The Stand Read online

  (a weasel)

  some small animal in the underbrush. Then he would just continue on to the east until he found the road he was looking for.

  He arrived back at the tanker truck from whose top he had last seen The Kid and The Kid's mythic deuce coupe, making better time on the return trip. This time he did not climb up to where he would be clearly silhouetted against the evening sky but began to crawl from car to car on his hands and knees, trying to be very quiet. The Kid might be alert and on watch. With a guy like The Kid, you just couldn't tell ... and it didn't pay to take chances. He found himself wishing he had taken one of the soldiers' guns, even though he had never used a gun in his life. He kept crawling, the road-pebbles biting painfully into his claw hand. It was eight o'clock, and the sun had gone behind the mountains.

  Trashcan stopped behind the hood of the Porsche The Kid had thrown his liquor bottle at and carefully raised his eyes over it. Yes, there was The Kid's deuce coupe, with its flamboyant flake-gold paint, its convex windshield and sharkfin cutting at the bruise-colored evening sky. The Kid was slumped behind the Day-Glo steering wheel, his eyes closed, his mouth open. Trashcan Man's heart thundered a percussive victory song in his chest. Dead drunk! his heartbeat proclaimed in syllables of two. Dead drunk! By God! Dead drunk! Trash thought he could be twenty miles east of here before The Kid even woke up to his hangover.

  Still, he was careful. He skittered from car to car like a waterbug crossing the still surface of a pond, skirting the deuce coupe on his left, hurrying across the increasing gaps. Now the deucey was at nine o'clock on his left, now seven, now six and directly behind him. Now to put distance between him and that crazy--

  "You prick-stupid cocksucker, you hold still."

  Trash froze on his hands and knees. He made wee-wee in his pants, and his mind dissolved into a madly fluttering black bird of panic.

  He turned around little by little, the tendons in his neck creaking like the hinges of a door in a haunted house. And there stood The Kid, resplendent in an iridescent shirt of green and gold and a pair of sunfaded cords. There was a .45 in each hand and a horrible grimace of hate and rage on his face.

  "I was just chuh-checkin down this way," Trashcan Man heard himself saying. "To make sure the cuh-cuh-coast was clear."

  "Sure--on your hands and knees you was checkin, dinkweed. I'll clear your motherfuckin coast. Stand up here."

  Trashcan somehow gained his feet and kept them by holding on to the doorhandle of a car on his right. The twin bores of The Kid's matched set of .45s looked every bit as big as the twin bores of the Eisenhower Tunnel. He was looking at death now. He knew that. There were no right words to avert it this time.

  He offered up a silent prayer to the dark man: Please ... if it be your will ... my life for you!

  "What's up there?" The Kid asked. "A wreck?"

  "A tunnel. It's jammed solid. That's why I came back, to tell you. Please--"

  "A tunnel," The Kid groaned. "Jesus-hairy-ole-baldheaded-Christ!" The scowl returned. "Are you lyin to me, you fuckin fairy?"

  "No! I swear I'm not! The sign said Eeesenhoover Tunnel. I think that's what it said, but I have trouble with long words. I--"

  "Shut your dough-hole. How far?"

  "Eight miles. Maybe even more."

  The Kid was silent for a moment, looking west along the turnpike. Then he fixed Trashcan Man with a glittery gaze. "You trine to tell me this traffic jam's eight miles long? You lyin sack of shit!" The Kid thumbed the triggers on both guns up to half-cock. Trashcan, who wouldn't have known half-cock from full cock and full cock from a bag of frogs, screeched like a woman and put his hands over his eyes.

  "No kidding!" he screamed. "No kidding! I swear! I swear!"

  The Kid looked at him for a long time. At last he lowered the hammers on his guns.

  "I'm gonna kill you, Trashy," he said, smiling. "I'm gonna take your motherfuckin life. But first we're gonna walk back to that pileup we squeaked by this morning. You're gonna push the van over the edge. Then I'm gonna go back and find another way around. Not gonna leave my fuckin car," he added petulantly. "Nohow no way."

  "Please don't kill me," Trashcan whispered. "Please don't."

  "If you can get that VW van over the side in less'n fifteen minutes, maybe I won't," The Kid said. "You believe that happy crappy?"

  "Yes," Trash said. But he had gotten a good look into those preternaturally glittering eyes, and he did not believe it at all.

  They walked back to the pileup, Trashcan Man walking in front of The Kid on wobbling rubber legs. The Kid walked mincingly, his leather jacket creaking softly in its secret folds. There was a vague, almost sweet smile on his doll-like lips.

  By the time they got to the pileup, dusk was almost gone. The VW Microbus was on its side, the corpses of the three or four occupants a tangle of arms and legs that was mercifully hard to see in the fast-failing light. The Kid walked past the van and stood on the shoulder, looking at the place they had edged by some ten hours before. One of the deucey's tire tracks was still there, but the other had crumbled away with the embankment.

  "Nope," The Kid said with finality. "Never make it by here again unless we do some movin and groovin first. Don't tell me, I'll tell you."

  For one brief moment, Trashcan Man entertained the notion of rushing at The Kid and trying to push him over the edge. Then The Kid turned around. His guns were drawn and pointing casually at Trashcan's midriff.

  "Say, Trashy. You was thinkin evil thoughts. Don't try to tell me no different. I can read you like a motherfuckin book."

  Trashcan shook his head violently back and forth in protest.

  "Don't you make a mistake with me, Trashy. That's the one thing in this wide world you don't want to do. Now get pushing on that van. You got fifteen minutes."

  There was an Austin parked nearby on the broken centerline. The Kid pulled open the passenger door, casually ripped out the bloated corpse of a teenage girl (her arm came off in his hand and he tossed it aside with the absent air of a man who has finished with the turkey drumstick he has been nibbling on), and sat down on the bucket seat with his feet out on the pavement. He gestured good-humoredly with his guns at the slumped, shuddering form of the Trashcan Man.

  "Time's a-wastin, good buddy." He threw back his head and sang: "Oh ... here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand, he's a one-ball man and he's OFF to the ro-dee-OH ... that's right, Trashy, ya fuckin wet end, getcha back into it, only twelve minutes left ... alamand left an alamand right, come on, ya fuckin dummy, getcha right foot right ..."

  Trash leaned against the Microbus. Bunched his legs and pushed. The Microbus moved perhaps two inches toward the drop. In his heart, hope --that indestructible weed of the human heart--had begun to bloom again. The Kid was irrational, impulsive, what Carley Yates and his poolhall buddies would have called crazier than a shithouse rat. Maybe if he actually got the van over the side and cleared the way for The Kid's precious deuce coupe, the lunatic would let him live.

  Maybe.

  He lowered his head, gripped the edge of the VW's frame, and shoved with all his might. Pain flared in his recently burned arm, and he knew that the fragile new tissue would soon rip open. Then the pain would become agony.

  The bus moved three inches. Sweat dripped from Trashcan's brow and ran into his eyes, stinging like warm engine oil.

  "Oh, here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand, he's a one-ball man and he's OFF to the ro-dee-OH!" The Kid sang. "Well, alamand left an alamand r--"

  The song broke off like a brittle twig. Trashcan Man looked up apprehensively. The Kid had come out of the Austin's passenger seat. He was standing in profile to Trash, staring across their half of the turnpike toward the eastbound lanes. A rocky, brushy slope rose beyond them, blotting out half the sky.

  "What the fuck was that?" The Kid whispered.

  "I didn't hear anyth--"

  Then he did hear something. He heard a small rattle of pebbles and stones on the other side of the
highway. His dream recurred to him in sudden, total recall that froze his blood and evaporated all the spit in his mouth.

  "Who's there?" The Kid shouted. "You better answer me! Answer, goddammit, or I start shooting!"

  And he was answered, but not by any human voice. A howl rose up in the night like a hoarse siren, first climbing and then dropping rapidly down to a gutteral growl.

  "Holy Jesus!" The Kid said, and his voice was suddenly thin.

  Coming down the slope on the far side of the turnpike and crossing the median strip were wolves, gaunt gray timberwolves, their eyes red, their jaws gaping and adrip. There were more than two dozen of them. Trashcan, in an ecstasy of terror, made wee-wee in his pants again.

  The Kid stepped around the trunk of the Austin, leveled his .45s, and began firing. Flame licked from the barrels; the sound of the shots echoed and reechoed from the mountain faces, making it sound as if artillery were at work. Trashcan Man cried out and poked his index fingers in his ears. The night breeze tattered the gunsmoke, fresh and ripe and hot. Its cordite aroma stung his nose.

  The wolves came on, no faster and no slower, at a fast walk. Their eyes ... Trashcan Man found himself unable to look away from their eyes. They were not the eyes of ordinary wolves; of that he was quite convinced. They were the eyes of their Master, he thought. Their Master and his Master. Suddenly he remembered his prayer and he was afraid no longer. He took his fingers out of his ears. He ignored the wetness spreading at his crotch. He began to smile.

  The Kid had emptied both of his guns, dropping three of the wolves in so doing. He holstered the .45s without making an attempt to reload and turned west. He went about ten paces and then stopped. More wolves were padding down the westbound lanes, weaving in and out of the dark hulks of the stalled cars like tattered streamers of mist. One of them raised its snout to the sky and howled. Its cry was joined by a second, the second by a third, the third by a whole chorus. Then they came on again.

  The Kid began to back up. He was trying to load one of his guns now, but the shells were spilling out between his nerveless fingers. Suddenly he gave up. The gun fell out of his hand and clunked on the road. As if it had been a signal, the wolves rushed him.

  With a high, reedy scream of fear, The Kid turned and ran for the Austin. As he ran, his second pistol tumbled from its low holster and bounced off the road. With a low, ripping growl, the wolf closest to him sprang just as The Kid dove into the Austin and slammed the door.

  He just made it. The wolf bounced off the door, growling, its red eyes rolling horribly. It was joined by the others, and in moments the Austin was ringed with wolves. From inside, The Kid's face was a small white moon looking out.

  Then one of the wolves was coming toward the Trashcan Man, its triangular head held low, its eyes glowing like stormlamps.

  My life for you ...

  Steadily, now not in the least afraid, Trash went to meet it. He held out his burned hand and the wolf licked it. After a moment it sat at his feet, curling its ragged, brushy tail about its withers.

  The Kid was staring at him, his mouth hanging open.

  Smiling into his eyes, Trashcan Man gave him the finger.

  Both fingers.

  And he screamed: "Fuck you! You're shut down! Do you hear me? DO YOU BELIEVE THAT HAPPY CRAPPY? SHUT DOWN! DON'T TELL ME, I'LL TELL YOU!"

  The wolf's mouth closed gently on Trashcan's good hand. He looked down. It was standing again, tugging him lightly. Tugging him west.

  "All right," Trashcan said serenely. "Okay, boy."

  He began to walk and the wolf fell in right behind him, walking like a well-trained dog at heel. As they walked away, five others joined them from amid the stalled cars. Now he walked with one wolf ahead of him, one behind him, and two on each side, like an escorted dignitary.

  He paused once and looked back over his shoulder. He never forgot what he saw: a ring of wolves sitting patiently in a gray circle around the little Austin, and the pale circle of The Kid's face staring out, his mouth working behind the windowglass. The wolves seemed to grin up at The Kid, their tongues lolling out of their mouths. They seemed to be asking him just how long it would be before he kicked the dark man out of ole Lost Wages on his ass. Just how long?

  Trashcan Man wondered how long those wolves would sit around the little Austin, ringing it in a circle of teeth. The answer, of course, was as long as it took. Two days, three, maybe even four. The Kid would sit there, looking out. Nothing to eat (unless the teenage girl had had a passenger, that was), nothing to drink, the afternoon temperature in the car's small interior maybe as high as a hundred and thirty degrees, what with the greenhouse effect. The dark man's lapdogs would wait until The Kid starved to death, or until he got crazy enough to open the door and try to make a run for it. Trashcan Man giggled in the darkness. The Kid wasn't very big. He wouldn't make much more than a mouthful for each of them. And what they did get might well poison them.

  "Am I right?" he cried, and cackled up at the bright stars. "Don't tell me if you believe that happy crappy! I'll motherfuckin tell YOU!"

  His gray-ghostly companions padded gravely along all about him, taking no notice of Trashcan Man's shouts. When they reached The Kid's deuce coupe, the wolf at his heel padded over to it, sniffed at one of the Wide Ovals, and then, grinning sardonically, lifted his leg and made wee-wee on it.

  Trashcan Man had to laugh. He laughed until tears squirted from his eyes and ran down his cracked, stubbled cheeks. His madness, like a fine skillet dish, now wanted only for the desert sun to simmer it and complete it, to give it that final subtle touch of flavor.

  They walked, the Trashcan Man and his escorts. As the traffic grew thicker, the wolves either squirmed under cars with their bellies dragging on the road or padded over hoods and roofs near him--sanguine, silent companions with red eyes and bright teeth. When, sometime after midnight, they reached the Eisenhower Tunnel, Trashcan did not hesitate but worked his way steadily into the maw of the westbound side. How could he be afraid now? How could he be afraid with guardians like these?

  It was a long trip, and he had lost all track of time before it had little more than begun. He groped blindly forward from one car to the next. Once his hand plunged into something wet and sickeningly soft, and there was a horrible whoosh of stinking gas. Even then he did not falter. From time to time he saw red eyes in the dark, always up ahead, always leading him forward.

  A time later he sensed a new freshness in the air and began to hurry, once losing his balance and plunging from the hood of one car to crack his skull painfully on the bumper of the next. A short time after that, he looked up and saw the stars again, now paling before the onset of dawn. He was out.

  His guardians had faded away. But Trashcan fell to his knees and gave thanks in a long, rambling, disjointed prayer. He had seen the hand of the dark man at work, and he had seen it plain.

  In spite of all he had been through since he had awakened the previous morning to see The Kid admiring his hairdo in the mirror of the Golden Motel room, Trash was too exalted to sleep. He walked instead, putting the tunnel behind him. The traffic was choked on the westbound side of the tunnel too, but it had cleared out enough to walk comfortably before he had gone two miles. Across the median, in the eastbound lanes, the stream of cars that had been waiting to use the tunnel stretched on and on.

  At noon he began to come down from Vail Pass into Vail itself, passing the condominiums and the singles apartment complexes. Now weariness had almost overcome him. He broke a window, unlocked a door, found a bed. And that was all he remembered until early the next morning.

  The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance ... or change. Once such incantatory phrases as "we see now through a glass darkly" and "mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform" are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania
is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world's vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it's all on purpose.

  It was quite likely for this reason that the Trashcan Man talked to a crow for nearly twenty minutes on the road west of Vail, convinced it was either an emissary of the dark man ... or the dark man himself. The crow regarded him silently from its perch on a high telephone wire for a long time, not flying away until it was bored or hungry ... or until Trashcan's outpouring of praise and promises of loyalty were complete.

  He got another bike near Grand Junction, and by July 25 he had been speeding across western Utah on Route 4, which connects I-89 on the east to the great southwestern-tending I-15, which goes from north of Salt Lake City all the way to San Bernadino, California. And when the front wheel of his new bike suddenly decided to part company from the rest of the machine and go speeding off into the desert on its own, Trashcan Man was pitched over the handlebars to land on his head, a crash that should have fractured his skull (he was doing forty when it happened, and wearing no helmet). Yet he was able to stand up less than five minutes later, with blood streaming over his face from half a dozen cuts and lacerations, able to do his shuffling, grimacing little dance, able to chant: "Cii-a-bo-la, my life for you, Ci-a-bola, bumpty, bumpty, bump!"