The Stand

  "You know something, old buddy?" Poke said, pausing.

  "Nope," Lloyd said, giggling nervously. "Not a thing."

  "I wonder if ole George there can keep a secret."

  For Lloyd, this was a brand-new consideration. He stared thoughtfully at Gorgeous George for a long hard minute. George's eyes bugged back at him in sudden terror.

  Then Lloyd said, "Sure. It's his ass too." But he sounded as uneasy as he felt. When certain seeds are planted, they nearly always grow.

  Poke smiled. "Oh, he could just say, 'Hey guys. I met this old friend and his buddy. We shot the shit for a while, had a few beers, and what do you think, the sons of bitches came over to the house and took me off. Sure hope you catch em. Lemme tell you what they look like.' "

  George was shaking his head wildly, his eyes capital Os of terror.

  The guns were by then in a heavy canvas laundry sack they had found in the downstairs bathroom. Now Lloyd hefted the bag nervously and said, "Well, what do you think we ought to do?"

  "I think we ought to pokerize him, ole buddy," Poke said regretfully. "Only thing we can do."

  Lloyd said, "That seems awful hard, after he put us onto this."

  "Hard old world, buddy."

  "Yeah," Lloyd sighed, and they walked over to George.

  "Mph," George said, shaking his head wildly. "Mmmmmnh! Mmmmph!"

  "I know," Poke soothed him. "Bitch, ain't it? I'm sorry, George, no shit. It ain't a bit personal. Want you to 'member that. Catch on his head, Lloyd."

  That was easier said than done. Gorgeous George was whipping his head wildly from side to side. He was sitting in the comer of his rumpus room and the walls were cinderblock and he kept rapping his head against them. Didn't even seem to feel it.

  "Catch him," Poke said serenely, and ripped another piece of tape from the roll.

  Lloyd at last got him by the hair and managed to hold him still long enough for Poke to slap the second strip of adhesive neatly across George's nose, thereby sealing all of his tubes. George went purely crazy. He rolled out of the corner, bellywhopped, and then lay there, humping the floor and making muffled sounds which Lloyd supposed were supposed to be screams. Poor old fellow. It went on for almost five minutes before George was completely still. He bucked and scrabbled and thumped. His face got as red as the side of old Dad's barn. The last thing he did was to lift both legs eight or ten inches straight up off the floor and bring them down with a crash. It reminded Lloyd of something he had seen in a Bugs Bunny cartoon or something, and he chuckled a little, feeling a bit cheered up. Up until then it had been sort of gruesome to see.

  Poke squatted beside George and felt for his pulse.

  "Well?" Lloyd said.

  "Nothin tickin but his watch, ole buddy," Poke said. "Speakin of which ..." He lifted George's meaty arm and looked at his wrist. "Naw, just a Timex. I was thinkin it might be a Casio, somethin like that." He let George's arm drop.

  George's car keys were in his front pants pocket. And in an upstairs cupboard they found a Skippy peanut butter jar half filled with dimes, and they took those, too. There was twenty dollars and sixty cents in dimes.

  George's car was a wheezy old Mustang with a four on the floor and lousy shocks and tires that were as bald as Telly Savalas. They left Vegas on US 93 and went southeast into Arizona. By noon of the next day, day before yesterday, they had skirted Phoenix on the back roads. Yesterday around nine they had stopped at a dusty old general store two miles beyond Sheldon on Arizona Highway 75. They knocked over the store and pokerized the proprietor, an elderly gentleman with mail-order false teeth. They got sixty-three dollars and the old dudemar's pickup truck.

  The pickup truck had blown two tires this morning. Two tires at the same time, and neither of them could find any tacks or nails on the road at all, although they spent nearly half an hour looking, swapping a bomber joint back and forth as they did so. Poke finally said it must have been a coincidence. Lloyd said he had heard of stranger things, by God. Then along came the white Connie, like an answer to their prayers. They had crossed the state line from Arizona into New Mexico earlier on, although neither of them knew it, and so they had become meat for the FBI.

  The Connie's driver had pulled over, leaned out, and said: "Need any help?"

  "Sure do," Poke had said, and pokerized the guy right on the spot. Got him dead-bang between the eyes with the .357 Mag. Poor sucker probably never even knew what had hit him.

  "Why don't you turn here?" Lloyd said, pointing to the junction coming up. He was pleasantly stoned.

  "Sure could," Poke said cheerfully. He let the Connie's speed drop from eighty to sixty. Drifted it to the left, right wheels barely leaving the ground, and then a new piece of road was unrolling in front of them. Route 78, due west. And so, not knowing they had ever left it or that they were now the perpetrators of what the newspapers were calling a TRI-STATE KILL-SPREE, they reentered Arizona.

  About an hour later a sign came up on their right: BURRACK 6.

  "Burlap?" Lloyd said foggily.

  "Burrack," Poke said, and began twisting the Connie's wheel so that the car made big graceful loops back and forth across the road. "Whoop! Whoop!"

  "You want to stop there? I'm hungry, man."

  "You're always hungry."

  "Fuck you. When I get stoned, I get the munchies."

  "You can munch my nine-inch hogleg, how's that? Whoop! Whoop!"

  "Seriously, Poke. Let's stop."

  "Okay. Got to get some cash, too. We've thrown off enough fuckin pursuit for a while. We got to get some money and shag ass north. This desert shit makes no sense to me."

  "Okay," Lloyd said. He didn't know if it was the dope working on him or what, but all of a sudden he felt paranoid as hell, even worse than when they had been on the turnpike. Poke was right. Stop outside this Burrack and pull a score like they had outside of Sheldon. Get some money and some gas station maps, ditch this fuckin Connie for something that would blend into the scenery, then head north and east by the secondary roads. Get the fuck out of Arizona.

  "I'll tell you the truth, man," Poke said. "All of a sudden I feel as nervous as a longtail cat in a room fulla rockin chairs."

  "I know what you mean, jellybean," Lloyd said gravely, and then it hit them both funny and they broke up.

  Burrack was a wide place in the road. They shot through it and on the other side was a combination cafe, store, and gas station. There was an old Ford wagon and a dust-streaked Olds with a horse trailer behind it in the dirt parking lot. The horse stared out at them as Poke wheeled the Connie in.

  "This looks like just the ticket," Lloyd said.

  Poke agreed. He reached into the back for the .357 and checked the loads. "You ready?"

  "I guess so," Lloyd said, and took hold of the Schmeisser.

  They walked across the baked parking lot. The police had known who they were for four days now; they had left their fingerprints all over Gorgeous George's house, and in the store where the old man with the mail-order dentures had been pokerized. The old man's pickup had been found within fifty feet of the bodies of the three people who belonged with the Continental, and it seemed reasonable to assume that the men who had killed Gorgeous George and the store owner had also killed these three. If they had been listening to the Connie's radio instead of the tape-player, they would have known that Arizona and New Mexico police were coordinating the largest manhunt in forty years, all for a couple of small-time grifters who could not quite comprehend what they might have done to start such a fuss.

  The gas was self-service; the clerk had to turn on the pump. So they went up the steps and inside. Three aisles of canned goods went up the room toward the counter. At the counter a man in cowboy clothes was paying for a pack of smokes and half a dozen Slim Jims. Halfway down the middle aisle a tired-looking woman with coarse black hair was trying to decide between two brands of spaghetti sauce. The place smelled of stale licorice and sun and tobacco and age. The proprietor was a freckled man in
a gray shirt. He was wearing a company cap that said SHELL in red letters against a white field. He looked up as the screen door slapped shut and his eyes widened.

  Lloyd put the wire stock of the Schmeisser against his shoulder and fired a burst at the ceiling. The two hanging lightbulbs shattered like bombs. The man in the cowboy clothes began to turn around.

  "Just hold still and nobody'll get hurt!" Lloyd shouted, and Poke immediately made him a liar by blowing a hole through the woman looking at the sauces. She flew out of her shoes.

  "Holy gee, Poke!" Lloyd hollered. "You didn't have to--"

  "Pokerized her, ole buddy!" Poke yelled. "She'll never watch Jerry Falwell again! Whoop! Whoop!"

  The man in the cowboy clothes kept turning. He was holding his smokes in his left hand. The harsh light falling through the show window and the screen door pricked out bright stars on the dark lenses of his sunglasses. There was a .45 revolver tucked into his belt, and now he plucked it out unhurriedly as Lloyd and Poke were staring at the dead woman. He aimed, fired, and the left side of Poke's face suddenly disappeared in a spray of blood and tissue and teeth.

  "Shot!" Poke screamed, dropping the .357 and flailing backward. His flailing hands raked potato chips and taco chips and Cheez Doodles onto the splintery wooden floor. "Shot me, Lloyd! Look out! Shot me! Shot me!" He hit the screen door and it slammed open and Poke sat down hard on the porch outside, pulling one of the aged door hinges loose.

  Lloyd, stunned, fired more in reflex than in self-defense. The Schmeisser's roar filled the room. Cans flew. Bottles crashed, spilling catsup, pickles, olives. The glass front of the Pepsi cooler jingled inward. Bottles of Dr. Pepper and Jolt and Orange Crush exploded like clay pigeons. Foam ran everywhere. The man in the cowboy clothes, cool, calm, and collected, fired his piece again. Lloyd felt rather than heard the bullet as it droned by nearly close enough to part hair. He raked the Schmeisser across the room, from left to right.

  The man in the SHELL cap dropped behind the counter with such suddenness that an observer might have thought a trapdoor had been sprung on him. A gumball machine disintegrated. Red, blue, and green chews rolled everywhere. The glass bottles on the counter exploded. One of them had contained pickled eggs; another, pickled pigs' feet. Immediately the room was filled with the sharp odor of vinegar.

  The Schmeisser put three bullet holes in the cowboy's khaki shirt and most of his innards exited from the back to splatter all over Spuds Mac-Kenzie. The cowboy went down, still clutching his .45 in one hand and his deck of Luckies in the other.

  Lloyd, bullshit with fear, continued to fire. The machine-pistol was growing hot in his hands. A box filled with returnable soda bottles tinkled and fell over. A calendar girl wearing hotpants took a bullet hole in one magical peach-colored thigh. A rack of paperbacks with no covers crashed over. Then the Schmeisser was empty, and the new silence was deafening. The smell of gunpowder was heavy and rank.

  "Holy gee," Lloyd said. He looked cautiously at the cowboy. It didn't look like the cowboy was going to be a problem in either the near or distant future.

  "Shot me!" Poke brayed, and staggered back inside. He clawed the screen door out of his way with such force that the other hinge popped and the door slapped onto the porch. "Shot me, Lloyd, look out!"

  "I got him, Poke," Lloyd soothed, but Poke seemed not to hear. He was a mess. His right eye blazed like a baleful sapphire. The left was gone. His left cheek had been vaporized; you could watch his jaw work on that side as he talked. Most of his teeth were gone over there, too. His shirt was soaked with blood. When you got right down to it, Poke was sort of a mess.

  "Stupid fuck blew me up!" Poke screamed. He bent over and got the .357 Mag. "I'll teach you to shoot me, you dumb fuck!"

  He advanced on the cowboy, a rural Dr. Sardonicus. He put one foot on the cowboy's butt like a hunter posing for a picture with the bear which would soon be decorating the wall of his den, and prepared to empty the .357 into his head. Lloyd stood watching, gape-mouthed, the smoking machine-pistol dangling from one hand, still trying to figure out how all of this had happened.

  At that moment the man in the SHELL cap popped back up from behind the counter like Jack from his box, his face screwed up in an expression of desperate intent, a double-barreled shotgun clutched in both hands.

  "Huh?" Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels. He went down, his face a worse mess than ever and not caring a bit.

  Lloyd decided it was time to leave. Fuck the money. There was money everywhere. The time to throw off a little more pursuit had clearly come. He wheeled and exited the store in large shambling strides, his boots barely touching the boards.

  He was halfway down the steps when an Arizona State Police cruiser wheeled into the yard. A trooper got out on the passenger side and pulled his pistol. "Hold it right there! What's going on in there?"

  "Three people dead!" Lloyd cried. "Hell of a mess! Guy that did it went out the back! I'm gettin the fuck out!"

  He ran to the Connie, had actually slipped behind the wheel, and was just remembering that the keys were in Poke's pocket when the trooper yelled: "Halt! Halt or I'll shoot!"

  Lloyd halted. After examining the radical surgery on Poke's face, it didn't take a long time to decide he'd just as soon pass.

  "Holy gee," he said miserably as a second trooper laid a big horse pistol upside his head. The first one cuffed him.

  "In the back of the cruiser, Sunny Jim."

  The man in the SHELL cap had come out onto the porch, still clutching his shotgun. "He shot Bill Markson!" he yelled in a high, queer voice. "T'other one shot Missus Storm! Hell of a note! I shot t'other one! He's deader'n a shitbug! Like to shoot this one too, iff'n you boys'll stand away!"

  "Calm down, Pop," one of the troopers said. "Fun's over."

  "I'll shoot him where he stands!" the old guy yelled. "I'll lay him low!" Then he leaned forward like an English butler making a bow and threw up on his shoes.

  "You boys get me away from that guy, would you?" Lloyd said. "I believe he's crazy."

  "You got this comin outta the store, Sunny Jim," the trooper who had thrown down on him in the first place said. The barrel of his pistol looped up and up, catching the sun, and then it crashed down on Lloyd Henreid's head and he never woke up until that evening in the Apache County Jail's infirmary.

  CHAPTER 17

  Starkey was standing in front of monitor 2, keeping a close eye on Tech 2nd Class Frank D. Bruce. When we last saw Bruce, he was facedown in a bowl of Chunky Sirloin Soup. No change except for the positive ID. Situation normal, all fucked up.

  Thoughtfully, hands locked behind his back like a general reviewing troops, like General Black Jack Pershing, his boyhood idol, Starkey moved down to monitor 4, where the situation had changed for the better. Dr. Emmanual Ezwick still lay dead on the floor, but the centrifuge had stopped. At 1940 hours last night, the centrifuge had begun to emit fine tendrils of smoke. At 1995 hours the sound pickups in Ezwick's lab had transmitted a whunga-whunga-whunga sort of sound that deepened into a fuller, richer, and more satisfying ronk! ronk! ronk! At 2107 hours the centrifuge had ronked its last ronk and had slowly come to rest. Was it Newton who had said that somewhere, beyond the farthest star, there may be a body perfectly at rest? Newton had been right about everything but the distance, Starkey thought. You didn't have to go far at all. Project Blue was perfectly at rest. Starkey was very glad. The centrifuge had been the last illusion of life, and the problem he'd had Steffens run through the main computer bank (Steffens had looked at him as though he were crazy, and yes, Starkey thought he might be) was: How long could that centrifuge be expected to run? The answer, which had come back in 6.6 seconds, was: +-3 YEARS PROBABLE MALFUNCTION NEXT TWO WEEKS .009% AREAS OF PROBABLE MALFUNCTION BEARINGS 38% MAIN MOTOR 16% ALL OTHER 54%. That was a smart computer. Starkey had gotten Steffens to query it again after the actual burnout of Ezwick's centrifuge. The computer communed with the Engineering Systems data bank and confirmed that t
he centrifuge had indeed burned out its bearings.

  Remember that, Starkey thought as his caller began to beep urgently behind him. The sound of burning bearings in the final stages of collapse is ronk-ronk-ronk.

  He went to the caller and pushed the button that snapped off the beeper. "Yes, Len."

  "Billy, I've got an urgent from one of our teams in a town called Sipe Springs, Texas. Almost four hundred miles from Arnette. They say they have to talk to you; it's a command decision."

  "What is it, Len?" he asked calmly. He had taken over sixteen "downers" in the last ten hours, and was, generally speaking, feeling fine. Not a sign of a ronk.

  "Press."

  "Oh Jesus," Starkey said mildly. "Patch them through."

  There was a muffled roar of static with a voice talking unintelligibly behind it.

  "Wait a minute," Len said.

  The static slowly cleared.

  "--Lion, Team Lion, do you read, Blue Base? Can you read? One ... two ... three ... four ... this is Team Lion--"

  "I've got you, Team Lion," Starkey said. "This is Blue Base One."

  "Problem is coded Flowerpot in the Contingency Book," the tinny voice said. "Repeat, Flowerpot."

  "I know what the fuck Flowerpot is," Starkey said. "What's the situation?"

  The tinny voice coming from Sipe Springs talked uninterrupted for almost five minutes. The situation itself was unimportant, Starkey thought, because the computer had informed him two days ago that just this sort of situation (in some shape or form) was apt to occur before the end of June. 88% probability. The specifics didn't matter. If it had two legs and belt-loops, it was a pair of pants. Never mind the color.

  A doctor in Sipe Springs had made some good guesses, and a pair of reporters for a Houston daily had linked what was happening in Sipe Springs with what had already happened in Arnette, Verona, Commerce City, and a town called Polliston, Kansas. Those were the towns where the problem had gotten so bad so fast that the army had been sent in to quarantine. The computer had a list of twenty-five other towns in ten states where traces of Blue were beginning to show up.

  The Sipe Springs situation wasn't important because it wasn't unique. They'd had their chance at unique in Arnette--well, maybe--and flubbed it. What was important was that the "situation" was finally going to see print on something besides yellow military flimsy; was, anyway, unless Starkey took steps. He hadn't decided whether to do that or not. But when the tinny voice stopped talking, Starkey realized that he had made the decision after all. He had perhaps made it as long as twenty years ago.