The Stand:BOOK III(49)

Tom had caught Bill Gehringer (despite Billy's self-conscious disclaimer that he was too old for such kid games, he had joined with a will), and together they had caught the Upshaw boy-or was it Upson? Stu had trouble keeping them all straight-and the three of them had tracked down Leo Rockway hiding behind Brentner Rock. Tom himself had put the tag on Leo.

The chase ranged back and forth over West Boulder, gangs of kids and adolescents surging up and down the streets that were still mostly empty, Tom bellowing and carrying his basket. And at last it led back up here, where the sun was hot and the wind blew warm. The band of tagged children was some two hundred strong, and they were still in the process of tracking down the last, half dozen or so that were still "out." In the process they were scaring up dozens of deer that wanted no part of the game.

Two miles farther up, at Sunrise Amphitheater, a huge picnic lunch had been spread where Harold Lauder had once waited for just the right moment to speak into his walkie-talkie. At noon, two or three thousand people would sit down together and look east toward Denver and eat venison and deviled eggs and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and fresh pie for dessert. It might be the last mass gathering the Zone would ever have, unless they all went down to Denver and got together in the stadium where the Broncos had once played football. Now, on Mayday, the trickle of early spring had swelled to a flood of immigrants. Since April 15 another eight thousand had come in, and they were now nineteen thousand or so-temporarily at least, Sandy's Census Bureau could not keep up. A day when only five hundred came in was a rare day.

In the playpen which Stu had brought up and covered with a blanket, Peter began to cry lustily. Fran moved toward him, but Lucy, mountainous and eight months pregnant, was there first.

"I warn you," Fran said, "it's his diapers. I can tell just by the way he sounds."

"Looking at a little poo isn't going to cross my eyes." Lucy lifted an indignantly crying Peter from the playpen and shook him gently back and forth in the sunlight. "Hi, baby. What you doing? Not too much?"

Peter blatted.

Lucy set him down on another blanket they had brought up for a changing table. Peter began to crawl away, still blatting. Lucy turned him over and began to unsnap his blue corduroy pants. Peter's legs waved in the air.

"Why don't you two go for a walk?" Lucy said. She smiled at Fran, but Stu thought the smile was sad.

"Why don't we do just that?" Fran agreed, and took Stu's arm.

Stu allowed himself to be walked away. They crossed the road and entered a mild green pasture that climbed upward at a steep angle under the moving white clouds and bright blue sky.

"What was that about?" Stu asked.

"Pardon me?" But Fran looked just a trifle too innocent.

"That look."

"What look?"

"I know a look when I see one," Stu said. "I may not know what it means, but I know it when I see it."

"Sit down with me, Stu."

"Like that, is it?"

They sat down and looked east where the land fell away in a series of swoops to flatlands that faded into a blue haze. Nebraska was out there in that haze somewhere.

"It's serious. And I don't know how to talk to you about it, Stuart."

"Well, you just go on the best you can," he said, and took her hand.

Instead of speaking, Fran's face began to work. A tear spilled down her cheek and her mouth drew down, trembling.

"Fran-"

"No, I won't cry!" she said angrily, and then there were more tears, and she cried hard in spite of herself. Bewildered, Stu put an arm around her and waited.

When the worst seemed to be over, he said: "Now tell me. What's this about?"

"I'm homesick, Stu. I want to go back to Maine."

Behind them, the children whooped and yelled. Stu looked at her, utterly flabbergasted. Then he grinned a little uncertainly. "That's it? I thought you must have decided to divorce me, at the very least. Not that we've ever actually had the benefit of the clergy, as they say."

"I won't go anyplace without you," she said. She had taken a Kleenex from her breast pocket and was wiping her eyes with it. "Don't you know that?"

"I guess I do."

"But I want to go back to Maine. I dream about it. Don't you ever dream about East Texas, Stu? Arnette?"

"No," he said truthfully. "I could live just as long and die just as happy if I never saw Arnette again. Did you want to go to Ogunquit, Frannie?"

"Eventually, maybe. But not right away. I'd want to go to western Maine, what they called the Lakes Region. You were almost there when Harold and I met you in New Hampshire. There are some beautiful places, Stu. Bridgton …  Sweden …  Castle Rock. The lakes would be jumping with fish, I'd imagine. In time, we might settle on the coast, I suppose. But I couldn't face that the first year. Too many memories. It would be too big at first. The sea would be too big." She looked down at her nervously plucking hands. "If you want to stay here …  help them get it going …  I'll understand. The mountains are beautiful, too, but …  it just doesn't seem like home."

He looked east and discovered he could at last name something he had felt stirring around in himself since the snow had begun to melt: an urge to move on. There were too many people here; they weren't exactly stepping all over each other, at least not yet, but they were beginning to make him feel nervous. There were Zoners (and so they had begun to call themselves) who could cope with that sort of thing, who actually seemed to relish it. Jack Jackson, who headed the new Free Zone Committee (now expanded to nine members), was one. Brad Kitchner was another-Brad had a hundred projects going, and all the warm bodies he could use to help with each of them. It had been his idea to get one of the Denver TV stations going. It showed old movies every night from 6 to 1 A.M., with a ten-minute news broadcast at nine o'clock.

And the man who had taken over the marshaling chore in Stu's absence, Hugh Petrella, was not the sort of man Stu much cottoned to. The very fact that Petrella had campaigned for the job made Stu feel uneasy. He was a hard, puritanical fellow with a face that looked as if it had been carved by licks of a hatchet. He had seventeen deputies and was pushing for more at each Free Zone Committee meeting-if Glen had been here, Stu thought he would have said that the endless American struggle between the law and freedom of the individual had begun again. Petrella was not a bad man, but he was a hard man …  and Stu supposed that with Hugh's sure belief that the law was the final answer to every problem, he made a better marshal than Stu himself ever would have been.

"I know you've been offered a spot on the committee," Fran was saying hesitantly.

"I got the feeling that was an honorary thing, didn't you?"

Fran looked relieved. "Well … "

"I got the idea they'd be just as happy if I turned it down. I'm the last holdover from the old committee. And we were a crisis committee. Now there's no crisis. What about Peter, Frannie?"

"I think he'll be old enough to travel by June," she said. "And I'd like to wait until Lucy has her baby."

There had been eighteen births in the Zone since Peter had come into the world on January 4. Four had died; the rest were just fine. The babies born of the plague-immune parents would begin to arrive very soon, and it was entirely possible that Lucy's would be the first. She was due on June 14.

"What would you think about leaving on July first?" he asked.

Fran's face lit up. "You will! You want to?"

"Sure."

"You're not just saying that to please me?"

"No," he said. "Other people will be leaving too. Not many, not for a while. But some."

She flung her arms around his neck and hugged him. "Maybe it will just be a vacation," she said. "Or maybe …  maybe we'll really like it." She looked at him timidly. "Maybe we'll want to stay."

He nodded. "Maybe so." But he wondered if either of them would be content to stay in one place for any run of years.

He looked over at Lucy and Peter. Lucy was sitting on the blanket and bouncing Peter up and down. He was giggling and trying to catch Lucy's nose.

"Have you thought that he might get sick? And you. What if you catch pregnant again?"

She smiled. "There are books. We can both read them. We can't live our lives afraid, can we?"

"No, I suppose not."

"Books and good drugs. We can learn to use them, and as for the drugs that have gone over …  we can learn to make them again. When it comes to getting sick and dying … " She looked back toward the large meadow where the last of the children were walking toward the picnic area, sweaty and winded. "That's going to happen here, too. Remember Rich Moffat?" He nodded. "And Shirley Hammett?"

"Yes." Shirley had died of a stroke in February.

Frannie took his hands. Her eyes were bright and shining with determination. "I say we take our chances and live our lives the way we want."

"All right. That sounds good to me. That sounds right."

"I love you, East Texas."

"That goes back to you, ma'am."

Peter had begun to cry again.

"Let's go see what's wrong with the emperor," she said, getting up and brushing grass from her slacks.