All three of them turned around, two of them bringing their weapons up to port arms. Tom's cover was thin, barely adequate. He was a shadow among shadows. The moon was behind a reef of clouds. If it chose this moment to come out …
One of them relaxed. "It's a deer," he said. "They're all over the place."
"I think we should investigate," another had said.
"Put your thumb up your asshole and investigate that," the third replied, and that was the end of it. They sat by the fire again, and Tom began to creep along, feeling for each step, watching as their campfire receded with agonizing slowness. An hour and it was only a spark on the slope below him. Finally it was gone and a great weight seemed to slip off his shoulders. He began to feel safe. He was still in the West and he knew enough to be careful-laws, yes-but the danger no longer seemed as thick, as if there were Indians or outlaws all around.
And now, with the sun coming up, he rolled into a tight ball in the low thicket of bushes and prepared to go to sleep. Got to get some blankets, he thought. It's getting cold. Then sleep took him, suddenly and completely, as it always did.
He dreamed of Nick.
Chapter 70
Trashcan Man had found what he wanted.
He came along a hallway deep underground, a hallway as dark as a mine pit. In his left hand he held a flashlight. In his right hand he held a gun, because it was spooky down here. He was riding an electric tram that rolled almost silently along the wide corridor. The only sound it made was a low, almost subaural hum.
The tram consisted of a seat for the driver and a large carry space. Resting in the carry space was an atomic warhead.
It was heavy.
Trash could not make an intelligent guess as to just how heavy it was, because he hadn't even been able to budge it by hand. It was long and cylindrical. It was cold. Running his hand over its curved surface, he had found it hard to believe that such a cold dead lump of metal could have the potential for so much heat.
He had found it at four in the morning. He had gone back to the motor pool and had gotten a chainfall. He had brought the chainfall back down and had rigged it over the warhead. Ninety minutes later, it was nestled cozily into the electric tram, nose up. Stamped on the nose was A161410USAF. The hard rubber tires of the tram had settled appreciably when he put it in.
Now he was coming to the end of the hallway. Straight ahead was the large freight elevator with its doors standing invitingly open. It was plenty big enough to take the tram, but of course there was no electricity. Trash had gotten down by the stairs. He had brought the chainfall down the same way. The chainfall was light compared to the warhead. It only weighed a hundred and fifty pounds or so. And still it had been a major chore getting it down five courses of stairs.
How was he going to get the warhead up those stairs?
Power-driver winch, his mind whispered.
Sitting on the driver's seat and shining his flash randomly around, Trash nodded to himself. Sure, that was the ticket. Winch it up. Set a motor topside and pull it up, stair-riser by stair-riser, if he had to. But where was he going to find five hundred feet of chain all in one piece?
Well, he probably wasn't. But he could weld pieces of chain together. Would that work? Would the welds hold? It was hard to say. And even if they did, what about all the switchbacks the stairs made going up?
He hopped down and ran a caressing hand over the smooth, deadly surface of the warhead in the silent darkness.
Love would find a way.
Leaving the warhead in the tram, he began to climb the stairs again to see what he could find. A base like this, there would be a little of everything. He would find what he needed.
He climbed two flights and paused to catch his breath. He suddenly wondered: Have I been taking radiation? They shielded all that stuff, shielded it with lead. But in the movies you saw on TV, the men who handled radioactive stuff were always wearing those protective suits and film badges that turned color if you got a dose. Because it was silent. You couldn't see it. It just settled into your flesh and your bones. You didn't even know you were sick until you started puking and losing your hair and having to run to the bathroom every few minutes.
Was all that going to happen to him?
He discovered that he didn't care. He was going to get that bomb up. Somehow he was going to get it up. Somehow he was going to get it back to Las Vegas. He had to make up for the terrible thing he had done at Indian Springs. If he had to die to atone, then he would die.
"My life for you," he whispered in the darkness, and began to climb the stairs again.
Chapter 71
It was nearly midnight on the evening of September 17. Randall Flagg was in the desert, wrapped in three blankets, from toes to chin. A fourth blanket was swirled around his head in a kind of burnoose, so that only his eyes and the tip of his nose were visible.
Little by little, he let all thoughts slip away. He grew still. The stars were cold fire, witchlight.
He sent out the Eye.
He felt it separate from himself with a small and painless tug. It went flying away, silent as a hawk, rising on dark thermals. Now he had joined with the night. He was eye of crow, eye of wolf, eye of weasel, eye of cat. He was the scorpion, the strutting trapdoor spider. He was a deadly poison arrow slipping endlessly through the desert air. Whatever else might have happened, the Eye had not left him.
Flying effortlessly, the world of earthbound things spread out below him like a clockface.
They're coming … they're almost in Utah now …
He flew high, wide, and silent over a graveyard world. Below him the desert lay like a whited sepulcher cut by the dark ribbon of the interstate highway. He flew east, over the state line now, his body far behind, glittering eyes rolled up to blind whites.
Now the land began to change. Buttes and strange, wind-carved pillars and tabletop mesas. The highway ran straight through. The Bonneville Salt Flats lay to the far north. Skull Valley somewhere west. Flying. The sound of the wind, dead and distant …
An eagle poised in the highest crotch of an ancient lightning-blasted pine somewhere south of Richfield felt something pass close by, some deadly sighted thing whizzing through the night, and the eagle took wing against it, fearless, and was buffeted away by a grinning sensation of deadly cold. The eagle fell almost all the way to the ground, stunned, before recovering itself.
The dark man's Eye went east.
Now the highway below was I-70. The towns were huddled lumps, deserted except for the rats and the cats and the deer that had already begun to creep in from the forests as the scent of man washed away. Towns with names like Freemont and Green River and Sego and Thompson and Harley Dome. Then a small city, also deserted. Grand Junction, Colorado. Then-
Just east of Grand Junction was a spark of campfire.
The Eye spiraled down.
The fire was dying. There were four figures sleeping around it.
It was true, then.
The Eye appraised them coldly. They were coming. For reasons he could not fathom, they were actually coming. Nadine had told the truth.
There was a low growling, and the Eye turned in another direction. There was a dog on the far side of the campfire, its head lowered, its tail coiled down and over its privates. Its eyes glowed like baleful amber gems. Its growl was a constant thing, like endlessly ripping cloth. The Eye stared at it, and the dog stared back, unafraid. Its lip curled back and it showed its teeth.
One of the forms rose to a sitting position. "Kojak," it mumbled. "Will you for Chrissakes shut up?"
Kojak continued to growl, his hackles up.
The man who had awakened-it was Glen Bateman-looked around, suddenly uneasy. "Who's there, boy?" he whispered to the dog. "Is something there?"
Kojak continued to growl.
"Stu!" He shook the form next to him. The form muttered something and was silent again in its sleeping bag.
The dark man who was now the dark Eye had seen enough. He whirled upward, catching just a glimpse of the dog's neck craning up to follow him. The low growl turned into a volley of barks, loud at first, then fading, fading, gone.
Silence and rushing darkness.
Some unknown time later he paused over the desert floor, looking down at himself. He sank slowly, approaching the body, then sinking into himself. For a moment there was a curious sensation of vertigo, of two things merging into one. Then the Eye was gone and there were only his eyes, staring up at the cold and gleaming stars.
They were coming, yes.
Flagg smiled. Had the old woman told them to come? Would they listen to her if she, on her deathbed, instructed them to commit suicide in that novel way? He supposed it was possible that they would.
What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling: They were having their problems too, they were frightened too … and as a result, they were making a colossal mistake.
Was it even possible that they had been turned out?
He lingered lovingly over the idea but in the end could not quite believe it. They were coming of their own choice. They were coming wrapped in righteousness like a clutch of missionaries approaching the cannibals' village.