Doctor Sleep: A Novel

romance novel. Then she was back. The girl had broken the connection, and in rather spectacular fashion.
    Was her nose bleeding? She wiped it with her fingers and checked. No. Good.
    One of the stockboys came rushing up. “Are you okay, ma’am?”
    “Fine. Just felt a little faint for a second or two. Probably from the tooth extraction I had yesterday. It’s passed off now. I’ve made a mess, haven’t I? Sorry. Good thing it was cans instead of bottles.”
    “No problem, no problem at all. Would you like to come up front and sit down on the taxi bench?”
    “That won’t be necessary,” Rose said. And it wasn’t, but she was done shopping for the day. She rolled her cart two aisles over and left it there.
    10
    She had brought her Tacoma (old but reliable) down from the high-country campground west of Sidewinder, and once she was in the cab, she pulled her phone out of her purse and hit speed dial. It rang at the other end just a single time.
    “What’s up, Rosie-girl?” Crow Daddy.
    “We’ve got a problem.”
    Of course it was also an opportunity. A kid with enough in her boiler to set off a blast like that—to not only detect Rose but send her reeling—wasn’t just a steamhead but the find of the century. She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.
    “Talk to me.” All business now.
    “A little over two years ago. The kid in Iowa. Remember him?”
    “Sure.”
    “You also remember me telling you we had a looker?”
    “Yeah. East Coast. You thought it was probably a girl.”
    “It was a girl, all right. She just found me again. I was in Sam’s, minding my own business, and then all at once there she was.”
    “Why, after all this time?”
    “I don’t know and I don’t care. But we have to have her, Crow. We have to have her.”
    “Does she know who you are? Where we are?”
    Rose had thought about this while walking to the truck. The intruder hadn’t seen her, of that much she was sure. The kid had been on the inside looking out. As to what she had seen? A supermarket aisle. How many of those were there in America? Probably a million.
    “I don’t think so, but that’s not the important part.”
    “Then what is?”
    “Remember me telling you she was big steam? Huge steam? Well, she’s even bigger than that. When I tried to turn it around on her, she blew me out of her head like I was a piece of milkweed fluff. Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before. I would have said it was impossible.”
    “Is she potential True or potential food?”
    “I don’t know.” But she did. They needed steam— stored steam—a lot more than they needed fresh recruits. Besides, Rose wanted no one in the True with that much power.
    “Okay, how do we find her? Any ideas?”
    Rose thought of what she’d seen through the girl’s eyes before she had been so unceremoniously booted back to Sam’s Supermarket in Sidewinder. Not much, but there had been a store . . .
    She said, “The kids call it the Lickety-Spliff.”
    “Huh?”
    “Nothing, never mind. I need to think about it. But we’re going to have her, Crow. We’ve got to have her.”
    There was a pause. When he spoke again, Crow sounded cautious. “The way you’re talking, there might be enough to fill a dozen canisters. If, that is, you really don’t want to try Turning her.”
    Rose gave a distracted, yapping laugh. “If I’m right, we don’t have enough canisters to store the steam from this one. If she was a mountain, she’d be Everest.” He made no reply. Rose didn’t need to see him or poke into his mind to know he was flabbergasted. “Maybe we don’t have to do either one.”
    “I don’t follow.”
    Of course he didn’t. Long-think had never been Crow’s specialty. “Maybe we don’t have to Turn her or kill her. Think cows.”
    “Cows.”
    “You can butcher one and get a couple of months’ worth of steaks and hamburgers. But if you keep it alive and take care of it, it will give milk for six years. Maybe even eight.”
    Silence. Long. She let it stretch. When he replied, he sounded more cautious than ever. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. We kill em once we’ve got the steam or if they’ve got something we need and they’re strong enough to survive the Turn, we Turn em. The way we Turned Andi back in the eighties. Grampa Flick might say different, if you believe him he remembers all the way back to when Henry the Eighth was killing his wives, but I don’t