The Stand (Original Edition) (104 page)

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 saguro 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, 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.

“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. He was sitting on the hood of an old Chevrolet sedan, 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 noissome 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.”

“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 skull of the moon.

He laid her down.

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

She saw what he had and began to scream.

His grin sprang forth at the sound, huge and glittering    and    obscene

in the night, and the moon stared down blankly, 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: /
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 nighttowns; 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 furthest 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 had 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. 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. 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 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 being 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?

Nadine 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.

At about the same time that Flagg was consummating his infernal marriage to Nadine Cross, 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.

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 he could have broken Lloyd in two pieces with one hand while mixing a daiquiri with the other if he had wanted to. Not that Lloyd was physically afraid of Carl; 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 Waxman 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.

“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. And fear sat strangely on that craggy face. “Yeah, I see your point. I’m 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 big 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?”

“He was in the motor pool. Lots of guys saw him, including me.”

“I thought he was out someplace. In the desert.”

“He came back. That sand-crawler he takes out was full of stuff. God knows where he gets it. 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. 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. Then there’s one hell of a fire. Small, but very intense.”

“Yeah.”

“So Trashy was just about drooling over it, 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 screen door in a submarine—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.

“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.

“An hour later, that 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. 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. 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 Waits 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.”