The Stand Read online

  "Why don't you know?"

  "Because I can't see it!" he roared, and flung her across the room. She went in a boneless, rolling heap, and when she saw the searchlight of his face bearing down upon her in the gloom, her bladder let go, spreading warmth down her legs. The soft and helpful face of reason was gone. Randy Flagg was gone. She was with the Walkin Dude now, the tall man, the big guy, and God help her.

  "You'll tell," he said. "You'll tell me what I want to know."

  She gazed at him, and then slowly got to her feet. She felt the weight of the knife lying against her forearm.

  "Yes, I'll tell you," she said. "Come closer."

  He took a step toward her, grinning.

  "No, a lot closer. I want to whisper it in your ear."

  He came closer still. She could feel baking heat, freezing cold. There was a high, atonal singing in her ears. She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.

  "Closer," she whispered huskily.

  He took another step and she cocked her right wrist in viciously. She heard the spring click. Weight slapped into her hand.

  "Here!" she shrieked hysterically, and brought her arm up in a hard sweep, meaning to gut him, leaving him to blunder around the room with his intestines hanging out in steaming loops. Instead he roared laughter, hands on his hips, flaming face cocked back, squeezing and contorting with great good humor.

  "Oh, my dear!" he cried, and went off into another gale of laughter.

  She looked stupidly down at her hand. It held a firm yellow banana with a blue and white Chiquita sticker on it. She dropped it, horrified, to the carpet, where it became a sickly yellow grin, miming Flagg's own.

  "You'll tell," he whispered. "Oh yes indeed you will."

  And Dayna knew he was right.

  She whirled quickly, so quickly that even the dark man was momentarily caught by surprise. One of those black hands snatched out and caught only the back of her blouse, leaving him with nothing more substantial than a swatch of silk.

  Dayna leaped at the window-wall.

  "No!" he screamed, and she could feel him after her like a black wind.

  She drove with her lower legs, using them like pistons, hitting the window with the top of her head. There was a dull flat cracking sound, and she saw amazingly thick hunks of glass fall out into the employees' parking lot. Twisting cracks, like lodes of quicksilver, ran out from her point of impact. Momentum carried her halfway through the hole and it was there that she lodged, bleeding.

  She felt his hands on her shoulders and wondered how long it would take him to make her tell. An hour? Two? She suspected she was dying now, but that was not good enough.

  It was Tom I saw, and you can't feel him or whatever it is you do because he's different, he's --

  He was dragging her back in.

  She killed herself by simply whipping her head viciously around to the right. A razor-sharp jag of glass plunged deep into her throat. Another slipped into her right eye. Her body went stiff for a moment, and her hands beat against the glass. Then she went limp. What the dark man dragged back into the office was only a bleeding sack.

  She had gone, perhaps in triumph.

  Bellowing his rage, Flagg kicked her. The yielding, indifferent movement of her body enraged him further. He began to kick her around the room, bellowing, snarling. Sparks began to jump from his hair, as if somewhere inside him a cyclotron had hummed into life, building up an electrical field and turning him into a battery. His eyes blazed with dark fire. He bellowed and kicked, kicked and bellowed.

  Outside, Lloyd and the others grew pale. They looked at each other. At last it was more than they could stand. Jenny, Ken, Whitney--they drifted away, and their curdled-milk faces were set in the careful expressions of people who hear nothing and want to go right on hearing it.

  Only Lloyd waited--not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him. And at last Flagg called him in.

  He was sitting on the wide desk, his legs crossed, his hands on the knees of his jeans. He was looking over Lloyd's head, out into space. There was a draft, and Lloyd saw that the window-wall was smashed in the middle. The jagged edges of the hole were sticky with blood.

  Resting on the floor was a huddled, vaguely human form wrapped in a drape.

  "Get rid of that," Flagg said.

  "Okay." His voice fell to a husky whisper. "Should I take the head?"

  "Take the whole thing out to the east of town and douse it in gasoline and burn it. Do you hear me? Burn it! You burn the fucking thing!"

  "All right."

  "Yes." Flagg smiled benignly.

  Trembling, cotton-mouthed, nearly groaning with terror, Lloyd struggled to pick up the bulky object. The underside was sticky. It made a u in his arms, slithered through them, and thumped back to the floor. He threw a terrified glance at Flagg, but he was still in a semi-lotus, looking outward. Lloyd got hold of it again, clutched it, and staggered toward the door.

  "Lloyd?"

  He stopped and looked back. A little moan escaped him. Flagg was still in the semi-lotus, but now he was floating about ten inches above the desk, still looking serenely across the room.

  "W-W-What?"

  "Do you still have the key I gave you in Phoenix?"

  "Yes."

  "Keep it handy. The time is coming."

  "A-All right."

  He waited, but Flagg did not speak again. He hung in the darkness, a mind-boggling Hindu fakir's trick, looking outward, smiling gently.

  Lloyd left quickly, happy as always just to go with his life and his sanity.

  That day was a quiet one in Vegas. Lloyd arrived back around 2 P.M., smelling of gasoline. The wind had started to rise, and by five o'clock it was howling up and down the Strip and making forlorn hooting noises between the hotels. The palms, which had begun to die without city water in July and August, flapped against the sky like tattered battle flags. Clouds in strange shapes scudded overhead.

  In the Cub Bar, Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott sat drinking bottled beer and eating egg salad sandwiches. Three old ladies--the Weird Sisters, everyone called them--kept chickens on the outskirts of town, and no one could seem to get enough eggs. Below Whitney and Ken, in the casino, little Dinny McCarthy was crawling happily around on one of the crap tables with an array of plastic soldiers.

  "Lookit that little squirt," Ken said fondly. "Someone ast me if I'd watch him an hour. I'd watch him all week. I wish to God he was mine. My wife only had the one, and he was two months premature. Died in the incubator the third day out." He looked up as Lloyd came in.

  "Hey, Dinny!" Lloyd called.

  "Yoyd! Yoyd!" Dinny cried. He ran to the edge of the crap table, jumped down, and ran to him. Lloyd picked him up, swung him, and hugged him hard.

  "Got kisses for Lloyd?" he asked.

  Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses.

  "I got something for you," Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey's Kisses from his breast pocket.

  Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. "Yoyd?"

  "What, Dinny?"

  "Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?"

  Lloyd smiled. "I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who's your mom now?"

  "Angelina." He pronounced it Angeyeena. "Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too."

  "Don't tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd."

  Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON'T COME line of the crap table, generaling his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of Hamm's.

  "Thanks," Lloyd said. "Looks great."

  "That's homemade Syrian bread," Whitney said proudly.

  Lloyd munched for a while. "Has anybody seen him?" he asked at last.

  Ken shook his he
ad. "I think he's gone again."

  Lloyd thought it over. Outside, a stronger-than-average gust of wind shrieked by, sounding lonely and lost in the desert. Dinny raised his head uneasily for a moment and then bent back to play.

  "I think he's around somewhere," Lloyd said finally. "I don't know why, but I do. I think he's around waiting for something to happen. I dunno what."

  Whitney said in a low voice, "You think he got it out of her?"

  "No," Lloyd said, watching Dinny. "I don't think he did. It went wrong for him somehow. She ... she got lucky or she outthought him. And that doesn't happen often."

  "It won't matter in the long run," Ken said, but he looked troubled just the same.

  "No, it won't." Lloyd listened to the wind for a while. "Maybe he's gone back to L.A." But he didn't really think so, and his face showed it.

  Whitney went back to the kitchen and produced another round of beer. They drank in silence, thinking disquieting thoughts. First the Judge, now the woman. Both dead. And neither had talked. Neither had been unmarked as he had ordered. It was as if the old Yankees of Mantle and Maris and Ford had lost the opening two games of the World Series; it was hard for them to believe, and frightening.

  The wind blew hard all night.

  CHAPTER 63

  On the late afternoon of September 10, Dinny was playing in the small city park that lies just north of the city's hotel and casino district. His "mother" that week, Angelina Hirschfield, was sitting on a park bench and talking with a young girl who had drifted into Las Vegas about five weeks before, ten days or so after Angie herself had come in.

  Angie Hirschfield was twenty-seven. The girl was ten years younger, now clad in tight bluejeans shorts and a brief middy blouse which left absolutely nothing to the imagination. There was something obscene about the contrast between the tight allure of her young body and the childish, pouty, and rather vacuous expression on her face. Her conversation was monotonous and seemingly without end: rock stars, sex, her lousy job cleaning Cosmoline preservative off armaments at Indian Springs, sex, her diamond ring, sex, the TV programs that she missed so much, and sex.

  Angie wished she would go have sex with someone and leave her alone. And she hoped Dinny would be at least thirty before he ever worked around to having this girl for a mother.

  At that moment Dinny looked up, smiled, and yelled: "Tom! Hey, Tom!"

  On the other side of the park, a big man with straw-blond hair was shambling along with a big workman's lunchbucket slamming against his leg.

  "Say, that guy looks drunk," the girl said to Angie.

  Angie smiled. "No, that's Tom. He's just--"

  But Dinny was off and running, hollering "Tom! Wait up, Tom!" at the top of his lungs.

  Tom turned, grinning. "Dinny! Hey-hey!"

  Dinny leaped at Tom. Tom dropped his lunchbucket and grabbed him. Swung him around.

  "Airplane me, Tom! Airplane me!"

  Tom grabbed Dinny's wrists and began to spin him around, faster and faster. Centrifugal force pulled the boy's body out until his whizzing legs were parallel to the ground. He shrieked with laughter. After two or three spins, Tom set him gently on his feet.

  Dinny wobbled around, laughing and trying to get his balance back.

  "Do it again, Tom! Do it again some more!"

  "No, you'll puke if I do. And Tom's got to get to his home. Laws, yes. "

  "Kay, Tom. 'Bye!"

  Angie said, "I think Dinny loves Lloyd Henreid and Tom Cullen more than anyone else in town. Tom Cullen is simple, but--" She looked at the girl and broke off. She was watching Tom, her eyes narrowed and thoughtful.

  "Did he come in with another man?" she asked.

  "Who? Tom? No--as far as I know, he came in all by himself about a week and a half ago. He was with those other people in their Zone, but they drove him out. Their loss is our gain, that's what I say."

  "And he didn't come in with a dummy? A deaf-and-dummy?"

  "A deaf-mute? No, I'm pretty sure he came in alone. Dinny just loves him."

  The girl watched Tom out of sight. She thought of Pepto-Bismol in a bottle. She thought of a scrawled note that said: We don't need you. That had been back in Kansas, a thousand years ago. She had shot at them. She wished she had killed them, particularly the dummy.

  "Julie? Are you all right?"

  Julie Lawry didn't answer. She stared after Tom Cullen. In a little while, she began to smile.

  CHAPTER 64

  The dying man opened the Permacover notebook, uncapped his pen, paused a moment, and then began to write.

  It was strange; where once the pen had flown over the paper, seeming to cover each sheet from top to bottom by a process of benign magic, the words now straggled and draggled, the letters large and tottery, as if he was regressing back to early grammar school days in his own private time machine.

  In those days, his mother and father had still had some love left over for him. Amy had not yet blossomed, and his own future as The Amazing Ogunquit Fat Boy and Possible Hommasexshul was not yet decided. He could remember sitting at the sun-washed kitchen table, slowly copying one of the Tom Swift books word for word in a Blue Horse tablet --pulp stock, blue lines--with a glass of Coke beside him. He could hear his mother's words drifting out of the living room. Sometimes she was talking on the phone, sometimes to a neighbor.

  It's just baby fat, the doctor says so. There's nothing wrong with his glands, thank God. And he's so bright!

  Watching the words grow, letter by letter. Watching the sentences grow, word by word. Watching the paragraphs grow, each one a brick in the great walled bulwark that was language.

  "It's to be my greatest invention," Tom said forcefully. "Watch what happens when I pull out the plate, but for gosh sakes, don't forget to shield your eyes!"

  The bricks of language. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Words. Worlds. Magic. Life and immortality. Power.

  I don't know where he gets it, Rita. Maybe from his grandfather. He was an ordained minister and they say he gave the most wonderful sermons ...

  Watching the letters improve as time passed. Watching them connect with each other, printing left behind, writing now. Assembling thoughts and plots. That was the whole world, after all, nothing but thoughts and plots. He had gotten a typewriter finally (and by then there wasn't much else left over for him; Amy was in high school, National Honor Society, cheerleader, dramatics club, debate society, straight A's, the braces had come off her teeth and her very best friend in the world was Frannie Goldsmith ... and her brother's baby fat had not yet departed although he was thirteen years old, and he had begun to use big words as a defense, and with a slowly blooming horror he had begun to realize what life was, what it really was: one big heathen cooking pot, and he was the missionary alone inside, being slowly boiled). The typewriter unlocked the rest of it for him. At first it was slow, so slow, and the constant typos were frustrating beyond belief. It was as if the machine was actively--but slyly--opposing his will. But when he got better at it, he began to understand what the machine really was--a kind of magic conduit between his brain and the blank page he strove to conquer. By the time of the superflu epidemic he was able to type better than a hundred words a minute, and he was at last able to keep up with his racing thoughts and snare them all. But he had never stopped his longhand entirely, remembering that Moby-Dick had been written longhand, and The Scarlet Letter, and Paradise Lost.

  He had developed the writing Frannie had seen in his ledger over years of practice--no paragraphs, no line breaks, no pause for the eye. It was work--terrible, hand-cramping work--but it was a labor of love. He had used the typewriter willingly and gratefully, but thought he had always saved the best of himself for longhand.

  And now he would transcribe the last of himself that same way.

  He looked up and saw buzzards circling slowly in the sky, like something from a Saturday matinee movie with Randolph Scott, or from a novel by Max Brand. He thought of it written in a novel: Harold saw the buzza
rds circling in the sky, waiting. He looked at them calmly for a moment, and then bent to his journal again.

  He bent to his journal again.

  At the end, he had been forced to return to the straggling letters which had been the best his shaky motor control could produce at the beginning. He was reminded achingly of the sunny kitchen, the cold glass of Coke, the old and mildewy Tom Swift books. And now, at last, he thought (and wrote), he might have been able to make his mother and father happy. He had lost his baby fat. And although still technically a virgin, he was morally sure that he was not a hommasexshul.

  He opened his mouth and croaked, "Top of the world, Ma."

  He was halfway down the page. He looked at what he had written, then looked at his leg, which was twisted and broken. Broken? That was too kind a word. It was shattered. He had been sitting in the shade of this rock for five days now. The last of his food was gone. He would have died of thirst yesterday or the day before except for two hard showers. His leg was putrefying. It had a green and gassy smell and the flesh had swelled tight against his pants, stretching the khaki fabric until it resembled a sausage casing.

  Nadine was long gone.

  Harold picked up the gun that had been lying by his side, and checked the loads. He had checked them a hundred times or more just this day. During the rainstorms, he had been careful to keep the gun dry. There were three cartridges left in it. He had fired the first two at Nadine when she looked down and told him she was going on without him.

  They had been coming around a hairpin turn, Nadine on the inside, Harold on the outside aboard his Triumph cycle. They were on the Colorado Western Slope, about seventy miles from the Utah border. There had been an oilslick on the outer part of the curve, and in the days since, Harold had pondered much on this oilslick. It seemed almost too perfect. An oilslick from what? Surely nothing had been moving up here over the last two months. Plenty of time for a slick to dry up. It was as if his red eye had been watching them, waiting for the correct time to produce an oilslick and take Harold out of the play. Leave him with her through the mountains in case of trouble, and then ditch him. He had, as they say, served his purpose.