The Stand

  They ate a cold supper and Tom disappeared into his sleeping bag and fell instantly asleep without even saying good night. Stu was tired, and his bad leg ached abominably. Be lucky if I haven't racked it up for good, he thought.

  But they would be in Boulder tomorrow night, sleeping in real beds--that was a promise.

  An unsettling thought occurred as he crawled into his sleeping bag. They would get to Boulder and Boulder would be empty--as empty as Grand Junction had been, and Avon, and Kittredge. Empty houses, empty stores, buildings with their roofs crashed in from the weight of the snow. Streets filled in with drifts. No sound but the drip of melting snow in one of the periodic thaws--he had read at the library that it was not unheard of for the temperature in Boulder to shoot suddenly up to seventy degrees in the heart of winter. But everyone would be gone, like people in a dream when you wake up. Because no one was left in the world but Stu Redman and Tom Cullen.

  It was a crazy thought, but he couldn't shake it. He crawled out of his sleeping bag and looked north again, hoping for that faint lightening at the horizon that you can see when there is a community of people not too far distant in that direction. Surely he should be able to see something. He tried to remember how many people Glen had guessed would be in the Free Zone by the time the snow closed down travel. He couldn't pull the figure out. Eight thousand? Had that been it? Eight thousand people wasn't many; they wouldn't make much of a glow, even if all the juice was back on. Maybe--

  Maybe you ought to get y'self some sleep and forget all this nutty stuff. Let tomorrow take care of tomorrow.

  He lay down, and after a few more minutes of tossing and turning, brute exhaustion had its way. He slept. And dreamed he was in Boulder, a summertime Boulder where all the lawns were yellow and dead from the heat and lack of water. The only sound was an unlatched door banging back and forth in the light breeze. They had all left. Even Tom was gone.

  Frannie! he called, but his only answer was the wind and that sound of the door, banging slowly back and forth.

  By two o'clock the next day, they had struggled along another few miles. They took turns breaking trail. Stu was beginning to believe that they would be on the road yet another day. He was the one that was slowing them down. His leg was beginning to seize up. Be crawling pretty soon, he thought. Tom had been doing most of the trail-breaking.

  When they paused for their cold canned lunch, it occurred to Stu that he had never even seen Frannie when she was real'y big. Might have that chance yet. But he didn't think he would. He had become more and more convinced that it had happened without him..for better or for worse.

  Now, an hour after they had finished lunch, he was still so full of his own thoughts that he almost walked into Tom, who had stopped.

  "What's the problem?" he asked, rubbing his leg.

  "The road," Tom said, and Stu came around to look in a hurry.

  After a long, wondering pause, Stu said, "I'll be dipped in pitch."

  They were standing atop a snowbank nearly nine feet high. Crusted snow sloped steeply down to the bare road below, and to the right was a sign which read simply: BOULDER CITY LIMITS.

  Stu began to laugh. He sat down on the snow and roared, his face turned up to the sky, oblivious of Tom's puzzled look. At last he said, "They plowed the roads. Y'see? We made it, Tom! We made it! Kojak! Come here!"

  Stu spread the rest of the Dog Yummies on top of the snowbank and Kojak gobbled them while Stu smoked and Tom looked at the road that had appeared out of the miles of unmarked snow like a lunatic's mirage.

  "We're in Boulder again," Tom murmured softly. "We really are. C-I-T-Y-L-I-M-I-T-S, that spells Boulder, laws, yes."

  Stu clapped him on the shoulder and tossed his cigarette away. "Come on, Tommy. Let's get our bad selves home."

  Around four, it began to snow again. By 6 P.M. it was dark and the black tar of the road had become a ghostly white under their feet. Stu was limping badly now, almost lurching along. Tom asked him once if he wanted to rest, and Stu only shook his head.

  By eight, the snow had become thick and driving. Once or twice they lost their direction and blundered into the snowbanks beside the road before getting themselves reoriented. The going underfoot became slick. Tom fell twice and then, around quarter past eight, Stu fell on his bad leg. He had to clench his teeth against a groan. Tom rushed to help him get up.

  "I'm okay," Stu said, and managed to gain his feet.

  It was twenty minutes later when a young, nervous voice quavered out of the dark, freezing them to the spot:

  "W-Who g-goes there?"

  Kojak began to growl, his fur bushing up into hackles. Tom gasped. And just audible below the steady shriek of the wind, Stu heard a sound that caused terror to race through him: the snick of a rifle bolt being levered back.

  Sentries. They've posted sentries. Be funny to come all this way and get shot by a sentry outside the Table Mesa Shopping Center. Real funny. That's one even Randall Flagg could appreciate.

  "Stu Redman!" he yelled into the dark. "It's Stu Redman here!" He swallowed and heard an audible click in his throat. "Who's that over there?"

  Stupid. Won't be anyone that you know--

  But the voice that drifted out of the snow did sound familiar. "Stu? Stu Redman?"

  "Tom Cullen's with me ... for Christ's sake, don't shoot us!"

  "Is it a trick?" The voice seemed to be deliberating with itself.

  "No trick! Tom, say something."

  "Hi there," Tom said obediently.

  There was a pause. The snow blew and shrieked around them. Then the sentry (yes, that voice was familiar) called: "Stu had a picture on the wall in the old apartment. What was it?"

  Stu racked his brain frantically. The sound of the drawn rifle bolt kept recurring, getting in the way. He thought, My God, I'm standing here in a blizzard trying to think what picture was on the wall in the apartment--the old apartment, he said. Fran must have moved in with Lucy. Lucy used to make fun of that picture, used to say that John Wayne was waiting for those Indians just where you couldn't see him --

  "Frederic Remington!" He bellowed at the top of his lungs. "It's called The Warpath!"

  "Stu!" the sentry yelled back. A black shape materialized out of the snow, slipping and sliding as it ran toward them. "I just can't believe it--"

  Then he was in front of them, and Stu saw it was Billy Gehringer, who had caused them so much trouble with his hot-rodding last summer.

  "Stu! Tom! And Kojak, by Christ! Where's Glen Bateman and Larry? Where's Ralph?"

  Stu shook his head slowly. "Don't know. We got to get out of the cold, Billy. We're freezing."

  "Sure, the supermarket's right up the road. I'll call Norm Kellogg ... Harry Dunbarton ... Dick Ellis ... shit, I'll wake the town! This is great! I don't believe it!"

  "Billy--"

  Billy turned back to them, and Stu limped over to where he stood.

  "Billy, Fran was going to have a baby--"

  Billy grew very still. And then he whispered, "Oh shit, I forgot about that."

  "She's had it?"

  "George. George Richardson can tell you, Stu. Or Dan Lathrop. He's our new doc, we got him about four weeks after you guys left, used to be a nose, throat, and ears man, but he's pretty g--"

  Stu gave Billy a brisk shake, cutting off his almost frantic babble.

  "What's wrong?" Tom asked. "Is something wrong with Frannie?"

  "Talk to me, Billy," Stu said. "Please."

  "Fran's okay," Billy said. "She's going to be fine."

  "That what you heard?"

  "No, I saw her. Me and Tony Donahue, we went up together with some flowers from the greenhouse. The greenhouse is Tony's project, he's got all kinds of stuff growing there, not just flowers. The only reason she's still in is because she had to have a what-do-you-call-it, a Roman birth--"

  "A cesarean section?"

  "Yeah, right, because the baby came the wrong way. But no sweat. We went to see her three days after she had the
baby, it was January seventh we went up, two days ago. We brought her some roses. We figured she could use some cheering up because ..."

  "The baby died?" Stu asked dully.

  "It's not dead," Billy said, and then he added with great reluctance: "Not yet."

  Stu suddenly felt far away, rushing through the void. He heard laughter ... and the howling of wolves ...

  Billy said in a miserable rush: "It's got the flu. It's got Captain Trips. It's the end for all of us, that's what people are saying. Frannie had him on the fourth, a boy, six pounds nine ounces, and at first he was okay and I guess everybody in the Zone got drunk, Dick Ellis said it was like V-E Day and V-J Day all rolled into one, and then on the sixth, he ... he just got it. Yeah, man," Billy said, and his voice began to hitch and thicken. "He got it, oh shit, ain't that some welcome home, I'm so fuckin sorry, Stu ..."

  Stu reached out, found Billy's shoulder, and pulled him closer.

  "At first everybody was sayin he might get better, maybe it's just the ordinary flu ... or bronchitis ... maybe the croup ... but the docs, they said newborn babies almost never get those things. It's like a natural immunity, because they're so little. And both George and Dan ... they saw so much of the superflu last year ..."

  "That it would be hard for them to make a mistake," Stu finished for him.

  "Yeah," Billy whispered. "You got it."

  "What a bitch," Stu muttered. He turned away from Billy and began to limp down the road again.

  "Stu, where are you going?"

  "To the hospital," Stu said. "To see my woman."

  CHAPTER 76

  Fran lay awake with the reading lamp on. It cast a pool of bright light on the left side of the clean white sheet that covered her. In the center of the light, face down, was an Agatha Christie. She was awake but slowly drifting off, in that state where memories clarify magically as they begin to transmute themselves into dreams. She was going to bury her father. What happened after that didn't matter, but she was going to drag herself out of the shockwave enough to get that done. The act of love. When that was done, she could cut herself a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie. It would be large, it would be juicy, and it would be very, very bitter.

  Marcy had been in half an hour ago to check on her, and Fran had asked, "Is Peter dead yet?" And even as she spoke, time seemed to double so that she wasn't sure if she meant Peter the baby or Peter the baby's grandfather, now deceased.

  "Shhh, he's fine," Marcy had said, but Frannie had seen a more truthful answer in Marcy's eyes. The baby she had made with Jess Rider was engaged in dying somewhere behind four glass walls. Perhaps Lucy's baby would have better luck; both of its parents had been immune to Captain Trips. The Zone had written off her Peter now and had pinned its collective hopes on those women who had conceived after July 1 of last year. It was brutal but completely understandable.

  Her mind drifted, cruising at some low level along the border of sleep, conning the terrain of her past and the landscape of her heart. She thought about her mother's parlor where seasons passed in a dry age. She thought about Stu's eyes, about the first sight of her baby, Peter Goldsmith-Redman. She dreamed that Stu was with her, in her room.

  "Fran?"

  Nothing had worked out the way it should have. All of the hopes had turned out to be phony, as false as those Audioanimatronic animals at Disney World, just a bunch of clockwork, a cheat, a false dawn, a false pregnancy, a--

  "Hey, Frannie."

  In her dream she saw that Stu had come back. He was standing in the doorway of her room, wearing a gigantic fur parka. Another cheat. But she saw that the dream-Stu had a beard. Wasn't that funny?

  She began to wonder if it was a dream when she saw Tom Cullen standing behind him. And ... was that Kojak sitting at Stu's heel?

  Her hand flew suddenly up to her cheek and pinched viciously, making her left eye water. Nothing changed.

  "Stu?" she whispered. "Oh my God, is it Stu?"

  His face was deeply tanned except for the skin around his eyes, which might have been covered by sunglasses. That was not a detail you would expect to notice in a dream--

  She pinched herself again.

  "It's me," Stu said, coming into the room. "Stop workin yourself over, honey." His limp was so severe he was nearly stumbling. "Frannie, I'm home."

  "Stu!" she cried. "Are you real? If you're real, come here!"

  He went to her then, and held her.

  CHAPTER 77

  Stu was sitting in a chair drawn up to Fran's bed when George Richardson and Dan Lathrop came in. Fran immediately seized Stu's hand and squeezed it tightly, almost painfully. Her face was set in rigid lines, and for a moment Stu saw what she would look like when she was old; for a moment she looked like Mother Abagail.

  "Stu," George said. "I heard about your return. Miraculous. I can't tell you how glad I am to see you. We all are."

  George shook his hand and then introduced Dan Lathrop.

  Dan said, "We've heard there was an explosion in Las Vegas. You actually saw it?"

  "Yes."

  "People around here seem to think it was a nuclear blast. Is that true?"

  "Yes."

  George nodded at this, then seemed to dismiss it and turned to Fran.

  "How are you feeling?"

  "All right. Glad to have my man back. What about the baby?"

  "Actually," Lathrop said, "that's what we're here about."

  Fran nodded. "Dead?"

  George and Dan exchanged a glance. "Frannie, I want you to listen carefully and try not to misunderstand anything I say--"

  Lightly, with suppressed hysteria, Fran said: "If he's dead, just tell me!"

  "Fran," Stu said.

  "Peter seems to be recovering," Dan Lathrop said mildly.

  There was a moment of utter shocked silence in the room. Fran, her face pale and oval below the dark chestnut mass of her hair on the pillow, looked up at Dan as if he had suddenly begun to spout some sort of lunatic doggerel. Someone--either Laurie Constable or Marcy Spruce-- looked into the room and then passed on. It was a moment that Stu never forgot.

  "What?" Fran whispered at last.

  George said, "You mustn't get your hopes up."

  "You said ... recovering," Fran said. Her face was flatly stunned. Until this moment she hadn't realized how much she had resigned herself to the baby's death.

  George said, "Both Dan and I saw thousands of cases during the epidemic, Fran ... you notice I don't say 'treated' because I don't think either of us ever changed the course of the disease by a jot or a tittle in any patient. Fair statement, Dan?"

  "Yes."

  The I-want line that Stu had first noticed in New Hampshire hours after meeting her now appeared on Fran's forehead. "Will you get to the point, for heaven's sake?"

  "I'm trying, but I have to be careful and I'm going to be careful," George said. "This is your son's life we're discussing, and I'm not going to let you press me. I want you to understand the drift of our thinking. Captain Trips was a shifting-antigen flu, we think now. Now, every kind of flu--the old flu--had a different antigen; that's why it kept coming back every two or three years or so in spite of flu vaccinations. There would be an outbreak of A-type flu, Hong Kong flu that was, and you'd get a vaccination for it, and then two years later a B-type strain would come along and you'd get sick unless you got a different vaccination."

  "But you'd get well again," Dan broke in, "because eventually your body would produce its own antibodies. Your body changed to cope with the flu. With Captain Trips, the flu itself changed every time your body came to a defense posture. In that way it was more similar to the AIDS virus than to the common sorts of flu our bodies have become used to. And as with AIDS, it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death."

  "Then why didn't we get it?" Stu asked.

  George said: "We don't know. I don't think we're ever going to know. The only thing we can be sure about is that the immunes didn't g
et sick and then throw the sickness off; they never got sick at all. Which brings us to Peter again. Dan?"

  "Yes. The key to Captain Trips is that people seemed to get almost better, but never completely better. Now this baby, Peter, got sick forty-eight hours after he was born. There was no doubt at all that it was Captain Trips--the symptoms were classic. But those discolorations under the line of the jaw, which both George and I had come to associate with the fourth and terminal stage of superflu--they never came. On the other hand, his periods of remission have been getting longer and longer."

  "I don't understand," Fran said, bewildered. "What--"

  "Every time the flu shifts, Peter is shifting right back at it," George said. "There's still the technical possibility that he might relapse, but he has never entered the final, critical phase. He seems to be wearing it out."

  There was a moment of total silence.

  Dan said, "You've passed on half an immunity to your child, Fran. He got it, but we think now he's got the ability to lick it. We theorize that Mrs. Wentworth's twins had the same chance, but with the odds stacked much more radically against them--and I still think that they may not have died of the superflu, but of complications arising from the superflu. That's a very small distinction, I know, but it may be crucial."

  "And the other women who got pregnant by men who weren't immune?" Stu asked.

  "We think they'll have to watch their babies go through the same painful struggle," George said, "and some of the children may die--it was touch and go with Peter for a while, and may be again from all we know now. But very shortly we're going to reach the point where all the fetuses in the Free Zone--in the world -- are the product of two immune parents. And while it wouldn't be fair to pre-guess, I'd be willing to lay money that when that happens, it's going to be our ballgame. In the meantime, we're going to be watching Peter very closely."

  "And we won't be watching him alone, if that's any added consolation, " Dan added. "In a very real sense, Peter belongs to the entire Free Zone right now."

  Fran whispered, "I only want him to live because he's mine and I love him." She looked at Stu. "And he's my link with the old world. He looks more like Jess than me, and I'm glad. That seems right. Do you understand, love?"