The Stand (Original Edition) (90 page)

“What does that leave?” Larry asked.

It was Fran who answered. “Exile.”

Larry turned to her. Stu was nodding slowly, looking at his cigarette.

“Just drive him out?” Larry asked.

“Him and her both,” Stu said.

“But will Flagg take them like that?” Frannie asked.

Stu looked up at her then. “Fran, that ain’t our problem.”

She nodded and thought:
Oh, Harold, I didn’t want it to come out like this. Never in a million years did I want it to come out this way.
“Any idea what they might be planning?” Stu asked.

Larry shrugged. “I can think of some things.”

“Such as?”

“Maybe sabotage at the power plant. Maybe some sort of assassination attempt on you or Frannie. Although he doesn’t come right out and say it, I think he went hunting for Mother Abagail with you and Ralph that time in hopes of getting you alone and killing you.” Stu said, “He had his chance.”

“Maybe he chickened.”

“Stop it, can’t you?” Fran asked dully. “Please.”

Stu got up and went back into the living room. There was a CB in there hooked up to a Die-Hard battery. After some tinkering, he got Brad Kitchner.

“Brad, you dog! Stu Redman. Listen. Can you round up some guys to stand watch at the power station tonight?”

“Sure,” Brad’s voice came, “but what in God’s name for?”

“Well, this is kind of delicate, Bradley. I heard one way and another that somebody might try doing some mischief up there.”

Brad’s reply was blue with profanity.

Stu nodded at the mike, smiling a little. “I know how you feel. This is just for tonight and maybe tomorrow night, so far as I know. Then I guess things be ironed out.”

Brad told him he could muster twelve men without going two blocks. “This something Rich Moffat’s up to?”

“No, it ain’t Rich. Listen, I’ll be talking to you, okay?”

“Fine, Stu. I’ll have them on watch.”

Stu turned off the CB and walked back to the kitchen. “People let you be just as secret as you want to be. It scares me, you know? The old bald-headed sociologist is right. We could set ourselves up like kings here if we wanted to.”

Fran put her hand over his. “I want you to promise me something. Both of you Promise me we’ll settle this once and for all at the meeting tomorrow night. I just want it to be over.”

Larry was nodding. “Exile. Yeah. It never even crossed my mind, but it might be the best solution. Well, I’m going to collect Lucy and Leo and get home.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Stu said.

“Yeah.” He went out.

In the hour before dawn on September 2, Harold stood on the edge of Sunrise Amphitheater, looking down. The town was in a ditch of blackness. Nadine slept behind him in the small two-man tent they had picked up along with a few other camping supplies as they crept out of town.

We'll come back, though. Driving chariots.

But in his secret heart, Harold doubted that. The darkness was upon him in more ways than one. The vile bastards had stolen everything from him—Frannie, his self-respect, then his ledger, now his hope. He felt that he was going down.

Behind him, Nadine moaned in her sleep. It was a scary sound. Harold thought she was as lost as he was, maybe worse. The sounds she made in her sleep were not the sounds of a person having happy dreams.

But I can keep sane. I can do that. If I can go down to whatever’s waiting for me with my mind intact, that will be something. Yes, something.

He wondered if they had surrounded his little house, if they were waiting for him to come home so they could arrest him and throw him in the cooler. Welcome to hard times. HAWK CAGED, wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about it. Well, they would wait a long time. He was on his adventure, and he remembered all too clearly Nadine putting his hand on her white hair and saying
Too late, Harold.
How like a corpse’s her eyes had been.

“All right,” Harold whispered. “We’re going through with it.” Around and above him, the dark September wind drummed through the trees.

The Free Zone Committee meeting was rapped to order some fourteen hours later in the living room of Ralph Brentner’s house. Stu was sitting in an easy chair, tapping an endtable with the rim of his beer can. “Okay, folks, we better get started here.”

Glen sat with Larry on the curving lip of the freestanding fireplace, their backs to the modest fire Ralph had kindled there. Nick, Susan Stern, and Ralph himself sat on the couch, Nick with the inevitable pen and pad of notepaper. Brad Kitchner was standing just inside the doorway with a can of Coors in his hand, talking to A1 Bundell, who was working a scotch and soda. George Richardson and Chad Norris were sitting by the large window-wall, watching the sunset over the Flatirons.

Frannie was sitting with her back propped comfortably against the door of the closet where Nadine had planted the bomb.

Stu glanced around at the eleven people spotted around the big combination living-room/dining-room area. “Okay . . . we’ve got a right smart of business, but first I’d like to thank Ralph for providing the roof over our heads and the booze and the crackers—”

He’s really getting good at it, Frannie thought. She tried to judge just how much Stu had changed since the day she and Harold had met him, and couldn’t do it. You get too subjective about the behavior of the people you’re close to, she decided. But she knew that when she first met him, Stu would have been stricken at the thought of having to chair a meeting of almost a dozen people . . . and he probably would have jumped straight up to heaven at the thought of chairing a mass Free Zone meeting of over a thousand people. She was now watching a Stu that never would have been without the plague.

It’s released you, my darling,
she thought. /
can cry for the others and still be so proud of you and love you so much
—

She shifted a little, propping her back more firmly against the closet door.

“We’ll have our guests speak first,” Stu said, “and after that we’ll have a short closed meeting. Any objections to that?”

There were none.

“Okay,” Stu said. “I’ll turn the floor over to Brad Kitchner, and you folks want to listen close because he’s the guy that’s going to put the rocks back in your bourbon in about three days.”

Brad walked to the center of the room. “We had two of the generators going yesterday, and as you know, one of them overloaded and blew its cookies, so to speak. That happened because when the plague hit, a lot of stuff got left on and we didn’t have the rest of the generators on to take the overload. We can take care of the overload danger by turning on the rest of the generators—even three or four would have absorbed the load easily—but that isn’t going to solve the fire danger. So we’ve got to get everything shut off that we can. Stove burners, electric blankets, all that stuff. In fact, I was thinking like this: The quickest way might be to go into every house where no one lives and just pull all the fuses or turn off the main breaker switches. See? Now, when we get ready to turn on, I think we ought to take some elementary fire precautions. I went to the liberty of checking out the fire station in East Boulder, and . . .”

The fire snapped comfortably. It’s going to be all right, Fran thought. Harold and Nadine have taken off without any prompting, and maybe that’s best. It solves the problem and Stu is safe from them. Poor Harold, I felt sorry for you, but in the end I felt more fear than pity. The pity is still there, and I’m afraid of what may happen to you, but I’m glad your house is empty and you and Nadine have gone. I’m glad you’ve left us in peace.

Harold sat atop a graffiti-inlaid picnic table like something out of a lunatic’s Zen handbook. His legs were crossed. His eyes were far, hazy, contemplative. He had gone to that cold and alien place where Nadine could not follow and she was frightened. In his hands he held the twin of the walkie-talkie in the shoebox. The mountains fell away in front of them in breathtaking ledges and pine-choked ravines

Miles to the east—maybe ten, maybe forty—the land smoothed into the American Midwest and marched away to the dim blue horizon. Night had already come over that part of the world. Behind them, the sun had just disappeared behind the mountains, leaving them outlined in gold that would flake and fade.

“When?” Nadine asked. She was horribly keyed up, and she had to go to the bathroom badly.

“Pretty soon,” Harold said. His grin had become a mellow smile. It was an expression she could not place right away, because she had never seen it on Harold’s face before. It took her a few minutes to place it. Harold looked happy.

The Committee voted 7-0 to empower Brad to round up twenty men and women for his Turning Off Crew. Ralph Brentner had agreed to fill up two of the Fire Department’s old tanker trucks at Boulder Reservoir and to have them at the power station when Brad turned on.

Chad Norris was next. Speaking quietly, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his chino pants, he talked about the work the Burial Committee had done over the last three weeks. He told them they had buried an incredible 25,000 corpses, better than 8,000 a week, and that he believed they were now over the bulge.

“We’ve either been lucky or blessed,” he said. “This mass exodus —that’s all I know to call it—has done most of our work for us. In another town Boulder’s size, it would have taken a year to get it done. We’re expecting to inter another twenty thousand plague victims by the first of October, and we’ll probably keep stumbling over individual victims for a long time after, but I wanted you to know that the job is getting done and I don’t think we have to worry too much about diseases breeding in the bodies of the unburied dead.”

Fran shifted her position so she could look out at the last of the day. The gold that had surrounded the peaks was already beginning to fade to a less spectacular lemon color. She felt a sudden wave of homesickness that was totally unexpected and almost sickening in its force. It was five minutes to eight.

If she didn’t go in the bushes, she was going to wet her pants. She went around a stand of scrub, lowered herself a little, and let go. When she came back, Harold was still sitting on the picnic table with the walkie-talkie clasped loosely in his hand. He had pulled up the antenna.

“Harold,” she said. “It’s getting late. It’s past eight o’clock.”

He glanced at her indifferently. “They’ll be there half the night, clapping each other on the back. When the time’s right, I’ll pull the plug. Don’t you worry.”

"When?”

Harold’s smile widened emptily. “Just as soon as it’s dark.”

Fran stifled a yawn as A1 Bundell stepped confidently up beside Stu. They were going to run late, and suddenly she wished she was back in the apartment, just the two of them. It wasn’t just tiredness, not precisely that feeling of homesickness, either. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be here in Ralph’s house. There was no reason for the feeling, but it was strong. She wanted to get out, she wanted them all to get out.

“The Law Committee has had four meetings in the last week,” A1 was saying, “and I’ll keep this as brief as possible—”

Fran shifted uneasily and Sue Stem winked at her. Fran didn’t wink back. She was frightened—and frightened of her own baseless fear, if such a thing were possible. Where had this stifling, claustrophobic feeling come from? She knew that what you were supposed to do with baseless feelings was to ignore them ... at least the old world. But what about Tom Cullen’s trances? What about Leo Rockway?

Get out of here,
the voice inside suddenly cried.
Get them all out!

But it was so crazy. She shifted again and decided to say nothing.

Larry Underwood’s hand waved. “This tribunal . . . could members be excused for cause?”

Frowning a trifle at the interruption, A1 said, “I was just getting to that. The way it would work—”

“Someone’s coming,” Fran said, getting to her feet.

There was a pause. They could all hear motorcycle engines revving toward them up Baseline, coming fast. Horns were beeping. And suddenly, for Frannie, the panic overflowed.

“Listen,” she said, “all of you!”

Faces turning toward her, surprised, concerned.

“Frannie, are you—” Stu started toward her.

She swallowed. It felt as if there was a heavy weight on her chest, stifling her. “We have to get out of here.
Right
. . .
now”

It was eight twenty-five. The last of the light had gone out of the sky. It was time. Harold sat up a little straighter and held the walkie-talkie to his mouth. His thumb rested lightly on the SEND button. He would depress it and blow them all to hell by saying—

“What’s that?”

Nadine’s hand on his arm, distracting him, pointing. Far below, snaking up Baseline, there was a daisy-chain of lights. In the great silence they could hear the faint roar of a great many motorcycle engines. Harold felt a thin thread of disquiet and threw it off.

“Leave me be,” he said. “This is it.”

Her hand fell from his shoulder. Her face was a white blur in the darkness. Harold pressed the SEND button.

She never knew if it was the motorcycles or her own words that got them moving. But they didn’t move fast enough. That would always be on her heart; they didn’t move fast enough.

Stu was first out the door, the snarl and echo of the motorcycles enormous. They came across the bridge that spanned the small dry wash below Ralph’s house, headlights blazing. Instinctively, Stu’s hand dropped to the butt of his gun.

The screen door opened and he turned, thinking it would be Frannie. It wasn’t; it was Larry. “What’s up, Stu?”

“Don’t know. But we better get them out.”

Then the cycles were winding their way into the driveway and Stu relaxed a little. He could see Dick Vollman, the Gehringer kid, Teddy Weizak, others he recognized.

“Dick,” Stu said. “What the hell?”

“Mother Abagail!”
Dick roared over the motors. More and more cycles filled the yard as the members of the committee    crowded    out

of the house. It was a carnival of swinging headlights    and    merry-go-