The Stand

“Go on, Larry,” she said, “don’t let me slow you down.”

“I said I was sorry,” he told her, his voice a trifle petulant. “We’ll get you some new shoes and some white socks. We’ll…”

“We’ll nothing. Go on.”

“Rita, I’m sorry—”

“If you say that one more time, I’ll scream. You’re a shit and your apology is not accepted. Now go on.”

“I said I was—”

She threw back her head and shrieked. He took a step backward, looking around to see if anyone had heard her, to see if maybe a policeman was running over to see what kind of awful thing that young fellow was doing to the old lady who was sitting on the sidewalk with her shoes off. Culture lag, he thought distractedly, what fun it all is.

She stopped screaming and looked at him. She made a flicking gesture with her hand, as if he was a bothersome fly.

“You better stop,” he said, “or I really will leave you.”

She only looked at him. He couldn’t meet her eyes and so dropped his gaze, hating her for making him do that.

“All right,” he said, “have a good time getting raped and murdered.”

He shouldered the rifle and started off again, now angling left toward the car-packed 495 entrance ramp, sloping down toward the tunnel’s mouth. At the foot of the ramp he saw there had been one hell of a crash; a man driving a Mayflower moving van had tried to butt his way into the main traffic flow and cars were scattered around the van like bowling pins. A burned-out Pinto lay almost beneath the van’s body. The van’s driver hung halfway out of the cab window, head down, arms dangling. There was a fan of dried blood and puke sprayed out below him on the door.

Larry looked around, sure he would see her walking toward him or standing and accusing him with her eyes. But Rita was gone.

“Fuck you,” he said with nervous resentment. “I tried to apologize.”

For a moment he couldn’t go on; he felt impaled by hundreds of angry dead eyes, staring out at him from all these cars. A snatch of Dylan occurred to him: “I waited for you inside the frozen traffic… when you knew I had some other place to be… but where are you tonight, sweet Marie? ”

Ahead, he could see four lanes of westbound traffic disappearing into the black arch of the tunnel, and with something like real dread he saw that the overhead fluorescent bars inside the Lincoln were out. It would be like going into an automobile graveyard. They would let him get halfway and then they would all begin to stir… to come alive… he would hear car doors clicking open and then softly chunking closed… their shuffling footsteps…

A light sweat broke on his body. Overhead a bird called raucously and he jumped. You’re being stupid, he told himself. Kid’s stuff, that’s what this is. All you have to do is stay on the pedestrian catwalk and in no time at all you’ll be—

–strangled by the walking dead.

He licked his lips and tried to laugh. It came out badly. He walked five paces toward the place where the ramp joined the highway and then stopped again. To his left was a Caddy, an El Dorado, and a woman with a blackened troll face was staring out at him. Her nose was pressed into a bulb against the glass. Blood and snot had trickled out onto the window. The man who had been driving the Caddy was slumped over the wheel as if looking for something on the floor. All the Caddy’s windows were rolled up; it would be like a greenhouse in there. If he opened the door the woman would spill out and break open on the pavement like a sack of rotten melons and the smell would be warm and steamy, wet and crawling with decay.

The way it would smell in the tunnel.

Abruptly Larry turned around and trotted back the way he had come, feeling the breeze he was making cool the sweat on his forehead.

“Rita! Rita, listen! I want to—”

The words died as he reached the top of the ramp. Rita was still gone. Thirty-ninth Street dwindled away to a point. He ran from the south sidewalk to the north, squeezing between bumpers and scrambling over hoods almost hot enough to blister his skin. But the north sidewalk was also empty. He cupped his hands around his mouth and cried: “Rita! Rita! ”

His only answer a dead echo: “Rita… ita… ita… ita… ”

By four o’clock dark clouds had begun to build over Manhattan and the sound of thunder rolled back and forth between the city’s cliffs. Lightning forked down at the buildings. It was as if God were trying to frighten the few remaining people out of hiding. The light had become yellow and strange, and Larry didn’t like it. His belly was cramped and when he lit a cigarette it trembled in his hand the way the coffee cup had trembled in Rita’s this morning.

He was sitting at the street end of the access ramp, leaning his back against the lowest bar of the railing. His pack was on his lap, and the .30-.30 was leaning against the railing beside him. He had thought she would get scared and come back before long, but she hadn’t. Fifteen minutes ago he had given up calling her name. The echoes freaked him out.

Thunder rolled again, close this time. A chilly breeze ran its hand over the back of his shirt, which was pasted to his skin with sweat. He was going to have to get inside somewhere or else stop shitting around and go through the tunnel. If he couldn’t work up the guts to go through, he’d have to spend another night in the city and go over the George Washington Bridge in the morning, and that was 140 blocks north.

He tried to think rationally about the tunnel. There was nothing in there that was going to bite him. He’d forgotten to pick up a good big flashlight—Christ, you never remembered everything — but he did have his butane Bic, and there was a guardrail between the catwalk and the road. Anything else… thinking about all those dead people in their cars, for instance… that was just panic talking, comic-book stuff, about as sensible as worrying about the boogeyman in the closet. If that’s all you can think about, Larry note 5, then you’re not going to get along in this brave new world. Not at all. You’re—

A stroke of lightning split the sky almost directly overhead, making him wince. It was followed by a heavy caisson of thunder. He thought randomly, July 1, this is the day you’re supposed to take your sweetie to Coney Island and eat hotdogs by the score. Knock down the three wooden milk-bottles with one ball and win the Kewpie doll. The fireworks at night—

A cold splash of rain struck the side of his face and then another hit the back of his neck and trickled inside the collar of his shirt. Dime-sized drops began to hit around him. He stood up, slung the pack over his shoulders, and hoisted the rifle. He was still not sure which way to go—back to Thirty-ninth or into the Lincoln Tunnel. But he had to get undercover somewhere because it was starting to pour.

Thunder broke overhead with a gigantic roar, making him squeal in terror—a sound no different than those made by Cro-Magnon men two million years before.

“You fucking coward,” he said, and trotted down the ramp toward the maw of the tunnel, his head bent forward as the rain began to come harder. It dripped from his hair. He passed the woman with her nose against the El Dorado’s passenger window, trying not to look but catching her out of the tail of his eye just the same. The rain drummed on the car roofs like jazz percussion. It was coming down so hard it bounced back up again, causing a light mist-haze.

Larry stopped for a moment just outside the tunnel, undecided and frightened again. Then it began to hail, and that decided him. The hailstones were big, stinging. Thunder bellowed again.

Okay, he thought. Okay, okay, okay, I’m convinced. He stepped into the Lincoln Tunnel.

It was much blacker inside than he had imagined it would be. At first the opening behind him cast dim white light ahead and he could see yet more cars, jammed in bumper to bumper (it must have been bad, dying in here, he thought, as claustrophobia wrapped its stealthy banana fingers lovingly around his head and began to first caress and then to squeeze his temples, it must have been really bad, it must have been fucking horrible), and the greenish-white tiles that dressed the upward-curving walls. He could