The Stand Read online

  Tom got in and slammed his door. Stu turned the ignition key to the "on" position and waited. The steering was power, no good with the engine off, and it took most of his fading strength just to keep the nose of the Plymouth pointed straight down the road. The speedometer needle crawled up to 10, 15, 20. They were rolling silently down the hill Tom had spent most of the morning dragging them up. Dew collected on the windshield. Too late, Stu realized they had left the travois behind. 25 mph now.

  "It's not running, Stu," Tom said anxiously.

  Thirty mph. High enough. "God help us now," Stu said, and popped the clutch. The Plymouth bucked and jerked. The engine coughed into life, spluttered, missed, stalled. Stu groaned, as much with frustration as with the bolt of pain that shot up his shattered leg.

  "Shit-fire!" he cried, and depressed the clutch again. "Pump that gas pedal, Tom! Use your hand!"

  "Which one is it?" Tom cried anxiously.

  "It's the long one!"

  Tom got down on the floor and pumped the gas pedal twice. The car was picking up speed again, and Stu had to force himself to wait. They were better than halfway down the slope.

  "Now!" he shouted, and popped the clutch again.

  The Plymouth roared into life. Kojak barked. Black smoke boiled out of the rusty exhaust pipe and turned blue. Then the car was running, choppily, missing on two cylinders, but really running. Stu snap-shifted to third and popped the clutch again, running all the pedals with his left foot.

  "We're going, Tom," he bellowed. "We got us some wheels now!"

  Tom shouted with pleasure. Kojak barked and wagged his tail. In his previous life, the life before Captain Trips when he had been Big Steve, he had ridden often in his master's car. It was nice to be riding again, with his new masters.

  They came to a U-turn road between the westbound and eastbound lanes about four miles down the road. OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY, a stern sign warned. Stu managed to manipulate the clutch well enough to get them around and into the eastbound lanes, having only one bad moment when the old car hitched and bucked and threatened to stall. But the engine was warm now, and he eased them through. He got back up to third gear and then relaxed a little, breathing hard, trying to catch up with his heartbeat, which was fast and thready. The grayness wanted to come back in and swamp him, but he wouldn't let it. A few minutes later, Tom spotted the bright orange sleeping bag that had been Stu's makeshift travois.

  "Bye-bye!" Tom called in high good humor. "Bye-bye, we're going to Boulder, laws, yes!"

  I'll be content with Green River tonight, Stu thought.

  They got there just after dark, Stu moving the Plymouth carefully in low gear through the dark streets, which were dotted with abandoned cars. He parked on the main drag, in front of a building that announced itself as the Utah Hotel. It was a dismal frame building three stories high, and Stu didn't think the Waldorf-Astoria had anything to worry about in the way of competition just yet. His head was jangling again, and he was flickering in and out of reality. The car had seemed stuffed with people at times during the last twenty miles. Fran. Nick Andros. Norm Bruett. He had looked over once and it had seemed that Chris Ortega, the bartender at the Indian Head, was riding shotgun.

  Tired. Had he ever been so tired?

  "In there," he muttered. "We gotta stay the night, Nicky. I'm done up."

  "It's Tom, Stu. Tom Cullen. Laws, yes."

  "Tom, yeah. We got to stop. Can you help me in?"

  "Sure. Getting this old car to run, that was great."

  "I'll have another beer," Stu told him. "And ain't you got a cigarette? I'm dying for a smoke." He fell forward over the wheel.

  Tom got out and carried him into the hotel. The lobby was damp and dark, but there was a fireplace and a half-filled woodbox beside it. Tom set Stu down on a threadbare sofa below a great stuffed moosehead and then set about building a fire while Kojak padded around, sniffing at things. Stu's breath came slow and raspy. He muttered occasionally, and every now and then he would scream something unintelligible, freezing Tom's blood.

  He kindled a monster blaze, and then went looking around. He found pillows and blankets for himself and Stu. He pushed the sofa Stu was on a little closer to the fire and then Tom bedded down next to him. Kojak lay on the other side, so that they bracketed the sick man with their heat.

  Tom lay looking at the ceiling, which was scrolled tin and laced with cobwebs at the corners. Stu was very sick. It was a worrisome thing. If he woke up again, Tom would ask him what to do about the sickness.

  But suppose ... suppose he didn't wake up?

  Outside the wind had picked up and went howling past the hotel. Rain lashed at the windows. By midnight, after Tom had gone to sleep, the temperature had dropped another four degrees, and the sound turned to the gritty slap of sleet. Far away to the west, the storm's outer edges were urging a vast cloud of radioactive pollution toward California, where more would die.

  At some time after two in the morning, Kojak raised his head and whined uneasily. Tom Cullen was getting up. His eyes were wide and blank. Kojak whined again, but Tom took no notice of him. He went to the door and let himself out into the screaming night. Kojak went to the hotel lobby window and put his paws up, looking out. He looked for some time, making low and unhappy sounds in his throat. Then he went back and laid down next to Stu again.

  Outside, the wind howled and screeched.

  CHAPTER 75

  "I almost died, you know," Nick said. He and Tom were walking up the empty sidewalk together. The wind howled steadily, an endless ghost-train highballing through the black sky. It made odd low hooting noises in the alleyways. Ha'ants, Tom would have said awake, and run away. But he wasn't awake--not exactly--and Nick was with him. Sleet smacked coldly against his cheeks.

  "You did?" Tom asked. "My laws!"

  Nick laughed. His voice was low and musical, a good voice. Tom loved to listen to him talk.

  "I sure did. That's a big laws yes. The flu didn't get me, but a little scratch along the leg almost did. Here, look at this."

  Seemingly oblivious of the cold, Nick unbuckled his jeans and pushed them down. Tom bent forward curiously, no different from any small boy who has been offered a glimpse of a wart with hair growing out of it or an interesting wound or puncture. Running down Nick's leg was an ugly scar, barely healed. It started just below the groin, in the slab part of the thigh, and corkscrewed past the knee to mid-shin, where it finally petered out.

  "And that almost killed you?"

  Nick pulled up his jeans and belted them. "It wasn't deep, but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection's the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the superflu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind."

  "Infection," Tom whispered, fascinated. They were walking again, almost floating along the sidewalk.

  "Tom, Stu's got an infection now."

  "No ... no, don't say that, Nick ... you're scaring Tom Cullen, laws, yes, you are!"

  "I know I am, Tom, and I'm sorry. But you have to know. He has pneumonia in both lungs. He's been sleeping outside for nearly two weeks. There are things you have to do for him. And still, he'll almost certainly die. You have to be prepared for that."

  "No, don't--"

  "Tom." Nick put his hand on Tom's shoulder, but Tom felt nothing ... it was as if Nick's hand was nothing but smoke. "If he dies, you and Kojak have to go on. You have to get back to Boulder and tell them that you saw the hand of God in the desert. If it's God's will, Stu will go with you ... in time. If it's God's will that Stu should die, then he will. Like me."

  "Nick," Tom begged. "Please--"

  "I showed you my leg for a reason. There are pills for infections. In places like this."

  Tom looked around and was surprised to see that they were no longer on the street. They were in a dark store. A drugstore. A wheelchair was suspended on piano wire from the ceiling like
a ghostly mechanical corpse. A sign on Tom's right advertised: CONTINENCE SUPPLIES.

  "Yes, sir? May I help you?"

  Tom whirled around. Nick was behind the counter, in a white coat.

  "Nick?"

  "Yes, sir." Nick began to put small bottles of pills in front of Tom. "This is penicillin. Very good for pneumonia. This is ampicillin, and this one's amoxicillin. Also good stuff. And this is V-cillin, most commonly given to children, and it may work if the others don't. He's to drink lots of water, and he should have juices, but that may not be possible. So give him these. They're vitamin C tablets. Also, he must be walked--"

  "I can't remember all of that!" Tom wailed.

  "I'm afraid you'll have to. Because there is no one else. You're on your own."

  Tom began to cry.

  Nick leaned forward. His arm swung. There was no slap--again there was only that feeling that Nick was smoke which had passed around him and possibly through him--but Tom felt his head rock back all the same. Something in his head seemed to snap.

  "Stop that! You can't be a baby now, Tom! Be a man! For God's sake, be a man!"

  Tom stared at Nick, his hand on his cheek, his eyes wide.

  "Walk him," Nick said. "Get him on his good leg. Drag him, if you have to. But get him off his back or he'll drown."

  "He isn't himself," Tom said. "He shouts ... he shouts to people who aren't there."

  "He's delirious. Walk him anyway. All you can. Make him take the penicillin, one pill at a time. Give him aspirin. Keep him warm. Pray. Those are all the things you can do."

  "All right, Nick. All right, I'll try to be a man. I'll try to remember. But I wish you was here, laws, yes, I do!"

  "You do your best, Tom. That's all."

  Nick was gone. Tom woke up and found himself standing in the deserted drugstore by the prescription counter. Standing on the glass were four bottles of pills. Tom stared at them for a long time and then gathered them up.

  Tom came back at four in the morning, his shoulders frosted with sleet. Outside, it was letting up, and there was a thin clean line of dawn in the east. Kojak barked an ecstatic welcome, and Stu moaned and woke up. Tom knelt beside him. "Stu?"

  "Tom? Hard to breathe."

  "I've got medicine, Stu. Nick showed me. You take it and get rid of that infection. You have to take one right now." From the bag he had brought in, Tom produced the four bottles of pills and a tall bottle of Gatorade. Nick had been wrong about the juice. There was plenty of bottled juice in the Green River Superette.

  Stu looked at the pills, holding them closely to his eyes. "Tom, where did you get these?"

  "In the drugstore. Nick gave them to me."

  "No, really."

  "Really! Really! You have to take the penicillin first to see if that works. Which one says penicillin?"

  "This one does ... but Tom ..."

  "No. You have to. Nick said so. And you have to walk."

  "I can't walk. I got a bust leg. And I'm sick." Stu's voice became sulky, petulant. It was a sickroom voice.

  "You have to. Or I'll drag you," Tom said.

  Stu lost his tenuous grip on reality. Tom put one of the penicillin capsules in his mouth, and Stu reflex-swallowed it with Gatorade to keep from choking. He began to cough wretchedly anyway, and Tom pounded him on the back as if he were burping a baby. Then he hauled Stu to his good foot by main force and began to drag him around the lobby, Kojak following them anxiously.

  "Please God," Tom said. "Please God, please God."

  Stu cried out: "I know where I can get her a washboard, Glen! That music store has em! I seen one in the window!"

  "Please God," Tom panted. Stu's head lolled on his shoulder. It felt as hot as a furnace. His splinted leg dragged uselessly.

  Boulder had never seemed so far away as it did on that dismal morning.

  Stu's struggle with pneumonia lasted two weeks. He drank quarts of Gatorade, V-8, Welch's grape juice, and various brands of orange drink. He rarely knew what he was drinking. His urine was strong and acidic. He messed himself like a baby, and like a baby's his stools were yellow and loose and totally blameless. Tom kept him clean. Tom dragged him around the lobby of the Utah Hotel. And Tom waited for the night when he would wake, not because Stu was raving in his sleep, but because his labored breathing had finally ceased.

  The penicillin produced an ugly red rash after two days, and Tom switched to the ampicillin. That was better. On October 7 Tom awoke in the morning to find Stu sleeping more deeply than he had in days. His entire body was soaked with sweat, but his forehead was cool. The fever had snapped in the night. For the next two days, Stu did little but sleep. Tom had to struggle to wake him up enough to take his pills and sugar cubes from the restaurant attached to the Utah Hotel.

  He relapsed on October 11, and Tom was terribly afraid it was the end. But the fever did not go as high, and his respiration never got as thick and labored as it had been on those terrifying early mornings of the fifth and the sixth.

  On October 13 Tom awoke from a dazed nap in one of the lobby chairs to find Stu sitting up and looking around. "Tom," he whispered. "I'm alive."

  "Yes," Tom said joyfully. "Laws, yes!"

  "I'm hungry. Could you rustle up some soup, Tom? With noodles in it, maybe?"

  By the eighteenth his strength had begun to come back a little. He was able to get around the lobby for five minutes at a time on the crutches Tom brought him from the drugstore. There was a steady, maddening itch from his broken leg as the bones began to knit themselves together. On October 20 he went outside for the first time, bundled up in thermal underwear and a huge sheepskin coat.

  The day was warm and sunny, but with an undertone of coolness. In Boulder it might still be mid-fall, the aspens turning gold, but here winter was almost close enough to touch. He could see small patches of frozen, granulated snow in shadowed areas the sun never touched.

  "I don't know, Tom," he said. "I think we can get over to Grand Junction, but after that I just don't know. There's going to be a lot of snow in the mountains. And I don't dare move for a while, anyway. I've got to get my go back."

  "How long before your go comes back, Stu?"

  "I don't know, Tom. We'll just have to wait and see."

  Stu was determined not to move too quickly, not to push it--he had been close enough to death to relish his recovery. He wanted it to be as complete as it could be. They moved out of the hotel lobby into a pair of connecting rooms down the first floor hall. The room across the way became Kojak's temporary doghouse. Stu's leg was indeed knitting, but because of the improper set, it was never going to be the same straight limb again, unless he got George Richardson to rebreak it and set it properly. When he got off the crutches, he was going to have a limp.

  Nonetheless, he set to work exercising it, trying to tone it up. Bringing the leg back to even 75 percent efficiency was going to be a long process, but so far as he could tell, he had a whole winter to do it in.

  On October 28 Green River was dusted with nearly five inches of snow.

  "If we don't make our move soon," Stu told Tom as they looked out at the snow, "we'll be spending the whole damn winter in the Utah Hotel."

  The next day they drove the Plymouth down to the gas station on the outskirts of town. Pausing often to rest and using Tom for the heavy work, they changed the balding back tires for a pair of studded snows. Stu considered taking a four-wheel drive, and had finally decided, quite irrationally, that they should stick with their luck. Tom finished the operation by loading four fifty-pound bags of sand into the Plymouth's trunk. They left Green River on Halloween and headed east.

  They reached Grand Junction at noon on November 2, with not much more than three hours to spare, as it turned out. The skies had been lead-gray all the forenoon, and as they turned down the main street, the first spits of snow began to skate across the Plymouth's hood. They had seen brief flurries half a dozen times en route, but this was not going to be a flurry. The sky promised serious snow. />
  "Pick your spot," Stu said. "We may be here for a while."

  Tom pointed. "There! The motel with the star on it!"

  The motel with the star on it was the Grand Junction Holiday Inn. Below the sign and the beckoning star was a marquee, and written on it in large red letters was: ELCOME TO GR ND JUNC ON'S SUMMERF ST '90! JUNE 12--JU Y 4TH!

  "Okay," Stu said. "Holiday Inn it is."

  He pulled in and killed the Plymouth's engine, and so far as either of them knew, it never ran again. By two that afternoon, the spits and spats of snow had developed into a thick white curtain that fell soundlessly and seemingly endlessly. By four o'clock the light wind had turned into a gale, driving the snow before it and piling up drifts that grew with a speed which was almost hallucinatory. It snowed all night. When Stu and Tom got up the next morning, they found Kojak sitting in front of the big double doors in the lobby, looking out at a nearly moveless world of white. Nothing moved but a single bluejay that was strutting around on the crushed remnants of a summer awning across the street.

  "Jeezly crow," Tom whispered. "We're snowed in, ain't we, Stu?"

  Stu nodded.

  "How can we get back to Boulder in this?"

  "We wait for spring," Stu said.

  "That long?" Tom looked distressed, and Stu put an arm around the big man-boy's shoulders.

  "The time will pass," he said, but even then he was not sure either of them would be able to wait that long.

  Stu had been moaning and gasping in the darkness for some time. At last he gave a cry loud enough to wake himself up and came out of the dream to his Holiday Inn motel room up on his elbows, staring wide-eyed at nothing. He let out a long, shivery sigh and fumbled for the lamp by the bed table. He had clicked it twice before everything came back. It was funny, how hard that belief in electricity died. He found the Coleman lamp on the floor and lit that instead. When he had it going, he used the chamberpot. Then he sat down in the chair by the desk. He looked at his watch and saw it was quarter past three in the morning.

  The dream again. The Frannie dream. The nightmare.

  It was always the same. Frannie in pain, her face bathed in sweat. Richardson was between her legs, and Laurie Constable was standing nearby to assist him. Fran's feet were up in stainless steel-stirrups ...