The Stand

it.”

Nick grinned. The women had come over and were looking at the trucks. Abagail’s eyes noted the way Ralph squired June over to the wrecker so she could look at the radio equipment, and approved. The woman had a good set of hips on her, there would be a fine porch door down there between them. She could have just about as many little ones as she wanted.

“So when do we go?” Ralph asked.

Nick scribbled, “Soon as we eat. Did you try the CB?”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “I had it on all the way back. Horrible static; there’s a squelch button, but it doesn’t seem to work very well. But you know, I swear I did hear something, static or no static. Far off. Might not have been voices at all. But I’ll say the truth, Nicky, I didn’t care for it much. Like those dreams.”

A silence fell among them.

“Well,” Olivia said, breaking it. “I’ll get something cooking. Hope nobody minds pork two days in a row.”

No one did. And by one o’clock the camping things—and Abagail’s rocker and guitar—had been stowed in the van and they were off, the wrecker now lumbering ahead to move anything blocking the road. Abagail sat up front in the van as they drove westbound on Route 30. She did not cry. Her cane was planted between her legs. Crying was done. She was set in the center of the Lord’s will and His will would be done. The Lord’s will would be done, but she thought of that red Eye opening in the dark heart of the night and she was afraid.

Chapter 46

It was late evening, July 27. They were camped on what the sign, now half-demolished by summer storms, proclaimed to be the Kunkle Fairgrounds. Kunkle itself, Kunkle, Ohio, was south of them. There had been some sort of fire there, and most of Kunkle was gone. Stu said it had probably been lightning. Harold had of course disputed that. These days if Stu Redman said a firetruck was red, Harold Lauder would produce facts and figures proving that most of them these days were green.

She sighed and rolled over. Couldn’t sleep. She was afraid of the dream.

To her left the five motorcycles stood in a row, heeled over on their kickstands, moonlight twinkling along their chromed exhaust pipes and fittings. As if a band of Hell’s Angels had picked this particular spot to crash for the night. Not that the Angels ever would have ridden such a pussycat bunch of bikes as these Hondas and Yamahas, she supposed. They had driven “hogs”… or was that just something she had picked up from the old American- International bike epic she’d seen on TV? The Wild Angels. The Devil’s Angels. Hell’s Angels on Wheels. The bike pictures had been very big at the drive-ins when she had been in high school, Wells Drive-In, Sanford Drive-In, South Portland Twin, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Now kaput, all the drive-ins were kaput, not to mention the Hell’s Angels and good old American-International Pictures.

Put it in your diary, Frannie, she told herself, and rolled over on her other side. Not tonight. Tonight she was going to sleep, dreams or no dreams.

Twenty paces from where she was lying, she could see the others, zonked out in their sleeping bags like Hell’s Angels after a big beer party, the one where everybody in the picture got laid except for Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. Harold, Stu, Glen Bateman, Mark Braddock, Perion McCarthy. Take Sominex tonight and sleep …

It wasn’t Sominex they were on but half a grain of Veronal apiece. It had been Stu’s idea when the dreams got really bad and they all began to get flaky and hard to live with. He had taken Harold aside before mentioning it to the rest of them because the way to flatter Harold was to soberly ask his opinion and also because Harold knew things. It was good that he did, but it was also rather spooky, as if they had a fifth-rate god traveling with them—more or less omniscient, but emotionally unstable and likely to fragment at any time. Harold had picked up a second gun in Albany, where they had met Mark and Perion, and now he wore the two pistols crisscrossed low on his hips like a latterday Johnny Ringo. She felt badly for Harold, but Harold had also begun to frighten her. She had begun to wonder if Harold might not just go crackers some night and start blazing away with his two pistols. She often found herself remembering the day she had come upon Harold in his back yard, all his emotional defenses demolished, mowing the lawn in his bathing suit and crying.

She knew just how Stu would have put it to him, very quietly, almost conspiratorially: Harold, these dreams are a problem. I’ve got an idea, but I don’t know exactly how to carry it out… a mild sedative… but it would have to be just the right dose. Too much and nobody would wake up if there was trouble. What do you suggest?

Harold had suggested they try a whole grain of Veronal, available at any drugstore, and if that interrupted the dream-cycle, that they cut back to three quarters of a grain, and if that worked to half. Stu had gone privately to Glen, had gotten a concurring opinion, and the experiment had been tried. At a quarter grain the dreams had begun to creep back in, so they held the dosage at a half.

At least for the others.

Frannie accepted her drug each night, but palmed it. She didn’t know if Veronal would hurt the baby or not, but she was taking no chances. They said that even aspirin could break the chromosome chain. So she suffered the dreams—suffered, that was the right word. One of them predominated; if the others were different, they would sooner or later blend into this one. She was in her Ogunquit house, and the dark man was chasing her. Up and down shadowy corridors, through her mother’s parlor where the clock continued to tick off seasons in a dry age… she could get away from him, she knew, if she didn’t have to carry the body. It was her father’s body, wrapped in a bedsheet, and if she dropped it the dark man would do something to it, perform some awful desecration on it. So she ran, knowing that he was getting closer and closer, and at last his hand would fall on her shoulder, his hot and sickening hand. She would go boneless and weak, her father’s shrouded corpse would slither out of her arms, she would turn, ready to say: Take him, do anything, I don’t care, just don’t chase me anymore.

And there he would be, dressed in some dark stuff like a hooded monk’s robe, nothing visible of his features save his huge and happy grin. And in one hand he held the bent and twisted coathanger. That was when the horror struck her like a padded fist and she struggled up from sleep, her skin clammy with sweat, her heart thudding, wanting never to sleep again.

Because it wasn’t the dead body of her father he wanted; it was the living child in her womb.

She rolled over again. If she didn’t go to sleep soon she really would take her diary out and write in it. She had been keeping the journal since July 5. In a way she was keeping it for the baby. It was an act of faith—faith that the baby would live. She wanted it to know what it had been like. How the plague had come to a place called Ogunquit, how she and Harold had escaped, what became of them. She wanted the child to know how things had been.

The moonlight was strong enough to write by, and two or three pages of diary were always enough to make her feel snoozy. Didn’t say much for her literary talents, she supposed. She would give sleep one more fair chance first, though.

She closed her eyes.

And went on thinking of Harold.

The situation might have eased with the coming of Mark and Perion if the two of them hadn’t already been committed to each other. Perion was thirty-three, eleven years older than Mark, but in this world such things made little difference. They had found each other, they had been looking out for each other, and they were content to stick together. Perion had confided to Frannie that they were trying to make a baby. Thank God I was on the pill and didn’t have a loop, Peri said. How in God’s name would I ever have gotten it out?

Frannie had almost told her about the baby she was carrying (she was over a third of the way along now) but something held her back. She was afraid it might make a bad situation even worse.

So now there were six of them instead of four (Glen refused utterly to try driving a motorcycle and always rode pillion behind Stu or Harold), but the situation hadn’t changed with the addition of another woman.

What about you, Frannie? What do you want?

If she had to exist in a world like this, she thought, with a biological clock inside her set to go off in six months, she wanted someone like Stu Redman to be her man—no, not someone like. She wanted him. There it was, stated with complete baldness.

With civilization gone, all the chrome and geegaws had been stripped from the engine of human society. Glen Bateman held forth on this theme often, and it always seemed to please Harold inordinately.

Women’s lib, Frannie had decided (thinking that if she was going to be bald, she might as well go totally bald),