The Stand

into one of the suitcases and slammed it shut. The hem of her best slip hung out, and she just bet it was torn.

“What is it?” she cried, and the distraught tone of her voice caused Baby LaVon to burst into fresh tears just as she was winding down to sniffles. “Have you gone crazy? They’ll send soldiers after us, Charlie! Soldiers!”

“Not tonight they won’t,” he said, and there was some thing so sure in his voice that it was horrible. “Point is, sugar-babe, if we don’t get our asses in gear, we ain’t never gonna make it off’n the base. I don’t even know how in hell I got out of the tower. Malfunction somewhere, I guess. Why not? Everything else sure-God malfunctioned.” And he uttered a high, loonlike laugh that frightened her more than anything else had done. “The baby dressed? Good. Put some of her clothes in that other suitcase. Use the blue tote-bag in the closet for the rest. Then we’re going to get the hell out. I think we’re all right. Wind’s blowing east to west. Thank God for that.”

He coughed into his hand again.

“Daddy!” Baby LaVon demanded, holding her arms up. “Want Daddy! Sure! Horsey-ride, Daddy! Horsey-ride! Sure!”

“Not now,” Charlie said, and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment later, Sally heard the rattle of crockery. He was getting her pin-money out of the blue soup-dish on the top shelf. Some thirty or forty dollars she had put away—a dollar, sometimes fifty cents, at a time. Her house money. It was real, then. Whatever it was, it was really real.

Baby LaVon, denied her horsey-ride by her daddy, who rarely if ever denied her anything, began to weep again. Sally struggled to get her into her light jacket and then threw most of her clothes into the tote, cramming them in helter-skelter. The idea of putting anything else into the other suitcase was ridiculous. It would burst. She had to kneel on it to snap the catches. She found herself thanking God Baby LaVon was trained, and there was no need to bother with diapers.

Charlie came back into the bedroom, and now he was running. He was still stuffing the crumpled ones and fives from the soup-dish into the front pocket of his suntans. Sally scooped Baby LaVon up. She was fully awake now and could walk perfectly well, but Sally wanted her in her arms. She bent and snagged the tote-bag.

“Where we going, Daddy?” Baby LaVon asked. “I was aseepin.”

“Baby can be aseepin in the car,” Charlie said, grabbing the two suitcases. The hem of Sally’s slip flapped. His eyes still had that white, starey look. An idea, a growing certainty, began to dawn in Sally’s mind.

“Was there an accident?” she whispered. “Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph, there was, wasn’t there? An accident. Out there.”

“I was playing solitaire,” he said. “I looked up and saw the clock had gone from green to red. I turned on the monitor. Sally, they’re all—”

He paused, looked at Baby LaVon’s eyes, wide and, although still rimmed with tears, curious.

“They’re all D-E-A-D down there,” he said. “All but one or two, and they’re probably gone now.”

“What’s D-E-D, Daddy?” Baby LaVon asked.

“Never mind, honey,” Sally said. Her voice seemed to come to her from down a very long canyon.

Charlie swallowed. Something clicked in his throat. “Everything’s supposed to mag-lock if the clock goes red. They got a Chubb computer that runs the whole place and it’s supposed to be fail-safe. I saw what was on the monitor, and I jumped out the door. I thought the goddam thing would cut me in half. It should have shut the second the clock went red, and I don’t know how long it was red before I looked up and noticed it. But I was almost to the parking lot before I heard it thump shut behind me. Still, if I’d looked up even thirty seconds later, I’d be shut up in that tower control room right now, like a bug in a bottle.”

“What is it? What—”

“I dunno. I don’t want to know. All I know is that it ki—that it K-I-L-L-E-D them quick. If they want me, they’ll have to catch me. I was gettin hazard pay, but they ain’t payin me enough to hang around here. Wind’s blowing west. We’re driving east. Come on, now.”

Still feeling half-asleep, caught in some awful grinding dream, she followed him out to the driveway where their fifteen-year-old Chevy stood, quietly rusting in the fragrant desert darkness of the California night.

Charlie dumped the suitcases in the trunk and the tote-bag in the back seat. Sally stood for a moment by the passenger door with the baby in her arms, looking at the bungalow where they had spent the last four years. When they had moved in, she reflected, Baby LaVon was still growing inside her body, all her horsey-rides ahead of her.

“Come on!” he said. “Get in, woman!”

She did. He backed out, the Chevy’s headlights momentarily splashing across the house. Their reflection in the windows looked like the eyes of some hunted beast.

He was hunched tensely over the steering wheel, his face drawn in the dim glow of the dashboard instruments. “If the base gates are closed, I’m gonna try to crash through.” And he meant it. She could tell. Suddenly her knees felt watery.

But there was no need for such desperate measures. The base gates were standing open. One guard was nodding over a magazine. She couldn’t see the other; perhaps he was in the head. This was the outer part of the base, a conventional army vehicle depot. What went on at the hub of the base was of no concern to these fellows.

I looked up and saw the clock had gone red.

She shivered and put her hand on his leg. Baby LaVon was sleeping again. Charlie patted her hand briefly and said: “It’s going to be all right, hon.”

By dawn they were running east across Nevada and Charlie was coughing steadily.

BOOK I CAPTAIN TRIPS JUNE 16 – JULY 4, 1990

I called the doctor on the telephone
Said doctor, doctor, please ,
I got this feeling, rocking and reeling ,
Tell me, what can it be?
Is it some new disease?

The Sylvers

Baby, can you dig your man?
He’s a righteous man ,
Baby, can you dig your man?

Larry Underwood

Chapter 1

Hapscomb’s Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston. Tonight the regulars were there, sitting by the cash register, drinking beer, talking idly, watching the bugs fly into the big lighted sign.

It was Bill Hapscomb’s station, so the others deferred to him even though he was a pure fool. They would have expected the same deferral if they had been gathered together in one of their business establishments. Except they had none. In Arnette, it was hard times. In 1980 the town had had two industries, a factory that made paper products (for picnics and barbecues, mostly) and a plant that made electronic calculators. Now the paper factory was shut down and the calculator plant was ailing—they could make them a lot cheaper in Taiwan, it turned out, just like those portable TVs and transistor radios.

Norman Bruett and Tommy Wannamaker, who had both worked in the paper factory, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago. Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week. Victor Palfrey was retired and smoked stinking home-rolled cigarettes, which were all he could afford.

“Now what I say is this,” Hap told them, putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward. “They just gotta say screw this inflation shit. Screw this national debt shit. We got the presses and we got the paper. We’re gonna run off fifty million thousand-dollar bills and hump them right the Christ into circulation.”

Palfrey, who had been a machinist until 1984, was the only one present with sufficient self-respect to point out Hap’s most obvious damfool statements. Now, rolling another of his shitty-smelling cigarettes, he said: “That wouldn’t get us nowhere. If they do that, it’ll be just like Richmond in the last two years of the States War. In those days, when you wanted a piece of gingerbread, you gave the baker a Confederate dollar, he’d put it on the gingerbread, and cut out a piece just that size. Money’s just paper, you know.”

“I know some people don’t agree with you,” Hap said sourly. He picked up a greasy red plastic paper-holder