The Stand, Page 67

  Then Stu was up on both elbows (both were scraped from hitting the road, and the Honda was lying on one of his legs), firing. The bearded man seemed to dance backward like a vaudeville hoofer leaving the stage after his encore. The faded plaid shirt he was wearing puffed and billowed. His pistol, an automatic, jerked up toward the sky and that steel-punching-through-cardboard sound happened four more times. He fell over on his back.

  Two of the three men behind him had jerked around at the blond woman's cry. One pulled both triggers of the weapon he was holding, an old-fashioned Remington twelve-gauge. The stock of the gun was not resting against anything--he was holding it outside his right hip--and when it went off with a sound like a thunderclap in a small room, it flew backward out of his hands, ripping skin from his fingers as it went. It clattered on the road. The face of one of the women who had not reacted to the blond woman's shout dissolved in an unbelievable fury of blood, and for a moment Frannie could actually hear blood raining down on the pavement, as if there had been a sudden shower. One eye peered unharmed through the mask of blood this woman now wore. It was dazed and unknowing. Then the woman fell forward onto the road. The Country Squire station wagon behind her was peppered with buckshot. One of the windows was a cataract of milky cracks.

  The blond girl grappled with the second man who had turned toward her. The rifle the man held went off between their bodies. One of the girls scrambled for the lost shotgun.

  The third man, who had not turned toward the women, began to fire at Fran. Frannie sat astride her bike, her rifle in her hands, blinking stupidly at him. He was an olive-skinned man who looked Italian. She felt a bullet drone by her left temple.

  Harold had finally gotten one of his pistols free. He raised it and fired at the olive-skinned man. The distance was about fifteen paces. He missed. A bullet hole appeared in the skin of the pink housetrailer just to the left of the olive-skinned man's head. The olive-skinned man looked at Harold and said, "Now I gonna keel-a you, you sonnabeesh."

  "Don't do that!" Harold screamed. He dropped his pistol and held out his open hands.

  The olive-skinned man fired three times at Harold. All three shots missed. The third round came the closest to doing damage; it screamed off the exhaust-pipe of Harold's Yamaha. It fell over, spilling Harold and Glen off.

  Now twenty seconds had passed. Harold and Stu lay flat. Glen sat cross-legged on the road, still looking as if he didn't know exactly where he was, or what was going on. Frannie was trying desperately to shoot the olive-skinned man before he could shoot Harold or Stu, but her gun wouldn't fire, the trigger wouldn't even pull, because she had forgotten to thumb the safety-catch to its off position. The blond woman continued to struggle with the second man, and the woman who had gone after the dropped shotgun was now fighting with a second woman for possession of it.

  Cursing in a language which was undoubtedly Italian, the olive-skinned man aimed at Harold again and then Stu fired and the olive-skinned man's forehead caved in and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

  Another woman had now joined the fray over the shotgun. The man who had lost it tried to throw her aside. She reached between his legs, grabbed the crotch of his jeans, and squeezed. Fran saw her hamstrings pop out all the way up her forearm to the elbow. The man screamed. The man lost interest in the shotgun. The man grabbed his privates and stumbled away bent-over.

  Harold crawled to where his dropped pistol lay on the road and pounced on it. He raised it and fired at the man holding his privates. He fired three times and missed every time.

  It's like Bonnie and Clyde, Frannie thought. Jesus, there's blood everywhere!

  The blond woman with the ragged hair had lost her struggle for possession of the second man's rifle. He jerked it free and kicked her, perhaps aiming for her stomach, catching her in the thigh with one of his heavy boots instead. She went quick-stepping backward, whirling her arms for balance, and landed on her fanny with a wet splat.

  Now he'll shoot her, Frannie thought, but the second man whirled around like a drunken soldier doing an about-face and began to fire rapidly into the group of three women still cringing against the side of the Country Squire.

  "Yaaah! You bitches!" this gentleman screamed. "Yaaaah! You bitches!"

  One of the women fell over and began to flop on the pavement between the station wagon and the overturned trailer like a stabbed fish. The other two women ran. Stu fired at the shooter and missed. The second man fired at one of the running women and did not. She threw her hands up to the sky and fell down. The other buttonhooked left and ran behind the pink trailer.

  The third man, the one who had lost and failed to regain the shotgun, was still staggering around and holding his crotch. One of the women pointed the shotgun at him and pulled both triggers, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth grimacing in anticipation of that thunder. The thunder didn't come. The shotgun was dry. She reversed it so she was holding it by the barrels and brought the stock down in a hard arc. She missed his head, but got the place where his neck joined his right shoulder. The man was driven to his knees. He began to crawl away. The woman, who was wearing a blue sweatshirt which said KENT STATE UNIVERSITY and tattered bluejeans, walked along after him, bludgeoning him with the shotgun as she went. The man continued to crawl, blood now running off him in rivers, and the woman in the Kent State sweatshirt continued to whale on him.

  "Yaaaaah, you bitches!" the second man screamed, and fired at a dazed and muttering middle-aged woman. The distance between muzzle and woman was at the most three feet; she could almost have reached out and plugged the barrel with her pinky finger. He missed. He pulled the trigger again, but this time the rifle only dry-fired.

  Harold was now holding his pistol in both hands, as he had seen cops do in the movies. He pulled the trigger and his bullet smashed the second man's elbow. The second man dropped his rifle and began to dance up and down, making high jabbering noises. To Frannie, he sounded a little like Roger Rabbit saying "P-P-Pleeeeze!"

  "I got im!" Harold cried ecstatically. "Got im! By God, I got im!"

  Frannie finally remembered the safety catch on her rifle. She thumbed it off just as Stu fired again. The second man fell down, now clutching his stomach instead of his elbow. He went on screaming.

  "My God, my God," Glen said mildly. He put his face into his hands and began to weep.

  Harold fired his pistol again. The second man's body jumped. He stopped screaming.

  The woman in the Kent State University sweatshirt brought the stock of the shotgun down again, and this time she connected solidly with the crawling man's head. It sounded like Jim Rice connecting solidly with a high, hard fastball. The shotgun's walnut stock and the man's head both shattered.

  For a moment there was silence. A bird called in it: Whitwhit ... whitwhit ... whitwhit.

  Then the girl in the sweatshirt stood astride the third man's body and gave a long, primeval scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith for the rest of her life.

  The blond girl was Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the Kent State sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun's crotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest, Dayna said, was Shirley Hammet. They didn't know the name of the other woman, who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al, Garvey, Virge, and Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two days before.

  The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere just west of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, and Fran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturned pink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observer like a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-high and still wet from the previous night's rain, had soon soaked their pants. White butterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy with moisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figure-eights.
The sun was struggling to break through but hadn't made it yet; it was a bright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already, wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows and their raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thought dazedly. If we don't watch out, they'll peck us right off the face of the earth. Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared that they were.

  Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind the melting cloud cover (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humid morning, the thirtieth of July, 1990), the gunbattle played over and over in her mind. The woman's face disintegrating under the shotgun blast. Stu falling over. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One man crying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Harold plugged him. The steel-punching -through-cardboard sound of the bearded man's pistol. Susan Stern's primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body of her enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull.

  Glen walked beside her, his thin, rather sardonic face now distraught, his gray hair flying wispily around his head as if in imitation of the butterflies. He held her hand, and he kept patting it compulsively.

  "You mustn't let it affect you," he said. "Such horrors... bound to occur. Best protection is in numbers. Society, you know. Society is the keystone of the arch we call civilization, and it is the only real antidote to outlawry. You must take... things... things like this ... as a matter of course. This was an isolated occurrence. Think of them as trolls. Yes! Trolls or yogs or affrits. Monsters of a generic sort. I accept that. I hold that truth to be self-evident, a socioconstitutional ethic, one might say. Ha! Ha!"

  His laugh was half moan. She punctuated each of his elliptical sentences with "Yes, Glen," but he seemed not to hear. Glen smelled a trifle vomitous. The butterflies banged against them and then banged off again on their butterfly errands. They were almost to the farmhouse. The battle had lasted less than a minute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over by popular demand inside her head. Glen patted her hand. She wanted to tell him to please stop doing that, but she was afraid that he might cry if she did. She could stand the patting. She wasn't sure she could stand to see Glen Bateman weeping.

  Stu was walking with Harold on one side and the blond girl, Dayna Jurgens, on the other. Susan Stern and Patty Kroger flanked the unnamed catatonic woman who had been picked up in Archbold. Shirley Hammet, the woman who had been missed at pointblank range by the man who had imitated Roger Rabbit before he died, walked a little way off to the left, muttering and making the occasional grab at the passing butterflies. The party was walking slowly, but Shirley Hammet was slower. Her gray hair hung untidily about her face, and her dazed eyes peered out at the world like frightened mice peering out of a temporary bolthole.

  Harold looked at Stu uneasily. "We wiped them out, didn't we, Stu? We blew them up. Scragged their asses."

  "I guess so, Harold."

  "Man, but we had to," Harold said earnestly, as if Stu had suggested things might have been otherwise. "It was them or us!"

  "They would have blown your heads off," Dayna Jurgens said quietly. "I was with two guys when they hit us. They shot Rich and Damon from ambush. After it was over, they put a round in each of their heads, just to make sure. You had to, all right. By rights you should be dead now."

  "By rights we should be dead now!" Harold exclaimed to Stu.

  "It's all right," Stu said. "Take her easy, Harold."

  "Sure! Negative perspiration!" Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in his pack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off the wrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in both hands like a lollypop.

  They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtively as he ate his candybar--had to keep making sure he wasn't hurt. He felt very sick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wet himself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into high gear.

  Dayna and Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which some picked at but none really ate. Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunched herself into the farthest comer of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammet sat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered.

  Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell. How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about "having business in the desert."

  By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer bad dreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gotten the idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. He had an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the other three people they'd met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear for Rich's sanity. He called the dream-man "the hardcase" and said he was getting an army of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the west and enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of the world. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility of slipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their own dreams were the result of Rich Darliss's powerful delusion.

  In Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover a large dumptruck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was a station wagon and a wrecker parked nearby.

  "We assumed it was just another smashup," Dayna said, crumbling a graham cracker nervously between her fingers, "which was, of course, exactly what we were supposed to think."

  They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dumptruck, and that was when the four hardcases--to use Rich's word-- opened up from the ditch. They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was the fourth addition to what they sometimes called "the zoo" and sometimes "the harem." One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammet, who at that time had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. "And once," Dayna said, "when she couldn't hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from her rectum for three days."

  "Jesus Christ," Stu said. "Which one was he?"

  "The man with the shotgun," Susan Stem said. "The one I brained. I wish he was right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again."

  The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the flu broke out. Their job had been "media relations, " which was an army euphemism for "media suppression." When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone on to "crowd control," which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran and hanging looters who didn't. By the twenty-seventh of June, Doc had told them, the chain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of their own men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn't matter anyway, as the citizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banks and jewelry stores.

  By June 30, the unit was gone--its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc and Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they had begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of July, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiar little club to further memberships.

  "But after a while you must have outnumbered them," Glen said.

  Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammet who spoke to this.

  "Pills," sh
e said, her trapped-mice eyes staring out at them from behind the fringe of her graying bangs. "Pills every morning to get up, pills every night to go down. Ups and downs." Her voice had been sinking, and this last was barely audible. She paused, then began to mutter again.

  Susan Stern took up the thread of the story. She and one of the dead women, Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus. By then the party was traveling in a caravan which consisted of two station wagons and the wrecker. The men used the wrecker to move crashed vehicles out of their way or to roadblock the highway, depending on what opportunities offered. Doc kept the pharmacy tied to his belt in an outsized poke. Heavy downers for bedtime; tranks for travel; reds for recess.

  "I'd get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Doc to hand out the pills," Susan said matter-of-factly. "The daytime pills, I mean. By the third day I had abrasions on my ... well, you know, my vagina, and any sort of normal intercourse was very painful. I used to hope for Ronnie, because all Ronnie ever wanted was a blowjob. But after the pills, you got very calm. Not sleepy, just calm. Things didn't seem to matter after you got yourself wrapped around a few of those blue pills. All you wanted to do was sit with your hands in your lap and watch the scenery go by or sit with your hands in your lap and watch them use the wrecker to move something out of the way. One day Garvey got mad because this one girl, she couldn't have been any more than twelve, she wouldn't do ... well, I'm not going to tell you. It was that bad. So Garvey blew her head off. I didn't even care. I was just... calm. After a while, you almost stopped thinking about escape. What you wanted more than getting away was those blue pills."

  Dayna and Patty Kroger were nodding.

  But they seemed to recognize eight women as their effective limit, Patty said. When they took her on July 22 after murdering the fiftyish man she had been traveling with, they had killed a very old woman who had been a part of "the zoo" for about a week. When the unnamed girl sitting in the corner had been picked up near Archbold, a sixteen-year-old girl with strabismus had been shot and left in a ditch. "Doc used to joke about it," Patty said. "He'd say, 'I don't walk under ladders, I don't cross black cats' paths, and I'm not going to have thirteen people traveling with me.' "