The Stand:BOOK III(44)

"My throat! It's all hot! Oh laws, lawsy me-"

"It's the cold, Tom. It goes away."

"I was choking-"

"It's all right now, Tom. We're going to be okay."

They lay on top of the snow, getting their wind back. Stu put his arm around Tom's shoulders to still the big fellow's trembling. A distance away, gaining volume and then diminishing, was the rumbling cold sound of another avalanche.

It took them the rest of the day to get the three quarters of a mile between the place where they had run off the road and the town of Avon. There was no question of salvaging the snowmobile or any of the supplies lashed to it; it was just too far down the grade. It would stay there until spring, at least-maybe forever, the way things were now.

They got to town half an hour past dusk, too cold and winded to do anything but build a fire and find a halfway warm place to sleep. That night there were no dreams-only the blackness of utter exhaustion.

In the morning, they set about the task of reoutfitting themselves. It was a tougher job in the small town of Avon than it had been in Grand Junction. Again Stu considered just stopping and wintering here-if he said it was the right thing to do, Tom would not question him, and they had had an explicit lesson in what happened to people who pressed their luck just yesterday. But in the end, he rejected the idea. The baby was due sometime in early January. He wanted to be there when it came. He wanted to see with his own eyes that it was all right.

At the end of Avon's short main street they found a John Deere dealership, and in the garage behind the showroom they found two used Deere snowmobiles. Neither of them was quite as good as the big Highway Department machine Stu had driven off the road, but one of them had an extra-wide cleated driving tread, and he thought it would do. They found no concentrates and had to settle for canned goods instead. The latter half of the day was spent ransacking houses for camping gear, a job neither of them relished. The victims of the plague were everywhere, transformed into grotesquely decayed ice-cave exhibits.

Near the end of the day they found most of what they needed in one place, a large rooming house just off the main drag. Before the superflu struck, it had apparently been filled with young people, the sort who came to Colorado to do all the things John Denver used to sing about. Tom, in fact, found a large green plastic garbage bag in the crawlspace under the stairs filled with a very potent version of "Rocky Mountain High."

"What's this? Is it tobacco, Stu?"

Stu grinned. "Well, I guess some people thought so. It's locoweed, Tom. Leave it where you found it."

They loaded the snowmobile carefully, storing away the canned goods, tying down new sleeping bags and shelter halves. By then the first stars were coming out, and they decided to spend one more night in Avon.

Driving slowly back over the crusting snow to the house where they had set up quarters, Stu had a quietly stunning thought: tomorrow would be Christmas Eve. It seemed impossible to believe that time could have gotten by so fast, but the proof was staring up at him from his calendar wristwatch. They had left Grand Junction over three weeks before.

When they reached the house, Stu said: "You and Kojak go on in and get the fire going. I got a small errand to run."

"What's that, Stu?"

"Well, it's a surprise," Stu said.

"Surprise? Am I going to find out?"

"Yeah."

"When?" Tom's eyes sparkled.

"Couple of days."

"Tom Cullen can't wait a couple of days for a surprise, laws, no."

"Tom Cullen will just have to," Stu said with a grin. "I'll be back in an hour. You just be ready to go."

"Well …  okay."

It was more like an hour and a half before Stu had exactly what he wanted. Tom pestered him about the surprise for the next two or three hours. Stu kept mum, and by the time they turned in, Tom had forgotten all about it.

As they lay in the dark, Stu said: "I bet by now you wish we'd stayed in Grand Junction, huh?"

"Laws, no," Tom answered sleepily. "I want to get back to my little house just as fast as I can. I just hope we don't run off the road and fall into the snow again. Tom Cullen almost choked!"

"We'll just have to go slower and try harder," Stu said, not mentioning what would probably happen to them if it did happen again …  and there was no shelter within walking distance.

"When do you think we'll be there, Stu?"

"It'll be a while yet, old hoss. But we're gettin there. And I think what we better do right now is get some sleep, don't you?"

"I guess."

Stu turned out the light.

That night he dreamed that both Frannie and her terrible wolf-child had died in childbirth. He heard George Richardson saying from a great distance: It's the flu. No more babies because of the flu. Pregnancy is death because of the flu. A chicken in every pot and a wolf in every womb. Because of the flu. We're all done. Mankind is done. Because of the flu.

And from somewhere nearer, closing in, came the dark man's howling laughter.

On Christmas Eve they began a run of good traveling that would last almost until the New Year. The surface of the snow had crusted up in the cold. The wind blew swirling clouds of ice-crystals over it to pile up in powdery herring-bone dunes that the John Deere snowmobile cut through easily. They wore sunglasses to guard against snow blindness.

They camped, that Christmas Eve, on top of the crust twenty-four miles east of Avon, not far from Silverthorne. They were in the throat of Loveland Pass now, the choked and buried Eisenhower Tunnel somewhere below and to the east of them. While they were waiting for dinner to warm up, Stu discovered an amazing thing. Idly using an axe to chop through the crust and his hand to dig out the loose powder beneath, he had discovered blue metal only an arm's length below where they sat. He almost called Tom's attention to his find, and then thought better of it. The thought that they were sitting less than two feet above a traffic jam, less than two feet above God only knew how many dead bodies, was an unsettling one.

When Tom woke up on the morning of the twenty-fifth at quarter of seven, he found Stu already up and cooking breakfast, which was something of an oddity; Tom was almost always up before Stu. There was a pot of Campbell's vegetable soup hanging over the fire, just coming to a simmer. Kojak was watching it with great enthusiasm.

"Morning, Stu," Tom said, zipping his jacket and crawling out of his sleeping bag and his shelter half. He had to whiz something terrible.

"Morning," Stu answered casually. "And a merry Christmas."

"Christmas?" Tom looked at him and forgot all about how badly he had to whiz. "Christmas? " he said again.

"Christmas morning." He hooked a thumb to Tom's left. "Best I could do."

Stuck into the snowcrust was a spruce-top about two feet high. It was decorated with a package of silver icicles Stu had found in the back room of the Avon Five-and-Ten.

"A tree," Tom whispered, awed. "And presents. Those are presents, aren't they, Stu?"

There were three packages on the snow under the tree, all of them wrapped in light blue tissue paper with silver wedding bells on it-there had been no Christmas paper at the five-and-ten, not even in the back room.

"They're presents, all right," Stu said. "For you. From Santa Claus, I guess."

Tom looked indignantly at Stu. "Tom Cullen knows there's no Santa Claus! Laws, no! They're from you!" He began to look distressed. "And I never got you one thing! I forgot …  I didn't know it was Christmas …  I'm stupid! Stupid!" He balled up his fist and struck himself in the center of the forehead. He was on the verge of tears.

Stu squatted on the snowcrust beside him. "Tom," he said. "You gave me my Christmas present early."

"No, sir, I never did. I forgot. Tom Cullen's nothing but a dummy, M-O-O-N, that spells dummy."

"But you did, you know. The best one of all. I'm still alive. I wouldn't be, if it wasn't for you."

Tom looked at him uncomprehendingly.

"If you hadn't come along when you did, I would have died in that washout west of Green River. And if it hadn't been for you, Tom, I would have died of pneumonia or the flu or whatever it was back there in the Utah Hotel. I don't know how you picked the right pills …  if it was Nick or God of just plain old luck, but you did it. You got no sense, calling yourself a dummy. If it hadn't been for you, I never would have seen this Christmas. I'm in your debt."

Tom said, "Aw, that ain't the same," but he was glowing with pleasure.

"It is the same," Stu said seriously.

"Well-"

"Go on, open your presents. See what he brung you. I heard his sleigh in the middle of the night for sure. Guess the flu didn't get up to the North Pole."

"You heard him?" Tom was looking at Stu carefully, to see if he was being ribbed.

"Heard something."

Tom took the first package and unwrapped it carefully-a pinball machine encased in Lucite, a new gadget all the kids had been yelling for the Christmas before, complete with two-year coin batteries. Tom's eyes lit up when he saw it. "Turn it on," Stu said.

"Naw, I want to see what else I got."

There was a sweatshirt with a winded skier on it, resting on crooked skis and propping himself up with his ski poles.

"It says: I CLIMBED LOVELAND PASS," Stu told him. "We haven't yet, but I guess we're gettin there."