The Stand Read online

  That was the night of June 24, and he slept raggedly on the Bakers' front porch, and his dreams were very bad. And now, on the afternoon of the following day, he was officiating at the death of Jane Baker, this fine woman ... and he couldn't say a word to comfort her.

  She was tugging at his hand. Nick looked down at her pale, drawn face. Her skin was dry now, the sweat evaporated. He took no hope or comfort in that, however. She was going. He had come to know the look.

  "Nick," she said, and smiled. She clasped one of his hands in both of hers. "I wanted to thank you again. No one wants to die all alone, do they?"

  He shook his head violently, and she understood this was not in agreement with her statement but rather in vehement contradiction of its premise.

  "Yes I am," she contradicted. "But never mind. There's a dress in that closet, Nick. A white one. You'll know it because of ..." A fit of coughing interrupted her. When she had it under control, she finished, "... because of the lace. It's the one I wore on the train when we left for our honeymoon. It still fits ... or did. I suppose it will be a little big on me now--I've lost some weight--but it doesn't really matter. I've always loved that dress. John and I went to Lake Pontchartrain. It was the happiest two weeks of my life. John always made me happy. Will you remember the dress, Nick? It's the one I want to be buried in. You wouldn't be too embarrassed to ... to dress me, would you?"

  He swallowed hard and shook his head, looking at the coverlet. She must have sensed his mixture of sadness and discomfort, because she didn't mention the dress again. She talked of other things instead--lightly, almost coquettishly. How she had won an elocution contest in high school, had gone on to the Arkansas state finals, and how her half-slip had fallen down and puddled around her shoes just as she reached the ringing climax of Shirley Jackson's "The Daemon Lover." About her sister, who had gone to Viet Nam as part of a Baptist mission group, and had come back with not one or two but three adopted children. About a camping trip she and John had taken three years ago, and how an ill-tempered moose in rut had forced them up a tree and kept them there all day.

  "So we sat up there and spooned," she said sleepily, "like a couple of high school kids in a balcony. My goodness, he was in a state when we got down. He was ... we were ... in love ... very much in love ... love is what moves the world, I've always thought ... it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down ... bring them low ... and make them crawl ... we were ... so much in love ..."

  She drowsed off and slept until he wakened her into fresh delirium by moving a curtain or perhaps just by treading on a squeaky board.

  "John!" she screamed now, her voice choked with phlegm. "Oh, John, I'll never get the hang of this dad-ratted stick shift! John, you got to help me! You got to help me--"

  Her words trailed off in a long, rattling exhalation he could not hear but sensed all the same. A thin trickle of dark blood issued from one nostril. She fell back on the pillow, and her head snapped back and forth once, twice, three times, as if she had made some kind of vital decision and the answer was negative.

  Then she was still.

  Nick put his hand timidly against the side of her neck, then her inner wrist, then between her breasts. There was nothing. She was dead. The clock on her bedtable ticked importantly, unheard by either of them. He put his head against his knees for a minute, crying a little in the silent way he had. All you can do is have sort of a slow leak, Rudy had told him once, but in a soap opera world, that can come in handy.

  He knew what came next and didn't want to do it. It wasn't fair, part of him cried out. It wasn't his responsibility. But since there was no one else here--maybe no one else well for miles around--he would have to shoulder it. Either that or leave her here to rot, and he couldn't do that. She had been kind to him, and there had been too many people along the way who hadn't been able to spare that, sick or well. He supposed he would have to get going. The longer he sat here and did nothing, the more he would dread the task. He knew where the Curtis Funeral Home was--three blocks down and one block west. It would be hot out there, too.

  He forced himself to get up and go to the closet, half hoping that the white dress, the honeymoon dress, would turn out to have been just another part of her delirium. But it was there. A little yellowed with the years now, but he knew it, all the same. Because of the lace. He took it down and laid it across the bench at the foot of the bed. He looked at the dress, looked at the woman, and thought, It's going to be more than just a little big on her now. The disease, whatever it is, was crueler to her than she knew... and I guess that's just as well.

  Unwillingly, he went around to her and began to remove the nightgown. But when it was off and she lay naked before him, the dread departed and he felt only pity--a pity lodged so deep in him that it made him ache and he began to cry again as he washed her body and then dressed it as it had been dressed when she wore it on the way to Lake Pontchartrain. And when she was dressed as she had been on that day, he took her in his arms and carried her down to the funeral home in her lace, oh, in her lace: he carried her like a bridegroom crossing an endless threshold with his beloved in his arms.

  CHAPTER 26

  Some campus group, probably either Students for a Democratic Society or the Young Maoists, had been busy with a ditto machine during the night of June 2526. In the morning, these posters were plastered all over the University of Kentucky at Louisville campus:

  ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!

  YOU ARE BEING LIED TO! THE GOVERNMENT IS LYING TO YOU! THE PRESS, WHICH HAS BEEN CO-OPTED BY THE FORCES OF THE PIG PARAMILITARY, IS LYING TO YOU! THE ADMINISTRATION OF THIS UNIVERSITY IS LYING TO YOU, AS ARE THE INFIRMARY DOCTORS UNDER THE ADMINISTRATION' S ORDERS!

  1. THERE IS NO SUPERFLU VACCINE.

  2. SUPERFLU IS NOT A SERIOUS DISEASE, IT IS A DEADLY DISEASE.

  3. SUSCEPTIBILITY MAY RUN AS HIGH AS 75%.

  4. SUPERFLU WAS DEVELOPED BY THE FORCES OF THE U.S. PIG PARAMILITARY AND DISBURSED BY ACCIDENT.

  5. THE U.S. PIG PARAMILITARY NOW MEANS TO COVER UP THEIR MURDEROUS BLUNDER EVEN IF IT MEANS 75% OF THE POPULATION WILL DIE! ALL REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLE, GREETINGS! THE TIME OF OUR STRUGGLE IS NOW! UNITE, STRIVE, CONQUER !

  MEETING IN GYM AT 7:00 PM!

  STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!

  What happened at WBZ-TV in Boston had been planned the night before by three newscasters and six technicians, all operating in Studio 6. Five of these men played poker regularly, and six of the nine were already ill. They felt they had nothing to lose. They collected nearly a dozen handguns. Bob Palmer, who anchored the morning news, brought them upstairs inside a flight bag where he usually carried his notes, pencils, and several legal-sized notepads.

  The entire broadcast facility was cordoned off by what they had been told were National Guardsmen, but as Palmer had told George Dickerson the night before, they were the only over-fifty Guardsmen he had ever seen.

  At 9:01 A.M., just after Palmer had begun to read the soothing copy he had been handed ten minutes before by an army noncom, a coup took place. The nine of them effectively captured the television station. The soldiers, who hadn't expected any real trouble from a soft bunch of civilians accustomed to reporting tragedy at long distance, were taken completely by surprise and disarmed. Other station personnel joined the small rebellion, and cleared the sixth floor quickly and locked all the doors. The elevators were brought to six before the soldiers on the lobby level quite knew what was happening. Three soldiers tried to come up the east fire stairs, and a janitor named Charles Yorkin, armed with an army-issue carbine, fired a shot over their heads. It was the only shot fired.

  Viewers in the WBZ-TV broadcast area saw Bob Palmer stop his newscast in the middle of a sentence, and heard him say, "Okay, right now!" There were scuffling sounds off-camera. When it was over, thousands of bemused viewers saw that Bob Palmer was now holding a snub-nosed pistol in his hand.

>   A hoarse, off-mike voice yelled jubilantly: "We got em, Bob! We got the bastards! We got em all!"

  "Okay, that's good work," Palmer said. He then faced into the camera again. "Fellow citizens of Boston, and Americans in our broadcast area. Something both grave and terribly important has just happened in this studio, and I am very glad it has happened here first, in Boston, the cradle of American independence. For the last seven days, this broadcast facility has been under guard by men purporting to be National Guardsmen. Men in army khaki, armed with guns, have been standing beside our cameramen, in our control rooms, beside our teletypes. Has the news been managed? I am sorry to say that this is the case. I have been given copy and forced to read it, almost literally with gun to my head. The copy I have been reading has to do with the so-called 'superflu epidemic,' and all of it is patently false."

  Lights began to flicker on the switchboard. Within fifteen seconds every light was on.

  "Our cameramen have taken film that has either been confiscated or deliberately exposed. Our reporters' stories have disappeared. Yet we do have film, ladies and gentlemen, and we have correspondents right here in the studio--not professional reporters, but eyewitnesses to what may be the greatest disaster this country has ever faced ... and I do not use those words lightly. We are going to run some of this film for you now. All of it was taken clandestinely, and some of it is of poor quality. Yet we here, who have just liberated our own television station, think you may see enough. More, indeed, than you might have wished."

  He looked up, took a handkerchief from his sport-coat pocket, and blew his nose. Those with good color TVs could see that he looked flushed and feverish.

  "If it's ready, George, go ahead and run it."

  Palmer's face was replaced with shots of Boston General Hospital. Wards were crammed. Patients lay on the floors. The halls were full; nurses, many of them obviously sick themselves, wove in and out, some of them weeping hysterically. Others looked shocked to the point of coma.

  Shots of guards standing on street corners with cradled rifles. Shots of buildings that had been broken into.

  Bob Palmer appeared again. "If you have children, ladies and gentlemen, " he said quietly, "we would advise that you ask them to leave the room."

  A grainy shot of a truck backing down a pier jutting out over Boston Harbor, a big olive-colored army truck. Below it, riding uncertainly, was a barge covered with canvas tarps. Two soldiers, rugose and alien in gas masks, jumped down from the truck's cab. The picture jiggled and joggled, then became steady again as they pulled back the canvas sheet covering the open rear end of the truck. Then they jumped up inside, and bodies began to cascade out onto the barge: women, old men, children, police, nurses; they came in a cartwheeling flood that seemed never to end. At some point during the film-clip it became clear that the soldiers were using pitchforks to get them out.

  Palmer went on broadcasting for two hours, his steadily hoarsening voice reading clippings and bulletins, interviewing other members of the crew. It went on until somebody on the ground floor realized that they didn't have to re-take the sixth floor to stop it. At 11:16, the WBZ transmitter was shut down permanently with twenty pounds of plastique.

  Palmer and the others on the sixth floor were summarily executed on charges of treason to their government, the United States of America.

  It was a small-town, once-weekly West Virginia newspaper called the Durbin Call-Clarion, put out by a retired lawyer named James D. Hogliss, and its circulation figures had always been good because Hogliss had been a fiery defender of the miners' right to organize in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, and because his anti-establishment editorials were always filled with hellfire and brimstone missiles aimed at the government hacks at every level, from town to federal.

  Hogliss had a regular bunch of paperboys, but on this clear summer morning he took the papers around himself in his 1948 Cadillac, the big whitewall tires whispering up and down the streets of Durbin ... and the streets were painfully empty. The papers were piled on the Cadillac's seats and in its trunk. It was the wrong day for the Call-Clarion to come out, but the paper was only one page of large type set inside a black border. The word at the top proclaimed EXTRA, the first extra edition Hogliss had put out since 1980, when the Ladybird mine had exploded, entombing forty miners for all time.

  The headline read: GOV'T FORCES TRY TO CONCEAL PLAGUE OUTBREAK!

  Beneath: "Special to the Call-Clarion by James D. Hogliss"

  Below that: "It has been revealed to this reporter by a reliable source that the flu epidemic (sometimes called Choking Sickness or Tube Neck here in West Virginia) is in reality a deadly mutation of the ordinary flu virus created by this government, for purposes of war--and in direct disregard of the revised Geneva accords concerning germ and chemical warfare, accords which representatives of the United States signed seven years ago. The source, who is an army official now stationed in Wheeling, also said that promises of a soon-forthcoming vaccine are 'a bald-faced lie.' No vaccine, according to this source, has yet been developed.

  "Citizens, this is more than a disaster or a tragedy; it is the end of all hope in our government. If we have indeed done such a thing to ourselves, then ..."

  Hogliss was sick, and very weak. He seemed to have used the last of his strength composing the editorial. It had gone from him into the words and had not been replaced. His chest was full of phlegm, and even normal breathing was like running uphill. Yet he went methodically from house to house, leaving his broadsides, not even knowing if the houses were still occupied, or if they were, if anyone inside had enough strength left to go out and pick up what he had left.

  Finally he was on the west end of town, Poverty Row, with its shacks and trailers and its rank septic-tank smell. Only the papers in the trunk remained and he left it open, its lid flopping slowly up and down as he went over the washboards in the road. He was trying to cope with a fearsome headache, and his vision kept doubling on him.

  When the last house, a tumbledown shack near the Rack's Crossing town line, was taken care of, he still had a bundle of perhaps twenty-five papers. He slit the string which bound them with his old pocketknife and then let the wind take them where the wind would, thinking of his source, a major with dark, haunted eyes who had been transferred from something top secret in California called Project Blue only three months before. The major had been charged with outside security there, and he kept fingering the pistol on his hip as he told Hogliss everything he knew. Hogliss thought it would not be long before the major used the gun, if he hadn't used it already.

  He climbed back behind the wheel of the Cadillac, the only car he had owned since his twenty-seventh birthday, and discovered he was too tired to drive back to town. So he leaned back sleepily, listened to the drowning sounds coming from his chest, and watched the wind blow his extra editions lazily up the road toward Rack's Crossing. Some of them had caught in the overhanging trees, where they hung like strange fruit. Nearby, he could hear the bubbling, racing sound of Durbin Stream, where he had fished as a boy. There were no fish in it now, of course-- the coal companies had seen to that--but the sound was still soothing. He closed his eyes, slept, and died an hour and a half later.

  The Los Angeles Times ran only 26,000 copies of their one-page extra before the officers in charge discovered that they were not printing an advertising circular, as they had been told. The reprisal was swift and bloody. The official FBI story was that "radical revolutionaries," that old bugaboo, had dynamited the L.A. Times presses, causing the death of twenty-eight workers. The FBI didn't have to explain how the explosion had put bullets in each of the twenty-eight heads, because the bodies were mingled with those of thousands of others, epidemic victims who were being buried at sea.

  Yet 10,000 copies got out, and that was enough. The headline, in 36-point -type, screamed:

  WEST COAST IN GRIP OF PLAGUE EPIDEMIC

  Thousands Flee Deadly Superflu

  Government Coverup Certain

&n
bsp; LOS ANGELES--Some of the soldiers purporting to be National Guardsmen helping out during the current ongoing tragedy are career soldiers with as many as four ten-year pips on their sleeves. Part of their job is to assure terrified Los Angeles residents that the superflu, known as Captain Trips by the young in most areas, is "only slightly more virulent" than the London or Hong Kong strains ... but these assurances are made through portable respirators. The President is scheduled to speak tonight at 6:00 PST and his press secretary, Hubert Ross, has branded reports that the President will speak from a set mocked up to look like the Oval Office but actually deep in the White House bunker "hysterical, vicious, and totally unfounded." Advance copies of the President's speech indicate that he will "spank" the American people for overreacting, and compare the current panic to that which followed Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast in the early 30s.

  The Times has five questions it wishes the President would answer in his speech.

  1. Why has the Times been enjoined from printing the news by thugs in army uniforms, in direct violation of its Constitutional right to do so?

  2. Why have the following highways--US 5, US 10, and US 15 --been blocked off by armored cars and troop carriers?

  3. If this is a "minor outbreak of flu," why has martial law been declared for Los Angeles and surrounding areas?

  4. If this is a "minor outbreak of flu," then why are barge-trains being towed out into the Pacific and dumped? And do these barges contain what we are afraid they contain and what informed sources have assured us they do contain--the dead bodies of plague victims?

  5. Finally, if a vaccine really is to be distributed to doctors and area hospitals early next week, why has not one of the forty-six physicians that this newspaper contacted for further details heard of any delivery plans? Why has not one clinic been set up to administer flu shots? Why has not one of the ten pharmaceutical houses we called gotten freight invoices or government fliers on this vaccine?