The Stand:BOOK III(25)

Oh, it was so lovely!

Doubts would end. Fears would end. All it would take was the sight of their four heads up on spikes in front of the MGM Grand's fountain. He would assemble every person in Vegas and make them file past and look. He would have photographs taken, would print fliers, have them sent out to LA and San Francisco and Spokane and Portland.

Five heads. He would put the dog's head up on a pole, too.

"Good doggy," Flagg said, and laughed aloud for the first time since Nadine had goaded him into throwing her off the roof. "Good doggy," he said again, grinning.

He slept well that night, and in the morning he sent out word that the watch on the roads between Utah and Nevada was to be tripled. They were no loner looking for one man going east but four men and a dog going west. And they were to be taken alive. Taken alive at all costs.

Oh, yes.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 72

"You know," Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, "I've heard the saying ‘That sucks' for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know." He looked down at his breakfast, which consisted of Morning Star Farms synthetic sausage links, and grimaced.

"No, this is good," Ralph said earnestly. "You should have had some of the chow we had in the army."

They were sitting around the campfire, which Larry had rekindled an hour earlier. They were all dressed in warm coats and gloves, and all were on their second cups of coffee. The temperature was about thirty-five degrees, and the sky was cloudy and bleak. Kojak was napping as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his fur.

"I'm done feeding the inner man," Glen said, getting up. "Give me your poor, your hungry. On second thought, just give me your garbage. I'll bury it."

Stu handed him his paper plate and cup. "This walkin's really something, isn't it, baldy? I bet you ain't been in this good shape since you were twenty."

"Yeah, seventy years ago," Larry said, and laughed.

"Stu, I was never in this kind of shape," Glen said grimly, picking up litter and popping it into the plastic sack he intended to bury. "I never wanted to be in this kind of shape. But I don't mind. After fifty years of confirmed agnosticism, it seems to be my fate to follow an old black woman's God into the jaws of death. If that's my fate, then that's my fate. End of story. But I'd rather walk than ride, when you get right down to it. Walking takes longer, consequently I live longer …  by a few days, anyway. Excuse me, gentlemen, while I give this swill a decent burial."

They watched him walk to the edge of the camp with a small entrenching tool. This "walking tour of Colorado and points west," as Glen put it, had been the hardest on Glen himself. He was the oldest, Ralph Brentner's senior by twelve years. But somehow he had eased it considerably for the others. His irony was constant but gentle, and he seemed at peace with himself. The fact that he was able to keep going day after day made an impression on the others even if it was not exactly an inspiration. He was fifty-seven, and Stu had seen him working his finger-joints on these last three or four cold mornings, and grimacing as he did it.

"Hurt bad?" Stu had asked him yesterday, about an hour after they had moved out.

"Aspirin takes care of it. It's arthritis, you know, but it's not as bad as it's apt to be in another five or seven years, and frankly, East Texas, I'm not looking that far ahead."

"You really think he's going to take us?"

And Glen Bateman had said a peculiar thing: "I will fear no evil." And that had been the end of the discussion.

Now they heard him digging at the frozen soil and cursing it.

"Quite a fella, ain't he?" Ralph said.

Larry nodded. "Yes. I think he is."

"I always thought those college teachers was sissies, but that man sure ain't. Know what he said when I asked him why he didn't just throw that crap to one side of the road? Said we didn't need to start up that kind of shit again. Said we'd started up too many of the old brands of shit already."

Kojak got up and trotted over to see what Glen was doing. Glen's voice floated over to them: "Well, there you are, you big lazy turd. I was starting to wonder where you'd gotten off to. Want me to bury you too?"

Larry grinned and took off the mileometer clipped to his belt. He had picked it up in a Golden sports supply shop. You set it according to the length of your stride and then clipped it to your belt like a carpenter's rule. Each evening he wrote down how far they had walked that day on a dog-eared and often-folded sheet of paper.

"Can I see that cheat sheet?" Stu asked.

"Sure," Larry said, and handed it over.

At the top of the sheet Larry had printed: Boulder to Vegas: 771 miles. Below that:


Date

September 6th

September 7th

September 8th

September 9th

September 10th

September 11th

September 12th

September 13th

September 14th

September 15th

September 16th

September 17th

Miles

28.1

27.0

26.5

28.2

27.9

29.1

28.8

29.5

32.0

32.6

35.5

37.2

Total Miles

28.1

55.1

81.6

109.8

137.7

166.8

195.6

225.1

257.1

289.7

325.2

362.4

Stu took a scrap of paper from his wallet and did some subtraction. "Well, we're makin better time than when we started out, but we've still got over four hundred miles to go. Shit, we ain't halfway yet."

Larry nodded. "Better time is right. We're going downhill. And Glen's right, you know. Why do we want to hurry? Guy's just gonna wipe us out when we get over there."

"You know, I just don't believe that," Ralph said. "We may die, sure, but it isn't going to be anything simple, anything cut and dried. Mother Abagail wouldn't send us off if we was to be just murdered and nothing more come of it. She just wouldn't."

"I don't believe she, was the one who sent us," Stu said quietly.

Larry's mileometer made four distinct little clicks as he set it for the day: 000.0. Stu doused what remained of the campfire with dirt. The little rituals of the morning went on. They had been twelve days on the road. It seemed to Stu that the days would go on forever like this: Glen bitching good-naturedly about the food, Larry noting their mileage on his dog-eared cheat sheet, the two cups of coffee, someone burying yesterday's scut, someone else burying the fire. It was routine, good routine. You forgot what it was all leading to, and that was good. In the mornings Fran seemed very distant to him-very clear, but very distant, like a photograph kept in a locket. But in the evenings, when the dark had come and the moon sailed the night, she seemed very close. Almost close enough to touch …  and that, of course, was where the ache lay. At times like those his faith in Mother Abagail turned to bitter doubt and he wanted to wake them all up and tell them it was a fool's errand, that they had taken up rubber lances to tilt at a lethal windmill, that they had better stop at the next town, get motorcycles, and go back. That they had better grab a little light and a little love while they still could-because a little was all Flagg was going to allow them.

But that was at night. In the mornings it still seemed right to go on. He looked speculatively at Larry, and wondered if Larry thought about his Lucy late at night. Dreamed about her and wished …

Glen came back into camp with Kojak at his heel, wincing a little as he walked. "Let's go get em,"-he said. "Right, Kojak?"

Kojak wagged his tail.

"He says Las Vegas or bust," Glen said. "Come on."

They climbed the embankment to I-70, now descending toward Grand Junction, and began their day's walk.

Late that afternoon, a cold rain began to fall, chilling them all and damping conversation. Larry walked by himself, hands shoved in his pockets. At first he thought about Harold Lauder, whose corpse they had found two days ago-there seemed to be an unspoken conspiracy among them not to talk about Harold-but eventually his thoughts turned to the person he had dubbed the Wolfman.

They had found the Wolfman just east of the Eisenhower Tunnel. The traffic was badly jammed up there, and the stink of death had been sickly potent. The Wolfman had been half in and half out of an Austin. He was wearing pegged jeans and a silk sequined Western shirt. The corpses of several wolves lay around the Austin. The Wolfman himself was half in and half out of the Austin's passenger seat, and a dead wolf lay on his chest. The Wolfman's hands were wrapped around the wolf's neck, and the wolf's bloody muzzle was angled up to the Wolfman's neck. Reconstructing, it seemed to all of them that a pack of wolves had come down out of the higher mountains, had spotted this lone man, and had attacked. The Wolfman had had a gun. He had dropped several of them before retreating to the Austin.

How long before hunger had forced him from his refuge?

Larry didn't know, didn't want to know. But he had seen how terribly thin the Wolfman had been. A week, maybe. He had been going west, whoever he was, going to join the dark man, but Larry would not have wished such a dreadful fate on anyone. He had spoken of it once to Stu, two days after they had emerged from the tunnel, with the Wolfman safely behind them.