The Stand

hope—yes, ever since the wheel had fallen off his bike he had been losing hope. God, the God of father-killing sheriffs, the God of Carley Yates, was stronger than the dark man after all, it seemed. Yet he had kept his faith and had kept on. And at last, when it seemed he was going to burn up in this desert before he ever got to Cibola where the dark man waited, he had seen it far below, dreaming in the sun.

“Cibola!” he whispered, and slept.

The first dream had come to him in Gary, over a month ago, after he had burned his arm. He had gone to sleep that night sure that he was going to die; no one could be burned as badly as he was and live. A refrain had beaten its way into his head: Live by the torch, die by the torch. Live by it, die by it.

His legs had given out in a small city park and he had fallen down, his left arm sprawled out and away from him like a dead thing, the shirtsleeve smoked off. The pain was giant, incredible. He had never dreamed there could be such pain in the world. He had been running gleefully from one set of oil tanks to the next, setting up crude timing devices, each constructed of a steel pipe and a flammable paraffin mixture separated from a little pool of acid by a steel tab. He had been pushing these devices into the outflow pipes on top of the tanks. When the acid ate through the steel the paraffin would ignite, and that would cause the tanks to blow. He had planned to get over to the west side of Gary, near the confusion of interchanges leading various roads toward Chicago or Milwaukee, before any of them blew. He wanted to watch the show as the entire dirty city went up in a firestorm.

But he had misjudged the last device or constructed it badly. It had gone off while he worked at opening the cap on the outflow with a pipewrench. There had been a blinding white flare as burning paraffin belched out of the tube, coating his left arm with fire. This was no painless flameglove of lighter fluid, to be waved in the air and then shaken out like a big match. This was agony, like having your arm in a volcano.

Shrieking, he had run wildly around the top of the oiltank, careering off the waist-high railings like a human pinball. If the railings had not been there, he would have plunged over the side and fallen, turning over and over, like a torch dropped down a well. Only accident saved his life; his feet tangled in each other and he fell with his left arm pinned under him, smothering the flames.

He sat up, still half-crazy with the pain. Later he would think that only blind luck—or the dark man’s purpose —had saved him from being burned to death. Most of the paraffin jet had missed him. So he was thankful—but his thankfulness only came later. At the time he could only cry out and rock back and forth, holding his crisped arm out from his body as the skin smoked and crackled and contracted.

Vaguely, as the light faded from the sky, it occurred to him that he had already set a dozen of the time- devices. They might go anytime. Dying and being out of his exquisite misery would be wonderful; dying in flames would be utter horror.

Somehow he had crawled down from the tank and had staggered away, weaving and lunging in and out of the dead traffic, holding his barbecued left arm away from his body.

By the time he reached a small park near the center of town, it was sunset. He sat on the grass between two shuffleboard courts, trying to think what you did for burns. Put butter on them, that’s what Donald Merwin Elbert’s mother would have said. But that was for a scald, or when the bacon fat jumped extra high and spattered you with hot grease. He couldn’t imagine putting butter on the cracked and blackened mess between his elbow and shoulder; couldn’t even imagine touching it.

Kill himself. That was it, that was the ticket. He would put himself out of his misery like an old dog—

There was a sudden gigantic explosion on the east side of town, as if the fabric of existence had been torn briskly in two. A liquid pillar of fire shot up against dusk’s deepening indigo. He had to squeeze his eyes to watering, protesting slits against it.

Even in his agony, the fire pleased him… more, it delighted, fulfilled him. The fire was the best medicine, even better than the morphine he found the next day (as a trusty in prison he had worked in the infirmary as well as the library and the motorpool, and he knew about morphine and Elavil and Darvon Complex). He did not connect his present agony to the pillar of fire. He only knew that the fire was good, the fire was beautiful, the fire was something he needed and would always need. Wonderful fire!

Moments later a second oiltank exploded and even here, three miles away, he could feel the warm push of expanding air. Another tank went, and another. A slight pause, and then six of them went up in a rattling string and now it was too bright over there to look at but he looked anyway, grinning, his eyes full of yellow flames, his wounded arm forgotten, thoughts of suicide forgotten.

It took better than two hours for all of them to go up, and by then dark had fallen but it wasn’t dark, the night was yellow and orange and feverish with flames. The entire eastern arc of the horizon danced with fire. It reminded him of a Classic funnybook he had owned as a child, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Now, years later, the boy who had owned that funnybook was gone, but the Trashcan Man was here, and Trash owned the wonderful, terrible secret of the Martians’ deathray.

It was time to leave the park. Already the temperature had risen ten degrees. He ought to go west, stay ahead of the fire the way he had in Powtanville, racing the expanding arc of destruction. But he was in no condition to race. And so he fell asleep on the grass, and the firelight played over the face of a tired, ill-used child.

In his dream, the dark man came in his hooded robe, his face invisible… yet the Trashcan Man thought he had seen this man before. When the loungers in the candy store and the beer parlor back in Powtanville catcalled at him, it seemed that this man had been among them, silent and thoughtful. When he had worked at the Scrubba- Dubba (soap the headlights, knock the wipers, soap the rocker panels, hey mister you want hotwax on that?), wearing the sponge glove on his right hand until the hand beneath looked like a pale dead fish, the nails as white as fresh ivory, it seemed he had seen this man’s face, fiery and grinning with lunatic joy from beneath the rippling film of water rolling down the windshield. When the sheriff had sent him away to the nuthatch in Terre Haute, he had been the grinning psych aide standing above his head in the room where they gave you the shocks, his hands on the controls (I’m gonna fry your brains out, boy, help you on your way as you change from Donald Merwin Elbert into the Trashcan Man, would you like hotwax on that?), ready to send about a thousand volts zizzing into his brain. He knew this dark man all right, his was the face you could never quite see, his the hands which dealt all spades from a dead deck, his the eyes beyond the flames, his the grin from beyond the grave of the world.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said gratefully in the dream. “My life for you!”

The dark man had lifted his arms inside his robe, turning the robe into the shape of a black kite. They stood on a high place, and below them, America lay in flames.

I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want.

Then he saw an army of ten thousand raggle-taggle castoff men and women driving east, driving across the desert and into the mountains, a rough beast of an army whose time had come round at last; they loaded down trucks and jeeps and Wagoneers and campers and tanks; each man and woman wore a dark stone about his or her neck, and deep in some of those stones was a red shape that might have been an Eye or might have been a Key. And riding in their van, atop a giant tanker with pillow tires, he saw himself, and knew that the truck was filled with jellied napalm… and behind him, in column, were trucks loaded with pressure bombs and Teller mines and plastic explosive; flame throwers and flares and heat-seeking missiles; grenades and machine guns and rocket launchers. The dance of death was about to begin, and already the strings of the fiddles and guitars were smoking and the stench of brimstone and cordite filled the air.

The dark man lifted his arms again and when he dropped them everything was cold and silent, the fires gone, even the ashes cold, and for just a moment he was only Donald Merwin Elbert again, small and afraid and confused. For just that moment he suspected he was just another pawn in the dark man’s huge chess game, that he had been deceived.

Then he saw the dark man’s face was no longer entirely hidden; two dark red coals burned in the sunken pits where his eyes should have been, and illuminated a nose as narrow as a blade.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” Trash said gratefully in the dream. “My life for you! My soul for you!”

“I will set you to burn,” the dark man said gravely. “You must come to my city and there all will be made clear.”

“Where? Where?” He was in an agony of hope and expectation.

“West,” the dark man said, fading. “West. Beyond the mountains.”

He woke up then, and it was still night and still bright. The flames were closer. The heat was stifling. Houses