The Stand

the way he had come to make sure his cycle wasn’t bearing down on him.

It was at least fifteen degrees cooler in the shade, and Larry let out his breath in a long sigh of pleasure and relief. He put a hand to the back of his neck where the sun had been beating most of the day and pulled it back with a little hiss of pain. Sunburn pain? Get Xylocaine. And all that good shit. Get these men out of the hot sun. Burn, baby, burn. Watts. Remember Watts? Another blast from the past. The whole human race, just one big heavy blast from the past, a great big golden gasser.

“Man, you’re sick,” he said, and leaned his head against the rough trunk of the elm tree and closed his eyes. Sun-dappled shade made moving patterns of red and black on the inside of his eyelids. The sound of water, chuckling and gurgling, was sweet and soothing. In a minute he would go down there and get a drink of water and wash up. In just a minute.

He dozed.

The minutes flowed by and his doze deepened into his first deep and dreamless sleep in days. His hands rested limply in his lap. His thin chest rose and fell, and his beard made his face look even thinner, the troubled face of a lone refugee who had escaped from a terrible slaughter none would believe. Little by little, the lines carved in his sunbaked face began to smooth out. He spiraled down to the deepest levels of unconsciousness and rested there like a small river creature dreamily estivating the summer away in cool mud. The sun moved lower in the sky.

Near the creek’s edge, the luxuriant screen of bushes rattled a little as something moved stealthily through them, paused, moved again. After a time, a boy emerged. He was perhaps thirteen, perhaps ten and tall for his age. He was naked except for Fruit of the Loom shorts. His body was tanned an even mahogany, except for the startling white band that began just above the waistband of his shorts. His skin was covered with the bumps of mosquito and chigger bites, some new, mostly old. In his right hand he held a butcher knife. The blade was a foot long, the edge serrated. It glittered hotly in the sun.

Softly, bent forward slightly at the waist, he approached the elm and the rock wall until he stood right behind Larry. His eyes were greenish blue, a seawater color, slightly turned up at the corners, giving him a Chinese look. They were expressionless eyes, mildly savage. He raised the knife.

A woman’s voice, soft but firm, said: “No.”

He turned to her, head cocked and listening, the knife still raised. His attitude was both questioning and disappointed.

“We’ll watch and see,” the woman’s voice said.

The boy paused, looking from the knife to Larry and then back to the knife again with a clear expression of longing, and then he retreated back the way he had come.

Larry slept on.

When he woke up, the first thing Larry was aware of was that he felt good. The second thing was that he felt hungry. The third thing was that the sun was wrong—it seemed to have traveled backward across the sky. The fourth thing was that he had to, you should pardon the expression, piss like a racehorse.

Standing and listening to the delicious crackle of his tendons as he stretched, he realized that he had not just napped; he had slept all night. He looked down at his watch and saw why the sun was wrong. It was nine-twenty in the morning. Hungry. There would be food in the big white house. Canned soup, maybe corned beef. His stomach rumbled.

Before going up he knelt by the stream with his clothes off and splashed water all over himself. He noticed how scrawny he was getting—that was no way to run a railroad. He stood up, dried himself with his shirt, and pulled his trousers back on. A couple of stones poked their wet black backs out of the stream and he used them to cross. On the far side he suddenly froze and gazed toward the thick stand of bushes. The fear, which had been dormant in him ever since waking up, suddenly blazed up like an exploding pine knot and then subsided just as quickly. It had been a squirrel or a wood chuck that he had heard, possibly a fox. Nothing else. He turned away indifferently and began to walk up the lawn toward the big white house.

Halfway there a thought rose to the surface of his mind like a bubble and popped. It happened casually, with no fanfare, but the implications brought him to a dead halt.

The thought was: Why haven’t you been riding a bicycle?

He stood in the middle of the lawn, equidistant from the stream and the house, flabbergasted by the simplicity of it. He had been walking ever since he had ditched the Harley. Walking, wearing himself out, finally collapsing with sunstroke or something so close to it that it made no difference. And he could have been pedaling along, doing no more than a fast run if that’s what he felt like, and he would probably be on the coast now, picking out his summer house and stocking it.

He began to laugh, gently at first, a little bit spooked by the sound of it in all the quiet. Laughing when there was no one else around to laugh with was just another sign that you were taking a one-way trip to that fabled land of bananas. But the laughter sounded so real and hearty, so goddamned healthy, and so much like the old Larry Underwood that he just let it come. He stood with his hands on his hips and cocked his head back to the sky and just bellowed with laughter at his own amazing foolishness.

Behind him, where the screening bushes by the creek were thickest, greenish-blue eyes watched all of this, and they watched as Larry at last continued up the lawn to the house, still laughing a little and shaking his head. They watched as he climbed the porch and tried the front door, and found it open. They watched as he disappeared inside. Then the bushes began to shake and make the rattling sound that Larry had heard and dismissed. The boy forced his way through, still naked except for his shorts, brandishing the butcher knife.

Another hand appeared and caressed his shoulder. The boy stopped immediately. The woman came out—she was tall and imposing, but seemed not to move the bushes at all. Her hair was a thick, luxuriant black streaked with thick blazes of purest white; attractive, startling hair. It was twisted into a cable that hung over one shoulder and trailed away only as it reached the swell of her breast. When you looked at this woman you first noticed how tall she was, and then your eyes would be dragged away to that hair and you would consider it, you would think how you could almost feel its rough yet oily texture with your eyes. And if you were a man, you would find yourself wondering what she would look like with that hair unpinned, freed, spread over a pillow in a spill of moonlight. You would wonder what she would be like in bed. But she had never taken a man into herself. She was pure. She was waiting. There had been dreams. Once, in college, there had been the Ouija board. And she wondered again if this man might be the one.

“Wait,” she told the boy.

She turned his agonized face up to her calm one. She knew what the trouble was.

“The house will be all right. Why would he hurt the house, Joe?”

He turned back and looked at the house, longingly, worriedly.

“When he goes, we’ll follow him.”

He shook his head viciously.

“Yes; we have to. I have to.” And she felt that strongly. He was not the one, perhaps, but even if he was not, he was a link in a chain she had followed for years, a chain that was now nearing its end.

Joe—that was not really his name—raised the knife wildly, as if to plunge it into her. She made no move to protect herself or to flee, and he lowered it slowly. He turned toward the house and jabbed the knife at it.

“No, you won’t,” she said. “Because he’s a human being, and he’ll lead us to…” She fell silent. Other human beings, she had meant to finish. He’s a human being, and he’ll lead us to other human beings. But she was not sure that was what she meant, or even if it was, that it was all she meant. Already she felt pulled two ways at once, and she began to wish they had never seen Larry. She tried to caress the boy again but he jerked away angrily. He looked up at the big white house and his eyes were burning and jealous. After a while he slipped back into the bushes, glaring at her reproachfully. She followed him to make sure he would be all right. He lay down and curled up in a fetal position, cradling the knife to his chest. He put his thumb in his mouth and closed his eyes.

Nadine went back to where the brook had made a small pool and knelt down. She drank from cupped hands, then settled in to watch the house. Her eyes were calm, her face very nearly that of a Raphael Madonna.

Late that afternoon, as Larry biked along a tree-lined section of Route 9, a green reflectorized sign loomed ahead and he stopped to read it, slightly amazed. The sign said he was entering MAINE, VACATIONLAND. He could hardly believe it; he must have walked an incredible distance in his semidaze of fear. Either that or he had lost a