The Stand (Original Edition) (61 page)

As they had moved west, picking up survivors, her hope that it could somehow end for her without confrontation had gradually died. It died as Larry grew in her estimation. He was sleeping with Lucy Swann now, but what did that matter? She was spoken for. The others had been having two opposing dreams: the dark man and the old woman. The old woman seemed to stand for some sort of elemental force, just as the dark man did. The old woman was the nucleus the others were gradually cohering around.

Nadine had never dreamed of her.

Only of the dark man. And when the dreams of the others had suddenly faded away as inexplicably as they had come, her own dreams had seemed to grow in power and in clarity.

She knew many things which they did not. The dark man’s name was Randall Flagg. Those in the west who opposed him had either been crucified or driven mad somehow and set free to wander in the boiling sink of Death Valley. There were small groups of technical people in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but they were only temporary; very soon they would be moving to Las Vegas, where the main concentration of his people was growing. For him there was no hurry. Summer was on the down side now. Soon the Rocky Mountain passes would be filling with snow. There would be a long winter in which to consolidate. And next April... or May . . .

Boulder was her last hope. The old woman was her last hope. The sanity and rationality she had hoped to find at Stovington had begun to form in Boulder. They were good, she thought, the good guys, and if only it could be that simple for her, caught in her crazy web of conflicting desires.

Played over and over again, like a dominant chord, was her own firm belief that murder in this decimated world was the gravest sin, and her heart told her firmly and without question that death was Randall Flagg’s business. But oh how she wanted his cold kiss— more than she had wanted the kisses of the high school boy, or the college boy . . . even more, she feared, than Larry Underwood’s kiss and embrace.

We’ll be in Boulder tomorrow,
she thought.
Maybe I’ll know then if the trip is over or
. . .

A shooting star scratched its fire across the sky, and like a child, she wished on it.

Dawn was coming up, painting the eastern sky a delicate rose color. Stu Redman and Glen Bateman were about halfway up Flagstaff Mountain in West Boulder, where the first foothills of the Rockies rise up out of the flat plains like a vision of prehistory. In the dawnlight Stu thought that the pines crawling between the naked and nearly perpendicular stone faces looked like the veins ridging some giant’s hand that had poked out of the earth.

“I’m going to have a headache this afternoon,” Glen said. “I don’t believe I’ve stayed up drinking all night since I was an undergrad.” “Sunrise is worth it,” Stu said.

“Yes it is. Beautiful.”

Stu hoisted the jug of wine and had a swallow. “I got quite a buzz on myself.” He looked out over the view in silence for a few moments and then turned to Glen with a slanted smile. “What’s going to happen now?”

“Happen?”

“Sure. That’s why I got you up here. Told Frannie, ‘I’m gonna get him good n drunk and then pick his brains.’ She said fine.”

Glen grinned. “There are no tealeaves in the bottom of a wine bottle.”

“So make some educated guesses.”

“Cross my palm with silver, O aspirant to knowledge.”

“Never mind the silver, baldy, I’ll take you down to the First National Bank of Boulder tomorrow and give you a million dollars. How’s that?”

“Seriously, Stu—what do you want to know?”

“Same things that mute guy Andros wants to know, I guess. What’s going to happen next. I don’t know how to put it any better than that.”

“There’s going to be a society,” Glen said slowly. “What kind? Impossible to say right now. There are almost four hundred people here now. I’d guess from the rate they’ve been coming in—more every day—that by the first of September there’ll be fifteen hundred of us. Forty-five hundred by the first of October, and maybe as many as eight thousand by the time the snow flies in November and closes the roads. Write that down as prediction number one.”

“Hard for me to believe,” Stu said. “We came all the way across the country and didn’t see a hundred people all told.”

“Ralph’s in touch with five or six groups right now that will bring us up to five hundred by the end of the week,” Glen said, and smiled again. “Mother Abagail sits right there with him in his ‘radio station,’ but she won’t talk on the CB. Says she’s afraid she’ll get an electroshock.”

"‘Frannie loves that old woman,” Stu said. “Part of it is because she knows so much about delivering babies, but part of it is just . . . loving her. You know?”

“Yes. Most everybody feels the same.”

“Eight thousand people by winter,” Stu said. “Man oh man.”

“It’s just arithmetic. Let’s say the flu wiped out ninety-nine per cent of the population. Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but let’s use that figure just so we have a place to put our feet. If the flu was ninety-nine per cent fatal, that means it wiped out damned near two hundred and eighteen million people, just in this country.” He looked at Stu’s shocked face and nodded grimly. “Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but we can make a pretty good guess that figure’s in the ballpark. Makes the Nazis look like pikers, doesn’t it?”

“My Lord,” Stu said in a dry voice.

“But that would still leave over two million people, a fifth of the pre-plague population of Tokyo, a fourth of the pre-plague population of New York. That’s in this country alone. Now, I believe that ten per cent of that two million might not have survived the aftermath of the flu. People like poor Mark Braddock with his burst appendix, but also the accidents, the suicides, yes, and murder, too. That takes us down to 1.8 million. But we suspect there’s an Adversary, don’t we? The dark man that we dreamed about. West of us somewhere. There are seven states over there that could legitimately be called his territory
... if
he really exists.”

“I guess he exists, all right,” Stu said.

“My feeling, too. But is he simply in dominion of all the people over there? I don’t think so, any more than Mother Abagail is automatically in dominion of the people in the other forty-one continental United States. I think things have been in a state of slow flux and that that state of affairs is beginning to end. People are cohering. When you and I first discussed this back in New Hampshire, I envisioned dozens of little tinpot societies. What I didn’t count on— because I didn’t know about it—was the all but irresistible pull of these two opposing dreams. It was a new fact that no one could have foreseen.”

“Are you saying that we’ll end up with nine hundred thousand people and
he’ll
end up with nine hundred thousand?”

“No. First, the coming winter is going to take its toll. It’s going to take it here, and it’s going to be even tougher for the small groups that don’t make it here before the snow. You realize we don’t even have one doctor in the Free Zone yet? Our medical staff consists of a veterinarian and Mother Abagail herself, who’s forgotten more valid folk medicine than you or I will ever have a chance to learn. Still, they’d look cute trying to put a steel plate in your skull after you took a fall and bashed in the back of your head, wouldn’t they?”

Stu snickered. “That ole boy Rolf Dannemont would probably drag out his Remington and let daylight through me.”

“I’d guess the total American population might be down to 1.6 million by next spring—and that’s a kind estimate. Of that number, I’d like to hope we’d get the million. Boulder couldn’t hold them. I know that boggles the mind, when you walk around the empty streets downtown and out toward Table Mesa, but it just couldn’t. We’d have to seed the communities all around us. The situation you’d have is this one giant community and the rest of the country east of here absolutely empty.”

“Why do you think we’d get most of the people?”

“For a very unscientific reason,” Glen said, riffling his tonsure of hair with one hand. “I like to believe most people are good. And I believe that whoever is running the show west of us is really bad. But I have a hunch . . .” He trailed off.

“Go on, spill it.”

“I will because I’m drunk. But it stays between us, Stuart.”

“All right.”

“Your word?”

“My word,” Stu said.

“I think he’s going to get most of the techies,” Glen said finally. “Don’t ask me why; it’s just a hunch. Except that tech people like to work in an atmosphere of tight discipline and linear goals, for the most part. They like it when the trains run on time. What we’ve got here in Boulder right now is mass confusion, everyone bopping along and doing his own thing . . . and we’ve got to do something about what my students would have called ‘getting our shit together.’ But that other fellow . . . I’ll bet
he’s
got the trains running on time and all his ducks in a row. And techies are just as human as the rest of us; they’ll go where they’re wanted the most. I’ve a suspicion that our Adversary wants as many as he can get. Fuck the farmers, he’d just as soon have a few men who can dust off those Idaho missile silos and get them operational again. Ditto tanks and helicopters and maybe a B-52 bomber or two just for chuckles. Right now he’s probably still concentrating on getting the power back on, re-establishing communications . . . maybe he’s had to indulge in a purge or two. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and he’ll know that. He has time. But when I watch the sun go down at night—this is no shit, Stuart—I get scared. I don’t need bad dreams to scare me anymore. All I have to do is think of them over there on the other side of the Rockies, busy as little bees.”

“What should we be doing?”

“Should I give you a list?” Glen responded, grinning.

Stuart took out a battered notebook with two disco dancers and the words BOOGIE DOWN! on its hot pink cover. “Yup,” he said. “You’re kidding.”

“No, I ain’t. You said it, Glen, we got to start getting our shit together someplace. I feel it, too. It’s getting later every day. We can’t just sit here jacking off and listening to the CB. We may wake up some morning to find that hardcase waltzing into Boulder at the head of an armored column, complete with air support.”

“Don’t look for him tomorrow,” Glen said.

“No. But what about next May?”

“Possible,” Glen said in a low voice. “Yes, quite possible.”

“And what do you think would happen to us?”

Glen didn’t reply with words. He made an explicit little trigger-pulling gesture with the forefinger of his right hand and then hurriedly scoffed the last of the wine.

“Yeah,” Stu said. “So let’s start getting it together. Talk.”

Glen closed his eyes. The brightening day touched his wrinkled cheeks and forehead.

“Okay,” he said. “Here it is, Stu. First: re-create America. Little America. By fair means and by foul. Organization and government come first. If it starts now, we can form the sort of government we want. If we wait until the population triples, we are going to have grave problems.

“Let’s say we call a meeting a week from today, that would make it August eighteenth. Everyone to attend. Before the meeting there should be an ad hoc Organization Committee. A committee of seven, let us say. You, me, Andros, Fran, Harold Lauder, maybe, a couple more. The job of the committee would be to create an agenda for the August eighteenth meeting. And I can tell you right now what some of the items on that agenda should be.”

“Shoot.”

“First, reading and ratification of the Declaration of Independence. Second, r and r of the Constitution. Third, r and r of the Bill of Rights. All ratification to be done by voice vote.”

“Christ, Glen, we’re all Americans—”

“No, that’s where you’re wrong,” Glen said, opening his eyes. “We’re a bunch of survivors with no government at all, from every age group, religious group, class group, and racial group. What we’ve got going for us now is culture lag. Most of these people still believe in government by representation—the Republic—what they think of as ‘democracy.’ But culture lag never lasts long. After a while they’ll wake up to the idea that the old ways are gone, and that they can restructure society any old way they want. We want—we
need
—to catch them before they wake up and do something nutty.” He leveled his finger at Stu.

“If someone stood up at that August eighteenth meeting and proposed that Mother Abagail be put in absolute charge, with you and me and that fellow Andros as her advisers, those people would pass the item by acclamation, blissfully unaware that they had just voted the first operating American dictatorship into power since Huey Long.”

“Oh, I can’t believe that. There are college graduates here, lawyers, political activists—”

“Maybe they used to be. Now they’re just a bunch of tired, scared people who don’t know what’s going to happen to them. Some might squawk, but they’d shut up when you told them that Mother Abagail and her advisers were going to get the power back on in sixty days. No, Stu, it’s very important that the first thing we do is ratify the
spirit
of the old society. That’s what I meant about re-creating America. It has to be that way as long as we’re operating under direct threat of the man we’re calling the Adversary.”

“Go on.”

“All right. The next item on the agenda would be that we run the government like a New England township. Perfect democracy. As long as we’re relatively small, it’ll work fine. Only instead of a board of selectmen we’ll have seven . . . representatives, I guess. And we’ll see to it that the people who get elected are the same people who were on the ad hoc committee. We’ll put the rush on everybody and get the vote taken before people can do any tub-thumping for their friends. We can handpick people to nominate us and then second us. The vote’ll go through as slick as shit through a goose.”

“That’s neat,” Stu said admiringly.

“Sure,” Glen said glumly. “If you want to short-circuit the democratic process, ask a sociologist.”

“What next?”

“This is going to be very popular. The item would read: ‘Resolved: Mother Abagail is to be given absolute veto power over any action proposed by the Board.”