The Stand (Original Edition) (58 page)

“Think there’s just enough room,” the old man muttered, and began to swing around. All the spit in Trashcan Man’s mouth dried up to a thin scum as the old man began to edge the car off the road. The righthand wheels whispered along the shoulder.

“Count me out,” Trash said, but he was already too late. The ground had disappeared on his side. If he stepped out of the T-Bird, he would fall three hundred feet before he hit the ground.

“Still want to get out?” the old man muttered. A crazy grin had appeared on his face.

Trash wanted to close his eyes but could not. He was looking straight down into a long vista of blue-gray pines and tumbled boulders.

“Another inch,” the old man whispered. Spit bubbled at the comers of his mouth. He was crazy, all right, but not harmless at all. No way. He was going to kill them.

But they made it—just. Trashcan Man felt the right rear of the T-Bird suddenly slip outward and downward sharply. He heard a millrace of falling pebbles, then larger stones. The old man cursed horribly and floored the accelerator. The cigar fell from his mouth and bounced to the floor in a shower of sparks. From the left, where they had been inching past the corpse of an overturned VW Microbus, there came a horrible scream of grinding metal. The T-Bird’s wheels spun. For a moment their shift toward the drop seemed to be growing greater, and then the car suddenly lurched up and they were back on the road.

Trash closed his eyes and began to shudder helplessly.

Some time later, he realized that they weren’t moving. A strange gagging sound was coming from the old man. Trash opened his eyes and looked at him. The old man was sitting upright behind the wheel, both hands clutched to his scrawny chest. His face was paper white. His mouth opened and closed slowly. Suddenly he pitched forward onto the wheel. The horn began to blare endlessly, as if in protest at this huge traffic jam.

Trash got out of the car on rubber legs and went around to the old man’s side. He pulled him out. The old man was dead of a heart attack. His eyes glared sightlessly at the sky.

After some debate, Trash put him back in the T-Bird and closed the doors. At least the animals wouldn’t get him. And to tell the truth, he was glad to be shut of him.

Trash started to walk.

He left the T-Bird behind at 10:30 in the morning. Walking was slow—at times he had to scramble over the roofs and hoods of cars and trucks, they were so tightly packed together—and by the time he came to the first TUNNEL CLOSED sign it was already 3:15. He had made about twelve miles. Just the thought of twelve miles of backed-up traffic was awesome. Now he stood pondering the sign, which was lying beneath the wheel of a Pinto. TUNNEL CLOSED. What tunnel? He peered ahead, shading his eyes. He thought he could make out something.

He walked on another three hundred yards, scrambling over cars where he had to, and came at last to an alarming confusion of crashed vehicles and dead bodies. Some of the cars and trucks had burned; many of these were army vehicles, and many of the dead bodies wore khaki. Beyond the scene of this battle, the traffic jam began again. East and west, the traffic disappeared into the twin bores of what a huge sign bolted into the living rock proclaimed to be THE EISENHOWER TUNNEL.

Heart bumping, Trash walked closer. Those twin bores punched into the rock intimidated him, and as he drew closer, intimidation became outright terror. He would have understood Larry Underwood’s feelings about the Lincoln Tunnel perfectly; in that instant they were unknowing soul brothers, the shared emotion one of stark terror. The main difference was that while the Lincoln Tunnel’s pedestrian catwalk was set high off the roadbed, here it was low enough so that some drivers had attempted to run their cars along the side, with one set of wheels up on the catwalk and the other set on the road. The tunnel was two miles long (although Trash didn’t know that then—mercifully). The only way to negotiate it would be to crawl along from car to car in the pitch dark, on hands and knees. Trashcan Man felt his bowels turn to water.

He stood looking at the tunnel for a long time, and at last he went in. What else was there to do?
He
was up ahead. Cibola was up ahead, Seven-in-One, the City that is Promised. Oh, but it would be dark in there, and the trip would be long . . . and who knew what Things, unknown in the schemes of God, man, Satan, or the dark man, might be waiting inside to clutch and catch?

Still, there was no choice. He was far past the point of turning back, so where was there to go but ahead, even if it was into this dark hellpit?

Trash worked his way steadily into the maw that was the westbound bore of the tunnel. It was a long trip, and before it was over he had totally lost track of time. He groped forward from one car to the next blindly.

An unknown time later he sensed a new freshness in the air and began to hurry, once losing his balance and plunging from the hood of one car to crack his skull painfully on the bumper of the next. A short time after that he looked up and saw stars instead of the blank tunnel roof. He gawped comically up at the majestic blind whirl of the Milky Way. He looked behind him and saw the tunnel exit . . .
almost seventy yards behind him.
He had been outside for fifteen minutes. He had been outside and he hadn’t known.

And Trashcan Man began to laugh. He laughed until tears squirted from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. His madness, like a fine skillet dish, now wanted only the desert sun to simmer and complete it, to give it the final touch of flavor.

Trashcan Man woke up in the back seat of the Mercedes just as dust was falling. It had gotten plenty hot in the car in spite of the clothes he had hung over the windows to minimize the greenhouse effect. His throat was a dry well faced with sandpaper. His temples thumped. When he ran his tongue out and stroked it with his fingers it felt like a dead treebranch. He had to wrap his shirttail around the doorhandle to let himself out. He thought he would just step out, but he had underestimated how far the dehydration had advanced on this evening of August 4, 1980: his legs collapsed and he fell onto the road, which was also hot. Moaning, he did the funky chicken until he was into the shade of the Mercedes. He sat there panting, staring morbidly at the two bodies he had pulled out of the car. He had to get to Cibola before the sun came up tomorrow morning or he would end up just like them. Surely the dark man would not let him die in sight of his goal.

“My life for you,” Trashcan Man whispered. And when the sun had dropped below the mountains, he gained his feet and began to walk up the broken white line toward the towers and avenues of Cibola, where the sparks of light were coming on again.

As the heat of the day faded into the cool ol desert night, he found himself more able to walk. He plodded with his head down, and did not see the green, reflectorized sign that said LAS VEGAS 30 when he passed it.

Around midnight he collapsed by the side of the road for a rest and fell into an uneasy doze. The city was closer now. He would make it. He was quite sure he would make it.

It was almost dawn when Trashcan man entered Cibola, otherwise known as Vegas. Somewhere in the last five miles he had lost his left sneaker and now, as he walked down the curving exit ramp, his footfalls sounded like this:
slap-THUMP, slap-THUMP
,
slap-THUMP.
It sounded like the flap of a fiat tire.

He was almost done in, but a little wonder came back as he made his way down the Strip, which was jammed with dead cars and quite a few dead people. He had made it. He was here in Cibola.

He saw a hundred honky-tonk nightclubs. There were signs that read LIBERAL SLOTS, signs that said BLUEBELL WEDDING CHAPEL and
6
O-SECOND WEDDING BUT IT’LL LAST A LIFETIME! He saw a Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce halfway through a plate glass window of an adult bookstore. He saw a naked woman hanging upside down from a lamppost. He saw two pages of the Las Vegas
Sun
go riffling by. The headline that revealed itself over and over again as the paper flapped and turned was PLAGUE GROWS
WORSE
WASHINGTON MUTE. He saw a gigantic billboard which said NEIL DIAMOND! THE AMERICANA HOTEL JUNE 15-AUGUST 30! Someone had slashed the words DIE LAS VEGAS for your sins! across the show window of a jewelry store seeming to specialize in nothing but wedding and engagement rings.

As he walked on he began to see other signs, their neon dead this midsummer for the first time in years. Flamingo. The Mint. Dunes. Sahara. Glass Slipper. Imperial. But where were the people? Where was the water?

Hardly knowing, letting his feet pick their own path, Trashcan turned off the Strip. His head dropped forward, his chin resting on his chest. He dozed as he walked. And when his feet tripped over the curbing, when he fell forward and gave himself a bloody nose on the pavement, when he looked up and beheld what was there, he could hardly believe it. Blood ran unnoticed from his nose to his tattered blue shirt. It was as if he was still dozing and this was his dream.

A tall white building stretched up to the desert sky, a monolith in the desert, a needle, a monument, every bit as magnificent as the Sphinx or the Great Pyramid. The windows of its eastern face gave off the fire of the rising sun like an omen. In front of this bone-white desert edifice, flanking its entranceway, were two huge gold pyramids. Over the canopy was a great bronze medallion, and carved on it in bas-relief was the snarling head of a lion.

Above this, also in bronze, the simple but mighty legend:
M-G-M GRAND HOTEL.

But what captured his eyes was what stood on the grassy quadrangle between the parking lot and the entranceway. Trashcan stared, an orgasmic shivering consuming him so fiercely that for a moment he could only prop himself on his bloody hands, the unraveling end of the Ace bandage trailing between them, and stare at the fountain with his faded blue eyes, eyes that were halfway to being glareblind by now. A little groaning noise began to escape him.

The fountain was working. It was a flawless stone ivory, chased and inlaid with gold. Colored lights played over the spray, making the water purple, then yellow-orange, then red, then green. The constant ticking patter as the spray fell back into the pool was very loud.

“Cibola,” he muttered, and struggled to his feet. He began to stagger toward the fountain. His stagger became a trot. The trot became a run, the run a sprint, the sprint a mad dash. His scabbed knees rose, pistonlike, almost to his neck. A word began to fly out of his mouth, a long word like a paper streamer that rose to the sky, bringing people to the windows high above. The word grew higher and shriller, longer and longer as he approached the fountain and that word was:

“ClllIllllBOLA A AAA AAA!”

The final “aahh” sound drew out and out, a sound of all the pleasures that all the people who have ever lived on the earth have ever known, and it ended only when he struck the lip of the fountain chest-high and yanked himself up and over and into a bath of incredible coolness and mercy. He could feel the pores of his body open like a million mouths and slurp the water in like a sponge. He screamed. He lowered his head, snorted in water, and blew it back out in a combined sneeze and cough that sent blood and water and

snot against the side of the fountain in a splat. He lowered his head and drank like a cow.

“Cibola! Cibola!” Trash cried rapturously. “My life for you!”

He dogpaddled his way around the fountain, drank again, then climbed over the edge and fell to the grass. It had all been worth it, everything had been worth it. Water cramps struck him and he suddenly threw up with a loud grunt. Even throwing up felt grand.

He got to his feet and, holding onto the lip of the fountain with his claw hand, he drank again. This time his belly accepted the gift gratefully.

Sloshing like a filled goatskin, he staggered toward the alabaster steps which led to the doors of this fabulous place, steps that led between the golden pyramids. The doors were of the revolving type, and it took all his feeble strength to get one of them in motion. He pushed through into a plushly carpeted lobby that seemed miles long. The rug underfoot was thick and lush and cranberry-colored. There was a registration desk, a mail desk, a key desk, the cashiers’ windows. All empty.

To his right, beyond an ornamental railing, was the casino. Trashcan Man stared at it in awe—the serried ranks of slot machines like soldiers standing at parade rest, beyond them the roulette and crap tables, the marble railings enclosing the baccarat tables.

“Who’s here?” Trash croaked, but no answer came back.

He was afraid then, but his fear was weakened by his exhaustion. He stumbled down the steps and into the casino, passing the Cub Bar, where Lloyd Henreid sat silently in the deep shadows, watching him and holding a glass of Perrier.

He came to a table upholstered in green baize, the mythic legend DEALER MUST HIT 16 AND STAND ON 17 inscribed thereon. Trash climbed up on it and fell instantly asleep. Soon nearly half a dozen men stood around the sleeping ragamuffin that was the Trashcan Man.

“What do we do with him?” Ken DeMott asked.

“Let him sleep,” Lloyd answered. “Flagg wants him.”

“Yeah? Where the Christ
is
Flagg, anyway?” another asked.

Lloyd turned to look at the man, who was balding and stood a full foot taller than Lloyd. Nonetheless, he drew back a step at Lloyd’s gaze. The stone around Lloyd’s neck was the only one that was not solid jet; in the center gleamed a small and disquieting red flaw.

“Are you that anxious to see him, Hec?” Lloyd asked.

“No,” the balding man said. “Hey, Lloyd, you know I didn’t—”

“Sure.” Lloyd looked down at the man sleeping on the blackjack table. “Flagg will be around,” he said. “He’s been waiting for this guy. This guy is something special.”

On the table, oblivious of all this, Trashcan Man slept on.

On August 7, Lloyd Henreid came to the room the dehydrated and semidelirious Trashcan Man had been installed in the day before. Trashcan Man recognized him but could hardly remember his name. People had drifted in and out of his room like creatures in a dream.