The Stand

  "What's this? Is it tobacco, Stu?"

  Stu grinned. "Well, I guess some people thought so. It's locoweed, Tom. Leave it where you found it."

  They loaded the snowmobile carefully, storing away the canned goods, tying down new sleeping bags and shelter halves. By then the first stars were coming out, and they decided to spend one more night in Avon.

  Driving slowly back over the crusting snow to the house where they had set up quarters, Stu had a quietly stunning thought: tomorrow would be Christmas Eve. It seemed impossible to believe that time could have gotten by so fast, but the proof was staring up at him from his calendar wristwatch. They had left Grand Junction over three weeks before.

  When they reached the house, Stu said: "You and Kojak go on in and get the fire going. I got a small errand to run."

  "What's that, Stu?"

  "Well, it's a surprise," Stu said.

  "Surprise? Am I going to find out?"

  "Yeah."

  "When?" Tom's eyes sparkled.

  "Couple of days."

  "Tom Cullen can't wait a couple of days for a surprise, laws, no."

  "Tom Cullen will just have to," Stu said with a grin. "I'll be back in an hour. You just be ready to go."

  "Well ... okay."

  It was more like an hour and a half before Stu had exactly what he wanted. Tom pestered him about the surprise for the next two or three hours. Stu kept mum, and by the time they turned in, Tom had forgotten all about it.

  As they lay in the dark, Stu said: "I bet by now you wish we'd stayed in Grand Junction, huh?"

  "Laws, no," Tom answered sleepily. "I want to get back to my little house just as fast as I can. I just hope we don't run off the road and fall into the snow again. Tom Cullen almost choked!"

  "We'll just have to go slower and try harder," Stu said, not mentioning what would probably happen to them if it did happen again ... and there was no shelter within walking distance.

  "When do you think we'll be there, Stu?"

  "It'll be a while yet, old hoss. But we're gettin there. And I think what we better do right now is get some sleep, don't you?"

  "I guess."

  Stu turned out the light.

  That night he dreamed that both Frannie and her terrible wolf-child had died in childbirth. He heard George Richardson saying from a great distance: It's the flu. No more babies because of the flu. Pregnancy is death because of the flu. A chicken in every pot and a wolf in every womb. Because of the flu. We're all done. Mankind is done. Because of the flu.

  And from somewhere nearer, closing in, came the dark man's howling laughter.

  On Christmas Eve they began a run of good traveling that would last almost until the New Year. The surface of the snow had crusted up in the cold. The wind blew swirling clouds of ice-crystals over it to pile up in powdery herring-bone dunes that the John Deere snowmobile cut through easily. They wore sunglasses to guard against snow blindness.

  They camped, that Christmas Eve, on top of the crust twenty-four miles east of Avon, not far from Silverthorne. They were in the throat of Loveland Pass now, the choked and buried Eisenhower Tunnel somewhere below and to the east of them. While they were waiting for dinner to warm up, Stu discovered an amazing thing. Idly using an axe to chop through the crust and his hand to dig out the loose powder beneath, he had discovered blue metal only an arm's length below where they sat. He almost called Tom's attention to his find, and then thought better of it. The thought that they were sitting less than two feet above a traffic jam, less than two feet above God only knew how many dead bodies, was an unsettling one.

  When Tom woke up on the morning of the twenty-fifth at quarter of seven, he found Stu already up and cooking breakfast, which was something of an oddity; Tom was almost always up before Stu. There was a pot of Campbell's vegetable soup hanging over the fire, just coming to a simmer. Kojak was watching it with great enthusiasm.

  "Morning, Stu," Tom said, zipping his jacket and crawling out of his sleeping bag and his shelter half. He had to whiz something terrible.

  "Morning," Stu answered casually. "And a merry Christmas."

  "Christmas?" Tom looked at him and forgot all about how badly he had to whiz. "Christmas?" he said again.

  "Christmas morning." He hooked a thumb to Tom's left. "Best I could do."

  Stuck into the snowcrust was a spruce-top about two feet high. It was decorated with a package of silver icicles Stu had found in the back room of the Avon Five-and-Ten.

  "A tree," Tom whispered, awed. "And presents. Those are presents, aren't they, Stu?"

  There were three packages on the snow under the tree, all of them wrapped in light blue tissue paper with silver wedding bells on it--there had been no Christmas paper at the five-and-ten, not even in the back room.

  "They're presents, all right," Stu said. "For you. From Santa Claus, I guess."

  Tom looked indignantly at Stu. "Tom Cullen knows there's no Santa Claus! Laws, no! They're from you!" He began to look distressed. "And I never got you one thing! I forgot ... I didn't know it was Christmas ... I'm stupid! Stupid!" He balled up his fist and struck himself in the center of the forehead. He was on the verge of tears.

  Stu squatted on the snowcrust beside him. "Tom," he said. "You gave me my Christmas present early."

  "No, sir, I never did. I forgot. Tom Cullen's nothing but a dummy, M-O-O-N, that spells dummy."

  "But you did, you know. The best one of all. I'm still alive. I wouldn't be, if it wasn't for you."

  Tom looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  "If you hadn't come along when you did, I would have died in that washout west of Green River. And if it hadn't been for you, Tom, I would have died of pneumonia or the flu or whatever it was back there in the Utah Hotel. I don't know how you picked the right pills ... if it was Nick or God or just plain old luck, but you did it. You got no sense, calling yourself a dummy. If it hadn't been for you, I never would have seen this Christmas. I'm in your debt."

  Tom said, "Aw, that ain't the same," but he was glowing with pleasure.

  "It is the same," Stu said seriously.

  "Well--"

  "Go on, open your presents. See what he brung you. I heard his sleigh in the middle of the night for sure. Guess the flu didn't get up to the North Pole."

  "You heard him?" Tom was looking at Stu carefully, to see if he was being ribbed.

  "Heard something."

  Tom took the first package and unwrapped it carefully--a pinball machine encased in Lucite, a new gadget all the kids had been yelling for the Christmas before, complete with two-year coin batteries. Tom's eyes lit up when he saw it. "Turn it on," Stu said.

  "Naw, I want to see what else I got."

  There was a sweatshirt with a winded skier on it, resting on crooked skis and propping himself up with his ski poles.

  "It says: I CLIMBED LOVELAND PASS," Stu told him. "We haven't yet, but I guess we're gettin there."

  Tom promptly stripped off his parka, put the sweatshirt on, and then replaced his parka.

  "Great! Great, Stu!"

  The last package, the smallest, contained a simple silver medallion on a fine-link silver chain. To Tom it looked like the number 8 lying on its side. He held it up in puzzlement and wonder.

  "What is it, Stu?"

  "It's a Greek symbol. I remember it from a long time ago, on a doctor program called 'Ben Casey.' It means infinity, Tom. Forever." He reached across to Tom and held the hand that held the medallion. "I think maybe we're going to get to Boulder, Tommy. I think we were meant to get there from the first. I'd like you to wear that, if you don't mind. And if you ever need a favor and wonder who to ask, you look at that and remember Stuart Redman. All right?"

  "Infinity," Tom said, turning it over in his hand. "Forever."

  He slipped the medallion over his neck.

  "I'll remember that," he said. "Tom Cullen's gonna remember that."

  "Shit! I almost forgot!" Stu reached back into his shelter half and brought out another
package. "Merry Christmas, Kojak! Just let me open this for you." He took off the wrappings and produced a box of Hartz Mountain Dog Yummies. He scattered a handful on the snow, and Kojak gobbled them up quickly. He came back to Stu, wagging his tail hopefully.

  "More later," Stu told him, pocketing the box. "Make manners your watchword in everything you do, as old baldy would ... would say." He heard his voice grow hoarse and felt tears sting his eyes. He suddenly missed Glen, missed Larry, missed Ralph with his cocked-back hat. Suddenly he missed them all, the ones who were gone, missed them terribly. Mother Abagail had said they would wade in blood before it was over, and she had been right. In his heart, Stu Redman cursed her and blessed her at the same time.

  "Stu? Are you okay?"

  "Yeah, Tommy, fine." He suddenly hugged Tom fiercely, and Tom hugged him back. "Merry Christmas, old hoss."

  Tom said hesitantly: "Can I sing a song before we go?"

  "Sure, if you want."

  Stu rather expected "Jingle Bells" or "Frosty the Snowman" sung in the off-key and rather toneless voice of a child. But what came out was a fragment of "The First Noel," sung in a surprisingly pleasant tenor voice.

  "The first Noel," Tom's voice drifted across the white wastes, echoing back with faint sweetness, "the angels did say ... was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay ... In fields ... as they ... lay keeping their sheep ... on a cold winter's night that was so deep ..."

  Stu joined in on the chorus, his voice not as good as Tom's but mixing well enough to suit the two of them, and the old sweet hymn drifted back and forth in the deep cathedral silence of Christmas morning:

  "Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel... Christ is born in Israel ..."

  "That's the only part of it I can remember," Tom said a little guiltily as their voices drifted away.

  "It was fine," Stu said. The tears were close again. It would not take much to set him off, and that would upset Tom. He swallowed them back. "We ought to get going. Daylight's wasting."

  "Sure." He looked at Stu, who was taking down his shelter half. "It's the best Christmas I ever had, Stu."

  "I'm glad, Tommy."

  And shortly after that they were under way again, traveling east and upward under the bright cold Christmas Day sun.

  They camped near the summit of Loveland Pass that night, nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level. They slept three in a shelter as the temperature slipped down to twenty degrees below zero. The wind swept by endlessly, cold as the flat blade of a honed kitchen knife, and in the high shadows of the rocks with the lunatic starsprawl of winter seeming almost close enough to touch, the wolves howled. The world seemed to be one gigantic crypt below them, both east and west.

  Early the next morning, before first light, Kojak woke them up with his barking. Stu crawled to the front of the shelter half, his rifle in hand. For the first time the wolves were visible. They had come down from their places and sat in a rough ring around the camp, not howling now, only looking. Their eyes held deep green glints, and they all seemed to grin heartlessly.

  Stu fired six shots at random, scattering them. One of them leaped high and came down in a heap. Kojak trotted over to it, sniffed at it, then lifted his leg and urinated on it.

  "The wolves are still his, "Tom said. "They always will be."

  Tom still seemed half asleep. His eyes were drugged and slow and dreamy. Stu suddenly realized what it was: Tom had fallen into that eerie state of hypnosis again.

  "Tom ... is he dead? Do you know?"

  "He never dies," Tom said. "He's in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He's blind like them."

  "Will he be back?" Stu asked urgently. He felt cold all over.

  Tom didn't answer.

  "Tommy ..."

  "Tom's sleeping. He went to see the elephant."

  "Tom, can you see Boulder?"

  Outside, a bitter white line of dawn was coming up in the sky against the jagged, sterile mountaintops.

  "Yes. They're waiting. Waiting for some word. Waiting for spring. Everything in Boulder is quiet."

  "Can you see Frannie?"

  Tom's face brightened. "Frannie, yes. She's fat. She's going to have a baby, I think. She stays with Lucy Swann. Lucy's going to have a baby, too. But Frannie will have her baby first. Except ..." Tom's face grew dark.

  "Tom? Except what?"

  "The baby ..."

  "What about the baby?"

  Tom looked around uncertainly. "We were shooting wolves, weren't we? Did I fall asleep, Stu?"

  Stu forced a smile. "A little bit, Tom."

  "I had a dream about an elephant. Funny, huh?"

  "Yeah." What about the baby? What about Fran?

  He began to suspect they weren't going to be in time; that whatever Tom had seen would happen before they could arrive.

  The good weather broke three days before the New Year, and they stopped in the town of Kittredge. They were close enough to Boulder now for the delay to be a bitter disappointment to them both--even Kojak seemed uneasy and restless.

  "Can we push on soon, Stu?" Tom asked hopefully.

  "I don't know," Stu said. "I hope so. If we'd only gotten two more days of good weather, I believe that's all it would have taken. Damn!" He sighed, then shrugged. "Well, maybe it'll just be flurries."

  But it turned out to be the worst storm of the winter. It snowed for five days, piling up drifts that were twelve and even fourteen feet high in places. When they dug themselves out on the second of January to look at a sun as flat and small as a tarnished copper coin, all the landmarks were gone. Most of the town's small business district had been not just buried but entombed. Snowdrifts and snowdunes had been carved into wild, sinuous shapes by the wind. They might have been on another planet.

  They went on, but the traveling was slower than ever; finding the road had developed from a continuing nuisance into a serious problem. The snowmobile got stuck repeatedly and they had to dig it out. And on the second day of 1991, the freight-train rumble of the avalanches began again.

  On the fourth of January they came to the place where US 6 split off from the turnpike to go its own way to Golden, and although neither of them knew it--there were no dreams or premonitions--that was the day that Frannie Goldsmith went into labor.

  "Okay," Stu said as they paused at the turnoff. "No more trouble finding the road, anyhow. It's been blasted through solid rock. We were damned lucky just to find the turnoff, though."

  Staying on the road was easy enough, but getting through the tunnels was not. To find the entrances they had to dig through powdered snow in some cases and through the packed remains of old avalanches in others. The snowmobile roared and clashed unhappily over the bare road inside.

  Worse, it was scary in the tunnels--as either Larry or the Trashcan Man could have told them. They were black as minepits except for the cone of light thrown by the snowmobile's headlamp, because both ends were packed with snow. Being inside them was like being shut in a dark refrigerator. Going was painfully slow, getting out of the far end of each tunnel was an exercise in engineering, and Stu was very much afraid that they would come upon a tunnel that was simply impassable no matter how much they grunted and heaved and shuffled the cars stuck inside from one place to another. If that happened, they would have to turn around and go back to the Interstate. They would lose a week at least. Abandoning the snowmobile was not an option; doing that would be a painful way of committing suicide.

  And Boulder was maddeningly close.

  On January seventh, about two hours after they had dug their way out of another tunnel, Tom stood up on the back of the snowmobile and pointed. "What's that, Stu?"

  Stu was tired and grumpy and out of sorts. The dreams had stopped coming, but perversely, that was somehow more frightening than having them.

  "Don't stand up while we're moving, Tom, how many times do I have to tell you that? You'll fall over backwar
d and go headfirst into the snow and--"

  "Yeah, but what is it? It looks like a bridge. Did we get on a river someplace, Stu?"

  Stu looked, saw, throttled down, and stopped.

  "What is it?" Tom asked anxiously.

  "Overpass," Stu muttered. "I--I just don't believe it--"

  "Overpass? Overpass?"

  Stu turned around and grabbed Tom's shoulders. "It's the Golden overpass, Tom! That's 119 up there, Route 119! The Boulder road! We're only twenty miles from town! Maybe even less!"

  Tom understood at last. His mouth fell open, and the comical expression on his face made Stu laugh out loud and clap him on the back. Not even the steady dull ache in his leg could bother him now.

  "Are we really almost home, Stu?"

  "Yes, yes, yeeessss!"

  Then they were grabbing each other, dancing around in a clumsy circle, falling down, sending up puffs of snow, powdering themselves with the stuff. Kojak looked on, amazed ... but after a few moments he began to jump around with them, barking and wagging his tail.

  They camped that night in Golden, and pushed on up 119 toward Boulder early the next morning. Neither of them had slept very well the night before. Stu had never felt such anticipation in his life ... and mixed with it was his steady nagging worry about Frannie and the baby.

  About an hour after noon, the snowmobile began to hitch and lug. Stu turned it off and got the spare gascan lashed to the side of Kojak's little cabin. "Oh Christ!" he said, feeling its deadly lightness.

  "What's the matter, Stu?"

  "Me! I'm the matter. I knew that friggin can was empty, and I forgot to fill it. Too damn excited, I guess. How's that for stupid?"

  "We're out of gas?"

  Stu flung the empty can away. "We sure-God are. How could I be that stupid?"

  "Thinking about Frannie, I guess. What do we do now, Stu?"

  "We walk, or try to. You'll want your sleeping bag. We'll split this canned stuff, put it in the sleeping bags. We'll leave the shelters behind. I'm sorry, Tom. My fault all the way."

  "That's all right, Stu. What about the shelters?"

  "Guess we better leave em, old hoss."

  They didn't get to Boulder that day; instead they camped at dusk, exhausted from wading through the powdery snow which seemed so light but had slowed them to a literal crawl. There was no fire that night. There was no wood handy, and they were all three too exhausted to dig for it. They were surrounded by high, rolling snowdunes. Even after dark there was no glow on the northern horizon, although Stu looked anxiously for it.