The Stand:BOOK I(69)

Slow, she had laughed. The last shall be first and the first last.

He had been on the verge when she had pushed him off and gotten cigarettes.

What the hell are you doing? he asked, amazed, while old John Thomas waved indignantly in the air, visibly throbbing.

She had smiled. You've got a free hand, don't you? So do I.

So they had done that while they smoked, and she chatted lightly about all manner of things-although the color had come up in her cheeks and after a while her breath had shortened and what she was saying began to drift off, forgotten.

Now, she said, taking his cigarette and her own and crushing them both out. Let's see if you can finish what you started. If you can't, I'll likely tear you apart.

He finished it, quite satisfactorily for both of them, and they had slipped off to sleep. He woke up sometime after four and watched her sleeping, thinking that there was something to be said for experience after all. He had done a lot of screwing in the last ten years or so, but what had happened earlier hadn't been screwing. It had been something much better than that, if a little decadent.

Well, she's had lovers, of course.

This had excited him again, and he woke her up.

And so it had been until they had found the monster-shouter, and last night. There had been other things before then, things that troubled him, but which he had accepted. Something like this, he had rationalized it, if it only makes you a little bit psycho, you're way ahead.

Two nights ago he had awakened sometime after two and had heard her running a glass of water in the bathroom. He knew she was probably taking another sleeping pill. She had the big red-and-yellow gelatine capsules that were known as "yellowjackets" on the West Coast. Big downers. He told himself she'd probably been taking them long before the superflu had happened.

And there was the way she followed him from place to place in the apartment, too, even standing in the bathroom door and talking to him while he was showering or relieving himself. He was a private bathroom person, but he told himself that some weren't. A lot of it depended on your upbringing. He would have a talk with her …  sometime.

But now …

Was he going to have to carry her on his back? Christ, he hoped not. She had seemed stronger than that, at least she had at first. It was one of the reasons she had appealed to him so strongly that day in the park …  the main reason, really. There's no more truth in advertising, he thought bitterly. How the hell was he qualified to take care of her when he couldn't even watch out for himself? He'd shown that pretty conclusively after the record had broken out. Wayne Stukey hadn't been shy about pointing it out, either.

"No," he told her, "I'm not angry. It's just that …  you know, I'm not your boss. If you don't feel like eating, just say so."

"I told you …  I said I didn't think I could-"

"The fuck you did," he snapped, startled and angry.

She bent her head and looked at her hands and he knew she was struggling to keep from sobbing because he wouldn't like that. For a moment it made him angrier than ever and he almost shouted: I'm not your father or your fat-cat husband! I'm not going to take care of you! You've got thirty years on me, for Christ's sake! Then he felt the familiar surge of self-contempt and wondered what the hell could be the matter with him.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm an insensitive bastard."

"No you're not," she said, and sniffled. "It's just that …  all of this is starting to catch up with me. It …  yesterday, that poor man in the park …  I thought: no one is ever going to catch the people who did that to him, and put them in jail. They'll just go on and do it again and again. Like animals in the jungle. And it all began to seem very real. Do you understand, Larry? Can you see what I mean?" She turned her tear-wet eyes up to him.

"Yes," he said, but he was still impatient with her, and just a trifle contemptuous. It was a real situation, how could it not be? They were in the middle of it and had watched it develop this far. His own mother was dead; he had watched her die, and was she trying to say that she was somehow more sensitive to all this than he was? He had lost his mother and she had lost the man who brought her Mercedes around, but somehow her loss was supposed to be the greater. Well, that was bullshit. Just bullshit.

"Try not to be angry with me," she said. "I'll do better."

I hope so. I sure do hope so.

"You're fine," he said, and helped her to her feet. "Come on, now. What do you say? We've got a lot to do. Feel up to it?"

"Yes," she said, but her expression was the same as it had been when he offered her the eggs.

"When we get out of the city, you'll feel better."

She looked at him nakedly. "Will I?"

"Sure," Larry said heartily. "Sure you will."

They went first-cabin.

Manhattan Sporting Goods was locked, but Larry broke a hole in the show window with a long iron pipe he had found. The burglar alarm brayed senselessly into the deserted street. He selected a large pack for himself and a smaller one for Rita. She had packed two changes of clothes for each of them-it was all he would allow-and he was carrying them in a PanAm flight bag she had found in the closet, along with toothbrushes. The toothbrushes struck him as slightly absurd. Rita was fashionably attired for walking, in white silk deckpants and a shell blouse. Larry wore faded bluejeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

They loaded the packs with freeze-dried foods and nothing else. There was no sense, Larry told her, in weighting themselves down with a lot of other stuff-including more clothes hen they could simply take what they wanted on the other side of the river. She agreed wanly, and her lack of interest nettled him again.

After a short interior debate with himself, he also added a .30-.30 and two hundred rounds of ammunition. It was a beautiful gun, and the pricetag he pulled from the trigger-guard and dropped indifferently on the floor said four hundred and fifty dollars.

"Do you really think we'll need that?" she asked apprehensively. She still had the .32 in her purse.

"I think we'd better have it," he told her, not wanting to say more but thinking about the monster-shouter's ugly end.

"Oh," she said in a small voice, and he guessed from her eyes that she was thinking about that, too.

"That pack's not too heavy for you, is it?"

"Oh, no. It isn't. Really."

"Well, they have a way of getting heavier as you walk along. You just say the word and I'll carry it for a while."

"I'll be all right," she said, and smiled. After they were on the sidewalk again, she looked both ways and said, "We're leaving New York."

"Yes."

She turned to him. "I'm glad. I feel like …  oh, when I was a little girl. And my father would say, ‘We're going on a trip today.' Do you remember how that was?"

Larry smiled a little in return, remembering the evenings his mother would say, "That Western you wanted to see is down at the Crest, Larry. Clint Eastwood. What do you say?"

"I guess I do remember," he said.

She stretched up on her toes, and readjusted the pack a little bit on her shoulders.

"The beginning of a journey," she said, and then so softly he wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly: "The way leads ever on …  "

"What?"

"It's a line from Tolkien," she said. "The Lord of the Rings. I've always thought of it as sort of a gateway to adventure."

"The less adventure the better," Larry said, but almost unwillingly he knew what she meant.

Still she was looking at the street. Near this intersection it was a narrow canyon between high stone and stretches of sun-reflecting thermopane, clogged with cars backed up for miles. It was as if everyone in New York had decided at the same time to park in the streets.

She said: "I've been to Bermuda and England and Jamaica and Montreal and Saigon and to Moscow. But I haven't been on a journey since I was a little girl and my father took my sister Bess and me to the zoo. Let's go, Larry."

It was a walk that Larry Underwood never, forgot. He found himself thinking that she hadn't been so wrong to quote Tolkien at that, Tolkien with his mythic lands seen through the lens of time and half-mad, half-exalted imaginings, peopled with elves and ents and trolls and orcs. There were none of those in New York, but so much had changed, so much was out of joint, that it was impossible not to think of it in terms of fantasy. A man hung from a lamppost at Fifth and East Fifty-fourth, below the park and in a once congested business district, a placard with the single word LOOTER hung around his neck. A cat lying on top of a hexagonal litter basket (the basket still had fresh-looking advertisements for a Broadway show on its sides) with her kittens, giving them suck and enjoying the midmorning sun. A young man with a big grin and a valise who strolled up to them and told Larry he would give him a million dollars for the use of the woman for fifteen minutes. The million, presumably, was in the valise. Larry unslung the rifle and told him to take his million elsewhere. "Sure, man. Don't hold it against me, you dig it? Can't blame a-guy for tryin, can you? Have a nice day. Hang loose."

They reached the corner of Fifth and East Thirty-ninth shortly after meeting that man (Rita, with a hysterical sort of good humor, insisted on referring to him as John Bearsford Tipton, a name which meant nothing to Larry). It was nearly noon, and Larry suggested lunch. There was a delicatessen on the corner, but when he pushed the door open, the smell of rotted meat that came out made her draw back.