The Stand

Lucy Swann looked stunned. “The swing,” she said. “I remember that, too.” She looked at Larry. “Why are we all having the same dreams? Is somebody using a ray on us?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at Nadine. “Have you had them, too?”

“I don’t dream,” she said sharply, and immediately dropped her eyes. He thought: You’re lying. But why?

“Nadine, if you—” he began.

“I told you I don’t dream! ” Nadine cried sharply, almost hysterically. “Can’t you just leave me alone? Do you have to badger me?”

She stood up and left the fire, almost running.

Lucy looked after her uncertainly for a moment and then stood up. “I’ll go after her.”

“Yes, you better. Joe, stay with me, okay?”

“Kay,” Joe said, and began to unsnap the guitar case.

Lucy came back with Nadine ten minutes later. They had both been crying, Larry saw, but they seemed to be on good terms now.

“I’m sorry,” Nadine said to Larry. “It’s just that I’m always upset. It comes out in funny ways.”

“Its all right.”

The subject did not come up again. They sat and listened to Joe run through his repertoire. He was getting very good indeed now, and in with the hootings and grunts, fragments of the lyrics were coming through.

At last they slept, Larry on one end, Nadine on the other, Joe and Lucy between.

Larry dreamed first of the black man on the high place, and then of the old black woman sitting on her porch. Only in this dream he knew the black man was coming, striding through the corn, knocking his own twisted swathe through the corn, his terrible hot grin spot-welded to his face, coming toward them, closer and closer.

Larry woke up in the middle of the night, out of breath, his chest constricted with terror. The others slept like stones. Somehow, in that dream he had known. The black man had not been coming empty handed. In his arms, borne like an offering as he strode through the corn, he held the decaying body of Rita Blakemore, now stiff and swollen, the flesh ripped by woodchucks and weasels. A mute accusation to be thrown at his feet to scream his guilt at the others, to silently proclaim that he wasn’t no nice guy, that something had been left out of him, that he was a loser, that he was a taker.

At last he slept again, and until he woke up the next morning at seven, stiff, cold, hungry, and needing to go to the bathroom, his sleep was dreamless.

“Oh God,” Nadine said emptily. Larry looked at her and saw a disappointment too deep for tears. Her face was pale, her remarkable eyes clouded and dull.

It was quarter past seven, July 19, and the shadows were drawing long. They had ridden all day, their few rest stops only five minutes long, their lunch break, which they had taken in Randolph, only half an hour. None of them had complained, although after six hours on a cycle Larry’s whole body felt numb and achy and full of pins.

Now they stood together in a line outside a wrought-iron fence. Below and behind them lay the town of Stovington, not much changed from the way Stu Redman had seen it on his last couple of days in this institution. Beyond the fence and a lawn that had once been well kept but which was now shaggy and littered by sticks and leaves that had blown onto it during afternoon thunderstorms, was the institution itself, three stories high, more of it buried underground, Larry surmised.

The place was deserted, silent, empty.

In the center of the lawn was a sign which read:

STOVINGTON PLAGUE CONTROL CENTER

THIS IS A GOVERNMENT INSTALLATION!

VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT MAIN DESK

Beside it was a second sign, and this was what they were looking at.

ROUTE 7 TO RUTLAND

ROUTE 4 TO SCHUYLERVILLE

ROUTE 29 TO I-87

I-87 SOUTH TO I-90

I-90 WEST

EVERYONE HERE IS DEAD

WE ARE MOVING WEST TO NEBRASKA

STAY ON OUR ROUTE

WATCH FOR SIGNS

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

FRANCES GOLDSMITH

STUART REDMAN

GLENDON PEQUOD BATEMAN

JULY 8, 1990

“Harold, my man,” Larry murmured. “Can’t wait to shake your hand and buy you a beer… or a Payday.”

“Larry!” Lucy said sharply.

Nadine had fainted.

Chapter 45

She tottered out onto her porch at twenty to eleven on the morning of July 20, carrying her coffee and her toast with her as she did every day that the Coca-Cola thermometer outside the sink window read over fifty degrees. It was high summer, the finest summer Mother Abagail could recollect since 1955 the year her mother had died at the goodish age of ninety-three. Too bad there ain’t more folks around to enjoy it, she thought as she sat carefully down in her armless rocking chair. But did they ever enjoy it? Some did, of course; young folks in love did, and old folks whose bones remembered so clearly what the death-clutch of winter was. Now most of the young folks and old folks were gone, and most of those in between. God had brought down a harsh judgment on the human race.

Some might argue with such a harsh judgment, but Mother Abagail was not among their number. He had done it once with water, and sometime further along, He would do it with fire. Her place was not to judge God, although she wished He hadn’t seen fit to set the cup before her lips that He had. But when it came to matters of judgment, she was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear.

She wheezed laughter and nodded her head and dipped her toast into the wide mouth of her coffee cup until it was soft enough to chew. It had been sixteen years since she had bid hail and farewell to her last tooth. Toothless she had come from her mother’s womb, and toothless she would go into her own grave. Molly, her great-granddaughter, and her husband had given her a set of false teeth for Mother’s Day just a year later, the year she herself had been ninety-three, but they hurt her gums and now she only wore them when she knew Molly and Jim were coming. Then she would take them from the box in the drawer and rinse them off good and stick them in. And if she had time before Molly and Jim came, she would make faces at herself in the spotty kitchen mirror and growl through all those big white fake teeth and laugh fit to split. She looked like an old black Everglades gator.

She was old and feeble, but her mind was pretty much in order. Abagail Freemantle was her name born in 1882 and with the birth certificate to prove it. She’d seen a heap during her time on the earth, but nothing to match the goings-on of the last month or so. No, there never had been such a thing, and now her time was coming to be a part of it and she hated it. She was old. She wanted to rest and enjoy the cycle of the seasons between now and whenever God got tired of watching her make her daily round and decided to call her home to Glory. But what happened when you questioned God? The answer you got was I Am, Who I AM, and that was the end. When His own Son prayed that the cup be taken from His lips, God never even answered… and she wasn’t up to that snuff, no how, no way. Just an ordinary sinner was all she was, and at night when the wind came up and blew through the corn it frightened her to think that God had looked down at a little baby girl poking out between her mother’s legs back in early 1882 and had said to Himself: