The Stand (Original Edition) (86 page)

They looked at Tom’s darkened house in silence for a minute.

“Let’s get out of here,” Larry said suddenly. “The thought of all those stuffed animals . . . all of a sudden I got a grade-A case of the creeps.”

When they left, Nick was still standing on the side lawn of Tom Cullen’s house, his hands in his pockets, his head down.

George Richardson, the new doctor, had set up in the Dakota Ridge Medical Center, because it was close to Boulder City Hospital with its medical equipment, its large supplies of drugs, and its operating rooms.

By August 28 he was pretty much in business, assisted by Laurie Constable and Dick Ellis. Dick had asked leave to quit the world of medicine and had been refused. “You’re doing a fine job here,” Richardson said. “You’ve learned a lot and you’re going to learn more. Besides, there’s just too much for me to do by myself. As it is, we’re going to be out of our minds if we don’t get another doctor in a month or two. So congratulations, Dick, you’re the Zone’s first paramedic. Give him a kiss, Laurie.”

Around eleven o’clock on that late August morning, Fran let herself into the waiting room and looked around curiously and a little nervously.

“Hi, Fran,” Laurie said. “I thought we’d see you sooner or later.”

The door to one of the examining rooms opened and Candy Jones came out, followed by Richardson. Candy was looking doubtfully at a pink bottle in her hand.

“Are you sure that’s what it is?” she asked Richardson doubtfully. “I never got it before.” “Well, you have it now,” George said with a grin. “Don’t forget the starch baths, and stay out of the tall grass after this.”

She smiled ruefully. “Jack’s got it, too. Should he come in?”

“No, but you can make the starch baths a family affair.”

Candy nodded dolefully and then spotted Fran. “Hi, Frannie, how’s the girl?”

“Okay. How’s by you?”

“Terrible.” Candy held up the bottle so Fran could read the word CALADRYL on the label. “Poison ivy. And you couldn’t guess where I got it.” She brightened. “But I bet you can guess where
Jack's
got it.”

They watched her go with some amusement. Then George said, “Miss Goldsmith, isn’t it? Free Zone Committee. A pleasure.”

She held out her hand to be shaken. “Just Fran, please. Or Frannie.”

“Okay, Frannie. What’s the problem?”

“I’m pregnant,” Fran said. “And pretty damn scared.” And then, with no warning at all, she was in tears.

George put an arm around her shoulders. “Laurie, I’ll want you in about five minutes.”

“All right, Doctor.”

He led her into the examining room.

“Now. Why the tears? Is it Mrs. Wentworth’s twins?”

Frannie nodded miserably.

“It was a difficult delivery, Fran. The mother was a heavy smoker. The babies were lightweights, even for twins. They came in the late evening, very suddenly. I had no opportunity to make a postmortem. Regina Wentworth is being cared for by some of the women who were in our party. She’s been under sedation. I believe—I
hope
— that she’s going to come out of this. But for now all I can say is that those babies had two strikes against them from the start. The cause of death could have been
anything ”

“Including the superflu.”

“Yes. Including that.”

“So we just wait and see.”

“Hell no. I’m going to give you a complete prenatal right now. I’m going to monitor you and any other woman that gets pregnant every step of the way. General Electric used to have a slogan, ‘Progress Is Our Most Important Product.’ In the Zone, babies are our most important product, and they are going to be treated accordingly.”

“But we really don’t know.” “No, we don’t. But be of good cheer, Fran.”

“Yes, all right. I’ll try.”

There was a brief rap at the door and Laurie came in. She handed George a form on a clipboard, and George began to ask Fran questions about her medical history.

“Fine,” George said half an hour later.

Fran raised her eyebrows, thinking for a moment he had mispronounced her name. For no good reason she remembered that until the third grade little Mikey Post from down the street had called her Fan.

“The baby. It’s fine.”

Fran found a Kleenex and held it tightly. “I felt it move ... but that was several days ago. Nothing since then. I was afraid . . .”

“It’s alive, all right, but I really doubt if you felt it move, you know. More likely a little intestinal gas.”

“It was the baby,” Fran said quietly.

“It’s going to move a lot in the future. I’ve got you pegged for early to mid-January. How does that sound?”

“Fine.”

“Are you eating right?”

“Yes. I’m trying very hard.”

“No nausea now?”

“A little at first, but it’s passed.”

“Lovely. Getting plenty of exercise?”

For a nightmare instant she saw herself digging her father’s grave. She blinked the vision away. That had been another life. “Yes, plenty.”

“Have you gained any weight?”

“About five pounds.”

“That’s all right. You can have another twelve; I’m feeling generous today.”

She grinned. “You’re the doctor.”

“Yes, and I used to be an OB man, so you’re in the right place. Take your doctor’s advice and you’ll go far. Now, concerning bicycles, motorbikes, and mopeds. All of them a no-no after November fifteenth, let’s say. No one’s going to be riding them by then anyway. Too damn cold. Don’t smoke or drink to excess, do you?”

“No.”

“If you want a nightcap once in a while, I think that’s perfectly okay. I’m going to put you on a vitamin supplement, you can pick it up at any drugstore in town—”

Frannie burst into laughter, and George smiled uncertainly.

“Did I say something funny?”

“No. It just came out funny under the circumstances.”

“Yes, I see. Well, at least there won’t be any more complaining about high drug prices, will there? One last thing, Fran. Have you ever been fitted with an inter-uterine device ... an IUD?”

“No, why?” Fran asked, and then she happened to think of her dream: the dark man with his coathanger. She shuddered. “No,” she said again.

“Good. That’s it.” He stood up. “I won’t tell you not to worry—”

“No,” she agreed. The laughter was gone from her eyes. “Don’t do that.”

“But I will ask you to keep it to a minimum. Excess anxiety in the mother can lead to glandular imbalance. And that’s not good for the baby. I don’t like to prescribe tranquilizers for pregnant women, but if you think—”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” Fran said, but going out into the hot midday sunshine, she knew that the entire second half of her pregnancy was going to be haunted by thoughts of Mrs. Wentworth’s vanished twins.

Two evenings later, Nadine Cross stood in the basement of Harold’s house, watching him and feeling uneasy.

When Harold was doing something that didn’t involve having some sort of strange sex with her, he seemed to go away to his own private place where she had no control over him. When he was in that place he seemed cold; more than that, he seemed contemptuous of her and even of himself. The only thing that didn’t change was his hate of Stuart Redman and the others on the committee.

There was a dead air hockey game in the basement and Harold was working on its pinholed surface. There was an open book beside him. On the facing page was a diagram. He would look at the diagram for a while, then look at the apparatus he was working on, and then he would do something to it. Spread out neatly by his right hand were the tools from his Triumph motorcycle kit. Little snips of wire littered the air hockey table.

“You know,” he said absently, “you ought to take a walk.”

“Why?” She felt a trifle hurt. Harold’s face was tense and unsmiling. Nadine could understand why Harold smiled as much as he did; because when he stopped, he looked insane. She suspected that he
was
insane, or very nearly.

“Because I don’t know how old this dynamite is,” Harold said.

“What do you mean?”

“Old dynamite sweats,” he said, and looked up at her. She saw that his entire face was running with sweat, as if to prove his point. “It
perspires,
to be perfectly couth. And what it perspires is pure nitroglycerine, one of the world’s great unstable substances. So if it’s old, there’s a very good chance that this little Science Fair project is going to blow us sky high.”

“Well, you don’t have to sound so snotty about it,” Nadine said.

“Nadine? Dear girl?”

“What?”

Harold looked at her calmly and without smiling. “Shut your fucking trap.”

She did, but she didn’t take a walk, although she wanted to. Surely if this was Flagg’s will (and the planchette had told her that Harold was Flagg’s way of taking care of the committee), the dynamite wouldn’t be old. And even if it
was
old, it wouldn’t explode until it was supposed to . . . would it? Just how much control over events did Flagg have?

Enough,
she told herself,
he has enough.
But she wasn’t sure, and she was increasingly uneasy. She had been back to her house and Joe was gone. She had gone to see Lucy, and had borne the cold reception long enough to learn that since she had moved in with Harold, Joe (Lucy, of course, called him Leo) had “slipped back some.” Lucy obviously blamed her for that, too . . . but if an avalanche came rumbling down from Flagstaff Mountain or an earthquake ripped Pearl Street apart, Lucy would probably blame her for those things, too. Not that there wouldn’t be enough to blame on her and Harold very soon. Still, she had been bitterly disappointed not to have seen Joe . . .to kiss him goodbye. She and Harold were not going to be in the Boulder Free Zone much longer.

Never mind, best you let him go completely now that you’re embarked on this obscenity. You’d only be doing him harm . . . and possibly harm to yourself as well, because Joe
. . .
sees things, knows things. Let him stop being Joe, let me stop being Nadine
-
mom. Let him go back to being Leo
.

But the paradox in that was inexorable. She could not believe that any of these Zone people had more than a year’s life left in them, and that included the boy. It was not
his
will that they should live . . .

. . .
so tell the truth, it isn’t just Harold who is his instrument. It's you too. You, who once defined the single unforgivable sin in the postplague world as murder, as the taking of a single human life .
. .

Suddenly she found herself wishing that the dynamite
was
old, that it would blow up and put an end to both of them. A merciful end. And then she found herself thinking about what would happen afterward, after they had gotten over the mountains, and felt the old slippery warmth kindle in her belly.

“There,” Harold said gently. He had lowered his apparatus into a Hush Puppies shoebox and set it aside.

“It’s done.”

“Yes.”

“Will it work?”

“Would you like to try it and find out?” His words were bitterly sarcastic, but she didn’t mind. His eyes were working over her in that greedy, crawling little boy’s way that she had come to recognize. He had come back from that distant place—the place from which he had written what was in the ledger that she had read and then replaced carelessly under the loose hearthstone where it had originally been. Now she could handle him. Now his talk was just talk.

“Would you like to watch me play with myself first? Like last night?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Good.”

She went up first, and she could feel him looking up the short skirt of the little sailor dress she was wearing. She was bare beneath it.

The door closed, and the thing that Harold had made sat in the open shoebox in the gloom. There was a battery-powered Realistic walkie-talkie handset from Radio Shack. Its back was off. Wired to it were eight sticks of dynamite. The book was still open. It was from the Boulder Public Library, and the title was
65 National Science Fair PrizerWinners.
The diagram showed a doorbell wired up to a walkie-talkie similar to the one in the shoebox. The caption beneath said:
Third Prize, 1977 National Science Fair, Constructed by Brian Ball, Rutland, Vermont. Say the word and ring the bell up to twelve miles away!

Some hours later that evening, Harold came back downstairs, put the cover on the shoebox, and carried it carefully upstairs. He put it on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard. Ralph Brentner had told him that afternoon that the Free Zone Committee was inviting Chad Norris to speak at their next meeting. When was that going to be? Harold had inquired casually. September 2, Ralph had said.

September 2.

Larry and Leo were sitting on the curb in front of the house. Larry was drinking a warm Hamm’s Beer, Leo a warm Orange Spot. From out back came the steady, gruff roar of the Lawnboy. Lucy was cutting the grass. It was the last day of August. Larry had offered to do it, but Lucy shook her head. “Find out what’s wrong with Leo, if you can.”

The day after Nadine had moved in with Harold, Leo hadn’t appeared for breakfast. Larry had found the boy in his room, dressed only in his underpants, his thumb in his mouth. He was uncommunicative and hostile. Larry had been more frightened than Lucy, because she didn’t know how Leo had been when Larry had first encountered him. His name had been Joe then, and he had been brandishing a killer’s knife.

The best part of a week had passed since then, and Leo was a little better, but he hadn’t come back all the way and he wouldn’t talk about what had happened.

“That woman had something to do with it,” Lucy had said, screwing the cap onto the lawnmower’s tank.

“Nadine? What makes you think that?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to mention it. But she came by here the other day while you and Leo were trying the fishing down at Cold Creek. She wanted to see the boy. I was just as glad the two of you were gone.”

“Lucy—”

She gave him a quick kiss, and he had slipped his hand under her halter and given her a friendly squeeze. “I judged you wrong before,” she said. “I guess I’ll always be sorry for that. And I’m never going to like Nadine Cross. There’s something
wrong
with her.”