Whatever else we might do in all the rest of our lives was secondary to that one thing: we had to finish with Delacroix. “Roll, for Christ’s sake! Roll, roll, roll!”
I turned to Brutal, hardly aware of the people talking behind us now, some on their feet, a couple screaming. “Quit that!” I yelled at Brutal. “No water! No water! Are you nuts?”
Brutal turned toward me, a kind of dazed understanding on his face. Throw water on a man who was getting the juice. Oh yes. That would be very smart. He looked around, saw the chemical fire extinguisher hanging on the wall, and got that instead. Good boy.
The mask had peeled away from Delacroix’s face enough to reveal features that had gone blacker than John Coffey’s. His eyes, now nothing but misshapen globs of white, filmy jelly, had been blown out of their sockets and lay on his cheeks. His eyelashes were gone, and as I looked, the lids themselves caught fire and began to burn. Smoke puffed from the open V of his shirt. And still the humming of the electricity went on and on, filling my head, vibrating in there. I think it’s the sound mad people must hear, that or something like it.
Dean started forward, thinking in some dazed way that he could beat the fire out of Del’s shirt with his hands, and I yanked him away almost hard enough to pull him off his feet. Touching Delacroix at that point would have been like Brer Rabbit punching into the Tar-Baby. An electrified Tar-Baby, in this case.
I still didn’t turn around to see what was going on behind us, but it sounded like pandemonium, chairs falling over, people bellowing, a woman crying “Stop it, stop it, oh can’t you see he’s had enough?” at the top of her lungs. Curtis Anderson grabbed my shoulder and asked what was happening, for Christ’s sake, what was happening, and why didn’t I order jack to shut down?
“Because I can’t,” I said. “We’ve gone too far to turn back, can’t you see that? It’ll be over in a few more seconds, anyway.”
But it was at least two minutes before it was over, the longest two minutes of my whole life, and through most of it I think Delacroix was conscious. He screamed and jittered and rocked from side to side. Smoke poured from his nostrils and from a mouth that had gone the purple-black of ripe plums. Smoke drifted up from his tongue the way smoke rises from a hot griddle. All the buttons on his shirt either burst or melted. His undershirt did not quite catch fire, but it charred and smoke poured through it and we could smell his chest-hair roasting. Behind us, people were heading for the door like cattle in a stampede. They couldn’t get out through it, of course – we were in a damn prison, after all – so they simply clustered around it while Delacroix fried (Now I’m fryin, Old Toot had said when we were rehearsing for Arlen Bitterbuck, I’m a done tom turkey) and the thunder rolled and the rain ran down out of the sky in a perfect fury.
At some point I thought of the doc and looked around for him. He was still there, but crumpled on the floor beside his black bag. He’d fainted.
Brutal came up and stood beside me, holding the fire extinguisher.
“Not yet,” I said.
“I know.”
We looked around for Percy and saw him standing almost behind Sparky now, frozen, eyes huge, one knuckle crammed into his mouth.
Then, at last, Delacroix slumped back in the chair, his bulging, misshapen face lying over on one shoulder. He was still jittering, but we’d seen this before; it was the current running through him. The cap had come askew on his head, but when we took it off a little later, most of his scalp and his remaining fringe of hair came with it, bonded to the metal as if by some powerful adhesive.
“Kill it!” I called to Jack when thirty seconds had gone by with nothing but electric jitters coming from the smoking, man-shaped lump of charcoal lolling in the electric chair. The hum died immediately, and I nodded to Brutal.