The Stand (Original Edition) (91 page)

round shadows.

“What?”
Larry screamed. Behind him and Stu, Glen, Ralph, and Chad Norris crowded out, forcing Larry and Stu to the foot of the steps.

“She’s come back!”
Dick had to bellow to make himself heard over the cycles.
“Oh, she’s in terrible shape! We need a doctor
. . .
Christ, we need a miracle!”

George Richardson pushed through them. “The old woman? Where?”

“Nick, come on!
Come on!”
Fran cried, seizing his shoulder. Nick was standing in the middle of the living room, his face still, immobile.

He couldn’t talk, but suddenly he knew. He
knew.
It came from nowhere, from everywhere.

There was something in the closet.

He gave Frannie a tremendous push.

“Nick—!”

GO!!
he waved at her.

She went. He turned to the closet, pulled open the door, and began to rip madly at the tangle of things inside, praying God that he wasn’t too late.

“Get on, Doc!” Dick shouted.

Richardson got onto the passenger seat. Dick turned the cycle in a tight circle and began to weave his way back to the road.

Frannie was next to Stu then, her face pallid, her eyes huge. She clutched at him. “Stu . . . Nick’s still in there . . . something . . . something. . .”

He pulled aside a handful of scarves and mittens and felt something. A shoebox. He grabbed it, and as he did, like malign necromancy, Harold Lauder’s voice spoke from inside it.

“What about Nick?” Stu shouted, grabbing her shoulders.

“We have to get him out—Stu—something’s going to happen, something awful—”

A1 Bundell shouted: “What the hell is going on, Stuart?”

“I don’t know,” Stu said.

“Stu, please, we have to get Nick out of there!"
Fran screamed.

That was when the house blew up behind them.

With the SEND button depressed, the background static disappeared and was replaced by a smooth, dark silence. Void, waiting for him to speak. Harold sat cross-legged on the picnic table, summoning himself up.

Then he raised his arm, and at the end of the arm one finger pointed out of his knotted fist, and in that moment he was like Babe Ruth, old and almost washed up, pointing to the spot where he was going to hit the home run, pointing for all the hecklers and bad-mouths in Yankee Stadium.

Speaking firmly but not loudly into the walkie-talkie, he said: “This is Harold Emery Lauder speaking. I do this of my own free will.”

A blue-white spark greeted
This is.
A gout of flame shot up at
Harold Emery Lauder speaking.
A faint, flat bang, like a cherrybomb stuffed into a tin can, reached their ears at /
do this,
and by the time he had spoken the words
of my own free will
and tossed the walkie-talkie away, its purpose served, a fire-rose had bloomed at the base of Flagstaff Mountain.

Nadine clutched at him, much as Frannie had clutched Stu only seconds ago. “We ought to be sure. We ought to be sure that it got them
.”
⁽

Harold looked at her, then gestured at the blooming rose of destruction below them. “Do you think anything could have lived through that?”

“I ... I d-don’t kn . . . ooow, Harold, I’m—” Nadine turned away, clutched her belly, and began to retch. It was a deep, constant, raw sound. Harold watched her with mild contempt.

She turned back at last, panting, pale, wiping at her mouth with a Kleenex. Scrubbing at her mouth. “Now what?”

“Now I guess we go west,” Harold said. “Unless you plan to go down there and sample the mood of the community.”

Nadine shuddered.

Harold slid off the picnic table and winced at the pins and needles as his feet struck the ground. They had gone to sleep.

“Harold—” She tried to touch him and he jerked away. Without looking at her, he began to strike the tent.

“I thought we’d wait until tomorrow—” she began timidly.

“Sure,” he jeered at her. “So twenty or thirty of them can decide to fan out on their bikes and catch us. Did you ever see what they did to Mussolini?”

She winced. Harold was rolling the tent up and cinching the ground-cords tight.

“And we don’t touch each other. That’s over. It got Flagg what he wanted. We wasted their Free Zone Committee. They’re washed up. They may get the power on, but as a functioning group, they’re washed up.
He’ll
give me a woman who makes you look like a potato sack, Nadine. And you . . . you get
him.
Happy days, right? Only if I was wearing your shoes, I would be shaking in them plenty.”

“Harold—please—” She was sick, crying. The irrevocable fact of murder was in her heart forever.

“Get used to it,” Harold said brutally. He flung the tent on the back of his cycle and began to tie it down. “It’s over for them down there, and it’s over for us, and it’s over for everybody that died in the plague. God went off on a celestial fishing trip and He’s going to be gone a long time. It’s totally dark. The dark man’s in the driver’s seat now.
Him.
So get used to it.”

She made a squeaking, moaning noise in her throat.

“Help me get this shit packed up. I want to do a hundred miles before sunup.”

After a moment she turned her back on the destruction below— destruction that seemed almost inconsequential from this height— and helped him pack the rest of the camping gear in his saddlebags and her wire carrier. Fifteen minutes later they had left the fire-rose behind and were riding through the cool and windy dark, headed west.

For Fran Goldsmith, that day’s ending was painless and simple. She felt a warm push of air at her back and suddenly she was flying through the night. She had been knocked out of her sandals.

Whafuck?
she thought.

She landed on her shoulder, landed hard, but there was still no pain. She was in the ravine that ran north-to-south at the foot of Ralph’s backyard.

A chair landed in front of her, neatly, on its legs.

WhaFUCK?

Something landed on the seat of the chair and rolled off. Something that was dripping. With faint and clinical horror, she saw that it was an arm.

Stu? Stu! What’s happening?

A steady, grinding roar of sound engulfed her, and stuff began to rain down everywhere. Rocks. Hunks of wood. Bricks. A glass block spiderwebbed with cracks (hadn’t the bookcase in Ralph’s living room been made of those blocks?). A motorcycle helmet with a horrible, lethal hole punched through the back of it. She could see everything clearly . . . much
too
clearly. It had been dark out only a few seconds ago—

Oh Stu, my God, where are you? What’s happening? Nick? Larry?

People were screaming. That grinding roar went on and on. It was now brighter than noontime. Every pebble cast a shadow. Stuff still raining down all around her. A board with a six-inch spike protruding from it came down in front of her nose.

—the baby
!—

And on the heels of that another thought came, a reprise of her premonition:
Harold did this, Harold did this, Harold
—

Something struck her on the head, the neck, the back. A huge thing that landed on her like a padded coffin.

OH MY GOD OH MY BABY—

Then darkness sucked her down to a nowhere place where not even the dark man could follow.

Birds.

She could hear birds.

Fran lay in darkness, listening to the birds for a long time before she realized the darkness wasn’t really dark. It was reddish, moving, peaceful. It made her think of her childhood. Saturday morning, no school, no church, the day you got to sleep late. The day you could wake up a little at a time, at your leisure. You lay with your eyes shut, and you saw nothing but a red darkness that was Saturday sunshine being filtered through the delicate screen of capillaries in your eyelids. You listened to the birds in the old oaks outside and maybe smelled sea-salt, because your name was Frances Goldsmith and you were eleven years old on a Saturday morning in Ogunquit—

Birds. She could hear birds.

But this wasn’t Ogunquit; it was

(Boulder)

She puzzled over it in the red darkness, and suddenly she remembered the explosion.

(? Explosion?)

(!Stu!)

Her eyes flashed open. There was sudden terror.
“Stu!”

And Stu was sitting there beside her bed, Stu with a clean white bandage wrapped over one forearm and a nasty-looking cut dried on one cheek and part of his hair burned away, but it was
Stu,
he was
alive,
with her, and when she opened her eyes the great relief came on his face and he said, “Frannie. Thank God.”

“The baby,” she said. Her throat was dry. It came out a whisper.

He looked blank, and blind fear stole into her body.

“The baby,” she said, forcing the words up her sandpaper throat. “Did I lose the baby?”

Understanding came over his face. He hugged her clumsily with his good arm. “No, Frannie, no. You didn’t lose the baby.”

Then she began to cry, scalding tears that flowed down her cheeks, and she hugged him fiercely, not caring that every muscle in her body seemed to cry out in pain. She hugged him. The future was later. Now the things she needed most were here in this sunwashed room.

The sound of birds came through the open window.

Later she said, “Tell me. How bad is it?”

His face was heavy and sorrowful and unwilling. “Fran . . .** “Nick?” she whispered. She swallowed and there was a tiny click in her throat. “I saw an arm, a severed arm—”

“It might be better to wait—”

“No. I have to know. How bad was it?”

“Seven dead,” he said in a low, husky voice. “We got off lucky, I figure. It could have been much worse.”

“Who, Stuart?”

He held her hands clumsily. “Nick was one of them, honey. He ... we were able to make identification by . . . certain scars . .

He turned away from her for a moment. Fran made a harsh sighing noise.

When Stu was able to go on he said, “Sue’s gone. Sue Stern. She was still inside when it went off.”

“That . . . just doesn’t seem possible, does it?” Fran said. She felt stunned, numbed, bewildered.

“It’s true.”

“Who else?”

“Chad Norris,” he said, and Fran made that harsh sighing noise again. A single tear slipped from the corner of her eye; she brushed it away almost absently.

‘‘Those were the only three from inside. It’s like a miracle. Brad says there must have been eight, nine sticks of dynamite hooked up in that closet. And Nick, he almost. . . when I think he might have had his hands right on that shoebox . . .”

“Don’t,” she said. “There was no way to know.”

“That doesn’t help much,” he said.

The other four were people who had come up from town on motorcycles—Andrea Terminello, Dean Wykoff, Dale Pedersen, and a young girl named Patsy Stone. Stu did not tell Fran that Patsy, who had been teaching Leo how to play the flute, had been struck and nearly beheaded by a whirling chunk of Glen Bateman’s Wollensak tape recorder.

Twenty had been wounded in the blast and one of them, Teddy Weizak of the Burial Committee, had no chance to recover. Two others were in critical condition. A man named Lewis Deschamps had lost an eye. And Ralph Brentner had lost the third and fourth fingers on his left hand.

“How badly am I hurt?” Fran asked him.

“Why, you have a whiplash and a sprained back and a broken foot,” Stu said. “That’s what George Richardson told me. The blast threw you all the way across the yard. You got the broken foot and the sprained back when the couch landed on you.”

“Couch?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I remember something like a coffin ... a padded coffin . . .”

“I yanked it off you myself. I was raving and . . . pretty hysterical, I guess. Larry came over to help me and I punched him in the mouth. That’s how bad off I was.” She touched his cheek and he put his hand over hers. “I thought you had to be dead. I remember thinking that I didn’t know what I’d do if you were. Go crazy, I guess.”

“I love you,” she said.

He hugged her—gently, because of her back—and they remained that way for some time.

“Harold?” she said at last.

“No sign of him. But it was his work. And if we catch him before they get too far west . . He held his hands, which were scratched and scabbed over, out in front of him and closed them with a sudden snap that made the joints pop. The hamstrings stood out on the insides of his wrists. A sudden cold grin surfaced on his face that made Fran want to shudder. It was too familiar.

“Don’t smile like that,” she said. “Ever.”

“People have been scouring for them since daybreak,” he went on, no longer smiling. “I don’t think they’ll find them. I told them not to go further than fifty miles west of Boulder no matter what, and I imagine Harold was smart enough to get them further than that. But we know how they did it. They had the explosive hooked up to a walkie-talkie—”

Fran gasped, suddenly understanding what Stu had meant about Nick having his hands on the shoebox when the explosive was detonated. Suddenly understanding everything.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

Speaking slowly, she told him about the snips of wire and the walkie-talkie box under the air hockey table. “If we’d searched the whole house instead of just taking his damn b-book, we might have found the bomb,” she said, and her voice began to choke and break. “N-Nick and Sue would be a-a-alive and—”

He held her. “Is that why Larry seems so down this morning? I thought it was cause I punched him. Frannie, how could you know, huh? How could you possibly know?”

“We should have! We should have known!” She buried her face against the good darkness of his shoulder. More tears, hot and scalding. He held her, bent over awkwardly because the electrically powered hospital bed would not crank up.

“I don’t want you blamin yourself, Frannie. It’s happened. I’m telling you there’s no way anybody—except maybe a bomb-squad detective—could make something out of a few snips of wire and an empty box. If they’d left a couple of sticks of dynamite or a blasting cap around, that would have been a different proposition. But they didn’t. I don’t blame you, and nobody else in the Zone is going to blame you, either.”