The Stand

be okay. Some of you may have to vomit here at the start. There’s no shame in that; just try to go someplace where the rest won’t have to look at you do it. Once you’ve puked, you’ll find it easier to think that way: cordwood. Nothing but cordwood.”

The men were eyeing each other uncomfortably.

Chad broke them up into three six-man crews. He and the two odd men out went to prepare a place for those who were brought. Each of the three crews were given a specific area of town to work. Harold’s truck had spent the day in the Table Mesa area, working their way slowly west from the Denver-Boulder Turnpike exit ramp. Up Martin Drive to the Broadway intersection. Down Thirty-ninth Street and then back up Fortieth, suburban houses in a tract area now about thirty years old, dating back to the start of Boulder’s population boom, houses with one floor aboveground and a second below.

Chad had provided gas masks from the local National Guard armory, but they didn’t have to use them until after lunch (lunch? what lunch? Harold’s consisted of a can of Berry’s apple pie filling; it was all he could bring himself to eat), when they entered the Church of Latter-Day Saints on lower Table Mesa Drive. They had come here, filled with the plague, and they had died there, over seventy of them, and the stink was enormous.

“Cordwood,” one of Harold’s mates had said in a high, revolted, laughing voice, and Harold had turned and stumbled out past him. He went around the corner of the handsome brick building that had once been a polling place in election years and up came the Berry’s apple pie filling and he discovered that Norris had been right: He really felt better without it.

It took them two trips and most of the afternoon to empty the church. Twenty men, Harold thought, to get rid of all the corpses in Boulder. It’s almost funny. A goodly number of Boulder’s previous population had run like rabbits because of the Air Testing Center scare, but still … Harold supposed that, as the Burial Committee grew with the population, it was just barely possible that they might get most of the bodies in the ground by the first heavy snowfall (not that he himself expected to be around by then), and most of the people would never know how real the danger of some new epidemic—one they weren’t immune to—had been.

The Free Zone Committee was full of bright ideas, he thought with contempt. The committee would be just fine… as long as they had good old Harold Lauder to make sure their shoelaces were tied, of course. Good old Harold’s good enough for that, but not quite good enough to serve on their fucking Permanent Committee. Heavens, no. He had never been quite good enough, not even quite good enough to get a date for the Class Dance at Ogunquit High School, even with a scag. Good God, no, not Harold. Let’s remember, folks, when we get right down to the proverbial place where the ursine mammal evacuated his bowels in the buckwheat, that this is no analytical, logical matter, not even a matter of common sense. When we get right down to it, what we end up with is a frigging beauty contest.

Well, somebody remembers. Somebody is keeping score, kids. And the name of that someone—could we have a drum-roll, please maestro?—Harold Emery Lauder.

So he came back into the church, wiping his mouth and grinning as best he could, nodding that he was ready to go on. Someone clapped him on the back and Harold’s grin widened and he thought: Someday you’re going to lose your hand for that, shitheap.

They made their last run at 4:15 P.M., the body of the dump truck filled with the last of the Latter-Day corpses. In town the truck had to weave laboriously in and out of stalled traffic, but on Colorado 119, three tow trucks had been out all day, latching on to stalled cars and depositing them into the ditches on both sides of the road. They lay there like the overturned toys of some giant-child.

At the burial site, the other two orange trucks were already parked. Men stood around with their rubber gloves off, their fingers white and pruney at the tips from a day of sweating inside rubber. They smoked and talked desultorily. Most of them were very pale.

Norris and his two helpers had it down to a science now. They shook out a huge piece of plastic sheeting on the rocky ground. Norman Kellogg, the Louisianian who was driving Harold’s truck, backed up to the edge of the plastic. The tailgate slammed down and the first bodies fell out onto the plastic crawsheet like partially stiffened ragdolls. Harold wanted to turn away but was afraid that the others might construe it as weakness. He did not mind watching them fall out too much; it was the sound that got him. The sound they made when they hit what was going to become their shroud.

The note of the dumper’s engine deepened and there was a hydraulic whine as the truck’s body began to go up. Now the bodies tumbled out in a grotesque human rain. Harold felt an instant of pity, a feeling so deep it was an ache. Cordwood, he thought. How right he was. That’s all that’s left. Just… cordwood.

“Ho! ” Chad Norris shouted, and Kellogg pulled the dump truck ahead and shut it off. Chad and his helpers stepped onto the plastic carrying rakes and now Harold did turn away, pretending to scan the sky for rain, and he was not alone—but he heard a sound that would haunt him in his dreams, and that was the sound of change falling from the pockets of the dead men and women as Chad and his helpers worked with their rakes, spreading the corpses evenly. The coins falling on the plastic made a sound that reminded Harold absurdly of tiddledywinks. The sickly-sweet stench of corruption drifted up in the warm air.

When he looked back, the three of them were pulling the edges of the plastic shroud together, grunting with the strain, arms bulging. A few of the other men, Harold among them, pitched in. Chad Norris produced a huge industrial stapling gun. Twenty minutes later that part of the job was done, and the plastic lay on the ground like a giant gelatin capsule. Norris climbed into the cab of a bright yellow bulldozer and keyed the engine. The scarred blade thudded down. The dozer rolled forward.

A man named Weizak, also on Harold’s truck, walked away from the scene with the jerky steps of a badly controlled puppet. A cigarette jittered between his fingers. “Man, I can’t watch that,” he said as he passed Harold. “It’s really kind of funny. I never knew I was Jewish until today.”

The bulldozer shoved and rolled the large plastic package into a long rectangular cut in the ground. Chad backed away, shut down, climbed off. Motioning the men to gather around, he walked over to one of the Public Works trucks and put one booted foot up on the running board.

“No football cheers,” he said, “but you did damned good. We put away close to a thousand units today, I guess.”

Units, Harold thought.

“I know this kind of work takes something out of a man. Committee’s promising us another two men before the end of the week, but I know that don’t change the way you guys feel—or the way I feel, for that matter. All I’m saying is that if you’ve had enough, don’t feel like you can take another day of it, you don’t have to worry about avoiding me on the street. But if you feel like you can’t cut it, its awful-damn important that you find someone to take your place tomorrow. So far as I’m concerned, this is the most important job in the Zone. ‘It isn’t too bad now, but if we’ve still got twenty thousand corpses in Boulder next month when it gets to be wet weather, people are going to get sick. If you feel like you can make it, I’ll see you tomorrow morning at the bus station.”

“I’ll be there,” someone said.

“Me too,” Norman Kellogg said. “After a six-hour bath tonight.” There was laughter.

“Count me in,” Weizak chimed in.

“Me too,” Harold said quietly.

“It’s a dirty job,” Norris said in a low, emotional voice. “You’re good men. I doubt if the rest of them will ever know just how good.”

Harold felt a sense of drawing-together, a camaraderie, and he fought against it, suddenly afraid. This was no part of the plan.

“See you tomorrow, Hawk,” Weizak said, and squeezed his shoulder.

Harold’s grin was startled and defensive. Hawk? What kind of joke was that? A bad one, of course. Cheap sarcasm. Calling fat, pimply Harold Lauder Hawk. He felt the old black hate rise, directed at Weizak this time, and then it subsided in sudden confusion. He wasn’t fat anymore. He couldn’t even properly be called stout. His pimples had vanished over the last seven weeks. Weizak didn’t know he had once been a school joke. Weizak didn’t know that Harold’s father had once asked him if he was a homosexual. Weizak didn’t know that Harold had been his popular sister’s cross to bear. And if he had known, Weizak probably wouldn’t have given a sweet shit.

Harold climbed into the back of one of the trucks, his mind churning helplessly. All of a sudden the old