The Stand:BOOK I(63)

Later that night, after the lights had come on automatically, Lloyd had eaten some of the beans he had saved from two days ago. They tasted horrible but he ate them anyway. He washed them down with water from the toilet bowl and then crawled up on his bunk and clasped his knees against his chest, cursing Poke for getting him into such a mess. It was all Poke's fault. On his own, Lloyd never would have been ambitious to get into more than small-time trouble.

Little by little, the roaring for food had quieted down, and Lloyd suspected he wasn't the only one who had been squirreling away some insurance. But he didn't have much. If he had really believed this was going to happen, he would have put away more. There was something in the back of his mind that he didn't want to see. It was as if there was a set of flapping drapes in the back of his mind, with something behind them. You could only see that thing's bony, skeletal feet below the hem of the drapes. That's all you wanted to see. Because the feet belonged to a nodding, emaciated corpse, and his name was STARVATION.

"Oh no," Lloyd said. "Someone's gonna come. Sure they are. Just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket."

But he kept remembering the rabbit. He couldn't help it. He had won the rabbit and a cage to keep him in at a school raffle. His daddy didn't want him to keep it, but Lloyd had somehow persuaded him that he would take care of it and feed it out of his own allowance. He loved that rabbit, and he did take care of it. At first. The trouble was, things slipped his mind after a while. It had always been that way. And one day while he was swinging idly in the tire that hung from the sickly maple behind their scraggy little house in Marathon, Pennsylvania, he had suddenly sat bolt upright, thinking of that rabbit. He hadn't thought of his rabbit in …  well, in better than two weeks. It had just completely slipped his mind.

He ran to the little shed tacked onto the barn, and it had been summer just like it was now, and when he stepped into that shed, the bland smell of the rabbit had struck him in the face like a big old roundhouse slap. The fur he had liked so much to stroke was matted and dirty. White maggots crawled busily in the sockets that had once held his rabbit's pretty pink eyes. The rabbit's paws were ragged and bloody. He tried to tell himself that the paws were bloody because it had tried to scratch its way out of the cage, and that was undoubtedly how it had happened, but some sick, dark part of his mind spoke up in a whisper and said that maybe the rabbit, in the final extremity of its hunger, had tried to eat itself.

Lloyd had taken the rabbit away, dug a deep hole, and buried it, still in its cage. His father had never asked him about the rabbit, might even have forgotten that his boy had a rabbit-Lloyd was not terribly bright, but he was a mental giant when stacked up against his daddy-but Lloyd had never forgotten. Always plagued by vivid dreams, the death of the rabbit had occasioned a series of terrible nightmares. And now the vision of the rabbit returned as he sat on his bunk with his knees drawn up to his chest, telling himself that someone would come, someone would surely come and let him go free. He didn't have this Captain Trips flu; he was just hungry. Like his rabbit had been hungry. Just like that.

Sometime after midnight he had fallen asleep, and this morning he had begun to work on the leg of his bunk. And now, looking at his bloody fingers, he thought with fresh horror about the paws of that long-ago rabbit, to whom he had meant no harm.

By one o'clock on the afternoon of June 29, he had the cotleg free. At the end the bolt had given with stupid ease and the leg had clanged to the floor of his cell and he had just looked at it, wondering what in God's name he had wanted it for in the first place. It was about three feet long.

He took it to the front of the cell and began to hammer furiously against the blued-steel bars. "Hey!" he yelled, as the clanging bar gave off its deep, gonglike notes. "Hey, I want out! I want to get the fuck out of here, understand? Hey, goddammit, hey! "

He stopped and listened as the echoes faded. For a moment there was total silence and then from the holding cellblock came the rapturous, hoarse answer: "Mother! Down here, Mother! I'm down here!"

"Jeeesus! " Lloyd cried, and threw the cotleg into the corner. He had struggled for hours, practically destroyed his fingers, just so he could wake that asshole up.

He sat on his bunk, lifted the mattress, and took out a piece of rough bread. He debated adding a handful of dates, told himself he should save them, and snatched them up anyway. He ate them one by one, grimacing, saving the bread for last to take that slimy, fruity taste out of his mouth.

When he was done with this miserable excuse for a meal, he walked aimlessly to the right side of his cell. He looked down and stifled a cry of revulsion. Trask was sprawled half on his cot and half off it, and his pants legs had pulled up a little. His ankles were bare above the prison slippers they gave you to wear. A large, sleek rat was lunching up on Trask's leg. Its repulsive pink tail was neatly coiled around its gray body.

Lloyd walked to the other corner of his own cell and picked up the cotleg. He went back and stood for a moment, wondering if the rat would see him and decide to go off where the company wasn't quite so lively. But the rat's back was to him, and as far as Lloyd could tell, the rat didn't even know he was there. Lloyd measured the distance with his eye and decided the cotleg would reach admirably.

"Huh!" Lloyd grunted, and swung the leg. It squashed the rat against Trask's leg, and Trask fell off his bunk with a stiff thump. The rat lay on its side, dazed, aspirating weakly. There were beads of blood in its whiskers. Its rear legs were moving, as if its ratty little brain was telling it to run somewhere but along the spinal cord the signals were getting all scrambled up. Lloyd hit it again and killed it.

"There you are, you cheap fuck," Lloyd said. He put the cotleg down and wandered back to his bunk. He was hot and scared and felt like crying. He looked back over his shoulder and cried: "How do you like rat hell, you scuzzy little cocksucker?"

"Mother!" the voice cried happily in answer. "Moootherrr! "

"Shut up! " Lloyd screamed. "I ain't your mother! Your mother's in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana! "

"Mother?" the voice said, now full of weak doubt. Then it fell silent.

Lloyd began to weep. As he cried he rubbed his eyes with his fists like a small boy. He wanted a steak sandwich, he wanted to talk to his lawyer, he wanted to get out of here.

At last he lay down on his cot, put one arm over his eyes, and masturbated. It was as good a way of getting to sleep as any.

When he woke up again it was 5 P.M. and Maximum Security was dead quiet. Blearily, Lloyd got off his cot, which now leaned drunkenly toward the spot where one of its supports had been taken away. He got the cotleg, steeled himself for the cries of "Mother! " and began hammering on the bars like a farm cook calling the hired hands in for a big country supper. Supper. Now there was a word, had there ever been a finer? Ham steaks and potatoes with redeye gravy and fresh new peas and milk with Hershey's chocolate syrup to dump in it. And a great big old dish of strawberry ice cream for dessert. No, there had never been a word to match supper.

"Hey, ain't nobody there?" Lloyd cried, his voice breaking.

No answer. Not even a cry of "Mother! " At this point, he might have welcomed it. Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

Lloyd let the cotleg drop with a crash. He stumbled back to his bunk, turned up the mattress, and made inventory. Two more hunks of bread, two more handfuls of dates, a half-gnawed pork chop, one piece of bologna. He pulled the slice of bologna in two and ate the big half, but that only whetted his appetite, brought it raging up.

"No more," he whispered, then gobbled the rest of the pork off the chopbone and called himself names and wept some more. He was going to die in here, just as his rabbit had died in its cage, just as Trask had died in his.

Trask.

He looked into Trask's cell for a long, thoughtful time, watching the flies circle and land and take off. There was a regular L.A. International Airport for flies right on ole Trask's face. At long last, Lloyd got the cotleg, went to the bars, and reached through with it. By standing on tiptoe he could get just enough length to catch the rat's body and drag it toward his cell.

When it was close enough, Lloyd got on his knees and pulled the rat through to his side. He picked it up by the tail and held the dangling body before his eyes for a long time. Then he put it under his mattress where the flies could not get at it, segregating the limp body from what remained of his food-stash. He looked fixedly at the rat for a long time before letting the mattress fall back, mercifully hiding it from sight.

"Just in case," Lloyd Henreid whispered to the silence. "Just in case, is all."

Then he climbed up on the other end of the bunk, drew his knees up to his chin, and sat still.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 33

At twenty-two minutes of nine by the clock over the sheriff's office doorway, the lights went off.

Nick Andros had been reading a paperback he had taken from the rack in the drugstore, a gothic novel about a frightened governess who thought the lonely estate where she was supposed to be teaching the handsome master's sons was haunted. Although he wasn't even halfway through the book, Nick already knew the ghost was really the handsome master's wife, who was probably locked up in the attic, and crazy as a loon.