The Stand, Page 41

  "Well," she said, "let's see if it does."

  It did work. And for almost four hours they sat at the opposite ends of the couch, the portable phonograph on the coffee table before them, their faces lit with silent and sorrowful fascination, listening as the music of a dead world filled the summer night.

  CHAPTER 37

  At first Stu accepted the sound without question; it was such a typical part of a bright summer morning. He had just passed through the town of South Ryegate, New Hampshire, and now the highway wound through a pretty country of overhanging elms that dappled the road with coins of moving sunlight. The underbrush on either side was thick--bright sumac, blue-gray juniper, lots of bushes he couldn't name. The profusion of them was still a wonder to his eyes, accustomed as they were to East Texas, where the roadside flora had nothing like this variety. On the left, an ancient rock wall meandered in and out of the brush, and on the right a small brook gurgled cheerily east. Every now and then small animals would move in the underbrush (yesterday he had been transfixed by the sight of a large doe standing on the white line of 302, scenting the morning air), and birds called raucously. And against that background of sound, the barking dog sounded like the most natural thing in the world.

  He walked almost another mile before it occurred to him that the dog--closer now, by the sound--might be out of the ordinary after all. He had seen a great many dead dogs since leaving Stovington, but no live ones. Well, he supposed, the flu had killed most but not all of the people. Apparently it had killed most but not all of the dogs, as well. Probably it would be extremely people-shy by now. When it scented him, it would most likely crawl back into the bushes and bark hysterically at him until Stu left its territory.

  He adjusted the straps of the Day-Glo pack he was wearing and refolded the handkerchiefs that lay under the straps at each shoulder. He was wearing a pair of Georgia Giants, and three days of walking had rubbed most of the new from them. On his head was a jaunty, wide-brimmed red felt hat, and there was an army carbine slung across his shoulder. He did not expect to run across marauders, but he had a vague idea that it might be a good idea to have a gun. Fresh meat, maybe. Well, he had seen fresh meat yesterday, still on the hoof, and he had been too amazed and pleased to even think about shooting it.

  The pack riding easily again, he went on up the road. The dog sounded as if it was just beyond the next bend. Maybe I'll see him after all, Stu thought.

  He had picked up 302 going east because he supposed that sooner or later it would take him to the ocean. He had made a kind of compact with himself: When I get to the ocean, I'll decide what I'm going to do. Until then, I won't think about it at all. His walk, now in its fourth day, had been a kind of healing process. He had thought about taking a ten-speed bike or maybe a motorcycle with which he could thread his way through the occasional crashes that blocked the road, but instead had decided to walk. He had always enjoyed hiking, and his body cried out for exercise. Until his escape from Stovington he had been cooped up for nearly two weeks, and he felt flabby and out of shape. He supposed that sooner or later his slow progress would make him impatient and he would get the bike or motorcycle, but for now he was content to hike east on this road, looking at whatever he wanted to look at, taking five when he wanted to, or in the afternoon, dropping off for a snooze during the hottest part of the day. It was good for him to be doing this. Little by little the lunatic search for a way out was fading into memory, just something that had happened instead of a thing so vivid it brought cold sweat out onto his skin. The memory of that feeling of someone following him had been the hardest to shake. The first two nights on the road he had dreamed again and again of his final encounter with Elder, when Elder had come to carry out his orders. In the dreams Stu was always too slow with the chair. Elder stepped back out of its arc, pulled the trigger of his pistol, and Stu felt a heavy but painless boxing glove weighted with lead shot land on his chest. He dreamed this over and over until he woke unrested in the morning, but so glad to be alive that he hardly realized it. Last night the dream hadn't come. He doubted if the willies would stop all at once, but he thought he might be walking the poison out of his system little by little. Maybe he would never get rid of all of it, but when most of it was gone he felt sure he would be able to think better about what came next, whether he had reached the ocean by then or not.

  He came around the bend and there was the dog, an auburn-colored Irish setter. It barked joyously at the sight of Stu and ran up the road, toenails clicking on the composition surface, tail wagging frantically back and forth. It jumped up, placing its forepaws on Stu's belly, and its forward motion made him stagger back a step. "Whoa, boy," he said, grinning.

  The dog barked happily at the sound of his voice and leaped up again.

  "Kojak!" a stern voice said, and Stu jumped and stared around. "Get down! Leave that man alone! You're going to track all over his shirt! Miserable dog!"

  Kojak put all four feet on the road again and walked around Stu with his tail between his legs. The tail was still flipping back and forth in suppressed joy despite its confinement, however, and Stu decided this one would never make much of a canine put-on artist.

  Now he could see the owner of the voice--and of Kojak, it seemed like. A man of about sixty wearing a ragged sweater, old gray pants... and a beret. He was sitting on a piano stool and holding a palette. An easel with a canvas on it stood before him.

  Now he stood up, placed the palette on the piano stool (under his breath Stu heard him mutter, "Now don't forget and sit on that"), and walked toward Stu with his hand extended. Beneath the beret his fluffy grayish hair bounced in a small and mellow breeze.

  "I hope you intend no foul play with that rifle, sir. Glen Bateman, at your service."

  Stu stepped forward and took the outstretched hand (Kojak was growing frisky again, bouncing around Stu but not daring to renew his leaps--not yet, at least). "Stuart Redman. Don't worry about the gun. I ain't seen enough people to start shootin em. In fact, I ain't seen any, until you."

  "Do you like caviar?"

  "Never tried it."

  "Then it's time you did. And if you don't care for it, there's plenty of other things. Kojak, don't jump. I know you're thinking of renewing your crazed leaps--I can read you like a book--but control yourself. Always remember, Kojak, that control is what separates the higher orders from the lower. Control!"

  His better nature thus appealed to, Kojak shrank down on his haunches and began to pant. He had a big grin on his doggy face. It had been Stu's experience that a grinning dog is either a biting dog or a damned good dog. And this didn't look like a biting dog.

  "I'm inviting you to lunch," Bateman said. "You're the first human being I've seen, at least in the last week. Will you stay?"

  "I'd be glad to."

  "Southerner, aren't you?"

  "East Texas."

  "An Easterner, my mistake." Bateman cackled at his own wit and turned back to his picture, an indifferent watercolor of the woods across the road.

  "I wouldn't sit down on that piano stool, if I were you," Stu said.

  "Shit, no! Wouldn't do at all, would it?" He changed course and headed toward the back of the small clearing. Stu saw there was an orange and white cooler chest in the shade back there, with what looked like a white lawn tablecloth folded on top of it. When Bateman fluffed it out, Stu saw that was just what it was.

  "Used to be part of the communion set at the Grace Baptist Church in Woodsville," Bateman said. "I liberated it. I don't think the Baptists will miss it. They've all gone home to Jesus. At least all the Woodsville Baptists have. They can celebrate their communion in person now. Although I think the Baptists are going to find heaven a great letdown unless the management allows them television--or perhaps they call it heavenvision up there--on which they can watch Jerry Falwell and Jack van Impe. What we have here is an old pagan communing with nature instead. Kojak, don't step on the tablecloth. Control, always remember that, Kojak. In all you do, make con
trol your watchword. Shall we step across the road and have a wash, Mr. Redman?"

  "Make it Stu."

  "All right, I will."

  They went down the road and washed in the cold, clear water. Stu felt happy. Meeting this particular man at this particular time seemed somehow exactly right. Downstream from them Kojak lapped at the water and then bounded off into the woods, barking happily. He flushed a wood pheasant and Stu watched it explode up from the brush and thought with some surprise that just maybe everything would be all right. Somehow all right.

  He didn't care much for the caviar--it tasted like cold fish jelly--but Bateman also had a pepperoni, a salami, two tins of sardines, some slightly mushy apples, and a large box of Keebler fig bars. Wonderful for the bowels, fig bars, Bateman said. Stu's bowels had been giving him no grief at all since he'd gotten out of Stovington and started walking, but he liked fig bars anyway, and helped himself to half a dozen. In fact, he ate hugely of everything.

  During the meal, which was eaten largely on Saltines, Bateman told Stu he had been an assistant professor of sociology at Woodsville Community College. Woodsville, he said, was a small town ("famous for its community college and its four gas stations," he told Stu) another six miles down the road. His wife had been dead ten years. They had been childless. Most of his colleagues had not cared for him, he said, and the feeling had been heartily mutual. "They thought I was a lunatic," he said. "The strong possibility that they were right did nothing to improve our relations." He had accepted the superflu epidemic with equanimity, he said, because at last he would be able to retire and paint full-time, as he had always wanted to do.

  As he divided the dessert (a Sara Lee poundcake) and handed Stu his half on a paper plate, he said, "I'm a horrible painter, horrible. But I simply tell myself that this July there is no one on earth painting better landscapes than Glendon Pequod Bateman, B.A., M.A., M.F.A. A cheap ego trip, but mine own."

  "Was Kojak your dog before?"

  "No--that would have been a rather amazing coincidence, wouldn't it? I believe Kojak belonged to someone across town. I saw him occasionally, but since I didn't know what his name was, I have taken the liberty of rechristening him. He doesn't seem to mind. Excuse me for a minute, Stu."

  He trotted across the road and Stu heard him splashing in the water. He came back shortly, pantslegs rolled to his knees. He was carrying a dripping six-pack of Narragansett beer in each hand.

  "This was supposed to go with the meal. Stupid of me."

  "It goes just as well after," Stu said, pulling a can off the template. "Thanks."

  They pulled their ringtabs and Bateman raised his can. "To us, Stu. May we have happy days, satisfied minds, and little or no low back pain."

  "Amen to that." They clicked their cans together and drank. Stu thought that a swallow of beer had never tasted so good to him before and probably never would again.

  "You're a man of few words," Bateman said. "I hope you don't feel that I'm dancing on the grave of the world, so to speak."

  "No," Stu said.

  "I was prejudiced against the world," Bateman said. "I admit that freely. The world in the last quarter of the twentieth century had, for me at least, all the charm of an eighty-year-old man dying of cancer of the colon. They say it's a malaise which has struck all Western peoples as the century--any century--draws to a close. We have always wrapped ourselves in mourning shrouds and gone around crying woe to thee, O Jerusalem... or Cleveland, as the case may be. The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague--the black death--decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We've become so used to the idea of the flu--it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn't it?--that no one but the historians seems to know that a hundred years ago it didn't exist.

  "It's during the last three decades of any given century that your religious maniacs arise with facts and figures showing that Armageddon is finally at hand. Such people are always there, of course, but near the end of a century their ranks seem to swell... and they are taken seriously by great numbers of people. Monsters appear. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden. Charles Manson and Richard Speck and Ted Bundy in our own time, if you like. It's been suggested by colleagues even more fanciful than I that Western Man needs an occasional high colonic, a purging, and this occurs at the end of centuries so that he can face the new century clean and full of optimism. And in this case, we've been given a super-enema, and when you think about it, that makes perfect sense. We are not, after all, simply approaching the centenary this time. We are approaching a whole new millennium."

  Bateman paused, considering.

  "Now that I think about it, I am dancing on the grave of the world. Another beer?"

  Stu took one, and thought over what Bateman had said.

  "It's not really the end," he said at last. "At least, I don't think so. Just ... intermission."

  "Rather apt. Well said. I'm going back to my picture, if you don't mind."

  "Go ahead."

  "Have you seen any other dogs?" Bateman asked as Kojak came bounding joyously back across the road.

  "No."

  "Nor have I. You're the only other person I've seen, but Kojak seems to be one of a kind."

  "If he's alive, there will be others."

  "Not very scientific," Bateman said kindly. "What kind of an American are you? Show me a second dog--preferably a bitch--and I'll accept your thesis that somewhere there is a third. But don't show me one and from that posit a second. It won't do."

  "I've seen cows," Stu said thoughtfully.

  "Cows, yes, and deer. But the horses are all dead."

  "You know, that's right," Stu agreed. He had seen several dead horses on his walk. In some cases cows had been grazing upwind of the bloating bodies. "Now why should that be?"

  "No idea. We all respire in much the same way, and this seems to be primarily a respiratory disease. But I wonder if there isn't some other factor? Men, dogs, and horses catch it. Cows and deer don't. And rats were down for a while but now seem to be coming back." Bateman was recklessly mixing paint on his palette. "Cats everywhere, a plague of cats, and from what I can see, the insects are going on pretty much as they always have. Of course, the little faux pas mankind commits rarely seem to affect them, anyway--and the thought of a mosquito with the flu is just too ridiculous to consider. None of it makes any surface sense. It's crazy."

  "It sure is," Stu said, and uncorked another beer. His head was buzzing pleasantly.

  "We're apt to see some interesting shifts in the ecology," Bateman said. He was making the horrible mistake of trying to paint Kojak into his picture. "Remains to be seen if Homo sapiens is going to be able to reproduce himself in the wake of this--it very much remains to be seen --but at least we can get together and try. But is Kojak going to find a mate? Is he ever going to become a proud papa?"

  "Jesus, I guess he might not."

  Bateman stood, put his palette on his piano stool, and got a fresh beer. "I think you're right," he said. "There probably are other people, other dogs, other horses. But many of the animals may die without ever reproducing. There may be some animals of those susceptible species who were pregnant when the flu came along, of course. There may be dozens of healthy women in the United States right now who--pardon the crudity--have cakes baking in the oven. But some of the animals are apt to just sink below the point of no return. If you take the dogs out of the equation, the deer--who seem immune--are going to run wild. Certainly there aren't enough men left around to keep the deer population down. Hunting season is going to be canceled for a few years."

  "Well," Stu said, "the surplus deer will just starve."

  "No they won't. Not all of them, not even most of them. Not up here, anyway. I can't speak for what might happen in East Texas, but in New England, all the gardens were planted and growing nicely
before this flu happened. The deer will have plenty to eat this year and next. Even after that, our crops will germinate wild. There won't be any starving deer for maybe as long as seven years. If you come back this way in a few years, Stu, you'll have to elbow deer out of your way to get up the road."

  Stu worked this over in his mind. Finally he said, "Aren't you exaggerating? "

  "Not on purpose. There may be a factor or factors I haven't taken into consideration, but I honestly don't think so. And we could take my hypothesis about the effect of the complete or almost complete subtraction of the dog population on the deer population and apply it to the relationships between other species. Cats breeding without check. What does that mean? Well, I said rats were down on the Ecological Exchange but making a comeback. If there are enough cats, that may change. A world without rats sounds good at first, but I wonder."

  "What did you mean when you said whether or not people could reproduce themselves was open to question?"

  "There are two possibilities," Bateman said. "At least two that I see now. The first is that the babies may not be immune."

  "You mean, die as soon as they get into the world?"

  "Yes, or possibly in utero. Less likely but still possible, the superflu may have had some sterility effect on those of us that are left."

  "That's crazy," Stu said.

  "So's the mumps," Glen Bateman said dryly.

  "But if the mothers of the babies that are... are in utero... if the mothers are immune--"

  "Yes, in some cases immunities can be passed on from mother to child just as susceptibilities can. But not in all cases. You just can't bank on it. I think the future of babies now in utero is very uncertain. Their mothers are immune, granted, but statistical probability says that most of the fathers were not, and are now dead."

  "What's the other possibility?"

  "That we may finish the job of destroying our species ourselves," Bateman said calmly. "I actually think that's very possible. Not right away, because we're all too scattered. But man is a gregarious, social animal, and eventually we'll get back together, if only so we can tell each other stories about how we survived the great plague of 1990. Most of the societies that form are apt to be primitive dictatorships run by little Caesars unless we're very lucky. A few may be enlightened, democratic communities, and I'll tell you exactly what the necessary requirement for that kind of society in the 1990s and early 2000s is going to be: a community with enough technical people in it to get the lights back on. It could be done, and very easily. This isn't the aftermath of a nuclear war, with everything laid to waste. All the machinery is just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along--the right someone, who knows how to clean the plugs and replace a few burned-out bearings--and start it up again. It's all a question of how many of those who have been spared understand the technology we all took for granted."