The Stand

He lay somewhere between, where most living things spend a good deal of time when they are hurt badly, but not badly enough to be in the mortal shadow. A deep itch lay in his belly like heat, the itch of healing. Glen would have to spend a good many hours trying to distract him from that itch so he wouldn’t scratch off the bandages, reopen the wounds, and reinfect them. But that was later. Just now Kojak (who still thought of himself occasionally as Big Steve, which had been his original name) was content to drift in the place in between. The wolves had come for him in Nebraska, while he was still sniffing dejectedly around the house on jacklifters in the little town of Hemingford Home. The scent of THE MAN—the feel of THE MAN—had led to this place and then stopped. Where had he gone? Kojak didn’t know. And then the wolves, four of them, had come out of the corn like ragged spirits of the dead. Their eyes blazed at Kojak, and their lips wrinkled back from their teeth to let out the low, ripping growls of their intent. Kojak had retreated before them, growling himself, his paws stiff-out and digging at the dirt of Mother Abagail’s dooryard. To the left hung the tire-swing, casting its depthless round shadow. The lead wolf had attacked just as Kojak’s hindquarters slipped into the shadow cast by the porch. It came in low, going for the belly, and the others followed. Kojak sprang up and over the leader’s snapping muzzle, giving the wolf his underbelly, and as the leader began to bite and scratch, Kojak fastened his own teeth in the wolf’s neck, his teeth sinking deep, letting blood, and the wolf howled and tried to struggle away, its courage suddenly gone. As it pulled away, Kojak’s jaws closed with lightning speed on the wolf’s tender muzzle, and the wolf uttered a howling, abject scream as its nose was laid open to the nostrils and pulled to strings and tatters. It fled yipping with agony, shaking its head crazily from side to side, spraying droplets of blood to the left and right, and in the crude telepathy that all animals of like kind share, Kojak could read its over-and-over thought clearly enough:

(wasps in me o the wasps the wasps in my head wasps are up my head o)

And then the others hit him, one from the left and another from the right like huge blunt bullets, the last of the trio submarining in low, grinning, snapping, ready to pull out his intestines. Kojak had broken to the right, baying hoarsely, wanting to deal with that one first so he could get under the porch. If he could get under the porch he could stand them off, maybe forever. Lying on the porch now he relived the battle in a kind of slow motion: the growls and howls, the strikes and withdrawals, the smell of blood that had gotten into his brain and gradually turned him into a kind of fighting machine, unaware of his own wounds until later. He sent the wolf that had been on his right the way of the first, one of its eyes dead and a huge, gouting, and probably mortal wound in the side of its throat. But the wolf had done its own damage in return; most of it was superficial, but two of the gores were extremely deep, wounds that would heal to hard and twisting scar-tissue like a scrawling lowercase t. Even when he was an old, old dog (and Kojak lived another sixteen years, long after Glen Bateman died), those scars would pain and throb on wet days. He had fought free, had scrambled under the porch, and when one of the two remaining wolves, overcome with bloodlust, tried to wriggle in after him, Kojak sprang on it, pinned it, and ripped its throat out. The other retreated almost to the edge of the corn, whining uneasily. If Kojak had come out to do battle, it would have fled with its tail between its legs. But Kojak didn’t come out, not then. He was done in. He could only lie on his side, panting rapidly and weakly, licking his wounds and growling deep in his chest whenever he saw the shadow of the remaining wolf draw near. Then it was dark, and a misty halfmoon rode the sky over Nebraska. And each time the last wolf heard Kojak alive and presumably still ready to fight, it shied away, whining. Sometime after midnight it left, leaving Kojak alone to see if he would live or die. In the early morning hours he had felt the presence of some other animal, something that terrified him into a series of soft whimpers. It was a thing in the corn, a thing walking in the corn, hunting for him, perhaps. Kojak lay shivering, waiting to see if this thing would find him, this horrible thing that felt like a Man and a Wolf and an Eye, some dark thing like an ancient crocodile in the corn. Some unknown time later, after the moon went down, Kojak felt that it was gone. He fell asleep. He had lain up under the porch for three days, coming out only when hunger and thirst drove him out. There was always a puddle of water gathered below the lip of the handpump in the yard, and in the house there were all sorts of rich scraps, many of them from the meal Mother Abagail had cooked for Nick’s party. When Kojak felt he could go on, he knew where to go. It was not a scent that told him; it was a deep sense of heat that had come out of his own deep and mortal time, a glowing pocket of heat to the west of him. And so he came, limping most of the last five hundred miles on three legs, the pain always gnawing at his belly. From time to time he was able to smell THE MAN, and thus knew he was on the right track. And at last he was here. THE MAN was here. There were no wolves here. Food was here. There was no sense of that dark Thing… the Man with the stink of a wolf and the feel of an Eye that could see you over long miles if it happened to turn your way. For now, things were fine. And so thinking (so far as dogs can think in their careful relating to a world seen almost wholly through feelings), Kojak drifted down deeper, now into real sleep, now into a dream, a good dream of chasing rabbits through the clover and timothy grass that was belly-high and wet with soothing dew. His name was Big Steve. This was the north forty. And oh the rabbits are everywhere this gray and endless morning —

As he dreamed, his paws twitched.

Chapter 53

Excerpts from the Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee Meeting

August 17, 1990

This meeting was held at the home of Larry Underwood on South Forty-second Street in the Table Mesa area. All members of the committee were present…

The first item of business concerned having the ad hoc committee elected as the permanent Boulder Committee. Fran Goldsmith was recognized.

Fran: “Both Stu and I agreed that the best, easiest way for us all to get elected would be if Mother Abagail endorsed the whole slate. It would save us the problem of having twenty people nominated by their friends and possibly upsetting the applecart. But now we’ll have to do it another way. I’m not going to suggest anything that isn’t perfectly democratic, and you all know the plan anyway, but I just want to re-emphasize that each of us has to make sure we have someone who will nominate and second us. We won’t do it for each other, obviously—that would look too much like the Mafia. And if you can’t find one person to nominate you and another to second you, you might as well give up anyway.”

Sue: “Wow! That’s sneaky, Fran.”

Fran: “Yes—it is, a little.”

Glen: “We’re edging back into the subject of the committee’s morality, and although I’m sure we all find that an endlessly fascinating topic, I’d like to see it tabled for the next few months. I think we just have to agree that we’re serving in the Free Zone’s best interest and leave it at that.”

Ralph: “You sound a little pissed, Glen.”

Glen: “I am a little pissed. I admit it. The very fact that we’ve spent so much time eating at our own livers on this subject should give a pretty good indication as to where our hearts are.”

Sue: “The road to hell is paved with—”

Glen: “Good intentions, yes, and since we all seem so worried about our intentions, we must surely be on the highway to heaven.”

Glen then said that he had intended to address the committee on the subject of our scouts or spies or whatever you want to call them, but that he wanted to make a motion instead that we meet to discuss that on the nineteenth. Stu asked him why.

Glen: “Because we might not all be here on the nineteenth. Somebody might get voted out. It’s a remote possibility, but no one really knows what a large group of people is going to do when they all get together in one place. We ought to be as careful as we can.”

That was good for a moment of silence, and the committee voted, 7–0, to meet on the nineteenth—as a Permanent Committee—to discuss the question of the scouts… or spies… or whatever.

Stu was recognized to put a third item of business before the committee, concerning Mother Abagail.

Stu: “As you know, she’s gone off for reasons of her own. Her note says she’ll ‘be gone for a while,’ which is pretty vague, and that she’ll be back ‘if it’s God’s will.’ Now, that’s not very encouraging. We’ve had a search-party out for three days now and we haven’t found a thing. We don’t want to just drag her back, not if she doesn’t want to come, but if she’s lying up somewhere with a busted leg or if she’s unconscious, that’s a lot different. Now part of the problem is that there just aren’t enough of us to search all the wildlands around here. But another part of it is the same thing that’s slowing us down at the power station. There’s just no organization. So what I’m looking for is permission to put this search-party on the agenda of the big meeting tomorrow night, same as the power