The Stand

  Now the land began to change. Buttes and strange, wind-carved pillars and tabletop mesas. The highway ran straight through. The Bonneville Salt Flats lay to the far north. Skull Valley somewhere west. Flying. The sound of the wind, dead and distant ...

  An eagle poised in the highest crotch of an ancient lightning-blasted pine somewhere south of Richfield felt something pass close by, some deadly sighted thing whizzing through the night, and the eagle took wing against it, fearless, and was buffeted away by a grinning sensation of deadly cold. The eagle fell almost all the way to the ground, stunned, before recovering itself.

  The dark man's Eye went east.

  Now the highway below was 1-70. The towns were huddled lumps, deserted except for the rats and the cats and the deer that had already begun to creep in from the forests as the scent of man washed away. Towns with names like Freemont and Green River and Sego and Thompson and Harley Dome. Then a small city, also deserted. Grand Junction, Colorado. Then--

  Just east of Grand Junction was a spark of campfire.

  The Eye spiraled down.

  The fire was dying. There were four figures sleeping around it.

  It was true, then.

  The Eye appraised them coldly. They were coming. For reasons he could not fathom, they were actually coming. Nadine had told the truth.

  There was a low growling, and the Eye turned in another direction. There was a dog on the far side of the campfire, its head lowered, its tail coiled down and over its privates. Its eyes glowed like baleful amber gems. Its growl was a constant thing, like endlessly ripping cloth. The Eye stared at it, and the dog stared back, unafraid. Its lip curled back and it showed its teeth.

  One of the forms rose to a sitting position. "Kojak," it mumbled. "Will you for Chrissakes shut up?"

  Kojak continued to growl, his hackles up.

  The man who had awakened--it was Glen Bateman--looked around, suddenly uneasy. "Who's there, boy?" he whispered to the dog. "Is something there?"

  Kojak continued to growl.

  "Stu!" He shook the form next to him. The form muttered something and was silent again in its sleeping bag.

  The dark man who was now the dark Eye had seen enough. He whirled upward, catching just a glimpse of the dog's neck craning up to follow him. The low growl turned into a volley of barks, loud at first, then fading, fading, gone.

  Silence and rushing darkness.

  Some unknown time later he paused over the desert floor, looking down at himself. He sank slowly, approaching the body, then sinking into himself. For a moment there was a curious sensation of vertigo, of two things merging into one. Then the Eye was gone and there were only his eyes, staring up at the cold and gleaming stars.

  They were coming, yes.

  Flagg smiled. Had the old woman told them to come? Would they listen to her if she, on her deathbed, instructed them to commit suicide in that novel way? He supposed it was possible that they would.

  What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling : They were having their problems too, they were frightened too ... and as a result, they were making a colossal mistake.

  Was it even possible that they had been turned out?

  He lingered lovingly over the idea but in the end could not quite believe it. They were coming of their own choice. They were coming wrapped in righteousness like a clutch of missionaries approaching the cannibal's village.

  Oh, it was so lovely!

  Doubts would end. Fears would end. All it would take was the sight of their four heads up on spikes in front of the MGM Grand's fountain. He would assemble every person in Vegas and make them file past and look. He would have photographs taken, would print fliers, have them sent out to L.A. and San Francisco and Spokane and Portland.

  Five heads. He would put the dog's head up on a pole, too.

  "Good doggy," Flagg said, and laughed aloud for the first time since Nadine had goaded him into throwing her off the roof. "Good doggy," he said again, grinning.

  He slept well that night, and in the morning he sent out word that the watch on the roads between Utah and Nevada was to be tripled. They were no longer looking for one man going east but four men and a dog going west. And they were to be taken alive. Taken alive at all costs.

  Oh, yes.

  CHAPTER 72

  "You know," Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, "I've heard the saying 'That sucks' for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know." He looked down at his breakfast, which consisted of Morning Star Farms synthetic sausage links, and grimaced.

  "No, this is good," Ralph said earnestly. "You should have had some of the chow we had in the army."

  They were sitting around the campfire, which Larry had rekindled an hour earlier. They were all dressed in warm coats and gloves, and all were on their second cups of coffee. The temperature was about thirty-five degrees, and the sky was cloudy and bleak. Kojak was napping as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his fur.

  "I'm done feeding the inner man," Glen said, getting up. "Give me your poor, your hungry. On second thought, just give me your garbage. I'll bury it."

  Stu handed him his paper plate and cup. "This walkin's really something, isn't it, baldy? I bet you ain't been in this good shape since you were twenty."

  "Yeah, seventy years ago," Larry said, and laughed.

  "Stu, I was never in this kind of shape," Glen said grimly, picking up litter and popping it into the plastic sack he intended to bury. "I never wanted to be in this kind of shape. But I don't mind. After fifty years of confirmed agnosticism, it seems to be my fate to follow an old black woman's God into the jaws of death. If that's my fate, then that's my fate. End of story. But I'd rather walk than ride, when you get right down to it. Walking takes longer, consequently I live longer ... by a few days, anyway. Excuse me, gentlemen, while I give this swill a decent burial."

  They watched him walk to the edge of the camp with a small entrenching tool. This "walking tour of Colorado and points west," as Glen put it, had been the hardest on Glen himself. He was the oldest, Ralph Brentner's senior by twelve years. But somehow he had eased it considerably for the others. His irony was constant but gentle, and he seemed at peace with himself. The fact that he was able to keep going day after day made an impression on the others even if it was not exactly an inspiration. He was fifty-seven, and Stu had seen him working his finger-joints on these last three or four cold mornings, and grimacing as he did it.

  "Hurt bad?" Stu had asked him yesterday, about an hour after they had moved out.

  "Aspirin takes care of it. It's arthritis, you know, but it's not as bad as it's apt to be in another five or seven years, and frankly, East Texas, I'm not looking that far ahead."

  "You really think he's going to take us?"

  And Glen Bateman had said a peculiar thing: "I will fear no evil." And that had been the end of the discussion.

  Now they heard him digging at the frozen soil and cursing it.

  "Quite a fella, ain't he?" Ralph said.

  Larry nodded. "Yes. I think he is."

  "I always thought those college teachers was sissies, but that man sure ain't. Know what he said when I asked him why he didn't just throw that crap to one side of the road? Said we didn't need to start up that kind of shit again. Said we'd started up too many of the old brands of shit already."

  Kojak got up and trotted over to see what Glen was doing. Glen's voice floated over to them: "Well, there you are, you big lazy turd. I was starting to wonder where you'd gotten off to. Want me to bury you too?"

  Larry grinned and took off the mileometer clipped to his belt. He had picked it up in a Golden sports supply shop. You set it according to the length of your stride and then clipped it to your belt like a carpenter's rule. Each evening he wrote down how far they had walked that day on a dog-eared and often-folded sheet of paper.

  "Can I see that cheat sheet?" Stu asked.

  "Sure," Lar
ry said, and handed it over.

  At the top of the sheet Larry had printed: Boulder to Vegas: 771 miles. Below that:

  Stu took a scrap of paper from his wallet and did some subtraction. "Well, we're makin better time than when we started out, but we've still got over four hundred miles to go. Shit, we ain't halfway yet."

  Larry nodded. "Better time is right. We're going downhill. And Glen's right, you know. Why do we want to hurry? Guy's just gonna wipe us out when we get over there."

  "You know, I just don't believe that," Ralph said. "We may die, sure, but it isn't going to be anything simple, anything cut and dried. Mother Abagail wouldn't send us off if we was to be just murdered and nothing more come of it. She just wouldn't."

  "I don't believe she was the one who sent us," Stu said quietly.

  Larry's mileometer made four distinct little clicks as he set it for the day: 000.0. Stu doused what remained of the campfire with dirt. The little rituals of the morning went on. They had been twelve days on the road. It seemed to Stu that the days would go on forever like this: Glen bitching goodnaturedly about the food, Larry noting their mileage on his dog-eared cheat sheet, the two cups of coffee, someone burying yesterday's scut, someone else burying the fire. It was routine, good routine. You forgot what it was all leading to, and that was good. In the mornings Fran seemed very distant to him--very clear, but very distant, like a photograph kept in a locket. But in the evenings, when the dark had come and the moon sailed the night, she seemed very close. Almost close enough to touch ... and that, of course, was where the ache lay. At times like those his faith in Mother Abagail turned to bitter doubt and he wanted to wake them all up and tell them it was a fool's errand, that they had taken up rubber lances to tilt at a lethal windmill, that they had better stop at the next town, get motorcycles, and go back. That they had better grab a little light and a little love while they still could--because a little was all Flagg was going to allow them.

  But that was at night. In the mornings it still seemed right to go on. He looked speculatively at Larry, and wondered if Larry thought about his Lucy late at night. Dreamed about her and wished ...

  Glen came back into camp with Kojak at his heel, wincing a little as he walked. "Let's go get em," he said. "Right, Kojak?"

  Kojak wagged his tail.

  "He says Las Vegas or bust," Glen said. "Come on."

  They climbed the embankment to 1-70, now descending toward Grand Junction, and began their day's walk.

  Late that afternoon, a cold rain began to fall, chilling them all and damping conversation. Larry walked by himself, hands shoved in his pockets. At first he thought about Harold Lauder, whose corpse they had found two days ago--there seemed to be an unspoken conspiracy among them not to talk about Harold--but eventually his thoughts turned to the person he had dubbed the Wolfman.

  They had found the Wolfman just east of the Eisenhower Tunnel. The traffic was badly jammed up there, and the stink of death had been sickly potent. The Wolfman had been half in and half out of an Austin. He was wearing pegged jeans and a silk sequined Western shirt. The corpses of several wolves lay around the Austin. The Wolfman himself was half in and half out of the Austin's passenger seat, and a dead wolf lay on his chest. The Wolfman's hands were wrapped around the wolf's neck, and the wolf's bloody muzzle was angled up to the Wolfman's neck. Reconstructing, it seemed to all of them that a pack of wolves had come down out of the higher mountains, had spotted this lone man, and had attacked. The Wolfman had had a gun. He had dropped several of them before retreating to the Austin.

  How long before hunger had forced him from his refuge?

  Larry didn't know, didn't want to know. But he had seen how terribly thin the Wolfman had been. A week, maybe. He had been going west, whoever he was, going to join the dark man, but Larry would not have wished such a dreadful fate on anyone. He had spoken of it once to Stu, two days after they had emerged from the tunnel, with the Wolfman safely behind them.

  "Why would a bunch of wolves hang around so long, Stu?"

  "I don't know."

  "I mean, if they wanted something to eat, couldn't they find it?"

  "I'd think so, yeah."

  It was a dreadful mystery to him, and he kept working it over in his mind, knowing he would never find the solution. Whoever the Wolfman had been, he hadn't been lacking in the balls department. Finally driven by hunger and thirst, he had opened the passenger door. One of the wolves had jumped him and torn his throat out. But the Wolfman had throttled it to death even as he himself died.

  The four of them had gone through the Eisenhower Tunnel roped together, and in that horrible blackness, Larry's mind had turned to the trip he had made through the Lincoln Tunnel. Only now it was not images of Rita Blakemoor that haunted him but the face of the Wolfman, frozen in its final snarl as he and the wolf had killed each other.

  Were the wolves sent to kill that man?

  But that thought was too unsettling to even consider. He tried to push the whole thing out of his mind and just keep walking, but that was a hard thing to do.

  They made their camp that night beyond Loma, quite close to the Utah state line. Supper consisted of forage and boiled water, as all their meals did--they were following Mother Abagail's instructions to the letter: Go in the clothes that you stand up in. Carry nothing.

  "It's going to get bad in Utah," Ralph remarked. "I guess that's where we're going to find out if God really is watchin over us. There's one stretch, better than a hundred miles, without a town or even a gas station and a cafe." He didn't seem particularly disturbed by the prospect.

  "Water?" Stu asked.

  Ralph shrugged. "Not much of that, either. Guess I'll turn in."

  Larry followed suit. Glen stayed up to smoke a pipe. Stu had a few cigarettes and decided to have one. They smoked in silence for a while.

  "Long way from New Hampshire, baldy," Stu said at last.

  "It isn't exactly shouting distance from here to Texas."

  Stu smiled. "No. No, it ain't."

  "You miss Fran a lot, I guess."

  "Yeah. Miss her, worry about her. Worry about the baby. It's worse after it gets dark."

  Glen puffed. "That's nothing you can change, Stuart."

  "I know. But I worry."

  "Sure." Glen knocked out his pipe on a rock. "Something funny happened last night, Stu. I've been trying to figure out all day if it was real, or a dream, or what."

  "What was it?"

  "Well, I woke up in the night and Kojak was growling at something. Must have been past midnight, because the fire had burned way down. Kojak was on the other side of it with his hackles standing up. I told him to shut up and he never even looked at me. He was looking over to my right. And I thought, What if it's wolves? Ever since we saw that guy Larry calls the Wolfman-- "

  "Yeah, that was bad."

  "But there was nothing. I had a clear view. He was growling at nothing. "

  "He had a scent, that's all."

  "Yeah, but the crazy part is still to come. After a couple of minutes I started to feel ... well, decidedly weird. I felt like there was something right over by the turnpike embankment, and that it was watching me. Watching all of us. I felt like I could almost see it, that if I squinted my eyes the right way, I would see it. But I didn't want to. Because it felt like him.

  "It felt like Flagg, Stuart."

  "Probably nothing," Stu said after a moment.

  "It sure felt like something. It felt like something to Kojak, too."

  "Well, suppose he was watching somehow? What could we do about it?"

  "Nothing. But I don't like it. I don't like it that he's able to watch us ... if that's what it is. It scares me shitless."

  Stu finished his cigarette, stubbed it out carefully on the side of a rock, but made no move toward his sleeping bag just yet. He looked at Kojak, who was lying by the campfire with his nose on his paws and watching them.

  "So Harold's dead," Stu said at last.

  "Yes."


  "And it was just a goddam waste. A waste of Sue and Nick. A waste of himself, too, I reckon."

  "I agree."

  There was nothing more to say. They had come upon Harold and his pitiful dying declaration the day after they had done the Eisenhower Tunnel. He and Nadine must have gone over Loveland Pass, because Harold still had his Triumph cycle--the remains of it, anyway--and as Ralph had said, it would have been impossible to get anything bigger than a kid's little red wagon through the Eisenhower. The buzzards had worked him over pretty well, but Harold still clutched the Permacover notebook in one stiffening hand. The .38 was jammed in his mouth like a grotesque lollipop, and although they hadn't buried Harold, Stu had removed the pistol. He had done it gently. Seeing how efficiently the dark man had destroyed Harold and how carelessly he had thrown him aside when his part was played out had made Stu hate Flagg all the more. It made him feel that they were throwing themselves away in a witless sort of children's crusade, and while he felt that they had to press on, Harold's corpse with the shattered leg haunted him the way the frozen grimace of the Wolfman haunted Larry. He had discovered he wanted to pay Flagg back for Harold as well as Nick and Susan ... but he felt more and more sure that he would never get that chance.

  But you want to watch out, he thought grimly. You want to look out if I get within choking distance of you, you freak.

  Glen got up with a little wince. "I'm going to turn in, East Texas. Don't beg me to stay. It really is a dull party."

  "How's that arthritis?"

  Glen smiled and said, "Not too bad," but as he crossed to his bedroll he was limping.

  Stu thought he should not have another cigarette--only smoking two or three a day would exhaust his supply by the end of the week-- and then he lit one anyway. This evening it was not so cold, but for all that, there could be no doubt that in this high country, at least, summer was done. It made him feel sad, because he felt very strongly that he would never see another summer. When this one had begun, he had been an on-again, off-again worker at a factory that made pocket calculators. He had been living in a small town called Arnette, and he had spent a lot of his spare time hanging around Bill Hapscomb's Texaco station, listening to the other guys shoot the shit about the economy, the government, hard times. Stu guessed that none of them had known what real hard times were. He finished his cigarette and tossed it into the campfire.