The Stand Read online

  "You lie," he whispered. His face was parchment white, his eyes bulging. "They wouldn't dare. And if they were, I'd know."

  Her eyes gazed blankly over his shoulder to the east. "I see them," she whispered. "They're leaving their posts in the dead of night, and your Eye doesn't see them. They're leaving their posts and sneaking away. A work-crew goes out with twenty people and comes back with eighteen. The border guards are defecting. They're afraid the balance of power is shifting on its arm. They're leaving you, leaving you, and the ones that are left won't lift a finger when the men from the East come to finish you once and for all--"

  It snapped. Whatever there was inside him, it snapped.

  "YOU LIE!" he screamed at her. His hands slammed down on her shoulders, snapping both collarbones like pencils. He lifted her body high over his head into the faded blue desert sky, and as he pivoted on his heels he threw her, up and out, as he had thrown the glass. He saw the great smile of relief and triumph on her face, the sudden sanity in her eyes, and understood. She had baited him into doing it, understanding somehow that only he could set her free--

  And she was carrying his child.

  He leaned over the low parapet, almost overbalancing, trying to call back the irrevocable. Her nightgown fluttered. His hand closed on the gauzy material and he felt it rip, leaving him only a scrap of cloth so diaphanous that he could see his fingers through it--the stuff of dreams on waking.

  Then she was gone, plummeting straight down with her toes pointed toward the earth, her gown billowing up her neck and over her face in drifts. She didn't scream.

  She went down as silently as a defective skyrocket.

  When he heard the indescribable thud of her hard landing, Flagg threw his head back to the sky and howled.

  It made no difference, it made no difference.

  It was still all in the palm of his hand.

  He leaned over the parapet again and watched them come running, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Or maggots to a piece of offal.

  They looked so small, and he was so high above them.

  He would levitate, he decided, and regain his state of calm.

  But it was a long, long time before his bootheels would leave the sundeck, and when they did they would only hover a quarter of an inch above the concrete. They would go no higher.

  Tom awoke that night at eight o'clock, but there was still too much light to move. He waited. Nick had come to him again in his sleep, and they had talked. It was so good to talk to Nick.

  He lay in the shade of the big rock and watched the sky darken. The stars began to peep out. He thought about Pringle's Potato Chips and wished he had some. When he got back to the Zone--if he did get back to the Zone--he would have all of them he wanted. He would gorge on Pringle's chips. And bask in the love of his friends. That was what was missing back there in Las Vegas, he decided--simple love. They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn't much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

  Only mushrooms and toadstools grew big and fat in the dark, even he knew that, laws, yes.

  "I love Nick and Frannie and Dick Ellis and Lucy," Tom whispered. It was his prayer. "I love Larry Underwood and Glen Bateman, too. I love Stan and Rona. I love Ralph. I love Stu. I love--"

  It was odd, how easily their names came to him. Why, back in the Zone he was lucky if he could remember Stu's name when he came to visit. His thoughts turned to his toys. His garage, his cars, his model trains. He had played with them by the hour. But he wondered if he would want to play with them so much when he got back from this ... if he got back. It wouldn't be the same. That was sad, but maybe it was also good.

  "The Lord is my shepherd," he recited softly. "I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen."

  It was dark enough now, and he pushed on. By eleven-thirty that night he had reached God's Finger, and he paused there for a little lunch. The ground was high here, and looking back the way he had come, he could see moving lights. On the turnpike, he thought. They're looking for me.

  Tom looked northeast again. Far ahead, barely visible in the dark (the moon, now two nights past full, had already begun to sink), he saw a huge rounded granite dome. He was supposed to go there next.

  "Tom's got sore feet," he whispered to himself, but not without some cheeriness. Things could have been much worse than a case of sore feet. "M-O-O-N, that spells sore feet."

  He walked on, and the night things skittered away from him, and when he laid himself down at dawn, he had come almost forty miles. The Nevada-Utah border was not far to the east of him.

  By eight that morning he was hard asleep, his head pillowed on his jacket. His eyes began to move rapidly back and forth behind his closed lids.

  Nick had come, and Tom talked with him.

  A frown creased Tom's sleeping brow. He had told Nick how much he was looking forward to seeing him again.

  But for some reason he could not understand, Nick had turned away.

  CHAPTER 68

  Oh, how history repeats itself: Trashcan Man was once again being broiled alive in the devil's frying pan--but this time there was no hope of Cibola's cooling fountains to sustain him.

  It's what I deserve, no more than what I deserve.

  His skin had burned, peeled, burned, peeled again, and finally it had not tanned but blackened. He was walking proof that a man finally takes on the look of what he is. Trash looked as if someone had doused him in #2 kerosene and struck a match to him. The blue of his eyes had faded in the constant desert glare, and looking into them was like looking into weird, extra-dimensional holes in space. He was dressed in a strange imitation of the dark man--an open-throated red-checked shirt, faded jeans, and desert boots that were already scratched and mashed and folded and sprung. But he had thrown away his red-flawed amulet. He didn't deserve to wear it. He had proved unworthy. And like all imperfect devils, he had been cast out.

  He paused in the broiling sun and passed a thin and shaking hand across his brow. He had been meant for this place and time--all his life had been preparation. He had passed through the burning corridors of hell to get here. He had endured the father-killing sheriff, he had endured that place at Terre Haute, he had endured Carley Yates. After all his strange and lonely life, he had found friends. Lloyd. Ken. Whitney Horgan.

  And ah God, he had fucked it all up. He deserved to burn out here in the devil's frying pan. Could there be redemption for him? The dark man might know. Trashcan did not.

  He could barely remember now what had happened--perhaps because his tortured mind did not want to remember. He had been in the desert for over a week before his last disastrous return to Indian Springs. A scorpion had stung him on the middle finger of his left hand (his fuckfinger, that long-ago Carley Yates in that long-ago Powtanville would have called it with unfailing pool-hall vulgarity), and that hand had swelled up like a rubber glove filled with water. An unearthly fire had filled his head. And yet he had pushed on.

  He had finally returned to Indian Springs, still feeling like a figment of someone else's imagination. There had been some good-natured talk as the men examined his finds--incendiary fuses, contact land mines, small stuff, really. Trash had begun to feel good for the first time since the scorpion had stung him.

  And then, with no warning at all, time had sideslipped and he was back in Powtanville. Someone had said, "People who play with fire wet the bed, Trash," and he had looked up, expecting to see Billy Jamieson, but it hadn't been Bill, it was Rich Groudemore from Powtanville, grinning and picking his teeth with a match, his fingers black with grease because he'd strolled up to the pool-hall from the Texaco on the corner to have a game of nine-ball on his break. And someone else said, "You better put that away, Richie, Trash is back in town," and that sounded like S
teve Tobin at first, but it wasn't Steve. It was Carley Yates in his old, scuffed, and hoody motorcycle jacket. With growing horror he had seen they were all there, unquiet corpses come back to life. Richie Groudemore and Carley and Norm Morrisette and Hatch Cunningham, the one who was getting bald even though he was only eighteen and all of the others called him Hatch Cunnilingus.

  And they were leering at him. It came thick and fast then, through a feverhaze of years. Hey, Trash, why dintchoo torch the SCHOOL? Hey, Trashy, ya burned ya pork off yet? Hey, Trashcan Man, I heard you snort Ronson lighter fluid, that true?

  Then Carley Yates: Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?

  He tried to scream at them, but all that had come out was a whisper: "Don't ask me about old lady Semple's pension check no more." And he ran.

  The rest of it was a dream. Getting the incendiary fuses and slapping them on the trucks in the motor pool. His hands had done their own work, his mind far away in a confused whirl. People had seen him coming and going between the motor pool and his sandtrack with its big balloon tires, and some of them had even waved, but no one had come over and asked what he was doing. After all, he wore Flagg's charm.

  Trashy did his work and thought about Terre Haute.

  In Terre Haute they had made him bite on a rubber thing when they gave him the shocks, and the man at the controls sometimes looked like the father-killing sheriff and sometimes like Carley Yates and sometimes like Hatch Cunnilingus. And he always swore hysterically to himself that this time he wouldn't piss himself. And he always did.

  When the trucks were fixed, he had gone into the nearest hangar and had fixed the choppers in there. He had wanted timer fuses to do that job right, and so he had gone into the messhall kitchen and had found over a dozen of those five-and-dime plastic timers. You set them for fifteen minutes or half an hour and when they got back to zero they went ding and you knew it was time to take your pie out of the oven. Only instead of going ding this time, Trash had thought, they are going to go bang. He liked that. That was pretty good. If Carley Yates or Rich Groudemore tried taking one of those copters up, they were going to get a big fat surprise. He had simply hooked the kitchen timers up to the copter ignition systems.

  When it was done, a moment of sanity had come back. A moment of choice. He had stared around wonderingly at the helicopters parked in the echoing hangar and then down at his hands. They smelled like a roll of burned caps. But this was not Powtanville. There were no helicopters in Powtanville. The Indiana sun did not shine with the savage brilliance of this sun. He was in Nevada. Carley and his pool-hall buddies were dead. Dead of the superflu.

  Trash had turned around and looked doubtfully at his handiwork. What was he doing, sabotaging the dark man's equipment? It was senseless, insane. He would undo it, and quickly.

  Oh, but the lovely explosions.

  The lovely fires.

  Flaming jet fuel streaming everywhere. Helicopters exploding out of the air. So beautiful.

  And he had suddenly thrown his new life away. He had trotted back to his sand-crawler, a furtive grin on his sun-blackened face. He had gotten in and had driven away ... but not too far away. He had waited, and finally a fuel truck had come out of the motor pool garage and had trundled across the tarmac like a large olive-drab beetle. And when it blew, exploding greasy fire in every direction, Trash had dropped his fieldglasses and had bellowed at the sky, shaking his fists in inarticulate joy. But the joy had not lasted long. It had been replaced by deadly terror and sick, mourning sorrow.

  He had driven northwest into the desert, pushing the sand-crawler along at near-suicidal speeds. How long ago? He didn't know. If he had been told that this was the sixteenth of September, he would only have nodded in a total blank lack of understanding.

  He thought he would kill himself, that there was nothing else left for him, every hand was turned against him now, and that was just as it was supposed to be. When you bit the hand that fed you, you expected that extended hand to curl into a fist. That wasn't only the way life went; that was justice. He had three large cans of gasoline in the back of the track. He would pour it all over himself and then strike a match. It was what he deserved.

  But he hadn't done it. He didn't know why. Some force, more powerful than the agony of his remorse and loneliness, had stopped him. It seemed that even burning himself to death like a Buddhist monk was not penance enough. He had slept. And when he awoke, he discovered that a new thought had crept into his brain as he slept, and that thought was:

  REDEMPTION.

  Was it possible? He didn't know. But if he found something ... something big ... and brought it to the dark man in Las Vegas, might it not be possible? And even if REDEMPTION was impossible, perhaps ATONEMENT was not. If it was true, there was still a chance he could die content.

  What? What could it be? What was big enough for REDEMPTION, or even for ATONEMENT? Not land mines or a fleet of flametracks, not grenades or automatic weapons. None of those things were big enough. He knew where there were two large experimental bombers (they had been built without congressional knowledge, paid for out of blind defense funds), but he could not get them back to Vegas, and even if he could, there was no one there who could fly them. From the looks of them, they crewed at least ten, maybe more.

  He was like an infrared scope that senses heat in darkness and reveals those heat sources as vague red-devil shapes. He was able, in some strange way, to sense the things that had been left behind in this wasteland, where so many military projects had been carried out. He could have gone straight west, straight to Project Blue, where the whole thing had begun. But cold plague was not to his taste, and in his confused but not entirely illogical way, he thought it would not be to Flagg's taste, either. Plague didn't care who it killed. It might have been better for the human race if the original funders of Project Blue had kept that simple fact in mind.

  So he had gone northwest from Indian Springs, into the sandy desolation of the Nellis Air Force Range, stopping his crawler when he had to cut through high barbed wire fences marked with signs that read U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING and ARMED SENTRIES and GUARD DOGS and THERE IS A HIGH-VOLTAGE CHARGE PASSING THROUGH THESE WIRES. But the electricity was dead, like the guard dogs and the armed sentries, and Trashcan Man drove on, correcting his course from time to time. He was being drawn, drawn to something. He didn't know what it was, but he thought it was big. Big enough.

  The crawler's Goodyear balloon tires rolled steadily on, carrying Trash through dry washes and up slopes so rocky that they looked like half-exposed stegosaurus spines. The air hung still and dry. The temperature hovered at just above 100. The only sound was the drone of the crawler's modified Studebaker engine.

  He topped a knoll, saw what was below, and threw the transmission into neutral for a moment to get a better look.

  There was a huddled complex of buildings down there, shimmering through the rising heat like quicksilver. Quonset huts and low cinderblock. Vehicles stalled here and there on dusty streets. The whole area was surrounded by three courses of barbed wire, and he could see the porcelain conductors along the wire. These were not the small conductors the size of a knuckle that passed along a weak stay-away charge; these were the giant ones, the size of a closed fist.

  From the east, a paved two-lane road led to a guardhouse that looked like a reinforced pillbox. No cute little signs here saying CHECK YOUR CAMERA WITH MP ON DUTY or IF YOU LIKED US, TELL YOUR CONGRESS-MAN. The only sign in evidence was red on yellow, the colors of danger, curt and to the point: PRESENT IDENTIFICATION IMMEDIATELY.

  "Thank you," Trashcan whispered. He had no idea who he was thanking. "Oh thank you ... thank you." His special sense had led him to this place, but he had known it was here all along. Somewhere.

  He put the sandtrack in its forward gear and lurched down the slope. Ten minutes later he was nosing up the access road to the guardhouse. There were black-and-white-striped crash barriers across the road
, and Trash got out to examine them. Places like this had big generators to make sure there was plenty of emergency power. He doubted if any generator would have gone on supplying power for three months, but he would still have to be very careful and make sure everything was blown before going in. What he wanted was now very near at hand. He wouldn't allow himself to become overeager and get cooked like a roast in a microwave oven.

  Behind six inches of bulletproof glass, a mummy in an army uniform stared out and beyond him.

  Trash ducked under the crash barrier on the ingress side of the guardhouse and approached the door of the little concrete building. He tried it and it opened. That was good. When a place like this had to switch over to emergency power, everything was supposed to lock automatically. If you were taking a crap, you got locked in the bathroom until the crisis was over. But if the emergency power failed, everything unlocked again.

  The dead sentry had a dry, sweet, interesting smell, like cinnamon and sugar mixed together for toast. He had not bloated or rotted; he had simply dried up. There were still black discolorations under his neck, the distinctive trademark of Captain Trips. Standing in the corner behind him was a Browning automatic rifle. Trashcan Man took it and went back outside.

  He set the BAR for single fire, fiddled with the sight, and then socked it into the hollow of his scrawny right shoulder. He sighted down on one of the porcelain conductors and squeezed off a shot. There was a loud hand-clapping sound and an exciting whiff of cordite. The conductor exploded every whichway, but there was no purple-white glare of high-voltage electricity. Trashcan Man smiled.

  Humming, he walked over to the gate and examined it. Like the guardhouse door, it was unlocked. He pushed it open a little way and then hunkered down. There was a pressure mine here, under the paving. He didn't know how he knew, but he did know. It might be armed; it might not be.