The Stand

again? They might, too, because it wasn’t just a question of age. They had taken the goddam deaf-mute, and he was only a few years older than Harold himself.

The coal of resentment was burning brightly now. Think, sure, think—that was easy to say, and sometimes it was even to do… but what good was thinking when all it got you from the Neanderthals who ran the world was a horselaugh, or even worse, a thank-you letter?

He reached the bus station. It was still early, and no one was there yet. There was a poster on the door saying there was going to be another public meeting on the twenty-fifth. Public meeting? Public circle jerk.

The waiting room was festooned with travel posters and ads for the Greyhound Ameripass and pictures of big mother-humping Scenicruisers rolling through Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, Nashville, wherever. He sat down and stared with a cold morning eye at the darkened pinball machines, the Coke machine, the coffee machine that would also dispense a Lipton Cup-a-Soup that smelled vaguely like a dead fish. He lit a cigarette and threw the matchstub on the floor.

They had adopted the Constitution. Whooppee. How very-very and too-too. They had even sung The Star- Speckled Banana, for Christ’s sweet sake. But suppose Harold Lauder had gotten up, not to make a few constructive suggestions, but to tell them the facts of life in this first year after the plague?

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Harold Emery Lauder and I am here to tell you that, in the words of the old song, the fundamental things apply as time goes by. Like Darwin. The next time you stand and sing the National Anthem, friends and neighbors, chew on this: America is dead, dead as a doornail, dead as Jacob Marley and Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper and Harry S Truman, but the principles just propounded by Mr. Darwin are still very much alive—as alive as Jacob Marley’s ghost was to Ebenezer Scrooge. While you are meditating on the beauties of constitutional rule, spare a little time to meditate on Randall Flagg, Man of the West. I doubt very much if he has any time to spare for such fripperies as public meetings and ratifications and discussions on the true meaning of a peach in the best liberal mode. Instead he has been concentrating on the basics, on his Darwin, preparing to wipe the great Formica counter of the universe with your dead bodies. Ladies and gentlemen, let me modestly suggest that while we are trying to get the lights on and waiting for a doctor to find our happy little hive, he may be searching eagerly for someone with a pilot’s credentials so he can start overflights of Boulder in the best Francis Gary Powers tradition. While we debate the burning question of who will be on the Street Cleaning Committee, he has probably already seen to the creation of a Gun Cleaning Committee, not to mention mortars, missile sites, and possibly even germ warfare centers. Of course we know this country doesn’t have any germ or biological warfare centers, that’s one of the things that makes this country great—what country, ha-ha—but you should realize that while we’re busy getting all the wagons in a circle, he’s —

“Hey, Hawk, you pullin overtime?”

Harold looked up, smiling. “Yeah, I thought I’d get some,” he told Weizak. “I clocked you when I came in. You made six bucks already.”

Weizak laughed. “You’re a card, Hawk, you know that?”

“I am,” Harold agreed, still smiling. He began to relace his boots. “A wild card.”

Chapter 56

Stu spent the next day at the power station, wrapping motors, and was cycling home at the end of the workday. He had reached the small park opposite the First National Bank when Ralph hailed him over. He parked his cycle and walked over to the bandshell where Ralph was sitting.

“I’ve kind of been looking for you, Stu. You got a minute?”

“Just one. I’m late for supper. Frannie’ll be worried.”

“Yeah. Been up to the power station wrapping copper, from the look of your hands.” Ralph looked absent and worried.

“Yeah. Not even workmen’s gloves do much good. My hands are wrecked.”

Ralph nodded. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the park, some of them looking at the narrow-gauge railway train that had once gone between Boulder and Denver. A trio of young women had spread out a picnic supper. Stu found it very pleasant just to sit here with his wounded hands in his lap. Maybe marshaling won’t be so bad, he thought. At least it’ll get me off that goddam assembly line in East Boulder.

“How’s it going out there?” Ralph asked.

“Me, I wouldn’t know—I’m just hired help, like the rest. Brad Kitchner says it’s going like a house afire. He says the lights will be back on by the end of the first week of September, maybe sooner, and that we’ll have heat by the middle of the month. Of course, he’s pretty young to be making with the predictions…”

“I’ll put my money on Brad,” Ralph said. “I trust im. He’s been gettin a lot of what you call on-the-job training.” Ralph tried to laugh; the laugh turned into a sigh which seemed fetched up from the big man’s bootheels.

“Why you so down at the mouth, Ralph?”

“I got some news on my radio,” Ralph said. “Some of it’s good, some of it… well, some of its not so good, Stu. I want you to know, because there’s no way to keep it secret. Lots of people in the Zone with CBs. I imagine some were listening when I was talking to these new folks coming in.”

“How many?”

“Over forty. One of them’s a doctor, name of George Richardson. He sounds like a fine man. Level- headed.”

“Well, that’s great news!”

“He’s from Derbyshire, Tennessee. Most of the people in this group are sort of mid-Southern. Well, it seems they had a pregnant woman with them, and her time come up ten days ago, on the thirteenth. This doctor delivered her of them—twins, she had—and they were fine. At first they were fine.” Ralph lapsed back into silence, his mouth working.

Stu grabbed him. “They died? The babies died? That what you’re trying to tell me? That they died? Talk to me, dammit!”

“They died,” Ralph said in a low voice. “One of them went in twelve hours. Appeared to just choke to death. The other went two days later. Nothing Richardson could do to save them. The woman went loony. Raving about death and destruction and no more babies. You want to make sure Fran isn’t around when they come in, Stu. That’s what I wanted to tell you. And that you should let her know about this right away. Because if you don’t, someone else will.”

Stu let go of Ralph’s shirt slowly.

“This Richardson, he wanted to know how many pregnant women we had, and I said only one that we know of right now. He asked how far along she was and I said four months. Is that right?”

“She’s five months now. But Ralph, is he sure those babies died of the superflu? Is he sure?”

“No, he’s not, and you gotta tell Frannie that, too, so she understands it. He said it could have been any number of things… the mother’s diet… something hereditary… a respiratory infection… or maybe they were just, you know, defective babies. He said it could have been the Rh factor, whatever, that is. He just couldn’t tell, them being born in the middle of a field beside the doggone Interstate 70. He said that him and about three others who were in charge of their group sat up late at night and talked it over. Richardson, he told them what it might mean if it was the Captain Trips that killed those babies, and how important it was for them to find out one way or the other for sure.”

“Glen and I talked about that,” Stu said bleakly, “the day I met him. July Fourth, that was. It seems so long ago… anyway, if it was the superflu that killed those babies it probably means that in forty or fifty years we can leave the whole shebang to the rats and the houseflies and the sparrows.”

“I guess that’s pretty much what Richardson told them. Anyway, they were some forty miles west of Chicago, and he persuaded them to turn around the next day so they could take the bodies back to a big hospital where he could do an autopsy. He said he could find out for sure if it was the superflu. He saw enough of it at the end of June. I guess all doctors did.”

“Yeah.”

“But when the morning came, the babies were gone. That woman had buried them, and she wouldn’t say where. They spent two days digging, thinking that she couldn’t have gone too far away from the camp or buried them too deep, being just over her delivery and all. But they didn’t find them, and she wouldn’t say where no matter how much they tried to explain how important it was. Poor woman was just all the way off’n her