"Billy, Fran was going to have a baby-"
Billy grew very still. And then he whispered, "Oh shit, I forgot about that."
"She's had it?"
"George. George Richardson can tell you, Stu. Or Dan Lathrop. He's our new doc, we got him about four weeks after you guys left, used to be a nose, throat, and ears man, but he's pretty g-"
Stu gave Billy a brisk shake, cutting off his almost frantic babble.
"What's wrong?" Tom asked. "Is something wrong with Frannie?"
"Talk to me, Billy," Stu said. "Please."
"Fran's okay," Billy said. "She's going to be fine."
"That what you heard?"
"No, I saw her. Me and Tony Donahue, we went up together with some flowers from the greenhouse. The greenhouse is Tony's project, he's got all kinds of stuff growing there, not just flowers. The only reason she's still in is because she had to have a what-do-you-call-it, a Roman birth-"
"A cesarean section?"
"Yeah, right, because the baby came the wrong way. But no sweat. We went to see her three days after she had the baby, it was January seventh we went up, two days ago. We brought her some roses. We figured she could use some cheering up because … "
"The baby died?" Stu asked dully.
"It's not dead," Billy said, and then he added with great reluctance: "Not yet."
Stu suddenly felt far away, rushing through the void. He heard laughter … and the howling of wolves …
Billy said in a miserable rush: "It's got the flu. It's got Captain Trips. It's the end for all of us, that's what people are saying. Frannie had him on the fourth, a boy, six pounds nine ounces, and at first he was okay and I guess everybody in the Zone got drunk, Dick Ellis said it was like V-E Day and V-J Day all rolled into one, and then on the sixth, he … he just got it. Yeah, man," Billy said, and his voice began to hitch and thicken. "He got it, oh shit, ain't that some welcome home, I'm so fuckin sorry, Stu … "
Stu reached out, found Billy's shoulder, and pulled him closer.
"At first everybody was sayin he might get better, maybe it's just the ordinary flu … or bronchitis … maybe the croup … but the docs, they said newborn babies almost never get those things. It's like a natural immunity, because they're so little. And both George and Dan … they saw so much of the superflu last year … "
"That it would be hard for them to make a mistake," Stu finished for him.
"Yeah," Billy whispered. "You got it."
"What a bitch," Stu muttered. He turned away from Billy and began to limp down the road again.
"Stu, where are you going?"
"To the hospital," Stu said. "To see my woman."
Chapter 76
Fran lay awake with the reading lamp on. It cast a pool of bright light on the left side of the clean white sheet that covered her. In the center of the light, face-down, was an Agatha Christie. She was awake but slowly drifting off, in that state where memories clarify magically as they begin to transmute themselves into dreams. She was going to bury her father. What happened after that didn't matter, but she was going to drag herself out of the shockwave enough to get that done. The act of love. When that was done, she could cut herself a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie. It would be large, it would be juicy, and it would be very, very bitter.
Marcy had been in half an hour ago to check on her, and Fran had asked, "Is Peter dead yet?" And even as she spoke, time seemed to double so that she wasn't sure if she meant Peter the baby or Peter the baby's grandfather, now deceased.
"Shhh, he's fine," Marcy had said, but Frannie had seen a more truthful answer in Marcy's eyes. The baby she had made with Jess Rider was engaged in dying somewhere behind four glass walls. Perhaps Lucy's baby would have better luck; both of its parents had been immune to Captain Trips. The Zone had written off her Peter now and had pinned its collective hopes on those women who had conceived after July 1 of last year. It was brutal but completely understandable.
Her mind drifted, cruising at some low level along the border of sleep, conning the terrain of her past and the landscape of her heart. She thought about her mother's parlor where seasons passed in a dry age. She thought about Stu's eyes, about the first sight of her baby, Peter Goldsmith-Redman. She dreamed that Stu was with her, in her room.
"Fran?"
Nothing had worked out the way it should have. All of the hopes had turned out to be phony, as false as those Audioanimatronic animals at Disney World, just a bunch of clockwork, a cheat, a false dawn, a false pregnancy, a-
"Hey, Frannie."
In her dream she saw that Stu had come back. He was standing in the doorway of her room, wearing a gigantic fur parka. Another cheat. But she saw that the dream-Stu had a beard. Wasn't that funny?
She began to wonder if it was a dream when she saw Tom Cullen standing behind him. And … was that Kojak sitting at Stu's heel?
Her hand flew suddenly up to her cheek and pinched viciously, making her left eye water. Nothing changed.
"Stu?" she whispered. "Oh my God, is it Stu?"
His face was deeply tanned except for the skin around his eyes, which might have been covered by sunglasses. That was not a detail you would expect to notice in a dream-
She pinched herself again:
"It's me," Stu said, coming into the room. "Stop workin yourself over, honey." His limp was so severe he was nearly stumbling. "Frannie, I'm home."
"Stu!" she cried. "Are you real? If you're real, come here!"
He went to her then, and held her.
Chapter 77
Stu was sitting in a chair drawn up to Fran's bed when George Richardson and Dan Lathrop came in. Fran immediately seized Stu's hand and squeezed it tightly, almost painfully. Her face was set in rigid lines, and for a moment Stu saw what she would look like when she was old; for a moment she looked like Mother Abagail.
"Stu," George said. "I heard about your return. Miraculous. I can't tell you how glad I am to see you. We all are."
George shook his hand and then introduced Dan Lathrop.
Dan said, "We've heard there was an explosion in Las Vegas. You actually saw it?"
"Yes."
"People around here seem to think it was a nuclear blast. Is that true?"
"Yes."
George nodded at this, then seemed to dismiss it and turned to Fran.
"How are you feeling?"
"All right. Glad to have my man back. What about the baby?"
"Actually," Lathrop said, "that's what we're here about."
Fran nodded. "Dead?"
George and Dan exchanged a glance. "Frannie, I want you to listen carefully and try not to misunderstand anything I say-"
Lightly, with suppressed hysteria, Fran said: "If he's dead, just tell me!"
"Fran," Stu said.
"Peter seems to be recovering," Dan Lathrop said mildly.
There was a moment of utter shocked silence in the room. Fran, her face pale and oval below the dark chestnut mass of her hair on the pillow, looked up at Dan as if he had suddenly begun to spout some sort of lunatic doggerel. Someone-either Laurie Constable or Marcy Spruce-looked into the room and then passed on. It was a moment that Stu never forgot.
"What?" Fran whispered at last.
George said, "You mustn't get your hopes up."
"You said … recovering," Fran said. Her face was flatly stunned. Until this moment she hadn't realized how much she had resigned herself to the baby's death.
George said, "Both Dan and I saw thousands of cases during the epidemic, Fran … you notice I don't say ‘treated' because I don't think either of us ever changed the course of the disease by a jot or a tittle in any patient. Fair statement, Dan?"
"Yes."
The I-want line that Stu had first noticed in New Hampshire hours after meeting her now appeared on Fran's forehead. "Will you get to the point, for heaven's sake?"
"I'm trying, but I have to be careful and I'm going to be careful," George said. "This is your son's life we're discussing, and I'm not going to let you press me. I want you to understand the drift of our thinking. Captain Trips was a shifting-antigen flu, we think now. Now, every kind of flu-the old flu-had a different antigen; that's why it kept coming back every two or three years or so in spite of flu vaccinations. There would be an outbreak of A-type flu, Hong Kong flu that was, and you'd get a vaccination for it, and then two years later a B-type strain would come along and you'd get sick unless you got a different vaccination."
"But you'd get well again," Dan broke in, "because eventually your body would produce its own antibodies. Your body changed to cope with the flu. With Captain Trips, the flu itself changed every time your body came to a defense posture. In that way it was more similar to the AIDS virus than to the common sorts of flu our bodies have become used to. And as with AIDS, it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death."