The Stand (Original Edition) (109 page)

When it was done, a moment of sanity had come back. A moment of choice. He had stared around at the helicopters parked in the echoing hangar and then down at his hands. They smelled like a roll of burned caps. This was not Powtanville. There were no helicopters in Powtanville. The Indiana sun did not shine with the savage brilliance of this sun. He was in Nevada. Carley and his poolhall buddies were dead. Dead of the superflu.

Trash had looked doubtfully at his handiwork. What was he doing, sabotaging the dark man’s equipment? It was senseless, insane. He would undo it, and quickly.

Oh, but the lovely explosions. The lovely
fires.
Flaming jet fuel streaming everywhere. Helicopters exploding out of the air. So beautiful.

And he had suddenly thrown his new life away. He had trotted back to his sand-crawler, a furtive grin on his sunblackened face. He had gotten in and had driven away . . . but not too far away. He had waited, and finally a fuel truck had come out of the motor pool garage and had trundled across the tarmac like a large olive-drab beetle. And when it blew, exploding greasy fire in every direction, Trash had dropped his fieldglasses and had bellowed at the sky, shaking his fists in inarticulate joy. But the joy had not lasted long. It had been replaced by deadly terror and sick, mourning sorrow.

He had driven northwest into the desert, pushing the sand-crawler along at near-suicidal speeds. How long ago? He didn’t know. If he had been told that this was the sixteenth of September, he would only have nodded in a total blank lack of understanding.

He thought he would kill himself, that there was nothing else left for him, but he hadn’t done it. He didn’t know why. But some force, more powerful than the agony of his remorse and loneliness, had stopped him. It seemed that even burning himself to death like a Buddhist monk was not penance enough. He had slept. And when he awoke, he discovered that a new thought had crept into his brain as he slept, and that thought was:

REDEMPTION.

Was it possible? He didn’t know. But if he found something . . . something
big . . .
and brought it to the dark man in Las Vegas, might it not be possible? And even if
REDEMPTION
was impossible, perhaps
ATONEMENT
was not. If it was true, there was still a chance he could die content.

What? Not land mines or a fleet of flametracks, not grenades or automatic weapons. None of those things were
big
enough. He knew where there were two large experimental bombers (they had been built without congressional knowledge, paid for out of blind defense funds), but he could not get them back to Vegas, and even if he could, there was no one there who could fly them. From the looks of them, they crewed at least ten, maybe more.

He was like an infrared scope that senses heat in darkness and reveals those heat sources as vague red-devil shapes. He was able, in some strange way, to sense the things that had been left out in this wasteland, where so many military projects had been carried out. He could have gone straight west, straight to Project Blue, where the whole thing had begun. But cold plague was not to his taste, and in his confused but not entirely illogical way, he thought it would not be to Flagg’s taste, either. Plague didn’t care who it killed.

So he had gone northwest from Indian Springs, into the sandy desolation of the Nellis Air Force Range, stopping his crawler when he had to cut through high barbed wire fences marked with signs that read U. S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
NO TRESPASSING
and ARMED SENTRIES and GUARD DOGS and THERE IS A HIGH-VOLTAGE CHARGE PASSING THROUGH THESE WIRES. But the electricity was dead, like the guard dogs and the armed sentries, and Trashcan Man drove on, correcting his course from time to time. He was being drawn, drawn to something. He didn’t know what it was, but he thought it was big. Big enough.

The crawler’s Goodyear balloon tires rolled steadily on, carrying Trash through dry washes and up slopes so rocky that they looked like half-exposed stegosaurus spines. The air hung still and dry. The temperature hovered at just above 100°. The only sound was the drone of the crawler’s modified Studebaker engine.

He topped a knoll, saw what was below, and threw the transmission into neutral for a moment. There was a huddled complex of buildings down there, shimmering through the rising heat like quicksilver. Quonset huts and low cinderblock. Vehicles stalled here and there on the dusty streets. The whole area was surrounded by three courses of barbed wire, and he could see the porcelain conductors along the wire. These were not the small conductors the size of a knuckle that passed along a weak stay-away charge; these were the giant ones, the size of a closed fist.

A paved two-lane road led to a guardhouse. No cute little signs here saying CHECK YOUR CAMERA WITH MP ON DUTY or IF YOU LIKED US, TELL YOUR CONGRESSMAN. The only sign in evidence was red on yellow, the colors of danger, curt and to the point: PRESENT IDENTIFICATION IMMEDIATELY.

“Thank you,” Trashcan whispered. He had no idea who he was thanking. “Oh thank you . . . thank you.” His special sense had led him to this place, but he had known it was here all along. Somewhere.

He put the crawler in its forward gear and lurched down the slope. Ten minutes later he was nosing up the access road to the guardhouse. There were black-and-white-striped crash barriers across the road, and Trash got out to examine them. Places like this had big generators to make sure there was plenty of emergency power. He doubted if any generator would have gone on supplying power for three months, but he would still have to be very careful and make sure everything was blown before going in. What he wanted was now very near at hand. He wouldn’t allow himself to become overeager and get cooked like a roast in a microwave oven.

Behind six inches of bulletproof glass, a mummy in an army uniform stared out and beyond him.

Trash ducked under the crash barrier on the ingress side of the guardhouse and approached the door of the little concrete building. He tried it and it opened. That was good. When a place like this had to switch over to emergency power, everything was supposed to lock automatically. If you were taking a crap, you got locked in the bathroom until the crisis was over. But if the emergency power failed, everything unlocked again.

The dead sentry had a dry, sweet, interesting smell, like cinnamon and sugar mixed together for toast. He had not bloated or rotted; he had simply dried up. There were still black discolorations under his neck, the distinctive trademark of Captain Trips. Standing in the comer behind him was a BAR. Trashcan Man took it and went back outside.

He set the BAR for single fire, fiddled with the sight, and then socked it into the hollow of his scrawny right shoulder. He sighted down on one of the porcelain conductors and squeezed off a shot. There was a loud hand-clapping sound and an exciting whiff of cordite. The conductor exploded every whichway, but there was no purple-white glare of high voltage electricity. Trashcan Man smiled.

He went back to the sand-crawler, put it in gear, and drove it through the crash barriers. They broke off with a snapping, grinding sound and the crawler’s big balloon tires rolled over them. The desert sun pounded down. Trashcan Man’s peculiar eyes sparkled happily. He drove up the street to the first Quonset hut.

It was a barracks. The shadowy interior was filled with that sugar-and-cinnamon smell. There were perhaps twenty soldiers scattered among the fifty or so beds. Trashcan Man walked up the aisle between them, wondering where he was going. There was nothing in here for him, was there? These men had once been weapons of a sort, but they had been neutralized by the flu.

But there was something at the very rear of the building that interested him. A sign. He walked up to read it. The heat in here was tremendous. It made his head thump and swell. But when he stood in front of the sign, he began to smile. Yes, it was here. Somewhere on this base was what he had been looking for.

The sign showed a cartoon man in a cartoon shower. He was soaping his cartoon genitals busily; they were almost entirely covered with a drift of cartoon bubbles. The caption beneath read:
REMEMBER!
IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO SHOWER
DAILY!

Below that was a yellow-and-black emblem that showed three triangles pointed downward.

The symbol for radiation.

Trashcan Man laughed like a child and clapped his hands in the stillness.

Whitney Horgan found Lloyd in his room, lying on the big round bed he had most recently shared with Dayna Jurgens. There was a large gin and tonic balanced on his bare chest. He was staring solemnly up at his reflection in the overhead mirror.

“Come on in,” he said when he saw Whitney. “Don’t stand on ceremony, for Chrissake. Don’t bother to knock. Bastard.” It came out
bassard
.

“You drunk, Lloyd?” Whitney asked cautiously.

“Nope. Not yet. But I’m gettin there.”

“Is
he
here?”

“Who? Fearless Leader?” Lloyd sat up. “He’s around someplace. The Midnight Rambler.” He laughed and lay back down.

Whitney said in a low voice, “You want to watch what you’re saying. You know it’s not a good idea to hit the hard stuff when he’s—”

“Fuck it.”

“Remember what happened to Hec Drogan. And Strellerton.”

Lloyd nodded. “You’re right. The walls have ears. The fucking walls have ears. You ever hear that saying?”

“Yeah, once or twice. It’s a true saying around here, Lloyd.”

“You bet.” Lloyd suddenly sat up and threw his drink across the room. The glass shattered. “There’s one for the sweeper, right, Whitney?”

“You okay, Lloyd?”

“I’m all right. You want a gin and tonic?”

Whitney hesitated for a moment. “Naw. I don’t like them without the lime.”

“I got lime. Comes out of a little squeeze bottle.” Lloyd went over to the bar and held up a plastic RealLime. “Looks just like the Green Giant’s left testicle. Funny, huh?”

“Does it taste like lime?”

“Sure,” Lloyd said morosely. “What do you say? Be a man and have a drink with me.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“We’ll have them by the window and take in the view.”

“No,” Whitney said, harshly and abruptly. Lloyd paused on his way to the bar, his face suddenly paling. He looked toward Whitney, and for a moment their eyes met.

“Yeah, okay,” Lloyd said. “Sorry, man. Poor taste.”

“That’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay, and both of them knew it. The woman Flagg had introduced as his “bride” had taken a high dive the day before. Lloyd remembered Ace High saying that Dayna couldn’t jump from the balcony because the windows didn’t open. But the penthouse had a sundeck. Guess they must have thought none of the
real
high rollers—Arabs, most of them—would ever take the dive. A lot they knew.

He fixed Whitney a gin and tonic and they sat and drank in silence for a while. Outside, the sun was going down in a red glare. At last Whitney said in a voice almost too low to be heard: “Do you really think she dived?”

Lloyd shrugged. “What does it matter? Sure. I think she dived. You ready?”

Whitney looked at his glass and saw with some surprise that he was indeed ready. He handed it to Lloyd, who took it over to the bar. Lloyd was pouring the gin freehand, and Whitney had a nice buzz on.

Again they drank in silence for a while, watching the sun go down.

“What do you hear about that guy Cullen?” Whitney asked finally.

“Nothing. I don’t hear nothing, Barry don’t hear nothing. Nothing from Route 40, from Route 30, from Route 2 and 74 and 1-15. Nothing from the back roads. They’re all covered and they’re all nothing. He’s out in the desert someplace, and if he keeps moving at night and if he can figure out how to keep moving east, he’s going to slip through. And what does it matter, anyhow? What can he tell them?”

“I don’t know.”

“No? I don’t know either. Let him go, that’s what I say.”

Whitney felt uncomfortable. Lloyd was getting perilously close to criticizing the boss again. His buzz-on was stronger, and he was glad.

Maybe soon he would find the nerve to say what he had come here to say.

“I’ll tell you something,” Lloyd said, leaning forward. “He’s losing his stuff. You ever hear that fucking saying? It’s the eighth inning and he’s losing his stuff and there’s no-fucking-body warming up in the bullpen.”

“Lloyd, I—”

“You ready?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

Lloyd made them new drinks. He handed one to Whitney, and a little shiver went through
him
as he sipped. It was almost raw gin.

“Losing his stuff,” Lloyd said, returning to his text. “First Dayna, then this guy Cullen. His own wife—if that’s what she was—goes and takes a dive. Do you think that was in his game plan?”

“We shouldn’t be talking about it.”

“And Trashcan Man. Look what that guy did all by himself. With friends like that, who needs enemies? That’s what I’d like to know.” “Lloyd—”

Lloyd was shaking his head. “I don’t understand it at all. Everything was going so good, right up to the night he came and said the old lady was dead over there in the Free Zone. He said the last obstacle was out of our way. But that’s when things started to get funny. Now I just don’t know. We can take em by land assault next spring, I guess. We sure as shit can’t go before then. But by next spring, God knows what they might have rigged up over there, you know? We were going to hit them before they could think up any funny surprises, and now we can’t. Plus, holy God on His throne, there’s Trashy to think about. He’s out there in the desert ramming around someplace, and I sure as hell—”

“Lloyd,” Whitney said in a low, choked voice. “Listen to me.” Lloyd leaned forward, concerned. “What? What’s the trouble?”

“I didn’t even know if I’d have the guts to ask you,” Whitney said. He was squeezing his glass compulsively. “Me and Ace High and Ronnie Sykes and Jenny Engstrom. We’re cutting loose. You want to come? Christ, I must be crazy telling you this, with you so close to him.”