The Stand:BOOK III(5)

"He just looked at him. Eric was laying down all this funky shit about how he wanted to see the Vegas operation run …  we should do this, we should do that. Poor old Trash-he ain't all the way together himself, you know-was just staring at him like he was a TV actor or something. Eric's pacing back and forth like he's addressing a jury and like it was already proved he was going to get his own way. And he says-real soft-‘Eric.' Like that. And Eric looked at him. I didn't see nothing. But Eric just looked at him for a long time. Maybe five minutes. His eyes just got bigger and bigger …  and then he started to drool …  and then he started to giggle …  and he giggled right along with Eric, and that scared me. When Flagg laughs, you get scared. But Eric just kept right on giggling, and then he said, ‘When you go back, drop him off in the Mojave.' And that's what we did. And for all I know, Eric's wandering around out there right now. He looked at Eric for five minutes and drove him out of his mind."

He took a large drag on his cigarette and crushed it out. Then he slung an arm around her. "Why are we talkin about bad shit like that?"

"I don't know …  how's it going out at Indian Springs?"

Lloyd brightened. The Indian Springs project was his baby. "Good. Real good. We're going to have three guys checked out on the Skyhawk planes by the first of October, maybe sooner. Hank Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he's a fucking genius. About some things he's not too bright, but when it comes to weapons, he's incredible."

She had met Trashcan Man twice. Both times she had felt a chill slip over her when his strange, muddy eyes happened to light upon her, and a palpable sense of relief when those eyes passed on. It was obvious that many of the others-Lloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man-saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck charm. One of his arms was a horrid mass of freshly healed burn tissue, and she remembered something peculiar that had happened two nights ago. Hank Rawson had been talking. He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, and finished what he was saying before lighting the cigarette and shaking out the match. Dayna saw the way that Trashcan Man's eyes homed in on the match flame, the way his breathing seemed to stop. It was as if his whole being had focused on the tiny flame. It was like watching a starving man contemplate a nine-course dinner. Then Hank shook out the match and dropped the blackened stub into an ashtray. The moment had ended.

"He's good with weapons?" she asked Lloyd.

"He's great with them. The Skyhawks have under-wing missiles, air-to-ground. Shrikes. Weird how they name all that shit, isn't it? No one could figure out how the goddam things went on the planes. No one could figure out how to arm them or safety-control them. Christ, it took us most of one day to figure out how to get them off the storage racks. So Hank says, ‘We better get Trashy out here when he gets back and see if he can figure it out.'"

"When he gets back?"

"Yeah, he's a funny dude. He's been in Vegas almost a week now, but he'll be taking off again pretty quick."

"Where does he go?"

"Into the desert. He takes a Land-Rover and just goes. He's a strange guy, I tell you. In his way, Trash is almost as strange as the big guy himself. West of here there's nothing but empty desert and godforsaken waste. I ought to know. I did time way up west in a hellhole called Brownsville Station. I don't know how he lives out there, but he does. He looks for new toys, and he always comes back with a few. About a week after him and me got back from L.A., he brought back a pile of army machine guns with laser sights-never-miss machine guns, Hank calls them. This time it was Teller mines, contact mines, fragment mines, and a canister of Parathion. He said he found a whole stockpile of Parathion. Also enough defoliant to turn the whole state of Colorado bald as an egg."

"Where does he find it?"

"Everywhere," Lloyd said simply. "He sniffs it out, sweetbuns. It isn't really so strange. Most of western Nevada and eastern California was owned by the good old U.S.A. It's where they tested their toys, all the way up to A-bombs. He'll be dragging one of those back someday."

He laughed. Dayna felt cold, terribly cold.

"The superflu started somewhere out here. I'd lay money on it. Maybe Trash will find it. I tell you, he just sniffs that stuff out. The big guy says just give him his head and let him run, and so that's what he does. You know what his favorite toy is right now?"

"No," Dayna said. She wasn't sure she wanted to know …  but why else had she come over here?

"Flametracks."

"What are flametrucks?"

"Not trucks, tracks. He's got five of them out at Indian Springs, lined up like Formula One racecars." Lloyd laughed. "They used them in the Nam. The grunts called them Zippos. They're full of napalm. Trash loves em."

"Neato," she muttered.

"Anyway, when Trash came back this time, we took him out to the Springs. He hummed and muttered around those Shrikes and got them armed and mounted in about six hours. Can you believe that? They train Air Force technicians about ninety years to do stuff like that. But they're not Trash, you see. He's a fucking genius."

Idiot savant, you mean. I bet I know how he got those burns, too.

Lloyd looked at his watch and sat up. "Speaking of Indian Springs, I got to get out there. Just got time for another shower. You want to join me?"

"Not this time."

She got dressed after the shower began to run again. So far she had always managed to get dressed and undressed with him out of the room, and that was the way she intended to keep it.

She strapped the clip to her forearm and slid the switchblade knife into its spring-loaded clasp. A quick twist of her wrist would deliver all ten inches of it into her hand.

Well, she thought as she slipped into her blouse, a girl has to have some secrets.

During the afternoons, she was on a streetlamp maintenance crew. What the job amounted to was testing the bulbs with a simple gadget and replacing them if they had burned out, or if they had been broken by vandals when Las Vegas had been in the grip of the superflu. There were four of them on the job, and they had a cherry-picker truck that trundled around from post to post and street to street.

Late that afternoon, Dayna was up in the cherry-picker, removing the Plexiglas hood from one of the streetlamps and musing on how much she liked the people she was working with, particularly Jenny Engstrom, a tough and beautiful ex-nightclub dancer who was now running the cherry-picker's controls. She was the type of girl Dayna would have wanted for her best friend, and it confused her that Jenny was over here, on the dark man's side. It confused her so much that she didn't dare ask Jenny for an explanation.

The others were also okay. She thought that Vegas had a rather larger proportion of stupids than the Zone, but none of them wore fangs, and they didn't turn into bats at moonrise. They were also people who worked much harder than she remembered the people in the Zone working. In the Free Zone you saw people idling in the parks at all hours of the day, and there were people who decided to break for lunch from noon until two. That sort of thing didn't happen over here. From 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., everybody was working, either at Indian Springs or on the maintenance crews here in town. And school had started again. There were about twenty kids in Vegas, ages ranging from four (that was Daniel McCarthy, the pet of everyone in town, known as Dinny) up to fifteen. They had found two people with teaching certificates, and classes went on five days a week. Lloyd, who had quit school after repeating his junior year for the third time, was very proud of the educational opportunities that were being provided. The pharmacies were open and unguarded. People came and went all the time …  but they took away nothing heavier than a bottle of aspirin or Gelusil. There was no drug problem in the West. Anyone who had seen what had happened to Hector Drogan knew what the penalty for a habit was. There were no Rich Moffats, either. Everyone was friendly and straight. And it was wise to drink nothing stronger than bottled beer.

Germany in 1938, she thought. The Nazis? Oh, they're charming people. Very athletic. They don't go to the nightclubs, the nightclubs are for the tourists. What do they do? They make clocks.

Was it a fair comparison? Dayna wondered uneasily, thinking of Jenny Engstrom, who she liked so much. She didn't know …  but she thought that maybe it was.

She tested the bulb in the hood of the light standard. It was bad. She removed it, set it carefully between her feet, and got the last fresh one. Good, it was near the end of the day. It was-

She glanced down and froze.

People were coming back from the bus stop, headed home from Indian Springs. All of them were glancing up casually, the way a group of people always glance up at someone high in the air. The circus-for-free syndrome.

That face, looking up at her.

That wide, smiling, wondering face.

Dear sweet Jesus in heaven, is that Tom Cullen?

A dribble of salt-stinging sweat ran into her eye, doubling her vision. When she wiped it away, the face was gone. The people from the bus stop were halfway down the street, swinging their lunch buckets, talking and joking. Dayna gazed at the one she thought might be Tom, but from the rear it was so hard to tell-

Tom? Would they send Tom?

Surely not. That was so crazy it was almost-