The Stand (Original Edition) Read online

  “Oh, man,” Larry said, and started to cry.

  “Larry, you’re not in this. I want you to go on. If you get out of Vegas, come back this way. Maybe God’ll send a raven to feed me, you don’t know. I read once in the funnypages that a man can go seventy days without food, if he’s got water.”

  “It’s going to be winter before that here. You’ll be dead in three days, even if you don’t use the pills.”

  “That ain’t up to you. You ain’t in this part of it.”

  “Don’t send me away, Stu.”

  Stu said grimly: “I’m sending you.”

  “This sucks,” Larry said, and got to his feet. “What’s Fran going to say to us? When she finds out we left you for the gophers and the buzzards?”

  “She’s not going to say anything if you don’t get over there and fix his clock. Neither is Lucy. Or any of the others.”

  Larry said, “Okay. We’ll go. But tomorrow. We’ll camp here tonight, and maybe we’ll have a dream . . . something . . .”

  “No dreams,” Stu said gently. “No signs. It doesn’t work like that. You’d stay one night and there’d be nothing and then you’d want to stay another night, and another night. . . you got to go right now.” Larry walked away from them, head down, and stood with his back turned. “All right,” he said at last in a voice almost too low to hear. “We’ll do it your way. God help our souls.”

  Ralph came over to Stu and knelt down. “Can we get you anything, Stu?”

  Stu smiled. “Yeah. All those books about that Kent family. I always meant to read em. Now it looks like I got the chance.”

  Ralph grinned crookedly. “Sorry, Stu. Looks like I’m tapped.”

  Stu squeezed his arm, and Ralph went away. Glen came over. He had also been crying, and when he sat down by Stu, he started leaking again.

  “Come on, ya baby,” Stu said. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Larry’s right. This is bad. Like something you’d do to a horse.” “You know it has to be done.” “I guess I do, but who really knows? How’s that leg?”

  “No pain at all, right now.”

  “Okay, you got the pills.” Glen swiped his arm across his eyes. “Goodbye, East Texas. It’s been pretty goddam good to know you.” Stu turned his head aside. “Don’t say goodbye, Glen. Make it so long, that’s better luck. You’ll probably get halfway up that friggin bank and fall down here and we can spend the winter playin cribbage.”

  “It’s not so long,” Glen said. “I feel that, don’t you?”

  And because he did, Stu turned his face back to look at Glen. “Yeah, I do,” he said, and then smiled a little. “But I will fear no evil, right?”

  “Right,” Glen said. His voice had dropped to a husky whisper. “Pull the plug if you have to, Stuart. Don’t screw around.”

  “No.”

  “Goodbye, then.”

  “Goodbye, Glen.”

  The three of them drew together on the west side of the gully, and after a look back over his shoulder, Glen started to go up. Stu followed his progress up the side with growing alarm. He was moving casually, almost carelessly, hardly even glancing at his footing. The ground crumbled away beneath him once, then twice. Both times he grabbed nonchalantly for a handhold, and both times one just happened to be there. When he reached the top, Stu released his pent-up breath in a long, harsh sigh.

  Ralph went next, and when he reached the top, Stu called Larry over one last time. He looked up into Larry’s face and reflected that in a way it was something like Harold’s—remarkably still, the eyes watchful and a little wary. A face that gave away nothing but what it wanted to give away.

  “You’re in charge now,” Stu said. “Can you handle it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll try.”

  “His men are going to grab you.”

  “Yeah. I figure they will. They’ll either grab us or shoot us from ambush like we were dogs.”

  “No, I think they’ll grab you and take you to him. It’ll happen in the next few days, I think. When you get to Vegas, keep your eyes open. Wait. It’ll come.”

  “What, Stu? What’ll come?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever we were sent for. Be ready. Know it when it comes.” “We’ll be back for you, if we can. You know it.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Larry went up the bank quickly and joined the other two. They stood and waved down. Stu raised his hand in return. They left. And none of them ever saw Stu Redman again.

  Chapter 63

  The three of them camped sixteen miles west of the place where they had left Stu. They had come to another washout, this one minor. The real reason they had made such poor mileage was because some of the heart seemed to have gone out of them. Their feet seemed to weigh more. There was little conversation. They camped at dark and built a scrub fire. There was water, but no food. Glen tamped the last of his tobacco into his pipe, and wondered suddenly if Stu had any cigarettes. The thought spoiled his own taste for tobacco, and he knocked his pipe out on a rock, absently kicking away the last of his Borkum Riff. When an owl hooted somewhere out in the darkness a few minutes later, he looked around.

  “Say, where’s Kojak?” he asked.

  “Now, that’s kinda funny, ain’t it?” Ralph said. “I can’t remember seeing him the last couple of hours at all.”

  Glen got to his feet. “Kojak!” he yelled. “Hey, Kojak! Kojak!” His voice echoed lonesomely away into the wastes. There was no answering bark. He sat down again, overcome with gloom. A soft sighing noise escaped him. Kojak had followed him almost all the way across the continent. Now he was gone. It was like a terrible omen.

  “You s’pose something got him?” Ralph asked softly.

  Larry said in a quiet, thoughtful voice: “Maybe he stayed with Stu.”

  Glen looked up, startled. “Maybe,” he said, considering it. “Maybe that’s what happened.”

  The fire made a popping sound, sending a column of sparks up into the darkness to whirl in brief brightness and then to wink out.

  When Stu saw the dark shape come slinking down the gully toward him, he pulled himself up against ths-nearby boulder, leg sticking out stiffly in front of him, and found a good-sized stone with one numb hand. He was chilled to the bone. Larry had been right. Two or three days of lying around in these temperatures was going to kill him quite efficiently. Except now it looked like whatever this was would get him first. Kojak had remained with him until sunset and then had left him, scrambling easily out of the gully. Stu had not called him back. The dog would find his way back to Glen and go on with them. Perhaps he had his own part to play. But now he wished that Kojak had stayed a little longer. The pills were one thing, but he had no wish to be ripped to pieces by one of the dark man’s wolves.

  He gripped the rock harder and the dark shape paused about twenty yards up the cut. Then it started coming again, a blacker shadow in the night.

  “Come on, then,” Stu said hoarsely.

  The black shadow wagged its tail and came. "Kojak?"

  It was. And there was something in his mouth, something he dropped at Stu’s feet. He sat down, tail thumping, waiting to be complimented.

  "Good dog,” Stu said in amazement. "Good dog!”

  Kojak had brought him a rabbit. Stu pulled out his pocket knife, opened it, and disemboweled the rabbit in three quick movements. He picked up the steaming guts and tossed them to Kojak. “Want these?” Kojak did. Stu skinned the rabbit. The thought of eating it raw didn’t do much for his stomach.

  “Wood?” he said to Kojak without much hope. There were scattered branches and hunks of tree all along the banks of the gully, dropped by the flash flood, but nothing within reach.

  Kojak wagged his tail and didn’t move.

  “Fetch? F—”

  But Kojak was gone. He whirled, streaked to the east side of the gully, and ran back with a large piece of deadwood in his jaws. He dropped it beside Stu, and barked. His tail wagged rapidly.

  “Good dog,” Stu said
again. “I’ll be a son of a bitch! Fetch, Kojak!”

  Barking with joy, Kojak went again. In twenty minutes, he had brought back enough wood for a large fire. Stu carefully stripped enough splinters to make kindling. He checked the match situation and saw that he had a book and half. He got the kindling going on the second match and fed the fire carefully. Soon there was a respectable blaze going and Stu got as close to it as he could, sitting in his sleeping bag. Kojak lay down on the far side of the fire with his nose on his paws.

  When the fire had burned down a little, Stu spitted the rabbit and cooked it. The smell was soon strong enough and savory enough to have his stomach rumbling. Kojak came to attention.

  “Half for you and half for me, big guy, okay?”

  Fifteen minutes later he pulled the rabbit off the fire and managed to rip it in half without burning his fingers too badly. The meat was burned in places, half-raw in others, and it tasted wonderful. He and Kojak gulped it down . . . and as they were finishing, a bone-chilling howl drifted down the wash.

  "Christ!” Stu said around a mouthful of rabbit. Kojak was on his feet, hackles up, growling. He advanced stiff-legged around the fire and growled again. Whatever had howled fell silent.

  Stu lay down, the hand-sized rock nearby. His thoughts turned to Fran and he turned them away just as quickly. That hurt too much, full belly or not. But I won’t sleep, he thought. Not for a long time.

  But he did sleep, with the help of one of Glen’s pills. And when the coals of the fire had burned down to embers, Kojak came over and slept next to him, giving Stu his heat. And that was how, on the first night after the party was broken, Stu ate when the others went hungry, and slept easy while their sleep was broken by bad dreams and an uneasy feeling of rapidly approaching doom.

  On the twenty-fourth, Larry Underwood’s group of three pilgrims camped northeast of the San Rafael Knob. That night the temperature slid down into the mid-twenties, and they built a large fire and slept close by it. Kojak had not rejoined them.

  “What do you think Stu’s doing tonight?” Ralph asked Larry.

  “Dying,” Larry said shortly, and was sorry when he saw the wince of pain on Ralph’s homely, honest face, but he didn’t know how to redeem what he had said. And after all, it was almost surely true.

  He lay down again, feeling strangely certain that it was tomorrow. Whatever they were coming to, they were almost there.

  But they saw no one on the twenty-fifth. The three of them walked stolidly along under bright blue skies, and they saw birds and beasts in plenty, but no people.

  “It’s amazing how rapidly the wildlife is coming back,” Glen said. “I knew it would be a fairly rapid process, and of course the winter is going to prune it back some, but this is still amazing. It’s only been about a hundred days since the first outbreaks.”

  “Yeah, but there’s no dogs or horses,” Ralph said. “That just doesn’t seem right, you know it? They invented a bug that killed pretty near all the people, but that wasn’t enough. It had to take out his two favorite animals, too. It took man and man’s best friends.”

  “And left the cats,” Larry said morosely.

  Ralph brightened. “Well, there’s Kojak—”

  “There was Kojak.”

  That killed the conversation. The buttes frowned down at them, hiding places for dozens of men with rifles and scopes. Larry’s premonition that it was to be today hadn’t left him. Each time they topped a rise he expected to see the road blocked below them. And each time it wasn’t, he thought about ambush.

  Then it was nearly dark, and time to look for a place to camp. They came to the top of one final rise and Larry thought: Now. They’ll be right down there.

  But there was no one.

  They camped near a green reflectorized sign that said LAS VEGAS 260. They had eaten comparatively well that day: taco chips, soda, and two Slim Jims that they shared out equally.

  Tomorrow, Larry thought again, and slept. That night he dreamed that he and Barry Greig and the Tattered Remnants were playing at Madison Square Garden. It was their big chance—they were opening for some supergroup that was named after a city. Boston, or maybe Chicago. And all the microphone stands were at least nine feet tall and he began to stumble from one to the other in an increasing panic as the audience began to clap rhythmically and call for Baby, Can You Dig Your Man? He looked down in the first row and felt a slapping dash of cold icewater fear. Charles Manson was there, the X on his forehead healed to a white, twisted scar, clapping and chanting. And Richard Speck was there, looking up at Larry with cocky, impudent eyes, an unfiltered cigarette jittering between his lips. They were flanking the dark man. Flagg was leading the chant.

  Tomorrow, Larry thought again, stumbling from one too-tall mike to the next under the hot dreamlights of Madison Square Garden. I’ll see you tomorrow.

  But it was not the next day, or the day after that. On the evening of September 27 they camped in the town of Freemont Junction, and there was plenty to eat.

  “I keep expecting it to be over,” Larry told Glen that evening. “And every day that it’s not, it gets worse.”

  Glen nodded. “Me too. It would be funny if he was just a mirage, wouldn’t it? Nothing but a bad dream in our collective consciousness.”

  Larry looked at him with momentary surprised consideration. Then he shook his head slowly. “No. I don’t think it’s just a dream.” Glen smiled. “Nor do I, young man. Nor do I.”

  They made contact the following day.

  At just past ten in the morning, they topped a rise and below them and to the west, five miles away, two cars were parked nose to nose, blocking the highway.

  “Accident?” Glen asked.

  Ralph was shading his eyes. “I don’t think so. Not parked that way.”

  “His men,” Larry said.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Ralph agreed. “What do we do now, Larry?” Larry took his bandanna out of his back pocket and wiped his face with it. Today either summer had come back or they were starting to feel the southwestern desert. The temperature was in the low eighties.

  But it's a dry heat, he thought calmly. I'm only sweating a little. Just a little. He stuffed the bandanna back into his pocket. Now that it was actually on, he felt all right.

  “We go down and see what happens. Right, Glen?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  They started to walk again. Half an hour brought them close enough to see that the nose-to-nose cars had once belonged to the Utah State Patrol. There were several armed men waiting for them. “Are they going to shoot us?” Ralph asked conversationally.

  “I don’t know,” Larry said.

  “Because some of those rifles are wowsers. Scope-equipped. I can see the sun ticking off the lenses. If they want to knock us down, we’ll be in range anytime.”

  They kept walking. The men at the roadblock split into two groups, about five men in front, guns aimed at the party of three walking toward them, and three more crouched behind the cars.

  “Eight of them, Larry?” Glen asked.

  “I make it eight, yeah. How are you doing, anyhow?”

  “I’m okay,” Glen said.

  “Ralph?”

  “Just as long as we know what to do when the time comes,” Ralph said. “That’s all I want.”

  Larry gripped his hand for a moment and squeezed it. Then he took Glen’s hand and did likewise.

  They were less than a mile from the cruisers now. “They’re not going to shoot us outright,” Ralph said. “They would have done it already.”

  Now they could discern faces, and Larry searched them curiously. One was heavily bearded. Another was young but mostly bald—must have been a bummer for him to start losing his hair while he was still in school, Larry thought. Another was wearing a bright yellow tank top with a picture of a grinning camel on it and below the camel the word SUPERHUMP in scrolled, old-fashioned letters. Another of them had the look of an accountant. He was fiddling with a .357 Magnum, and he l
ooked three times as nervous as Larry felt; he looked like a man who was going to blow off one of his own feet if he didn’t settle down.

  “They don’t look no different from our guys,” Ralph said.

  “Sure they do,” Glen answered. “They’re all packing guns.”

  They approached to within twenty feet of the police cars blocking the road. Larry stopped, and the others stopped with him. There was a dead moment of silence as Flagg’s men and Larry’s small band of pilgrims looked each other over. Then Larry Underwood said mildly: “Hi.”

  The little man who looked like a CPA stepped forward. He was still twiddling with the Magnum. “Are you Glendon Bateman, Lawson Underwood. Stuart Redman, and Ralph Brentner?”

  “Say, you dummy,” Ralph said, “can’t you count?”

  Someone snickered. The CPA type flushed. “Who’s missing?”

  Larry said, “Stu met with an accident on the way here. And I do believe you’re going to have one yourself if you don’t stop fooling with that gun.”

  There were more snickers. The CPA managed to tuck the pistol into the waistband of his gray slacks, which made him look more ridiculous than ever; a Walter Mitty outlaw daydream.

  “My name is Paul Burlson,” he said, “and by virtue of the power vested in me, I arrest you and order you to come with me.”

  “In whose name?” Glen said immediately.

  Burlson looked at him with contempt ... but the contempt was mixed with something else. “You know who I speak for.”

  “Then say it.”

  But Burlson was silent.

  “Are you afraid?” Glen asked him. He looked at all eight of them.

  “Are you so afraid of him you don’t dare speak his name? Very well, I’ll say it for you. His name is Randall Flagg, also known as the dark man, also known as the Walkin Dude. Don’t some of you call him that?” His voice had climbed to the high, clear octaves of fury. Some of the men looked uneasily at each other and Burlson fell back a step. “Call him Beelzebub, because that’s his name, too. Call him Nyarlahotep and Ahaz and Astaroth. Call him R’yelah and Seti and Anubis. His name is legion and he’s an apostate of hell and you men kiss his ass.” His voice dropped to a conversational pitch again; he smiled disarmingly. “Just thought we ought to have that out front.” “Grab them,” Burlson said. “Grab them all and shoot the first one that moves.”