her was that Larry also depended on Joe, needed Joe in a way she didn’t…
Had her judgment been that wrong about Larry’s character? She thought now that the answer was yes. That nervous, self-serving exterior was a veneer, and it was being worn away by hard use. Just the fact that he had held them all together on this long trip spoke for his determination.
The conclusion seemed clear. Beneath her decision to let Larry make love to her, a part of her was still committed to the other man… and making love to Larry would be like killing that part of herself forever. She wasn’t sure she could do that.
And she wasn’t the only one who had dreamed of the dark man now.
That had disturbed her at first, then frightened her. Fright was all it was when she had only Joe and Larry to compare notes with; when they met Lucy Swann and she said she’d had the same sort of dream, fright became a kind of frenzied terror. It was no longer possible to tell herself their dreams only
This idea more than any other raised the conflicting emotions of utter terror and strong attraction within her. She had held to the idea of Stovington with a nearly panicky grip. It stood, by nature of its function, as a symbol of sanity and rationality against the rising tide of dark magic she felt around her. But Stovington had been deserted, a mockery of the safe haven she had built it up to be in her mind. The symbol of sanity and rationality was a deathhouse.
As they moved west, picking up survivors, her hope that it could somehow end for her without confrontation had gradually died. It died as Larry grew in her estimation. He was sleeping with Lucy Swann now, but what did that matter? She was spoken for. The others had been having two opposing dreams: the dark man and the old woman. The old woman seemed to stand for some sort of elemental force, just as the dark man did. The old woman was the nucleus the others were gradually cohering around.
Nadine had never dreamed of her.
Only of the dark man. And when the dreams of the others had suddenly faded away as inexplicably as they had come, her own dreams had seemed to grow in power and in clarity.
She knew many things which they did not. The dark man’s name was Randall Flagg. Those in the West who opposed him or went against his way of doing things had either been crucified or driven mad somehow and set free to wander in the boiling sink of Death Valley. There were small groups of technical people in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but they were only temporary; very soon they would be moving to Las Vegas, where the main concentration of people was growing. For him there was no hurry. Summer was on the downside now. Soon the Rocky Mountain passes would be filling with snow, and while there were plows to clear them, they would not be able to spare enough warm bodies to man the plows. There would be a long winter in which to consolidate. And next April… or May…
Nadine lay in the dark, looking up at the sky.
Boulder was her last hope. The old woman was her last hope. The sanity and rationality she had hoped to find at Stovington had begun to form in Boulder. They were good, she thought, the good guys, and if only it could be that simple for her, caught in her crazy web of conflicting desires.
Played over and over again, like a dominant chord, was her own firm belief that murder in this decimated world was the gravest sin, and her heart told her firmly and without question that death was Randall Flagg’s business. But oh how she wanted his cold kiss—more than she had wanted the kisses of the high school boy, or the college boy… even more, she feared, than Larry Underwood’s kiss and embrace.
A shooting star scratched its fire across the sky, and like a child, she wished on it.
Chapter 50
Dawn was coming up, painting the eastern sky a delicate rose color. Stu Redman and Glen Bateman were about halfway up Flagstaff Mountain in West Boulder, where the first foothills of the Rockies rise up out of the flat plains like a vision of prehistory. In the dawnlight Stu thought that the pines crawling between the naked and nearly perpendicular stone faces looked like the veins ridging some giant’s hand that had poked out of the earth. Somewhere to the east, Nadine Cross was at last falling into a thin, unsatisfactory sleep.
“I’m going to have a headache this afternoon,” Glen said. “I don’t believe I’ve stayed up drinking all night since I was an undergrad.”
“Sunrise is worth it,” Stu said.
“Yes, it is. Beautiful. Have you ever been in the Rockies before?”
“Nope,” Stu said. “But I’m glad I came.” He hoisted the jug of wine and had a swallow. “I got quite a buzz on myself.” He looked out over the view in silence for a few moments and then turned to Glen with a slanted smile. “What’s going to happen now?”
“Happen?” Glen raised his eyebrows.
“Sure. That’s why I got you up here. Told Frannie, ‘I’m gonna get him good n drunk and then pick his brains.’ She said fine.”
Glen grinned. “There are no tea leaves in the bottom of a wine bottle.”
“No, but she explained to me just what it is you used to be. Sociology. The study of group interaction. So make some educated guesses.”
“Cross my palm with silver, O aspirant to knowledge.”
“Never mind the silver, baldy. I’ll take you down to the First National Bank of Boulder tomorrow and give you a million dollars. How’s that?”
“Seriously, Stu—what do you want to know?”
“Same things that mute guy Andros wants to know, I guess. What’s going to happen next. I don’t know how to put it any better than that.”
“There’s going to be a society,” Glen said slowly. “What kind? Impossible to say right now. There are almost four hundred people here now. I’d guess from the rate they’ve been coming in—more every day—that by the first of September there’ll be fifteen hundred of us. Forty-five hundred by the first of October, and maybe as many as eight thousand by the time the snow flies in November and closes the roads. Write that down as prediction number one.”
To Glen’s amusement, Stu did indeed produce a notebook from the back pocket of his jeans and jotted down what he had just said.
“Hard for me to believe,” Stu said. “We came all the way across the country and didn’t see a hundred people all told.”
“Yes, but they’re coming in, aren’t they?”
“Yes… in dribs and drabs.”
“In what and whats?” Glen asked, grinning.
“Dribs and drabs. My mother used to say that. You shitting on my mom’s way of talking?”
“The day will never come in when I lose enough respect for my own hide to shit on a Texan’s mother, Stuart.”
“Well, they’re comin in, sure. Ralph’s in touch with five or six groups right now that will bring us up to five hundred by the end of the week.”
Glen smiled again. “Yes, and Mother Abagail sits right there with him in his ‘radio station,’ but she won’t talk on the CB. Says she’s afraid she’ll get an electroshock.”
“Frannie loves that old woman,” Stu said. “Part of it is because she knows so much about delivering babies, but part of it is just… loving her. You know?”
“Yes. Most everybody feels the same.”
“Eight thousand people by winter,” Stu said, returning to the original topic. “Man oh man.”
“It’s just arithmetic. Let’s say the flu wiped out ninety-nine percent of the population. Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but let’s use that figure just so we have a place to put our feet. If the flu was ninety-nine percent fatal, that means it wiped out damned near two hundred and eighteen million people, just in this country.” He looked at Stu’s shocked face and nodded grimly. “Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but we can make a pretty good guess that figure’s in the ballpark. Makes the Nazis look like pikers, doesn’t it?”
