The Stand Read online

  Nick nodded.

  Jane Baker had come in around six yesterday evening with a covered dish supper and a carton of milk.

  Nick wrote, "Thanks very much. How's your husband?"

  She laughed, a small woman with chestnut brown hair, dressed prettily in a checked shirt and faded jeans. "He wanted to come down himself, but I talked him out of it. His fever was up so high this afternoon that it scared me, but it's almost normal tonight. I think it's because of the State Patrol. Johnny's never really happy unless he can be mad at the State Patrol."

  Nick looked at her quizzically.

  "They told him they couldn't send anybody down for his prisoners until nine tomorrow morning. They've had a bad sick-day, twenty or more troopers out. And a lot of the people who are on have been fetching people to the hospital up at Camden or even Pine Bluff. There's a lot of this sickness around. I think Am Soames is a lot more worried than he's letting on."

  She looked worried herself. Then she took the two folded sheets of memo paper from her breast pocket.

  "This is quite a story," she said quietly, handing the papers back to him. "You've had just about the worst luck of anyone I ever heard of. I think the way you've risen above your handicaps is admirable. And I have to apologize again for my brother."

  Nick, embarrassed, could only shrug.

  "I hope you'll stay on in Shoyo," she said, standing. "My husband likes you, and I do, too. Be careful of those men in there."

  "I will," Nick wrote. "Tell the sheriff I hope he feels better."

  "I'll take him your good wishes."

  She left then, and Nick passed a night of broken rest, getting up occasionally to check on his three wards. Desperadoes they were not; by ten o'clock they were all sleeping. Two town fellows came in to check and make sure Nick was all right, and Nick noticed that both of them seemed to have colds.

  He dreamed oddly, and all he could remember upon waking was that he seemed to have been walking through endless rows of green corn, looking for something and terribly afraid of something else that seemed to be behind him.

  This morning he was up early, carefully sweeping out the back of the jail and ignoring Billy Warner and Mike Childress. As he went out, Billy called after him: "Ray's gonna be back, you know. And when he catches you, you're gonna wish you were blind as well as deaf and dumb!"

  Nick, his back turned, missed most of this.

  Back in the office, he picked up an old copy of Time magazine and began to read. He considered putting his feet up on the desk and decided that would be a very good way to get in trouble if the sheriff came by.

  By eight o'clock he was wondering uneasily if Sheriff Baker might have had a relapse in the night. Nick had expected him by now, ready to turn the three prisoners in his jail over to the county when the State Patrol came for them. Also, Nick's stomach was rumbling uncomfortably. No one had showed up from the truck-stop down the road, and he looked at the telephone, more with disgust than with longing. He was quite fond of science fiction, picking up falling-apart paperbacks from time to time on the dusty back shelves of antique barns for a nickel or a dime, and he found himself thinking, not for the first time, that it was going to be a great day for the deaf-mutes of the world when the telephone viewscreens the science fiction novels were always predicting finally came into general use.

  By quarter of nine he was acutely uneasy. He went to the door which gave on the cells and looked in.

  Billy and Mike were both standing at their cell doors. Both of them had been banging on the bars with their shoes... which just went to show you that people who can't talk only made up a small percentage of the world's dummies. Vince Hogan was lying down. He only turned his head and stared at Nick when he came to the door. Hogan's face was pallid except for a hectic flush on his cheeks, and there were dark patches under his eyes. Beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. Nick met his apathetic, fevered gaze and realized that the man was sick. His uneasiness deepened.

  "Hey, dummy, how about some brefus?" Mike called down to him. "An ole Vince there seems like he could use a doctor. Tattle-talein don't agree with him, does it, Bill?"

  Bill didn't want to banter. "I'm sorry I yelled at you before, man. Vince, he's sick, all right. He needs the doctor."

  Nick nodded and went out, trying to figure out what he should do next. He bent over the desk and wrote on the memo pad: "Sheriff Baker, or Whoever: I've gone to get the prisoners some breakfast and to see if I can hunt Dr. Soames up for Vincent Hogan. He appears to be really sick, not just playing possum. Nick Andros."

  He tore the sheet off the pad and left it in the middle of the desk. Then, tucking the pad into his pocket, he went out into the street.

  The first thing that struck him was the still heat of the day and the smell of greenery. By afternoon it was going to be a scorcher. It was the sort of day when people like to get their chores and errands done early so they can spend the afternoon as quietly as possible, but to Nick, Shoyo's main street looked strangely indolent this forenoon, more like a Sunday than a workday.

  Most of the diagonal parking spaces in front of the stores were empty. A few cars and farm trucks were going up and down the street, but not many. The hardware store looked open, but the shades of the Mercantile Bank were still drawn, although it was past nine now.

  Nick turned right, toward the truck-stop, which was five blocks down. He was on the comer of the third block when he saw Dr. Soames's car moving slowly up the street toward him, weaving a little from side to side, as if with exhaustion. Nick waved vigorously, not sure if Soames would stop, but Soames pulled in at the curb, indifferently taking up four of the slanted parking spaces. He didn't get out but merely sat behind the wheel. The look of the man shocked Nick. Soames had aged twenty years since he had last seen him bantering casually with the sheriff. It was partly exhaustion, but exhaustion couldn't be the whole explanation--even Nick could see that. As if to confirm his thought, the doctor produced a wrinkled handkerchief from his breast pocket like an old magician doing a creaky trick that does not interest him much anymore, and sneezed into it repeatedly. When he was done he leaned his head back against the car's seat, mouth half-open to draw breath. His skin looked so shiny and yellow that he reminded Nick of a dead person.

  Then Soames opened his eyes and said, "Sheriff Baker's dead. If that's what you flagged me down for, you can forget it. He died a little after two o'clock this morning. Now Janey's sick with it."

  Nick's eyes widened. Sheriff Baker dead? But his wife had been in just last night and said he was feeling better. And she... she had been fine. No, it just wasn't possible.

  "Dead, all right," Soames said, as though Nick had spoken his thought aloud. "And he's not the only one. I've signed twelve death certificates in the last twelve hours. And I know of another twenty that are going to be dead by noon unless God shows mercy. But I doubt if this is God's doing. I suspect He'll keep right out of it as a consequence."

  Nick pulled the pad from his pocket and wrote: "What's the matter with them?"

  "I don't know," Soames said, crumpling the sheet slowly and tossing the ball into the gutter. "But everyone in town seems to be coming down with it, and I'm more frightened than I ever have been in my life. I have it myself, although what I'm suffering most from right now is exhaustion. I'm not a young man anymore. I can't go these long hours without paying the price, you know." A tired, frightened petulance had entered his voice, which Nick fortunately couldn't hear. "And feeling sorry for myself won't help."

  Nick, who hadn't been aware Soames was feeling sorry for himself, could only look at him, puzzled.

  Soames got out of his car, holding on to Nick's arm for a minute to help himself. He had an old man's grip, weak and a little frenzied. "Come on over to that bench, Nick. You're good to talk to. I suppose you've been told that before."

  Nick pointed back toward the jail.

  "They're not going anywhere," Soames said, "and if they're down with it, right now they're on the bottom of m
y list."

  They sat on the bench, which was painted bright green and bore an advertisement on the backrest for a local insurance company. Soames turned his face gratefully up to the warmth of the sun.

  "Chills and fever," he said. "Ever since about ten o'clock last night. Just lately it's been the chills. Thank God there hasn't been any diarrhea."

  "You ought to go home to bed," Nick wrote.

  "So I ought. And will. I just want to rest for a few minutes first..." His eyes slipped shut and Nick thought he had gone to sleep. He wondered if he should go on down to the truck-stop and get Billy and Mike some breakfast.

  Then Dr. Soames spoke again, without opening his eyes. Nick watched his lips. "The symptoms are all very common," he said, and began to enumerate them on his fingers until all ten were spread out in front of him like a fan. "Chills. Fever. Headache. Weakness and general debilitation. Loss of appetite. Painful urination. Swelling of the glands, progressing from minor to acute. Swelling in the armpits and in the groin. Respiratory weakness and failure."

  He looked at Nick.

  "They are the symptoms of the common cold, of influenza, of pneumonia. We can cure all of those things, Nick. Unless the patient is very young or very old, or perhaps already weakened by a previous illness, antibiotics will knock them out. But not this. It comes on the patient quickly or slowly. It doesn't seem to matter. Nothing helps. The thing escalates, backs up, escalates again; debilitation increases; the swelling gets worse; finally, death.

  "Somebody made a mistake.

  "And they're trying to cover it up."

  Nick looked at him doubtfully, wondering if he had picked the words rightly from the doctor's lips, wondering if Soames might be raving.

  "It sounds slightly paranoid, doesn't it?" Soames asked, looking at him with weary humor. "I used to be frightened of the younger generation's paranoia, do you know that? Always afraid someone was tapping their phones... following them... running computer checks on them... and now I find out they were right and I was wrong. Life is a fine thing, Nick, but old age takes an unpleasantly high toll on one's dearly held prejudices, I find."

  "What do you mean?" Nick wrote.

  "None of the phones in Shoyo work," Soames said. Nick had no idea if this was in answer to his question (Soames seemed to have given Nick's last note only the most cursory of glances), or if the doctor had gone off on some new tack--the fever could be making Soames's mind jump around, he supposed.

  The doctor observed Nick's puzzled face, and seemed to think the deaf-mute might not believe him. "Quite true," he said. "If you try to dial any number not on this town's circuit, you get a recorded announcement. Furthermore, the two Shoyo exits and entrances from the turnpike are closed off with barriers which say ROAD CONSTRUCTION. But there is no construction. Only the barriers. I was out there. I believe it would be possible to move the barriers aside, but the traffic on the turnpike seems very light this morning. And most of it seems to consist of army vehicles. Trucks and jeeps."

  "What about the other roads?" Nick wrote.

  "Route 63 has been torn up at the east end of town to replace a culvert," Soames said. "At the west end of town there appears to have been a rather nasty car accident. Two cars across the road, blocking it entirely. There are smudge pots out, but no sign of state troopers or wreckers."

  He paused, removed his handkerchief, and blew his nose.

  "The men working on the culvert are going very slowly, according to Joe Rackman, who lives out that way. I was at the Rackmans' about two hours ago, looking at their little boy, who is very ill indeed. Joe said that he thinks that the men at the culvert are in fact soldiers, though they're dressed in state road crew coveralls and driving a state truck."

  Nick wrote: "How does he know?"

  Standing up, Soames said: "Workmen rarely salute each other."

  Nick got up, too.

  "Back roads?" he jotted.

  "Possibly." Soames nodded. "But I am a doctor, not a hero. Joe said he saw guns in the cab of that truck. Army-issue carbines. If one tried to leave Shoyo by the back roads and if they were watched, who knows? And what might one find beyond Shoyo? I repeat: someone made a mistake. And now they're trying to cover it up. Madness. Madness. Of course the news of something like this will get out, and it won't take long. And in the meantime, how many will die?"

  Nick, frightened, only looked at Dr. Soames as he went back to his car and climbed slowly in.

  "And you, Nick," Soames said, looking out the window at him. "How do you feel? A cold? Sneezing? Coughing?"

  Nick shook his head to each one.

  "Will you try to leave town? I think you could, if you went by the fields."

  Nick shook his head and wrote, "Those men are locked up. I can't just leave them. Vincent Hogan is sick but the other two seem okay. I'll get them their breakfast and then go see Mrs. Baker."

  "You're a thoughtful boy," Soames said. "That's rare. A boy in this degraded age who has a sense of responsibility is even rarer. She'd appreciate that, Nick, I know. Mr. Braceman, the Methodist minister, also said he would stop by. I'm afraid he'll have a lot of calls to make before the day is over. You'll be careful of those three you have locked up, won't you?"

  Nick nodded soberly.

  "Good. I'll try to drop by and check on you this afternoon." He dropped the car into gear and drove away, looking weary and redeyed and shriveled. Nick stared after him, his face troubled, and then began to walk down to the truck-stop again. It was open, but one of the two cooks was not in and three of the four waitresses hadn't shown up for the seven-to-three shift. Nick had to wait a long time to get his order. When he got back to the jail, both Billy and Mike looked badly frightened. Vince Hogan was delirious, and by six o'clock that evening he was dead.

  CHAPTER 19

  It had been so long since Larry had been in Times Square that he expected it to look different somehow, magical. Things would look smaller and yet better there, and he would not feel intimidated by the rank, smelly, and sometimes dangerous vitality of the place the way he had as a child, when he and Buddy Marx or just he alone would scuttle down here to see the 99-cent double features or to stare at the glittering junk in the windows of the shops and arcades and pool-halls.

  But it all looked just the same--more than it should have because some things really had changed. When you came up the stairs from the subway, the newsstand that had been on the corner as you came out was gone. Half a block down, where there had been a penny arcade full of flashing lights and bells and dangerous-looking young men with cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths as they played the Gottlieb Desert Isle or Space Race, where that had been there was now an Orange Julius with a flock of young blacks standing in front of it, their lower bodies moving gently as if somewhere jive played on and on, jive that only black ears could hear. There were more massage parlors and X-rated movies.

  Still, it was much the same, and this made him sad. In a way the only real difference made things seem worse: he felt like a tourist here now. But maybe even native New Yorkers felt like tourists in the Square, dwarfed, wanting to look up and read the electronic headlines as they marched around and around up there. He couldn't tell; he had forgotten what it was like to be a part of New York. He had no particular urge to relearn.

  His mother hadn't gone to work that morning. She'd been fighting a cold for the last couple of days and had gotten up early this morning with a fever. He had heard her from the narrow, safe bed in his old room, banging around out in the kitchen, sneezing and saying "Shit!" under her breath, getting ready for breakfast. The sound of the TV being turned on, then the news on the "Today" program. An attempted coup in India. A power station blown up in Wyoming. The Supreme Court was expected to hand down a landmark decision having to do with gay rights.

  By the time Larry came out into the kitchen, buttoning his shirt, the news was over and Gene Shalit was interviewing a man with a bald head. The man with the bald head was showing a number of small animals he
had hand-blown. Glassblowing, he said, had been his hobby for forty years, and his book would be published by Random House. Then he sneezed. "Excuse you," Gene Shalit said, and chuckled.

  "You want em fried or scrambled?" Alice Underwood asked. She was in her bathrobe.

  "Scrambled," Larry said, knowing it would do no good to protest the eggs. In Alice's view, it wasn't breakfast without eggs (which she called "crackleberries" when she was in a good humor). They had protein and nutrition. Her idea of nutrition was vague but all-encompassing. She kept a list of nutritious items in her head, Larry knew, as well as their opposite numbers--Jujubes, pickles, Slim Jims, the slice of pink bubble gum that came with baseball cards, and oh dear God, so many others.

  He sat down and watched her make the eggs, pouring them into the same old black skillet, stirring them with the same wire whisk that she had used to stir his eggs when he had been going to the first grade at PS 162.

  She pulled her hankie out of her bathrobe pocket, coughed into it, sneezed into it, and muttered "Shit!" indistinctly into it before putting it back.

  "Day off, Mom?"

  "I called in sick. This cold wants to break me. I hate to call in sick on Fridays, so many do, but I've got to get off my feet. I'm running a fever. Swollen glands, too."

  "Did you call the doctor?"

  "When I was a charming maid, doctors made housecalls," she said. "Now if you're sick, you have to go to the hospital emergency room. That, or spend the day waiting for some quack to see you in one of those places where they're supposed to have--ha-ha--walk-in medical care. Walk in and get ready to collect your Medicare, that's what I think. Those places are worse than the Green Stamp Redemption Center a week before Christmas. I'll stay home and take aspirin, and by tomorrow this time I'll be on the downhill side of it."

  He stayed most of the morning, trying to help out. He lugged the TV in by her bed, the cords standing out heroically on his arms ("You're going to give yourself a hernia so I can watch 'Let's Make a Deal,' " she sniffed), brought her juice and an old bottle of NyQuil for her stuffiness, and ran down to the market to get her a couple of paperbacks.