The Stand, Page 76

  "Oh my God it HURTS!" Hector Drogan screamed from above them. "Oh my God my God oh God God God!"

  The crowd remained for almost an hour, each person afraid to be remarked upon as having been the first to leave. There was disgust on many faces, a drowsy kind of excitement on many others... but if there was a common denominator, it was fear.

  Trashcan Man wasn't frightened, though. Why should he have been frightened? He hadn't known the man.

  He hadn't known him at all.

  It was quarter past ten that night when Lloyd came back to Trashcan Man's room. He glanced at Trash and said, "You're dressed. Good. I thought you might have gone to bed already."

  "No," Trashcan Man said, "I'm up. Why?"

  Lloyd's voice dropped. "It's now, Trashy. He wants to see you. Flagg."

  "He--?"

  "Yeah."

  Trashcan Man was transported. "Where is he? My life for him, oh yes--"

  "Top floor," Lloyd said. "He got in just after we finished burning Drogan's body. From the Coast. He was just here when Whitey and I got back from the landfill. No one ever sees him come or go, Trash, but they always know when he's taken off again. Or when he comes back. Come on, let's go."

  Four minutes later the elevator arrived at the top floor and Trashcan Man, his face alight and his eyes goggling, stepped out. Lloyd did not.

  Trash turned toward him. "Aren't you--?"

  Lloyd managed a smile, but it was a sorry affair. "No, he wants to see you alone. Good luck, Trash."

  And before he could say anything else, the elevator door had slid shut and Lloyd was gone.

  Trashcan Man turned around. He was in a wide, sumptuous hallway. There were two doors...and the one at the end was slowly opening. It was dark in there. But Trash could see a form standing in the doorway. And eyes. Red eyes.

  Heart thudding slowly in his chest, mouth dry, Trashcan Man started to walk toward that form. As he did, the air seemed to grow steadily cooler and cooler. Goosebumps rashed out on his sunbaked arms. Somewhere deep inside him, the corpse of Donald Merwin Elbert rolled over in its grave and seemed to cry out.

  Then it was still again.

  "The Trashcan Man," a low and charming voice said. "How good it is to have you here. How very good."

  The words fell like dust from his mouth: "My... my life for you."

  "Yes," the shape in the doorway said soothingly. Lips parted and white teeth showed in a grin. "But I don't think it will come to that. Come in. Let me look at you."

  His eyes overbright, his face as slack as the face of a sleepwalker, Trashcan Man stepped inside. The door closed, and they were in dimness. A terribly hot hand closed over Trashcan Man's icy one... and suddenly he felt at peace.

  Flagg said: "There's work for you in the desert, Trash. Great work. If you want it."

  "Anything," Trashcan Man whispered. "Anything."

  Randall Flagg slipped an arm around his wasted shoulders. "I'm going to set you to burn," he said. "Come, let's have something to drink and talk about it."

  And in the end, that burning was very great.

  CHAPTER 49

  When Lucy Swann woke up it was fifteen minutes to midnight by the ladies' Pulsar watch she wore. There was silent heat lightning in the west where the mountains were--the Rocky Mountains, she amended with some awe. Before this trip she had never been west of Philadelphia, where her brother-in-law lived. Had lived.

  The other half of the double sleeping bag was empty; that was what had wakened her. She thought of just rolling over and going back to sleep -- he would come back to bed when he was ready -- and then she got up and went quietly toward where she thought he would be, on the west side of camp. She went lithely, without disturbing a soul. Except for the Judge, of course; ten to midnight was his watch, and you'd never catch Judge Farris nodding off on duty. The Judge was seventy, and he'd joined them in Joliet. There were nineteen of them now, fifteen adults, three children, and Joe.

  "Lucy?" the Judge said, his voice low.

  "Yes. Did you see--"

  A low chuckle. "Sure did. He's out by the highway. Same place as last night and the night before that."

  She drew closer to him and saw that his Bible was open on his lap. "Judge, you'll strain your eyes doing that."

  "Nonsense. Starlight's the best light for this stuff. Maybe the only light. How's this? 'Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? are not his days like the days of an hireling? As a servant earnestly desireth the shadow, and as an hireling looketh for the reward of his work: So am I made to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed to me. When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.' "

  "Far out," Lucy said without much enthusiasm. "Real nice, Judge."

  "It's not nice, it's Job. There's nothing very nice in the Book of Job, Lucy." He closed the Bible. " 'I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.' That's your man, Lucy: that's Larry Underwood to a t."

  "I know," she said, and sighed. "Now if I only knew what was wrong with him."

  The Judge, who had his suspicions, kept silent.

  "It can't be the dreams," she said. "No one has them anymore, unless Joe does. And Joe's... different."

  "Yes. He is. Poor boy."

  "And everyone's healthy. At least since Mrs. Vollman died." Two days after the Judge joined them, a couple who introduced themselves as Dick and Sally Vollman had thrown in with Larry and his assorted company of survivors. Lucy thought it extremely unlikely that the flu had spared a man and wife, and suspected that their marriage was common-law and of extremely short duration. They were in their forties, and obviously very much in love. Then, a week ago, at the old woman's house in Hemingford Home, Sally Vollman had gotten sick. They camped for two days, waiting helplessly for her to get better or die. She had died. Dick Vollman was still with them, but he was a different man -- silent, thoughtful, pale.

  "He's taken that to heart, hasn't he?" she asked Judge Farris.

  "Larry is a man who found himself comparatively late in life," the Judge said, clearing his throat. "At least, that is how he strikes me. Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizens should be: partisans but never zealots, respecters of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely able to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered... or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power. Quite the opposite. And when things go wrong... when a Mrs. Vollman dies...

  "Could it have been diabetes?" the Judge interrupted himself. "I think it likely. The cyanosed skin, the fast drop into a coma... possibly, possibly. But if so, where was her insulin? Might she have let herself die? Could it have been suicide?"

  The Judge lapsed into a thinking pause, hands clasped under his chin. He looked like a brooding black bird of prey.

  "You were going to say something about when things go wrong," Lucy prompted gently.

  "When they go wrong -- when a Sally Vollman dies, of diabetes or internal bleeding or whatever--a man like Larry blames himself. The men the civics books idolize rarely come to good ends. Melvin Purvis, the super G-man of the thirties, shot himself with his own service pistol in 1959. When Lincoln was assassinated, he was a prematurely old man tottering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. We used to watch Presidents decay before our very eyes from month to month and even week to week on national TV -- except for Nixon, of course, who thrived on power the way that a vampire bat thrives on blood, and Reagan, who seemed a little too stupid to get old. I guess Gerald Ford was that way, too."

  "I think there's something more," Lucy said sadly.

  He looked at her, inquiring.

  "How did it go? I am full of tossings and turnings unto the dawning of the day?"

  He nodded.

  Lucy said, "Pretty good descr
iption of a man in love, isn't it?"

  He looked at her, surprised that she had known all along about the thing he wouldn't say. Lucy shrugged, smiled--a bitter quirk of the lips. "Women know," she said. "Women almost always know."

  Before he could reply, she had drifted away toward the road, where Larry would be, sitting and thinking about Nadine Cross.

  "Larry?"

  "Here," he said briefly. "What are you doing up?"

  "I got cold," she said. He was sitting cross-legged on the shoulder of the road, as if in meditation. "Room for me?"

  "Sure." He moved over. The boulder still held a bit of warmth from the day which was now passing. She sat down. He slipped an arm around her. According to Lucy's estimation, they were about fifty miles east of Boulder tonight. If they could get on the road by nine tomorrow, they could be in the Boulder Free Zone for lunch.

  It was the man on the radio who called it the Boulder Free Zone; his name was Ralph Brentner, and he said (with some embarrassment) that the Boulder Free Zone was mostly a radio call-sign, but Lucy liked it just for itself, for the way it sounded. It sounded right. It sounded like a fresh start. And Nadine Cross had adopted the name with an almost religious zeal, as if it was talismanic.

  Three days after Larry, Nadine, Joe, and Lucy had arrived at Stovington and found the plague center deserted, Nadine had suggested they pick up a CB radio and start conning the forty channels. Larry had accepted the idea wholeheartedly -- the way he accepted most of her ideas, Lucy thought. She didn't understand Nadine Cross at all. Larry was stuck on her, that was obvious, but Nadine didn't want to have much to do with him outside of each day's routine.

  Anyway, the CB idea had been a good one, even if the brain that had produced it was icelocked (except when it came to Joe). It would be the easiest way to locate other groups, Nadine had said, and to agree upon a rendezvous.

  This had led to some puzzled discussion in their group, which at that time had numbered half a dozen with the addition of Mark Zellman, who had been a welder in upstate New York, and Laurie Constable, a twenty-six-year-old nurse. And the puzzled discussion had led to yet another upsetting argument about the dreams.

  Laurie had begun by protesting that they knew exactly where they were going. They were following the resourceful Harold Lauder and his party to Nebraska. Of course they were, and for the same reason. The force of the dreams was simply too powerful to be denied.

  After some back and forth on this, Nadine had gotten hysterical. She had had no dreams -- repeat: no goddam dreams. If the others wanted to practice autohypnosis on each other, fine. As long as there was some rational basis for pushing on to Nebraska, such as the sign at the Stovington installation, fine. But she wanted it understood that she wasn't going along on the basis of a lot of metaphysical bullshit. If it was all the same to them, she would place her faith in radios, not visions.

  Mark had turned a friendly, gapped grin on Nadine's strained countenance and said, "If you ain't had no dreams, how come you woke me up last night talkin in your sleep?"

  Nadine had gone paper white. "Are you calling me a liar?" she nearly screamed. "Because if you are, one of us had better leave right now!" Joe shrank close to her, whimpering.

  Larry had smoothed it over, agreeing with the CB idea. And in the last week or so, they had begun to pick up broadcasts, not from Nebraska (which had been abandoned even before they got there -- the dreams had told them that, but even then the dreams had been fading, losing their urgency), but from Boulder, Colorado, six hundred miles farther west -- signals boosted by Ralph's powerful transmitter.

  Lucy could still remember the joyous, almost ecstatic faces of the others as Ralph Brentner's drawling, Oklahoma accent had cut nasally through the static: "This is Ralph Brentner, Boulder Free Zone. If you hear me, reply on Channel 14. Repeat, Channel 14."

  They could hear Ralph, but had no transmitter powerful enough to acknowledge, not then. But they had drawn closer, and since that first transmission they had found out that the old woman, Abagail Freemantle by name (but Lucy herself would always think of her as Mother Abagail) , and her party had been the first to arrive, but since then people had been straggling in by twos and threes and in groups as large as thirty. There had been two hundred people in Boulder when Brentner first got in contact with them; this evening, as they chattered back and forth -- their own CB now in easy reaching distance -- there were over three hundred and fifty. Their own group would send that number well on the way to four hundred.

  "Penny for your thoughts," Lucy said to Larry, and put her hand on his arm.

  "I was thinking about that watch and the death of capitalism," he said, pointing at her Pulsar. "It used to be root, hog, or die -- and the hog who rooted the hardest ended up with the red, white, and blue Cadillac and the Pulsar watch. Now, true democracy. Any lady in America can have a Pulsar digital and a blue haze mink." He laughed.

  "Maybe," she said. "But I'll tell you something, Larry. I may not know much about capitalism, but I know something about this thousand-dollar watch. I know it's no damned good."

  "No?" He looked at her, surprised and smiling. It was just a little one, but it was genuine. She was glad to see his smile--a smile that was for her. "Why not?"

  "Because no one knows what time it is," Lucy said pertly. "Four or five days ago I asked Mr. Jackson, and Mark, and you, one right after another. And you all gave me different times and you all said that your watches had stopped at least once... remember that place where they kept the world's time? I read an article about it in a magazine one time when I was in the doctor's office. It was tremendous. They had it right down to the micro-micro-second. They had pendulums and solar clocks and everything. Now I think about that place sometimes and it just makes me mad. All the clocks there must be stopped and I have a thousand-dollar Pulsar watch that I hawked from a jewelry store and it can't keep time down to the solar second like it's supposed to. Because of the flu. The goddamned flu."

  She fell silent and they sat together awhile without talking. Then Larry pointed at the sky. "See there!"

  "What? Where?"

  "Three o'clock high. Two, now."

  She looked but didn't see what he had pointed at until he pressed his warm hands to the sides of her face and tilted it toward the right quadrant of the sky. Then she did see and her breath caught in her throat. A bright light, starbright, but hard and unwinking. It fled rapidly across the sky on an east-to-west course.

  "My God," she cried, "it's a plane, isn't it, Larry? A plane?"

  "No. An earth satellite. It will be going around and around up there for the next seven hundred years, probably."

  They sat and watched it until it was out of sight behind the dark bulk of the Rockies.

  "Larry?" she said softly. "Why didn't Nadine admit it? About the dreams?"

  There was a barely perceptible stiffening in him, making her wish she hadn't brought it up. But now that she had, she was determined to pursue it ... unless he cut her off entirely.

  "She says she doesn't have any dreams."

  "She does have them, though -- Mark was right about that. And she talks in her sleep. She was so loud one night she woke me up."

  He was looking at her now. After a long time he asked, "What was she saying?"

  Lucy thought, trying to get it just right. "She was thrashing around in her sleeping bag and she was saying over and over, 'Don't, it's so cold, don't, I can't stand it if you do, it's so cold, so cold.' And then she started to pull her hair. She started to pull her own hair in her sleep. And moan. It gave me the creeps."

  "People can have nightmares, Lucy. That doesn't mean they're about ... well, about him."

  "It's better not to say much about him after dark, isn't it?"

  "Better, yes."

  "She acts as if she's coming unraveled, Larry. Do you know what I mean?"

  "Yes." He knew. In spite of her insistence that she didn't dream, there had been brown circles under her eyes by the time they reached Hemingford Home. Tha
t magnificent cable of heavy hair was noticeably whiter. And if you touched her, she jumped. She flinched.

  Lucy said, "You love her, don't you?"

  "Oh, Lucy," he said reproachfully.

  "No, I just want you to know..." She shook her head violently at his expression. "I have to say this. I see the way you look at her... the way she looks at you sometimes, when you're busy with something else and it's... it's safe. She loves you, Larry. But she's afraid."

  "Afraid of what? Afraid of what?"

  He was remembering his attempt to make love to her, three days after the Stovington fiasco. Since then she had grown quiet--she was still cheerful on occasion, but now she was quite obviously laboring to be cheerful. Joe had been asleep. Larry had gone to sit beside her, and for a while they had talked, not about their current situation but about the old things, the safe things. Larry had tried to kiss her. She pushed him away, turning her head, but not before he had felt the things Lucy had just told him. He had tried again, being rough and gentle at the same time, wanting her so damn badly. And for just one moment she had given in to him, had shown him what it could be like, if ...

  Then she broke from him and moved away, her face pale, her arms strapped across her breasts, hands cupping elbows, head lowered.

  Don't do that again, Larry. Please don't. Or I'll have to take Joe and leave.

  Why? Why, Nadine? Why does it have to be such a goddam big deal?

  She hadn't answered. Simply stood in that head-down posture, the brown bruised places already beginning beneath her eyes.

  If I could tell you I would, she said finally, and walked away without looking back.

  "I had a girlfriend once who acted a little like her," Lucy said. "My senior year in high school. Her name was Joline. Joline Majors. Joline wasn't in high school. She dropped out to marry her boyfriend. He was in the Navy. She was pregnant when they got married, but she lost the baby. Her man was gone a lot, and Joline ... she liked to party down. She liked that, and her man was a regular jealous bear. He told her if he ever found out she was doing anything behind his back, he'd break both of her arms and spoil her face. Can you imagine what that life must have been like? Your husband comes home and says, 'Well, I'm shipping out now, love. Give me a kiss, and then we'll have a little roll in the hay, and by the way, if I come back and someone tells me you've been messing around, I'll break both your arms and spoil your face.' "