"Holy crow," Ralph said. "Somebody oughtta call the Utah State Highway Department about this."
Larry pointed. "Look over there," he said. They looked out into the emptiness, which was now beginning to be dotted with strange, wind-carved pillars and monoliths. About one hundred yards down the course of the San Rafael they saw a tangle of guardrails, cable, and large slabs of asphalt-composition paving. One chunk stuck up toward the cloudy, racing sky like an apocalyptic finger, complete with white broken passing line.
Glen was looking down into the rubble-strewn cut, hands stuffed into his pockets, an absent, dreaming look on his face. In a low voice, Stu said: "Can you make it, Glen?"
"Sure, I think so."
"How's that arthritis?"
"It's been worse." He cracked a smile. "But in all honesty, it's been better, too."
They had no rope with which to anchor each other. Stu went down first, moving carefully. He didn't like the way the ground sometimes shifted under his feet, starting little slides of rock and dirt. Once he thought his footing was going to go out from under him completely, sending him sliding all the way to the bottom on his can. One groping hand caught a solid rock outcropping and he hung on for dear life, finding more solid ground for his feet. Then Kojak was bounding blithely past him, kicking up little puffs of dirt and sending down only small runnels of earth. A moment later he was standing on the bottom, wagging his tail and barking amiably up at Stu.
"Fucking showoff dog," Stu growled, and carefully made his way to the bottom.
"I'm coming next," Glen called. "I heard what you said about my dog!"
"Be careful, baldy! Be damn careful! It's really loose underfoot."
Glen came down slowly, moving with great deliberation from one hold to the next. Stu tensed every time he saw loose dirt start to slide out from underneath Glen's battered Georgia Giants. His hair blew like fine silver around his ears in the light breeze that had sprung up. It occurred to him that when he had first met Glen, painting a mediocre picture beside the road in New Hampshire, Glen's hair had still been salt-and-pepper.
Until the moment Glen finally planted his feet on the level ground of the mudflat at the bottom of the gully, Stu was sure he was going to fall and break himself in two. Stu sighed with relief and clapped him on the shoulder.
"No sweat, East Texas," Glen said, and bent to ruffle Kojak's fur.
"Plenty here," Stu told him.
Ralph came next, moving carefully from one hold to the next, lumping the last eight feet or so. "Boy," he said. "That shits just as loose as a goose. Be funny if we couldn't get up that other bank and had to walk four or five miles upstream to find shallower bank, wouldn't it?"
"Be a lot funnier if another flash flood came along while we were looking," Stu said.
Larry came down agilely and well, joining them less than three minutes after they had started down. "Who goes up first?" he asked.
"Why don't you, since you're so perky?" Glen said.
"Sure."
It took him considerably longer to get up, and twice the treacherous footing ran out beneath him and he nearly fell. But finally he gained the top and waved down at them.
"Who's next?" Ralph asked.
"Me," Glen said, and walked across to the other bank.
Stu caught his arm. "Listen," he said. "We can walk upstream and find a shallower bank like Ralph said."
"And lose the rest of the day? When I was a kid, I could have gone up there in forty seconds and registered a pulse-rate under seventy at the top."
"You're no kid now, Glen."
"No. But I think there's still some of him left."
Before Stu could say more, Glen had started. He paused to rest about a third of the way up and then pressed on. Near the halfway point he grabbed an outcrop of shale that crumbled away under his hands and Stu was sure he was going to tumble all the way to the bottom, end over arthritic end.
"Ah, shit-" Ralph breathed.
Glen flailed his arms and somehow kept his balance. He jigged to his right and went up another twenty feet, rested, and then up again. Near the top a spur of rock that he had been standing on tore loose and he would have fallen, but Larry was there. He grabbed Glen's arm and hauled him up.
"Nothing to it," Glen called down.
Stu grinned with relief. "How's your pulse-rate, baldy?"
"Plus ninety, I think," Glen admitted.
Ralph climbed the cut-bank like a stolid mountain goat, checking each hold, shifting his hands and feet with great deliberation. When he reached the top, Stu started up.
Right up until the moment he fell, Stu was thinking that actually this slope was a little easier than the one they had descended. The holds were better, the gradient a tiny bit shallower. But the surface was a mixture of chalky soil and rock fragments that had been badly loosened by the wet weather. Stu sensed that it wanted to be evil, and he went up carefully.
His chest was over the edge when the knob of outcropping his left foot was on suddenly disappeared. He felt himself begin to slide. Larry grabbed for his hand, but this time he missed his grip. Stu grabbed the outjutting edge of the turnpike, and it came off in his hands. He stared at it stupidly for a moment as the speed of his descent began to increase. He discarded it, feeling insanely like Wile E. Coyote. All I need, he thought, is for someone to go beep-beep before I hit the bottom.
His knee struck something, and there was a sudden bolt of pain. He grabbed at the gluey surface of the slope, which was now speeding past him at an alarming rate, and kept coming away with nothing but handfuls of dirt.
He slammed into a boulder sticking out of the rubble like a big blunt arrowhead and cartwheeled, the breath slapped from his body. He fell free for about ten feet, and came down on his lower leg at an angle. He heard it snap. The pain was instantaneous and huge. He yelled. He did a backward somersault. He was eating dirt now. Sharp pebbles scrawled bloody scratches across his face and arms. He came down on the hurt leg again, and felt it snap somewhere else. This time he didn't yell. This time he screamed.
He slid the last fifteen feet on his belly, like a kid on a greasy chute-the-chute. He came to rest with his pants full of mud and his heart beating crazily in his ears. The leg was white fire. His coat and the shirt beneath were both rucked up to his chin.
Broken. But how bad? Pretty bad from the way it feels. Two places at least, maybe more. And the knee's sprung.
Larry was coming down the slope, moving in little jumps that seemed almost a mockery of what had just happened to Stu. Then he was kneeling beside him, asking the question which Stu had already asked himself.
"How bad, Stu?"
Stu got up on his elbows and looked at Larry, his face white with shock and streaked brown with dirt.
"I figure I'll be walking again in about three months," he said. He began to feel as if he were going to puke. He looked up at the cloudy sky, balled his fists up, and shook them at it.
"OHHH, SHIT! " he screamed.
The Stand
Ralph and Larry splinted the leg. Glen had produced a bottle of what he called "my arthritis pills" and gave Stu one. Stu didn't know what was in the "arthritis pills" and Glen refused to say, but the pain in his leg faded to a faraway drone. He felt very calm, even serene. It occurred to him that they were all living on borrowed time, not because they were on their way to find Flagg, necessarily, but because they had survived Captain Trips in the first place. At any rate, he knew what had to be done … and he was going to see that it was done. Larry had just finished speaking. They all looked at him anxiously to see what he would say.
What he said was simple enough. "No."
"Stu," Glen said gently, "you don't understand-"
"I understand. I'm saying no. No trip back to Green River. No rope. No car. Against the rules of the game."
"It's no fucking game!" Larry cried. "You'd die here!"
"And you're almost surely gonna die over there in Nevada. Now go on and get getting. You've got another four hours of daylight. No need to waste it."
"We're not going to leave you," Larry said.
"I'm sorry, but you are. I'm telling you to."
"No. I'm in charge now. Mother said if anything happened to you-"
"-that you were to go on."
"No. No." Larry looked around at Glen and Ralph for support. They looked back at him, troubled. Kojak sat nearby, watching all four with his tail curled neatly around his paws.
"Listen to me, Larry," Stu said. "This whole trip is based on the idea that the old lady knew what she was talking about. If you start frigging around with that, you're putting everything on the line."
"Yeah, that's right," Ralph said.
"No, it ain't right, you sodbuster," Larry said, furiously mimicking Ralph's flat Oklahoma accent. "It wasn't God's will that Stu fell down here, it wasn't even the dark man's doing. It was just loose dirt, that's all, just loose dirt! I'm not leaving you, Stu. I'm done leaving people behind."
"Yes. We are going to leave him," Glen said quietly.
Larry stared around unbelievingly, as if he had been betrayed. "I thought you were his friend!"
"I am. But that doesn't matter."
Larry uttered a hysterical laugh and walked a little way down the gully. "You're crazy! You know that?"