The Stand:BOOK III(16)

"What dummy?"

"Well, I saw the retard, and so I figured the dummy must be with him, you know? And they're just not our type. I figure they must have come from the other side."

"That's what you figure, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I don't know what the Christ you're talking about. It's been a long day and I'm tired. If you don't start talking some sense, Julie, I'm going up to bed."

Julie sat down, crossed her legs, and told Lloyd about her meeting with Nick Andros and Tom Cullen in Pratt, Kansas, her hometown. About the Pepto-Bismol ("I was just having a little fun with the softie, and this deaf-and-dumb pulls a gun on me!"). She even told him about shooting at them as they left town.

"Which all proves what?" Lloyd asked when she finished. He had been a little intrigued with the word "spy," but since then had lapsed into a semidaze of boredom.

Julie pouted again and lit a cigarette. "I told you. That feeb, he's over here now. I just bet he's spying."

"Tom Cullen, you said his name was?"

"Yes."

He had the vaguest sort of memory. Cullen was a big blond guy, a few cards short the deck for sure, but surely not as bad as this high-iron bitch was making out. He tried for more and came up empty. People were still streaming into Vegas in numbers of sixty to a hundred a day. It was becoming impossible to keep them all straight, and Flagg said the immigration was going to get a lot heavier before it tapered off. He supposed he could go to Paul Burlson, who was keeping a file of Vegas residents and find something out about this Cullen dude.

"Are you going to arrest him?" Julie asked.

Lloyd looked at her. "I'll arrest you if you don't get off my case," he said.

"Nice fucking guy!" Julie Lawry cried, her voice rising shrewishly. She jumped to her feet, glaring at him. In her tight white cotton shorts, her legs seemed to go all the way up to her chin. "Try to do you a favor!"

"I'll check it."

"Yeah, right, I know that story."

She stomped off, fanny swinging in tight little circles of indignation.

Lloyd watched her with a certain weary amusement, thinking there were a lot of chicks like her in the world-even now, after the superflu, he was willing to bet there were a lot around. Easy to slap the make on, but watch out for the fingernails afterward. Kissing cousins to those spiders that gobble up their mates after sex. Two months had gone by and she still bore that mute guy a grudge. What did she say his name was? Andros?

Lloyd pulled a battered black notebook from his back pocket, wet his finger, and paged over to a blank sheet. This was his memory book, and it was chock-full of little notes to himself-everything from a reminder to take a shave before meeting with Flagg to a boxed memorandum to get the contents of Las Vegas' pharmacies inventoried before they started to lose morphine and codeine. It would be time to get another little book soon.

In his flat and scrawling grammar school script he wrote: Nick Andros or maybe Androtes-mute. In town? And below that: Tom Cullen, check out with Paul. He tucked the book back into his pocket. Forty miles northeast, the dark man had consummated his long-term relationship with Nadine Cross under the glittering desert stars. He would have been very interested to know that a friend of Nick Andros's was in Las Vegas.

But he slept.

Lloyd looked morosely down at his solitaire game, forgetting about Julie Lawry and her grudge and her tight little ass. He cheated out another ace, and his thoughts turned dolefully back to the Trashcan Man and what Flagg might say-or do-when Lloyd told him.

At the same time Julie Lawry was leaving the Cub Bar, feeling shat upon for doing no more than what she saw as her civic duty, Tom Cullen stood by the picture window of his apartment in another part of the city, looking dreamily out at the full moon.

It was time to go.

Time to go back.

This apartment was not like his house in Boulder. This place was furnished but not decorated. He had not put up so much as a single poster or hung a single stuffed bird from piano wire. This place had been only a way station, and now it was time to go on. He was glad. He hated it here. It had a kind of smell to it here, a dry and rotten smell that you could never quite-put your finger on. The people were mostly nice, and some of them he liked every bit as well as the people in Boulder, folks like Angie and that little boy, Dinny. No one made fun of him because he was slow. They had given him a job and joked with him, and on lunchbreak they'd trade out of their dinner-buckets for something out of someone else's that looked better. They were nice folks, not much different from Boulder folks, as far as he could tell, but-

But they had that smell about them.

They all seemed to be waiting and watching. Sometimes strange silences fell among them and their eyes seemed to glaze over, as if they were all having the same uneasy dream. They did things without asking for explanations of why they were doing them, or what it was for. It was as if these people were wearing happy-folks faces, but their real faces, their underneath-faces, were monster faces. He had seen a scary movie about that once. That kind of monster was called a werewolf.

The moon rode over the desert, ghostly, high, and free.

He had seen Dayna, from the Free Zone. He had seen her once and never again. What had happened to her? Had she been spying, too? Had she gone back?

He didn't know. But he was afraid.

There was a small knapsack in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the apartment's useless color console TV. The knapsack was full of vacuum-sealed ham strips and Slim Jims and Saltines. He picked it up and put it on.

Travel at night, sleep in the day.

He stepped out into the courtyard of the building without a backward glance. The moon was so bright that he cast a shadow on the cracked cement where the would-be high rollers had once parked their cars with the out-of-state plates.

He looked up at the ghostly coin that floated in the sky.

"M-O-O-N, that spells moon," he whispered. "Laws, yes. Tom Cullen knows what that means."

His bike was leaning against the pink stucco wall of the apartment building. He paused once to adjust his knapsack, then got on and set off for the Interstate. By 11 P.M., he had cleared Las Vegas and was pedaling east in the breakdown lane of I-15. No one saw him. No alarm was raised.

His mind dropped into a soft neutral, as it almost always did when the most immediate things were taken care of. He biked steadily along, conscious only that the light night breeze felt nice against his sweaty face. Every now and then he had to swerve around a sand dune that had crept out of the desert and had laid a white, skeletal arm across the road, and once he was well away from the city, there were stalled cars and trucks to contend with, too-look on my works, ye mighty, and despair, Glen Bateman might have said in his ironic way.

He stopped at two in the morning for a light lunch of Slim Jims crackers, and Kool-Aid from the big thermos strapped to the back of the bike. Then he went on. The moon was down. Las Vegas fell farther behind with every revolution of his bicycle tires. That made him feel good.

But at quarter past four on that morning of September 13, a cold comber of fear washed over him. It was made all the more terrifying by virtue of its unexpectedness, by its seeming irrationality. Tom would have cried out loud, but his vocal cords were suddenly frozen, locked. The muscles in his pumping legs went slack and he coasted along under the stars. The black and white negative of the desert streamed by more and more slowly.

He was near.

The man with no face, the demon who now walked the earth.

Flagg.

The tall man, they called him. The grinning man, Tom called him in his heart. Only when his grin fell on you, all the blood in your body fell into a dead swoon, leaving your flesh cold and gray. The man who could look at a cat and make it puke up hairballs. If he walked through a building project, men would hammer their own thumbnails and put shingles on upside down and sleepwalk off the ends of girders and-

 – and oh dear God he was awake!

A whimper escaped Tom's throat. He could feel the sudden wakefulness. He seemed to see/feel an Eye opening in the darkness of the early morning, a dreadful red Eye that was still a bit bleared and confused with sleep. It was turning in the darkness. Looking. Looking for him. It knew Tom Cullen was there, but not just where he was.

Numbly, his feet found the pedals and he biked on, faster and faster, bending over the handlebars to cut down the wind resistance, picking up speed until he was nearly flying along. If he had come upon a wrecked car in his path, he would have pedaled into it full-tilt and perhaps killed himself.

But little by little he could feel that dark, hot presence falling behind him. And the greatest wonder was that that awful red Eye had glanced his way, had passed over him without seeing (maybe because I'm bent over my handlebars so far, Tom Cullen reasoned incoherently) …  and then it had closed again.

The dark man had gone back to sleep.

How does the rabbit feel when the shadow of the hawk falls on him like a dark crucifix …  and then goes on without stopping or even slowing? How does the mouse feel when the cat who has been crouched patiently outside his hole for the entire day is picked up by its master and tossed unceremoniously out the front door? How does the deer feel when it steps quietly past the mighty hunter who is snoozing away the effects of his three lunchtime beers? Perhaps they feel nothing, or perhaps they feel what Tom Cullen felt as he rode out of that black and dangerous sphere of influence: a great and nearly electrifying sunburst of relief; a feeling of new birth. Most of all a feeling of safety scarcely earned, that such great good luck must surely be a sign from heaven.