The Stand Read online

  He clenched his fists slowly. "I was shouting at you. I'm sorry. I had no right to do that, Frannie."

  "It's all right. You weren't the one who opened Pandora's box."

  "We're all opening it, I guess," he said dully, and got another cigarette from the pack in the dresser. "Anyhow, when I gave him that ... what do you call it? When I said he should kill any one person that got in his way, a kind of frown came over his face. It was gone right away. I don't even know if Ralph or Nick saw it. But I did. It was like he was thinking, 'Okay, I understand what you mean, but I'll make up m'own mind on that when the time comes.' "

  "I've read that you can't hypnotize someone into doing something they wouldn't do when they were awake. A person won't go against his own moral code just because they're told to do it when they're under."

  Stu nodded. "Yeah, I was thinking of that. But what if this fellow Flagg has got a line of pickets strung down the whole eastern length of his border? I would, if I were him. If Tom runs into that picket line going west, he's got his story to cover him. But if he's coming back east and runs into them, it's going to be kill or get killed. And if Tom won't kill, he's apt to be a dead duck."

  "You may be too worried about that one part of it," Frannie said. "I mean, if there is a picket line, wouldn't it have to be strung pretty thin?"

  "Yeah. One man every fifty miles, something like that. Unless he's got five times the people we do."

  "So unless they've got some pretty sophisticated equipment already set up and running, radar and infrared and all that stuff you see in the spy movies, wouldn't Tom be apt to walk right through them?"

  "That's what we're hoping. But--"

  "But you've got a bad attack of conscience," she said softly.

  "Is that what it comes down to? Well ... maybe so. What did Harold want, honey?"

  "He left a bunch of those survey maps. Areas where his Search Committee has looked for Mother Abagail. Anyhow, Harold's been working on that burial detail as well as supervising the Search Committee. He looked very tired, but his Free Zone duties aren't the only reason. He's been working on something else as well, it seems."

  "What's that?"

  "Harold's got a woman."

  Stu raised his eyebrows.

  "Anyway, that's why he begged off on dinner. Can you guess who she is?"

  Stu squinted up at the ceiling. "Now who could Harold be shackin with? Let me see--"

  "Well, that's a hell of a way to put it! What do you think we're doing?" She threw a mock-slap at him, and he drew back, grinning.

  "Fun, ain't it? I give up. Who is it?"

  "Nadine Cross."

  "That woman with the white in her hair?"

  "That's her."

  "Gosh, she must be twice his age."

  "I doubt," Frannie said, "that it's a concern to Harold at this point in his relationship."

  "Does Larry know?"

  "I don't know and care less. The Cross woman isn't Larry's girl now. If she ever was."

  "Yeah," Stu said. He was glad Harold had found himself a little love-interest, but not terribly interested in the subject. "How does Harold feel about the Search Committee, anyway? Did he give you any idea?"

  "Well, you know Harold. He smiles a lot, but ... not very hopeful. I guess that's why he's putting in most of his time on the burial detail. They call him Hawk now, did you know that?"

  "Really?"

  "I heard it today. I didn't know who they were talking about until I asked." She mused for a moment, then laughed.

  "What's funny?" Stu asked.

  She stuck out her feet, which were clad in low-topped sneakers. On the soles were patterns of circles and lines. "He complimented me on my sneakers," she said. "Isn't that dippy?"

  "You're dippy," Stu said, grinning.

  Harold woke up just before dawn with a dull but not entirely unpleasant ache in his groin. He shivered a little as he got up. It was getting noticeably colder in the early mornings, although it was only August 22 and fall was still a calendar month away.

  But there was heat below his waist, oh yes. Just looking at the delectable curve of her buttocks in those tiny see-through underpants as she slept was warming him up considerably. She wouldn't mind if he woke her up ... well, maybe she would mind, but she wouldn't object. He still had no real idea of what might lie behind those dark eyes, and he was a little afraid of her.

  Instead of waking her up, he dressed quietly. He didn't want to mess around with Nadine, as much as he would have liked to.

  What he needed to do was go someplace alone and think.

  He paused at the door, fully dressed, carrying his boots in his left hand. Between the slight chilliness of the room and the prosy act of getting dressed, his desire had left him. He could smell the room now, and the smell was not terribly appealing.

  It was just a little thing, she had said, a thing they could do without. Perhaps it was true. She could do things with her mouth and hands that were nearly beyond belief. But if it was such a small thing, why did this room have that stale and slightly sour odor that he associated with the solitary pleasure of all his bad years?

  Maybe you want it to be bad.

  Disturbing thought. He went out, closing the door softly behind him.

  Nadine's eyes opened the moment the door was closed. She sat up, looked thoughtfully at the door, and then lay down again. Her body ached in a slow and unrelieved cycle of desire. It felt almost like menstrual cramps. If it was such a small thing, she thought (with no idea of how close to Harold's her own thoughts were), why did she feel this way? At one point last night she'd had to bite her lips together to stifle the cries: Stop that fooling around and STICK me with that thing! Do you hear me? STICK me with it, cram me FULL of it! Do you think what you're doing is doing anything for me? Stick me with it and let's for Christ's sake--or mine, at least--end this crazy game!

  He had been lying with his head between her legs, making strange noises of lust, noises that might have been comic had they not been so honestly urgent, so nearly savage. And she had looked up, those words trembling behind her lips, and had seen (or only thought she had?) a face at the window. In an instant the fire of her own lust had been damped down to cold ash.

  It had been his face, grinning savagely in at her.

  A scream had risen in her throat ... and then the face was gone, the face was nothing but a moving pattern of shadows on the darkened glass mingled with smudges of dust. No more than the boogeyman a child imagines he sees in the closet, or curled up slyly behind the chest of toys in the corner.

  No more than that.

  Except it was more, and not even now, in the first cold rational light of dawn, could she pretend otherwise. It would be dangerous to pretend otherwise. It had been him, and he had been warning her. The husband-to-be was watching over his intended. And the bride defiled would be the bride unaccepted.

  Staring at the ceiling, she thought: I suck his cock, but that's not defilement. I let him stick himself up my ass, but that isn't defilement, either. I dress for him like a cheap streetwalking slut, but that's perfectly okay.

  It was enough to make you wonder what sort of man your fiance really was.

  Nadine stared up at the ceiling for a long, long time.

  Harold made instant coffee, drank it with a grimace, and then took a couple of cold Pop-Tarts out onto the front step. He sat down and ate them while dawn crept across the land.

  In retrospect, the last couple of days seemed like a mad carnival ride to him. It was a blur of orange trucks, of Weizak clapping him on the shoulder and calling him Hawk (they all called him that now), of dead bodies, a never-ending moldy stream of them, and then coming home from all that death to a never-ending flow of kinky sex. Enough to blur your head.

  But now, sitting here on a front step as cold as a marble headstone, a horrible cup of instant coffee sloshing in his guts, he could munch these sawdust-tasting cold Pop-Tarts and think. He felt clear-headed, sane after a season of insanity. It occurred to hi
m that, for a person who had always considered himself to be a Cro-Magnon man amid a herd of thundering Neanderthals, he had been doing precious little thinking lately. He had been led, not by the nose, but by the penis.

  He turned his mind to Frannie Goldsmith even as he turned his gaze out to the Flatirons. It was Frannie who had been at his house that day, he knew it for sure now. He had gone over to the place where she lived with Redman on a pretext, really hoping to get a look at her footgear. As it turned out, she had been wearing the sneakers that matched the print he had found on his cellar floor. Circles and lines instead of the usual waffle or zigzag tread. No question, baby.

  He thought he could put it together without too much trouble. Somehow she had found out he had read her diary. He must have left a smudge or mark on one of the pages ... maybe more than one. So she had come to his house looking for some indication of how he felt about what he had read. Something written down.

  There was, of course, his ledger. But she hadn't found it, he could feel positive of that. His ledger said flat-out that he planned to kill Stuart Redman. If she had found something like that, she would have told Stu. Even if she hadn't, he didn't believe she could have been as easy and as natural with him as she had been yesterday.

  He finished his last Pop-Tart, grimacing at the taste of its cold frosting and colder jelly center. He decided he would walk to the bus station instead of taking his cycle; Teddy Weizak or Norris could drop him off on the way home. He set off, zipping his light jacket all the way to his chin against the chill that would be gone in an hour or so. He walked past the empty houses with their shades drawn, and about six blocks down Arapahoe, he began to see an x-mark chalked boldly on door after door. Again, his idea. The Burial Committee had checked all those houses where the mark appeared, and had hauled away whatever bodies there were to be hauled away. X, a crossing-out. The people who had lived in those houses where the mark appeared were gone for all time. In another month that x-mark would be all over Boulder, signifying the end of an age.

  It was time to think, and to think carefully. It seemed that, since he had met Nadine, he really had stopped thinking ... but maybe he had really stopped even before that.

  I read her diary because I was hurt and jealous, he thought. Then she broke into my house, probably looking for my own diary, but she didn't find it. But just the shock of someone breaking in had maybe been revenge enough. It had certainly bent him out of shape. Maybe they were even and it could be quits.

  He didn't really want Frannie anymore, did he? ... Did he?

  He felt the sullen coal of resentment glow in his chest. Maybe not. But that didn't change the fact that they had excluded him. Although Nadine had said little about her reasons for coming to him, Harold had an idea that she had been excluded in some way too, rebuffed, turned back. They were a couple of outsiders, and outsiders hatch plots. It's perhaps the only thing that keeps them sane. (Remember to put that in the ledger, Harold thought ... he was almost downtown now.) There was a whole company of outsiders on the other side of the mountains. And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside. Inside where it's warm. Just a little thing, being inside where it's warm, but really such a big thing. About the most important thing in the world.

  Maybe he didn't want to be quits and even. Maybe he didn't want to settle for a draw, for a career of riding in a twentieth-century deadcart and getting meaningless letters of thanks for his ideas, and waiting five years for Bateman to retire from their precious committee so he could be on it ... and what if they decided to pass over him again? They might, too, because it wasn't just a question of age. They had taken the goddam deaf-mute, and he was only a few years older than Harold himself.

  The coal of resentment was burning brightly now. Think, sure, think --that was easy to say, and sometimes it was even to do ... but what good was thinking when all it got you from the Neanderthals who ran the world was a horse-laugh, or even worse, a thank-you letter?

  He reached the bus station. It was still early, and no one was there yet. There was a poster on the door saying there was going to be another public meeting on the twenty-fifth. Public meeting? Public circle jerk.

  The waiting room was festooned with travel posters and ads for the Greyhound Ameripass and pictures of big mother-humping Scenicruisers rolling through Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, Nashville, wherever. He sat down and stared with a cold morning eye at the darkened pinball machines, the Coke machine, the coffee machine that would also dispense a Lipton Cup-a-Soup that smelled vaguely like a dead fish. He lit a cigarette and threw the matchstub on the floor.

  They had adopted the Constitution. Whooppee. How very-very and too-too. They had even sung The Star-Speckled Banana, for Christ's sweet sake. But suppose Harold Lauder had gotten up, not to make a few constructive suggestions, but to tell them the facts of life in this first year after the plague?

  Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Harold Emery Lauder and I am here to tell you that, in the words of the old song, the fundamental things apply as time goes by. Like Darwin. The next time you stand and sing the National Anthem, friends and neighbors, chew on this: America is dead, dead as a doornail, dead as Jacob Marley and Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper and Harry S. Truman, but the principles just propounded by Mr. Darwin are still very much alive--as alive as Jacob Marley's ghost was to Ebenezer Scrooge. While you are meditating on the beauties of constitutional rule, spare a little time to meditate on Randall Flagg, Man of the West. I doubt very much if he has any time to spare for such fripperies as public meetings and ratifications and discussions on the true meaning of a peach in the best liberal mode. Instead he has been concentrating on the basics, on his Darwin, preparing to wipe the great Formica counter of the universe with your dead bodies. Ladies and gentlemen, let me modestly suggest that while we are trying to get the lights on and waiting for a doctor to find our happy little hive, he may be searching eagerly for someone with a pilot's credentials so he can start overflights of Boulder in the best Francis Gary Powers tradition. While we debate the burning question of who will be on the Street Cleaning Committee, he has probably already seen to the creation of a Gun Cleaning Committee, not to mention mortars, missile sites, and possibly even germ warfare centers. Of course we know this country doesn't have any germ or biological warfare centers, that's one of the things that makes this country great --what country, ha-ha--but you should realize that while we're busy getting all the wagons in a circle, he's--

  "Hey, Hawk, you pullin overtime?"

  Harold looked up, smiling. "Yeah, I thought I'd get some," he told Weizak. "I clocked you when I came in. You made six bucks already."

  Weizak laughed. "You're a card, Hawk, you know that?"

  "I am," Harold agreed, still smiling. He began to relace his boots. "A wild card."

  CHAPTER 56

  Stu spent the next day at the power station, wrapping motors, and was cycling home at the end of the workday. He had reached the small park opposite the First National Bank when Ralph hailed him over. He parked his cycle and walked over to the bandshell where Ralph was sitting.

  "I've kind of been looking for you, Stu. You got a minute? "

  "Just one. I'm late for supper. Frannie'll be worried."

  "Yeah. Been up to the power station wrapping copper, from the look of your hands." Ralph looked absent and worried.

  "Yeah. Not even workmen's gloves do much good. My hands are wrecked."

  Ralph nodded. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the park, some of them looking at the narrow-gauge railway train that had once gone between Boulder and Denver. A trio of young women had spread out a picnic supper. Stu found it very pleasant just to sit here with his wounded hands in his lap. Maybe marshaling won't be so bad, he thought. At least it'll get me off that goddam assembly line in East Boulder.

  "How's it going out there?" Ralph asked.

  "Me, I wouldn't know--I'm just hired help, like the rest. Brad Kitchner says it's g
oing like a house afire. He says the lights will be back on by the end of the first week of September, maybe sooner, and that we'll have heat by the middle of the month. Of course, he's pretty young to be making with the predictions ..."

  "I'll put my money on Brad," Ralph said. "I trust im. He's been gettin a lot of what you call on-the-job training." Ralph tried to laugh; the laugh turned into a sigh which seemed fetched up from the big man's bootheels.

  "Why you so down at the mouth, Ralph?" "I got some news on my radio," Ralph said. "Some of it's good, some of it ... well, some of it's not so good, Stu. I want you to know, because there's no way to keep it secret. Lots of people in the Zone with CBs. I imagine some were listening when I was talking to these new folks coming in."

  "How many?"

  "Over forty. One of them's a doctor, name of George Richardson. He sounds like a fine man. Level-headed."

  "Well, that's great news!"

  "He's from Derbyshire, Tennessee. Most of the people in this group are sort of mid-Southern. Well, it seems they had a pregnant woman with them, and her time come up ten days ago, on the thirteenth. This doctor delivered her of them--twins, she had--and they were fine. At first they were fine." Ralph lapsed back into silence, his mouth working.

  Stu grabbed him. "They died? The babies died? That what you're trying to tell me? That they died? Talk to me, dammit!"

  "They died," Ralph said in a low voice. "One of them went in twelve hours. Appeared to just choke to death. The other went two days later. Nothing Richardson could do to save them. The woman went loony. Raving about death and destruction and no more babies. You want to make sure Fran isn't around when they come in, Stu. That's what I wanted to tell you. And that you should let her know about this right away. Because if you don't, someone else will."

  Stu let go of Ralph's shirt slowly.

  "This Richardson, he wanted to know how many pregnant women we had, and I said only one that we know of right now. He asked how far along she was and I said four months. Is that right?"

  "She's five months now. But Ralph, is he sure those babies died of the superflu? Is he sure?"

  "No, he's not, and you gotta tell Frannie that, too, so she understands it. He said it could have been any number of things ... the mother's diet ... something hereditary ... a respiratory infection ... or maybe they were just, you know, defective babies. He said it could have been the Rh factor, whatever that is. He just couldn't tell, them being born in the middle of a field beside the doggone Interstate 70. He said that him and about three others who were in charge of their group sat up late at night and talked it over. Richardson, he told them what it might mean if it was the Captain Trips that killed those babies, and how important it was for them to find out one way or the other for sure."