The Stand Read online

  He went to the Grand, and there he learned what had happened while he slept. He saw the new look in their eyes, wary and questioning, and he felt the fear touch him again with its light moth wings.

  CHAPTER 66

  At about the same time that Nadine Cross was beginning to realize certain truths which should perhaps have been self-evident, Lloyd Henreid was sitting alone in the Cub Bar, playing Big Clock solitaire and cheating. He was out of temper. There had been a flash fire at Indian Springs that day, one dead, three hurt, and one of those likely to die of bad flash burns. They had no one in Vegas who knew how to treat such burns.

  Carl Hough had brought the news. He had been pissed off to a high extreme, and he was not a man to be taken lightly. He had been a pilot for Ozark Airlines before the plague, was an ex-Marine, and could have broken Lloyd in two pieces with one hand while making a daiquiri with the other if he had wanted to. According to Carl, he had killed several men during the course of his long and checkered career, and Lloyd tended to believe him. Not that Lloyd was physically afraid of Carl Hough; the pilot was big and tough, but he was as leery of the Walkin Dude as anyone else in the West, and Lloyd wore Flagg's charm. But he was one of their fliers, and because he was, he had to be handled diplomatically. And oddly enough, Lloyd was something of a diplomat. His credentials were simple but awesome: He had spent several weeks with a certain madman named Poke Freeman and had lived to tell the tale. He had also spent several months with Randall Flagg, and was still drawing air and in his right mind.

  Carl had come in around two on September 12, his cycle helmet under one arm. There was an ugly burn on his left cheek and blisters on one hand. There had been a fire. Bad, but not as bad as it could have been. A fuel truck had exploded, spewing burning petroleum all over the tarmac area.

  "All right," Lloyd had said. "I'll see that the big guy knows. The guys that got hurt are at the infirmary?"

  "Yeah. They are. I don't think Freddy Campanari is going to live to see the sun go down. That leaves two pilots, me and Andy. Tell him that, and tell him something else when he gets back. I want that fuck Trashcan Man gone. That's my price for staying."

  Lloyd gazed at Carl Hough. "Is it?"

  "You're damn well told."

  "Well, I tell you, Carl," Lloyd said. "I can't pass that message on. If you want to give orders to him, you'll have to do it yourself."

  Carl looked suddenly confused and a little afraid. Fear sat strangely on that craggy face. "Yeah, I see your point. I'm just tired and fucked over, Lloyd. My face hurts like hell. I don't mean to take it out on you."

  "That's okay, man. It's what I'm here for." Sometimes he wished it wasn't. Already his head was starting to ache.

  Carl said, "But he's gotta go. If I have to tell him that, I will. I know he's got one of those black stones. He's ace-high with the tall man, I guess. But, hey, listen." Carl sat down and put his helmet on a baccarat table. "Trash was responsible for that fire. My Christ, how're we ever going to get those planes up if one of the big guy's men is torching the fucking pilots?"

  Several people passing through the lobby of the Grand glanced uneasily over at the table where Lloyd and Carl sat.

  "Keep your voice down, Carl."

  "Okay. But you see the problem, don't you?"

  "How sure are you that Trash did it?"

  "Listen," Carl said, leaning forward, "he was in the motor pool, all right? In there for a long time. Lots of guys saw him, not just me."

  "I thought he was out someplace. In the desert. You know, looking for stuff."

  "Well, he came back, all right? That sand-crawler he takes out was full of stuff. God knows where he gets it, I sure don't. Well, he had the guys in stitches at coffee break. You know how he is. To him, weaponry is like candy is to a kid."

  "Yeah."

  "The last thing he showed us was one of those incendiary fuses. You pull the tab, and there's this little burst of phosphorus. Then nothing for half an hour or forty minutes, depending on the size of the fuse, all right? You get it? Then there's one hell of a fire. Small, but very intense."

  "Yeah."

  "So okay. Trashy's showin us, just about droolin over the thing, in fact, and Freddy Campanari says, 'Hey, people who play with fire wet the bed, Trash.' And Steve Tobin--you know him, he's funny like a rubber crutch--he says, 'You guys better put away your matches, Trashy's back in town.' And Trash got really weird. He looked around at us, and he muttered under his breath. I was sitting right next to him and it sounded like he said, 'Don't ask me about old lady Semple's check no more.' That make any sense to you?"

  Lloyd shook his head. Nothing about the Trashcan Man made much sense to him.

  "Then he just left. Picked up the stuff he was showing us and took off. Well, none of us felt very good about it. We didn't mean to hurt his feelings. Most of the guys really like Trash. Or they did. He's like a little kid, you know?"

  Lloyd nodded.

  "An hour later, that goddam fuel truck goes up like a rocket. And while we were picking up the pieces, I happened to look up and there's Trashy over in his sand-crawler by the barracks building, watching us with binoculars."

  "Is that all you've got?" Lloyd asked, relieved.

  "No. It ain't. If it was, I wouldn't even have bothered to come see you, Lloyd. But it got me thinking about how that truck went up. That's just the sort of thing you use an incendiary fuse for. In Nam, the Cong blew up a lot of our ammo dumps just that way, with our own fucking incendiary fuses. Stick it under the truck, on the exhaust pipe. If no one starts the truck up, it goes when the timer runs out. If someone does, it goes when the pipe gets hot. Either way, ka-boom, no more truck. The only thing that didn't fit was there's always a dozen fuel trucks in the motor pool, and we don't use them in any particular order. So after we got poor old Freddy over to the infirmary, John Waite and I went over there. John's in charge of the motor pool and he was just about pissing himself. He'd seen Trash in there earlier."

  "He was sure it was Trashcan Man?"

  "With those burns all the way up his arm, it's kind of hard to make a mistake, wouldn't you say? All right? No one thought anything of it then. He was just poking around, and that's his job, ain't it?"

  "Yes, I guess you'd have to say it is."

  "So me and John start to look over the rest of the fuel trucks. And holy shit, there's an incendiary fuse on every one of them. He put them on the exhaust pipes just below the fuel-tanks themselves. The reason the truck we were using went first was because the exhaust pipe got hot, like I just told you, all right? But the others were getting ready to go. Two or three were starting to smoke. Some of the trucks were empty, but at least five of them were full of jet fuel. Another ten minutes and we would have lost half the goddam base."

  Oh Jesus, Lloyd thought mournfully. It really is bad. Just about as bad as it can get.

  Carl held up his blistered hand. "I got this pulling one of the hot ones. Now do you see why he's got to go?"

  Lloyd said hesitantly, "Maybe someone stole those fuses out of the back of his sand-crawler while he was taking a leak or something."

  Carl said patiently: "That's not how it happened. Someone hurt his feelings while he was showing off his toys, and he tried to burn us all up. He damn near succeeded. Something's got to be done, Lloyd."

  "All right, Carl."

  He spent the rest of the afternoon asking around about Trash--had anyone seen him or know where he might be? Guarded looks and negative answers. Word had gotten around. Maybe that was good. Anyone who did see him would be quick to report it, in hopes of having a good word put in on their behalf with the big guy. But Lloyd had a hunch that no one was going to see Trash. He had given them a little hotfoot and had gone running back into the desert in his sand-crawler.

  He looked down at the solitaire game spread out in front of him and carefully controlled an urge to sweep the whole thing onto the floor. Instead, he cheated out another ace and went on playing. It didn't matter. When Flagg wanted him, he would
just reach out and gather him up. Old Trashy was going to end up riding a crosspiece just like Hec Drogan. Hard luck, guy.

  But in his secret heart, he wondered.

  Things had happened lately that he didn't like. Dayna, for instance. Flagg had known about her, that was true, but she hadn't talked. She had somehow escaped into death instead, leaving them no further ahead in the matter of the third spy.

  That was another thing. How come Flagg didn't just know about the third spy? He had known about the old fart, and when he had come back from the desert he had known about Dayna, and had told them exactly how he was going to handle her. But it hadn't worked.

  And now, Trashcan Man.

  Trash wasn't a nobody. Maybe he had been back in the old days, but not anymore. He wore the black man's stone just as he himself did. After Flagg had crisped that bigmouth lawyer's brains in L.A., Lloyd had seen Flagg lay his hands on Trashcan's shoulders and tell him gently that all the dreams had been true dreams. And Trash had whispered, "My life for you."

  Lloyd didn't know what else might have passed between them, but it seemed clear that he had wandered the desert with Flagg's blessing. And now Trashcan Man had gone berserk.

  Which raised some pretty serious questions.

  Which was why Lloyd was sitting here alone at nine in the evening, cheating at solitaire and wishing he was drunk.

  "Mr. Henreid?"

  Now what? He looked up and saw a girl with a pretty, pouty face. Tight white shorts. A halter that didn't quite cover the areolae of her nipples. Sexpot type for sure, but she looked nervous and pale, almost ill. She was biting compulsively at one of her thumbnails, and he saw that all her nails were bitten and ragged.

  "What."

  "I ... I have to see Mr. Flagg," she said. The strength went rapidly out of her voice, and it ended as a whisper.

  "You do, huh? What do you think I am, his social secretary?"

  "But ... they said ... to see you."

  "Who did?"

  "Well, Angie Hirschfield did. It was her."

  "What's your name?"

  "Uh, Julie." She giggled, but it was only a reflex. The scared look never left her face, and Lloyd wondered wearily what sort of shit was up in the fan now. A girl like this wouldn't ask for Flagg unless it was very serious indeed. "Julie Lawry."

  "Well, Julie Lawry, Flagg isn't in Las Vegas now."

  "When will he be back?"

  "I don't know. He comes and goes, and he doesn't wear a beeper. He doesn't explain himself to me, either. If you have something, give it to me and I'll see that he gets the message." She looked at him doubtfully and Lloyd repeated what he had told Carl Hough that afternoon. "It's what I'm here for, Julie."

  "Okay." Then, in a rush: "If it's important, you tell him I'm the one told you. Julie Lawry."

  "Okay."

  "You won't forget?"

  "No, for Chrissake! Now what is it?"

  She pouted. "Well, you don't have to be so mean about it."

  He sighed and put the handful of cards he had been holding down on the table. "No," he said. "I guess I don't. Now, what is it?"

  "That dummy. If he's around, I figure he's spying. I just thought you should know." Her eyes glinted viciously. "Motherfucker pulled a gun on me."

  "What dummy?"

  "Well, I saw the retard, and so I figured the dummy must be with him, you know? And they're just not our type. I figure they must have come from the other side."

  "That's what you figure, huh?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, I don't know what the Christ you're talking about. It's been a long day and I'm tired. If you don't start talking some sense, Julie, I'm going up to bed."

  Julie sat down, crossed her legs, and told Lloyd about her meeting with Nick Andros and Tom Cullen in Pratt, Kansas, her hometown. About the Pepto-Bismol ("I was just having a little fun with the softie, and this deaf-and-dumb pulls a gun on me!"). She even told him about shooting at them as they left town.

  "Which all proves what?" Lloyd asked when she finished. He had been a little intrigued with the word "spy," but since then had lapsed into a semidaze of boredom.

  Julie pouted again and lit a cigarette. "I told you. That feeb, he's over here now. I just bet he's spying."

  "Tom Cullen, you said his name was?"

  "Yes."

  He had the vaguest sort of memory. Cullen was a big blond guy, a few cards short the deck for sure, but surely not as bad as this high-iron bitch was making out. He tried for more and came up empty. People were still streaming into Vegas in numbers of sixty to a hundred a day. It was becoming impossible to keep them all straight, and Flagg said the immigration was going to get a lot heavier before it tapered off. He supposed he could go to Paul Burlson, who was keeping a file of Vegas residents and find something out about this Cullen dude.

  "Are you going to arrest him?" Julie asked.

  Lloyd looked at her. "I'll arrest you if you don't get off my case," he said.

  "Nice fucking guy!" Julie Lawry cried, her voice rising shrewishly. She jumped to her feet, glaring at him. In her tight white cotton shorts, her legs seemed to go all the way up to her chin. "Try to do you a favor!"

  "I'll check it."

  "Yeah, right, I know that story."

  She stomped off, fanny swinging in tight little circles of indignation.

  Lloyd watched her with a certain weary amusement, thinking there were a lot of chicks like her in the world--even now, after the superflu, he was willing to bet there were a lot around. Easy to slap the make on, but watch out for the fingernails afterward. Kissing cousins to those spiders that gobble up their mates after sex. Two months had gone by and she still bore that mute guy a grudge. What did she say his name was? Andros?

  Lloyd pulled a battered black notebook from his back pocket, wet his finger, and paged over to a blank sheet. This was his memory book, and it was chock-full of little notes to himself--everything from a reminder to take a shave before meeting with Flagg to a boxed memorandum to get the contents of Las Vegas' pharmacies inventoried before they started to lose morphine and codeine. It would be time to get another little book soon.

  In his flat and scrawling grammar school script he wrote: Nick Andros or maybe Androtes -- mute. In town? And below that: Tom Cullen, check out with Paul. He tucked the book back into his pocket. Forty miles northeast, the dark man had consummated his long-term relationship with Nadine Cross under the glittering desert stars. He would have been very interested to know that a friend of Nick Andros's was in Las Vegas.

  But he slept.

  Lloyd looked morosely down at his solitaire game, forgetting about Julie Lawry and her grudge and her tight little ass. He cheated out another ace, and his thoughts turned dolefully back to the Trashcan Man and what Flagg might say--or do--when Lloyd told him.

  At the same time Julie Lawry was leaving the Cub Bar, feeling shat upon for doing no more than what she saw as her civic duty, Tom Cullen stood by the picture window of his apartment in another part of the city, looking dreamily out at the full moon.

  It was time to go.

  Time to go back.

  This apartment was not like his house in Boulder. This place was furnished but not decorated. He had not put up so much as a single poster or hung a single stuffed bird from piano wire. This place had been only a way station, and now it was time to go on. He was glad. He hated it here. It had a kind of smell to it here, a dry and rotten smell that you could never quite put your finger on. The people were mostly nice, and some of them he liked every bit as well as the people in Boulder, folks like Angie and that little boy, Dinny. No one made fun of him because he was slow. They had given him a job and joked with him, and on lunch-break they'd trade out of their dinner-buckets for something out of someone else's that looked better. They were nice folks, not much different from Boulder folks, as far as he could tell, but--

  But they had that smell about them.

  They all seemed to be waiting and watching. Sometimes strange silences fell a
mong them and their eyes seemed to glaze over, as if they were all having the same uneasy dream. They did things without asking for explanations of why they were doing them, or what it was for. It was as if these people were wearing happy-folks faces, but their real faces, their underneath-faces, were monster faces. He had seen a scary movie about that once. That kind of monster was called a werewolf.

  The moon rode over the desert, ghostly, high, and free.

  He had seen Dayna, from the Free Zone. He had seen her once and never again. What had happened to her? Had she been spying, too? Had she gone back?

  He didn't know. But he was afraid.

  There was a small knapsack in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the apartment's useless color console TV. The knapsack was full of vacuum-sealed ham strips and Slim Jims and Saltines. He picked it up and put it on.

  Travel at night, sleep in the day.

  He stepped out into the courtyard of the building without a backward glance. The moon was so bright that he cast a shadow on the cracked cement where the would-be high rollers had once parked their cars with the out-of-state plates.

  He looked up at the ghostly coin that floated in the sky.

  "M-O-O-N, that spells moon," he whispered. "Laws, yes. Tom Cullen knows what that means."

  His bike was leaning against the pink stucco wall of the apartment building. He paused once to adjust his knapsack, then got on and set off for the Interstate. By 11 P.M., he had cleared Las Vegas and was pedaling east in the breakdown lane of I-15. No one saw him. No alarm was raised.

  His mind dropped into a soft neutral, as it almost always did when the most immediate things were taken care of. He biked steadily along, conscious only that the light night breeze felt nice against his sweaty face. Every now and then he had to swerve around a sand dune that had crept out of the desert and had lain a white, skeletal arm across the road, and once he was well away from the city, there were stalled cars and trucks to contend with, too--look on my works, ye mighty, and despair, Glen Bateman might have said in his ironic way.

  He stopped at two in the morning for a light lunch of Slim Jims, crackers, and Kool-Aid from the big thermos strapped to the back of the bike. Then he went on. The moon was down. Las Vegas fell farther behind with every revolution of his bicycle tires. That made him feel good.