The Stand (Original Edition) (35 page)

“Was Kojak your dog before?”

“No, Kojak belonged to the woman around the corner from me. We both lived—along with a great deal of the faculty—in a development called College Hill. She was a miserable, opinionated woman

She died and her dog lived, which gives lie to the idea that there is no justice in the world. Excuse me for a minute, Stu.”

He trotted across the road and Stu heard him splashing in the water. He came back shortly, pantslegs rolled to his knees. He was carrying a dripping six-pack of Narragansett beer in each hand.

“This was supposed to go with the meal. Stupid of me.”

“It goes just as well after,” Stu said, pulling a can off the template. “Thanks.”

They pulled their ringtabs and Bateman raised his can. “To us, Stu. May we have happy days, satisfied minds, and little or no low back pain.”

“Amen to that.” They clicked their cans together and drank. Stu thought that a swallow of beer had never tasted so good to him before and probably never would again.

“You’re a man of few words,” Bateman said. “I hope you don’t feel that I’m dancing on the grave of the world, so to speak.” “No,” Stu said.

“I
am
dancing on the grave of the world, now that I stop to think about it,” Glen Bateman said.

“It’s not really the end,” Stu said. “At least, I don’t think so. Just . . . intermission.”

“Rather apt. Well said. I’m going back to my picture, if you don’t mind?”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you seen any other dogs?”

“No.”

“Nor have I. You’re the only other person I’ve seen, but Kojak seems to be one of a kind.”

“If he’s alive, there will be others.”

“Not very scientific,” Bateman said kindly. “What kind of an American are you? Show me a second dog—preferably a bitch—and I’ll accept your thesis that somewhere there is a third. But don’t show me one and from that posit a second. It won’t do.”

“I’ve seen cows,” Stu said thoughtfully.

“Cows, yes, and deer. But the horses are all dead.”

“You know, that’s right,” Stu agreed. He had seen several dead horses on his walk. In some cases cows had been grazing upwind of the bloating bodies. “Now why should that be?”

“No idea. We all respire in much the same way, and this seems primarily to be a respiratory disease. But I wonder if there isn’t some other factor? Men, dogs, and horses catch it. Cows and deer don’t.

And rats were down for a while but now seem to be coming back.” Bateman was recklessly mixing paint on his palette. “Cats everywhere, a plague of cats. None of it makes any surface sense. It’s crazy.”

“It sure is,” Stu said, and uncorked another beer. His head was buzzing pleasantly.

“We’re apt to see some interesting shifts in the ecology,” Bateman said. He was making the horrible mistake of trying to paint Kojak into his picture. “Remains to be seen if
Homo sapiens
is going to be able to reproduce himself in the wake of this—it very much remains to be seen—but at least we can get together and try. But is Kojak going to find a mate? Is he ever going to become a proud papa?” “Jesus, I guess he might not.”

Bateman got a fresh beer. “I think you’re right,” he said. “There probably are other people, other dogs, other horses. But many of the animals may die without ever reproducing. There may be some animals of those susceptible species who were pregnant when the flu came along, of course. I’m sure there are dozens of healthy women in the United States right now who—pardon the crudity—have cakes baking in the oven. But some of the animals are apt to just sink below the point of no return. If you take dogs out of the equation, the deer—who seem immune—are going to run wild. Certainly there aren’t enough men left around to keep the population down. Hunting season is going to be canceled for a few years.”

“Well,” Stu said, “the surplus deer will just starve.”

“No they won’t. Not up here, anyway. I can’t speak for what might happen in east Texas, but in New England, all the gardens were planted and growing nicely before this flu happened. The deer will have plenty to eat this year and next. Even after that, our crops will germinate wild. There won’t be any starving deer for maybe as long as seven years. If you come back this way in a few years, Stu, you’ll have to elbow deer out of your way to get up the road.”

“What did you mean when you said whether or not people could reproduce themselves was open to question?”

“There are two possibilities,” Bateman said. “At least two that I see right now. The first is that the babies may not be immune.”

“You mean, die as soon as they get into the world?”

“Yes, or possibly
in utero.
Less likely but still possible, the superflu may have had some sterility effect on those of us that are left.”

“That’s crazy,” Stu said.

“Sure, so’s the mumps,” Glen Bateman said dryly.    '

“But if the mothers of the babies that are . . . are
in utero
... if the mothers are immune—”

“Yes, immunities can be passed on mother to child just as susceptibilities can. But you just can’t bank on it. I think the future of babies now
in utero
is very uncertain. Their mothers are immune, granted, but statistical probability says that most of the fathers were not, and are now dead.”

“What’s the other possibility?”

“That we may finish the job of destroying ourselves,” Bateman said calmly. “Not right away, because we’re all too scattered. But man is a gregarious, social animal, and eventually we’ll get back together. Most of the societies that form are apt to be primitive dictatorships run by little Caesars unless we’re very lucky. A few may be enlightened, democratic communities, and I’ll tell you exactly what the necessary requirement for that kind of society in the 1980s and ’90s is going to be: a community with enough technical people in it to get the lights back on.”

Stu sipped his beer. “Think so?”

“Sure. Now let me give you a hypothetical situation, Mr. Stuart Redman from east Texas. Suppose we have Community A in Boston and Community B in Utica, New York. Society A is in good shape. They are living on Beacon Hill in the lap of luxury because one of their members is an electrical technician. This man knows just enough to get the Beacon Hill power plant running again. It would mostly be a matter of knowing which switches to pull when the plant went into an automatic shutdown. So in Boston, the juice is flowing. There’s heat against the cold, light so you can read at night, refrigeration so you can have your scotch on the rocks like a civilized man. In fact, life is pretty damn near idyllic. No pollution, drug problem, race problem, shortage problem. No money or barter problem, because all the goods, if not the services, are out on display and there are enough of them to last a radically reduced society for three centuries.

“But Community B, up there in Utica. There’s no one to run the power plant. It’s going to take a long time for them to figure out how to make it go again. In the meantime, they’re cold at night, they’re eating out of cans, they’re miserable. A strongman takes over. They’re glad to have him because they’re confused and cold and sick. He sends someone to Boston with a request, will they send their technician up to Utica to help them get their power plant going

again? The alternative is a long and dangerous move south for the winter. So what does Community A do when they get this message?”

“Send the guy?” Stu asked.

“Christ, no! He might be held against his will, in fact it would be extremely likely. In the post-flu world, technological know-how is going to replace gold as the most perfect medium of exchange. And in those terms, Society A is rich and Society B is poor. So what does Society B do?”

“I guess they go south,” Stu said. “Maybe even to east Texas.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they threaten the Boston people with a nuclear warhead.”

“Right,” Stu said. “They can’t get their power plant going, but they can explode an A-bomb.”

Bateman said. “If I had the bomb, I’d simply pile several crates of dynamite around it and try to detonate it that way . . . would that work?”

“Dogged if I know.”

“Even if it didn’t, there are plenty of conventional weapons around. That’s the point.
All
of that stuff is lying around, waiting to be picked up. And if Communities A and B both have pet technicians, they might work up some kind of rusty nuclear exchange over religion, or territoriality or some paltry ideological difference. Just think, instead of six or seven world nuclear powers, we may end up with sixty or seventy of them right here in the continental United States.”

A silence fell between them. Far off they could hear Kojak barking in the woods as the day turned on its noontime axis.

“You know,” Bateman said finally, “I’m fundamentally a cheerful man. Maybe because I have a low threshold of satisfaction. Eccentric but cheerful, that’s me. The only bane of my life has been my dreams. Ever since boyhood I’ve been plagued by amazingly vivid dreams. A lot of them have been nasty. As a youngster it was trolls under bridges that reached up and grabbed my foot or a witch that turned me into a bird. Do you ever have bad dreams, Stu?”

“Sometimes,” Stu said, thinking of Elder, and how Elder lurched after him in his nightmares, and of the corridors that never ended but only switched back on themselves, lit by cold fluorescents and filled with echoes.

“Just lately, I’ve had an extremely bad dream. It recurs. It’s like no other dream I’ve ever had, but somehow it’s like all of them. As if . . . as if it were the
sum
of all bad dreams. And I wake up feeling bad, as if it wasn’t a dream at all, but a vision. I know how crazy that must sound.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a man,” Bateman said quietly. “At least, I think it’s a man. He’s standing on the roof of a high building, or maybe it’s a cliff that he’s on. It’s near sunset, but he’s looking the other way, east. Sometimes he seems to be wearing bluejeans and a denim jacket, but more often he’s in a robe with a cowl. I can never see his face, but I can see his eyes. He has red eyes. And I have a feeling that he’s looking for
me
—and that sooner or later he will find me. It’s more than a feeling, it’s a premonition. Sooner or later he will find me or I will be forced to go to him . . . and that will be the death of me.”

“That’s when you wake up?”

“Yes.” They watched Kojak come trotting back, and Bateman patted him while Kojak nosed in the aluminum dish and cleaned up the last of the poundcake.

“Well, it’s just a dream, I suppose,” Bateman said. He stood up. “If I were being psychoanalyzed, I suppose the shrink would say the dream expresses my unconscious fear of some leader or leaders who will start the whole thing going again. Maybe a fear of technology in general. But this dream ... it preys on me, Stu.”

Stu said nothing.    .

“Well, I want to get back,” Bateman said briskly. “I’m halfway drunk already, and I believe there will be thundershowers this afternoon.” He walked to the back of the clearing and rummaged there. A few moments later he came back with a wheelbarrow. He screwed the piano stool down to its lowest elevation, put it in, added his palette, the picnic cooler, and balanced precariously on top of everything else, his mediocre painting.

“You wheeled that all the way out here?” Stu asked.

“I wheeled it until I saw something I wanted to paint. I go different ways on different days. It’s good exercise. If you’re going east, why don’t you come back to Woodsville and spend the night at my house? We can take turns wheeling the barrow, and I’ve got yet another sixpack of beer cooling in yonder stream. That ought to get us home in style.”

“I accept,” Stu said.

“Good man. I’ll probably talk all the way home. You are in the arms of the Garrulous Professor, East Texas. When I bore you, just tell me to shut up. I won’t be offended.”

“I like to listen,” Stu said.

“Then you are one of God’s chosen. Let’s go.”

So they walked on down 302, one of them wheeling the barrow while the other drank a beer. No matter which was which, Bateman talked, an endless monologue that jumped from topic to topic with hardly a pause. Kojak bounced alongside. Stu would listen for a while, then his thoughts would trail off for a while, following their own tangents, and then his mind would come back. He was disquieted by Bateman’s picture of a hundred little enclaves of people, some of them militaristic, living in a country where thousands of doomsday weapons had been left around like a child’s set of blocks. But oddly, the thing his mind kept returning to was Glen Bateman’s dream, the man with no face on top of the high building—or the cliff-edge—the man with the red eyes, his back to the setting sun, looking restlessly to the east.

He woke up sometime before midnight, bathed in sweat, afraid he had screamed. But in the next room, Glen Bateman’s breathing was slow and regular, undisturbed, and in the hallway he could see Kojak sleeping with his head on his paws. Everything was picked out in moonlight so bright it was surreal.

When he woke, Stu had been up on his elbows, and now he lowered himself back to the damp sheet and put an arm over his eyes, not wanting to remember the dream but helpless to avoid it.

He had been in Stovington again. Elder was dead. Everyone was dead. The place was an echoing tomb. He was the only one alive, and he couldn’t find the way out. At first he tried to control his panic.
Walk, don't run,
he told himself over and over, but soon he would have to run. His stride was becoming quicker and quicker, and the urge to look back over his shoulder and make sure that it was only the echoes behind him was becoming insuperable.

He walked past closed office doors with names written in black on milky frosted glass. Past an overturned Gurney. Past the body of a nurse with her white skirt rucked up to her thighs, her blackened, grimacing face staring at the cold white inverted icecube trays that were the ceiling fluorescents.

At last he began to run.

Faster, faster, the doors slipping by him and gone, his feet pounding on the linoleum. Orange arrows oozing on white cinderblock. Signs. At first they seemed right: RADIOLOGY and CORRIDOR B TO LABS and DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT VALID PASS. And then he was in another part of the installation, a part he had never seen and had never been meant to see. The paint on these walls had begun to peel and flake. Some of the fluorescents were out; others buzzed like flies caught in a screen. Some of the frosted glass office windows were shattered, and through the stellated holes he had been able to see wreckage and bodies in terrible positions of pain. There was blood. These people had not died of the flu. These people had been murdered. Their bodies had sustained punctures and gunshots and traumas. Their eyes bulged and stared.