The Stand

eager that he had begun to spray hot fluid more properly meant for his soon-to-be marriage bed.

Then he had run back to the vestibule, pulled a single wooden match from his breast pocket, scratched it on the zipper of his jeans, flung the match on the pile of dripping hymnals, direct hit, kaflump! , and the next day he was riding to the Northern Indiana Correctional Center for Boys past the black and smoldering ribs of the Methodist Church.

And there was Carley Yates leaning against the light standard across from the Scrubba-Dubba, a Lucky Strike pasted in the corner of his mouth, and Carley had yelled his valedictory, his epitaph, his hail and farewell: Hey, Trashcan, whydja wanta burn up a church? Why dintcha burn up the SCHOOL?

He was seventeen when he went to the jail for kids, and when he turned eighteen they sent him over to the state prison, and how long was he there? Who knew? Not the Trashcan Man, that was for sure. No one in stir cared that he had burned the Methodist Church down. There were people in stir who had done much worse. Murder. Rape. Breaking open the heads of old lady librarians. Some of the inmates wanted to do something to him, and some of them wanted him to do something to them. He didn’t mind. It happened after the lights were out. One man with a bald head had said he loved him—I love you, Donald —and that was sure better than dodging rocks. Sometimes he would think, just as long as I can stay in here forever. But sometimes at night he would dream of CHEERY OIL, and in the dreams it was always a single, thundering explosion followed by two others, and the sound was WHAM! … … … … WHAM! WHAM! Huge, toneless explosions slamming their way into bright daylight, shaping the daylight like the blows of a hammer shaping thin copper. And everyone in town would stop what they were doing and look north, toward Gary, toward where the three tanks stood against the sky like oversized whitewashed tin cans. Carley Yates would be trying to sell a two-year-old Plymouth to a young couple with a baby, and he would stop in mid-spiel and look. The idlers in O’Toole’s and in the candy store would crowd outside, leaving their beers and chocolate malteds behind. In the cafe his mother would pause in front of the cash register. The new boy at the Scrubba-Dubba would straighten from the headlights he had been soaping, the sponge glove still on his hand, looking north as that huge and portentous sound sledgehammered its way into the thin copper routine of the day: WHAMM! That was his dream.

He became a trusty somewhere along the line, and when the strange sickness came they sent him to the infirmary and some days ago there had been no more sick people because all of those who had been sick were now dead. Everybody was dead or had run off, except for a young guard named Jason Debbins, who sat behind the wheel of a prison laundry truck and shot himself.

And where else did he have to go then, except home?

The breeze pressed softly against his cheek and then died.

He struck another match and dropped it. It landed in a small pool of gasoline and the gas caught. The flames were blue. They spread out delicately, a kind of corona with the burned match stub, at its center. Trashcan watched for a moment, paralyzed with fascination, and then he stepped quickly to the stairs that circled around the tank to the bottom, looking back over his shoulder. He could see the pumping machinery through a heat haze now, flickering back and forth like a mirage. The blue flames, no more than two inches high, spread toward the machinery and toward the open pipe in a widening semicircle. The bug’s struggles had ended. It was nothing but a blackened husk.

I could let that happen to me.

But he didn’t seem to want to. It seemed, vaguely, that there might be another purpose in his life now, something very grand and great. So he felt a touch of fear and he began to descend the steps on the run, his shoes clanging, his hand slipping quickly over the steep, rust-pitted railing.

Down and down, circling, wondering how long until the vapor hanging around the mouth of the outflow pipe would catch, how long before heat great enough for ignition would rush down the pipe’s throat and into the tank’s belly.

Hair flying back from his forehead, a terrified grin pasted to his face, the wind roaring in his ears, he rushed down. Now he was halfway, racing past the letters CH, letters twenty feet high and lime green against the white of the tank. Down and down, and if his flying feet stuttered or caught on anything, he would tumble like the gascan had tumbled, his bones breaking like dead branches.

The ground came closer, the white gravel circles around the tanks, the green grass beyond the gravel. The cars in the parking lot began to regain their normal size. And still he seemed to be floating, floating in a dream, and he would never reach the bottom, only run and run and get nowhere. He was next to a bomb and the fuse was lit.

From far overhead there came a sudden bang, like a five-inch Fourth of July firecracker. There was a dim clang, and then something whirred past him. It was part of the outflow pipe, he saw with a sharp and almost delicious fear. It was totally black and twisted into a new and excitingly senseless shape by the heat.

He placed one hand on the railing and vaulted over, hearing something snap in his wrist. Sickening pain flowed up his arm to the elbow. He dropped the last twenty-five feet, landed on the gravel, and went sprawling. The gravel scraped skin from his forearms, but he hardly felt it. He was full of moaning, grinning panic now, and the day seemed very bright.

Trashcan Man scrambled up, craning his head around and back, sending his gaze up even as he began to run again. The top of this middle tank had grown yellow hair, and the hair was growing at an amazing rate. The whole thing could blow at any second.

He ran, his right hand flopping on its broken wrist. He leaped over the parking lot curb, and his feet slapped on asphalt. Now he was across the parking lot, his shadow trailing at his feet, and now he was running straight down the wide gravel access road and bolting through the half-open gate and back onto Highway 130. He ran straight across it and flung himself into the ditch on the far side, landing on a soft bed of dead leaves and wet moss, his arms wrapped around his head, the breath tearing in and out of his lungs like stabbing jackknives.

The oil tank blew. Not WHAMM! but KA-WHAP!, a sound so huge, yet at the same time so short and guttural, that he felt his eardrums actually press in and his eyeballs press out as the air somehow changed. A second explosion followed, then a third, and Trashcan writhed on the dead leaves and grinned and screamed soundlessly. He sat up, holding his hands over his ears, and sudden wind struck him and slapped him flat with such power that he might have been no more than a piece of litter.

The young saplings behind him bent over backward and their leaves made a frantic whirring sound, like the pennants over a used car lot on a windy day. One or two snapped with small cracking sounds, as if someone was shooting a target pistol. Burning pieces of the tank started to fall on the other side of the road, some actually on the road. They hit with a clanging noise, the rivets still hanging in some of the chunks of metal, twisted and black, as the outflow pipe had been.

KA-WHAMMM!

Trashcan sat up again and saw a gigantic firetree beyond the Cheery Oil parking lot. Black smoke was billowing from its top, rising straight to an amazing height before the wind could disrupt it and rafter it away. You couldn’t look at it without squinting your eyes almost shut and now there was radiant heat baking across the road at him, tightening his skin, making it feel shiny. His eyes were gushing water in protest. Another burning chunk of metal, this one better than seven feet across at its widest and shaped like a diamond, fell out of the sky, landed in the ditch twenty feet to his left, and the dry leaves on top of the wet moss were instantly ablaze.

KA-WHAMM-KA-WHAMM!

If he stayed here he would go up in a jigging, screaming blaze of spontaneous combustion. He scrambled to his feet and began to run along the shoulder of the highway in the direction of Gary, the breath getting hotter and hotter in his lungs. The air had begun to taste like heavy metal. Presently he began to feel his hair to see if he had started burning. The sweet stench of gasoline filled the air, seeming to coat him. Hot wind ripped his clothes. He felt like something trying to escape from a microwave oven. The road doubled before his watering eyes, then trebled.

There was another coughing roar as rising air pressure caused the Cheery Oil Company office building to implode. Scimitars of glass whickered through the air. Chunks of concrete and cinderblock rained out of the sky and hailed on the road. A whizzing piece of steel about the size of a and the thickness of a Mars Bar sliced through trashcan’s shirtsleeve and made a thin scrape on his skin. A piece big enough to have turned his head to guava jelly struck in front of his feet and then bounded away, leaving a good-sized crater behind. Then he was beyond the fallout zone, still running, the blood beating in his head as if his very brain had been sprayed with #2 heating oil and then set ablaze.