The Stand (Original Edition) (108 page)

They had found no more bombs at Indian Springs. The entire place had been turned upside down. Apparently Trash had booby-trapped the first things he had come to, the choppers in Hangar 9 and the trucks in the motor pool next door.

Flagg had reiterated his orders that the Trashcan Man was to be killed on sight. The thought of Trash wandering around out in all that government property, where God knew what might be stored, now made him distinctly nervous.

Nervous.

Yes. The beautiful surety was still evaporating. Things were getting flaky. Lloyd knew it. He could see it in the way that Lloyd looked at him. It might not be a bad idea if Lloyd had an accident before the winter was out. He was asshole buddies with too many of the people in the palace guard, people like Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott. Even Burlson, who had spilled that business about the red list. He had thought idly about skinning Paul Burlson alive for that.

But if Lloyd had known about the red list, none of this would have
—

“Shut up,” he muttered. “Just. . . shut. . . up!”

But the thought wouldn’t go away that easily. Why
hadn’t
he given Lloyd the names of the top-echelon Free Zone people? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember. It seemed there had been a perfectly good reason at the time, but the more he tried to grasp it, the more it slipped through his fingers. Had it only been a sly-stupid decision not to put too many of his eggs in one basket—a feeling that not too many secrets should be stored with any one person, even a person as stupid and loyal as Lloyd Henreid?

An expression of bewilderment rippled across his face. Had he been making such stupid decisions all along?

And just how loyal was Lloyd, anyway? That expression in his eyes—

Abruptly he decided to push it all aside and levitate. That always made him feel better. It made him feel stronger, more serene, and it cleared his head. He looked out at the desert sky.

(/
am, I am, I Am, I AM
—)

His rundown bootheels left the surface of the sundeck, hovered, rose another inch. Then two. Peace came to him, and suddenly he knew he could find the answers. Everything was clearer. First he must—

“They’re coming for you, you know.”

He crashed back down at the sound of that soft, uninflected voice. The jarring shock went up his legs and his spine all the way to his jaw, which clicked. He whirled around like a cat. But his blooming grin withered when he saw Nadine. She was dressed in a white nightgown, yards of gauzy material that billowed around her body. Her hair, as white as the gown, blew about her face. She looked like some pallid deranged sibyl, and in spite of himself, Flagg was afraid. She took a delicate step closer. Her feet were bare.

“They’re coming. Stu Redman, Glen Bateman, Ralph Brentner, and Larry Underwood. They’re coming and they’ll kill you like a chicken-stealing weasel.”

“They’re in Boulder,” he said, “hiding under their beds and mourning their dead nigger woman.”

“No,” she said indifferently. “They’re almost in Utah now. They’ll be here soon. And they’ll stamp you out like a disease.”

“Shut up. Go downstairs.”

“I’ll go down,” she said, approaching him, and now it was she who smiled—a smile that filled him with dread. The furious color faded from his cheeks, and his strange, hot vitality seemed to go with it. For a moment he seemed old and frail. “I’ll go down . . . and so will you.”

“Get out.”

“We’ll go down,” she sang, smiling ... it was horrible. “Down,
doowwwn
. .

“They’re in
Boulder!”

“They’re almost here.”

“Get downstairs!”

“Everything you made here is falling apart, and why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short. People are whispering about you. They’re saying you let Tom Cullen get away, just a simple retarded boy but smart enough to outwit Randall Flagg.” Her words came faster and faster, now tumbling through a jeering smile. “They’re saying your weapons expert has gone crazy and you didn’t know it was going to happen. They’re afraid that what he brings back from the desert next time may be for them instead of for the people in the east. And they’re leaving. Did you know that?”

“You lie,” he whispered. His face was parchment white, his eyes bulging. “If they were leaving, I’d know.”

Her eyes gazed blankly over his shoulder to the east. “They’re leaving their posts in the dead of night, and your Eye doesn’t see them. They’re leaving their posts and sneaking away. A work-crew goes out with twenty people and comes back with eighteen. The border guards are defecting. They’re afraid the balance of power is shifting on its arm. They’re leaving you, leaving you, and the ones that are left won’t lift a finger when the men from the east come to finish you once and for all—”

It snapped. Whatever there was inside him, it snapped.

“YOU LIE!”
he screamed at her. His hands slammed down on her shoulders, snapping both collarbones like pencils. He lifted her bodily high over his head into the faded blue desert sky, and as he pivoted on his heels he threw her, up and out, as he had thrown the glass. He saw the great smile of relief and triumph on her face, the sudden sanity in her eyes, and understood. She had baited him into doing it, understanding somehow that only he could set her free—
And she was carrying his child.

He leaned over the low parapet, almost overbalancing, trying to call back the irrevocable. Her nightgown fluttered. His hand closed on the gauzy material and he felt it rip, leaving him only a scrap of cloth so diaphanous that he could see his fingers through it—the stuff of dreams on waking.

Then she was gone, plummeting straight down with her toes pointed toward the earth, her gown billowing up her neck and over her face in drifts. She didn’t scream. She went down as silently as a defective skyrocket.

When he heard the indescribable thud of her hard landing, Flagg threw his head back to the sky and howled.

It made no difference, it made no difference.

It was still all in the palm of his hand.

He leaned over the parapet again and watched them come running, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Or maggots to a piece of offal.

They looked so small, and he was so high above them.

He would levitate, he decided, and regain his state of calm.

But it was a long, long time before his bootheels would leave the sundeck, and when they did they would only hover a quarter of an inch above the concrete. They would go no higher.

Tom awoke that night at eight o’clock, but there was still too much light to move. He waited. Nick had come to him again in his sleep, and they had talked. It was so good to talk to Nick.

He lay in the shade of the big rock and watched the sky darken. The stars began to peep out. He thought about Pringle’s New Fangled Potato Chips and wished he had some. When he got back to the Zone—if he
did
get back to the Zone—he would have all of them he wanted. He would gorge on Pringle’s chips. And bask in the love of his friends. That was what was missing back there in Las Vegas, he decided; simple love. They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid.

“I love Nick and Frannie and Dick Ellis and Lucy,” Tom whispered. It was his prayer. “I love Larry Underwood and Glen Bateman, too. I love Stan and Rona. I love Ralph. I love Stu. I love—”

It was odd, how easily their names came to him. Why, back in the Zone he was lucky if he could remember Stu’s name when he came to visit. His thoughts turned to his toys. His garage, his cars, his model trains. He had played with them by the hour. But he wondered if he would want to play with them so much when he got back from this
... if
he got back. It wouldn’t be the same. That was sad, but maybe it was also good.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he recited softly, “I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen.”

It was dark enough now, and he pushed on. By eleven-thirty that night he had reached God’s Finger, and he paused there for a little lunch. The ground was high here, and looking back the way he had come, he could see moving lights. On the turnpike, he thought. They’re looking for me.

Tom looked northeast again. Far ahead, barely visible in the dark (the moon, now two nights past full, had already begun to sink), he saw a huge rounded granite dome. He was supposed to go there next.

“Tom’s got sore feet,” he whispered to himself, but not without some cheeriness. Things could have been much worse than a case of sore feet. “M-O-O-N, that spells sore feet.”

He walked on, and the night things skittered away from him, and when he laid himself down at dawn, he had come almost forty miles. The Nevada-Utah border was not far to the east of him.

By eight that morning he was hard asleep, his head pillowed on his jacket. His eyes began to move rapidly back and forth behind his closed lids.

Nick had come, and Tom talked with him.

A frown creased Tom’s sleeping brow. He had told Nick how much he was looking forward to seeing him again.

But for some reason he could not understand, Nick had turned away.

Oh, how history repeats itself: Trashcan Man was once again being broiled alive in the devil’s frying pan—but this time there was no hope of Cibola’s cooling fountains to sustain him.

It’s what I deserve, no more than what I deserve.

His skin had burned, peeled, burned, peeled again, and finally it had not tanned but blackened. He was walking proof that a man finally takes on the look of what he is. Trash looked as if someone had doused him in $2 kerosene and struck a match to him. The blue of his eyes had faded in the constant desert glare, and looking into them was like looking into weird, extra-dimensional holes in space. He was dressed in a strange imitation of the dark man—an open-throated red-checked shirt, faded jeans, and desert boots that were already scratched and mashed and folded and sprung. But he had thrown away his red-flawed amulet. He didn’t deserve to wear it. He had proved unworthy.

He paused in the broiling sun and passed a thin and shaking hand across his brow. He had been meant for this place and time—all his life had been preparation. He had passed through the burning corridors of hell to get here. He had endured the father-killing sheriff, he had endured that place at Terre Haute, he had endured Carley Yates. After all his strange and lonely life, he had found friends. Lloyd. Ken. Whitney Horgan.

And ah God, he had fucked it all up. He deserved to burn out here in the devil’s frying pan. Could there be redemption for him? The dark man might know. Trashcan Man did not.

He could barely remember now what had happened—perhaps because his tortured mind did not
want
to remember. He had been in the desert for over a week before his last disastrous return to Indian Springs. A scorpion had stung him on the middle finger of his left

hand (his fuckfinger, that long-ago Carley Yates in that long-ago Powtanville would have called it with unfailing poolhall vulgarity), and that hand had swelled up like a rubber glove filled with water. An unearthly fire had filled his head. And yet he had pushed on.

He had finally returned to Indian Springs, still feeling like a figment of someone else’s imagination. There had been some good-natured talk as the men examined his finds—incendiary fuses, contact land mines, small stuff, really. Trash had begun to feel good for the first time since the scorpion had stung
him
.

And then, with no warning at all, time had sideslipped and he was back in Powtanville. Someone had said, “People who play with fire wet the bed, Trash,” and he had looked up, expecting to see Billy Jamieson, but it hadn’t been Bill, it was Rich Groudemore from Powtanville, grinning and picking his teeth with a match, his fingers black with grease because he’d strolled up to the poolhall from the Texaco on the comer to have a game of nine-ball on his break. And someone else said, “You better put that away, Richie, Trash is back in town,” and that sounded like Steve Tobin at first, but it wasn’t Steve. It was Carley Yates in his old, scuffed, and hoody motorcycle jacket. With growing horror he had seen they were
all
there, unquiet corpses come back to life. Richie Groudemore and Carley and Norm Morrisette and Hatch Cunningham, the one who was getting bald even though he was only eighteen and all of the others called him Hatch Cunnilingus. And they were leering at him. It came thick and fast then, through a feverhaze of the years.
Hey Trash, why dintchoo torch the SCHOOL? Hey Trashy, ya burned ya pork off yet? Hey Trashcan Man, I heard you snort Ronson lighter fluid, that true?

Then Carley Yates:
Hey Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?

He tried to scream at them, but all that had come out was a whisper: “Don’t ask me about old lady Semple’s pension check no more.” And he ran.

The rest of it was a dream. Getting the incendiary fuses and slapping them on the trucks in the motor pool. His hands had done their own work, his mind far away. In Terre Haute they had made him bite on a rubber thing when they gave him the shocks, and the man at the controls sometimes looked like the father-killing sheriff and sometimes like Carley Yates and sometimes like Hatch Cunnilingus. And he always swore hysterically to himself that this time he wouldn’t piss himself. And he always did.

When the trucks were fixed, he had gone into the nearest hangar and had fixed the choppers in there. He had wanted timer fuses to do that job right, and so he had gone into the messhall kitchen and had found over a dozen of those five-and-dime plastic timers. You set them for fifteen minutes or half an hour and when they got back to zero they went ding and you knew it was time to take your pie out of the oven. Only instead of going ding this time, Trash had thought, they are going to go bang. He liked that. That was pretty good. If Carley Yates or Rich Groudemore tried taking one of those copters up, they were going to get a big fat surprise. He had simply hooked the kitchen timers up to the copter ignition systems.