The Stand

  "He just looked at him. Eric was laying down all this funky shit about how he wanted to see the Vegas operation run ... we should do this, we should do that. Poor old Trash--he ain't all the way together himself, you know--was just staring at him like he was a TV actor or something. Eric's pacing back and forth like he's addressing a jury and like it was already proved he was going to get his own way. And he says--real soft --'Eric.' Like that. And Eric looked at him. I didn't see nothing. But Eric just looked at him for a long time. Maybe five minutes. His eyes just got bigger and bigger ... and then he started to drool ... and then he started to giggle ... and he giggled right along with Eric, and that scared me. When Flagg laughs, you get scared. But Eric just kep right on giggling, and then he said, 'When you go back, drop him off in the Mojave.' And that's what we did. And for all I know, Eric's wandering around out there right now. He looked at Eric for five minutes and drove him out of his mind."

  He took a large drag on his cigarette and crushed it out. Then he slung an arm around her. "Why are we talkin about bad shit like that?"

  "I don't know ... how's it going out at Indian Springs?"

  Lloyd brightened. The Indian Springs project was his baby. "Good. Real good. We're going to have three guys checked out on the Skyhawk planes by the first of October, maybe sooner. Hank Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he's a fucking genius. About some things he's not too bright, but when it comes to weapons, he's incredible."

  She had met Trashcan Man twice. Both times she had felt a chill slip over her when his strange, muddy eyes happened to light upon her, and a palpable sense of relief when those eyes passed on. It was obvious that many of the others--Lloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man--saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck charm. One of his arms was a horrid mass of freshly healed burn tissue, and she remembered something peculiar that had happened two nights ago. Hank Rawson had been talking. He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, and finished what he was saying before lighting the cigarette and shaking out the match. Dayna saw the way that Trashcan Man's eyes homed in on the match flame, the way his breathing seemed to stop. It was as if his whole being had focused on the tiny flame. It was like watching a starving man contemplate a nine-course dinner. Then Hank shook out the match and dropped the blackened stub into an ashtray. The moment had ended.

  "He's good with weapons?" she asked Lloyd.

  "He's great with them. The Skyhawks have underwing missiles, air-to-ground. Shrikes. Weird how they name all that shit, isn't it? No one could figure out how the goddam things went on the planes. No one could figure out how to arm them or safety-control them. Christ, it took us most of one day to figure out how to get them off the storage racks. So Hank says, 'We better get Trashy out here when he gets back and see if he can figure it out.' "

  "When he gets back?"

  "Yeah, he's a funny dude. He's been in Vegas almost a week now, but he'll be taking off again pretty quick."

  "Where does he go?"

  "Into the desert. He takes a Land-Rover and just goes. He's a strange guy, I tell you. In his way, Trash is almost as strange as the big guy himself. West of here there's nothing but empty desert and godforsaken waste. I ought to know. I did time way up west in a hellhole called Brownsville Station. I don't know how he lives out there, but he does. He looks for new toys, and he always comes back with a few. About a week after him and me got back from L.A., he brought back a pile of army machine guns with laser sights--never-miss machine guns, Hank calls them. This time it was Teller mines, contact mines, fragment mines, and a canister of Parathion. He said he found a whole stockpile of Parathion. Also enough defoliant to turn the whole state of Colorado bald as an egg."

  "Where does he find it?"

  "Everywhere," Lloyd said simply. "He sniffs it out, sweetbuns. It isn't really so strange. Most of western Nevada and eastern California was owned by the good old U.S.A. It's where they tested their toys, all the way up to A-bombs. He'll be dragging one of those back someday."

  He laughed. Dayna felt cold, terribly cold.

  "The superflu started somewhere out here. I'd lay money on it. Maybe Trash will find it. I tell you, he just sniffs that stuff out. The big guy says just give him his head and let him run, and so that's what he does. You know what his favorite toy is right now?"

  "No," Dayna said. She wasn't sure she wanted to know ... but why else had she come over here?

  "Flametracks."

  "What are flametrucks?"

  "Not trucks, tracks. He's got five of them out at Indian Springs, lined up like Formula One racecars." Lloyd laughed. "They used them in the Nam. The grunts called them Zippos. They're full of napalm. Trash loves em".

  "Neato," she muttered.

  "Anyway, when Trash came back this time, we took him out to the Springs. He hummed and muttered around those Shrikes and got them armed and mounted in about six hours. Can you believe that? They train Air Force technicians about ninety years to do stuff like that. But they're not Trash, you see. He's a fucking genius."

  Idiot savant, you mean. I bet I know how he got those burns, too.

  Lloyd looked at his watch and sat up. "Speaking of Indian Springs, I got to get out there. Just got time for another shower. You want to join me?"

  "Not this time."

  She got dressed after the shower began to run again. So far she had always managed to get dressed and undressed with him out of the room, and that was the way she intended to keep it.

  She strapped the clip to her forearm and slid the switch-blade knife into its spring-loaded clasp. A quick twist of her wrist would deliver all ten inches of it into her hand.

  Well, she thought as she slipped into her blouse, a girl has to have some secrets.

  During the afternoons, she was on a streetlamp maintenance crew. What the job amounted to was testing the bulbs with a simple gadget and replacing them if they had burned out, or if they had been broken by vandals when Las Vegas had been in the grip of the superflu. There were four of them on the job, and they had a cherry-picker truck that trundled around from post to post and street to street.

  Late that afternoon, Dayna was up in the cherry-picker, removing the Plexiglas hood from one of the streetlamps and musing on how much she liked the people she was working with, particularly Jenny Engstrom, a tough and beautiful ex-nightclub dancer who was now running the cherry-picker's controls. She was the type of girl Dayna would have wanted for her best friend, and it confused her that Jenny was over here, on the dark man's side. It confused her so much that she didn't dare ask Jenny for an explanation.

  The others were also okay. She thought that Vegas had a rather larger proportion of stupids than the Zone, but none of them wore fangs, and they didn't turn into bats at moonrise. They were also people who worked much harder than she remembered the people in the Zone working. In the Free Zone you saw people idling in the parks at all hours of the day, and there were people who decided to break for lunch from noon until two. That sort of thing didn't happen over here. From 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., everybody was working, either at Indian Springs or on the maintenance crews here in town. And school had started again. There were about twenty kids in Vegas, ages ranging from four (that was Daniel McCarthy, the pet of everyone in town, known as Dinny) up to fifteen. They had found two people with teaching certificates, and classes went on five days a week. Lloyd, who had quit school after repeating his junior year for the third time, was very proud of the educational opportunities that were being provided. The pharmacies were open and unguarded. People came and went all the time ... but they took away nothing heavier than a bottle of aspirin or Gelusil. There was no drug problem in the West. Anyone who had seen what had happened to Hector Drogan knew what the penalty for a habit was. There were no Rich Moffats, either. Everyone was friendly and straight. And it was wise to drink nothing stronger than bottled beer.

  Germany in 1938, she thought. The Nazis? Oh, they're charming people. Very athletic. They don't go to the nightclubs, the nightclubs are for
the tourists. What do they do? They make clocks.

  Was it a fair comparison? Dayna wondered uneasily, thinking of Jenny Engstrom, who she liked so much. She didn't know ... but she thought that maybe it was.

  She tested the bulb in the hood of the light standard. It was bad. She removed it, set it carefully between her feet, and got the last fresh one. Good, it was near the end of the day. It was--

  She glanced down and froze.

  People were coming back from the bus stop, headed home from Indian Springs. All of them were glancing up casually, the way a group of people always glance up at someone high in the air. The circus-for-free syndrome.

  That face, looking up at her.

  That wide, smiling, wondering face.

  Dear sweet Jesus in heaven, is that Tom Cullen?

  A dribble of salt-stinging sweat ran into her eye, doubling her vision. When she wiped it away, the face was gone. The people from the bus stop were halfway down the street, swinging their lunch buckets, talking and joking. Dayna gazed at the one she thought might be Tom, but from the rear it was so hard to tell--

  Tom? Would they send Tom?

  Surely not. That was so crazy it was almost--

  Almost sane.

  But she just couldn't believe it.

  "Hey, Jurgens!" Jenny called up brassily. "Did you fall asleep up there, or are you just playing with yourself?"

  Dayna leaned over the cherry-picker's low railing and looked down at Jenny's upturned face. Gave her the finger. Jenny laughed. Dayna went back to her streetlamp bulb, struggling to snap it in, and by the time she had it right, it was time to knock off for the day. On the ride back to the garage, she was quiet and preoccupied ... quiet enough for Jenny to comment on it.

  "Just got nothing to say, I guess," Dayna told her with a half-smile.

  It couldn't have been Tom.

  Could it?

  "Wake up! Wake up! Goddammit, wake up, you bitch!"

  She was coming out of murky sleep when a foot caught her in the small of the back, knocking her out of the big round bed and onto the floor. She came awake at once, blinking and confused.

  Lloyd was there, looking down at her with cold anger. Whitney Horgan. Ken DeMott. Ace High. Jenny. Only Jenny's usually open face was also blank and cold.

  "Jen--?"

  No answer. Dayna got up on her knees, dimly aware of her nakedness, more aware of the cold circle of faces looking down at her. The expression on Lloyd's face was that of a man who has been betrayed and has discovered the betrayal.

  Am I dreaming this?

  "Get the fuck dressed, you lying, spying bitch!"

  Okay, so it was no dream. She felt a sinking terror in her stomach that seemed almost preordained. They had known about the Judge, and now they knew about her. He had told them. She glanced at the clock on the night table. It was quarter of four in the morning. The Hour of the Secret Police, she thought.

  "Where is he?" she asked.

  "Around," Lloyd said grimly. His face was pale and shiny. His amulet lay in the open v of his shirt. "You'll wish he wasn't before long."

  "Lloyd?"

  "What."

  "I gave you VD, Lloyd. I hope it rots off."

  He kicked her just below the breastbone, knocking her on her back.

  "I hope it rots off, Lloyd."

  "Shut up and get dressed."

  "Get out of here. I don't dress in front of any man."

  Lloyd kicked her again, this time in the bicep of her right arm. The pain was tremendous and her mouth drew down in a quivering bow but she didn't cry out.

  "You in a little hot water, Lloyd? Sleeping with Mata Hari?" She grinned at him with tears of pain standing in her eyes.

  "Come on, Lloyd," Whitney Horgan said. He saw murder in Lloyd's eyes and now stepped forward quickly and put a hand on Lloyd's arm. "We'll go in the living room. Jenny can watch her get dressed."

  "And what if she decides to jump out the window?"

  "She won't get the chance," Jenny said. Her broad face was dead blank, and for the first time Dayna noticed she was wearing a pistol on her hip.

  "She can't anyway," Ace High said. "The windows up here are just for show, didn't you know that? Sometimes big losers at the tables get wanting to take a high dive, and that would be bad publicity for the hotel. So they don't open." His eyes fell on Dayna, and they held a touch of compassion. "Now you, babe, you're a real big loser."

  "Come on, Lloyd," Whitney said again. "You're going to do something you'll be sorry for later--kick her in the head or something--if you don't get out of here."

  "Okay." They went to the door together, and Lloyd looked back over his shoulder. "He's going to make it bad for you, you bitch."

  "You were the crappiest lover I ever had, Lloyd," she said sweetly.

  He tried to lunge back at her, but Whitney and Ken DeMott held him back and drew him through the doorway. The double doors closed with a low snicking sound.

  "Get dressed, Dayna," Jenny said.

  Dayna stood up, still rubbing the purpling bruise on her arm. "You people like that?" she asked. "Is that where you're at? People like Lloyd Henreid?"

  "You were the one sleeping with him, not me." Her face showed an emotion for the first time: angry reproach. "You think it's nice to come over here and spy on folks? You deserve everything you're going to get. And, sister, you're going to get a lot."

  "I was sleeping with him for a reason." She drew on her panties. "And I was spying for a reason."

  "Why don't you just shut up?"

  Dayna turned and looked at Jenny. "What do you think they're doing here, girl? Why do you think they're learning to fly those jets out at Indian Springs? Those Shrike missiles, do you think they're so Flagg can win his girl a Kewpie doll at the country fair?"

  Jenny pressed her lips tightly together. "That's none of my business."

  "Will it be none of your business if they use the jets to fly over the Rockies next spring and the missiles to wipe out everyone living there?"

  "I hope they do. It's us or you people; that's what he says. And I believe him."

  "They believed Hitler, too. But you don't believe him; you're just scared gutless of him."

  "Get dressed, Dayna."

  Dayna pulled on her slacks, buttoned them, zipped them. Then she put her hand to her mouth. "I ... I think I'm going to throw up ... God! ..." Clutching her long-sleeved blouse in her hand, she turned and ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She made loud retching noises.

  "Open the door, Dayna! Open it or I'll shoot the lock out of it!"

  "Sick--" She made another loud retching noise. Standing on tiptoe, she felt along the top of the medicine cabinet, thanking God she had left the knife and its spring clip up here, praying for another twenty seconds--

  She had the clip. She strapped it on. Now there were other voices in the bedroom.

  With her left hand she turned on the water in the basin. "Just a minute, I'm sick, dammit!"

  But they weren't going to give her a minute. Someone dealt the bathroom door a kick and it shuddered in its frame. Dayna clicked the knife home. It lay along her forearm like a deadly arrow. Moving with desperate speed, she yanked the blouse on and buttoned the sleeves. Splashed water on her mouth. Flushed the toilet.

  Another kick dealt to the door. Dayna twisted the knob and they burst in, Lloyd looking wild-eyed, Jenny standing behind Ken DeMott and Ace High, her pistol drawn.

  "I puked," Dayna said coldly. "Too bad you couldn't watch it, huh?"

  Lloyd grabbed her by the shoulder and threw her out into the bedroom. "I ought to break your neck, you cunt."

  "Remember your master's voice." She buttoned the front of her blouse, sweeping them with her flashing eyes. "He's your dog-god, isn't that right? Kiss his ass and you belong to him."

  "You better just shut up," Whitney said gruffly. "You're only making it worse for yourself."

  She looked at Jenny, unable to understand how the openly smiling, bawdy day-girl could have changed into
this blank-faced night-thing. "Don't you see that he's getting ready to start it all over again?" she asked them desperately. "The killing, the shooting ... the plague?"

  "He's the biggest and the strongest," Whitney said with curious gentleness. "He's going to wipe you people off the face of the earth."

  "No more talk," Lloyd said. "Let's go."

  They moved to take her arms, but she stepped away, holding her arms across her body, and shook her head. "I'll walk," she said.

  The casino was deserted except for a number of men with rifles, sitting or standing by the doors. They seemed to find interesting things to look at on the walls, the ceilings, and the bare gaming tables as the elevator doors opened and Lloyd's party stepped out, herding Dayna along.

  She was taken to the gate at the end of the rank of cashiers' windows. Lloyd opened it with a small key and they stepped through. She was herded quickly through an area that looked like a bank: there were adding machines, wastebaskets full of paper tapes, jars of rubber bands and paper clips. Computer screens, now gray and blank. Cash drawers ajar. Money had spilled out some of them and lay on the tile floors. Most of the bills were fifties and hundreds.

  At the rear of the cashiers' area, Whitney opened another door and Dayna was led down a carpeted hallway to an empty receptionist's office. Tastefully decorated. Free-form white desk for a tasteful secretary who had died, coughing and hacking up great green gobbets of phlegm, some months ago. A picture on the wall that looked like a Klee print. A mellow light-brown shag rug. The antechamber to the seat of power.

  Fear trickled into the hollows of her body like cold water, stiffening her up, making her feel awkward. Lloyd leaned over the desk and flicked the toggle switch there. Dayna saw that he was sweating lightly.

  "We have her, R.F."

  She felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her and was helpless to stop it--not that she cared. "R.F.! R.F.! Oh, that's good! Ready when you are, C.B.!" She went off into a gale of giggles, and suddenly Jenny slapped her.

  "Shut up!" she hissed. "You don't know what you're in for."