46

   Now the floor below Gardener was also transparent; he seemed to be sitting in thin air, looking down at the billowing reefs of smoke coming from the edge of the woods and filling the air.
   The ship was fully alive now – but he was fading fast.
   His hands crept up to the earphones.
   Scotty, he thought, gimme warp-speed. We're blowing this disco.
   He bore down hard inside his mind, and this time the pain was thick and fibrous and sickening.
   Meltdown, he thought dimly, this is what meltdown feels like.
   There was a sensation of tremendous speed. A hand knocked him sprawling to the deck, although there was no sensation of multi-g force; the Tommyknockers had apparently found a way to beat that.
   The ship didn't tilt; it simply rose straight up into the air.
   Instead of blotting out the whole sky, it blotted out only three-quarters, then half. It grew indistinct in the smoke, its hard-edged metal-alloy reality growing fuzzy, and thus dreamy.
   Then it was gone in the smoke, leaving only the dazed, drained Tommyknockers to try and find their feet before the fire could overtake them. It left the Tommyknockers, and the clearing, the lean-to . . . and the trench, like a black socket from which some poisonous fang had been drawn.

47

   Gard lay on the floor of the control room, staring upward. As he watched, the smoky, chromed look of the sky disappeared. It became blue again – the brightest, clearest blue he had ever seen.
   Gorgeous, he tried to say, but no word came out – not even a croak. He swallowed blood and coughed, his eyes never leaving that brilliant sky.
   Its blue deepened to indigo … then to purple.
   Please don't let it stop now, please
   Purple to black.
   And now in that blackness he saw the first hard chips of stars.
   The Klaxon blared again. He felt fresh pain as the ship drew from him, and there was a sensation of increasing speed as it slipped into a higher gear.
   Where are we going? Gardener thought incoherently, and then the blackness overtook him as the ship fled up and out, escaping the envelope of the earth's atmosphere as easily as it had escaped the ground which had held it for so long. Where are we – ?
   Up and up, out and out – the ship rose and Jim Gardener, born in Portland, Maine, went with it.
   He drifted down through black levels of unconsciousness, and shortly before the final vomiting began – a vomiting of which he was never even aware – he had a dream. A dream so real that he smiled as he lay in the middle of blackness, surrounded by space and with the earth below him like a giant blue-gray croaker marble.
   He had gotten through it – somehow gotten through it. Patricia McCardle had tried to break him, but she had never quite been able to do it. Now he was back in Haven, and there was Bobbi coming down the porch steps and across the dooryard to meet him, and Peter was barking and wagging his tail, and Gard grabbed Bobbi and hugged her, because it was good to be with your friends, good to be where you belonged … good to have some safe haven to come to.
   Lying on the transparent floor of the control room, already better than seventy thousand miles out in space, Jim Gardener lay in a widening pool of his own blood … and smiled.

EPILOGUE

   Curl up, baby! Curl up tight! Curl up, baby! Keep it all outta sight! Undercover Keep it all outta sight, Under cover of the night.
   –The Rolling Stones, 'Undercover'
   0 every night and every day A little piece of you is falling away … Toe your line and play their game Let the anaesthetic cover it all Till one day they call your name: You're only waiting for the hammer to fall.
   –Queen, 'Hammer to Fall'

1

   Most of them died in the fire.
   Not all; a hundred or more never reached the clearing at all before the ship pulled itself out of the ground and disappeared into the sky. Some, like Elt Barker, who had gone flying off his motorcycle, did not reach it because they had been wounded or killed on the way … fortunes of war. Others, like Ashley Ruvall and old Miss Timms, who was the town librarian on Tuesdays and Thursdays, were simply too late or too slow.
   Nor were all of those who did reach the clearing killed. The ship had gone into the sky and the awful, draining power which had seized them dwindled away to nothing before the fire reached the clearing (although by then sparks were drifting down and many of the smaller trees at the eastern edge were blazing). Some of them managed to stumble and limp further into the woods ahead of that spreading, fiery fan. Of course, going straight west was no good to these few (Rosalie Skehan was among them, as were Frank Spruce and Rudy Barfield, brother of the late and mostly unlamented Pits), because eventually they would run out of breathable air, in spite of the prevailing winds. So it was necessary to first go west, and then turn either south or north in an effort to buttonhook around the fire-front … a desperation play where the penalty for failure was not losing the ball but being roasted to cinders in Big Injun Woods. A few – not all, but a few – actually did make it.
   Most, however, died in the clearing where Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener had worked so long and hard – died within feet of that empty socket where something had been buried and then pulled.
   They had been used roughly by a power which was much greater than the early, tentative state of their 'becoming' could cope with. The ship had reached out to the net of their minds, seized it, and used it to obey the Controller's weak but unmistakable command, which had been expressed as WARP SPEED to the ship's organic-cybernetic circuits. The words WARP SPEED were not in the ship's vocabulary, but the concept was clear.
   The living lay on the ground, most unconscious, some deeply dazed. A few sat up, holding their heads and moaning, oblivious of the sparks drifting down around them. Some, mindful of the danger coming from the east, tried to get up and fell back.
   One of those who did not fall back was Chip McCausland, who lived on Dugout Road with his common-law wife and about ten kids; two months and a million years ago, Bobbi Anderson had gone to Chip for more egg cartons to hold her expanding collection of batteries. Chip shambled halfway across the clearing like an old drunk and fell into the empty trench. He tumbled, shrieking, all the way to the bottom, where he died of a broken neck and a shattered skull.
   Others who understood the danger of the fire and who could possibly have gotten away elected not to do so. The 'becoming' was at an end. It had ended with the departure of the ship. The purpose of their lives had been canceled. So they only sat and waited for the fire to take care of what remained of them .

2

   By nightfall, there were less than two hundred people left alive in Haven. Most of the township's heavily wooded western half had burned or was burning flat. The wind grew stronger yet. The air began to change, and the remaining Tommyknockers, gasping and whey-faced, gathered in Hazel McCready's yard. Phil Golden and Bryant Brown got the big air-exchanger going. The survivors gathered around it as homesteaders might once have gathered around a stove on a bitter night. Their tortured breathing gradually ceased.
   Bryant looked over at Phil.
   Weather for tomorrow?
   Clear skies, diminishing winds.
   Marie was standing nearby, and Bryant saw her relax.
   Good that's good.
   And so it was … for the time being. But the winds were not going to remain calm for the rest of their lives. And with the ship gone, there was only this gadget and the twenty-four truck batteries between them and eventual strangulation.
   How long? Bryant asked, and no one answered. There was only the flat shine of their frightened, inhuman eyes in the fireshot night.

3

   The following morning there were twenty less. During the night John Leandro's story had broken worldwide, with all the force of a hammerfall. State and Defense Departments denied everything, but dozens of people had taken photographs as the ship rose. These photographs were persuasive … and no one could stop the flood of leaks from such 'informed sources' as frightened residents of the surrounding towns and the first arriving National Guardsmen.
   The Haven border-barriers held, at least for the time being. The fire-front had advanced into Newport, where the flames were finally being brought under control.
   Several Tommyknockers blew their brains out in the night.
   Poley Andrews swallowed Dran-O.
   Phil Golden awoke to discover that Queenie, his wife of twenty years, had jumped into Hazel McCready's dry well.
   That day there were only four suicides, but the nights … the nights were worse.
   By the time the Army finally broke into Haven, like inept burglars into a strong safe, later that week, there were less than eighty Tommyknockers left.
   Justin Hurd shot a fat Army sergeant with a kid's Daisy air rifle that squirted green fire. The fat sergeant exploded. A scared E-4 in the APC just then roaring past Cooder's market turned the .50 caliber he was sitting behind on Justin Hurd, who was standing in front of the hardware store, wearing only a yellowing pair of Hanes underpants and his orange work-shoes.
   'Fixed them woodchucks!' Justin was screaming. 'Fixed them all, you're fucking-A, you're – '
   Then he was hit by some twenty .50 caliber slugs. Justin nearly exploded, too.
   The E-4 puked into his gas mask and nearly choked on the stuff before someone could get a fresh one over his face.
   'Someone get that popgun!' a major shouted through an electric bullhorn. His mask muffled his words but did not destroy them. 'Get it, but be careful! Pick it up by the barrel! I repeat, be extremely careful! Don't point it at anyone!'
   Pointing it at someone, Gard would have said, always comes later.

4

   More than a dozen were shot down on the first day of the invasion by scared, trigger-happy soldiers, kids, most of them, who pursued the Tommyknockers from house to house. After a while, some of the invaders' fear began to rub off. By afternoon they were actually having fun – they were like men driving rabbits through wheat. Two dozen more were killed before the Army doctors and Pentagon brain-trusters realized that the air outside of Haven was lethal to these freak-show mutations who had once been American taxpayers. The fact that the invaders could not breathe the air inside Haven would have seemed to have made the converse self-evident, but in all the excitement, no one was really thinking very well (Gard wouldn't have found this very surprising).
   Now there were only forty or so. Most were insane; those who weren't wouldn't talk. A makeshift stockade was built in the area which passed for a town square in Haven Village – just below and to the right of the towerless town hall. They were kept there for another week, and during that period another fourteen died.
   The changed air was analyzed; the machine which manufactured it was carefully studied; the failing batteries were replaced. As Bobbi had suggested, it didn't take the brain-trusters long to understand the mechanics of the device. and the underlying principles were already being studied at MIT, Cal Tech, Bell Labs, and the Shop in Virginia by scientists who were nearly vomiting with excitement.
   The remaining twenty-six Tommyknockers, looking like the weary, pox raddled remnants of the final Apache tribe in existence, were flown in the controlled-environment cargo-bay of a C-140 Starlifter to a government installation in Virginia. This installation, which had once been burned to the ground by a child, was the Shop. There they were studied … and there they died, one by one.
   The last survivor was Alice Kimball, the schoolteacher who was a lesbian (a fact 'Becka Paulson had learned from Jesus one hot day in July). She died on October 31st … Halloween.

5

   At about the same time Queenie Golden was standing on the edge of Hazel's dry well and preparing to jump in, a nurse stepped into Hilly Brown's room to check on the boy, who had shown some faint signs of returning consciousness over the last couple of days.
   She looked at the bed, and frowned. She couldn't be seeing what she was seeing -it was an illusion of some kind, a double shadow thrown onto the wall by the light from the corridor
   She flipped the wall switch and took a step closer. Her mouth dropped open. It hadn't been an illusion. There were two shadows on the wall because there were two boys in the bed. They slept with their arms wrapped around each other.
   'What – ?'
   She took another step, her hand going unconsciously to the crucifix she wore around her neck.
   One of them, of course, was Hilly Brown, his face thin and wasted, his arms seemingly no thicker than sticks, his skin nearly as white as his hospital johnny.
   She didn't know the other boy, who was very young. He was wearing blue shorts and a T-shirt which read THEY CALL ME DR LOVE. His feet were black with dirt … and something about that dirt seemed unnatural to her.
   'What – ?' she whispered again, and the younger boy stirred and wrapped his arms more tightly around Hilly's neck. His cheek rested against Hilly's shoulder, and she saw with something like terror that the boys looked very much alike.
   She decided she had to tell Dr Greenleaf about this. Right now. She turned to leave, heart beating fast, one hand still clutching at her crucifix … and saw something that was quite impossible.
   'What – ?' she whispered for the third and last time. Her eyes were very wide.
   More of that strange black dirt. On the floor. Tracks on the floor. Leading to the bed. The little boy had crossed to the bed and gotten in. The two boys' facial resemblance suggested that this was Hilly's missing – and long since presumed dead – brother.
   The tracks didn't come from the hall. They started in the middle of the floor.
   As if the little boy had come from nowhere.
   The nurse bolted from the room, screaming for Dr Greenleaf.

6

   Hilly Brown opened his eyes.
   'David?'
   'Shut up, Hilly, I'm sleepun.'
   Hilly smiled, not sure where he was, not sure when he was, sure only that many things had been wrong – just what those things had been no longer mattered, because everything was okay now. David was here, warm and solid against him.
   'Me too,' Hilly said. 'We got to trade G.I Joes tomorrow.'
   'Why?'
   'I dunno. But we got to. I promised.'
   'When?'
   'I dunno.'
   'As long as I get Crystal Ball,' David said, settling himself more firmly into the crook of Hilly's arm.
   'Well okay.'
   Silence there was a dim commotion at the nurses' station down the hall, but here there was silence, and the sweet warmth of boys.
   'Hilly?'
   'What?' Hilly muttered.
   'It was cold where I was.'
   'Was it?'
   'Yes.'
   'Better now?'
   'Better. I love you, Hilly.'
   'I love you too, David. I'm sorry.'
   'For what?'
   'I dunno.'
   'Oh.'
   David's hand groped for the blanket, found it, and pulled it up. Ninety-three million miles from the sun and a hundred parsecs from the axis-pole of the galaxy, Hilly and David Brown slept in each other's arms.

   August 19th, 1982
   May 19th, 1987

The Stand


AUTHOR’S NOTE
   
The Stand is a work of fiction, as its subject matter makes perfectly clear. Many of the events occur in real places—such as Ogunquit, Maine; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Boulder, Colorado—and with these places I have taken the liberty of changing them to whatever degree best suited the course of my fiction. I hope that those readers who live in these and the other real places that are mentioned in this novel will not be too upset by my “monstrous impertinence,” to quote Dorothy Sayers, who indulged freely in the same sort of thing. Other places, such as Arnette, Texas, and Shoyo, Arkansas, are as fictional as the plot itself. Special thanks are due to Russell Dorr (P.A.) and Dr. Richard Herman, both of the Bridgton Family Medical Center, who answered my questions about the nature of the flu, and its peculiar way of mutating every two years or so, and to Susan Artz Manning of Castine, who proofed the original manuscript. Most thanks of all to Bill Thompson and Betty Prashker, who made this book happen in the best way. S.K.