The Stand (Original Edition) (103 page)

He thought:
One . . .Two . . . THREE!

He pulled the trigger.

The gun went off.

Harold jumped.

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 boots and his sheepskin jacket with its two buttons. The nightwind 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 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 tail-feathers 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, God damn it!
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.

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 windup 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. 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 and seventies 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 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. 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 that would eradicate the troublesome, worrisome Free Zone people 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? Randy Flagg, the black Santa, in his National Guard sleigh, with a little virus to drop down every chimney?

He would wait, and he would know at the right time.

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 headed down 1-15 again 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 hoarse 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 worries 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 he was going to leave Harold with her until the two of them were almost into Utah. Then he would be removed in a quick, painless accident.

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 tell herself it was Flagg’s way of throwing a scare into her. 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.

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. 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, low and insistent.

He didn’t know Harold was going to try to kill you .
. .
what else doesn’t he know? And will it be a clean miss next time?

But oh dear God, it was too late, by days and weeks and 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 to 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, sick, and delirious, 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.

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. 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.