The Stand

  "The committee--"

  "Not the committee! The committee won't help you, it won't help anyone, the committee is the old way, he laughs at your committee because it's the old way and the old ways are his ways, you know, Frannie knows, if you talk together you can--"

  Leo brought the ball down hard--THOK!--and it rose higher than his head and came down and rolled away. Larry watched it, his mouth dry, his heart thudding nastily in his chest.

  "I dropped my ball," Leo said, and ran to get it.

  Larry sat watching him.

  Frannie, he thought.

  The two of them sat on the edge of the bandshell stage, their feet dangling. It was an hour before dark, and a few people were walking through the park, some of them holding hands. The children's hour is also the lovers' hour, Fran thought disjointedly. Larry had just finished telling her everything Leo had said in his trance, and her mind was whirling with it.

  "So what do you think?" Larry asked.

  "I don't know what to think," she said softly, "except I don't like any of the things that have been happening. Visionary dreams. An old woman who's the voice of God for a while and then walks off into the wilderness. Now a little boy who seems to be a telepath. It's like life in a fairy tale. Sometimes I think the superflu left us alive but drove us all mad."

  "He said I should talk to you. So I am."

  She didn't reply.

  "Well," Larry said, "if anything comes to you--"

  "Written down," Frannie said softly. "He was right, that kid. It's the whole root of the problem, I think. If I hadn't been so stupid, so conceited, as to write it all down ... oh goddam me!"

  Larry stared at her, amazed. "What are you talking about?"

  "It's Harold," she said, "and I'm afraid. I haven't told Stu. I've been ashamed. Keeping the diary was so dumb ... and now Stu ... he actually likes Harold ... everybody in the Free Zone likes Harold, including you." She uttered a laugh which was choked with tears. "After all, he was your ... your spirit-guide on the way out here, wasn't he?"

  "I'm not tracking this very well," Larry said slowly. "Can you tell me what it is you're afraid of?"

  "That's just it--I don't really know." She looked at him, her eyes wet with tears. "I think I'd better tell you what I can, Larry. I have to talk to someone. God knows I just can't keep it inside anymore, and Stu ... Stu's maybe not the person who should hear. At least, not the first one."

  "Go ahead, Fran. Shoot."

  So she told him, beginning with the day in June that Harold had driven into the driveway of her Ogunquit home in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac. As she talked, the last bright daylight changed to a bluish shade. The lovers in the park began to drift away. A thin rind of moon rose. In the high-rise condominium on the far side of Canyon Boulevard, a few Coleman gaslamps had come on. She told him about the sign on the barn roof and how she had been sleeping when Harold risked his life to put her name on the bottom. About meeting Stu in Fabyan, and about Harold's shrill get-away-from-my-bone reaction to Stu. She told him about her diary, and about the thumbprint in it. By the time she finished, it was past nine o'clock and the crickets were singing. A silence fell between them and Fran waited apprehensively for Larry to break it. But he seemed lost in thought.

  At last he said, "How sure are you about that fingerprint? In your own mind are you positive it was Harold's?"

  She only hesitated a moment. "Yes. I knew it was Harold's print the first time I saw it."

  "That barn he put the sign on," Larry said. "You remember the night I met you I said I'd been up in it? And that Harold had carved his initials on a beam in the loft?"

  "Yes."

  "It wasn't just his initials. It was yours, too. In a heart. The kind of thing a lovesick little boy would do on his school desk."

  She put her hands over her eyes and wiped them. "What a mess," she said huskily.

  "You're not responsible for Harold Lauder's actions, keed." He took her hand in both of his and held it tightly. He looked at her. "Take it from me, the original dipstick, oilslick, and drippy dick. You can't hold it against yourself. Because if you do ..." His grip tightened to a degree where it became painful, but his face remained soft. "If you do, you really will go mad. It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's."

  He took his hand away and they were quiet for a time.

  "You think Harold bears Stu a killing grudge?" he said at last. "You really think it's that deep?"

  "Yes," she said. "I really think that's a possibility. Maybe the whole committee. But I don't know what--"

  His hand fell on her shoulder and gripped it hard, stilling her. In the darkness his posture had changed, his eyes had widened. His lips moved soundlessly.

  "Larry? What--"

  "When he went downstairs," Larry muttered. "He went down to get a corkscrew or something."

  "What?"

  He turned toward her slowly, as if his head was on a rusty hinge. "You know," he said, "there just might be a way to resolve all this. I don't guarantee it, because I didn't look in the book, but ... it makes such beautiful sense ... Harold reads your diary and not only gets an earful but an idea. Hell, he might have even been jealous that you thought of it first. Didn't all the best writers keep journals?"

  "Are you saying Harold's got a diary?"

  "When he went down to the basement, the day I brought the wine, I was looking around his living room. He said he was going to put in some chrome and leather, and I was trying to figure out how it would look. And I noticed this loose stone on the hearth--"

  "YES!" she yelled, so loudly that he jumped. "The day I snuck in ... and Nadine Cross came ... I sat on the hearth ... I remember that loose stone." She looked at Larry again. "There it is again. As if something had us by the nose, was leading us to it ..."

  "Coincidence," he said, but he sounded uneasy.

  "Is it? We were both in Harold's house. We both noticed the loose stone. And we're both here now. Is it coincidence?"

  "I don't know."

  "What was under that stone?"

  "A ledger," he said slowly. "At least, that was the word stamped on the cover. I didn't look in it. At the time I thought it could just as easily have belonged to the previous owner of the house as to Harold. But if it did, wouldn't Harold have found it? We both noticed the loose stone. So let's say he finds it. Even if the guy who lived there before the flu had filled it up with little secrets--the amount he cheated on his taxes, his sex fantasies about his daughter, I don't know what all--those secrets wouldn't have been Harold's secrets. Do you see that?"

  "Yes, but--"

  "Don't interrupt while Inspector Underwood is elucidating, you giddy slip of a girl. So if the secrets weren't Harold's secrets, why would he have put the ledger back under the stone? Because they were his secrets. That was Harold's journal."

  "Do you think it's still there?"

  "Maybe. I think we'd better look and see."

  "Now?"

  "Tomorrow. He'll be out with the Burial Committee, and Nadine has been helping out at the power station afternoons."

  "All right," she said. "Do you think I should tell Stu about this?"

  "Why don't we wait? There's no sense stirring things up unless we're sure it's something important. The book might be gone. It might be nothing but a list of things to do. It might be full of perfectly innocent things. Or Harold's master political plan. Or it might be in code."

  "I hadn't thought of that. What will we do if there is ... something important?"

  "Then I guess we'll have to bring it up before the Free Zone Committee. Another reason to get it done quickly. We're meeting on the second. The committee will handle it."

  "Will it?"

  "Yes, I think so," Larry said, but he was also thinking of what Leo had said about the committee.

  She slipped off the edge of the bandshell and onto the ground. "I feel better. Thanks for being here, Larry."

  "Where should we meet?"

  "The litt
le park across from Harold's. What about there, at one o'clock tomorrow afternoon?"

  "Fine," Larry said. "I'll see you then."

  Frannie went home feeling lighter at heart than she had for weeks. As Larry said, the alternatives were now fairly clear. The ledger might prove all of their fears groundless. But if it proved otherwise ...

  Well, if it was otherwise, let the committee decide. As Larry had reminded her, they were meeting on the evening of the second, at Nick and Ralph's place, out near the end of Baseline Road.

  When she got home, Stu was sitting in the bedroom, a felt-tip marker in one hand and a weighty leather-bound volume in the other. The title, stamped in gold leaf on the cover, was An Introduction to the Colorado Code of Criminal Justice.

  "Heavy reading," she said, and kissed him on the mouth.

  "Arg." He tossed the book across the room and it landed on the dresser with a thump. "Al Bundell brought it over. He and his Law Committee are really up and in the doins, Fran. He wants to talk to the Free Zone Committee when we meet day after tomorrow. What have you been up to, pretty lady?"

  "Talking with Larry Underwood."

  He looked at her closely for a long moment. "Fran--have you been crying?"

  "Yes," she said, meeting his gaze steadily, "but I feel better now. Much better."

  "Is it the baby?"

  "No."

  "What, then?"

  "I'll tell you tomorrow night. I'll tell you everything that's been on what passes for my mind. Until then, no questions. Kay?"

  "Is it serious?"

  "Stu, I don't know."

  He looked at her for a long, long time.

  "All right, Frannie," he said. "I love you."

  "I know. And I love you, too."

  "Bed?"

  She smiled. "Race you."

  The first of September dawned gray and rainy, a dull, forgettable day --but one that no resident of the Free Zone ever forgot. That was the day the power came back on in North Boulder ... briefly, at least.

  At ten to noon, in the control room of the power station, Brad Kitchner looked at Stu, Nick, Ralph, and Jack Jackson, who were all standing behind him. Brad smiled nervously and said, "Hail Mary, fulla grace, help me win this stock-car race."

  He yanked two big switches down hard. In the huge and cavernous hall below them, two trial generators began to whine. The five men walked over to the wall-to-wall polarized glass window and looked below, to where almost a hundred men and women stood, all of them wearing protective goggles as per Brad's order.

  "If we did something wrong, I'd rather blow two than fifty-two," Brad had told them earlier.

  The generators began to whine more loudly.

  Nick elbowed Stu and pointed to the office ceiling, Stu looked up and began to grin. Behind the translucent panels, the fluorescents had begun to glow weakly. The generators cycled up and up, reached a high, steady hum, and leveled off. Down below, the crowd of assembled workers broke into spontaneous applause, some of them wincing as they did so; their hands were raw and frayed from wrapping copper wire hour after drudging hour.

  The fluorescents were shining brightly and normally now.

  For Nick, the feeling was the exact opposite of the dread he had known when the lights went out in Shoyo--not one of entombment now, but of resurrection.

  The two generators supplied power to one small section of North Boulder in the North Street area. There were people in the area who hadn't known about the test that morning, and many of these people fled as if all the devils of hell were after them.

  TV sets went on in blares of snow. In a house on Spruce Street, a blender whirred into life, trying to blend a cheese-and-egg mixture that had congealed long since. The blender's motor soon overloaded and blew out. A power saw whined into life in a deserted garage, puffing sawdust out of its guts. Stove burners began to glow. Marvin Gaye began to sing from the loudspeakers of an oldies record shop called the Wax Museum; the words, backed by a jive disco beat, seemed like a dream of the past come to life: "Let's dance ... let's shout ... get funky what it's all about ... let's dance ... let's shout ..."

  A power transformer blew on Maple Street and a gaudy spiral of purple sparks drifted down, lit on the wet grass, and went out.

  At the power station, one of the generators began to whine at a higher, more desperate note. It began to smoke. People backed away, poised just below the point of panic. The place began to fill with the sickish-sweet smell of ozone. A buzzer went off stridently.

  "Too high!" Brad roared. "Bastard's crossing over! Overloading!"

  He scrambled across the room and slammed both switches back up. The whine of the generators began to die, but not before there was a loud pop and screams, deadened by the safety glass, from below.

  "Holy crow," Ralph said. "One of em's afire."

  Above them, the fluorescents faded to sullen cores of white light, then went out completely. Brad jerked open the control room door and came out on the landing. His words echoed flatly in the big open space. "Get the foam to that! Hustle!"

  Several foam extinguishers were turned on the generators, and the fire was doused. The smell of ozone still hung on the air. The others crowded out on the landing beside Brad.

  Stu laid a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry it turned out the way it did, man," he said.

  Brad turned toward him, grinning. "Sorry? What for?"

  "Well, it caught fire, didn't it?" Jack asked.

  "Shit, yes! It surely did! And somewhere around North Street there's a transformer all blown to shit. We forgot, goddammit, we forgot! They got sick, they died, but they didn't go around turning off their electrical appliances before they did it! There are TVs on, and ovens, and electric blankets, all over Boulder. Hell of a power drain. These generators, they're built to cross over when the load's heavy in one place and light in another. That one down there tried to cross, but all the others were shut down, see?" Brad was fairly jerking with excitement. "Gary! You remember the way Gary, Indiana, was burned to the ground?"

  They nodded.

  "Can't be sure, we'll never be sure, but what happened here could have happened there. Could be the power didn't go off soon enough. One shorted-out electric blanket could have been enough under the right conditions, just like Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over that lantern in Chicago. These gennies tried to cross and had nothing to cross to. So they burned out. We're lucky it happened, that's what I think--take my word for it."

  "If you say so," Ralph responded doubtfully.

  Brad said, "We've got the job to do all over again, but only on one motor. We'll be in business. But--" Brad had begun to snap his fingers, an unconscious gesture of excitement. "We don't dare turn the juice back on until we're sure. Can we get another work-crew? A dozen guys or so?"

  "Sure, I guess so," Stu said. "What for?"

  "A Turning-Off Crew. Just a bunch of guys to go around Boulder and turn off everything that was left on. We don't dare turn the juice back on until that gets done. We got no fire department, man." Brad laughed a little crazily.

  "We're having a Free Zone Committee meeting tomorrow night," Stu said. "You come on over and explain why you want them, and you'll get your men. But are you sure that overload won't happen again?"

  "Pretty damn sure, yeah. It wouldn't have happened today if there hadn't been so much stuff left on. Speaking of that, somebody ought to go over to North Boulder and see if it's burning down."

  Nobody was sure if Brad was joking or not. As it turned out there were several small fires, mostly from hot appliances. None of them spread in the drizzle that was falling. And what people in the Zone remembered later about the first of September 1990 was that it was the day the power came back on--if only for thirty seconds or so.

  An hour later, Fran pedaled her bike into Eben G. Fine Park across from Harold's. At the park's north end, just beyond the picnic tables, Boulder Stream chuckled mildly along. The morning's drizzly rain was turning into a fine mist.

  She looked around for Larry
, didn't see him, and parked her bike. She walked through the dewy grass toward the swings and a voice said, "Over here, Frannie."

  Startled, she looked toward the building that housed the men's and women's toilets, and felt a moment of utter confused fear. A tall figure was standing in the shadows of the short passageway running through the center of the dual comfort station, and for just a moment she thought ...

  Then the figure stepped out and it was Larry, dressed in faded jeans and a khaki shirt. Fran relaxed.

  "Did I scare you?" he asked.

  "You did, just a little." She sat down in one of the swings, the thud of her heart beginning to slow. "I just saw a shape, standing there in the dark ..."

  "I'm sorry. I thought it might be safer, even though there's no direct line of sight from here to Harold's place. I see you rode a bicycle, too."

  She nodded. "Quieter."

  "I stowed mine out of sight in that shelter." He nodded to an open-walled, low-roofed building by the playground.

  Frannie trundled her bike between the swings and the slide and into the shelter. The odor inside was musty and fetid. The place had been a make-out spot for kids too young or too stoned to drive, she guessed. It was littered with beer bottles and cigarette ends. There was a crumpled pair of panties in the far comer and the remains of a small fire in the near one. She parked her bike next to Larry's and came back outside quickly. In those shadows, with the scent of that long-dead sex-musk in her nose, it was too easy to imagine the dark man standing just behind her, his twisted coathanger in hand.

  "Regular Holiday Inn, isn't it?" Larry said dryly.

  "Not my idea of pleasant accommodations," Fran said with a little shiver. "No matter what comes of this, Larry, I want to tell Stu everything tonight."

  Larry nodded. "Yeah, and not just because he's on the committee. He's also the marshal."

  Fran looked at him, troubled. Really for the first time she understood that this expedition might end with Harold in jail. They were going to sneak into his house without a warrant or anything and poke around.

  "Oh, bad," she said.

  "Not too good, is it?" he agreed. "You want to call it off?"

  She thought for a long time and then shook her head.

  "Good. I think we ought to know, one way or the other."

  "Are you sure they're both gone?"

  "Yes. I saw Harold driving one of the Burial Committee trucks early this morning. And all the people who were on the Power Committee were invited over for the tryout."