The Stand Read online

  Push, Frannie. Bear down. You're doing fine.

  But looking at George's somber eyes over the top of his mask, Stu knew that Frannie wasn't doing fine at all. Something was wrong. Laurie sponged off her sweaty face and pushed back her hair from her forehead.

  Breech birth.

  Who had said that? It was a sinister, bodiless voice, low and draggy, like a voice on a 45 rpm record played at 331/3.

  Breech birth.

  George's voice: You'd better call Dick. Tell him we may have to ...

  Laurie's voice: Doctor, she's losing a lot of blood now...

  Stu lit a cigarette. It was terribly stale, but after that particular dream, anything was a comfort. It's an anxiety dream, that's all. You got this typical macho idea that things won't come right if you're not there. Well, bag it up, Stuart; she's fine. Not all dreams come true.

  But too many of them had come true during the last half-year. The feeling that he was being shown the future in this recurring dream of Fran's delivery would not leave him.

  He stubbed the cigarette out half-smoked and looked blankly into the gas lamp's steady glow. It was November 29; they had been quartered in the Grand Junction Holiday Inn for nearly four weeks. The time had passed slowly, but they had managed to keep amused with a whole town to plunder for diverting odds and ends.

  Stu had found a medium-sized Honda electrical generator in a supply house on Grand Avenue, and he and Tom had hauled it back to the Convention Hall across from the Holiday Inn by putting it onto a sledge with a chainfall and then hooking up two Sno Cats to the sledge-- moving it, in other words, in much the same way the Trashcan Man had moved his final gift for Randall Flagg.

  "What are we gonna do with it?" Tom asked. "Get the electricity going at the motel?"

  "This is too small for that," Stu said.

  "What, then? What's it for?" Tom was fairly dancing with impatience.

  "You'll see," Stu said.

  They put the generator in the Convention Hall's electrical closet, and Tom promptly forgot about it--which was just what Stu had hoped for. The next day he went to the Grand Junction Sixplex by snowmobile, and using the sledge and the chainfall himself this time, he had lowered an old thirty-five-millimeter motion picture projector from the second-story window of the storage area where he had found it on one of his exploring trips. It had been wrapped in plastic ... and then simply forgotten, judging by the dust which had gathered on the protective covering.

  His leg was coming around nicely, but it had still taken him almost three hours to muscle the projector from the doorway of the Convention Hall into the center of the floor. He used three dollies and kept expecting Tom to happen by at any moment, looking for him. With Tom to pitch in, the work would have gone faster, but it also would have spoiled the surprise. But Tom was apparently off on business of his own, and Stu didn't see him all day. When he came into the Holiday Inn around five, apple-cheeked and wrapped in a scarf, the surprise was all ready.

  Stu had brought back all six of the movies which had been playing in the Grand Junction Cinema complex. After supper that evening, Stu said casually: "Come on over to the Convention Hall with me, Tom."

  "What for?"

  "You'll see."

  The Convention Hall faced the Holiday Inn across the snowy street. Stu handed Tom a box of popcorn at the doorway.

  "What's this for?" Tom asked.

  "Can't watch a movie without popcorn, you big dummy," Stu grinned.

  "MOVIE?"

  "Sure."

  Tom burst into the Convention Hall. Saw the big projector set up, completely threaded. Saw the big convention movie screen pulled down. Saw two folding chairs set up in the middle of the huge, empty floor.

  "Wow," he whispered, and his expression of naked wonder had been all Stu could have hoped for.

  "I did this three summers at the Starlite Drive-In over in Braintree," Stu said. "I hope I ain't forgot how to fix one of these bastards if the film breaks."

  "Wow," Tom said again.

  "We'll have to wait in between reels. I wasn't about to go back and grab a second one." Stu stepped through the welter of patch cords leading from the projector to the Honda generator in the electrical closet, and pulled the starter cord. The generator began to chug cheerfully along. Stu shut the door as far as it would go to mute the engine sound and killed the lights. And five minutes later they were sitting side by side, watching Sylvester Stallone kill hundreds of dope-dealers in Rambo IV: The Fire-Fight. Dolby sound blared out at them from the Convention Hall's sixteen speakers, sometimes so loud it was hard to hear the dialogue (what dialogue there was) ... but they had both loved it.

  Now, thinking about that, Stu smiled. Someone who didn't know better would have called him dumb--he could have hooked a VCR up to a much smaller gennie and they could have watched hundreds of movies that way, probably right in the Holiday Inn. But movies on TV were not the same, never had been, to his way of thinking. And that wasn't really the point, either. The point was simply that they had time to kill ... and some days it died goddamned hard.

  Anyway, one of the films had been a reissue of one of the last Disney cartoons, Oliver and Company, which had never been released on videotape. Tom watched it again and again, laughing like a child at the antics of Oliver and the Artful Dodger and Fagin, who, in the cartoon, lived on a barge in New York and slept in a stolen airline seat.

  In addition to the movie project, Stu had built over twenty models, including a Rolls-Royce that had 240 parts and had sold for sixty-five dollars before the superflu. Tom had built a strange but somehow compelling terrain-contoured landscape that covered nearly half the floor-space of the Holiday Inn's main function room; he had used papier-mache, plaster of paris, and various food colorings. He called it Moonbase Alpha. Yes, they had kept busy, but--

  What you're thinking is crazy.

  He flexed his leg. It was in better shape than he ever would have hoped, partially thanks to the Holiday Inn's weight room and exercising machines. There was still considerable stiffness and some pain but he was able to limp around without the crutches. They could take it slow and easy. He was quite sure he could show Tom how to run one of the Arctic Cats that almost everyone around here kept packed away in the back of their garages. Do twenty miles a day, pack shelter halves, big sleeping bags, plenty of those freeze-dried concentrates ...

  Sure, and when the avalanche comes down on you up in Vail Pass, you and Tom can wave a pack of freeze-dried carrots at it and tell it to go away. It's crazy!

  Still ...

  He crushed his smoke and turned off the gas lamp. But it was a long time before he slept.

  Over breakfast he said, "Tom, how badly do you want to get back to Boulder?"

  "And see Fran? Dick? Sandy? Laws, I want to get back to Boulder worse than anything, Stu. You don't think they gave my little house away, do you?"

  "No, I'm sure they didn't. What I mean is, would it be worth it to you to take a chance?"

  Tom looked at him, puzzled. Stu was getting ready to try and explain further when Tom said: "Laws, everything's a chance, isn't it?"

  It was decided as simply as that. They left Grand Junction on the last day of November.

  There was no need to teach Tom the fundamentals of snowmobiling. Stu found a monster machine in a Colorado Highway Department shed not a mile from the Holiday Inn. It had an oversized engine, a fairing to cut the worst of the wind, and most important of all, it had been modified to include a large open storage compartment. It had once no doubt held all manner of emergency gear. The compartment was big enough to take one good-sized dog comfortably. With the number of shops in town devoted to outdoor activities, they had no trouble at all in outfitting themselves for the trip, even though the superflu had struck at the beginning of summer. They took light shelter halves and heavy sleeping bags, a pair of cross-country skis each (although the thought of trying to teach Tom the fundamentals of cross-country skiing made Stu's blood run cold), a big Coleman gas stove, lamps,
gas bottles, extra batteries, concentrated foods, and a big Garand rifle with a scope.

  By two o'clock of that first day, Stu saw that his fear of being snowed in someplace and starving to death was groundless. The woods were fairly crawling with game; he had never seen anything like it in his life. Later that afternoon he shot a deer, his first deer since the ninth grade, when he had played hooky from school to go out hunting with his Uncle Dale. That deer had been a scrawny doe whose meat had been wild-tasting and rather bitter ... from eating nettles, Uncle Dale said. This one was a buck, fine and heavy and broad-chested. But then, Stu thought as he gutted it with a big knife he had liberated from a Grand Junction sporting goods store, the winter had just started. Nature had her own way of dealing with overpopulation.

  Tom built a fire while Stu butchered the deer as best he could, getting the sleeves of his heavy coat stiff and tacky with blood. By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing "Ave Maria." The deer he had gotten with his Uncle Dale had gone to an old man named Schoey who lived in a shack just over the Braintree town line. He had skinned and dressed the deer for three dollars and ten pounds of deermeat.

  "I sure wish old man Schoey was here tonight," he said with a sigh.

  "Who?" Tom asked, coming out of a semidoze.

  "No one, Tom. Talking to myself."

  As it turned out, the venison was worth it. Sweet and delicious. After they had eaten their fill, Stu cooked about thirty pounds of extra meat and packed it away in one of the Highway Department snowmobile's smaller storage compartments the next morning. That first day they only made sixteen miles.

  That night the dream changed. He was in the delivery room again. There was blood everywhere--the sleeves of the white coat he was wearing were stiff and tacky with it. The sheet covering Frannie was soaked through. And still she shrieked.

  It's coming, George panted. Its time has come round at last, Frannie, it's waiting to be born, so push! PUSH!

  And it came, it came in a final freshet of blood. George pulled the infant free, grasping the hips because it had come feet-first.

  Laurie began to scream. Stainless-steel instruments sprayed everywhere--

  Because it was a wolf with a furious grinning human face, his face, it was Flagg, his time come round again, he was not dead, not dead yet, he still walked the world, Frannie had given birth to Randall Flagg--

  Stu woke up, his harsh breathing loud in his ears. Had he screamed?

  Tom was still asleep, huddled so deeply in his sleeping bag that Stu could only see his cowlick. Kojak was curled at Stu's side. Everything was all right, it had only been a dream--

  And then a single howl rose in the night, climbing, ululating, a silver chime of desperate horror ... the howl of a wolf, or perhaps the scream of a killer's ghost.

  Kojak raised his head.

  Gooseflesh broke out on Stu's arms, thighs, groin.

  The howl didn't come again.

  Stu slept. In the morning they packed up and went on. It was Tom who noticed and pointed out that the deer guts were all gone. There was a flurry of tracks where they had been, and the bloodstain of Stu's kill faded to a dull pink on the snow ... but that was all.

  Five days of good weather brought them to Rifle. The next morning they awoke to a deepening blizzard. Stu said he thought they should wait it out here, and they put up in a local motel. Tom held the lobby doors open and Stu drove the snowmobile right inside. As he told Tom, it made a handy garage, although the snowmobile's heavy-duty tread had chewed up the lobby's deep-pile rug considerably.

  It snowed for three days. When they awoke on the morning of December 10 and dug themselves out, the sun was shining brightly and the temperature had climbed into the mid-thirties. The snow was much deeper now, and it had gotten more difficult to read the twists and turns of I-70. But it wasn't keeping to the highway that worried Stu on that bright, warm, and sunny day. In the late afternoon, as the blue shadows began to lengthen, Stu throttled down and then killed the snowmobile's engine, his head cocked, his whole body seeming to listen.

  "What is it, Stu? What's--" Then Tom heard it, too. A low rumbling sound off to their left and up ahead. It swelled to a deep express-train roar and then faded. The afternoon was still again.

  "Stu?" Tom asked anxiously.

  "Don't worry," he said, and thought: I'll worry enough for both of us.

  The warm temperatures held. By December 13 they were nearly to Shoshone, and still climbing toward the roof of the Rockies--for them the highest point they would reach before beginning to descend again would be Loveland Pass.

  Again and again they heard the low rumble of avalanches, sometimes far away, sometimes so close that there was nothing to do but look up and wait and hope those great shelves of white death would not blot out the sky. On the twelfth, one swept down and over a place where they had been only half an hour before, burying the snowmobile's track under tons of packed snow. Stu was increasingly afraid that the vibration caused by the sound of the snowmobile's engine would be what finally killed them, triggering a slide that would bury them forty feet deep before they even had time enough to realize what was happening. But now there was nothing to do but press on and hope for the best.

  Then the temperatures plunged again and the threat abated somewhat. There was another storm and they were stopped for two days. They dug out and went on ... and at night the wolves howled. Sometimes they were far away, sometimes so close that they seemed right outside the shelter halves, bringing Kojak to his feet, growling low in his chest, as taut as a steel spring. But the temperatures remained low and the frequency of the avalanches diminished, although they had another near miss on the eighteenth.

  On December 22, outside the town of Avon, Stu ran the snowmobile off the highway embankment. At one moment they were running along at a steady ten miles an hour, safe and fine, spuming up clouds of snow behind them. Tom had just pointed out the small village below, silent as a 1980s stereopticon image with its single white church steeple and the undisturbed drifts up to the eaves of the houses. The next moment the cowling of the snowmobile began to tilt forward.

  "What the fuck--" Stu began, and that was all he had time for.

  The snowmobile canted farther forward. Stu throttled back, but it was too late. There was a peculiar sensation of weightlessness, the feeling you have when you have just left the diving board and the pull of gravity just matches the force of your upward spring. They were pitched off the machine head over heels. Stu lost sight of Tom and Kojak. Cold snow up his nose. When he opened his mouth to shout, the snow went down his throat. Down the back of his coat. Tumbling. Falling. Finally coming to rest in a deep white quilt of snow.

  He fought his way up like a swimmer, gasping hot fire. His throat had been snowburned.

  "Tom!" he shouted, treading snow. Oddly enough, from this angle he could see the highway embankment very clearly, and where they had run off it, causing their own small avalanche as they did so. The rear end of the snowmobile jutted out of the snow about fifty feet farther down the steep gradient. It looked like an orange buoy. Strange how the water imagery persisted ... and by the way, was Tom drowning?

  "Tom! Tommy!"

  Kojak popped up, looking as if he had been dusted from stem to stern with confectioners sugar, and breasted his way through the snow toward Stu.

  "Kojak!" Stu shouted. "Find Tom! Find Tom!"

  Kojak barked and struggled to turn around. He headed toward a churned-up place in the snow and barked again. Struggling, falling, eating snow, Stu got to the place and felt around. One gloved hand snagged Tom's jacket and he gave a furious yank. Tom bobbed up, gasping and retching, and they both fell on top of the snow on their backs. Tom whooped and gasped.

  "My throat! It's all hot! Oh laws, lawsy me--"

  "It's the cold, Tom. It goes away."

  "I was choking--"

  "It's all right now, Tom. We're going to be okay."

  They lay on top of the snow, gett
ing their wind back. Stu put his arm around Tom's shoulders to still the big fellow's trembling. A distance away, gaining volume and then diminishing, was the rumbling cold sound of another avalanche.

  It took them the rest of the day to get the three quarters of a mile between the place where they had run off the road and the town of Avon. There was no question of salvaging the snowmobile or any of the supplies lashed to it; it was just too far down the grade. It would stay there until spring, at least--maybe forever, the way things were now.

  They got to town half an hour past dusk, too cold and winded to do anything but build a fire and find a halfway warm place to sleep. That night there were no dreams--only the blackness of utter exhaustion.

  In the morning, they set about the task of reoutfitting themselves. It was a tougher job in the small town of Avon than it had been in Grand Junction. Again Stu considered just stopping and wintering here--if he said it was the right thing to do, Tom would not question him, and they had had an explicit lesson in what happened to people who pressed their luck just yesterday. But in the end, he rejected the idea. The baby was due sometime in early January. He wanted to be there when it came. He wanted to see with his own eyes that it was all right.

  At the end of Avon's short main street they found a John Deere dealership, and in the garage behind the showroom they found two used Deere snowmobiles. Neither of them was quite as good as the big Highway Department machine Stu had driven off the road, but one of them had an extra-wide cleated driving tread, and he thought it would do. They found no concentrates and had to settle for canned goods instead. The latter half of the day was spent ransacking houses for camping gear, a job neither of them relished. The victims of the plague were everywhere, transformed into grotesquely decayed ice-cave exhibits.

  Near the end of the day they found most of what they needed in one place, a large rooming house just off the main drag. Before the superflu struck, it had apparently been filled with young people, the sort who came to Colorado to do all the things John Denver used to sing about. Tom, in fact, found a large green plastic garbage bag in the crawlspace under the stairs filled with a very potent version of "Rocky Mountain High."