The Stand

Chapter 65

North of Las Vegas is Emigrant Valley, and that night a small spark of fire glowed in its tumbled wilderness. Randall Flagg sat beside it, moodily cooking the carcass of a small rabbit. He turned it steadily on the crude rotisserie he had made, watching it sizzle and spit grease into the fire. There was a light breeze, blowing the savory smell out into the desert, and the wolves had come. They sat two rises over from his fire, howling at the nearly full moon and at the smell of cooking meat. Every now and then he would glance at them and two or three would begin to fight, biting and snapping and kicking with their powerful back legs until the weakest was banished. Then the others would begin to howl again, their snouts pointed at the bloated, reddish moon.

But the wolves bored him now.

He wore his jeans and his tattered walking boots and his sheepskin jacket with its two buttons on the breast pockets: smiley-smile and HOW’S YOUR PORK? The night wind flapped fitfully at his collar.

He didn’t like the way things were going.

There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn. The old woman had died and at first he had thought that was good. In spite of everything, he had been afraid of the old woman. She had died, and he had told Dayna Jurgens that she had died in a coma… but was it true? He was no longer quite so sure.

Had she talked, at the end? And if so, what had she said?

What were they planning?

He had developed a sort of third eye. It was like the levitating ability; something he had and accepted but which he didn’t really understand. He was able to send it out, to see… almost always. But sometimes the eye fell mysteriously blind. He had been able to look into the old woman’s death chamber, had seen them gathered around her, their tailfeathers still singed from Harold and Nadine’s little surprise… but then the vision had faded away and he had been back in the desert, wrapped in his bedroll, looking up and seeing nothing but Cassiopeia in her starry rocking chair. And there had been a voice inside him that said: She’s gone. They waited for her to talk but she never did.

But he no longer trusted the voice.

There was the troubling matter of the spies.

The Judge, with his head blown off.

The girl, who had eluded him at the last second. And she had known, Goddammit! She had known!

He threw a sudden furious stare at the wolves and nearly half a dozen fell to fighting, their guttural sounds like ripping cloth in the stillness.

He knew all their secrets except… the third. Who was the third? He had sent the Eye out over and over again, and it afforded him with nothing but the cryptic, idiotic face of the moon. M-O-O-N, that spells moon.

Who was the third?

How had the girl been able to escape him? He had been taken utterly by surprise, left with nothing but a handful of her blouse. He had known about her knife, that had been child’s play, but not about that sudden leap at the window-wall. And the coldblooded way she had taken her own life, without a moment’s hesitation. A mere space of seconds and she had been gone.

His thoughts chased each other like weasels in the dark.

Things were getting just a trifle flaky around the edges. He didn’t like it.

Lauder, for instance. There was Lauder.

He had performed so excellently, like one of those little wind-up toys with a key sticking out of its back. Go here. Go there. Do this. Do that. But the dynamite bomb had only gotten two of them— all that planning, all that effort spoiled by that dying old nigger woman’s return. And then… after Harold had been disposed of… he had nearly killed Nadine! He still felt a burst of amazed anger when he thought about it. And the dumb cunt had stood there with her mouth hanging open, waiting for him to do it again, almost as if she wanted to be killed. And who was going to end up with all this, if Nadine died?

Who, if not his son?

The rabbit was done. He slipped it off the spit and onto his tin plate.

“All right, all you asshole gyrenes, chow down!”

That made him grin right out loud. Had he been a Marine once? He thought so. Strictly the Parris Island variety, though. There had been a kid, a defective, name of Boo Dinkway. They had…

What?

Flagg frowned down at his messkit. Had they beaten ole Boo into the ground with those padded poles? Scragged him somehow? He seemed to remember something about gasoline. But what?

In a sudden rage, he almost slung the freshly cooked rabbit into the fire. He should be able to remember that, goddammit!

“Chow down, grunts,” he whispered, but this time there was only a whiff of memory lane.

He was losing himself. Once he had been able to look back over the sixties, seventies, and eighties like a man looking down a double flight of stairs leading into a darkened room. Now he could only clearly remember the events since the superflu. Beyond that there was nothing but a haze that would sometimes lift a tiny bit, just enough to afford a glimpse of some enigmatic object or memory (Boo Dinkway, for instance… if there ever had been such a person) before closing down again.

The earliest memory he could now be sure of was of walking south on US 51, heading toward Mountain City and the home of Kit Bradenton.

Of being born. Born again.

He was no longer strictly a man, if he had ever been one. He was like an onion, slowly peeling away one layer at a time, only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away: organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will… if there ever had been such a thing.

He began to eat the rabbit.

Once, he was quite sure, he would have done a quick fade when things began to get flaky. Not this time. This was his place, his time, and he would take his stand here. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t yet been able to uncover the third spy, or that Harold had gotten out of control at the end and had had the colossal effrontery to try to kill the bride who had been promised, the mother of his son.

Somewhere that strange Trashcan Man was in the desert, sniffing out the weapons which would eradicate the troublesome, worrisome Free Zone forever. His Eye could not follow the Trashcan Man, and in some ways Flagg thought that Trash was stranger than he was himself, a kind of human bloodhound who sniffed cordite and napalm and gelignite with deadly radar accuracy.

In a month or less, the National Guard jets would be flying, with a full complement of Shrike missiles tucked under their wings. And when he was sure that the bride had conceived, they would fly east.

He looked dreamily up at the basketball moon and smiled.

There was one other possibility. He thought the Eye would show him, in time. He might go there, possibly as a crow, possibly as a wolf, possibly as an insect—a praying mantis, perhaps, something small enough to squirm through a carefully concealed vent cap in the middle of a spiky patch of desert grass. He would hop or crawl through dark conduits and finally slip through an air conditioner grille or a stilled exhaust fan.

The place was underground. Just over the border and into California.

There were beakers there, rows and rows of beakers, each with its own neat Dymo tape identifying it: a super cholera, a super anthrax, a new and improved version of the bubonic plague, all of them based on the shifting-antigen ability that had made the superflu so almost universally deadly. There were hundreds of them in this place; assorted flavors, as they used to say in the Life Savers commercials.

How about a little in your water, Free Zone?

How about a nice airburst?

Some lovely Legionnaires’ disease for Christmas, or would you rather have the new and improved Swine flu?

Randy Flagg, the dark Santa, in his National Guard sleigh, with a little virus to drop down every chimney?

He would wait, and he would know the right time when it came round at last.

Something would tell him.