The Stand Read online

  Nadine said: "This is Joe. Do you know him as well?"

  Mother Abagail's eyes remained locked on the eyes of the woman who called herself Nadine Cross, but a thin shine of perspiration had broken out on the back of her neck.

  "I don't think Joe's his name any more than mine's Cassandra," she said, "and I don't think you're his mom." She dropped her eyes to the boy with something like relief, unable to suppress a queer feeling that the woman had somehow won -- that she had put the little chap between them, used him to keep her from doing whatever her duty was... ah, but it had come so sudden, and she hadn't been ready for it!

  "What's your name, chap?" she asked the boy.

  The boy struggled as if a bone were caught in his throat. "He won't tell you," Nadine said, and put a hand on the boy's shoulder. "He can't tell you. I don't think he remem--"

  Joe threw it off and that seemed to break the block. "Leo!" he said with sudden force and great clarity. "Leo Rockway, that's me! I'm Leo!" And he sprang into Mother Abagail's arms, laughing. That generated laughter and some applause from the crowd. Nadine became virtually unnoticed, and Abby felt again that some vital focus, some vital chance, had ebbed away.

  "Joe," Nadine called. Her face was remote, under control again.

  The boy drew away a bit from Mother Abagail and looked at her.

  "Come away," Nadine said, and now she looked unflinchingly at Abby, speaking not to the boy but directly at her. "She's old. You'll hurt her. She's very old and... not very strong."

  "Oh, I think I'm strong enough to love a chap like him a bit," Mother Abagail said, but her voice sounded oddly uncertain in her own ears. "He looks like he's had a hard road."

  "Well, he's tired now. And you are, too, from the look. Come on, Joe."

  "I love her," the boy said, not moving.

  Nadine seemed to flinch at that. Her voice sharpened. "Come away, Joe!"

  "That's not my name! Leo! Leo! That's my name!"

  The little crowd of new pilgrims quieted again, aware that something unexpected had happened, might be happening still, but unable to know what.

  The two women locked eyes again like sabers.

  I know who you are, Abby's eyes said.

  Nadine's answered: Yes. And I know you.

  But this time it was Nadine who dropped her eyes first.

  "All right," she said. "Leo, or whatever you like. Just come away before you tire her any more."

  He left Mother Abagail's arms, but reluctantly.

  "You come back and see me whenever you want," Abby said, but she did not raise her eyes to include Nadine.

  "Okay," the boy said, and blew her a kiss. Nadine's face was stony. She didn't speak. As they went back down the porch steps, the arm Nadine had around his shoulders seemed more like a dragchain than a comfort. Mother Abagail watched them go, aware that she was losing the focus again. With the woman's face out of her sight, the sense of revelation began to grow fuzzy. She became unsure of what she had felt. She was only another woman, surely... wasn't she?

  The young man, Underwood, was standing at the base of the steps, and his face was like a thundercloud.

  "Why were you like that?" he asked the woman, and although he'd lowered his voice, Mother Abagail could still hear perfectly well.

  The woman paid no attention. She went by him without a word. The boy looked at Underwood in a beseeching way, but the woman was in charge, at least for the time being, and the little boy let her bear him along, bear him away.

  There was a moment of silence, and she suddenly felt at a loss to fill it, although it needed to be filled--

  -- didn't it?

  Wasn't it her job to fill it?

  And a voice asked softly, Is it? Is that your job? Is that why God brought you here, woman? To be the Official Greeter at the gates of the Free Zone?

  I can't think, she protested. The woman was right: I AM tired.

  He comes in more shapes than his own, the small interior voice persisted. Wolf, crow, snake... woman.

  What did it mean? What had happened here? What, in God's name?

  I was sitting here complacently, waiting to be kowtowed to--yes, that's what I was doing, no use denying it -- and now that woman has come and something has happened and I'm losing what it was. But there was something about that woman... wasn't there? Are you sure? Are you sure?

  There was an instant of silence, and in it they all seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to prove herself. And she wasn't doing it. The woman and the boy were gone from sight; they had left as if they were the true believers and she nothing but a shoddy, grinning Sanhedrin they had seen through immediately.

  Oh, but I'm old! It's not fair !

  And on the heels of that came another voice, small and low and rational, a voice that was not her own: Not too old to know the woman is--

  Now another man had approached her in hesitant, deferential fashion. "Hi, Mother Abagail," he said. "The name's Zellman. Mark Zellman. From Lowville, New York. I dreamed about you."

  And she was faced with a sudden choice that was clear-cut for only an instant in her groping mind. She could acknowledge this man's hello, banter with him a little to set him at his ease (but not too much at ease; that was not precisely what she wanted), and then go on to the next and the next and the next, receiving their homage like new palm leaves, or she could ignore him and the rest. She could follow the thread of her thought down into the depths of herself, searching for whatever it was that the Lord meant her to know.

  The woman is --

  -- what?

  Did it matter? The woman was gone.

  "I had me a great-nephew lived in upstate New York one time," she said easily to Mark Zellman. "Town named Rouse's Point. Backed right up against Vermont on Lake Champlain, it is. Probably never heard of it, have you?"

  Mark Zellman said he sure had heard of it; just about everyone in New York State knew that town. Had he ever been there? His face broke tragically. No, never had. Always meant to.

  "From what Ronnie wrote in his letters, you didn't miss much," she said, and Zellman went away beaming broadly.

  The others came up to make their manners as the other parties had done before them, as still others would do in the days and weeks to come. A teenage boy named Tony Donahue. A fellow named Jack Jackson, who was a car mechanic. A young R.N. named Laurie Constable -- she would come in handy. An old man named Richard Farris whom everyone called the Judge; he looked at her keenly and almost made her feel uncomfortable again. Dick Vollman. Sandy DuChiens -- pretty name, that, French. Harry Dunbarton, a man who had sold spectacles for a living only three months ago. Andrea Terminello. A Smith. A Rennett. And a great many others. She spoke to them all, nodded, smiled, and put them at their ease, but the pleasure she had felt on other days was gone today and she felt only the aches in her wrists and fingers and knees, plus the gnawing suspicion that she had to go use the Port-O-San and if she didn't get there soon she was going to stain her dress.

  All of that and the feeling, fading now (and it would be entirely gone by nightfall), that she had missed something of great significance and might later be very sorry.

  He thought better when he wrote, and so he jotted down everything which might be of importance in outline, using two felt-tip pens: a blue and a black. Nick Andros sat in the study of the house on Baseline Drive that he shared with Ralph Brentner and Ralph's woman, Elise. It was almost dark. The house was a beauty, sitting below the bulk of Flagstaff Mountain but quite a bit above the town of Boulder proper, so that from the wide living room window the streets and roads of the municipality appeared spread out like a gigantic gameboard. That window was treated on the outside with some sort of silvery reflective stuff, so that the squire could look out but passersby could not look in. Nick guessed that the house was in the $450,000-$500,000 range ... and the owner and his family were mysteriously absent.

  On his own long journey from Shoyo to Boulder, first by himself, then with Tom Cullen and the others, he had passed throu
gh tens of dozens of towns and cities, and all of them had been stinking charnel houses. Boulder had no business being any different... but it was. There were corpses here, yes, thousands of them, and something was going to have to be done about them before the hot, dry days ended and the fall rains began, causing quicker decomposition and possible disease ... but there were not enough corpses. Nick wondered if anyone other than he and Stu Redman had noticed it ... Lauder, maybe. Lauder noticed almost everything.

  For every house or public building you found littered with corpses, there were ten others completely empty. Sometime, during the last spasm of the plague, most of Boulder's citizens, sick or well, had blown town. Why? Well, he supposed it really didn't matter, and maybe they would never know. The awesome fact remained that Mother Abagail, sight unseen, had managed to lead them to maybe the one small city in the United States that had been cleared of plague victims. It was enough to make even an agnostic like himself wonder where she was getting her information.

  Nick had taken three rooms on the basement level of the house, and nice rooms they were, furnished in knotty pine. No urging on Ralph's part had moved him to enlarge his living space -- he felt like an interloper already, but he liked them... and until his trip from Shoyo to Hemingford Home, he hadn't realized how much he had come to miss other faces. He hadn't gotten his fill yet.

  And the place was the finest one he'd ever lived in, just as it was. He had his own entrance by the back door, and he kept his ten-speed parked under the door's low, overhanging eave, where it stood axle-deep in generations of fragrantly rotting aspen leaves. He had the beginnings of a book collection, something he had always wanted and never been able to have in his years of wandering. He had been a great reader in those days (during these new days, there rarely seemed to be time to sit and have a good long conversation with a book), and some of the books on the shelves -- shelves which were still largely empty--were old friends, most of them originally borrowed from lending libraries at two cents a day; in the last few years he had never spent enough time in one town to get a regular library card. Others were books he hadn't yet read, books the lending library books had led him to look for. As he sat here with his felt-tip pens and paper, one of these books sat on the desk beside his right hand--Set This House on Fire, by William Styron. He had marked his place with a ten-dollar bill he had found on the street. There was a lot of money in the streets, blowing along the gutters in the wind, and he was still surprised and amused at how many people -- himself among them-- still stopped to pick them up. And why? The books were free now. The ideas were free. Sometimes that thought exhilarated him. Sometimes it frightened him.

  The paper he was writing on came from a ring binder in which he kept all his thoughts -- the contents of the binder were half diary, half shopping list. He had discovered a deep fondness in himself for making lists; he thought one of his forebears must have been an accountant. When your mind was troubled, he had discovered that making a list often set it at ease again.

  He went back to the fresh page before him, doodling formlessly in the margin.

  It seemed to him that all the things they wanted or needed from the old life were stored in the silent East Boulder power plant, like dusty treasure in a dark cupboard. An unpleasant feeling seemed to run through the people who had gathered in Boulder, a feeling just submerged below the surface -- they were like a scared bunch of kids knocking around in the local haunted house after dark. In some ways, the place was like a rancid ghost town. There was a sense that being here was a strictly temporary thing. There was one man, a fellow named Impening, who had once lived in Boulder and worked on one of the custodial crews at the IBM plant out on the Boulder-Longmont Diagonal. Impening seemed determined to stir up unrest. He was going around telling people that in 1984 there had been an inch and a half of snow in Boulder by September 14, and that by November it would be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. That was the kind of talk Nick would like to put a quick stop to. Never mind that if Impening had been in the army he would have been cashiered for such talk; that was an empty logic, if it was logic at all. The important thing was that Impening's words would have no power if people could move into houses where the lights worked and where the furnaces blew hot air up through grates at the touch of a finger on a button. If that didn't happen by the time the first coldsnap arrived, Nick was afraid that people would begin simply to slip away, and all the meetings, representatives, and ratifications in the world wouldn't stop that.

  According to Ralph, there wasn't that much wrong at the power plant, at least not that much visible. The crews who ran it had shut some of the machinery down; other machinery had shut itself down. Two or three of the big turbine engines had blown, perhaps as the result of some final power surge. Ralph said that some of the wiring would have to be replaced, but he thought that he and Brad Kitchner and a crew of a dozen warm bodies could do that. A much bigger work crew was needed to remove fused and blackened copper wire from the blown turbine generators and then install new copper wire by the yard. There was plenty of copper wire in the Denver supply houses for the taking; Ralph and Brad had gone one day last week to check for themselves. With the manpower, they thought they could have the lights on again by Labor Day.

  "And then we'll throw the biggest fucking party this town ever saw," Brad said.

  Law and Order. That was something else that troubled him. Could Stu Redman be handed that particular package? He wouldn't want the job, but Nick thought he could perhaps persuade Stu to take it ... and if push came to shove, he could get Stu's friend Glen to back him up. What really bothered him was the memory, still too fresh and hurtful to look at more than briefly, of his own brief and terrible tour as Shoyo's jailkeeper. Vince and Billy dying, Mike Childress jumping up and down on his supper and crying out in wretched defiance: Hunger strike! I'm on a fuckin hunger strike!

  It made him ache inside to think they might need courts and jails ... maybe even an executioner. Christ, these were Mother Abagail's people, not the dark man's! But he supposed the dark man would not bother with such trivialities as courts and jails. His punishment would be swift and sure and heavy. He would not need the threat of jail when the corpses hung on the telephone pole crosses along I-15 for the birds to pick.

  Nick hoped most of the infractions would be small ones. There had been several cases of drunk and disorderly already. One kid, really too young to drive, had been rodding a big dragging machine up and down Broadway, scaring people out of the street. He had finally driven into a stalled bread truck and had gashed his forehead -- and lucky to get off so cheaply, in Nick's opinion. The people who had seen him knew he was too young, but no one had felt he or she had the authority to put a stop to it.

  Authority. Organization. He wrote the words on his pad and put them inside a double circle. Being Mother Abagail's people gave them no immunity to weakness, stupidity, or bad companions. Nick didn't know if they were the children of God or not, but when Moses had come down from the mountain, those not busy worshipping the golden calf had been busy shooting craps, he knew that. And they had to face the possibility that someone might get cut over a card game or decide to shoot someone else over a woman.

  Authority. Organization. He circled the words again and now they were like prisoners behind a triple stockade. How well they went together ... and what a sorry sound they made.

  Not long after, Ralph came in. "We got some more folks coming in tomorrow, Nicky, and a whole parade the day after. Over thirty in that second one."

  "Good," Nick wrote. "We'll get a doc before long, I bet. Law of averages says so."

  "Yeah," Ralph said. "We're turnin into a regular by-God city."

  Nick nodded.

  "I had a talk with the fella leadin the party that came in today. His name's Larry Underwood. Smart man, Nick. Sharp as a tack."

  Nick raised his eyebrows and drew a ? in the air.

  "Well, let's see," Ralph said. He knew what the question mark meant: give more information,
if you can. "He's six or seven years older'n you, I think, and maybe eight or nine younger than Redman. But he's the kind of man you said we ought to be on the lookout for. He asks the right questions."

  ?

  "Who's in charge, for one," Ralph said. "What comes next, for another. Who does it, for a third."

  Nick nodded. Yes -- the right questions. But was he the right man? Ralph might be right. He also might not be.

  "I'll try to meet up with him tomorrow & say hello," he wrote on a fresh sheet of paper.

  "Yeah, you oughtta. He's all right." Ralph shuffled his feet. "And I talked to Mother a little bit before this Underwood and his folks came up to be innerduced. Talked to her like you wanted me to."

  ?

  "She says we ought to go ahead. Get moving. She says there's people lollygaggin, and they need some folks to be in charge and tell em where to squat and lean."

  Nick leaned back in his chair and laughed silently. Then he wrote, "I was pretty sure she'd feel that way. I'll talk to Stu & Glen tomorrow. Did you print the handbills?"

  "Oh! Those! Shit, yeah," Ralph said. "That's where I been most of the afternoon, for Christ's sake." He showed Nick a sample poster. Still smelling strongly of mimeograph ink, the print was large and eyecatching. Ralph had done the graphics himself:

  MASS MEETING!!!

  REPRESENTATIVE BOARD

  TO BE NOMINATED AND ELECTED!

  8:30 P.M., August 18, 1990

  Place: Canyon Boulevard Park & Bandshell if FINE

  Chautauqua Hall in Chautauqua Park if FOUL

  REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED

  FOLLOWING THE MEETING

  Below this were two rudimentary street maps for newcomers and those who hadn't spent much time exploring Boulder. Below, in rather fine print, were the names he and Stu and Glen had agreed upon after some discussion earlier in the day:

  Ad Hoc Committee

  Nick Andros

  Glen Bateman

  Ralph Brentner

  Richard Ellis

  Fran Goldsmith

  Stuart Redman

  Susan Stern

  Nick pointed to the line on the flier about refreshments and raised his eyebrows.