The Stand Read online

  He became a trusty somewhere along the line, and when the strange sickness came they sent him to the infirmary and some days ago there had been no more sick people because all of those who had been sick were now dead. Everybody was dead or had run off, except for a young guard named Jason Debbins, who sat behind the wheel of a prison laundry truck and shot himself.

  And where else did he have to go then, except home?

  The breeze pressed softly against his cheek and then died.

  He struck another match and dropped it. It landed in a small pool of gasoline and the gas caught. The flames were blue. They spread out delicately, a kind of corona with the burned match stub at its center. Trashcan watched for a moment, paralyzed with fascination, and then he stepped quickly to the stairs that circled around the tank to the bottom, looking back over his shoulder. He could see the pumping machinery through a heat haze now, flickering back and forth like a mirage. The blue flames, no more than two inches high, spread toward the machinery and toward the open pipe in a widening semicircle. The bug's struggles had ended. It was nothing but a blackened husk.

  I could let that happen to me.

  But he didn't seem to want to. It seemed, vaguely, that there might be another purpose in his life now, something very grand and great. So he felt a touch of fear and he began to descend the steps on the run, his shoes clanging, his hand slipping quickly over the steep, rust-pitted railing.

  Down and down, circling, wondering how long until the vapor hanging around the mouth of the outflow pipe would catch, how long before heat great enough for ignition would rush down the pipe's throat and into the tank's belly.

  Hair flying back from his forehead, a terrified grin pasted to his face, the wind roaring in his ears, he rushed down. Now he was halfway, racing past the letters CH, letters twenty feet high and lime green against the white of the tank. Down and down, and if his flying feet stuttered or caught on anything, he would tumble like the gascan had tumbled, his bones breaking like dead branches.

  The ground came closer, the white gravel circles around the tanks, the green grass beyond the gravel. The cars in the parking lot began to regain their normal size. And still he seemed to be floating, floating in a dream, and he would never reach the bottom, only run and run and get nowhere. He was next to a bomb and the fuse was lit.

  From far overhead there came a sudden bang, like a five-inch Fourth of July firecracker. There was a dim clang, and then something whirred past him. It was part of the outflow pipe, he saw with a sharp and almost delicious fear. It was totally black and twisted into a new and excitingly senseless shape by the heat.

  He placed one hand on the railing and vaulted over, hearing something snap in his wrist. Sickening pain flowed up his arm to the elbow. He dropped the last twenty-five feet, landed on the gravel, and went sprawling. The gravel scraped skin from his forearms, but he hardly felt it. He was full of moaning, grinning panic now, and the day seemed very bright.

  Trashcan Man scrambled up, craning his head around and back, sending his gaze up even as he began to run again. The top of this middle tank had grown yellow hair, and the hair was growing at an amazing rate. The whole thing could blow at any second.

  He ran, his right hand flopping on its broken wrist. He leaped over the parking lot curb, and his feet slapped on asphalt. Now he was across the parking lot, his shadow trailing at his feet, and now he was running straight down the wide gravel access road and bolting through the half-open gate and back onto Highway 130. He ran straight across it and flung himself into the ditch on the far side, landing on a soft bed of dead leaves and wet moss, his arms wrapped around his head, the breath tearing in and out of his lungs like stabbing jackknives.

  The oiltank blew. Not WHAMM! but KA-WHAP!, a sound so huge, yet at the same time so short and guttural, that he felt his eardrums actually press in and his eyeballs press out as the air somehow changed. A second explosion followed, then a third, and Trashcan writhed on the dead leaves and grinned and screamed soundlessly. He sat up, holding his hands over his ears, and sudden wind struck him and slapped him flat with such power that he might have been no more than a piece of litter.

  The young saplings behind him bent over backward and their leaves made a frantic whirring sound, like the pennants over a used car lot on a windy day. One or two snapped with small cracking sounds, as if someone was shooting a target pistol. Burning pieces of the tank started to fall on the other side of the road, some actually on the road. They hit with a clanging noise, the rivets still hanging in some of the chunks of metal, twisted and black, as the outflow pipe had been.

  KA-WHAMMM!

  Trashcan sat up again and saw a gigantic firetree beyond the Cheery Oil parking lot. Black smoke was billowing from its top, rising straight to an amazing height before the wind could disrupt it and rafter it away. You couldn't look at it without squinting your eyes almost shut and now there was radiant heat baking across the road at him, tightening his skin, making it feel shiny. His eyes were gushing water in protest. Another burning chunk of metal, this one better than seven feet across at its widest and shaped like a diamond, fell out of the sky, landed in the ditch twenty feet to his left, and the dry leaves on top of the wet moss were instantly ablaze.

  KA-WHAMM-KA-WHAMM!

  If he stayed here he would go up in a jigging, screaming blaze of spontaneous combustion. He scrambled to his feet and began to run along the shoulder of the highway in the direction of Gary, the breath getting hotter and hotter in his lungs. The air had begun to taste like heavy metal. Presently he began to feel his hair to see if he had started burning. The sweet stench of gasoline filled the air, seeming to coat him. Hot wind ripped his clothes. He felt like something trying to escape from a microwave oven. The road doubled before his watering eyes, then trebled.

  There was another coughing roar as rising air pressure caused the Cheery Oil Company office building to implode. Scimitars of glass whickered through the air. Chunks of concrete and cinderblock rained out of the sky and hailed on the road. A whizzing piece of steel about the size of a quarter and the thickness of a Mars Bar sliced through Trashcan's shirtsleeve and made a thin scrape on his skin. A piece big enough to have turned his head to guava jelly struck in front of his feet and then bounded away, leaving a good-sized crater behind. Then he was beyond the fallout zone, still running, the blood beating in his head as if his very brain had been sprayed with #2 heating oil and then set ablaze.

  KA-WHAMM!

  That was another one of the tanks, and the air resistance in front of him seemed to disappear and a large warm hand pushed him firmly from behind, a hand that fitted every contour of his body from heels to head; it shoved him forward with his toes barely touching the road, and now his face bore the terrified, pants-wetting grin of someone who has been attached to the world's biggest kite in a high cap of wind and let loose to fly, fly, baby, up into the sky until the wind goes somewhere else, leaving him to scream all the way down in a helpless power-dive.

  From behind a perfect fusillade of explosions, God's ammunition dump going up in the flames of righteousness, Satan storming heaven, his artillery captain a fiercely grinning fool with red, flayed cheeks, Trashcan Man by name, never to be Donald Merwin Elbert again.

  Sights jittering by: cars wrecked off the road, Mr. Strang's blue mailbox with the flag up, a dead dog with its legs up, a powerline down in a cornfield.

  The hand was not pushing him quite so hard now. Resistance had come back in front. Trash risked a glance back over his shoulder and saw that the knoll where the oil tanks had stood was a mass of fire. Everything was burning. The road itself seemed to be on fire back there, and he could see the summer trees going up like torches.

  He ran another quarter mile, then dropped into a puffing, blowing, shambling walk. A mile farther on he rested, looking back, smelling the glad smell of burning. With no firetrucks and firefighters to put it out, it would go whatever way the wind took it. It might burn for months. Powtanville would go and the fireline w
ould march south, destroying houses, villages, farms, crops, meadows, forests. It might get as far south as Terre Haute, and it would burn that place he had been in. It might burn farther! In fact--

  His eyes turned north again, toward Gary. He could see the town now, its great stacks standing quiet and blameless, like strokes of chalk on a light blue blackboard. Chicago beyond that. How many oil tanks? How many gas stations? How many trains standing silent on sidings, full of lp gas and flammable fertilizer? How many slums, as dry as kindling? How many cities beyond Gary and Chicago?

  There was a whole country ripe for burning under the summer sun.

  Grinning, Trashcan Man got to his feet and began to walk. His skin was already going lobster red. He didn't feel it, although that night it would keep him awake in a kind of exaltation. There were bigger and better fires ahead. His eyes were soft and joyful and utterly crazy. They were the eyes of a man who has discovered the great axle of his destiny and has laid his hands upon it.

  CHAPTER 35

  "I want to get out of the city," Rita said without turning around. She was standing on the small apartment balcony, the early morning breeze catching the diaphanous nightgown she wore, blowing yards of the material back through the sliding doors.

  "All right," Larry said. He was sitting at the table, eating a fried egg sandwich.

  She turned to him, her face haggard. If she had looked an elegant forty in the park the day he had met her, she now looked like a woman dancing on the chronological knife edge that separates the early sixties from the late. There was a cigarette between her fingers and the tip trembled, making jitters of smoke, as she brought it to her lips and puffed without inhaling.

  "I mean it, I'm serious."

  He used his napkin. "I know you are," he said, "and I can dig it. We have to go."

  Her facial muscles sagged into something like relief, and with an almost (but not quite) subconscious distaste, Larry thought it made her look even older.

  "When?"

  "Why not today?" he asked.

  "You're a dear boy," she said. "Would you like more coffee?"

  "I can get it."

  "Nonsense. You sit right where you are. I always used to get my husband a second cup. He insisted on it. Although I never saw more than his hairline at breakfast. The rest of him was behind The Wall Street Journal or some dreadful heavy piece of literature. Something not just meaningful, or deep, but positively gravid with meaning. Boll. Camus. Milton, for God's sake. You're a welcome change." She looked back over her shoulder on the way to the kitchenette; her expression was arch. "It would be a shame to hide your face behind a newspaper. "

  He smiled vaguely. Her wit seemed forced this morning, as it had all yesterday afternoon. He remembered meeting her in the park, and how he had thought her conversation seemed like a careless spray of diamonds on the green felt of a billiard table. Since yesterday afternoon it had seemed more like the glitter of zircons, near-perfect pastes that were, after all, only pastes.

  "Here you are." She went to set the cup down, and her hand, still trembling, caused hot coffee to slop out onto the side of his forearm. He jerked back from her with an indrawn feline hiss of pain.

  "Oh, I'm sorry--" Something more than consternation on her face; there was something there which could almost be terror.

  "It's all right--"

  "No, I'll just ... a cold rag ... don't ... sit right there ... clumsy ... stupid ..."

  She burst into tears, harsh caws escaping her as if she had witnessed the messy death of her best friend instead of burning him slightly.

  He got to his feet and held her, and didn't much care for the convulsive way she hugged him in return. It was almost a clutch. Cosmic Clutch, the new album by Larry Underwood, he thought unhappily. Oh shit. You ain't no nice guy. Here we go again.

  "I'm sorry, I don't know what's the matter with me, I'm never like this, I'm so sorry ..."

  "It's all right, it's nothing." He went on soothing her automatically, brushing his hand over her salt-and-pepper hair that would look so much better (all of her would look better, as a matter of fact) after she had put in some heavy time in the bathroom.

  Of course he knew what part of the trouble was. It was both personal and impersonal. It had affected him too, but not so suddenly or deeply. With her, it was as if some internal crystal had shattered in the last twenty hours or so.

  Impersonally, he supposed, it was the smell. It was coming in through the opening between the apartment living room and the balcony right now, riding the cool early morning breeze that would later give way to still, humid heat if this day was anything like the last three or four. The smell was hard to define in any way that could be correct yet less painful than the naked truth. You could say it was like moldy oranges or spoiled fish or the smell you sometimes got in subway tunnels when the windows were open; none of them were exactly right. That it was the smell of rotting people, thousands of them, decomposing in the heat behind closed doors was putting it right, but you wanted to shy away from that.

  The power was still on in Manhattan, but Larry didn't think it would be for much longer. It had gone out in most other places already. Last night he had stood on the balcony after Rita was asleep and from this high up you could see that the lights were out in better than half of Brooklyn and all of Queens. There was a dark pocket across 110th all the way to that end of Manhattan Island. Looking the other way you could still see bright lights in Union City and--maybe--Bayonne, but otherwise, New Jersey was black.

  The blackness meant more than the loss of lights. Among other things it meant the loss of the air conditioning, the modern convenience that made it possible to live in this particular hardcore urban sprawl after the middle of June. It meant that all the people who had died quietly in their apartments and tenements were now rotting in ovens, and whenever he thought of that his mind returned to the thing he had seen in the comfort station on Transverse Number One. He had dreamed about that, and in his dreams that black, sweet treat came to life and beckoned him.

  On a more personal level, he supposed she was troubled by what they had found when they walked down to the park yesterday. She had been laughing and chatty and gay when they started out, but coming back she had begun to be old.

  The monster-shouter had been lying on one of the paths in a huge pool of his own blood. His glasses lay with both lenses shattered beside his stiff and outstretched left hand. Some monster had been abroad after all, apparently. The man had been stabbed repeatedly. To Larry's sickened eyes he looked like a human pincushion.

  She had screamed and screamed, and when her hysteria had finally quieted, she insisted that they bury him. So they had. And going back to the apartment, she had been the woman he had found this morning.

  "It's all right," he said. "Just a little scald. The skin's hardly red."

  "I'll get the Unguentine. There's some in the medicine cabinet."

  She started away, and he grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and made her sit down. She looked up at him from darkly circled eyes.

  "What you're going to do is eat," he said. "Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee. Then we're going to get some maps and see what's the best way to get off Manhattan. We'll have to walk, you know."

  "Yes ... I suppose we will."

  He went into the kitchenette, not wanting to look at the mute need in her eyes anymore, and got the last two eggs from the refrigerator. He cracked them into a bowl, tossed the eggshells into the disposal, and began to beat them.

  "Where do you want to go?" he asked.

  "What? I don't ..."

  "Which way?" he said with a touch of impatience. He added milk to the eggs and put the skillet back on the stove. "North? New England's that way. South? I don't really see the point in that. We could go--"

  A strangled sob. He turned and saw her looking at him, her hands warring with each other in her lap, her eyes shiny. She was trying to control herself and having no luck.

  "What's the matter?" he asked, going to her. "What
is it?"

  "I don't think I can eat," she sobbed. "I know you want me to ... I'll try ... but the smell ..."

  He crossed the living room, trundled the glass doors closed along their stainless steel tracks, then latched them firmly.

  "There," he said lightly, hoping the annoyance he felt with her didn't show. "Better?"

  "Yes," she said eagerly. "That's a lot better. I can eat now."

  He went back to the kitchenette and stirred the eggs, which had begun to bubble. There was a grater in the utensil drawer and he ran a block of American cheese along it, making a small pile that he sprinkled into the eggs. Behind him she moved and a moment later Debussy filled the apartment, too light and pretty for Larry's taste. He didn't care for light classical music. If you were going to have classical shit, you ought to go whole hog and have your Beethoven or your Wagner or someone like that. Why fuck around?