The Stand:BOOK III(26)

"Why would a bunch of wolves hang around so long, Stu?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, if they wanted something to eat, couldn't they find it?"

"I'd think so, yeah."

It was a dreadful mystery to him, and he kept working it over in his mind, knowing he would never find the solution. Whoever the Wolfman had been, he hadn't been lacking in the balls department. Finally driven by hunger and thirst, he had opened the passenger door. One of the wolves had jumped him and torn his throat out. But the Wolfman had throttled it to death even as he himself died.

The four of them had gone through the Eisenhower Tunnel roped together, and in that horrible blackness, Larry's mind had turned to the trip he had made through the Lincoln Tunnel. Only now it was not images of Rita Blakemoor that haunted him but the face of the Wolfman, frozen in its final snarl as he and the wolf had killed each other.

Were the wolves sent to kill that man?

But that thought was too unsettling to even consider. He tried to push the whole thing out of his mind and just keep walking, but that was a hard thing to do.

They made their camp that night beyond Loma, quite close to the Utah state line. Supper consisted of forage and boiled water, as all their meals did-they were following Mother Abagail's instructions to the letter: Go in the clothes that you stand up in. Carry nothing.

"It's going to get bad in Utah," Ralph remarked. "I guess that's where we're going to find out if God really is watchin over us. There's one stretch, better than a hundred miles, without a town or even a gas station and a café." He didn't seem particularly disturbed by the prospect.

"Water?" Stu asked.

Ralph shrugged. "Not much of that, either. Guess I'll turn in."

Larry followed suit. Glen stayed up to smoke a pipe. Stu had a few cigarettes and decided to have one. They smoked in silence for a while.

"Long way from New Hampshire, baldy," Stu said at last.

"It isn't exactly shouting distance from here to Texas."

Stu smiled. "No. No, it ain't."

"You miss Fran a lot, I guess."

"Yeah. Miss her, worry about her. Worry about the baby. It's worse after it gets dark."

Glen puffed. "That's nothing you can change, Stuart."

"I know. But I worry."

"Sure." Glen knocked out his pipe on a rock. "Something funny happened last night, Stu. I've been trying to figure out all day if it was real, or a dream, or what."

"What was it?"

"Well, I woke up in the night and Kojak was growling at something. Must have been past midnight, because the fire had burned way down. Kojak was on the other side of it with his hackles standing up. I told him to shut up and he never even looked at me. He was looking over to my right. And I thought, What if it's wolves? Ever since we saw that guy Larry calls the Wolfman-"

"Yeah, that was bad."

"But there was nothing. I had a clear view. He was growling at nothing."

"He had a scent, that's all."

"Yeah, but the crazy part is still to come. After a couple of minutes I started to feel …  well, decidedly weird. I felt like there was something right over by the turnpike embankment, and that it was watching me. Watching all of us. I felt like I could almost see it, that if I squinted my eyes the right way, I would see it. But I didn't want to. Because it felt like him.

"It felt like Flagg, Stuart."

"Probably nothing," Stu said after a moment.

"It sure felt like something. It felt like something to Kojak, too."

"Well, suppose he was watching somehow? What could we do about it?"

"Nothing. But I don't like it. I don't like it that he's able to watch us …  if that's what it is. It scares me shitless."

Stu finished his cigarette, stubbed it out carefully on the side of a rock, but made no move toward his sleeping bag just yet. He looked at Kojak, who was lying by the campfire with his nose on his paws and watching them.

"So Harold's dead," Stu said at last.

"Yes."

"And it was just a goddam waste. A waste of Sue and Nick. A waste of himself, too, I reckon."

"I agree."

There was nothing more to say. They had come upon Harold and his pitiful dying declaration the day after they had done the Eisenhower Tunnel. He and Nadine must have gone over Loveland Pass, because Harold still had his Triumph cycle-the remains of it, anyway-and as Ralph had said, it would have been impossible to get anything bigger than a kid's little red wagon through the Eisenhower. The buzzards had worked him over pretty well, but Harold still clutched the Permacover notebook in one stiffening hand. The .38 was jammed in his mouth like a grotesque lollipop, and although they hadn't buried Harold, Stu had removed the pistol. He had done it gently. Seeing how efficiently the dark man had destroyed Harold and how carelessly he had thrown him aside when his part was played out had made Stu hate Flagg all the more. It made him feel that they were throwing themselves away in a witless sort of children's crusade, and while he felt that they had to press on, Harold's corpse with the shattered leg haunted him the way the frozen grimace of the Wolfman haunted Larry. He had discovered he wanted to pay Flagg back for Harold as well as Nick and Susan …  but he felt more and more sure that he would never get that chance.

But you want to watch out, he thought grimly. You want to look out if I get within choking distance of you, you freak.

Glen got up with a little wince. "I'm going to turn in, East Texas. Don't beg me to stay. It really is a dull party."

"How's that arthritis?"

Glen smiled and said, "Not too bad," but as he crossed to his bedroll he was limping.

Stu thought he should not have another cigarette-only smoking two or three a day would exhaust his supply by the end of the week-and then he lit one anyway. This evening it was not so cold, but for all that, there could be no doubt that in this high country, at least, summer was done. It made him feel sad, because he felt very strongly that he would never see another summer. When this one had begun, he had been an on-again, off-again worker at a factory that made pocket calculators. He had been living in a small town called Arnette, and he had spent a lot of his spare time hanging around Bill Hapscomb's Texaco station, listening to the other guys shoot the shit about the economy, the government, hard times. Stu guessed that none of them had known what real hard times were. He finished his cigarette and tossed it into the campfire.

"Keep well, Frannie, old kid," he said, and got into his sleeping bag. And in his dreams he thought that Something had come near their camp, Something that was keeping malevolent watch over them. It might have been a wolf with human understanding. Or a crow. Or a weasel, creeping bellydown through the scrub. Or it might have been some disembodied presence, a watching Eye.

I will fear no evil, he muttered in his dream. Yea, though I walk though the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. No evil.

At last the dream faded and he slept soundly.

The next morning they were on the road again early, Larry's gadget clicking off the miles as the highway switched lazily back and forth down the gentling Western Slope toward Utah. Shortly after noon they left Colorado behind them. That evening they camped west of Harley Dome, Utah. For the first time the great silence impressed then as being oppressive and malefic. Ralph Brentner went to sleep that night thinking: We're in the West now. We're out of our ballpark and into his.

And that night Ralph dreamed of a wolf with a single red eye that had come out of the badlands to watch them. Go away, Ralph told it. Go away, we're not afraid. Not afraid of you.

By 2 P.M. on the afternoon of September 21, they were past Sego. The next large town, according to Stu's pocket map, was Green River. There were no more towns after that for a long, long time. Then, as Ralph had said, they would probably find out if God was with them or not.

"Actually," Larry said to Glen, "I'm not as worried about food as I am water. Most everyone who's on a trip keeps a few munchies in their car, Oreos or Fig Newtons or something like that."

Glen smiled. "Maybe the Lord will send us showers of blessing."

Larry looked up at the cloudless blue sky and grimaced at the idea. "I sometimes think she was right off her block at the end of it."

"Maybe she was," Glen said mildly. "If you read your theology, you'll find that God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane. It even seems to me-here's the closet Jesuit coming out-that there are good psychological reasons for it. A madman or a person on her deathbed is a human being with a drastically changed psyche. A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet."

"The ways of God," Larry said. "I know. We see through a glass darkly. It's a pretty dark glass to me, all right. Why we're walking all this way when we could have driven it in a week is beyond me. But since we're doing a nutty thing, I guess it's okay to do it in a nutty way."

"What we're doing has all sorts of historical precedent," Glen said, "and I see some perfectly sound psychological and sociological reasons for this walk. I don't know if they're God's reasons or not, but they make good sense to me."

"Such as what?" Stu and Ralph had walked over to hear this, too.