The Stand:BOOK III(30)

"You s'pose something got him?" Ralph asked softly.

Larry said in a quiet, thoughtful voice: "Maybe he stayed with Stu."

Glen looked up, startled. "Maybe," he said, considering it. "Maybe that's what happened."

Larry tossed a pebble from one hand to the other, back and forth, back and forth. "He said maybe God would send a raven to feed him. I doubt if there's any out here, so maybe He sent a dog instead."

The fire made a popping sound, sending a column of sparks up into the darkness to whirl in brief brightness and then to wink out.

When Stu saw the dark shape come slinking down the gully toward him, he pulled himself up against the nearby boulder, leg sticking out stiffly in front of him, and found a good-sized stone with one numb hand. He was chilled to the bone. Larry had been right. Two or three days of lying around in these temperatures was going to kill him quite efficiently. Except now it looked like whatever this was would get him first. Kojak had remained with him until sunset and then had left him, scrambling easily out of the gully. Stu had not called him back. The dog would find his way back to Glen and go on with them. Perhaps he had his own part to play. But now he wished that Kojak had stayed a little longer. The pills were one thing, but he had no wish to be ripped to pieces by one of the dark man's wolves.

He gripped the rock harder and the dark shape paused about twenty yards up the cut. Then it started coming again, a blacker shadow in the night.

"Come on, then," Stu said hoarsely.

The black shadow wagged its tail and came. "Kojak? "

It was. And there was something in his mouth, something he dropped at Stu's feet. He sat down, tail thumping, waiting to be complimented.

"Good dog," Stu said in amazement. "Good dog!"

Kojak had brought him a rabbit.

Stu pulled out his pocket knife, opened it, and disemboweled the rabbit in three quick movements. He picked up the steaming guts and tossed them to Kojak. "Want these?" Kojak did. Stu skinned the rabbit. The thought of eating it raw didn't do much for his stomach.

"Wood?" he said to Kojak without much hope. There were scattered branches and hunks of tree all along the banks of the gully, dropped by the flash flood, but nothing within reach.

Kojak wagged his tail and didn't move.

"Fetch? F-"

But Kojak was gone. He whirled, streaked to the east side of the gully, and ran back with a large piece of deadwood in his jaws. He dropped it beside Stu, and barked. His tail wagged rapidly.

"Good dog," Stu said again. "I'll be a sonofabitch! Fetch, Kojak!"

Barking with joy, Kojak went again. In twenty minutes, he had brought back enough wood for a large fire. Stu carefully stripped enough splinters to make kindling. He checked the match situation and saw that he had a book and a half. He got the kindling going on the second match and fed the fire carefully. Soon there was a respectable blaze going and Stu got as close to it as he could, sitting in his sleeping bag. Kojak lay down on the far side of the fire with his nose on his paws.

When the fire had burned down a little, Stu spitted the rabbit and cooked it. The smell was soon strong enough and savory enough to have his stomach rumbling. Kojak came to attention and sat watching the rabbit with close interest.

"Half for you and half for me, big guy, okay?"

Fifteen minutes later he pulled the rabbit off the fire and managed to rip it in half without burning his fingers too badly. The meat was burned in places, half-raw in others, but it put the canned ham from Great Western Markets in the shade. He and Kojak gulped it down …  and as they were finishing, a bone-chilling howl drifted down the wash.

"Christ! " Stu said around a mouthful of rabbit.

Kojak was on his feet, hackles up, growling. He advanced stiff-legged around the fire and growled again. Whatever had howled fell silent.

Stu lay down, the hand-sized stone by one hand and his opened pocket knife by the other. The stars were cold and high and indifferent. His thoughts turned to Fran and he turned them away just as quickly. That hurt too much, full belly or not. I won't sleep, he thought. Not for a long time.

But he did sleep, with the help of one of Glen's pills. And when the coals of the fire had burned down to embers, Kojak came over and slept next to him, giving Stu his heat. And that was how, on the first night after the party was broken, Stu ate when the others went hungry, and slept easy while their sleep was broken by bad dreams and an uneasy feeling of rapidly approaching doom.

On the twenty-fourth, Larry Underwood's group of three pilgrims made thirty miles and camped northeast of the San Rafael Knob. That night the temperature slid down into the mid-twenties, and they built a large fire and slept dose by it. Kojak had not rejoined them.

"What do you think Stu's doing tonight?" Ralph asked Larry.

"Dying," Larry said shortly, and was sorry when he saw the wince of pain on Ralph's homely, honest face, but he didn't know how to redeem what he had said. And after all, it was almost surely true.

He lay down again, feeling strangely certain that it was tomorrow. Whatever they were coming to, they were almost there.

Bad dreams that night. He was on tour with an outfit called the Shady Blues Connection in the one he remembered most clearly on waking. They were booked into Madison Square Garden, and the place was sold out. They took the stage to thunderous applause. Larry went to adjust his mike, bring it down to proper height, and couldn't budge it. He went to the lead guitarist's mike, but that one was frozen, too. Bass guitarist, organist, same thing. Booing and rhythmic clapping began to come from the crowd. One by one, the members of the Shady Blues Connection slunk off the stage, grinning furtively into high psychedelic shirt-collars like the ones the Byrds used to wear back in 1966, when Roger McGuinn was still eight miles high. Or eight hundred. And still Larry wandered from mike to mike, trying to find at least one he could adjust. But they were all at least nine feet tall and frozen solid. They looked like stainless steel cobras. Someone in the crowd began to yell for "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" I don't do that number anymore, he tried to say. I stopped doing that one when the world ended. They couldn't hear him, and a chant began to arise, starting in the back rows, then sweeping the Garden, gaining strength and volume: "Baby Can You Dig Your Man! Baby Can You Dig Your Man! BABY CAN YOU DIG YOUR MAN! "

He awoke with the chant in his ears. Sweat had popped out all over his body.

He didn't need Glen to tell him what kind of dream that had been, or what it meant. The dream where you can't reach the mikes, can't adjust them, is a common one for rock musicians, just as common as dreaming that you're on stage and can't remember a single lyric. Larry guessed that all performers had a variation on one of those before-

Before a performance.

It was an inadequacy dream. It expressed that one simple overriding fear: What if you can't? What if you want to, but you can't? The terror of being unable to make the simple leap of faith which is the place where any artist-singer, writer, painter, musician-begins.

Make it nice for the people, Larry.

Whose voice was that? His mother's?

You're a taker, Larry.

No, Mom-no I'm not. I don't do that number anymore. I stopped doing that one when the world ended. Honest.

He lay back down and drifted off to sleep again. His last thought was that Stu had been right: The dark man was going to grab them. Tomorrow, he thought. Whatever we're coming to, we're almost there.

But they saw no one on the twenty-fifth. The three of them walked stolidly along under the bright blue skies, and they saw birds and beasts in plenty, but no people.

"It's amazing how rapidly the wildlife is coming back," Glen said. "I knew it would be a fairly rapid process, and of course the winter is going to prune it back some, but this is still amazing. It's only been about a hundred days since the first outbreaks."

"Yeah, but there's no dogs or horses," Ralph said. "That just doesn't seem right, you know it? They invented a bug that killed pretty near all the people, but that wasn't enough. It had to take out his two favorite animals, too. It took man and man's best friends."

"And left the cats," Larry said morosely.

Ralph brightened. "Well, there's Kojak-"

"There was Kojak."

That killed the conversation. The buttes frowned down at them, hiding places for dozens of men with rifles and scopes. Larry's premonition that it was to be today hadn't left him. Each time they topped a rise, he expected to see the road blocked below them. And each time it wasn't, he thought about ambush.

They talked about horses. About dogs and buffalo. The buffalo were coming back, Ralph told them-Nick and Tom Cullen had seen them. The day was not so far off-in their lifetimes, maybe-when the buffalo might darken the plains again.

Larry knew it was the truth, but he also knew it was bushwa-their lifetimes might amount to no more than another ten minutes.

Then it was nearly dark, and time to look for a place to camp. They came to the top of one final rise and Larry thought: Now. They'll be right down there.

But there was no one.

They camped near a green reflectorized sign that said LAS VEGAS 260. They had eaten comparatively well that day: taco chips, soda, and two Slim Jims that they shared out equally.

Tomorrow, Larry thought again, and slept. That night he dreamed that he and Barry Greig and the Tattered Remnants were playing at the Garden. It was their big chance-they were opening for some supergroup that was named after a city. Boston, or maybe Chicago. And all the microphone stands were at least nine feet tall again and he began to stumble from one to the other again as the audience began to clap rhythmically and call for "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" again.