The Stand Read online

  "Keep well, Frannie, old kid," he said, and got into his sleeping bag. And in his dreams he thought that Something had come near their camp, Something that was keeping malevolent watch over them. It might have been a wolf with human understanding. Or a crow. Or a weasel, creeping bellydown through the scrub. Or it might have been some disembodied presence, a watching Eye.

  I will fear no evil, he muttered in his dream. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. No evil.

  At last the dream faded and he slept soundly.

  The next morning they were on the road again early, Larry's gadget clicking off the miles as the highway switched lazily back and forth down the gentling Western Slope toward Utah. Shortly after noon they left Colorado behind them. That evening they camped west of Harley Dome, Utah. For the first time the great silence impressed them as being oppressive and malefic. Ralph Brentner went to sleep that night thinking: We're in the West now. We're out of our ballpark and into his.

  And that night Ralph dreamed of a wolf with a single red eye that had come out of the badlands to watch them. Go away, Ralph told it. Go away, we're not afraid. Not afraid of you.

  By 2 P.M. on the afternoon of September 21, they were past Sego. The next large town, according to Stu's pocket map, was Green River. There were no more towns after that for a long, long time. Then, as Ralph had said, they would probably find out if God was with them or not.

  "Actually," Larry said to Glen, "I'm not as worried about food as I am water. Most everyone who's on a trip keeps a few munchies in their car, Oreos or Fig Newtons or something like that."

  Glen smiled. "Maybe the Lord will send us showers of blessing."

  Larry looked up at the cloudless blue sky and grimaced at the idea. "I sometimes think she was right off her block at the end of it."

  "Maybe she was," Glen said mildly. "If you read your theology, you'll find that God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane. It even seems to me--here's the closet Jesuit coming out--that there are good psychological reasons for it. A madman or a person on her deathbed is a human being with a drastically changed psyche. A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet."

  "The ways of God," Larry said. "I know. We see through a glass darkly. It's a pretty dark glass to me, all right. Why we're walking all this way when we could have driven it in a week is beyond me. But since we're doing a nutty thing, I guess it's okay to do it in a nutty way."

  "What we're doing has all sorts of historical precedent," Glen said, "and I see some perfectly sound psychological and sociological reasons for this walk. I don't know if they're God's reasons or not, but they make good sense to me."

  "Such as what?" Stu and Ralph had walked over to hear this, too.

  "There were several American Indian tribes that used to make 'having a vision' an integral part of their manhood rite. When it was your time to become a man, you were supposed to go out into the wilderness unarmed. You were supposed to make a kill, and two songs--one about the Great Spirit and one about your own prowess as a hunter and a rider and a warrior and a fucker--and have that vision. You weren't supposed to eat. You were supposed to get up high--mentally as well as physically--and wait for that vision to come. And eventually, of course, it would." He chuckled. "Starvation is a great hallucinogenic."

  "You think Mother sent us out here to have visions?" Ralph asked.

  "Maybe to gain strength and holiness by a purging process," Glen said. "The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you're also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel."

  Larry shook his head slowly. "I don't follow that."

  "Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?"

  "Reads a book," Ralph said.

  "Goes to see his friends," Stu said.

  "Plays the stereo," Larry said, grinning.

  "Sure, all those things," Glen said. "But he's also missing that TV. There's a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he's still thinking, At nine o'clock I'm going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?"

  "Yeah," Ralph said. "Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn't feel right until it was back."

  "It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It's an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your selves, gentlemen--they are turning into a window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers."

  "But what's the point?" Ralph asked. "Why go through all the rigmarole?"

  Glen said, "If you read your Bible, you'll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time--Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means 'no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.' Does that remind you of anyone?"

  "Sure. Mother," Ralph said.

  "Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too--a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you'd never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car."

  They were all listening closely.

  "Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner ... all of it runs off the battery. A normal life--at least in what used to be Western civilization--was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?"

  "Yeah," Ralph said. "Even a big Delco won't ever overcharge when it's sitting in a Cadillac."

  "Well, what we've done is to strip off the accessories. We're on charge."

  Ralph said uneasily: "If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she'll explode."

  "Yes," Glen agreed. "Same with people. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn't say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here--"

  "Off my case, baldy," Stu growled.

  "Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity."

  They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over.

  "Are we changing?" Stu asked quietly.

  "Yes," Glen answered. "Yes, I think we are."

  "We've dropped some weight," Ralph said. "I know that just looking at you guys. And me, I used to have a helluva beergut. Now I can look down and see my toes again. In fact, I can see just about my whole feet."

  "It's a state of mind," Larry said suddenly. When they looked at him he seemed a trifle embarrassed but went on: "I've had this feeling for the last week or so, and I couldn't understand it. Maybe now I can. I've been feeling high. Like I'd done half a joint of really dynamite grass or snorted just a touch of coke. But there's none of the disorienting feeling that g
oes with dope. You do some dope and you feel like normal thinking is just a little bit out of your grasp. I feel like I'm thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high." Larry laughed. "Maybe it's just hunger" .

  "Hunger's part of it," Glen agreed, "but not all of it."

  "Me, I'm hungry all the time," Ralph said, "but it doesn't seem too important. I feel good."

  "I do too," Stu said. "Physically, I haven't felt this good in years."

  "When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there," Glen said. "The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It's a whole-body, whole-mind enema."

  "You got such a fancy way of puttin things, baldy."

  "It may be inelegant, but it's accurate."

  Ralph asked, "Will it help us with him?"

  "Well," Glen said, "that's what it's for. I don't have much doubt about that. But we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?"

  They walked on. Kojak came out of the brush and walked with them for a while, his toenails clicking on the pavement of US 70. Larry reached down and ruffled his fur. "Ole Kojak," he said. "Did you know you were a battery? Just one great big old Delco battery with a lifetime guarantee?"

  Kojak didn't appear to know or care, but he wagged his tail to show he was on Larry's side.

  They camped that night about fifteen miles west of Sego, and as if to drive home the point of what they had been talking about in the afternoon, there was nothing to eat for the first time since they had left Boulder. Glen had the last of their instant coffee in a Glad Bag, and they shared it out of a single mug, passing it from hand to hand. They had come the last ten miles without seeing a single car.

  The next morning, the twenty-second, they came upon an overturned Ford station wagon with four corpses in it--two of them little children. There were two boxes of animal crackers in the car, and a large bag of stale potato chips. The animal crackers were in better shape. They shared them out five ways.

  "Don't wolf them, Kojak," Glen admonished. "Bad dog! Where are your manners? And if you have no manners--as I must now conclude--where is your savoir faire?"

  Kojak thumped his tail and eyed the animal crackers in a way which showed pretty conclusively that he had no more savoir faire than he did manners.

  "Then root, hog, or die," Glen said, and gave the dog the last of his own share--a tiger. Kojak wolfed it down and then went sniffing off.

  Larry had saved his entire menagerie--about ten animals--to eat at once. He did so slowly and dreamily. "Did you ever notice," he said, "that animal crackers have a faint, lemony undertaste? I remember that from being a kid. Never noticed it again until now."

  Ralph had been tossing his last two crackers from hand to hand, and now he gobbled one. "Yeah, you're right. They do have sort of a lemon taste to em. You know, I kind of wish ole Nicky was here. I wouldn't mind sharing these old animal crackers a little further."

  Stu nodded. They finished the animal crackers and went on. That afternoon they found a Great Western Markets delivery truck, apparently bound for Green River, pulled neatly over in the breakdown lane, the driver sitting bolt upright and dead behind the wheel. They lunched on a canned ham from the back, but none of them seemed to want much. Glen said their stomachs had shrunk. Stu said the ham smelled bad to him--not spoiled, just too rich. Too meaty. It kind of turned his stomach. He could only bring himself to eat a single slice. Ralph said he would have just as soon had two or three more boxes of animal crackers, and they all laughed. Even Kojak ate only a small serving before going off to investigate some scent.

  They camped east of Green River that night, and there was a dust of snow in the early morning hours.

  They came to the washout a little past noon on the twenty-third. The sky had been overcast all day, and it was cold--cold enough to snow, Stu thought--and not just flurries, either.

  The four of them stood on the edge, Kojak at Glen's heel, looking down and across. Somewhere north of here a dam might have given way, or there might have been a succession of hard summer rainstorms. Whatever, there had been a flash flood along the San Rafael, which was only a dry-wash in some years. It had swept away a great thirty-foot slab of I-70. The gully was about fifty feet deep, the banks crumbly, rubbly soil and sedimentary rock. At the bottom was a sullen trickle of water.

  "Holy crow," Ralph said. "Somebody oughtta call the Utah State Highway Department about this."

  Larry pointed. "Look over there," he said. They looked out into the emptiness, which was now beginning to be dotted with strange, wind-carved pillars and monoliths. About one hundred yards down the course of the San Rafael they saw a tangle of guardrails, cable, and large slabs of asphalt-composition, paving. One chunk stuck up toward the cloudy, racing sky like an apocalyptic finger, complete with white broken passing line.

  Glen was looking down into the rubble-strewn cut, hands stuffed into his pockets, an absent, dreaming look on his face. In a low voice, Stu said: "Can you make it, Glen?"

  "Sure, I think so."

  "How's that arthritis?"

  "It's been worse." He cracked a smile. "But in all honesty, it's been better, too."

  They had no rope with which to anchor each other. Stu went down first, moving carefully. He didn't like the way the ground sometimes shifted under his feet, starting little slides of rock and dirt. Once he thought his footing was going to go out from under him completely, sending him sliding all the way to the bottom on his can. One groping hand caught a solid rock outcropping and he hung on for dear life, finding more solid ground for his feet. Then Kojak was bounding blithely past him, kicking up little puffs of dirt and sending down only small runnels of earth. A moment later he was standing on the bottom, wagging his tail and barking amiably up at Stu.

  "Fucking showoff dog," Stu growled, and carefully made his way to the bottom.

  "I'm coming next," Glen called. "I heard what you said about my dog!"

  "Be careful, baldy! Be damn careful! It's really loose underfoot."

  Glen came down slowly, moving with great deliberation from one hold to the next. Stu tensed every time he saw loose dirt start to slide out from underneath Glen's battered Georgia Giants. His hair blew like fine silver around his ears in the light breeze that had sprung up. It occurred to him that when he had first met Glen, painting a mediocre picture beside the road in New Hampshire, Glen's hair had still been salt-and-pepper.

  Until the moment Glen finally planted his feet on the level ground of the mudflat at the bottom of the gully, Stu was sure he was going to fall and break himself in two. Stu sighed with relief and clapped him on the shoulder.

  "No sweat, East Texas," Glen said, and bent to ruffle Kojak's fur.

  "Plenty here," Stu told him.

  Ralph came next, moving carefully from one hold to the next, jumping the last eight feet or so. "Boy," he said. "That shit's just as loose as a goose. Be funny if we couldn't get up that other bank and had to walk four or five miles upstream to find shallower bank, wouldn't it?"

  "Be a lot funnier if another flash flood came along while we were looking," Stu said.

  Larry came down agilely and well, joining them less than three minutes after they had started down. "Who goes up first?" he asked.

  "Why don't you, since you're so perky?" Glen said.

  "Sure."

  It took him considerably longer to get up, and twice the treacherous footing ran out beneath him and he nearly fell. But finally he gained the top and waved down at them.

  "Who's next?" Ralph asked.

  "Me," Glen said, and walked across to the other bank.

  Stu caught his arm. "Listen," he said. "We can walk upstream and find a shallower bank like Ralph said."

  "And lose the rest of the day? When I was a kid, I could have gone up there in forty seconds and registered a pulse-rate under seventy at the top."

  "You're no kid now, Glen."

  "No. But I think there's still some of him left."

  Before Stu could say more,
Glen had started. He paused to rest about a third of the way up and then pressed on. Near the halfway point he grabbed an outcrop of shale that crumbled away under his hands and Stu was sure he was going to tumble all the way to the bottom, end over arthritic end.

  "Ah, shit--" Ralph breathed.

  Glen flailed his arms and somehow kept his balance. He jigged to his right and went up another twenty feet, rested, and then up again. Near the top a spur of rock that he had been standing on tore loose and he would have fallen, but Larry was there. He grabbed Glen's arm and hauled him up.

  "Nothing to it," Glen called down.

  Stu grinned with relief. "How's your pulse-rate, baldy?"

  "Plus ninety, I think," Glen admitted.

  Ralph climbed the cut-bank like a stolid mountain goat, checking each hold, shifting his hands and feet with great deliberation. When he reached the top, Stu started up.

  Right up until the moment he fell, Stu was thinking that actually this slope was a little easier than the one they had descended. The holds were better, the gradient a tiny bit shallower. But the surface was a mixture of chalky soil and rock fragments that had been badly loosened by the wet weather. Stu sensed that it wanted to be evil, and he went up carefully.

  His chest was over the edge when the knob of outcropping his left foot was on suddenly disappeared. He felt himself begin to slide. Larry grabbed for his hand, but this time he missed his grip. Stu grabbed the outjutting edge of the turnpike, and it came off in his hands. He stared at it stupidly for a moment as the speed of his descent began to increase. He discarded it, feeling insanely like Wile E. Coyote. All I need, he thought, is for someone to go beep-beep before I hit the bottom.

  His knee struck something, and there was a sudden bolt of pain. He grabbed at the gluey surface of the slope, which was now speeding past him at an alarming rate, and kept coming away with nothing but handfuls of dirt.

  He slammed into a boulder sticking out of the rubble like a big blunt arrowhead and cartwheeled, the breath slapped from his body. He fell free for about ten feet, and came down on his lower leg at an angle. He heard it snap. The pain was instantaneous and huge. He yelled. He did a backward somersault. He was eating dirt now. Sharp pebbles scrawled bloody scratches across his face and arms. He came down on the hurt leg again, and felt it snap somewhere else. This time he didn't yell. This time he screamed.