The Stand Read online

  "What are you doing here?" Carla snapped, suddenly unmindful of any structural damage her husband's heart might have sustained. "I thought you were working late this afternoon."

  "I switched off with Harry Masters," Peter said. "Fran's already told me, Carla. We are going to be grandparents."

  "Grandparents!" she shrieked. An ugly, confused sort of laughter jarred out of her. "You leave this to me. She told you first and you kept it from me. All right. It's what I've come to expect of you. But now I'm going to close the door and the two of us are going to thrash this out."

  She smiled with glittery bitterness at Frannie.

  "Just ... we 'girls.' "

  She put her hand on the knob of the parlor door and began to swing it closed. Frannie watched, still dazed, hardly able to comprehend her mother's sudden gush of fury and vitriol.

  Peter put his hand out slowly, reluctantly, and stopped the door halfway through its swing.

  "Peter, I want you to leave this to me."

  "I know you do. I have in the past. But not this time, Carla."

  "This is not your province."

  Calmly, he replied: "It is."

  "Daddy--"

  Carla turned on her, the parchment white of her face now tattooed red over the cheekbones. "Don't you speak to him!" she screamed. "He's not the one you're dealing with! I know you could always wheedle him around to any crazy idea you had or sweet-talk him into taking your side no matter what you did, but he is not the one you're dealing with today, miss!"

  "Stop it, Carla."

  "Get out!"

  "I'm not in. You can see th--"

  "Don't you make fun of me! Get out of my parlor!"

  And with that she began to push the door, lowering her head and getting her shoulders into it until she looked like some strange bull, both human and female. He held her back easily at first, then with more effort. At last the cords stood out on his neck, although she was a woman and seventy pounds lighter than he.

  Frannie wanted to scream at them to stop it, to tell her father to go away so the two of them wouldn't have to look at Carla like this, at the sudden and irrational bitterness that had always seemed to threaten but which had now swept her up. But her mouth was frozen, its hinges seemingly rusted shut.

  "Get out! Get out of my parlor! Out! Out! Out! You bastard, let go of the goddamned door and GET OUT!"

  That was when he slapped her.

  It was a flat, almost unimportant sound. The grandfather clock did not fly into outraged dust at the sound, but went on ticking just as it had ever since it was set going. The furniture did not groan. But Carla's raging words were cut off as if amputated with a scalpel. She fell on her knees and the door swung all the way open to bang softly against a high-backed Victorian chair with a hand-embroidered slipcover.

  "No, oh no," Frannie said in a hurt little voice.

  Carla pressed a hand to her cheek and stared up at her husband.

  "You have had that coming for ten years or better," Peter remarked. His voice had a slight unsteadiness in it. "I always told myself I didn't do it because I don't hold with hitting women. I still don't. But when a person--man or woman--turns into a dog and begins to bite, someone has to shy it off. I only wish, Carla, I'd had the guts to do it sooner. 'Twould have hurt us both less."

  "Daddy--"

  "Hush, Frannie," he said with absent sternness, and she hushed.

  "You say she's being selfish," Peter said, still looking down into his wife's still, shocked face. "You're the one doing that. You stopped caring about Frannie when Fred died. That was when you decided caring hurt too much and decided it'd be safer just to live for yourself. And this is where you came to do that, time and time and time again. This room. You doted on your dead family and forgot the part of it still living. And when she came in here and told you she was in trouble, asked for your help, I bet the first thing that crossed your mind was to wonder what the ladies in the Flower and Garden Club would say, or if it meant you'd have to stay away from Amy Lauder's weddin. Hurt's a reason to change, but all the hurt in the world don't change facts. You have been selfish."

  He reached down and helped her up. She came to her feet like a sleepwalker. Her expression didn't change; her eyes were still wide and unbelieving. Relentlessness hadn't yet come back into them, but Frannie dully thought that in time it would.

  It would.

  "It's my fault for letting you go on. For not wanting any unpleasantness. For not wanting to rock the boat. I was selfish, too, you see. And when Fran went off to school I thought, Well, now Carla can have what she wants and it won't hurt nobody but herself, and if a person doesn't know they're hurting, why, maybe they're not. I was wrong. I've been wrong before, but never as bad as this." Gently, but with great force, he reached out and grasped Carla's shoulders. "Now: I am telling you this as your husband. If Frannie needs a place to stay, this can be the place-- same as it always was. If she needs money, she can have it from my purse --same as she always could. And if she decides to keep her baby, you will see that she has a proper baby shower, and you may think no one will come, but she has friends, good ones, and they will. I'll tell you one more thing, too. If she wants it christened, it will be done right here. Right here in this goddamned parlor."

  Carla's mouth had dropped open, and now a sound began to come from it. At first it sounded uncannily like the whistle of a teakettle on a hot burner. Then it became a keening wail.

  "Peter, your own son lay in his coffin in this room!"

  "Yes. And that's why I can't think of a better place to christen a new life," he said. "Fred's blood. Live blood. Fred himself, he's been dead a lot of years, Carla. He was worm-food long since."

  She screamed at that and put her hands to her ears. He bent down and pulled them away.

  "But the worms haven't got your daughter and your daughter's baby. It don't matter how it was got; it's alive. You act like you want to drive her off, Carla. What will you have if you do? Nothing but this room and a husband who'll hate you for what you did. If you do that, why, it might just as well have been all three of us that day--me and Frannie as well as Fred."

  "I want to go upstairs and lie down," Carla said. "I feel nauseated. I think I'd better lie down."

  "I'll help you," Frannie said.

  "Don't you touch me. Stay with your father. You and he seem to have this all worked out. How you are going to destroy me in this town. Why don't you just settle into my parlor, Frannie? Throw mud on the carpet, take ashes from the stove and throw them into my clock? Why not? Why not?"

  She began to laugh and pushed past Peter, into the hall. She was listing like a drunken woman. Peter tried to put an arm around her shoulders. She bared her teeth and hissed at him like a cat.

  Her laughter turned to sobs as she went slowly up the stairs, leaning on the mahogany banister for support; those sobs had a ripping, helpless quality that made Frannie want to scream and throw up at the same time. Her father's face was the color of dirty linen. At the top, Carla turned and swayed so alarmingly that for a moment Frannie believed she would tumble all the way back down to the bottom. She looked at them, seemingly about to speak, then turned away again. A moment later, the closing of her bedroom door muted the stormy sound of her grief and hurt.

  Frannie and Peter stared at each other, appalled, and the grandfather clock ticked calmly on.

  "This will work itself out," Peter said calmly. "She'll come around."

  "Will she?" Frannie asked. She walked slowly to her father, leaned against him, and he put his arm around her. "I don't think so."

  "Never mind. We won't think about it for now."

  "I ought to go. She doesn't want me here."

  "You ought to stay. You ought to be here when--if--she comes to and finds out she still needs you to stay." He paused. "Me, I already do, Fran."

  "Daddy," she said, and put her head against his chest. "Oh, Daddy, I'm so sorry, just so goddam sorry--"

  "Shhh," he said, and stroked her hair. Over her h
ead he could see the afternoon sunlight streaming duskily in through the bow windows, as it had always done, golden and still, the way sunlight falls into museums and the halls of the dead. "Shhh, Frannie; I love you. I love you."

  CHAPTER 13

  The red light went on. The pump hissed. The door opened. The man who stepped through was not wearing one of the white all-over suits, but a small shiny nose-filter that looked a little bit like a two-pronged silver fork, the kind the hostess leaves on the canape table to get the olives out of the bottle.

  "Hi, Mr. Redman," he said, strolling across the room. He stuck out his hand, clad in a thin transparent rubber glove, and Stu, surprised into the defensive, shook it. "I'm Dick Deitz. Denninger said you wouldn't play ball anymore unless somebody told you what the score was."

  Stu nodded.

  "Good." Deitz sat on the edge of the bed. He was a small brown man, and sitting there with his elbows cocked just above his knees, he looked like a gnome in a Disney picture. "So what do you want to know?"

  "First, I guess I want to know why you're not wearing one of those space-suits."

  "Because Geraldo there says you're not catching." Deitz pointed to a guinea pig behind the double-paned window. The guinea pig was in a cage, and standing behind the cage was Denninger himself, his face expressionless.

  "Geraldo, huh?"

  "Geraldo's been breathing your air for the last three days, via convector. This disease that your friends have passes easily from humans to guinea pigs and vice versa. If you were catching, we figure Geraldo would be dead by now."

  "But you're not taking any chances," Stu said dryly, and cocked a thumb at the nose-filter.

  "That," Deitz said with a cynical smile, "is not in my contract."

  "What have I got?"

  Smoothly, as if rehearsed, Deitz said, "Black hair, blue eyes, one hell of a suntan ..." He looked closely at Stu. "Not funny, huh?"

  Stu said nothing.

  "Want to hit me?"

  "I don't believe it would do any good."

  Deitz sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if the plugs going up the nostrils hurt. "Listen," he said. "When things look serious, I do jokes. Some people smoke or chew gum. It's the way I keep my shit together, that's all. I don't doubt there are lots of people who have better ways. As to what sort of disease you've got, well, so far as Denninger and his colleagues have been able to ascertain, you don't have any at all."

  Stu nodded impassively. Yet somehow he had an idea this little gnome of a man had seen past his poker face to his sudden and deep relief.

  "What have the others got?"

  "I'm sorry, that's classified."

  "How did that fellow Campion get it?"

  "That's classified, too."

  "My guess is that he was in the army. And there was an accident someplace. Like what happened to those sheep in Utah thirty years ago, only a lot worse."

  "Mr. Redman, I could go to jail just for telling you you were hot or cold."

  Stu rubbed a hand thoughtfully over his new scrub of beard.

  "You should be glad we're not telling you more than we are," Deitz said. "You know that, don't you?"

  "So I can serve my country better," Stu said dryly.

  "No, that's strictly Denninger's thing," Deitz said. "In the scheme of things both Denninger and I are little men, but Denninger is even littler than I am. He's a servomotor, nothing more. There's a more pragmatic reason for you to be glad. You're classified, too, you know. You've disappeared from the face of the earth. If you knew enough, the big guys might decide that the safest thing would be for you to disappear forever."

  Stu said nothing. He was stunned.

  "But I didn't come here to threaten you. We want your cooperation very badly, Mr. Redman. We need it."

  "Where are the other people I came in here with?"

  Deitz brought a paper out of an inside pocket. "Victor Palfrey, deceased. Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased."

  The names reeled in Stu's head. Chris the bartender. He'd always kept a sawed-off, lead-loaded Louisville Slugger under the bar, and the trucker who thought Chris was just kidding about using it was apt to get a big surprise. Tony Leominster, who drove that big International with the Cobra CB under the dash. Sometimes hung around Hap's station, but hadn't been there the night Campion took out the pumps. Vic Palfrey ... Christ, he had known Vic his whole life. How could Vic be dead? But the thing that hit him the hardest was the Hodges family.

  "All of them?" he heard himself ask. "Ralph's whole family?"

  Deitz turned the paper over. "No, there's a little girl. Eva. Four years old. She's alive."

  "Well, how is she?"

  "I'm sorry, that's classified."

  Rage struck him with all the unexpectedness of a sweet surprise. He was up, and then he had hold of Deitz's lapels, and he was shaking him back and forth. From the corner of his eye he saw startled movement behind the double-paned glass. Dimly, muffled by distance and sound-proofed walls, he heard a hooter go off.

  "What did you people do?" he shouted. "What did you do? What in Christ's name did you do?"

  "Mr. Redman--"

  "Huh? What the fuck did you people do?"

  The door hissed open. Three large men in olive-drab uniforms stepped in. They were all wearing nose-filters.

  Deitz looked over at them and snapped, "Get the hell out of here!"

  The three men looked uncertain.

  "Our orders--"

  "Get out of here and that's an order!"

  They retreated. Deitz sat calmly on the bed. His lapels were rumpled and his hair had tumbled over his forehead. That was all. He was looking at Stu calmly, even compassionately. For a wild moment Stu considered ripping his nose-filter out, and then he remembered Geraldo, what a stupid name for a guinea pig. Dull despair struck him like cold water. He sat down.

  "Christ in a sidecar," he muttered.

  "Listen to me," Deitz said. "I'm not responsible for you being here. Neither is Denninger, or the nurses who come in to take your blood pressure. If there was a responsible party it was Campion, but you can't lay it all on him, either. He ran, but under the circumstances, you or I might have run, too. It was a technical slipup that allowed him to run. The situation exists. We are trying to cope with it, all of us. But that doesn't make us responsible."

  "Then who is?"

  "Nobody," Deitz said, and smiled. "On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it's invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways."

  "Some accident," Stu said, his voice nearly a whisper. "What about the others? Hap and Hank Carmichael and Lila Bruett? Their boy Luke? Monty Sullivan--"

  "Classified," Deitz said. "Going to shake me some more? If it will make you feel better, shake away."

  Stu said nothing, but the way he was looking at Deitz made Deitz suddenly look down and begin to fiddle with the creases of his pants.

  "They're alive," he said, "and you may see them in time."

  "What about Arnette?"

  "Quarantined."

  "Who's dead there?"

  "Nobody."

  "You're lying."

  "Sorry you think so."

  "When do I get out of here?"

  "I don't know."

  "Classified?" Stu asked bitterly.

  "No, just unknown. You don't seem to have this disease. We want to know why you don't have it. Then we're home free."

  "Can I get a shave? I itch."

  Deitz smiled. "If you'll allow Denninger to start running his tests again, I'll get an orderly in to shave you right now."

  "I can handle it. I've been doing it since I was fifteen."

  Deitz shook his head firmly. "I think not."

  Stu smiled dryly at him. "Afraid I might cut my own throat?"

  "Let's just say--"

  Stu interrupted him wit
h a series of harsh, dry coughs. He bent over with the force of them.

  The effect on Deitz was galvanic. He was up off the bed like a shot and across to the airlock with his feet seeming not to touch the floor at all. Then he was fumbling in his pocket for the square key and ramming it into the slot.

  "Don't bother," Stu said mildly. "I was faking."

  Deitz turned to him slowly. Now his face had changed. His lips were thinned with anger, his eyes staring. "You were what?"

  "Faking," Stu said. His smile broadened.

  Deitz took two uncertain steps toward him. His fists closed, opened, then closed again. "But why? Why would you want to do something like that?"

  "Sorry," Stu said, smiling. "That's classified."

  "You shit son of a bitch," Deitz said with soft wonder.

  "Go on. Go on out and tell them they can do their tests."

  He slept better that night than he had since they had brought him here. And he had an extremely vivid dream. He had always dreamed a great deal--his wife had complained about him thrashing and muttering in his sleep--but he had never had a dream like this.

  He was standing on a country road, at the precise place where the black hottop gave up to bone-white dirt. A blazing summer sun shone down. On both sides of the road there was green corn, and it stretched away endlessly. There was a sign, but it was dusty and he couldn't read it. There was the sound of crows, harsh and far away. Closer by, someone was playing an acoustic guitar, fingerpicking it. Vic Palfrey had been a picker, and it was a fine sound.

  This is where I ought to get to, Stu thought dimly. Yeah, this is the place, all right.

  What was that tune? "Beautiful Zion"? "The Fields of My Father's Home"? "Sweet Bye and Bye"? Some hymn he remembered from his childhood, something he associated with full immersion and picnic lunches. But he couldn't remember which one.

  Then the music stopped. A cloud came over the sun. He began to be afraid. He began to feel that there was something terrible, something worse than plague, fire, or earthquake. Something was in the corn and it was watching him. Something dark was in the corn.

  He looked, and saw two burning red eyes far back in the shadows, far back in the corn. Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel. Him, he thought. The man with no face. Oh dear God. Oh dear God no.