The Stand Read online

  Trask had six joints under the thin mattress of his bunk, and he gave four of them to one of the screws who still seemed okay to tell him what was going on outside. The guard said people were leaving Phoenix, bound for anyplace. There was a lot of sickness, and people were croaking faster than a horse could trot. The government said a vaccine was going to be available soon, but most people seemed to think that was crap. A lot of the radio stations from California were broadcasting really terrible things about martial law, army blockades, home-boys with automatic weapons on the rampage, and rumors of people dying by the tens of thousands. The guard said he wouldn't be surprised to find out that the longhaired comsymp pervos had done it by putting something into the water.

  The guard said he was feeling fine himself, but he was going to get the Christ out just as soon as his shift was over. He had heard the army was going to roadblock US 17 and I-10 and US 80 by tomorrow morning, and he was going to load up his wife and kid and all the food he could get his hands on and stay up in the mountains until it all blew over. He had a cabin up there, the guard said, and if anyone tried to get within thirty yards of it, he would put a bullet in his head.

  The next morning Trask had a runny nose and said he felt feverish. He had been nearly gibbering with panic, Lloyd remembered as he sucked his fingers. Trask had yelled at every guard who passed to get him the fuck out before he got really sick or something. The guards never even looked at him, or at any of the other prisoners, who were now as restless as underfed lions in the zoo. That was when Lloyd started to feel scared. Usually there were as many as twenty different screws on the floor at any given time. So how come he had seen only four or five different faces on the other side of the bars?

  That day, the twenty-seventh, Lloyd had begun eating only half of the meals that were thrust through the bars at him, and saving the other half--precious little--under his bunk mattress.

  Yesterday Trask had gone into sudden convulsions. His face had turned as black as the ace of spades and he had died. Lloyd had looked longingly at Trask's half-eaten lunch, but he had no way to reach it. Yesterday afternoon there had still been a few guards on the floor, but they weren't carrying anyone down to the infirmary anymore, no matter how sick. Maybe they were dying down in the infirmary, too, and the warden decided to stop wasting the effort. No one came to remove Trask's body.

  Lloyd napped late yesterday afternoon. When he woke, the Maximum Security corridors were empty. No supper had been served. Now the place really did sound like the lion house at the zoo. Lloyd wasn't imaginative enough to wonder how much more savage it would have sounded if Maximum Security had been filled to its capacity. He had no idea how many were still alive and lively enough to yell for their supper, but the echoes made it sound like more. All Lloyd knew for sure was that Trask was gathering flies on his right, and the cell on his left was empty. The former occupant, a young jive-talking black guy who had tried to mug an old lady and had killed her instead, had been taken to the infirmary days back. Across the way he could see two empty cells and the dangling feet of a man who was in for killing his wife and his brother-in-law during a penny Pokeno game. The Pokeno Killer, as he had been called, had apparently opted out with his belt, or if they had taken that, his own pair of pants.

  Later that night, after the lights had come on automatically, Lloyd had eaten some of the beans he had saved from two days ago. They tasted horrible but he ate them anyway. He washed them down with water from the toilet bowl and then crawled up on his bunk and clasped his knees against his chest, cursing Poke for getting him into such a mess. It was all Poke's fault. On his own, Lloyd never would have been ambitious to get into more than small-time trouble.

  Little by little, the roaring for food had quieted down, and Lloyd suspected he wasn't the only one who had been squirreling away some insurance. But he didn't have much. If he had really believed this was going to happen, he would have put away more. There was something in the back of his mind that he didn't want to see. It was as if there was a set of flapping drapes in the back of his mind, with something behind them. You could only see that thing's bony, skeletal feet below the hem of the drapes. That's all you wanted to see. Because the feet belonged to a nodding, emaciated corpse, and his name was STARVATION.

  "Oh no," Lloyd said. "Someone's gonna come. Sure they are. Just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket."

  But he kept remembering the rabbit. He couldn't help it. He had won the rabbit and a cage to keep him in at a school raffle. His daddy didn't want him to keep it, but Lloyd had somehow persuaded him that he would take care of it and feed it out of his own allowance. He loved that rabbit, and he did take care of it. At first. The trouble was, things slipped his mind after a while. It had always been that way. And one day while he was swinging idly in the tire that hung from the sickly maple behind their scraggy little house in Marathon, Pennsylvania, he had suddenly sat bolt upright, thinking of that rabbit. He hadn't thought of his rabbit in ... well, in better than two weeks. It had just completely slipped his mind.

  He ran to the little shed tacked onto the barn, and it had been summer just like it was now, and when he stepped into that shed, the bland smell of the rabbit had struck him in the face like a big old roundhouse slap. The fur he had liked so much to stroke was matted and dirty. White maggots crawled busily in the sockets that had once held his rabbit's pretty pink eyes. The rabbit's paws were ragged and bloody. He tried to tell himself that the paws were bloody because it had tried to scratch its way out of the cage, and that was undoubtedly how it had happened, but some sick, dark part of his mind spoke up in a whisper and said that maybe the rabbit, in the final extremity of its hunger, had tried to eat itself.

  Lloyd had taken the rabbit away, dug a deep hole, and buried it, still in its cage. His father had never asked him about the rabbit, might even have forgotten that his boy had a rabbit--Lloyd was not terribly bright, but he was a mental giant when stacked up against his daddy--but Lloyd had never forgotten. Always plagued by vivid dreams, the death of the rabbit had occasioned a series of terrible nightmares. And now the vision of the rabbit returned as he sat on his bunk with his knees drawn up to his chest, telling himself that someone would come, someone would surely come and let him go free. He didn't have this Captain Trips flu; he was just hungry. Like his rabbit had been hungry. Just like that.

  Sometime after midnight he had fallen asleep, and this morning he had begun to work on the leg of his bunk. And now, looking at his bloody fingers, he thought with fresh horror about the paws of that long-ago rabbit, to whom he had meant no harm.

  By one o'clock on the afternoon of June 29, he had the cotleg free. At the end the bolt had given with stupid ease and the leg had clanged to the floor of his cell and he had just looked at it, wondering what in God's name he had wanted it for in the first place. It was about three feet long.

  He took it to the front of the cell and began to hammer furiously against the blued-steel bars. "Hey!" he yelled, as the clanging bar gave off its deep, gonglike notes. "Hey, I want out! I want to get the fuck out of here, understand? Hey, goddammit, hey!"

  He stopped and listened as the echoes faded. For a moment there was total silence and then from the holding cellblock came the rapturous, hoarse answer: "Mother! Down here, Mother! I'm down here!"

  "Jeeesus!" Lloyd cried, and threw the cotleg into the corner. He had struggled for hours, practically destroyed his fingers, just so he could wake that asshole up.

  He sat on his bunk, lifted the mattress, and took out a piece of rough bread. He debated adding a handful of dates, told himself he should save them, and snatched them up anyway. He ate them one by one, grimacing, saving the bread for last to take that slimy, fruity taste out of his mouth.

  When he was done with this miserable excuse for a meal, he walked aimlessly to the right side of his cell. He looked down and stifled a cry of revulsion. Trask was sprawled half on his cot and half off it, and his pants legs had pulled up a little. His ankles were bare above the prison sli
ppers they gave you to wear. A large, sleek rat was lunching up on Trask's leg. Its repulsive pink tail was neatly coiled around its gray body.

  Lloyd walked to the other corner of his own cell and picked up the cotleg. He went back and stood for a moment, wondering if the rat would see him and decide to go off where the company wasn't quite so lively. But the rat's back was to him, and as far as Lloyd could tell, the rat didn't even know he was there. Lloyd measured the distance with his eye and decided the cotleg would reach admirably.

  "Huh!" Lloyd grunted, and swung the leg. It squashed the rat against Trask's leg, and Trask fell off his bunk with a stiff thump. The rat lay on its side, dazed, aspirating weakly. There were beads of blood in its whiskers. Its rear legs were moving, as if its ratty little brain was telling it to run somewhere but along the spinal cord the signals were getting all scrambled up. Lloyd hit it again and killed it.

  "There you are, you cheap fuck," Lloyd said. He put the cotleg down and wandered back to his bunk. He was hot and scared and felt like crying. He looked back over his shoulder and cried: "How do you like rat hell, you scuzzy little cocksucker?"

  "Mother!" the voice cried happily in answer. "Moootherrr!"

  "Shut up!" Lloyd screamed. "I ain't your mother! Your mother's in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana!"

  "Mother?" the voice said, now full of weak doubt. Then it fell silent.

  Lloyd began to weep. As he cried he rubbed his eyes with his fists like a small boy. He wanted a steak sandwich, he wanted to talk to his lawyer, he wanted to get out of here.

  At last he lay down on his cot, put one arm over his eyes, and masturbated. It was as good a way of getting to sleep as any.

  When he woke up again it was 5 P.M. and Maximum Security was dead quiet. Blearily, Lloyd got off his cot, which now leaned drunkenly toward the spot where one of its supports had been taken away. He got the cotleg, steeled himself for the cries of "Mother!" and began hammering on the bars like a farm cook calling the hired hands in for a big country supper. Supper. Now there was a word, had there ever been a finer? Ham steaks and potatoes with red-eye gravy and fresh new peas and milk with Hershey's chocolate syrup to dump in it. And a great big old dish of strawberry ice cream for dessert. No, there had never been a word to match supper.

  "Hey, ain't nobody there?" Lloyd cried, his voice breaking.

  No answer. Not even a cry of "Mother!" At this point, he might have welcomed it. Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

  Lloyd let the cotleg drop with a crash. He stumbled back to his bunk, turned up the mattress, and made inventory. Two more hunks of bread, two more handfuls of dates, a half-gnawed porkchop, one piece of bologna. He pulled the slice of bologna in two and ate the big half, but that only whetted his appetite, brought it raging up.

  "No more," he whispered, then gobbled the rest of the pork off the chopbone and called himself names and wept some more. He was going to die in here, just as his rabbit had died in its cage, just as Trask had died in his.

  Trask.

  He looked into Trask's cell for a long, thoughtful time, watching the flies circle and land and take off. There was a regular L.A. International Airport for flies right on ole Trask's face. At long last, Lloyd got the cotleg, went to the bars, and reached through with it. By standing on tiptoe he could get just enough length to catch the rat's body and drag it toward his cell.

  When it was close enough, Lloyd got on his knees and pulled the rat through to his side. He picked it up by the tail and held the dangling body before his eyes for a long time. Then he put it under his mattress where the flies could not get at it, segregating the limp body from what remained of his food-stash. He looked fixedly at the rat for a long time before letting the mattress fall back, mercifully hiding it from sight.

  "Just in case," Lloyd Henreid whispered to the silence. "Just in case, is all."

  Then he climbed up on the other end of the bunk, drew his knees up to his chin, and sat still.

  CHAPTER 33

  At twenty-two minutes of nine by the clock over the sheriffs office doorway, the lights went off.

  Nick Andros had been reading a paperback he had taken from the rack in the drugstore, a gothic novel about a frightened governess who thought the lonely estate where she was supposed to be teaching the handsome master's sons was haunted. Although he wasn't even halfway through the book, Nick already knew the ghost was really the handsome master's wife, who was probably locked up in the attic, and crazy as a loon.

  When the lights went out he felt his heart lurch in his chest and a voice whispered to him from deep in his mind, from the place where the nightmares which now haunted him every time he fell asleep lay in wait: He's coming for you ... he's out there now, on the highways of the night ... the highways in hiding ... the dark man ...

  He dropped the paperback on the desk and went out into the street. The last of the daylight hadn't gone out of the sky yet, but twilight was nearly over. All the streetlights were dark. The fluorescents in the drugstore, which had burned night and day, were also gone. The subdued thrum of the junction boxes atop the power poles was also gone; this was something Nick verified by putting his hand on one and feeling nothing but wood. The vibration, which was to him a kind of hearing, had ceased.

  There were candles in the office supply cabinet, a whole box of them, but the thought of candles did not comfort Nick very much. The fact of the lights going out had hit him very hard and now he stood looking to the west, silently begging the light not to desert him and leave him in this dark graveyard.

  But the light did go. Nick could no longer even pretend there was a little light left in the sky by ten past nine, and he went back to the office and fumbled his way to the cabinet where the candles were. He was feeling around on one of the shelves for the right box when the door behind him burst open and Ray Booth staggered inside, his face black and puffy, his LSU ring still glistening on his finger. He had been laid up in the woods close to town ever since the night of June twenty-second, a week ago. By the morning of the twenty-fourth he had been feeling sick, and at last, this evening, hunger and fear for his life had driven him down to town, where he had seen no one at all but the goddam mutie freak who had gotten him into this fix in the first place. The mutie had been crossing the town square just as big as Billy-be-damned, walking as if he owned the town where Ray had lived most of his life, the sheriffs pistol holstered at his right hip and secured to his thigh with a gunslinger's tie-down. Maybe he thought he did own the town. Ray suspected he was going to die of whatever had taken everyone else off, but first he was going to show the goddam freak that he didn't own jack-shit.

  Nick's back was turned, and he had no idea he was no longer alone in Sheriff Baker's office until the hands closed around his neck and locked there. The box he had just picked up fell out of his hands, wax candles breaking and rolling everywhere on the floor. He was half-strangled before he got over his first terror and he felt sudden certainty that the black creature from his dreams had come to life: some fiend from the basement of hell was behind him, and had wrapped its scaled claws around his neck as soon as the power had failed.

  Then, convulsively, instinctively, he put his own hands over the hands that were throttling him and tried to pull them free. Hot breath blew against his right ear, making a windtunnel there which he could feel but not hear. He caught one clogged and rasping breath before the hands clamped tight again.

  The two of them swayed in the black like dark dancers. Ray Booth could feel his strength ebbing as the kid struggled. His head was pounding. If he didn't finish the mutie quick, he would never finish him at all. He throttled the scrawny kid's neck with all the force left in his hands.

  Nick felt the world going away. The pain in his throat, which had been sharp at first, was now numb and far off--almost pleasant. He stamped his booted heel down hard on one of Booth's feet, and leaned his weight back against the big man at the same time. Booth was forced back a step. One of h
is feet came down on a candle. It rolled away under him and he crashed to the floor with Nick back-to on top of him. His hands were finally jarred loose.

  Nick rolled away, breathing in harsh rasps. Everything seemed far off and floating, except for the pain in his throat, which had returned in slow, thudding bursts. He could taste slick blood in the back of his throat.

  The large humped shape of whoever it was who had jumped him was lurching to its feet. Nick remembered the gun and clawed for it. It was there, but it wouldn't come free. It was stuck in the holster somehow. He pulled at it mightily, now crazed with panic. It went off. The slug furrowed the side of his leg and embedded itself in the floor.

  The shape fell on him like dead fate.

  Nick's breath exploded out of him, and then large white hands were groping at his face, the thumbs gouging at his eyes. Nick saw a purple gleam on one of those hands in the faint moonlight and his surprised mouth formed the word "Booth!" in the darkness. His right hand continued to pull at the gun. He had barely felt the hot sizzle of pain along the length of his thigh.

  One of Ray Booth's thumbs jammed into Nick's right eye. Exquisite pain flared and sparkled in his head. He jerked the gun free at last. Booth's thumb, work-callused and hard, turned briskly clock and counterclock, grinding Nick's eyeball.

  Nick uttered an amorphous scream which was little more than a violent susurrus of air and jammed the gun into Booth's flabby side. He pulled the trigger and the gun made a muffled whump! which Nick felt as a violent recoil that went nowhere but up his arm: the gunsight had snagged in Booth's shirt. Nick saw a muzzle-flash, and a moment later smelled powder and Booth's charring shirt. Ray Booth stiffened, then slumped on top of him.