The Stand:BOOK III(4)

Running his hands through his hair, still looking down at the ruined face of the Judge, he tried to think.

South. That was the answer. South. No border guards anymore. South of Mexico, and if that wasn't far enough, get on down to Guatemala, Panama, maybe fucking Brazil. Opt out of the whole mess. No more East, no more West, just Bobby Terry, safe and as far away from the Walkin Dude as his old boogie shoes could carry h-

A new sound in the rainy afternoon.

Bobby Terry's head jerked up.

The rain, yes, making its steel drum sound on the cabs of the two vehicles, and the grumbling of two idling motors, and-

A strange clocking sound, like rundown bootheels hammering swiftly along the secondary road macadam.

"No," Bobby Terry whispered.

He began to turn around.

The clocking sound was speeding up. A fast walk, a trot, a jog, run, sprint, and Bobby Terry got all the way around, too late, he was coming, Flagg was coming like some terrible horror monster out of the scariest picture ever made. The dark man's cheeks were flushed with jolly color, his eyes were twinkling with happy good fellowship, and a great hungry voracious grin stretched his lips over huge tombstone teeth, shark teeth, and his hands were held out in front of him, and there were shiny black crowfeathers fluttering from his hair.

No, Bobby Terry tried to say, but nothing came out.

"HEY, BOBBY TERRY, YOU SCROOOOWED IT UP! " the dark man bellowed, and fell upon the hapless Bobby Terry.

There were worse things than crucifixion.

There were teeth.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 62
The Stand

Dayna Jurgens lay naked in the huge double bed, listening to the steady hiss of water coming from the shower, and looked up at her reflection in the big circular ceiling mirror, which was the exact shape and size of the bed it reflected. She thought that the female body always looks its best when it is flat on its back, stretched out, the tummy pulled flat, the breasts naturally upright without the vertical drag of gravity to pull them down. It was nine-thirty in the morning, September 8. The Judge had been dead about eighteen hours, Bobby Terry considerably less-unfortunately for him.

The shower ran on and on.

There's a man with a cleanliness compulsion, she thought. I wonder what happened to him that makes him want to shower for half an hour at a stretch?

Her mind turned back to the Judge. Who would have figured that? In its own way, it was a damned brilliant idea. Who would have suspected an old man? Well, Flagg had, it seemed. Somehow he had known when and approximately where. A picket line had been set up all the way along the Idaho-Oregon border, with orders to kill him.

But the job had been botched somehow. Since suppertime last night, the upper echelon here in Las Vegas had been walking around with pasty faces and downcast eyes. Whitney Horgan, who was one damned fine cook, had served something that looked like dog food and was too burned to taste like much of anything. The Judge was dead, but something had gone wrong.

She got up and walked to the window and looked out over the desert. She saw two big Las Vegas High School buses trundling west on US 95 in the hot sunshine, headed out toward the Indian Springs airbase, where, she knew, a daily seminar in the art and craft of jet planes went on. There were over a dozen people in the West who knew how to fly, but by great good luck-for the Free Zone-none of them were checked out for the National Guard jets at Indian Springs.

But they were learning. Oh my, yes.

What was most important for her right now about the Judge's demise was that they had known when they had no business knowing. Was there a spy of their own back in the Free Zone? That was possible, she supposed; spying was a game two could play at. But Sue Stern had told her that the decision to send spies into the West had been strictly a committee thing, and she doubted very much if any of those seven were in the Flagg bag. Mother Abagail would have known if one of the committee had turned rotten, for one thing. Dayna was sure of it.

That left a very unappetizing alternative. Flagg himself had just known.

Dayna had been in Las Vegas eight days as of today, and as far as she could tell she was a fully accepted member of the community. She had already accumulated enough information about the operation over here to scare the living Jesus out of everyone back in Boulder. It would only take the news about the jet plane training program to do that. But the thing that frightened her the most personally was the way people turned away from you if you mentioned Flagg's name, the way they pretended they hadn't heard. Some of them would cross their fingers, or genuflect, or make the sign of the evil eye behind one cupped hand. He was the great There/Not-There.

That was by day. By night, if you would just sit quietly by in the Cub Bar of the Grand or the Silver Slipper Room at The Cashbox, you heard stories about him, the beginning of myth. They talked slowly, haltingly, not looking at each other, drinking bottles of beer mostly. If you drank something stronger, you might lose control of your mouth, and that was dangerous. She knew that not all of what they said was the truth, but it was already impossible to separate the gilt embroidery from the whole cloth. She had heard he was a shape-changer, a werewolf, that he had started the plague himself, that he was the Antichrist whose coming was foretold in Revelation. She heard about the crucifixion of Hector Drogan, how he had just known Heck was freebasing …  the way he had just known that the Judge was on the way, apparently.

And he was never referred to as Flagg in these nightly discussions; it was as if they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle. They called him the dark man. The Walkin Dude. The tall man. And Ratty Erwins called him Old Creeping Judas.

If he had known about the Judge, didn't it stand to reason that he knew about her?

The shower turned off.

Keep it together, sweetie. He encourages the mumbo jumbo. It makes him look taller. It could be that he does have a spy in the Free Zone-it wouldn't necessarily have to be someone on the committee, just someone who told him Judge Farris wasn't the defector type.

"You shouldn't walk around like that with no clothes on, sweetbuns. You'll get me horny all over again."

She turned toward him, her smile rich and inviting, thinking that she would like to take him downstairs to the kitchen and stuff that thing he was so goddam proud of into Whitney Horgan's industrial meat-grinder. "Why do you think I was walking around with no clothes on?"

He looked at his watch. "Well, we got maybe forty minutes." His penis was already beginning to make twitching movements …  like a divining rod, Dayna thought with sour amusement.

"Well, come on then." He came toward her and she pointed at his chest. "And take that thing off. It gives me the creeps."

Lloyd Henreid looked down at the amulet, dark teardrop marked with a single red flaw, and slipped it off. He put it on the night table and the fine-linked chain made a little hissing sound. "Better?"

"All kinds of better."

She held out her arms. A moment later he was on top of her. A moment after that he was thrusting into her.

"You like that?" he panted. "You like the way that feels, sweetie?"

"God, I love it," she moaned, thinking of the meat-grinder, all white enamel and gleaming steel.

"What?"

"I said I love it!" she screamed.

She faked an orgasm shortly after that, tossing her hips wildly, crying out. He came seconds later (she had shared Lloyd's bed for four days now, and had his rhythms timed almost perfectly), and as she felt his semen beginning to run down her thigh, she happened to glance over at the night table.

Black stone.

Red flaw.

It seemed to be staring at her.

She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie.

It sees me, she thought with hopeless horror in that defenseless moment before rationality reasserted itself. More: it sees THROUGH me.

Afterward, as she had hoped, Lloyd talked. That was part of his rhythm, too. He would put an arm around her bare shoulders, smoke a cigarette, look up at their reflections in the mirror over the bed, and tell her what was going on.

"Glad I wasn't that Bobby Terry," he said. "No sir, no way. The main man wanted that old fart's head without so much as a bruise on it. Wanted to send it back over the Rockies. And look what happened. That numbnuts puts two .45 slugs into his face. At close range. I guess he deserved what he got, but I'm glad I wasn't there."

"What happened to him?"

"Sweetbuns, don't ask."

"How did he know? The big guy?"

"He was there."

She felt a chill.

"Just happened to be there?"

"Yeah. He just happens to be anywhere that there's trouble. Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to LA with … "

"What did he do?"

For a long time she didn't think he was going to answer. Usually she could gently push him in the direction she wanted him to go by asking a series of soft, respectful questions; making him feel as if he was (in the never-to-be-forgotten words of her kid sister) King Shit of Turd Mountain. But this time she had a feeling she had pushed too far until Lloyd said in a funny, squeezed voice: