The Stand (Original Edition) (122 page)

According to Stu’s Pulsar watch, they stayed the night of December 22 in Avon, and the following morning Stu asked Tom to pack up while he went downtown. “I got a small errand to run,” he said.

“What’s that, Stu?”

“Well, it’s a surprise,” Stu said.

“Surprise? Am I going to find out?”

“Yeah.” “When?” Tom’s eyes sparkled.

“Couple of days.”

“Tom Cullen can’t wait a couple of days for a surprise, laws, no.”

“Tom Cullen will just have to,” Stu said with a grin. “I’ll be back in an hour. You just be ready to go.”

“Well. . . okay.”

It was more like an hour and a half before Stu had exactly what he wanted. Tom pestered him about the surprise for the next two or three hours. Stu kept mum, and by that afternoon, Tom had forgotten all about it.

That night Stu dreamed that both Frannie and her terrible wolf-child had died in childbirth. He heard George Richardson saying from a great distance:
It’s the flu. No more babies because of the flu. Pregnancy is death because of the flu. A chicken in every pot and a wolf in every womb. Because of the flu. We’re all done. Mankind is done. Because of the flu.

And from somewhere nearer, closing in, came the dark man’s howling laughter.

When Tom woke up on the morning of the twenty-fifth at quarter of seven, he found Stu already up and cooking breakfast, which was something of an oddity; Tom was almost always up before Stu. There was a pot of Campbell’s vegetable soup hanging over the fire, just coming to a simmer. Kojak was watching it with great enthusiasm.

“Morning, Stu,” Tom said, zipping his jacket and crawling out of his sleeping bag and his shelter half. He had to whiz something terrible.

“Morning,” Stu answered casually. “And a merry Christmas.”

“Christmas?” Tom looked at him and forgot all about how badly he had to whiz. "
Christmas?”
he said again.

“Christmas morning.” He hooked a thumb to Tom’s left. “Best I could do.”

Stuck into the snowcrust was a spruce-top about two feet high. It was decorated with a package of silver icicles Stu had found in the back room of the Avon Five and Ten.

“A tree,” Tom whispered, awed. “And presents. Those are presents, aren’t they, Stu?”

There were three packages on the snow under the tree, all of them done in light blue tissue paper with silver wedding bells on it—there had been no Christmas paper at the Five and Ten, not even in the back room.

“They’re presents, all right,” Stu said. “For you. From Santa Claus, I guess.”

Tom looked indignantly at Stu. “Tom Cullen knows there’s no Santa Claus! Laws, no! They’re from you!” He began to look distressed. “And I never got you one thing! I forgot ... I didn’t know it was Christmas . . . I’m stupid! Stupid!” He balled up his fist and struck himself in the center of the forehead. He was on the verge of tears.

Stu squatted on the snowcrust beside him. “Tom,” he said. “You gave me my Christmas present early. I’m still alive. I wouldn’t be, if it wasn’t for you.”

Tom looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“If you hadn’t come along when you did, I would have died in that washout west of Green River. And if it hadn’t been for you, Tom, I would have died of pneumonia or the flu or whatever it was back there in the Utah Hotel. I don’t know how you picked the right pills . . . if it was Nick or God or just plain old luck, but you did it. You got no sense, calling yourself a dummy. If it hadn’t been for you, I never would have seen this Christmas. I’m in your debt.”

Tom said, “Aw, that ain’t the same,” but he was glowing with pleasure.

“It is the same,” Stu said seriously.

“Well—”

“Go on, open your presents. See what he brung you. I heard his sleigh in the middle of the night for sure. Guess the flu didn’t get up to the North Pole.”

“You heard him?” Tom was looking at Stu carefully, to see if he was being ribbed.

“Heard something.”

Tom took the first package and unwrapped it carefully—a pinball machine encased in Lucite, a new gadget all the kids had been yelling for the Christmas before, complete with two-year coin batteries. Tom’s eyes lit up when he saw it. “Turn it on,” Stu said.

“Naw, I want to see what else I got.”

There was a sweatshirt with a winded skier on it, resting on crooked skis and propping himself up with his ski poles.

“It says I CLIMBED LOVELAND PASS. We haven’t yet, but we’re gettin there.”

Tom promptly stripped off his parka, put the sweatshirt on, and then replaced his parka. “Great! Great, Stu!”

The last package, the smallest, contained a simple silver medallion on a fine-link silver chain. To Tom it looked like the number 8 lying on its side. He held it up in puzzlement and wonder.

“What is it, Stu?”

“It’s a Greek symbol. I remember it from a long time ago, on a doctor program called ‘Ben Casey.’ It means infinity, Tom. Forever.” He reached across to Tom and held the hand that held the medallion. “I think maybe we’re going to get to Boulder, Tommy. I think we were meant to get there from the first. I’d like you to wear that, if you don’t mind. And if you ever need a favor and wonder who to ask, you look at that and remember Stuart Redman. All right?”

“Infinity,” Tom said, turning it over in his hand. “Forever.”

He slipped the medallion over his neck.

“I’ll remember that,” he said. “Tom Cullen’s gonna remember that.”

“Shit! I almost forgot!” Stu reached back into his shelter half and brought out another package. “Merry Christmas, Kojak! Just let me open this for you.” He took off the wrappings and produced a box of Hartz Mountain Dog Yummies. He scattered a handful on the snow, and Kojak gobbled them up quickly. He came back to Stu, wagging his tail hopefully.

“Later,” Stu said, pocketing the box. “Christmas comes but once a year, big fella.”

Tom said hesitantly: “Can I sing a song before we go?”

“Sure, if you want.” Stu rather expected “Jingle Bells” or “Frosty the Snowman” sung in the offkey and rather toneless voice of a child. But what came out was a fragment of “The First Noel,” sung in a surprisingly pleasant tenor voice.

“The first Noel,” Tom’s voice drifted across the white wastes, echoing back with faint sweetness, “the angels did say . . . was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay . . . In fields ... as they ... lay keeping their sheep ... on a cold winter’s night that was so deep . . .”

Stu joined in on the chorus, his voice not as good as Tom’s but mixing well enough to suit the two of them, and the old sweet hymn drifted back and forth in the deep cathedral silence of Christmas morning:

“Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel. . . Christ is born in Israel . . .” “That’s the only part of it I can remember,” Tom said a little guiltily as their voices drifted away.

“It was fine,” Stu said. He felt a little bit like crying with sudden homesickness. “We ought to get going. Daylight’s wasting.”

“Sure.” He looked at Stu, who was taking down his shelter half. “It’s the best Christmas I ever had, Stu.”

“I’m glad, Tommy.”

And shortly after that they were under way again, traveling east and upward under the bright cold Christmas Day sun.

They camped near the summit of Loveland Pass that night, nearly 12,000 feet above sea level. They slept three in a shelter as the temperature slipped down to twenty degrees below zero. The wind swept by endlessly, cold as the flat blade of a honed kitchen knife, and in the high shadows of the rocks with the lunatic starsprawl of winter seeming almost close enough to touch, the wolves howled. The world seemed to be one gigantic crypt below them, both east and west.

Early the next morning, before first light, Kojak woke them up with his barking. Stu crawled to the front of the shelter half, his rifle in hand. For the first time the wolves were visible. They had come down from their places and sat in a rough ring around the camp, not howling now, only looking. Their eyes held deep green glints, and they all seemed to grin heartlessly.

Stu fired six shots at random, scattering them. One of them leaped high and came down in a heap. Kojak trotted over to it, sniffed at it, then lifted his leg and urinated on it.

“The wolves are still
his,”
Tom said. “They always will be.”

Tom still seemed half asleep. His eyes were drugged and slow and dreamy.

“Tom . . . is he dead? Do you know?”

“He never dies,” Tom said. “He’s in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He’s blind like them.”

“Will he be back?” Stu asked urgently. He felt cold all over.

Tom didn’t answer.

“Tommy . .

“Tom’s sleeping. He went to see the elephant.”

“Tom, can you see Boulder?”

Outside, a bitter white line of dawn was coming up in the sky against the jagged, sterile mountaintops.

“Yes. They’re waiting. Waiting for some word. Waiting for spring. Everything in Boulder is quiet.”

“Can you see Frannie?”

Tom’s face brightened. “Frannie, yes. She’s fat. She’s going to have a baby, I think. She stays with Lucy Swann. Lucy’s going to have a baby, too. But Frannie will have her baby first. Except . . Tom’s face grew dark.

“Tom? Except what?”

“The baby . .

“What about the baby?"

Tom looked around uncertainly. “We were shooting wolfs, weren’t we? Did I fall asleep, Stu?”

Stu forced a smile. “A little bit, Tom.”

“I had a dream about an elephant. Funny, huh?”

“Yeah.”
What about the baby? What about Fran?

He began to suspect they weren’t going to be in time; that whatever Tom had seen would happen before they could arrive.

The good weather broke three days before the New Year, and they had to stop for two days in the small town of Kittredge. They were close enough to Boulder now for the delay to be a bitter disappointment to them both—even Kojak seemed uneasy and restless.

When the weather cleared, the going was slower than ever; finding the road had developed from a continuing nuisance into a serious problem. The snowmobile got stuck repeatedly and they had to dig it out. And on the second day of the New Year, the freight-train rumble of the avalanches began again.

On the fourth they came to the place where US 6 split off from the turnpike to go its own way to Golden, and although neither of them knew it—there were no dreams or premonitions—that was the day that Frannie Goldsmith went into labor.

“Okay,” Stu said as they paused at the turnoff. “No more trouble finding the road, anyhow. It’s been blasted through solid rock.” Staying on the road was easy enough, but getting through the tunnels was not. To find the entrances they had to dig through powdered snow in some cases and through the packed remains of old avalanches in others. The snowmobile roared and clashed unhappily over the bare road inside.

Worse, it was scary in the tunnels—as either Larry or the Trashcan Man could have told them. They were black as minepits except for the cone of light thrown by the snowmobile’s headlamp, because both ends were packed with snow. Being inside them was like being shut in a dark refrigerator. Going was painfully slow, getting out at the far end of each tunnel was an exercise in engineering, and Stu was very much afraid that they would come upon a tunnel that was simply impassable no matter how much they grunted and heaved.

On January seventh, about two hours after they had dug their way out of another tunnel, Tom stood up on the back of the snowmobile and pointed. “What’s that, Stu?”

Stu was tired and grumpy. The dreams had stopped coming, but, perversely, that was somehow more frightening than having them. “Don’t stand up while we’re moving, how many times have I told you that? You’ll fall over backward and go head first into the snow and—”

“Yeah, but what
is
it? It looks like a bridge. Did we get on a river someplace, Stu?”

Stu looked, saw, throttled down, and stopped.

“What is it?” Tom asked anxiously.

“Overpass,” Stu muttered, “I—I just don’t believe it—”

“Overpass? Overpass?”

Stu turned around and grabbed Tom’s shoulders. “It’s the Golden overpass, Tom! That’s 119 up there, Route 119! The Boulder road! Twenty miles! No more!”

Tom understood at last. His mouth fell open, and the comical expression on his face made Stu laugh out loud and clap him on the back. Not even the steady dull ache in his leg could bother him now.

“Are we really almost home, Stu?”

"Yes, yes, yeeessss!”

Then they were grabbing each other, dancing around in a clumsy circle, falling down, sending up puffs of snow, powdering themselves with the stuff. Kojak looked on, amazed ... but after a few moments he joined them.

They camped that night in Golden, and headed north toward Boulder early the next morning. Neither of them had slept very well the night before. Stu had never felt such anticipation in his life . . . and mixed with it was his steady nagging worry about Frannie and the baby.

About an hour after noon, the snowmobile began to hitch and lug. Stu turned it off and got the spare gas can lashed to the side of Kojak’s little cabin. “Oh Christ!” he said, feeling its deadly lightness.

“What’s the matter, Stu?”

“Me, I’m the matter. I knew that friggin can was empty, and I forgot to fill it. Too damn excited, I guess. How’s that for stupid?”

“We’re out of gas?”

Stu flung the empty can away. “We sure-God are. How could I be that stupid?”

“Thinking about Frannie, I guess. What do we do now, Stu?”

“We walk, or try to. You’ll want your sleeping bag. We’ll split this canned stuff, put it in the sleeping bags. We’ll leave the shelters behind. I’m sorry, Tom. My fault all the way.”

“That’s all right, Stu.”

They didn’t get to Boulder that day; instead they camped at dusk, exhausted from wading through the powdery snow which seemed so light but had slowed them to a literal crawl. There was no fire that night. There was no wood handy, and they were all three too exhausted to dig for it. They were surrounded by high, rolling snow-dunes. Even after dark there was no glow on the northern horizon, although Stu looked anxiously for it.