The Stand (Original Edition) (64 page)

For every house or public building you found littered with corpses, there were ten others completely empty. Sometime, during the last spasm of the plague, most of Boulder’s citizens, sick or well, had blown town. Why? Well, he supposed it really didn’t matter, and maybe they would never know. The awesome fact remained that Mother Abagail, sight unseen, had managed to lead them to maybe the one small city in the United States that had been cleared of plague victims. It was enough to make even an agnostic like himself wonder where she was getting her information.

He went back to his thoughts, doodling formlessly on a pad in front of him.

It seemed to him that all they wanted or needed from the old life was stored in the silent East Boulder power plant, like dusty treasure in a dark cupboard. An unpleasant feeling seemed to run through the people who had gathered in Boulder, a feeling just submerged below the surface—they were like a scared bunch of kids knocking around in the local haunted house after dark. There was a sense that being here in Boulder was strictly a temporary thing. There was one man, a fellow named Impening, who had lived in Boulder and worked on one of the custodial crews at the IBM plant out on the Boulder-Longmont Diagonal. Impening seemed determined to stir up unrest. He was going around telling people that in 1974 there had been an inch and a half of snow in Boulder by September 14, and that by November it would be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. That was the kind of talk Nick would like to put a quick stop to. Never mind that if Impening had been in the army he would have been cashiered for such talk; that was an empty logic, if it was logic at all. The important thing was that Impening’s words would have no power if people could move into houses where the lights worked and where the furnaces blew hot air up through grates at the touch of a finger on a button. If that didn’t happen by the time the first coldsnap arrived, Nick was afraid that people would begin to simply slip away, and all the meetings, representatives, and ratifications in the world wouldn’t stop that.

According to Ralph, there wasn’t that much wrong at the power plant, at least not that much visible. The crews who ran it had shut some of the machinery down; other machinery had shut itself down. Two or three of the big turbine engines had blown, perhaps as the result of some final power surge. Ralph said that some of the wiring would have to be replaced, but he thought that he and Brad Kitchner and a crew of a dozen warm bodies could do that. A much bigger work crew was needed to remove fused and blackened copper wire from the blown turbine generators and then install new copper wire by the yard. There was plenty of copper wire in the Denver supply houses for the taking; Ralph and Brad had gone one day last week to check for themselves. With the manpower, they thought they could have the lights on again by Labor Day.

“And then we’ll throw the biggest fucking party this town ever saw,” Brad said.

Law and Order. That was something else that troubled him. Could Stu Redman be handed that particular package? He wouldn’t want the job, but Nick thought he could perhaps persuade Stu to take it . . . and if push came to shove, he could get Stu’s friend Glen to back him up. What really bothered him was the memory, still too fresh and hurtful to look at more than briefly, of his own brief and terrible tour as Shoyo’s jailkeeper. Vince and Billy dying, Mike Childress jumping up and down on his supper and crying out in wretched defiance:
Hunger strike! Vm on a fuckin hunger strike!

It made him ache inside to think they might need courts and jails . . . Christ, these were Mother Abagail’s people, not the dark man’s! But he suspected the dark man would not bother with such trivialities as courts and jails. His punishment would be swift and sure and heavy. He would not need the threat of jail when the corpses hung on the telephone pole crosses along 1-15.

Nick hoped most of the infractions would be small ones. There had been several cases of drunk and disorderly already. One kid, really too young to drive, had been rodding a big dragging machine up and down Broadway, scaring people out of the street. He had finally driven into a stalled bread truck and had gashed his forehead—and lucky to get off so cheaply, in Nick’s opinion. The people who had seen him knew he was too young, but no one had felt he or she had the authority to put a stop to it.

Authority. Organization.
He wrote the words on his pad and put them inside a double circle. Being Mother Abagail’s people gave them no immunity to weakness, stupidity, or bad companions. Nick didn’t know if they were the children of God or not, but when Moses had come down from the mountain, those not busy worshiping the golden calf had been busy shooting craps, he knew that. And they had to face the possibility that someone might get cut over a card game or decide to shoot someone else over a woman.

Authority. Organization.
He circled the words again and now they were like prisoners behind a triple stockade. How well they went together . . . and what a sorry sound they made.

Not long after, Ralph came in to show Nick a sample poster. Still smelling strongly of mimeograph ink, the print was large and eyecatching. Ralph had done the graphics himself:

MASS MEETING!!!

REPRESENTATIVE BOARD TO BE NOMINATED AND ELECTED!

8:30
p.m.,
August 18, 1980

Place: Canyon Boulevard Park & Bandshell if FINE 

Chautauqua Hall in Chautauqua Park if FOUL

REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED 

FOLLOWING THE MEETING

Below this were two rudimentary street maps for newcomers and those who hadn’t spent much time exploring Boulder. Below, in rather fine print, were the names he and Stu and Glen had agreed upon after some discussion earlier in the day:

Ad Hoc Committee

Nick Andros 

Glen Bateman 

Ralph Brentner 

Richard Ellis 

Fran Goldsmith 

Stuart Redman 

Susan Stern

“Spent some time talking with the fellow in charge of that big group that came in today,” Ralph said after Nick had nodded his approval and handed the flier back. “Larry Underwood, his name is. Smart man, Nick. Sharp. He’s five or six years older than you, and maybe five years younger than Redman. He’s the kind of man you’ve been looking for. Wish we had room for him on this committee thing. You’d like him.”

Nick shrugged. It was too late now; he and the others had been finalizing the committee even as Larry and his party were meeting Mother Abagail.

He pointed to the line on the flier about refreshments and raised his eyebrows.

“Oh yeah, well, Frannie came by and said we’d be more apt to get everybody if we had something. She and her friend there, Patty Kroger, they’re going to see to it. Cookies and Za-Rex.” Ralph made a face. “If it came down to a choice between drinking Za-Rex and bullpiss, I’d have to sit down and think her over. You c’n have mine, Nicky.”

Nick grinned.

“The only thing about this,” Ralph went on more seriously, “is you guys putting me on this committee. I know what that word means. It means ‘Congratulations, you get to do all the hard work.’ Well, I don’t really mind that, I been workin hard all my life. But committees are supposed to have idears, and I ain’t much of an idear man.”

On his pad, Nick quickly sketched a big CB setup, and in the background a radio tower with bolts of electricity coming from its top.

“Yeah, but that’s a lot different,” Ralph said glumly.

“You’ll be fine,” Nick wrote. “Believe it.”

“If you say so, Nicky. I’ll give her a try. I still think you’d be better off with this Underwood fella, though.”

Nick clapped Ralph on the shoulder. Ralph bid him goodnight

and went upstairs. When he was gone, Nick looked thoughtfully at the handbill for a long time. If Stu and Glen had seen copies—and he was sure they had by now—they knew that he had unilaterally stricken Harold Lauder’s name from their list of ad hoc committee members. He didn’t know how they might be taking it, but the fact that they hadn’t shown up at his door yet was probably a good sign. They might want him to do some horse trading of his own, and if he had to, he would do it, just to keep Harold out at the top. If he had to, he would give them Ralph. Ralph didn’t really want the position anyway, although, goddammit, Ralph had great native wit and the nearly priceless ability to think around the corners of problems. He would be a good man to have on the permanent committee, and he felt that Stu and Glen had already packed the committee with their friends. If he wanted Lauder out, they would just have to go along. To pull off this leadership coup smoothly, there had to be no dissension at all among them. And they would have to be constantly thinking three steps ahead . . .

After love, Stu had gone to sleep. He had been on short sleep rations lately, and the night before he had been up all night with Glen Bateman, planning for the future. Frannie had put on her robe and had come out here on the balcony.

The building they lived in was downtown, on the corner of Pearl Street and Broadway. Their apartment was on the third floor, and below her she could see the intersection, Pearl running east-west, Broadway running north-south. She liked it here. They had the compass boxed. The night was warm and windless, the black stone of the sky flawed with a million stars. In their faint and frosty glow, Fran could see the slabs of the Flatirons rising in the west.

She passed a hand down from her neck to her thighs. The dressing gown she wore was silk, and she was naked underneath. Her hand passed smoothly over her breasts and then, instead of continuing on flat and straight to the mild rise of her pubis, her hand traced an arc of belly, following a curve that had not been this pronounced even two weeks ago.

She was beginning to show, not a lot yet, but Stu had commented on it this evening. His question had been casual enough, even comic:
How long can we do it without me, uh, squeezing him?

Or her,
she had answered, amused.
How does four months sound, Chief?

Fine,
he had answered, and slipped deliciously into her.

Earlier talk had been much more serious. Not long after they got to Boulder, Stu told her he had discussed the baby with Glen and Glen had advanced the idea, very cautiously, that the superflu germ or virus might still be around. If so, the baby might die. It was an unsettling thought (you could always, she thought, count on Glen Bateman for an Unsettling Thought or two), but surely if the mother was immune, the baby . . . ?

Yet there were plenty of people here who had lost children to the plague.

Yes, but that would mean
—

Would mean what?

Well, for one thing, it might mean that all these people here were just an epilogue to the human race, a brief coda. She didn’t want to believe that,
couldn’t
believe it. If that were—

Someone was coming up the street, turning sideways to slip between a dumptruck that had stalled with two of its wheels on the pavement and the wall of a restaurant called the Pearl Street Kitchen. He had a light jacket slung over one shoulder and was carrying something in one hand that was either a bottle or a gun with a long barrel. In the other hand he had a sheet of paper, probably with an address written on it from the way he was checking street numbers. At last he stopped in front of their building. He was looking at the door and trying to decide what to do. Frannie was standing less than twenty feet above his head, and she found herself in one of those situations. If she called to him, she might scare him. If she didn’t, he might start knocking and wake Stuart up. And what was he doing with a gun in his hand anyway, if it was a gun?

He suddenly craned his neck and looked up, probably to see if any lights were on. Frannie was still looking down. They peered directly into each others’ eyes.

“Holy God!” the man on the sidewalk cried. He took an involuntary step backward, went off the sidewalk into the gutter, and sat down hard.

“Oh!” Frannie said at the same moment, and took her own step backward on the balcony. There was a spider-plant in a large pottery vase on a pedestal behind her. Frannie’s behind struck it. It tottered, almost decided to live a little longer, and then defenestrated itself on the balcony’s slate flags with a loud crash.

In the bedroom, Stu grunted, turned over, and was still again.

Frannie, perhaps predictably, was seized with the giggles. She put both hands over her mouth and pinched viciously at her lips, but the giggles came out anyway in a series of hoarse little whispers. Grace strikes again, she thought, and whisper-giggled madly into her cupped hands. If he’d had a guitar I could have dropped the damned vase on his head.
O Solo mio .
. .
CRASH!
Her belly hurt from trying to hold in the giggles.

A conspiratorial whisper wafted its way up from below: “Hey, you . . . you on the balcony . . .
psssst!”

“Pssst,”
Frannie whispered to herself.
“Pssst,
oh great.”

She had to get out before she started hee-hawing away like a donkey. She had never been able to hold in her laughter once it got hold of her. She ran fleetly across the darkened bedroom, snatched a more substantial—and demure—wrapper from the back of the bathroom door, and went down the hall struggling it on, her face working like a rubber mask. She let herself out onto the landing and got down one flight before the laughter escaped her and flew free. She went down the lower two flights laughing wildly.

The man—a young man, she saw now—had picked himself up and was brushing himself off. He was slim and well built, most of his face covered with a beard that might be blond or possibly sandy-red by daylight. There were dark circles under his eyes, but he was smiling a rueful little smile.

“What did you knock over?” he asked. “It sounded like a piano.”

“It was a vase,” she said. “It . . . it . . .” But then the giggles caught her again and she could only point a finger at him and laugh quietly and shake her head and then hold her aching belly again. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “You really looked funny ... I know that’s a hell of a thing to say to somebody you just met, but. . . oh my! you
did!”