The Stand (Original Edition) (39 page)

“Maybe,
shit!"
Larry said angrily. He tipped the canteen up to his mouth but it was empty and he still had that slimy taste in his mouth. Maybe there were people like her all over the country. The flu didn’t just leave survivor types, why the hell should it? There might be a young guy somewhere in the country right now, perfect physical condition, immune to the flu but dying of tonsillitis.

Larry was sitting on a paved scenic turnout just off the highway. The view of Vermont marching away to New York in the golden morning haze was breathtaking. A sign announced that this was Twelve-Mile Point. Actually Larry thought he could see a lot further than twelve miles. On a clear day you could see forever. So why was he feeling so bad, anyway? He was telling the truth, wasn’t he? And the worst of the truth was that he felt relief, wasn’t it? That the stone around his neck was gone?

No, the worst is being alone. Being lonely.

Corny but true. He wanted someone to share this view with. Someone he could turn to and say with modest wit:
On a clear day you can see forever.
And the only company was in a tent a mile and a half back with a mouthful of green puke. Getting stiff. Drawing flies.

Larry put his head on his knees and closed his eyes. He told himself he wouldn’t cry. He hated to cry almost as bad as he hated to puke.

In the end he was chicken. He couldn’t bury her. He summoned up the worst thoughts he could—maggots and beetles, the woodchucks that would smell her and come in for a munch, the unfairness of one human being leaving another like a candy wrapper or a discarded Pepsi can. But there also seemed to be something vaguely illegal about burying her, and to tell the truth (and he was telling the truth now, wasn’t he?), that was just a cheap rationalization. He could face going down to Bennington and breaking into the Ever Popular hardware store, taking the Ever Popular spade and a matching Ever Popular pick; he could even face coming back up here where it was still and beautiful and digging the Ever Popular grave near the Ever Popular Twelve-Mile Point. But to go back into that tent (which would now smell very much like the comfort station on Transverse Number One in Central Park, where the Ever Popular dark sweet treat would be sitting for eternity) and unzip her side of the sleeping bag the rest of the way and pull out her stiff and baggy body and drag it up to the hole by the armpits and tumble it in and then shovel the dirt over it, watching the earth patter on her white legs and stick in her hair . . .

Uh-uh, buddy. Guess I’ll sit this one out. If I’m a chicken, so be it. Plucka-plucka-plucka.

He went back to where the tent was pitched and turned back the flap. He found a long stick. He took a deep breath of fresh air, held it, and hooked his clothes out with a stick. Backed away with them, put them on. Took another deep breath, held it, and used the stick to fish out his boots. He sat on a fallen tree and put them on, too.

The smell was in his clothes.

“Bullshit,” he whispered.

He could see her, half in and half out of the sleeping bag, her stiff hand held out and still curled around the pill bottle that was no longer there. Her half-lidded eyes seemed to be staring at him accusingly. Quickly he used the stick to close the tent-flap.

But he could still smell her on him.

So he made Bennington his first stop after all, and in the Bennington Men’s Shop he stripped off all his clothes and got new ones, three changes plus four pairs of socks and shorts. He even found a new pair of boots. Looking at himself in the three-way mirror he could see the empty store spread out behind him and the Harley leaning raffishly at the curb.

“Sharp threads,” he murmured. “Heavy-heavy.” But there was no one to admire his taste.

He left the store and gunned the Harley into life. He supposed he should stop at the hardware store and see if they had a tent and another sleeping bag, but all he wanted now was to get out of Bennington. He would stop further up the line.

He looked up toward where the land made its slow rise as he guided the Harley out of town, and he could see Twelve-Mile Point, but not where they had pitched the tent. That was really all for the best, it was—

Larry looked back at the road and terror jumped nimbly down his throat. An International-Harvester pickup towing a horsetrailer had swerved to avoid a car and the horsetrailer had overturned. He was going to drive the Harley right into it because he hadn’t been looking where he was going.

He turned hard right, his new boot dragging on the road, and he almost got around. But the left footrest clipped the trailer’s rear bumper and yanked the bike out from under him. Larry came to rest on the highway’s verge with a bone-rattling thump. The Harley chattered on for a moment behind him and then stalled out.

“You all right?” he asked aloud. Thank God he’d only been doing twenty or so. Thank God Rita wasn’t with him, she’d be bullshit out of her mind with hysterics. Of course if Rita had been with him he wouldn’t have been looking up there in the first place, he would have been taking care of business so she wouldn’t get any more scared than necessary.

“I’m all right,” he answered himself, but he still wasn’t sure he was. He sat up. The quiet impressed itself upon him as it did from time to time, it was so quiet that if you thought about it you could go crazy. Even Rita bawling would have been a relief at this point. Everything seemed suddenly full of bright twinkles, and with sudden horror he thought he was going to pass out. He thought,
I really am hurt, in just a minute I’ll feel it when the shock wears off, I’m cut bad or something, and who’s going to put on a tourniquet?

But when the instant of faintness had passed, he looked at himself and thought he was probably all right. He had cut both hands and his new pants had shredded away at the right knee—the knee was also cut—but they were all just scrapes and what the fuck was the big deal, anybody could dump their cycle, it happens to everybody once in a while.

But he knew what the big deal was. He could have hit his head the right way and fractured his skull and he would have lain there in the hot sun until he died.

He walked shakily over to the Harley and stood it up. It didn’t seem to be damaged in any way, but it looked different. Before it had just been a machine, a rather charming machine that could serve the dual purpose of transporting him and making him feel like James Dean or Jack Nicholson in
Hell’s Angels on Wheels.
But now its chrome seemed to grin at him like a sideshow barker, seeming to invite him to step right up and see if he was man enough to ride the two-wheeled monster.

It started on the third kick, and he putted out of Bennington at no more than walking speed. He was wearing bracelets of cold sweat on his arms and suddenly he had never, no never, in his whole life wanted so badly to see another human face.

While Larry Underwood was taking his Fourth of July spill only a state away, Stuart Redman was sitting on a large rock at the side of the road and eating his lunch. He heard the sound of approaching engines. He finished his can of beer at a swallow and carefully folded over the top of the waxed-paper tube the Ritz crackers were in. His rifle was leaning against the rock beside him. He picked it up, flicked off the safety catch, and then put it down again, a little closer to hand. Motorcycles coming, small ones by the sound. Two-fifties? In this great stillness it was impossible to tell how far away they were. Ten miles, maybe, but only maybe. Plenty of time to eat more if he wanted to, but he didn’t. In the meantime, the sun was warm and the thought of meeting fellow creatures pleasant. He had seen no living people since leaving Glen Bateman’s house in Woodsville. He glanced at the rifle again. He had flicked the safety because the fellow creatures might turn out to be like Elder. He had left the rifle leaning against the rock because he hoped they would be like Bateman—only maybe not quite so glum about the future.
Society will reappear,
Bateman had said.
Notice I didn’t use the word “reform” That would have been a ghastly pun. There’s precious little reform in the human race.

Bateman himself had seemed perfectly content—at least for the time being—to go for his walks with Kojak, paint his pictures, and think about the sociological ramifications of nearly total decimation.

If you come back this way and renew your invitation to “jine up,” Stu, I’ll probably agree. That is the curse of the human race. Sociability. What Christ should have said was "Yea, verily, whenever two or three of you are gathered together, some other guy is going to get the living shit kicked out of him.” Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell.

Show me a man or woman alone and I’11 show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent that charming thing we call “society." Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll re-invent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll re-invent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

Was that true? If it was, then God help them. Just lately Stu had been thinking a great deal about old friends and acquaintances. In his memory there was a great tendency to downplay or completely forget their unloveable characteristics—the way Bill Hapscomb used to pick his nose and wipe the snot on the sole of his shoe, Norm Bruett’s heavy hand with his kids, Billy Verecker’s unpleasant method of controlling the cat population around his house by crushing the thin skulls of the new kittens under the heels of his Range Rider boots.

The thoughts that came wanted to be wholly good. Going hunting at dawn, bundled up in quilted jackets and Day-Glo orange vests. Poker games at Ralph Hodges’s house and Willy Craddock always complaining about how he was four dollars in the game, even if he was twenty ahead. Six or seven of them pushing Tony Leominster’s Scout back onto the road that time he went down into the ditch drunk out of his mind, Tony staggering around and swearing to God and all the saints that he had swerved to avoid a U-Haul full of Mexican wetbacks. Jesus, how they had laughed. Chris Ortega’s endless stream of ethnic jokes. Going down to Huntsville for whores, and that time Joe Bob Brentwood caught the crabs and tried to tell everybody they came from the sofa in the parlor and not from the girl upstairs. They had been goddam good times. Not what your sophisticates with their nightclubs and their fancy restaurants and their museums would think of as good times, maybe, but good times just the same. He thought about those things, went over them and over them, the way an old recluse will lay out hand after hand of solitaire. Mostly he wanted to hear other human voices, get to know someone, be able to turn to someone and say,
Did you see that?
when something happened like the meteor shower he had watched the other night.

So he sat up a little straighter when the motorcycles finally swept around the bend, and he saw they were a couple of Honda 250s, ridden by a boy of about eighteen and a pretty girl who was maybe older than the boy. The girl was wearing a bright yellow blouse and light blue Levi’s.

They saw him sitting on the rock, and both Hondas swerved a little as their drivers’ surprise caused control to waver briefly. The boy’s mouth dropped open. For a moment it was unclear whether they would stop or just speed by heading west.

Stu raised an empty hand and said “Hi!” in an amiable voice. His heart was beating heavily in his chest. He wanted them to stop. They did.

For a moment he was puzzled by the tenseness in their postures. Particularly the boy; he looked as if a gallon of adrenalin had just been dumped into his blood. Of course Stu had a rifle, but he wasn’t holding it on them and they were armed themselves; he was wearing a pistol and she had a small deer-rifle slung across her back on a strap, like an actress playing Patty Hearst with no great conviction.

“I think he’s all right, Harold,” the girl said, but the boy she called Harold continued to stand astride his bike, looking at Stu with an expression of surprise and considering antagonism.

“I said I think—” she began again.

“How are we supposed to know that?”

“Well, I’m glad to see you, if that makes any difference,” Stu said.

“What if I don’t believe you?” Harold challenged, and Stu saw that he was scared green. Scared by him and by his responsibility to the girl.

Stu climbed off the rock. Harold’s hand jittered toward his holstered pistol.

“Harold, you leave that alone,” the girl said. Then she fell silent and for a moment they all seemed helpless to proceed further—a group of three dots which, when connected, would form a triangle whose exact shape could not yet be foreseen.

“Ouuuu,” Frannie said, easing herself down. “I’m never going to get the calluses off my fanny, Harold.”

Harold uttered a surly grunt.

She turned to Stu. “Have you ever ridden a hundred and seventy miles on a Honda, Mr. Redman?
Not
recommended.”

Stu smiled. “Where are you headed?”

“What business is it of yours?” Harold asked rudely.

“And what kind of attitude is that?” Fran asked him. “Mr. Redman is the first person we’ve seen since Gus Dinsmore died! I mean, if we didn’t come looking for other people, what did we come for?” “He’s watching out for you, is all,” Stu said quietly.

“That’s right, I am,” Harold said, unmollified.

“I thought we were watching out for each other,” she said, and Harold flushed darkly.

Stu thought:
Give me three people and they’ll form a society.
But were these the right two for his one? He liked the girl, but the boy impressed him as a frightened blowhard.

“We’re going to Stovington, Vermont,” Frannie said. “To the plague center there. We—what’s wrong? Mr. Redman?” He had gone pale all of a sudden, and the stem of grass he had been chewing fell onto his lap.

“Why there?” Stu asked.