The Stand

bike where it had been. He climbed the embankment to the road and looked both ways. He scuttled across the median strip and after another cautious look, he trotted across the westbound lanes of I-15.

They know about you now, Tom.

He caught his foot in the guardrail cable on the far side and tumbled most of the way to the bottom of the embankment beside the highway. He lay in a heap for a moment, heart pounding. There was no sound but faint wind, whining over the broken floor of the desert.

He got up and began to scan the horizon. His eyes were keen and the desert air was crystal clear. Before long he saw it, standing out against the starstrewn sky like an exclamation point. God’s Finger. As he faced due east, the stone monolith was at ten o’clock. He thought he could walk to it in an hour or two. But the clear, magnifying quality of the air had fooled more experienced hikers than Tom Cullen, and he was bemused by the way the stone finger always seemed to remain the same distance away. Midnight passed, then two o’clock. The great clock of stars in the sky had revolved. Tom began to wonder if the rock that looked so much like a pointing finger might not be a mirage. He rubbed his eyes, but it was still there. Behind him, the turnpike had merged into the dark distance.

When he looked back at the Finger, it did seem to be a little closer, and by 4 A.M., when an inner voice began to whisper that it was time to find a good hiding place for the coming day, there could be no doubt that he had drawn nearer to the landmark. But he would not reach it this night.

And when he did reach it (assuming that they didn’t find him when day came)? What then?

It didn’t matter.

Nick would tell him. Good old Nick.

Tom couldn’t wait to get back to Boulder and see him, laws, yes.

He found a fairly comfortable spot in the shade of a huge spine of rock and went to sleep almost instantly. He had come about thirty miles northeast that night, and was approaching the Mormon Mountains.

During the afternoon, a large rattlesnake crawled in beside him to get out of the heat of the day. It coiled itself by Tom, slept awhile, and then passed on.

Flagg stood at the edge of the roof sundeck that afternoon, looking east. The sun would be going down in another four hours, and then the retard would be on the move again.

A strong and steady desert breeze lifted his dark hair back from his hot brow. The city ended so abruptly, giving up to the desert. A few billboards on the edge of nowhere, and that was it. So much desert, so many places to hide. Men had walked into that desert before and had never been seen again.

“But not this time,” he whispered. “I’ll have him. I’ll have him.”

He could not have explained why it was so important to have the retard; the rationality of the problem constantly eluded him. More and more he felt an urge to simply act, to move, to do. To destroy.

Last evening, when Lloyd had informed him of the helicopter explosions and the deaths of the three pilots, he had had to use every resource at his command to keep from going into an utter screaming rage. His first impulse had been to order an armored column assembled immediately—tanks, flametracks, armored trucks, the whole works. They could be in Boulder in five days. The whole stinking mess would be over in a week and a half.

Sure.

And if there was early snow in the mountains passes, that would be the end of the great Wehrmacht. And it was already September 14. Good weather was no longer a sure bet. How in hell’s name had it gotten so late so fast?

But he was the strongest man on the face of the earth, wasn’t he? There might be another like him in Russia or China or Iran, but that was a problem for ten years from now. Now all that mattered was that he was ascendant, he knew it, he felt it. He was strong, that was all the retard could tell them… if he managed to avoid getting lost in the desert or freezing to death in the mountains. He could only tell them that Flagg’s people lived in fear of the Walkin Dude and would obey the Walkin Dude’s least command. He could only tell them things that would demoralize their will further. So why did he have this steady, gnawing feeling that Cullen must be found and killed before he could leave the West?

Because it’s what I want, and I am going to have what I want, and that is reason enough.

And Trashcan Man. He had thought he could dismiss Trash entirely. He had thought Trashcan Man could be thrown away like a defective tool. But he had succeeded in doing what the entire Free Zone could not have done. He had thrown dirt into the foolproof machinery of the dark man’s conquest.

I misjudged —

It was a hateful thought, and he would not allow his mind to follow it to its conclusion. He threw his glass over the roof’s low parapet and saw it twinkling, end over end, out and out, then descending. A randomly vicious thought, a petulant child’s thought, streaked across his mind: Hope it hits someone on the head!

Far below, the glass struck the parking lot and exploded… so far below, the dark man could not even hear it.

They had found no more bombs at Indian Springs. The entire place had been turned upside down. Apparently Trash had booby-trapped the first things he had come to, the choppers in Hangar 9 and the trucks in the motor pool next door.

Flagg had reiterated his orders that the Trashcan Man was to be killed on sight. The thought of Trash wandering around out in all that government property, where God knew what might be stored, now made him distinctly nervous.

Nervous.

Yes. The beautiful surety was still evaporating. When had that evaporation begun? He could not say, not for sure. All he knew was that things were getting flaky. Lloyd knew it too. He could see it in the way that Lloyd looked at him. It might not be a bad idea if Lloyd had an accident before the winter was out. He was asshole buddies with too many of the people in the palace guard, people like Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott. Even Burlson, who had spilled that business about the red list. He had thought idly about skinning Paul Burlson alive for that.

But if Lloyd had known about the red list, none of this would have —

“Shut up,” he muttered. “Just… shut… up!”

But the thought wouldn’t go away that easily. Why hadn’t he given Lloyd the names of the top-echelon Free Zone people? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember. It seemed there had been a perfectly good reason at the time, but the more he tried to grasp it, the more it slipped through his fingers. Had it only been a sly-stupid decision not to put too many of his eggs in one basket—a feeling that not too many secrets should be stored with any one person, even a person as stupid and loyal as Lloyd Henreid?

An expression of bewilderment rippled across his face. Had he been making such stupid decisions all along?

And just how loyal was Lloyd, anyway? That expression in his eyes—

Abruptly he decided to push it all aside and levitate. That always made him feel better. It made him feel stronger, more serene, and it cleared his head. He looked out at the desert sky.

(I am, I am, I am, I AM —)

His rundown bootheels left the surface of the sundeck, hovered, rose another inch. Then two. Peace came to him, and suddenly he knew he could find the answers. Everything was clearer. First he must—

“They’re coming for you, you know.”

He crashed back down at the sound of that soft, uninflected voice. The jarring shock went up his legs and his spine all the way to his jaw, which clicked. He whirled around like a cat. But his blooming grin withered when he saw Nadine. She was dressed in a white nightgown, yards of gauzy material that billowed around her body. Her hair, as white as the gown, blew about her face. She looked like some pallid deranged sibyl, and in spite of himself, Flagg was afraid. She took a delicate step closer. Her feet were bare.

“They’re coming. Stu Redman, Glen Bateman, Ralph Brentner, and Larry Underwood. They’re coming and they’ll kill you like a chicken-stealing weasel.”

“They’re in Boulder,” he said, “hiding under their beds and mourning their dead nigger woman.”

“No,” she said indifferently. “They’re almost in Utah now. They’ll be here soon. And they’ll stamp you out like a disease.”