The Stand:BOOK I(46)

He helped her upstairs, then wrote: "I'll be back."

"Thank you, Nick. You're a good boy … " She was already drifting off to sleep.

Nick left the house and stood on the sidewalk, wondering what to do next. If he could drive, he might be able to do something. But …

He saw a child's bicycle lying on the lawn of a house across the street. He went to it, looked at the house it belonged to with its drawn shades (so much like the houses in his confused dreams), then went and knocked on the door. There was no answer, although he knocked several times.

He went back to the bike. It was small, but not too small for him to ride, if he didn't mind his knees whamming the handlebars. He would look ludicrous, of course, but he was not at all sure there was anyone left in Shoyo to see …  and if there was, he didn't think many of them would be in a laughing frame of mind.

He got on the bike and pedaled clumsily up Main Street, past the jail, then east on Route 63, toward where Joe Rackman had seen the soldiers masquerading as a road crew. If they were still there, and if they really were soldiers, Nick would get them to take care of Billy Warner and Mike Childress. If Billy was still alive, that was. If those men had quarantined Shoyo, then surely the sick of Shoyo were their responsibility.

It took him an hour to pedal out to the roadwork, the bike weaving crazily back and forth across the center line, his knees thumping the handlebars with monotonous regularity. But when he got there the soldiers, or road crew, or whatever they had been, were gone. There were a few smudgepots, one of them still flickering. There were two orange sawhorses. And the road had been torn up, although Nick judged it would still be passable, if you weren't too choosy about the springs of your car.

Black flickering movement caught the tail of his eye, and at the same instant the wind stirred around a little, just a soft summer breath, but enough to bring a ripe and sickening odor of corruption to his nostrils. The black movement was a cloud of flies, constantly forming and re-forming itself. He walked the bike over to the ditch at the far side of the road. In it, next to a shiny new corrugated culvert pipe, were the bodies of four men. Their necks and swollen faces were black. Nick didn't know if they were soldiers or not, and he didn't go any closer. He told himself he would walk back to the bike, there was nothing here to be scared about, they were dead, and dead people couldn't hurt you. He was running by the time he was twenty feet from the ditch, anyway, and he was in a panic as he rode back toward Shoyo. On the outskirts of town he hit a rock and crashed the bike. He went over the handlebars, bumped his head, and scraped his hands. He only hunkered there for a moment in the middle of the road, shivering all over.

For the next hour and a half of that morning, yesterday morning, Nick knocked on doors and rang bells. There would be someone well, he told himself. He himself felt all right, and surely he could not be the only one. There would be someone, a man, a woman, maybe a teenager with a learner's permit, and he or she would say: Oh, hey, yes. Let's get them to Camden. We'll take the station wagon. Or words to that effect.

But his knocking and ringing were answered less than a dozen times. The door would open to the length of a latch-chain, a sick but hopeful face would look out, see Nick, and hope would die. The face would move back and forth in negation, and then the door would shut. If Nick could talk, he would have argued if they could still walk, they could drive. That if they took his prisoners to Camden, they could go themselves, and there would be a hospital. They would be made well. But he couldn't speak.

Some asked if he had seen Dr. Soames. One man, in a delirious rage, threw the door of his small ranch-house wide open, staggered out on the porch dressed only in Isis underpants, and tried to grab Nick. He said he was going to do "what I should have done to you back in Houston." He seemed to think Nick was someone named Jenner. He lurched back and forth along the porch after Nick like a zombie in a third-rate horror picture. His crotch had swelled terribly; his underpants looked as if someone had stuffed a honeydew melon into them. At last he crashed to the porch and Nick watched him from the lawn below, his heart thumping rapidly. The man shook his fist weakly, then crawled back inside, not bothering to shut the door.

But most of the houses were only silent and cryptic, and at last he could do no more. That dream-sense of ominousness was creeping up on him and it became impossible to dismiss the idea that he was knocking on the doors of tombs, knocking to wake the dead, and that sooner or later the corpses might begin to answer. It didn't help much to tell himself that most of the houses were empty, their occupants already fled to Camden or El Dorado or Texarkana.

He went back to the Baker house. Jane Baker was sleeping deeply, her forehead cool. But this time he wasn't as hopeful.

It was noon. Nick went back to the truck-stop, feeling his night's broken rest now. His body seemed to throb all over from his spill off the bike. Baker's .45 banged his hip. At the truck-stop he heated two cans of soup and put them in thermos jugs. The milk in the fridge still seemed fine, so he took a bottle of that, too.

Billy Warner was dead, and when Mike saw Nick, he began to giggle hysterically and point his finger. "Two down and one to go! Two down and one to go! You're gettin your revenge! Right? Right?"

Nick carefully pushed the thermos of soup through the slot with the broomhandle, and then a big glass of milk. Mike began to drink soup directly from the thermos in small sips. Nick took his own thermos and sat down in the hallway. He would take Billy downstairs, but first he would have lunch. He was hungry. As he drank his soup he looked at Mike thoughtfully.

"You wondering how I am?" Mike asked.

Nick nodded.

"Just the same as when you left this morning. I must have hawked out a pound of snot." He looked at Nick hopefully. "My mom always said that when you hawked snot like that, you was gettin better. Maybe I just got a mild case, huh? You think that might be?"

Nick shrugged. Anything was possible.

"I got the constitution of a brass eagle," Mike said. "I think it's nothing. I think I'll throw it off. Listen, man, let me out. Please. I'm fuckin beggin you now."

Nick thought about it.

"Hell, you got the gun. I don't want you for nothing, anyway. I just want to get out of this town. I want to check on my wife first-"

Nick pointed to Mike's left hand, which was bare of rings.

"Yeah, we're divorced, but she's still here in town, out on the Ridge Road. I'd like to look in on her. What do you say, man?" Mike was crying. "Give me a chance. Don't keep me locked up in this rat-trap."

Nick stood up slowly, went out into the office, and opened the desk drawer. The keys were there. The man's logic was inexorable; there was no sense in believing that someone was going to come and bail them out of this terrible mess. He got the keys and went back. He held up the one Big John Baker had shown him, with the tag of white tape on it, and tossed them through the bars to Mike Childress.

"Thanks," Mike babbled. "Oh, thanks. I'm sorry we beat up on you, I swear to God, it was Ray's idea, me and Vince tried to stop him but he gets drinkin and he gets crazy-" He rattled the key in the lock. Nick stood back, his hand on the gunbutt.

The cell door opened and Mike stepped out. "I meant it," he said. "All I want to do is get out of this town." He sidled past Nick, a grin twitching at his lips. Then he bolted through the door between the small cellblock and the office. Nick followed just in time to see the office door closing behind him.

Nick went outside. Mike was standing on the curb, his hand on a parking meter, looking at the empty street.

"My God," he whispered, and turned his stunned face to look at Nick. "All this? All this?"

Nick nodded, his hand still on the gunbutt.

Mike started to say something, and it turned into a coughing spasm. He covered his mouth, then wiped his lips.

"I'm getting to Christ out of here," he said. "You're wise, you'll do the same thing, mutie. This is like the black death, or somethin."

Nick shrugged, and Mike started down the sidewalk. He moved faster and faster until he was nearly running. Nick watched him until he was out of sight, and then went back inside. He never saw Mike again. His heart felt lighter, and he was suddenly sure that he had done the right thing. He lay down on the cot and went to sleep almost at once.

He slept all afternoon on the blanketless couch and awoke sweaty but feeling a little better. Thunderstorms were beating the hills-he couldn't hear the thunder, but he could see the blue-white forks of light stabbing the hills-but none had come to Shoyo that night.

At dusk he walked down Main Street to Paulie's Radio & TV and committed another of his apologetic break-ins. He left a note by the cash register and lugged a Sony portable back to the jail. He turned it on and flipped through the channels. The CBS affiliate was broadcasting a sign which read MICROWAVE RELAY DIFFICULTY PLEASE STAY TUNED. The ABC station was showing "I Love Lucy," and the NBC feed was a rerun episode in a current series about a perky young girl trying to be a mechanic on the stock-car circuit. The Texarkana station, an independent specializing mostly in old movies, game shows, and religious zanies of the Jack Van Impe stripe, was off the air.

Nick snapped the TV off, went down to the truck-stop, and fixed enough soup and sandwiches for two. He thought there was something eerie about the way all the streetlights still came on, stretching out both ways along Main Street in spotlit pools of white light. He put the food in a hamper, and on the way to Jane Baker's house three or four dogs, obviously unfed and ravenous, advanced on him in a pack, drawn by the smell from the hamper. Nick drew the .45 but couldn't summon up the heart to use it until one of the dogs was getting ready to bite him. Then he pulled the trigger and the bullet whined off the cement five feet in front of him, leaving a silvery streak of lead. The sound of the report did not come to him, but he felt the dull thud of vibration. The dogs broke and ran.