The Stand

down, making high jabbering noises. To Frannie, he sounded a little like Roger Rabbit saying “P-P- Pleeeeze! ”

“I got im!” Harold cried ecstatically. “Got im! By God, I got im!”

Frannie finally remembered the safety catch on her rifle. She thumbed it off just as Stu fired again. The second man fell down, now clutching his stomach instead of his elbow. He went on screaming.

“My God, my God,” Glen said mildly. He put his face into his hands and began to weep.

Harold fired his pistol again. The second man’s body jumped. He stopped screaming.

The woman in the Kent State University sweatshirt brought the stock of the shotgun down again, and this time she connected solidly with the crawling man’s head. It sounded like Jim Rice connecting solidly with a high, hard fastball. The shotgun’s walnut stock and the man’s head both shattered.

For a moment there was silence. A bird called in it: Whitwhit… whitwhit… whitwhit.

Then the girl in the sweatshirt stood astride the third man’s body and gave a long, primeval scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith for the rest of her life.

The blond girl was Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the Kent State sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun’s crotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest, Dayna said, was Shirley Hammett. They didn’t know the name of the other woman, who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al, Garvey, Virge, and Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two days before.

The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere just west of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, and Fran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturned pink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observer like a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-high and still wet from the previous night’s rain, had soon soaked their pants. White butterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy with moisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figure-eights. The sun was struggling to break through but hadn’t made it yet; it was a bright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already, wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows and their raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thought dazedly. If we don’t watch out, they’ll peck us right off the face of the earth. Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared that they were.

Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind the melting cloud cover (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humid morning, the thirtieth of July, 1990), the gunbattle played over and over in her mind. The woman’s face disintegrating under the shotgun blast. Stu falling over. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One man crying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Harold plugged him. The steel-punching-through-cardboard sound of the bearded man’s pistol. Susan Stern’s primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body of her enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull.

Glen walked beside her, his thin, rather sardonic face now distraught, his gray hair flying wispily around his head as if in imitation of the butterflies. He held her hand, and he kept patting it compulsively.

“You mustn’t let it affect you,” he said. “Such horrors… bound to occur. Best protection is in numbers. Society, you know. Society is the keystone of the arch we call civilization, and it is the only real antidote to outlawry. You must take… things… things like this… as a matter of course. This was an isolated occurrence. Think of them as trolls. Yes! Trolls or yogs or affrits. Monsters of a generic sort. I accept that. I hold that truth to be self-evident, a socioconstitutional ethic, one might say. Ha! Ha!”

His laugh was half moan. She punctuated each of his elliptical sentences with “Yes, Glen,” but he seemed not to hear. Glen smelled a trifle vomitous. The butterflies banged against them and then banged off again on their butterfly errands. They were almost to the farmhouse. The battle had lasted less than a minute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over by popular demand inside her head. Glen patted her hand. She wanted to tell him to please stop doing that, but she was afraid that he might cry if she did. She could stand the patting. She wasn’t sure she could stand to see Glen Bateman weeping.

Stu was walking with Harold on one side and the blond girl, Dayna Jurgens, on the other. Susan Stern and Patty Kroger flanked the unnamed catatonic woman who had been picked up in Archbold. Shirley Hammett, the woman who had been missed at pointblank range by the man who had imitated Roger Rabbit before he died, walked a little way off to the left, muttering and making the occasional grab at the passing butterflies. The party was walking slowly, but Shirley Hammett was slower. Her gray hair hung untidily about her face, and her dazed eyes peered out at the world like frightened mice peering out of a temporary bolthole.

Harold looked at Stu uneasily. “We wiped them out, didn’t we, Stu? We blew them up. Scragged their asses.”

“I guess so, Harold.”

“Man, but we had to,” Harold said earnestly, as if Stu had suggested things might have been otherwise. “It was them or us!”

“They would have blown your heads off,” Dayna Jurgens said quietly. “I was with two guys when they hit us. They shot Rich and Damon from ambush. After it was over, they put a round in each of their heads, just to make sure. You had to, all right. By rights you should be dead now.”

“By rights we should be dead now!” Harold exclaimed to Stu.

“It’s all right,” Stu said. “Take her easy, Harold.”

“Sure! Negative perspiration!” Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in his pack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off the wrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in both hands like a lollypop.

They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtively as he ate his candy bar—had to keep making sure he wasn’t hurt. He felt very sick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wet himself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into high gear.

Dayna and Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which some picked at but none really ate. Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunched herself into the farthest corner of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammett sat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered.

Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell. How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about “having business in the desert.”

By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer bad dreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gotten the idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. He had an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the other three people they’d met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear for Rich’s sanity. He called the dream-man “the hardcase” and said he was getting an army of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the west and enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of the world. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility of slipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their own dreams were the result of Rich Darliss’s powerful delusion.

In Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover a large dump truck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was a station wagon and a wrecker parked nearby.

“We assumed it was just another smashup,” Dayna said, crumbling a graham cracker nervously between her fingers, “which was, of course, exactly what we were supposed to think.”

They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dump truck, and that was when the four hardcases—to use Rich’s word—opened up from the ditch. They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was the fourth addition to what they sometimes called “the zoo” and sometimes “the harem.” One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammett, who at that time had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. “And once,” Dayna said, “when she couldn’t hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from her rectum for three days.”