The Stand

  Just on general principles.

  "Faster! Can't you move this fucking thing any faster?"

  "You get off my ass, Bobby Terry. Just because you were asleep at the switch is no reason to get on my butt."

  Dave Roberts was behind the wheel of the Willys International that had been parked nose-out in the alley beside the five-and-dime. By the time Bobby Terry had gotten Dave awake and up and dressed, the old geezer in the Scout had gotten a ten-minute start on them. The rain was coming down hard, and visibility was poor. Bobby Terry was holding a Winchester across his lap. There was a .45 Colt tucked in his belt.

  Dave, who was wearing cowboy boots, jeans, a yellow foul-weather slicker, and nothing else, glanced over at him.

  "You keep squeezing the trigger of that rifle and you're going to blow a hole right through your door, Bobby Terry."

  "You just catch him," Bobby Terry said. He muttered to himself. "The guts. Got to shoot him in the guts. Dasn't mark the head. Right."

  "Stop talkin to yourself. People who talk to theirselves play with theirselves. That's what I think."

  "Where is he?" Bobby Terry asked.

  "We'll get him. Unless you dreamed the whole thing. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes if you did, brother."

  "I didn't. It was that Scout. But what if he turns off?"

  "Turns off where?" Dave asked. "There's nothing but farm roads all the way to the Interstate. He couldn't get fifty feet up a one of them without going into the mud up to his fenders, four-wheel drive and all. Relax, Bobby Terry."

  Bobby Terry said miserably, "I can't. I keep wonderin how it'd feel to get hung up to dry on some telephone pole out in the desert."

  "Can that! ... And lookit there! See im? We're sniffin up his ass now, by God!"

  Ahead of them was a months-old head-on collision between a Chevy and a big heavy Buick. They lay in the rain, blocking the road from one side to the other like the rusted bones of unburied mastodons. To the right, deep fresh tire tracks were printed into the shoulder.

  "That's him," Dave said. "Those tracks ain't five minutes old."

  He swung the Willys out and around the smashup, and they bounced wildly along the shoulder. Dave swung back onto the road where the Judge had before him, and they both saw the muddy herringbone pattern of the Scout's tires on the asphalt. At the top of the next hill, they saw the Scout just disappearing over a knoll some two miles distant.

  "Howdy-doody!" Dave Roberts cried. "Go for broke!"

  He floored the accelerator and the Willys crept up to sixty. The windshield was a silvery blur of rain that the wipers could not hope to keep up with. At the top of the knoll they saw the Scout again, closer. Dave yanked out his headlight switch and began to work the dimmer switch with his foot. After a few moments, the Scout's taillights flashed on.

  "All right," Dave said. "We act friendly. Get him to step out. Don't you go off half-cocked, Bobby Terry. If we do this right, we're gonna have a couple of suites at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Fuck it up and we're gonna get our assholes cored out. So don't you fuck up. Get him to step out."

  "Oh my God, why couldn't he have come through Robinette?" Bobby Terry whined. His hands were locked on the Winchester.

  Dave whacked at one of them. "You don't carry that rifle out, either. "

  "But--"

  "Shut up! Get a smile on, goddam you!"

  Bobby Terry began to grin. It was like watching a mechanical funhouse clown grin.

  "You nogood," Dave snarled. "I'll do it. Stay in the goddam car."

  They had pulled even with the Scout, which was idling with two wheels on the pavement and two on the soft shoulder. Smiling, Dave got out. His hands were in the pockets of his yellow slicker. In the lefthand pocket was a .38 Police Special.

  The Judge climbed carefully down from the Scout. He was also wearing a yellow rain slicker. He walked carefully, bearing himself the way a man might bear a fragile vase. The arthritis was loose in him like a pack of tigers. He carried the Garand rifle in his left hand.

  "Hey, you won't shoot me with that, will you?" the man from the Willys said with a friendly grin.

  "I guess not," the Judge said. They spoke over the steady hiss of the rain. "You must have been back in Copperfield."

  "So we were. I'm Dave Roberts." He stuck out his right hand.

  "Farris is my name," said the Judge, and put out his own right hand. He glanced up toward the passenger window of the Willys and saw Bobby Terry leaning out, holding his .45 in both hands. Rain was dripping off the barrel. His face, dead pale, was still frozen in that maniacal funhouse grin.

  "Oh bastard," the Judge murmured, and pulled his hand out of Roberts's rain-slippery grip just as Roberts fired through the pocket of his slicker. The bullet ploughed through the Judge's midsection just below the stomach, flattening, spinning, mushrooming, coming out to the right of his spine, leaving an exit hole the size of a tea saucer. The Garand fell from his hand onto the road and he was driven back into the Scout's open driver's side door.

  None of them noticed the crow that had fluttered down to a telephone wire on the far side of the road.

  Dave Roberts took a step forward to finish the job. As he did, Bobby Terry fired from the passenger window of the Willys. His bullet took Roberts in the throat, tearing most of it away. A fury of blood cascaded down the front of Roberts's slicker and mixed with the rain. He turned toward Bobby Terry, his jaw working in soundless, dying amazement, his eyes bulging. He took two shuffling steps forward, and then the amazement went out of his face. Everything went out of it. He fell dead. Rain plinked and drummed on the back of his slicker.

  "Oh shit, lookit this!" Bobby Terry cried in utter dismay.

  The Judge thought: My arthritis is gone. If I could live, I could stun the medical profession. The cure for arthritis is a bullet in the guts. Oh dear God, they were laying for me. Did Flagg tell them? He must have, Jesus help whoever else the committee sent over here ...

  The Garand was lying on the road. He bent for it, feeling his guts trying to run right out of his body. Strange feeling. Not very pleasant. Never mind. He got hold of the gun. Was the safety off? Yes. He began to bring it up. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

  Bobby Terry ripped his stunned gaze away from Dave at last, just in time to see the Judge preparing to shoot him. The Judge was sitting on the road. His slicker was red with blood from chest to hem. He had settled the barrel of the Garand on his knee.

  Bobby snapped a shot and missed. The Garand went off with a giant thunderclap and jagged glass sprayed Bobby Terry's face. He screamed, sure he was dead. Then he saw that the left half of the windshield was gone and understood that he was still in the running.

  The Judge was ponderously correcting his aim, swiveling the Garand perhaps two degrees on his knee. Bobby Terry, his nerves entirely shot now, fired three times in rapid succession. The first bullet spanged a hole through the side of the Scout's cab. The second struck the Judge above the right eye. A .45 is a large gun, and at close range it does large, unpleasant things. This bullet took off most of the top of the Judge's skull and hurled it back into the Scout. His head tilted back radically, and Bobby Terry's third bullet struck the Judge a quarter of an inch below his lower lip, exploding his teeth into his mouth, where he aspirated them with his final breath. His chin and jawbone disintegrated. His finger squeezed the Garand's trigger in a dying convulsion, but the bullet went wild into the white, rainy sky.

  Silence descended.

  Rain drummed on the roofs of the Scout and the Willys. On the slickers of the two dead men. It was the only sound until the crow took off from the telephone wire with a raucous caw. That startled Bobby Terry out of his daze. He got slowly down from the passenger seat, still clutching the smoking .45.

  "I did it," he said confidentially to the rain. "Killed his ass. You better believe it. Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Fuckin-A right. Ole Bobby Terry just killed him as dead as you'd want."

  But with dawning horror, he realized that it wa
sn't the Judge's ass he'd killed after all.

  The Judge had died leaning back into the Scout. Now Bobby Terry grabbed the lapels of his slicker and yanked him forward, staring at what remained of the Judge's features. There was really nothing left but his nose. To tell the truth, that wasn't in such hot shape, either.

  It could have been anyone.

  And in a dream of terror, Bobby Terry again heard Flagg saying: I want to send him back undamaged.

  Holy God, this could be anyone. It was as if he had set out to deliberately do just the opposite of what the Walkin Dude had ordered. Two direct hits in the face. Even the teeth were gone.

  Rain, drumming, drumming.

  It was over here. That was all. He didn't dare go east, and he didn't dare stay in the West. He would either wind up riding a telephone pole bareback or ... or something worse.

  Were there worse things?

  With that grinning freak in charge, Bobby Terry had no doubt there were. So what was the answer?

  Running his hands through his hair, still looking down at the ruined face of the Judge, he tried to think.

  South. That was the answer. South. No border guards anymore. South to Mexico, and if that wasn't far enough, get on down to Guatemala, Panama, maybe fucking Brazil. Opt out of the whole mess. No more East, no more West, just Bobby Terry, safe and as far away from the Walkin Dude as his old boogie shoes could carry h--

  A new sound in the rainy afternoon.

  Bobby Terry's head jerked up.

  The rain, yes, making its steel drum sound on the cabs of the two vehicles, and the grumbling of two idling motors, and--

  A strange clocking sound, like rundown bootheels hammering swiftly along the secondary road macadam.

  "No," Bobby Terry whispered.

  He began to turn around.

  The clocking sound was speeding up. A fast walk, a trot, a jog, run, sprint, and Bobby Terry got all the way around, too late, he was coming, Flagg was coming like some terrible horror monster out of the scariest picture ever made. The dark man's cheeks were flushed with jolly color, his eyes were twinkling with happy good fellowship, and a great hungry voracious grin stretched his lips over huge tombstone teeth, shark teeth, and his hands were held out in front of him, and there were shiny black crowfeathers fluttering from his hair.

  No, Bobby Terry tried to say, but nothing came out.

  "HEY, BOBBY TERRY, YOU SCROOOOWED IT UP!" the dark man bellowed, and fell upon the hapless Bobby Terry.

  There were worse things than crucifixion.

  There were teeth.

  CHAPTER 62

  Dayna Jurgens lay naked in the huge double bed, listening to the steady hiss of water coming from the shower, and looked up at her reflection in the big circular ceiling mirror, which was the exact shape and size of the bed it reflected. She thought that the female body always looks its best when it is flat on its back, stretched out, the tummy pulled flat, the breasts naturally upright without the vertical drag of gravity to pull them down. It was nine-thirty in the morning, September 8. The Judge had been dead about eighteen hours, Bobby Terry considerably less--unfortunately for him.

  The shower ran on and on.

  There's a man with a cleanliness compulsion, she thought. I wonder what happened to him that makes him want to shower for half an hour at a stretch?

  Her mind turned back to the Judge. Who would have figured that? In its own way, it was a damned brilliant idea. Who would have suspected an old man? Well, Flagg had, it seemed. Somehow he had known when and approximately where. A picket line had been set up all the way along the Idaho-Oregon border, with orders to kill him.

  But the job had been botched somehow. Since suppertime last night, the upper echelon here in Las Vegas had been walking around with pasty faces and downcast eyes. Whitney Horgan, who was one damned fine cook, had served something that looked like dog food and was too burned to taste like much of anything. The Judge was dead, but something had gone wrong.

  She got up and walked to the window and looked out over the desert. She saw two big Las Vegas High School buses trundling west on US 95 in the hot sunshine, headed out toward the Indian Springs airbase, where, she knew, a daily seminar in the art and craft of jet planes went on. There were over a dozen people in the West who knew how to fly, but by great good luck--for the Free Zone--none of them were checked out for the National Guard jets at Indian Springs.

  But they were learning. Oh my, yes.

  What was most important for her right now about the Judge's demise was that they had known when they had no business knowing. Was there a spy of their own back in the Free Zone? That was possible, she supposed; spying was a game two could play at. But Sue Stern had told her that the decision to send spies into the West had been strictly a committee thing, and she doubted very much if any of those seven were in the Flagg bag. Mother Abagail would have known if one of the committee had turned rotten, for one thing. Dayna was sure of it.

  That left a very unappetizing alternative. Flagg himself had just known.

  Dayna had been in Las Vegas eight days as of today, and as far as she could tell she was a fully accepted member of the community. She had already accumulated enough information about the operation over here to scare the living Jesus out of everyone back in Boulder. It would only take the news about the jet plane training program to do that. But the thing that frightened her the most personally was the way people turned away from you if you mentioned Flagg's name, the way they pretended they hadn't heard. Some of them would cross their fingers, or genuflect, or make the sign of the evil eye behind one cupped hand. He was the great There/Not-There.

  That was by day. By night, if you would just sit quietly by in the Cub Bar of the Grand or the Silver Slipper Room at The Cashbox, you heard stories about him, the beginning of myth. They talked slowly, haltingly, not looking at each other, drinking bottles of beer mostly. If you drank something stronger, you might lose control of your mouth, and that was dangerous. She knew that not all of what they said was the truth, but it was already impossible to separate the gilt embroidery from the whole cloth. She had heard he was a shape-changer, a werewolf, that he had started the plague himself, that he was the Antichrist whose coming was foretold in Revelation. She heard about the crucifixion of Hector Drogan, how he had just known Heck was freebasing ... the way he had just known that the Judge was on the way, apparently.

  And he was never referred to as Flagg in these nightly discussions; it was as if they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle. They called him the dark man. The Walkin Dude. The tall man. And Ratty Erwins called him Old Creeping Judas.

  If he had known about the Judge, didn't it stand to reason that he knew about her?

  The shower turned off.

  Keep it together, sweetie. He encourages the mumbo-jumbo. It makes him look taller. It could be that he does have a spy in the Free Zone--it wouldn't necessarily have to be someone on the committee, just someone who told him Judge Farris wasn't th defector type.

  "You shouldn't walk around like that with no clothes on, sweetbuns. You'll get me horny all over again."

  She turned toward him, her smile rich and inviting, thinking that she would like to take him downstairs to the kitchen and stuff that thing he was so goddam proud of into Whitney Horgan's industrial meat-grinder. "Why do you think I was walking around with no clothes on?"

  He looked at his watch. "Well, we got maybe forty minutes." His penis was already beginning to make twitching movements ... like a divining rod, Dayna thought with sour amusement.

  "Well, come on then." He came toward her and she pointed at his chest. "And take that thing off. It gives me the creeps."

  Lloyd Henreid looked down at the amulet, dark teardrop marked with a single red flaw, and slipped it off. He put it on the night table and the fine-linked chain made a little hissing sound. "Better?"

  "All kinds of better."

  She held out her arms. A moment later he was on top of her. A moment
after that he was thrusting into her.

  "You like that?" he panted. "You like the way that feels, sweetie?"

  "God, I love it," she moaned, thinking of the meat-grinder, all white enamel and gleaming steel.

  "What?"

  "I said I love it!" she screamed.

  She faked an orgasm shortly after that, tossing her hips wildly, crying out. He came seconds later (she had shared Lloyd's bed for four days now, and had his rhythms timed almost perfectly), and as she felt his semen beginning to run down her thigh, she happened to glance over at the night table.

  Black stone.

  Red flaw.

  It seemed to be staring at her.

  She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie.

  It sees me, she thought with hopeless horror in that defenseless moment before rationality reasserted itself. More: it sees THROUGH me.

  Afterward, as she had hoped, Lloyd talked. That was part of his rhythm, too. He would put an arm around her bare shoulders, smoke a cigarette, look up at their reflections in the mirror over the bed, and tell her what was going on.

  "Glad I wasn't that Bobby Terry," he said. "No sir, no way. The main man wanted that old fart's head without so much as a bruise on it. Wanted to send it back over the Rockies. And look what happened. That numbnuts puts two .45 slugs into his face. At close range. I guess he deserved what he got, but I'm glad I wasn't there."

  "What happened to him?"

  "Sweetbuns, don't ask."

  "How did he know? The big guy?"

  "He was there."

  She felt a chill.

  "Just happened to be there?"

  "Yeah. He just happens to be anywhere that there's trouble. Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to L.A. with ..."

  "What did he do?"

  For a long time she didn't think he was going to answer. Usually she could gently push him in the direction she wanted him to go by asking a series of soft, respectful questions; making him feel as if he was (in the never-to-be-forgotten words of her kid sister) King Shit of Turd Mountain. But this time she had a feeling she had pushed too far until Lloyd said in a funny, squeezed voice: