The Stand (Original Edition) (18 page)

Larry decided to go down and see if Mr. Freeman could watch her while he got over to the hospital. Or should he call a private ambulance? Christ, how come nobody knew about these things when they had to? Why didn’t they teach it in school?

In the bedroom his mother’s laborious breathing went on and on.

“I’ll be back,” he muttered, and went to the door. He was scared, terrified for her, but underneath another voice was saying things like:
These things always happen to me.
And:
Why did it have to happen just after I got the good news?
And most despicable of all:
How bad is this going to screw up my plans? How many things am I going to have to change around?

He hated that voice, wished it would die a quick, nasty death, but it just went on and on.

He ran down the stairs to Mr. Freeman’s apartment and thunder boomed through the dark clouds. As he reached the first-floor landing the door blew open and a curtain of rain swept in.

Stu Redman was frightened.

He looked out the barred window of his new room in Stovington, Vermont, and what he saw was a small town far below, miniature gas station signs and some sort of mill, a main street, a river, the turnpike, and beyond the turnpike the granite backbone of far western New England—the Green Mountains.

He was frightened because this was more like a jail cell than a hospital room. He was frightened because Denninger was gone. He hadn’t seen Denninger since the whole crazy three-ring circus moved from Atlanta to here. Deitz was gone, too. Stu thought that maybe Denninger and Deitz were sick, perhaps dead already.

Somebody had slipped. Either that, or the disease that Charles D. Campion had brought to Arnette was a lot more communicable than anyone had guessed. Either way, the integrity of the Atlanta Plague Center had been breached, and Stu thought that everyone who had been there was now getting a chance to do a little firsthand research on the virus they had been studying.

They still did tests on him here, but they seemed desultory. The schedule had become slipshod. Results were scrawled down and he had a suspicion that someone looked at them cursorily, shook his head, and dumped them in the nearest shredder.

That wasn’t even the worst. The worst was the guns. The nurses who came in to take blood or spit or urine were now always accompanied by a soldier in a white-suit, and the soldier had a gun in a plastic Baggie. The Baggie was fastened over the wrist of the soldier’s right gauntlet. The gun was an army-issue .45, and Stu had no doubt that, if he tried any of the games he had tried with Deitz, the .45 would tear the end of the Baggie into smoking, burning shreds and Stu Redman would cease to exist.

If they were just going through the motions now, then he had become expendable. He was under detention.

He had watched the six o’clock news very carefully, as he did every night now. The men who had attempted the coup in India had been branded “outside agitators” and shot. The police were still looking for the person(s) who had blown a power station in Laramie, Wyoming, yesterday. The Supreme Court had decided 6-3 that known homosexuals could not be fired from civil service jobs. And for the first time, there had been a whisper of other things.

AEC officials in Miller County, Arkansas, had denied there was any chance of a reactor meltdown. The atomic power plant in the small town of Fouke, about thirty miles from the Texas border, had been plagued with minor circuitry problems in the equipment that controlled the pile’s cooling cycle, but there was no cause for alarm. The army units in that area were merely a precautionary measure. Stu wondered what precautions the army could take if the Fouke reactor did indeed melt down. He thought the army might be in southwestern Arkansas for other reasons altogether. Fouke wasn’t all that far from Amette.

Another item reported that an East Coast flu epidemic seemed to be in the early stages—the Russian strain, nothing to really worry about except for the very old and the very young. A tired New York City doctor was interviewed in a hallway of Brooklyn’s Mercy Hospital. He said the flu was exceptionally tenacious for Russian-A, and he urged viewers to get flu boosters. Then he suddenly started to say something else, but the sound cut off and you could only see his lips moving. The picture cut back to the newscaster in the studio, who said: “There have been some reported deaths in New York as a result of this latest flu outbreak, but contributing causes such as urban pollution and emphysema have also been present in most of those fatal cases. Government health officials emphasize that this is Russian-A flu, not the more dangerous swine flu. In the meantime, old advice is good advice, the doctors say: Stay in bed, get lots of rest, drink fluids, and take aspirin for the fever.”

The sun was touching the horizon now, tinting it a gold that would turn to red and fading orange soon enough. The nights were the worst. They had flown him to a part of the country that was alien to him. In this early summer season, the amount of green he could see from his window seemed abnormal, excessive, a little scary. He had no friends; as far as he knew all the people who had been on the plane with him when it flew from Braintree to Atlanta were now dead. He was surrounded by unfriendly automatons who took his blood and pointed revolvers at him. He was afraid for his life, although he still felt fine and had begun to believe that he wasn’t going to catch It, whatever It was.

Thoughtfully, Stu wondered if it would be possible to escape from here.

When Creighton came in on June 24, he found Starkey looking at the monitors, his hands behind his back. He could see the old man’s West Point ring glittering on his right hand, and he felt a wave of pity for him. Starkey had been cruising on pills for ten days, and he was close to the inevitable crash. But, Creighton thought, if his suspicion about the phone call was correct, the crash had already occurred.

“Len,” Starkey said, as if surprised. “Good of you to come in.”

“De nada,”
Creighton said with a slight smile.

“You know who that was on the phone.”

“It was really him, then?”

“The old Georgia Giant himself. I’ve been relieved. The clodhopper relieved me, Len. Of course I knew it was coming. But it still hurts. Hurts like hell. It hurts coming from that grinning, gladhanding sack of shit.”

Len Creighton nodded. The night that man had been elected had been a night of horror for him, and for all thinking men.

“Well,” Starkey said, passing a hand over his face. “It’s done, anyway. You’re in charge now. He wants you in Washington as soon as you can get there. He’ll have you on the carpet and he’ll chew your ass to a bloody rag, but you just stand there and yessir him and take it. We’ve salvaged what we can. It’s enough. I’m convinced it’s enough.”

“If so, this country ought to get down on its knees to you.”

Starkey waved it away. “One thing is top priority. You’ve got to see Jack Cleveland, first chance you get. He knows who we’ve got behind both curtains, iron and bamboo. He knows how to get in touch with them, and he won’t stick at what has to be done. He’ll know it’ll have to be quick.”

“I don’t understand, Billy.”

“We have to assume the worst,” Starkey said, and a queer grin came over his face. It lifted his upper lip and made it wrinkle like the snout of a dog protecting a farmyard. He pointed a finger at the sheets of yellow flimsy on the table. “It’s out of control now. It’s popped up in Oregon, Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida. Tentative cases in Mexico and Chile. When we lost Atlanta, we lost the three men best equipped to deal with the problem. We’re getting exactly nowhere with Stuart Redman. Did you know they actually injected him with the Blue virus? He thought it was a sedative. He killed it, and no one has the slightest idea how. If we had six weeks, we might be able to turn the trick. But we don’t. The flu story is the best one, but it is imperative—
imperative
—that the other side never sees this as a ... an artificial situation created in America. It might give them ideas.

“Cleveland has between eight and twenty men and women in the USSR and between five and ten in each of the European satellite countries. Not even I know how many he has in Red China.” Starkey’s mouth was trembling again. “When you see Cleveland this afternoon, all you need tell him is
Rome falls.
You won’t forget?” “No,” Len said. His lips felt curiously cold. “But do you really expect that they’ll do it? Those men and women?”

“Our people got those vials one week ago. They believe they contain radioactive trace particles to be charted by our Sky-Cruise satellites. That’s all they need to know, isn’t it, Len?”

“Yes, Billy.”

“And if things do go from bad to ... to worse, no one will ever know. Project Blue was uninfiltrated to the very end, we’re sure of that. A new virus, a mutation . . . our opposite numbers may suspect, but there won’t be time enough. Share and share alike, Len.” “Yes.”

Starkey was looking at the monitors again. “My daughter gave me a book of poems some years ago. By a man named Yeets. She said every military man should read Yeets. I think it was her idea of a joke. You ever heard of Yeets, Len?”

“I think so,” Creighton said, considering and rejecting the idea of telling Starkey the man’s name was pronounced Yates.

“I read every line,” Starkey said, as he peered into the silent cafeteria. “Mostly because she thought I wouldn’t. It’s a mistake to become too predictable. I didn’t understand much of it—I believe the man must have been crazy—but I read it. Funny poetry. Didn’t al-

ways rhyme. But there was one poem in that book that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind. It seemed as if that man was describing everything I dedicated my life to, its hopelessness, its damned nobility. He said that things fall apart, the center doesn’t hold. Things get flaky, Len. That’s what he meant. Yeets knew that even if he didn’t know anything else.”

“Yes, sir,” Creighton said quietly.

“The end of it gave me goosebumps the first time I read it, and it still does. I’ve got that part by heart. ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ ” Creighton stood silent. He had nothing to say.

“The rough beast is on its way,” Starkey said, turning around. He was weeping and grinning. “Things are falling apart. The job is to hold as much as you can for as long as you can.”

“Yes, sir,” Creighton said, and for the first time he felt the sting of tears in his own eyes. “Yes, Billy.”

Randall Flagg, the dark man, strode south on US 51, listening to the nightsounds that pressed close on both sides of this narrow road that would take him sooner or later out of Idaho and into Nevada. From Nevada he might go anywhere. It was his country, and none knew or loved it better. He knew where the roads went, and he walked them at night. Now, an hour before dawn, he was somewhere between Grasmere and Riddle, west of Twin Falls, still north of the Duck Valley Reservation that spreads across two states.

He walked rapidly, rundown bootheels clocking against the paved surface of the road, and if car lights showed on the horizon he faded back and back, down over the soft shoulder to the high grass where the night bugs make their homes . . . and the car would pass him, the driver perhaps feeling a slight chill as if he had driven through an air pocket, his sleeping wife and children stirring uneasily, as if all had been touched with a bad dream at the same instant.

He walked south, south on US 51, the worn heels of his sharptoed cowboy boots clocking on the pavement; a tall man with no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket. His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature. When this man handed you a tract you took it no matter what the subject: the dangers of atomic power plants, the role played by the International Jewish Cartel in the overthrow of friendly governments, the CIA, the farm workers’ union, the Jehovah’s Witnesses (
If
 
You Can Answer These Ten Questions "Yes,” You Have Been SAVED!),
the Blacks for Militant Equality, the Kode of the Klan. He had them all, and more, too. There was a button on each breast of his denim jacket. On the right, a yellow smile-face. On the left, a pig wearing a policeman’s cap. The legend was written beneath in a semicircle: HOW’S YOUR PORK?

He moved on, not pausing, not slowing, but alive to the night. His eyes seemed almost frantic with the night’s possibilities. There was a Boy Scouts of America knapsack on his back, old and battered. There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think—and you would be right. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make waterglasses shatter in the hands of tired truckstop waitresses, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with stake-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody.

He moved on south, somewhere on US 51 between Grasmere and Riddle, now closer to Nevada. Soon he would camp and sleep the day away, waking up as evening drew on. He would read as his supper cooked over a small, smokeless campfire, it didn’t matter what; words from some battered and coverless paperback novel. And after supper he would walk, walk south on this excellent two-lane highway cutting through this godforsaken wilderness, watching and smelling and listening as the climate grew more arid, strangling everything down to sagebrush and tumbleweed, watching as the mountains began to poke out of the earth like dinosaur bones. By dawn tomorrow or the day after that he would pass into Nevada, striking Owyhee first and then Mountain City, and in Mountain City there was a man named Christopher Bradenton who would see that he had a clean car. With a car the country would come alive in all its glorious possibilities, a body politic with its network of roads embedded in its skin like marvelous capillaries, ready to take him, the dark speck of foreign matter, anywhere.

He hammered along, arms swinging by his sides. He was known, well known, along the highways in hiding that are traveled by the poor and the mad, by the professional revolutionaries and by those who have been taught to hate so well that their hate shows on their faces like harelips and they are unwelcome except by others like them, who welcome them to cheap rooms with slogans and posters on the walls, to basements where lengths of sawed-off pipe are held in padded vises while they are stuffed with high explosives, to back rooms where lunatic plans are laid: to kill a cabinet member, to kidnap the child of a visiting dignitary, or to break into a boardroom meeting of Standard Oil with grenades and machine guns and murder in the name of the people. He was known there, and even the maddest of them could only look at his dark and grinning face at an oblique angle. The women he took to bed with him, even if they had reduced intercourse to something as casual as getting a snack from the refrigerator, accepted him with a stiffening of the body, a turning away of the countenance. Sometimes they accepted him with tears. They took him the way they might take a ram with golden eyes or a black dog—and when it was done they were
cold,
so
cold,
it seemed impossible they could ever be warm again. When he walked into a meeting the hysterical babble ceased—the backbiting, recriminations, accusations, the ideological rhetoric. For a moment there would be dead silence and they would start to turn to him and then turn away, as if he had come to them with some old and terrible engine of destruction cradled in his arms, something a thousand times worse than the plastic explosive made in the basement labs of renegade chemistry students or the black market arms obtained from some greedy army post supply sergeant. It seemed that he had come to them with a device gone rusty with blood and packed for centuries in the Cosmoline of screams but now ready again, carried to their meeting like some infernal gift, a birthday cake with nitroglycerine candles. And when the talk began again it would be rational and disciplined —as rational and disciplined as madmen can make it—and things would be agreed upon.