The Stand Read online

  Then the dream was fading and he awoke with feelings of disquiet, dislocation, and relief. He went to the bathroom and then to his window. He looked out at the moon. He went back to bed but it was an hour before he got back to sleep. All that corn, he thought sleepily. Must have been Iowa or Nebraska, maybe northern Kansas. But he had never been in any of those places in his life.

  CHAPTER 14

  It was quarter of twelve. Outside the small pillbox window, dark pressed evenly against the glass. Deitz sat alone in the office cubicle, tie pulled down, collar button undone. His feet were up on the anonymous metal desk, and he was holding a microphone. On top of the desk, the reels of an old-fashioned Wollensak tape recorder turned and turned.

  "This is Colonel Deitz," he said. "Located Atlanta facility code PB-2. This is Report 16, subject file Project Blue, subfile Princess/Prince. This report, file, and subfile are Top Secret, classification 2-2-3, eyes only. If you are not classified to receive this material, fuck off, Jack."

  He stopped and let his eyes fall closed for a moment. The tape reels ran on smoothly, undergoing all the correct electrical and magnetic changes.

  "Prince gave me one helluva scare tonight," he said at last. "I won't go into it; it'll be in Denninger's report. That guy will be more than willing to quote chapter and verse. Plus, of course, a transcription of my conversation with Prince will be on the telecommunications disc which also contains the transcription of this tape, which is being made at 2345 hours. I was almost pissed enough to hit him, because he scared the living Jesus out of me. I am not pissed anymore, however. The man put me into his shoes, and for just a second there I knew exactly how it feels to shake in them. He's a fairly bright man once you get past the Gary Cooper exterior, and one independent son of a bitch. If it suits him, he'll find all sorts of novel monkey-wrenches to throw into the gears. He has no close family in Arnette or anyplace else, so we can't put much of a hammerlock on him. Denninger has volunteers--or says he does--who'll be happy to go in and muscle him into a more cooperative frame of mind, and it may come to that, but if I may be pardoned another personal observation, I believe it would take more muscle than Denninger thinks. Maybe a whole lot more. For the record, I am still against it. My mother used to say you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar, and I guess I still believe it.

  "Again, for the record, he still tests virus-clean. You figure it out."

  He paused again, fighting the urge to doze off. He had managed only four hours of sleep in the last seventy-two.

  "Records as of twenty-two-hundred hours," he said formally, and picked a sheaf of reports off the desk. "Henry Carmichael died while I was talking with Prince. The cop, Joseph Robert Brentwood, died half an hour ago. This won't be in Dr. D's report, but he was all but shitting green apples over that one. Brentwood showed a sudden positive response to the vaccine type ... uh ..." He shuffled papers. "Here it is. 63-A-3. See subfile, if you like. Brentwood's fever broke, the characteristic swellings in the glands of the neck went down, he reported hunger, and ate a poached egg and a slice of unbuttered toast. Spoke rationally, wanted to know where he was, and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-do. Then, around twenty-hundred hours, the fever came back with a bang. Delirious. He broke the restraints on his bed and went reeling around the room, yelling, coughing, blowing snot, the whole bit. Then he fell over and died. Kaboom. The opinion of the team is that the vaccine killed him. It made him better for a while, but he was getting sick again even before it killed him. So, it's back to the old drawing boards."

  He paused.

  "I saved the worst for last. We can declassify Princess back to plain old Eva Hodges, female, age four, Caucasian. Her coach-and-four turned back into a pumpkin and a bunch of mice late this afternoon. To look at her, you'd think she was perfectly normal, not even a sniffle. She's downhearted, of course; she misses her mom. Other than that, she appears perfectly normal. She's got it, though. Her post-lunch BP first showed a drop, then a rise, which is the only halfway decent diagnostic tool Denninger's got so far. Before supper Denninger showed me her sputum slides--as an incentive to diet, sputum slides are really primo, believe me --and they're lousy with those wagon-wheel germs he says aren't really germs at all, but incubators. I can't understand how he can know where this thing is and what it looks like and still not be able to stop it. He gives me a lot of jargon, but I don't think he understands it, either."

  Deitz lit a cigarette.

  "So where are we tonight? We've got a disease that's got several well-defined stages ... but some people may skip a stage. Some people may backtrack a stage. Some people may do both. Some people stay in one stage for a relatively long time and others zoom through all four as if they were on a rocket-sled. One of our two 'clean' subjects is no longer clean. The other is a thirty-year-old redneck who seems to be as healthy as I am. Denninger has done about thirty million tests on him and has succeeded in isolating only four abnormalities: Redman appears to have a great many moles on his body. He has a slight hypertensive condition, too slight to medicate right now. He develops a mild tic under his left eye when he's under stress. And Denninger says he dreams a great deal more than average--almost all night, every night. They got that from the standard EEG series they ran before he went on strike. And that's it. I can't make anything out of it, neither can Dr. Denninger, and neither can the people who check Dr. Demento's work.

  "This scares me, Starkey. It scares me because nobody but a very smart doctor with all the facts is going to be able to diagnose anything but a common cold in the people who are out there carrying this. Christ, nobody goes to the doctor anymore unless they've got pneumonia or a suspicious lump on the tit or a bad case of the dancing hives. Too hard to get one to look at you. So they're going to stay home, drink fluids and get plenty of bedrest, and then they're going to die. Before they do, they're going to infect everyone who comes into the same room with them. All of us are still expecting the Prince--I think I used his real name here someplace, but at this juncture I don't really give a fuck--to come down with it tonight or tomorrow or the day after, at the latest. And so far, no one who's come down with it has gotten better. Those sons of bitches out in California did this job a little too well for my taste.

  "Deitz, Atlanta PB facility 2, this report ends."

  He turned off the recorder and stared at it for a long time. Then he lit another cigarette.

  CHAPTER 15

  It was two minutes to midnight.

  Patty Greer, the nurse who had been trying to take Stu's blood pressure when he went on strike, was leafing through the current issue of McCall's at the nurses' station and waiting to go in and check Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Hapscomb. Hap would still be awake watching Johnny Carson and would be no problem. He liked to josh her about how hard it would be to pinch her bottom through her white all-over suit. Mr. Hapscomb was scared, but he was being cooperative, not like that dreadful Stuart Redman, who only looked at you and wouldn't say boo to a goose. Mr. Hapscomb was what Patty Greer thought of as a "good sport." As far as she was concerned, all patients could be divided into two categories: "good sports" and "old poops." Patty, who had broken a leg roller skating when she was seven and had never spent a day in bed since, had very little patience with the "old poops." You were either really sick and being a "good sport" or you were a hypochondriac "old poop" making trouble for a poor working girl.

  Mr. Sullivan would be asleep, and he would wake up ugly. It wasn't her fault that she had to wake him up, and she would think Mr. Sullivan would understand that. He should just be grateful that he was getting the best care the government could provide, and all free at that. And she would just tell him so if he started being an "old poop" again tonight.

  The clock touched midnight; time to get going.

  She left the nurses' station and walked down the hallway toward the white room where she would first be sprayed and then helped into her suit. Halfway there, her nose began to tickle. She got her hankie out of her pocket and sneezed lightly thre
e times. She replaced the handkerchief.

  Intent on dealing with cranky Mr. Sullivan, she attached no significance to her sneezes. It was probably a touch of hay fever. The directive in the nurses' station which said in big red letters, REPORT ANY COLD SYMPTOMS NO MATTER HOW MINOR TO YOUR SUPERVISOR AT ONCE, never even crossed her mind. They were worried that whatever those poor people from Texas had might spread outside the sealed rooms, but she also knew it was impossible for even a tiny virus to get inside the self-contained environment of the white-suits.

  Nevertheless, on her way down to the white room she infected an orderly, a doctor who was just getting ready to leave, and another nurse on her way to do her midnight rounds.

  A new day had begun.

  CHAPTER 16

  A day later, on June 23, a big white Connie was roaring north on US 180, in another part of the country. It was doing somewhere between ninety and one hundred, its Corinthian white paintjob glittering in the sun, the chrome winking. The opera windows in the rear also gave back the sun, heliographing it viciously.

  The trail that Connie had left behind itself since Poke and Lloyd killed its owner and stole it somewhere just south of Hachita was wandering and pretty much senseless. Up 81 to US 80, the turnpike, until Poke and Lloyd began to feel nervous. They had killed six people in the last six days, including the owner of the Continental, his wife, and his smarmy daughter. But it was not the six murders that made them feel antsy about being on the interstate. It was the dope and the guns. Five grams of hash, a little tin snuffbox filled with God knew how much coke, and sixteen pounds of marijuana. Also two .38s, three .45s, a .357 Mag that Poke called his Pokerizer, six shotguns--two of them sawed-off pumps-- and a Schmeisser submachine gun. Murder was a trifle beyond their intellectual reach, but they both understood the trouble they were going to be in if the Arizona State Police picked them up in a stolen car full of blow and shootin irons. On top of everything else, they were interstate fugitives. Had been ever since they crossed the Nevada border.

  Interstate fugitives. Lloyd Henreid liked the sound of that. Gangbusters. Take that, you dirty rat. Have a lead sandwich, ya lousy copper.

  So they had turned north at Deming, now on 180; had gone through Hurley and Bayard and the slightly larger town of Silver City, where Lloyd had bought a bag of burgers and eight milkshakes (why in the name of Christ had he bought eight of the motherfuckers? they would soon be pissing chocolate), grinning at the waitress in an empty yet hilarious way that made her nervous for hours afterward. I believe that man would just as soon killed me as looked at me, she told her boss that afternoon.

  Past Silver City and roaring through Cliff, the road now bending west again, just the direction they didn't want to go. Through Buckhorn and then they were back in the country God forgot, two-lane blacktop running through sagebrush and sand, buttes and mesas in the background, all that same old same old made you want to just rare back and puke at it.

  "We're gettin low on gas," Poke said.

  "Wouldn't be if you didn't drive so fuckin fast," Lloyd said. He took a sip of his third milkshake, gagged on it, powered down the window, and threw out all the leftover crap, including the three milkshakes neither of them had touched.

  "Whoop! Whoop!" Poke cried. He began to goose the gas pedal. The Connie lurched forward, dropped back, lurched forward.

  "Ride em cowboy!" Lloyd yelled.

  "Whoop! Whoop!"

  "You want to smoke?"

  "Smoke em if you got em," Poke said. "Whoop! Whoop!"

  There was a large green Hefty bag on the floor between Lloyd's feet. It held the sixteen pounds of marijuana. He reached in, got a handful, and began to roll a bomber joint.

  "Whoop! Whoop!" The Connie cruised back and forth over the white line.

  "Cut the shit!" Lloyd shouted. "I'm spillin it everywhere!"

  "Plenty more where that came from ... whoop!"

  "Come on, we gotta deal this stuff, man. We gotta deal this stuff or we're gonna get caught and wind up in somebody's trunk."

  "Okay, sport." Poke began to drive smoothly again, but his expression was sulky. "It was your idea, your fuckin idea."

  "You thought it was a good idea."

  "Yeah, but I didn't know we'd end up drivin all over fuckin Arizona. How we ever gonna get to New York this way?"

  "We're throwin off pursuit, man," Lloyd said. In his mind he saw police garage doors opening and thousands of 1940s radio cars issuing forth into the night. Spotlights crawling over brick walls. Come on out, Canarsie, we know you're in there.

  "Good fuckin luck," Poke said, still sulking. "We're doin a helluva job. You know what we got, besides that dope and the guns? We got sixteen bucks and three hundred fuckin credit cards we don't dare use. What the fuck, we don't even have enough cash to fill this hog's gas tank."

  "God will provide," Lloyd said, and spit-sealed the bomber. He lit it with the Connie's dashboard lighter. "Happy fuckin days."

  "And if you want to sell it, what are we doing smokin it?" Poke went on, not much mollified by the thought of God providing.

  "So we sell a few short ounces. Come on, Poke. Have a smoke."

  This never failed to break Poke up. He brayed laughter and took the joint. Between them, standing on its wire stock, was the Schmeisser, fully loaded. The Connie blazed on up the road, its gas gauge standing at an eighth.

  Poke and Lloyd had met a year before in the Brownsville Minimum Security Station, a Nevada workfarm. Brownsville was ninety acres of irrigated farmland and a prison compound of Quonset huts about sixty miles north of Tonopah and eighty northeast of Gabbs. It was a mean place to do short time. Although Brownsville Station was supposed to be a farm, nothing much grew there. Carrots and lettuce got one taste of that blaring sun, chuckled weakly, and died. Legumes and weeds would grow, and the state legislature was fanatically dedicated to the idea that someday soybeans would grow. But the kindest thing that could be said about Brownsville's ostensible purpose was that the desert was taking a Christless long time to bloom. The warden (who preferred to be called "the boss") prided himself on being a hardass, and he hired only men he considered to be fellow hardasses. And, as he was fond of telling the new fish, Brownsville was mostly minimum security because when it came to escape, it was like the song said: noplace to run to, baby, noplace to hide. Some gave it a shot anyway, but most were brought back in two or three days, sunburned, glareblind, and eager to sell the boss their shriveled raisin souls for a drink of water. Some of them cackled madly, and one young man who was out for three days claimed he saw a large castle some miles south of Gabbs, a castle with a moat. The moat, he said, was guarded by trolls riding big black horses. Some months later when a Colorado revival preacher did a show at Brownsville, this same young man got Jesus in a big way.

  Andrew "Poke" Freeman, in for simple assault, was released in April 1989. He had occupied a bed next to Lloyd Henreid, and had told him that if Lloyd was interested in a big score, he knew about something interesting in Vegas. Lloyd was willing.

  Lloyd was released on June 1. His crime, committed in Reno, had been attempted rape. The lady was a showgirl on her way home, and she had shot a load of teargas into Lloyd's eyes. He felt lucky to get only two to four, plus time served, plus time off for good behavior. At Brownsville it was just too fuckin hot to misbehave.

  He caught a bus to Las Vegas, and Poke met him at the terminal. This is the deal, Poke told him. He knew this guy, "one-time business associate" might describe him best, and this guy was known in certain circles as Gorgeous George. He did some piecework for a group of people with mostly Italian and Sicilian names. George was strictly part-time help. What he did mostly for these Sicilian-type people was to take things and bring things. Sometimes he took things from Vegas to L.A.; sometimes he brought other things from L.A. to Vegas. Small-time dope mostly, freebies for big-time customers. Sometimes guns. The guns were always a bring, never a take. As Poke understood it (and Poke's understanding never got much beyond what the movie people cal
l "soft focus"), these Sicilian-type people sometimes sold iron to independent thieves. Well, Poke said, Gorgeous George was willing to tell them the time and place when a fairly good haul of these items would be in the offing. George was asking twenty-five percent of what they realized. Poke and Lloyd would crash in on George, tie him and gag him, take the stuff, and maybe give him a couple of biffs and baffs for good measure. It had to look good, George had cautioned, because these Sicilian-type people were no one to fool around with.

  "Well," Lloyd said, "it sounds good."

  The next day Poke and Lloyd went to see Gorgeous George, a mild-mannered six-footer with a small head which sat incongruously above his roofbeam shoulders on a neck which did not seem to exist. He had a full head of waved blond hair, which made him look a bit like the famed wrestler.

  Lloyd had had second thoughts about the deal, but Poke had changed his mind again. Poke was good at that. George told them to come around to his house the following Friday evening around six. "Wear masks, for God's sake," he said. "And you bloody my nose and black my eye, too. Jesus, I wish I'd never gotten into this."

  The big night came. Poke and Lloyd took a bus to the corner of George's street and put on ski-masks at the foot of his walk. The door was locked, but as George had promised, not too tightly locked. There was a rumpus room downstairs, and there was George, standing in front of a Hefty bag full of pot. The Ping-Pong table was loaded down with guns. George was scared.

  "Jesus, oh Jesus, I wish I'd never gotten into this," he kept saying as Lloyd tied his feet with clothesrope and Poke bound his hands with Scotch brand filament tape.

  Then Lloyd biffed George in the nose, bloodying it, and Poke baffed him in the eye, blacking it as per request.

  "Jeez!" George cried. "Did you have to do it so hard?"

  "You were the one wanted to make sure it looked good," Lloyd pointed out.

  Poke plastered a piece of adhesive tape across George's mouth. The two of them had begun to gather up the swag.