The Stand (Original Edition) (21 page)

Billy Warner was dead, and when Mike saw Nick, he began to giggle hysterically and point his finger. “Two down and one to go! Two down and one to go! Right? Right?”

Nick carefully pushed the Thermos of soup through the slot with the broomhandle, and then a big glass of milk. Mike began to drink soup directly from the Thermos in small sips. Nick took his own

Thermos and sat down in the hallway. He would take Billy downstairs, but first he would have his lunch. He was hungry. As he drank his soup he looked at Mike thoughtfully.

“You wondering how I am?” Mike asked.

Nick nodded.

“Just the same as when you left this morning. I must have hawked out a pound of snot.” He looked at Nick hopefully. “My mom always said when you hawked snot like that, you was gettin better. Maybe I just got a mild case, huh?”

Nick shrugged. Anything was possible.

“I got the constitution of a brass eagle,” Mike said. “I think it’s nothing. I think I’ll throw it off. Listen, man, let me out. Please. I’m fuckin beggin you now.”

Nick thought about it.

“Hell, you got the gun. I don’t want you for nothing, anyway. I just want to get out of this town. I want to check on my wife first—”

Nick pointed to his left hand, which was bare of rings.

“Yeah, we’re divorced, but she’s still here in town, out on the Ridge Road. I’d like to look in on her. What do you say, man?” Mike was crying. “Give me a chance.”

Nick stood up slowly, went out into the office, and opened the desk drawer. The keys were there. The man’s logic was inexorable; there was no sense in believing that someone was going to come and bail them out of this terrible mess. He got the keys and went back. He held up the one Big John Baker had shown him, with the tag of white tape on it, and tossed them through the bars to Mike Childress.

“Thanks,” Mike babbled. “Oh, thanks. I’m sorry we beat up on you, I swear to God, it was Ray’s idea, me and Vince tried to stop him but he gets drinkin and he gets crazy—” He rattled the key in the lock. Nick stood back, his hand on the gunbutt.

The cell door opened and Mike stepped out. “I meant it,” he said. “All I want to do is get out of this town.” He sidled past Nick, a grin twitching at his lips. Then he bolted through the door between the small cell-block and the office. Nick followed just in time to see the office door closing behind him.

Nick went outside. Mike was standing on the curb, his hand on a parking meter, looking at the empty street.

“My God,” he whispered, and turned his stunned face to look at Nick. “All this? All
this?”

Nick nodded, his hand still on the gunbutt.

Mike started to say something and it turned into a coughing spasm. He covered his mouth, then wiped his lips.

“I’m getting to Christ out of here,” he said. “You’re wise, you’ll do the same thing, mutie. This is like the black death, or somethin.”

Nick shrugged, and Mike started down the sidewalk. He moved faster and faster until he was nearly running. Nick watched him until he was out of sight, and then went back inside. He never saw Mike again. His heart felt lighter, and he was suddenly sure that he had done the right thing. He lay down on the cot and went to sleep almost at once.

He slept all afternoon on the blanketless couch and awoke sweaty but feeling a little better. Thunderstorms were beating the hills, but none had come to Shoyo that night.

At dusk he walked down Main Street to Paulie’s Radio & TV and committed another of his apologetic break-ins. He left a note by the cash register and lugged a Sony portable back to the jail. He turned it on and flipped through the channels. The CBS affiliate was broadcasting a sign which read MICROWAVE RELAY DIFFICULTY PLEASE STAY TUNED. The ABC station was showing “I Love Lucy,” and the NBC feed was a rerun episode in a current series about a perky young girl trying to be a mechanic on the stock-car circuit. The Texarkana station, an independent specializing mostly in old movies, game shows, and the PTL Club, was off the air.

Nick snapped it off, went down to the truck-stop, and fixed enough soup and sandwiches for two. He thought there was something eerie about the way all the streetlights still came on, stretching out both ways along Main Street in spotlit pools of white light. He put the food in a hamper, and on the way to Jane Baker’s house three or four dogs, obviously unfed and ravenous, advanced on him in a pack, drawn by the smell from the hamper. Nick drew the .45 but couldn’t summon up the heart to use it until one of the dogs was getting ready to bite him. Then he pulled the trigger and the bullet whined off the cement five feet in front of him, leaving a silvery streak of lead. The sound of the report did not come to him, but he felt the dull thud of vibration. The dogs broke and ran.

Jane was asleep, her forehead and cheeks hot, her breathing slow and labored. She looked dreadfully wasted to Nick. He got a cold washcloth and wiped her face. He left her share of food on the night table, and then went down into the living room and turned on the Bakers’ TV, a big console color job.

CBS didn’t come on all night. NBC kept to a regular broadcast schedule, but the picture on the ABC affiliate kept going hazy, sometimes fading out to snow and then snapping back suddenly. The ABC channel showed only old syndication programs, as if its line to the network had been severed. It didn’t matter. What Nick was waiting for was the news.

When it came on, he was dumbfounded. The “superflu epidemic,” as it was now being called, was the lead story, but the newscasters on both stations said it was being brought under control. A flu vaccine had been developed at the Atlanta Center for Disease Control, and you could get the shot from your doctor by early the following week. Outbreaks were reportedly serious in New York, San Francisco, L.A., and London, but all were being contained. In some areas, the newscaster went on, public gatherings had been canceled temporarily.

In Shoyo, Nick thought, the entire
town
had been canceled. Who was kidding who?

The newscaster concluded by saying that travel to most of the large city areas was still restricted, but the restrictions would be lifted as soon as the vaccine was in general release. He then went on to a plane crash in Michigan and some congressional reactions to the Supreme Court’s gay-rights decision.

Nick turned off the TV and went out onto the Bakers’ porch. There was a glider and he sat down in it. The back-and-forth motion was soothing, and he couldn’t hear the rusty squeak that John Baker had kept forgetting to oil. He watched fireflies as they hemmed irregular seams in the dark. Lightning flashed dully inside the clouds on the horizon, making them look as if they held fireflies of their own, monster fireflies the size of dinosaurs. The night was sticky and close.

Because television was a completely visual medium for Nick, he had noticed something about the news broadcast that others might have missed. There had been no film-clips, none at all. There had been no baseball scores, maybe because no ball-games had been played. A vague weather report and no weather map showing the highs and lows—it was as if the U. S. Bureau of Meteorology had closed up shop. For all Nick knew to the contrary, they had.

Both newscasters had seemed nervous and upset. One of them had a cold; he had coughed once on mike and had excused himself. Both newscasters had kept cutting their eyes to the left and right of the camera they were facing ... as if someone was in the studio with them, someone who was there to make sure they got it right.

That was the night of June 24, and he slept raggedly on the Bakers’ front porch, and his dreams were very bad. And now, on the afternoon of the following day, he was officiating at the death of Jane Baker, this fine woman . . .
and he couldn’t say a word to comfort her.

Nick put his forehead against the glass of the window that looked out on the deserted, sunstruck town, and cried his tears of fear and sorrow. He was afraid to look behind him, because her harsh struggle to breathe had ended.

Now, except for the beat of his own heart, not heard but felt in his temples, this bedroom was as silent as the rest of Shoyo, Arkansas.

In Duluth a man in khaki shorts and sandals walked up and down Piedmont Avenue with a large smear of ash on his forehead and a hand-lettered sandwich board hanging over his scrawny shoulders.

The front read:

THE TIME OF THE DISAPPEARANCE IS HERE 

CHRIST THE LORD RETURNETH SOON 

PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD!

The back read:

BEHOLD THE HEARTS OF THE SINNERS WERE BROKEN THE GREAT SHALL BE ABASED AND THE ABASED MADE

GREAT

THE EVIL DAYS ARE AT HAND 

WOE TO THEE O ZION

Four young men in motorcycle jackets, all of them with bad coughs and runny noses, set upon the man in the khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board. Then they fled, one of them calling back hysterically over his shoulder: “Teach you to scare people! Teach you to scare people, you half-baked freak!”

The highest-rated morning program in Springfield, Missouri, was KLFT’s morning phone-in show, “Speak Your Piece,” with Ray Flowers. He had six phone lines into his studio booth, and on the morning of June 26, he was the only KLFT employee to show up for work. He was aware of what was going on in the world outside and it scared him. In the last week or so, it seemed to Ray that everyone he knew had come down sick. There were no troops in Springfield, but he had heard that the National Guard had been called into K.C. and St. Louis to “stop the spread of panic” and “prevent looting.” Ray Flowers himself felt fine. He looked thoughtfully at his equipment— phones, time-delay device, racks of commercials on cassettes
(“If your toilet overflows /And you don't know just what goes/ Call for the man with the big steel hose/Call your Kleen-Owt Man!”),
and of course, the mike.

He lit a cigarette, went to the studio door and locked it. Went into his booth and locked that. He turned off the canned music that had been playing from a tape reel, turned on his own theme music, and then settled in at the microphone.

“Hi, y’all,” he said, “this is Ray Flowers on ‘Speak Your Piece,’ and this morning I guess there’s only one thing to call about, isn’t there? You can call it tube-neck or superflu or Captain Trips, but it all means the same thing. I’ve heard some horror stories about the army clamping down on everything, and if you want to talk about that, I’m ready to listen. It’s still a free country, right? And since I’m here by myself this morning, we’re going to do things just a little bit differently. I’ve got the time-delay turned off, and I think we can dispense with the commercials. If the Springfield you’re seeing is anything like the one I’m seeing from the KLFT windows, no one feels much like shopping, anyway.

“So if you’re so’s to be up and around, as my mother used to say, let’s get going. Our toll-free numbers are 656-8600 and 656-8601. If you get a busy, just be patient. Remember, I’m doing it all myself.”

There was an army unit in Carthage, fifty miles from Springfield, and a twenty-man patrol was dispatched to take care of Ray Flowers. Two men refused the order. They were shot on the spot.

In the hour it took them to get to Springfield, Ray Flowers took calls from: a doctor who said people were dying like flies and who thought the government was lying through its teeth about a vaccine; a hospital nurse who confirmed that bodies were being removed from Kansas City hospitals by the truckload; a delirious woman who claimed it was flying saucers from outer space; a farmer who said that an army squad with two payloaders had just finished digging a hell of a long ditch in a field near Route 71 south of Kansas City; half a dozen others with their own stories to tell.

Then there was a crashing sound on the outer studio door. “Open up!” a muffled voice cried. “Open up in the name of the United States!”

Ray looked at his watch. Quarter of twelve.

“Well,” he said, “it looks like the Marines have landed. But we’ll just keep taking calls, shall w—”

There was a rattle of automatic rifle fire, and the knob of the studio door fell to the rug. Blue smoke drifted out of the ragged hole. The door was shouldered inward and half a dozen soldiers, wearing respirators and full battle-dress, burst in.

“Several soldiers have just broken into the outer office,” Ray said. “They’re fully armed . . . they look like they’re ready to start a mop-up operation in France thirty-six years ago. Except for the respirators on their faces . . .”

“Shut it down!” a heavy-set man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves yelled. He loomed outside the broadcast booth’s glass walls and gestured with his rifle.

“I think not!” Ray called back. He felt very cold, and when he fumbled his cigarette out of his ashtray he saw that his fingers were trembling. “This station is licensed by the FCC and I’m—”

“I’m revokin ya fuckin license! Now shut
down!”

“I think not,” Ray said again, and turned back to his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have been ordered to shut down and I have refused the order, quite properly, I think. These men are acting like Nazis, not American soldiers. I am not—”

“Last chance!” The sergeant brought his gun up.

“Sergeant,” one of the soldiers by the door said. “I don’t think you can just—”

“If that man says anything else, waste him,” the sergeant said.

“I think they’re going to shoot me,” Ray Flowers said, and the next moment the glass of his broadcast booth blew inward and he fell over his control panel. From somewhere there came a terrific feedback whine that spiraled up and up. The sergeant fired his entire clip into the control panel and the feedback cut off. The lights on the switchboard continued to blink.

“Okay,” the sergeant said, turning around. “I want to get back to Carthage by one o’clock and I don’t—”

Three of his men fired simultaneously, one of them with a recoil-less rifle that fired seventy gas-tipped slugs per second. The sergeant did a jigging, shuffling death-dance and then fell backward through the shattered remains of the broadcast booth’s glass wall. One leg spasmed and his combat boot kicked shards of glass from the frame.