The Stand Read online

  "Mine's broken, too. And how. Tom, I'm awful thirsty--"

  "Oh, there's water. All kinds! Here."

  He handed Stu a plastic bottle that might once have held milk. The water was clear and delicious. No grit at all. Stu drank greedily and then threw it all up.

  "Slow and easy does it," Tom said. "That's the ticket. Slow and easy. Boy, it's good to see you. Hurt your leg, didn't you?"

  "Yes, I broke it. Week ago, maybe longer." He drank more water, and this time it stayed down. "But there's more wrong than the leg. I'm bad sick, Tom. Fever. Listen to me."

  "Right! Tom's listening. Just tell me what to do." Tom leaned forward and Stu thought, Why, he looks brighter. Is that possible? Where had Tom been? Did he know anything about the Judge? About Dayna? So many things to talk about, but there was no time now. He was getting worse. There was a deep rattling sound in his chest, like padded chains. Symptoms so much like the superflu. It was really quite funny.

  "I've got to knock down the fever," he said to Tom. "That's the first thing. I need aspirin. Do you know aspirin?"

  "Sure. Aspirin. For fast-fast-fast relief."

  "That's the ticket, all right. You start walking up the road, Tom. Look in the glove-box of every car you come to. Look for a first-aid kit --it'll most likely be a box with a red cross on it. When you find some aspirin in one of those boxes, bring it back here. And if you should find a car with camping gear in it, bring back a tent. Okay?"

  "Sure." Tom stood up. "Aspirin and a tent, then you'll be all better again, right?"

  "Well, it'll be a start."

  "Say," Tom said, "how's Nick? I've been dreaming about him. In the dreams he tells me where to go, because in the dreams he can talk. Dreams are funny, aren't they? But when I try to talk to him, he always goes away. He's okay, isn't he?" Tom looked at Stu anxiously.

  "Not now," Stu said. "I ... I can't talk now. Not about that. Just get the aspirin, okay? Then we'll talk."

  "Okay ..." But fear had settled onto Tom's face like a gray cloud. "Kojak, want to come with Tom?"

  Kojak did. They walked off together, heading east. Stu lay down and put an arm over his eyes.

  When Stu slipped back into reality again, it was twilight. Tom was shaking him. "Stu! Wake up! Wake up, Stu!"

  He was frightened by the way time seemed to be slipping by in sudden lurches--as if the teeth on the cog of his personal reality were wearing down. Tom had to help him sit up, and when he was sitting, he had to lean his head between his legs and cough. He coughed so long and hard that he almost passed out again. Tom watched him with alarm. Little by little, Stu got control of himself. He pulled the blankets closer around him. He was shivering again.

  "What did you find, Tom?"

  Tom held out a first-aid kit. Inside were Band-Aids, Mercurochrome, and a big bottle of Anacin. Stu was shocked to find he could not work the childproof cap. He had to give it to Tom, who finally worried it open. Stu washed down three Anacin with water from the plastic bottle.

  "And I found this," Tom said. "It was in a car full of camping stuff, but there was no tent." It was a huge, puffy double sleeping bag, fluorescent orange on the outside, the lining done in a gaudy stars-and-bars pattern.

  "Yeah, that's great. Almost as good as a tent. You did fine, Tom."

  "And these. They were in the same car." Tom reached into his jacket and produced half a dozen foil packages. Stu could hardly believe his eyes. Freeze-dried concentrates. Eggs. Peas. Squash. Dried beef. "Food, isn't it, Stu? It's got pictures of food on it, laws, yes."

  "It's food," Stu agreed gratefully. "Just about the only kind I can eat, I think." His head was buzzing, and far away, at the center of his brain, a sweetly sickening high C hummed on and on. "Can we heat some water? We don't have a pot or a kettle."

  "I'll find something."

  "Yeah, fine."

  "Stu--"

  Stu looked into that troubled, miserable face, still a boy's face in spite of the beard, and slowly shook his head.

  "Dead, Tom," he said gently. "Nick's dead. Almost a month ago. It was a ... a political thing. Assassination, I s'pose you'd say. I'm sorry."

  Tom lowered his head, and in the freshly built-up fire, Stu saw his tears fall into his lap. They fell in a gentle silver rain. But he was silent. At last he looked up, his blue eyes brighter than ever. He wiped at them with the heel of his hand.

  "I knew he was," he said huskily. "I didn't want to think I knew, but I did. Laws, yes. He kept turning his back and going away. He was my main man, Stu--did you know that?"

  Stu reached out and took Tom's big hand. "I knew, Tom."

  "Yes he was, M-O-O-N, that spells my main man. I miss him awful. But I'm going to see him in heaven. Tom Cullen will see him there. And he'll be able to talk and I'll be able to think. Isn't that right?"

  "It wouldn't surprise me at all, Tom."

  "It was the bad man killed Nick. Tom knows. But God fixed that bad man. I saw it. The hand of God came down out of the sky." There was a cold wind whistling over the floor of the Utah badlands, and Stu shivered violently in its clasp. "Fixed him for what he did to Nick and to the poor Judge. Laws, yes."

  "What do you know about the Judge, Tom?"

  "Dead! Up in Oregon! Shot him!"

  Stu nodded wearily. "And Dayna? Do you know anything about her?"

  "Tom saw her, but he doesn't know. They gave me a job cleaning up. And when I came back one day I saw her doing her job. She was up in the air changing a streetlight bulb. She looked at me and ..." He fell silent for a moment, and when he spoke again it was more to himself than to Stu. "Did she see Tom? Did she know Tom? Tom doesn't know. Tom ... thinks... she did. But Tom never saw her again."

  Tom left to go foraging shortly after, taking Kojak with him, and Stu dozed. He returned not with a big tin can, which was the best Stu had hoped for, but with a broiling pan big enough to hold a Christmas turkey. There were treasures in the desert, apparently. Stu grinned in spite of the painful fever blisters that had begun to form on his lips. Tom told him he had gotten the pan from an orange truck with a big u on it-- someone who had been fleeing the superflu with all their worldly possessions, Stu guessed. Much good it had done them.

  Half an hour later there was food. Stu ate carefully, sticking to the vegetables, watering the concentrates enough to make a thin gruel. He held everything down and felt a little better, at least for the time being. Not long after supper, he and Tom went to sleep with Kojak between them.

  "Tom, listen to me."

  Tom hunkered down by Stu's big, fluffy sleeping bag. It was the next morning. Stu had been able to eat only a little breakfast; his throat was sore and badly swollen, all his joints painful. The cough was worse, and the Anacin wasn't doing much of a job of knocking back the fever.

  "I got to get inside and get some medicine into me or I'm gonna die. And it has to be today. Now, the closest town is Green River, and that's sixty miles east of here. We'll have to drive."

  "Tom Cullen can't drive a car, Stu. Laws, no!"

  "Yeah, I know. It's gonna be a chore for me, because as well as being sick as a dog, I broke the wrong friggin leg."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well ... never mind right now. It's too hard to explain. We won't even worry about it, because that ain't the first problem. The first problem is getting a car to start. Most of them have been sitting out here three months or more. The batteries will be as flat as pancakes. So we'll need a little luck. We got to find a stalled car with a standard shift at the top of one of these hills. We might do it. It's pretty hilly country." He didn't add that the car would have to have been kept reasonably tuned, would have to have some gas in it ... and an ignition key. All those guys on TV might know how to hotwire a car, but Stu didn't have a clue.

  He looked up at the sky, which was scumming over with clouds. "Most of it's on you, Tom. You got to be my legs."

  "All right, Stu. When we get the car, are we going back to Boulder? Tom wants to go to Boulder, don't you?"


  "More than anything, Tom." He looked toward the Rockies, which were a dim shadow on the horizon. Had the snow started falling up in the high passes yet? Almost certainly. And if not yet, then soon. Winter came early in this high and forsaken part of the world. "It may take a while," he said.

  "How do we start?"

  "By making a travois."

  "Trav--?"

  Stu gave Tom his pocket knife. "You've got to make holes in the bottom of this sleeping bag. One on each side."

  It took them an hour to make the travois. Tom found a couple of fairly straight sticks to ram down into the sleeping bag and out the holes at the bottom. Tom got some rope from the U-Haul where he had gotten the broiling pan, and Stu used it to secure the sleeping bag to the poles. When it was done, it reminded Stu more of a crazy rickshaw than a travois like the ones the Plains Indians had used.

  Tom picked up the poles and looked doubtfully over his shoulder. "Are you in, Stu?"

  "Yeah." He wondered how long the seams would hold before unraveling straight up the sides of the bag. "How heavy am I, Tommy?"

  "Not bad. I can haul you a long way. Giddup!"

  They started moving. The gully where Stu had broken his leg-- where he had been sure he was going to die--fell slowly behind them. Weak though he was, Stu felt a mad sort of exultation. Not there, anyway. He was going to die somewhere, and probably soon, but it wasn't going to be alone in that muddy ditch. The sleeping bag swayed back and forth, lulling him. He dozed. Tom pulled him along under a thickening scud of clouds. Kojak padded along beside them.

  Stu woke up when Tom eased him down.

  "Sorry," Tom said apologetically. "I had to rest my arms." He first twirled, then flexed them.

  "You rest all you want," Stu said. "Slow and easy wins the race." His head was thudding. He found the Anacin and dry-swallowed two of them. It felt as if his throat had been lined with sandpaper and some sadistic soul was striking matches on it. He checked the sleeping bag seams. As he had expected, they were coming unraveled, but it wasn't too bad yet. They were on a long, gradual upslope, exactly the sort of thing he had been looking for. On a slope like this, better than two miles long, a car with the clutch disengaged could get cruising along pretty good. You could try to pop-start it in second, maybe even third gear.

  He looked longingly to the left, where a plum-colored Triumph was parked askew in the breakdown lane. Something skeletal in a bright woolen sweater leaned behind the wheel. The Triumph would have a manual transmission, but there was no way in God's world that he could get his splinted leg into that small cabin.

  "How far have we come?" he asked Tom, but Tom could only shrug. It had been quite a piece, anyway, Stu thought. Tom had pulled him for at least three hours before stopping to rest. It spoke of phenomenal strength. The old landmarks were gone in the distance. Tom, who was built like a young bull, had dragged him maybe six or eight miles while he dozed. "You rest all you want," he repeated. "Don't knock yourself out."

  "Tom's okay. O-and-K, that spells okay, laws, yes, everybody knows that."

  Tom wolfed a huge lunch, and Stu managed to eat a little. Then they went on. The road continued to curve upward, and Stu began to realize it had to be this hill. If they crested it without finding the right car, it would take them another two hours to get to the next one. Then dark. Rain or snow, from the look of the sky. A nice cold night out in the wet. And goodbye, Stu Redman.

  They came up to a Chevrolet sedan.

  "Stop," he croaked, and Tom set the travois down. "Go over and look in that car. Count the pedals on the floor. Tell me if there's two or three."

  Tom trotted over and opened the car door. A mummy in a flowered print dress fell out like someone's bad joke. Her purse fell out beside her, scattering cosmetics, tissues, and money.

  "Two," Tom called back to Stu.

  "Okay. We got to go on."

  Tom came back, took a deep breath, and grabbed the handles of the travois. A quarter of a mile farther along, they came to a VW van.

  "Want me to count the pedals?" Tom asked.

  "No, not this time." The van was standing on three flats.

  He began to think they were not going to find it; their luck was simply not in. They came to a station wagon that had only one flat shoe, it could be changed, but like the Chevy sedan, Tom reported it only had two pedals. That meant it was an automatic, and that meant it was useless to them. They pushed on. The long hill was flattening out now, beginning to crest. Stu could see one more car ahead, one last chance. Stu's heart sank. It was a very old Plymouth, a 1970 at best. For a wonder it was standing on four inflated tires, but it was rust-eaten and battered. Nobody had ever bothered with much in the way of maintenance on this heap; Stu knew its sort well enough from Arnette. The battery would be old and probably cracked, the oil would be blacker than midnight in a mineshaft, but there would be a pink fuzz runner around the steering wheel and maybe a stuffed poodle with rhinestone eyes and a noddy head on the back shelf.

  "Want me to check?" Tom asked.

  "Yeah, I guess so. Beggars can't be choosers, can they?" A fine cold mist was starting to drift down from the sky.

  Tom crossed the road and looked inside the car, which was empty. Stu lay shivering inside the sleeping bag. At last Tom came back.

  "Three pedals," he said.

  Stu tried to think it out. That high, sweet-sour buzzing in his head kept trying to get in the way.

  The old Plymouth was almost surely a loser. They could go on over to the other side of the hill, but then all the cars would be pointing the wrong way, uphill, unless they crossed the median strip ... which was a rocky half-mile wide here. Maybe they could manage to find a standard shift car on the other side ... but by then it would be dark.

  "Tom, help me get up."

  Somehow Tom helped him to his foot without hurting his broken leg too badly. His head thumped and buzzed. Black comets shot across his field of vision and he nearly passed out. Then he had one arm around Tom's neck.

  "Rest," he muttered. "Rest ..."

  He had no idea how long they stood that way, Tom supporting him patiently as he swam around in the gray half-tones of semiconsciousness. When the world finally came back, Tom was still patiently supporting him. The mist had thickened to a slow, cold drizzle.

  "Tom, help me across to it."

  Tom put an arm around Stu's waist and the two of them staggered across to where the old Plymouth stood in the breakdown lane.

  "Hood release," Stu muttered, fumbling in the Plymouth's grille. Sweat rolled down his face. Shudders wracked him. He found the hood release but couldn't pull it up. He guided Tom's hands to it and at last the hood swung up.

  The engine was about what Stu had expected--a dirty and indifferently maintained V8. But the battery wasn't as bad as he had feared it would be. It was a Sears, not the top of the line, but the guarantee-punch was February of 1991. Struggling against the feverish rush of his thoughts, Stu counted backward and guessed that the battery had been new last May.

  "Go try the horn," he told Tom, and propped himself against the car while Tom leaned in to do it. He had heard of drowning men grasping at straws, and he guessed that now he understood. His last chance of surviving this was a rattletrap junkyard refugee.

  The horn gave a loud honk. Okay then. If there was a key, take the shot. Probably he should have had Tom check that first, but on second thought, it didn't much matter. If there was no key, they were most likely all through no matter what.

  He got the hood down and latched by leaning all of his weight on it. Then he hopped around to the driver's door and stared in, fully expecting to see an empty ignition slot. But the keys were there, dangling from an imitation leather case with the initials A.C. on it. Bending in carefully, he turned the key over to accessory. Slowly, the gas gauge needle swung over to a little more than a quarter of a tank. Here was a mystery. Why had the car's owner, why had A.C. pulled over to walk when he could have driven?

  In his light-headed state,
Stu thought of Charles Campion, almost dead, driving into Hap's pumps. Old A.C. had the superflu, had it bad. Final stages. He pulls over, shuts off his car's engine--not because he's thinking about it, but because it's a long-ingrained habit--and gets out. He's delirious, maybe hallucinating. He stumbles out into the Utah badlands, laughing and singing and muttering and cackling, and dies there. Four months later Stu Redman and Tom Cullen happen along, and the keys are in the car, and the battery's relatively fresh, and there's gas--

  The hand of God.

  Wasn't that what Tom had said about Vegas? The hand of God came down out of the sky. And maybe God had left this battered '70 Plymouth here for them, like manna in the desert. It was a crazy idea, but no more crazy than the idea of a hundred-year-old black woman leading a bunch of refugees into the promised land.

  "And she still made her own biscuits," he croaked. "Right up until the very end, she still made her own biscuits."

  "What, Stu?"

  "Never mind. Move over, Tom."

  Tom did. "Can we ride?" he asked hopefully.

  Stu pushed the driver's seat down so Kojak could hop in, which he did after a careful sniff or two. "I don't know. You just better pray this thing starts."

  "Okay," Tom said agreeably.

  It took Stu five minutes just to get behind the wheel. He sat on a slant, almost in the place where a middle front-seat passenger was supposed to sit. Kojak sat attentively in the back seat, panting. The car was littered with McDonald's boxes and Taco Bell wrappers; the interior smelled like an old corn chip.

  Stu turned the key. The old Plymouth cranked briskly for about twenty seconds, and then the starter began to lag. Stu tapped the horn again, and this time there was only a feeble croak. Tom's face fell.

  "We're not done with her yet," Stu said. He was encouraged; there was juice lurking inside that Sears battery yet. He pushed in the clutch and shifted up to second. "Open your door and get us rolling. Then hop back in."

  Tom said doubtfully: "Isn't the car pointing the wrong way?"

  "Right now it is. But if we can get this old shitheap running, we'll fix that in a hurry."

  Tom got out and started pushing on the doorpost. The Plymouth began to roll. When the speedometer got up to 5 mph, Stu said: "Hop in, Tom."