The Stand (Original Edition) (26 page)

There was a noise behind him and he whirled, bringing the gun up, but it was only the elevator door sliding shut for the second time. He looked at it for a moment, swallowed hard, then walked on. The rubber hand was back, playing tunes on the base of his spine, telling him to hell with this walk-don’t-run bit, let’s get out quick before someone . . . something . . . can get us. The echoes of his footfalls in this semidark corridor of the administration wing was too much like macabre company
—Come to play, Stuart? Very good.
Doors with frosted glass panels marched past him, each with its own tale to tell: DR. SLOANE. RECORDS AND TRANSCRIPTS. MR. BALLINGER. MICROFILM. COPYFILE. MRS. WIGGS. Perhaps of the cabbage patch, Stu thought.

There was a drinking fountain at the T-junction, but the warm, 
no
chlorinated taste of the water made his stomach turn. There was no exit to his left; a sign on the tile wall with an orange arrow beneath read LIBRARY WING. The corridor seemed to stretch away for miles down that way. Some fifty yards down was the body of a man in a white-suit, like some strange animal cast up on a beach.

His control was getting bad. This place was much, much bigger than he had first assumed. Not that he’d had a right to assume much of anything from what he’d seen when he was admitted—which had been two halls, one elevator, and one room. Now he guessed it to be the size of a largish metropolitan hospital. He remembered taking Norma, his wife, to a big hospital in Houston when they diagnosed the cancer. Everyplace you went in there they had little maps on the walls with little arrows pointing at a dot. The words written on each arrow said: YOU ARE HERE. They put those up so people wouldn’t get lost. Like he was now.
Lost.
He could stumble around for hours, his footfalls echoing and rebounding, coming across corpses strewn here and there like prizes in a ghastly treasure hunt.

“Don’t go tham now, you’re almost home free,” he said, and his words echoed back, flat and strange. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud, and that made it worse.

He turned to the right, setting his back to the library wing, walked past more offices, came to another corridor, and turned down that. He began to look behind himself frequently, assuring himself that no one—Elder, maybe—was following him, but unable to believe it. The hallway ended in a closed door that said RADIOLOGY. A hand-lettered sign hung on the knob: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE RANDALL.

Stu went back and peered around the corner and back where he had come from. The dead body in the white-suit was tiny with distance now, hardly more than a speck, but seeing it there so changeless and eternal made him want to run away as fast as he could.

He turned right, setting his back to it again. Twenty yards further up, the corridor branched into another T-junction. Stu turned right and went past more offices. The corridor ended at the microbiology lab. In one of the lab karels a young man clad in jockey shorts lay sprawled over his desk. He was comatose, and bleeding from the nose and mouth. His breath rattled in and out with a sound like October wind in dead cornhusks.

And then Stu did begin to run, turning from one corridor to another, becoming more and more convinced that there was no way out, at least not from this level. The echo of his footfalls chased him, as if either Elder or Vic had lived just long enough to put a squad of MPs on his trail. Then another fancy crowded that out, one he somehow associated with the queer dreams he had been having the last few nights. The idea grew so strong that he became afraid to turn around, afraid that if he did he would see a white-suited figure striding after him, a white-suited figure with no face but only blackness behind the Plexiglas plate. Some dreadful apparition, a hit-man from beyond sane time and space.

Panting, Stu rounded a comer, sprinted ten feet before he realized the corridor was a dead end, and crashed into a door with a sign over it. The sign read EXIT.

He pushed at the bar, convinced it would be locked, but the door opened easily. He went down four steps to another door. To the left of this landing, more stairs went down into thick darkness. The top half of the second door was clear glass reinforced with crisscrossed safety wire. Beyond it was only the night, the beautiful mellow summer night, and all the freedom a man ever dreamed of.

Stu was still staring out, transfixed, when the hand slipped out of the darkness the stairs descended into and grasped his ankle. A gasp tore at Stu’s throat like a thorn. He looked around, his belly a freezing floe of ice, and beheld a bloody, grinning face upturned in the darkness.

“Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful,” it whispered in a cracked and dying voice. “It’s
soooo
dark—”

Stu screamed and tried to pull free. The grinning thing from the darkness held on, talking and grinning and chuckling. Blood or bile was trickling from the corners of its mouth. Stu kicked at the hand holding his ankle, then stomped it. The face hanging in the darkness of the stairwell disappeared. There was a series of thudding crashes . . . and then the screams began. Of pain or of rage, Stu could not tell. He didn’t care. He battered against the outside door with his shoulder. It banged open and he tottered out, pinwheeling his arms to keep his balance. He lost it anyway and fell down on the cement path.

He sat up slowly, almost warily. Behind him, the screams had stopped. A cool evening breeze touched his face, dried the sweat on his brow. He saw with something very like wonder that there was grass, and flowerbeds. Night had never smelled as fragrantly sweet as this. A crescent moon rode the sky. Stu turned his face up to it thankfully, and then walked across the lawn toward the road which led to the town of Stovington below. The grass was dressed with dewfall. He could hear wind whispering in the pines.

“I’m alive,” Stu Redman said to the night. He began to cry. “I’m alive, thank God I’m alive, thank You, God, thank You, God, thank You—”

Tottering a little, he began to walk down the road.

Dust blew straight across the Texas scrubland, and at twilight it created a translucent curtain that made the town of Arnette seem like a ghost-image. Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco sign had blown down and lay in the middle of the road. Someone had left the gas on in Norm Bruett’s house and the day before a spark from the air conditioner had blown the whole place sky-high, rattling lumber and shingles and Fisher-Price toys all over Laurel Street. On Main Street, dogs and soldiers lay dead together in the gutter. In Randy’s Sooperette a man in pj’s lay draped over the meat counter, his arms hanging down. One of the dogs now lying in the gutter had been at this man’s face before losing its appetite. Cats did not catch the flu and dozens of them wove in and out of the twilit stillness like smoky shades. From several houses the sound of television snow ran on and on. A random shutter banged back and forth. A red wagon, old and faded and rusty, the words SPEEDAWAY EXPRESS barely legible on its sides, stood in the middle of Durgin Street in front of the Indian Head Tavern. There were a number of returnable beer and soda bottles in the wagon. On Logan Lane, in Arnette’s best neighborhood, wind chimes played on the porch of Tony Leominster’s house. Tony’s Scout stood in the driveway, its windows open. A family of squirrels had nested in the back seat. The sun deserted Arnette and the town grew dark under the wing of the night. The town was, except for the chirr and whisper of small animals and the tinkle of Tony Leominster’s wind chimes, silent. And silent. And silent.

Someone had left the door open between Maximum Security and the cellblock beyond it; the steel-walled length of corridor acted as a natural amplifier, blowing up the steady, monotonous hollering that had been going on all morning to monster size, making it echo and re-echo until Lloyd Henreid thought that, between the cries and the very natural fear that he felt, he would go utterly and completely bugshit.

“Mother ”
the hoarse, echoing cry came.
“Mootherr!”

Lloyd was sitting crosslegged on the floor of his cell. Both of his hands were slimed with blood. The light blue cotton shirt of his prison uniform was smeared with blood because he kept wiping his hands dry on it so he could get a better purchase. It was ten o’clock in the morning, June 29. Around seven this morning he had noticed that the front right leg of his bunk was loose, and since then he had been trying to unthread the bolts that held it to the floor and to the underside of the bedframe. He was trying to do this with only his fingers for tools, and he had actually gotten five of the six bolts. As a result his fingers now looked like a spongy mess of raw hamburger. The sixth bolt was the one that had turned out to be the bitch-kitty, but he was beginning to think he might actually get it. Beyond that, he hadn’t allowed himself to think. The only way to keep back brute panic was not to think.

“Mootherrr
—”

He leaped to his feet, drops of blood from his wounded, throbbing fingers splattering on the floor, and shoved his face out into the corridor as far as he could, eyes bulging furiously, hands gripping the bars.

“Shut up, cock-knocker!”
he screamed.
“Shut up, ya drivin me fuckin batshit!”

There was a long pause. Lloyd savored the silence as he had once savored a piping hot Quarter Pounder With Cheese from McD’s. Silence is golden, he had always thought that was a stupid saying, but it sure had its points.

"MOOOOTHERRRR
—” The voice came drifting up the steel throat of the holding cells again, as mournful as a foghorn.

“Jesus,” Lloyd muttered. “Holy Jesus.
SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP, YA FUCKIN DIMWIT!”

“
MOOOOOOOTHERRRRRRRRR
—”

Lloyd turned back to the leg of his bunk and attacked it savagely, wishing again that there was something in the cell to pry with, trying to ignore the throbbing in his fingers and the panic in his mind. He tried to remember exactly when he had seen his lawyer last—things like that grew hazy very soon in Lloyd’s mind, which retained a chronology of past events about as well as a sieve retains water. Three days ago. Yes. The day after that prick Mathers had socked him in the balls. Two guards had taken him down to the conference room again and Shockley was still on the door and Shockley had greeted him
Why, here's the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pus-bag, got anything smart to say?
And then Shockley had opened his mouth and sneezed right into Lloyd’s face, spraying him with thick spit.
There’s some cold germs for you, pusbag, everybody else has got one from the warden on down
,
and I believe in share the wealth. In America even scummy douchebags like you should be able to catch a cold.
Then they had taken him in, and the lawyer had given him some pretty good news. The judge who was supposed to hear Lloyd’s case was flat on his back with the flu. Two other judges were also ill, so the remaining benchwarmers were swamped. Maybe they could get a postponement. Keep your fingers crossed, the lawyer had said. Lloyd hadn’t seen him since then and now, thinking back on it, he remembered that the lawyer had had a runny nose himself and—

“Owwwooo Jesus!”

He slipped the fingers of his right hand into his mouth and tasted warm blood. But that frigging bolt had given a little bit, and that meant he was going to get it for sure. Even the mother-shouter down there at the end of the hall could no longer bother him ... at least not so badly. He was going to get it. After that he would just have to wait and see what happened. He sat with his fingers in his mouth, giving them a rest. When this was done, he’d rip his shirt into strips and bandage them.

“Mother?”

“I know what you can do with your mother,” Lloyd muttered.

That night, after he had talked to his lawyer for the last time, they had begun taking sick prisoners out,
carrying
them out, not to put too fine a point on it, because they weren’t taking anyone that wasn’t far gone. The man in the cell on Lloyd’s right, Trask, had pointed out that most of the guards sounded pretty snotty themselves. Maybe we can get something outta this, Trask said. What? Lloyd had asked. I dunno, Trask said. He was a skinny man with a long bloodhound face who was in Maximum Security while awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Postponements, he said. I dunno.

Trask had six joints under the thin mattress of his bunk, and he gave four of them to one of the screws who still seemed okay to tell him what was going on outside. The guard said people were leaving Phoenix, bound for anyplace. There was a lot of sickness, and people were croaking faster than a horse could trot. The government said a vaccine was going to be available soon, but most people seemed to think that was crap. A lot of the radio stations from California were broadcasting really terrible things about martial law and army blockades and rumors of people dying by the tens of thousands. The guard said he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the longhaired com-symp pervos had done it by putting something into the water.

The guard said he was feeling fine himself, but he was going to get the Christ out just as soon as his shift was over. He had heard the army was going to roadblock US 17 and I-10 and US 80 by tomorrow morning, and he was going to load up his wife and kid and all the food he could get his hands on and stay up in the mountains until it all blew over. He had a cabin up there, the guard said, and if anyone tried to get within thirty yards of it, he would put a bullet in his head.

The next morning Trask had a runny nose and said he felt feverish. He had been nearly gibbering with panic, Lloyd remembered as he sucked his fingers. Trask had yelled at every guard that passed to get him the fuck out before he got really sick or something. The guards never even looked at him, or at any of the other prisoners, who were now as restless as underfed lions in zoo cages. That was when Lloyd started to feel scared. Usually there were as many as twenty different screws on the floor at any given time. So how come he had only seen four or five different faces on the other side of the bars?