The Stand

steel pipes. They were assembling the pipes on two flatbed trucks in front of the fountain. The welding arcs soon drew a crowd.

“Look, Angie-mom!” Dinny cried. “It’s a fireworks show!”

“Yes, but it’s time for all good little boys to be in bed.” Angie Hirschfield drew the boy away with a secret fear in her heart, feeling that something bad, something perhaps as evil as the superflu itself, was in the making.

“Wanna see! Wanna see the sparks!” Dinny wailed, but she drew him quickly and firmly away.

Julie Lawry approached the Rat-Man, the only fellow in Vegas she considered too creepy to sleep with… except maybe in a pinch. His black skin glimmered in the blue-white glare of the welding arcs. He was tricked out like an Ethiopian pirate—wide silk trousers, a red sash, and a necklace of silver dollars around his scrawny neck.

“What is it, Ratty?” she asked.

“The Rat-Man don’t know, dear, but the Rat-Man got hisself an idea. Yes indeedy he does. It looks like black work tomorrow, very black. Like to slip away for a quick one with Ratty, my dear?”

“Maybe,” Julie said, “but only if you know what all of this is about.”

“Tomorrow all of Vegas gonna know,” Ratty said. “You bet your sweet and delectable little sugarbuns on that. Come along with the Rat-Man, dear, and he show you the nine thousand names of God.”

But Julie, much to the Rat-Man’s displeasure, had slipped away.

By the time Lloyd finally went to sleep, the work was done and the crowd had drifted away. Two large cages stood on the back of the two flatbeds. There were squarish holes in the right and left sides of each. Parked close by were four cars, each with a trailer hitch. Attached to each hitch was a heavy steel towing chain. The chains snaked across the lawn of the Grand, and each ended just inside the squarish holes in the cages.

At the end of each chain there dangled a single steel handcuff.

At dawn on the morning of September 30, Larry heard the door at the far end of the cellblock slide back. Footsteps came rapidly down the corridor. Larry was lying on his cot, hands laced at the back of his head. He had not slept the night before. He had been

(thinking? praying?)

It was all the same thing. Whichever it had been, the old wound in himself had finally closed, leaving him at peace. He had felt the two people that he had been all his life—the real one and the ideal one—merge into one living being. His mother would have liked this Larry. And Rita Blakemoor. It was a Larry to whom Wayne Stukey never would have had to tell the facts. It was a Larry that even that long-ago oral hygienist might have liked.

I’m going to die. If there’s a God—and now I believe there must be—that’s His will. We’re going to die and somehow all of this will end as a result of our dying.

He suspected that Glen Bateman had already died. There had been shooting in one of the other wings the day before, a lot of shooting. It was in the direction that Glen had been taken rather than Ralph. Well, he had been old, his arthritis had been paining him, and whatever Flagg had planned for them this morning was apt to be very unpleasant.

The footsteps reached his cell.

“Get up, Wonder Bread,” a gleeful voice called in. “The Rat-Man has come for yo pale gray ass.”

Larry looked around. A grinning black pirate with a chain of silver dollars around his neck stood at the cell door, a drawn sword in one hand. Behind him stood the bespectacled CPA type. Burlson, his name was.

“What is it?” Larry asked.

“Dear man,” the pirate said, “it is the end. The very end.”

“All right,” Larry said, and got up.

Burlson spoke quickly, and Larry saw that he was scared. “I want you to know that this is not my idea.”

“Nothing around here is, as far as I can see,” Larry said. “Who was killed yesterday?”

“Bateman,” Burlson said, dropping his eyes. “Trying to escape.”

“Trying to escape,” Larry murmured. He began to laugh. Rat-Man joined him, mocked him. They laughed together.

The cell door opened. Burlson stepped forward with the cuffs. Larry offered no resistance; only put out his wrists. Burlson attached the bracelets.

“Trying to escape,” Larry said. “One of these days you’ll be shot trying to escape, Burlson.” His eyes flicked toward the pirate. “You too, Ratty. Just shot trying to escape.” He began to laugh again, and this time Rat-Man didn’t join him. He looked at Larry sullenly and then began to raise his sword.

“Put that down, you ass,” Burlson said.

They made a line of three going out—Burlson, Larry, and the Rat-Man bringing up the rear. When they stepped through the door at the end of the wing, they were joined by another five men. One of them was Ralph, also cuffed.

“Hey, Larry,” Ralph said sorrowfully. “Did you hear? Did they tell you?”

“Yes. I heard.”

“Bastards. It’s almost over for them, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is.”

“You shut up that talk!” one of them growled. “It’s you it’s almost over for. You wait and see what he’s got waiting for you. It’s gonna be quite a party.”

“No, it’s over,” Ralph insisted. “Don’t you know it? Can’t you feel it?”

Ratty pushed Ralph, making him stumble. “Shut up!” he cried. “Rat-Man don’t want to hear no more of that honky bullshit voodoo! No more!”

“You’re awful pale, Ratty,” Larry said, grinning. “Awful pale. You’re the one who looks like graymeat now.”

Rat-Man brandished his sword again, but there was no menace in it. He looked frightened; they all did. There was a feeling in the air, a sense that they had all entered the shadow of some great and onrushing thing.

An olive-drab van with LAS VEGAS COUNTY JAIL on the side stood in the sunny courtyard. Larry and Ralph were pushed in. The doors slammed, the engine started, and they drew away. They sat down on the hard wooden benches, cuffed hands between their knees.

Ralph said in a low voice, “I heard one of them saying everybody in Vegas was gonna be there. You think they’re gonna crucify us, Larry?”

“That or something like it.” He looked at the big man. Ralph’s sweat-stained hat was crammed down on his head. The feather was frayed and matted, but it still stuck up defiantly from the band. “You scared, Ralph?”

“Scared bad,” Ralph whispered. “Me, I’m a baby about pain. I never even liked going to the doctor’s for a shot. I’d find an excuse to put it off, if I could. What about you?”

“Plenty. Can you come over here and sit beside me?”

Ralph got up, handcuff chains clinking, and sat beside Larry. They sat quietly for a few moments and then Ralph said softly, “We’ve hoed us one helluva long row.”

“That’s true.”

“I just wish I knew what it was all for. All I can see is that he’s gonna make a show of us. So everyone will see he’s the big cheese. Is that what we came all this way for?”

“I don’t know.”

The van hummed on in silence. They sat on the bench without speaking, holding hands. Larry was scared, but beyond the scary feeling, the deeper sense of peace held, undisturbed. It was going to work out.

“I will fear no evil,” he muttered, but he was afraid. He closed his eyes, thought of Lucy. He thought of his mother. Random thoughts. Getting up for school on cold mornings. The time he had thrown up in church. Finding a skin magazine in the gutter and looking at it with Rudy, both of them about nine years old. Watching the World Series his first fall in L.A. with Yvonne Wetterlin. He didn’t want to die, he was afraid to die, but he had made his peace with it as best he could. The choice, after all, had never been his to make, and he had come to believe that death was just a staging area, a place to wait, the way you waited in a green-room before going on to play.

He rested as easily as he could, trying to make himself ready.

The van stopped and the doors were thrown open. Bright sunlight poured in, making him and Ralph blink dazedly. Rat-Man and Burlson hopped inside. Pouring in with the sunlight was a sound—a low, rustling murmur