The Stand (Original Edition) (96 page)

“Ah, man,” Larry said softly. “I feel like this is the end of everything.”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “It does feel like that.”

“Come on,” Stu said, smiling a little. “Do you dogfaces want to live forever?”

They went on, leaving Boulder behind them. By nine that night they were camped in Golden, half a mile from where Route 6 begins its twisting, turning course along Clear Creek and into the stone heart of the Rockies.

None of them slept well that first night. Already they felt far from home, and under the shadow of death.

THE STAND

September
7,
1980-January 10,1981

“I understand you’ve been running from the man

Who goes by the name of the Sandman

He flies the sky like an eagle in the eye

of a hurricane that’s abandoned . .

—America

“Hey Trash, what did old lady Semple say

when you torched her pension check?”

—Carley Yates

“When the night has come

And the land is dark

And the moon is the only light we’ll see,

I won’t be afraid

Just as long as you stand by me.”

—The Drifters

The dark man had set his guardposts all along the eastern border of Oregon. The largest was at Ontario, where 1-80 crosses over from Idaho; there were six men there, quartered in the trailer of a large Peterbilt truck. They had been there for more than a week, playing poker the whole time with twenties and fifties as useless as Monopoly money. One man was almost sixty thousand dollars ahead.

It had rained almost the whole week, and tempers were getting short. They had come out of Portland, and they wanted to get back there. There were women in Portland. Hung from a spike was a powerful two-way radio, broadcasting nothing but static. They were waiting for the radio to broadcast two simple words:
Come home.
That would mean that the man they were looking for had been captured somewhere else.

The man they were looking for was approximately seventy years old, heavyset, balding. He wore glasses and he was driving a white-over-blue four-wheel-drive, either a Jeep or an International Harvester. He was to be killed when he was finally spotted.

They were edgy and bored, but not enough so to just take off for Portland on their own. They had received their orders from the Walkin Dude himself, and even after rain-induced cabin fever had set in, their terror of
him
remained. If they screwed the job up and he found out, God help them all.

So they sat and played cards and watched by turns. 1-80 was deserted in the dull, constant rain. They waited for the Scout to happen along here or somewhere else.

“He’s a spy from the other side,” the Walkin Dude had told them. That horrible grin wreathed his chops as he spoke. Why it was so horrible none of them could have said, but when it turned your way you felt as if your blood had turned to hot soup in your veins. “He’s a spy and we could welcome him in with open arms, show him everything, and send him back with no harm done. But I want him. I want them both. And we’re going to send their heads back over the mountains before the snow flies. Let them chew on that all winter.” And he bellowed hot laughter at the people he had gathered together in one of the conference rooms at the Portland Civic Center. They smiled back, but their smiles were cold and uneasy. Aloud they might congratulate each other on having been singled out for such a responsibility. But inside, they wished that those happy, awful, weasel-like eyes had fixed on anyone but
them.

There was another large guardpost far south of Ontario, at Sheaville. Others were manned by pairs of men, and there were an even dozen of them, ranging from the tiny town of Flora, just off Route 3 and less than sixty miles from the Washington border, all the way down to McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada border.

An old man in a blue and white four-wheel-drive. The instructions to all the sentinels were the same: Kill him, but don’t hit him in the head. There was to be no blood or bruise above the throat.

“I don’t want to send back damaged goods,” Randy Flagg told them, and clacked and roared his horrible laughter.

The northern border between Oregon and Idaho is marked by the Snake River. If you were to follow the Snake north from Ontario, where the six men sat in their Peterbilt playing spit-in-the-ocean for worthless money, you would eventually come to within spitting distance of Copperfield. The Snake takes a kink here that geologists call an oxbow, and near Copperfield the Snake was dammed by the Oxbow Dam. And on that seventh day of September, as Stu Redman and his party trudged up Colorado Highway 6 over a thousand miles to the east and south, Bobby Terry was sitting inside the Copperfield Five and Dime, a stack of comic books by his side, wondering what sort of shape the Oxbow Dam was in, and if the sluice gates had been left open or shut. Outside, Oregon Highway 86 ran past the dime store.

He and his partner, Dave Roberts (now asleep in the apartment overhead) had discussed the dam at great length. It had been raining for a week. The Snake was high. Suppose that old Oxbow Dam decided to let go? Bad news. A rushing wall of water would sweep down on Copperfield and ole Bobby Terry and ole Dave Roberts might be washed all the way down to the Pacific Ocean. They had discussed going over to the dam to look for cracks, but finally just hadn’t dared. Flagg’s orders had been specific: stay under cover.

Dave had pointed out that Flagg might be
anywhere.
He was a great traveler, and stories had already sprung up about the way he could suddenly appear in a small, out-of-the-way burg where there were only a dozen people repairing power lines or collecting weapons from some army depot. He
materialized,
like a ghost. Only this was a grinning black ghost in dusty boots with rundown heels. Sometimes he was alone and sometimes Lloyd Henreid was with him. Sometimes he was behind the wheel of a big white ’62 Thunder-bird and sometimes he was walking. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next moment he was. He could be in L.A. one day (or so the talk went) and show up in Boise a day later ... on foot.

But, as Dave had also pointed out, not even Flagg could be in six different places at the same time. One of them could just scoot over to that damn dam, have a look, and scoot back. The odds in their favor were a thousand to one.

Good, you do it, Bobby Terry told him. You have my permission. But Dave had declined the invitation with an uneasy grin. Because Flagg had a way of
knowing
things, even if he didn’t turn up on the dime. There were some who said he had an unnatural power over the predators of the animal kingdom. A woman named Rose Kingman claimed to have seen him snap his fingers at a number of crows sitting on a telephone wire, and the crows fluttered down onto his shoulders, this Rose Kingman said, and she further testified that they had croaked “Flagg . . . Flagg . . . Flagg . . .” over and over.

That
was just ridiculous, and he knew it. Bobby Terry’s mother Delores had never raised any fools. He knew the way stories got around, growing between the mouth that spoke and the ear that listened. And how happy the dark man would be to encourage stories like that.

But the stories still gave him an atavistic little shiver, as though at the core of each there was a nugget of truth. Some said he could call the wolves, or send his spirit into the body of a cat. There was a man in Portland who said he carried a weasel or a fisher or something in that ratty old Boy Scout pack he wore when he was walking. Stupid stuff, all of it. But . . . just suppose he
could
talk to the animals, like a satanic Dr. Doolittle. And suppose he or Dave walked out to look at that dam in a direct contradiction of
his
orders, and was seen.

The penalty for disobedience was crucifixion.

Bobby Terry guessed that old dam wouldn’t break, anyway.

He shot a Kent out of the pack on the table and lit up, grimacing at the hot, dry taste. In another six months, none of the damn cigarettes would be smokable. Probably just as well. The damn things were death, anyway.

He sighed and took another comic book off the stack. Some ridiculous fucking thing called Howard Duck, who was supposed to be a master of Quack-Fu. He threw it across the store and it fluttered down in a tent shape on top of a cash register. It was things like Howard Duck, he thought, that made you believe the world was maybe just as well off destroyed.

He picked up the next one, a Superman—there was a hero you could at least sort of believe in—and was just turning to the first page when he saw the blue Scout go by out front, heading west. Its big tires splashed up muddy sheets of rainwater.

Bobby Terry stared at the place where it had passed with his mouth a jaw. He couldn’t believe that the vehicle they were all looking for had just passed his post. To tell the truth, way down deep he had suspected this whole thing was nothing but a make-work shit detail.

He rushed to the front door and jerked it open. He ran out on the sidewalk, still holding the Superman comic book in one hand. Maybe the thing had been nothing but a hallucination. Thinking about Flagg could get anyone hallucinating.

But it wasn’t. He caught just a glimpse of the Scout’s roof as it went down over the next hill and out of town. Then he was running back through the deserted five-and-dime, bawling for Dave at the top of his lungs.

The Judge held onto the steering wheel grimly, trying to pretend there was no such thing as arthritis, and if there was, he didn’t have it, and if he did have it, it never bothered him in damp weather. He didn’t try to take it any further because the rain was a fact, a pure-d fact, as his father would have said, and there was no hope but Mount Hope.

He had been running through rain for the last three days. It sometimes backed off to a drizzle, but mostly it had been nothing more or less than a good old solid downpour. And that was a pure-d fact. The roads were on the point of washing out in some places, and by next spring a lot of them were going to be flat impassable.

The first three days, struggling along 1-80, had convinced him that he wasn’t going to raise the West Coast before the year 2000 if he didn’t get off onto the secondary roads. The interstate had been eerily deserted for long stretches, but too many times he had been forced to hook the Scout’s winch onto some car’s back bumper and yank it off the road to make himself a hole he could crawl through.

By Rawlins, he’d had enough. He turned northwest, skirted the Great Divide Basin, and had camped two days later in Wyoming’s northwest corner, east of Yellowstone. Up here, the roads were almost completely empty. Crossing Wyoming and eastern Idaho had been a frightening, dreamlike experience. He would not have thought that the feeling of death could have set so heavily on such an empty land, nor on his own soul. But it was there; a malign stillness under all that big western sky, where once the deer and the Winnebagos had roamed. It was there in the telephone poles that had fallen over and not been repaired; it was there in the cold, waiting stillness of the small towns he drove his Scout through: Lamont, Muddy Gap, Jeffrey City, Lander, Crowheart.

His loneliness grew with his realization of the emptiness, with his internalization of the death feeling. He grew more and more certain that he was never going to see the Boulder Free Zone again, or the people who lived there—Frannie, Lucy, the Lauder boy, Nick Andros. He began to think he knew how Cain must have felt when God exiled him to the land of Nod.

He came into Idaho through the Targhee Pass, and had stopped by the roadside for a light lunch. There was no sound but the sullen boil of high water in a nearby creek, and an odd grinding sound that reminded
him
of dirt in a doorhinge. Overhead the blue sky was beginning to silt up with mackerel scales. Wet weather coming, and arthritis coming with it. His arthritis had been very quiet so far, in spite of the exercise and the long hours of driving and . . .

. . . and what
was
that grinding sound?

His lunch done, he got his Garand out of the Scout and went down to the picnic area by the stream. There was a small grove of trees, several tables spotted among them. And hanging from one of the trees, his shoes almost touching the ground, was a hanged man, his head grotesquely cocked, his flesh nearly picked clean by the birds. The grinding, creaking sound was the rope slipping back and forth. It was almost frayed through.

That was how he had come to know he was in the west.

He reached Butte City two days later, and the pain in his fingers and knees had gotten so bad that he had stopped for a full day, holed up in a motel room. Stretched out on the motel bed in the great silence, hot towels wrapped around his hands and knees, reading Lapham’s
Law and the Classes of Society,
Judge Farris looked like a weird cross between the Ancient Mariner and a Valley Forge survivor.

Stocking up well on aspirin and brandy, he pushed on, patiently searching out secondary roads, putting the Scout in four-wheel-drive and churning his muddy way around wrecks rather than using the winch when he could, so as to spare himself the necessary flexing and bending that came with attaching it.

On the night of September 4, three days before Bobby Terry spotted him passing through Copperfield, he had camped in New Meadows, and a rather unsettling thing had happened. He had pulled in at the Ranchhand Motel, got a key to one of the units in the office, and had found a bonus—a battery-operated heater which he set up by the foot of his bed. Dusk had found him really warm and comfortable for the first time in a week. The heater put out a strong, mellow glow. He was stripped to his underwear shorts, propped up on the pillows, and reading about a case where an uneducated black woman from Brixton, Mississippi, had been sentenced to ten years on a common shoplifting offense. The assistant D.A. who had tried the case and three of the jurors had been black, and Lapham seemed to be pointing out that—

Tap, tap, tap:
at the window.