The Stand (Original Edition) (29 page)

He became a trustee somewhere along the line, and when the strange sickness came they sent him to the infirmary and some days ago there had been no more sick people because all of those who had been sick were now dead. Everybody was dead or had run off, except for a young guard named Jason Debbins who sat behind the wheel of a prison laundry truck and shot himself.

And where else did he have to go then, except home?

He struck another match and dropped it. The burning match landed in a small pool of gasoline and the gas caught. The flames were blue. They spread out delicately, a kind of corona with the burned match stub at its center. Trashcan watched for a moment, paralyzed with fascination, and then he stepped quickly to the stairs that circled around the tank to the bottom, looking back over his shoulder. He could see the pumping machinery through a heat-haze now, flickering back and forth like a mirage. The blue flames, no more than two inches high, spread toward the machinery and toward the open pipe in a widening semicircle. The bug’s struggles had ended. It was nothing but a blackened husk.

I could let that happen to me.

But he didn’t seem to want to. It seemed, vaguely, that there might be another purpose in his life now, something very grand and great. So he felt a touch of fear and he began to descend the steps on the run, his shoes clanging, his hand slipped quickly over the steep, rust-pitted railing.

Down and down, circling, wondering how long until the vapor hanging around the mouth of the outflow pipe would catch, how long before heat great enough for ignition would rush down the pipe’s throat and into the tank’s belly.

Hair flying back from his forehead, a terrified grin pasted to his face, the wind roaring in his ears, he rushed down. Now he was halfway, racing past the letters CH, letters twenty feet high and lime green against the white of the tank. Down and down, and if his flying feet stuttered or caught on anything, he would tumble like the gascan had tumbled, his bones breaking like dead branches.

The ground came closer, the white gravel around the tanks, the green grass beyond the gravel. The cars in the parking lot began to regain their normal size. And still he seemed to be floating, floating in a dream, and he would never reach the bottom, only run and run and get nowhere. He was next to a bomb and the fuse was lit.

From far overhead there came a sudden loud bang, like a five-inch Fourth of July firecracker. There was a dim clang, and then something whirred past him. It was part of the outflow pipe, he saw with a sharp and almost delicious fear. It was totally black and twisted into a new and excitingly senseless shape by the heat.

He placed one hand on the railing and vaulted over, hearing something snap in his wrist. Sickening pain flowed up his arm to the elbow. He dropped the last twenty-five feet, landed on the gravel and went sprawling. The gravel scraped skin from his forearms, but he hardly felt it. He was full of moaning, grinning panic now, and the daylight seemed very bright.

Trashcan Man scrambled up, craning his head around and back, sending his gaze up even as he began to run again. The top of this middle tank had grown yellow hair, and the hair was growing at an amazing rate. The whole thing could blow at any second.

He ran, his right hand flopping on its broken wrist. He leaped over the parking lot curb, and his feet slapped on asphalt. Now he was across the parking lot, his shadow trailing at his feet, and now he was running straight down the wide gravel access road and bolting through the half-open gate and back onto Highway 130. He ran straight across it and flung himself into the ditch on the far side, landing on a soft bed of dead leaves and wet moss, his arms wrapped around his head, the breath tearing in and out of his lungs like stabbing jackknives.

The oiltank blew. Not
WHAMM!
but
KA-WHAP!,
a sound so huge, yet at the same time so short and guttural, that he felt his eardrums actually press in and his eyeballs press out as the air somehow changed. A second explosion followed, then a third, and Trashcan writhed on the dead leaves and grinned and screamed soundlessly. He sat up, holding his hands over his ears, and sudden wind struck him and slapped him flat with such power that he might have been no more than a piece of litter.

The young saplings behind him bent over backward and their leaves made a frantic whirring sound, like the pennants over a used car lot on a windy day. One or two snapped with small flat cracking sounds, as if someone was shooting a target pistol. Burning pieces of the tank started to fall on the other side of the road, some actually on the road. They hit with a clanging noise, the rivets still hanging in some chunks, twisted and black, as the outflow pipe had been.

KA-WHAMMM!

Trashcan sat up again and saw a gigantic firetree beyond the Cheery Oil parking lot. Black smoke was billowing from its top, rising straight to an amazing height before the wind could disrupt it and rafter it away. You couldn’t look at it without squinting your eyes almost shut and now there was radiant heat baking across the road at him, tightening his skin, making it feel shiny. His eyes were gushing water in protest. Another burning chunk of metal, this one better than seven feet across at its widest and shaped like a diamond, fell out of the sky, landed in the ditch twenty feet to his left, and the dry leaves on top of the wet moss were instantly ablaze.

KA-WHAMM-KA-WHAMM!

If he stayed here he would go up in a jigging, screaming blaze of spontaneous combustion. He scrambled to his feet and began to run along the shoulder of the highway in the direction of Gary, the breath getting hotter and hotter in his lungs. The air had begun to taste like heavy metal. Presently he began to feel his hair to see if he had started burning. The sweet stench of gasoline filled the air, seeming to coat him. Hot wind rippled his clothes. He felt like something trying to escape from a microwave oven. The road doubled before his watering eyes, then trebled.

There was another coughing roar as rising air pressure caused the Cheery Oil Company office building to implode. Scimitars of glass whickered through the air. Chunks of concrete and cinderblock rained out of the sky and hailed on the road. A whizzing piece of steel about the size of a quarter and the thickness of a Mars Bar sliced through Trashcan’s shirt-sleeve and made a thin scrape on his skin. A piece big enough to have turned his head to guava jelly struck in front of his feet and then bounded away, leaving a goodsized crater behind. Then he was beyond the fallout zone, still running, the blood beating in his head as if his very brain had been sprayed with $2 heating oil and then set ablaze.

KA-WHAMM!

That was another one of the tanks, and the air resistance in front of him seemed to disappear and a large warm hand pushed him firmly from behind, a hand that fitted every contour of his body from heels to head; it
shoved
him forward with his toes barely touching the road, and now his face bore the terrified, pants-wetting grin of someone who has been attached to the world’s biggest kite in a high cap of wind and let loose to fly, fly, baby, up into the sky until the wind goes somewhere else, leaving him to scream all the way down in a helpless power-dive.

From behind a perfect fusillade of explosions, God’s ammunition dump going up in the flames of righteousness, Satan storming heaven, his artillery captain a fiercely grinning fool with red, flayed cheeks, Trashcan Man by name, never to be Donald Merwin Elbert again.

Sights jittering by: cars wrecked off the road, Mr. Strang’s blue mailbox with the flag up, a dead dog with its legs up, a powerline down in a cornfield.

The hand was not pushing him quite so hard now. Resistance had come back in front. Trash risked a glance back over his shoulder and saw that the knoll where the oil tanks had stood was a mass of fire. Everything was burning. The road itself seemed to be on fire back there, and he could see the summer trees going up like torches.

He ran another quarter mile, then dropped into a puffing, blowing, shambling walk. A mile further on he rested, looking back, smelling the glad smell of burning. With no firetrucks and firefighters to put it out, it would go whatever way the wind took it. It might bum for months. Powtanville would go and the fireline would march south, destroying houses, villages, farms, crops, meadows, forests. It might get as far south as Terre Haute, and it would bum that place he had been in. It might bum further! In fact—

His eyes turned north again, toward Gary. He could see the town now, its great stacks standing quiet and blameless, like strokes of chalk on a light blue blackboard. Chicago beyond that. How many oil tanks? How many gas stations? How many trains standing silent on sidings, full of LP gas and flammable fertilizer? How many slums, as dry as kindling? How many cities beyond Gary and Chicago?

There was a whole country ripe for burning under the summer sun.

Grinning, Trashcan Man got to his feet and began to walk. His skin was already going lobster red. He didn’t feel it, although that night it would keep him awake in a kind of exaltation. There were bigger and better fires ahead. His eyes were soft and joyful and utterly crazy. They were the eyes of a man who has discovered the great axle of his destiny and has laid his hands upon it.

The smell was awful.

It came in through the open sliding door that gave on the balcony, riding the cool morning breeze that would give way to still, humid heat later on in the day. You could say the smell was like moldy oranges or spoiled fish or the smell you sometimes got in subway tunnels when the train windows were open, but no metaphor would really cover the flat truth. It was the smell of dead bodies, decomposing dead bodies, thousands of them. No—this was, after all, New York.
Millions
of them. That was the flat truth, no matter how much you might want to gussy it up by making fancy metaphors about moldy oranges or subway tunnels. It was the smell of the rotting dead.

The power was still on, but Larry didn’t think it would be for much longer. It had gone out in half of Brooklyn and all of Queens already. Last night, standing on the balcony, he and Rita had seen a dark pocket across 110th, and looking the other way, toward Jersey, you could see bright lights in Jersey City and—maybe—Bayonne, but the rest of the Jersey shore was dark.

The blackness meant the air conditioning was gone as well as the lights. It meant that all the people who had died quietly in their apartments and tenements were now rotting in furnished ovens, and when he thought of that his mind returned to the thing he had seen in the park comfort station. He had dreamed about that, and in his dreams that black sweet treat came to life and beckoned him and seemed to be something more than a living-dead comic book monster. The black sweet treat seemed to be turning into a living man— or thing—that wanted
him.
A relentlessly grinning spook who walked the night. These dreams disturbed him deeply.

And Rita was troubled by the monster-shouter. He and Rita had found him in Central Park yesterday, lying beside one of the paths in a huge pool of his own blood. His glasses with their one mended bow lay beside one stiffening hand, both lenses shattered. Some monster had been abroad after all, apparently.

Rita had screamed and screamed, and when her hysteria had finally quieted, she insisted that they bury him. And so they had. And going back to the apartment, Rita had begun to change into the woman he was faced with this morning.

“It’s all right,” Larry said.

She started away and he grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and made her sit down. She looked at him from darkly circled eyes. “What you’re going to do,” he said, “is eat. Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee. Then we’re going to get some maps and see what’s the best way to get off Manhattan. We’ll have to walk, you know.”

“Yes . . .I suppose we will.”

He went into the kitchenette, not wanting to watch her have the shakes. He got the last two eggs, cracked them into a bowl, and began to beat them. “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“What? I don’t—”

“Which way?” he said with a touch of impatience. “North? New England’s that way. South? I really don’t see the point in that. We could—”

A strangled sob. He turned and saw her looking at him, her hands warring in her lap, her eyes shiny.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, going to her. “Rita? What is it?”

“I don’t think I can eat,” she sobbed. “I know you want me to . . . I’ll try . . . but the
smell
. . .”

He crossed the living room and trundled the glass doors shut. “There,” he said lightly, hoping the annoyance he felt with her didn’t show. “Better?”

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “That’s a lot better. I can eat now.”

He went back to the kitchenette and scrambled the eggs, grating a little cheese into them as he went. Debussy filled the apartment, too light and pretty for Larry’s taste. He didn’t care much for classical music, but if you were going to have it, you ought to have your Beethoven or your Wagner or something like that.

She had asked him in a casual manner what he did for a living ... the casual manner, he reflected with some resentment, of a person for whom anything so simple as “a living” had never been a problem. I was a rock and roll singer, he told her, slightly amazed at how really painless that past tense was. Sing with this band for a while, then that one. Sometimes a studio session. She had nodded and that was the end of it. He had no urge to tell her about the single —that was the past, too. It had no bearing on where they were now.

He put the eggs on a plate, added a cup of instant coffee with a lot of cream and sugar (Larry himself subscribed to the truckers’ credo of “if you wanted a cup of cream and sugar, whydja ask for coffee?”), and brought it to the table. She was sitting on a hassock, holding her elbows and facing the stereo. Debussy strained out of the speakers like melted butter.

“Soup’s on,” he said, and she came to the table with a wan smile, looking at the eggs the way a track-and-field runner might look at a set of hurdles. Then she sat down and began to eat.