up. Because it plays against the historical backdrop of the last decade, the reader may recognize certain actual figures who played their parts in the 1970s. It is my hope that none of these figures has been misrepresented. There is no third congressional district in New Hampshire and no town of Castle Rock in Maine. Chuck Chatsworths reading lesson is drawn from Fire Brain, by Max Brand, originally published by Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc.
THIS IS FOR OWEN I LOVE YOU, OLD BEAR
Prologue
1
By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the bad fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953. In fact, he would have been hard put to remember it by the time he graduated from grammar school. And his mother and father never knew about it at all.
They were skating on a cleared patch of Runaround Pond in Durham. The bigger boys were playing hockey with old taped sticks and using a couple of potato baskets for goals. The little kids were just farting around the way little kids have done since time immemorialtheir ankles bowing comically in and out, their breath puffing in the frosty twenty-degree air. At one corner of the cleared ice two rubber tires burned sootily, and a few parents sat nearby, watching their children. The age of the snowmobile was still distant and winter fun still consisted of exercising your body rather than a gasoline engine.
Johnny had walked down from his house, just over the Pownal line, with his skates hung over his shoulder. At six, he was a pretty fair skater. Not good enough to join in the big kids hockey games yet, but able to skate rings around most of the other first graders, who were always pinwheeling their arms for balance or sprawling on their butts.
Now he skated slowly around the outer edge of the clear patch, wishing he could go backward like Timmy Benedix, listening to the ice thud and crackle mysteriously under the snow cover farther out, also listening to the shouts of the hockey players, the rumble of a pulp truck crossing the bridge on its way to U.S. Gypsum in Lisbon Falls, the murmur of conversation from the adults. He was very glad to be alive on that cold, fair winter day. Nothing was wrong with him, nothing troubled his mind, he wanted nothing ... except to be able to skate backward, like Timmy Benedix.
He skated past the fire and saw that two or three of the grown-ups were passing around a bottle of booze.
Gimme some of that! he shouted to Chuck Spier, who was bundled up in a big lumberjack shirt and green flannel snowpants.
Chuck grinned at him. Get outta here, kid, I hear your mother callin you.
Grinning, six-year-old Johnny Smith skated on. And on the road side of the skating area, he saw Timmy Benedix himself coming down the slope, with his father behind him.
Timmy! he shouted. Watch this!
He turned around and began to skate clumsily backward. Without realizing it, he was skating into the area of the hockey game.
Hey kid! someone shouted. Get out the way!
Johnny didnt hear. He was doing it! He was skating backward! He had caught the rhythmall at once. It was in a kind of sway of the legs ...
He looked down, fascinated, to see what his legs were doing.
The big kids hockey puck, old and scarred and gouged around the edges, buzzed past him, unseen. One of the big kids, not a very good skater, was chasing it with what was almost a blind, headlong plunge.
Chuck Spier saw it coming. He rose to his feet and shouted, Johnny! Watch out!
John raised his headand the next moment the clumsy skater, all one hundred and sixty pounds of him, crashed into little John Smith at full speed.
Johnny went flying, arms out. A bare moment later his head connected with the ice and he blacked out.
Blacked out ... black ice ... blacked out ... black ice ... black. Black.
They told him he had blacked out. All he was really sure of was that strange repeating thought and suddenly looking up at a circle of facesscared hockey players, worried adults, curious little kids. Timmy Benedix smirking. Chuck Spier was holding him.
Black ice. Black.
What? Chuck asked. Johnny ... you okay? You took a hell of a knock.
Black, Johnny said gutturally. Black ice. Dont jump it no more, Chuck.
Chuck looked around, a little scared, then back at Johnny. He touched the large knot that was rising on the boys forehead.
Im sorry, the clumsy hockey player said. I never even saw him. Little kids are supposed to stay away from the hockey. Its the rules. He looked around uncertainly for support.
Johnny? Chuck said. He didnt like the look of Johnnys eyes. They were dark and faraway, distant and cold. Are you okay?
Dont jump it no more, Johnny said, unaware of what he was saying, thinking only of iceblack ice. The explosion. The acid.
Think we ought to take him to the doctor? Chuck asked Bill Gendron. He dont know what hes sayin.
Give him a minute, Bill advised.
They gave him a minute, and Johnnys head did clear. Im okay, he muttered. Lemme up. Timmy Benedix was still smirking, damn him. Johnny decided he would show Timmy a thing or two. He would be skating rings around Timmy by the end of the week ... backward
