The room was large and mostly bare. The desk had been shoved up against the far wall, the executive swivel chair pinned behind it. The pictures were covered with dropcloths. The lights were off.
   Across the room, a drape had been pulled back to uncover a window-wall of glass that looked out on the desert. Dayna thought she had never seen such a sterile and uninviting vista in her life. Overhead was a moon like a small, highly polished silver coin. It was nearly full.
   Standing there, looking out, was the shape of a man.
   He continued to look out long after she had entered, indifferently presenting her his back, before he turned. How long does it take a man to turn around? Two, maybe three seconds at the most. But to Dayna it seemed that the dark man went on turning forever, showing more and more of himself, like the very moon he had been watching. She became a child again, struck dumb by the dreadful curiosity of great fear. For a moment she was caught entirely in the web of his attraction, his glamour, and she was sure that when the turn was completed, unknown eons from now, she would be staring into the face of her dreams: a Gothic cowled monk, his hood shaped around total darkness. A negative man with no face. She would see and then go mad.
   Then he was looking at her, walking forward, smiling warmly, and her first shocked thought was: Why, he’s my age!
   Randy Flagg’s hair was dark, tousled. His face was handsome and ruddy, as if he spent much time out in the desert wind. His features were mobile and sensitive, and his eyes danced with high glee, the eyes of a small child with a momentous and wonderful secret surprise.
   “Dayna!” he said. “Hi!”
   “H-H-Hello.” She could say no more. She had thought she was prepared for anything, but she hadn’t been prepared for this. Her mind had been knocked, reeling, to the mat. He was smiling at her confusion. Then he spread his hands, as if in apology. He was wearing a faded paisley shirt with a frayed collar, pegged jeans, and a very old pair of cowboy boots with rundown heels.
   “What did you expect? A vampire?” His smile broadened, almost demanding that she smile back. “A skin-turner? What have they been telling you about me?”
   “They’re afraid,” she said. “Lloyd was… sweating like a pig.” His smile was still demanding an answering smile, and it took all her effort of will to deny him that. She had been kicked out of bed on his orders. Brought here to… what? Confess? Tell everything she knew about the Free Zone? She couldn’t believe there was that much he didn’t already know.
   “Lloyd,” Flagg said, and laughed ruefully. “Lloyd went through a rather bitter experience in Phoenix when the flu was raging. He doesn’t like to talk about it. I rescued him from death and”—his smile grew even more disarming, if that was possible—“and from a fate worse than death is the popular idiom, I believe. He’s associated me with that experience to a great degree, although his situation was not of my doing. Do you believe me?”
   She nodded slowly. She did believe him, and found herself wondering if Lloyd’s constant showering had something to do with his “rather bitter experience in Phoenix.” She also found herself feeling an emotion she never would have expected in connection with Lloyd Henreid: pity.
   “Good. Sit down, dear.”
   She looked around doubtfully.
   “On the floor. The floor will be fine. We have to talk, and talk truth. Liars sit in chairs, so we’ll eschew them. We’ll sit as though we were friends on opposite sides of a campfire. Sit, girl.” His eyes positively sparkled with suppressed mirth, and his sides seemed to bellow with laughter barely held in. He sat down and crossed his legs and then looked up at her appealingly, his expression seeming to say: You’re not going to let me sit all alone on the floor of this ridiculous office, are you?
   After a moment’s debate she did sit down. She crossed her legs and put her hands lightly on her knees. She could feel the comforting weight of the knife in its spring clip.
   “You were sent over here to spy out the land, dear,” he said. “Is that an accurate description of the situation?”
   “Yes.” There was no use denying it.
   “And you know what usually befalls spies in time of war?”
   “Yes.”
   His smile broadened like sunshine. “Then isn’t it lucky we’re not at war, your people and mine?”
   She looked at him, totally surprised.
   “But we’re not, you know,” he said with quiet sincerity.
   “But… you…” A thousand confused thoughts spun in her head. Indian Springs. The Shrikes. Trashcan Man with his defoliant and his Zippos. The way the conversation always veered when this man’s name—or presence—came into the conversation. And that lawyer, Eric Strellerton. Wandering in the Mojave with his brains burned out.
   All he did was look at him.
   “Have we attacked your Free Zone, so-called? Made any warlike move at all against you over there?”
   “No… but—”
   “And have you attacked us?”
   “Of course not!”
   “No. And we have no plans in that direction. Look!” He suddenly held up his right hand and curled it into a tube. Looking through it, she could see the desert beyond the window-wall.
   “The Great Western Desert!” he cried. “The Big Piss-All! Nevada! Arizona! New Mexico! California! A smattering of my people are in Washington, around the Seattle area, and in Portland, Oregon. A fistful each in Idaho and New Mexico. We’re too scattered to even think about taking a census for a year or more. We’re much more vulnerable than your Zone. The Free Zone is like a highly organized hive or commune. We are nothing but a confederacy, with me as the titular head. There’s room for both of us. There will still be room for both of us in 2190. That’s if the babies live, something we won’t know about here for at least another five months. If they do, and humanity continues, let our grandfathers fight it out, if they have a bone to pick. Or their grandfathers. But what in God’s name do we have to fight about? ”
   “Nothing,” she muttered. Her throat was dry. She felt dazed. And something else… was it hope? She was looking into his eyes. She could not seem to tear her gaze away, and she didn’t want to. She wasn’t going mad. He wasn’t driving her mad at all. He was… a very reasonable man.
   “There are no economic reasons for us to fight, no technological ones either. Our politics are a bit different, but that is a very minor thing, with the Rockies between us…”
   He’s hypnotizing me.
   With a huge effort she dragged her eyes away from his and looked out over his shoulder at the moon. Flagg’s smile faded a bit, and a shadow of irritation seemed to cross his features. Or had she imagined it? When she looked back (more warily this time), he was smiling gently at her again.
   “You had the Judge killed,” she said harshly. “You want something from me, and when you get it, you’ll have me killed, too.”
   He looked at her patiently. “There were pickets all along the Idaho-Oregon border, and they were looking for Judge Farris, that is true. But not to kill him! Their orders were to bring him to me. I was in Portland until yesterday. I wanted to talk to him as I’m now talking to you, dear: calmly, reasonably, and sanely. Two of my pickets spotted him in Copperfield, Oregon. He came out shooting, mortally wounding one of my men and killing the other outright. The wounded man killed the Judge before he himself died. I’m sorry about the way it came out. More sorry than you can know or understand.” His eyes darkened, and about that she believed him… but probably not in the way he wanted her to believe him. And she felt that coldness again.
   “That’s not the way they tell it here.”
   “Believe them or believe me, dear. But remember I give them their orders.”
   He was persuasive… goddamned persuasive. He seemed nearly harmless—but that wasn’t exactly true, was it? That feeling only came from seeing that he was a man… or something that looked like a man. There was enough relief in just that to turn her into something like Silly Putty. He had a presence, and a politician’s knack of knocking all your best arguments into a cocked hat… but he did it in a way she found very disturbing.
   “If you don’t mean war, why the jets and all the other stuff you’ve got out at Indian Springs?”
   “Defensive measures,” he said promptly. “We’re doing similar things at Searles Lake in California, and at Edwards Air Force Base. There’s another group at the atomic reactor on Yakima Ridge in Washington. Your folks will be doing the same thing… if they’re not already.”
   Dayna shook her head, very slowly. “When I left the Zone, they were still trying to get the electric lights working again.”
   “And I’d be happy to send them two or three technicians, except I happen to know that your Brad Kitchner already has things going nicely. They had a brief outage yesterday, but he solved the problem very quickly. It was a power overload out on Arapahoe.”
   “How do you know all that?”
   “Oh, I have my ways,” Flagg said genially. “The old woman came back, by the way. Sweet old woman.”
   “Mother Abagail?”
   “Yes.” His eyes were distant and murky; sad, perhaps. “She’s dead. A pity. I really had hoped to meet her in person.”
   “Dead? Mother Abagail is dead?”
   The murky look cleared, and he smiled at her. “Does that really surprise you so much?”
   “No. But it surprises me that she came back. And it surprises me even more that you know.”
   “She came back to die.”
   “Did she say anything?”
   For just a moment Flagg’s mask of genial composure slipped, showing black and angry bafflement.
   “No,” he said. “I thought she might… might speak. But she died in a coma.”
   “Are you sure?”
   His smile reappeared, as radiant as the summer sun burning off ground-fog.
   “Never mind her, Dayna. Let’s talk of more pleasant things, such as your return to the Zone. I’m sure you’d rather be there than here. I have something for you to take back.” He reached into his shirt, removed a chamois bag, and took three service station maps from it. He handed them to Dayna, who looked at them with growing bewilderment. They showed the seven Western states. Certain areas were shaded in red. The hand-lettered key at the bottom of each map identified them as the areas where population had again begun to spring up.
   “You want me to take these?”
   “Yes. I know where your people are; I want you to know where mine are. As a gesture of good faith and friendship. And when you get back, I want you to tell them this: that Flagg means them no harm, and Flagg’s people mean them no harm. Tell them not to send any more spies. If they want to send people over here, have them call it a diplomatic mission… or exchange students… or any damn thing. But have them come openly. Will you tell them that?”
   She felt dazed, punchy. “Sure. I’ll tell them. But—”
   “That’s all.” He lifted his open, empty palms again. She saw something and leaned forward, unsettled.
   “What are you looking at?” There was an edge in his voice.
   “Nothing.”
   But she had seen, and she knew from the narrow expression on his face that he knew she had. There were no lines on Flagg’s palms. They were as smooth and as blank as the skin on an infant’s stomach. No lifeline, no loveline, no rings or bracelets or loops. Just… blank.
   They looked at each other for what seemed a very long time.
   Then Flagg bounced to his feet and went toward the desk. Dayna also rose. She had actually begun to believe that he might let her go. He sat on the edge of the desk and drew the intercom toward him.
   “I’ll tell Lloyd to have the oil and the plugs and points changed on your cycle,” he said. “I’ll also tell him to have it gassed up. No more worries about gas or oil shortages now, hey? Plenty for all. Although there was a day—I remember it, and probably you do too, Dayna, when it seemed as if the whole world might go up in a series of nuclear fireballs over a lack of premium unleaded gasoline.” He shook his head. “People were very, very stupid.” He thumbed the button on the intercom. “Lloyd?”
   “Yeah, right here.”
   “Will you have Dayna’s bike gassed and tuned up and left in front of the hotel? She’s going to be leaving us.”
   “Yes.”
   Flagg clicked off. “Well, that’s it, dear.”
   “I can… just go?”
   “Yes, ma’am. It’s been my pleasure.” He lifted his hand to the door… palm side down.
   She went to the door. Her hand had barely brushed the knob when he said: “There is one more thing. One… very minor thing.”
   Dayna turned to look at him. He was grinning at her, and it was a friendly grin, but for a flashing second she was reminded of a huge black mastiff, its tongue lolling over white spiked teeth that could rip off an arm as if it was a dishrag.
   “What’s that?”
   “There’s one more of your people over here,” Flagg said. His smile widened. “Who might that be?”
   “How in the world would I know?” Dayna asked, and her mind flashed: Tom Cullen!… Could it really have been him?
   “Oh, come now, dear. I thought we had it all straightened out.”
   “Really,” she said. “Look at it straight ahead and you’ll see I’m being dead honest. The committee sent me… and the Judge… and who knows how many others… and they were very careful. Just so we couldn’t tattle on each other if something… you know, happened.”
   “If we decided to pull some fingernails?”
   “Okay, yes. I was approached by Sue Stern. I’d guess Larry Underwood… he’s on the committee, too—”
   “I know who Mr. Underwood is.”
   “Yes, well, I’d guess he asked the Judge. But as for anyone else…” She shook her head. “It could be anyone. Or anyones. For all I know each of the seven committee members was responsible for recruiting one spy.”
   “Yes, that could be, but it isn’t. There’s only one, and you know who it is.” His grin widened yet more, and now it began to frighten her. It was not a natural thing. It began to remind her of dead fish, polluted water, the surface of the moon seen through a telescope. It made her bladder feel loose and full of hot liquid.
   “You know,” Flagg repeated.
   “No, I—”
   Flagg bent over the intercom again. “Has Lloyd left yet?”
   “No, I’m right here.” Expensive intercom, good reproduction.
   “Hold off a bit on Dayna’s cycle,” he said. “We still have a matter to”—he looked at her, and his eyes glimmered speculatively—“to thrash out in here,” he finished.
   “Okay.”
   The intercom clicked off. Flagg looked at her, smiling, hands folded. He looked for a very long time. Dayna began to sweat. His eyes seemed to grow larger and darker. Looking into them was like looking into wells which were very old and very deep. This time when she tried to drag her gaze away, she couldn’t.
   “Tell me,” he said, very softly. “Let’s not have any unpleasantness, dear.”
   From far off, she heard her voice say, “This whole thing was a script, wasn’t it? A little one-act play.”
   “Dear, I don’t understand what you mean.”
   “Yes, you do. The mistake was having Lloyd answer so fast. When you say frog around here, they jump. He should have been halfway down the Strip with my cycle. Except you told him to stay put because you never intended to let me go.”
   “Dear, you’ve got a terrible case of unfounded paranoia. It was your experience with those men, I suspect. The ones with the traveling zoo. It must have been a terrible thing. This could be a terrible thing, too, and we don’t want that, do we?”
   Her strength was draining away; it seemed to be flowing down her legs in perfect lines of force. With the last of her will, she turned her numb right hand into a fist and struck herself above the right eye. There was an airburst of pain inside her skull and her vision went wavery. Her head rocked back and struck the door with a hollow whack. Her gaze snapped away from his, and she felt her will returning. And her strength to resist.
   “Oh, you’re good,” she said raggedly.
   “You know who it is,” he said. He got off the desk and began to walk toward her. “You know and you’re going to tell me. Punching yourself in the head won’t help, dear.”
   “How come you don’t know?” she cried at him. “You knew about the Judge and you knew about me! How come you don’t know about—”
   His hands descended on her shoulders with terrible power, and they were cold, as cold as marble. “Who?”
   “I don’t know.”
   He shook her like a ragdoll, his face grinning and fierce and terrible. His hands were cold, but his face gave off the baking oven heat of the desert. “You know. Tell me. Who?”
   “Why don’t you know? ”
   “Because I can’t see it! ” he roared, and flung her across the room. She went in a boneless, rolling heap, and when she saw the searchlight of his face bearing down upon her in the gloom, her bladder let go, spreading warmth down her legs. The soft and helpful face of reason was gone. Randy Flagg was gone. She was with the Walkin Dude now, the tall man, the big guy, and God help her.
   “You’ll tell,” he said. “You’ll tell me what I want to know.”
   She gazed at him, and then slowly got to her feet. She felt the weight of the knife lying against her forearm.
   “Yes, I’ll tell you,” she said. “Come closer.”
   He took a step toward her, grinning.
   “No, a lot closer. I want to whisper it in your ear.”
   He came closer still. She could feel baking heat, freezing cold. There was a high, atonal singing in her ears. She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.
   “Closer,” she whispered huskily.
   He took another step and she cocked her right wrist in viciously. She heard the spring click. Weight slapped into her hand.
   “Here! ” she shrieked hysterically, and brought her arm up in a hard sweep, meaning to gut him, leaving him to blunder around the room with his intestines hanging out in steaming loops. Instead he roared laughter, hands on his hips, flaming face cocked back, squeezing and contorting with great good humor.
   “Oh, my dear!” he cried, and went off into another gale of laughter.
   She looked stupidly down at her hand. It held a firm yellow banana with a blue and white Chiquita sticker on it. She dropped it, horrified, to the carpet, where it became a sickly yellow grin, miming Flagg’s own.
   “You’ll tell,” he whispered. “Oh yes indeed you will.”
   And Dayna knew he was right.
   She whirled quickly, so quickly that even the dark man was momentarily caught by surprise. One of those black hands snatched out and caught only the back of her blouse, leaving him with nothing more substantial than a swatch of silk.
   Dayna leaped at the window-wall.
   “No! ” he screamed, and she could feel him after her like a black wind.
   She drove with her lower legs, using them like pistons, hitting the window with the top of her head. There was a dull flat cracking sound, and she saw amazingly thick hunks of glass fall out into the employees’ parking lot. Twisting cracks, like lodes of quicksilver, ran out from her point of impact. Momentum carried her halfway through the hole and it was there that she lodged, bleeding.
   She felt his hands on her shoulders and wondered how long it would take him to make her tell. An hour? Two? She suspected she was dying now, but that was not good enough.
   It was Tom I saw, and you can’t feel him or whatever it is you do because he’s different, he’s —
   He was dragging her back in.
   She killed herself by simply whipping her head viciously around to the right. A razor-sharp jag of glass plunged deep into her throat. Another slipped into her right eye. Her body went stiff for a moment, and her hands beat against the glass. Then she went limp. What the dark man dragged back into the office was only a bleeding sack.
   She had gone, perhaps in triumph.
   Bellowing his rage, Flagg kicked her. The yielding, indifferent movement of her body enraged him further. He began to kick her around the room, bellowing, snarling. Sparks began to jump from his hair, as if somewhere inside him a cyclotron had hummed into life, building up an electrical field and turning him into a battery. His eyes blazed with dark fire. He bellowed and kicked, kicked and bellowed.
   Outside, Lloyd and the others grew pale. They looked at each other. At last it was more than they could stand. Jenny, Ken, Whitney—they drifted away, and their curdled-milk faces were set in the careful expressions of people who hear nothing and want to go right on hearing it.
   Only Lloyd waited—not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him. And at last Flagg called him in.

He was sitting on the wide desk, his legs crossed, his hands on the knees of his jeans. He was looking over Lloyd’s head, out into space. There was a draft, and Lloyd saw that the window-wall was smashed in the middle. The jagged edges of the hole were sticky with blood.
   Resting on the floor was a huddled, vaguely human form wrapped in a drape.
   “Get rid of that,” Flagg said.
   “Okay.” His voice fell to a husky whisper. “Should I take the head?”
   “Take the whole thing out to the east of town and douse it in gasoline and burn it. Do you hear me? Burn it! You burn the fucking thing! ”
   “All right.”
   “Yes.” Flagg smiled benignly.
   Trembling, cotton-mouthed, nearly groaning with terror, Lloyd struggled to pick up the bulky object. The underside was sticky. It made a U in his arms, slithered through them, and thumped back to the floor. He threw a terrified glance at Flagg, but he was still in a semi-lotus, looking outward. Lloyd got hold of it again, clutched it, and staggered toward the door.
   “Lloyd?”
   He stopped and looked back. A little moan escaped him. Flagg was still in the semi-lotus, but now he was floating about ten inches above the desk, still looking serenely across the room.
   “W-W-What?”
   “Do you still have the key I gave you in Phoenix?”
   “Yes.”
   “Keep it handy. The time is coming.”
   “A-All right.”
   He waited, but Flagg did not speak again. He hung in the darkness, a mind-boggling Hindu fakir’s trick, looking outward, smiling gently.
   Lloyd left quickly, happy as always just to go with his life and his sanity.
   That day was a quiet one in Vegas. Lloyd arrived back around 2 P.M., smelling of gasoline. The wind had started to rise, and by five o’clock it was howling up and down the Strip and making forlorn hooting noises between the hotels. The palms, which had begun to die without city water in July and August, flapped against the sky like tattered battle flags. Clouds in strange shapes scudded overhead.
   In the Cub Bar, Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott sat drinking bottled beer and eating egg salad sandwiches. Three old ladies—the Weird Sisters, everyone called them—kept chickens on the outskirts of town, and no one could seem to get enough eggs. Below Whitney and Ken, in the casino, little Dinny McCarthy was crawling happily around on one of the crap tables with an array of plastic soldiers.
   “Lookit that little squirt,” Ken said fondly. “Someone ast me if I’d watch him an hour. I’d watch him all week. I wish to God he was mine. My wife only had the one, and he was two months premature. Died in the incubator the third day out.” He looked up as Lloyd came in.
   “Hey, Dinny!” Lloyd called.
   “Yoyd! Yoyd!” Dinny cried. He ran to the edge of the crap table, jumped down, and ran to him. Lloyd picked him up, swung him, and hugged him hard.
   “Got kisses for Lloyd?” he asked.
   Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses.
   “I got something for you,” Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses from his breast pocket.
   Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. “Yoyd?”
   “What, Dinny?”
   “Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?”
   Lloyd smiled. “I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who’s your mom now?”
   “Angelina.” He pronounced it Angeyeena. “Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too.”
   “Don’t tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd.”
   Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON’T COME line of the crap table, generating his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of Hamm’s.
   “Thanks,” Lloyd said. “Looks great.”
   “That’s homemade Syrian bread,” Whitney said proudly.
   Lloyd munched for a while. “Has anybody seen him?” he asked at last.
   Ken shook his head. “I think he’s gone again.”
   Lloyd thought it over. Outside, a stronger-than-average gust of wind shrieked by, sounding lonely and lost in the desert. Dinny raised his head uneasily for a moment and then bent back to play.
   “I think he’s around somewhere,” Lloyd said finally. “I don’t know why, but I do. I think he’s around waiting for something to happen. I dunno what.”
   Whitney said in a low voice, “You think he got it out of her?”
   “No,” Lloyd said, watching Dinny. “I don’t think he did. It went wrong for him somehow. She… she got lucky or she outthought him. And that doesn’t happen often.”
   “It won’t matter in the long run,” Ken said, but he looked troubled just the same.
   “No, it won’t.” Lloyd listened to the wind for a while. “Maybe he’s gone back to L.A.” But he didn’t really think so, and his face showed it.
   Whitney went back to the kitchen and produced another round of beer. They drank in silence, thinking disquieting thoughts. First the Judge, now the woman. Both dead. And neither had talked. Neither had been unmarked as he had ordered. It was as if the old Yankees of Mantle and Maris and Ford had lost the opening two games of the World Series; it was hard for them to believe, and frightening.
   The wind blew hard all night.

Chapter 63
   
On the late afternoon of September 10, Dinny was playing in the small city park that lies just north of the city’s hotel and casino district. His “mother” that week, Angelina Hirschfield, was sitting on a park bench and talking with a young girl who had drifted into Las Vegas about five weeks before, ten days or so after Angie herself had come in.
   Angie Hirschfield was twenty-seven. The girl was ten years younger, now clad in tight bluejeans shorts and a brief middy blouse which left absolutely nothing to the imagination. There was something obscene about the contrast between the tight allure of her young body and the childish, pouty, and rather vacuous expression on her face. Her conversation was monotonous and seemingly without end: rock stars, sex, her lousy job cleaning Cosmoline preservative off armaments at Indian Springs, sex, her diamond ring, sex, the TV programs that she missed so much, and sex.
   Angie wished she would go have sex with someone and leave her alone. And she hoped Dinny would be at least thirty before he ever worked around to having this girl for a mother.
   At that moment Dinny looked up, smiled, and yelled: “Tom! Hey, Tom!”
   On the other side of the park, a big man with straw-blond hair was shambling along with a big workman’s lunch bucket slamming against his leg.
   “Say, that guy looks drunk,” the girl said to Angie.
   Angie smiled. “No, that’s Tom. He’s just—”
   But Dinny was off and running, hollering “Tom! Wait up, Tom!” at the top of his lungs.
   Tom turned, grinning. “Dinny! Hey-hey!”
   Dinny leaped at Tom. Tom dropped his lunch bucket and grabbed him. Swung him around.
   “Airplane me, Tom! Airplane me!”
   Tom grabbed Dinny’s wrists and began to spin him around, faster and faster. Centrifugal force pulled the boy’s body out until his whizzing legs were parallel to the ground. He shrieked with laughter. After two or three spins, Tom set him gently on his feet.
   Dinny wobbled around, laughing and trying to get his balance back.
   “Do it again, Tom! Do it again some more!”
   “No, you’ll puke if I do. And Tom’s got to get to his home. Laws, yes.”
   “Kay, Tom. ‘Bye!”
   Angie said, “I think Dinny loves Lloyd Henreid and Tom Cullen more than anyone else in town. Tom Cullen is simple, but—” She looked at the girl and broke off. She was watching Tom, her eyes narrowed and thoughtful.
   “Did he come in with another man?” she asked.
   “Who? Tom? No—as far as I know, he came in all by himself about a week and a half ago. He was with those other people in their Zone, but they drove him out. Their loss is our gain, that’s what I say.”
   “And he didn’t come in with a dummy? A deaf-and-dummy?”
   “A deaf-mute? No, I’m pretty sure he came in alone. Dinny just loves him.”
   The girl watched Tom out of sight. She thought of Pepto-Bismol in a bottle. She thought of a scrawled note that said: We don’t need you. That had been back in Kansas, a thousand years ago. She had shot at them. She wished she had killed them, particularly the dummy.
   “Julie? Are you all right?”
   Julie Lawry didn’t answer. She stared after Tom Cullen. In a little while, she began to smile.

Chapter 64
   
The dying man opened the Permacover notebook, uncapped his pen, paused a moment, and then began to write.
   It was strange; where once the pen had flown over the paper, seeming to cover each sheet from top to bottom by a process of benign magic, the words now straggled and draggled, the letters large and tottery, as if he was regressing back to early grammar school days in his own private time machine.
   In those days, his mother and father had still had some love left over for him. Amy had not yet blossomed, and his own future as The Amazing Ogunquit Fat Boy and Possible Hommasexshul was not yet decided. He could remember sitting at the sun-washed kitchen table, slowly copying one of the Tom Swift books word for word in a Blue Horse tablet—pulp stock, blue lines—with a glass of Coke beside him. He could hear his mother’s words drifting out of the living room. Sometimes she was talking on the phone, sometimes to a neighbor.
   It’s just baby fat, the doctor says so. There’s nothing wrong with his glands, thank God. And he’s so bright!
   Watching the words grow, letter by letter. Watching the sentences grow, word by word. Watching the paragraphs grow, each one a brick in the great walled bulwark that was language.
   “It’s to be my greatest invention,” Tom said forcefully. “Watch what happens when I pull out the plate, but for gosh sakes, don’t forget to shield your eyes! ”
   The bricks of language. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Words. Worlds. Magic. Life and immortality. Power.
   I don’t know where he gets it, Rita. Maybe from his grandfather. He was an ordained minister and they say he gave the most wonderful sermons…
   Watching the letters improve as time passed. Watching them connect with each other, printing left behind, writing now. Assembling thoughts and plots. That was the whole world, after all, nothing but thoughts and plots. He had gotten a typewriter finally (and by then there wasn’t much else left over for him; Amy was in high school, National Honor Society, cheerleader, dramatics club, debate society, straight A’s, the braces had come off her teeth and her very best friend in the world was Frannie Goldsmith… and her brother’s baby fat had not yet departed although he was thirteen years old, and he had begun to use big words as a defense, and with a slowly blooming horror he had begun to realize what life was, what it really was: one big heathen cooking pot, and he was the missionary alone inside, being slowly boiled). The typewriter unlocked the rest of it for him. At first it was slow, so slow, and the constant typos were frustrating beyond belief. It was as if the machine was actively—but slyly—opposing his will. But when he got better at it, he began to understand what the machine really was—a kind of magic conduit between his brain and the blank page he strove to conquer. By the time of the superflu epidemic he was able to type better than a hundred words a minute, and he was at last able to keep up with his racing thoughts and snare them all. But he had never stopped his longhand entirely, remembering that Moby Dick had been written longhand, and The Scarlet Letter, and Paradise Lost.
   He had developed the writing Frannie had seen in his ledger over years of practice—no paragraphs, no line breaks, no pause for the eye. It was work—terrible, hand-cramping work—but it was a labor of love. He had used the typewriter willingly and gratefully, but thought he had always saved the best of himself for longhand.
   And now he would transcribe the last of himself that same way.
   He looked up and saw buzzards circling slowly in the sky, like something from a Saturday matinee movie with Randolph Scott, or from a novel by Max Brand. He thought of it written in a novel: Harold saw the buzzards circling in the sky, waiting. He looked at them calmly for a moment, and then bent to his journal again.
   He bent to his journal again.
   At the end, he had been forced to return to the straggling letters which had been the best his shaky motor control could produce at the beginning. He was reminded achingly of the sunny kitchen, the cold glass of Coke, the old and mildewy Tom Swift books. And now, at last, he thought (and wrote), he might have been able to make his mother and father happy. He had lost his baby fat. And although still technically a virgin, he was morally sure that he was not a hommasexshul.
   He opened his mouth and croaked, “Top of the world, Ma.”
   He was halfway down the page. He looked at what he had written, then looked at his leg, which was twisted and broken. Broken? That was too kind a word. It was shattered. He had been sitting in the shade of this rock for five days now. The last of his food was gone. He would have died of thirst yesterday or the day before except for two hard showers. His leg was putrefying. It had a green and gassy smell and the flesh had swelled tight against his pants, stretching the khaki fabric until it resembled a sausage casing.
   Nadine was long gone.
   Harold picked up the gun that had been lying by his side, and checked the loads. He had checked them a hundred times or more just this day. During the rainstorms, he had been careful to keep the gun dry. There were three cartridges left in it. He had fired the first two at Nadine when she looked down and told him she was going on without him.
   They had been coming around a hairpin turn, Nadine on the inside, Harold on the outside aboard his Triumph cycle. They were on the Colorado Western Slope, about seventy miles from the Utah border. There had been an oilslick on the outer part of the curve, and in the days since, Harold had pondered much on this oilslick. It seemed almost too perfect. An oilslick from what? Surely nothing had been moving up here over the last two months. Plenty of time for a slick to dry up. It was as if his red eye had been watching them, waiting for the correct time to produce an oilslick and take Harold out of the play. Leave him with her through the mountains in case of trouble, and then ditch him. He had, as they say, served his purpose.
   The Triumph had slid into the guardrail, and Harold had been flicked over the side like a bug. There had been an excruciating pain in his right leg. He had heard the wet snap as it broke. He screamed. Then hardscrabble was coming up to meet him, hardscrabble that was falling away at a steep, sickening angle toward the gorge below. He could hear fast-flowing water somewhere down there.
   He hit the ground, cartwheeled high into the air, screamed again, came down on his right leg once more, heard it break someplace else, went flying into the air again, came down, rolled, and suddenly fetched up against a dead tree that had heeled over in some years-ago thunderstorm. If it hadn’t been there, he would have gone into the gorge and the mountain trout could have snacked on him instead of the buzzards.
   He wrote in his notebook, still marveling at the straggling, child-size letters: I don’t blame Nadine. That was true. But he had blamed her then.
   Shocked, shaken, scraped raw, his right leg a bolt of agony, he had picked himself up and had crawled a little way up the slope. Far above him, he saw Nadine looking over the guardrail. Her face was white and tiny, a doll’s face.
   “Nadine!” he cried. His voice came out in a hard croak. “The rope! It’s in the left saddlebag!”
   She only looked down at him. He had begun to think she hadn’t heard him and he was preparing to repeat when he saw her head move to the left, to the right, to the left again. Very slowly. She was shaking her head.
   “Nadine! I can’t get up without the rope! My leg’s broken! ”
   She didn’t answer. She was only looking down at him, not even shaking her head now. He began to have the feeling he was down in a deep hole, and she was looking at him over the rim of it.
   “Nadine, toss me the rope! ”
   That slow headshaking again, as terrible as the door of a crypt swinging slowly shut on a man not yet dead but rather in the grip of some terrible catalepsy.
   “NADINE! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! ”
   At last her voice drifted down to him, small but perfectly audible in the great mountain stillness. “All of this was arranged, Harold. I have to go on. I’m very sorry.”
   But she made no move to go; she remained at the guardrail, watching him where he lay some two hundred feet below. Already there were flies, busily sampling his blood on the various rocks where he had hit and scraped off some of himself.
   Harold began to crawl upward, dragging his shattered leg behind him. At first there was no hate, no need to put a bullet in her. It only seemed vital that he get close enough to read her expression.
   It was a little past noon. It was hot. Sweat dripped from his face and onto the sharp pebbles and rocks he was climbing over. He moved by dragging himself upward on his elbows and pushing with his left leg, like a crippled insect. His breath rasped in and out of his throat, a hot file. He had no idea how long it went on, but once or twice he bumped his bad leg against a stone outcropping, and the giant burst of pain had caused him to gray out. Several times he had slipped backward, moaning helplessly.
   At last he became stupidly aware that he could go no farther. The shadows had changed. Three hours had passed. He could not remember the last time he had looked up toward the guardrail and the road; over an hour ago, surely. In his pain, he had been completely absorbed in whatever minute progress he was making. Nadine had probably left long ago.
   But she had still been there, and although he had only succeeded in gaining twenty-five feet or so, the expression on her face was hellishly clear. It was one of grieving sorrow, but her eyes were flat and far away.
   Her eyes were with him.
   That was when he began to hate her, and he felt for the shoulder holster. The Colt was still there, held in during his tumbling fall by the strap across the butt. He snapped the strap off, hunching his body craftily so she wouldn’t see.
   “Nadine—”
   “It’s better this way, Harold. Better for you, because his way would be so much worse. You see that, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to meet him face-to-face, Harold. He feels that someone who would betray one side would probably betray the other. He’d kill you, but he’d drive you mad first. He has that power. He let me choose. This way… or his way. I chose this. You can end it quickly if you’re brave. You know what I mean.”
   He checked the loads in the pistol for the first of hundreds (maybe thousands) of times, keeping the gun in the shadowed hollow of one lacerated and shredded elbow.
   “What about you?” he called up. “Aren’t you a betrayer, too?”
   Her voice was sad. “I never betrayed him in my heart.”
   “I believe that’s exactly where you did betray him,” Harold called up to her. He tried to put a large expression of sincerity on his face, but he was actually calculating the distance. He would have two shots at the most. And a pistol was a notoriously chancy weapon. “I believe he knows it, too.”
   “He needs me,” she said, “and I need him. You were never in it, Harold. And if we’d gone on together, I might have… might have let you do something to me. That small thing. And that would have destroyed everything. I couldn’t take the smallest chance that might happen after all the sacrifice and blood and nastiness. We sold our souls together, Harold, but there’s enough of me left to want full value for mine.”
   “I’ll give you full value,” Harold said, and managed to get up on his knees. The sun was dazzling. Vertigo seized him in rough hands, whirling the gyroscope balance inside his head. He seemed to hear voices—a voice —roaring in surprised protest. He pulled the trigger. The shot echoed, bounced back, was thrown from cliff-face to cliff-face, cracking and whacking and fading. Comical surprise spread over Nadine’s face.
   Harold thought in a drunken kind of triumph: She didn’t think I had it in me! Her mouth hung open in a shocked, round O. Her eyes were wide. The fingers of her hands tensed and flew up, as if she were about to play some abnormal tune on the piano. The moment was so sweet that he lost a second or two savoring it and not realizing that he had missed. When he did realize, he brought the pistol back down, trying to aim it, locking his right wrist with his left hand.
   “Harold! No! You can’t! ”
   Can’t I? It’s such a little thing, squeezing a trigger. Sure I can.
   She seemed too shocked to move, and as the pistol’s front sight came to rest in the hollow of her throat, he felt a sudden cold certainty that this was how it had been meant to end, in a short and meaningless spate of violence.
   He had her, dead in his sights.
   But as he started to pull the trigger, two things happened. Sweat ran into his eyes, doubling his vision. And he began to slide. He later told himself that the loose gravel had given way, or that his mangled leg had buckled, or both. It might even have been true. But it felt… it felt like a push, and in the long nights between then and now, he had not been able to convince himself otherwise. The daytime Harold was stubbornly rational to the end, but in the night the hideous certainty stole over him that in the end it was the dark man himself who had stepped in to thwart him. The shot he had meant to put smack into the hollow of her throat went wild: high, wide, and handsome into the indifferent blue sky. Harold went rolling and tumbling back down to the dead tree, his right leg twisting and buckling, a huge sheet of agony from ankle to groin.
   He had struck the tree and passed out. When he came to again, it was just past dusk and the moon, three quarters full, was riding solemnly over the gorge. Nadine was gone.
   He spent the first night in a delirium of terror, sure that he would be unable to crawl back up to the road, sure he would die in the ravine. When morning came he began to crawl upward again nevertheless, sweating and racked with pain.
   He began around seven o’clock, just about the time the big orange Burial Committee trucks would be leaving the bus depot back in Boulder. He finally wrapped one raw and blistered hand around the guardrail cable at five o’clock that afternoon. His motorcycle was still there, and he nearly wept with relief. He dug some cans and the opener out of one of the saddlebags with frantic haste, opened one of the cans, and crammed cold corned beef hash into his mouth in double handfuls. But it tasted bad, and after a long struggle he threw it up.
   He began to understand the irrefutable fact of his coming death then, and he lay beside the Triumph and wept, his twisted leg under him. After that he was able to sleep a little.
   The following day he was drenched by a pounding rainshower that left him soaked and shivering. His leg had begun to smell of gangrene, and he took pains to keep the Cold Woodsman sheltered from the wet with his body. That evening he had begun to write in the Permacover notebook and discovered for the first time that his handwriting was beginning to regress. He found himself thinking of a story by Daniel Keyes—“Flowers for Algernon,” it had been called. In it, a bunch of scientists had somehow turned a mentally retarded janitor into a genius… for a while. And then the poor guy began to lose it. What was the guy’s name? Charley something, right? Sure, because that was the name of the movie they made out of it. Charly. A pretty good movie. Not as good as the story, full of sixties psychedelic shit as he remembered, but still pretty good. Harold had gone to the movies a lot in the old days, and he had watched a lot more on the family VCR. Back in the days when the world had been what the Pentagon would have called a quote viable alternative unquote. He had watched most of them alone.
   He wrote in his notebook, the words emerging slowly from the straggling letters:
   Are they all dead, I wonder? The committee? If so, I am sorry. I was misled. That is a poor excuse for my actions, but I swear out of all I know that it is the only excuse that ever matters. The dark man is as real as the superflu itself, as real as the atomic bombs that still sit somewhere in their leadlined closets. And when the end comes, and when it is as horrible as good men always knew it would be, there is only one thing to say as all those good men approach the Throne of Judgment: I was misled.
   Harold read what he had written and passed a thin and trembling hand over his brow. It wasn’t a good excuse; it was a bad one. Pretty it up however you would, it still smelled. Someone who read that paragraph after reading his ledger would see him as a total hypocrite. He had seen himself as the king of anarchy, but the dark man had seen through him and had reduced him effortlessly to a shivering bag of bones dying badly by the highway. His leg had swelled up like an innertube, it smelled like gassy, overripe bananas, and he sat here with buzzards swooping and diving on the thermals overhead, trying to rationalize the unspeakable. He had fallen victim to his own protracted adolescence, it was as simple as that. He had been poisoned by his own lethal visions.
   Dying, he felt as if he had gained a little sanity and maybe even a little dignity. He did not want to demean that with small excuses that would come limping off the page on crutches.
   “I could have been something in Boulder,” he said quietly, and the simple, awful truth of that might have brought tears if he hadn’t been so tired and so dehydrated. He looked at the straggling letters on the page, and from there to the Colt. Suddenly he wanted it over, and he tried to think how to put a finish to his life in the truest, simplest way he could. It seemed more necessary than ever to write it and leave it for whoever might find him, in one year or in ten.
   He gripped the pen. Thought. Wrote:
   I apologize for the destructive things I have done, but do not deny that I did them of my own free will. On my school papers, I always signed my name Harold Emery Lauder. I signed my manuscripts—poor things that they were—the same way. God help me, I once wrote it on the roof of a barn in letters three feet high. I want to sign this by a name given me in Boulder. I could not accept it then, but I take it now freely.
   I am going to die in my right mind.
   Writing neatly at the bottom, he affixed his signature: Hawk.
   He put the Permacover notebook into the Triumph’s saddlebag. He capped the pen and clipped it in his pocket. He put the muzzle of the Colt into his mouth and looked up at the blue sky. He thought of a game they had played when they were children, a game the others had teased him about because he never quite dared to go through with it. There was a gravel pit out on one of the back roads, and you could jump off the edge and fall a heartstopping distance before hitting the sand, rolling over and over, and finally climbing up to do it all over again.
   All except Harold. Harold would stand on the lip of the drop and chant, One… Two… Three! just like the others, but the talisman never worked. His legs remained locked. He could not bring himself to jump. And the others sometimes chased him home, shouting at him, calling him Harold the Pansy.
   He thought: If I could have brought myself to jump once… just once… I might not be here. Well, last time pays for all.
   He thought: One… Two… THREE!
   He pulled the trigger.
   The gun went off.
   Harold jumped.

Chapter 65
   North of Las Vegas is Emigrant Valley, and that night a small spark of fire glowed in its tumbled wilderness. Randall Flagg sat beside it, moodily cooking the carcass of a small rabbit. He turned it steadily on the crude rotisserie he had made, watching it sizzle and spit grease into the fire. There was a light breeze, blowing the savory smell out into the desert, and the wolves had come. They sat two rises over from his fire, howling at the nearly full moon and at the smell of cooking meat. Every now and then he would glance at them and two or three would begin to fight, biting and snapping and kicking with their powerful back legs until the weakest was banished. Then the others would begin to howl again, their snouts pointed at the bloated, reddish moon.
   But the wolves bored him now.
   He wore his jeans and his tattered walking boots and his sheepskin jacket with its two buttons on the breast pockets: smiley-smile and HOW’S YOUR PORK? The night wind flapped fitfully at his collar.
   He didn’t like the way things were going.
   There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn. The old woman had died and at first he had thought that was good. In spite of everything, he had been afraid of the old woman. She had died, and he had told Dayna Jurgens that she had died in a coma… but was it true? He was no longer quite so sure.
   Had she talked, at the end? And if so, what had she said?
   What were they planning?
   He had developed a sort of third eye. It was like the levitating ability; something he had and accepted but which he didn’t really understand. He was able to send it out, to see… almost always. But sometimes the eye fell mysteriously blind. He had been able to look into the old woman’s death chamber, had seen them gathered around her, their tailfeathers still singed from Harold and Nadine’s little surprise… but then the vision had faded away and he had been back in the desert, wrapped in his bedroll, looking up and seeing nothing but Cassiopeia in her starry rocking chair. And there had been a voice inside him that said: She’s gone. They waited for her to talk but she never did.
   But he no longer trusted the voice.
   There was the troubling matter of the spies.
   The Judge, with his head blown off.
   The girl, who had eluded him at the last second. And she had known, Goddammit! She had known!
   He threw a sudden furious stare at the wolves and nearly half a dozen fell to fighting, their guttural sounds like ripping cloth in the stillness.
   He knew all their secrets except… the third. Who was the third? He had sent the Eye out over and over again, and it afforded him with nothing but the cryptic, idiotic face of the moon. M-O-O-N, that spells moon.
   Who was the third?
   How had the girl been able to escape him? He had been taken utterly by surprise, left with nothing but a handful of her blouse. He had known about her knife, that had been child’s play, but not about that sudden leap at the window-wall. And the coldblooded way she had taken her own life, without a moment’s hesitation. A mere space of seconds and she had been gone.
   His thoughts chased each other like weasels in the dark.
   Things were getting just a trifle flaky around the edges. He didn’t like it.
   Lauder, for instance. There was Lauder.
   He had performed so excellently, like one of those little wind-up toys with a key sticking out of its back. Go here. Go there. Do this. Do that. But the dynamite bomb had only gotten two of them—all that planning, all that effort spoiled by that dying old nigger woman’s return. And then… after Harold had been disposed of… he had nearly killed Nadine! He still felt a burst of amazed anger when he thought about it. And the dumb cunt had stood there with her mouth hanging open, waiting for him to do it again, almost as if she wanted to be killed. And who was going to end up with all this, if Nadine died?
   Who, if not his son?
   The rabbit was done. He slipped it off the spit and onto his tin plate.
   “All right, all you asshole gyrenes, chow down!”
   That made him grin right out loud. Had he been a Marine once? He thought so. Strictly the Parris Island variety, though. There had been a kid, a defective, name of Boo Dinkway. They had…
   What?
   Flagg frowned down at his messkit. Had they beaten ole Boo into the ground with those padded poles? Scragged him somehow? He seemed to remember something about gasoline. But what?
   In a sudden rage, he almost slung the freshly cooked rabbit into the fire. He should be able to remember that, goddammit!
   “Chow down, grunts,” he whispered, but this time there was only a whiff of memory lane.
   He was losing himself. Once he had been able to look back over the sixties, seventies, and eighties like a man looking down a double flight of stairs leading into a darkened room. Now he could only clearly remember the events since the superflu. Beyond that there was nothing but a haze that would sometimes lift a tiny bit, just enough to afford a glimpse of some enigmatic object or memory (Boo Dinkway, for instance… if there ever had been such a person) before closing down again.
   The earliest memory he could now be sure of was of walking south on US 51, heading toward Mountain City and the home of Kit Bradenton.
   Of being born. Born again.
   He was no longer strictly a man, if he had ever been one. He was like an onion, slowly peeling away one layer at a time, only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away: organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will… if there ever had been such a thing.
   He began to eat the rabbit.
   Once, he was quite sure, he would have done a quick fade when things began to get flaky. Not this time. This was his place, his time, and he would take his stand here. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t yet been able to uncover the third spy, or that Harold had gotten out of control at the end and had had the colossal effrontery to try to kill the bride who had been promised, the mother of his son.
   Somewhere that strange Trashcan Man was in the desert, sniffing out the weapons which would eradicate the troublesome, worrisome Free Zone forever. His Eye could not follow the Trashcan Man, and in some ways Flagg thought that Trash was stranger than he was himself, a kind of human bloodhound who sniffed cordite and napalm and gelignite with deadly radar accuracy.
   In a month or less, the National Guard jets would be flying, with a full complement of Shrike missiles tucked under their wings. And when he was sure that the bride had conceived, they would fly east.
   He looked dreamily up at the basketball moon and smiled.
   There was one other possibility. He thought the Eye would show him, in time. He might go there, possibly as a crow, possibly as a wolf, possibly as an insect—a praying mantis, perhaps, something small enough to squirm through a carefully concealed vent cap in the middle of a spiky patch of desert grass. He would hop or crawl through dark conduits and finally slip through an air conditioner grille or a stilled exhaust fan.
   The place was underground. Just over the border and into California.
   There were beakers there, rows and rows of beakers, each with its own neat Dymo tape identifying it: a super cholera, a super anthrax, a new and improved version of the bubonic plague, all of them based on the shifting-antigen ability that had made the superflu so almost universally deadly. There were hundreds of them in this place; assorted flavors, as they used to say in the Life Savers commercials.
   How about a little in your water, Free Zone?
   How about a nice airburst?
   Some lovely Legionnaires’ disease for Christmas, or would you rather have the new and improved Swine flu?
   Randy Flagg, the dark Santa, in his National Guard sleigh, with a little virus to drop down every chimney?
   He would wait, and he would know the right time when it came round at last.
   Something would tell him.
   Things were going to be fine. No quick fade this time. He was on top and he was going to stay there.
   The rabbit was gone. Full of hot food, he felt himself again. He stood, tin plate in hand, and slung the bones out into the night. The wolves charged at them, fought over them, growling and biting and snarling, their eyes rolling blankly in the moonlight.
   Flagg stood, hands on his hips, and roared laughter up at the moon.
   Early the next morning Nadine left the town of Glendale and headed down I-15 on her Vespa. Her snow-white hair, unbound, trailed out behind her, looking very much like a bridal train.
   She felt sorry for the Vespa, which had served her so long and faithfully and which was now dying. Mileage and desert heat, the laborious crossing of the Rockies, and indifferent maintenance had all taken their toll. The engine now sounded horse and laboring. The RPM needle had begun to shudder instead of remaining docilely against the 5X1000 figure. It didn’t matter. If it died on her before she arrived, she would walk. No one was chasing her now. Harold was dead. And if she had to walk, he would know and send someone out to pick her up.
   Harold had shot at her! Harold had tried to kill her!
   Her mind kept returning to that no matter how she tried to avoid it. Her mind worried it like a dog worrying a bone. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Flagg had come to her in a dream that first night after the explosion, when Harold finally allowed them to camp. He told her that he was going to leave Harold with her until the two of them were on the Western Slope, almost in Utah. Then he would be removed in a quick, painless accident. An oilslick. Over the side. No fuss, no muss, no bother.
   But it hadn’t been quick and painless, and Harold had almost killed her. The bullet had droned past within an inch of her cheek and still she had been unable to move. She had been frozen in shock, wondering how he could have done such a thing, how he could have been allowed to even try such a thing.
   She had tried to rationalize it by telling herself it was Flagg’s way of throwing a scare into her, of reminding her who it was she belonged to. But it made no sense! It was crazy! Even if it had made some sort of sense, there was a firm, knowing voice inside her which said the shooting incident had just been something Flagg had not been prepared against.
   She tried to push the voice away, to bar the door against it the way a sane person will bar the door against an undesirable person with murder in his or her eyes. But she couldn’t do it. The voice told her she was alive through blind chance now. That Harold’s bullet could just as easily have gone between her eyes, and it wouldn’t have been Randall Flagg’s doing either way.
   She called the voice a liar. Flagg knew everything, where the smallest sparrow had fallen—
   No, that’s God, the voice replied implacably. God, he’s not. You’re alive through blind chance, and that means that all bets are off. You owe him nothing. You can turn around and go back, if you want to.
   Go back, that was a laugh. Go back where?
   The voice had little to say on that subject; she would have been surprised if it did. If the dark man’s feet were made of clay, she had discovered the fact just a little late.
   She tried to concentrate on the cool beauty of the desert morning instead of the voice. But the voice remained, so low and insistent she was barely aware of it:
   If he didn’t know Harold was going to be able to defy him and strike back at you, what else doesn’t he know? And will it be a clean miss next time?
   But oh dear God, it was too late. Too late by days, weeks, maybe even years. Why had that voice waited until it was useless to speak up?
   And as if in agreement, the voice finally fell silent and she had the morning to herself. She rode without thinking, her eyes fixed on the road unreeling in front of her. The road that led to Las Vegas. The road that led to him.
   The Vespa died that afternoon. There was a grinding clank deep in its guts and the engine stalled. She could smell something hot and abnormal, like frying rubber, drifting up from the engine case. Her speed had dropped from the steady forty she had been maintaining until she had been putting along at walking speed. Now she trundled it over into the breakdown lane and cranked the starter a few times, knowing it was useless. She had killed it. She had killed a lot of things on her way to her husband. She had been responsible for wiping out the entire Free Zone Committee and all of their invited guests at that final explosive meeting. And then there was Harold. Also, say-hey and by the way, let’s not forget Fran Goldsmith’s unborn baby.
   That made her feel sick. She stumbled over to the guardrail and tossed up her light lunch. She felt hot, delirious, and very ill, the only living thing in a sunstruck desert nightmare. It was hot… so hot.
   She turned back, wiping her mouth. The Vespa lay on its side like a dead animal. Nadine looked at it for a few moments and then began to walk. She had already passed Dry Lake. That meant she would have to sleep by the road tonight if no one picked her up. With any luck she would reach Las Vegas in the morning. And suddenly she was sure that the dark man would let her walk. She would reach Las Vegas hungry and thirsty and burning with the desert heat, every last bit of the old life flushed from her system. The woman who had taught small children at a private school in New England would be gone, as dead as Napoleon. With her luck, the small voice which snapped and worried at her so would be the last part of the old Nadine to expire. But in the end, of course, that part would go, too.
   She walked, and the afternoon advanced. Sweat rolled down her face. Quicksilver glimmered, always at the point where the highway met the faded-denim sky. She unbuttoned her light blouse and took it off, walking in her white cotton bra. Sunburn? So what? Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a fuck.
   By dusk she had gone a terrible shade of red that was nearly purple along the raised ridges of her collarbones. The cool of the evening came suddenly, making her shiver, and making her remember that she had left her camping gear with the Vespa.
   She looked around doubtfully, seeing cars here and there, some of them buried in drifting sand up to their hood ornaments. The thought of sheltering in one of those tombs made her feel sick—even sicker than her terrible sunburn was making her feel.
   I’m delirious, she thought.
   Not that it mattered. She decided she would walk all night rather than sleep in one of those cars. If this were only the Midwest again. She could have found a barn, a haystack, a field of clover. A clean, soft place. Out here there was only the road, the sand, the baked hardpan of the desert.
   She brushed her long hair away from her face and dully realized that she wished she was dead.
   Now the sun was below the horizon, the day perfectly poised between light and dark. The wind that now slipped over her was dead cold. She looked around herself, suddenly afraid.
   It was too cold.
   The buttes had become dark monoliths. The sand dunes were like ominous toppled colossi. Even the spiny stands of saguaro were like the skeletal fingers of the accusing dead, poking up out of the sand from their shallow graves.
   Overhead, the cosmic wheel of the sky.
   A snatch of lyric occurred to her, a Dylan song, cold and comfortless: Hunted like a crocodile… ravaged in the corn…
   And on the heels of that, some other song, an Eagles song, suddenly frightening: And I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight… with a million stars all around…
   Suddenly she knew he was there.
   Even before he spoke, she knew.
   “Nadine.” His soft voice, coming out of the growing darkness. Infinitely soft, the final enveloping terror that was like coming home.
   “Nadine, Nadine… how I love to love Nadine.”
   She turned around and there he was, as she had always known he would be someday, a thing as simple as this. He was sitting on the hood of an old Chevrolet sedan (had it been there a moment ago? she didn’t know for sure, but she didn’t think it had been), his legs crossed, his hands laid lightly on the knees of his faded jeans. Looking at her and smiling gently. But his eyes were not gentle at all. They gave lie to the idea that this man felt anything gentle. In them she saw a black glee that danced endlessly like the legs of a man fresh through the trapdoor in a gibbet platform.
   “Hello,” she said. “I’m here.”
   “Yes. At last you’re here. As promised.” His smile broadened and he held his hands out to her. She took them, and as she reached him she felt his baking heat. He radiated it, like a well-stoked brick oven. His smooth, lineless hands slipped around hers… and then closed over them tight, like handcuffs.
   “Oh, Nadine,” he whispered, and bent to kiss her. She turned her head just a little, looking up at the cold fire of the stars, and his kiss was on the hollow below her jaw rather than on her lips. He wasn’t fooled. She felt the mocking curve of his grin against her flesh.
   He revolts me, she thought.
   But revulsion was only a scaly crust over something worse—a caked and long-hidden lust, an ageless pimple finally brought to a head and about to spew forth some noisome fluid, some sweetness long since curdled. His hands, slipping over her back, were much hotter than her sunburn. She moved against him, and suddenly the slim saddle between her legs seemed plumper, fuller, more tender, more aware. The seam of her slacks was chafing her in a delicately obscene way that made her want to rub herself, get rid of the itch, cure it once and for all.
   “Tell me one thing,” she said.
   “Anything.”
   “You said, ‘As promised.’ Who promised me to you? Why me? And what do I call you? I don’t even know that. I’ve known about you for most of my life, and I don’t know what to call you.”
   “Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.”
   “That’s your real name? Richard?” she asked doubtfully, and he giggled against her neck, making her skin crawl with loathing and desire. “And who promised me?”
   “Nadine,” he said, “I have forgotten. Come on.”
   He slipped off the hood of the car, still holding her hands, and she almost jerked them away and ran… but what good would that have done? He would only chase after her, catch her, rape her.
   “The moon,” he said. “It’s full. And so am I.” He brought her hand down to the smooth and faded crotch of his jeans and there was something terrible there, beating with a life of its own beneath the notched coldness of his zipper.
   “No,” she muttered, and tried to pull her hand away, thinking how far this was from that other moonstruck night, how impossibly far. This was at the other end of time’s rainbow.
   He held her hand against him. “Come out in the desert and be my wife,” he said.
   “No!”
   “It’s much too late to say no, dear.”
   She went with him. There was a bedroll, and the blackened bones of a campfire under the silver bones of the moon.
   He laid her down.
   “All right,” he breathed. “All right, then.” His fingers worked his belt buckle, then the button, then the zipper.
   She saw what he had for her and began to scream.
   The dark man’s grin sprang forth at the sound, huge and glittering and obscene in the night, and the moon stared down blankly at them both, bloated and cheesy.
   Nadine pealed forth scream after scream and tried to crawl away and he grabbed her and then she was holding her legs shut with all her strength, and when one of those blank hands inserted itself between them they parted like water and she thought: I will look up… I will look up at the moon… I will feel nothing and it will be over… it will be over… I will feel nothing…
   And when the dead coldness of him slipped into her the shriek ripped up and out of her, bolted free, and she struggled, and the struggle was useless. He battered into her, invader, destroyer, and the cold blood gushed down her thighs and then he was in her, all the way up to her womb, and the moon was in her eyes, cold and silver fire, and when he came it was like molten iron, molten pig iron, molten brass, and she came herself, came in screaming, incredible pleasure, came in terror, in horror, passing through the pig-iron and brass gates into the desert land of insanity, chased through, blown through like a leaf by the bellowing of his laughter, watching his face melt away, and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid. He went again… and again… and again. It seemed he would never be used up. Cold. He was dead cold. And old. Older than mankind, older than the earth. Again and again he filled her with his nightspawn, screaming laughter. Earth. Light. Coming. Coming again. The last shriek coming out of her to be wiped away by the desert wind and carried into the farthest chambers of the night, out to where a thousand weapons waited for their new owner to come and claim them. Shaggy demon’s head, a lolling tongue deeply split into two forks. Its dead breath fell on her face. She was in the land of insanity now. The iron gates were closed.
   The moon—!
   The moon was almost down.
   He had caught another rabbit, had caught the trembling little thing in his bare hands and broken its neck. He had built a new fire on the bones of the old one and now the rabbit cooked, sending up savory ribbons of aroma. There were no wolves now. Tonight they had stayed away—it was meet and right that they should have done. It was, after all, his wedding night, and the dazed and apathetic thing sitting lumpishly on the other side of the fire was his blushing bride.
   He leaned over and raised her hand out of her lap. When he let it go it stayed in place, raised to the level of her mouth. He looked at this phenomenon for a moment and then put her hand back in her lap. There her fingers began to wiggle sluggishly, like dying snakes. He poked two fingers at her eyes, and she did not blink. That blank stare just went on and on.
   He was honestly puzzled.
   What had he done to her?
   He couldn’t remember.
   And it didn’t matter. She was pregnant. If she was also catatonic, what did that matter? She was the perfect incubator. She would breed his son, bear him, and then she could die with her purpose served. After all, it was what she was there for.
   The rabbit was done. He broke it in two. He pulled her half into tiny pieces, the way you break up a baby’s food. He fed it to her a piece at a time. Some pieces fell out of her mouth and into her lap half-chewed, but she ate most of it. If she remained like this, she would need a nurse. Jenny Engstrom, perhaps.
   “That was very good, dear,” he said softly.
   She looked blankly up at the moon. Flagg smiled gently at her and ate his wedding supper.
   Good sex always made him hungry.
   He awoke in the latter part of the night and sat up in his bedroll, confused and afraid… afraid in the instinctive, unknowing way that an animal is afraid—a predator who senses that he himself may be stalked.
   Had it been a dream? A vision—?
   They’re coming.
   Frightened, he tried to understand the thought, to put it in some context. He couldn’t. It hung there on its own like a bad hex.
   They’re closer now.
   Who? Who was closer now?
   The night wind whispered past him, seeming to bring him a scent. Someone was coming and—
   Someone’s going.
   While he slept, someone had passed his camp, headed east. The unseen third? He didn’t know. It was the night of the full moon. Had the third escaped? The thought brought panic with it.
   Yes, but who’s coming?
   He looked at Nadine. She was asleep, pulled up in a tight fetal position, the position his son would assume in her belly only months from now.
   Are there months?
   Again there was that feeling of things going flaky around the edges. He lay down again, believing there would be no more sleep for him this night. But he did sleep. And by the time he drove into Vegas the next morning, he was smiling again and he had nearly forgotten his night panic. Nadine sat docilely beside him on the seat, a big doll with a seed hidden carefully in its belly.
   He went to the Grand, and there he learned what had happened while he slept. He saw the new look in their eyes, wary and questioning, and he felt the fear touch him again with its light moth wings.

Chapter 66
   At about the same time that Nadine Cross was beginning to realize certain truths which should perhaps have been self-evident, Lloyd Henreid was sitting alone in the Cub Bar, playing Big Clock solitaire and cheating. He was out of temper. There had been a flash fire at Indian Springs that day, one dead, three hurt, and one of those likely to die of bad flash burns. They had no one in Vegas who knew how to treat such burns.
   Carl Hough had brought the news. He had been pissed off to a high extreme, and he was not a man to be taken lightly. He had been a pilot for Ozark Airlines before the plague, was an ex-Marine, and could have broken Lloyd in two pieces with one hand while making a daiquiri with the other if he had wanted to. According to Carl, he had killed several men during the course of his long and checkered career, and Lloyd tended to believe him. Not that Lloyd was physically afraid of Carl Hough; the pilot was big and tough, but he was as leery of the Walkin Dude as anyone else in the West, and Lloyd wore Flagg’s charm. But he was one of their fliers, and because he was, he had to be handled diplomatically. And oddly enough, Lloyd was something, of a diplomat. His credentials were simple but awesome: He had spent several weeks with a certain madman named Poke Freeman and had lived to tell the tale. He had also spent several months with Randall Flagg, and was still drawing air and in his right mind.
   Carl had come in around two on September 12, his cycle helmet under one arm. There was an ugly burn on his left cheek and blisters on one hand. There had been a fire. Bad, but not as bad as it could have been. A fuel truck had exploded, spewing burning petroleum all over the tarmac area.
   “All right,” Lloyd had said. “I’ll see that the big guy knows. The guys that got hurt are at the infirmary?”
   “Yeah. They are. I don’t think Freddy Campanari is going to live to see the sun go down. That leaves two pilots, me and Andy. Tell him that, and tell him something else when he gets back. I want that fuck Trashcan Man gone. That’s my price for staying.”
   Lloyd gazed at Carl Hough. “Is it?”
   “You’re damn well told.”
   “Well, I tell you, Carl,” Lloyd said. “I can’t pass that message on. If you want to give orders to him, you’ll have to do it yourself.”
   Carl looked suddenly confused and a little afraid. Fear sat strangely on that craggy face. “Yeah, I see your point. I’m just tired and fucked over, Lloyd. My face hurts like hell. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”
   “That’s okay, man. It’s what I’m here for.” Sometimes he wished it wasn’t. Already his head was starting to ache.
   Carl said, “But he’s gotta go. If I have to tell him that, I will. I know he’s got one of those black stones. He’s ace-high with the tall man, I guess. But, hey, listen.” Carl sat down and put his helmet on a baccarat table. “Trash was responsible for that fire. My Christ, how’re we ever going to get those planes up if one of the big guy’s men is torching the fucking pilots?”
   Several people passing through the lobby of the Grand glanced uneasily over at the table where Lloyd and Carl sat.
   “Keep your voice down, Carl.”
   “Okay. But you see the problem, don’t you?”
   “How sure are you that Trash did it?”
   “Listen,” Carl said, leaning forward, “he was in the motor pool, all right? In there for a long time. Lots of guys saw him, not just me.”
   “I thought he was out someplace. In the desert. You know, looking for stuff.”
   “Well, he came back, all right? That sand-crawler he takes out was full of stuff. God knows where he gets it, I sure don’t. Well, he had the guys in stitches at coffee break. You know how he is. To him, weaponry is like candy is to a kid.”
   “Yeah.”
   “The last thing he showed us was one of those incendiary fuses. You pull the tab, and there’s this little burst of phosphorus. Then nothing for half an hour or forty minutes, depending on the size of the fuse, all right? You get it? Then there’s one hell of a fire. Small, but very intense.”
   “Yeah.”
   “So okay. Trashy’s showin us, just about droolin over the thing, in fact, and Freddy Campanari says, ‘Hey, people who play with fire wet the bed, Trash.’ And Steve Tobin—you know him, he’s funny like a rubber crutch—he says, ‘You guys better put away your matches, Trashy’s back in town.’ And Trash got really weird. He looked around at us, and he muttered under his breath. I was sitting right next to him and it sounded like he said, ‘Don’t ask me about old lady Semple’s check no more.’ That make any sense to you?”
   Lloyd shook his head. Nothing about the Trashcan Man made much sense to him.
   “Then he just left. Picked up the stuff he was showing us and took off. Well, none of us felt very good about it. We didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. Most of the guys really like Trash. Or they did. He’s like a little kid, you know?”
   Lloyd nodded.
   “An hour later, that goddam fuel truck goes up like a rocket. And while we were picking up the pieces, I happened to look up and there’s Trashy over in his sand-crawler by the barracks building, watching us with binoculars.”
   “Is that all you’ve got?” Lloyd asked, relieved.
   “No. It ain’t. If it was, I wouldn’t even have bothered to come see you, Lloyd. But it got me thinking about how that truck went up. That’s just the sort of thing you use an incendiary fuse for. In Nam, the Cong blew up a lot of our ammo dumps just that way, with our own fucking incendiary fuses. Stick it under the truck, on the exhaust pipe. If no one starts the truck up, it goes when the timer runs out. If someone does, it goes when the pipe gets hot. Either way, ka-boom, no more truck. The only thing that didn’t fit was there’s always a dozen fuel trucks in the motor pool, and we don’t use them in any particular order. So after we got poor old Freddy over to the infirmary, John Waite and I went over there. John’s in charge of the motor pool and he was just about pissing himself. He’d seen Trash in there earlier.”
   “He was sure it was Trashcan Man?”
   “With those burns all the way up his arm, it’s kind of hard to make a mistake, wouldn’t you say? All right? No one thought anything of it then. He was just poking around, and that’s his job, ain’t it?”
   “Yes, I guess you’d have to say it is.”
   “So me and John start to look over the rest of the fuel trucks. And holy shit, there’s an incendiary fuse on every one of them. He put them on the exhaust pipes just below the fuel-tanks themselves. The reason the truck we were using went first was because the exhaust pipe got hot, like I just told you, all right? But the others were getting ready to go. Two or three were starting to smoke. Some of the trucks were empty, but at least five of them were full of jet fuel. Another ten minutes and we would have lost half the goddam base.”
   Oh Jesus, Lloyd thought mournfully. It really is bad. Just about as bad as it can get.
   Carl held up his blistered hand. “I got this pulling one of the hot ones. Now do you see why he’s got to go?”
   Lloyd said hesitantly, “Maybe someone stole those fuses out of the back of his sand-crawler while he was taking a leak or something.”
   Carl said patiently: “That’s not how it happened. Someone hurt his feelings while he was showing off his toys, and he tried to burn us all up. He damn near succeeded. Something’s got to be done, Lloyd.”
   “All right, Carl.”
   He spent the rest of the afternoon asking around about Trash—had anyone seen him or know where he might be? Guarded looks and negative answers. Word had gotten around. Maybe that was good. Anyone who did see him would be quick to report it, in hopes of having a good word put in on their behalf with the big guy. But Lloyd had a hunch that no one was going to see Trash. He had given them a little hotfoot and had gone running back into the desert in his sand-crawler.
   He looked down at the solitaire game spread out in front of him and carefully controlled an urge to sweep the whole thing onto the floor. Instead, he cheated out another ace and went on playing. It didn’t matter. When Flagg wanted him, he would just reach out and gather him up. Old Trashy was going to end up riding a crosspiece just like Hec Drogan. Hard luck, guy.
   But in his secret heart, he wondered.
   Things had happened lately that he didn’t like. Dayna, for instance. Flagg had known about her, that was true, but she hadn’t talked. She had somehow escaped into death instead, leaving them no further ahead in the matter of the third spy.
   That was another thing. How come Flagg didn’t just know about the third spy? He had known about the old fart, and when he had come back from the desert he had known about Dayna, and had told them exactly how he was going to handle her. But it hadn’t worked.
   And now, Trashcan Man.
   Trash wasn’t a nobody. Maybe he had been back in the old days, but not anymore. He wore the black man’s stone just as he himself did. After Flagg had crisped that bigmouth lawyer’s brains in L.A., Lloyd had seen Flagg lay his hands on Trashcan’s shoulders and tell him gently that all the dreams had been true dreams. And Trash had whispered, “My life for you.”
   Lloyd didn’t know what else might have passed between them, but it seemed clear that he had wandered the desert with Flagg’s blessing. And now Trashcan Man had gone berserk.
   Which raised some pretty serious questions.
   Which was why Lloyd was sitting here alone at nine in the evening, cheating at solitaire and wishing he was drunk.
   “Mr. Henreid?”
   Now what? He looked up and saw a girl with a pretty, pouty face. Tight white shorts. A halter that didn’t quite cover the areolae of her nipples. Sexpot type for sure, but she looked nervous and pale, almost ill. She was biting compulsively at one of her thumbnails, and he saw that all her nails were bitten and ragged.
   “What.”
   “I… I have to see Mr. Flagg,” she said. The strength went rapidly out of her voice, and it ended as a whisper.
   “You do, huh? What do you think I am, his social secretary?”
   “But… they said… to see you.”
   “Who did?”
   “Well, Angie Hirschfield did. It was her.”
   “What’s your name?”
   “Uh, Julie.” She giggled, but it was only a reflex. The scared look never left her face, and Lloyd wondered wearily what sort of shit was up in the fan now. A girl like this wouldn’t ask for Flagg unless it was very serious indeed. “Julie Lawry.”
   “Well, Julie Lawry, Flagg isn’t in Las Vegas now.”
   “When will he be back?”
   “I don’t know. He comes and goes, and he doesn’t wear a beeper. He doesn’t explain himself to me, either. If you have something, give it to me and I’ll see that he gets the message.” She looked at him doubtfully and Lloyd repeated what he had told Carl Hough that afternoon. “It’s what I’m here for, Julie.”
   “Okay.” Then, in a rush: “If it’s important, you tell him I’m the one told you. Julie Lawry.”
   “Okay.”
   “You won’t forget?”
   “No, for Chrissake! Now what is it?”
   She pouted. “Well, you don’t have to be so mean about it.”
   He sighed and put the handful of cards he had been holding down on the table. “No,” he said. “I guess I don’t. Now, what is it?”
   “That dummy. If he’s around, I figure he’s spying. I just thought you should know.” Her eyes glinted viciously. “Motherfucker pulled a gun on me.”
   “What dummy?”
   “Well, I saw the retard, and so I figured the dummy must be with him, you know? And they’re just not our type. I figure they must have come from the other side.”
   “That’s what you figure, huh?”
   “Yeah.”
   “Well, I don’t know what the Christ you’re talking about. It’s been a long day and I’m tired. If you don’t start talking some sense, Julie, I’m going up to bed.”
   Julie sat down, crossed her legs, and told Lloyd about her meeting with Nick Andros and Tom Cullen in Pratt, Kansas, her hometown. About the Pepto-Bismol (“I was just having a little fun with the softie, and this deaf-and-dumb pulls a gun on me!”). She even told him about shooting at them as they left town.
   “Which all proves what?” Lloyd asked when she finished. He had been a little intrigued with the word “spy,” but since then had lapsed into a semidaze of boredom.
   Julie pouted again and lit a cigarette. “I told you. That feeb, he’s over here now. I just bet he’s spying.”
   “Tom Cullen, you said his name was?”
   “Yes.”
   He had the vaguest sort of memory. Cullen was a big blond guy, a few cards short the deck for sure, but surely not as bad as this high-iron bitch was making out. He tried for more and came up empty. People were still streaming into Vegas in numbers of sixty to a hundred a day. It was becoming impossible to keep them all straight, and Flagg said the immigration was going to get a lot heavier before it tapered off. He supposed he could go to Paul Burlson, who was keeping a file of Vegas residents and find something out about this Cullen dude.
   “Are you going to arrest him?” Julie asked.
   Lloyd looked at her. “I’ll arrest you if you don’t get off my case,” he said.
   “Nice fucking guy!” Julie Lawry cried, her voice rising shrewishly. She jumped to her feet, glaring at him. In her tight white cotton shorts, her legs seemed to go all the way up to her chin. “Try to do you a favor!”
   “I’ll check it.”
   “Yeah, right, I know that story.”
   She stomped off, fanny swinging in tight little circles of indignation.
   Lloyd watched her with a certain weary amusement, thinking there were a lot of chicks like her in the world—even now, after the superflu, he was willing to bet there were a lot around. Easy to slap the make on, but watch out for the fingernails afterward. Kissing cousins to those spiders that gobble up their mates after sex. Two months had gone by and she still bore that mute guy a grudge. What did she say his name was? Andros?
   Lloyd pulled a battered black notebook from his back pocket, wet his finger, and paged over to a blank sheet. This was his memory book, and it was chock-full of little notes to himself—everything from a reminder to take a shave before meeting with Flagg to a boxed memorandum to get the contents of Las Vegas’ pharmacies inventoried before they started to lose morphine and codeine. It would be time to get another little book soon.
   In his flat and scrawling grammar school script he wrote: Nick Andros or maybe Androtes—mute. In town? And below that: Tom Cullen, check out with Paul. He tucked the book back into his pocket. Forty miles northeast, the dark man had consummated his long-term relationship with Nadine Cross under the glittering desert stars. He would have been very interested to know that a friend of Nick Andros’s was in Las Vegas.
   But he slept.
   Lloyd looked morosely down at his solitaire game, forgetting about Julie Lawry and her grudge and her tight little ass. He cheated out another ace, and his thoughts turned dolefully back to the Trashcan Man and what Flagg might say—or do—when Lloyd told him.
   At the same time Julie Lawry was leaving the Cub Bar, feeling shat upon for doing no more than what she saw as her civic duty, Tom Cullen stood by the picture window of his apartment in another part of the city, looking dreamily out at the full moon.
   It was time to go.
   Time to go back.
   This apartment was not like his house in Boulder. This place was furnished but not decorated. He had not put up so much as a single poster or hung a single stuffed bird from piano wire. This place had been only a way station, and now it was time to go on. He was glad. He hated it here. It had a kind of smell to it here, a dry and rotten smell that you could never quite-put your finger on. The people were mostly nice, and some of them he liked every bit as well as the people in Boulder, folks like Angie and that little boy, Dinny. No one made fun of him because he was slow. They had given him a job and joked with him, and on lunchbreak they’d trade out of their dinner-buckets for something out of someone else’s that looked better. They were nice folks, not much different from Boulder folks, as far as he could tell, but—
   But they had that smell about them.
   They all seemed to be waiting and watching. Sometimes strange silences fell among them and their eyes seemed to glaze over, as if they were all having the same uneasy dream. They did things without asking for explanations of why they were doing them, or what it was for. It was as if these people were wearing happy-folks faces, but their real faces, their underneath-faces, were monster faces. He had seen a scary movie about that once. That kind of monster was called a werewolf.
   The moon rode over the desert, ghostly, high, and free.
   He had seen Dayna, from the Free Zone. He had seen her once and never again. What had happened to her? Had she been spying, too? Had she gone back?
   He didn’t know. But he was afraid.
   There was a small knapsack in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the apartment’s useless color console TV. The knapsack was full of vacuum-sealed ham strips and Slim Jims and Saltines. He picked it up and put it on.
   Travel at night, sleep in the day.
   He stepped out into the courtyard of the building without a backward glance. The moon was so bright that he cast a shadow on the cracked cement where the would-be high rollers had once parked their cars with the out-of-state plates.
   He looked up at the ghostly coin that floated in the sky.
   “M-O-O-N, that spells moon,” he whispered. “Laws, yes. Tom Cullen knows what that means.”
   His bike was leaning against the pink stucco wall of the apartment building. He paused once to adjust his knapsack, then got on and set off for the Interstate. By 11 P.M., he had cleared Las Vegas and was pedaling east in the breakdown lane of I-15. No one saw him. No alarm was raised.
   His mind dropped into a soft neutral, as it almost always did when the most immediate things were taken care of. He biked steadily along, conscious only that the light night breeze felt nice against his sweaty face. Every now and then he had to swerve around a sand dune that had crept out of the desert and had laid a white, skeletal arm across the road, and once he was well away from the city, there were stalled cars and trucks to contend with, too—look on my works, ye mighty, and despair, Glen Bateman might have said in his ironic way.
   He stopped at two in the morning for a light lunch of Slim Jims crackers, and Kool-Aid from the big thermos strapped to the back of the bike. Then he went on. The moon was down. Las Vegas fell farther behind with every revolution of his bicycle tires. That made him feel good.
   But at quarter past four on that morning of September 13, a cold comber of fear washed over him. It was made all the more terrifying by virtue of its unexpectedness, by its seeming irrationality. Tom would have cried out loud, but his vocal cords were suddenly frozen, locked. The muscles in his pumping legs went slack and he coasted along under the stars. The black and white negative of the desert streamed by more and more slowly.
   He was near.
   The man with no face, the demon who now walked the earth.
   Flagg.
   The tall man, they called him. The grinning man, Tom called him in his heart. Only when his grin fell on you, all the blood in your body fell into a dead swoon, leaving your flesh cold and gray. The man who could look at a cat and make it puke up hairballs. If he walked through a building project, men would hammer their own thumbnails and put shingles on upside down and sleepwalk off the ends of girders and—
   –and oh dear God he was awake!
   A whimper escaped Tom’s throat. He could feel the sudden wakefulness. He seemed to see/feel an Eye opening in the darkness of the early morning, a dreadful red Eye that was still a bit bleared and confused with sleep. It was turning in the darkness. Looking. Looking for him. It knew Tom Cullen was there, but not just where he was.
   Numbly, his feet found the pedals and he biked on, faster and faster, bending over the handlebars to cut down the wind resistance, picking up speed until he was nearly flying along. If he had come upon a wrecked car in his path, he would have pedaled into it full-tilt and perhaps killed himself.
   But little by little he could feel that dark, hot presence falling behind him. And the greatest wonder was that that awful red Eye had glanced his way, had passed over him without seeing (maybe because I’m bent over my handlebars so far, Tom Cullen reasoned incoherently)… and then it had closed again.
   The dark man had gone back to sleep.
   How does the rabbit feel when the shadow of the hawk falls on him like a dark crucifix… and then goes on without stopping or even slowing? How does the mouse feel when the cat who has been crouched patiently outside his hole for the entire day is picked up by its master and tossed unceremoniously out the front door? How does the deer feel when it steps quietly past the mighty hunter who is snoozing away the effects of his three lunchtime beers? Perhaps they feel nothing, or perhaps they feel what Tom Cullen felt as he rode out of that black and dangerous sphere of influence: a great and nearly electrifying sunburst of relief; a feeling of new birth. Most of all a feeling of safety scarcely earned, that such great good luck must surely be a sign from heaven.
   He rode on until five o’clock in the morning. Ahead of him, the sky was turning the dark-blue-laced-with-gold of sunrise. The stars were fading.
   Tom was almost done in. He went on a little farther, then spotted a sharp decline about seventy yards to the right of the highway. He pushed his bike over and then down into the dry-wash. Consulting the tickings and workings of instinct, he pulled enough dry grass and mesquite to cover most of the bike. There were two big rocks leaning against each other about ten yards from his bike. He crawled into the pocket of shade beneath them, put his jacket under his head, and was asleep almost at once.

Chapter 67

   The Walkin Dude was back in Vegas.

   He had gotten in around nine-thirty in the morning. Lloyd had seen him arrive. Flagg had also seen Lloyd, but had taken no notice of him. He had been crossing the lobby of the Grand, leading a woman. Heads turned to look at her in spite of everyone’s nearly unanimous aversion to looking at the dark man. Her hair was a uniform snow-white. She had a terrible sunburn, one so bad that it made Lloyd think of the victims of the gasoline fire at Indian Springs. White hair, horrible sunburn, utterly empty eyes. They looked out at the world with a lack of expression that was beyond placidity, even beyond idiocy. Lloyd had seen eyes like that once before. In Los Angeles, after the dark man had finished with Eric Strellerton, the lawyer who was going to tell Flagg how to run everything.
   Flagg looked at no one. He grinned. He led the woman to the elevator and inside. The doors slid shut behind them and they went up to the top floor.
   For the next six hours Lloyd was busy trying to get everything organized, so when Flagg called him and asked for a report, he would be ready. He thought everything was under control. The only item left was tracking down Paul Burlson and getting whatever he had on this Tom Cullen, just in case Julie Lawry really had stumbled onto something. Lloyd didn’t think it likely, but with Flagg it was better to be safe than sorry. Much better.
   He picked up the telephone and waited patiently. After a few moments there was a click and then Shirley Dunbar’s Tennessee twang was in his ear: “Operator.”
   “Hi, Shirley, it’s Lloyd.”
   “Lloyd Henreid! How are ya?”
   “Not too bad, Shirl. Can you try 6214 for me?”
   “Paul? He’s not home. He’s out at Indian Springs. Bet I could catch him for you at BaseOps.”
   “Okay, try that.”
   “You bet. Say, Lloyd, when you gonna come over and try some of my coffee cake? I bake fresh every two, three days.”
   “Soon, Shirley,” Lloyd said, grimacing. Shirley was forty, ran about one-eighty… and had set her cap for Lloyd. He took a lot of ribbing about her, especially from Whitney and Ronnie Sykes. But she was a fine telephone operator, able to do wonders with the Las Vegas phone system. Getting the phones working—the most important ones, anyway—had been their first priority after the power, but most of the automatic switching equipment had burned out, and so they were back to the equivalent of tin cans and lots of waxed string. There were also constant outages. Shirley handled what there was to handle with uncanny skill, and she was patient with the three or four other operators, who were still learning.
   Also, she did make nice coffee cake.
   “Real soon,” he added, and thought of how nice it would be if Julie Lawry’s firm, rounded body could be grafted onto Shirley Dunbar’s skills and gentle, uncomplaining nature.
   She seemed satisfied. There were beeps and boops on the line, and one high-pitched, echoing whine that made him hold the handset away from his ear, grimacing. Then the phone rang at the other end in a series of hoarse burrs.
   “Bailey, Ops,” a voice made tinny by distance said.
   “This is Lloyd,” he bellowed into the phone. “Is Paul there?”
   “Haul what, Lloyd?” Bailey asked.
   “Paul! Paul Burlson! ”
   “Oh, him! Yeah, he’s right here having a Co-Cola.”
   There was a pause—Lloyd began to think that the tenuous connection had been broken—and then Paul came on.
   “We’re going to have to shout, Paul. The connection stinks.” Lloyd wasn’t completely sure that Paul Burlson had the lung capacity to shout. He was a scrawny little man with thick lenses in his glasses, and some men called him Mr. Cool because he insisted on wearing a complete three-piece suit each day despite the dry crunch of the Vegas heat. But he was a good man to have as your information officer, and Flagg had told Lloyd in one of his expansive moods that by 1991 Burlson would be in charge of the secret police. And he’ll be sooo good at it, Flagg had added with a warm and loving smile.
   Paul did manage to speak a little louder.
   “Have you got your directory with you?” Lloyd asked.
   “Yes. Stan Bailey and I were going over a work rotation program.”
   “See if you’ve got anything on a guy named Tom Cullen, would you?”
   “Just a second.” A second stretched out to two or three minutes, and Lloyd began to wonder again if they had been cut off. Then Paul said, “Okay, Tom Cullen… you there, Lloyd?”
   “Right here.”
   “You can never be sure, with the phones the way they are. He’s somewhere between twenty-two and thirty-five at a guess. He doesn’t know for sure. Light mental retardation. He has some work skills. We’ve had him on the clean-up crew.”
   “How long has he been in Vegas?”
   “Something less than three weeks.”
   “From Colorado?”
   “Yes, but we have a dozen people over here who tried it over there and decided they didn’t like it. They drove this guy out. He was having sex with a normal woman and I guess they were afraid for their gene pool.” Paul laughed.
   “Got his address?”
   Paul gave it to him and Lloyd jotted it down in his notebook.
   “That it, Lloyd?”
   “One other name, if you’ve got the time.”
   Paul laughed—a small man’s fussy laugh. “Sure, it’s only my coffee break.”
   “The name is Nick Andros.”
   Paul said instantly: “I have that name on my red list.”
   “Oh?” Lloyd thought as quickly as he could, which was far from the speed of light. He had no idea what Paul’s “red list” might be. “Who gave you his name?”
   Exasperated, Paul said: “Who do you think? The same person that gave me all the red list names.”
   “Oh. Okay.” He said goodbye and hung up. Small-talk was impossible with the bad connection, and Lloyd had too much to think about to want to make it, anyway.
   Red list.
   Names that Flagg had given to Paul and to no one else, apparently—although Paul had assumed Lloyd knew all about it. Red list, what did that mean? Red meant stop.
   Red meant danger.
   Lloyd lifted the telephone again.
   “Operator.”
   “Lloyd again, Shirl.”
   “Well, Lloyd, did you—”
   “Shirley, I can’t gab. I’m onto something that’s maybe big.”
   “Okay, Lloyd.” Shirley’s voice lost its flirtiness and she was suddenly all business.
   “Who’s catching at Security?”
   “Barry Dorgan.”
   “Get him for me. And I never called you.”
   “Yes, Lloyd.” She sounded afraid now. Lloyd was afraid, too, but he was also excited.
   A moment later Dorgan was on. He was a good man, for which Lloyd was profoundly grateful. Too many men of the Poke Freeman type had gravitated toward the police department.
   “I want you to pick someone up for me,” Lloyd said. “Get him alive. I have to have him alive even if it means you lose men. His name is Tom Cullen and you can probably catch him at home. Bring him to the Grand.” He gave Barry Tom’s address and then made him repeat it back.
   “How important is this, Lloyd?”
   “Very important. You do this right, and someone bigger than me is going to be very happy with you.”
   “Okay.” Barry hung up and Lloyd did too, confident that Barry understood the converse: Fuck it up and somebody is going to be very angry with you.
   Barry called back an hour later to say he was fairly sure Tom Cullen had split.
   “But he’s feeble,” Barry went on, “and he can’t drive. Not even a motor-scooter. If he’s going east, he can’t be any further than Dry Lake. We can catch him, Lloyd, I know we can. Give me a green light.” Barry was fairly drooling. He was one of four or five people in Vegas who knew about the spies, and he had read Lloyd’s thoughts.
   “Let me think this over,” Lloyd said, and hung up before Barry could protest. He had gotten better at thinking things over than he would have believed possible in the pre-flu days, but he knew this was too big for him. And that red list business troubled him. Why hadn’t he been told about that?
   For the first time since meeting Flagg in Phoenix, Lloyd had the disquieting feeling that his position might be vulnerable. Secrets had been kept. They could probably still get Cullen; both Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson could fly the army choppers that were hangared out at the Springs, and if they had to they could close every road going out of Nevada to the east. Also, the guy wasn’t Jack the Ripper or Dr. Octopus; he was a feeb on the run. But Christ! If he had known about this Andros what’s-his-face when Julie Lawry had come to see him, they might have been able to take him right in his little North Vegas apartment.
   Somewhere inside him a door had opened, letting in a cool breeze of fear. Flagg had screwed up. And Flagg was capable of distrusting Lloyd Henreid. And that was baaaad shit.
   Still, he would have to be told about this. He wasn’t going to take the decision to start another manhunt upon himself. Not after what had happened with the Judge. He got up to go to the house phones, and met Whitney Horgan coming from them.
   “It’s the man, Lloyd,” he said. “He wants you.”
   “All right,” he said, surprised by how calm his voice was—the fear inside him was now very great. And above all else, it was important for him to remember that he would have long since starved in his Phoenix holding cell if it hadn’t been for Flagg. There was no sense kidding himself; he belonged to the dark man lock, stock, and barrel.
   But I can’t do my job if he shuts off the information, he thought, going to the elevator bank. He pushed the penthouse button, and the elevator car rose swiftly. Again there was that nagging, unhappy feeling: Flagg hadn’t known. The third spy had been here all along, and Flagg hadn’t known.
   “Come in, Lloyd.” Flagg’s lazy smiling face above a prosy blue-checked bathrobe.
   Lloyd came in. The air conditioning was on high, and it was like stepping into an open-air suite in Greenland. And still, as Lloyd stepped past the dark man, he could feel the radiating body heat he gave off. It was like being in a room which contained a small but very powerful furnace.
   Sitting in the corner, in a white sling chair, was the woman who had come in with Flagg that morning. Her hair was carefully pinned up, and she wore a shift dress. Her face was blank and moony, and looking at her gave Lloyd a deep chill. As teenagers, he and some friends had once stolen some dynamite from a construction project, had fused it and thrown it into Lake Harrison, where it exploded. The dead fish that had floated to the surface afterward had had that same look of awful blank impartiality in their moon-rimmed eyes.
   “I’d like you to meet Nadine Cross,” Flagg said softly from behind him, making Lloyd jump. “My wife.”
   Startled, Lloyd looked at Flagg and met only that mocking grin, those dancing eyes.
   “My dear, Lloyd Henreid, my righthand man. Lloyd and I met in Phoenix, where Lloyd was being detained and was consequently about to dine on a fellow detainee. In fact, Lloyd might already have partaken of the appetizer. Correct, Lloyd?”
   Lloyd blushed dully and said nothing, although the woman was either gonzo or stoned right over the moon.
   “Put out your hand, dear,” the dark man said.
   Like a robot, Nadine put her hand out. Her eyes continued to stare indifferently at a point somewhere above Lloyd’s shoulder.
   Jesus, this is creepy, Lloyd thought. A light sweat had sprung out all over his body in spite of the frigid air conditioning.
   “Pleestameetcha,” he said, and shook the soft warm meat of her hand. Afterward, he had to restrain a powerful urge to wipe his hand on the leg of his pants. Nadine’s hand continued to hang laxly in the air.
   “You can put your hand down now, my love,” Flagg said.
   Nadine put her hand back in her lap, where it began to twist and squirm. Lloyd realized with something like horror that she was masturbating.
   “My wife is indisposed,” Flagg said, and tittered. “She is also in a family way, as the saying is. Congratulate me, Lloyd. I am going to be a papa.” That titter again; the sound of scampering, light-footed rats behind an old wall.
   “Congratulations,” Lloyd said through lips that felt blue and numb.
   “We can talk our little hearts out around Nadine, can’t we, dear? She’s as silent as the grave. To make a small pun, mum’s the word.”
   “What about Indian Springs?”
   Lloyd blinked and tried to shift his mental gears, feeling naked and on the defensive. “It’s going good,” he managed at last.
   “ ‘Going good’?” The dark man leaned toward him and for one moment Lloyd was sure he was going to open his mouth and bite his head off like a Tootsie Pop. He recoiled. “That’s hardly what I’d call a close analysis, Lloyd.”
   “There are some other things—”
   “When I want to talk about other things, I’ll ask about other things.” Flagg’s voice was rising, getting uncomfortably close to a scream. Lloyd had never seen such a radical shift in temperament, and it scared him badly. “Right now I want a status report on Indian Springs and you better have it for me, Lloyd, for your sake you better have it!”
   “All right,” Lloyd muttered. “Okay.” He fumbled his notebook out of his hip pocket, and for the next half hour they talked about Indian Springs, the National Guard jets, and the Shrike missiles. Flagg began to relax again—although it was hard to tell, and it was a very bad idea to take anything at all for granted when you were dealing with the Walkin Dude.
   “Do you think they could overfly Boulder in two weeks?” he asked. “Say… by the first of October?”
   “Carl could, I guess,” Lloyd said doubtfully. “I don’t know about the other two.”
   “I want them ready,” Flagg muttered. He got up and began to pace around the room. “I want those people hiding in holes by next spring. I want to hit them at night, while they’re sleeping. Rake that town from one end to the other. I want it to be like Hamburg and Dresden in World War II.” He turned to Lloyd and his face was parchment white, the dark eyes blazing out of it with their own crazy fire. His grin was like a scimitar. “Teach them to send spies. They’ll be living in caves when spring comes. Then we’ll go over there and have us a pig hunt. Teach them to send spies.”
   Lloyd found his tongue at last. “The third spy—”
   “We’ll find him, Lloyd. Don’t worry about that. We’ll get the bastard.” The smile was back, darkly charming. But Lloyd had seen an instant of angry and bewildered fear before that smile reappeared. And fear was the one expression he had never expected to see there.
   “We know who he is, I think,” Lloyd said quietly.
   Flagg had been turning a jade figurine over in his hands, examining it. Now his hand froze. He became very still, and a peculiar expression of concentration stole over his face. For the first time the Cross woman’s gaze shifted, first toward Flagg and then hastily away. The air in the penthouse suite seemed to thicken.
   “What? What did you say?”
   “The third spy—”
   “No,” Flagg said with sudden decision. “No. You’re jumping at shadows, Lloyd.”
   “If I’ve got it right, he’s a friend of a guy named Nick Andros.”
   The jade figurine fell through Flagg’s fingers and shattered. A moment later Lloyd was lifted out of his chair by the front of his shirt. Flagg had moved across the room so swiftly that Lloyd had not even seen him. And then Flagg’s face was plastered against his, that awful sick heat was baking into him, and Flagg’s black weasel eyes were only an inch from his own.
   Flagg screamed: “And you sat there and talked about Indian Springs? I ought to throw you out that window! ”
   Something—perhaps it was seeing the dark man vulnerable, perhaps it was only the knowledge that Flagg wouldn’t kill him until he got all of the information—allowed Lloyd to find his tongue and speak in his own defense.
   “I tried to tell you!” he cried. “You cut me off! And you cut me off from the red list, whatever that is! If I’d known about that, I could have had that fucking retard last night!”
   Then he was flung across the room to crash into the far wall. Stars exploded in his head and he dropped to the parquet floor, dazed. He shook his head, trying to clear it. There was a high humming noise in his ears.
   Flagg seemed to have gone crazy. He was striding jerkily around the room, his face blank with rage. Nadine had shrunk back into her chair. Flagg reached a knickknack shelf populated with a milky-green menagerie of jade animals. He stared at them for a second, seeming almost puzzled by them, and then swept them all off onto the floor. They shattered like tiny grenades. He kicked at the bigger pieces with one bare foot, sending them flying. His dark hair had fallen over his forehead. He flipped it back with a jerk of his head and then turned toward Lloyd. There was a grotesque expression of sympathy and compassion on his face—both emotions every bit as real as a three-dollar bill, Lloyd thought. He walked over to help Lloyd up, and Lloyd noticed that he stepped on several jagged pieces of broken jade with no sign of pain… and no blood.
   “I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s have a drink.” He offered a hand and helped Lloyd to his feet. Like a kid doing a temper tantrum, Lloyd thought. “Yours is bourbon straight up, isn’t it?”
   “Fine.”
   Flagg went to the bar and made monstrous drinks. Lloyd demolished half of his at a gulp. The glass chattered briefly on the end table as he set it down. But he felt a little better.
   Flagg said, “The red list is something I didn’t think you’d ever have to use. There were eight names on it—five now. It was their governing council plus the old woman. Andros was one of them. But he’s dead now. Yes, Andros is dead, I’m sure of it.” He fixed Lloyd with a narrow, baleful stare.
   Lloyd told the story, referring to his notebook from time to time. He didn’t really need it, but it was good, from time to time, to get away from that smoking glare. He began with Julie Lawry and ended with Barry Dorgan.
   “You say he’s retarded,” Flagg mused.
   “Yes.”
   Happiness spread over Flagg’s face and he began to nod. “Yes,” he said, but not to Lloyd. “Yes, that’s why I couldn’t see—”
   He broke off and went to the telephone. Moments later he was talking to Barry.
   “The helicopters. You get Carl in one and Bill Jamieson in the other. Continuous radio contact. Send out sixty—no, a hundred men. Close every road going out of eastern and southern Nevada. See that they have this Cullen’s description. And I want hourly reports.”
   He hung up and rubbed his hands happily. “We’ll get him. I only wish we could send his head back to his bum-buddy Andros. But Andros is dead. Isn’t he, Nadine?”
   Nadine only stared blankly.
   “The helicopters won’t be much good tonight,” Lloyd said. “It’ll be dark in three hours.”
   “Don’t you fret, old Lloyd,” the dark man said cheerfully. “Tomorrow will be time enough for the helicopters. He isn’t far. No, not far at all.”
   Lloyd was bending his spiral notebook nervously back and forth in his hands, wishing he was anywhere but here. Flagg was in a good mood now, but Lloyd didn’t think he would be after hearing about Trash.
   “I have one other item,” he said reluctantly. “It’s about the Trashcan Man.” He wondered if this was going to trigger another tantrum like the jade-smashing outburst.
   “Dear Trashy. Is he off on one of his prospecting trips?”
   “I don’t know where he is. He pulled a little trick at Indian Springs before he went out again.” He related the story as Carl had told it the day before. Flagg’s face darkened when he heard that Freddy Campanari had been mortally wounded, but by the time Lloyd had finished, his face was serene again. Instead of bursting into a rage, Flagg only waved his hand impatiently.
   “All right. When he comes back in, I want him killed. But quickly and mercifully. I don’t want him to suffer. I had hoped he might… last longer. You probably don’t understand this, Lloyd, but I felt a certain… kinship with that boy. I thought I might be able to use him—and I have—but I was never completely sure. Even a master sculptor can find that the knife has turned in his hand, if it’s a defective knife. Correct, Lloyd?”
   Lloyd, who knew from nothing about sculpture and sculptors’ knives (he thought they used mallets and chisels), nodded agreeably. “Sure.”
   “And he’s done us the great service of arming the Shrikes. It was him, wasn’t it!”
   “Yes. It was.”
   “He’ll be back. Tell Barry Trash is to be… put out of his misery. Painlessly, if possible. Right now I am more concerned with the retarded boy to the east of us. I could let him go, but it’s the principle of the thing. Perhaps we can end it before dark. Do you think so, my dear?”
   He was squatting beside Nadine’s chair now. He touched her cheek and she pulled away as if she had been touched with a red-hot poker. Flagg grinned and touched her again. This time she submitted, shuddering.
   “The moon,” Flagg said, delighted. He sprang to his feet. “If the helicopters don’t spot him before dark, they’ll have the moon tonight. Why, I’ll bet he’s biking right up the middle of I-15 right now, in broad daylight. Expecting the old woman’s God to watch out for him. But she’s dead, too, isn’t she, my dear?” Flagg laughed delightedly, the laugh of a happy child. “And her God is, too, I suspect. Everything is going to work out well. And Randy Flagg is going to be a da-da.”
   He touched her cheek again. She moaned like a hurt animal.
   Lloyd licked his dry lips. “I’ll push off now, if that’s okay.”
   “Fine, Lloyd, fine.” The dark man did not look around; he was staring raptly into Nadine’s face. “Everything is going well. Very well.”
   Lloyd left as quickly as he could, almost running. In the elevator it all caught up with him and he had to push the EMERGENCY STOP button as hysterics overwhelmed him. He laughed and cried for nearly five minutes. When the storm had passed, he felt a little better.
   He’s not falling apart, he told himself. There are a few little problems, but he’s on top of them. The ballgame will probably be over by the first of October, and surely by the fifteenth. Everything’s starting to go good, just like he said, and never mind that he almost killed me… never mind that he seems stranger than ever…
   Lloyd got the call from Stan Bailey at Indian Springs fifteen minutes later. Stan was nearly hysterical between his fury at Trash and his fear of the dark man.
   Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson had taken off from the Springs at 6:02 P.M. to run a recon mission east of Vegas. One of their other trainee pilots, Cliff Benson, had been riding with Carl as an observer.
   At 6:12 P.M. both helicopters had blown up in the air. Stunned though he had been, Stan had sent five men over to Hangar 9, where two other skimmers and three large Baby Huey copters were stored. They found explosive taped to all five of the remaining choppers, and incendiary fuses rigged to simple kitchen timers. The fuses were not the same as the ones Trash had rigged to the fuel trucks, but they were very similar. There was not much room for doubt.
   “It was the Trashcan Man,” Stan said. “He went hogwild. Jesus Christ only knows what else he’s wired up to explode out here.”
   “Check everything,” Lloyd said. His heartbeat was rapid and thready with fear. Adrenaline boiled through his body, and his eyes felt as if they were in danger of popping from his head. “Check everything! You get every man jack out there and go from one end to the other of that cock-knocking base. You hear me, Stan?”
   “Why bother?”
   “Why bother? ” Lloyd screamed. “Do I have to draw you a picture, shitheels? What’s the big dude gonna say if the whole base—”
   “All our pilots are dead,” Stan said softly. “Don’t you get it, Lloyd? Even Cliff, and he wasn’t very fucking good. We’ve got six guys that aren’t even close to soloing and no teachers. What do we need those jets for now, Lloyd?”
   And he hung up, leaving Lloyd to sit thunderstruck, finally realizing.
   Tom Cullen woke up shortly after nine-thirty that evening, feeling thirsty and stiff. He had a drink from his water canteen, crawled out from under the two leaning rocks, and looked up at the dark sky. The moon rode overhead, mysterious and serene. It was time to go on. But he would have to be careful, laws yes.
   Because they were after him now.
   He had had a dream. Nick was talking to him and that was strange, because Nick couldn’t talk. He was M-O-O-N, that spelled deaf-mute. Had to write everything, and Tom could hardly read at all. But dreams were funny things, anything could happen in a dream, and in Tom’s, Nick had been talking.
   Nick said, “They know about you now, Tom, but it wasn’t your fault. You did everything right. It was bad luck. So now you have to be careful. You have to leave the road, Tom, but you have to keep going east.”
   Tom understood about east, but not how he was going to keep from getting mixed up in the desert. He might just go around in big circles.
   “You’ll know,” Nick said. “First you have to look for God’s Finger…”
   Now Tom put his canteen back on his belt and adjusted his pack. He walked back to the turnpike, leaving his bike where it had been. He climbed the embankment to the road and looked both ways. He scuttled across the median strip and after another cautious look, he trotted across the westbound lanes of I-15.
   They know about you now, Tom.
   He caught his foot in the guardrail cable on the far side and tumbled most of the way to the bottom of the embankment beside the highway. He lay in a heap for a moment, heart pounding. There was no sound but faint wind, whining over the broken floor of the desert.
   He got up and began to scan the horizon. His eyes were keen and the desert air was crystal clear. Before long he saw it, standing out against the starstrewn sky like an exclamation point. God’s Finger. As he faced due east, the stone monolith was at ten o’clock. He thought he could walk to it in an hour or two. But the clear, magnifying quality of the air had fooled more experienced hikers than Tom Cullen, and he was bemused by the way the stone finger always seemed to remain the same distance away. Midnight passed, then two o’clock. The great clock of stars in the sky had revolved. Tom began to wonder if the rock that looked so much like a pointing finger might not be a mirage. He rubbed his eyes, but it was still there. Behind him, the turnpike had merged into the dark distance.
   When he looked back at the Finger, it did seem to be a little closer, and by 4 A.M., when an inner voice began to whisper that it was time to find a good hiding place for the coming day, there could be no doubt that he had drawn nearer to the landmark. But he would not reach it this night.
   And when he did reach it (assuming that they didn’t find him when day came)? What then?
   It didn’t matter.
   Nick would tell him. Good old Nick.
   Tom couldn’t wait to get back to Boulder and see him, laws, yes.
   He found a fairly comfortable spot in the shade of a huge spine of rock and went to sleep almost instantly. He had come about thirty miles northeast that night, and was approaching the Mormon Mountains.
   During the afternoon, a large rattlesnake crawled in beside him to get out of the heat of the day. It coiled itself by Tom, slept awhile, and then passed on.
   Flagg stood at the edge of the roof sundeck that afternoon, looking east. The sun would be going down in another four hours, and then the retard would be on the move again.
   A strong and steady desert breeze lifted his dark hair back from his hot brow. The city ended so abruptly, giving up to the desert. A few billboards on the edge of nowhere, and that was it. So much desert, so many places to hide. Men had walked into that desert before and had never been seen again.
   “But not this time,” he whispered. “I’ll have him. I’ll have him.”
   He could not have explained why it was so important to have the retard; the rationality of the problem constantly eluded him. More and more he felt an urge to simply act, to move, to do. To destroy.
   Last evening, when Lloyd had informed him of the helicopter explosions and the deaths of the three pilots, he had had to use every resource at his command to keep from going into an utter screaming rage. His first impulse had been to order an armored column assembled immediately—tanks, flametracks, armored trucks, the whole works. They could be in Boulder in five days. The whole stinking mess would be over in a week and a half.
   Sure.
   And if there was early snow in the mountains passes, that would be the end of the great Wehrmacht. And it was already September 14. Good weather was no longer a sure bet. How in hell’s name had it gotten so late so fast?
   But he was the strongest man on the face of the earth, wasn’t he? There might be another like him in Russia or China or Iran, but that was a problem for ten years from now. Now all that mattered was that he was ascendant, he knew it, he felt it. He was strong, that was all the retard could tell them… if he managed to avoid getting lost in the desert or freezing to death in the mountains. He could only tell them that Flagg’s people lived in fear of the Walkin Dude and would obey the Walkin Dude’s least command. He could only tell them things that would demoralize their will further. So why did he have this steady, gnawing feeling that Cullen must be found and killed before he could leave the West?
   Because it’s what I want, and I am going to have what I want, and that is reason enough.
   And Trashcan Man. He had thought he could dismiss Trash entirely. He had thought Trashcan Man could be thrown away like a defective tool. But he had succeeded in doing what the entire Free Zone could not have done. He had thrown dirt into the foolproof machinery of the dark man’s conquest.
   I misjudged —
   It was a hateful thought, and he would not allow his mind to follow it to its conclusion. He threw his glass over the roof’s low parapet and saw it twinkling, end over end, out and out, then descending. A randomly vicious thought, a petulant child’s thought, streaked across his mind: Hope it hits someone on the head!
   Far below, the glass struck the parking lot and exploded… so far below, the dark man could not even hear it.
   They had found no more bombs at Indian Springs. The entire place had been turned upside down. Apparently Trash had booby-trapped the first things he had come to, the choppers in Hangar 9 and the trucks in the motor pool next door.
   Flagg had reiterated his orders that the Trashcan Man was to be killed on sight. The thought of Trash wandering around out in all that government property, where God knew what might be stored, now made him distinctly nervous.
   Nervous.
   Yes. The beautiful surety was still evaporating. When had that evaporation begun? He could not say, not for sure. All he knew was that things were getting flaky. Lloyd knew it too. He could see it in the way that Lloyd looked at him. It might not be a bad idea if Lloyd had an accident before the winter was out. He was asshole buddies with too many of the people in the palace guard, people like Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott. Even Burlson, who had spilled that business about the red list. He had thought idly about skinning Paul Burlson alive for that.
   But if Lloyd had known about the red list, none of this would have —
   “Shut up,” he muttered. “Just… shut… up!”
   But the thought wouldn’t go away that easily. Why hadn’t he given Lloyd the names of the top-echelon Free Zone people? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember. It seemed there had been a perfectly good reason at the time, but the more he tried to grasp it, the more it slipped through his fingers. Had it only been a sly-stupid decision not to put too many of his eggs in one basket—a feeling that not too many secrets should be stored with any one person, even a person as stupid and loyal as Lloyd Henreid?
   An expression of bewilderment rippled across his face. Had he been making such stupid decisions all along?
   And just how loyal was Lloyd, anyway? That expression in his eyes—
   Abruptly he decided to push it all aside and levitate. That always made him feel better. It made him feel stronger, more serene, and it cleared his head. He looked out at the desert sky.
   (I am, I am, I am, I AM —)
   His rundown bootheels left the surface of the sundeck, hovered, rose another inch. Then two. Peace came to him, and suddenly he knew he could find the answers. Everything was clearer. First he must—
   “They’re coming for you, you know.”
   He crashed back down at the sound of that soft, uninflected voice. The jarring shock went up his legs and his spine all the way to his jaw, which clicked. He whirled around like a cat. But his blooming grin withered when he saw Nadine. She was dressed in a white nightgown, yards of gauzy material that billowed around her body. Her hair, as white as the gown, blew about her face. She looked like some pallid deranged sibyl, and in spite of himself, Flagg was afraid. She took a delicate step closer. Her feet were bare.
   “They’re coming. Stu Redman, Glen Bateman, Ralph Brentner, and Larry Underwood. They’re coming and they’ll kill you like a chicken-stealing weasel.”
   “They’re in Boulder,” he said, “hiding under their beds and mourning their dead nigger woman.”
   “No,” she said indifferently. “They’re almost in Utah now. They’ll be here soon. And they’ll stamp you out like a disease.”
   “Shut up. Go downstairs.”
   “I’ll go down,” she said, approaching him, and now it was she who smiled—a smile that filled him with dread. The furious color faded from his cheeks, and his strange, hot vitality seemed to go with it. For a moment he seemed old and frail. “I’ll go down… and so will you.”
   “Get out.”
   “We’ll go down,” she sang, smiling… it was horrible. “Down, doowwwn …”
   “They’re in Boulder!”
   “They’re almost here.”
   “Get downstairs! ”
   “Everything you made here is falling apart, and why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short. People are whispering about you. They’re saying you let Tom Cullen get away, just a simple retarded boy but smart enough to outwit Randall Flagg.” Her words came faster and faster, now tumbling through a jeering smile. “They’re saying your weapons expert has gone crazy and you didn’t know it was going to happen. They’re afraid that what he brings back from the desert next time may be for them instead of for the people in the East. And they’re leaving. Did you know that?”
   “You lie,” he whispered. His face was parchment white, his eyes bulging. “They wouldn’t dare. And if they were, I’d know.”
   Her eyes gazed blankly over his shoulder to the east. “I see them,” she whispered. “They’re leaving their posts in the dead of night, and your Eye doesn’t see them. They’re leaving their posts and sneaking away. A work-crew goes out with twenty people and comes back with eighteen. The border guards are defecting. They’re afraid the balance of power is shifting op its arm. They’re leaving you, leaving you, and the ones that are left won’t lift a finger when the men from the East come to finish you once and for all—”
   It snapped. Whatever there was inside him, it snapped.
   “YOU LIE! ” he screamed at her. His hands slammed down on her shoulders, snapping both collarbones like pencils. He lifted her body high over his head into the faded blue desert sky, and as he pivoted on his heels he threw her, up and out, as he had thrown the glass. He saw the great smile of relief and triumph on her face, the sudden sanity in her eyes, and understood. She had baited him into doing it, understanding somehow that only he could set her free—
   And she was carrying his child.
   He leaned over the low parapet, almost overbalancing, trying to call back the irrevocable. Her nightgown fluttered. His hand closed on the gauzy material and he felt it rip, leaving him only a scrap of cloth so diaphanous that he could see his fingers through it—the stuff of dreams on waking.
   Then she was gone, plummeting straight down with her toes pointed toward the earth, her gown pillowing up her neck and over her face in drifts. She didn’t scream.
   She went down as silently as a defective skyrocket.
   When he heard the indescribable thud of her hard landing, Flagg threw his head back to the sky and howled.
   It made no difference, it made no difference.
   It was still all in the palm of his hand.
   He leaned over the parapet again and watched them come running, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Or maggots to a piece of offal.
   They looked so small, and he was so high above them.
   He would levitate, he decided, and regain his state of calm.
   But it was a long, long time before his bootheels would leave the sundeck, and when they did they would only hover a quarter of an inch above the concrete. They would go no higher.
   Tom awoke that night at eight o’clock, but there was still too much light to move. He waited. Nick had come to him again in his sleep, and they had talked. It was so good to talk to Nick.
   He lay in the shade of the big rock and watched the sky darken. The stars began to peep out. He thought about Pringle’s Potato Chips and wished he had some. When he got back to the Zone—if he did get back to the Zone—he would have all of them he wanted. He would gorge on Pringle’s chips. And bask in the love of his friends. That was what was missing back there in Las Vegas, he decided—simple love. They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.
   Only mushrooms and toadstools grew big and fat in the dark, even he knew that, laws, yes.
   “I love Nick and Frannie and Dick Ellis and Lucy,” Tom whispered. It was his prayer. “I love Larry Underwood and Glen Bateman, too. I love Stan and Rona. I love Ralph. I love Stu. I love—”
   It was odd, how easily their names came to him. Why, back in the Zone he was lucky if he could remember Stu’s name when he came to visit. His thoughts turned to his toys. His garage, his cars, his model trains. He had played with them by the hour. But he wondered if he would want to play with them so much when he got back from this… if he got back. It wouldn’t be the same. That was sad, but maybe it was also good.
   “The Lord is my shepherd,” he recited softly. “I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen.”
   It was dark enough now, and he pushed on. By eleven-thirty that night he had reached God’s Finger, and he paused there for a little lunch. The ground was high here, and looking back the way he had come, he could see moving lights. On the turnpike, he thought. They’re looking for me.
   Tom looked northeast again. Far ahead, barely visible in the dark (the moon, now two nights past full, had already begun to sink), he saw a huge rounded granite dome. He was supposed to go there next.
   “Tom’s got sore feet,” he whispered to himself, but not without some cheeriness. Things could have been much worse than a case of sore feet. “M-O-O-N, that spells sore feet.”
   He walked on, and the night things skittered away from him, and when he laid himself down at dawn, he had come almost forty miles. The Nevada-Utah border was not far to the east of him.
   By eight that morning he was hard asleep, his head pillowed on his jacket. His eyes began to move rapidly back and forth behind his closed lids.
   Nick had come, and Tom talked with him.
   A frown creased Tom’s sleeping brow. He had told Nick how much he was looking forward to seeing him again.
   But for some reason he could not understand, Nick had turned away.

Chapter 68
   Oh, how history repeats itself: Trashcan Man was once again being broiled alive in the devils frying pan—but this time there was no hope of Cibola’s cooling fountains to sustain him.
   It’s what I deserve, no more than what I deserve.
   His skin had burned, peeled, burned, peeled again, and finally it had not tanned but blackened. He was walking proof that a man finally takes on the look of what he is. Trash looked as if someone had doused him in #2 kerosene and struck a match to him. The blue of his eyes had faded in the constant desert glare, and looking into them was like looking into weird, extra-dimensional holes in space. He was dressed in a strange imitation of the dark man—an open-throated red-checked shirt, faded jeans, and desert boots that were already scratched and mashed and folded and sprung. But he had thrown away his red-flawed amulet. He didn’t deserve to wear it. He had proved unworthy. And like all imperfect devils, he had been cast out.
   He paused in the broiling sun and passed a thin and shaking hand across his brow. He had been meant for this place and time—all his life had been preparation. He had passed through the burning corridors of hell to get here. He had endured the father-killing sheriff, he had endured that place at Terre Haute, he had endured Carley Yates. After all his strange and lonely life, he had found friends. Lloyd. Ken. Whitney Horgan.
   And ah God, he had fucked it all up. He deserved to burn out here in the devil’s frying pan. Could there be redemption for him? The dark man might know. Trashcan did not.
   He could barely remember now what had happened—perhaps because his tortured mind did not want to remember. He had been in the desert for over a week before his last disastrous return to Indian Springs. A scorpion had stung him on the middle finger of his left hand (his fuckfinger, that long-ago Carley Yates in that long-ago Powtanville would have called it with unfailing pool-hall vulgarity), and that hand had swelled up like a rubber glove filled with water. An unearthly fire had filled his head. And yet he had pushed on.
   He had finally returned to Indian Springs, still feeling like a figment of someone else’s imagination. There had been some good-natured talk as the men examined his finds—incendiary fuses, contact land mines, small stuff, really. Trash had begun to feel good for the first time since the scorpion had stung him.
   And then, with no warning at all, time had sideslipped and he was back in Powtanville. Someone had said, “People who play with fire wet the bed, Trash,” and he had looked up; expecting to see Billy Jamieson, but it hadn’t been Bill, it was Rich Groudemore from Powtanville, grinning and picking his teeth with a match, his fingers black with grease because he’d strolled up to the pool-hall from the Texaco on the corner to have a game of nine-ball on his break. And someone else said, “You better put that away, Richie, Trash is back in town,” and that sounded like Steve Tobin at first, but it wasn’t Steve. It was Carley Yates in his old, scuffed, and hoody motorcycle jacket. With growing horror he had seen they were all there, unquiet corpses come back to life. Richie Groudemore and Carley and Norm Morrisette and Hatch Cunningham, the one who was getting bald even though he was only eighteen and all of the others called him Hatch Cunnilingus.
   And they were leering at him. It came thick and fast then, through a feverhaze of years. Hey, Trash, why dintchoo torch the SCHOOL? Hey, Trashy, ya burned ya pork off yet? Hey, Trashcan Man, I heard you snort Ronson lighter fluid, that true?
   Then Carley Yates: Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?
   He tried to scream at them, but all that had come out was a whisper: “Don’t ask me about old lady Semple’s pension check no more.” And he ran.
   The rest of it was a dream. Getting the incendiary fuses and slapping them on the trucks in the motor pool. His hands had done their own work, his mind far away in a confused whirl. People had seen him coming and going between the motor pool and his sandtrack with its big balloon tires, and some of them had even waved, but no one had come over and asked what he was doing. After all, he wore Flagg’s charm.
   Trashy did his work and thought about Terre Haute.
   In Terre Haute they had made him bite on a rubber thing when they gave him the shocks, and the man at the controls sometimes looked like the father-killing sheriff and sometimes like Carley Yates and sometimes like Hatch Cunnilingus. And he always swore hysterically to himself that this time he wouldn’t piss himself. And he always did.
   When the trucks were fixed, he had gone into the nearest hangar and had fixed the choppers in there. He had wanted timer fuses to do that job right, and so he had gone into the messhall kitchen and had found over a dozen of those five-and-dime plastic timers. You set them for fifteen minutes or half an hour and when they got back to zero they went ding and you knew it was time to take your pie out of the oven. Only instead of going ding this time, Trash had thought, they are going to go bang. He liked that. That was pretty good. If Carley Yates or Rich Groudemore tried taking one of those copters up, they were going to get a big fat surprise. He had simply hooked the kitchen timers up to the copter ignition systems.
   When it was done, a moment of sanity had come back. A moment of choice. He had stared around wonderingly at the helicopters parked in the echoing hangar and then down at his hands. They smelled like a roll of burned caps. But this was not Powtanville. There were no helicopters in Powtanville. The Indiana sun did not shine with the savage brilliance of this sun. He was in Nevada. Carley and his pool-hall buddies were dead. Dead of the superflu.
   Trash had turned around and looked doubtfully at his handiwork. What was he doing, sabotaging the dark man’s equipment? It was senseless, insane. He would undo it, and quickly.
   Oh, but the lovely explosions.
   The lovely fires.
   Flaming jet fuel streaming everywhere. Helicopters exploding out of the air. So beautiful.
   And he had suddenly thrown his new life away. He had trotted back to his sand-crawler, a furtive grin on his sun-blackened face. He had gotten in and had driven away… but not too far away. He had waited, and finally a fuel truck had come out of the motor pool garage and had trundled across the tarmac like a large olive-drab beetle. And when it blew, exploding greasy fire in every direction, Trash had dropped his fieldglasses and had bellowed at the sky, shaking his fists in inarticulate joy. But the joy had not lasted long. It had been replaced by deadly terror and sick, mourning sorrow.
   He had driven northwest into the desert, pushing the sand-crawler along at near-suicidal speeds. How long ago? He didn’t know. If he had been told that this was the sixteenth of September, he would only have nodded in a total blank lack of understanding.
   He thought he would kill himself, that there was nothing else left for him, every hand was turned against him now, and that was just as it was supposed to be. When you bit the hand that fed you, you expected that extended hand to curl into a fist. That wasn’t only the way life went; that was justice. He had three large cans of gasoline in the back of the track. He would pour it all over himself and then strike a match. It was what he deserved.
   But he hadn’t done it. He didn’t know why. Some force, more powerful than the agony of his remorse and loneliness, had stopped him. It seemed that even burning himself to death like a Buddhist monk was not penance enough. He had slept. And when he awoke, he discovered that a new thought had crept into his brain as he slept, and that thought was:
   REDEMPTION.
   Was it possible? He didn’t know. But if he found something… something big … and brought it to the dark man in Las Vegas, might it not be possible? And even if REDEMPTION was impossible, perhaps ATONEMENT was not. If it was true, there was still a chance he could die content.
   What? What could it be? What was big enough for REDEMPTION, or even for ATONEMENT? Not landmines or a fleet of flametracks, not grenades or automatic weapons. None of those things were big enough. He knew where there were two large experimental bombers (they had been built without congressional knowledge, paid for out of blind defense funds), but he could not get them back to Vegas, and even if he could, there was no one there who could fly them. From the looks of them, they crewed at least ten, maybe more.
   He was like an infrared scope that senses heat in darkness and reveals those heat sources as vague red-devil shapes. He was able, in some strange way, to sense the things that had been left behind in this wasteland, where so many military projects had been carried out. He could have gone straight west, straight to Project Blue, where the whole thing had begun. But cold plague was not to his taste, and in his confused but not entirely illogical way, he thought it would not be to Flagg’s taste, either. Plague didn’t care who it killed. It might have been better for the human race if the original funders of Project Blue had kept that simple fact in mind.
   So he had gone northwest from Indian Springs, into the sandy desolation of the Nellis Air Force Range, stopping his crawler when he had to cut through high barbed-wire fences marked with signs that read—US GOVERNMENT PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING and ARMED SENTRIES and GUARD DOGS and THERE IS A HIGH-VOLTAGE CHARGE PASSING THROUGH THESE WIRES. But the electricity was dead, like the guard dogs and the armed sentries, and Trashcan Man drove on, correcting his course from time to time. He was being drawn, drawn to something. He didn’t know what it was, but he thought it was big. Big enough.
   The crawler’s Goodyear balloon tires rolled steadily on, carrying Trash through dry washes and up slopes so rocky that they looked like half-exposed stegosaurus spines. The air hung still and dry. The temperature hovered at just above 100. The only sound was the drone of the crawler’s modified Studebaker engine.
   He topped a knoll, saw what was below, and threw the transmission into neutral for a moment to get a better look.
   There was a huddled complex of buildings down there, shimmering through the rising heat like quicksilver. Quonset huts and low cinderblock. Vehicles stalled here and there on dusty streets. The whole area was surrounded by three courses of barbed wire, and he could see the porcelain conductors along the wire. These were not the small conductors the size of a knuckle that passed along a weak stay-away charge; these were the giant ones, the size of a closed fist.
   From the east, a paved two-lane road led to a guardhouse that looked like a reinforced pillbox. No cute little signs here saying CHECK YOUR CAMERA WITH MP ON DUTY or IF YOU LIKED US, TELL YOUR CONGRESSMAN. The only sign in evidence was red on yellow, the colors of danger, curt and to the point: PRESENT IDENTIFICATION IMMEDIATELY.
   “Thank you,” Trashcan whispered. He had no idea who he was thanking. “Oh thank you… thank you.” His special sense had led him to this place, but he had known it was here all along. Somewhere.
   He put the sandtrack in its forward gear and lurched down the slope. Ten minutes later he was nosing up the access road to the guardhouse. There were black-and-white-striped crash barriers across the road, and Trash got out to examine them. Places like this had big generators to make sure there was plenty of emergency power. He doubted if any generator would have gone on supplying power for three months, but he would still have to be very careful and make sure everything was blown before going in. What he wanted was now very near at hand. He wouldn’t allow himself to become overeager and get cooked like a roast in a microwave oven.
   Behind six inches of bulletproof glass, a mummy in an army uniform stared out and beyond him.
   Trash ducked under the crash barrier on the ingress side of the guardhouse and approached the door of the little concrete building. He tried it and it opened. That was good. When a place like this had to switch over to emergency power, everything was supposed to lock automatically. If you were taking a crap, you got locked in the bathroom until the crisis was over. But if the emergency power failed, everything unlocked again.
   The dead sentry had a dry, sweet, interesting smell, like cinnamon and sugar mixed together for toast. He had not bloated or rotted; he had simply dried up. There were still black discolorations under his neck, the distinctive trademark of Captain Trips. Standing in the corner behind him was a Browning automatic rifle. Trashcan Man took it and went back outside.
   He set the BAR for single fire, fiddled with the sight, and then socked it into the hollow of his scrawny right shoulder. He sighted down on one of the porcelain conductors and squeezed off a shot. There was a loud hand-clapping sound and an exciting whiff of cordite. The conductor exploded every which way, but there was no purple-white glare of high-voltage electricity. Trashcan Man smiled.
   Humming, he walked over to the gate and examined it. Like the guardhouse door, it was unlocked. He pushed it open a little way and then hunkered down. There was a pressure mine here under the paving. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did know. It might be armed; it might not be.
   He went back to the sandtrack, put it in gear, and drove it through the crash barriers. They broke off with a snapping, grinding sound and the crawler’s big balloon tires rolled over them. The desert sun pounded down. Trashcan Man’s peculiar eyes sparkled happily. In front of the gate, he got out of the sandtrack and then put it in gear again. The driverless track rolled forward and pushed the gate all the way open. Trashcan Man darted into the guardhouse.
   He squinched his eyes shut, but there was no explosion. That was good; they really had shut down completely. Their emergency systems might have run a month, perhaps even two, but in the end the heat and lack of regular maintenance had killed them. Still, he would be careful.
   Meanwhile, his sandtrack was rolling serenely toward the corrugated wall of a long Quonset hut. Trashcan Man trotted onto the base after it and caught up with it just as it was bumping over the curb of what a sign announced was Illinois Street. He put it back into neutral, and the sandtrack stopped. He got in, reversed, and drove around to the front of the Quonset.
   It was a barracks. The shadowy interior was filled with that sugar-and-cinnamon smell. There were perhaps twenty soldiers scattered among the fifty or so beds. Trashcan Man walked up the aisle between them, wondering where he was going. There was nothing in here for him, was there? These men had once been weapons of a sort, but they had been neutralized by the flu.
   But there was something at the very rear of the building that interested him. A sign. He walked up to read it. The heat in here was tremendous. It made his head thump and swell. But when he stood in front of the sign, he began to smile. Yes, it was here. Somewhere on this base was what he had been looking for.
   The sign showed a cartoon man in a cartoon shower. He was soaping his cartoon genitals busily; they were almost entirely covered with a drift of cartoon bubbles. The caption beneath read: REMEMBER ! IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO SHOWER DAILY!
   Below that was a yellow-and-black emblem that showed three triangles pointed downward.
   The symbol for radiation.
   Trashcan Man laughed like a child and clapped his hands in the stillness.

Chapter 69
   Whitney Horgan found Lloyd in his room, lying on the big round bed he had most recently shared with Dayna Jurgens. There was a large gin and tonic balanced on his bare chest. He was staring solemnly up at his reflection in the overhead mirror.
   “Come on in,” he said when he saw Whitney. “Don’t stand on ceremony, for Chrissake. Don’t bother to knock. Bastard.” It came out as bassard.
   “You drunk, Lloyd?” Whitney asked cautiously.
   “Nope. Not yet. But I’m gettin there.”
   “Is he here?”
   “Who? Fearless Leader?” Lloyd sat up. “He’s around someplace. The Midnight Rambler.” He laughed and lay back down.
   Whitney said in a low voice, “You want to watch what you’re saying. You know it’s not a good idea to hit the hard stuff when he’s—”
   “Fuck it.”
   “Remember what happened to Hec Drogan. And Strellerton.”
   Lloyd nodded. “You’re right. The walls have ears. The fucking walls have ears. You ever hear that saying?”
   “Yeah, once or twice. It’s a true saying around here, Lloyd.”
   “You bet.” Lloyd suddenly sat up and threw his drink across the room. The glass shattered. “There’s one for the sweeper, right, Whitney?”
   “You okay, Lloyd?”
   “I’m all right. You want a gin and tonic?”
   Whitney hesitated for a moment. “Naw. I don’t like them without the lime.”
   “Hey, Jesus, don’t say no just because of that! I got lime. Comes out of a little squeeze bottle.” Lloyd went over to the bar and held up a plastic ReaLime. “Looks just like the Green Giant’s left testicle. Funny, huh?”
   “Does it taste like lime?”
   “Sure,” Lloyd said morosely. “What do you think it tastes like? Fuckin Cheerios? So what do you say? Be a man and have a drink with me.”
   “Well… okay.”
   “We’ll have them by the window and take in the view.”
   “No,” Whitney said, harshly and abruptly. Lloyd paused on his way to the bar, his face suddenly paling. He looked toward Whitney, and for a moment their eyes met.
   “Yeah, okay,” Lloyd said. “Sorry, man. Poor taste.”
   “That’s okay.”
   But it wasn’t okay, and both of them knew it. The woman Flagg had introduced as his “bride” had taken a high dive the day before. Lloyd remembered Ace High saying that Dayna couldn’t jump from the balcony because the windows didn’t open. But the penthouse had a sundeck. Guess they must have thought none of the real high rollers—Arabs, most of them—would ever take the dive. A lot they knew.
   He fixed Whitney a gin and tonic and they sat and drank in silence for a while. Outside, the sun was going down in a red glare. At last Whitney said in a voice almost too low to be heard: “Do you really think she went on her own?”
   Lloyd shrugged. “What does it matter? Sure. I think she dived. Wouldn’t you, if you was married to him? You ready?”
   Whitney looked at his glass and saw with some surprise that he was indeed ready. He handed it to Lloyd, who took it over to the bar. Lloyd was pouring the gin freehand, and Whitney had a nice buzz on.
   Again they drank in silence for a while, watching the sun go down.
   “What do you hear about that guy Cullen?” Whitney asked finally.
   “Nothing. Doodley-squat. El-zilcho. I don’t hear nothing, Barry don’t hear nothing. Nothing from Route 40, from Route 30, from Route 2 and 74 and I-15. Nothing from the back roads. They’re all covered and they’re all nothing. He’s out in the desert someplace, and if he keeps moving at night and if he can figure out how to keep moving east, he’s going to slip through. And what does it matter, anyhow? What can he tell them?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “I don’t either. Let him go, that’s what I say.”
   Whitney felt uncomfortable. Lloyd was getting perilously close to criticizing the boss again. His buzz-on was stronger, and he was glad. Maybe soon he would find the nerve to say what he had come here to say.
   “I’ll tell you something,” Lloyd said, leaning forward. “He’s losing his stuff. You ever hear that fucking saying? It’s the eighth inning and he’s losing his stuff and there’s no-fucking-body warming up in the bullpen.”
   “Lloyd, I—”
   “You ready?”
   “Sure, I guess.”
   Lloyd made them new drinks. He handed one to Whitney, and a little shiver went through him as he sipped. It was almost raw gin.
   “Losing his stuff,” Lloyd said, returning to his text. “First Dayna, then this guy Cullen. His own wife—if that’s what she was—goes and takes a dive. Do you think her double-fucking-gainer from the penthouse balcony was in his game plan?”
   “We shouldn’t be talking about it.”
   “And Trashcan Man. Look what that guy did all by himself. With fiends like that, who needs enemas? That’s what I’d like to know.”
   “Lloyd—”
   Lloyd was shaking his head. “I don’t understand it at all. Everything was going so good, right up to the night he came and said the old lady was dead over there in the Free Zone. He said the last obstacle was out of our way. But that’s when things started to get funny.”
   “Lloyd, I really don’t think we should be—”
   “Now I just don’t know. We can take em by land assault next spring, I guess. We sure as shit can’t go before then. But by next spring, God knows what they might have rigged up over there, you know? We were going to hit them before they could think up any funny surprises, and now we can’t. Plus, holy God on His throne, there’s Trashy to think about. He’s out there in the desert ramming around someplace, and I sure as hell—”
   “Lloyd,” Whitney said in a low, choked voice. “Listen to me.”
   Lloyd leaned forward, concerned. “What? What’s the trouble, old hoss?”
   “I didn’t even know if I’d have the guts to ask you,” Whitney said. He was squeezing his glass compulsively. “Me and Ace High and Ronnie Sykes and Jenny Engstrom. We’re cutting loose. You want to come? Christ, I must be crazy telling you this, with you so close to him.”
   “Cutting loose? Where are you going?”
   “South America, I guess. Brazil. That ought to be just about far enough.” He paused, struggling, then plunged on. “A lot of people have been leaving. Well, maybe not a lot, but quite a few, and there’s more every day. They don’t think Flagg can cut it. Some are going north, up to Canada. That’s too frigging cold for me. But I got to get out. I’d go east if I thought they’d have me. And if I was sure we could get through.” Whitney stopped abruptly and looked at Lloyd miserably. It was the face of a man who thinks he has gone much too far.
   “You’re all right,” Lloyd said softly. “I ain’t going to blow the whistle on you, old hoss.”
   “It’s just… all gone bad here,” Whitney said miserably.
   “When you planning to go?” Lloyd asked.
   Whitney looked at him with narrow suspicion.
   “Aw, forget I asked,” Lloyd said. “You ready?”
   “Not yet,” Whitney said, looking into his glass.
   “I am.” He went to the bar. With his back to Whitney he said, “I couldn’t.”
   “Huh?”
   “Couldn’t! ” Lloyd said sharply, and turned back to Whitney. “I owe him something. I owe him a lot. He got me out of a bad jam back in Phoenix and I been with him since then. Seems longer than it really is. Sometimes it seems like forever.”
   “I’ll bet.”
   “But it’s more than that. He’s done something to me, made me brighter or something. I don’t know what it is, but I ain’t the same man I was, Whitney. Nothing like. Before… him … I was nothing but a minor leaguer. Now he’s got me running things here, and I do okay. It seems like I think better. Yeah, he’s made me brighter.” Lloyd lifted the flawed stone from his chest, looked at it briefly, then dropped it again. He wiped his hand against his pants as though it had touched something nasty. “I know I ain’t no genius now. I have to write everything I’m s’posed to do in a notebook or I forget it. But with him behind me I can give orders and most times things turn out right. Before, all I could do was take orders and get in jams. I’ve changed… and he changed me. Yeah, it seems a lot longer than it really is.
   “When we got to Vegas, there were only sixteen people here. Ronnie was one of them; so was Jenny and poor old Hec Drogan. They were waiting for him. When we got into town, Jenny Engstrom got down on those pretty knees of hers and kissed his boots. I bet she never told you that in bed.” He smiled crookedly at Whitney. “Now she wants to cut and run. Well, I don’t blame her, or you either. But it sure doesn’t take much to sour a good operation, does it?”
   “You’re going to stick?”
   “To the very end, Whitney. His or mine. I owe him that.” He didn’t add that he still had enough faith in the dark man to believe that Whitney and the others would end up riding crosstrees, more likely than not. And there was something else. Here he was Flagg’s second-in-command. What could he be in Brazil? Why, Whitney and Ronnie were both brighter than he was. He and Ace High would end up low chickens, and that wasn’t to Lloyd’s taste. Once he wouldn’t have minded, but things had changed. And when your head changed, he was finding out, it most always changed forever.
   “Well, it might work out for all of us,” Whitney said lamely.
   “Sure,” Lloyd said, and thought: But I wouldn’t want to be walking in your shoes if it comes out right for Flagg after all. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when he finally has time to notice you down there in Brazil. Riding a crosstree might be the least of your worries then…
   Lloyd raised his glass. “A toast, Whitney.”
   Whitney raised his own glass.
   “Nobody gets hurt,” Lloyd said. “That’s my toast. Nobody gets hurt.”
   “Man, I’ll drink to that,” Whitney said fervently, and they both did.
   Whitney left soon after. Lloyd kept on drinking. He passed out around nine-thirty and slept soddenly on the round bed. There were no dreams, and that was almost worth the price of the next day’s hangover.
   When the sun rose on the morning of September 17, Tom Cullen made his camp a little north of Gunlock, Utah. It was cold enough for him to be able to see his breath puffing out in front of him. His ears were numb and cold. But he felt good. He had passed quite close to a rutted bad road the night before, and he had seen three men gathered around a small spluttering campfire. All three had guns.
   Trying to ease past them through a tangled field of boulders—he was now on the western edge of the Utah badlands—he had sent a small splatter of pebbles rolling and tumbling into a dry-wash. Tom froze. Warm wee-wee spilled down his legs, but he wasn’t even aware that he’d done it in his pants like a little baby until an hour or so later.
   All three of them turned around, two of them bringing their weapons up to port arms. Tom’s cover was thin, barely adequate. He was a shadow among shadows. The moon was behind a reef of clouds. If it chose this moment to come out…
   One of them relaxed. “It’s a deer,” he said. “They’re all over the place.”
   “I think we should investigate,” another had said.
   “Put your thumb up your asshole and investigate that,” the third replied, and that was the end of it. They sat by the fire again, and Tom began to creep along, feeling for each step, watching as their campfire receded with agonizing slowness. An hour and it was only a spark on the slope below him. Finally it was gone and a great weight seemed to slip off his shoulders. He began to feel safe. He was still in the West and he knew enough to be careful—laws, yes—but the danger no longer seemed as thick, as if there were Indians or outlaws all around.
   And now, with the sun coming up, he rolled into a tight ball in the low thicket of bushes and prepared to go to sleep. Got to get some blankets, he thought. It’s getting cold. Then sleep took him, suddenly and completely, as it always did.
   He dreamed of Nick.

Chapter 70

   Trashcan Man had found what he wanted.

   He came along a hallway deep underground, a hallway as dark as a mine pit. In his left hand he held a flashlight. In his right hand he held a gun, because it was spooky down here. He was riding an electric tram that rolled almost silently along the wide corridor. The only sound it made was a low, almost subaural hum.
   The tram consisted of a seat for the driver and a large carry space. Resting in the carry space was an atomic warhead.
   It was heavy.
   Trash could not make an intelligent guess as to just how heavy it was, because he hadn’t even been able to budge it by hand. It was long and cylindrical. It was cold. Running his hand over its curved surface, he had found it hard to believe that such a cold dead lump of metal could have the potential for so much heat.
   He had found it at four in the morning. He had gone back to the motor pool and had gotten a chainfall. He had brought the chainfall back down and had rigged it over the warhead. Ninety minutes later, it was nestled cozily into the electric tram, nose up. Stamped on the nose was A161410USAF. The hard rubber tires of the tram had settled appreciably when he put it in.
   Now he was coming to the end of the hallway. Straight ahead was the large freight elevator with its doors standing invitingly open. It was plenty big enough to take the tram, but of course there was no electricity. Trash had gotten down by the stairs. He had brought the chainfall down the same way. The chainfall was light compared to the warhead. It only weighed a hundred and fifty pounds or so. And still it had been a major chore getting it down five courses of stairs.
   How was he going to get the warhead up those stairs?
   Power-driver winch, his mind whispered.
   Sitting on the driver’s seat and shining his flash randomly around, Trash nodded to himself. Sure, that was the ticket. Winch it up. Set a motor topside and pull it up, stair-riser by stair-riser, if he had to. But where was he going to find five hundred feet of chain all in one piece?
   Well, he probably wasn’t. But he could weld pieces of chain together. Would that work? Would the welds hold? It was hard to say. And even if they did, what about all the switchbacks the stairs made going up?
   He hopped down and ran a caressing hand over the smooth, deadly surface of the warhead in the silent darkness.
   Love would find a way.
   Leaving the warhead in the tram, he began to climb the stairs again to see what he could find. A base like this, there would be a little of everything. He would find what he needed.
   He climbed two flights and paused to catch his breath. He suddenly wondered: Have I been taking radiation? They shielded all that stuff, shielded it with lead. But in the movies you saw on TV, the men who handled radioactive stuff were always wearing those protective suits and film badges that turned color if you got a dose. Because it was silent. You couldn’t see it. It just settled into your flesh and your bones. You didn’t even know you were sick until you started puking and losing your hair and having to run to the bathroom every few minutes.
   Was all that going to happen to him?
   He discovered that he didn’t care. He was going to get that bomb up. Somehow he was going to get it up. Somehow he was going to get it back to Las Vegas. He had to make up for the terrible thing he had done at Indian Springs. If he had to die to atone, then he would die.
   “My life for you,” he whispered in the darkness, and began to climb the stairs again.