The Stand

indent here, the only indent in the whole book, as far as Frannie could tell, excepting those which began each boxed motto. They read that first sentence holding the ledger between them like children at a choir practice and Fran said “Oh!” in a small, strangled voice and stepped away, her hand pressed lightly to her mouth.

“Fran, we have to take the book,” Larry said.

“Yes—”

“And show it to Stu. I don’t know if Leo’s right about them being on the dark man’s side, but at the very least, Harold is dangerously disturbed. You can see that.”

“Yes,” she said again. She felt faint, weak. So this was how the matter of the diaries ended. It was as if she had known, as if she had known it all from the moment she saw that big smudged thumbprint, and she had to keep telling herself not to faint, not to faint.

“Fran? Frannie? Are you all right?”

Larry’s voice. From far away.

The first sentence in Harold’s ledger: My great pleasure this delightful post-Apocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too.

“Ralph? Ralph Brentner, you home? Hooo-hooo, anybody home? ”

She stood on the steps, looking at the house. No motorcycles in the yard, only a couple of bikes parked around to one side. Ralph would have heard her, but there was the mute to think about. The deaf-mute. You could holler until you were blue and he wouldn’t answer and still he, might be there.

Shifting her shopping bag from one arm to the other, Nadine tried the door and found it unlocked. She stepped inside out of the fine mist which was falling. She was in a small foyer. Four steps went up to the kitchen, and a flight of them went down to the basement area where, Harold said Andros had his apartment. Putting her most pleasant expression on her face, Nadine went downstairs, fixing her excuse in her mind if he should be there.

I came right in because I didn’t think you’d know I was knocking. Some of us wanted to know if there’s going to be a late shift wrapping those two motors that blew. Did Brad say anything to you?

There were only two rooms down here. One of them was a bedroom as simple as a monk’s cell. The other was a study. There was a desk, a big chair, a wastebasket, a bookcase. The top of the desk was littered with scraps of paper and she looked through them idly. Most of them made little sense to her—she guessed they were Nick’s side of some conversation (I guess so, but shouldn’t we ask him if it can be done in some simpler way? one of them read). Others seemed to be memos to himself, jottings, thoughts. A few of them reminded her of the boxes in Harold’s ledger, what he called his “Guideposts to a Better Life” with a sarcastic smile.

One read: Talk to Glen about trade. Do any of us know how trade starts? Scarcity of goods, isn’t it? Or a modified corner on some market? Skills. That may be a key word. What if Brad Kitchner decides to sell instead of giving away? Or the doc? What would we pay with? Hmmm.

Another: Community protection is a two-way street.

Another: Every time we talk about the law I spend the night having nightmares about Shoyo. Watching them die. Watching Childress throw his supper around the cell. The law, the law, what do we do about the goddamned law? Capital punishment. Now there’s a smiley thought. When Brad gets the power on, how long before someone asks him to rig up an electric chair?

She turned away from the scraps—reluctantly. It was fascinating to look through papers left by a man who could think wholly only by writing (one of her college profs had been fond of saying that the thought process can never be complete without articulation), but her purpose down here was already completed. Nick was not here, no one was here. To linger overlong would be to press her luck unnecessarily.

She went back upstairs. Harold had told her they would probably meet in the living room. It was a huge room, carpeted with a thick wine-colored shag rug, dominated by a freestanding fireplace that went up through the roof in a column of rock. The entire west wall was glass, giving on a magnificent view of the Flatirons. It made her feel as exposed as a bug on a wall. She knew that the outer surface of the thermoplex was iodized so that anyone outside would only see a mirrorlike reflection, but the psychological feeling was still one of utter exposure. She wanted to finish quickly.

On the southern side of the room she found what she was looking for, a deep closet that Ralph hadn’t cleaned out. Coats hung far back inside, and in the rear corner there was a tangle of boots and mittens and winter woolens about three feet deep.

Working quickly, she took the groceries out of her shopping bag. They were camouflage, and there was only a single layer of them. Beneath the cans of tomato paste and sardines was the Hush Puppies shoebox with the dynamite and the walkie-talkie inside.

“If I put it in a closet, will it still work?” she had asked. “Won’t the extra wall muffle the blast?”

“Nadine,” Harold had responded, “if that device works, and I have no reason whatever to believe it won’t, it will take the house and most of the surrounding hillside. Put it anywhere you think it will be unobserved until their meeting. A closet will be fine. The extra wall will blow out and become shrapnel. I trust your judgment, dear. It’s going to be just like the old fairy tale about the tailor and the flies. Seven at a blow. Only in this case, we’re dealing with a bunch of political cockroaches.”

Nadine pushed aside boots and scarves, made a hole, and slipped the shoebox into it. She covered it over again and then worked her way out of the closet. There. Done. For better or worse.

She left the house quickly, not looking back, trying to ignore the voice that wouldn’t stay dead, the voice that was now telling her to go back in there and pull the wires that ran between the blasting caps and the walkie-talkie, telling her to give this up before it drove her mad. Because wasn’t that what was really lying somewhere up ahead, now maybe less than two weeks ahead? Wasn’t madness the final logical conclusion?

She slipped the bag of groceries into the Vespa’s carrier and kicked the machine into life. And all the time she was driving away, that voice went on: You’re not going to leave that there, are you? You’re not going to leave that bomb in there, are you?

In a world where so many have died —

She leaned into a turn, barely able to see where she was going. Tears had begun to blur her eyes.

–the one great sin is to take a human life.

Seven lives here. No, more than that, because the committee was going to hear reports from the heads of several subcommittees.

She stopped at the corner of Baseline and Broadway, thinking she would turn around and go back. She was shuddering all over.

And later she would never be able to explain to Harold precisely what had happened—in truth, she never even tried. It was a foretaste of the horrors to come.

She felt a blackness creeping over her vision.

It came like a dark curtain slowly drawn, flipping and flapping in a mild breeze. Every now and then the breeze would gust, the curtain would flap more vigorously, and she would see a bit of daylight under its hem, a little bit of this deserted intersection.

But the curtain came over her vision in steady blackout drifts and soon she was lost in it. She was blind, she was deaf, she was without the sense of touch. The thinking creature, the Nadine-ego, drifted in a warm black cocoon like seawater, like amniotic fluid.

And she felt him creep into her.

A shriek built up within her, but she had no mouth with which to scream.

Penetration: entropy.

She didn’t know what those words meant, put together like that; she only knew that they were right.

It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Later, metaphors occurred to her to describe it, and she rejected them, one by one:

You’re swimming and suddenly, in the midst of the warm water, you’re treading water in a pocket of deep, numbing cold.

You’ve been given Novocain and the dentist pulls a tooth. It comes out with a painless tug. You spit blood into the white enamel basin. There’s a hole in you; you’ve been gouged. You can slip your tongue into the hole where