The Stand

Chapter 61

The dark man had set his guardposts all along the eastern border of Oregon. The largest was at Ontario, where I-80 crosses over from Idaho; there were six men there, quartered in the trailer of a large Peterbilt truck. They had been there for more than a week, playing poker the whole time with twenties and fifties as useless as Monopoly money. One man was almost sixty thousand dollars ahead and another—a man whose working wage in the pre-plague world had been about ten thousand dollars a year—was over forty grand in the bucket.

It had rained almost the whole week, and tempers in the trailer were getting short. They had come out of Portland, and they wanted to get back there. There were women in Portland. Hung from a spike was a powerful two-way radio, broadcasting nothing but static. They were waiting for the radio to broadcast two simple words: Come home. That would mean that the man they were looking for had been captured somewhere else.

The man they were looking for was approximately seventy years old, heavyset, balding. He wore glasses and he was driving a white-over-blue four-wheel drive, either a jeep or an International-Harvester. He was to be killed when he was finally spotted.

They were edgy and bored—the novelty of high-stakes poker for real money had worn off two days ago, even for the dullest of them—but not bored enough to just take off for Portland on their own. They had received their orders from the Walkin Dude himself, and even after rain-induced cabin fever had set in, their terror of him remained. If they screwed the job up and he found out, God help them all.

So they sat and played cards and watched by turns at the sight-slit which had been carved through the side of the trailer’s steel wall. I-80 was deserted in the dull, constant rain. But if the Scout happened along, it would be seen… and stopped.

“He’s a spy from the other side,” the Walkin Dude had told them, that horrible grin wreathing his chops. Why it was so horrible none of them could have said, but when it turned your way you felt as if your blood had turned to hot tomato soup in your veins. “He’s a spy and we could welcome him in with open arms, show him everything, and send him back with no harm done. But I want him. I want them both. And we’re going to send their heads back over the mountains before the snow flies. Let them chew on that all winter.” And he bellowed hot laughter at the people he had gathered together in one of the conference rooms at the Portland Civic Center. They smiled back, but their smiles were cold and uneasy. Aloud they might congratulate each other on having been singled out for such a responsibility, but inside, they wished that those happy, awful, weasel-like eyes had fixed on anyone but them.

There was another large guardpost far south of Ontario, at Sheaville. Here there were four men in a small house just off I-95, which meanders down toward the Alvord Desert, with its weird rock formations and its dark, sullen streams of water.

The other posts were manned by pairs of men, and there were an even dozen of them, ranging from the tiny town of Flora, just off Route 3 and less than sixty miles from the Washington border, all the way down to McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada border.

An old man in a blue-and-white four-wheel drive. The instructions to all the sentinels were the same: Kill him, but don’t hit him in the head. There was to be no blood or bruise above the Adam’s apple.

“I don’t want to send back damaged goods,” Randy Flagg told them, and clacked and roared his horrible laughter.

The northern border between Oregon and Idaho is marked by the Snake River. If you were to follow the Snake north from Ontario, where the six men sat in their Peterbilt playing spit-in-the-ocean for worthless money, you would eventually come to within spitting distance of Copperfield. The Snake takes a kink here that geologists call an oxbow, and near Copperfield the Snake was dammed by the Oxbow Dam. And on that seventh day of September, as Stu Redman and his party trudged up Colorado Highway 6 over a thousand miles to the east and south, Bobby Terry was sitting inside the Copperfield Five-and-Dime, a stack of comic books by his side, wondering what sort of shape the Oxbow Dam was in, and if the sluice gates had been left open or shut. Outside, Oregon Highway 86 ran past the dime store.

He and his partner, Dave Roberts (now asleep in the apartment overhead), had discussed the dam at great length. It had been raining for a week. The Snake was high. Suppose that old Oxbow Dam decided to let go? Bad news. A rushing wall of water would sweep down on Copperfield and ole Bobby Terry and ole Dave Roberts might be washed all the way down to the Pacific Ocean. They had discussed going over to the dam to look for cracks, but finally just hadn’t dared. Flagg’s orders had been specific: Stay under cover.

Dave had pointed out that Flagg might be anywhere. He was a great traveler, and stories had already sprung up about the way he could suddenly appear in a small, out-of-the-way burg where there were only a dozen people repairing power lines or collecting weapons from some army depot. He materialized, like a ghost. Only this was a grinning black ghost in dusty boots with rundown heels. Sometimes he was alone, and sometimes Lloyd Henreid was with him, behind the wheel of a great big Daimler automobile, black as a hearse and just as long. Sometimes he was walking. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next moment he was. He could be in L.A. one day (or so the talk went) and show up in Boise a day later… on foot.

But as Dave had also pointed out, not even Flagg could be in six different places at the same time. One of them could just scoot over to that damn dam, have a look, and scoot back. The odds in their favor were a thousand to one.

Good, you do it, Bobby Terry told him. You have my permission. But Dave had declined the invitation with an uneasy grin. Because Flagg had a way of knowing things, even if he didn’t turn up on the dime. There were some who said he had an unnatural power over the predators of the animal kingdom. A woman named Rose Kingman claimed to have seen him snap his fingers at a number of crows sitting on a telephone wire, and the crows fluttered down onto his shoulders, this Rose Kingman said, and she further testified that they had croaked “Flagg… Flagg… Flagg…” over and over.

That was just ridiculous, and he knew it. Morons might believe it, but Bobby Terry’s mother Delores had never raised any morons. He knew the way stories got around, growing between the mouth that spoke and the ear that listened. And how happy the dark man would be to encourage stories like that.

But the stories still gave him an atavistic little shiver, as though at the core of each there was a nugget of truth. Some said he could call the wolves, or send his spirit into the body of a cat. There was a man in Portland who said he carried a weasel or a fisher or something less nameable than either in that ratty old Boy Scout pack he wore when he was walking. Stupid stuff, all of it. But… just suppose he could talk to the animals, like a satanic Dr. Doolittle. And suppose he or Dave walked out to look at that damn dam in a direct contradiction of his orders, and was seen.

The penalty for disobedience was crucifixion.

Bobby Terry guessed that old dam wouldn’t break, anyway.

He shot a Kent out of the pack on the table and ht up, grimacing at the hot, dry taste. In another six months, none of the damn cigarettes would be smokable. Probably just as well. Fucking things were death, anyway.

He sighed and took another comic book off the stack. Some ridiculous fucking thing called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Ninja Turtles were supposed to be “heroes on a half-shell.” He threw Raphael, Donatello, and their numbfuck buddies across the store and the comic book they inhabited fluttered down in a tent shape on top of a cash register. It was things like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he thought, that made you believe the world was maybe just as well off destroyed.

He picked up the next one, a Batman —there was a hero you could at least sort of believe in—and was just turning to the first page when he saw the blue Scout go by out front, heading west. Its big tires splashed up muddy sheets of rainwater.

Bobby Terry stared with his mouth ajar at the place where it had passed. He couldn’t believe that the vehicle they were all looking for had just passed his post. To tell the truth, way down deep he had suspected this whole thing was nothing but a make-work shit detail.

He rushed to the front door and jerked it open. He ran out on the sidewalk, still holding the Batman comic book in one hand. Maybe the thing had been nothing but a hallucination. Thinking about Flagg could get anyone hallucinating.

But it wasn’t. He caught a glimpse of the Scout’s roof as it went down over the next hill and out of town. Then he was running back through the deserted five-and-dime, bawling for Dave at the top of his lungs.

The Judge held on to the steering wheel grimly, trying to pretend there was no such thing as arthritis, and if there was, he didn’t have it, and if he did have it, it never bothered him in damp weather. He didn’t try to take it any further because the rain was a fact, a pure-d fact, as his father would have said, and there was no hope but Mount Hope.

He wasn’t getting too far with the rest of the fantasy, either.

He had been running through rain for the last three days. It sometimes backed off to a drizzle, but mostly it had been nothing more or less than a good old solid downpour. And that was also a pure-d fact. The roads were on the point of washing out in some places, and by next spring a lot of them were going to be flat impassable. He had thanked God for the Scout many times on this little expedition.

The first three days, struggling along I-80, had convinced him that he wasn’t going to raise the West Coast before the year 2000 if he didn’t get off onto the secondary roads. The Interstate had been eerily deserted for long stretches, and in places he had been able to weave in and out of stalled traffic in second gear, but too many times he had been forced to hook the Scout’s winch on to some car’s back bumper and yank it off the road to make himself a hole he could crawl through.

By Rawlins, he’d had enough. He turned northwest on I-287, skirted the Great Divide Basin, and had camped two days later in Wyoming’s northwest corner, east of Yellowstone. Up here, the roads were almost completely empty. Crossing Wyoming and eastern Idaho had been a frightening, dreamlike experience. He would not have thought that the feeling of death could have set so heavily on such an empty land, nor on his own soul. But it was there—a malign stillness under all that big western sky, where once the deer and the Winnebagos had roamed. It was there in the telephone poles that had fallen over and not been repaired; it was there in the cold, waiting stillness of the small towns he drove his Scout through: Lamont, Muddy Gap, Jeffrey City, Lander, Crowheart.

His loneliness grew with his realization of the emptiness, with his internalization of the death feeling. He grew more and more certain that he was never going to see the Boulder Free Zone again, or the people who lived there—Frannie, Lucy, the Lauder boy, Nick Andros. He began to think he knew how Cain must have felt when God exiled him to the land of Nod.

Only that land had been to the east of Eden.

The Judge was now in the West.

He felt it most strongly crossing the border between Wyoming and Idaho. He came into Idaho through the Targhee Pass, and stopped by the roadside for a light lunch. There was no sound but the sullen boil of high water in a nearby creek, and an odd grinding sound that reminded him of dirt in a doorhinge. Overhead the blue sky was beginning to silt up with mackerel scales. Wet weather coming, and arthritis coming with it. His arthritis had been very quiet so far, in spite of the exercise and the long hours of driving and…

…and what was that grinding sound?

When he had finished his lunch, he got his Garand out of the Scout and went down to the picnic area by the stream—it would have been a pleasant place to eat in kindlier weather. There was a small grove of trees, several tables spotted among them. And hanging from one of the trees, his shoes almost touching the ground, was a hanged man, his head grotesquely cocked, his flesh nearly picked clean by the birds. The grinding, creaking sound was the rope slipping back and forth on the branch over which it had been looped. It was almost frayed through.

That was how he had come to know he was in the West.

That afternoon, around four o’clock, the first hesitant splashes of rain had struck the Scout’s windshield. It had been raining ever since.

He reached Butte City two days later, and the pain in his fingers and knees had gotten so bad that he had stopped for a full day, holed up in a motel room. Stretched out on the motel bed in the great silence, hot towels wrapped around his hands and knees, reading Lapham’s Law and the Classes of Society, Judge Farris looked like a weird cross between the Ancient Mariner and a Valley Forge survivor.

Stocking up well on aspirin and brandy, he pushed on, patiently searching out secondary roads, putting the Scout in four-wheel drive and churning his muddy way around wrecks rather than using the winch when he could, so as to spare himself the necessary flexing and bending that came with attaching it. It was not always possible. Approaching the Salmon River Mountains on September 5, two days ago, he had been forced to hook on to a large ConTel telephone truck and haul it a mile and a half in reverse before the shoulder fell away on one side and he was able to dump the bastardly thing into a river for which he had no name.

On the night of September 4, one day before the ConTel truck and three days before Bobby Terry spotted him passing through Copperfield, he had camped in New Meadows, and a rather unsettling thing happened. He had pulled in at the Ranchhand Motel, got a key to one of the units in the office, and had found a bonus—a battery-operated heater, which he set up by the foot of his bed. Dusk had found him really warm and comfortable for the first time in a week. The heater put out a strong, mellow glow. He was stripped to his underwear shorts, propped up on the pillows, and reading about a case where an uneducated black woman from Brixton, Mississippi, had been sentenced to ten years on a common shoplifting offense. The assistant D.A. who had tried the case and three of the jurors had been black, and Lapham seemed to be pointing out that—

Tap, tap, tap: at the window.

The Judge’s old heart staggered in his chest. Lapham went flying. He grabbed for the Garand leaning against the chair and turned to the window, ready for anything. His cover story went flying through his mind like jackstraws blown in the wind. This was it, they’d want to know who he was, where he’d come from—

It was a crow.

The Judge relaxed, a little at a time, and managed a small, shaken smile.

Just a crow.

It sat on the outer sill in the rain, its glossy feathers pasted together in a comic way, its little eyes looking through the dripping pane at one very old lawyer and the world’s oldest amateur spy, lying on a motel bed in western Idaho, wearing nothing but boxer shorts with LOS ANGELES LAKERS printed all over them in purple and gold, a heavy lawbook across his big belly. The crow seemed almost to grin at the sight. The Judge relaxed all the way and grinned back. That’s right, the joke’s on me. But after two weeks of pushing on alone through this empty country, he felt he had a right to be a little jumpy.

Tap, tap, tap.

The crow, tapping the pane of glass with his beak. Tapping as he had tapped before.

The Judge’s smile faltered a bit. There was something in the way the crow was looking at him that he didn’t quite like. It still seemed almost to grin, but he could have sworn it was a contemptuous grin, a kind of sneer.

Tap, tap, tap.

Like the raven that had flown in to roost on the bust of Pallas. When will I find out the things they need to know, back in the Free Zone that seems so far away? Nevermore. Will I get any idea what chinks there might be in the dark man’s armor? Nevermore.

Will I get back safe?

Nevermore.

Tap, tap, tap.

The crow, looking in at him, seeming to grin.

And it came to him with a dreamy, testicle-shriveling certainty that this was the dark man, his soul, his ka somehow projected into this rain-drenched, grinning crow that was looking in at him, checking up on him.

He stared at it, fascinated.

The crow’s eyes seemed to grow larger. They were rimmed with red, he noticed, a darkly rich ruby color. Rainwater dripped and ran, dripped and ran. The crow leaned forward and, very deliberately, tapped on the glass.

The Judge thought: It thinks it’s hypnotizing me. And maybe it is, a little. But maybe I’m too old for such things. And suppose… it’s silly, of course, but suppose it is him. And suppose I could bring that rifle up in one quick snap motion? It’s been four years since I shot any skeet, but I was club champion back in ‘76 and again in ‘79, and still pretty good in ‘86. Not great, no ribbon that year so I gave it up, my pride was in better shape than my eyesight by then, but I was still good enough to place fifth in a field of twenty-two. And that window’s a lot closer than skeet-shooting distance. If it was him, could I kill him? Trap his ka—if there is such a thing—inside that dying crow body? Would it be so unfitting if an old geezer could end the whole thing by the undramatic murder of a blackbird in western Idaho?

The crow grinned at him. He was now quite sure it was grinning.

With a sudden lunge the Judge sat up, bringing the Garand up to his shoulder in a quick, sure motion—he did it better than he ever would have dreamed. A kind of terror seemed to seize the crow. Its rain-drenched wings fluttered, spraying drops of water. Its eyes seemed to widen in fear. The Judge heard it utter a strangled caw! and he felt a moment’s triumphant certainty: It was the black man, and he had misjudged the Judge, and the price for it would be his miserable life—

“EAT THIS! ” the Judge thundered, and squeezed the trigger.

But the trigger would not depress, because he had left the safety on. A moment later the window was empty except for the rain.

The Judge lowered the Garand to his lap, feeling dull and stupid. He told himself it was just a crow after all, a moment’s diversion to liven up the evening. And if he had blown out the window and let the rain in, he would have had to go to the botheration of changing rooms. Lucky, really.

But he slept poorly that night, and several times he started awake and stared toward the window, convinced that he heard a ghostly tapping sound there. And if the crow happened to land there again, it wouldn’t get away. He left the safety catch off the rifle.

But the crow didn’t come back.

The next morning he had driven west again, his arthritis no worse but certainly no better, and at just past eleven he had stopped at a small café for lunch. And as he finished his sandwich and thermos of coffee, he had seen a large black crow flutter down and land on the telephone wire half a block up the street. The Judge watched it, fascinated, the red thermos cup stopped dead halfway between the table and his mouth. It wasn’t the same crow, of course not. There must be millions of crows by now, all of them plump and sassy. It was a crow’s world now. But all the same, he felt that it was the same crow, and he felt a presentiment of doom, a creeping resignation that it was all over.

He was no longer hungry.

He pushed on. Some days later, at quarter past twelve in the afternoon, now in Oregon and moving west on Highway 86, he drove through the town of Copperfield, not even glancing toward the five-and-dime where Bobby Terry watched him go by, slackjawed with amazement. The Garand was beside him on the seat, the safety still off, a box of ammo beside it. The Judge had decided to shoot any crow he might see.

Just on general principles.

“Faster! Can’t you move this fucking thing any faster?”

“You get off my ass, Bobby Terry. Just because you were asleep at the switch is no reason to get on my butt.”

Dave Roberts was behind the wheel of the Willys International that had been parked nose-out in the alley beside the five-and-dime. By the time Bobby Terry had gotten Dave awake and up and dressed, the old geezer in the Scout had gotten a ten-minute start on them. The rain was coming down hard, and visibility was poor. Bobby Terry was holding a Winchester across his lap. There was a .45 Colt tucked in his belt.

Dave, who was wearing cowboy boots, jeans, a yellow foul-weather slicker, and nothing else, glanced over at him.

“You keep squeezing the trigger of that rifle and you’re going to blow a hole right through your door, Bobby Terry.”

“You just catch him,” Bobby Terry said. He muttered to himself. “The guts. Got to shoot him in the guts. Dasn’t mark the head. Right.”

“Stop talkin to yourself. People who talk to theirselves play with theirselves. That’s what I think.”

“Where is he?” Bobby Terry asked.

“We’ll get him. Unless you dreamed the whole thing. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if you did, brother.”

“I didn’t. It was that Scout. But what if he turns off?”

“Turns off where?” Dave asked. “There’s nothing but farm roads all the way to the Interstate. He couldn’t get fifty feet up a one of them without going into the mud up to his fenders, four-wheel drive and all. Relax, Bobby Terry.”

Bobby Terry said miserably, “I can’t. I keep wonderin how it’d feel to get hung up to dry on some telephone pole out in the desert.”

“Can that!… And lookit there! See im? We’re sniffin up his ass now, by God!”

Ahead of them was a months-old head-on collision between a Chevy and a big heavy Buick. They lay in the rain, blocking the road from one side to the other like the rusted bones of unburied mastodons. To the right, deep fresh tire tracks were printed into the shoulder.

“That’s him,” Dave said. “Those tracks ain’t five minutes old.”

He swung the Willys out and around the smashup, and they bounced wildly along the shoulder. Dave swung back onto the road where the Judge had before him, and they both saw the muddy herringbone pattern of the Scout’s tires on the asphalt. At the top of the next hill, they saw the Scout just disappearing over a knoll some two miles distant.

“Howdy-doody!” Dave Roberts cried. “Go for broke!”

He floored the accelerator and the Willys crept up to sixty. The windshield was a silvery blur of rain that the wipers could not hope to keep up with. At the top of the knoll they saw the Scout again, closer. Dave yanked out his headlight switch and began to work the dimmer switch with his foot. After a few moments, the Scout’s taillights flashed on.

“All right,” Dave said. “We act friendly. Get him to step out. Don’t you go off half-cocked, Bobby Terry. If we do this right, we’re gonna have a couple of suites at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Fuck it up and we’re gonna get our assholes cored out. So don’t you fuck up. Get him to step out.”

“Oh my God, why couldn’t he have come through Robinette?” Bobby Terry whined. His hands were locked on the Winchester.

Dave whacked at one of them. “You don’t carry that rifle out, either.”

“But—”

“Shut up! Get a smile on, goddam you!”

Bobby Terry began to grin. It was like watching a mechanical funhouse clown grin.

“You nogood,” Dave snarled. “I’ll do it. Stay in the goddam car.”

They had pulled even with the Scout, which was idling with two wheels on the pavement and two on the soft shoulder. Smiling, Dave got out. His hands were in the pockets of his yellow slicker. In the lefthand pocket was a .38 Police Special.

The Judge climbed carefully down from the Scout. He was also wearing a yellow rain slicker. He walked carefully, bearing himself the way a man might bear a fragile vase. The arthritis was loose in him like a pack of tigers. He carried the Garand rifle in his left hand.

“Hey, you won’t shoot me with that, will you?” the man from the Willys said with a friendly grin.

“I guess not,” the Judge said. They spoke over the steady hiss of the rain. “You must have been back in Copperfield.”

“So we were. I’m Dave Roberts.” He stuck out his right hand.

“Farris is my name,” said the Judge, and put out his own right hand. He glanced up toward the passenger window of the Willys and saw Bobby Terry leaning out, holding his .45 in both hands. Rain was dripping off the barrel. His face, dead pale, was still frozen in that maniacal funhouse grin.

“Oh bastard,” the Judge murmured, and pulled his hand out of Roberts’s rain-slippery grip just as Roberts fired through the pocket of his slicker. The bullet ploughed through the Judge’s midsection just below the stomach, flattening, spinning, mushrooming, coming out to the right of his spine, leaving an exit hole the size of a tea saucer. The Garand fell from his hand onto the road and he was driven back into the Scout’s open driver’s side door.

None of them noticed the crow that had fluttered down to a telephone wire on the far side of the road.

Dave Roberts took a step forward to finish the job. As he did, Bobby Terry fired from the passenger window of the Willys. His bullet took Roberts in the throat, tearing most of it away. A fury of blood cascaded down the front of Roberts’s slicker and mixed with the rain. He turned toward Bobby Terry, his jaw working in soundless, dying amazement, his eyes bulging. He took two shuffling steps forward, and then the amazement went out of his face. Everything went out of it. He fell dead. Rain plinked and drummed on the back of his slicker.

“Oh shit, lookit this! ” Bobby Terry cried in utter dismay.

The Judge thought: My arthritis is gone. If I could live, I could stun the medical profession. The cure for arthritis is a bullet in the guts. Oh dear God, they were laying for me. Did Flagg tell them? He must have, Jesus help whoever else the committee sent over here…

The Garand was lying on the road. He bent for it, feeling his guts trying to run right out of his body. Strange feeling. Not very pleasant. Never mind. He got hold of the gun. Was the safety off? Yes. He began to bring it up. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

Bobby Terry ripped his stunned gaze away from Dave at last, just in time to see the Judge preparing to shoot him. The Judge was sitting on the road. His slicker was red with blood from chest to hem. He had settled the barrel of the Garand on his knee.

Bobby snapped a shot and missed. The Garand went off with a giant thunderclap and jagged glass sprayed Bobby Terry’s face. He screamed, sure he was dead. Then he saw that the left half of the windshield was gone and understood that he was still in the running.

The Judge was ponderously correcting his aim, swiveling the Garand perhaps two degrees on his knee. Bobby Terry, his nerves entirely shot now, fired three times in rapid succession. The first bullet spanged a hole through the side of the Scout’s cab. The second struck the Judge above the right eye. A .45 is a large gun, and at close range it does large, unpleasant things. This bullet took off most of the top of the Judge’s skull and hurled it back into the Scout. His head tilted back radically, and Bobby Terry’s third bullet struck the Judge a quarter of an inch below his lower lip, exploding his teeth into his mouth, where he aspirated them with his final breath. His chin and jawbone disintegrated. His finger squeezed the Garand’s trigger in a dying convulsion, but the bullet went wild into the white, rainy sky.

Silence descended.

Rain drummed on the roofs of the Scout and the Willys. On the slickers of the two dead men. It was the only sound until the crow took off from the telephone wire with a raucous caw. That startled Bobby Terry out of his daze. He got slowly down from the passenger seat, still clutching the smoking .45.

“I did it,” he said confidentially to the rain. “Killed his ass. You better believe it. Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Fuckin-A right. Ole Bobby Terry just killed him as dead as you’d want.”

But with dawning horror, he realized that it wasn’t the Judge’s ass he’d killed after all.

The Judge had died leaning back into the Scout. Now Bobby Terry grabbed the lapels of his slicker and yanked him forward; staring at what remained of the Judge’s features. There was really nothing left but his nose. To tell the truth, that wasn’t in such hot shape, either.

It could have been anyone.

And in a dream of terror, Bobby Terry again heard Flagg saying: I want to send him back undamaged.

Holy God, this could be anyone. It was as if he had set out to deliberately do just the opposite of what the Walkin Dude had ordered. Two direct hits in the face. Even the teeth were gone.

Rain, drumming, drumming.

It was over here. That was all. He didn’t dare go east, and he didn’t dare stay in the West. He would either wind up riding a telephone pole bareback or… or something worse.

Were there worse things?

With that grinning freak in charge, Bobby Terry had no doubt there were. So what was the answer?

Running his hands through his hair, still looking down at the ruined face of the Judge, he tried to think.

South. That was the answer. South. No border guards anymore. South of Mexico, and if that wasn’t far enough, get on down to Guatemala, Panama, maybe fucking Brazil. Opt out of the whole mess. No more East, no more West, just Bobby Terry, safe and as far away from the Walkin Dude as his old boogie shoes could carry h—

A new sound in the rainy afternoon.

Bobby Terry’s head jerked up.

The rain, yes, making its steel drum sound on the cabs of the two vehicles, and the grumbling of two idling motors, and—

A strange clocking sound, like rundown bootheels hammering swiftly along the secondary road macadam.

“No,” Bobby Terry whispered.

He began to turn around.

The clocking sound was speeding up. A fast walk, a trot, a jog, run, sprint, and Bobby Terry got all the way around, too late, he was coming, Flagg was coming like some terrible horror monster out of the scariest picture ever made. The dark man’s cheeks were flushed with jolly color, his eyes were twinkling with happy good fellowship, and a great hungry voracious grin stretched his lips over huge tombstone teeth, shark teeth, and his hands were held out in front of him, and there were shiny black crowfeathers fluttering from his hair.

No, Bobby Terry tried to say, but nothing came out.

“HEY, BOBBY TERRY, YOU SCROOOOWED IT UP! ” the dark man bellowed, and fell upon the hapless Bobby Terry.

There were worse things than crucifixion.

There were teeth.

Chapter 62

Dayna Jurgens lay naked in the huge double bed, listening to the steady hiss of water coming from the shower, and looked up at her reflection in the big circular ceiling mirror, which was the exact shape and size of the bed it reflected. She thought that the female body always looks its best when it is flat on its back, stretched out, the tummy pulled flat, the breasts naturally upright without the vertical drag of gravity to pull them down. It was nine-thirty in the morning, September 8. The Judge had been dead about eighteen hours, Bobby Terry considerably less—unfortunately for him.

The shower ran on and on.

There’s a man with a cleanliness compulsion, she thought. I wonder what happened to him that makes him want to shower for half an hour at a stretch?

Her mind turned back to the Judge. Who would have figured that? In its own way, it was a damned brilliant idea. Who would have suspected an old man? Well, Flagg had, it seemed. Somehow he had known when and approximately where. A picket line had been set up all the way along the Idaho-Oregon border, with orders to kill him.

But the job had been botched somehow. Since suppertime last night, the upper echelon here in Las Vegas had been walking around with pasty faces and downcast eyes. Whitney Horgan, who was one damned fine cook, had served something that looked like dog food and was too burned to taste like much of anything. The Judge was dead, but something had gone wrong.

She got up and walked to the window and looked out over the desert. She saw two big Las Vegas High School buses trundling west on US 95 in the hot sunshine, headed out toward the Indian Springs airbase, where, she knew, a daily seminar in the art and craft of jet planes went on. There were over a dozen people in the West who knew how to fly, but by great good luck—for the Free Zone—none of them were checked out for the National Guard jets at Indian Springs.

But they were learning. Oh my, yes.

What was most important for her right now about the Judge’s demise was that they had known when they had no business knowing. Was there a spy of their own back in the Free Zone? That was possible, she supposed; spying was a game two could play at. But Sue Stern had told her that the decision to send spies into the West had been strictly a committee thing, and she doubted very much if any of those seven were in the Flagg bag. Mother Abagail would have known if one of the committee had turned rotten, for one thing. Dayna was sure of it.

That left a very unappetizing alternative. Flagg himself had just known.

Dayna had been in Las Vegas eight days as of today, and as far as she could tell she was a fully accepted member of the community. She had already accumulated enough information about the operation over here to scare the living Jesus out of everyone back in Boulder. It would only take the news about the jet plane training program to do that. But the thing that frightened her the most personally was the way people turned away from you if you mentioned Flagg’s name, the way they pretended they hadn’t heard. Some of them would cross their fingers, or genuflect, or make the sign of the evil eye behind one cupped hand. He was the great There/Not-There.

That was by day. By night, if you would just sit quietly by in the Cub Bar of the Grand or the Silver Slipper Room at The Cashbox, you heard stories about him, the beginning of myth. They talked slowly, haltingly, not looking at each other, drinking bottles of beer mostly. If you drank something stronger, you might lose control of your mouth, and that was dangerous. She knew that not all of what they said was the truth, but it was already impossible to separate the gilt embroidery from the whole cloth. She had heard he was a shape-changer, a werewolf, that he had started the plague himself, that he was the Antichrist whose coming was foretold in Revelation. She heard about the crucifixion of Hector Drogan, how he had just known Heck was freebasing… the way he had just known that the Judge was on the way, apparently.

And he was never referred to as Flagg in these nightly discussions; it was as if they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle. They called him the dark man. The Walkin Dude. The tall man. And Ratty Erwins called him Old Creeping Judas.

If he had known about the Judge, didn’t it stand to reason that he knew about her?

The shower turned off.

Keep it together, sweetie. He encourages the mumbo jumbo. It makes him look taller. It could be that he does have a spy in the Free Zone—it wouldn’t necessarily have to be someone on the committee, just someone who told him Judge Farris wasn’t the defector type.

“You shouldn’t walk around like that with no clothes on, sweetbuns. You’ll get me horny all over again.”

She turned toward him, her smile rich and inviting, thinking that she would like to take him downstairs to the kitchen and stuff that thing he was so goddam proud of into Whitney Horgan’s industrial meat-grinder. “Why do you think I was walking around with no clothes on?”

He looked at his watch. “Well, we got maybe forty minutes.” His penis was already beginning to make twitching movements… like a divining rod, Dayna thought with sour amusement.

“Well, come on then.” He came toward her and she pointed at his chest. “And take that thing off. It gives me the creeps.”

Lloyd Henreid looked down at the amulet, dark teardrop marked with a single red flaw, and slipped it off. He put it on the night table and the fine-linked chain made a little hissing sound. “Better?”

“All kinds of better.”

She held out her arms. A moment later he was on top of her. A moment after that he was thrusting into her.

“You like that?” he panted. “You like the way that feels, sweetie?”

“God, I love it,” she moaned, thinking of the meat-grinder, all white enamel and gleaming steel.

“What?”

“I said I love it!” she screamed.

She faked an orgasm shortly after that, tossing her hips wildly, crying out. He came seconds later (she had shared Lloyd’s bed for four days now, and had his rhythms timed almost perfectly), and as she felt his semen beginning to run down her thigh, she happened to glance over at the night table.

Black stone.

Red flaw.

It seemed to be staring at her.

She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie.

It sees me, she thought with hopeless horror in that defenseless moment before rationality reasserted itself. More: it sees THROUGH me.

Afterward, as she had hoped, Lloyd talked. That was part of his rhythm, too. He would put an arm around her bare shoulders, smoke a cigarette, look up at their reflections in the mirror over the bed, and tell her what was going on.

“Glad I wasn’t that Bobby Terry,” he said. “No sir, no way. The main man wanted that old fart’s head without so much as a bruise on it. Wanted to send it back over the Rockies. And look what happened. That numbnuts puts two .45 slugs into his face. At close range. I guess he deserved what he got, but I’m glad I wasn’t there.”

“What happened to him?”

“Sweetbuns, don’t ask.”

“How did he know? The big guy?”

“He was there.”

She felt a chill.

“Just happened to be there?”

“Yeah. He just happens to be anywhere that there’s trouble. Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to LA with…”

“What did he do?”

For a long time she didn’t think he was going to answer. Usually she could gently push him in the direction she wanted him to go by asking a series of soft, respectful questions; making him feel as if he was (in the never-to-be-forgotten words of her kid sister) King Shit of Turd Mountain. But this time she had a feeling she had pushed too far until Lloyd said in a funny, squeezed voice:

“He just looked at him. Eric was laying down all this funky shit about how he wanted to see the Vegas operation run… we should do this, we should do that. Poor old Trash—he ain’t all the way together himself, you know—was just staring at him like he was a TV actor or something. Eric’s pacing back and forth like he’s addressing a jury and like it was already proved he was going to get his own way. And he says—real soft—‘Eric.’ Like that. And Eric looked at him. I didn’t see nothing. But Eric just looked at him for a long time. Maybe five minutes. His eyes just got bigger and bigger… and then he started to drool… and then he started to giggle… and he giggled right along with Eric, and that scared me. When Flagg laughs, you get scared. But Eric just kept right on giggling, and then he said, ‘When you go back, drop him off in the Mojave.’ And that’s what we did. And for all I know, Eric’s wandering around out there right now. He looked at Eric for five minutes and drove him out of his mind.”

He took a large drag on his cigarette and crushed it out. Then he slung an arm around her. “Why are we talkin about bad shit like that?”

“I don’t know… how’s it going out at Indian Springs?”

Lloyd brightened. The Indian Springs project was his baby. “Good. Real good. We’re going to have three guys checked out on the Skyhawk planes by the first of October, maybe sooner. Hank Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he’s a fucking genius. About some things he’s not too bright, but when it comes to weapons, he’s incredible.”

She had met Trashcan Man twice. Both times she had felt a chill slip over her when his strange, muddy eyes happened to light upon her, and a palpable sense of relief when those eyes passed on. It was obvious that many of the others—Lloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man—saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck charm. One of his arms was a horrid mass of freshly healed burn tissue, and she remembered something peculiar that had happened two nights ago. Hank Rawson had been talking. He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, and finished what he was saying before lighting the cigarette and shaking out the match. Dayna saw the way that Trashcan Man’s eyes homed in on the match flame, the way his breathing seemed to stop. It was as if his whole being had focused on the tiny flame. It was like watching a starving man contemplate a nine-course dinner. Then Hank shook out the match and dropped the blackened stub into an ashtray. The moment had ended.

“He’s good with weapons?” she asked Lloyd.

“He’s great with them. The Skyhawks have under-wing missiles, air-to-ground. Shrikes. Weird how they name all that shit, isn’t it? No one could figure out how the goddam things went on the planes. No one could figure out how to arm them or safety-control them. Christ, it took us most of one day to figure out how to get them off the storage racks. So Hank says, ‘We better get Trashy out here when he gets back and see if he can figure it out.’”

“When he gets back?”

“Yeah, he’s a funny dude. He’s been in Vegas almost a week now, but he’ll be taking off again pretty quick.”

“Where does he go?”

“Into the desert. He takes a Land-Rover and just goes. He’s a strange guy, I tell you. In his way, Trash is almost as strange as the big guy himself. West of here there’s nothing but empty desert and godforsaken waste. I ought to know. I did time way up west in a hellhole called Brownsville Station. I don’t know how he lives out there, but he does. He looks for new toys, and he always comes back with a few. About a week after him and me got back from L.A., he brought back a pile of army machine guns with laser sights—never-miss machine guns, Hank calls them. This time it was Teller mines, contact mines, fragment mines, and a canister of Parathion. He said he found a whole stockpile of Parathion. Also enough defoliant to turn the whole state of Colorado bald as an egg.”

“Where does he find it?”

“Everywhere,” Lloyd said simply. “He sniffs it out, sweetbuns. It isn’t really so strange. Most of western Nevada and eastern California was owned by the good old U.S.A. It’s where they tested their toys, all the way up to A-bombs. He’ll be dragging one of those back someday.”

He laughed. Dayna felt cold, terribly cold.

“The superflu started somewhere out here. I’d lay money on it. Maybe Trash will find it. I tell you, he just sniffs that stuff out. The big guy says just give him his head and let him run, and so that’s what he does. You know what his favorite toy is right now?”

“No,” Dayna said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know… but why else had she come over here?

“Flametracks.”

“What are flametrucks?”

“Not trucks, tracks. He’s got five of them out at Indian Springs, lined up like Formula One racecars.” Lloyd laughed. “They used them in the Nam. The grunts called them Zippos. They’re full of napalm. Trash loves em.”

“Neato,” she muttered.

“Anyway, when Trash came back this time, we took him out to the Springs. He hummed and muttered around those Shrikes and got them armed and mounted in about six hours. Can you believe that? They train Air Force technicians about ninety years to do stuff like that. But they’re not Trash, you see. He’s a fucking genius.”

Idiot savant, you mean. I bet I know how he got those burns, too.

Lloyd looked at his watch and sat up. “Speaking of Indian Springs, I got to get out there. Just got time for another shower. You want to join me?”

“Not this time.”

She got dressed after the shower began to run again. So far she had always managed to get dressed and undressed with him out of the room, and that was the way she intended to keep it.

She strapped the clip to her forearm and slid the switchblade knife into its spring-loaded clasp. A quick twist of her wrist would deliver all ten inches of it into her hand.

Well, she thought as she slipped into her blouse, a girl has to have some secrets.

During the afternoons, she was on a streetlamp maintenance crew. What the job amounted to was testing the bulbs with a simple gadget and replacing them if they had burned out, or if they had been broken by vandals when Las Vegas had been in the grip of the superflu. There were four of them on the job, and they had a cherry-picker truck that trundled around from post to post and street to street.

Late that afternoon, Dayna was up in the cherry-picker, removing the Plexiglas hood from one of the streetlamps and musing on how much she liked the people she was working with, particularly Jenny Engstrom, a tough and beautiful ex-nightclub dancer who was now running the cherry-picker’s controls. She was the type of girl Dayna would have wanted for her best friend, and it confused her that Jenny was over here, on the dark man’s side. It confused her so much that she didn’t dare ask Jenny for an explanation.

The others were also okay. She thought that Vegas had a rather larger proportion of stupids than the Zone, but none of them wore fangs, and they didn’t turn into bats at moonrise. They were also people who worked much harder than she remembered the people in the Zone working. In the Free Zone you saw people idling in the parks at all hours of the day, and there were people who decided to break for lunch from noon until two. That sort of thing didn’t happen over here. From 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., everybody was working, either at Indian Springs or on the maintenance crews here in town. And school had started again. There were about twenty kids in Vegas, ages ranging from four (that was Daniel McCarthy, the pet of everyone in town, known as Dinny) up to fifteen. They had found two people with teaching certificates, and classes went on five days a week. Lloyd, who had quit school after repeating his junior year for the third time, was very proud of the educational opportunities that were being provided. The pharmacies were open and unguarded. People came and went all the time… but they took away nothing heavier than a bottle of aspirin or Gelusil. There was no drug problem in the West. Anyone who had seen what had happened to Hector Drogan knew what the penalty for a habit was. There were no Rich Moffats, either. Everyone was friendly and straight. And it was wise to drink nothing stronger than bottled beer.

Germany in 1938, she thought. The Nazis? Oh, they’re charming people. Very athletic. They don’t go to the nightclubs, the nightclubs are for the tourists. What do they do? They make clocks.

Was it a fair comparison? Dayna wondered uneasily, thinking of Jenny Engstrom, who she liked so much. She didn’t know… but she thought that maybe it was.

She tested the bulb in the hood of the light standard. It was bad. She removed it, set it carefully between her feet, and got the last fresh one. Good, it was near the end of the day. It was—

She glanced down and froze.

People were coming back from the bus stop, headed home from Indian Springs. All of them were glancing up casually, the way a group of people always glance up at someone high in the air. The circus-for-free syndrome.

That face, looking up at her.

That wide, smiling, wondering face.

Dear sweet Jesus in heaven, is that Tom Cullen?

A dribble of salt-stinging sweat ran into her eye, doubling her vision. When she wiped it away, the face was gone. The people from the bus stop were halfway down the street, swinging their lunch buckets, talking and joking. Dayna gazed at the one she thought might be Tom, but from the rear it was so hard to tell—

Tom? Would they send Tom?

Surely not. That was so crazy it was almost—

Almost sane.

But she just couldn’t believe it.

“Hey, Jurgens!” Jenny called up brassily. “Did you fall asleep up there, or are you just playing with yourself?”

Dayna leaned over the cherry-picker’s low railing and looked down at Jenny’s upturned face. Gave her the finger. Jenny laughed. Dayna went back to her streetlamp bulb, struggling to snap it in, and by the time she had it right, it was time to knock off for the day. On the ride back to the garage, she was quiet and preoccupied… quiet enough for Jenny to comment on it.

“Just got nothing to say, I guess,” Dayna told her with a half-smile.

It couldn’t have been Tom.

Could it?

“Wake up! Wake up! Goddammit, wake up, you bitch!”

She was coming out of murky sleep when a foot caught her in the small of the back, knocking her out of the big round bed and onto the floor. She came awake at once, blinking and confused.

Lloyd was there, looking down at her with cold anger. Whitney Horgan. Ken DeMott. Ace High. Jenny. Only Jenny’s usually open face was also blank and cold.

“Jen—?”

No answer. Dayna got up on her knees, dimly aware of her nakedness, more aware of the cold circle of faces looking down at her. The expression on Lloyd’s face was that of a man who has been betrayed and has discovered the betrayal.

Am I dreaming this?

“Get the fuck dressed, you lying, spying bitch!”

Okay, so it was no dream. She felt a sinking terror in her stomach that seemed almost preordained. They had known about the Judge, and now they knew about her. He had told them. She glanced at the clock on the night table. It was quarter of four in the morning. The Hour of the Secret Police, she thought.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Around,” Lloyd said grimly. His face was pale and shiny. His amulet lay in the open V of his shirt. “You’ll wish he wasn’t before long.”

“Lloyd?”

“What.”

“I gave you VD, Lloyd. I hope it rots off.”

He kicked her just below the breastbone, knocking her on her back.

“I hope it rots off, Lloyd.”

“Shut up and get dressed.”

“Get out of here. I don’t dress in front of any man.”

Lloyd kicked her again, this time in the bicep of her right arm. The pain was tremendous and her mouth drew down in a quivering bow but she didn’t cry out.

“You in a little hot water, Lloyd? Sleeping with Mata Hari?” She grinned at him with tears of pain standing in her eyes.

“Come on, Lloyd,” Whitney Horgan said. He saw murder in Lloyd’s eyes and now stepped forward quickly and put a hand on Lloyd’s arm. “We’ll go in the living room. Jenny can watch her get dressed.”

“And what if she decides to jump out the window?”

“She won’t get the chance,” Jenny said. Her broad face was dead blank, and for the first time Dayna noticed she was wearing a pistol on her hip.

“She can’t anyway,” Ace High said. “The windows up here are just for show, didn’t you know that? Sometimes big losers at the tables get wanting to take a high dive, and that would be bad publicity for the hotel. So they don’t open.” His eyes fell on Dayna, and they held a touch of compassion. “Now you, babe, you’re a real big loser.”

“Come on, Lloyd,” Whitney said again. “You’re going to do something you’ll be sorry for later—kick her in the head or something—if you don’t get out of here.”

“Okay.” They went to the door together, and Lloyd looked back over his shoulder. “He’s going to make it bad for you, you bitch.”

“You were the crappiest lover I ever had, Lloyd,” she said sweetly.

He tried to lunge back at her, but Whitney and Ken DeMott held him back and drew him through the doorway. The double doors closed with a low snicking sound.

“Get dressed, Dayna,” Jenny said.

Dayna stood up, still rubbing the purpling bruise on her arm. “You people like that?” she asked. “Is that where you’re at? People like Lloyd Henreid?”

“You were the one sleeping with him, not me.” Her face showed an emotion for the first time: angry reproach. “You think it’s nice to come over here and spy on folks? You deserve everything you’re going to get. And, sister, you’re going to get a lot.”

“I was sleeping with him for a reason.” She drew on her panties. “And I was spying for a reason.”

“Why don’t you just shut up?”

Dayna turned and looked at Jenny. “What do you think they’re doing here, girl? Why do you think they’re learning to fly those jets out at Indian Springs? Those Shrike missiles, do you think they’re so Flagg can win his girl a Kewpie doll at the country fair?”

Jenny pressed her lips tightly together. “That’s none of my business.”

“Will it be none of your business if they use the jets to fly over the Rockies next spring and the missiles to wipe out everyone living there?”

“I hope they do. It’s us or you people; that’s what he says. And I believe him.”

“They believed Hitler, too. But you don’t believe him; you’re just scared gutless of him.”

“Get dressed, Dayna.”

Dayna pulled on her slacks, buttoned them, zipped them. Then she put her hand to her mouth. “I… I think I’m going to throw up… God!…” Clutching her long-sleeved blouse in her hand, she turned and ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She made loud retching noises.

“Open the door, Dayna! Open it or I’ll shoot the lock out of it!”

“Sick—” She made another loud retching noise. Standing on tiptoe, she felt along the top of the medicine cabinet, thanking God she had left the knife and its spring clip up here, praying for another twenty seconds—

She had the clip. She strapped it on. Now there were other voices in the bedroom.

With her left hand she turned on the water in the basin. “Just a minute, I’m sick, dammit!”

But they weren’t going to give her a minute. Someone dealt the bathroom door a kick and it shuddered in its frame. Dayna clicked the knife home. It lay along her forearm like a deadly arrow. Moving with desperate speed, she yanked the blouse on and buttoned the sleeves. Splashed water on her mouth. Flushed the toilet.

Another kick dealt to the door. Dayna twisted the knob and they burst in, Lloyd looking wild-eyed, Jenny standing behind Ken DeMott and Ace High, her pistol drawn.

“I puked,” Dayna said coldly. “Too bad you couldn’t watch it, huh?”

Lloyd grabbed her by the shoulder and threw her out into the bedroom. “I ought to break your neck, you cunt.”

“Remember your master’s voice.” She buttoned the front of her blouse, sweeping them with her flashing eyes. “He’s your dog-god, isn’t that right? Kiss his ass and you belong to him.”

“You better just shut up,” Whitney said gruffly. “You’re only making it worse for yourself.”

She looked at Jenny, unable to understand how the openly smiling, bawdy day-girl could have changed into this blank-faced night-thing. “Don’t you see that he’s getting ready to start it all over again?” she asked them desperately. “The killing, the shooting… the plague? ”

“He’s the biggest and the strongest,” Whitney said with curious gentleness. “He’s going to wipe you people off the face of the earth.”

“No more talk,” Lloyd said. “Let’s go.”

They moved to take her arms, but she stepped away, holding her arms across her body, and shook her head. “I’ll walk,” she said.

The casino was deserted except for a number of men with rifles, sitting or standing by the doors. They seemed to find interesting things to look at on the walls, the ceilings, and the bare gaming tables as the elevator doors opened and Lloyd’s party stepped out, herding Dayna along.

She was taken to the gate at the end of the rank of cashiers’ windows. Lloyd opened it with a small key and they stepped through. She was herded quickly through an area that looked like a bank: there were adding machines, wastebaskets full of paper tapes, jars of rubber bands and paper clips. Computer screens, now gray and blank. Cash drawers ajar. Money had spilled out some of them and lay on the tile floors. Most of the bills were fifties and hundreds.

At the rear of the cashiers’ area, Whitney opened another door and Dayna was led down a carpeted hallway to an empty receptionist’s office. Tastefully decorated. Free-form white desk for a tasteful secretary who had died, coughing and hacking up great green gobbets of phlegm, some months ago. A picture on the wall that looked like a Klee print. A mellow light-brown shag rug. The antechamber to the seat of power.

Fear trickled into the hollows of her body like cold water, stiffening her up, making her feel awkward. Lloyd leaned over the desk and flicked the toggle switch there. Dayna saw that he was sweating lightly. “We have her, R.F.”

She felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her and was helpless to stop it—not that she cared. “R.F.! R.F.! Oh, that’s good! Ready when you are, C.B.!” She went off into a gale of giggles, and suddenly Jenny slapped her.

“Shut up!” she hissed. “You don’t know what you’re in for.”

“I know,” Dayna said, looking at her. “You and the rest, you’re the ones who don’t know.”

A voice came out of the intercom, warm and pleased and cheerful. “Very good, Lloyd, thanks. Send her in, please.”

“Alone?”

“Yes indeed.” There was an indulgent chuckle as the intercom cut off. Dayna felt her mouth dry up at the sound of it.

Lloyd turned around. A lot of sweat now, standing out on his forehead in large drops and running down his thin cheeks like tears. “You heard him. Go on.”

She folded her arms below her breasts, keeping the knife turned inward. “Suppose I decline.”

“I’ll drag you in.”

“Look at you, Lloyd. You’re so scared you couldn’t drag a mongrel puppy in there.” She looked at the others. “You’re all scared. Jenny, you’re practically making in your pants. Not good for your complexion, dear. Or your pants.”

“Stop it, you filthy sneak,” Jenny whispered.

“I was never scared like that in the Free Zone,” Dayna said. “I felt good over there. I came over here because I wanted that good feeling to stay on. It was nothing more political than that. You ought to think it over. Maybe he sells fear because he’s got nothing else to sell.”

“Ma’am,” Whitney said apologetically, “I’d sure like to listen to the rest of your sermon, but the man is waiting. I’m sorry, but you either got to say amen and go through that door on your own or I’ll drag you. You can tell your tale to him once you get in there… if you can find enough spit to talk with, that is. But until then, you’re our responsibility.” And the odd thing is, she thought, he sounds genuinely sorry. Too bad he’s also so genuinely scared.

“You won’t have to do that.”

She forced her feet to get started, and then it was a little easier. She was going to her death; she was quite sure of that. If so, let it be so. She had the knife. For him first, if she could, and then for herself, if necessary.

She thought: My name is Dayna Roberta Jurgens, and I am afraid, but I have been afraid before. All he can take from me is what I would have to give up someday anyhow—my life. I will not let him break me down. I will not let him make me less than I am, if I can possibly help it. I want to die well… and I am going to have what I want.

She turned the knob and stepped through into the inner office… and into the presence of Randall Flagg.

The room was large and mostly bare. The desk had been shoved up against the far wall, the executive swivel chair pinned behind it. The pictures were covered with dropcloths. The lights were off.

Across the room, a drape had been pulled back to uncover a window-wall of glass that looked out on the desert. Dayna thought she had never seen such a sterile and uninviting vista in her life. Overhead was a moon like a small, highly polished silver coin. It was nearly full.

Standing there, looking out, was the shape of a man.

He continued to look out long after she had entered, indifferently presenting her his back, before he turned. How long does it take a man to turn around? Two, maybe three seconds at the most. But to Dayna it seemed that the dark man went on turning forever, showing more and more of himself, like the very moon he had been watching. She became a child again, struck dumb by the dreadful curiosity of great fear. For a moment she was caught entirely in the web of his attraction, his glamour, and she was sure that when the turn was completed, unknown eons from now, she would be staring into the face of her dreams: a Gothic cowled monk, his hood shaped around total darkness. A negative man with no face. She would see and then go mad.

Then he was looking at her, walking forward, smiling warmly, and her first shocked thought was: Why, he’s my age!

Randy Flagg’s hair was dark, tousled. His face was handsome and ruddy, as if he spent much time out in the desert wind. His features were mobile and sensitive, and his eyes danced with high glee, the eyes of a small child with a momentous and wonderful secret surprise.

“Dayna!” he said. “Hi!”

“H-H-Hello.” She could say no more. She had thought she was prepared for anything, but she hadn’t been prepared for this. Her mind had been knocked, reeling, to the mat. He was smiling at her confusion. Then he spread his hands, as if in apology. He was wearing a faded paisley shirt with a frayed collar, pegged jeans, and a very old pair of cowboy boots with rundown heels.

“What did you expect? A vampire?” His smile broadened, almost demanding that she smile back. “A skin-turner? What have they been telling you about me?”

“They’re afraid,” she said. “Lloyd was… sweating like a pig.” His smile was still demanding an answering smile, and it took all her effort of will to deny him that. She had been kicked out of bed on his orders. Brought here to… what? Confess? Tell everything she knew about the Free Zone? She couldn’t believe there was that much he didn’t already know.

“Lloyd,” Flagg said, and laughed ruefully. “Lloyd went through a rather bitter experience in Phoenix when the flu was raging. He doesn’t like to talk about it. I rescued him from death and”—his smile grew even more disarming, if that was possible—“and from a fate worse than death is the popular idiom, I believe. He’s associated me with that experience to a great degree, although his situation was not of my doing. Do you believe me?”

She nodded slowly. She did believe him, and found herself wondering if Lloyd’s constant showering had something to do with his “rather bitter experience in Phoenix.” She also found herself feeling an emotion she never would have expected in connection with Lloyd Henreid: pity.

“Good. Sit down, dear.”

She looked around doubtfully.

“On the floor. The floor will be fine. We have to talk, and talk truth. Liars sit in chairs, so we’ll eschew them. We’ll sit as though we were friends on opposite sides of a campfire. Sit, girl.” His eyes positively sparkled with suppressed mirth, and his sides seemed to bellow with laughter barely held in. He sat down and crossed his legs and then looked up at her appealingly, his expression seeming to say: You’re not going to let me sit all alone on the floor of this ridiculous office, are you?

After a moment’s debate she did sit down. She crossed her legs and put her hands lightly on her knees. She could feel the comforting weight of the knife in its spring clip.

“You were sent over here to spy out the land, dear,” he said. “Is that an accurate description of the situation?”

“Yes.” There was no use denying it.

“And you know what usually befalls spies in time of war?”

“Yes.”

His smile broadened like sunshine. “Then isn’t it lucky we’re not at war, your people and mine?”

She looked at him, totally surprised.

“But we’re not, you know,” he said with quiet sincerity.

“But… you…” A thousand confused thoughts spun in her head. Indian Springs. The Shrikes. Trashcan Man with his defoliant and his Zippos. The way the conversation always veered when this man’s name—or presence—came into the conversation. And that lawyer, Eric Strellerton. Wandering in the Mojave with his brains burned out.

All he did was look at him.

“Have we attacked your Free Zone, so-called? Made any warlike move at all against you over there?”

“No… but—”

“And have you attacked us?”

“Of course not!”

“No. And we have no plans in that direction. Look!” He suddenly held up his right hand and curled it into a tube. Looking through it, she could see the desert beyond the window-wall.

“The Great Western Desert!” he cried. “The Big Piss-All! Nevada! Arizona! New Mexico! California! A smattering of my people are in Washington, around the Seattle area, and in Portland, Oregon. A fistful each in Idaho and New Mexico. We’re too scattered to even think about taking a census for a year or more. We’re much more vulnerable than your Zone. The Free Zone is like a highly organized hive or commune. We are nothing but a confederacy, with me as the titular head. There’s room for both of us. There will still be room for both of us in 2190. That’s if the babies live, something we won’t know about here for at least another five months. If they do, and humanity continues, let our grandfathers fight it out, if they have a bone to pick. Or their grandfathers. But what in God’s name do we have to fight about? ”

“Nothing,” she muttered. Her throat was dry. She felt dazed. And something else… was it hope? She was looking into his eyes. She could not seem to tear her gaze away, and she didn’t want to. She wasn’t going mad. He wasn’t driving her mad at all. He was… a very reasonable man.

“There are no economic reasons for us to fight, no technological ones either. Our politics are a bit different, but that is a very minor thing, with the Rockies between us…”

He’s hypnotizing me.

With a huge effort she dragged her eyes away from his and looked out over his shoulder at the moon. Flagg’s smile faded a bit, and a shadow of irritation seemed to cross his features. Or had she imagined it? When she looked back (more warily this time), he was smiling gently at her again.

“You had the Judge killed,” she said harshly. “You want something from me, and when you get it, you’ll have me killed, too.”

He looked at her patiently. “There were pickets all along the Idaho-Oregon border, and they were looking for Judge Farris, that is true. But not to kill him! Their orders were to bring him to me. I was in Portland until yesterday. I wanted to talk to him as I’m now talking to you, dear: calmly, reasonably, and sanely. Two of my pickets spotted him in Copperfield, Oregon. He came out shooting, mortally wounding one of my men and killing the other outright. The wounded man killed the Judge before he himself died. I’m sorry about the way it came out. More sorry than you can know or understand.” His eyes darkened, and about that she believed him… but probably not in the way he wanted her to believe him. And she felt that coldness again.

“That’s not the way they tell it here.”

“Believe them or believe me, dear. But remember I give them their orders.”

He was persuasive… goddamned persuasive. He seemed nearly harmless—but that wasn’t exactly true, was it? That feeling only came from seeing that he was a man… or something that looked like a man. There was enough relief in just that to turn her into something like Silly Putty. He had a presence, and a politician’s knack of knocking all your best arguments into a cocked hat… but he did it in a way she found very disturbing.

“If you don’t mean war, why the jets and all the other stuff you’ve got out at Indian Springs?”

“Defensive measures,” he said promptly. “We’re doing similar things at Searles Lake in California, and at Edwards Air Force Base. There’s another group at the atomic reactor on Yakima Ridge in Washington. Your folks will be doing the same thing… if they’re not already.”

Dayna shook her head, very slowly. “When I left the Zone, they were still trying to get the electric lights working again.”

“And I’d be happy to send them two or three technicians, except I happen to know that your Brad Kitchner already has things going nicely. They had a brief outage yesterday, but he solved the problem very quickly. It was a power overload out on Arapahoe.”

“How do you know all that?”

“Oh, I have my ways,” Flagg said genially. “The old woman came back, by the way. Sweet old woman.”

“Mother Abagail?”

“Yes.” His eyes were distant and murky; sad, perhaps. “She’s dead. A pity. I really had hoped to meet her in person.”

“Dead? Mother Abagail is dead?”

The murky look cleared, and he smiled at her. “Does that really surprise you so much?”

“No. But it surprises me that she came back. And it surprises me even more that you know.”

“She came back to die.”

“Did she say anything?”

For just a moment Flagg’s mask of genial composure slipped, showing black and angry bafflement.

“No,” he said. “I thought she might… might speak. But she died in a coma.”

“Are you sure?”

His smile reappeared, as radiant as the summer sun burning off ground-fog.

“Never mind her, Dayna. Let’s talk of more pleasant things, such as your return to the Zone. I’m sure you’d rather be there than here. I have something for you to take back.” He reached into his shirt, removed a chamois bag, and took three service station maps from it. He handed them to Dayna, who looked at them with growing bewilderment. They showed the seven Western states. Certain areas were shaded in red. The hand-lettered key at the bottom of each map identified them as the areas where population had again begun to spring up.

“You want me to take these?”

“Yes. I know where your people are; I want you to know where mine are. As a gesture of good faith and friendship. And when you get back, I want you to tell them this: that Flagg means them no harm, and Flagg’s people mean them no harm. Tell them not to send any more spies. If they want to send people over here, have them call it a diplomatic mission… or exchange students… or any damn thing. But have them come openly. Will you tell them that?”

She felt dazed, punchy. “Sure. I’ll tell them. But—”

“That’s all.” He lifted his open, empty palms again. She saw something and leaned forward, unsettled.

“What are you looking at?” There was an edge in his voice.

“Nothing.”

But she had seen, and she knew from the narrow expression on his face that he knew she had. There were no lines on Flagg’s palms. They were as smooth and as blank as the skin on an infant’s stomach. No lifeline, no loveline, no rings or bracelets or loops. Just… blank.

They looked at each other for what seemed a very long time.

Then Flagg bounced to his feet and went toward the desk. Dayna also rose. She had actually begun to believe that he might let her go. He sat on the edge of the desk and drew the intercom toward him.

“I’ll tell Lloyd to have the oil and the plugs and points changed on your cycle,” he said. “I’ll also tell him to have it gassed up. No more worries about gas or oil shortages now, hey? Plenty for all. Although there was a day—I remember it, and probably you do too, Dayna, when it seemed as if the whole world might go up in a series of nuclear fireballs over a lack of premium unleaded gasoline.” He shook his head. “People were very, very stupid.” He thumbed the button on the intercom. “Lloyd?”

“Yeah, right here.”

“Will you have Dayna’s bike gassed and tuned up and left in front of the hotel? She’s going to be leaving us.”

“Yes.”

Flagg clicked off. “Well, that’s it, dear.”

“I can… just go?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s been my pleasure.” He lifted his hand to the door… palm side down.

She went to the door. Her hand had barely brushed the knob when he said: “There is one more thing. One… very minor thing.”

Dayna turned to look at him. He was grinning at her, and it was a friendly grin, but for a flashing second she was reminded of a huge black mastiff, its tongue lolling over white spiked teeth that could rip off an arm as if it was a dishrag.

“What’s that?”

“There’s one more of your people over here,” Flagg said. His smile widened. “Who might that be?”

“How in the world would I know?” Dayna asked, and her mind flashed: Tom Cullen!… Could it really have been him?

“Oh, come now, dear. I thought we had it all straightened out.”

“Really,” she said. “Look at it straight ahead and you’ll see I’m being dead honest. The committee sent me… and the Judge… and who knows how many others… and they were very careful. Just so we couldn’t tattle on each other if something… you know, happened.”

“If we decided to pull some fingernails?”

“Okay, yes. I was approached by Sue Stern. I’d guess Larry Underwood… he’s on the committee, too—”

“I know who Mr. Underwood is.”

“Yes, well, I’d guess he asked the Judge. But as for anyone else…” She shook her head. “It could be anyone. Or anyones. For all I know each of the seven committee members was responsible for recruiting one spy.”

“Yes, that could be, but it isn’t. There’s only one, and you know who it is.” His grin widened yet more, and now it began to frighten her. It was not a natural thing. It began to remind her of dead fish, polluted water, the surface of the moon seen through a telescope. It made her bladder feel loose and full of hot liquid.

“You know,” Flagg repeated.

“No, I—”

Flagg bent over the intercom again. “Has Lloyd left yet?”

“No, I’m right here.” Expensive intercom, good reproduction.

“Hold off a bit on Dayna’s cycle,” he said. “We still have a matter to”—he looked at her, and his eyes glimmered speculatively—“to thrash out in here,” he finished.

“Okay.”

The intercom clicked off. Flagg looked at her, smiling, hands folded. He looked for a very long time. Dayna began to sweat. His eyes seemed to grow larger and darker. Looking into them was like looking into wells which were very old and very deep. This time when she tried to drag her gaze away, she couldn’t.

“Tell me,” he said, very softly. “Let’s not have any unpleasantness, dear.”

From far off, she heard her voice say, “This whole thing was a script, wasn’t it? A little one-act play.”

“Dear, I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. The mistake was having Lloyd answer so fast. When you say frog around here, they jump. He should have been halfway down the Strip with my cycle. Except you told him to stay put because you never intended to let me go.”

“Dear, you’ve got a terrible case of unfounded paranoia. It was your experience with those men, I suspect. The ones with the traveling zoo. It must have been a terrible thing. This could be a terrible thing, too, and we don’t want that, do we?”

Her strength was draining away; it seemed to be flowing down her legs in perfect lines of force. With the last of her will, she turned her numb right hand into a fist and struck herself above the right eye. There was an airburst of pain inside her skull and her vision went wavery. Her head rocked back and struck the door with a hollow whack. Her gaze snapped away from his, and she felt her will returning. And her strength to resist.

“Oh, you’re good,” she said raggedly.

“You know who it is,” he said. He got off the desk and began to walk toward her. “You know and you’re going to tell me. Punching yourself in the head won’t help, dear.”

“How come you don’t know?” she cried at him. “You knew about the Judge and you knew about me! How come you don’t know about—”

His hands descended on her shoulders with terrible power, and they were cold, as cold as marble. “Who?”

“I don’t know.”

He shook her like a ragdoll, his face grinning and fierce and terrible. His hands were cold, but his face gave off the baking oven heat of the desert. “You know. Tell me. Who?”

“Why don’t you know? ”

“Because I can’t see it! ” he roared, and flung her across the room. She went in a boneless, rolling heap, and when she saw the searchlight of his face bearing down upon her in the gloom, her bladder let go, spreading warmth down her legs. The soft and helpful face of reason was gone. Randy Flagg was gone. She was with the Walkin Dude now, the tall man, the big guy, and God help her.

“You’ll tell,” he said. “You’ll tell me what I want to know.”

She gazed at him, and then slowly got to her feet. She felt the weight of the knife lying against her forearm.

“Yes, I’ll tell you,” she said. “Come closer.”

He took a step toward her, grinning.

“No, a lot closer. I want to whisper it in your ear.”

He came closer still. She could feel baking heat, freezing cold. There was a high, atonal singing in her ears. She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.

“Closer,” she whispered huskily.

He took another step and she cocked her right wrist in viciously. She heard the spring click. Weight slapped into her hand.

“Here! ” she shrieked hysterically, and brought her arm up in a hard sweep, meaning to gut him, leaving him to blunder around the room with his intestines hanging out in steaming loops. Instead he roared laughter, hands on his hips, flaming face cocked back, squeezing and contorting with great good humor.

“Oh, my dear!” he cried, and went off into another gale of laughter.

She looked stupidly down at her hand. It held a firm yellow banana with a blue and white Chiquita sticker on it. She dropped it, horrified, to the carpet, where it became a sickly yellow grin, miming Flagg’s own.

“You’ll tell,” he whispered. “Oh yes indeed you will.”

And Dayna knew he was right.

She whirled quickly, so quickly that even the dark man was momentarily caught by surprise. One of those black hands snatched out and caught only the back of her blouse, leaving him with nothing more substantial than a swatch of silk.

Dayna leaped at the window-wall.

“No! ” he screamed, and she could feel him after her like a black wind.

She drove with her lower legs, using them like pistons, hitting the window with the top of her head. There was a dull flat cracking sound, and she saw amazingly thick hunks of glass fall out into the employees’ parking lot. Twisting cracks, like lodes of quicksilver, ran out from her point of impact. Momentum carried her halfway through the hole and it was there that she lodged, bleeding.

She felt his hands on her shoulders and wondered how long it would take him to make her tell. An hour? Two? She suspected she was dying now, but that was not good enough.

It was Tom I saw, and you can’t feel him or whatever it is you do because he’s different, he’s —

He was dragging her back in.

She killed herself by simply whipping her head viciously around to the right. A razor-sharp jag of glass plunged deep into her throat. Another slipped into her right eye. Her body went stiff for a moment, and her hands beat against the glass. Then she went limp. What the dark man dragged back into the office was only a bleeding sack.

She had gone, perhaps in triumph.

Bellowing his rage, Flagg kicked her. The yielding, indifferent movement of her body enraged him further. He began to kick her around the room, bellowing, snarling. Sparks began to jump from his hair, as if somewhere inside him a cyclotron had hummed into life, building up an electrical field and turning him into a battery. His eyes blazed with dark fire. He bellowed and kicked, kicked and bellowed.

Outside, Lloyd and the others grew pale. They looked at each other. At last it was more than they could stand. Jenny, Ken, Whitney—they drifted away, and their curdled-milk faces were set in the careful expressions of people who hear nothing and want to go right on hearing it.

Only Lloyd waited—not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him. And at last Flagg called him in.

He was sitting on the wide desk, his legs crossed, his hands on the knees of his jeans. He was looking over Lloyd’s head, out into space. There was a draft, and Lloyd saw that the window-wall was smashed in the middle. The jagged edges of the hole were sticky with blood.

Resting on the floor was a huddled, vaguely human form wrapped in a drape.

“Get rid of that,” Flagg said.

“Okay.” His voice fell to a husky whisper. “Should I take the head?”

“Take the whole thing out to the east of town and douse it in gasoline and burn it. Do you hear me? Burn it! You burn the fucking thing! ”

“All right.”

“Yes.” Flagg smiled benignly.

Trembling, cotton-mouthed, nearly groaning with terror, Lloyd struggled to pick up the bulky object. The underside was sticky. It made a U in his arms, slithered through them, and thumped back to the floor. He threw a terrified glance at Flagg, but he was still in a semi-lotus, looking outward. Lloyd got hold of it again, clutched it, and staggered toward the door.

“Lloyd?”

He stopped and looked back. A little moan escaped him. Flagg was still in the semi-lotus, but now he was floating about ten inches above the desk, still looking serenely across the room.

“W-W-What?”

“Do you still have the key I gave you in Phoenix?”

“Yes.”

“Keep it handy. The time is coming.”

“A-All right.”

He waited, but Flagg did not speak again. He hung in the darkness, a mind-boggling Hindu fakir’s trick, looking outward, smiling gently.

Lloyd left quickly, happy as always just to go with his life and his sanity.

That day was a quiet one in Vegas. Lloyd arrived back around 2 P.M., smelling of gasoline. The wind had started to rise, and by five o’clock it was howling up and down the Strip and making forlorn hooting noises between the hotels. The palms, which had begun to die without city water in July and August, flapped against the sky like tattered battle flags. Clouds in strange shapes scudded overhead.

In the Cub Bar, Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott sat drinking bottled beer and eating egg salad sandwiches. Three old ladies—the Weird Sisters, everyone called them—kept chickens on the outskirts of town, and no one could seem to get enough eggs. Below Whitney and Ken, in the casino, little Dinny McCarthy was crawling happily around on one of the crap tables with an array of plastic soldiers.

“Lookit that little squirt,” Ken said fondly. “Someone ast me if I’d watch him an hour. I’d watch him all week. I wish to God he was mine. My wife only had the one, and he was two months premature. Died in the incubator the third day out.” He looked up as Lloyd came in.

“Hey, Dinny!” Lloyd called.

“Yoyd! Yoyd!” Dinny cried. He ran to the edge of the crap table, jumped down, and ran to him. Lloyd picked him up, swung him, and hugged him hard.

“Got kisses for Lloyd?” he asked.

Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses.

“I got something for you,” Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses from his breast pocket.

Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. “Yoyd?”

“What, Dinny?”

“Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?”

Lloyd smiled. “I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who’s your mom now?”

“Angelina.” He pronounced it Angeyeena. “Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too.”

“Don’t tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd.”

Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON’T COME line of the crap table, generating his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of Hamm’s.

“Thanks,” Lloyd said. “Looks great.”

“That’s homemade Syrian bread,” Whitney said proudly.

Lloyd munched for a while. “Has anybody seen him?” he asked at last.

Ken shook his head. “I think he’s gone again.”

Lloyd thought it over. Outside, a stronger-than-average gust of wind shrieked by, sounding lonely and lost in the desert. Dinny raised his head uneasily for a moment and then bent back to play.

“I think he’s around somewhere,” Lloyd said finally. “I don’t know why, but I do. I think he’s around waiting for something to happen. I dunno what.”

Whitney said in a low voice, “You think he got it out of her?”

“No,” Lloyd said, watching Dinny. “I don’t think he did. It went wrong for him somehow. She… she got lucky or she outthought him. And that doesn’t happen often.”

“It won’t matter in the long run,” Ken said, but he looked troubled just the same.

“No, it won’t.” Lloyd listened to the wind for a while. “Maybe he’s gone back to L.A.” But he didn’t really think so, and his face showed it.

Whitney went back to the kitchen and produced another round of beer. They drank in silence, thinking disquieting thoughts. First the Judge, now the woman. Both dead. And neither had talked. Neither had been unmarked as he had ordered. It was as if the old Yankees of Mantle and Maris and Ford had lost the opening two games of the World Series; it was hard for them to believe, and frightening.

The wind blew hard all night.

Chapter 63

On the late afternoon of September 10, Dinny was playing in the small city park that lies just north of the city’s hotel and casino district. His “mother” that week, Angelina Hirschfield, was sitting on a park bench and talking with a young girl who had drifted into Las Vegas about five weeks before, ten days or so after Angie herself had come in.

Angie Hirschfield was twenty-seven. The girl was ten years younger, now clad in tight bluejeans shorts and a brief middy blouse which left absolutely nothing to the imagination. There was something obscene about the contrast between the tight allure of her young body and the childish, pouty, and rather vacuous expression on her face. Her conversation was monotonous and seemingly without end: rock stars, sex, her lousy job cleaning Cosmoline preservative off armaments at Indian Springs, sex, her diamond ring, sex, the TV programs that she missed so much, and sex.

Angie wished she would go have sex with someone and leave her alone. And she hoped Dinny would be at least thirty before he ever worked around to having this girl for a mother.

At that moment Dinny looked up, smiled, and yelled: “Tom! Hey, Tom!”

On the other side of the park, a big man with straw-blond hair was shambling along with a big workman’s lunch bucket slamming against his leg.

“Say, that guy looks drunk,” the girl said to Angie.

Angie smiled. “No, that’s Tom. He’s just—”

But Dinny was off and running, hollering “Tom! Wait up, Tom!” at the top of his lungs.

Tom turned, grinning. “Dinny! Hey-hey!”

Dinny leaped at Tom. Tom dropped his lunch bucket and grabbed him. Swung him around.

“Airplane me, Tom! Airplane me!”

Tom grabbed Dinny’s wrists and began to spin him around, faster and faster. Centrifugal force pulled the boy’s body out until his whizzing legs were parallel to the ground. He shrieked with laughter. After two or three spins, Tom set him gently on his feet.

Dinny wobbled around, laughing and trying to get his balance back.

“Do it again, Tom! Do it again some more!”

“No, you’ll puke if I do. And Tom’s got to get to his home. Laws, yes.”

“Kay, Tom. ‘Bye!”

Angie said, “I think Dinny loves Lloyd Henreid and Tom Cullen more than anyone else in town. Tom Cullen is simple, but—” She looked at the girl and broke off. She was watching Tom, her eyes narrowed and thoughtful.

“Did he come in with another man?” she asked.

“Who? Tom? No—as far as I know, he came in all by himself about a week and a half ago. He was with those other people in their Zone, but they drove him out. Their loss is our gain, that’s what I say.”

“And he didn’t come in with a dummy? A deaf-and-dummy?”

“A deaf-mute? No, I’m pretty sure he came in alone. Dinny just loves him.”

The girl watched Tom out of sight. She thought of Pepto-Bismol in a bottle. She thought of a scrawled note that said: We don’t need you. That had been back in Kansas, a thousand years ago. She had shot at them. She wished she had killed them, particularly the dummy.

“Julie? Are you all right?”

Julie Lawry didn’t answer. She stared after Tom Cullen. In a little while, she began to smile.

Chapter 64

The dying man opened the Permacover notebook, uncapped his pen, paused a moment, and then began to write.

It was strange; where once the pen had flown over the paper, seeming to cover each sheet from top to bottom by a process of benign magic, the words now straggled and draggled, the letters large and tottery, as if he was regressing back to early grammar school days in his own private time machine.

In those days, his mother and father had still had some love left over for him. Amy had not yet blossomed, and his own future as The Amazing Ogunquit Fat Boy and Possible Hommasexshul was not yet decided. He could remember sitting at the sun-washed kitchen table, slowly copying one of the Tom Swift books word for word in a Blue Horse tablet—pulp stock, blue lines—with a glass of Coke beside him. He could hear his mother’s words drifting out of the living room. Sometimes she was talking on the phone, sometimes to a neighbor.

It’s just baby fat, the doctor says so. There’s nothing wrong with his glands, thank God. And he’s so bright!

Watching the words grow, letter by letter. Watching the sentences grow, word by word. Watching the paragraphs grow, each one a brick in the great walled bulwark that was language.

“It’s to be my greatest invention,” Tom said forcefully. “Watch what happens when I pull out the plate, but for gosh sakes, don’t forget to shield your eyes! ”

The bricks of language. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Words. Worlds. Magic. Life and immortality. Power.

I don’t know where he gets it, Rita. Maybe from his grandfather. He was an ordained minister and they say he gave the most wonderful sermons…

Watching the letters improve as time passed. Watching them connect with each other, printing left behind, writing now. Assembling thoughts and plots. That was the whole world, after all, nothing but thoughts and plots. He had gotten a typewriter finally (and by then there wasn’t much else left over for him; Amy was in high school, National Honor Society, cheerleader, dramatics club, debate society, straight A’s, the braces had come off her teeth and her very best friend in the world was Frannie Goldsmith… and her brother’s baby fat had not yet departed although he was thirteen years old, and he had begun to use big words as a defense, and with a slowly blooming horror he had begun to realize what life was, what it really was: one big heathen cooking pot, and he was the missionary alone inside, being slowly boiled). The typewriter unlocked the rest of it for him. At first it was slow, so slow, and the constant typos were frustrating beyond belief. It was as if the machine was actively—but slyly—opposing his will. But when he got better at it, he began to understand what the machine really was—a kind of magic conduit between his brain and the blank page he strove to conquer. By the time of the superflu epidemic he was able to type better than a hundred words a minute, and he was at last able to keep up with his racing thoughts and snare them all. But he had never stopped his longhand entirely, remembering that Moby Dick had been written longhand, and The Scarlet Letter, and Paradise Lost.

He had developed the writing Frannie had seen in his ledger over years of practice—no paragraphs, no line breaks, no pause for the eye. It was work—terrible, hand-cramping work—but it was a labor of love. He had used the typewriter willingly and gratefully, but thought he had always saved the best of himself for longhand.

And now he would transcribe the last of himself that same way.

He looked up and saw buzzards circling slowly in the sky, like something from a Saturday matinee movie with Randolph Scott, or from a novel by Max Brand. He thought of it written in a novel: Harold saw the buzzards circling in the sky, waiting. He looked at them calmly for a moment, and then bent to his journal again.

He bent to his journal again.

At the end, he had been forced to return to the straggling letters which had been the best his shaky motor control could produce at the beginning. He was reminded achingly of the sunny kitchen, the cold glass of Coke, the old and mildewy Tom Swift books. And now, at last, he thought (and wrote), he might have been able to make his mother and father happy. He had lost his baby fat. And although still technically a virgin, he was morally sure that he was not a hommasexshul.

He opened his mouth and croaked, “Top of the world, Ma.”

He was halfway down the page. He looked at what he had written, then looked at his leg, which was twisted and broken. Broken? That was too kind a word. It was shattered. He had been sitting in the shade of this rock for five days now. The last of his food was gone. He would have died of thirst yesterday or the day before except for two hard showers. His leg was putrefying. It had a green and gassy smell and the flesh had swelled tight against his pants, stretching the khaki fabric until it resembled a sausage casing.

Nadine was long gone.

Harold picked up the gun that had been lying by his side, and checked the loads. He had checked them a hundred times or more just this day. During the rainstorms, he had been careful to keep the gun dry. There were three cartridges left in it. He had fired the first two at Nadine when she looked down and told him she was going on without him.

They had been coming around a hairpin turn, Nadine on the inside, Harold on the outside aboard his Triumph cycle. They were on the Colorado Western Slope, about seventy miles from the Utah border. There had been an oilslick on the outer part of the curve, and in the days since, Harold had pondered much on this oilslick. It seemed almost too perfect. An oilslick from what? Surely nothing had been moving up here over the last two months. Plenty of time for a slick to dry up. It was as if his red eye had been watching them, waiting for the correct time to produce an oilslick and take Harold out of the play. Leave him with her through the mountains in case of trouble, and then ditch him. He had, as they say, served his purpose.

The Triumph had slid into the guardrail, and Harold had been flicked over the side like a bug. There had been an excruciating pain in his right leg. He had heard the wet snap as it broke. He screamed. Then hardscrabble was coming up to meet him, hardscrabble that was falling away at a steep, sickening angle toward the gorge below. He could hear fast-flowing water somewhere down there.

He hit the ground, cartwheeled high into the air, screamed again, came down on his right leg once more, heard it break someplace else, went flying into the air again, came down, rolled, and suddenly fetched up against a dead tree that had heeled over in some years-ago thunderstorm. If it hadn’t been there, he would have gone into the gorge and the mountain trout could have snacked on him instead of the buzzards.

He wrote in his notebook, still marveling at the straggling, child-size letters: I don’t blame Nadine. That was true. But he had blamed her then.

Shocked, shaken, scraped raw, his right leg a bolt of agony, he had picked himself up and had crawled a little way up the slope. Far above him, he saw Nadine looking over the guardrail. Her face was white and tiny, a doll’s face.

“Nadine!” he cried. His voice came out in a hard croak. “The rope! It’s in the left saddlebag!”

She only looked down at him. He had begun to think she hadn’t heard him and he was preparing to repeat when he saw her head move to the left, to the right, to the left again. Very slowly. She was shaking her head.

“Nadine! I can’t get up without the rope! My leg’s broken! ”

She didn’t answer. She was only looking down at him, not even shaking her head now. He began to have the feeling he was down in a deep hole, and she was looking at him over the rim of it.

“Nadine, toss me the rope! ”

That slow headshaking again, as terrible as the door of a crypt swinging slowly shut on a man not yet dead but rather in the grip of some terrible catalepsy.

“NADINE! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! ”

At last her voice drifted down to him, small but perfectly audible in the great mountain stillness. “All of this was arranged, Harold. I have to go on. I’m very sorry.”

But she made no move to go; she remained at the guardrail, watching him where he lay some two hundred feet below. Already there were flies, busily sampling his blood on the various rocks where he had hit and scraped off some of himself.

Harold began to crawl upward, dragging his shattered leg behind him. At first there was no hate, no need to put a bullet in her. It only seemed vital that he get close enough to read her expression.

It was a little past noon. It was hot. Sweat dripped from his face and onto the sharp pebbles and rocks he was climbing over. He moved by dragging himself upward on his elbows and pushing with his left leg, like a crippled insect. His breath rasped in and out of his throat, a hot file. He had no idea how long it went on, but once or twice he bumped his bad leg against a stone outcropping, and the giant burst of pain had caused him to gray out. Several times he had slipped backward, moaning helplessly.

At last he became stupidly aware that he could go no farther. The shadows had changed. Three hours had passed. He could not remember the last time he had looked up toward the guardrail and the road; over an hour ago, surely. In his pain, he had been completely absorbed in whatever minute progress he was making. Nadine had probably left long ago.

But she had still been there, and although he had only succeeded in gaining twenty-five feet or so, the expression on her face was hellishly clear. It was one of grieving sorrow, but her eyes were flat and far away.

Her eyes were with him.

That was when he began to hate her, and he felt for the shoulder holster. The Colt was still there, held in during his tumbling fall by the strap across the butt. He snapped the strap off, hunching his body craftily so she wouldn’t see.

“Nadine—”

“It’s better this way, Harold. Better for you, because his way would be so much worse. You see that, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to meet him face-to-face, Harold. He feels that someone who would betray one side would probably betray the other. He’d kill you, but he’d drive you mad first. He has that power. He let me choose. This way… or his way. I chose this. You can end it quickly if you’re brave. You know what I mean.”

He checked the loads in the pistol for the first of hundreds (maybe thousands) of times, keeping the gun in the shadowed hollow of one lacerated and shredded elbow.

“What about you?” he called up. “Aren’t you a betrayer, too?”

Her voice was sad. “I never betrayed him in my heart.”

“I believe that’s exactly where you did betray him,” Harold called up to her. He tried to put a large expression of sincerity on his face, but he was actually calculating the distance. He would have two shots at the most. And a pistol was a notoriously chancy weapon. “I believe he knows it, too.”

“He needs me,” she said, “and I need him. You were never in it, Harold. And if we’d gone on together, I might have… might have let you do something to me. That small thing. And that would have destroyed everything. I couldn’t take the smallest chance that might happen after all the sacrifice and blood and nastiness. We sold our souls together, Harold, but there’s enough of me left to want full value for mine.”

“I’ll give you full value,” Harold said, and managed to get up on his knees. The sun was dazzling. Vertigo seized him in rough hands, whirling the gyroscope balance inside his head. He seemed to hear voices—a voice —roaring in surprised protest. He pulled the trigger. The shot echoed, bounced back, was thrown from cliff-face to cliff-face, cracking and whacking and fading. Comical surprise spread over Nadine’s face.

Harold thought in a drunken kind of triumph: She didn’t think I had it in me! Her mouth hung open in a shocked, round O. Her eyes were wide. The fingers of her hands tensed and flew up, as if she were about to play some abnormal tune on the piano. The moment was so sweet that he lost a second or two savoring it and not realizing that he had missed. When he did realize, he brought the pistol back down, trying to aim it, locking his right wrist with his left hand.

“Harold! No! You can’t! ”

Can’t I? It’s such a little thing, squeezing a trigger. Sure I can.

She seemed too shocked to move, and as the pistol’s front sight came to rest in the hollow of her throat, he felt a sudden cold certainty that this was how it had been meant to end, in a short and meaningless spate of violence.

He had her, dead in his sights.

But as he started to pull the trigger, two things happened. Sweat ran into his eyes, doubling his vision. And he began to slide. He later told himself that the loose gravel had given way, or that his mangled leg had buckled, or both. It might even have been true. But it felt… it felt like a push, and in the long nights between then and now, he had not been able to convince himself otherwise. The daytime Harold was stubbornly rational to the end, but in the night the hideous certainty stole over him that in the end it was the dark man himself who had stepped in to thwart him. The shot he had meant to put smack into the hollow of her throat went wild: high, wide, and handsome into the indifferent blue sky. Harold went rolling and tumbling back down to the dead tree, his right leg twisting and buckling, a huge sheet of agony from ankle to groin.

He had struck the tree and passed out. When he came to again, it was just past dusk and the moon, three quarters full, was riding solemnly over the gorge. Nadine was gone.

He spent the first night in a delirium of terror, sure that he would be unable to crawl back up to the road, sure he would die in the ravine. When morning came he began to crawl upward again nevertheless, sweating and racked with pain.

He began around seven o’clock, just about the time the big orange Burial Committee trucks would be leaving the bus depot back in Boulder. He finally wrapped one raw and blistered hand around the guardrail cable at five o’clock that afternoon. His motorcycle was still there, and he nearly wept with relief. He dug some cans and the opener out of one of the saddlebags with frantic haste, opened one of the cans, and crammed cold corned beef hash into his mouth in double handfuls. But it tasted bad, and after a long struggle he threw it up.

He began to understand the irrefutable fact of his coming death then, and he lay beside the Triumph and wept, his twisted leg under him. After that he was able to sleep a little.

The following day he was drenched by a pounding rainshower that left him soaked and shivering. His leg had begun to smell of gangrene, and he took pains to keep the Cold Woodsman sheltered from the wet with his body. That evening he had begun to write in the Permacover notebook and discovered for the first time that his handwriting was beginning to regress. He found himself thinking of a story by Daniel Keyes—“Flowers for Algernon,” it had been called. In it, a bunch of scientists had somehow turned a mentally retarded janitor into a genius… for a while. And then the poor guy began to lose it. What was the guy’s name? Charley something, right? Sure, because that was the name of the movie they made out of it. Charly. A pretty good movie. Not as good as the story, full of sixties psychedelic shit as he remembered, but still pretty good. Harold had gone to the movies a lot in the old days, and he had watched a lot more on the family VCR. Back in the days when the world had been what the Pentagon would have called a quote viable alternative unquote. He had watched most of them alone.

He wrote in his notebook, the words emerging slowly from the straggling letters:

Are they all dead, I wonder? The committee? If so, I am sorry. I was misled. That is a poor excuse for my actions, but I swear out of all I know that it is the only excuse that ever matters. The dark man is as real as the superflu itself, as real as the atomic bombs that still sit somewhere in their leadlined closets. And when the end comes, and when it is as horrible as good men always knew it would be, there is only one thing to say as all those good men approach the Throne of Judgment: I was misled.

Harold read what he had written and passed a thin and trembling hand over his brow. It wasn’t a good excuse; it was a bad one. Pretty it up however you would, it still smelled. Someone who read that paragraph after reading his ledger would see him as a total hypocrite. He had seen himself as the king of anarchy, but the dark man had seen through him and had reduced him effortlessly to a shivering bag of bones dying badly by the highway. His leg had swelled up like an innertube, it smelled like gassy, overripe bananas, and he sat here with buzzards swooping and diving on the thermals overhead, trying to rationalize the unspeakable. He had fallen victim to his own protracted adolescence, it was as simple as that. He had been poisoned by his own lethal visions.

Dying, he felt as if he had gained a little sanity and maybe even a little dignity. He did not want to demean that with small excuses that would come limping off the page on crutches.

“I could have been something in Boulder,” he said quietly, and the simple, awful truth of that might have brought tears if he hadn’t been so tired and so dehydrated. He looked at the straggling letters on the page, and from there to the Colt. Suddenly he wanted it over, and he tried to think how to put a finish to his life in the truest, simplest way he could. It seemed more necessary than ever to write it and leave it for whoever might find him, in one year or in ten.

He gripped the pen. Thought. Wrote:

I apologize for the destructive things I have done, but do not deny that I did them of my own free will. On my school papers, I always signed my name Harold Emery Lauder. I signed my manuscripts—poor things that they were—the same way. God help me, I once wrote it on the roof of a barn in letters three feet high. I want to sign this by a name given me in Boulder. I could not accept it then, but I take it now freely.

I am going to die in my right mind.

Writing neatly at the bottom, he affixed his signature: Hawk.

He put the Permacover notebook into the Triumph’s saddlebag. He capped the pen and clipped it in his pocket. He put the muzzle of the Colt into his mouth and looked up at the blue sky. He thought of a game they had played when they were children, a game the others had teased him about because he never quite dared to go through with it. There was a gravel pit out on one of the back roads, and you could jump off the edge and fall a heartstopping distance before hitting the sand, rolling over and over, and finally climbing up to do it all over again.

All except Harold. Harold would stand on the lip of the drop and chant, One… Two… Three! just like the others, but the talisman never worked. His legs remained locked. He could not bring himself to jump. And the others sometimes chased him home, shouting at him, calling him Harold the Pansy.

He thought: If I could have brought myself to jump once… just once… I might not be here. Well, last time pays for all.

He thought: One… Two… THREE!

He pulled the trigger.

The gun went off.

Harold jumped.

Chapter 65

North of Las Vegas is Emigrant Valley, and that night a small spark of fire glowed in its tumbled wilderness. Randall Flagg sat beside it, moodily cooking the carcass of a small rabbit. He turned it steadily on the crude rotisserie he had made, watching it sizzle and spit grease into the fire. There was a light breeze, blowing the savory smell out into the desert, and the wolves had come. They sat two rises over from his fire, howling at the nearly full moon and at the smell of cooking meat. Every now and then he would glance at them and two or three would begin to fight, biting and snapping and kicking with their powerful back legs until the weakest was banished. Then the others would begin to howl again, their snouts pointed at the bloated, reddish moon.

But the wolves bored him now.

He wore his jeans and his tattered walking boots and his sheepskin jacket with its two buttons on the breast pockets: smiley-smile and HOW’S YOUR PORK? The night wind flapped fitfully at his collar.

He didn’t like the way things were going.

There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn. The old woman had died and at first he had thought that was good. In spite of everything, he had been afraid of the old woman. She had died, and he had told Dayna Jurgens that she had died in a coma… but was it true? He was no longer quite so sure.

Had she talked, at the end? And if so, what had she said?

What were they planning?

He had developed a sort of third eye. It was like the levitating ability; something he had and accepted but which he didn’t really understand. He was able to send it out, to see… almost always. But sometimes the eye fell mysteriously blind. He had been able to look into the old woman’s death chamber, had seen them gathered around her, their tailfeathers still singed from Harold and Nadine’s little surprise… but then the vision had faded away and he had been back in the desert, wrapped in his bedroll, looking up and seeing nothing but Cassiopeia in her starry rocking chair. And there had been a voice inside him that said: She’s gone. They waited for her to talk but she never did.

But he no longer trusted the voice.

There was the troubling matter of the spies.

The Judge, with his head blown off.

The girl, who had eluded him at the last second. And she had known, Goddammit! She had known!

He threw a sudden furious stare at the wolves and nearly half a dozen fell to fighting, their guttural sounds like ripping cloth in the stillness.

He knew all their secrets except… the third. Who was the third? He had sent the Eye out over and over again, and it afforded him with nothing but the cryptic, idiotic face of the moon. M-O-O-N, that spells moon.

Who was the third?

How had the girl been able to escape him? He had been taken utterly by surprise, left with nothing but a handful of her blouse. He had known about her knife, that had been child’s play, but not about that sudden leap at the window-wall. And the coldblooded way she had taken her own life, without a moment’s hesitation. A mere space of seconds and she had been gone.

His thoughts chased each other like weasels in the dark.

Things were getting just a trifle flaky around the edges. He didn’t like it.

Lauder, for instance. There was Lauder.

He had performed so excellently, like one of those little wind-up toys with a key sticking out of its back. Go here. Go there. Do this. Do that. But the dynamite bomb had only gotten two of them—all that planning, all that effort spoiled by that dying old nigger woman’s return. And then… after Harold had been disposed of… he had nearly killed Nadine! He still felt a burst of amazed anger when he thought about it. And the dumb cunt had stood there with her mouth hanging open, waiting for him to do it again, almost as if she wanted to be killed. And who was going to end up with all this, if Nadine died?

Who, if not his son?

The rabbit was done. He slipped it off the spit and onto his tin plate.

“All right, all you asshole gyrenes, chow down!”

That made him grin right out loud. Had he been a Marine once? He thought so. Strictly the Parris Island variety, though. There had been a kid, a defective, name of Boo Dinkway. They had…

What?

Flagg frowned down at his messkit. Had they beaten ole Boo into the ground with those padded poles? Scragged him somehow? He seemed to remember something about gasoline. But what?

In a sudden rage, he almost slung the freshly cooked rabbit into the fire. He should be able to remember that, goddammit!

“Chow down, grunts,” he whispered, but this time there was only a whiff of memory lane.

He was losing himself. Once he had been able to look back over the sixties, seventies, and eighties like a man looking down a double flight of stairs leading into a darkened room. Now he could only clearly remember the events since the superflu. Beyond that there was nothing but a haze that would sometimes lift a tiny bit, just enough to afford a glimpse of some enigmatic object or memory (Boo Dinkway, for instance… if there ever had been such a person) before closing down again.

The earliest memory he could now be sure of was of walking south on US 51, heading toward Mountain City and the home of Kit Bradenton.

Of being born. Born again.

He was no longer strictly a man, if he had ever been one. He was like an onion, slowly peeling away one layer at a time, only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away: organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will… if there ever had been such a thing.

He began to eat the rabbit.

Once, he was quite sure, he would have done a quick fade when things began to get flaky. Not this time. This was his place, his time, and he would take his stand here. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t yet been able to uncover the third spy, or that Harold had gotten out of control at the end and had had the colossal effrontery to try to kill the bride who had been promised, the mother of his son.

Somewhere that strange Trashcan Man was in the desert, sniffing out the weapons which would eradicate the troublesome, worrisome Free Zone forever. His Eye could not follow the Trashcan Man, and in some ways Flagg thought that Trash was stranger than he was himself, a kind of human bloodhound who sniffed cordite and napalm and gelignite with deadly radar accuracy.

In a month or less, the National Guard jets would be flying, with a full complement of Shrike missiles tucked under their wings. And when he was sure that the bride had conceived, they would fly east.

He looked dreamily up at the basketball moon and smiled.

There was one other possibility. He thought the Eye would show him, in time. He might go there, possibly as a crow, possibly as a wolf, possibly as an insect—a praying mantis, perhaps, something small enough to squirm through a carefully concealed vent cap in the middle of a spiky patch of desert grass. He would hop or crawl through dark conduits and finally slip through an air conditioner grille or a stilled exhaust fan.

The place was underground. Just over the border and into California.

There were beakers there, rows and rows of beakers, each with its own neat Dymo tape identifying it: a super cholera, a super anthrax, a new and improved version of the bubonic plague, all of them based on the shifting-antigen ability that had made the superflu so almost universally deadly. There were hundreds of them in this place; assorted flavors, as they used to say in the Life Savers commercials.

How about a little in your water, Free Zone?

How about a nice airburst?

Some lovely Legionnaires’ disease for Christmas, or would you rather have the new and improved Swine flu?

Randy Flagg, the dark Santa, in his National Guard sleigh, with a little virus to drop down every chimney?

He would wait, and he would know the right time when it came round at last.

Something would tell him.

Things were going to be fine. No quick fade this time. He was on top and he was going to stay there.

The rabbit was gone. Full of hot food, he felt himself again. He stood, tin plate in hand, and slung the bones out into the night. The wolves charged at them, fought over them, growling and biting and snarling, their eyes rolling blankly in the moonlight.

Flagg stood, hands on his hips, and roared laughter up at the moon.

Early the next morning Nadine left the town of Glendale and headed down I-15 on her Vespa. Her snow-white hair, unbound, trailed out behind her, looking very much like a bridal train.

She felt sorry for the Vespa, which had served her so long and faithfully and which was now dying. Mileage and desert heat, the laborious crossing of the Rockies, and indifferent maintenance had all taken their toll. The engine now sounded horse and laboring. The RPM needle had begun to shudder instead of remaining docilely against the 5X1000 figure. It didn’t matter. If it died on her before she arrived, she would walk. No one was chasing her now. Harold was dead. And if she had to walk, he would know and send someone out to pick her up.

Harold had shot at her! Harold had tried to kill her!

Her mind kept returning to that no matter how she tried to avoid it. Her mind worried it like a dog worrying a bone. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Flagg had come to her in a dream that first night after the explosion, when Harold finally allowed them to camp. He told her that he was going to leave Harold with her until the two of them were on the Western Slope, almost in Utah. Then he would be removed in a quick, painless accident. An oilslick. Over the side. No fuss, no muss, no bother.

But it hadn’t been quick and painless, and Harold had almost killed her. The bullet had droned past within an inch of her cheek and still she had been unable to move. She had been frozen in shock, wondering how he could have done such a thing, how he could have been allowed to even try such a thing.

She had tried to rationalize it by telling herself it was Flagg’s way of throwing a scare into her, of reminding her who it was she belonged to. But it made no sense! It was crazy! Even if it had made some sort of sense, there was a firm, knowing voice inside her which said the shooting incident had just been something Flagg had not been prepared against.

She tried to push the voice away, to bar the door against it the way a sane person will bar the door against an undesirable person with murder in his or her eyes. But she couldn’t do it. The voice told her she was alive through blind chance now. That Harold’s bullet could just as easily have gone between her eyes, and it wouldn’t have been Randall Flagg’s doing either way.

She called the voice a liar. Flagg knew everything, where the smallest sparrow had fallen—

No, that’s God, the voice replied implacably. God, he’s not. You’re alive through blind chance, and that means that all bets are off. You owe him nothing. You can turn around and go back, if you want to.

Go back, that was a laugh. Go back where?

The voice had little to say on that subject; she would have been surprised if it did. If the dark man’s feet were made of clay, she had discovered the fact just a little late.

She tried to concentrate on the cool beauty of the desert morning instead of the voice. But the voice remained, so low and insistent she was barely aware of it:

If he didn’t know Harold was going to be able to defy him and strike back at you, what else doesn’t he know? And will it be a clean miss next time?

But oh dear God, it was too late. Too late by days, weeks, maybe even years. Why had that voice waited until it was useless to speak up?

And as if in agreement, the voice finally fell silent and she had the morning to herself. She rode without thinking, her eyes fixed on the road unreeling in front of her. The road that led to Las Vegas. The road that led to him.

The Vespa died that afternoon. There was a grinding clank deep in its guts and the engine stalled. She could smell something hot and abnormal, like frying rubber, drifting up from the engine case. Her speed had dropped from the steady forty she had been maintaining until she had been putting along at walking speed. Now she trundled it over into the breakdown lane and cranked the starter a few times, knowing it was useless. She had killed it. She had killed a lot of things on her way to her husband. She had been responsible for wiping out the entire Free Zone Committee and all of their invited guests at that final explosive meeting. And then there was Harold. Also, say-hey and by the way, let’s not forget Fran Goldsmith’s unborn baby.

That made her feel sick. She stumbled over to the guardrail and tossed up her light lunch. She felt hot, delirious, and very ill, the only living thing in a sunstruck desert nightmare. It was hot… so hot.

She turned back, wiping her mouth. The Vespa lay on its side like a dead animal. Nadine looked at it for a few moments and then began to walk. She had already passed Dry Lake. That meant she would have to sleep by the road tonight if no one picked her up. With any luck she would reach Las Vegas in the morning. And suddenly she was sure that the dark man would let her walk. She would reach Las Vegas hungry and thirsty and burning with the desert heat, every last bit of the old life flushed from her system. The woman who had taught small children at a private school in New England would be gone, as dead as Napoleon. With her luck, the small voice which snapped and worried at her so would be the last part of the old Nadine to expire. But in the end, of course, that part would go, too.

She walked, and the afternoon advanced. Sweat rolled down her face. Quicksilver glimmered, always at the point where the highway met the faded-denim sky. She unbuttoned her light blouse and took it off, walking in her white cotton bra. Sunburn? So what? Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a fuck.

By dusk she had gone a terrible shade of red that was nearly purple along the raised ridges of her collarbones. The cool of the evening came suddenly, making her shiver, and making her remember that she had left her camping gear with the Vespa.

She looked around doubtfully, seeing cars here and there, some of them buried in drifting sand up to their hood ornaments. The thought of sheltering in one of those tombs made her feel sick—even sicker than her terrible sunburn was making her feel.

I’m delirious, she thought.

Not that it mattered. She decided she would walk all night rather than sleep in one of those cars. If this were only the Midwest again. She could have found a barn, a haystack, a field of clover. A clean, soft place. Out here there was only the road, the sand, the baked hardpan of the desert.

She brushed her long hair away from her face and dully realized that she wished she was dead.

Now the sun was below the horizon, the day perfectly poised between light and dark. The wind that now slipped over her was dead cold. She looked around herself, suddenly afraid.

It was too cold.

The buttes had become dark monoliths. The sand dunes were like ominous toppled colossi. Even the spiny stands of saguaro were like the skeletal fingers of the accusing dead, poking up out of the sand from their shallow graves.

Overhead, the cosmic wheel of the sky.

A snatch of lyric occurred to her, a Dylan song, cold and comfortless: Hunted like a crocodile… ravaged in the corn…

And on the heels of that, some other song, an Eagles song, suddenly frightening: And I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight… with a million stars all around…

Suddenly she knew he was there.

Even before he spoke, she knew.

“Nadine.” His soft voice, coming out of the growing darkness. Infinitely soft, the final enveloping terror that was like coming home.

“Nadine, Nadine… how I love to love Nadine.”

She turned around and there he was, as she had always known he would be someday, a thing as simple as this. He was sitting on the hood of an old Chevrolet sedan (had it been there a moment ago? she didn’t know for sure, but she didn’t think it had been), his legs crossed, his hands laid lightly on the knees of his faded jeans. Looking at her and smiling gently. But his eyes were not gentle at all. They gave lie to the idea that this man felt anything gentle. In them she saw a black glee that danced endlessly like the legs of a man fresh through the trapdoor in a gibbet platform.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m here.”

“Yes. At last you’re here. As promised.” His smile broadened and he held his hands out to her. She took them, and as she reached him she felt his baking heat. He radiated it, like a well-stoked brick oven. His smooth, lineless hands slipped around hers… and then closed over them tight, like handcuffs.

“Oh, Nadine,” he whispered, and bent to kiss her. She turned her head just a little, looking up at the cold fire of the stars, and his kiss was on the hollow below her jaw rather than on her lips. He wasn’t fooled. She felt the mocking curve of his grin against her flesh.

He revolts me, she thought.

But revulsion was only a scaly crust over something worse—a caked and long-hidden lust, an ageless pimple finally brought to a head and about to spew forth some noisome fluid, some sweetness long since curdled. His hands, slipping over her back, were much hotter than her sunburn. She moved against him, and suddenly the slim saddle between her legs seemed plumper, fuller, more tender, more aware. The seam of her slacks was chafing her in a delicately obscene way that made her want to rub herself, get rid of the itch, cure it once and for all.

“Tell me one thing,” she said.

“Anything.”

“You said, ‘As promised.’ Who promised me to you? Why me? And what do I call you? I don’t even know that. I’ve known about you for most of my life, and I don’t know what to call you.”

“Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.”

“That’s your real name? Richard?” she asked doubtfully, and he giggled against her neck, making her skin crawl with loathing and desire. “And who promised me?”

“Nadine,” he said, “I have forgotten. Come on.”

He slipped off the hood of the car, still holding her hands, and she almost jerked them away and ran… but what good would that have done? He would only chase after her, catch her, rape her.

“The moon,” he said. “It’s full. And so am I.” He brought her hand down to the smooth and faded crotch of his jeans and there was something terrible there, beating with a life of its own beneath the notched coldness of his zipper.

“No,” she muttered, and tried to pull her hand away, thinking how far this was from that other moonstruck night, how impossibly far. This was at the other end of time’s rainbow.

He held her hand against him. “Come out in the desert and be my wife,” he said.

“No!”

“It’s much too late to say no, dear.”

She went with him. There was a bedroll, and the blackened bones of a campfire under the silver bones of the moon.

He laid her down.

“All right,” he breathed. “All right, then.” His fingers worked his belt buckle, then the button, then the zipper.

She saw what he had for her and began to scream.

The dark man’s grin sprang forth at the sound, huge and glittering and obscene in the night, and the moon stared down blankly at them both, bloated and cheesy.

Nadine pealed forth scream after scream and tried to crawl away and he grabbed her and then she was holding her legs shut with all her strength, and when one of those blank hands inserted itself between them they parted like water and she thought: I will look up… I will look up at the moon… I will feel nothing and it will be over… it will be over… I will feel nothing…

And when the dead coldness of him slipped into her the shriek ripped up and out of her, bolted free, and she struggled, and the struggle was useless. He battered into her, invader, destroyer, and the cold blood gushed down her thighs and then he was in her, all the way up to her womb, and the moon was in her eyes, cold and silver fire, and when he came it was like molten iron, molten pig iron, molten brass, and she came herself, came in screaming, incredible pleasure, came in terror, in horror, passing through the pig-iron and brass gates into the desert land of insanity, chased through, blown through like a leaf by the bellowing of his laughter, watching his face melt away, and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid. He went again… and again… and again. It seemed he would never be used up. Cold. He was dead cold. And old. Older than mankind, older than the earth. Again and again he filled her with his nightspawn, screaming laughter. Earth. Light. Coming. Coming again. The last shriek coming out of her to be wiped away by the desert wind and carried into the farthest chambers of the night, out to where a thousand weapons waited for their new owner to come and claim them. Shaggy demon’s head, a lolling tongue deeply split into two forks. Its dead breath fell on her face. She was in the land of insanity now. The iron gates were closed.

The moon—!

The moon was almost down.

He had caught another rabbit, had caught the trembling little thing in his bare hands and broken its neck. He had built a new fire on the bones of the old one and now the rabbit cooked, sending up savory ribbons of aroma. There were no wolves now. Tonight they had stayed away—it was meet and right that they should have done. It was, after all, his wedding night, and the dazed and apathetic thing sitting lumpishly on the other side of the fire was his blushing bride.

He leaned over and raised her hand out of her lap. When he let it go it stayed in place, raised to the level of her mouth. He looked at this phenomenon for a moment and then put her hand back in her lap. There her fingers began to wiggle sluggishly, like dying snakes. He poked two fingers at her eyes, and she did not blink. That blank stare just went on and on.

He was honestly puzzled.

What had he done to her?

He couldn’t remember.

And it didn’t matter. She was pregnant. If she was also catatonic, what did that matter? She was the perfect incubator. She would breed his son, bear him, and then she could die with her purpose served. After all, it was what she was there for.

The rabbit was done. He broke it in two. He pulled her half into tiny pieces, the way you break up a baby’s food. He fed it to her a piece at a time. Some pieces fell out of her mouth and into her lap half-chewed, but she ate most of it. If she remained like this, she would need a nurse. Jenny Engstrom, perhaps.

“That was very good, dear,” he said softly.

She looked blankly up at the moon. Flagg smiled gently at her and ate his wedding supper.

Good sex always made him hungry.

He awoke in the latter part of the night and sat up in his bedroll, confused and afraid… afraid in the instinctive, unknowing way that an animal is afraid—a predator who senses that he himself may be stalked.

Had it been a dream? A vision—?

They’re coming.

Frightened, he tried to understand the thought, to put it in some context. He couldn’t. It hung there on its own like a bad hex.

They’re closer now.

Who? Who was closer now?

The night wind whispered past him, seeming to bring him a scent. Someone was coming and—

Someone’s going.

While he slept, someone had passed his camp, headed east. The unseen third? He didn’t know. It was the night of the full moon. Had the third escaped? The thought brought panic with it.

Yes, but who’s coming?

He looked at Nadine. She was asleep, pulled up in a tight fetal position, the position his son would assume in her belly only months from now.

Are there months?

Again there was that feeling of things going flaky around the edges. He lay down again, believing there would be no more sleep for him this night. But he did sleep. And by the time he drove into Vegas the next morning, he was smiling again and he had nearly forgotten his night panic. Nadine sat docilely beside him on the seat, a big doll with a seed hidden carefully in its belly.

He went to the Grand, and there he learned what had happened while he slept. He saw the new look in their eyes, wary and questioning, and he felt the fear touch him again with its light moth wings.

Chapter 66

At about the same time that Nadine Cross was beginning to realize certain truths which should perhaps have been self-evident, Lloyd Henreid was sitting alone in the Cub Bar, playing Big Clock solitaire and cheating. He was out of temper. There had been a flash fire at Indian Springs that day, one dead, three hurt, and one of those likely to die of bad flash burns. They had no one in Vegas who knew how to treat such burns.

Carl Hough had brought the news. He had been pissed off to a high extreme, and he was not a man to be taken lightly. He had been a pilot for Ozark Airlines before the plague, was an ex-Marine, and could have broken Lloyd in two pieces with one hand while making a daiquiri with the other if he had wanted to. According to Carl, he had killed several men during the course of his long and checkered career, and Lloyd tended to believe him. Not that Lloyd was physically afraid of Carl Hough; the pilot was big and tough, but he was as leery of the Walkin Dude as anyone else in the West, and Lloyd wore Flagg’s charm. But he was one of their fliers, and because he was, he had to be handled diplomatically. And oddly enough, Lloyd was something, of a diplomat. His credentials were simple but awesome: He had spent several weeks with a certain madman named Poke Freeman and had lived to tell the tale. He had also spent several months with Randall Flagg, and was still drawing air and in his right mind.

Carl had come in around two on September 12, his cycle helmet under one arm. There was an ugly burn on his left cheek and blisters on one hand. There had been a fire. Bad, but not as bad as it could have been. A fuel truck had exploded, spewing burning petroleum all over the tarmac area.

“All right,” Lloyd had said. “I’ll see that the big guy knows. The guys that got hurt are at the infirmary?”

“Yeah. They are. I don’t think Freddy Campanari is going to live to see the sun go down. That leaves two pilots, me and Andy. Tell him that, and tell him something else when he gets back. I want that fuck Trashcan Man gone. That’s my price for staying.”

Lloyd gazed at Carl Hough. “Is it?”

“You’re damn well told.”

“Well, I tell you, Carl,” Lloyd said. “I can’t pass that message on. If you want to give orders to him, you’ll have to do it yourself.”

Carl looked suddenly confused and a little afraid. Fear sat strangely on that craggy face. “Yeah, I see your point. I’m just tired and fucked over, Lloyd. My face hurts like hell. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

“That’s okay, man. It’s what I’m here for.” Sometimes he wished it wasn’t. Already his head was starting to ache.

Carl said, “But he’s gotta go. If I have to tell him that, I will. I know he’s got one of those black stones. He’s ace-high with the tall man, I guess. But, hey, listen.” Carl sat down and put his helmet on a baccarat table. “Trash was responsible for that fire. My Christ, how’re we ever going to get those planes up if one of the big guy’s men is torching the fucking pilots?”

Several people passing through the lobby of the Grand glanced uneasily over at the table where Lloyd and Carl sat.

“Keep your voice down, Carl.”

“Okay. But you see the problem, don’t you?”

“How sure are you that Trash did it?”

“Listen,” Carl said, leaning forward, “he was in the motor pool, all right? In there for a long time. Lots of guys saw him, not just me.”

“I thought he was out someplace. In the desert. You know, looking for stuff.”

“Well, he came back, all right? That sand-crawler he takes out was full of stuff. God knows where he gets it, I sure don’t. Well, he had the guys in stitches at coffee break. You know how he is. To him, weaponry is like candy is to a kid.”

“Yeah.”

“The last thing he showed us was one of those incendiary fuses. You pull the tab, and there’s this little burst of phosphorus. Then nothing for half an hour or forty minutes, depending on the size of the fuse, all right? You get it? Then there’s one hell of a fire. Small, but very intense.”

“Yeah.”

“So okay. Trashy’s showin us, just about droolin over the thing, in fact, and Freddy Campanari says, ‘Hey, people who play with fire wet the bed, Trash.’ And Steve Tobin—you know him, he’s funny like a rubber crutch—he says, ‘You guys better put away your matches, Trashy’s back in town.’ And Trash got really weird. He looked around at us, and he muttered under his breath. I was sitting right next to him and it sounded like he said, ‘Don’t ask me about old lady Semple’s check no more.’ That make any sense to you?”

Lloyd shook his head. Nothing about the Trashcan Man made much sense to him.

“Then he just left. Picked up the stuff he was showing us and took off. Well, none of us felt very good about it. We didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. Most of the guys really like Trash. Or they did. He’s like a little kid, you know?”

Lloyd nodded.

“An hour later, that goddam fuel truck goes up like a rocket. And while we were picking up the pieces, I happened to look up and there’s Trashy over in his sand-crawler by the barracks building, watching us with binoculars.”

“Is that all you’ve got?” Lloyd asked, relieved.

“No. It ain’t. If it was, I wouldn’t even have bothered to come see you, Lloyd. But it got me thinking about how that truck went up. That’s just the sort of thing you use an incendiary fuse for. In Nam, the Cong blew up a lot of our ammo dumps just that way, with our own fucking incendiary fuses. Stick it under the truck, on the exhaust pipe. If no one starts the truck up, it goes when the timer runs out. If someone does, it goes when the pipe gets hot. Either way, ka-boom, no more truck. The only thing that didn’t fit was there’s always a dozen fuel trucks in the motor pool, and we don’t use them in any particular order. So after we got poor old Freddy over to the infirmary, John Waite and I went over there. John’s in charge of the motor pool and he was just about pissing himself. He’d seen Trash in there earlier.”

“He was sure it was Trashcan Man?”

“With those burns all the way up his arm, it’s kind of hard to make a mistake, wouldn’t you say? All right? No one thought anything of it then. He was just poking around, and that’s his job, ain’t it?”

“Yes, I guess you’d have to say it is.”

“So me and John start to look over the rest of the fuel trucks. And holy shit, there’s an incendiary fuse on every one of them. He put them on the exhaust pipes just below the fuel-tanks themselves. The reason the truck we were using went first was because the exhaust pipe got hot, like I just told you, all right? But the others were getting ready to go. Two or three were starting to smoke. Some of the trucks were empty, but at least five of them were full of jet fuel. Another ten minutes and we would have lost half the goddam base.”

Oh Jesus, Lloyd thought mournfully. It really is bad. Just about as bad as it can get.

Carl held up his blistered hand. “I got this pulling one of the hot ones. Now do you see why he’s got to go?”

Lloyd said hesitantly, “Maybe someone stole those fuses out of the back of his sand-crawler while he was taking a leak or something.”

Carl said patiently: “That’s not how it happened. Someone hurt his feelings while he was showing off his toys, and he tried to burn us all up. He damn near succeeded. Something’s got to be done, Lloyd.”

“All right, Carl.”

He spent the rest of the afternoon asking around about Trash—had anyone seen him or know where he might be? Guarded looks and negative answers. Word had gotten around. Maybe that was good. Anyone who did see him would be quick to report it, in hopes of having a good word put in on their behalf with the big guy. But Lloyd had a hunch that no one was going to see Trash. He had given them a little hotfoot and had gone running back into the desert in his sand-crawler.

He looked down at the solitaire game spread out in front of him and carefully controlled an urge to sweep the whole thing onto the floor. Instead, he cheated out another ace and went on playing. It didn’t matter. When Flagg wanted him, he would just reach out and gather him up. Old Trashy was going to end up riding a crosspiece just like Hec Drogan. Hard luck, guy.

But in his secret heart, he wondered.

Things had happened lately that he didn’t like. Dayna, for instance. Flagg had known about her, that was true, but she hadn’t talked. She had somehow escaped into death instead, leaving them no further ahead in the matter of the third spy.

That was another thing. How come Flagg didn’t just know about the third spy? He had known about the old fart, and when he had come back from the desert he had known about Dayna, and had told them exactly how he was going to handle her. But it hadn’t worked.

And now, Trashcan Man.

Trash wasn’t a nobody. Maybe he had been back in the old days, but not anymore. He wore the black man’s stone just as he himself did. After Flagg had crisped that bigmouth lawyer’s brains in L.A., Lloyd had seen Flagg lay his hands on Trashcan’s shoulders and tell him gently that all the dreams had been true dreams. And Trash had whispered, “My life for you.”

Lloyd didn’t know what else might have passed between them, but it seemed clear that he had wandered the desert with Flagg’s blessing. And now Trashcan Man had gone berserk.

Which raised some pretty serious questions.

Which was why Lloyd was sitting here alone at nine in the evening, cheating at solitaire and wishing he was drunk.

“Mr. Henreid?”

Now what? He looked up and saw a girl with a pretty, pouty face. Tight white shorts. A halter that didn’t quite cover the areolae of her nipples. Sexpot type for sure, but she looked nervous and pale, almost ill. She was biting compulsively at one of her thumbnails, and he saw that all her nails were bitten and ragged.

“What.”

“I… I have to see Mr. Flagg,” she said. The strength went rapidly out of her voice, and it ended as a whisper.

“You do, huh? What do you think I am, his social secretary?”

“But… they said… to see you.”

“Who did?”

“Well, Angie Hirschfield did. It was her.”

“What’s your name?”

“Uh, Julie.” She giggled, but it was only a reflex. The scared look never left her face, and Lloyd wondered wearily what sort of shit was up in the fan now. A girl like this wouldn’t ask for Flagg unless it was very serious indeed. “Julie Lawry.”

“Well, Julie Lawry, Flagg isn’t in Las Vegas now.”

“When will he be back?”

“I don’t know. He comes and goes, and he doesn’t wear a beeper. He doesn’t explain himself to me, either. If you have something, give it to me and I’ll see that he gets the message.” She looked at him doubtfully and Lloyd repeated what he had told Carl Hough that afternoon. “It’s what I’m here for, Julie.”

“Okay.” Then, in a rush: “If it’s important, you tell him I’m the one told you. Julie Lawry.”

“Okay.”

“You won’t forget?”

“No, for Chrissake! Now what is it?”

She pouted. “Well, you don’t have to be so mean about it.”

He sighed and put the handful of cards he had been holding down on the table. “No,” he said. “I guess I don’t. Now, what is it?”

“That dummy. If he’s around, I figure he’s spying. I just thought you should know.” Her eyes glinted viciously. “Motherfucker pulled a gun on me.”

“What dummy?”

“Well, I saw the retard, and so I figured the dummy must be with him, you know? And they’re just not our type. I figure they must have come from the other side.”

“That’s what you figure, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I don’t know what the Christ you’re talking about. It’s been a long day and I’m tired. If you don’t start talking some sense, Julie, I’m going up to bed.”

Julie sat down, crossed her legs, and told Lloyd about her meeting with Nick Andros and Tom Cullen in Pratt, Kansas, her hometown. About the Pepto-Bismol (“I was just having a little fun with the softie, and this deaf-and-dumb pulls a gun on me!”). She even told him about shooting at them as they left town.

“Which all proves what?” Lloyd asked when she finished. He had been a little intrigued with the word “spy,” but since then had lapsed into a semidaze of boredom.

Julie pouted again and lit a cigarette. “I told you. That feeb, he’s over here now. I just bet he’s spying.”

“Tom Cullen, you said his name was?”

“Yes.”

He had the vaguest sort of memory. Cullen was a big blond guy, a few cards short the deck for sure, but surely not as bad as this high-iron bitch was making out. He tried for more and came up empty. People were still streaming into Vegas in numbers of sixty to a hundred a day. It was becoming impossible to keep them all straight, and Flagg said the immigration was going to get a lot heavier before it tapered off. He supposed he could go to Paul Burlson, who was keeping a file of Vegas residents and find something out about this Cullen dude.

“Are you going to arrest him?” Julie asked.

Lloyd looked at her. “I’ll arrest you if you don’t get off my case,” he said.

“Nice fucking guy!” Julie Lawry cried, her voice rising shrewishly. She jumped to her feet, glaring at him. In her tight white cotton shorts, her legs seemed to go all the way up to her chin. “Try to do you a favor!”

“I’ll check it.”

“Yeah, right, I know that story.”

She stomped off, fanny swinging in tight little circles of indignation.

Lloyd watched her with a certain weary amusement, thinking there were a lot of chicks like her in the world—even now, after the superflu, he was willing to bet there were a lot around. Easy to slap the make on, but watch out for the fingernails afterward. Kissing cousins to those spiders that gobble up their mates after sex. Two months had gone by and she still bore that mute guy a grudge. What did she say his name was? Andros?

Lloyd pulled a battered black notebook from his back pocket, wet his finger, and paged over to a blank sheet. This was his memory book, and it was chock-full of little notes to himself—everything from a reminder to take a shave before meeting with Flagg to a boxed memorandum to get the contents of Las Vegas’ pharmacies inventoried before they started to lose morphine and codeine. It would be time to get another little book soon.

In his flat and scrawling grammar school script he wrote: Nick Andros or maybe Androtes—mute. In town? And below that: Tom Cullen, check out with Paul. He tucked the book back into his pocket. Forty miles northeast, the dark man had consummated his long-term relationship with Nadine Cross under the glittering desert stars. He would have been very interested to know that a friend of Nick Andros’s was in Las Vegas.

But he slept.

Lloyd looked morosely down at his solitaire game, forgetting about Julie Lawry and her grudge and her tight little ass. He cheated out another ace, and his thoughts turned dolefully back to the Trashcan Man and what Flagg might say—or do—when Lloyd told him.

At the same time Julie Lawry was leaving the Cub Bar, feeling shat upon for doing no more than what she saw as her civic duty, Tom Cullen stood by the picture window of his apartment in another part of the city, looking dreamily out at the full moon.

It was time to go.

Time to go back.

This apartment was not like his house in Boulder. This place was furnished but not decorated. He had not put up so much as a single poster or hung a single stuffed bird from piano wire. This place had been only a way station, and now it was time to go on. He was glad. He hated it here. It had a kind of smell to it here, a dry and rotten smell that you could never quite-put your finger on. The people were mostly nice, and some of them he liked every bit as well as the people in Boulder, folks like Angie and that little boy, Dinny. No one made fun of him because he was slow. They had given him a job and joked with him, and on lunchbreak they’d trade out of their dinner-buckets for something out of someone else’s that looked better. They were nice folks, not much different from Boulder folks, as far as he could tell, but—

But they had that smell about them.

They all seemed to be waiting and watching. Sometimes strange silences fell among them and their eyes seemed to glaze over, as if they were all having the same uneasy dream. They did things without asking for explanations of why they were doing them, or what it was for. It was as if these people were wearing happy-folks faces, but their real faces, their underneath-faces, were monster faces. He had seen a scary movie about that once. That kind of monster was called a werewolf.

The moon rode over the desert, ghostly, high, and free.

He had seen Dayna, from the Free Zone. He had seen her once and never again. What had happened to her? Had she been spying, too? Had she gone back?

He didn’t know. But he was afraid.

There was a small knapsack in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the apartment’s useless color console TV. The knapsack was full of vacuum-sealed ham strips and Slim Jims and Saltines. He picked it up and put it on.

Travel at night, sleep in the day.

He stepped out into the courtyard of the building without a backward glance. The moon was so bright that he cast a shadow on the cracked cement where the would-be high rollers had once parked their cars with the out-of-state plates.

He looked up at the ghostly coin that floated in the sky.

“M-O-O-N, that spells moon,” he whispered. “Laws, yes. Tom Cullen knows what that means.”

His bike was leaning against the pink stucco wall of the apartment building. He paused once to adjust his knapsack, then got on and set off for the Interstate. By 11 P.M., he had cleared Las Vegas and was pedaling east in the breakdown lane of I-15. No one saw him. No alarm was raised.

His mind dropped into a soft neutral, as it almost always did when the most immediate things were taken care of. He biked steadily along, conscious only that the light night breeze felt nice against his sweaty face. Every now and then he had to swerve around a sand dune that had crept out of the desert and had laid a white, skeletal arm across the road, and once he was well away from the city, there were stalled cars and trucks to contend with, too—look on my works, ye mighty, and despair, Glen Bateman might have said in his ironic way.

He stopped at two in the morning for a light lunch of Slim Jims crackers, and Kool-Aid from the big thermos strapped to the back of the bike. Then he went on. The moon was down. Las Vegas fell farther behind with every revolution of his bicycle tires. That made him feel good.

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

He was near.

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

Flagg.

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

–and oh dear God he was awake!

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

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

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

The dark man had gone back to sleep.

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

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

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

Chapter 67

The Walkin Dude was back in Vegas.

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

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

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

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

“Hi, Shirley, it’s Lloyd.”

“Lloyd Henreid! How are ya?”

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

“Paul? He’s not home. He’s out at Indian Springs. Bet I could catch him for you at BaseOps.”

“Okay, try that.”

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

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

Also, she did make nice coffee cake.

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

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

“Bailey, Ops,” a voice made tinny by distance said.

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

“Haul what, Lloyd?” Bailey asked.

“Paul! Paul Burlson! ”

“Oh, him! Yeah, he’s right here having a Co-Cola.”

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

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

Paul did manage to speak a little louder.

“Have you got your directory with you?” Lloyd asked.

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

“See if you’ve got anything on a guy named Tom Cullen, would you?”

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

“Right here.”

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

“How long has he been in Vegas?”

“Something less than three weeks.”

“From Colorado?”

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

“Got his address?”

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

“That it, Lloyd?”

“One other name, if you’ve got the time.”

Paul laughed—a small man’s fussy laugh. “Sure, it’s only my coffee break.”

“The name is Nick Andros.”

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

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

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

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

Red list.

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

Red meant danger.

Lloyd lifted the telephone again.

“Operator.”

“Lloyd again, Shirl.”

“Well, Lloyd, did you—”

“Shirley, I can’t gab. I’m onto something that’s maybe big.”

“Okay, Lloyd.” Shirley’s voice lost its flirtiness and she was suddenly all business.

“Who’s catching at Security?”

“Barry Dorgan.”

“Get him for me. And I never called you.”

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

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

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

“How important is this, Lloyd?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s the man, Lloyd,” he said. “He wants you.”

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

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

“Come in, Lloyd.” Flagg’s lazy smiling face above a prosy blue-checked bathrobe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Put out your hand, dear,” the dark man said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about Indian Springs?”

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

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

“There are some other things—”

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

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

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

“Carl could, I guess,” Lloyd said doubtfully. “I don’t know about the other two.”

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

Lloyd found his tongue at last. “The third spy—”

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

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

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

“What? What did you say?”

“The third spy—”

“No,” Flagg said with sudden decision. “No. You’re jumping at shadows, Lloyd.”

“If I’ve got it right, he’s a friend of a guy named Nick Andros.”

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

Flagg screamed: “And you sat there and talked about Indian Springs? I ought to throw you out that window! ”

Something—perhaps it was seeing the dark man vulnerable, perhaps it was only the knowledge that Flagg wouldn’t kill him until he got all of the information—allowed Lloyd to find his tongue and speak in his own defense.

“I tried to tell you!” he cried. “You cut me off! And you cut me off from the red list, whatever that is! If I’d known about that, I could have had that fucking retard last night!”

Then he was flung across the room to crash into the far wall. Stars exploded in his head and he dropped to the parquet floor, dazed. He shook his head, trying to clear it. There was a high humming noise in his ears.

Flagg seemed to have gone crazy. He was striding jerkily around the room, his face blank with rage. Nadine had shrunk back into her chair. Flagg reached a knickknack shelf populated with a milky-green menagerie of jade animals. He stared at them for a second, seeming almost puzzled by them, and then swept them all off onto the floor. They shattered like tiny grenades. He kicked at the bigger pieces with one bare foot, sending them flying. His dark hair had fallen over his forehead. He flipped it back with a jerk of his head and then turned toward Lloyd. There was a grotesque expression of sympathy and compassion on his face—both emotions every bit as real as a three-dollar bill, Lloyd thought. He walked over to help Lloyd up, and Lloyd noticed that he stepped on several jagged pieces of broken jade with no sign of pain… and no blood.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s have a drink.” He offered a hand and helped Lloyd to his feet. Like a kid doing a temper tantrum, Lloyd thought. “Yours is bourbon straight up, isn’t it?”

“Fine.”

Flagg went to the bar and made monstrous drinks. Lloyd demolished half of his at a gulp. The glass chattered briefly on the end table as he set it down. But he felt a little better.

Flagg said, “The red list is something I didn’t think you’d ever have to use. There were eight names on it—five now. It was their governing council plus the old woman. Andros was one of them. But he’s dead now. Yes, Andros is dead, I’m sure of it.” He fixed Lloyd with a narrow, baleful stare.

Lloyd told the story, referring to his notebook from time to time. He didn’t really need it, but it was good, from time to time, to get away from that smoking glare. He began with Julie Lawry and ended with Barry Dorgan.

“You say he’s retarded,” Flagg mused.

“Yes.”

Happiness spread over Flagg’s face and he began to nod. “Yes,” he said, but not to Lloyd. “Yes, that’s why I couldn’t see—”

He broke off and went to the telephone. Moments later he was talking to Barry.

“The helicopters. You get Carl in one and Bill Jamieson in the other. Continuous radio contact. Send out sixty—no, a hundred men. Close every road going out of eastern and southern Nevada. See that they have this Cullen’s description. And I want hourly reports.”

He hung up and rubbed his hands happily. “We’ll get him. I only wish we could send his head back to his bum-buddy Andros. But Andros is dead. Isn’t he, Nadine?”

Nadine only stared blankly.

“The helicopters won’t be much good tonight,” Lloyd said. “It’ll be dark in three hours.”

“Don’t you fret, old Lloyd,” the dark man said cheerfully. “Tomorrow will be time enough for the helicopters. He isn’t far. No, not far at all.”

Lloyd was bending his spiral notebook nervously back and forth in his hands, wishing he was anywhere but here. Flagg was in a good mood now, but Lloyd didn’t think he would be after hearing about Trash.

“I have one other item,” he said reluctantly. “It’s about the Trashcan Man.” He wondered if this was going to trigger another tantrum like the jade-smashing outburst.

“Dear Trashy. Is he off on one of his prospecting trips?”

“I don’t know where he is. He pulled a little trick at Indian Springs before he went out again.” He related the story as Carl had told it the day before. Flagg’s face darkened when he heard that Freddy Campanari had been mortally wounded, but by the time Lloyd had finished, his face was serene again. Instead of bursting into a rage, Flagg only waved his hand impatiently.

“All right. When he comes back in, I want him killed. But quickly and mercifully. I don’t want him to suffer. I had hoped he might… last longer. You probably don’t understand this, Lloyd, but I felt a certain… kinship with that boy. I thought I might be able to use him—and I have—but I was never completely sure. Even a master sculptor can find that the knife has turned in his hand, if it’s a defective knife. Correct, Lloyd?”

Lloyd, who knew from nothing about sculpture and sculptors’ knives (he thought they used mallets and chisels), nodded agreeably. “Sure.”

“And he’s done us the great service of arming the Shrikes. It was him, wasn’t it!”

“Yes. It was.”

“He’ll be back. Tell Barry Trash is to be… put out of his misery. Painlessly, if possible. Right now I am more concerned with the retarded boy to the east of us. I could let him go, but it’s the principle of the thing. Perhaps we can end it before dark. Do you think so, my dear?”

He was squatting beside Nadine’s chair now. He touched her cheek and she pulled away as if she had been touched with a red-hot poker. Flagg grinned and touched her again. This time she submitted, shuddering.

“The moon,” Flagg said, delighted. He sprang to his feet. “If the helicopters don’t spot him before dark, they’ll have the moon tonight. Why, I’ll bet he’s biking right up the middle of I-15 right now, in broad daylight. Expecting the old woman’s God to watch out for him. But she’s dead, too, isn’t she, my dear?” Flagg laughed delightedly, the laugh of a happy child. “And her God is, too, I suspect. Everything is going to work out well. And Randy Flagg is going to be a da-da.”

He touched her cheek again. She moaned like a hurt animal.

Lloyd licked his dry lips. “I’ll push off now, if that’s okay.”

“Fine, Lloyd, fine.” The dark man did not look around; he was staring raptly into Nadine’s face. “Everything is going well. Very well.”

Lloyd left as quickly as he could, almost running. In the elevator it all caught up with him and he had to push the EMERGENCY STOP button as hysterics overwhelmed him. He laughed and cried for nearly five minutes. When the storm had passed, he felt a little better.

He’s not falling apart, he told himself. There are a few little problems, but he’s on top of them. The ballgame will probably be over by the first of October, and surely by the fifteenth. Everything’s starting to go good, just like he said, and never mind that he almost killed me… never mind that he seems stranger than ever…

Lloyd got the call from Stan Bailey at Indian Springs fifteen minutes later. Stan was nearly hysterical between his fury at Trash and his fear of the dark man.

Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson had taken off from the Springs at 6:02 P.M. to run a recon mission east of Vegas. One of their other trainee pilots, Cliff Benson, had been riding with Carl as an observer.

At 6:12 P.M. both helicopters had blown up in the air. Stunned though he had been, Stan had sent five men over to Hangar 9, where two other skimmers and three large Baby Huey copters were stored. They found explosive taped to all five of the remaining choppers, and incendiary fuses rigged to simple kitchen timers. The fuses were not the same as the ones Trash had rigged to the fuel trucks, but they were very similar. There was not much room for doubt.

“It was the Trashcan Man,” Stan said. “He went hogwild. Jesus Christ only knows what else he’s wired up to explode out here.”

“Check everything,” Lloyd said. His heartbeat was rapid and thready with fear. Adrenaline boiled through his body, and his eyes felt as if they were in danger of popping from his head. “Check everything! You get every man jack out there and go from one end to the other of that cock-knocking base. You hear me, Stan?”

“Why bother?”

“Why bother? ” Lloyd screamed. “Do I have to draw you a picture, shitheels? What’s the big dude gonna say if the whole base—”

“All our pilots are dead,” Stan said softly. “Don’t you get it, Lloyd? Even Cliff, and he wasn’t very fucking good. We’ve got six guys that aren’t even close to soloing and no teachers. What do we need those jets for now, Lloyd?”

And he hung up, leaving Lloyd to sit thunderstruck, finally realizing.

Tom Cullen woke up shortly after nine-thirty that evening, feeling thirsty and stiff. He had a drink from his water canteen, crawled out from under the two leaning rocks, and looked up at the dark sky. The moon rode overhead, mysterious and serene. It was time to go on. But he would have to be careful, laws yes.

Because they were after him now.

He had had a dream. Nick was talking to him and that was strange, because Nick couldn’t talk. He was M-O-O-N, that spelled deaf-mute. Had to write everything, and Tom could hardly read at all. But dreams were funny things, anything could happen in a dream, and in Tom’s, Nick had been talking.

Nick said, “They know about you now, Tom, but it wasn’t your fault. You did everything right. It was bad luck. So now you have to be careful. You have to leave the road, Tom, but you have to keep going east.”

Tom understood about east, but not how he was going to keep from getting mixed up in the desert. He might just go around in big circles.

“You’ll know,” Nick said. “First you have to look for God’s Finger…”

Now Tom put his canteen back on his belt and adjusted his pack. He walked back to the turnpike, leaving his bike where it had been. He climbed the embankment to the road and looked both ways. He scuttled across the median strip and after another cautious look, he trotted across the westbound lanes of I-15.

They know about you now, Tom.

He caught his foot in the guardrail cable on the far side and tumbled most of the way to the bottom of the embankment beside the highway. He lay in a heap for a moment, heart pounding. There was no sound but faint wind, whining over the broken floor of the desert.

He got up and began to scan the horizon. His eyes were keen and the desert air was crystal clear. Before long he saw it, standing out against the starstrewn sky like an exclamation point. God’s Finger. As he faced due east, the stone monolith was at ten o’clock. He thought he could walk to it in an hour or two. But the clear, magnifying quality of the air had fooled more experienced hikers than Tom Cullen, and he was bemused by the way the stone finger always seemed to remain the same distance away. Midnight passed, then two o’clock. The great clock of stars in the sky had revolved. Tom began to wonder if the rock that looked so much like a pointing finger might not be a mirage. He rubbed his eyes, but it was still there. Behind him, the turnpike had merged into the dark distance.

When he looked back at the Finger, it did seem to be a little closer, and by 4 A.M., when an inner voice began to whisper that it was time to find a good hiding place for the coming day, there could be no doubt that he had drawn nearer to the landmark. But he would not reach it this night.

And when he did reach it (assuming that they didn’t find him when day came)? What then?

It didn’t matter.

Nick would tell him. Good old Nick.

Tom couldn’t wait to get back to Boulder and see him, laws, yes.

He found a fairly comfortable spot in the shade of a huge spine of rock and went to sleep almost instantly. He had come about thirty miles northeast that night, and was approaching the Mormon Mountains.

During the afternoon, a large rattlesnake crawled in beside him to get out of the heat of the day. It coiled itself by Tom, slept awhile, and then passed on.

Flagg stood at the edge of the roof sundeck that afternoon, looking east. The sun would be going down in another four hours, and then the retard would be on the move again.

A strong and steady desert breeze lifted his dark hair back from his hot brow. The city ended so abruptly, giving up to the desert. A few billboards on the edge of nowhere, and that was it. So much desert, so many places to hide. Men had walked into that desert before and had never been seen again.

“But not this time,” he whispered. “I’ll have him. I’ll have him.”

He could not have explained why it was so important to have the retard; the rationality of the problem constantly eluded him. More and more he felt an urge to simply act, to move, to do. To destroy.

Last evening, when Lloyd had informed him of the helicopter explosions and the deaths of the three pilots, he had had to use every resource at his command to keep from going into an utter screaming rage. His first impulse had been to order an armored column assembled immediately—tanks, flametracks, armored trucks, the whole works. They could be in Boulder in five days. The whole stinking mess would be over in a week and a half.

Sure.

And if there was early snow in the mountains passes, that would be the end of the great Wehrmacht. And it was already September 14. Good weather was no longer a sure bet. How in hell’s name had it gotten so late so fast?

But he was the strongest man on the face of the earth, wasn’t he? There might be another like him in Russia or China or Iran, but that was a problem for ten years from now. Now all that mattered was that he was ascendant, he knew it, he felt it. He was strong, that was all the retard could tell them… if he managed to avoid getting lost in the desert or freezing to death in the mountains. He could only tell them that Flagg’s people lived in fear of the Walkin Dude and would obey the Walkin Dude’s least command. He could only tell them things that would demoralize their will further. So why did he have this steady, gnawing feeling that Cullen must be found and killed before he could leave the West?

Because it’s what I want, and I am going to have what I want, and that is reason enough.

And Trashcan Man. He had thought he could dismiss Trash entirely. He had thought Trashcan Man could be thrown away like a defective tool. But he had succeeded in doing what the entire Free Zone could not have done. He had thrown dirt into the foolproof machinery of the dark man’s conquest.

I misjudged —

It was a hateful thought, and he would not allow his mind to follow it to its conclusion. He threw his glass over the roof’s low parapet and saw it twinkling, end over end, out and out, then descending. A randomly vicious thought, a petulant child’s thought, streaked across his mind: Hope it hits someone on the head!

Far below, the glass struck the parking lot and exploded… so far below, the dark man could not even hear it.

They had found no more bombs at Indian Springs. The entire place had been turned upside down. Apparently Trash had booby-trapped the first things he had come to, the choppers in Hangar 9 and the trucks in the motor pool next door.

Flagg had reiterated his orders that the Trashcan Man was to be killed on sight. The thought of Trash wandering around out in all that government property, where God knew what might be stored, now made him distinctly nervous.

Nervous.

Yes. The beautiful surety was still evaporating. When had that evaporation begun? He could not say, not for sure. All he knew was that things were getting flaky. Lloyd knew it too. He could see it in the way that Lloyd looked at him. It might not be a bad idea if Lloyd had an accident before the winter was out. He was asshole buddies with too many of the people in the palace guard, people like Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott. Even Burlson, who had spilled that business about the red list. He had thought idly about skinning Paul Burlson alive for that.

But if Lloyd had known about the red list, none of this would have —

“Shut up,” he muttered. “Just… shut… up!”

But the thought wouldn’t go away that easily. Why hadn’t he given Lloyd the names of the top-echelon Free Zone people? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember. It seemed there had been a perfectly good reason at the time, but the more he tried to grasp it, the more it slipped through his fingers. Had it only been a sly-stupid decision not to put too many of his eggs in one basket—a feeling that not too many secrets should be stored with any one person, even a person as stupid and loyal as Lloyd Henreid?

An expression of bewilderment rippled across his face. Had he been making such stupid decisions all along?

And just how loyal was Lloyd, anyway? That expression in his eyes—

Abruptly he decided to push it all aside and levitate. That always made him feel better. It made him feel stronger, more serene, and it cleared his head. He looked out at the desert sky.

(I am, I am, I am, I AM —)

His rundown bootheels left the surface of the sundeck, hovered, rose another inch. Then two. Peace came to him, and suddenly he knew he could find the answers. Everything was clearer. First he must—

“They’re coming for you, you know.”

He crashed back down at the sound of that soft, uninflected voice. The jarring shock went up his legs and his spine all the way to his jaw, which clicked. He whirled around like a cat. But his blooming grin withered when he saw Nadine. She was dressed in a white nightgown, yards of gauzy material that billowed around her body. Her hair, as white as the gown, blew about her face. She looked like some pallid deranged sibyl, and in spite of himself, Flagg was afraid. She took a delicate step closer. Her feet were bare.

“They’re coming. Stu Redman, Glen Bateman, Ralph Brentner, and Larry Underwood. They’re coming and they’ll kill you like a chicken-stealing weasel.”

“They’re in Boulder,” he said, “hiding under their beds and mourning their dead nigger woman.”

“No,” she said indifferently. “They’re almost in Utah now. They’ll be here soon. And they’ll stamp you out like a disease.”

“Shut up. Go downstairs.”

“I’ll go down,” she said, approaching him, and now it was she who smiled—a smile that filled him with dread. The furious color faded from his cheeks, and his strange, hot vitality seemed to go with it. For a moment he seemed old and frail. “I’ll go down… and so will you.”

“Get out.”

“We’ll go down,” she sang, smiling… it was horrible. “Down, doowwwn …”

“They’re in Boulder!”

“They’re almost here.”

“Get downstairs! ”

“Everything you made here is falling apart, and why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short. People are whispering about you. They’re saying you let Tom Cullen get away, just a simple retarded boy but smart enough to outwit Randall Flagg.” Her words came faster and faster, now tumbling through a jeering smile. “They’re saying your weapons expert has gone crazy and you didn’t know it was going to happen. They’re afraid that what he brings back from the desert next time may be for them instead of for the people in the East. And they’re leaving. Did you know that?”

“You lie,” he whispered. His face was parchment white, his eyes bulging. “They wouldn’t dare. And if they were, I’d know.”

Her eyes gazed blankly over his shoulder to the east. “I see them,” she whispered. “They’re leaving their posts in the dead of night, and your Eye doesn’t see them. They’re leaving their posts and sneaking away. A work-crew goes out with twenty people and comes back with eighteen. The border guards are defecting. They’re afraid the balance of power is shifting op its arm. They’re leaving you, leaving you, and the ones that are left won’t lift a finger when the men from the East come to finish you once and for all—”

It snapped. Whatever there was inside him, it snapped.

“YOU LIE! ” he screamed at her. His hands slammed down on her shoulders, snapping both collarbones like pencils. He lifted her body high over his head into the faded blue desert sky, and as he pivoted on his heels he threw her, up and out, as he had thrown the glass. He saw the great smile of relief and triumph on her face, the sudden sanity in her eyes, and understood. She had baited him into doing it, understanding somehow that only he could set her free—

And she was carrying his child.

He leaned over the low parapet, almost overbalancing, trying to call back the irrevocable. Her nightgown fluttered. His hand closed on the gauzy material and he felt it rip, leaving him only a scrap of cloth so diaphanous that he could see his fingers through it—the stuff of dreams on waking.

Then she was gone, plummeting straight down with her toes pointed toward the earth, her gown pillowing up her neck and over her face in drifts. She didn’t scream.

She went down as silently as a defective skyrocket.

When he heard the indescribable thud of her hard landing, Flagg threw his head back to the sky and howled.

It made no difference, it made no difference.

It was still all in the palm of his hand.

He leaned over the parapet again and watched them come running, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Or maggots to a piece of offal.

They looked so small, and he was so high above them.

He would levitate, he decided, and regain his state of calm.

But it was a long, long time before his bootheels would leave the sundeck, and when they did they would only hover a quarter of an inch above the concrete. They would go no higher.

Tom awoke that night at eight o’clock, but there was still too much light to move. He waited. Nick had come to him again in his sleep, and they had talked. It was so good to talk to Nick.

He lay in the shade of the big rock and watched the sky darken. The stars began to peep out. He thought about Pringle’s Potato Chips and wished he had some. When he got back to the Zone—if he did get back to the Zone—he would have all of them he wanted. He would gorge on Pringle’s chips. And bask in the love of his friends. That was what was missing back there in Las Vegas, he decided—simple love. They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

Only mushrooms and toadstools grew big and fat in the dark, even he knew that, laws, yes.

“I love Nick and Frannie and Dick Ellis and Lucy,” Tom whispered. It was his prayer. “I love Larry Underwood and Glen Bateman, too. I love Stan and Rona. I love Ralph. I love Stu. I love—”

It was odd, how easily their names came to him. Why, back in the Zone he was lucky if he could remember Stu’s name when he came to visit. His thoughts turned to his toys. His garage, his cars, his model trains. He had played with them by the hour. But he wondered if he would want to play with them so much when he got back from this… if he got back. It wouldn’t be the same. That was sad, but maybe it was also good.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he recited softly. “I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen.”

It was dark enough now, and he pushed on. By eleven-thirty that night he had reached God’s Finger, and he paused there for a little lunch. The ground was high here, and looking back the way he had come, he could see moving lights. On the turnpike, he thought. They’re looking for me.

Tom looked northeast again. Far ahead, barely visible in the dark (the moon, now two nights past full, had already begun to sink), he saw a huge rounded granite dome. He was supposed to go there next.

“Tom’s got sore feet,” he whispered to himself, but not without some cheeriness. Things could have been much worse than a case of sore feet. “M-O-O-N, that spells sore feet.”

He walked on, and the night things skittered away from him, and when he laid himself down at dawn, he had come almost forty miles. The Nevada-Utah border was not far to the east of him.

By eight that morning he was hard asleep, his head pillowed on his jacket. His eyes began to move rapidly back and forth behind his closed lids.

Nick had come, and Tom talked with him.

A frown creased Tom’s sleeping brow. He had told Nick how much he was looking forward to seeing him again.

But for some reason he could not understand, Nick had turned away.

Chapter 68

Oh, how history repeats itself: Trashcan Man was once again being broiled alive in the devils frying pan—but this time there was no hope of Cibola’s cooling fountains to sustain him.

It’s what I deserve, no more than what I deserve.

His skin had burned, peeled, burned, peeled again, and finally it had not tanned but blackened. He was walking proof that a man finally takes on the look of what he is. Trash looked as if someone had doused him in #2 kerosene and struck a match to him. The blue of his eyes had faded in the constant desert glare, and looking into them was like looking into weird, extra-dimensional holes in space. He was dressed in a strange imitation of the dark man—an open-throated red-checked shirt, faded jeans, and desert boots that were already scratched and mashed and folded and sprung. But he had thrown away his red-flawed amulet. He didn’t deserve to wear it. He had proved unworthy. And like all imperfect devils, he had been cast out.

He paused in the broiling sun and passed a thin and shaking hand across his brow. He had been meant for this place and time—all his life had been preparation. He had passed through the burning corridors of hell to get here. He had endured the father-killing sheriff, he had endured that place at Terre Haute, he had endured Carley Yates. After all his strange and lonely life, he had found friends. Lloyd. Ken. Whitney Horgan.

And ah God, he had fucked it all up. He deserved to burn out here in the devil’s frying pan. Could there be redemption for him? The dark man might know. Trashcan did not.

He could barely remember now what had happened—perhaps because his tortured mind did not want to remember. He had been in the desert for over a week before his last disastrous return to Indian Springs. A scorpion had stung him on the middle finger of his left hand (his fuckfinger, that long-ago Carley Yates in that long-ago Powtanville would have called it with unfailing pool-hall vulgarity), and that hand had swelled up like a rubber glove filled with water. An unearthly fire had filled his head. And yet he had pushed on.

He had finally returned to Indian Springs, still feeling like a figment of someone else’s imagination. There had been some good-natured talk as the men examined his finds—incendiary fuses, contact land mines, small stuff, really. Trash had begun to feel good for the first time since the scorpion had stung him.

And then, with no warning at all, time had sideslipped and he was back in Powtanville. Someone had said, “People who play with fire wet the bed, Trash,” and he had looked up; expecting to see Billy Jamieson, but it hadn’t been Bill, it was Rich Groudemore from Powtanville, grinning and picking his teeth with a match, his fingers black with grease because he’d strolled up to the pool-hall from the Texaco on the corner to have a game of nine-ball on his break. And someone else said, “You better put that away, Richie, Trash is back in town,” and that sounded like Steve Tobin at first, but it wasn’t Steve. It was Carley Yates in his old, scuffed, and hoody motorcycle jacket. With growing horror he had seen they were all there, unquiet corpses come back to life. Richie Groudemore and Carley and Norm Morrisette and Hatch Cunningham, the one who was getting bald even though he was only eighteen and all of the others called him Hatch Cunnilingus.

And they were leering at him. It came thick and fast then, through a feverhaze of years. Hey, Trash, why dintchoo torch the SCHOOL? Hey, Trashy, ya burned ya pork off yet? Hey, Trashcan Man, I heard you snort Ronson lighter fluid, that true?

Then Carley Yates: Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?

He tried to scream at them, but all that had come out was a whisper: “Don’t ask me about old lady Semple’s pension check no more.” And he ran.

The rest of it was a dream. Getting the incendiary fuses and slapping them on the trucks in the motor pool. His hands had done their own work, his mind far away in a confused whirl. People had seen him coming and going between the motor pool and his sandtrack with its big balloon tires, and some of them had even waved, but no one had come over and asked what he was doing. After all, he wore Flagg’s charm.

Trashy did his work and thought about Terre Haute.

In Terre Haute they had made him bite on a rubber thing when they gave him the shocks, and the man at the controls sometimes looked like the father-killing sheriff and sometimes like Carley Yates and sometimes like Hatch Cunnilingus. And he always swore hysterically to himself that this time he wouldn’t piss himself. And he always did.

When the trucks were fixed, he had gone into the nearest hangar and had fixed the choppers in there. He had wanted timer fuses to do that job right, and so he had gone into the messhall kitchen and had found over a dozen of those five-and-dime plastic timers. You set them for fifteen minutes or half an hour and when they got back to zero they went ding and you knew it was time to take your pie out of the oven. Only instead of going ding this time, Trash had thought, they are going to go bang. He liked that. That was pretty good. If Carley Yates or Rich Groudemore tried taking one of those copters up, they were going to get a big fat surprise. He had simply hooked the kitchen timers up to the copter ignition systems.

When it was done, a moment of sanity had come back. A moment of choice. He had stared around wonderingly at the helicopters parked in the echoing hangar and then down at his hands. They smelled like a roll of burned caps. But this was not Powtanville. There were no helicopters in Powtanville. The Indiana sun did not shine with the savage brilliance of this sun. He was in Nevada. Carley and his pool-hall buddies were dead. Dead of the superflu.

Trash had turned around and looked doubtfully at his handiwork. What was he doing, sabotaging the dark man’s equipment? It was senseless, insane. He would undo it, and quickly.

Oh, but the lovely explosions.

The lovely fires.

Flaming jet fuel streaming everywhere. Helicopters exploding out of the air. So beautiful.

And he had suddenly thrown his new life away. He had trotted back to his sand-crawler, a furtive grin on his sun-blackened face. He had gotten in and had driven away… but not too far away. He had waited, and finally a fuel truck had come out of the motor pool garage and had trundled across the tarmac like a large olive-drab beetle. And when it blew, exploding greasy fire in every direction, Trash had dropped his fieldglasses and had bellowed at the sky, shaking his fists in inarticulate joy. But the joy had not lasted long. It had been replaced by deadly terror and sick, mourning sorrow.

He had driven northwest into the desert, pushing the sand-crawler along at near-suicidal speeds. How long ago? He didn’t know. If he had been told that this was the sixteenth of September, he would only have nodded in a total blank lack of understanding.

He thought he would kill himself, that there was nothing else left for him, every hand was turned against him now, and that was just as it was supposed to be. When you bit the hand that fed you, you expected that extended hand to curl into a fist. That wasn’t only the way life went; that was justice. He had three large cans of gasoline in the back of the track. He would pour it all over himself and then strike a match. It was what he deserved.

But he hadn’t done it. He didn’t know why. Some force, more powerful than the agony of his remorse and loneliness, had stopped him. It seemed that even burning himself to death like a Buddhist monk was not penance enough. He had slept. And when he awoke, he discovered that a new thought had crept into his brain as he slept, and that thought was:

REDEMPTION.

Was it possible? He didn’t know. But if he found something… something big … and brought it to the dark man in Las Vegas, might it not be possible? And even if REDEMPTION was impossible, perhaps ATONEMENT was not. If it was true, there was still a chance he could die content.

What? What could it be? What was big enough for REDEMPTION, or even for ATONEMENT? Not landmines or a fleet of flametracks, not grenades or automatic weapons. None of those things were big enough. He knew where there were two large experimental bombers (they had been built without congressional knowledge, paid for out of blind defense funds), but he could not get them back to Vegas, and even if he could, there was no one there who could fly them. From the looks of them, they crewed at least ten, maybe more.

He was like an infrared scope that senses heat in darkness and reveals those heat sources as vague red-devil shapes. He was able, in some strange way, to sense the things that had been left behind in this wasteland, where so many military projects had been carried out. He could have gone straight west, straight to Project Blue, where the whole thing had begun. But cold plague was not to his taste, and in his confused but not entirely illogical way, he thought it would not be to Flagg’s taste, either. Plague didn’t care who it killed. It might have been better for the human race if the original funders of Project Blue had kept that simple fact in mind.

So he had gone northwest from Indian Springs, into the sandy desolation of the Nellis Air Force Range, stopping his crawler when he had to cut through high barbed-wire fences marked with signs that read—US GOVERNMENT PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING and ARMED SENTRIES and GUARD DOGS and THERE IS A HIGH-VOLTAGE CHARGE PASSING THROUGH THESE WIRES. But the electricity was dead, like the guard dogs and the armed sentries, and Trashcan Man drove on, correcting his course from time to time. He was being drawn, drawn to something. He didn’t know what it was, but he thought it was big. Big enough.

The crawler’s Goodyear balloon tires rolled steadily on, carrying Trash through dry washes and up slopes so rocky that they looked like half-exposed stegosaurus spines. The air hung still and dry. The temperature hovered at just above 100. The only sound was the drone of the crawler’s modified Studebaker engine.

He topped a knoll, saw what was below, and threw the transmission into neutral for a moment to get a better look.

There was a huddled complex of buildings down there, shimmering through the rising heat like quicksilver. Quonset huts and low cinderblock. Vehicles stalled here and there on dusty streets. The whole area was surrounded by three courses of barbed wire, and he could see the porcelain conductors along the wire. These were not the small conductors the size of a knuckle that passed along a weak stay-away charge; these were the giant ones, the size of a closed fist.

From the east, a paved two-lane road led to a guardhouse that looked like a reinforced pillbox. No cute little signs here saying CHECK YOUR CAMERA WITH MP ON DUTY or IF YOU LIKED US, TELL YOUR CONGRESSMAN. The only sign in evidence was red on yellow, the colors of danger, curt and to the point: PRESENT IDENTIFICATION IMMEDIATELY.

“Thank you,” Trashcan whispered. He had no idea who he was thanking. “Oh thank you… thank you.” His special sense had led him to this place, but he had known it was here all along. Somewhere.

He put the sandtrack in its forward gear and lurched down the slope. Ten minutes later he was nosing up the access road to the guardhouse. There were black-and-white-striped crash barriers across the road, and Trash got out to examine them. Places like this had big generators to make sure there was plenty of emergency power. He doubted if any generator would have gone on supplying power for three months, but he would still have to be very careful and make sure everything was blown before going in. What he wanted was now very near at hand. He wouldn’t allow himself to become overeager and get cooked like a roast in a microwave oven.

Behind six inches of bulletproof glass, a mummy in an army uniform stared out and beyond him.

Trash ducked under the crash barrier on the ingress side of the guardhouse and approached the door of the little concrete building. He tried it and it opened. That was good. When a place like this had to switch over to emergency power, everything was supposed to lock automatically. If you were taking a crap, you got locked in the bathroom until the crisis was over. But if the emergency power failed, everything unlocked again.

The dead sentry had a dry, sweet, interesting smell, like cinnamon and sugar mixed together for toast. He had not bloated or rotted; he had simply dried up. There were still black discolorations under his neck, the distinctive trademark of Captain Trips. Standing in the corner behind him was a Browning automatic rifle. Trashcan Man took it and went back outside.

He set the BAR for single fire, fiddled with the sight, and then socked it into the hollow of his scrawny right shoulder. He sighted down on one of the porcelain conductors and squeezed off a shot. There was a loud hand-clapping sound and an exciting whiff of cordite. The conductor exploded every which way, but there was no purple-white glare of high-voltage electricity. Trashcan Man smiled.

Humming, he walked over to the gate and examined it. Like the guardhouse door, it was unlocked. He pushed it open a little way and then hunkered down. There was a pressure mine here under the paving. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did know. It might be armed; it might not be.

He went back to the sandtrack, put it in gear, and drove it through the crash barriers. They broke off with a snapping, grinding sound and the crawler’s big balloon tires rolled over them. The desert sun pounded down. Trashcan Man’s peculiar eyes sparkled happily. In front of the gate, he got out of the sandtrack and then put it in gear again. The driverless track rolled forward and pushed the gate all the way open. Trashcan Man darted into the guardhouse.

He squinched his eyes shut, but there was no explosion. That was good; they really had shut down completely. Their emergency systems might have run a month, perhaps even two, but in the end the heat and lack of regular maintenance had killed them. Still, he would be careful.

Meanwhile, his sandtrack was rolling serenely toward the corrugated wall of a long Quonset hut. Trashcan Man trotted onto the base after it and caught up with it just as it was bumping over the curb of what a sign announced was Illinois Street. He put it back into neutral, and the sandtrack stopped. He got in, reversed, and drove around to the front of the Quonset.

It was a barracks. The shadowy interior was filled with that sugar-and-cinnamon smell. There were perhaps twenty soldiers scattered among the fifty or so beds. Trashcan Man walked up the aisle between them, wondering where he was going. There was nothing in here for him, was there? These men had once been weapons of a sort, but they had been neutralized by the flu.

But there was something at the very rear of the building that interested him. A sign. He walked up to read it. The heat in here was tremendous. It made his head thump and swell. But when he stood in front of the sign, he began to smile. Yes, it was here. Somewhere on this base was what he had been looking for.

The sign showed a cartoon man in a cartoon shower. He was soaping his cartoon genitals busily; they were almost entirely covered with a drift of cartoon bubbles. The caption beneath read: REMEMBER ! IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO SHOWER DAILY!

Below that was a yellow-and-black emblem that showed three triangles pointed downward.

The symbol for radiation.

Trashcan Man laughed like a child and clapped his hands in the stillness.

Chapter 69

Whitney Horgan found Lloyd in his room, lying on the big round bed he had most recently shared with Dayna Jurgens. There was a large gin and tonic balanced on his bare chest. He was staring solemnly up at his reflection in the overhead mirror.

“Come on in,” he said when he saw Whitney. “Don’t stand on ceremony, for Chrissake. Don’t bother to knock. Bastard.” It came out as bassard.

“You drunk, Lloyd?” Whitney asked cautiously.

“Nope. Not yet. But I’m gettin there.”

“Is he here?”

“Who? Fearless Leader?” Lloyd sat up. “He’s around someplace. The Midnight Rambler.” He laughed and lay back down.

Whitney said in a low voice, “You want to watch what you’re saying. You know it’s not a good idea to hit the hard stuff when he’s—”

“Fuck it.”

“Remember what happened to Hec Drogan. And Strellerton.”

Lloyd nodded. “You’re right. The walls have ears. The fucking walls have ears. You ever hear that saying?”

“Yeah, once or twice. It’s a true saying around here, Lloyd.”

“You bet.” Lloyd suddenly sat up and threw his drink across the room. The glass shattered. “There’s one for the sweeper, right, Whitney?”

“You okay, Lloyd?”

“I’m all right. You want a gin and tonic?”

Whitney hesitated for a moment. “Naw. I don’t like them without the lime.”

“Hey, Jesus, don’t say no just because of that! I got lime. Comes out of a little squeeze bottle.” Lloyd went over to the bar and held up a plastic ReaLime. “Looks just like the Green Giant’s left testicle. Funny, huh?”

“Does it taste like lime?”

“Sure,” Lloyd said morosely. “What do you think it tastes like? Fuckin Cheerios? So what do you say? Be a man and have a drink with me.”

“Well… okay.”

“We’ll have them by the window and take in the view.”

“No,” Whitney said, harshly and abruptly. Lloyd paused on his way to the bar, his face suddenly paling. He looked toward Whitney, and for a moment their eyes met.

“Yeah, okay,” Lloyd said. “Sorry, man. Poor taste.”

“That’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay, and both of them knew it. The woman Flagg had introduced as his “bride” had taken a high dive the day before. Lloyd remembered Ace High saying that Dayna couldn’t jump from the balcony because the windows didn’t open. But the penthouse had a sundeck. Guess they must have thought none of the real high rollers—Arabs, most of them—would ever take the dive. A lot they knew.

He fixed Whitney a gin and tonic and they sat and drank in silence for a while. Outside, the sun was going down in a red glare. At last Whitney said in a voice almost too low to be heard: “Do you really think she went on her own?”

Lloyd shrugged. “What does it matter? Sure. I think she dived. Wouldn’t you, if you was married to him? You ready?”

Whitney looked at his glass and saw with some surprise that he was indeed ready. He handed it to Lloyd, who took it over to the bar. Lloyd was pouring the gin freehand, and Whitney had a nice buzz on.

Again they drank in silence for a while, watching the sun go down.

“What do you hear about that guy Cullen?” Whitney asked finally.

“Nothing. Doodley-squat. El-zilcho. I don’t hear nothing, Barry don’t hear nothing. Nothing from Route 40, from Route 30, from Route 2 and 74 and I-15. Nothing from the back roads. They’re all covered and they’re all nothing. He’s out in the desert someplace, and if he keeps moving at night and if he can figure out how to keep moving east, he’s going to slip through. And what does it matter, anyhow? What can he tell them?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either. Let him go, that’s what I say.”

Whitney felt uncomfortable. Lloyd was getting perilously close to criticizing the boss again. His buzz-on was stronger, and he was glad. Maybe soon he would find the nerve to say what he had come here to say.

“I’ll tell you something,” Lloyd said, leaning forward. “He’s losing his stuff. You ever hear that fucking saying? It’s the eighth inning and he’s losing his stuff and there’s no-fucking-body warming up in the bullpen.”

“Lloyd, I—”

“You ready?”

“Sure, I guess.”

Lloyd made them new drinks. He handed one to Whitney, and a little shiver went through him as he sipped. It was almost raw gin.

“Losing his stuff,” Lloyd said, returning to his text. “First Dayna, then this guy Cullen. His own wife—if that’s what she was—goes and takes a dive. Do you think her double-fucking-gainer from the penthouse balcony was in his game plan?”

“We shouldn’t be talking about it.”

“And Trashcan Man. Look what that guy did all by himself. With fiends like that, who needs enemas? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Lloyd—”

Lloyd was shaking his head. “I don’t understand it at all. Everything was going so good, right up to the night he came and said the old lady was dead over there in the Free Zone. He said the last obstacle was out of our way. But that’s when things started to get funny.”

“Lloyd, I really don’t think we should be—”

“Now I just don’t know. We can take em by land assault next spring, I guess. We sure as shit can’t go before then. But by next spring, God knows what they might have rigged up over there, you know? We were going to hit them before they could think up any funny surprises, and now we can’t. Plus, holy God on His throne, there’s Trashy to think about. He’s out there in the desert ramming around someplace, and I sure as hell—”

“Lloyd,” Whitney said in a low, choked voice. “Listen to me.”

Lloyd leaned forward, concerned. “What? What’s the trouble, old hoss?”

“I didn’t even know if I’d have the guts to ask you,” Whitney said. He was squeezing his glass compulsively. “Me and Ace High and Ronnie Sykes and Jenny Engstrom. We’re cutting loose. You want to come? Christ, I must be crazy telling you this, with you so close to him.”

“Cutting loose? Where are you going?”

“South America, I guess. Brazil. That ought to be just about far enough.” He paused, struggling, then plunged on. “A lot of people have been leaving. Well, maybe not a lot, but quite a few, and there’s more every day. They don’t think Flagg can cut it. Some are going north, up to Canada. That’s too frigging cold for me. But I got to get out. I’d go east if I thought they’d have me. And if I was sure we could get through.” Whitney stopped abruptly and looked at Lloyd miserably. It was the face of a man who thinks he has gone much too far.

“You’re all right,” Lloyd said softly. “I ain’t going to blow the whistle on you, old hoss.”

“It’s just… all gone bad here,” Whitney said miserably.

“When you planning to go?” Lloyd asked.

Whitney looked at him with narrow suspicion.

“Aw, forget I asked,” Lloyd said. “You ready?”

“Not yet,” Whitney said, looking into his glass.

“I am.” He went to the bar. With his back to Whitney he said, “I couldn’t.”

“Huh?”

“Couldn’t! ” Lloyd said sharply, and turned back to Whitney. “I owe him something. I owe him a lot. He got me out of a bad jam back in Phoenix and I been with him since then. Seems longer than it really is. Sometimes it seems like forever.”

“I’ll bet.”

“But it’s more than that. He’s done something to me, made me brighter or something. I don’t know what it is, but I ain’t the same man I was, Whitney. Nothing like. Before… him … I was nothing but a minor leaguer. Now he’s got me running things here, and I do okay. It seems like I think better. Yeah, he’s made me brighter.” Lloyd lifted the flawed stone from his chest, looked at it briefly, then dropped it again. He wiped his hand against his pants as though it had touched something nasty. “I know I ain’t no genius now. I have to write everything I’m s’posed to do in a notebook or I forget it. But with him behind me I can give orders and most times things turn out right. Before, all I could do was take orders and get in jams. I’ve changed… and he changed me. Yeah, it seems a lot longer than it really is.

“When we got to Vegas, there were only sixteen people here. Ronnie was one of them; so was Jenny and poor old Hec Drogan. They were waiting for him. When we got into town, Jenny Engstrom got down on those pretty knees of hers and kissed his boots. I bet she never told you that in bed.” He smiled crookedly at Whitney. “Now she wants to cut and run. Well, I don’t blame her, or you either. But it sure doesn’t take much to sour a good operation, does it?”

“You’re going to stick?”

“To the very end, Whitney. His or mine. I owe him that.” He didn’t add that he still had enough faith in the dark man to believe that Whitney and the others would end up riding crosstrees, more likely than not. And there was something else. Here he was Flagg’s second-in-command. What could he be in Brazil? Why, Whitney and Ronnie were both brighter than he was. He and Ace High would end up low chickens, and that wasn’t to Lloyd’s taste. Once he wouldn’t have minded, but things had changed. And when your head changed, he was finding out, it most always changed forever.

“Well, it might work out for all of us,” Whitney said lamely.

“Sure,” Lloyd said, and thought: But I wouldn’t want to be walking in your shoes if it comes out right for Flagg after all. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when he finally has time to notice you down there in Brazil. Riding a crosstree might be the least of your worries then…

Lloyd raised his glass. “A toast, Whitney.”

Whitney raised his own glass.

“Nobody gets hurt,” Lloyd said. “That’s my toast. Nobody gets hurt.”

“Man, I’ll drink to that,” Whitney said fervently, and they both did.

Whitney left soon after. Lloyd kept on drinking. He passed out around nine-thirty and slept soddenly on the round bed. There were no dreams, and that was almost worth the price of the next day’s hangover.

When the sun rose on the morning of September 17, Tom Cullen made his camp a little north of Gunlock, Utah. It was cold enough for him to be able to see his breath puffing out in front of him. His ears were numb and cold. But he felt good. He had passed quite close to a rutted bad road the night before, and he had seen three men gathered around a small spluttering campfire. All three had guns.

Trying to ease past them through a tangled field of boulders—he was now on the western edge of the Utah badlands—he had sent a small splatter of pebbles rolling and tumbling into a dry-wash. Tom froze. Warm wee-wee spilled down his legs, but he wasn’t even aware that he’d done it in his pants like a little baby until an hour or so later.

All three of them turned around, two of them bringing their weapons up to port arms. Tom’s cover was thin, barely adequate. He was a shadow among shadows. The moon was behind a reef of clouds. If it chose this moment to come out…

One of them relaxed. “It’s a deer,” he said. “They’re all over the place.”

“I think we should investigate,” another had said.

“Put your thumb up your asshole and investigate that,” the third replied, and that was the end of it. They sat by the fire again, and Tom began to creep along, feeling for each step, watching as their campfire receded with agonizing slowness. An hour and it was only a spark on the slope below him. Finally it was gone and a great weight seemed to slip off his shoulders. He began to feel safe. He was still in the West and he knew enough to be careful—laws, yes—but the danger no longer seemed as thick, as if there were Indians or outlaws all around.

And now, with the sun coming up, he rolled into a tight ball in the low thicket of bushes and prepared to go to sleep. Got to get some blankets, he thought. It’s getting cold. Then sleep took him, suddenly and completely, as it always did.

He dreamed of Nick.

Chapter 70

Trashcan Man had found what he wanted.

He came along a hallway deep underground, a hallway as dark as a mine pit. In his left hand he held a flashlight. In his right hand he held a gun, because it was spooky down here. He was riding an electric tram that rolled almost silently along the wide corridor. The only sound it made was a low, almost subaural hum.

The tram consisted of a seat for the driver and a large carry space. Resting in the carry space was an atomic warhead.

It was heavy.

Trash could not make an intelligent guess as to just how heavy it was, because he hadn’t even been able to budge it by hand. It was long and cylindrical. It was cold. Running his hand over its curved surface, he had found it hard to believe that such a cold dead lump of metal could have the potential for so much heat.

He had found it at four in the morning. He had gone back to the motor pool and had gotten a chainfall. He had brought the chainfall back down and had rigged it over the warhead. Ninety minutes later, it was nestled cozily into the electric tram, nose up. Stamped on the nose was A161410USAF. The hard rubber tires of the tram had settled appreciably when he put it in.

Now he was coming to the end of the hallway. Straight ahead was the large freight elevator with its doors standing invitingly open. It was plenty big enough to take the tram, but of course there was no electricity. Trash had gotten down by the stairs. He had brought the chainfall down the same way. The chainfall was light compared to the warhead. It only weighed a hundred and fifty pounds or so. And still it had been a major chore getting it down five courses of stairs.

How was he going to get the warhead up those stairs?

Power-driver winch, his mind whispered.

Sitting on the driver’s seat and shining his flash randomly around, Trash nodded to himself. Sure, that was the ticket. Winch it up. Set a motor topside and pull it up, stair-riser by stair-riser, if he had to. But where was he going to find five hundred feet of chain all in one piece?

Well, he probably wasn’t. But he could weld pieces of chain together. Would that work? Would the welds hold? It was hard to say. And even if they did, what about all the switchbacks the stairs made going up?

He hopped down and ran a caressing hand over the smooth, deadly surface of the warhead in the silent darkness.

Love would find a way.

Leaving the warhead in the tram, he began to climb the stairs again to see what he could find. A base like this, there would be a little of everything. He would find what he needed.

He climbed two flights and paused to catch his breath. He suddenly wondered: Have I been taking radiation? They shielded all that stuff, shielded it with lead. But in the movies you saw on TV, the men who handled radioactive stuff were always wearing those protective suits and film badges that turned color if you got a dose. Because it was silent. You couldn’t see it. It just settled into your flesh and your bones. You didn’t even know you were sick until you started puking and losing your hair and having to run to the bathroom every few minutes.

Was all that going to happen to him?

He discovered that he didn’t care. He was going to get that bomb up. Somehow he was going to get it up. Somehow he was going to get it back to Las Vegas. He had to make up for the terrible thing he had done at Indian Springs. If he had to die to atone, then he would die.

“My life for you,” he whispered in the darkness, and began to climb the stairs again.

Chapter 71

It was nearly midnight on the evening of September 17. Randall Flagg was in the desert, wrapped in three blankets, from toes to chin. A fourth blanket was swirled around his head in a kind of burnoose, so that only his eyes and the tip of his nose were visible.

Little by little, he let all thoughts slip away. He grew still. The stars were cold fire, witchlight.

He sent out the Eye.

He felt it separate from himself with a small and painless tug. It went flying away, silent as a hawk, rising on dark thermals. Now he had joined with the night. He was eye of crow, eye of wolf, eye of weasel, eye of cat. He was the scorpion, the strutting trapdoor spider. He was a deadly poison arrow slipping endlessly through the desert air. Whatever else might have happened, the Eye had not left him.

Flying effortlessly, the world of earthbound things spread out below him like a clockface.

They’re coming… they’re almost in Utah now…

He flew high, wide, and silent over a graveyard world. Below him the desert lay like a whited sepulcher cut by the dark ribbon of the interstate highway. He flew east, over the state line now, his body far behind, glittering eyes rolled up to blind whites.

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

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

The dark man’s Eye went east.

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

Just east of Grand Junction was a spark of campfire.

The Eye spiraled down.

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

It was true, then.

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

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

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

Kojak continued to growl, his hackles up.

The man who had awakened—it was Glen Bateman—looked around, suddenly uneasy. “Who’s there, boy?” he whispered to the dog. “Is something there?”

Kojak continued to growl.

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

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

Silence and rushing darkness.

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

They were coming, yes.

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

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

Was it even possible that they had been turned out?

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

Oh, it was so lovely!

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

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

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

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

Oh, yes.

Chapter 72

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, seventy years ago,” Larry said, and laughed.

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

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

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

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

“You really think he’s going to take us?”

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

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

“Quite a fella, ain’t he?” Ralph said.

Larry nodded. “Yes. I think he is.”

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

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

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

“Can I see that cheat sheet?” Stu asked.

“Sure,” Larry said, and handed it over.

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

Date

September 6th

September 7th

September 8th

September 9th

September 10th

September 11th

September 12th

September 13th

September 14th

September 15th

September 16th

September 17th

Miles

28.1

27.0

26.5

28.2

27.9

29.1

28.8

29.5

32.0

32.6

35.5

37.2

Total Miles

28.1

55.1

81.6

109.8

137.7

166.8

195.6

225.1

257.1

289.7

325.2

362.4

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

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

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

“I don’t believe she, was the one who sent us,” Stu said quietly.

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

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

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

Kojak wagged his tail.

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

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

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

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

How long before hunger had forced him from his refuge?

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

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

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, if they wanted something to eat, couldn’t they find it?”

“I’d think so, yeah.”

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

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

Were the wolves sent to kill that man?

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

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

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

“Water?” Stu asked.

Ralph shrugged. “Not much of that, either. Guess I’ll turn in.”

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

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

“It isn’t exactly shouting distance from here to Texas.”

Stu smiled. “No. No, it ain’t.”

“You miss Fran a lot, I guess.”

“Yeah. Miss her, worry about her. Worry about the baby. It’s worse after it gets dark.”

Glen puffed. “That’s nothing you can change, Stuart.”

“I know. But I worry.”

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

“What was it?”

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

“Yeah, that was bad.”

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

“He had a scent, that’s all.”

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

“It felt like Flagg, Stuart.”

“Probably nothing,” Stu said after a moment.

“It sure felt like something. It felt like something to Kojak, too.”

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

“Nothing. But I don’t like it. I don’t like it that he’s able to watch us… if that’s what it is. It scares me shitless.”

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

“So Harold’s dead,” Stu said at last.

“Yes.”

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

“I agree.”

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

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

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

“How’s that arthritis?”

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

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

“Keep well, Frannie, old kid,” he said, and got into his sleeping bag. And in his dreams he thought that Something had come near their camp, Something that was keeping malevolent watch over them. It might have been a wolf with human understanding. Or a crow. Or a weasel, creeping bellydown through the scrub. Or it might have been some disembodied presence, a watching Eye.

I will fear no evil, he muttered in his dream. Yea, though I walk though the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. No evil.

At last the dream faded and he slept soundly.

The next morning they were on the road again early, Larry’s gadget clicking off the miles as the highway switched lazily back and forth down the gentling Western Slope toward Utah. Shortly after noon they left Colorado behind them. That evening they camped west of Harley Dome, Utah. For the first time the great silence impressed then as being oppressive and malefic. Ralph Brentner went to sleep that night thinking: We’re in the West now. We’re out of our ballpark and into his.

And that night Ralph dreamed of a wolf with a single red eye that had come out of the badlands to watch them. Go away, Ralph told it. Go away, we’re not afraid. Not afraid of you.

By 2 P.M. on the afternoon of September 21, they were past Sego. The next large town, according to Stu’s pocket map, was Green River. There were no more towns after that for a long, long time. Then, as Ralph had said, they would probably find out if God was with them or not.

“Actually,” Larry said to Glen, “I’m not as worried about food as I am water. Most everyone who’s on a trip keeps a few munchies in their car, Oreos or Fig Newtons or something like that.”

Glen smiled. “Maybe the Lord will send us showers of blessing.”

Larry looked up at the cloudless blue sky and grimaced at the idea. “I sometimes think she was right off her block at the end of it.”

“Maybe she was,” Glen said mildly. “If you read your theology, you’ll find that God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane. It even seems to me—here’s the closet Jesuit coming out—that there are good psychological reasons for it. A madman or a person on her deathbed is a human being with a drastically changed psyche. A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet.”

“The ways of God,” Larry said. “I know. We see through a glass darkly. It’s a pretty dark glass to me, all right. Why we’re walking all this way when we could have driven it in a week is beyond me. But since we’re doing a nutty thing, I guess it’s okay to do it in a nutty way.”

“What we’re doing has all sorts of historical precedent,” Glen said, “and I see some perfectly sound psychological and sociological reasons for this walk. I don’t know if they’re God’s reasons or not, but they make good sense to me.”

“Such as what?” Stu and Ralph had walked over to hear this, too.

“There were several American Indian tribes that used to make ‘having a vision’ an integral part of their manhood rite. When it was your time to become a man, you were supposed to go out into the wilderness unarmed. You were supposed to make a kill, and two songs—one about the Great Spirit and one about your own prowess as a hunter and a rider and a warrior and a fucker—and have that vision. You weren’t supposed to eat. You were supposed to get up high—mentally as well as physically—and wait for that vision to come. And eventually, of course, it would.” He chuckled. “Starvation is a great hallucinogenic.”

“You think Mother sent us out here to have visions?” Ralph asked.

“Maybe to gain strength and holiness by a purging process,” Glen said. “The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you’re also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel.”

Larry shook his head slowly. “I don’t follow that.”

“Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?”

“Reads a book,” Ralph said.

“Goes to see his friends,” Stu said.

“Plays the stereo,” Larry said, grinning.

“Sure, all those things,” Glen said. “But he’s also missing that TV. There’s a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he’s still thinking, At nine o’clock I’m going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn’t feel right until it was back.”

“It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It’s an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your selves, gentlemen—they are turning into a window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers.”

“But what’s the point?” Ralph asked. “Why go through all the rigmarole?”

Glen said, “If you read your Bible, you’ll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time—Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means ‘no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.’ Does that remind you of anyone?”

“Sure. Mother,” Ralph said.

“Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too—a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you’d never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car.”

They were all listening closely.

“Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner… all of it runs off the battery. A normal life—at least in what used to be Western civilization—was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “Even a big Delco won’t ever overcharge when it’s sitting in a Cadillac.”

“Well, what we’ve done is to strip off the accessories. We’re on charge.”

Ralph said uneasily: “If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she’ll explode.”

“Yes,” Glen agreed. “Same with people. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn’t say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here—”

“Off my case, baldy,” Stu growled.

“Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity.”

They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over.

“Are we changing?” Stu asked quietly.

“Yes,” Glen answered. “Yes, I think we are.”

“We’ve dropped some weight,” Ralph said. “I know that just looking at you guys. And me, I used to have a helluva beergut. Now I can look down and see my toes again. In fact, I can see just about my whole feet.”

“It’s a state of mind,” Larry said suddenly. When they looked at him he seemed a trifle embarrassed but went on: “I’ve had this feeling for the last week or so, and I couldn’t understand it. Maybe now I can. I’ve been feeling high. Like I’d done half a joint of really dynamite grass or snorted just a touch of coke. But there’s none of the disorienting feeling that goes with dope. You do some dope and you feel like normal thinking is lust a little bit out of your grasp. I feel like I’m thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high.” Larry laughed. “Maybe it’s just hunger.”

“Hunger’s part of it,” Glen agreed, “but not all of it.”

“Me, I’m hungry all the time,” Ralph said, “but it doesn’t seem too important. I feel good.”

“I do too,” Stu said. “Physically, I haven’t felt this good in years.”

“When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there,” Glen said. “The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It’s a whole-body, whole-mind enema.”

“You got such a fancy way of puttin things, baldy.”

“It may be inelegant, but it’s accurate.”

Ralph asked, “Will it help us with him?”

“Well,” Glen said, “that’s what it’s for. I don’t have much doubt about that. But we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”

They walked on. Kojak came out of the brush and walked with them for a while, his toenails clicking on the pavement of US 70. Larry reached down and ruffled his fur. “Ole Kojak,” he said. “Did you know you were a battery? Just one great big old Delco battery with a lifetime guarantee?”

Kojak didn’t appear to know or care, but he wagged his tail to show he was on Larry’s side.

They camped that night about fifteen miles west of Sego, and as if to drive home the point of what they had been talking about in the afternoon, there was nothing to eat for the first time since they had left Boulder. Glen had the last of their instant coffee in a Glad Bag, and they shared it out of a single mug, passing it from hand to hand. They had come the last ten miles without seeing a single car.

The next morning, the twenty-second, they came upon an overturned Ford station wagon with four corpses in it—two of them little children. There were two boxes of animal crackers in the car, and a large bag of stale potato chips. The animal crackers were in better shape. They shared them out five ways.

“Don’t wolf them, Kojak,” Glen admonished. “Bad dog! Where are your manners? And if you have no manners—as I must now conclude—where is your savoir faire?”

Kojak thumped his tail and eyed the animal crackers in a way which showed pretty conclusively that he had no more savoir faire than he did manners.

“Then root, hog, or die,” Glen said, and gave the dog the last of his own share—a tiger. Kojak wolfed it down and then went sniffing off.

Larry had saved his entire menagerie—about ten animals—to eat at once. He did so slowly and dreamily. “Did you ever notice,” he said, “that animal crackers have a faint, lemony undertaste? I remember that from being a kid. Never noticed it again until now.”

Ralph had been tossing his last two crackers from hand to hand, and now he gobbled one. “Yeah, you’re right. They do have sort of a lemon taste to em. You know, I kind of wish ole Nicky was here. I wouldn’t mind sharing these old animal crackers a little further.”

Stu nodded. They finished the animal crackers and went on. That afternoon they found a Great Western Markets delivery truck, apparently bound for Green River, pulled neatly over in the breakdown lane, the driver sitting bolt upright and dead behind the wheel. They lunched on a canned ham from the back, but none of them seemed to want much. Glen said their stomachs had shrunk. Stu said the ham smelled bad to him—not spoiled, just too rich. Too meaty. It kind of turned his stomach. He could only bring himself to eat a single slice. Ralph said he would have just as soon had two or three more boxes of animal crackers, and they all laughed. Even Kojak ate only a small serving before going off to investigate some scent.

They camped east of Green River that night, and there was a dust of snow in the early morning hours.

They came to the washout a little past noon on the twenty-third. The sky had been overcast all day, and it was cold—cold enough to snow, Stu thought—and not just flurries, either.

The four of them stood on the edge, Kojak at Glen’s heel, looking down and across. Somewhere north of here a dam might have given way, or there might have been a succession of hard summer rainstorms. Whatever, there had been a flash flood along the San Rafael, which was only a dry-wash in some years. It had swept away a great thirty-foot slab of I-70. The gully was about fifty feet deep, the banks crumbly, rubbly soil and sedimentary rock. At the bottom was a sullen trickle of water.

“Holy crow,” Ralph said. “Somebody oughtta call the Utah State Highway Department about this.”

Larry pointed. “Look over there,” he said. They looked out into the emptiness, which was now beginning to be dotted with strange, wind-carved pillars and monoliths. About one hundred yards down the course of the San Rafael they saw a tangle of guardrails, cable, and large slabs of asphalt-composition paving. One chunk stuck up toward the cloudy, racing sky like an apocalyptic finger, complete with white broken passing line.

Glen was looking down into the rubble-strewn cut, hands stuffed into his pockets, an absent, dreaming look on his face. In a low voice, Stu said: “Can you make it, Glen?”

“Sure, I think so.”

“How’s that arthritis?”

“It’s been worse.” He cracked a smile. “But in all honesty, it’s been better, too.”

They had no rope with which to anchor each other. Stu went down first, moving carefully. He didn’t like the way the ground sometimes shifted under his feet, starting little slides of rock and dirt. Once he thought his footing was going to go out from under him completely, sending him sliding all the way to the bottom on his can. One groping hand caught a solid rock outcropping and he hung on for dear life, finding more solid ground for his feet. Then Kojak was bounding blithely past him, kicking up little puffs of dirt and sending down only small runnels of earth. A moment later he was standing on the bottom, wagging his tail and barking amiably up at Stu.

“Fucking showoff dog,” Stu growled, and carefully made his way to the bottom.

“I’m coming next,” Glen called. “I heard what you said about my dog!”

“Be careful, baldy! Be damn careful! It’s really loose underfoot.”

Glen came down slowly, moving with great deliberation from one hold to the next. Stu tensed every time he saw loose dirt start to slide out from underneath Glen’s battered Georgia Giants. His hair blew like fine silver around his ears in the light breeze that had sprung up. It occurred to him that when he had first met Glen, painting a mediocre picture beside the road in New Hampshire, Glen’s hair had still been salt-and-pepper.

Until the moment Glen finally planted his feet on the level ground of the mudflat at the bottom of the gully, Stu was sure he was going to fall and break himself in two. Stu sighed with relief and clapped him on the shoulder.

“No sweat, East Texas,” Glen said, and bent to ruffle Kojak’s fur.

“Plenty here,” Stu told him.

Ralph came next, moving carefully from one hold to the next, lumping the last eight feet or so. “Boy,” he said. “That shits just as loose as a goose. Be funny if we couldn’t get up that other bank and had to walk four or five miles upstream to find shallower bank, wouldn’t it?”

“Be a lot funnier if another flash flood came along while we were looking,” Stu said.

Larry came down agilely and well, joining them less than three minutes after they had started down. “Who goes up first?” he asked.

“Why don’t you, since you’re so perky?” Glen said.

“Sure.”

It took him considerably longer to get up, and twice the treacherous footing ran out beneath him and he nearly fell. But finally he gained the top and waved down at them.

“Who’s next?” Ralph asked.

“Me,” Glen said, and walked across to the other bank.

Stu caught his arm. “Listen,” he said. “We can walk upstream and find a shallower bank like Ralph said.”

“And lose the rest of the day? When I was a kid, I could have gone up there in forty seconds and registered a pulse-rate under seventy at the top.”

“You’re no kid now, Glen.”

“No. But I think there’s still some of him left.”

Before Stu could say more, Glen had started. He paused to rest about a third of the way up and then pressed on. Near the halfway point he grabbed an outcrop of shale that crumbled away under his hands and Stu was sure he was going to tumble all the way to the bottom, end over arthritic end.

“Ah, shit—” Ralph breathed.

Glen flailed his arms and somehow kept his balance. He jigged to his right and went up another twenty feet, rested, and then up again. Near the top a spur of rock that he had been standing on tore loose and he would have fallen, but Larry was there. He grabbed Glen’s arm and hauled him up.

“Nothing to it,” Glen called down.

Stu grinned with relief. “How’s your pulse-rate, baldy?”

“Plus ninety, I think,” Glen admitted.

Ralph climbed the cut-bank like a stolid mountain goat, checking each hold, shifting his hands and feet with great deliberation. When he reached the top, Stu started up.

Right up until the moment he fell, Stu was thinking that actually this slope was a little easier than the one they had descended. The holds were better, the gradient a tiny bit shallower. But the surface was a mixture of chalky soil and rock fragments that had been badly loosened by the wet weather. Stu sensed that it wanted to be evil, and he went up carefully.

His chest was over the edge when the knob of outcropping his left foot was on suddenly disappeared. He felt himself begin to slide. Larry grabbed for his hand, but this time he missed his grip. Stu grabbed the outjutting edge of the turnpike, and it came off in his hands. He stared at it stupidly for a moment as the speed of his descent began to increase. He discarded it, feeling insanely like Wile E. Coyote. All I need, he thought, is for someone to go beep-beep before I hit the bottom.

His knee struck something, and there was a sudden bolt of pain. He grabbed at the gluey surface of the slope, which was now speeding past him at an alarming rate, and kept coming away with nothing but handfuls of dirt.

He slammed into a boulder sticking out of the rubble like a big blunt arrowhead and cartwheeled, the breath slapped from his body. He fell free for about ten feet, and came down on his lower leg at an angle. He heard it snap. The pain was instantaneous and huge. He yelled. He did a backward somersault. He was eating dirt now. Sharp pebbles scrawled bloody scratches across his face and arms. He came down on the hurt leg again, and felt it snap somewhere else. This time he didn’t yell. This time he screamed.

He slid the last fifteen feet on his belly, like a kid on a greasy chute-the-chute. He came to rest with his pants full of mud and his heart beating crazily in his ears. The leg was white fire. His coat and the shirt beneath were both rucked up to his chin.

Broken. But how bad? Pretty bad from the way it feels. Two places at least, maybe more. And the knee’s sprung.

Larry was coming down the slope, moving in little jumps that seemed almost a mockery of what had just happened to Stu. Then he was kneeling beside him, asking the question which Stu had already asked himself.

“How bad, Stu?”

Stu got up on his elbows and looked at Larry, his face white with shock and streaked brown with dirt.

“I figure I’ll be walking again in about three months,” he said. He began to feel as if he were going to puke. He looked up at the cloudy sky, balled his fists up, and shook them at it.

“OHHH, SHIT! ” he screamed.

Ralph and Larry splinted the leg. Glen had produced a bottle of what he called “my arthritis pills” and gave Stu one. Stu didn’t know what was in the “arthritis pills” and Glen refused to say, but the pain in his leg faded to a faraway drone. He felt very calm, even serene. It occurred to him that they were all living on borrowed time, not because they were on their way to find Flagg, necessarily, but because they had survived Captain Trips in the first place. At any rate, he knew what had to be done… and he was going to see that it was done. Larry had just finished speaking. They all looked at him anxiously to see what he would say.

What he said was simple enough. “No.”

“Stu,” Glen said gently, “you don’t understand—”

“I understand. I’m saying no. No trip back to Green River. No rope. No car. Against the rules of the game.”

“It’s no fucking game!” Larry cried. “You’d die here!”

“And you’re almost surely gonna die over there in Nevada. Now go on and get getting. You’ve got another four hours of daylight. No need to waste it.”

“We’re not going to leave you,” Larry said.

“I’m sorry, but you are. I’m telling you to.”

“No. I’m in charge now. Mother said if anything happened to you—”

“—that you were to go on.”

“No. No.” Larry looked around at Glen and Ralph for support. They looked back at him, troubled. Kojak sat nearby, watching all four with his tail curled neatly around his paws.

“Listen to me, Larry,” Stu said. “This whole trip is based on the idea that the old lady knew what she was talking about. If you start frigging around with that, you’re putting everything on the line.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Ralph said.

“No, it ain’t right, you sodbuster,” Larry said, furiously mimicking Ralph’s flat Oklahoma accent. “It wasn’t God’s will that Stu fell down here, it wasn’t even the dark man’s doing. It was just loose dirt, that’s all, just loose dirt! I’m not leaving you, Stu. I’m done leaving people behind.”

“Yes. We are going to leave him,” Glen said quietly.

Larry stared around unbelievingly, as if he had been betrayed. “I thought you were his friend!”

“I am. But that doesn’t matter.”

Larry uttered a hysterical laugh and walked a little way down the gully. “You’re crazy! You know that?”

“No I’m not. We made an agreement. We stood around Mother Abagail’s deathbed and entered into it. It almost certainly meant our deaths, and we knew it. We understood the agreement. Now we’re going to live up to it.”

“Well, I want to, for Chrissake. I mean, it doesn’t have to be Green River; we can get a station wagon, put him in the back, and go on—”

“We’re supposed to walk,” Ralph said. He pointed at Stu. “He can’t walk.”

“Right. Fine. He’s got a broken leg. What do you propose we do? Shoot him like a horse?”

“Larry—” Stu began.

Before he could go on, Glen grabbed Larry’s shirt and yanked him toward him. “Who are you trying to save?” His voice was cold and stern. “Stu, or yourself?”

Larry looked at him, mouth working.

“It’s very simple,” Glen said. “We can’t stay… and he can’t go.”

“I refuse to accept that,” Larry whispered. His face was dead pale.

“It’s a test,” Ralph said suddenly. “That’s what it is.”

“A sanity test, maybe,” Larry said.

“Vote,” Stu said from the ground. “I vote you go on.”

“Me too,” Ralph said. “Stu, I’m sorry. But if God’s gonna watch out for us, maybe he’ll watch out for you, too—”

“I won’t do it,” Larry said.

“It’s not Stu you’re thinking of,” Glen said. “You’re trying to save something in yourself, I think. But this time it’s right to go on, Larry. We have to.”

Larry rubbed his mouth slowly with the back of his hand.

“Let’s stay here tonight,” he said. “Let’s think this thing out.”

“No,” Stu said.

Ralph nodded. A look passed between him and Glen, and then Glen fished the bottle of “arthritis pills” out of his pocket and put it in Stu’s hand. “These have a morphine base,” he said. “More than three or four would probably be fatal.” His eyes locked with Stu’s. “Do you understand, East Texas?”

“Yeah. I get you.”

“What are you talking about?” Larry cried. “Just what the hell are you suggesting?”

“Don’t you know?” Ralph said with such utter contempt that for a moment Larry was silenced. Then it all rushed before him again with the nightmare speed of strangers’ faces as you ride the whip at the carnival: pills, uppers, downers, cruisers. Rita. Turning her over in her sleeping bag and seeing that she was dead and stiff, green puke coming out of her mouth like a rancid party favor.

“No! ” he yelled, and tried to snatch the bottle from Stu’s hand.

Ralph grabbed him by the shoulders. Larry struggled.

“Let him go,” Stu said. “I want to talk to him.” Ralph still held on, looking at Stu uncertainly. “No, go on, let him go.”

Ralph let go, but looked ready to spring again.

Stu said, “Come here, Larry. Hunker down.”

Larry came over and hunkered by Stu. He looked miserably into Stu’s face. “It’s not right, man. When somebody falls down and breaks his leg, you don’t… you can’t just walk off and let that person die. Don’t you know that? Hey, man…” He touched Stu’s face. “Please. Think.”

Stu took Larry’s hand and held it. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No! No, but—”

“And do you think that people who are in their right minds have the right to decide for themselves what they want to do?”

“Oh, man,” Larry said, and started to cry.

“Larry, you’re not in this. I want you to go on. If you get out of Vegas, come back this way. Maybe God’ll send a raven to feed me, you don’t know. I read once in the funny-pages that a man can go seventy days without food, if he’s got water.”

“It’s going to be winter before that here. You’ll be dead of exposure in three days, even if you don’t use the pills.”

“That ain’t up to you. You ain’t in this part of it.”

“Don’t send me away, Stu.”

Stu said grimly: “I’m sending you.”

“This sucks,” Larry said, and got to his feet. “What’s Fran going to say to us? When she finds out we left you for the gophers and the buzzards?”

“She’s not going to say anything if you don’t get over there and fix his clock. Neither is Lucy. Or Dick Ellis. Or Brad. Or any of the others.”

Larry said, “Okay. We’ll go. But tomorrow. We’ll camp here tonight, and maybe we’ll have a dream… something…”

“No dreams,” Stu said gently. “No signs. It doesn’t work like that. You’d stay one night and there’d be nothing and then you’d want to stay another night, and another night… you got to go right now.”

Larry walked away from them, head down, and stood with his back turned. “All right,” he said at last in a voice almost too low to hear. “We’ll do it your way. God help our souls.”

Ralph came over to Stu and knelt down. “Can we get you anything, Stu?”

Stu smiled. “Yeah. Everything Gore Vidal ever wrote—those books about Lincoln and Aaron Burr and those guys. I always meant to read the suckers. Now it looks like I got the chance.”

Ralph grinned crookedly. “Sorry, Stu. Looks like I’m tapped.”

Stu squeezed his arm, and Ralph went away. Glen came over. He had also been crying, and when he sat down by Stu, he started leaking again.

“Come on, ya baby,” Stu said. “I’ll be okay.”

“Larry’s right. This is bad. Like something you’d do to a horse.”

“You know it has to be done.”

“I guess I do, but who really knows? How’s that leg?”

“No pain at all, right now.”

“Okay, you got the pills.” Glen swiped his arm across his eyes. “Goodbye, East Texas. It’s been pretty goddam good to know you.”

Stu turned his head aside. “Don’t say goodbye, Glen. Make it so long, it’s better luck. You’ll probably get halfway up that frigging bank and fall down here and we can spend the winter playing cribbage.”

“It’s not so long,” Glen said. “I feel that, don’t you?”

And because he did, Stu turned his face back to look at Glen. “Yeah, I do,” he said, and then smiled a little. “But I will fear no evil, right?”

“Right!” Glen said. His voice dropped to a husky whisper. “Pull the plug if you have to, Stuart. Don’t screw around.”

“No.”

“Goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye, Glen.”

The three of them drew together on the west side of the gully, and after a look back over his shoulder, Glen started to go up. Stu followed his progress up the side with growing alarm. He was moving casually, almost carelessly; hardly even glancing at his footing. The ground crumbled away beneath him once, then twice. Both times he grabbed nonchalantly for a handhold, and both times one just happened to be there. When he reached the top, Stu released his pent-up breath in a long, harsh sigh.

Ralph went next, and when he reached the top, Stu called Larry over one last time. He looked up into Larry’s face and reflected that in its way it was remarkably like the late Harold Lauder’s—remarkably still, the eyes watchful and a little wary. A face that gave away nothing but what it wanted to give away.

“You’re in charge now,” Stu said. “Can you handle it?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try.”

“You’ll be making the decisions.”

“Will I? Looks like my first one was overruled.” Now his eyes did give away an emotion: reproach.

“Yeah, but that’s the only one that will be. Listen—his men are going to grab you.”

“Yeah. I figure they will. They’ll either grab us or shoot us from ambush like we were dogs.”

“No, I think they’ll grab you and take you to him. It’ll happen in the next few days, I think. When you get to Vegas, keep your eyes open. Wait. It’ll come.”

“What, Stu? What’ll come?”

“I don’t know. Whatever we were sent for. Be ready. Know it when it comes.”

“We’ll be back for you, if we can. You know it.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Larry went up the bank quickly and joined the other two. They stood and waved down. Stu raised his hand in return. They left. And they never saw Stu Redman again.

Chapter 73

The three of them camped sixteen miles west of the place where they had left Stu. They had come to another washout, this one minor. The real reason they had made such poor mileage was because some of the heart seemed to have gone out of them. It was hard to tell if it was going to come back. Their feet seemed to weigh more. There was little conversation. Not one of them wanted to look into the face of another, for fear of seeing his own guilt mirrored there.

They camped at dark and built a scrub fire. There was water, but no food. Glen tamped the last of his tobacco into his pipe, and wondered suddenly if Stu had any cigarettes. The thought spoiled his own taste for tobacco, and he knocked his pipe out on a rock, absently kicking away the last of his Borkum Riff. When an owl hooted somewhere out in the darkness a few minutes later, he looked around.

“Say, where’s Kojak?” he asked.

“Now, that’s kinda funny, ain’t it?” Ralph said. “I can’t remember seeing him the last couple of hours at all.”

Glen got to his feet. “Kojak!” he yelled. “Hey, Kojak! Kojak! ” His voice echoed lonesomely away into the wastes. There was no answering bark. He sat down again, overcome with gloom. A soft sighing noise escaped him. Kojak had followed him almost all the way across the continent. Now he was gone. It was like a terrible omen.

“You s’pose something got him?” Ralph asked softly.

Larry said in a quiet, thoughtful voice: “Maybe he stayed with Stu.”

Glen looked up, startled. “Maybe,” he said, considering it. “Maybe that’s what happened.”

Larry tossed a pebble from one hand to the other, back and forth, back and forth. “He said maybe God would send a raven to feed him. I doubt if there’s any out here, so maybe He sent a dog instead.”

The fire made a popping sound, sending a column of sparks up into the darkness to whirl in brief brightness and then to wink out.

When Stu saw the dark shape come slinking down the gully toward him, he pulled himself up against the nearby boulder, leg sticking out stiffly in front of him, and found a good-sized stone with one numb hand. He was chilled to the bone. Larry had been right. Two or three days of lying around in these temperatures was going to kill him quite efficiently. Except now it looked like whatever this was would get him first. Kojak had remained with him until sunset and then had left him, scrambling easily out of the gully. Stu had not called him back. The dog would find his way back to Glen and go on with them. Perhaps he had his own part to play. But now he wished that Kojak had stayed a little longer. The pills were one thing, but he had no wish to be ripped to pieces by one of the dark man’s wolves.

He gripped the rock harder and the dark shape paused about twenty yards up the cut. Then it started coming again, a blacker shadow in the night.

“Come on, then,” Stu said hoarsely.

The black shadow wagged its tail and came. “Kojak? ”

It was. And there was something in his mouth, something he dropped at Stu’s feet. He sat down, tail thumping, waiting to be complimented.

“Good dog,” Stu said in amazement. “Good dog!”

Kojak had brought him a rabbit.

Stu pulled out his pocket knife, opened it, and disemboweled the rabbit in three quick movements. He picked up the steaming guts and tossed them to Kojak. “Want these?” Kojak did. Stu skinned the rabbit. The thought of eating it raw didn’t do much for his stomach.

“Wood?” he said to Kojak without much hope. There were scattered branches and hunks of tree all along the banks of the gully, dropped by the flash flood, but nothing within reach.

Kojak wagged his tail and didn’t move.

“Fetch? F—”

But Kojak was gone. He whirled, streaked to the east side of the gully, and ran back with a large piece of deadwood in his jaws. He dropped it beside Stu, and barked. His tail wagged rapidly.

“Good dog,” Stu said again. “I’ll be a sonofabitch! Fetch, Kojak!”

Barking with joy, Kojak went again. In twenty minutes, he had brought back enough wood for a large fire. Stu carefully stripped enough splinters to make kindling. He checked the match situation and saw that he had a book and a half. He got the kindling going on the second match and fed the fire carefully. Soon there was a respectable blaze going and Stu got as close to it as he could, sitting in his sleeping bag. Kojak lay down on the far side of the fire with his nose on his paws.

When the fire had burned down a little, Stu spitted the rabbit and cooked it. The smell was soon strong enough and savory enough to have his stomach rumbling. Kojak came to attention and sat watching the rabbit with close interest.

“Half for you and half for me, big guy, okay?”

Fifteen minutes later he pulled the rabbit off the fire and managed to rip it in half without burning his fingers too badly. The meat was burned in places, half-raw in others, but it put the canned ham from Great Western Markets in the shade. He and Kojak gulped it down… and as they were finishing, a bone-chilling howl drifted down the wash.

“Christ! ” Stu said around a mouthful of rabbit.

Kojak was on his feet, hackles up, growling. He advanced stiff-legged around the fire and growled again. Whatever had howled fell silent.

Stu lay down, the hand-sized stone by one hand and his opened pocket knife by the other. The stars were cold and high and indifferent. His thoughts turned to Fran and he turned them away just as quickly. That hurt too much, full belly or not. I won’t sleep, he thought. Not for a long time.

But he did sleep, with the help of one of Glen’s pills. And when the coals of the fire had burned down to embers, Kojak came over and slept next to him, giving Stu his heat. And that was how, on the first night after the party was broken, Stu ate when the others went hungry, and slept easy while their sleep was broken by bad dreams and an uneasy feeling of rapidly approaching doom.

On the twenty-fourth, Larry Underwood’s group of three pilgrims made thirty miles and camped northeast of the San Rafael Knob. That night the temperature slid down into the mid-twenties, and they built a large fire and slept dose by it. Kojak had not rejoined them.

“What do you think Stu’s doing tonight?” Ralph asked Larry.

“Dying,” Larry said shortly, and was sorry when he saw the wince of pain on Ralph’s homely, honest face, but he didn’t know how to redeem what he had said. And after all, it was almost surely true.

He lay down again, feeling strangely certain that it was tomorrow. Whatever they were coming to, they were almost there.

Bad dreams that night. He was on tour with an outfit called the Shady Blues Connection in the one he remembered most clearly on waking. They were booked into Madison Square Garden, and the place was sold out. They took the stage to thunderous applause. Larry went to adjust his mike, bring it down to proper height, and couldn’t budge it. He went to the lead guitarist’s mike, but that one was frozen, too. Bass guitarist, organist, same thing. Booing and rhythmic clapping began to come from the crowd. One by one, the members of the Shady Blues Connection slunk off the stage, grinning furtively into high psychedelic shirt-collars like the ones the Byrds used to wear back in 1966, when Roger McGuinn was still eight miles high. Or eight hundred. And still Larry wandered from mike to mike, trying to find at least one he could adjust. But they were all at least nine feet tall and frozen solid. They looked like stainless steel cobras. Someone in the crowd began to yell for “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” I don’t do that number anymore, he tried to say. I stopped doing that one when the world ended. They couldn’t hear him, and a chant began to arise, starting in the back rows, then sweeping the Garden, gaining strength and volume: “Baby Can You Dig Your Man! Baby Can You Dig Your Man! BABY CAN YOU DIG YOUR MAN! ”

He awoke with the chant in his ears. Sweat had popped out all over his body.

He didn’t need Glen to tell him what kind of dream that had been, or what it meant. The dream where you can’t reach the mikes, can’t adjust them, is a common one for rock musicians, just as common as dreaming that you’re on stage and can’t remember a single lyric. Larry guessed that all performers had a variation on one of those before—

Before a performance.

It was an inadequacy dream. It expressed that one simple overriding fear: What if you can’t? What if you want to, but you can’t? The terror of being unable to make the simple leap of faith which is the place where any artist—singer, writer, painter, musician—begins.

Make it nice for the people, Larry.

Whose voice was that? His mother’s?

You’re a taker, Larry.

No, Mom—no I’m not. I don’t do that number anymore. I stopped doing that one when the world ended. Honest.

He lay back down and drifted off to sleep again. His last thought was that Stu had been right: The dark man was going to grab them. Tomorrow, he thought. Whatever we’re coming to, we’re almost there.

But they saw no one on the twenty-fifth. The three of them walked stolidly along under the bright blue skies, and they saw birds and beasts in plenty, but no people.

“It’s amazing how rapidly the wildlife is coming back,” Glen said. “I knew it would be a fairly rapid process, and of course the winter is going to prune it back some, but this is still amazing. It’s only been about a hundred days since the first outbreaks.”

“Yeah, but there’s no dogs or horses,” Ralph said. “That just doesn’t seem right, you know it? They invented a bug that killed pretty near all the people, but that wasn’t enough. It had to take out his two favorite animals, too. It took man and man’s best friends.”

“And left the cats,” Larry said morosely.

Ralph brightened. “Well, there’s Kojak—”

“There was Kojak.”

That killed the conversation. The buttes frowned down at them, hiding places for dozens of men with rifles and scopes. Larry’s premonition that it was to be today hadn’t left him. Each time they topped a rise, he expected to see the road blocked below them. And each time it wasn’t, he thought about ambush.

They talked about horses. About dogs and buffalo. The buffalo were coming back, Ralph told them—Nick and Tom Cullen had seen them. The day was not so far off—in their lifetimes, maybe—when the buffalo might darken the plains again.

Larry knew it was the truth, but he also knew it was bushwa—their lifetimes might amount to no more than another ten minutes.

Then it was nearly dark, and time to look for a place to camp. They came to the top of one final rise and Larry thought: Now. They’ll be right down there.

But there was no one.

They camped near a green reflectorized sign that said LAS VEGAS 260. They had eaten comparatively well that day: taco chips, soda, and two Slim Jims that they shared out equally.

Tomorrow, Larry thought again, and slept. That night he dreamed that he and Barry Greig and the Tattered Remnants were playing at the Garden. It was their big chance—they were opening for some supergroup that was named after a city. Boston, or maybe Chicago. And all the microphone stands were at least nine feet tall again and he began to stumble from one to the other again as the audience began to clap rhythmically and call for “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” again.

He looked down in the first row and felt a slapping dash of cold icewater fear. Charles Manson was there, the x on his forehead healed to a white, twisted scar, clapping and chanting. And Richard Speck was there, looking up at Larry with cocky, impudent eyes, an unfiltered cigarette jittering between his lips. They were flanking the dark man. John Wayne Gacy was behind them. Flagg was leading the chant.

Tomorrow, Larry thought again, stumbling from one too-tall mike to the next under the hot dreamlights of Madison Square Garden. I’ll see you tomorrow.

But it was not the next day, or the day after that. On the evening of September 27 they camped in the town of Freemont Junction, and there was plenty to eat.

“I keep expecting it to be over,” Larry told Glen that evening. “And every day that it’s not, it gets worse.”

Glen nodded. “I feel the same way. It would be funny if he was just a mirage, wouldn’t it? Nothing but a bad dream in our collective consciousness.”

Larry looked at him with momentary surprised consideration. Then he shook his head slowly. “No. I don’t think it’s just a dream.”

Glen smiled. “Nor do I, young man. Nor do I.”

They made contact the following day.

At just past ten in the morning, they topped a rise and below them and to the west, five miles away, two cars were parked nose-to-nose, blocking the highway. It all looked exactly as Larry had thought it would.

“Accident?” Glen asked.

Ralph was shading his eyes. “I don’t think so. Not parked that way.”

“His men,” Larry said.

“Yeah, I think so,” Ralph agreed. “What do we do now, Larry?”

Larry took his bandanna out of his back pocket and wiped his face with it. Today either summer had come back or they were starting to feel the southwestern desert. The temperature was in the low eighties.

But it’s a dry heat, he thought calmly. I’m only sweating a little. Just a little. He stuffed the bandanna back into his pocket. Now that it was actually on, he felt all right. Again there was that queer feeling that it was a performance, a show to be played.

“We go down and see if God really is with us. Right, Glen?”

“You’re the boss.”

They started to walk again. Half an hour brought them close enough to see that the nose-to-nose cars had once belonged to the Utah State Patrol. There were several armed men waiting for them.

“Are they going to shoot us?” Ralph asked conversationally.

“I don’t know,” Larry said.

“Because some of the rifles are wowsers. Scope-equipped. I can see the sun ticking off the lenses. If they want to knock us down, we’ll be in range anytime.”

They kept walking. The men at the roadblock split into two groups, about five men in front, guns aimed at the party of three walking toward them, and three more crouched behind the cars.

“Eight of them, Larry?” Glen asked.

“I make it eight, yeah. How are you doing, anyhow?”

“I’m okay,” Glen said.

“Ralph?”

“Just as long as we know what to do when the time comes,” Ralph said. “That’s all I want.”

Larry gripped his hand for a moment and squeezed it. Then he took Glen’s and did likewise.

They were less than a mile from the cruisers now. “They’re not going to shoot us outright,” Ralph said. “They would have done it already.”

Now they could discern faces, and Larry searched them curiously. One was heavily bearded. Another was young but mostly bald—must have been a bummer for him to start losing his hair while he was still in school, Larry thought. Another was wearing a bright yellow tank top with a picture of a grinning camel on it, and below the camel the word SUPERHUMP in scrolled, old-fashioned letters. Another of them had the look of an accountant. He was fiddling with a .357 Magnum, and he looked three times as nervous as Larry felt; he looked like a man who was going to blow off one of his own feet if he didn’t settle down.

“They don’t look no different from our guys,” Ralph said.

“Sure they do,” Glen answered. “They’re all packing iron.”

They approached to within twenty feet of the police cars blocking the road. Larry stopped, and the others stopped with him. There was a dead moment of silence as Flagg’s men and Larry’s band of pilgrims looked each other over. Then Larry Underwood said mildly: “How-do.”

The little man who looked like a CPA stepped forward. He was still twiddling with the Magnum. “Are you Glendon Bateman, Lawson Underwood, Stuart Redman, and, Ralph Brentner?”

“Say, you dummy,” Ralph said, “can’t you count?”

Someone snickered. The CPA type flushed. “Who’s missing?”

Larry said, “Stu met with an accident on the way here. And I do believe you’re going to have one yourself if you don’t stop fooling with that gun.”

There were more snickers. The CPA managed to tuck the pistol into the waistband of his gray slacks, which made him look more ridiculous than ever; a Walter Mitty outlaw daydream.

“My name is Paul Burlson,” he said, “and by virtue of the power vested in me, I arrest you and order you to come with me.”

“In whose name?” Glen said immediately.

Burlson looked at him with contempt… but the contempt was mixed with something else. “You know who I speak for.”

“Then say it.”

But Burlson was silent.

“Are you afraid?” Glen asked him. He looked at all eight of them. “Are you so afraid of him you don’t dare speak his name? Very well, I’ll say it for you. His name is Randall Flagg, also known as the dark man, also known as the tall man, also known as the Walkin Dude. Don’t some of you call him that?” His voice had climbed to the high, clear octaves of fury. Some of the men looked uneasily at each other and Burlson fell back a step. “Call him Beelzebub, because that’s his name, too. Call him Nyarlahotep and Ahaz and Astaroth. Call him R’yelah and Seti and Anubis. His name is legion and he’s an apostate of hell and you men kiss his ass.” His voice dropped to a conversational pitch again; he smiled disarmingly. “Just thought we ought to have that out front.”

“Grab them,” Burlson said. “Grab them all and shoot the first one that moves.”

For one strange second no one moved at all and Larry thought: They’re not going to do it, they’re as afraid of us as we are of them, more afraid, even though they have guns —

He looked at Burlson and said, “Who are you kidding, you little scumbucket? We want to go. That’s why we came.”

Then they moved, almost as though it was Larry who had ordered them. He and Ralph were bundled into the back of one cruiser, Glen into the back of the other. They were behind a steel mesh grill. There were no inside doorhandles.

We’re arrested, Larry thought. He found that the idea amused him.

Four men smashed into the front seat. The cruiser backed up, turned around, and began to head west. Ralph sighed.

“Scared?” Larry asked him in a low voice.

“I’ll be frigged if I know. It feels so-good to be off m’dogs, I can’t tell.”

One of the men in front said: “The old man with the big mouth. He in charge?”

“No. I am.”

“What’s your name?”

“Larry Underwood. This is Ralph Brentner. The other guy is Glen Bateman.” He looked out the back window. The other cruiser was behind them.

“What happened to the fourth guy?”

“He broke his leg. We had to leave him.”

“Tough go, all right. I’m Barry Dorgan. Vegas security.”

Larry felt an absurd response, Pleased to meet you, rise to his lips and had to smile a little. “How long a drive is it to Las Vegas?”

“Well, we can’t whistle along too fast because of the stalls in the road. We’re clearing them out from the city, but it’s slow going. We’ll be there in about five hours.”

“Isn’t that something,” Ralph said, shaking his head. “We’ve been on the road three weeks, and just five hours in a car takes you there.”

Dorgan squirmed around until he could look at them. “I don’t understand why you were walking. For that matter I don’t understand why you came at all. You must have known it would end like this.”

“We were sent,” Larry said. “To kill Flagg, I think.”

“Not much chance of that, buddy. You and your friends are going right into the Las Vegas County Jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. He’s got a special interest in you. He knew you were coming.” He paused. “You just want to hope he makes it quick for you. But I don’t think he will. He hasn’t been in a very good mood lately.”

“Why not?” Larry asked.

But Dorgan seemed to feel he had said enough—too much, maybe. He turned around without answering, and Larry and Ralph watched the desert flow by. In just three weeks, speed had become a novelty all over again.

It actually took them six hours to reach Vegas. It lay in the middle of the desert like some improbable gem. There were a lot of people on the streets; the workday was over, and they were enjoying the early evening cool on lawns and benches and at bus stops, or sitting in the doorways of defunct wedding chapels and hockshops. They rubber-necked the Utah S.P. cars as they went by and then went back to whatever they had been talking about.

Larry was looking around thoughtfully. The electricity was on, the streets were cleared, and the rubble of looting was gone. “Glen was right,” he said. “He’s got the trains running on time. But still I wonder if this is any way to run a railroad. Your people all look like they’ve got the nervous complaint, Dorgan.”

Dorgan didn’t reply.

They arrived at the county jail and drove around to the rear. The two police cars parked in a cement courtyard. When Larry got out, wincing at the stiffness that had settled into his muscles, he saw that Dorgan had two sets of handcuffs.

“Hey, come on,” he said. “Really.”

“Sorry. His orders.”

Ralph said, “I ain’t never been handcuffed in my life. I was picked up and throwed in the drunk tank a couple of times before I was married, but never was I cuffed.” Ralph was speaking slowly, his Oklahoma accent becoming more pronounced, and Larry realized he was totally furious.

“I have my orders,” Dorgan said. “Don’t make it any tougher than it has to be.”

“Your orders,” Ralph said. “I know who gives your orders. He murdered my friend Nick. What are you doing hooked up with that hellhound? You seem like a nice enough fella when you’re by yourself.” He was looking at Dorgan with such an expression of angry interrogation that Dorgan shook his head and looked away.

“This is my job,” he said, “and I do it. End of story. Put your wrists out or I’ll have somebody do it for you.”

Larry put his hands out and Dorgan cuffed him. “What were you?” Larry asked curiously. “Before?”

“Santa Monica Police. Detective second.”

“And you’re with him. It’s… forgive me for saying so, but it’s really sort of funny.”

Glen Bateman was pushed over to join them.

“What are you shoving him around for?” Dorgan asked angrily.

“If you had to listen to six hours of this guy’s bullshit, you’d do some pushing, too,” one of the men said.

“I don’t care how much bullshit you had to listen to, keep your hands to yourself.” Dorgan looked at Larry. “Why is it funny that I should be with him? I was a cop for ten years before Captain Trips. I saw what happens when guys like you are in charge, you see.”

“Young man,” Glen said mildly, “your experiences with a few battered babies and drug abusers does not justify your embrace of a monster.”

“Get them out of here,” Dorgan said evenly. “Separate cells, separate wings.”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to live with your choice, young man,” Glen said. “There doesn’t seem to be quite enough Nazi in you.”

This time Dorgan pushed Glen himself.

Larry was separated from the other two and taken down an empty corridor graced with signs reading NO SPITTING, THIS WAY TO SHOWERS & DELOUSING, and one that read, YOU ARE NOT A GUEST.

“I wouldn’t mind a shower,” he said.

“Maybe,” Dorgan said. “We’ll see.”

“See what?”

“How cooperative you can be.”

Dorgan opened a cell at the end of the corridor and ushered Larry in.

“How about the bracelets?” Larry asked, holding them out.

“Sure.” Dorgan unlocked them and took them off. “Better?”

“Much.”

“Still want that shower?”

“I sure do.” More than that, Larry didn’t want to be left alone, listening to the echoey sound of footfalls going away. If he was left alone, the fear would start to come back.

Dorgan produced a small notebook. “How many are you? In the Zone?”

“Six thousand,” Larry said. “We all play Bingo every Thursday night and the prize in the cover-all game is a twenty-pound turkey.”

“Do you want that shower or not?”

“I want it.” But he no longer thought he was going to get it.

“How many of you over there?”

“Twenty-five thousand, but four thousand are under twelve and get in free at the drive-in. Economically speaking, it’s a bummer.”

Dorgan snapped his notebook shut and looked at him.

“I can’t, man,” Larry said. “Put yourself in my place.”

Dorgan shook his head. “I can’t do that, because I’m not nuts. Why are you guys here? What good do you think it’s going to do you? He’s going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day. And if he wants you to talk, you will. If he wants you to tapdance and jerk off at the same time, you’ll do that, too. You must be crazy.”

“We were told to come by the old woman. Mother Abagail. Probably you dreamed about her.”

Dorgan shook his head, but suddenly his eyes wouldn’t meet Larry’s. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then let’s leave it at that.”

“Sure you don’t want to talk to me? Get that shower?”

Larry laughed. “I don’t work that cheap. Send your own spy over to our side. If you can find one that doesn’t look like a weasel the second Mother Abagail’s name gets mentioned, that is.”

“Any way you want it,” Dorgan said. He walked back down the hallway under the mesh-enclosed lights. At the far end he stepped past a steel-barred gate that rolled shut behind him with a hollow crash.

Larry looked around. Like Ralph, he had been in jail on a couple of occasions—public intoxication once, possession of an ounce of marijuana on another. Flaming youth.

“It’s not the Ritz,” he muttered.

The mattress on the bunk looked decidedly moldy, and he wondered a little morbidly if someone had died on it back in June or early July. The toilet worked but filled with rusty water the first time he flushed it, a reliable sign that it hadn’t been used for a long time. Someone had left a paperback Western. Larry picked it up and then put it down again. He sat on the bunk and listened to the silence. He had always hated to be alone—but in a way, he always had been… until he had arrived in the Free Zone. And now it wasn’t so bad as he had been afraid it would be. Bad enough, but he could cope.

He’s going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day.

Except Larry didn’t believe it. It just wasn’t going to happen that way.

“I will fear no evil,” he said into the dead silence of the cellblock wing, and he liked the way it sounded. He said it again.

He lay down, and the thought occurred that he had finally made it most of the way back to the West Coast. But the trip had been longer and stranger than anyone ever could have imagined. And the trip wasn’t quite over yet.

“I will fear no evil,” he said again. He fell asleep, his face calm, and he slept in dreamless peace.

At ten o’clock the next day, twenty-four hours after they had first seen the roadblock in the distance, Randall Flagg and Lloyd Henreid came to see Glen Bateman.

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his cell. He had found a piece of charcoal under his bunk, and had just finished writing this legend on the wall amid the intaglio of male and female genitals, names, phone numbers, and obscene little poems: I am not the potter, not the potter’s wheel, but the potter’s clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the Master’s skill? Glen was admiring this proverb—or was it an aphorism?—when the temperature in the deserted cellblock suddenly seemed to drop ten degrees. The door at the end of the corridor rumbled open. The saliva in Glen’s mouth was suddenly all gone, and the charcoal snapped between his fingers.

Bootheels clocked up the hallway toward him.

Other footfalls, smaller and insignificant, pattered along in counterpoint, trying to keep up.

Why, it’s him. I’m going to see his face.

Suddenly his arthritis was worse. Terrible, in fact. It seemed that his bones had suddenly been hollowed out and filled with ground glass. And still, he turned with an interested, expectant smile on his face as the bootheels stopped in front of his cell.

“Well, there you are,” Glen said. “And you’re not half the boogeyman we thought you must be.”

Standing on the other side of the bars were two men. Flagg was on Glen’s right. He was wearing bluejeans and a white silk shirt that gleamed mellowly in the dim lights. He was grinning in at Glen. Behind him was a shorter man who was not smiling at all. He had an undershot chin and eyes that seemed too big for his face. His complexion was one that the desert climate was never going to be kind to; he had burned, peeled, and burned again. Around his neck he wore a black stone flawed with red. It had a greasy, resinous look.

“I’d like you to meet my associate,” Flagg said with a giggle. “Lloyd Henreid, meet Glen Bateman, sociologist, Free Zone Committee member, and single existing member of the Free Zone think tank now that Nick Andros is dead.”

“Meetcha,” Lloyd mumbled.

“How’s your arthritis, Glen?” Flagg asked. His tone was commiserating, but his eyes sparkled with high glee and secret knowledge.

Glen opened and closed his hands rapidly, smiling back at Flagg. No one would ever know what an effort it took to maintain that gentle smile.

The intrinsic worth of the clay!

“Fine,” he said. “Much better for sleeping indoors, thank you.”

Flagg’s smile faltered a bit. Glen caught just a glimpse of narrow surprise and anger. Of fear?

“I’ve decided to let you go,” he said briskly. His smile sprang forth again, radiant and vulpine. Lloyd uttered a little gasp of surprise, and Flagg turned to him. “Haven’t I, Lloyd?”

“Uh… sure,” Lloyd said. “Sure nuff.”

“Well, fine,” Glen said easily. He could feel the arthritis sinking deeper and deeper into his joints, numbing them like ice, swelling them like fire.

“You’ll be given a small motorbike and you may drive back at your leisure.”

“Of course I couldn’t go without my friends.”

“Of course not. And all you have to do is ask. Get down on your knees and ask me.”

Glen laughed heartily. He threw back his head and laughed long and hard. And as he laughed, the pain in his joints began to abate. He felt better, stronger, in control again.

“Oh, you’re a card,” he said. “I tell you what you do. Why don’t you find a nice big sandpile, get yourself a hammer, and pound all that sand right up your ass?”

Flagg’s face grew dark. The smile slipped away. His eyes, previously as dark as the jet stone Lloyd wore, now seemed to gleam yellowly. He reached out his hand to the locking mechanism on the door and wrapped his fingers around it. There was an electric buzzing sound. Fire leaped out between his fingers, and there was a hot smell in the air. The lockbox fell to the floor, smoking and black. Lloyd Henreid cried out. The dark man grabbed the bars and threw the cell door back on its track.

“Stop laughing.”

Glen laughed harder.

“Stop laughing at me! ”

“You’re nothing!” Glen said, wiping his streaming eyes and still chuckling. “Oh pardon me… it’s just that we were all so frightened… we made such a business out of you… I’m laughing as much at our own foolishness as at your regrettable lack of substance…”

“Shoot him, Lloyd.” Flagg had turned to the other man. His face was working horribly. His hands were hooked into predator’s claws.

“Oh, kill me yourself if you’re going to kill me,” Glen said. “Surely you’re capable. Touch me with your finger and stop my heart. Make the sign of the inverted cross and give me a massive brain embolism. Bring down the lightning from the overhead socket to cleave me in two. Oh… oh dear… oh dear me!”

Glen collapsed onto the cell cot and rocked back and forth, consumed with delicious laughter.

“Shoot him! ” the dark man roared at Lloyd.

Pale, shaking with fear, Lloyd fumbled the pistol out of his belt, almost dropped it, then tried to point it at Glen. He had to use both hands.

Glen looked at Lloyd, still smiling. He might have been at a faculty cocktail party back in the Brain Ghetto at Woodsville, New Hampshire, recovering from a good joke, now ready to turn the conversation back into more serious channels of reflection.

“If you have to shoot somebody, Mr. Henreid, shoot him.”

“Do it now, Lloyd.”

Lloyd blindly pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a tremendous crash in the enclosed space. The echoes bounced furiously back and forth. But the bullet only chipped concrete two inches from Glen’s right shoulder, ricocheted, struck something else, and whined off again.

“Can’t you do anything right?” Flagg roared. “Shoot him, you moron! Shoot him! He’s standing right in front of you!”

“I’m trying—”

Glen’s smile had not changed, and he had only flinched a little at the gunshot. “I repeat, if you must shoot somebody, shoot him. He’s really not human at all, you know. I once described him to a friend as the last magician of rational thought, Mr. Henreid. That was more correct than I knew. But he’s losing his magic now. It’s slipping away from him and he knows it. And you know it, too. Shoot him now and save us all God knows how much bloodshed and dying.”

Flagg’s face had grown very still. “Shoot one of us, anyhow, Lloyd,” he said. “I got you out of jail when you were dying of starvation. It’s guys like this that you wanted to get back at. Little guys who talk big.”

Lloyd said: “Mister, you don’t fool me. It’s like Randy Flagg says.”

“But he lies. You know he lies.”

“He told me more of the truth than anyone else bothered to in my whole lousy life,” Lloyd said, and shot Glen three times. Glen was driven backward, twisted and turned like a ragdoll. Blood flew in the dim air. He struck the cot, bounced, and rolled onto the floor. He managed to get up on one elbow.

“It’s all right, Mr. Henreid,” he whispered. “You don’t know any better.”

“Shut up, you mouthy old bastard! ” Lloyd screamed. He fired again and Glen Bateman’s face disappeared. He fired again and the body jumped lifelessly. Lloyd shot him yet again. He was crying. The tears rolled down his angry, sunburned cheeks. He was remembering the rabbit he had forgotten and left to eat its own paws. He was remembering Poke, and the people in the white Connie, and Gorgeous George. He was remembering the Phoenix jail, and the rat, and how he hadn’t been able to eat the ticking out of his mattress. He was remembering Trask, and how Trask’s leg had started to look like a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner after a while. He pulled the trigger again, but the pistol only uttered a sterile click.

“All right,” Flagg said softly. “All right. Well done. Well done, Lloyd.”

Lloyd dropped the gun on the floor and shrank away from Flagg. “Don’t you touch me!” he cried. “I didn’t do it for you!”

“Yes, you did,” Flagg said tenderly. “You may not think so, but you did.” He reached out and fingered the jet stone around Lloyd’s neck. He closed his hand over it, and when he opened the hand again, the stone was gone. It had been replaced with a small silver key.

“I promised you this, I think,” the dark man said. “In another jail. He was wrong… I keep my promises, don’t I, Lloyd?”

“Yes.”

“The others are leaving, or planning to leave. I know who they are. I know all the names. Whitney… Ken… Jenny… oh yes, I know all the names.”

“Then why don’t you—”

“Put a stop to it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to let them go. But you, Lloyd. You’re my good and faithful servant, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Lloyd whispered. The final admission. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Without me, the best you could have done was small shit, even if you had survived that jail. Correct?”

“Yeah.”

“The Lauder boy knew that. He knew I could make him bigger. Taller. That’s why he was coming to me. But he was too full of thoughts… too full of…” He looked suddenly perplexed and old. Then he waved his hand impatiently, and the smile bloomed on his face again. “Perhaps it is going bad, Lloyd. Perhaps it is, for some reason not even I can understand… but the old magician has a few tricks left in him yet, Lloyd. One or two. Now listen to me. Time is short if we want to stop this… this crisis in confidence. If we want to nip it in the bud, as it were. We’ll want to finish things tomorrow with Underwood and Brentner. Now listen to me very carefully…”

Lloyd didn’t get to bed until past midnight, and got no sleep until the small hours of the morning. He talked to the Rat-Man. He talked to Paul Burlson. To Barry Dorgan, who agreed that what the dark man wanted could—and probably should—be done before daylight. Construction began on the front lawn of the MGM Grand around 10 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, a work party of ten men with welding arcs and hammers and bolts and a good supply of long steel pipes. They were assembling the pipes on two flatbed trucks in front of the fountain. The welding arcs soon drew a crowd.

“Look, Angie-mom!” Dinny cried. “It’s a fireworks show!”

“Yes, but it’s time for all good little boys to be in bed.” Angie Hirschfield drew the boy away with a secret fear in her heart, feeling that something bad, something perhaps as evil as the superflu itself, was in the making.

“Wanna see! Wanna see the sparks!” Dinny wailed, but she drew him quickly and firmly away.

Julie Lawry approached the Rat-Man, the only fellow in Vegas she considered too creepy to sleep with… except maybe in a pinch. His black skin glimmered in the blue-white glare of the welding arcs. He was tricked out like an Ethiopian pirate—wide silk trousers, a red sash, and a necklace of silver dollars around his scrawny neck.

“What is it, Ratty?” she asked.

“The Rat-Man don’t know, dear, but the Rat-Man got hisself an idea. Yes indeedy he does. It looks like black work tomorrow, very black. Like to slip away for a quick one with Ratty, my dear?”

“Maybe,” Julie said, “but only if you know what all of this is about.”

“Tomorrow all of Vegas gonna know,” Ratty said. “You bet your sweet and delectable little sugarbuns on that. Come along with the Rat-Man, dear, and he show you the nine thousand names of God.”

But Julie, much to the Rat-Man’s displeasure, had slipped away.

By the time Lloyd finally went to sleep, the work was done and the crowd had drifted away. Two large cages stood on the back of the two flatbeds. There were squarish holes in the right and left sides of each. Parked close by were four cars, each with a trailer hitch. Attached to each hitch was a heavy steel towing chain. The chains snaked across the lawn of the Grand, and each ended just inside the squarish holes in the cages.

At the end of each chain there dangled a single steel handcuff.

At dawn on the morning of September 30, Larry heard the door at the far end of the cellblock slide back. Footsteps came rapidly down the corridor. Larry was lying on his cot, hands laced at the back of his head. He had not slept the night before. He had been

(thinking? praying?)

It was all the same thing. Whichever it had been, the old wound in himself had finally closed, leaving him at peace. He had felt the two people that he had been all his life—the real one and the ideal one—merge into one living being. His mother would have liked this Larry. And Rita Blakemoor. It was a Larry to whom Wayne Stukey never would have had to tell the facts. It was a Larry that even that long-ago oral hygienist might have liked.

I’m going to die. If there’s a God—and now I believe there must be—that’s His will. We’re going to die and somehow all of this will end as a result of our dying.

He suspected that Glen Bateman had already died. There had been shooting in one of the other wings the day before, a lot of shooting. It was in the direction that Glen had been taken rather than Ralph. Well, he had been old, his arthritis had been paining him, and whatever Flagg had planned for them this morning was apt to be very unpleasant.

The footsteps reached his cell.

“Get up, Wonder Bread,” a gleeful voice called in. “The Rat-Man has come for yo pale gray ass.”

Larry looked around. A grinning black pirate with a chain of silver dollars around his neck stood at the cell door, a drawn sword in one hand. Behind him stood the bespectacled CPA type. Burlson, his name was.

“What is it?” Larry asked.

“Dear man,” the pirate said, “it is the end. The very end.”

“All right,” Larry said, and got up.

Burlson spoke quickly, and Larry saw that he was scared. “I want you to know that this is not my idea.”

“Nothing around here is, as far as I can see,” Larry said. “Who was killed yesterday?”

“Bateman,” Burlson said, dropping his eyes. “Trying to escape.”

“Trying to escape,” Larry murmured. He began to laugh. Rat-Man joined him, mocked him. They laughed together.

The cell door opened. Burlson stepped forward with the cuffs. Larry offered no resistance; only put out his wrists. Burlson attached the bracelets.

“Trying to escape,” Larry said. “One of these days you’ll be shot trying to escape, Burlson.” His eyes flicked toward the pirate. “You too, Ratty. Just shot trying to escape.” He began to laugh again, and this time Rat-Man didn’t join him. He looked at Larry sullenly and then began to raise his sword.

“Put that down, you ass,” Burlson said.

They made a line of three going out—Burlson, Larry, and the Rat-Man bringing up the rear. When they stepped through the door at the end of the wing, they were joined by another five men. One of them was Ralph, also cuffed.

“Hey, Larry,” Ralph said sorrowfully. “Did you hear? Did they tell you?”

“Yes. I heard.”

“Bastards. It’s almost over for them, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is.”

“You shut up that talk!” one of them growled. “It’s you it’s almost over for. You wait and see what he’s got waiting for you. It’s gonna be quite a party.”

“No, it’s over,” Ralph insisted. “Don’t you know it? Can’t you feel it?”

Ratty pushed Ralph, making him stumble. “Shut up!” he cried. “Rat-Man don’t want to hear no more of that honky bullshit voodoo! No more!”

“You’re awful pale, Ratty,” Larry said, grinning. “Awful pale. You’re the one who looks like graymeat now.”

Rat-Man brandished his sword again, but there was no menace in it. He looked frightened; they all did. There was a feeling in the air, a sense that they had all entered the shadow of some great and onrushing thing.

An olive-drab van with LAS VEGAS COUNTY JAIL on the side stood in the sunny courtyard. Larry and Ralph were pushed in. The doors slammed, the engine started, and they drew away. They sat down on the hard wooden benches, cuffed hands between their knees.

Ralph said in a low voice, “I heard one of them saying everybody in Vegas was gonna be there. You think they’re gonna crucify us, Larry?”

“That or something like it.” He looked at the big man. Ralph’s sweat-stained hat was crammed down on his head. The feather was frayed and matted, but it still stuck up defiantly from the band. “You scared, Ralph?”

“Scared bad,” Ralph whispered. “Me, I’m a baby about pain. I never even liked going to the doctor’s for a shot. I’d find an excuse to put it off, if I could. What about you?”

“Plenty. Can you come over here and sit beside me?”

Ralph got up, handcuff chains clinking, and sat beside Larry. They sat quietly for a few moments and then Ralph said softly, “We’ve hoed us one helluva long row.”

“That’s true.”

“I just wish I knew what it was all for. All I can see is that he’s gonna make a show of us. So everyone will see he’s the big cheese. Is that what we came all this way for?”

“I don’t know.”

The van hummed on in silence. They sat on the bench without speaking, holding hands. Larry was scared, but beyond the scary feeling, the deeper sense of peace held, undisturbed. It was going to work out.

“I will fear no evil,” he muttered, but he was afraid. He closed his eyes, thought of Lucy. He thought of his mother. Random thoughts. Getting up for school on cold mornings. The time he had thrown up in church. Finding a skin magazine in the gutter and looking at it with Rudy, both of them about nine years old. Watching the World Series his first fall in L.A. with Yvonne Wetterlin. He didn’t want to die, he was afraid to die, but he had made his peace with it as best he could. The choice, after all, had never been his to make, and he had come to believe that death was just a staging area, a place to wait, the way you waited in a green-room before going on to play.

He rested as easily as he could, trying to make himself ready.

The van stopped and the doors were thrown open. Bright sunlight poured in, making him and Ralph blink dazedly. Rat-Man and Burlson hopped inside. Pouring in with the sunlight was a sound—a low, rustling murmur that made Ralph cock his head warily. But Larry knew what that sound was.

In 1986 the Tattered Remnants had played their biggest gig—opening for Van Halen at Chavez Ravine. And the sound just before they went on had been like this sound. And so when he stepped out of the van he knew what to expect, and his face didn’t change, although he heard Ralph’s thin gasp beside him.

They were on the lawn of a huge hotel-casino. The entrance was flanked by two golden pyramids. Drawn up on the grass were two flatbed trucks. On each flatbed was a cage constructed of steel piping.

Surrounding them were people.

They spread out across the lawn in a rough circle. They were standing in the casino parking lot, on the steps leading up to the lobby doors, in the turnaround drive where incoming guests had once parked while the doorman whistled up a bellhop. They spilled out into the street itself. Some of the younger men had hoisted their girlfriends on their shoulders for a better look at the upcoming festivities. The low murmuring was the sound of the crowd-animal.

Larry ran his eyes over them, and every eye he met turned away. Every face seemed pallid, distant, marked for death and seeming to know it. Yet they were here.

He and Ralph were nudged toward the cages, and as they went, Larry noticed the cars with their chains and trailer hitches. But it was Ralph who understood the implication. He had, after all, spent most of his life working with and around machinery.

“Larry,” he said in a dry voice. “They’re going to pull us to pieces!”

“Go on, get in,” Rat-Man said, breathing a stale odor of garlic into his face. “Get on up there, Wonder Bread. You and your friend goan ride the tiger.”

Larry climbed onto the flatbed.

“Gimme your shirt, Wonder Bread.”

Larry took off his shirt and stood barechested, the morning air cool and kind on his skin. Ralph had already taken off his. A ripple of conversation went through the crowd and died. They were both terribly thin from their walk; each rib was clearly visible.

“Get in that cage, graymeat.”

Larry backed into the cage.

Now it was Barry Dorgan giving the orders. He went from place to place, checking arrangements, a set expression of disgust on his face.

The four drivers got into the cars and started them up. Ralph stood blankly for a moment, then seized one of the welded handcuffs that dangled into his cage and threw it out through the small hole. It hit Paul Burlson on the head, and a nervous titter ran through the crowd.

Dorgan said, “You don’t want to do that, fella. I’ll just have to send some guys to hold you.”

“Let them do their thing,” Larry said to Ralph. He looked down at Dorgan. “Hey, Barry. Did they teach you this one in the Santa Monica P.D.?”

Another laugh rippled through the crowd. “Police brutality!” some daring soul cried. Dorgan flushed but said nothing. He fed the chains farther into Larry’s cell and Larry spit on them, a little surprised that he had enough saliva to do it. A small cheer went up from the back of the crowd and Larry thought, Maybe this is it, maybe they’re going to rise up —

But his heart didn’t believe it. Their faces were too pale, too secretive. The defiance from the back was meaningless. It was the sound of kids cutting up in a studyhall, no more than that. There was doubt here—he could feel it—and disaffection. But Flagg colored even that. These people would steal away in the dead of night for some of the great empty space that the world had become. And the Walkin Dude would let them go, knowing he only had to keep a hard core, people like Dorgan and Burlson. The runners and midnight creepers could be gathered up later, perchance to pay the price of their imperfect faith. There would be no open rebellion here.

Dorgan, Rat-Man, and a third man crowded their way into the cage with him. Rat-Man was holding the cuffs welded to the chains open for Larry’s wrists.

“Put out your arms,” Dorgan said.

“Isn’t law and order a wonderful thing, Barry?”

“Put them out, goddammit!”

“You don’t look well, Dorgan—how’s your heart these days?”

“I’m telling you for the last time, my friend. Put your arms out through those holes!”

Larry did it. The cuffs were slipped on and locked. Dorgan and the others backed out and the door was shut. Larry looked right and saw Ralph standing in his cage, head down, arms at his sides. His wrists had also been cuffed.

“You people know this is wrong!” Larry cried, and his voice, trained by years of singing, rolled out of his chest with surprising strength. “I don’t expect you to stop it, but I do expect you to remember it! We’re being put to death because Randall Flagg is afraid of us! He’s afraid of us and the people we came from!” A rising murmur ran through the crowd. “Remember the way we die! And remember that next time it may be your turn to die this way, with no dignity, just an animal in a cage!”

That low murmur again, rising and angry… and the silence.

“Larry!” Ralph called out.

Flagg was coming down the steps of the Grand, Lloyd Henreid beside him. Flagg was wearing jeans, a checked shirt, his jeans jacket with the two buttons on the breast pockets, and his rundown cowboy boots. In the sudden hush the sound of those bootheels clocking their way down the cement path was the only sound… a sound out of time.

The dark man was grinning.

Larry stared down at him. Flagg came to a halt between the two cages and stood looking up. His grin was darkly charming. He was a man completely in control, and Larry suddenly knew this was his watershed moment, the apotheosis of his life.

Flagg turned away from them and faced his people. He passed his eyes over them, and no eye would meet his. “Lloyd,” he said quietly, and Lloyd, who looked pale, haunted, and sickly, handed Flagg a paper that had been rolled up like a scroll.

The dark man unrolled it, held it up, and began to speak. His voice was deep, sonorous, and pleasing, spreading in the stillness like a single silver ripple on a black pond. “Know you that this is a true bill to which I, Randall Flagg, have put my name on this thirtieth day of September, the year nineteen hundred and ninety, now known as The Year One, year of the plague.”

“Flagg’s not your name!” Ralph roared. There was a shocked murmur from the crowd. “Why don’t you tell em your real name?”

Flagg took no notice.

“Know you that these men, Lawson Underwood and Ralph Brentner, are spies, here in Las Vegas with no good intent but rather with seditious motives, who have entered this state with stealth, and under cover of darkness—”

“That’s pretty good,” Larry said, “since we were coming down Route 70 in broad daylight.” He raised his voice to a shout. “They took us at noon on the Interstate, how’s that for stealth and under cover of darkness? ”

Flagg bore through this patiently, as if he felt that Larry and Ralph had every right to answer the charges… not that it was going to make any ultimate difference.

Now he continued: “Know you that the cohorts of these men were responsible for the sabotage bombing of the helicopters at Indian Springs, and therefore responsible for the deaths of Carl Hough, Bill Jamieson, and Cliff Benson. They are guilty of murder.”

Larry’s eyes touched those of a man standing on the front rim of the crowd. Although Larry did not know it, this was Stan Bailey, Operations Chief at Indian Springs. He saw a haze of bewilderment and surprise cover the man’s face, and saw him mouthing something ridiculous that looked like Can Man.

“Know you that the cohorts of these men have sent other spies among us and they have been killed. It is the sentence then that these men shall be put to death in an appropriate manner, to wit, that they shall be pulled apart. It is the duty and the responsibility of each of you to witness this punishment, so you may remember it and tell others what you have seen here today.”

Flagg’s grin flashed out, meant to be solicitous in this instance, but still no more warm and human than a shark’s grin.

“Those of you with children are excused.”

He turned toward the cars, which were now idling, sending out small puffs of exhaust into the morning. As he did so, there was a commotion near the front of the crowd. Suddenly a man pushed through into the clearing. He was a big man, his face nearly as pallid as his cook’s whites. The dark man had handed the scroll back to Lloyd, and Lloyd’s hands jerked convulsively when Whitney Horgan pushed into the clear. There was a clear ripping sound as the scroll tore in half.

“Hey, you people! ” Whitney cried.

A confused murmur ran through the crowd. Whitney was shaking all over, as if with a palsy. His head kept jerking toward the dark man and then away again. Flagg regarded Whitney with a ferocious smile. Dorgan started toward the cook, and Flagg motioned him back.

“This ain’t right! ” Whitney yelled. “You know it ain’t! ”

Dead silence from the crowd. They might all have been turned to gravestones.

Whitney’s throat worked convulsively. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a monkey on a stick.

“We was Americans once!” Whitney cried at last. “This ain’t how Americans act. I wasn’t so much, I’ll tell you that, nothin but a cook, but I know this ain’t how Americans act, listening to some murderin freak in cowboy boots—”

A horrified, rustling gasp came from these new Las Vegans. Larry and Ralph exchanged a puzzled glance.

“That’s what he is!” Whitney insisted. The sweat was running down his face like tears from the brushy edges of his flattop haircut. “You wanna watch these two guys ripped in two right in front of you, huh? You think that’s the way to start a new life? You think a thing like that can ever be right? I tell you you’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of your lives! ”

The crowd murmured its assent.

“We got to stop this,” Whitney said. “You know it? We got to have time to think about what… what…”

“Whitney.” That voice, smooth as silk, little more than a whisper, but enough to silence the cook’s faltering voice completely. He turned toward Flagg, lips moving soundlessly, his eye as fixed as a mackerel’s. Now the sweat was pouring down his face in torrents.

“Whitney, you should have kept still.” His voice was soft, but still it carried easily to every ear. “I would have let you go… why would I want you?”

Whitney’s lips moved, but still no sound came out.

“Come here, Whitney.”

“No,” Whitney whispered, and no one heard his demurral except Lloyd and Ralph and Larry and possibly Barry Dorgan. Whitney’s feet moved as if they had not heard his mouth. His sprung and mushy black loafers whispered through the grass and he moved toward the dark man like a ghost.

The crowd had become a slack jaw and staring eye.

“I knew about your plans,” the dark man said. “I knew what you meant to do before you did. And I would have let you crawl away until I was ready to take you back. Maybe in a year, maybe in ten. But that’s all behind you now, Whitney. Believe it.”

Whitney found his voice one last time, his words rushing out in a strangled scream. “You ain’t a man at all! You’re some kind of a… a devil! ”

Flagg stretched out the index finger of his left hand so that it almost touched Whitney Horgan’s chin. “Yes, that’s right,” he said so softly that no one but Lloyd and Larry Underwood heard. “I am.”

A blue ball of fire no bigger than the Ping-Pong ball Leo was endlessly bouncing leaped from the tip of Flagg’s finger with a faint ozone crackle.

An autumn wind of sighs went through those watching.

Whitney screamed—but didn’t move. The ball of fire lit on his chin. There was a sudden cloying smell of burning flesh. The ball moved across his mouth, fusing his lips shut, locking the scream behind Whitney’s bulging eyes. It crossed one cheek, digging a charred and instantly cauterized trench.

It closed his eyes.

It paused above his forehead and Larry heard Ralph speaking, saying the same thing over and over, and Larry joined his voice to Ralph’s, making it a litany: “I will fear no evil… I will fear no evil… I will fear no evil…”

The ball of fire rolled up from Whitney’s forehead and now there was a hot smell of burning hair. It rolled toward the back of his head, leaving a grotesque bald strip behind it. Whitney swayed on his feet for a moment and then fell over, mercifully facedown.

The crowd released a long, sibilant sound: Aaaahhhh. It was the sound people had made on the Fourth of July when the fireworks display had been particularly good. The ball of blue fire hung in the air, bigger now, too bright to look at without slitting the eyes. The dark man pointed at it and it moved slowly toward the crowd. Those in the front row—a whey-faced Jenny Engstrom was among them—shrank back.

In a thundering voice, Flagg challenged them. “Is there anyone else here who disagrees with my sentence? If so, let him speak now! ”

Deep silence greeted this.

Flagg seemed satisfied. “Then let—”

Heads began to turn away from him suddenly. A surprised murmur ran through the crowd, then rose to a babble. Flagg seemed completely caught by surprise. Now people in the crowd began to cry out, and while it was impossible to make out the words clearly, the tone was one of wonder and surprise. The ball of fire dipped and spun uncertainly.

The humming sound of an electric motor came to Larry’s ears. And again he caught that puzzling name tossed from mouth to mouth, never clear, never all of one piece: Man… Can Man… Trash… Trashy…

Someone was coming through the crowd, as if in answer to the dark man’s challenge.

Flagg felt terror seep into the chambers of his heart. It was a terror of the unknown and the unexpected. He had foreseen everything, even Whitney’s foolish spur-of-the-moment speech. He had foreseen everything but this. The crowd—his crowd—was parting, peeling back. There was a scream, high, clear, and freezing. Someone broke and ran. Then someone else. And then the crowd, already on an emotional hair-trigger, broke and stampeded.

“Hold still! ” Flagg cried at the top of his voice, but it was useless. The crowd had become a strong wind, and not even the dark man could stop the wind. Terrible, impotent rage rose in him, joining the fear and making some new and volatile mix. It had gone wrong again. In the last minute it had somehow gone wrong, like the old lawyer in Oregon, the woman slitting her throat on the windowglass… and Nadine… Nadine failing…

They ran, scattering to all the points of the compass, pounding across the lawn of the MGM Grand, across the street, toward the Strip. They had seen the final guest, arrived at last like some grim vision out of a horror tale. They had seen, perhaps, the raddled face of some final awful retribution.

And they had seen what the returning wanderer had brought with him.

As the crowd melted, Randall Flagg also saw, as did Larry and Ralph and a frozen Lloyd Henreid, who was still holding the torn scroll in his hands.

It was Donald Merwin Elbert, now known as the Trashcan Man, now and forever, world without end, hallelujah, amen.

He was behind the wheel of a long, dirty electric cart. The cart’s heavy-duty bank of batteries was nearly drained dry. The cart was humming and buzzing and lurching. Trashcan Man bobbed back and forth on the open seat like a mad marionette.

He was in the last stages of radiation sickness. His hair was gone. His arms, poking out of the tatters of his shirt, were covered with open running sores. His face was a cratered red soup from which one desert-faded blue eye peered with a terrible, pitiful intelligence. His teeth were gone. His nails were gone. His eyelids were frayed flaps.

He looked like a man who had driven his electric cart out of the dark and burning subterranean mouth of hell itself.

Flagg watched him come, frozen. His smile was gone. His high, rich color was gone. His face was suddenly a window made of pale clear glass.

Trashcan Man’s voice bubbled ecstatically up from his thin chest:

“I brought it… I brought you the fire… please… I’m sorry…”

It was Lloyd who moved. He took one step forward, then another. “Trashy… Trash, baby…” His voice was a croak.

That single eye moved, painfully seeking Lloyd out. “Lloyd? That you?”

“It’s me, Trash.” Lloyd was shaking violently all over, the way Whitney had been shaking. “Hey, what you got there? Is it—”

“It’s the Big One,” Trash said happily. “It’s the A-bomb.” He began to rock back and forth on the seat of the electric cart like a convert at a revival meeting. “The A-bomb, the Big One, the big fire, my life for you! ”

“Take it away, Trash,” Lloyd whispered. “It’s dangerous. It’s… it’s hot. Take it away…”

“Make him get rid of it, Lloyd,” the dark man who was now the pale man whined. “Make him take it back where he got it. Make him—”

Trashcan’s one operative eye grew puzzled. “Where is he?” he asked, and then his voice rose to an agonized howl. “Where is he? He’s gone! Where is he? What did you do to him? ”

Lloyd made one last supreme effort. “Trash, you’ve got to get rid of that thing. You—”

And suddenly Ralph shrieked: “Larry! Larry! The Hand of God! ” Ralph’s face was transported in a terrible joy. His eyes shone. He was pointing into the sky.

Larry looked up. He saw the ball of electricity Flagg had flicked from the end of his finger. It had grown to a tremendous size. It hung in the sky, jittering toward Trashcan Man, giving off sparks like hair. Larry realized dimly that the air was now so full of electricity that every hair on his own body was standing on end.

And the thing in the sky did look like a hand.

“Noooo! ” the dark man wailed.

Larry looked at him… but Flagg was no longer there. He had a bare impression of something monstrous standing in front of where Flagg had been. Something slumped and hunched and almost without shape—something with enormous yellow eyes slit by dark cat’s pupils.

Then it was gone.

Larry saw Flagg’s clothes—the jacket, the jeans, the boots—standing upright with nothing in them. For a split second they held the shape of the body that had been inside them. And then they collapsed.

The crackling blue fire in the air rushed at the yellow electric cart that Trashcan Man had somehow driven back from the Nellis Range. He had lost hair and thrown up blood and finally vomited out his own teeth as the radiation sickness sank deeper and deeper into him, yet he had never faltered in his resolve to bring it back to the dark man… you could say that he had never flagged in his determination.

The blue ball of fire flung itself into the back of the cart, seeking what was there, drawn to it.

“Oh shit we’re all fucked! ” Lloyd Henreid cried. He put his hands over his head and fell to his knees.

Oh God, thank God, Larry thought. I will fear no evil, I will f

Silent white light filled the world.

And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.

Chapter 74

Stu woke up from a night of broken rest at dawn and lay shivering, even with Kojak curled up next to him. The morning sky was coldly blue, but in spite of the shivers he was hot. He was running a fever.

“Sick,” he muttered, and Kojak looked up at him. He wagged his tail and then trotted into the gully. He brought back a piece of deadwood and laid it at Stu’s feet.

“I said sick, not stick, but I guess it’ll do,” Stu told him. He sent Kojak out for a dozen more sticks. Soon he had a fire blazing. Even sitting close would not drive the shivers away, although sweat was rolling down his face. It was the final irony. He had the flu, or something very like it. He had come down with it two days after Glen, Larry, and Ralph left him. For another two days the flu had seemed to consider him—was he worth taking? Apparently he was. Little by little he was getting worse. And this morning he felt very bad indeed.

Among the odds and ends in his pockets, Stu found a stub of pencil, his notebook (all the Free Zone organizational stuff that had once seemed the vital stuff of life itself now seemed mildly foolish), and his key ring. He had puzzled over the key ring for a long time, coming back to it over the last few days again and again, constantly surprised by the strong ache of sadness and nostalgia. This one was to his apartment. This one was his locker key. This one was a spare for his car, a 1977 Dodge with a lot of rust—so far as he knew it was still parked behind the apartment building at 31 Thompson Street in Arnette.

Also attached to the key ring was a cardboard address card encased in Lucite. STU REDMAN—31 THOMPSON STREET—PH (713) 555-6283, it read. He took the keys off the ring, bounced them thoughtfully on the palm of his hand for a moment, and then threw them away. The last of the man he had been went into the dry-wash and clinked into a dry clump of sage, where it would stay, he supposed, until the end of time. He slipped the cardboard address card out of the Lucite, and then ripped a blank page from his notebook.

Dear Frannie, he wrote at the top.

He told her all that had happened up until he had broken his leg. He told her that he hoped to see her again, but that he doubted it was in the cards. The best he could hope for was that Kojak would find the Zone again. He wiped tears absently from his face with the heel of his hand and wrote that he loved her. I expect you to mourn me and then get on, he wrote. You and the baby have to get on. That’s the most important thing now. He signed, folded it small, and slipped the note into the address slot in the Lucite square. Then he attached the key ring to Kojak’s collar.

“Good dog,” he said when that was done. “You want to go look around? Find a rabbit or something?”

Kojak bounded up the slope where Stu had broken his leg and was gone. Stu watched his progress with a mixture of bitterness and amusement, then picked up the 7-Up can Kojak had brought him on one trip yesterday in lieu of a stick. He had filled it with muddy water from the ditch. When the water stood, the mud silted down to the bottom. It made a gritty drink, but as his mother would have said, it was a whole lot grittier when there was none. He drank slowly, slaking his thirst bit by bit. It hurt to swallow.

“Life sure is a bitch,” he muttered, and then had to laugh at himself. For a moment or two he let his fingers fret at the swellings high on his neck, just under his jaw. Then he lay back, splinted leg in front of him, and dozed.

He woke with a start about an hour later, clutching at the sandy earth in sleepy panic. Had he had a nightmare? If so, it seemed to still be going on. The ground was moving slowly under his hands.

Earthquake? We got an earthquake here?

For a moment he clung to the idea that it must be delirium, that his fever had come back while he dozed. But looking toward the gully, he saw that dirt was sliding down in small, muddy sheets. Bounding, bouncing pebbles flashed mica and quartz glints at his startled eyes. And then a faint, dull thudding noise came—it seemed to push its way into his ears. A moment later he was heaving for breath, as if most of the air had suddenly been pushed out of the gully the flash flood had cut.

There was a whining sound above him. Kojak stood silhouetted against the western edge of the cut, hunkered down with his tail between his legs. He was staring west, toward Nevada.

“Kojak!” Stu cried in panic. That thudding noise had terrified him—it was as if God had suddenly stamped his foot down on the desert floor somewhere not too distant.

Kojak bounded down the slope and joined him, whining. As Stu passed a hand down the dog’s back, he felt Kojak trembling. He had to see, he had to. A sudden feeling of surety came to him: what had been meant to happen was happening: Right now.

“I’m going up, boy,” Stu muttered.

He crawled to the eastern edge of the gully. It was a little steeper, but it offered more handholds. He had thought for the last three days that he might be able to get up there, but he hadn’t seen the point. He was sheltered from the worst of the wind at the bottom of the cut, and he had water. But now he had to get up there. He had to see. He dragged his splinted leg behind him like a club. He got up on his hands and craned his neck to see the top. It looked very high, very far away.

“Can’t do it, boy,” he muttered to Kojak, and started trying anyway.

A fresh pile of rubble had piled up at the bottom as a result of the… the earthquake. Or whatever it was. Stu pulled himself over it and then began to inch his way up the slope, using his hands and his left knee. He made twelve yards and then lost six of them before he could grab a quartz outcropping and stop his slide.

“Nope, never make it,” he panted, and rested.

Ten minutes later he started again and made another ten yards. He rested. Went again. Came to a place with no holds and had to inch to the left until he found one. Kojak walked beside him, no doubt wondering what this fool was up to, leaving his water and his nice warm fire.

Warm. Too warm.

The fever must be coming up again, but at least the shivering had subsided. Fresh sweat was running down his face and arms. His hair, dusty and oily, hung in his eyes.

Lord, I’m burning up! Must be a hundred and two, a hundred and three…

He happened to glance at Kojak. It took almost a minute for what he was seeing to sink in. Kojak was panting. It wasn’t fever, or not just fever, because Kojak was hot, too.

Overhead, a squadron of birds suddenly flocked, wheeling aimlessly and squawking.

They feel it, too. Whatever it is, the birds feel it, too.

He began to crawl again, fear lending him additional strength. An hour passed; two. He fought for every foot, every inch. By one o’clock that afternoon he was only six feet below the edge. He could see jags of paving jutting out above him. Only six feet, but the grade here was very steep and smooth. He tried once to just wriggle up like a garter snake, but loose gravel, the underbedding of the Interstate, had begun to rattle out from beneath him, and now he was afraid that if he tried to move at all he would go all the way to the bottom again, probably breaking his other damn leg in the process.

“Stuck,” he muttered. “Good fucking show. Now what?”

Now what became obvious very quickly. Even without moving around, the earth was beginning to shift downward beneath him. He slipped an inch and clawed for purchase with his hands. His broken leg was thudding heavily, and he had not thought to pocket Glen’s pills.

He slipped another two inches. Then five. His left foot was now dangling over space. Only his hands were holding him, and as he watched they began to slip, digging ten little furrows in the damp ground.

“Kojak! ” he cried miserably, expecting nothing. But suddenly Kojak was there. Stu flung his arms around his neck blindly, not expecting to be saved but only grabbing what there was to be grabbed, like a drowning man. Kojak made no effort to throw him off. He dug in. For a moment they were frozen, a living sculpture. Then Kojak began to move, digging for inches, claws clicking against small stones and bits of gravel. Pebbles rattled into Stu’s face and he shut his eyes. Kojak dragged him, panting like an air compressor in Stu’s right ear.

He slitted his eyes open and saw they were nearly at the top. Kojak’s head was down. His back legs were working furiously. He gained four more inches and it was enough. With a desperate cry, Stu let go of Kojak’s neck and grabbed an outcrop of paving. It snapped off in his hands. He grabbed another one. Two fingernails peeled back like wet decals, and he cried out. The pain was exquisite, galvanizing. He scrambled up, pistoning with his good leg, and at last—somehow—lay panting on the surface of I-70, his eyes shut.

Kojak was beside him then. He whined and licked Stu’s face.

Slowly then, Stu sat up and looked west. He looked for a long time, oblivious of the heat that was still rushing against his face in warm, bloated waves.

“Oh, my God,” he said at last in a weak, breaking voice. “Look at that, Kojak. Larry. Glen. They’re gone. God, everything’s gone. All gone.”

The mushroom cloud stood out on the horizon like a clenched fist on the end of a long, dusty forearm. It was swirling, fuzzy at the edges, beginning to dissipate. It was backlighted in sullen orange-red, as if the sun had decided to go down in the early afternoon.

The firestorm, he thought.

They were all dead in Las Vegas. Someone had fiddled when he should have faddled, and a nuclear weapon had gone off… and one hellish big one, from the look and the feel. Maybe a whole stockpile of them had gone. Glen, Larry, Ralph… even if they hadn’t reached Vegas yet, even if they were still walking, surely they were close enough to have been baked alive.

Close beside him, Kojak whimpered unhappily.

Fallout. Which way is the wind going to blow it?

Did it matter?

He remembered his note to Fran. It was important that he add what had happened. If the wind blew the fallout east, it might cause them problems… but more than that, they had to know that if Las Vegas had been the dark man’s staging area, it was gone now. The people had been vaporized along with all the deadly toys that had just been lying around, waiting for someone to pick them up. He ought to add all of that to the note.

But not now. He was too tired now. The climb had exhausted him, and the stupendous sight of that dissipating mushroom cloud had exhausted him even more. He felt no jubilation, only dull and grinding weariness. He lay down on the pavement and his last thought before drifting off to sleep was: How many megatons? He didn’t think anyone would ever know, or want to know.

He awoke after six. The mushroom cloud was gone, but the western sky was an angry pinkish-red, like a bright weal of burnflesh. Stu hauled himself over into the breakdown lane and lay down, exhausted all over again. The shakes were back. And the fever. He touched his forehead with his wrist and tried to gauge the temperature there. He guessed it was well over a hundred degrees.

Kojak came out of the early evening with a rabbit in his jaws. He laid it at Stu’s feet and wagged his tail, waiting to be complimented.

“Good dog,” Stu said tiredly. “That’s a good dog.”

Kojak’s tail wagged faster. Yes, I’m a pretty good dog, he seemed to agree. But he remained looking at Stu, seeming to wait for something. Part of the ritual was incomplete. Stu tried to think what it was. His brain was moving very slowly; while he was sleeping, someone seemed to have poured molasses all over his interior gears.

“Good dog,” he repeated, and looked at the dead rabbit. Then he remembered, although he wasn’t even sure he had his matches anymore. “Fetch, Kojak,” he said, mostly to please the dog. Kojak bounced away and soon returned with a good chunk of dry wood.

He had his matches, but a good breeze had sprung up and his hands were shaking badly. It took a long time to get a fire going. He got the kindling he had stripped lighted on the tenth match, and then the breeze gusted roguishly, puffing out the flames. Stu rebuilt it carefully, shielding it with his body and his hands. He had eight remaining matches in a LaSalle Business School folder. He cooked the rabbit, gave Kojak his half, and could eat only a little of his share. He tossed Kojak what was left. Kojak didn’t pick it up. He looked at it, then whined uneasily at Stu.

“Go on, boy. I can’t.”

Kojak ate up. Stu looked at him and shivered. His two blankets were, of course, below.

The sun went down, and the western sky was grotesque with color. It was the most spectacular sunset Stu had ever seen in his life… and it was poison. He could remember the narrator of a MovieTone newsreel saying enthusiastically back in the early sixties that there were beautiful sunsets for weeks after a nuclear test. And, of course, after earthquakes.

Kojak came up from the washout with something in his mouth—one of Stu’s blankets. He dropped it in Stu’s lap. “Hey,” Stu said, hugging him unsteadily. “You’re some kind of dog, you know it?”

Kojak wagged his tail to show that he knew it.

Stu wrapped the blanket around him and moved closer to the fire. Kojak lay next to him, and soon they both slept. But Stu’s sleep was light and uneasy, skimming in and out of delirium. Sometime after midnight he roused Kojak, yelling in his sleep.

“Hap!” Stu cried. “You better turn off y’pumps! He’s coming! Black man’s coming for you! Better turn off y’pumps! He’s in the old car yonder!”

Kojak whined uneasily. The Man was sick. He could smell the sickness and mingling with that smell was a new one. A black one. It was the smell the rabbits had on them when he pounced. The smell had been on the wolf he had disemboweled under Mother Abagail’s house in Hemingford Home. The smell had been on the towns he had passed through on his way to Boulder and Glen Bateman. It was the smell of death. If he could have attacked it and driven it out of this Man, he would have. But it was inside this Man. The Man drew in good air and sent out that smell of coming death, and there was nothing to do but wait and see it through to the end. Kojak whined again, low, and then slept.

Stu woke up the next morning more feverish than ever. The glands under his jaw had swollen to the size of golfballs. His eyes were hot marbles.

I’m dying… yes, that’s affirmative.

He called Kojak over and removed the keychain and his note from the Lucite address-holder. Printing carefully, he added what he had seen and replaced the note. He lay back down and slept. And then, somehow, it was nearly dark again. Another spectacular, horrible sunset burned and jittered in the West. And Kojak had brought a gopher for dinner.

“This the best y’could do?”

Kojak wagged his tail and grinned shamefacedly.

Stu cooked it, divided it, and managed to eat his entire half. It was tough, and it had a horrible wild taste, and when he was done he had a nasty bout of stomach cramps.

“When I die, I want you to go back to Boulder,” he told the dog. “You go back and find Fran. Find Frannie. Okay, big old dumb dog?”

Kojak wagged his tail doubtfully.

An hour later, Stu’s stomach rumbled once in warning. He had just time enough to roll over on one elbow to avoid fouling himself before his share of the gopher came up in a rush.

“Shit,” he muttered miserably, and dozed off.

He awoke in the small hours and got up on his elbows, his head buzzing with fever. The fire had gone out, he saw. It didn’t matter. He was pretty well done up.

Some sound in the darkness had awakened him. Pebbles and stones. Kojak coming up the embankment from the cut, that’s all it was…

Except that Kojak was beside him, sleeping.

Even as Stu glanced at him, the dog woke up. His head came off his paws and a moment later he was on his feet, facing the cut, growling deep in his throat.

Rattling pebbles and stones. Someone—something —coming up.

Stu struggled into a sitting position. It’s him, he thought. He was there, but somehow he got away. Now he’s here, and he means to do me before the flu can.

Kojak’s growl became stronger. His hackles stood, his head was down. The rattling sound was closer now. Stu could hear a low panting sound. There was a pause then, long enough for Stu to arty sweat off his forehead. A moment later a dark shape humped against the edge of the cut, head and shoulders blotting out the stars.

Kojak advanced, stiff-legged, still growling.

“Hey!” a bewildered but familiar voice said. “Hey, is that Kojak? Is it?”

The growling stopped immediately. Kojak bounded forward joyfully, tail wagging.

“No!” Stu croaked. “It’s a trick! Kojak… ! ”

But Kojak was jumping up and down on the figure that had finally gained the pavement. And that shape… something about the shape was also familiar. It advanced toward him with Kojak at his heel. Kojak was volleying joyful barks. Stu licked his lips and got ready to fight if he had to. He thought he could manage one good punch, maybe two.

“Who is it?” he called. “Who is that there?”

The dark figure paused, then spoke.

“Well, it’s Tom Cullen, that’s who, my laws, yes. M-O-O-N, that spells Tom Cullen. Who’s that?”

“Stu,” he said, and his voice seemed to come from far away. Everything was far away now. “Hello, Tom, it’s good to see you.” But he didn’t see him, not that night. Stu fainted.

He came around at ten in the morning on October 2, although neither he nor Tom knew that was the date. Tom had built a huge bonfire and had wrapped Stu in his sleeping bag and his blankets. Tom himself was sitting by the fire and roasting a rabbit. Kojak lay contentedly on the ground between the two of them.

“Tom,” Stu managed.

Tom came over. He had grown a beard, Stu saw; he hardly looked like the man who had left Boulder for the West five weeks ago. His blue eyes glinted happily. “Stu Redman! You’re awake now, my laws, yes! I’m glad. Boy, it’s good to see you. What did you do to your leg? Hurt it, I guess. I hurt mine once. Jumped off a haystack and broke it, I guess. Did my daddy whip me? My laws, yes! That was before he run off with DeeDee Packalotte.”

“Mine’s broken, too. And how. Tom, I’m awful thirsty—”

“Oh, there’s water. All kinds! Here.”

He handed Stu a plastic bottle that might once have held milk. The water was clear and delicious. No grit at all. Stu drank greedily and then threw it all up.

“Slow and easy does it,” Tom said. “That’s the ticket. Slow and easy. Boy, it’s good to see you. Hurt your leg, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I broke it. Week ago, maybe longer.” He drank more water, and this time it stayed down. “But there’s more wrong than the leg. I’m bad sick, Tom. Fever. Listen to me.”

“Right! Tom’s listening. Just tell me what to do.” Tom leaned forward and Stu thought, Why, he looks brighter. Is that possible? Where had Tom been? Did he know anything about the Judge? About Dayna? So many things to talk about, but there was no time now. He was getting worse. There was a deep rattling sound in his chest, like padded chains. Symptoms so much like the superflu. It was really quite funny.

“I’ve got to knock down the fever,” he said to Tom. “That’s the first thing. I need aspirin. Do you know aspirin?”

“Sure. Aspirin. For fast-fast-fast relief.”

“That’s the ticket, all right. You start walking up the road, Tom. Look in the glove-box of every car you come to. Look for a first-aid kit—it’ll most likely be a box with a red cross on it. When you find some aspirin in one of those boxes, bring it back here. And if you should find a car with camping gear in it, bring back a tent. Okay?”

“Sure.” Tom stood up. “Aspirin and a tent, then you’ll be all better again, right?”

“Well, it’ll be a start.”

“Say,” Tom said, “how’s Nick? I’ve been dreaming about him. In the dreams he tells me where to go, because in the dreams he can talk. Dreams are funny, aren’t they? But when I try to talk to him, he always goes away. He’s okay, isn’t he?” Tom looked at Stu anxiously.

“Not now,” Stu said. “I… I can’t talk now. Not about that. Just get the aspirin, okay? Then we’ll talk.”

“Okay…” But fear had settled onto Tom’s face like a gray cloud. “Kojak, want to come with Tom?”

Kojak did. They walked off together, heading east. Stu lay down and put an arm over his eyes.

When Stu slipped back into reality again, it was twilight. Tom was shaking him. “Stu! Wake up! Wake up, Stu!”

He was frightened by the way time seemed to be slipping by in sudden lurches—as if the teeth on the cog of his personal reality were wearing down. Tom had to help him sit up, and when he was sitting, he had to lean his head between his legs and cough. He coughed so long and hard that he almost passed out again. Tom watched him with alarm. Little by little, Stu got control of himself. He pulled the blankets closer around him. He was shivering again.

“What did you find, Tom?”

Tom held out a first-aid kit. Inside were Band-Aids, Mercurochrome, and a big bottle of Anacin. Stu was shocked to find he could not work the childproof cap. He had to give it to Tom, who finally worried it open. Stu washed down three Anacin with water from the plastic bottle.

“And I found this,” Tom said. “It was in a car full of camping stuff, but there was no tent.” It was a huge, puffy double sleeping bag, fluorescent orange on the outside, the lining done in a gaudy stars-and-bars pattern.

“Yeah, that’s great. Almost as good as a tent. You did fine, Tom.”

“And these. They were in the same car.” Tom reached into his jacket and produced half a dozen foil packages. Stu could hardly believe his eyes. Freeze-dried concentrates. Eggs. Peas. Squash. Dried beef. “Food, isn’t it, Stu? It’s got pictures of food on it, laws, yes.”

“It’s food,” Stu agreed gratefully. “Just about the only kind I can eat, I think.” His head was buzzing, and far away, at the center of his brain, a sweetly sickening high C hummed on and on. “Can we heat some water? We don’t have a pot or a kettle.”

“I’ll find something.”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Stu—”

Stu looked into that troubled, miserable face, still a boy’s face in spite of the beard, and slowly shook his head.

“Dead, Tom,” he said gently. “Nick’s dead. Almost a month ago. It was a… a political thing. Assassination, I s’pose you’d say. I’m sorry.”

Tom lowered his head, and in the freshly built-up fire, Stu saw his tears fall into his lap. They fell in a gentle silver rain. But he was silent. At last he looked up, his blue eyes brighter than ever. He wiped at them with the heel of his hand.

“I knew he was,” he said huskily. “I didn’t want to think I knew, but I did. Laws, yes. He kept turning his back and going away. He was my main man, Stu—did you know that?”

Stu reached out and took Tom’s big hand. “I knew, Tom.”

“Yes he was, M-O-O-N, that spells my main man. I miss him awful. But I’m going to see him in heaven. Tom Cullen will see him there. And he’ll be able to talk and I’ll be able to think. Isn’t that right?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all, Tom.”

“It was the bad man killed Nick. Tom knows. But God fixed that bad man. I saw it. The hand of God came down out of the sky.” There was a cold wind whistling over the floor of the Utah badlands, and Stu shivered violently in its clasp. “Fixed him for what he did to Nick and to the poor Judge. Laws, yes.”

“What do you know about the Judge, Tom?”

“Dead! Up in Oregon! Shot him!”

Stu nodded wearily. “And Dayna? Do you know anything about her?”

“Tom saw her, but he doesn’t know. They gave me a job cleaning up. And when I came back one day I saw her doing her job. She was up in the air changing a streetlight bulb. She looked at me and…” He fell silent for a moment, and when he spoke again it was more to himself than to Stu. “Did she see Tom? Did she know Tom? Tom doesn’t know. Tom… thinks … she did. But Tom never saw her again.”

Tom left to go foraging shortly after, taking Kojak with him, and Stu dozed. He returned not with a big tin can, which was the best Stu had hoped for, but with a broiling pan big enough to hold a Christmas turkey. There were treasures in the desert, apparently. Stu grinned in spite of the painful fever blisters that had begun to form on his lips. Tom told him he had gotten the pan from an orange truck with a big U on it—someone who had been fleeing the superflu with all their worldly possessions, Stu guessed. Much good it had done them.

Half an hour later there was food. Stu ate carefully, sticking to the vegetables, watering the concentrates enough to make a thin gruel. He held everything down and felt a little better, at least for the time being. Not long after supper, he and Tom went to sleep with Kojak between them.

“Tom, listen to me.”

Tom hunkered down by Stu’s big, fluffy sleeping bag. It was the next morning. Stu had been able to eat only a little breakfast; his throat was sore and badly swollen, all his joints painful. The cough was worse, and the Anacin wasn’t doing much of a job of knocking back the fever.

“I got to get inside and get some medicine into me or I’m gonna die. And it has to be today. Now, the closest town is Green River, and that’s sixty miles east of here. We’ll have to drive.”

“Tom Cullen can’t drive a car, Stu. Laws, no!”

“Yeah, I know. It’s gonna be a chore for me, because as well as being sick as a dog, I broke the wrong friggin leg.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well… never mind right now. It’s too hard to explain. We won’t even worry about it, because that ain’t the first problem. The first problem is getting a car to start. Most of them have been sitting out here three months or more. The batteries will be as flat as pancakes. So we’ll need a little luck. We got to find a stalled car with a standard shift at the top of one of these hills. We might do it. It’s pretty hilly country.” He didn’t add that the car would have to have been kept reasonably tuned, would have to have some gas in it… and an ignition key. All those guys on TV might know how to hotwire a car, but Stu didn’t have a clue.

He looked up at the sky, which was scumming over with clouds. “Most of it’s on you, Tom. You got to be my legs.”

“All right, Stu. When we get the car, are we going back to Boulder? Tom wants to go to Boulder, don’t you?”

“More than anything, Tom.” He looked toward the Rockies, which were a dim shadow on the horizon. Had the snow started falling up in the high passes yet? Almost certainly. And if not yet, then soon. Winter came early in this high and forsaken part of the world. “It may take a while,” he said.

“How do we start?”

“By making a travois.”

“Trav—?”

Stu gave Tom his pocket knife. “You’ve got to make holes in the bottom of this sleeping bag. One on each side.”

It took them an hour to make the travois. Tom found a couple of fairly straight sticks to ram down into the sleeping bag and out the holes at the bottom. Tom got some rope from the U-Haul where he had gotten the broiling pan, and Stu used it to secure the sleeping bag to the poles. When it was done, it reminded Stu more of a crazy rickshaw than a travois like the ones the Plains Indians had used.

Tom picked up the poles and looked doubtfully over his shoulder. “Are you in, Stu?”

“Yeah.” He wondered how long the seams would hold before unraveling straight up the sides of the bag. “How heavy am I, Tommy?”

“Not bad. I can haul you a long way. Giddup!”

They started moving. The gully where Stu had broken his leg—where he had been sure he was going to die—fell slowly behind them. Weak though he was, Stu felt a mad sort of exultation. Not there, anyway. He was going to die somewhere, and probably soon, but it wasn’t going to be alone in that muddy ditch. The sleeping bag swayed back and forth, lulling him. He dozed. Tom pulled him along under a thickening scud of clouds. Kojak padded along beside them.

Stu woke up when Tom eased him down.

“Sorry,” Tom said apologetically. “I had to rest my arms.” He first twirled, then flexed them.

“You rest all you want,” Stu said. “Slow and easy wins the race.” His head was thudding. He found the Anacin and dry-swallowed two of them. It felt as if his throat had been lined with sandpaper and some sadistic soul was striking matches on it. He checked the sleeping bag seams. As he had expected, they were coming unraveled, but it wasn’t too bad yet. They were on a long, gradual upslope, exactly the sort of thing he had been looking for. On a slope like this, better than two miles long, a car with the clutch disengaged could get cruising along pretty good. You could try to pop-start it in second, maybe even third gear.

He looked longingly to the left, where a plum-colored Triumph was parked askew in the breakdown lane. Something skeletal in a bright woolen sweater leaned behind the wheel. The Triumph would have a manual transmission, but there was no way in God’s world that he could get his splinted leg into that small cabin.

“How far have we come?” he asked Tom, but Tom could only shrug. It had been quite a piece, anyway, Stu thought. Tom had pulled him for at least three hours before stopping to rest. It spoke of phenomenal strength. The old landmarks were gone in the distance. Tom, who was built like a young bull, had dragged him maybe six or eight miles while he dozed. “You rest all you want,” he repeated. “Don’t knock yourself out.”

“Tom’s okay. O-and-K, that spells okay, laws, yes, everybody knows that.”

Tom wolfed a huge lunch, and Stu managed to eat a little. Then they went on. The road continued to curve upward, and Stu began to realize it had to be this hill. If they crested it without finding the right car, it would take them another two hours to get to the next one. Then dark. Rain or snow, from the look of the sky. A nice cold night out in the wet. And goodbye, Stu Redman.

They came up to a Chevrolet sedan.

“Stop,” he croaked, and Tom set the travois down. “Go over and look in that car. Count the pedals on the floor. Tell me if there’s two or three.”

Tom trotted over and opened the car door. A mummy in a flowered print dress fell out like someone’s bad joke. Her purse fell out beside her, scattering cosmetics, tissues, and money.

“Two,” Tom called back to Stu.

“Okay. We got to go on.”

Tom came back, took a deep breath, and grabbed the handles of the travois. A quarter of a mile farther along, they came to a VW van.

“Want me to count the pedals?” Tom asked.

“No, not this time.” The van was standing on three flats.

He began to think they were not going to find it; their luck was simply not in. They came to a station wagon that had only one flat shoe, it could be changed, but like the Chevy sedan, Tom reported it only had two pedals. That meant it was an automatic, and that meant it was useless to them. They pushed on. The long hill was flattening out now, beginning to crest. Stu could see one more car ahead, one last chance. Stu’s heart sank. It was a very old Plymouth, a 1970 at best. For a wonder it was standing on four inflated tires, but it was rust-eaten and battered. Nobody had ever bothered with much in the way of maintenance on this heap; Stu knew its sort well enough from Arnette. The battery would be old and probably cracked, the oil would be blacker than midnight in a mineshaft, but there would be a pink fuzz runner around the steering wheel and maybe a stuffed poodle with rhinestone eyes and a noddy head on the back shelf.

“Want me to check?” Tom asked.

“Yeah, I guess so. Beggars can’t be choosers, can they?” A fine cold mist was starting to drift down from the sky.

Tom crossed the road and looked inside the car, which was empty. Stu lay shivering inside the sleeping bag. At last Tom came back.

“Three pedals,” he said.

Stu tried to think it out. That high, sweet-sour buzzing in his head kept trying to get in the way.

The old Plymouth was almost surely a loser. They could go on over to the other side of the hill, but then all the cars would be pointing the wrong way, uphill, unless they crossed the median strip… which was a rocky half-mile wide here. Maybe they could manage to find a standard shift car on the other side… but by then it would be dark.

“Tom, help me get up.”

Somehow Tom helped him to his foot without hurting his broken leg too badly. His head thumped and buzzed. Black comets shot across his field of vision and he nearly passed out. Then he had one arm around Tom’s neck.

“Rest,” he muttered. “Rest…”

He had no idea how long they stood that way, Tom supporting him patiently as he swam around in the gray half-tones of semiconsciousness. When the world finally came back, Tom was still patiently supporting him. The mist had thickened to a slow, cold drizzle.

“Tom, help me across to it.”

Tom put an arm around Stu’s waist and the two of them staggered across to where the old Plymouth stood in the breakdown lane.

“Hood release,” Stu muttered, fumbling in the Plymouth’s grille. Sweat rolled down his face. Shudders wracked him. He found the hood release but couldn’t pull it up. He guided Tom’s hands to it and at last the hood swung up.

The engine was about what Stu had expected—a dirty and indifferently maintained V8. But the battery wasn’t as bad as he had feared it would be. It was a Sears, not the top of the line, but the guarantee-punch was February of 1991. Struggling against the feverish rush of his thoughts, Stu counted backward and guessed that the battery had been new last May.

“Go try the horn,” he told Tom, and propped himself against the car while Tom leaned in to do it. He had heard of drowning men grasping at straws, and he guessed that now he understood. His last chance of surviving this was a rattletrap junkyard refugee.

The horn gave a loud honk. Okay then. If there was a key, take the shot. Probably he should have had Tom check that first, but on second thought, it didn’t much matter. If there was no key, they were most likely all through no matter what.

He got the hood down and latched by leaning all off his weight on it. Then he hopped around to the driver’s door and stared in, fully expecting to see an empty ignition slot. But the keys were there, dangling from an imitation leather case with the initials A.C. on it. Bending in carefully, he turned the key over to accessory. Slowly, the gas gauge needle swung over to a little more than a quarter of a tank. Here was a mystery. Why had the car’s owner, why had A.C. pulled over to walk when he could have driven?

In his light-headed state, Stu thought of Charles Campion, almost dead, driving into Hap’s pumps. Old A.C. had the superflu, had it bad. Final stages. He pulls over, shuts off his car’s engine—not because he’s thinking about it, but because it’s a long-ingrained habit—and gets out. He’s delirious, maybe hallucinating. He stumbles out into the Utah badlands, laughing and singing and muttering and cackling, and dies there. Four months later Stu Redman and Tom Cullen happen along, and the keys are in the car, and the battery’s relatively fresh, and there’s gas—

The hand of God.

Wasn’t that what Tom had said about Vegas? The hand of God came down out of the sky. And maybe God had left this battered ‘70 Plymouth here for them, like manna in the desert. It was a crazy idea, but no more crazy than the idea of a hundred-year-old black woman leading a bunch of refugee into the promised land.

“And she still made her own biscuits,” he croaked. “Right up until the very end, she still made her own biscuits.”

“What, Stu?”

“Never mind. Move over, Tom.”

Tom did. “Can we ride?” he asked hopefully.

Stu pushed the driver’s seat down so Kojak could hop in, which he did after a careful sniff or two. “I don’t know. You just better pray this thing starts.”

“Okay,” Tom said agreeably.

It took Stu five minutes just to get behind the wheel. He sat on a slant, almost in the place where a middle front-seat passenger was supposed to sit. Kojak sat attentively in the back seat, panting. The car was littered with McDonald’s boxes and Taco Bell wrappers; the interior smelled like an old corn chip.

Stu turned the key. The old Plymouth cranked briskly for about twenty seconds, and then the starter began to lag. Stu tapped the horn again, and this time there was only a feeble croak. Tom’s face fell.

“We’re not done with her yet,” Stu said. He was encouraged; there was juice lurking inside that Sears battery yet. He pushed in the clutch and shifted up to second. “Open your door and get us rolling. Then hop back in.”

Tom said doubtfully: “Isn’t the car pointing the wrong way?”

“Right now it is. But if we can get this old shitheap running, we’ll fix that in a hurry.”

Tom got out and started pushing on the doorpost. The Plymouth began to roll. When the speedometer got up to 5 mph, Stu said: “Hop in, Tom.”

Tom got in and slammed his door. Stu turned the ignition key to the “on” position and waited. The steering was power, no good with the engine off, and it took most of his fading strength just to keep the nose of the Plymouth pointed straight down the road. The speedometer needle crawled up to 10, 15, 20. They were rolling silently down the hill Tom had spent most of the morning dragging them up. Dew collected on the windshield. Too late, Stu realized they had left the travois behind. 25 mph now.

“It’s not running, Stu,” Tom said anxiously.

Thirty mph. High enough. “God help us now,” Stu said, and popped the clutch. The Plymouth bucked and jerked. The engine coughed into life, spluttered, missed, stalled. Stu groaned, as much with frustration as with the bolt of pain that shot up his shattered leg.

“Shit-fire!” he cried, and depressed the clutch again. “Pump that gas pedal, Tom! Use your hand!”

“Which one is it?” Tom cried anxiously.

“It’s the long one!”

Tom got down on the floor and pumped the gas pedal twice. The car was picking up speed again, and Stu had to force himself to wait. They were better than halfway down the slope.

“Now! ” he shouted, and popped the clutch again.

The Plymouth roared into life. Kojak barked. Black smoke boiled out of the rusty exhaust pipe and turned blue. Then the car was running, choppily, missing on two cylinders, but really running. Stu snap-shifted to third and popped the clutch again, running all the pedals with his left foot.

“We’re going, Tom,” he bellowed. “We got us some wheels now!”

Tom shouted with pleasure. Kojak barked and wagged his tail. In his previous life, the life before Captain Trips when he had been Big Steve, he had ridden often in his master’s car. It was nice to be riding again, with his new masters.

They came to a U-turn road between the westbound and eastbound lanes about four miles down the road. OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY, a stern sign warned. Stu managed to manipulate the clutch well enough to get them around and into the eastbound lanes, having only one bad moment when the old car hitched and bucked and threatened to stall. But the engine was warm now, and he eased them through. He got back up to third gear and then relaxed a little, breathing hard, trying to catch up with his heartbeat, which was fast and thready. The grayness wanted to come back in and swamp him, but he wouldn’t let it. A few minutes later, Tom spotted the bright orange sleeping bag that had been Stu’s makeshift travois.

“Bye-bye!” Tom called in high good humor. “Bye-bye, we’re going to Boulder, laws, yes!”

I’ll be content with Green River tonight, Stu thought.

They got there just after dark, Stu moving the Plymouth carefully in low gear through the dark streets, which were dotted with abandoned cars. He parked on the main drag, in front of a building that announced itself as the Utah Hotel. It was a dismal frame building three stories high, and Stu didn’t think the Waldorf-Astoria had anything to worry about in the way of competition just yet. His head was jangling again, and he was flickering in and out of reality. The car had seemed stuffed with people at times during the last twenty miles. Fran. Nick Andros. Norm Bruett. He had looked over once and it had seemed that Chris Ortega, the bartender at the Indian Head, was riding shotgun.

Tired. Had he ever been so tired?

“In there,” he muttered. “We gotta stay the night, Nicky. I’m done up.”

“It’s Tom, Stu. Tom Cullen. Laws, yes.”

“Tom, yeah. We got to stop. Can you help me in?”

“Sure. Getting this old car to run, that was great.”

“I’ll have another beer,” Stu told him. “And ain’t you got a cigarette? I’m dying for a smoke.” He fell forward over the wheel.

Tom got out and carried him into the hotel. The lobby was damp and dark, but there was a fireplace and a half-filled woodbox beside it. Tom set Stu down on a threadbare sofa below a great stuffed moosehead and then set about building a fire while Kojak padded around, sniffing at things. Stu’s breath came slow and raspy. He muttered occasionally, and every now and then he would scream something unintelligible, freezing Tom’s blood.

He kindled a monster blaze, and then went looking around. He found pillows and blankets for himself and Stu. He pushed the sofa Stu was on a little closer to the fire and then Tom bedded down next to him. Kojak lay on the other side, so that they bracketed the sick man with their heat.

Tom lay looking at the ceiling, which was scrolled tin and laced with cobwebs at the corners. Stu was very sick. It was a worrisome thing. If he woke up again, Tom would ask him what to do about the sickness.

But suppose… suppose he didn’t wake up?

Outside the wind had picked up and went howling past the hotel. Rain lashed at the windows. By midnight, after Tom had gone to sleep, the temperature had dropped another four degrees, and the sound turned to the gritty slap of sleet. Far away to the west, the storm’s outer edges were urging a vast cloud of radioactive pollution toward California, where more would die.

At some time after two in the morning, Kojak raised his head and whined uneasily. Tom Cullen was getting up. His eyes were wide and blank. Kojak whined again, but Tom took no notice of him. He went to the door and let himself out into the screaming night. Kojak went to the hotel lobby window and put his paws up, looking out. He looked for some time, making low and unhappy sounds in his throat. Then he went back and laid down next to Stu again.

Outside, the wind howled and screeched.

Chapter 75

“I almost died, you know,” Nick said. He and Tom were walking up the empty sidewalk together. The wind howled steadily, an endless ghost-train highballing through the black sky. It made odd low hooting noises in the alleyways. Ha’ants, Tom would have said awake, and run away. But he wasn’t awake—not exactly—and Nick was with him. Sleet smacked coldly against his cheeks.

“You did?” Tom asked. “My laws!”

Nick laughed. His voice was low and musical, a good voice. Tom loved to listen to him talk.

“I sure did. That’s a big laws yes. The flu didn’t get me, but a little scratch along the leg almost did. Here, look at this.”

Seemingly oblivious of the cold, Nick unbuckled his jeans and pushed them down. Tom bent forward curiously, no different from any small boy who has been offered a glimpse of a wart with hair growing out of it or an interesting wound or puncture. Running down Nick’s leg was an ugly scar, barely healed. It started just below the groin, in the slab part of the thigh, and corkscrewed past the knee to mid-shin, where it finally petered out.

“And that almost killed you?”

Nick pulled up his jeans and belted them. “It wasn’t deep, but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection’s the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the superflu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind.”

“Infection,” Tom whispered, fascinated. They were walking again, almost floating along the sidewalk.

“Tom, Stu’s got an infection now.”

“No… no, don’t say that, Nick… you’re scaring Tom Cullen, laws, yes, you are!”

“I know I am, Tom, and I’m sorry. But you have to know. He has pneumonia in both lungs. He’s been sleeping outside for nearly two weeks. There are things you have to do for him. And still, he’ll almost certainly die. You have to be prepared for that.”

“No, don’t—”

“Tom.” Nick put his hand on Tom’s shoulder, but Tom felt nothing… it was as if Nick’s hand was nothing but smoke. “If he dies, you and Kojak have to go on. You have to get back to Boulder and tell them that you saw the hand of God in the desert. If it’s God’s will, Stu will go with you… in time. If it’s God’s will that Stu should die, then he will. Like me.”

“Nick,” Tom begged. “Please—”

“I showed you my leg for a reason. There are pills for infections. In places like this.”

Tom looked around and was surprised to see that they were no longer on the street. They were in a dark store. A drugstore. A wheelchair was suspended on piano wire from the ceiling like a ghostly mechanical corpse. A sign on Tom’s right advertised: CONTINENCE SUPPLIES.

“Yes, sir? May I help you?”

Tom whirled around. Nick was behind the counter, in a white coat.

“Nick?”

“Yes, sir.” Nick began to put small bottles of pills in front of Tom. “This is penicillin. Very good for pneumonia. This is ampicillin, and this one’s amoxicillin. Also good stuff. And this is V-cillin, most commonly given to children, and it may work if the others don’t. He’s to drink lots of water, and he should have juices, but that may not be possible. So give him these. They’re vitamin C tablets. Also, he must be walked—”

“I can’t remember all of that! ” Tom wailed.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to. Because there is no one else. You’re on your own.”

Tom began to cry.

Nick leaned forward. His arm swung. There was no slap—again there was only that feeling that Nick was smoke which had passed around him and possibly through him—but Tom felt his head rock back all the same. Something in his head seemed to snap.

“Stop that! You can’t be a baby now, Tom! Be a man! For God’s sake, be a man!”

Tom stared at Nick, his hand on his cheek, his eyes wide.

“Walk him,” Nick said. “Get him on his good leg. Drag him, if you have to. But get him off his back or he’ll drown.”

“He isn’t himself,” Tom said. “He shouts… he shouts to people who aren’t there.”

“He’s delirious. Walk him anyway. All you can. Make him take the penicillin, one pill at a time. Give him aspirin. Keep him warm. Pray. Those are all the things you can do.”

“All right, Nick. All right, I’ll try to be a man. I’ll try to remember. But I wish you was here, laws, yes, I do!”

“You do your best, Tom. That’s all.”

Nick was gone. Tom woke up and found himself standing in the deserted drugstore by the prescription counter. Standing on the glass were four bottles of pills. Tom stared at them for a long time and then gathered them up.

Tom came back at four in the morning, his shoulders frosted with sleet. Outside, it was letting up, and there was a thin clean line of dawn in the east. Kojak barked an ecstatic welcome, and Stu moaned and woke up. Tom knelt beside him. “Stu?”

“Tom? Hard to breathe.”

“I’ve got medicine, Stu. Nick showed me. You take it and get rid of that infection. You have to take one right now.” From the bag he had brought in, Tom produced the four bottles of pills and a tall bottle of Gatorade. Nick had been wrong about the juice. There was plenty of bottled juice in the Green River Superette.

Stu looked at the pills, holding them closely to his eyes. “Tom, where did you get these?”

“In the drugstore. Nick gave them to me.”

“No, really.”

“Really! Really! You have to take the penicillin first to see if that works. Which one says penicillin?”

“This one does… but Tom…”

“No. You have to. Nick said so. And you have to walk.”

“I can’t walk. I got a bust leg. And I’m sick.” Stu’s voice became sulky, petulant. It was a sickroom voice.

“You have to. Or I’ll drag you,” Tom said.

Stu lost his tenuous grip on reality. Tom put one of the penicillin capsules in his mouth, and Stu reflex-swallowed it with Gatorade to keep from choking. He began to cough wretchedly anyway, and Tom pounded him on the back as if he were burping a baby. Then he hauled Stu to his good foot by main force and began to drag him around the lobby, Kojak following them anxiously.

“Please God,” Tom said. “Please God, please God.”

Stu cried out: “I know where I can get her a washboard, Glen! That music store has em! I seen one in the window!”

“Please God,” Tom panted. Stu’s head lolled on his shoulder. It felt as hot as a furnace. His splinted leg dragged uselessly.

Boulder had never seemed so far away as it did on that dismal morning.

Stu’s struggle with pneumonia lasted two weeks. He drank quarts of Gatorade, V-8, Welch’s grape juice, and various brands of orange drink. He rarely knew what he was drinking. His urine was strong and acidic. He messed himself like a baby, and like a baby’s his stools were yellow and loose and totally blameless. Tom kept him clean. Tom dragged him around the lobby of the Utah Hotel. And Tom waited for the night when he would wake, not because Stu was raving in his sleep, but because his labored breathing had finally ceased.

The penicillin produced an ugly red rash after two days, and Tom switched to the ampicillin. That was better. On October 7 Tom awoke in the morning to find Stu sleeping more deeply than he had in days. His entire body was soaked with sweat, but his forehead was cool. The fever had snapped in the night. For the next two days, Stu did little but sleep. Tom had to struggle to wake him up enough to take his pills and sugar cubes from the restaurant attached to the Utah Hotel.

He relapsed on October 11, and Tom was terribly afraid it was the end. But the fever did not go as high, and his respiration never got as thick and labored as it had been on those terrifying early mornings of the fifth and the sixth.

On October 13 Tom awoke from a dazed nap in one of the lobby chairs to find Stu sitting up and looking around. “Tom,” he whispered. “I’m alive.”

“Yes,” Tom said joyfully. “Laws, yes!”

“I’m hungry. Could you rustle up some soup, Tom? With noodles in it, maybe?”

By the eighteenth his strength had begun to come back a little. He was able to get around the lobby for five minutes at a time on the crutches Tom brought him from the drugstore. There was a steady, maddening itch from his broken leg as the bones began to knit themselves together. On October 20 he went outside for the first time, bundled up in thermal underwear and a huge sheepskin coat.

The day was warm and sunny, but with an undertone of coolness. In Boulder it might still be mid-fall, the aspens turning gold, but here winter was almost close enough to touch. He could see small patches of frozen, granulated snow in shadowed areas the sun never touched.

“I don’t know, Tom,” he said. “I think we can get over to Grand Junction, but after that I just don’t know. There’s going to be a lot of snow in the mountains. And I don’t dare move for a while, anyway. I’ve got to get my go back.”

“How long before your go comes back, Stu?”

“I don’t know, Tom. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Stu was determined not to move too quickly, not to push it—he had been close enough to death to relish his recovery. He wanted it to be as complete as it could be. They moved out of the hotel lobby into a pair of connecting rooms down the first-floor hall. The room across the way became Kojak’s temporary doghouse. Stu’s leg was indeed knitting, but because of the improper set, it was never going to be the same straight limb again, unless he got George Richardson to rebreak it and set it properly. When he got off the crutches, he was going to have a limp.

Nonetheless, he set to work exercising it, trying to tone it up. Bringing the leg back to even 75 percent efficiency was going to be a long process, but so far as he could tell, he had a whole winter to do it in.

On October 28 Green River was dusted with nearly five inches of snow.

“If we don’t make our move soon,” Stu told Tom as they looked out at the snow, “we’ll be spending the whole damn winter in the Utah Hotel.”

The next day they drove the Plymouth down to the gas station on the outskirts of town. Pausing often to rest and using Tom for the heavy work, they changed the balding back tires for a pair of studded snows. Stu considered taking a four-wheel drive, and had finally decided, quite irrationally, that they should stick with their luck. Tom finished the operation by loading four fifty-pound bags of sand into the Plymouth’s trunk. They left Green River on Halloween and headed east.

They reached Grand Junction at noon on November 2, with not much more than three hours to spare, as it turned out. The skies had been lead-gray all the forenoon, and as they turned down the main street, the first spits of snow began to skate across the Plymouth’s hood. They had seen brief flurries half a dozen times en route, but this was not going to be a flurry. The sky promised serious snow.

“Pick your spot,” Stu said. “We may be here for a while.”

Tom pointed. “There! The motel with the star on it!”

The motel with the star on it was the Grand Junction Holiday Inn. Below the sign and the beckoning star was a marquee, and written on it in large red letters was: ELCOME TO GR ND JUNC ON’S SUMMERF ST ‘90! JUNE 12 – JU Y 4TH!

“Okay,” Stu said. “Holiday Inn it is.”

He pulled in and killed the Plymouth’s engine, and so far as either of them knew, it never ran again. By two that afternoon, the spits and spats of snow had developed into a thick white curtain that fell soundlessly and seemingly endlessly. By four o’clock the light wind had turned into a gale, driving the snow before it and piling up drifts that grew with a speed which was almost hallucinatory. It snowed all night. When Stu and Tom got up the next morning, they found Kojak sitting in front of the big double doors in the lobby, looking out at a nearly moveless world of white. Nothing moved but a single bluejay that was strutting around on the crushed remnants of a summer awning across the street.

“Jeezly crow,” Tom whispered. “We’re snowed in, ain’t we, Stu?”

Stu nodded.

“How can we get back to Boulder in this?”

“We wait for spring,” Stu said.

“That long?” Tom looked distressed, and Stu put an arm around the big man-boy’s shoulders.

“The time will pass,” he said, but even then he was not sure either of them would be able to wait that long.

Stu had been moaning and gasping in the darkness for some time. At last he gave a cry loud enough to wake himself up and came out of the dream to his Holiday Inn motel room up on his elbows, staring wide-eyed at nothing. He let out a long, shivery sigh and fumbled for the lamp by the bed table. He had clicked it twice before everything came back. It was funny, how hard that belief in electricity died. He found the Coleman lamp on the floor and lit that instead. When he had it going, he used the chamberpot. Then he sat down in the chair by the desk. He looked at his watch and saw it was quarter past three in the morning.

The dream again. The Frannie dream. The nightmare.

It was always the same. Frannie in pain, her face bathed in sweat. Richardson was between her legs, and Laurie Constable was standing nearby to assist him. Fran’s feet were up in stainless-steel stirrups…

Push, Frannie. Bear down. You’re doing fine.

But looking at George’s somber eyes over the top of his mask, Stu knew that Frannie wasn’t doing fine at all. Something was wrong. Laurie sponged off her sweaty face and pushed back her hair from her forehead.

Breech birth.

Who had said that? It was a sinister, bodiless voice, low and draggy, like a voice on a 45 rpm record played at 33 1/3.

Breech birth.

George’s voice: You’d better call Dick. Tell him we may have to…

Laurie’s voice: Doctor, she’s losing a lot of blood now…

Stu lit a cigarette. It was terribly stale, but after that particular dream, anything was a comfort. It’s an anxiety dream, that’s all. You got this typical macho idea that things won’t come right if you’re not there. Well, bag it up, Stuart; she’s fine. Not all dreams come true.

But too many of them had come true during the last half-year. The feeling that he was being shown the future in this recurring dream of Fran’s delivery would not leave him.

He stubbed the cigarette out half-smoked and looked blankly into the gaslamp’s steady glow. It was November 29; they had been quartered in the Grand Junction Holiday Inn for nearly four weeks. The time had passed slowly, but they had managed to keep amused with a whole town to plunder for diverting odds and ends.

Stu had found a medium-sized Honda electrical generator in a supply house on Grand Avenue, and he and Tom had hauled it back to the Convention Hall across from the Holiday Inn by putting it onto a sledge with a chainfall and then hooking up two Sno Cats to the sledge—moving it, in other words, in much the same way the Trashcan Man had moved his final gift for Randall Flagg.

“What are we gonna do with it?” Tom asked. “Get the electricity going at the motel?”

“This is too small for that,” Stu said.

“What, then? What’s it for?” Tom was fairly dancing with impatience.

“You’ll see,” Stu said.

They put the generator in the Convention Hall’s electrical closet, and Tom promptly forgot about it—which was just what Stu had hoped for. The next day he went to the Grand Junction Sixplex by snowmobile, and using the sledge and the chainfall himself this time, he had lowered an old thirty-five-millimeter motion picture projector from the second-story window of the storage area where he had found it on one of his exploring trips. It had been wrapped in plastic… and then simply forgotten, judging by the dust which had gathered on the protective covering.

His leg was coming around nicely, but it had still taken him almost three hours to muscle the projector from the doorway of the Convention Hall into the center of the floor. He used three dollies and kept expecting Tom to happen by at any moment, looking for him. With Tom to pitch in, the work would have gone faster, but it also would have spoiled the surprise. But Tom was apparently off on business of his own, and Stu didn’t see him all day. When he came into the Holiday Inn around five, apple-cheeked and wrapped in a scarf, the surprise was all ready.

Stu had brought back all six of the movies which had been playing in the Grand Junction Cinema complex. After supper that evening, Stu said casually: “Come on over to the Convention Hall with me, Tom.”

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

The Convention Hall faced the Holiday Inn across the snowy street. Stu handed Tom a box of popcorn at the doorway.

“What’s this for?” Tom asked.

“Can’t watch a movie without popcorn, you big dummy,” Stu grinned.

“MOVIE? ”

“Sure.”

Tom burst into the Convention Hall. Saw the big projector set up, completely threaded. Saw the big convention movie screen pulled down. Saw two folding chairs set up in the middle of the huge, empty floor.

“Wow,” he whispered, and his expression of naked wonder had been all Stu could have hoped for.

“I did this three summers at the Starlite Drive-In over in Braintree,” Stu said. “I hope I ain’t forgot how to fix one of these bastards if the film breaks.”

“Wow,” Tom said again.

“We’ll have to wait in between reels. I wasn’t about to go back and grab a second one.” Stu stepped through the welter of patch cords leading from the projector to the Honda generator in the electrical closet, and pulled the starter cord. The generator began to chug cheerfully along. Stu shut the door as far as it would go to mute the engine sound and killed the lights. And five minutes later they were sitting side by side, watching Sylvester Stallone kill hundreds of dope-dealers in Rambo IV: The Fire-Fight. Dolby sound blared out at them from the Convention Hall’s sixteen speakers, sometimes so loud it was hard to hear the dialogue (what dialogue there was)… but they had both loved it.

Now, thinking about that, Stu smiled. Someone who didn’t know better would have called him dumb—he could have hooked a VCR up to a much smaller gennie and they could have watched hundreds of movies that way, probably right in the Holiday Inn. But movies on TV were not the same, never had been, to his way of thinking. And that wasn’t really the point, either. The point was simply that they had time to kill… and some days it died goddamned hard.

Anyway, one of the films had been a reissue of one of the last Disney cartoons, Oliver and Company, which had never been released on videotape. Tom watched it again and again, laughing like a child at the antics of Oliver and the Artful Dodger and Fagin, who, in the cartoon, lived on a barge in New York and slept in a stolen airline seat.

In addition to the movie project, Stu had built over twenty models, including a Rolls-Royce that had 240 parts and had sold for sixty-five dollars before the superflu. Tom had built a strange but somehow compelling terrain-contoured landscape that covered nearly half the floor space of the Holiday Inn’s main function room; he had used papier-mâché, plaster of paris, and various food colorings. He called it Moonbase Alpha. Yes, they had kept busy, but—

What you’re thinking is crazy.

He flexed his leg. It was in better shape than he ever would have hoped, partially thanks to the Holiday Inn’s weight room and exercising machines. There was still considerable stiffness and some pain but he was able to limp around without the crutches. They could take it slow and easy. He was quite sure he could show Tom how to run one of the Arctic Cats that almost everyone around here kept packed away in the back of their garages. Do twenty miles a day, pack shelter halves, big sleeping bags, plenty of those freeze-dried concentrates…

Sure, and when the avalanche comes down on you up in Vail Pass, you and Tom can wave a pack of freeze-dried carrots at it and tell it to go away. It’s crazy!

Still…

He crushed his smoke and turned off the gas lamp. But it was a long time before he slept.

Over breakfast he said, “Tom, how badly do you want to get back to Boulder?”

“And see Fran? Dick? Sandy? Laws, I want to get back to Boulder worse than anything, Stu. You don’t think they gave my little house away, do you?”

“No, I’m sure they didn’t. What I mean is, would it be worth it to you to take a chance?”

Tom looked at him, puzzled. Stu was getting ready to try and explain further when Tom said: “Laws, everything’s a chance, isn’t it?”

It was decided as simply as that. They left Grand Junction on the last day of November.

There was no need to teach Tom the fundamentals of snowmobiling. Stu found a monster machine in a Colorado Highway Department shed not a mile from the Holiday Inn. It had an oversized engine, a fairing to cut the worst of the wind, and most important of all, it had been modified to include a large open storage compartment. It had once no doubt held all manner of emergency gear. The compartment was big enough to take one good-sized dog comfortably. With the number of shops in town devoted to outdoor activities, they had no trouble at all in outfitting themselves for the trip, even though the superflu had struck at the beginning of summer. They took light shelter halves and heavy sleeping bags, a pair of cross-country skis each (although the thought of trying to teach Tom the fundamentals of cross-country skiing made Stu’s blood run cold), a big Coleman gas stove, lamps, gas bottles, extra batteries, concentrated foods, and a big Garand rifle with a scope.

By two o’clock of that first day, Stu saw that his fear of being snowed in someplace and starving to death was groundless. The woods were fairly crawling with game; he had never seen anything like it in his life. Later that afternoon he shot a deer, his first deer since the ninth grade, when he had played hooky from school to go out hunting with his Uncle Dale. That deer had been a scrawny doe whose meat had been wild-tasting and rather bitter… from eating nettles, Uncle Dale said. This one was a buck, fine and heavy and broad-chested. But then, Stu thought as he gutted it with a big knife he had liberated from a Grand Junction sporting goods store, the winter had just started. Nature had her own way of dealing with overpopulation.

Tom built a fire while Stu butchered the deer as best he could, getting the sleeves of his heavy coat stiff and tacky with blood. By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing “Ave Maria.” The deer he had gotten with his Uncle Dale had gone to an old man named Schoey who lived in a shack just over the Braintree town line. He had skinned and dressed the deer for three dollars and ten pounds of deermeat.

“I sure wish old man Schoey was here tonight,” he said with a sigh.

“Who?” Tom asked, coming out of a semidoze.

“No one, Tom. Talking to myself.”

As it turned out, the venison was worth it. Sweet and delicious. After they had eaten their fill, Stu cooked about thirty pounds of extra meat and packed it away in one of the Highway Department snowmobile’s smaller storage compartments the next morning. That first day they only made sixteen miles.

That night the dream changed. He was in the delivery room again. There was blood everywhere—the sleeves of the white coat he was wearing were stiff and tacky with it. The sheet covering Frannie was soaked through. And still she shrieked.

It’s coming, George panted. Its time has come round at last, Frannie, it’s waiting to be born, so push! PUSH!

And it came, it came in a final freshet of blood. George pulled the infant free, grasping the hips because it had come feet-first.

Laurie began to scream. Stainless-steel instruments sprayed everywhere—

Because it was a wolf with a furious grinning human face, his face, it was Flagg, his time come round again, he was not dead, not dead yet, he still walked the world, Frannie had given birth to Randall Flagg—

Stu woke up, his harsh breathing loud in his ears. Had he screamed?

Tom was still asleep, huddled so deeply in his sleeping bag that Stu could only see his cowlick. Kojak was curled at Stu’s side. Everything was all right, it had only been a dream—

And then a single howl rose in the night, climbing, ululating, a silver chime of desperate horror… the howl of a wolf, or perhaps the scream of a killer’s ghost.

Kojak raised his head.

Gooseflesh broke out on Stu’s arms, thighs, groin.

The howl didn’t come again.

Stu slept. In the morning they packed up and went on. It was Tom who noticed and pointed out that the deer guts were all gone. There was a flurry of tracks where they had been, and the bloodstain of Stu’s kill faded to a dull pink on the snow… but that was all.

Five days of good weather brought them to Rifle. The next morning they awoke to a deepening blizzard. Stu said he thought they should wait it out here, and they put up in a local motel. Tom held the lobby doors open and Stu drove the snowmobile right inside. As he told Tom, it made a handy garage, although the snowmobile’s heavy-duty tread had chewed up the lobby’s deep-pile rug considerably.

It snowed for three days. When they awoke on the morning of December 10 and dug themselves out, the sun was shining brightly and the temperature had climbed into the mid-thirties. The snow was much deeper now, and it had gotten more difficult to read the twists and turns of I-70. But it wasn’t keeping to the highway that worried Stu on that bright, warm, and sunny day. In the late afternoon, as the blue shadows began to lengthen, Stu throttled down and then killed the snowmobile’s engine, his head cocked, his whole body seeming to listen.

“What is it, Stu? What’s—” Then Tom heard it, too. A low rumbling sound off to their left and up ahead. It swelled to a deep express-train roar and then faded. The afternoon was still again.

“Stu?” Tom asked anxiously.

“Don’t worry,” he said, and thought: I’ll worry enough for both of us.

The warm temperatures held. By December 13 they were nearly to Shoshone, and still climbing toward the roof of the Rockies—for them the highest point they would reach before beginning to descend again would be Loveland Pass.

Again and again they heard the low rumble of avalanches, sometimes far away, sometimes so close that there was nothing to do but look up and wait and hope those great shelves of white death would not blot out the sky. On the twelfth, one swept down and over a place where they had been only half an hour before, burying the snowmobile’s track under tons of packed snow. Stu was increasingly afraid that the vibration caused by the sound of the snowmobile’s engine would be what finally killed them, triggering a slide that would bury them forty feet deep before they even had time enough to realize what was happening. But now there was nothing to do but press on and hope for the best.

Then the temperatures plunged again and the threat abated somewhat. There was another storm and they were stopped for two days. They dug out and went on… and at night the wolves howled. Sometimes they were far away, sometimes so close that they seemed right outside the shelter halves, bringing Kojak to his feet, growling low in his chest, as taut as a steel spring. But the temperatures remained low and the frequency of the avalanches diminished, although they had another near miss on the eighteenth.

On December 22, outside the town of Avon, Stu ran the snowmobile off the highway embankment. At one moment they were running along at a steady ten miles an hour, safe and fine, spuming up clouds of snow behind them. Tom had just pointed out the small village below, silent as a 1980s stereopticon image with its single white church steeple and the undisturbed drifts up to the eaves of the houses. The next moment the cowling of the snowmobile began to tilt forward.

“What the fuck—” Stu began, and that was all he had time for.

The snowmobile canted farther forward. Stu throttled back, but it was too late. There was a peculiar sensation of weightlessness, the feeling you have when you have just left the diving board and the pull of gravity just matches the force of your upward spring. They were pitched off the machine head over heels. Stu lost sight of Tom and Kojak. Cold snow up his nose. When he opened his mouth to shout, the snow went down his throat. Down the back of his coat. Tumbling. Falling. Finally coming to rest in a deep white quilt of snow.

He fought his way up like a swimmer, gasping hot fire. His throat had been snowburned.

“Tom!” he shouted, treading snow. Oddly enough, from this angle he could see the highway embankment very clearly, and where they had run off it, causing their own small avalanche as they did so. The rear end of the snowmobile jutted out of the snow about fifty feet farther down the steep gradient. It looked like an orange buoy. Strange how the water imagery persisted… and by the way, was Tom drowning?

“Tom! Tommy! ”

Kojak popped up, looking as if he had been dusted from stem to stern with confectioners sugar, and breasted his way through the snow toward Stu.

“Kojak!” Stu shouted. “Find Tom! Find Tom! ”

Kojak barked and struggled to turn around. He headed toward a churned-up place in the snow and barked again. Struggling, falling, eating snow, Stu got to the place and felt around. One gloved hand snagged Tom’s jacket and he gave a furious yank. Tom bobbed up, gasping and retching, and they both fell on top of the snow on their backs. Tom whooped and gasped.

“My throat! It’s all hot! Oh laws, lawsy me—”

“It’s the cold, Tom. It goes away.”

“I was choking—”

“It’s all right now, Tom. We’re going to be okay.”

They lay on top of the snow, getting their wind back. Stu put his arm around Tom’s shoulders to still the big fellow’s trembling. A distance away, gaining volume and then diminishing, was the rumbling cold sound of another avalanche.

It took them the rest of the day to get the three quarters of a mile between the place where they had run off the road and the town of Avon. There was no question of salvaging the snowmobile or any of the supplies lashed to it; it was just too far down the grade. It would stay there until spring, at least—maybe forever, the way things were now.

They got to town half an hour past dusk, too cold and winded to do anything but build a fire and find a halfway warm place to sleep. That night there were no dreams—only the blackness of utter exhaustion.

In the morning, they set about the task of reoutfitting themselves. It was a tougher job in the small town of Avon than it had been in Grand Junction. Again Stu considered just stopping and wintering here—if he said it was the right thing to do, Tom would not question him, and they had had an explicit lesson in what happened to people who pressed their luck just yesterday. But in the end, he rejected the idea. The baby was due sometime in early January. He wanted to be there when it came. He wanted to see with his own eyes that it was all right.

At the end of Avon’s short main street they found a John Deere dealership, and in the garage behind the showroom they found two used Deere snowmobiles. Neither of them was quite as good as the big Highway Department machine Stu had driven off the road, but one of them had an extra-wide cleated driving tread, and he thought it would do. They found no concentrates and had to settle for canned goods instead. The latter half of the day was spent ransacking houses for camping gear, a job neither of them relished. The victims of the plague were everywhere, transformed into grotesquely decayed ice-cave exhibits.

Near the end of the day they found most of what they needed in one place, a large rooming house just off the main drag. Before the superflu struck, it had apparently been filled with young people, the sort who came to Colorado to do all the things John Denver used to sing about. Tom, in fact, found a large green plastic garbage bag in the crawlspace under the stairs filled with a very potent version of “Rocky Mountain High.”

“What’s this? Is it tobacco, Stu?”

Stu grinned. “Well, I guess some people thought so. It’s locoweed, Tom. Leave it where you found it.”

They loaded the snowmobile carefully, storing away the canned goods, tying down new sleeping bags and shelter halves. By then the first stars were coming out, and they decided to spend one more night in Avon.

Driving slowly back over the crusting snow to the house where they had set up quarters, Stu had a quietly stunning thought: tomorrow would be Christmas Eve. It seemed impossible to believe that time could have gotten by so fast, but the proof was staring up at him from his calendar wristwatch. They had left Grand Junction over three weeks before.

When they reached the house, Stu said: “You and Kojak go on in and get the fire going. I got a small errand to run.”

“What’s that, Stu?”

“Well, it’s a surprise,” Stu said.

“Surprise? Am I going to find out?”

“Yeah.”

“When?” Tom’s eyes sparkled.

“Couple of days.”

“Tom Cullen can’t wait a couple of days for a surprise, laws, no.”

“Tom Cullen will just have to,” Stu said with a grin. “I’ll be back in an hour. You just be ready to go.”

“Well… okay.”

It was more like an hour and a half before Stu had exactly what he wanted. Tom pestered him about the surprise for the next two or three hours. Stu kept mum, and by the time they turned in, Tom had forgotten all about it.

As they lay in the dark, Stu said: “I bet by now you wish we’d stayed in Grand Junction, huh?”

“Laws, no,” Tom answered sleepily. “I want to get back to my little house just as fast as I can. I just hope we don’t run off the road and fall into the snow again. Tom Cullen almost choked!”

“We’ll just have to go slower and try harder,” Stu said, not mentioning what would probably happen to them if it did happen again… and there was no shelter within walking distance.

“When do you think we’ll be there, Stu?”

“It’ll be a while yet, old hoss. But we’re gettin there. And I think what we better do right now is get some sleep, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

Stu turned out the light.

That night he dreamed that both Frannie and her terrible wolf-child had died in childbirth. He heard George Richardson saying from a great distance: It’s the flu. No more babies because of the flu. Pregnancy is death because of the flu. A chicken in every pot and a wolf in every womb. Because of the flu. We’re all done. Mankind is done. Because of the flu.

And from somewhere nearer, closing in, came the dark man’s howling laughter.

On Christmas Eve they began a run of good traveling that would last almost until the New Year. The surface of the snow had crusted up in the cold. The wind blew swirling clouds of ice-crystals over it to pile up in powdery herring-bone dunes that the John Deere snowmobile cut through easily. They wore sunglasses to guard against snow blindness.

They camped, that Christmas Eve, on top of the crust twenty-four miles east of Avon, not far from Silverthorne. They were in the throat of Loveland Pass now, the choked and buried Eisenhower Tunnel somewhere below and to the east of them. While they were waiting for dinner to warm up, Stu discovered an amazing thing. Idly using an axe to chop through the crust and his hand to dig out the loose powder beneath, he had discovered blue metal only an arm’s length below where they sat. He almost called Tom’s attention to his find, and then thought better of it. The thought that they were sitting less than two feet above a traffic jam, less than two feet above God only knew how many dead bodies, was an unsettling one.

When Tom woke up on the morning of the twenty-fifth at quarter of seven, he found Stu already up and cooking breakfast, which was something of an oddity; Tom was almost always up before Stu. There was a pot of Campbell’s vegetable soup hanging over the fire, just coming to a simmer. Kojak was watching it with great enthusiasm.

“Morning, Stu,” Tom said, zipping his jacket and crawling out of his sleeping bag and his shelter half. He had to whiz something terrible.

“Morning,” Stu answered casually. “And a merry Christmas.”

“Christmas?” Tom looked at him and forgot all about how badly he had to whiz. “Christmas? ” he said again.

“Christmas morning.” He hooked a thumb to Tom’s left. “Best I could do.”

Stuck into the snowcrust was a spruce-top about two feet high. It was decorated with a package of silver icicles Stu had found in the back room of the Avon Five-and-Ten.

“A tree,” Tom whispered, awed. “And presents. Those are presents, aren’t they, Stu?”

There were three packages on the snow under the tree, all of them wrapped in light blue tissue paper with silver wedding bells on it—there had been no Christmas paper at the five-and-ten, not even in the back room.

“They’re presents, all right,” Stu said. “For you. From Santa Claus, I guess.”

Tom looked indignantly at Stu. “Tom Cullen knows there’s no Santa Claus! Laws, no! They’re from you!” He began to look distressed. “And I never got you one thing! I forgot… I didn’t know it was Christmas… I’m stupid! Stupid!” He balled up his fist and struck himself in the center of the forehead. He was on the verge of tears.

Stu squatted on the snowcrust beside him. “Tom,” he said. “You gave me my Christmas present early.”

“No, sir, I never did. I forgot. Tom Cullen’s nothing but a dummy, M-O-O-N, that spells dummy.”

“But you did, you know. The best one of all. I’m still alive. I wouldn’t be, if it wasn’t for you.”

Tom looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“If you hadn’t come along when you did, I would have died in that washout west of Green River. And if it hadn’t been for you, Tom, I would have died of pneumonia or the flu or whatever it was back there in the Utah Hotel. I don’t know how you picked the right pills… if it was Nick or God of just plain old luck, but you did it. You got no sense, calling yourself a dummy. If it hadn’t been for you, I never would have seen this Christmas. I’m in your debt.”

Tom said, “Aw, that ain’t the same,” but he was glowing with pleasure.

“It is the same,” Stu said seriously.

“Well—”

“Go on, open your presents. See what he brung you. I heard his sleigh in the middle of the night for sure. Guess the flu didn’t get up to the North Pole.”

“You heard him?” Tom was looking at Stu carefully, to see if he was being ribbed.

“Heard something.”

Tom took the first package and unwrapped it carefully—a pinball machine encased in Lucite, a new gadget all the kids had been yelling for the Christmas before, complete with two-year coin batteries. Tom’s eyes lit up when he saw it. “Turn it on,” Stu said.

“Naw, I want to see what else I got.”

There was a sweatshirt with a winded skier on it, resting on crooked skis and propping himself up with his ski poles.

“It says: I CLIMBED LOVELAND PASS,” Stu told him. “We haven’t yet, but I guess we’re gettin there.”

Tom promptly stripped off his parka, put the sweatshirt on, and then replaced his parka.

“Great! Great, Stu!”

The last package, the smallest, contained a simple silver medallion on a fine-link silver chain. To Tom it looked like the number 8 lying on its side. He held it up in puzzlement and wonder.

“What is it, Stu?”

“It’s a Greek symbol. I remember it from a long time ago, on a doctor program called ‘Ben Casey.’ It means infinity, Tom. Forever.” He reached across to Tom and held the hand that held the medallion. “I think maybe we’re going to get to Boulder, Tommy. I think we were meant to get there from the first. I’d like you to wear that, if you don’t mind. And if you ever need a favor and wonder who to ask, you look at that and remember Stuart Redman. All right?”

“Infinity,” Tom said, turning it over in his hand. “Forever.”

He slipped the medallion over his neck.

“I’ll remember that,” he said. “Tom Cullen’s gonna remember that.”

“Shit! I almost forgot!” Stu reached back into his shelter half and brought out another package. “Merry Christmas, Kojak! Just let me open this for you.” He took off the wrappings and produced a box of Hartz Mountain Dog Yummies. He scattered a handful on the snow, and Kojak gobbled them up quickly. He came back to Stu, wagging his tail hopefully.

“More later,” Stu told him, pocketing the box. “Make manners your watchword in everything you do, as old baldy would… would say.” He heard his voice grow hoarse and felt tears sting his eyes. He suddenly missed Glen, missed Larry, missed Ralph with his cocked-back hat. Suddenly he missed them all, the ones who were gone, missed them terribly. Mother Abagail had said they would wade in blood before it was over, and she had been right. In his heart, Stu Redman cursed her and blessed her at the same time.

“Stu? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Tommy, fine.” He suddenly hugged Tom fiercely, and Tom hugged him back. “Merry Christmas, old hoss.”

Tom said hesitantly: “Can I sing a song before we go?”

“Sure, if you want.”

Stu rather expected “Jingle Bells” or “Frosty the Snowman” sung in the off-key and rather toneless voice of a child. But what came out was a fragment of “The First Noel,” sung in a surprisingly pleasant tenor voice.

“The first Noel,” Tom’s voice drifted across the white wastes, echoing back with faint sweetness, “the angels did say… was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay… In fields… as they… lay keeping their sheep… on a cold winter’s night that was so deep…”

Stu joined in on the chorus, his voice not as good as Tom’s but mixing well enough to suit the two of them, and the old sweet hymn drifted back and forth in the deep cathedral silence of Christmas morning:

“Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel… Christ is born in Israel… ”

“That’s the only part of it I can remember,” Tom said a little guiltily as their voices drifted away.

“It was fine,” Stu said. The tears were close again. It would not take much to set him off, and that would upset Tom. He swallowed them back. “We ought to get going. Daylight’s wasting.”

“Sure.” He looked at Stu, who was taking down his shelter half. “It’s the best Christmas I ever had, Stu.”

“I’m glad, Tommy.”

And shortly after that they were under way again, traveling east and upward under the bright cold Christmas Day sun.

They camped near the summit of Loveland Pass that night, nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level. They slept three in a shelter as the temperature slipped down to twenty degrees below zero. The wind swept by endlessly, cold as the flat blade of a honed kitchen knife, and in the high shadows of the rocks with the lunatic starsprawl of winter seeming almost close enough to touch, the wolves howled. The world seemed to be one gigantic crypt below them, both east and west.

Early the next morning, before first light, Kojak woke them up with his barking. Stu crawled to the front of the, shelter half, his rifle in hand. For the first time the wolves were visible. They had come down from their places and sat in a rough ring around the camp, not howling now, only looking. Their eyes held deep green glints, and they all seemed to grin heartlessly.

Stu fired six shots at random, scattering them. One of them leaped high and came down in a heap. Kojak trotted over to it, sniffed at it, then lifted his leg and urinated on it.

“The wolves are still his,” Tom said. “They always will be.”

Tom still seemed half asleep. His eyes were drugged and slow and dreamy. Stu suddenly realized what it was: Tom had fallen into that eerie state of hypnosis again.

“Tom… is he dead? Do you know?”

“He never dies,” Tom said. “He’s in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He’s blind like them.”

“Will he be back?” Stu asked urgently. He felt cold all over.

Tom didn’t answer.

“Tommy…”

“Tom’s sleeping. He went to see the elephant.”

“Tom, can you see Boulder?”

Outside, a bitter white line of dawn was coming up in the sky against the jagged, sterile mountaintops.

“Yes. They’re waiting. Waiting for some word. Waiting for spring. Everything in Boulder is quiet.”

“Can you see Frannie?”

Tom’s face brightened. “Frannie, yes. She’s fat. She’s going to have a baby, I think. She stays with Lucy Swann. Lucy’s going to have a baby, too. But Frannie will have her baby first. Except…” Tom’s face grew dark.

“Tom? Except what?”

“The baby…”

“What about the baby? ”

Tom looked around uncertainly. “We were shooting wolves, weren’t we? Did I fall asleep, Stu?”

Stu forced a smile. “A little bit, Tom.”

“I had a dream about an elephant. Funny, huh?”

“Yeah.” What about the baby? What about Fran?

He began to suspect they weren’t going to be in time; that whatever Tom had seen would happen before they could arrive.

The good weather broke three days before the New Year, and they stopped in the town of Kittredge. They were close enough to Boulder now for the delay to be a bitter disappointment to them both—even Kojak seemed uneasy and restless.

“Can we push on soon, Stu?” Tom asked hopefully.

“I don’t know,” Stu said. “I hope so. If we’d only gotten two more days of good weather, I believe that’s all it would have taken. Damn!” He sighed, then shrugged. “Well, maybe it’ll just be flurries.”

But it turned out to be the worst storm of the winter. It snowed for five days, piling up drifts that were twelve and even fourteen feet high in places. When they dug themselves out on the second of January to look at a sun as flat and small as a tarnished copper coin, all the landmarks were gone. Most of the town’s small business district had been not just buried but entombed. Snowdrifts and snowdunes had been carved into wild, sinuous shapes by the wind. They might have been on another planet.

They went on, but the traveling was slower than ever; finding the road had developed from a continuing nuisance into a serious problem. The snowmobile got stuck repeatedly and they had to dig it out. And on the second day of 1991, the freight-train rumble of the avalanches began again.

On the fourth of January they came to the place where US 6 split off from the turnpike to go its own way to Golden, and although neither of them knew it—there were no dreams or premonitions—that was the day that Frannie Goldsmith went into labor.

“Okay,” Stu said as they paused at the turn-off. “No more trouble finding the road, anyhow. It’s been blasted through solid rock. We were damned lucky just to find the turn-off, though.”

Staying on the road was easy enough, but getting through the tunnels was not. To find the entrances they had to dig through powdered snow in some cases and through the packed remains of old avalanches in others. The snowmobile roared and clashed unhappily over the bare road inside.

Worse, it was scary in the tunnels—as either Larry or the Trashcan Man could have told them. They were black as minepits except for the cone of light thrown by the snowmobile’s headlamp, because both ends were packed with snow. Being inside them was like being shut in a dark refrigerator. Going was painfully slow, getting out of the far end of each tunnel was an exercise in engineering, and Stu was very much afraid that they would come upon a tunnel that was simply impassable no matter how much they grunted and heaved and shuffled the cars stuck inside from one place to another. If that happened, they would have to turn around and go back to the Interstate. They would lose a week at least. Abandoning the snowmobile was not an option; doing that would be a painful way of committing suicide.

And Boulder was maddeningly close.

On January seventh, about two hours after they had dug their way out of another tunnel, Tom stood up on the back of the snowmobile and pointed. “What’s that, Stu?”

Stu was tired and grumpy and out of sorts. The dreams had stopped coming, but perversely, that was somehow more frightening than having them.

“Don’t stand up while we’re moving, Tom, how many times do I have to tell you that? You’ll fall over backward and go headfirst into the snow and—”

“Yeah, but what is it? It looks like a bridge. Did we get on a river someplace, Stu?”

Stu looked, saw, throttled down, and stopped.

“What is it?” Tom asked anxiously.

“Overpass,” Stu muttered. “I—I just don’t believe it—”

“Overpass? Overpass?”

Stu turned around and grabbed Tom’s shoulders. “It’s the Golden overpass, Tom! That’s 119 up there, Route 119! The Boulder road! We’re only twenty miles from town! Maybe even less!”

Tom understood at last. His mouth fell open, and the comical expression on his face made Stu laugh out loud and clap him on the back. Not even the steady dull ache in his leg could bother him now.

“Are we really almost home, Stu?”

“Yes, yes, yeeessss! ”

Then they were grabbing each other, dancing around in a clumsy circle, falling down, sending up puffs of snow, powdering themselves with the stuff. Kojak looked on, amazed… but after a few moments he began to jump around with them, barking and wagging his tail.

They camped that night in Golden, and pushed on up 119 toward Boulder early the next morning. Neither of them had slept very well the night before. Stu had never felt such anticipation in his life… and mixed with it was his steady nagging worry about Frannie and the baby.

About an hour after noon, the snowmobile began to hitch and lug. Stu turned it off and got the spare gascan lashed to the side of Kojak’s little cabin. “Oh Christ!” he said, feeling its deadly lightness.

“What’s the matter, Stu?”

“Me! I’m the matter. I knew that friggin can was empty, and I forgot to fill it. Too damn excited, I guess. How’s that for stupid?”

“We’re out of gas?”

Stu flung the empty can away. “We sure-God are. How could I be that stupid?”

“Thinking about Frannie, I guess. What do we do now, Stu?”

“We walk, or try to. You’ll want your sleeping bag. We’ll split this canned stuff, put it in the sleeping bags. We’ll leave the shelters behind. I’m sorry, Tom. My fault all the way.”

“That’s all right, Stu. What about the shelters?”

“Guess we better leave em, old hoss.”

They didn’t get to Boulder that day; instead they camped at dusk, exhausted from wading through the powdery snow which seemed so light but had slowed them to a literal crawl. There was no fire that night. There was no wood handy, and they were all three too exhausted to dig for it. They were surrounded by high, rolling snowdunes. Even after dark there was no glow on the northern horizon, although Stu looked anxiously for it.

They ate a cold supper and Tom disappeared into his sleeping bag and fell instantly asleep without even saying good night. Stu was tired, and his bad leg ached abominably. Be lucky if I haven’t racked it up for good, he thought.

But they would be in Boulder tomorrow night, sleeping in real beds—that was a promise.

An unsettling thought occurred as he crawled into his sleeping bag. They would get to Boulder and Boulder would be empty—as empty as Grand Junction had been, and Avon, and Kittredge. Empty houses, empty stores, buildings with their roofs crashed in from the weight of the snow. Streets filled in with drifts. No sound but the drip of melting snow in one of the periodic thaws—he had read at the library that it was not unheard of for the temperature in Boulder to shoot suddenly up to seventy degrees in the heart of winter. But everyone would be gone, like people in a dream when you wake up. Because no one was left in the world but Stu Redman and Tom Cullen.

It was a crazy thought, but he couldn’t shake it. He crawled out of his sleeping bag and looked north again, hoping for that faint lightening at the horizon that you can see when there is a community of people not too far distant in that direction. Surely he should be able to see something. He tried to remember how many people Glen had guessed would be in the Free Zone by the time the snow closed down travel. He couldn’t pull the figure out. Eight thousand? Had that been it? Eight thousand people wasn’t many; they wouldn’t make much of a glow, even if all the juice was back on. Maybe—

Maybe you ought to get y’self some sleep and forget all this nutty stuff. Let tomorrow take care of tomorrow.

He lay down, and after a few more minutes of tossing and turning, brute exhaustion had its way. He slept. And dreamed he was in Boulder, a summertime Boulder where all the lawns were yellow and dead from the heat and lack of water. The only sound was an unlatched door banging back and forth in the light breeze. They had all left. Even Tom was gone.

Frannie! he called, but his only answer was the wind and that sound of the door, banging slowly back and forth.

By two o’clock the next day, they had struggled along another few miles. They took turns breaking trail. Stu was beginning to believe that they would be on the road yet another day. He was the one that was slowing them down. His leg was beginning to seize up. Be crawling pretty soon, he thought. Tom had been doing most of the trail-breaking.

When they paused for their cold canned lunch, it occurred to Stu that he had never even seen Frannie when she was really big. Might have that chance yet. But he didn’t think he would. He had become more and more convinced that it had happened without him… for better or for worse.

Now, an hour after they had finished lunch, he was still so full of his own thoughts that he almost walked into Tom, who had stopped.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, rubbing his leg.

“The road,” Tom said, and Stu came around to look in a hurry.

After a long, wondering pause, Stu said, “I’ll be dipped in pitch.”

They were standing atop a snowbank nearly nine feet high. Crusted snow sloped steeply down to the bare road below, and to the right was a sign which read simply: BOULDER CITY LIMITS.

Stu began to laugh. He sat down on the snow and roared, his face turned up to the sky, oblivious of Tom’s puzzled look. At last he said, “They plowed the roads. Y’see? We made it, Tom! We made it! Kojak! Come here!”

Stu spread the rest of the Dog Yummies on top of the snowbank and Kojak gobbled them while Stu smoked and Tom looked at the road that had appeared out of the miles of unmarked snow like a lunatic’s mirage.

“We’re in Boulder again,” Tom murmured softly. “We really are. C-I-T-Y-L-I-M-I-T-S, that spells Boulder, laws, yes.”

Stu clapped him on the shoulder and tossed his cigarette away. “Come on, Tommy. Let’s get our bad selves home.”

Around four, it began to snow again. By 6 P.M. it was dark and the black tar of the road had become a ghostly white under their feet. Stu was limping badly now, almost lurching along. Tom asked him once if he wanted to rest, and Stu only shook his head.

By eight, the snow had become thick and driving. Once or twice they lost their direction and blundered into the snowbanks beside the road before getting themselves reoriented. The going underfoot became slick. Tom fell twice and then, around quarter past eight, Stu fell on his bad leg. He had to clench his teeth against a groan. Tom rushed to help him get up.

“I’m okay,” Stu said, and managed to gain his feet.

It was twenty minutes later when a young, nervous voice quavered out of the dark, freezing them to the spot:

“W-Who g-goes there?”

Kojak began to growl, his fur bushing up into hackles. Tom gasped. And just audible below the steady shriek of the wind, Stu heard a sound that caused terror to race through him: the snick of a rifle bolt being levered back.

Sentries. They’ve posted sentries. Be funny to come all this way and get shot by a sentry outside the Table Mesa Shopping Center. Real funny. That’s one even Randall Flagg could appreciate.

“Stu Redman!” he yelled into the dark. “It’s Stu Redman here!” He swallowed and heard an audible click in his throat. “Who’s that over there?”

Stupid. Won’t be anyone that you know —

But the voice that drifted out of the snow did sound familiar. “Stu? Stu Redman?”

“Tom Cullen’s with me… for Christ’s sake, don’t shoot us!”

“Is it a trick?” The voice seemed to be deliberating with itself.

“No trick! Tom, say something.”

“Hi there,” Tom said obediently.

There was a pause. The snow blew and shrieked around them. Then the sentry (yes, that voice was familiar) called: “Stu had a picture on the wall in the old apartment. What was it?”

Stu racked his brain frantically. The sound of the drawn rifle bolt kept recurring, getting in the way. He thought, My God, I’m standing here in a blizzard trying to think what picture was on the wall in the apartment—the old apartment, he said. Fran must have moved in with Lucy. Lucy used to make fun of that picture, used to say that John Wayne was waiting for those Indians just where you couldn’t see him —

“Frederic Remington!” He bellowed at the top of his lungs. “It’s called The Warpath! ”

“Stu!” the sentry yelled back. A black shape materialized out of the snow, slipping and sliding as it ran toward them. “I just can’t believe it—”

Then he was in front of them, and Stu saw it was Billy Gehringer, who had caused them so much trouble with his hot-rodding last summer.

“Stu! Tom! And Kojak, by Christ! Where’s Glen Bateman and Larry? Where’s Ralph?”

Stu shook his head slowly. “Don’t know. We got to get out of the cold, Billy. We’re freezing.”

“Sure, the supermarket’s right up the road. I’ll call Norm Kellogg… Harry Dunbarton… Dick Ellis… shit, I’ll wake the town! This is great! I don’t believe it!”

“Billy—”

Billy turned back to them, and Stu limped over to where he stood.

“Billy, Fran was going to have a baby—”

Billy grew very still. And then he whispered, “Oh shit, I forgot about that.”

“She’s had it?”

“George. George Richardson can tell you, Stu. Or Dan Lathrop. He’s our new doc, we got him about four weeks after you guys left, used to be a nose, throat, and ears man, but he’s pretty g—”

Stu gave Billy a brisk shake, cutting off his almost frantic babble.

“What’s wrong?” Tom asked. “Is something wrong with Frannie?”

“Talk to me, Billy,” Stu said. “Please.”

“Fran’s okay,” Billy said. “She’s going to be fine.”

“That what you heard?”

“No, I saw her. Me and Tony Donahue, we went up together with some flowers from the greenhouse. The greenhouse is Tony’s project, he’s got all kinds of stuff growing there, not just flowers. The only reason she’s still in is because she had to have a what-do-you-call-it, a Roman birth—”

“A cesarean section?”

“Yeah, right, because the baby came the wrong way. But no sweat. We went to see her three days after she had the baby, it was January seventh we went up, two days ago. We brought her some roses. We figured she could use some cheering up because…”

“The baby died?” Stu asked dully.

“It’s not dead,” Billy said, and then he added with great reluctance: “Not yet.”

Stu suddenly felt far away, rushing through the void. He heard laughter… and the howling of wolves…

Billy said in a miserable rush: “It’s got the flu. It’s got Captain Trips. It’s the end for all of us, that’s what people are saying. Frannie had him on the fourth, a boy, six pounds nine ounces, and at first he was okay and I guess everybody in the Zone got drunk, Dick Ellis said it was like V-E Day and V-J Day all rolled into one, and then on the sixth, he… he just got it. Yeah, man,” Billy said, and his voice began to hitch and thicken. “He got it, oh shit, ain’t that some welcome home, I’m so fuckin sorry, Stu…”

Stu reached out, found Billy’s shoulder, and pulled him closer.

“At first everybody was sayin he might get better, maybe it’s just the ordinary flu… or bronchitis… maybe the croup… but the docs, they said newborn babies almost never get those things. It’s like a natural immunity, because they’re so little. And both George and Dan… they saw so much of the superflu last year…”

“That it would be hard for them to make a mistake,” Stu finished for him.

“Yeah,” Billy whispered. “You got it.”

“What a bitch,” Stu muttered. He turned away from Billy and began to limp down the road again.

“Stu, where are you going?”

“To the hospital,” Stu said. “To see my woman.”

Chapter 76

Fran lay awake with the reading lamp on. It cast a pool of bright light on the left side of the clean white sheet that covered her. In the center of the light, face-down, was an Agatha Christie. She was awake but slowly drifting off, in that state where memories clarify magically as they begin to transmute themselves into dreams. She was going to bury her father. What happened after that didn’t matter, but she was going to drag herself out of the shockwave enough to get that done. The act of love. When that was done, she could cut herself a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie. It would be large, it would be juicy, and it would be very, very bitter.

Marcy had been in half an hour ago to check on her, and Fran had asked, “Is Peter dead yet?” And even as she spoke, time seemed to double so that she wasn’t sure if she meant Peter the baby or Peter the baby’s grandfather, now deceased.

“Shhh, he’s fine,” Marcy had said, but Frannie had seen a more truthful answer in Marcy’s eyes. The baby she had made with Jess Rider was engaged in dying somewhere behind four glass walls. Perhaps Lucy’s baby would have better luck; both of its parents had been immune to Captain Trips. The Zone had written off her Peter now and had pinned its collective hopes on those women who had conceived after July 1 of last year. It was brutal but completely understandable.

Her mind drifted, cruising at some low level along the border of sleep, conning the terrain of her past and the landscape of her heart. She thought about her mother’s parlor where seasons passed in a dry age. She thought about Stu’s eyes, about the first sight of her baby, Peter Goldsmith-Redman. She dreamed that Stu was with her, in her room.

“Fran?”

Nothing had worked out the way it should have. All of the hopes had turned out to be phony, as false as those Audioanimatronic animals at Disney World, just a bunch of clockwork, a cheat, a false dawn, a false pregnancy, a—

“Hey, Frannie.”

In her dream she saw that Stu had come back. He was standing in the doorway of her room, wearing a gigantic fur parka. Another cheat. But she saw that the dream-Stu had a beard. Wasn’t that funny?

She began to wonder if it was a dream when she saw Tom Cullen standing behind him. And… was that Kojak sitting at Stu’s heel?

Her hand flew suddenly up to her cheek and pinched viciously, making her left eye water. Nothing changed.

“Stu?” she whispered. “Oh my God, is it Stu?”

His face was deeply tanned except for the skin around his eyes, which might have been covered by sunglasses. That was not a detail you would expect to notice in a dream—

She pinched herself again:

“It’s me,” Stu said, coming into the room. “Stop workin yourself over, honey.” His limp was so severe he was nearly stumbling. “Frannie, I’m home.”

“Stu!” she cried. “Are you real? If you’re real, come here!”

He went to her then, and held her.

Chapter 77

Stu was sitting in a chair drawn up to Fran’s bed when George Richardson and Dan Lathrop came in. Fran immediately seized Stu’s hand and squeezed it tightly, almost painfully. Her face was set in rigid lines, and for a moment Stu saw what she would look like when she was old; for a moment she looked like Mother Abagail.

“Stu,” George said. “I heard about your return. Miraculous. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you. We all are.”

George shook his hand and then introduced Dan Lathrop.

Dan said, “We’ve heard there was an explosion in Las Vegas. You actually saw it?”

“Yes.”

“People around here seem to think it was a nuclear blast. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

George nodded at this, then seemed to dismiss it and turned to Fran.

“How are you feeling?”

“All right. Glad to have my man back. What about the baby?”

“Actually,” Lathrop said, “that’s what we’re here about.”

Fran nodded. “Dead?”

George and Dan exchanged a glance. “Frannie, I want you to listen carefully and try not to misunderstand anything I say—”

Lightly, with suppressed hysteria, Fran said: “If he’s dead, just tell me!”

“Fran,” Stu said.

“Peter seems to be recovering,” Dan Lathrop said mildly.

There was a moment of utter shocked silence in the room. Fran, her face pale and oval below the dark chestnut mass of her hair on the pillow, looked up at Dan as if he had suddenly begun to spout some sort of lunatic doggerel. Someone—either Laurie Constable or Marcy Spruce—looked into the room and then passed on. It was a moment that Stu never forgot.

“What?” Fran whispered at last.

George said, “You mustn’t get your hopes up.”

“You said… recovering,” Fran said. Her face was flatly stunned. Until this moment she hadn’t realized how much she had resigned herself to the baby’s death.

George said, “Both Dan and I saw thousands of cases during the epidemic, Fran… you notice I don’t say ‘treated’ because I don’t think either of us ever changed the course of the disease by a jot or a tittle in any patient. Fair statement, Dan?”

“Yes.”

The I-want line that Stu had first noticed in New Hampshire hours after meeting her now appeared on Fran’s forehead. “Will you get to the point, for heaven’s sake?”

“I’m trying, but I have to be careful and I’m going to be careful,” George said. “This is your son’s life we’re discussing, and I’m not going to let you press me. I want you to understand the drift of our thinking. Captain Trips was a shifting-antigen flu, we think now. Now, every kind of flu—the old flu—had a different antigen; that’s why it kept coming back every two or three years or so in spite of flu vaccinations. There would be an outbreak of A-type flu, Hong Kong flu that was, and you’d get a vaccination for it, and then two years later a B-type strain would come along and you’d get sick unless you got a different vaccination.”

“But you’d get well again,” Dan broke in, “because eventually your body would produce its own antibodies. Your body changed to cope with the flu. With Captain Trips, the flu itself changed every time your body came to a defense posture. In that way it was more similar to the AIDS virus than to the common sorts of flu our bodies have become used to. And as with AIDS, it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death.”

“Then why didn’t we get it?” Stu asked.

George said: “We don’t know. I don’t think we’re ever going to know. The only thing we can be sure about is that the immunes didn’t get sick and then throw the sickness off; they never got sick at all. Which brings us to Peter again. Dan?”

“Yes. The key to Captain Trips is that people seemed to get almost better, but never completely better. Now this baby, Peter, got sick forty-eight hours after he was born. There was no doubt at all that it was Captain Trips—the symptoms were classic. But those discolorations under the line of the jaw, which both George and I had come to associate with the fourth and terminal stage of superflu—they never came. On the other hand, his periods of remission have been getting longer and longer.”

“I don’t understand,” Fran said, bewildered. “What—”

“Every time the flu shifts, Peter is shifting right back at it,” George said. “There’s still the technical possibility that he might relapse, but he has never entered the final, critical phase. He seems to be wearing it out.”

There was a moment of total silence.

Dan said, “You’ve passed on half an immunity to your child, Fran. He got it, but we think now he’s got the ability to lick it. We theorize that Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had the same chance, but with the odds stacked much more radically against them—and I still think that they may not have died of the superflu, but of complications arising from the superflu. That’s a very small distinction, I know, but it may be crucial.”

“And the other women who got pregnant by men who weren’t immune?” Stu asked.

“We think they’ll have to watch their babies go through the same painful struggle,” George said, “and some of the children may die—it was touch and go with Peter for a while, and may be again from all we know now. But very shortly we’re going to reach the point where all the fetuses, in the Free Zone—in the world —are the product of two immune parents. And while it wouldn’t be fair to pre-guess, I’d be willing to lay money that when that happens, it’s going to be our ballgame. In the meantime, we’re going to be watching Peter very closely.”

“And we won’t be watching him alone, if that’s any added consolation,” Dan added. “In a very real sense, Peter belongs to the entire Free Zone right now.”

Fran whispered, “I only want him to live because he’s mine and I love him.” She, looked at Stu. “And he’s my link with the old world. He looks more like Jess than me, and I’m glad. That seems right. Do you understand, love?”

Stu nodded, and a strange thought occurred to him—how much he would like to sit down with Hap and Norm Bruett and Vic Palfrey and have a beer with them and watch Vic make one of his shitty-smelling home-rolled cigarettes, and tell them how all of this had come out. They had always called him Silent Stu; ole Stu, they said, wouldn’t say “shit” if he had a mouthful. But he would talk their ears off their heads. He would talk all night and all day. He grasped Fran’s hand blindly, feeling the sting of tears.

“We’ve got rounds to make,” George said, getting up, “but we’ll be monitoring Peter closely, Fran. You’ll know for sure when we know for sure.”

“When could I nurse him? If… If he doesn’t… ?”

“A week,” Dan said.

“But that’s so long!”

“It’s going to be long for all of us. We’ve got sixty-one pregnant women in the Zone, and nine of them conceived before the superflu. It’s going to be especially long for them. Stu? It was good meeting you.” Dan held out his hand and Stu shook it. He left quickly, a man with a necessary job to do and anxious to do it.

George shook Stu’s hand and said, “I’ll see you by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, hum? Just tell Laurie when would be the most convenient time for you.”

“What for?”

“The leg,” George said. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Not too bad.”

“Stu?” Frannie said, sitting up. “What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Broken, badly set, overtaxed,” George said. “Nasty. But it can be fixed.”

“Well…” Stu said.

“Well, nothing! Let me see it, Stuart!” The I-want line was back.

“Later,” Stu said.

George got up. “See Laurie, all right?”

“He will,” Frannie said.

Stu grinned. “I will. Boss lady says so.”

“It’s very good to have you back,” George said. A thousand questions seemed to stop just behind his lips. He shook his head slightly and then left, closing the door firmly behind him.

“Let me see you walk,” Frannie said. The I-want line still creased her brow.

“Hey, Frannie—”

“Come on, let me see you walk.”

He walked for her. It was a little like watching a sailor make his way across a pitching foredeck. When he turned back to her, she was crying.

“Oh, Frannie, don’t do that, honey.”

“I have to,” she said, and put her hands over her face.

He sat beside her and took her hands away. “No. No, you don’t.”

She looked at him nakedly, her tears still flowing. “So many people dead… Harold, Nick, Susan… and what about Larry? What about Glen and Ralph?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what’s Lucy going to say? She’ll be here in an hour. She comes every day, and she’s four months pregnant herself. Stu, when she asks you…”

“They died over there,” Stu said, speaking more to himself than to her. “That’s what I think. What I know, in my heart.”

“Don’t say it that way,” Fran begged. “Not when Lucy gets here. It will break her heart if you do.”

“I think they were the sacrifice. God always asks for a sacrifice. His hands are bloody with it. Why? I can’t say. I’m not a very smart man. P’raps we brought it on ourselves. All I know for sure is that the bomb went off over there instead of over here and we’re safe for a while. For a little while.”

“Is Flagg gone? Really gone?”

“I don’t know. I think… we’ll have to stand a watch for him. And in time, someone will have to find the place where they made the germs like Captain Trips and fill that place up with dirt and seed the ground with salt and then pray over it. Pray for all of us.”

Much later that evening, not long before midnight, Stu pushed her down the silent hospital corridor in a wheelchair. Laurie Constable walked with them, and Fran had seen to it that Stu had made his appointment.

“You look like you’re the one that should be in that wheelchair, Stu Redman,” Laurie said.

“Right now it doesn’t bother me at all,” Stu said.

They came to a large glass window that looked in on a room done in blues and pinks. A large mobile hung from the ceiling. Only one crib was occupied, in the front row.

Stu stared in, fascinated.

GOLDSMITH-REDMAN, PETER, the card at the front of the crib read. BOY. B.W. 6 LB 9 OZ. M. FRANCES GOLDSMITH, RM. 209 F. JESSE RIDER (D.)

Peter was crying.

His small hands were balled into fists. His face was red. There was an amazing swatch of dark black hair on his head. His eyes were blue and they seemed to look directly into Stu’s eyes, as if accusing him of being the author of all his misery.

His forehead was creased with a deep vertical slash… an I-want line.

Frannie was crying again.

“Frannie, what’s wrong?”

“All those empty cribs,” she said, and her voice became a sob. “That’s what’s wrong. He’s all alone in there. No wonder he’s crying, Stu, he’s all alone. All those empty cribs, my God—”

“He won’t be alone for very long,” Stu said, and put an arm around her shoulders. “And he looks to me as if he’s going to bear up just fine. Don’t you think so, Laurie?”

But Laurie had left the two of them alone in front of the nursery window.

Wincing at the pain in his leg, Stu knelt beside Frannie and hugged her clumsily, and they looked in at Peter in mutual wonder, as if the child were the first that had ever been gotten upon the earth. After a bit Peter fell asleep, small hands clenched together on his chest, and still they watched him… and wondered that he should be there at all.

Chapter 78

Mayday

They had finally put the winter behind them.

It had been long, and to Stu, with his East Texas background, it had seemed fantastically hard. Two days after his return to Boulder, his right leg had been rebroken and reset and this time encased in a heavy plaster cast that had not come off until early April. By then the cast had begun to look like some incredibly complex roadmap; it seemed that everyone in the Zone had autographed it, although that was a patent impossibility. The pilgrims had begun to trickle in again by the first of March, and by the day that had been the cut-off for income tax returns in the old world, the Free Zone was nearly eleven thousand strong, according to Sandy DuChiens, who now headed a Census Bureau of a dozen persons, a bureau that had its own computer terminal at the First Bank of Boulder.

Now he and Fran stood with Lucy Swann in the picnic area halfway up Flagstaff Mountain and watched the Mayday Chase. All the Zone’s children appeared to be involved (and not a few of the adults). The original maybasket, bedecked with crepe ribbons and filled with fruit and toys, had been hung on Tom Cullen. It had been Fran’s idea.

Tom had caught Bill Gehringer (despite Billy’s self-conscious disclaimer that he was too old for such kid games, he had joined with a will), and together they had caught the Upshaw boy—or was it Upson? Stu had trouble keeping them all straight—and the three of them had tracked down Leo Rockway hiding behind Brentner Rock. Tom himself had put the tag on Leo.

The chase ranged back and forth over West Boulder, gangs of kids and adolescents surging up and down the streets that were still mostly empty, Tom bellowing and carrying his basket. And at last it led back up here, where the sun was hot and the wind blew warm. The band of tagged children was some two hundred strong, and they were still in the process of tracking down the last, half dozen or so that were still “out.” In the process they were scaring up dozens of deer that wanted no part of the game.

Two miles farther up, at Sunrise Amphitheater, a huge picnic lunch had been spread where Harold Lauder had once waited for just the right moment to speak into his walkie-talkie. At noon, two or three thousand people would sit down together and look east toward Denver and eat venison and deviled eggs and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and fresh pie for dessert. It might be the last mass gathering the Zone would ever have, unless they all went down to Denver and got together in the stadium where the Broncos had once played football. Now, on Mayday, the trickle of early spring had swelled to a flood of immigrants. Since April 15 another eight thousand had come in, and they were now nineteen thousand or so—temporarily at least, Sandy’s Census Bureau could not keep up. A day when only five hundred came in was a rare day.

In the playpen which Stu had brought up and covered with a blanket, Peter began to cry lustily. Fran moved toward him, but Lucy, mountainous and eight months pregnant, was there first.

“I warn you,” Fran said, “it’s his diapers. I can tell just by the way he sounds.”

“Looking at a little poo isn’t going to cross my eyes.” Lucy lifted an indignantly crying Peter from the playpen and shook him gently back and forth in the sunlight. “Hi, baby. What you doing? Not too much?”

Peter blatted.

Lucy set him down on another blanket they had brought up for a changing table. Peter began to crawl away, still blatting. Lucy turned him over and began to unsnap his blue corduroy pants. Peter’s legs waved in the air.

“Why don’t you two go for a walk?” Lucy said. She smiled at Fran, but Stu thought the smile was sad.

“Why don’t we do just that?” Fran agreed, and took Stu’s arm.

Stu allowed himself to be walked away. They crossed the road and entered a mild green pasture that climbed upward at a steep angle under the moving white clouds and bright blue sky.

“What was that about?” Stu asked.

“Pardon me?” But Fran looked just a trifle too innocent.

“That look.”

“What look?”

“I know a look when I see one,” Stu said. “I may not know what it means, but I know it when I see it.”

“Sit down with me, Stu.”

“Like that, is it?”

They sat down and looked east where the land fell away in a series of swoops to flatlands that faded into a blue haze. Nebraska was out there in that haze somewhere.

“It’s serious. And I don’t know how to talk to you about it, Stuart.”

“Well, you just go on the best you can,” he said, and took her hand.

Instead of speaking, Fran’s face began to work. A tear spilled down her cheek and her mouth drew down, trembling.

“Fran—”

“No, I won’t cry!” she said angrily, and then there were more tears, and she cried hard in spite of herself. Bewildered, Stu put an arm around her and waited.

When the worst seemed to be over, he said: “Now tell me. What’s this about?”

“I’m homesick, Stu. I want to go back to Maine.”

Behind them, the children whooped and yelled. Stu looked at her, utterly flabbergasted. Then he grinned a little uncertainly. “That’s it? I thought you must have decided to divorce me, at the very least. Not that we’ve ever actually had the benefit of the clergy, as they say.”

“I won’t go anyplace without you,” she said. She had taken a Kleenex from her breast pocket and was wiping her eyes with it. “Don’t you know that?”

“I guess I do.”

“But I want to go back to Maine. I dream about it. Don’t you ever dream about East Texas, Stu? Arnette?”

“No,” he said truthfully. “I could live just as long and die just as happy if I never saw Arnette again. Did you want to go to Ogunquit, Frannie?”

“Eventually, maybe. But not right away. I’d want to go to western Maine, what they called the Lakes Region. You were almost there when Harold and I met you in New Hampshire. There are some beautiful places, Stu. Bridgton… Sweden… Castle Rock. The lakes would be jumping with fish, I’d imagine. In time, we might settle on the coast, I suppose. But I couldn’t face that the first year. Too many memories. It would be too big at first. The sea would be too big.” She looked down at her nervously plucking hands. “If you want to stay here… help them get it going… I’ll understand. The mountains are beautiful, too, but… it just doesn’t seem like home.”

He looked east and discovered he could at last name something he had felt stirring around in himself since the snow had begun to melt: an urge to move on. There were too many people here; they weren’t exactly stepping all over each other, at least not yet, but they were beginning to make him feel nervous. There were Zoners (and so they had begun to call themselves) who could cope with that sort of thing, who actually seemed to relish it. Jack Jackson, who headed the new Free Zone Committee (now expanded to nine members), was one. Brad Kitchner was another—Brad had a hundred projects going, and all the warm bodies he could use to help with each of them. It had been his idea to get one of the Denver TV stations going. It showed old movies every night from 6 to 1 A.M., with a ten-minute news broadcast at nine o’clock.

And the man who had taken over the marshaling chore in Stu’s absence, Hugh Petrella, was not the sort of man Stu much cottoned to. The very fact that Petrella had campaigned for the job made Stu feel uneasy. He was a hard, puritanical fellow with a face that looked as if it had been carved by licks of a hatchet. He had seventeen deputies and was pushing for more at each Free Zone Committee meeting—if Glen had been here, Stu thought he would have said that the endless American struggle between the law and freedom of the individual had begun again. Petrella was not a bad man, but he was a hard man… and Stu supposed that with Hugh’s sure belief that the law was the final answer to every problem, he made a better marshal than Stu himself ever would have been.

“I know you’ve been offered a spot on the committee,” Fran was saying hesitantly.

“I got the feeling that was an honorary thing, didn’t you?”

Fran looked relieved. “Well…”

“I got the idea they’d be just as happy if I turned it down. I’m the last holdover from the old committee. And we were a crisis committee. Now there’s no crisis. What about Peter, Frannie?”

“I think he’ll be old enough to travel by June,” she said. “And I’d like to wait until Lucy has her baby.”

There had been eighteen births in the Zone since Peter had come into the world on January 4. Four had died; the rest were just fine. The babies born of the plague-immune parents would begin to arrive very soon, and it was entirely possible that Lucy’s would be the first. She was due on June 14.

“What would you think about leaving on July first?” he asked.

Fran’s face lit up. “You will! You want to?”

“Sure.”

“You’re not just saying that to please me?”

“No,” he said. “Other people will be leaving too. Not many, not for a while. But some.”

She flung her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Maybe it will just be a vacation,” she said. “Or maybe… maybe we’ll really like it.” She looked at him timidly. “Maybe we’ll want to stay.”

He nodded. “Maybe so.” But he wondered if either of them would be content to stay in one place for any run of years.

He looked over at Lucy and Peter. Lucy was sitting on the blanket and bouncing Peter up and down. He was giggling and trying to catch Lucy’s nose.

“Have you thought that he might get sick? And you. What if you catch pregnant again?”

She smiled. “There are books. We can both read them. We can’t live our lives afraid, can we?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Books and good drugs. We can learn to use them, and as for the drugs that have gone over… we can learn to make them again. When it comes to getting sick and dying…” She looked back toward the large meadow where the last of the children were walking toward the picnic area, sweaty and winded. “That’s going to happen here, too. Remember Rich Moffat?” He nodded. “And Shirley Hammett?”

“Yes.” Shirley had died of a stroke in February.

Frannie took his hands. Her eyes were bright and shining with determination. “I say we take our chances and live our lives the way we want.”

“All right. That sounds good to me. That sounds right.”

“I love you, East Texas.”

“That goes back to you, ma’am.”

Peter had begun to cry again.

“Let’s go see what’s wrong with the emperor,” she said, getting up and brushing grass from her slacks.

“He tried to crawl and bumped his nose,” Lucy said, handing Peter to Fran. “Poor baby.”

“Poor baby,” Fran agreed, and put Peter on her shoulder. He laid his head familiarly against her neck, looked at Stu, and smiled. Stu smiled back.

“Peek, baby,” he said, and Peter laughed.

Lucy looked from Fran to Stu and back to Fran again. “You’re going, aren’t you? You talked him into it.”

“I guess she did,” Stu said. “We’ll stick around long enough to see which flavor you get, though.”

“I’m glad,” Lucy said.

From far off, a bell began to clang in strong musical notes which seemed to beat themselves into the day.

“Lunch,” Lucy said, getting up. She patted her gigantic belly. “Hear that, junior? We’re going to eat. Ow, don’t kick, I’m going.”

Stu and Fran got up, too. “Here, you take the boy,” Fran said.

Peter had gone to sleep. The three of them walked up the hill to Sunrise Amphitheater together.

Dusk, of a Summer Evening

They sat on the porch as the sun went down and watched Peter as he crawled enthusiastically through the dust of the yard. Stu was in a chair with a caned seat; the caning had been belled downward by years of use. Sitting at his left was Fran, in the rocker. In the yard, to Peter’s left, the doughnut-shaped shadow of the tire swing printed its depthless image on the ground in the day’s kind last light.

“She lived here a long time, didn’t she?” Fran asked softly.

“Long and long,” Stu agreed, and pointed at Peter. “He’s gettin all dirty.”

“There’s water. She had a hand-pump. All it takes is priming. All the conveniences, Stuart.”

He nodded and said no more. He lit his pipe, taking long puffs. Peter turned around to make sure they were still there.

“Hi, baby,” Stu said, and waved.

Peter fell over. He got back up on his hands and knees and began to creep around in a large circle again. Standing at the end of the dirt road that cut through the wild corn was a small Winnebago camper with a winch attachment on the front. They were sticking to secondary roads, but the winch had still come in handy again and again.

“Are you lonely?” Fran asked.

“No. I may be, in time.”

“Scared about the baby?” She patted her stomach, which was still perfectly flat.

“Nope.”

“It’s going to put a scab on Pete’s nose.”

“It’ll fall off. And Lucy had twins.” He smiled at the sky. “Can you imagine it?”

“I saw them. Seeing’s believing, they say. When do you think we’ll be in Maine, Stu?”

He shrugged. “Near the end of July. In plenty of time to start getting ready for winter, anyhow. You worried?”

“Nope,” she said, mocking him. She stood up. “Look at him, he’s getting filthy.”

“Told you.”

He watched her go down the porch steps and gather up the baby. He sat there, where Mother Abagail had sat often and long, and thought about the life that was ahead of them. He thought it would be all right. In time they would have to go back to Boulder, if only so their children could meet others their own age and court and marry and make more children. Or perhaps part of Boulder would come to them. There had been people who had questioned their plans closely, almost cross-examining them… but the look in their eyes had been one of longing rather than contempt or anger. Stu and Fran weren’t the only ones with a touch of the wanderlust, apparently. Harry Dunbarton, the former spectacles salesman, had talked about Minnesota. And Mark Zellman had spoken of Hawaii, of all places. Learning how to fly a plane and going to Hawaii.

“Mark, you’d kill yourself!” Fran had scolded indignantly.

Mark had only smiled slyly and said, “Look who’s talkin, Frannie.”

And Stan Nogotny had begun to talk thoughtfully about going south, perhaps stopping at Acapulco for a few years, then maybe going on down to Peru. “I tell you what, Stu,” he said. “All these people make me nervous as a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. I don’t know one person in a dozen anymore. People lock their houses at night… don’t look at me that way, it’s a fact. Listenin to me, you’d never think I lived in Miami, which I did for sixteen years, and locked the house every night. But damn! That was one habit I liked losing. Anyway, it’s just getting too crowded. I think about Acapulco a lot. Now if I could just convince Janey—”

It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, Stu thought, watching Fran pump water, if the Free Zone did fall apart. Glen Bateman would think so, he was quite sure. Its purpose has been served, Glen would say. Best to disband before—

Before what?

Well, at the last Free Zone Committee meeting before he and Fran had left, Hugh Petrella had asked for and had been given the authorization to arm his deputies. It had been the cause in Boulder during his and Fran’s last few weeks there—everyone had taken a side. In early June a drunk had man-handled one of the deputies and had thrown him through the plate-glass window of The Broken Drum, a bar on Pearl Street. The deputy had needed over thirty stitches and a blood transfusion. Petrella had argued it never would have happened if his man had had a Police Special to point at the drunk. And so the controversy raged. There were plenty of people (and Stu was among them, although he kept his opinions mostly to himself) who believed that, if the deputy had had a gun, the incident might have ended with a dead drunk instead of a wounded deputy.

What happens after you give guns to the deputies? he asked himself. What’s the logical progression? And it seemed that it was the scholarly, slightly dry voice of Glen Bateman that spoke in answer. You give them bigger guns. And police cars. And when you discover a Free Zone community down in Chile or maybe up in Canada, you make Hugh Petrella the Minister of Defense just in case, and maybe you start sending out search-parties, because after all—

That stuff is lying around, just waiting to be picked up.

“Let’s put him to bed,” Fran said, coming up the steps.

“Okay.”

“Why are you sitting around in such a blue study, anyhow?”

“Was I?”

“You certainly were.”

He used his fingers to push the corners of his mouth up in a smile. “Better?”

“Much. Help me put him in.”

“My pleasure.”

As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problem. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names… the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death—they’re flashburns and radiation sickness and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please… please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think… do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.