The Stand (Original Edition) (117 page)

Now he continued: “Know you that the cohorts of these men were responsible for the sabotage bombing of the helicopters at Indian Springs, and therefore responsible for the deaths of Carl Hough, Bill Jamieson, and Cliff Benson. They are guilty of murder.”

Larry’s eyes touched those of a man standing on the front rim of the crowd. Although Larry did not know it, this was Stan Bailey, Operations Chief at Indian Springs. He saw a haze of bewilderment and surprise cover the man’s face, and saw him mouth something ridiculous that looked like
Can Man.

“Know you that the cohorts of these men have sent other spies among us and they have been killed. It is the sentence then that these men shall be put to death in an appropriate manner, to wit, that they shall be pulled apart. It is the duty and the responsibility of each of you to witness this punishment so you may remember it and tell others what you have seen here today.”

Flagg’s grin flashed out, meant to be solicitous in this instance, but still no more warm and human than a shark’s grin.

“Those of you with children are excused.”

He turned toward the cars, which were now idling, sending out small puffs of exhaust into the morning. As he did so, there was a commotion near the front of the crowd. Suddenly a man pushed through into the clearing. He was a big man, his face nearly as pallid as his'n cook’s whites. The dark man had handed the scroll back to Lloyd, and Lloyd’s hands jerked convulsively when Whitney Horgan pushed into the clear. There was a clear ripping sound as the scroll tore in half.

“Hey you people!”
Whitney cried.

A confused murmur ran through the crowd. Whitney was shaking all over, as if with a palsy. His head kept jerking toward the dark man and then away again. Flagg regarded Whitney with a ferocious smile. Dorgan started toward the cook, and Flagg motioned him back.

"This ain’t right!”
Whitney yelled.
"You know it ain't!”

Dead silence from the crowd.

Whitney’s throat worked convulsively. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a monkey on a stick.

“We was Americans once!” Whitney cried at last. “This ain’t how Americans act. I wasn’t so much, I’ll tell you that, nothin but a cook, but I know this ain’t how Americans act, listening to some murderin freak in cowboy boots—”

A horrified, rustling gasp came from these new Las Vegans.

“That’s what he is!” Whitney insisted. The sweat was running down his face like tears from the brushy edges of his flattop haircut. “You wanna watch these two guys ripped in two right in front of you, huh? You think that’s the way to start a new life? You think a thing like that can ever be right? I tell you you’ll have nightmares about it
for the rest of your lives!”

The crowd murmured its assent. Larry and Ralph exchanged a glance.

“We got to stop this,” Whitney said. “You know it? We got to have time to think about what . . . what . . .”

“Whitney.” That voice, smooth as silk, little more than a whisper, but enough to silence the cook’s faltering voice completely. He turned toward Flagg, lips moving soundlessly, his eye as fixed as a mackerel’s. Now the sweat was pouring down his face in torrents.

“Whitney, you should have kept still.” His voice was soft, but still it carried easily to every ear. “I would have let you go . . . why would I want you?”

Whitney’s lips moved, but still no sound came out.

“Come here, Whitney.”

“No,” Whitney whispered, and no one heard his demurral except Lloyd and Ralph and Larry and possibly Barry Dorgan. Whitney’s feet moved as if they had not heard his mouth. His sprung and mushy black loafers whispered through the grass and he moved toward the dark man like a ghost.

The crowd had become a slack jaw and a staring eye.

“I knew about your plans,” the dark man said. “I knew what you meant to do before you did. And I would have let you crawl away until I was ready to take you back. Maybe in a year, maybe in ten. But that’s all behind you now, Whitney. Believe it.”

Whitney found his voice one last time, his words rushing out in a strangled scream.
“You ain’t a man at all! You’re some kind of a . . . a devil!”

Flagg stretched out the index finger of his left hand so that it almost touched Whitney Horgan’s chin. “Yes, that’s right,” he said so softly that no one but Lloyd and Larry Underwood heard. “I am.”

A blue ball of fire no bigger than the Ping-Pong ball Leo was endlessly bouncing leaped from the tip of Flagg’s finger with a faint ozone crackle.

An autumn wind of sighs went through those watching.

Whitney screamed—but didn’t move. The ball of fire lit on his chin. There was a sudden cloying smell of burning flesh. The ball moved across his mouth, fusing his lips shut, locking the scream behind Whitney’s bulging eyes. It crossed one cheek, digging a charred and instantly cauterized trench.

It closed his eyes.

It paused above his forehead and Larry heard Ralph speaking, saying the same thing over and over, and Larry joined his voice to Ralph’s, making it a litany: “I will fear no evil ... I will fear no evil ... I will fear no evil. . .”

The ball of fire rolled up from Whitney’s forehead and now there was a hot smell of burning hair. It rolled toward the back of his head, leaving a grotesque bald strip behind it. Whitney swayed on his feet for a moment and then fell over, mercifully face-down.

The crowd released a long, sibilant sound:
Aaaahhhh.
It was the sound people had made on the Fourth of July when the fireworks display had been particularly good. The ball of blue fire hung in the air, bigger now, too bright to look at without slitting the eyes. The dark man pointed at it and it moved slowly toward the crowd. Those in the front row—a whey-faced Jenny Engstrom was among them— shrank back.

In a thundering voice, Flagg challenged them.
“Is there anyone else here who disagrees with my sentence? If so, let him speak now!”

Deep silence greeted this.

Flagg seemed satisfied. “Then let—”

Heads began to turn away from him suddenly. A surprised murmur ran through the crowd, then rose to a babble. Flagg seemed completely caught by surprise. Now people in the crowd began to cry out, and while it was impossible to make out the words clearly, the tone was one of wonder and surprise. The ball of fire dipped and spun uncertainly.

The humming sound of an electric motor came to Larry’s ears. And again he caught that puzzling name tossed from mouth to mouth, never clear, never all of one piece: Man . . . Can Man . . . Trash . . . Trashy . . .

Someone was coming through the crowd, as if in answer to the dark man’s challenge.

Flagg felt terror seep into his heart. It was a terror of the unknown and the unexpected. He had foreseen everything, even Whitney’s foolish spur-of-the-moment speech. He had foreseen everything but this. The crowd—
his
crowd—was parting, peeling back. There was a scream, high, clear, and freezing. Someone broke and ran. Then someone else. And then the crowd, already on an emotional hair-trigger, broke and stampeded.

“Hold still!”
Flagg cried at the top of his voice, but it was useless. The crowd had become a strong wind, and not even the dark man could still the wind. Terrible, impotent rage rose in him, joining the fear and making some new and volatile mix. It had gone wrong again. In the last minute it had somehow gone wrong, like the old lawyer in Oregon, the woman slitting her throat on the windowglass . . . and Nadine . . . Nadine falling . . .

They ran, scattering to all the points of the compass, pounding across the lawn of the MGM Grand, across the street, toward the Strip. They had seen the late-arriving guest, arrived at last like some grim vision out of a horror tale. They had seen, perhaps, the raddled face of some final awful retribution.

And they had seen what that returning wanderer had brought with him.

As the crowd melted, Randall Flagg also saw, as did Larry and Ralph and a frozen Lloyd Henreid, who was still holding the torn scroll in his hands.

It was Donald Merwin Elbert, now known as the Trashcan Man, now and forever, world without end, hallelujah, amen.

He was behind the wheel of a long, dirty electric cart. The cart’s heavy-duty bank of batteries was nearly drained dry. The cart was humming and buzzing and lurching. Trashcan Man bobbed back and forth on the open seat like a mad marionette.

He was in the last stages of radiation sickness. His hair was gone. His arms, poking out of the tatters of his shirt, were covered with open running sores. His face was a cratered red soup from which one desert-faded blue eye peered with a terrible, pitiful intelligence. His teeth were gone. His nails were gone. His eyelids were frayed flaps.

He looked like a man who had driven his electric cart out of the dark and burning subterranean mouth of hell itself.

Flagg watched him come, frozen. His smile was gone. His high, rich color was gone. His face was suddenly a window made of pale clear glass.

Trashcan Man’s voice bubbled ecstatically up from his thin chest: “I brought it ... I brought you the fire . . . please . . . I’m sorry....”

It was Lloyd who moved. He took one step forward, then another. “Trashy . . . Trash, baby . . .” His voice was a croak.

That single eye moved, painfully seeking Lloyd out. “Lloyd? That you?”

“It’s me, Trash.” Lloyd was shaking violently all over, the way Whitney had been shaking. “Hey, what you got there? Is it—”

“It’s the A-bomb,” Trash said happily. He began to rock back and forth on the seat of the electric cart like a convert at a revival meeting. “The A-bomb, it’s a big one, the A-bomb, the big fire,
my life for you!”

“Take it away, Trash,” Lloyd whispered. “It’s dangerous. It’s . . . it’s hot. Take it away . .

“Make him get rid of it, Lloyd,” the dark man who was now the pale man whined. “Make him take it back where he got it. Make him—”

Trashcan’s one operative eye grew puzzled. “Where is he?” he asked, and then his voice rose to an agonized howl. “Where is he? He’s gone!
Where is he? What did you do to him?”

Lloyd made one last supreme effort. “Trash, you’ve got to get rid of that thing. You—”

And suddenly Ralph shrieked:
“Larry! Larry! The Hand of God!”
Ralph’s face was transported in a terrible joy. His eyes shone. He was pointing into the sky.

Larry looked up. He saw the ball of electricity Flagg had flicked from the end of his finger. It had grown to a tremendous size. It hung in the sky, jittering toward Trashcan Man, giving off sparks like hair. Larry realized dimly that the air was now so full of electricity that every hair on his own body was standing on end.

And the thing in the sky did look like a hand.

“
Noooo!”
the dark man wailed.

Larry looked at him ... but Flagg was no longer there. He had a bare impression of something monstrous standing
in front
of where Flagg had been. Something slumped and hunched and almost without shape—something with enormous yellow eyes slit by dark cat’s pupils.

Then it was gone.

Larry saw Flagg’s clothes—the jacket, the jeans, the boots—standing upright with nothing in them. For a split second they held the shape of the body that had been inside them. And then they collapsed.

The crackling blue fire in the air rushed at the yellow electric cart that Trashcan Man had somehow driven back from the Nellis Range. He had thrown up blood and finally vomited out his own teeth as the radiation sickness sank deeper and deeper into him—yet he had never faltered in his resolve to bring it back to the dark man . . . you could say that he had never flagged in his determination.

The blue ball of fire flung itself into the back of the cart, seeking what was there, drawn to it.

“Oh shit we’re all fucked!”
Lloyd Henreid cried. He put his hands over his head and fell to his knees.

Oh God, thank God,
Larry thought.
I will fear no evil, I will f

Silent white light filled the world.

And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.

Stu woke up from a night of broken rest at dawn and lay shivering even with Kojak curled up next to him. The morning sky was coldly blue, but in spite of the shivers he was hot. He was running a fever.

“Sick,” he muttered, and Kojak looked up at him.

He began to feed the fire with the last of the wood on hand and then sent Kojak out for a dozen more sticks. Soon the fire was blazing. Even sitting close would not drive the shivers away, although sweat was rolling down his face. It was the final irony. He had the flu, or something very like it. He had come down with it two days after Glen, Larry, and Ralph left him. For another two days the flu had seemed to consider him—was he worth taking? Apparently he was. Little by little he was getting worse. And this morning he felt very bad indeed.

Among the odds and ends in his pockets, Stu found a stub of pencil, his notebook (all the Free Zone organizational stuff that had once seemed the vital stuff of life itself now seemed mildly foolish), and his keyring. He had puzzled over the keyring for a long time, coming back to it over the last few days again and again, constantly surprised by the strong ache of sadness and nostalgia. This one was to his apartment. This one was his locker key. This one was a spare for his car, a 1972 Dodge with a lot of rust—so far as he knew it was still parked behind the apartment building at 31 Thompson Street in Arnette.

Also attached to the keyring was a cardboard address card encased in Lucite. He took the keys off the ring, bounced them thoughtfully on the palm of his hand for a moment, and then threw them away. He slipped the cardboard address card out of the Lucite, and then ripped a blank page from his notebook.

Dear Frannie,
he wrote at the top. He told her all that had happened up until he had broken his leg. He told her that he hoped to see her again, but that he doubted it was in the cards. The best he could hope for was that Kojak would find the Zone again. He wiped tears absently from his face with the heel of his hand and wrote that he loved her.
I expect you to mourn me and then get on,
he wrote.
You and the baby have to get on. That’s the most important thing now.
He signed, folded it small, and slipped the note into the address slot in the Lucite square. Then he attached the keyring to Kojak’s collar.