Some unknown time later he paused over the desert floor, looking down at himself. He sank slowly, approaching the body, then sinking into himself. For a moment there was a curious sensation of vertigo, of two things merging into one. Then the Eye was gone and there were only his eyes, staring up at the cold and gleaming stars.
They were coming, yes.
Flagg smiled. Had the old woman told them to come? Would they listen to her if she, on her deathbed, instructed them to commit suicide in that novel way? He supposed it was possible that they would.
What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling:
Was it even possible that they had been turned out?
He lingered lovingly over the idea but in the end could not quite believe it. They were coming of their own choice. They were coming wrapped in righteousness like a clutch of missionaries approaching the cannibals’ village.
Oh, it was so lovely!
Doubts would end. Fears would end. All it would take was the sight of their four heads up on spikes in front of the MGM Grand’s fountain. He would assemble every person in Vegas and make them file past and look. He would have photographs taken, would print fliers, have them sent out to LA and San Francisco and Spokane and Portland.
Five heads. He would put the dog’s head up on a pole, too.
“Good doggy,” Flagg said, and laughed aloud for the first time since Nadine had goaded him into throwing her off the roof. “Good doggy,” he said again, grinning.
He slept well that night, and in the morning he sent out word that the watch on the roads between Utah and Nevada was to be tripled. They were no loner looking for one man going east but four men and a dog going west. And they were to be taken alive. Taken alive at all costs.
Oh, yes.
Chapter 72
“You know,” Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, “I’ve heard the saying ‘That sucks’ for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.” He looked down at his breakfast, which consisted of Morning Star Farms synthetic sausage links, and grimaced.
“No, this is
They were sitting around the campfire, which Larry had rekindled an hour earlier. They were all dressed in warm coats and gloves, and all were on their second cups of coffee. The temperature was about thirty-five degrees, and the sky was cloudy and bleak. Kojak was napping as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his fur.
“I’m done feeding the inner man,” Glen said, getting up. “Give me your poor, your hungry. On second thought, just give me your garbage. I’ll bury it.”
Stu handed him his paper plate and cup. “This walkin’s really something, isn’t it, baldy? I bet you ain’t been in this good shape since you were twenty.”
“Yeah, seventy years ago,” Larry said, and laughed.
“Stu, I was never in this kind of shape,” Glen said grimly, picking up litter and popping it into the plastic sack he intended to bury. “I never
They watched him walk to the edge of the camp with a small entrenching tool. This “walking tour of Colorado and points west,” as Glen put it, had been the hardest on Glen himself. He was the oldest, Ralph Brentner’s senior by twelve years. But somehow he had eased it considerably for the others. His irony was constant but gentle, and he seemed at peace with himself. The fact that he was able to keep going day after day made an impression on the others even if it was not exactly an inspiration. He was fifty-seven, and Stu had seen him working his finger- joints on these last three or four cold mornings, and grimacing as he did it.
“Hurt bad?” Stu had asked him yesterday, about an hour after they had moved out.
“Aspirin takes care of it. It’s arthritis, you know, but it’s not as bad as it’s apt to be in another five or seven years, and frankly, East Texas, I’m not looking that far ahead.”
“You really think he’s going to take us?”
And Glen Bateman had said a peculiar thing: “I will fear no evil.” And that had been the end of the discussion.
Now they heard him digging at the frozen soil and cursing it.
“Quite a fella, ain’t he?” Ralph said.
Larry nodded. “Yes. I think he is.”
“I always thought those college teachers was sissies, but that man sure ain’t. Know what he said when I asked him why he didn’t just throw that crap to one side of the road? Said we didn’t need to start up that kind of shit again. Said we’d started up too many of the old brands of shit already.”
Kojak got up and trotted over to see what Glen was doing. Glen’s voice floated over to them: “Well, there you are, you big lazy turd. I was starting to wonder where you’d gotten off to. Want me to bury you too?”
Larry grinned and took off the mileometer clipped to his belt. He had picked it up in a Golden sports supply shop. You set it according to the length of your stride and then clipped it to your belt like a carpenter’s rule. Each evening he wrote down how far they had walked that day on a dog-eared and often-folded sheet of paper.
“Can I see that cheat sheet?” Stu asked.
“Sure,” Larry said, and handed it over.
At the top of the sheet Larry had printed:
Date
September 6th
September 7th
September 8th
September 9th
September 10th
September 11th
September 12th
September 13th
September 14th
September 15th
September 16th
September 17th
Miles
28.1
27.0
26.5
28.2
27.9
29.1
28.8
29.5
32.0
32.6
35.5
