The Stand:BOOK III(3)

He was no longer hungry.

He pushed on. Some days later, at quarter past twelve in the afternoon, now in Oregon and moving west on Highway 86, he drove through the town of Copperfield, not even glancing toward the five-and-dime where Bobby Terry watched him go by, slackjawed with amazement. The Garand was beside him on the seat, the safety still off, a box of ammo beside it. The Judge had decided to shoot any crow he might see.

Just on general principles.

"Faster! Can't you move this fucking thing any faster?"

"You get off my ass, Bobby Terry. Just because you were asleep at the switch is no reason to get on my butt."

Dave Roberts was behind the wheel of the Willys International that had been parked nose-out in the alley beside the five-and-dime. By the time Bobby Terry had gotten Dave awake and up and dressed, the old geezer in the Scout had gotten a ten-minute start on them. The rain was coming down hard, and visibility was poor. Bobby Terry was holding a Winchester across his lap. There was a .45 Colt tucked in his belt.

Dave, who was wearing cowboy boots, jeans, a yellow foul-weather slicker, and nothing else, glanced over at him.

"You keep squeezing the trigger of that rifle and you're going to blow a hole right through your door, Bobby Terry."

"You just catch him," Bobby Terry said. He muttered to himself. "The guts. Got to shoot him in the guts. Dasn't mark the head. Right."

"Stop talkin to yourself. People who talk to theirselves play with theirselves. That's what I think."

"Where is he?" Bobby Terry asked.

"We'll get him. Unless you dreamed the whole thing. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes if you did, brother."

"I didn't. It was that Scout. But what if he turns off?"

"Turns off where?" Dave asked. "There's nothing but farm roads all the way to the Interstate. He couldn't get fifty feet up a one of them without going into the mud up to his fenders, four-wheel drive and all. Relax, Bobby Terry."

Bobby Terry said miserably, "I can't. I keep wonderin how it'd feel to get hung up to dry on some telephone pole out in the desert."

"Can that! …  And lookit there! See im? We're sniffin up his ass now, by God!"

Ahead of them was a months-old head-on collision between a Chevy and a big heavy Buick. They lay in the rain, blocking the road from one side to the other like the rusted bones of unburied mastodons. To the right, deep fresh tire tracks were printed into the shoulder.

"That's him," Dave said. "Those tracks ain't five minutes old."

He swung the Willys out and around the smashup, and they bounced wildly along the shoulder. Dave swung back onto the road where the Judge had before him, and they both saw the muddy herringbone pattern of the Scout's tires on the asphalt. At the top of the next hill, they saw the Scout just disappearing over a knoll some two miles distant.

"Howdy-doody!" Dave Roberts cried. "Go for broke!"

He floored the accelerator and the Willys crept up to sixty. The windshield was a silvery blur of rain that the wipers could not hope to keep up with. At the top of the knoll they saw the Scout again, closer. Dave yanked out his headlight switch and began to work the dimmer switch with his foot. After a few moments, the Scout's taillights flashed on.

"All right," Dave said. "We act friendly. Get him to step out. Don't you go off half-cocked, Bobby Terry. If we do this right, we're gonna have a couple of suites at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Fuck it up and we're gonna get our assholes cored out. So don't you fuck up. Get him to step out."

"Oh my God, why couldn't he have come through Robinette?" Bobby Terry whined. His hands were locked on the Winchester.

Dave whacked at one of them. "You don't carry that rifle out, either."

"But-"

"Shut up! Get a smile on, goddam you!"

Bobby Terry began to grin. It was like watching a mechanical funhouse clown grin.

"You nogood," Dave snarled. "I'll do it. Stay in the goddam car."

They had pulled even with the Scout, which was idling with two wheels on the pavement and two on the soft shoulder. Smiling, Dave got out. His hands were in the pockets of his yellow slicker. In the lefthand pocket was a .38 Police Special.

The Judge climbed carefully down from the Scout. He was also wearing a yellow rain slicker. He walked carefully, bearing himself the way a man might bear a fragile vase. The arthritis was loose in him like a pack of tigers. He carried the Garand rifle in his left hand.

"Hey, you won't shoot me with that, will you?" the man from the Willys said with a friendly grin.

"I guess not," the Judge said. They spoke over the steady hiss of the rain. "You must have been back in Copperfield."

"So we were. I'm Dave Roberts." He stuck out his right hand.

"Farris is my name," said the Judge, and put out his own right hand. He glanced up toward the passenger window of the Willys and saw Bobby Terry leaning out, holding his .45 in both hands. Rain was dripping off the barrel. His face, dead pale, was still frozen in that maniacal funhouse grin.

"Oh bastard," the Judge murmured, and pulled his hand out of Roberts's rain-slippery grip just as Roberts fired through the pocket of his slicker. The bullet ploughed through the Judge's midsection just below the stomach, flattening, spinning, mushrooming, coming out to the right of his spine, leaving an exit hole the size of a tea saucer. The Garand fell from his hand onto the road and he was driven back into the Scout's open driver's side door.

None of them noticed the crow that had fluttered down to a telephone wire on the far side of the road.

Dave Roberts took a step forward to finish the job. As he did, Bobby Terry fired from the passenger window of the Willys. His bullet took Roberts in the throat, tearing most of it away. A fury of blood cascaded down the front of Roberts's slicker and mixed with the rain. He turned toward Bobby Terry, his jaw working in soundless, dying amazement, his eyes bulging. He took two shuffling steps forward, and then the amazement went out of his face. Everything went out of it. He fell dead. Rain plinked and drummed on the back of his slicker.

"Oh shit, lookit this! " Bobby Terry cried in utter dismay.

The Judge thought: My arthritis is gone. If I could live, I could stun the medical profession. The cure for arthritis is a bullet in the guts. Oh dear God, they were laying for me. Did Flagg tell them? He must have, Jesus help whoever else the committee sent over here …

The Garand was lying on the road. He bent for it, feeling his guts trying to run right out of his body. Strange feeling. Not very pleasant. Never mind. He got hold of the gun. Was the safety off? Yes. He began to bring it up. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

Bobby Terry ripped his stunned gaze away from Dave at last, just in time to see the Judge preparing to shoot him. The Judge was sitting on the road. His slicker was red with blood from chest to hem. He had settled the barrel of the Garand on his knee.

Bobby snapped a shot and missed. The Garand went off with a giant thunderclap and jagged glass sprayed Bobby Terry's face. He screamed, sure he was dead. Then he saw that the left half of the windshield was gone and understood that he was still in the running.

The Judge was ponderously correcting his aim, swiveling the Garand perhaps two degrees on his knee. Bobby Terry, his nerves entirely shot now, fired three times in rapid succession. The first bullet spanged a hole through the side of the Scout's cab. The second struck the Judge above the right eye. A .45 is a large gun, and at close range it does large, unpleasant things. This bullet took off most of the top of the Judge's skull and hurled it back into the Scout. His head tilted back radically, and Bobby Terry's third bullet struck the Judge a quarter of an inch below his lower lip, exploding his teeth into his mouth, where he aspirated them with his final breath. His chin and jawbone disintegrated. His finger squeezed the Garand's trigger in a dying convulsion, but the bullet went wild into the white, rainy sky.

Silence descended.

Rain drummed on the roofs of the Scout and the Willys. On the slickers of the two dead men. It was the only sound until the crow took off from the telephone wire with a raucous caw. That startled Bobby Terry out of his daze. He got slowly down from the passenger seat, still clutching the smoking .45.

"I did it," he said confidentially to the rain. "Killed his ass. You better believe it. Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Fuckin-A right. Ole Bobby Terry just killed him as dead as you'd want."

But with dawning horror, he realized that it wasn't the Judge's ass he'd killed after all.

The Judge had died leaning back into the Scout. Now Bobby Terry grabbed the lapels of his slicker and yanked him forward; staring at what remained of the Judge's features. There was really nothing left but his nose. To tell the truth, that wasn't in such hot shape, either.

It could have been anyone.

And in a dream of terror, Bobby Terry again heard Flagg saying: I want to send him back undamaged.

Holy God, this could be anyone. It was as if he had set out to deliberately do just the opposite of what the Walkin Dude had ordered. Two direct hits in the face. Even the teeth were gone.

Rain, drumming, drumming.

It was over here. That was all. He didn't dare go east, and he didn't dare stay in the West. He would either wind up riding a telephone pole bareback or …  or something worse.

Were there worse things?

With that grinning freak in charge, Bobby Terry had no doubt there were. So what was the answer?