The Stand

Chapter 43

There was a dead man lying in the middle of Main Street in May, Oklahoma.

Nick wasn’t surprised. He had seen a lot of corpses since leaving Shoyo, and he suspected he hadn’t seen a thousandth of all the dead people he must have passed. In places, the rich smell of death on the air was enough to make you feel like swooning. One more dead man, more or less, wasn’t going to make any difference.

But when the dead man sat up, such an explosion of terror rose in him that he again lost control of his bike. It wavered, then wobbled, then crashed, spilling Nick violently onto the pavement of Oklahoma Route 3. He cut his hands and scraped his forehead.

“Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble,” the corpse said, coming toward Nick at a pace best described as an amiable stagger. “Didn’t you just? My laws!”

Nick got none of this. He was looking at a spot on the pavement between his hands where drops of blood from his cut forehead were falling, and wondering how badly he had been cut. When the hand touched him on the shoulder he remembered the corpse and scrambled away on the palms of his hands and the soles of his shoes, the eye not covered with the patch bright with terror.

“Don’t you take on so,” the corpse said, and Nick saw he wasn’t a corpse at all but a young man who was looking happily at him. He had most of a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and now Nick understood. Not a corpse but a man who had gotten drunk and had passed out in the middle of the road.

Nick nodded at him and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Just then a drop of blood oozed warmly into the eye that Ray Booth had worked over, making it smart. He raised the eyepatch and swiped his forearm across it. He had a little more vision on that side today, but when he closed his good eye, the world still retreated to something which was little more than a colorful blur. He replaced the patch and then walked slowly to the curb and sat beside a Plymouth with Kansas plates which was slowly settling on its tires. He could see the gash on his forehead reflected in the Plymouth’s bumper. It looked ugly but not deep. He would find the local drugstore, disinfect it, and slap a Band-Aid over it. He thought he still must have enough penicillin in his system to fight off almost anything, but his close call from the bullet-scrape on his leg had given him a horror of infection. He picked scraps of gravel out of his palms, wincing.

The man with the bottle of whiskey had been watching all of this with no expression at all. If Nick had looked up, it would have struck him as queer immediately. When he had turned away to examine his wound in the bumper’s reflection, the animation had leaked out of the man’s face. It became empty and clean and unlined. He was wearing bib-alls that were clean but faded and heavy workshoes. He stood about five-nine, and his hair was so blond it was nearly white. His eyes were a bright, empty blue, and with the cornsilk hair, his Swedish or Norwegian descent was unmistakable. He looked no more than twenty-three, but Nick found out later he had to be forty-five or close to it because he could remember the end of the Korean War, and how his daddy had come home in uniform a month later. There was no question that he might have made that up. Invention was not Tom Cullen’s long suit.

He stood there, empty of face, like a robot whose plug has been pulled. Then, little by little, animation seeped back into his face. His whiskey-reddened eyes began to twinkle. He smiled. He had remembered again what this situation called for.

“Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble. Didn’t you just? My laws!” He blinked at the amount of blood on Nick’s forehead.

Nick had a pad of paper and a Bic in his shirt pocket; neither had been jarred loose by the fall. He wrote: “You just scared me. Thought you were dead until you sat up. I’m okay. Is there a drugstore in town?”

He showed the pad to the man in the bib-alls. The man took it. Looked at what was written there. Handed it back. Smiling, he said, “I’m Tom Cullen. But I can’t read. I only got to third grade but then I was sixteen and my daddy made me quit. He said I was too big.”

Retarded, Nick thought. I can’t talk and he can’t read. For a moment he was utterly nonplussed.

“Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble!” Tom Cullen exclaimed. In a way, it was the first time for both of them. “My laws, didn’t you just!”

Nick nodded. Replaced the pad and pen. Put a hand over his mouth again and shook his head. Cupped his hands over his ears and shook his head. Placed his left hand against his throat and shook his head.

Cullen grinned, puzzled. “Got a toothache? I had one once. Gee, it hurt. Didn’t it just? My laws!”

Nick shook his head and went through his dumbshow again. Cullen guessed earache this time. Nick threw his hands up and went over to his bike. The paint, was scraped, but it didn’t seem hurt. He got on and pedaled a little way up the street. Yes, it was all right. Cullen jogged alongside, smiling happily. His eyes never left Nick. He hadn’t seen anyone for most of a week.

“Don’t you feel like talkin?” he asked, but Nick didn’t look around or appear to have heard. Tom tugged at his sleeve and repeated his question.

The man on the bike put his hand over his mouth and shook his head. Tom frowned. Now the man had put his bike on its kickstand and was looking at the storefronts. He seemed to see what he wanted, because he went over to the sidewalk and then to Mr. Norton’s drugstore. If he wanted to go in there it was just too bad, because the drug was locked up. Mr. Norton had left town. Just about everybody had locked up and left town, it seemed like, except for Mom and her friend Mrs. Blakely, and they were both dead.

Now the no-talking-man was trying the door. Tom could have told him it was no use even though the OPEN sign was on the door. The OPEN sign was a liar. Too bad, because Tom would dearly have loved an ice cream soda. It was a lot better than the whiskey, which had made him feel good at first and then made him sleepy and then had made his head ache fit to split. He had gone to sleep to get away from the headache but he had had a lot of crazy dreams about a man in a black suit like the one that Revrunt Deiffenbaker always wore. The man in the black suit chased him through the dreams. He seemed like a very bad man to Tom. The only reason he had gone to drinking in the first place was because he wasn’t supposed to, his daddy had told him that, and Mom too, but now everyone was gone, so what? He would if he wanted to.

But what was the no-talking-man doing now? Picked up the litter basket from the sidewalk and he was going to… what? Break Mr. Norton’s window? CRASH! By God and by damn if he didn’t! And now he was reaching through, unlocking the door…

“Hey, mister, you can’t do that!” Tom cried, his voice throbbing with outrage and excitement. “That’s illegal! M-O-O-N and that spells il -legal. Don’t you know—”

But the man was already inside and he never turned around.

“What are you, anyway, deaf?” Tom called indignantly. “My laws! Are you…”

He trailed off. The animation and excitement left his face. He was the robot with the pulled plug again. In May it had not been an, uncommon sight to see Feeble Tom like this. He would be walking along the street, looking into shop windows with that eternally happy expression on his slightly rounded Scandahoovian face, and all of a sudden he would stop dead and go blank. Someone might shout, “There goes Tom! ” and there would be laughter. If Tom’s daddy was with him he would scowl and elbow Tom, perhaps even sock him repeatedly on the shoulder or the back until Tom came to life. But Tom’s daddy had been around less and less over the first half of 1988 because he was stepping out with a redheaded waitress who worked at Boomer’s Bar & Grille. Her name was DeeDee Packalotte (and weren’t there some jokes about that name), and about a year ago she and Don Cullen run off together. They had been seen just once, in a cheap fleabag motel not far away, in Slapout, Oklahoma, and that had been the last of them.

Most folks took Tom’s sudden blankouts as a further sign of retardation, but they were actually instances of nearly normal thinking. The human thinking process is based (or so the psychologists tell us) on deduction and induction, and the retarded person is incapable of making these deductive and inductive leaps. There are lines down somewhere inside, circuits shorted out, fouled switches. Tom Cullen was not severely retarded, and he was capable of making simple connections. Every now and then—during his blankouts—he would be capable of making a more sophisticated inductive or deductive connection. He would feel the possibility of making such a connection the way a normal person will sometimes feel a name dancing “right on the tip of his tongue.” When it happened, Tom would dismiss his real world, which was nothing more or less than an instant-by-instant flow of sensory input, and go into his mind. He would be like a man in a darkened unfamiliar room who holds the plug-end of a lampcord in one hand and who goes crawling around on the floor, bumping into things and feeling with his free hand for the electrical socket. And if he found it he didn’t always—there would be a burst of illumination and he would see the room (or the idea) plain. Tom was a sensory creature. A list of his favorite things would have included the taste of an ice cream soda at Mr. Norton’s fountain, watching a pretty girl in a short dress waiting on the corner to cross the street, the smell of lilac, the feel of silk. But more than any of these things he loved the intangible, he loved that moment when the connection would be made, the switch cleared (at least momentarily), the light would go on in the dark room. It didn’t always happen; often the connection eluded him. This time it didn’t.

He had said, What are you, anyway, deaf?

The man hadn’t acted like he heard what Tom was saying except for those times he had been looking right at him. And the man hadn’t said anything to him, not even hi. Sometimes people didn’t answer Tom when he asked questions because something in his face told them he was soft upstairs. But when that happened, the person who wouldn’t answer looked mad or sad or kind of blushy. This man didn’t act like that—he had given Tom a circle made of his thumb and forefinger and Tom knew that meant Okey Dokey… but still he didn’t talk.

Hands over his ears and a shake of his head.

Hands over his mouth and the same.

Hands over his neck and the same again.

The room lit up: connection made.

“My laws!” Tom said, and the animation came back into his face. His bloodshot eyes glowed. He rushed into Norton’s Drugstore, forgetting that it was illegal to do so. The no-talking-man was squirting something that smelled like Bactine onto cotton and was then wiping the cotton on his forehead.

“Hey mister!” Tom said, rushing up. The no-talking-man didn’t turn around. Tom was momentarily puzzled, and then he remembered. He tapped Nick on the shoulder and Nick turned. “You’re deaf n dumb, right? Can’t hear! Can’t talk! Right?”

Nick nodded. And to him, Tom’s reaction was nothing short of amazing. He jumped into the air and clapped his hands wildly.

“I thought of it! Hooray for me! I thought of it myself! Hooray for Tom Cullen!”

Nick had to grin. He couldn’t remember when his disability had brought someone so much pleasure.

There was a small town square fronting on the courthouse, and in this square was a statue of a Marine tricked out in World War II kit and weaponry. The plaque beneath announced that this monument was dedicated to the boys from Harper County who had made the ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THEIR COUNTRY. In the shade of this monument Nick Andros and Tom Cullen sat, eating Underwood Deviled Ham and Underwood Deviled Chicken on potato chips. Nick had an x of Band-Aids on his forehead above his left eye. He was reading Tom’s lips (which was a little tough, because Tom kept stuffing food through what he was saying) and reflecting to himself that he was getting damned tired of eating stuff which came out of cans. What he would really like was a big steak with all the trimmings.

Tom hadn’t stopped talking since they sat down. It was pretty repetitious stuff, with many ejaculations of My laws! and Wasn’t it just? thrown in for seasoning. Nick didn’t mind. He hadn’t really known how much he missed other people until he met Tom, or how much he had been secretly afraid that he was the only one left, out of all the earth. It had even crossed his mind at one point that maybe the disease had killed everyone in the world but deaf-mutes. Now, he thought with an interior smile, he could speculate on the possibility that it had killed everyone in the world but deaf-mutes and the mentally retarded. That thought, which seemed amusing in the two o’clock light of a summer’s afternoon, would come back to haunt him that night and not seem funny at all.

He wondered where Tom thought all the people had gone. He had already heard about Tom’s daddy, who had run off a couple of years before with a waitress, and about Tom’s job as a handyman out on the Norbutt farm and how, two years ago, Mr. Norbutt had decided Tom was “getting on well enough” to be trusted handling an axe, and about the “big boys” who had jumped Tom one night and how Tom had “fought em all off ‘til they was just about dead, and I put one of em in the hospital with ruptures, M-O-O-N, that spells ruptures, that’s what Tom Cullen did,” and he had heard about how Tom had found his mother at Mrs. Blakely’s house and they were both dead in the living room and so Tom had stolen away. Jesus wouldn’t come and take dead people up to heaven if anyone was watching, Tom said (Nick reflected that Tom’s Jesus was a kind of Santa Claus in reverse, taking dead people up the chimney instead of bringing presents down). But he had said nothing at all about May’s total emptiness, or the road arrowing in and out of town on which nothing moved.

He put his hands lightly on Tom’s chest, stopping the flow of words.

“What?” Tom asked.

Nick waved his arm in a large circle at the buildings of the downtown area. He put a burlesque expression of puzzlement on his face, wrinkling his brow, cocking his head, scratching the back of his skull. Then he made walking motions with his fingers on the grass and finished by looking up at Tom questioningly.

What he saw was alarming. Tom might have died sitting up for all the animation on his face. His eyes, which had been sparkling a moment before with all the things he wanted to tell, were now cloudy blue marbles. His mouth hung ajar so Nick could see the soggy potato chip crumbs lying on his tongue. His hands were lax in his lap.

Concerned, Nick reached out to touch him. Before he could, Tom’s body gave a jerk. His eyelids fluttered, and the animation flowed back into his eyes like water filling a pail. He began to grin. If a balloon containing the word EUREKA had appeared over his head, what had happened would not have been more plain.

“You want to know where all the people went!” Tom exclaimed.

Nick nodded his head strongly.

“Well, I guess they went to Kansas City,” Tom said. “My laws, yes. Everybody’s always talkin about what a little town this is. Nothin happens. No fun. Even the roller-skating place went bust. Now there’s nothin but the drive-in, and that doesn’t show anything but those diddly-daddly pitchers. My mom always says people leaves but no people comes back. Just like my dad, he run off with a waitress from Boomer’s Café, her name was M-O-O-N, that spells DeeDee Packalotte. So I guess everybody just got fed up and went at the same time. To Kansas City it must have been, my laws, didn’t they just? That’s where they must have gone. Except for Mrs. Blakely and my mom. Jesus is going to take them up to heaven up above and rock them in the everlasting harms.”

Tom’s monologue recommenced.

Gone to Kansas City, Nick thought. For all I know, that could be it, too. Everybody left on the poor sad planet picked up by the Hand of God and either rocked in the everlasting harms of Same or set down again in Kansas City.

He leaned back and his eyelids fluttered so that Tom’s words broke up into the visual equivalent of a modern poem, sans caps, like a work by e.e. cummings:

mother said

ain’t got no

but i said to them i said you better

not mess with

The dreams had been bad the night before, which he had spent in a barn, and now, with his belly full, all he wanted was…

my laws

M-O-O-N that spells

sure do wish

Nick fell asleep.

Waking up, he first wondered in that dazed way you have when you sleep heavily in the middle of the day why he was sweating so much. Sitting up, he understood. It was quarter to five in the afternoon; he had slept over two and a half hours and the sun had moved out from behind the war memorial. But that was not all. Tom Cullen, in a perfect orgy of solicitude, had covered him so he would not take a chill. With two blankets and a quilt.

He threw them aside, stood up, stretched. Tom was not in sight. Nick walked slowly toward the main entrance to the square, wondering what—if anything—he was going to do about Tom… or with him. The retarded fellow had been feeding himself from the A&P on the far side of the town square. He had felt no compunction about going in there and picking out what he wanted to eat by the pictures on the labels of the cans because, Tom said, the supermarket door had been unlocked.

Nick wondered idly what Tom would have done if it hadn’t been. He supposed that, when he’d gotten hungry enough, he would have forgotten his scruples, or laid them aside for the nonce. But what would become of him when the food was gone?

But that wasn’t what really bothered him about Tom. It was the pathetic eagerness with which the man had greeted him. Retarded he might be, Nick thought, but he was not too retarded to feel loneliness. Both his mother and the woman who had served as his commonlaw aunt were dead. His dad had run off long before. His employer, Mr. Norbutt, and everyone else in May had stolen off to Kansas City one night while Tom slept, leaving him behind to wander up and down Main Street like a gently unhinged ghost. And he was getting into things he had no business getting into—like the whiskey. If he got drunk again, he might hurt himself. And if he got hurt with no one to take care of him, it would probably mean the end of him.

But… a deaf-mute and a man who was mentally retarded? Of what possible use could they be to each other? Here you got one guy who can’t talk and another guy who can’t think. Well, that wasn’t fair. Tom could think at least a little, but he couldn’t read, and Nick had no illusions about how long it would take him to get tired of playing charades with Tom Cullen. Not that Tom would get tired of it. Laws, no.

He stopped on the sidewalk just outside the park’s entrance, hands stuffed in his pockets. Well, he decided, I can spend the night here with him. One night won’t matter. I can cook him a decent meal at the very least.

Cheered a little by this, he went to find Tom.

Nick slept in the park that night. He didn’t know where Tom slept, but when he woke up the next morning, slightly dewy but feeling pretty good otherwise, the first thing he saw when he crossed the town square was Tom, crouched over a fleet of toy Corgi cars and a large plastic Texaco station.

Tom must have decided that if it was all right to break into Norton’s Drug Store, it was all right to break into another place. He was sitting on the curb of the five-and-ten, his back to Nick. About forty model cars were lined up along the edge of the sidewalk. Next to them was the screwdriver Tom had used to jimmy the display case open. There were Jaguars, Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, a scale-model Bentley with a long, lime-green cowling, a Lamborghini, a Cord, a four-inch-long customized Pontiac Bonneville, a Corvette, a Maserati, and, God watch over us and protect us, a 1933 Moon. Tom was hunched over these studiously, driving them in and out of the garage, gassing them up at the toy pump. One of the lifts in the repair bay worked, Nick saw, and from time to time Tom would raise one of the cars up on it and, pretend to do something underneath. If he had been able to hear, he would have heard, in the nearly perfect silence, the sound of Tom Cullen’s imagination at work—the lip-vibrating brrrrrr as he drove the cars onto the Fisher-Price tarmac, the chk-chk-chk-ding! of the gas-pump at work, the ssshhhhhhh as the lift inside went up and down. As it was, he could catch some of the conversation between the station proprietor and the little people in the little cars: Fill that up, sir? Regular? You bet! Just let me get that windshield, ma’am. I think it’s your carb. Let’s put her up in the air and take a look at the bass-tud. Restrooms? You bet! Right around the side there!

And over this, arching for miles in every direction, the sky God had allocated to this little bit of Oklahoma.

Nick thought: I can’t leave him. I can’t do that. And he was suddenly swept by a bitter and totally unexpected sadness, a feeling so deep he thought for a moment he would weep.

They’ve gone to Kansas City, he thought. That’s what’s happened. They’ve all gone to Kansas City.

Nick walked across the street and tapped Tom on the arm. Tom jumped and looked over his shoulder. A large and guilty smile stretched his lips, and a blush climbed out of his shirt collar.

“I know it’s for little boys and not for grown men,” he said. “I know that, laws yes, Daddy tole me.”

Nick shrugged, smiled, spread his hands. Tom looked relieved.

“It’s mine now. Mine if I want it. If you could go in the drug and get something, I could go into the five-and-dime and get something. My laws, couldn’t I just? I don’t have to put it back, do I?”

Nick shook his head.

“Mine,” Tom said happily, and turned back to the garage. Nick tapped him again and Tom looked back. “What?”

Nick tugged his sleeve and Tom stood up willingly enough. Nick led him down the street to where his bike leaned on its kickstand. He pointed to himself. Then at the bike. Tom nodded.

“Sure. That bike is yours. That Texaco garage is mine. I won’t take your bike and you won’t take my garage. Laws, no!”

Nick shook his head. He pointed at himself. At the bike. Then down Main Street. He waved his fingers: byebye.

Tom became very still. Nick waited. Tom said hesitantly: “You movin on, mister?”

Nick nodded.

“I don’t want you to!” Tom burst out. His eyes were wide and very blue, sparkling with tears. “I like you! I don’t want you to go to Kansas City, too!”

Nick pulled Tom next to him and put an arm around him. Pointed to himself. To Tom. To the bike. Out of town.

“I don’t getcha,” Tom said.

Patiently, Nick went through it again. This time he added the byebye wave, and in a burst of inspiration he lifted Tom’s hand and made it wave byebye, too.

“Want me to go with you?” Tom asked. A smile of disbelieving delight lit up his face.

Relieved, Nick nodded.

“Sure!” Tom shouted. “Tom Cullen’s gonna go! Tom’s—” He halted, some of the happiness dying out of his face, and looked at Nick cautiously. “Can I take my garage?”

Nick thought about it a moment and then nodded his head yes.

“Okay!” Tom’s grin reappeared like the sun from behind a cloud. “Tom Cullen’s going!”

Nick led him to the bike. He pointed at Tom, then at the bike.

“I never rode one like that,” Tom said doubtfully, eyeing the bike’s gearshift and the high, narrow seat. “I guess I better not. Tom Cullen would fall off a fancy bike like that.”

But Nick was provisionally encouraged. I never rode one like that meant that he had ridden some sort of bike. It was only a question of finding a nice simple one. Tom was going to slow him down, that was inevitable, but perhaps not too much after all. And what was the hurry, anyway? Dreams were only dreams. But he did feel an inner urge to hurry, something so strong yet indefinable that it amounted to a subconscious command.

He led Tom back to his filling station. He pointed at it, then smiled and nodded at Tom. Tom squatted down eagerly, and then his hands paused in the act of reaching for a couple of cars. He looked up at Nick, his face troubled and transparently suspicious. “You ain’t gonna go without Tom Cullen, are you?”

Nick shook his head firmly.

“Okay,” Tom said, and turned confidently to his toys. Before he could stop himself, Nick had ruffled the man’s hair. Tom looked up and smiles shyly at him. Nick smiled back. No, he couldn’t just leave him. That was sure.

It was almost noon before he found a bike which he thought would suit Tom. He hadn’t expected it to take anywhere near as long as it did, but a surprising majority of people had locked their houses, garages, and outbuildings. In most cases he was reduced to peering into shadowy garages through dirty, cobwebby windows, hoping to spot the right bike. He spent a good three hours trudging from street to street with the sweat pouring off him and the sun pounding steadily against the back of his neck. At one point he had gone back to recheck the Western Auto, but that was no good; the two bikes in the show window were his-and-hers three-speeds and everything else was unassembled.

In the end he found what he was looking for in a small detached garage at the southern end of town. The garage was locked, but—it had one window big enough to crawl through. Nick broke the glass with a rock and carefully picked the remaining slivers out of the old, crumbling putty. Inside, the garage was explosively hot and furry with a thick oil-and-dust smell. The bike, an old-fashioned boy’s Schwinn, stood next to a ten-year-old Merc station wagon with balding tires and flaking rocker panels.

The way my luck’s running the damn bike’ll be busted, Nick thought. No chain, flat tires, something. But this time his luck was in. The bike rolled easily. The tires were up and had good tread; all the bolts and sprockets seemed tight. There was no bike basket, he would have to remedy that, but there was a chainguard and hung neatly on the wall between a rake and a snowshovel was an unexpected bonus: a nearly new Briggs hand-pump.

He hunted further and found a can of 3-in-One Oil on a shelf. Nick sat down on the cracked cement floor, now unmindful of the heat, and carefully oiled the chain and both sprockets. That done, he recapped the 3-in-One and carefully put it in his pants pocket.

He tied the bike-pump to the package carrier on the Schwinn’s back fender with a hank of hayrope, then unlocked the garage door and ran it up. Fresh air had never smelled so sweet. He closed his eyes, inhaled it deeply, wheeled the bike out to the road, got on, and pedaled slowly down Main Street. The bike rode fine. It would be just the ticket for Tom… assuming he really could ride it.

He parked it beside his Raleigh and went into the five-and-dime. He found a good-sized wire bike basket in a jumble of sporting goods near the back of the store and was turning to leave with it under his arm when something else caught his eye: a Klaxon horn with a chrome bell and a large red rubber bulb. Grinning, Nick put the horn in the basket and then went over to the hardware section for a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench. He went back outside. Tom was sprawled peacefully in the shade of the old World War II Marine in the town square, napping.

Nick put the basket on the Schwinn’s handlebars and attached the Klaxon horn beside it. He went back into the five-and-dime and came out with a good-sized tote-bag.

He took it up to the A&P and filled it with canned meat, fruit, and vegetables. He was pausing over some canned chili beans when he saw a shadow flit by on the aisle facing him. If he had been able to hear, he would already have been aware that Tom had discovered his bike. The Klaxon’s hoarse and drawn-out cry of Howww-OOO-Gah! floated up and down the street, punctuated by Tom Cullen’s giggles.

Nick pushed out through the supermarket’s doors and saw Tom speeding grandly down Main, his blond hair and his shirttail whipping out behind him, squeezing the bulb of the Klaxon horn for all it was worth. At the Arco station that marked the end of the business section he whirled around and pedaled back. There was a huge and triumphant grin on his face. The Fisher-Price garage sat in the bikes basket. His pants pockets and the flap pockets of his khaki shirt bulged with scale-model Corgi cars. The sun flashed bright, revolving circles in the wheelspokes. A little wistfully Nick wished he could hear the sound of the horn, just to see if it pleased him as much as it was pleasing to Tom.

Tom waved to him and continued on up the street. At the far end of the business section he swerved around again and rode back, still squeezing the horn. Nick held his hand out, a policeman’s order to stop. Tom brought the bike to a skidding halt in front of him. Sweat stood out on his face in great beads. The bike-pump’s rubber hose flopped. Tom was panting and grinning.

Nick pointed out of town and waved byebye.

“Can I still take my garage?”

Nick nodded and slipped the strap of the tote bag over Tom’s bull neck.

“We going right now?”

Nick nodded again. Made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

“To Kansas City?”

Nick shook his head.

“To anywhere we want?”

Nick nodded. Yes. Anywhere they wanted, he thought, but anywhere would most likely turn out to be somewhere in Nebraska.

“Wow!” Tom said happily. “Okay! Yeah! Wow!”

They got on Route 283 going north and had ridden only two and a half hours when thunderheads began to build up in the west. The storm came at them quickly, riding on a gauzy caul of rain. Nick couldn’t hear the thunderclaps, but he could see forks of lightning stabbing down from the clouds. They were bright enough to dazzle the eyes with bluish-purple afterimages. As they approached the outskirts of Rosston, where Nick meant to turn east on Route 64, the veil of rain under the clouds disappeared and the sky turned a still and queerly ominous shade of yellow. The wind, which had been freshening against his left cheek, died away altogether. He began to feel extremely nervous without knowing why, and oddly clumsy. No one had ever told him that one of the few instincts man still shares with the lower animals is exactly that response to a sudden and radical drop in the air pressure.

Then Tom was tugging at his sleeve, tugging him frantically. Nick looked over at him. He was startled to see that all the color had gone out of Tom’s face. His eyes were huge, floating saucers.

“Tornado! ” Tom screamed. “There’s a tornado coming! ”

Nick looked for a funnel and saw none. He turned back to Tom, trying to think of a way to reassure him. But Tom was gone. He was riding his bike into the field at the right of the road, beating a twisted, flattened path through the high grass.

Goddamned fool, Nick thought angrily. You’re going to break your fucking axle!

Tom was making for a barn with an attached silo which stood at the end of a dirt road about a quarter of a mile long. Nick, still feeling nervous, pedaled his own bike up the highway, lifted it over the cattle-gate, and then pedaled up the dirt feeder road to the barn. Tom’s bike lay on the dirt fill outside. He hadn’t even bothered to put the kickstand down. Nick would have chalked this up to simple forgetfulness if he hadn’t seen Tom use the kickstand several times before. He’s scared right out of what little mind he has, Nick thought.

His own uneasiness made him take one last look over his shoulder, and what he saw coming froze him coldly in his tracks.

A horrible darkness was coming out of the west. It was not a cloud; it was more like a total absence of light. It was in the shape of a funnel, and at first glance it looked a thousand feet high. It was wider at the top than at the bottom; the bottom was not quite touching the earth. At its summit, the very clouds seemed to be fleeing from it, as if it possessed some mysterious power of repulsion.

As Nick watched, it touched down about three quarters of a mile away and a long blue building with a roof made of corrugated metal—an auto supply place, or perhaps a lumber storage shed—exploded with a loud bang. He could not hear this, of course, but the vibration struck him, rocking him back on his feet. And the building seemed to explode inward, as if the funnel had sucked all the air out of it. The next moment the tin roof broke in two. The sections whirled upward, spinning and spinning like a top gone insane. Fascinated, Nick craned his neck to follow their progress.

I am looking at whatever it is in my worst dreams, Nick thought, and it is not a man at all, although it may sometimes look like a man. What it really is is a tornado. One almighty big black twister ripping out of the west, sucking up anything and everything unlucky enough to be in its path. It’s —

Then he was grabbed by both arms and literally jerked off his feet and into the barn. He looked around at Tom Cullen and was momentarily surprised to see him. In his fascination with the storm, he had quite forgotten that Tom Cullen existed.

“Downstairs!” Tom panted. “Quick! Quick! Oh my laws, yes! Tornado! Tornado! ”

At last Nick was fully, consciously afraid, ripped out of the half-entranced state he had been in and aware again of where he was and who he was with. As he let Tom lead him to the stairs going down into the barn’s storm cellar, he became aware of a strange, thrumming vibration. It was the closest thing to sound he had ever experienced. It was like a nagging ache in the center of his brain. Then, as he went down the stairs behind Tom, he saw something he would never forget: the plank siding of the barn being pulled out board by board, pulled out and whirled up into the cloudy air, like rotted brown teeth being pulled out by invisible forceps. The hay littered on the floor began to rise and whirl in a dozen miniature tornado funnels, nodding and dipping and skipping. That thrumming vibration grew ever more persistent.

Then Tom was pushing open a heavy wooden door, thrusting him through. Nick smelled wet mold and decay. In the last instant of light he saw they were sharing the storm cellar with a family of rat-gnawed corpses. Then Tom slammed the door shut and they were in perfect darkness. The vibration lessened but did not cease completely even then.

Panic crept up on him with its cloak open and gathered him in. The blackness reduced his senses to touch and smell, and neither of them sent messages which were comforting. He could feel the constant vibration of the boards beneath his feet, and the smell was death.

Tom clutched his hand blindly and Nick drew the retarded man next to him. He could feel Tom trembling, and he wondered if Tom was crying, or perhaps trying to speak to him. The thought eased some of his own fear and he slung an arm about Tom’s shoulders. Tom reciprocated and they stood bolt upright in the dark, clinging to each other.

The vibration grew stronger under Nick’s feet; even the air seemed to be trembling lightly against his face. Tom held him more tightly still. Blind and deaf, he waited for what might happen next and reflected that if Ray Booth had gotten his other eye, all of life would be like this. If that had happened, he believed he would have shot himself in the head days ago and had done with it.

Later he would be almost unable to believe his watch, which insisted that they had spent only fifteen minutes in the darkness of the storm cellar, although logic told him that since the watch was still running, it must be so. Never before in his life had he understood how subjective, how plastic, time really is. It seemed that it must have been at least an hour, probably two or three. And as the time passed, he became convinced that he and Tom were not alone in the storm cellar. Oh, there were the bodies—some poor guy had brought his family down here near the end, perhaps on the fevered assumption that, since they had weathered other natural disasters down here, they could weather this here one, too—but it wasn’t the bodies that he meant. To Nick’s mind, a corpse was just a thing, no different than a chair or a typewriter or a rug. A corpse was just an inanimate thing which filled space. What he felt was the presence of another being, and he became more and more convinced who—or what—it was.

It was the dark man, the man who came to life in his dreams, the creature whose spirit he had sensed in the black heart of the cyclone.

Somewhere… over in the corner or perhaps right behind them… he was watching them. And waiting. At the right moment he would touch them and they would both… what? Go mad with fear, of course. Just that. He could see them. Nick was sure he could see them. He had eyes which could see in the dark like a cat’s eyes, or those of some weird alien creature. Like the one in that movie, Predator, perhaps. Yes—like that. The dark man could see tones of the spectrum that human eyes could never attain to, and to him everything would look slow and red, as if the whole world had been tie-dyed in a vat of gore.

At first Nick was able to divide this fantasy from reality, but as time passed, he became more and more sure that the fantasy was reality. He fancied he could feel the dark man’s breath on the back of his neck.

He was about to make a lunge at the door, open it and flee upstairs no matter what, when Tom did it for him. The arm around Nick’s shoulders was suddenly gone. The next instant the door of the storm cellar banged open, letting in a flood of dazzling white light that made Nick raise a hand to shield his good eye. He caught just a ghostly, wavering glimpse of Tom Cullen staggering and stumbling up the stairs, and then he followed, groping his way in the dazzle. By the time he got to the top, his eye had adjusted.

He thought that the light hadn’t been so bright when they went down, and saw why immediately. The roof had been torn off the barn. It seemed to have been almost surgically removed; the job was so clean that there were no splinters and hardly any litter lying on the floor it had once sheltered. Three roofbeams hung down from the sides of the loft, and almost all the boards had been stripped off the sides. Standing here was like standing inside the picked skeleton of a prehistoric monster.

Tom had not stopped to inventory the damage. He was fleeing the barn as if the devil himself was at his heels. He looked back just once, his eyes huge and almost comically terrified. Nick could not resist a look back over his shoulder and into the storm cellar. The stairs pitched and yawed downward into shadow, old wood, splintered and sunken in the center of each riser. He could see littered straw on the floor and two sets of hands protruding from the shadow. The fingers had been stripped down to the bone by rats.

If there was anyone else down there, Nick did not see him.

Nor did he want to.

He followed Tom outside.

Tom was standing by his bicycle, shivering. Nick was momentarily bemused by the freaky choosiness of the tornado, which had taken most of the barn but had disdained their bikes, when he saw that Tom was weeping. Nick went over to him and put an arm about his shoulders. Tom was staring, wide-eyed, at the sagging double doors of the barn. Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle. Tom’s eyes dropped to this briefly, but the smile Nick had hoped for did not surface on Tom’s face. He simply went back to staring at the barn. His eyes had a vacant, fixated cast Nick didn’t like at all.

“Someone was in there,” Tom said abruptly.

Nick smiled, but the smile felt cold on his lips. He had no idea how good the imitation looked, but it felt crappy. He pointed to Tom, to himself, and then made a sharp cutting gesture through the air with the side of his hand.

“No,” Tom said. “Not just us. Someone else. Someone who came out of the twister.”

Nick shrugged.

“Can we go now? Please?”

Nick nodded.

They trundled their bicycles back to the highway, using the path of uprooted grass and torn soil that the tornado had made. It had touched down on the west side of Rosston, had cut across US 283 on a west-to-east course, throwing guardrails and connecting cable into the air like piano wire, had skirted the barn to their left and ploughed directly through the house which stood—had stood—in front of it. Four hundred yards farther along, its track through the field abruptly ceased. Now the clouds had begun to break up (although it was still showering, lightly and refreshingly) and birds were singing unconcernedly.

Nick watched the hefty muscles under Tom’s shirt work as he lifted his bike over the jumble of guardrail cable on the verge of the highway. That guy saved my life, he thought. I never saw a twister in my life before today. If I’d left him behind back there in May like I thought about doing, I’d be as dead as a doornail right about now.

He lifted his bike over the frayed cables and clapped Tom on the back and smiled at him.

We’ve got to find somebody else, Nick thought. We’ve got to, just so I can tell him thanks. And my name. He doesn’t even know my name, because he can’t read.

He stood there for a moment, bemused by this, and then they mounted their bikes and rode away.

They camped that night in left field of the Rosston Jaycees’ Little League ballfield. The evening was cloudless and starry. Nick’s sleep came quickly and was dreamless. He woke up at dawn the next morning, thinking how good it was to be with someone again, what a difference it made.

There really was a Polk County, Nebraska. At first that had given him a start, but he had traveled all over the last few years. He must have talked to somebody who mentioned Polk County, or who had come from Polk County, and his conscious mind had just forgotten it. There was a Route 30, too. But he couldn’t really believe, at least not in the bright day of this early morning, that they were actually going to find an old Negro woman sitting on her porch in the middle of a field of corn and accompanying herself on a guitar while she sang hymns. He didn’t believe in precognition or in visions. But it seemed important to go somewhere, to look for people. In a way he shared Fran Goldsmith’s and Stu Redman’s urge to regroup. Until that could be done, everything would remain alien and out of joint. There was danger everywhere. You couldn’t see it but you could feel it, the way he thought he had felt the presence of the dark man in that cellar yesterday. You felt that danger was everywhere, inside the houses, around the next bend in the highway, maybe even hiding beneath the cars and trucks littered all over the main roads. And if it wasn’t there, it was in the calendar, hidden just two or three leaves down. Danger, every particle of his being seemed to whisper it. BRIDGE OUT. FORTY MILES OF BAD ROAD. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PERSONS PROCEEDING BEYOND THIS POINT.

Part of it was the tremendous, walloping psychological shock of the empty countryside. As long as he had been in Shoyo, he had been partially protected from it. It didn’t matter if Shoyo was empty, at least not too much, because Shoyo was so small in the scheme of things. But when you got moving, it was as if… well, he remembered a Walt Disney movie he had seen as a kid, a nature thing. Filling the screen was this tulip, this one tulip, so beautiful it just made you want to hold your breath. Then the camera pulled back with dizzying suddenness and you saw a whole field filled with tulips. It knocked you flat. It produced total sensory overload and some internal circuit breaker fell with a sizzle, cutting off the input. It was too much. And that was how this trip had been. Shoyo was empty and he could adjust to that. But McNab was empty, too, and Texarkana, and Spencerville; Ardmore had burned right to the ground. He had come north on Highway 81 and had only seen deer. Twice he had seen what were probably signs of living people: a campfire perhaps two days old, and a deer that had been shot and neatly cleaned out. But no people. It was enough to screw you all up, because the enormity of it was steadily creeping up on you. It wasn’t just Shoyo or McNab or Texarkana; it was America, lying here like a huge discarded tin can with a few forgotten peas rolling around in the bottom. And beyond America was the whole world, and thinking of that made Nick feel so dizzy and sick that he had to give up.

He bent over the atlas instead. If they kept rolling, maybe they would be like a snowball going downhill, getting bigger. With any luck they would pick up a few more people between here and Nebraska (or be picked up themselves, if they met a larger group). After Nebraska he supposed they would go somewhere else. It was like a quest with no object in view at the end of it—no Grail, no sword plunged into an anvil.

We’ll cut northeast, he thought, up into Kansas. Highway 35 would take them to another version of 81, and 81 would take them all the way to Swedeholm, Nebraska, where it intersected Nebraska Route 92 at a perfect right angle. Another highway, Route 30, connected the two, the hypotenuse of a right triangle. And somewhere in that triangle was the country of his dream.

Thinking about it gave him a queer, anticipatory thrill.

Movement at the top of his vision made him look up. Tom was sitting, both fists screwed into his eyes. A cavernous yawn seemed to make the whole bottom half of his face disappear. Nick grinned at him and Tom grinned back.

“We gonna ride some more today?” Tom asked, and Nick nodded. “Gee, that’s good. I like to ride my bike. Laws, yes! I hope we never stop!”

Putting the atlas away Nick thought: And who knows? You may get your wish.

They turned east that morning and ate their lunch at a crossroads not far from the Oklahoma-Kansas border. It was July 7, and hot.

Shortly before they stopped to eat, Tom brought his bike to its customary skidding halt. He was staring at a signpost which had been sunk into a cement plug half-buried in the soft shoulder at the side of the road. Nick looked at it. The sign said: YOU ARE LEAVING HARPER COUNTY, OKLAHOMA—YOU ARE ENTERING WOODS COUNTY, OKLAHOMA.

“I can read that,” Tom said, and if Nick had been able to hear, he would have been partly amused and partly touched by the way Tom’s voice climbed into a high, reedy, and declamatory register: “You are now going out of Harper County. You are now going into Woods County.” He turned to Nick. “You know what, mister?”

Nick shook his head.

“I never been out of Harper County in my life, laws, no, not Tom Cullen. But once my daddy took me out here and showed me this sign. He told me if he ever caught me t’other side of it, he’d whale the tar out of me. I sure hope he don’t catch us over there in Woods County. You think he will?”

Nick shook his head emphatically.

“Is Kansas City in Woods County?”

Nick shook his head again.

“But we’re going into Woods County before we go anyplace else, ain’t we?”

Nick nodded.

Tom’s eyes gleamed. “Is it the world?”

Nick didn’t understand. He frowned… raised his eyebrows… shrugged.

“The world is the place I mean,” Tom said. “Are we going into the world, mister?” Tom hesitated and then asked with hesitant gravity: “Is Woods the word for world?”

Slowly, Nick nodded his head.

“Okay,” Tom said. He looked at the sign for a moment, then wiped his right eye, from which a single tear had trickled. Then he hopped back onto his bike. “Okay, let’s go.” He biked over the county line without another word, and Nick followed.

They crossed into Kansas just before it got too dark to ride any farther. Tom had turned sulky and tired after supper; he wanted to play with his garage. He wanted to watch TV. He didn’t want to ride anymore because his bum hurt from the seat. He had no conception of state lines and felt none of the lift Nick did when they passed another sign, this one saying YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KANSAS. By then the dusk was so thick that the white letters seemed to float inches above the brown sign, like spirits.

They camped a quarter of a mile over the line, beneath a water tower standing on tall steel legs like an H.G. Wells Martian. Tom was asleep as soon as he crawled into his sleeping bag. Nick sat awhile, watching the stars come out. The land was utterly dark, and for him, utterly still. Shortly before crawling in himself, a crow fluttered down to a fencepost nearby and seemed to be watching him. Its small black eyes were rimmed with half-circles of blood—reflection from a bloated orange summer moon that had risen silently. There was something about the crow Nick didn’t like; it made him uneasy. He found a big dirt-clod and pegged it at the crow. It fluttered its wings, seemed to fix him with a baleful glare, and was gone into the night.

That night he dreamed of the man with no face standing on the high roof, his hands stretched out to the east, and then of the corn—corn higher than his head—and the sound of the music. Only this time he knew it was music and this time he knew it was a guitar. He awoke near dawn with a painfully full bladder and her words ringing in his ears: Mother Abagail is what they call me… you come see me anytime.

Late that afternoon, moving east through Comanche County on Highway 160, they sat astride their bikes in amazement, watching a small herd of buffalo—a dozen in all, perhaps—walking calmly back and forth across the road in search of good graze. There had been a barbed wire fence on the north side of the road, but it appeared the buffalo had butted it down.

“What are they?” Tom asked fearfully. “Those ain’t cows!”

And because Nick couldn’t talk and Tom couldn’t read, Nick couldn’t tell him. That day was July 8, 1990, and they slept that night in flat open farm country forty miles west of Deerhead.

It was July 9, and they were eating their lunch in the shade of an old, graceful elm in the front yard of a farmhouse which had partially burned down. Tom was eating sausages from a tin with one hand and driving a car in and out of his service station with the other. And singing the refrain of a popular song over and over again. Nick knew the shape it made on Tom’s lips by heart: “Baby, can you dig your man—he’s a raht-eous ma-yun—baby, can you dig your man?”

Nick was depressed and slightly overawed by the size of the country; never before had he realized how easy it was to stick out your thumb, knowing that sooner or later the law of averages was going to favor you. A car was going to stop, usually with a man driving, and with a can of beer resting comfortably in the fork of his crotch more often than not. He would want to know how far you were going and you would hand him a slip of paper which you’d kept handy in your breast pocket, a slip of paper which read: “Hello, my name is Nick Andros. I’m a deaf-mute. Sorry about that. I’m going to—. Thanks very much for the ride. I can read lips.” And that would be that. Unless the guy had a thing about deaf-mutes (and some people did, although they were a minority), you hopped in and the car took you where you wanted to go, or a good piece in that direction. The car ate road and blew miles out its tailpipe. The car was a form of teleportation. The car defeated the map. But now there was no car, although on many of these roads a car would have been a practical mode of transportation for seventy or eighty miles at a stretch, if you were careful. And when you were finally blocked, you would only have to abandon your vehicle, walk for a while, and then take another. With no car, they were like ants crawling across the chest of a fallen giant, ants trundling endlessly from one nipple to the other. And so Nick half wished, half daydreamed, that when they finally did meet someone else (always assuming that would happen), it would be as it had been in those mostly carefree days of hitchhiking: there would be that familiar twinkle of chrome rising over the top of the next hill, that sunflare which simultaneously dazzled and pleased the eye. It would be some perfectly ordinary American car, a Chevy Biscayne or a Pontiac Tempest, sweet old Detroit rolling iron. In his dreams it was never a Honda or Mazda or Yugo. That American beauty would pull over and he would see a man behind the wheel, a man with a sunburned elbow cocked cockily out the window. This man would be smiling and he would say, “Holy Joe, boys! Ain’t I some glad sumbitch to see you guys! Hop in here! Hop in and let’s us see where we’re goin!”

But they saw no one that day, and on the tenth it was Julie Lawry they ran across.

The day was another scorcher. They had pedaled most of the afternoon with their shirts tied around their waists, and both of them were getting brown as Indians. They hadn’t been making very good time, not today, because of the apples. The green apples.

They had found them growing on an old apple tree in a farmyard, green and small and sour, but they had both been deprived of fresh fruit for a long time, and they tasted ambrosial. Nick made himself stop after two, but Tom ate six, greedily, one after the other, right down to the cores. He had ignored Nick’s motions that he should stop; when he got an idea in his head, Tom Cullen could be every bit as attractive as a wayward child of four.

So, beginning around eleven in the morning and continuing through the rest of the afternoon, Tom had the squats. Sweat ran off him in small creeks. He groaned. He had to get off his bike and walk it up even shallow hills. Despite his irritation at the poor time they were making, Nick couldn’t help a certain rueful amusement.

When they reached the town of Pratt around 4 P.M., Nick decided that was it for the day. Tom collapsed gratefully on a bus-stop bench in the shade and dozed off at once. Nick left him there and went along the deserted business section in search of a drugstore. He would get some Pepto-Bismol and force Tom to drink it when he woke up, whether Tom wanted to or not. If it took a whole bottle to cork Tom up, so be it. Nick wanted to make up some time tomorrow.

He found a Rexall between the Pratt Theater and the local Norge. He slipped in through the open door, and stood for a moment smelling the familiar hot, unaired, stale smell. There were other odors mixed in, strong and cloying. Perfume was the strongest. Perhaps some of the bottles had burst in the heat.

Nick glanced around, looking for the stomach medicines, trying to remember if Pepto-Bismol went over in the heat. Well, the label would say. His eyes slipped past a mannequin and two rows to the right he saw what he wanted. He had taken two steps that way when he realized that he had never before seen a mannequin in a drugstore.

He looked back and what he saw was Julie Lawry.

She was standing perfectly still, a bottle of perfume in one hand, the small glass wand you used to daub the stuff on in the other. Her china-blue eyes were wide in stunned, disbelieving surprise. Her brown hair was drawn back and tied with a brilliant silk scarf that hung halfway down her back. She was wearing a pink middy sweater and bluejeans shorts that were almost abbreviated enough to be mistaken for panties. There was a rash of pimples on her forehead and a hell of a good one right in the middle of her chin.

She and Nick stared at each other across half the length of the deserted drugstore, both frozen now. Then the bottle of perfume dropped from her fingers, shattered like a bomb, and a hothouse reek filled the store, making it smell like a funeral parlor.

“Jesus, are you real?” she asked in a trembling voice.

Nick’s heart had begun to race, and he could feel his blood thudding crazily in his temples. Even his eyesight had begun to wham in and out a little, making dots of light race across his field of vision.

He nodded.

“You ain’t a ghost?”

He shook his head.

“Then say somethin. If you ain’t a ghost, say somethin.”

Nick put a hand across his mouth, then on his throat.

“What’s that s’posed to mean?” Her voice had taken on a slightly hysterical tone. Nick couldn’t hear it… but he could sense it, see it on her face. He was afraid to step toward her, because if he did, she would run. He didn’t think she was afraid of seeing another person; what she was afraid of was that she was seeing a hallucination, and she was cracking up. Again, he felt that wave of frustration. If he could only talk —

Instead, he went through his pantomime again. It was, after all, the only thing he could do. This time understanding dawned.

“You can’t talk? You’re a mute?”

Nick nodded.

She gave a high laugh that was mostly frustration. “You mean somebody finally showed up and it’s a mute guy?”

Nick shrugged and gave a slanting smile.

“Well,” she said, coming down the aisle to him, “you ain’t bad-looking. That’s something.” She put a hand on his arm, and the swell of her breasts almost touched his arm. He could smell at least three different kinds of perfume, and under all of them the unlovely aroma of her sweat.

“My name’s Julie,” she said. “Julie Lawry. What’s yours?” She giggled a little. “You can’t tell me, can you? Poor you.” She leaned a little closer, and her breasts brushed him. He began to feel very warm. What the hell, he thought uneasily, she’s only a kid.

He broke away from her, took the pad from his pocket, and began to write. A line or so into his message she leaned over his shoulder to see what he was writing. No bra. Jesus. She had sure gotten over her scare quick. His writing became a little uneven.

“Oh, wow,” she said as he wrote—it was as if he was a monkey capable of doing a particularly sophisticated trick. Nick was looking down at his pad and didn’t “read” her words, but he could feel the tickling warmth of her breath.

“I’m Nick Andros. I’m a deaf-mute. I’m traveling with a man named Tom Cullen, who is lightly retarded. He can’t read or understand many of the things I can act out unless they’re very simple. We’re on our way to Nebraska because I think there might be people there. Come with us, if you want.”

“Sure,” she said immediately, and then, remembering that he was deaf and shaping her words very carefully, she asked, “Can you read lips?”

Nick nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m so glad to see someone, who cares if it’s a deaf-mute and a retard. Spooky here. I can hardly sleep nights since the power went off.” Her face set in martyred lines of grief more appropriate to a soap opera heroine than a real person. “My mom and dad died two weeks ago, you know. Everybody died but me. I’ve been so lonely.” With a sob she threw herself into Nick’s arms and began to undulate against him in an obscene parody of grief.

When she drew back from him, her eyes were dry and shiny.

“Hey, let’s make it,” she said. “You’re sort of cute.”

Nick gawped at her. I can’t believe this, he thought.

But it was real enough. She was tugging at his belt. “Come on. I’m on the pill. It’s safe.” She paused for a moment. “You can, can’t you? I mean, just because you can’t talk, that doesn’t mean you can’t—”

He put his hands out, perhaps meaning to take her by the shoulders, but he found her breasts instead. That was the end of any resistance he might have had. Coherent thought left his mind as well. He lowered her to the floor and had her.

Afterwards he went to the door and looked out as he buckled his belt again, checking on Tom. He was still on the park bench, dead to the world. Julie joined him, fiddling with a fresh bottle of perfume.

“That the retard?” she asked.

Nick nodded, not liking the word. It seemed like a cruel word.

She began to talk about herself, and Nick discovered to his relief that she was seventeen, not much younger than he was. Her mamma and her friends had always called her Angel-Face or just Angel for short, she said, because she looked so young. She told him a great deal more in the following hour, and Nick found it next to impossible to separate the truth from the lies… or the wish-fulfillment, if you preferred. She might have been waiting for someone like him, who could never interrupt the endless flow of her monologue, all her life. Nick’s eyes got tired just watching her pink lips push out the shapes of words. But if his eyes wandered for more than just a moment, to check on Tom or to consider the crashed-out plate-glass window of the dress shop across the street, her hand would touch his cheek, bringing his eyes back to her mouth. She wanted him to “hear” everything, ignore nothing. He was annoyed with her at first, then bored with her. In the space of an hour, incredibly, he found himself wishing he hadn’t found her in the first place, or that she would change her mind about coming with them.

She was “into” rock music and marijuana and had a taste for what she called “Colombian short rounds” and “fry-daddies.” She’d had a boyfriend, but he’d gotten so pissed off at the “establishment system” running the local high school that he had quit to join the Marines last April. She hadn’t seen him since then, but still wrote him every week. She and her two girlfriends, Ruth Honinger and Mary Beth Gooch, went to all the rock concerts in Wichita and had hitched all the way to Kansas City last September to see Van Halen and the Monsters of Heavy Metal in concert. She claimed to have “made it” with the Dokken bassist, and said it had been “the most bitchin-groovy experience of my life”; she had just “cried and cried” after the deaths of her mother and father within twenty-four hours of each other, even though her mother was a “bitchy prude” and her father “had a stick up his ass” about Ronnie, her boyfriend who had left town to join the Marines; she had plans to become either a beautician in Wichita when she graduated high school, or to “truck on out to Hollywood and get a job with one of those companies that do the homes of the stars, I’m bitchin-groovy at interior decoration, and Mary Beth said she’d come with me.”

At this point she suddenly remembered Mary Beth Gooch was dead, and that her opportunity to become a beautician or an interior decorator to the stars had passed with her… and everyone and everything else. This seemed to strike her with a more genuine sort of grief. It was not a storm, however, but only a brief squall.

When the flow of words had begun to dry up a little—at least for the time being—she wanted to “do it” (as she so coyly put it) again. Nick shook his head and she pouted briefly. “Maybe I don’t want to go with you after all,” she said.

Nick shrugged.

“Dummy-dummy-dummy,” she said with sudden sharp viciousness. Her eyes shone with spite. Then she smiled. “I didn’t mean that. I was just kidding.”

Nick looked at her, expressionless. He had been called worse names, but there was something in her that he very much did not like. Some restless instability. If she got angry with you, she wouldn’t yell or slap your face; not this one. This one would claw you. It came to him with sudden surety that she had lied about her age. She wasn’t seventeen, or fourteen, or twenty-one. She was any age you wanted her to be… as long as you wanted her more than she wanted you, needed her more than she needed you. She came across as a sexual creature, but Nick thought that her sexuality was only a manifestation of something else in her personality… a symptom. Symptom was a word you used for someone who was sick, though, wasn’t it? Did he think she was sick? In a way he did, and he was suddenly afraid of the effect she might have on Tom.

“Hey, your friend’s waking up!” Julie said.

Nick looked around. Yes—Tom was now sitting on the park bench, scratching his crow’s-nest hair and goggling around pallidly. Nick suddenly remembered the Pepto-Bismol.

“Hi, y’all!” Julie trilled, and ran down the street toward Tom, her breasts bouncing sweetly under her tight middy top. Tom’s goggle had been big to begin with; now it grew bigger still.

“Hi?” he said-asked slowly, and looked at Nick for confirmation and/or explanation.

Masking his own unease, Nick shrugged and nodded.

“I’m Julie,” she said. “How you doin, cutie-pie?”

Deep in thought—and unease—Nick went back into the drugstore to get what Tom needed.

“Uh-uh,” Tom said, shaking his head and backing away. “Uh-uh, I ain’t gonna. Tom Cullen doesn’t like medicine, laws no, tastes bad.”

Nick looked at him with frustration and disgust, holding the three-sided bottle of Pepto-Bismol in one hand. He looked to Julie and she caught his gaze, but in it he saw that same teasing light as when she had called him dummy—it was not a twinkle but a hard mirthless shine. It is the look that a person with no essential sense of humor gets in his or her eye when he or she is getting ready to tease.

“That’s right, Tom,” she said. “Don’t drink it, it’s poison.”

Nick gaped at her. She grinned back, hands on hips, challenging him to convince Tom otherwise. This was her petty revenge, perhaps; for having her second offer of sex turned down.

He looked back at Tom and swigged from the Pepto-Bismol bottle himself. He could feel the dull pressure of anger at his temples. He held the bottle out to Tom, but Tom was not convinced.

“No, uh-uh, Tom Cullen doesn’t drink poison,” he said, and with rising fury at the girl Nick saw that Tom was terrified. “Daddy said don’t. Daddy said if it’ll kill the rats in the barn, it’ll kill Tom! No poison!”

Nick suddenly half turned to Julie, unable to bear her smug grin. He hit her open-handed, hit her hard. Tom stared, eyes wide and scared.

“You…” she began, and for a moment she couldn’t find the words. Her face flushed thinly, and she suddenly looked scrawny and spoiled and vicious. “You dummy freak bastard! It was just a joke, you shithead! You can’t hit me! You can’t hit me, goddamn you! ”

She lunged at him and he pushed her backward. She fell on the seat of her denim shorts and stared up at him, lips pulled back in a snarl. “I’ll tear your balls off,” she breathed. “You can’t do that.”

Hands trembling, head pounding now, Nick took his pen out and scrawled a note out in large, jagged letters. He tore it off and held it out to her. Eyes glaring and furious, she batted it aside. He picked it up, grabbed the back of her neck, and shoved the note into her face. Tom had withdrawn, whimpering.

She screamed: “All right! I’ll read it! I’ll read your crappy note!”

It was four words: “We don’t need you.”

“Fuck you!” she cried, tearing herself out of his grasp. She backed several steps down the sidewalk. Her eyes were as wide and blue as they had been in the drugstore when he almost literally stumbled over her, but now they were spitting with hate. Nick felt tired. Of all the possible people, why her?

“I’m not staying here,” Julie Lawry said. “I’m coming. And you can’t stop me.”

But he could. Didn’t she realize that yet? No, Nick thought, she didn’t. To her all of this was some sort of Hollywood scenario, a living disaster movie in which she had the starring part. It was a movie where Julie Lawry, also known as Angel-Face, always got what she wanted.

He drew the revolver from its holster and pointed it at her feet. She became very still, and the flush evaporated from her face. Her eyes changed, and she looked very different, somehow real for the first time. Something had entered her world that she could not, at least in her own mind, manipulate to her advantage. A gun. Nick suddenly felt sick as well as tired.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said rapidly. “I’ll do anything you want, honest to God.”

He motioned her away with the gun.

She turned and began to walk, looking back over her shoulder. She walked faster and faster, then broke into a run. She turned the corner a block up and was gone. Nick holstered the gun. He was trembling. He felt soiled and depressed, as if Julie Lawry had been something inhuman, more kin to the trundling and coldblooded beetles you find under dead trees than to other human beings.

He turned around, looking for Tom, but Tom wasn’t in sight.

He trotted back down the sunstruck street, his head pounding monstrously, the eye Ray Booth had gouged throbbing. It took him almost twenty minutes to find Tom. He was crouched on a back porch two streets down from the business section. He was sitting on a rusty porch glider, his Fisher-Price garage cradled to his chest. When he saw Nick he began to cry.

“Please don’t make me drink it, please don’t make Tom Cullen drink poison, laws no, Daddy said if it would kill the rats it would kill me… pleeease! ”

Nick saw that he was still holding the bottle of Pepto-Bismol. He threw it away and spread his empty hands in front of Tom. His diarrhea would just have to run its course. Thanks a lot, Julie.

Tom came down the porch steps, blubbering. “I’m sorry,” he said over and over. “I’m sorry, Tom Cullen’s sorry.”

They walked back to Main Street together… and came to a halt, staring. Both bikes were overturned. The tires had been slashed. The contents of their packs had been strewn from one side of the street to the other.

Just then something passed at high speed close to Nick’s face—he felt it—and Tom shrieked and began to run. Nick stood puzzled for a moment, looking around, and happened to be looking in the right direction to see the muzzle-flash of the second shot. It came from a second-story window of the Pratt Hotel. Something like a high-speed darning needle tugged at the fabric of his shirt collar.

He turned and ran after Tom.

He had no way of knowing if Julie fired again; all he knew for sure when he caught up to Tom was that neither of them had been shot. At least we’re shut of that hellion, he thought, but that turned out to be only half-true.

They slept in a barn three miles north of Pratt that evening, and Tom kept waking up with nightmares and then waking Nick to be reassured. They reached Iuka the next morning around eleven, and found two good bicycles in a shop called Sport and Cycle World. Nick, who was beginning to recover at last from the encounter with Julie, thought they could finish re-outfitting themselves in Great Bend, which they should reach by the fourteenth at the latest.

But at just about quarter to three on the afternoon of July 12, he saw a twinkle in the rearview mirror mounted near his left handgrip. He stopped (Tom, who was riding behind him and woolgathering, ran over his foot but Nick barely noticed) and looked back over his shoulder. The twinkle that had risen over the hill directly behind them like a daystar pleased and dazzled his eye—he could hardly believe it. It was a Chevy pickup of an ancient vintage, good old Detroit rolling iron, picking its way slowly, slaloming from one lane of US 281 to the other, avoiding a scatter of stalled vehicles.

It pulled up beside them (Tom was waving wildly, but Nick could only stand with his legs apart and his bike’s crossbar between them, frozen) and came to a stop. Nick’s last thought before the driver’s head appeared was that it would be Julie Lawry, smiling her vicious, triumphant smile. She would have the gun with which she had tried to kill them before, and at a range this close, there would be no chance she would miss. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

But the face that appeared belonged to a fortyish man wearing a straw hat with a feather cocked into the blue velvet band at a rakish angle, and when he grinned, his face became a dry-wash of agreeable sunwrinkles.

And what he said was: “Holy Christ on a carousel, am I glad to see you boys? I guess I am. Climb on up here and let’s see where we’re going.”

That was how Nick and Tom met Ralph Brentner.

Chapter 44

He was cracking up—baby, don’t you just know it?

That was a line from Huey “Piano” Smith, now that he thought of it. Went way back. A blast from the past. Huey “Piano” Smith, remember how that one went? Ah-ah-ah-ah, daaaay-o… gooba-gooba-gooba-gooba… ah-ah-ah-ah. Et cetera. The wit, wisdom, and social commentary of Huey “Piano” Smith.

“Fuck the social commentary,” he said. “Huey Piano Smith was before my time.”

Years later Johnny Rivers had recorded one of Huey’s songs, “Rockin Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu.” Larry Underwood could remember that one very clearly, and he thought it very appropriate to the situation. Good old Johnny Rivers. Good old Huey “Piano” Smith.

“Fuck it,” Larry opined once again. He looked terrible—a pale, frail phantom stumbling up a New England highway. “Gimme the sixties.”

Sure, the sixties, those were the days. Mid-sixties, late sixties. Flower Power. Getting clean for Gene. Andy Warhol with his pink-rimmed glasses and his fucking Brillo boxes. Velvet Underground. The Return of the Creature from Yorba Linda. Norman Spinrad, Norman Mailer, Norman Thomas, Norman Rockwell, and good old Norman Bates of the Bates Motel, heh-heh-heh. Dylan broke his neck. Barry McGuire croaked “The Eve of Destruction.” Diana Ross raised the consciousness of every white kid in America. All those wonderful groups, Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram the eighties up your ass. When it came to rock and roll, the sixties had been the Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde. Cream. Rascals. Spoonful. Airplane with Grace Slick on vocals, Norman Mailer on lead guitar, and good old Norman Bates on drums. Beatles. Who. Dead—

He fell over and hit his head.

The world swam away blackly and then came back in bright fragments. He wiped his hand across his temple and it came away with a thin foam of blood on it. Didn’t even matter. Whafuck, as they used to say back in the bright and glorious mid-sixties. What was falling down and hitting your head when he had spent the last week unable to sleep without waking up from nightmares, and the good nights were the nights when the scream got no farther than the middle of his throat? If you screamed out loud and woke up to that, you scared yourself even worse.

Dreams of being back in the Lincoln Tunnel. There was somebody behind him, only in the dreams it wasn’t Rita. It was the devil, and he was stalking Larry with a lightless grin frozen on his face. The black man wasn’t the walking dead; he was worse than the walking dead. Larry ran with the slow sludgy panic of bad dreams, tripping over unseen corpses, knowing they were staring at him with the glassy eyes of stuffed trophies from the crypts of their cars, which had stalled inside the frozen traffic even though they had some other place to be, he ran, but what good was running when the black devil man, the black magic man, could see in the dark with eyes like snooperscopes? And after a while the dark man would begin to croon to him: Come on, Laarry, come on, we’ll get it togeeeether Laaarry —

He would feel the black man’s breath on his very shoulder and that was when he would struggle up from sleep, escaping sleep, and the scream would be stuck in his throat like a hot bone or actually escaping his lips, loud enough to wake the dead.

Daytimes, the vision of the dark man would recede. The dark man strictly worked the night shift. Daytimes, it was the Big Alone that went to work on him, gnawing its way into his brain with the sharp teeth of some tireless rodent—a rat, or a weasel, maybe. During the days, his thoughts would dwell on Rita. Lovely Rita, meter-maid. Over and over in his mind he would turn her over and over, seeing those slitted eyes, like the eyes of an animal which has died in surprise and pain, that mouth he had kissed now filled with stale green puke. She had died so easy, in the night, in the same fucking sleeping bag, and now he was…

Well, cracking up. That was it, wasn’t it? That was what was happening to him. He was cracking up.

“Cracking,” he moaned. “Oh Jeez, I’m going out of my mind.”

A part of him that still retained a measure of rationality asserted that that might be true, but what he was suffering from right this minute was heat prostration. After what had happened to Rita, he hadn’t been able to ride the motorcycle anymore. He just hadn’t been able to; it was like a mental block. He kept seeing himself smeared all over the highway. So finally he had ditched it. Since then he had been walking—how many days? four? eight? nine? He didn’t know. It had been in the nineties since ten this morning, it was now nearly four, the sun was right behind him, and he wasn’t wearing a hat.

He couldn’t remember how many days ago he had ditched the motorcycle. Not yesterday, and probably not the day before (maybe, but probably not), and what did it matter? He had gotten off it, snapped it into gear, twisted the throttle, and let go of the clutch. It had torn itself out of his trembling, sick hands like a dervish and had gone plunging and rearing over the embankment of US 9 somewhere just east of Concord. He thought the name of the town in which he had murdered his motorcycle might have been Gossville, although that didn’t matter much, either. The fact was, the bike had been no more good to him. He hadn’t dared drive it over fifteen miles an hour, and even at fifteen he would have nightmare visions of being thrown over the handlebars and fracturing his skull or going around a blind corner and slamming into an overturned truck and going up in a fireball. And after a while the motherfucking overheat light had come on, of course it had, and it seemed he could almost read the word COWARD printed in small no-nonsense letters on the plastic housing over the little red bulb. Had there been a time when he had not only taken the cycle for granted but had actually enjoyed it, the sensation of speed as the wind rushed by on both sides of his face, the pavement blurring by six cold inches below the footposts? Yes. When Rita had been with him, before Rita had turned into nothing but a mouthful of green puke and a pair of slitted eyes, he had enjoyed it.

So he’d sent the motorcycle crashing over the embankment and into a weed-choked gully and then he had peered at it with a kind of cautious terror, as if it could somehow rise up and smite him. Come on, he had thought, come on and stall out, ya sucker. But for a long time, the motorcycle wouldn’t. For a long time it raved and bellowed down there in that gully, the rear wheel spinning fruitlessly, the hungry chain gobbling up last fall’s leaves and spitting out clouds of brown, bitter-smelling dust. Blue smoke belched from the chromed exhaust pipe. And even then he had been far enough gone to think there was something supernatural about it, that the cycle would right itself, rise out of its grave, and chew him up… either that or he would look back one afternoon at the rising sound of an engine and see his cycle, this damned cycle which wouldn’t just stall out and die decently, roaring straight down the highway at him, doing eighty, and bent over the handlebars would be that dark man, that hardcase, and riding pillion behind him, with her white silk deckpants rippling in the breeze, would be Rita Blakemoor, her face chalk white, her eyes slitted, her hair as dry and dead as a cornpatch in the wintertime. Then, at last, the cycle began to spit and chug and seizure and misfire, and when it finally stopped he had looked down at it and felt sad, as if it had been some part of himself he had killed. Without the cycle there was no way in which he could mount a serious assault on the silence, and the silence was, in a way, worse than his fears of dying or being seriously hurt in an accident. Since then he had been walking. He had gone through several small towns along Route 9 which had cycle shops, showroom models with the keys hanging right in them, but if he looked at them too long, the visions of himself lying beside the road in a pool of blood would rise up in vivid, unhealthy Technicolor, like something from one of those awful but somehow fascinating Charles Band horror movies, the ones where people kept dying under the wheels of large trucks or as a consequence of large, nameless bugs which had bred and grown in their warm vitals and finally burst free in a gut-busting display of flying flesh, and he would pass by, enduring the silence, pallid, shivering. He would pass by with exquisite little clusters of perspiration growing on his upper lip and in the hollows of his temples.

He had lost weight—why not? He walked all day long, every day, from sunrise to sunset. He wasn’t sleeping. The nightmares would wake him up by four and he would light his Coleman lamp and crouch by it, waiting for the sun to come up enough so he dared to walk. And he would go on walking until it was almost too dark to see and then make camp with the sneaky, urgent speed of a chain-gang fugitive. With camp made he would lie awake late, feeling like a man with about two grams of cocaine chasing itself through his system. Oh baby, shake, rattle, and roll. Also like a heavy coke user, he wasn’t eating much; he never felt hungry. Cocaine does not enhance the appetite, and neither does terror. Larry hadn’t touched coke since the long-ago party in California, but he was terrified all the time. The squawk of a bird in the woods made him twitch. The deathcry of some small animal as a larger one took it made him almost jump out of his skin. He had passed through slimness and skinniness, had traveled through scrawniness. He was now poised on some metaphoric (or metabolic) fence between scrawniness and emaciation. He had grown a beard and it was actually rather striking, a tawny red-gold two shades lighter than his hair. His eyes were sunken deep in his face; they glittered out of their sockets like small, desperate animals that had been trapped in twin pit-snares.

“Cracking up,” he moaned again. The broken desperation in this splintery whine horrified him. Had it gotten that bad? Once there had been a Larry Underwood who’d had a moderate hit record, who had visions of becoming the Elton John of his time… oh my dear, how Jerry Garcia would laugh at that … and now that fellow had been transmuted into this broken thing crawling on the black hottop of Route 9 somewhere in southeastern New Hampshire, crawling, just a crawling kingsnake, that was him. That other Larry Underwood could surely bear no relation to this crawling cheapskate… this…

He tried to get up and couldn’t.

“Oh this is so ridiculous,” he said, half laughing and half weeping.

Across the road on a hill two hundred yards away, glimmering like a beautiful mirage, was a white and rambling New England farmhouse. It had green siding, green trim, and a green shingled roof. Rolling down from it was a green lawn just beginning to look shaggy. At the foot of the lawn, a small rill of brook ran; he could hear it gurgling and chuckling, an entrancing sound. A rock wall meandered along beside it, probably marking the edge of the property, and leaning over the wall at spaced intervals were big, shady elms. He would just do his World-Famous Crawling Cheapskate Wriggle over there and sit in the shade for a while, that’s what he would do. And when he felt a little better about… about things in general… he would make it to his feet and go down to the brook and have a drink and a wash-up. Probably he smelled bad. Who cared, though? Who was there to smell him now that Rita was dead?

Was she still lying there in that tent? he wondered morbidly. Swelling up? Gathering flies? Looking more and more like the black sweet treat in the comfort station on Transverse Number One? Where the hell else would she be? Golfing at Palm Springs with Bob Hope?

“Christ, that’s horrible,” he whispered, and crawled across the road. Once he was in the shade he felt sure he could get to his feet, but it seemed like too much effort. He did spare enough energy, however, to glance slyly back the way he had come to make sure his cycle wasn’t bearing down on him.

It was at least fifteen degrees cooler in the shade, and Larry let out his breath in a long sigh of pleasure and relief. He put a hand to the back of his neck where the sun had been beating most of the day and pulled it back with a little hiss of pain. Sunburn pain? Get Xylocaine. And all that good shit. Get these men out of the hot sun. Burn, baby, burn. Watts. Remember Watts? Another blast from the past. The whole human race, just one big heavy blast from the past, a great big golden gasser.

“Man, you’re sick,” he said, and leaned his head against the rough trunk of the elm tree and closed his eyes. Sun-dappled shade made moving patterns of red and black on the inside of his eyelids. The sound of water, chuckling and gurgling, was sweet and soothing. In a minute he would go down there and get a drink of water and wash up. In just a minute.

He dozed.

The minutes flowed by and his doze deepened into his first deep and dreamless sleep in days. His hands rested limply in his lap. His thin chest rose and fell, and his beard made his face look even thinner, the troubled face of a lone refugee who had escaped from a terrible slaughter none would believe. Little by little, the lines carved in his sunbaked face began to smooth out. He spiraled down to the deepest levels of unconsciousness and rested there like a small river creature dreamily estivating the summer away in cool mud. The sun moved lower in the sky.

Near the creek’s edge, the luxuriant screen of bushes rattled a little as something moved stealthily through them, paused, moved again. After a time, a boy emerged. He was perhaps thirteen, perhaps ten and tall for his age. He was naked except for Fruit of the Loom shorts. His body was tanned an even mahogany, except for the startling white band that began just above the waistband of his shorts. His skin was covered with the bumps of mosquito and chigger bites, some new, mostly old. In his right hand he held a butcher knife. The blade was a foot long, the edge serrated. It glittered hotly in the sun.

Softly, bent forward slightly at the waist, he approached the elm and the rock wall until he stood right behind Larry. His eyes were greenish blue, a seawater color, slightly turned up at the corners, giving him a Chinese look. They were expressionless eyes, mildly savage. He raised the knife.

A woman’s voice, soft but firm, said: “No.”

He turned to her, head cocked and listening, the knife still raised. His attitude was both questioning and disappointed.

“We’ll watch and see,” the woman’s voice said.

The boy paused, looking from the knife to Larry and then back to the knife again with a clear expression of longing, and then he retreated back the way he had come.

Larry slept on.

When he woke up, the first thing Larry was aware of was that he felt good. The second thing was that he felt hungry. The third thing was that the sun was wrong—it seemed to have traveled backward across the sky. The fourth thing was that he had to, you should pardon the expression, piss like a racehorse.

Standing and listening to the delicious crackle of his tendons as he stretched, he realized that he had not just napped; he had slept all night. He looked down at his watch and saw why the sun was wrong. It was nine-twenty in the morning. Hungry. There would be food in the big white house. Canned soup, maybe corned beef. His stomach rumbled.

Before going up he knelt by the stream with his clothes off and splashed water all over himself. He noticed how scrawny he was getting—that was no way to run a railroad. He stood up, dried himself with his shirt, and pulled his trousers back on. A couple of stones poked their wet black backs out of the stream and he used them to cross. On the far side he suddenly froze and gazed toward the thick stand of bushes. The fear, which had been dormant in him ever since waking up, suddenly blazed up like an exploding pine knot and then subsided just as quickly. It had been a squirrel or a wood chuck that he had heard, possibly a fox. Nothing else. He turned away indifferently and began to walk up the lawn toward the big white house.

Halfway there a thought rose to the surface of his mind like a bubble and popped. It happened casually, with no fanfare, but the implications brought him to a dead halt.

The thought was: Why haven’t you been riding a bicycle?

He stood in the middle of the lawn, equidistant from the stream and the house, flabbergasted by the simplicity of it. He had been walking ever since he had ditched the Harley. Walking, wearing himself out, finally collapsing with sunstroke or something so close to it that it made no difference. And he could have been pedaling along, doing no more than a fast run if that’s what he felt like, and he would probably be on the coast now, picking out his summer house and stocking it.

He began to laugh, gently at first, a little bit spooked by the sound of it in all the quiet. Laughing when there was no one else around to laugh with was just another sign that you were taking a one-way trip to that fabled land of bananas. But the laughter sounded so real and hearty, so goddamned healthy, and so much like the old Larry Underwood that he just let it come. He stood with his hands on his hips and cocked his head back to the sky and just bellowed with laughter at his own amazing foolishness.

Behind him, where the screening bushes by the creek were thickest, greenish-blue eyes watched all of this, and they watched as Larry at last continued up the lawn to the house, still laughing a little and shaking his head. They watched as he climbed the porch and tried the front door, and found it open. They watched as he disappeared inside. Then the bushes began to shake and make the rattling sound that Larry had heard and dismissed. The boy forced his way through, still naked except for his shorts, brandishing the butcher knife.

Another hand appeared and caressed his shoulder. The boy stopped immediately. The woman came out—she was tall and imposing, but seemed not to move the bushes at all. Her hair was a thick, luxuriant black streaked with thick blazes of purest white; attractive, startling hair. It was twisted into a cable that hung over one shoulder and trailed away only as it reached the swell of her breast. When you looked at this woman you first noticed how tall she was, and then your eyes would be dragged away to that hair and you would consider it, you would think how you could almost feel its rough yet oily texture with your eyes. And if you were a man, you would find yourself wondering what she would look like with that hair unpinned, freed, spread over a pillow in a spill of moonlight. You would wonder what she would be like in bed. But she had never taken a man into herself. She was pure. She was waiting. There had been dreams. Once, in college, there had been the Ouija board. And she wondered again if this man might be the one.

“Wait,” she told the boy.

She turned his agonized face up to her calm one. She knew what the trouble was.

“The house will be all right. Why would he hurt the house, Joe?”

He turned back and looked at the house, longingly, worriedly.

“When he goes, we’ll follow him.”

He shook his head viciously.

“Yes; we have to. I have to.” And she felt that strongly. He was not the one, perhaps, but even if he was not, he was a link in a chain she had followed for years, a chain that was now nearing its end.

Joe—that was not really his name—raised the knife wildly, as if to plunge it into her. She made no move to protect herself or to flee, and he lowered it slowly. He turned toward the house and jabbed the knife at it.

“No, you won’t,” she said. “Because he’s a human being, and he’ll lead us to…” She fell silent. Other human beings, she had meant to finish. He’s a human being, and he’ll lead us to other human beings. But she was not sure that was what she meant, or even if it was, that it was all she meant. Already she felt pulled two ways at once, and she began to wish they had never seen Larry. She tried to caress the boy again but he jerked away angrily. He looked up at the big white house and his eyes were burning and jealous. After a while he slipped back into the bushes, glaring at her reproachfully. She followed him to make sure he would be all right. He lay down and curled up in a fetal position, cradling the knife to his chest. He put his thumb in his mouth and closed his eyes.

Nadine went back to where the brook had made a small pool and knelt down. She drank from cupped hands, then settled in to watch the house. Her eyes were calm, her face very nearly that of a Raphael Madonna.

Late that afternoon, as Larry biked along a tree-lined section of Route 9, a green reflectorized sign loomed ahead and he stopped to read it, slightly amazed. The sign said he was entering MAINE, VACATIONLAND. He could hardly believe it; he must have walked an incredible distance in his semidaze of fear. Either that or he had lost a couple of days somewhere. He was about to start riding again when something—a noise in the woods or perhaps only in his head—made him look sharply back over his shoulder. There was nothing, only Route 9 running back into New Hampshire, deserted.

Since the big white house, where he had breakfasted on dry cereal and cheese spread from an aerosol can squeezed onto slightly stale Ritz crackers, he had several times had the strong feeling that he was being watched and followed. He was hearing things, perhaps even seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. His powers of observation, just starting to come fully to life in this strange situation, kept triggering at stimuli so slight as to be subliminal, nagging his nerve-endings with things so small that even in the aggregate they only formed a vague hunch, a feeling of “watched-ness.” This feeling didn’t frighten him as the others had. It had no feeling of hallucination or delirium about it. If someone was watching him and just lying back, it was probably because they were scared of him. And if they were scared of poor old skinny Larry Underwood, who was now too chicken even to go putting along on a motorcycle at twenty-five miles an hour, they were probably nothing to worry about.

Now, standing astride the bike he had taken from a sporting goods shop some four miles east of the big white house, he called out clearly: “If someone’s there, why don’t you come on out? I won’t hurt you.”

There was no answer. He stood on the road by the sign marking the border, watching and waiting. A bird twittered and then swooped across the sky. Nothing else moved. After a while he pushed on.

By six o’clock that evening he had reached the little town of North Berwick, at the junction of Routes 9 and 4. He decided to camp there and push on to the seacoast in the morning.

There was a small store at the North Berwick crossroads of 9 and 4, and inside he took a six-pack of beer from the dead cooler. It was Black Label, a brand he had never tried before—a regional beer, presumably. He also took a large bag of Humpty Dumpty Salt ‘n Vinegar potato chips, and two cans of Dinty Moore Beef. Stew. He put these goods in his pack and went back out the door.

Across the street was a restaurant, and for just a moment he thought he saw two long shadows trailing back behind it and out of sight. It might have been his eyes playing him tricks, but he didn’t think so. He considered running across the highway and seeing if he could surprise them out of hiding: Allee-allee-in-free, game’s over, kids. He decided not to. He knew what fear was.

He walked a little way down the highway instead, pushing his bike with the loaded knapsack swinging from the handlebars. He saw a large brick school with a stand of trees behind it. He gathered enough wood from the grove to make a fire of decent size and built it in the middle of the school’s asphalt-paved playground. There was a creek nearby, flowing past a textile mill and under the highway. He cooled his beer in the water and cooked one of the cans of beef stew in its tin. He ate it from his Boy Scout messkit, sitting on one of the playground swings and rocking slowly back and forth with his shadow trailing out long across the faded lines of the basketball court.

It occurred to him to wonder why he was so little afraid of the people who were following him—because he was sure now that there were people following him, at least two, maybe more. As a corollary, it occurred to him to wonder why he had felt so good all day long, as if some black poison had leaked out of his system during his long sleep the previous afternoon. Was it just that he had needed rest? That, and nothing more? It seemed too simple.

He supposed, looking at it logically, that if the followers had meant to do him harm, they would have already tried to do it. They would have shot at him from ambush or at least covered him with their weapons and forced him to surrender his. They would have taken what they wanted… but again thinking logically (it was good to think logically, too, because for the last few days all the thinking he had done had been etched in a corrosive acid-bath of terror), what could he possibly have that anybody would want? As far as worldly goods went, there was now plenty for everybody, because there were precious few everybodies left. Why go to the trouble of stealing and killing and risking your life when everything you’d ever dreamed of having as you sat in the shithouse with the Sears catalogue in your lap was now available behind every shop window in America? Just break the glass, walk in, and take it.

Everything, that was, except the companionship of your fellows. That was at a premium, as Larry knew very well. And the real reason he didn’t feel afraid was because he thought that was what these people must want. Sooner or later their desire would overcome their fear. He would wait until it did. He wasn’t going to flush them out like a covey of quail; that would only make things worse. Two days ago, he would probably have done a fade himself if he had seen someone. Just too freaked to do anything else. So he could wait. But, man, he really wanted to see somebody again. He really did.

He walked back to the stream and rinsed out his messkit. He fished the six-pack out of the water and went back to his swing. He snapped the top on the first one and held the can up in the direction of the restaurant where he had seen the shadows.

“Your very good health,” Larry said, and drank half the can at a draught. Talk about going down smooth!

By the time he had finished the six-pack it was after seven o’clock and the sun was getting ready to go down. He kicked the last few embers of the campfire apart and gathered his stuff together. Then, half-drunk and feeling pleasant, he rode up Route 9 a quarter of a mile and found a house with a screened-in porch. He parked the bike on the lawn, took his sleeping bag, and forced the porch door with a screwdriver.

He looked around once more, hoping to see him or her or them—they were still keeping up with him, he felt it—but the street was quiet and empty. He went inside with a shrug.

It was still early and he expected to lie restless for a while at least, but apparently he still had some sleep to catch up on. Fifteen minutes after lying down he was out, breathing slowly and evenly, his rifle close by his right hand.

Nadine was tired. This now seemed like the longest day of her life. Twice she felt sure they had been spotted, once near Strafford, and again at the Maine–New Hampshire state line, when he had looked back over his shoulder and called out. For herself, she didn’t care if they were spotted or not. This man wasn’t crazy, like the man who had passed by the big white house ten days ago. That man had been a soldier loaded down with guns and grenades and bandoliers of ammunition. He had been laughing and crying and threatening to blow the balls off someone named Lieutenant Morton. Lieutenant Morton had been nowhere in sight, which was probably a good thing for him, if he was still alive. Joe had been frightened of the soldier, too, and in that case it was probably a very good thing.

“Joe?”

She looked around.

Joe was gone.

And she had been on the edge of sleep and slipping over. She pushed the single blanket back and stood up, wincing at a hundred different aches. How long had it been since she had spent so much time on a bicycle? Never, probably. And then there was the constant, nerve-wracking effort to find the golden mean. If they got too close, he would see them and that would upset Joe. If they dropped back too far, he might leave Route 9 for another road and they would lose him. That would upset her. It had never occurred to her that Larry might circle back and get behind them. Luckily (for Joe, at least), it had never occurred to Larry, either.

She kept telling herself that Joe would get used to the idea that they needed him… and not just him. They could not be alone. If they stayed alone, they would die alone. Joe would get used to the idea; he had not lived his previous life in a vacuum any more than she had. Other people got to be a habit.

“Joe,” she called again, softly.

He could be as quiet as a Viet Cong guerrilla creeping through the bush, but her ears had gotten attuned to him over the last three weeks, and tonight, as a bonus, there was a moon. She heard a faint scrape and clatter of gravel, and she knew where he was going. Ignoring her aches, she followed. It was quarter after ten.

They had made camp (if you wanted to call two blankets in the grass “camp”) behind the North Berwick Grille across from the general store, storing the bikes in a shed behind the restaurant. The man they were following had eaten in the school playground across the street (“If we went over there, I’ll bet he would give us some of his supper, Joe,” she had said tactfully. “It’s hot… and doesn’t it smell nice? I’ll bet it’s lots nicer than this bologna.” Joe’s eyes had gone wide, showing a lot of the white, and he shook his knife balefully in Larry’s direction) and then he had gone up the road to a house with a screened-in porch. She thought from the way he was steering his bike that he was maybe a little drunk. He was now asleep on the porch of the house he had chosen.

She went faster, wincing as random pebbles bit into the balls of her feet. There were houses on the left and she crossed to their lawns, which were now growing into fields. The grass, heavy with dew and smelling sweet, came all the way to her bare shins. It made her think of a time she had run with a boy through grass like this, under a moon that had been full, instead of waning like this one was. There had been a hot sweet ball of excitement in her lower belly, and she had been very conscious of her breasts as sexual things, full and ripe and standing out from her chest. The moon had made her feel drunk, and so had the grass, wetting her legs with its night moisture. She had known that if the boy caught her she would let the boy have her maidenhead. She had run like an Indian through the corn. Had he caught her? What did it matter now?

She ran faster, leaping a cement driveway that glimmered like ice in the darkness.

And there was Joe, standing at the edge of the screened porch where the man slept. His white underpants were the brightest thing in the darkness; in fact, the boy’s skin was so dark that at first glance you almost thought the underpants were there alone, suspended in space, or else worn by H.G. Wells’s invisible man.

Joe was from Epsom, she knew that, because that was where she had found him. Nadine was from South Barnstead, a town fifteen miles northeast of Epsom. She had been searching methodically for other healthy people, reluctant to leave her own house in her own hometown. She worked in concentric circles which grew larger and larger. She had found only Joe, delirious and fevered from some sort of animal bite… rat or squirrel, from the size of it. He had been sitting on the lawn of a house in Epsom naked except for his underpants, butcher knife clutched in his hand like an old Stone Age savage or a dying but still vicious pygmy. She had had experience with infections before. She had carried him into the house. Had it been his own? She thought it likely, but would never be sure unless Joe told her. There had been dead people in the house, a lot of them: mother, father, three other children, the oldest about fifteen. She had found a doctor’s office where there was disinfectant and antibiotics and bandages. She was not sure which antibiotics would be right, and she knew she might kill him if she chose wrongly, but if she did nothing he would die anyway. The bite was on the ankle, which had puffed to the size of an innertube. Fortune was with her. In three days the ankle was down to normal size and the fever was gone. The boy trusted her. No one else, apparently, but her. She would wake up mornings and he would be clinging to her. They had gone to the big white house. She called him Joe. It wasn’t his name, but in her life as a teacher, any little girl whose name she hadn’t known had always been a Jane, any little boy a Joe. The soldier had come by, laughing and crying and cursing Lieutenant Morton. Joe had wanted to rush out and kill him with the knife. Now this man. She was afraid to take the knife away from him, because it was Joe’s talisman. Attempting to do that might be the one thing that could make him turn on her. He slept with it clutched in his hand, and the one night she had attempted to pull it free, more to see if it could actually be done than to actually remove it for good, he had been awake instantly, with no movement. One moment fast asleep. The next, those unsettling blue-gray eyes with their Chinese shape had been staring at her with mild savagery. He had pulled the knife back with a low growl. He didn’t talk.

Now he was raising the knife, lowering it, raising it again. Making those low growling noises in his throat and jabbing the knife at the screen. Working himself up to actually rushing in the door, perhaps.

She came up behind him, not making any special effort to be quiet, but he didn’t hear her; Joe was lost in his own world. In an instant, unaware that she was going to do it, she clapped her hand over his wrist and twisted it violently in an anticlockwise direction.

Joe uttered a hissing gasp and Larry Underwood stirred a little in his sleep, turned over, and was quiet again. The knife fell to the grass between them, its serrated blade holding splintered reflections of the silver moon. They looked like luminous snowflakes.

He stared at her with angry, reproachful, and distrusting eyes. Nadine stared back uncompromisingly. She pointed back the way they had come. Joe shook his head viciously. He pointed at the screen and the dark lump in the sleeping bag beyond the screen. He made a horribly explicit gesture, drawing his thumb across his throat at the Adam’s apple. Then he grinned. Nadine had never seen him grin before and it chilled her. It could not have been more savage if those gleaming white teeth had been filed to points.

“No” she said softly. “Or I’ll wake him up now.”

Joe looked alarmed. He shook his head rapidly.

“Then come back with me. Sleep.”

He looked down at the knife, then up at her again. The savagery, for now at least, was gone. He was only a lost little boy who wanted his teddy, or the scratchy blanket which had graduated with him from the crib. Nadine recognized vaguely that this might be the time to make him leave the knife, to just shake her head firmly “No.” But then what? Would he scream? He had screamed after the lunatic soldier had passed out of sight. Screamed and screamed, huge, inarticulate sounds of terror and rage. Did she want to meet the man in the sleeping bag at night, and with such screams ringing in her ears and his?

“Will you come back with me?”

Joe nodded.

“All right,” she said quietly. He bent quickly and picked it up.

They went back together, and he crawled next to her trustingly, the interloper forgotten, at least temporarily. Wrapped his arms around her and went to sleep. She felt the old familiar ache in her belly, the one so much deeper and all-pervading than those caused by the exercise. It was a womanache, and nothing could be done about it. She fell asleep.

She woke up sometime in the early hours of the morning—she wore no watch—cold and stiff and terrified, afraid suddenly that Joe had cunningly waited until she was asleep to creep back to the house and cut the man’s throat in his sleep. Joe’s arms were no longer around her. She felt responsible for the boy, she had always felt responsible for the little ones who had not asked to be in the world, but if he had done that, she would cut him adrift. To take life when so much had been lost was the one unpardonable sin. And she could not be alone with Joe much longer without help; being with him was like being in a cage with a temperamental lion. Like a lion, Joe could not (or would not) speak; he could only roar in his lost little boy’s voice.

She sat up and saw that the boy was still with her. In his sleep he had drawn away from her a little, that was all. He had curled up like a fetus, his thumb in his mouth, his hand wrapped around the shaft of the knife.

Mostly asleep again already, she walked to the grass, urinated, and went back to her blanket. The next morning she was not sure if she had really awakened in the night or only dreamed she had.

If I dreamed, Larry thought, they must have been good dreams. He couldn’t remember any of them. He felt like his old self, and he thought today would be a good day. He would see the ocean today. He rolled up his sleeping bag, tied it to the bike-carrier, went back to get his pack… and stopped.

A cement path led up to the porch steps, and on both sides the grass was long and violently green. To the right, close by the porch itself, the dewy grass was beaten down. When the dew evaporated, the grass would spring back up, but now it held the shape of footprints. He was a city boy and no kind of woodsman (he had been more into Hunter Thompson than James Fenimore Cooper), but you would have to be blind, he thought, not to see by the tracks that there had been two of them: a big one and a small one. Sometime during the night they had come up to the screen and looked in at him. It gave him a chill. It was the stealth he didn’t like, and he liked the first touch of returning fear even less.

If they don’t show themselves pretty quick, he thought, I’m going to try and flush them out. Just the thought that he could do that brought most of his self-confidence back. He slipped into his pack and got going.

By noon he had reached US 1 in Wells. He flipped a coin and it came up tails. He turned south on 1, leaving the coin to gleam indifferently up from the dust. Joe found it twenty minutes later and stared at it as if it were a hypnotist’s crystal. He put it in his mouth and Nadine made him spit it out.

Two miles down the road Larry saw it for the first time, the huge blue animal, lazy and slow this day. It was completely different from the Pacific or the Atlantic that lay off Long Island. That part of the ocean looked complacent, somehow, almost tame. This water was a darker blue, nearly cobalt, and it came up to the land in one rushing swell after another and bit at the rocks. Spume as thick as eggwhite jumped into the air and then splattered back. The waves made a constant growling boom against the shore.

Larry parked his bike and walked toward the ocean, feeling a deep excitement that he couldn’t explain. He was here, he had made it to the place where the sea took over. This was the end of east. This was land’s end.

He crossed a marshy field, his shoes squishing through water standing around hummocks and clumps of reeds. There was a rich and fecund tidal smell. As he, drew closer to the headland, the thin skin of earth was peeled away and the naked bone of granite poked through—granite, Maine’s final truth. Gulls rose, clean white against the blue sky, crying and wailing. He had never seen so many birds in one place before. It occurred to him that, despite their white beauty, gulls were carrion eaters. The thought that followed was nearly unspeakable, but it had formed fully in his mind before he could push it away: The pickings must be real good just lately.

He began to walk again, his shoes now clicking and scraping on sun-dried rock which would always be wet in its many seams from the spray. There were barnacles growing in those cracks, and scattered here and there like shrapnel bursts of bone were the shells the gulls had dropped to get at the soft meat inside.

A moment later he stood upon the naked headland. The seawind struck him full force, lifting his heavy growth of hair back from his forehead. He lifted his face into it, into the harsh-clean salt-smell of the blue animal. The combers, glassy blue-green, moved slowly in, their slopes becoming more pronounced as the bottom shallowed up beneath them, their peaks gaining first a curl of foam, then a curdly topping. Then they crashed suicidally against the rocks as they had since the beginning of time, destroying themselves, destroying an infinitesimal bit of the land at the same time. There was a ramming, coughing boom as water was forced deep into some half-submerged channel of rock that had been carved out over the millennia.

He turned first left, then right, and saw the same thing happening in each direction, as far as he could see… combers, waves, spray, most of all an endless glut of color that took his breath away.

He was at land’s end.

He sat down with his feet dangling over the edge, feeling a little overcome. He sat there for half an hour or better. The seabreeze honed his appetite and he rummaged in his pack for lunch. He ate heartily. Thrown spray had turned the legs of his bluejeans black. He felt cleaned out, fresh.

He walked back across the marsh, still so full of his own thoughts that he first supposed the rising scream to be the gulls again. He had even started to look up at the sky before he realized with a nasty jolt of fear that it was a human scream. A warcry.

His eyes jerked downward again and he saw a young boy running across the road toward him, muscular legs pumping. In one hand he held a long butcher knife. He was naked except for underpants and his legs were crisscrossed with bramble welts. Behind him, just coming out of the brush and nettles on the far side of the highway, was a woman. She looked pale, and there were circles of weariness under her eyes.

“Joe! ” she called, and then began to run as if it hurt her to do so.

Joe came on, never heeding, his bare feet splashing up thin sheets of marsh water. His entire face was drawn back in a tight and murderous grin. The butcher knife was high over his head, catching the sun.

He’s coming to kill me, Larry thought, entirely poleaxed by the idea. This boy… what did I ever do to him?

“Joe! ” the woman screamed, this time in a high, weary, despairing voice. Joe ran on, closing the distance.

Larry had time to realize he had left his rifle with his bike, and then the screaming boy was upon him.

As he brought the butcher knife down in a long, sweeping arc, Larry’s paralysis broke. He stepped aside and, not even thinking, brought his right foot up and sent the wet yellow workboot it was wearing into the boy’s midriff. And what he felt was pity: there was nothing to the kid—he went over like a candlepin. He looked fierce but was no heavyweight.

“Joe!” Nadine called. She tripped over a hummock and fell to her knees, splashing her white blouse with brown mud. “Don’t hurt him! He’s only a little boy! Please, don’t hurt him!” She got to her feet and struggled on.

Joe had fallen flat on his back. He was splayed out like an x, his arms making a v, his open legs making a second, inverted v. Larry took a step forward and tromped on his right wrist, pinning the hand holding the knife to the muddy ground.

“Let go of the sticker, kid.”

The boy hissed and then made a grunting, gobbling sound like a turkey. His upper lip drew back from his teeth. His Chinese eyes glared into Larry’s. Keeping his foot on the boy’s wrist was like standing on a wounded but still vicious snake. He could feel the boy trying to yank his hand free, and never mind if it was at the expense of skin, flesh, or even a broken bone. He jerked into a half-sitting position and tried to bite Larry’s leg through the heavy wet denim of his jeans. Larry stepped down even harder on the thin wrist and Joe uttered a cry—not of pain but defiance.

“Let it go, kid.”

Joe continued to struggle.

The stalemate would have continued until Joe got the knife free or until Larry broke his wrist if Nadine had not finally arrived, muddy, breathless, and staggering with weariness.

Without looking at Larry she dropped to her knees. “Let it go!” she said quietly but with great firmness. Her face was sweaty but calm. She held it only inches above Joe’s contorted, twisting features. He snapped at her like a dog and continued to struggle. Grimly, Larry strove to keep his balance. If the boy got free now, he would probably strike at the woman first.

“Let… it… go!” Nadine said.

The boy growled. Spit leaked between his clenched teeth. There was a smear of mud in the shape of a question mark on his right cheek.

“We’ll leave you, Joe. I’ll leave you. I’ll go with him. Unless you’re good.”

Larry felt a further tensing of the arm under his foot, then a loosening. But the boy was looking at her grievingly, accusingly, reproachfully. When he shifted his gaze slightly to look at Larry, Larry could read the hot jealousy in those eyes. Even with the sweat running off him in buckets, Larry felt cold under that stare.

She continued to speak calmly. No one would hurt him. No one would leave him. If he let go of the knife, everyone could be friends.

Gradually Larry became aware that the hand under his shoe had relaxed and let go. The boy lay dormant, staring up at the sky. He had opted out. Larry took his foot off Joe’s wrist, bent quickly, and picked up the knife. He turned and scaled it up and out toward the headland. The blade whirled and whirled, throwing off spears of sunlight. Joe’s strange eyes followed its course and he gave one long, hooting wail of pain. The knife bounced on the rocks with a thin clatter and skittered over the edge.

Larry turned back and regarded them. The woman was looking at Joe’s right forearm where the waffled shape of Larry’s boot was deeply embedded and turning an angry, exclamatory red. Her dark eyes looked up from that to Larry’s face. They were full of sorrow.

Larry felt the old defensive and self-serving words rise—I had to do it, it wasn’t my fault, listen lady, he wanted to kill me —because he thought he could read the judgment in those sorrowing eyes: You ain’t no nice guy.

But in the end he said nothing. The situation was what the situation was, and his actions had been forced by the kid’s. Looking at the boy, who had now curled himself up desolately over his own knees and put a thumb in his mouth, he doubted if the boy himself had initiated the situation. And it could have ended in a worse way, with one of them cut or even killed.

So he said nothing, and he met the woman’s soft gaze and thought: I think I’ve changed. Somehow. I don’t know how much. He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year’s Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn’t talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: He’s come out the other side. That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just… come out the other side.

Or you don’t.

I’ve changed somehow, Larry thought dimly. I’ve come out the other side, too.

She said: “I’m Nadine Cross. This is Joe. I’m happy to meet you.”

“Larry Underwood.”

They shook hands, both smiling faintly at the absurdity.

“Let’s walk back to the road,” Nadine said.

They started off side by side, and after a few steps Larry looked back over his shoulder at Joe, who was still sitting over his knees and sucking his thumb, apparently unaware they were gone.

“He’ll come,” she said quietly.

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

As they came to the highway’s gravel shoulder she stumbled and Larry took her arm. She looked at him gratefully.

“Can we sit down?” she asked.

“Sure.”

So they sat down on the pavement, facing each other. After a little bit Joe got up and plodded toward them, looking down at his bare feet. He sat a little way apart from them. Larry looked at him warily, then back at Nadine Cross.

“You were the two following me.”

“You knew? Yes. I thought you did.”

“How long?”

“Two days now,” Nadine said. “We were staying in the big house at Epsom.” Seeing his puzzled expression she added: “By the creek. You fell asleep by the rock wall.”

He nodded. “And last night the two of you came to peek at me while I was sleeping on that porch. Maybe to see if I had horns or a long red tail.”

“That was Joe,” she said quietly. “I came after him when I found he was gone. How did you know?”

“You left tracks in the dew.”

“Oh.” She looked at him closely, examining him, and although he wanted to, Larry didn’t drop his eyes. “I don’t want you to be angry with us. I suppose that sounds ridiculous after Joe just tried to kill you, but Joe isn’t responsible.”

“Is that his real name?”

“No, just what I call him.”

“He’s like a savage in a National Geographic TV show.”

“Yes, just like that. I found him on the lawn of a house—his house, maybe, the name was Rockway—sick from a bite. A rat bite, maybe. He doesn’t talk. He growls and grunts. Until this morning I’ve been able to control him. But I… I’m tired, you see… and…” She shrugged. Marsh-mud was drying on her blouse in what could have been a series of Chinese ideograms. “I dressed him at first. He took everything off but his underpants. Eventually I got tired of trying. The minges and mosquitoes don’t seem to bother him.” She paused. “I want us to come with you. I guess there is no way to be coy about it, under the circumstances.”

Larry wondered what she would think if he told her about the last woman who had wanted to come with him. Not that he ever would; that episode was deeply buried, even if the woman in question was not. He was no more anxious to bring up Rita than a murderer would be to drag his victim’s name into parlor conversation.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” he said. “I came up from New York City, the long way around, I guess. The plan was to find a nice house on the coast and just lie up there until October or so. But the longer I go, the more I want other people. The longer I go, the more all of this seems to hit me.”

He was expressing himself badly and didn’t seem to be able to do better without bringing up Rita or his bad dreams about the dark man. “I’ve been scared a lot of the time,” he said carefully, “because I’m on my own. Pretty paranoid. It’s like I expected Indians to just swoop down and scalp me.”

“In other words, you’ve stopped looking for houses and started looking for people.”

“Yes, maybe.”

“You’ve found us. That’s a start.”

“I do believe you found me. And that boy worries me, Nadine. I have to be up front about that. His knife’s gone, but the world is full of knives just lying around waiting to be picked up.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to sound brutal…” He trailed off, hoping she would say it for him, but she said nothing at all, only looked at him with those dark eyes.

“Would you consider leaving him?” There it was, spat out like a lump of rock, and he still didn’t sound like much of a nice guy… but was it right, was it fair to either of them, to make a bad situation worse by burdening themselves with a ten-year-old psychopath? He had told her he was going to sound brutal, and he supposed he had. But they were in a brutal world now.

Meanwhile, Joe’s odd seawater-colored eyes bored into him.

“I couldn’t do that,” Nadine said calmly. “I understand the danger, and I understand that the danger would be primarily to you. He’s jealous. He’s afraid that you might become more important to me than he is. He might very well try to… try to get at you again unless you can make friends with him or at least convince him you don’t mean to…” She trailed off, leaving that part vague. “But if I left him, that would be the same as murder. And I won’t be a party to that. Too many have died to kill more.”

“If he cuts my throat in the middle of the night, you’ll be a party to that.”

She bowed her head.

Speaking so quietly that only she could hear (he didn’t know if Joe, who was watching them, understood what they were talking about or not), Larry said, “He probably would have done it last night if you hadn’t come after him. Isn’t that the truth?”

Softly she replied: “Those are things that might be.”

Larry laughed. “The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come?”

She looked up. “I want to come with you, Larry, but I can’t leave Joe. You will have to decide.”

“You don’t make it easy.”

“These days it’s no easy life.”

He thought about it. Joe sat on the soft shoulder of the road, watching them with his seawater eyes. Behind them, the real sea moved restlessly against the rocks, booming in its secret channels where it had infiltrated the land.

“All right,” he said. “I think you’re being dangerously softhearted, but… all right.”

“Thank you,” Nadine said. “I will be responsible for his actions.”

“That will be a great comfort if he kills me.”

“That would be on my heart for the rest of my life,” Nadine said, and a sudden certainty that all her words about the sanctity of life would someday not too distant rise up to mock her swept her like a cold wind, and she shuddered. No, she told herself. I’ll not kill. Not that. Never that.

They camped that night on the soft white sand of the Wells public beach. Larry built a large fire above the strand of kelp that marked the last high tide and Joe sat on the other side, away from him and Nadine, feeding small sticks into the blaze. Occasionally he would hold a bigger stick into the flames until it caught like a torch and then tear away down the sand, holding it aloft like a single flaming birthday candle. They were able to see him until he was beyond the thirty-foot glow of the fire and then only his moving torch, drawn back in the wind manufactured by his wild sprinting. The seabreeze had come up a little, and it was cooler than it had been for days. Vaguely, Larry remembered the spell of rain that had occurred the afternoon he had found his mother dying, just before the superflu had hit New York like a highballing freight train. Remembered the thunderstorm and the white curtains blowing wildly into the apartment. He shivered a little, and the wind danced a spiral of fire out of the fire and up toward the black starshot sky. Embers cycloned up even higher and flickered out. He thought of fall, still distant but not so far as it had been on that day in June when he had discovered his mother lying on the floor, delirious. He shivered a little. North, far down on the beach, Joe’s torch bobbed up and down. It made him feel lonely and all the colder—that single light flickering in the large and silent darkness. The surf rolled and boomed.

“Do you play?”

He jumped a little at her voice and looked at the guitar case lying beside them on the sand. It had been leaning against a Steinway piano in the music room of the big house they had broken into to get their supper. He had loaded his pack with enough cans to replace what they had eaten this day, and had taken the guitar on impulse, not even looking inside the case to see what it was—coming from a house like that, it was probably a good un. He hadn’t played since that crazy Malibu party, and that had been six weeks ago. In another life.

“Yeah, I do,” he said, and discovered that he wanted to play, not for her but because sometimes it felt good to play, it eased your mind. And when you had a bonfire on the beach, someone was supposed to play the guitar. That was practically graven in stone.

“Let’s see what we got here,” he said, and unsnapped the catches.

He had expected something good, but what lay inside the case was still a happy surprise. It was a Gibson twelve-string, a beautiful instrument, perhaps even custom-made. Larry wasn’t enough of a judge of guitars to be sure. He did know that the fretboard inlays were real mother-of-pearl, catching reddish-orange glints from the fire and waxing them into prisms of light.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“It sure is.”

He strummed it and liked the sound it made, even open and not quite in tune. The sound was fuller and richer than the sound you got from a six-string. A harmonic sound, but tough. That was the good thing about a steel-string guitar, you got a nice tough sound. And the strings were Black Diamonds, wrapped and a little hokey, but you got an honest sound, a trifle rough when you changed chords—zing! He smiled a little, remembering Barry Grieg’s contempt for the smooth flat guitar strings. He had always called them “dollar slicks.” Good old Barry, who wanted to be Steve Miller when he grew up.

“What are you smiling about?” Nadine asked.

“Old times,” he said, and felt a little sad.

He tuned by ear, getting it just right, still thinking about Barry and Johnny McCall and Wayne Stukey. As he was finishing she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and he looked up.

Joe was standing by the fire, a burned-out stick held forgotten in one hand. Those strange eyes were staring at him with frank fascination, and his mouth was open.

Very quietly, so quietly that it might have been a thought in his own head, Nadine said: “Music hath charms…”

Larry began to pick out a rough melody on the guitar, an old blues he had picked up off an Elektra folk album as a teenager. Something originally done by Koerner, Ray, and Glover, he thought. When he thought he had the melody right, he let it walk off down the beach and then sang… his singing was always going to be better than his playing.

Well you see me comin baby from a long ways away

I will turn the night mamma right into day

Cause I’m here

A long ways from my home

But you can hear me comin baby

By the slappin on my black cat bone.

The boy was grinning now, grinning in the amazed way of someone who has discovered a glad secret. Larry thought he looked like someone who had been suffering from an unreachable itch between his shoulderblades for a long, long time and had finally found someone who knew exactly where to scratch. He scruffed through long-unused archives of memory, hunting a second verse, and found one.

I can do some things mamma that other men can’t do

They can’t find the numbers baby, can’t work the

Conqueror root

But I can, cause I’m a long way from my home

And you know you’ll hear me comin

By the whackin on my black cat bone.

The boy’s open, delighted grin lit those eyes up, made them into something, Larry realized, that would be apt to make the muscles in any young girl’s thighs loosen a little. He reached for an instrumental bridge and fumbled through it, not too badly, either. His fingers wrung the right sounds out of the guitar: hard, flashy, a little bit tawdry, like a display of junk jewelry, probably stolen, sold out of a paper bag on a street corner. He made it swagger a little and then retreated quickly to a good old three-finger E before he could fuck it all up. He couldn’t remember all of the last verse, something about a railroad track, so he repeated the first verse again and quit.

When the silence hit again, Nadine laughed and clapped her hands. Joe threw his stick away and jumped up and down on the sand, making fierce hooting sounds of joy. Larry couldn’t believe the change in the kid, and had to caution himself not to make too much of it. To do so would be to risk disappointment.

Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

He found himself wondering with unwilling distrust if it could be something as simple as that. Joe was gesturing at him and Nadine said: “He wants you to play something else. Would you? That was wonderful. It makes me feel better. So much better.”

So he played Geoff Muldaur’s “Goin Downtown” and his own “Sally’s Fresno Blues”; he played “The Springhill Mine Disaster” and Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mamma.” He switched to primitive rock and roll—“Milk Cow Blues,” “Jim Dandy,” “Twenty Flight Rock” (doing the boogie-woogie rhythm of the chorus as well as he could, although his fingers were getting slow and numb and painful by now), and finally a song he had always liked, “Endless Sleep,” originally done by Jody Reynolds.

“I can’t play anymore,” he said to Joe, who had stood without moving through this entire recital. “My fingers.” He held them out, showing the deep grooves the strings had made in his fingers, and the chips in his nails.

The boy held out his own hands.

Larry paused for a moment, then shrugged inside. He handed the guitar to the boy neck first. “It takes a lot of practice,” he said.

But what followed was the most amazing thing he had ever heard in his life. The boy struck up “Jim Dandy” almost flawlessly, hooting at the words rather than singing them, as if his tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. At the same time it was perfectly obvious that he had never played a guitar in his life before; he couldn’t bear down hard enough on the strings to make them ring out properly and his chord changes were slurred and sloppy. The sound that came out was muted and ghostly—as if Joe was playing a guitar stuffed full of cotton—but otherwise it was a perfect carbon copy of the way Larry had played the tune.

When he had finished, Joe looked curiously down at his own fingers, as if trying to understand why they could make the substance of the music Larry had played but not the sharp sounds themselves.

Numbly, as if from a distance, Larry heard himself say: “You’re not bearing down hard enough, that’s all. You have to build up calluses—hard spots—on the ends of your fingers. And the muscles in your left hand, too.”

Joe looked at him closely as he spoke, but Larry didn’t know if the boy really understood or not. He turned to Nadine. “Did you know he could do that?”

“No. I’m as surprised as you are. It’s as if he is a prodigy or something, isn’t it?”

Larry nodded. The boy ran through “That’s All Right, Mamma,” again getting almost every nuance of the way Larry had played it. But the strings sometimes thudded like wood as Joe’s fingers blocked the vibration of the strings rather than making it come true.

“Let me show you,” Larry said, and held out his hands for the guitar. Joe’s eyes immediately slanted down with distrust. Larry thought he was remembering the knife going down into the sea. He backed away, holding the guitar tightly. “All right,” Larry said. “All yours. When you want a lesson, come see me.”

The boy made a hooting sound and ran off along the beach, holding the guitar high over his head like a sacrificial offering.

“He’s going to smash it to hell,” Larry said.

“No,” Nadine answered, “I don’t think he is.”

Larry woke up sometime in the night and propped himself up on one elbow. Nadine was only a vaguely female shape wrapped up in three blankets a quarter of the way around the dead fire. Directly across from Larry was Joe. He was also under several blankets, but his head stuck out. His thumb was corked securely in his mouth. His legs were drawn up and between them was the body of the Gibson twelve-string. His free hand was wrapped loosely around the guitar’s neck. Larry stared at him, fascinated. He had taken the boy’s knife and thrown it away; the boy had adopted the guitar. Fine. Let him have it. You couldn’t stab anybody to death with a guitar, although, Larry supposed, it would make a pretty fair blunt instrument. He dropped off to sleep again.

When he woke up the next morning, Joe was sitting on a rock with the guitar on his lap and his bare feet in the run of the surf, playing “Sally’s Fresno Blues.” He had gotten better. Nadine woke up twenty minutes later, and smiled at him radiantly. It occurred to Larry that she was a lovely woman, and a snatch of song occurred to him, something by Chuck Berry: Nadine, honey is that you?

Aloud, he said: “Let’s see what we’ve got for breakfast.”

He built up the fire and the three of them sat close to it, working the nightchill out of their bones. Nadine made oatmeal with powdered milk and they drank strong tea brewed in a can, hobo fashion. Joe ate with the Gibson across his lap. And twice Larry found himself smiling at the boy and thinking you couldn’t not like someone who liked the guitar.

They cycled south on US 1. Joe rode his bike straight down the white line, sometimes ranging as far as a mile ahead. Once they caught up to him placidly walking his bike along the verge of the road and eating blackberries in an amusing way—he would toss each berry into the air, unerringly catching them in his mouth as they came down. An hour after that, they found him seated on a historic Revolutionary War marker and playing “Jim Dandy” on the guitar.

Just before eleven o’clock they came to a bizarre roadblock at the town line of a place called Ogunquit. Three bright orange town dump trucks were driven across the road, blocking it from shoulder to shoulder. Sprawled in the back of one of the dump-bins was the crow-picked body of what had once been a man. The last ten days of solid heat had done their work. Where the body was not clothed, a fever of maggots boiled.

Nadine turned away. “Where’s Joe?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Somewhere up ahead.”

“I wish he hadn’t seen that. Do you think he did?”

“Probably,” Larry said. He had been thinking that, for a main artery, Route 1 had been awfully deserted ever since they left Wells, with no more than two dozen stalled cars along the way. Now he understood why. They had blocked the road. There would probably be hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars stacked up on the far side of this town. He knew how she felt about Joe. It would have been good to spare the boy this.

“Why did they block the road?” she asked him. “Why would they do that?”

“They must have tried to quarantine their town. I imagine we’ll find another roadblock on the other end.”

“Are there other bodies?”

Larry put his bike on its stand and looked. “Three,” he said.

“All right. I’m not going to look at them.”

He nodded. They wheeled their bikes past the trucks and then rode on. The highway had turned close to the sea again and it was cooler. Summer cottages were jammed together in long and sordid rows. People took their vacations in those tenements? Larry wondered. Why not just go to Harlem and let your kids play under the hydrant spray?

“Not very pretty, are they?” Nadine asked. On either side of them the essence of honky-tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini-golf.

Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red-and-black-striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups—never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic-arcane rites of summer along US 1 in Maine. And now all those Americans were gone. A thunderstorm had ripped a branch from a tree and it had knocked the gigantic plastic Dairy Treet sign into the ice cream stand’s parking lot, where it lay on its side like a pallid duncecap. The grass was starting to get long on the mini-golf course. This stretch of highway between Portland and Portsmouth had once been a seventy-mile amusement park and now it was only a haunted funhouse where all the clockwork had run down.

“Not very pretty, no,” he said, “but once it was ours, Nadine. Once it was ours, even though we were never here before. Now it’s gone.”

“But not forever,” she said calmly, and he looked at her, her clean and shining face. Her forehead, from which her amazing white-streaked hair was drawn back, glowed like a lamp. “I am not a religious person, but if I was I would call what has happened a judgment of God. In a hundred years, maybe two hundred, it will be ours again.”

“Those trucks won’t be gone in two hundred years.”

“No, but the road will be. The trucks will be standing in the middle of a field or a forest, and there will be lousewort and ladies’ slipper growing where their tires used to be. They won’t really be trucks anymore. They will be artifacts.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“How can I be wrong?”

“Because we’re looking for other people,” Larry said. “Now why do you think we’re doing that?”

She gazed at him, troubled. “Well… because it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “People need other people. Didn’t you feel that? When you were alone?”

“Yes,” Larry said. “If we don’t have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness. When we get together we build miles of summer cottages and kill each other in the bars on Saturday night.” He laughed. It was a cold and unhappy sound with no humor in it at all. It hung on the deserted air for a long time. “There’s no answer. It’s like being stuck inside an egg. Come on—Joe’ll be way ahead of us.”

She stood astride her bike a moment longer, her troubled gaze on Larry’s back as it pulled away. Then she rode after him. He couldn’t be right. Couldn’t be. If such a monstrous thing as this had happened for no good reason at all, what sense did anything make? Why were they even still alive?

Joe wasn’t so far ahead after all. They came upon him sitting on the back bumper of a blue Ford parked in a driveway. He was looking at a girlie magazine he had found somewhere, and Larry observed uncomfortably that the boy had an erection. He shot a glance at Nadine, but she was looking elsewhere—perhaps on purpose.

When they reached the driveway Larry asked, “Coming?”

Joe put the magazine aside and instead of standing up made a guttural interrogative sound and pointed up in the air. Larry glanced up wildly, for a moment thinking the boy had seen an airplane. Then Nadine cried: “Not the sky, the barn!” Her voice was close and tight with excitement. “On the barn! Thank God for you, Joe! We never would have seen it!”

She went to Joe, put her arms around him, and hugged him. Larry turned to the barn, where white letters stood out clearly on the faded shingle roof:

HAVE GONE TO STOVINGTON, VT. PLAGUE CENTER

Below that were a series of road directions. And at the bottom:

LEAVING OGUNQUIT JULY 2, 1990

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

FRANCES GOLDSMITH

“Jesus Christ, his ass must have been out to the wind when he put that last line on,” Larry said.

“The plague center!” Nadine said, ignoring him. “Why didn’t I think of it? I read an article about it in the Sunday supplement magazine not three months ago! They’ve gone there!”

“If they’re still alive.”

“Still alive? Of course they are. The plague was over by July second. And if they could climb up on that barn roof, they surely weren’t feeling sick.”

“One of them was surely feeling pretty frisky,” Larry agreed, feeling a half-reluctant excitement building in his own stomach. “And to think I came right across Vermont.”

“Stovington is north of Highway 9 by quite a ways,” Nadine said absently, still looking up at the barn. “Still, they must be there by now. July second was two weeks ago today.” Her eyes were alight. “Do you think there might be others at that plague center, Larry? There might be, don’t you think? Since they know all about quarantines and sterile clothing? They would have been working on a cure, wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Larry said cautiously.

“Of course they would,” she said impatiently and a trifle wildly. Larry had never seen her so excited, not even when Joe performed his amazing feat of mimicry on the guitar. “I’ll bet Harold and Frances have found dozens of people, maybe hundreds. We’ll go right away. The quickest route—”

“Wait a minute,” Larry said, taking her by the shoulder.

“What do you mean, wait? Do you realize—”

“I realize that sign’s waited two weeks for us to come by, and this can wait a little longer. In the meantime, let’s have some lunch. And ole Joe the Guitar-Picking Fool is falling asleep on his feet.”

She glanced around. Joe was looking at the girlie magazine again, but he had started to nod and blink over it in a glassy way. There were circles under his eyes.

“You said he just got over an infection,” Larry said. “And you’ve done a lot of hard traveling, too… not to mention Stalking the Blue-Eyed Guitar-Player.”

“You’re right… I never thought.”

“All he needs is a good meal and a good nap.”

“Of course. Joe, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

Joe made a sleepy and mostly disinterested grunt.

Larry felt a lump of residual fear rise up in him at what he had to say next, but it ought to be said. If he didn’t, Nadine would as soon as she had a chance to think… and besides, it was time, maybe, to find out if he had changed as much as he thought.

“Nadine, can you drive?”

“Drive? Do you mean do I have a license? Yes; but a car really isn’t that practical with all the stalls in the road, is it? I mean—”

“I wasn’t thinking about a car,” he said, and the image of Rita riding pillion behind the mysterious black man (his mind’s symbolic representation of death, he supposed) suddenly rose up behind his eyes, the two of them dark and pale, bearing down on him astride a monstrous Harley hog like weird horsemen of the apocalypse. The thought dried out the moisture in his mouth and made his temples pound, but when he went on, his voice was steady. If there was a break in it Nadine did not seem to notice. Oddly, it was Joe who looked up at him out of his half-doze, seeming to notice some change.

“I was thinking about motorbikes of some kind. We could make better time with less effort and walk them around any… well, any messes in the road. Like we walked our bikes around those town trucks back there.”

Dawning excitement in her eyes. “Yes, we could do that. I’ve never driven one, but you could show me what to do, couldn’t you?”

At the words I’ve never driven one, Larry’s dread intensified. “Yes,” he said. “But most of what I’d teach you would be to drive slowly until you get the hang of it. Very slowly. A motorcycle—even a little motorbike—doesn’t forgive human error, and I can’t take you to a doctor if you get wrecked up on the highway.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll… Larry, were you riding a cycle before we came across you? You must have been, to make it up here from New York City so quickly.”

“I ditched it,” he said steadily. “I got nervous about riding alone.”

“Well, you won’t be alone anymore,” Nadine said, almost gaily. She whirled to Joe. “We’re going to Vermont, Joe! We’re going to see some other people! Isn’t it nice? Isn’t it just great?”

Joe yawned.

Nadine said she was too excited to sleep but she would lie down with Joe until he was under. Larry rode into Ogunquit to look for a motorcycle dealership. There was none, but he thought that he had seen a cycle shop on their way out of Wells. He went back to tell Nadine and found them both asleep in the shade of the blue Ford where Joe had been perusing Gallery.

He lay down a little way from them but couldn’t sleep. At last he crossed the highway and made his way through the knee-high timothy grass to the barn where the sign was painted. Thousands of grasshoppers jumped wildly to get out of his way as he walked toward them, and Larry thought: I’m their plague. I’m their dark man.

Near the barn’s wide double doors he spotted two empty Pepsi cans and a crust of sandwich. In more normal times the gulls would have had the remains of sandwich long ago, but times had changed and the gulls were no doubt used to richer food. He toed the crust, then one of the cans.

Get these right down to the crime lab, Sergeant Briggs. I think our killer has finally made a mistake.

Right-o, Inspector Underwood. The day Scotland Yard decided to send you was a lucky day for Squinchly-on-the-Green.

Don’t mention it, Sergeant. All part of the job.

Larry went inside—it was dark, hot, and alive with the softly whirring wings of the barnswallows. The smell of hay was sweet. There were no animals in the stalls; the owner must have let them out to live or die with the superflu rather than face certain starvation.

Mark that down for the coroner’s inquest, Sergeant.

I will indeed, Inspector Underwood.

He glanced down at the floor and saw a candy wrapper. He picked it up. A chocolate Payday candy bar had once been stowed inside it. The signpainter had had guts, maybe. Good taste, no. Anyone with a taste for chocolate Paydays had been spending too much time in the hot sun.

Steps leading to the loft were nailed to one of the loft’s supporting beams. Greasy with sweat already, not even knowing why he was here, Larry climbed up. In the center of the loft (he was walking slowly and keeping an eye out for rats), a more conventional flight of stairs went up to the cupola, and these stairs were splattered with drips of white paint.

We’ve stumbled on another find, I believe, Sergeant.

Inspector, I stand amazed—your deductive acumen is exceeded only by your good looks and the extraordinary length of your reproductive organ.

Don’t mention it, Sergeant.

He went up to the cupola. It was even hotter up here, explosively so, and Larry reflected that if Frances and Harold had left their paint up here when the job was done, the barn would have burned merrily to the ground a week ago. The windows were dusty and festooned with decaying cobwebs which had no doubt been freshly spun when Gerald Ford was President. One of these windows had been forced up, and when Larry leaned out, he had a breathtaking view of the country for miles around.

This side of the barn faced east, and he was high enough for the roadside concessions, which seemed so monstrously ugly when seen at ground level, to look as inconsequential as a little strewing of roadside litter. Beyond the highway, magnificent, was the ocean, with the incoming waves neatly broken in two by the breakwater stretching out from the northern side of the harbor. The land was an oil painting depicting high summer, all green and gold, wrapped in a still haze of afternoon. He could smell salt and brine. And looking down along the slope of the roof, he could read Harold’s sign, upside down.

Just the thought of crawling around on that roof, so high above the ground, made Larry’s guts feel dauncy. And he really must have hung his legs right over the raingutter to get the girl’s name on.

Why did he go to the trouble, Sergeant? That, I think, is one of the questions to which we must address ourselves.

If you say so, Inspector Underwood.

He went back down the stairs, going slowly and watching his footing. This was no time for a broken leg. At the bottom, something else caught his eye, something carved into one of the support beams, startlingly white and fresh and in direct contrast to all the rest of the barn’s old dusty darkness. He went over to the beam and peered at the carving, then ran the ball of his thumb over it, part in amusement, part in wonder that another human being had done it on the day he and Rita had been trekking north. He ran his nail along the carved letters again.

In a heart. With an arrow.

I believe, Sergeant, that the bloke must have been in love.

“Good for you, Harold,” Larry said, and left the barn.

The cycle shop in Wells was a Honda dealership, and from the way the showroom bikes were lined up, Larry deduced that two of them were missing. He was more proud of a second find—a crumpled candy wrapper near one of the wastebaskets. A chocolate Payday. It looked as if someone—lovesick Harold Lauder probably—had finished his candy bar while deciding which bikes he and his inamorata would be happiest with. He had balled up his wrapper and shot it at the wastebasket. And missed.

Nadine thought his deductions were good, but she was not as fetched by them as Larry was. She was eyeing the remaining bikes, in a fever to be off. Joe sat on the showroom’s front step, playing the Gibson twelve-string and hooting contentedly.

“Listen,” Larry said, “it’s five o’clock now, Nadine. There’s absolutely no way to get going until tomorrow.”

“But there’s three hours of daylight left! We can’t just sit around! We might miss them!”

“If we miss them, that’s that,” he said. “Harold Lauder left instructions once, right down to the roads they were going to take. If they move on, he’ll probably do it again.”

“But—”

“I know you’re anxious,” he said, and put his hands on her shoulders. He could feel the old impatience building up and forced himself to control it. “But you’ve never been on a motorcycle before.”

“I can ride a bike, though. And I know how to use a clutch, I told you that. Please, Larry. If we don’t waste time we can camp in New Hampshire tonight and be halfway there by tomorrow night. We—”

“It’s not like a bike, goddammit!” he burst out, and the guitar came to a jangling stop behind him. He could see Joe looking back at them over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed and instantly distrustful. Gee, I sure do have a way with people, Larry thought. That made him even angrier.

Nadine said mildly: “You’re hurting me.”

He looked and saw that his fingers were buried in the soft flesh of her shoulders, and his anger collapsed into dull shame. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Joe was still looking at him, and Larry recognized that he had just lost half the ground he had gained with the boy. Maybe more. Nadine had said something.

“What?”

“I said, tell me why it’s not like a bike.”

His first impulse was to shout at her, If you know so much, go on and try it. See how you like looking at the world with your head on backward. He controlled that, thinking it wasn’t only the boy he had lost ground with. He’d lost some with himself. Maybe he had come out the other side, but some of the old childish Larry had come out with him, tagging along at his heels like a shadow which has shrunk in the noonday sun but has not entirely disappeared.

“They’re heavier,” he said. “If you overbalance, you can’t get rebalanced as easily as you can with a bicycle. One of these 360s goes three hundred and fifty pounds. You get used to controlling that extra weight very quickly, but it does take some getting used to. In a standard shift car, you operate the gearshift with your hand and the throttle with your foot. On a cycle it’s reversed: the gearshift is foot-operated, the throttle hand-operated, and that takes a lot of getting used to. There are two brakes instead of one. Your right foot brakes the rear wheel, your right hand brakes the front wheel. If you forget and just use the hand-brake, you’re apt to fly right over the handlebars. And you’re going to have to get used to your passenger.”

“Joe? But I thought he’d ride with you!”

“I’d be glad to take him,” Larry said. “But right now I don’t think he’d have me. Do you?”

Nadine looked at Joe for a long, troubled time. “No,” she said, and then sighed. “He may not even want to ride with me. It may scare him.”

“If he does, you’re going to be responsible for him. And I’m responsible for both of you. I don’t want to see you spill.”

“Did that happen to you, Larry? Were you with someone?”

“I was,” Larry said, “and I took a spill. But by then the lady I was with was already dead.”

“She crashed her motorcycle?” Nadine’s face was very still.

“No. What happened, I’d say it was seventy percent accident and thirty percent suicide. Whatever she needed from me… friendship, understanding, help, I don’t know… she wasn’t getting enough.” He was upset now, his temples pounding thickly, his throat tight, the tears close. “Her name was Rita. Rita Blakemoor. I’d like to do better by you that’s all. You and Joe.”

“Larry, why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because it hurts to talk about it,” he said simply. “It hurts a lot.” That was the truth, but not the whole truth. There were the dreams. He found himself wondering if Nadine had bad dreams—last night he had awakened briefly and she had been tossing restlessly and muttering. But she had said nothing today. And Joe. Did Joe have bad dreams? Well, he didn’t know about them, but fearless Inspector Underwood of Scotland Yard was afraid of the dreams… and if Nadine took a spill on the motorcycle, they might come back.

“We’ll go tomorrow, then,” she said. “Teach me how tonight.”

But first there was the matter of getting the two small bikes Larry had picked out gassed up. The dealership had a pump, but without electricity it wouldn’t run. He found another candy wrapper by the plate covering the underground tank and deduced that it had recently been pried up by the ever-resourceful Harold Lauder. Lovesick or no, Payday freak or not, Larry had gained a lot of respect for Harold, almost a liking in advance. He had already developed his own mental picture of Harold. Probably in his mid-thirties, a farmer maybe, tall and suntanned, skinny, not too bright in the book sense, maybe, but plenty canny. He grinned. Building up a mental picture of someone you had never seen was a fool’s game, because they were never the way you had imagined. Everybody knows the one about the three-hundred-pound disc jockey with the whipcord-thin voice.

While Nadine got a cold supper together, Larry prowled around the side of the dealership. There he found a large steel wastecan. Leaning against it was a crowbar and curling over the top was a piece of rubber tubing.

I’ve found you again, Harold! Take a look at this, Sergeant Briggs. Our man siphoned some gas from the underground tank to get going. I’m surprised he didn’t take his hose with him.

Perhaps he cut off a piece and that’s what’s left, Inspector Underwood—begging your pardon, but it is in the wastecan.

By jove, Sergeant, you’re right. I’m going to write you up for a promotion.

He took the crowbar and rubber hose back around to the plate covering the tank.

“Joe, can you come here for a minute and help me?”

The boy looked up from the cheese and crackers he was eating and gazed distrustfully at Larry.

“Go on, now, that’s all right,” Nadine said quietly.

Joe came over, his feet dragging a little.

Larry slipped the crowbar into the plate’s slot. “Throw your weight on that and let’s see if we can get it up,” he said.

For a moment he thought the boy either didn’t understand him or didn’t want to do it. Then he grasped the far end of the crowbar and pushed on it. His arms were thin but belted with a scrawny sort of muscle, the kind of muscle that working men from poor families always seem to have. The plate tilted a little but didn’t come up enough for Larry to get his fingers under.

“Lay over it,” he said.

Those half-savage, uptilted eyes studied him coolly for a moment and then Joe balanced on the crowbar, his feet coming off the ground as his whole weight was thrown onto the lever.

The plate came up a little farther than before, enough so that Larry could squirm his fingers under it. While he was struggling for purchase he happened to think that if the boy still didn’t like him, this was the best chance he could have to show it. If Joe took his weight off the crowbar the plate would come down with a crash and he’d lose everything on his hands but the thumbs. Nadine had realized this, Larry saw. She had been peering at one of the bikes but now had turned to watch, her body angled into a posture of tension. Her dark eyes went from Larry, down on one knee, to Joe, who was watching Larry as he leaned his weight on the bar. Those seawater eyes were inscrutable. And still Larry couldn’t find purchase.

“Need help?” Nadine asked, her normally calm voice now just a little highpitched.

Sweat ran into one eye and he blinked it away. Still no joy. He could smell gasoline.

“I think we can handle it,” Larry said, looking directly at her.

A moment later his fingers slipped into a short groove on the underside of the plate. He threw his shoulders into it and the plate came up and crashed over on the tarmac with a dull clang. He heard Nadine sigh, and the crowbar fall to the pavement. He wiped his perspiring brow and looked back at the boy.

“That’s good work, Joe,” he said. “If you’d let that thing slip, I would’ve spent the rest of my life zipping my fly with my teeth. Thank you.”

He expected no response (except perhaps an uninterpretable hoot as Joe walked back to inspect the motorcycles again), but Joe said in a rusty, struggling voice: “Weck-come.”

Larry flashed a glance at Nadine, who stared back at him and then at Joe. Her face was surprised and pleased, yet somehow she looked—he couldn’t have said just how—as if she had expected this. It was an expression he had seen before, but not one he could put his finger on right away. “Joe,” he said, “did you say ‘welcome’?”

Joe nodded vigorously. “Weck-come. You weck-come.”

Nadine was holding her arms out, smiling. “That’s good, Joe. Very, very good.” Joe trotted to her and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment or two. Then he began to peer at the bikes again, hooting and chuckling to himself.

“He can talk,” Larry said.

“I knew he wasn’t mute,” Nadine answered. “But it’s wonderful to know he can recover. I think he needed two of us. Two halves. He… oh, I don’t know.”

He saw that she was blushing and thought he knew why. He began to slip the length of rubber hose into the hole in the cement, and suddenly realized that what he was doing could easily be interpreted as a symbolic (and rather crude) bit of dumbshow. He looked up at her, sharply. She turned away quickly, but not before he had seen how intently she was watching what he was doing, and the high color in her cheeks.

The nasty fear rose in his chest and he called: “For Chrissake, Nadine, look out! ” She was concentrating on the hand controls, not looking where she was going, and she was going to drive the Honda directly into a pine tree at a wobbling five miles an hour.

She looked up and he heard her say “Oh! ” in a startled voice. Then she swerved, much too sharply, and fell off the bike. The Honda stalled.

He ran to her, his heart in his throat. “Are you all right? Nadine! Are you—”

Then she was picking herself up shakily, looking at her scraped hands. “Yes, I’m fine. Stupid me, not looking where I was going. Did I hurt the motorcycle?”

“Never mind the goddamn motorcycle, let me take a look at your hands.”

She held them out and he took a plastic bottle of Bactine from his pants pocket and sprayed them.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“Never mind that either,” Larry answered, more roughly than he had intended. “Listen, maybe we had better just stick to the bicycles. This is dangerous—”

“So is breathing,” she answered calmly. “And I think Joe should ride with you, at least at first.”

“He won’t—”

“I think he will,” Nadine said, looking into his face. “And so do you.”

“Well, let’s stop for tonight. It’s almost too dark to see.”

“Once more. Haven’t I read that if your horse throws you, you should get right back on?”

Joe strolled by, munching blueberries from a motorcycle helmet. He had found a number of wild blueberry bushes behind the dealership and had been picking them while Nadine had her first lesson.

“I guess so,” Larry said, defeated. “But will you please watch where you’re going?”

“Yes, sir. Right, sir.” She saluted and then smiled at him. She had a beautiful slow smile that lit up her whole face. Larry smiled back; there was nothing else to do. When Nadine smiled, even Joe smiled back.

This time she putted around the lot twice and then turned out into the road, swinging over too sharply, bringing Larry’s heart into his mouth again. But she brought her foot down smartly as he had shown her, and went up the hill and out of sight. He saw her switch carefully up to second gear, and heard her switch to third as she dropped behind the first rise. Then the bike’s engine faded to a drone that melted away to nothing. He stood anxiously in the twilight, absently slapping at an occasional mosquito.

Joe strolled by again, his mouth blue. “Weck-come,” he said, and grinned. Larry managed a strained smile in return. If she didn’t come back soon, he would go after her. Visions of finding her lying in a ditch with a broken neck danced blackly in his head.

He was just walking over to the other cycle, debating whether or not to take Joe with him, when the droning hum came to his ears again and swelled to the sound of the Honda’s engine, clocking smoothly along in fourth. He relaxed… a little. Dismally he realized he would never be able to relax completely while she was riding that thing.

She came back into sight, the cycle’s headlamp now on, and pulled up beside him.

“Pretty good, huh?” She switched off.

“I was getting ready to come after you. I thought you’d had an accident.”

“I sort of did.” She saw the way he stiffened and added, “I went too slow turning around and forgot to push the clutch in. I stalled.”

“Oh. Enough for tonight, huh?”

“Yes,” she said. “My tailbone hurts.”

He lay in his blankets that night wondering if she might come to him when Joe was asleep, or if he should go to her. He wanted her and thought, from the way she had looked at the absurd little pantomime with the rubber hose earlier, that she wanted him. At last he fell asleep.

He dreamed he was in a field of corn, lost there. But there was music, guitar music. Joe playing the guitar. If he found Joe he would be all right. So he followed the sound, breaking through one row of corn to the next when he had to, at last coming out in a ragged clearing. There was a small house there, more of a shack really, the porch held up with rusty old jacklifters. It wasn’t Joe playing the guitar, how could it have been? Joe was holding his left hand and Nadine his right. They were with him. An old woman was playing the guitar, a jazzy sort of spiritual that had Joe smiling. The old woman was black, and she was sitting on the porch, and Larry guessed she was just about the oldest woman he had ever seen in his life. But there was something about her that made him feel good… good in the way his mother had once made him feel good when he was very little and she would suddenly hug him and say, Here’s the best boy, here’s Alice Underwood’s all-time best boy.

The old woman stopped playing and looked up at them.

Well say, I got me comp’ny. Step on out where I can see you, my peepers ain’t what they once was.

So they came closer, the three of them hand in hand, and Joe reached out and set a bald old tire swing to slow pendulum movement as they passed it. The tire’s doughnut-shaped shadow slipped back and forth on the weedy ground. They were in a small clearing, an island in a sea of corn. To the north, a dirt road stretched away to a point.

You like to have a swing on this old box o mine? she asked Joe, and Joe came forward eagerly and took the old guitar from her gnarled hands. He began to play the tune they had followed through the corn, but better and faster than the old woman.

Bless im, he plays good. Me, I’m too old. Cain’t make my fingers go that fast now. It’s the rheumatiz. But in 1902 I played at the County Hall. I was the first Negro to ever play there, the very first.

Nadine asked who she was. They were in a kind of forever place where the sun seemed to stand still one hour from darkness and the shadow of the swing Joe had set in motion would always travel back and forth across the weedy yard. Larry wished he could stay here forever, he and his family. This was a good place. The man with no face could never get him here, or Joe, or Nadine.

Mother Abagail is what they call me. I’m the oldest woman in eastern Nebraska, I guess, and I still make my own biscuits. You come see me as quick as you can. We got to go before he gets wind of us.

A cloud came over the sun. The swing’s arc had decreased to nothing. Joe stopped playing with a jangling rattle of strings, and Larry felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. The old woman seemed not to notice.

Before who gets wind of us? Nadine asked, and Larry wished he could speak, cry out for her to take the question back before it could leap free and hurt them.

That black man. That servant of the devil. We got the Rockies between us n him, praise God, but they won’t keep him black. That’s why we got to knit together. In Colorado. God come to me in a dream and showed me where. But we got to be quick, quick as we can, anyway. So you come see me. There’s others coming, too.

No, Nadine said in a cold and fearful voice. We’re going to Vermont, that’s all. Only to Vermont—just a short trip.

Your trip will be longer than ours, if’n you don’t fight off his power, the old woman in Larry’s dream replied. She was looking at Nadine with great sadness. This could be a good man you got here, woman. He wants to make something out of himself. Why don’t you cleave to him instead of using him?

No! We’re going to Vermont, to VERMONT!

The old woman looked at Nadine pityingly. You’ll go straight to hell if you don’t watch close, daughter of Eve. And when you get there, you are gonna find that hell is cold.

The dream broke up then, splitting into cracks of darkness that swallowed him. But something in that darkness was stalking him. It was cold and merciless, and soon he would see its grinning teeth.

But before that could happen he was awake. It was half an hour after dawn, and the world was swaddled in a thick white ground fog that would burn off when the sun got up a little more. Now the motorcycle dealership rose out of it like some strange ship’s prow constructed of cinderblock instead of wood.

Someone was next to him, and he saw that it wasn’t Nadine who had joined him in the night, but Joe. The boy lay next to him, thumb corked in his mouth, shivering in his sleep, as if his own nightmare had gripped him. Larry wondered if Joe’s dreams were so different from his own… and he lay on his back, staring up into the white fog and thinking about that until the others woke up an hour later.

The fog had burned off enough to travel by the time they had finished breakfast and packed their things on the cycles. As Nadine had said, Joe showed no qualms about riding behind Larry; in fact, he climbed on Larry’s cycle without having to be asked.

“Slow,” Larry said for the fourth time. “We’re not going to hurry and have an accident.”

“Fine,” Nadine said. “I’m really excited. It’s like being on a quest!”

She smiled at him, but Larry could not smile back. Rita Blakemoor had said something very much like that when they were leaving New York City. Two days before she died, she had said it.

They stopped for lunch in Epsom, eating fried ham from a can and drinking orange soda under the tree where Larry had fallen asleep and Joe had stood over him with the knife. Larry was relieved to find that riding the motorcycles wasn’t as bad as he had thought it would be; in most of the places they could make fairly decent time, and even going through the villages it was only necessary to putt along the sidewalks at walking speed. Nadine was being extremely careful about slowing down on blind curves, and even on the open road she did not urge Larry to go any faster than the steady thirty-five-miles-an-hour pace he was setting. He thought that, barring bad weather, they could be in Stovington by the nineteenth.

They stopped for supper west of Concord, where Nadine said they could save time on Lauder and Goldsmith’s route by going directly northwest on the thruway, I-89.

“There will be a lot of stalled traffic,” Larry said doubtfully.

“We can weave in and out,” she said with confidence, “and use the breakdown lane when we have to. The worst that can happen is we’ll have to backtrack to an exit and go around on a secondary road.”

They tried it for two hours after supper, and did indeed come upon a blockage from one side of the northbound lanes to the other. Just beyond Warner a car-and-housetrailer combo had jackknifed; the driver and his wife, weeks dead, lay like grainsacks in the front seat of their Electra.

The three of them, working together, were able to hoist the bikes over the buckled hitch between the car and the trailer. Afterward they were too tired to go any farther, and that night Larry didn’t ponder whether or not to go to Nadine, who had taken her blankets ten feet farther down from where he had spread his (the boy was between them). That night he was too tired to do anything but fall asleep.

The next afternoon they came upon a block they couldn’t get around. A trailer truck had overturned and half a dozen cars had crashed behind it. Luckily, they were only two miles beyond the Enfield exit. They went back, took the exit ramp, and then, feeling tired and discouraged, stopped in the Enfield town park for a twenty-minute rest.

“What did you do before, Nadine?” Larry asked. He had been thinking about the expression in her eyes when Joe had finally spoken (the boy had added “Larry, Nadine, fanks,” and “Go baffroom” to his working vocabulary), and now he made a guess based on that. “Were you a teacher?”

She looked at him with surprise. “Yes. That’s a good guess.”

“Little kids?”

“That’s right. First and second graders.”

That explained something about her complete unwillingness to leave Joe behind. In mind at least, the boy had regressed to a seven-year-old age level.

“How did you guess?”

“A long time ago I used to date a speech therapist from Long Island,” Larry said. “I know that sounds like the start of one of those involved New York jokes, but it’s the truth. She worked for the Ocean View school system. Younger grades. Kids with speech impediments, cleft palates, harelips, deaf kids. She used to say that correcting speech defects in children was just showing them an alternative way of getting the right sounds. Show them, say the word. Show them, say the word. Over and over until something in the kid’s head clicked. And when she talked about that click happening, she looked the way you did when Joe said ‘You’re welcome.’”

“Did I?” She smiled a little wistfully. “I loved the little ones. Some of them were bruised, but none of them at that age are irrevocably spoiled. The little ones are the only good human beings.”

“Kind of a romantic idea, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “Children are good. And if you work with them, you get to be a romantic. That’s not so bad. Wasn’t your speech therapist friend happy in her work?”

“Yeah, she liked it,” Larry agreed. “Were you married? Before?” There it was again—that simple, ubiquitous word. Before. It was only two syllables, but it had become all-encompassing.

“Married? No. Never married.” She began to look nervous again. “I’m the original old maid schoolteacher, younger than I look but older than I feel. Thirty-seven.” His eyes had moved to her hair before he could stop them and she nodded as if he had spoken out loud. “It’s premature,” she said matter-of-factly. “My grandmother’s hair was totally white by the time she was forty. I think I’m going to last at least five years longer.”

“Where did you teach?”

“A small private school in Pittsfield. Very exclusive. Ivy-covered walls, all the newest playground equipment. Damn the recession, full speed ahead. The car pool consisted of two Thunderbirds, three Mercedes-Benzes, a couple of Lincolns, and a Chrysler Imperial.”

“You must have been very good.”

“Yes, I think I was,” she said artlessly, then smiled. “Doesn’t matter much now.”

He put an arm around her. She started a little and he felt her stiffen. Her hand and shoulder were warm.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said uncomfortably.

“You don’t want me to?”

“No. I don’t.”

He drew his arm back, baffled. She did want him to that was the thing; he could feel her wanting coming off her in mild but clearly receivable waves. Her color was very high now, and she was looking desperately down at her hands, which were fiddling together in her lap like a couple of hurt spiders. Her eyes were shiny, as if she might be on the verge of tears.

“Nadine—”

(honey, is that you?)

She looked up at him and he saw she was past the verge of tears. She was about to speak when Joe strolled up, carrying his guitar case in one hand. They looked at him guiltily, as if he had found them doing something rather more personal than talking.

“Lady,” Joe said conversationally.

“What?” Larry asked, startled and not tracking very well.

“Lady!” Joe said again, and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.

Larry and Nadine looked at each other.

Suddenly there was a fourth voice, highpitched and choking with emotion, as startling as the voice of God.

“Thank heaven!” it cried. “Oh thank heaven!”

They stood up and looked at the woman who was now half running up the street toward them. She was smiling and crying at the same time.

“Glad to see you,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you, thank heaven—”

She swayed and might have fainted if Larry hadn’t been there to steady her until her dizziness passed. He guessed her age at about twenty-five. She was dressed in bluejeans and a plain white cotton blouse. Her face was pale, her blue eyes unnaturally fixed. Those eyes stared at Larry as if trying to convince the brain behind them that this was not a hallucination, that the three people she saw were really here.

“I’m Larry Underwood,” he said. “The lady is Nadine Cross. The boy is Joe. We’re very happy to meet you.”

The woman continued to stare at him wordlessly for a moment, and then walked slowly away from him and toward Nadine.

“I’m so pleased…” she began, “… so pleased to meet you.” She stumbled a little. “Oh my God, are you really people?”

“Yes,” Nadine said.

The woman put her arms around Nadine and sobbed. Nadine held her. Joe stood in the street by a stalled pickup truck, his guitar case in one hand, his free thumb in his mouth. At last he went to Larry and looked up at him. Larry held his hand. The two of them stood that way and watched the women solemnly. And that was how they met Lucy Swann.

She was eager to go with them when they told her where they were headed, and that they had reason to believe there were at least two other people there, and possibly more. Larry found a medium-sized knapsack for her in the Enfield Sporting Goods, and Nadine went down to her house on the outskirts of town to help her pack… two changes of clothes, some underwear, an extra pair of shoes, a raincoat. And pictures of her late husband and daughter.

They camped that night in a town called Quechee, now over the state line and into Vermont. Lucy Swann told a tale which was short and simple and not much different from the others they would hear. The grief came built-in, and the shock, which had driven her at least within hailing distance of madness.

Her husband had sickened on the twenty-fifth of June, her daughter the next day. She had nursed them as well as she had been able, fully expecting to come down with the rales, as they were calling the sickness in her corner of New England, herself. By the twenty-seventh, when her husband had gone into a coma, Enfield was pretty much cut off from the outside world. Television reception had become spotty and queer. People were dying like flies. During the previous week they had seen extraordinary movements of army troops along the turnpike, but none of them had business in such a little place as Enfield, New Hampshire. In the early morning hours of June twenty-eighth, her husband had died. Her daughter had seemed a little bit better for a while on the twenty-ninth, and then had taken an abrupt turn for the worst that evening. She had died around eleven o’clock. By July 3, everyone in Enfield except her and an old man named Bill Dadds had died. Bill had been sick, Lucy said, but he seemed to have thrown it off entirely. Then, on the morning of Independence Day, she had found Bill dead on Main Street, swollen up and black, like everyone else.

“So I buried my people, and Bill too,” she said as they sat around the crackling fire. “It took all of one day, but I put them to rest. And then I thought that I better go on down to Concord, where my mother and father live. But I just… never got around to it.” She looked at them appealingly. “Was it so wrong? Do you think they would have been alive?”

“No,” Larry said. “The immunity sure wasn’t hereditary in any direct way. My mother…” He looked into the fire.

“Wes and me, we had to get married,” Lucy said. “That was the summer after I graduated high school—1984. My mom and dad didn’t want me to marry him. They wanted me to go away to have the baby and just give her up. But I wouldn’t. My mom said it would end in divorce. My dad said Wes was a no-account man and he’d always be shiftless. I just said, ‘That may be, but we’ll see what happens.’ I just wanted to take the chance. You know?”

“Yes,” Nadine said. She was sitting next to Lucy, looking at her with great compassion.

“We had a nice little home, and I sure never thought it would end like this,” Lucy said with a sigh that was half a sob. “We settled down real good, the three of us. It was more Marcy than me that settled Wes down. He thought the sun rose and set on that baby. He thought…”

“Don’t,” Nadine said. “All that was before.”

That word again, Larry thought. That little two-syllable word.

“Yes. It’s gone now. And I guess I could have gotten along. I was, anyway, until I started to have all those bad dreams.”

Larry’s head jerked up. “Dreams?”

Nadine was looking at Joe. A moment before, the boy had been nodding out in front of the fire. Now he was staring at Lucy, his eyes gleaming.

“Bad dreams, nightmares,” Lucy said. “They’re not always the same. Mostly it’s a man chasing me, and I can never see exactly what he looks like because he’s all wrapped up in a, what do you call it, a cloak. And he stays in the shadows and alleys.” She shivered. “I got so I was afraid to go to sleep. But now maybe I’ll—”

“Brrr-ack man!” Joe cried suddenly, so fiercely they all jumped. He leaped to his feet and held his arms out like a miniature Bela Lugosi, his fingers hooked into claws. “Brrack man! Bad dreams! Chases! Chases me! ‘Cares me!” And he shrank against Nadine and stared untrustingly into the darkness.

A little silence fell among them.

“This is crazy,” Larry said, and then stopped. They were all looking at him. Suddenly the darkness seemed very dark indeed, and Lucy looked frightened again.

He forced himself to go on. “Lucy, do you ever dream about… well, about a place in Nebraska?”

“I had a dream one night about an old Negro woman,” Lucy said, “but it didn’t last very long. She said something like, ‘You come see me.’ Then I was back in Enfield and that… that scary guy was chasing me. Then I woke up.”

Larry looked at her so long that she colored and dropped her eyes.

He looked at Joe. “Joe, do you ever dream about… uh, corn? An old woman? A guitar?” Joe only looked at him from Nadine’s encircling arm.

“Leave him alone, you’ll upset him more,” Nadine said, but she was the one who sounded upset.

Larry thought. “A house, Joe? A little house with a porch up on jacks?”

He thought he saw a gleam in Joe’s eyes.

“Stop it, Larry!” Nadine said.

“A swing, Joe? A swing made out of a tire?”

Joe suddenly jerked in Nadine’s arms. His thumb came out of his mouth. Nadine tried to hold him, but Joe broke through.

“The swing!” Joe said exultantly. “The swing! The swing!” He whirled away from them and pointed first at Nadine, then at Larry. “Her! You! Lots!”

“Lots?” Larry asked, but Joe had subsided again.

Lucy Swann looked stunned. “The swing,” she said. “I remember that, too.” She looked at Larry. “Why are we all having the same dreams? Is somebody using a ray on us?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at Nadine. “Have you had them, too?”

“I don’t dream,” she said sharply, and immediately dropped her eyes. He thought: You’re lying. But why?

“Nadine, if you—” he began.

“I told you I don’t dream! ” Nadine cried sharply, almost hysterically. “Can’t you just leave me alone? Do you have to badger me?”

She stood up and left the fire, almost running.

Lucy looked after her uncertainly for a moment and then stood up. “I’ll go after her.”

“Yes, you better. Joe, stay with me, okay?”

“Kay,” Joe said, and began to unsnap the guitar case.

Lucy came back with Nadine ten minutes later. They had both been crying, Larry saw, but they seemed to be on good terms now.

“I’m sorry,” Nadine said to Larry. “It’s just that I’m always upset. It comes out in funny ways.”

“Its all right.”

The subject did not come up again. They sat and listened to Joe run through his repertoire. He was getting very good indeed now, and in with the hootings and grunts, fragments of the lyrics were coming through.

At last they slept, Larry on one end, Nadine on the other, Joe and Lucy between.

Larry dreamed first of the black man on the high place, and then of the old black woman sitting on her porch. Only in this dream he knew the black man was coming, striding through the corn, knocking his own twisted swathe through the corn, his terrible hot grin spot-welded to his face, coming toward them, closer and closer.

Larry woke up in the middle of the night, out of breath, his chest constricted with terror. The others slept like stones. Somehow, in that dream he had known. The black man had not been coming empty handed. In his arms, borne like an offering as he strode through the corn, he held the decaying body of Rita Blakemore, now stiff and swollen, the flesh ripped by woodchucks and weasels. A mute accusation to be thrown at his feet to scream his guilt at the others, to silently proclaim that he wasn’t no nice guy, that something had been left out of him, that he was a loser, that he was a taker.

At last he slept again, and until he woke up the next morning at seven, stiff, cold, hungry, and needing to go to the bathroom, his sleep was dreamless.

“Oh God,” Nadine said emptily. Larry looked at her and saw a disappointment too deep for tears. Her face was pale, her remarkable eyes clouded and dull.

It was quarter past seven, July 19, and the shadows were drawing long. They had ridden all day, their few rest stops only five minutes long, their lunch break, which they had taken in Randolph, only half an hour. None of them had complained, although after six hours on a cycle Larry’s whole body felt numb and achy and full of pins.

Now they stood together in a line outside a wrought-iron fence. Below and behind them lay the town of Stovington, not much changed from the way Stu Redman had seen it on his last couple of days in this institution. Beyond the fence and a lawn that had once been well kept but which was now shaggy and littered by sticks and leaves that had blown onto it during afternoon thunderstorms, was the institution itself, three stories high, more of it buried underground, Larry surmised.

The place was deserted, silent, empty.

In the center of the lawn was a sign which read:

STOVINGTON PLAGUE CONTROL CENTER

THIS IS A GOVERNMENT INSTALLATION!

VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT MAIN DESK

Beside it was a second sign, and this was what they were looking at.

ROUTE 7 TO RUTLAND

ROUTE 4 TO SCHUYLERVILLE

ROUTE 29 TO I-87

I-87 SOUTH TO I-90

I-90 WEST

EVERYONE HERE IS DEAD

WE ARE MOVING WEST TO NEBRASKA

STAY ON OUR ROUTE

WATCH FOR SIGNS

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

FRANCES GOLDSMITH

STUART REDMAN

GLENDON PEQUOD BATEMAN

JULY 8, 1990

“Harold, my man,” Larry murmured. “Can’t wait to shake your hand and buy you a beer… or a Payday.”

“Larry!” Lucy said sharply.

Nadine had fainted.

Chapter 45

She tottered out onto her porch at twenty to eleven on the morning of July 20, carrying her coffee and her toast with her as she did every day that the Coca-Cola thermometer outside the sink window read over fifty degrees. It was high summer, the finest summer Mother Abagail could recollect since 1955 the year her mother had died at the goodish age of ninety-three. Too bad there ain’t more folks around to enjoy it, she thought as she sat carefully down in her armless rocking chair. But did they ever enjoy it? Some did, of course; young folks in love did, and old folks whose bones remembered so clearly what the death-clutch of winter was. Now most of the young folks and old folks were gone, and most of those in between. God had brought down a harsh judgment on the human race.

Some might argue with such a harsh judgment, but Mother Abagail was not among their number. He had done it once with water, and sometime further along, He would do it with fire. Her place was not to judge God, although she wished He hadn’t seen fit to set the cup before her lips that He had. But when it came to matters of judgment, she was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear.

She wheezed laughter and nodded her head and dipped her toast into the wide mouth of her coffee cup until it was soft enough to chew. It had been sixteen years since she had bid hail and farewell to her last tooth. Toothless she had come from her mother’s womb, and toothless she would go into her own grave. Molly, her great-granddaughter, and her husband had given her a set of false teeth for Mother’s Day just a year later, the year she herself had been ninety-three, but they hurt her gums and now she only wore them when she knew Molly and Jim were coming. Then she would take them from the box in the drawer and rinse them off good and stick them in. And if she had time before Molly and Jim came, she would make faces at herself in the spotty kitchen mirror and growl through all those big white fake teeth and laugh fit to split. She looked like an old black Everglades gator.

She was old and feeble, but her mind was pretty much in order. Abagail Freemantle was her name born in 1882 and with the birth certificate to prove it. She’d seen a heap during her time on the earth, but nothing to match the goings-on of the last month or so. No, there never had been such a thing, and now her time was coming to be a part of it and she hated it. She was old. She wanted to rest and enjoy the cycle of the seasons between now and whenever God got tired of watching her make her daily round and decided to call her home to Glory. But what happened when you questioned God? The answer you got was I Am, Who I AM, and that was the end. When His own Son prayed that the cup be taken from His lips, God never even answered… and she wasn’t up to that snuff, no how, no way. Just an ordinary sinner was all she was, and at night when the wind came up and blew through the corn it frightened her to think that God had looked down at a little baby girl poking out between her mother’s legs back in early 1882 and had said to Himself: I got to keep her around a goodish time. She’s got work in 1990, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages.

Her time here in Hemingford Home was coming to an end, and her final season of work lay ahead of her in the West, near the Rocky Mountains. He had sent Moses to mountain-climbing and Noah to boatbuilding; He had seen His own Son nailed up on a Tree. What did He care how miserably afraid Abby Freemantle was of the man with no face, he who stalked her dreams?

She never saw him; she didn’t have to see him. He was a shadow passing through the corn at noon, a cold pocket of air, a gore-crew peering down at you from the phone lines. His voice called to her in all the sounds that had ever frightened her—spoken soft, it was the tick of a deathwatch beetle under the stairs, telling that someone loved would soon pass over; spoken loud it was the afternoon thunder rolling amid the clouds that came out of the west like boiling Armageddon. And sometimes there was no sound at all but the lonely rustle of the nightwind in the corn but she would know he was there and that was the worst of all, because then the man with no face seemed only a little less than God Himself; at those times it seemed that she was within touching distance of the dark angel that had flown silently over Egypt, killing the firstborn of every house where the door post wasn’t daubed with blood. That frightened her most of all. She became a child again in her fear and knew that while others knew of him and were frightened by him, only she had been given a clear vision of his terrible power.

“Welladay,” she said, and popped the last bite of toast into her mouth. She rocked back and forth, drinking her coffee. This was a bright, fine day, and no part of her body was giving her particular misery, and she offered up a brief prayer of thanksgiving for what she had got. God is great, God is good; the littlest child could learn those words, and they encompassed the whole world and all the world held, good and evil.

“God is great,” Mother Abagail said, “God is good. Thank You for the sunshine. For the coffee. For the fine BM I had last night, You was right, those dates turned the trick, but my God, they taste nasty to me. Ain’t I the one? God is great…”

Her coffee was about gone. She set the cup down and rocked, her face turned up to the sun like some strange living rockface, seamed with veins of coal. She dozed, then slept. Her heart, its walls now almost as thin as tissue paper, beat on and on as it had every minute for the last 39,630 days. Like a baby in a crib, you would have had to put your hand on her chest to assure yourself that she was breathing at all.

But the smile stayed on.

Things had surely changed in all the years since she had been a girl. The Freemantles had come to Nebraska as freed slaves, and Abagail’s own great-granddaughter Molly laughed in a nasty, cynical way and suggested the money Abby’s father had used to buy the home place—money paid to him by Sam Freemantle of Lewis, South Carolina, as wages for the eight years her daddy and his brothers had stayed on after the States War had ended—had been “conscience money.” Abagail had held her tongue when Molly said that—Molly and Jim and the others were young and didn’t understand anything but the veriest good and the veriest bad—but inside she had rolled her eyes and said to herself: Conscience money? Well, is there any money cleaner than that?

So the Freemantles had settled in Hemingford Home and Abby, the last of Daddy and Mamma’s children, had been born right here on the home place. Her father had bested those who would not buy from niggers and those who would not sell to them; he had bought land a little smidge at a time so as not to alarm those who were worried about “those black bastards over Columbus way”; he had been the first man in Polk County to try crop rotation; the first man to try chemical fertilizer; and in March of 1902 Gary Sites had come to the house to tell John Freemantle that he had been voted into the Grange. He was the first black man to belong to the Grange in the whole state of Nebraska. That year had been a topper.

She reckoned that anyone, looking back over her life, could pick out one year and say, “That was the best.” It seemed that, for everyone, there was one spell of seasons when everything came together, smooth and glorious and full of wonder. It was only later on that you might wonder why it had happened that way. It was like putting ten different savory things in the cold-pantry all at once, so each took on a bit of the others’ flavors; the mushrooms had a taste of ham and the ham of mushrooms; the venison had the slightest wild taste of partridge and the partridge had the tiniest hint of cucumbers. Later on in life, you might wish that the good things which all befell in your one special year had spread themselves out a little more, that you could maybe take one of the golden things and kind of transplant it right down in the middle of a three-year stretch you couldn’t remember a blessed good thing about, or even a bad one, and so you knew that things had just gone on the way they were supposed to in the world God had created and Adam and Eve had half uncreated—the washing had gone out, the floors had been scrubbed, the babies had been cared for, the clothes had been mended; three years with nothing to break up the gray even flow of time but Easter and the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and Christmas. But there was no answering the ways God set about His wonders to perform, and for Abby Freemantle as well as her father, ‘02 had been a topper.

Abby thought she was the only one in the family—other than her daddy, that was—that understood what a great, nearly unprecedented thing it was to be invited into the Grange. He would be the first Negro Granger in Nebraska, and very possibly the first Negro Granger in the United States. He had no illusions about the price he and his family would pay in the form of crude jokes and racial slurs from those men—Ben Conveigh chief among them—who were set against the idea. But he also saw that Gary Sites was handing him something more than a chance at survival: Gary was giving him a chance to prosper with the rest of the corn belt.

As a member of the Grange, his problems buying good seed would end. The necessity of taking his crops all the way to Omaha to find a buyer would likewise end. It might mean the end of the water-rights squabble he had been having with Ben Conveigh, who was rabid on the subjects of niggers like John Freemantle and nigger-lovers like Gary Sites. It might even mean that the county tax assessor would stop his endless gouging. So John Freemantle accepted the invitation, and the vote went his way (by quite a comfortable margin, too), and there were nasty cracks, and jokes about how a coon had got caught in the Grange Hall loft, and about how when a nigger-baby went to heaven and got its little black wings you called it a bat instead of an angel, and Ben Conveigh went around for a while telling people that the only reason the Mystic Tie Grange had voted John Freemantle in was because the Children’s Fair was coming up pretty soon and they needed a nigger to play the African orangutan. John Freemantle pretended not to hear these things, and at home he would quote from the Bible—“A soft answer turneth away wrath” and “Brethren, as ye reap so shalt ye surely sow” and his favorite, spoken not in humility but in grim expectation: “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

And little by little he had brought his neighbors around. Not all of them, not the rabid ones like Ben Conveigh and his half-brother George, not the Arnolds and the Deacons, but all the others. In 1903 they had taken dinner with Gary Sites and his family, right in the parlor, just as good as white.

And in 1902 Abagail had played her guitar at the Grange Hall, and not in the minstrel show, either; she had played in the white folks’ talent show at the end of the year. Her mother had been deadset against that; it was one of the few times in her life when she let her opposition to one of her husband’s ideas out in front of the children (except by then the boys were damned near middle-aged and John himself had a good deal more than a touch of snow on the mountain).

“I know how it was,” she said, weeping. “You and Sites and that Frank Fenner, you whipped this up together. That’s fine for them, John Freemantle, but what’s got into your head? They’re white! You go hunker down with them in the backyard and talk about plowin! You can even go downtown and have a spot of beer with them, if that Nate Jackson will let you into his saloon. Fine! I know what you’ve been through these last years—none better. I know you’ve kep a smile on your face when it must have hurt like a grassfire in your heart. But this is different! This is your own daughter! What you gonna say if she gets up there in her pretty white dress and they laughs at her? What you gonna do if they throws rotten tomatas at her like they did at Brick Sullivan when he tried to sing in the minstrel show? And what are you going to say if she comes to you with those tomatas all over the front of her dress and asks, ‘Why, Daddy? Why did they do it, and why did you let them do it?’”

“Well, Rebecca,” John had answered, “I guess we better leave it up to her and David.”

David had been her first husband; in 1902 Abagail Freemantle had become Abagail Trotts. David Trotts was a black farmhand from over Valparaiso way, and he had come pretty nearly thirty miles one way to court her. John Freemantle had once said to Rebecca that the bear had caught ole Davy right and proper, and he had been Trotting plenty. There were plenty who had laughed at her first husband and said things like, “I guess I know who wears the pants in that family.”

But David had not been a weakling, only quiet and thoughtful. When he told John and Rebecca Freemantle, “Whatever Abagail thinks is right, why, I reckon that’s what’s to do,” she had blessed him for it and told her mother and father she intended to go ahead.

So on December 27, 1902, already three months gone with her first, she had mounted the Grange Hall stage in the dead silence that had ensued when the master of ceremonies had announced her name. Just before her Gretchen Tilyons had been on and had done a racy French dance, showing her ankles and petticoats to the raucous whistles, cheers, and stamping feet of the men in the audience.

She stood in the thick silence, knowing how black her face and neck must look in her new white dress, and her heart was thudding terribly in her chest and she was thinking, I’ve forgot every word, every single word, I promised Daddy I wouldn’t cry no matter what, I wouldn’t cry, but Ben Conveigh’s out there and when Ben Conveigh yells NIGGER, then I guess I’ll cry, oh why did I ever get into this? Mamma was right, I’ve got above my place and I’ll pay for it —

The hall was filled with white faces turned up to look at her. Every chair was filled and there were two rows of standees at the back of the hall. Kerosene lanterns glowed and flared. The red velvet curtains were pulled back in swoops of cloth and tied with gold ropes.

And she thought: I’m Abagail Freemantle Trotts, I play well and I sing well; I do not know these things because anyone told me.

And so she began to sing “The Old Rugged Cross” into the moveless silence, her fingers picking melody. Then picking up a strum, the slightly stronger melody of “How I Love My Jesus,” and then stronger still, “Camp Meeting in Georgia.” Now people were swaying back and forth almost in spite of themselves. Some were grinning and tapping their knees.

She sang a medley of Civil War songs: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Marching Through Georgia,” and “Goober Peas” (more smiles at that one; many of these men, Grand Army of the Republic veterans, had eaten more than a few goober peas during their time in the service). She finished with “Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground,” and as the last chord floated away into a silence that was now thoughtful and sad, she thought: Now if you want to throw your tomatas or whatever, you go on and do it. I played and sang my best, and I was real fine.

When the last chord floated into silence, that silence held for a long, almost enchanted instant, as though the people in those seats and the others standing at the back of the hall had been taken far away, so far they could not find their way back all at once. Then the applause broke and rolled over her in a wave, long and sustained, making her blush, making her feel confused, hot and shivery all over. She saw her mother, weeping openly, and her father, and David, beaming at her.

She had tried to leave the stage then, but cries of “Encore! Encore! ” broke out, and so, smiling, she played “Digging My Potatoes.” That song was just a tiny bit risky, but Abby guessed that if Gretchen Tilyons could show her ankles in public, then she could sing a song that was the teeniest bit bawdy. She was, after all, a married woman.

Someone’s been diggin my potatoes

They’ve left em in my bin,

And now that someone’s gone

And see the trouble I’ve got in.

There were six more verses like that (some even worse) and she sang every one, and at the last line of each the roar of approval was louder. And later she thought that if she had done anything wrong that night, it was singing that song, which was exactly the kind of song they probably expected to hear a nigger sing.

She finished to another thunderous ovation and fresh cries of “Encore! ” She remounted the stage, and when the crowd had quietened, she said: “Thank you all very much. I hope you won’t think I am bein forward if I ask to sing just one more song, which I have learned special but never ever expected to sing here. But it is just about the best song I know, on account of what President Lincoln and this country did for me and mine, even before I was born.”

They were very quiet now, listening closely. Her family sat stock still, all together near the left aisle, like a spot of blackberry jam on a white handkerchief.

“On account of what happened back in the middle of the States War,” she went steadily on, “my family was able to come here and live with the fine neighbors that we have.”

Then she played and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and everyone stood up and listened, and some of the handkerchiefs came out again, and when she had finished, they applauded fit to raise the roof.

That was the proudest day of her life.

She stirred awake a little after noon and sat up, blinking in the sunlight, an old woman of a hundred and eight. She had slept wrong on her back and it was a pure misery to her. Would be all day, if she knew anything about it.

“Welladay,” she said, and stood up carefully. She began to go down the porch steps, holding carefully to the rickety railing, wincing at the daggers of pain in her back and the prickles in her legs. Her circulation was not what it had once been… why should it be? Time after time she had warned herself about the consequences of falling asleep in that rocker. She would doze off and all the old times would come back and that was wonderful, oh yes it was, better than watching a play on the television, but there was hell to pay when she woke up. She could lecture herself all she liked, but she was like an old dog that splays itself out by a fireplace. If she sat in the sun, she went to sleep, that was all. She no longer had a say in the matter.

She reached the bottom of the steps, paused to “let her legs catch up with her,” then hawked up a goodish gob of snot and spat it into the dirt. When she felt about as usual (except for the misery in her back), she walked slowly around to the privy her grandson Victor had put behind the house in 1931. She went inside, primly shut the door and put the hook through the eye just as if there was a whole crowd of folks out there instead of a few blackbirds, and sat down. A moment later she began to make water and sighed contentedly. Here was another thing about being old no one ever thought to tell you (or was it just that you never listened?)—you stopped knowing when you had to make water. Seemed like you lost all the feeling down there in your bladder, and if you weren’t careful, first thing you knew you had to be changing your clothes. It wasn’t like her to be dirty, and so she came out here to squat six or seven times a day, and at night she kept the chamberpot beside the bed. Molly’s Jim told her once that she was like a dog that couldn’t pass a fireplug without at least lifting one leg to salute it, and that had made her laugh until tears spouted from her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. Molly’s Jim was an advertising executive in Chicago and getting along a right smart… had been, anyway. She supposed he was gone with the rest of them. Molly too. Bless their hearts, they were with Jesus now.

The last year or so, Molly and Jim were about the only ones who came out to the place to see her anymore. The rest seemed to have forgot she was alive, but she could understand that. She had lived past her time. She was like a dinosaur which had no business still wearing its flesh over its bones, a thing whose proper place was in a museum (or a graveyard). She could understand them not wanting to come see her, but what she couldn’t understand was why they didn’t want to come back and see the land. There wasn’t much left, no; just a matter of acres out of the original large freehold. It was still theirs, however; still their land. But black folks didn’t seem to care so much about land anymore. There were, in fact, those that actually seemed ashamed of it. They had gone off to make their way in the cities, and most of them, like Jim, came along real well… but how it made her heart ache, to think of all those black folks with their faces set away from the land!

Molly and Jim had wanted to put in a flushing toilet for her the year before last, and had been hurt when she refused. She tried to explain so they could understand, but all Molly had been able to say, over and over again was, “Mother Abagail, you are a hundred and six years old. How do you think I feel, knowing you are going out there to squat down some days when it’s only ten degrees above zero? Don’t you know that the shock of the cold could do your heart in?”

“When the Lord wants me, the Lord will take me,” Abagail said, and she was knitting, and so of course they thought that was what she was looking at and couldn’t see the way they rolled their eyes at each other.

Some things you couldn’t let go of. It seemed like that was another thing the young people didn’t know. Now, back in ‘82, when she had turned a hundred, Cathy and David had offered her a TV set and she had taken them up on that one. The TV was a marvelous machine for passing the time when you were by your onesome. But when Christopher and Susy came and said they wanted to get her on the city water, she had turned them down just as she had turned down Molly and Jim on their kind offer of a flushing toilet. They had argued that her dug well was shallow, and it could go dry if there was another summer like 1988, when the drought came. It was true, but she just went on saying no. They thought she had flipped her wig, of course, that she was taking coat after coat of senility the way a floor takes varnish, but she herself believed her mind was pretty nigh as good as it had ever been.

She hoisted herself off the privy’s seat, dusted lime down through the hole, and slowly let herself out into the sunlight again. She kept her privy sweet, but they were dank old places no matter how sweet they smelled.

It was as if the voice of God had been whispering in her ear when Chris and Susy offered to see that she was put on the city water… the voice of God even way back when. Molly and Jim wanted to get her that china throne with the flush-lever on the side. God did speak to folks; hadn’t He talked to Noah about the ark, telling him how many cubits long and how many deep and how many wide? Yes. And she believed He had spoken to her as well, not from a burning bush or out of a pillar of fire, but in a still, small voice that said: Abby, you are going to need your hand-pump. You enjoy your lectricity all you want, Abby, but you keep those oil-lamps of yours full and keep the wicks trimmed. You keep the cold-pantry just the way your mother kept it before you. And mind you don’t let any of the young folks talk you into anything you know to be against My will, Abby. They are your kin, but I am your Father.

She paused in the middle of the yard, looking out at the sea of corn, broken only by the dirt road going north toward Duncan and Columbus. Three miles up from her house it went to tar. The corn was going to be fine this year, and it was such a shame that no one would be around to harvest it but the rooks. It was sad to think that the big red harvesting machines were going to stay in their barns this September, sad to think there would be no husking bees and barn dances. Sad to think that, for the first time in the last one hundred and eight years, she would not be here in Hemingford Home to see the time of the change as summer gave in to pagan, jocund autumn. She would love this summer all the more because it was to be her last—she felt that clearly. And she would not be laid to rest here but farther west, in a strange country. It was bitter.

She shuffled over to the tire swing and set it to moving. It was an old tractor tire that her brother Lucas had hung here in 1922. The rope had been changed many times between then and now, but never the tire. Now the canvas showed through in many places, and on the inside rim there was a deep depression where generations of young buttocks had set themselves down. Below the tire was a deep and dusty groove in the earth where the grass had long since given up trying to grow, and on the limb where the rope was tied, the bark had been rubbed away to show the branch’s white bone. The rope creaked slowly and this time she spoke aloud.

“Please, my Lord, my Lord, not unless I have to, I’d have you take this cup from my lips if You can. I’m old and I’m scared and mostly I’d just like to lie right here on the home place. I’m ready to go right now if You want me. Thy will be done, my Lord, but Abb’s one tired shufflin old black woman. Thy will be done.”

No sound but the creak of the rope against the branch and the crows off in the corn. She put her old seamed forehead against the old seamed bark of the apple tree her father had planted so long ago and she wept bitterly.

That night she dreamed she was mounting the steps to the Grange Hall stage again, a young and pretty Abagail, three months quick with child, a dusky Ethiopian jewel in her white dress, holding her guitar by the neck, climbing, climbing into that stillness, her thoughts a millrace, yet holding above all to one thought: I am Abagail Freemantle Trotts, and I play well and I sing well. I do not know these things because anyone told me.

In the dream she turned slowly, facing those white faces turned up to her like moons, faced the hall so richly alight with its lamps and the mellow glow thrown back from the darkened, slightly steamed windows and the red velvet swags with their gold ropes.

She held firmly to that one thought and began to play “Rock of Ages.” She played and her voice came out, not nervous and restrained, but exactly as it had come out when she had been practicing, rich and mellow, like the yellow lamplight itself, and she thought: I am going to win them. With the help of God I am going to win them over. Oh my people, if you are thirsty, will I not bring water from the rock? I will win them over, and I will make David proud of me and Mamma and Daddy proud of me, I will make myself proud of myself, I will bring music from the air and water from the rock —

And that was when she saw him for the first time. He was standing far back in the corner, behind all the seats, his arms folded across his chest. He was wearing jeans and a denim jacket with buttons on the pockets. He was wearing dusty black boots with rundown heels, boots that looked as if they had walked many a dark and dusty mile. His forehead was white as gaslight, his cheeks red with jolly blood, his eyes blazing blue diamond chips, sparkling with infernal good cheer, as if the Imp of Satan had taken over the job of Kris Kringle. A hot and fleering grin had pulled his lips back from his teeth into something close to a snarl. The teeth were white and sharp and neat, like the teeth of a weasel.

He raised his hands out from his body. Both of them were curled into fists, as tight and hard as knots on an apple tree. His grin remained, jolly and utterly hideous. Drops of blood began to fall from his fists.

The words dried up in her mind. Her fingers forgot how to play; there was a final discordant jangle and then silence.

God! God! she cried, but God had turned His face away.

Then Ben Conveigh was standing up, his face red and flaming, his small pig’s eyes glittering. Nigger bitch! he shouted. What’s that nigger bitch doing up on our stage? No nigger bitch ever brought music from the air! No nigger bitch ever brought water from the rock!

Answering cries of savage agreement. People surging forward. She saw her husband stand up and attempt to mount the stage. A fist hit him in the mouth, bowling him over backward.

Get those dirty coons in the back of the hall! Bill Arnold hollered, and somebody pushed Rebecca Freemantle into the wall. Someone else—Chet Deacon, by the looks—wrapped one of the red velvet window curtains around Rebecca and then tied her in with one of the gold ropes. He was yelling: Looka here! Dressed coon! Dressed coon!

Others rushed over to where Chet Deacon was, and they all began to punch and pummel the struggling woman under the velvet drape.

Mamma! Abby screamed.

The guitar was plucked from her nerveless fingers and smashed to strips and strings on the edge of the stage.

She looked wildly for the dark man at the back of the hall, but his engine had been set in motion and was running sweet and hot; he had gone on to some other place.

Mamma! she screamed again, and then rough hands were hauling her from the stage, they were under her dress, pawing her, tweaking her, pinching her bottom. Her hand was pulled sharply by someone, yanking her arm in her socket. It was put against something hard and hot.

Ben Conveigh’s voice in her ear: How do you like MY rock of ages, you nigger slut?

The room was whirling. She saw her father struggling to get at the limp form of her mother, and she saw a white hand holding a bottle come down on the back of a folding camp chair. There was a rattle and a smash, and then the jagged neck of the bottle, twinkling in the warm glow of all those lamps, was thrust into her father’s face. She saw his staring, bulging eyes pop like grapes.

She screamed and the force of her cry seemed to break the room apart, to let in darkness, and she was Mother Abagail again one hundred and eight years old, too old, my Lord, too old (but let Thy will be done), and she was walking in the corn, the mystic corn that was rooted shallow in the earth but wide, lost in the corn that was silver with moonglow and black with shadow; she could hear the summer nightwind rustling gently through it, she could smell its growing, wholly alive smell as she had smelled it all her long, long life (and she had thought many times that this was the plant closest to all life, the corn, and its smell was the smell of life itself, the start of life, oh she had married and buried three husbands, David Trotts, Henry Hardesty, and Nate Brooks, and she had had three men in bed, had welcomed them as a woman must welcome a man, by giving way before him, and there had always been the yearning pleasure, the thought Oh my God how I love to be sexy with my man and how I love him to be sexy with me when he gets me what he gets me what he shoots in me and sometimes at the instant of her climax she would think of the corn, the bland corn with its roots planted not deep but wide, she would think of flesh and then the corn, when it was all over and her husband lay beside her the sex smell would be in the room, the smell of the spunk the man had shot into her, the smell of the juices she made to smooth his way, and it was a smell like husked corn, mild and sweet, a goodish smell).

And yet she was afraid, ashamed of this very intimacy with soil and summer and growing things, because she was not alone. He was here with her, two rows to the right or left, trailing just behind or ranging just ahead. The dark man was here, his dusty boots digging into the meat of the soil and throwing it away in clouts, grinning in the night like a stormlamp.

Then he spoke, for the first time he spoke aloud, and she could see his moonshadow, tall and hunched and grotesque, falling into the row she was walking. His voice was like the night wind that begins to moan through the old and fleshless cornstalks in October, like the very rattling of those old white infertile cornstalks themselves as they seem to speak of their end. It was a soft voice. It was the voice of doom.

It said: I have your blood in my fists, old Mother. If you pray to God, pray He takes you before you ever hear my feet coming up your steps. It was not you who brought music from the air, not you who brought water from the rock, and your blood is in my fists.

Then she was awake, awake in the hour before dawn, and at first she thought she had peed the bed, but it was only a night sweat, heavy as May dew. Her thin body was shuddering helplessly, and every part of her ached for rest.

My Lord, my Lord, take this cup from my lips.

Her Lord did not answer. There was only the light knocking of the early morning wind at the windowpanes, which were loose and rattling and in need of fresh putty. At last she got up and poked up the fire in her old woodburning stove and put on the coffee.

She had a great deal to do in the next few days, because she was going to have company. Dreams or not, tired or not, she had never been one to slight company and she didn’t intend to start now. But she would have to go very slowly or she would get forgetting things—she forgot a lot these days—and misplacing things until she ended up chasing her own tail.

The first thing was to get down to Addie Richardson’s henhouse, and that was a goodish way, four or five miles. She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send her an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send Elijah in his fiery chariot to give her a lift.

“Blasphemy,” she told herself complacently. “The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs.”

When her few dishes were washed, she put on her heavy shoes and took her cane. Even now she rarely used the cane, but today she would need it. Four miles going, four miles coming back. At sixteen she could have dashed one way and trotted the other, but sixteen was far behind her now.

She set off at eight o’clock in the morning, hoping to reach the Richardson farm by noon and sleep through the hottest part of the day. In the late afternoon she would kill her chickens and then come home in the gloaming. She wouldn’t arrive until after dark, and that made her think of her dream of the night before, but that man was still far away. Her company was much closer.

She walked very slowly, even more slowly than she felt she had to, because even at eight-thirty the sun was fat and powerful. She didn’t sweat much—there wasn’t enough excess flesh on her bones to wring the sweat out of—but by the time she’d reached the Goodells’ mailbox, she had to rest a bit. She sat in the shade of their pepper tree and ate a few fig bars. Not an eagle or a taxicab in sight, either. She cackled a little at that, got up, brushed the crumbs off her dress, and went on. Nope, no taxicabs. The Lord helped those that helped themselves. All the same, she could feel all of her joints tuning up; tonight there would be a concert.

She hunched more and more over her cane as she went, even though her wrists began to be a misery to her. Her brogans with the yellow rawhide lacings shuffled in the dust. The sun beat down on her, and as the time passed, her shadow got shorter and shorter. She saw more wild animals that morning than she had seen since the twenties: fox, coon, porcupine, fisher. Crows were everywhere, squalling and cawing and circling in the sky. If she had been around to hear Stu Redman and Glen Bateman discussing the capricious—it had seemed capricious to them, anyhow—way the superflu had taken some animals while leaving others alone, she would have laughed. It had taken the domestic animals and left the wild ones alone, it was as simple as that. A few species of domestics had been spared, but as a general rule, the plague had taken man and man’s best friends. It had taken the dogs but left the wolves, because the wolves were wild and the dogs weren’t.

A red-hot sparkplug of pain had settled deep into each of her hips, behind each knee, in her ankles, in the wrists she was using to support herself on the cane. She walked and she talked to her God, sometimes silently, sometimes aloud, unaware of any difference between the two. And she fell to thinking about her own past again. 1902 had been the best year, all right. After that it seemed that time sped up, the pages of some big fat calendar ruffling over and over, hardly ever pausing. A body’s life went by so fast… how was it a body could get so tired of living it?

She’d had five children by Davy Trotts; one of them, Maybelle, had choked to death on a piece of apple in the back yard of the Old Place. Abby had been hanging clothes and she had turned around to see the baby lying on her back, clawing at her throat and turning purple. She had gotten the chunk of apple out at last, but by then little Maybelle had been still and cold, the only girl she had ever borne and the only one of her many children to die an accidental death.

Now she sat in the shade of an elm just inside the Nauglers’ fence, and two hundred yards up the road she could see where dirt gave way to tar—this was the place where Freemantle Road became Polk County Road. The heat of the day made a shimmer over the tar, and at the horizon was quicksilver, shining like water in a dream. On a hot day you always saw that quicksilver just at the end of where your eye could see, but you never quite caught up to it. Or at least she never had…

David had died in 1913, of an influenza not so very different from this one, which had wiped out so many. In 1916, when she had been thirty-four, she had married Henry Hardesty, a black farmer from Wheeler County up north. He had come to court her special. Henry was a widower with seven children, all but two of them grown up and gone away. He was seven years older than Abagail. He had given her two boys before his tractor turned turtle on him and killed him in the late summer of 1925.

A year after that she had married Nate Brooks, and people had talked—oh yes, people talk, how people do love to talk, sometimes it seemed that was all they had to do. Nate had been Henry Hardesty’s hired man, and he had been a good husband to her. Not as sweet as David, perhaps, and surely not as tenacious as Henry, but a good man who had pretty much done as she had told him. When a woman began to get a trifle along in years, it was a comfort to know who had the upper hand.

Her six boys had produced a crop of thirty-two grandchildren for her. Her thirty-two grandchildren had produced ninety-one great-grandchildren that she knew of, and at the time of the superflu, she had had three great-great-grandchildren. Would have had more, if not for the pills the girls took these days to keep the babies away. It seemed like for them, being sexy was just another playground to be in. Abagail felt sorry for them in their modern ways, but she never spoke of it. It was up to God to judge whether or not they were sinning by taking those pills (and not to that baldheaded old fart in Rome—Mother Abagail had been a Methodist all her life, and she was damned proud of not having any truck with those mackerel-snapping Catholics), but Abagail knew what they were missing: the ecstasy which comes when you stand on the lip of the Valley of the Shadow, the ecstasy that comes when you gave yourself up to your man and your God, when you say thy will be done and Thy will be done; the final ecstasy of sex in the sight of the Lord, when a man and a woman relive the old sin of Adam and Eve, only now washed and sanctified in the Blood of the Lamb.

Ah, welladay…

She wanted a drink of water, she wanted to be home in her rocker, she wanted to be left alone. Now she could see the sun glinting off the henhouse roof ahead to her left. A mile, no more. It was quarter past ten, and she wasn’t doing too badly for an old gal. She would let herself in and sleep until the cool of the evening. No sin in that. Not at her age. She shuffled along the shoulder, her heavy shoes now coated with road-dust.

Well, she had had a lot of kin to bless her in her old age, and that was something. There were some, like Linda and that no-account salesman she had married, who didn’t care to come calling, but there were the good ones like Molly and Jim and David and Cathy, enough to make up for a thousand Lindas and no-account salesmen who went door to door selling waterless cookware. The last of her brothers, Luke, had died in 1949, at the age of eightysomething, and the last of her children, Samuel, in 1974, at the age of fifty-four. She had outlived all of her children, and that was not the way it was supposed to be, but it seemed like the Lord had special plans for her.

In 1982, when she had turned one hundred, her picture had been in the Omaha paper and they had sent out a TV reporter to do a story on her. “To what do you attribute your great age?” the young man had asked her, and he had looked disappointed at her brief, almost curt answer: “To God.” They wanted to hear about how she ate beeswax, or stayed away from fried pork, or how she kept her legs up when she slept. But she did none of those things, and was she to lie? God gives life and He takes it away when He wants.

Cathy and David had given her her TV so she could watch herself on the news, and she got a letter from President Reagan (no spring chicken himself) congratulating her on her “advanced age” and the fact that she had voted Republican for as long as she’d had a vote to cast. Well, who else would she vote for? Roosevelt and his crowd had all been Communists. And when she turned the century, the town of Hemingford Home had repealed her taxes “in perpetuity” because of that same advanced age Ronald Reagan had congratulated her for. She got a paper certifying her as the oldest living person in Nebraska, as if that was something little children grew up hoping to be. It was a good thing about the taxes, though, even if the rest of it had been purest foolishness—if they hadn’t done that, she would have lost what little land she still had. Most of it had been long gone anyway; the Freemantle holdings and the power of the Grange had both reached high water in that magic year of 1902 and had been declining ever since. Four acres was all that was left. The rest had either been taken for taxes or sold off for cash over the years… and most of the selling had been done by her own sons, she was ashamed to say.

Last year she had been sent a paper by some New York combination that called itself the American Geriatrics Society. The paper said she was the sixth-oldest human being in the United States, and the third-oldest woman. The oldest of them all was a fellow in Santa Rosa, California. The fellow in Santa Rosa was a hundred and twenty-two. She had gotten Jim to put that letter in a frame for her and hang it beside the letter from the President. Jim hadn’t got around to doing that until this February. Now that she thought about it, that had been the last time she saw Molly and Jim.

She had reached the Richardson farm. Almost completely exhausted, she leaned for a moment against the fencepost closest to the barn and looked longingly at the house. It would be cool inside there, cool and nice. She felt she could sleep an age. Yet before she could do that, there was one more thing she had to do. A lot of animals had died with this disease—horses, dogs, and rats—and she had to know if chickens were among them. It would be a bitter laugh on her to discover she had come all this way to find only dead chicken.

She shuffled toward the henhouse, which was attached to the barn, and stopped when she could hear them cackling inside. A moment later a cock crowed irritably.

“All right,” she muttered. “That’s good, then.”

She was turning around when she saw the body sprawled by the woodpile, one hand thrown over his face. It was Bill Richardson, Addie’s brother-in-law. He had been well picked over by foraging animals.

“Poor man,” Abagail said. “Poor, poor man. Flights of angels sing you to y’rest, Billy Richardson.”

She turned back to the cool, inviting house. It seemed miles away, although in reality it was only across the dooryard. She wasn’t sure she could make it that far; she was utterly exhausted.

“Lord’s will be done,” she said, and began to walk.

The sun was shining in the window of the guest bedroom, where she had lain down and fallen asleep as soon as her brogans were off. For along time she couldn’t understand why the light was so bright; it was much the feeling Larry Underwood had had upon awakening beside the rock wall in New Hampshire.

She sat up, every strained muscle and fragile bone in her body crying out. “God A’mighty, done slep the afternoon and the whole night through!”

If that was so, she must have been tired indeed. She was so lamed up now that it took her almost ten minutes to get out of bed and go down the hall to the bathroom; another ten to get her shoes on her feet. Walking was agony, but she knew she must walk. If she didn’t, that stiffness would settle in like iron.

Limping and hobbling, she crossed to the henhouse and went inside, wincing at the explosive hotness, the smell of fowls, and the inevitable smell of decomposition. The water supply was automatic, fed from the Richardsons’ artesian well by a gravity pump, but most of the feed had been used up and the heat itself had killed many of the birds. The weakest had long ago been starved or pecked to death, and they lay around the feed– and droppings-spotted floor like small drifts of sadly melting snow.

Most of the remaining chickens fled before her approach with a great flapping of wings, but those that were broody only sat and blinked at her slow, shuffling approach with their stupid eyes. There were so many diseases that killed chickens that she had been afraid that the flu might have carried them off, but these looked all right. The Lord had provided.

She took three of the plumpest and made them stick their heads under their wings. They went immediately to sleep. She bundled them into a sack and then found she was too stiff to actually lift it. She had to drag it along the floor.

The other chickens watched her cautiously from their high vantage points until the old woman was gone, then went back to their vicious squabbling over the diminishing feed.

It was now close to nine in the morning. She sat down on the bench that ran in a circle around the Richardsons’ dooryard oak to think. It seemed to her that her original idea, to go home in the cool of dusk, was still best. She had lost a day, but her company was still coming. She could use this day to take care of the chickens and rest.

Her muscles were already riding a little easier against her bones, and there was an unfamiliar but rather pleasant gnawing sensation below her breastbone. It took her several moments to realize what it was… she was hungry! This morning she was actually hungry, praise God, and how long had it been since she had eaten for any reason other than force of habit? She’d been like a locomotive fireman stoking coal, no more. But when she had parted these three chickens from their heads, she would see what Addie had left in her pantry, and by the blessed Lord, she would enjoy what she found. You see? she lectured herself. The Lord knows best. Blessed assurance, Abagail, blessed assurance.

Grunting and puffing, she dragged her towsack around to the chopping block that stood between the barn and the woodshed. Just inside the woodshed door she found Billy Richardson’s Son House hanging on a couple of pegs, its rubber glove snugged neatly down over the blade. She took it and went back out.

“Now Lord,” she said, standing over the towsack in her dusty yellow workshoes and looking up at the cloudless midsummer sky, “You have given me the strength to walk up here, and I’m believin You’ll give me the strength to walk back. Your prophet Isaiah says that if a man or woman believes in the Lord God of Hosts, he shall mount up with wings as eagles. I don’t know nothin much about eagles, my Lord, except they are mostly ugly-natured birds who can see a long ways, but I got three broilers in this bag and I should like to whack off their heads and not m’own hand. Thy will be done, amen.”

She picked up the towsack, opened it, and peered down. One of the hens still had her head under her wing, fast asleep. The other two had squashed against each other, not moving much. It was dark in the sack and the hens thought it was nighttime. The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat.

Abagail plucked one out and laid it across the block before it knew what was happening. She brought the hatchet down hard, wincing as she always had at the final mortal thud of the blade biting through to wood. The head fell into the dust on one side of the chopping block. The headless chicken strutted off into the Richardsons’ dooryard, blood spouting, wings fluttering. After a bit it found out it was dead and lay down decently. Broody hens and New York Democrats, my Lord, my Lord.

Then the job was done and all her worrying that she might botch it or hurt herself doing it had been for nothing. God had heard her prayer. Three good chickens, and now all she had to do was get home with them.

She put the birds back into the towsack and then hung Billy Richardson’s Son House hatchet back up. Then she went into the farmhouse again to see what there might be to eat.

She napped during the early part of the afternoon and dreamed that her company was getting closer now; they were just south of York, coming along in an old pickup truck. There were six of them, one of them a boy who was deaf and dumb. But a powerful boy, all the same. He was one of the ones she would have to talk to.

She woke around three-thirty, a little stiff but otherwise feeling rested and refreshed. For the next two and a half hours she plucked the chickens, resting when the work put too much misery into her arthritic fingers, then going on. She sang hymns while she worked—“Seven Gates to the City (My Lord Hallelu’),” “Trust and Obey,” and her own favorite, “In the Garden.”

When she finished the last chicken, each of her fingers had a migraine headache and the daylight had begun to take on that still and golden hue that means twilight’s outrider has arrived. Late July now, and the days were shortening down again.

She went inside and had another bite. The bread was stale but not moldy—no mold would ever dare show its green face in Addie Richardson’s kitchen—and she found a half-used jar of smooth peanut butter. She ate a peanut butter sandwich and made up another, which she put in her dress pocket in case she got hungry later.

It was now twenty to seven. She went back out again, gathered up her towsack, and went carefully down the porch steps. She had plucked neatly into another sack, but a few feathers had escaped and now fluttered from the Richardsons’ hedge, which was drying for lack of water.

Abagail sighed heavily and said: “I’m off, Lord. Headed home. I’ll be going slow, don’t reckon to get there until midnight or so, but the Book says fear neither the terror of night nor that which flieth at noonday. I’m in the way of doing Your will as best I know it. Walk with me, please. Jesus’ sake, amen.”

By the time she reached the place where the tar stopped and the road went to dirt, it was full dark. Crickets sang and frogs croaked down in some wet place, probably Cal Goodell’s cowpond. There was going to be a moon, a big red one, the color of blood until it got up in the sky a ways.

She sat down to rest and eat half of her peanut butter sandwich (and what she would have done for some nice black-currant jelly to cut that sticky taste, but Addie kept her preserves down cellar and that was just too many stairs). The towsack was beside her. She ached again and her strength seemed just about gone with two and a half miles before her still to walk… but she felt strangely exhilarated. How long since she had been out after dark, under the canopy of the stars? They shone just as bright as ever, and if her luck was in she might see a falling star to wish on. A warm night like this, the stars, the summer moon just peeking his red lover’s face over the horizon, it made her remember her girlhood again with all its strange fits and starts, its heats, its gorgeous vulnerability as it stood on the edge of the Mystery. Oh, she had been a girl. There were those who would not believe it, just as they were unable to believe that the giant sequoia had ever been a green sprout. But she had been a girl, and in those times the childhood fears of the night had faded a little and the adult fears that came in the night when everything is silent and you can hear the voice of your eternal soul, those fears were yet down the road. In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life. It seemed you would be forever young and that—

Your blood is in my fists.

There was a sudden sharp tug at her sack, making her heart jump.

“Hi!” she shrieked in her cracked and startled old woman’s voice. She yanked the bag back to her with a small rip in the bottom.

There was a low growling sound. Crouched on the verge of the road, between the gravel shoulder and the corn, was a large brown weasel. Its eyes rolled at her, picking up red glints of moonlight. It was joined by another. And another. And another.

She looked at the other side of the road and saw that it was lined with them, their mean eyes speculative. They were smelling the chickens in the bag. How could so many of them have crept around her? she wondered with mounting fear. She had been bitten by a weasel once; she had reached under the porch of the Big House to get a red rubber ball that had rolled under there, and something which felt like a mouthful of needles had fastened on her forearm. The unexpected viciousness of it, agony jumping red-hot and vital out of the humdrum order of things, had made her shriek as much as the actual pain. She had drawn her arm back and the weasel had been hanging from it with her blood beaded on its smooth brown fur, its body whipping back and forth in the air like a snake’s body. She had screamed and waved her arm, but the weasel had not let go; it seemed to have become a part of her.

Her brothers Micah and Matthew had been in the yard; her father had been on the porch, looking at a mail-order catalogue. They had all come running and for a moment they had been struck frozen by the sight of Abagail, then just twelve, tearing around the clearing where the barn was to shortly go up, the brown weasel hanging down from her arm like a stole with its back paws digging for purchase in the thin air. Blood had fallen onto her dress, legs, end shoes in a pattering shower.

It was her father who had acted first. John Freemantle had picked up a chunk of stovewood from beside the chopping block and had bawled: “Stand still, Abby! ” His voice, which had been the voice of ultimate command ever since her babyhood, had cut through the yatter and babble of panic in her mind when probably nothing else could have done. She stood still and the stovelength came whistling down and a jolting agony went all the way up to her shoulder (she had thought her arm was broken for sure) and then the brown Thing which had caused her such agony and surprise—in the horrid heat of those few moments the two feelings had been completely interchangeable—was lying on the ground, its fur streaked and matted with her blood and then Micah jumped straight up into the air and came down on it with both feet and there was a horrid final crunching sound like the sound hard candy made in your head when you crunched it between your teeth and if it hadn’t been dead before, it surely was then. Abagail had not fainted, but she had gone into sobbing, screaming hysterics.

By then Richard, the oldest son, had come running, his face pale and scared. He and his father exchanged a sober, frightened glance.

“I never saw a weasel do nothing like that in all my life,” John Freemantle said, holding his sobbing daughter by the shoulders. “Thank God your mother was up the road with them beans.”

“Maybe it was r—” Richard began.

“You hesh your mouth,” his father rode in before Richard could go any further. His voice had been cold and furious and frightened all at the same time. And Richard did hesh his mouth—closed it so fast and hard, in fact, that Abby had heard it snap shut. Then her father said to her, “Let’s take you on over to the pump, Abagail, honey, and wash that mess out.”

It was a year later that Luke told her what their father hadn’t wanted Richard to say right out loud: that the weasel must almost surely have been rabid to do a thing like that, and if it had been, she would have died one of the most horrible deaths, aside from outright torture, of which men knew. But the weasel had not been rabid; the wound had healed clean. All the same, she had been terrified of the creatures from that day to this, terrified in the way some people are terrified of rats and spiders. If only the plague had taken them instead of the dogs! But it hadn’t, and she was—

Your blood is in my fists.

One of them darted forward and tore at the rough hem of the towsack.

“Hi! ” she screamed at it. The weasel darted away, seeming to grin, a thread of the bag hanging from its chops.

He had sent them—the dark man.

Terror engulfed her. There were hundreds of them now, gray ones, brown ones, black ones, all of them smelling chicken. They lined both sides of the road, squirming over each other in their eagerness to get at some of what they smelled.

I got to give it to them. It was all for nothing. If I don’t give it to them, they’ll rip me to pieces to get it. All for nothing.

In the darkness of her mind she could see the dark man’s grin, she could see his fists held out and the blood dripping from them.

Another tug at the bag. And another.

The weasels on the far side of the road were now squirming across toward her, low, their bellies in the dust. Their little savage eyes glinted like icepicks in the moonlight.

But whosoever believeth on Me, behold, he shall not perish… for I have put My sign on him and no thing shall touch him… he is Mine, saith the Lord…

She stood up, still terrified, but now sure of what she must do. “Get out!” she cried. “It’s chicken, all right, but it’s for my company! Now you all git! ”

They drew back. Their little eyes seemed to fill with unease. And suddenly they were gone like drifting smoke. A miracle, she thought, and exultation and praise for the Lord filled her. Then, suddenly, she was cold.

Somewhere, far to the west, beyond the Rockies that were not even visible on the horizon, she felt an eye—some glittering Eye—suddenly open wide and turn toward her, searching. As clearly as if the words had been spoken aloud she heard him: Who’s there? Is it you, old woman?

“He knows I’m here,” she whispered in the night. “Oh help me, Lord. Help me now, help all of us.”

Dragging the towsack, she began to walk home again.

They showed up two days later, on July 24. She hadn’t got as much done as she would have liked in the way of preparations; once again she was lame and almost laid up, able to hobble from one place to another only with the aid of her cane and hardly able to pump water up from the well. The day after killing the chickens and standing off the weasels, she had fallen asleep for a long time in the afternoon, exhausted. She dreamed she was in some high cold pass in the middle of the Rockies, west of the Continental Divide. Highway 6 stretched and twisted between high rock walls that shaded this gap all day long, except from about eleven forty-five in the morning until about twelve-fifty in the afternoon. It was not daylight in her dream but full, moonless dark. Somewhere, wolves were howling. And suddenly an Eye had opened in all that darkness, rolling horribly from one side to the other while the wind moved lonesomely through the pines and the blue mountain spruce. It was him, and he was looking for her.

She had awakened from that long, heavy nap feeling less rested than she had when she lay down, and again she prayed to God to let her off, or at least change the direction He wanted her to go in.

North, south, or east, Lord, and I’ll leave Hemingford Home singing Your praises. But not west, not toward that dark man. The Rockies ain’t enough to have between him and us. The Andes wouldn’t be enough.

But it didn’t matter. Sooner or later, when that man felt he was strong enough, he would come looking for those who would stand against him. If not this year, then next. The dogs were gone, carried off by the plague, but the wolves remained in the high mountain country, ready to serve the Imp of Satan.

And it was not just the wolves that would serve him.

On the morning of the day her company finally arrived she had begun at seven, lugging wood two sticks at a time until the stove was hot and her woodbox full. God had favored her with a cool, cloudy day, the first in weeks. By nightfall there might be rain. The hip she’d broken in 1958 said so, anyway.

She baked her pies first, using the canned fillings from the shelves in her pantry and the fresh rhubarb and strawberries from the garden. The strawberries had just come on, praise God, and it was good to know they weren’t going to go to waste. Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life. A blueberry pie, two strawberry-rhubarb, and one apple. The smell of them filled the morning kitchen. She set them on the kitchen windowsills to cool as she had all her life.

She made the best batter she could, although it was hard going with no fresh eggs—there she’d been, right in the henhouse, and she had no one to blame but herself. Eggs or no, by early afternoon the small kitchen with its hilly floor and faded linoleum was filled with the smell of frying chicken. It had gotten pretty toasty inside and so she hobbled out to the porch to read her daily lesson, using her dog-eared last copy of The Upper Room to fan her face.

The chicken came out just as light and nice as you could want. One of those fellows could go out and pick her two dozen butter-and-sugar ears of corn, and they would have themselves a good sit-down feed outside.

After the chicken was put on paper towels, she went on out to the back porch with her guitar, sat down, and began to play. She sang all her favorite hymns, her high and quivering voice drifting into the still air.

Have we trials and temptations,

Are we cumbered with a load of care?

We must never be discouraged,

Take it to the Lord in prayer.

The music sounded so fine to her (even though her ear had failed to a degree where she could never be sure her old git was in tune) that she played another hymn, and another, and another.

She was settling down to “We Are Marching to Zion” when she heard the sound of an engine off to the north, coming down County Road toward her. She stopped singing but her fingers continued to twiddle absently on the strings as she cocked her head and listened. Coming, yes Lord, they found their way just fine, and now she could see the spume of dust the truck was throwing as it left the tar and came onto the dirt track that stopped in her dooryard. A great, welcoming excitement filled her and she was glad she had put on her for-best. She put her git between her knees and shaded her eyes, although there was still no sun.

Now the engine sound was much louder and in a moment, where the corn gave way for Cal Goodell’s cattle wade—

Yes, she could see it, an old Chevrolet farm truck, moving slow. The cab was full; four people crammed in there by the looks (there was nothing wrong with her long vision, even at a hundred and eight), and three more in the truckbed, standing up and looking over the cab. She could see a thinnish blond man, a girl with red hair, and in the middle… yes, that was him, a boy who was just finishing up learning about being a man. Dark hair, narrow face, high forehead. He saw her sitting on her porch and began to wave frantically. A moment later the blond man copied him. The redheaded girl just looked. Mother Abagail raised her own hand and waved back.

“Praise God for bringin em through,” she muttered hoarsely. Tears coursed warmly down her cheeks. “My Lord, I thank You so.”

The pickup, rattling and jouncing, turned into the yard. The man behind the wheel was wearing a straw hat with a blue velvet band and a big feather tucked into it.

“Yeeeeee-haw! ” he shouted, and waved. “Hi there, Mother! Nick said he thought you might be here and here you be! Yeeeeee-haw! ” He laid on the horn. Sitting with him in the cab was a man of about fifty, a woman of the same age, and a little girl in a red corduroy jumper. The little girl waved shyly with one hand; the thumb of the other was corked securely in her mouth.

The young man with the eyepatch and the dark hair—Nick—jumped over the side of the truck even before it had stopped. He caught his balance and then walked slowly toward her. His face was solemn, but his eye was alight with joy. He stopped at the porch steps and then looked around wonderingly… at the yard, the house, the old tree with its tire swing. Most of all at her.

“Hello, Nick,” she said. “I’m glad to see you. God bless.”

He smiled, now beginning to shed his own tears. He came up the steps toward her and took her hands. She turned her wrinkled cheek toward him and he kissed it gently. Behind him, the truck had stopped and everyone got out. The man who had been driving was holding the girl in the red jumper, who had a cast on her right leg. Her arms were linked firmly around the driver’s sunburned neck. Next to him stood the fiftyish woman, next to her the redhead and the blond boy with the beard. No, not a boy, Mother Abagail thought; he’s feeble. Last in line stood the other man who had been riding in the cab. He was polishing the lenses of his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

Nick was looking at her urgently, and she nodded.

“You done just right,” she said. “The Lord has brought you and Mother Abagail is going to feed you.

“You’re all welcome here!” she added, raising her voice. “We can’t stay long, but before we do any moving on, we’ll rest, and break bread together, and have some fellowship one with the other.”

The little girl piped up from the safety of the driver’s arms: “Are you the oldest lady in the world?”

The fiftyish woman said: “Shhhh, Gina!”

But Mother Abagail only put a hand on her hip and laughed. “Mayhap I am, child. Mayhap I am.”

She got them to spread her red-checked tablecloth on the far side of the apple tree and the two women, Olivia and June, spread the picnic lunch while the men went off to pick corn. It was short work to boil it up, and while there was no real butter, she had plenty of oleo and salt.

There was little talk during the meal—mostly the sound of chomping jaws and little grunts of pleasure. It did her heart good to see folks dig into a meal, and these folks were doing her spread full justice. It made her walk to Richardsons’ and her tussle with those weasels seem more than worthwhile. It wasn’t that they were hungry, exactly, but when you’ve spent a month eating almost nothing that hasn’t come out of a can, you get a powerful hunger for something fresh and just cooked special. She herself put away three pieces of chicken, an ear of cons, and a little smidge of that strawberry-rhubarb pie. When it was all gone, she felt as full as a bedtick in a mattress.

When they got settled and the coffee was poured, the driver, a pleasant, open-faced man named Ralph Brentner, told her: “That was one dilly of a meal, ma’am. I can’t remember when anything hit the spot so good. Thanks are in order.”

The others murmured agreement. Nick smiled and nodded.

The little girl said, “Can I come and sit with you, grammylady?”

“I think you’d be too heavy, honey,” the older woman, Olivia Walker, said.

“Nonsense,” Abagail said. “The day I can’t take a little one on my lap for a spell will be the day they wind me in my shroud. Come on over, Gina.”

Ralph carried her over and set her down. “When she gets too heavy, you just tell me.” He tickled Gina’s face with the feather in his hatband. She put up her hands and giggled. “Don’t tickle me, Ralph! Don’t you dare tickle me!”

“Don’t worry,” Ralph said, relenting. “I’m too full to tickle anyone for long.” He sat down again.

“What happened to your leg, Gina?” Abagail asked.

“I broke it when I fell out of the barn,” Gina said. “Dick fixed it. Ralph says Dick saved my life.” She blew a kiss to the man with the steel-rimmed glasses, who blushed a bit, coughed, and smiled.

Nick, Tom Cullen, and Ralph had happened on Dick Ellis halfway across Kansas, walking along the side of the road with a pack on his back and a hiking staff in one hand. He was a veterinarian. The next day, passing through the small town of Lindsborg, they had stopped for lunch and heard weak cries coming from the south side of town. If the wind had been blowing the other way, they never would have heard the cries at all.

“God’s mercy,” Abby said complacently, stroking the little girl’s hair.

Gina had been on her own for three weeks. She’d been playing in the hayloft of her uncle’s barn a day or two before when the rotted flooring gave way, spilling her forty feet into the lower haymow. There had been hay in it to break her fall, but she had cartwheeled off it and broken her leg. At first Dick Ellis had been pessimistic about her chances. He gave her a local anesthetic to set the leg; she had lost so much weight and her overall physical condition was so poor he had been afraid a general would kill her (the key words in this conversation were spelled out while Gina McCone played unconcernedly with the buttons on Mother Abagail’s dress).

Gina had bounced back with a speed that had surprised them all. She had formed an instant attachment for Ralph and his jaunty hat. Speaking in a low, diffident voice, Ellis said he suspected that a lot of her problem had been crushing loneliness.

“Course it was,” Abagail said. “If you’d missed her, she would have just pined away.”

Gina yawned. Her eyes were large and glassy.

“I’ll take her now,” Olivia Walker said.

“Put her in the little room at the end of the hall,” Abby said. “You can sleep with her, if that’s what you want. This other girl… what did you say your name was, honey? It’s slipped my mind for sure.”

“June Brinkmeyer,” the redhead said.

“Well, you c’n sleep with me, June, unless you’ve some other mind. The bed ain’t big enough for two, and I don’t think you’d want to sleep with an old bundle of sticks like me even if it was, but there’s a mattress put away overhead that should do you if the bugs ain’t got into it. One of these big men will get it down for you, I guess.”

“Sure,” Ralph said.

Olivia carried Gina, who had already fallen asleep, away to bed. The kitchen, now more populated than it had been for years, was filling up with dusk. Grunting, Mother Abagail got to her feet and lit three oil-lamps, one for the table, one which she set on the stove (the cast-iron Blackwood was now cooling and ticking contentedly to itself), and one for the porch windowsill. The darkness was pushed back.

“Maybe the old ways are best,” Dick said abruptly, and they all looked at him. He blushed and coughed again, but Abagail only chuckled.

“I mean,” Dick went on a little defensively, “that’s the first home-cooked meal I’ve had since… well, since June thirtieth, I guess. The day the power went off. And I cooked that myself. What I do could hardly be called home cooking. My wife, now… she was one hell of a good cook. She…” He trailed off blankly.

Olivia came back in. “Fast asleep,” she said. “That was a tired girl.”

“Do you bake your own bread?” Dick asked Mother Abagail.

“Course I do. Always have. Of course, it ain’t yeast bread; ail the yeast has gone over. But there’s other kinds.”

“I crave bread,” he said simply. “Helen… my wife… used to make bread twice a week. Just lately it seems to be all I want. Give me three slices of bread and some strawberry jam and I think I could die happy.”

“Tom Cullen’s tired,” Tom said abruptly. “M-O-O-N, that spells tired.” He yawned bone-crackingly.

“You can bed down in the shed,” Abagail said. “It smells a bit musty, but it’s dry.”

For a moment they listened to the steady rustle of the rain, which had been falling for almost an hour now. Alone, it would have been a desolate sound. In company it was a pleasant, secret sound, closing them in together. It gurgled from the galvanized tin gutters and plopped in the rain barrel Abby still kept on the far side of the house. Thunder muttered far away, back over Iowa.

“I guess you got your campin gear?” she asked them.

“All kinds,” Ralph said. “We’ll be fine. Come on, Tom.” He stood up.

“I wonder,” Abagail said, “if you and Nick would stay a bit, Ralph.”

Nick had been sitting at the table through all of this, on the far side of the room from her rocking chair. You would think, she mused, that if a man couldn’t talk he would get lost in a roomful of people, that he would just sink from view. But something about Nick kept that from happening. He sat perfectly still, following the conversation as it traveled around the room, his face reacting to whatever was being said. That face was open and intelligent, but careworn for one so young. Several times as the talk went on she saw people look at him, as if Nick could confirm what he or she was saying. They were very much aware of him, too. And several times she had seen him looking out the window into the dark, his expression troubled.

“Could you get me that mattress?” June asked softly.

“Nick and I will get it,” Ralph said, standing up.

“I don’t want to go out in that back shed all by myself,” Tom said. “Laws, no!”

“I’ll go out with you, hoss,” Dick said. “We’ll light the Coleman lamp and bed down.” He rose. “Thanks again, ma’am. Can’t tell you how good all this has been.”

The others echoed his thanks. Nick and Ralph got the mattress, which proved to be bug-free. Tom and Dick—needing only a Harry to fill em up, Abagail thought—went out to the shed, where the Coleman lantern soon flared. Not long after, Nick, Ralph, and Mother Abagail were left alone in the kitchen.

“Mind if I smoke, ma’am?” Ralph asked.

“Not so long as you don’t tap ashes on the floor. There’s an ashtray in that cupboard right behind you.”

Ralph got up to get it, and Abby was left looking at Nick. He was wearing a khaki shirt, bluejeans, and a faded drill vest. There was something about him that made her feel she had known him before, or had always been meant to know him. Looking at him, she felt a quiet sense of knowledge and completion, as if this moment had been simple fate. As if, at one end of her life there had been her father, John Freemantle, tall and black and proud, and this man at the other end, young, white, and mute, with that one brilliant, expressive eye looking at her from that careworn face.

She looked out the window and saw the glow of the Coleman battery lamp drifting out of the shed window and lighting a little piece of her dooryard. She wondered if that shed still smelled of cow; she hadn’t been out there for close on to three years. No need to. Her last cow, Daisy, had been sold in 1975, but in 1987 the shed had still smelled of cow. Probably did to this day. No matter; there were worse smells.

“Ma’am?”

She looked back. Ralph was sitting next to Nick now, holding a sheet of notepaper and squinting at it in the lamplight. On his lap, Nick was holding a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. He was still looking at her closely.

“Nick says…” Ralph cleared his throat, embarrassed.

“Go ahead.”

“His note says it’s hard to read your lips because—”

“I guess I know why,” she said. “No fear.”

She got up and shuffled over to the bureau. On the second shelf above it was a plastic jar, and in it two denture plates floated in cloudy liquid like a medical exhibit.

She fished them out and rinsed them with a dipper of water.

“Lord God I have suffered,” Mother Abagail said balefully, and popped the plates in.

“We got to talk,” she said. “You two are the head ones, and we got some things to sort out.”

“Well,” Ralph said, “it ain’t me. I was never much more than a full-time factory worker and a part-time farmer. I’ve raised a helluva lot more calluses than idears in my time. Nick, I guess he’s in charge.”

“Is that right?” she asked, looking at Nick.

Nick wrote briefly and Ralph read it aloud, as he continued to do.

“It was my idea to come up this way, yes. About being in charge, I don’t know.”

“We met June and Olivia about ninety miles south of here,” Ralph said. “Day before yesterday, wasn’t it, Nick?”

Nick nodded.

“We was on our way to you even then, Mother. The women were headed north, too. So was Dick. We all just threw in together.”

“Have you seen any other folks?” she asked.

“No,” Nick wrote. “But I’ve had a feeling—Ralph has, too—that there are other people hiding, watching us. Afraid, I guess. Still getting over the shock of what’s happened.”

She nodded.

“Dick said that the day before he joined us, he heard a motorcycle somewhere south. So there are other people around. I think what scares them is seeing a fairly big group all together.”

“Why did you come here?” Her eyes, caught in their nets of wrinkles, stared at him keenly.

Nick wrote: “I have dreamed of you. Dick Ellis says he has once. And the little girl, Gina, was calling you ‘grammylady’ long before we got here. She described your place. The tire swing.”

“Bless the child,” Mother Abagail said absently. She looked at Ralph. “You?”

“Once or twice, ma’am,” Ralph said. He wet his lips. “Mostly what I dreamed about was just… just that other fella.”

“What other fella?”

Nick wrote. Circled what he had written. Handed it to her directly. Her eyes were not much good for close work without her specs or the lighted magnifying glass she’d gotten in Hemingford Center last year, but she could read this. It was writ large, like the writing God had put on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace. Circled, it gave her a cold chill just looking at it. She thought of weasels squirming across the road on their bellies, yanking at her towsack with their needle-sharp killers’ teeth. She thought of a single red eye opening, disclosing itself in the darkness, looking, searching, now not just for an old woman but a whole party of men and women… and one little girl.

The two circled words were: dark man.

“I’ve been told,” she said, folding the paper, straightening it, then folding it again, for the time being unmindful of the misery of her arthritis, “that we’re to go west. I’ve been told in a dream, by the Lord God. I didn’t want to listen. I’m an old woman, and all I want to do is die on this little piece of land. It’s been my family’s freehold for a hundred and twelve years, but I wasn’t meant to die here any more than Moses was meant to go over into Canaan with the Children of Israel.”

She paused. The two men watched her soberly in the lamplight, and outside the rain continued to fall, slow and ceaseless. There was no more thunder. Lord, she thought, these dentures hurt my mouth. I want to take them out and go to bed.

“I started having dreams two years before this plague ever fell. I’ve always dreamed, and sometimes my dreams have come true. Prophecy is the gift of God and everyone has a smidge of it. My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shine. In my dreams I saw myself going west. At first with just a few people, then a few more, then a few more. West, always west, until I could see the Rocky Mountains. It got so there was a whole caravan of us, two hundred or more. And there would be signs… no, not signs from God but regular road-signs, and every one of them saying things like BOULDER, COLORADO, 609 MILES or THIS WAY TO BOULDER.”

She paused.

“Those dreams, they scared me. I never told a soul I was havin em, that’s how scared I was. I felt the way I guess Job must have felt when God spoke to him out of the whirlwind. I even tried to pretend they was just dreams, foolish old woman runnin from God the way Jonah did. But the big fish has swallowed us up just the same, you see! And if God says to Abby, You got to tell, then tell I must. And I always felt like someone would come to me, someone special, and that’s how I’d be in the way of knowin the time had come.”

She looked at Nick, who sat at the table and regarded her solemnly with his good eye through the haze of Ralph Brentner’s cigarette smoke.

“I knew when I saw you,” she said. “It’s you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart. But he has more fingers than one, and there’s others out there, still comin on, praise God, and He’s got a finger on them, too. I dream of him, how he’s lookin for us even now, and God forgive my sick spirit, I curse him in my heart.” She began to weep and got up to have a drink of water and a splash. Her tears were the human part of her, weak and flagging.

When she turned back, Nick was writing. At last he ripped the page off his pad and handed it to Ralph.

“I don’t know about the God part, but I know something is working here. Everyone we’ve met has been moving north. As if you had the answer. Have you dreamed about any of the others? Dick? June or Olivia? Maybe the little girl?”

“Not any of these others. A man who doesn’t talk much. A woman who is with child. A man of about your age who comes to me with a guitar of his own. And you, Nick.”

“And you think going to Boulder is the right thing?”

Mother Abagail said, “It’s what we’re meant to do.”

Nick doodled aimlessly on his pad for a moment and then wrote, “How much do you know about the dark man? Do you know who he is?”

“I know what he’s about but not who he is. He’s the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he’ll call them. He’s started already. He’s getting them together a lot faster than we are. Before he’s ready to make his move, I guess he’ll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones… the lonely ones… and the ones that have left God out of their hearts.”

“Maybe he’s not real,” Nick wrote. “Maybe he’s just…” He had to nibble at the top of his pen and think. At last he added: “… the scared, bad part of all of us. Maybe we are dreaming of the things we’re afraid we might do.”

Ralph frowned over this as he read it aloud, but Abby grasped what Nick meant right off. It wasn’t much different from the talk of the new preachers who had got on the land in the last twenty years or so. There wasn’t really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan was like a jigsaw puzzle—and every man, woman, and child on earth added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn’t true. And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would eat him for dinner.

She said: “You dreamed of me. Ain’t I real?”

Nick nodded.

“And I dreamed you. Ain’t you real? Praise God, you’re sittin right over there with a pad o paper on your knee. This other man, Nick, he’s as real as you are.” Yes, he was real. She thought of the weasels, and of the red eye opening in the darkness. And when she spoke up again, her voice was husky. “He ain’t Satan,” she said, “but he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old.

“The Bible, it don’t say what happened to Noah and his family after the flood went down. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some awful tussle for the souls of those few people—for their souls, their bodies, their way of thinking. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that was what was on for us.

“He’s west of the Rockies now. Sooner or later he’ll come east. Maybe not this year, no, but when he’s ready. And it’s our lot to deal with him.”

Nick was shaking his head, disturbed.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “You’ll see. There’s bitter days ahead. Death and terror, betrayal and tears. And not all of us will be alive to see how it ends.”

“I don’t like any of this,” Ralph muttered. “Aren’t things hard enough without this guy you and Nick are talkin about? Ain’t we got enough problems, with no doctors or electricity or nothing? Why did we have to get stuck with this damn doorprize?”

“I don’t know. It’s God’s way. He don’t explain to the likes of Abby Freemantle.”

“If this is His way,” Ralph said, “why, I wish He’d retire and let somebody younger take over.”

“If the dark man is west,” Nick wrote, “maybe we ought to pick up stakes and move east.”

She shook her head patiently. “Nick, all things serve the Lord. Don’t you think this black man serves Him, too? He does, no matter how mysterious His purpose may be. The black man will follow you no matter where you run, because he serves the purpose of God, and God wants you to treat with him. It don’t do no good to run from the will of the Lord God of Hosts. A man or woman who tries that only ends up in the belly of the beast.”

Nick wrote briefly. Ralph studied the note, rubbed the side of his nose, and wished he didn’t have to read it. Old ladies like this didn’t cotton to stuff like what Nick had just written. She’d likely call it a blasphemy, and shout it loud enough to wake everyone in the place, too.

“What’s he say?” Abagail asked.

“He says…” Ralph cleared his throat; the feather stuck in the band of his hat jiggled. “He says that he don’t believe in God.” The message relayed, he looked unhappily down at his shoes and waited for the explosion.

But she only chuckled, got up, and walked across to Nick. She took one of his hands and patted it. “Bless you, Nick, but that don’t matter. He believes in you.”

They stayed at Abby Freemantle’s place the next day, and it was the best day any of them could remember since the superflu had drawn away, like the waters going down from Mount Ararat. The rain had stopped sometime during the early hours of the morning, and by nine o’clock the sky was a pleasant Midwest mural of sun and broken clouds. The corn twinkled away in all directions like a ransom of emeralds. It was cooler than it had been for weeks.

Tom Cullen spent the morning running up and down the rows of corn, his arms outstretched, scaring up droves of crows. Gina McCone sat contentedly in the dirt by the tire swing, playing with a large number of paper dolls Abagail had found at the bottom of a trunk in her bedroom closet. A little earlier, she and Tom had had a pleasant game of cars and trucks around the Fisher-Price garage Tom had taken from the five-and-dime in May, Oklahoma. Tom did what Gina wanted him to do willingly enough.

Dick Ellis, the vet, came diffidently to Mother Abagail and asked her if anyone in the area had kept pigs.

“Why, the Stoners always had pigs,” she said. She was sitting on the porch in her rocker, chording her guitar and watching Gina at play in the yard, her broken leg in its cast stuck out stiffly in front of her.

“Think any of them might still be alive?”

“You’d have to go see. Might be. Might be they’ve bust down their pens and gone hogwild.” Her eyes gleamed. “Might also be I know a fella who dreamed about pork chops last night.”

“Could be you do,” Dick said.

“You ever slaughtered a hog?”

“No, ma’am,” he said, grinning broadly now. “Wormed a few, but haven’t slaughtered ary hog. I was always what you’d call nonviolent.”

“Do you think you and Ralph there could stand a woman foreman?”

“Could be,” he said.

Twenty minutes later the three of them were off, Abagail riding between the two men in the Chevy’s cab with her cane planted regally between her knees. At the Stoners’ they found two yearling pigs in the back pen, healthy and full of beans. It appeared that, when the feed had given out, they had taken to dining on their weaker and less fortunate pen-mates.

Ralph set up Reg Stoner’s chainfall in the barn, and at Abagail’s direction, Dick was finally able to get a rope firmly around the back leg of one of the yearlings. Squealing and thrashing, it was yanked into the barn and hung upside down from the chainfall.

Ralph came out of the house with a butcher knife three feet long—That ain’t a knife, that’s a regular bayernet, praise God, Abby thought.

“You know, I don’t know if I can do this,” he said.

“Well, give her here, then,” Abagail said, and then held out her hand. Ralph looked doubtfully at Dick. Dick shrugged. Ralph handed the knife over.

“Lord,” Abagail said, “we thank Thee for the gift we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Bless this pig that it might nourish us, amen. Stand clear, boys, she’s gonna go a gusher.”

She cut the pig’s throat with one practiced sweep of the knife—some things you never forgot, no matter how old you got—and then stepped back as quick as she could.

“You got that fire going under the kettle?” she asked Dick. “Nice hot fire out there in the dooryard?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dick said respectfully, unable to take his eyes from the pig.

“You got those brushes?” she asked Ralph.

Ralph displayed two big scrub brushes with stiff yellow bristles.

“Well then, you want to haul him over and dump him in. After he’s boiled awhile, those bristles will scrub right off. After that you can peel old Mr. Hog just like a banana.”

They both looked a trifle green at the prospect.

“Lively,” she said. “You can’t eat him with his jacket on. Got to get him undressed first.”

Ralph and Dick Ellis looked at each other, gulped, and began to lower the pig from the chainfall. They were done by three that afternoon, back at Abagail’s by four with a truckload of meat, and there were fresh pork chops for dinner. Neither of the men ate very well, but Abagail put away two chops all by herself, relishing the way the crisp fat crackled between her dentures. There was nothing like fresh meat you’d seen to yourself.

It was sometime after nine o’clock. Gina was asleep, and Tom Cullen had dozed off in Mother Abagail’s rocker on the porch. Soundless lightning flickered against the sky far to the west. The other adults were gathered in the kitchen, except for Nick, who had gone for a walk. Abagail knew what the boy was wrestling with, and her heart went out to him.

“Say, you’re not really a hundred and eight, are you?” Ralph asked, remembering something she had said that morning as they set out on the hog-slaughtering expedition.

“You wait right there,” Abagail said. “I’ve got something to show you, Mister Man.” She went into the bedroom and got her framed letter from President Reagan out of the top drawer of her bureau. She brought it back to Ralph and put it in his lap. “Read that, sonny,” she said pridefully.

Ralph read it. “… occasion of your one hundredth birthday… one of seventy-two proven centenarians in the United States of America… fifth oldest registered Republican in the United States of America… greetings and congratulations from President Ronald Reagan, January 14, 1982.” He looked up at her with wide eyes. “Well, I’ll be dipped in sh—” He stopped, blushing and in confusion. “Pardon me, ma’am.”

“All the things you must have seen!” Olivia marveled.

“None of it’s very much compared to what I’ve seen in the last month or so.” She sighed. “Or what I expect to see.”

The door opened and Nick came in—conversation broke off as if they had all been marking time, waiting for him. She could see in his face that he had made his decision, and she thought she knew what it was. He handed her a note that he had written out on the porch, standing by Tom. She held the note at arm’s length to read it.

“We’d better start for Boulder tomorrow,” Nick had written.

She looked from the note to Nick’s face and nodded slowly. She passed the note on to June Brinkmeyer, who passed it to Olivia. “I guess we had,” Abagail said. “I don’t want to any more than you, but I guess we had better. What made up your mind?”

He shrugged almost angrily and pointed at her.

“So be it,” Abagail said. “My faith’s in the Lord.”

Nick thought: I wish mine was.

The next morning, July 26, after a brief conference, Dick and Ralph set off for Columbus in Ralph’s truck. “I hate to trade her in,” Ralph said, “but if it’s the way you say it is, Nick, okay.”

Nick wrote, “Be back as soon as you can.”

Ralph uttered a short laugh and looked around the yard. June and Olivia were washing clothes in a large tub with a scrub board stuck in one end. Tom was in the corn, scaring crows—an occupation he seemed to find endlessly diverting. Gina was playing with his Corgi cars and his garage. The old woman sat dozing in her rocker, dozing and snoring.

“You’re in one tearin hurry to stick your head in the lion’s mouth, Nicky.”

Nick wrote: “Have we got anyplace better to go to?”

“That’s true. It’s no good just wandering around. It makes you feel kind of worthless. A person don’t hardly feel right unless he’s lookin forward, you ever notice that?”

Nick nodded.

“Okay.” Ralph clapped Nick on the shoulder and turned away. “Dick, you ready to take a ride?”

Tom Cullen came running out of the corn, silk clinging to his shirt and pants and long blond hair. “Me too! Tom Cullen wants to go on the ride, too! Laws, yes!”

“Come on, then,” Ralph said. “Here, lookit you, cornsilk from top to bottom and fore to aft. And you ain’t caught a crow yet! Better let me brush you off.”

Grinning vacantly, Tom allowed Ralph to brush off his shirt and pants. For Tom, Nick reflected, these last two weeks had probably been the happiest of his life. He was with people who accepted and wanted him. Why shouldn’t they? He might be feeble, but he was still a comparative rarity in this new world, a living human being.

“See you, Nicky,” Ralph said, and climbed up behind the wheel of the Chevy.

“See you, Nicky,” Tom Cullen echoed, still grinning.

Nick watched the truck out of sight, then went into the shed and found an old crate and a can of paint. He broke out one of the crate’s panels and nailed a long piece of picket fence to it. He took the sign and the paint out into the yard and carefully daubed on it while Gina looked over his shoulder with interest.

“What does it say?” she asked.

“It says, ‘We have gone to Boulder, Colorado. We are taking secondary roads to avoid traffic jams. Citizen’s Band Channel 14,’” Olivia read.

“What does that mean?” June asked, coming over. She picked Gina up and they both watched as Nick carefully planted the sign so that it faced the area where the dirt road became Mother Abagail’s driveway. He buried the bottom three feet of the picket. Nothing but a big wind would knock it over now. Of course there were big winds out in this part of the world; he thought of the one which had almost carried him and Tom away, and of the scare they’d had in the cellar.

He wrote a note and handed it to June.

“One of the things Dick and Ralph are supposed to get in Columbus is a CB radio. Someone will have to monitor Channel 14 all the time.”

“Oh,” Olivia said. “Smart.”

Nick tapped his forehead gravely, then smiled.

The two women went back to hang their clothes. Gina returned to the toy cars, hopping nimbly on one leg. Nick walked across the yard, mounted the porch steps, and sat down next to the dozing old woman. He looked out over the corn and wondered what was going to become of them.

If that’s the way you say it is, Nick, okay.

They had turned him into a leader. They had done that and he couldn’t even begin to understand why. You couldn’t take orders from a deaf-mute; it was like a bad joke. Dick should have been their leader. His own place was as spear-carrier, third from the left, no lines, recognized only by his mother. But from the time they had met Ralph Brentner pottering up the road in his truck, not really going anywhere, that business of saying something and then glancing quickly at Nick, as if for confirmation, had begun. A fog of nostalgia had already begun to creep over those few days between Shoyo and May, before Tom and responsibility. It was easy to forget how lonely he had been, the fear that the constant bad dreams might mean he was going crazy. Easy to remember how there had been only yourself to look out for, a spear-carrier, third from the left, a bit player in this terrible play.

I knew when I saw you. It’s you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart…

No, I don’t accept that. I don’t accept God either, for that matter. Let the old woman have her God, God was as necessary for old women as enemas and Lipton tea bags. He would concentrate on one thing at a time, planting one foot ahead of the other. Get them to Boulder, then see what came next. The old woman said the dark man was a real man, not just a psychological symbol, and he didn’t want to believe that, either… but in his heart he did. In his heart he believed everything she had said, and it scared him. He didn’t want to be their leader.

It’s you, Nick.

A hand squeezed his shoulder and he jumped with surprise, then turned around. If she had been dozing, she wasn’t anymore. She was smiling down at him from her armless rocker.

“I was just sittin here and thinkin on the Great Depression,” she said. “Do you know my daddy once owned all this land for miles around? It’s true. No small trick for a black man. And I played my guitar and sang down at the Grange Hall in nineteen and oh-two. Long ago, Nick. Long, long ago.”

Nick nodded.

“Those were good days, Nick—most of em were, anyway. But nothin lasts, I guess. Only the love of the Lord. My daddy died, and the land was split between his sons with a piece for my first husband, sixty acres, not much. This house stands on part o that sixty, you know. Four acres, that’s all that’s left. Oh, I guess now I could lay claim to all of it again, but t’wouldn’t be the same, somehow.”

Nick patted her scrawny hand and she sighed deeply.

“Brothers don’t always work so well together; they almost always fall to squabblin. Look at Cain n Abel! Everyone wanted to be a foreman and nobody wanted to be a fielhand! Comes 1931, and the bank called its paper home. Then they all pulled together, but by then it was most too late. By 1945 everything was gone but my sixty and forty or fifty more where the Goodell place is now.”

She fumbled her handkerchief from her dress pocket and wiped her eyes with it, slowly and thoughtfully.

“Finally there was only me left, with no money nor nothing. And each year when tax-time came round, they’d take a little more to pay it off, and I’d come out here to look at the part that wasn’t my own anymore, and I’d cry over it like I’m crying now. A little more each year for taxes, that’s how it happened. A whack here, a whack there. I rented out what was left, but it was never enough to cover what they had to have for their cussed taxes. Then, when I got to be a hundred years old, they remanded the taxes in perpetuity. Yes, they give it over after they’d taken everything but this little piece o scratch that’s here. Big o them, wa’n’t it?”

He squeezed her hand lightly and looked at her.

“Oh, Nick,” Mother Abagail said, “I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He’s apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy. I do His will, but the human part o me has cursed Him in my heart. ‘Abby,’ the Lord says to me, ‘there’s work for you far up ahead. So I’ll let you live an live, until your flesh is bitter on your bones. I’ll let you see all your children die ahead of you and still you’ll walk the earth. I’ll let you see your daddy’s lan taken away piece by piece. And in the end, your reward will be to go away with strangers from all the things you love best and you’ll die in a strange land with the work not yet finished. That’s My will, Abby,’ says He, and ‘Yes, Lord,’ says I. ‘Thy will be done,’ and in my heart I curse Him and ask, ‘Why, why, why?’ and the only answer I get is ‘Where were you when I made the world?’”

Now her tears came in a bitter flood, running down her cheeks and wetting the bodice of her dress, and Nick marveled that there could be so many tears in such an old woman, who seemed as dry and thin as a dead twig.

“Help me along, Nick,” she said. “I only want to do what’s right.”

He held her hands tightly. Behind them Gina giggled and held one of the toy cars up to the sky for the sun to shine and sparkle on.

Dick and Ralph came back at noon, Dick behind the wheel of a new Dodge van and Ralph driving a red wrecker truck with a pushboard on the front and the crane and hook dangling from the back. Tom stood in the rear, waving grandly. They pulled up by the porch and Dick got out of the van.

“There’s a helluva nice CB in that wrecker,” he told Nick. “Forty-channel job. I think Ralph’s in love with it.”

Nick grinned. The women had come over and were looking at the trucks. Abagail’s eyes noted the way Ralph squired June over to the wrecker so she could look at the radio equipment, and approved. The woman had a good set of hips on her, there would be a fine porch door down there between them. She could have just about as many little ones as she wanted.

“So when do we go?” Ralph asked.

Nick scribbled, “Soon as we eat. Did you try the CB?”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “I had it on all the way back. Horrible static; there’s a squelch button, but it doesn’t seem to work very well. But you know, I swear I did hear something, static or no static. Far off. Might not have been voices at all. But I’ll say the truth, Nicky, I didn’t care for it much. Like those dreams.”

A silence fell among them.

“Well,” Olivia said, breaking it. “I’ll get something cooking. Hope nobody minds pork two days in a row.”

No one did. And by one o’clock the camping things—and Abagail’s rocker and guitar—had been stowed in the van and they were off, the wrecker now lumbering ahead to move anything blocking the road. Abagail sat up front in the van as they drove westbound on Route 30. She did not cry. Her cane was planted between her legs. Crying was done. She was set in the center of the Lord’s will and His will would be done. The Lord’s will would be done, but she thought of that red Eye opening in the dark heart of the night and she was afraid.

Chapter 46

It was late evening, July 27. They were camped on what the sign, now half-demolished by summer storms, proclaimed to be the Kunkle Fairgrounds. Kunkle itself, Kunkle, Ohio, was south of them. There had been some sort of fire there, and most of Kunkle was gone. Stu said it had probably been lightning. Harold had of course disputed that. These days if Stu Redman said a firetruck was red, Harold Lauder would produce facts and figures proving that most of them these days were green.

She sighed and rolled over. Couldn’t sleep. She was afraid of the dream.

To her left the five motorcycles stood in a row, heeled over on their kickstands, moonlight twinkling along their chromed exhaust pipes and fittings. As if a band of Hell’s Angels had picked this particular spot to crash for the night. Not that the Angels ever would have ridden such a pussycat bunch of bikes as these Hondas and Yamahas, she supposed. They had driven “hogs”… or was that just something she had picked up from the old American-International bike epic she’d seen on TV? The Wild Angels. The Devil’s Angels. Hell’s Angels on Wheels. The bike pictures had been very big at the drive-ins when she had been in high school, Wells Drive-In, Sanford Drive-In, South Portland Twin, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Now kaput, all the drive-ins were kaput, not to mention the Hell’s Angels and good old American-International Pictures.

Put it in your diary, Frannie, she told herself, and rolled over on her other side. Not tonight. Tonight she was going to sleep, dreams or no dreams.

Twenty paces from where she was lying, she could see the others, zonked out in their sleeping bags like Hell’s Angels after a big beer party, the one where everybody in the picture got laid except for Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. Harold, Stu, Glen Bateman, Mark Braddock, Perion McCarthy. Take Sominex tonight and sleep …

It wasn’t Sominex they were on but half a grain of Veronal apiece. It had been Stu’s idea when the dreams got really bad and they all began to get flaky and hard to live with. He had taken Harold aside before mentioning it to the rest of them because the way to flatter Harold was to soberly ask his opinion and also because Harold knew things. It was good that he did, but it was also rather spooky, as if they had a fifth-rate god traveling with them—more or less omniscient, but emotionally unstable and likely to fragment at any time. Harold had picked up a second gun in Albany, where they had met Mark and Perion, and now he wore the two pistols crisscrossed low on his hips like a latterday Johnny Ringo. She felt badly for Harold, but Harold had also begun to frighten her. She had begun to wonder if Harold might not just go crackers some night and start blazing away with his two pistols. She often found herself remembering the day she had come upon Harold in his back yard, all his emotional defenses demolished, mowing the lawn in his bathing suit and crying.

She knew just how Stu would have put it to him, very quietly, almost conspiratorially: Harold, these dreams are a problem. I’ve got an idea, but I don’t know exactly how to carry it out… a mild sedative… but it would have to be just the right dose. Too much and nobody would wake up if there was trouble. What do you suggest?

Harold had suggested they try a whole grain of Veronal, available at any drugstore, and if that interrupted the dream-cycle, that they cut back to three quarters of a grain, and if that worked to half. Stu had gone privately to Glen, had gotten a concurring opinion, and the experiment had been tried. At a quarter grain the dreams had begun to creep back in, so they held the dosage at a half.

At least for the others.

Frannie accepted her drug each night, but palmed it. She didn’t know if Veronal would hurt the baby or not, but she was taking no chances. They said that even aspirin could break the chromosome chain. So she suffered the dreams—suffered, that was the right word. One of them predominated; if the others were different, they would sooner or later blend into this one. She was in her Ogunquit house, and the dark man was chasing her. Up and down shadowy corridors, through her mother’s parlor where the clock continued to tick off seasons in a dry age… she could get away from him, she knew, if she didn’t have to carry the body. It was her father’s body, wrapped in a bedsheet, and if she dropped it the dark man would do something to it, perform some awful desecration on it. So she ran, knowing that he was getting closer and closer, and at last his hand would fall on her shoulder, his hot and sickening hand. She would go boneless and weak, her father’s shrouded corpse would slither out of her arms, she would turn, ready to say: Take him, do anything, I don’t care, just don’t chase me anymore.

And there he would be, dressed in some dark stuff like a hooded monk’s robe, nothing visible of his features save his huge and happy grin. And in one hand he held the bent and twisted coathanger. That was when the horror struck her like a padded fist and she struggled up from sleep, her skin clammy with sweat, her heart thudding, wanting never to sleep again.

Because it wasn’t the dead body of her father he wanted; it was the living child in her womb.

She rolled over again. If she didn’t go to sleep soon she really would take her diary out and write in it. She had been keeping the journal since July 5. In a way she was keeping it for the baby. It was an act of faith—faith that the baby would live. She wanted it to know what it had been like. How the plague had come to a place called Ogunquit, how she and Harold had escaped, what became of them. She wanted the child to know how things had been.

The moonlight was strong enough to write by, and two or three pages of diary were always enough to make her feel snoozy. Didn’t say much for her literary talents, she supposed. She would give sleep one more fair chance first, though.

She closed her eyes.

And went on thinking of Harold.

The situation might have eased with the coming of Mark and Perion if the two of them hadn’t already been committed to each other. Perion was thirty-three, eleven years older than Mark, but in this world such things made little difference. They had found each other, they had been looking out for each other, and they were content to stick together. Perion had confided to Frannie that they were trying to make a baby. Thank God I was on the pill and didn’t have a loop, Peri said. How in God’s name would I ever have gotten it out?

Frannie had almost told her about the baby she was carrying (she was over a third of the way along now) but something held her back. She was afraid it might make a bad situation even worse.

So now there were six of them instead of four (Glen refused utterly to try driving a motorcycle and always rode pillion behind Stu or Harold), but the situation hadn’t changed with the addition of another woman.

What about you, Frannie? What do you want?

If she had to exist in a world like this, she thought, with a biological clock inside her set to go off in six months, she wanted someone like Stu Redman to be her man—no, not someone like. She wanted him. There it was, stated with complete baldness.

With civilization gone, all the chrome and geegaws had been stripped from the engine of human society. Glen Bateman held forth on this theme often, and it always seemed to please Harold inordinately.

Women’s lib, Frannie had decided (thinking that if she was going to be bald, she might as well go totally bald), was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn’t get with child, but a woman could—every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath. Liberation —that one word said it all. Before civilization, with its careful and merciful system of protections, women had been slaves. Let us not gild the lily; slaves was what we were, Fran thought. Then the evil days ended. And the Women’s Credo, which should have been hung in the offices of Ms. magazine, preferably in needlepoint, was just this: Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I’d like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Once I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying. Thank you, Men.

And what was there to say? Nothing. The rednecks could grunt about burning bras, the reactionaries could play intellectual little games, but the truth only smiles. Now all that had changed, in a matter of weeks it had changed—how much only time would tell. But lying here in the night, she knew that she needed a man. Oh God, she badly needed a man.

Nor was it all a matter of preserving herself and her baby, of looking out for number one (and, she supposed, number two). Stu attracted her, especially after Jess Rider. Stu was calm, capable, and most of all he was not what her father would have called “twenty pounds of bullshit in a ten-pound bag.”

He was attracted to her as well. She knew that perfectly well, had known it since that first lunch together on the Fourth of July in that deserted restaurant. For a moment—just one moment—their eyes had met and there had been that instant of heat, like a power surge when all the needles swing over to overload. She guessed Stu knew how things were, too, but he was waiting on her, letting her make her decision in her own time. She had been with Harold first, therefore she was Harold’s chattel. A stinking macho idea, but she was afraid this was going to be a stinking macho world again, at least for a while.

If only there was someone else, someone for Harold, but there wasn’t, and she was afraid she could not wait long. She thought of the day Harold, in his clumsy way, had tried to make love to her, to make his claim of ownership irrevocable. How long ago? Two weeks? It seemed longer. All the past seemed longer now. It had pulled out like warm Bonomo’s Turkish taffy. Between her worry of what to do about Harold—and her fears of what he might do if she did go to Stuart—and her fears of the dreams, she would never get to sleep.

So thinking, she drifted off.

When she woke up, it was still dark. Someone was shaking her.

She muttered some protest—her sleep had been restful and without dreams for the first time in a week—and then came reluctantly out of it, thinking that it must be morning, and time to get going. But why would they want to get going in the dark? As she sat up, she saw that even the moon was down.

It was Harold shaking her, and Harold looked scared.

“Harold? Is something wrong?”

Stu was also up, she saw. And Glen Bateman. Perion was kneeling on the far side of the place where their small fire had been.

“It’s Mark,” Harold said. “He’s sick.”

“Sick?” she said, and then a low moan came from the other side of the campfire’s ashes, where Perion was kneeling and the two men were standing. Frannie felt dread rise up inside her like a black column. Sickness was the thing they were all most afraid of.

“It isn’t… the flu, is it, Harold?” Because if Mark came down with a belated case of Captain Trips, that meant any of them could. Perhaps the germ was still hanging around. Perhaps it had even mutated. The better to feed on you, my dear.

“No, it’s not the flu. It’s nothing like the flu. Fran, did you eat any of the canned oysters tonight? Or maybe when we stopped for lunch?”

She tried to think, her mind still fuzzy with sleep. “Yes, I had some both times,” she said. “They tasted fine. I love oysters. Is it food poisoning? Is that what it is?”

“Fran, I’m just asking. None of us know what it is. There isn’t a doctor in the house. How do you feel? Do you feel all right?”

“Fine, just sleepy.” But she wasn’t. Not anymore. Another groan floated over from the other side of the camp, as if Mark were accusing her of feeling well while he did not.

Harold said, “Glen thinks it might be his appendix.”

“What? ”

Harold only grinned sickly and nodded.

Fran got up and walked across to where the others were gathered. Harold trailed her like an unhappy shadow.

“We’ve got to help him,” Perion said. She spoke mechanically, as if she had said it many times before. Her eyes went from one of them to the next relentlessly, eyes so full of terror and helplessness that Frannie once again felt accused. Her thoughts went selfishly to the baby she was carrying and she tried to push the thoughts away. Inappropriate or not, they wouldn’t go. Get away from him, part of her screamed at the rest of her. You get away from him right now, he might be catching. She looked at Glen, who was pale and old-looking in the steady glow of the Coleman lantern.

“Harold says you think it’s his appendix?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Glen said, sounding upset and scared. “He’s got the symptoms, certainly; he’s feverish, his belly is hard and swelled, painful to touch—”

“We’ve got to help him,” Perion said again, and burst into tears.

Glen touched Mark’s belly and Mark’s eyes, which had been half-lidded and glazed, opened wide. He screamed. Glen jerked his hand away as if he had put it on a hot stove and looked from Stu to Harold and then back to Stu again with barely concealed panic. “What would you two gentlemen suggest?”

Harold stood with his throat working convulsively, as if something was stuck in there, and choking him. At last he blurted, “Give him some aspirin.”

Perion, who had been gazing down at Mark through her tears, now whirled to look at Harold. “Aspirin?” she asked. Her tone was one of furious astonishment. “Aspirin? ” This time she shrieked it. “Is that the best you can do with all your big-talk smartassery? Aspirin? ”

Harold stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at her miserably, accepting the rebuke.

Stu said very quietly, “But Harold’s right, Perion. For now, aspirin’s just about the best we can do. What time is it?”

“You don’t know what to do!” she screamed at them. “Why don’t you just admit it?”

“It’s quarter of three,” Frannie said.

“What if he dies?” Peri pushed a sheaf of dark auburn hair away from her face, which was puffed from crying.

“Leave them alone, Peri,” Mark said in a dull, tired voice. It startled them all. “They’ll do what they can. If it goes on hurting as bad as this, I think I’d father be dead anyway. Give me some aspirin. Anything.”

“I’ll get it,” Harold said, eager to be away. “There’s some in my knapsack. Extra Strength Excedrin,” he added, as if hoping for their approval, and then he went for it nearly scuttling in his hurry.

“We’ve got to help him,” Perion said, returning to her old scripture.

Stu drew Glen and Frannie off to one side.

“Any ideas on what to do about this?” he asked them quietly. “I don’t have any, I can tell you. She was mad at Harold, but his aspirin idea was just about twice as good as any I’ve had.”

“She’s upset, that’s all,” Fran said.

Glen sighed. “Maybe it’s just his bowels. Too much roughage. Maybe he’ll have a good movement and it’ll clear up.”

Frannie was shaking her head. “I don’t think that’s it. He wouldn’t be running a fever if it was his bowels. And I don’t think his belly would have swelled up that way, either.” It had almost looked as if a tumor had swelled up there overnight. It made her feel ill to think about it. She could not remember when (except for when she was dreaming the dreams) she had been so badly frightened. What was it Harold had said? There’s no doctor in the house. How true it was. How horribly true. God, it was all coming at her at once, crashing down all around her. How horribly alone they were. How horribly far out on the wire they were, and somebody had forgotten the safety net. She looked from Glen’s strained face to Stu’s. She saw deep concern in both of them, but no answers in either of them.

Behind them, Mark screamed again, and Perion echoed his cry as if she felt his pain. In a way, Frannie supposed that she did.

“What are we going to do?” Frannie asked helplessly.

She was thinking of the baby, and over and over again the question which dinned its way into her mind was: What if it has to be cesarean? What if it has to be cesarean? What if —

Behind her, Mark screamed again like some horrible prophet, and she hated him.

They looked at each other in the trembling dark.

From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary

July 6, 1990

After some persuasion Mr. Bateman has agreed to come along with us. He sez that after all his articles (“I write them in big words so no one will really know how simpleminded they are,” he sez) and boring twenty years of students to death in SY-1 and SY-2, not to mention the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Rural Sociology, he has decided he can’t afford to turn down this opportunity.

Stu wanted to know what opportunity he meant.

“I should think that would be clear,” sez Harold in that INSUFFERABLY SNOTTY way of his (sometimes Harold can be a dear but he can also be a real boogersnot and tonight he was being the latter). “Mr. Bateman—”

“Please call me Glen,” sez he, very quietly, but the way Harold glared at him, you would have thought he had accused Harold of having some social disease.

“Glen, as a sociologist, sees the opportunity to study the formation of a society first-hand, I believe. He wants to see how fact compares with theory.”

Well, to make a long story short, Glen (which I will call him from now on, since that’s what he likes) agreed that was mostly it but added: “I also have certain theories which I’ve written down and hope to prove or disprove. I don’t believe that man arising from the ashes of the superflu is going to be anything like man arising from the cradle of the Nile with a bone in his nose and a woman by the hair. That’s one of the theories.”

Stu said, in that quiet way he has, “Because everything is lying around, waiting to be picked up again.” He looked so grim when he said it that I was surprised, and even Harold looked at him sort of funny.

But Glen just nodded and said, “That’s right. The technological society has walked off the court, so to speak, but they’ve left all the basketballs behind. Someone will come along who remembers the game and teach it to the rest again. That’s rather neat, isn’t it? I ought to write it down later.”

note 6

So then Harold sez, “You sound as if you believe the whole thing will start up again—the arms race, the pollution, and so on. Is that another of your theories? Or a corollary to the first one?”

“Not exactly,” Glen started to say, but before he could go any further, Harold burst in with his own chicken-bone to pick. I can’t put it down word for word, because when he gets excited Harold talks fast, but what he said amounted to how, even though he had a pretty low opinion of people in general, he didn’t think they could be that stupid. He said he thought that this time around, certain laws would be made. One would be no fiddling around with badass stuff like nuclear fission and fleurocarbon (probably spelled that one wrong, oh well) sprays and stuff like that. I do remember one thing he said, because it was a very vivid image. “Just because the Gordian knot has been cut for us is no reason for us to go to work and tie it back up.”

I could see he was just spoiling for an argument—one of the things that makes Harold hard to like is how eager he is to show off how much he knows (and he sure does know a lot, I can’t take that away from him, Harold is superbright)—but all Glen said was, “Time will tell, won’t it?”

That all finished up about an hour ago, and now I am in an upstairs bedroom with Kojak lying on the floor beside me. Good dog! It is all rawther cozy, reminds me of home, but I am trying not to think about home too much because it makes me weepy. I know this must sound awful but I really wish I had someone to help me warm this bed. I even have a candidate in mind.

Put it out of your mind, Frannie!

So tomorrow we’re off for Stovington and I know Stu doesn’t like the idea much. He’s scared of that place. I like Stu very much, only wish Harold liked him more. Harold is making everything very hard, but I suppose he can’t help his nature.

Glen has decided to leave Kojak behind. He is sorry to have to do that, even though Kojak will have no trouble finding forage. Still there is nothing else for it unless we could find a motorcycle with a sidecar, and even then poor Kojak might get scared and jump out. Hurt or kill himself.

Anyway tomorrow we’ll be going.

Things to Remember: The Texas Rangers (baseball team) had a pitcher named Nolan Ryan who pitched all kinds of no-hitters and things with his famous fastball, and a no-hitter is very good. There were TV comedies with laugh-tracks, and a laugh-track was people on tape laughing at the funny parts, and they were supposed to make you have a better time watching. You used to be able to get frozen cakes and pies at the supermarket and just thaw them out and eat them. Sara Lee strawberry cheesecake was my personal favorite.

July 7, 1990

Can’t write long. Cycled all day. My fanny feels like hamburger & my back feels like there’s a rock in it. I had that bad dream again last night. Harold has also been dreaming about that ?man? and it upsets the hell out of him because he can’t explain how both of us can be having what is essentially the same dream.

Stu sez he is still having that dream about Nebraska and the old black woman there. She keeps saying he should come and see her anytime. Stu thinks she lives in a town called Holland Home or Hometown or something like that. Sez he thinks he could find it. Harold sneered at him and went into a long spiel about how dreams were psycho-Freudian manifestations of things we didn’t dare think about when we were awake. Stu was angry, I think, but kept his temper. I’m so afraid that the bad feeling between them may break out into the open, I WISH IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!

Anyway, Stu said, “So how come you and Frannie are having the same dream?” Harold muttered something about coincidence and just stalked off.

Stu told Glen and I that he would like us to go to Nebraska after Stovington. Glen shrugged and said, “Why not? We have to go somewhere.”

Harold, of course, will object on general principles. Damn you, Harold, grow up!

Things to Remember: There were gasoline shortages in the early 80s because everybody in America was driving something and we had used up most of our oil supplies and the Arabs had us by the short hairs. The Arabs had so much money they literally couldn’t spend it. There was a rock and roll group called The Who that sometimes used to finish their live performances by smashing their guitars and amplifiers. This was known as “conspicuous consumption.”

July 8, 1990

It’s late and I’m tired again but I should try to get as much down as I possibly can before my eyelids just SLAM SHUT. Harold finished his sign about an hour ago (with much bad grace I must say) and put it on the front lawn of the Stovington installation. Stu helped him put it up and held his peace in spite of all Harold’s mean little jibes.

I had tried to prepare myself for the disappointment. I never believed Stu was lying, and I really don’t think Harold believed he was, either. So I was sure everybody was dead, but still it was an upsetting experience and I cried. I couldn’t help myself.

But I wasn’t the only one who was upset. When Stu saw the place he turned almost dead white. He had on a short-sleeved shirt, and I could see he had goosebumps all up and down his arms. His eyes are normally blue but they had gone a slaty color, like the ocean on a gray day.

He pointed up to the third floor and said, “That was my room.”

Harold turned toward him, and I could see him getting ready with one of his patented Harold Lauder Smartass Comments, but then he saw Stu’s face and shut up. I think that was very wise of him, actually.

So after a little while Harold sez, “Well, let’s go in and look around.”

“What would you want to do that for?” Stu answers, and he sounded almost hysterical, but keeping it under a tight rein. It scared me, more so because he is usually as cool as icewater. Witness what little success Harold has had getting under his skin.

“Stuart—” Glen starts, but Stu interrupts with,

“What for? Can’t you see it’s a dead place? No brass bands, no soldiers, no nothing. Believe it,” he says, “if they were here they’d be all over us by now. We’d be up in those white rooms like a bunch of fucking guinea pigs.” Then he looks at me and says, “Sorry, Fran—I didn’t mean to talk that way. I guess I’m upset.”

“Well, I’m going in,” Harold sez, “who’s coming with me?” But I could see that even though Harold was trying to be BIG & BOLD, he was really scared himself.

Glen said he would, and Stu said: “You go in, too, Fran. Have a look. Satisfy yourself.”

I wanted to say I’d stay outside with him, because he looked so uptight (and because I really didn’t want to go in, either, you know), but that would have made more trouble with Harold, so I said okay.

If we—Glen and I—had really had any doubts about Stu’s story, we could have dropped them as soon as we opened the door. It was the smell. You can smell the same thing in any of the fair-sized towns we’ve traveled thru, it’s a smell like decayed tomatoes, and oh God I’m crying again, but is it right for people not just to die but then to stink like

Wait

(later)

There, I’ve had my second GOOD CRY of the day, whatever can be happening to L’il Fran Goldsmith, Our Gal Sal, who used to be able to chew up nails and spit out carpet tacks, ha-ha, as the old saying goes. Well, no more tears tonite, and that’s a promise.

We went inside anyway, morbid curiosity, I guess. I don’t know about the others, but I kind of wanted to see the room where Stu was held prisoner. Anyway, it wasn’t just the smell, you know, but how cool the place was after the outside. A lot of granite and marble and probably really fantastic insulation. It was warmer on the top 2 floors, but down below was that smell… and the cool… it was like a tomb. YUCK.

It was also spooky, like a haunted house—the three of us were all huddled together like sheep, and I was glad I had my rifle, even if it is only a .22. Our footsteps kept echoing back to us as if there was someone creeping along, following us, you know, and I started thinking about that dream again, the one starring the man in the black robe. No wonder Stu didn’t want to come with us.

We wandered around to the elevators at last and went up to the 2nd floor. Nothing there but offices… and several bodies. The 3rd floor was made up like a hospital, but all the rooms had airlock doors (both Harold and Glen said that’s what they were) and special viewing windows. There were lots of bodies up there, in the rooms and in the hallways, too. Very few women. Did they try to evacuate them at the end, I wonder? There’s so much we’ll never know. But then, why would we want to?

Anyway, at the end of the hall leading down from the main corridor where the elevator core was, we found a room with its airlock door open. There was a dead man in there, but he wasn’t a patient (they were all wearing white hospital johnnies) and he sure didn’t die of the flu. He was lying in a big pool of dried blood, and he looked like he’d been trying to crawl out of the room when he died. There was a broken chair, and things were all messed up, as if there’d been a fight.

Glen looked around for a long time and then said, “I don’t think we’d better say anything about this room to Stu. I believe he came very close to dying in here.”

I looked at that sprawled body and felt creepier than ever.

“What do you mean?” Harold asked, and even he sounded hushed. It was one of the few times I ever heard Harold talk as if what he was saying wasn’t going out on a public address system.

“I believe that gentleman came in here to kill Stuart,” Glen said, “and that Stu somehow got the better of him.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why would they want to kill Stu if he was immune? It doesn’t make any sense!”

He looked at me, and his eyes were scary. His eyes looked almost dead, like a mackerel’s eyes.

“That doesn’t matter, Fran,” he said. “Sense didn’t have much to do with this place, from the way it looks. There is a certain mentality that believes in covering up. They believe in it with the sincerity and fanaticism that members of some religious groups believe in the divinity of Jesus. Because, for some people, the necessity to continue covering up even after the damage is done is all-important. It makes me wonder how many immunes they killed in Atlanta and San Francisco and the Topeka Viral Center before the plague finally killed them and made an end to their butchery. This asshole? I’m glad he’s dead. I’m only sorry for Stu, who’ll probably spend the rest of his life having nightmares about him.”

And do you know what Glen Bateman did then? That nice man who paints the horrible pictures? He went over and kicked that dead man in the face. Harold made a muffled sort of grunt, as if he was the one who had been kicked. Then Glen drew his foot back again.

“No!” Harold yells, but Glen kicked the dead man again just the same. Then he turned around and he was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, but at least his eyes had lost that awful dead-fish look.

“Come on,” he sez, “let’s get out of here. Stu was right. It’s a dead place.”

So we went out, and Stu was sitting with his back to the iron gate in the high wall that ran around the place, and I wanted to… oh go ahead, Frannie, if you can’t tell your diary, who can you tell? I wanted to run to him and kiss him and tell him I was ashamed for all of us not believing him. And ashamed of how all of us had gone on about what a hard time we’d had when the plague was on, and him hardly saying anything when all the time that man had almost killed him.

Oh dear, I’m falling in love with him, I think I’ve got the world’s most crushable crush, if only it wasn’t for Harold I’d take my damn chances!

Anyway (there’s always an anyway, even tho by now my fingers are so numb they are just about falling off), that was when Stu told us for the first time that he wanted to go to Nebraska, that he wanted to check out his dream. He had a stubborn, sort of embarrassed look on his face, as if he knew he was going to have to take some more patronizing shit from Harold, but Harold was too unnerved from our “tour” of the Stovington facility to offer more than token resistance. And even that stopped when Glen said, in a very reticent way, that he had also dreamed of the old woman the night before.

“Of course, it might only be because Stu told us about his dream,” he said, kind of red in the face, “but it was remarkably similar.”

Harold said that of course that was it, but Stu said, “Wait a minute, Harold—I’ve got an idea.”

His idea was that we all take a sheet of paper and write down everything we could remember of our dreams over the last week, then compare notes. This was just scientific enough so that Harold couldn’t grumble too much.

Well, the only dream I’ve had is the one I’ve already written down, and I won’t repeat it. I’ll just say I wrote it down, leaving in the part about my father but leaving out the part about the baby and the coathanger he always has.

The results when we compared our papers were rather amazing.

Harold, Stu, and I had all dreamed about “the dark man,” as I call him. Both Stu & I visualized him as a man in a monk’s robe with no visible features—his face is always in a shadow. Harold’s paper said that he was always standing in a dark doorway, beckoning to him “like a pimp.” Sometimes he could just see his feet and the shine of his eyes “like weasel’s eyes” is how he put it.

Stu and Glen’s dreams of the old woman are very similar. The points of similarity are almost too many to go into (which is my “literary” way of saying my fingers are going numb). Anyway, they both agree she is in Polk County, Nebraska, altho they couldn’t get together on the actual name of the town—Stu says Hollingford Home, Glen says Hemingway Home. Close either way. They both seemed to feel they could find it. (Note Well, diary: My guess is “Hemingford Home.”)

Glen said, “This is really remarkable. We all seem to be sharing an authentic psychic experience.” Harold pooh-poohed, of course, but he looked like he’d been given lots of food for thought. He would only agree to go on the basis of “we have to go somewhere.” We leave in the morning. I’m scared, excited, and mostly happy to be leaving Stovington, which is a death-place. And I’ll take that old woman over the dark man anytime.

Things to Remember: “Hang loose” meant don’t get upset. “Rad” and “gnarly” were ways of saying a thing was good. “No sweat” meant you weren’t worried. To “boogie down” was to have a good time, and lots of people wore T-shirts which said SHIT HAPPENS, which it certainly did… and still does. “I got grease” was a pretty current expression (I first heard it just this year) that meant everything was going well. “Digs,” an old British expression, was just replacing “pad” or “crashpad” as an expression for the place you were living in before the superflu hit. It was very cool to say “I dig your digs.” Stupid, huh? But that was life.

It was just after twelve noon.

Perion had fallen into an exhausted sleep beside Mark, who they had moved carefully into the shade two hours earlier. He was in and out of consciousness, and it was easier on all of them when he was out. He had held against the pain for the remainder of the night, but after daybreak he had finally given in to it and when he was conscious, his screams curdled their blood. They stood looking at each other, helpless. No one had wanted any lunch.

“It’s his appendix,” Glen said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”

“Maybe we ought to try… well, operating on him,” Harold said. He was looking at Glen. “I don’t suppose you…”

“We’d kill him,” Glen said flatly. “You know that, Harold. If we could open him up without having him bleed to death, which we couldn’t, we wouldn’t know his appendix from his pancreas. The stuff in there isn’t labeled, you know.”

“We’ll kill him if we don’t,” Harold said.

“Do you want to try?” Glen asked waspishly. “Sometimes I wonder about you, Harold.”

“I don’t see that you’re being much help in our current situation, either,” Harold said, flushing.

“No, stop, come on,” Stu said. “What good are either of you doing? Unless one of you plans to saw him open with a jackknife, it’s out of the question, anyway.”

“Stu! ” Frannie almost gasped.

“Well?” he asked, and shrugged. “The nearest hospital would be back in Maumee. We could never get him there. I don’t even think we could get him back to the turnpike.”

“You’re right, of course,” Glen muttered, and ran a hand over his sandpapery cheek. “Harold, I apologize. I’m very upset. I knew this sort of thing could happen—pardon me, would happen—but I guess I only knew it in an academic way. This is a lot different than sitting in the old study, blue-skying things.”

Harold muttered an ungrateful acknowledgment and walked off with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. He looked like a sulky, overgrown ten-year-old.

“Why can’t we move him?” Fran asked desperately, looking from Stu to Glen.

“Because of how much his appendix must have swelled by now,” Glen said. “If it bursts, it’s going to dump enough poison into his system to kill ten men.”

Stu nodded. “Peritonitis.”

Frannie’s head whirled. Appendicitis? That was nothing these days. Nothing. Why sometimes, if you were in the hospital for gallstones or something, they would just lift out your appendix on general principles while they still had you open. She remembered that one of her grammar school friends, a boy named Charley Biggers whom everyone had called Biggy, had had his appendix out during the summer between fifth and sixth grades. He was only in the hospital for two or three days. Having your appendix out was just nothing, medically speaking.

Just like having a baby was nothing, medically speaking.

“But if you leave him alone,” she asked, “won’t it burst anyway?”

Stu and Glen looked at each other uncomfortably and said nothing.

“Then you’re just as bad as Harold says!” she burst out wildly. “You’ve got to do something, even if it is with a jackknife! You’ve got to!”

“Why us?” Glen asked angrily. “Why not you? We don’t even have a medical book, for Christ’s sweet sake!”

“But you… he… it can’t happen this way! Having your appendix out is supposed to be nothing! ”

“Well, maybe not in the old days, but it’s sure something now,” Glen said, but by then she had blundered off, crying.

She came back around three o’clock, ashamed of herself and ready to apologize. But neither Glen nor Stu was in camp. Harold was sitting dejectedly on the trunk of a fallen tree. Perion was sitting crosslegged by Mark, sponging his face with a cloth. She looked pale but composed.

“Frannie!” Harold said, looking up and brightening visibly.

“Hi, Harold.” She went on to Peri. “How is he?”

“Sleeping,” Perion said, but he wasn’t sleeping; even Fran could see that. He was unconscious.

“Where have the others gone, Peri? Do you know?”

It was Harold who answered her. He had come up behind her, and Fran could feel him wanting to touch her hair or put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t want him to. Harold had begun to make her acutely uncomfortable almost all of the time.

“They’ve gone to Kunkle. To look for a doctor’s office.”

“They thought they could get some books,” Peri said. “And some… some instruments.” She swallowed and her throat made an audible click. She went on cooling Mark’s face, occasionally dipping her cloth into one of the canteens and wringing it out.

“We’re really sorry,” Harold said uncomfortably. “I guess that doesn’t sound like jack-shit, but we really are.”

Peri looked up and offered Harold a strained, sweet smile. “I know that,” she said. “Thank you. This is no one’s fault. Unless there’s a God, of course. If there’s a God, then it’s His fault. And when I see Him, I intend to kick Him in the balls.”

She had a horsey sort of face and a thick peasant’s body. Fran, who saw everyone’s best features long before she saw the less fortunate ones (Harold, for instance, had a lovely pair of hands for a boy), noticed that Peri’s hair, a soft auburn shade, was almost gorgeous, and that her dark indigo eyes were fine and intelligent. She had taught anthropology at NYU, she had told them, and she had also been active in a number of political causes, including women’s rights and equal treatment under the law for AIDS victims. She had never been married. Mark, she told Frannie once, had been better to her than she had ever expected a man to be. The others she had known had either ignored her or lumped her in with other girls as a “pig” or a “scag.” She admitted Mark might have been in the group which had always just ignored her if conditions had been normal, but they hadn’t been. They had met each other in Albany, where Perion had been summering with her parents, on the last day of June, and after some talk they had decided to get out of the city before all the germs incubating in all the decomposing bodies could do to them what the superflu hadn’t been able to do.

So they had left, and the next night they had become lovers, more out of desperate loneliness than any real attraction (this was girl-talk, and Frannie hadn’t even written it down in her diary). He was good to her, Peri had told Fran in the soft and slightly amazed way of all plain women who have discovered a nice man in a hard world. She began to love him, a little more each day she had begun to love him.

And now this.

“It’s funny,” she said. “Everybody here but Stu and Harold are college graduates, and you certainly would have been if things had gone on in their normal course, Harold.”

“Yes, I guess that’s true,” Harold said.

Peri turned back to Mark and began to sponge his forehead again, gently, with love. Frannie was reminded of a color plate in their family Bible, a picture that showed three women making the body of Jesus ready for burial—they were anointing him with oils and spices.

“Frannie was studying English, Glen was a teacher of sociology, Mark was getting his doctorate in American history, Harold, you’d be in English, too, wanting to be a writer. We could sit around and have some wonderful bull sessions. We did, as a matter of fact, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” Harold agreed. His voice, normally penetrating, was almost too low to hear.

“A liberal arts education teaches you how to think—I read that somewhere. The hard facts you learn are secondary to that. The big thing you take away from school with you is how to induct and deduct in a constructive way.”

“That’s good,” Harold said. “I like that.”

Now his hand did drop on Fran’s shoulder. She didn’t shrug it away, but she was unhappily conscious of its presence.

“But it isn’t good,” Peri said fiercely, and in his surprise, Harold took his hand off Fran’s shoulder. She felt lighter immediately.

“No?” he asked, rather timidly.

“He’s dying!” Peri said, not loudly but in an angry, helpless way. “He’s dying because we’ve all been spending our time learning how to bullshit each other in dorms and the living rooms of cheap apartments in college towns. Oh, I could tell you about the Midi Indians of New Guinea, and Harold could explain the literary technique of the later English poets, but what good does any of that do my Mark?”

“If we had somebody from med school—” Fran began tentatively.

“Yes, if we did. But we don’t. We don’t even have a car mechanic with us, or someone who went to ag college and might have at least watched once when a vet was working on a cow or a horse.” She looked at them, her indigo eyes growing even darker. “Much as I like you all, I think at this point I’d trade the whole bunch of you for Mr. Goodwrench. You’re all so afraid to touch him, even though you know what’s going to happen if you don’t. And I’m the same way—I’m not excluding myself.”

“At least the two…” Fran stopped. She had been about to say At least the two men went, then decided that might be unfortunate phrasing, with Harold still here. “At least Stu and Glen went. That’s something, isn’t it?”

Peri sighed. “Yes—that’s something. But it was Stu’s decision to go, wasn’t it? The only one of us who finally decided it would be better to try anything than to just stand around wringing our hands.” She looked at Frannie. “Did he tell you what he did for a living before?”

“He worked in a factory,” Fran said promptly. She did not notice that Harold’s brow clouded at how quickly she was able to come up with this information. “He put circuits in electronic calculators. I guess you could say he was a computer technician.”

“Ha!” Harold said, and smiled sourly.

“He’s the only one of us who understands taking things apart,” Peri said. “What he and Mr. Bateman do will kill Mark, I’m almost sure it will, but it’s better that he be killed while somebody is trying to make him well than it would be for him to die while we just stand around watching… as if he were a dog that had been run over in the street.”

Neither Harold nor Fran could find a reply to that. They only stood behind her and watched Mark’s pale, still face. After a while Harold put his sweaty hand on Fran’s shoulder again. It made her feel like screaming.

Stu and Glen got back at quarter to four. They had taken one of the cycles. Tied behind it was a doctor’s black bag of instruments and several large black books.

“We’ll try,” was all Stu said.

Peri looked up. Her face was white and strained, her voice calm. “Would you? Please. We both want you to,” she said.

“Stu?” Perion said.

It was ten minutes past four. Stu was kneeling on a rubber sheet that had been spread under the tree. Sweat was pouring from his face in rivers. His eyes looked bright and haunted and frantic. Frannie was holding a book open in front of him, switching back and forth between two colored plates whenever Stu raised his eyes and nodded at her. Beside him, horribly white, Glen Bateman held a spool of fine white thread. Between them was an open case of stainless steel instruments. The case was now splashed with blood.

“It’s here!” Stu cried. His voice was suddenly high and hard and exultant. His eyes had narrowed to two points. “Here’s the little bastard! Here! Right here!”

“Stu?” Perion said.

“Fran, show me that other plate again! Quick! Quick!”

“Can you take it out?” Glen asked. “Jesus, East Texas, do you really think you can?”

Harold was gone. He had left the party early, holding one hand cupped over his mouth. He had been standing in a small grove of trees to the east, his back to them, for the last fifteen minutes. Now he turned back, his large round face hopeful.

“I don’t know,” Stu said, “but I might. I just might.”

He stared at the color plate Fran was showing him. He was wearing blood up to his elbows, like scarlet evening gloves.

“Stu?” Perion said.

“It’s self-containing above and below,” Stu whispered. His eyes glittered fantastically. “The appendix. It’s its own little unit. It… wipe my forehead, Frannie, Jesus, I’m sweating like a fucking pig… thanks… God, I don’t want to cut his doins any worse than I have to… that’s his everfucking intestines… but Christ, I gotta. I gotta.”

“Stu?” Perion said.

“Give me the scissors, Glen. No—not those. The small pair.”

“Stu.”

He looked at her at last.

“You don’t need to.” Her voice was calm, soft. “He’s dead.”

Stu looked at her, his narrowed eyes slowly widening.

She nodded. “Almost two minutes ago. But thank you. Thank you for trying.”

Stu looked at her for a long time. “You’re sure?” he whispered at last.

She nodded again. Tears were spilling silently down her face.

Stu turned away from them, dropping the small scalpel he had been holding, and put his hands over his eyes in a gesture of utter despair. Glen had already gotten up and walked off, not looking back, his shoulders hunched, as if from a blow.

Frannie put her arms around Stu and hugged him.

“That’s that,” he said. He said it over and over again, speaking in a slow and toneless way that frightened her. “That’s that. All over. That’s that. That’s that.”

“You did the best you could,” she said, and hugged him even tighter, as if he might fly away.

“That’s that,” he said again, with dull finality.

Frannie hugged him. Despite all her thoughts of the last three and a half weeks, despite her “crushable crush,” she had not made a single overt move. She had been almost painfully careful not to show the way she felt. The situation with Harold was just too much on a hair trigger. And she was not showing the true way she felt about Stu even now, not really. It was not a lover’s hug she was bestowing on him. It was simply one survivor clinging to another. Stu seemed to understand this. His hands came up to her shoulders and pressed them firmly, leaving bloody handprints on her khaki shirt, marking her in a way which seemed to make them partners in some unhappy crime. Somewhere a jay cawed harshly, and closer at hand Perion began to weep.

Harold Lauder, who did not know the difference between the hugs survivors and lovers may bestow on each other, gazed at Frannie and Stu with dawning suspicion and fear. After a long moment he crashed furiously off into the brush and didn’t come back until long after supper.

She woke up early the next morning. Someone was shaking her. I’ll open my eyes and it’ll be Glen or Harold, she thought sleepily. We’re going to go through it again, and we’ll keep going through it until we get it right. Those who do not learn from history—

But it was Stu. And it was already daylight of a sort; creeping dawn, muffled in early mist like fresh gold wrapped in thin cotton. The others were sleeping humps.

“What is it?” she asked, sitting up. “Is something wrong?”

“I was dreaming again,” he said. “Not the old woman, the… the other one. The dark man. I was scared, so I…”

“Stop it,” she said, frightened by the look on his face. “Say what you mean, please.”

“It’s Perion. The Veronal. She got the Veronal out of Glen’s pack.”

She hissed in breath.

“Oh boy,” Stu said brokenly. “She’s dead, Frannie. Oh Lord, ain’t this some mess.”

She tried to speak and found she could not.

“I guess I’ve got to wake the other two up,” Stu said in an absent sort of way. He rubbed at his cheek, which was sandpapery with beard. Fran could still remember how it had felt against her own cheek yesterday, when she had hugged him. He turned back to her, bewildered. “When does it end?”

She said softly: “I don’t think it ever will.”

Their eyes locked in the early dawn.

From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary

July 12, 1990

We’re camped just west of Guilderland (NY) tonight, have finally made it onto the Big Highway, Route 80/90. The excitement of meeting Mark and Perion (don’t you think that’s a pretty name? I do) yesterday afternoon has more or less abated. They have agreed to throw in with us… in fact, they made the suggestion before any of us could.

Not that I’m sure Harold would have offered. You know how he is. And he was a little put off (I think Glen was, too) by all the hardware they were carrying, including semiautomatic rifles (two). But mostly Harold just had to have his little song and dance… he has to register his presence, you know.

I guess I have filled up pages and pages with THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAROLD, and if you don’t know him by now, you never will. Underneath his swagger and all those pompous pronouncements, there is a very insecure little boy. He can’t really believe that things have changed. Part of him—quite a large part, I think—has to go on believing that all his high school tormentors are going to rise out of their graves one fine day and start shooting spitballs at him again or maybe calling him Whack-Off Lauder, as Amy said they used to do. Sometimes I think it would have been better for him (and maybe me too) if we hadn’t hooked up back in Ogunquit. I’m part of his old life, I was best friends with his sister once upon a time, and so on and so on. What sums up my weird relationship with Harold is this: strange as it may seem, knowing what I know now, I would probably pick Harold to be friends with instead of Amy, who was mostly dizzy about boys with nice cars and clothes from Sweetie’s, and who was (God forgive me for saying Cruddy Things about the Dead but it’s true) a real Ogunquit Snob, the way only a year-round townie can be one. Harold is, in his own weird way, sort of cool. When he’s not concentrating all his mental energies on being an asshole, that is. But, you see, Harold could never believe that anyone could think he was cool. Part of him has such a huge investment in being square. He is determined to carry all of his problems right along with him into this not-so-brave new world. He might as well have them packed right inside his knapsack along with those chocolate Payday candy bars he likes to eat.

Oh Harold, jeez, I just don’t know.

Things to Remember: The Gillette parrot. “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin.” The walking Kool-Aid pitcher that used to say, “Oh… YEAAAAHHH! ” “O.B. Tampons… created by a woman gynecologist.” Converse All-Stars. Night of the Living Dead. Brrrr! That last one hits too close to home. I quit.

July 14, 1990

We had a very long and very sober talk about these dreams today at lunch, stopping much longer than we should have, probably. We’re just north of Batavia, New York, by the way.

Yesterday, Harold very diffidently (for him) suggested we start stocking up on Veronal and hitting ourselves with very light doses to see if we couldn’t “disrupt the dream-cycle,” as he put it. I went along with the idea so no one would start to wonder if something might be wrong with me, but I plan to palm my dose because I don’t know what it might do to the Lone Ranger (I hope he’s Lone; I’m not sure I could face twins).

With the Veronal proposal adopted, Mark had a comment. “You know,” he sez, “things like this really don’t bear too much thinking about. The next thing you know, we’ll all be thinking we’re Moses or Joseph, getting telephone calls from God.”

“That dark man isn’t calling from heaven,” Stu sez. “If it’s a toll-call, I think it’s comin from someplace a lot lower down.”

“Which is Stu’s way of saying Old Scratch is after us,” Frannie pipes up.

“And that’s as good an explanation as any other,” Glen sez. We all looked at him. “Well,” he went on, a little on the defensive, I think, “if you look at it from a theological point of view, it does rather seem as if we’re the knot in a tug-o-war rope between heaven and hell, doesn’t it? If there are any Jesuit survivors of the superflu, they must be going absolutely bananas.”

That made Mark laugh his head off. I didn’t really get it, but kept my mouth shut.

“Well, I think the whole thing is ridiculous,” Harold put in. “You’ll be getting around to Edgar Cayce and the transmigration of souls before we know it.”

He pronounced Cayce Case, and when I corrected him (you say it like the initials for Kansas City), he gave me a really HORRID HAROLD-FROWN. He isn’t the type of guy who swamps you with gratitude when you point out his little flaws, diary!

“Whenever something overtly paranormal occurs,” Glen said, “the only explanation that really fits well and holds its interior logic is the theological one. That’s why psychics and religion have always gone hand in hand, right up to your modern-day faith-healers.”

Harold was grumbling, but Glen went on anyway.

“My own gut feeling is that everyone’s psychic… and it’s so ingrained a part of us that we very rarely notice it. The talent may be largely preventative, and that keeps it from being noticed, too.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s a negative factor, Fran. Have any of you ever read James D.L. Staunton’s 1958 study of train and airplane crashes? It was originally published in a sociology journal, but the tabloid newspapers rake it up every now and again.”

We all shook our heads.

“You ought to,” he said. “James Staunton was what my students of twenty years ago would have called ‘a real good head’—a mild-mannered clinical sociologist who studied the occult as a kind of hobby. He wrote any number of articles on the combined subjects before going over to the other side to do some first-hand research.”

Harold snorted, but Stu and Mark were grinning. I fear I was, too.

“So tell us about the planes and trains,” Peri sez.

“Well, Staunton got the stats on over fifty plane crashes since 1925 and over two hundred train crashes since 1900. He fed all the data into a computer. Basically, he was correlating three factors: those present on any such conveyance that met with disaster, those killed, and the capacity of the vehicle.”

“Don’t see what he was trying to prove,” Stu said.

“To see that, you have to understand that he fed a second series of figures into the computer—this time an equal number of planes and trains which didn’t meet with disaster.”

Mark nodded. “A control group and an experimental group. That seems solid enough.”

“What he found was simple enough, but staggering in its implications. It’s a shame one has to stagger through sixteen tables to get at the underlying statistical fact.”

“What fact?” I asked.

“Full planes and trains rarely crash,” Glen said.

“Oh fucking BULLSHIT! ” Harold just about screams.

“Not at all,” Glen sez calmly. “That was Staunton’s theory, and the computer bore him out. In cases where planes or trains crash, the vehicles are running at 61 percent capacity, as regards passenger loads. In cases where they don’t, the vehicles are running at 76 per cent capacity. That’s a difference of 15 percent over a large computer run, and that sort of across-the-board deviation is significant. Staunton points out that, statistically speaking, a 3 percent deviation would be food for thought, and he’s right. It’s an anomaly the size of Texas. Staunton’s deduction was that people know which planes and trains are going to crash… that they are unconsciously predicting the future.

“Your Aunt Sally gets a bad stomachache just before Flight 61 takes off from Chicago bound for San Diego. And when the plane crashes in the Nevada desert, everyone says, ‘Oh Aunt Sally, that bellyache was really the grace of God.’ But until James Staunton came along, no one had realized that there were really thirty people with bellyaches… or headaches… or just that funny feeling you get in your legs when your body is trying to tell your head that something is getting ready to go way off-course.”

“I just can’t believe that,” Harold sez, shaking his head rather woefully.

“Well, you know,” Glen said, “about a week after I finished the Staunton article for the first time, a Majestic Airlines jet crashed at Logan Airport. It killed everyone on board. Well, I called the Majestic office at Logan after things had settled down a bit. I told them I was a reporter from the Manchester Union-Leader —a small lie in a good cause. I said we were getting a sidebar on airline crashes together and asked if they could tell me how many no-shows there were on that flight. The man sounded kind of surprised, because he said the airline personnel had been talking about that. The number was sixteen. Sixteen no-shows. I asked him what the average was on 747 flights from Denver to Boston, and he said it was three.”

“Three,” Perion sez in a marveling kind of way.

“Right. But the guy went further. He said they’d also had fifteen cancelations, and the average number is eight. So, although the headlines after the fact screamed LOGAN AIR CRASH KILLS 94, it could just as well have read 31 AVOID DEATH IN LOGAN AIRPORT DISASTER.”

Well… there was a lot more talk about psychic stuff, but it wandered pretty far afield from the subject of our dreams and whether or not they come from the Big Righteous in the sky. One thing that did come up (this was after Harold had wandered away in utter disgust) was Stu asking Glen, “If we’re all so psychic, then how come we don’t know when a loved one has just died or that our house just blew away in a tornado, or something?”

“There are cases of exactly that sort of thing,” Glen said, “but I will admit they are nowhere near as common… or as easy to prove with the aid of a computer. It’s an interesting point. I have a theory—”

(Doesn’t he always, diary?)

“—that has to do with evolution. You know, once men—or their progenitors—had tails and hair all over their bodies, and much sharper senses than they do now. Why don’t we have them anymore? Quick, Stu! This is your chance to go to the head of the class, mortarboard and all.”

“Why, for the same reason people don’t wear goggles and dusters when they drive anymore, I guess. Sometimes you outgrow a thing. It gets to a point where you don’t need it anymore.”

“Exactly. And what is the point of having a psychic sense that’s useless in any practical way? What earthly good would it do you to be working in your office and suddenly know that your wife had been killed in a car-smash coming back from the market? Someone is going to call you on, the telephone and tell you, right? That sense may have atrophied long ago, if we ever had it. It may have gone the way, of our tails and our pelts.

“What interests me about these dreams,” he went on, “is that they seem to presage some future struggle. We seem to be getting cloudy pictures of a protagonist… and an antagonist. An adversary, if you like. If that’s so, it may be like looking at a plane on which we’re scheduled to fly… and getting a bellyache. We’re being given the means to help shape our own futures, perhaps. A kind of fourth-dimensional free will: the chance to choose in advance of events.”

“But we don’t know what the dreams mean,” I said.

“No, we don’t. But we may. I don’t know if a little tickle of psychic ability means we are divine; there are plenty of people who can accept the miracle of eyesight without believing that eyesight proves the existence of God, and I am one of them; but I do believe these dreams are a constructive force in spite of their ability to frighten us. I’m having second thoughts about the Veronal as a result. Taking it is very much like swallowing some Pepto-Bismol to quiet the bellyache, and then getting on the pane anyway.”

Things to Remember: Recessions, shortages, the prototype Ford Growler that could go sixty miles of highway on a single gallon of gas. Quite the wonder car. That’s all; I quit. If I don’t shorten my entries, this diary will be as long as Gone with the Wind even before the Lone Ranger arrives (although please not on a white horse named Silver). Oh yes, one other Thing to Remember. Edgar Cayce. Can’t forget him. He supposedly saw the future in his dreams.

July 16, 1990

Only two notes, both of them relating to the dreams (see entry two days ago). First, Glen Bateman has been very pale and silent these last two days, and tonight I saw him take an extra-large dose of Veronal. My suspicion is that he skipped his last two doses and the result was some VERY bad dreams. That worries me. I wish I knew a way to approach him about it, but can think of nothing.

Second, my own dreams. Nothing night before last (the night after our discussion); slept like a baby and can’t remember a thing. Last night I dreamed of the old woman for the first time. Have nothing to add beyond what has already been said except to say she seems to exude an aura of NICENESS, of KINDNESS. I think I can understand why Stu was so set on going to Nebraska even in the face of Harold’s sarcasm. I woke up this morning completely refreshed, thinking that if we could just get to that old woman, Mother Abigail, everything would be A-OK. I hope she’s really there. (By the way, I’m quite sure that the name of the town is Hemingford Home.)

Things to Remember: Mother Abigail!

Chapter 47

When it happened, it happened fast.

It was around quarter of ten on July 30, and they had been on the road only an hour. Going was slow because there had been heavy showers the night before and the road was still slippery. There had been little talk among the four of them since yesterday morning, when Stu had awakened first Frannie, then Harold and Glen, to tell them about Perion’s suicide. He was blaming himself, Fran thought miserably, blaming himself for something that was no more his fault than a thunderstorm would have been.

She would have liked to have told him so, partly because he needed to be scolded for his self-indulgence and partly because she loved him. This latter was a fact she could no longer conceal from herself. She thought she could convince him that Peri’s death wasn’t his fault… but the convincing would entail showing him what her own true feelings were. She thought she would have to pin her heart to her sleeve, where he could see it. Unfortunately, Harold would be able to see it, too. So that was out… but only for the time being. She thought she would have to do it soon, Harold or no Harold. She could only protect him so long. Then he would have to know… and either accept or not accept. She was afraid Harold might opt for the second choice. A decision like that could lead to something horrible. They were, after all, carrying a lot of shooting irons.

She was mulling these thoughts over when they swept around a curve and saw a large housetrailer overturned in the middle of the road, blocking it from one end to the other. Its pink corrugated side still glistened with last night’s rain. This was surprising enough, but there was more—three cars, all station wagons, and a big auto-wrecker were parked along the sides of the road. There were people standing around, too, at least a dozen of them.

Fran was so surprised she braked too suddenly. The Honda she was riding skidded on the wet road, and almost dumped her before she was able to get it under control. Then all four of them had stopped, more or less in a line which crossed the road, blinking and more than a little stunned at the sight of so many people who were still alive.

“Okay, dismount,” one of the men said. He was tall, sandy-bearded, and wearing dark sunglasses. Fran timetraveled for a moment inside her head, back to the Maine Turnpike and being hauled down by a state trooper for speeding.

Next he’ll ask to see our drivers’ licenses, Fran thought. But this was no lone State Trooper, bagging speeders and writing tickets. There were four men here, three of them standing behind the sandy-bearded man in a short skirmish line. The rest were all women. At least eight of them. They looked pale and scared, clustered around the parked station wagons in little groups.

The sandy-bearded man was carrying a pistol. The men behind him all had rifles. Two of them were wearing bits and pieces of army kit.

“Dismount, goddamn you,” the bearded man said, and one of the men behind him levered a round into the breech of his rifle. It was a loud, bitterly imperative sound in the misty morning air.

Glen and Harold looked puzzled and apprehensive. That, and no more. They’re sitting ducks, Frannie thought with rising panic. She did not fully understand the situation herself yet, but she knew the equation here was all wrong. Four men, eight women, her brain said, and then repeated it, louder, in tones of alarm: Four men! Eight women!

“Harold,” Stu said in a quiet voice. Something had come up in his eyes. Some realization. “Harold, don’t—” And then everything happened.

Stu’s rifle was slung over his back. He dropped one shoulder so that the strap slid down his arm, and then the rifle was in his hands.

“Don’t do it!” the bearded man shouted furiously. “Garvey! Virge! Ronnie! Get them! Save the woman!”

Harold began to grab for his pistols, at first forgetting they were still strapped into their holsters.

Glen Bateman still sat behind Harold in stunned surprise.

“Harold! ” Stu yelled again.

Frannie began to unsling her own rifle. She felt as if the air around her had suddenly been packed with invisible molasses, treacly stuff she would never be able to struggle through in time. She realized they were probably going to die here.

One of the girls screamed: “NOW! ”

Frannie’s gaze switched to this girl even as she continued to struggle with her rifle. Not really a girl; she was at least twenty-five. Her hair, ash-blond, lay against her head in a ragged helmet, as if she had recently lopped it off with a pair of hedge-clippers.

Not all of the women moved; some of them appeared to be nearly catatonic with fright. But the blond girl and three of the others did.

All of this happened in the space of seven seconds.

The bearded man had been pointing his pistol at Stu. When the young blond woman screamed, “Now! ”, the barrel jerked slightly toward her, like a divining rod sensing water. It went off, making a loud noise like a piece of steel being punched through cardboard. Stu fell off his bike and Frannie screamed his name.

Then Stu was up on both elbows (both were scraped from hitting the road, and the Honda was lying on one of his legs), firing. The bearded man seemed to dance backward like a vaudeville hoofer leaving the stage after his encore. The faded plaid shirt he was wearing puffed and billowed. His pistol, an automatic, jerked up toward the sky and that steel-punching-through-cardboard sound happened four more times. He fell over on his back.

Two of the three men behind him had jerked around at the blond woman’s cry. One pulled both triggers of the weapon he was holding, an old-fashioned Remington twelve-gauge. The stock of the gun was not resting against anything—he was holding it outside his right hip—and when it went off with a sound like a thunderclap in a small room, it flew backward out of his hands, ripping skin from his fingers as it went. It clattered on the road. The face of one of the women who had not reacted to the blond woman’s shout dissolved in an unbelievable fury of blood, and for a moment Frannie could actually hear blood raining down on the pavement, as if there had been a sudden shower. One eye peered unharmed through the mask of blood this woman now wore. It was dazed and unknowing. Then the woman fell forward onto the road. The Country Squire station wagon behind her was peppered with buckshot. One of the windows was a cataract of milky cracks.

The blond girl grappled with the second man who had turned toward her. The rifle the man held went off between their bodies. One of the girls scrambled for the lost shotgun.

The third man, who had not turned toward the women, began to fire at Fran. Frannie sat astride her bike, her rifle in her hands, blinking stupidly at him. He was an olive-skinned man who looked Italian. She felt a bullet drone by her left temple.

Harold had finally gotten one of his pistols free. He raised it and fired at the olive-skinned man. The distance was about fifteen paces. He missed. A bullet hole appeared in the skin of the pink housetrailer just to the left of the olive-skinned man’s head. The olive-skinned man looked at Harold and said, “Now I gonna keel-a you, you sonnabeesh.”

“Don’t do that! ” Harold screamed. He dropped his pistol and held out his open hands.

The olive-skinned man fired three times at Harold. All three shots missed. The third round came the closest to doing damage; it screamed off the exhaust pipe of Harold’s Yamaha. It fell over, spilling Harold and Glen off.

Now twenty seconds had passed. Harold and Stu lay flat. Glen sat cross-legged on the road, still looking as if he didn’t know exactly where he was, or what was going on. Frannie was trying desperately to shoot the olive-skinned man before he could shoot Harold or Stu, but her gun wouldn’t fire, the trigger wouldn’t even pull, because she had forgotten to thumb the safety catch to its off position. The blond woman continued to struggle with the second man, and the woman who had gone after the dropped shotgun was now fighting with a second woman for possession of it.

Cursing in a language which was undoubtedly Italian, the olive-skinned man aimed at Harold again and then Stu fired and the olive-skinned man’s forehead caved in and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

Another woman had now joined the fray over the shotgun. The man who had lost it tried to throw her aside. She reached between his legs, grabbed the crotch of his jeans, and squeezed. Fran saw her hamstrings pop out all the way up her forearm to the elbow. The man screamed. The man lost interest in the shotgun. The man grabbed his privates and stumbled away bent-over.

Harold crawled to where his dropped pistol lay on the road and pounced on it. He raised it and fired at the man holding his privates. He fired three times and missed every time.

It’s like Bonnie and Clyde, Frannie thought. Jesus, there’s blood everywhere!

The blond woman with the ragged hair had lost her struggle for possession of the second man’s rifle. He jerked it free and kicked her, perhaps aiming for her stomach, catching her in the thigh with one of his heavy boots instead. She went quick-stepping backward, whirling her arms for balance, and landed on her fanny with a wet splat.

Now he’ll shoot her, Frannie thought, but the second man whirled around like a drunken soldier doing an about-face and began to fire rapidly into the group of three women still cringing against the side of the Country Squire.

“Yaaah! You bitches!” this gentleman screamed. “Yaaaah! You bitches!”

One of the women fell over and began to flop on the pavement between the station wagon and the overturned trailer like a stabbed fish. The other two women ran. Stu fired at the shooter and missed. The second man fired at one of the running women and did not. She threw her hands up to the sky and fell down. The other buttonhooked left and ran behind the pink trailer.

The third man, the one who had lost and failed to regain the shotgun, was still staggering around and holding his crotch. One of the women pointed the shotgun at him and pulled both triggers, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth grimacing in anticipation of that thunder. The thunder didn’t come. The shotgun was dry. She reversed it so she was holding it by the barrels and brought the stock down in a hard arc. She missed his head, but got the place where his neck joined his right shoulder. The man was driven to his knees. He began to crawl away. The woman, who was wearing a blue sweatshirt which said KENT STATE UNIVERSITY and tattered bluejeans, walked along after him, bludgeoning him with the shotgun as she went. The man continued to crawl, blood now running off him in rivers, and the woman in the Kent State sweatshirt continued to whale on him.

“Yaaaaah, you bitches!” the second man screamed, and fired at a dazed and muttering middle-aged woman. The distance between muzzle and woman was at the most three feet; she could almost have reached out and plugged the barrel with her pinky finger. He missed. He pulled the trigger again, but this time the rifle only dry-fired.

Harold was now holding his pistol in both hands, as he had seen cops do in the movies. He pulled the trigger and his bullet smashed the second man’s elbow. The second man dropped his rifle and began to dance up and down, making high jabbering noises. To Frannie, he sounded a little like Roger Rabbit saying “P-P-Pleeeeze! ”

“I got im!” Harold cried ecstatically. “Got im! By God, I got im!”

Frannie finally remembered the safety catch on her rifle. She thumbed it off just as Stu fired again. The second man fell down, now clutching his stomach instead of his elbow. He went on screaming.

“My God, my God,” Glen said mildly. He put his face into his hands and began to weep.

Harold fired his pistol again. The second man’s body jumped. He stopped screaming.

The woman in the Kent State University sweatshirt brought the stock of the shotgun down again, and this time she connected solidly with the crawling man’s head. It sounded like Jim Rice connecting solidly with a high, hard fastball. The shotgun’s walnut stock and the man’s head both shattered.

For a moment there was silence. A bird called in it: Whitwhit… whitwhit… whitwhit.

Then the girl in the sweatshirt stood astride the third man’s body and gave a long, primeval scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith for the rest of her life.

The blond girl was Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the Kent State sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun’s crotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest, Dayna said, was Shirley Hammett. They didn’t know the name of the other woman, who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al, Garvey, Virge, and Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two days before.

The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere just west of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, and Fran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturned pink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observer like a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-high and still wet from the previous night’s rain, had soon soaked their pants. White butterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy with moisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figure-eights. The sun was struggling to break through but hadn’t made it yet; it was a bright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already, wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows and their raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thought dazedly. If we don’t watch out, they’ll peck us right off the face of the earth. Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared that they were.

Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind the melting cloud cover (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humid morning, the thirtieth of July, 1990), the gunbattle played over and over in her mind. The woman’s face disintegrating under the shotgun blast. Stu falling over. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One man crying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Harold plugged him. The steel-punching-through-cardboard sound of the bearded man’s pistol. Susan Stern’s primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body of her enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull.

Glen walked beside her, his thin, rather sardonic face now distraught, his gray hair flying wispily around his head as if in imitation of the butterflies. He held her hand, and he kept patting it compulsively.

“You mustn’t let it affect you,” he said. “Such horrors… bound to occur. Best protection is in numbers. Society, you know. Society is the keystone of the arch we call civilization, and it is the only real antidote to outlawry. You must take… things… things like this… as a matter of course. This was an isolated occurrence. Think of them as trolls. Yes! Trolls or yogs or affrits. Monsters of a generic sort. I accept that. I hold that truth to be self-evident, a socioconstitutional ethic, one might say. Ha! Ha!”

His laugh was half moan. She punctuated each of his elliptical sentences with “Yes, Glen,” but he seemed not to hear. Glen smelled a trifle vomitous. The butterflies banged against them and then banged off again on their butterfly errands. They were almost to the farmhouse. The battle had lasted less than a minute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over by popular demand inside her head. Glen patted her hand. She wanted to tell him to please stop doing that, but she was afraid that he might cry if she did. She could stand the patting. She wasn’t sure she could stand to see Glen Bateman weeping.

Stu was walking with Harold on one side and the blond girl, Dayna Jurgens, on the other. Susan Stern and Patty Kroger flanked the unnamed catatonic woman who had been picked up in Archbold. Shirley Hammett, the woman who had been missed at pointblank range by the man who had imitated Roger Rabbit before he died, walked a little way off to the left, muttering and making the occasional grab at the passing butterflies. The party was walking slowly, but Shirley Hammett was slower. Her gray hair hung untidily about her face, and her dazed eyes peered out at the world like frightened mice peering out of a temporary bolthole.

Harold looked at Stu uneasily. “We wiped them out, didn’t we, Stu? We blew them up. Scragged their asses.”

“I guess so, Harold.”

“Man, but we had to,” Harold said earnestly, as if Stu had suggested things might have been otherwise. “It was them or us!”

“They would have blown your heads off,” Dayna Jurgens said quietly. “I was with two guys when they hit us. They shot Rich and Damon from ambush. After it was over, they put a round in each of their heads, just to make sure. You had to, all right. By rights you should be dead now.”

“By rights we should be dead now!” Harold exclaimed to Stu.

“It’s all right,” Stu said. “Take her easy, Harold.”

“Sure! Negative perspiration!” Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in his pack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off the wrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in both hands like a lollypop.

They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtively as he ate his candy bar—had to keep making sure he wasn’t hurt. He felt very sick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wet himself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into high gear.

Dayna and Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which some picked at but none really ate. Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunched herself into the farthest corner of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammett sat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered.

Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell. How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about “having business in the desert.”

By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer bad dreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gotten the idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. He had an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the other three people they’d met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear for Rich’s sanity. He called the dream-man “the hardcase” and said he was getting an army of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the west and enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of the world. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility of slipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their own dreams were the result of Rich Darliss’s powerful delusion.

In Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover a large dump truck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was a station wagon and a wrecker parked nearby.

“We assumed it was just another smashup,” Dayna said, crumbling a graham cracker nervously between her fingers, “which was, of course, exactly what we were supposed to think.”

They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dump truck, and that was when the four hardcases—to use Rich’s word—opened up from the ditch. They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was the fourth addition to what they sometimes called “the zoo” and sometimes “the harem.” One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammett, who at that time had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. “And once,” Dayna said, “when she couldn’t hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from her rectum for three days.”

“Jesus Christ,” Stu said. “Which one was he?”

“The man with the shotgun,” Susan Stern said. “The one I brained. I wish he was right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again.”

The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the flu broke out. Their job had been “media relations,” which was an army euphemism for “media suppression.” When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone on to “crowd control,” which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran and hanging looters who didn’t. By the twenty-seventh of June, Doc had told them, the chain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of their own men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn’t matter anyway, as the citizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banks and jewelry stores.

By June 30, the unit was gone—its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc and Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they had begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of July, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiar little club to further memberships.

“But after a while you must have outnumbered them,” Glen said.

Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammett who spoke to this.

“Pills,” she said, her trapped-mice eyes staring out at them from behind the fringe of her graying bangs. “Pills every morning to get up, pills every night to go down. Ups and downs.” Her voice had been sinking, and this last was barely audible. She paused, then began to mutter again.

Susan Stern took up the thread of the story. She and one of the dead women, Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus. By then the party was traveling in a caravan which consisted of two station wagons and the wrecker. The men used the wrecker to move crashed vehicles out of their way or to roadblock the highway, depending on what opportunities offered. Doc kept the pharmacy tied to his belt in an outsized poke. Heavy downers for bedtime; tranks for travel; reds for recess.

“I’d get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Doc to hand out the pills,” Susan said matter-of-factly. “The daytime pills, I mean. By the third day I had abrasions on my… well, you know, my vagina, and any sort of normal intercourse was very painful. I used to hope for Ronnie, because all Ronnie ever wanted was a blowjob. But after the pills, you got very calm. Not sleepy, just calm. Things didn’t seem to matter after you got yourself wrapped around a few of those blue pills. All you wanted to do was sit with your hands in your lap and watch the scenery go by or sit with your hands in your lap and watch them use the wrecker to move something out of the way. One day Garvey got mad because this one girl, she couldn’t have been any more than twelve, she wouldn’t do… well, I’m not going to tell you. It was that bad. So Garvey blew her head off. I didn’t even care. I was just… calm. After a while, you almost stopped thinking about escape. What you wanted more than getting away was those blue pills.”

Dayna and Patty Kroger were nodding.

But they seemed to recognize eight women as their effective limit, Patty said. When they took her on July 22 after murdering the fiftyish man she had been traveling with, they had killed a very old woman who had been a part of “the zoo” for about a week. When the unnamed girl sitting in the corner had been picked up near Archbold, a sixteen-year-old girl with strabismus had been shot and left in a ditch. “Doc used to joke about it,” Patty said. “He’d say, ‘I don’t walk under ladders, I don’t cross black cats’ paths, and I’m not going to have thirteen people traveling with me.’”

On the twenty-ninth, they had caught sight of Stu and the others for the first time. The zoo had been camped in a picnic area just off the interstate when the four of them passed by.

“Garvey was very taken with you,” Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannie shuddered.

Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. “And they’d made it pretty clear whose place you were going to take.” She nodded her head almost imperceptibly at Shirley Hammett, who was still muttering and eating graham crackers.

“That poor woman,” Frannie said.

“It was Dayna who decided you guys might be our best chance,” Patty said. “Or maybe our last chance. There were three men in your party—both she and Helen Roget had seen that. Three armed men. And Doc had gotten just the teeniest bit overconfident about the trailer-overturned-in-the-road bit. Doc would just act like somebody official, and the men in the parties they met—when there were men—just caved in. And got shot. It had been working like a charm.”

“Dayna asked us to try and palm our pills this morning,” Susan went on. “They’d gotten sort of careless about making sure we really took them, too, and we knew that this morning they’d be busy pulling that big trailer out into the road and tipping it over. We didn’t tell everyone. The only ones in on it were Dayna and Patty and Helen Roget… one of the girls Ronnie shot back there. And me, of course. Helen said, ‘If they catch us trying to spit the pills into our hands, they’re going to kill us.’ And Dayna said they would kill us anyway, sooner or later, and only sooner if we were lucky, and of course we knew that was true. So we did it.”

“I had to hold mine in my mouth for quite a while,” Patty said. “It was starting to dissolve by the time I got a chance to spit it out.” She looked at Dayna. “I think Helen actually had to swallow hers. I think that’s why she was so slow.”

Dayna nodded. She was looking at Stu with a clear warmth that made Frannie uneasy. “It still would have worked if you hadn’t gotten wise, big fella.”

“I didn’t get wise near soon enough, looks like,” Stu said. “Next time I will.” He stood up, went to the window, and looked out. “You know, that’s half of what scares me,” he said. “How wise we’re all getting.”

Fran cared even less for the sympathetic way Dayna looked after him. She had no right to look sympathetic after all she’d been through. And she’s much prettier than I am, in spite of everything, Fran thought. Also, I doubt if she’s pregnant.

“It’s a get-wise world, big fella,” Dayna said. “Get wise or die.”

Stu turned to look at her, really seeing her for the first time, and Fran felt a stab of pure jealous agony. I waited too long, she thought. Oh my God, I went and did it, I went and waited too long.

She happened to glance at Harold and saw that Harold was smiling in a guarded way, one hand up to his mouth to conceal it. It looked like a smile of relief. She suddenly felt that she would like to stand up, walk casually over to Harold, and hook his eyes out of his head with her fingernails.

Never, Harold! she would scream as she did it. Never!

Never?

From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary

July 19, 1990

Oh Lord. The worst has happened. At least in the books when it happens it’s over, something at least changes, but in real life it just seems to go on and on, like a soap opera where nothing ever comes to a head. Maybe I should move to clear things up, take a chance, but I’m so afraid something might happen between them and. You can’t end a sentence with “and,” but I’m afraid to put down what might come after the conjunction.

Let me tell you everything, dear diary, even though it’s no great treat to write it down. I even hate to think about it.

Glen and Stu went into town (which happens to be Girard, Ohio, tonight) near dusk to look for some food, hopefully concentrates and freeze-dried stuff. They’re easy to carry and some of the concentrates are really tasty, but as far as I am concerned all the freeze-dried food has the same flavor, namely dried turkey turds. And when have you ever had dried turkey turds to serve as your basis for a comparison? Never mind, diary, some things will never be told, ha-ha.

They asked Harold and me if we wanted to come, but I said I’d had enough motorcycling for one day if they could do without me, and Harold said no, he would fetch some water and get it boiled up. Probably already laying his plans. Sorry to make him sound so scheming, but the simple fact is, he is.

note 7

Well, Mark and Perion were off somewhere, supposedly hunting for wild berries to supplement our diet, probably doing something else—they are quite modest about it & bully for them, say I—and so I was first gathering wood for a fire and then getting one going for Harold’s kettle of water… and pretty soon he came back with one (he’d pretty obviously stayed at the stream long enough to have a bath and wash his hair). He hung it on the whatdoyoucallit that goes over the fire. Then he comes & sits down beside me.

We were sitting on a log, talking about one thing and another, when he suddenly put his arms around me and tried to kiss me. I say tried but he actually succeeded, at least at first, because I was so surprised. Then I jerked away from him—looking back it seems sorta comic altho I’m still sore—and fell backward right off the log. It rucked up the back of my blouse and scraped about a yard of skin off. I let out a yell. Talk about history repeating, that was too much like the time with Jess out on the breakwater when I bit my tongue… too much like it for comfort.

In a second Harold’s on one knee beside me, asking if I’m all right, blushing right down to the roots of his clean hair. Harold tries sometimes to be so icy, so sophisticated—he always seems to me like a jaded young writer constantly searching for that special Sad Café on the West Bank where he can idle the day away talking about Jean-Paul Sartre and drinking cheap plonk—but underneath, well covered, is a teenager with a far less mature set of fantasies. Or so I believe. Saturday matinee fantasies for the most part: Tyrone Power in Captain from Castile, Humphrey Bogart in Dark Passage, Steve McQueen in Bullitt. In times of stress it’s always this side of him which seems to come out, maybe because he repressed it so severely as a child, I don’t know. Anyway, when he regresses to Bogie, he only succeeds in reminding me of that guy who played Bogie in that Woody Allen movie, Play It Again, Sam.

So when he knelt beside me and said, “Are you all right, baby?,” I started to giggle. Talk about history repeating itself! But it was more than the humor of the situation, you know. If that had been all, I could have held it in. No, it was more in the line of hysterics. The bad dreams, the worrying about the baby, what to do about my feelings for Stu, the traveling every day, the stiffness, the soreness, losing my parents, everything changed for good… it came out in giggles at first, then in hysterical laughter I just couldn’t stop.

“What’s so funny?” Harold asked, getting up. I think it was supposed to come out in this terribly righteous voice, but by then I had stopped thinking about Harold and got this crazy image of Donald Duck in my head. Donald Duck waddling through the rains of Western civilization quacking angrily: What’s so funny, hah? What’s so funny? What’s so fucking funny? I put my hands over my face & just giggled & sobbed & giggled until Harold must have thought I’d gone absolutely crackers.

After a little bit I managed to stop. I wiped the tears off my face and wanted to ask Harold to look at my back and see how badly it was scraped. But I didn’t because I was afraid he might take it as a LIBERTY. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Frannie, oh-ho, that’s not so funny.

“Fran,” Harold sez, “I find this very hard to say.”

“Then maybe you better not say it,” I said.

“I have to,” he answers, and I began to see he wasn’t going to take no for an answer unless it was hollered at him. “Frannie,” he says, “I love you.”

I guess I knew all along it was just as bald as that. It would be easier if he only wanted to sleep with me. Love’s more dangerous than just balling, and I was in a spot. How, to say no to Harold? I guess there’s only one way, no matter who you have to say it to.

“I don’t love you, Harold,” is what I said.

His face cracked all to pieces. “It’s him, isn’t it?” he said, and his face got an ugly grimace on it. “It’s Stu Redman, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Now I have a temper, which I have not always been able to control—a gift from my mother’s side, I think. But I have struggled womanfully with it as applies to Harold. I could feel it straining its leash, however.

“I know.” His voice had gotten shrill and self-pitying. “I know, all right. The day we met him, I knew it then. I didn’t want him to come with us, because I knew. And he said…”

“What did he say?”

“That he didn’t want you! That you could be mine!”

“Just like giving you a new pair of shoes, right, Harold?”

He didn’t answer, maybe realizing he had gone too far. With a little effort I remembered back to that day in Fabyan. Harold’s instant reaction to Stu was the reaction of a dog when a new dog, a strange dog, comes into the first dog’s yard. Into his domain. I could almost see the hackles bristling on the back of Harold’s neck. I understood that what Stu said, he said it to take us out of the class of dogs and put us back in the class of people. And isn’t that what it’s really all about? This hellacious struggle we’re in now, I mean? If it isn’t, why are we even bothering to try and be decent?

“No one owns me, Harold,” I said.

He muttered something.

“What?”

“I said, you may have to change that idea.”

A sharp retort came to mind, but I didn’t let it out. Harold’s eyes had gone far away, and his face was very still and open. He said: “I’ve seen that guy before. You better believe it, Frannie. He’s the guy that’s the quarterback on the football team but who just sits there in class throwing spitballs and flipping people the bird because he knows the teacher’s got to pass him with at least a C so he can keep on playing. He’s the guy who goes steady with the prettiest cheerleader and she thinks he’s Jesus Christ with a bullet. The guy who farts when the English teacher asks you to read your composition because it’s the best one in the class.

“Yeah, I know fuckers like him. Good luck, Fran.”

Then he just walked off. It wasn’t the GRAND, TRAMPLING EXIT that he’d meant to make, I feel quite sure. It was more like he’d had some secret dream, and I’d just shot it full of holes—the dream being that things had changed, the reality being that nothing really had. I felt terrible for him, God’s truth, because when he walked off he wasn’t playing at jaded cynicism but feeling REAL cynicism, not jaded but as sharp & hurtful as a knife-blade. He was whipped. Oh, but what Harold will never see is that his head has got to change a little first, he’s got to see that the world is going to stay the same as long as he does. He stores up rebuffs the way pirates were supposed to store up treasure…

Well. Now everyone is back, supper eaten, smokes smoked, Veronal handed out (mine is in my pocket instead of dissolving in my stomach), people settling down Harold and I have gone through a painful confrontation which has left me with the feeling that nothing has really been resolved, except that he is watching Stu and me to see what happens next. It makes me feel sick and pointlessly angry to write that. What right does he have to watch us? What right does he have to complicate this miserable situation we are in?

Things to Remember: I’m sorry, diary. It must be my state of mind. I can’t remember a single thing.

When Frannie came upon him, Stu was sitting on a rock and smoking a cigar. He had scraped a small round circle of bare earth with his boot heel and was using it for an ashtray. He was facing west, where the sun was just going down. The clouds had rifted enough to allow the red sun to poke its head through. Although they had met the four women and taken them into their party only yesterday, it already seemed distant. They had gotten one of the station wagons out of the ditch easily enough and now, with the motorcycles, they made quite a caravan as they moved slowly west on the turnpike.

The smell of his cigar made her think of her father and her father’s pipe. What came with the memory was sorrow that had almost mellowed into nostalgia. I’m getting over losing you, Daddy, she thought. I don’t think you’d mind.

Stu looked around. “Frannie,” he said with real pleasure. “How are you?”

She shrugged. “Up and around.”

“Want to share my rock and watch the sun go down?”

She joined him, her heartbeat quickening a little. But after all, why else had she come out here? She had known which way he left camp, just as she knew that Harold and Glen and two of the girls had gone into Brighton to look for a CB radio (Glen’s idea instead of Harold’s for a change). Patty Kroger was back in camp babysitting their two combat-fatigue patients. Shirley Hammett showed some signs of coming out of her daze, but she had awakened them all around one this morning, shrieking in her sleep, her hands clawing at the air in warding-off gestures. The other woman, the one with no name, seemed to be going in the other direction. She sat. She would eat if she was fed. She would perform the functions of elimination. She would not answer questions. She only really came alive in her sleep. Even with a heavy dose of Veronal, she often moaned and sometimes shrieked. Frannie thought she knew what the poor woman was dreaming of.

“It seems like a long way still to go, doesn’t it?” she said.

He didn’t answer for a moment, and then he said: “It’s further than we thought. That old woman, she’s not in Nebraska anymore.”

“I know—” she began, and then bit down on her words.

He glanced at her with a faint grin. “You’ve been skippin your medication, ma’am.”

“My secret’s out,” she said with a lame smile.

“We’re not the only ones,” Stu said. “I was talkin to Dayna this afternoon” (she felt that interior dig of jealousy—and fear—at the familiar way he used her name) “and she said neither she nor Susan wanted to take it.”

Fran nodded. “Why did you stop? Did they drug you… in that place?”

He tapped ashes into his bare earth ashtray. “Mild sedatives at night, that was all. They didn’t need to drug me. I was locked up nice and tight. No, I stopped three nights ago because I felt… out of touch.” He meditated for a moment and then expanded. “Glen and Harold going to get that CB radio, that was a real good idea. What’s a two-way for? To put you in touch. This buddy of mine back in Arnette, Tony Leominster, he had one in his Scout. Great gadget. You could talk to folks, or you could holler for help if you got in a jam of trouble. These dreams, they’re almost like having a CB in your head, except the transmit seems to be broken and we’re only receiving.”

“Maybe we are transmitting,” Fran said quietly.

He looked at her, startled.

They sat quiet for a while. The sun peered through the clouds, as if to say a quick goodbye before sinking below the horizon. Fran could understand why primitive people worshiped it. As the gigantic quiet of the nearly empty country accumulated on her day by day, imprinting its truth on her brain by its very weight, the sun—the moon, too, for that matter—began to seem bigger and more important. More personal. Those bright skyships began to look to you as they had when you were a child.

“Anyway, I stopped,” Stu said. “Last night I dreamed about that black man again. It was the worst yet. He’s setting up somewhere out in the desert. Las Vegas, I think. And Frannie… I think he’s crucifying people. The ones who give him trouble.”

“He’s doing what?”

“That’s what I dreamed. Lines of crosses along Highway 15 made out of barn-beams and telephone poles. People hanging off them.”

“Just a dream,” she said uneasily.

“Maybe.” He smoked and looked west at the red-tinged clouds. “But the other two nights, just before we run on those maniacs holding the women, I dreamed about her—the woman who calls herself Mother Abigail. She was sitting in the cab of an old pickup truck parked on the shoulder of Highway 76. I was standing on the ground with one arm leaning on the window, talking to her just as natural as I’m talking to you. And she says, ‘You got to move em along faster still, Stuart; if an old lady like me can do it, a big tough fella from Texas like you should be able to.’” Stu laughed, threw down his cigar, and crushed it under his heel. In kind of an absent way, as if not knowing what he was doing, he put an arm around Frannie’s shoulders.

“They’re going to Colorado,” she said.

“Why, yes, I think they are.”

“Has… has either Dayna or Susan dreamed of her?”

“Both. And last night Susan dreamed of the crosses. Just like I did.”

“There’s a lot of people with that old woman now.”

Stu agreed. “Twenty, maybe more. You know, we’re passing people nearly every day. They just hunker down and wait for us to go by. They’re scared of us, but her… they’ll come to her, I guess. In their own good time.”

“Or to the other one,” Frannie said.

Stu nodded. “Yeah, or to him. Fran, why did you stop taking the Veronal?”

She uttered a trembling sigh and wondered if she should tell him. She wanted to, but she was afraid of what his reaction might be.

“There’s no counting on what a woman will do,” she said at last.

“No,” he agreed. “But there are ways to find out what they’re thinking, maybe.”

“What—” she began, and he stopped her mouth with a kiss.

They lay on the grass in the last of the twilight. Flagrant red had given way to cooler purple as they made love, and now Frannie could see stars shining through the last of the clouds. It would be good riding weather tomorrow. With any luck they would be able to get most of the way across Indiana.

Stu slapped lazily at a mosquito hovering over his chest. His shirt was hung on a nearby bush. Fran’s shirt was on but unbuttoned. Her breasts pushed at the cloth and she thought, I’m getting bigger, just a little right now, but it’s noticeable… at least to me.

“I’ve wanted you for a pretty long time now,” Stu said without looking directly at her. “I guess you know that.”

“I wanted to avoid trouble with Harold,” she said. “And there’s something else that—”

“Harold’s got a ways to go,” Stu said, “but he’s got the makings of a fine man somewhere inside him if he’ll toughen up. You like him, don’t you?”

“That’s not the right word. There isn’t a word in English for how I feel about Harold.”

“How do you feel about me?” he asked.

She looked at him and found she couldn’t say she loved him, couldn’t say it right out, although she wanted to.

“No,” he said, as if she’d contradicted him, “I just like to get things straight. I guess you’d just as soon not have Harold know anything about this yet. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” she said gratefully.

“It’s just as well. If we lie low, it may take care of itself. I’ve seen him lookin at Patty. She’s about his age.”

“I don’t know…”

“You feel a debt of gratitude to him, don’t you?”

“I suppose so. We were the only two left in Ogunquit, and—”

“That was luck, no more, Frannie. You don’t want to let anyone put you in a headhold over something that was pure luck.”

“I suppose.”

“I guess I love you,” he said. “That’s not so easy for me to say.”

“I guess I love you, too. But there’s something else…”

“I knew that.”

“You asked me why I stopped taking the pills.” She plucked at her shirt, not daring to look at him. Her lips felt unnaturally dry. “I thought they might be bad for the baby,” she whispered.

“For the.” He stopped. Then he grasped her and turned her to face him. “You’re pregnant?”

She nodded.

“And you didn’t tell anyone?”

“No.”

“Harold. Does Harold know?”

“No one but you.”

“God-almighty-damn,” he said. He was peering into her face in a concentrated way that scared her. She had imagined one of two things: he would leave her immediately (as Jess undoubtedly would have done if he had discovered she was pregnant with another man’s child) or he would hug her, tell her not to worry, that he would take care of everything. She had never expected this startled, close scrutiny, and she found herself remembering the night she had told her father in the garden. His look had been very much like this one. She wished she had told Stu what her situation was before they had made love. Maybe then they wouldn’t have made love at all, but at least he wouldn’t have been able to feel he had somehow been taken advantage of, that she was… what was the old phrase? Damaged goods. Was he thinking that? She simply could not tell.

“Stu?” she said in a frightened voice.

“You didn’t tell anyone,” he repeated.

“I didn’t know how.” Her tears were close to the surface now.

“When are you due?”

“January,” she said, and the tears came.

He held her and made her know it was all right without saying anything. He didn’t tell her not to worry or that he would take care of everything, but he made love to her again and she thought that she had never been so happy.

Neither of them saw Harold, as shadowy and as silent as the dark man himself, standing in the bushes and looking at them. Neither of them knew that his eyes squinted down into small, deadly triangles as Fran cried out her pleasure at the end of it, as her good orgasm burst through her.

By the time they had finished, it was full dark.

Harold slipped away silently.

From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary

August 1, 1990

No entry last night, too excited, too happy. Stu and I are together.

He has agreed that I’d better keep the secret of my Lone Ranger as long as possible, hopefully until we are settled. If it’s to be Colorado, that’s okay with me. The way I feel tonight, the mountains of the moon would be okay with me. Do I sound like a dizzy schoolgirl? Well—if a lady can’t sound like a dizzy schoolgirl in her diary, where can she sound like one?

But I must say one other thing before I drop the subject of the Lone Ranger. It has to do with my “maternal instinct.” Is there such a thing? I think yes. Probably hormonal. I have not felt my old self for some weeks now, but it’s very hard to separate the changes caused by my pregnancy from the changes caused by the terrible disaster which has overtaken the world. But there IS a certain jealous feeling (“jealousy” isn’t really the right word, but it’s the closest I can seem to come to the right word tonight), a feeling that you have moved a little closer to the center of the universe and must protect your position there. That’s why the Veronal seems a greater risk than the bad dreams, although my rational mind believes that Veronal would not hurt the baby at all—not, at least, at the low levels the others have been maintaining. And I suppose that jealous feeling is also a part of the love I feel for Stu Redman. I feel I am loving, as well as eating, for two.

Otherwise, I must be quick. I need my sleep, no matter what dreams may come. We haven’t made it all the way across Indiana as quickly as we had hoped—a horrible clog of vehicles near the Elkhart interchange slowed us down. A good many of the vehicles were army. There were dead soldiers. Glen, Susan Stern, Dayna, and Stu took as much firepower as they could find—about 2 dozen rifles, some grenades, and—yes, folks, it’s true—a rocket launcher. As I write now, Harold and Stu are trying to figure out the rocket launcher, for which there are 17 or 18 rockets. Please God they don’t blow themselves up.

Speaking of Harold, I must tell you, dear diary, that he doesn’t SUSPECT A THING (sounds like a line from an old Bette Davis movie, doesn’t it). When we catch up with Mother Abigail’s party I suppose he will have to be told; it would not be fair to hide it any longer, come what may.

But today he was brighter & more cheerful than I have ever seen him. He grinned so much I thought his face would crack! He was the one who suggested Stu help him with that dangerous rocket launcher, and

But here they come back now. Will finish later.

Frannie slept heavily and dreamlessly. So did they all, with the exception of Harold Lauder. Sometime shortly after midnight he rose and walked softly to where Frannie lay, and stood looking down at her. He was not smiling now, although he had smiled all day. At times he had felt that the smile would crack his face right up the middle and spill out his whirling brains. That might have been a relief.

He stood looking down at her, listening to the chin of summer crickets. We’re in dog days now, he thought. Dog days, from July the twenty-fifth to August twenty-eighth, according to Webster’s. So named because rabid dogs were supposed to be the most common then. He looked down at Fran, sleeping so sweetly, using her sweater for a pillow. Her pack was beside her.

Every dog has his day, Frannie.

He knelt, freezing at the gunshots of his bending knees, but no one stirred. He unbuckled her pack, untied the drawstring, and reached inside. He trained a small pencil flash on the pack’s contents. Frannie muttered from deep down in sleep, stiffed, and Harold held his breath. He found what he wanted way at the bottom, behind three clean blouses and a lap-eared pocket road atlas. A Spiral notebook. He pulled it out, opened to the first page, and shone his light on Frannie’s close but extremely legible handwriting.

July 6, 1990—After some persuasion, Mr. Bateman has agreed to come along with us…

Harold shut the book and crept back to his sleeping bag with it. He was feeling like the little boy he had once been, the boy with few friends (he had enjoyed a brief period of babyhood beauty until about age three, had been a fat and ugly joke ever since) but many enemies, the boy who had been more or less taken for granted by his parents—their eyes had been trained on Amy as she began her long walk down the Miss America/Atlantic City runway of her life—the boy who had turned to books for solace, the boy who had escaped never being picked for baseball or always being passed over for School Patrol Boy by becoming Long John Silver or Tarzan or Philip Kent… the boy who had become these people late at night under his covers with a flashlight trained on the printed page, his eyes wide with excitement, barely smelling his own bedfarts; this boy now crawled upside down to the bottom of his sleeping bag with Frannie’s diary and his flashlight.

As he trained its beam on the front cover of the Spiral, there was a moment of sanity. For just a moment part of his mind cried out Harold! Stop! so strongly that he was shaken to his heels. And stop he almost did. For just a moment it seemed possible to stop, to put the diary back where he had found it, to give her up, to let them go their own way before something terrible and irrevocable happened. For that moment it seemed he could put the bitter drink away, pour it out of the cup, and refill it with whatever there was for him in this world. Give it over, Harold, this sane voice begged, but maybe it was already too late.

At age sixteen he had given up Burroughs and Stevenson and Robert Howard in favor of other fantasies, fantasies that were both well loved and much hated—not of rockets or pirates but of girls in silk see-through pajamas kneeling before him on satin pillows while Harold the Great lolled naked on his throne, ready to chastise them with small leather whips, with silver-headed canes. They were bitter fantasies through which every pretty girl at Ogunquit High School had strolled at one time or another. These daydreams always ended with a gathering expletive in his loins, an explosion of seminal fluid that was more curse than pleasure. And then he would sleep, the sperm drying to a scale on his belly. Every doggy has his day.

And now it was those bitter fantasies, the old hurts, that he gathered around him like yellowed sheets, the old friends who never died, whose teeth never dulled, whose deadly affection never wavered.

He turned to that first page, trained his flashlight on the words, and began to read.

In the hour before dawn, he replaced the diary in Fran’s pack and secured the buckles. He took no special precautions. If she woke, he thought coldly, he would kill her and then run. Run where? West. But he would not stop in Nebraska or even in Colorado, oh no.

She didn’t wake.

He went back to his sleeping bag. He masturbated bitterly. When sleep came, it was thin. He dreamed he was dying halfway down a steep grade of tumbled rocks and moonscape boulders. High above, riding the night thermals, were cruising buzzards, waiting for him to make them a meal. There was no moon, no stars—

And then a frightful red Eye opened in the dark: vulpine, eldritch. The Eye terrified him yet held him.

The Eye beckoned him.

To the west, where the shadows were even now gathering, in their twilight dance of death.

When they made camp at sundown that evening, they were west of Joliet, Illinois. There was a case of beer, good talk, laughter. They felt they had put the rain behind them with Indiana. Everyone remarked specially on Harold, who had never been so cheerful.

“You know, Harold,” Frannie said later that evening, as the party began to break up, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you feeling so good. What is it?”

He gave her a jolly wink. “Every dog has his day, Fran.”

She smiled back at him, a little puzzled. But she supposed it was just Harold, being elliptical. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that things were finally coming right.

That night Harold began his own journal.

Chapter 48

He came staggering and flapping up a long upgrade, the heat of the sun stewing his stomach and baking his brains. The interstate shimmered with reflected radiant heat. He had been Donald Merwin Elbert once, now he was Trashcan Man forever and ever, and he beheld the fabled City, Seven-in-One, Cibola.

How long had he been traveling west? How long since The Kid? God might know; Trashcan Man did not. It had been days. Nights. Oh, he remembered the nights!

He stood, swaying in his rags, looking down at Cibola, the City that is Promised, the City of Dreams. He was a wreck. The wrist that he had broken when he leaped the railing of the stairway bolted to the Cheery Oil tank had not healed right, and that wrist was a grotesque lump wrapped in a dirty, unraveling Ace bandage. All the bones in the fingers of that hand had pulled up somehow, turning the hand into a Quasimodo claw. His left arm was a slowly healing mass of burn tissue from elbow to shoulder. It no longer smelled bad and suppurated, but the new flesh was hairless and pink, like the skin of a cheap doll. His grinning, mad face was sunburned, peeling, scruffy-bearded, and covered with scabs from the header he had taken when the front wheel of his bike had parted company from the frame. He wore a faded blue J.C. Penney workshirt that was marked with expanding rings of sweatstain and a dirty pair of corduroy trousers. His pack, which had been new not so long ago, had now taken on the style and substance of its owner—one strap had broken, Trash had knotted it as best he could, and the pack now hung askew on his back like a shutter on a haunted house. It was dusty, its creases filled with desert sand. On his feet were Keds now bound together with hanks of twine, and from them his scratched and sand-chafed ankles rose innocent of socks.

He stared at the city far ahead and below. He turned his face up to the savage gunmetal sky and to the sun that blared down, coating him with furnace heat. He screamed. It was a savage, triumphant scream, very much like the one Susan Stern had uttered when she split Roger Rabbit’s skull with the butt of his own shotgun.

He began to do a shuffling, victorious dance on the hot, shimmering surface of Interstate 15 while the desert sirocco blew sand across the highway and the blue peaks of the Pahranagat and Spotted ranges sawed their teeth indifferently at the brilliant sky as they had done for millennia. Off the other side of the highway, a Lincoln Continental and a T-Bird were now almost buried in sand, their occupants mummified behind safety glass. Up ahead on Trashcan’s side was an overturned pickup, everything covered but the wheels and the rocker panels.

He danced. His feet, clad in the lashed and bulging Keds, bumped up and down on the highway in a drunken sort of hornpipe. The tattered tail of his shirt flapped. His canteen clunked against his pack. The unraveling ends of the Ace bandage fluttered in the hot breath of the wind. Pink, smooth burn tissue gleamed rawly. Clocksprings of veins bulged at his temples. He had been in God’s frying pan for a week now, moving southwest across Utah, the tip of Arizona, and then into Nevada, and he was just as mad as a hatter.

As he danced, he sang monotonously, the same words over and over, to a tune that had been popular when he was in the Terre Haute institution, a song called “Down to the Nightclub” that had been done by a black group called Tower of Power. But the words were his own. He sang:

“Ci-a-bola, Ci-a-bola, bump-ty, bump-ty, bump! Ci-a-bola, Ci-a-bola, bump-ty, bump-ty, bump! ” Each final “bump! ” was followed by a little skipping leap until the heat made everything swim and the harsh bright sky went twilight gray and he collapsed on the road, half fainting, his taxed heart thundering crazily in his arid chest. With the last of his strength, blubbering and grinning, he pulled himself over the overturned pickup truck and lay in its diminishing shade, shivering in the heat and panting.

“Cibola!” He croaked. “Bumpty-bumpty-bump! ”

He fumbled his canteen off his shoulder with his claw hand and shook it. The canteen was nearly empty. Didn’t matter. He would drink every single drop and lay up here until the sun went down, and then he would walk down the highway and into Cibola, fabled City. Seven-in-One. Tonight he would drink from ever-springing fountains faced in gold. But not until the killer sun went down. God was the greatest firebug of them all. A long time ago a boy named Donald Merwin Elbert had burned up old lady Semple’s pension check. That same boy had torched the Methodist Church in Powtanville, and if there had been anything left of Donald Merwin Elbert in this shell, it had surely been cremated with the oiltanks in Gary, Indiana. Over nine dozen of them, and they had gone up like a walloping string of firecrackers. Just in time for the Fourth of July, too. Nice. And in the wake of that conflagration, only the Trashcan Man had been left, his left arm a cracked and boiling stew, a fire inside his body that was never going to go out… at least not until his body was so much blackened charcoal.

And tonight he would drink the water of Cibola, yes, and it would taste like wine.

He upended the canteen and his throat worked as the last of his water, pisswarm, gurgled down into his belly. When it was gone, he threw the canteen out into the desert. Sweat had broken on his forehead like dew. He lay shivering deliciously with water cramps.

“Cibola!” He muttered. “Cibola! I’m coming! I’m coming! I’ll do whatever you want! My life for you! Bumpty-bumpty-bump! ”

Drowsiness began to steal over him now that his thirst was a little slaked. He was nearly asleep when a polar thought slipped up through the floor of his mind like an icy stiletto blade:

What if Cibola had been a mirage?

“No,” he muttered. “No, uh-uh, no.”

But simple denial would not drive the thought off. The blade probed and poked, keeping sleep at arm’s length. What if he had drunk the last of his water in celebration of a mirage? In his own way he recognized his madness, and that was the sort of thing mad people did, right enough. If it had been a mirage, he would die here in the desert and the buzzards would dine on him.

At last, unable to bear the hideous possibility any longer, he staggered to his feet and made his way back to the road, fighting off the waves of faintness and nausea that wanted to take him down. At the breast of the hill he stared out anxiously into the long flat plain below, studded with yucca and tumbleweed and devil’s mantilla. His breath caught in his throat and unraveled into a sigh, like a sleeve of fabric on a spike.

It was there!

Cibola, fabled of old, searched for by many, found by the Trashcan Man!

Far down in the desert, surrounded by blue mountains, blue itself in the haze of distance, its towers and avenues gleamed in the desert day. There were palm trees… he could see palm trees… and movement… and water!

“Oh, Cibola…” he crooned, and staggered back to the shade of the pickup. It was farther than it looked, he knew that. Tonight, after God’s torch had left the sky, he would walk as he never had before. He would reach Cibola and his first act would be to plunge headlong into the first fountain he came to. Then he would find him, the man who had bade him come here. The man who had drawn him across the plains and the mountains and finally into the desert, all in a month’s time and despite his horribly burned arm.

He who Is —the dark man, the hardcase. He waited for Trashcan Man in Cibola, and his were the armies of the night, his were the white-faced riders of the dead who would sweep out of the west and into the very face of the rising sun. They would come raving and grinning and stinking of sweat and gunpowder. There would be shrieks, and Trashcan cared very little for shrieks, there would be rape and subjugation, things about which he cared even less, there would be murder, which was immaterial—

–and there would be a Great Burning.

About that he cared very much. In the dreams the dark man came to him and spread out his arms from a high place and showed Trashcan a country in flames. Cities going up like bombs. Cultivated fields drawn in lines of fire. The very rivers of Chicago and Pittsburgh and Detroit and Birmingham ablaze with floating oil. And the dark man had told him a very simple thing in his dreams, a thing which had brought him running: I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want.

He rolled on his side, his cheeks and eyelids chafed and irritated from the blowing sand. He had been losing hope—yes, ever since the wheel had fallen off his bike he had been losing hope. God, the God of father-killing sheriffs, the God of Carley Yates, was stronger than the dark man after all, it seemed. Yet he had kept his faith and had kept on. And at last, when it seemed he was going to burn up in this desert before he ever got to Cibola where the dark man waited, he had seen it far below, dreaming in the sun.

“Cibola!” he whispered, and slept.

The first dream had come to him in Gary, over a month ago, after he had burned his arm. He had gone to sleep that night sure that he was going to die; no one could be burned as badly as he was and live. A refrain had beaten its way into his head: Live by the torch, die by the torch. Live by it, die by it.

His legs had given out in a small city park and he had fallen down, his left arm sprawled out and away from him like a dead thing, the shirtsleeve smoked off. The pain was giant, incredible. He had never dreamed there could be such pain in the world. He had been running gleefully from one set of oil tanks to the next, setting up crude timing devices, each constructed of a steel pipe and a flammable paraffin mixture separated from a little pool of acid by a steel tab. He had been pushing these devices into the outflow pipes on top of the tanks. When the acid ate through the steel the paraffin would ignite, and that would cause the tanks to blow. He had planned to get over to the west side of Gary, near the confusion of interchanges leading various roads toward Chicago or Milwaukee, before any of them blew. He wanted to watch the show as the entire dirty city went up in a firestorm.

But he had misjudged the last device or constructed it badly. It had gone off while he worked at opening the cap on the outflow with a pipewrench. There had been a blinding white flare as burning paraffin belched out of the tube, coating his left arm with fire. This was no painless flameglove of lighter fluid, to be waved in the air and then shaken out like a big match. This was agony, like having your arm in a volcano.

Shrieking, he had run wildly around the top of the oiltank, careering off the waist-high railings like a human pinball. If the railings had not been there, he would have plunged over the side and fallen, turning over and over, like a torch dropped down a well. Only accident saved his life; his feet tangled in each other and he fell with his left arm pinned under him, smothering the flames.

He sat up, still half-crazy with the pain. Later he would think that only blind luck—or the dark man’s purpose—had saved him from being burned to death. Most of the paraffin jet had missed him. So he was thankful—but his thankfulness only came later. At the time he could only cry out and rock back and forth, holding his crisped arm out from his body as the skin smoked and crackled and contracted.

Vaguely, as the light faded from the sky, it occurred to him that he had already set a dozen of the time-devices. They might go anytime. Dying and being out of his exquisite misery would be wonderful; dying in flames would be utter horror.

Somehow he had crawled down from the tank and had staggered away, weaving and lunging in and out of the dead traffic, holding his barbecued left arm away from his body.

By the time he reached a small park near the center of town, it was sunset. He sat on the grass between two shuffleboard courts, trying to think what you did for burns. Put butter on them, that’s what Donald Merwin Elbert’s mother would have said. But that was for a scald, or when the bacon fat jumped extra high and spattered you with hot grease. He couldn’t imagine putting butter on the cracked and blackened mess between his elbow and shoulder; couldn’t even imagine touching it.

Kill himself. That was it, that was the ticket. He would put himself out of his misery like an old dog—

There was a sudden gigantic explosion on the east side of town, as if the fabric of existence had been torn briskly in two. A liquid pillar of fire shot up against dusk’s deepening indigo. He had to squeeze his eyes to watering, protesting slits against it.

Even in his agony, the fire pleased him… more, it delighted, fulfilled him. The fire was the best medicine, even better than the morphine he found the next day (as a trusty in prison he had worked in the infirmary as well as the library and the motorpool, and he knew about morphine and Elavil and Darvon Complex). He did not connect his present agony to the pillar of fire. He only knew that the fire was good, the fire was beautiful, the fire was something he needed and would always need. Wonderful fire!

Moments later a second oiltank exploded and even here, three miles away, he could feel the warm push of expanding air. Another tank went, and another. A slight pause, and then six of them went up in a rattling string and now it was too bright over there to look at but he looked anyway, grinning, his eyes full of yellow flames, his wounded arm forgotten, thoughts of suicide forgotten.

It took better than two hours for all of them to go up, and by then dark had fallen but it wasn’t dark, the night was yellow and orange and feverish with flames. The entire eastern arc of the horizon danced with fire. It reminded him of a Classic funnybook he had owned as a child, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Now, years later, the boy who had owned that funnybook was gone, but the Trashcan Man was here, and Trash owned the wonderful, terrible secret of the Martians’ deathray.

It was time to leave the park. Already the temperature had risen ten degrees. He ought to go west, stay ahead of the fire the way he had in Powtanville, racing the expanding arc of destruction. But he was in no condition to race. And so he fell asleep on the grass, and the firelight played over the face of a tired, ill-used child.

In his dream, the dark man came in his hooded robe, his face invisible… yet the Trashcan Man thought he had seen this man before. When the loungers in the candy store and the beer parlor back in Powtanville catcalled at him, it seemed that this man had been among them, silent and thoughtful. When he had worked at the Scrubba-Dubba (soap the headlights, knock the wipers, soap the rocker panels, hey mister you want hotwax on that?), wearing the sponge glove on his right hand until the hand beneath looked like a pale dead fish, the nails as white as fresh ivory, it seemed he had seen this man’s face, fiery and grinning with lunatic joy from beneath the rippling film of water rolling down the windshield. When the sheriff had sent him away to the nuthatch in Terre Haute, he had been the grinning psych aide standing above his head in the room where they gave you the shocks, his hands on the controls (I’m gonna fry your brains out, boy, help you on your way as you change from Donald Merwin Elbert into the Trashcan Man, would you like hotwax on that?), ready to send about a thousand volts zizzing into his brain. He knew this dark man all right, his was the face you could never quite see, his the hands which dealt all spades from a dead deck, his the eyes beyond the flames, his the grin from beyond the grave of the world.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said gratefully in the dream. “My life for you!”

The dark man had lifted his arms inside his robe, turning the robe into the shape of a black kite. They stood on a high place, and below them, America lay in flames.

I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want.

Then he saw an army of ten thousand raggle-taggle castoff men and women driving east, driving across the desert and into the mountains, a rough beast of an army whose time had come round at last; they loaded down trucks and jeeps and Wagoneers and campers and tanks; each man and woman wore a dark stone about his or her neck, and deep in some of those stones was a red shape that might have been an Eye or might have been a Key. And riding in their van, atop a giant tanker with pillow tires, he saw himself, and knew that the truck was filled with jellied napalm… and behind him, in column, were trucks loaded with pressure bombs and Teller mines and plastic explosive; flame throwers and flares and heat-seeking missiles; grenades and machine guns and rocket launchers. The dance of death was about to begin, and already the strings of the fiddles and guitars were smoking and the stench of brimstone and cordite filled the air.

The dark man lifted his arms again and when he dropped them everything was cold and silent, the fires gone, even the ashes cold, and for just a moment he was only Donald Merwin Elbert again, small and afraid and confused. For just that moment he suspected he was just another pawn in the dark man’s huge chess game, that he had been deceived.

Then he saw the dark man’s face was no longer entirely hidden; two dark red coals burned in the sunken pits where his eyes should have been, and illuminated a nose as narrow as a blade.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” Trash said gratefully in the dream. “My life for you! My soul for you!”

“I will set you to burn,” the dark man said gravely. “You must come to my city and there all will be made clear.”

“Where? Where?” He was in an agony of hope and expectation.

“West,” the dark man said, fading. “West. Beyond the mountains.”

He woke up then, and it was still night and still bright. The flames were closer. The heat was stifling. Houses were exploding. The stars were gone, shrouded in a thick pall of oilsmoke. A fine rain of soot had begun. The shuffleboard courts were dusted with black snow.

Now that he had a purpose, he found he could walk. He limped west, and from time to time he saw a few others leaving Gary, looking back over their shoulders at the conflagration. Fools, Trash thought, almost affectionately. You’ll burn. In good time, you’ll burn. They took no notice of him; to them, the Trashcan Man was only another survivor. They disappeared into the smoke and sometime after dawn Trashcan Man limped across the Illinois state line. Chicago was north of him, Joliet to the southwest, the fire lost in its own horizon-blotting smoke behind. That had been the dawn of July 2.

He had forgotten his dreams of burning Chicago to the ground—his dreams of more oiltanks and freightcars full of LP gas tucked away on railroad sidings and the tinder-dry tenements. He didn’t care a fig for the Windy City. That afternoon he broke into a Chicago Heights doctor’s office and stole a case of morphine syrettes. The morphine drove back the pain a little, but it had a more important side-effect: it made him care less about the pain he did feel.

He took a huge jar of Vaseline from a drugstore that night and packed the burned part of his arm in an inch of the jelly. He was very thirsty; it seemed he wanted to drink all of the time. Fantasies of the dark man buzzed in and out of his mind like blowflies. When he collapsed at dusk, he had already begun to think that the city the dark man was directing him to must be Cibola, Seven-in-One, the City that is Promised.

That night the dark man came to him again in his dreams, and with a sardonic giggle confirmed that this was so.

Trashcan Man awoke from these confused dream-memories of what had been to shivering desert cold. In the desert it was always ice or fire; there was no in-between.

Moaning a little, he stood up, holding himself as close to himself as he could. Overhead a trillion stars gleamed, seeming almost close enough to touch, bathing the desert in their cold witchlight.

He walked back to the road, wincing at his chafed and tender skin, and his many aches and pains. They were little to him now. He paused for a moment looking down at the city, dreaming in the night (there were little sparks of light here and there, like electric campfires). Then he began to walk.

When dawn began to color the sky hours later, Cibola seemed almost as distant as it had when he first came over the rise and saw it. And he had foolishly drunk all of his water, forgetting how magnified things looked out here. He didn’t dare walk for long after sunrise because of the dehydration. He would have to lie up again before the sun rose in all its power.

An hour past dawn he came to a Mercedes-Benz off the road, its right side drifted in sand up to the door panels. He opened one of the left side doors and pulled the two wrinkled, monkeylike occupants out—an old woman wearing a lot of bangled jewelry, an old man with theatrical-looking white hair. Muttering, Trash took the keys from the ignition, went around, and opened the trunk. Their suitcases were not locked. He hung a variety of clothes over the windows of the Mercedes, weighting them down with rocks. Now he had a cool, dim cave.

He crawled in and went to sleep. Miles to the west, the city of Las Vegas gleamed in the light of the summer sun.

He couldn’t drive a car, they had never taught him that in prison, but he could ride a bike. On July 4, the day that Larry Underwood discovered Rita Blakemoor had overdosed and died in her sleep, Trashcan Man took a ten-speed and began to ride. At first his progress was slow, because his left arm wasn’t much good to him. He fell off twice that first day, once squarely on his burn, causing terrible agony. By then the burn was suppurating freely through the Vaseline and the smell was terrific. He wondered from time to time about gangrene but would not allow himself to wonder for long. He began to mix the Vaseline with an antiseptic ointment, not knowing if it would help, but feeling it certainly couldn’t hurt any. It made a milky, viscous gloop that looked like semen.

Little by little he adjusted to riding the bike mostly one-handed and found that he could make good speed. The land had flattened out and most of the time he could keep the bike speeding giddily along. He drove himself steadily in spite of the burn and the light-headedness that came from being constantly stoned on morphine. He drank gallons of water and ate prodigiously. He pondered the dark man’s words: I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want. How lovely those words were—had anyone really wanted him before? The words played over and over in his mind as he pedaled under the hot Midwestern sun. And he began to hum the melody of a little tune called “Down to the Nightclub” under his breath. The words (“Ci-a-bola! Bumpty-bumpty-bump! ”) came in their own good time. He was not then as insane as he was to become, but he was advancing.

On July 8, the day Nick Andros and Tom Cullen saw buffalo grazing in Comanche County, Kansas, Trashcan Man crossed the Mississippi at the Quad Cities of Davenport, Rock Island, Bettendorf, and Moline. He was in Iowa.

On the fourteenth, the day Larry Underwood woke up near the big white house in eastern New Hampshire, Trashy crossed the Missouri north of Council Bluffs and entered Nebraska. He had regained some use of his left hand, his leg muscles had toned up, and he pressed on, feeling a huge need to hurry, hurry.

It was on the west side of the Missouri that Trash first suspected that God Himself might intervene between Trashcan Man and his destiny. There was something wrong about Nebraska, something dreadfully wrong. Something that made him afraid. It looked about the same as Iowa… but it wasn’t. The dark man had come to him every previous night in dreams, but when Trashy crossed into Nebraska, the dark man came no more.

Instead, he began to dream about an old woman. In these dreams he would find himself belly-down in a cornfield, almost paralyzed with hate and fear. It was bright morning. He could hear flocks of crows cawing. In front of him was a screen of broad, sword-like corn-leaves. Not wanting to, but powerless to stop himself, he would spread the leaves with a shaking hand and peer between them. He saw an old house in the middle of a clearing. The house was up on blocks or jacks or something. There was an apple tree with a tire swing hanging from one of the branches. And sitting on the porch was an old black woman playing a guitar and singing some old-time spiritual song. The song varied from dream to dream and Trashcan knew most of them because he had once known a woman, the mother of a boy named Donald Merwin Elbert, who had sung many of the same songs as she did her housework.

This dream was a nightmare, but not just because something exceedingly horrible happened at the end of it. At first you would have said there wasn’t a frightening element in the whole dream. Corn? Blue sky? Old woman? Tire swing? What could be frightening about those things? Old women didn’t throw rocks and jeer, especially not old women that sang old-home Jesus-jumping songs like “In That Great Getting-Up Morning” and “Bye-and-Bye, Sweet Lord, Bye-and-Bye.” It was the Carley Yateses of the world who threw rocks.

But long before the dream ended he was paralyzed with fear, as if it wasn’t an old woman at all he was peeking at but at some secret, some barely concealed light that seemed ready to break out all around her, to play over her with a fiery brilliance that would make the flaming oiltanks of Gary seem like so many candles in the wind—a light so bright it would chalk his eyes to cinders. And during this part of the dream all he thought was: Oh please get me away from her, I don’t want no part of that old biddy, please oh please get me out of Nebraska!

Then whatever song she had been playing would come to a discordant, jangling stop. She would look right at the place where he was peeping through a tiny loophole in the broad lattice of leaves. Her face was old and seamed with wrinkles, her hair was thin enough to show her brown skull, but her eyes were bright as diamonds, full of the light he feared.

In an old, cracked, but strong voice she would cry out: Weasels in the corn! and he would feel the change in himself and would look down to see he had become a weasel, a terry, brownish-black slinking thing, his nose grown long and sharp, his eyes melted down to beady black points, his fingers turned into claws. He was a weasel, a cowardly nocturnal thing preying on the weak and the small.

He would begin to scream then, and eventually he would scream himself awake, streaming with sweat and buggy-eyed. His hands would fly over his body, reassuring himself that all his human parts were still there. At the end of this panicky check he would grip his head, making sure it was still a human head and not something long and sleek and streamlined, furry and bullet-shaped.

He crossed four hundred miles of Nebraska in three days, running mostly on high octane terror. He crossed into Colorado near Julesburg, and the dream began to fade and grow sepia-toned.

(For Mother Abagail’s part, she woke on the night of July 15—shortly after Trashcan Man had passed north of Hemingford Home—with a terrible chill and a feeling that was both fear and pity; pity for whom or for what she did not know. She thought she might have been dreaming of her grandson Anders, who had been killed senselessly in a hunting accident when he was but six.)

On July 18, then southwest of Sterling, Colorado, and still some miles from Brush, he had met The Kid.

Trash woke up just as twilight was falling. In spite of the clothes he had hung over the windows, the Mercedes had gotten hot. His throat was a dry well which had been faced with sandpaper. His temples thumped and jumped. He ran his tongue out, and when he stroked it with his finger, it felt like a dead treebranch. Sitting up, he put his hand on the Mercedes’ steering wheel and then drew it back with a scalded hiss of pain. He had to wrap his shirttail around the doorhandle to let himself out. He thought he would just step out, but he had overestimated his strength and underestimated how far the dehydration had advanced on this August evening: his legs collapsed and he fell onto the road, which was also hot. Moaning, he scrabbled his way into the shadow of the Mercedes like a crippled crawdad. He sat there, arms and head dangling between his cocked knees, panting. He stared morbidly at the two bodies he had pulled out of the car, she with her bangles on her shriveled arms and he with his shock of theatrical white hair above his mummified monkey-face.

He must get to Cibola before the sun came up tomorrow morning. If he didn’t, he would die… and in sight of his goal! Surely the dark man could not be as cruel as that—surely not!

“My life for you,” Trashcan Man whispered, and when the sun had dropped below the line of the mountains, he gained his feet and began to walk toward the towers, minarets, and avenues of Cibola, where the sparks of the lights were coming on again.

As the heat of the day segued into the cool of the desert night, he found himself more able to walk. His sprung and rope-tied sneakers flapped and thudded against the surface of I-15. He was plodding along, his head hanging like the bloom of a dying sunflower, and did not see the green, reflectorized sign which read LAS VEGAS 30 when he passed it.

He was thinking about The Kid. By rights The Kid should have been with him now. They should be driving into Cibola together, with the straightpipes of The Kid’s deuce coupe blatting back echoes from the desert. But The Kid had proved unworthy, and Trash had been sent on alone into the wilderness.

His feet rose and fell on the pavement. “Ci-a-bola!” he croaked. “Bumpty-bumpty-bump! ”

Around midnight he collapsed by the side of the road and fell into an uneasy doze. The city was closer now.

He would make it.

He was quite sure he would make it.

He heard The Kid a long time before he saw him. It was the heavy, crackling roar of unmuffled straightpipes thundering toward him from the east, branding the day. The sound was coming up Highway 34 from the direction of Yuma, Colorado. His first impulse was to hide, the way he’d hidden from the few other survivors he’d seen since Gary. But this time something made him stay where he was, astride his bike on the shoulder of the road, looking back apprehensively over his shoulder.

The thunder grew louder and louder, and then the sun was reflecting off chrome and

(??FIRE??)

something bright and orange.

The driver saw him. Downshifted in a machine-gun burst of backfires. Goodyear rubber peeled off on the highway in hot swatches. And then the car was beside him, not idling but panting like a deadly animal which may or may not be tamed, and the driver was getting out. But at first Trashcan only had eyes for the car. He knew about cars, he liked cars, even though he had never gotten so much as a learner’s permit. This one was a beauty, a car someone had worked on for years, put thousands of dollars into, the kind of thing you usually only saw at funnycar shows, a labor of love.

It was a 1932 Ford deuce coupe, but the owner had not stinted nor stopped with the usual deuce coupe customizing innovations. He had gone on and on, turning it into a parody of all American cars, a glittering science fiction vehicle with hand-painted flames billowing out of the manifold pipes. The paint job was flake gold. The chrome headpipes, which stretched almost the whole length of the car, reflected the sun fiercely. The windshield was a convex bubble. The back tires were gigantic Goodyear Wide Ovals, the wheel-wells cut to an exaggerated height and depth to accommodate them. Growing out of the hood like a weird heating duct was a supercharger. Growing out of the roof, solid black but shot with red flecks like embers, was a steel sharkfin. Written on both sides were two words, raked backward to indicate speed. THE KID, they said.

“Hey, youall long tall an og ly,” the driver drawled, and Trash shifted his attention from the painted flames to the driver of this rolling bomb.

He stood about five feet three inches. His hair was piled and swirled and pomaded and brilliantined. The hair alone gave him another three inches of height. The swirls all met above his collar in what was not just a duck’s ass but the avatar of all the duck’s-ass hairdos ever affected by the punks and hoods of the world. He was wearing black boots with pointed toes. The sides were elasticized. The heels, which gave The Kid another three inches, bringing him up to a respectable five-nine total, were stacked Cubans. His pegged and faded jeans were tight enough to read the dates of the coins in his pockets. They limned each nifty little buttock into a kind of blue sculpture and made his crotch look like he’d maybe stuffed a chamois bag full of Spalding golfballs in there. He wore a Western-style silk shirt of an off-burgundy color. It was decorated with yellow trim and imitation sapphire buttons. The cufflinks looked like polished bone, and Trash later found out that was just what they were. The Kid had two sets, one made from a pair of human molars, the other from the incisors of a Doberman pinscher. Over this wonder of a shirt, in spite of the heat of the day, he wore a black leather motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back. It was crisscrossed with zippers, the teeth glimmering like diamonds. From the shoulder-flaps and waistbelt three rabbits’ feet dangled. One was white, one brown, one bright St. Paddy’s Day green. This jacket, even more wonderful than the shirt, creaked smugly with rich oil. Above the eagle, this time written in white silk thread, were the words THE KID. The face now looking up at the Trashcan Man from between the high pile of gleaming hair and the upturned collar of the gleaming motorcycle jacket was tiny and pallid, a doll’s face, with heavy but flawlessly sculpted pouting lips, dead gray eyes, a wide forehead without a mark or a seam, and strange full cheeks. He looked like Baby Elvis.

Two gunbelts were crisscrossed on his flat belly, and a giant .45 leaned out of each of the sagging holsters on his hips.

“Hey, boy, whatchall say?” The Kid drawled.

And the only thing Trashcan could think of to say was, “I like your car.”

It was the right thing. Maybe the only thing. Five minutes later Trash was in the passenger seat and the deuce coupe was accelerating up to The Kid’s cruising speed, which was about ninety-five. The bike Trash had ridden all the way from eastern Illinois was fading to a speck on the horizon.

Timidly, Trashcan Man suggested that at such a speed The Kid would not be able to see a wreck or a stall in the road if they came to one (they had already come to several, as a matter of fact; The Kid simply slalomed around them, the Wide Ovals shrieking unheeded protest).

“Hey, boy,” The Kid said. “I got the reflexes. I got the timin. I got three-fiffs of a second. You believe that?”

“Yes, sir,” Trash said faintly. He felt like a man who has just used a stick to stir up a nest of snakes.

“I like you, boy,” The Kid said in his odd, droning voice. His doll’s eyes stared out over the fluorescent orange steering wheel at the shimmering road. Large Styrofoam dice with death’s heads for pips dangled and bounced from the rearview mirror. “Getchall a beer out’n the back seat.”

They were Coors and they were warm and Trashcan Man hated beer and he drank one fast and said how good it was.

“Hey, boy,” The Kid said. “Coors beer’s the only beer. I’d piss Coors if I could. You believe that happy crappy?”

Trashcan said he did indeed believe that happy crappy.

“They call me The Kid. Outta Shreveport, Looseyanna. You know that? This here beast won every major carshow award in the South. You believe that happy crappy?”

Trashcan Man said he did and got another warm beer. It seemed like the best move under the circumstances.

“What they call you, boy?”

“The Trashcan Man.”

“The whut?” For one horrible moment the dead doll’s eyes rested on Trashcan’s face. “You jokin me, boy? Ain’t nobody jokes The Kid. An you better believe that happy crappy.”

“I do believe it,” Trashcan said earnestly, “but that’s what they call me. Because I used to light fires in people’s trashcans and mailboxes and stuff. I set old lady Semple’s pension check on fire. I got sent to the reformatory for it. I also burned down the Methodist Church in Powtanville, Indiana.”

“Didja? ” The Kid asked, delighted. “Boy, you sound as crazy as a rat in a shithouse. That’s okay. I like crazy people. I’m crazy myself. Tripped right outta my fuckin gourd. Trashcan Man, huh? I like that. We make a pair. The fucking Kid and the fucking Trashcan Man. Shake, Trash.”

The Kid offered his hand and Trash shook it as quick as he could so that The Kid could put both hands back on the wheel. They whizzed around a bend and there was a Bekins semi nearly blocking the whole highway and Trashcan put his hands over his face, prepared to make an immediate transition to the astral plane. The Kid never turned a hair. The deuce coupe skittered along the left side of the highway like a waterbug and they skinned by the cab of the truck with a coat of paint to spare.

“Close,” Trashcan said when he felt he could speak without a quaver in his voice.

“Hey, boy,” The Kid said flatly. Then one of his doll’s eyes closed in a solemn wink. “Don’t tell me—I’ll tell you. How’s that beer? Pretty fuckin gnarly, ain’t it? Hits the spot after ridin that kiddy-bike, don’t it?”

“It sure does,” Trashcan Man said, and took another big swallow of warm Coors. He was insane, but not yet insane enough to disagree with The Kid while he was driving. Nowhere near.

“Well, no sense beatin around the motherfuckin bush,” The Kid said, reaching back over the seat to get his own can of suds. “I guess we’re goin to the same place.”

“I guess so,” Trash said cautiously.

“Gonna jine up,” The Kid said. “Goin west. Gonna get in on the motherfuckin ground floor. You believe that happy crappy?”

“I guess so.”

“You been gettin dreams about that boogeyman in the black flight-suit, ain’tcha?”

“You mean the priest.”

“I always mean what I say an say what I mean,” The Kid said flatly. “Don’t tell me, ya fuckin bug, I’ll tell you. It’s a black flight-suit, and the guy’s got goggles. Like in a John Wayne movie about Big Two. Goggles so big you can’t see his motherfuckin face. Spooky old cock-knocker, ain’t he?”

“Yeah,” Trashcan said, and sipped his warm beer. His head was beginning to buzz.

The Kid hunched over the orange steering wheel and began to imitate a fighter pilot—one who had done his stuff in Big Two, presumably—in a dogfight. The deuce coupe rollercoastered alarmingly from one side of the road to the other as he imitated loops and dives and barrel rolls.

“Neeeeyaaaahhhh… eheheheheheh… budda-budda-budda… take that, ya fuckin kraut… Cap’n! Bandits at twelve o’clock!… Turn the air-cooled cannon on em, ya fuckin dipstick… takka… takka… takka-takka-takka! We got em, sir! All clear… HowOOOGAH! Stand down, fellers! HowOOOOOOOGAH! ”

His face gained no expression as he went through this fantasy; not a single well-oiled hair fell from grace as he jerked the car back into its lane and pounded on up the road. Trashcan Man’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. A light sheen of sweat had oiled his body. He drank his beer. He had to make wee-wee.

“But he don’t scare me,” The Kid said, as if the former topic of conversation had never lapsed. “Fuck no. He’s a hard baby, but The Kid has handled hard babies before. I shut em up and then I shut em down, just like The Boss says. You believe that happy crappy?”

“Sure,” Trash said.

“You dig The Boss?”

“Sure,” Trash said. He hadn’t the slightest idea who The Boss was or had been.

“Fuckin better dig The Boss. Listen, you know what I’m gonna do?”

“Go west?” Trashcan Man hazarded. It seemed safe.

The Kid looked impatient. “After I get there, I mean. After. You know what I’m gonna do after?”

“No. What?”

“I’m gonna lay low for a while. Check out the situation. Can you dig that happy crappy?”

“Sure,” Trash said.

“Fuckin A. Don’t tell me, I’ll fuckin tell you. Just check it out. Check out the big man. Then…”

The Kid fell silent, brooding over the top of his orange steering wheel.

“Then what?” Trashcan asked hesitantly.

“Gonna shut him down. Send him around dead man’s curve. Put him out to pasture on the motherfuckin Cadillac Ranch. You believe it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’m gonna take over,” The Kid said confidently. “Gonna strip his gears and leave him at the Cadillac Ranch. You stick with me, Trashman or whatever the fuck ya call yaself. We ain’t gonna eat no pork and beans. We’re gonna eat more chicken than any man ever seen.”

The deuce coupe roared down the highway with painted flames shooting up from the manifold. Trashcan Man sat in the passenger seat, a warm beer in his lap and troubled in his mind.

It was almost dawn on the morning of August 5 when Trashcan Man entered Cibola, otherwise known as Vegas. Somewhere in the last five miles he had lost his left sneaker and now, as he walked down the curving exit ramp, his footfalls sounded like this: slap-THUMP, slap-THUMP, slap-THUMP. They sounded like the flap of a flat tire.

He was almost done in, but a little wonder came back as he made his way down the Strip, which was jammed with dead cars and quite a few dead people, most of them well picked over by the buzzards. He had made it. He was here in Cibola. He had been tested and he had passed the test.

He saw a hundred honky-tonk nightclubs. There were signs that read LIBERAL SLOTS, signs that said BLUEBELL WEDDING CHAPEL and 60-SECOND WEDDING BUT IT’LL LAST A LIFETIME! He saw a Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce halfway through a plate glass window of an adult bookstore. He saw a naked woman hanging upside down from a lamppost. He saw two pages of the Las Vegas Sun go riffling by. The headline that revealed itself over and over again as the paper flapped and turned was PLAGUE GROWS WORSE WASHINGTON MUTE. He saw a gigantic billboard which said NEIL DIAMOND! THE AMERICANA HOTEL JUNE 15—AUGUST 30! Someone had scrawled the words DIE LAS VEGAS FOR YOUR SINS! across the show window of a jewelry store seeming to specialize in nothing but wedding and engagement rings. He saw an overturned grand piano lying in the street like a large dead wooden horse. His eyes were full of these wonders.

As he walked on he began to see other signs, their neon dead this midsummer for the first time in years. Flamingo. The Mint. Dunes. Sahara. Glass Slipper. Imperial. But where were the people? Where was the water?

Hardly knowing what he was doing, letting his feet pick their own path, Trashcan turned off the Strip. His head dropped forward, his chin resting on his chest. He dozed as he walked. And when his feet tripped over the curbing, when he fell forward and gave himself a bloody nose on the pavement, when he looked up and beheld what was there, he could hardly believe it. Blood ran unnoticed from his nose to his tattered blue shirt. It was as if he was still dozing and this was his dream.

A tall white building stretched up to the desert sky, a monolith in the desert, a needle, a monument, every bit as magnificent as the Sphinx or the Great Pyramid. The windows of its eastern face gave off the fire of the rising sun like an omen. In front of this bone-white desert edifice, flanking its entranceway, were two huge gold pyramids. Over the canopy was a great bronze medallion, and carved on it in bas-relief was the snarling head of a lion.

Above this, also in bronze, the simple but mighty legend: MGM GRAND HOTEL.

But what captured his eyes was what stood on the grassy quadrangle between the parking lot and the entranceway. Trashcan stared, an orgasmic shivering consuming him so fiercely that for a moment he could only prop himself on his bloody hands, the unraveling end of the Ace bandage trailing between them, and stare at the fountain with his faded blue eyes, eyes that were halfway to being glareblind by now. A little groaning noise began to escape him.

The fountain was working. It was a gorgeous construction of stone and ivory, chased and inlaid with gold. Colored lights played over the spray, making the water purple, then yellow-orange, then red, then green. The constant ticking patter as the spray fell back into the pool was very loud.

“Cibola,” he muttered, and struggled to his feet. His nose was still dripping blood.

He began to stagger toward the fountain. His stagger became a trot. The trot became a run, the run a sprint, the sprint a mad dash. His scabbed knees rose, pistonlike, almost to his neck. A word began to fly out of his mouth, a long word like a paper streamer that rose to the sky, bringing people to the windows high above (and who saw them? God, perhaps, or the devil, but certainly not the Trashcan Man). The word grew higher and shriller, longer and longer as he approached the fountain and that word was:

“CIIIIIIIIBOLAAAAAAAA!”

The final “aahh” sound drew out and out, a sound of all the pleasures that all the people who have ever lived on the earth have ever known, and it ended only when he struck the lip of the fountain chest-high and yanked himself up and over and into a bath of incredible coolness and mercy. He could feel the pores of his body open like a million mouths and slurp the water in like a sponge. He screamed. He lowered his head, snorted in water, and blew it back out in a combined sneeze and cough that sent blood and water and snot against the side of the fountain in a splat. He lowered his head and drank like a cow.

“Cibola! Cibola!” Trash cried rapturously. “My life for you!”

He dogpaddled his way around the fountain, drank again, then climbed over the edge and fell onto the grass with an awkward thump. It had all been worth it, everything had been worth it. Water cramps struck him and he suddenly threw up with a loud grunt. Even throwing up felt grand.

He got to his feet, and holding on to the lip of the fountain with his claw hand, he drank again. This time his belly accepted the gift gratefully.

Sloshing like a filled goatskin, he staggered toward the alabaster steps which led to the doors of this fabulous place, steps that led between the golden pyramids. Halfway up the steps, a water cramp struck him and doubled him over. When it passed he lurched gamely onward. The doors were of the revolving type, and it took all his feeble strength to get one of them in motion. He pushed through into a plushy carpeted lobby that seemed miles long. The rug underfoot was thick and lush and cranberry-colored. There was a registration desk, a mail desk, a key desk, the cashiers’ windows. All empty. To his right, beyond an ornamental grilled railing, was the casino. Trashcan Man stared at it in awe—the serried ranks of slot machines like soldiers standing at parade rest, beyond them the roulette and crap tables, the marble railings enclosing the baccarat tables.

“Who’s here?” Trash croaked, but no answer came back.

He was afraid then, because this was a place of ghosts, a place where monsters might lurk, but the fear was weakened by his weariness. He stumbled down the steps and into the casino, passing the Cub Bar, where Lloyd Henreid sat silently in the deep shadows, watching him and holding a glass of Poland water.

He came to a table upholstered in green baize, the mystic legend DEALER MUST HIT 16 AND STAND ON 17 inscribed thereon. Trash climbed up on it and fell instantly asleep. Soon nearly half a dozen men stood around the sleeping ragamuffin that was the Trashcan Man.

“What do we do with him?” Ken DeMott asked.

“Let him sleep,” Lloyd answered. “Flagg wants him.”

“Yeah? Where the Christ is Flagg, anyway?” another asked. Lloyd turned to look at the man, who was balding and stood a full foot taller than Lloyd. Nonetheless, he drew back a step at Lloyd’s gaze. The stone around Lloyd’s neck was the only one that was not solid jet; in the center gleamed a small and disquieting red flaw.

“Are you that anxious to see him, Hec?” Lloyd asked.

“No,” the balding man said. “Hey, Lloyd, you know I didn’t—”

“Sure.” Lloyd looked down at the man sleeping on the blackjack table. “Flagg will be around,” he said. “He’s been waiting for this guy. This guy is something special.”

On the table, oblivious of all this, Trashcan Man slept on.

Trash and The Kid spent the night of July 18 in a motel in Golden, Colorado. The Kid picked two rooms with a connecting door. The connecting door was locked. The Kid, now well in the bag, solved this minor problem by blowing the lock off with three bullets from one of his .45s.

The Kid raised one tiny boot and kicked the door. It shuddered open in a fine blue haze of gunsmoke.

“Betcha fuckin A,” he said. “Which room? Take your pick, Trashy.”

Trashcan Man opted for the room on the right, and for a while was left alone. The Kid had gone out someplace. Trashcan Man was slowly considering the idea of simply fading away into the gloom before something really bad could happen—trying to balance that possibility against his lack of transportation—when The Kid returned. Trashcan Man was alarmed to see that he was pushing a shopping cart which was full of six-packs of Coors beer. The doll’s eyes were now bloodshot and rimmed with red. The pompadour hairdo was coming unraveled like a broken and expanding clockspring, and greasy bunches of hair now hung down over The Kid’s ears and cheeks, making him look like some dangerous (albeit absurd) caveman who had found a leather jacket left by a time-traveler and put it on. The rabbits’ feet bobbed back and forth on the belt of the jacket.

“It’s warm,” The Kid said, “but who gives a rip, am I right?”

“Right, absolutely,” Trashcan Man said.

“Have a beer, asshole,” The Kid said, and tossed him a can. When Trashcan pulled the ringtab, he got a fateful of foam and The Kid roared with oddly diminutive laughter, holding his flat belly with both hands. Trash smiled weakly. He decided that later tonight, after this small monster had succumbed to sleep, he would slip away. He had had enough. And what The Kid had said about the dark priest… Trashcan Man’s fears about that were so big he could not even get them to coalesce. Saying things like that, even if you were joking, was like shitting on the altar of a church or holding your face up to the sky in a thunderstorm and begging the lightning to come hit you.

The worst thing was that he didn’t think The Kid had been joking.

Trashcan Man had no intention of going up into the mountains and around all those hairpin turns with this crazy dwarf who drank all day (and apparently all night) and who talked about overthrowing the dark man and putting himself in his place.

Meanwhile, The Kid had put away two beers in two minutes, crushed the cans, and tossed them indifferently on one of the room’s twin beds. He was looking morosely at the RCA Chromacolor, a fresh Coors in his left hand and the .45 he had used to blow open the connecting door in his right.

“No fuckin lectricity, so there ain’t no fuckin TV,” he said. As he grew more drunk, his Southern accent grew more pronounced, putting fur on his words. “Don’t I hate that. I love it that all the assholes got wasted, but Jesus-jumped-up-baldheaded-ole-Christ, where’s HBO? Where’s the goddam rasslin matches? Where’s the Playboy Channel? That was a good one, Trashy. I mean, they never showed guys gettin right down and eating hair pie, munchin the ole bearded clam, you know what I mean, but some of those ladies had laigs went right up to their chins, you know what the motherfuck I’m talkin about?”

“Sure,” Trashcan said.

“You’re fuckin A. Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you.”

The Kid stared at the dead TV. “You numb cunt,” he said, and shot the TV. The picture tube imploded with a great hollow bang. Glass belched out onto the carpet. Trashcan Man raised his arm to shield his eyes, and his beer gurgled out onto the green nylon shag when he did.

“Oh looka that, you dumb dork!” The Kid exclaimed. His tone was one of great outrage. Suddenly the .45 was pointed at Trash, its bore as big and dark as an ocean liner’s smoke stack. Trashcan felt his groin go numb. He thought he might be pissing himself, but had no way of telling for sure.

“I’m gonna venilate your thinkin-machine for that,” The Kid said. “You done spilt the beer. If it was any other kind I won’t do it, but that was Coors you spilled. I’d piss Coors if I could, you believe that happy crappy?”

“Sure,” Trashcan whispered.

“And do you think they’re makin any more Coors these days, Trash? That seem very fuckin likely to you?”

“No,” Trashcan whispered. “Guess not.”

“You’re fuckin right. It’s a dangered spee-shees.” He raised the gun slightly. Trashcan Man thought it was the end of his life, the end of his life for sure. Then The Kid lowered the gun again… slightly. He had an absolutely vacant look on his face. Trashcan guessed this expression indicated deep thought. “I’ll tell you what, Trash. You get you another can, and you chug it. If you can chug the whole thing, I won’t send you to the Cadillac Ranch. You believe that happy crappy?”

“What’s… what’s chugging?”

“Jesus Christ, boy, you as dumb as a stone boat! Drink the whole can without stoppin, that’s what chuggin is! Where you been spendin your time, motherfuckin Africa? You want to get on the stick, Trashy. If I have to put one inya, it goes right in your eye. I got this sucker loaded up with dumdums. Open you right the fuck up, turn you into a fuckin buffet dinner for the cockroaches in this dump.” He gestured with the pistol, his red eyes fixed on Trash. There was a speckle of beer-foam on his upper lip.

Trashcan went to the cardboard carton, selected a beer, and popped the top.

“Go on. Ever drop. And if you puke it back up, you’re a gone fuckin goose.”

Trashcan Man upended the can. Beer gurgled out. He swallowed convulsively, his Adam’s apple going up and down like a monkey on a stick. When the can was empty he dropped it between his feet, fought a seemingly endless battle with his gorge, and won his life back in one long, echoing belch. The Kid threw his small head back and laughed with tinkling delight. Trash swayed on his feet, grinning sickly. All at once he was a lot drunk instead of a little.

The Kid holstered his piece.

“Okay. Not bad, Trashcan Man. Not too motherfuckin shabby.”

The Kid continued to drink. Squashed cans piled up on the motel bed. Trash held a can of Coors between his knees and sipped on it whenever The Kid seemed to be looking at him with disapproval. The Kid muttered on and on, his voice growing ever lower and more Southern as the empties piled up. He talked of places he had been. Races he had won. A load of dope he had run across the border from Mexico in a laundry truck with a 442 hemi engine under the hood. Nasty stuff, he said. All dope was nasty motherfuckin stuff. He never touched it himself, but boy-howdy, after you muled a few loads of that shit, you could wipe your ass with gold toilet-paper. At last he began to nod off, the little red eyes closing for longer and longer periods, then coming reluctantly back to halfmast.

“Gonna get him, Trashy,” The Kid muttered. “I’ll go out there, check it out, keep kissin his motherfuckin ass until I see how the land lays. But nobody orders this Kid around. No-fuckin-body. Not for long. I don’t do piecework. If I’m on a job, I run it. That’s just my style. I dunno who he is or where he comes from or how he can broadcast into our motherfuckin thinkin-machines, but I’m gonna run him right the fuck”—huge yawn—“outta town. Gonna shut him down. Gonna send him to the Cadillac Ranch. Stick with me, Crash, or whoever the fuck y’are.”

He collapsed slowly backward onto the bed. His can of beer, freshly opened, fell from his relaxing hand. More Coors puddled on the rug. The case was gone, and by Trashcan’s reckoning, The Kid had gotten through twenty-one cans of it himself. Trashcan Man couldn’t understand how such a little man could drink so much beer, but he did understand what time it was: time for him to go. He knew that, but he felt drunk and weak and ill. What he wanted more than anything was to sleep for a little while. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? The Kid was apt to sleep like a log all night, maybe half of tomorrow morning, too. Plenty of time for him to take a little nap.

So he went into the other room (tiptoeing in spite of The Kid’s comatose state) and closed the connecting door as well as he could—which wasn’t very well. The force of the bullets had warped it somehow. There was a wind-up alarm clock on the dresser. Trash wound it, set it for midnight since he didn’t know (and didn’t care) what time it really was, and then set the alarm for five o’clock. He lay down on one of the twin beds without even stopping to take off his sneakers. He was asleep in five minutes.

He woke up sometime later, in the dark grave of the morning, with the smell of beer and puke blowing across his face in a dry little gale. Something was in bed with him, something hot and smooth and squirmy. His first panicky thought was that a weasel had somehow gotten right out of his Nebraska dream and into reality. A whimpery little moan came out of him as he realized that the animal in bed with him, while not big, was too big to be a weasel. He had a headache from the beer; it drilled mercilessly at his temples.

“Grab on me,” The Kid whispered in the dark. Trashcan’s hand was seized and led to something hard and cylindrical and throbbing like a piston. “Jerk me off. Go on, jerk me off, you know what to do, I saw that the first time I looked atcha. Come on, ya motherfuckin jerkoff, jerk me off.”

Trashcan Man knew how to do it. In many ways it was a relief. He knew about it from the long nights in stir. They said it was bad, that it was queer, but what the queers did was better than what some of the others did, the ones who spent their nights sharpening spoonhandles into shanks, and the ones who just lay there on their bunks, cracking their knuckles and looking at you and grinning.

The Kid had put Trashcan’s hand on the kind of gun he understood. He closed his hand around it and began. After it was over The Kid would fall asleep again. Then he would creep out.

The Kid’s breath was becoming ragged. He began to bump his hips in time with Trashcan’s strokes. Trash did not at first realize The Kid was also unbuckling his belt, then slipping his jeans and underpants down to his knees. Trash let him. It didn’t matter if The Kid wanted to slip it to him. Trash had had it slipped to him before. You didn’t die. It wasn’t poison.

Then his hand froze. Whatever it was suddenly pressing against his anus, it wasn’t flesh. It was cold steel.

And suddenly he knew what it was.

“No,” he whispered. His eyes were wide and terrified in the dark. Now he could dimly see that homicidal doll’s face in the mirror, hanging over his shoulder with its hair in its red eyes.

“Yes,” The Kid whispered back. “And you don’t want to lose a stroke, Trashy. Not one motherfuckin stroke. Or I might just pull the trigger on this thang. Blow your shit-factory all to hell and gone. Dumdums, Trashy. You believe that happy crappy?”

Whining, Trashcan began to stroke him again. His whines became little gasps of pain as the barrel of the .45 worked its way into him, rotating, gouging, tearing. And could it be that this was exciting him? It was.

Eventually his excitement became apparent to The Kid.

“Like it, dontcha?” The Kid panted. “I knew you would, you bag of pus. You like having it up your ass, dontcha? Say yes, pusbag. Say yes or right to hell you go.”

“Yes,” Trashcan Man whimpered.

“Want me to do it to you?”

He didn’t. Excited or not, he didn’t. But he knew better than to say so. “Yes.”

“I wouldn’t touch your dick if it was diamonds. Do it yaself. Why you think God gave you two hands?”

How long did it go on? God might know; the Trashcan Man did not. A minute, an hour, an age—what was the difference? He became sure that at the instant of The Kid’s orgasm he would feel two things simultaneously: the hot jet of the small monster’s semen on his belly and the mushrooming agony of a dumdum bullet roaring up through his vitals. The ultimate enema.

Then The Kid’s hips froze and his penis went through its convulsions in Trashcan Man’s hand. His fist became slick, like a rubber glove. An instant later, the pistol was withdrawn. Silent tears of relief gushed down Trashcan’s cheeks. He was not afraid to die, at least not in the service of the dark man, but he did not want to die in this dark motel room at the hands of a psychopath. Not before he had seen Cibola. He would have prayed to God, but he knew instinctively that God would not lend a sympathetic ear to those who had thrown their allegiance to the dark man. And what had God ever done for the Trashcan Man, anyway? Or for Donald Merwin Elbert either, for that matter?

In the breathing silence The Kid’s voice rose in song, offkey, cracking, trailing down toward sleep:

“My buddies an me are gettin real well known… yeah, the bad guys know us an they leave us alone… ”

He began to snore.

Now I’ll leave, Trashcan Man thought, but he was afraid that if he moved, he would wake The Kid up. I’ll leave just as soon as I’m sure he’s really asleep. Five minutes. Shouldn’t take any longer than that.

But no one knows how long five minutes is in the dark; it might be fair to say that, in the dark, five minutes does not exist. He waited. He rolled in and out of a doze without knowing he had dozed. Before long he had slipped down the slide of sleep.

He was on a dark road that was very high. The stars seemed close enough to reach up and touch; it seemed you could just pick them off the sky and pop them into a jar, like fireflies. It was bitterly cold. It was dark. Dimly, frosted with starshine, he could see the living rockfaces through which this highway had been cut.

And in the darkness, something was walking toward him.

And then his voice, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere: In the mountains I’ll give you a sign. I’ll show you my power. I’ll show you what happens to those who would set themselves against me. Wait. Watch.

Red eyes began to open in the dark, as if someone had set out three dozen danger lamps with hoods on them and now that someone was pulling the hoods off in pairs. They were eyes, and they surrounded the Trashcan Man in a fey ring. At first he thought they were the eyes of weasels, but as the ring tightened around him he saw they were great gray mountain wolves, their ears cocked forward, foam dripping from their dark muzzles.

He was afraid.

They are not for you, my good and faithful servant. See?

And they were gone. Just tike that, the panting gray timberwolves were gone.

Watch, the voice said.

Wait, the voice said.

The dream ended. He woke to discover bright sunshine falling in through the motel room window. The Kid was standing in front of it, seeming none the worse for wear from his bout with the now-defunct Adolph Coors Company the night before. His hair was combed into its former shining swirls and eddies, and he was admiring his reflection in the glass. He had slipped his leather jacket over the back of a chair. The rabbits’ feet dangled from the belt like tiny corpses from a gibbet.

“Hey, pusbag! I thought I was gonna hafta grease your hand again to wake you up. Come on, we got us a big day ahead. Lotta stuff gonna happen today, am I right?”

“You sure are,” the Trashcan Man replied with a queer smile.

When the Trashcan Man swam out of sleep on the evening of August 5, he was still lying on the blackjack table in the casino of the MGM Grand Hotel. Sitting backward on a chair in front of him was a young man with lank straw-blond hair and mirror sunglasses. The first thing Trash noticed was the stone which hung about his neck in the V of his open sport-shirt. Black, with a red flaw in the center. Like the eye of a wolf in the night.

He tried to say he was thirsty and managed only a weak “Gaw!” sound.

“You sure did spend some time in the hot sun, I guess,” Lloyd Henreid said.

“Are you him?” Trash whispered. “Are you—”

“The big guy? No, I’m not him. Flagg’s in L.A. He knows you’re here, though. I talked to him on the radio this afternoon.”

“Is he coming?”

“What, just to see you? Hell, no! He’ll be here in his own good time. You and me, guy, we’re just little people. He’ll be here in his own good time.” And he reiterated the question he had asked the tall man that morning, not long after Trashcan Man had stumbled in. “Are you that anxious to see him?”

“Yes… no… I don’t know.”

“Well, whichever way it turns out to be, you’ll get your chance.”

“Thirsty…”

“Sure. Here.” He handed over a large thermos filled with cherry Kool-Aid. Trashcan drained it at a draught, then leaned over, holding his belly and groaning. When the cramp had passed, he looked at Lloyd with dumb gratitude.

“Think you could eat something?” Lloyd asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

Lloyd turned to a man standing behind them. The man was idly whirling a roulette wheel, then letting the little white ball bounce and rattle.

“Roger, go tell Whitney or Stephanie-Ann to rustle this man up some fries and a couple of hamburgers. Naw, shit, what am I thinking about? He’ll ralph all over the place. Soup. Get him some soup. That okay, man?”

“Anything,” Trash said gratefully.

“We got a guy here,” Lloyd said, “name of Whitney Horgan, used to be a butcher. He’s a fat, loud sack of shit, but don’t that man know how to cook! Jesus! And they got everything here. The gennies were still running when we moved in, and the freezers’re full. Fucking Vegas! Ain’t it the goddamndest place you ever saw?”

“Yeah,” Trash said. He liked Lloyd already, and he didn’t even know his name. “It’s Cibola.”

“Say what?”

“Cibola. Searched for by many.”

“Yeah, been plenty people searchin for it over the years, but most of em go away sort of sorry they found it. Well, you call it whatever you want, buddy—looks like you almost cooked yourself gettin here. What’s your name?”

“Trashcan Man.”

Lloyd didn’t seem to think this a strange name at all. “Name like that, I bet you used to be a biker.” He stuck out a hand. The tips of his fingers still bore the fading marks of his stay in the Phoenix jail where he had almost died of starvation. “I’m Lloyd Henreid. Pleased to meet you, Trash. Welcome aboard the good ship Lollypop.”

Trashcan Man shook the offered hand and had to struggle to keep from weeping with gratitude. So far as he could remember, this was the first time in his life someone had offered to shake his hand. He was here. He had been accepted. At long last he was on the inside of something. He would have walked through twice as much desert as he had for this moment, would have burned the other arm and both legs as well.

“Thanks,” he muttered. “Thanks, Mr. Henreid.”

“Shit, brother—if you don’t call me Lloyd, we’ll have to throw that soup out.”

“Lloyd, then. Thanks, Lloyd.”

“That’s better. After you eat, I’ll take you upstairs and put you in a room of your own. We’ll get you doing something tomorrow. The big guy’s got something of his own for you, I think, but until then there’s plenty for you to do. We’ve got some of the place running again, but nowhere near all of it. There’s a crew up at Boulder Dam, trying to get all the power back on. There’s another one working on water supplies. We’ve got scout parties out, we’ve been pulling in six or eight people a day, but we’ll keep you off that detail for a while. Looks like you’ve had enough sun to last you a month.”

“I guess I have,” Trashcan Man said with a weak smile. He was already willing to lay down his life for Lloyd Henreid. Gathering up all of his courage, he pointed at the stone which lay in the hollow of Lloyd’s throat. “That—”

“Yeah, us guys who are sort of in charge all wear em. His idea. It’s jet. Not really a rock at all, you know. It’s like an oil bubble.”

“I mean… the red light. The eye.”

“Looks like that to you too, huh? It’s a flaw. Special from him. I’m not the smartest guy he’s got, not even the smartest guy in good ole Lost Wages, not by a long shot. But I’m… shit, I guess you’d say I’m his mascot.” He looked closely at Trash. “Maybe you too, who knows? Not me, that’s for sure. He’s a close one, Flagg is. Anyway, we heard about you special. Me and Whitney. That’s not the regular drill at all. Too many comin in to take special notice of many.” He paused. “Although I guess he could, if he wanted to. I guess he could take notice of just about anybody.”

Trashcan Man nodded.

“He can do magic,” Lloyd said, his voice becoming slightly hoarse. “I seen it. I’d hate to be the people against him, you know?”

“Yes,” Trashcan said. “I saw what happened to The Kid.”

“What kid?”

“The guy I was with until we got into the mountains.” He shuddered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay, man. Here comes your soup. And Whitney put a burger on the side after all. You’ll love it. The guy makes great burgers, but try not to puke, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Me, I got places to go and people to see. If my old buddy Poke could see me now, he’d never believe it. I’m busier’n a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. Catch you later.”

“Sure,” Trashcan said, and then added, almost timidly: “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

“Don’t thank me,” Lloyd said amiably. “Thank him.”

“I do,” Trashcan Man said. “Every night.” But he was talking to himself. Lloyd was already halfway down the lobby, talking with the man who had brought the soup and the hamburger. Trashcan Man watched them fondly until they were out of sight, and then he began to chow down, eating ravenously until almost everything was gone. He would have been fine if he hadn’t looked down into the soup bowl. It was tomato soup, and it was the color of blood.

He pushed the bowl aside, his appetite suddenly gone. It was all very well for him to tell Lloyd Henreid he didn’t want to talk about The Kid; it was quite another thing to stop thinking about what had happened to him.

He walked over to the roulette wheel, sipping at the glass of milk that had come with his food. He gave the wheel an idle twist and dropped the little white marble into the dish. It rolled around the rim, then hit the slots below and began to racket back and forth. He thought about The Kid. He wondered if someone would come and show him which room was his. He thought about The Kid. He wondered if the ball would fetch up on a red number or a black one… but mostly he thought about The Kid. The bouncing, jittering ball caught in one of the slots, this time for good. The wheel came to a stop. The ball was sitting under the green double zero.

House spin.

On the cloudless, eighty-degree day when they headed west from Golden directly into the Rockies along Interstate 70, The Kid had given up Coors in favor of a bottle of Rebel Yell whiskey. Two more bottles sat between the two of them on the driveshaft hump, each neatly packed into an empty cardboard milk carton so the bottles wouldn’t roll around and break. The Kid would nip at the bottle, chase the nip with a swallow of Pepsi-Cola, and then holler hot-damn! or yahoo! or sex-machine! at the top of his lungs. He remarked several times that he would piss Rebel Yell if he could. He asked Trashcan Man if he believed that happy crappy. Trashcan Man, pale with fright and still hung over from his three beers of the night before, said he did.

Even The Kid couldn’t stampede along at ninety on these roads. He lowered his speed to sixty and muttered about the goddam fucking mountains under his breath. Then he brightened. “When we get over in Utah n Nevada, we’ll make up plenty of lost time, Trashy. This little darlin’ll do a hunnert n sixty on the flat. You believe that happy crappy?”

“Sure is a nice car,” Trashcan said with a sick-doggy smile.

“Bet your ass.” He nipped Rebel Yell. Chased it with Pepsi. Yelled yahoo! at the top of his lungs.

Trash stared morbidly out at the passing scenery, which was now washed with midmorning sunshine. The Interstate had been blasted right into the shoulder of the mountain, and at times they were traveling between huge cliffs of rock. The cliffs he had seen in his dream of the night before. After dark, would those red eyes open again?

He shuddered.

A short while later he became aware that their speed had dropped from sixty to forty. Then to thirty. The Kid was swearing monotonously and horribly under his breath. The deuce coupe wove in and out of steadily thickening traffic, all of it stalled and deadly silent.

“What the fuck is this?” The Kid raged. “What did they? All decide to die at ten thousand motherfuckin feet? Hey, you stupid fucks, out my way! You hear me? Get the fuck out my way! ”

Trashcan Man cringed.

They rounded a curve and faced a horrendous four-car pileup which blocked the westbound lanes of I-70 completely. A dead man covered with blood which had dried to an uneven crack-glaze long since lay spreadeagled facedown in the road. Near him was a broken Chatty Cathy doll. Any way around the jam on the left was blocked by steel guardrail posts six feet high. On the right, the land fell away into cloudy distance.

The Kid gulped Rebel Yell and swung the deuce coupe toward the dropoff. “Hang on, Trashy,” he whispered, “we’re goin around.”

“There’s no room,” Trashcan Man rasped. His throat felt like the side of a steel file.

“Yeah, just enough,” The Kid whispered. His eyes were glittering. He began to edge the car off the road. The righthand wheels were now hissing in the dirt of the shoulder.

“Count me out,” Trashcan said hurriedly, and grabbed for the doorhandle.

“You sit,” said The Kid, “or you’re gonna be one dead pusbag.”

Trash turned his head and looked into the bore of a .45. The Kid giggled tensely.

Trashcan Man sat back. He wanted to close his eyes but could not. On his side of the car, the last six inches of shoulder dropped from view. Now he was looking straight down at a long vista of blue-gay pines and huge tumbled boulders. He could imagine the deuce coupe’s Wide Oval tires now four inches from the edge… now two…

“Another inch,” The Kid crooned, his eyes huge, his grin enormous. Sweat stood out on that pale doll’s forehead in perfect clear drops. “Just… one… more.”

It ended in a hurry. Trashcan Man felt the right rear of the car slip suddenly outward and sharply downward. He heard a falling millrace, first of pebbles, then of larger stones. He screamed. The Kid cursed horribly, changed down to first gear, and floored the accelerator. From the left, where they had been inching by the overturned corpse of a VW Microbus, came a squall of grinding metal.

“Fly! ” The Kid screamed. “Just like a bigass bird! Fly! Goddammit, FLY! ”

The deuce coupe’s rear wheels spun. For a moment their shift toward the drop seemed to be increasing. Then the car jerked forward, lurched up, and they were back on the road on the far side of the pileup, laying rubber.

“I told you she’d do it! ” The Kid screamed triumphantly. “Goddam! Did we do it? Did we do it, Trashy, ya fuckin chickenshit suckhole? ”

“We did it,” Trashcan Man said quietly. He was twitching all over. He couldn’t seem to control it. And then, for the second time since meeting The Kid, he unwittingly said the one thing that could have saved his life—had he not said it, The Kid surely would have killed him; it would have been his queer way of celebrating. “Good driving, champ,” he said. He had never called anyone “champ” in his whole life before now.

“Ahhh… not that great,” The Kid said patronizingly. “There’s at least two other guys in the country coulda done it. You believe that happy crappy?”

“If you say so, Kid.”

“Don’t tell me, sweetheart, I’ll fuckin tell you. Well, on we go. All in a day’s work.”

But they did not go on for long. The Kid’s deuce coupe was stopped for good fifteen minutes later, eighteen hundred miles or more from its point of origin in Shreveport, Louisiana.

“I don’t believe it,” The Kid said. “I don’t… motherfuckin… B’LEEVE it!”

He threw open the driver’s side door and jumped out, the quarter-full bottle of Rebel Yell still clutched in his left hand.

“GET OUTTA MY ROAD! ” The Kid roared, dancing about in his grotesquely high-heeled boots, a tiny natural force of destruction, like an earthquake in a bottle. “GET OUTTA MY ROAD, MOTHERFUCKERS, YOU’RE DEAD, Y’ALL B’LONG IN THE MOTHERFUCKIN BONEYARD, YOU GOT NO BUSINESS IN MY FUCKIN ROAD! ”

He threw the Rebel Yell bottle and it flew end over end, spraying amber droplets. It crashed into a hundred pieces against the side of an old Porsche. The Kid stood silent, panting and reeling a little on his feet.

The problem was nothing so simple as a four-car pileup this time. This time the problem was nothing but traffic. The eastbound lanes were here divided from those westbound by a grassy median strip about ten yards across, and the deuce coupe probably could have made it from one side of the highway to the other, but the condition of both arteries was the same: the four lanes were crowded with six lanes of traffic, bumper to bumper and side to side. The breakdown lanes were as full as the travel lanes. Some drivers had even attempted to use the median itself, although it was rough and upgraded and full of rocks which punched out of the thin gray soil like dragon’s teeth. Perhaps there had been high-hung four-wheel-drive vehicles which had had some success there, but what Trashcan saw on the median strip was an automobile graveyard of crashed, bashed, and mashed Detroit rolling iron. It was as if a mass madness had infected all the drivers and they had decided to hold an apocalyptic demolition derby or lunatic gymkhana here high up on I-70. Colorado Rocky Mountain high, Trashcan Man thought, I’ve seen it raining Chevies in the sky. He almost giggled and hurriedly covered his mouth. If The Kid heard him giggling now, he would most likely never giggle again.

The Kid came striding back in his high-heeled boots, his carefully coiffed hair gleaming. His face was that of a dwarf basilisk. His eyes were bulging with fury. “I’m not leavin my fuckin car,” he said. “You hear me? No way. I’m not leavin it. You get walkin, Trashy. You walk up there and see how far this motherfuckin traffic jam goes. Maybe it’s a truck in the road, I don’t know. I know we can’t fuckin backtrack. We lost the shoulder. We’d go all the way down. But if it’s just a stalled truck or somethin, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’ll jump these sonsofwhores one at a time and run em right the fuck over the edge. I can do it, and you better believe that happy crappy. Get movie, son.”

Trash didn’t argue. He began to walk carefully up the road, weaving in and out between the packed cars. He was ready to duck and run if The Kid started shooting. But The Kid didn’t. When Trashcan had walked what he judged to be a safe distance (i.e., out of pistol range), he climbed atop a tanker truck and looked back. The Kid, miniature streetpunk from hell, truly doll-sized at this half-a-mile distance, was leaning against the side of his deucey, having a drink. Trashcan Man thought of waving and then decided it might be a bad idea.

The Trashcan Man started his walk that day at about ten-thirty in the morning, MDT. Walking was slow—he often had to scramble over the hoods and roofs of cars and trucks, they were so tightly packed together—and by the time he got to the first TUNNEL CLOSED sign, it was already quarter past three in the afternoon. He had made about twelve miles. Twelve miles wasn’t so much—not to someone who’d crossed twenty percent of the country on a bicycle—but considering the obstacles, he thought twelve miles was pretty awesome. He could have gone back long-ago to tell The Kid it was impossible… if, that was, he’d ever had any intentions of going back. He didn’t, of course. Trashcan Man had never read much history (after the electroshock therapy, reading had gotten sort of tough for him), but he didn’t need to know that, in times of old, kings and emperors had often killed the bearers of bad news out of simple pique. What he did know was enough: he had seen enough of The Kid to know he didn’t ever want to see any more.

He stood pondering the sign, black letters on an orange diamond-shaped field. It had been knocked over and was lying beneath one wheel of what looked like the world’s oldest Yugo. TUNNEL CLOSED. What tunnel? He peered ahead, shading his eyes, and thought he could see something. He walked on another three hundred yards, scrambling over cars when he had to, and came to an alarming confusion of crashed vehicles and dead bodies. Some of the cars and trucks had been burned to the axles. Many were army vehicles. Many of the bodies were dressed in khaki. Beyond the scene of this battle—Trash was pretty sure that’s what it had been—the traffic jam began again. And beyond it, east and west, the traffic disappeared into the twin bores of what a huge sign bolted to the living rock proclaimed to be THE EISENHOWER TUNNEL.

He walked closer, heart bumping, not knowing just what he intended. Those twin bores punching their way into the rock intimidated him, and as he drew closer, intimidation became outright terror. He would have understood Larry Underwood’s feelings about the Lincoln Tunnel perfectly; in that instant they were unknowing soul brothers, the shared soul emotion one of stark fear.

The main difference was that, while the Lincoln Tunnel’s pedestrian catwalk was set high off the roadbed, here it was low enough so that some cars had actually attempted to run along the side, with one pair of wheels up on the catwalk and the other on the road. The tunnel was two miles long. The only way to negotiate it would be to crawl along from car to car in the pitch dark. It would take hours.

Trashcan Man felt his bowels turn to water.

He stood looking at the tunnel for a long time. Larry Underwood, over a month before, had gone into his tunnel in spite of his fear. After a long contemplation, Trashcan Man turned away and began to walk back toward The Kid, his shoulders slumped, the corners of his mouth trembling. It was not just the absence of any easy place to walk which made him turn back, or the length of the tunnel (Trash, who had lived his whole life in Indiana, had no idea how long the Eisenhower Tunnel was). Larry Underwood had been moved (and perhaps controlled) by an underlying streak of self-interest by the simple logic of survival: New York was an island, and he had to get off. The tunnel was the quickest way. So he would walk through as quick as he could; he would do it the way you held your nose and swallowed fast when you knew the medicine was going to taste bad. Trashcan Man was a beaten thing, used to accepting the punchings and pummelings of both fate and his own inexplicable nature… and doing so with a bowed head. He had been further unmanned, brainwashed almost, by his cataclysmic encounter with The Kid. He had been whooshed along at speeds high enough to induce brain-damage. He had been threatened with extinction if he could not drink a whole can of beer without stopping and without throwing up afterward. He had been sodomized with a pistol barrel. He had been nearly dumped a thousand feet straight down from the edge of the turnpike. On top of this, could he summon enough courage to crawl through a hole bored straight through the base of a mountain, a hole where he might encounter who knew what horrors in the dark? He could not. Others, maybe, but not the Trashcan Man. And there was also a certain logic in the idea of turning back. It was the logic of the beaten and the half-mad, true, but it still had its own perverse charm. He was not on an island. If he had to backtrack the rest of today and all day tomorrow in order to find a road that went over the mountains instead of through them, he would do it. He’d have to get by The Kid, it was true, but he thought The Kid might have changed his mind and left already, in spite of his declarations to the contrary. He might be dead drunk. He might even (although Trash really doubted that such extraordinarily good luck would ever come his way) be simply dead. At the worst, if The Kid was still there, watching and waiting, Trashcan could wait until dark and then creep past him like

(a weasel)

some small animal in the underbrush. Then he would just continue on to the east until he found the road he was looking for.

He arrived back at the tanker truck from whose top he had last seen The Kid and The Kid’s mythic deuce coupe, making better time on the return trip. This time he did not climb up to where he would be clearly silhouetted against the evening sky but began to crawl from car to car on his hands and knees, trying to be very quiet. The Kid might be alert and on watch. With a guy like The Kid, you just couldn’t tell… and it didn’t pay to take chances. He found himself wishing he had taken one of the soldiers’ guns, even though he had never used a gun in his life. He kept crawling, the road-pebbles biting painfully into his claw hand. It was eight o’clock, and the sun had gone behind the mountains.

Trashcan stopped behind the hood of the Porsche The Kid had thrown his liquor bottle at and carefully raised his eyes over it. Yes, there was The Kid’s deuce coupe, with its flamboyant flake-gold paint, its convex windshield and sharkfin cutting at the bruise-colored evening sky. The Kid was slumped behind the Day-Glo steering wheel, his eyes closed, his mouth open. Trashcan Man’s heart thundered a percussive victory song in his chest. Dead drunk! his heartbeat proclaimed in syllables of two. Dead drunk! By God! Dead drunk! Trash thought he could be twenty miles east of here before The Kid even woke up to his hangover.

Still, he was careful. He skittered from car to car like a waterbug crossing the still surface of a pond, skirting the deuce coupe on his left, hurrying across the increasing gaps. Now the deucey was at nine o’clock on his left, now seven, now six and directly behind him. Now to put distance between him and that crazy—

“You prick-stupid cocksucker, you hold still.”

Trash froze on his hands and knees. He made wee-wee in his pants, and his mind dissolved into a madly fluttering black bird of panic.

He turned around little by little, the tendons in his neck creaking like the hinges of a door in a haunted house. And there stood The Kid, resplendent in an iridescent shirt of green and gold and a pair of sunfaded cords. There was a .45 in each hand and a horrible grimace of hate and rage on his face.

“I was just chuh-checkin down this way,” Trashcan Man heard himself saying. “To make sure the cuh-cuh-coast was clear.”

“Sure—on your hands and knees you was checkin, dinkweed. I’ll clear your motherfuckin coast. Stand up here.”

Trashcan somehow gained his feet and kept them by holding on to the doorhandle of a car on his right. The twin bores of The Kid’s matched set of .45s looked every bit as big as the twin bores of the Eisenhower Tunnel. He was looking at death now. He knew that. There were no right words to avert it this time.

He offered up a silent prayer to the dark man: Please… if it be your will… my life for you!

“What’s up there?” The Kid asked. “A wreck?”

“A tunnel. It’s jammed solid. That’s why I came back, to tell you. Please—”

“A tunnel,” The Kid groaned. “Jesus-hairy-ole-baldheaded-Christ! ” The scowl returned. “Are you lyin to me, you fuckin fairy?”

“No! I swear I’m not! The sign said Eeesenhoover Tunnel. I think that’s what it said, but I have trouble with long words. I—”

“Shut your dough-hole. How far?”

“Eight miles. Maybe even more.”

The Kid was silent for a moment, looking west along the turnpike. Then he fixed Trashcan Man with a glittery gaze. “You trine to tell me this traffic jam’s eight miles long? You lyin sack of shit!” The Kid thumbed the triggers on both guns up to half-cock. Trashcan, who wouldn’t have known half-cock from full cock and full cock from a bag of frogs, screeched like a woman and put his hands over his eyes.

“No kidding! ” he screamed. “No kidding! I swear! I swear! ”

The Kid looked at him for a long time. At last he lowered the hammers on his guns.

“I’m gonna kill you, Trashy,” he said, smiling. “I’m gonna take your motherfuckin life. But first we’re gonna walk back to that pileup we squeaked by this morning. You’re gonna push the van over the edge. Then I’m gonna go back and find another way around. Not gonna leave my fuckin car,” he added petulantly. “Nohow no way.”

“Please don’t kill me,” Trashcan whispered. “Please don’t.”

“If you can get that VW van over the side in less’n fifteen minutes, maybe I won’t,” The Kid said. “You believe that happy crappy?”

“Yes,” Trash said. But he had gotten a good look into those preternaturally glittering eyes, and he did not believe it at all.

They walked back to the pileup, Trashcan Man walking in front of The Kid on wobbling rubber legs. The Kid walked mincingly, his leather jacket creaking softly in its secret folds. There was a vague, almost sweet smile on his doll-like lips.

By the time they got to the pileup, dusk was almost gone. The VW Microbus was on its side, the corpses of the three or four occupants a tangle of arms and legs that was mercifully hard to see in the fast-failing light. The Kid walked past the van and stood on the shoulder, looking at the place they had edged by some ten hours before. One of the deucey’s tire tracks was still there, but the other had crumbled away with the embankment.

“Nope,” The Kid said with finality. “Never make it by here again unless we do some movin and groovin first. Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you.”

For one brief moment, Trashcan Man entertained the notion of rushing at The Kid and trying to push him over the edge. Then The Kid turned around. His guns were drawn and pointing casually at Trashcan’s midriff.

“Say, Trashy. You was thinkin evil thoughts. Don’t try to tell me no different. I can read you like a motherfuckin book.”

Trashcan shook his head violently back and forth in protest.

“Don’t you make a mistake with me, Trashy. That’s the one thing in this wide world you don’t want to do. Now get pushing on that van. You got fifteen minutes.”

There was an Austin parked nearby on the broken centerline. The Kid pulled open the passenger door, casually ripped out the bloated corpse of a teenage girl (her arm came off in his hand and he tossed it aside with the absent air of a man who has finished with the turkey drumstick he has been nibbling on), and sat down on the bucket seat with his feet out on the pavement. He gestured good-humoredly with his guns at the slumped, shuddering form of the Trashcan Man.

“Time’s a-wastin, good buddy.” He threw back his head and sang: “Oh… here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand, he’s a one-ball man and he’s OFF to the ro-dee-OH … that’s right, Trashy, ya fuckin wet end, getcha back into it, only twelve minutes left… alamand left an alamand right, come on, ya fuckin dummy, getcha right foot right—”

Trash leaned against the Microbus. Bunched his legs and pushed. The Microbus moved perhaps two inches toward the drop. In his heart, hope—that indestructible weed of the human heart—had begun to bloom again. The Kid was irrational, impulsive, what Carley Yates and his pool-hall buddies would have called crazier than a shithouse rat. Maybe if he actually got the van over the side and cleared the way for The Kid’s precious deuce coupe, the lunatic would let him live.

Maybe.

He lowered his head, gripped the edge of the VW’s frame, and shoved with all his might. Pain flared in his recently burned arm, and he knew that the fragile new tissue would soon rip open. Then the pain would become agony.

The bus moved three inches. Sweat dripped from Trashcan’s brow and ran into his eyes, stinging like warm engine oil.

“Oh, here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand, he’s a one-ball man and he’s OFF to the ro-dee-OH! ” The Kid sang. “Well, alamand left an alamand r—”

The song broke off like a brittle twig. Trashcan Man looked up apprehensively. The Kid had come out of the Austin’s passenger seat. He was standing in profile to Trash, staring across their half of the turnpike toward the eastbound lanes. A rocky, brushy slope rose beyond them, blotting out half the sky.

“What the fuck was that?” The Kid whispered.

“I didn’t hear anyth—”

Then he did hear something. He heard a small rattle of pebbles and stones on the other side of the highway. His dream recurred to him in sudden, total recall that froze his blood and evaporated all the spit in his mouth.

“Who’s there? ” The Kid shouted. “You better answer me! Answer, goddammit, or I start shooting! ”

And he was answered, but not by any human voice. A howl rose up in the night like a hoarse siren, first climbing and then dropping rapidly down to a guttural growl.

“Holy Jesus!” The Kid said, and his voice was suddenly thin.

Coming down the slope on the far side of the turnpike and crossing the median strip were wolves, gaunt gray timberwolves, their eyes red, their jaws gaping and adrip. There were more than two dozen of them. Trashcan, in an ecstasy of terror, made wee-wee in his pants again.

The Kid stepped around the trunk of the Austin, leveled his .45s, and began firing. Flame licked from the barrels; the sound of the shots echoed and reechoed from the mountain faces, making it sound as if artillery were at work. Trashcan Man cried out and poked his index fingers in his ears. The night breeze tattered the gunsmoke, fresh and ripe and hot. Its cordite aroma stung his nose.

The wolves came on, no faster and no slower, at a fast walk. Their eyes… Trashcan Man found himself unable to look away from their eyes. They were not the eyes of—ordinary wolves; of that he was quite convinced. They were the eyes of their Master, he thought. Their Master and his Master. Suddenly he remembered his prayer and he was afraid no longer. He took his fingers out of his ears. He ignored the wetness spreading at his crotch. He began to smile.

The Kid had emptied both of his guns, dropping three of the wolves in so doing. He holstered the .45s without making an attempt to reload and turned west. He went about ten paces and then stopped. More wolves were padding down the westbound lanes, weaving in and out of the dark hulks of the stalled cars like tattered streamers of mist. One of them raised its snout to the sky and howled. Its cry was joined by a second, the second by a third, the third by a whole chorus. Then they came on again.

The Kid began to back up. He was trying to load one of his guns now, but the shells were spilling out between his nerveless fingers. Suddenly he gave up. The gun fell out of his hand and clanked on the road. As if it had been a signal, the wolves rushed him.

With a high, reedy scream of fear, The Kid turned and ran for the Austin. As he ran, his second pistol tumbled from its low holster and bounced off the road. With a low, ripping growl, the wolf closest to him sprang just as The Kid dove into the Austin and slammed the door.

He just made it. The wolf bounced off the door, growling, its red eyes rolling horribly. It was joined by the others, and in moments the Austin was ringed with wolves. From inside, The Kid’s face was a small white moon looking out.

Then one of the wolves was coming toward the Trashcan Man, its triangular head held low, its eyes glowing like stormlamps.

My life for you…

Steadily, now not in the least afraid, Trash went to meet it. He held out his burned hand and the wolf licked it. After a moment it sat at his feet, curling its ragged, brushy tail about its withers.

The Kid was staring at him, his mouth hanging open.

Smiling into his eyes, Trashcan Man gave him the finger.

Both fingers.

And he screamed: “Fuck you! You’re shut down! Do you hear me? DO YOU BELIEVE THAT HAPPY CRAPPY? SHUT DOWN! DON’T TELL ME, I’LL TELL YOU! ”

The wolf’s mouth closed gently on Trashcan’s good hand. He looked down. It was standing again, tugging him lightly. Tugging him west.

“All right,” Trashcan said serenely. “Okay, boy.”

He began to walk and the wolf fell in right behind him, walking like a well-trained dog at heel. As they walked away, five others joined them from amid the stalled cars. Now he walked with one wolf ahead of him, one behind him, and two on each side, like an escorted dignitary.

He paused once and looked back over his shoulder. He never forgot what he saw: a ring of wolves sitting patiently in a gray circle around the little Austin, and the pale circle of The Kid’s face staring out, his mouth working behind the windowglass. The wolves seemed to grin up at The Kid, their tongues lolling out of their mouths. They seemed to be asking him just how long it would be before he kicked the dark man out of ole Lost Wages on his ass. Just how long?

Trashcan Man wondered how long those wolves would sit around the little Austin, ringing it in a circle of teeth. The answer, of course, was as long as it took. Two days, three, maybe even four. The Kid would sit there, looking out. Nothing to eat (unless the teenage girl had had a passenger, that was), nothing to drink, the afternoon temperature in the car’s small interior maybe as high as a hundred and thirty degrees, what with the greenhouse effect. The dark man’s lapdogs would wait until The Kid starved to death, or until he got crazy enough to open the door and try to make a run for it. Trashcan Man giggled in the darkness. The Kid wasn’t very big. He wouldn’t make much more than a mouthful for each of them. And what they did get might well poison them.

“Am I right?” he cried, and cackled up at the bright stars. “Don’t tell me if you believe that happy crappy! I’ll motherfuckin tell YOU! ”

His gray-ghostly companions padded gravely along all about him, taking no notice of Trashcan Man’s shouts. When they reached The Kid’s deuce coupe, the wolf at his heel padded over to it, sniffed at one of the Wide Ovals, and then, grinning sardonically, lifted his leg and made wee-wee on it.

Trashcan Man had to laugh. He laughed until tears squirted from his eyes and ran down his cracked, stubbled cheeks. His madness, like a fine skillet dish, now wanted only for the desert sun to simmer it and complete it, to give it that final subtle touch of flavor.

They walked, the Trashcan Man and his escorts. As the traffic grew thicker, the wolves either squirmed under cars with their bellies dragging on the road or padded over hoods and roofs near him—sanguine, silent companions with red eyes and bright teeth. When, sometime after midnight, they reached the Eisenhower Tunnel, Trashcan did not hesitate but worked his way steadily into the maw of the westbound side. How could he be afraid now? How could he be afraid with guardians like these?

It was a long trip, and he had lost all track of time before it had little more than begun. He groped blindly forward from one car to the next. Once his hand plunged into something wet and sickeningly soft, and there was a horrible whoosh of stinking gas. Even then he did not falter. From time to time he saw red eyes in the dark, always up ahead, always leading him forward.

A time later he sensed a new freshness in the air and began to hurry, once losing his balance and plunging from the hood of one car to crack his skull painfully on the bumper of the next. A short time after that, he looked up and saw the stars again; now paling before the onset of dawn. He was out.

His guardians had faded away. But Trashcan fell to his knees and gave thanks in a long, rambling, disjointed prayer. He had seen the hand of the dark man at work, and he had seen it plain.

In spite of all he had been through since he had awakened the previous morning to see The Kid admiring his hairdo in the mirror of the Golden Motel room, Trash was too exalted to sleep. He walked instead, putting the tunnel behind him. The traffic was choked on the westbound side of the tunnel too, but it had cleared out enough to walk comfortably before he had gone two miles. Across the median, in the eastbound lanes, the stream of cars that had been waiting to use the tunnel stretched on and on.

At noon he began to come down from Vail Pass into Vail itself, passing the condominiums and the singles apartment complexes. Now weariness had almost overcome him. He broke a window, unlocked a door, found a bed. And that was all he remembered until early the next morning.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance… or change. Once such incantatory phrases as “we see now through a glass darkly” and “mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform” are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s all on purpose.

It was quite likely for this reason that the Trashcan Man talked to a crow for nearly twenty minutes on the road west of Vail, convinced it was either an emissary of the dark man… or the dark man himself. The crow regarded him silently from its perch on a high telephone wire for a long time, not flying away until it was bored or hungry… or until Trashcan’s outpouring of praise and promises of loyalty were complete.

He got another bike near Grand Junction, and by July 25 he had been speeding across western Utah on Route 4, which connects I-89 on the east to the great southwestern-tending I-15, which goes from north of Salt Lake City all the way to San Bernadino, California. And when the front wheel of his new bike suddenly decided to part company from the rest of the machine and go speeding off into the desert on its own, Trashcan Man was pitched over the handlebars to land on his head, a crash that should have fractured his skull (he was doing forty when it happened, and wearing no helmet). Yet he was able to stand up less than five minutes later, with blood streaming over his face from half a dozen cuts and lacerations, able to do his shuffling, grimacing little dance, able to chant: “Cii-a-bo-la, my life for you, Ci-a-bola, bumpty, bumpty, bump! ”

There is really nothing so comforting to the beaten of spirit or the broken of skull than a good strong dose of “Thy will be done.”

On August 7, Lloyd Henreid came to the room in which the dehydrated and semidelirious Trashcan Man had been installed the day before. It was a fine room, on the thirtieth floor of the MGM Grand. There was a round bed with silk sheets, and a round mirror which looked to be the exact same size as the bed, mounted on the ceiling.

Trashcan Man looked at Lloyd.

“How you feeling, Trash?” Lloyd asked, looking back.

“Good,” Trashcan Man said. “Better.”

“Some food and water and rest, that’s all you needed,” Lloyd said. “I brought you some clean clothes. Had to guess at the sizes.”

“They look fine.” Trash had never really been able to remember his sizes. He took the jeans and the workshirt Lloyd offered.

“Come on down to breakfast when you’re dressed,” Lloyd said. He spoke almost deferentially. “Most of us eat in the deli.”

“Okay. Sure.”

The deli hummed with conversation, and he paused outside and around the corner, suddenly overcome with fright. They would look up at him when he came in. They would look up and laugh. Someone would start giggling in the back of the room, someone else would join in, and then the whole place would be an uproar of laughter and pointing fingers.

Hey, put away ya matches, here comes the Trashcan Man!

Hey, Trash! What did ole lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?

Wet the bed much, Trashy?

Sweat popped out on his skin, making him feel slimy in spite of the shower he’d taken after Lloyd left. He remembered his face in the bathroom mirror, covered with slowly healing scabs, his body, too gaunt, his eyes, too small for their yawning sockets. Yes, they would laugh. He listened to the hum of conversation, the clink of silverware, and thought he should just slink away.

Then he thought of the way the wolf had taken his hand, so gently, and had led him away from The Kid’s metal tomb, and Trash squared his shoulders and walked inside.

A few people looked up briefly, then went back to their meals and their conversations. Lloyd, at a big table in the middle of the room, raised an arm and waved him over. Trash threaded his way among the tables and under a darkened electronic Keno toteboard. There were three other people at the table. They were all eating ham and scrambled eggs.

“Serve yourself,” Lloyd said. “It’s a steam-table kinda thing.”

Trashcan Man got a tray and served himself. The man behind the counter, large and dressed in dirty cook’s whites, watched him.

“Are you Mr. Horgan?” Trashcan Man asked timidly.

Horgan grinned, exposing gapped teeth. “Yeah, but we won’t get nowhere with you callin me that, boy. You call me Whitey. You feelin a little better? When you came in, you looked like the wratha God.”

“Much better, sure.”

“Dig in those aigs. All you want. Go light on the home fries, though. I would, at least. Them taters is old and tough. Good to have you here, boy.”

“Thanks,” Trash said.

He went back to Lloyd’s table.

“Trash, this here is Ken DeMott. The fella with the bald spot is Hector Drogan. And this kid tryin to grow on his face what springs up wild in his asshole calls himself Ace High.”

They all nodded at him.

“This is our new boy,” Lloyd said. “Name’s Trashcan Man.”

Hands were shaken all around. Trash started to dig into his eggs. He looked up at the young man with the scraggly beard and said in a low, polite voice: “Would you pass the salt, please, Mr. High?”

There was a moment of surprise as they looked at each other, and then they all burst into laughter. Trash stared at them, feeling the panic rise in his chest, and then he heard the laughter, really heard it, with his mind as well as his ears, and understood that there was no meanness in it. No one here was going to ask him why he hadn’t burned down the school instead of the church. No one here was going to dun him about old lady Semple’s pension check. He could smile too, if he wanted. And he did.

“Mr. High,” Hector Drogan was giggling. “Oh, Ace, you just been had. Mr. High, I love it. Meeestair Haaaaah. Man, that is so fuckin rich.”

Ace High handed Trashcan the salt. “Just Ace, my man. That’ll get me every time. You don’t call me Mr. High and I won’t call you Mr. Man, that a deal?”

“Okay,” Trashcan Man said, still smiling. “That’s fine.”

“Oh, Mr. Hiiiigh?” Heck Drogan said in a coy falsetto. Then he burst into laughter again. “Ace, you never gonna live that down. I swear you won’t.”

“Maybe not, but I’m sure-God gonna live it up,” Ace High said, and got up with his plate for more eggs. His hand closed for a moment on Trashcan Man’s shoulder as he went. The hand was warm and solid. It was a friendly hand that did not squeeze or pinch.

Trashcan Man dug into his eggs, feeling warm and good inside. This warmth and goodness was so foreign to his nature that it almost felt like a disease. As he ate he tried to isolate it, understand it. He looked up, looked at the faces around him, and thought he might understand what it was.

Happiness.

What a good bunch of people, he thought.

And on the heels of that: I’m home.

That day he was left on his own to sleep, but the next day he was bussed up to Boulder Dam with a lot of other people. There they spent the day wrapping copper core wire around the spindles of burned-out motors. He worked at a bench with a view of the water—Lake Mead—and no one supervised him. Trashcan Man assumed that there was no foreman or anyone like that around because everyone was as in love with what they were doing as he was himself.

He learned differently the next day.

It was quarter past ten in the morning. Trashcan Man was sitting on his bench, wrapping copper wire, his mind a million miles away as his fingers did their work. He was composing a psalm of praise to the dark man in his mind. It had occurred to him that he should get a large book (a Book, actually) and begin to write some of his thoughts about him down. It would be the sort of Book people might want to read someday. People who felt about him as Trash did.

Ken DeMott came to his bench, and Ken looked pale and frightened under his desert tan. “Come on,” he said. “Work’s over. We’re going back to Vegas. Everyone. The buses are outside.”

“Huh? Why?” Trashcan blinked up at him.

“I don’t know. It’s his order. Lloyd passed it along. Get your ass in gear, Trashy. It’s best not to ask questions when the hardcase is involved.”

So he didn’t. Outside, on Hoover Drive, three Las Vegas Public School buses were parked with their engines idling. Men and women were climbing aboard. There was little talk; the midmorning ride back to Vegas was the antithesis of the usual commutes to and from work. There was no horseplay, little conversation, and none of the usual light banter that passed between the twenty or so women and the thirty or so men. Everyone had drawn into himself or herself.

As they neared the city, Trashcan Man heard one of the men sitting across the aisle from him say quietly to his seatmate: “It’s Heck. Heck Drogan. Goddammit, how does that spook find things out?”

“Shut up,” the other said, and gave Trashcan Man a mistrustful glance.

Trash averted his gaze and looked out the window at the passing desert. He was once again troubled in his mind.

“Oh Jesus,” one of the women said as they filed off the bus, but hers was the only comment.

Trashcan looked around, puzzled. Everyone was here, it looked like, everyone in Cibola. They had all been called back, with the exception of a few scouts that might be anywhere from the Mexican peninsula to west Texas. They were gathered in a loose semicircle around the fountain, six and seven deep, more than four hundred in all. Some of those in the back were standing on hotel chairs so they could see, and until Trashcan drew closer, he thought it was the fountain they were looking at. Craning his neck, he could see there was something lying on the lawn in front of the fountain, but he couldn’t see what it was.

A hand grasped his elbow. It was Lloyd. His face looked white and strained. “I been lookin for you. He wants to see you later. Meantime, we got this. God, I hate these. Come on. I need help and you’re elected.”

Trashcan Man’s head was whirling. He wanted to see him! Him! But in the meantime there was this… whatever this was.

“What, Lloyd? What is it?”

Lloyd didn’t answer. Still holding lightly to Trashcan Man’s arm, he led him toward the fountain. The crowd parted before them, almost shrank from them. The narrow corridor they passed through seemed to be insulated with a still cold layer of loathing and fear.

Standing at the front of the crowd was Whitney Horgan. He was smoking a cigarette. One of his Hush Puppies was propped on the object Trash hadn’t been quite able to make out before. It was a wooden cross. Its vertical piece was about twelve feet long. It looked like a crude lowercase t.

“Everyone here?” Lloyd asked.

“Yeah,” Whitey said, “I guess they are. Winky took roll-call. We got nine guys out of state. Flagg said never mind about them. How are you holding up, Lloyd?”

“I’ll be fine,” Lloyd said. “Well… not fine, but you know—I’ll get through it.”

Whitey cocked his head toward Trashcan Man. “How much does the kid know?”

“I don’t know anything,” Trashcan said, more confused than ever. Hope, awe, and dread were all in dubious battle within him. “What is this? Someone said something about Heck—”

“Yeah, it’s Heck,” Lloyd said. “He’s been freebasing. Fucking blow, don’t I hate the goddam fucking blow. Go on, Whitey, tell em to bring him out.”

Whitey moved away from Lloyd and Trash, stepping over a rectangular hole in the ground. The hole had been throated with cement. It looked just the right size and depth to take the butt end of the cross. As Whitney “Whitey” Horgan trotted up the wide steps between the gold pyramids, Trashcan Man felt all the spit in his mouth dry up. He suddenly turned, first to the silent crowd, waiting in its crescent formation under the blue sky, then to Lloyd, who stood pale and silent, looking at the cross and picking the white head of a pimple on his chin.

“You… we… nail him up?” Trashcan managed at last. “Is that what this is about?”

Lloyd reached suddenly into the pocket of his faded shirt. “You know, I got something for you. He gave it to me to give to you. I can’t make you take it, but it’s a goddam good thing for me that I remembered to at least make the offer. Do you want it?”

From his breast pocket he drew a fine gold chain with a black jet stone on the end of it. The stone was flawed with a tiny red spot, as was Lloyd’s own. He dangled it before Trashcan Man’s eyes like a hypnotist’s amulet.

The truth was in Lloyd’s eyes, too clear not to be recognized, and Trashcan Man knew he could never weep and grovel—not before him, not before anybody, but especially not before him —and claim he hadn’t understood. Take this and you take everything, Lloyd’s eyes said. And what’s apart of everything? Why, Heck Drogan, of course. Heck and the cement-lined hole in the ground, the hole just big enough to take the butt end of Heck’s cross-tree.

He reached for it slowly. His hand paused just before the outstretched fingers could touch the gold chain.

This is my last chance. My last chance to be Donald Merwin Elbert.

But another voice, one which spoke with greater authority (but with a certain gentleness, like a cool hand on a fevered brow), told him that the time of choices had long since passed. If he chose Donald Merwin Elbert now, he would die. He had sought the dark man of his own free will (if there is such a thing for the Trashcan Men of the world), had accepted the dark man’s favors. The dark man had saved him from dying at the hands of The Kid (that the dark man might have sent The Kid for just that purpose never crossed Trashcan Man’s mind), and surely that meant his life was now a debt he owed to that same dark man… the man some of them here called the Walkin Dude. His life! Had he not himself offered it again and again?

But your soul… did you offer your soul as well?

In for a penny, in for a pound, the Trashcan Man thought, and gently put one hand around the gold chain and the other around the dark stone. The stone was cold and smooth. He held it in his fist for a moment just to see if he could warm it up. He didn’t think he would be able to, and he was right. So he put it around his neck, where it lay against his skin like a tiny ball of ice.

But he didn’t mind that icy feeling.

That icy feeling counterbalanced the fire which was always in his mind.

“Just tell yourself you don’t know him,” Lloyd said. “Heck, I mean. That’s what I always do. It makes it easier. It—”

Two of the wide hotel doors banged open. Frantic, terrified screams floated across to them. The crowd sighed.

A party of nine came down the steps. Hector Drogan was in the center. He was fighting like a tiger caught in a net. His face was dead pale except for two hectic blots of color riding high up on his cheekbones. Sweat was pouring off every inch of skin in rivers. He was mother-naked. Five men were holding on to him. One of them was Ace High, the kid Heck had been ribbing about his name.

“Ace!” Hector was babbling. “Hey, Ace, what do you say? Little help for the kid, okay? Tell them to quit this, man—I can get clean, I swear to God I can clean up my act. What do you say? Little help here! Please, Ace!”

Ace High said nothing; simply tightened his grip on Heck’s thrashing arm. It was answer enough. Hector Drogan began to scream again. He was dragged relentlessly across the pavilion and toward the fountain.

Behind him, walking in line like a solemn undertaker’s party, were three men: Whitney Horgan, carrying a large carpetbag; a man named Roy Hoopes, with a stepladder; and Winky Winks, a bald man whose eyes twitched constantly. Winky was carrying a clipboard with a typed sheet of paper on it.

Heck was dragged to the foot of the cross. A horrible yellow smell of fear was radiating out from him; his eyes rolled, showing the muddy whites, like the eyes of a horse left out in a thunderstorm.

“Hey, Trashy,” he said hoarsely as Roy Hoopes set up the stepladder behind him. “Trashcan Man. Tell em to cut it out, buddy. Tell them I can get clean. Tell them a scare like this is better’n all the fuckin rehabs in the world. Tell em, man.”

Trashcan stared down at his feet. As he bent his neck, the black stone swung out from his chest and into his field of vision. The red flaw, the eye, seemed to be staring up at him fixedly.

“I don’t know you,” he mumbled.

From the tail of his eye he saw Whitey down on one knee, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, his left eye squinted against the smoke. He opened the carpetbag. He was taking out sharp wooden nails. To Trashcan Man’s horrified gaze, they looked almost as big as tentpegs. He laid the nails on the grass and then removed a large wooden mallet from the carpetbag.

In spite of the murmuring voices all around them, Trashcan Man’s words seemed to have penetrated the panicky haze in Hector brogan’s mind. “What do you mean, you don’t know me?” he cried wildly. “We had breakfast together just two days ago! You called the kid there Mr. High. What do you mean you don’t know me, you chickenshit little liar? ”

“I don’t know you at all,” Trash repeated, a little more clearly this time. And what he felt was almost a sense of relief. All he saw here in front of him was a stranger, a stranger who looked a bit like Carley Yates. His hand went to the stone and curled around it. Its coolness reassured him further.

“You liar! ” Heck screamed. He began to struggle again, his muscles flexing and pumping, the sweat trickling down his bare chest and arms. “You liar! You do so know me! You do so, you liar! ”

“No I don’t. I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you.”

Heck began to scream again. The four men holding him bore down, panting and out of breath.

“Go ahead,” Lloyd said.

Heck was dragged backward. One of the men holding him stuck out a leg and tripped him. He landed half on the cross and half off it. Meanwhile, Winky had begun to read the typed sheet on his clipboard in a high voice that sliced through Heck’s screams like the howl of a buzz-saw.

“Attention attention attention! By the order of Randall Flagg, Leader of the People and First Citizen, this man, Hector Alonzo Drogan by name, is ordered executed by an act of crucifixion, this penalty so ordered for the crime of drug use.”

“No! No! No! ” Heck screamed in frenzied counterpoint. His left arm, greasy with sweat, escaped Ace High’s hold, and instinctively Trash knelt and pinned the arm back down, forcing the wrist against an arm of the cross. A second later, Whitey was kneeling beside Trashcan with the wooden mallet and two of the crude nails. The cigarette still hung from the corner of his mouth. He looked like a man about to do a little job of carpentering in his back yard.

“Yeah, good, hold him just like that, Trash. I’ll staple him. Won’t take a minute.”

“Drug use is not allowed in this Society of the People because it impairs the user’s ability to contribute fully to the Society of the People,” Winky was proclaiming. He spoke fast, like an auctioneer, and his eyes bunched and scrunched and wiggled. “Specifically in this case, the accused Hector brogan was found with freebasing paraphernalia and a large supply of cocaine.”

Now Heck’s screams had reached a pitch that might well have shattered crystal, if there had been any crystal around to shatter. His head lashed from side to side. There was foam on his lips. Ribbons of blood coursed down his arms as six of them, Trashcan Man included, lifted the cross into the cement pit. Now Hector Drogan was silhouetted against the sky with his head thrown back in a rictus of pain.

“—is done for the good of this Society of the People,” Winky screamed relentlessly. “This communication ends with a solemn warning and greetings to the People of Las Vegas. Let this bill of true facts be nailed above the miscreant’s head, and let it be marked with the seal of the First Citizen, RANDALL FLAGG by name.”

“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 brogan’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 rushed 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, std 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 it?

Lucy said, “Pretty good description 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. That 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.’”

“Yeah, that’s not so great.”

“So after a while she met this guy,” Lucy said. “He was the assistant phys ed coach at Burlington High. They snuck around, always looking over their shoulders, and I don’t know if her husband had set someone up to spy on them, but after a while it didn’t matter. After a while Joline got really flaky. She’d think that some guy waiting for a bus on the corner was one of her husband’s friends. Or the salesman checking in behind her and Herb at some fleabag motel was. She’d think that even if the motel was somewhere way down in New York State. Or even the cop who gave them directions to a picnic spot when they were together. It got so bad that she’d give a little scream if a door slammed in the wind, and she’d jump every time someone came up her stairs. And since she was living in a place that was split up into seven little apartments, someone was almost always coming up the stairs. Herb got scared and left her. He didn’t get scared of Joline’s husband—he got scared of her. And just before her husband came back on leave, Joline had a nervous breakdown. All because she liked to love a little too much… and because he was crazy jealous. Nadine reminds me of that girl, Larry. I’m sorry for her. I don’t like her that much, I guess, but I sure am sorry for her. She looks terrible.”

“Are you saying Nadine is afraid of me the way that girl was afraid of her husband?”

Lucy said: “Maybe. I’ll tell you this—wherever Nadine’s husband is, he’s not here.”

He laughed a little uneasily. “We ought to go back to bed. Tomorrow’s going to be a heavy day.”

“Yes,” she said, thinking he hadn’t understood a word she said. And suddenly she burst into tears.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey.” He tried to put an arm around her.

She struck it off. “You’re getting what you want from me; you don’t have to do that!”

There was still enough of the old Larry in him to wonder if her voice would carry back to camp.

“Lucy, I never twisted your arm,” he said grimily.

“Oh, you’re so stupid!” she cried, and beat at his leg. “Why are men so stupid, Larry? All you can see is what’s in black and white. No, you never twisted my arm. I ain’t like her. You could twist her arm and she’d still spit in your eye and cross her legs. Men have names for girls like me; they write them on bathroom stalls, I’ve heard. But all it is, is needing someone warm, needing to be warm. Needing to love. Is that so bad?”

“No. No, it isn’t. But Lucy—”

“But you don’t believe that,” she said scornfully. “So you go on chasing Miss Highpockets and in the meantime you got Lucy to do the horizontal bop with when the sun goes down.”

He sat quietly, nodding. It was true, every word of it. He was too tired, too Christless beat, to argue against it. She seemed to see that; her face softened and she put a hand on his arm.

“If you catch her, Larry, I’ll be the first to throw you a bouquet. I never held a grudge in my life. Just… try not to be too disappointed.”

“Lucy—”

Her voice rose suddenly, rough with unexpected power, and for a moment his arms goosefleshed. “I just happen to think love is very important, only love will get us through this, good connections; it’s hate against us, worse, it’s emptiness.” Her voice dropped. “You’re right. It’s late. I’m going back to bed. Coming?”

“Yes,” he said, and as they stood up, he took her in his arms with no calculation at all and kissed her firmly. “I love you as much as I can; Lucy.”

“I know that,” she said, and gave him a tired smile. “I know that, Larry.”

This time when he put his arm around her she let it stay. They walked back to camp together, made diffident love, slept.

Nadine came awake like a cat in the dark some twenty minutes after Larry Underwood and Lucy Swann had come back to camp, ten minutes after they had finished their act of love and drifted off to sleep.

The high iron of terror sang in her veins.

Someone wants me, she thought, listening as the millrace of her heart slowed. Her eyes, wide and full of darkness, stared up to where the overhanging branches of an elm laced the sky with shadows. There’s that. Someone wants me. It’s true.

But… it’s so cold.

Her parents and her brother had been killed in a car accident when she was six; she hadn’t gone along that day to see her aunt and uncle, staying behind instead to play with a friend from down the street. They had liked brother best anyway, she could remember that. Brother hadn’t been like her, little halfling stolen from an orphanage cradle at the age of four and a half months. Brother’s origins had been clear. Brother had been—trumpets, please—Their Own. But Nadine had always and forever belonged only to Nadine. She was the earth’s child.

After the accident she had gone to live with the aunt and uncle, because they were the only two relatives. The White Mountains of eastern New Hampshire. She remembered that they had taken her for a ride on the Cog Railway up Mount Washington for her eighth birthday and the altitude had caused a bloody nose and they had been angry with her. Aunt and Uncle were too old, they had been in their mid-fifties when she turned sixteen, the year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon—the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the nightmilk of fantasy. A lovenight. And if the boy caught her she would have given him whatever prizes were hers to give, and what did it matter if he caught her? They had run, wasn’t that the important thing?

But he hadn’t caught her. A cloud had drifted over the moon. The dew began to feel clammy and unpleasant, frightening. The taste of wine in her mouth had somehow changed to the taste of electric spit; slightly sour. A kind of metamorphosis had taken place, a feeling that she should, must wait.

And where had he been then, her intended, her dark bridegroom? On what streets, what back roads, clocking along in outside suburban darkness while inside the brittle clink of cocktail chatter broke the world into neat and rational sections? What cold winds were his? How many sticks of dynamite in his frayed packsack? Who knew what his name had been when she was sixteen? How ancient was he? Where had been his home? What sort of mother had held him to her breast? She was only sure that he was an orphan as she was, his time still to come. He walked mostly on roads that hadn’t even been laid down yet, while she had but one foot on those same roads. The junction where they would meet was far ahead. He was an American man, she knew that, a man who would have a taste for milk and apple pie, a man who would appreciate the homely beauty of red check and gingham. His home was America, and his ways were the secret ways, the highways in hiding, the underground railways where directions are written in runes. He was the other man, the other face, the hardcase, the dark man, the Walkin Dude, and his rundown bootheels clocked along the perfumed ways of the summer night.

Who knoweth when the bridegroom comes?

She had waited for him, the unbroken vessel. At sixteen she had almost fallen, and again in college. Both of them had gone away angry and perplexed, the way Larry was now, sensing the crossroads inside her, the sense of some preordained, mystic junction point.

Boulder was the place where the roads diverged.

The time was close. He had called, bid her come.

After college she had buried herself in her work, had shared a rented house with two other girls. What two girls? Well, they came and went. Only Nadine stayed, and she was pleasant to the young men her changing roommates brought home, but she never had a young man herself. She supposed they talked about her, called her spinster-in-waiting, maybe even conjectured that she might be a carefully circumspect lesbian. It wasn’t true. She was simply—

Unbroken.

Waiting.

It had seemed to her sometimes that a change was coming. She would be putting toys away in the silent classroom at the end of the day and suddenly she would pause, her eyes lambent and watchful, a jack-in-the-box held forgotten in one hand. And she would think: A change is coming… a great wind is going to blow. Sometimes, when such a thought came to her, she would find herself looking back over her shoulder like something pursued. Then it would break and she would laugh uneasily.

Her hair had begun to gray in her sixteenth year, the year she had been chased and not caught—just a few strands at first, startlingly visible in all the black, and not gray, no, that was the wrong word… white, it had been white.

Years later she had attended a party in the basement lounge of a frathouse. The lights had been low and after a while the people had drifted away by twos. Many of the girls—Nadine among them—had signed out for overnight from their dorms. She had fully intended to go through with it… but something that was still buried beneath the months and years had held her back. And the next morning, in the cold light of 7 A.M., she had looked at herself in one of a long line of dormitory bathroom mirrors and saw that the white had advanced again, seemingly overnight—although that, of course, was impossible.

And so the years had passed, ticking away like seasons in a dry age, and there had been feelings, yes, feelings, and sometimes in the dead grave of night she had awakened both hot and cold, bathed in sweat, deliciously alive and aware in the trench of her bed, thinking of weird dark sex in a kind of gutter ecstasy. Rolling in hot liquid. Coming and biting at the same time. And the mornings after she would go to the mirror and she would fancy that she saw more white there.

Through those years she was, outwardly, only Nadine Cross: sweet, good with the children, good at her job, single. Once such a woman would have caused comment and curiosity in the community, but times had changed. And her beauty was so singular that it somehow seemed perfectly right for her to be just as she was.

Now times were going to change again.

Now the change was coming, and in her dreams she had begun to know her bridegroom, to understand him a little, even though she had never seen his face. He was the one she had been waiting for. She wanted to go to him… but she didn’t want to. She was meant for him, but he terrified her.

Then Joe had come, and after him, Larry. Things had become terribly complicated then. She began to feel like a prize ring in a tug-of-war rope. She knew that her purity, her virginity, was somehow important to the dark man. That if she let Larry have her (or if she let any man have her), the dark enchantment would end. And she was attracted to Larry. She had set out, quite deliberately, to let him have her—again, she had intended to go through with it. Let him have her, let it end, let it all end. She was tired, and Larry was right. She had waited too long for the other one, through too many dry years.

But Larry was not right… or so it had seemed at first. She had brushed his initial advances away with a kind of contempt, the way a mare might switch at a fly with her tail. She could remember thinking: If that’s all there is to him, who could blame me for rejecting his suit?

She had followed him, though. That was a fact. But she had been frantic to reach other people, not just because of Joe but because she had come almost to the point of deserting the boy and striking west on her own to find the man. Only years of ingrained responsibility to the children who had been placed under her care had kept her from doing that… and her knowledge that, left on his own, Joe would die.

In a world where so many have died, to parcel out more death is surely the gravest sin.

So she had gone with Larry, who was, after all, better than nothing or no one.

But it had turned out that there was a great deal more to Larry Underwood than nothing or no one—he was like one of those optical illusions (maybe even to himself) where the water looks shallow, only an inch or two deep, but when you put your hand in you’ve suddenly got your arm wet to the shoulder. The way he had gotten to know Joe, that was one thing. The way Joe had taken to him was another, her own jealous reaction to the growing relationship between Joe and Larry was a third. At the motorcycle dealership in Wells, Larry had bet the fingers of both hands on the boy, and he had won.

If they had not been concentrating their full attention on the lid covering the gasoline tank, they would have seen her mouth drop open in a slack o of surprise. She had stood watching them, unable to move, her gaze concentrated on the bright metal line of the crowbar, waiting for it to first jitter and then fall away. She only realized after it was over that she had been waiting for the screams to begin.

Then the lid was up and over and she was faced with her own error in judgment, an error so deep it was fundamental. In that case he had known Joe better than she, and without any special training, and on much shorter notice. Only hindsight allowed her to understand how important the guitar episode had been, how quickly and fundamentally it had defined Larry’s relationship with Joe. And what was at the center of that relationship?

Why, dependence, of course—what else could have caused that sudden jangle of jealousy all through her system? If Joe had depended on Larry, that would have been one thing, normal and acceptable. What had upset her was that Larry also depended on Joe, needed Joe in a way she didn’t… and Joe knew it.

Had her judgment been that wrong about Larry’s character? She thought now that the answer was yes. That nervous, self-serving exterior was a veneer, and it was being worn away by hard use. Just the fact that he had held them all together on this long trip spoke for his determination.

The conclusion seemed clear. Beneath her decision to let Larry make love to her, a part of her was still committed to the other man… and making love to Larry would be like killing that part of herself forever. She wasn’t sure she could do that.

And she wasn’t the only one who had dreamed of the dark man now.

That had disturbed her at first, then frightened her. Fright was all it was when she had only Joe and Larry to compare notes with; when they met Lucy Swann and she said she’d had the same sort of dream, fright became a kind of frenzied terror. It was no longer possible to tell herself their dreams only sounded like hers. What if everyone left was having them? What if the dark man’s time had come around at last—not just for her, but for everyone left on the planet?

This idea more than any other raised the conflicting emotions of utter terror and strong attraction within her. She had held to the idea of Stovington with a nearly panicky grip. It stood, by nature of its function, as a symbol of sanity and rationality against the rising tide of dark magic she felt around her. But Stovington had been deserted, a mockery of the safe haven she had built it up to be in her mind. The symbol of sanity and rationality was a deathhouse.

As they moved west, picking up survivors, her hope that it could somehow end for her without confrontation had gradually died. It died as Larry grew in her estimation. He was sleeping with Lucy Swann now, but what did that matter? She was spoken for. The others had been having two opposing dreams: the dark man and the old woman. The old woman seemed to stand for some sort of elemental force, just as the dark man did. The old woman was the nucleus the others were gradually cohering around.

Nadine had never dreamed of her.

Only of the dark man. And when the dreams of the others had suddenly faded away as inexplicably as they had come, her own dreams had seemed to grow in power and in clarity.

She knew many things which they did not. The dark man’s name was Randall Flagg. Those in the West who opposed him or went against his way of doing things had either been crucified or driven mad somehow and set free to wander in the boiling sink of Death Valley. There were small groups of technical people in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but they were only temporary; very soon they would be moving to Las Vegas, where the main concentration of people was growing. For him there was no hurry. Summer was on the downside now. Soon the Rocky Mountain passes would be filling with snow, and while there were plows to clear them, they would not be able to spare enough warm bodies to man the plows. There would be a long winter in which to consolidate. And next April… or May…

Nadine lay in the dark, looking up at the sky.

Boulder was her last hope. The old woman was her last hope. The sanity and rationality she had hoped to find at Stovington had begun to form in Boulder. They were good, she thought, the good guys, and if only it could be that simple for her, caught in her crazy web of conflicting desires.

Played over and over again, like a dominant chord, was her own firm belief that murder in this decimated world was the gravest sin, and her heart told her firmly and without question that death was Randall Flagg’s business. But oh how she wanted his cold kiss—more than she had wanted the kisses of the high school boy, or the college boy… even more, she feared, than Larry Underwood’s kiss and embrace.

We’ll be in Boulder tomorrow, she thought. Maybe I’ll know then if the trip is over or…

A shooting star scratched its fire across the sky, and like a child, she wished on it.

Chapter 50

Dawn was coming up, painting the eastern sky a delicate rose color. Stu Redman and Glen Bateman were about halfway up Flagstaff Mountain in West Boulder, where the first foothills of the Rockies rise up out of the flat plains like a vision of prehistory. In the dawnlight Stu thought that the pines crawling between the naked and nearly perpendicular stone faces looked like the veins ridging some giant’s hand that had poked out of the earth. Somewhere to the east, Nadine Cross was at last falling into a thin, unsatisfactory sleep.

“I’m going to have a headache this afternoon,” Glen said. “I don’t believe I’ve stayed up drinking all night since I was an undergrad.”

“Sunrise is worth it,” Stu said.

“Yes, it is. Beautiful. Have you ever been in the Rockies before?”

“Nope,” Stu said. “But I’m glad I came.” He hoisted the jug of wine and had a swallow. “I got quite a buzz on myself.” He looked out over the view in silence for a few moments and then turned to Glen with a slanted smile. “What’s going to happen now?”

“Happen?” Glen raised his eyebrows.

“Sure. That’s why I got you up here. Told Frannie, ‘I’m gonna get him good n drunk and then pick his brains.’ She said fine.”

Glen grinned. “There are no tea leaves in the bottom of a wine bottle.”

“No, but she explained to me just what it is you used to be. Sociology. The study of group interaction. So make some educated guesses.”

“Cross my palm with silver, O aspirant to knowledge.”

“Never mind the silver, baldy. I’ll take you down to the First National Bank of Boulder tomorrow and give you a million dollars. How’s that?”

“Seriously, Stu—what do you want to know?”

“Same things that mute guy Andros wants to know, I guess. What’s going to happen next. I don’t know how to put it any better than that.”

“There’s going to be a society,” Glen said slowly. “What kind? Impossible to say right now. There are almost four hundred people here now. I’d guess from the rate they’ve been coming in—more every day—that by the first of September there’ll be fifteen hundred of us. Forty-five hundred by the first of October, and maybe as many as eight thousand by the time the snow flies in November and closes the roads. Write that down as prediction number one.”

To Glen’s amusement, Stu did indeed produce a notebook from the back pocket of his jeans and jotted down what he had just said.

“Hard for me to believe,” Stu said. “We came all the way across the country and didn’t see a hundred people all told.”

“Yes, but they’re coming in, aren’t they?”

“Yes… in dribs and drabs.”

“In what and whats?” Glen asked, grinning.

“Dribs and drabs. My mother used to say that. You shitting on my mom’s way of talking?”

“The day will never come in when I lose enough respect for my own hide to shit on a Texan’s mother, Stuart.”

“Well, they’re comin in, sure. Ralph’s in touch with five or six groups right now that will bring us up to five hundred by the end of the week.”

Glen smiled again. “Yes, and Mother Abagail sits right there with him in his ‘radio station,’ but she won’t talk on the CB. Says she’s afraid she’ll get an electroshock.”

“Frannie loves that old woman,” Stu said. “Part of it is because she knows so much about delivering babies, but part of it is just… loving her. You know?”

“Yes. Most everybody feels the same.”

“Eight thousand people by winter,” Stu said, returning to the original topic. “Man oh man.”

“It’s just arithmetic. Let’s say the flu wiped out ninety-nine percent of the population. Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but let’s use that figure just so we have a place to put our feet. If the flu was ninety-nine percent fatal, that means it wiped out damned near two hundred and eighteen million people, just in this country.” He looked at Stu’s shocked face and nodded grimly. “Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but we can make a pretty good guess that figure’s in the ballpark. Makes the Nazis look like pikers, doesn’t it?”

“My Lord,” Stu said in a dry voice.

“But that would still leave over two million people, a fifth of the pre-plague population of Tokyo, a fourth of the pre-plague population of New York. That’s in this country alone. Now, I believe that ten percent of that two million might not have survived the aftermath of the flu. Folks who fell victims to what I’d call the—aftershock. People like poor Mark Braddock with his burst appendix, but also the accidents, the suicides, yes, and murder, too. That takes us down to 1.8 million. But we suspect there’s an Adversary, don’t we? The dark man that we dreamed about. West of us somewhere. There are seven states over there that could legitimately be called his territory… if he really exists.”

“I guess he exists, all right,” Stu said.

“My feeling, too. But is he simply in dominion of all the people over there? I don’t think so, any more than Mother Abagail is automatically in dominion over the people in the other forty-one continental United States. I think things have been in a state of slow flux and that that state of affairs is beginning to end. People are cohering. When you and I first discussed this back in New Hampshire, I envisioned dozens of little tinpot societies. What I didn’t count on—because I didn’t know about it—was the all but irresistible pull of these two opposing dreams. It was a new fact that no one could have foreseen.”

“Are you saying that we’ll end up with nine hundred thousand people and he’ll end up with nine hundred thousand?”

“No. First, the coming winter is going to take its toll. It’s going to take it here, and it’s going to be even tougher for the small groups that don’t make it here before the snow. You realize we don’t even have one doctor in the Free Zone yet? Our medical staff consists of a veterinarian and Mother Abagail herself, who’s forgotten more valid folk medicine than you or I will ever have a chance to learn. Still, they’d look cute trying to put a steel plate in your skull after you took a fall and bashed in the back of your head, wouldn’t they?”

Stu snickered. “That ole boy Rolf Dannemont would probably drag out his Remington and let daylight through me.”

“I’d guess the total American population might be down to 1.6 million by next spring—and that’s a kind estimate. Of that number, I’d like to hope we’d get the million.”

“A million people,” Stu said, awed. He looked out over the sprawling, mostly deserted city of Boulder, now brightening as the sun began to hoist itself over the flat eastern horizon. “I just can’t picture that. This town would be busting at the seams.”

“Boulder couldn’t hold them. I know that boggles the mind when you walk around the empty streets downtown and out toward Table Mesa, but it just couldn’t. We’d have to seed the communities around us. The situation you’d have is this one giant community and the rest of the country east of here absolutely empty.”

“Why do you think we’d get most of the people?”

“For a very unscientific reason,” Glen said, riffling his tonsure of hair with one hand. “I like to believe most people are good. And I believe that whoever is running the show west of us is really bad. But I have a hunch…” He trailed off.

“Go on, spill it.”

“I will because I’m drunk. But it stays between us, Stuart.”

“All right.”

“Your word?”

“My word,” Stu said.

“I think he’s going to get most of the techies,” Glen said finally. “Don’t ask me why; it’s just a hunch. Except that tech people like to work in an atmosphere of tight discipline and linear goals, for the most part. They like it when the trains run on time. What we’ve got here in Boulder right now is mass confusion, everyone bopping along and doing his own thing… and we’ve got to do something about what my students would have called ‘getting our shit together.’ But that other fellow… I’ll bet he ’s got the trains running on time and all his ducks in a row. And techies are just as human as the rest of us; they’ll go where they’re wanted the most. I’ve a suspicion that our Adversary wants as many as he can get. Fuck the farmers, he’d just as soon have a few men who can dust off those Idaho missile silos and get them operational again. Ditto tanks and helicopters and maybe a B-52 bomber or two just for chuckles. I doubt if he’s gotten that far yet—in fact, I’m sure of it. We’d know. Right now he’s probably still concentrating on getting the power back on, re-establishing communications… maybe he’s even had to indulge in a purge of the fainthearted. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and he’ll know that. He has time. But when I watch the sun go down at night—this is no shit, Stuart—I get scared. I don’t need bad dreams to scare me anymore. All I have to do is think of them over there on the other side of the Rockies, busy as little bees.”

“What should we be doing?”

“Should I give you a list?” Glen responded, grinning.

Stuart gestured at his battered notebook. There were two dancers in silhouette and the words BOOGIE DOWN! on its hot pink cover. “Yup,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I ain’t. You said it, Glen, we got to start getting our shit together someplace. I feel it, too. It’s getting later every day. We can’t just sit here jacking off and listening to the CB. We may wake up some morning to find that hardcase waltzing into Boulder at the head of an armored column, complete with air support.”

“Don’t look for him tomorrow,” Glen said.

“No. But what about next May?”

“Possible,” Glen said in a low voice. “Yes, quite possible.”

“And what do you think would happen to us?”

Glen didn’t reply with words. He made an explicit little trigger-pulling gesture with the forefinger of his right hand and then hurriedly scoffed the last of the wine.

“Yeah,” Stu said. “So let’s start getting it together. Talk.”

Glen closed his eyes. The brightening day touched his wrinkled cheeks and forehead.

“Okay,” he said. “Here it is, Stu. First: Re-create America. Little America. By fair means and by foul. Organization and government come first. If it starts now, we can form the sort of government we want. If we wait until the population triples, we are going to have grave problems.

“Let’s say we call a meeting a week from today, that would make it August eighteenth. Everyone to attend. Before the meeting there should be an ad hoc Organization Committee. A committee of seven, let us say. You, me, Andros, Fran, Harold Lauder, maybe, a couple more. The job of the committee would be to create an agenda for the August eighteenth meeting. And I can tell you right now what some of the items on that agenda should be.”

“Shoot.”

“First, reading and ratification of the Declaration of Independence. Second, r and r of the Constitution. Third, r and r of the Bill of Rights. All ratification to be done by voice vote.”

“Christ, Glen, we’re all Americans—”

“No, that’s where you’re wrong,” Glen said, opening his eyes. They looked socketed and bloodshot. “We’re a bunch of survivors with no government at all. We’re a hodgepodge collection from every age group, religious group, class group, and racial group. Government is an idea, Stu. That’s really all it is, once you strip away the bureaucracy and the bullshit. I’ll go further. It’s an inculcation, nothing but a memory path worn through the brain. What we’ve got going for us now is culture lag. Most of these people still believe in government by representation—the Republic—what they think of as ‘democracy.’ But culture lag never lasts long. After a while they’ll start having the gut reactions: the President is dead, the Pentagon is for rent, nobody is debating anything in the House and the Senate except maybe for the termites and the cockroaches. Our people here are very soon going to wake up to the fact that the old ways are gone, and that they can restructure society any old way they want. We want—we need —to catch them before they wake up and do something nutty.”

He leveled his finger at Stu.

“If someone stood up at the August eighteenth meeting and proposed that Mother Abagail be put in absolute charge, with you and me and that fellow Andros as her advisers, those people would pass the item by acclamation, blissfully unaware that they had just voted the first operating American dictatorship into power since Huey Long.”

“Oh, I cant believe that. There are college graduates here, lawyers, political activists—”

“Maybe they used to be. Now they’re just a bunch of tired, scared people who don’t know what’s going to happen to them. Some might squawk, but they’d shut up when you told them that Mother Abagail and her advisers were going to get the power back on in sixty days. No, Stu, it’s very important that the first thing we do is ratify the spirit of the old society. That’s what I meant about recreating America. It has to be that way as long as we’re operating under direct threat of the man we’re calling the Adversary.”

“Go on.”

“All right. The next item on the agenda would be that we run the government like a New England township. Perfect democracy. As long as we’re relatively small, it’ll work fine. Only instead of a board of selectmen we’ll have seven… representatives, I guess. Free Zone Representatives. How does that sound?”

“It sounds fine.”

“I think so, too. And we’ll see to it that the people who get elected are the same people who were on the ad hoc committee. We’ll put the rush on everybody and get the vote taken before people can do any tub-thumping for their friends. We can handpick people to nominate us and then second us. The vote’ll go through as slick as shit through a goose.”

“That’s neat,” Stu said admiringly.

“Sure,” Glen said glumly. “If you want to short-circuit the democratic process, ask a sociologist.”

“What’s next?”

“This is going to be very popular. The item would read: ‘Resolved: Mother Abagail is to be given absolute veto power over any action proposed by the Board.’”

“Jesus! Will she agree to that?”

“I think so. But I don’t think she’d ever be apt to exercise her veto power, not in any circumstance I can foresee. We just can’t expect to have a workable government here unless we make her its titular head. She’s the thing we all have in common. We’ve all had a paranormal experience that revolves around her. And she has a… a kind of aura about her. People all use the same loose bunch of adjectives to describe her: good, kind, old, wise, clever, nice. These people have had one dream that frightens the bejesus out of them and one that makes them feel safe and secure. They love and trust the source of the good dream all the more because of the dream that frightened them. And we can make it clear to her that she’s our leader in name only. I think that’s how she’d want it. She’s old, tired…”

Stu was shaking his head. “She’s old and tired, but she sees this problem of the dark man as a religious crusade, Glen. And she’s not the only one, either. You know that.”

“You mean she might decide to take the bit in her teeth?”

“Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad,” Stu remarked. “After all, it was her we dreamed of, not a Representative Board.”

Glen was shaking his head. “No, I can’t accept the idea that we’re all pawns in some post-Apocalypse game of good and evil, dreams or not. Goddammit, it’s irrational!”

Stu shrugged. “Well, let’s not get bogged down in it now. I think your idea of giving her veto power is a good one. In fact, I don’t think it goes far enough. We ought to give her the power to propose as well as dispose.”

“But not absolute power on that side of the slate,” Glen said hastily.

“No, her ideas would have to be ratified by the Representative Board,” Stu said, and then added slyly: “But we might find ourselves a rubber stamp for her instead of the other way around.”

There was a long silence. Glen had put his forehead into one hand. At last he said, “Yeah, you’re right. She can’t just be a figurehead… at the very least we have to accept the possibility that she may have her own ideas. And that’s where I pack up my cloudy crystal ball, East Texas. Because she’s what those of us who ride the sociology range call other-directed.”

“Who’s the other?”

“God? Thor? Allah? Pee-wee Herman? It doesn’t matter. What it means is that what she says won’t necessarily be directed by what this society needs or by what its mores turn out to be. She’ll be listening to some other voice. Like Joan of Arc. What you’ve made me see is that we just might wind up with a theocracy on our hands here.”

“Theoc-what?”

“On a God trip,” Glen said. He didn’t sound too happy about it. “When you were a little boy, Stu, did you ever dream that you might grow up to be one of seven high priests and/or priestesses to a one-hundred-and-eight-year-old black woman from Nebraska?”

Stu stared at him. Finally he said: “Is there any more of that wine?”

“All gone.”

“Shit.”

“Yes,” Glen said. They studied each other’s face in silence and then suddenly burst out laughing.

It was surely the nicest house Mother Abagail had ever lived in, and sitting here on the screened-in porch put her in mind of a traveling salesman who had come around Hemingford back in 1936 or ‘37. Why, he had been the sweetest-talking fellow she had ever met in her life; he could have charmed the birdies right down from the trees. She had asked this young man, Mr. Donald King by name, what his business was with Abby Freemantle, and he had replied: “My business, ma’am, is pleasure. Your pleasure. Do you like to read? Listen to the radio, perchance? Or maybe just put your tired old dogs up on a foot hassock and listen to the world as it rolls down the great bowling alley of the universe?”

She had admitted she enjoyed all those things, not admitting that the Motorola had been sold a month before to pay for ninety bales of hay.

“Well, those are the things I’m selling,” this sweet-talking road-merchant had told her. “It may be called an Electrolux vacuum cleaner complete with all the attachments, but what it really is, is spare time. Plug her in and you open up whole new vistas of relaxation for yourself. And the payments are almost as easy as your housework’s going to be.”

They had been deep in the Depression then, she hadn’t even been able to raise twenty cents for hair ribbons for her granddaughters’ birthdays, and there was no chance for that Electrolux. But say, didn’t that Mr. Donald King of Peru, Indiana, talk sweet. My! She had never seen him again, but she had never forgotten his name, either. She just bet he had gone on to break some white lady’s heart. She never did own a vacuum cleaner until the end of the Nazi war, when it seemed like all of a sudden anybody could afford anything and even poor white trash had a Mercury hidden away in their back shed.

Now this house, which Nick had told her was in the Mapleton Hill section of Boulder (Mother Abagail just bet there hadn’t been many blacks living up here before the smiting plague), had every gadget she’d ever heard of and some she hadn’t. Dishwasher. Two vacuums, one strictly for the upstairs work. Dispos-All in the sink. Microwave oven. Clothes washer and dryer. There was a gadget in the kitchen, eked like nothing more than a steel box, and Nick’s good friend Ralph Brentner told her it was a “trash masher,” and you could put about a hundred pounds of swill into it and get back a little block of garbage about the size of a footstool. Wonders never ceased.

But come to think of it, some of them had.

Sitting, rocking on the porch, her eye happened to fall upon an electrical plug-in plate set into the baseboard. Probably so folks could come out here in the summertime and listen to the radio or even have the baseball on that cute little round TV. Nothing in the whole country more common than those little wall-plates with the prong-slits in them. She’d even had them back in her squatter’s shack in Hemingford. You didn’t think nothing of those plates… unless they didn’t work anymore. Then you realized that one hell of a lot of a person’s life came out of them. All that spare time, that pleasure which the long-ago Don King had extolled her on… it came out of those switchplates set into the wall. With their potency taken away, you might as well use all those gadgets like the microwave oven and the “trash masher” to hang your hat and coat on.

Say! Her own little house had been better equipped to handle the death of those little switchplates than this one was. Here, someone had to bring her water fetched all the way from Boulder Creek, and it had to be boiled before you could use it, just for safety’s sake. Back home she’d had her own handpump. Here, Nick and Ralph had had to truck up an ugly gadget called a Port-O-San; they had put it in the back yard. At home she’d had her own outhouse. She would have traded the Maytag washer-dryer combination in a second for her own washtub, but she had gotten Nick to find her a new one, and Brad Kitchner had found her a scrub-board somewhere and some good old lye soap. They probably thought she was a good old pain in the ass, wanting to do her own washing—and so much of it—but cleanly went next to Godly, she had never sent her washing out in her whole life, and she didn’t mean to start now. She had her little accidents from time to time, too, as old folks often did, but as long as she could do her own wash, those accidents didn’t have to be anybody’s business but her own.

They would get the power back on, of course. It was one of the things God had shown her in her dreams. She knew a goodish number of things about what was to come here—some from the dreams, some from her own common sense. The two were too intertwined to tell apart.

Soon all these people would stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off and start pulling together. She was not a sociologist like that Glen Bateman (who always eyed her like a racetrack agent looking at a phony ten), but she knew that people always did pull together after a while. The curse and blessing of the human race was its chumminess. Why, if six people went floating down the Mississippi on a church roof in a flood, they’d start a bingo game as soon as the roof grounded on a sandbar.

First they’d want to form some sort of government, probably one they’d want to run around her. She couldn’t allow that, of course, as much as she would like to; that would not be God’s will. Let them run all the things that had to do with this earth—get the power back on? Fine. First thing she was going to do was try out that “trash masher.” Get the gas running so they wouldn’t freeze their bee-hinds off this winter. Let them pass their resolutions and make their plans, that was fine. She would keep her nose right out of that part. She would insist that Nick have a part in the running of it, and maybe Ralph. That Texan seemed all right, he knew enough to shut off his mouth when his brains weren’t running. She supposed they might want that fat boy, that Harold, and she wouldn’t stop them, but she didn’t like him. Harold made her nervous. All the time grinning, but the grin never touched his eyes. He was pleasant, he said the right things, but his eyes were like two cold flints poking out of the ground.

She thought that Harold had some kind of secret. Some smelly, nasty thing all wrapped up in a stinking poultice in the middle of his heart. She had no idea what it might be; it was not God’s will for her to see that, so it must not matter to His plan for this community. All the same, it troubled her to think that fat boy might be a part of their high councils… but she would say nothing.

Her business she thought rather complacently in her rocker, her place in their councils and deliberations had only to do with the dark man.

He had no name, although it pleased him to call himself Flagg… at least for the time being. And on the far side of the mountains, his work was already well begun. She did not know his plans; they were as veiled from her eyes as whatever secrets lay in that fat boy Harold’s heart. But she did not have to know the specifics. His goal was clear and simple: to destroy all of them.

Her understanding of him was surprisingly sophisticated. The people who had been drawn to the Free Zone all came to see her in this place, and she received them, although they sometimes made her tired… and they all wanted to tell her that they had dreamed of her and of him. They were terrified of him, and she nodded and comforted and soothed as best she could, but privately she thought that most of them wouldn’t know this Flagg if they met him on the street… unless he wanted to be noticed. They might feel him—a cold chill, the kind you got when a goose walked over your grave, a sudden hot feeling like a fever-flash, or a sharp and momentary drilling pain in the ears or the temples. But these people were wrong to think he had two heads, or six eyes, or big spike horns growing out of his temples. He probably didn’t look much different than the man who used to bring the milk or the mail.

She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth’s children of darkness; they couldn’t make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God’s light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted—was able—only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

He would have his followers, of course; that was nothing new. He was a liar, and his father was the Father of Lies. He would be like a big neon sign to them, standing high to the sky, dazzling their sight with fizzing fireworks. They would not be apt to notice, these apprentice unshapers, that like a neon sign, he only made the same simple patterns over and over again. They would not be apt to realize that, if you release the gas which makes the pretty patterns from its complex assortment of tubes, it floats silently away and dissipates, leaving not a taste or so much as a whiff of smell behind.

Some would make the deduction for themselves in time—his kingdom would never be one of peace. The sentry posts and barbed wire at the frontiers of his land would be there as much to keep the converts in as to keep the invader out.

Would he win?

She had no assurance that he would not. She knew he must be as aware of her as she was of him, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to see her scrawny black body hung up to the sky on a cross of telephone poles for the crows to pick. She knew that a few of them besides herself had dreamed of crucifixions, but only a few. Those who did had told her but no one else, she suspected. And none of that answered the question:

Would he win?

That was not for her to know, either. God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

God was a gamesman—if He had been a mortal, He would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann’s general store back in Hemingford Home. He played red to black, white to black. She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game was the candle. He would prevail in His own good time. But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand… and she would not overestimate the dark man’s craft and cozening. If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land. Only another private soldier—long past retirement age, it was true!—in the service of the Lord.

“Thy will be done,” she said, and reached into her apron pocket for a packet of Planters peanuts. Her last doctor, Dr. Staunton, had told her to steer clear of salty foods, but what did he know? She had outlived both of the doctors who had presumed to advise her on her health since her eighty-sixth birthday, and she would have a few peanuts if she wanted to. They hurt her gums mortal bad, but my! weren’t they tasty?

As she munched, Ralph Brentner came up her walk, his hat with the feather in the band cocked back well on his head. As he tapped on the porch door, he took the hat off.

“You awake, Mother?”

“That I am,” she said through a mouthful of peanuts. “Step in, Ralph, I ain’t chewin these nuts, I’m gummin em to death.”

Ralph laughed and came in. “There’s some folk out past the gate that’d like to say howdy, if you ain’t too tired. They just got in about an hour ago. A pretty good crew, I’d say. The fella in charge is one of these longhairs, but he seems well about it. Name’s Underwood.”

“Well, bring em up, Ralph, that’s fine,” she said.

“Good enough.” He turned to go.

“Where’s Nick?” she asked him. “Haven’t seen him today nor yesterday neither. He gettin too good for homefolks?”

“He’s been out at the reservoir,” Ralph said. “Him and that electrician, Brad Kitchner, have been looking at the power plant.” He rubbed the side of his nose. “I was out this morning. Figured all those chiefs orta have at least one Indian to order around.”

Mother Abagail cackled. She did like Ralph. He was a simple soul, but canny. He had a feel for how things worked. She was not surprised that he had been the one to get what everybody now called Free Zone Radio going. He was the kind of man who wouldn’t be afraid to try epoxy on your tractor battery when it started to split open, and if the epoxy did the job, why, he’d just take off his shapeless hat and scratch his balding head and grin that grin, like he was an eleven-year-old kid with the chores done and his fishing pole leaned against his shoulder. He was a good sort to have around when things weren’t going just right and the type of man who always somehow ended up on relief when rimes were flush for lust about everyone else. He could put the right sort of valve on your bicycle pump when it wouldn’t mate to a tire bigger than the kind that went on a bike and he’d know what was making that funny buzzing noise in your oven just by looking at it, but when he had to deal with a company timeclock, he’d somehow always end up punching in late and punching out early and get fired for it before very long. He’d know you could fertilize corn with pigshit if you mixed it right, and he’d know how to pickle cukes, but he would never be able to understand a car loan agreement, or to figure out how the dealers managed to rook him every time. A job application form filled out by Ralph Brentner would look as if it had been through a Hamilton-Beach blender… misspelled, dog-eared, dotted with blots of ink and greasy fingerprints. His employment history would look like a checkerboard which had been around the world on a tramp steamer. But when the very fabric of the world began to tear open, it was the Ralph Brentners who were not afraid to say, “Let’s slap a little epoxy in there and see if that’ll hold her.” And more often than not, it did.

“You’re a good fella, Ralph, you know it? You’re a one.”

“Why, you are too, Mother. Not that you’re a fella, but you know what I mean. Anyhow, that fella Redman came by while we were workin. Wanted to talk to Nick about being on some kind of committee.”

“And what did Nick say?”

“Aw, he wrote a couple of pages. But what it came down to was fine by me if it’s fine by Mother Abagail. Is it?”

“Well now, what would an old lady like myself have to say about such doings?”

“A lot,” Ralph said in a serious, almost shocked manner. “You’re the reason we’re here. I guess we’ll do whatever you want.”

“What I want is to go on livin free like I always have, like an American. I just want my say when it’s time for me to have it. Like an American.”

“Well, you’ll have all of that.”

“The rest feel that way, Ralph?”

“You bet they do.”

“Then that’s fine.” She rocked serenely. “Time everyone got going. There’s people lollygaggin around. Mostly just waitin for somebody to tell em where to squat and lean.”

“Then I can go ahead?”

“With what?”

“Well, Nick and Stu ast me if I could find a printing press and maybe get her going, if they got me some electricity to run it. I said I didn’t need any electricity, I’d just go down to the high school and find the biggest hand-crank mimeograph I could lay my hands on. They want some fliers.” He shook his head. “Do they! Seven hundred. Why, we only got four hundred and some here.”

“And nineteen out by the gate, probably getting heatstroke while you and me chin. You go bring them in.”

“I will.” Ralph started away.

“And Ralph?”

He turned back.

“Print a thousand,” she said.

They filed in through the gate that Ralph opened and she felt her sin, the one she thought of as the mother of sin. The father of sin was theft; every one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to “Thou shalt not steal.” Murder was the theft of a life, adultery the theft of a wife, covetousness the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God’s name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out to—walk the streets like a strutting whore. She had never been much of a thief, a minor pilferer from time to time at worst.

The mother of sin was pride.

Pride was the female side of Satan in the human race, the quiet egg of sin, always fertile. Pride had kept Moses out of Canaan, where the grapes were so big the men had to carry them in slings. Who brought the water from the rock when we were thirsty? the Children of Israel asked, and Moses had answered, I did it.

She had always been a proud woman. Proud of the floor she washed on her hands and knees (but Who had provided the hands, the knees, the very water she washed with?), proud that all her children had turned out all right—none in jail ever, none caught by dope or the bottle, none of them frigging around on the wrong side of the sheets—but the mothers of children were the daughters of God. She was proud of her life, but she had not made her life. Pride was the curse of will, and like a woman, pride had its wiles. At her great age she had not learned all its illusions yet, or mastered its glamors.

And when they filed through the gate she thought: It’s me they’ve come to see. And on the heels of that sin, a series of blasphemous metaphors, rising unbidden in her mind: how they filed through one by one like communicants, their young leader with his eyes mostly cast down, a light-haired woman by his side, a little boy just behind him with a dark-eyed woman whose black hair was shot with twists of gray. The others behind them in a line.

The young man climbed the porch steps, but his woman stopped at the foot. His hair was long, as Ralph had said, but it was clean. He had a considerable growth of reddish-gold beard. He had a strong face with freshly etched lines of care in it, around the mouth and across the forehead.

“You’re really real,” he said softly.

“Why, I have always thought so,” she said. “I am Abagail Freemantle, but most folks round here just call me Mother Abagail. Welcome to our place.”

“Thank you,” he said thickly, and she saw he was struggling with tears. “I’m… we’re glad to be here. My name’s Larry Underwood.”

She held her hand out and he took it lightly, with awe, and she felt that twinge of pride again, that stiffneckedness. It was as if he thought she had a fire in her that would burn him.

“I… dreamed of you,” he said awkwardly.

She smiled and nodded and he turned stiffly, almost stumbling. He went back down the steps, shoulders hunched. He would unwind, she thought. Now that he was here and when he found out he didn’t have to take the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. A man who doubts himself shouldn’t have to try too hard for too long, not until he’s seasoned, and this man Larry Underwood was still a little green and apt to bend. But she liked him.

His woman, a pretty little thing with eyes like violets, came next. She looked boldly at Mother Abagail, but not scornfully. “I’m Lucy Swann. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” And although she was wearing pants, she sketched a little curtsy.

“Glad you could come by, Lucy.”

“Would you mind if I asked… well…” Now her eyes dropped and she began to blush furiously.

“A hundred and eight at last count,” she said kindly. “Feels more like two hundred and sixteen some days.”

“I dreamed about you,” Lucy said, and then retired in some confusion.

The woman with the dark eyes and the boy came next. The woman looked at her gravely and unflinchingly; the boy’s face showed frank wonder. The boy was all right. But something about the woman made her feel grave-cold. He’s here, she thought. He’s come in the shape of this woman… for behold he comes in more forms than his own… the wolf… the crow… the snake.

She was not above feeling fear for herself, and for one instant she felt this strange woman with the white in her hair would reach out, almost casually, and snap her neck. For the one instant the feeling held, Mother Abagail actually fancied that the woman’s face was gone and she was looking into a hole in time and space, a hole from which two eyes, dark and damned, stared out at her—eyes that were lost and haggard and hopeless.

But it was just a woman, and not him. The dark man would never dare come to her here, even in a shape that was not his own. This was just a woman—a very pretty one, too—with an expressive, sensitive face and one arm about her little boy’s shoulders. She had only been daydreaming for a moment. Surely that was all.

For Nadine Cross, the moment was a confusion. She had been all right when they came in through the gate. She had been all right until Larry had begun talking to the old lady. Then an almost swooning sense of revulsion and terror had come over her. The old woman could… could what?

Could see.

Yes. She was afraid that the old woman could see inside her, to where the darkness was already planted and growing well. She was afraid the old woman would rise from her place on the porch and denounce her, demand that she leave Joe and go to those (to him) for whom she was intended.

The two of them, each with their own murky fears, looked at each other. They measured each other. The moment was short, but it seemed very long to the two of them.

He’s in her—the Devil’s Imp, Abby Freemantle thought.

All of their power is right here, Nadine thought in her own turn. She’s all they’ve got, although they may think differently.

Joe was growing restive beside her, tugging at her hand.

“Hello,” she said in a thin, dead voice. “I’m Nadine Cross.”

The old woman said: “I know who you are.”

The words hung in the air, cutting suddenly through the other chatter. People turned, puzzled, to see if something was happening.

“Do you?” Nadine said softly. Suddenly it seemed that Joe was her protection, her only one.

She moved the boy slowly in front of her, like a hostage. Joe’s queer seawater eyes looked up at Mother Abagail.

Nadine said: “This is Joe. Do you know him as well?”

Mother Abagail’s eyes remained locked on the eyes of the woman who called herself Nadine Cross, but a thin shine of perspiration had broken out on the back of her neck.

“I don’t think Joe’s his name any more than mine’s Cassandra,” she said, “and I don’t think you’re his mom.” She dropped her eyes to the boy with something like relief, unable to suppress a queer feeling that the woman had somehow won—that she had put the little chap between them, used him to keep her from doing whatever her duty was… ah, but it had come so sudden, and she hadn’t been ready for it!

“What’s your name, chap?” she asked the boy.

The boy struggled as if a bone were caught in his throat. “He won’t tell you,” Nadine said, and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “He can’t tell you. I don’t think he remem—”

Joe threw it off and that seemed to break the block. “Leo! ” he said with sudden force and great clarity. “Leo Rockway, that’s me! I’m Leo!” And he sprang into Mother Abagail’s arms, laughing. That generated laughter and some applause from the crowd. Nadine became virtually unnoticed, and Abby felt again that some vital focus, some vital chance, had ebbed away.

“Joe,” Nadine called. Her face was remote, under control again.

The boy drew away a bit from Mother Abagail and looked at her.

“Come away,” Nadine said, and now she looked unflinchingly at Abby, speaking not to the boy but directly at her. “She’s old. You’ll hurt her. She’s very old and… not very strong.”

“Oh, I think I’m strong enough to love a chap like him a bit,” Mother Abagail said, but her voice sounded oddly uncertain in her own ears. “He looks like he’s had a hard road.”

“Well, he’s tired now. And you are, too, from the look. Come on, Joe.”

“I love her,” the boy said, not moving.

Nadine seemed to flinch at that. Her voice sharpened. “Come away, Joe!”

“That’s not my name! Leo! Leo! That’s my name! ”

The little crowd of new pilgrims quieted again, aware that something unexpected had happened, might be happening still, but unable to know what.

The two women locked eyes again like sabers.

I know who you are, Abby’s eyes said.

Nadine’s answered: Yes. And I know you.

But this time it was Nadine who dropped her eyes first.

“All right,” she said. “Leo, or whatever you like. Just come away before you tire her any more.”

He left Mother Abagail’s arms, but reluctantly.

“You come back and see me whenever you want,” Abby said, but she did not raise her eyes to include Nadine.

“Okay,” the boy said, and blew her a kiss. Nadine’s face was stony. She didn’t speak. As they went back down the porch steps, the arm Nadine had around his shoulders seemed more like a dragchain than a comfort. Mother Abagail watched them go, aware that she was losing the focus again. With the woman’s face out of her sight, the sense of revelation began to grow fuzzy. She became unsure of what she had felt. She was only another woman, surely… wasn’t she?

The young man, Underwood, was standing at the base of the steps, and his face was like a thundercloud.

“Why were you like that?” he asked the woman, and although he’d lowered his voice, Mother Abagail could still hear perfectly well.

The woman paid no attention. She went by him without a word. The boy looked at Underwood in a beseeching way, but the woman was in charge, at least for the time being, and the little boy let her bear him along, bear him away.

There was a moment of silence, and she suddenly felt at a loss to fill it, although it needed to be filled—

–didn’t it?

Wasn’t it her job to fill it?

And a voice asked softly, Is it? Is that your job? Is that why God brought you here, woman? To be the Official Greeter at the gates of the Free Zone?

I can’t think, she protested. The woman was right: I AM tired.

He comes in more shapes than his own, the small interior voice persisted. Wolf, crow, snake… woman.

What did it mean? What had happened here? What, in God’s name?

I was sitting here complacently, waiting to be kowtowed to—yes, that’s what I was doing, no use denying it—and now that woman has come and something has happened and I’m losing what it was. But there was something about that woman… wasn’t there? Are you sure? Are you sure?

There was an instant of silence, and in it they all seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to prove herself. And she wasn’t doing it. The woman and the boy were gone from sight; they had left as if they were the true believers and she nothing but a shoddy, grinning Sanhedrin they had seen through immediately.

Oh, but I’m old! It’s not fair!

And on the heels of that came another voice, small and low and rational, a voice that was not her own: Not too old to know the woman is —

Now another man had approached her in hesitant, deferential fashion. “Hi, Mother Abagail,” he said. “The name’s Zellman. Mark Zellman. From Lowville, New York. I dreamed about you.”

And she was faced with a sudden choice that was clearcut for only an instant in her groping mind. She could acknowledge this man’s hello, banter with him a little to set him at his ease (but not too much at ease; that was not precisely what she wanted), and then go on to the next and the next and the next, receiving their homage like new palm leaves, or she could ignore him and the rest. She could follow the thread of her thought down into the depths of herself, searching for whatever it was that the Lord meant her to know.

The woman is —

–what?

Did it matter? The woman was gone.

“I had me a great-nephew lived in upstate New York one time,” she said easily to Mark Zellman. “Town named Rouse’s Point. Backed right up against Vermont on Lake Champlain, it is. Probably never heard of it, have you?”

Mark Zellman said he sure had heard of it; just about everyone in New York State knew that town. Had he ever been there? His face broke tragically. No, never had. Always meant to.

“From what Ronnie wrote in his letters, you didn’t miss much,” she said, and Zellman went away beaming broadly.

The others came up to make their manners as the other parties had done before them, as still others would do in the days and weeks to come. A teenage boy named Tony Donahue. A fellow named Jack Jackson, who was a car mechanic. A young R.N. named Laurie Constable—she would come in handy. An old man named Richard Farris whom everyone called the Judge; he looked at her keenly and almost made her feel uncomfortable again. Dick Vollman. Sandy DuChiens—pretty name, that, French. Harry Dunbarton, a man who had sold spectacles for a living only three months ago. Andrea Terminello. A Smith. A Rennett. And a great many others. She spoke to them all, nodded, smiled, and put them at their ease, but the pleasure she had felt on other days was gone today and she felt only the aches in her wrists and fingers and knees, plus the gnawing suspicion that she had to go use the Port-O-San and if she didn’t get there soon she was going to stain her dress.

All of that and the feeling, fading now (and it would be entirely gone by nightfall), that she had missed something of great significance and might later be very sorry.

He thought better when he wrote, and so he jotted down everything which might be of importance in outline, using two felt-tip pens: a blue and a black. Nick Andros sat in the study of the house on Baseline Drive that he shared with Ralph Brentner and Ralph’s woman, Elise. It was almost dark. The house was a beauty, sitting below the bulk of Flagstaff Mountain but quite a bit above the town of Boulder proper, so that from the wide living room window the streets and roads of the municipality appeared spread out like a gigantic gameboard. That window was treated on the outside with some sort of silvery reflective stuff, so that the squire could look out but passersby could not look in. Nick guessed that the house was in the $450,000–$500,000 range… and the owner and his family were mysteriously absent.

On his own long journey from Shoyo to Boulder, first by himself, then with Tom Cullen and the others, he had passed through tens of dozens of towns and cities, and all of them had been stinking charnel houses. Boulder had no business being any different… but it was. There were corpses here, yes, thousands of them, and something was going to have to be done about them before the hot, dry days ended and the fall rains began, causing quicker decomposition and possible disease… but there were not enough corpses. Nick wondered if anyone other than he and Stu Redman had noticed it… Lauder, maybe. Lauder noticed almost everything.

For every house or public building you found littered with corpses, there were ten others completely empty. Sometime, during the last spasm of the plague, most of Boulder’s citizens, sick or well, had blown town. Why? Well, he supposed it really didn’t matter, and maybe they would never know. The awesome fact remained that Mother Abagail, sight unseen, had managed to lead them to maybe the one small city in the United States that had been cleared of plague victims. It was enough to make even an agnostic like himself wonder where she was getting her information.

Nick had taken three rooms on the basement level of the house, and nice rooms they were, furnished in knotty pine. No urging on Ralph’s part had moved him to enlarge his living space—he felt like an interloper already, but he liked them… and until his trip from Shoyo to Hemingford Home he hadn’t realized how much he had come to miss other faces. He hadn’t gotten his fill yet.

And the place was the finest one he’d ever lived in, just as it was. He had his own entrance by the back door, and he kept his ten-speed parked under the door’s low, overhanging eave, where it stood axle-deep in generations of fragrantly rotting aspen leaves. He had the beginnings of a book collection, something he had always wanted and never been able to have in his years of wandering. He had been a great reader in those days (during these new days, there rarely seemed to be time to sit and have a good long conversation with a book), and some of the books on the shelves—shelves which were still largely empty—were old friends, most of them originally borrowed from lending libraries at two cents a day; in the last few years he had never spent enough time in one town to get a regular library card. Others were books he hadn’t yet read, books the lending library books had led him to look for. As he sat here with his felt-tip pens and paper, one of these books sat on the desk beside his right hand—Set This House on Fire, by William Styron. He had marked his place with a ten-dollar bill he had found on the street. There was a lot of money in the streets, blowing along the gutters in the wind, and he was still surprised and amused at how many people—himself among them—still stopped to pick them up. And why? The books were free now. The ideas were free. Sometimes that thought exhilarated him. Sometimes it frightened him.

The paper he was writing on came from a ring binder in which he kept all his thoughts—the contents of the binder were half diary, half shopping list. He had discovered a deep fondness in himself for making lists; he thought one of his forebears must have been an accountant. When your mind was troubled, he had discovered that making a list often set it at ease again.

He went back to the fresh page before him, doodling formlessly in the margin.

It seemed to him that all the things they wanted or needed from the old life were stored in the silent East Boulder power plant, like dusty treasure in a dark cupboard. An unpleasant feeling seemed to run through the people who had gathered in Boulder, a feeling just submerged below the surface—they were like a scared bunch of kids knocking around in the local haunted house after dark. In some ways, the place was like a rancid ghost town. There was a sense that being here was a strictly temporary thing. There was one man, a fellow named Impening, who had once lived in Boulder and worked on one of the custodial crews at the IBM plant out on the Boulder-Longmont Diagonal. Impening seemed determined to stir up unrest. He was going around telling people that in 1984 there had been an inch and a half of snow in Boulder by September 14, and that by November it would be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. That was the kind of talk Nick would like to put a quick stop to. Never mind that if Impening had been in the army he would have been cashiered for such talk; that was an empty logic, if it was logic at all. The important thing was that Impening’s words would have no power if people could move into houses where the lights worked and where the furnaces blew hot air up through grates at the touch of a finger on a button. If that didn’t happen by the time the first coldsnap arrived, Nick was afraid that people would begin simply to slip away, and all the meetings, representatives, and ratifications in the world wouldn’t stop that.

According to Ralph, there wasn’t that much wrong at the power plant, at least not that much visible. The crews who ran it had shut some of the machinery down; other machinery had shut itself down. Two or three of the big turbine engines had blown, perhaps as the result of some final power surge. Ralph said that some of the wiring would have to be replaced, but he thought that he and Brad Kitchner and a crew of a dozen warm bodies could do that. A much bigger work crew was needed to remove fused and blackened copper wire from the blown turbine generators and then install new copper wire by the yard. There was plenty of copper wire in the Denver supply houses for the taking; Ralph and Brad had gone one day last week to check for themselves. With the manpower, they thought they could have the lights on again by Labor Day.

“And then we’ll throw the biggest fucking party this town ever saw,” Brad said.

Law and Order. That was something else that troubled him. Could Stu Redman be handed that particular package? He wouldn’t want the job, but Nick thought he could perhaps persuade Stu to take it… and if push came to shove, he could get Stu’s friend Glen to back him up. What really bothered him was the memory, still too fresh and hurtful to look at more than briefly, of his own brief and terrible tour as Shoyo’s jailkeeper. Vince and Billy dying, Mike Childress jumping up and down on his supper and crying out in wretched defiance: Hunger strike! I’m on a fuckin hunger strike!

It made him ache inside to think they might need courts and jails… maybe even an executioner. Christ, these were Mother Abagail’s people, not the dark man’s! But he supposed the dark man would not bother with such trivialities as courts and jails. His punishment would be swift and sure and heavy. He would not need the threat of jail when the corpses hung on the telephone pole crosses along I-15 for the birds to pick.

Nick hoped most of the infractions would be small ones. There had been several cases of drunk and disorderly already. One kid, really too young to drive, had been rodding a big dragging machine up and down Broadway, scaring people out of the street. He had finally driven into a stalled bread truck and had gashed his forehead—and lucky to get off so cheaply, in Nick’s opinion. The people who had seen him knew he was too young, but no one had felt he or she had the authority to put a stop to it.

Authority. Organization. He wrote the words on his pad and put them inside a double circle. Being Mother Abagail’s people gave them no immunity to weakness, stupidity, or bad companions. Nick didn’t know if they were the children of God or not, but when Moses had come down from the mountain, those not busy worshipping the golden calf had been busy shooting craps, he knew that. And they had to face the possibility that someone might get cut over a card game or decide to shoot someone else over a woman.

Authority. Organization. He circled the words again and now they were like prisoners behind a triple stockade. How well they went together… and what a sorry sound they made.

Not long after, Ralph came in. “We got some more folks coming in tomorrow, Nicky, and a whole parade the day after. Over thirty in that second one.”

“Good,” Nick wrote. “We’ll get a doc before long, I bet. Law of averages says so.”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “We’re turnip into a regular by-God city.”

Nick nodded.

“I had a talk with the fella leadin the party that came in today. His name’s Larry Underwood. Smart man, Nick. Sharp as a tack.”

Nick raised his eyebrows and drew a ? in the air.

“Well, let’s see,” Ralph said. He knew what the question mark meant: give more information, if you can. “He’s six or seven years older’n you, I think, and maybe eight or nine younger than Redman. But he’s the kind of man you said we ought to be on the lookout for. He asks the right questions.”

?

“Who’s in charge, for one,” Ralph said. “What comes next, for another. Who does it, for a third.”

Nick nodded. Yes—the right questions. But was he the right man? Ralph might be right. He also might not be.

“I’ll try to meet up with him tomorrow & say hello,” he wrote on a fresh sheet of paper.

“Yeah, you oughtta. He’s all right.” Ralph shuffled his feet. “And I talked to Mother a little bit before this Underwood and his folks came up to be innerduced. Talked to her like you wanted me to.”

?

“She says we ought to go ahead. Get moving. She says there’s people lollygaggin, and they need some folks to be in charge and tell em where to squat and lean.”

Nick leaned back in his chair and laughed silently. Then he wrote, “I was pretty sure she’d feel that way. I’ll talk to Stu & Glen tomorrow. Did you print the handbills?”

“Oh! Those! Shit, yeah,” Ralph said. “That’s where I been most of the afternoon, for Christ’s sake.” He showed Nick a sample poster. Still smelling strongly of mimeograph ink, the print was large and eyecatching. Ralph had done the graphics himself:

MASS MEETING!!!

REPRESENTATIVE BOARD

TO BE NOMINATED AND ELECTED!

8:30 P.M., August 18, 1990

Place: Canyon Boulevard Park & Bandshell if FINE

Chautauqua Hall in Chautauqua Park if FOUL

REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED

FOLLOWING THE MEETING

Below this were two rudimentary street maps for newcomers and those who hadn’t spent much time exploring Boulder. Below, in rather fine print, were the names he and Stu and Glen had agreed upon after some discussion earlier in the day:

Ad Hoc Committee

Nick Andros

Glen Bateman

Ralph Brentner

Richard Ellis

Fran Goldsmith

Stuart Redman

Susan Stern

Nick pointed to the line on the flier about refreshments and raised his eyebrows.

“Oh yeah, well, Frannie came by and said we’d be more apt to get everybody if we had something. She and her friend there, Patty Kroger, they’re going to see to it. Cookies and Za-Rex.” Ralph made a face. “If it came down to a choice between drinking Za-Rex and bullpiss, I’d have to sit down and think her over. You c’n have mine, Nicky.”

Nick grinned.

“The only thing about this,” Ralph went on more seriously, “is you guys putting me on this committee. I know what that word means. It means ‘Congratulations, you get to do all the hard work.’ Well, I don’t really mind that, I been workin hard all my life. But committees are supposed to have idears, and I ain’t much of an idear man.”

On his pad, Nick quickly sketched a big CB setup, and in the background a radio tower with bolts of electricity coming from its top.

“Yeah, but that’s a lot different,” Ralph said glumly:

“You’ll be fine,” Nick wrote. “Believe it.”

“If you say so, Nicky. I’ll give her a try. I still think you’d be better off with this Underwood fella, though.”

Nick shook his head and clapped Ralph on the shoulder. Ralph bid him goodnight and went upstairs. When he was gone, Nick looked thoughtfully at the handbill for a long time. If Stu and Glen had seen copies—and he was sure they had by now—they knew that he had unilaterally stricken Harold Lauder’s name from their list of ad hoc committee members. He didn’t know how they might be taking it, but the fact that they hadn’t shown up at his door yet was probably a good sign. They might want him to do some horsetrading of his own, and if he had to, he would do it, just to keep Harold out at the top. If he had to, he would give them Ralph. Ralph didn’t really want the position anyway, although, goddammit, Ralph had great native wit and the nearly priceless ability to think around the corners of problems. He would be a good man to have on the permanent committee, and he felt that Stu and Glen had already packed the committee with their friends. If he, Nick, wanted Lauder out, they would just have to go along. To pull off this leadership coup smoothly, there had to be no dissension at all among them. Say, Ma, how did that man get a rabbit to come out of that hat? Well, son, I’m not sure, but I think he might have used the old “misdirect em with cookies and Za-Rex” trick. It works just about every time.

He turned back to the page he had been doodling on when Ralph came in. He stared at the words he had circled not just once but three times, as if to keep them in. Authority. Organization. He suddenly wrote another one below them—there was just room. Now the words in the triple circle read:

Authority. Organization. Politics.

But he wasn’t trying to knock Lauder out of the picture just because he felt Stu and Glen Bateman were trying to hog what was really his football. He felt a certain amount of pique, sure. It would have been odd if he hadn’t. In a way, he, Ralph, and Mother Abagail had founded the Boulder Free Zone.

There’s hundreds of people here now and thousands more on their way if Bateman’s right, he thought, tapping his pencil against the circled words. The longer he looked at them, the uglier they seemed. But when Ralph and I and Mother and Tom Cullen and the rest in our party got here, the only living things in Boulder were the cats and the deer that had come down here from the state park to forage in people’s gardens… and even in the stores. Remember that one that got into the Table Mesa Supermarket somehow and then couldn’t get out? It was crazy, running up and down the aisles, knocking things over, falling down, then getting up and running again.

We’re Johnny-come-latelies, sure, we haven’t even been here a month yet, but we were first! So there’s a little pique, but pique isn’t the reason I want Harold out. I want him out because I don’t trust him. He smiles all the time, but there’s a watertight

(smiletight?)

compartment between his mouth and his eyes. There was some friction between him and Stu at one time, over Frannie, and all three of them say it’s over, but I wonder if it really is over. Sometimes I see Frannie looking at Harold, and she looks uneasy. She looks as if she’s trying to figure out how “over” this over really is. He’s bright enough, but he strikes me as unstable.

Nick shook his head. That wasn’t all. On more than one occasion he had wondered if Harold Lauder might not be crazy.

Mostly it’s that grin. I don’t want to have to share secrets with anyone who grins like that and looks as if he isn’t sleeping well at night.

No Lauder. They’ll have to go along with that.

Nick closed his ring-binder and put it away in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he stood up and began taking off his clothes. He wanted a shower. He felt obscurely dirty.

The world, he thought, not according to Garp but according to the superflu. This brave new world. But it didn’t seem particularly brave to him, or particularly new. It was as if someone had put a large cherry bomb into a child’s toybox. There had been a big bang and everything had gone everywhere. Toys had scattered from one end of the playroom to the other. Some things were shattered beyond repair, other things would be fixable, but most of the stuff had just been scattered. Those things were still a little too hot to handle, but they would be fine once they had cooled off.

Meanwhile, the job was to sort things out. Throw away the things which were no longer good. Set aside the toys which could be fixed. List everything which was still okay. Get a new toybox to put the things in, a nice new toybox. A strong toybox. There is a frightening, sickening ease—and a clear attraction—to the way in which things can be blown apart. The hard job is bringing things together again. The sorting. The fixing. The listing. And discarding the things which are no good, of course.

Except… can you ever bring yourself to throw away the things which are no good?

Nick paused halfway to the bathroom, naked, his clothes held in his arms.

Oh, the night was so silent… but weren’t all his nights symphonies of silence? Why had his body suddenly broke out in gooseflesh?

Why, because he suddenly felt that it was not toys the Free Zone Committee would be in charge of picking up, not toys at all. He suddenly felt that he had joined some bizarre sewing circle of the human spirit—he and Redman and Bateman and Mother Abagail, yes, even Ralph with his big radio and his boosting equipment that sent the Free Zone signal flying far and wide across the dead continent. They each had a needle and perhaps they were working together to make a warm blanket to keep off the winter chill… or perhaps they had only, after a brief pause, begun once again to make a large shroud for the human race, beginning their work at the toes and working their way up.

After love, Stu had gone to sleep. He had been on short sleep rations lately, and the night before he had been up all night with Glen Bateman, getting drunk and planning for the future. Frannie had put on her robe and come out here on the balcony.

The building they lived in was downtown, on the corner of Pearl Street and Broadway. Their apartment was on the third floor, and below her she could see the intersection, Pearl running east-west, Broadway running north-south. She liked it here. They had the compass boxed. The night was warm and windless, the black stone of the sky flawed with a million stars. In their faint and frosty glow, Fran could see the slabs of the Flatirons rising in the west.

She passed a hand down from her neck to her thighs. The dressing gown she wore was silk, and she was naked underneath. Her hand passed smoothly over her breasts and then, instead of continuing on flat and straight to the mild rise of her pubis, her hand traced an arc of belly, following a curve that had not been this pronounced even two weeks ago.

She was beginning to show, not a lot yet, but Stu had commented on it this evening. His question had been casual enough, even comic: How long can we do it without me, uh, squeezing him?

Or her, she had answered, amused. How does four months sound, Chief?

Fine, he had answered, and slipped deliciously into her.

Earlier talk had been much more serious. Not long after they got to Boulder, Stu had told her he had discussed the baby with Glen and Glen had advanced the idea, very cautiously, that the superflu germ or virus might still be around. If so, the baby might die. It was an unsettling thought (you could always, she thought, count on Glen Bateman for an Unsettling Thought or two), but surely if the mother was immune, the baby… ?

Yet there were plenty of people here who had lost children to the plague.

Yes, but that would mean —

Would mean what?

Well, for one thing, it might mean that all these people here were just an epilogue to the human race, a brief coda. She didn’t want to believe that, couldn’t believe it. If that were true—

Someone was coming up the street, turning sideways to slip between a dump truck that had stalled with two of its wheels on the pavement and the wall of a restaurant called the Pearl Street Kitchen. He had a light jacket slung over one shoulder and was carrying something in one hand that was either a bottle or a gun with a long barrel. In the other hand he had a sheet of paper, probably with an address written on it from the way he was checking street numbers. At last he stopped in front of their building. He was looking at the door as if trying to decide what to do next. Frannie thought he looked a little like a private detective in some old TV series. She was standing less than twenty feet above his head, and she found herself in one of those situations. If she called him, she might scare him. If she didn’t, he might start knocking and wake Stuart up. And what was he doing with a gun in his hand anyway… if it was a gun?

He suddenly craned his neck and looked up, probably to see if any lights were on in the building. Frannie was still looking down. They peered directly into each other’s eyes.

“Holy God!” the man on the sidewalk cried. He took an involuntary step backward, went off the sidewalk into the gutter, and sat down hard.

“Oh!” Frannie said at the same moment, and took her own step backward on the balcony. There was a spider-plant in a large pottery vase on a pedestal behind her. Frannie’s behind struck it. It tottered, almost decided to live a little longer, and then defenestrated itself on the balcony’s slate flags with a loud crash.

In the bedroom, Stu grunted, turned over, and was still again.

Frannie, perhaps predictably, was seized with the giggles. She put both hands over her mouth and pinched viciously at her lips, but the giggles came out anyway in a series of hoarse little whispers. Grace strikes again, she thought, and whisper-giggled madly into her cupped hands. If he’d had a guitar I could have dropped the damned vase on his head. O sole mio… CRASH! Her belly hurt from trying to hold in the giggles.

A conspiratorial whisper wafted its way up from below: “Hey, you… you on the balcony… psssst! ”

“Pssst,” Frannie whispered to herself. “Pssst, oh great.”

She had to get out before she started hee-hawing away like a donkey. She had never been able to hold in her laughter once it got hold of her. She ran fleetly across the darkened bedroom, snatched a more substantial—and demure—wrapper from the back of the bathroom door, and went down the hall struggling it on, her face working like a rubber mask. She let herself out onto the landing and got down one flight before the laughter escaped her and flew free. She went down the lower two flights cackling wildly.

The man—a young man, she saw now—had picked him self up and was brushing himself off. He was slim and well built, most of his face covered with a beard that might be blond or possibly sandy-red by daylight. There were dark circles under his eyes, but he was smiling a rueful little smile.

“What did you knock over?” he asked. “It sounded like a piano.”

“It was a vase,” she said. “It… it…” But then the giggles caught her again and she could only point a finger at him and laugh quietly and shake her head and then hold her aching belly again. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “You really looked funny… I know that’s a hell of a thing to say to somebody you just met but… oh, my! You did!”

“If this was the old days,” he said, grinning, “my next move would be to sue you for at least a quarter of a million. Whiplash. Judge, I looked up and this young woman was peering down at me. Yes, I believe she was making a face. Her face was on, at any rate. We find for the plaintiff, this poor boy. Also for the bailiff. There will be a ten-minute recess.”

They laughed together a little. The young man was wearing clean faded jeans and a dark blue shirt. The summer night was warm and kind, and Frannie was beginning to be glad she had come out.

“Your name wouldn’t happen to be Fran Goldsmith, would it?”

“It so happens. But I don’t know you.”

“Larry Underwood. We just came in today. Actually, I was looking for a fellow named Harold Lauder. They said he was living at 261 Pearl along with Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith and some other people.”

That dried her giggles up. “Harold was in the building when we first got to Boulder, but he split quite a while ago. He’s on Arapahoe now, on the west side of town. I can give you his address if you want it, and directions.”

“I’d appreciate that. But I’ll wait until tomorrow to go over, I guess. I’m not risking this action again.”

“Do you know Harold?”

“I do and I don’t—the same way I do and don’t know you. Although I have to be honest and say you don’t look the way I pictured you. In my mind I saw you as a Valkyrie-type blonde right out of a Frank Frazetta painting, probably with a .45 on each hip. But I’m pleased to meet you any way.” He stuck out his hand and Frannie shook it with a bewildered little smile.

“I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sit down on the curb a minute and I’ll tell you.”

She sat. A ghost of a breeze riffled up the street, shuffling scraps of paper and making the old elms move on the courthouse lawn three blocks farther down.

“I’ve got some stuff for Harold Lauder,” Larry said. “But it’s supposed to be a surprise, so if you see him before I do, mum’s the word and all that.”

“Okay, sure,” Frannie said. She was more mystified than ever.

He held up the long-barreled gun and it wasn’t a gun at all; it was a wine bottle with a long neck. She tilted the label to the starlight and could just barely read the large print—BORDEAUX at the top, and at the bottom, the date: 1947.

“The best vintage Bordeaux in this century,” he said. “At least that’s what an old friend of mine used to say. His name was Rudy. God love and rest his soul.”

“But 1947… that’s forty-three years ago. Won’t it be… well, gone over?”

“Rudy used to say a good Bordeaux never went over. Anyway, I’ve carried it all the way from Ohio. If it’s bad wine, it’ll be well-traveled bad wine.”

“And that’s for Harold?”

“That and a bunch of these.” He took something out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She didn’t have to turn this up to the starlight to read the print. She burst out laughing. “A Payday candy bar!” she exclaimed. “Harold’s favorite… but how could you know that?”

“That’s the story.”

“Then tell me!”

“Well, then. Once upon a time there was a fellow named Larry Underwood who came from California to New York to see his dear old mother. That wasn’t the only reason he came, and the other reasons were a little less pleasant, but let’s stick to the nice-guy reason, shall we?”

“Why not?” Fran agreed.

“And behold, the Wicked Witch of the West, or some Pentagon assholes, visited the country with a great plague, and before you could say, ‘Here comes Captain Trips,’ just about everyone in New York was dead. Including Larry’s mother.”

“I’m sorry. My mom and dad, too.”

“Yeah—everybody’s mom and dad. If we all sent each other sympathy cards, there wouldn’t be any left. But Larry was one of the lucky ones. He made it out of the city with a lady named Rita who wasn’t very well equipped to deal with what had happened. And unfortunately, Larry wasn’t very well equipped to help her deal with it.”

“No one had the equipment.”

“But some developed it quicker than others. Anyhow, Larry and Rita headed for the coast of Maine. They made it as far as Vermont, and there the lady OD’d on sleeping pills.”

“Oh, Larry, that is too bad.”

“Larry took it very hard. In fact, he took it as a more or less divine judgment on his strength of character. In further fact, he had been told by one or two people who should have known that his most incorruptible character trait was a splendid streak of self-interest, which came shining through like a Day-Glo madonna sitting on the dashboard of a ‘59 Cadillac.”

Frannie shifted a bit on the curb.

“I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable, but all of this has been sloshing around inside for a long time, and it does have some bearing on the Harold part of the story. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thanks. I think that ever since we stopped by and met that old woman today I’ve been looking for a friendly face so I could spill this. I just thought it would be Harold’s. Anyway—Larry continued on to Maine because there didn’t seem to be anyplace else to go. He was having very bad dreams by then, but since he was alone he had no way of knowing that other people were having them, too. He simply assumed it was another symptom of his continuing mental breakdown. But eventually he made it to a small coastal town named Wells, where he met a woman named Nadine Cross and a strange little boy whose name turns out to be Leo Rockway.”

“Wells,” she marveled softly.

“Anyway, the three travelers sort of flipped a coin to see which way they should head on US 1, and since it came up tails, they headed down south where they eventually came to—”

“Ogunquit!” Frannie said, delighted.

“Just so. And there, on a barn, in huge letters, I made my first acquaintance with Harold Lauder and Frances Goldsmith.”

“Harold’s sign! Oh, Larry, he will be pleased!”

“We followed the directions on the barn to Stovington, and the directions at Stovington to Nebraska and the directions at Mother Abagail’s house to Boulder. We met people along the way. One of them was a girl named Lucy Swann, who’s my woman. I’d like you to meet her sometime. I think you’d like her.”

“By then something had happened that Larry didn’t really want. His little party of four grew to six. The six met four more in upstate New York, and our party absorbed theirs. By the time we made it to Harold’s sign in Mother Abagail’s dooryard there were sixteen of us, and we picked up another three just as we were leaving. Larry was in charge of this brave band. There was no vote or anything like that. It just was. And he really didn’t want the responsibility. It was a drag. It was keeping him awake nights. He started popping Tums and Rolaids. But it’s funny the way your mind boxes your mind. I couldn’t let it go. It got to be a self-respect thing. And I—he —was always afraid he was going to fuck it up righteously, that he’d get up some morning and someone would be dead in their sleeping bag the way Rita was that time in Vermont and everyone would be standing around pointing their fingers and saying, ‘It’s your fault. You didn’t know any better and it’s your fault.’ And that was something I couldn’t talk about, not even to the Judge—”

“Who’s the Judge?”

“Judge Farris. An old guy from Peoria. I guess he really was a judge at one time back in the early fifties, circuit judge or something, but he’d been retired a long time when the flu hit. He’s plenty sharp, though. When he looks at you, you’d swear he has X-ray eyes. Anyhow, Harold was important to me. He got to be more important as there got to be more people. In direct ratio, you might say.” He chuckled a little. “That barn. Man! The last line of that sign, the one with your name, was so low I figured he really must have been hanging ass out to the wind when he painted it on.”

“Yes. I was sleeping when he did that. I would have made him stop.”

“I started to get a sense of him,” Larry said. “I found a Payday wrapper in the cupola of that barn in Ogunquit, and then the carving on the beam—”

“What carving?”

She felt that Larry was studying her in the dark, and she pulled her robe a little closer around her… not a gesture of modesty, because she felt no threat from this man, but one of nervousness.

“Just his initials,” Larry said casually. “H.E.L. If that had been the end of it, I wouldn’t be here now. But then at the motorcycle dealership in Wells—”

“We were there!”

“I know you were. I saw a couple of bikes gone. What made an even bigger impression was that Harold had siphoned some gas from the underground tank. You must have helped him, Fran. I damn near lost my fingers.”

“No, I didn’t have to. Harold hunted around until he found something he called a plug-vent—”

Larry groaned and slapped his forehead. “Plug-vent! Jesus! I never even looked for where they were venting the tank! You mean he just hunted around… pulled a plug… and put his hose in?”

“Well… yes.”

“Oh, Harold,” Larry said in a tone of admiration that she had never heard before, at least not in connection with Harold Lauder’s name. “Well, that’s one of his tricks I missed. Anyway, we got to Stovington. And Nadine was so upset she fainted.”

“I cried,” Fran said. “I bawled until it seemed I’d never stop. I just had my mind made up that when we got there, someone would welcome us in and say, ‘Hi! Step inside, delousing on the right, cafeteria’s on your left.’” She shook her head. “That seems so silly now.”

“I was not dismayed. Dauntless Harold had been there before me, left his sign, and gone on. I felt like a tenderfoot Easterner following that Indian from The Pathfinder.”

His view of Harold both fascinated and amazed her. Hadn’t Stu really been leading the party by the time they left Vermont and struck out for Nebraska? She couldn’t honestly remember. By then they had all been preoccupied with the dreams. Larry was reminding her of things she had forgotten… or worse, taken for granted. Harold risking his life to put that sign on the barn—it had seemed like a foolish risk to her, but it had done some good after all. And getting gas from that underground tank… it had apparently been a major operation for Larry, but Harold had seemed to take it purely as a matter of course. It made her feel small and made her feel guilty. They all more or less assumed that Harold was nothing but a grinning supernumerary. But Harold had turned quite a few tricks in the last six weeks. Had she been so much in love with Stu that it took this total stranger to point out some home truths about Harold? What made the feeling even more uncomfortable was the fact that, once he had gotten his feet under him, Harold had been completely adult about herself and Stuart.

Larry said, “So here’s another neat sign, complete with route numbers, at Stovington, right? And fluttering in the grass next to it, another Payday candy wrapper. I felt like instead of following broken sticks and bent grasses, I was following Harold’s trail of chocolate Paydays. Well, we didn’t follow your route the whole way. We bent north near Gary, Indiana, because there was one hell of a fire, still burning in places. It looked like every damn oiltank in the city went up. Anyhow, we picked up the Judge on the detour, stopped by Hemingford Home—we knew she was gone by then, the dreams you know, but we all wanted to see that place just the same. The corn… the tire-swing… you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Frannie said quietly. “Yes, I do.”

“And all the time I’m going crazy, thinking that something is going to happen, we’re going to get attacked by a motorcycle gang or something, run out of water, I don’t know.

“There used to be a book my mom had, she got it from her grandmother or something. In His Steps, that was the name of it. And there were all these little stories about guys with horrible problems. Ethical problems, most of them. And the guy who wrote the book said that to solve the problems, all you had to do was ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ It always cleared the trouble right up. You know what I think? It’s a Zen question, not really a question at all but a way to clear your mind, like saying Om and looking at the tip of your nose.”

Fran smiled. She knew what her mother would have said about something like that.

“So when I really started to get wound up, Lucy—that’s my girl, did I tell you?—Lucy would say, ‘Hurry up, Larry, ask the question.’”

“What would Jesus do?” Fran said, amused.

“No, what would Harold do?” Larry answered seriously. Fran was nearly dumbfounded. She could not help wishing to be around when Larry actually met Harold. Whatever in the world would his reaction be?

“We camped in this farmyard one night and we really were almost out of water. The place had a well, but no way of drawing it up, naturally, because the power was off and the pump wouldn’t work. And Joe—Leo, I’m sorry, his real name is Leo—Leo kept walking by and saying, ‘Firsty, Larry, pwetty firsty now.’ And he was driving me bugshit. I could feel myself tightening up, and the next time he came by I probably would have hit him. Nice guy, huh? Getting ready to hit a disturbed child. But a person can’t change all at once. I’ve had plenty of time to work that out for myself.”

“You brought them all across from Maine intact,” Frannie said. “One of ours died. His appendix burst. Stu tried to operate on him, but it was no good. All in all, Larry, I’d say you did pretty well.”

“Harold and I did pretty well,” he corrected. “Anyway, Lucy said, ‘Quick, Larry, ask the question.’ So I did. There was a windmill on the place that ran water up to the barn. It was turning pretty good, but there wasn’t any water coming out of the barn faucets either. So I opened the big case at the foot of the windmill, where all the machinery was, and I saw that the main driveshaft had popped out of its hole. I got it back in and bingo! All the water you could want. Cold and tasty. Thanks to Harold.”

“Thanks to you. Harold wasn’t really there, Larry.”

“Well, he was in my head. And now I’m here and I brought him the wine and the candy bars.” He looked at her sideways. “You know, I kind of thought he might be your man.”

She shook her head and looked down at her clasped fingers. “No. He… not Harold.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time, but she felt him looking at her. At last he said, “Okay, how have I got it wrong? About Harold?”

She stood up. “I ought to go in now. It’s been nice to meet you, Larry. Come by tomorrow and meet Stu. Bring your Lucy, if she’s not busy.”

“What is it about him?” he insisted, standing with her.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said thickly. Suddenly the tears were very close. “You make me feel as if… as if I’ve treated Harold very shabbily and I don’t know… why or how I did it… can I be blamed for not loving him the way I do Stu? Is that supposed to be my fault?”

“No, of course not.” Larry looked taken aback. “Listen, I’m sorry. I barged in on you. I’ll go.”

“He’s changed!” Frannie burst out. “I don’t know how or why, and sometimes I think it might be for the better… but I don’t… don’t really know. And sometimes I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of Harold?”

She didn’t answer; only looked down at her feet. She thought she had already said too much.

“You were going to tell me how I could get there?” he asked gently.

“It’s easy. Just go straight out Arapahoe until you come to the little park… the Eben G. Fine Park, I think it is. The park’s on the right. Harold’s little house is on the left, just across from it.”

“All right, thanks. Meeting you was a pleasure, Fran, busted vase and all.”

She smiled, but it was perfunctory. All of the dizzy good humor had gone out of the evening.

Larry raised the bottle of wine and offered his slanted little smile. “And if you see him before I do… keep a secret, huh?”

“Sure.”

“Night, Frannie.”

He walked back the way he had come. She watched him out of sight, then went upstairs and slipped into bed next to Stu, who was still out like a light.

Harold, she thought, pulling the covers up to her chin. How was she supposed to tell this Larry, who seemed so nice in his strangely lost way (but weren’t they all lost now?), that Harold Lauder was fat and juvenile and lost himself? Was she supposed to tell him that one day not so long ago she had happened upon wise Harold, resourceful Harold, what-would-Jesus-do Harold, mowing the back lawn in his bathing suit and weeping? Was she supposed to tell him that the sometimes sulky, often frightened Harold that had come to Boulder from Ogunquit had turned into a stout politician, a backslapper, a hail-fellow-well-met type of guy who nonetheless looked at you with the flat and unsmiling eyes of a gila monster?

She thought her wait for sleep might be very long tonight. Harold had fallen hopelessly in love with her and she had fallen hopelessly in love with Stu Redman, and it certainly was a tough old world. And now every time I see Harold I get such a case of the creeps. Even though he looks like he’s lost ten pounds or so and he doesn’t have quite so many pimples, I get the—

Her breath caught audibly in her throat and she sat up on her elbows, eyes wide in the dark.

Something had moved inside her.

Her hands went to the slight swelling of her middle. Surely it was too early. It had only been her imagination. Except—

Except it hadn’t been.

She lay back down slowly, her heart beating hard. She almost woke Stu up and then didn’t. If only he had put the baby inside her, instead of Jess. If he had, she would have awakened him and shared the moment with him. The next baby she would. If there was a next baby, of course.

And then the movement came again, so slight it might only have been gas. Except she knew better. It was the baby. And the baby was alive.

“Oh glory,” she murmured to herself, and lay back. Larry Underwood and Harold Lauder were forgotten. Everything that had happened to her since her mother had fallen ill was forgotten. She waited for it to move again, listening for that presence inside herself and fell asleep listening. Her baby was alive.

Harold sat in a chair on the lawn of the little house he had picked out for himself, looking up at the sky and thinking of an old rock and roll song. He hated rock, but he could remember this one almost line-for-line and even the name of the group that had sung it: Kathy Young and the Innocents. The lead singer, songstress, whatever, had a high, yearning, reedy voice that had somehow caught his full attention. A golden goody, the DJs called it. A Blast from the Past. A Platter that Matters. The girl singing lead sounded sixteen years old, pallid, blond, and plain. She sounded as if she might be singing to a picture that spent most of its time buried in a dresser drawer, a picture that was taken out only late at night when everyone else in the house was asleep. She sounded hopeless. The picture she sang to had perhaps been clipped from her big sister’s yearbook, a picture of the local Big Jock—captain of the football team and president of the Student Council. The Big Jock would be slipping it to the head cheerleader on some deserted lovers’ lane while far away in suburbia this plain girl with no breasts and a pimple in the corner of her mouth sang:

“A thousand stars in the sky… make me realize… you are the one love that I’ll adore… tell me you love me… tell me you’re mine, all mine… ”

There were a lot more than a thousand stars in his sky tonight, but they weren’t lovers’ stars. No soft caul of Milky Way here. Here, a mile above sea-level they were as sharp and cruel as a billion holes in black velvet, stabs from God’s icepick. They were haters’ stars, and because they were, Harold felt well qualified to wish on them. Wish-I-may, wish-I-might, have-the-wish-I-wish-tonight. Drop dead, folks.

He sat silently with his head cocked back, a brooding astronomer. Harold’s hair was longer than ever, but it was no longer dirty and clotted and tangled. He no longer smelled like a shootoff in a haymow. Even his blemishes were clearing up, now that he had laid off the candy. And with the hard work and all the walking, he was losing some weight. He was starting to look pretty good. There had been times in the last few weeks when he had strode past some reflective surface only to glance back over his shoulder, startled, as if he had caught a glimpse of a total stranger.

He shifted in his chair. There was a book in his lap, a tall volume with a marbled blue binding and imitation leather covers. He kept it hidden under a loose hearthstone in the house when he was away. If anyone found the book, that would be the end of him in Boulder. There was one word stamped in gold leaf on the book’s cover, and the word was LEDGER. It was the journal he had started after reading Fran’s diary. Already he had filled the first sixty pages with his close, margin-to-margin handwriting. There were no paragraphs, only a solid block of writing, an outpouring of hate like pus from a skin abscess. He hadn’t thought he had so much hate in him. It seemed he should have exhausted the flow by now, yet it seemed he had only tapped it. It was like that old joke. Why was the ground all white after Custer’s Last Stand? Because the Indians kept coming and coming and…

And why did he hate?

He sat up straight, as if the question had come from the outside. It was a hard question to answer, except maybe to a few, a chosen few. Hadn’t Einstein said there were only six people in the world who understood all the implications of E=mc 2 ? What about the equation inside his own skull? The relativity of Harold. The speed of blight. Oh, he could fill twice as many pages as he had already written about that, becoming more obscure, more arcane, until he finally became lost in the clockwork of himself and still nowhere near the mainspring at all. He was perhaps… raping himself. Was that it? It was close, anyway. An obscene and ongoing act of buggery. The Indians just kept on coming and coming.

He would be leaving Boulder soon. A month or two, no more. When he finally settled on a method of settling his scores. Then he would head out west. And when he got there he would open his mouth and spill his guts about this place. He would tell them what went on at the public meetings, and much more important, what went on at the private meetings. He was sure to be on the Free Zone Committee. He would be welcomed, and he would be well rewarded by the fellow in charge over there… not by an end to hate but by the perfect vehicle for it, a Hate Cadillac, a Fearderado, long and darkly shining. He would climb into it and it would bear him and his hate down on them. He and Flagg would kick this miserable settlement apart like an anthill. But first he would settle with Redman, who had lied to him and stolen his woman.

Yes, Harold, but why do you hate?

No; there was no satisfactory answer to that, only a kind of… of endorsement for the hate itself. Was it even a fair question? He thought not. You might as well ask a woman why she gave birth to a defective baby.

There had been a time, an hour or an instant, when he had contemplated jettisoning the hate. That had been after he had finished reading Fran’s diary and had discovered she was irrevocably committed to Stu Redman. That sudden knowledge had acted upon him the way a dash of cold water acts on a slug, causing it to contract into a tight little ball instead of a spread-out, loosely questing organism. In that hour or instant, he became aware that he could simply accept what was, and that knowledge had both exhilarated and terrified him. For that space of time he knew he could turn himself into a new person, a fresh Harold Lauder cloned from the old one by the sharp intervening knife of the superflu epidemic. He sensed, more clearly than any of the others, that that was what the Boulder Free Zone was all about. People were not the same as they had been. This small-town society was like no other in American pre-plague society. They didn’t see it because they didn’t stand outside the boundaries as he did. Men and women were living together with no apparent desire to reinstitute the ceremony of marriage. Whole groups of people were living together in small subcommunities like communes. There wasn’t much fighting. People seemed to be getting along. And strangest of all, none of them seemed to be questioning the profound theological implications of the dreams… and of the plague itself. Boulder itself was a cloned society, a tabula so rasa that it could not sense its own novel beauty.

Harold sensed it, and hated it.

Far away over the mountains was another cloned creature. A cutting from the dark malignancy, a single wild cell taken from the dying corpus of the old body politic, a lone representative of the carcinoma that had been eating the old society alive. One single cell, but it had already begun to reproduce itself and spawn other wild cells. For society it would be the old struggle, the effort of healthy tissue to reject the malignant incursion. But for each individual cell there was the old, old question, the one that went back to the Garden—did you eat the apple or leave it alone? Over there, in the West, they were already eating them a mess of apple pie and apple cobbler. The assassins of Eden were there, the dark fusiliers.

And he himself, when faced with the knowledge that he was free to accept what was, had rejected the new opportunity. To seize it would have been to murder himself. The ghost of every humiliation he had ever suffered cried out against it. His murdered dreams and ambitions came back to eldritch life and asked if he could forget them so easily. In the new Free Zone society he could only be Harold Lauder. Over there he could be a prince.

The malignancy drew him. It was a dark carnival—Ferris wheels with their lights out revolving above a black landscape, a never-ending sideshow filled with freaks like himself, and in the main tent the lions ate the spectators. What called to him was this discordant music of chaos.

He opened his journal and by starlight wrote firmly:

August 12, 1990 (early morning).

It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To embrace them, to vent them, is more noble; that is to say that the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure.

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

He closed the book. He went into the house, put the book in its hole in the hearth, and carefully replaced the hearthstone. He went into the bathroom, set his Coleman lamp on the sink so that it illuminated the mirror, and for the next fifteen minutes he practiced smiling. He was getting very good at it.

Chapter 51

Ralph’s posters announcing the August 18 meeting went up all over Boulder. There was a great deal of excited conversation, most of it having to do with the good and bad qualities of the seven-person ad hoc committee.

Mother Abagail went to bed exhausted before the light was even gone from the sky. The day had been a steady stream of callers, all of them wanting to know what her opinion was. She allowed as how she thought most of the choices for the committee were pretty good. The people were anxious to know if she would serve on a more permanent committee, if one should be formed at the big meeting. She replied that that would be a spot too tiring, but she sure would give a committee of elected representatives whatever help she could, if people wanted her to help out. She was assured again and again that any permanent committee that refused her help would be turned out en masse, and that right early. Mother Abagail went to bed tired but satisfied.

So did Nick Andros that night. In one day, by virtue of a single poster turned out on a hand-crank mimeograph machine, the Free Zone had been transformed from a loose group of refugees into potential voters. They liked it; it gave them the sense of a place to stand after a long period of free fall.

That afternoon Ralph drove him out to the power plant. He, Ralph, and Stu agreed to hold a preliminary meeting at Stu and Frannie’s place the day after next. It would give all seven of them another two days to listen to what people were saying.

Nick smiled and cupped his own useless ears.

“Lip-reading’s even better,” Stu said. “You know, Nick, I’m starting to think we’re really going to get somewhere with those blown motors. That Brad Kitchner’s a regular bear for work. If we had ten like him, we’d have this whole town running perfect by the first of September.”

Nick gave him a thumb-and-forefinger circle and they walked inside together.

That afternoon Larry Underwood and Leo Rockway walked west on Arapahoe Street toward Harold’s house. Larry was wearing the knapsack he had worn all the way across the country, but all that was in it now was the bottle of wine and a half dozen Paydays.

Lucy was out with a party of half a dozen people who had taken two wrecking trucks and were beginning to clear the streets and roads in and around Boulder of stalled vehicles. Trouble was, they were working on their own—it was a sporadic operation that only ran when a few people felt like getting together and doing it. A wrecking bee instead of a quilting bee, Larry thought, and his eye caught one of the posters headed MASS MEETING, this one nailed to a telephone pole. Maybe that would be the answer. Hell, people around here wanted to work; what they needed was somebody to coordinate things and tell them what to do. He thought that, most of all, they wanted to wipe away the evidence of what had happened here this early summer (and could it be late summer already?) the way you would use an eraser to wipe dirty words off a blackboard. Maybe we can’t do it from one end of America to the other, Larry thought, but we should be able to do it here in Boulder before snow flies, if Mother Nature cooperates.

A tinkle of glass made him turn. Leo had lobbed a large stone from someone’s rock garden through the rear window of an old Ford. A bumper sticker on the back deck of the Ford’s trunk read: GET YO ASS UP THE PASS– COLD CREEK CANYON .

“Don’t do that, Joe.”

“I’m Leo.”

“Leo,” he corrected. “Don’t do that.”

“Why not?” Leo asked complacently, and for a long time Larry couldn’t think of a satisfactory answer.

“Because it makes an ugly sound,” he said finally.

“Oh. Okay.”

They walked on. Larry put his hands in his pockets. Leo did likewise. Larry kicked a beer can. Leo swerved out of his way to kick a stone. Larry began to whistle a tune. Leo made a whispering chuffling sound in accompaniment. Larry ruffled the kid’s hair and Leo looked up at him with those odd Chinese eyes and grinned. And Larry thought: For Christ’s sake, I’m falling in love with him. Pretty far out.

They came to the park Frannie had mentioned, and across from it was a green house with white shutters. There was a wheelbarrow full of bricks on the cement path leading up to the front door, and next to it was a garbage can lid filled with that do-it-yourself mortar-mix to which you just add water. Squatting beside it, his back to the street, was a broad-shouldered dude with his shirt off and the peeling remnants of a bad sunburn. He had a trowel in one hand. He was building a low and curving brick wall around a flower bed.

Larry thought of Fran saying: He’s changed… I don’t know how or why or even if its for the best… and sometimes I’m afraid.

Then he stepped forward, saying it just the way he had planned on his long days crossing the country: “Harold Lauder, I presume?”

Harold jerked with surprise, then turned with a brick in one hand and his mortar-dripping trowel in the other, half-raised, like a weapon. Out of the corner of his eye, Larry thought he saw Leo flinch backward. His first thought was, sure enough, Harold didn’t look at all as he had imagined. His second thought had to do with the trowel: My God, is he going to let me have it with that thing? Harold’s face was grimly set, his eyes narrow and dark. His hair fell in a lank wave across his sweaty forehead. His lips were pressed together and almost white.

And then there was a transformation so sudden and complete that Larry was never quite able to believe afterward that he had seen that tense, unsmiling Harold, the face of a man more apt to use a trowel to wall someone up in a basement niche than to construct a garden wall around a flower bed.

He smiled, a broad and harmless grin that made deep dimples at the corners of his mouth. His eyes lost their menacing cast (they were bottle-green, and how could such clear and feckless eyes have seemed menacing, or even dark?). He stuck the trowel blade-down into the mortar—chunk! —wiped his hands on the hips of his jeans, and advanced with his hand out. Larry thought: My God, he’s just a kid, younger than I am. If he’s eighteen yet I’ll eat the candles on his last birthday cake.

“Don’t think I know you,” Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip. Larry’s hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with George Bush back when the old bushwhacker had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago. If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.

But Harold’s grin was contagious, and Larry grinned back. Kid or not, politician’s handshake or not, the grin impressed him as completely genuine, and after all this time, after all those candy wrappers, here was Harold Lauder, in the flesh.

“No, you don’t,” Larry said. “But I’m acquainted with you.”

“Is that so!” Harold exclaimed, and his grin escalated. If it got any broader, Larry thought with amusement, the ends would meet around at the back of his skull and the top two thirds of his head would just topple off.

“I followed you across the country from Maine,” Larry said.

“No fooling! You did, really?”

“Really did.” He unslung his packsack. “Here, I’ve got some stuff for you.” He took out the bottle of Bordeaux and put it in Harold’s hand.

“Say, you shouldn’t have,” Harold said, looking at the bottle with some astonishment. “Nineteen forty-seven?”

“A good year,” Larry said. “And these.”

He put nearly half a dozen Paydays in Harold’s other hand. One of them slipped through his fingers and onto the grass. Harold bent to pick it up, and as he did, Larry caught a glimpse of that earlier expression.

Then Harold bobbed back up, smiling. “How did you know?”

“I followed your signs… and your candy wrappers.”

“Well I be go to hell. Come on in the house. We ought to have a jaw, as my dad was fond of saying. Would your boy drink a Coke?”

“Sure. Wouldn’t you, L—”

He looked around, but Leo was no longer beside him. He was all the way back on the sidewalk and looking down at some cracks in the pavement as if they were of great interest to him.

“Hey, Leo! Want a Coke?”

Leo muttered something Larry couldn’t hear.

“Talk up!” he said, irritated. “What did God give you a voice for? I asked you if you wanted a Coke.”

Barely audible, Leo said: “I think I’ll go see if Nadine-mom’s back.”

“What the hell? We just got here!”

“I want to go back!” Leo said, looking up from the cement. The sun flashed too strongly back from his eyes and Larry thought, What in God’s name is this? He’s almost crying.

“Just a sec,” he said to Harold.

“Sure,” Harold said, grinning. “Sometimes kids’re shy. I was.”

Larry walked over to Leo and hunkered down, so they would be at eye-level. “What’s the matter, kiddo?”

“I just want to go back,” Leo said, not meeting his gaze. “I want Nadine-mom.”

“Well, you…” He paused helplessly.

“Want to go back.” He looked up briefly at Larry. His eyes flickered over Larry’s shoulder toward where Harold stood in the middle of his lawn. Then down at the cement again. “Please.”

“You don’t like Harold?”

“I don’t know… he’s all right… I just want to go back.”

Larry sighed. “Can you find your way?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. But I sure wish you’d come in and have a Coke with us. I’ve been waiting to meet Harold a long time. You know that, don’t you?”

“Ye-es…”

“And we could walk back together.”

“I’m not going in that house,” Leo hissed, and for a moment he was Joe again, the eyes going blank and savage.

“Okay,” Larry said hastily. He stood up. “Go straight home. I’ll check to see if you did. And stay out of the street.”

“I will.” And suddenly Leo blurted in that small, hissing whisper: “Why don’t you come back with me? Right now? We’ll go together. Please, Larry? Okay?”

“Jeez, Leo, what—”

“Never mind,” Leo said. And before Larry could say anything more, Leo was hurrying away. Larry stood watching him until he was out of sight. Then he turned back to Harold with a troubled frown.

“Say, that’s all right,” Harold said. “Kids are funny.”

“Well, that one sure is, but I guess he’s got a right. He’s been through a lot.”

“I’ll bet he has,” Harold replied, and just for an instant Larry felt distrust, felt that Harold’s quick sympathy for a boy he had never met was as ersatz as powdered eggs.

“Well, come in,” Harold said. “You know, you’re just about my first company. Frannie and Stu have been out a few times, but they hardly count.” His grin became a smile, a slightly sad smile, and Larry felt sudden pity for this boy—because a boy was all he was, really. He was lonely and here stood Larry, same old Larry, never a good word for anyone, judging him on vapors. It wasn’t fair. It was time for him to stop being so goddam mistrustful.

“Glad to,” he answered.

The living room was small but comfortable. “I’m going to put in some new furniture when I get around to it,” Harold said. “Modern. Chrome and leather. As the commercial says, ‘Fuck the budget. I’ve got MasterCard.’”

Larry laughed heartily.

“There are some good glasses in the basement, I’ll just get them. I think I’ll pass on the candy bars, if that’s all right with you—I’m off the sweets, trying to lose weight, but we’ve got to try the wine, this is a special occasion. You came all the way across the country from Maine behind us, huh, and following my—our—signs. That’s really something. You’ll have to tell me all about it. Meanwhile, try that green chair. It’s the best of a bad lot.”

Larry had one final doubtful thought during this outpouring: He even talks like a politician—smooth and quick and glib.

Harold left, and Larry sat down in the green chair. He heard a door open and then Harold’s heavy tread descending a flight of stairs. He looked around. Nope, not one of the world’s great living rooms, but with a shag rug and some nice modern furniture, it might be fine. The best feature was the stone fireplace and chimney. Lovely work, carefully done by hand. But there was one loose stone on the hearth. It looked to Larry as if it had come out and had been put back a little carelessly. Leaving it like that would be like leaving one piece out of the jigsaw puzzle or a picture hanging crooked on the wall.

He got up and picked the stone out of the hearth. Harold was still rummaging around downstairs. Larry was about to put it back in when he saw there was a book down in the hole, its front now lightly powdered with rockdust, not enough to obscure the single word stamped there in gold leaf: LEDGER.

Feeling slightly ashamed, as if he had been prying intentionally, he put the rock back in place just as Harold’s footfalls began to ascend the stairs again. This time the fit was perfect, and when Harold came back into the living room with a balloon glass in each hand, Larry was seated in the green chair again.

“I took a minute to rinse them out in the downstairs sink,” Harold said. “They were a bit dusty.”

“They look fine,” Larry said. “Look, I can’t swear that Bordeaux hasn’t gone over. We might be helping ourselves to vinegar.”

“Nothing ventured,” Harold said, grinning, “nothing gained.”

That grin made him feel uncomfortable, and Larry suddenly found himself thinking about the ledger—was it Harold’s, or had it belonged to the house’s previous owner? And if it was Harold’s, what in the world might be written in there?

They cracked the bottle of Bordeaux and found, to their mutual pleasure, that it was just fine. Half an hour later they were both pleasantly squiffed, Harold a little more so than Larry. Even so, Harold’s grin remained; broadened, in fact.

His tongue loosened a bit by wine, Larry said: “Those posters. The big meeting on the eighteenth. How come you didn’t get on that committee, Harold? I would have thought a guy like you would have been a natural.”

Harold’s smile became large, beatific. “Well, I’m awfully young. I suppose they thought I didn’t have experience enough.”

“I think it’s a goddam shame.” But did he? The grin. The dark, barely glimpsed expression of suspicion. Did he? He didn’t know.

“Well, who knows what lies in the future?” Harold said, grinning broadly. “Every dog has its day.”

Larry left around five o’clock. His parting from Harold was friendly; Harold shook his hand, grinned, told him to come back often. But Larry had somehow gotten the feeling that Harold could give a shit if he never came back.

He walked slowly down the cement path to the sidewalk and turned to wave, but Harold had already gone back inside. The door was shut. It had been very cool in the house because the venetian blinds were drawn, and inside that had seemed all right, but standing outside it occurred to him suddenly that it was the only house he’d been inside in Boulder where the blinds and curtains were drawn. But of course, he thought, there were still plenty of houses in Boulder where the shades were drawn. They were the houses of the dead. When they got sick, they had drawn their curtains against the world. They had drawn them and died in privacy, like any animal in its last extremity prefers to do. The living—maybe in subconscious acknowledgment of that fact of death—threw their shutters and their curtains wide.

He had a slight headache from the wine, and he tried to tell himself that the chill he felt came from that, part of a little hangover, righteous punishment administered for guzzling good wine as if it was cheap muscatel. But that wouldn’t quite get it—no, it wouldn’t. He stared up and down the street and thought: Thank God for tunnel vision. Thank God for selective perception. Because without it, we might as well all be in a Lovecraft story.

His thoughts became confused. He became suddenly convinced that Harold was peeping at him from between the slats of his blinds, his hands opening and closing in a strangler’s grip, his grin turned into a leer of hatred… Every dog has its day. At the same time he was remembering the night in Bennington, sleeping on the stage of the bandshell, waking up to the horrible feeling that someone was there… and then hearing (or only dreaming it?) the dusty sound of bootheels moving off to the west.

Stop it. Stop freaking yourself out.

Boot Hill, his mind free-associated. Chrissake, just stop it, wish I’d never thought about the dead people, the dead people behind all those closed blinds and pulled drapes and shut curtains, in the dark, like in the tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, Christ, what if they all started to move, to stir around, Holy God, cut it out —

And suddenly he found himself thinking of a trip to the Bronx Zoo with his mother when he had been small. They had gone into the monkey-house and the smell in there had hit him like a physical thing, a fist driven not just at his nose but into it. He had turned to bolt out of there, but his mother had stopped him.

Just breathe normal, Larry, she had said. In five minutes you won’t notice that nasty smell at all.

So he had stayed, not believing her, just fighting not to puke (even at the age of seven, he had hated to puke worse than anything), and it turned out she was right. When he looked down at his watch the next time, he saw that they had been in the monkey-house for half an hour, and he couldn’t understand why the ladies who came in the door were suddenly clapping their hands over their noses and looking disgusted. He said as much to his mother, and Alice Underwood had laughed.

Oh, it still smells bad, all right. Just not to you.

How come, Mommy?

I don’t know. Everybody can do it. Now just say to yourself, “I’m going to smell how the monkey-house REALLY is again,” and take a deep breath.

So he did, and the stink was there, the stink was even bigger and badder than it had been when they first came in, and his hotdogs and cherry pie started to come up on him again in one big sickening whipped bubble, and he had charged for the door and the fresh air beyond it and managed—barely—to hold everything down.

That’s selective perception, he thought now, and she knew what it was even if she didn’t know what it’s called. This thought had no more than completed itself in his mind before he heard his mother’s voice saying, Just say to your self, “I’m going to smell how Boulder REALLY smells again.” And he was smelling it—just like that, he was smelling it. He was smelling what was behind all the closed doors and drawn shades and pulled blinds, he was smelling the slow corruption that was going on even in this place which had died almost empty.

He walked faster, not running but getting closer and closer to it, smelling that fruity, rich reek which he—and everyone else—had stopped consciously smelling because it was everywhere, it was everything, it was coloring their thoughts, and you didn’t pull your shades even if you were making love because the dead lie behind drawn shades and the living still want to look out on the world.

It wanted to come up on him, not hotdogs and cherry pie now but wine and a Payday candy bar. Because this was one monkey-house he was never going to be able to get out of, not unless he moved to an island where no one had ever lived, and even though he still hated to puke worse than anything, he was going to now—

“Larry? Are you okay?”

He was so startled that a little noise—“Yike! ” squeaked out of his throat and he jumped. It was Leo, sitting on the curb about three blocks down from Harold’s. He had a Ping-Pong ball and was bouncing it up and down on the pavement.

“What are you doing here?” Larry asked. His heartbeat was slowly returning to normal.

“I wanted to walk home with you,” Leo said diffidently, “but I didn’t want to go into that guy’s house.”

“Why not?” Larry asked. He sat down on the curb beside Leo.

Leo shrugged and turned his eyes back to the Ping-Pong ball. It made a small whock! whock! sound as it struck the pavement and bounced back up to his hand.

“I don’t know.”

“What.”

“This is very important to me. Because I like Harold… and don’t like him. I feel two ways about him. Have you ever felt two ways about a person?”

“I only feel one way about him.” Whock! Whock!

“How?”

“Scared,” Leo said simply. “Can we go home and see my Nadine-mom and my Lucy-mom?”

“Sure.”

They continued down Arapahoe for a while without speaking, Leo still bouncing the Ping-Pong ball and catching it deftly.

“Sorry you had to wait so long,” Larry said.

“Aw, that’s okay.”

“No, really, if I’d known I would have hurried up.”

“I had something to do. I found this on a guy’s lawn. It’s a Pong-Ping ball.”

“Ping-Pong,” Larry corrected absently. “Why do you think Harold would keep his shades down?”

“So nobody can see in, I guess,” Leo said. “So he can do secret things. It’s like the dead people, isn’t it?” Whock! Whock!

They walked on, reached the corner of Broadway, and turned south. They saw other people on the streets now; women looking in windows at dresses, a man with a pickaxe returning from somewhere, another man casually sorting through fishing tackle in the broken display window of a sporting goods store. Larry saw Dick Vollman from his party biking in the other direction. He waved at Larry and Leo. They waved back.

“Secret things,” Larry mused aloud, not really trying to draw the boy out anymore.

“Maybe he’s praying to the dark man,” Leo said casually, and Larry jerked as if brushed by a live wire. Leo didn’t notice. He was double-bouncing his Ping-Pong ball, first off the sidewalk and then catching it on the rebound from the brick wall they were passing… whock-whap!

“Do you really think so?” Larry asked, making an effort to sound casual.

“I don’t know. But he’s not like us. He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him, making him smile. Big white worms eating up his brain. Like maggots.”

“Joe… Leo, I mean…”

Leo’s eyes—dark, remote, and Chinese—suddenly cleared. He smiled. “Look, there’s Dayna. I like her. Hey, Dayna!” he yelled, waving. “Got any gum?”

Dayna, who had been oiling the sprocket of a spidery-thin ten-speed bike, turned and smiled. She reached into her shirt pocket and spread out five sticks of Juicy Fruit like a poker hand. With a happy laugh, Leo ran toward her, his long hair flying, Ping-Pong ball clutched in one hand, leaving Larry to stare after him. That idea of white worms behind Harold’s smile… where had Joe (no, Leo, he’s Leo, at least I think he is) gotten an idea as sophisticated—and as horrible—as that? The boy had been in a semi-trance. And he wasn’t the only one; how many times in the few days he had been here had Larry seen someone just stop dead on the street, looking blankly at nothing for a moment, and then go on? Things had changed. The whole range of human perception seemed to have stepped up a notch.

It was scary as hell.

Larry got his feet moving and walked over to where Leo and Dayna were sharing out the chewing gum.

That afternoon Stu found Frannie washing clothes in the small yard behind their building. She had filled a low washtub with water, had shaken in nearly half a box of Tide, and had stirred everything with a mop-handle until a sickly suds had resulted. She doubted if she was going about this in the right way, but she was damned if she was going to go to Mother Abagail and expose her ignorance. She dumped their clothes in the water, which was stone-cold, then grimly jumped in and began to stomp and slosh around, like a Sicilian mashing grapes. Your new model Maytag 5000, she thought. The Double-Foot Agitation Method, perfect for all your bright colors, fragile underthings, and —

She turned around and beheld her man, standing just inside the backyard gate and watching with an expression of amusement. Frannie stopped, a little out of breath.

“Ha-ha, very funny. How long have you been there, smartypants?”

“Couple of minutes. What do you call that, anyway? The mating dance of the wild wood duck?”

“Again, ha-ha.” She looked coolly at him. “One more crack like that and you can spend the night on the couch, or up on Flagstaff with your friend Glen Bateman.”

“Say, I didn’t mean—”

“They’re your clothes too, Mr. Stuart Redman. You may be a Founding Father and all that, but you still leave an occasional skidmark in your underdrawers.”

Stu grinned, the grin broadened, and finally he had to laugh. “That’s crude, darlin.”

“Right now I don’t feel particularly delicate.”

“Well, pop out for a minute. I need to talk to you.”

She was glad to, even though she would have to wash her feet before getting back in. Her heart was hurrying along, not happily but rather dolefully, like a faithful piece of machinery being misused by someone with a marked lack of good sense. If this was the way my great-great-great-grandmother had to do it, Fran thought, then maybe she was entitled to the room which eventually became my mother’s precious parlor. Maybe she thought of it as hazard pay, or something like that.

She looked down at her feet and lower legs with some discouragement. There was still a thin sheath of gray soapsuds clinging to them. She brushed at it distastefully.

“When my wife handwashed,” Stu said, “she used a… what do you call it? Scrub-board, I think. My mother had about three, I remember.”

“I know that,” Frannie said, irritated. “June Brinkmeyer and I walked over half of Boulder looking for one. We couldn’t find a single one. Technology strikes again.”

He was smiling again.

Frannie put her hands on her hips. “Are you trying to piss me off, Stuart Redman?”

“No’m. I was just thinking I know where I can get you a scrub-board, I think. Juney too, if she wants one.”

“Where?”

“You let me look and see first.” His smile disappeared, and he put his arms around her and his forehead on hers. “You know I appreciate you washing my clothes,” he said, “and I know that a woman who is pregnant knows better than her man what she should and shouldn’t be doing. But, Frannie, why bother?”

“Why? ” She looked at him, perplexed. “Well, what are you going to wear? Do you want to go around in dirty clothes?”

“Frannie, the stores are full of clothes. And I’m an easy size.”

“What, throw out old ones just because they’re dirty?”

He shrugged a little uneasily.

“No way, uh-uh,” she said. “That’s the old way, Stu. Like the boxes they used to put your Big Mac in or the no-deposit-no-return bottles. That’s no way to start over.”

He gave her a little kiss. “All right. Only next washday it’s my turn, you hear?”

“Sure.” She smiled a little slyly. “And how long does that last? Until I deliver?”

“Until we get the power back on,” Stu said. “Then I’m going to bring you the biggest, shiniest washer you ever saw, and hook it up myself.”

“Offer accepted.” She kissed him firmly and he kissed back, his strong hands moving restlessly in her hair. The result was a spreading warmth (hotness, let’s not be coy, I’m hot and he always gets me hot when he does that) that first peaked her nipples, then spread down into her lower belly.

“You better stop,” she said rather breathlessly, “unless you plan to do more than talk.”

“Maybe we’ll talk later.”

“The clothes—”

“Soaking’s good for that grimed-in dirt,” he said seriously. She started to laugh and he stopped her mouth with a kiss. As he lifted her, set her on her feet, and led her inside, she was struck by the warmth of the sun on her shoulders and wondered, Was it ever so hot before? So strong? It’s cleared up every last blemish on my back… could it be the ultraviolet, I wonder, or the altitude? Is it this way every summer? Is it this hot?

And then he was doing things to her, even on the stairs he was doing things to her, making her naked, making her hot, making her love him.

“No, you sit down,” he said.

“But—”

“I mean it, Frannie.”

“Stuart, they’ll congeal or something. I put half a box of Tide in there—”

“Don’t worry.”

So she sat down in the lawn chair in the building’s shady overhang. He had set up two of them when they came back down. Stu took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pants past the knee. As he stepped into the washtub and began gravely to stomp up and down on the clothes, she began to giggle helplessly.

Stu looked over and said, “You want to spend the night on the couch?”

“No, Stuart,” she said with grave repentance, and then began to giggle again… until tears ran down her cheeks and the little muscles in her stomach felt rubbery and weak. When she had some control again she said, “For the third and last time, what did you come back to talk about?”

“Oh yeah.” He marched back and forth, and by now he had worked up quite a bed of lather. A pair of bluejeans floated to the surface and he stomped them back down, sending a creamy squirt of soapsuds onto the lawn. Frannie thought: It looks a little like… oh no, away with that, away with that unless you want to laugh yourself into a miscarriage.

“We’ve got that first ad hoc meeting tonight,” Stu said.

“I’ve got two cases of beer, cheese crackers, cheese spread, some pepperoni that should still be—”

“That’s not it, Frannie. Dick Ellis came by today and said he wanted off the committee.”

“He did?” She was surprised. Dick had not impressed her as the sort of man who would back away from responsibility.

“He said he’d be glad to serve in any capacity as soon as we get ourselves a real doctor, but just now he can’t. We had another twenty-five come in today, and one of them had a gangrenous leg. Came from a scratch she got crawling under a rusty bobwire fence, apparently.”

“Oh, that’s bad.”

“Dick saved her… Dick and that nurse that came in with Underwood. Tall, pretty girl. Laurie Constable, her name is. Dick said he just would have lost the woman without her. Anyway, they took her leg off at the knee, and they’re both exhausted. It took em three hours. Plus they’ve got a little boy with convulsive fits, and Dick’s driving himself crazy trying to figure out if it’s epilepsy or cranial pressure of some kind or maybe diabetes. They’ve had several cases of food poisoning from people eating stuff that’s gone over, and he says some people are going to die of it if we don’t get out a flier real soon telling people how to pick their supplies. Let’s see, where was I? Two broken arms, one case of the flu—”

“My God! Did you say flu?”

“Ease up. It’s the regular flu. Aspirin knocks down the fever no sweat… and it doesn’t come back up. No black patches on the neck, either. But Dick isn’t sure which antibiotics to use, if any, and he’s burning the midnight oil trying to find out. Also, he’s scared the flu will spread and people will panic.”

“Who is it?”

“A lady named Rona Hewett. She walked most of the way here from Laramie, Wyoming, and Dick says she was ripe for a bug.”

Fran nodded.

“Lucky for us, this Laurie Constable seems sort of stuck on Dick, even though he’s about twice her age. I guess that’s all right.”

“How big of you to give them your seal of approval, Stuart.”

He smiled. “Anyhow, Dick’s forty-eight and he’s got a minor heart condition. Right now he feels that he can’t spread himself too thin… he’s practically studying to be a doctor, for the Lord’s sake.” He looked soberly at Fran. “I can understand why that Laurie fell for him. He’s the closest thing to a hero we’ve got around here. He’s just a country, vet and he’s scared shitless he’s going to kill someone. And he knows there are more people coming in every day, and some of them have been banged around.”

“So we need one more for the committee.”

“Yeah. Ralph Brentner’s gung-ho for this Larry Underwood guy, and from what you say, he struck you as being pretty handy.”

“Yes. He did. I think he’d be fine. And I met his lady today downtown. Lucy Swann, her name is. She’s awfully sweet, and she thinks the world of Larry.”

“I guess every good woman feels that way. But, Frannie, I got to be honest with you—I don’t like the way he spilled his life’s story to someone he just met.”

“I think it was just because I was with Harold from the start. I don’t think he understood why I was with you instead of him.”

“I wonder what he made of Harold?”

“Ask him and see.”

“I guess I will.”

“Are you going to invite him onto the committee?”

“More likely than not.” He stood up. “I’d like to have that old fellow they call the Judge. But he’s seventy, and that’s too damn old.”

“Have you talked to him about Larry?”

“No, but Nick did. Nick Andros is one sharp guy, Fran. He changed a few things around on Glen and I. Glen was a little bent out of shape about it, but even he had to admit Nick’s ideas were good ones. Anyway, the Judge told Nick that Larry’s just the kind of person we’re looking for. He said Larry was just getting around to finding out he was good for something, and that he was going to get a lot better.”

“I’d call that a pretty strong recommendation.”

“Yes,” Stu said. “But I’m going to find out what he thought of Harold before I invite him along for the ride.”

“What is it about Harold?” she asked restlessly.

“Might as well ask what it is about you, Fran. You still feel responsible for him.”

“Do I? I don’t know. But when I think about him, I still feel a little guilty—I can tell you that.”

“Why? Because I cut in on him? Fran, did you ever want him?”

“No. God, no.” She almost shuddered.

“I lied to him once,” Stu said. “Well… it wasn’t actually a lie. It was the day the three of us met. July Fourth. I think he might have sensed what was coming even then. I said I didn’t want you. How was I to know right then if I wanted you or not? There may be such a thing as love at first sight in books, but in real life…”

He stopped, and a slow grin spread across his face.

“What are you grinning about, Stuart Redman?”

“I was just thinkin,” he said, “that in real life it took me at least…” He rubbed his chin consideringly. “Oh, I’m gonna say four hours.”

She kissed his cheek. “That’s very sweet.”

“It’s the truth. Anyway, I think he still holds what I said against me.”

“He never says a mean word against you, Stu… or anybody.”

“No,” Stu agreed. “He smiles. That’s what I don’t like.”

“You don’t think he’s… plotting revenge, or anything?”

Stu smiled and stood up. “No, not Harold. Glen thinks the Opposition Party may just end up coming together around Harold. That’s okay. I just hope he doesn’t try to fuck up what we’re doing now.”

“Just remember that he’s scared and lonely.”

“And jealous.”

“Jealous?” She considered it, then shook her head. “I don’t think so—I really don’t. I’ve talked to him, and I think I’d know. He may be feeling rejected, though. I think he expected to be on the ad hoc committee—”

“That was one of Nick’s unilateral—is that the word?—decisions that we all went along with. What it came down to was that none of us quite trusted him.”

“In Ogunquit,” she said, “he was the most insufferable kid you could imagine. A lot of it was compensation for his family situation, I guess… to them it must have seemed like he had hatched from a cowbird egg or something… but after the flu, he seemed to change. At least to me, he did. He seemed to be trying to be, well… a man. Then he changed again. Like all at once. He started to smile all the time. You couldn’t really talk to him anymore. He was… in himself. The way people get when they convert to religion or read—” She stopped suddenly, and her eyes took on a momentary startled look that seemed very like fear.

“Read what?” Stu asked.

“Something that changes their lives,” she said. “Das Kapital. Mein Kampf. Or maybe just intercepted love letters.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hmm?” She looked around at him, as if startled out of a deep daydream. Then she smiled. “Nothing. Weren’t you going to go see Larry Underwood?”

“Sure… if you’re okay.”

“I’m better than okay—I’m ultimately fine. Go on. Shoo. Meeting’s at seven. If you hurry, you’ve got just enough time to get back here for some supper before.”

“All right.”

He was at the gate which separated the front yard from the back when she called after him: “Don’t forget to ask him what he thought of Harold.”

“Don’t worry,” Stu said, “I won’t.”

“And watch his eyes when he answers, Stuart.”

When Stu asked casually about his impression of Harold (at this point Stu had not mentioned the vacancy on the ad hoc committee at all), Larry Underwood’s eyes grew both wary and puzzled.

“Fran told you about my fixation on Harold, huh?”

“Yep.”

Larry and Stu were in the living room of a small Table Mesa tract house. Out in the kitchen Lucy was rattling dinner together, heating canned stuff on a brazier grill Larry had rigged for her. It ran off bottled gas. She was singing snatches of “Honky Tonk Women” as she worked, and she sounded very happy.

Stu lit a cigarette. He was down to no more than five or six a day; he didn’t fancy having Dick Ellis operating on him for lung cancer.

“Well, all the time I was following Harold I kept telling myself he probably wouldn’t be like I pictured him. And he wasn’t, but I’m still trying to figure out what it is about him. He was pleasant as hell. A good host. He cracked the bottle of wine I brought him and we toasted each other’s good health. I had a good time. But…”

“But?”

“We came up behind him. Leo and me. He was putting a brick wall around this flower garden and he whirled around… didn’t hear us coming until I spoke up, I guess… and for a minute there I’m saying to myself, ‘Holy God, this dude is gonna kill me.’”

Lucy came into the doorway. “Stu, can you stay for dinner? There’s plenty.”

“Thanks, but Frannie expects me back. I can only stay fifteen minutes or so.”

“Sure?”

“Next time, Lucy, thanks.”

“Okay.” She went back into the kitchen.

“Did you come just to ask about Harold?” Larry asked.

“No,” Stu said, coming to a decision. “I came to ask if you’d serve on our little ad hoc committee. One of the other guys, Dick Ellis, had to say no.”

“Like that, is it?” Larry went to the window and looked out on the silent street. “I thought I could go back to being a private again.”

“Your decision, of course. We need one more. You were recommended.”

“By who, if you don’t mind me—”

“We asked around. Frannie seems to think you’re pretty level. And Nick Andros talked—well, he doesn’t talk, but you know—to one of the men that came in with you. Judge Farris.”

Larry looked pleased. “The Judge gave me a recommendation, huh? That’s great. You know, you ought to have him. He’s smart as the devil.”

“That’s what Nick said. But he’s also seventy, and our medical facilities are pretty primitive.”

Larry turned to look at Stu, half smiling. “This committee isn’t quite as temporary as it looks on the face of it, is it?”

Stu smiled and relaxed a little. He still hadn’t really decided how he felt about Larry Underwood, but it was clear enough the man hadn’t fallen off a hayrick yesterday. “We-ell, let’s put it this way. We’d like to see our committee stand for election to a full term.”

“Preferably unopposed,” Larry said. His eyes on Stu were friendly but sharp—very sharp. “Can I get you a beer?”

“I better not. Had a few too many with Glen Bateman a couple nights ago. Fran’s a patient girl, but her patience only stretches so far. What do you say, Larry? Want to ride along?”

“I guess… oh hell, I say yes. I thought nothing in the world would make me happier than to get here and dump my people and let somebody else take over for a change. Instead, pardon my French, I’ve been just about bored out of my tits.”

“We’re having a little meeting tonight at my place to talk over the big meeting on the eighteenth. Think you could come?”

“Sure. Can I bring Lucy?”

Stu shook his head slowly. “Nor talk to her about it. We want to keep some of this stuff close for a while.”

Larry’s smile evaporated. “I’m not much on cloak-and-dagger, Stu. I better get that up front because it might save a hassle later. I think what happened in June happened because too many people were playing it a little too close. That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.”

“That’s one you don’t want to get into with Mother,” Stu said. He was still smiling, relaxed. “As it happens, I agree with you. But would you feel the same way if it was wartime?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“That man we dreamed about. I doubt if he’s just gone away.”

Larry looked startled, considering.

“Glen says he can understand why nobody’s talking about that,” Stu went on, “even though we’ve all been warned. The people here are still shellshocked. They feel like they’ve been through hell to get here. All they want to do is lick their wounds and bury their dead. But if Mother Abagail’s here, then he’s there.” Stu jerked his head toward the window, which gave on a view of the Flatirons rising in the high summer haze. “And most of the people here may not be thinking about him, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that he’s thinking about us.”

Larry glanced at the doorway to the kitchen, but Lucy had gone outside to talk to Jane Hovington from next door.

“You think he’s after us,” he said in a low voice. “That’s a nice thought to have just before dinner. Good for the appetite.”

“Larry, I’m not sure of anything, myself. But Mother Abagail says it won’t be over, one way or the other, until he’s got us or we’ve got him.”

“I hope she’s not saying that around. These people would be headed for fucking Australia.”

“Thought you didn’t hold much with secrets.”

“Yeah, but this—” Larry stopped. Stu was smiling kindly, and Larry smiled back, rather sourly. “Okay. Your point. We talk it out and keep our mouths shut.”

“Fine. See you at seven.”

“Sure thing.”

They walked to the door together. “Thank Lucy for the invite again,” Stu said. “Frannie and I’ll take her up on it before long.”

“Okay.” As Stu reached the door, Larry said, “Hey.”

Stu turned back, questioning.

“There’s a boy,” Larry said slowly, “that came across from Maine with us. His name is Leo Rockway. He’s had his problems. Lucy and I sort of share him with a woman named Nadine Cross. Nadine’s a little out of the ordinary herself, you know?”

Stu nodded. There had been some talk about a peculiar little scene between Mother Abagail and the Cross woman when Larry brought his party in.

“Nadine was taking care of Leo before I ran across them. Leo kind of sees into people. He’s not the only one, either. Maybe there were always people like that, but there seems to be a little bit more of it around since the flu. And Leo… he wouldn’t go into Harold’s house. Wouldn’t even stay on the lawn. That’s… sort of funny, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Stu agreed.

They looked at each other thoughtfully for a moment and then Stu left to go home and get his supper. Fran seemed preoccupied herself during the meal, and didn’t talk much. And while she was doing the last of the dishes in a plastic bucket full of warm water, people began arriving for the first meeting of the Free Zone Ad Hoc Committee.

After Stu had gone over to Larry’s, Frannie rushed upstairs to the bedroom. In the corner of the closet was the sleeping bag she had carried across the country strapped to the back of her motorcycle. She had kept her personal belongings in a small zipper bag. Most of these belongings were now distributed through the apartment she and Stu shared, but a few still hadn’t found a home and rested at the foot of the sleeping bag. There were several bottles of cleansing cream—she had suffered a sudden rash of skin outbreaks after the deaths of her mother and father, but that had now subsided—a box of Stayfree Mini Pads in case she started spotting (she had heard that pregnant women sometimes did), two boxes of cheap cigars, one marked IT’S A BOY! and the other marked IT’S A GIRL! The last item was her diary.

She drew it out and looked at it speculatively. She had entered in it only eight or nine times since their arrival in Boulder, and most of the entries had been short, almost elliptical. The great outpouring had come and gone while they were still on the road… like afterbirth, she thought a little ruefully. She hadn’t entered at all in the last four days, and suspected that the diary might eventually have slipped her mind altogether, although she had firmly intended to keep it more fully when things settled down a little. For the baby. Now, however, it was very much on her mind once more.

The way people get when they convert to religion… or read something that changes their lives… like intercepted love letters…

Suddenly it seemed to her that the book had gained weight, and that the very act of turning back the pasteboard cover would cause sweat to pop out on her brow and… and…

She suddenly looked back over her shoulder, her heart beating wildly. Had something moved in here?

A mouse, scuttering behind the wall, maybe. Surely no more than that. More likely just her imagination. There was no reason, no reason at all, for her to suddenly be thinking of the man in the black robe, the man with the coathanger. Her baby was alive and safe and this was just a book and anyhow there was no way to tell if a book had been read, and even if there was a way, there would be no way to tell if the person who had read it had been Harold Lauder.

Still, she opened the book and began to turn slowly through its pages, getting shutterclicks of the recent past like black-and-white photographs taken by an amateur. Home movie of the mind.

Tonight we were admiring them and Harold was going on about color & texture & tone and Stu gave me a very sober wink. Evil me, I winked back…

Harold will object on general principles, of course. Damn you, Harold, grow up!

… and I could see him getting ready with one of his Patented Harold Lauder Smartass Comments…

(my God, Fran, why did you ever say all those things about him? to what purpose?)

Well, you know Harold… his swagger… all those pompous words & pronouncements… an insecure little boy…

That was July 12. Wincing, she turned past it rapidly, fluttering through the pages now, in a hurry to get to the end. Phrases still leaped up, seeming to slap at her: Anyway, Harold smelled pretty clean for a change… Harold’s breath would have driven away a dragon tonight… And another, seeming almost prophetic: He stores up rebuffs like pirate treasure. But to what purpose? To feed his own feelings of secret superiority and persecution? Or was it a matter of retribution?

Oh, he’s making a list… and checking it twice… he’s gonna find out… who’s naughty and nice…

Then, on August 1, only two weeks ago. The entry started at the bottom of a page. No entry last night, I was too happy. Have I ever been this happy? I don’t think so. Stu and I are together. We

End of the page. She turned to the next one. The first words at the top of the page were made love twice. But they barely caught her eye before her glance dropped halfway down the page. There, beside some blathering about the maternal instinct, was something that caught her eyes and froze her almost solid.

It was a dark, smeary thumbprint.

She thought wildly: I was riding on a motorcycle all day long, every day. Sure, I took care to clean up every chance I got, but your hands get dirty and…

She put out her hand, not at all surprised to see that it was shaking badly. She put her thumb on the smudge. The smudge was a lot bigger.

Well, of course it is, she told herself. When you smear something around, it naturally gets bigger. That’s why, that’s all that is…

But this thumbprint wasn’t that smeared. The little lines and loops and whorls were still clear, for the most part.

And it wasn’t grease or oil, there was no use even kidding herself that it was.

It was dried chocolate.

Paydays, Fran thought sickly. Chocolate-covered Payday candy bars.

For a moment she was afraid to do so much as turn around—afraid that she might see Harold’s grin hanging over her shoulder like the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice. Harold’s thick lips moving as he said solemnly: Every dog has his day, Frannie. Every dog has his day.

But even if Harold had sneaked a glance into her diary, did it have to mean he was contemplating some secret vendetta against her or Stu or any of the others? Of course not.

But Harold’s changed, an interior voice whispered.

“Goddammit, he hasn’t changed that much!” she cried to the empty room. She flinched a little at the sound of her own voice, then laughed shakily. She went downstairs and began to get supper. They would be eating early because of the meeting… but suddenly the meeting didn’t seem as important as it had earlier.

Excerpts from the Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee Meeting

August 13, 1990

The meeting was held in the apartment of Stu Redman and Frances Goldsmith. All members of the ad hoc committee were present, those being: Stuart Redman, Frances Goldsmith, Nick Andros, Glen Bateman, Ralph Brentner, Susan Stern, and Larry Underwood…

Stu Redman was elected moderator of the meeting. Frances Goldsmith was elected recording secretary…

These notes (plus complete coverage of every burp, gurgle, and aside, all recorded on Memorex cassettes for anyone crazy enough to want to listen to them) will be placed in a safe-deposit box of the First Bank of Boulder…

Stu Redman presented a broadside on the subject of food poisoning written by Dick Ellis and Laurie Constable (eyecatchingly titled IF YOU EAT YOU SHOULD READ THIS!). He said Dick wanted to see it printed and nailed up all over Boulder before the big meeting on August 18, because there have already been fifteen cases of food poisoning in Boulder, two of them quite serious. The committee voted 7–0 that Ralph should duplicate a thousand copies of Dick’s poster and get ten people to help him put them up all over town…

Susan Stern then presented another item that Dick and Laurie wanted to put before the meeting (we all wished one or the other of them could have been here). They both feel that there must be a Burial Committee; Dick’s idea was that it should be put on the agenda of the public meeting and that it be presented not as a health hazard—because of the possibility it might cause panic—but as “the decent thing to do.” We all know there are surprisingly few corpses in Boulder in proportion to its pre-plague population, but we don’t know why… not that it matters much now. But there are still thousands of dead bodies and they must be gotten rid of if we intend to stay here.

Stu asked how serious the problem was at present and Sue said she thought it would not become really serious until fall, when the dry, hot weather usually turns damp.

Larry made a motion that we add Dick’s suggestion that a Burial Committee be formed to the agenda of the August 18 meeting. A motion was carried, 7–0.

Nick Andros was then recognized, and Ralph Brentner read his prepared comments, which I am here quoting verbatim:

“One of the most important questions this committee must deal with is whether or not it will agree to take Mother Abagail into its complete confidence, and shall she be told about everything that goes on at our meetings, both open and closed? The question can also be put the other way: ‘Shall Mother Abagail agree to take this committee—and the permanent committee that will follow it—into her complete confidence, and shall the committee be told about all that goes on in her meetings with God or Whoever… particularly the closed ones?’

“That may sound like gibberish, but let me explain, be cause it’s really a pragmatic question. We have to settle Mother Abagail’s place in the community right away, be cause our problem is not just one of ‘getting on our feet again.’ If that was all, we wouldn’t really need her in the first place. As we all know there is another problem, that of the man we sometimes call the dark man, or as Glen puts it, the Adversary. My proof for his existence is very simple, and I think most people in Boulder would agree with my reasoning—if they wanted to think of it at all. Here it is: ‘I dreamed of Mother Abagail and she was; I dreamed of the dark man and therefore he must be, although I have never seen him.’ The people here love Mother Abagail, and I love her myself. But we won’t get far—in fact, we won’t get anywhere—if we don’t start off with her approval of what we’re doing.

“So this early afternoon I went to see the lady and put the question to her directly, with all the bark on it: Will you go along? She said that she would—but not without conditions. She was perfectly blunt. She said we should be perfectly free to guide the community in all ‘worldly matters’—her phrase. Clearing the streets, allocating housing, getting the power back on.

“But she was also very clear about wanting to be consulted on all matters that have to do with the dark man. She believes we are all a part of a chess game between God and Satan; that Satan’s chief agent in this game is the Adversary, whose name she says is Randall Flagg (‘the name he’s using this time,’ is how she puts it); that for reasons best known to Himself, God has chosen her as His agent in this matter. She believes, and in this I happen to agree with her, that a struggle is coming and it’s going to be us or him. She thinks this struggle is the most important thing, and she’s adamant about being consulted when our deliberations touch on it… and on him.

“Now I don’t want to get into the religious implications of all—this, or argue whether she’s right or wrong, but it should be obvious that all implications aside, we have a situation we must cope with. So I have a series of motions.”

There was some discussion of Nick’s statement.

Nick made this motion: Can we, as a committee, agree not to discuss the theological, religious, or supernatural implications of the Adversary matter during our meetings? By a 7–0 vote, the committee agreed to bar discussion on those matters, at least while we’re “in session.”

Nick then made this motion: Can we agree that the main private, secret business of the committee is the question of how to deal with this force known as the dark man, the Adversary, or Randall Flagg? Glen Bateman seconded the motion, adding that from time to time there might be other business—such as the real reason for the Burial Committee—that we should keep close to the vest. The motion carried, 7–0.

Nick then made his original motion, that we keep Mother Abagail informed of all public and private business transacted by the committee.

That motion was passed, 7–0.

Having disposed of the Mother Abagail business for the time being, the committee then moved on to the question of the dark man himself at Nick’s request. He proposed that we send three volunteers west to join the dark man’s people, the purpose being to gain intelligence about what’s really going on over there.

Sue Stern immediately volunteered. After some hot discussion of that, Glen Bateman was recognized by Stu and put this motion on the floor: Resolved, that no one from our ad hoc committee or from the permanent committee be eligible to volunteer for this reconnaissance. Sue Stern wanted to know why not.

Glen: “Everyone respects your honest desire to help, Susan, but the fact is, we simply don’t know if the people we send will ever come back, or when, or in what shape. In the meantime, we have the not-so-inconsiderable job of getting things in Boulder back on a paying basis, if you’ll pardon the slang. If you go, we’ll have to fill your seat with someone new who would have to be briefed on the ground we’ve already covered. I just don’t think we can afford all that lost time.”

Sue: “I suppose you’re right… or at least being sensible… but I do wonder sometimes if those two things are always the same. Or even usually the same. What you’re really saying is that we can’t send anyone from the committee because we’re all so fucking inexpendable. So we just… just… I don’t know…”

Stu: “Lay back in the buckwheat?”

Sue: “Yes. Thank you. That’s just what I mean. We lay back in the buckwheat and send somebody over there, maybe to get crucified on a telephone pole, maybe something even worse.”

Ralph: “What the hell could be worse?”

Sue: “I don’t know, but if anyone does know, it will be Flagg. I just hate it.”

Glen: “You may hate it, but you’ve stated our position very succinctly. We’re politicians here. The first politicians of the new age. We just have to hope that our cause is more just than some of the causes for which politicians have sent people into life-or-death situations before this.”

Sue: “I never thought I’d be a politician.”

Larry: “Welcome to the club.”

Glen’s motion that no one from the ad hoc committee should be one of the scouts was carried—gloomily—by a 7–0 vote. Fran Goldsmith then asked Nick what sort of qualifications we should look for in prospective undercover agents, and what we should expect them to find out.

Nick: “We won’t know what there is to be learned until they come back. If they do come back. The point is, we have absolutely no idea what he’s up to over there. We’re more or less like fishermen using human bait.”

Stu said he thought the committee should pick the people it wanted to ask, and there was general agreement on this. By committee vote, most of the discussion from this point on has been transcribed into these excerpts verbatim from the audio tapes. It seemed important to have a permanent record of our deliberations on the matter of the scouts (or spies), because it turned out to be so delicate and so troubling.

Larry: “I’ve got a name I’d like to put into nomination, if I could. I suppose it’ll sound off the wall to those of you who don’t know him, but it might be a really good idea. I’d like to send Judge Farris.”

Sue: “What, that old man? Larry, you must be nuts!”

Larry: “He’s the sharpest old guy I’ve ever met. He’s only seventy, for the record. Ronald Reagan was serving as President at an older age than that.”

Fran: “That’s not what I’d call a very strong recommendation.”

Larry: “But he’s hale and hearty. And I think the dark man might not suspect we’d send an old crock like Farris to spy on him… and we have to take his suspicions into account, you know. He’s got to, be looking for a move like this, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he had border guards checking people coming in over there against a potential ‘spy profile.’ And—this will sound brutal, I know, especially to Fran—but if we lose him, we haven’t lost somebody with fifty good years in front of him.”

Fran: “You’re right. It sounds brutal.”

Larry: “All I want to add is that I know the Judge would say okay. He really wants to help. And I really think he could carry it off.”

Glen: “A point well taken. What does anybody else think?”

Ralph: “I’ll go either way, because I don’t know the gentleman. But I don’t think we should throw the guy out just because he’s old. After all, look who’s in charge of this place—an old lady who’s well over a hundred.”

Glen: “Another point well taken.”

Stu: “You sound like a tennis ref, baldy.”

Sue: “Listen, Larry. What if he fools the dark man and then drops dead of a heart attack while he’s busting his hump to get back here?”

Stu: “That could happen to just about anyone. Or an accident.”

Sue: “I agree… but with an old man, the odds go way up.”

Larry: “That’s true, but you don’t know the Judge, Sue. If you did, you’d see that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. He’s really smart. Defense rests.”

Stu: “I think Larry’s right. It’s the sort of thing Flagg might not expect. I second the motion. Those in favor?”

Committee voted aye, 7–0.

Sue: “Well, I went along with yours, Larry—maybe you’ll go along with mine.”

Larry: “Yeah, this is politics, all right. note 8 Who is it?”

Sue: “Dayna.”

Ralph: “Dayna who?”

Sue: “Dayna Jurgens. She’s got more guts than any woman I ever knew. Of course, I know she isn’t seventy, but I think if we put the idea to her, she’d go along.”

Fran: “Yes—if we really have to do this, I think she’d be good. I second the nomination.”

Stu: “Okay—it’s been moved and seconded that we ask Dayna Jurgens along for the ride. Those in favor?”

Committee voted aye, 7–0.

Glen: “Okay—who’s number three?”

Nick (read by Ralph): “If Fran disliked Larry’s, I’m afraid she’s really going to dislike mine. I nominate—”

Ralph: “Nick, you’re crazy! You don’t mean it!”

Stu: “Come on, Ralph, just read it.”

Ralph: “Well… it says here he wants to nominate… Tom Cullen.”

Uproar from the committee.

Stu: “Okay. Nick has the floor. He’s been writin like a bastard, so you better read it, Ralph.”

Nick: “First of all, I know Tom just as well as Larry knows the Judge, and probably better. He loves Mother Abagail. He’d do anything for her, including roasting over a slow fire. I really mean that—no hype. He’d set himself on fire for her, if she asked him to.”

Fran: “Oh, Nick, nobody’s arguing that, but Tom is—”

Stu: “Let it go, Fran—Nick’s got the floor.”

Nick: “My second point is the same one Larry made about the Judge. The Adversary is not going to expect us to send a retarded person as a spy. Your combined reactions to the idea are maybe the best argument in favor of the idea.

“My third—and last—point is that, while Tom may be retarded, he is not a halfwit. He saved my life once when a tornado came, and he reacted much faster than anyone else I know would have done. Tom is childish, but even a child can learn to do certain things if he is drilled and taught and then drilled some more. I see no problem at all in giving Tom a very simple story to memorize. In the end, they’ll likely assume that we sent him away because—”

Sue: “Because we didn’t want him polluting our gene-pool? Say, that’s good.”

Nick: “—because he is retarded. He can even say he’s mad at the people who sent him away and would like to get back at them. The one imperative which would have to be drilled into him would be to never change his story, no matter what.”

Fran: “Oh, no, I can’t believe—”

Stu: “Come on, Nick has the floor. Let’s keep it orderly.”

Fran: “Yes—I’m sorry.”

Nick: “Some of you may feel that, because Tom is retarded, it would be easier to shake him from his story than it would be someone with a wider intelligence, but—”

Larry: “Yeah.”

Nick: “—but actually, the reverse is true. If I tell Tom he simply must stick to the story I give him, stick to it no matter what, he will. A so-called normal person could only stand up to so many hours of water torture or so many electric shocks or splinters under the fingernails—”

Fran: “It wouldn’t come to that, would it? Would it? I mean, nobody really thinks it would come to that, do they?”

Nick: “—before saying, ‘Okay, I give up. I’ll tell you what I know.’ Tom simply won’t do that. If he goes over his story enough times, he won’t just have it by heart; he’ll come to almost believe it is true. Nobody will be able to shake him on it. I just want to make it clear that I think, in a number of ways, Tom’s retardation is actually a plus in a mission like this. ‘Mission’ sounds like a pretentious word, but that’s just what it is.”

Stu: “Is that it, Ralph?”

Ralph: “There’s a little more.”

Sue: “If he actually starts to live his cover story, Nick, how in the hell will he know when it’s time to come back?”

Ralph: “Pardon me, ma’am, but it looks like that’s what some of this is about.”

Sue: “Oh.”

Nick (read by Ralph): “Tom can be given a post-hypnotic suggestion before we send him out. Again, this is not just blue-skying; when I had this idea, I asked Stan Nogotny if he would try to hypnotize Tom. Stan used to do it as a parlor trick at parties sometimes, I heard him say. Well, Stan didn’t think it would work… but Tom went under in about six seconds.”

Stu: “I’ll be. Ole Stan knows how to do that, huh?”

Nick: “The reason I thought Tom might be ultra-susceptible dates back to when I met him in Oklahoma. He’s apparently developed the knack, over a long period of years, of hypnotizing himself to a degree. It helps him make connections. He couldn’t understand what I was up to on the day I met him—why I didn’t talk to him or answer any of his questions. I kept putting my hand on my mouth and then my throat to show I was mute, but he didn’t get it at all. Then, all at once, he just turned off. I can’t explain it any better than that. He became perfectly still. His eyes went far away. Then he came out of it, exactly the way a subject comes out of it when the hypnotist tells him it’s time to wake up. And he knew. Just like that. He went into himself and came up with the answer.”

Glen: “That’s really amazing.”

Stu: “It sure is.”

Nick: “I had Stan give him a post-hypnotic suggestion when we tried this, about five days ago now. The suggestion was that when Stan said, ‘I sure would like to see an elephant,’ Tom would feel a great urge to go into the corner and stand on his head. Stan sprang it on him about half an hour after he woke Tom up, and Tom hustled right over into the corner and stood on his head. All the toys and marbles fell out of his pants pockets. Then he sat down and grinned at us and said, ‘Now I wonder why Tom Cullen went and did that?’”

Glen: “I can just hear him, too.”

Nick: “Anyway, all this elaborate hypnosis stuff is just an introduction to two very simple points. One, we can plant a post-hypnotic suggestion that Tom return at a certain time. The obvious way would be to do this by the moon. The full moon. Two, by putting him into deep hypnosis when he gets back, we’d get almost perfect recall of everything he saw.”

Ralph: “That’s the end of what Nick’s got written down. Wow.”

Larry: “It sounds like that old movie The Manchurian Candidate to me.”

Stu: “What?”

Larry: “Nothing.”

Sue: “I have a question, Nick. Would you also program Tom—I guess that’s the right word—not to give out any information about what we’re doing?”

Glen: “Nick, let me answer that, and if your reasoning is different, just shake your head. I would say that Tom doesn’t need to be programmed at all. Let him spill anything and everything he knows about us. We’re keeping our business as it relates to Flagg in camera anyway, and we’re not doing much else that he couldn’t guess on his own… even if his crystal ball is on the blink.”

Nick: “Exactly.”

Glen: “Okay—I’m going to second Nick’s motion right on the spot. I think we have everything to win and nothing to lose. It’s a tremendously daring and original idea.”

Stu: “It’s been moved and seconded. We can have a little further discussion if you want, but only a little. We’ll be here all night, if we don’t look lively. Is there any further discussion?”

Fran: “You bet there is. You said we have everything to win and nothing to lose, Glen. Well, what about Tom? What about our own goddam souls? Maybe it doesn’t bother you guys to think about people sticking… things… under Tom’s fingernails and giving him electric shocks, but it bothers me. How can you be so cold-blooded? And Nick, hypnotizing him so he’d behave like a… a chicken with its head stuck in a bag! You ought to be ashamed! I thought he was your friend!”

Stu: “Fran—”

Fran: “No, I’m going to have my say. I won’t wash my hands of the committee or even walk off in a huff if I’m voted down, but I’m going to have my say. Do you really want to take that sweet, foggy boy and turn him into a human U-2 plane? Don’t any of you understand that’s the same as starting all the old shit over again? Can’t you see that? What do we do if they kill him, Nick? What do we do if they kill all of them? Breed up some new bugs? An improved version of Captain Trips?”

There was a pause here while Nick wrote out a response.

Nick (read by Ralph): “The things Fran has, brought up have affected me pretty deeply, but I stand by my nomination. No, I don’t feel good about standing Tom on his head, and I don’t feel good about sending him into a situation where he might be tortured and then killed. I’ll only point out again that he would be doing it for Mother Abagail, and her ideas, and her God, not for us. I also truly believe that we have to use any means at our disposal to end the threat this being poses. He’s crucifying people over there. I’m sure of that from my dreams, and I know some of you others have had that dream, too. Mother Abagail has had it herself. And I know that Flagg is evil. If anyone works up a new strain of Captain Trips, Frannie, it will be him, to use on us. I’d like to stop him while we still can.”

Fran: “Those things are all true, Nick. I can’t argue them. I know he’s bad. For all I know, he may be Satan’s Imp, as Mother Abagail says. But we’re putting our hand to the same switch in order to stop him. Remember Animal Farm? ‘They looked from the pigs to the men, and could not tell the difference.’ I guess what I really want to hear you say—even if it’s Ralph who reads it—is that if we do have to pull that switch in order to stop him… if we do … that we’ll be able to let go once it’s over. Can you say that?”

Nick: “Not for sure, I guess. Not for sure.”

Fran: “Then I vote no. If we must send people into the West, let’s at least send people who know what they are in for.”

Stu: “Anyone else?”

Sue: “I’m against it, too, but for more practical reasons. If we go on the way we’re headed, we’re going to end up with an old man and a feeb. Pardon the expression, I like him too, but that’s what he is. I’m against it, and now I’ll shut up.”

Glen: “Call the question, Stu.”

Stu: “Okay. Let’s go around the table. I vote aye. Frannie?”

Fran: “Nay.”

Stu: “Glen?”

Glen: “Aye.”

Stu: “Suze?”

Sue: “Nay.”

Stu: “Nick?”

Nick: “Aye.”

Stu: “Ralph?”

Ralph: “Well—I don’t like it that much either, but if Nick’s for it, I got to go along. Aye.”

Stu: “Larry?”

Larry: “Want me to be frank? I think the idea sucks so bad I feel like a pay toilet. This is the kind of stuff you get when you’re at the top, I guess. Neat fucking place to be. I vote aye.”

Stu: “Motion’s carried, 5–2.”

Fran: “Stu?”

Stu: “Yes?”

Fran: “I’d like to change my vote. If we’re really going to put Tom into it, we better do it together. I’m sorry I made such a fuss, Nick. I know it hurts you—I can see it on your face. It’s so crazy! Why did any of this have to happen? It sure isn’t like being on the sorority prom committee, I’ll tell you that. Frannie votes aye.”

Sue: “Me too, then. United front. Nixon Stands Firm, Says I Am Not a Crook. Aye.”

Stu: “Amended vote is 7–0. Here’s a hanky, Fran. And I’d like the record to show that I love you.”

Larry: “On that note, I think we should adjourn.”

Sue: “I second that emotion.”

Stu: “It has been moved and seconded by Zippy and Zippy’s mom that we adjourn. Those in favor, raise your hands. Those opposed, be prepared to get a can of beer dumped on your head.”

The vote to adjourn was 7–0.

“Coming to bed, Stu?”

“Yeah. Is it late?”

“Almost midnight. Late enough.”

Stu came in from the balcony. He was wearing jockey shorts and nothing else; their whiteness was nearly dazzling against his tanned skin. Frannie, propped up in bed with a Coleman gas lantern on the night table next to her, found herself amazed again by the confident depth of her love for him.

“Thinking about the meeting?”

“Yes. I was.” He poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the night table and grimaced at the flat, boiled taste.

“I thought you made a wonderful moderator. Glen asked you if you’d do it at the public meeting, didn’t he? Is it bothering you? Did you decline?”

“No, I said I would. I guess I can do that. I was thinking about sending those three across the mountains. It’s a dirty business, sending out spies. You were right, Frannie. Only trouble is, Nick was right, too. In a case like that, what you gonna do?”

“Vote your conscience and then get the best night’s sleep you can, I guess.” She reached out to touch the Coleman lamp switch. “Ready for the light?”

“Yeah.” She put it out and he swung into bed beside her. “Good night, Frannie,” he said. “I love you.”

She lay looking at the ceiling. She had made her peace with Tom Cullen… but that smudged chocolate thumbprint stayed on her mind.

Every dog has its day, Fran.

Maybe I ought to tell Stu right now, she thought. But if there was a problem, it was her problem. She would just have to wait… watch… and see if anything happened.

It was a long time before she slept.

Chapter 52

In the early hours of the morning, Mother Abagail lay sleepless in her bed. She was trying to pray.

She got up without making a light and knelt down in her white cotton nightgown. She pressed her forehead to her Bible, which was open to the Acts of the Apostles. The conversion of dour old Saul on the Damascus road. He had been blinded by the light, and on the Damascus road the scales had fallen from his eyes. Acts was the last book in the Bible where doctrine was backed up by miracles, and what were miracles but the divine hand of God at work upon the earth?

And oh, there were scales on her eyes and would they ever be shaken free?

The only sounds in the room were the faint hiss of the oil lamp, the tick of her windup Westclox, and her low, muttering voice.

“Show me my sin, Lord. I don’t know. I know I’ve gone and missed something You meant for me to see. I can’t sleep, I can’t take a crap, and I don’t feel You, Lord. I feel like I’m prayin into a dead phone, and this is a bad time for that to happen. How have I offended Thee? I’m listenin, Lord. Listenin for the still, small voice in my heart.”

And she did listen. She put her arthritis-bunched fingers over her eyes and leaned forward even farther and tried to clear her mind. But all was dark there, dark like her skin, dark like the fallow earth that waits for the good seed.

Please my Lord, my Lord, please my Lord —

But the image that rose was of a lonely stretch of dirt road in a sea of corn. There was a woman with a gunnysack full of freshly killed chickens. And the weasels came. They darted forward and made snatches at the bag. They could smell the blood—the old blood of sin and the fresh blood of sacrifice. She heard the old woman raise her voice to God, but her tone was weak and whining, a petulant voice, not begging humbly that God’s will be done, whatever her place in that will’s scheme of things might be, but demanding that God save her so she could finish the work… her work… as if she knew the Mind of God and could suborn His will to hers. The weasels grew bolder still; the croker sack began to fray as they twitched and pulled it. Her fingers were too old, too weak. And when the chickens were gone the weasels would still be hungry and they would come for her. Yes. They would—

And then the weasels were scattering, they had run squeaking into the night, leaving the contents of the sack half-devoured, and she thought exultantly: God has saved me after all! Praise His Name! God has saved His good and faithful servant.

Not God, old woman. Me.

In her vision, she turned, fear leaping hotly into her throat with a taste like fresh copper. And there, shouldering its way out of the corn like a ragged silver ghost, was a huge Rocky Mountain timberwolf, its jaws hanging open in a sardonic grin, its eyes burning. There was a beaten silver collar around its thick neck, a thing of handsome, barbarous beauty, and from it dangled a small stone of blackest jet… and in the center was a small red flaw, like an eye. Or a key.

She crossed herself and forked the sign of the evil eye at this dreadful apparition, but its jaws only grinned wider, and between them lolled the naked pink muscle of its tongue.

I’m coming for you, Mother. Not now, but soon. We’ll run you like dogs run deer, I am all the things you think, but I’m more. I’m the magic man. I’m the man who speaks for the latter age. Your own people know me best, Mother. They call me John the Conqueror.

Go! Lave me in the name of the Lord God Almighty!

But she was so terrified! Not for the people around her, which were represented in her dream by the chickens in the sack, but for herself. She was afraid in her soul, afraid for her soul.

Your God has no power over me, Mother. His vessel is weak.

No! Not true! My strength is the strength of ten, I shall mount up with wings as eagles —

But the wolf only grinned and drew closer. She shrank from its breath, which was heavy and savage. This was the terror at noonday and the terror which flieth at midnight, and she was afraid. She was in her extremity of fear. And the wolf, still grinning, began to speak in two voices, asking and then answering itself.

“Who brought water from the rock when we were thirsty? ”

“I did,” the wolf answered in a petulant, half-crowing, half-cowering voice.

“Who saved us when we did faint? ” asked the grinning wolf, its muzzle now only bare inches from her, its breath that of a living abattoir.

“I did,” the wolf whined, drawing closer still, its grinning muzzle full of sharp death, its eyes red and haughty. “Oh fall down and praise my name, I am the bringer of water in the desert, praise my name, I am the good and faithful servant who brings water in the desert, and my name is also the name of my Master —”

The mouth of the wolf opened wide to swallow her.

“… my name,” she muttered. “Praise my name, praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise Him ye creatures here below…”

She raised her head and looked around the room in a kind of stupor. Her Bible had fallen to the floor. There was dawnlight in the eastward-facing window.

“O my Lord!” she cried in a great and quavering voice.

Who brought water from the rock when we were thirsty?

Was that it? Dear God, was that it? Was that why the scales had covered her eyes, making her blind to the things she should know?

Bitter tears began to fall from her eyes and she got slowly and painfully to her feet and walked to the window. Arthritis jabbed blunt darning needles into the joints of her hips and knees.

She looked out and knew what she had to do now.

She went back to the closet and pulled the white cotton nightgown over her head. She dropped it on the floor. Now she stood naked, revealing a body so lapped with wrinkles that it might have been the bed of time’s great river.

“Thy will be done,” she said, and began to dress.

An hour later she was walking slowly west on Mapleton Avenue toward the wooded tangles and narrow-throated defiles beyond town.

Stu was at the power plant with Nick when Glen burst in. Without preamble he said, “Mother Abagail. She’s gone.”

Nick looked at him sharply.

“What are you talking about?” Stu asked, at the same time drawing Glen away from the crew wrapping copper wire on one of the blown turbines.

Glen nodded. He had ridden a bike the five miles out here, and he was still trying to catch his breath.

“I went over to tell her a little about the meeting last night, and to play her the tape, if she wanted to hear it. I wanted her to know about Tom, because I was uneasy about the whole idea… what Frannie had to say kind of worked on me in the wee hours, I guess. I wanted to do it early because Ralph said there’s another two parties coming in today and you know she likes to greet them. I went over around eight-thirty. She didn’t answer my knock, so I went on in. I thought if she was asleep I’d just leave… but I wanted to make sure she wasn’t… wasn’t dead or anything… she’s so old.”

Nick’s gaze never left Glen’s lips.

“But she wasn’t there at all. And I found this on her pillow.” He handed them a paper towel. Written on it in large and trembling strokes was this message:

I must be gone a bit now. I’ve sinned and presumed to know the Mind of God. My sin has been PRIDE, and He wants me to find my place in His work again.

I will be with you again soon if it is God’s will.

Abby Freemantle

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Stu said. “What do we do now? What do you think, Nick?”

Nick took the note and read it again. He handed it back to Glen. The fierceness had died out of his face and he only looked sad.

“I guess we’ll have to move up that meeting to tonight,” Glen said.

Nick shook his head. He took out his pad, wrote, tore it off, and handed it to Glen. Stu read it over his shoulder.

“Man proposes, God disposes. Mother A. was fond of that one, used to quote it frequently. Glen, you yourself said she was other-directed; God or her own mind or her delusions or whatever. What’s to coo? She’s gone. We can’t change it.”

“But the uproar—” Stu began.

“Sure, there’s going to be an uproar,” Glen said. “Nick, shouldn’t we at least have a meeting of the committee and discuss it?”

Nick jotted, “What purpose? Why have a meeting that can’t accomplish anything?”

“Well, we could get up a search-party. She can’t have gone far.”

Nick double-circled the phrase Man proposes, God disposes. Below it he wrote, “If you found her, how would you bring her back? Chains?”

“Jesus, no!” Stu exclaimed. “But we can’t just let her wander around, Nick! She’s got some crazy idea she’s offended God. What if she feels like she has to go off into the frigging wilderness, like some Old Testament guy?”

Nick wrote, “I’m almost positive that’s just what she’s done.”

“Well, there you go!”

Glen put a hand on Stu’s arm. “Slow down a minute, East Texas. Let’s look at the implications of this.”

“To hell with the implications! I don’t see no implications in leaving an old woman to wander around day n night until she dies of exposure!”

“She is not just any old woman. She is Mother Abagail and around here she’s the Pope. If the Pope decides he has to walk to Jerusalem, do you argue with him if you’re a good Catholic?”

“Goddammit, it’s not the same thing and you know it!”

“Yes, it is the same thing. It is. At least, that’s how the people in the Free Zone are going to see it. Stu, are you prepared to say for sure that God didn’t tell her to go out into the bushes?”

“No-oo… but…”

Nick had been writing and now he showed the paper to Stu, who had to puzzle out some of the words. Nick’s handwriting was usually impeccable, but this was hurried, perhaps impatient.

“Stu, this changes nothing, except that it will probably hurt the Free Zone’s morale. Not even sure that will happen. People aren’t going to scatter just because she’s gone. It does mean we won’t have to clear our plans with her right now. Maybe that’s best.”

“I’m going crazy,” Stu said. “Sometimes we talk about her as an obstacle to get around, like she was a roadblock. Sometimes you talk about her like she was the Pope, and she couldn’t do anything wrong if she wanted to. And it just so happens that I like her. What do you want, Nicky? Someone stumbling over her body this fall in one of those box canyons west of town? You want us to leave her out there so she can make a… a holy meal for the crows?”

“Stu,” Glen said gently. “It was her decision to go.”

“Oh, god-damn, what a mess,” Stu said.

By noon, the news of Mother Abagail’s disappearance had swept the community. As Nick had predicted, the general feeling was more one of unhappy resignation than alarm. The sense of the community was that she must have gone off to “pray for guidance,” so she could help them pick the right path to follow at the mass meeting on the eighteenth.

“I don’t want to blaspheme by calling her God,” Glen said over a scratch lunch in the park, “but she is a sort of God-by-proxy. You can measure the strength of any society’s faith by seeing how much that faith weakens when its empiric object is removed.”

“Run that one by me again.”

“When Moses smashed the golden calf, the Israelites stopped worshipping it. When a flood inundated the temple of Baal, the Malachites decided Baal wasn’t such a hot god anyway. But Jesus has been out to lunch for two thousand years, and people not only still follow his teachings, they live and die believing he’ll come back eventually, and it will be business as usual when he does. That’s the way the Free Zone feels about Mother Abagail. These people are perfectly certain she is going to come back. Have you talked to them?”

“Yeah,” Stu said. “I can’t believe it. There’s an old woman wandering around out there and everyone says ho-hum, I wonder if she’ll bring back the Ten Commandments on stone tablets in time for the meeting.”

“Maybe she will,” Glen said somberly. “Anyway, not everyone is saying ho-hum. Ralph Brentner is practically tearing his hair out by the roots.”

“Good for Ralph.” He looked at Glen closely. “What about you, baldy? Where are you in all of this?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that. It’s not at all dignified. But I’ll tell you… it’s a little bit funny. Ole East Texas turns out to be a lot more immune from the Godspell she’s cast over this community than the agnostic old bear sociologist. I think she’ll be back. Somehow I just do. What does Frannie think?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her at all this morning. For all I know she’s out there eating locusts and wild honey with Mother Abagail.” He stared at the Flatirons, rising high in the blue haze of early afternoon. “Jesus, Glen, I hope that old lady is all right.”

Fran didn’t even know Mother Abagail was gone. She had spent the morning at the library, reading up on gardening. Nor was she the only student. She saw two or three people with books on farming, a bespectacled young man of about twenty-five poring over a book called Seven Independent Power Sources for Your Home, and a pretty blond girl of about fourteen with a battered paperback titled 600 Simple Recipes.

She left the library around noon and strolled down to Walnut Street. She was halfway home when she met Shirley Hammett, the older woman that had been traveling with Dayna, Susan, and Patty Kroger. Shirley had improved strikingly since then. Now she looked like a brisk and pretty matron-about-town.

She stopped and greeted Fran. “When do you think she’ll be back? I’ve been asking everybody. If this town had a newspaper, I’d write it up for the People Poll. Like, ‘What do you think of Senator Bunghole’s stand on oil depletion?’ That sort of thing.”

“When will who be back?”

“Mother Abagail, of course. Where have you been, girl, cold storage?”

“What is all this?” Frannie asked, alarmed. “What’s happened?”

“That’s just it. Nobody really knows.” And Shirley told Fran what had been going on while Fran had been at the library.

“She just… left?” Frannie asked, frowning.

“Yes. Of course she’ll be back,” Shirley added confidently. “The note said so.”

“ ‘If it is God’s will?’”

“That’s just a manner of speaking, I’m sure,” Shirley said, and looked at Fran with a touch of coldness.

“Well… I hope so. Thanks for telling me, Shirley. Are you still having headaches?”

“Oh no. They’re all gone now. I’ll be voting for you, Fran.”

“Hmmm?” Her mind was far away, chasing this new information, and for a moment she hadn’t the slightest idea what Shirley could be talking about.

“For the permanent committee!”

“Oh. Well, thanks. I’m not even sure I want the job.”

“You’ll do fine. You and Susy both. Got to get going, Fran. See you.”

They parted. Fran hurried toward the apartment, wanting to see if Stu knew anything else. Coming so soon after their meeting last night, the old woman’s disappearance struck her around her heart with a kind of superstitious dread. She didn’t like not being able to pass on their major decisions—like the one to send people west—to Mother Abagail for judgment. With her gone, Fran felt too much of the responsibility on her own shoulders.

When she got home the apartment was empty. She had missed Stu by about fifteen minutes. The note under the sugarbowl said simply: “Back by 9:30. I’m with Ralph and Harold. No worry. Stu.”

Ralph and Harold? she thought, and felt a sudden twinge of dread that had nothing to do with Mother Abagail. Now why should I be afraid for Stu? My God, if Harold tried to do something… well, something funny… Stu would tear him apart. Unless… unless Harold sneaked up behind him or something and…

She clutched at her elbows, feeling cold, wondering what Stu could be doing with Ralph and Harold.

Back by 9:30.

God, that seemed a long time away.

She stood in the kitchen a moment longer, frowning down at her knapsack, which she had put on the counter.

I’m with Ralph and Harold.

So Harold’s little house on outer Arapahoe would be deserted until nine-thirty tonight. Unless, of course, they were there, and if they were, she could join them and satisfy her curiosity. She could bike out there in no time. If no one was there, she might find something that would set her mind at rest… or… but she wouldn’t let herself think about that.

Set your mind at rest? the interior voice nagged. Or just make it crazier? Suppose you DO find something funny? What then? What will you do about it?

She didn’t know. She didn’t, in fact, have the least tiny smidgen of an idea.

No worry. Stu.

But there was worry. That thumbprint in her diary meant there was worry. Because a man who would steal your diary and pilfer your thoughts was a man without much principle or scruple. A man like that might creep up behind someone he hated and give a push off a high place. Or use a rock. Or a knife. Or a gun.

No worry. Stu.

But if Harold did a thing like that, he would be through in Boulder. What could he do then?

But Fran knew what then. She didn’t know if Harold was the sort of man she had hypothesized—not yet, not for sure—but she knew in her heart that there was a place for people like that now. Oh yes indeedy.

She put her knapsack back on with quick little jerks and went out the door. Three minutes later she was biking up Broadway toward Arapahoe in the bright afternoon sunshine, thinking: They’ll be right in Harold’s living room, drinking coffee and talking about Mother Abagail and everybody will be fine. Just fine.

But Harold’s small house was dark, deserted… and locked.

That in itself was something of a freak in Boulder. In the old days you locked up when you went out so no one would steal your TV, stereo, your wife’s jewels. But now the stereos and TVs were free, much good they would do you with no juice to run them, and as for jewels, you could go to Denver and pick up a sackful any old time.

Why do you lock your door, Harold, when everything’s free? Because nobody is as afraid of robbery as a thief? Could that be it?

She was no lockpicker. She had resigned herself to leaving when it occurred to her to try the cellar windows. They were set just above ground level, opaque with dirt. The first one she tried slid open sideways on its track, giving way grudgingly and sifting dirt down onto the basement floor.

Fran looked around, but the world was quiet. No one except Harold had settled in this far out on Arapahoe as yet. That was odd, too. Harold could grin until his face cracked and slap people on the back and pass the time of day with folks, he could and did gladly offer his help whenever it was asked for and sometimes when it wasn’t, he could and did make people like him—and it was a fact that he was highly regarded in Boulder. But where he had chosen to live… that was something else, now wasn’t it? That displayed a slightly different aspect of Harold’s view of society and his place in it… maybe. Or maybe he just liked the quiet.

She wriggled in the window, getting her blouse dirty, and dropped to the floor. Now the cellar window was on a level with her eyes. She was no more a gymnast than she was a lockpicker, and she would have to stand on something to get back out.

Fran looked around. The basement had been finished off into a playroom/rumpus room. The kind of thing her own dad had always talked about but never quite got around to doing, she thought with a little pang of sadness. The walls were knotty pine with quadraphonic speakers embedded in them, there was an Armstrong suspended ceiling overhead, a large case filled with jigsaw puzzles and books, an electric train set, a slotcar racing set. There was also an air-hockey game on which Harold had indifferently set a case of Coke. It had been the kids’ room, and posters dotted the walls—the biggest, now old and frayed, showed George Bush coming out of a church in Harlem, hands raised high, a big grin on his face. The caption, in huge red letters, said: YOU DON’T WANT TO LAY NO BOOGIE-WOOGIE ON THE KING OF ROCK AND ROLL!

She suddenly felt sadder than she had since… well, since she couldn’t remember, to tell the truth. She had been through shocks, and fear, and outright terror, and a perfect numbing savagery of grief, but this deep and aching sadness was something new. With it came a sudden wave of homesickness for Ogunquit, for the ocean, for the good Maine hills and pines. For no reason at all she suddenly thought of Gus, the parking lot attendant at the Ogunquit public beach, and for a moment she thought her heart would break with loss and sorrow. What was she doing here, poised between the plains and the mountains that broke the country in two? It wasn’t her place. She didn’t belong here.

One sob escaped her and it sounded so terrified and lonely that she clapped both hands over her mouth for the second time that day. No more, Frannie old kid old sock. You don’t get over anything this big so quickly. A little at a time. If you have to have a cry, have it later, not here in Harold Lauder’s basement. Business first.

She walked past the poster on her way to the stairs, and a bitter little smile crossed her face as she passed George Bush’s grinning and tirelessly cheerful face. They sure laid some boogie-woogie on you, she thought. Someone did, anyhow.

As she got to the top of the cellar stairs, she became certain that the door would be locked, but it opened easily. The kitchen was neat and shipshape, the luncheon dishes done up and drying in the drainer, the little Coleman gas stove washed off and sparkling… but a greasy smell of frying still hung in the air, like a ghost of Harold’s old self, the Harold who had introduced himself into this part of her life by motoring up to her house behind the wheel of Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac as she was burying her father.

Sure would be in a fix if Harold picked right now to come back, she thought. The idea made her look suddenly over her shoulder. She half expected to see Harold standing by the door which led into the living room, grinning at her. There was no one there, but her heart had begun to knock unpleasantly against her ribcage.

There was nothing in the kitchen, so she went into the living room.

It was dark, so dark it made her uneasy. Harold not only kept his doors locked, he kept his shades pulled. Again she felt as if she were witnessing an unconscious outward manifestation of Harold’s personality. Why would anyone keep their shades pulled down in a small city where that was the way the living came to know and mark the houses of the dead?

The living room, like the kitchen, was astringently neat, but the furniture was stodgy and a little seedy-looking. The room’s nicest feature was the fireplace, a huge stone job with a hearth wide enough to sit on. She did sit down for a moment, looking around thoughtfully. As she shifted, she felt a loose hearthstone under her fanny, and she was about to get up and look at it when someone knocked on the door.

Fear drifted down on her like a smothering weight of feathers. She was paralyzed with sudden terror. Her breath stopped, and she would not be aware until later that she had wet herself a little.

The knock came again, half a dozen quick, firm raps.

My God, she thought. The shades are down at least, thank heaven for that.

That thought was followed by a sudden cold certainty that she had left her bike out where anyone could see it. Had she? She tried desperately to think, but for a long moment she could summon nothing to mind except a babble of gibberish that was unsettlingly familiar: Before removing the mote from thy neighbor’s eye, remove the pie from thine own —

The knock came again, and a woman’s voice: “Anybody home?”

Fran sat stockstill. She suddenly remembered that she had parked her bike around back, under Harold’s clothesline. Not visible from the front of the house. But if Harold’s visitor decided to try the back door—

The knob of the front door—Frannie could see it down the short length of hall—began to turn back and forth in frustrated half-circles.

Whoever she is, I hope she’s no better at locks than I am, Frannie thought, and then had to squeeze both hands over her mouth to stop an insane bray of laughter. That was when she looked down at her cotton slacks and saw how badly she had been frightened. At least she didn’t scare the shit out of me, Fran thought. At least, not yet. The laughter bubbled up again, hysterical and frightened, just below the surface.

Then, with an indescribable sense of relief, she heard footfalls clicking away from the door and down Harold’s concrete path.

What Fran did next she did with no conscious decision at all. She ran quietly down the hall to the front door and put her eye to the small crack between the shade and the edge of the window. She saw a woman with long dark hair that was streaked with white. She climbed onto a small Vespa motorscooter that was parked at the curb. As the motor burped into life, she tossed her hair back and clipped it.

It’s the Cross woman—the one who came over with Larry Underwood! Does she know Harold?

Then Nadine had the scooter in gear. She started off with a little jerk and was soon out of sight. Fran uttered a huge sigh, and her legs turned to water. She opened her mouth to let out the laugh that had been bubbling below the surface, knowing already how it would sound—shaky and relieved. Instead, she burst into tears.

Five minutes later, too nervous now to search any further, she was boosting herself back through the cellar window from the seat of a wicker chair she had pulled over. Once out, she was able to push the chair far enough so that it wouldn’t be obvious someone had used it to climb out. It was still out of position, but people rarely noticed things like that… and it didn’t look as if Harold used the basement at all, except to store his Coca-Cola.

She reclosed the window and got her bike. She still felt weak and stunned and a little nauseated from her scare. At least my pants are drying, she thought. Next time you go housebreaking, Frances Rebecca, remember to wear your continence pants.

She pedaled out of Harold’s yard and left Arapahoe as soon as she could, coming back to the downtown area on Canyon Boulevard. She was back in her own apartment fifteen minutes later.

The place was utterly silent.

She opened her diary and looked down at the muddy chocolate fingerprint and wondered where Stu was.

She wondered if Harold was with him.

Oh Stu please come home. I need you.

After lunch, Stu had left Glen and had come home. He had been sitting blankly in the living room, wondering where Mother Abagail was and also wondering if Nick and Glen could possibly be right about just letting the matter be, when there was a knock.

“Stu?” Ralph Brentner called. “Hello, Stu, you home?”

Harold Lauder was with him. Harold’s smile was muted today but not entirely gone; he looked like a jolly mourner trying to be serious for the graveside service.

Ralph, heartsick over Mother Abagail’s disappearance, had met Harold half an hour ago, Harold being on his way home after helping with a water-hauling party at Boulder Creek. Ralph liked Harold, who always seemed to have time to listen and commiserate with whoever had a sad tale to tell… and Harold never seemed to want anything in return. Ralph had poured out the whole story of Mother Abagail’s disappearance, including his fears that she might suffer a heart attack or break one of her brittle bones or die of exposure if she stayed out overnight.

“And you know it showers just about every damn afternoon,” Ralph finished as Stu poured coffee. “If she gets soaked, she’d be sure to take a cold. Then what? Pneumonia, I guess.”

“What can we do about it?” Stu asked them. “We can’t force her to come back if she doesn’t want to.”

“Well, no,” Ralph conceded. “But Harold had a real good idea.”

Stu’s eyes shifted. “How you doing, Harold?”

“Pretty good. You?”

“Fine.”

“And Fran? You watching out for her?” Harold’s eyes didn’t waver from Stu’s, and they kept their slightly humorous, pleasant light, but Stu had a momentary feeling that Harold’s smiling eyes were like sunshine on the water of Brakeman’s Quarry back home—the water looked so pleasant, but it went down and down to black depths where the sun had never reached, and four boys had lost their lives in pleasant-looking Brakeman’s Quarry over the years.

“As best I can,” he said. “What’s your thought, Harold?”

“Well, look. I see Nick’s point. Glen’s, too. They recognize that the Free Zone sees Mother Abagail as a theocratic symbol… and they’re pretty close to speaking for the Zone now, aren’t they?”

Stu sipped his coffee. “What do you mean, ‘theocratic symbol’?”

“I’d call it an earthly symbol of a covenant made with God,” Harold said, and his eyes veiled a little. “Like Holy Communion, or the Sacred Cows of India.”

Stu kindled a little at that. “Yeah, pretty good. Those cows… they let em walk the streets and cause traffic jams, right? They can go in and out of the stores, or decide to leave town altogether.”

“Yes,” Harold agreed. “But most of those cows are sick, Stu. They’re always near the point of starvation. Some are tubercular. And all because they’re an aggregate symbol. The people are convinced God will take care of them, just as our people are convinced God will take care of Mother Abagail. But I have my own doubts about a God that says it’s right to let a poor dumb cow wander around in pain.”

Ralph looked momentarily uncomfortable, and Stu knew what he was feeling. He felt it himself, and it gave him a way to measure how he felt about Mother Abagail himself. He felt that Harold was edging into blasphemy.

“Anyway,” Harold said briskly, dismissing the Sacred Cows of India, “we can’t change the way people feel about her—”

“And wouldn’t want to,” Ralph added quickly.

“Right!” Harold exclaimed. “After all, she brought us together, and not exactly by shortwave, either. My idea was that we mount our trusty cycles and spend the afternoon reconnoitering the west side of Boulder. If we stay fairly close, we can keep in touch with each other by walkie-talkie.”

Stu was nodding. This was the sort of thing he had wanted to do all along. Sacred Cows or not, God or not, it just wasn’t right to leave her to wander around on her own. That didn’t have anything to do with religion; something like that was just callous disregard.

“And if we find her,” Harold said, “we can ask her if she wants anything.”

“Like a ride back to town,” Ralph chipped in.

“At least we can keep tabs on her,” Harold said.

“Okay,” Stu said. “I think it’s a helluva good idea, Harold. Just let me leave a note for Fran.”

But as he scribbled the note, he kept feeling an urge to look back over his shoulder at Harold—to see what Harold was doing while Stu wasn’t looking, and what expression might be in Harold’s eyes.

Harold had asked for and gotten the twisting stretch of road between Boulder and Nederland, because he considered it to be the least likely area. He didn’t think he could walk from Boulder to Nederland in one day, let alone that crazy old cunt. But it made a pleasant ride and gave him a chance to think.

Now, at a quarter to seven, he was on his way back. His Honda was parked in a rest area and he was sitting at a picnic table, having a Coke and a few Slim Jims. The walkie-talkie that hung over the Honda’s handlebars with its antenna at full extension crackled faintly with Ralph Brentner’s voice. They were short-range radios only, and Ralph was somewhere up on Flagstaff Mountain.

“… Sunrise Amphitheater… no sign of her… storm’s over up here.”

Then Stu’s voice, stronger and closer. He was in Chautauqua Park, only four miles from Harold’s location. “Say again, Ralph.”

Ralph’s voice came back, really bellowing. Maybe he would give himself a stroke. That would be a lovely way to end the day. “No sign of her up here! I’m going down before it gets dark! Over!”

“Ten-four,” Stu said, sounding discouraged. “Harold, you there?” Harold got up, wiping Slim Jim grease on his jeans. “Harold? Calling Harold Lauder! You copy, Harold?”

Harold pointed his middle finger—yer fuckfinger, as the high school Neanderthals back in Ogunquit had called it—at the walkie-talkie; then he depressed the talk button and said pleasantly, but with just the right note of discouragement: “I’m here. I was off to one side… thought I saw something down in the ditch. It was just an old jacket. Over.”

“Yeah, okay. Why don’t you come down to Chautauqua, Harold? We’ll wait there for Ralph.”

Love to give orders, don’t you, suckhole? I might have something for you. Yes, I just might.

“Harold, you copy?”

“Yes. Sorry, Stu, I was woolgathering. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“You copying this, Ralph? ” Stu bellowed, making Harold wince. He gave Stu’s voice the finger again, grinning furtively as he did so. Copy this, you Wild West motherfucker.

“Roger, you’ll be at Chautauqua Park,” Ralph’s voice came faintly through the roar of static. “I’m on my way. Over and out.”

“I’m on my way, too,” Harold said. “Over and out.”

He turned off the walkie-talkie, collapsed the antenna, and hung the radio on the handlebars again, but he sat astride the Honda for a moment without operating the kickstarter. He was wearing an army surplus flak jacket; the heavy padding was good when you were riding a cycle above six thousand feet, even in August. But the jacket served another purpose. It had a great many zippered pockets and in one of these was a Smith & Wesson .38. Harold took the pistol out and turned it over and over in his hands. It was fully loaded and it was heavy in his hands, as if it realized its purposes were grave ones: death, destruction, assassination.

Tonight?

Why not?

He had initiated this expedition on the chance that he might be alone with Stu long enough to do it. Now it looked as though he was going to have that chance, at Chautauqua Park, in less than fifteen minutes. But the trip had served another purpose, as well.

He hadn’t meant to go all the way to Nederland, a miserable little town nestled high above Boulder, a town whose only claim to fame was that Patty Hearst had once allegedly stayed there during her time as a fugitive. But as he drove up and up, the Honda purring smoothly between his legs, the air as cold as a blunt razorblade against his face, something had happened.

If you put a magnet on one end of a table and a steel slug on the other, nothing happens. If you move the slug closer to the magnet in slow increments of distance (he held this image in his mind for a moment, savoring it, reminding himself to put it in his diary when he entered tonight), a time will come when the shove you give the slug seems to propel it farther than it should. The slug stops, but it seems to do so reluctantly, as if it has come alive, and part of its liveliness is a resentment of the physical law which deals with inertia. Another little push or two and you can almost—or perhaps even actually—see the slug trembling on the table, seeming to jitter and vibrate slightly, like one of those Mexican jumping beans you can buy in novelty shops, the ones which look like knuckle-sized knots of wood but which actually have a live worm inside. One more push and the balance between friction/inertia and the attraction of the magnet begins to tip the other way. The slug, wholly alive now, moves on its own, faster and faster, until it finally smacks into the magnet and sticks there.

Horrible, fascinating process.

When the world had ended this June, the force of magnetism had still not been understood, although Harold thought (his mind had never been of the rational-scientific bent) that the physicists who studied such things thought it was intimately entwined with the phenomenon of gravity, and that gravity was the keystone of the universe.

On his way to Nederland, moving west, moving up, feeling the air grow chillier, seeing the thunderheads slowly piling up around the still-higher peaks far beyond Nederland, Harold had felt that process begin in himself. He was approaching the point of balance… and not far beyond that, he would reach the point of shift. He was the steel slug just that distance from the magnet where a little push sends it farther than the force imparted would do under more ordinary circumstances. He could feel the jittering in himself.

It was the closest thing to a holy experience that he had ever had. The young reject the holy, because to accept it means to accept the eventual death of all empiric objects, and Harold also rejected it. The old woman was some sort of psychic, he had thought, and so was Flagg, the dark man. They were human radio stations, and no more. Their real power would lie in societies that coalesced around their signals, which were so different one from the other. So he had thought.

But parked on his cycle at the end of Nederland’s cheesy main street with the Honda’s neutral light glowing like a cat’s eye, listening to the winterwhine of the wind in the pines and the aspens, he had felt something more than mere magnetic attraction. He had felt a stupendous, irrational power coming out of the West, an attraction so great that he felt to closely contemplate it now would be to go mad. He felt that, if he ventured much farther out on the arm of balance, any self-will would be lost. He would go just as he was, emptyhanded.

And for that, although he could not be blamed, the dark man would kill him.

So he had turned away feeling the cold relief of a presuicidal man coming away from a long period of regarding a long drop. But he could go tonight, if he liked. Yes, he could kill Redman with a single bullet fired at pointblank range. Then just stay put, stay cool until the Oklahoma sodbuster showed up. Another shot to the temple. No one would take alarm at the gunshots; game was plentiful, and lots of people had taken to banging away at the deer that wandered down into town.

It was ten to seven now. He could waste them both by seven-thirty. Fran would not raise the alarm until ten-thirty or later, and by then he could be well away, working his way west on his Honda, with his ledger in his knapsack. But it wouldn’t happen if he just sat here on his bike, letting time pass.

The Honda started on the second kick. It was a good bike. Harold smiled. Harold grinned. Harold positively radiated good cheer. He drove off toward Chautauqua Park.

Dusk was starting to close down when Stu heard Harold’s bike coming into the park. A moment later he saw the Honda’s headlamp flashing in and out between the trees that lined the climbing sweep of the drive. Then he could see Harold’s helmeted head turning right and left, looking for him.

Stu, who was sitting on the edge of a rock barbecue pit, waved and shouted. After a minute Harold saw him, waved back, and began to putt over in second gear.

After the afternoon the three of them had put in, Stu felt considerably better about Harold… better than he ever had, in fact. Harold’s idea had been a damn good one even if it hadn’t panned out. And Harold had insisted on taking the Nederland road… must have been pretty cold in spite of his heavy jacket. As he pulled up, Stu saw that Harold’s perpetual grin looked more like a grimace; his face was strained and too white. Disappointed that things hadn’t worked out better, Stu guessed. He felt a sudden flush of guilt at the way he and Frannie had treated Harold, as if his constant grin and his overfriendly way with people was some kind of camouflage. Had they ever really considered the idea that the guy might just be trying to turn over a new leaf, that he might be going at it a little strangely just because he had never tried to do such a thing before? Stu didn’t guess they had.

“Nothing at all, huh?” he asked Harold, jumping nimbly down from the top of the barbecue pit.

“De nada,” Harold said. The grin reappeared, but it was automatic, without strength, like a rictus. His face still looked strange and deadly pale. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his jacket.

“Never mind. It was a good idea. For all we know, she’s back in her house right now. If not, we can look again tomorrow.”

“That might be like looking for a body.”

Stu sighed. “Maybe… yeah, maybe. Why don’t you come back to supper with me, Harold?”

“What?” Harold seemed to flinch back in the gathering gloom under the trees. His grin looked more strained than ever.

“Supper,” Stu said patiently. “Look, Frannie’d be glad to see you, too. That’s no shit. She really would.”

“Well, maybe,” Harold said, still looking uncomfortable. “But I’m… well, I had a thing for her, you know. Maybe it’s best if we… just let it go for now. Nothing personal. The two of you go well together. I know that.” His smile shone forth with renewed sincerity. It was infectious; Stu answered it.

“Your choice, Harold. But the door’s open, anytime.”

“Thanks.”

“No, I got to thank you,” Stu said seriously.

Harold blinked. “Me?”

“For helping us hunt when everybody else decided to let nature take her course. Even if it didn’t come to nothing. Will you shake with me?” Stu put his hand out. Harold stared at it blankly for a moment, and Stu didn’t think his gesture was going to be accepted. Then Harold took his right hand out of his jacket pocket—it seemed to catch on something, the zipper, maybe—and shook Stu’s hand briefly. Harold’s hand was warm and a little sweaty.

Stu stepped in front of him, looking down the drive. “Ralph should be here by now. I hope he didn’t have an accident coming down that frigging mountain. He… there he is now.”

Stu walked out to the side of the road; a second headlamp was now flashing up the drive and playing hide-and-seek through the screening trees.

“Yes, that’s him,” Harold said in an odd flat voice behind Stu.

“Someone with him, too.”

“Wh-what?”

“There.” Stu pointed to a second motorcycle headlamp behind the first.

“Oh.” That queerly flat voice again. It caused Stu to turn around.

“You okay, Harold?”

“Just tired.”

The second vehicle belonged to Glen Bateman; it was a low-power moped, the closest to a motorcycle that he would come, and it made Nadine’s Vespa look like a Harley. Behind Ralph, Nick Andros was riding pillion. Nick had an invitation for all of them to come back to the house he and Ralph shared to have coffee and/or brandy. Stu agreed but Harold begged off, still looking strained and tired.

He’s so goddam disappointed, Stu thought, and reflected that it was not only the first sympathy he had probably ever felt for Harold, but also that it was long overdue. He renewed Nick’s invitation himself, but Harold only shook his head and told Stu he was shot for the day. He guessed he would go home and get some sleep.

By the time he got home, Harold was shaking so badly he could barely get his key in the front door. When he did get the door open, he darted in as if he suspected a maniac might be creeping up the walk behind him. He slammed the door, turned the lock, shot the bolt. Then he leaned against the door for a moment with his head back and his eyes shut, feeling on the verge of hysterical tears. When he had a grip on himself again, he felt his way down the hall to the living room and lit all three gas lanterns. The room became bright, and bright was better.

He sat down in his favorite chair and closed his eyes. When his heartbeat had slowed a little he went to the hearth, removed the loose stone, and removed his LEDGER. It soothed him. A ledger was where you kept track of debts owed, bills outstanding, accumulating interest. It was where you finally put paid to all accounts.

He sat back down, flipped to the place where he had stopped, hesitated, then wrote: “August 14, 1990.” He wrote for nearly an hour and a half, his pen dashing back and forth line after line, page after page. His face as he wrote was by turns savagely amused and dully righteous, terrified and joyous, hurt and grinning. When he was finished, he read what he had written (“These are my letters to the world / which never wrote to me… ”) while he absently massaged his aching right hand.

He replaced the ledger and the covering stone. He was calm; he had written it all out of him; he had translated his terror and his fury to the page and his resolve remained strong. That was good. Sometimes the act of writing things down made him feel more jittery, and those were the times he knew he had written falsely, or without the effort required to hone the dull edge of truth to an edge where it would cut—where it would bring blood. But tonight he could put the book back with a calm and serene mind. The rage and fear and frustration had been safely transferred into the book, with a rock to hold it down while he slept.

Harold ran up one of his shades and looked out into the silent street. Looking up at the Flatirons he thought calmly about how close he had come to just going ahead anyway, just hauling out the .38 and trying to mow down all four of them. That would have fixed their reeking sanctimonious ad hoc committee. When he had finished with them they wouldn’t even have had a fucking quorum left.

But at the last moment some fraying cord of sanity had held instead of giving way. He had been able to let go of the gun and shake the betraying cracker’s hand. How, he would never know, but thank God he had. The mark of genius is its ability to bide—and so he would.

He was sleepy now; it had been a long and eventful day.

Unbuttoning his shirt, Harold turned out two of the three gaslamps, and picked up the last to take into his bedroom. As he went through into the kitchen he stopped, frozen.

The door to the basement was standing open.

He went to it, holding the lamp aloft, and went down the first three steps. Fear came into his heart, driving the calmness out.

“Who’s here?” he called. No answer. He could see the air-hockey table. The posters. In the far corner, a set of gaily striped croquet mallets sat in their rack.

He went down another three steps. “Is someone here?”

No; he felt there was not. But that did not allay his fear.

He went the rest of the way down and held the lamp high above his head; across the room a monstrous shadow-Harold, as huge and black as the ape in the Rue Morgue, did likewise.

Was there something on the floor over there? Yes. There was.

He crossed behind the slotcar track to beneath the window where Fran had entered. On the floor was a spill of light brown grit. Harold set the light down beside the spill. In the center of it, as clear as a fingerprint, was the track of a sneaker or tennis shoe… not a waffle or zigzag pattern, but groups of circles and lines. He stared at it, burning it into his mind, and then kicked the dust into a light cloud, destroying the mark. His face was the face of a living waxwork in the light of the Coleman lamp.

“You’ll pay!” Harold cried softly. “Whichever one of you it was, you’ll pay! Yes you will! Yes you will!”

He climbed the stairs again and went through his house from end to end, looking for any other signs of defilation. He found none. He ended in the living room, not sleepy at all now. He was just concluding that someone—a kid, maybe—had broken in out of curiosity, when the thought of his LEDGER exploded in his mind like a flare in a midnight sky. The break-in motive was so clear, so awful, that he had nearly overlooked it completely.

He ran to the hearth, pulled up the stone, and ripped the LEDGER from its place. For the first time it came completely home to him how dangerous the book was. If someone found it, everything was over. He of all people should know that; hadn’t all of this begun because of Fran’s diary?

The LEDGER. The footprint. Did the latter mean the former had been discovered? Of course not. But how to be sure? There was no way, that was the pure and hellish truth of the matter.

He replaced the hearthstone and took the LEDGER into his bedroom with him. He put it under his pillow along with his Smith & Wesson revolver, thinking he should burn it, knowing he never could. The best writing he had ever done in his life was between its covers, the only writing that had ever come as a result of belief and personal commitment.

He lay down, resigned to a sleepless night, his mind running restlessly over possible hiding places. Under a loose board? In the back of a cupboard? Could he perhaps pull the old purloined letter trick, and leave it boldly on one of the bookshelves, a volume among many other volumes, flanked by a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book on one side and a copy of The Total Woman on the other? No—that was too bold; he would never be able to leave the house and have peace. What about a safety-deposit box at the bank? No, that wouldn’t do—he wanted it with him, where he could look at it.

At last he did begin to drift off, and his mind, freed by oncoming sleep, drifted along with no conscious guidance, a pinball in slow motion. He thought: It’s got to be hidden, that’s the thing… if Frannie had hidden hers better… if I hadn’t read what she really thought of me… her hypocrisy… if she had…

Harold sat bolt upright in bed, a little cry in his mouth, his eyes wide.

He sat like that for a long time, and after a while he began to shiver. Did she know? Had it been Fran’s footprint? Diaries… journals… ledgers…

At last he lay down again, but it was a long time before he slept. He kept wondering if Fran Goldsmith regularly wore a pair of tennis shoes or sneakers. And if she did, what did the pattern on their soles look like?

Patterns of soles, patterns of souls. When he did sleep, his dreams were uneasy and more than once he cried out miserably in the dark, as if to ward off things that had already been let in forever.

Stu let himself in at quarter past nine. Fran was curled up on the double bed, wearing one of his shirts—it came almost to her knees—and reading a book titled Fifty Friendly Plants. She got up when he came in.

“Where have you been? I was worried!”

Stu explained Harold’s idea that they hunt for Mother Abagail so they could at least keep an eye on her. He didn’t mention Sacred Cows. Unbuttoning his shirt, he finished: “We would have taken you along, kiddo, but you were nowhere to be found.”

“I was at the library,” she said, watching as he took off his shirt and slipped it into the net laundry bag hanging from the back of the door. He was quite hairy, chest and back, and she found herself thinking that, until she met Stu, she had always found hairy men mildly repulsive. She supposed her relief at having him back was making her a little silly in the head.

Harold had read her diary, she knew that now. She had been terribly afraid that Harold might connive to get Stu alone and… well, do something to him. But why now, today, just when she had found out? If Harold had let the sleeping dog lie this long, wasn’t it more logical to assume that he didn’t want to wake the dog up at all? And wasn’t it just as possible that by reading her diary Harold had seen the futility of his constant chase after her? Coming on top of the news that Mother Abagail had disappeared, she had been in a ripe mood to see ill omens in chicken entrails, but the fact was, it had simply been her diary Harold had read, not a confession to the crimes of the world. And if she told Stu what she had found out, she would succeed only in looking silly and maybe getting him pissed at Harold… and probably at herself as well for being so silly in the first place.

“No sign of her at all, Stu?”

“Nope.”

“How did Harold seem?”

Stu was taking off his pants. “Pretty well racked. Sorry his idea didn’t pan out better. I invited him to supper whenever he wanted to come. I hope that’s okay by you. You know, I really think I could get to like that sucker. You never could have convinced me of that the day I met you two in New Hampshire. Was it wrong to invite him?”

“No,” she said, after a considering pause. “No, I’d like to be on good terms with Harold.” I’m sitting home thinking that Harold might be planning to blow his head off, she thought, and Stu’s inviting him to dinner. Talk about your cases of the pregnant-woman vapors!

Stu said, “If Mother Abagail doesn’t show up by daylight, I thought I’d ask Harold if he wanted to go out again with me.”

“I’d like to go, too,” Fran said quickly. “And there are a few others around here who aren’t totally convinced that she’s being fed by the ravens. Dick Vollman’s one. Larry Underwood’s another.”

“Okay, fine,” he said, and joined her on the bed. “Say, what are you wearing under that shirt?”

“A big strong man like yourself should be able to find that out without my help,” Fran said primly.

It turned out to be nothing.

The next day’s search-party started out modestly at eight o’clock with half a dozen searchers—Stu, Fran, Harold, Dick Vollman, Larry Underwood, and Lucy Swann. By noon the party had swelled to twenty, and by dusk (accompanied by the usual brief spat of ram and lightning in the foothills) there were better than fifty people combing the brush west of Boulder, splashing through streams, hunting up and down canyons, and stepping all over each other’s CB transmissions.

A strange mood of resigned dread had gradually replaced yesterday’s acceptance. Despite the powerful force of the dreams that accorded Mother Abagail a semidivine status in the Zone, most of the people had been through enough to be realists about survival: The old woman was well past a hundred, and she had been out all night on her own. And now a second night was coming on.

The fellow who had struggled across the country from Louisiana to Boulder with a party of twelve summed it up perfectly. He had come in with his people at noon the day before. When told that Mother Abagail was gone, this man, Norman Kellogg by name, threw his Astros baseball cap on the ground and said, “Ain’t that my fucking luck… who you got hunting her up?”

Charlie Impening, who had more or less become the Zone’s resident doomcrier (he had been the one to pass the cheerful news about snow in September), began to suggest to people that if Mother Abagail had bugged out, maybe that was a sign for all of them to bug out. After all, Boulder was just too damn close. Too close to what? Never mind, you know what it’s too close to, and New York or Boston would make Mavis Impening’s boy Charlie feel a whole hell of a lot safer. He had no takers. People were tired and ready to sit. If it got cold and there was no heat, they might move, but not before. They were healing. Impening was asked politely if he planned to go alone. Impening said he believed he would wait until a few more people had seen the daylight. Glen Bateman was heard to opine that Charlie Impening would make a hell of a poor Moses.

“Resigned dread” was as far as the community’s feelings went, Glen Bateman believed, because they were still rationally minded people in spite of all the dreams, in spite of their deep-seated dread concerning whatever might be going on west of the Rockies. Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself. When you finish a barn, he told Nick and Stu and Fran after darkness had put an end to the search for the night, you hang a horseshoe ends up over the door to keep the luck in. But if one of the nails falls out and the horseshoe swings points down, you don’t abandon the barn.

“The day may come when we or our children may abandon the barn if the horseshoe spills the luck out, but that’s years away. Right now all we feel is a little strange and lost. And that will pass, I think. If Mother Abagail is dead—and God knows I hope she isn’t—it probably couldn’t have come at a better time for the mental health of this community.”

Nick wrote, “But if she was meant as a check for our Adversary, his opposite number, someone put here to keep the scales in balance…”

“Yes, I know,” Glen said gloomily. “I know. The days when the horseshoe didn’t matter may really be passing… or already gone. Believe me, I know.”

Frannie said: “You don’t really think our grandchildren are going to be superstitious natives, do you, Glen? Burning witches and spitting through their fingers for luck?”

“I can’t read the future, Fran,” Glen said, and in the lamplight his face looked old and worn—the face, perhaps, of a failed magician. “I couldn’t even properly see the effect Mother Abagail was having on the community until Stu pointed it out to me that night on Flagstaff Mountain. But I do know this: We’re all in this town because of two events. The superflu we can charge off to the stupidity of the human race. It doesn’t matter if we did it or the Russians, or the Latvians. Who emptied the beaker loses importance beside the general truth: At the end of all rationalism, the mass grave. The laws of physics, the laws of biology, the axioms of mathematics, they’re all part of the deathtrip, because we are what we are. If it hadn’t been Captain Trips, it would have been something else. The fashion was to blame it on ‘technology,’ but ‘technology’ is the trunk of the tree, not the roots. The roots are rationalism, and I would define that word so: ‘Rationalism is the idea we can ever understand anything about the state of being.’ It’s a deathtrip. It always has been. So you can charge the superflu off to rationalism if you want. But the other reason we’re here is the dreams, and the dreams are irrational. We’ve agreed not to talk about that simple fact while we’re in committee, but we’re not in committee now. So I’ll say what we all know is true: We’re here under the fiat of powers we don’t understand. For me, that means we may be beginning to accept—only subconsciously now, and with plenty of slips backward due to culture lag—a different definition of existence. The idea that we can never understand anything about the state of being. And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then ir rationalism might very well be a lifetrip… at least unless it proves otherwise.”

Speaking very slowly, Stu said: “Well, I got my superstitions. I been laughed at for it, but I got em. I know it don’t make any difference if a guy lights two cigarettes on a match or three, but two don’t make me nervous and three does. I don’t walk under ladders and I never care to see a black cat cross my path. But to live with no science… worshipping the sun, maybe… thinking monsters are rolling bowling balls across the sky when it thunders… I can’t say any of that turns me on very much, baldy. Why, it seems like a kind of slavery to me.”

“But suppose those things were true?” Glen said quietly.

“What?”

“Assume that the age of rationalism has passed. I myself am almost positive that it has. It’s come and gone before, you know; it almost left us in the 1960s, the so-called Age of Aquarius, and it took a damn near permanent vacation during the Middle Ages. And suppose… suppose that when rationalism does go, it’s as if a bright dazzle has gone for a while and we could see…” He trailed off, his eyes looking inward.

“See what?” Fran asked.

He raised his eyes to hers; they were gray and strange, seeming to glow with their own inner light.

“Dark magic,” he said softly. “A universe of marvels where water flows uphill and trolls live in the deepest woods and dragons live under the mountains. Bright wonders, white power. ‘Lazarus, come forth.’ Water into wine. And… and just maybe… the casting out of devils.”

He paused, then smiled.

“The lifetrip.”

“And the dark man?” Fran asked quietly.

Glen shrugged. “Mother Abagail calls him the Devil’s Imp. Maybe he’s just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. And maybe there’s something more, something much darker. I only know that he is, and I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put an end to him. I think only white magic will do that… and our white magician is out there someplace, wandering and alone.” Glen’s voice nearly broke, and he looked down quickly.

Outside there was only dark, and a breeze coming down from the mountains threw a fresh spatter of rain against the glass of Stu and Fran’s living room. Glen was lighting his pipe. Stu had taken a random handful of change from his pocket and was shaking the coins up and down, then opening his hands to see how many had come up heads, how many tails. Nick was making elaborate doodles on the top sheet of his pad, and in his mind he saw the empty streets of Shoyo and heard—yes, heard—a voice whisper: He’s coming for you, mutie. He’s closer now.

After a while Glen and Stu kindled a blaze in the fireplace and they all watched the flames without saying much.

After they were gone, Fran felt low and unhappy. Stu was also in a brown study. He looks tired, she thought. We ought to stay home tomorrow, just stay home and talk to each other and have a nap in the afternoon. We ought to take it easy. She looked at the Coleman gaslamp and wished for electric light instead, bright electric light you got by just flicking a wall switch.

She felt her eyes sting with tears. She told herself angrily not to start, not to add that to their problems, but the part of herself which controlled the waterworks did not seem inclined to listen.

Then, suddenly, Stu brightened. “By golly! I damn near forgot, didn’t I?”

“Forgot what?”

“I’ll show you! Stay right here!” He went out the door and clattered down the hall stairs. She went to the doorway and in a moment she could hear him coming back up. He had something in his hand and it was a… a…

“Stuart Redman, where did you get that?” she asked, happily surprised.

“Folk Arts Music,” he said, grinning.

She picked up the washboard and tilted it this way and that. The gleam of light spilled off its bluing. “Folk—?”

“Down Walnut Street aways.”

“A washboard in a music store?”

“Yeah. There was a helluva good washtub, too, but somebody had already poked a hole through it and turned it into a bass.”

She began to laugh. She put the washboard down on the sofa, came to him, and hugged him tight. His hands came up to her breasts and she hugged him tighter still. “The doctor said give him jug band music,” she whispered.

“Huh?”

She pressed her face against his neck. “It seems to make him feel just fine. That’s what the song says, anyway. Can you make me feel fine, Stu?”

Smiling, he picked her up. “Well,” he said, “I guess I could give it a try.”

At quarter past two the next afternoon, Glen Bateman burst straight into the apartment without knocking. Fran was at Lucy Swann’s house, where the two women were trying to get a sourdough sponge started. Stu was reading a Max Brand Western. He looked up and saw Glen, his face pale and shocked, his eyes wide, and tossed the book on the floor.

“Stu,” Glen said. “Oh, man, Stu. I’m glad you’re here.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked Glen sharply. “Is it… did someone find her?”

“No,” Glen said. He sat down abruptly as if his legs had just given out. “It’s not bad news, it’s good news. But it’s very strange.”

“What? What is?”

“It’s Kojak. I took a nap after lunch and when I got up, Kojak was on the porch, fast asleep. He’s beat to shit, Stu, he looks like he’s been through a Mixmaster with a set of blunt blades, but it’s him.”

“You mean the dog? That Kojak?”

“That’s who I mean.”

“Are you sure?”

“Same dog-tag that says Woodsville, N.H. Same red collar. Same dog. He’s really scrawny, and he’s been fighting. Dick Ellis—Dick was overjoyed to have an animal to work on for a change—he says he’s lost one eye for good. Bad scratches on his sides and belly, some of them infected, but Dick took care of them. Gave him a sedative and taped up his belly. Dick said it looked like he’d tangled with a wolf, maybe more than one. No rabies, anyhow. He’s clean.” Glen shook his head slowly, and two tears spilled down his cheeks. “That damn dog came back to me. I wish to Christ I hadn’t left him behind to come on his own, Stu. That makes me feel so friggin bad.”

“It couldn’t have been done, Glen. Not with the motorcycles.”

“Yes, but… he followed me, Stu. That’s the kind of thing you read about in Star Weekly … Faithful Dog Follows Master Two Thousand Miles. How could he do a thing like that? How?”

“Maybe the same way we did. Dogs dream, you know—sure they do. Didn’t you ever see one lying fast asleep on the kitchen floor, paws twitching away? There was an old guy in Arnette, Vic Palfrey, and he used to say dogs had two dreams, the good dream and the bad one. The good one’s when the paws twitch. The bad one’s the growling dream. Wake a dog up in the middle of the bad dream, the growling dream, and he’s apt to bite you, like as not.”

Glen shook his head in a dazed way. “You’re saying he dreamed —”

“I’m not sayin anything funnier than what you were talking last night,” Stu reproached him.

Glen grinned and nodded. “Oh, I can talk that stuff for hours on end. I’m one of the great all-time bullshitters. It’s when something actually happens.”

“Awake at the lectern and asleep at the switch.”

“Fuck you, East Texas. Want to come over and see my dog?”

“You bet.”

Glen’s house was on Spruce Street, about two blocks from the Boulderado Hotel. The climbing ivy on the porch trellis was mostly dead, as were all the lawns and most of the flowers in Boulder—without daily watering from the city mains, the arid climate had triumphed.

On the porch was a small round table holding up a gin and tonic. (“Ain’t that pretty horrible stuff without ice?” Stu asked, and Glen answered, “You don’t notice much one way or the other after the third one.”) Beside the drink was an ashtray with five pipes in it, copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ball Four, and My Gun Is Quick —all of them open to different places. There was also an open bag of Kraft Cheese Kisses.

Kojak was lying on the porch, his tattered snout laid peacefully on his forepaws. The dog was rack-thin and pitifully chewed, but Stu recognized him, even on short acquaintance. He squatted and began to stroke Kojak’s head. Kojak woke up and looked happily at Stu. In the way that dogs have, he seemed to grin.

“Say, that’s a good dog,” Stu said, feeling a ridiculous lump in his throat. Like a deck of cards swiftly dealt with the faces up, he seemed to see every dog he’d had since his mom had given him Old Spike, when Stu was only five years old. A lot of dogs. Maybe not one for every card in the deck, but still a lot of dogs. A dog was a good thing to have, and so far as he knew, Kojak was the only dog in Boulder. He glanced up at Glen and glanced down quickly. He guessed even old bald sociologists who read three books at a whack didn’t like to get caught leaking around the eyes.

“Good dog,” he repeated, and Kojak thumped his tail against the porch boards, presumably agreeing that he was, indeed, a good dog.

“Going inside for a minute,” Glen said thickly. “Got to use the bathroom.”

“Yeah,” Stu said, not looking up. “Hey, good boy, say, ole Kojak, wasn’t you a good boy? Ain’t you a one?”

Kojak’s tail thumped agreeably.

“Can you roll over? Play dead, boy. Roll over.”

Kojak obediently rolled over on his back, rear legs splayed out, front paws in the air. Stu’s face grew concerned as he ran his hand gently over the stiff white concertina of bandage Dick Ellis had put on. Farther up, he could see red and puffy-looking scratches that undoubtedly deepened to gores under the bandages. Something had been at him, all right, and it hadn’t been some other wandering dog. A dog would have gone for the muzzle or the throat. What had happened to Kojak was the work of something lower than a dog. More sneaking. Wolfpack, maybe, but Stu doubted if Kojak could have gotten away from a pack. Whatever, he had been lucky not to be disemboweled.

The screen banged as Glen came back out on the porch.

“Whatever it was got at him didn’t miss his vitals by much,” Stu said.

“The wounds were deep and he lost a lot of blood,” Glen agreed. “I just can’t get over thinking that I was the one who let him in for that.”

“And Dick said wolves.”

“Wolves or maybe coyotes… but he thought it was unlikely coyotes would have done such a job, and I agree.”

Stu patted Kojak on the rump and Kojak rolled back onto his belly. “How is it almost all the dogs are gone and there’s still enough wolves in one place—and east of the Rockies, at that—to set on a good dog like this?”

“I guess we’ll never know,” Glen said. “Any more than we’ll know why the goddamned plague took the horses but not the cows and most of the people but not us. I’m not even going to think about it. I’m just going to lay in a big supply of Gainesburgers and keep him fed.”

“Yeah.” Stu looked at Kojak, whose eyes had slipped closed. “He’s tore up, but his doings are still intact—I saw that when he rolled over. We could do worse than to keep our eye out for a bitch, you know it?”

“Yes, that’s so,” Glen said thoughtfully. “Want a warm gin and tonic, East Texas?”

“Hell, no. I may never have gone any further than one year of vocational-technical school, but I’m no fucking barbarian. Got a beer?”

“Oh, I think I can scare up a can of Coors. Warm, though.”

“Sold.” He started to follow Glen into the house, then paused with the screen door in his hand to look back at the sleeping dog. “You sleep good, ole boy,” he told the dog. “Good to have you here.”

He and Glen went inside.

But Kojak wasn’t asleep.

He lay somewhere between, where most living things spend a good deal of time when they are hurt badly, but not badly enough to be in the mortal shadow. A deep itch lay in his belly like heat, the itch of healing. Glen would have to spend a good many hours trying to distract him from that itch so he wouldn’t scratch off the bandages, reopen the wounds, and reinfect them. But that was later. Just now Kojak (who still thought of himself occasionally as Big Steve, which had been his original name) was content to drift in the place in between. The wolves had come for him in Nebraska, while he was still sniffing dejectedly around the house on jacklifters in the little town of Hemingford Home. The scent of THE MAN—the feel of THE MAN—had led to this place and then stopped. Where had he gone? Kojak didn’t know. And then the wolves, four of them, had come out of the corn like ragged spirits of the dead. Their eyes blazed at Kojak, and their lips wrinkled back from their teeth to let out the low, ripping growls of their intent. Kojak had retreated before them, growling himself, his paws stiff-out and digging at the dirt of Mother Abagail’s dooryard. To the left hung the tire-swing, casting its depthless round shadow. The lead wolf had attacked just as Kojak’s hindquarters slipped into the shadow cast by the porch. It came in low, going for the belly, and the others followed. Kojak sprang up and over the leader’s snapping muzzle, giving the wolf his underbelly, and as the leader began to bite and scratch, Kojak fastened his own teeth in the wolf’s neck, his teeth sinking deep, letting blood, and the wolf howled and tried to struggle away, its courage suddenly gone. As it pulled away, Kojak’s jaws closed with lightning speed on the wolf’s tender muzzle, and the wolf uttered a howling, abject scream as its nose was laid open to the nostrils and pulled to strings and tatters. It fled yipping with agony, shaking its head crazily from side to side, spraying droplets of blood to the left and right, and in the crude telepathy that all animals of like kind share, Kojak could read its over-and-over thought clearly enough:

(wasps in me o the wasps the wasps in my head wasps are up my head o)

And then the others hit him, one from the left and another from the right like huge blunt bullets, the last of the trio submarining in low, grinning, snapping, ready to pull out his intestines. Kojak had broken to the right, baying hoarsely, wanting to deal with that one first so he could get under the porch. If he could get under the porch he could stand them off, maybe forever. Lying on the porch now he relived the battle in a kind of slow motion: the growls and howls, the strikes and withdrawals, the smell of blood that had gotten into his brain and gradually turned him into a kind of fighting machine, unaware of his own wounds until later. He sent the wolf that had been on his right the way of the first, one of its eyes dead and a huge, gouting, and probably mortal wound in the side of its throat. But the wolf had done its own damage in return; most of it was superficial, but two of the gores were extremely deep, wounds that would heal to hard and twisting scar-tissue like a scrawling lowercase t. Even when he was an old, old dog (and Kojak lived another sixteen years, long after Glen Bateman died), those scars would pain and throb on wet days. He had fought free, had scrambled under the porch, and when one of the two remaining wolves, overcome with bloodlust, tried to wriggle in after him, Kojak sprang on it, pinned it, and ripped its throat out. The other retreated almost to the edge of the corn, whining uneasily. If Kojak had come out to do battle, it would have fled with its tail between its legs. But Kojak didn’t come out, not then. He was done in. He could only lie on his side, panting rapidly and weakly, licking his wounds and growling deep in his chest whenever he saw the shadow of the remaining wolf draw near. Then it was dark, and a misty halfmoon rode the sky over Nebraska. And each time the last wolf heard Kojak alive and presumably still ready to fight, it shied away, whining. Sometime after midnight it left, leaving Kojak alone to see if he would live or die. In the early morning hours he had felt the presence of some other animal, something that terrified him into a series of soft whimpers. It was a thing in the corn, a thing walking in the corn, hunting for him, perhaps. Kojak lay shivering, waiting to see if this thing would find him, this horrible thing that felt like a Man and a Wolf and an Eye, some dark thing like an ancient crocodile in the corn. Some unknown time later, after the moon went down, Kojak felt that it was gone. He fell asleep. He had lain up under the porch for three days, coming out only when hunger and thirst drove him out. There was always a puddle of water gathered below the lip of the handpump in the yard, and in the house there were all sorts of rich scraps, many of them from the meal Mother Abagail had cooked for Nick’s party. When Kojak felt he could go on, he knew where to go. It was not a scent that told him; it was a deep sense of heat that had come out of his own deep and mortal time, a glowing pocket of heat to the west of him. And so he came, limping most of the last five hundred miles on three legs, the pain always gnawing at his belly. From time to time he was able to smell THE MAN, and thus knew he was on the right track. And at last he was here. THE MAN was here. There were no wolves here. Food was here. There was no sense of that dark Thing… the Man with the stink of a wolf and the feel of an Eye that could see you over long miles if it happened to turn your way. For now, things were fine. And so thinking (so far as dogs can think in their careful relating to a world seen almost wholly through feelings), Kojak drifted down deeper, now into real sleep, now into a dream, a good dream of chasing rabbits through the clover and timothy grass that was belly-high and wet with soothing dew. His name was Big Steve. This was the north forty. And oh the rabbits are everywhere this gray and endless morning—

As he dreamed, his paws twitched.

Chapter 53

Excerpts from the Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee Meeting

August 17, 1990

This meeting was held at the home of Larry Underwood on South Forty-second Street in the Table Mesa area. All members of the committee were present…

The first item of business concerned having the ad hoc committee elected as the permanent Boulder Committee. Fran Goldsmith was recognized.

Fran: “Both Stu and I agreed that the best, easiest way for us all to get elected would be if Mother Abagail endorsed the whole slate. It would save us the problem of having twenty people nominated by their friends and possibly upsetting the applecart. But now we’ll have to do it another way. I’m not going to suggest anything that isn’t perfectly democratic, and you all know the plan anyway, but I just want to re-emphasize that each of us has to make sure we have someone who will nominate and second us. We won’t do it for each other, obviously—that would look too much like the Mafia. And if you can’t find one person to nominate you and another to second you, you might as well give up anyway.”

Sue: “Wow! That’s sneaky, Fran.”

Fran: “Yes—it is, a little.”

Glen: “We’re edging back into the subject of the committee’s morality, and although I’m sure we all find that an endlessly fascinating topic, I’d like to see it tabled for the next few months. I think we just have to agree that we’re serving in the Free Zone’s best interest and leave it at that.”

Ralph: “You sound a little pissed, Glen.”

Glen: “I am a little pissed. I admit it. The very fact that we’ve spent so much time eating at our own livers on this subject should give a pretty good indication as to where our hearts are.”

Sue: “The road to hell is paved with—”

Glen: “Good intentions, yes, and since we all seem so worried about our intentions, we must surely be on the highway to heaven.”

Glen then said that he had intended to address the committee on the subject of our scouts or spies or whatever you want to call them, but that he wanted to make a motion instead that we meet to discuss that on the nineteenth. Stu asked him why.

Glen: “Because we might not all be here on the nineteenth. Somebody might get voted out. It’s a remote possibility, but no one really knows what a large group of people is going to do when they all get together in one place. We ought to be as careful as we can.”

That was good for a moment of silence, and the committee voted, 7–0, to meet on the nineteenth—as a Permanent Committee—to discuss the question of the scouts… or spies… or whatever.

Stu was recognized to put a third item of business before the committee, concerning Mother Abagail.

Stu: “As you know, she’s gone off for reasons of her own. Her note says she’ll ‘be gone for a while,’ which is pretty vague, and that she’ll be back ‘if it’s God’s will.’ Now, that’s not very encouraging. We’ve had a search-party out for three days now and we haven’t found a thing. We don’t want to just drag her back, not if she doesn’t want to come, but if she’s lying up somewhere with a busted leg or if she’s unconscious, that’s a lot different. Now part of the problem is that there just aren’t enough of us to search all the wildlands around here. But another part of it is the same thing that’s slowing us down at the power station. There’s just no organization. So what I’m looking for is permission to put this search-party on the agenda of the big meeting tomorrow night, same as the power station and the burial crew. And I’d like to see Harold Lauder in charge, because it was his idea in the first place.”

Glen said that he didn’t think any search-party was going to find very good news after a week or so. After all, the lady in question is a hundred and eight years old. The committee as a whole agreed with that, and then voted in favor of the motion, 7–0, as Stu had put it. To make this record as honest as possible, I should add there were several expressions of doubt over putting Harold in charge… but as Stu pointed out, it had been his idea to begin with, and not to give him command of the search-party would be a direct slap in the face.

Nick: “I withdraw my objection to Harold, but not my basic reservations. I just don’t like him very much.”

Ralph Brentner asked if either Stu or Glen would write out Stu’s motion about the search-party so he could add it to the agenda, which he plans to print at the high school tonight. Stu said he’d be glad to.

Larry Underwood then moved that we adjourn, Ralph seconded it, and it was voted, 7–0.

Frances Goldsmith, Secretary

The turnout for the meeting the next evening was almost total, and for the first time Larry Underwood, who had been in the Zone only a week, got an idea of just how large the community was becoming. It was one thing to see people coming and going on the streets, usually alone or by twos, and quite another thing to see them all gathered together in one place—Chautauqua Auditorium. The place was full, every seat taken and more people sitting in the aisles and standing at the back of the hall. They were a curiously subdued crowd, murmuring but not babbling. For the first time since he had gotten to Boulder it had rained all day long, a soft drizzle that seemed to hang suspended in the air, fogging you rather than wetting you, and even with the assemblage of close to six hundred, you could hear the quiet sound of rain on the roof. The loudest sound inside was the constant riffle of paper as people looked at the mimeographed agendas that had been piled up on two card tables just inside the double doors.

This agenda read:

THE BOULDER FREE ZONE

Open Meeting Agenda

August 18, 1990

1. To see if the Free Zone will agree to read and ratify the Constitution of the United States of America.

2. To see if the Free Zone will agree to read and ratify the Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States of America.

3. To see if the Free Zone will nominate and elect a slate of seven Free Zone representatives to serve as a governing board.

4. To see if the Free Zone will agree to veto power for Abagail Freemantle on any and all matters agreed to by the Free Zone representatives.

5. To see if the Free Zone will approve a Burial Committee of at least twenty persons initially to decently inter those who died of the superflu epidemic in Boulder.

6. To see if the Free Zone will approve a Power Committee of at least sixty persons initially to get the electricity back on before cold weather.

7. To see if the Free Zone will approve a Search Committee of at least fifteen persons, its purpose to find the whereabouts of Abagail Freemantle, if possible.

Larry found that his nervous hands had been busy folding this agenda, which he knew nearly word for word, into a paper airplane. Being on the ad hoc committee was sort of fun, like a game—children playing at parliamentary process in someone’s living room, sitting around and drinking Cokes, having a piece of the cake Frannie had made, talking things over. Even the part about sending spies over the mountains and right into the dark man’s lap had seemed like a game, partly because it was a thing he couldn’t imagine doing himself. You’d have to have lost most of your marbles to face such a living nightmare. But in their closed sessions, with the room comfortably lit with Coleman gas lanterns, it had seemed okay. And if the Judge or Dayna Jurgens or Tom Cullen got caught, it seemed—in those closed sessions, at least—a thing no more important than losing a rook or a queen in a chess game.

But now, sitting halfway down the hall with Lucy on one side and Leo on the other (he had not seen Nadine all day, and Leo didn’t seem to know where she was, either; “Out” had been his disinterested response), the truth of it came home, and in his guts it felt as if a battering ram was in use. It was no game. There were five hundred and eighty people here and most of them didn’t have any idea that Larry Underwood wasn’t no nice guy, or that the first person Larry Underwood had attempted to take care of after the epidemic had died of a drug overdose.

His hands were damp and chilly. They were trying to fold the agenda into a paper plane again and he stopped them. Lucy took one of them, squeezed it, and smiled at him. He was able to respond only with something that felt like a grimace, and in his heart he heard his mother’s voice: There’s something left out of you, Larry.

Thinking of that made him feel panicky. Was there a way out of this, or had things already gone too far? He didn’t want this millstone. He had already made a motion in closed session that could send Judge Farris to his death. If he was voted out and someone else was voted into his seat, they’d have to take another vote on sending the Judge, wouldn’t they? Sure they would. And they’d vote to send someone else. When Laurie Constable nominates me, I’ll just stand up and say I decline. Sure, nobody can force me, can they? Not if I decide I want out. And who the fuck needs this kind of hassle?

Wayne Stukey on that long ago beach saying: There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil.

Quietly, Lucy said: “You’ll be fine.”

He jumped. “Huh?”

“I said you’ll be fine. Won’t he, Leo?”

“Oh yes,” Leo said, bobbing his head. His eyes never left the audience, as if they had not yet been able to communicate its size to his brain. “Fine.”

You don’t understand, you numb broad, Larry thought. You’re holding my hand and you don’t understand that I could make a bad decision and wind up killing both of you. I’m well on my way to killing Judge Farris and he’s seconding my fucking nomination. What a Polish firedrill this turned out to be. A little sound escaped his throat.

“Did you say something?” Lucy asked.

“No.”

Then Stu was walking across the stage to the podium, his red sweater and bluejeans very bright and clear in the harsh glow of the emergency lights, which were running from a Honda generator that Brad Kitchner and part of his crew from the power station had set up. The applause started somewhere in the middle of the hall, Larry was never sure where, and a cynical part of him was always convinced that it had been a plot arranged by Glen Bateman, their resident expert in the art/craft of crowd management. At any rate, it didn’t really matter. The first solitary spats swelled to a thunder of applause. On the stage, Stu paused by the podium, looking comically amazed. The applause was joined by cheers and shrill whistles.

Then the entire audience rose to its feet, the applause swelling to a sound like heavy rain, and people were shouting, “Bravo! Bravo! ” Stu held up his hands, but they wouldn’t stop; if anything, the sound redoubled in intensity. Larry glanced sideways at Lucy and saw she was applauding strenuously, her eyes fixed on Stu, her mouth curved in a trembling but triumphant smile. She was crying. On his other side Leo was also applauding, bringing his hands together again and again with so much force that Larry thought they would fall off if Leo kept on much longer. In the extremity of his joy, Leo’s carefully won-back vocabulary had deserted him, the way English will sometimes desert a man or woman who has learned it as his or her second tongue. He could only hoot loudly and enthusiastically.

Brad and Ralph had also run a PA from the generator and now Stu blew into the mike and then spoke: “Ladies and gentlemen—”

But the applause rolled on.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll take your seats—”

But they were not ready to take their seats. The applause roared on and on, and Larry looked down because his own hands hurt, and he saw that he was applauding as frantically as the rest.

“Ladies and gentlemen—”

The applause thundered and echoed. Overhead, a family of barnswallows that had taken up residence in this fine and private place after the plague struck now flew about crazily, swooping and diving, mad to get away to someplace where people weren’t.

We’re applauding ourselves, Larry thought. We’re applauding the fact that we’re here, alive, together. Maybe we’re saying hello to the group self again, I don’t know. Hello, Boulder. Finally. Good to be here, great to be alive.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you’d take your seats, please, I sure would appreciate it.”

The applause began to taper off little by little. Now you could hear ladies—and some men, too—sniffing. Noses were honked. Conversations were whispered. There was that rustling auditorium sound of people taking their seats.

“I’m glad you’re all here,” Stu said. “I’m glad to be here myself.” There was a whine of feedback from the PA and Stu muttered, “Goddam thing,” which was clearly picked up and broadcast. There was a ripple of laughter and Stu colored. “Guess we’re all going to have to get used to this stuff again,” he said, and that set off another burst of applause.

When that had run itself out, Stu said: “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Stuart Redman, originally from Arnette, Texas, although that seems a far way down the road from where I am now, lemme tell you.” He cleared his throat, feedback whined briefly, and he took a wary step back from the mike. “I’m also pretty nervous up here, so bear with me—”

“We will, Stu!” Harry Dunbarton yelled exuberantly, and there was appreciative laughter. It’s like a camp meeting, Larry thought. Next they’ll be singing hymns. If Mother Abagail was here, I bet we would be already.

“Last time I had so many people looking at me was when our little consolidated high school made it to the football playoffs, and then they had twenty-one other guys to look at too, not to mention some girls in those little tiny skirts.”

A hearty burst of laughter.

Lucy pulled at Larry’s neck and whispered in his ear, “What was he worried about? He’s a natural!”

Larry nodded.

“But if you’ll bear with me, I’ll get through it somehow,” Stu said.

More applause. This crowd would applaud Nixon’s resignation speech and ask him to encore on the piano, Larry thought.

“First off, I should explain about the ad hoc committee and how I happen to be up here at all,” Stu said. “There are seven of us who got together and planned for this meeting so we could get organized somehow. There’s a lot of things to do, and I’d like to introduce each member of our committee to you now, and I hope you saved some applause for them, because they all pitched together to work out the agenda you’ve got in your hands right now. First, Miss Frances Goldsmith. Stand up, Frannie, and let em see what you look like with a dress on.”

Fran stood up. She was wearing a pretty kelly-green dress and a modest string of pearls that might have cost two thousand dollars in the old days. She was roundly applauded, the applause accompanied by some good-natured wolf whistles.

Fran sat down, blushing furiously, and before the applause could die away entirely, Stu went on. “Mr. Glen Bateman, from Woodsville, New Hampshire.”

Glen stood, and they applauded him. He flipped a pair of twin v ’s from each of his closed fists, and the crowd roared its approval.

Stu introduced Larry second-to-last and he stood up, aware that Lucy was smiling up at him, and then that was lost in a warm comber of applause that washed over him. Once, he thought, in another world, there would have been concerts, and this kind of applause would have been reserved for the show-closer, a little nothing tune called “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” This was better. He only stood for a second, but it seemed much longer. He knew he would not decline his nomination.

Stu introduced Nick last, and he got the longest, loudest applause.

When it died away, Stu said: “This wasn’t on the agenda, but I wonder if we could start by singing the National Anthem. I guess you folks remember the words and the tune.”

There was that ruffling, shuffling sound of people getting to their feet. Another pause as everyone waited for someone else to start. Then a girl’s sweet voice rose in the air, solo for only the first three syllables: “Oh, say can—” It was Frannie’s voice, but for a moment it seemed to Larry to be underlaid by another voice, his own, and the place was not Boulder but upstate Vermont and the day was July 4, the Republic was two hundred and fourteen years old, and Rita lay dead in the tent behind him, her mouth filled with green puke and a bottle of pills in her stiffening hand.

A chill of gooseflesh passed over him and suddenly he felt that they were being watched, watched by something that could, in the words of that old song by The Who, see for miles and miles and miles. Something awful and dark and alien. For just a moment he felt an urge to run from this place, just run and never stop. This was no game they were playing here. This was serious business; killing business. Maybe worse.

Then other voices joined in. “—can you see, by the dawn’s early light,” and Lucy was singing, holding his hand, crying again, and others were crying, most of them were crying, crying for what was lost and bitter, the runaway American dream, chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected, and stepping out over the line, and suddenly his memory was not of Rita, dead in the tent, but of he and his mother at Yankee Stadium—it was September 29, the Yankees were only a game and a half behind the Red Sox, and all things were still possible. There were fifty-five thousand people in the Stadium, all standing, the players in the field with their caps over their hearts, Guidry on the mound, Rickey Henderson was standing in deep left field (“—by the twilight’s last gleaming—”), and the light-standards were on in the purple gloaming, moths and night-fliers banging softly against them, and New York was around them, teeming, city of night and light.

Larry joined the singing too, and when it was done and the applause rolled out once more, he was crying a bit himself. Rita was gone. Alice Underwood was gone. New York was gone. America was gone. Even if they could defeat Randall Flagg, whatever they might make would never be the same as that world of dark streets and bright dreams.

Sweating freely under the bright emergency lights, Stu called the first items: reading and ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The singing of the anthem had also affected him deeply, and he wasn’t alone. Half the audience, more, was in tears.

No one asked for an actual reading of either document—which would have been their right under the parliamentary process—for which Stu was profoundly grateful. He wasn’t much of a reader. The “reading” section of each item was approved by the Free Zone citizens. Glen Bateman rose and moved that they accept both documents as governing Free Zone law.

A voice in the back said, “Second that!”

“Moved and seconded,” Stu said. “Those in favor say aye.”

“AYE! ” to the rooftops. Kojak, who had been sleeping by Glen’s chair, looked up, blinked, and then laid his muzzle on his paws again. A moment later he looked up again as the crowd gave themselves a thunderous round of applause. They like voting, Stu thought. It makes them feel like they’re finally in control of something again. God knows they need that feeling. We all need it.

That preliminary taken care of, Stu felt tension worm into his muscles. Now, he thought, we’ll see if there are any nasty surprises waiting for us.

“The third item on your agenda reads,” he began, and then he had to clear his throat again. Feedback whined at him, making him sweat even more. Fran was looking calmly up at him, nodding for him to go on. “It reads, ‘To see if the Free Zone will nominate and elect a slate of seven Free Zone representatives.’ That means—”

“Mr. Chairman? Mr. Chairman!”

Stu looked up from his jotted notes and felt a real jolt of fear, accompanied by something like a premonition. It was Harold Lauder. Harold was dressed in a suit and a tie, his hair was neatly combed, and he was standing halfway up the middle aisle. Once Glen had said he thought the opposition might coalesce around Harold. But so soon? He hoped not. For just a moment he thought wildly of not recognizing Harold—but both Nick and Glen had warned him of the dangers inherent in making any part of this look like a railroad job. He wondered if he had been wrong about Harold turning over a new leaf. It looked as if he was going to find out right here.

“Chair recognizes Harold Lauder.”

Heads turned, necks craned to see Harold better.

“I’d like to move that we accept the slate of ad hoc committee members in toto as the Permanent Committee. If they’ll serve, that is.” Harold sat down.

There was a moment of silence. Stu thought crazily: Toto? Toto? Wasn’t that the dog in The Wizard of Oz?

Then the applause swelled out again, filling the room, and dozens of cries of “I second!” rang out. Harold was sitting placidly in his seat again, smiling and talking to the people who were thumping him on the back.

Stu brought his gavel doyen half a dozen times for order.

He planned this, Stu thought. These people are going to elect us, but it’s Harold they’ll remember. Still, he got to the root of the thing in a way none of us thought of, not even Glen. It was pretty damn near a stroke of genius. So why should he be so upset? Was he jealous, maybe? Were his good resolutions about Harold, made only the day before yesterday, already going by the boards?

“There’s a motion on the floor,” he blared into the mike, ignoring the feedback whine this time. “Motion on the floor, folks!” He pounded the gavel and they quieted to a low babble. “It’s been moved and seconded that we accept the ad hoc committee just as it stands as the Permanent Free Zone Committee. Before we go to a discussion of the motion or to a vote, I ought to ask if anyone now serving on the committee has an objection or would like to step down.”

Silence from the floor.

“Very well,” Stu said. “Discussion of the motion?”

“I don’t think we need any, Stu,” Dick Ellis said. “It’s a grand idea. Let’s vote!”

Applause greeted this, and Stu needed no further urging. Charlie Impening was waving his hand to be recognized, but Stu ignored him—a good case of selective perception, Glen Bateman would have said—and called the question.

“Those in favor of Harold Lauder’s motion please signify by saying aye.”

“Aye!! ” they bellowed, sending the barnswallows into another frenzy.

“Opposed?”

But no one was, not even Charlie Impening—at least, vocally. There was not a nay in the chamber. So Stu pushed on to the next item of business, feeling slightly dazed, as if someone—namely, Harold Lauder—had crept up behind him and clopped him one on the head with a large sledgehammer made out of Silly Putty.

“Let’s get off and push them awhile, want to?” Fran asked. She sounded tired.

“Sure.” He got off his bike and walked along beside her. “You okay, Fran? The baby bothering?”

“No. I’m just tired. It’s quarter of one in the morning, or hadn’t you noticed?”

“Yeah, it’s late,” Stu agreed, and they pushed their bikes side by side in companionable silence. The meeting had gone on until an hour ago, most of the discussion centering on the search-party for Mother Abagail. The other items had all passed with a minimum of discussion, although Judge Farris had provided a fascinating piece of information that explained why there were so relatively few bodies in Boulder. According to the last four issues of the Camera, Boulder’s daily newspaper, a wild rumor had swept the community, a rumor that the superflu had originated in the Boulder Air Testing facility on Broadway. Spokesmen for the center—the few still on their feet—protested that it was utter nonsense, and anyone who doubted it was free to tour the facility, where they would find nothing more dangerous than air pollution indicators and wind-vectoring devices. In spite of this, the rumor persisted, probably fed by the hysterical temper of those terrible days in late June. The Air Testing Center had been either bombed or burned, and much of Boulder’s population had fled.

Both the Burial Committee and the Power Committee had been passed with an amendment from Harold Lauder—who had seemed almost awesomely prepared for the meeting—to the effect that each committee be increased by two for each increase of one hundred in the total Free Zone population.

The Search Committee was also voted with no opposition, but the discussion of Mother Abagail’s disappearance had been a protracted one. Glen had advised Stu before the meeting not to limit discussion on this topic unless absolutely necessary; it was worrying all of them, especially the idea that their spiritual leader believed she had committed some sort of sin. Best to let them get it off their chests.

On the back of her note, the old woman had scrawled two biblical references: Proverbs II: 1–3, and Proverbs 21:28-31. Judge Farris had searched these out with the careful diligence of a lawyer preparing a brief, and at the beginning of the discussion, he rose and read them in his cracked and apocalyptic old man’s voice. The verses in the eleventh chapter of Proverbs stated, “A false balance is an abomination of the Lord: but a just weight is his delight. When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom. The integrity of the upright shall guide them: but the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them.” The quotation from the twenty-first chapter was in a similar vein: “A false witness shall perish, but the man that heareth speaketh constantly. A wicked man hardeneth his face, but as for the upright, he directeth his way. There is no wisdom nor understanding nor counsel against the Lord. The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the Lord.”

The talk following the Judge’s oration (it could be called nothing else) of these two Scriptural tidbits had ranged over far-reaching—and often comical—ground. One man stated ominously that if the chapter numbers were added, you came out with thirty-one, the number of chapters in the Book of Revelations. Judge Farris rose again to say that the Book of Revelations had only twenty-two chapters, at least in his Bible, and that, in any case, twenty-one and eleven added up to thirty-two, not thirty-one. The aspiring numerologist muttered but said no more.

Another fellow stated that he had seen lights in the sky the night before Mother Abagail’s disappearance and that the Prophet Isaiah had confirmed the existence of flying saucers… so they’d better put that in their collective pipe and smoke it, hadn’t they? Judge Farris rose once more, this time to point out that the previous gentleman had mistaken Isaiah for Ezekiel, that the exact reference was not to flying saucers but to “a wheel within a wheel,” and that the Judge himself was of the opinion that the only flying saucers yet proven were those that sometimes flew during marital spats.

Much of the other discussion was a rehash of the dreams, which had ceased altogether, as far as anyone knew, and now seemed rather dreamlike themselves. Person after person rose to protest the charge that Mother Abagail had laid upon herself, that of pride. They spoke of her courtesy and her ability to put a person at ease with just a word or a sentence. Ralph Brentner, who looked awed by the size of the crowd and was nearly tongue-tied—but determined to speak his piece—rose and spoke in that vein for nearly five minutes, adding at the end that he had not known a finer woman since his mother had died. When he sat down, he seemed very near tears.

When taken together, the discussion reminded Stu uncomfortably of a wake. It told him that in their hearts, they had already come halfway to giving her up. If she did return now, Abby Freemantle would find herself welcomed, still sought after, still listened to… but she would also find, Stu thought, that her position was subtly changed. If a showdown between her and the Free Zone Committee came, it was no longer a foregone conclusion that she would win, veto power or not. She had gone away and the community had continued to exist. The community would not forget that, as they had already half forgotten the power the dreams had once briefly held over their lives.

After the meeting, more than two dozen people had sat for a while on the lawn behind Chautauqua Hall; the rain had stopped, the clouds were tattering, and the evening was pleasantly cool. Stu and Frannie had sat with Larry, Lucy, Leo, and Harold.

“You darn near knocked us out of the ballpark this evening,” Larry told Harold. He nudged Frannie with an elbow. “I told you he was ace high, didn’t I?”

Harold had merely smiled and shrugged modestly. “A couple of ideas, that’s all. You seven have started things moving again. You should at least have the privilege of seeing it through to the end of the beginning.”

Now, fifteen minutes after the two of them had left that impromptu gathering and still ten minutes from home, Stu repeated: “You sure you’re feeling okay?”

“Yes. My legs are a little tired, that’s all.”

“You want to take it easy, Frances.”

“Don’t call me that, you know I hate it.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Frances.”

“All men are bastards.”

“I’m going to try and improve my act, Frances—honest I am.”

She showed him her tongue, which came to an interesting point, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in the banter, and he dropped it. She looked pale and rather listless, a startling contrast to the Frannie who had sung the National Anthem with such heart a few hours earlier.

“Something giving you the blues, honey?”

She shook her head no, but he thought he saw tears in her eyes.

“What is it? Tell me.”

“It’s nothing. That’s what’s the matter. Nothing is what’s bothering me. It’s over, and I finally realized it, that’s all. Less than six hundred people singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ It just kind of hit me all at once. No hotdog stands. The Ferris wheel isn’t going around and around at Coney Island tonight. No one’s having a nightcap at the Space Needle in Seattle. Someone finally found a way to clean up the dope in Boston’s Combat Zone and the chicken-ranch business in Times Square. Those were terrible things, but I think the cure was a lot worse than the disease. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“In my diary I had a little section called ‘Things to Remember.’ So the baby would know… oh, all the things he never will. And it gives me the blues, thinking of that. I should have called it ‘Things That Are Gone.’” She did sob a little, stopping her bike so she could put the back of her hand to her mouth and try to keep it in.

“It got everybody the same way,” Stu said, putting an arm around her. “Lot of people are going to cry themselves to sleep tonight. You better believe it.”

“I don’t see how you can grieve for a whole country,” she said, crying harder, “but I guess you can. These… these little things keep shooting through my mind. Car salesmen. Frank Sinatra. Old Orchard Beach in July, all crowded with people, most of them from Quebec. That stupid guy on MTV—Randy, I think his name was. The times… oh God, I sound like a fuh-fuh-frigging Rod Muh-McKuen poem!”

He held her, patting her back, remembering one time when his Aunt Betty had gotten a crying fit over some bread that didn’t rise—she was big with his little cousin Laddie then, seven months or so—and Stu could remember her wiping her eyes with the corner of a dishtowel and telling him to never mind, any pregnant woman was just two doors down from the mental ward because the juices their glands put out were always scrambled up into a stew.

After a while Frannie said, “Okay. Okay. Better. Let’s go.”

“Frannie, I love you,” he said. They resumed pushing their bikes.

She asked him, “What do you remember best? What’s the one thing?”

“Well, you know—” he said, and then stopped with a little laugh.

“No, I don’t know, Stuart.”

“It’s crazy.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know if I want to. You’ll start looking for the guys with the butterfly nets.”

“Tell me!” She had seen Stu in many moods, but this curious, embarrassed uneasiness was new to her.

“I never told anybody,” he said, “but I have been thinking on it the last couple of weeks. Something happened to me back in 1982, I was pumping gas at Bill Hapscomb’s gas station then. He used to hire me on, if he could, when I was laid off at the calculator plant in town. He had me on part-time, eleven P.M. to closing, which was three in the morning back in those days. There wasn’t much business after the people getting off the three-to-eleven shift at the Dixie Paper factory stopped to get their gas… lots of nights there wasn’t a single car stopped between twelve and three. I’d sit there and read a book or a magazine, and lots of night I’d doze off. You know?”

“Yes.” She did know. In her mind’s eye she could see him, the man who would become her man in the fullness of time and the peculiarity of events, a broad-shouldered man sleeping in a plastic Woolco chair with a book open and facedown on his lap. She saw him sleeping in an island of white light, an island surrounded by a great inland sea of Texas night. She loved him in this picture, as she loved him in all the pictures her mind drew.

“Well, this one night it was about quarter past two, and I was sitting behind Hap’s desk with my feet up, reading some Western—Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, someone like that, and in pulls this big old Pontiac with all the windows rolled down and the tape-player going like mad, playing Hank Williams. I even remember the song—it was ‘Movin’ On.’ This guy, not young and not old, is all by himself. He was a good-lookin man, but in a way that was a little scary—I mean, he looked like he might do scary things without thinkin very hard about em. He had bushy, curly dark hair. There was a bottle of wine snugged down between his legs and a pair of Styrofoam dice hanging from the rearview mirror. He says, ‘High test,’ and I said okay, but for a minute I just stood there and looked at him. Because he looked familiar. I was playin place the face.”

They were on the corner now; their apartment building was across the street. They paused there. Frannie was looking at him closely.

“So I said, ‘Don’t I know you? Ain’t you from up around Corbett or Maxin?’ But it didn’t really seem like I knew him from those two towns. And he says, ‘No, but I passed through Corbett once with my family, when I was just a kid. It seems like I passed through just about everyplace in America when I was a kid. My dad was in the Air Force.’

“So I went back and filled up his car, and all the time I’m thinkin about him, playing place the face, and all at once it came to me. All at once I knew. And I damned near pissed myself, because the man behind the wheel of that Pontiac was supposed to be dead.”

“Who was he, Stuart? Who was he?”

“No, you let me tell it my way, Frannie. Not that it isn’t a crazy story no matter what way you tell it. I went back to the window and I says, ‘That’ll be six dollars and thirty cents.’ He gave me two five-dollar bills and told me I could keep the change. And I says, ‘I think I might have you placed now.’ And he says, ‘Well, maybe you do,’ and he gives me this weird, chilly smile, and all the time Hank Williams is singin about goin to town. I says, ‘If you are who I think you are, you’re supposed to be dead.’ He says, ‘You don’t want to believe everything you read, man.’ I says, ‘You like Hank Williams all right?’ It was all I could think of to say. Because I saw, Frannie, if I didn’t say something, he was just going to roll up that power window and go tooling on down the road… and I wanted him to go, but I also didn’t want him to go. Not yet. Not until I was sure. I didn’t know then that a person is never sure about a lot of things, no matter how much he wants to be.

“He says, ‘Hank Williams is one of the best. I like roadhouse music.’ Then he says, ‘I’m going to New Orleans, going to drive all night, sleep all day tomorrow, then barrelhouse all night long. Is it the same? New Orleans?’ And I say, ‘As what?’ And he says, ‘Well, you know.’ And I say, ‘Well, it’s all the South, you know, although there are considerable more trees down that way.’ And that makes him laugh. He says, ‘Maybe I’ll see you again.’ But I didn’t want to see him again, Frannie. Because he had the eyes of a man who has been trying to look into the dark for a long time and has maybe begun to see what is there. I think, if I ever see that man Flagg, his eyes might look a little like that.”

Stu shook his head as they pushed their bikes across the road and parked them. “I’ve been thinking of that. I thought about getting some of his records after that, but I didn’t want them. His voice… it’s a good voice, but it gives me the creeps.”

“Stuart, who are you talking about?”

“You remember a rock and roll group called The Doors? The man that stopped that night for gas in Arnette was Jim Morrison. I’m sure of it.”

Her mouth dropped open. “But he died! He died in France! He—” And then she stopped. Because there had been something funny about Morrison’s death, hadn’t there? Something secret.

“Did he?” Stu asked. “I wonder. Maybe he did, and the fellow I saw was just a guy who looked like him, but—”

“Do you really think it was?” she asked.

They were sitting on the steps of their building now, shoulders touching, like small children waiting for their mother to call them in to supper.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do. And until this summer, I thought that would always be the strangest thing that ever happened to me. Boy, was I wrong.”

“And you never told anyone,” she marveled. “You saw Jim Morrison years after he supposedly died and you never told anyone. Stuart Redman, God should have given you a combination lock instead of a mouth when He sent you out into the world.”

Stu smiled. “Well, the years rolled by, as they say in the books, and whenever I thought of that night—as I did, from time to time—I got surer and surer it wasn’t him after all. Just someone who looked a little bit like him, you know. I had my mind pretty well at rest on the subject. But in the last few weeks, I’ve found myself puzzling over it again. And I think more and more that it was. Hell, he might even still be alive now. That’d be a real laugh, wouldn’t it?”

“If he is,” she said, “he’s not here.”

“No,” Stu agreed, “I wouldn’t expect him to be here. I saw his eyes, you see.”

She put her hand on his arm. “That’s some story.”

“Yeah, and there’s probably twenty million people in this country with one just like it… only about Elvis Presley or Howard Hughes.”

“Not anymore.”

“No—not anymore. Harold was something tonight, wasn’t he?”

“I believe that’s called changing the subject.”

“I believe you’re right.”

“Yes,” she said, “he was.”

He smiled at her worried tone and the slight frown which had puckered her brow. “Bothered you a little, didn’t it?”

“Yes, but I won’t say so. You’re in Harold’s corner now.”

“Now, that’s not fair, Fran. It bothered me, too. There we had those two advance meetings… hashed everything over to a fare-thee-well… at least we thought so… and along comes Harold. He takes a whack-whack here and a whack-whack there and says, ‘Ain’t that what you really meant?’ And we say, ‘Yeah, thanks, Harold. It was.’” Stu shook his head. “Putting everybody up for blanket election, how come we never thought of that, Fran? That was sharp. And we never even discussed it.”

“Well, none of us knew for sure what kind of mood they’d be in. I thought—especially after Mother Abagail walked off—that they’d be glum, maybe even mean. With that Impening talking to them like some kind of deathcrow—”

“I wonder if he should be shut up somehow,” Stu said thoughtfully.

“But it wasn’t like that. They were so… exuberant just to be together. Did you feel that?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“It was like a tent revival, almost. I don’t think it was anything Harold had planned. He just seized the moment.”

“I just don’t know how to feel about him,” Stu said. “That night after we hunted for Mother Abagail, I felt real bad for him. When Ralph and Glen turned up, he looked downright horrible, like he was going to faint, or something. But when we were talking out on the lawn just now and everybody was congratulating him, he seemed puffed up like a toad. Like he was smiling on the outside and on the inside he was saying, ‘There, you see what your committee’s worth, you stupid bunch of fools.’ He’s like one of those puzzles you could never figure out when you were a kid. The Chinese finger-pullers or those three steel rings that would come apart if you pulled them just the right way.”

Fran stuck out her feet and looked at them. “Speaking of Harold, do you see anything funny about my feet, Stuart?”

Stu looked at them judiciously. “Nope. Just that you’re wearing those funny-looking Earth Shoes from up the street. And they’re almighty big, o course.”

She slapped at him. “Earth Shoes are very good for your feet. All the best magazines say so. And I happen to be a size seven, for your information. That’s practically petite.”

“So what have your feet got to do with anything? It’s late, honey.” He began to push his bike again and she fell in beside him.

“Nothing, I guess. It’s just that Harold kept looking at my feet. After the meeting when we were sitting out on the grass and talking things over.” She shook her head, frowning a little. “Now why would Harold Lauder be interested in my feet?” she asked.

When Larry and Lucy got home, they were by themselves, walking hand in hand. Sometime before, Leo had gone into the house where he stayed with “Nadine-mom.”

Now, as they walked toward the door, Lucy said: “It was quite a meeting. I never thought—” Her words caught in her throat as a dark form unfolded itself from the shadows of their porch. Larry felt hot fear leap up in his throat. It’s him, he thought wildly. He’s come to get me… I’m going to see his face.

But then he wondered how he could have thought that, because it was Nadine Cross, that was all. She was wearing a dress of some soft bluish-gray material, and her hair was loose, flowing over her shoulders and down her back, dark hair shot with skeins of purest white.

She sort of makes Lucy look like a used car on a scalper’s lot, he thought before he could help himself, and then hated himself for thinking it. That was the old Larry talking… old Larry? You might as well say old Adam.

“Nadine,” Lucy was saying shakily, with one hand pressed to her chest. “You gave me the fright of my life. I thought… well, I don’t know what I thought.”

She took no notice of Lucy. “Can I talk to you?” she asked Larry.

“What? Now?” He looked sideways at Lucy, or thought he did… later he was never able to remember what Lucy had looked like in that moment. It was as if she had been eclipsed, but by a dark star rather than by a bright one.

“Now. It has to be now.”

“In the morning would—”

“It has to be now, Larry. Or never.”

He looked at Lucy again and this time he did see her, saw the resignation on her face as she looked from Larry to Nadine and back again. He saw the hurt.

“I’ll be right in, Lucy.”

“No you won’t,” she said dully. Tears had begun to sparkle in her eyes. “Oh no, I doubt it.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes, ten years,” Lucy said. “She’s come to get you. Did you bring your dog collar and your muzzle, Nadine?”

For Nadine, Lucy Swann did not exist. Her eyes were fixed only on Larry, those dark, wide eyes. For Larry, they would always be the strangest, most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, the eyes that come back to you, calm and deep, when you’re hurt or in bad trouble or maybe just about out of your mind with grief.

“I’ll be in, Lucy,” he said automatically.

“She—”

“Go on.”

“Yes, I guess I will. She’s come. I’m dismissed.”

She ran up the steps, stumbling on the top one, regaining her balance, pulling the door open, closing it behind her with a slam, cutting off the sound of her sobs even as they started.

Nadine and Larry looked at each other for a long time as if entranced. This is how it happens, he thought. When you catch someone’s eyes across a room and never forget them, or see someone at the far end of a crowded subway platform that could have been your double, or hear a laugh on the street that could have been the laugh of the first girl you ever made love to—

But something in his mouth tasted so bitter.

“Let’s walk down to the corner and back,” Nadine said in a low voice. “Would you do that much?”

“I better go in to her. You picked one hell of a bad time to come here.”

“Please? Just down to the corner and back? If you want, I’ll get down on my knees and beg. If that’s what you want. Here. See?”

And to his horror she did get down on her knees, pulling her skirt up a little so she could do it, showing him her bare legs, making him curiously certain that everything else was bare as well. Why should he think that? He didn’t know. Her eyes were on him, making his head spin, and there was a sickening feeling of power involved here someplace, involved with having her on her knees before him, her mouth on a level with—

“Get up!” he said roughly. He took her hands and yanked her to her feet, trying not to see the way the skirt rode up even more before falling back into place; her thighs were the color of cream, that shade of white that is not pale and dead but vigorous and healthy and enticing.

“Come on,” he said, almost totally unnerved.

They walked west, in the direction of the mountains, which were a negative presence far ahead, triangular patches of darkness blotting out the stars that had come out after the rain. Walking toward those mountains at night always made him feel queerly uneasy but somehow adventurous, and now, with Nadine by his side, her hand resting lightly in the crook of his elbow, those feelings seemed heightened. He had always had vivid dreams, and three or four nights ago about those mountains; he had dreamed there were trolls in them, hideous creatures with bright green eyes, the oversized heads of hydrocephalic cretins, and short-fingered, powerful hands. Strangler’s hands. Idiot trolls, guarding the passes through the mountains. Waiting until his time came around—the time of the dark man.

A soft breeze meandered down the street, blowing papers before it. They passed King Sooper’s, a few shopping carts standing in the big parking lot like dead sentinels, making him think of the Lincoln Tunnel. There had been trolls in the Lincoln Tunnel. They had been dead, but that didn’t mean all the trolls in their new world were dead.

“It’s hard,” Nadine said, her voice still low. “She made it hard because she’s right. I want you now. And I’m afraid I’m too late. I want to stay here.”

“Nadine—”

“No! ” she said fiercely. “Let me finish. I want to stay here, can’t you understand that? And if we’re with each other, I’ll be able to. You’re my last chance,” she said, her voice breaking. “Joe’s gone now.”

“No, he hasn’t,” Larry said, feeling slow and stupid and bewildered. “We dropped him off at your place on the way home. Isn’t he there?”

“No. There’s a boy named Leo Rockway asleep in his bed.”

“What are you—”

“Listen,” she said. “Listen to me, can’t you listen? As long as I had Joe, I was all right. I could… be as strong as I had to be. But he doesn’t need me anymore. And I need to be needed.”

“He does need you!”

“Of course he does,” Nadine said, and Larry felt afraid again. She wasn’t talking about Leo anymore; he didn’t know who she was talking about. “He needs me. That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s why I came to you.” She stepped in front of him and looked up, her chin tilted. He could smell her secret clean scent, and he wanted her. But part of him turned back toward Lucy. That was the part of him he needed if he was going to make it here in Boulder. If he let it go and went with Nadine, they might as well slink out of Boulder tonight. It would be finished with him. The old Larry triumphant.

“I have to go home,” he said. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to work it out on your own, Nadine.” Work it out on your own —weren’t they the words he had been using to people in one form or another all his life? Why did they have to rise up this way when he knew he was right and still catch him, and twist in him, and make him doubt himself?

“Make love to me,” she said, and put her arms around his neck. She pressed her body against his and he knew by its looseness, its warmth and springiness, that he had been right, she was wearing the dress and that was all. Buck naked underneath, he thought, and thinking it excited him blackly.

“That’s all right, I can feel you,” she said, and began to wriggle against him—sideways, up and down, creating a delicious friction. “Make love to me and that will be the end of it. I’ll be safe. Safe. I’ll be safe.”

He reached up, and later he never knew how he was able to do that when he could have been inside her warmth in only three quick movements and one thrust, the way she wanted it, but somehow he reached up and unlocked her hands and pushed her away with such force that she stumbled and almost fell. A low moan came from her.

“Larry, if you knew—”

“Well, I don’t. Why don’t you try telling me instead of… of raping me?”

“Rape!” she repeated, laughing shrilly. “Oh, that’s funny! Oh, what you said! Me! Rape you! Oh, Larry!”

“Whatever you want from me, you could have had. You could have had it last week, or the week before. The week before that I asked you to take it. I wanted you to have it.”

“That was too soon,” she whispered.

“And now it’s too late,” he said, hating the brutal sound of his voice but unable to control it. He was still shaking all over from wanting her, how was he supposed to sound? “What are you gonna do; huh?”

“All right. Goodbye, Larry.”

She was turning away. In that instant she was more than Nadine, turning her back on him forever. She was the oral hygienist. She was Yvonne, with whom he had shared an apartment in L.A.—she had pissed him off and so he had just slipped into his boogie shoes, leaving her holding the lease. She was Rita Blakemoor.

Worst of all, she was his mother.

“Nadine?”

She didn’t turn around. She was a black shape distinguishable from other black shapes only when she crossed the street. Then she disappeared altogether against the black background of the mountains. He called her name once again and she didn’t answer. There was something terrifying in the way she had left him, the way she had just melted into that black backdrop.

He stood in front of King Sooper’s, hands clenched, brow covered with pearls of sweat in spite of the evening cool. His ghosts were with him now, and at last he knew how you pay off for not being no nice guy: never clear about your own motivations, never able to weigh hurt against help except by rule of thumb, never able to get rid of the sour taste of doubt in your mouth and—

His head jerked up. His eyes widened until they seemed to bulge from his face. The wind had picked up again, it made a strange hooting sound in some empty doorway, and farther away he thought he could hear bootheels pacing off the night, rundown bootheels somewhere in the foothills coming to him on the chilly draft of this early morning breeze.

Dirty bootheels clocking their way into the grave of the West.

Lucy heard him let himself in and her heart leaped up fiercely. She told it to stop, that he was probably only coming back for his things, but it would not stop. He picked me, was the thought that hammered into her brain, driven there by her heart’s triphammer beat. He picked me —

In spite of her excitement and hope, which she was helpless to control, she lay stiffly on her back on the bed, waiting and watching nothing but the ceiling. She had only told him the truth when she had said that, for her and for girls like her friend Joline, the only fault was too much need to love. But she had always been faithful. She was no cheater. She hadn’t cheated on her husband and she had never cheated on Larry, and if in the years before she had met them she hadn’t exactly been a nun… time past was time past. You just couldn’t get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.

If you knew that past was out of reach, maybe you could forgive.

Tears were stealing down her cheeks.

The door clicked open and she saw him in it, just a silhouette.

“Lucy? You awake?”

“Yes.”

“Can I put on the lamp?”

“If you want.”

She heard the minute hiss of gas and then the light came on, turned down to a thread of flame, revealing him. He looked pale and shaken.

“I have to say something.”

“No you don’t. Just come to bed.”

“I have to say it. I…” He pressed his hand against his forehead and ran it through his hair.

“Larry?” She sat up. “Are you all right?”

He spoke as if he hadn’t heard her, and he spoke without looking at her. “I love you. If you want me, you got me. But I don’t know if you’re getting much. I’m never going to be your best bet, Lucy.”

“I’ll take the chance. Come to bed.”

He did. And they did. And when the love was over she told him she loved him, it was true, God knew that, and it seemed to be what he wanted, needed, to hear, but she didn’t think he slept for a long time. Once in the night she came awake (or dreamed she did) and it seemed to her that Larry was at the window, looking out, his head cocked in a listening posture, the lines of light and shadow giving his face the appearance of a haggard mask. But in the light of day she was more sure that it must have been a dream; in the light of day he seemed to be his old self again.

It was only three days later that they heard from Ralph Brentner that Nadine had moved in with Harold Lauder. At that, Larry’s face seemed to tighten, but it was only for a moment. And although Lucy disliked herself for it, Ralph’s news made her breathe a little easier. It seemed it must be over.

She went home only briefly after seeing Larry. She let herself in, went to the living room, and lit the lamp. Carrying it high, she went to the back of the house, pausing for just a moment to let the light spill into the boy’s room. She wanted to see if she had told Larry the truth. She had.

Leo lay asprawl in a tangle of bedclothes, dressed only in his undershorts… but the cuts and scratches had faded, disappeared altogether in most cases, and the all-over tan he had gotten from going practically naked had also faded. But it was more than that, she thought. Something in his face had changed—she could see the change even though he was asleep. That expression of mute, needful savagery had gone out of it. He was not Joe anymore. This was just a boy sleeping after a busy day.

She thought of the night she had been almost asleep and had come awake to find him gone from her side. That had been in North Berwick, Maine—most of the continent away now. She had followed him to the house where Larry lay sleeping on the porch. Larry sleeping inside, Joe standing outside, brandishing his knife with mute savagery, and nothing between them but the thin and sliceable screen. And she had made him come away.

Hate pounced on Nadine in a surging flash, striking up brilliant sparks as if from flint and steel. The Coleman lamp trembled in her hand, making wild shadows leap and dance. She should have let him do it! She should have held the door for Joe herself, let him in so he could stab and rip and cut and puncture and gut and destroy. She should have—

But now the boy turned over, and moaned in his throat, as if waking. His hands came up and batted the air, as if warding off a black shape in a dream. And Nadine withdrew, a pulse beating thickly at her temples. There was still something strange in the boy, and she didn’t like the way he had moved just now, as if he had picked up her thoughts.

She had to go ahead now. She had to be quick.

She went into her own room. There was a rug on the floor. There was a single narrow bed—an old maid’s bed. That was all. There was not even a picture. The room was totally devoid of character. She opened the closet door and rummaged behind her hanging clothes. She was on her knees now, sweating. She drew out a brightly colored box with a photograph of laughing adults on the front, adults who were playing a party-game. A party-game that was at least three thousand years old.

She had found the planchette in a downtown novelty shop, but she dared not use it in the house, not with the boy here. In fact, she had not dared use it at all… until now. Something had impelled her into the shop, and when she had seen the planchette in its gay party box, a terrible struggle had gone on inside her—the sort of struggle psychologists call aversion/compulsion. She had been sweating then as now, wanting two things at the same time: to hurry out of that shop without looking back, and to snatch the box, that dreadful gay box, and carry it home with her. The latter wish frightened her the more, because it did not seem to be her own wish.

At last, she had taken the box.

That had been four days ago. Each night the compulsion had grown stronger until tonight, half insane with fears she didn’t understand, she had gone to Larry wearing the blue-gray dress with nothing on underneath. She had gone to put an end to the fears for good. Waiting on the porch for them to get back from the meeting, she had been sure she had finally done the right thing. There had been that feeling in her, that lightly drunk, starstruck feeling, that she’d not properly had since she had run across the dew-drenched grass with the boy behind her. Only this time the boy would catch her. She would let him catch her. It would be the end.

But when he had caught her, he hadn’t wanted her.

Nadine stood up, holding the box to her chest, and put out the lamp. He had scorned her, and didn’t they say that hell hath no fury—? A scorned woman might well traffic with the devil… or his henchman.

She paused only long enough to get the large flashlight from the table in the front hall. From deeper inside the house, the boy cried out in his sleep, freezing her for a moment, making the hair prickle on her scalp.

Then she let herself out.

Her Vespa was at the curb, the Vespa she had used some days ago to motor up to Harold Lauder’s house. Why had she gone there? She hadn’t passed a dozen words with Harold since she’d gotten to Boulder. But in her confusion about the planchette, and in her terror of the dreams that continued to come to her even after everyone else’s had stopped, it had seemed to her that she must talk about it to Harold. She had been afraid of that impulse, too, she remembered as she put the Vespa’s ignition key in its slot. Like the sudden urge to pick up the planchette (Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Get-togethers! the box said), it had seemed to be an idea that had come to her from outside herself. His thought, maybe. But when she had given in and gone to Harold’s, he hadn’t been at home. The house was locked, the only locked house she had come upon in Boulder, and the shades were drawn. She had rather liked that and she’d had a moment’s bitter disappointment that Harold was not there. If he had been, he could have let her in and then locked the door behind her. They could have gone into the living room and talked, or made love, or have done unspeakable things together, and no one would have known.

Harold’s was a private place.

“What’s happening to me?” she whispered to the dark, but the dark had no answer for her. She started the Vespa, and the steady burping pop of its engine seemed to profane the night. She put it in gear and drove away. To the west.

Moving, the cool night air on her face, she felt better at last. Blow away the cobwebs, night wind. You know, don’t you? When all the choices have been taken away, what do you do? You choose what’s left. You choose whatever dark adventure was meant for you. You let Larry have his stupid little twist of tail with her tight pants and her single-syllable vocabulary and her movie-magazine mind. You go beyond them. You risk… whatever there is to be risked.

Mostly you risk yourself.

The road unrolled before her in the baby spotlight of the Vespa’s headlamp. She had to switch to second gear as the road began to climb; she was on Baseline Road now, headed up the black mountain. Let them have their meetings. They were concerned with getting the power back on; her lover was concerned with the world.

The Vespa’s engine lugged and strained and somehow carried on. A horrible yet sexy kind of fear began to grip her, and the vibrating saddle of the motorbike began to heat her up down there (why, you’re horny, Nadine, she thought with shrill good humor, naughty, naughty, NAUGHTY). To her right was a straight dropoff. Nothing but death down there. And up above? Well, she would see. It was too late to turn back, and that thought alone made her feel paradoxically and deliciously free.

An hour later she was in Sunrise Amphitheater—but sunrise was still three or more hours away. The amphitheater was close to the summit of Flagstaff Mountain, and nearly everyone in the Free Zone had made the trip to the camping area at the top before they had been in Boulder very long. On a clear day—which was most days in Boulder, at least during the summer season—you could see Boulder, and I-25 stretching away south to Denver and then off into the haze toward New Mexico two hundred miles beyond. Due east were the flatlands, stretching away toward Nebraska, and closer at hand was Boulder Canyon, a knife-gash through foothills that were walled in pine and spruce. In summers gone by, gliders had plied the thermals over Sunrise Amphitheater like birds.

Now Nadine saw only what was revealed in the glow of the six-cell flashlight which she put on a picnic table near the dropoff. There was a large artist’s sketchpad turned back to a clean sheet, and squatting on it the three-cornered planchette like a triangular spider. Protruding from its belly, like the spider’s stinger, was a pencil, lightly touching the pad.

Nadine was in a feverish state that was half-euphoria, half-terror. Coming up here on the back of her gamely laboring Vespa, which had most decidedly not been made for mountain climbing, she had felt what Harold had felt in Nederland. She could feel him. But while Harold had felt this in a rather precise and technological way, as a piece of steel attracted by a magnet, a drawing toward, Nadine felt it as a kind of mystic event, a border-crossing. It was as if these mountains, of which she was even now only in the foothills, were a no-man’s-land between two spheres of influence—Flagg in the West, the old woman in the East. And here the magic flew both ways, mixing, making its own concoction that belonged neither to God nor to Satan but which was totally pagan. She felt she was in a haunted place.

And the planchette…

She had tossed the brightly marked box, stamped MADE IN TAIWAN, away indifferently for the wind to take. The planchette itself was only a poorly stamped piece of fiberboard or gypsum. But it didn’t matter. It was a tool she would only use once—only dared to use once—and even a poorly made tool can serve its purpose: to break open a door, to close a window, to write a Name.

The words on the box recurred: Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Get-togethers!

What was that song Larry sometimes bellowed from the seat of his Honda as they rode along? Hello, Central, what’s the matter with your line? I want to talk to —

Talk to who? But that was the question, wasn’t it?

She remembered the time she had used the planchette in college. That had been more than a dozen years ago… but it might as well have been yesterday. She had gone upstairs to ask someone on the third floor of the dorm, a girl named Rachel Timms, about the assignment in a remedial reading class they shared. The room had been filled with girls, six or eight of them at least, giggling and laughing. Nadine remembered thinking that they acted as if they were high on something, smoke or maybe even blow.

“Stop it!” Rachel said, giggling herself. “How do you expect the spirits to communicate if you’re all acting like a bunch of donkeys?”

The idea of laughing donkeys struck them as deliciously funny, and a fresh feminine gale blew through the room for a while. The planchette had set then as it sat now, a triangular spider on three stubby legs, pencil pointing down. While they giggled, Nadine picked up a sheaf of oversized pages torn from an artist’s sketchbook and shuffled through those “messages from the astral plane” which had already come in.

Tommy says you have been using that strawberry douche again.

Mother says she’s fine.

Chunga! Chunga!

John says you won’t fart so much if you stop eating those CAFETERIA BEANS!!!!!

Others, just as silly.

Now the giggles had quieted enough so they could start again. Three girls sat on the bed, each with her fingertips placed on a different side of the planchette. For a moment there was nothing. Then the board quivered.

“You did that, Sandy!” Rachel accused.

“I did not!”

“Shhhh! ”

The board quivered again and the girls hushed. It moved, stopped, moved again. It made the letter F.

“Fuh…” the girl named Sandy said.

“Fuck you, too,” someone else said, and they were off and giggling again.

“Shhhh!” Rachel said sternly.

The planchette began to move more rapidly, tracing out the letters A, T, H, E, and R.

“Father dear, your baby’s here,” a girl named Patty something-or-other said, and giggled. “It must be my father, he died of a heart attack when I was three.”

“It’s writing some more,” Sandy said.

S, A, Y, S, the planchette spelled laboriously.

“What’s going on?” Nadine whispered to a tall, horse-faced girl she didn’t know. The horse-faced girl was looking on with her hands in her pockets and a disgusted look on her face.

“A bunch of girls playing games with something they don’t understand,” the horse-faced girl said. “That’s what’s going on.” She spoke in an even lower whisper.

“FATHER SAYS PATTY,” Sandy quoted. “It’s your dear old dad, all right, Pats.”

Another burst of giggles.

The horse-faced girl was wearing spectacles. Now she took her hands out of the pockets of the overalls she was wearing and used them to remove the spectacles from her face. She polished them and explained further to Nadine, still in a whisper. “The planchette is a tool used by psychics and mediums. Kinestheologists—”

“What ologists?”

“Scientists who study movement, and the interaction of muscles and nerves.”

“Oh.”

“They claim that the planchette is actually responding to tiny muscle movements, probably guided by the subconscious rather than the conscious mind. Of course, mediums and psychics claim that the planchette is moved by entities from the spirit world—”

Another burst of hysterical laughter came from the girls clustered around the board. Nadine looked over the horse-faced girl’s shoulder and saw the message now read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING.

“—to the bathroom so much,” another girl in the circle of spectators suggested, and everyone laughed some more.

“Either way, they’re just fooling with it,” the horse-faced girl said with a disdainful sniff. “It’s very unwise. Both mediums and scientists agree that automatic writing can be dangerous.”

“The spirits are unfriendly tonight, you think?” Nadine asked lightly.

“Perhaps the spirits are always unfriendly,” the horse-faced girl said, giving her a sharp look. “Or you might get a message from your subconscious mind which you were totally unprepared to receive. There are documented cases of automatic writing getting entirely out of control, you know. People have gone mad.”

“Oh, that seems awfully farfetched. It’s just a game.”

“Games have a way of turning serious sometimes.”

The loudest burst of laughter yet tacked a period to the horse-faced girl’s comment before Nadine could reply. The girl named Patty something-or-other had fallen off the bed and lay on the floor, holding her stomach and laughing and kicking her feet weakly. The completed message read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING TO THE SUBMARINE RACES WITH LEONARD KATZ.

“You did that!” Patty said to Sandy as she finally sat up again.

“I didn’t, Patty! Honest!”

“It was your father! From the Great Beyond! From Out There!” another girl told Patty in a Boris Karloff voice which Nadine thought was actually quite good. “Just remember that he’s watching you the next time you take off your pants in the back seat of Leonard’s Dodge.”

Another loud outburst greeted this sally. As it tapered off, Nadine pushed forward and twitched Rachel’s arm. She meant to ask for the assignment and then make a quiet escape.

“Nadine!” Rachel cried. Her eyes were sparkling and gay. Her cheeks had bloomed with roses. “Sit down, let’s see if the spirits have a message for you!”

“No, really, I only came to get the assignment in remedial r—”

“Oh, poop on the assignment in remedial reading! This is important, Nadine! This is big-time! You’ve got to have a try. Here, sit down next to me. Janey, you take the other side.”

Janey sat down opposite Nadine, and at the repeated urging of Rachel Timms, Nadine found herself with the eight fingers of her hands touching the planchette lightly. For some reason she looked over her shoulder at the horse-faced girl. She shook her head at Nadine once, deliberately, and the overhead fluorescent bounced off the lenses of her spectacles and turned her eyes into a pair of large white flashes of light.

She had felt a moment of fear then, she remembered as she stood looking down at another planchette in the glow of a six-cell flashlight, but her remark to the horse-faced girl had recurred—it was just a game, for heaven’s sake, and what horrible thing could possibly happen in the middle of a gaggle of giggling girls? If there was a more hostile atmosphere for the production of genuine spirits, hostile or otherwise, Nadine didn’t know what it would be.

“Now everybody be quiet,” Rachel commanded. “Spirits, do you have a message for our sister and Brownie-in-good-standing Nadine Cross?”

The planchette didn’t move. Nadine felt mildly embarrassed.

“Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie,” the girl who had done Boris Karloff said in an equally successful Bullwinkle Moose voice. “The spirits are about to speak!”

More giggles.

“Shhhh!” Rachel commanded.

Nadine decided that if one of the other two girls didn’t start moving the planchette soon so it would spell out whatever silly message they had for her, she would do it herself—slide it around to spell out something short and sweet, like BOO!, so she could get her assignment and leave.

Just as she was about to try doing this, the planchette jerked rudely under her fingers. The pencil left a dark black diagonal slash on the fresh page.

“Hey! No fair yanking, spirits,” Rachel said in a vaguely uneasy tone of voice. “Did you do that, Nadine?”

“No.”

“Janey.”

“Uh-uh. Honestly.”

The planchette jerked again, almost pulling their fingers from it, and skittered to the upper-lefthand corner of the paper.

“Wowie,” Nadine said. “Did you feel—”

They did, all of them did, although neither Rachel nor Jane Fargood would talk to her about it later. And she had never felt particularly welcome in either girl’s room after that night. It was as if they were both a little afraid to get too close to her after that.

The planchette suddenly began to thrum underneath their fingers; it was like lightly touching the fender of a smoothly idling car. The vibration was steady and disquieting. It was not the sort of movement a person could cause without being fairly obvious about it.

The girls had grown quiet. Their faces all wore a peculiar expression, an expression common to the faces of all people who have attended a séance where something unexpectedly genuine has occurred—when the table begins to rock, when unseen knuckles rap on the wall, or when the medium begins to extrude smoky-gray teleplasm from her nostrils. It is a pallid waiting expression, half wanting whatever it is that has begun to stop, half wanting it to go on. It is an expression of dreadful, distracted excitement… and when it wears that particular look, the human face looks most like the skull which always rests half an inch below the skin.

“Stop it!” the horse-faced girl cried out suddenly. “Stop it right now or you’ll be sorry!”

And Jane Fargood screamed in a fear-filled voice: “I can’t take my fingers off it! ”

Someone uttered a little burping scream. At the same instant Nadine realized that her own fingers were also glued to the board. The muscles of her arms bunched in an effort to pull the tips of her fingers from the planchette, but they remained where they were.

“All right, the joke is over,” Rachel said in a tight, scared voice. “Who—”

And suddenly the planchette began to write.

It moved with lightning speed, dragging their fingers with it, snapping their arms out and back and around in a way which would have been funny if it weren’t for the helpless, caught expressions on all three girls’ faces. Nadine thought later that it was as if her arms had been caught in an exercise machine. The writing before had been in stilted, draggling letters—messages that looked as if they had been written by a seven-year-old. This writing was smooth and powerful… big, slanting capital letters that slashed across the white page. There was something both relentless and vicious about it.

NADINE, NADINE, NADINE, the whirling planchette wrote. HOW I LOVE NADINE TO BE MY TO LOVE MY NADINE TO BE MY QUEEN IF YOU IF YOU IF YOU ARE PURE FOR ME IF YOU ARE CLEAN FOR ME IF YOU ARE IF YOU ARE DEAD FOR ME DEAD YOU ARE

The planchette swooped, raced, and began again, lower down.

YOU ARE DEAD WITH THE REST OF THEM YOU ARE IN THE DEADBOOK WITH THE REST OF THEM NADINE IS DEAD WITH THEM NADINE IS ROTTEN WITH THEM UNLESS UNLESS

It stopped. Thrummed. Nadine thought, hoped—oh how she hoped—that it was over, and then it raced back to the edge of the paper and began again. Jane shrieked miserably. The faces of the other girls were shocked white o ’s of wonder and dismay.

THE WORLD THE WORLD SOON THE WORLD IS DEAD AND WE WE WE NADINE NADINE I I I WE WE WE ARE WE ARE WE

Now the letters seemed to scream across the page:

WE ARE IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD NADINE

The last word howled itself across the page in inch-high capital letters and then the planchette whirled from the tablet, leaving a long streak of graphite behind like a shout. It fell on the floor and snapped in two.

There had been an instant of shocked, immobile silence, and then Jane Fargood had burst into high, weeping hysterics. The thing had ended with the housemother coming upstairs to see what was wrong; Nadine remembered, and she had been about to call the infirmary for Jane when the girl had managed to get hold of herself a little.

Through the whole thing Rachel Timms had sat on her bed, calm and pale. When the housemother and most of the other girls (including the horse-faced girl, who undoubtedly felt that a prophetess is without much honor in her own land) had left, she had asked Nadine in a flat, strange voice: “Who was it, Nadine?”

“I don’t know,” Nadine had answered truthfully. She hadn’t had the slightest idea. Not then.

“You didn’t recognize the handwriting?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe you just better take that… that note from beyond or whatever it is… and go back to your room.”

“You asked me to sit down!” Nadine flashed at her. “How was I supposed to know anything like… like that would happen? I did it to be polite, for God’s sake!”

Rachel had had the good grace to flush at that; she had even offered a little apology. But Nadine had never seen much of the girl after that, and Rachel Timms had been one of the few girls Nadine had ever felt really close to during her first three semesters at college.

From then until now she had never touched one of these triangular spiders made of pressed fiberboard.

But the time had… well, it had slouched around at last, hadn’t it?

Yes indeed.

Heart beating loudly, Nadine sat down on the picnic bench and pressed her fingers lightly to two of the planchette’s three sides. She could feel it begin to move under the balls of her fingers almost immediately, and she thought of a car with its engine idling. But who was the driver? Who was he, really? Who would climb in, and slam the door, and put his sun-blackened hands on the wheel? Whose foot, brutal and heavy, shod in an old and dusty cowboy boot, would come down on the accelerator and take her… where?

Driver, where you taking us?

Nadine, beyond help or hope of succor, sat upright on the bench at the crest of Flagstaff Mountain in the black trench of morning, her eyes wide, that feeling of being on the border stronger than ever. She stared east, but felt his presence coming from behind her, pressing heavy on her, dragging her down like weights tied to the feet of a dead woman: Flagg’s dark presence, coming in steady, inexorable waves.

Somewhere the dark man was abroad in the night, and she spoke two words like an incantation to all the black spirits that had ever been—incantation and invitation:

“Tell me.”

And beneath her fingers, the planchette began to write.

Chapter 54

Excerpts from the Minutes of the Permanent Free Zone Committee Meeting

August 19, 1990

This meeting was held at the apartment of Stu Redman and Fran Goldsmith. All members of the Free Zone Committee were present.

Stu Redman offered congratulations to all of us, including himself, on being elected to the Permanent Committee. He made a motion that a letter of thanks to Harold Lauder be drafted and signed by each member of the Committee. It passed unanimously.

Stu: “Once we get the old business taken care of, Glen Bateman has a couple of items. I don’t know what they are any more than you do, but I suspect one of them has to do with the next public meeting. Right, Glen?”

Glen: “I’ll wait my turn.”

Stu: “That’s baldy for you. The main difference between an old drunk and an old bald college professor is the professor waits his turn before he starts talkin the ears off your head.”

Glen: “Thank you for those pearls of wisdom, East Texas.”

Fran said she could see Stu and Glen were having a wonderful time but wanted to know if they could get down to business, as all her favorite TV shows started at nine. This comment was greeted with more laughter than it probably deserved.

The first real item of business was our scouts in the West. To recap, the committee has decided to ask Judge Farris, Tom Cullen, and Dayna Jurgens to go. Stu suggested that the people who nominated each of them be the ones to broach the subject to their own nominees—that is, Larry Underwood asks the Judge, Nick will have to talk to Tom—with Ralph Brentner’s help—and Sue will talk to Dayna.

Nick said that working with Tom might take a few days, and Stu said that brought up the point of when to send them. Larry said they couldn’t be sent together or they might all get caught together. He went on to say that both the Judge and Dayna would probably suspect that we had sent more than one spy, but as long as they didn’t know the actual names, they couldn’t tattle. Fran said that tattle was hardly the word, considering what the man in the West might do to them—if he is a man.

Glen: “I wouldn’t be so gloomy, if I were you, Fran. If we give our Adversary credit for even a modicum of intelligence, he’ll know we wouldn’t give our—operatives, I guess one could call them—any information we considered vital to his interests. He’ll know that torture could do him very little good.”

Fran: “You mean he’ll probably pat them on the head and tell them not to do it anymore? I have an idea he might torture them just because torture is one of the things he likes. What do you say to that?”

Glen: “I guess there’s not much I can say.”

Stu: “That decision’s been made, Frannie. We’ve all agreed that we’re sending our people into a dangerous situation, and we all know that making the decision sure wasn’t any fun.”

Glen suggested that we agree tentatively to this schedule: The Judge would go out on August twenty-sixth, Dayna on the twenty-seventh, and Tom on the twenty-eighth, none of them to know about the others and each to leave on a different road. That would allow the time necessary to work with Tom, he added.

Nick said that, with the exception of Tom Cullen, who will be told when to come back by means of a post-hypnotic suggestion, the other two must be told to come back when their own discretion advises them to, but that the weather could become a factor—there can be heavy snow in the mountains by the first week of October. Nick suggested that each of them should be advised to spend no more than three weeks in the West.

Fran said they could swing around to the south if the snow came early in the mountains but Larry disagreed, pointing out that the Sangre de Cristo chain would be in the way, unless they swung all the way down to Mexico. And if they had to do that, we probably wouldn’t see them again until spring.

Larry said if that was the case, perhaps we ought to give the Judge a headstart. He suggested August 21, day after tomorrow.

That closed the subject of the scouts… or spies, if you prefer.

Glen was then recognized, and I am now quoting from the taped record:

Glen: “I want to move that we call another public meeting on August twenty-fifth, and I’m going to suggest a few things that we might cover at that meeting.

“I’d like to start by pointing out something that may surprise you. We’ve been assuming that we’ve got about six hundred people in the Zone, and Ralph has kept admirable, accurate records of the number of large groups that have come in, and we’ve based our population assumption on those figures. But there have also been people coming in by dribs and drabs, maybe as many as ten a day. So earlier today I went over to Chautauqua Park auditorium with Leo Rockway, and we counted the seats in the hall. There are six hundred and seven of them. Now does that tell you anything?”

Sue Stern said that couldn’t be right, because people had been standing in the back and sitting in the aisles when they couldn’t get seats. Then we all saw what Glen was getting at, and I guess it would be appropriate to say the committee was thunderstruck.

Glen: “We don’t have any way of accurately estimating how many standees and sittees we had, but my memory of the gathering is fairly clear and I’d have to say that one hundred would be a terribly conservative estimate. So you see, we really have better than seven hundred people here in the Zone. As a result of Leo’s and my findings, I motion that one of the items to go on the big meeting agenda is a Census Committee.”

Ralph: “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch! That’s one on me.”

Glen: “No, it’s not your fault. You’ve got about a dozen irons in the fire, Ralph, and I think we’d all agree you’ve kept them turning nicely—”

Larry: “Boy, I’ll say.”

Glen: “—but even if we’ve only been getting four loners a day, that still adds up to almost thirty a week. And my guess is we’re getting more like twelve or fourteen. They don’t lust run up to one of us and announce themselves, you know, and with Mother Abagail gone, there’s no one place where you can count on them going after they arrive.”

Fran Goldsmith then seconded Glen’s motion that the committee put a Census Committee on the agenda for the meeting on August 25, said committee to be responsible for keeping a roll of every Free Zone member.

Larry: “I’m all for that if there’s some good, practical reason for doing it. But…”

Nick: “But what, Larry?”

Larry: “Well… don’t we have enough other things to worry about without hacking around with a bunch of diddly-shit bureaucracy?”

Fran: “I can see one valid reason right now, Larry.”

Larry: “What’s that?”

Fran: “Well, if Glen’s right, it means we’re going to need to hire a bigger hall for the next meeting. That’s one thing. If there are going to be eight hundred people here by the twenty-fifth, we’ll never cram them all into Chautauqua Auditorium.”

Ralph: “Jesus, I never thought of that. I told you guys I wasn’t cut out for this work.”

Stu: “Relax, Ralph, you’re doing fine.”

Sue: “So where are we going to hold the goddam meeting?”

Glen: “Wait a minute, wait a minute. One thing at a time. There’s a goddam motion on the goddam floor!”

It was voted 7–0 to put the Census Committee on the agenda of the next public meeting.

Stu then moved that we hold the meeting on August 25 in Munzinger Auditorium at CU, which had a bigger capacity—probably over a thousand.

Glen then asked for and received the floor again.

Glen: “Before we move on, I’d like to point out that there’s another good reason to have a Census Committee, one that’s a little more serious than knowing how much dip and how many bags of chips to bring to the party. We should know who’s coming in… but we should also know who is leaving. I think people are, you know. Maybe it’s just paranoia, but I could swear that there have been faces I’ve gotten used to seeing that just aren’t around anymore. Anyhow, after we went out to the Chautauqua Auditorium, Leo and I went over to Charlie Impening’s house. And guess what? The house is empty, Charlie’s things are gone, and so is Charlie’s BSA.”

Some uproar from the committee, also profanity which, while colorful, does not have any place in this record.

Ralph then asked what good it would do for us to know who is leaving. He suggested that if people like Impening wanted to go over to the dark man, then we should look at it as a case of good riddance. Several of the committee applauded Ralph, who blushed like a schoolboy, if I may add that.

Sue: “No, I see Glen’s point. It would be like a constant drain of information.”

Ralph: “Well, what could we do? Put them in jail?”

Glen: “Ugly as it sounds, I think we have to consider that very strongly.”

Fran: “No, sir. Sending spies… I can stomach that. But locking up people who come here because they don’t like the way we’re doing things? Jesus, Glen! That’s secret police stuff!”

Glen: “Yes, that’s about what it comes down to. But our position here is extremely precarious. You’re putting me in the position of having to advocate repression, and I think that’s very unfair. I’m asking you if you want to allow a brain-drain to go on, in light of our Adversary.”

Fran: “I still hate it. In the 1950s, Joe McCarthy had Communism. We’ve got our dark man. How wonderful for us.”

Glen: “Fran, are you prepared to take the chance that someone may leave here with a key piece of information in his pocket? That Mother Abagail is gone, for instance?”

Fran: “Charlie Impening can tell him that. What other key pieces of information do we have, Glen? For the most part, aren’t we just wandering around without a clue?”

Glen: “Do you want him to know our strength of numbers? How we’re getting along on the technical side? That we don’t even have a doctor yet?”

Fran said she’d rather have it that way than start locking people up because they didn’t like the way we were running things. Stu then motioned that we table the whole idea of locking people up for contrary views. This motion was passed, with Glen voting against.

Glen: “You better get used to the idea that you’re going to have to deal with this sooner or later, and probably sooner. Charlie Impening spilling his guts to Flagg is bad enough. You just have to ask yourself if you want to multiply what Impening knows by some theoretical x -factor. Well, never mind, you’ve voted to table. But here’s another thing… we’re elected indefinitely, did any of you think of that? We don’t know if we’re serving six weeks, six months, or six years. My suggestion would be one year… that ought to take us to the end of the beginning, in Harold’s phrase. I’d like to see the one-year thing on the agenda for our next public meeting.

“One last item and I’m done. Government by town meeting—which is essentially what we have, with ourselves as town selectmen—is going to be fine for a while, until we’ve got about three thousand people or so, but when things get too big, most of the people who show up at the public meetings are going to be cliques and folks with axes to grind… fluoridation makes you sterile, people who want one sort of flag, things like that. My suggestion would be that we all think very hard about how to turn Boulder into a Republic by late next winter or early spring.”

There was some informal discussion of Glen’s last proposal, but no action was taken at this meeting. Nick was recognized and gave Ralph something to read.

Nick: “I’m writing this on the morning of the nineteenth, in preparation for the meeting tonight, and will get Ralph to read it as the last order of business. Being mute is very difficult sometimes, but I have tried to think of all the possible ramifications of what I’m about to propose. I’d like to see this go on the agenda for our next public meeting: ‘To see if the Free Zone will create a Department of Law and Order with Stu Redman at its head.’”

Stu: “That’s a hell of a thing to spring on me, Nick.”

Glen: “Interesting. Goes back to what we were just talking about, too. Let him finish, Stuart—you’ll get your innings.”

Nick: “The headquarters of this Department of Law and Order would be in the Boulder County Courthouse. Stu would have the power to deputize men on his own up to thirty, over thirty on a majority vote of the Free Zone Committee, and over seventy on a majority vote of the Free Zone in public session. That’s the resolution I’d like to see on the next agenda. Of course we can approve until we’re black in the face and it will do no good unless Stu goes along.”

Stu: “Damn right!”

Nick: “We’ve gotten big enough to really need some law. Things are going to get flaky without it. There’s the case of the Gehringer boy racing that fast car up and down Pearl Street. He finally crashed it and was lucky to walk away with nothing worse than a gash on his forehead. He could have killed himself or someone else. Now everybody who saw him doing that knew it was nothing but trouble, M-O-O-N, that spells trouble, as Tom would say. But nobody felt they could stop him, because they just didn’t have the authority. That’s one thing. Then there’s Rich Moffat. Probably some of you know who Rich is, but for those of you who don’t, he’s probably the Zone’s only practicing alcoholic. He’s a half-decent guy when he’s sober, but when he’s drunk, he’s just not accountable for what he does, and he spends a lot of time drunk. Three or four days ago he got a load on and decided he was going to break every plate-glass window on Arapahoe. Now I talked to him about that after he sobered off a little—in my way of talking, you know, by note—and he was pretty ashamed. He pointed back the way he come and said, ‘Look at that. Look at what I done. Glass all over the sidewalk! What if some kid gets hurt in that? I’ll be to blame.’”

Ralph: “I got no sympathy. None.”

Fran: “Come on, Ralph. Everybody knows alcoholism’s a disease.”

Ralph: “Disease, my ass. It’s getting sloppo, that’s what it is.”

Stu: “And you’re both out of order. Come on, you two, pipe down.”

Ralph: “Sorry, Stu. I’ll stick to reading Nick’s letter here.”

Fran: “And I’ll be quiet for at least two minutes, Mr. Chairman. I promise.”

Nick: “To make a long story short, I found Rich a broom and he swept up most of the mess he’d made. Did a pretty good job, too. But he was right to ask why someone didn’t stop him. In the old days a guy like Rich couldn’t get anywhere near all the high-tension booze he wanted; guys like Rich were just winos. But now there are incredible amounts of booze just waiting around to be lifted off the shelves. And furthermore, I really do believe that Rich never should have been allowed to get past his second window, but he broke every window on the south side of the street for three blocks. He finally stopped because he got tired. And here is one more example: We had a case where a man whose name I won’t mention found out that his woman, who I also won’t name, was spending her afternoon sack-time with a third party. I guess we all know who I’m talking about.”

Sue: “Yeah, I guess we do. Big man with his fists.”

Nick: “Anyway, the man in question beat up the third party and then the woman in the case. Now I don’t think it matters to any of us here who was right and who was wrong—”

Glen: “You are mistaken there, Nick.”

Stu: “Let the man finish, Glen.”

Glen: “I’m going to, but it’s a point I want to come back to.”

Stu: “Fine. Go ahead, Ralph.”

Ralph: “Yep—getting toward the end now.”

Nick: “—because what matters is that the man in question committed a felony crime, assault and battery, and he is walking around free. Of the three cases, this one worries ordinary citizens the most. We’ve got a melting-pot society, a real hodgepodge, and there are going to be all kinds of conflicts and abrasions. I don’t think any of us want a frontier society here in Boulder. Think of the situation we’d have if the man in question had gotten a .45 out of a pawnshop and had shot them both dead instead of just beating them up. Then we’d have a murderer walking around free.”

Sue: “My God, Nicky, what’s that? The thought for the day?”

Larry: “Yeah, it’s ugly, but he’s right. There’s an old saying, Navy, I think, that goes, ‘Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.’”

Nick: “Stu’s already our public and private moderator, which means people already see him as an authority figure. And personally, I think Stu is a good man.”

Stu: “Thanks for the kind words, Nick. I guess you never noticed that I wear elevator shoes. Seriously, though—I’ll accept the nomination, if that’s what you want. I don’t really want the goddam job—from what I’ve seen down in Texas, police work is mostly cleaning puke off your shirt when guys like Rich Moffat barf on you, or scraping dummies like that Gehringer boy off the roads. All I ask is that when we put it up to the public meeting, we set the same one-year time limit on it that we’re setting on our committee jobs. And I intend to make it clear that I’m stepping down at the end of that year. If that’s acceptable, okay.”

Glen: “I think I can speak for all of us in saying that it is. I want to thank Nick for his motion, and get it on the record that I think it’s a stroke of genius. And I second the motion.”

Stu: “Okay, the motion is on the floor. Any discussion?”

Fran: “Yes, there’s some discussion. I have a question. What if somebody blows your head off?”

Stu: “I don’t think—”

Fran: “No, you don’t think. You don’t think so. Well, what’s Nick going to tell me if what you all think is wrong? ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Fran?’ Is that what he’s going to say? ‘Your man is down in the county courthouse with a bullet hole in his head and I guess we made a mistake?’ Jesus Mary and Joseph, I’m going to have a baby and you people want him to be Pat Garrett!”

There was another ten minutes of discussion, most of which is irrelevant; and Fran, your ob’nt recording secretary, had herself a good cry and then got herself under control. The vote on nominating Stu to be Free Zone Marshal was 6–1, and this time Fran would not change her vote. Glen asked to be recognized for one last thing before we closed the meeting.

Glen: “This is middle-think again, not a motion, nothing to vote on, but something we ought to chew over. Going back to Nick’s third example of law-and-order problems. He described the case and finished by saying we didn’t have to be concerned with who was right and who was wrong. I think he was mistaken. I believe Stu is one of the fairest men I’ve ever met. But law enforcement without a court system isn’t justice. It’s just vigilantism, rule by the fist. Now suppose that fellow we all know had gotten a .45 and killed his woman and her lover. And further suppose that Stu, as our marshal, went out and collared him and put him in the calaboose. Then what? How long do we keep him there? Legally, we couldn’t keep him at all, at least according to the Constitution we adopted at our meeting last night, because under that document a man’s innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now, as a matter of fact, we all know we’d keep him locked up. We wouldn’t feel safe with him walking the streets! So we’d do it even though it would be patently unconstitutional, because when safety and constitutionality are at swords’ points, safety must win out. But it behooves us to make safety and constitutionality synonymous as quickly as we can. We need to think about a court system.”

Fran: “That’s very interesting, and I agree that it’s something we ought to think about, but right now I’m going to move that we adjourn. It’s late, and I’m very tired.”

Ralph: “Boy, I second that motion. Let’s talk about courts next time. My head’s got so much in it right now that it’s going round and round. This reinventing the country is a lot tougher than it looked at first.”

Larry: “Amen.”

Stu: “There’s a motion to adjourn on the floor. Do you like it, people?”

The motion to adjourn was voted, 7–0.

Frances Goldsmith, Secretary

“Why are you stopping?” Fran asked as Stu slowly biked over to the curb and put his feet down. “It’s a block further up.” Her eyes were still red from her burst of tears during the meeting, and Stu thought he had never seen her looking so tired.

“This marshal thing—” he began.

“Stu, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Somebody has to do it, honey. And Nick was right. I’m the logical choice.”

“Fuck logic. What about me and the baby? Do you see no logic in us, Stu?”

“I ought to know what you want for the baby,” he said softly. “Haven’t you told me enough times? You want him brought into a world that isn’t totally crazy. You want things safe for him—or her. I want that, too. But I wasn’t going to say that in front of the rest. It’s between you and me. You and the baby are the two main reasons I said okay.”

“I know that,” she said in a low, choked voice.

He put his fingers under her chin and tilted her face up. He smiled at her and she made an effort to smile back. It was a weary smile, and tears were coursing down her cheeks, but it was better than no smile at all.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.

She was shaking her head back and forth slowly, and some of her tears flew off into the warm summer night.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “No, I really don’t think it is.”

She lay awake long into the night, thinking that warmth can only come from a burning—Prometheus got his eyes pecked out on that one—and that love always comes due in blood.

And a queer certainty stole over her, as numbing as some creeping anesthesia, that they would finish by wading in blood. The thought made her place her hands protectively over her belly, and she found herself thinking for the first time in weeks of her dream: the dark man with his grin… and his twisted coathanger.

As well as hunting for Mother Abagail with a picked group of volunteers in his spare time, Harold Lauder was on the Burial Committee, and on August 21 he spent the day in the back of a dump truck with five other men, all of them wearing boots and protective clothing and heavy-duty Playtex rubber gloves. The head of the Burial Committee, Chad Norris, was out at what he referred to, with an almost grisly calm, as Burial Site #1. It was ten miles southwest of Boulder in an area that had once been stripmined for coal. The site lay as bleak and barren as the mountains of the moon under the burning August sun. Chad had accepted the post reluctantly because he had once been an undertaker’s assistant in Morristown, New Jersey.

“There’s no undertaking about this,” he had said this morning at the Greyhound Bus Terminal between Arapahoe and Walnut, which was the Burial Committee’s base of operations. He lit a Winston with a wooden match and grinned at the twenty men sitting around. “That is, it’s an undertaking but not an undertaking undertaking, if you get my meaning.”

There were a few strained smiles, Harold’s largest among them. His belly had been rumbling constantly because he hadn’t dared eat breakfast. He hadn’t been sure he could keep it down, considering the nature of the work. He could have stuck with finding Mother Abagail and no one would have murmured a word of protest, even though it had to be obvious to every thinking man in the Zone (if there were any thinking men in the Free Zone besides himself—a debatable question) that looking for her with fifteen men was an exercise in comic relief when you considered the thousands of square miles of empty forest and plain around Boulder. And, of course, she might never have left Boulder, none of them seemed to have thought of that (which didn’t surprise Harold at all). She could be set up in a house just about anywhere beyond the center of town and they’d still never find her without a house-to-house search. Redman and Andros hadn’t raised a word of protest between them when Harold suggested that the Search Committee be a weekend and evening sort of thing, which told Harold that they accepted it as a closed case, too.

He could have stuck with it, but who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn’t bring yourself to do.

“It’s going to be like burying cordwood,” Chad told them. “If you can keep it on that level in your mind, you’ll be okay. Some of you may have to vomit here at the start. There’s no shame in that; just try to go someplace where the rest won’t have to look at you do it. Once you’ve puked, you’ll find it easier to think that way: cordwood. Nothing but cordwood.”

The men were eyeing each other uncomfortably.

Chad broke them up into three six-man crews. He and the two odd men out went to prepare a place for those who were brought. Each of the three crews were given a specific area of town to work. Harold’s truck had spent the day in the Table Mesa area, working their way slowly west from the Denver-Boulder Turnpike exit ramp. Up Martin Drive to the Broadway intersection. Down Thirty-ninth Street and then back up Fortieth, suburban houses in a tract area now about thirty years old, dating back to the start of Boulder’s population boom, houses with one floor aboveground and a second below.

Chad had provided gas masks from the local National Guard armory, but they didn’t have to use them until after lunch (lunch? what lunch? Harold’s consisted of a can of Berry’s apple pie filling; it was all he could bring himself to eat), when they entered the Church of Latter-Day Saints on lower Table Mesa Drive. They had come here, filled with the plague, and they had died there, over seventy of them, and the stink was enormous.

“Cordwood,” one of Harold’s mates had said in a high, revolted, laughing voice, and Harold had turned and stumbled out past him. He went around the corner of the handsome brick building that had once been a polling place in election years and up came the Berry’s apple pie filling and he discovered that Norris had been right: He really felt better without it.

It took them two trips and most of the afternoon to empty the church. Twenty men, Harold thought, to get rid of all the corpses in Boulder. It’s almost funny. A goodly number of Boulder’s previous population had run like rabbits because of the Air Testing Center scare, but still … Harold supposed that, as the Burial Committee grew with the population, it was just barely possible that they might get most of the bodies in the ground by the first heavy snowfall (not that he himself expected to be around by then), and most of the people would never know how real the danger of some new epidemic—one they weren’t immune to—had been.

The Free Zone Committee was full of bright ideas, he thought with contempt. The committee would be just fine… as long as they had good old Harold Lauder to make sure their shoelaces were tied, of course. Good old Harold’s good enough for that, but not quite good enough to serve on their fucking Permanent Committee. Heavens, no. He had never been quite good enough, not even quite good enough to get a date for the Class Dance at Ogunquit High School, even with a scag. Good God, no, not Harold. Let’s remember, folks, when we get right down to the proverbial place where the ursine mammal evacuated his bowels in the buckwheat, that this is no analytical, logical matter, not even a matter of common sense. When we get right down to it, what we end up with is a frigging beauty contest.

Well, somebody remembers. Somebody is keeping score, kids. And the name of that someone—could we have a drum-roll, please maestro?—Harold Emery Lauder.

So he came back into the church, wiping his mouth and grinning as best he could, nodding that he was ready to go on. Someone clapped him on the back and Harold’s grin widened and he thought: Someday you’re going to lose your hand for that, shitheap.

They made their last run at 4:15 P.M., the body of the dump truck filled with the last of the Latter-Day corpses. In town the truck had to weave laboriously in and out of stalled traffic, but on Colorado 119, three tow trucks had been out all day, latching on to stalled cars and depositing them into the ditches on both sides of the road. They lay there like the overturned toys of some giant-child.

At the burial site, the other two orange trucks were already parked. Men stood around with their rubber gloves off, their fingers white and pruney at the tips from a day of sweating inside rubber. They smoked and talked desultorily. Most of them were very pale.

Norris and his two helpers had it down to a science now. They shook out a huge piece of plastic sheeting on the rocky ground. Norman Kellogg, the Louisianian who was driving Harold’s truck, backed up to the edge of the plastic. The tailgate slammed down and the first bodies fell out onto the plastic crawsheet like partially stiffened ragdolls. Harold wanted to turn away but was afraid that the others might construe it as weakness. He did not mind watching them fall out too much; it was the sound that got him. The sound they made when they hit what was going to become their shroud.

The note of the dumper’s engine deepened and there was a hydraulic whine as the truck’s body began to go up. Now the bodies tumbled out in a grotesque human rain. Harold felt an instant of pity, a feeling so deep it was an ache. Cordwood, he thought. How right he was. That’s all that’s left. Just… cordwood.

“Ho! ” Chad Norris shouted, and Kellogg pulled the dump truck ahead and shut it off. Chad and his helpers stepped onto the plastic carrying rakes and now Harold did turn away, pretending to scan the sky for rain, and he was not alone—but he heard a sound that would haunt him in his dreams, and that was the sound of change falling from the pockets of the dead men and women as Chad and his helpers worked with their rakes, spreading the corpses evenly. The coins falling on the plastic made a sound that reminded Harold absurdly of tiddledywinks. The sickly-sweet stench of corruption drifted up in the warm air.

When he looked back, the three of them were pulling the edges of the plastic shroud together, grunting with the strain, arms bulging. A few of the other men, Harold among them, pitched in. Chad Norris produced a huge industrial stapling gun. Twenty minutes later that part of the job was done, and the plastic lay on the ground like a giant gelatin capsule. Norris climbed into the cab of a bright yellow bulldozer and keyed the engine. The scarred blade thudded down. The dozer rolled forward.

A man named Weizak, also on Harold’s truck, walked away from the scene with the jerky steps of a badly controlled puppet. A cigarette jittered between his fingers. “Man, I can’t watch that,” he said as he passed Harold. “It’s really kind of funny. I never knew I was Jewish until today.”

The bulldozer shoved and rolled the large plastic package into a long rectangular cut in the ground. Chad backed away, shut down, climbed off. Motioning the men to gather around, he walked over to one of the Public Works trucks and put one booted foot up on the running board.

“No football cheers,” he said, “but you did damned good. We put away close to a thousand units today, I guess.”

Units, Harold thought.

“I know this kind of work takes something out of a man. Committee’s promising us another two men before the end of the week, but I know that don’t change the way you guys feel—or the way I feel, for that matter. All I’m saying is that if you’ve had enough, don’t feel like you can take another day of it, you don’t have to worry about avoiding me on the street. But if you feel like you can’t cut it, its awful-damn important that you find someone to take your place tomorrow. So far as I’m concerned, this is the most important job in the Zone. ‘It isn’t too bad now, but if we’ve still got twenty thousand corpses in Boulder next month when it gets to be wet weather, people are going to get sick. If you feel like you can make it, I’ll see you tomorrow morning at the bus station.”

“I’ll be there,” someone said.

“Me too,” Norman Kellogg said. “After a six-hour bath tonight.” There was laughter.

“Count me in,” Weizak chimed in.

“Me too,” Harold said quietly.

“It’s a dirty job,” Norris said in a low, emotional voice. “You’re good men. I doubt if the rest of them will ever know just how good.”

Harold felt a sense of drawing-together, a camaraderie, and he fought against it, suddenly afraid. This was no part of the plan.

“See you tomorrow, Hawk,” Weizak said, and squeezed his shoulder.

Harold’s grin was startled and defensive. Hawk? What kind of joke was that? A bad one, of course. Cheap sarcasm. Calling fat, pimply Harold Lauder Hawk. He felt the old black hate rise, directed at Weizak this time, and then it subsided in sudden confusion. He wasn’t fat anymore. He couldn’t even properly be called stout. His pimples had vanished over the last seven weeks. Weizak didn’t know he had once been a school joke. Weizak didn’t know that Harold’s father had once asked him if he was a homosexual. Weizak didn’t know that Harold had been his popular sister’s cross to bear. And if he had known, Weizak probably wouldn’t have given a sweet shit.

Harold climbed into the back of one of the trucks, his mind churning helplessly. All of a sudden the old grudges, the old hurts, and the unpaid debts seemed as worthless as the paper money choking all the cash registers of America.

Could that be true? Could it possibly be true? He felt panicked, alone, scared. No, he decided at last. It couldn’t possibly be true. Because, consider. If you were strong-willed enough to be able to resist the low opinions of others, when they thought you were a queer, or an embarrassment, or just a plain old bag of shit, then you had to be strong-willed enough to resist…

Resist what?

Their good opinion of you?

Wasn’t that kind of logic… well, that kind of logic was lunacy, wasn’t it?

An old quote surfaced in his troubled mind, some general’s defense of interning Japanese-Americans during World War II. It had been pointed out to this general that no acts of sabotage had occurred on the West Coast, where the naturalized Japanese were most heavily concentrated. The general’s reply had been: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place is an ominous development.”

Was that him?

Was it?

Their truck pulled into the bus station parking lot. Harold jumped over the side, reflecting that even his coordination had improved a thousand percent, either from the weight he had lost, his almost constant exercise, or both.

The thought came to him again, stubborn, refusing to be buried: I could be an asset to this community.

But they had shut him out.

That doesn’t matter. I’ve got the brains to pick the lock on the door they slammed in my face. And I believe I’ve found enough guts to open it once it’s unlocked.

But—

Stop it! Stop it! You might as well be wearing handcuffs and legchains with that one word stamped all over them. But! But! But! Can’t you stop it, Harold? Can’t you for Christ’s sake climb down off your high fucking horse?

“Hey, man, you okay?”

Harold jumped. It was Norris, coming out of the dispatcher’s office, which he had taken over. He looked tired.

“Me? I’m fine. I was just thinking.”

“Well, you go right along. Seems like every time you do that you coin money for this joint.”

Harold shook his head. “Not true.”

“No?” Chad let it go. “Can I drop you somewhere?”

“Huh-uh. I’ve got my chopper.”

“You wanna know something, Hawk? I think most of these guys are really going to come back tomorrow.”

“Yes, so do I.” Harold walked over to his motorcycle and climbed on. He found himself savoring his new nickname, rather against his will.

Norris shook his head. “I never would have believed it. I figured that once they actually saw what the job was, they’d think of a hundred other things they had to do.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Harold said. “I think it’s easier to do a dirty job for yourself than it is to do for somebody else. Some of these guys, it’s the first time they ever really worked for themselves in their whole lives.”

“Yeah, there’s something in that, I guess. I’ll see you tomorrow Hawk.”

“Eight,” Harold confirmed, and drove out Arapahoe to Broadway. To his right a crew comprised mostly of women was at work with a wrecker and a derrick righting a tractor-trailer truck that had jackknifed, partially blocking the street. They had drawn a respectable little crowd. This place is building up, Harold thought. I don’t recognize half of those people.

He went on out toward hit house, his mind worrying and gnawing at the problem he thought he had solved long ago. When he got home, there was a small white Vespa parked at the curb. And a woman sitting on his front step.

She stood up as Harold came up the walk, and put her hand out. She was one of the most striking women Harold had ever seen—he had seen her before, of course, but rarely this close up.

“I’m Nadine Cross,” she said. Her voice was low, close to being husky. Her grip was firm and cool. Harold’s eyes dropped involuntarily to her body for a moment, a habit he knew girls hated, but one he seemed powerless to stop. This one did not seem to mind. She was wearing a pair of light cotton twill slacks that clung to her long legs and a sleeveless blouse of some light blue silky material. No bra under it, either. How old was she? Thirty? Thirty-five? Younger, maybe. She was going prematurely gray.

All over? the endlessly horny (and endlessly virginal, seemingly) part of his mind inquired, and his heart beat a little faster.

“Harold Lauder,” he said, smiling. “You came in with Larry Underwood’s party, didn’t you?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Followed Stu and Frannie and me across the Big Empty, I understand. Larry came to see me last week, brought me a bottle of wine and some candy bars.” His words had a tinkling, false sound to them, and he was suddenly sure that she knew he had been cataloging her, undressing her in his mind. He fought an urge to lick his lips and won… at least temporarily. “He’s a helluva nice guy.”

“Larry?” She laughed a little, a strange and somehow cryptic sound. “Yes, Larry’s a prince.”

They gazed at each other for a moment, and Harold had never been looked at by a woman whose eyes were so frank and speculative. He was again aware of his excitement, and a warm nervousness in his belly.

“Well,” he said. “What can I do for you this afternoon, Miss Cross?”

“You could call me Nadine, for a start. And you could invite me to stay for supper. That would get us a little further along.”

That sense of nervous excitement began to spread. “Nadine, would you like to stay for supper?”

“Very much,” she said, and smiled. When she laid her hand on his forearm, he felt a tingle like a low-grade electric shock. Her eyes never left his. “Thank you.”

He fumbled his latchkey into its slot, thinking: Now she’ll ask me why I lock my door and I’ll mumble and stumble around, looking for an answer, and seem like a fool.

But Nadine never asked.

He didn’t cook dinner; she did.

Harold had gotten to the point where he considered it impossible to get even a half-decent meal out of cans, but Nadine managed nicely. Suddenly aware of and appalled by what he had spent his day doing, he asked if she could entertain herself for twenty minutes (and she was probably here on some very mundane piece of business, he cautioned himself desperately) while he cleaned up.

When he came back—having splurged and taken a two-bucket shower—she was bustling around in the kitchen. Water was boiling merrily away on the bottled gas stove. As he came into the kitchen, she dumped half a cup of elbow macaroni into the pot. Something mellow was being simmered in a skillet on the other burner; he got a combined aroma of French onion soup, red wine, and mushrooms. His stomach rumbled. The day’s grisly work had suddenly lost its power over his appetite.

“It smells fantastic,” he said. “You shouldn’t have, but I’m not complaining.”

“It’s a Stroganoff casserole,” she said, turning to smile at him. “Strictly makeshift, I’m afraid. Tinned beef is not one of the recommended ingredients when they make this dish in the world’s finer restaurants, but—” She shrugged to indicate the limitations they all labored under.

“It’s nice of you to do it.”

“Not at all.” She gave him that speculative glance again, and turned halfway toward him, the silky material of her blouse pulled taut against her left breast, molding it sweetly. He felt a hot flush creeping up his neck and willed himself not to have an erection. He suspected that his willpower would not be equal to the task. He suspected, in fact, that it wouldn’t even be close. “We’re going to be very good friends,” she said.

“We… are?”

“Yes.” She turned back to the stove, seeming to close the subject, leaving Harold in a thicket of possibilities.

After that, their conversation consisted strictly of trivialities… Free Zone gossip, for the most part. Of this there was already a rich supply. Once, halfway through the meal, he tried again to ask her what had brought her here, but she only smiled and shook her head. “I like to see a man eat.”

For a moment Harold thought she must be talking about someone else and then realized she meant him. And he did eat; he had three helpings of the Stroganoff, and the tinned meat did not detract from the recipe at all, in Harold’s opinion. The conversation seemed to make itself, leaving him free to quiet the lion in his belly, and to look at her.

Striking, had he thought? She was beautiful. Ripe and beautiful. Her hair, which she had pulled back into a casual horsetail in order to cook more easily, was twisted with strands of pure white, not gray as he had first thought. Her eyes were grave and dark, and when they focused unhesitatingly on his, Harold felt giddy. Her voice was low and confidential. The sound of it began to affect him in a way that was both uncomfortable and almost excruciatingly pleasant.

When the meal was done, he started to get up but she beat him to it. “Coffee or tea?”

“Really, I could—”

“You could, but you won’t. Coffee, tea… or me?” She smiled then, not the smile of someone who has offered a remark of minor risquéness (“risky talk,” as his dear old mum would have said, her mouth set in a disapproving line), but a slow little smile, rich as the dollop of cream on top of a gooey dessert. And again the speculative look.

His brain spinning, Harold replied with insane casualness: “The latter two,” and was only able to contain a burst of adolescent giggles with a mighty effort.

“Well, we’ll start with tea for two,” Nadine said, and went to the stove.

Hot blood crashed into Harold’s head the instant her back was turned, undoubtedly turning his face as purple as a turnip. Some Mr. Suave you are! he hectored himself feverishly. You misinterpreted a perfectly innocent remark like the goddam fool that you are, and you’ve probably spoiled a very nice occasion. And it serves you right! It serves you damned well right!

By the time she brought the steaming mugs of tea back to the table, Harold’s violent flush had faded somewhat and he had himself under control. Giddiness had turned just as abruptly to despair, and he felt (not for the first time) that his body and mind had been stuffed willy-nilly into the car of a huge roller-coaster made of pure emotion. He hated it but was powerless to get off the ride.

If she was interested in me at all, he thought (and God knows why she would be, he added gloomily to himself), I have undoubtedly put paid to that by exposing the full range of my sophomoric wit.

Well, he had done things like that before, and he supposed he could live with the knowledge that he had done it again.

She looked at him over the rim of her teacup with those disconcertingly frank eyes and smiled again, and the shred of equanimity he had been able to muster up promptly vanished.

“Can I help you with something?” he asked. It sounded like some lumbering double-entendre, but he had to say something, because she must have had some purpose in coming here. He felt his own protective smile faltering on his lips in his confusion.

“Yes,” she said, and put her teacup down decisively. “Yes, you can. Maybe we can help each other. Could you come into the living room?”

“Sure.” His hand was shaking; when he set his cup down and rose, some of it spilled. As he followed her into the living room, he noticed how smoothly her slacks (which aren’t very slack at all, his mind gibbered) clung to her buttocks. It was the panty line that broke up the smooth look of most women’s slacks, he had read that somewhere, maybe in one of the magazines he had kept in the back of his bedroom closet behind the shoeboxes, and the magazine had gone on to say that if a woman really wanted that smooth and seamless look, she should wear a G-string or no panties at all.

He swallowed; tried to, at least. There seemed to be a huge blockage of some kind in his throat.

The living room was dim, lit only by the glow that filtered through the drawn shades. It was past six-thirty, and outside the evening was drawing toward dusk. Harold went to one of the windows to run the shade up and let more light in, when she put her hand on his arm. He turned toward her, his mouth dry.

“No. I like them down. It gives us privacy.”

“Privacy,” Harold croaked. His voice was that, of an age-rusted parrot.

“So I can do this,” she said, and stepped lightly into his arms.

Her body was pressed frankly and completely against him, the first time in his life anything of the sort had happened, and his amazement was total. He could feel the soft and individual press of each breast through his white cotton shirt and her silky blue one. Her belly, firm but vulnerable, against his, not shying away from the feel of his erection. There was a sweet smell to her, perfume maybe, or maybe just her own smell, that seemed like a told secret that bursts, revelative, on the listener. His hands found her hair and plunged into it.

At last the kiss broke but she didn’t move away. Her body remained against his like soft fire. She was perhaps three inches shorter, and her face was turned up to his. It occurred to him in a dim sort of way that it was one of the most amusing ironies of his life: When love—or a reasonable facsimile—had finally found him, it was as if he had slipped sideways into the pages of a love story in a glossy women’s magazine. The authors of such stories, he had once claimed in an unacknowledged letter to Redbook, were one of the few convincing arguments in favor of enforced eugenics.

But now her face was turned up to his, her lips were moist and half-parted, her eyes were bright and almost… almost… yes, almost starry. The only detail not strictly compatible with a Redbook ’s-eye view of life was his hard-on, which was truly amazing.

“Now,” she said. “On the couch.”

Somehow they got there, and then they were tangled up there, and her hair had come loose and flowed over her shoulders; her perfume seemed everywhere. His hands were on her breasts and she was not minding; in fact she was twisting and squirming around to allow his hands freer access. He did not caress her; in his frantic need what he did was plunder her.

“You’re a virgin,” Nadine said. No question there… and it was easier not to have to lie. He nodded.

“Then we do this first. Next time it will be slower. Better.”

She unbuttoned his jeans and they snapped open to the zipper-tab of his fly. She traced a light forefinger across his belly just below the navel. Harold’s flesh shuddered and jumped at her touch.

“Nadine—”

“Shhh!” Her face was hidden in the fall of her hair, making it impossible to read her expression.

His fly was pulled down and the Ridiculous Thing, made even more ridiculous by the white cotton in which it was swaddled (thank God he had changed clothes after his shower), popped out like Jack from his box. The Ridiculous Thing was unaware of its own comical appearance, for its business was deadly serious. The business of virgins is always deadly serious—not pleasure but experience.

“My blouse—”

“Can I—?”

“Yes, that’s what I want. And then I’ll take care of you.”

Take care of you. The words echoed down into his mind like stones flung into a well, and then he was sucking greedily at her breast, tasting the salt and sweet of her.

She drew in breath. “Harold, that’s lovely.”

Take care of you, the words clanged and banged in his mind.

Her hands slipped inside the waistband of his underpants and his jeans slid down to his ankles in a meaningless jingle of keys.

“Raise up,” she whispered, and he did.

It took less than a minute. He cried aloud with the strength of his climax, unable to help himself. It was as if someone had touched a match to a whole network of nerves just under his skin, nerves that plunged deep to form the living webwork of his groin. He could understand why so many of the writers made that connection between orgasm and death.

Then he lay back in the dimness, his head against the sofa, his chest heaving, his mouth open. He was afraid to look down. He felt that quarts of semen must have splattered all over everything.

Young feller, we’ve struck oil!

He looked at her shamefacedly, embarrassed at the hair-trigger way he had gone off. But she was only smiling at him with those calm, dark eyes that seemed to know everything, the eyes of a very young girl in a Victorian painting. A girl who knows too much, perhaps, about her father.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

“Why? For what?” Her eyes never left his face.

“You didn’t get much out of that.”

“Au contraire, I got a great deal of satisfaction.” But he didn’t think that was exactly what he had meant. Before he had a chance to consider this, she went on: “You’re young. We can go as many times as you want to.”

He looked at her without speaking, unable to speak.

“But you must know one thing.” She put a hand lightly on him. “What you told me about being a virgin? Well, I am, too.”

“You—” His expression of astonishment must have been comical, because she threw back her head and laughed.

“Is there no room for virginity in your philosophy, Horatio?”

“No… yes… but—”

“I’m a virgin. And I’m going to stay that way. Because it’s for someone else to… to make me not a virgin anymore.”

“Who?”

“You know who.”

He stared at her, suddenly cold all over. She looked back calmly.

“Him? ”

She half turned away and nodded.

“But I can show you things,” she said, still not looking at him. “We can do things. Things you’ve never even… no, I take that back. Maybe you have dreamed of them, but you never dreamed you’d do them. We can play. We can make ourselves drunk with it. We can wallow in it. We can…” She trailed off, and then did look at him, a look so sly and sensual that he felt himself stirring again. “We can do anything—everything —but that one little thing. And that one thing really isn’t so important, is it?”

Images whirled giddily in his mind. Silk scarves… boots… leather… rubber. Oh Jesus. Fantasies of a Schoolboy. A weird kind of sexual solitaire. But it was all a kind of dream, wasn’t it? A fantasy begotten of fantasy, child of a dark dream. He wanted all those things, wanted her, but he also wanted more.

The question was, how much would he settle for?

“You can tell me everything,” she said. “I’ll be your mother, or your sister, or your whore, or your slave. All you have to do is tell me, Harold.”

How that echoed in his mind! How that intoxicated him!

He opened his mouth, and the voice that emerged was as tuneless as the chiming of a cracked bell. “But for a price. Isn’t that right? For a price. Because nothing is for free. Not even now, when everything is lying around, waiting to be picked up.”

“I want what you want,” she said. “I know what’s in your heart.”

“No one knows that.”

“What’s in your heart is in your ledger. I could read it there—I know where it is—but I don’t need to.”

He started and looked at her with a wild guilt.

“It used to be under that loose stone there,” she said, pointing to the hearth, “but you moved it. Now it’s behind the insulation in the attic.”

“How do you know that? How do you know? ”

“I know because he told me. He… you could say that he wrote me a letter. And what’s more important, he told me about you, Harold. How the cowboy took your woman and then kept you off the Free Zone Committee. He wants us to be together, Harold. And he’s generous. From now until when we leave here, it’s recess for you and me.”

She touched him and smiled.

“From now until then it’s playtime. Do you understand?”

“I—”

“No,” she answered, “you don’t. Not yet. But you will, Harold. You will.”

Insanely, it came to his mind to tell her to call him Hawk.

“And later, Nadine? What does he want later?”

“What you want. And what I want. What you almost did to Redman on the first night you went out hunting for the old woman… but on a much larger scale. And when that’s done, we can go to him, Harold. We can be with him. We can stay with him.” Her eyes slipped half-closed in a kind of rapture. Perhaps paradoxically, the fact that she loved the other but would give herself to him—might actually enjoy it—brought his desire up again, hot and close.

“What if I say no?” His lips felt cold, ashy.

She shrugged, and the movement made her breasts sway prettily. “Life will go on, won’t it, Harold? I’ll try to find some way of doing the thing I have to do. You’ll go on. Sooner or later you’ll find a girl who will do that… one little thing for you. But that one little thing is very tiresome after a while. Very tiresome.”

“How would you know?” he asked, and grinned crookedly at her.

“I know because sex is life in small, and life is tiresome—time spent in a variety of waiting rooms. You might have your little glories here, Harold, but to what end? On the whole it will be a humdrum, slipping-down life, and you’ll always remember me with my shirt off, and you’ll always wonder what I would have looked like with everything off. You’ll wonder what it would have been like to hear me talking dirty to you… or to have me spill honey all over your… body… and then lick it off… and you’ll wonder—”

“Stop it,” he said. He was trembling all over.

But she wouldn’t.

“I think you’ll also wonder what it would have been like on his side of the world,” she said. “That more than anything and everything else, maybe.”

“I—”

“Decide, Harold. Do I put my shirt back on or take everything else off?”

How long did he think? He didn’t know. Later, he wasn’t even sure he had struggled with the question. But when he spoke, the words tasted like death in his mouth: “In the bedroom. Let’s go in the bedroom.”

She smiled at him, such a smile of triumph and sensual promise that he shuddered from it, and his own eager response to it.

She took his hand.

And Harold Lauder succumbed to his destiny.

Chapter 55

The Judge’s house overlooked a cemetery.

He and Larry sat on the back porch after dinner, smoking Roi-Tan cigars and watching sunset fade to pale orange around the mountains.

“When I was a boy,” the Judge said, “we lived within walking distance of the finest cemetery in Illinois. Its name was Mount Hope. Every night after supper, my father, who was then in his early sixties, would take a walk. Sometimes I would walk with him. And if the walk took us past this perfectly maintained necropolis, he would say, ‘What do you think, Teddy? Is there any hope?’ And I would answer, ‘There’s Mount Hope,’ and each time he’d roar with laughter as if it had been the first time. I sometimes think we walked past that boneyard just so he could share that joke with me. He was a wealthy man, but it was the funniest joke he seemed to know.”

The Judge smoked, his chin low, his shoulders hunched high.

“He died in 1937, when I was still in my teens,” he said. “I have missed him ever since. A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable. No hope but Mount Hope. How he enjoyed that! He was seventy-eight years old when he passed on. He died like a king, Larry. He was seated upon the throne in our home’s smallest room, with the newspaper in his lap.”

Larry, not sure how to respond to this rather bizarre bit of nostalgia, said nothing.

The Judge sighed. “This is going to be quite a little operation here before long,” he said. “If you can get the power on again, that is. If you can’t, people are going to get nervous and start heading south before the bad weather can come and hem them in.”

“Ralph and Brad say it’s going to happen. I trust them.”

“Then we’ll hope that your trust is well founded, won’t we? Maybe it is a good thing that the old woman is gone. Perhaps she knew it would be better that way. Maybe people should be free to judge for themselves what the lights in the sky are, and if one tree has a face or if the face was only a trick of the light and shadow. Do you understand me, Larry?”

“No, sir,” Larry said truthfully. “I’m not sure I do.”

“I wonder if we need to reinvent that whole tiresome business of gods and saviors and ever-afters before we reinvent the flushing toilet. That’s what I’m saying. I wonder if this is the right time for gods.”

“Do you think she’s dead?”

“She’s been gone six days now. The Search Committee hasn’t found a trace of her. Yes, I think she’s dead, but even now I am not completely sure. She was an amazing woman, completely outside any rational frame of reference. Perhaps one of the reasons I’m almost glad to have her gone is because I’m such a rational old curmudgeon. I like to creep through my daily round, to water my garden—did you see the way I’ve brought the begonias back? I’m quite proud of that—to read my books, to write my notes for my own book about the plague. I like to do all those things and then have a glass of wine at bedtime and fall asleep with an untroubled mind. Yes. None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine. If we have to see God in the black face of an old woman, it’s bound to remind us that there’s a devil for every god—and our devil may be closer than we like to think.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Larry said awkwardly. He wished mightily that the Judge hadn’t just mentioned his garden, his books, his notes, and his glass of wine before bedtime. He had had a two-bit bright idea at a meeting of friends and had made a blithe suggestion. Now he wondered if there was any possible way of going on without sounding like a cruel and opportunistic halfwit.

“I know why you’re here. I accept.”

Larry jerked, making the wicker of his chair strain and whisper. “Who told you? This is supposed to be very quiet, Judge. If someone on the committee has been leaking, we’re in a hell of a jam.”

The Judge raised one liverspotted hand, cutting him off. His eyes twinkled in his time-beaten face. “Softly, my boy—softly. No one on your committee has been leaking, not that I know of, and I keep my ear close to the ground. No, I whispered the secret to myself. Why did you come here tonight? Your face is an education in itself, Larry. I hope you don’t play poker. When I was talking about my few simple pleasures, I could see your face sag and droop… a rather comic stricken expression appeared on it—”

“Is that so funny? What should I do, look happy about… about…”

“Sending me west,” the Judge said quietly. “To spy out the land. Isn’t that about it?”

“That’s exactly it.”

“I wondered how long it would be before the idea would surface. It is tremendously important, of course, tremendously necessary if the Free Zone is to be assured its full chance to survive. We have no real idea what he’s up to over there. He might as well be on the dark side of the moon.”

“If he’s really there.”

“Oh, he’s there. In one form or another, he is there. Never doubt it.” He took a nail-clipper from his pants pocket and went to work on his fingernails, the little snipping sound punctuating his speech. “Tell me, has the committee discussed what might happen if we decided we liked it better over there? If we decided to stay?”

Larry was flabbergasted by the idea. He told the Judge that, to the best of his knowledge, it hadn’t occurred to anybody.

“I imagine he’s got the lights on,” the Judge said with deceptive idleness. “There’s an attraction in that, you know. Obviously this man Impening felt it.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Larry said grimly, and the Judge laughed long and heartily.

When he sobered he said, “I’ll go tomorrow. In a Land-Rover, I think. North to Wyoming, and then west. Thank God I can still drive well enough! I’ll travel straight across Idaho and toward Northern California. It may take two weeks going, longer coming back. Coming back, there may be snow.”

“Yes. We’ve discussed that possibility.”

“And I’m old. The old are prone to attacks of heart trouble and stupidity. I presume you are sending backups?”

“Well…”

“No, you’re not supposed to talk about that. I withdraw the question.”

“Look, you can refuse this,” Larry blurted. “No one is holding a gun to your hea—”

“Are you trying to absolve yourself of your responsibility to me?” the Judge asked sharply.

“Maybe. Maybe I am. Maybe I think your chances of getting back are one in ten and your chances of getting back with information we can actually base decisions on are one in twenty. Maybe I’m just trying to say in a nice way that I could have made a mistake. You could be too old.”

“I am too old for adventure,” the Judge said, putting his clippers away, “but I hope I am not too old to do what I feel is right. There is an old woman out there someplace who has probably gone to a miserable death because she felt it was right. Prompted by religious mania, I have no doubt. But people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad. I’ll go. I’ll be cold. My bowels will not work properly. I’ll be lonely. I’ll miss my begonias. But…” He looked up at Larry, and his eyes gleamed in the dark. “I’ll also be clever.”

“I suppose you will,” Larry said, and felt the sting of tears at the corners of his eyes.

“How is Lucy?” the Judge asked, apparently closing the subject of his departure.

“Fine,” Larry said. “We’re both fine.”

“No problems?”

“No,” he said, and thought about Nadine. Something about her desperation the last time he had seen her still troubled him deeply. You’re my last chance, she had said. Strange talk, almost suicidal. And what help was there for her? Psychiatry? That was a laugh, when the best they could do for a GP was a horse doctor. Even Dial-A-Prayer was gone now.

“It’s good that you are with Lucy,” the Judge said, “but you’re worried about the other woman, I suspect.”

“Yes, I am.” What followed was extremely difficult to say, but having it out and confessed to another person made him feel much better. “I think she might be considering, well, suicide.” He rushed on: “It’s not just me, don’t get the idea I think any girl would kill herself just because she can’t have sexy old Larry Underwood. But the boy she was taking care of has come out of his shell, and I think she feels alone, with no one to depend on her.”

“If her depression deepens into a chronic, cyclic thing, she may indeed kill herself,” the Judge said with chilling indifference.

Larry looked at him, shocked.

“But you can only be one man,” the Judge said. “Isn’t that true?”

“Yes.”

“And your choice is made?”

“Yes.”

“For good?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Then live with it,” the Judge said with great relish. “For God’s sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sun-block is to the skin during the heat of the summer. You can only captain your own soul, and from time to time some smartass psychologist will question your ability to even do that. Grow up! Your Lucy is a fine woman. To take responsibility for more than her and your own soul is to ask for too much, and asking for too much is one of humanity’s more popular ways of courting disaster.”

“I like talking to you,” Larry said, and was both startled and amused by the open ingenuousness of the comment.

“Probably because I am telling you exactly what you want to hear,” the Judge said serenely. And then he added: “There are a great many ways to commit suicide, you know.”

And before too much time had passed, Larry had occasion to recall that remark in bitter circumstances.

At quarter past eight the next morning, Harold’s truck was leaving the Greyhound depot to go back to the Table Mesa area. Harold, Weizak, and two others were sitting in the back of the truck. Norman Kellogg and another man were in the cab. They were at the intersection of Arapahoe and Broadway when a brand-new Land-Rover drove slowly toward them.

Weizak waved and shouted, “Where ya headed, Judge?”

The Judge, looking rather comic in a woolen shirt and a vest, pulled over. “I believe I might go to Denver for the day,” he said blandly.

“Will that thing get you there?” Weizak asked.

“Oh, I believe so, if I steer clear of the main-traveled roads.”

“Well, if you go by one of those X-rated bookstores, why don’t you bring back a trunkful?”

This sally was greeted with a burst of laughter from everyone—the Judge included—but Harold. He looked sallow and haggard this morning, as if he had rested ill. In fact, he had hardly slept at all. Nadine had been as good as her word; he had fulfilled quite a few dreams the night before. Dreams of the damp variety, let us say. He was already looking forward to tonight, and Weizak’s sally about pornography was only good for a ghost of a smile now that he had had a little first-hand experience. Nadine had been sleeping when he left. Before they dropped off around two, she had told him she wanted to read his ledger. He had told her to go ahead if she wanted to. Perhaps he was putting himself at her mercy, but he was too confused to know for sure. But it was the best writing he had ever done in his life and the deciding factor was his want—no, his need. His need to have someone else read, experience, his good work.

Now Kellogg was leaning out of the dump truck’s cab toward the Judge. “You be careful, Pop. Okay? There’s funny folks on the roads these days.”

“Indeed there are,” the Judge said with a strange smile. “And indeed I will. A good day to you, gentlemen. And you too, Mr. Weizak.”

That brought another burst of laughter, and they parted.

The Judge did not head toward Denver. When he reached Route 36, he proceeded directly across it and out along Route 7. The morning sun was bright and mellow, and on this secondary route, there was not enough stalled traffic to block the road. The town of Brighton was worse; at one point he had to leave the highway and drive across the local high school football field to avoid a colossal traffic jam. He continued east until he reached I-25. A right turn here would have taken him into Denver. Instead he turned left—north—and nosed onto the feeder ramp. Halfway down he put the transmission in neutral and looked left again, west, to where the Rockies rose serenely into the blue sky with Boulder lying at their base.

He had told Larry he was too old for adventure, and God save him, but that had been a lie. His heart hadn’t beat with this quick rhythm for twenty years, the air had not tasted this sweet, colors had not seemed this bright. He would follow I-25 to Cheyenne and then move west toward whatever waited for him beyond the mountains. His skin, dry with age, nonetheless crawled and goosebumped a little at the thought. I-80 west, into Salt Lake City, then across Nevada to Reno. Then he would head north again, but that hardly mattered. Because somewhere between Salt Lake and Reno, maybe even sooner, he would be stopped, questioned, and probably sent somewhere else to be questioned again. And at some place or other, an invitation might be issued.

It was not even impossible to think that he might meet the dark man himself.

“Get moving, old man,” he said softly.

He put the Rover in gear and crept down to the turnpike. There were three lanes northbound, all of them relatively clear. As he had guessed, traffic jams and multiple accidents back in Denver had effectively dammed the flow of traffic. The traffic was heavy on the other side of the median strip—the poor fools who had been headed south, blindly hoping that south would be better—but here the going was good. For a while at least.

Judge Farris drove on, glad to be making his start. He had slept poorly last night. He would sleep better tonight, under the stars, his old body wrapped firmly in two sleeping bags. He wondered if he would ever see Boulder again and thought the chances were probably against it. And yet his excitement was very great.

It was one of the finest days of his life.

Early that afternoon, Nick, Ralph, and Stu biked out to North Boulder to a small stucco house where Tom Cullen lived by himself. Tom’s house had already become a landmark to Boulder’s “old” residents. Stan Nogotny said it was as if the Catholics, Baptists, and Seventh-Day Adventists had gotten together with the Democrats and the Moonies to create a religious-political Disneyland.

The front lawn of the house was a weird tableau of statues. There were a dozen Virgin Marys, some of them apparently in the act of feeding flocks of pink plastic lawn flamingos. The largest of the flamingos was taller than Tom himself and anchored to the ground on a single leg that ended in a four-foot spike. There was a giant wishing well with a large plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesus standing in the ornamental bucket with His hands outstretched… apparently to bless the pink flamingos. Beside the wishing well was a large plaster cow who was apparently drinking from a birdbath.

The front door screen slammed open and Tom came out to meet them, stripped to the waist. Seen from a distance, Nick thought, you would have supposed he was some fantastically virile writer or painter, with his bright blue eyes and that big reddish-blond beard. As he got closer you might have given up that idea in favor of one not quite so intellectual… maybe some sort of craftsman from the counterculture who had substituted kitsch for originality. And when he got very close, smiling and talking away a mile a minute, you realized for sure that a goodly chunk of Tom Cullen’s attic insulation was missing.

Nick knew that one of the reasons he felt a strong sense of empathy for Tom was because he himself had been assumed to be mentally retarded, at first because his handicap had held him back from learning to read and write, later because people just assumed that someone who was both deaf and mute must be mentally retarded. He had heard all the slang terms at one time or another. A few bricks short the load. Soft upstairs. Running on three wheels. The guy’s got a hole in his head and his brains done leaked out. This guy ain’t traveling with a full seabag. He remembered the night he had stopped for a couple of beers in Zack’s, the ginmill on the outskirts of Shoyo—the night Ray Booth and his buddies had jumped him. The bartender had stood at the far end of the bar, leaning confidentially over it to speak to a customer. His hand had been half shielding his mouth, so Nick could only make out fragments of what he had been saying. He didn’t need to make out any more than that, however. Deaf-mute… probably retarded… almost all those guys’re retarded…

But among all the ugly terms for mental retardation, there was one term that did fit Tom Cullen. It was one Nick had applied to him often, and with great compassion, in the silence of his own mind. The phrase was: The guys not playing with a full deck. That was what was wrong with Tom. That was what it came down to. And the pity in Tom’s case was that so few cards were missing, and low cards at that—a deuce of diamonds, a trey of clubs, something like that. But without those cards, you just couldn’t have a good game of anything. You couldn’t even win at solitaire with those cards missing from the deck.

“Nicky!” Tom yelled. “Am I glad to see you! Laws, yes! Tom Cullen is so glad!” He threw his arms around Nick’s neck and gave him a hug. Nick felt his bad eye sting with tears behind the black eyepatch he still wore on bright days like this one. “And Ralph too! And that one. You’re… let’s see…”

“I’m—” Stu began, but Nick silenced him with a brusque chopping gesture of his left hand. He had been practicing mnemonics with Tom, and it seemed to work. If you could associate something you knew with a name you wanted to remember, it often clicked home and stuck. Rudy had turned him on to that, too, all those long years ago.

Now he took his pad from his pocket and jotted on it. Then he handed it to Ralph to read aloud.

Frowning a little, Ralph did so: “What do you like to eat that comes in a bowl with meat and vegetables and gravy?”

Tom went stockstill. The animation died out of his face. His mouth dropped slackly open and he became the picture of idiocy.

Stu stirred uncomfortably and said, “Nick, don’t you think we ought to—”

Nick shushed him with a finger at his lips, and at the same instant Tom came alive again.

“Stew!” he said, capering and laughing. “You’re Stew!” He looked at Nick for confirmation, and Nick gave him a V-for-victory.

“M-O-O-N, that spells Stew, Tom Cullen knows that, everybody knows that!”

Nick pointed to the door of Tom’s house.

“Want to come in? Laws, yes! All of us are going to come in. Tom’s been decorating his house.”

Ralph and Stu exchanged an amused glance as they followed Nick and Tom up the porch steps. Tom was always “decorating.” He did not “furnish,” because the house had of course been furnished when he moved in. Going inside was like entering a madly jumbled Mother Goose world.

A huge gilded birdcage with a green stuffed parrot carefully wired to the perch hung just inside the front door and Nick had to duck under it. The thing was, he thought, Tom’s decorations were not just random rickrack. That would have made this house into something no more striking than a rummage sale barn. But there was something more here, something that seemed just beyond what the ordinary mind could grasp as a pattern. In a large square block over the mantel in the living room were a number of credit card signs, all of them centered and carefully mounted. YOUR VISA CARD WELCOME HERE. JUST SAY MASTERCARD. WE HONOR AMERICAN EXPRESS. DINER’S CLUB. Now the question occurred: How did Tom know that all those signs were part of a fixed set? He couldn’t read, but somehow he had grasped the pattern.

Sitting on the coffee table was a large Styrofoam fireplug. On the windowsill, where it could catch the sunlight and reflect cool fans of blue light onto the wall, was a police car bubble.

Tom toured them through the entire house. The downstairs game room was filled with stuffed birds and animals that Tom had found in a taxidermy shop; he had strung the birds on nearly invisible piano wire and they seemed to cruise, owls and hawks and even a bald eagle with moth-eaten feathers and one yellow glass eye missing. A woodchuck stood on its hind legs in one corner, a gopher in another, a skunk in another, a weasel in the fourth. In the center of the room was a coyote, somehow seeming to be the focus for all the smaller animals.

The banister leading up the stairs had been wrapped in red and white strips of Con-Tact paper so that it resembled a barber pole. The upper hallway was hung with fighter planes on more piano wire—Fokkers, Spads, Stukas, Spitfires, Zeros, Messerschmitts. The floor of the bathroom had been painted a bright electric blue and on it was Tom’s extensive collection of toy boats, sailing an enamel sea around four white porcelain islands and one white porcelain continent: the legs of the tub, the base of the toilet.

At last Tom took them back downstairs and they sat below the credit card montage and facing a 3-D picture of John and Robert Kennedy against a background of gold-edged clouds. The legend beneath proclaimed BROTHERS TOGETHER IN HEAVEN.

“You like Tom’s decorations? What do you think? Nice?”

“Very nice,” Stu said. “Tell me. Those birds downstairs… do they ever get on your nerves?”

“Laws, no!” Tom said, astounded. “They’re full of sawdust!”

Nick handed a note to Ralph.

“Tom, Nick wants to know if you’d mind being hypnotized again. Like the time Stan did it. It’s important this time, not just a game. Nick says he’ll explain why afterward.”

“Go ahead,” Tom said. “Youuu… are getting… verrrry sleepy… right?”

“Yes, that’s it,” Ralph said.

“Do you want me to look at the watch again? I don’t mind. You know, when you swing it back and forth? Verrrry… sleeeepy… ” Tom looked at them doubtfully. “Except I don’t feel very sleepy. Laws, no. I went to bed early last night. Tom Cullen always goes to bed early because there’s no TV to watch.”

Stu said softly: “Tom, would you like to see an elephant?”

Tom’s eyes closed immediately. His head dropped forward loosely. His respiration deepened to long, slow strokes. Stu watched this with great surprise. Nick had given him the key phrase, but Stu hadn’t known whether or not to believe it would work. And he had never expected that it could happen so fast.

“Just like putting a chicken’s head under its wing,” Ralph marveled.

Nick handed Stu his prepared “script” for this encounter. Stu looked at Nick for a long moment. Nick looked back, then nodded gravely that Stu should go ahead.

“Tom, can you hear me?” Stu asked.

“Yes, I can hear you,” Tom said, and the quality of his voice made Stu look up sharply.

It was different from Tom’s usual voice, but in a way Stu could not quite put his hand to. It reminded him of something which had happened when he was eighteen, and graduating from high school. They had been in the boys’ locker room before the ceremony, all the guys he’d been going to school with since… well, since the first day of the first grade in at least four cases, and almost as long in many others. And for just a moment he had seen how much their faces had changed between those old days, those first days, and that moment of insight, standing on the tile floor of the locker room with the black robe in his hands. That vision of change had made him shiver then, and it made him shiver now. The faces he had looked into had no longer been the faces of children… but neither had they yet become the faces of men. They were faces in limbo, faces caught perfectly between two well-defined states of being. This voice, coming out of the shadowland of Tom Cullen’s subconscious, seemed like those faces, only infinitely sadder. Stu thought it was the voice of the man forever denied.

But they were waiting for him to go on, and go on he must.

“I’m Stu Redman, Tom.”

“Yes. Stu Redman.”

“Nick is here.”

“Yes, Nick is here.”

“Ralph Brentner is here, too.”

“Yes, Ralph is, too.”

“We’re your friends.”

“I know.”

“We’d like you to do something, Tom. For the Zone. It’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous…”

Trouble crossed over Tom’s face, like a cloud shadow slowly crossing a midsummer field of corn.

“Will I have to be afraid? Will I have to…” He trailed off, sighing.

Stu looked at Nick, troubled.

Nick mouthed: Yes.

“It’s him,” Tom said, and sighed dreadfully. It was like the sound a bitter November wind makes in a stand of denuded oaks. Stu felt that shudder inside him again. Ralph had gone pale.

“Who, Tom?” Stu asked gently.

“Flagg. His name is Randy Flagg. The dark man. You want me to…” That sick sigh again, bitter and long.

“How do you know him, Tom?” This wasn’t in the script.

“Dreams… I see his face in dreams.”

I see his face in dreams. But none of them had seen his face. It was always hidden.

“You see him?”

“Yes…”

“What does he look like, Tom?”

Tom didn’t speak for a long time. Stu had decided he wasn’t going to answer and he was preparing to go back to the “script” when Tom said: “He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He’s always outside. He came out of time. He doesn’t know himself. He has the name of a thousand demons. Jesus knocked him into a herd of pigs once. His name is Legion. He’s afraid of us. We’re inside. He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. He’s the king of nowhere. But he’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of… inside.”

Tom fell silent.

The three of them stared at each other, pallid as gravestones. Ralph had seized his hat from his head and was kneading it convulsively in his hands. Nick had put one hand over his eyes. Stu’s throat had turned to dry glass.

His name is Legion. He is the king of nowhere.

“Can you say anything else about him?” Stu asked in a low voice.

“Only that I’m afraid of him, too. But I’ll do what you want. But Tom… is so afraid.” That dreadful sigh again.

“Tom,” Ralph said suddenly. “Do you know if Mother Abagail… if she’s still alive?” Ralph’s face was desperately set, the face of a man who has staked everything on one turn of the cards.

“She’s alive.” Ralph leaned against the back of his chair with a great gust of breath. “But she’s not right with God yet,” Tom added.

“Not right with God? Why not, Tommy?”

“She’s in the wilderness, God has lifted her up in the wilderness, she does not fear the terror that flies at noon or the terror that creeps at midnight… neither will the snake bite her nor the bee sting her… but she’s not right with God yet. It was not the hand of Moses that brought water from the rock. It was not the hand of Abagail that turned the weasels back with their bellies empty. She’s to be pitied. She will see, but she will see too late. There will be death. His death. She will die on the wrong side of the river. She—”

“Stop him,” Ralph groaned. “Can’t you stop him?”

“Tom,” Stu said.

“Yes.”

“Are you the same Tom that Nick met in Oklahoma? Are you the same Tom we know when you’re awake?”

“Yes, but I am more than that Tom.”

“I don’t understand.”

He shifted a little, his sleeping face calm.

“I am God’s Tom.”

Completely unnerved now, Stu almost dropped Nick’s notes.

“You say you’ll do what we want.”

“Yes.”

“But do you see… do you think you’ll come back?”

“That’s not for me to see or say. Where shall I go?”

“West, Tom.”

Tom moaned. It was a sound that made the hair on the nape of Stu’s neck stand on end. What are we sending him into? And maybe he knew. Maybe he had been there himself, only in Vermont, in mazes of corridors where the echo made it seem as if footsteps were following him. And gaining.

“West,” Tom said. “West, yes.”

“We’re sending you to look, Tom. To look and see. Then to come back.”

“Come back and tell.”

“Can you do that?”

“Yes. Unless they catch and kill me.”

Stu winced; they all winced.

“You go by yourself, Tom. Always west. Can you find west?”

“Where the sun goes down.”

“Yes. And if anyone asks why you’re there, this is what you’ll say: They drove you out of the Free Zone—”

“Drove me out. Drove Tom out. Put him on the road.”

“—because you were feebleminded.”

“They drove Tom out because Tom is feebleminded.”

“—and because you might have a woman and the woman might have idiot children.”

“Idiot children like Tom.”

Stu’s stomach was rolling back and forth helplessly. His head felt like iron that had learned how to sweat. It was as if he was suffering from a terrible, debilitating hangover.

“Now repeat what you’ll say if someone asks why you’re in the west.”

“They drove Tom out because he was feebleminded. Laws, yes. They were afraid I night have a woman the way you have them with your prick in bed. Make her pregnant with idiots.”

“That’s right, Tom. That’s—”

“Drove me out,” he said in a soft, grieving voice. “Drove Tom out of his nice house and put his feet on the road.”

Stu passed a shaking hand over his eyes. He looked at Nick. Nick seemed to double, then treble, in his vision. “Nick, I don’t know as I can finish,” he said helplessly.

Nick looked at Ralph. Ralph, pale as cheese, could only shake his head.

“Finish,” Tom said unexpectedly. “Don’t leave me out here in the dark.”

Forcing himself, Stu went on.

“Tom, do you know what the full moon looks like?”

“Yes… big and round.”

“Not the half-moon, or even most of the moon.”

“No,” Tom said.

“When you see that big round moon, you’ll come back east. Back to us. Back to your house, Tom.”

“Yes, when I see it, I’ll come back,” Tom agreed. “I’ll come back home.”

“And when you come back, you’ll walk in the night and sleep in the day.”

“Walk at night, sleep in the day.”

“Right. And you won’t let anybody see you if you can help it.”

“No.”

“But, Tom, someone might see you.”

“Yes, someone might.”

“If it’s one person that sees you, Tom, kill him.”

“Kill him,” Tom said doubtfully.

“If it’s more than one, run.”

“Run,” Tom said, with more certainty.

“But try not to be seen at all. Can you repeat all that back?”

“Yes. Come back when the moon is full. Not the halfmoon, not the fingernail moon. Walk at night, sleep in the day. Don’t let anybody see me. If one person sees me, kill him. If more than one person sees me, run away. But try not to let anyone see me.”

“That’s very good. I want you to wake up in a few seconds. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“When I ask about the elephant, you’ll wake up, okay?”

“Okay.”

Stu sat back with a long, shuddery sigh. “Thank God that’s over.”

Nick agreed with his eyes.

“Did you know that might happen, Nick?”

Nick shook his head.

“How could he know those things?” Stu muttered.

Nick was motioning for his pad. Stu gave it to him, glad to be rid of it. His fingers had sweated the page with Nick’s script written on it almost to transparency. Nick wrote and handed it to Ralph. Ralph read it, lips moving slowly, and then handed it to Stu.

“Some people through history have considered the insane and the retarded to be close to divine. I don’t think he told us anything that can be of practical use to us, but I know he scared the hell out of me. Magic, he said. How do you fight magic?”

“It’s over my head, that’s all,” Ralph muttered. “Those things he said about Mother Abagail, I don’t even want to think about them. Wake him up, Stu, and let’s get out of here as quick as we can.” Ralph was close to tears.

Stu leaned forward again. “Tom?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to see an elephant?”

Tom’s eyes opened at once and he looked around at them. “I told you it wouldn’t work,” he said. “Laws, no. Tom doesn’t get sleepy in the middle of the day.”

Nick handed a sheet to Stu, who glanced at it and then spoke to Tom. “Nick says you did just fine.”

“I did? Did I stand on my head like before?”

With a twinge of bitter shame, Nick thought: No, Tom, you did a bunch of even better tricks this time.

“No,” Stu said. “Tom, we came to ask if you could help us.”

“Me? Help? Sure! I love to help!”

“This is dangerous, Tom. We want you to go west, and then come back and tell us what you saw.”

“Okay, sure,” Tom said without the slightest hesitation, but Stu thought he saw a momentary shadow cross Tom’s face… and linger behind his guileless blue eyes. “When?”

Stu put a gentle hand on Tom’s neck and wondered just what in the hell he was doing here. How were you supposed to figure these things out if you weren’t Mother Abagail and didn’t have a hot line to heaven? “Pretty soon now,” he said gently. “Pretty soon.”

When Stu got back to the apartment, Frannie was fixing supper.

“Harold was over,” she said. “I asked him to stay to dinner, but he begged off.”

“Oh.”

She looked more closely at him. “Stuart Redman, what dog bit you?”

“A dog named Tom Cullen, I guess.” And he told her everything.

They sat down to dinner. “What does it all mean?” Fran asked. Her face was pale, and she was not really eating, only pushing her food from one side of her plate to the other.

“Damned if I know,” Stu said. “It’s a kind of… of seeing, I guess. I don’t know why we should balk at the idea of Tom Cullen having visions while he’s under hypnosis, not after the dreams we all had on our way here. If they weren’t a kind of seeing, I don’t know what they were.”

“But they seem so long ago now… or at least they do to me.”

“Yeah, to me, too,” Stu agreed, and realized he was pushing his own food around.

“Look, Stu—I know we agreed not to talk about committee business outside the committee’s meetings if we could help it. You said we’d be wrangling all the time, and you were probably right. I haven’t said word one about you turning into Marshal Dillon after the twenty-fifth, have I?”

He smiled briefly. “No, you haven’t, Frannie.”

“But I have to ask if you still think sending Tom Cullen west is a good idea. After what happened this afternoon.”

“I don’t know,” Stu said. He pushed his plate away. Most of the food on it was untouched. He got up, went to the hall dresser, and found a pack of cigarettes. He had cut his consumption to three or four a day. He lit this one, drew harsh, stale tobacco smoke deep into his lungs, and blew it out. “On the positive side, his story is simple enough and believable enough. We drove him out because he’s a halfwit. Nobody is going to be able to shake him from that. And if he gets back okay, we can hypnotize him—he goes under in the time it takes you to snap your fingers, for the Lord’s sake—and he’ll tell us everything he’s seen, the important things and the unimportant things. It’s possible that he’ll turn out to be a better eyewitness than either of the others. I don’t doubt that.”

“If he gets back okay.”

“Yeah, if. We gave him an instruction to travel east only at night and to hide up in the day. If he sees more than one person, to run. But if he was seen by one person only, to kill him.”

“Stu, you didn’t!”

“Of course we did!” he said angrily, wheeling on her. “We’re not playing pat-a-cake here, Frannie! You must know what’s going to happen to him… or the Judge… or Dayna… if they get caught over there! Why else were you so set against the idea in the first place?”

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay, Stu.”

“No, it’s not okay!” he said, and slammed the freshly lit cigarette down into a pottery ashtray, sending up a little cloud of sparks. Several of them landed on the back of his hand and he brushed them off with a quick, savage gesture. “It’s not okay to send a feeble kid out to fight our battles, and it’s not okay to push people around like pawns on a fuckin chessboard and it’s not okay giving orders to kill like a Mafia boss. But I don’t know what else we can do. I just don’t know. If we don’t find out what he’s up to, there’s a damn fine chance that someday next spring he may turn the whole Free Zone into one big mushroom cloud.”

“Okay. Hey. Okay.”

He clenched his fists slowly. “I was shouting at you. I’m sorry. I had no right to do that, Frannie.”

“It’s all right. You weren’t the one who opened Pandora’s box.”

“We’re all opening it, I guess,” he said dully, and got another cigarette from the pack in the dresser. “Anyhow, when I gave him that… what do you call it? When I said he should kill any one person that got in his way, a kind of frown came over his face. It was gone right away. I don’t even know if Ralph or Nick saw it. But I did. It was like he was thinking, ‘Okay, I understand what you mean, but I’ll make up m’own mind on that when the time comes.’”

“I’ve read that you can’t hypnotize someone into doing something they wouldn’t do when they were awake. A person won’t go against his own moral code just because they’re told to do it when they’re under.”

Stu nodded. “Yeah, I was thinking of that. But what if this fellow Flagg has got a line of pickets strung down the whole eastern length of his border? I would, if I were him. If Tom runs into that picket line going west, he’s got his story to cover him. But if he’s coming back east and runs into them, it’s going to be kill or get killed. And if Tom won’t kill, he’s apt to be a dead duck.”

“You may be too worried about that one part of it,” Frannie said. “I mean, if there is a picket line, wouldn’t it have to be strung pretty thin?”

“Yeah. One man every fifty miles, something like that. Unless he’s got five times the people we do.”

“So unless they’ve got some pretty sophisticated equipment already set up and running, radar and infrared and all that stuff you see in the spy movies, wouldn’t Tom be apt to walk right through them?”

“That’s what we’re hoping. But—”

“But you’ve got a bad attack of conscience,” she said softly.

“Is that what it comes down to? Well… maybe so. What did Harold want; honey?”

“He left a bunch of those survey maps. Areas where his Search Committee has looked for Mother Abagail. Anyhow, Harold’s been working on that burial detail as well as supervising the Search Committee. He looked very tired, but his Free Zone duties aren’t the only reason. He’s been working on something else as well, it seems.”

“What’s that?”

“Harold’s got a woman.”

Stu raised his eyebrows.

“Anyway, that’s why he begged off on dinner. Can you guess who she is?”

Stu squinted up at the ceiling. “Now who could Harold be shackin with? Let me see—”

“Well, that’s a hell of a way to put it! What do you think we’re doing?” She threw a mock-slap at him, and he drew back, grinning.

“Fun, ain’t it? I give up. Who is it?”

“Nadine Cross.”

“That woman with the white in her hair?”

“That’s her.”

“Gosh, she must be twice his age.”

“I doubt,” Frannie said, “that it’s a concern to Harold at this point in his relationship.”

“Does Larry know?”

“I don’t know and care less. The Cross woman isn’t Larry’s girl now. If she ever was.”

“Yeah,” Stu said. He was glad Harold had found himself a little love-interest, but not terribly interested in the subject. “How does Harold feel about the Search Committee, anyway? Did he give you any idea?”

“Well, you know Harold. He smiles a lot, but… not very hopeful. I guess that’s why he’s putting in most of his time on the burial detail. They call him Hawk now, did you know that?”

“Really?”

“I heard it today. I didn’t know who they were talking about until I asked.” She mused for a moment, then laughed.

“What’s funny?” Stu asked.

She stuck out her feet, which were clad in low-topped sneakers. On the soles were patterns of circles and lines. “He complimented me on my sneakers,” she said. “Isn’t that dippy?”

“You’re dippy,” Stu said, grinning.

Harold woke up just before dawn with a dull but not entirely unpleasant ache in his groin. He shivered a little as he got up. It was getting noticeably colder in the early mornings, although it was only August 22 and fall was still a calendar month away.

But there was heat below his waist, oh yes. Just looking at the delectable curve of her buttocks in those tiny see-through underpants as she slept was warming him up considerably. She wouldn’t mind if he woke her up… well, maybe she would mind, but she wouldn’t object. He still had no real idea of what might lie behind those dark eyes, and he was a little afraid of her.

Instead of waking her up, he dressed quietly. He didn’t want to mess around with Nadine, as much as he would have liked to.

What he needed to do was go someplace alone and think.

He paused at the door, fully dressed, carrying his boots in his left hand. Between the slight chilliness of the room and the prosy act of getting dressed, his desire had left him. He could smell the room now, and the smell was not terribly appealing.

It was just a little thing, she had said, a thing they could do without. Perhaps it was true. She could do things with her mouth and hands that were nearly beyond belief. But if it was such a small thing, why did this room have that stale and slightly sour odor that he associated with the solitary pleasure of all his bad years?

Maybe you want it to be bad.

Disturbing thought. He went out, closing the door softly behind him.

Nadine’s eyes opened the moment the door was closed. She sat up, looked thoughtfully at the door, and then lay down again. Her body ached in a slow and unrelieved cycle of desire. It felt almost like menstrual cramps. If it was such a small thing, she thought (with no idea of how close to Harold’s her own thoughts were), why did she feel this way? At one point last night she’d had to bite her lips together to stifle the cries: Stop that fooling around and STICK me with that thing! Do you hear me? STICK me with it, cram me FULL of it! Do you think what you’re doing is doing anything for me? Stick me with it and let’s for Christ’s sake—or mine, at least—end this crazy game!

He had been lying with his head between her legs, making strange noises of lust, noises that might have been comic had they not been so honestly urgent, so nearly savage. And she had looked up, those words trembling behind her lips, and had seen (or only thought she had?) a face at the window. In an instant the fire of her own lust had been damped down to cold ash.

It had been his face, grinning savagely in at her.

A scream had risen in her throat… and then the face was gone, the face was nothing but a moving pattern of shadows on the darkened glass mingled with smudges of dust. No more than the boogeyman a child imagines he sees in the closet, or curled up slyly behind the chest of toys in the corner.

No more than that.

Except it was more, and not even now, in the first cold rational light of dawn, could she pretend otherwise. It would be dangerous to pretend otherwise. It had been him, and he had been warning her. The husband-to-be was watching over his intended. And the bride defiled would be the bride unaccepted.

Staring at the ceiling, she thought: I suck his cock, but that’s not defilement. I let him stick himself up my ass, but that isn’t defilement, either. I dress for him like a cheap streetwalking slut, but that’s perfectly okay.

It was enough to make you wonder what sort of man your fiancé really was.

Nadine stared up at the ceiling for a long, long time.

Harold made instant coffee, drank it with a grimace, and then took a couple of cold Pop-Tarts out onto the front step. He sat down and ate them while dawn crept across the land.

In retrospect, the last couple of days seemed like a mad carnival ride to him. It was a blur of orange trucks, of Weizak clapping him on the shoulder and calling him Hawk (they all called him that now), of dead bodies, a never-ending moldy stream of them, and then coming home from all that death to a never-ending flow of kinky sex. Enough to blur your head.

But now, sitting here on a front step as cold as a marble headstone, a horrible cup of instant coffee sloshing in his guts, he could munch these sawdust-tasting cold Pop-Tarts and think. He felt clear-headed, sane after a season of insanity. It occurred to him that, for a person who had always considered himself to be a Cro-Magnon man amid a herd of thundering Neanderthals, he had been doing precious little thinking lately. He had been led, not by the nose, but by the penis.

He turned his mind to Frannie Goldsmith even as he turned his gaze out to the Flatirons. It was Frannie who had been at his house that day, he knew it for sure now. He had gone over to the place where she lived with Redman on a pretext, really hoping to get a look at her footgear. As it turned out, she had been wearing the sneakers that matched the print he had found on his cellar floor. Circles and lines instead of the usual waffle or zigzag tread. No question, baby.

He thought he could put it together without too much trouble. Somehow she had found out he had read her diary. He must have left a smudge or mark on one of the pages… maybe more than one. So she had come to his house looking for some indication of how he felt about what he had read. Something written down.

There was, of course, his ledger. But she hadn’t found it, he could feel positive of that. His ledger said flat-out that he planned to kill Stuart Redman. If she had found something like that, she would have told Stu. Even if she hadn’t, he didn’t believe she could have been as easy and as natural with him as she had been yesterday.

He finished his last Pop-Tart, grimacing at the taste of its cold frosting and colder jelly center. He decided he would walk to the bus station instead of taking his cycle; Teddy Weizak or Norris could drop him off on the way home. He set off, zipping his light jacket all the way to his chin against the chill that would be gone in an hour or so. He walked past the empty houses with their shades drawn, and about six blocks down Arapahoe, he began to see an x -mark chalked boldly on door after door. Again, his idea. The Burial Committee had checked all those houses where the mark appeared, and had hauled away whatever bodies there were to be hauled away. x, a crossing-out. The people who had lived in those houses where the mark appeared were gone for all time. In another month that x -mark would be all over Boulder, signifying the end of an age.

It was time to think, and to think carefully. It seemed that, since he had met Nadine, he really had stopped thinking… but maybe he had really stopped even before that.

I read her diary because I was hurt and jealous, he thought. Then she broke into my house, probably looking for my own diary, but she didn’t find it. But just the shock of someone breaking in had maybe been revenge enough. It had certainly bent him out of shape. Maybe they were even and it could be quits.

He didn’t really want Frannie anymore, did he?… Did he?

He felt the sullen coal of resentment glow in his chest. Maybe not. But that didn’t change the fact that they had excluded him. Although Nadine had said little about her reasons for coming to him, Harold had an idea that she had been excluded in some way too, rebuffed, turned back. They were a couple of outsiders, and outsiders hatch plots. It’s perhaps the only thing that keeps them sane. (Remember to put that in the ledger, Harold thought… he was almost downtown now.)

There was a whole company of outsiders on the other side of the mountains. And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you’re inside. Inside where it’s warm. Just a little thing, being inside where it’s warm, but really such a big thing. About the most important thing in the world.

Maybe he didn’t want to be quits and even. Maybe he didn’t want to settle for a draw, for a career of riding in a twentieth-century deadcart and getting meaningless letters of thanks for his ideas, and waiting five years for Bateman to retire from their precious committee so he could be on it… and what if they decided to pass over him again? They might, too, because it wasn’t just a question of age. They had taken the goddam deaf-mute, and he was only a few years older than Harold himself.

The coal of resentment was burning brightly now. Think, sure, think—that was easy to say, and sometimes it was even to do… but what good was thinking when all it got you from the Neanderthals who ran the world was a horselaugh, or even worse, a thank-you letter?

He reached the bus station. It was still early, and no one was there yet. There was a poster on the door saying there was going to be another public meeting on the twenty-fifth. Public meeting? Public circle jerk.

The waiting room was festooned with travel posters and ads for the Greyhound Ameripass and pictures of big mother-humping Scenicruisers rolling through Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, Nashville, wherever. He sat down and stared with a cold morning eye at the darkened pinball machines, the Coke machine, the coffee machine that would also dispense a Lipton Cup-a-Soup that smelled vaguely like a dead fish. He lit a cigarette and threw the matchstub on the floor.

They had adopted the Constitution. Whooppee. How very-very and too-too. They had even sung The Star-Speckled Banana, for Christ’s sweet sake. But suppose Harold Lauder had gotten up, not to make a few constructive suggestions, but to tell them the facts of life in this first year after the plague?

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Harold Emery Lauder and I am here to tell you that, in the words of the old song, the fundamental things apply as time goes by. Like Darwin. The next time you stand and sing the National Anthem, friends and neighbors, chew on this: America is dead, dead as a doornail, dead as Jacob Marley and Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper and Harry S Truman, but the principles just propounded by Mr. Darwin are still very much alive—as alive as Jacob Marley’s ghost was to Ebenezer Scrooge. While you are meditating on the beauties of constitutional rule, spare a little time to meditate on Randall Flagg, Man of the West. I doubt very much if he has any time to spare for such fripperies as public meetings and ratifications and discussions on the true meaning of a peach in the best liberal mode. Instead he has been concentrating on the basics, on his Darwin, preparing to wipe the great Formica counter of the universe with your dead bodies. Ladies and gentlemen, let me modestly suggest that while we are trying to get the lights on and waiting for a doctor to find our happy little hive, he may be searching eagerly for someone with a pilot’s credentials so he can start overflights of Boulder in the best Francis Gary Powers tradition. While we debate the burning question of who will be on the Street Cleaning Committee, he has probably already seen to the creation of a Gun Cleaning Committee, not to mention mortars, missile sites, and possibly even germ warfare centers. Of course we know this country doesn’t have any germ or biological warfare centers, that’s one of the things that makes this country great—what country, ha-ha—but you should realize that while we’re busy getting all the wagons in a circle, he’s —

“Hey, Hawk, you pullin overtime?”

Harold looked up, smiling. “Yeah, I thought I’d get some,” he told Weizak. “I clocked you when I came in. You made six bucks already.”

Weizak laughed. “You’re a card, Hawk, you know that?”

“I am,” Harold agreed, still smiling. He began to relace his boots. “A wild card.”

Chapter 56

Stu spent the next day at the power station, wrapping motors, and was cycling home at the end of the workday. He had reached the small park opposite the First National Bank when Ralph hailed him over. He parked his cycle and walked over to the bandshell where Ralph was sitting.

“I’ve kind of been looking for you, Stu. You got a minute?”

“Just one. I’m late for supper. Frannie’ll be worried.”

“Yeah. Been up to the power station wrapping copper, from the look of your hands.” Ralph looked absent and worried.

“Yeah. Not even workmen’s gloves do much good. My hands are wrecked.”

Ralph nodded. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the park, some of them looking at the narrow-gauge railway train that had once gone between Boulder and Denver. A trio of young women had spread out a picnic supper. Stu found it very pleasant just to sit here with his wounded hands in his lap. Maybe marshaling won’t be so bad, he thought. At least it’ll get me off that goddam assembly line in East Boulder.

“How’s it going out there?” Ralph asked.

“Me, I wouldn’t know—I’m just hired help, like the rest. Brad Kitchner says it’s going like a house afire. He says the lights will be back on by the end of the first week of September, maybe sooner, and that we’ll have heat by the middle of the month. Of course, he’s pretty young to be making with the predictions…”

“I’ll put my money on Brad,” Ralph said. “I trust im. He’s been gettin a lot of what you call on-the-job training.” Ralph tried to laugh; the laugh turned into a sigh which seemed fetched up from the big man’s bootheels.

“Why you so down at the mouth, Ralph?”

“I got some news on my radio,” Ralph said. “Some of it’s good, some of it… well, some of its not so good, Stu. I want you to know, because there’s no way to keep it secret. Lots of people in the Zone with CBs. I imagine some were listening when I was talking to these new folks coming in.”

“How many?”

“Over forty. One of them’s a doctor, name of George Richardson. He sounds like a fine man. Level-headed.”

“Well, that’s great news!”

“He’s from Derbyshire, Tennessee. Most of the people in this group are sort of mid-Southern. Well, it seems they had a pregnant woman with them, and her time come up ten days ago, on the thirteenth. This doctor delivered her of them—twins, she had—and they were fine. At first they were fine.” Ralph lapsed back into silence, his mouth working.

Stu grabbed him. “They died? The babies died? That what you’re trying to tell me? That they died? Talk to me, dammit!”

“They died,” Ralph said in a low voice. “One of them went in twelve hours. Appeared to just choke to death. The other went two days later. Nothing Richardson could do to save them. The woman went loony. Raving about death and destruction and no more babies. You want to make sure Fran isn’t around when they come in, Stu. That’s what I wanted to tell you. And that you should let her know about this right away. Because if you don’t, someone else will.”

Stu let go of Ralph’s shirt slowly.

“This Richardson, he wanted to know how many pregnant women we had, and I said only one that we know of right now. He asked how far along she was and I said four months. Is that right?”

“She’s five months now. But Ralph, is he sure those babies died of the superflu? Is he sure?”

“No, he’s not, and you gotta tell Frannie that, too, so she understands it. He said it could have been any number of things… the mother’s diet… something hereditary… a respiratory infection… or maybe they were just, you know, defective babies. He said it could have been the Rh factor, whatever, that is. He just couldn’t tell, them being born in the middle of a field beside the doggone Interstate 70. He said that him and about three others who were in charge of their group sat up late at night and talked it over. Richardson, he told them what it might mean if it was the Captain Trips that killed those babies, and how important it was for them to find out one way or the other for sure.”

“Glen and I talked about that,” Stu said bleakly, “the day I met him. July Fourth, that was. It seems so long ago… anyway, if it was the superflu that killed those babies it probably means that in forty or fifty years we can leave the whole shebang to the rats and the houseflies and the sparrows.”

“I guess that’s pretty much what Richardson told them. Anyway, they were some forty miles west of Chicago, and he persuaded them to turn around the next day so they could take the bodies back to a big hospital where he could do an autopsy. He said he could find out for sure if it was the superflu. He saw enough of it at the end of June. I guess all doctors did.”

“Yeah.”

“But when the morning came, the babies were gone. That woman had buried them, and she wouldn’t say where. They spent two days digging, thinking that she couldn’t have gone too far away from the camp or buried them too deep, being just over her delivery and all. But they didn’t find them, and she wouldn’t say where no matter how much they tried to explain how important it was. Poor woman was just all the way off’n her chump.”

“I can understand that,” Stu said, thinking of how much Fran wanted her baby.

“The doctor said even if it was the superflu, maybe two immune people could make an immune baby,” Ralph said hopefully.

“The chances that the natural father of Fran’s baby was immune are about one in a billion, I guess,” Stu said. “He sure isn’t here.”

“Yeah, I guess it couldn’t hardly be, could it? I’m sorry to have to put this on you, Stu. But I thought you’d better know. So you could tell her.”

“I don’t look forward to that,” Stu said.

But when he got home he found that someone else had already done it.

“Frannie?”

No answer. Supper was on the stove—burnt on, mostly—but the apartment was dark and quiet.

Stu came into the living room and looked around. There was an ashtray on the coffee table with two cigarette butts in it, but Fran didn’t smoke and they weren’t his brand.

“Babe?”

He went into the bedroom and she was there, lying on the bed in the semigloom, looking at the ceiling. Her face was puffy and tear-streaked. “Hi Stu,” she said quietly.

“Who told you?” he asked angrily. “Who just couldn’t wait to spread the good news? Whoever it was, I’ll break their damn arm.”

“It was Sue Stern. She heard it from Jack Jackson. He’s got a CB, and he heard that doctor talking with Ralph. She thought she better tell me before someone else made a bad job of it. Poor little Frannie. Handle with care. Do not open until Christmas.” She uttered a little laugh. There was a desolation in that sound that made Stu feel like crying.

He came across the room and lay down beside her on the bed and stroked her hair off her forehead. “Honey, it’s not sure. No way that it’s sure.”

“I know it’s not. And maybe we could have our own babies, even so.” She turned to look up at him, her eyes red-rimmed and unhappy. “But I want this one. Is that so wrong?”

“No. Course not.”

“I’ve been lying here waiting for him to move, or something. I’ve never felt him move since that night Larry came looking for Harold. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“I felt the baby move and I didn’t wake you up. Now I wish I had. I sure do.” She began to cry again and put an arm over her face so he wouldn’t see her doing it.

Stu took the arm away, stretched out beside her, kissed her. She hugged him fiercely and then lay passively against him. When she spoke, the words were half muffled against his neck.

“Not knowing makes it that much worse. Now I just have to wait and see. It seems like such a long time to have to wait and see if your baby is going to die before it’s spent a day outside of your body.”

“You won’t be waiting alone,” he said.

She hugged him tight again for that and they lay there together without moving for a long time.

Nadine Cross had been in the living room of her old place for almost five minutes, gathering things up, before she saw him sitting in the chair in the corner, naked except for his underpants, his thumb in his mouth, his strange gray-green Chinese eyes watching her. She was so startled—as much by the knowledge that he had been sitting there all the time as by the actual sudden sight of him—that her heart took a high, frightened leap in her chest and she screamed. The paperbacks she had been about to stuff into her packsack tumbled to the floor in a flutter of pages.

“Joe… I mean Leo…”

She put a hand on her chest above the swell of her breasts as if to quell the crazy beating of her heart. But her heart was not ready to slow yet, hand or no hand. Catching sudden sight of him was bad; catching sight of him dressed and acting the way he had been when she had first made his acquaintance in New Hampshire was even worse. It was too much of a return, as if some irrational god had suddenly bundled her viciously through a time-warp and condemned her to live the last six weeks all over again.

“You scared the dickins out of me,” she finished weakly.

Joe said nothing.

She walked slowly over to him, half expecting to see a long kitchen knife in one of his hands, as in days of yore, but the hand which was not at his mouth was curled blamelessly in his lap. She saw that his body had been milked of its tan. The old scars and bramble-scratches were gone. But the eyes were the same… eyes that could haunt you. Whatever had been in them, a little more each day, since he had come to the fire to listen to Larry play the guitar, was now utterly gone. His eyes were as they had been when she first met him, and this filled her with a creeping sort of terror.

“What are you doing here?”

Joe said nothing.

“Why aren’t you with Larry and Lucy-mom?”

No reply.

“You can’t stay here,” she said, trying to reason with him, but before she could go on, she found herself wondering how long he had already been here.

This was the morning of August 24. She had spent the previous two nights at Harold’s. The thought that he might have been sitting in that chair with his thumb corked securely in his mouth for the last forty hours came to her. It was a ridiculous idea, of course, he would have to eat and drink (wouldn’t he?), but once the thought/image had come, it would not leave. That sense of creepiness came over her again, and she realized with something like despair how much she herself had changed: once she had slept fearlessly next to this little savage, at a time when he had been armed and dangerous. Now he was without weapons, but she found herself in terror of him. She had thought

(Joe? Leo?)

his previous self had been neatly and completely disposed of. Now he was back. And he was here.

“You can’t stay here,” she said. “I just came back to get some things. I’m moving out. I’m moving in with a… with a man.”

Oh, is that what Harold is? some interior voice mocked. I thought he was just a tool, a means to an end.

“Leo, listen—”

His head shook, faintly but visibly. His eyes, stern and glittering, fixed upon her face.

“You’re not Leo?”

That faint shake came again.

“Are you Joe?”

A nod, just as faint.

“Well, all right. But you have to understand that it really doesn’t matter who you are,” she said, trying to be patient. That crazy feeling that she was in a time-warp, that she was back to square one, persisted. It made her feel unreal and frightened. “That part of our lives—the part where we were together and on our own—that part is gone. You’ve changed, I’ve changed, and we can’t change back.”

But his strange eyes remained fixed upon hers, seeming to deny this.

“And stop staring at me,” she snapped. “It’s very impolite to stare at people.”

Now his eyes seemed to become faintly accusatory. They seemed to suggest that it was also impolite to leave people on their own, and more impolite still to withdraw one’s love from people who still needed and depended on it.

“It’s not as if you’re on your own,” she said, turning and beginning to pick up the books she had dropped. She knelt clumsily and without grace, her knees popping like firecrackers as she did so. She began to stuff the books into the packsack willy-nilly, on top of her sanitary napkins and her aspirin and her underthings—plain cotton underthings, quite different from the ones she wore for Harold’s frantic amusement.

“You have Larry and Lucy. You want them, and they want you. Well, Larry wants you, and that’s all that matters, because she wants all the things he does. She’s like a piece of carbon paper. Things are different for me now, Joe, and that’s not my fault. That’s not my fault at all. So you can just stop trying to guilt-trip me.”

She began trying to buckle the packsack’s clasps but her fingers were trembling uncontrollably and it was hard work. The silence grew heavier and heavier around them.

At last she stood up, shrugging the packsack onto her shoulders.

“Leo.” She tried to speak calmly and reasonably, the way she used to speak to difficult children in her classes when they had tantrums. It just wasn’t possible. Her voice was all in jigs and jags, and the little shake of his head which greeted her use of the word Leo made it even worse.

“It wasn’t Larry and Lucy,” Nadine said viciously. “I could have understood that, if that was all it was. But it was really that old bag you gave me up for, wasn’t it? That stupid old woman in her rocking chair, grinning at the world with her false teeth. But now she’s gone, and so you come running back to me. But it won’t play, do you hear me? It won’t play! ”

Joe said nothing.

“And when I begged Larry… got down on my knees and begged him… he couldn’t be bothered. He was too busy playing big man. So you see, none of this is my fault. None of it! ”

The boy only stared at her impassively.

Her terror began to return, burying her incoherent rage. She backed away from him to the door and fumbled behind her for the knob. She found it at last, turned it, and jerked the door open. The rush of cool outside air against her shoulders was very welcome.

“Go to Larry,” she muttered. “Goodbye, kiddo.”

She backed out awkwardly and stood on the top step for a moment, trying to gather her wits. It suddenly occurred to her that the whole thing might have been a hallucination, brought on by her own guilt feelings… guilt at abandoning the boy, guilt at making Larry wait too long, guilt at the things she and Harold had done, and the much worse things which were waiting. Perhaps there had been no real boy in that house at all. No more real than the phantasms of Poe—the beating of the old man’s heart, sounding like a watch wrapped in cotton, or the raven perched on the bust of Pallas.

“Tapping, ever tapping at my chamber door,” she whispered aloud without thinking, and that made her utter a horrid, croaking little giggle, probably not much different from the sounds ravens actually made.

Still, she had to know.

She went to the window beside the front steps and looked into the living room of what had once been her house. Not that it had ever been hers, not really. When you lived in a place and all you wanted to take out of it when you left would fit in one packsack, it had never really been yours to begin with. Looking in, she saw some dead wife’s rug and curtains and wallpaper, some dead husband’s pipe-stand and issues of Sports Illustrated scattered carelessly on the coffee table. Pictures of dead children on the mantel. And sitting in the corner chair, some dead woman’s little boy, clad only in his underpants, sitting, still sitting, sitting as he had sat before—

Nadine fled, stumbling, almost falling over the low wire wickets which protected the flower bed to the left of the window where she had looked in. She flung herself onto her Vespa and got it started. She drove with reckless speed for the first few blocks, slaloming in and out of the stalled cars which still littered these side-streets, but a little at a time she calmed down.

By the time she reached Harold’s, she had gotten herself under some kind of control. But she knew it had to end quickly for her here in the Zone. If she wanted to keep her sanity, she must soon be away.

The meeting at Munzinger Auditorium went well. They began by singing the National Anthem again, but this time most of them remained dry-eyed; it was simply a part of what would soon become ritual. A Census Committee was voted routinely with Sandy DuChiens in charge. She and her four helpers immediately began going through the audience, counting heads, taking names. At the end of the meeting, to the accompaniment of tremendous cheers, she announced that there were now 814 souls in the Free Zone, and promised (rashly, as it turned out) to have a complete “directory” by the time the next Zone meeting was called—a directory she hoped to update week by week, containing names in alphabetical order, ages, Boulder addresses, previous addresses, and previous occupations. As it turned out, the flow into the Zone was so heavy and yet so erratic that she was always two or three weeks behind.

The elective period of the Free Zone Committee was brought up, and after some extravagant suggestions (ten years was one, life another, and Larry brought down the house by saying they sounded more like prison terms than those of elective office), the yearly term was voted in. Harry Dunbarton’s hand waved near the back of the hall, and Stu recognized him.

Bellowing to make himself heard, Harry said: “Even a year may be too much. I have nothing at all against the ladies and gentlemen of the committee, I think you’re doing a helluva job”—cheers and whistles—“but this is gonna get out of hand before long if we keep gettin bigger.”

Glen raised his hand, and Stu acknowledged him.

“Mr. Chairman, this isn’t on the agenda, but I think Mr. Dunbarton there has an excellent point.”

I just bet you think he does, baldy, Stu thought, since you bought it up a week ago.

“I’d like to make a motion that we have a Representative Government Committee so we can really put the Constitution back to work. I think Harry Dunbarton should head that committee, and I’ll serve on it myself, unless someone thinks I’ve got a conflict of interest.”

More cheers.

In the last row, Harold turned to Nadine and whispered in her ear: “Ladies and gentlemen, the public love feast is now in session.”

She gave him a slow, dark smile, and he felt giddy.

Stu was elected Free Zone Marshal by roaring acclamation.

“I’ll do the best I can by you,” he said. “Some of you cheerin me now may have cause to change your tunes later if I catch you doin somethin you shouldn’t be doin. You hear me, Rich Moffat?”

A large roar of laughter. Rich, who was as drunk as a hootowl, joined in agreeably.

“But I don’t see any reason why we should have any real trouble here. The main job of a marshal as I see it is stoppin people from hurtin each other. And there aren’t any of us who want to do that. Enough people have been hurt already. And I guess that’s all I’ve got to say.”

The crowd gave him a long ovation.

“Now this next item,” Stu said, “kind of goes along with the marshaling. We need about five people to serve on a Law Committee, or I’m not going to feel right about locking anyone up, should it come to that. Do I hear any nominations?”

“How about the Judge?” someone shouted.

“Yeah, the Judge, damn right!” someone else yelled.

Heads craned expectantly as people waited for the Judge to stand up and accept the responsibility in his usual rococo style; a whisper ran around the hall as people retold the story of how he had put a pin in the flying saucer nut’s balloon. Agendas were put down as people prepared to clap. Stu’s eyes met Glen’s with mutual chagrin: someone on the committee should have foreseen this.

“Ain’t here,” someone said.

“Who’s seen him?” Lucy Swann asked, upset. Larry glanced at her uncomfortably, but she was still looking around the hall for the Judge.

“I seen him.”

A mutter of interest as Teddy Weizak stood up about three quarters of the way back in the auditorium, looking nervous and polishing his steel-rimmed spectacles compulsively with his bandanna.

“Where?”

“Where was he, Teddy?”

“Was it in town?”

“What was he doing?”

Teddy Weizak flinched visibly from this barrage of questions.

Stu pounded his gavel. “Come on, folks. Order.”

“I seen him two days ago,” Teddy said. “He had himself a Land-Rover. Said he was going to Denver for the day. Didn’t say why. We had a joke or two about it. He seemed in real good spirits. That’s all I know.” He sat down, still polishing his spectacles and blushing furiously.

Stu rapped for order again. “I’m sorry the Judge isn’t here. I think he would have been just the man for the job, but since he isn’t, could we have another nomination—?”

“No, let’s not leave it at that!” Lucy protested, getting to her feet. She was wearing a snug denim jumpsuit that brought interested looks to the faces of most of the males in the audience. “Judge Farris is an old man. What if he got sick in Denver and can’t get back?”

“Lucy,” Stu said, “Denver’s a big place.”

An odd silence fell over the meeting hall as people considered this. Lucy sat down, looking pale, and Larry put his arm around her. His eyes met Stu’s, and Stu looked away.

A half-hearted motion was made to table the Law Committee until the Judge got back and was voted down after twenty minutes of discussion. They had another lawyer, a young man of about twenty-six named Al Bundell, who had come in late that afternoon with the Dr. Richardson party, and he accepted the chairmanship when it was offered, saying only that he hoped no one would do anything too terrible in the next month or so, because it would take at least that long to work out some sort of rotating tribunal system. Judge Farris was voted a place on the committee in absentia.

Brad Kitchner, looking pale, fidgety, and a little ridiculous in a suit and tie, approached the podium, dropped his prepared remarks, picked them up in the wrong order, and contented himself by saying they hoped and expected to have the electricity back on by the second or third of September.

This remark was greeted with such a storm of cheering that he gained enough confidence to finish in style and actually strut a little as he left the podium.

Chad Norris was next, and Stu told Frannie later that he had approached the thing in just the right way: They were burying the dead out of common decency, none of them would feel really good until that was done and life could go on, and if it was finished by the fall rainy season they would all feel so much the better. He asked for a couple of volunteers and could have had three dozen if he wanted them. He finished by asking each member of the current Spade Squad (as he called them) to stand and take a bow.

Harold Lauder barely popped up and then sat back down again, and there were those who left the meeting remarking on what a smart but very modest fellow he was. Actually, Nadine had been whispering things in his ear and he was afraid to do much more than bob and nod. A fairly large pup-tent appeared to have been erected in the crotch of his pants.

When Norris left the podium, Ralph Brentner took his place. He told them that they at last had a doctor. George Richardson stood up (to loud applause; Richardson flipped the peace sign with both hands, and the applause turned to cheers), and then told them that, as far as he could tell, they had another sixty people joining them over the next couple of days.

“Well, that’s the agenda,” Stu said. He looked out over the gathered people. “I want Sandy DuChiens to come up here again and tell us how many we are, but before I do that, is there other business we should take up tonight?”

He waited. He could see Glen’s face in the crowd, and Sue Stern’s, Larry’s, Nick’s, and of course, Frannie’s. They all looked a bit strained. If someone was going to bring up Flagg, ask what the committee was doing about him, this would be the time. But there was silence. After fifteen seconds of it, Stu turned the meeting over to Sandy, who ended things in style. As people began to file out, Stu thought: Well, we got by it again.

Several people came up to congratulate him after the meeting, one of them the new doctor. “You handled that very well, Marshal,” Richardson said, and for a moment Stu almost looked over his shoulder to see who Richardson was talking to. Then he remembered, and suddenly felt scared. Lawman? He was an imposter.

A year, he told himself. A year and no more. But he still felt scared.

Stu, Fran, Sue Stern, and Nick walked back toward the center of town together, their feet clicking hollowly on the cement sidewalk as they crossed the C.U. campus toward Broadway. Around them, other people were streaming away, talking quietly, headed home. It was nearly eleven-thirty.

“It’s chilly,” Fran said. “I wish I’d worn my jacket as well as this sweater.”

Nick nodded. He also felt the chill. The Boulder evenings were always cool, but tonight it could be no more than fifty degrees. It served to remind that this strange and terrible summer was nearing its end. Not for the first time he wished that Mother Abagail’s God or Muse or whatever It was had been more in favor of Miami or New Orleans. But that might not have been so great, now that he stopped to think about it. High humidity, lots of rain… and lots of bodies. At least Boulder was dry.

“They jumped the shit out of me, wanting the Judge for the Law Committee,” Stu said. “We should have expected that.”

Frannie nodded, and Nick jotted quickly on his pad: “Sure. People will miss Tom & Dayna, 2. Fax of life.”

“Think people will be suspicious, Nick?” Stu asked.

Nick nodded. “They’ll wonder if they did go west. For real.”

They all considered this as Nick took out his butane match and burned the scrap of paper.

“That’s tough,” Stu said finally. “You really think so?”

“Sure, he’s right,” Sue said glumly. “What else have they got to think? That Judge Farris went to Far Rockaway to ride the Monster Coaster?”

“We were lucky to get away tonight without a big discussion of what’s going on in the West,” Fran said.

Nick wrote: “Sure were. Next time we’ll have to tackle it head on, I think. That’s why I want to postpone another big meeting as long as possible. Three weeks, maybe. September 15?”

Sue said, “We can hold off that long if Brad gets the power on.”

“I think he will,” Stu said.

“I’m going home,” Sue told them. “Big day tomorrow. Dayna’s off. I’m going with her as far as Colorado Springs.”

“Do you think that’s safe, Sue?” Fran asked.

She shrugged. “Safer for her than for me.”

“How did she take it?” Fran asked her.

“Well, she’s a funny sort of girl. She was a jock in college, you know. Tennis and swimming were her biggies, although she played them all. She went to some small community college down in Georgia, but for the first two years she kept on going with her high school boyfriend. He was a big leather jacket type, me Tarzan, you Jane, so get out in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans. Then she got dragged along to a couple of female consciousness meetings by her roomie, who was this big libber type.”

“And as an upshot, she got to be an even bigger libber than the roomie,” Fran guessed.

“First a libber, then a lesbian,” Sue said.

Stu stopped as if thunderstruck. Frannie looked at him with guarded amusement. “Come on, splendor in the grass,” she said. “See if you can’t fix the hinge on your mouth.”

Stu shut his mouth with a snap.

Sue went on: “She dropped both rocks on the caveman boyfriend at the same time. It blew his wheels, and he came after her with a gun. She disarmed him. She says it was the major turning point of her life. She told me she always knew she was stronger and more agile than he was—she knew it intellectually. But it took doing it to put it in her guts.”

“You sayin she hates men?” Stu asked, looking at Sue closely.

Susan shook her head. “She’s bi now.”

“Bye now?” Stu said doubtfully.

“She’s happy with either sex, Stuart. And I hope you’re not going to start leaning on the committee to institute the blue laws along with ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

“I got enough to worry about without gettin into who sleeps with who,” he mumbled, and they all laughed. “I only asked because I don’t want anyone goin into this thing as a crusade. We need eyes over there, not guerrilla fighters. This is a job for a weasel, not a lion.”

“She knows that,” Susan said. “Fran asked me how she took it when I asked her if she’d go over there for us. She took it very well. For one thing, she reminded me that if we’d stayed with those men… remember how you found us, Stu?”

He nodded.

“If we’d stayed with them, we would have either wound up dead or in the West anyway, because that’s the direction they were going in… at least when they were sober enough to read the road-signs. She said she’d been wondering what her place in the Zone was, and guessed that her place in the Zone was out of it. And she said…”

“What?” Fran asked.

“That she’d try to come back,” Sue said, rather abruptly, and said no more. What else Dayna Jurgens had said was between the two of them, something not even the other members of the committee were to know. Dayna was going west with a ten-inch switchblade strapped to her arm in a spring-loaded clip. When she bent her wrist sharply, the spring unloaded and hey, presto, she had suddenly grown a sixth finger, one which was ten inches long and double-bladed. She felt that most of them—the men—would not have understood.

If he’s a big enough dictator, then maybe he’s all that’s holding them together. If he was gone, maybe they’d start fighting and squabbling among themselves. It might be the end of them, if he dies. And if I get close to him, Susie, he better have his guardian devil with him.

They’ll kill you, Dayna.

Maybe. Maybe not. It might be worth it just to have the pleasure of watching his guts fall out on the floor.

Susan could have stopped her, maybe, but she hadn’t tried. She had contented herself with extracting a promise from Dayna that she would stick to the original script unless a near-perfect opportunity came up. To that, Dayna had agreed and Sue didn’t think her friend would get that chance. Flagg would be well guarded. Still, in the three days since she had broached the idea of going west as a spy to her friend, Sue Stern had found it very difficult to sleep.

“Well,” she said to the rest of them now, “I’m home to bed. Night, folks.”

She walked off, hands in the pockets of her fatigue jacket.

“She looks older,” Stu said.

Nick wrote and offered the open pad to both of them.

We all do was written there.

Stu was on his way up to the power station the next morning when he saw Susan and Dayna headed down Canyon Boulevard on a pair of cycles. He waved and they pulled over. He thought he had never seen Dayna looking prettier. Her hair was tied behind her with a bright green silk scarf, and she was wearing a rawhide coat open over jeans and a chambray shirt. A bedroll was strapped on behind her.

“Stuart!” she cried, and waved to him, smiling.

Lesbian? he thought doubtfully.

“I understand you’re off on a little trip,” he said.

“For sure. And you never saw me.”

“Nope,” Stu said. “Never did. Smoke?”

Dayna took a Marlboro and cupped her hands over his match.

“You be careful, girl.”

“I will.”

“And get back.”

“I hope to.”

They looked at each other in the bright late-summer morning.

“You take care of Frannie, big fella.”

“I will.”

“And go easy on the marshaling.”

“That I know I can do.”

She cast the cigarette away. “What do you say, Suze?”

Susan nodded and put her bike in gear, smiling a strained smile.

“Dayna?”

She looked at him, and Stu planted a soft kiss on her mouth.

“Good luck.”

She smiled. “You have to do it twice for really good luck. Didn’t you know that?”

He kissed her again, more slowly and thoroughly this time. Lesbian? he wondered again.

“Frannie’s a lucky woman,” Dayna said. “And you can quote me.”

Smiling, not really knowing what to say, Stu stepped back and said nothing at all. Two blocks up, one of the lumbering orange Burial Committee trucks rumbled through the intersection like an omen and the moment was broken.

“Let’s go, kid,” Dayna said. “Get-em-up-Scout.”

They drove off, and Stu stood on the curbing and watched them.

Sue Stern was back two days later. She had watched Dayna moving west from Colorado Springs, she said, had watched her until she was nothing but a speck that merged with the great still landscape. Then she had cried a little. The first night Sue had made camp at Monument, and had awakened in the small hours, chilled by a low whining sound that seemed to be coming from a culvert that traveled beneath the farm road she had camped by.

Finally summoning up her courage, she had shined her flash into the corrugated pipe and had discovered a gaunt and shivering puppy. It looked to be about six months old. It shied from her touch and she was too big to crawl into the pipe. At last she had gone into the town of Monument, smashed her way into the local grocery, and had come back in the first cold light of false dawn with a knapsack full of Alpo and Cycle One. That did the trick. The puppy rode back with her, neatly tucked into one of the BSA saddlebags.

Dick Ellis went into raptures over the puppy. It was an Irish setter bitch, either purebred or so close as to make no difference. When she got older, he was sure Kojak would be glad to make her acquaintance. The news swept the Free Zone, and for that day the subject of Mother Abagail was forgotten in the excitement over the canine Adam and Eve. Susan Stern became something of a heroine, and as far as any of the committee ever knew, no one even thought to wonder what she had been doing in Monument that night, far south of Boulder.

But it was the morning the two of them left Boulder that Stu remembered, watching them ride off toward the Denver-Boulder Turnpike. Because no one in the Zone ever saw Dayna Jurgens again.

August 27; nearly dusk; Venus shining against the sky.

Nick, Ralph, Larry, and Stu sat on the steps of Tom Cullen’s house. Tom was on the lawn, whooping and knocking croquet balls through a set of wickets.

It’s time, Nick wrote.

Speaking low, Stu asked if they would have to hypnotize him again, and Nick shook his head.

“Good,” Ralph said. “I don’t think I could take that action.” Raising his voice, he called: “Tom! Hey, Tommy! Come on over here!”

Tom came running over, grinning.

“Tommy, it’s time to go,” Ralph said.

Tom’s smile faltered. For the first time he seemed to notice that it was getting dark.

“Go? Now? Laws, no! When it gets dark, Tom goes to bed. M-O-O-N, that spells bed. Tom doesn’t like to be out after dark. Because of the boogies. Tom… Tom…”

He fell silent, and the others looked at him uneasily. Tom had lapsed into dull silence. He came out of it… but not in the usual way. It was not a sudden reanimation, life flooding back in a rush, but a slow thing, reluctant, almost sad.

“Go west?” he said. “Do you mean it’s that time?”

Stu laid a hand on his shoulder. “Yes, Tom. If you can.”

“On the road.”

Ralph made a choked, muttering sound and walked around the house. Tom did not seem to notice. His gaze alternated between Stu and Nick.

“Travel at night. Sleep in the day.” Very slowly, in the dusk, Tom added: “And see the elephant.”

Nick nodded.

Larry brought Tom’s pack up from where it had rested beside the steps. Tom put it on slowly, dreamily.

“You want to be careful, Tom,” Larry said thickly.

“Careful. Laws, yes.”

Stu wondered belatedly if they should have given Tom a one-man tent as well, and rejected it. Tom would get all bollixed up trying to set up even a little tent.

“Nick,” Tom whispered. “Do I really have to do this?”

Nick put an arm around Tom and nodded slowly.

“All right.”

“Just stay on the big four-lane highway, Tom,” Larry said. “The one that says 70. Ralph is going to drive you down to the start of it on his motorcycle.”

“Yes, Ralph.” He paused. Ralph had come back around the house. He was swabbing at his eyes with his bandanna.

“You ready, Tom?” he asked gruffly.

“Nick? Will it still be my house when I get back?”

Nick nodded vigorously.

“Tom loves his house. Laws, yes.”

“We know you do, Tommy.” Stu could feel warm tears in the back of his own throat now.

“All right. I’m ready. Who am I riding with?”

“Me, Tom,” Ralph said. “Down to Route 70, remember?”

Tom nodded and began to walk toward Ralph’s cycle. After a moment Ralph followed him, his big shoulders slumped. Even the feather in his hatband seemed dejected. He climbed on the bike and kicked it alive. A moment later it pulled out onto Broadway and turned east. They stood together, watching the motorcycle dwindle to a moving silhouette in the purple dusk marked by a moving headlight. Then the light disappeared behind the bulk of the Holiday Twin Drive-in and was gone.

Nick walked away, head down, hands in pockets. Stu tried to join him, but Nick shook his head almost angrily and motioned him away. Stu went back to Larry.

“That’s that,” Larry said, and Stu nodded gloomily.

“You think we’ll ever see him again, Larry?”

“If we don’t, the seven of us—well, maybe not Fran, she was never for sending him—the rest of us are going to be eating and sleeping with the decision to send him for the rest of our lives.”

“Nick more than anyone else,” Stu said.

“Yeah. Nick more than anyone else.”

They watched Nick walking slowly down Broadway, losing himself in the shadows which grew around him. Then they looked at Tom’s darkened house in silence for a minute.

“Let’s get out of here,” Larry said suddenly. “The thought of all those stuffed animals… all of a sudden I got a grade-A case of the creeps.”

When they left, Nick was still standing on the side lawn of Tom Cullen’s house, his hands in his pockets, his head down.

George Richardson, the new doctor, had set up in the Dakota Ridge Medical Center, because it was close to Boulder City Hospital with its medical equipment, its large supplies of drugs, and its operating rooms.

By August 28 he was pretty much in business, assisted by Laurie Constable and Dick Ellis. Dick had asked leave to quit the world of medicine and had been refused permission to do so. “You’re doing a fine job here,” Richardson said. “You’ve learned a lot and you’re going to learn more. Besides, there’s just too much for me to do by myself. We’re going to be out of our minds as it is if we don’t get another doctor in a month or two. So congratulations, Dick, you’re the Zone’s first paramedic. Give him a kiss, Laurie.”

Laurie did.

Around eleven o’clock on that late August morning, Fran let herself into the waiting room and looked around curiously and a little nervously. Laurie was behind the counter, reading an old copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal.

“Hi, Fran,” she said, jumping up. “I thought we’d see you sooner or later. George is with Candy Jones right now, but he’ll be right with you. How are you feeling?”

“Pretty well, thanks,” Fran said. “I guess—”

The door to one of the examining rooms opened and Candy Jones came out following a tall, stooped man in corduroy slacks and a sport shirt with the Izod alligator on the breast. Candy was looking doubtfully at a bottle of pink stuff which she held in one hand.

“Are you sure that’s what it is?” she asked Richardson doubtfully. “I never got it before. I thought I was immune.”

“Well, you’re not and you have it now,” George said with a grin. “Don’t forget the starch baths, and stay out of the tall grass after this.”

She smiled ruefully. “Jack’s got it too. Should he come in?”

“No, but you can make the starch baths a family affair.”

Candy nodded dolefully and then spotted Fran. “Hi, Frannie, how’s the girl?”

“Okay. How’s by you?”

“Terrible.” Candy held up the bottle so Fran could read the word CALADRYL on the label. “Poison ivy. And you couldn’t guess where I got it.” She brightened. “But I bet you can guess where Jack’s got it.”

They watched her go with some amusement. Then George said, “Miss Goldsmith, isn’t it? Free Zone Committee. A pleasure.”

She held out her hand to be shaken. “Just Fran, please. Or Frannie.”

“Okay, Frannie. What’s the problem?”

“I’m pregnant,” Fran said. “And pretty damn scared.” And then, with no warning at all, she was in tears.

George put an arm around her shoulders. “Laurie, I’ll want you in about five minutes.”

“All right, Doctor.”

He led her into the examining room and had her sit on the black-upholstered table.

“Now. Why the tears? Is it Mrs. Wentworth’s twins?”

Frannie nodded miserably.

“It was a difficult delivery, Fran. The mother was a heavy smoker. The babies were lightweights, even for twins. They came in the late evening, very suddenly. I had no opportunity to make a postmortem. Regina Wentworth is being cared for by some of the women who were in our party. I believe—I hope —that she’s going to come out of the mental fugue-state she’s currently in. But for now all I can say is that those babies had two strikes against them from the start. The cause of death could have been anything.”

“Including the superflu.”

“Yes. Including that.”

“So we just wait and see.”

“Hell no. I’m going to give you a complete prenatal right now. I’m going to monitor you and any other woman that gets pregnant or is pregnant now every step of the way. General Electric used to have a slogan, ‘Progress Is Our Most Important Product.’ In the Zone, babies are our most important product, and they are going to be treated accordingly.”

“But we really don’t know.”

“No, we don’t. But be of good cheer, Fran.”

“Yes, all right. I’ll try.”

There was a brief rap at the door and Laurie came in. She handed George a form on a clipboard, and George began to ask Fran questions about her medical history.

When the exam was over, George left her for a while to do something in the next room. Laurie stayed with her while Fran dressed.

As she was buttoning her blouse, Laurie said quietly: “I envy you, you know. Uncertainty and all. Dick and I had been trying to make a baby like mad. It’s really funny—I was the one who used to wear a ZERO POPULATION button to work. It meant zero population growth, of course, but when I think about that button now, it gives me a really creepy feeling. Oh, Frannie, yours is going to be the first. And I know it will be all right. It has to be.”

Fran only smiled and nodded, not wanting to remind Laurie that hers would not be the first.

Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had been the first.

And Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had died.

“Fine,” George said half an hour later.

Fran raised her eyebrows, thinking for a moment he had mispronounced her name. For no good reason she remembered that until the third grade little Mikey Post from down the street had called her Fan.

“The baby. It’s fine.”

Fran found a Kleenex and held it tightly. “I felt it move… but that was some time ago. Nothing since then. I was afraid…”

“It’s alive, all right, but I really doubt if you felt it move, you know. More likely a little intestinal gas.”

“It was the baby,” Fran said quietly.

“Well, whether it did or not, it’s going to move a lot in the future. I’ve got you pegged for early to mid-January. How does that sound?”

“Fine.”

“Are you eating right?”

“Yes, I think so—trying hard, anyway.”

“Good. No nausea now?”

“A little at first, but it’s passed.”

“Lovely. Getting plenty of exercise?”

For a nightmare instant she saw herself digging her father’s grave. She blinked the vision away. That had been another life. “Yes, plenty.”

“Have you gained any weight?”

“About five pounds.”

“That’s all right. You can have another twelve; I’m feeling generous today.”

She grinned. “You’re the doctor.”

“Yes, and I used to be an OB man, so you’re in the right place. Take your doctor’s advice and you’ll go far. Now, concerning bicycles, motorbikes, and mopeds. All of them a no-no after November fifteenth, let’s say. No one’s going to be riding them by then anyway. Too damn cold. Don’t smoke or drink to excess, do you?”

“No.”

“If you want a nightcap once in a while, I think that’s perfectly okay. I’m going to put you on a vitamin supplement; you can pick it up at any drugstore in town—”

Frannie burst into laughter, and George smiled uncertainly.

“Did I say something funny?”

“No. It just came out funny under the circumstances.”

“Oh! Yes, I see. Well, at least there won’t be any more complaining about high drug prices, will there? One last thing, Fran. Have you ever been fitted with an intrauterine device… an IUD?”

“No, why?” Fran asked, and then she happened to think of her dream: the dark man with his coathanger. She shuddered. “No,” she said again.

“Good. That’s it.” He stood up. “I won’t tell you not to worry—”

“No,” she agreed. The laughter was gone from her eyes. “Don’t do that.”

“But I will ask you to keep it to a minimum. Excess anxiety in the mother can lead to glandular imbalance. And that’s not good for the baby. I don’t like to prescribe tranquilizers for pregnant women, but if you think—”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” Fran said, but going out into the hot midday sunshine, she knew that the entire second half of her pregnancy was going to be haunted by thoughts of Mrs. Wentworth’s vanished twins.

On the twenty-ninth of August three groups came in, one with twenty-two members, one with sixteen, and one with twenty-five. Sandy DuChiens got around to see all seven members of the committee and tell them that the Free Zone now had over one thousand residents.

Boulder no longer seemed such a ghost town.

On the evening of the thirtieth, Nadine Cross stood in the basement of Harold’s house, watching him and feeling uneasy.

When Harold was doing something that didn’t involve having some sort of strange sex with her, he seemed to go away to his own private place where she had no control over him. When he was in that place he seemed cold; more than that, he seemed contemptuous of her and even of himself. The only thing that didn’t change was his hate of Stuart Redman and the others on the committee.

There was a dead air-hockey game in the basement and Harold was working on its pinholed surface. There was an open book beside him. On the facing page was a diagram. He would look at the diagram for a while, then look at the apparatus he was working on, and then he would do something to it. Spread out neatly by his right hand were the tools from his Triumph motorcycle kit. Little snips of wire littered the air-hockey table.

“You know,” he said absently, “you ought to take a walk.”

“Why?” She felt a trifle hurt. Harold’s face was tense and unsmiling. Nadine could understand why Harold smiled as much as he did: because when he stopped, he looked insane. She suspected that he was insane, or very nearly.

“Because I don’t know how old this dynamite is,” Harold said.

“What do you mean?”

“Old dynamite sweats, dear heart,” he said, and looked up at her. She saw that his entire face was running with sweat, as if to prove his point. “It perspires, to be perfectly couth. And what it perspires is pure nitroglycerin, one of the world’s great unstable substances. So if it’s old, there’s a very good chance that this little Science Fair project could blow us right over the top of Flagstaff Mountain and all the way to the Land of Oz.”

“Well, you don’t have to sound so snotty about it,” Nadine said.

“Nadine? Ma chère? ”

“What?”

Harold looked at her calmly and without smiling. “Shut your fucking trap.”

She did, but she didn’t take a walk, although she wanted to. Surely if this was Flagg’s will (and the planchette had told her that Harold was Flagg’s way of taking care of the committee), the dynamite wouldn’t be old. And even if it was old, it wouldn’t explode until it was supposed to… would it? Just how much control over events did Flagg have?

Enough, she told herself, he has enough. But she wasn’t sure, and she was increasingly uneasy. She had been back to her house and Joe was gone—gone for good this time. She had gone to see Lucy, and had borne the cold reception long enough to learn that since she had moved in with Harold, Joe (Lucy, of course, called him Leo) had “slipped back some.” Lucy obviously blamed her for that, too… but if an avalanche came rumbling down from Flagstaff Mountain or an earthquake ripped Pearl Street apart, Lucy would probably blame her for those things, too. Not that there wouldn’t be enough to blame on her and Harold very soon. Still, she had been bitterly disappointed not to have seen Joe once more… to kiss him goodbye. She and Harold were not going to be in the Boulder Free Zone much longer.

Never mind, best you let him go completely now that you’re embarked on this obscenity. You’d only be doing him harm… and possibly harm to yourself as well, because Joe… sees things, knows things. Let him stop being Joe, let me stop being Nadine-mom. Let him go back to being Leo, forever.

But the paradox in that was inexorable. She could not believe that any of these Zone people had more than a year’s life left in them, and that included the boy. It was not his will that they should live…

…so tell the truth, it isn’t just Harold who is his instrument. It’s you too. You, who once defined the single unforgivable sin in the postplague world as murder, as the taking of a single life…

Suddenly she found herself wishing that the dynamite was old, that it would blow up and put an end to both of them. A merciful end. And then she found herself thinking about what would happen afterward, after they had gotten over the mountains, and felt the old slippery warmth kindle in her belly.

“There,” Harold said gently. He had lowered his apparatus into a Hush Puppies shoebox and set it aside.

“It’s done?”

“Yes. Done.”

“Will it work?”

“Would you like to try it and find out?” His words were bitterly sarcastic, but she didn’t mind. His eyes were working her over in that greedy, crawling little boy’s way that she had come to recognize. He had returned from that distant place—the place from which he had written what was in the ledger that she had read and then replaced carelessly under the loose hearthstone where it had originally been. Now she could handle him. Now his talk was just talk.

“Would you like to watch me play with myself first?” she asked. “Like last night?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Good.”

“Let’s go upstairs then.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “I’ll go first.”

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. Little dots of sweat stood out on his brow, but fear hadn’t put them there this time. “Go first.”

So she went up first, and she could feel him looking up the short skirt of the little-girl sailor dress she was wearing. She was bare beneath it.

The door closed, and the thing that Harold had made sat in the open shoebox in the gloom. There was a battery-powered Realistic walkie-talkie handset from Radio Shack. Its back was off. Wired to it were eight sticks of dynamite. The book was still open. It was from the Boulder Public Library, and the title was 65 National Science Fair Prize Winners. The diagram showed a doorbell wired up to a walkie-talkie similar to the one in the shoebox. The caption beneath said: Third Prize, 1977 National Science Fair, Constructed by Brian Ball, Rutland, Vermont. Say the word and ring the bell up to twelve miles away!

Some hours later that evening, Harold came back downstairs, put the cover on the shoebox, and carried it carefully upstairs. He put it on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard. Ralph Brentner had told him that afternoon that the Free Zone Committee was inviting Chad Norris to speak at their next meeting. When was that going to be? Harold had inquired casually. September 2, Ralph had said.

September 2.

Chapter 57

Larry and Leo were sitting on the curb in front of the house. Larry was drinking a warm Hamm’s Beer, Leo a warm Orange Spot. You could have anything to drink in Boulder that you wanted these days, as long as it came in a can and you didn’t mind drinking it warn. From out back came the steady, gruff roar of the Lawnboy. Lucy was cutting the grass. Larry had offered to do it, but Lucy shook her head. “Find out what’s wrong with Leo, if you can.”

It was the last day of August.

The day after Nadine had moved in with Harold, Leo hadn’t appeared for breakfast. Larry had found the boy in his room, dressed only in his underpants, his thumb in his mouth. He was uncommunicative and hostile. Larry had been more frightened than Lucy, because she didn’t know how Leo had been when Larry had first encountered him. His name had been Joe then, and he had been brandishing a killer’s knife.

The best part of a week had passed since then, and Leo was a little better, but he hadn’t come back all the way and he wouldn’t talk about what had happened.

“That woman has something to do with it,” Lucy had said, screwing the cap onto the lawnmower’s tank.

“Nadine? What makes you think that?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to mention it. But she came by the other day while you and Leo were trying the fishing down at Cold Creek. She wanted to see the boy. I was just as glad the two of you were gone.”

“Lucy—”

She gave him a quick kiss, and he had slipped his hand under her halter and given her a friendly squeeze. “I judged you wrong before,” she said. “I guess I’ll always be sorry for that. But I’m never going to like Nadine Cross. There’s something wrong with her.”

Larry didn’t answer, but he thought Lucy’s judgment was probably a true one. That night up by King Sooper’s she had been like a crazy woman.

“There’s one other thing—when she was here, she didn’t call him Leo. She called him the other name. Joe.”

He looked at her blankly as she turned the automatic starter and got the Lawnboy going.

Now, half an hour after that discussion, he drank his Hamm’s and watched Leo bounce the Ping-Pong ball he had found the day the two of them had walked up to Harold’s, where Nadine now lived. The small white ball was smudged, but not dented. Thok-thok-thok against the pavement. Bouncy-bouncy-bally, look-at-the-way-we-play.

Leo (he was Leo now, wasn’t he?) hadn’t wanted to go inside Harold’s house that day.

Into the house where Nadine-mom was now living.

“You want to go fishing, kiddo?” Larry offered suddenly.

“No fish,” Leo said. He looked at Larry with his strange, seawater-green eyes. “Do you know Mr. Ellis?”

“Sure.”

“He says we can drink the water when the fish come back. Drink it without—” He made a hooting noise and waved his fingers in front of his eyes. “You know.”

“Without boiling it?”

“Yes.”

Thok-thok-thok.

“I like Dick. Him and Laurie. Always give me something to eat. He’s afraid they won’t be able to, but I think they will.”

“Will what?”

“Be able to make a baby. Dick thinks he may be too old. But I guess he’s not.”

Larry started to ask how Leo and Dick had gotten on that subject, and then didn’t. The answer, of course, was that they hadn’t. Dick wouldn’t talk to a small boy about something so personal as making a baby. Leo had just… had just known.

Thok-thok-thok.

Yes, Leo knew things… or intuited them. He hadn’t wanted to go in Harold’s house and had said something about Nadine… he couldn’t remember exactly what… but Larry had recalled that discussion and had felt very uneasy when he heard that Nadine had moved in with Harold. It had been as if the boy was in a trance, as if—

(—thok-thok-thok —)

Larry watched the Ping-Pong ball bounce up and down, and suddenly he looked into Leo’s face. The boy’s eyes were dark and faraway. The sound of the lawnmower was a far-off, soporific drone. The daylight was smooth and warm. And Leo was in a trance again, as if he had read Larry’s thought and simply responded to it.

Leo had gone to see the elephant.

Very casually Larry said: “Yes, I think they can make a baby. Dick can’t be any more than fifty-five at the outside. Cary Grant made one when he was almost seventy, I believe.”

“Who’s Cary Grant?” Leo asked. The ball went up and down, up and down.

(Notorious. North by Northwest.)

“Don’t you know?” he asked Leo.

“He was that actor,” Leo said. “He was in Notorious. And Northwest.”

(North by Northwest.)

“North by Northwest, I mean,” Leo said in a tone of agreement. His eyes never left the Ping-Pong ball’s bouncing course.

“That’s right,” he said. “How’s Nadine-mom, Leo?”

“She calls me Joe. I’m Joe to her.”

“Oh.” A cold chill was weaving its slow way up Larry’s back.

“It’s bad now.”

“Bad?”

“It’s bad with both of them.”

“Nadine and—”

(Harold?)

“Yes, him.”

“They’re not happy?”

“He’s got them fooled. They think he wants them.”

“He?”

“Him.”

The word hung on the still summer air.

Thok-thok-thok.

“They’re going to go west,” Leo said.

“Jesus,” Larry muttered. He was very cold now. The old fear swept him. Did he really want to hear any more of this? It was like watching a tomb door swing slowly open in a silent graveyard, seeing a hand emerge—

Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to know it.

“Nadine-mom wants to think it’s your fault,” Leo said. “She wants to think you drove her to Harold. But she waited on purpose. She waited until you loved Lucy-mom too much. She waited until she was sure. It’s like he’s rubbing away the part of her brain that knows right from wrong. Little by little he’s rubbing that part away. And when it’s gone she’ll be as crazy as everyone else in the West. Crazier maybe.”

“Leo—” Larry whispered, and Leo answered immediately:

“She calls me Joe. I’m Joe to her.”

“Shall I call you Joe?” Larry asked doubtfully.

“No.” There was a note of pleading in the boy’s voice. “No, please don’t.”

“You miss your Nadine-mom, don’t you, Leo?”

“She’s dead,” Leo said with chilling simplicity.

“Is that why you stayed out so late that night?”

“Yes.”

“And why you wouldn’t talk?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re talking now.”

“I have you and Lucy-mom to talk to.”

“Yes, of course—”

“But not for always!” the boy said fiercely. “Not for always, unless you talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie! ”

“About Nadine?”

“No!”

“About what? About you?”

Leo’s voice rose, became even shriller. “It’s all written down! You know! Frannie knows! Talk to Frannie! ”

“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 little 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 corner 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.”

“You sure she went?”

“It would look damn funny if she didn’t, wouldn’t it?”

Fran thought that over, then nodded. “I guess it would. By the way, Stu said they hope to have most of the town electrified again by the sixth.”

“That’s going to be a mighty day,” Larry said, and thought how nice it would be to sit down in Shannon’s or the Broken Drum with a big Fender guitar and an even bigger amp and play something—anything, as long as it was simple and had a heavy beat—at full volume. “Gloria,” maybe, or “Walkin’ the Dog.” Just about anything, in fact, except “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”

“Maybe,” Fran said, “we ought to have a cover story, though. Just in case.”

Larry grinned crookedly. “Want to say we’re selling magazine subscriptions if one of them comes back?”

“Har-har, Larry.”

“Well, we could say we came to tell her what you just told me about getting the juice turned on again. If she’s there.”

Fran nodded. “Yes, that might be okay.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Fran. She’d be suspicious if we told her we’d come up because Jesus Christ just appeared and is walking back and forth on top of the City Reservoir.”

“If she’s guilty of something.”

“Yes. If she’s guilty of something.”

“Come on,” Fran said after a moment’s thought. “Let’s go.”

There was no need for the cover story. Steady hard rapping at first the front and then the back door convinced them that Harold’s house was indeed empty. It was just as well, Fran thought—the more she thought about the cover they’d worked out, the thinner it seemed.

“How did you get in?” Larry asked.

“The cellar window.”

They went around to the side of the house and Larry pulled and tugged fruitlessly at the window while Fran kept watch.

“Maybe you did,” he said, “but it’s locked now.”

“No, it’s just sticking. Let me try.”

But she had no better luck. Sometime between her first clandestine trip out here and now, Harold had locked up tight.

“What do we do now?” she asked him.

“Let’s break it.”

“Larry, he’ll see it.”

“Let him. If he doesn’t have anything to hide, he’ll think it was just a couple of kids, breaking windows in empty houses. It sure looks empty, with all the shades pulled down. And if he does have something to hide, it’ll worry him plenty and he deserves to be worried. Right?”

She looked doubtful but didn’t stop him as he took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist and forearm, and crunched the basement window. Glass tinkled inward and he felt around for the catch.

“Here tis.” He released it and the window slid back. Larry slipped through and turned to help her. “Be careful, kiddo. No miscarriages in Harold Lauder’s basement, please.”

He caught her under the arms and eased her down. They looked around the rumpus room together. The croquet set stood sentinel. The air-hockey table was littered with little snips of colored electrical wire.

“What’s this?” she said, picking up a piece of it. “This wasn’t here before.”

He shrugged. “Maybe Harold’s building a better mousetrap.”

There was a box under the table and he fished it out. The cover said: DELUXE REALISTIC WALKIE-TALKIE SET, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. Larry opened the box, but the heft of it had already told him it was empty.

“Building walkie-talkies instead of mousetraps,” Fran said.

“No, this wasn’t a kit. You buy this kind ready to go. Maybe he was modifying them somehow. It sounds like Harold. Remember how Stu bitched about the walkie-talkie reception when he and Harold and Ralph were out hunting for Mother Abagail?”

She nodded, but there was still something about those snips of wire that bothered her.

Larry dropped the box back onto the floor and made what he would later think of as the most wildly erroneous statement of his entire life. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They went up the stairs, but this time the door at the top was locked. She looked at him and Larry shrugged. “We’ve come this far, right?”

Fran nodded.

Larry bumped his shoulder against the door a few times to get the feel of the bolt on the other side, and then rammed it hard. There was a snapping-metal sound, a clunk, and the door swung open. Larry bent and picked up a bolt assembly from the linoleum kitchen floor. “I can put this back on and he’ll never know the difference. That is, if there’s a screwdriver handy.”

“Why bother? He’s going to see the broken window.”

“That’s true. But if the bolt’s back on the door, he’ll… what are you smiling about?”

“Put the bolt back on, by all means. But how are you going to draw it from the cellar side of the door?”

He thought about it and said, “Jeez, I hate a smartass woman worse than anything.” He tossed the bolt onto the Formica kitchen counter. “Let’s go look under that hearthstone.”

They went into the shadowy living room, and Fran felt anxiety start to creep up. Last time Nadine hadn’t had a key. This time, if she came back, she would. And if she did come back, they would be caught red-handed. It would be a bitter joke if Stu’s first job as marshal turned out to be arresting his own woman for breaking and entering.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Larry asked, pointing.

“Yes. Be as quick as you can.”

“There’s a good chance he’s moved it, anyway.” And Harold had. It was Nadine who had replaced it under the loose hearthstone. Larry and Fran knew nothing of that, only that when Larry pulled the loose hearthstone aside, the book lay there in the hollow beneath, the word LEDGER gleaming mellowly up at them in gold-filled letters. They both stared at it. The room seemed suddenly hotter, stuffier, darker.

“Well,” Larry said, “are we going to admire it or read it?”

“You,” Fran said. “I don’t even want to touch it.”

Larry picked it out of the hole and automatically wiped the white stone-dust from the cover. He began to flip through it at random. The writing had been done with a felt-tipped marker of the sort that had been marketed under the pugnacious brand name Hardhead. It had allowed Harold to write in a tiny, perfect script—the handwriting of an intensely conscientious man, perhaps a driven man. There were no paragraph breaks. There was only an eyelash of a margin to the right and left, but that margin was constant, so straight that it might have been drawn with a ruler.

“It’d take me three days to read all this,” Larry said, and went on flipping toward the front of the book.

“Hold it,” Fran said, and reached over his arm to turn back a couple of pages. Here the steady flow of words was broken by a boldly boxed-off area. What had been enclosed seemed to be some sort of motto:

To follow one’s star is to concede the power of some greater Force, some Providence; yet is it still not possible that the act of following itself is the taproot of even greater Power? Your GOD, your DEVIL, owns the keys to the lighthouse; I have grappled with that so long and hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION.

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

“Sorry,” Larry said. “It’s by me. You get it?”

Fran shook her head slowly. “I guess it’s Harold’s way of saying following can be as honorable as leading. But as a motto, I don’t think it’s going to put ‘Waste not, want not’ out of business.”

Larry continued to flip toward the front of the book, coming upon another four or five of the boxed maxims, all of them attributed to Harold in capital letters.

“Whoo,” Larry said. “Look at this one, Frannie!”

It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To vent them is more noble; that is to say the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure.

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

“That’s the work of a profoundly disturbed mind,” Fran said. She felt cold.

“It’s the kind of thinking that got us into this mess to start with,” Larry agreed. He flipped rapidly to the start of the book. “Time’s wasting. Let’s see what we can make of this.”

Neither of them knew exactly what to expect. They had read nothing of the ledger except the boxed mottos and an occasional phrase or two which, mostly owing to Harold’s convoluted style (the compound-complex sentence seemed to have been invented with Harold Lauder in mind), meant little or nothing.

What they saw at the ledger’s beginning was therefore a complete shock.

The diary began at the top of the first facing page. It was neatly marked with a 1 in a circle. There was an indent here, the only indent in the whole book, as far as Frannie could tell, excepting those which began each boxed motto. They read that first sentence holding the ledger between them like children at a choir practice and Fran said “Oh!” in a small, strangled voice and stepped away, her hand pressed lightly to her mouth.

“Fran, we have to take the book,” Larry said.

“Yes—”

“And show it to Stu. I don’t know if Leo’s right about them being on the dark man’s side, but at the very least, Harold is dangerously disturbed. You can see that.”

“Yes,” she said again. She felt faint, weak. So this was how the matter of the diaries ended. It was as if she had known, as if she had known it all from the moment she saw that big smudged thumbprint, and she had to keep telling herself not to faint, not to faint.

“Fran? Frannie? Are you all right?”

Larry’s voice. From far away.

The first sentence in Harold’s ledger: My great pleasure this delightful post-Apocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too.

“Ralph? Ralph Brentner, you home? Hooo-hooo, anybody home? ”

She stood on the steps, looking at the house. No motorcycles in the yard, only a couple of bikes parked around to one side. Ralph would have heard her, but there was the mute to think about. The deaf-mute. You could holler until you were blue and he wouldn’t answer and still he, might be there.

Shifting her shopping bag from one arm to the other, Nadine tried the door and found it unlocked. She stepped inside out of the fine mist which was falling. She was in a small foyer. Four steps went up to the kitchen, and a flight of them went down to the basement area where, Harold said Andros had his apartment. Putting her most pleasant expression on her face, Nadine went downstairs, fixing her excuse in her mind if he should be there.

I came right in because I didn’t think you’d know I was knocking. Some of us wanted to know if there’s going to be a late shift wrapping those two motors that blew. Did Brad say anything to you?

There were only two rooms down here. One of them was a bedroom as simple as a monk’s cell. The other was a study. There was a desk, a big chair, a wastebasket, a bookcase. The top of the desk was littered with scraps of paper and she looked through them idly. Most of them made little sense to her—she guessed they were Nick’s side of some conversation (I guess so, but shouldn’t we ask him if it can be done in some simpler way? one of them read). Others seemed to be memos to himself, jottings, thoughts. A few of them reminded her of the boxes in Harold’s ledger, what he called his “Guideposts to a Better Life” with a sarcastic smile.

One read: Talk to Glen about trade. Do any of us know how trade starts? Scarcity of goods, isn’t it? Or a modified corner on some market? Skills. That may be a key word. What if Brad Kitchner decides to sell instead of giving away? Or the doc? What would we pay with? Hmmm.

Another: Community protection is a two-way street.

Another: Every time we talk about the law I spend the night having nightmares about Shoyo. Watching them die. Watching Childress throw his supper around the cell. The law, the law, what do we do about the goddamned law? Capital punishment. Now there’s a smiley thought. When Brad gets the power on, how long before someone asks him to rig up an electric chair?

She turned away from the scraps—reluctantly. It was fascinating to look through papers left by a man who could think wholly only by writing (one of her college profs had been fond of saying that the thought process can never be complete without articulation), but her purpose down here was already completed. Nick was not here, no one was here. To linger overlong would be to press her luck unnecessarily.

She went back upstairs. Harold had told her they would probably meet in the living room. It was a huge room, carpeted with a thick wine-colored shag rug, dominated by a freestanding fireplace that went up through the roof in a column of rock. The entire west wall was glass, giving on a magnificent view of the Flatirons. It made her feel as exposed as a bug on a wall. She knew that the outer surface of the thermoplex was iodized so that anyone outside would only see a mirrorlike reflection, but the psychological feeling was still one of utter exposure. She wanted to finish quickly.

On the southern side of the room she found what she was looking for, a deep closet that Ralph hadn’t cleaned out. Coats hung far back inside, and in the rear corner there was a tangle of boots and mittens and winter woolens about three feet deep.

Working quickly, she took the groceries out of her shopping bag. They were camouflage, and there was only a single layer of them. Beneath the cans of tomato paste and sardines was the Hush Puppies shoebox with the dynamite and the walkie-talkie inside.

“If I put it in a closet, will it still work?” she had asked. “Won’t the extra wall muffle the blast?”

“Nadine,” Harold had responded, “if that device works, and I have no reason whatever to believe it won’t, it will take the house and most of the surrounding hillside. Put it anywhere you think it will be unobserved until their meeting. A closet will be fine. The extra wall will blow out and become shrapnel. I trust your judgment, dear. It’s going to be just like the old fairy tale about the tailor and the flies. Seven at a blow. Only in this case, we’re dealing with a bunch of political cockroaches.”

Nadine pushed aside boots and scarves, made a hole, and slipped the shoebox into it. She covered it over again and then worked her way out of the closet. There. Done. For better or worse.

She left the house quickly, not looking back, trying to ignore the voice that wouldn’t stay dead, the voice that was now telling her to go back in there and pull the wires that ran between the blasting caps and the walkie-talkie, telling her to give this up before it drove her mad. Because wasn’t that what was really lying somewhere up ahead, now maybe less than two weeks ahead? Wasn’t madness the final logical conclusion?

She slipped the bag of groceries into the Vespa’s carrier and kicked the machine into life. And all the time she was driving away, that voice went on: You’re not going to leave that there, are you? You’re not going to leave that bomb in there, are you?

In a world where so many have died —

She leaned into a turn, barely able to see where she was going. Tears had begun to blur her eyes.

–the one great sin is to take a human life.

Seven lives here. No, more than that, because the committee was going to hear reports from the heads of several subcommittees.

She stopped at the corner of Baseline and Broadway, thinking she would turn around and go back. She was shuddering all over.

And later she would never be able to explain to Harold precisely what had happened—in truth, she never even tried. It was a foretaste of the horrors to come.

She felt a blackness creeping over her vision.

It came like a dark curtain slowly drawn, flipping and flapping in a mild breeze. Every now and then the breeze would gust, the curtain would flap more vigorously, and she would see a bit of daylight under its hem, a little bit of this deserted intersection.

But the curtain came over her vision in steady blackout drifts and soon she was lost in it. She was blind, she was deaf, she was without the sense of touch. The thinking creature, the Nadine-ego, drifted in a warm black cocoon like seawater, like amniotic fluid.

And she felt him creep into her.

A shriek built up within her, but she had no mouth with which to scream.

Penetration: entropy.

She didn’t know what those words meant, put together like that; she only knew that they were right.

It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Later, metaphors occurred to her to describe it, and she rejected them, one by one:

You’re swimming and suddenly, in the midst of the warm water, you’re treading water in a pocket of deep, numbing cold.

You’ve been given Novocain and the dentist pulls a tooth. It comes out with a painless tug. You spit blood into the white enamel basin. There’s a hole in you; you’ve been gouged. You can slip your tongue into the hole where part of you was living a second ago.

You stare at your face in the mirror. You stare at it for a long time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. No fair blinking. You watch with an intellectual sort of horror as your face changes, like the face of Lon Chaney, Jr., in a werewolf epic. You become a stranger to yourself, an olive-skinned Doppelgänger, a psychotic Vampira with pale skin and fishslit eyes.

It was really none of those things, but there was a taste-trace of all of them.

The dark man entered her, and he was cold.

When Nadine opened her eyes, her first thought was that she was in hell.

Hell was whiteness, the thesis to the dark man’s antithesis. She saw white, ivory, bleached-out nothingness. White-white-white. It was white hell, and it was everywhere.

She stared at the whiteness (it was impossible to stare into it), fascinated, agonized, for minutes before she realized she could feel the fork of the Vespa between her thighs, and that there was another color—green—at the periphery of her vision.

With a jerk she pulled her eyes out of their blank, locked stare. She gazed around herself. Her mouth was slack, trembling; the eyes themselves dazed and horror-drugged. The dark man had been in her, Flagg had been in her, and when he had come he had driven her away from the windows of her five senses, her loopholes on reality. He had driven her as a man might drive a car or a truck. And he had brought her… where?

She glanced toward the white and saw it was a huge blank drive-in movie screen against a background of white late afternoon rainy sky. Turning around, she saw the snack-bar. It was painted a garish flesh-tone pink. Written across the front was WELCOME TO THE HOLIDAY TWIN! ENJOY ENTERTAINMENT UNDER THE STARS TO-NITE!

The darkness had come on her at the intersection of Baseline and Broadway. Now she was far out on Twenty-eighth Street, almost over the town line to… Longmont, wasn’t it?

There was a taste of him in her still, far back in her mind, like cold slime on a floor.

She was surrounded by poles, steel poles like sentries, each of them five feet high, each bearing a matched set of drive-in speakers. There was gravel underfoot, but grass and dandelions were growing up through it. She guessed the Holiday Twin hadn’t been doing much business since the middle of June or so. You could say that it had been kind of a dead summer for the entertainment biz.

“Why am I here?” she whispered.

It was only talking aloud, talking to herself; she expected no answer. So when she was answered, a shriek of terror pealed from her throat.

All the speakers fell off the speaker poles at once and onto the weed-strewn gravel. The sound they made was a huge, amplified CHUNK! —the sound of a dead body striking gravel.

“NADINE,” the speakers blared, and it was his voice, and how she shrieked then! Her hands flew to her head, her palms clapped themselves over her ears, but it was all the speakers at once and there was no hiding from that giant voice, which was full of fearful hilarity and dreadful comic lust.

“NADINE, NADINE, OH HOW I LOVE TO LOVE NADINE, MY PET, MY PRETTY —”

“Stop it! ” she shrieked back, straining her vocal cords with the force of her cry, and still her voice was so small compared with that giant’s bellow. And yet, for a moment the voice did stop. There was silence. The fallen speakers looked up at her from the gravel like the rugose eyes of giant insects.

Nadine’s hands slowly came down from her ears.

You’ve gone insane, she comforted herself. That’s all it is. The strain of waiting… and Harold’s games… finally planting the explosive… all of it has finally driven you over the edge, dear, and you’ve gone crazy. It’s probably better this way.

But she hadn’t gone crazy, and she knew it.

This was far worse than being crazy.

As if to prove this, the speakers now boomed out in the stern yet almost prissy voice of a principal reprimanding the student body over the high school intercom for some prank they had all played together. “NADINE. THEY KNOW.”

“They know,” she parroted. She wasn’t sure who they were, or what they knew, but she was quite sure it was inevitable.

“YOU’VE BEEN STUPID. GOD MAY LOVE STUPIDITY: I DO NOT.”

The words crackled and rolled away into the late afternoon. Her clothes clung soddenly to her skin, her hair lay lankly against her pallid cheeks, and she began to shiver.

Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid. I know what that word means. I think. I think it means death.

“THEY KNOW EVERYTHING… EXCEPT THE SHOEBOX. THE DYNAMITE.”

Speakers. Speakers everywhere, staring up at her from the white gravel, peeking at her from clusters of dandelions closed against the rain.

“GO TO SUNRISE AMPHITHEATER. STAY THERE. UNTIL TOMORROW NIGHT. UNTIL THEY MEET. AND THEN YOU AND HAROLD MAY COME. COME TO ME.”

Now Nadine began to feel a simple, shining gratitude. They had been stupid… but they had also been granted a second chance. They were important enough to have warranted intervention. And soon, very soon, she would be with him… and then she would go crazy, she was quite sure of it, and all this would cease to matter.

“Sunrise Amphitheater may be too far,” she said. Her vocal cords had been hurt somehow; she could only croak. “It may be too far for the…” For the what? She pondered. Oh! Oh yes! Right! “For the walkie-talkie. The signal.”

No answer.

The speakers lay on the gravel, staring at her, hundreds of them.

She pushed the Vespa’s starter and the little engine coughed to life. The echo made her wince. It sounded like rifle fire. She wanted to get out of this awful place, away from those staring speakers.

Had to get out.

She overbalanced the motor-scooter going around the concession stand. She might have held it if she’d been on a paved surface, but the Vespa’s rear wheel skidded out from under her in the loose gravel and she fell with a thump, biting her lip bloody and cutting her cheek. She got up, her eyes wide and skittish, and drove on. She was trembling all over.

Now she was in the alley the cars drove through to get into the drive-in and the ticket stand, looking like a small toll-booth, was just ahead of her. She was going to get out. She was going to get away. Her mouth softened in gratitude.

Behind her, hundreds of speakers blared into life all at once, and now the voice was singing, a horrid, tuneless singing: “I’LL BE SEEING YOU… IN ALL THE OLD FAMILIAR PLACES… THAT THIS HEART OF MINE EMBRACES… ALL DAY THROOOOO… ”

Nadine screamed in her newly cracked voice.

Huge, monstrous laughter came then, a dark and sterile cackling which seemed to fill the earth.

“DO WELL, NADINE,” the voice boomed. “DO WELL, MY FANCY, MY DEAR ONE.”

Then she gained the road and fled back toward Boulder at the Vespa’s top speed, leaving the disembodied voice and staring speakers behind… but carrying them with her in her heart, for then, for always.

She was waiting for Harold around the corner from the bus station. When he saw her, his face froze and drained of color. “Nadine—” he whispered. The lunch bucket dropped from his hand and clacked on the pavement.

“Harold,” she said. “They know. We’ve got to—”

“Your hair, Nadine, oh my God, your hair —” His face seemed to be all eyes.

“Listen to me! ”

He seemed to gain some of himself back. “A-all right. What?”

“They went up to your house and found your book. They took it away.”

Emotions at war on Harold’s face: anger, horror, shame. Little by little they drained away and then, like some terrible corpse coming up from deep water, a frozen grin resurfaced on Harold’s face. “Who? Who did that?”

“I don’t know all of it, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Fran Goldsmith was one of them, I’m sure of that. Maybe Bateman or Underwood. I don’t know. But they’ll come for you, Harold.”

“How do you know?” He grabbed her roughly by the shoulders, remembering that she had put the ledger back under the hearthstone. He shook her like a ragdoll, but Nadine faced him without fear. She had been face-to-face with more terrible things than Harold Lauder on this long, long day. “You bitch, how do you know? ”

“He told me.”

Harold’s hands dropped away.

“Flagg?” A whisper. “He told you? He spoke to you? And it did that?” Harold’s grin was ghastly, the grin of the Reaper on horseback.

“What are you talking about?”

They were standing next to an appliance store. Taking her by the shoulders again, Harold turned her to face the glass. Nadine looked at her reflection for a long time.

Her hair had gone white. Entirely white. There was not a single black strand left.

Oh how I love to love Nadine.

“Come on,” she said. “We have to leave town.”

“Now?”

“After dark. We’ll hide until then, and pick up what camping gear we need on the way out.”

“West?”

“Not yet. Not until tomorrow night.”

“Maybe I don’t want to anymore,” Harold whispered. He was still looking at her hair.

She put his hand on it. “Too late, Harold,” she said.

Chapter 58

Fran and Larry sat at the kitchen table of Stu and Fran’s place, sipping coffee. Downstairs, Leo was stretching out on his guitar, one that Larry had helped him pick out at Earthly Sounds. It was a nice $600 Gibson with a hand-rubbed cherry finish. As an afterthought he had gotten the boy a battery-powered phonograph and about a dozen folk/blues albums. Now Lucy was with him, and a startlingly good imitation of Dave van Ronk’s “Backwater Blues” drifted up to them.

Well it rained five days

and the sky turned black as night…

There’s trouble takin place,

on the bayou tonight.

Through the arch that gave on the living room, Fran and Larry could see Stu, sitting in his favorite easy chair, Harold’s ledger open on his lap. He had been sitting that way since four in the afternoon. It was now nine, and full dark. He had refused supper. As Frannie watched him, he turned another page.

Down below, Leo finished “Backwater Blues” and there was a pause.

“He plays well, doesn’t he?” Fran said.

“Better than I do or ever will,” Larry said. He sipped his coffee.

From below there suddenly came a familiar chop, a swift running down the frets to a not-quite-standard blues progression that made Larry’s coffee cup pause. And then Leo’s voice, low and insinuating, adding the vocal to the slow, driving beat:

Hey baby I come down here tonight

And I didn’t come to get in no fight,

I just want you to say if you can,

Tell me once and I’ll understand,

Baby, can you dig your man?

He’s a righteous man,

Baby, can you dig your man?

Larry spilled his coffee.

“Whoops,” Fran said, and got up to get a dishcloth.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “Jiggled when I should have joggled, I guess.”

“No, sit still.” She got the dishcloth and wiped up the stain quickly. “I remember that one. It was big just before the flu. He must have picked up the single downtown.”

“I guess so.”

“What was that guy’s name? The guy that did it?”

“I can’t remember,” Larry said. “Pop music came and went so fast.”

“Yes, but it was something familiar,” she said, wringing the dishcloth out at the sink. “It’s funny how you get something like that on the tip of your tongue, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Larry said.

Stu closed the ledger with a soft snap, and Larry was relieved to see her look at him as he came into the kitchen. Her eyes went first to the gun on his hip. He had been wearing it since his election as marshal, and he made a lot of jokes about shooting himself in the foot. Fran didn’t think the jokes were all that funny.

“Well?” Larry asked.

Stu’s face was deeply troubled. He put the ledger on the table and sat down. Fran started to get him a cup of coffee and he shook his head and put a hand on her forearm. “No thanks, honey.” He looked at Larry in an absent, distracted sort of way. “I read it all, and now I’ve got a damn headache. Not used to reading so much. Last book I just sat down and read all the way through like that was this rabbit story. Watership Down. I got it for a nephew of mine and just started to read it…”

He trailed off for a moment, thinking.

“I read that one,” Larry said. “Great book.”

“There was this one bunch of rabbits,” Stu said, “and they had it soft. They were big and well fed and they always lived in one place. There was something wrong there, but none of the rabbits knew what it was. Seemed like they didn’t want to know. Only… only, see, there was this farmer…”

Larry said, “He left the warren alone so he could take a rabbit for the stewpot whenever he wanted one. Or maybe he sold them. Either way, he had his own little rabbit farm.”

“Yeah. And there was this one rabbit, Silverweed, and he made up poems about the shining wire—the snare the farmer caught the rabbits in, I guess. The snare the farmer used to catch them and strangle them. Silverweed made up poems about that.” He shook his head in slow, tired incredulity. “And that’s what Harold reminds me of. Silverweed the rabbit.”

“Harold’s ill,” Fran said.

“Yeah.” Stu lit a cigarette. “And dangerous.”

“What should we do? Arrest him?”

Stu tapped the ledger. “He and the Cross woman are planning to do something so they’ll be made to feel welcome when they go west. But this book doesn’t say what.”

“It mentions a lot of people he’s not too crazy about,” Larry said.

“Are we going to arrest him?” Fran asked again.

“I just don’t know. I want to talk it over with the rest of the committee first. What’s on for tomorrow night, Larry?”

“Well, the meeting’s going to be in two halves, public business and then private business. Brad wants to talk about his Turning-Off Crew. Al Bundell wants to present a preliminary report from the Law Committee. Let’s see… George Richardson on clinic hours at Dakota Ridge, then Chad Norris. After that, they leave and it’s just us.”

“If we get Al Bundell to stay after and fill him in on this Harold business, can we be sure he’ll keep his lip zipped?”

“I’m sure we can,” Fran said.

Stu said fretfully, “I wish the Judge was here. I cottoned to that man.”

They were quiet for a moment, thinking about the Judge, wondering where he might be tonight. From below came the sound of Leo playing “Sister Kate” like Tom Rush.

“But if it’s got to be Al, it’s got to be. I only see two choices anyway. We have to take the pair of them out of circulation. But I don’t want to put them in jail, goddammit.”

“What does that leave?” Larry asked.

It was Fran who answered. “Exile.”

Larry turned to her. Stu was nodding slowly, looking at his cigarette.

“Just drive him out?” Larry asked.

“Him and her both,” Stu said.

“But will Flagg take them like that?” Frannie asked.

Stu looked up at her then. “Honey, that ain’t our problem.”

She nodded and thought: Oh, Harold, I didn’t want it to come out like this. Never in a million years did I want it to come out this way.

“Any idea what they might be planning?” Stu asked.

Larry shrugged. “You’d have to get the whole committee’s thoughts on that, Stu. But I can think of some things.”

“Such as?”

“The power plant. Sabotage. An assassination attempt on you and Frannie. Those are just the first two things that occur to me.”

Fran looked pale and dismayed.

Larry went on: “Although he doesn’t come right out and say it, I think he went hunting for Mother Abagail with you and Ralph that time in hopes of getting you alone and killing you.”

Stu said, “He had his chance.”

“Maybe he chickened.”

“Stop it, can’t you?” Fran asked dully. “Please.”

Stu got up and went back into the living room. There was a CB in there hooked up to a Die-Hard battery. After some tinkering, he got Brad Kitchner.

“Brad, you dog! Stu Redman. Listen. Can you round up some guys to stand watch at the power station tonight?”

“Sure,” Brad’s voice came, “but what in God’s name for?”

“Well, this is kind of delicate, Bradley. I heard one way and another that somebody might try doing some mischief up there.”

Brad’s reply was blue with profanity.

Stu nodded at the mike, smiling a little. “I know how you feel. This is just for tonight and maybe tomorrow night, so far as I know. Then I guess things’ll be ironed out.”

Brad told him he could muster twelve men from the Power Committee without going two blocks, and any one of them would be happy to geld any would-be mischief-maker. “This something Rich Moffat’s up to?”

“No, it ain’t Rich. Listen, I’ll be talking to you, okay?”

“Fine, Stu. I’ll have them on watch.”

Stu turned off the CB and walked back to the kitchen. “People let you be just as secret as you want to be. It scares me, you know? The old bald-headed sociologist is right. We could set ourselves up like kings here if we wanted to.”

Fran put her hand over his. “I want you to promise me something. Both of you. Promise me we’ll settle this once and for all at the meeting tomorrow night. I just want it to be over.”

Larry was nodding. “Exile. Yeah. It never crossed my mind, but it might be the best solution. Well, I’m going to collect Lucy and Leo and get home.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Stu said.

“Yeah.” He went out.

In the hour before dawn on September 2, Harold stood on the edge of Sunrise Amphitheater, looking down. The town was in a ditch of blackness. Nadine slept behind him in the small two-man tent they had picked up along with a few other camping supplies as they crept out of town.

We’ll come back, though. Driving chariots.

But in his secret heart, Harold doubted that. The darkness was upon him in more ways than one. The vile bastards had stolen everything from him—Frannie, his self-respect, then his ledger, now his hope. He felt that he was going down.

The wind was strong, rippling his hair, making the tight canvas of the tent snap back and forth with a steady machine-gun popping sound. Behind him, Nadine moaned in her sleep. It was a scary sound. Harold thought she was as lost as he was, maybe worse. The sounds she made in her sleep were not the sounds of a person having happy dreams.

But I can keep sane. I can do that. If I can go down to whatever’s waiting for me with my mind intact, that will be something. Yes, something.

He wondered if they were down there now, Stu and his friends, surrounding his little house, if they were waiting for him to come home so they could arrest him and throw him in the cooler. He would go down in the history books—if any of those sorry slobs were left to write them, that was—as the Free Zone’s first jailbird. Welcome to hard times. HAWK CAGED, wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about it. Well, they would wait a long time. He was on his adventure, and he remembered all too clearly Nadine putting his hand on her white hair and saying, Too late, Harold. How like a corpse’s her eyes had been.

“All right,” Harold whispered. “We’re going through with it.” Around and above him, the dark September wind drummed through the trees.

The Free Zone Committee meeting was rapped to order some fourteen hours later in the living room of the house Ralph Brentner and Nick Andros shared. Stu was sitting in an easy chair, tapping an end table with the rim of his beer can. “Okay, folks, we better get started here.”

Glen sat with Larry on the curving lip of the freestanding fireplace, their backs to the modest fire Ralph had kindled there. Nick, Susan Stern, and Ralph himself sat on the couch. Nick held the inevitable pen and pad of notepaper. Brad Kitchner was standing just inside the doorway with a can of Coors in his hand, talking to Al Bundell, who was working a Scotch and soda. George Richardson and Chad Norris were sitting by the large window-wall watching the sunset over the Flatirons.

Frannie was sitting with her back propped comfortably against the door of the closet where Nadine had planted the bomb. Her pack, with Harold’s ledger inside it, was between her folded legs.

“Order, I say, order!” Stu said, rapping harder. “That tape recorder working, baldy?”

“It’s fine,” Glen said. “I see your mouth is in good working order, too, East Texas.”

“I oil her a little and she do just fine,” Stu said, smiling. He glanced around at the eleven people spotted around the big combination living room/dining room area. “Okay… we’ve got a right smart of business, but first I’d like to thank Ralph for providing the roof over our heads and the booze and the crackers—”

He’s really getting good at it, Frannie thought. She tried to judge just how much Stu had changed since the day she and Harold had met him, and couldn’t do it. You get too subjective about the behavior of the people you’re close to, she decided. But she knew that when she had first met him, Stu would have been stricken at the thought of having to chair a meeting of almost a dozen people… and he probably would have jumped straight up to heaven at the thought of chairing a mass Free Zone meeting of over a thousand people. She was now watching a Stu that never would have been without the plague.

It’s released you, my darling, she thought. I can cry for the others and still be so proud of you and love you so much —

She shifted a little, propping her back more firmly against the closet door.

“We’ll have our guests speak first,” Stu said, “and after that we’ll have a short closed meeting. Any objections to that?”

There were none.

“Okay,” Stu said. “I’ll turn the floor over to Brad Kitchner, and you folks want to listen close because he’s the guy that’s going to put the rocks back in your bourbon in about three days.”

This generated a hearty round of spontaneous applause. Blushing furiously, tugging at his tie, Brad walked to the center of the room. He came very close to tripping over a hassock on his way.

“I’m. Real. Happy. To be. Here,” Brad began in a trembling monotone. He looked as if he would have been happier anywhere else, even at the South Pole, addressing a penguin convention. “The… ah…” He paused, examining his notes, and then brightened. “The power!” he exclaimed with the air of a man making a great discovery. “The power is almost on. Right.”

He fumbled with his notes some more and then went on.

“We had two of the generators going yesterday, and as you know, one of them overloaded and blew its cookies. So to speak. What I mean is that it overlooked. Overloaded, rather. Well… you know what I mean.”

A chuckle ran through them, and it seemed to put Brad a little more at ease.

“That happened because when the plague hit, a lot of stuff got left on and we didn’t have the rest of the generators on to take the overload. We can take care of the overload danger by turning on the rest of the generators—even three or four would have absorbed the load easily—but that isn’t going to solve the fire danger. So we’ve got to get everything shut off that we can. Stove burners, electric blankets, all that stuff. In fact, I was thinking like this: The quickest way might be to go into every house where no one lives and just pull all the fuses or turn off the main breaker switches. See? Now, when we get ready to turn on, I think we ought to take some elementary fire precautions. I went to the liberty of checking out the fire station in East Boulder, and…”

The fire snapped comfortably. It’s going to be all right, Fran thought. Harold and Nadine have taken off without any prompting, and maybe that’s best. It solves the problem and Stu is safe from them. Poor Harold, I felt sorry for you, but in the end I felt more fear than pity. The pity is still there, and I’m afraid of what may happen to you, but I’m glad your house is empty and you and Nadine have gone. I’m glad you’ve left us in peace.

Harold sat atop a graffiti-inlaid picnic table like something out of a lunatic’s Zen handbook. His legs were crossed. His eyes were far, hazy, contemplative. He had gone to that cold and alien place where Nadine could not follow and she was frightened. In his hands he held the twin of the walkie-talkie in the shoebox. The mountains fell away in front of them in breathtaking ledges and pine-choked ravines. Miles to the east—maybe ten, maybe forty—the land smoothed into the American Midwest and marched away to the dim blue horizon. Night had already come over that part of the world. Behind them, the sun had just disappeared behind the mountains, leaving them outlined in gold that would flake and fade.

“When?” Nadine asked. She was horribly keyed up, and she had to go to the bathroom badly.

“Pretty soon,” Harold said. His grin had become a mellow smile. It was an expression she could not place right away, because she had never seen it on Harold’s face before. It took her a few minutes to place it. Harold looked happy.

The committee voted 7–0 to empower Brad to round up twenty men and women for his Turning-Off Crew. Ralph Brentner had agreed to fill up two of the Fire Department’s old tanker trucks at Boulder Reservoir and to have them at the power station when Brad turned on.

Chad Norris was next. Speaking quietly, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his chino pants, he talked about the work the Burial Committee had done over the last three weeks. He told them they had buried an incredible twenty-five thousand corpses, better than eight thousand a week, and that he believed they were now over the bulge.

“We’ve either been lucky or blessed,” he said. “This mass exodus—that’s all I know to call it—has done most of our work for us. In another town Boulder’s size, it would have taken a year to get it done. We’re expecting to inter another twenty thousand plague victims by the first of October, and we’ll probably keep stumbling over individual victims for a long time after, but I wanted you to know that the job is getting done and I don’t think we have to worry too much about diseases breeding in the bodies of the unburied dead.”

Fran shifted her position so she could look out at the last of the day. The gold that had surrounded the peaks was already beginning to fade to a less spectacular lemon color. She felt a sudden wave of homesickness that was totally unexpected and almost sickening in its force.

It was five minutes to eight.

If she didn’t go in the bushes, she was going to wet her pants. She went around a stand of scrub, lowered herself a little, and let go. When she came back, Harold was still sitting on the picnic table with the walkie-talkie clasped loosely in his hand. He had pulled up the antenna.

“Harold,” she said. “It’s getting late. It’s past eight o’clock.”

He glanced at her indifferently. “They’ll be there half the night, clapping each other on the back. When the time’s right, I’ll pull the pin. Don’t you worry.”

“When? ”

Harold’s smile widened emptily. “Just as soon as it’s dark.”

Fran stifled a yawn as Al Bundell stepped confidently up beside Stu. They were going to run late, and suddenly she wished she was back in the apartment, just the two of them. It wasn’t just tiredness, not precisely that feeling of homesickness, either. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be in this house. There was no reason for the feeling, but it was strong. She wanted to get out. In fact, she wanted them all to get out. I’ve just lost my happy thoughts for the evening, she told herself. Pregnant woman blues, that’s all.

“The Law Committee has had four meetings in the last week,” Al was saying, “and I’ll keep this as brief as possible. The system we’ve decided on is a kind of tribunal. Sitting members would be chosen by lottery, much the same way as young men were once selected for the draft—”

“Hiss! Boo!” Susan said, and there was some companionable laughter.

Al smiled. “But, I was going to add, I think service on such a tribunal would be a lot more palatable to those who were called upon to serve. The tribunal would consist of three adults—eighteen and over—who would serve for six months. Their names would be picked out of a big drum containing the names of every adult in Boulder.”

Larry’s hand waved. “Could they be excused for cause?”

Frowning a trifle at this interruption, Al said: “I was just getting to that. There would have to be—”

Fran shifted uneasily and Sue Stern winked at her. Fran didn’t wink back. She was frightened—and frightened of her own baseless fear, if such a thing were possible. Where had this stifling, claustrophobic feeling come from? She knew that what you were supposed to do with baseless feelings was to ignore them… at least in the old world. But what about Tom Cullen’s trance? What about Leo Rockway?

Get out of here, the voice inside suddenly cried. Get them all out!

But it was so crazy. She shifted again and decided to say nothing.

“—a brief deposition from the person wanting to be excused, but I don’t think—”

“Someone’s coming,” Fran said suddenly, getting to her feet.

There was a pause. They could all hear motorcycle engines revving toward them up Baseline, coming fast. Horns were beeping. And suddenly, for Frannie, the panic overflowed.

“Listen,” she said, “all of you!”

Faces turning toward her, surprised, concerned.

“Frannie, are you—” Stu started toward her.

She swallowed. It felt as if there was a heavy weight on her chest, stifling her. “We have to get out of here. Right… now.”

It was eight twenty-five. The last of the light had gone out of the sky. It was time. Harold sat up a little straighter and held the walkie-talkie to his mouth. His thumb rested lightly on the SEND button. He would depress it and blow them all to hell by saying—

“What’s that?”

Nadine’s hand on his arm, distracting him, pointing. Far below, snaking up Baseline, there was a daisy-chain of lights. In the great silence they could hear the faint roar of a great many motorcycle engines. Harold felt a thin thread of disquiet and threw it off.

“Leave me be,” he said. “This is it.”

Her hand fell from his shoulder. Her face was a white blur in the darkness. Harold pressed the SEND button.

She never knew if it was the motorcycles or her own words that got them moving. But they didn’t move fast enough. That would always be on her heart; they didn’t move fast enough.

Stu was first out the door, the snarl and echo of the motorcycles enormous. They came across the bridge that spanned the small dry wash below Ralph’s house, headlights blazing. Instinctively, Stu’s hand dropped to the butt of his gun.

The screen door opened and he turned, thinking it would be Frannie. It wasn’t; it was Larry.

“What’s up, Stu?”

“Don’t know. But we better get them out.”

Then the cycles were winding their way into the driveway and Stu relaxed a little. He could see Dick Vollman, the Gehringer kid, Teddy Weizak, others he recognized. Now he could allow himself to recognize what his chief fear had been: that behind the blazing headlights and snarling motorcycle engines had been the spearhead of Flagg’s forces, that the war was about to start.

“Dick,” Stu said. “What the hell?”

“Mother Abagail! ” Dick roared over the motors. More and more cycles filled the yard as the members of the committee crowded out of the house. It was a carnival of swinging headlights and merry-go-round shadows.

“What? ” Larry screamed. Behind him and Stu, Glen, Ralph, and Chad Norris crowded out, forcing Larry and Stu to the foot of the steps.

“She’s come back! ” Dick had to bellow to make himself heard over the cycles. “Oh, she’s in terrible shape! We need a doctor… Christ, we need a miracle! ”

George Richardson pushed through them. “The old woman? Where?”

“Get on, Doc!” Dick shouted at him. “Don’t ask questions! Just for Christ’s sake be quick!”

Richardson mounted the cycle behind Dick Vollman. Dick turned in a tight circle and began to weave his way back through the cluster of motorcycles.

Stu’s eyes met Larry’s. Larry looked as bewildered as Stu felt… but there was a gathering cloud in Stu’s head, and suddenly a terrible feeling of impending doom engulfed him.

“Nick, come on! Come on! ” Fran cried, seizing his shoulder. Nick was standing in the middle of the living room, his face still, immobile.

He couldn’t talk, but suddenly he knew. He knew. It came from nowhere, from everywhere.

There was something in the closet.

He gave Frannie a tremendous push.

“Nick !”

GO!! he waved at her.

She went. He turned to the closet, pulled open the door, and began to rip madly at the tangle of things inside, praying God that he wasn’t too late.

Suddenly Frannie was next to Stu, her face pallid, her eyes huge. She clutched at him. “Stu… Nick’s still in there… something… something…”

“Frannie, what are you talking about?”

“Death! ” she screamed at him. “I’m talking about death and NICK IS STILL IN THERE! ”

He pulled aside a handful of scarves and mittens and felt something. A shoebox. He grabbed it, and as he did, like malign necromancy, Harold Lauder’s voice spoke from inside it.

“What about Nick? ” Stu shouted, grabbing her shoulders.

“We have to get him out—Stu—something’s going to happen, something awful—”

Al Bundell shouted: “What the hell is going on, Stuart?”

“I don’t know,” Stu said.

“Stu, please, we have to get Nick out of there! ” Fran screamed.

That was when the house blew up behind them.

With the SEND button depressed, the background static disappeared and was replaced by a smooth, dark silence. Void, waiting for him to fill it. Harold sat cross-legged on the picnic table, summoning himself up.

Then he raised his arm, and at the end of the arm one finger pointed out of his knotted fist, and in that moment he was like Babe Ruth, old and almost washed up, pointing to the spot where he was going to hit the home run, pointing for all the hecklers and badmouths in Wrigley Field, shutting them up once and for all.

Speaking firmly but not loudly into the walkie-talkie, he said: “This is Harold Emery Lauder speaking. I do this of my own free will.”

A blue-white spark greeted This is. A gout of flame shot up at Harold Emery Lauder speaking. A faint, flat bang, like a cherrybomb stuffed into a tin can, reached their ears at I do this, and by the time he had spoken the words of my own free will and tossed the walkie-talkie away, its purpose served, a fire-rose had bloomed at the base of Flagstaff Mountain.

“Breaker, breaker, that’s a big ten-four, over and out,” Harold said softly.

Nadine clutched at him, much as Frannie had clutched Stu only seconds ago. “We ought to be sure. We ought to be sure that it got them.”

Harold looked at her, then gestured at the blooming rose of destruction below them. “Do you think anything could have lived through that?”

“I… I d-don’t kn… ooow, Harold, I’m—” Nadine turned away, clutched her belly, and began to retch. It was a deep, constant, raw sound. Harold watched her with mild contempt.

She turned back at last, panting, pale, wiping at her mouth with a Kleenex. Scrubbing at her mouth. “Now what?”

“Now I guess we go west,” Harold said. “Unless you plan to go down there and sample the mood of the community.”

Nadine shuddered.

Harold slid off the picnic table and winced at the pins and needles as his feet struck the ground. They had gone to sleep.

“Harold—” She tried to touch him and he jerked away. Without looking at her, he began to strike the tent.

“I thought we’d wait until tomorrow—” she began timidly.

“Sure,” he jeered at her. “So twenty or thirty of them can decide to fan out on their bikes and catch us. Did you ever see what they did to Mussolini?”

She winced. Harold was rolling the tent up and cinching the ground-cords tight.

“And we don’t touch each other. That’s over. It got Flagg what he wanted. We wasted their Free Zone Committee. They’re washed up. They may get the power on, but as a functioning group, they’re washed up. He’ll give me a woman who makes you look like a potato sack, Nadine. And you… you get him. Happy days, right? Only if I were wearing your Hush Puppies, I would be shaking in them plenty.”

“Harold—please—” She was sick, crying. He could see her face in the dim fireglow, and felt pity for her. He forced it out of his heart like an unwelcome drunk who has tried to enter a cozy little suburban tavern where everybody knows everybody else. The irrevocable fact of murder was in her heart forever—that fact shone sickly in her eyes. But so what? It was in his, as well. In it and on it, weighing it down like stones.

“Get used to it,” Harold said brutally. He flung the tent on the back of his cycle and began to tie it down. “It’s over for them down there, and it’s over for us, and it’s over for everybody that died in the plague. God went off on a celestial fishing trip and He’s going to be gone a long time. It’s totally dark. The dark man’s in the driver’s seat now. Him. So get used to it.”

She made a squeaking, moaning noise in her throat.

“Come on, Nadine. This stopped being a beauty contest two minutes ago. Help me get this shit packed up. I want to do a hundred miles before sunup.”

After a moment she turned her back on the destruction below—destruction that seemed almost inconsequential from this height—and helped him pack the rest of the camping gear in his saddlebags and her wire carrier. Fifteen minutes later they had left the fire-rose behind and were riding through the cool and windy dark, heading west.

For Fran Goldsmith, that day’s ending was painless and simple. She felt a warm push of air at her back and suddenly she was flying through the night. She had been knocked out of her sandals.

Whafuck? she thought.

She landed on her shoulder, landed hard, but there was still no pain. She was in the ravine that ran north-to-south at the foot of Ralph’s back yard.

A chair landed in front of her, neatly, on its legs. Its seat-cushion was a smoldering black snarl.

WhaFUCK?

Something landed on the seat of the chair and rolled off. Something that was dripping. With faint and clinical horror, she saw that it was an arm.

Stu? Stu! What’s happening?

A steady, grinding roar of sound engulfed her, and stuff began to rain down everywhere. Rocks. Hunks of wood. Bricks. A glass block spiderwebbed with cracks (hadn’t the bookcase in Ralph’s living room been made of those blocks?). A motorcycle helmet with a horrible, lethal hole punched through the back of it. She could see everything clearly… much too clearly. It had been dark out only a few seconds ago

Oh Stu, my God, where are you? What’s happening? Nick? Larry?

People were screaming. That grinding roar went on and on. It was now brighter than noontime. Every pebble cast a shadow. Stuff still raining down all around her. A board with a six-inch spike protruding from it came down in front of her nose.

–the baby! —

And on the heels of that, another thought came, a reprise of her premonition: Harold did this, Harold did this, Harold —

Something struck her on the head, the neck, the back. A huge thing that landed on her like a padded coffin.

OH MY GOD OH MY BABY —

Then darkness sucked her down to a nowhere place where not even the dark man could follow.

Chapter 59

Birds.

She could hear birds.

Fran lay in darkness, listening to the birds for a long time before she realized the darkness wasn’t really dark. It was reddish, moving, peaceful. It made her think of her childhood. Saturday morning, no school, no church, the day you got to sleep late. The day you could wake up a little at a time, at your leisure. You lay with your eyes shut, and you saw nothing but a red darkness that was Saturday sunshine being filtered through the delicate screen of capillaries in your eyelids. You listened to the birds in the old oaks outside and maybe smelled sea-salt, because your name was Frances Goldsmith and you were eleven years old on a Saturday morning in Ogunquit—

Birds. She could hear birds.

But this wasn’t Ogunquit; it was

(Boulder)

She puzzled over it in the red darkness for a long time, and suddenly she remembered the explosion.

(?Explosion?)

(!Stu!)

Her eyes flashed open. There was sudden terror. “Stu! ”

And Stu was sitting there beside her bed, Stu with a clean white bandage wrapped over one forearm and a nasty-looking cut dried on one cheek and part of his hair burned away, but it was Stu, he was alive, with her, and when she opened her eyes the great relief came on his face and he said, “Frannie. Thank God.”

“The baby,” she said. Her throat was dry. It came out a whisper.

He looked blank, and blind fear stole into her body. It was cold and numbing.

“The baby,” she said, forcing the words up her sandpaper throat. “Did I lose the baby?”

Understanding came over his face then. He hugged her clumsily with his good arm. “No, Frannie, no. You didn’t lose the baby.”

Then she began to cry, scalding tears that flowed down her cheeks, and she hugged him fiercely, not caring that every muscle in her body seemed to cry out in pain. She hugged him. The future was later. Now the things she needed most were here in this sun-washed room.

The sound of birds came through the open window.

Later she said, “Tell me. How bad is it?”

His face was heavy and sorrowful and unwilling. “Fran…”

“Nick?” she whispered. She swallowed and there was a tiny click in her throat. “I saw an arm, a severed arm—”

“It might be better to wait—”

“No. I have to know. How bad was it?”

“Seven dead,” he said in a low, husky voice. “We got off lucky, I figure. It could have been much worse.”

“Who, Stuart?”

He held her hands clumsily. “Nick was one of them, honey. There was a pane of glass, I guess—you know, that iodized glass—and it… it…” He stopped for a moment, looked down at his hands, then up at her again. “He… we were able to make identification by… certain scars…” He turned away from her for a moment. Fran made a harsh sighing noise.

When Stu was able to go on he said, “And Sue. Sue Stern. She was still inside when it went off.”

“That… just doesn’t seem possible, does it?” Fran said. She felt stunned, numbed, bewildered.

“It’s true.”

“Who else?”

“Chad Norris,” he said, and Fran made that harsh sighing noise again. A single tear slipped from the corner of her eye; she brushed it away almost absently.

“Those were the only three from inside. It’s like a miracle. Brad says there must have been eight, nine sticks of dynamite hooked up in that closet. And Nick, he almost… when I think he might have had his hands right on that shoebox…”

“Don’t,” she said. “There was no way to know.”

“That doesn’t help much,” he said.

The other four were people who had come up from town on motorcycles—Andrea Terminello, Dean Wykoff, Dale Pedersen, and a young girl named Patsy Stone. Stu did not tell Fran that Patsy, who had been teaching Leo how to play the flute, had been struck and nearly beheaded by a whirling chunk of Glen Bateman’s Wollensak tape recorder.

Fran nodded, and it hurt her neck. When she shifted her body, even a little, her entire back seemed to scream with pain.

Twenty had been wounded in the blast and one of them, Teddy Weizak of the Burial Committee, had no chance to recover. Two others were in critical condition. A man named Lewis Deschamps had lost an eye. Ralph Brentner had lost the third and fourth fingers on his left hand.

“How badly am I hurt?” Fran asked him.

“Why, you have a whiplash and a sprained back and a broken foot,” Stu said. “That’s what George Richardson told me. The blast threw you all the way across the yard. You got the broken foot and the sprained back when the couch landed on you.”

“Couch? ”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I remember something like a coffin… a padded coffin…”

“That was the couch. I yanked it off you myself. I was raving and… pretty hysterical, I guess. Larry came over to help me and I punched him in the mouth. That’s how bad off I was.” She touched his cheek and he put his hand over hers. “I thought you had to be dead. I remember thinking that I didn’t know what I’d do if you were. Go crazy, I guess.”

“I love you,” she said.

He hugged her—gently, because of her back—and they remained that way for some time.

“Harold?” she said at last.

“And Nadine Cross,” he agreed. “They hurt us. They hurt us bad. But they didn’t do anywhere near the damage they wanted to do. And if we catch him before they get too far west…” He held his hands, which were scratched and scabbed over, out in front of him and closed them with a sudden snap that made the joints pop. The hamstrings stood out on the insides of his wrists. A sudden cold grin surfaced on his face that made Fran want to shudder. It was too familiar.

“Don’t smile like that,” she said. “Ever.”

The smile faded. “People have been scouring the hills for them since daybreak,” he went on, no longer smiling. “I don’t think they’ll find them. I told them not to go further than fifty miles west of Boulder no matter what, and I imagine Harold was smart enough to get them further than that. But we know how they did it. They had the explosive hooked up to a walkie-talkie—”

Fran gasped, and Stu looked at her with concern.

“What’s wrong, babe? Is it your back?”

“No.” She was suddenly understanding what Stu had meant about Nick having his hands on the shoebox when the explosive was detonated. Suddenly understanding everything. Speaking slowly, she told him about the snips of wire and the walkie-talkie box under the air-hockey table. “If we’d searched the whole house instead of just taking his damn b-book, we might have found the bomb,” she said, and her voice began to choke and break. “N-Nick and Sue would be a-a-alive and—”

He held her. “Is that why Larry seems so down this morning? I thought it was because I punched him. Frannie, how could you know, huh? How could you possibly know?”

“We should have! We should have known!” She buried her face against the good darkness of his shoulder. More tears, hot and scalding. He held her, bent over awkwardly because the electrically powered hospital bed would not crank up.

“I don’t want you blamin yourself, Frannie. It’s happened. I’m telling you there’s no way anybody—except maybe a bomb-squad detective—could make something out of a few snips of wire and an empty box. If they’d left a couple of sticks of dynamite or a blasting cap around, that would have been a different proposition. But they didn’t. I don’t blame you, and nobody else in the Zone is going to blame you, either.”

As he spoke, two things were combining, slowly and belatedly, in her mind.

Those were the only three from inside… it’s like a miracle.

Mother Abagail… she’s come back… oh, she’s in terrible shape… we need a miracle!

With a little hiss of pain, she drew herself up a little so she could look into Stu’s face. “Mother Abagail,” she said. “We all would have been inside when it went off if they hadn’t come up to tell us—”

“It’s like a miracle,” Stu repeated. “She saved our lives. Even if she is—” He fell silent.

“Stu?”

“She saved our lives by coming back when she did, Frannie. She saved our lives.”

“Is she dead?” Fran asked. She grabbed his hand, clutched it. “Stu, is she dead, too?”

“She came back into town around a quarter of eight. Larry Underwood’s boy was leading her by the hand. He’d lost all his words, you know he does that when he gets excited, but he took her to Lucy. Then she just collapsed.” Stu shook his head. “My God, how she ever walked as far as she did… and what she can have been eating or doing… I’ll tell you something, Fran. There’s more in the world—and out of it—than I ever dreamed of back in Arnette. I think that woman is from God. Or was.”

She closed her eyes. “She died, didn’t she? In the night. She came back to die.”

“She’s not dead yet. She ought to be, and George Richardson says she’ll have to go soon, but she’s not dead yet.” He looked at her simply and nakedly. “And I’m afraid. She saved our lives by coming back, but I’m afraid of her, and I’m afraid of why she came back.”

“What do you mean, Stu? Mother Abagail would never harm—”

“Mother Abagail does what her God tells her to,” he said harshly. “That’s the same God murdered his own boy, or so I heard.”

“Stu!”

The fire died out of his eyes. “I don’t know why she’s back, or if she has anything left to tell us at all. I just don’t know. Maybe she’ll die without regaining consciousness. George says that’s the most likely. But I do know that the explosion… and Nick dying… and her coming back… it’s taken the blinkers off this town. They’re talking about him. They know Harold was the one who set off the blast, but they think he made Harold do it. Hell, I think so too. There’s plenty who are saying Flagg’s responsible for Mother Abagail coming back the way she is, too. Me, I don’t know. I don’t know nothing, seems like, but I feel scared. Like it’s going to end bad. I didn’t feel that way before, but I do now.”

“But there’s us,” she said, almost pleading with him. “There’s us and the baby, isn’t there? Isn’t there? ”

He didn’t answer for a long time. She didn’t think he was going to answer. And then he said, “Yeah. But for how long?”

Near dusk on that day, the third of September, people began to drift slowly—almost aimlessly—down Table Mesa Drive toward Larry and Lucy’s house. Singly, by couples, in threes. They sat on the front steps of houses that bore Harold’s x -sign on their doors. They sat on curbs and lawns that were dry and brown at this long summer’s ending. They talked a little in low tones. They smoked their cigarettes and their pipes. Brad Kitchner was there, one arm wrapped in a bulky white bandage and supported in a sling. Candy Jones was there, and Rich Moffat showed up with two bottles of Black Velvet in a newsboy’s pouch. Norman Kellogg sat with Tommy Gehringer, his shirtsleeves rolled up to show sunburned, freckled biceps. The Gehringer boy’s sleeves were rolled up in imitation. Harry Dunbarton and Sandy DuChiens sat on a blanket together, holding hands. Dick Vollman, Chip Hobart, and sixteen-year-old Tony Donahue sat in a breezeway half a block up from Larry’s tract house, passing a bottle of Canadian Club back and forth, chasing it with warm 7-Up. Patty Kroger sat with Shirley Hammett. There was a picnic hamper between them. The hamper was well filled, but they only nibbled. By eight o’clock the street was lined with people, all of them watching the house. Larry’s cycle was parked out front, and George Richardson’s big Kawasaki 650 was parked beside it.

Larry watched them from the bedroom window. Behind him, in his and Lucy’s bed, Mother Abagail lay unconscious. The dry, sickly smell coming from her filled his nose and made him want to puke—he hated to puke—but he wouldn’t move. This was his penance for escaping while Nick and Susan died. He heard low voices behind him, the deathwatch around her bed. George would be leaving for the hospital shortly to check on his other patients. There were only sixteen now. Three had been released. And Teddy Weizak had died.

Larry himself had been totally unhurt.

Same old Larry—keeps his head while others all around him are losing theirs. The blast had thrown him across the driveway and into a flower bed, but he had not sustained a single scratch. Jagged shrapnel had rained down all around him, but nothing had touched him. Nick had died, Susan had died, and he had been unhurt. Yeah; same old Larry Underwood.

Deathwatch in here, deathwatch out there. All the way up the block. Six hundred of them, easy. Harold, you ought to come on back with a dozen hand grenades and finish the job. Harold. He had followed Harold all the way across the country, had followed a trail of Payday candy wrappers and clever improvisations. Larry had almost lost his fingers getting gas back in Wells. Harold had simply found the plug vent and used a siphon. Harold was the one who had suggested the memberships in the various committees slide upward with population. Harold, who had suggested that the ad hoc committee be accepted in toto. Clever Harold. Harold and his ledger. Harold and his grin.

It was all well and good for Stu to say no one could have figured out what Harold and Nadine were up to from a few scraps of wire on an air-hockey table. With Larry that line of reasoning just didn’t hold up. He had seen Harold’s brilliant improvisations before. One of them had been written on the roof of a barn in letters almost twenty feet high, for Christ’s sweet sake. He should have guessed. Inspector Underwood was great at ferreting out candy wrappers, but not so great when it came to dynamite. In point of fact, Inspector Underwood was a bloody asshole.

Larry, if you knew —

Nadine’s voice.

If you want, I’ll get down on my knees and beg.

That had been another chance to avert the murder and destruction… one he could never bring himself to tell anybody about. Had it really been in the works even then? Probably. If not the specifics of the dynamite bomb wired to the walkie-talkie, then at least some general plan.

Flagg’s plan.

Yes—in the background there was always Flagg, the dark puppet master, pulling the strings on Harold, Nadine, on Charlie Impening, God knew how many others. The people in the Zone would happily lynch Harold on sight, but it was Flagg’s doing… and Nadine’s. And who had sent her to Harold, if not Flagg? But before she had gone to Harold she had come to Larry. And he had sent her away.

How could he have said yes? There was his responsibility to Lucy. That had been all-important, not just because of her but because of himself—he sensed it would take only one or two more fades to destroy him as a man for good. So he had sent her away, and he supposed Flagg was well pleased with the previous night’s work… if Flagg was really his name. Oh, Stu was still alive, and he spoke for the committee—he was the mouth that Nick could never use. Glen was alive, and Larry supposed he was the point-man of the committee’s mind, but Nick had been the heart of the committee, and Sue, along with Frannie, had served as its moral conscience. Yes, he thought bitterly, all in all, a good evening’s work for that bastard. He ought to reward Harold and Nadine well when they got over there.

He turned from the window, feeling a dull throb behind his forehead. Richardson was taking Mother Abagail’s pulse. Laurie was fiddling with the IV bottles hung on their T-shaped rack. Dick Ellis was standing by. Lucy sat by the door, looking at Larry.

“How is she?” Larry asked George.

“The same,” Richardson said.

“Will she live through the night?”

“I can’t say, Larry.”

The woman on the bed was a skeleton covered with thinly stretched, ash-gray skin. She seemed without sex. Most of her hair was gone; her breasts were gone; her mouth hung unhinged and her breath rasped through it harshly. To Larry, she looked like pictures he had seen of the Yucatán mummies—not decayed but shriveled; cured; dry; ageless.

Yes, that’s what she was now, not a mother but a mummy. There was only that harsh sigh of her respiration, like a light breeze through hay-stubble. How could she still be alive? Larry wondered… and what God would put her through it? To what purpose? It had to be a joke, a big cosmic horselaugh. George said he had heard of similar cases, but never of one so extreme, and he himself had never expected to see one. She was somehow… eating herself. Her body had kept running long after it should have succumbed to malnutrition. She was breaking down parts of herself for nourishment that had never been meant to be broken down. Lucy, who had lifted her onto the bed, had told him in a low, marveling voice that she seemed to weigh no more than a child’s box kite, a thing only waiting for a puff of wind to blow it away forever.

And now Lucy spoke from her corner by the door, startling all of them: “She’s got something to say.”

Laurie said uncertainly, “She’s in deep coma, Lucy… the chances that she can ever regain consciousness…”

“She came back to tell us something. And God won’t let her go until she does.”

“But what could it be, Lucy?” Dick asked her.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said, “but I’m afraid to hear it. I know that. The dying ain’t over. It’s just got started. That’s what I fear.”

There was a long silence that George Richardson finally broke. “I’ve got to get up to the hospital. Laurie, Dick, I’m going to need both of you.”

You aren’t going to leave us alone with this mummy, are you? Larry almost asked, and pinched his lips shut to keep it in.

The three of them went to the door, and Lucy got them their coats. The temperature was barely sixty this night, and riding a cycle in shirtsleeves was uncomfortable.

“Is there anything we can do for her?” Larry asked George quietly.

“Lucy knows about the IV drip,” George said. “There’s nothing else. You see…” He trailed off. Of course they all saw. It was on the bed, wasn’t it?

“Good night, Larry, Lucy,” Dick said.

They went out. Larry drifted back to the window. Outside, everyone had come to their feet, watching. Was she alive? Dead? Dying? Perhaps healed by the power of God? Had she said anything?

Lucy slipped an arm around his waist, making him jump a little. “I love you,” she said.

He groped for her, held her. He put his head down and began to shudder helplessly.

“I love you,” she said calmly. “It’s all right. Let it come. Let it come out, Larry.”

He cried. The tears were as hot and hard as bullets. “Lucy—”

“Shhh.” Her hands on the back of his neck; her soothing hands.

“Oh Lucy, my God, what is all this? ” he cried out against her neck, and she held him as tight as she could, not knowing, not knowing yet, and Mother Abagail breathed harshly behind them, holding on in the depths of her coma.

George drove up the street at walking speed, passing the same message over and over again: Yes, still alive. Prognosis is poor. No, she hasn’t said anything and isn’t likely to. You might as well go home. If anything happens, you’ll hear.

When they reached the corner they accelerated, turning toward the hospital. The exhaust of their bikes crackled and echoed back, hitting buildings and bouncing off them, finally fading away to nothing.

People did not go home. They remained standing for a while, renewing their conversations, examining each word George had said. Prognosis, now what might that mean? Coma. Brain-death. If her brain was dead, that was it. Might as well expect a can of peas to talk as a person with a dead brain. Well, maybe that would be it if this was a natural situation, but things were hardly natural anymore, were they?

They sat down again. Darkness came. The glow of Coleman lamps came on in the house where the old woman lay. They would go home later, and lie sleepless.

Talk turned hesitantly to the dark man. If Mother Abagail died, didn’t that mean he was stronger?

What do you mean, “not necessarily”?

Well I hold he’s Satan, pure and simple.

The Antichrist, that’s what I think. We’re living out the Book of Revelation right in our own time… how can you doubt it? “And the seven vials were opened…” Sure sounds like the superflu to me.

Ah, balls, people said Hitler was the Antichrist.

If those dreams come back, I’ll kill myself.

In mine I was in a subway station and he was the ticket-taker, only I couldn’t see his face. I was scared. I ran into the subway tunnel. Then I could hear him, running after me. And gaining.

In mine I was going down cellar to get a jar of pickled watermelon slices and I saw someone standing by the furnace… just a shape. And I knew it was him.

Crickets began to chirrup. Stars spread across the sky. The chill in the air was duly commented on. Drinks were drunk. Pipes and cigarettes glowed in the dark.

I heard the Power people went right ahead turning things off.

Good for them. If they don’t get the lights and heat back on pretty quick, we’re going to be in a peck of trouble.

Low murmur of voices, now faceless in the gloom.

I guess we’re safe for this winter. Sure enough. No way he can get over the passes. Too full of cars and snow. But in the spring…

Suppose he’s got a few A-bombs?

Fuck the A-bomb, what if he’s got a few of those dirty neutron bombs? Or the other six of Sally’s seven vials?

Or planes?

What’s to do?

I don’t know.

Damn if I know.

Ain’t got a friggin clue.

Dig a hole, then jump in and pull it over you.

And around ten o’clock Stu Redman, Glen Bateman, and Ralph Brentner came among them, talking quietly and giving out fliers, telling them to pass the word on to those not here tonight. Glen was limping slightly because a flying stove dial had clipped a piece of meat out of his right calf. The mimeographed posters said: FREE ZONE MEETING * MUNZINGER AUDITORIUM * SEPTEMBER 4 * 8:00 P.M.

That seemed to be the signal to leave. People drifted away silently into the dark. Most of them took the fliers, but quite a few were crumpled into balls and thrown away. All of them went home to get what sleep they could.

Perchance to dream.

The auditorium was crammed but extremely quiet when Stu convened the meeting the following night. Sitting behind him were Larry, Ralph, and Glen. Fran had tried to get up, but her back was still much too painful. Unmindful of the grisly irony, Ralph had patched her through to the meeting by walkie-talkie.

“There’s a few things that need talking about,” Stu said with quiet and studied understatement. His voice, although only slightly amplified, carried well in the silent hall. “I guess there’s nobody here who doesn’t know about the explosion that killed Nick and Sue and the others, and nobody who doesn’t know that Mother Abagail has come back. We need to talk about those things, but we wanted you to have some good news first. Want you to listen to Brad Kitchner for that. Brad?”

Brad walked toward the podium, not nearly as nervous as he had been the night before last, and was greeted by listless applause. When he got there he turned to face them, gripped the lectern in both hands, and said simply: “We’re going to switch on tomorrow.”

This time the applause was much louder. Brad held up his hands, but the applause rode over him in a wave. It held for thirty seconds or more. Later Stu told Frannie that if it hadn’t been for the events of the last two days, Brad probably would have been dragged down from the podium and carried around the auditorium on the shoulders of the crowd like a halfback who has scored the winning touchdown of the championship game in the last thirty seconds. It had gotten so close to the end of the summer that, in a way, that was just what he was.

But at last the applause subsided.

“We’re going to switch on at noon, and I’d like to have every one of you at home and ready. Ready for what? Four things. Listen up now, this is important. First, turn off every light and electrical appliance in your own house that you’re not using. Second, do the same for the unoccupied houses around yours. Third, if you smell gas, track down the smell and shut off whatever is on. Fourth, if you hear a fire siren, go to the source of the sound… but go safely and sanely. Let’s not have any necks broken in motorcycle accidents. Now—are there any questions?”

There were several, all of them reconfirming Brad’s original points. He answered each one patiently, the only sign of nervousness the way he bent his little black notebook ceaselessly back and forth in his hands.

When the questions had slowed to a trickle, Brad said: “I want to thank the folks who busted their humps getting us going again. And I want to remind the Power Committee that it isn’t disbanded. There are going to be lines down, power outages, oil supplies to track down in Denver and haul up here. I hope you’ll all stick with it. Mr. Glen Bateman says we may have ten thousand people here by the time the snow flies, and a lot more next spring. There’s power stations in Longmont and Denver that are going to have to come on line before next year’s done with—”

“Not if that hardcase gets his way!” someone shouted out hoarsely in the back of the hall.

There was a moment of dead silence. Brad stood with his hands clutching the lectern in a deathgrip, his face pasty white. He’s not going to be able to finish, Stu thought, and then Brad did go on, his voice amazingly even:

“My business is power, whoever said that. But I think we’ll be here long after that other guy’s dead and gone. If I didn’t think that, I’d be wrapping motors over on his side. Who gives a shit for him?”

Brad stepped away front the podium and someone else bellowed, “You’re goddam right!”

This time the applause was heavy and hard, nearly savage, but there was a note to it Stu didn’t like. He bad to pound with his gavel a long time to get the meeting back under control.

“The next thing on the agenda—”

“Fuck your agenda!” a young woman yelled stridently. “Let’s talk about the dark man! Let’s talk about Flagg! It’s long overdue, I’d say!”

Roars of approval. Shouts of “out of order!” Disapproving babble at the young woman’s choice of words. Rumble of side-chatter.

Stu whacked at the block on the podium so hard that the mallet-head flew off his gavel. “This is a meeting here!” he shouted. “You’re going to get a chance to talk about whatever you want to talk about, but while I’m chairing this meeting, I want… to have… some ORDER!” He bellowed the last word so loudly that feedback cut through the auditorium like a boomerang, and they quieted at last.

“Now,” Stu said, his voice purposely low and calm, “the next thing is to report to you on what happened up at Ralph’s on the night of September second, and I guess that falls to me, since I’m our elected law enforcement officer.”

He had quiet again, but like the applause that had greeted Brad’s closing remarks, this wasn’t a quiet Stu liked. They were leaning forward, intent, their expressions greedy. It made him feel disquieted and bewildered, as if the Free Zone had changed radically over the last forty-eight hours and he didn’t know what it was anymore. It made him feel the way he’d felt when he had been trying to find his way out of the Stovington Plague Center—a fly caught and struggling in an invisible spider’s web. There were so many faces he didn’t recognize out there, so many strangers…

But there was no time to think about it now.

He described the events leading up to the explosion briefly, omitting Fran’s last-minute premonition; with the mood they were in, they didn’t need that.

“Yesterday morning Brad and Ralph and I went up and poked through the ruins for three hours or more. We found what seemed to be a dynamite bomb wired up to a walkie-talkie. It appears that this bomb was planted in the living room closet. Bill Scanlon and Ted Frampton found another walkie-talkie up in Sunrise Amphitheater, and we assume the bomb was set off from there. It—”

“Assume, my ass!” Ted Frampton shouted from the third row. “It was that bastard Lauder and his little whore!”

An uneasy murmur ran through the room.

These are the good guys? They don’t give a shit about Nick and Sue and Chad and the rest. They’re like a lynch-mob, and all they care about is catching Harold and Nadine and hanging them… like a charm against the dark man.

He happened to catch Glen’s eye; Glen offered him a very small, very cynical shrug.

“If one more person yells out from the floor without bein recognized, I’m gonna declare this meeting closed and you can talk to each other,” Stu said. “This is no bull session. If we don’t keep to the rules, where are we?” Ted Frampton was staring up at him angrily, and Stu stared back. After a few moments, Ted dropped his eyes.

“We suspect Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross. We have some good reasons, some pretty convincing circumstantial evidence. But there’s no real hard evidence against them yet, and I hope you’ll keep that in mind.”

A sullen eddy of conversation rippled and disappeared.

“I only said that to say this,” Stu continued. “If they happen to wander back into the Zone, I want them brought to me. I’ll lock them up and Al Bundell will see to it that they’re tried… and a trial means they get to tell their side, if they got one. We’re… we’re supposed to be the good guys here. I guess we know where the bad guys are. And being the good guys means we have to be civilized about this.”

He looked out at them hopefully and saw only puzzled resentment. Stuart Redman had seen two of his best friends blown to hell, those eyes said, and here he was, taking up for the ones who did it.

“For what it’s worth to you, I think they’re the ones,” he said. “But it’s got to be done right. And I’m here to tell you that it will be.”

Eyes boring into him. Over a thousand pairs, and he could feel the thought behind each one: What’s this shit you’re talking, anyway? They’re gone. Gone west. You act like they were on a two-day bird-watching trip.

He poured a glass of water and drank some, hoping to get rid of the dryness in his throat. The taste of it, boiled and flat, made him grimace. “Anyway, that’s where we stand on that,” he said lamely. “What’s next, I guess, is filling the committee back up to strength. We’re not goin to do that tonight, but you ought to be thinkin about who you want—” A hand shot up on the floor and Stu pointed. “Go ahead. Just identify yourself so everybody’ll know who you are.”

“I’m Sheldon Jones,” a big man in a wool-plaid shirt said. “Why don’t we just go ahead and get two new ones tonight? I nom’nate Ted Frampton over there.”

“Hey, I second that!” Bill Scanlon yelled. “Beautiful!”

Ted Frampton clasped his hands and shook them over his head to scattered applause, and Stu felt that despairing, disoriented feeling sweep over him again. They were supposed to replace Nick Andros with Ted Frampton? It was like one of those sick jokes. Ted had tried the Power Committee and had found it too much like work. He had drifted over to the Burial Committee and that had seemed to suit him better, although Chad had mentioned to Stu that Ted was one of those fellows who seemed able to stretch a coffee break into a lunch hour and a lunch hour into a half-day vacation. He had been quick to join yesterday’s hunt for Harold and Nadine, probably because it offered a change. He and Bill Scanlon had stumbled on the walkie-talkie up at Sunrise through sheer luck (and to give Ted his due, he had admitted that), but since the find he had acquired a swagger that Stu didn’t like at all.

Now Stu caught Glen’s eyes again, and could almost read Glen’s thought in the cynical look there, the slight tuck in the corner of Glen’s mouth: Maybe we could use Harold to stack this one, too.

A word that Nixon had used a lot suddenly floated into Stu’s mind, and as he grasped it, he suddenly understood the source of his despair and feeling of disorientation. The word was “mandate.” Their mandate had disappeared. It had gone up two nights ago in a flash and a roar.

He said, “You may know who you want, Sheldon, but I imagine some of the other folks would like to have time to think it over. Let’s call the question. Those of you who want to elect two new reps tonight say aye.”

Quite a few ayes were shouted out.

“Those of you who’d like a week or so to think it over, say nay.”

The nays were louder, but not by a whole lot. A great many people had abstained altogether, as if the topic had no interest for them.

“Okay,” Stu said. “We’ll plan to meet here in Munzinger Auditorium a week from today, September eleventh, to nominate and vote on candidates for the two empty slots on the committee.”

Pretty crappy epitaph, Nick. I’m sorry.

“Dr. Richardson is here to talk to you about Mother Abagail and about those folks that were injured in the explosion. Doc?”

Richardson got a solid blast of applause as he stepped forward, polishing his eyeglasses. He told them that there were nine dead as a result of the explosion, three people still in critical condition, two in serious condition, eight in satisfactory condition.

“Considering the force of the blast, I think that fortune was with us. Now, concerning Mother Abagail.”

They leaned forward.

“I think a very short statement and a brief bit of elaboration should suffice. The statement is this: I can do nothing for her.”

A mutter ran through the crowd and stilled. Stu saw unhappiness but no real surprise.

“I am told by members of the Zone who were here before she left that the lady claimed one hundred and eight years. I can’t vouch for that, but I can say she is the oldest human being I myself have ever seen and treated. I’m told she has been gone for two weeks, and my estimation—no, my guess —is that her diet during that period contained no prepared foods at all. She seems to have lived on roots, herbs, grass, and other things of a similar nature.” He paused. “She bas had one small bowel movement since she returned. It contained a number of small sticks and twigs.”

“My God,” someone muttered, and it was impossible to tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman.

“One arm is covered with poison ivy. Her legs are covered with ulcerations which would be running if her condition were not so—”

“Hey, can’t you stop it?” Jack Jackson hollered, standing up. His face was white, furious, miserable. “Don’t you have any damn decency?”

“Decency is not my concern, Jack. I’m only reporting her condition as it is. She’s comatose, malnourished, and most of all, she’s very, very old. I think she’s going to die. If she was anyone else, I would state that as a certainty. But… like all of you, I dreamed of her. Her and one other.”

The low mutter again, like a passing breeze, and Stu felt the hackles on the nape of his neck first stir and then come to attention.

“To me, dreams of such opposing configurations seem mystical,” George said. “The fact that we all shared them seems to indicate a telepathic ability at the very least. But I pass on parapsychology and theology just as I pass on decency, and for the same reason: neither of them is my field. If the woman is from God, He may choose to heal her. I cannot. I will tell you that the fact that she is still alive at all seems a miracle of sorts to me. That is my statement. Are there any questions?”

There weren’t. They looked at him, stunned, some of them openly weeping.

“Thank you,” George said, and returned to his seat in a dead sea of silence.

“All right,” Stu whispered to Glen. “You’re on.”

Glen approached the podium without introduction and gripped it familiarly. “We’ve discussed everything but the dark man,” he said.

That mutter again. Several men and women instinctively made the sign of the cross. An elderly woman on the lefthand aisle placed her hands rapidly across her eyes, mouth, and ears in an eerie imitation of Nick Andros before refolding them over the bulky black purse in her lap.

“We’ve discussed him to some degree in closed committee meetings,” Glen went on, his tone calm and conversational, “and the question came up in private as to whether or not we should bring the question up in public. The point was made that no one in the Zone really seemed to want to talk about it, not after the funhouse dreams we all had on the way here. That perhaps a period of recuperation was needed. Now, I think, is the time to bring the subject up. To drag him out into the light, as it were. In police work, they have a handy gadget called an Ident-i-Kit, which a police-artist uses to create the face of a criminal from various witnesses’ recollections of him. In our case we have no face, but we do have a series of recollections that form at least an outline of our Antagonist. I’ve talked to quite a few people about this and I would like to present you with my own Ident-i-Kit sketch.

“This man’s name seems to be Randall Flagg, although some people have associated the names Richard Frye, Robert Freemont, and Richard Freemantle with him. The initials R.F. may have some significance, but if so, none of us on the Free Zone Committee know what it is. His presence—at least in dreams—produces feelings of dread, disquiet, terror, horror. In case after case, the physical feeling associated with him is one of coldness.”

Heads were nodding, and that excited hum of conversation broke out again. Stu thought they sounded like boys who had just discovered sex, were comparing notes, and were excited to find that all reports put the receptacle in approximately the same place. He covered a slight grin with his hand, and reminded himself to save that one for Fran later on.

“This Flagg is in the West,” Glen continued. “Equal numbers of people have ‘seen’ him in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland. Some people—Mother Abagail was among them—claim that Flagg is crucifying people who step out of line. All of them seem to believe that there is a confrontation shaping up between this man and ourselves, and that Flagg will stick at nothing to bring us down. And sticking at nothing includes quite a lot. Armored force. Nuclear weapons. Perhaps… plague.”

“I’d like to catch hold of that dirty bastard!” Rich Moffat called shrilly. “I’d give him a dose of the everfucking plague!”

There was a tension-relieving burst of laughter, and Rich got a hand. Glen grinned easily. He had given Rich his cue and his line half an hour before the meeting, and Rich had delivered admirably. Old baldy had been right as rain about one thing, Stu was discovering: a background in sociology often came in handy at large meetings.

“All right, I’ve outlined what I know about him,” he went on. “My last contribution before throwing the meeting open to discussion is this: I think Stu is right in telling you that we have to deal with Harold and Nadine in a civilized way if they’re caught, but like him, I think that is unlikely. Also like him, I believe they did what they did on this man Flagg’s orders.”

His words rang out strongly in the hall.

“This man has got to be dealt with. George Richardson told you mysticism isn’t his field of study. It isn’t mine, either. But I tell you this: I think that dying old woman somehow represents the forces of good as much as Flagg represents the forces of evil. I think that whatever power controls her used her to bring us together. I don’t think that power intends to forsake us now. Maybe we need to talk it over and let some air into those nightmares. Maybe we need to begin deciding what we’re going to do about him. But he can’t just walk into this Zone next spring and take over, not if you people are standing watch. Now I’ll turn the meeting back to Stu, who’ll chair the discussion.”

His last sentence was lost in a crash of applause, and Glen went back to his seat feeling pleased. He had stirred them with a big stick… or was the phrase played them like a violin? It didn’t really matter. They were more mad than scared, they were ready for a challenge (although they might not be so eager next April, after they’d had a long winter to cool off in)… and most of all, they were ready to talk.

And talk they did, for the next three hours. A few people left as midnight came and went, but not many. As Larry had suspected, no good hard advice came out of it. There were wild suggestions: a bomber and/or a nuclear stockpile of their own, a summit meeting, a trained hit squad. There were few practical ideas.

For the final hour, person after person stood up and recited his or her dream, to the seemingly endless fascination of the others. Stu was once again reminded of the endless bull sessions about sex he had participated in (mostly as a listener) during his teenage years.

Glen was both amazed and heartened by their growing willingness to talk, and by the charged atmosphere of excitement that had taken over the dull blankness with which they had begun the meeting. A large catharsis, long overdue, was going on, and he was also reminded of sex-talk, but in a different way. They talk like people, he thought, who have kept the huddled-up secrets of their guilts and inadequacies to themselves for a long time, only to discover that these things, when verbalized, were only life-sized after all. When the inner terror sowed in sleep was finally harvested in this marathon public discussion, the terror became more manageable… perhaps even conquerable.

The meeting broke up at one-thirty in the morning, and Glen left it with Stu, feeling good for the first time since Nick’s death. He left feeling they had gone the first hard steps out of themselves and toward whatever battleground there would be.

He felt hope.

The power went on at noon on September 5, as Brad had promised.

The air raid siren atop of the County Courthouse went on with a huge, braying whoop, scaring many people into the streets, where they looked wildly up into the blameless blue sky for a glimpse of the dark man’s air force. Some ran for their cellars, where they stayed until Brad found a fused switch and turned the siren off. Then they came up, shamefaced.

There was an electrical fire on Willow Street, and a group of a dozen volunteer firepeople promptly rushed over and put it out. A manhole cover exploded into the air at the Broadway-and-Walnut intersection, went nearly fifty feet, and came down on the roof of the Oz Toyshop like a great rusty tiddledywink.

There was a single fatality on what the Zone came to call Power Day. For some unknown reason, an auto-body shop on outer Pearl Street exploded. Rich Moffat was sitting in a doorway across the street with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his newsboy’s pouch, and a flying panel of corrugated steel siding struck him and killed him instantly. He would break no more plate-glass windows.

Stu was with Fran when the fluorescents buzzed into life in the ceiling of her hospital room. He watched them flicker, flicker, flicker, and finally catch with the old familiar light. He was unable to look away until they had been glowing solidly for nearly three minutes. When he looked at Frannie again, her eyes were shiny with tears.

“Fran? What’s wrong? Is it the pain?”

“It’s Nick,” she said. “It’s so wrong that Nick isn’t alive to see this. Hold me, Stu. I want to pray for him if I can. I want to try.”

He held her, but didn’t know if she prayed or not. He suddenly found himself missing Nick very much, and hating Harold Lauder more than he ever had before. Fran was right. Harold had not just killed Nick and Sue; he had stolen their light.

“Shh,” he said. “Frannie, shh.”

But she cried for a long time. When the tears were finally gone, he used the button to raise her bed and turned on the night table lamp so she could see to read.

Stu was being shaken awake, and it took him a long time to come all the way around. His mind ran over a slow and seemingly endless list of people who might be trying to rob his sleep. It was his mother, telling him it was time to get up and light the stoves and get ready for school. It was Manuel, the bouncer in that sleazy little Nuevo Laredo whorehouse, telling him his twenty dollars was used up and it would be another twenty if he wanted to stay all night. It was a nurse in a white all-over suit who wanted to take his blood pressure and a throat culture. It was Frannie.

It was Randall Flagg.

The last thought brought him up like a dash of cold water in the face. It was none of those people. It was Glen Bateman, with Kojak at his knee.

“You’re a hard man to wake up, East Texas,” Glen said. “Like a stone post.” He was only a vague shape in nearly total darkness.

“Well, you could have turned on the damn light to start with.”

“You know, I clean forgot all about that.”

Stu switched on the lamp, squinted against the sudden bright light, and peered owlishly at the wind-up alarm clock. It was quarter to three in the morning.

“What are you doing here, Glen? I was sleepin, in case you didn’t happen to notice.”

He got his first good look at Glen as he put the clock down. He looked pale, scared… and old. The lines were drawn deeply into his face and he looked haggard.

“What is it?”

“Mother Abagail,” Glen said quietly.

“Dead?”

“God help me, I almost wish she were. She’s awake. She wants us.”

“The two of us?”

“The five of us. She—” His voice roughened, went hoarse. “She knew Nick and Susan were dead, and she knew Fran was in the hospital. I don’t know how, but she did.”

“And she wants the committee?”

“What’s left of it. She’s dying and she says she has to tell us something. And I don’t know if I want to hear it.”

Outside the night was cold—not just chilly but cold. The jacket Stu had pulled from the closet felt good, and he zipped it all the way to the neck. A frosty moon hung overhead, making him think of Tom, who had instructions to come back to them and report when the moon was full. This moon was just a trifle past the first quarter. God knew where that moon was looking down on Tom, on Dayna Jurgens, on Judge Farris. God knew it was looking down on strange doings here.

“I got Ralph up first,” Glen said. “Told him to go over to the hospital and get Fran.”

“If the doctor wanted her up and around, he would have sent her home,” Stu said angrily.

“This is a special case, Stu.”

“For someone who doesn’t want to hear what that old woman has to say, you seem to be in an all-fired hurry to get to her.”

“I’m afraid not to,” Glen said.

The jeep drew up in front of Larry’s house at ten minutes past three. The place was blazing with light—not gaslamps now, but good electric lights. Every second streetlamp was on, too, not just here but all over town, and Stu had stared at them all the way over in Glen’s jeep, fascinated. The last of the summer bugs, sluggish with the cold, were beating lackadaisically against the sodium globes.

They got out of the jeep just as headlights swung around the corner. It was Ralph’s clattering old truck, and it pulled up nose to nose with the jeep. Ralph got out, and Stu went quickly around to the passenger side, where Frannie sat with her back resting against a plaid sofa cushion.

“Hey, babe,” he said softly.

She took his hand. Her face was a pale disk in the darkness.

“Bad pain?” Stu asked.

“Not so bad. I took some Advil. Just don’t ask me to do the hustle.”

He helped her out of the truck and Ralph took her other arm. They both saw her wince as she stepped away from the cab.

“Want me to carry you?”

“I’ll be fine. Just keep your arm around me, huh?”

“Sure will.”

“And walk slow. Us grammies can’t go very fast.”

They crossed behind Ralph’s truck, more shuffling than walking. When they reached the sidewalk, Stu saw Glen and Larry standing in the doorway, watching them. Against the light they looked like figures cut from black construction paper.

“What is it, do you think?” Frannie murmured.

Stu shook his head. “I don’t know.”

They got up the walk, Frannie very obviously in pain now, and Ralph helped Stu get her in. Larry, like Glen, looked pale and worried. He was wearing faded jeans, a shirt that was untucked and buttoned wrong at the bottom, and expensive mocs on bare feet.

“I’m sorry like hell to have to get you out,” he said. “I was in with her, dozing off and on. We’ve been keeping watch. You understand?”

“Yes. I understand,” Frannie said. For some reason the phrase keeping watch made her think of her mother’s parlor… and in a kinder, more forgiving light than she had ever thought of it before.

“Lucy had been in bed about an hour. I snapped out of my doze, and—Fran, can I help you?”

Fran shook her head and smiled with an effort. “No, I’m fine. Go on.”

“—and she was looking at me. She can’t talk above a whisper, but she’s perfectly understandable.” Larry swallowed. All five of them were now standing in the hallway. “She told me the Lord was going to take her home at the sunrise. But that she had to talk to those of us God hadn’t taken first. I asked her what she meant and she said God had taken Nick and Susan. She knew.” He let out a ragged breath and ran his hands through his long hair.

Lucy appeared at the end of the hall. “I made coffee. It’s here when you want it.”

“Thank you, love,” Larry said.

Lucy looked uncertain. “Should I come in with you folks? Or is it private, like the committee?”

Larry looked at Stu, who said quietly, “Come on along. I got an idea that stuff don’t cut ice anymore.”

They went up the hall to the bedroom, moving slowly to accommodate Fran.

“She’ll tell us,” Ralph said suddenly. “Mother will tell us. No sense fretting.”

They went in together, and Mother Abagail’s bright, dying gaze fell upon them.

Fran knew about the old woman’s physical condition, but it was still a nasty shock. There was nothing left of her but a pemmican-tough membrane of skin and tendon binding her bones. There was not even a smell of putrescence and oncoming death in the room; instead there was a dry attic smell… no, a parlor smell. Half the length of the IV needle hung out of her flesh, simply because there was nowhere for it to go.

Yet the eyes had not changed. They were warm and kind and human. That was a relief, but Fran still felt a kind of terror… not strictly fear, but perhaps something more sanctified—awe. Was it awe? An impending feeling. Not doom, but as though some dreadful responsibility was poised above their heads like a stone.

Man proposes—God disposes.

“Little girl, sit down,” Mother Abagail whispered. “You’re in pain.”

Larry led her to an armchair and Fran sat down with a thin, whistling sigh of relief, although she knew even sitting would pain her after a while.

Mother Abagail was still watching her with those bright eyes.

“You’re quick with child,” she whispered.

“Yes… how…”

“Shhhhh…”

Silence fell in the room, deep silence. Fascinated, hypnotized, Fran looked at the dying old woman who had been in their dreams before she had been in their lives.

“Look out the window, little girl.”

Fran turned, her face to the window, where Larry had stood and looked out at the gathered people two days before. She saw not pressing darkness but a quiet light. It was not a reflection of the room; it was morning light. She was looking at the faint, slightly distorted reflection of a bright nursery with ruffled check curtains. There was a crib—but it was empty. There was a playpen—empty. A mobile of bright plastic butterflies—moved only by the wind. Dread clapped its cold hands around her heart. The others saw it on her face but did not understand it; they saw nothing through the window but a section of lawn lit by a streetlight.

“Where’s the baby?” Fran asked hoarsely.

“Stuart is not the baby’s father, little girl. But his life is in Stuart’s hands, and in God’s. This chap will have four fathers. If God lets him draw breath at all.”

“If he draws—”

“God has hidden that from my eyes,” she whispered.

The empty nursery was gone. Fran saw only darkness. And now dread closed its hands into fists, her heart beating between them.

Mother Abagail whispered: “The Imp has called his bride, and he means to put her with child. Will he let your child live?”

“Stop it,” Frannie moaned. She put her hands over her face.

Silence, deep silence like snow in the room. Glen Bateman’s face was an old dull searchlight. Lucy’s right hand worked slowly up and down the neck of her bathrobe. Ralph had his hat in his hands, picking absently at the feather in the band. Stu looked at Frannie, but could not go to her. Not now. He thought fleetingly of the woman at the meeting, the one who had put her hands rapidly over her eyes, ears, and mouth at the mention of the dark man’s name.

“Mother, father, wife, husband,” Mother Abagail whispered. “Set against them, the Prince of High Places, the lord of dark mornings. I sinned in pride. So have you all, all sinned in pride. Ain’t you heard it said, put not your faith in the lords and princes of this world?”

They watched her.

“Electric lights ain’t the answer, Stu Redman. CB radio ain’t it, either, Ralph Brentner. Sociology won’t end it, Glen Bateman. And you doin penance for a life that’s long since a closed book won’t stop it from coming, Larry Underwood. And your boy-child won’t stop it either, Fran Goldsmith. The bad moon has risen. You propose nothing in the sight of God.”

She looked at each of them in turn. “God will dispose as He sees fit. You are not the potter but the potter’s clay. Mayhap the man in the West is the wheel on which you will be broken. I am not allowed to know.”

A tear, amazing in that dying desert, stole from her left eye and rolled down her cheek.

“Mother, what should we do?” Ralph asked.

“Draw near, all of you. My time is short. I’m going home to glory, and there’s never been no human more ready than I am now. Get close to me.”

Ralph sat on the edge of the bed. Larry and Glen stood at the foot of it. Fran got up with a grimace, and Stu dragged her chair up beside Ralph. She sat down again and took his hand with her own cold fingers.

“God didn’t bring you folks together to make a committee or a community,” she said. “He brought you here only to send you further, on a quest. He means for you to try and destroy this Dark Prince, this Man of Far Leagues.”

Ticking silence. In it, Mother Abagail sighed.

“I thought it was Nick to lead you, but He’s taken Nick—although not all of Nick is gone yet, it seems to me. No, not all. But you must lead, Stuart. And if it’s His will to take Stu, then you must lead, Larry. And if He takes you, it falls to Ralph.”

“Looks like I’m riding drag,” Glen began. “What—”

“Lead?” Fran asked coldly. “Lead? Lead where—?”

“Why, west, little girl,” Mother Abagail said. “West. You’re not to go. Only these four.”

“No! ” She was on her feet in spite of the pain. “What are you saying? That the four of them are just supposed to deliver themselves into his hands? The heart and soul and guts of the Free Zone?” Her eyes blazed. “So he can hang them on crosses and just walk in here next summer and kill everyone? I won’t see my man sacrificed to your killer God. Fuck Him.”

“Frannie! ” Stu gasped.

“Killer God! Killer God! ” she spat. “Millions—maybe billions —dead in the plague. Millions more afterward. We don’t even know if the children will live. Isn’t He done yet? Does it just have to go on and on until the earth belongs to the rats and the roaches? He’s no God. He’s a daemon, and you’re His witch.”

“Stop it, Frannie.”

“No problem. I’m done. I want to leave. Take me home, Stu. Not to the hospital but back home.”

“We’ll listen to what she has to say.”

“Fine. You listen for both of us. I’m leaving.”

“Little girl.”

“Don’t call me that! ”

Her hand shot out and closed around Frannie’s wrist. Fran went rigid. Her eyes closed. Her head snapped back.

“Don’t D-D-Don’t… OH MY GOD—STU—”

“Here! Here!” Stu roared. “What are you doing to her?”

Mother Abagail didn’t answer. The moment spun out, seemed to stretch into a pocket of eternity, and then the old woman let go.

Slowly, dazedly, Fran began to massage the wrist Mother Abagail had taken, although there was no red ring or dent in the flesh to show that pressure had been applied. Frannie’s eyes suddenly widened.

“Hon?” Stu asked anxiously.

“Gone,” Fran muttered.

“What… what’s she talking about?” Stu looked around at the others in shaken appeal. Glen only shook his head. His face was white and strained but not disbelieving.

“The pain… the whiplash. The pain in my back. It’s gone.” She looked at Stu, dazed. “It’s all gone. Look.” She bent and touched her toes lightly: once, then twice. Then she bent a third time and placed her palms flat on the floor without unlocking her knees.

She stood up again and met Mother Abagail’s eyes.

“Is this a bribe from your God? Because if it is, He can take His cure back. I’d rather have the pain if Stu comes with it.”

“God don’t lay on no bribes, child,” Mother Abagail whispered. “He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will.”

“Stu isn’t going west,” Fran said, but now she seemed bewildered as well as frightened.

“Sit down,” Stu said. “We’ll listen to what she has to say.”

Fran sat down, shocked, unbelieving, lost at sea. Her hands kept stealing around to the small of her back.

“You are to go west,” Mother Abagail whispered. “You are to take no food, no water. You are to go this very day, and in the clothes you stand up in. You are to go on foot. I am in the way of knowing that one of you will not reach your destination, but I don’t know which will be the one to fall. I am in the way of knowing that the rest will be taken before this man Flagg, who is not a man at all but a supernatural being. I don’t know if it’s God’s will for you to defeat him. I don’t know if it’s God’s will for you to ever see Boulder again. Those things are not for me to see. But he is in Las Vegas, and you must go there, and it is there that you will make your stand. You will go, and you will not falter, because you will have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God’s help you will stand.”

She nodded.

“That’s all. I’ve said m’piece.”

“No,” Fran whispered. “It can’t be.”

“Mother,” Glen said in a kind of croak. He cleared his throat. “Mother, we’re not ‘in the way of understanding,’ if you see what I mean. We’re… we’re not blessed with your closeness to whatever is controlling this. It just isn’t our way. Fran’s right. If we go over there we’ll be slaughtered, probably by the first pickets we come to.”

“Have you no eyes? You’ve just seen Fran healed of her affliction by God, through me. Do you think His plan for you is to let you be shot and killed by the Dark Prince’s least minion?”

“But, Mother—”

“No.” She raised her hand and waved his words away. “It’s not my place to argue with you, or convince, but only to put you in the way of understanding God’s plan for you. Listen, Glen.”

And suddenly, from Mother Abagail’s mouth, the voice of Glen Bateman issued, frightening them all and making Fran shrink back against Stu with a little cry.

“Mother Abagail calls him the devil’s pawn,” this strong, masculine voice said, originating somehow in the old woman’s wasted chest and emerging from her toothless mouth. “Maybe he’s just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. Maybe he’s something more, something darker. I only know that he is. And I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put a stop to him. I think only white magic will do that.”

Glen’s mouth hung open.

“Is that a true thing, or are those the words of a liar?” Mother Abagail said.

“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but they’re my words,” Glen said shakily.

“Trust. All of you, trust. Larry… Ralph… Stu… Glen… Frannie. You most patic’ly, Frannie. Trust… and obey the word of God.”

“Do we have a choice?” Larry asked bitterly.

She turned to look at him, surprised. “A choice? There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But… this is what God wants of you.”

That silence again, like deep snow. At last, Ralph broke it. “Says in the Bible that David did the job on Goliath,” he said. “I’ll be going along if you say it’s right, Mother.”

She took his hand.

“Me,” Larry said. “Me too. Okay.” He sighed and put his hands on his forehead as if it ached. Glen opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, there was a heavy, tired sigh from the corner and a thud.

It was Lucy, whom they had all forgotten. She had fainted.

Dawn touched the edge of the world.

They sat around Larry’s kitchen table, drinking coffee. It was ten to five when Fran came up the hall and stood in the doorway. Her face was puffy from crying, but there was no limp as she walked. She was, indeed, cured. “She’s going, I think,” Fran said.

They went in, Larry with his arm around Lucy.

Mother Abagail’s breathing had taken on a heavy, hollow rattle that was horribly reminiscent of the superflu. They gathered around the bed without speaking, deep in awe and afraid. Ralph was sure that something would happen at the end that would cause the wonder of God to stand before all of them, naked and revealed. She would be gone in a flash of light, taken. Or they would see her spirit, transfigured in radiance, leaving by the window and going up into the sky.

But in the end, she simply died.

There was a single final breath, the last of millions. It was drawn in, held, and finally let out. Her chest just didn’t rise again.

“She’s done,” Stu muttered.

“God have mercy on her soul,” Ralph said, no longer afraid. He crossed her hands on her thin bosom, and his tears fell on them.

“I’ll go,” Glen said suddenly. “She was right. White magic. That’s all that’s left.”

“Stu,” Frannie whispered. “Please, Stu, say no.”

They looked at him—all of them.

Now you must lead, Stuart.

He thought of Arnette, of the old car carrying Charles D. Campion and his load of death, crashing into Bill Hapscomb’s pumps like some wicked Pandora. He thought of Denninger and Deitz, and how he had begun to associate them in his mind with the smiling doctors who had lied and lied and lied to him and to his wife about her condition—and maybe they had lied to themselves, as well. Most of all, he thought of Frannie. And of Mother Abagail saying, This is what God wants of you.

“Frannie,” he said. “I have to go.”

“And die.” She looked at him bitterly, almost hatefully, and then to Lucy, as if for support. But Lucy was stunned and far-off, no help.

“If we don’t go, we’ll die,” Stu said, feeling his way along the words. “She was right. If we wait, then spring comes. Then what? How are we going to stop him? We don’t know. We don’t have a clue. We never did. We had our heads in the sand, too. We can’t stop him except like Glen says. White magic. Or the power of God.”

She began to weep bitterly.

“Frannie, don’t do that,” he said, and tried to take her hand.

“Don’t touch me!” she cried at him. “You’re a dead man, you’re a corpse, so don’t touch me! ”

They stood around the bed in tableau as the sun came up.

Stu and Frannie went to Flagstaff Mountain around eleven o’clock. They parked halfway up, and Stu brought the hamper while Fran carried the tablecloth and a bottle of Blue Nun. The picnic had been her idea, but a strange and awkward silence held between them.

“Help me spread it,” she said. “And watch out for those spiny things.”

They were in a small, slanting meadow a thousand feet below Sunrise Amphitheater. Boulder was spread out below them in a blue haze. Today it was wholly summer again. The sun shone down with power and authority. Crickets buzzed in the grass. A grasshopper leaped up and Stu caught it with a quick lunge of his right hand. He could feel it inside his fingers, tickling and frightened.

“Spit n I’ll let you go,” he said, the old childhood formula, and looked up to see Fran smiling sadly at him. With quick, ladylike precision, she turned her head and spat. It hurt his heart, seeing her do that. “Fran—”

“No, Stu. Don’t talk about it. Not now.”

They spread the white lawn tablecloth, which Fran had glommed from the Hotel Boulderado, and moving with quick economy (it made him feel strange to watch her supple grace as she bent and moved, as if there had never been a whiplash injury and sprained back at all), she set out their early lunch: a cucumber and lettuce salad dressed with vinegar; cold ham sandwiches; the wine; an apple pie for dessert.

“Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat,” she said. He sat down beside her and took a sandwich and some salad. He wasn’t hungry. He hurt inside. But he ate.

When they had both finished a token sandwich and most of the salad—the fresh greens had been delicious—and a small sliver of apple pie each, she said: “When are you going?”

“Noon,” he said. He lit a cigarette, cupping the flame in his hands.

“How long will it take you to get there?”

He shrugged. “Walking? I don’t know. Glen’s not young. Neither is Ralph, for that matter. If we can make thirty miles a day, we could do it by the first of October, I guess.”

“And if there’s early snow in the mountains? Or in Utah?”

He shrugged, looking at her steadily.

“More wine?” she asked.

“No. It gives me acid indigestion. It always did.”

Fran poured herself another glass and drank it off.

“Was she God’s voice, Stu? Was she?”

“Frannie, I just don’t know.”

“We dreamed of her, and she was. This whole thing is part and parcel of some stupid game, do you know that, Stuart? Have you ever read the Book of Job?”

“I was never much on the Bible, I guess.”

“My mom was. She thought it was very important that my brother Fred and I have a certain amount of religious background. She never said why. All the good it ever did me, so far as I know, was that I was always able to answer the Bible questions on ‘Jeopardy.’ Do you remember ‘Jeopardy,’ Stu?”

Smiling a little, he said: “And now here’s your host, Alex Trebeck.”

“That’s the one. It was backward. They gave you the answer; you supplied the question. When it came to the Bible, I knew all the questions. Job was a bet between God and the Devil. The Devil said, ‘Sure he worships You. He’s got it soft. But if You piss in his face long enough, he’ll renounce You.’ So God took the wager. And God won.” She smiled dully. “God always wins. God’s a Boston Celtics fan, I bet.”

“Maybe it is a bet,” Stu said, “but it’s their lives, those folks down there. And the guy inside you. What did she call him? The chap?”

“She wouldn’t even promise about him,” Fran said. “If she could have done that… just that… it would have been at least a little bit easier to let you go.”

Stu could think of nothing to say.

“Well, it’s getting on toward noon now,” Fran said. “Help me pack up, Stuart.”

The half-eaten lunch went back into the hamper with the tablecloth and the rest of the wine. Stu looked at the spot and thought of how there were only a few crumbs to show where their picnic had been… and the birds would get those soon enough. When he glanced up, Frannie was looking at him and crying. He went to her.

“It’s all right. It’s being pregnant. I’m always running at the eyes. I can’t seem to help it.”

“It’s okay.”

“Stu, make love to me.”

“Here? Now?”

She nodded, then smiled a little. “It will be all right. If we watch out for the spiny things.”

They spread the tablecloth again.

At the foot of Baseline Road she made him stop at what had been Ralph and Nick’s house until four days ago. The entire rear of the house was blown away. The back yard was littered with debris. A shattered digital clock radio sat atop the shredded back hedge. Nearby was the sofa under which Frannie had been pinned. There was a patch of dried blood on the back steps. She looked at this fixedly.

“Is that Nick’s blood?” she asked him. “Could it be?”

“Frannie, what’s the point?” Stu asked uneasily.

“Is it?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. It could be, I suppose.”

“Put your hand on it, Stu.”

“Frannie, have you gone nuts?”

The frown-line creased her brow, the I-want line that he had first noticed back in New Hampshire.

“Put your hand on it!”

Reluctantly, Stu put his hand on the stain. He didn’t know if it was Nick’s blood or not (and believed, in fact, that it probably wasn’t), but the gesture gave him a ghastly, crawly feeling.

“Now swear you’ll come back.”

The step seemed rather too warm here, and he wanted to take his hand away.

“Fran, how can I—”

“God can’t run all of it!” she hissed at him. “Not all of it. Swear, Stu, swear it!”

“Frannie, I swear to try.”

“I guess that will have to be good enough, won’t it?”

“We have to get down to Larry’s.”

“I know.” But she held him more tightly still. “Say you love me.”

“You know I do.”

“I know, but say it. I want to hear it.”

He took her by the shoulder. “Fran, I love you.”

“Thank you,” she said, and put her cheek against his shoulder. “Now I think I can say goodbye. I think I can let you go.”

They held each other in the shattered back yard.

Chapter 60

She and Lucy watched the undramatic start of their quest from the steps of Larry’s house. The four of them stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, no packs, no bedrolls, no special equipment… as per instructions. They had all changed into heavy walking shoes.

“ ‘Bye, Larry,” Lucy said. Her face was shiny pale.

“Remember, Stuart,” Fran said. “Remember what you swore.”

“Yes. I’ll remember.”

Glen put his fingers into his mouth and whistled. Kojak, who had been investigating a sewer grating, came running.

“Let’s go then,” Larry said. His face was as pale as Lucy’s, his eyes unusually bright, almost glittery. “Before I lose my nerve.”

Stu blew a kiss through his closed fist, something he could not remember doing since the days when his mother saw him off on the school bus. Fran waved back. The tears were coming again, hot and burning, but she did not let them fall. They began. They simply walked away. They were halfway down the block now, and somewhere a bird sang. The midday sun was warm and undramatic. They reached the end of the block. Stu turned and waved again. Larry also waved. Fran and Lucy waved back. They crossed the street. They were gone. Lucy looked almost sick with loss and fear.

“Dear God,” she said.

“Let’s go in,” Fran said. “I want tea.”

They went inside. Fran put the teapot on. They began to wait.

The four of them moved slowly southwest during the afternoon, not talking much. They were headed toward Golden, where they would camp this first night. They passed the burial sites, three of them now, and around four o’clock, when their shadows had begun to trail out long behind them and the heat had begun to sneak out of the day, they came to the township marker spotted beside the road at the southern edge of Boulder. For a moment Stu had a feeling that all of them were on the verge of turning together and going back. Ahead of them was darkness and death. Behind them was a little warmth, a little love.

Glen took a bandanna out of his back pocket, whipped it into a blue paisley rope, and tied it around his head. “Chapter Forty-Three, The Bald-Headed Sociologist Dons His Sweat-Band,” he said hollowly. Kojak was up ahead, over the line into Golden, nosing his way happily through a splash of wildflowers.

“Ah, man,” Larry said, and his voice was almost a sob. “I feel like this is the end of everything.”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “It do feel like that.”

“Anybody want to take five?” Glen asked without much hope.

“Come on,” Stu said, smiling a little. “Do you dogfaces want to live forever?”

They went on, leaving Boulder behind them. By nine that night they were camped in Golden, half a mile from where Route 6 begins its twisting, turning course along Clear Creek and into the stone heart of the Rockies.

None of them slept well that first night. Already they felt far from home, and under the shadow of death.