The Stand:BOOK I(45)

"I don't know anymore," Nick wrote. "It's pretty bad."

"Have you seen the doctor?"

"Not since this morning."

"Am will wear himself out if he's not careful," she said. "He'll be careful, won't he, Nick? Not to wear himself out?"

Nick nodded and tried a smile.

"What about John's prisoners? Has the patrol come for them?"

"No," Nick wrote. "Hogan is very sick. I'm doing what I can. The others want me to let them out before Hogan can make them sick."

"Don't you let them out!" she said with some spirit. "I hope you're not thinking of it."

"No," Nick wrote, and after a moment he added: "You ought to go back to bed. You need rest."

She smiled at him, and when she moved her head Nick could see the dark smudges under the angles of her jaw-and he wondered uneasily if she was out of the woods yet.

"Yes. I'm going to sleep the clock right around. It seems wrong, somehow, to sleep with John dead …  I can hardly believe he is, you know. I keep stumbling over the idea like something I forgot to put away." He took her hand and squeezed it. She smiled wanly. "There may be something else to live for, in time. Have you gotten your prisoners their supper, Nick?"

Nick shook his head.

"You ought to. Why don't you take John's car?"

"I can't drive," Nick wrote, "but thank you. I'll just walk down to the truck-stop. It isn't far. & check on you-in the morning, if that's all right."

"Yes," she said. "Fine."

He got up and pointed sternly at the teacup.

"Every drop," she promised.

He was going out the screen door when he felt her hesitant touch on his arm.

"John-" she said, stopped, and then forced herself to go on. "I hope they …  took him to the Curtis Mortuary. That's where John's folks and mine have always buried out of. Do you think they took him there all right?"

Nick nodded. The tears brimmed over her cheeks and she began to sob again.

When he left her that night he had gone directly to the truck-stop. A CLOSED sign hung crookedly in the window. He had gone around to the house trailer in back, but it was locked and dark. No one answered his knock. Under the circumstances he felt he was justified in a little breaking and entering; there would be enough in Sheriff Baker's petty cash box to pay any damages.

He hammered in the glass by the restaurant's lock and let himself in. The place was spooky even with all the lights on, the jukebox dark and dead, no one at the bumper-pool table or the video games, the booths empty, the stools unoccupied. The hood was over the grille.

Nick went out back and fried some hamburgers on the gas stove and put them in a sack. He added a bottle of milk and half an apple pie that stood under a plastic dome on the counter. Then he went back to the jail, after leaving a note on the counter explaining who had broken in and why.

Vince Hogan was dead. He lay on the floor of his cell amid a clutter of melting ice and wet towels. He had clawed at his neck at the end, as if he had been resisting an invisible strangler. The tips of his fingers were bloody. Flies were lighting on him and buzzing off. His neck was as black and swollen as an inner-tube some heedless child has pumped up to the point of bursting.

"Now will you let us out?" Mike Childress asked. "He's dead, ya fuckin mutie, are you satisfied? You feel revenged yet? Now he's got it, too." He pointed to Billy Warner.

Billy looked terrified. There were hectic red splotches on his neck and cheeks; the arm of his workshirt, with which he had repeatedly swiped at his nose, was stiff with snot. "That's a lie!" he chanted hysterically. "A lie, a lie, a fuckin lie! that's a l-" He began to sneeze suddenly, doubling over with the force of them, expelling a heavy spray of saliva and mucus.

"See?" Mike demanded. "Huh? Y'happy, ya fuckin mutie dimwit? Let me out! You can keep him if you want to, but not me. It's murder, that's all it is, cold-blooded murder!"

Nick shook his head, and Mike had a tantrum. He began to throw himself against the bars of his cell, bruising his face, bloodying the knuckles of both hands. He stared at Nick with bulging eyes while he banged his forehead repeatedly.

Nick waited until he got tired and then pushed the food through the slots in the bottoms of the cells with the broomhandle. Billy Warner looked at him dully for a moment, then began to eat.

Mike threw his glass of milk against the bars. It shattered and milk sprayed everywhere. He slammed his two burgers against the graffiti-covered rear wall of his cell. One of them stuck in a splat of mustard, ketchup, and relish that was grotesquely cheery, like a Jackson Pollock painting. He jumped up and down on his slice of apple pie, boogying on it. Apple chunks flew every which way. The white plastic plate splintered.

"I'm on a hunger strike!" he yelled. "Fuckin hunger strike! I won't eat nothing! You'll eat my dingle before I eat anything you bring me, you fuckin deaf-mute retard asshole! You'll-"

Nick turned away and silence immediately descended. He went back out into the office, not knowing what to do, scared. If he could drive, he would take them up to Camden himself. But he couldn't drive. And there was Vince to think about. He couldn't just let him lie there, drawing flies.

There were two doors opening off the office. One was a coat closet. The other led down a flight of stairs. Nick went down and saw it was a combination cellar and storage room. It was cool down there. It would do, at least for a while.

He went back upstairs. Mike was sitting on the floor, morosely picking up squashed apple slices, brushing them off and eating them. He didn't look up at Nick.

Nick gathered the body up in his arms and tried to lift it. The sick smell coming off the corpse was making his stomach do cartwheels and handstands. Vince was too heavy for him. He looked at the body helplessly for a moment, and became aware that both of the others were now standing at their cell doors, watching with a dreadful fascination. Nick could guess what they were thinking. Vince had been one of them, a whiny gasbag, maybe, but someone they hung with, just the same. He had died like a rat in a trap with some horrible swelling sickness they didn't understand. Nick wondered, not for the first time that day, when he would start to sneeze and run a fever and develop those peculiar swellings on his neck.

He laid hold of Vince Hogan's meaty forearms and dragged him out of the cell. Vince's head leaned toward him because of the weight on his shoulders, and he seemed to be looking at Nick, wordlessly telling him to be careful, not to joggle him too much.

It took ten minutes to get the big man's remains down the steep stairs. Panting, Nick laid him on the concrete under the fluorescents, and then covered him quickly with a frayed army blanket from the cot in his cell.

He tried to sleep then, but sleep only came in the early hours of the morning after June twenty-third had become the twenty-fourth, yesterday. His dreams had always been very vivid, and sometimes he was afraid of them. He rarely had out-and-out nightmares, but more and more often lately they were ominous, giving him the feeling that no one in them was exactly as they seemed, and that the normal world had skewed into a place where babies were sacrificed behind closed blinds and stupendous black machines roared on and on in locked basements.

And, of course, there was the very personal terror-that he would wake up with it himself.

He did sleep a little, and the dream that came was one he had had before recently: the cornfield, the smell of warm growing things, the feel that something-or someone-very good and safe was close. A sense of home. And that began to fade into cold terror as he became aware that something was in the corn, watching him. He thought: Ma, weasel's got in the henhouse! and awoke to early morning light, sweat standing out on his body.

He put coffee on and went in to check on his two prisoners.

Mike Childress was in tears. Behind him, the hamburger was still stuck on the wall in its drying glue of condiments.

"You satisfied now? I got it too. Ain't that what you wanted? Ain't that your revenge? Listen to me, I sound like a fuckin freight train goin up a hill!"

But Nick's first concern had been for Billy Warner, who lay comatose on his bunk. His neck was swelled and black, his chest rising in fits and starts.

He hurried back to the office, looked at the telephone, and in a fit of rage and guilt he knocked it off the desk and onto the floor, where it lay meaninglessly at the end of its cord. He turned the hotplate off and ran down the street to the Baker house. He pushed the bell for what seemed an hour before Jane came down, wrapped in her robe. The fever-sweat was back on her face. She was not delirious, but her words were slow and slurry and her lips were blistered.

"Nick. Come in. What is it?"

"V. Hogan died last night. Warner's dying, I think. He's awful sick. Have you seen Dr. Soames?"

She shook her head, shivered in the light draft, sneezed, and then swayed on her feet. Nick put an arm around her shoulders and led her to a chair. He wrote: "Can you call his office for me?"

"Yes, of course. Bring me the phone, Nick. I seem …  to have had a setback in the night."

He brought the phone over and she dialed Soames's number. After she had held the receiver to her ear for more than half a minute, he knew there was going to be no answer.

She tried his home, then the home of his nurse. No answer.

"I'll try the State Patrol," she said, but put the phone back in the cradle after dialing a single number. "The long-distance is still out of service, I guess. After I dial 1, it just goes wah-wah-wah in my ear." She gave him a pallid smile and then the tears began to flow helplessly. "Poor Nick," she said. "Poor me. Poor everybody. Could you help me upstairs? I feel so weak, and I can't catch my breath. I think I'll be with John soon." He looked at her, wishing he could speak. "I think I'll lie down, if you can help me."