The Stand

  George put an arm around her shoulders. "Laurie, I'll want you in about five minutes."

  "All right, Doctor."

  He led her into the examining room and had her sit on the black-upholstered table.

  "Now. Why the tears? Is it Mrs. Wentworth's twins?"

  Frannie nodded miserably.

  "It was a difficult delivery, Fran. The mother was a heavy smoker. The babies were lightweights, even for twins. They came in the late evening, very suddenly. I had no opportunity to make a postmortem. Regina Wentworth is being cared for by some of the women who were in our party. I believe--I hope--that she's going to come out of the mental fugue-state she's currently in. But for now all I can say is that those babies had two strikes against them from the start. The cause of death could have been anything."

  "Including the superflu."

  "Yes. Including that."

  "So we just wait and see."

  "Hell no. I'm going to give you a complete prenatal right now. I'm going to monitor you and any other woman that gets pregnant or is pregnant now every step of the way. General Electric used to have a slogan, 'Progress Is Our Most Important Product.' In the Zone, babies are our most important product, and they are going to be treated accordingly. "

  "But we really don't know."

  "No, we don't. But be of good cheer, Fran."

  "Yes, all right. I'll try."

  There was a brief rap at the door and Laurie came in. She handed George a form on a clipboard, and George began to ask Fran questions about her medical history.

  When the exam was over, George left her for a while to do something in the next room. Laurie stayed with her while Fran dressed.

  As she was buttoning her blouse, Laurie said quietly: "I envy you, you know. Uncertainty and all. Dick and I had been trying to make a baby like mad. It's really funny--I was the one who used to wear a ZERO POPULATION button to work. It meant zero population growth, of course, but when I think about that button now, it gives me a really creepy feeling. Oh, Frannie, yours is going to be the first. And I know it will be all right. It has to be."

  Fran only smiled and nodded, not wanting to remind Laurie that hers would not be the first.

  Mrs. Wentworth's twins had been the first.

  And Mrs. Wentworth's twins had died.

  "Fine," George said half an hour later.

  Fran raised her eyebrows, thinking for a moment he had mispronounced her name. For no good reason she remembered that until the third grade little Mikey Post from down the street had called her Fan.

  "The baby. It's fine."

  Fran found a Kleenex and held it tightly. "I felt it move ... but that was some time ago. Nothing since then. I was afraid ..."

  "It's alive, all right, but I really doubt if you felt it move, you know. More likely a little intestinal gas."

  "It was the baby," Fran said quietly.

  "Well, whether it did or not, it's going to move a lot in the future. I've got you pegged for early to mid-January. How does that sound?"

  "Fine."

  "Are you eating right?"

  "Yes, I think so--trying hard, anyway."

  "Good. No nausea now?"

  "A little at first, but it's passed."

  "Lovely. Getting plenty of exercise?"

  For a nightmare instant she saw herself digging her father's grave. She blinked the vision away. That had been another life. "Yes, plenty."

  "Have you gained any weight?"

  "About five pounds."

  "That's all right. You can have another twelve; I'm feeling generous today."

  She grinned. "You're the doctor."

  "Yes, and I used to be an OB man, so you're in the right place. Take your doctor's advice and you'll go far. Now, concerning bicycles, motorbikes, and mopeds. All of them a no-no after November fifteenth, let's say. No one's going to be riding them by then anyway. Too damn cold. Don't smoke or drink to excess, do you?"

  "No."

  "If you want a nightcap once in a while, I think that's perfectly okay. I'm going to put you on a vitamin supplement; you can pick it up at any drugstore in town--"

  Frannie burst into laughter, and George smiled uncertainly.

  "Did I say something funny?"

  "No. It just came out funny under the circumstances."

  "Oh! Yes, I see. Well, at least there won't be any more complaining about high drug prices, will there? One last thing, Fran. Have you ever been fitted with an intrauterine device ... an IUD?"

  "No, why?" Fran asked, and then she happened to think of her dream: the dark man with his coathanger. She shuddered. "No," she said again.

  "Good. That's it." He stood up. "I won't tell you not to worry--"

  "No," she agreed. The laughter was gone from her eyes. "Don't do that."

  "But I will ask you to keep it to a minimum. Excess anxiety in the mother can lead to glandular imbalance. And that's not good for the baby. I don't like to prescribe tranquilizers for pregnant women, but if you think--"

  "No, that won't be necessary," Fran said, but going out into the hot midday sunshine, she knew that the entire second half of her pregnancy was going to be haunted by thoughts of Mrs. Wentworth's vanished twins.

  On the twenty-ninth of August three groups came in, one with twenty-two members, one with sixteen, and one with twenty-five. Sandy DuChiens got around to see all seven members of the committee and tell them that the Free Zone now had over one thousand residents.

  Boulder no longer seemed such a ghost town.

  On the evening of the thirtieth, Nadine Cross stood in the basement of Harold's house, watching him and feeling uneasy.

  When Harold was doing something that didn't involve having some sort of strange sex with her, he seemed to go away to his own private place where she had no control over him. When he was in that place he seemed cold; more than that, he seemed contemptuous of her and even of himself. The only thing that didn't change was his hate of Stuart Redman and the others on the committee.

  There was a dead air hockey game in the basement and Harold was working on its pinholed surface. There was an open book beside him. On the facing page was a diagram. He would look at the diagram for a while, then look at the apparatus he was working on, and then he would do something to it. Spread out neatly by his right hand were the tools from his Triumph motorcycle kit. Little snips of wire littered the air hockey table.

  "You know," he said absently, "you ought to take a walk."

  "Why?" She felt a trifle hurt. Harold's face was tense and unsmiling. Nadine could understand why Harold smiled as much as he did: because when he stopped, he looked insane. She suspected that he was insane, or very nearly.

  "Because I don't know how old this dynamite is," Harold said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Old dynamite sweats, dear heart," he said, and looked up at her. She saw that his entire face was running with sweat, as if to prove his point. "It perspires, to be perfectly couth. And what it perspires is pure nitroglycerin, one of the world's great unstable substances. So if it's old, there's a very good chance that this little Science Fair project could blow us right over the top of Flagstaff Mountain and all the way to the Land of Oz. "

  "Well, you don't have to sound so snotty about it," Nadine said.

  "Nadine? Ma chere?"

  "What?"

  Harold looked at her calmly and without smiling. "Shut your fucking trap."

  She did, but she didn't take a walk, although she wanted to. Surely if this was Flagg's will (and the planchette had told her that Harold was Flagg's way of taking care of the committee), the dynamite wouldn't be old. And even if it was old, it wouldn't explode until it was supposed to ... would it? Just how much control over events did Flagg have?

  Enough, she told herself, he has enough. But she wasn't sure, and she was increasingly uneasy. She had been back to her house and Joe was gone--gone for good this time. She had gone to see Lucy, and had borne the cold reception long enough to learn that since she had moved in with Harold,
Joe (Lucy, of course, called him Leo) had "slipped back some." Lucy obviously blamed her for that, too ... but if an avalanche came rumbling down from Flagstaff Mountain or an earthquake ripped Pearl Street apart, Lucy would probably blame her for those things, too. Not that there wouldn't be enough to blame on her and Harold very soon. Still, she had been bitterly disappointed not to have seen Joe once more ... to kiss him goodbye. She and Harold were not going to be in the Boulder Free Zone much longer.

  Never mind, best you let him go completely now that you're embarked on this obscenity. You'd only be doing him harm ... and possibly harm to yourself as well, because Joe ... sees things, knows things. Let him stop being Joe, let me stop being Nadine-mom. Let him go back to being Leo, forever.

  But the paradox in that was inexorable. She could not believe that any of these Zone people had more than a year's life left in them, and that included the boy. It was not his will that they should live ...

  ... so tell the truth, it isn't just Harold who is his instrument. It's you too. You, who once defined the single unforgivable sin in the postplague world as murder, as the taking of a single life ...

  Suddenly she found herself wishing that the dynamite was old, that it would blow up and put an end to both of them. A merciful end. And then she found herself thinking about what would happen afterward, after they had gotten over the mountains, and felt the old slippery warmth kindle in her belly.

  "There," Harold said gently. He had lowered his apparatus into a Hush Puppies shoebox and set it aside.

  "It's done?"

  "Yes. Done."

  "Will it work?"

  "Would you like to try it and find out?" His words were bitterly sarcastic, but she didn't mind. His eyes were working her over in that greedy, crawling little boy's way that she had come to recognize. He had returned from that distant place--the place from which he had written what was in the ledger that she had read and then replaced carelessly under the loose hearthstone where it had originally been. Now she could handle him. Now his talk was just talk.

  "Would you like to watch me play with myself first?" she asked. "Like last night?"

  "Yeah," he said. "Okay. Good."

  "Let's go upstairs then." She batted her eyelashes at him. "I'll go first."

  "Yeah," he said hoarsely. Little dots of sweat stood out on his brow, but fear hadn't put them there this time. "Go first."

  So she went up first, and she could feel him looking up the short skirt of the little-girl sailor dress she was wearing. She was bare beneath it.

  The door closed, and the thing that Harold had made sat in the open shoebox in the gloom. There was a battery-powered Realistic walkie-talkie handset from Radio Shack. Its back was off. Wired to it were eight sticks of dynamite. The book was still open. It was from the Boulder Public Library, and the title was 65 National Science Fair Prize Winners. The diagram showed a doorbell wired up to a walkie-talkie similar to the one in the shoebox. The caption beneath said: Third Prize, 1977 National Science Fair, Constructed by Brian Ball, Rutland, Vermont. Say the word and ring the bell up to twelve miles away!

  Some hours later that evening, Harold came back downstairs, put the cover on the shoebox, and carried it carefully upstairs. He put it on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard. Ralph Brentner had told him that afternoon that the Free Zone Committee was inviting Chad Norris to speak at their next meeting. When was that going to be? Harold had inquired casually. September 2, Ralph had said.

  September 2.

  CHAPTER 57

  Larry and Leo were sitting on the curb in front of the house. Larry was drinking a warm Hamm's Beer, Leo a warm Orange Spot. You could have anything to drink in Boulder that you wanted these days, as long as it came in a can and you didn't mind drinking it warm. From out back came the steady, gruff roar of the Lawnboy. Lucy was cutting the grass. Larry had offered to do it, but Lucy shook her head. "Find out what's wrong with Leo, if you can."

  It was the last day of August.

  The day after Nadine had moved in with Harold, Leo hadn't appeared for breakfast. Larry had found the boy in his room, dressed only in his underpants, his thumb in his mouth. He was uncommunicative and hostile. Larry had been more frightened than Lucy, because she didn't know how Leo had been when Larry had first encountered him. His name had been Joe then, and he had been brandishing a killer's knife.

  The best part of a week had passed since then, and Leo was a little better, but he hadn't come back all the way and he wouldn't talk about what had happened.

  "That woman has something to do with it," Lucy had said, screwing the cap onto the lawnmower's tank.

  "Nadine? What makes you think that?"

  "Well, I wasn't going to mention it. But she came by the other day while you and Leo were trying the fishing down at Cold Creek. She wanted to see the boy. I was just as glad the two of you were gone."

  "Lucy--"

  She gave him a quick kiss, and he had slipped his hand under her halter and given her a friendly squeeze. "I judged you wrong before," she said. "I guess I'll always be sorry for that. But I'm never going to like Nadine Cross. There's something wrong with her."

  Larry didn't answer, but he thought Lucy's judgment was probably a true one. That night up by King Sooper's she had been like a crazy woman.

  "There's one other thing--when she was here, she didn't call him Leo. She called him the other name. Joe."

  He looked at her blankly as she turned the automatic starter and got the Lawnboy going.

  Now, half an hour after that discussion, he drank his Hamm's and watched Leo bounce the Ping-Pong ball he had found the day the two of them had walked up to Harold's, where Nadine now lived. The small white ball was smudged, but not dented. Thok-thok-thok against the pavement. Bouncy-bouncy-bally, look-at-the-way-we-play.

  Leo (he was Leo now, wasn't he?) hadn't wanted to go inside Harold's house that day.

  Into the house where Nadine-mom was now living.

  "You want to go fishing, kiddo?" Larry offered suddenly.

  "No fish," Leo said. He looked at Larry with his strange, seawater green eyes. "Do you know Mr. Ellis?"

  "Sure."

  "He says we can drink the water when the fish come back. Drink it without--" He made a hooting noise and waved his fingers in front of his eyes. "You know."

  "Without boiling it?"

  "Yes."

  Thok-thok-thok.

  "I like Dick. Him and Laurie. Always give me something to eat. He's afraid they won't be able to, but I think they will."

  "Will what?"

  "Be able to make a baby. Dick thinks he may be too old. But I guess he's not."

  Larry started to ask how Leo and Dick had gotten on that subject, and then didn't. The answer, of course, was that they hadn't. Dick wouldn't talk to a small boy about something so personal as making a baby. Leo had just ... had just known.

  Thok-thok-thok.

  Yes, Leo knew things ... or intuited them. He hadn't wanted to go in Harold's house and had said something about Nadine ... he couldn't remember exactly what ... but Larry had recalled that discussion and had felt very uneasy when he heard that Nadine had moved in with Harold. It had been as if the boy was in a trance, as if--

  (--thok-thok-thok--)

  Larry watched the Ping-Pong ball bounce up and down, and suddenly he looked into Leo's face. The boy's eyes were dark and faraway. The sound of the lawnmower was a far-off, soporific drone. The daylight was smooth and warm. And Leo was in a trance again, as if he had read Larry's thought and simply responded to it.

  Leo had gone to see the elephant.

  Very casually Larry said: "Yes, I think they can make a baby. Dick can't be any more than fifty-five at the outside. Cary Grant made one when he was almost seventy, I believe."

  "Who's Cary Grant?" Leo asked. The ball went up and down, up and down.

  (Notorious. North by Northwest.)

  "Don't you know?" he asked Leo.

  "He was that actor," Leo said. "He was in Notorious. And Northw
est."

  (North by Northwest.)

  "North by Northwest, I mean," Leo said in a tone of agreement. His eyes never left the Ping-Pong ball's bouncing course.

  "That's right," he said. "How's Nadine-mom, Leo?"

  "She calls me Joe. I'm Joe to her."

  "Oh." A cold chill was weaving its slow way up Larry's back.

  "It's bad now."

  "Bad?"

  "It's bad with both of them."

  "Nadine and--"

  (Harold?)

  "Yes, him."

  "They're not happy?"

  "He's got them fooled. They think he wants them."

  "He?"

  "Him. "

  The word hung on the still summer air.

  Thok-thok-thok.

  "They're going to go west," Leo said.

  "Jesus," Larry muttered. He was very cold now. The old fear swept him. Did he really want to hear any more of this? It was like watching a tomb door swing slowly open in a silent graveyard, seeing a hand emerge--

  Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it, I don't want to know it.

  "Nadine-mom wants to think it's your fault," Leo said. "She wants to think you drove her to Harold. But she waited on purpose. She waited until you loved Lucy-mom too much. She waited until she was sure. It's like he's rubbing away the part of her brain that knows right from wrong. Little by little he's rubbing that part away. And when it's gone she'll be as crazy as everyone else in the West. Crazier maybe."

  "Leo--" Larry whispered, and Leo answered immediately:

  "She calls me Joe. I'm Joe to her."

  "Shall I call you Joe?" Larry asked doubtfully.

  "No." There was a note of pleading in the boy's voice. "No, please don't."

  "You miss your Nadine-mom, don't you, Leo?"

  "She's dead," Leo said with chilling simplicity.

  "Is that why you stayed out so late that night?"

  "Yes."

  "And why you wouldn't talk?"

  "Yes."

  "But you're talking now."

  "I have you and Lucy-mom to talk to."

  "Yes, of course--"

  "But not for always!" the boy said fiercely. "Not for always, unless you talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie!"

  "About Nadine?"

  "No!"

  "About what? About you?"

  Leo's voice rose, became even shriller. "It's all written down! You know! Frannie knows! Talk to Frannie!"