The Stand:BOOK I(26)

He paused.

"I saved the worst for last. We can declassify Princess back to plain old Eva Hodges, female, age four, Caucasian. Her coach-and-four turned back into a pumpkin and a bunch of mice late this afternoon. To look at her, you'd think she was perfectly normal, not even a sniffle. She's down-hearted, of course; she misses her mom. Other than that, she appears perfectly normal. She's got it, though. Her post-lunch BP first showed a drop, then a rise, which is the only halfway decent diagnostic tool Denninger's got so far. Before supper Denninger showed me her sputum slides-as an incentive to diet, sputum slides are really primo, believe me-and they're lousy with those wagon-wheel germs he says aren't really germs at all, but incubators. I can't understand how he can know where this thing is and what it looks like and still not be able to stop it. He gives me a lot of jargon, but I don't think he understands it, either."

Deitz lit a cigarette.

"So where are we tonight? We've got a disease that's got several well-defined stages …  but some people may skip a stage. Some people may backtrack a stage. Some people may do both. Some people stay in one stage for a relatively long time and others zoom through all four as if they were on a rocket-sled. One of our two ‘clean' subjects is no longer clean. The other is a thirty-year-old redneck who seems to be as healthy as I am. Denninger has done about thirty million tests on him and has succeeded in isolating only four abnormalities: Redman appears to have a great many moles on his body. He has a slight hypertensive condition, too slight to medicate right now. He develops a mild tic under his left eye when he's under stress. And Denninger says he dreams a great deal more than average-almost all night, every night. They got that from the standard EEG series they ran before he went on strike. And that's it. I can't make anything out of it, neither can Dr. Denninger, and neither can the people who check Dr. Demento's Work.

"This scares me, Starkey. It scares me because nobody but a very smart doctor with all the facts is going to be able to diagnose anything but a common cold in the people who are out there carrying this. Christ, nobody goes to the doctor anymore unless they've got pneumonia or a suspicious lump on the tit or a bad case of the dancing hives. Too hard to get one to look at you. So they're going to stay home, drink fluids and get plenty of bedrest, and then they're going to die. Before they do, they're going to infect everyone who comes into the same room with them. All of us are still expecting the Prince-I think I used his real name here someplace, but at this juncture I don't really give a fuck-to come down with it tonight or tomorrow or the day after, at the latest. And so far, no one who's come down with it has gotten better. Those sonsofbitches out in California did this job a little too well for my taste.

"Deitz, Atlanta PB facility 2, this report ends."

He turned off the recorder and stared at it for a long time. Then he lit another cigarette.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 15

It was two minutes to midnight.

Patty Greer, the nurse who had been trying to take Stu's blood pressure when he went on strike was leafing through the current issue of McCall's at the nurses' station and waiting to go in and check Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Hapscomb. Hap would still be awake watching Johnny Carson and would be no problem. He liked to josh her about how hard it would be to pinch her bottom through her white all-over suit. Mr. Hapscomb was scared, but he was being cooperative, not like that dreadful Stuart Redman, who only looked at you and wouldn't say boo to a goose. Mr. Hapscomb was what Patty Greer thought of as a "good sport." As far as she was concerned, all patients could be divided into two categories: "good sports" and "old poops." Patty, who had broken a leg roller skating when she was seven and had never spent a day in bed since, had very little patience with the "old poops." You were either really sick and being a "good sport" or you were a hypochondriac "old poop" making trouble for a poor working girl.

Mr. Sullivan would be asleep, and he would wake up ugly. It wasn't her fault that she had to wake him up, and she would think Mr. Sullivan would understand that. He should just be grateful that he was getting the best care the government could provide, and all free at that. And she would just tell him so if he started being an "old poop" again tonight.

The clock touched midnight; time to get going.

She left the nurses' station and walked down the hallway toward the white room where she would first be sprayed and then helped into her suit. Halfway there, her nose began to tickle. She got her hankie out of her pocket and sneezed lightly three times. She replaced the handkerchief.

Intent on dealing with cranky Mr. Sullivan, she attached no significance to her sneezes. It was probably a touch of hay fever. The directive in the nurses' station which said in big red letters, REPORT ANY COLD SYMPTOMS NO MATTER HOW MINOR TO YOUR SUPERVISOR AT ONCE , never even crossed her mind. They were worried that whatever those poor people from Texas had might spread outside the sealed rooms, but she also knew it was impossible for even a tiny virus to get inside the self-contained environment of the white-suits. Nevertheless, on her way down to the white room she infected an orderly, a doctor who was just getting ready to leave, and another nurse on her way to do her midnight rounds.

A new day had begun.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 16

A day later, on June 23, a big white Connie was roaring north on US 180, in another part of the country. It was doing somewhere between ninety and one hundred, its Corinthian white paint job glittering in the sun, the chrome winking. The opera windows in the rear also gave back the sun, heliographing it viciously.

The trail that Connie had left behind itself since Poke and Lloyd killed its owner and stole it somewhere just south of Hachita was wandering and pretty much senseless. Up 81 to US 80, the turnpike, until Poke and Lloyd began to feel nervous. They had killed six people in the last six days, including the owner of the Continental, his wife, and his smarmy daughter. But it was not the six murders that made them feel antsy about being on the interstate. It was the dope and the guns. Five grams of hash, a little tin snuffbox filled with God knew how much coke, and sixteen pounds of marijuana. Also two .38s, three .45s, a .357 Mag that Poke called his Pokerizer, six shotguns-two of them sawed-off pumps-and a Schmeisser submachine gun. Murder was a trifle beyond their intellectual reach, but they both understood the trouble they were going to be in if the Arizona State Police picked them up in a stolen car full of blow and shootin irons. On top of everything else, they were interstate fugitives. Had been ever since they crossed the Nevada border.

Interstate fugitives. Lloyd Henreid liked the sound of that. Gangbusters. Take that, you dirty rat. Have a lead sandwich, ya lousy copper.

So they had turned north at Deming, now on 180; had gone through Hurley and Bayard and the slightly larger town of Silver City, where Lloyd had bought a bag of burgers and eight milkshakes (why in the name of Christ had he bought eight of the motherfuckers? they would soon be pissing chocolate), grinning at the waitress in an empty yet hilarious way that made her nervous for hours afterward. I believe that man would just as soon killed me as looked at me, she told her boss that afternoon.

Past Silver City and roaring through Cliff, the road now bending west again, just the direction they didn't want to go. Through Buckhorn and then they were back in the country God forgot, two-lane blacktop running through sagebrush and sand, buttes and mesas in the background, all that same old same old made you want to just rare back and puke at it.

"We're gettin low on gas," Poke said.

"Wouldn't be if you didn't drive so fuckin fast," Lloyd said. He took a sip of his third milkshake, gagged on it, powered down the window, and threw out all the leftover crap, including the three milkshakes neither of them had touched.

"Whoop! Whoop!" Poke cried. He began to goose the gas pedal. The Connie lurched forward, dropped back, lurched forward.

"Ride em cowboy!" Lloyd yelled.

"Whoop! Whoop!"

"You want to smoke?"

"Smoke em if you got em," Poke said. "Whoop! Whoop!"

There was a large green Hefty bag on the floor between Lloyd's feet. It held the sixteen pounds of marijuana. He reached in, got a handful, and began to roll a bomber joint.

"Whoop! Whoop!" The Connie cruised back and forth over the white line.

"Cut the shit!" Lloyd shouted. "I'm spillin it everywhere!"

"Plenty more where that came from …  whoop!"

"Come on, we gotta deal this stuff, man. We gotta deal this stuff or we're gonna get caught and wind up in somebody's trunk."

"Okay, sport." Poke began to drive smoothly again, but his expression was sulky. "It was your idea, your fuckin idea."

"You thought it was a good idea."

"Yeah, but I didn't know we'd end up drivin all over fuckin Arizona. How we ever gonna get to New York this way?"