The Stand:BOOK III(42)

"If we don't make our move soon," Stu told Tom as they looked out at the snow, "we'll be spending the whole damn winter in the Utah Hotel."

The next day they drove the Plymouth down to the gas station on the outskirts of town. Pausing often to rest and using Tom for the heavy work, they changed the balding back tires for a pair of studded snows. Stu considered taking a four-wheel drive, and had finally decided, quite irrationally, that they should stick with their luck. Tom finished the operation by loading four fifty-pound bags of sand into the Plymouth's trunk. They left Green River on Halloween and headed east.

They reached Grand Junction at noon on November 2, with not much more than three hours to spare, as it turned out. The skies had been lead-gray all the forenoon, and as they turned down the main street, the first spits of snow began to skate across the Plymouth's hood. They had seen brief flurries half a dozen times en route, but this was not going to be a flurry. The sky promised serious snow.

"Pick your spot," Stu said. "We may be here for a while."

Tom pointed. "There! The motel with the star on it!"

The motel with the star on it was the Grand Junction Holiday Inn. Below the sign and the beckoning star was a marquee, and written on it in large red letters was: ELCOME TO GR ND JUNC ON'S SUMMERF ST ‘90! JUNE 12  –  JU Y 4TH!

"Okay," Stu said. "Holiday Inn it is."

He pulled in and killed the Plymouth's engine, and so far as either of them knew, it never ran again. By two that afternoon, the spits and spats of snow had developed into a thick white curtain that fell soundlessly and seemingly endlessly. By four o'clock the light wind had turned into a gale, driving the snow before it and piling up drifts that grew with a speed which was almost hallucinatory. It snowed all night. When Stu and Tom got up the next morning, they found Kojak sitting in front of the big double doors in the lobby, looking out at a nearly moveless world of white. Nothing moved but a single bluejay that was strutting around on the crushed remnants of a summer awning across the street.

"Jeezly crow," Tom whispered. "We're snowed in, ain't we, Stu?"

Stu nodded.

"How can we get back to Boulder in this?"

"We wait for spring," Stu said.

"That long?" Tom looked distressed, and Stu put an arm around the big man-boy's shoulders.

"The time will pass," he said, but even then he was not sure either of them would be able to wait that long.

Stu had been moaning and gasping in the darkness for some time. At last he gave a cry loud enough to wake himself up and came out of the dream to his Holiday Inn motel room up on his elbows, staring wide-eyed at nothing. He let out a long, shivery sigh and fumbled for the lamp by the bed table. He had clicked it twice before everything came back. It was funny, how hard that belief in electricity died. He found the Coleman lamp on the floor and lit that instead. When he had it going, he used the chamberpot. Then he sat down in the chair by the desk. He looked at his watch and saw it was quarter past three in the morning.

The dream again. The Frannie dream. The nightmare.

It was always the same. Frannie in pain, her face bathed in sweat. Richardson was between her legs, and Laurie Constable was standing nearby to assist him. Fran's feet were up in stainless-steel stirrups …

Push, Frannie. Bear down. You're doing fine.

But looking at George's somber eyes over the top of his mask, Stu knew that Frannie wasn't doing fine at all. Something was wrong. Laurie sponged off her sweaty face and pushed back her hair from her forehead.

Breech birth.

Who had said that? It was a sinister, bodiless voice, low and draggy, like a voice on a 45 rpm record played at 33 1/3.

Breech birth.

George's voice: You'd better call Dick. Tell him we may have to …

Laurie's voice: Doctor, she's losing a lot of blood now …

Stu lit a cigarette. It was terribly stale, but after that particular dream, anything was a comfort. It's an anxiety dream, that's all. You got this typical macho idea that things won't come right if you're not there. Well, bag it up, Stuart; she's fine. Not all dreams come true.

But too many of them had come true during the last half-year. The feeling that he was being shown the future in this recurring dream of Fran's delivery would not leave him.

He stubbed the cigarette out half-smoked and looked blankly into the gaslamp's steady glow. It was November 29; they had been quartered in the Grand Junction Holiday Inn for nearly four weeks. The time had passed slowly, but they had managed to keep amused with a whole town to plunder for diverting odds and ends.

Stu had found a medium-sized Honda electrical generator in a supply house on Grand Avenue, and he and Tom had hauled it back to the Convention Hall across from the Holiday Inn by putting it onto a sledge with a chainfall and then hooking up two Sno Cats to the sledge-moving it, in other words, in much the same way the Trashcan Man had moved his final gift for Randall Flagg.

"What are we gonna do with it?" Tom asked. "Get the electricity going at the motel?"

"This is too small for that," Stu said.

"What, then? What's it for?" Tom was fairly dancing with impatience.

"You'll see," Stu said.

They put the generator in the Convention Hall's electrical closet, and Tom promptly forgot about it-which was just what Stu had hoped for. The next day he went to the Grand Junction Sixplex by snowmobile, and using the sledge and the chainfall himself this time, he had lowered an old thirty-five-millimeter motion picture projector from the second-story window of the storage area where he had found it on one of his exploring trips. It had been wrapped in plastic …  and then simply forgotten, judging by the dust which had gathered on the protective covering.

His leg was coming around nicely, but it had still taken him almost three hours to muscle the projector from the doorway of the Convention Hall into the center of the floor. He used three dollies and kept expecting Tom to happen by at any moment, looking for him. With Tom to pitch in, the work would have gone faster, but it also would have spoiled the surprise. But Tom was apparently off on business of his own, and Stu didn't see him all day. When he came into the Holiday Inn around five, apple-cheeked and wrapped in a scarf, the surprise was all ready.

Stu had brought back all six of the movies which had been playing in the Grand Junction Cinema complex. After supper that evening, Stu said casually: "Come on over to the Convention Hall with me, Tom."

"What for?"

"You'll see."

The Convention Hall faced the Holiday Inn across the snowy street. Stu handed Tom a box of popcorn at the doorway.

"What's this for?" Tom asked.

"Can't watch a movie without popcorn, you big dummy," Stu grinned.

"MOVIE? "

"Sure."

Tom burst into the Convention Hall. Saw the big projector set up, completely threaded. Saw the big convention movie screen pulled down. Saw two folding chairs set up in the middle of the huge, empty floor.

"Wow," he whispered, and his expression of naked wonder had been all Stu could have hoped for.

"I did this three summers at the Starlite Drive-In over in Braintree," Stu said. "I hope I ain't forgot how to fix one of these bastards if the film breaks."

"Wow," Tom said again.

"We'll have to wait in between reels. I wasn't about to go back and grab a second one." Stu stepped through the welter of patch cords leading from the projector to the Honda generator in the electrical closet, and pulled the starter cord. The generator began to chug cheerfully along. Stu shut the door as far as it would go to mute the engine sound and killed the lights. And five minutes later they were sitting side by side, watching Sylvester Stallone kill hundreds of dope-dealers in Rambo IV: The Fire-Fight. Dolby sound blared out at them from the Convention Hall's sixteen speakers, sometimes so loud it was hard to hear the dialogue (what dialogue there was) …  but they had both loved it.

Now, thinking about that, Stu smiled. Someone who didn't know better would have called him dumb-he could have hooked a VCR up to a much smaller gennie and they could have watched hundreds of movies that way, probably right in the Holiday Inn. But movies on TV were not the same, never had been, to his way of thinking. And that wasn't really the point, either. The point was simply that they had time to kill …  and some days it died goddamned hard.

Anyway, one of the films had been a reissue of one of the last Disney cartoons, Oliver and Company, which had never been released on videotape. Tom watched it again and again, laughing like a child at the antics of Oliver and the Artful Dodger and Fagin, who, in the cartoon, lived on a barge in New York and slept in a stolen airline seat.

In addition to the movie project, Stu had built over twenty models, including a Rolls-Royce that had 240 parts and had sold for sixty-five dollars before the superflu. Tom had built a strange but somehow compelling terrain-contoured landscape that covered nearly half the floor space of the Holiday Inn's main function room; he had used papier-maché, plaster of paris, and various food colorings. He called it Moonbase Alpha. Yes, they had kept busy, but-

What you're thinking is crazy.

He flexed his leg. It was in better shape than he ever would have hoped, partially thanks to the Holiday Inn's weight room and exercising machines. There was still considerable stiffness and some pain but he was able to limp around without the crutches. They could take it slow and easy. He was quite sure he could show Tom how to run one of the Arctic Cats that almost everyone around here kept packed away in the back of their garages. Do twenty miles a day, pack shelter halves, big sleeping bags, plenty of those freeze-dried concentrates …