The Stand

  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.

  CHAPTER 59

  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 for a long time, 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. It was cold and numbing.

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

  Understanding came over his face then. 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 sun-washed 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. There was a pane of glass, I guess--you know, that iodized glass--and it ... it ..." He stopped for a moment, looked down at his hands, then up at her again. "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, "And Sue. 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 comer 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.

  Fran nodded, and it hurt her neck. When she shifted her body, even a little, her entire back seemed to scream with pain.

  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. 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..."

  "That was the couch. 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.

  "And Nadine Cross," he agreed. "They hurt us. They hurt us bad. But they didn't do anywhere near the damage they wanted to do. 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."

  The smile faded. "People have been scouring the hills 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, and Stu looked at her with concern.

  "What's wrong, babe? Is it your back?"

  "No." She was suddenly understanding what Stu had meant about Nick having his hands on the shoebox when the explosive was detonated. Suddenly understanding everything. 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 because 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 propositio
n. But they didn't. I don't blame you, and nobody else in the Zone is going to blame you, either."

  As he spoke, two things were combining, slowly and belatedly, in her mind.

  Those were the only three from inside ... it's like a miracle.

  Mother Abagail ... she's come back ... oh, she's in terrible shape ... we need a miracle!

  With a little hiss of pain, she drew herself up a little so she could look into Stu's face. "Mother Abagail," she said. "We all would have been inside when it went off if they hadn't come up to tell us--"

  "It's like a miracle," Stu repeated. "She saved our lives. Even if she is--" He fell silent.

  "Stu?"

  "She saved our lives by coming back when she did, Frannie. She saved our lives."

  "Is she dead?" Fran asked. She grabbed his hand, clutched it. "Stu, is she dead, too?"

  "She came back into town around a quarter of eight. Larry Underwood's boy was leading her by the hand. He'd lost all his words, you know he does that when he gets excited, but he took her to Lucy. Then she just collapsed." Stu shook his head. "My God, how she ever walked as far as she did ... and what she can have been eating or doing ... I'll tell you something, Fran. There's more in the world--and out of it-- than I ever dreamed of back in Arnette. I think that woman is from God. Or was."

  She closed her eyes. "She died, didn't she? In the night. She came back to die."

  "She's not dead yet. She ought to be, and George Richardson says she'll have to go soon, but she's not dead yet." He looked at her simply and nakedly. "And I'm afraid. She saved our lives by coming back, but I'm afraid of her, and I'm afraid of why she came back."

  "What do you mean, Stu? Mother Abagail would never harm--"

  "Mother Abagail does what her God tells her to," he said harshly. "That's the same God murdered his own boy, or so I heard."

  "Stu!"

  The fire died out of his eyes. "I don't know why she's back, or if she has anything left to tell us at all. I just don't know. Maybe she'll die without regaining consciousness. George says that's the most likely. But I do know that the explosion ... and Nick dying ... and her coming back ... it's taken the blinkers off this town. They're talking about him. They know Harold was the one who set off the blast, but they think he made Harold do it. Hell, I think so too. There's plenty who are saying Flagg's responsible for Mother Abagail coming back the way she is, too. Me, I don't know. I don't know nothing, seems like, but I feel scared. Like it's going to end bad. I didn't feel that way before, but I do now."

  "But there's us," she said, almost pleading with him. "There's us and the baby, isn't there? Isn't there?"

  He didn't answer for a long time. She didn't think he was going to answer. And then he said, "Yeah. But for how long?"

  Near dusk on that day, the third of September, people began to drift slowly--almost aimlessly--down Table Mesa Drive toward Larry and Lucy's house. Singly, by couples, in threes. They sat on the front steps of houses that bore Harold's x-sign on their doors. They sat on curbs and lawns that were dry and brown at this long summer's ending. They talked a little in low tones. They smoked their cigarettes and their pipes. Brad Kitchner was there, one arm wrapped in a bulky white bandage and supported in a sling. Candy Jones was there, and Rich Moffat showed up with two bottles of Black Velvet in a newsboy's pouch. Norman Kellogg sat with Tommy Gehringer, his shirtsleeves rolled up to show sunburned, freckled biceps. The Gehringer boy's sleeves were rolled up in imitation. Harry Dunbarton and Sandy DuChiens sat on a blanket together, holding hands. Dick Vollman, Chip Hobart, and sixteen-year-old Tony Donahue sat in a breezeway half a block up from Larry's tract house, passing a bottle of Canadian Club back and forth, chasing it with warm Seven-Up. Patty Kroger sat with Shirley Hammett. There was a picnic hamper between them. The hamper was well filled, but they only nibbled. By eight o'clock the street was lined with people, all of them watching the house. Larry's cycle was parked out front, and George Richardson's big Kawasaki 650 was parked beside it.

  Larry watched them from the bedroom window. Behind him, in his and Lucy's bed, Mother Abagail lay unconscious. The dry, sickly smell coming from her filled his nose and made him want to puke--he hated to puke--but he wouldn't move. This was his penance for escaping while Nick and Susan died. He heard low voices behind him, the deathwatch around her bed. George would be leaving for the hospital shortly to check on his other patients. There were only sixteen now. Three had been released. And Teddy Weizak had died.

  Larry himself had been totally unhurt.

  Same old Larry--keeps his head while others all around him are losing theirs. The blast had thrown him across the driveway and into a flowerbed, but he had not sustained a single scratch. Jagged shrapnel had rained down all around him, but nothing had touched him. Nick had died, Susan had died, and he had been unhurt. Yeah; same old Larry Underwood.

  Deathwatch in here, deathwatch out there. All the way up the block. Six hundred of them, easy. Harold, you ought to come on back with a dozen hand grenades and finish the job. Harold. He had followed Harold all the way across the country, had followed a trail of Payday candy wrappers and clever improvisations. Larry had almost lost his fingers getting gas back in Wells. Harold had simply found the plug vent and used a siphon. Harold was the one who had suggested the memberships in the various committees slide upward with population. Harold, who had suggested that the ad hoc committee be accepted in toto. Clever Harold. Harold and his ledger. Harold and his grin.

  It was all well and good for Stu to say no one could have figured out what Harold and Nadine were up to from a few scraps of wire on an air hockey table. With Larry that line of reasoning just didn't hold up. He had seen Harold's brilliant improvisations before. One of them had been written on the roof of a barn in letters almost twenty feet high, for Christ's sweet sake. He should have guessed. Inspector Underwood was great at ferreting out candy wrappers, but not so great when it came to dynamite. In point of fact, Inspector Underwood was a bloody asshole.

  Larry, if you knew--

  Nadine's voice.

  If you want, I'll get down on my knees and beg.

  That had been another chance to avert the murder and destruction ... one he could never bring himself to tell anybody about. Had it really been in the works even then? Probably. If not the specifics of the dynamite bomb wired to the walkie-talkie, then at least some general plan.

  Flagg's plan.

  Yes--in the background there was always Flagg, the dark puppet master, pulling the strings on Harold, Nadine, on Charlie Impening, God knew how many others. The people in the Zone would happily lynch Harold on sight, but it was Flagg's doing ... and Nadine's. And who had sent her to Harold, if not Flagg? But before she had gone to Harold she had come to Larry. And he had sent her away.

  How could he have said yes? There was his responsibility to Lucy. That had been all-important, not just because of her but because of himself--he sensed it would take only one or two more fades to destroy him as a man for good. So he had sent her away, and he supposed Flagg was well pleased with the previous night's work ... if Flagg was really his name. Oh, Stu was still alive, and he spoke for the committee--he was the mouth that Nick could never use. Glen was alive, and Larry supposed he was the point-man of the committee's mind, but Nick had been the heart of the committee, and Sue, along with Frannie, had served as its moral conscience. Yes, he thought bitterly, all in all, a good evening's work for that bastard. He ought to reward Harold and Nadine well when they got over there.

  He turned from the window, feeling a dull throb behind his forehead. Richardson was taking Mother Abagail's pulse. Laurie was fiddling with the IV bottles hung on their T-shaped rack. Dick Ellis was standing by. Lucy sat by the door, looking at Larry.

  "How is she?" Larry asked George.

  "The same," Richardson said.

  "Will she live through the night?"

  "I can't say, Larry."

  The woman on the bed was a skeleton covered with thinly stretched, ash-gray skin. She s
eemed without sex. Most of her hair was gone; her breasts were gone; her mouth hung unhinged and her breath rasped through it harshly. To Larry, she looked like pictures he had seen of the Yucatan mummies--not decayed but shriveled; cured; dry; ageless.

  Yes, that's what she was now, not a mother but a mummy. There was only that harsh sigh of her respiration, like a light breeze through hay-stubble. How could she still be alive? Larry wondered ... and what God would put her through it? To what purpose? It had to be a joke, a big cosmic horselaugh. George said he had heard of similar cases, but never of one so extreme, and he himself had never expected to see one. She was somehow ... eating herself. Her body had kept running long after it should have succumbed to malnutrition. She was breaking down parts of herself for nourishment that had never been meant to be broken down. Lucy, who had lifted her onto the bed, had told him in a low, marveling voice that she seemed to weigh no more than a child's box kite, a thing only waiting for a puff of wind to blow it away forever.

  And now Lucy spoke from her corner by the door, startling all of them: "She's got something to say."

  Laurie said uncertainly, "She's in deep coma, Lucy ... the chances that she can ever regain consciousness ..."

  "She came back to tell us something. And God won't let her go until she does."

  "But what could it be, Lucy?" Dick asked her.

  "I don't know," Lucy said, "but I'm afraid to hear it. I know that. The dying ain't over. It's just got started. That's what I fear."

  There was a long silence that George Richardson finally broke. "I've got to get up to the hospital. Laurie, Dick, I'm going to need both of you."

  You aren't going to leave us alone with this mummy, are you? Larry almost asked, and pinched his lips shut to keep it in.

  The three of them went to the door, and Lucy got them their coats. The temperature was barely sixty this night, and riding a cycle in shirtsleeves was uncomfortable.

  "Is there anything we can do for her?" Larry asked George quietly.

  "Lucy knows about the IV drip," George said. "There's nothing else. You see ..." He trailed off. Of course they all saw. It was on the bed, wasn't it?

  "Good night, Larry, Lucy," Dick said.

  They went out. Larry drifted back to the window. Outside, everyone had come to their feet, watching. Was she alive? Dead? Dying? Perhaps healed by the power of God? Had she said anything?