The Stand Read online

  He began to eat the rabbit.

  Once, he was quite sure, he would have done a quick fade when things began to get flaky. Not this time. This was his place, his time, and he would take his stand here. It didn't matter that he hadn't yet been able to uncover the third spy, or that Harold had gotten out of control at the end and had had the colossal effrontery to try to kill the bride who had been promised, the mother of his son.

  Somewhere that strange Trashcan Man was in the desert, sniffing out the weapons which would eradicate the troublesome, worrisome Free Zone forever. His Eye could not follow the Trashcan Man, and in some ways Flagg thought that Trash was stranger than he was himself, a kind of human bloodhound who sniffed cordite and napalm and gelignite with deadly radar accuracy.

  In a month or less, the National Guard jets would be flying, with a full complement of Shrike missiles tucked under their wings. And when he was sure that the bride had conceived, they would fly east.

  He looked dreamily up at the basketball moon and smiled.

  There was one other possibility. He thought the Eye would show him, in time. He might go there, possibly as a crow, possibly as a wolf, possibly as an insect--a praying mantis, perhaps, something small enough to squirm through a carefully concealed vent cap in the middle of a spiky patch of desert grass. He would hop or crawl through dark conduits and finally slip through an air conditioner grille or a stilled exhaust fan.

  The place was underground. Just over the border and into California.

  There were beakers there, rows and rows of beakers, each with its own neat Dymo tape identifying it: a super cholera, a super anthrax, a new and improved version of the bubonic plague, all of them based on the shifting-antigen ability that had made the superflu so almost universally deadly. There were hundreds of them in this place; assorted flavors, as they used to say in the Life Savers commercials.

  How about a little in your water, Free Zone?

  How about a nice airburst?

  Some lovely Legionnaires' disease for Christmas, or would you rather have the new and improved Swine flu?

  Randy Flagg, the dark Santa, in his National Guard sleigh, with a little virus to drop down every chimney?

  He would wait, and he would know the right time when it came round at last.

  Something would tell him.

  Things were going to be fine. No quick fade this time. He was on top and he was going to stay there.

  The rabbit was gone. Full of hot food, he felt himself again. He stood, tin plate in hand, and slung the bones out into the night. The wolves charged at them, fought over them, growling and biting and snarling, their eyes rolling blankly in the moonlight.

  Flagg stood, hands on his hips, and roared laughter up at the moon.

  Early the next morning Nadine left the town of Glendale and headed down I-15 on her Vespa. Her snow-white hair, unbound, trailed out behind her, looking very much like a bridal train.

  She felt sorry for the Vespa, which had served her so long and faithfully and which was now dying. Mileage and desert heat, the laborious crossing of the Rockies, and indifferent maintenance had all taken their toll. The engine now sounded hoarse and laboring. The RPM needle had begun to shudder instead of remaining docilely against the 5X1000 figure. It didn't matter. If it died on her before she arrived, she would walk. No one was chasing her now. Harold was dead. And if she had to walk, he would know and send someone out to pick her up.

  Harold had shot at her! Harold had tried to kill her!

  Her mind kept returning to that no matter how she tried to avoid it. Her mind worried it like a dog worrying a bone. It wasn't supposed to be that way. Flagg had come to her in a dream that first night after the explosion, when Harold finally allowed them to camp. He told her that he was going to leave Harold with her until the two of them were on the Western Slope, almost in Utah. Then he would be removed in a quick, painless accident. An oilslick. Over the side. No fuss, no muss, no bother.

  But it hadn't been quick and painless, and Harold had almost killed her. The bullet had droned past within an inch of her cheek and still she had been unable to move. She had been frozen in shock, wondering how he could have done such a thing, how he could have been allowed to even try such a thing.

  She had tried to rationalize it by telling herself it was Flagg's way of throwing a scare into her, of reminding her who it was she belonged to. But it made no sense! It was crazy! Even if it had made some sort of sense, there was a firm, knowing voice inside her which said the shooting incident had just been something Flagg had not been prepared against.

  She tried to push the voice away, to bar the door against it the way a sane person will bar the door against an undesirable person with murder in his or her eyes. But she couldn't do it. The voice told her she was alive through blind chance now. That Harold's bullet could just as easily have gone between her eyes, and it wouldn't have been Randall Flagg's doing either way.

  She called the voice a liar. Flagg knew everything, where the smallest sparrow had fallen--

  No, that's God, the voice replied implacably. God, he's not. You're alive through blind chance, and that means that all bets are off. You owe him nothing. You can turn around and go back, if you want to.

  Go back, that was a laugh. Go back where?

  The voice had little to say on that subject; she would have been surprised if it did. If the dark man's feet were made of clay, she had discovered the fact just a little late.

  She tried to concentrate on the cool beauty of the desert morning instead of the voice. But the voice remained, so low and insistent she was barely aware of it:

  If he didn't know Harold was going to be able to defy him and strike back at you, what else doesn't he know? And will it be a clean miss next time?

  But oh dear God, it was too late. Too late by days, weeks, maybe even years. Why had that voice waited until it was useless to speak up?

  And as if in agreement, the voice finally fell silent and she had the morning to herself. She rode without thinking, her eyes fixed on the road unreeling in front of her. The road that led to Las Vegas. The road that led to him.

  The Vespa died that afternoon. There was a grinding clank deep in its guts and the engine stalled. She could smell something hot and abnormal, like frying rubber, drifting up from the engine case. Her speed had dropped from the steady forty she had been maintaining until she had been putting along at walking speed. Now she trundled it over into the breakdown lane and cranked the starter a few times, knowing it was useless. She had killed it. She had killed a lot of things on her way to her husband. She had been responsible for wiping out the entire Free Zone Committee and all of their invited guests at that final explosive meeting. And then there was Harold. Also, say-hey and by the way, let's not forget Fran Goldsmith's unborn baby.

  That made her feel sick. She stumbled over to the guardrail and tossed up her light lunch. She felt hot, delirious, and very ill, the only living thing in a sunstruck desert nightmare. It was hot ... so hot.

  She turned back, wiping her mouth. The Vespa lay on its side like a dead animal. Nadine looked at it for a few moments and then began to walk. She had already passed Dry Lake. That meant she would have to sleep by the road tonight if no one picked her up. With any luck she would reach Las Vegas in the morning. And suddenly she was sure that the dark man would let her walk. She would reach Las Vegas hungry and thirsty and burning with the desert heat, every last bit of the old life flushed from her system. The woman who had taught small children at a private school in New England would be gone, as dead as Napoleon. With her luck, the small voice which snapped and worried at her so would be the last part of the old Nadine to expire. But in the end, of course, that part would go, too.

  She walked, and the afternoon advanced. Sweat rolled down her face. Quicksilver glimmered, always at the point where the highway met the faded-denim sky. She unbuttoned her light blouse and took it off, walking in her white cotton bra. Sunburn? So what? Frankly, my dear, I don't give a fuck.
<
br />   By dusk she had gone a terrible shade of red that was nearly purple along the raised ridges of her collarbones. The cool of the evening came suddenly, making her shiver, and making her remember that she had left her camping gear with the Vespa.

  She looked around doubtfully, seeing cars here and there, some of them buried in drifting sand up to their hood ornaments. The thought of sheltering in one of those tombs made her feel sick--even sicker than her terrible sunburn was making her feel.

  I'm delirious, she thought.

  Not that it mattered. She decided she would walk all night rather than sleep in one of those cars. If this were only the Midwest again. She could have found a barn, a haystack, a field of clover. A clean, soft place. Out here there was only the road, the sand, the baked hardpan of the desert.

  She brushed her long hair away from her face and dully realized that she wished she was dead.

  Now the sun was below the horizon, the day perfectly poised between light and dark. The wind that now slipped over her was dead cold. She looked around herself, suddenly afraid.

  It was too cold.

  The buttes had become dark monoliths. The sand dunes were like ominous toppled colossi. Even the spiny stands of saguaro were like the skeletal fingers of the accusing dead, poking up out of the sand from their shallow graves.

  Overhead, the cosmic wheel of the sky.

  A snatch of lyric occurred to her, a Dylan song, cold and comfortless: Hunted like a crocodile ... ravaged in the corn ...

  And on the heels of that, some other song, an Eagles song, suddenly frightening: And I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight ... with a million stars all around ...

  Suddenly she knew he was there.

  Even before he spoke, she knew.

  "Nadine." His soft voice, coming out of the growing darkness. Infinitely soft, the final enveloping terror that was like coming home.

  "Nadine, Nadine ... how I love to love Nadine."

  She turned around and there he was, as she had always known he would be someday, a thing as simple as this. He was sitting on the hood of an old Chevrolet sedan (had it been there a moment ago? she didn't know for sure, but she didn't think it had been), his legs crossed, his hands laid lightly on the knees of his faded jeans. Looking at her and smiling gently. But his eyes were not gentle at all. They gave lie to the idea that this man felt anything gentle. In them she saw a black glee that danced endlessly like the legs of a man fresh through the trapdoor in a gibbet platform.

  "Hello," she said. "I'm here."

  "Yes. At last you're here. As promised." His smile broadened and he held his hands out to her. She took them, and as she reached him she felt his baking heat. He radiated it, like a well-stoked brick oven. His smooth, lineless hands slipped around hers ... and then closed over them tight, like handcuffs.

  "Oh, Nadine," he whispered, and bent to kiss her. She turned her head just a little, looking up at the cold fire of the stars, and his kiss was on the hollow below her jaw rather than on her lips. He wasn't fooled. She felt the mocking curve of his grin against her flesh.

  He revolts me, she thought.

  But revulsion was only a scaly crust over something worse--a caked and long-hidden lust, an ageless pimple finally brought to a head and about to spew forth some noisome fluid, some sweetness long since curdled. His hands, slipping over her back, were much hotter than her sunburn. She moved against him, and suddenly the slim saddle between her legs seemed plumper, fuller, more tender, more aware. The seam of her slacks was chafing her in a delicately obscene way that made her want to rub herself, get rid of the itch, cure it once and for all.

  "Tell me one thing," she said.

  "Anything."

  "You said, 'As promised.' Who promised me to you? Why me? And what do I call you? I don't even know that. I've known about you for most of my life, and I don't know what to call you."

  "Call me Richard. That's my real name. Call me that."

  "That's your real name? Richard?" she asked doubtfully, and he giggled against her neck, making her skin crawl with loathing and desire. "And who promised me?"

  "Nadine," he said, "I have forgotten. Come on."

  He slipped off the hood of the car, still holding her hands, and she almost jerked them away and ran ... but what good would that have done? He would only chase after her, catch her, rape her.

  "The moon," he said. "It's full. And so am I." He brought her hand down to the smooth and faded crotch of his jeans and there was something terrible there, beating with a life of its own beneath the notched coldness of his zipper.

  "No," she muttered, and tried to pull her hand away, thinking how far this was from that other moonstruck night, how impossibly far. This was at the other end of time's rainbow.

  He held her hand against him. "Come out in the desert and be my wife," he said.

  "No!"

  "It's much too late to say no, dear."

  She went with him. There was a bedroll, and the blackened bones of a campfire under the silver bones of the moon.

  He laid her down.

  "All right," he breathed. "All right, then." His fingers worked his belt buckle, then the button, then the zipper.

  She saw what he had for her and began to scream.

  The dark man's grin sprang forth at the sound, huge and glittering and obscene in the night, and the moon stared down blankly at them both, bloated and cheesy.

  Nadine pealed forth scream after scream and tried to crawl away and he grabbed her and then she was holding her legs shut with all her strength, and when one of those blank hands inserted itself between them they parted like water and she thought: I will look up ... I will look up at the moon... I will feel nothing and it will be over ... it will be over ... I will feel nothing ...

  And when the dead coldness of him slipped into her the shriek ripped up and out of her, bolted free, and she struggled, and the struggle was useless. He battered into her, invader, destroyer, and the cold blood gushed down her thighs and then he was in her, all the way up to her womb, and the moon was in her eyes, cold and silver fire, and when he came it was like molten iron, molten pig iron, molten brass, and she came herself, came in screaming, incredible pleasure, came in terror, in horror, passing through the pig-iron and brass gates into the desert land of insanity, chased through, blown through like a leaf by the bellowing of his laughter, watching his face melt away, and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid. He went again ... and again ... and again. It seemed he would never be used up. Cold. He was dead cold. And old. Older than mankind, older than the earth. Again and again he filled her with his nightspawn, screaming laughter. Earth. Light. Coming. Coming again. The last shriek coming out of her to be wiped away by the desert wind and carried into the farthest chambers of the night, out to where a thousand weapons waited for their new owner to come and claim them. Shaggy demon's head, a lolling tongue deeply split into two forks. Its dead breath fell on her face. She was in the land of insanity now. The iron gates were closed.

  The moon--!

  The moon was almost down.

  He had caught another rabbit, had caught the trembling little thing in his bare hands and broken its neck. He had built a new fire on the bones of the old one and now the rabbit cooked, sending up savory ribbons of aroma. There were no wolves now. Tonight they had stayed away--it was meet and right that they should have done. It was, after all, his wedding night, and the dazed and apathetic thing sitting lumpishly on the other side of the fire was his blushing bride.

  He leaned over and raised her hand out of her lap. When he let it go it stayed in place, raised to the level of her mouth. He looked at this phenomenon for a moment and then put her hand back in her lap. There her fingers began to wiggle sluggishly, l
ike dying snakes. He poked two fingers at her eyes, and she did not blink. That blank stare just went on and on.

  He was honestly puzzled.

  What had he done to her?

  He couldn't remember.

  And it didn't matter. She was pregnant. If she was also catatonic, what did that matter? She was the perfect incubator. She would breed his son, bear him, and then she could die with her purpose served. After all, it was what she was there for.

  The rabbit was done. He broke it in two. He pulled her half into tiny pieces, the way you break up a baby's food. He fed it to her a piece at a time. Some pieces fell out of her mouth and into her lap half-chewed, but she ate most of it. If she remained like this, she would need a nurse. Jenny Engstrom, perhaps.

  "That was very good, dear," he said softly.

  She looked blankly up at the moon. Flagg smiled gently at her and ate his wedding supper.

  Good sex always made him hungry.

  He awoke in the latter part of the night and sat up in his bedroll, confused and afraid ... afraid in the instinctive, unknowing way that an animal is afraid--a predator who senses that he himself may be stalked.

  Had it been a dream? A vision--?

  They're coming.

  Frightened, he tried to understand the thought, to put it in some context. He couldn't. It hung there on its own like a bad hex.

  They're closer now.

  Who? Who was closer now?

  The night wind whispered past him, seeming to bring him a scent. Someone was coming and--

  Someone's going.

  While he slept, someone had passed his camp, headed east. The unseen third? He didn't know. It was the night of the full moon. Had the third escaped? The thought brought panic with it.

  Yes, but who's coming?

  He looked at Nadine. She was asleep, pulled up in a tight fetal position, the position his son would assume in her belly only months from now.

  Are there months?

  Again there was that feeling of things going flaky around the edges. He lay down again, believing there would be no more sleep for him this night. But he did sleep. And by the time he drove into Vegas the next morning, he was smiling again and he had nearly forgotten his night panic. Nadine sat docilely beside him on the seat, a big doll with a seed hidden carefully in its belly.