The Stand (Original Edition) (110 page)

“Cutting loose? Where are you going?”

“South America, I guess. Brazil. That ought to be just about far enough.” He paused, struggling, then plunged on. “A lot of people have been leaving. Well, maybe not a lot, but quite a few, and there’s more every day. They don’t think Flagg can cut it. Some are going north, up to Canada. That’s too frigging cold for me. But I got to get out. I’d go east if I thought they’d have me. And if I was sure we could get through.” Whitney stopped abruptly and looked at Lloyd miserably. It was the face of a man who thinks he has gone much too far.

“You’re all right,” Lloyd said softly. “I ain’t going to blow the whistle on you.”

“It’s just... all gone bad here,” Whitney said miserably.

“When you planning to go?” Lloyd asked.

Whitney looked at him with narrow suspicion.

“Aw, forget I asked,” Lloyd said. “You ready?”

“Not yet,” Whitney said, looking into his glass.

“I am.” He went to the bar. With his back to Whitney he said, “I couldn’t. I owe him something. I owe him a lot. He got me out of a bad jam back in Phoenix, but it’s more than that. He’s done something to me, made me brighter or something. I don’t know what it is, but I ain’t the same man I was, Whitney. Nothing like. Before . . .
him
... I was nothing but a minor leaguer. Now he’s got me running things here, and I do okay. It seems like I think better. Yeah, he’s made me brighter.” Lloyd lifted the flawed stone from his chest, looked at it briefly, then dropped it again. He wiped his hand against his pants as though it had touched something nasty. “I know I ain’t no genius now. I have to write everything I’m s’posed to do in a notebook or I forget it. But with him behind me I can give orders and most times things turn out right. Before, all I could do was take orders and get in jams. I’ve changed . . . and he changed me. I’ve been with him since the start. It seems longer than it really is. Sometimes it seems like forever, you know? When we got to Vegas, there was sixteen people here. Ronnie was one of them, so was Jenny and poor old Hec Drogan. They were waiting for him. When we got into town, Jenny Engstrom got down on those pretty knees of hers and kissed his boots. I bet she never told you that in bed.” He smiled crookedly at Whitney. “Now she wants to cut and run. Well, I don’t blame her, or you either. But it sure doesn’t take much to sour a good operation, does it?”

“You’re going to stick?”

“I owe him that.” He didn’t add that he still had enough faith in the dark man to believe that Whitney and the others would end up riding crosstrees, more likely than not. And there was something else. Here he was Flagg’s second-in-command. What could he be in Brazil? Why, Whitney and Ronnie were both brighter than he was.

He and Ace High would end up low chickens, and that wasn’t to Lloyd’s taste. Once he wouldn’t have minded, but things had changed. And when your head changed, he was finding out, it most always changed forever.

“Well, it might work out for all of us,” Whitney said lamely.

“Sure,” Lloyd said, and thought:
But I wouldn’t want to be walking in your shoes if it comes out right for Flagg after all. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when he finally has time to notice you down there in Brazil
.
Riding a crosstree might be the least of your worries then
. . .

Lloyd raised his glass. “A toast, Whitney.”

Whitney raised his own glass.

“Nobody gets hurt,” Lloyd said. “That’s my toast. Nobody gets hurt.”

“Man, I’ll drink to that,” Whitney said, and they both did.

Whitney left soon after. Lloyd kept on drinking. He passed out around nine-thirty and slept soddenly on the round bed. There were no dreams, and that was almost worth the price of the next day’s hangover.

When the sun rose on the morning of September 17, Tom Cullen made his camp a little north of Gunlock, Utah. It was cold enough for him to be able to see his breath puffing out in front of him. His ears were numb and cold. But he felt good. He had passed quite close to a rutted bad road the night before, and he had seen three men gathered around a small spluttering campfire. All three had guns.

Trying to ease past them through a tangled field of boulders—he was now on the western edge of the Utah badlands—he had sent a small spatter of pebbles rolling and tumbling into a dry wash. Tom froze. Warm weewee spilled down his legs, but he wasn’t even aware that he’d done it in his pants like a little baby until an hour or so later.

All three of the men turned around, two of them bringing their weapons up to port arms. Tom’s cover was thin, barely adequate. He was a shadow among shadows. The moon was behind a reef of clouds. If it chose this moment to come out. . .

One of them relaxed. “It’s a deer,” he said. “They’re all over the place.”

“I think we should investigate,” another had said.

“Put your thumb up your asshole and investigate that,” the third replied, and that was the end of it. They sat by the fire again, and Tom began to creep along, feeling for each step, watching as their campfire receded with agonizing slowness. An hour and it was only a spark on the slope below him. Finally it was gone and a great weight seemed to slip off his shoulders. He began to feel safe. He was still in the west and he knew enough to still be careful—laws, yes—but the danger no longer seemed as thick, as if there were Indians or outlaws all around.

And now, with the sun coming up, he rolled into a tight ball in a low thicket of bushes and prepared to go to sleep.
Got to get me some blankets
, he thought.
It’s getting cold.
Then sleep took him, suddenly and completely, as it always did.

He dreamed of Nick.

Trashcan Man had what he wanted.

He came along a hallway deep underground, a hallway as dark as a mine pit. In his left hand he held a flashlight. In his right hand he held a gun, because it was spooky down here. He was riding an electric tram that rolled almost silently along the wide corridor. The only sound it made was a low, almost subaural hum.

The tram consisted of a seat for the driver and a large carry space. Resting in the carry space was an atomic warhead.

It was heavy.

Trash could not make an intelligent guess as to just how heavy it was, because he hadn’t even been able to budge it by hand. It was long and cylindrical. It was cold. Running his hand over its curved surface, he had found it hard to believe that such a cold dead lump of metal could have the potential for so much heat.

He had found it at four in the morning. He had gone back to the motor pool and had gotten a chainfall. He had brought the chainfall back down and had rigged it over the warhead. Ninety minutes later, it was nestled cozily into the electric tram, nose up. Stamped on the nose was A16410USAF. The hard rubber tires of the tram had settled appreciably when he put it in.

Now he was coming to the end of the hallway. Straight ahead was the large freight elevator with its doors standing invitingly open. It was plenty big enough to take the tram, but of course there was no electricity. Trash had gotten down by the stairs. He had brought the chainfall down the same way. The chainfall was light compared to the warhead. It only weighed a hundred pounds or so. And still, it had been a chore getting it down five courses of stairs.

How was he going to get the warhead
up
those stairs?

Power-driven winch,
his mind whispered.

Sitting on the driver’s seat and shining his flash randomly around, Trash nodded to himself. Sure, that was the ticket. Winch it up. Set a motor topside and pull it up, stair-riser by stair-riser, if he had to. But where was he going to find five hundred feet of chain all in one piece?

He hopped down and ran a caressing hand over the smooth, deadly surface of the warhead in the silent darkness.

Love would find a way.

Leaving the warhead in the tram, he began to climb the stairs again to see what he could find. A base like .this, there would be a little of everything. He would find what he needed.

He climbed two flights and paused to catch his breath. He suddenly wondered:
Have 1 been taking radiation?
They shielded all that stuff, shielded it with lead. But in the movies you saw on TV, the men who handled radioactive stuff were always wearing those protective suits and film badges that turned color if you got a dose. Because it was silent. You couldn’t see it. It just settled into your flesh and your bones. You didn’t even know you were sick until you started puking and losing your hair.

Was that going to happen to him?

He discovered that he didn’t care. He was going to get that bomb up. Somehow he was going to get it up. Somehow he was going to get it back to Las Vegas. He had to make up for the terrible thing he had done at Indian Springs. If he had to die to atone, then he would die.

“My life for you,” he whispered in the darkness, and began to climb the stairs again.

It was nearly midnight on the evening of September 17. Randall Flagg was in the desert, wrapped in three blankets, from toes to chin. A fourth blanket was swirled around his head in a kind of burnoose, so that only his eyes and the tip of his nose were visible. He looked up at the bright desert stars.

Little by little, he let all thoughts slip away. He grew still. The stars were cold fire, witchlight.

He sent out the Eye.

He felt it separate from himself with a small and painless tug. It went flying away, silent as a hawk rising on dark thermals. Now he had joined with the night. He was eye of crow, eye of wolf, eye of weasel, eye of cat. He was the scorpion, the strutting trapdoor spider. He was a deadly poison arrow slipping endlessly through the desert air.

Flying effortlessly, the world of earthbound things spread out below him like a clockface.

They’re coming
. . .
they’re almost in Utah now
. . .

He flew high, wide, and silent over a graveyard world. Below him the desert lay like a whited sepulcher cut by the dark ribbon of the interstate highway. He flew east, over the state line now, his body far behind, glittering eyes rolled up to blind whites.

Now the land below began to change. Buttes and strange, wind-carved pillars and tabletop mesas. The highway ran straight through. The Bonneville Salt Flats lay to the far north. Skull Valley somewhere west. Flying. The sound of the wind, dead and distant. . .

An eagle poised in the highest crotch of an ancient lightning-blasted pine somewhere south of Richfield felt something pass close by, some deadly sighted thing whizzing through the night, and the eagle took wing against it, fearless, and was buffeted away by a grinning sensation of deadly cold. The eagle fell almost all the way to the ground, stunned, before recovering itself.

The dark man’s Eye went east.

Now the highway below was 1-70. The towns were huddled lumps, deserted except for the rats and the cats and the deer that had already begun to creep in from the forests as the scent of man washed away. Towns with names like Freemont and Green River and Sego and Thompson and Harley Dome. Then a small city, also deserted. Grand Junction, Colorado. Then—

Just east of Grand Junction was a spark of campfire.

The Eye spiraled down.

The fire was dying. There were four figures sleeping around it.

It was true, then.

The Eye appraised them coldly. They were coming. For reasons he could not fathom, they were actually coming. Nadine had told the truth.

Then there was a low growling, and the Eye turned in another direction. There was a dog on the far side of the campfire, its head lowered, its tail coiled down and over its privates. Its eyes glowed like baleful amber gems. Its growl was a constant thing, like endlessly ripping cloth. The Eye stared at it, and the dog stared back, unafraid. Its lip curled back and it showed its teeth.

One of the forms rose to a sitting position. “Kojak,” it mumbled. “Will you for Chrissakes shut up?”

Kojak continued to growl, his hackles up.

The man who had awakened—it was Glen Bateman—looked around, suddenly uneasy. “Who’s there, boy?” he whispered to the dog. “Is something there?”

Kojak continued to growl.

“Stu!” He shook the form next to him. The form muttered something and was silent again.

He had seen enough. He whirled upward, catching just a glimpse of the dog’s neck craning up to follow him. The low growl turned into a volley of barks, loud at first, then fading, fading, gone.

Silence and rushing darkness.

Some unknown time later he paused over the desert floor, looking down at himself. He sank slowly, approaching the body, then sinking into himself. For a moment there was a curious sensation of vertigo, of two things merging into one. Then the Eye was gone and there was only his eyes, staring up at the cold and gleaming stars.

They were coming, yes.

Flagg smiled. Had the old woman told them to come? Would they listen to her if she, on her deathbed, instructed them to commit suicide in that novel way? He thought it was possible that they would.

What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling:
They
were having their problems too,
they
were frightened too . . . and as a result, they were making a colossal mistake. They were coming wrapped in righteousness like a clutch of missionaries approaching the cannibals’ village. Oh! It was lovely!

Doubts would end. Fears would end. All it would take was the sight of their four heads up on spikes in front of the MGM Grand’s fountain. He would assemble every person in Vegas and make them file past and look. He would have photographs taken, would print fliers, have them sent out to L.A. and San Francisco and Spokane and Portland.

Five heads. He would put the dog’s head up on a pole, too.

“Good doggy,” Flagg said, and laughed aloud for the first time since Nadine had goaded him into throwing her off the roof. “Good doggy,” he said again, grinning.

He slept well that night, and in the morning he sent out word that the watch on the roads between Utah and Nevada was to be tripled. But they were no longer looking for one man going east but four men and a dog going west. And they were to be taken alive. Taken alive at all costs.