The Stand (Original Edition) (22 page)

A pfc, pimples standing out in stark relief on his whey-colored face, burst into tears. The others only stood in stunned disbelief. The smell of cordite was heavy and sickening in the air.

“We scragged him!” the pfc cried hysterically. “Holy God, we done scragged Sergeant Buchan!”

No one replied. Their faces were still dazed and uncomprehending, although later they would only wish they had done it sooner. All of this was some deadly game, but it wasn’t their game.

The phone, which Ray Flowers had put in the amplifier cradle just before he died, gave out a series of squawks.

“Ray? You there, Ray?” The voice was tired, nasal. “I listen to your program all the time, me and my husband both, and we just wanted to say keep up the good work and don’t let them bully you. Okay, Ray? Ray? . . . Ray? . . .”

In Boulder, Colorado, a rumor that the U. S. Meteorological Air Testing Center was really a biological warfare installation began to spread. The rumor was repeated on the air by a semidelirious Denver FM disc jockey. By 11
p.m.
on the night of June 26, a vast, lemminglike exodus from Boulder had begun. A company of soldiers was sent out from Denver-Arvada to stop them, but it was like sending a man with a whisk-broom to clean out the Augean stables. Better than eleven thousand civilians—sick, scared, and with no other thought but to put as many miles between themselves and the Air Testing Center as possible—rolled over them. Thousands of other Boulderites fled to other points of the compass.

At quarter past eleven a shattering explosion lit the night at the Air Testing Center’s location on Broadway. A young radical named Desmond Ramage had planted better than sixteen pounds of plastique, originally earmarked for various midwestem courthouses and state legislatures, in the ATC lobby. The explosive was great; the timer was cruddy. Ramage was vaporized along with all sorts of harmless weather equipment and particle-for-particle pollution-measuring gadgets.

Meanwhile, the exodus from Boulder went on.

Larry Underwood sat on a bench in Central Park on the morning of June 27, looking into the menagerie. Behind him, Fifth Avenue was crazily jammed with cars, all of them silent now, their owners dead or fled. Further down Fifth, many of the posh shops were smoking rubble.

From where Larry sat he could see a lion, an antelope, a zebra, and some sort of monkey. All but the monkey were dead. They had not died of the flu, Larry judged; they had gotten no food or water for God knew how long, and that had killed them. All but the monkey, and in the three hours that Larry had been sitting here, the monkey had only moved four or five times. The monkey had been smart enough to outwit starvation or death by thirst—so far—but it surely had a good case of superflu. That was one monkey who was hurtin for certain. It was a hard old world.

To his right, the clock with all the animals chimed the hour of eleven. The clockwork figures which had once delighted all children now played to an empty house. The bear tooted his horn, a clockwork monkey who would never get sick (but who might eventually run down) played a tambourine, the elephant beat his drum with his trunk. Heavy tunes, baby, heavy fucking tunes. End of the World Suite Arranged for Clockwork Figures.

After a bit the clock silenced and he could hear the hoarse shouting again, now mercifully faint with distance. The monster-shouter was now off to Larry’s left, perhaps in the Heckscher Playground. Maybe he would fall into the wading pool there and drown.

“Monsters coming!” the faint, hoarse voice cried. The overcast had broken this morning, and the day was bright and hot. A bee cruised past Larry’s nose, circled one of the nearby flowerbeds, and made a three-point landing on a peony. From the menagerie came

the soothing, soporific drone of the flies as they landed on the dead animals.

“Monsters coming now!” the monster-shouter called. The monster-shouter was a tall man in his middle sixties, Larry judged. He had first heard the monster-shouter the night before, which he had spent in the Sherry-Netherland. With night lying over the unnaturally quiet city, the faint, howling voice had seemed sonorous and dark, the voice of a lunatic Jeremiah floating through the streets of Manhattan, echoing, rebounding, distorting. Larry, lying sleepless in a queen-sized double with every light in the suite blazing, had become irrationally convinced that the monster-shouter was coming for him, seeking him out, the way the creatures of his frequent bad dreams sometimes did. For a long time it had seemed that the voice was drawing ever closer
—Monsters coming! Monsters on the way! They’re in the suburbs
!—and Larry became convinced that the suite’s door, which he had triple-locked, would burst inward and that the monster-shouter would be there . . . not a human being at all but a gigantic troll-thing with the head of a dog and saucer-sized fly eyes and champing teeth.

But this morning Larry had seen him in the park and it was only a crazy old man wearing corduroy pants and zoris and horn-rimmed glasses with one bow taped. Larry had tried to speak to him and the monster-shouter had run in terror, crying back over his shoulder that the monsters would be in the streets at any moment. He had tripped over an ankle-high wire fence and went sprawling on one of the bike-paths, his glasses flying off but not shattering. Larry had gone to him, but before he could get there, the monster-shouter had scooped up his glasses and was gone toward the mall, crying his endless warning. So Larry’s opinion of him had swung from extreme terror to utter boredom and mild annoyance in the space of twelve hours.

There were other people in the park, and Larry had spoken to a few. They were all pretty much the same, and Larry supposed that he himself wasn’t much different; they were dazed, their speech disjointed, they seemed helpless to stop reaching for your sleeve with their hands as they talked. They had stories to tell. All the stories were the same. Their friends and relatives were dead or dying. There had been shooting in the streets, there had been the big fire on Fifth Avenue, was it true that Tiffany’s was gone, could that be true? Who was going to clean up? Who was going to collect the garbage? Should they get out of New York? They had heard that troops were guarding all the points of egress. One woman was terrified that the rats were going to rise up out of the subways and inherit the earth, reminding Larry uneasily of his own thoughts on the day he had first returned to New York. A young man munching Fritos from a gigantic bag told Larry conversationally that he was going to fulfill a lifetime ambition. He was going to Yankee Stadium, run around the outfield naked, and then masturbate on home plate. “Chance of a lifetime, man,” he told Larry, winked with both eyes, and then wandered off, eating Fritos.

Many of the people in the park were sick, but not many had died there. Perhaps they had uneasy thoughts of being munched for dinner by the animals, and they had crawled indoors when they felt the end was near. Larry had had only one confrontation with death this morning, and one was all he wanted. He had walked up Transverse Number One to the comfort station there. He had opened the door and a grinning dead man with maggots crawling briskly hither and yon on his face had been seated inside, his hands settled on his bare thighs, his sunken eyes staring into Larry’s own. A sickening sweet smell bloated out at Larry as if the man sitting there was a rancid bonbon, a sweet treat which, in all the confusion, had been left for the flies. Larry slammed the door to, but belatedly: He lost the cornflakes he had eaten for breakfast and then had dry-heaved until he was afraid he might rupture some of his inner workings. God, if You’re there, he had prayed as he stumbled back toward the menagerie, if You’re taking requests today, Big Fella, mine is not to have to look at anything else like that today. The kooks are bad enough, something like that is more than I can take. Thank you so much.

Now, sitting on this bench (the monster-shouter had moved out of earshot, at least temporarily), Larry found himself thinking about the World Series five years ago, when Cincinnati had played and bested the Boston Red Sox. It was good to remember that because, it now seemed to him, that was the last time he had been completely happy, his physical condition tiptop, his mind resting easily and not working against itself.

That had been just after he and Rudy split. That had been a damn piss-poor thing, that split-up, and if he ever saw Rudy again (never happen, his mind told him with a sigh), Larry was going to apologize. He would get down and kiss Rudy’s shoetops, if that was what Rudy needed to make it okay again.

They had worked their way across the country, and for a while they worked on a farm in western Nebraska, and one night Larry had lost sixty dollars in a poker game. The next day he’d had to ask

Rudy for a loan to tide him over. They had arrived in L.A. a month later, and Larry had been the first to land a job—if you wanted to call washing dishes for the minimum wage working. One night about three weeks later, Rudy had broached the subject of the loan. He said he’d met a guy who’d recommended a really good employment agency, never miss, but the fee was twenty-five bucks. Which happened to be the amount of the loan he had made to Larry after the poker game. Ordinarily, Rudy said, he never would have asked, but—

Larry had protested that he’d paid the loan back. They were square. If Rudy wanted the twenty-five, okay, but he just hoped Rudy wasn’t trying to get him to pay off the same loan twice.

Rudy said he didn’t want a
gift;
he wanted the money he was
owed,
and he wasn’t interested in a lot of Larry Underwood bullshit, either. Jesus Christ, Larry said, trying a good-humored laugh. I never thought I’d need a receipt from you, Rudy. Guess I was wrong.

It had escalated into a full-scale argument, almost to the point of blows. At the end Rudy’s face had been flushed. That’s you, Larry, he’d shouted. That’s you all over. That’s how you are. I used to think I’d never learn my lesson, but I think I finally did. Fuck off, Larry.

Rudy left, and Larry followed him to the stairs of the cheap rooming house, digging his wallet out of his back pocket. There were three tens neatly folded into the secret compartment behind the photos and he had heaved them after Rudy.
Go on, you cheap little lying fuck! Take it! Take the goddam money!

Rudy had slammed the outer door open with a bang and had gone out into the night, toward whatever destiny the Rudys of this world can expect. He didn’t look back. Larry had stood at the top of the stairs, breathing hard, and after a minute or so he had gathered up his three ten-dollar bills and put them away again.

Thinking of the incident now and then over the years, he had become more and more sure that Rudy had been right. Actually, he was positive. Even if he had paid Rudy back, the two of them had been friends since grade school, and it seemed (looking back) that Larry had always been a dime short for the Saturday matinee because he’d bought some licorice whips or a couple of candy bars on the way over to Rudy’s, or borrowing a nickel to round out his school lunch money or getting seven cents to make up carfare. Over the years he must have bummed fifty dollars in change from Rudy, maybe a hundred. When Rudy had braced him for that twenty-five,

Larry could remember the way he had tightened up. His brain had subtracted twenty-five dollars from the three tens, and had said to him:
That only leaves five bucks. Therefore, you already paid him back. I’m not sure just when, but you did. Let’s have no more discussion of the matter.
And no more there had been.

He realized he was crying a little bit, and he felt a momentary disgust that he should be sitting here on a bench in Central Park, crying in the sun like some wretched old man on a pension. Then it occurred to him that he had a right to cry for the things he had lost, that he had a right to be in shock if that was what this was.

His mother had died three days ago. She had been lying on a cot in the hallway of Mercy Hospital when she died, crammed in with thousands of others who were also busy dying. Larry had been kneeling beside her when she went, and he had thought he might go mad, watching his mother die while all around him rose the stench of urine and feces, the hell’s babble of the delirious, the choking, the insane, the screams of the bereaved. She hadn’t known him at the end; there had been no final moment of recognition. Her chest had finally just stopped in mid-heave and had settled very slowly, like the weight of an automobile settling down on a flat tire. He had crouched beside her for ten minutes or so, not knowing what to do, thinking in a confused way that he ought to wait until a death certificate was signed or someone asked him what had happened. But it was obvious what had happened, it was happening everywhere. It was just as obvious that the place was a madhouse. No sober young doctor was going to come along, express sympathy, and then start the machinery of death. Sooner or later his mother would just be carried away like a sack of oats, and he didn’t want to watch that. Her purse was under the cot. He found a pen and a bobby pin and her checkbook. He tore a deposit slip from the back of her book and wrote on it her name, her address, and after a moment’s subtraction, her age. He clipped it to her blouse pocket with the bobby pin and began to cry. He kissed her cheek and fled, crying. He felt like a deserter. Being on the street had been a little better, although at that time the streets had been full of crazy people, sick people, and circling army patrols. And now he could sit on this bench and grieve for more general things: his mother’s loss of her retirement, the loss of his own career, for that time in L.A. when he had sat watching the Reds play the Bosox, knowing there would be bed and love later, and for Rudy. Most of all he grieved for Rudy and wished he had paid Rudy his twenty-five dollars with a grin and a shrug, saving the six years that had been lost.

The monkey died at quarter of twelve.

It was on its perch, just sitting there apathetically with its hands drawn up under its chin, and then its eyelids fluttered and it fell forward and hit the cement with a final horrid smack.