Carrie: Part 2: Pages 215-238 Summary & Analysis

Earlier that night, the blood buckets fall. Carrie is doused in blood, and she telepathically feels Tommy’s pain as he’s struck. She closes her eyes, overwhelmed with mortification that she’s been tricked again. Someone begins to laugh, and she opens her eyes, looking in horror at the blood covering her and thinking back to the blood running down her thighs in the locker room. Everyone joins in on the laughter. At first Carrie is frozen, then, devastated, she staggers off the stage. Miss Desjardin runs towards her, offering help, but Carrie thinks she’s faking her compassion and flings her against the wall. She flees the school and crawls across the ground. Defeated, she prepares to go home—but then, she decides to take revenge. Resolving to ruin the night with the sprinklers, she goes back inside.

Carrie walks back into the lobby and slams the gymnasium doors shut, savoring how the students desperately push to get out. She looks through the window and sees the sprinkler pipes, then recalls the thick cables covering the stage. She turns on the sprinklers, then watches in surprise and delight as Josie is electrocuted onstage. Laughing, she takes control of all of the cords and circuit breakers. An electrical fire begins, and a student named Rhonda Simard burns alive. As the gym goes up in flames, Carrie begins to dissociate, her heart pounding wildly. She exits the building and walks towards downtown Chamberlain, giggling madly. She begins to open every fire hydrant she sees, then begins to walk to a nearby gas station—the first, but not last, she’ll pass during the night.

In the future, the White Commission interrogates Sheriff Otis Doyle. He talks about receiving a radio transmission about Ewen’s fire from Officer Jacob Plessy; he never hears back, since Plessy was later killed. He receives more transmissions as the situation escalates, so he makes his way back to Chamberlain from a neighboring town. When he arrives, he’s stunned to find half the town engulfed in flames. He encounters a distraught Sue, who has just crashed her car after the school explosion. Sue insists that Carrie caused the disaster and that “they’ve hurt Carrie for the last time.” The Commission asks him if she said “we” instead of “they,” but Doyle can’t say for sure. Doyle talks to Sue about what happened, and she begs him to find Carrie. He then tells her to go home.

After Doyle arrives in town, Vic Mooney approaches him, disheveled and grinning deliriously. He hysterically recounts how Carrie electrocuted the promgoers, although Doyle struggles to follow him. In the middle of their conversation, another gas station explodes. Tom Quillan runs out of the police station, much to Doyle’s relief, and tells Quillan that he’s been manning the police radio and telling surrounding towns to send help. He also tells Doyle that a hospital is being set up in the police station. Then, he warns Doyle to watch out for Carrie. When Doyle asks Quillan how he knows that it’s Carrie, Quillan blinks in confusion and says that it just came to him.

At 11:46 p.m., another AP ticker reports the major disaster that has spread from the school to the rest of Chamberlain, reporting at least 67 dead. This is the last ticker that the Chamberlain Clarion is able to release before it is blown up by an explosion on Summer Street. By midnight, phone lines are completely jammed. Residents wander helplessly into the streets. Carrie emerges from a church where she has been praying, although she has received no answer. She looks at the people and decides to make them her sacrifice by destroying nearby power transformers, littering the ground with live wires. After watching her victims get electrocuted and burned to death, she heads towards home.