The Stand

ago Carley Yates in that long-ago Powtanville would have called it with unfailing pool-hall vulgarity), and that hand had swelled up like a rubber glove filled with water. An unearthly fire had filled his head. And yet he had pushed on.

He had finally returned to Indian Springs, still feeling like a figment of someone else’s imagination. There had been some good-natured talk as the men examined his finds—incendiary fuses, contact land mines, small stuff, really. Trash had begun to feel good for the first time since the scorpion had stung him.

And then, with no warning at all, time had sideslipped and he was back in Powtanville. Someone had said, “People who play with fire wet the bed, Trash,” and he had looked up; expecting to see Billy Jamieson, but it hadn’t been Bill, it was Rich Groudemore from Powtanville, grinning and picking his teeth with a match, his fingers black with grease because he’d strolled up to the pool-hall from the Texaco on the corner to have a game of nine-ball on his break. And someone else said, “You better put that away, Richie, Trash is back in town,” and that sounded like Steve Tobin at first, but it wasn’t Steve. It was Carley Yates in his old, scuffed, and hoody motorcycle jacket. With growing horror he had seen they were all there, unquiet corpses come back to life. Richie Groudemore and Carley and Norm Morrisette and Hatch Cunningham, the one who was getting bald even though he was only eighteen and all of the others called him Hatch Cunnilingus.

And they were leering at him. It came thick and fast then, through a feverhaze of years. Hey, Trash, why dintchoo torch the SCHOOL? Hey, Trashy, ya burned ya pork off yet? Hey, Trashcan Man, I heard you snort Ronson lighter fluid, that true?

Then Carley Yates: Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?

He tried to scream at them, but all that had come out was a whisper: “Don’t ask me about old lady Semple’s pension check no more.” And he ran.

The rest of it was a dream. Getting the incendiary fuses and slapping them on the trucks in the motor pool. His hands had done their own work, his mind far away in a confused whirl. People had seen him coming and going between the motor pool and his sandtrack with its big balloon tires, and some of them had even waved, but no one had come over and asked what he was doing. After all, he wore Flagg’s charm.

Trashy did his work and thought about Terre Haute.

In Terre Haute they had made him bite on a rubber thing when they gave him the shocks, and the man at the controls sometimes looked like the father-killing sheriff and sometimes like Carley Yates and sometimes like Hatch Cunnilingus. And he always swore hysterically to himself that this time he wouldn’t piss himself. And he always did.

When the trucks were fixed, he had gone into the nearest hangar and had fixed the choppers in there. He had wanted timer fuses to do that job right, and so he had gone into the messhall kitchen and had found over a dozen of those five-and-dime plastic timers. You set them for fifteen minutes or half an hour and when they got back to zero they went ding and you knew it was time to take your pie out of the oven. Only instead of going ding this time, Trash had thought, they are going to go bang. He liked that. That was pretty good. If Carley Yates or Rich Groudemore tried taking one of those copters up, they were going to get a big fat surprise. He had simply hooked the kitchen timers up to the copter ignition systems.

When it was done, a moment of sanity had come back. A moment of choice. He had stared around wonderingly at the helicopters parked in the echoing hangar and then down at his hands. They smelled like a roll of burned caps. But this was not Powtanville. There were no helicopters in Powtanville. The Indiana sun did not shine with the savage brilliance of this sun. He was in Nevada. Carley and his pool-hall buddies were dead. Dead of the superflu.

Trash had turned around and looked doubtfully at his handiwork. What was he doing, sabotaging the dark man’s equipment? It was senseless, insane. He would undo it, and quickly.

Oh, but the lovely explosions.

The lovely fires.

Flaming jet fuel streaming everywhere. Helicopters exploding out of the air. So beautiful.

And he had suddenly thrown his new life away. He had trotted back to his sand-crawler, a furtive grin on his sun-blackened face. He had gotten in and had driven away… but not too far away. He had waited, and finally a fuel truck had come out of the motor pool garage and had trundled across the tarmac like a large olive-drab beetle. And when it blew, exploding greasy fire in every direction, Trash had dropped his fieldglasses and had bellowed at the sky, shaking his fists in inarticulate joy. But the joy had not lasted long. It had been replaced by deadly terror and sick, mourning sorrow.

He had driven northwest into the desert, pushing the sand-crawler along at near-suicidal speeds. How long ago? He didn’t know. If he had been told that this was the sixteenth of September, he would only have nodded in a total blank lack of understanding.

He thought he would kill himself, that there was nothing else left for him, every hand was turned against him now, and that was just as it was supposed to be. When you bit the hand that fed you, you expected that extended hand to curl into a fist. That wasn’t only the way life went; that was justice. He had three large cans of gasoline in the back of the track. He would pour it all over himself and then strike a match. It was what he deserved.

But he hadn’t done it. He didn’t know why. Some force, more powerful than the agony of his remorse and loneliness, had stopped him. It seemed that even burning himself to death like a Buddhist monk was not penance enough. He had slept. And when he awoke, he discovered that a new thought had crept into his brain as he slept, and that thought was:

REDEMPTION.

Was it possible? He didn’t know. But if he found something… something big … and brought it to the dark man in Las Vegas, might it not be possible? And even if REDEMPTION was impossible, perhaps ATONEMENT was not. If it was true, there was still a chance he could die content.

What? What could it be? What was big enough for REDEMPTION, or even for ATONEMENT? Not landmines or a fleet of flametracks, not grenades or automatic weapons. None of those things were big enough. He knew where there were two large experimental bombers (they had been built without congressional knowledge, paid for out of blind defense funds), but he could not get them back to Vegas, and even if he could, there was no one there who could fly them. From the looks of them, they crewed at least ten, maybe more.

He was like an infrared scope that senses heat in darkness and reveals those heat sources as vague red-devil shapes. He was able, in some strange way, to sense the things that had been left behind in this wasteland, where so many military projects had been carried out. He could have gone straight west, straight to Project Blue, where the whole thing had begun. But cold plague was not to his taste, and in his confused but not entirely illogical way, he thought it would not be to Flagg’s taste, either. Plague didn’t care who it killed. It might have been better for the human race if the original funders of Project Blue had kept that simple fact in mind.

So he had gone northwest from Indian Springs, into the sandy desolation of the Nellis Air Force Range, stopping his crawler when he had to cut through high barbed-wire fences marked with signs that read—US GOVERNMENT PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING and ARMED SENTRIES and GUARD DOGS and THERE IS A HIGH- VOLTAGE CHARGE PASSING THROUGH THESE WIRES. But the electricity was dead, like the guard dogs and the armed sentries, and Trashcan Man drove on, correcting his course from time to time. He was being drawn, drawn to something. He didn’t know what it was, but he thought it was big. Big enough.

The crawler’s Goodyear balloon tires rolled steadily on, carrying Trash through dry washes and up slopes so rocky that they looked like half-exposed stegosaurus spines. The air hung still and dry. The temperature hovered at just above 100. The only sound was the drone of the crawler’s modified Studebaker engine.

He topped a knoll, saw what was below, and threw the transmission into neutral for a moment to get a better look.

There was a huddled complex of buildings down there, shimmering through the rising heat like quicksilver. Quonset huts and low cinderblock. Vehicles stalled here and there on dusty streets. The whole area was surrounded by three courses of barbed wire, and he could see the porcelain conductors along the wire. These were not the small conductors the size of a knuckle that passed along a weak stay-away charge; these were the giant ones, the size of a closed fist.