The Stand:BOOK I(73)

He felt for her face and kissed her, first her nose, then each eye, then her mouth.

"Thank you," he said humbly, having not the slightest idea what he meant. "Thank you. Thank you."

"Thank you," she repeated. "Oh dear Larry. You won't leave me, will you?"

"No," he said. "I won't leave you. Just tell me when you feel like you can, Rita, and we'll go together."

When she felt she could, they did.

They got over the bodies, their arms slung about each other's necks like drunken chums coming home from a neighborhood tavern. Beyond that they came to a blockage of some sort. It was impossible to see, but after running her hands over it, Rita said it might be a bed standing on end. Together they managed to tip it over the catwalk railing. It crashed onto a car below with a loud, echoing bang that made them both jump and clutch each other. Behind where it had been there were more sprawled bodies, three of them, and Larry guessed that these were the soldiers that had shot down the Jewish family. They got over them and went on, holding hands.

A short time later Rita stopped short.

"What's the matter?" Larry asked. "Is there something in the way?"

"No. I can see, Larry! It's the end of the tunnel!"

He blinked and realized that he could see, too. The glow was dim and it had come so gradually that he hadn't been aware of it until Rita had spoken. He could make out a faint shine on the tiles, and the pale blur of Rita's face closer by. Looking over to the left he could see the dead river of automobiles.

"Come on," he said, jubilant.

Sixty paces farther along there were more bodies sprawled on the walkway, all soldiers. They stepped over them.

"Why would they only close off New York?" she asked. "Unless maybe …  Larry, maybe it only happened in New York!"

"I don't think so," he said, but felt a touch of irrational hope anyway.

They walked faster. The mouth of the tunnel was ahead of them now. It was blocked by two huge army convoy trucks parked nose to nose. The trucks blotted out much of the daylight; if they hadn't been there, Larry and Rita would have had some light much farther back in the tunnel. There was another sprawl of bodies where the catwalk descended to join the ramp leading outside. They squeezed between the convoy trucks, scrambling over the locked bumpers. Rita didn't look inside, but Larry did. There was a half-assembled tripod machine gun, boxes of ammunition, and canisters of stuff that looked like teargas. Also, three dead men.

As they came outside, a rain-dampened breeze pressed against them, and its wonderfully fresh smell seemed to make it all worthwhile. He said so to Rita, and she nodded and put her head against his shoulder for a moment.

"I wouldn't go through there again for a million dollars, though," she said.

"In a few years you'll be using money for toilet paper," he said. "Please don't squeeze the greenbacks."

"But are you sure-"

"That it wasn't just New York?" He pointed. "Look."

The tollbooths were empty. The middle one stood in a heap of broken glass. Beyond them, the westbound lanes were empty for as far as they could see, but the eastbound lanes, the ones which fed into the tunnel and the city they had just left, were crowded with silent traffic. There was an untidy pile of bodies in the breakdown lane, and a number of seagulls stood watch over it.

"Oh dear God," she said weakly.

"There were as many people trying to get into New York as there were trying to get out of it. I don't know why they bothered blockading the tunnel on the Jersey end. Probably they didn't know why, either. Just somebody's bright idea, busywork-"

But she had sat down on the road and was crying.

"Don't," he said, kneeling beside her. The experience in the tunnel was still too fresh for him to feel angry with her. "It's all right, Rita."

"What is?" she sobbed. "What is? Just tell me one thing."

"We're out, anyway. That's something. And there's fresh air. In fact, New Jersey never smelled so good."

That earned him a wan smile. Larry looked at the scratches on her cheek and temple where the shards of tile had cut her.

"We ought to get you to a drugstore and put some peroxide on those cuts," he said. "Do you feel up to walking?"

"Yes." She was looking at him with a dumb gratitude that made him feel uneasy. "And I'll get some new shoes. Some sneakers. I'll do just what you tell me, Larry. I want to."

"I shouted at you because I was upset," he said quietly. He brushed her hair back and kissed one of the scratches over her right eye. "I'm not such a bad guy," he added quietly.

"Just don't leave me."

He helped her to her feet and slipped an arm around her waist. Then they walked slowly toward the tollbooths and slipped through them, New York behind them and across the river.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 36

There was a small park in the center of Ogunquit, complete with a Civil War cannon and a War Memorial, and after Gus Dinsmore died, Frannie Goldsmith went there and sat beside the duck pond, idly throwing stones in and watching the ripples spread in the calm water until they reached the lily pads around the edges and broke up in confusion.

She had taken Gus to the Hanson house down on the beach the day before yesterday, afraid that if she waited any longer Gus wouldn't be able to walk and would have to spend his "final confinement," as her ancestors would have termed it with such grisly yet apt euphemism, in his hot little cubicle near the public beach parking lot.

She had thought Gus would die that night. His fever had been high and he had been crazily delirious, falling out of bed twice and even staggering around old Mr. Hanson's bedroom, knocking things over, falling to his knees, getting up again. He cried out to people who were not there, answered them, and watched them with emotions varying from hilarity to dismay until Frannie began to feel that Gus's invisible companions were the real ones and she was the phantom. She had begged Gus to get back into bed, but for Gus she wasn't there. She had to keep stepping out of his way; if she hadn't, he would have knocked her over and walked over her.

At last he had fallen onto the bed and had passed from energetic delirium to a gasping, heavy-breathing unconsciousness that Fran supposed was the final coma. But the next morning when she looked in on him, Gus had been sitting up in bed and reading a paperback Western he had found on one of the shelves. He thanked her for taking care of him and told her earnestly that he hoped he hadn't said or done anything embarrassing the night before.

When she said he hadn't, Gus had looked doubtfully around the wreckage of the bedroom and told her she was good to say so, anyway. She made some soup, which he ate with gusto, and when he complained of how hard it was to read without his spectacles, which had been broken while he had been taking his turn on the barricade at the south end of town the week before, she had taken the paperback (over his weak protests) and had read him four chapters in a Western by that woman who lived up north in Haven. Rimfire Christmas, it was called. Sheriff John Stoner was having problems with the rowdier element in the town of Roaring Rock, Wyoming, it seemed-and, worse, he just couldn't find anything to give his lovely young wife for Christmas.

Fran had gone away more optimistic, thinking that Gus might be recovering. But last night he had been worse again, and he had died at quarter to eight this morning, only an hour and a half ago. He had been rational at the end, but unaware of just how serious his condition was. He had told her longingly that he'd like to have an ice cream soda, the kind his daddy had treated Gus and his brothers to every Fourth of July and again at Labor Day when the fair came to Bangor. But the power was off in Ogunquit by then-it had gone at exactly 9:17 P.M. on the evening of June 28 by the electric clocks-and there was no ice cream to be had in town. She had wondered if someone in town might not have a gasoline generator with a freezer hooked up to it on an emergency circuit, and even thought of hunting up Harold Lauder to ask him, but then Gus began to breathe his final whooping, hopeless breaths. That went on for five minutes while she held his head up with one hand and a cloth under his mouth with the other to catch the thick expectorations of mucus. Then it was over.

Frannie covered him with a clean sheet and had left him on old Jack Hanson's bed, which overlooked the ocean. Then she had come here and since then had been skipping rocks across the pond, not thinking about much of anything. But she unconsciously realized that it was a good kind of not thinking; it wasn't like that strange apathy that had shrouded her on the day after her father had died. Since then, she had been more and more herself. She had gotten a rosebush down at Nathan's House of Flowers and had carefully planted it at the foot of Peter's grave. She thought it would take hold real well, as her father would have said. Her lack of thought now was a kind of rest, after seeing Gus through the last of it. It was nothing like the prelude to madness she had gone through before. That had been like passing through some gray, foul tunnel full of shapes more sensed than seen; it was a tunnel she never wanted to travel again.