The Stand:BOOK I(71)

"Fuck you," he said with nervous resentment. "I tried to apologize."

For a moment he couldn't go on; he felt impaled by hundreds of angry dead eyes, staring out at him from all these cars. A snatch of Dylan occurred to him: "I waited for you inside the frozen traffic …  when you knew I had some other place to be …  but where are you tonight, sweet Marie? "

Ahead, he could see four lanes of westbound traffic disappearing into the black arch of the tunnel, and with something like real dread he saw that the overhead fluorescent bars inside the Lincoln were out. It would be like going into an automobile graveyard. They would let him get halfway and then they would all begin to stir …  to come alive …  he would hear car doors clicking open and then softly chunking closed …  their shuffling footsteps …

A light sweat broke on his body. Overhead a bird called raucously and he jumped. You're being stupid, he told himself. Kid's stuff, that's what this is. All you have to do is stay on the pedestrian catwalk and in no time at all you'll be-

 – strangled by the walking dead.

He licked his lips and tried to laugh. It came out badly. He walked five paces toward the place where the ramp joined the highway and then stopped again. To his left was a Caddy, an El Dorado, and a woman with a blackened troll face was staring out at him. Her nose was pressed into a bulb against the glass. Blood and snot had trickled out onto the window. The man who had been driving the Caddy was slumped over the wheel as if looking for something on the floor. All the Caddy's windows were rolled up; it would be like a greenhouse in there. If he opened the door the woman would spill out and break open on the pavement like a sack of rotten melons and the smell would be warm and steamy, wet and crawling with decay.

The way it would smell in the tunnel.

Abruptly Larry turned around and trotted back the way he had come, feeling the breeze he was making cool the sweat on his forehead.

"Rita! Rita, listen! I want to-"

The words died as he reached the top of the ramp. Rita was still gone. Thirty-ninth Street dwindled away to a point. He ran from the south sidewalk to the north, squeezing between bumpers and scrambling over hoods almost hot enough to blister his skin. But the north sidewalk was also empty. He cupped his hands around his mouth and cried: "Rita! Rita! "

His only answer a dead echo: "Rita …  ita …  ita …  ita …  "

By four o'clock dark clouds had begun to build over Manhattan and the sound of thunder rolled back and forth between the city's cliffs. Lightning forked down at the buildings. It was as if God were trying to frighten the few remaining people out of hiding. The light had become yellow and strange, and Larry didn't like it. His belly was cramped and when he lit a cigarette it trembled in his hand the way the coffee cup had trembled in Rita's this morning.

He was sitting at the street end of the access ramp, leaning his back against the lowest bar of the railing. His pack was on his lap, and the .30-.30 was leaning against the railing beside him. He had thought she would get scared and come back before long, but she hadn't. Fifteen minutes ago he had given up calling her name. The echoes freaked him out.

Thunder rolled again, close this time. A chilly breeze ran its hand over the back of his shirt, which was pasted to his skin with sweat. He was going to have to get inside somewhere or else stop shitting around and go through the tunnel. If he couldn't work up the guts to go through, he'd have to spend another night in the city and go over the George Washington Bridge in the morning, and that was 140 blocks north.

He tried to think rationally about the tunnel. There was nothing in there that was going to bite him. He'd forgotten to pick up a good big flashlight-Christ, you never remembered everything -but he did have his butane Bic, and there was a guardrail between the catwalk and the road. Anything else …  thinking about all those dead people in their cars, for instance …  that was just panic talking, comic-book stuff, about as sensible as worrying about the boogeyman in the closet. If that's all you can think about, Larry note 5, then you're not going to get along in this brave new world. Not at all. You're-

A stroke of lightning split the sky almost directly overhead, making him wince. It was followed by a heavy caisson of thunder. He thought randomly, July 1, this is the day you're supposed to take your sweetie to Coney Island and eat hotdogs by the score. Knock down the three wooden milk-bottles with one ball and win the Kewpie doll. The fireworks at night-

A cold splash of rain struck the side of his face and then another hit the back of his neck and trickled inside the collar of his shirt. Dime-sized drops began to hit around him. He stood up, slung the pack over his shoulders, and hoisted the rifle. He was still not sure which way to go-back to Thirty-ninth or into the Lincoln Tunnel. But he had to get undercover somewhere because it was starting to pour.

Thunder broke overhead with a gigantic roar, making him squeal in terror-a sound no different than those made by Cro-Magnon men two million years before.

"You fucking coward," he said, and trotted down the ramp toward the maw of the tunnel, his head bent forward as the rain began to come harder. It dripped from his hair. He passed the woman with her nose against the El Dorado's passenger window, trying not to look but catching her out of the tail of his eye just the same. The rain drummed on the car roofs like jazz percussion. It was coming down so hard it bounced back up again, causing a light mist-haze.

Larry stopped for a moment just outside the tunnel, undecided and frightened again. Then it began to hail, and that decided him. The hailstones were big, stinging. Thunder bellowed again.

Okay, he thought. Okay, okay, okay, I'm convinced. He stepped into the Lincoln Tunnel.

It was much blacker inside than he had imagined it would be. At first the opening behind him cast dim white light ahead and he could see yet more cars, jammed in bumper to bumper (it must have been bad, dying in here, he thought, as claustrophobia wrapped its stealthy banana fingers lovingly around his head and began to first caress and then to squeeze his temples, it must have been really bad, it must have been fucking horrible), and the greenish-white tiles that dressed the upward-curving walls. He could see the pedestrian railing to his right, stretching dimly ahead. On his left, at thirty –  or forty-foot intervals, were big support pillars. A sign advised him DO NOT CHANGE LANES. There were dark fluorescents embedded in the tunnel's roof, and the blank glass eyes of closed-circuit TV cameras. And as he negotiated the first slow, banked curve, bearing gently to the right, the light grew dimmer until all he could see were muted flashes of chrome. After that the light simply ceased to exist at all.

He fumbled out his Bic, held it up, and spun the wheel. The light it provided was pitifully small, feeding his unease rather than assuaging it. Even with the flame turned up all the way it only gave him a circle of visibility about six feet in diameter.

He put it back in his pocket and kept walking, trailing his hand lightly along the railing. There was an echo in here, too, one he liked even less than the one outside. The echo made it sound like someone was behind him …  stalking him. He stopped several times, head cocked, eyes wide (but blind), listening until the echo had died off. After a bit he began to shuffle along, not lifting his heels from the concrete, so the echo wouldn't recur.

Sometime after that he stopped again and flicked the lighter close to his wristwatch. It was four-twenty, but he wasn't sure what to make of that. In this blackness time seemed to have no objective meaning. Neither did distance, for that matter; how long was the Lincoln Tunnel, anyway? A mile? Two? Surely it couldn't be two miles under the Hudson River. Let's say a mile. But if a mile was all it was, he should have been at the other end already. If the average man walks four miles an hour, he can walk one mile in fifteen minutes and he'd already been in this stinking hole five minutes longer than that.

"I'm walking a lot slower," he said, and jumped at the sound of his own voice. The lighter dropped from his hand and clicked onto the catwalk. The echo spoke back, changed into the dangerously jocular voice of an approaching lunatic:

" …  lot slower …  lower …  lower …  "

"Jesus," Larry muttered, and the echo whispered back: "zuss …  zuss …  zuss …  "

He wiped a hand across his face, fighting panic and the urge to give up thought and just run blindly forward. Instead he knelt (his knees popped like pistol shots, frightening him again) and walked his fingers over the miniature topography of the pedestrian catwalk-the chipped valleys in the cement, the ridge of an old cigarette butt, the hill of a tiny tinfoil ball-until at last he happened on his Bic. With an inner sigh he squeezed it tightly in his hand, stood up, and walked on.

Larry was beginning to get himself under control again when his foot struck something stiff and barely yielding. He uttered an inhalatory sort of scream and took two staggering steps backward. He made himself hold steady as he pulled the Bic lighter from his pocket and flicked it. The flame wavered crazily in his trembling grasp.

He had stepped on a soldier's hand. He was sitting with his back against the tunnel wall, his legs splayed across the walkway, a horrible sentinel left here to bar passage. His glazed eyes stared up at Larry. His lips had fallen away from his teeth and he seemed to be grinning. A switchblade knife jutted jauntily from his throat.