The Stand

Fortune. And it’s my lucky night, Kit. I feel that. I feel that very strongly. So we have to hurry.”

It was a mile and a half to the Conoco station, and by the time he got there it was quarter past three in the morning. The wind had picked up, whining along the street, and on his way here he had seen the corpses of three dead dogs and one dead man. The man had been wearing some sort of uniform. Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe.

The tarp which covered the Buick had been pegged tautly to the ground, and the wind made the canvas flap. When Flagg pulled the pegs the tarpaulin went cartwheeling off into the night like a large brown ghost, moving east. The question was, in which direction was he heading?

He stood beside the Buick, which was a well-preserved 1975 model (cars did well out here: there was little moisture and rust had a hard time starting), scenting the summer night sir like a coyote. There was desert perfume on it, the kind you can only smell clearly at night. The Buick stood whole in an automobile mortuary of dismembered parts, Easter Island monoliths in the windy silence. An engine block. An axle looking like some muscle-boy’s dumbbell. A pile of tires for the wind to make hooting sound effects in. A cracked windshield. More.

He thought best in scenes like these. In scenes like these, any man could be Iago.

He walked past the Buick and ran his hand across the dented hood of what might once have been a Mustang. “Hey, little Cobra, don’t ya know ya gonna shut em down…” he sang softly. He kicked over a stove-in radiator with one dusty boot and disclosed a nest of jewels, winking back at him with dim fire. Rubies, emeralds, pearls the size of goose eggs, diamonds to rival the stars. Snapped his finger at them. They were gone. Where was he to go?

The wind moaned through the shattered wing window of an old Plymouth and tiny living things rustled inside.

Something else rustled behind him. He turned and it was Kit Bradenton, clad only in absurd yellow underpants, his poet’s pot hanging over the waistband like an avalanche held in suspended animation. Bradenton walked toward him over the heaped remains of Detroit rolling iron. A leafspring pierced through his foot like crucifixion, but the wound was bloodless. Bradenton’s navel was a black eye.

The dark man snapped his fingers and Bradenton was gone.

He grinned and walked back to the Buick. Laid his forehead against the slope of roof on the passenger’s side. Time passed. At some length he straightened, still grinning. He knew.

He slipped behind the wheel of the Buick, and pumped the gas a couple of times to prime up the carburetor. The motor purred into life and the needle on the gas gauge swung over to F. He pulled out and drove around the side of the gas station, his headlight beams for a moment catching another pair of emeralds, cat’s eyes glistening warily from the tall grass by the Conoco station’s Ladies Room door. In the cat’s mouth was the small limp body of a mouse. At the sight of his grinning, moonlike face peering down at it from the driver’s side window, the cat dropped its morsel and ran. Flagg laughed aloud, heartily, the laugh of a man with nothing on his mind but lots of good things. Where the Conoco’s tarmac became highway, he turned right and began to run south.

Chapter 32

Someone had left the door open between Maximum Security and the cellblock beyond it; the steel- walled length of corridor acted as a natural amplifier, blowing up the steady, monotonous hollering that had been going on all morning to monster size, making it echo and re-echo until Lloyd Henreid thought that, between the cries and the very natural fear that he felt, he would go utterly and completely bugshit.

“Mother,” the hoarse, echoing cry came. “Mootherr! ”

Lloyd was sitting crosslegged on the floor of his cell. Both of his hands were slimed with blood; he looked like a man who has drawn on a pair of red gloves. The light blue cotton shirt of his prison uniform was smeared with blood because he kept wiping his hands dry on it in order to get a better purchase. It was ten o’clock in the morning, June 29. Around seven this morning he had noticed that the front right leg of his bunk was loose, and since then he had been trying to unthread the bolts that held it to the floor and to the underside of the bedframe. He was trying to do this with only his fingers for tools, and he had actually gotten five of the six bolts. As a result his fingers now looked like a spongy mess of raw hamburger. The sixth bolt was the one that had turned out to be the bitch-kitty, but he was beginning to think he might actually get it. Beyond that, he hadn’t allowed himself to think. The only way to keep back brute panic was not to think.

“Mootherr —”

He leaped to his feet, drops of blood from his wounded, throbbing fingers splattering on the floor, and shoved his face out into the corridor as far as he could, eyes bulging furiously, hands gripping the bars.

“Shut up, cock-knocker! ” he screamed. “Shut up, ya drivin me fuckin batshit! ”

There was a long pause. Lloyd savored the silence as he had once savored a piping hot Quarter Pounder with Cheese from McD’s. Silence is golden, he had always thought that was a stupid saying, but it sure had its points.

“MOOOOTHERRRR —” The voice came drifting up at the steel throat of the holding cells again, as mournful as a foghorn.

“Jesus,” Lloyd muttered. “Holy Jesus. SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP, YA FUCKIN DIMWIT! ”

“MOOOOOOOTHERRRRRRRRRR —”

Lloyd turned back to the leg of his bunk and attacked it savagely, wishing again that there was something in the cell to pry with, trying to ignore the throbbing in his fingers and the panic in his mind. He tried to remember exactly when he had seen his lawyer last—things like that grew hazy very soon in Lloyd’s mind, which retained a chronology of past events about as well as a sieve retains water. Three days ago. Yes. The day after that prick Mathers had socked him in the balls. Two guards had taken him down to the conference room again and Shockley was still on the door and Shockley had greeted him: Why, here’s the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say? And then Shockley had opened his mouth and sneezed right into Lloyd’s face, spraying him with thick spit. There’s some cold germs for you, pusbag, everybody else has got one from the warden on down, and I believe in share the wealth. In America even scummy douchebags like you should be able to catch a cold. Then they had taken him in, and Devins had looked like a man who is trying to conceal some pretty good news lest it should turn out to be bad news, after all. The judge who was supposed to hear Lloyd’s case was flat on his back with the flu. Two other judges were also ill, either with the flu that was going around or with something else, so the remaining benchwarmers were swamped. Maybe they could get a postponement. Keep your fingers crossed, the lawyer had said. When would we know? Lloyd had asked. Probably not until the last minute, Devins had replied. I’ll let you know, don’t worry. But Lloyd hadn’t seen him since then and now, thinking, back on it, he remembered that the lawyer had had a runny nose himself and—

“OwwwoooJesus! ”

He slipped the fingers of his right hand into his mouth and tasted blood. But that frigging bolt had given a little bit, and that meant he was going to get it for sure. Even the mother-shouter down there at the end of the hall could no longer bother him… at least not so badly. He was going to get it. After that he would just have to wait and see what happened. He sat with his fingers in his mouth, giving them a rest. When this was done, he’d rip his shirt into strips and bandage them.

“Mother? ”

“I know what you can do with your mother,” Lloyd muttered.

That night, after he had talked to Devins for the last time, they had begun taking sick prisoners out, carrying them out, not to put too fine a point on it, because they weren’t taking anyone that wasn’t already far gone. The man in the cell on Lloyd’s right, Trask, had pointed out that most of the guards sounded pretty snotty themselves. Maybe we can get something outta this, Trask said. What? Lloyd had asked. I dunno, Trask said. He was a skinny man with a long bloodhound face who was in Maximum Security while awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Postponements, he said. I dunno.

Trask had six joints under the thin mattress of his bunk, and he gave four of them to one of the screws who still seemed okay to tell him what was going on outside. The guard said people were leaving Phoenix, bound for anyplace. There was a lot of sickness, and people were croaking faster than a horse could trot. The government