The Stand:BOOK III(45)

Tom promptly stripped off his parka, put the sweatshirt on, and then replaced his parka.

"Great! Great, Stu!"

The last package, the smallest, contained a simple silver medallion on a fine-link silver chain. To Tom it looked like the number 8 lying on its side. He held it up in puzzlement and wonder.

"What is it, Stu?"

"It's a Greek symbol. I remember it from a long time ago, on a doctor program called ‘Ben Casey.' It means infinity, Tom. Forever." He reached across to Tom and held the hand that held the medallion. "I think maybe we're going to get to Boulder, Tommy. I think we were meant to get there from the first. I'd like you to wear that, if you don't mind. And if you ever need a favor and wonder who to ask, you look at that and remember Stuart Redman. All right?"

"Infinity," Tom said, turning it over in his hand. "Forever."

He slipped the medallion over his neck.

"I'll remember that," he said. "Tom Cullen's gonna remember that."

"Shit! I almost forgot!" Stu reached back into his shelter half and brought out another package. "Merry Christmas, Kojak! Just let me open this for you." He took off the wrappings and produced a box of Hartz Mountain Dog Yummies. He scattered a handful on the snow, and Kojak gobbled them up quickly. He came back to Stu, wagging his tail hopefully.

"More later," Stu told him, pocketing the box. "Make manners your watchword in everything you do, as old baldy would …  would say." He heard his voice grow hoarse and felt tears sting his eyes. He suddenly missed Glen, missed Larry, missed Ralph with his cocked-back hat. Suddenly he missed them all, the ones who were gone, missed them terribly. Mother Abagail had said they would wade in blood before it was over, and she had been right. In his heart, Stu Redman cursed her and blessed her at the same time.

"Stu? Are you okay?"

"Yeah, Tommy, fine." He suddenly hugged Tom fiercely, and Tom hugged him back. "Merry Christmas, old hoss."

Tom said hesitantly: "Can I sing a song before we go?"

"Sure, if you want."

Stu rather expected "Jingle Bells" or "Frosty the Snowman" sung in the off-key and rather toneless voice of a child. But what came out was a fragment of "The First Noel," sung in a surprisingly pleasant tenor voice.

"The first Noel," Tom's voice drifted across the white wastes, echoing back with faint sweetness, "the angels did say …  was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay …  In fields …  as they …  lay keeping their sheep …  on a cold winter's night that was so deep … "

Stu joined in on the chorus, his voice not as good as Tom's but mixing well enough to suit the two of them, and the old sweet hymn drifted back and forth in the deep cathedral silence of Christmas morning:

"Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel …  Christ is born in Israel …  "

"That's the only part of it I can remember," Tom said a little guiltily as their voices drifted away.

"It was fine," Stu said. The tears were close again. It would not take much to set him off, and that would upset Tom. He swallowed them back. "We ought to get going. Daylight's wasting."

"Sure." He looked at Stu, who was taking down his shelter half. "It's the best Christmas I ever had, Stu."

"I'm glad, Tommy."

And shortly after that they were under way again, traveling east and upward under the bright cold Christmas Day sun.

The Stand

They camped near the summit of Loveland Pass that night, nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level. They slept three in a shelter as the temperature slipped down to twenty degrees below zero. The wind swept by endlessly, cold as the flat blade of a honed kitchen knife, and in the high shadows of the rocks with the lunatic starsprawl of winter seeming almost close enough to touch, the wolves howled. The world seemed to be one gigantic crypt below them, both east and west.

Early the next morning, before first light, Kojak woke them up with his barking. Stu crawled to the front of the, shelter half, his rifle in hand. For the first time the wolves were visible. They had come down from their places and sat in a rough ring around the camp, not howling now, only looking. Their eyes held deep green glints, and they all seemed to grin heartlessly.

Stu fired six shots at random, scattering them. One of them leaped high and came down in a heap. Kojak trotted over to it, sniffed at it, then lifted his leg and urinated on it.

"The wolves are still his," Tom said. "They always will be."

Tom still seemed half asleep. His eyes were drugged and slow and dreamy. Stu suddenly realized what it was: Tom had fallen into that eerie state of hypnosis again.

"Tom …  is he dead? Do you know?"

"He never dies," Tom said. "He's in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He's blind like them."

"Will he be back?" Stu asked urgently. He felt cold all over.

Tom didn't answer.

"Tommy … "

"Tom's sleeping. He went to see the elephant."

"Tom, can you see Boulder?"

Outside, a bitter white line of dawn was coming up in the sky against the jagged, sterile mountaintops.

"Yes. They're waiting. Waiting for some word. Waiting for spring. Everything in Boulder is quiet."

"Can you see Frannie?"

Tom's face brightened. "Frannie, yes. She's fat. She's going to have a baby, I think. She stays with Lucy Swann. Lucy's going to have a baby, too. But Frannie will have her baby first. Except … " Tom's face grew dark.

"Tom? Except what?"

"The baby … "

"What about the baby? "

Tom looked around uncertainly. "We were shooting wolves, weren't we? Did I fall asleep, Stu?"

Stu forced a smile. "A little bit, Tom."

"I had a dream about an elephant. Funny, huh?"

"Yeah." What about the baby? What about Fran?

He began to suspect they weren't going to be in time; that whatever Tom had seen would happen before they could arrive.

The good weather broke three days before the New Year, and they stopped in the town of Kittredge. They were close enough to Boulder now for the delay to be a bitter disappointment to them both-even Kojak seemed uneasy and restless.

"Can we push on soon, Stu?" Tom asked hopefully.

"I don't know," Stu said. "I hope so. If we'd only gotten two more days of good weather, I believe that's all it would have taken. Damn!" He sighed, then shrugged. "Well, maybe it'll just be flurries."

But it turned out to be the worst storm of the winter. It snowed for five days, piling up drifts that were twelve and even fourteen feet high in places. When they dug themselves out on the second of January to look at a sun as flat and small as a tarnished copper coin, all the landmarks were gone. Most of the town's small business district had been not just buried but entombed. Snowdrifts and snowdunes had been carved into wild, sinuous shapes by the wind. They might have been on another planet.

They went on, but the traveling was slower than ever; finding the road had developed from a continuing nuisance into a serious problem. The snowmobile got stuck repeatedly and they had to dig it out. And on the second day of 1991, the freight-train rumble of the avalanches began again.

On the fourth of January they came to the place where US 6 split off from the turnpike to go its own way to Golden, and although neither of them knew it-there were no dreams or premonitions-that was the day that Frannie Goldsmith went into labor.

"Okay," Stu said as they paused at the turn-off. "No more trouble finding the road, anyhow. It's been blasted through solid rock. We were damned lucky just to find the turn-off, though."

Staying on the road was easy enough, but getting through the tunnels was not. To find the entrances they had to dig through powdered snow in some cases and through the packed remains of old avalanches in others. The snowmobile roared and clashed unhappily over the bare road inside.

Worse, it was scary in the tunnels-as either Larry or the Trashcan Man could have told them. They were black as minepits except for the cone of light thrown by the snowmobile's headlamp, because both ends were packed with snow. Being inside them was like being shut in a dark refrigerator. Going was painfully slow, getting out of the far end of each tunnel was an exercise in engineering, and Stu was very much afraid that they would come upon a tunnel that was simply impassable no matter how much they grunted and heaved and shuffled the cars stuck inside from one place to another. If that happened, they would have to turn around and go back to the Interstate. They would lose a week at least. Abandoning the snowmobile was not an option; doing that would be a painful way of committing suicide.

And Boulder was maddeningly close.

On January seventh, about two hours after they had dug their way out of another tunnel, Tom stood up on the back of the snowmobile and pointed. "What's that, Stu?"

Stu was tired and grumpy and out of sorts. The dreams had stopped coming, but perversely, that was somehow more frightening than having them.

"Don't stand up while we're moving, Tom, how many times do I have to tell you that? You'll fall over backward and go headfirst into the snow and-"

"Yeah, but what is it? It looks like a bridge. Did we get on a river someplace, Stu?"