The Stand:BOOK I(82)

"Ride around all night …  ride around all day …  doo-dah … "

The cotleg snagged the calf of Trask's pantsleg and then pulled free. Lloyd put his head down and sobbed like a child. Behind him, tossed indifferently in one corner, was the skeleton of the rat he had killed in Trask's cell on June 29, five days ago. The rat's long pink tail was still attached to the skeleton. Lloyd had tried repeatedly to eat the tail but it was too tough. Almost all the water in the toilet bowl was gone despite his efforts to conserve it. The cell was filled with the reek of urine; he had been peeing out into the corridor so as not to contaminate his water supply. He had not-and this was understandable enough, considering the radically reduced conditions of his diet-had to move his bowels.

He had eaten the food he had squirreled away too fast. He knew that now. He had thought someone would come. He hadn't been able to believe-

He didn't want to eat Trask. The thought of eating Trask was horrible. Just last night he had managed to slap one of his slippers over a cockroach and had eaten it alive; he had felt it scuttering madly around inside his mouth just before his teeth had crunched it in two. Actually, it hadn't been half bad, much tastier than the rat. No, he didn't want to eat Trask. He didn't want to be a cannibal. It was like the rat. He would get Trask over within reaching distance …  but just in case. Just in case. He had heard a man could go a long time without food as long as he had water.

(not much water but I won't think about that now not just now no not just now)

He didn't want to die. He didn't want to starve. He was too full of hate.

The hate had built up at a fairly leisurely pace over the last three days, growing with his hunger. He supposed that, if his long-dead pet rabbit had been capable of thought, it would have hated him in the same way (he slept a great deal tow, and his sleep was always troubled with dreams of his rabbit, its body swollen, its fur matted, the maggots squirming in its eyes, and worst of all, those bloody paws: when he awoke he would look at his own fingers in dread fascination). Lloyd's hate had coalesced around a simple imagistic concept, and this concept was THE KEY.

He was locked in. Once upon a time it had seemed right that he should be. He was one of the bad guys. Not a really bad guy; Poke had been the really bad guy. Small shit was the worst he would have done without Poke. Still, he shared a certain amount of the blame. There had been Gorgeous George in Vegas, and the three people in the white Continental-he had been in on that, and he supposed he had owned some of that heat. He supposed he deserved to take a fall, do a little time. It wasn't something you volunteered for, but when they had you cold they gave you the bullet and you ate it. Like he had told the lawyer, he thought he deserved about twenty for his part in the "tri-state killspree." Not in the electric chair, Christ no. The thought of Lloyd Henreid riding the lightning was just …  it was crazy.

But they had THE KEY, that was the thing. They could lock you up and do what they wanted with you.

In the last three days, Lloyd had vaguely begun to grasp the symbolic, talismanic power of THE KEY. THE KEY was your reward for playing by the rules. If you didn't, they could lock you up. It was no different than the Go to Jail card in Monopoly. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And with THE KEY went certain prerogatives. They could take away ten years of your life, or twenty, or forty. They could hire people like Mathers to beat on you. They could even take away your life in the electric chair.

But having THE KEY didn't give them the right to go away and leave you locked up to starve. It didn't give them the right to force you into eating a dead rat and to try to eat the dry ticking of your mattress. It didn't give them the right to leave you in a spot where you might just have to eat the man in the next cell to stay alive (if you can get ahold of him, that is-doo-dah, doo-dah).

There were certain things you just couldn't do to people. Having THE KEY only took you so far and no farther. They had left him here to die a horrible death when they could have let him out. He wasn't a mad dog killer who was going to waste the first person he saw, in spite of what the papers had said. Small shit was the worst he had ever gotten into before meeting Poke.

So he hated, and the hate commanded him to live …  or at least to try. For a while it seemed to him that the hate and the determination to go on living were useless things, because all of those who had THE KEY had succumbed to the flu. They were beyond the reach of his vengeance. Then, little by little, as he grew hungrier, he realized that the flu wouldn't kill them. It would kill the losers like him; it would kill Mathers but not that scumbag screw who had hired Mathers because the screw had THE KEY. It wasn't going to kill the governor or the warden-the guard who said the warden was sick had obviously been a fucking liar. It wasn't going to kill the parole officers, the county sheriffs, or the FBI agents. The flu would not touch those who had THE KEY. It wouldn't dare. But Lloyd would touch them. If he lived long enough to get out of here, he would touch them plenty.

The cotleg snagged in Trask's cuff again.

"Come on," Lloyd whispered. "Come on. Come on over here …  camptown ladies sing dis song …  all doo-dah day."

Trask's body slid slowly, stiffly, along the floor of his cell. No fisherman ever played a bonita more carefully or with greater wile than Lloyd played Trask. Once Trask's trousers ripped and Lloyd had to hook on in a new place. But at last his foot was close enough so that Lloyd could reach through the bars and grab it …  if he wanted to.

"Nothing personal," he whispered to Trask. He touched Trask's leg. He caressed it. "Nothing personal, I ain't going to eat you, old buddy. Not less I have to."

He was not even aware that he was salivating.

The Stand

Lloyd heard someone in the ashy afterglow of dusk, and at first the sound was so far away and so strange-the clash of metal on metal-that he thought he must be dreaming it. The waking and sleeping states had become very similar to him now; he crossed back and forth across that boundary almost without knowing it.

But then the voice came and he snapped upright on his cot, his eyes flaring wide, huge and lambent in his starved face. The voice came floating down the corridors from God knew how far up in the Administration Wing and then down the stairwell to the hallways which connected the visiting areas to the central cellblock, where Lloyd was. It bobbed serenely through the twice-barred doors and finally reached Lloyd's ears:

"Hooooo-hoooo! Anybody home? "

And strangely, Lloyd's first thought was: Don't answer. Maybe he'll go away.

"Anybody home? Going once, going twice? …  Okay, I'm on my way, just about to shake the dust of Phoenix from my boots -"

At that, Lloyd's paralysis broke. He catapulted off the cot, snatched up the cotleg, and began to beat it frantically on the bars; the vibrations raced up the metal and shivered in the bones of his clenched fist.

"No! " he screamed. "No! Don't go! Please don't go! "

The voice, closer now, coming from the stairway between the Administration and this floor: "We'll eat you up, we love you so …  and oh, someone sounds so …  hungry." This was followed by a lazy chuckle.

Lloyd dropped the cotleg on the floor and wrapped both hands around the bars of the cell door. Now he could hear the footfalls somewhere up in the shadows, clocking steadily down the hall that led to the holding cellblock. Lloyd wanted to burst into tears of relief …  after all, he was saved …  yet it was not joy but fear he felt in his heart, a growing dread that made him wish he had stayed silent. Stayed silent? My God! What could be worse than starvation?

Starvation made him think of Trask. Trask lay sprawled on his back in the ashy afterglow of dusk, one leg stretched stiffly into Lloyd's cell, and an essential subtraction had occurred in the region of that leg's calf. The fleshy part of that leg's calf. There were teeth-marks there. Lloyd knew whose teeth had made those marks, but he had only the vaguest memory of lunching on filet of Trask. All the same, powerful feelings of revulsion, guilt, and horror filled him. He rushed across to the bars and pushed Trask's leg back into his own cell. Then, looking over his shoulder to make sure the owner of the voice was not yet in sight, he reached through, and with the dividing bars pressed against his face, he pulled Trask's pantsleg down, hiding what he had done.

Of course there was no great hurry, because the barred gates at the head of the cellblock were shut, and with the power off, the pushbutton wouldn't work. His rescuer would have to go back and find THE KEY. He would have to-

Lloyd grunted as the electric motor which operated the barred gates, whined into life. The silence of the cellblock magnified the sound, which ceased with the familiar click-slam! of the gates locking open.

Then the steps were clocking steadily up the cellblock walkway.

Lloyd had gone to his cell door again after neatening up Trask; now he involuntarily fell back two steps. He dropped his gaze to the floor outside and what he saw first was a pair of dusty cowboy boots with pointed toes and rundown heels and his first thought was that Poke had had a pair like that.

The boots stopped in front of his cell.

His gaze rose slowly, taking in the faded jeans snugged down over the boots, the leather belt with the brass buckle (various astrological signs inside a pair of concentric circles), the jeans jacket with a button pinned to each of the breast pockets-a smiley-smile face on one, a dead pig and the words HOW'S YOUR PORK on the other.