The Stand, Page 73

  He tried to say he was thirsty and managed only a weak "Gaw!" sound.

  "You sure did spend some time in the hot sun, I guess," Lloyd Henreid said.

  "Are you him?" Trash whispered. "Are you--"

  "The big guy? No, I'm not him. Flagg's in L.A. He knows you're here, though. I talked to him on the radio this afternoon."

  "Is he coming?"

  "What, just to see you? Hell, no! He'll be here in his own good time. You and me, guy, we're just little people. He'll be here in his own good time." And he reiterated the question he had asked the tall man that morning, not long after Trashcan Man had stumbled in. "Are you that anxious to see him?"

  "Yes ... no ... I don't know."

  "Well, whichever way it turns out to be, you'll get your chance."

  "Thirsty ..."

  "Sure. Here." He handed over a large thermos filled with cherry Kool-Aid. Trashcan drained it at a draught, then leaned over, holding his belly and groaning. When the cramp had passed, he looked at Lloyd with dumb gratitude.

  "Think you could eat something?" Lloyd asked.

  "Yes, I think so."

  Lloyd turned to a man standing behind them. The man was idly whirling a roulette wheel, then letting the little white ball bounce and rattle.

  "Roger, go tell Whitney or Stephanie-Ann to rustle this man up some fries and a couple of hamburgers. Naw, shit, what am I thinking about? He'll ralph all over the place. Soup. Get him some soup. That okay, man?"

  "Anything," Trash said gratefully.

  "We got a guy here," Lloyd said, "name of Whitney Horgan, used to be a butcher. He's a fat, loud sack of shit, but don't that man know how to cook! Jesus! And they got everything here. The gennies were still running when we moved in, and the freezers're full. Fucking Vegas! Ain't it the goddamndest place you ever saw?"

  "Yeah," Trash said. He liked Lloyd already, and he didn't even know his name. "It's Cibola."

  "Say what?"

  "Cibola. Searched for by many."

  "Yeah, been plenty people searchin for it over the years, but most of em go away sort of sorry they found it. Well, you call it whatever you want, buddy--looks like you almost cooked yourself gettin here. What's your name?"

  "Trashcan Man."

  Lloyd didn't seem to think this a strange name at all. "Name like that, I bet you used to be a biker." He stuck out a hand. The tips of his fingers still bore the fading marks of his stay in the Phoenix jail where he had almost died of starvation. "I'm Lloyd Henreid. Pleased to meet you, Trash. Welcome aboard the good ship Lollypop."

  Trashcan Man shook the offered hand and had to struggle to keep from weeping with gratitude. So far as he could remember, this was the first time in his life someone had offered to shake his hand. He was here. He had been accepted. At long last he was on the inside of something. He would have walked through twice as much desert as he had for this moment, would have burned the other arm and both legs as well.

  "Thanks," he muttered. "Thanks, Mr. Henreid."

  "Shit, brother--if you don't call me Lloyd, we'll have to throw that soup out."

  "Lloyd, then. Thanks, Lloyd."

  "That's better. After you eat, I'll take you upstairs and put you in a room of your own. We'll get you doing something tomorrow. The big guy's got something of his own for you, I think, but until then there's plenty for you to do. We've got some of the place running again, but nowhere near all of it. There's a crew up at Boulder Dam, trying to get all the power back on. There's another one working on water supplies. We've got scout parties out, we've been pulling in six or eight people a day, but we'll keep you off that detail for a while. Looks like you've had enough sun to last you a month."

  "I guess I have," Trashcan Man said with a weak smile. He was already willing to lay down his life for Lloyd Henreid. Gathering up all of his courage, he pointed at the stone which lay in the hollow of Lloyd's throat. "That--"

  "Yeah, us guys who are sort of in charge all wear em. His idea. It's jet. Not really a rock at all, you know. It's like an oil bubble."

  "I mean ... the red light. The eye."

  "Looks like that to you too, huh? It's a flaw. Special from him. I'm not the smartest guy he's got, not even the smartest guy in good ole Lost Wages, not by a long shot. But I'm ... shit, I guess you'd say I'm his mascot." He looked closely at Trash. "Maybe you too, who knows? Not me, that's for sure. He's a close one, Flagg is. Anyway, we heard about you special. Me and Whitney. That's not the regular drill at all. Too many comin in to take special notice of many." He paused. "Although I guess he could, if he wanted to. I guess he could take notice of just about anybody."

  Trashcan Man nodded.

  "He can do magic," Lloyd said, his voice becoming slightly hoarse. "I seen it. I'd hate to be the people against him, you know?"

  "Yes," Trashcan said. "I saw what happened to The Kid."

  "What kid?"

  "The guy I was with until we got into the mountains." He shuddered. "I don't want to talk about it."

  "Okay, man. Here comes your soup. And Whitney put a burger on the side after all. You'll love it. The guy makes great burgers, but try not to puke, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Me, I got places to go and people to see. If my old buddy Poke could see me now, he'd never believe it. I'm busier'n a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. Catch you later."

  "Sure," Trashcan said, and then added, almost timidly: "Thanks. Thanks for everything."

  "Don't thank me," Lloyd said amiably. "Thank him."

  "I do," Trashcan Man said. "Every night." But he was talking to himself. Lloyd was already halfway down the lobby, talking with the man who had brought the soup and the hamburger. Trashcan Man watched them fondly until they were out of sight, and then he began to chow down, eating ravenously until almost everything was gone. He would have been fine if he hadn't looked down into the soup bowl. It was tomato soup, and it was the color of blood.

  He pushed the bowl aside, his appetite suddenly gone. It was all very well for him to tell Lloyd Henreid he didn't want to talk about The Kid; it was quite another thing to stop thinking about what had happened to him.

  He walked over to the roulette wheel, sipping at the glass of milk that had come with his food. He gave the wheel an idle twist and dropped the little white marble into the dish. It rolled around the rim, then hit the slots below and began to racket back and forth. He thought about The Kid. He wondered if someone would come and show him which room was his. He thought about The Kid. He wondered if the ball would fetch up on a red number or a black one ... but mostly he thought about The Kid. The bouncing, jittering ball caught in one of the slots, this time for good. The wheel came to a stop. The ball was sitting under the green double zero.

  House spin.

  On the cloudless, eighty-degree day when they headed west from Golden directly into the Rockies along Interstate 70, The Kid had given up Coors in favor of a bottle of Rebel Yell whiskey. Two more bottles sat between the two of them on the driveshaft hump, each neatly packed into an empty cardboard milk carton so the bottles wouldn't roll around and break. The Kid would nip at the bottle, chase the nip with a swallow of Pepsi-Cola, and then holler hot-damn! or yahoo! or sex-machine! at the top of his lungs. He remarked several times that he would piss Rebel Yell if he could. He asked Trashcan Man if he believed that happy crappy. Trashcan Man, pale with fright and still hung over from his three beers of the night before, said he did.

  Even The Kid couldn't stampede along at ninety on these roads. He lowered his speed to sixty and muttered about the goddam fucking mountains under his breath. Then he brightened. "When we get over in Utah n Nevada, we'll make up plenty of lost time, Trashy. This little darlin'll do a hunnert n sixty on the flat. You believe that happy crappy?"

  "Sure is a nice car," Trashcan said with a sick-doggy smile.

  "Bet your ass." He nipped Rebel Yell. Chased it with Pepsi. Yelled yahoo! at the top of his lungs.

  Trash stared morbidly out at the passing scenery, which was now washe
d with midmorning sunshine. The Interstate had been blasted right into the shoulder of the mountain, and at times they were traveling between huge cliffs of rock. The cliffs he had seen in his dream of the night before. After dark, would those red eyes open again?

  He shuddered.

  A short while later he became aware that their speed had dropped from sixty to forty. Then to thirty. The Kid was swearing monotonously and horribly under his breath. The deuce coupe wove in and out of steadily thickening traffic, all of it stalled and deadly silent.

  "What the fuck is this?" The Kid raged. "What did they? All decide to die at ten thousand motherfuckin feet? Hey, you stupid fucks, out my way! You hear me? Get the fuck out my way!"

  Trashcan Man cringed.

  They rounded a curve and faced a horrendous four-car pileup which blocked the westbound lanes of I-70 completely. A dead man covered with blood which had dried to an uneven crack-glaze long since lay spreadeagled facedown in the road. Near him was a broken Chatty Cathy doll. Any way around the jam on the left was blocked by steel guardrail posts six feet high. On the right, the land fell away into cloudy distance.

  The Kid gulped Rebel Yell and swung the deuce coupe toward the dropoff. "Hang on, Trashy," he whispered, "we're goin around."

  "There's no room," Trashcan Man rasped. His throat felt like the side of a steel file.

  "Yeah, just enough," The Kid whispered. His eyes were glittering. He began to edge the car off the road. The righthand wheels were now hissing in the dirt of the shoulder.

  "Count me out," Trashcan said hurriedly, and grabbed for the doorhandle.

  "You sit," said The Kid, "or you're gonna be one dead pusbag."

  Trash turned his head and looked into the bore of a .45. The Kid giggled tensely.

  Trashcan Man sat back. He wanted to close his eyes but could not. On his side of the car, the last six inches of shoulder dropped from view. Now he was looking straight down at a long vista of blue-gray pines and huge tumbled boulders. He could imagine the deuce coupe's Wide Oval tires now four inches from the edge ... now two ...

  "Another inch," The Kid crooned, his eyes huge, his grin enormous. Sweat stood out on that pale doll's forehead in perfect clear drops. "Just ... one ... more."

  It ended in a hurry. Trashcan Man felt the right rear of the car slip suddenly outward and sharply downward. He heard a falling millrace, first of pebbles, then of larger stones. He screamed. The Kid cursed horribly, changed down to first gear, and floored the accelerator. From the left, where they had been inching by the overturned corpse of a VW Microbus, came a squall of grinding metal.

  "Fly!" The Kid screamed. "Just like a bigass bird! Fly! Goddammit, FLY!"

  The deuce coupe's rear wheels spun. For a moment their shift toward the drop seemed to be increasing. Then the car jerked forward, lurched up, and they were back on the road on the far side of the pileup, laying rubber.

  "I told you she'd do it!" The Kid screamed triumphantly. "Goddam! Did we do it? Did we do it, Trashy, ya fuckin chickenshit suckhole?"

  "We did it," Trashcan Man said quietly. He was twitching all over. He couldn't seem to control it. And then, for the second time since meeting The Kid, he unwittingly said the one thing that could have saved his hie--had he not said it, The Kid surely would have killed him; it would have been his queer way of celebrating. "Good driving, champ," he said. He had never called anyone "champ" in his whole life before now.

  "Ahhh ... not that great," The Kid said patronizingly. "There's at least two other guys in the country coulda done it. You believe that happy crappy?"

  "If you say so, Kid."

  "Don't tell me, sweetheart, I'll fuckin tell you. Well, on we go. All in a day's work."

  But they did not go on for long. The Kid's deuce coupe was stopped for good fifteen minutes later, eighteen hundred miles or more from its point of origin in Shreveport, Louisiana.

  "I don't believe it," The Kid said. "I don't ... motherfuckin ... B'LEEVE it!"

  He threw open the driver's side door and jumped out, the quarter-full bottle of Rebel Yell still clutched in his left hand.

  "GET OUTTA MY ROAD!" The Kid roared, dancing about in his grotesquely high-heeled boots, a tiny natural force of destruction, like an earthquake in a bottle. "GET OUTTA MY ROAD, MOTHERFUCKERS, YOU'RE DEAD, Y'ALL B'LONG IN THE MOTHERFUCKIN BONEYARD, YOU GOT NO BUSINESS IN MY FUCKIN ROAD!"

  He threw the Rebel Yell bottle and it flew end over end, spraying amber droplets. It crashed into a hundred pieces against the side of an old Porsche. The Kid stood silent, panting and reeling a little on his feet.

  The problem was nothing so simple as a four-car pileup this time. This time the problem was nothing but traffic. The eastbound lanes were here divided from those westbound by a grassy median strip about ten yards across, and the deuce coupe probably could have made it from one side of the highway to the other, but the condition of both arteries was the same: the four lanes were crowded with six lanes of traffic, bumper to bumper and side to side. The breakdown lanes were as full as the travel lanes. Some drivers had even attempted to use the median itself, although it was rough and ungraded and full of rocks which punched out of the thin gray soil like dragon's teeth. Perhaps there had been high-hung four-wheel-drive vehicles which had had some success there, but what Trashcan saw on the median strip was an automobile graveyard of crashed, bashed, and mashed Detroit rolling iron. It was as if a mass madness had infected all the drivers and they had decided to hold an apocalyptic demolition derby or lunatic gymkhana here high up on I-70. Colorado Rocky Mountain high, Trashcan Man thought, I've seen it raining Chevies in the sky. He almost giggled and hurriedly covered his mouth. If The Kid heard him giggling now, he would most likely never giggle again.

  The Kid came striding back in his high-heeled boots, his carefully coiffed hair gleaming. His face was that of a dwarf basilisk. His eyes were bulging with fury. "I'm not leavin my fuckin car," he said. "You hear me? No way. I'm not leavin it. You get walkin, Trashy. You walk up there and see how far this motherfuckin traffic jam goes. Maybe it's a truck in the road, I don't know. I know we can't fuckin backtrack. We lost the shoulder. We'd go all the way down. But if it's just a stalled truck or somethin, I don't give a rat's ass. I'll jump these sonsofwhores one at a time and run em right the fuck over the edge. I can do it, and you better believe that happy crappy. Get movin, son."

  Trash didn't argue. He began to walk carefully up the road, weaving in and out between the packed cars. He was ready to duck and run if The Kid started shooting. But The Kid didn't. When Trashcan had walked what he judged to be a safe distance (i.e., out of pistol range), he climbed atop a tanker truck and looked back. The Kid, miniature streetpunk from hell, truly doll-sized at this half-a-mile distance, was leaning against the side of his deucey, having a drink. Trashcan Man thought of waving and then decided it might be a bad idea.

  The Trashcan Man started his walk that day at about ten-thirty in the morning, MDT. Walking was slow--he often had to scramble over the hoods and roofs of cars and trucks, they were so tightly packed together--and by the time he got to the first TUNNEL CLOSED sign, it was already quarter past three in the afternoon. He had made about twelve miles. Twelve miles wasn't so much--not to someone who'd crossed twenty percent of the country on a bicycle--but considering the obstacles, he thought twelve miles was pretty awesome. He could have gone back long ago to tell The Kid it was impossible ... if, that was, he'd ever had any intentions of going back. He didn't, of course. Trashcan Man had never read much history (after the electroshock therapy, reading had gotten sort of tough for him), but he didn't need to know that, in times of old, kings and emperors had often killed the bearers of bad news out of simple pique. What he did know was enough: he had seen enough of The Kid to know he didn't ever want to see any more.

  He stood pondering the sign, black letters on an orange diamond-shaped field. It had been knocked over and was lying beneath one wheel of what looked like the world's oldest Yugo. TUNNEL CLOSED. What tunnel? He peer
ed ahead, shading his eyes, and thought he could see something. He walked on another three hundred yards, scrambling over cars when he had to, and came to an alarming confusion of crashed vehicles and dead bodies. Some of the cars and trucks had been burned to the axles. Many were army vehicles. Many of the bodies were dressed in khaki. Beyond the scene of this battle--Trash was pretty sure that's what it had been--the traffic jam began again. And beyond it, east and west, the traffic disappeared into the twin bores of what a huge sign bolted to the living rock proclaimed to be THE EISENHOWER TUNNEL.

  He walked closer, heart bumping, not knowing just what he intended. Those twin bores punching their way into the rock intimidated him, and as he drew closer, intimidation became outright terror. He would have understood Larry Underwood's feelings about the Lincoln Tunnel perfectly; in that instant they were unknowing soul brothers, the shared soul emotion one of stark fear.

  The main difference was that, while the Lincoln Tunnel's pedestrian catwalk was set high off the roadbed, here it was low enough so that some cars had actually attempted to run along the side, with one pair of wheels up on the catwalk and the other on the road. The tunnel was two miles long. The only way to negotiate it would be to crawl along from car to car in the pitch dark. It would take hours.

  Trashcan Man felt his bowels turn to water.

  He stood looking at the tunnel for a long time. Larry Underwood, over a month before, had gone into his tunnel in spite of his fear. After a long contemplation, Trashcan Man turned away and began to walk back toward The Kid, his shoulders slumped, the comers of his mouth trembling. It was not just the absence of any easy place to walk which made him turn back, or the length of the tunnel (Trash, who had lived his whole life in Indiana, had no idea how long the Eisenhower Tunnel was). Larry Underwood had been moved (and perhaps controlled) by an underlying streak of self-interest, by the simple logic of survival: New York was an island, and he had to get off. The tunnel was the quickest way. So he would walk through as quick as he could; he would do it the way you held your nose and swallowed fast when you knew the medicine was going to taste bad. Trashcan Man was a beaten thing, used to accepting the punchings and pummelings of both fate and his own inexplicable nature ... and doing so with a bowed head. He had been further unmanned, brainwashed almost, by his cataclysmic encounter with The Kid. He had been whooshed along at speeds high enough to induce brain-damage. He had been threatened with extinction if he could not drink a whole can of beer without stopping and without throwing up afterward. He had been sodomized with a pistol barrel. He had been nearly dumped a thousand feet straight down from the edge of the turnpike. On top of this, could he summon enough courage to crawl through a hole bored straight through the base of a mountain, a hole where he might encounter who knew what horrors in the dark? He could not. Others, maybe, but not the Trashcan Man. And there was also a certain logic in the idea of turning back. It was the logic of the beaten and the half-mad, true, but it still had its own perverse charm. He was not on an island. If he had to backtrack the rest of today and all day tomorrow in order to find a road that went over the mountains instead of through them, he would do it. He'd have to get by The Kid, it was true, but he thought The Kid might have changed his mind and left already, in spite of his declarations to the contrary. He might be dead drunk. He might even (although Trash really doubted that such extraordinarily good luck would ever come his way) be simply dead. At the worst, if The Kid was still there, watching and waiting, Trashcan could wait until dark and then creep past him like