The Stand

not know. She thought she might have been dreaming of her grandson Anders, who had been killed senselessly in a hunting accident when he was but six.)

On July 18, then southwest of Sterling, Colorado, and still some miles from Brush, he had met The Kid.

Trash woke up just as twilight was falling. In spite of the clothes he had hung over the windows, the Mercedes had gotten hot. His throat was a dry well which had been faced with sandpaper. His temples thumped and jumped. He ran his tongue out, and when he stroked it with his finger, it felt like a dead treebranch. Sitting up, he put his hand on the Mercedes’ steering wheel and then drew it back with a scalded hiss of pain. He had to wrap his shirttail around the doorhandle to let himself out. He thought he would just step out, but he had overestimated his strength and underestimated how far the dehydration had advanced on this August evening: his legs collapsed and he fell onto the road, which was also hot. Moaning, he scrabbled his way into the shadow of the Mercedes like a crippled crawdad. He sat there, arms and head dangling between his cocked knees, panting. He stared morbidly at the two bodies he had pulled out of the car, she with her bangles on her shriveled arms and he with his shock of theatrical white hair above his mummified monkey-face.

He must get to Cibola before the sun came up tomorrow morning. If he didn’t, he would die… and in sight of his goal! Surely the dark man could not be as cruel as that—surely not!

“My life for you,” Trashcan Man whispered, and when the sun had dropped below the line of the mountains, he gained his feet and began to walk toward the towers, minarets, and avenues of Cibola, where the sparks of the lights were coming on again.

As the heat of the day segued into the cool of the desert night, he found himself more able to walk. His sprung and rope-tied sneakers flapped and thudded against the surface of I-15. He was plodding along, his head hanging like the bloom of a dying sunflower, and did not see the green, reflectorized sign which read LAS VEGAS 30 when he passed it.

He was thinking about The Kid. By rights The Kid should have been with him now. They should be driving into Cibola together, with the straightpipes of The Kid’s deuce coupe blatting back echoes from the desert. But The Kid had proved unworthy, and Trash had been sent on alone into the wilderness.

His feet rose and fell on the pavement. “Ci-a-bola!” he croaked. “Bumpty-bumpty-bump! ”

Around midnight he collapsed by the side of the road and fell into an uneasy doze. The city was closer now.

He would make it.

He was quite sure he would make it.

He heard The Kid a long time before he saw him. It was the heavy, crackling roar of unmuffled straightpipes thundering toward him from the east, branding the day. The sound was coming up Highway 34 from the direction of Yuma, Colorado. His first impulse was to hide, the way he’d hidden from the few other survivors he’d seen since Gary. But this time something made him stay where he was, astride his bike on the shoulder of the road, looking back apprehensively over his shoulder.

The thunder grew louder and louder, and then the sun was reflecting off chrome and

(??FIRE??)

something bright and orange.

The driver saw him. Downshifted in a machine-gun burst of backfires. Goodyear rubber peeled off on the highway in hot swatches. And then the car was beside him, not idling but panting like a deadly animal which may or may not be tamed, and the driver was getting out. But at first Trashcan only had eyes for the car. He knew about cars, he liked cars, even though he had never gotten so much as a learner’s permit. This one was a beauty, a car someone had worked on for years, put thousands of dollars into, the kind of thing you usually only saw at funnycar shows, a labor of love.

It was a 1932 Ford deuce coupe, but the owner had not stinted nor stopped with the usual deuce coupe customizing innovations. He had gone on and on, turning it into a parody of all American cars, a glittering science fiction vehicle with hand-painted flames billowing out of the manifold pipes. The paint job was flake gold. The chrome headpipes, which stretched almost the whole length of the car, reflected the sun fiercely. The windshield was a convex bubble. The back tires were gigantic Goodyear Wide Ovals, the wheel-wells cut to an exaggerated height and depth to accommodate them. Growing out of the hood like a weird heating duct was a supercharger. Growing out of the roof, solid black but shot with red flecks like embers, was a steel sharkfin. Written on both sides were two words, raked backward to indicate speed. THE KID, they said.

“Hey, youall long tall an og ly,” the driver drawled, and Trash shifted his attention from the painted flames to the driver of this rolling bomb.

He stood about five feet three inches. His hair was piled and swirled and pomaded and brilliantined. The hair alone gave him another three inches of height. The swirls all met above his collar in what was not just a duck’s ass but the avatar of all the duck’s-ass hairdos ever affected by the punks and hoods of the world. He was wearing black boots with pointed toes. The sides were elasticized. The heels, which gave The Kid another three inches, bringing him up to a respectable five-nine total, were stacked Cubans. His pegged and faded jeans were tight enough to read the dates of the coins in his pockets. They limned each nifty little buttock into a kind of blue sculpture and made his crotch look like he’d maybe stuffed a chamois bag full of Spalding golfballs in there. He wore a Western-style silk shirt of an off-burgundy color. It was decorated with yellow trim and imitation sapphire buttons. The cufflinks looked like polished bone, and Trash later found out that was just what they were. The Kid had two sets, one made from a pair of human molars, the other from the incisors of a Doberman pinscher. Over this wonder of a shirt, in spite of the heat of the day, he wore a black leather motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back. It was crisscrossed with zippers, the teeth glimmering like diamonds. From the shoulder-flaps and waistbelt three rabbits’ feet dangled. One was white, one brown, one bright St. Paddy’s Day green. This jacket, even more wonderful than the shirt, creaked smugly with rich oil. Above the eagle, this time written in white silk thread, were the words THE KID. The face now looking up at the Trashcan Man from between the high pile of gleaming hair and the upturned collar of the gleaming motorcycle jacket was tiny and pallid, a doll’s face, with heavy but flawlessly sculpted pouting lips, dead gray eyes, a wide forehead without a mark or a seam, and strange full cheeks. He looked like Baby Elvis.

Two gunbelts were crisscrossed on his flat belly, and a giant .45 leaned out of each of the sagging holsters on his hips.

“Hey, boy, whatchall say?” The Kid drawled.

And the only thing Trashcan could think of to say was, “I like your car.”

It was the right thing. Maybe the only thing. Five minutes later Trash was in the passenger seat and the deuce coupe was accelerating up to The Kid’s cruising speed, which was about ninety-five. The bike Trash had ridden all the way from eastern Illinois was fading to a speck on the horizon.

Timidly, Trashcan Man suggested that at such a speed The Kid would not be able to see a wreck or a stall in the road if they came to one (they had already come to several, as a matter of fact; The Kid simply slalomed around them, the Wide Ovals shrieking unheeded protest).

“Hey, boy,” The Kid said. “I got the reflexes. I got the timin. I got three-fiffs of a second. You believe that?”

“Yes, sir,” Trash said faintly. He felt like a man who has just used a stick to stir up a nest of snakes.

“I like you, boy,” The Kid said in his odd, droning voice. His doll’s eyes stared out over the fluorescent orange steering wheel at the shimmering road. Large Styrofoam dice with death’s heads for pips dangled and bounced from the rearview mirror. “Getchall a beer out’n the back seat.”

They were Coors and they were warm and Trashcan Man hated beer and he drank one fast and said how good it was.

“Hey, boy,” The Kid said. “Coors beer’s the only beer. I’d piss Coors if I could. You believe that happy crappy?”

Trashcan said he did indeed believe that happy crappy.

“They call me The Kid. Outta Shreveport, Looseyanna. You know that? This here beast won every major carshow award in the South. You believe that happy crappy?”

Trashcan Man said he did and got another warm beer. It seemed like the best move under the circumstances.

“What they call you, boy?”