The Stand (Original Edition) Read online

  From behind him came a final long braying cry, triumphant with juicy Bronx intonation: “KISS MY ASS, YOU CHEAP BAAAAS-TARD!” Then he was around the corner and on the expressway overpass, leaning over, laughing with a shaky intensity that was nearly hysteria, watching the cars pass below.

  “Couldn’t you have handled that better?” he said, totally unaware he was speaking out loud. “Oh man, you coulda done better than that. That was a bad scene. Crap on that, man.” He realized he was speaking aloud, and another burst of laughter escaped him. He suddenly felt a dizzy, spinning nausea in his stomach and squeezed his eyes tightly closed. A memory circuit clicked open and he heard Wayne Stukey saying, There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil.

  He had treated the girl like an old whore on the morning after the frathouse gangbang.

  You ain’t no nice guy.

  I am. I am.

  But when the people at the big party had protested his decision to cut them off, he had threatened to call the police, and he had meant it. Most of them were strangers, true, he could care if they crapped on a landmine, but four or five of the protestors had gone back a ways. And Wayne Stukey, that bastard, standing in the doorway with his arms folded like a judge or something.

  Sal Doria going out, saying: If this is what it does to guys like you, Larry, I wish you were still playing sessions.

  He opened his eyes and turned away from the overpass, looking for a cab. Oh sure. The outraged friend bit. If Sal was such a big friend, what was he doing there sucking the cream in the first place? I was stupid, and nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up. That’s the real story.

  You ain’t no nice guy.

  “I am a nice guy,” he said sulkily. “And whose business is it, anyway?”

  A cab was coming and Larry flagged it.

  “The Chemical Bank Building on Park,” he said, climbing in.

  “You got a cut on your forehead, guy,” the cabbie said.

  “A girl threw a spatula at me,” Larry said absently.

  The cabbie offered him a strange false smile of commiseration and drove on, leaving Larry to settle back and try to imagine how he was going to explain his night out to his mother.

  Chapter 11

  The red light went on. The pump hissed. The door opened. The man who stepped through was not wearing one of the white all-over suits, but a small shiny nose-filter that looked a little bit like a two-pronged silver fork, the kind the hostess leaves on the canape table to get the olives out of the bottle.

  “Hi, Mr. Redman,” he said, strolling across the room. He stuck out his hand, clad in a thin transparent rubber glove, and Stu, surprised into the defensive, shook it. “I’m Dick Deitz. Denninger said you wouldn’t play ball anymore unless somebody told you what the score was.”

  Stu nodded.

  “Good,” Deitz said, and sat on the edge of the bed. He was a small brown man, and sitting there with his elbows cocked just above his knees, he looked like a gnome in a Disney picture. “So what do you want to know?”

  “First, I guess I want to know why you’re not wearing one of those space-suits.”

  “Because Geraldo there says you’re not catching.” Deitz pointed to a guinea pig behind the two-panel glass window. The guinea pig was in a cage, and standing behind the cage was Denninger himself, his face expressionless.

  “Geraldo, huh?”

  “Geraldo’s been breathing your air for the last three days, via convector. This disease that your friends have passes easily from humans to guinea pigs and vice versa. If you were catching, we figure Geraldo would be dead by now.”

  “But you’re not taking any chances,” Stu said dryly, and cocked a thumb at the nose-filter.

  “That,” Deitz said with a cynical smile, “is not in my contract.” “What have the others got?”

  “I’m sorry, that’s classified.”

  “How did that fellow Campion get it?”

  “That’s classified, too.”

  “My guess is that he was in the army. And there was an accident someplace. Like what happened to those sheep in Utah, only a lot worse.”

  “Mr. Redman, I could go to jail just for telling you you were hot or cold.”

  Stu rubbed a hand thoughtfully over his new scrub of beard.

  “You should be glad we’re not telling you more than we are,” Deitz said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “So I can serve my country better,” Stu said dryly.

  “No, that’s strictly Denninger’s stick,” Deitz said. “In the scheme of things both Denninger and I are little men, but Denninger is even littler than I am. He’s a servomotor, nothing more. There’s a more pragmatic reason for you to be glad. You’re classified, too, you know. You’ve disappeared from the face of the earth. If you knew enough, the big guys might decide that the safest thing would be for you to disappear forever.”

  Stu said nothing. He was stunned.

  “But I didn’t come here to threaten you. We want your cooperation very badly, Mr. Redman. We need it.”

  “Where are the other people I came in here with?”

  Deitz brought a paper out of an inside pocket. “Victor Palfrey, deceased. Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased.” The names reeled in Stu’s head. Chris the bartender. He’d always kept a sawed-off, lead-loaded Louisville Slugger under the bar, and the trucker who thought Chris was kidding about using it was apt to get a big surprise. Tony Leominster, who drove that big International with the Cobra CB under the dash. Sometimes hung around Hap’s station, but hadn’t been there the night Campion took out the pumps. Vic Palfrey . . . Christ, he had known Vic his whole life. How could Vic be dead? But the thing that hit him the hardest was the Hodges family.

  “All of them?” he heard himself ask. “Ralph’s whole family?”

  Deitz turned the paper over. “No, there’s a little girl. Eva. Four years old. She’s alive.”

  “Well, how is she?”

  “I’m sorry, that’s classified.”

  Rage struck him with all the unexpectedness of a sweet surprise. He was up, and then he had hold of Deitz’s lapels, and he was shaking him back and forth. From the comer of his eye he saw startled movement behind the double-paned glass. Dimly, muffled by distance and soundproofed walls, he heard a hooter go off.

  “What did you people do?” he shouted. “What did you do? What in Christ’s name did you do?”

  “Mr. Redman—”

  “Huh? What the fuck did you people do?”

  The door hissed open. Three large men in olive-drab uniforms stepped in. They were all wearing nose-filters.

  Deitz looked over at them and snapped, “Get the hell out of here.”

  The three men looked uncertain.

  “Our orders—”

  “Get out of here and that's an order!”

  They retreated. Deitz sat calmly on the bed. His lapels were rumpled and his hair had tumbled over his forehead. That was all. He was looking at Stu calmly, even compassionately. For a wild moment Stu considered ripping his nose-filter out, and then he remembered Geraldo, what a stupid name for a guinea pig. Dull despair struck him like cold water. He sat down.

  “Christ in a sidecar,” he muttered.

  “Listen to me,” Deitz said. “I’m not responsible for you being here. Neither is Denninger, or the nurses who come in to take your blood pressure. If there was a responsible party it was Campion, but you can’t lay it all on him, either. He ran, but it was a technical slipup that allowed him to run. The situation exists. We are trying to cope with it, all of us. But that doesn’t make us responsible.”

  “Then who is?”

  “Nobody,” Deitz said, and smiled. “On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it’s invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways.”

  “Some accident,” Stu said, his vo
ice nearly a whisper. “What about the others? Hap and Hank Carmichael and Lila Bruett? Their boy Luke? Monty Sullivan—”

  “Classified,” Deitz said. “Going to shake me some more? If it will make you feel better, shake away.”

  Stu said nothing, but the way he was looking at Deitz made Deitz suddenly look down and begin to fiddle with the creases of his pants.

  “They’re alive,” he said, “and you may see them in time.” “What about Amette?”

  “Quarantined.”

  “Who’s dead there?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Sorry you think so.”

  “When do I get out of here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Classified?” Stu asked bitterly.

  “No, just unknown. You don’t seem to have this disease. We want to know why you don’t have it. Then we’re home free.”

  “Can I get a shave? I itch.”

  Deitz smiled. “If you’ll allow Denninger to start running his tests again, I’ll get an orderly in to shave you right now.”

  “I can handle it. I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen.”

  Deitz shook his head firmly. “I think not.”

  Stu smiled dryly at him. “Afraid I might cut my own throat?”

  “Let’s just say—”

  Stu interrupted him with a series of harsh, dry coughs. He bent over with the force of them.

  The effect on Deitz was galvanic. He was up off the bed like a shot and across to the airlock with his feet seeming not to touch the floor at all. Then he was fumbling in his pocket for the square key and ramming it into the slot.

  “Don’t bother,” Stu said, smiling. “I was faking.”

  Deitz turned to him slowly. Now his face had changed. His lips were thinned with anger, his eyes staring. “You were what?” “Faking,” Stu said. His smile broadened.

  Deitz took two uncertain steps toward him. His fists closed, opened, then closed again. “But why? Why would you want to do something like that?”

  “Sorry,” Stu said, smiling. “That’s classified.”

  “You shit son of a bitch,” Deitz said with soft wonder.

  “Go on,” Stu said. “Go on out and tell them they can do their tests.”

  He slept better that night than he had since they had brought him here. And he had an extremely vivid dream. He had always dreamed a great deal—his wife had complained about him thrashing and muttering in his sleep—but he had never had a dream like this.

  He was standing on a country road, at the precise place where the black hottop gave up to bone-white dirt. A blazing summer sun

  shone down. On both sides of the road there was green corn, and it stretched away endlessly. There was a sign, but it was dusty and he couldn’t read it. There was the sound of crows, harsh and far away. Closer by, someone was playing an acoustic guitar, fingerpicking it. Vic Palfrey had been a picker, and it was a fine sound.

  This is where I ought to get to, Stu thought dimly. Yeah, this is the place, all right.

  What was that tune? “Beautiful Zion”? “The Fields of My Father’s Home”? “Sweet Bye and Bye”? Some hymn he remembered from his childhood, something he associated with full immersion and picnic lunches. But he couldn’t remember which one.

  Then the music stopped. A cloud came over the sun. He began to be afraid. He began to feel that there was something terrible, something worse than plague, fire, or earthquake. Something was in the corn and it was watching him. Something dark was in the corn.

  He looked, and saw two burning red eyes far back in the shadows, far back in the corn. Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel. Him, he thought. The man with no face. Oh dear God. Oh dear God no.

  Then the dream was fading and he awoke with feelings of disquiet, dislocation, and relief. He went to the bathroom and then to his window. He looked out at the moon. He went back to bed but it was an hour before he got back to sleep. All that corn, he thought sleepily. Must have been Iowa or Nebraska, maybe northern Kansas. But he had never been in any of those places in his life.

  It was two minutes to midnight.

  Patty Greer, the nurse who had been trying to take Stu’s blood pressure when he went on strike, was leafing through the current issue of McCall’s at the nurses’ station and waiting to go in and check Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Hapscomb. Hap would still be awake watching Johnny Carson and would be no problem. He liked to josh her about how hard it would be to pinch her bottom through her white all-over suit. Mr. Hapscomb was scared, but he was being cooperative, not like that dreadful Stuart Redman, who only looked at you and wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Mr. Hapscomb was what Patty Greer thought of as a “good sport.” As far as she was concerned, all patients could be divided into two categories: “good sports” and “old poops.” Patty, who had broken a leg roller skating when she was seven and had never spent a day in bed since, had very little patience with the “old poops.” You were either really sick and being a “good sport” or you were a hypochondriac making trouble for a poor working girl.

  Mr. Sullivan would be asleep, and he would wake up ugly. It wasn’t her fault that she had to wake him up, and she would think Mr. Sullivan would understand that. He should just be grateful that he was getting the best care the government could provide, and all free at that. And she would just tell him so if he started being an “old poop” again tonight.

  The clock touched midnight; time to get going.

  She left the nurses’ station and walked down the hallway toward the white room where she would first be sprayed and then helped into her suit. Halfway there, her nose began to tickle. She got her hankie out of her pocket and sneezed lightly three times. She replaced the handkerchief.

  Intent on dealing with cranky Mr. Sullivan, she attached no significance to her sneezes. It was probably a touch of hay fever. The directive in the nurses’ station which said in big red letters, REPORT ANY COLD SYMPTOMS NO MATTER HOW MINOR TO YOUR SUPERVISOR AT ONCE, never even crossed her mind. They were worried that whatever those poor people from Texas had might spread outside the sealed rooms, but she also knew it was impossible for even a tiny virus to get inside the self-contained environment of the white-suits.

  Nevertheless, on her way down to the white room she infected an orderly, a doctor who was just getting ready to leave, and another nurse on her way to do her midnight rounds.

  A new day had begun.

  Chapter 12

  A day later, on June 23, a big white Connie was roaring north on US 180, in another part of the country. It was doing somewhere between ninety and one hundred, its Corinthian white paintjob glittering in the sun, the chrome winking. The opera windows in the rear also gave back the sun, heliographing it viciously.

  The trail that Connie had left behind was wandering and pretty much senseless. Up 81 to US 80, the turnpike, until Poke and Lloyd began to feel nervous. They had killed six people in the last six days, including the owner of the Continental, his wife, and his daughter. But it was not the six murders that made them feel antsy about being on the interstate. It was the dope and the guns. Five grams of hash, a little tin snuffbox filled with God knew how much coke, and sixteen pounds of marijuana. Also two .38s, three .45s, a .357 Mag that Poke called his Pokerizer, six shotguns—two of them sawed-off pumps—and a Schmeisser submachine gun. Murder was a trifle beyond their intellectual reach, but they both understood the trouble they were going to be in if the Arizona state police picked them up in a stolen car full of blow and shooting irons. On top of everything else, they were interstate fugitives. Had been ever since they crossed the Nevada border.

  Interstate fugitives. Lloyd Henreid liked the sound of that. Gang-busters. Take that, you dirty rats. Have a lead sandwich, ya lousy copper.

  So they had turned north at Deming, now on 180; had gone through Hurley and Bayard and the slightly larger town of Silver City, where Lloyd had bought a bag of burgers and eight milkshake
s (why in the name of Christ had he bought eight of the motherfuckers? they would «r>on be pissing chocolate), grinning at the waitress in an empty yet hilarious way that made her nervous for hours afterward. I believe that man would just as soon have killed me as looked at me, she told her boss that afternoon.

  Past Silver City and roaring through Cliff, the road now bending west again, just the direction they didn’t want to go in. Through Buckhom and then they were back in the country God forgot, two-lane blacktop running through sagebrush and sand, buttes and mesas in the background, made you want to puke.

  “We’re gettin low on gas,” Poke said.

  “Wouldn’t be if you didn’t drive so fuckin fast,” Lloyd said. He took a sip of his third milkshake, gagged on it, powered down the window, and threw out all the leftover crap, including the three milkshakes neither of them had touched.

  “Whoop! Whoop!” Poke cried. He began to goose the gas pedal. The Connie lurched forward, dropped back, lurched forward.

  “Ride em cowboy!” Lloyd yelled.

  “Whoop! Whoop!”

  “You want to smoke?”

  “Smoke em if you got em,” Poke said. “Whoop! Whoop!”

  There was a large green Hefty bag on the floor between Lloyd’s feet. It was holding the sixteen pounds of marijuana. He reached in, got a handful, and began to roll up a bomber joint.

  “Whoop! Whoop!” The Connie cruised back and forth over the white line.

  “Cut the shit!” Lloyd shouted. “I’m spillin it everywhere!”

  “Plenty more where that came from . . . whoop!”

  “Come on, we gotta sell this stuff, man. We gotta deal this stuff or we’re gonna get caught and wind up in somebody’s trunk.”

  “Okay, sport.” Poke began to drive smoothly again, but his expression was sulky. “It was your idea, your fuckin idea.”

  “You thought it was a good idea.”

  “Yeah, and I didn’t know we’d end up drivin all over fuckin Arizona, either. How are we ever gonna get to New York this way?” “We’re throwin off pursuit, man,” Lloyd said. In his mind he saw police garage doors opening and thousands of 1940s radio cars issuing forth into the night. Spotlights crawling over brick walls. Come on out, Canarsie, we know you’re in there.