The Stand

Your body changed to cope with the flu. With Captain Trips, the flu itself changed every time your body came to a defense posture. In that way it was more similar to the AIDS virus than to the common sorts of flu our bodies have become used to. And as with AIDS, it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death.”

“Then why didn’t we get it?” Stu asked.

George said: “We don’t know. I don’t think we’re ever going to know. The only thing we can be sure about is that the immunes didn’t get sick and then throw the sickness off; they never got sick at all. Which brings us to Peter again. Dan?”

“Yes. The key to Captain Trips is that people seemed to get almost better, but never completely better. Now this baby, Peter, got sick forty-eight hours after he was born. There was no doubt at all that it was Captain Trips—the symptoms were classic. But those discolorations under the line of the jaw, which both George and I had come to associate with the fourth and terminal stage of superflu—they never came. On the other hand, his periods of remission have been getting longer and longer.”

“I don’t understand,” Fran said, bewildered. “What—”

“Every time the flu shifts, Peter is shifting right back at it,” George said. “There’s still the technical possibility that he might relapse, but he has never entered the final, critical phase. He seems to be wearing it out.”

There was a moment of total silence.

Dan said, “You’ve passed on half an immunity to your child, Fran. He got it, but we think now he’s got the ability to lick it. We theorize that Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had the same chance, but with the odds stacked much more radically against them—and I still think that they may not have died of the superflu, but of complications arising from the superflu. That’s a very small distinction, I know, but it may be crucial.”

“And the other women who got pregnant by men who weren’t immune?” Stu asked.

“We think they’ll have to watch their babies go through the same painful struggle,” George said, “and some of the children may die—it was touch and go with Peter for a while, and may be again from all we know now. But very shortly we’re going to reach the point where all the fetuses, in the Free Zone—in the world —are the product of two immune parents. And while it wouldn’t be fair to pre- guess, I’d be willing to lay money that when that happens, it’s going to be our ballgame. In the meantime, we’re going to be watching Peter very closely.”

“And we won’t be watching him alone, if that’s any added consolation,” Dan added. “In a very real sense, Peter belongs to the entire Free Zone right now.”

Fran whispered, “I only want him to live because he’s mine and I love him.” She, looked at Stu. “And he’s my link with the old world. He looks more like Jess than me, and I’m glad. That seems right. Do you understand, love?”

Stu nodded, and a strange thought occurred to him—how much he would like to sit down with Hap and Norm Bruett and Vic Palfrey and have a beer with them and watch Vic make one of his shitty-smelling home-rolled cigarettes, and tell them how all of this had come out. They had always called him Silent Stu; ole Stu, they said, wouldn’t say “shit” if he had a mouthful. But he would talk their ears off their heads. He would talk all night and all day. He grasped Fran’s hand blindly, feeling the sting of tears.

“We’ve got rounds to make,” George said, getting up, “but we’ll be monitoring Peter closely, Fran. You’ll know for sure when we know for sure.”

“When could I nurse him? If… If he doesn’t… ?”

“A week,” Dan said.

“But that’s so long!”

“It’s going to be long for all of us. We’ve got sixty-one pregnant women in the Zone, and nine of them conceived before the superflu. It’s going to be especially long for them. Stu? It was good meeting you.” Dan held out his hand and Stu shook it. He left quickly, a man with a necessary job to do and anxious to do it.

George shook Stu’s hand and said, “I’ll see you by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, hum? Just tell Laurie when would be the most convenient time for you.”

“What for?”

“The leg,” George said. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Not too bad.”

“Stu?” Frannie said, sitting up. “What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Broken, badly set, overtaxed,” George said. “Nasty. But it can be fixed.”

“Well…” Stu said.

“Well, nothing! Let me see it, Stuart!” The I-want line was back.

“Later,” Stu said.

George got up. “See Laurie, all right?”

“He will,” Frannie said.

Stu grinned. “I will. Boss lady says so.”

“It’s very good to have you back,” George said. A thousand questions seemed to stop just behind his lips. He shook his head slightly and then left, closing the door firmly behind him.

“Let me see you walk,” Frannie said. The I-want line still creased her brow.

“Hey, Frannie—”

“Come on, let me see you walk.”

He walked for her. It was a little like watching a sailor make his way across a pitching foredeck. When he turned back to her, she was crying.

“Oh, Frannie, don’t do that, honey.”

“I have to,” she said, and put her hands over her face.

He sat beside her and took her hands away. “No. No, you don’t.”

She looked at him nakedly, her tears still flowing. “So many people dead… Harold, Nick, Susan… and what about Larry? What about Glen and Ralph?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what’s Lucy going to say? She’ll be here in an hour. She comes every day, and she’s four months pregnant herself. Stu, when she asks you…”

“They died over there,” Stu said, speaking more to himself than to her. “That’s what I think. What I know, in my heart.”

“Don’t say it that way,” Fran begged. “Not when Lucy gets here. It will break her heart if you do.”

“I think they were the sacrifice. God always asks for a sacrifice. His hands are bloody with it. Why? I can’t say. I’m not a very smart man. P’raps we brought it on ourselves. All I know for sure is that the bomb went off over there instead of over here and we’re safe for a while. For a little while.”

“Is Flagg gone? Really gone?”

“I don’t know. I think… we’ll have to stand a watch for him. And in time, someone will have to find the place where they made the germs like Captain Trips and fill that place up with dirt and seed the ground with salt and then pray over it. Pray for all of us.”

Much later that evening, not long before midnight, Stu pushed her down the silent hospital corridor in a wheelchair. Laurie Constable walked with them, and Fran had seen to it that Stu had made his appointment.

“You look like you’re the one that should be in that wheelchair, Stu Redman,” Laurie said.

“Right now it doesn’t bother me at all,” Stu said.

They came to a large glass window that looked in on a room done in blues and pinks. A large mobile hung from the ceiling. Only one crib was occupied, in the front row.

Stu stared in, fascinated.

GOLDSMITH-REDMAN, PETER, the card at the front of the crib read. BOY. B.W. 6 LB 9 OZ. M. FRANCES GOLDSMITH, RM. 209 F. JESSE RIDER (D.)

Peter was crying.

His small hands were balled into fists. His face was red. There was an amazing swatch of dark black hair on his head. His eyes were blue and they seemed to look directly into Stu’s eyes, as if accusing him of being the author of all his misery.

His forehead was creased with a deep vertical slash… an I-want line.