The Stand

  But at quarter past four on that morning of September 13, a cold comber of fear washed over him. It was made all the more terrifying by virtue of its unexpectedness, by its seeming irrationality. Tom would have cried out loud, but his vocal cords were suddenly frozen, locked. The muscles in his pumping legs went slack and he coasted along under the stars. The black and white negative of the desert streamed by more and more slowly.

  He was near.

  The man with no face, the demon who now walked the earth.

  Flagg.

  The tall man, they called him. The grinning man, Tom called him in his heart. Only when his grin fell on you, all the blood in your body fell into a dead swoon, leaving your flesh cold and gray. The man who could look at a cat and make it puke up hairballs. If he walked through a building project, men would hammer their own thumbnails and put shingles on upside down and sleepwalk off the ends of girders and--

  --and oh dear God he was awake!

  A whimper escaped Tom's throat. He could feel the sudden wakefulness. He seemed to see/feel an Eye opening in the darkness of the early morning, a dreadful red Eye that was still a bit bleared and confused with sleep. It was turning in the darkness. Looking. Looking for him. It knew Tom Cullen was there, but not just where he was.

  Numbly, his feet found the pedals and he biked on, faster and faster, bending over the handlebars to cut down the wind resistance, picking up speed until he was nearly flying along. If he had come upon a wrecked car in his path, he would have pedaled into it full-tilt and perhaps killed himself.

  But little by little he could feel that dark, hot presence falling behind him. And the greatest wonder was that that awful red Eye had glanced his way, had passed over him without seeing (maybe because I'm bent over my handlebars so far, Tom Cullen reasoned incoherently) ... and then it had closed again.

  The dark man had gone back to sleep.

  How does the rabbit feel when the shadow of the hawk falls on him like a dark crucifix ... and then goes on without stopping or even slowing? How does the mouse feel when the cat who has been crouched patiently outside his hole for the entire day is picked up by its master and tossed unceremoniously out the front door? How does the deer feel when it steps quietly past the mighty hunter who is snoozing away the effects of his three lunchtime beers? Perhaps they feel nothing, or perhaps they feel what Tom Cullen felt as he rode out of that black and dangerous sphere of influence: a great and nearly electrifying sunburst of relief; a feeling of new birth. Most of all a feeling of safety scarcely earned, that such great good luck must surely be a sign from heaven.

  He rode on until five o'clock in the morning. Ahead of him, the sky was turning the dark-blue-laced-with-gold of sunrise. The stars were fading.

  Tom was almost done in. He went on a little farther, then spotted a sharp decline about seventy yards to the right of the highway. He pushed his bike over and then down into the dry-wash. Consulting the tickings and workings of instinct, he pulled enough dry grass and mesquite to cover most of the bike. There were two big rocks leaning against each other about ten yards from his bike. He crawled into the pocket of shade beneath them, put his jacket under his head, and was asleep almost at once.

  CHAPTER 67

  The Walkin Dude was back in Vegas.

  He had gotten in around nine-thirty in the morning. Lloyd had seen him arrive. Flagg had also seen Lloyd, but had taken no notice of him. He had been crossing the lobby of the Grand, leading a woman. Heads turned to look at her in spite of everyone's nearly unanimous aversion to looking at the dark man. Her hair was a uniform snow-white. She had a terrible sunburn, one so bad that it made Lloyd think of the victims of the gasoline fire at Indian Springs. White hair, horrible sunburn, utterly empty eyes. They looked out at the world with a lack of expression that was beyond placidity, even beyond idiocy. Lloyd had seen eyes like that once before. In Los Angeles, after the dark man had finished with Eric Strellerton, the lawyer who was going to tell Flagg how to run everything.

  Flagg looked at no one. He grinned. He led the woman to the elevator and inside. The doors slid shut behind them and they went up to the top floor.

  For the next six hours Lloyd was busy trying to get everything organized, so when Flagg called him and asked for a report, he would be ready. He thought everything was under control. The only item left was tracking down Paul Burlson and getting whatever he had on this Tom Cullen, just in case Julie Lawry really had stumbled onto something. Lloyd didn't think it likely, but with Flagg it was better to be safe than sorry. Much better.

  He picked up the telephone and waited patiently. After a few moments there was a click and then Shirley Dunbar's Tennessee twang was in his ear: "Operator."

  "Hi, Shirley, it's Lloyd."

  "Lloyd Henreid! How are ya?"

  "Not too bad, Shirl. Can you try 6214 for me?"

  "Paul? He's not home. He's out at Indian Springs. Bet I could catch him for you at BaseOps."

  "Okay, try that."

  "You bet. Say, Lloyd, when you gonna come over and try some of my coffee cake? I bake fresh every two, three days."

  "Soon, Shirley," Lloyd said, grimacing. Shirley was forty, ran about one-eighty ... and had set her cap for Lloyd. He took a lot of ribbing about her, especially from Whitney and Ronnie Sykes. But she was a fine telephone operator, able to do wonders with the Las Vegas phone system. Getting the phones working--the most important ones, anyway--had been their first priority after the power, but most of the automatic switching equipment had burned out, and so they were back to the equivalent of tin cans and lots of waxed string. There were also constant outages. Shirley handled what there was to handle with uncanny skill, and she was patient with the three or four other operators, who were still learning.

  Also, she did make nice coffee cake.

  "Real soon," he added, and thought of how nice it would be if Julie Lawry's firm, rounded body could be grafted onto Shirley Dunbar's skills and gentle, uncomplaining nature.

  She seemed satisfied. There were beeps and boops on the line, and one high-pitched, echoing whine that made him hold the handset away from his ear, grimacing. Then the phone rang at the other end in a series of hoarse burrs.

  "Bailey, Ops," a voice made tinny by distance said.

  "This is Lloyd," he bellowed into the phone. "Is Paul there?"

  "Haul what, Lloyd?" Bailey asked.

  "Paul! Paul Burlson!"

  "Oh, him! Yeah, he's right here having a Co-Cola."

  There was a pause--Lloyd began to think that the tenuous connection had been broken--and then Paul came on.

  "We're going to have to shout, Paul. The connection stinks." Lloyd wasn't completely sure that Paul Burlson had the lung capacity to shout. He was a scrawny little man with thick lenses in his glasses, and some men called him Mr. Cool because he insisted on wearing a complete three-piece suit each day despite the dry crunch of the Vegas heat. But he was a good man to have as your information officer, and Flagg had told Lloyd in one of his expansive moods that by 1991 Burlson would be in charge of the secret police. And he'll be sooo good at it, Flagg had added with a warm and loving smile.

  Paul did manage to speak a little louder.

  "Have you got your directory with you?" Lloyd asked.

  "Yes. Stan Bailey and I were going over a work rotation program."

  "See if you've got anything on a guy named Tom Cullen, would you?"

  "Just a second." A second stretched out to two or three minutes, and Lloyd began to wonder again if they had been cut off. Then Paul said, "Okay, Tom Cullen ... you there, Lloyd?"

  "Right here."

  "You can never be sure, with the phones the way they are. He's somewhere between twenty-two and thirty-five at a guess. He doesn't know for sure. Light mental retardation. He has some work skills. We've had him on the clean-up crew."

  "How long has he been in Vegas?"

  "Something less than three weeks."

  "From Colorado?"

  "Yes, but we have a dozen people over
here who tried it over there and decided they didn't like it. They drove this guy out. He was having sex with a normal woman and I guess they were afraid for their gene pool." Paul laughed.

  "Got his address?"

  Paul gave it to him and Lloyd jotted it down in his notebook.

  "That it, Lloyd?"

  "One other name, if you've got the time."

  Paul laughed--a small man's fussy laugh. "Sure, it's only my coffee break."

  "The name is Nick Andros."

  Paul said instantly: "I have that name on my red list."

  "Oh?" Lloyd thought as quickly as he could, which was far from the speed of light. He had no idea what Paul's "red list" might be. "Who gave you his name?"

  Exasperated, Paul said: "Who do you think? The same person that gave me all the red list names."

  "Oh. Okay." He said goodbye and hung up. Small-talk was impossible with the bad connection, and Lloyd had too much to think about to want to make it, anyway.

  Red list.

  Names that Flagg had given to Paul and to no one else, apparently-- although Paul had assumed Lloyd knew all about it. Red list, what did that mean? Red meant stop.

  Red meant danger.

  Lloyd lifted the telephone again.

  "Operator."

  "Lloyd again, Shirl."

  "Well, Lloyd, did you--"

  "Shirley, I can't gab. I'm onto something that's maybe big."

  "Okay, Lloyd." Shirley's voice lost its flirtiness and she was suddenly all business.

  "Who's catching at Security?"

  "Barry Dorgan."

  "Get him for me. And I never called you."

  "Yes, Lloyd." She sounded afraid now. Lloyd was afraid, too, but he was also excited.

  A moment later Dorgan was on. He was a good man, for which Lloyd was profoundly grateful. Too many men of the Poke Freeman type had gravitated toward the police department.

  "I want you to pick someone up for me," Lloyd said. "Get him alive. I have to have him alive even if it means you lose men. His name is Tom Cullen and you can probably catch him at home. Bring him to the Grand." He gave Barry Tom's address and then made him repeat it back.

  "How important is this, Lloyd?"

  "Very important. You do this right, and someone bigger than me is going to be very happy with you."

  "Okay." Barry hung up and Lloyd did too, confident that Barry understood the converse: Fuck it up and somebody is going to be very angry with you.

  Barry called back an hour later to say he was fairly sure Tom Cullen had split.

  "But he's feeble," Barry went on, "and he can't drive. Not even a motor-scooter. If he's going east, he can't be any further than Dry Lake. We can catch him, Lloyd, I know we can. Give me a green light." Barry was fairly drooling. He was one of four or five people in Vegas who knew about the spies, and he had read Lloyd's thoughts.

  "Let me think this over," Lloyd said, and hung up before Barry could protest. He had gotten better at thinking things over than he would have believed possible in the pre-flu days, but he knew this was too big for him. And that red list business troubled him. Why hadn't he been told about that?

  For the first time since meeting Flagg in Phoenix, Lloyd had the disquieting feeling that his position might be vulnerable. Secrets had been kept. They could probably still get Cullen; both Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson could fly the army choppers that were hangared out at the Springs, and if they had to they could close every road going out of Nevada to the east. Also, the guy wasn't Jack the Ripper or Dr. Octopus; he was a feeb on the run. But Christ! If he had known about this Andros what's-his-face when Julie Lawry had come to see him, they might have been able to take him right in his little North Vegas apartment.

  Somewhere inside him a door had opened, letting in a cool breeze of fear. Flagg had screwed up. And Flagg was capable of distrusting Lloyd Henreid. And that was baaaad shit.

  Still, he would have to be told about this. He wasn't going to take the decision to start another manhunt upon himself. Not after what had happened with the Judge. He got up to go to the house phones, and met Whitney Horgan coming from them.

  "It's the man, Lloyd," he said. "He wants you."

  "All right," he said, surprised by how calm his voice was--the fear inside him was now very great. And above all else, it was important for him to remember that he would have long since starved in his Phoenix holding cell if it hadn't been for Flagg. There was no sense kidding himself; he belonged to the dark man lock, stock, and barrel.

  But I can't do my job if he shuts off the information, he thought, going to the elevator bank. He pushed the penthouse button, and the elevator car rose swiftly. Again there was that nagging, unhappy feeling: Flagg hadn't known. The third spy had been here all along, and Flagg hadn't known.

  "Come in, Lloyd." Flagg's lazy smiling face above a prosy blue-checked bathrobe.

  Lloyd came in. The air conditioning was on high, and it was like stepping into an open-air suite in Greenland. And still, as Lloyd stepped past the dark man, he could feel the radiating body heat he gave off. It was like being in a room which contained a small but very powerful furnace.

  Sitting in the corner, in a white sling chair, was the woman who had come in with Flagg that morning. Her hair was carefully pinned up, and she wore a shift dress. Her face was blank and moony, and looking at her gave Lloyd a deep chill. As teenagers, he and some friends had once stolen some dynamite from a construction project, had fused it and thrown it into Lake Harrison, where it exploded. The dead fish that had floated to the surface afterward had had that same look of awful blank impartiality in their moon-rimmed eyes.

  "I'd like you to meet Nadine Cross," Flagg said softly from behind him, making Lloyd jump. "My wife."

  Startled, Lloyd looked at Flagg and met only that mocking grin, those dancing eyes.

  "My dear, Lloyd Henreid, my righthand man. Lloyd and I met in Phoenix, where Lloyd was being detained and was consequently about to dine on a fellow detainee. In fact, Lloyd might already have partaken of the appetizer. Correct, Lloyd?"

  Lloyd blushed dully and said nothing, although the woman was either gonzo or stoned right over the moon.

  "Put out your hand, dear," the dark man said.

  Like a robot, Nadine put her hand out. Her eyes continued to stare indifferently at a point somewhere above Lloyd's shoulder.

  Jesus, this is creepy, Lloyd thought. A light sweat had sprung out all over his body in spite of the frigid air conditioning.

  "Pleestameetcha," he said, and shook the soft warm meat of her hand. Afterward, he had to restrain a powerful urge to wipe his hand on the leg of his pants. Nadine's hand continued to hang laxly in the air.

  "You can put your hand down now, my love," Flagg said.

  Nadine put her hand back in her lap, where it began to twist and squirm. Lloyd realized with something like horror that she was masturbating.

  "My wife is indisposed," Flagg said, and tittered. "She is also in a family way, as the saying is. Congratulate me, Lloyd. I am going to be a papa." That titter again; the sound of scampering, light-footed rats behind an old wall.

  "Congratulations," Lloyd said through lips that felt blue and numb.

  "We can talk our little hearts out around Nadine, can't we, dear? She's as silent as the grave. To make a small pun, mum's the word.

  "What about Indian Springs?"

  Lloyd blinked and tried to shift his mental gears, feeling naked and on the defensive. "It's going good," he managed at last.

  " 'Going good'?" The dark man leaned toward him and for one moment Lloyd was sure he was going to open his mouth and bite his head off like a Tootsie Pop. He recoiled. "That's hardly what I'd call a close analysis, Lloyd."

  "There are some other things--"

  "When I want to talk about other things, I'll ask about other things." Flagg's voice was rising, getting uncomfortably close to a scream. Lloyd had never seen such a radical shift in temperament, and it scared him badly. "Right now I want a status report on In
dian Springs and you better have it for me, Lloyd, for your sake you better have it!"

  "All right," Lloyd muttered. "Okay." He fumbled his notebook out of his hip pocket, and for the next half hour they talked about Indian Springs, the National Guard jets, and the Shrike missiles. Flagg began to relax again--although it was hard to tell, and it was a very bad idea to take anything at all for granted when you were dealing with the Walkin Dude.

  "Do you think they could overfly Boulder in two weeks?" he asked. "Say ... by the first of October?"

  "Carl could, I guess," Lloyd said doubtfully. "I don't know about the other two."

  "I want them ready," Flagg muttered. He got up and began to pace around the room. "I want those people hiding in holes by next spring. I want to hit them at night, while they're sleeping. Rake that town from one end to the other. I want it to be like Hamburg and Dresden in World War II." He turned to Lloyd and his face was parchment white, the dark eyes blazing out of it with their own crazy fire. His grin was like a scimitar. "Teach them to send spies. They'll be living in caves when spring comes. Then we'll go over there and have us a pig hunt. Teach them to send spies."

  Lloyd found his tongue at last. "The third spy--"

  "We'll find him, Lloyd. Don't worry about that. We'll get the bastard. " The smile was back, darkly charming. But Lloyd had seen an instant of angry and bewildered fear before that smile reappeared. And fear was the one expression he had never expected to see there.

  "We know who he is, I think," Lloyd said quietly.

  Flagg had been turning a jade figurine over in his hands, examining it. Now his hand froze. He became very still, and a peculiar expression of concentration stole over his face. For the first time the Cross woman's gaze shifted, first toward Flagg and then hastily away. The air in the penthouse suite seemed to thicken.

  "What? What did you say?"

  "The third spy--"

  "No," Flagg said with sudden decision. "No. You're jumping at shadows, Lloyd."

  "If I've got it right, he's a friend of a guy named Nick Andros."

  The jade figurine fell through Flagg's fingers and shattered. A moment later Lloyd was lifted out of his chair by the front of his shirt. Flagg had moved across the room so swiftly that Lloyd had not even seen him. And then Flagg's face was plastered against his, that awful sick heat was baking into him, and Flagg's black weasel eyes were only an inch from his own.