The Stand (Original Edition) Read online

  They were coming, yes.

  Flagg smiled. Had the old woman told them to come? Would they listen to her if she, on her deathbed, instructed them to commit suicide in that novel way? He thought it was possible that they would.

  What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling: They were having their problems too, they were frightened too . . . and as a result, they were making a colossal mistake. They were coming wrapped in righteousness like a clutch of missionaries approaching the cannibals’ village. Oh! It was lovely!

  Doubts would end. Fears would end. All it would take was the sight of their four heads up on spikes in front of the MGM Grand’s fountain. He would assemble every person in Vegas and make them file past and look. He would have photographs taken, would print fliers, have them sent out to L.A. and San Francisco and Spokane and Portland.

  Five heads. He would put the dog’s head up on a pole, too.

  “Good doggy,” Flagg said, and laughed aloud for the first time since Nadine had goaded him into throwing her off the roof. “Good doggy,” he said again, grinning.

  He slept well that night, and in the morning he sent out word that the watch on the roads between Utah and Nevada was to be tripled. But they were no longer looking for one man going east but four men and a dog going west. And they were to be taken alive. Taken alive at all costs.

  Chapter 62

  “You know,” Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, “I’ve heard the saying ‘That sucks’ for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.” He looked down at his breakfast, which consisted of Morning Star Farms synthetic sausage links and grimaced.

  “No, this is good,” Ralph said earnestly. “You should have had some of the chow we had in the army.”

  They were sitting around the campfire, which Larry had rekindled an hour earlier. They were all dressed in warm coats and gloves, and all were on their second cups of coffee. The temperature was about thirty-five degrees, and the sky was cloudy and bleak. Kojak was napping as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his fur.

  “I’m done feeding the inner man,” Glen said, getting up. “Give me your garbage. I’ll bury it.”

  Stu handed him his paper plate and cup. “This walkin’s really something, isn’t it, baldy? I bet you ain’t been in this good shape since you were twenty.”

  “Yeah, seventy years ago,” Larry said, and laughed.

  “Stu, I was never in this kind of shape,” Glen said grimly, picking up Utter and popping it into the plastic sack he intended to bury. “I never wanted to be in this kind of shape. But I don’t mind. After fifty years of confirmed agnosticism, it seems to be my fate to follow an old black woman’s God into the jaws of death. Walking takes longer, consequently I live longer ... by a few days, anyway. Excuse me, gentlemen, while I give this rubbish a decent burial.”

  They watched him walk to the edge of the camp with a small entrenching tool. This “walking tour of Colorado and points west,” as Glen put it, had been the hardest on Glen himself. He was the oldest,

  Ralph Brentner’s senior by twelve years. But somehow he had eased it considerably for the others. His irony was constant but gentle, and he seemed at peace with himself. The fact that he was able to keep going day after day made an impression on the others even if it was not exactly an inspiration. He was fifty-seven, and Stu had seen him working his finger-joints on these last three or four cold mornings, and grimacing as he did it.

  “Hurt bad?” Stu had asked him yesterday, about an hour after they had moved out.

  “Aspirin takes care of it. It’s arthritis, you know, but it’s not as bad as it’s apt to be in another five or seven years, and frankly, East Texas, I’m not looking that far ahead.”

  Now they heard him digging at the frozen soil and cursing it.

  “Quite a fella, ain’t he?” Ralph said. “I always thought those college teachers was sissies. Know what he said when I asked him why he didn’t just throw that crap to one side of the road? Said we didn’t need to start up that kind of shit again. Said we’d started up too many of the old brands of shit already.”

  Kojak got up and trotted over to see what Glen was doing. Glen’s voice floated over to them: “Well, there you are, you big lazy turd. Want me to bury you too?”

  Larry grinned and took off the mileometer clipped to his belt. He had picked it up in a Golden sports supply shop. You set it according to the length of your stride and then clipped it to your belt like a carpenter’s rule. Each evening he wrote down how far they had walked that day on a dog-eared and often-folded sheet of paper.

  “Can I see that cheat-sheet?” Stu asked.

  “Sure,” Larry said, and handed it over.

  Stu looked at Larry’s running total. As of this morning they had come 362 miles from Boulder—according to Larry’s mileometer, at least. “Shit,” he said. “We’re not even halfway.”

  Larry nodded. “But we’re making better time now. We’re going downhill. And he’s right, you know. Why do we want to hurry?” Larry’s mileometer made four distinct little clicks as he set it for the day: 00.0. Stu doused what remained of the campfire with dirt. The little rituals of the morning went on. They had been twelve days on the road. It seemed to Stu that the days would go on forever like this: Glen bitching goodnaturedly about the food, Larry noting their mileage on his dog-eared cheat-sheet, the two cups of coffee, someone burying yesterday’s scut, someone else burying the fire. It was routine, good routine. You forgot what it was all leading to, and that was good. In the mornings Fran seemed very distant to him—very clear, but very distant, like a photograph kept in a locket. But in the evenings, when the dark had come and the moon sailed the night, she seemed very close. Almost close enough to touch . . . and that, of course, was where the ache lay. At times like those his faith in Mother Abagail turned to bitter doubt and he wanted to wake them all up and tell them it was a fool’s errand, that they had taken up rubber lances to tilt at a lethal windmill, that they had better stop at the next town, get motorcycles, and go back. That they had better grab a little light and a little love while they still could—because a little was all that Flagg was going to allow them.

  But that was at night. In the mornings it still seemed right to go on. He looked speculatively at Larry, and wondered if Larry thought about his Lucy late at night. Dreamed about her and wished . . .

  Glen came back into camp with Kojak at his heel, wincing a little as he walked. “Let’s go get em,” he said. “Right, Kojak?”

  Kojak wagged his tail.

  “He says Las Vegas or bust,” Glen said. “Come on.”

  They climbed the embankment to 1-70, now descending toward Grand Junction, and began their day’s walk.

  Late that afternoon, a cold rain began to fall, chilling them all and damping conversation. Larry walked by himself, hands shoved in his pockets. At first he thought about Harold Lauder, whose corpse they had found two days ago—there seemed to be an unspoken conspiracy among them not to talk about Harold—but eventually his thoughts turned to the person he had dubbed the Wolfman.

  They had found the Wolfman just east of the Eisenhower Tunnel. The traffic was badly jammed up there, and the stink of death had been sickly potent. The Wolfman had been half in and half out of an Austen. He was wearing pegged jeans and a silk sequined Western shirt. The corpses of several wolves lay around the Austen. The Wolfman himself was half in and half out of the Austen’s passenger seat, and a dead wolf lay on his chest. The Wolfman’s hands were wrapped around the wolf’s neck, and the wolfs bloody muzzle was angled up to the Wolfman’s neck. Reconstructing, it seemed to all of them that a pack of wolves had come down out of the higher mountains, had spotted this lone man, and had attacked. The Wolfman had had a gun. He had dropped several of them before retreating into the Austen.

  How long before hunger had forced him from his refuge?

  Larry didn’t know, didn’t want to know. But
he had seen how terribly thin the Wolfman had been. A week, maybe. He had been going west, whoever he was, going to join the dark man, but Larry would not have wished such a dreadful fate on anyone. He had spoken of it once to Stu, two days after they had emerged from the tunnel, with the Wolfman safely behind them.

  “Why would a bunch of wolves hang around so long, Stu?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, if they wanted something to eat, couldn’t they find it?”

  “I’d think so, yeah.”

  It was a dreadful mystery to him, and he kept working it over in his mind, knowing he would never find the solution. Whoever the Wolfman had been, he hadn’t been lacking in the balls department. Finally driven by hunger and thirst, he had opened the passenger door. One of the wolves had jumped him and tom his throat out. But the Wolfman had throttled it to death even as he himself died.

  The four of them had gone through the Eisenhower Tunnel roped together, and in that horrible blackness, Larry’s mind had turned to the trip he had made through the Lincoln Tunnel. Only now it was not images of Rita Blakemoor that haunted him but the face of the Wolfman, frozen in its final snarl as he and the wolf had killed each other.

  Were the wolves sent to kill that man?

  But that thought was too unsettling to even consider.

  They made their camp that night close to the Utah line. Supper consisted of forage and boiled water, as all their meals did—they were following Mother Abagail’s instructions to the letter.

  “It’s going to get bad in Utah,” Ralph remarked. I guess that’s where we’re going to find out if God really is watchin over us. There’s one stretch, better than a hundred miles, without a town or even a gas station and a cafe.” He didn’t seem particularly disturbed by the prospect.

  Ralph shrugged. “Guess I’ll turn in,” he said.

  Larry followed suit. Glen stayed up to smoke a pipe. Stu had a few cigarettes and decided to have one. They smoked in silence for a while.

  “Long way from New Hampshire, baldy,” Stu said at last.

  “It isn’t exactly shouting distance from here to Texas.”

  Stu smiled. “No. No, it ain’t.”

  “You miss Fran a lot, I guess.” “Yeah. Miss her, worry about her. Worry about the baby.”

  Glen puffed. “That’s nothing you can change, Stuart.”

  “I know. But I worry.”

  “Sure.” Glen knocked out his pipe on a rock. “Something funny happened last night, Stu. I’ve been trying to figure out all day if it was real, or a dream, or what.”

  “What was it?”

  “Well, I woke up in the night and Kojak was growling at something. Must have been past midnight, because the fire had burned way down. Kojak was on the other side of it with his hackles standing up. I told him to shut up and he never even looked at me. He was looking over to my right. And I thought, what if it’s wolves. Ever since we saw that guy Larry calls the Wolfman—”

  “Yeah, that was bad.”

  “But there was nothing. I had a clear view. He was growling at nothing”

  “He had a scent, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, but the crazy part is still to come. After a couple of minutes I started to feel . . . well, decidedly weird. I felt like there was something right over by the turnpike embankment, and that it was watching me. Watching all of us. I felt like I could almost see it, that if I squinted my eyes the right way, I would see it. But I didn’t want to. Because it felt like him."

  “Probably nothing, Glen,” Stu said after a moment.

  “It sure felt like something. It felt like something to Kojak, too.” “Well, suppose he was watching somehow? What could we do about it?”

  “Nothing. But I don’t like it. It scares me shitless. Even more than . . . well, finding Harold that way. Blew his own head off. Christ-Jesus.” Glen grimaced sourly and rubbed his sore knees.

  Stu nodded. “That was nothing but a waste. A waste of Nick and Sue and of himself, too.”

  “I agree.”

  They had come upon Harold and his pitiful dying declaration the day after they had done the Eisenhower Tunnel. He and Nadine must have gone over Loveland Pass, because Harold still had his Triumph cycle—the remains of it, anyway—and as Ralph had said, it would have been impossible to get anything bigger than a kid’s little red wagon through the Eisenhower. The buzzards had worked him over pretty well. The .38 was jammed in his mouth like a grotesque lollipop, and although they hadn’t buried Harold, Stu had removed the pistol. He had done it gently. Seeing how efficiently the dark man had destroyed Harold and how carelessly he had thrown him aside when his part was played out had made Stu hate Flagg all the more. It made him feel that they were throwing themselves away in a witless sort of children’s crusade, and while he felt that they had to press on, Harold’s corpse with the shattered leg haunted him the way the frozen grimace of the Wolfman haunted Larry. He had discovered he wanted to pay Flagg back for Harold as well as Nick and Susan ... but he felt more and more sure that he would never get that chance.

  But you want to watch out, he thought grimly. You want to look out if I get within choking distance of you, you freak.

  Glen got up with a little wince. ‘Tm going to turn in, East Texas. Don’t beg me to stay. It really is a dull party.”

  “How’s that arthritis?”

  Glen smiled and said, “Not too bad,” but as he crossed to his bedroll he was limping.

  Stu thought he should not have another cigarette—only smoking two or three a day would exhaust his supply by the end of the week —and then he lit one anyway. This evening it was not so cold, but for all that there could be no doubt that in this high country, at least, summer was done. It made him feel sad, because he felt very strongly that he would never see another summer. When this one had begun, he had been an on-again off-again worker at a factory that made pocket calculators. He had spent a lot of his spare time hanging around Hap’s station, listening to the other guys shoot the shit about the economy, the government, hard times. Stu guessed that none of them had known what real hard times were. He finished his cigarette and tossed it into the campfire.

  “Keep well, Frannie old kid,” he said, and got into his sleeping bag. And in his dreams he thought that Something had come near their camp, something that was keeping malevolent watch over them. It might have been a wolf with human understanding. Or a crow. Or a weasel, creeping bellydown through the scrub. Or it might have been some disembodied presence, a watching Eye.

  I will fear no evil, he muttered in his dream. Yea, though 1 walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. No evil.

  At last the dream faded and he slept soundly.

  The next morning they were on the road again early, Larry’s mileometer clicking off the miles as the highway switched lazily back and forth down the gentling Western Slope toward Utah. Shortly after noon they left Colorado behind them. That evening they camped west of Harley Dome, Utah. For the first time the great silence impressed them as being oppressive and malefic. Ralph Brentner went to sleep that night thinking: We’re in the west now. We’re out of our ballpark and into his.

  And that night Ralph dreamed of a wolf with a single red eye that had come out of the badlands to watch them. Go away, Ralph told it. Go away, we’re not afraid. Not afraid of you.

  By 2 P.M. on the afternoon of September 21, they were past Sego. The next large town, according to Stu’s pocket map, was Green River. There were no more towns after that for a long, long time.

  “Actually,” Larry said to Glen, “I’m not as worried about food as I am water. Most everyone who’s on a trip keeps a few munchies in their car, Oreos or Fig Newtons or something like that.”

  Glen smiled. “Maybe the Lord will send us showers of blessing.” Larry looked up at the cloudless blue sky and grimaced at the idea. “I sometimes think she was right off her block at the end of it.” “Maybe she was,” Glen said mildly. “If you read your theology, you’ll find that
God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane. It even seems to me—here’s the closet Jesuit coming out —that there are good psychological reasons for it. A madman or a person on her deathbed is a human being with a drastically changed psyche. A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet.”

  “The ways of God,” Larry said. “I know. We see through a glass darkly. It’s a pretty dark glass to me, all right. Why we’re walking all this way when we could have driven it in a week—”

  “I see some perfectly sound psychological and sociological reasons for this walk,” Glen said. “I don’t know if they’re God’s reasons or not, but they make good sense to me.”

  “Such as what?” Stu and Ralph had walked over to hear this, too. “There were several American Indian tribes that used to make ‘having a vision’ an integral part of their manhood rite. When it was your time to become a man, you were supposed to go out into the wilderness unarmed. You were supposed to make a kill, and two songs—one about the Great Spirit and one about your own prowess as a hunter and a rider and a warrior and a fucker—and have that vision. You weren’t supposed to eat. You were supposed to get up high and wait for that vision to come. And eventually, of course, it would.” He chuckled. “Starvation is a great hallucinogenic.”

  “You think Mother sent us out here to have visions?” Ralph asked.

  “Maybe to gain strength and holiness by a purging process,” Glen said. “The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you’re also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel.”

  Larry shook his head slowly. “I don’t follow that.”

  “Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?”