The Stand Read online

  "I don't want an abortion," she said quietly. "For my own reasons."

  "What are they?"

  "The baby is partly me," she said, lifting her chin slightly. "If that's ego, I don't care."

  "Will you give it up, Frannie?"

  "I don't know."

  "Do you want to?"

  "No. I want to keep it."

  He was silent. She thought she felt his disapproval.

  "You're thinking of school, aren't you?" she asked.

  "No," he said, standing up. He put his hands in the small of his back and grimaced pleasurably as his spine crackled. "I was thinking we've talked enough. And that you don't have to make that decision just yet."

  "Mom's home," she said.

  He turned to follow her gaze as the station wagon turned into the drive, the chrome winking in the day's last light. Carla saw them, beeped the horn, and waved cheerily.

  "I have to tell her," Frannie said.

  "Yes. But give it a day or two, Frannie."

  "All right."

  She helped him pick up the gardening tools and then they walked up toward the station wagon together.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the dim light that comes over the land just after sunset but before true dark, during one of those very few minutes that moviemakers call "the magic hour," Vic Palfrey rose out of green delirium to brief lucidity.

  I'm dying, he thought, and the words clanged strangely through his mind, making him believe he had spoken aloud, although he had not.

  He gazed around himself and saw a hospital bed, now cranked up to keep his lungs from drowning in themselves. He had been tightly secured with brass laundry-pins, and the sides of the bed were up. Been thrashing some, I guess, he thought with faint amusement. Been kicking up dickens. And belatedly: Where am I?

  There was a bib around his neck and the bib was covered with clots of phlegm. His head ached. Queer thoughts danced in and out of his mind and he knew he had been delirious ... and would be again. He was sick and this was not a cure or the beginning of one, but only a brief respite.

  He put the inside of his right wrist against his forehead and pulled it away with a wince, the way you pull your hand off a hot stove. Burning up, all right, and full of tubes. Two small clear plastic ones were coming out of his nose. Another one snaked out from under the hospital sheet to a bottle on the floor, and he surely knew where the other end of that one was connected. Two bottles hung suspended from a rack beside the bed, a tube coming from each one and then joining to make a Y that ended by going into his arm just below the elbow. An IV feed.

  You'd think that would be enough, he thought. But there were wires on him as well. Attached to his scalp. And chest. And left arm. One seemed to be plastered into his sonofabitching belly-button. And to cap it all off, he was pretty sure something was jammed up his ass. What in God's name could that one be? Shit radar?

  "Hey!"

  He had intended a resonant, indignant shout. What he produced was the humble whisper of a very sick man. It came out surrounded on all sides by the phlegm on which he seemed to be choking.

  Mamma, did George put the horse in?

  That was the delirium talking. An irrational thought, zooming boldly across the field of more rational cogitation like a meteor. All the same, it almost fooled him for a second. He wasn't going to be up for long. The thought filled him with panic. Looking at the scrawny sticks of his arms, he guessed he had lost as much as thirty pounds, and there hadn't been all that much of him to start with. This ... this whatever-it-was ... was going to kill him. The idea that he might die babbling insanities and inanities like a senile old man terrified him.

  Georgie's gone courting Norma Willis. You get that horse your ownself, Vic, and put his nosebag on like a good boy.

  Ain't my job.

  Victor, you love your mamma, now.

  I do. But it ain't--

  You got to love your mamma, now. Mamma's got the flu.

  No you don't, Mamma. You got TB. It's the TB that's going to kill you. In nineteen and forty-seven. And George is going to die just about six days after he gets to Korea, time enough for just one letter and then bang bang bang. George is--

  Vic, you help me now and put that horse in and that is my last word ON it.

  "I'm the one with the flu, not her," he whispered, surfacing again. "It's me."

  He was looking at the door, and thinking it was a damn funny door even for a hospital. It was round at the corners, outlined with pop-rivets, and the lower jamb was set six inches or more up from the tile floor. Even a jackleg carpenter like Vic Palfrey could

  (gimme the funnies Vic you had em long enough)

  (Mamma he took my funnypages! Give em back! Give em baaaack!)

  build better than that. It was

  (steel)

  Something in the thought drove a nail deep into his brain and Vic struggled to sit up so he could see the door better. Yes, it was. It definitely was. A steel door. Why was he in a hospital behind a steel door? What had happened? Was he really dying? Had he best be thinking of just how he was going to meet his God? God, what had happened? He tried desperately to pierce the hanging gray fog, but only voices came through, far away, voices he could put no names against.

  Now what I say is this . . . they just got to say . . . 'fuck this inflation shit ...'

  Better turn off your pumps, Hap.

  (Hap? Bill Hapscomb? Who was he? I know that name)

  Holy moly ...

  They're dead, okay ...

  Gimme your hand and I'll pull you up outta there ...

  Gimme the funnies Vic you had --

  At that moment the sun sank far enough below the horizon to cause a light-activated circuit (or in this case, an absence-of-light-activated circuit) to kick in. The lights went on in Vic's room. As the room lit up, he saw the row of faces observing him solemnly from behind two layers of glass and he screamed, at first thinking these were the people who had been holding conversations in his mind. One of the figures, a man in doctor's whites, was gesturing urgently to someone outside Vic's field of vision, but Vic was already over his scare. He was too weak to stay scared long. But the sudden fright that had come with the silent bloom of light and this vision of staring faces (like a jury of ghosts in their hospital whites) had cleared away some of the blockage in his mind and he knew where he was. Atlanta. Atlanta, Georgia. They had come and taken him away--him and Hap and Norm and Norm's wife and Norm's kids. They had taken Hank Carmichael. Stu Redman. God alone knew how many others. Vic had been scared and indignant. Sure, he had the snuffles and sneezes, but he surely wasn't coming down with cholera or whatever it was that poor man Campion and his family had had. He'd been running a low-grade fever, too, and he remembered that Norm Bruett had stumbled and needed help getting up the steps to the plane. His wife had been scared, crying, and little Bobby Bruett had been crying too--crying and coughing. A raspy, croupy cough. The plane had been at the small landing strip outside of Braintree, but to get beyond the Arnette town limits they had had to pass a roadblock on US 93, and men had been stringing bobwire ... stringing bobwire right out into the desert . . .

  A red light flashed on over the strange door. There was a hissing sound, then a sound like a pump running. When it kicked off, the door opened. The man who came in was dressed in a huge white pressure suit with a transparent faceplate. Behind the faceplate, the man's head bobbed like a balloon enclosed in a capsule. There were pressure tanks on his back, and when he spoke, his voice was metallic and clipped, devoid of all human quality. It might have been a voice coming from one of those video games, like the one that said "Try again, Space Cadet" when you fucked up your last go.

  It rasped: "How are you feeling, Mr. Palfrey?"

  But Vic couldn't answer. Vic had gone back down into the green depths. It was his mamma he saw behind the faceplate of the white-suit. Mamma had been dressed in white when Poppa took him and George to see her for the last time in the sanny-tarium. She had to go to the sanny-tarium so
everybody else in the fambly wouldn't catch what she had. TB was catching. You could die.

  He talked to his mamma . . . said he would be good and put in the horse . . . told her George had taken the funnies . . . asked her if she felt better . . . asked her if she thought she would be home soon . . . and the man in the white-suit gave him a shot and he sank deeper and his words became incoherent. The man in the white-suit glanced back at the faces behind the glass wall and shook his head.

  He clicked an intercom switch inside his helmet with his chin and said, "If this one doesn't work, we'll lose him by midnight."

  For Vic Palfrey, magic hour was over.

  "Just roll up your sleeve, Mr. Redman," the pretty nurse with the dark hair said. "This won't take a minute." She was holding the blood pressure cuff in two gloved hands. Behind the plastic mask she was smiling as if they shared an amusing secret.

  "No," Stu said.

  The smile faltered a little. "It's only your blood pressure. It won't take a minute."

  "No."

  "Doctor's orders," she said, becoming businesslike. "Please."

  "If it's doctor's orders, let me talk to the doctor."

  "I'm afraid he's busy right now. If you'll just--"

  "I'll wait," Stu said equably, making no move to unbutton the cuff of his shirtsleeve.

  "This is only my job. You don't want me to get in trouble, do you?" This time she gave him a charming-waif smile. "If you'll only let me--"

  "I won't," Stu said. "Go back and tell them. They'll send somebody."

  Looking troubled, the nurse went across to the steel door and turned a square key in a lockplate. The pump kicked on, the door shooshed open, and she stepped through. As it closed, she gave Stu a final reproachful look. Stu gazed back blandly.

  When the door was closed, he got up and went restlessly to the window--double-paned glass and barred on the outside--but it was full dark now and there was nothing to see. He went back and sat down. He was wearing faded jeans and a checked shirt and his brown boots with the stitching beginning to bulge up the sides. He ran a hand up the side of his face and winced disapprovingly at the prickle. They wouldn't let him shave, and he haired up fast.

  He had no objection to the tests themselves. What he objected to was being kept in the dark, kept scared. He wasn't sick, at least not yet, but scared plenty. There was some sort of snow job going on here, and he wasn't going to be a party to it anymore until somebody told him something about what had happened in Arnette and what that fellow Campion had to do with it. At least then he could base his fears on something solid.

  They had expected him to ask before now, he could read it in their eyes. They had certain ways of keeping things from you in hospitals. Four years ago his wife had died of cancer at the age of twenty-seven, it had started in her womb and then just raced up through her like wildfire, and Stu had observed the way they got around her questions, either by changing the subject or giving her information in large, technical lumps. So he simply hadn't asked, and he could see it had worried them. Now it was time to ask, and he would get some answers. In words of one syllable.

  He could fill in some of the blank spots on his own. Campion and his wife and child had something pretty bad. It hit you like the flu or a summer cold, only it kept on getting worse, presumably until you choked to death on your own snot or until the fever burned you down. It was highly contagious.

  They had come and got him on the afternoon of the seventeenth, two days ago. Four army men and a doctor. Polite but firm. There was no question of declining; all four of the army men had been wearing sidearms. That was when Stu Redman started being seriously scared.

  There had been a regular caravan going out of Arnette and over to the airstrip in Braintree. Stu had been riding with Vic Palfrey, Hap, the Bruetts, Hank Carmichael and his wife, and two army non-coms. They were all crammed into an army station wagon, and the army guys wouldn't say aye, nay, or maybe no matter how hysterical Lila Bruett got.

  The other wagons were crammed, too. Stu hadn't seen all the people in them, but he had seen all five of the Hodges family, and Chris Ortega, brother of Carlos, the volunteer ambulance driver. Chris was the bartender down at the Indian Head. He had seen Parker Nason and his wife, the elderly people from the trailer park near Stu's house. Stu guessed that they had netted up everyone who had been in the gas station and everyone that the people from the gas station said they'd talked to since Campion crashed into the pumps.

  At the town limits there had been two olive-green trucks blocking the road. Stu guessed the other roads going into Arnette were most likely blocked off, too. They were stringing barbed wire, and when they had the town fenced off they would probably post sentries.

  So it was serious. Deadly serious.

  He sat patiently in the chair by the hospital bed he hadn't had to use, waiting for the nurse to bring someone. The first someone would most likely be no one. Maybe by morning they would finally send in a someone who would have enough authority to tell him the things he needed to know. He could wait. Patience had always been Stuart Redman's strong suit.

  For something to do, he began to tick over the conditions of the people who had ridden to the airstrip with him. Norm had been the only obvious sick one. Coughing, bringing up phlegm, feverish. The rest seemed to be suffering to a greater or lesser degree from the common cold. Luke Bruett was sneezing. Lila Bruett and Vic Palfrey had mild coughs. Hap had the sniffles and kept blowing his nose. They hadn't sounded much different from the first-and second-grade classes Stu remembered attending as a little boy, when at least two thirds of the kids present seemed to have some kind of a bug.

  But the thing that scared him most of all--and maybe it was only coincidence--was what had happened just as they were turning onto the airstrip. The army driver had let out three sudden bellowing sneezes. Probably just coincidence. June was a bad time in east-central Texas for people with allergies. Or maybe the driver was just coming down with a common, garden-variety cold instead of the weird shit the rest of them bad. Stu wanted to believe that. Because something that could jump from one person to another that quickly . . .

  Their army escort had boarded the plane with them. They rode stolidly, refusing to answer any questions except as to their destination. They were going to Atlanta. They would be told more there (a bald-faced lie). Beyond that, the army men refused to say.

  Hap had been sitting next to Stu on the flight, and he was pretty well sloshed. The plane was army too, strictly functional, but the booze and the food had been first-class airline stuff. Of course, instead of being served by a pretty stewardess, a plank-faced sergeant took your order, but if you could overlook that, you could get along pretty well. Even Lila Bruett had calmed down with a couple of grasshoppers in her.

  Hap leaned close, bathing Stu in a warm mist of Scotch fumes. "This is a pretty funny bunch of ole boys, Stuart. Ain't one of em under fifty, nor one with a weddin ring. Career boys, low rank."

  About half an hour before they touched down, Norm Bruett had some kind of a fainting spell and Lila began to scream. Two of the hard-faced stewards bundled Norm into a blanket and brought him around in fairly short order. Lila, no longer calm, continued to scream. After a while she threw up her grasshoppers and the chicken salad sandwich she had eaten. Two of the good ole boys went expressionlessly about the job of cleaning it up.

  "What is all this?" Lila screamed. "What's wrong with my man? Are we going to die? Are my babies going to die?" She had one "baby" in a headlock under each arm, their heads digging into her plentiful breasts. Luke and Bobby looked frightened and uncomfortable and rather embarrassed at the fuss she was making. "Why won't somebody answer me? Isn't this America?"

  "Can't somebody shut her up?" Chris Ortega had grumbled from the back of the plane. "Christly woman's worse'n a jukebox with a broken record inside it."

  One of the army men had forced a glass of milk on her and Lila did shut up. She spent the rest of the ride looking out the window at the countryside passing
far below and humming. Stu guessed there had been more than milk in that glass.

  When they touched down, there had been four Cadillac limousines waiting for them. The Arnette folks got into three of them. Their army escort had gotten into the fourth. Stu guessed that those good old boys with no wedding rings--or close relatives, probably--were now somewhere right in this building.

  The red light went on over his door. When the compressor or pump or whatever it was had stopped, a man in one of the white space-suits stepped through. Dr. Denninger. He was young. He had black hair, olive skin, sharp features, and a mealy mouth.

  "Patty Greer says you gave her some trouble," Denninger's chest-speaker said as he clopped over to Stu. "She's quite upset."

  "No need for her to be," Stu said easily. It was hard to sound easy, but he felt it was important to hide his fear from this man. Denninger looked and acted like the kind of man who would ride his help and bullyrag them around but lick up to his superiors like an egg-suck dog. That kind of man could be pushed a ways if he thought you held the whip hand. But if he smelled fear on you, he would hand you the same old cake: a thin icing of "I'm sorry I can't tell you more" on top and a lot of contempt for stupid civilians who wanted to know more than what was good for them underneath.