The Stand (Original Edition) (121 page)

The pencillin produced an ugly red rash after two days, and Tom switched to the ampicillin. On October 7 Tom awoke in the morning to find Stu sleeping more deeply than he had in days. His entire body was soaked with sweat, but his forehead was cool. The fever had snapped in the night. For the next two days, Stu did little but sleep. Tom had to struggle to wake him up enough to take his pills and sugar cubes from the restaurant attached to the Utah Hotel.

He relapsed on October 11, and Tom was terribly afraid it was the end. But the fever did not go as high, and his respiration never got as thick and labored as it had been on those terrifying early mornings of the fifth and the sixth.

On October 13 Tom awoke from a dazed nap in one of the lobby chairs to find Stu sitting up and looking around. “Tom,” he whispered. “I’m alive.”

“Yes,” Tom said joyfully. “Laws, yes!”

“I’m hungry. Could you rustle up some soup, Tom?”

By the eighteenth his strength had begun to come back a little. He was able to get around the lobby for five minutes at a time on the crutches Tom brought him from the drugstore. There was a steady, maddening itch from his broken leg as the bones began to knit themselves together. On October 20 he went outside for the first time, bundled up in thermal underwear and a huge sheepskin coat.

The day was warm and sunny, but with an undertone of coolness. In Boulder it might still be mid-fall, the aspens turning gold, but here winter was almost close enough to touch.

“I don’t know, Tom,” he said. “I think we can get over to Grand Junction, but after that I just don’t know. There’s going to be a lot of snow in the mountains. And I don’t dare move for a while, anyway. I’ve got to get my go back.”

“How long before your go comes back, Stu?”

“I don’t know, Tom. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Stu was determined not to push it—he had been close enough to death to relish his recovery. They moved out of the hotel lobby into a pair of connecting rooms down the first floor hall. His leg was indeed knitting, but because of the improper set, it was never going to be the same straight limb again, unless he got George Richardson to re-break it and set it properly. When he got off the crutches, he was going to have a limp.

Nonetheless, he set to work exercising it, trying to tone it up. Bringing the leg back to even 75 per cent efficiency was going to be a long process, but so far as he could tell, he had a whole winter to do it in.

On October 28 Green River was dusted with nearly five inches of snow. ‘‘If we don’t make our move soon,” Stu told Tom as they looked out at the snow, “we’ll be spending the whole damn winter in the Utah Hotel.”

The next day they drove the Plymouth down to the gas station on the outskirts of town. Pausing often to rest and using Tom for the heavy work, they changed the balding back tires for a pair of studded snows. Stu considered taking a four-wheel-drive, and had finally decided, quite irrationally, that they should stick with their luck. Tom finished the operation by loading four fifty-pound bags of sand into the Plymouth’s trunk. They left Green River on Halloween and headed east.

They reached Grand Junction at noon on November 2, with not much more than three hours to spare, as it turned out. The skies had been lead-gray all the forenoon, and as they turned down the main street, the first spits of snow began to skate across the Plymouth’s hood. They had seen brief flurries half a dozen times en route, but this was not going to be a flurry. The sky promised serious snow.

“Pick your spot,” Stu said. “We may be here for a while.”

Tom pointed. “There!”

It was the Grand Junction Holiday Inn. Below the distinctive trademark sign and the beckoning star was a marquee, and written 3n it in large red letters was:
ELCOME TO GR ND JUNC ON’S SUMMERF ST ’80! JUNE 12-JU Y 4TH!

“Okay,” Stu said. “Holiday Inn it is.”

He pulled in and killed the Plymouth’s engine, and so far as either of them knew, it never ran again. By two that afternoon, the spits and spats of snow had developed into a thick white curtain that danced wildly at the crazy tune of the wind. It snowed all night. When Stu and Tom got up the next morning, they found Kojak sitting in front of the big double doors in the lobby, looking out at a nearly moveless world of white. Nothing moved but a single bluejay that was strutting around on the crushed remnants of a summer awning on a shop across the street.

“Jeezly crow,” Tom whispered. “We’re snowed in, ain’t we, Stu?”

Stu nodded.

“How can we get back to Boulder in this?”

“We wait for spring,” Stu said, but even then he was not sure either of them would be able to wait that long.

At last he came out of the dream to his Holiday Inn motel room up on his elbows, staring wide-eyed at nothing. He swung his legs out of bed and lit the Coleman lamp and a cigarette. It had been the Frannie dream again.

It was always the same. Frannie in pain, her face bathed in sweat. Richardson was between her legs, and Laurie Constable was standing nearby to assist him. Fran’s feet were up in stainless steel stirrups . . .

Push, Frannie. Bear down. You're doing fine.

But looking at George’s somber eyes over the top of his mask, Stu knew that Frannie wasn’t doing fine at all. Something was wrong, Laurie sponged off her sweaty face and pushed back her hair from her forehead.

Breach birth.

Who had said that? It was a sinister, bodiless voice, low and draggy, like a voice on a 45 rpm record played at 33-
1/2.

Breach birth.

George’s voice:
You'd better call Dick. Tell him we may have to .
. .

Laurie’s voice:
Doctor, she's losing a lot of blood now
. . .

The cigarette was terribly stale, but after that particular dream, anything was a comfort
.
It's an anxiety dream, that’s all. You got this typical macho idea that things won’t come right if you’re not there. Well, bag it up, Stuart; she’s fine. Not all dreams come true.

But too many of them
had
come true during the last half-year. The feeling that he was being shown the future in this recurring dream of Fran’s delivery would not leave him.

It was November 29; they had been quartered in the Grand Junction Holiday Inn nearly four weeks. They had managed to keep amused with a whole town to plunder for amusing and diverting odds and ends. Stu had built over twenty models, including a Rolls-Royce that had 240 parts and had sold for sixty-five dollars before the superflu. Tom had built a strange but somehow compelling terrain-contoured landscape that covered nearly half the floor-space of the Holiday Inn’s convention hall; he had used papier-mache, plaster of paris, and various food colorings. He called it Moonbase Alpha. Yes, they had kept busy, but—

What you’re thinking is crazy.

He flexed his leg. It was in better shape than he ever would have hoped, partially thanks to the Holiday Inn’s weight-room and exercising machines. There was still considerable stiffness and some pain, but he was able to limp around without the crutches. They could take it slow and easy. He was quite sure he could show Tom how to run one of the Arctic Cats that almost everyone around here kept packed away in the back of their garages. Do twenty miles a day, pack shelter halves, big sleeping bags, plenty of those freeze-dried concentrates . . .

Sure, and when the avalanche comes down on you up in Vail Pass, you and Tom can wave a pack of freeze-dried carrots at it and tell it to go away. Ifs crazy!

Still. . .

He crushed his smoke and turned off the gaslamp. But it was a long time before he slept.

Over breakfast he said, “Tom, how badly do you want to get back to Boulder?”

“And see Fran? Dick? Sandy? Laws, I want to get back to Boulder worse than anything, Stu. You don’t think they gave my little house away, do you?”

“No, I’m sure they didn’t. What I mean is, would it be worth it to you to take a chance?”

Tom looked at him, puzzled. Stu was getting ready to try and explain further when Tom said: “Laws, everything’s a chance, isn’t it?”

It was decided as simply as that.

There was no need to teach Tom the fundamentals of snow-mobiling. Stu found a monster machine in a Colorado Highway Department shed not a mile from the Holiday Inn. It had an oversized engine, a fairing to cut the worst of the wind, and most important of all, it had been modified to include a large open storage compartment. It had once no doubt held all manner of emergency gear. The compartment was big enough to take one good-sized dog comfortably. With the number of shops in town devoted to outdoor activities, they had no trouble at all outfitting themselves for the trip, even though the superflu had struck at the beginning of summer.

By two o’clock of that first day, Stu saw that his fear of being snowed in someplace and starving to death had been groundless. The woods were fairly crawling with game; he had never seen anything like it in his life. Later that afternoon he shot a deer, his first deer since the ninth grade, when he had played hooky from school to go out hunting with his Uncle Dale. That deer had been a scrawny doe whose meat had been wild-tasting and rather bitter . . . from eating nettles, Uncle Dale said. This one was a buck, fine and heavy and broad-chested. But then, Stu thought as he gutted it with a big knife he had liberated from a Grand Junction sporting goods store, the winter had just started. Nature had her own ways of dealing with overpopulation.

Tom built a fire while Stu butchered the deer as best he could, getting the sleeves of his heavy coat stiff and tacky with blood. By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing “Ave Maria.” The deer he had gotten with his Uncle Dale had gone to an old man named Schoey who lived in a shack just over the Braintree town line. He had skinned and dressed the deer for three dollars and ten pounds of deermeat.

“I sure wish old man Schoey was here tonight,” he said with a sigh.

“Who?” Tom asked.

“No one, Tom. Talking to myself.”

As it turned out, the venison was worth it. Sweet and delicious. After they had eaten their fill, Stu cooked about thirty pounds of extra meat and packed it away in one of the Highway Department snowmobile’s smaller storage compartments the next morning. That first day they only made sixteen miles.

That night the dream changed. He was in the delivery room again. There was blood everywhere—the sleeves of the white coat he was wearing were stiff and tacky with it. Not deer blood this time. Fran’s blood. The greengowns George and Laurie wore were drenched with it. The sheet covering Frannie was soaked through. And still she shrieked.

It's coming,
George panted.
Its time has come round at last, Frannie, ifs waiting to be born, so push! PUSH!

And it came, it came in a final freshet of blood. George pulled the infant free, grasping the hips because it had come feet first—

Laurie began to scream. Stainless steel instruments sprayed everywhere—

Because it was a wolf with a furious grinning human face,
his
face, it was Flagg, his time come around again, he was not dead, not dead yet, he still walked the world, Frannie had given birth to Randall Flagg—

Stu woke up, his harsh breathing loud in his ears. Had he screamed?

Tom was still asleep, huddled so deeply in his sleeping bag that Stu could only see his blond cowlick. Kojak was curled at Stu’s side. Everything was all right, it had only been a dream—

And then a single howl rose in the night, climbing, ululating, a silver chime of desperate horror ... the howl of a wolf, or, perhaps, the scream of a killer’s ghost.

Kojak raised his head.

Gooseflesh broke out on Stu’s arms, thighs, groin.

The howl didn’t come again.

Stu slept. In the morning they packed up and went on. It was Tom who noticed and pointed out that the deer guts were all gone. There was a flurry of tracks where they had been, and the bloodstain of Stu’s kill faded to a dull pink on the snow . . . but that was all.

Five days of good weather brought them to Rifle. The next morning they awoke to a deepening blizzard. Stu said he thought they should wait it out here, and they put up in a local motel. Tom held the lobby doors open and Stu drove the snowmobile right into the lobby. As he told Tom, it made a handy garage, although the snowmobile’s heavy-duty tread had chewed up the lobby’s deep-pile rug considerably.

It snowed for three days, and then they pushed on again. The snow was much deeper now, and it had gotten more difficult to read the twists and turns of 1-70. But it wasn’t keeping to the highway that worried Stu on that bright, warm and sunny December 10. In the late afternoon, as the blue shadows began to lengthen, Stu throttled down and then killed the snowmobile’s engine, his head cocked, his whole body seeming to listen.

“What is it, Stu? What’s—” Then Tom heard it, too. A low rumbling sound off to their left and up ahead. It swelled to a deep roar and then faded away. The afternoon was still again.

“Stu?” Tom asked anxiously.

“Don’t worry,” he said, and thought:
I’ll worry enough for both of us.

The warm temperatures held, and by December 13 they were close to Loveland Pass. Again and again they heard the low rumble of avalanches, sometimes far away, sometimes so close that there was nothing to do but look up and wait and hope. On the twelfth, one swept down and over a place where they had been only half an hour before, burying the snowmobile’s track under tons of packed snow. Stu was increasingly afraid that the vibration caused by the sound of the snowmobile’s engine would be what finally killed them, triggering a slide that would bury them forty feet deep before they even had time enough to realize what was happening. White death, they called it. But now there was nothing to do but press on and hope.

Then the temperatures plunged again and the threat abated somewhat. There was another storm and they were stopped for two days. They dug out and went on . . . and at night the wolves howled. Sometimes they were far away, sometimes so close that they seemed right outside the shelter halves, bringing Kojak to his feet, growling low in his chest, as taut as a steel spring.