Chapter 48
 
 He came staggering and flapping up a long upgrade, the heat of the sun stewing his stomach and baking his brains. The interstate shimmered with reflected radiant heat. He had been Donald Merwin Elbert once, now he was Trashcan Man forever and ever, and he beheld the fabled City, Seven-in-One, Cibola.
   How long had he been traveling west? How long since The Kid? God might know; Trashcan Man did not. It had been days. Nights. Oh, he remembered the nights!
   He stood, swaying in his rags, looking down at Cibola, the City that is Promised, the City of Dreams. He was a wreck. The wrist that he had broken when he leaped the railing of the stairway bolted to the Cheery Oil tank had not healed right, and that wrist was a grotesque lump wrapped in a dirty, unraveling Ace bandage. All the bones in the fingers of that hand had pulled up somehow, turning the hand into a Quasimodo claw. His left arm was a slowly healing mass of burn tissue from elbow to shoulder. It no longer smelled bad and suppurated, but the new flesh was hairless and pink, like the skin of a cheap doll. His grinning, mad face was sunburned, peeling, scruffy-bearded, and covered with scabs from the header he had taken when the front wheel of his bike had parted company from the frame. He wore a faded blue J.C. Penney workshirt that was marked with expanding rings of sweatstain and a dirty pair of corduroy trousers. His pack, which had been new not so long ago, had now taken on the style and substance of its owner—one strap had broken, Trash had knotted it as best he could, and the pack now hung askew on his back like a shutter on a haunted house. It was dusty, its creases filled with desert sand. On his feet were Keds now bound together with hanks of twine, and from them his scratched and sand-chafed ankles rose innocent of socks.
   He stared at the city far ahead and below. He turned his face up to the savage gunmetal sky and to the sun that blared down, coating him with furnace heat. He screamed. It was a savage, triumphant scream, very much like the one Susan Stern had uttered when she split Roger Rabbit’s skull with the butt of his own shotgun.
   He began to do a shuffling, victorious dance on the hot, shimmering surface of Interstate 15 while the desert sirocco blew sand across the highway and the blue peaks of the Pahranagat and Spotted ranges sawed their teeth indifferently at the brilliant sky as they had done for millennia. Off the other side of the highway, a Lincoln Continental and a T-Bird were now almost buried in sand, their occupants mummified behind safety glass. Up ahead on Trashcan’s side was an overturned pickup, everything covered but the wheels and the rocker panels.
   He danced. His feet, clad in the lashed and bulging Keds, bumped up and down on the highway in a drunken sort of hornpipe. The tattered tail of his shirt flapped. His canteen clunked against his pack. The unraveling ends of the Ace bandage fluttered in the hot breath of the wind. Pink, smooth burn tissue gleamed rawly. Clocksprings of veins bulged at his temples. He had been in God’s frying pan for a week now, moving southwest across Utah, the tip of Arizona, and then into Nevada, and he was just as mad as a hatter.
   As he danced, he sang monotonously, the same words over and over, to a tune that had been popular when he was in the Terre Haute institution, a song called “Down to the Nightclub” that had been done by a black group called Tower of Power. But the words were his own. He sang:
   “Ci-a-bola, Ci-a-bola, bump-ty, bump-ty, bump! Ci-a-bola, Ci-a-bola, bump-ty, bump-ty, bump! ” Each final “bump! ” was followed by a little skipping leap until the heat made everything swim and the harsh bright sky went twilight gray and he collapsed on the road, half fainting, his taxed heart thundering crazily in his arid chest. With the last of his strength, blubbering and grinning, he pulled himself over the overturned pickup truck and lay in its diminishing shade, shivering in the heat and panting.
   “Cibola!” He croaked. “Bumpty-bumpty-bump! ”
   He fumbled his canteen off his shoulder with his claw hand and shook it. The canteen was nearly empty. Didn’t matter. He would drink every single drop and lay up here until the sun went down, and then he would walk down the highway and into Cibola, fabled City. Seven-in-One. Tonight he would drink from ever-springing fountains faced in gold. But not until the killer sun went down. God was the greatest firebug of them all. A long time ago a boy named Donald Merwin Elbert had burned up old lady Semple’s pension check. That same boy had torched the Methodist Church in Powtanville, and if there had been anything left of Donald Merwin Elbert in this shell, it had surely been cremated with the oiltanks in Gary, Indiana. Over nine dozen of them, and they had gone up like a walloping string of firecrackers. Just in time for the Fourth of July, too. Nice. And in the wake of that conflagration, only the Trashcan Man had been left, his left arm a cracked and boiling stew, a fire inside his body that was never going to go out… at least not until his body was so much blackened charcoal.
   And tonight he would drink the water of Cibola, yes, and it would taste like wine.
   He upended the canteen and his throat worked as the last of his water, pisswarm, gurgled down into his belly. When it was gone, he threw the canteen out into the desert. Sweat had broken on his forehead like dew. He lay shivering deliciously with water cramps.
   “Cibola!” He muttered. “Cibola! I’m coming! I’m coming! I’ll do whatever you want! My life for you! Bumpty-bumpty-bump! ”
   Drowsiness began to steal over him now that his thirst was a little slaked. He was nearly asleep when a polar thought slipped up through the floor of his mind like an icy stiletto blade:
   What if Cibola had been a mirage?
   “No,” he muttered. “No, uh-uh, no.”
   But simple denial would not drive the thought off. The blade probed and poked, keeping sleep at arm’s length. What if he had drunk the last of his water in celebration of a mirage? In his own way he recognized his madness, and that was the sort of thing mad people did, right enough. If it had been a mirage, he would die here in the desert and the buzzards would dine on him.
   At last, unable to bear the hideous possibility any longer, he staggered to his feet and made his way back to the road, fighting off the waves of faintness and nausea that wanted to take him down. At the breast of the hill he stared out anxiously into the long flat plain below, studded with yucca and tumbleweed and devil’s mantilla. His breath caught in his throat and unraveled into a sigh, like a sleeve of fabric on a spike.
   It was there!
   Cibola, fabled of old, searched for by many, found by the Trashcan Man!
   Far down in the desert, surrounded by blue mountains, blue itself in the haze of distance, its towers and avenues gleamed in the desert day. There were palm trees… he could see palm trees… and movement… and water!
   “Oh, Cibola…” he crooned, and staggered back to the shade of the pickup. It was farther than it looked, he knew that. Tonight, after God’s torch had left the sky, he would walk as he never had before. He would reach Cibola and his first act would be to plunge headlong into the first fountain he came to. Then he would find him, the man who had bade him come here. The man who had drawn him across the plains and the mountains and finally into the desert, all in a month’s time and despite his horribly burned arm.
   He who Is —the dark man, the hardcase. He waited for Trashcan Man in Cibola, and his were the armies of the night, his were the white-faced riders of the dead who would sweep out of the west and into the very face of the rising sun. They would come raving and grinning and stinking of sweat and gunpowder. There would be shrieks, and Trashcan cared very little for shrieks, there would be rape and subjugation, things about which he cared even less, there would be murder, which was immaterial—
   –and there would be a Great Burning.
   About that he cared very much. In the dreams the dark man came to him and spread out his arms from a high place and showed Trashcan a country in flames. Cities going up like bombs. Cultivated fields drawn in lines of fire. The very rivers of Chicago and Pittsburgh and Detroit and Birmingham ablaze with floating oil. And the dark man had told him a very simple thing in his dreams, a thing which had brought him running: I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want.
   He rolled on his side, his cheeks and eyelids chafed and irritated from the blowing sand. He had been losing hope—yes, ever since the wheel had fallen off his bike he had been losing hope. God, the God of father-killing sheriffs, the God of Carley Yates, was stronger than the dark man after all, it seemed. Yet he had kept his faith and had kept on. And at last, when it seemed he was going to burn up in this desert before he ever got to Cibola where the dark man waited, he had seen it far below, dreaming in the sun.
   “Cibola!” he whispered, and slept.
   The first dream had come to him in Gary, over a month ago, after he had burned his arm. He had gone to sleep that night sure that he was going to die; no one could be burned as badly as he was and live. A refrain had beaten its way into his head: Live by the torch, die by the torch. Live by it, die by it.
   His legs had given out in a small city park and he had fallen down, his left arm sprawled out and away from him like a dead thing, the shirtsleeve smoked off. The pain was giant, incredible. He had never dreamed there could be such pain in the world. He had been running gleefully from one set of oil tanks to the next, setting up crude timing devices, each constructed of a steel pipe and a flammable paraffin mixture separated from a little pool of acid by a steel tab. He had been pushing these devices into the outflow pipes on top of the tanks. When the acid ate through the steel the paraffin would ignite, and that would cause the tanks to blow. He had planned to get over to the west side of Gary, near the confusion of interchanges leading various roads toward Chicago or Milwaukee, before any of them blew. He wanted to watch the show as the entire dirty city went up in a firestorm.
   But he had misjudged the last device or constructed it badly. It had gone off while he worked at opening the cap on the outflow with a pipewrench. There had been a blinding white flare as burning paraffin belched out of the tube, coating his left arm with fire. This was no painless flameglove of lighter fluid, to be waved in the air and then shaken out like a big match. This was agony, like having your arm in a volcano.
   Shrieking, he had run wildly around the top of the oiltank, careering off the waist-high railings like a human pinball. If the railings had not been there, he would have plunged over the side and fallen, turning over and over, like a torch dropped down a well. Only accident saved his life; his feet tangled in each other and he fell with his left arm pinned under him, smothering the flames.
   He sat up, still half-crazy with the pain. Later he would think that only blind luck—or the dark man’s purpose—had saved him from being burned to death. Most of the paraffin jet had missed him. So he was thankful—but his thankfulness only came later. At the time he could only cry out and rock back and forth, holding his crisped arm out from his body as the skin smoked and crackled and contracted.
   Vaguely, as the light faded from the sky, it occurred to him that he had already set a dozen of the time-devices. They might go anytime. Dying and being out of his exquisite misery would be wonderful; dying in flames would be utter horror.
   Somehow he had crawled down from the tank and had staggered away, weaving and lunging in and out of the dead traffic, holding his barbecued left arm away from his body.
   By the time he reached a small park near the center of town, it was sunset. He sat on the grass between two shuffleboard courts, trying to think what you did for burns. Put butter on them, that’s what Donald Merwin Elbert’s mother would have said. But that was for a scald, or when the bacon fat jumped extra high and spattered you with hot grease. He couldn’t imagine putting butter on the cracked and blackened mess between his elbow and shoulder; couldn’t even imagine touching it.
   Kill himself. That was it, that was the ticket. He would put himself out of his misery like an old dog—
   There was a sudden gigantic explosion on the east side of town, as if the fabric of existence had been torn briskly in two. A liquid pillar of fire shot up against dusk’s deepening indigo. He had to squeeze his eyes to watering, protesting slits against it.
   Even in his agony, the fire pleased him… more, it delighted, fulfilled him. The fire was the best medicine, even better than the morphine he found the next day (as a trusty in prison he had worked in the infirmary as well as the library and the motorpool, and he knew about morphine and Elavil and Darvon Complex). He did not connect his present agony to the pillar of fire. He only knew that the fire was good, the fire was beautiful, the fire was something he needed and would always need. Wonderful fire!
   Moments later a second oiltank exploded and even here, three miles away, he could feel the warm push of expanding air. Another tank went, and another. A slight pause, and then six of them went up in a rattling string and now it was too bright over there to look at but he looked anyway, grinning, his eyes full of yellow flames, his wounded arm forgotten, thoughts of suicide forgotten.
   It took better than two hours for all of them to go up, and by then dark had fallen but it wasn’t dark, the night was yellow and orange and feverish with flames. The entire eastern arc of the horizon danced with fire. It reminded him of a Classic funnybook he had owned as a child, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Now, years later, the boy who had owned that funnybook was gone, but the Trashcan Man was here, and Trash owned the wonderful, terrible secret of the Martians’ deathray.
   It was time to leave the park. Already the temperature had risen ten degrees. He ought to go west, stay ahead of the fire the way he had in Powtanville, racing the expanding arc of destruction. But he was in no condition to race. And so he fell asleep on the grass, and the firelight played over the face of a tired, ill-used child.
   In his dream, the dark man came in his hooded robe, his face invisible… yet the Trashcan Man thought he had seen this man before. When the loungers in the candy store and the beer parlor back in Powtanville catcalled at him, it seemed that this man had been among them, silent and thoughtful. When he had worked at the Scrubba-Dubba (soap the headlights, knock the wipers, soap the rocker panels, hey mister you want hotwax on that?), wearing the sponge glove on his right hand until the hand beneath looked like a pale dead fish, the nails as white as fresh ivory, it seemed he had seen this man’s face, fiery and grinning with lunatic joy from beneath the rippling film of water rolling down the windshield. When the sheriff had sent him away to the nuthatch in Terre Haute, he had been the grinning psych aide standing above his head in the room where they gave you the shocks, his hands on the controls (I’m gonna fry your brains out, boy, help you on your way as you change from Donald Merwin Elbert into the Trashcan Man, would you like hotwax on that?), ready to send about a thousand volts zizzing into his brain. He knew this dark man all right, his was the face you could never quite see, his the hands which dealt all spades from a dead deck, his the eyes beyond the flames, his the grin from beyond the grave of the world.
   “I’ll do whatever you want,” he said gratefully in the dream. “My life for you!”
   The dark man had lifted his arms inside his robe, turning the robe into the shape of a black kite. They stood on a high place, and below them, America lay in flames.
   I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want.
   Then he saw an army of ten thousand raggle-taggle castoff men and women driving east, driving across the desert and into the mountains, a rough beast of an army whose time had come round at last; they loaded down trucks and jeeps and Wagoneers and campers and tanks; each man and woman wore a dark stone about his or her neck, and deep in some of those stones was a red shape that might have been an Eye or might have been a Key. And riding in their van, atop a giant tanker with pillow tires, he saw himself, and knew that the truck was filled with jellied napalm… and behind him, in column, were trucks loaded with pressure bombs and Teller mines and plastic explosive; flame throwers and flares and heat-seeking missiles; grenades and machine guns and rocket launchers. The dance of death was about to begin, and already the strings of the fiddles and guitars were smoking and the stench of brimstone and cordite filled the air.
   The dark man lifted his arms again and when he dropped them everything was cold and silent, the fires gone, even the ashes cold, and for just a moment he was only Donald Merwin Elbert again, small and afraid and confused. For just that moment he suspected he was just another pawn in the dark man’s huge chess game, that he had been deceived.
   Then he saw the dark man’s face was no longer entirely hidden; two dark red coals burned in the sunken pits where his eyes should have been, and illuminated a nose as narrow as a blade.
   “I’ll do whatever you want,” Trash said gratefully in the dream. “My life for you! My soul for you!”
   “I will set you to burn,” the dark man said gravely. “You must come to my city and there all will be made clear.”
   “Where? Where?” He was in an agony of hope and expectation.
   “West,” the dark man said, fading. “West. Beyond the mountains.”
   He woke up then, and it was still night and still bright. The flames were closer. The heat was stifling. Houses were exploding. The stars were gone, shrouded in a thick pall of oilsmoke. A fine rain of soot had begun. The shuffleboard courts were dusted with black snow.
   Now that he had a purpose, he found he could walk. He limped west, and from time to time he saw a few others leaving Gary, looking back over their shoulders at the conflagration. Fools, Trash thought, almost affectionately. You’ll burn. In good time, you’ll burn. They took no notice of him; to them, the Trashcan Man was only another survivor. They disappeared into the smoke and sometime after dawn Trashcan Man limped across the Illinois state line. Chicago was north of him, Joliet to the southwest, the fire lost in its own horizon-blotting smoke behind. That had been the dawn of July 2.
   He had forgotten his dreams of burning Chicago to the ground—his dreams of more oiltanks and freightcars full of LP gas tucked away on railroad sidings and the tinder-dry tenements. He didn’t care a fig for the Windy City. That afternoon he broke into a Chicago Heights doctor’s office and stole a case of morphine syrettes. The morphine drove back the pain a little, but it had a more important side-effect: it made him care less about the pain he did feel.
   He took a huge jar of Vaseline from a drugstore that night and packed the burned part of his arm in an inch of the jelly. He was very thirsty; it seemed he wanted to drink all of the time. Fantasies of the dark man buzzed in and out of his mind like blowflies. When he collapsed at dusk, he had already begun to think that the city the dark man was directing him to must be Cibola, Seven-in-One, the City that is Promised.
   That night the dark man came to him again in his dreams, and with a sardonic giggle confirmed that this was so.
   Trashcan Man awoke from these confused dream-memories of what had been to shivering desert cold. In the desert it was always ice or fire; there was no in-between.
   Moaning a little, he stood up, holding himself as close to himself as he could. Overhead a trillion stars gleamed, seeming almost close enough to touch, bathing the desert in their cold witchlight.
   He walked back to the road, wincing at his chafed and tender skin, and his many aches and pains. They were little to him now. He paused for a moment looking down at the city, dreaming in the night (there were little sparks of light here and there, like electric campfires). Then he began to walk.
   When dawn began to color the sky hours later, Cibola seemed almost as distant as it had when he first came over the rise and saw it. And he had foolishly drunk all of his water, forgetting how magnified things looked out here. He didn’t dare walk for long after sunrise because of the dehydration. He would have to lie up again before the sun rose in all its power.
   An hour past dawn he came to a Mercedes-Benz off the road, its right side drifted in sand up to the door panels. He opened one of the left side doors and pulled the two wrinkled, monkeylike occupants out—an old woman wearing a lot of bangled jewelry, an old man with theatrical-looking white hair. Muttering, Trash took the keys from the ignition, went around, and opened the trunk. Their suitcases were not locked. He hung a variety of clothes over the windows of the Mercedes, weighting them down with rocks. Now he had a cool, dim cave.
   He crawled in and went to sleep. Miles to the west, the city of Las Vegas gleamed in the light of the summer sun.
   He couldn’t drive a car, they had never taught him that in prison, but he could ride a bike. On July 4, the day that Larry Underwood discovered Rita Blakemoor had overdosed and died in her sleep, Trashcan Man took a ten-speed and began to ride. At first his progress was slow, because his left arm wasn’t much good to him. He fell off twice that first day, once squarely on his burn, causing terrible agony. By then the burn was suppurating freely through the Vaseline and the smell was terrific. He wondered from time to time about gangrene but would not allow himself to wonder for long. He began to mix the Vaseline with an antiseptic ointment, not knowing if it would help, but feeling it certainly couldn’t hurt any. It made a milky, viscous gloop that looked like semen.
   Little by little he adjusted to riding the bike mostly one-handed and found that he could make good speed. The land had flattened out and most of the time he could keep the bike speeding giddily along. He drove himself steadily in spite of the burn and the light-headedness that came from being constantly stoned on morphine. He drank gallons of water and ate prodigiously. He pondered the dark man’s words: I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want. How lovely those words were—had anyone really wanted him before? The words played over and over in his mind as he pedaled under the hot Midwestern sun. And he began to hum the melody of a little tune called “Down to the Nightclub” under his breath. The words (“Ci-a-bola! Bumpty-bumpty-bump! ”) came in their own good time. He was not then as insane as he was to become, but he was advancing.
   On July 8, the day Nick Andros and Tom Cullen saw buffalo grazing in Comanche County, Kansas, Trashcan Man crossed the Mississippi at the Quad Cities of Davenport, Rock Island, Bettendorf, and Moline. He was in Iowa.
   On the fourteenth, the day Larry Underwood woke up near the big white house in eastern New Hampshire, Trashy crossed the Missouri north of Council Bluffs and entered Nebraska. He had regained some use of his left hand, his leg muscles had toned up, and he pressed on, feeling a huge need to hurry, hurry.
   It was on the west side of the Missouri that Trash first suspected that God Himself might intervene between Trashcan Man and his destiny. There was something wrong about Nebraska, something dreadfully wrong. Something that made him afraid. It looked about the same as Iowa… but it wasn’t. The dark man had come to him every previous night in dreams, but when Trashy crossed into Nebraska, the dark man came no more.
   Instead, he began to dream about an old woman. In these dreams he would find himself belly-down in a cornfield, almost paralyzed with hate and fear. It was bright morning. He could hear flocks of crows cawing. In front of him was a screen of broad, sword-like corn-leaves. Not wanting to, but powerless to stop himself, he would spread the leaves with a shaking hand and peer between them. He saw an old house in the middle of a clearing. The house was up on blocks or jacks or something. There was an apple tree with a tire swing hanging from one of the branches. And sitting on the porch was an old black woman playing a guitar and singing some old-time spiritual song. The song varied from dream to dream and Trashcan knew most of them because he had once known a woman, the mother of a boy named Donald Merwin Elbert, who had sung many of the same songs as she did her housework.
   This dream was a nightmare, but not just because something exceedingly horrible happened at the end of it. At first you would have said there wasn’t a frightening element in the whole dream. Corn? Blue sky? Old woman? Tire swing? What could be frightening about those things? Old women didn’t throw rocks and jeer, especially not old women that sang old-home Jesus-jumping songs like “In That Great Getting-Up Morning” and “Bye-and-Bye, Sweet Lord, Bye-and-Bye.” It was the Carley Yateses of the world who threw rocks.
   But long before the dream ended he was paralyzed with fear, as if it wasn’t an old woman at all he was peeking at but at some secret, some barely concealed light that seemed ready to break out all around her, to play over her with a fiery brilliance that would make the flaming oiltanks of Gary seem like so many candles in the wind—a light so bright it would chalk his eyes to cinders. And during this part of the dream all he thought was: Oh please get me away from her, I don’t want no part of that old biddy, please oh please get me out of Nebraska!
   Then whatever song she had been playing would come to a discordant, jangling stop. She would look right at the place where he was peeping through a tiny loophole in the broad lattice of leaves. Her face was old and seamed with wrinkles, her hair was thin enough to show her brown skull, but her eyes were bright as diamonds, full of the light he feared.
   In an old, cracked, but strong voice she would cry out: Weasels in the corn! and he would feel the change in himself and would look down to see he had become a weasel, a terry, brownish-black slinking thing, his nose grown long and sharp, his eyes melted down to beady black points, his fingers turned into claws. He was a weasel, a cowardly nocturnal thing preying on the weak and the small.
   He would begin to scream then, and eventually he would scream himself awake, streaming with sweat and buggy-eyed. His hands would fly over his body, reassuring himself that all his human parts were still there. At the end of this panicky check he would grip his head, making sure it was still a human head and not something long and sleek and streamlined, furry and bullet-shaped.
   He crossed four hundred miles of Nebraska in three days, running mostly on high octane terror. He crossed into Colorado near Julesburg, and the dream began to fade and grow sepia-toned.
   (For Mother Abagail’s part, she woke on the night of July 15—shortly after Trashcan Man had passed north of Hemingford Home—with a terrible chill and a feeling that was both fear and pity; pity for whom or for what she did not know. She thought she might have been dreaming of her grandson Anders, who had been killed senselessly in a hunting accident when he was but six.)
   On July 18, then southwest of Sterling, Colorado, and still some miles from Brush, he had met The Kid.
   Trash woke up just as twilight was falling. In spite of the clothes he had hung over the windows, the Mercedes had gotten hot. His throat was a dry well which had been faced with sandpaper. His temples thumped and jumped. He ran his tongue out, and when he stroked it with his finger, it felt like a dead treebranch. Sitting up, he put his hand on the Mercedes’ steering wheel and then drew it back with a scalded hiss of pain. He had to wrap his shirttail around the doorhandle to let himself out. He thought he would just step out, but he had overestimated his strength and underestimated how far the dehydration had advanced on this August evening: his legs collapsed and he fell onto the road, which was also hot. Moaning, he scrabbled his way into the shadow of the Mercedes like a crippled crawdad. He sat there, arms and head dangling between his cocked knees, panting. He stared morbidly at the two bodies he had pulled out of the car, she with her bangles on her shriveled arms and he with his shock of theatrical white hair above his mummified monkey-face.
   He must get to Cibola before the sun came up tomorrow morning. If he didn’t, he would die… and in sight of his goal! Surely the dark man could not be as cruel as that—surely not!
   “My life for you,” Trashcan Man whispered, and when the sun had dropped below the line of the mountains, he gained his feet and began to walk toward the towers, minarets, and avenues of Cibola, where the sparks of the lights were coming on again.
   As the heat of the day segued into the cool of the desert night, he found himself more able to walk. His sprung and rope-tied sneakers flapped and thudded against the surface of I-15. He was plodding along, his head hanging like the bloom of a dying sunflower, and did not see the green, reflectorized sign which read LAS VEGAS 30 when he passed it.
   He was thinking about The Kid. By rights The Kid should have been with him now. They should be driving into Cibola together, with the straightpipes of The Kid’s deuce coupe blatting back echoes from the desert. But The Kid had proved unworthy, and Trash had been sent on alone into the wilderness.
   His feet rose and fell on the pavement. “Ci-a-bola!” he croaked. “Bumpty-bumpty-bump! ”
   Around midnight he collapsed by the side of the road and fell into an uneasy doze. The city was closer now.
   He would make it.
   He was quite sure he would make it.
   He heard The Kid a long time before he saw him. It was the heavy, crackling roar of unmuffled straightpipes thundering toward him from the east, branding the day. The sound was coming up Highway 34 from the direction of Yuma, Colorado. His first impulse was to hide, the way he’d hidden from the few other survivors he’d seen since Gary. But this time something made him stay where he was, astride his bike on the shoulder of the road, looking back apprehensively over his shoulder.
   The thunder grew louder and louder, and then the sun was reflecting off chrome and
   (??FIRE??)
   something bright and orange.
   The driver saw him. Downshifted in a machine-gun burst of backfires. Goodyear rubber peeled off on the highway in hot swatches. And then the car was beside him, not idling but panting like a deadly animal which may or may not be tamed, and the driver was getting out. But at first Trashcan only had eyes for the car. He knew about cars, he liked cars, even though he had never gotten so much as a learner’s permit. This one was a beauty, a car someone had worked on for years, put thousands of dollars into, the kind of thing you usually only saw at funnycar shows, a labor of love.
   It was a 1932 Ford deuce coupe, but the owner had not stinted nor stopped with the usual deuce coupe customizing innovations. He had gone on and on, turning it into a parody of all American cars, a glittering science fiction vehicle with hand-painted flames billowing out of the manifold pipes. The paint job was flake gold. The chrome headpipes, which stretched almost the whole length of the car, reflected the sun fiercely. The windshield was a convex bubble. The back tires were gigantic Goodyear Wide Ovals, the wheel-wells cut to an exaggerated height and depth to accommodate them. Growing out of the hood like a weird heating duct was a supercharger. Growing out of the roof, solid black but shot with red flecks like embers, was a steel sharkfin. Written on both sides were two words, raked backward to indicate speed. THE KID, they said.
   “Hey, youall long tall an og ly,” the driver drawled, and Trash shifted his attention from the painted flames to the driver of this rolling bomb.
   He stood about five feet three inches. His hair was piled and swirled and pomaded and brilliantined. The hair alone gave him another three inches of height. The swirls all met above his collar in what was not just a duck’s ass but the avatar of all the duck’s-ass hairdos ever affected by the punks and hoods of the world. He was wearing black boots with pointed toes. The sides were elasticized. The heels, which gave The Kid another three inches, bringing him up to a respectable five-nine total, were stacked Cubans. His pegged and faded jeans were tight enough to read the dates of the coins in his pockets. They limned each nifty little buttock into a kind of blue sculpture and made his crotch look like he’d maybe stuffed a chamois bag full of Spalding golfballs in there. He wore a Western-style silk shirt of an off-burgundy color. It was decorated with yellow trim and imitation sapphire buttons. The cufflinks looked like polished bone, and Trash later found out that was just what they were. The Kid had two sets, one made from a pair of human molars, the other from the incisors of a Doberman pinscher. Over this wonder of a shirt, in spite of the heat of the day, he wore a black leather motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back. It was crisscrossed with zippers, the teeth glimmering like diamonds. From the shoulder-flaps and waistbelt three rabbits’ feet dangled. One was white, one brown, one bright St. Paddy’s Day green. This jacket, even more wonderful than the shirt, creaked smugly with rich oil. Above the eagle, this time written in white silk thread, were the words THE KID. The face now looking up at the Trashcan Man from between the high pile of gleaming hair and the upturned collar of the gleaming motorcycle jacket was tiny and pallid, a doll’s face, with heavy but flawlessly sculpted pouting lips, dead gray eyes, a wide forehead without a mark or a seam, and strange full cheeks. He looked like Baby Elvis.
   Two gunbelts were crisscrossed on his flat belly, and a giant .45 leaned out of each of the sagging holsters on his hips.
   “Hey, boy, whatchall say?” The Kid drawled.
   And the only thing Trashcan could think of to say was, “I like your car.”
   It was the right thing. Maybe the only thing. Five minutes later Trash was in the passenger seat and the deuce coupe was accelerating up to The Kid’s cruising speed, which was about ninety-five. The bike Trash had ridden all the way from eastern Illinois was fading to a speck on the horizon.
   Timidly, Trashcan Man suggested that at such a speed The Kid would not be able to see a wreck or a stall in the road if they came to one (they had already come to several, as a matter of fact; The Kid simply slalomed around them, the Wide Ovals shrieking unheeded protest).
   “Hey, boy,” The Kid said. “I got the reflexes. I got the timin. I got three-fiffs of a second. You believe that?”
   “Yes, sir,” Trash said faintly. He felt like a man who has just used a stick to stir up a nest of snakes.
   “I like you, boy,” The Kid said in his odd, droning voice. His doll’s eyes stared out over the fluorescent orange steering wheel at the shimmering road. Large Styrofoam dice with death’s heads for pips dangled and bounced from the rearview mirror. “Getchall a beer out’n the back seat.”
   They were Coors and they were warm and Trashcan Man hated beer and he drank one fast and said how good it was.
   “Hey, boy,” The Kid said. “Coors beer’s the only beer. I’d piss Coors if I could. You believe that happy crappy?”
   Trashcan said he did indeed believe that happy crappy.
   “They call me The Kid. Outta Shreveport, Looseyanna. You know that? This here beast won every major carshow award in the South. You believe that happy crappy?”
   Trashcan Man said he did and got another warm beer. It seemed like the best move under the circumstances.
   “What they call you, boy?”
   “The Trashcan Man.”
   “The whut?” For one horrible moment the dead doll’s eyes rested on Trashcan’s face. “You jokin me, boy? Ain’t nobody jokes The Kid. An you better believe that happy crappy.”
   “I do believe it,” Trashcan said earnestly, “but that’s what they call me. Because I used to light fires in people’s trashcans and mailboxes and stuff. I set old lady Semple’s pension check on fire. I got sent to the reformatory for it. I also burned down the Methodist Church in Powtanville, Indiana.”
   “Didja? ” The Kid asked, delighted. “Boy, you sound as crazy as a rat in a shithouse. That’s okay. I like crazy people. I’m crazy myself. Tripped right outta my fuckin gourd. Trashcan Man, huh? I like that. We make a pair. The fucking Kid and the fucking Trashcan Man. Shake, Trash.”
   The Kid offered his hand and Trash shook it as quick as he could so that The Kid could put both hands back on the wheel. They whizzed around a bend and there was a Bekins semi nearly blocking the whole highway and Trashcan put his hands over his face, prepared to make an immediate transition to the astral plane. The Kid never turned a hair. The deuce coupe skittered along the left side of the highway like a waterbug and they skinned by the cab of the truck with a coat of paint to spare.
   “Close,” Trashcan said when he felt he could speak without a quaver in his voice.
   “Hey, boy,” The Kid said flatly. Then one of his doll’s eyes closed in a solemn wink. “Don’t tell me—I’ll tell you. How’s that beer? Pretty fuckin gnarly, ain’t it? Hits the spot after ridin that kiddy-bike, don’t it?”
   “It sure does,” Trashcan Man said, and took another big swallow of warm Coors. He was insane, but not yet insane enough to disagree with The Kid while he was driving. Nowhere near.
   “Well, no sense beatin around the motherfuckin bush,” The Kid said, reaching back over the seat to get his own can of suds. “I guess we’re goin to the same place.”
   “I guess so,” Trash said cautiously.
   “Gonna jine up,” The Kid said. “Goin west. Gonna get in on the motherfuckin ground floor. You believe that happy crappy?”
   “I guess so.”
   “You been gettin dreams about that boogeyman in the black flight-suit, ain’tcha?”
   “You mean the priest.”
   “I always mean what I say an say what I mean,” The Kid said flatly. “Don’t tell me, ya fuckin bug, I’ll tell you. It’s a black flight-suit, and the guy’s got goggles. Like in a John Wayne movie about Big Two. Goggles so big you can’t see his motherfuckin face. Spooky old cock-knocker, ain’t he?”
   “Yeah,” Trashcan said, and sipped his warm beer. His head was beginning to buzz.
   The Kid hunched over the orange steering wheel and began to imitate a fighter pilot—one who had done his stuff in Big Two, presumably—in a dogfight. The deuce coupe rollercoastered alarmingly from one side of the road to the other as he imitated loops and dives and barrel rolls.
   “Neeeeyaaaahhhh… eheheheheheh… budda-budda-budda… take that, ya fuckin kraut… Cap’n! Bandits at twelve o’clock!… Turn the air-cooled cannon on em, ya fuckin dipstick… takka… takka… takka-takka-takka! We got em, sir! All clear… HowOOOGAH! Stand down, fellers! HowOOOOOOOGAH! ”
   His face gained no expression as he went through this fantasy; not a single well-oiled hair fell from grace as he jerked the car back into its lane and pounded on up the road. Trashcan Man’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. A light sheen of sweat had oiled his body. He drank his beer. He had to make wee-wee.
   “But he don’t scare me,” The Kid said, as if the former topic of conversation had never lapsed. “Fuck no. He’s a hard baby, but The Kid has handled hard babies before. I shut em up and then I shut em down, just like The Boss says. You believe that happy crappy?”
   “Sure,” Trash said.
   “You dig The Boss?”
   “Sure,” Trash said. He hadn’t the slightest idea who The Boss was or had been.
   “Fuckin better dig The Boss. Listen, you know what I’m gonna do?”
   “Go west?” Trashcan Man hazarded. It seemed safe.
   The Kid looked impatient. “After I get there, I mean. After. You know what I’m gonna do after?”
   “No. What?”
   “I’m gonna lay low for a while. Check out the situation. Can you dig that happy crappy?”
   “Sure,” Trash said.
   “Fuckin A. Don’t tell me, I’ll fuckin tell you. Just check it out. Check out the big man. Then…”
   The Kid fell silent, brooding over the top of his orange steering wheel.
   “Then what?” Trashcan asked hesitantly.
   “Gonna shut him down. Send him around dead man’s curve. Put him out to pasture on the motherfuckin Cadillac Ranch. You believe it?”
   “Yeah, sure.”
   “I’m gonna take over,” The Kid said confidently. “Gonna strip his gears and leave him at the Cadillac Ranch. You stick with me, Trashman or whatever the fuck ya call yaself. We ain’t gonna eat no pork and beans. We’re gonna eat more chicken than any man ever seen.”
   The deuce coupe roared down the highway with painted flames shooting up from the manifold. Trashcan Man sat in the passenger seat, a warm beer in his lap and troubled in his mind.

It was almost dawn on the morning of August 5 when Trashcan Man entered Cibola, otherwise known as Vegas. Somewhere in the last five miles he had lost his left sneaker and now, as he walked down the curving exit ramp, his footfalls sounded like this: slap-THUMP, slap-THUMP, slap-THUMP. They sounded like the flap of a flat tire.
   He was almost done in, but a little wonder came back as he made his way down the Strip, which was jammed with dead cars and quite a few dead people, most of them well picked over by the buzzards. He had made it. He was here in Cibola. He had been tested and he had passed the test.
   He saw a hundred honky-tonk nightclubs. There were signs that read LIBERAL SLOTS, signs that said BLUEBELL WEDDING CHAPEL and 60-SECOND WEDDING BUT IT’LL LAST A LIFETIME! He saw a Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce halfway through a plate glass window of an adult bookstore. He saw a naked woman hanging upside down from a lamppost. He saw two pages of the Las Vegas Sun go riffling by. The headline that revealed itself over and over again as the paper flapped and turned was PLAGUE GROWS WORSE WASHINGTON MUTE. He saw a gigantic billboard which said NEIL DIAMOND! THE AMERICANA HOTEL JUNE 15—AUGUST 30! Someone had scrawled the words DIE LAS VEGAS FOR YOUR SINS! across the show window of a jewelry store seeming to specialize in nothing but wedding and engagement rings. He saw an overturned grand piano lying in the street like a large dead wooden horse. His eyes were full of these wonders.
   As he walked on he began to see other signs, their neon dead this midsummer for the first time in years. Flamingo. The Mint. Dunes. Sahara. Glass Slipper. Imperial. But where were the people? Where was the water?
   Hardly knowing what he was doing, letting his feet pick their own path, Trashcan turned off the Strip. His head dropped forward, his chin resting on his chest. He dozed as he walked. And when his feet tripped over the curbing, when he fell forward and gave himself a bloody nose on the pavement, when he looked up and beheld what was there, he could hardly believe it. Blood ran unnoticed from his nose to his tattered blue shirt. It was as if he was still dozing and this was his dream.
   A tall white building stretched up to the desert sky, a monolith in the desert, a needle, a monument, every bit as magnificent as the Sphinx or the Great Pyramid. The windows of its eastern face gave off the fire of the rising sun like an omen. In front of this bone-white desert edifice, flanking its entranceway, were two huge gold pyramids. Over the canopy was a great bronze medallion, and carved on it in bas-relief was the snarling head of a lion.
   Above this, also in bronze, the simple but mighty legend: MGM GRAND HOTEL.
   But what captured his eyes was what stood on the grassy quadrangle between the parking lot and the entranceway. Trashcan stared, an orgasmic shivering consuming him so fiercely that for a moment he could only prop himself on his bloody hands, the unraveling end of the Ace bandage trailing between them, and stare at the fountain with his faded blue eyes, eyes that were halfway to being glareblind by now. A little groaning noise began to escape him.
   The fountain was working. It was a gorgeous construction of stone and ivory, chased and inlaid with gold. Colored lights played over the spray, making the water purple, then yellow-orange, then red, then green. The constant ticking patter as the spray fell back into the pool was very loud.
   “Cibola,” he muttered, and struggled to his feet. His nose was still dripping blood.
   He began to stagger toward the fountain. His stagger became a trot. The trot became a run, the run a sprint, the sprint a mad dash. His scabbed knees rose, pistonlike, almost to his neck. A word began to fly out of his mouth, a long word like a paper streamer that rose to the sky, bringing people to the windows high above (and who saw them? God, perhaps, or the devil, but certainly not the Trashcan Man). The word grew higher and shriller, longer and longer as he approached the fountain and that word was:
   “CIIIIIIIIBOLAAAAAAAA!”
   The final “aahh” sound drew out and out, a sound of all the pleasures that all the people who have ever lived on the earth have ever known, and it ended only when he struck the lip of the fountain chest-high and yanked himself up and over and into a bath of incredible coolness and mercy. He could feel the pores of his body open like a million mouths and slurp the water in like a sponge. He screamed. He lowered his head, snorted in water, and blew it back out in a combined sneeze and cough that sent blood and water and snot against the side of the fountain in a splat. He lowered his head and drank like a cow.
   “Cibola! Cibola!” Trash cried rapturously. “My life for you!”
   He dogpaddled his way around the fountain, drank again, then climbed over the edge and fell onto the grass with an awkward thump. It had all been worth it, everything had been worth it. Water cramps struck him and he suddenly threw up with a loud grunt. Even throwing up felt grand.
   He got to his feet, and holding on to the lip of the fountain with his claw hand, he drank again. This time his belly accepted the gift gratefully.
   Sloshing like a filled goatskin, he staggered toward the alabaster steps which led to the doors of this fabulous place, steps that led between the golden pyramids. Halfway up the steps, a water cramp struck him and doubled him over. When it passed he lurched gamely onward. The doors were of the revolving type, and it took all his feeble strength to get one of them in motion. He pushed through into a plushy carpeted lobby that seemed miles long. The rug underfoot was thick and lush and cranberry-colored. There was a registration desk, a mail desk, a key desk, the cashiers’ windows. All empty. To his right, beyond an ornamental grilled railing, was the casino. Trashcan Man stared at it in awe—the serried ranks of slot machines like soldiers standing at parade rest, beyond them the roulette and crap tables, the marble railings enclosing the baccarat tables.
   “Who’s here?” Trash croaked, but no answer came back.
   He was afraid then, because this was a place of ghosts, a place where monsters might lurk, but the fear was weakened by his weariness. He stumbled down the steps and into the casino, passing the Cub Bar, where Lloyd Henreid sat silently in the deep shadows, watching him and holding a glass of Poland water.
   He came to a table upholstered in green baize, the mystic legend DEALER MUST HIT 16 AND STAND ON 17 inscribed thereon. Trash climbed up on it and fell instantly asleep. Soon nearly half a dozen men stood around the sleeping ragamuffin that was the Trashcan Man.
   “What do we do with him?” Ken DeMott asked.
   “Let him sleep,” Lloyd answered. “Flagg wants him.”
   “Yeah? Where the Christ is Flagg, anyway?” another asked. Lloyd turned to look at the man, who was balding and stood a full foot taller than Lloyd. Nonetheless, he drew back a step at Lloyd’s gaze. The stone around Lloyd’s neck was the only one that was not solid jet; in the center gleamed a small and disquieting red flaw.
   “Are you that anxious to see him, Hec?” Lloyd asked.
   “No,” the balding man said. “Hey, Lloyd, you know I didn’t—”
   “Sure.” Lloyd looked down at the man sleeping on the blackjack table. “Flagg will be around,” he said. “He’s been waiting for this guy. This guy is something special.”
   On the table, oblivious of all this, Trashcan Man slept on.
   Trash and The Kid spent the night of July 18 in a motel in Golden, Colorado. The Kid picked two rooms with a connecting door. The connecting door was locked. The Kid, now well in the bag, solved this minor problem by blowing the lock off with three bullets from one of his .45s.
   The Kid raised one tiny boot and kicked the door. It shuddered open in a fine blue haze of gunsmoke.
   “Betcha fuckin A,” he said. “Which room? Take your pick, Trashy.”
   Trashcan Man opted for the room on the right, and for a while was left alone. The Kid had gone out someplace. Trashcan Man was slowly considering the idea of simply fading away into the gloom before something really bad could happen—trying to balance that possibility against his lack of transportation—when The Kid returned. Trashcan Man was alarmed to see that he was pushing a shopping cart which was full of six-packs of Coors beer. The doll’s eyes were now bloodshot and rimmed with red. The pompadour hairdo was coming unraveled like a broken and expanding clockspring, and greasy bunches of hair now hung down over The Kid’s ears and cheeks, making him look like some dangerous (albeit absurd) caveman who had found a leather jacket left by a time-traveler and put it on. The rabbits’ feet bobbed back and forth on the belt of the jacket.
   “It’s warm,” The Kid said, “but who gives a rip, am I right?”
   “Right, absolutely,” Trashcan Man said.
   “Have a beer, asshole,” The Kid said, and tossed him a can. When Trashcan pulled the ringtab, he got a fateful of foam and The Kid roared with oddly diminutive laughter, holding his flat belly with both hands. Trash smiled weakly. He decided that later tonight, after this small monster had succumbed to sleep, he would slip away. He had had enough. And what The Kid had said about the dark priest… Trashcan Man’s fears about that were so big he could not even get them to coalesce. Saying things like that, even if you were joking, was like shitting on the altar of a church or holding your face up to the sky in a thunderstorm and begging the lightning to come hit you.
   The worst thing was that he didn’t think The Kid had been joking.
   Trashcan Man had no intention of going up into the mountains and around all those hairpin turns with this crazy dwarf who drank all day (and apparently all night) and who talked about overthrowing the dark man and putting himself in his place.
   Meanwhile, The Kid had put away two beers in two minutes, crushed the cans, and tossed them indifferently on one of the room’s twin beds. He was looking morosely at the RCA Chromacolor, a fresh Coors in his left hand and the .45 he had used to blow open the connecting door in his right.
   “No fuckin lectricity, so there ain’t no fuckin TV,” he said. As he grew more drunk, his Southern accent grew more pronounced, putting fur on his words. “Don’t I hate that. I love it that all the assholes got wasted, but Jesus-jumped-up-baldheaded-ole-Christ, where’s HBO? Where’s the goddam rasslin matches? Where’s the Playboy Channel? That was a good one, Trashy. I mean, they never showed guys gettin right down and eating hair pie, munchin the ole bearded clam, you know what I mean, but some of those ladies had laigs went right up to their chins, you know what the motherfuck I’m talkin about?”
   “Sure,” Trashcan said.
   “You’re fuckin A. Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you.”
   The Kid stared at the dead TV. “You numb cunt,” he said, and shot the TV. The picture tube imploded with a great hollow bang. Glass belched out onto the carpet. Trashcan Man raised his arm to shield his eyes, and his beer gurgled out onto the green nylon shag when he did.
   “Oh looka that, you dumb dork!” The Kid exclaimed. His tone was one of great outrage. Suddenly the .45 was pointed at Trash, its bore as big and dark as an ocean liner’s smoke stack. Trashcan felt his groin go numb. He thought he might be pissing himself, but had no way of telling for sure.
   “I’m gonna venilate your thinkin-machine for that,” The Kid said. “You done spilt the beer. If it was any other kind I won’t do it, but that was Coors you spilled. I’d piss Coors if I could, you believe that happy crappy?”
   “Sure,” Trashcan whispered.
   “And do you think they’re makin any more Coors these days, Trash? That seem very fuckin likely to you?”
   “No,” Trashcan whispered. “Guess not.”
   “You’re fuckin right. It’s a dangered spee-shees.” He raised the gun slightly. Trashcan Man thought it was the end of his life, the end of his life for sure. Then The Kid lowered the gun again… slightly. He had an absolutely vacant look on his face. Trashcan guessed this expression indicated deep thought. “I’ll tell you what, Trash. You get you another can, and you chug it. If you can chug the whole thing, I won’t send you to the Cadillac Ranch. You believe that happy crappy?”
   “What’s… what’s chugging?”
   “Jesus Christ, boy, you as dumb as a stone boat! Drink the whole can without stoppin, that’s what chuggin is! Where you been spendin your time, motherfuckin Africa? You want to get on the stick, Trashy. If I have to put one inya, it goes right in your eye. I got this sucker loaded up with dumdums. Open you right the fuck up, turn you into a fuckin buffet dinner for the cockroaches in this dump.” He gestured with the pistol, his red eyes fixed on Trash. There was a speckle of beer-foam on his upper lip.
   Trashcan went to the cardboard carton, selected a beer, and popped the top.
   “Go on. Ever drop. And if you puke it back up, you’re a gone fuckin goose.”
   Trashcan Man upended the can. Beer gurgled out. He swallowed convulsively, his Adam’s apple going up and down like a monkey on a stick. When the can was empty he dropped it between his feet, fought a seemingly endless battle with his gorge, and won his life back in one long, echoing belch. The Kid threw his small head back and laughed with tinkling delight. Trash swayed on his feet, grinning sickly. All at once he was a lot drunk instead of a little.
   The Kid holstered his piece.
   “Okay. Not bad, Trashcan Man. Not too motherfuckin shabby.”
   The Kid continued to drink. Squashed cans piled up on the motel bed. Trash held a can of Coors between his knees and sipped on it whenever The Kid seemed to be looking at him with disapproval. The Kid muttered on and on, his voice growing ever lower and more Southern as the empties piled up. He talked of places he had been. Races he had won. A load of dope he had run across the border from Mexico in a laundry truck with a 442 hemi engine under the hood. Nasty stuff, he said. All dope was nasty motherfuckin stuff. He never touched it himself, but boy-howdy, after you muled a few loads of that shit, you could wipe your ass with gold toilet-paper. At last he began to nod off, the little red eyes closing for longer and longer periods, then coming reluctantly back to halfmast.
   “Gonna get him, Trashy,” The Kid muttered. “I’ll go out there, check it out, keep kissin his motherfuckin ass until I see how the land lays. But nobody orders this Kid around. No-fuckin-body. Not for long. I don’t do piecework. If I’m on a job, I run it. That’s just my style. I dunno who he is or where he comes from or how he can broadcast into our motherfuckin thinkin-machines, but I’m gonna run him right the fuck”—huge yawn—“outta town. Gonna shut him down. Gonna send him to the Cadillac Ranch. Stick with me, Crash, or whoever the fuck y’are.”
   He collapsed slowly backward onto the bed. His can of beer, freshly opened, fell from his relaxing hand. More Coors puddled on the rug. The case was gone, and by Trashcan’s reckoning, The Kid had gotten through twenty-one cans of it himself. Trashcan Man couldn’t understand how such a little man could drink so much beer, but he did understand what time it was: time for him to go. He knew that, but he felt drunk and weak and ill. What he wanted more than anything was to sleep for a little while. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? The Kid was apt to sleep like a log all night, maybe half of tomorrow morning, too. Plenty of time for him to take a little nap.
   So he went into the other room (tiptoeing in spite of The Kid’s comatose state) and closed the connecting door as well as he could—which wasn’t very well. The force of the bullets had warped it somehow. There was a wind-up alarm clock on the dresser. Trash wound it, set it for midnight since he didn’t know (and didn’t care) what time it really was, and then set the alarm for five o’clock. He lay down on one of the twin beds without even stopping to take off his sneakers. He was asleep in five minutes.
   He woke up sometime later, in the dark grave of the morning, with the smell of beer and puke blowing across his face in a dry little gale. Something was in bed with him, something hot and smooth and squirmy. His first panicky thought was that a weasel had somehow gotten right out of his Nebraska dream and into reality. A whimpery little moan came out of him as he realized that the animal in bed with him, while not big, was too big to be a weasel. He had a headache from the beer; it drilled mercilessly at his temples.
   “Grab on me,” The Kid whispered in the dark. Trashcan’s hand was seized and led to something hard and cylindrical and throbbing like a piston. “Jerk me off. Go on, jerk me off, you know what to do, I saw that the first time I looked atcha. Come on, ya motherfuckin jerkoff, jerk me off.”
   Trashcan Man knew how to do it. In many ways it was a relief. He knew about it from the long nights in stir. They said it was bad, that it was queer, but what the queers did was better than what some of the others did, the ones who spent their nights sharpening spoonhandles into shanks, and the ones who just lay there on their bunks, cracking their knuckles and looking at you and grinning.
   The Kid had put Trashcan’s hand on the kind of gun he understood. He closed his hand around it and began. After it was over The Kid would fall asleep again. Then he would creep out.
   The Kid’s breath was becoming ragged. He began to bump his hips in time with Trashcan’s strokes. Trash did not at first realize The Kid was also unbuckling his belt, then slipping his jeans and underpants down to his knees. Trash let him. It didn’t matter if The Kid wanted to slip it to him. Trash had had it slipped to him before. You didn’t die. It wasn’t poison.
   Then his hand froze. Whatever it was suddenly pressing against his anus, it wasn’t flesh. It was cold steel.
   And suddenly he knew what it was.
   “No,” he whispered. His eyes were wide and terrified in the dark. Now he could dimly see that homicidal doll’s face in the mirror, hanging over his shoulder with its hair in its red eyes.
   “Yes,” The Kid whispered back. “And you don’t want to lose a stroke, Trashy. Not one motherfuckin stroke. Or I might just pull the trigger on this thang. Blow your shit-factory all to hell and gone. Dumdums, Trashy. You believe that happy crappy?”
   Whining, Trashcan began to stroke him again. His whines became little gasps of pain as the barrel of the .45 worked its way into him, rotating, gouging, tearing. And could it be that this was exciting him? It was.
   Eventually his excitement became apparent to The Kid.
   “Like it, dontcha?” The Kid panted. “I knew you would, you bag of pus. You like having it up your ass, dontcha? Say yes, pusbag. Say yes or right to hell you go.”
   “Yes,” Trashcan Man whimpered.
   “Want me to do it to you?”
   He didn’t. Excited or not, he didn’t. But he knew better than to say so. “Yes.”
   “I wouldn’t touch your dick if it was diamonds. Do it yaself. Why you think God gave you two hands?”
   How long did it go on? God might know; the Trashcan Man did not. A minute, an hour, an age—what was the difference? He became sure that at the instant of The Kid’s orgasm he would feel two things simultaneously: the hot jet of the small monster’s semen on his belly and the mushrooming agony of a dumdum bullet roaring up through his vitals. The ultimate enema.
   Then The Kid’s hips froze and his penis went through its convulsions in Trashcan Man’s hand. His fist became slick, like a rubber glove. An instant later, the pistol was withdrawn. Silent tears of relief gushed down Trashcan’s cheeks. He was not afraid to die, at least not in the service of the dark man, but he did not want to die in this dark motel room at the hands of a psychopath. Not before he had seen Cibola. He would have prayed to God, but he knew instinctively that God would not lend a sympathetic ear to those who had thrown their allegiance to the dark man. And what had God ever done for the Trashcan Man, anyway? Or for Donald Merwin Elbert either, for that matter?
   In the breathing silence The Kid’s voice rose in song, offkey, cracking, trailing down toward sleep:
   “My buddies an me are gettin real well known… yeah, the bad guys know us an they leave us alone… ”
   He began to snore.
   Now I’ll leave, Trashcan Man thought, but he was afraid that if he moved, he would wake The Kid up. I’ll leave just as soon as I’m sure he’s really asleep. Five minutes. Shouldn’t take any longer than that.
   But no one knows how long five minutes is in the dark; it might be fair to say that, in the dark, five minutes does not exist. He waited. He rolled in and out of a doze without knowing he had dozed. Before long he had slipped down the slide of sleep.
   He was on a dark road that was very high. The stars seemed close enough to reach up and touch; it seemed you could just pick them off the sky and pop them into a jar, like fireflies. It was bitterly cold. It was dark. Dimly, frosted with starshine, he could see the living rockfaces through which this highway had been cut.
   And in the darkness, something was walking toward him.
   And then his voice, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere: In the mountains I’ll give you a sign. I’ll show you my power. I’ll show you what happens to those who would set themselves against me. Wait. Watch.
   Red eyes began to open in the dark, as if someone had set out three dozen danger lamps with hoods on them and now that someone was pulling the hoods off in pairs. They were eyes, and they surrounded the Trashcan Man in a fey ring. At first he thought they were the eyes of weasels, but as the ring tightened around him he saw they were great gray mountain wolves, their ears cocked forward, foam dripping from their dark muzzles.
   He was afraid.
   They are not for you, my good and faithful servant. See?
   And they were gone. Just tike that, the panting gray timberwolves were gone.
   Watch, the voice said.
   Wait, the voice said.
   The dream ended. He woke to discover bright sunshine falling in through the motel room window. The Kid was standing in front of it, seeming none the worse for wear from his bout with the now-defunct Adolph Coors Company the night before. His hair was combed into its former shining swirls and eddies, and he was admiring his reflection in the glass. He had slipped his leather jacket over the back of a chair. The rabbits’ feet dangled from the belt like tiny corpses from a gibbet.
   “Hey, pusbag! I thought I was gonna hafta grease your hand again to wake you up. Come on, we got us a big day ahead. Lotta stuff gonna happen today, am I right?”
   “You sure are,” the Trashcan Man replied with a queer smile.
   When the Trashcan Man swam out of sleep on the evening of August 5, he was still lying on the blackjack table in the casino of the MGM Grand Hotel. Sitting backward on a chair in front of him was a young man with lank straw-blond hair and mirror sunglasses. The first thing Trash noticed was the stone which hung about his neck in the V of his open sport-shirt. Black, with a red flaw in the center. Like the eye of a wolf in the night.
   He tried to say he was thirsty and managed only a weak “Gaw!” sound.
   “You sure did spend some time in the hot sun, I guess,” Lloyd Henreid said.
   “Are you him?” Trash whispered. “Are you—”
   “The big guy? No, I’m not him. Flagg’s in L.A. He knows you’re here, though. I talked to him on the radio this afternoon.”
   “Is he coming?”
   “What, just to see you? Hell, no! He’ll be here in his own good time. You and me, guy, we’re just little people. He’ll be here in his own good time.” And he reiterated the question he had asked the tall man that morning, not long after Trashcan Man had stumbled in. “Are you that anxious to see him?”
   “Yes… no… I don’t know.”
   “Well, whichever way it turns out to be, you’ll get your chance.”
   “Thirsty…”
   “Sure. Here.” He handed over a large thermos filled with cherry Kool-Aid. Trashcan drained it at a draught, then leaned over, holding his belly and groaning. When the cramp had passed, he looked at Lloyd with dumb gratitude.
   “Think you could eat something?” Lloyd asked.
   “Yes, I think so.”
   Lloyd turned to a man standing behind them. The man was idly whirling a roulette wheel, then letting the little white ball bounce and rattle.
   “Roger, go tell Whitney or Stephanie-Ann to rustle this man up some fries and a couple of hamburgers. Naw, shit, what am I thinking about? He’ll ralph all over the place. Soup. Get him some soup. That okay, man?”
   “Anything,” Trash said gratefully.
   “We got a guy here,” Lloyd said, “name of Whitney Horgan, used to be a butcher. He’s a fat, loud sack of shit, but don’t that man know how to cook! Jesus! And they got everything here. The gennies were still running when we moved in, and the freezers’re full. Fucking Vegas! Ain’t it the goddamndest place you ever saw?”
   “Yeah,” Trash said. He liked Lloyd already, and he didn’t even know his name. “It’s Cibola.”
   “Say what?”
   “Cibola. Searched for by many.”
   “Yeah, been plenty people searchin for it over the years, but most of em go away sort of sorry they found it. Well, you call it whatever you want, buddy—looks like you almost cooked yourself gettin here. What’s your name?”
   “Trashcan Man.”
   Lloyd didn’t seem to think this a strange name at all. “Name like that, I bet you used to be a biker.” He stuck out a hand. The tips of his fingers still bore the fading marks of his stay in the Phoenix jail where he had almost died of starvation. “I’m Lloyd Henreid. Pleased to meet you, Trash. Welcome aboard the good ship Lollypop.”
   Trashcan Man shook the offered hand and had to struggle to keep from weeping with gratitude. So far as he could remember, this was the first time in his life someone had offered to shake his hand. He was here. He had been accepted. At long last he was on the inside of something. He would have walked through twice as much desert as he had for this moment, would have burned the other arm and both legs as well.
   “Thanks,” he muttered. “Thanks, Mr. Henreid.”
   “Shit, brother—if you don’t call me Lloyd, we’ll have to throw that soup out.”
   “Lloyd, then. Thanks, Lloyd.”
   “That’s better. After you eat, I’ll take you upstairs and put you in a room of your own. We’ll get you doing something tomorrow. The big guy’s got something of his own for you, I think, but until then there’s plenty for you to do. We’ve got some of the place running again, but nowhere near all of it. There’s a crew up at Boulder Dam, trying to get all the power back on. There’s another one working on water supplies. We’ve got scout parties out, we’ve been pulling in six or eight people a day, but we’ll keep you off that detail for a while. Looks like you’ve had enough sun to last you a month.”
   “I guess I have,” Trashcan Man said with a weak smile. He was already willing to lay down his life for Lloyd Henreid. Gathering up all of his courage, he pointed at the stone which lay in the hollow of Lloyd’s throat. “That—”
   “Yeah, us guys who are sort of in charge all wear em. His idea. It’s jet. Not really a rock at all, you know. It’s like an oil bubble.”
   “I mean… the red light. The eye.”
   “Looks like that to you too, huh? It’s a flaw. Special from him. I’m not the smartest guy he’s got, not even the smartest guy in good ole Lost Wages, not by a long shot. But I’m… shit, I guess you’d say I’m his mascot.” He looked closely at Trash. “Maybe you too, who knows? Not me, that’s for sure. He’s a close one, Flagg is. Anyway, we heard about you special. Me and Whitney. That’s not the regular drill at all. Too many comin in to take special notice of many.” He paused. “Although I guess he could, if he wanted to. I guess he could take notice of just about anybody.”
   Trashcan Man nodded.
   “He can do magic,” Lloyd said, his voice becoming slightly hoarse. “I seen it. I’d hate to be the people against him, you know?”
   “Yes,” Trashcan said. “I saw what happened to The Kid.”
   “What kid?”
   “The guy I was with until we got into the mountains.” He shuddered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
   “Okay, man. Here comes your soup. And Whitney put a burger on the side after all. You’ll love it. The guy makes great burgers, but try not to puke, okay?”
   “Okay.”
   “Me, I got places to go and people to see. If my old buddy Poke could see me now, he’d never believe it. I’m busier’n a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. Catch you later.”
   “Sure,” Trashcan said, and then added, almost timidly: “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”
   “Don’t thank me,” Lloyd said amiably. “Thank him.”
   “I do,” Trashcan Man said. “Every night.” But he was talking to himself. Lloyd was already halfway down the lobby, talking with the man who had brought the soup and the hamburger. Trashcan Man watched them fondly until they were out of sight, and then he began to chow down, eating ravenously until almost everything was gone. He would have been fine if he hadn’t looked down into the soup bowl. It was tomato soup, and it was the color of blood.
   He pushed the bowl aside, his appetite suddenly gone. It was all very well for him to tell Lloyd Henreid he didn’t want to talk about The Kid; it was quite another thing to stop thinking about what had happened to him.
   He walked over to the roulette wheel, sipping at the glass of milk that had come with his food. He gave the wheel an idle twist and dropped the little white marble into the dish. It rolled around the rim, then hit the slots below and began to racket back and forth. He thought about The Kid. He wondered if someone would come and show him which room was his. He thought about The Kid. He wondered if the ball would fetch up on a red number or a black one… but mostly he thought about The Kid. The bouncing, jittering ball caught in one of the slots, this time for good. The wheel came to a stop. The ball was sitting under the green double zero.
   House spin.
   On the cloudless, eighty-degree day when they headed west from Golden directly into the Rockies along Interstate 70, The Kid had given up Coors in favor of a bottle of Rebel Yell whiskey. Two more bottles sat between the two of them on the driveshaft hump, each neatly packed into an empty cardboard milk carton so the bottles wouldn’t roll around and break. The Kid would nip at the bottle, chase the nip with a swallow of Pepsi-Cola, and then holler hot-damn! or yahoo! or sex-machine! at the top of his lungs. He remarked several times that he would piss Rebel Yell if he could. He asked Trashcan Man if he believed that happy crappy. Trashcan Man, pale with fright and still hung over from his three beers of the night before, said he did.
   Even The Kid couldn’t stampede along at ninety on these roads. He lowered his speed to sixty and muttered about the goddam fucking mountains under his breath. Then he brightened. “When we get over in Utah n Nevada, we’ll make up plenty of lost time, Trashy. This little darlin’ll do a hunnert n sixty on the flat. You believe that happy crappy?”
   “Sure is a nice car,” Trashcan said with a sick-doggy smile.
   “Bet your ass.” He nipped Rebel Yell. Chased it with Pepsi. Yelled yahoo! at the top of his lungs.
   Trash stared morbidly out at the passing scenery, which was now washed with midmorning sunshine. The Interstate had been blasted right into the shoulder of the mountain, and at times they were traveling between huge cliffs of rock. The cliffs he had seen in his dream of the night before. After dark, would those red eyes open again?
   He shuddered.
   A short while later he became aware that their speed had dropped from sixty to forty. Then to thirty. The Kid was swearing monotonously and horribly under his breath. The deuce coupe wove in and out of steadily thickening traffic, all of it stalled and deadly silent.
   “What the fuck is this?” The Kid raged. “What did they? All decide to die at ten thousand motherfuckin feet? Hey, you stupid fucks, out my way! You hear me? Get the fuck out my way! ”
   Trashcan Man cringed.
   They rounded a curve and faced a horrendous four-car pileup which blocked the westbound lanes of I-70 completely. A dead man covered with blood which had dried to an uneven crack-glaze long since lay spreadeagled facedown in the road. Near him was a broken Chatty Cathy doll. Any way around the jam on the left was blocked by steel guardrail posts six feet high. On the right, the land fell away into cloudy distance.
   The Kid gulped Rebel Yell and swung the deuce coupe toward the dropoff. “Hang on, Trashy,” he whispered, “we’re goin around.”
   “There’s no room,” Trashcan Man rasped. His throat felt like the side of a steel file.
   “Yeah, just enough,” The Kid whispered. His eyes were glittering. He began to edge the car off the road. The righthand wheels were now hissing in the dirt of the shoulder.
   “Count me out,” Trashcan said hurriedly, and grabbed for the doorhandle.
   “You sit,” said The Kid, “or you’re gonna be one dead pusbag.”
   Trash turned his head and looked into the bore of a .45. The Kid giggled tensely.
   Trashcan Man sat back. He wanted to close his eyes but could not. On his side of the car, the last six inches of shoulder dropped from view. Now he was looking straight down at a long vista of blue-gay pines and huge tumbled boulders. He could imagine the deuce coupe’s Wide Oval tires now four inches from the edge… now two…
   “Another inch,” The Kid crooned, his eyes huge, his grin enormous. Sweat stood out on that pale doll’s forehead in perfect clear drops. “Just… one… more.”
   It ended in a hurry. Trashcan Man felt the right rear of the car slip suddenly outward and sharply downward. He heard a falling millrace, first of pebbles, then of larger stones. He screamed. The Kid cursed horribly, changed down to first gear, and floored the accelerator. From the left, where they had been inching by the overturned corpse of a VW Microbus, came a squall of grinding metal.
   “Fly! ” The Kid screamed. “Just like a bigass bird! Fly! Goddammit, FLY! ”
   The deuce coupe’s rear wheels spun. For a moment their shift toward the drop seemed to be increasing. Then the car jerked forward, lurched up, and they were back on the road on the far side of the pileup, laying rubber.
   “I told you she’d do it! ” The Kid screamed triumphantly. “Goddam! Did we do it? Did we do it, Trashy, ya fuckin chickenshit suckhole? ”
   “We did it,” Trashcan Man said quietly. He was twitching all over. He couldn’t seem to control it. And then, for the second time since meeting The Kid, he unwittingly said the one thing that could have saved his life—had he not said it, The Kid surely would have killed him; it would have been his queer way of celebrating. “Good driving, champ,” he said. He had never called anyone “champ” in his whole life before now.
   “Ahhh… not that great,” The Kid said patronizingly. “There’s at least two other guys in the country coulda done it. You believe that happy crappy?”
   “If you say so, Kid.”
   “Don’t tell me, sweetheart, I’ll fuckin tell you. Well, on we go. All in a day’s work.”
   But they did not go on for long. The Kid’s deuce coupe was stopped for good fifteen minutes later, eighteen hundred miles or more from its point of origin in Shreveport, Louisiana.
   “I don’t believe it,” The Kid said. “I don’t… motherfuckin… B’LEEVE it!”
   He threw open the driver’s side door and jumped out, the quarter-full bottle of Rebel Yell still clutched in his left hand.
   “GET OUTTA MY ROAD! ” The Kid roared, dancing about in his grotesquely high-heeled boots, a tiny natural force of destruction, like an earthquake in a bottle. “GET OUTTA MY ROAD, MOTHERFUCKERS, YOU’RE DEAD, Y’ALL B’LONG IN THE MOTHERFUCKIN BONEYARD, YOU GOT NO BUSINESS IN MY FUCKIN ROAD! ”
   He threw the Rebel Yell bottle and it flew end over end, spraying amber droplets. It crashed into a hundred pieces against the side of an old Porsche. The Kid stood silent, panting and reeling a little on his feet.
   The problem was nothing so simple as a four-car pileup this time. This time the problem was nothing but traffic. The eastbound lanes were here divided from those westbound by a grassy median strip about ten yards across, and the deuce coupe probably could have made it from one side of the highway to the other, but the condition of both arteries was the same: the four lanes were crowded with six lanes of traffic, bumper to bumper and side to side. The breakdown lanes were as full as the travel lanes. Some drivers had even attempted to use the median itself, although it was rough and upgraded and full of rocks which punched out of the thin gray soil like dragon’s teeth. Perhaps there had been high-hung four-wheel-drive vehicles which had had some success there, but what Trashcan saw on the median strip was an automobile graveyard of crashed, bashed, and mashed Detroit rolling iron. It was as if a mass madness had infected all the drivers and they had decided to hold an apocalyptic demolition derby or lunatic gymkhana here high up on I-70. Colorado Rocky Mountain high, Trashcan Man thought, I’ve seen it raining Chevies in the sky. He almost giggled and hurriedly covered his mouth. If The Kid heard him giggling now, he would most likely never giggle again.
   The Kid came striding back in his high-heeled boots, his carefully coiffed hair gleaming. His face was that of a dwarf basilisk. His eyes were bulging with fury. “I’m not leavin my fuckin car,” he said. “You hear me? No way. I’m not leavin it. You get walkin, Trashy. You walk up there and see how far this motherfuckin traffic jam goes. Maybe it’s a truck in the road, I don’t know. I know we can’t fuckin backtrack. We lost the shoulder. We’d go all the way down. But if it’s just a stalled truck or somethin, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’ll jump these sonsofwhores one at a time and run em right the fuck over the edge. I can do it, and you better believe that happy crappy. Get movie, son.”
   Trash didn’t argue. He began to walk carefully up the road, weaving in and out between the packed cars. He was ready to duck and run if The Kid started shooting. But The Kid didn’t. When Trashcan had walked what he judged to be a safe distance (i.e., out of pistol range), he climbed atop a tanker truck and looked back. The Kid, miniature streetpunk from hell, truly doll-sized at this half-a-mile distance, was leaning against the side of his deucey, having a drink. Trashcan Man thought of waving and then decided it might be a bad idea.

The Trashcan Man started his walk that day at about ten-thirty in the morning, MDT. Walking was slow—he often had to scramble over the hoods and roofs of cars and trucks, they were so tightly packed together—and by the time he got to the first TUNNEL CLOSED sign, it was already quarter past three in the afternoon. He had made about twelve miles. Twelve miles wasn’t so much—not to someone who’d crossed twenty percent of the country on a bicycle—but considering the obstacles, he thought twelve miles was pretty awesome. He could have gone back long-ago to tell The Kid it was impossible… if, that was, he’d ever had any intentions of going back. He didn’t, of course. Trashcan Man had never read much history (after the electroshock therapy, reading had gotten sort of tough for him), but he didn’t need to know that, in times of old, kings and emperors had often killed the bearers of bad news out of simple pique. What he did know was enough: he had seen enough of The Kid to know he didn’t ever want to see any more.
   He stood pondering the sign, black letters on an orange diamond-shaped field. It had been knocked over and was lying beneath one wheel of what looked like the world’s oldest Yugo. TUNNEL CLOSED. What tunnel? He peered ahead, shading his eyes, and thought he could see something. He walked on another three hundred yards, scrambling over cars when he had to, and came to an alarming confusion of crashed vehicles and dead bodies. Some of the cars and trucks had been burned to the axles. Many were army vehicles. Many of the bodies were dressed in khaki. Beyond the scene of this battle—Trash was pretty sure that’s what it had been—the traffic jam began again. And beyond it, east and west, the traffic disappeared into the twin bores of what a huge sign bolted to the living rock proclaimed to be THE EISENHOWER TUNNEL.
   He walked closer, heart bumping, not knowing just what he intended. Those twin bores punching their way into the rock intimidated him, and as he drew closer, intimidation became outright terror. He would have understood Larry Underwood’s feelings about the Lincoln Tunnel perfectly; in that instant they were unknowing soul brothers, the shared soul emotion one of stark fear.
   The main difference was that, while the Lincoln Tunnel’s pedestrian catwalk was set high off the roadbed, here it was low enough so that some cars had actually attempted to run along the side, with one pair of wheels up on the catwalk and the other on the road. The tunnel was two miles long. The only way to negotiate it would be to crawl along from car to car in the pitch dark. It would take hours.
   Trashcan Man felt his bowels turn to water.
   He stood looking at the tunnel for a long time. Larry Underwood, over a month before, had gone into his tunnel in spite of his fear. After a long contemplation, Trashcan Man turned away and began to walk back toward The Kid, his shoulders slumped, the corners of his mouth trembling. It was not just the absence of any easy place to walk which made him turn back, or the length of the tunnel (Trash, who had lived his whole life in Indiana, had no idea how long the Eisenhower Tunnel was). Larry Underwood had been moved (and perhaps controlled) by an underlying streak of self-interest by the simple logic of survival: New York was an island, and he had to get off. The tunnel was the quickest way. So he would walk through as quick as he could; he would do it the way you held your nose and swallowed fast when you knew the medicine was going to taste bad. Trashcan Man was a beaten thing, used to accepting the punchings and pummelings of both fate and his own inexplicable nature… and doing so with a bowed head. He had been further unmanned, brainwashed almost, by his cataclysmic encounter with The Kid. He had been whooshed along at speeds high enough to induce brain-damage. He had been threatened with extinction if he could not drink a whole can of beer without stopping and without throwing up afterward. He had been sodomized with a pistol barrel. He had been nearly dumped a thousand feet straight down from the edge of the turnpike. On top of this, could he summon enough courage to crawl through a hole bored straight through the base of a mountain, a hole where he might encounter who knew what horrors in the dark? He could not. Others, maybe, but not the Trashcan Man. And there was also a certain logic in the idea of turning back. It was the logic of the beaten and the half-mad, true, but it still had its own perverse charm. He was not on an island. If he had to backtrack the rest of today and all day tomorrow in order to find a road that went over the mountains instead of through them, he would do it. He’d have to get by The Kid, it was true, but he thought The Kid might have changed his mind and left already, in spite of his declarations to the contrary. He might be dead drunk. He might even (although Trash really doubted that such extraordinarily good luck would ever come his way) be simply dead. At the worst, if The Kid was still there, watching and waiting, Trashcan could wait until dark and then creep past him like
   (a weasel)
   some small animal in the underbrush. Then he would just continue on to the east until he found the road he was looking for.
   He arrived back at the tanker truck from whose top he had last seen The Kid and The Kid’s mythic deuce coupe, making better time on the return trip. This time he did not climb up to where he would be clearly silhouetted against the evening sky but began to crawl from car to car on his hands and knees, trying to be very quiet. The Kid might be alert and on watch. With a guy like The Kid, you just couldn’t tell… and it didn’t pay to take chances. He found himself wishing he had taken one of the soldiers’ guns, even though he had never used a gun in his life. He kept crawling, the road-pebbles biting painfully into his claw hand. It was eight o’clock, and the sun had gone behind the mountains.
   Trashcan stopped behind the hood of the Porsche The Kid had thrown his liquor bottle at and carefully raised his eyes over it. Yes, there was The Kid’s deuce coupe, with its flamboyant flake-gold paint, its convex windshield and sharkfin cutting at the bruise-colored evening sky. The Kid was slumped behind the Day-Glo steering wheel, his eyes closed, his mouth open. Trashcan Man’s heart thundered a percussive victory song in his chest. Dead drunk! his heartbeat proclaimed in syllables of two. Dead drunk! By God! Dead drunk! Trash thought he could be twenty miles east of here before The Kid even woke up to his hangover.
   Still, he was careful. He skittered from car to car like a waterbug crossing the still surface of a pond, skirting the deuce coupe on his left, hurrying across the increasing gaps. Now the deucey was at nine o’clock on his left, now seven, now six and directly behind him. Now to put distance between him and that crazy—
   “You prick-stupid cocksucker, you hold still.”
   Trash froze on his hands and knees. He made wee-wee in his pants, and his mind dissolved into a madly fluttering black bird of panic.
   He turned around little by little, the tendons in his neck creaking like the hinges of a door in a haunted house. And there stood The Kid, resplendent in an iridescent shirt of green and gold and a pair of sunfaded cords. There was a .45 in each hand and a horrible grimace of hate and rage on his face.
   “I was just chuh-checkin down this way,” Trashcan Man heard himself saying. “To make sure the cuh-cuh-coast was clear.”
   “Sure—on your hands and knees you was checkin, dinkweed. I’ll clear your motherfuckin coast. Stand up here.”
   Trashcan somehow gained his feet and kept them by holding on to the doorhandle of a car on his right. The twin bores of The Kid’s matched set of .45s looked every bit as big as the twin bores of the Eisenhower Tunnel. He was looking at death now. He knew that. There were no right words to avert it this time.
   He offered up a silent prayer to the dark man: Please… if it be your will… my life for you!
   “What’s up there?” The Kid asked. “A wreck?”
   “A tunnel. It’s jammed solid. That’s why I came back, to tell you. Please—”
   “A tunnel,” The Kid groaned. “Jesus-hairy-ole-baldheaded-Christ! ” The scowl returned. “Are you lyin to me, you fuckin fairy?”
   “No! I swear I’m not! The sign said Eeesenhoover Tunnel. I think that’s what it said, but I have trouble with long words. I—”
   “Shut your dough-hole. How far?”
   “Eight miles. Maybe even more.”
   The Kid was silent for a moment, looking west along the turnpike. Then he fixed Trashcan Man with a glittery gaze. “You trine to tell me this traffic jam’s eight miles long? You lyin sack of shit!” The Kid thumbed the triggers on both guns up to half-cock. Trashcan, who wouldn’t have known half-cock from full cock and full cock from a bag of frogs, screeched like a woman and put his hands over his eyes.
   “No kidding! ” he screamed. “No kidding! I swear! I swear! ”
   The Kid looked at him for a long time. At last he lowered the hammers on his guns.
   “I’m gonna kill you, Trashy,” he said, smiling. “I’m gonna take your motherfuckin life. But first we’re gonna walk back to that pileup we squeaked by this morning. You’re gonna push the van over the edge. Then I’m gonna go back and find another way around. Not gonna leave my fuckin car,” he added petulantly. “Nohow no way.”
   “Please don’t kill me,” Trashcan whispered. “Please don’t.”
   “If you can get that VW van over the side in less’n fifteen minutes, maybe I won’t,” The Kid said. “You believe that happy crappy?”
   “Yes,” Trash said. But he had gotten a good look into those preternaturally glittering eyes, and he did not believe it at all.
   They walked back to the pileup, Trashcan Man walking in front of The Kid on wobbling rubber legs. The Kid walked mincingly, his leather jacket creaking softly in its secret folds. There was a vague, almost sweet smile on his doll-like lips.
   By the time they got to the pileup, dusk was almost gone. The VW Microbus was on its side, the corpses of the three or four occupants a tangle of arms and legs that was mercifully hard to see in the fast-failing light. The Kid walked past the van and stood on the shoulder, looking at the place they had edged by some ten hours before. One of the deucey’s tire tracks was still there, but the other had crumbled away with the embankment.
   “Nope,” The Kid said with finality. “Never make it by here again unless we do some movin and groovin first. Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you.”
   For one brief moment, Trashcan Man entertained the notion of rushing at The Kid and trying to push him over the edge. Then The Kid turned around. His guns were drawn and pointing casually at Trashcan’s midriff.
   “Say, Trashy. You was thinkin evil thoughts. Don’t try to tell me no different. I can read you like a motherfuckin book.”
   Trashcan shook his head violently back and forth in protest.
   “Don’t you make a mistake with me, Trashy. That’s the one thing in this wide world you don’t want to do. Now get pushing on that van. You got fifteen minutes.”
   There was an Austin parked nearby on the broken centerline. The Kid pulled open the passenger door, casually ripped out the bloated corpse of a teenage girl (her arm came off in his hand and he tossed it aside with the absent air of a man who has finished with the turkey drumstick he has been nibbling on), and sat down on the bucket seat with his feet out on the pavement. He gestured good-humoredly with his guns at the slumped, shuddering form of the Trashcan Man.
   “Time’s a-wastin, good buddy.” He threw back his head and sang: “Oh… here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand, he’s a one-ball man and he’s OFF to the ro-dee-OH … that’s right, Trashy, ya fuckin wet end, getcha back into it, only twelve minutes left… alamand left an alamand right, come on, ya fuckin dummy, getcha right foot right—”
   Trash leaned against the Microbus. Bunched his legs and pushed. The Microbus moved perhaps two inches toward the drop. In his heart, hope—that indestructible weed of the human heart—had begun to bloom again. The Kid was irrational, impulsive, what Carley Yates and his pool-hall buddies would have called crazier than a shithouse rat. Maybe if he actually got the van over the side and cleared the way for The Kid’s precious deuce coupe, the lunatic would let him live.
   Maybe.
   He lowered his head, gripped the edge of the VW’s frame, and shoved with all his might. Pain flared in his recently burned arm, and he knew that the fragile new tissue would soon rip open. Then the pain would become agony.
   The bus moved three inches. Sweat dripped from Trashcan’s brow and ran into his eyes, stinging like warm engine oil.
   “Oh, here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand, he’s a one-ball man and he’s OFF to the ro-dee-OH! ” The Kid sang. “Well, alamand left an alamand r—”
   The song broke off like a brittle twig. Trashcan Man looked up apprehensively. The Kid had come out of the Austin’s passenger seat. He was standing in profile to Trash, staring across their half of the turnpike toward the eastbound lanes. A rocky, brushy slope rose beyond them, blotting out half the sky.
   “What the fuck was that?” The Kid whispered.
   “I didn’t hear anyth—”
   Then he did hear something. He heard a small rattle of pebbles and stones on the other side of the highway. His dream recurred to him in sudden, total recall that froze his blood and evaporated all the spit in his mouth.
   “Who’s there? ” The Kid shouted. “You better answer me! Answer, goddammit, or I start shooting! ”
   And he was answered, but not by any human voice. A howl rose up in the night like a hoarse siren, first climbing and then dropping rapidly down to a guttural growl.
   “Holy Jesus!” The Kid said, and his voice was suddenly thin.
   Coming down the slope on the far side of the turnpike and crossing the median strip were wolves, gaunt gray timberwolves, their eyes red, their jaws gaping and adrip. There were more than two dozen of them. Trashcan, in an ecstasy of terror, made wee-wee in his pants again.
   The Kid stepped around the trunk of the Austin, leveled his .45s, and began firing. Flame licked from the barrels; the sound of the shots echoed and reechoed from the mountain faces, making it sound as if artillery were at work. Trashcan Man cried out and poked his index fingers in his ears. The night breeze tattered the gunsmoke, fresh and ripe and hot. Its cordite aroma stung his nose.
   The wolves came on, no faster and no slower, at a fast walk. Their eyes… Trashcan Man found himself unable to look away from their eyes. They were not the eyes of—ordinary wolves; of that he was quite convinced. They were the eyes of their Master, he thought. Their Master and his Master. Suddenly he remembered his prayer and he was afraid no longer. He took his fingers out of his ears. He ignored the wetness spreading at his crotch. He began to smile.
   The Kid had emptied both of his guns, dropping three of the wolves in so doing. He holstered the .45s without making an attempt to reload and turned west. He went about ten paces and then stopped. More wolves were padding down the westbound lanes, weaving in and out of the dark hulks of the stalled cars like tattered streamers of mist. One of them raised its snout to the sky and howled. Its cry was joined by a second, the second by a third, the third by a whole chorus. Then they came on again.
   The Kid began to back up. He was trying to load one of his guns now, but the shells were spilling out between his nerveless fingers. Suddenly he gave up. The gun fell out of his hand and clanked on the road. As if it had been a signal, the wolves rushed him.
   With a high, reedy scream of fear, The Kid turned and ran for the Austin. As he ran, his second pistol tumbled from its low holster and bounced off the road. With a low, ripping growl, the wolf closest to him sprang just as The Kid dove into the Austin and slammed the door.
   He just made it. The wolf bounced off the door, growling, its red eyes rolling horribly. It was joined by the others, and in moments the Austin was ringed with wolves. From inside, The Kid’s face was a small white moon looking out.
   Then one of the wolves was coming toward the Trashcan Man, its triangular head held low, its eyes glowing like stormlamps.
   My life for you…
   Steadily, now not in the least afraid, Trash went to meet it. He held out his burned hand and the wolf licked it. After a moment it sat at his feet, curling its ragged, brushy tail about its withers.

The Kid was staring at him, his mouth hanging open.
   Smiling into his eyes, Trashcan Man gave him the finger.
   Both fingers.
   And he screamed: “Fuck you! You’re shut down! Do you hear me? DO YOU BELIEVE THAT HAPPY CRAPPY? SHUT DOWN! DON’T TELL ME, I’LL TELL YOU! ”
   The wolf’s mouth closed gently on Trashcan’s good hand. He looked down. It was standing again, tugging him lightly. Tugging him west.
   “All right,” Trashcan said serenely. “Okay, boy.”
   He began to walk and the wolf fell in right behind him, walking like a well-trained dog at heel. As they walked away, five others joined them from amid the stalled cars. Now he walked with one wolf ahead of him, one behind him, and two on each side, like an escorted dignitary.
   He paused once and looked back over his shoulder. He never forgot what he saw: a ring of wolves sitting patiently in a gray circle around the little Austin, and the pale circle of The Kid’s face staring out, his mouth working behind the windowglass. The wolves seemed to grin up at The Kid, their tongues lolling out of their mouths. They seemed to be asking him just how long it would be before he kicked the dark man out of ole Lost Wages on his ass. Just how long?
   Trashcan Man wondered how long those wolves would sit around the little Austin, ringing it in a circle of teeth. The answer, of course, was as long as it took. Two days, three, maybe even four. The Kid would sit there, looking out. Nothing to eat (unless the teenage girl had had a passenger, that was), nothing to drink, the afternoon temperature in the car’s small interior maybe as high as a hundred and thirty degrees, what with the greenhouse effect. The dark man’s lapdogs would wait until The Kid starved to death, or until he got crazy enough to open the door and try to make a run for it. Trashcan Man giggled in the darkness. The Kid wasn’t very big. He wouldn’t make much more than a mouthful for each of them. And what they did get might well poison them.
   “Am I right?” he cried, and cackled up at the bright stars. “Don’t tell me if you believe that happy crappy! I’ll motherfuckin tell YOU! ”
   His gray-ghostly companions padded gravely along all about him, taking no notice of Trashcan Man’s shouts. When they reached The Kid’s deuce coupe, the wolf at his heel padded over to it, sniffed at one of the Wide Ovals, and then, grinning sardonically, lifted his leg and made wee-wee on it.
   Trashcan Man had to laugh. He laughed until tears squirted from his eyes and ran down his cracked, stubbled cheeks. His madness, like a fine skillet dish, now wanted only for the desert sun to simmer it and complete it, to give it that final subtle touch of flavor.
   They walked, the Trashcan Man and his escorts. As the traffic grew thicker, the wolves either squirmed under cars with their bellies dragging on the road or padded over hoods and roofs near him—sanguine, silent companions with red eyes and bright teeth. When, sometime after midnight, they reached the Eisenhower Tunnel, Trashcan did not hesitate but worked his way steadily into the maw of the westbound side. How could he be afraid now? How could he be afraid with guardians like these?
   It was a long trip, and he had lost all track of time before it had little more than begun. He groped blindly forward from one car to the next. Once his hand plunged into something wet and sickeningly soft, and there was a horrible whoosh of stinking gas. Even then he did not falter. From time to time he saw red eyes in the dark, always up ahead, always leading him forward.
   A time later he sensed a new freshness in the air and began to hurry, once losing his balance and plunging from the hood of one car to crack his skull painfully on the bumper of the next. A short time after that, he looked up and saw the stars again; now paling before the onset of dawn. He was out.
   His guardians had faded away. But Trashcan fell to his knees and gave thanks in a long, rambling, disjointed prayer. He had seen the hand of the dark man at work, and he had seen it plain.
   In spite of all he had been through since he had awakened the previous morning to see The Kid admiring his hairdo in the mirror of the Golden Motel room, Trash was too exalted to sleep. He walked instead, putting the tunnel behind him. The traffic was choked on the westbound side of the tunnel too, but it had cleared out enough to walk comfortably before he had gone two miles. Across the median, in the eastbound lanes, the stream of cars that had been waiting to use the tunnel stretched on and on.
   At noon he began to come down from Vail Pass into Vail itself, passing the condominiums and the singles apartment complexes. Now weariness had almost overcome him. He broke a window, unlocked a door, found a bed. And that was all he remembered until early the next morning.
   The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance… or change. Once such incantatory phrases as “we see now through a glass darkly” and “mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform” are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s all on purpose.
   It was quite likely for this reason that the Trashcan Man talked to a crow for nearly twenty minutes on the road west of Vail, convinced it was either an emissary of the dark man… or the dark man himself. The crow regarded him silently from its perch on a high telephone wire for a long time, not flying away until it was bored or hungry… or until Trashcan’s outpouring of praise and promises of loyalty were complete.
   He got another bike near Grand Junction, and by July 25 he had been speeding across western Utah on Route 4, which connects I-89 on the east to the great southwestern-tending I-15, which goes from north of Salt Lake City all the way to San Bernadino, California. And when the front wheel of his new bike suddenly decided to part company from the rest of the machine and go speeding off into the desert on its own, Trashcan Man was pitched over the handlebars to land on his head, a crash that should have fractured his skull (he was doing forty when it happened, and wearing no helmet). Yet he was able to stand up less than five minutes later, with blood streaming over his face from half a dozen cuts and lacerations, able to do his shuffling, grimacing little dance, able to chant: “Cii-a-bo-la, my life for you, Ci-a-bola, bumpty, bumpty, bump! ”
   There is really nothing so comforting to the beaten of spirit or the broken of skull than a good strong dose of “Thy will be done.”
   On August 7, Lloyd Henreid came to the room in which the dehydrated and semidelirious Trashcan Man had been installed the day before. It was a fine room, on the thirtieth floor of the MGM Grand. There was a round bed with silk sheets, and a round mirror which looked to be the exact same size as the bed, mounted on the ceiling.
   Trashcan Man looked at Lloyd.
   “How you feeling, Trash?” Lloyd asked, looking back.
   “Good,” Trashcan Man said. “Better.”
   “Some food and water and rest, that’s all you needed,” Lloyd said. “I brought you some clean clothes. Had to guess at the sizes.”
   “They look fine.” Trash had never really been able to remember his sizes. He took the jeans and the workshirt Lloyd offered.
   “Come on down to breakfast when you’re dressed,” Lloyd said. He spoke almost deferentially. “Most of us eat in the deli.”
   “Okay. Sure.”
   The deli hummed with conversation, and he paused outside and around the corner, suddenly overcome with fright. They would look up at him when he came in. They would look up and laugh. Someone would start giggling in the back of the room, someone else would join in, and then the whole place would be an uproar of laughter and pointing fingers.
   Hey, put away ya matches, here comes the Trashcan Man!
   Hey, Trash! What did ole lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?
   Wet the bed much, Trashy?
   Sweat popped out on his skin, making him feel slimy in spite of the shower he’d taken after Lloyd left. He remembered his face in the bathroom mirror, covered with slowly healing scabs, his body, too gaunt, his eyes, too small for their yawning sockets. Yes, they would laugh. He listened to the hum of conversation, the clink of silverware, and thought he should just slink away.
   Then he thought of the way the wolf had taken his hand, so gently, and had led him away from The Kid’s metal tomb, and Trash squared his shoulders and walked inside.
   A few people looked up briefly, then went back to their meals and their conversations. Lloyd, at a big table in the middle of the room, raised an arm and waved him over. Trash threaded his way among the tables and under a darkened electronic Keno toteboard. There were three other people at the table. They were all eating ham and scrambled eggs.
   “Serve yourself,” Lloyd said. “It’s a steam-table kinda thing.”
   Trashcan Man got a tray and served himself. The man behind the counter, large and dressed in dirty cook’s whites, watched him.
   “Are you Mr. Horgan?” Trashcan Man asked timidly.
   Horgan grinned, exposing gapped teeth. “Yeah, but we won’t get nowhere with you callin me that, boy. You call me Whitey. You feelin a little better? When you came in, you looked like the wratha God.”
   “Much better, sure.”
   “Dig in those aigs. All you want. Go light on the home fries, though. I would, at least. Them taters is old and tough. Good to have you here, boy.”
   “Thanks,” Trash said.
   He went back to Lloyd’s table.
   “Trash, this here is Ken DeMott. The fella with the bald spot is Hector Drogan. And this kid tryin to grow on his face what springs up wild in his asshole calls himself Ace High.”
   They all nodded at him.
   “This is our new boy,” Lloyd said. “Name’s Trashcan Man.”
   Hands were shaken all around. Trash started to dig into his eggs. He looked up at the young man with the scraggly beard and said in a low, polite voice: “Would you pass the salt, please, Mr. High?”
   There was a moment of surprise as they looked at each other, and then they all burst into laughter. Trash stared at them, feeling the panic rise in his chest, and then he heard the laughter, really heard it, with his mind as well as his ears, and understood that there was no meanness in it. No one here was going to ask him why he hadn’t burned down the school instead of the church. No one here was going to dun him about old lady Semple’s pension check. He could smile too, if he wanted. And he did.
   “Mr. High,” Hector Drogan was giggling. “Oh, Ace, you just been had. Mr. High, I love it. Meeestair Haaaaah. Man, that is so fuckin rich.”
   Ace High handed Trashcan the salt. “Just Ace, my man. That’ll get me every time. You don’t call me Mr. High and I won’t call you Mr. Man, that a deal?”
   “Okay,” Trashcan Man said, still smiling. “That’s fine.”
   “Oh, Mr. Hiiiigh?” Heck Drogan said in a coy falsetto. Then he burst into laughter again. “Ace, you never gonna live that down. I swear you won’t.”
   “Maybe not, but I’m sure-God gonna live it up,” Ace High said, and got up with his plate for more eggs. His hand closed for a moment on Trashcan Man’s shoulder as he went. The hand was warm and solid. It was a friendly hand that did not squeeze or pinch.
   Trashcan Man dug into his eggs, feeling warm and good inside. This warmth and goodness was so foreign to his nature that it almost felt like a disease. As he ate he tried to isolate it, understand it. He looked up, looked at the faces around him, and thought he might understand what it was.
   Happiness.
   What a good bunch of people, he thought.
   And on the heels of that: I’m home.
   That day he was left on his own to sleep, but the next day he was bussed up to Boulder Dam with a lot of other people. There they spent the day wrapping copper core wire around the spindles of burned-out motors. He worked at a bench with a view of the water—Lake Mead—and no one supervised him. Trashcan Man assumed that there was no foreman or anyone like that around because everyone was as in love with what they were doing as he was himself.
   He learned differently the next day.
   It was quarter past ten in the morning. Trashcan Man was sitting on his bench, wrapping copper wire, his mind a million miles away as his fingers did their work. He was composing a psalm of praise to the dark man in his mind. It had occurred to him that he should get a large book (a Book, actually) and begin to write some of his thoughts about him down. It would be the sort of Book people might want to read someday. People who felt about him as Trash did.
   Ken DeMott came to his bench, and Ken looked pale and frightened under his desert tan. “Come on,” he said. “Work’s over. We’re going back to Vegas. Everyone. The buses are outside.”
   “Huh? Why?” Trashcan blinked up at him.
   “I don’t know. It’s his order. Lloyd passed it along. Get your ass in gear, Trashy. It’s best not to ask questions when the hardcase is involved.”
   So he didn’t. Outside, on Hoover Drive, three Las Vegas Public School buses were parked with their engines idling. Men and women were climbing aboard. There was little talk; the midmorning ride back to Vegas was the antithesis of the usual commutes to and from work. There was no horseplay, little conversation, and none of the usual light banter that passed between the twenty or so women and the thirty or so men. Everyone had drawn into himself or herself.
   As they neared the city, Trashcan Man heard one of the men sitting across the aisle from him say quietly to his seatmate: “It’s Heck. Heck Drogan. Goddammit, how does that spook find things out?”
   “Shut up,” the other said, and gave Trashcan Man a mistrustful glance.
   Trash averted his gaze and looked out the window at the passing desert. He was once again troubled in his mind.
   “Oh Jesus,” one of the women said as they filed off the bus, but hers was the only comment.
   Trashcan looked around, puzzled. Everyone was here, it looked like, everyone in Cibola. They had all been called back, with the exception of a few scouts that might be anywhere from the Mexican peninsula to west Texas. They were gathered in a loose semicircle around the fountain, six and seven deep, more than four hundred in all. Some of those in the back were standing on hotel chairs so they could see, and until Trashcan drew closer, he thought it was the fountain they were looking at. Craning his neck, he could see there was something lying on the lawn in front of the fountain, but he couldn’t see what it was.
   A hand grasped his elbow. It was Lloyd. His face looked white and strained. “I been lookin for you. He wants to see you later. Meantime, we got this. God, I hate these. Come on. I need help and you’re elected.”
   Trashcan Man’s head was whirling. He wanted to see him! Him! But in the meantime there was this… whatever this was.
   “What, Lloyd? What is it?”
   Lloyd didn’t answer. Still holding lightly to Trashcan Man’s arm, he led him toward the fountain. The crowd parted before them, almost shrank from them. The narrow corridor they passed through seemed to be insulated with a still cold layer of loathing and fear.
   Standing at the front of the crowd was Whitney Horgan. He was smoking a cigarette. One of his Hush Puppies was propped on the object Trash hadn’t been quite able to make out before. It was a wooden cross. Its vertical piece was about twelve feet long. It looked like a crude lowercase t.
   “Everyone here?” Lloyd asked.
   “Yeah,” Whitey said, “I guess they are. Winky took roll-call. We got nine guys out of state. Flagg said never mind about them. How are you holding up, Lloyd?”
   “I’ll be fine,” Lloyd said. “Well… not fine, but you know—I’ll get through it.”
   Whitey cocked his head toward Trashcan Man. “How much does the kid know?”
   “I don’t know anything,” Trashcan said, more confused than ever. Hope, awe, and dread were all in dubious battle within him. “What is this? Someone said something about Heck—”
   “Yeah, it’s Heck,” Lloyd said. “He’s been freebasing. Fucking blow, don’t I hate the goddam fucking blow. Go on, Whitey, tell em to bring him out.”
   Whitey moved away from Lloyd and Trash, stepping over a rectangular hole in the ground. The hole had been throated with cement. It looked just the right size and depth to take the butt end of the cross. As Whitney “Whitey” Horgan trotted up the wide steps between the gold pyramids, Trashcan Man felt all the spit in his mouth dry up. He suddenly turned, first to the silent crowd, waiting in its crescent formation under the blue sky, then to Lloyd, who stood pale and silent, looking at the cross and picking the white head of a pimple on his chin.
   “You… we… nail him up?” Trashcan managed at last. “Is that what this is about?”
   Lloyd reached suddenly into the pocket of his faded shirt. “You know, I got something for you. He gave it to me to give to you. I can’t make you take it, but it’s a goddam good thing for me that I remembered to at least make the offer. Do you want it?”
   From his breast pocket he drew a fine gold chain with a black jet stone on the end of it. The stone was flawed with a tiny red spot, as was Lloyd’s own. He dangled it before Trashcan Man’s eyes like a hypnotist’s amulet.
   The truth was in Lloyd’s eyes, too clear not to be recognized, and Trashcan Man knew he could never weep and grovel—not before him, not before anybody, but especially not before him —and claim he hadn’t understood. Take this and you take everything, Lloyd’s eyes said. And what’s apart of everything? Why, Heck Drogan, of course. Heck and the cement-lined hole in the ground, the hole just big enough to take the butt end of Heck’s cross-tree.
   He reached for it slowly. His hand paused just before the outstretched fingers could touch the gold chain.
   This is my last chance. My last chance to be Donald Merwin Elbert.
   But another voice, one which spoke with greater authority (but with a certain gentleness, like a cool hand on a fevered brow), told him that the time of choices had long since passed. If he chose Donald Merwin Elbert now, he would die. He had sought the dark man of his own free will (if there is such a thing for the Trashcan Men of the world), had accepted the dark man’s favors. The dark man had saved him from dying at the hands of The Kid (that the dark man might have sent The Kid for just that purpose never crossed Trashcan Man’s mind), and surely that meant his life was now a debt he owed to that same dark man… the man some of them here called the Walkin Dude. His life! Had he not himself offered it again and again?
   But your soul… did you offer your soul as well?
   In for a penny, in for a pound, the Trashcan Man thought, and gently put one hand around the gold chain and the other around the dark stone. The stone was cold and smooth. He held it in his fist for a moment just to see if he could warm it up. He didn’t think he would be able to, and he was right. So he put it around his neck, where it lay against his skin like a tiny ball of ice.
   But he didn’t mind that icy feeling.
   That icy feeling counterbalanced the fire which was always in his mind.
   “Just tell yourself you don’t know him,” Lloyd said. “Heck, I mean. That’s what I always do. It makes it easier. It—”
   Two of the wide hotel doors banged open. Frantic, terrified screams floated across to them. The crowd sighed.
   A party of nine came down the steps. Hector Drogan was in the center. He was fighting like a tiger caught in a net. His face was dead pale except for two hectic blots of color riding high up on his cheekbones. Sweat was pouring off every inch of skin in rivers. He was mother-naked. Five men were holding on to him. One of them was Ace High, the kid Heck had been ribbing about his name.
   “Ace!” Hector was babbling. “Hey, Ace, what do you say? Little help for the kid, okay? Tell them to quit this, man—I can get clean, I swear to God I can clean up my act. What do you say? Little help here! Please, Ace!”
   Ace High said nothing; simply tightened his grip on Heck’s thrashing arm. It was answer enough. Hector Drogan began to scream again. He was dragged relentlessly across the pavilion and toward the fountain.
   Behind him, walking in line like a solemn undertaker’s party, were three men: Whitney Horgan, carrying a large carpetbag; a man named Roy Hoopes, with a stepladder; and Winky Winks, a bald man whose eyes twitched constantly. Winky was carrying a clipboard with a typed sheet of paper on it.
   Heck was dragged to the foot of the cross. A horrible yellow smell of fear was radiating out from him; his eyes rolled, showing the muddy whites, like the eyes of a horse left out in a thunderstorm.
   “Hey, Trashy,” he said hoarsely as Roy Hoopes set up the stepladder behind him. “Trashcan Man. Tell em to cut it out, buddy. Tell them I can get clean. Tell them a scare like this is better’n all the fuckin rehabs in the world. Tell em, man.”
   Trashcan stared down at his feet. As he bent his neck, the black stone swung out from his chest and into his field of vision. The red flaw, the eye, seemed to be staring up at him fixedly.
   “I don’t know you,” he mumbled.
   From the tail of his eye he saw Whitey down on one knee, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, his left eye squinted against the smoke. He opened the carpetbag. He was taking out sharp wooden nails. To Trashcan Man’s horrified gaze, they looked almost as big as tentpegs. He laid the nails on the grass and then removed a large wooden mallet from the carpetbag.
   In spite of the murmuring voices all around them, Trashcan Man’s words seemed to have penetrated the panicky haze in Hector brogan’s mind. “What do you mean, you don’t know me?” he cried wildly. “We had breakfast together just two days ago! You called the kid there Mr. High. What do you mean you don’t know me, you chickenshit little liar? ”
   “I don’t know you at all,” Trash repeated, a little more clearly this time. And what he felt was almost a sense of relief. All he saw here in front of him was a stranger, a stranger who looked a bit like Carley Yates. His hand went to the stone and curled around it. Its coolness reassured him further.
   “You liar! ” Heck screamed. He began to struggle again, his muscles flexing and pumping, the sweat trickling down his bare chest and arms. “You liar! You do so know me! You do so, you liar! ”
   “No I don’t. I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you.”
   Heck began to scream again. The four men holding him bore down, panting and out of breath.
   “Go ahead,” Lloyd said.
   Heck was dragged backward. One of the men holding him stuck out a leg and tripped him. He landed half on the cross and half off it. Meanwhile, Winky had begun to read the typed sheet on his clipboard in a high voice that sliced through Heck’s screams like the howl of a buzz-saw.
   “Attention attention attention! By the order of Randall Flagg, Leader of the People and First Citizen, this man, Hector Alonzo Drogan by name, is ordered executed by an act of crucifixion, this penalty so ordered for the crime of drug use.”
   “No! No! No! ” Heck screamed in frenzied counterpoint. His left arm, greasy with sweat, escaped Ace High’s hold, and instinctively Trash knelt and pinned the arm back down, forcing the wrist against an arm of the cross. A second later, Whitey was kneeling beside Trashcan with the wooden mallet and two of the crude nails. The cigarette still hung from the corner of his mouth. He looked like a man about to do a little job of carpentering in his back yard.
   “Yeah, good, hold him just like that, Trash. I’ll staple him. Won’t take a minute.”
   “Drug use is not allowed in this Society of the People because it impairs the user’s ability to contribute fully to the Society of the People,” Winky was proclaiming. He spoke fast, like an auctioneer, and his eyes bunched and scrunched and wiggled. “Specifically in this case, the accused Hector brogan was found with freebasing paraphernalia and a large supply of cocaine.”
   Now Heck’s screams had reached a pitch that might well have shattered crystal, if there had been any crystal around to shatter. His head lashed from side to side. There was foam on his lips. Ribbons of blood coursed down his arms as six of them, Trashcan Man included, lifted the cross into the cement pit. Now Hector Drogan was silhouetted against the sky with his head thrown back in a rictus of pain.
   “—is done for the good of this Society of the People,” Winky screamed relentlessly. “This communication ends with a solemn warning and greetings to the People of Las Vegas. Let this bill of true facts be nailed above the miscreant’s head, and let it be marked with the seal of the First Citizen, RANDALL FLAGG by name.”
   “Oh my God it HURTS! ” Hector Drogan screamed from above them. “Oh my God my God oh God God God! ”
   The crowd remained for almost an hour, each person afraid to be remarked upon as having been the first to leave. There was disgust on many faces, a drowsy kind of excitement on many others… but if there was a common denominator, it was fear.
   Trashcan Man wasn’t frightened, though. Why should he have been frightened? He hadn’t known the man.
   He hadn’t known him at all.
   It was quarter past ten that night when Lloyd came back to Trashcan Man’s room. He glanced at Trash and said, “You’re dressed. Good. I thought you might have gone to bed already.”
   “No,” Trashcan Man said, “I’m up. Why?”
   Lloyd’s voice dropped. “It’s now, Trashy. He wants to see you. Flagg.”
   “He—?”
   “Yeah.”
   Trashcan Man was transported. “Where is he? My life for him, oh yes—”
   “Top floor,” Lloyd said. “He got in just after we finished burning brogan’s body. From the Coast. He was just here when Whitey and I got back from the landfill. No one ever sees him come or go, Trash, but they always know when he’s taken off again. Or when he comes back. Come on, let’s go.”
   Four minutes later the elevator arrived at the top floor and Trashcan Man, his face alight and his eyes goggling, stepped out. Lloyd did not.
   Trash turned toward him. “Aren’t you—?”
   Lloyd managed a smile, but it was a sorry affair. “No, he wants to see you alone. Good luck, Trash.”
   And before he could say anything else, the elevator door had slid shut and Lloyd was gone.
   Trashcan Man turned around. He was in a wide, sumptuous hallway. There were two doors… and the one at the end was slowly opening. It was dark in there. But Trash could see a form standing in the doorway. And eyes. Red eyes.
   Heart thudding slowly in his chest, mouth dry, Trashcan Man started to walk toward that form. As he did, the air seemed to grow steadily cooler and cooler. Goosebumps rushed out on his sunbaked arms. Somewhere deep inside him, the corpse of Donald Merwin Elbert rolled over in its grave and seemed to cry out.
   Then it was still again.
   “The Trashcan Man,” a low and charming voice said. “How good it is to have you here. How very good.”
   The words fell like dust from his mouth: “My… my life for you.”
   “Yes,” the shape in the doorway said soothingly. Lips parted and white teeth showed in a grin. “But I don’t think it will come to that. Come in. Let me look at you.”
   His eyes overbright, his face as slack as the face of a sleepwalker, Trashcan Man stepped inside. The door closed, std they were in dimness. A terribly hot hand closed over Trashcan Man’s icy one… and suddenly he felt at peace.
   Flagg said: “There’s work for you in the desert, Trash. Great work. If you want it.”
   “Anything,” Trashcan Man whispered. “Anything.”
   Randall Flagg slipped an arm around his wasted shoulders. “I’m going to set you to burn,” he said. “Come, let’s have something to drink and talk about it.”
   And in the end, that burning was very great.

Chapter 49
   
When Lucy Swann woke up it was fifteen minutes to midnight by the ladies’ Pulsar watch she wore. There was silent heat lightning in the west where the mountains were—the Rocky Mountains, she amended with some awe. Before this trip she had never been west of Philadelphia, where her brother-in-law lived. Had lived.
   The other half of the double sleeping bag was empty; that was what had wakened her. She thought of just rolling over and going back to sleep—he would come back to bed when he was ready—and then she got up and went quietly toward where she thought he would be, on the west side of camp. She went lithely, without disturbing a soul. Except for the Judge, of course; ten to midnight was his watch, and you’d never catch Judge Farris nodding off on duty. The Judge was seventy, and he’d joined them in Joliet. There were nineteen of them now, fifteen adults, three children, and Joe.
   “Lucy?” the Judge said, his voice low.
   “Yes. Did you see—”
   A low chuckle. “Sure did. He’s out by the highway. Same place as last night and the night before that.”
   She drew closer to him and saw that his Bible was open on his lap. “Judge, you’ll strain your eyes doing that.”
   “Nonsense. Starlight’s the best light for this stuff. Maybe the only light. How’s this? ‘Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? are not his days like the days of an hireling? As a servant earnestly desireth the shadow, and as an hireling looketh for the reward of his work: So am I made to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed to me. When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.’”
   “Far out,” Lucy said without much enthusiasm. “Real nice, Judge.”
   “It’s not nice, it’s Job. There’s nothing very nice in the Book of Job, Lucy.” He closed the Bible. “ ‘I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.’ That’s your man, Lucy: that’s Larry Underwood to a t.”
   “I know,” she said, and sighed. “Now if I only knew what was wrong with him.”
   The Judge, who had his suspicions, kept silent.
   “It can’t be the dreams,” she said. “No one has them anymore, unless Joe does. And Joe’s… different.”
   “Yes. He is. Poor boy.”
   “And everyone’s healthy. At least since Mrs. Vollman died.” Two days after the Judge joined them, a couple who introduced themselves as Dick and Sally Vollman had thrown in with Larry and his assorted company of survivors. Lucy thought it extremely unlikely that the flu had spared a man and wife, and suspected that their marriage was common-law and of extremely short duration. They were in their forties, and obviously very much in love. Then, a week ago, at the old woman’s house in Hemingford Home, Sally Vollman had gotten sick. They camped for two days, waiting helplessly for her to get better or die. She had died. Dick Vollman was still with them, but he was a different man—silent, thoughtful, pale.
   “He’s taken that to heart, hasn’t he?” she asked Judge Farris.
   “Larry is a man who found himself comparatively late in life,” the Judge said, clearing his throat. “At least, that is how he strikes me. Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizens should be: partisans but never zealots, respecters of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely able to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered… or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power. Quite the opposite. And when things go wrong… when a Mrs. Vollman dies…”
   “Could it have been diabetes?” the Judge interrupted himself. “I think it likely. The cyanosed skin, the fast drop into a coma… possibly, possibly. But if so, where was her insulin? Might she have let herself die? Could it have been suicide?”
   The Judge lapsed into a thinking pause, hands clasped under his chin. He looked like a brooding black bird of prey.
   “You were going to say something about when things go wrong,” Lucy prompted gently.
   “When they go wrong—when a Sally Vollman dies, of diabetes or internal bleeding or whatever—a man like Larry blames himself. The men the civics books idolize rarely come to good ends. Melvin Purvis, the super G-man of the thirties, shot himself with his own service pistol in 1959. When Lincoln was assassinated, he was a prematurely old man tottering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. We used to watch Presidents decay before our very eyes from month to month and even week to week on national TV—except for Nixon, of course, who thrived on power the way that a vampire bat thrives on blood, and Reagan, who seemed a little too stupid to get old. I guess Gerald Ford was that way, too.”
   “I think there’s something more,” Lucy said sadly.
   He looked at her, inquiring.
   “How did it go? I am full of tossings and turnings unto the dawning of the day?”
   He nodded it?
   Lucy said, “Pretty good description of a man in love, isn’t it?”
   He looked at her, surprised that she had known all along about the thing he wouldn’t say. Lucy shrugged, smiled—a bitter quirk of the lips. “Women know,” she said. “Women almost always know.”
   Before he could reply, she had drifted away toward the road, where Larry would be, sitting and thinking about Nadine Cross.
   “Larry?”
   “Here,” he said briefly. “What are you doing up?”
   “I got cold,” she said. He was sitting cross-legged on the shoulder of the road, as if in meditation. “Room for me?”
   “Sure.” He moved over. The boulder still held a bit of warmth from the day which was now passing. She sat down. He slipped an arm around her. According to Lucy’s estimation, they were about fifty miles east of Boulder tonight. If they could get on the road by nine tomorrow, they could be in the Boulder Free Zone for lunch.
   It was the man on the radio who called it the Boulder Free Zone; his name was Ralph Brentner, and he said (with some embarrassment) that the Boulder Free Zone was mostly a radio call-sign, but Lucy liked it just for itself, for the way it sounded. It sounded right. It sounded like a fresh start. And Nadine Cross had adopted the name with an almost religious zeal, as if it was talismanic.
   Three days after Larry, Nadine, Joe, and Lucy had arrived at Stovington and found the plague center deserted, Nadine had suggested they pick up a CB radio and start conning the forty channels. Larry had accepted the idea wholeheartedly—the way he accepted most of her ideas, Lucy thought. She didn’t understand Nadine Cross at all. Larry was stuck on her, that was obvious, but Nadine didn’t want to have much to do with him outside of each day’s routine.
   Anyway, the CB idea had been a good one, even if the brain that had produced it was icelocked (except when it came to Joe). It would be the easiest way to locate other groups, Nadine had said, and to agree upon a rendezvous.
   This had led to some puzzled discussion in their group, which at that time had numbered half a dozen with the addition of Mark Zellman, who had been a welder in upstate New York, and Laurie Constable, a twenty-six-year-old nurse. And the puzzled discussion had led to yet another upsetting argument about the dreams.
   Laurie had begun by protesting that they knew exactly where they were going. They were following the resourceful Harold Lauder and his party to Nebraska. Of course they were, and for the same reason. The force of the dreams was simply too powerful to be denied.
   After some back and forth on this, Nadine had gotten hysterical. She had had no dreams—repeat: no goddam dreams. If the others wanted to practice autohypnosis on each other, fine. As long as there was some rational basis for pushing on to Nebraska, such as the sign at the Stovington installation, fine. But she wanted it understood that she wasn’t going along on the basis of a lot of metaphysical bullshit. If it was all the same to them, she would place her faith in radios, not visions.
   Mark had turned a friendly, gapped grin on Nadine’s strained countenance and said, “If you ain’t had no dreams, how come you woke me up last night talkin in your sleep?”
   Nadine had gone paper white. “Are you calling me a liar?” she nearly screamed. “Because if you are, one of us had better leave right now!” Joe shrank close to her, whimpering.
   Larry had smoothed it over, agreeing with the CB idea. And in the last week or so, they had begun to pick up broadcasts, not from Nebraska (which had been abandoned even before they got there—the dreams had told them that, but even then the dreams had been fading, losing their urgency), but from Boulder, Colorado, six hundred miles farther west—signals boosted by Ralph’s powerful transmitter.
   Lucy could still remember the joyous, almost ecstatic faces of the others as Ralph Brentner’s drawling, Oklahoma accent had cut nasally through the static: “This is Ralph Brentner, Boulder Free Zone. If you hear me, reply on Channel 14. Repeat, Channel 14.”
   They could hear Ralph, but had no transmitter powerful enough to acknowledge, not then. But they had drawn closer, and since that first transmission they had found out that the old woman, Abagail Freemantle by name (but Lucy herself would always think of her as Mother Abagail), and her party had been the first to arrive, but since then people had been straggling in by twos and threes and in groups as large as thirty. There had been two hundred people in Boulder when Brentner first got in contact with them; this evening, as they chattered back and forth—their own CB now in easy reaching distance—there were over three hundred and fifty. Their own group would send that number well on the way to four hundred.
   “Penny for your thoughts,” Lucy said to Larry, and put her hand on his arm.
   “I was thinking about that watch and the death of capitalism,” he said, pointing at her Pulsar. “It used to be root, hog, or die—and the hog who rooted the hardest ended up with the red, white, and blue Cadillac and the Pulsar watch. Now, true democracy. Any lady in America can have a Pulsar digital and a blue haze mink.” He laughed.
   “Maybe,” she said. “But I’ll tell you something, Larry. I may not know much about capitalism, but I know something about this thousand-dollar watch. I know it’s no damned good.”
   “No?” He looked at her, surprised and smiling. It was just a little one, but it was genuine. She was glad to see his smile—a smile that was for her. “Why not?”
   “Because no one knows what time it is,” Lucy said pertly. “Four or five days ago I asked Mr. Jackson, and Mark, and you, one right after another. And you all gave me different times and you all said that your watches had stopped at least once… remember that place where they kept the world’s time? I read an article about it in a magazine one time when I was in the doctor’s office. It was tremendous. They had it right down to the micro-micro-second. They had pendulums and solar clocks and everything. Now I think about that place sometimes and it just makes me mad. All the clocks there must be stopped and I have a thousand-dollar Pulsar watch that I hawked from a jewelry store and it can’t keep time down to the solar second like it’s supposed to. Because of the flu. The goddamned flu.”
   She fell silent and they sat together awhile without talking. Then Larry pointed at the sky. “See there!”
   “What? Where?”
   “Three o’clock high. Two, now.”
   She looked but didn’t see what he had pointed at until he pressed his warm hands to the sides of her face and tilted it toward the right quadrant of the sky. Then she did see and her breath caught in her throat. A bright light, starbright, but hard and unwinking. It fled rapidly across the sky on an east-to-west course.
   “My God,” she cried, “it’s a plane, isn’t it, Larry? A plane?”
   “No. An earth satellite. It will be going around and around up there for the next seven hundred years, probably.”
   They sat and watched it until it was out of sight behind the dark bulk of the Rockies.
   “Larry?” she said softly. “Why didn’t Nadine admit it? About the dreams?”
   There was a barely perceptible stiffening in him, making her wish she hadn’t brought it up. But now that she had, she was determined to pursue it… unless he cut her off entirely.
   “She says she doesn’t have any dreams.”
   “She does have them, though—Mark was right about that. And she talks in her sleep. She was so loud one night she woke me up.”
   He was looking at her now. After a long time he asked, “What was she saying?”
   Lucy thought, trying to get it just right. “She was thrashing around in her sleeping bag and she was saying over and over, ‘Don’t, it’s so cold, don’t, I can’t stand it if you do, it’s so cold, so cold.’ And then she started to pull her hair. She started to pull her own hair in her sleep. And moan. It gave me the creeps.”
   “People can have nightmares, Lucy. That doesn’t mean they’re about… well, about him.”
   “It’s better not to say much about him after dark, isn’t it?”
   “Better, yes.”
   “She acts as if she’s coming unraveled, Larry. Do you know what I mean?”
   “Yes.” He knew. In spite of her insistence that she didn’t dream, there had been brown circles under her eyes by the time they reached Hemingford Home. That magnificent cable of heavy hair was noticeably whiter. And if you touched her, she jumped. She flinched.
   Lucy said, “You love her, don’t you?”
   “Oh, Lucy,” he said reproachfully.
   “No, I just want you to know…” She shook her head violently at his expression. “I have to say this. I see the way you look at her… the way she looks at you sometimes, when you’re busy with something else and it’s… it’s safe. She loves you, Larry. But she’s afraid.”
   “Afraid of what? Afraid of what?”
   He was remembering his attempt to make love to her, three days after the Stovington fiasco. Since then she had grown quiet—she was still cheerful on occasion, but now she was quite obviously laboring to be cheerful. Joe had been asleep. Larry had gone to sit beside her, and for a while they had talked, not about their current situation but about the old things, the safe things. Larry had tried to kiss her. She pushed him away, turning her head, but not before he had felt the things Lucy had just told him. He had tried again, being rough and gentle at the same time, wanting her so damn badly. And for just one moment she had given in to him, had shown him what it could be like, if…
   Then she broke from him and moved away, her face pale, her arms strapped across her breasts, hands cupping elbows, head lowered.
   Don’t do that again, Larry. Please don’t. Or I’ll have to take Joe and leave.
   Why? Why, Nadine? Why does it have to be such a goddam big deal?
   She hadn’t answered. Simply stood in that head-down posture, the brown bruised places already beginning beneath her eyes.
   If I could tell you I would, she said finally, and walked away without looking back.
   “I had a girlfriend once who acted a little like her,” Lucy said. “My senior year in high school. Her name was Joline. Joline Majors. Joline wasn’t in high school. She dropped out to marry her boyfriend. He was in the Navy. She was pregnant when they got married, but she lost the baby. Her man was gone a lot, and Joline… she liked to party down. She liked that, and her man was a regular jealous bear. He told her if he ever found out she was doing anything behind his back, he’d break both of her arms and spoil her face. Can you imagine what that life must have been like? Your husband comes home and says, ‘Well, I’m shipping out now, love. Give me a kiss, and then we’ll have a little roll in the hay, and by the way, if I come back and someone tells me you’ve been messing around, I’ll break both your arms and spoil your face.’”
   “Yeah, that’s not so great.”
   “So after a while she met this guy,” Lucy said. “He was the assistant phys ed coach at Burlington High. They snuck around, always looking over their shoulders, and I don’t know if her husband had set someone up to spy on them, but after a while it didn’t matter. After a while Joline got really flaky. She’d think that some guy waiting for a bus on the corner was one of her husband’s friends. Or the salesman checking in behind her and Herb at some fleabag motel was. She’d think that even if the motel was somewhere way down in New York State. Or even the cop who gave them directions to a picnic spot when they were together. It got so bad that she’d give a little scream if a door slammed in the wind, and she’d jump every time someone came up her stairs. And since she was living in a place that was split up into seven little apartments, someone was almost always coming up the stairs. Herb got scared and left her. He didn’t get scared of Joline’s husband—he got scared of her. And just before her husband came back on leave, Joline had a nervous breakdown. All because she liked to love a little too much… and because he was crazy jealous. Nadine reminds me of that girl, Larry. I’m sorry for her. I don’t like her that much, I guess, but I sure am sorry for her. She looks terrible.”
   “Are you saying Nadine is afraid of me the way that girl was afraid of her husband?”
   Lucy said: “Maybe. I’ll tell you this—wherever Nadine’s husband is, he’s not here.”
   He laughed a little uneasily. “We ought to go back to bed. Tomorrow’s going to be a heavy day.”
   “Yes,” she said, thinking he hadn’t understood a word she said. And suddenly she burst into tears.
   “Hey,” he said. “Hey.” He tried to put an arm around her.
   She struck it off. “You’re getting what you want from me; you don’t have to do that!”
   There was still enough of the old Larry in him to wonder if her voice would carry back to camp.
   “Lucy, I never twisted your arm,” he said grimily.
   “Oh, you’re so stupid!” she cried, and beat at his leg. “Why are men so stupid, Larry? All you can see is what’s in black and white. No, you never twisted my arm. I ain’t like her. You could twist her arm and she’d still spit in your eye and cross her legs. Men have names for girls like me; they write them on bathroom stalls, I’ve heard. But all it is, is needing someone warm, needing to be warm. Needing to love. Is that so bad?”
   “No. No, it isn’t. But Lucy—”
   “But you don’t believe that,” she said scornfully. “So you go on chasing Miss Highpockets and in the meantime you got Lucy to do the horizontal bop with when the sun goes down.”
   He sat quietly, nodding. It was true, every word of it. He was too tired, too Christless beat, to argue against it. She seemed to see that; her face softened and she put a hand on his arm.
   “If you catch her, Larry, I’ll be the first to throw you a bouquet. I never held a grudge in my life. Just… try not to be too disappointed.”
   “Lucy—”
   Her voice rose suddenly, rough with unexpected power, and for a moment his arms goosefleshed. “I just happen to think love is very important, only love will get us through this, good connections; it’s hate against us, worse, it’s emptiness.” Her voice dropped. “You’re right. It’s late. I’m going back to bed. Coming?”
   “Yes,” he said, and as they stood up, he took her in his arms with no calculation at all and kissed her firmly. “I love you as much as I can; Lucy.”
   “I know that,” she said, and gave him a tired smile. “I know that, Larry.”
   This time when he put his arm around her she let it stay. They walked back to camp together, made diffident love, slept.
   Nadine came awake like a cat in the dark some twenty minutes after Larry Underwood and Lucy Swann had come back to camp, ten minutes after they had finished their act of love and drifted off to sleep.
   The high iron of terror sang in her veins.
   Someone wants me, she thought, listening as the millrace of her heart slowed. Her eyes, wide and full of darkness, stared up to where the overhanging branches of an elm laced the sky with shadows. There’s that. Someone wants me. It’s true.
   But… it’s so cold.
   Her parents and her brother had been killed in a car accident when she was six; she hadn’t gone along that day to see her aunt and uncle, staying behind instead to play with a friend from down the street. They had liked brother best anyway, she could remember that. Brother hadn’t been like her, little halfling stolen from an orphanage cradle at the age of four and a half months. Brother’s origins had been clear. Brother had been—trumpets, please—Their Own. But Nadine had always and forever belonged only to Nadine. She was the earth’s child.
   After the accident she had gone to live with the aunt and uncle, because they were the only two relatives. The White Mountains of eastern New Hampshire. She remembered that they had taken her for a ride on the Cog Railway up Mount Washington for her eighth birthday and the altitude had caused a bloody nose and they had been angry with her. Aunt and Uncle were too old, they had been in their mid-fifties when she turned sixteen, the year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon—the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the nightmilk of fantasy. A lovenight. And if the boy caught her she would have given him whatever prizes were hers to give, and what did it matter if he caught her? They had run, wasn’t that the important thing?
   But he hadn’t caught her. A cloud had drifted over the moon. The dew began to feel clammy and unpleasant, frightening. The taste of wine in her mouth had somehow changed to the taste of electric spit; slightly sour. A kind of metamorphosis had taken place, a feeling that she should, must wait.
   And where had he been then, her intended, her dark bridegroom? On what streets, what back roads, clocking along in outside suburban darkness while inside the brittle clink of cocktail chatter broke the world into neat and rational sections? What cold winds were his? How many sticks of dynamite in his frayed packsack? Who knew what his name had been when she was sixteen? How ancient was he? Where had been his home? What sort of mother had held him to her breast? She was only sure that he was an orphan as she was, his time still to come. He walked mostly on roads that hadn’t even been laid down yet, while she had but one foot on those same roads. The junction where they would meet was far ahead. He was an American man, she knew that, a man who would have a taste for milk and apple pie, a man who would appreciate the homely beauty of red check and gingham. His home was America, and his ways were the secret ways, the highways in hiding, the underground railways where directions are written in runes. He was the other man, the other face, the hardcase, the dark man, the Walkin Dude, and his rundown bootheels clocked along the perfumed ways of the summer night.
   Who knoweth when the bridegroom comes?
   She had waited for him, the unbroken vessel. At sixteen she had almost fallen, and again in college. Both of them had gone away angry and perplexed, the way Larry was now, sensing the crossroads inside her, the sense of some preordained, mystic junction point.
   Boulder was the place where the roads diverged.
   The time was close. He had called, bid her come.
   After college she had buried herself in her work, had shared a rented house with two other girls. What two girls? Well, they came and went. Only Nadine stayed, and she was pleasant to the young men her changing roommates brought home, but she never had a young man herself. She supposed they talked about her, called her spinster-in-waiting, maybe even conjectured that she might be a carefully circumspect lesbian. It wasn’t true. She was simply—
   Unbroken.
   Waiting.
   It had seemed to her sometimes that a change was coming. She would be putting toys away in the silent classroom at the end of the day and suddenly she would pause, her eyes lambent and watchful, a jack-in-the-box held forgotten in one hand. And she would think: A change is coming… a great wind is going to blow. Sometimes, when such a thought came to her, she would find herself looking back over her shoulder like something pursued. Then it would break and she would laugh uneasily.
   Her hair had begun to gray in her sixteenth year, the year she had been chased and not caught—just a few strands at first, startlingly visible in all the black, and not gray, no, that was the wrong word… white, it had been white.
   Years later she had attended a party in the basement lounge of a frathouse. The lights had been low and after a while the people had drifted away by twos. Many of the girls—Nadine among them—had signed out for overnight from their dorms. She had fully intended to go through with it… but something that was still buried beneath the months and years had held her back. And the next morning, in the cold light of 7 A.M., she had looked at herself in one of a long line of dormitory bathroom mirrors and saw that the white had advanced again, seemingly overnight—although that, of course, was impossible.
   And so the years had passed, ticking away like seasons in a dry age, and there had been feelings, yes, feelings, and sometimes in the dead grave of night she had awakened both hot and cold, bathed in sweat, deliciously alive and aware in the trench of her bed, thinking of weird dark sex in a kind of gutter ecstasy. Rolling in hot liquid. Coming and biting at the same time. And the mornings after she would go to the mirror and she would fancy that she saw more white there.
   Through those years she was, outwardly, only Nadine Cross: sweet, good with the children, good at her job, single. Once such a woman would have caused comment and curiosity in the community, but times had changed. And her beauty was so singular that it somehow seemed perfectly right for her to be just as she was.
   Now times were going to change again.
   Now the change was coming, and in her dreams she had begun to know her bridegroom, to understand him a little, even though she had never seen his face. He was the one she had been waiting for. She wanted to go to him… but she didn’t want to. She was meant for him, but he terrified her.
   Then Joe had come, and after him, Larry. Things had become terribly complicated then. She began to feel like a prize ring in a tug-of-war rope. She knew that her purity, her virginity, was somehow important to the dark man. That if she let Larry have her (or if she let any man have her), the dark enchantment would end. And she was attracted to Larry. She had set out, quite deliberately, to let him have her—again, she had intended to go through with it. Let him have her, let it end, let it all end. She was tired, and Larry was right. She had waited too long for the other one, through too many dry years.
   But Larry was not right… or so it had seemed at first. She had brushed his initial advances away with a kind of contempt, the way a mare might switch at a fly with her tail. She could remember thinking: If that’s all there is to him, who could blame me for rejecting his suit?
   She had followed him, though. That was a fact. But she had been frantic to reach other people, not just because of Joe but because she had come almost to the point of deserting the boy and striking west on her own to find the man. Only years of ingrained responsibility to the children who had been placed under her care had kept her from doing that… and her knowledge that, left on his own, Joe would die.
   In a world where so many have died, to parcel out more death is surely the gravest sin.
   So she had gone with Larry, who was, after all, better than nothing or no one.
   But it had turned out that there was a great deal more to Larry Underwood than nothing or no one—he was like one of those optical illusions (maybe even to himself) where the water looks shallow, only an inch or two deep, but when you put your hand in you’ve suddenly got your arm wet to the shoulder. The way he had gotten to know Joe, that was one thing. The way Joe had taken to him was another, her own jealous reaction to the growing relationship between Joe and Larry was a third. At the motorcycle dealership in Wells, Larry had bet the fingers of both hands on the boy, and he had won.
   If they had not been concentrating their full attention on the lid covering the gasoline tank, they would have seen her mouth drop open in a slack o of surprise. She had stood watching them, unable to move, her gaze concentrated on the bright metal line of the crowbar, waiting for it to first jitter and then fall away. She only realized after it was over that she had been waiting for the screams to begin.
   Then the lid was up and over and she was faced with her own error in judgment, an error so deep it was fundamental. In that case he had known Joe better than she, and without any special training, and on much shorter notice. Only hindsight allowed her to understand how important the guitar episode had been, how quickly and fundamentally it had defined Larry’s relationship with Joe. And what was at the center of that relationship?
   Why, dependence, of course—what else could have caused that sudden jangle of jealousy all through her system? If Joe had depended on Larry, that would have been one thing, normal and acceptable. What had upset her was that Larry also depended on Joe, needed Joe in a way she didn’t… and Joe knew it.
   Had her judgment been that wrong about Larry’s character? She thought now that the answer was yes. That nervous, self-serving exterior was a veneer, and it was being worn away by hard use. Just the fact that he had held them all together on this long trip spoke for his determination.
   The conclusion seemed clear. Beneath her decision to let Larry make love to her, a part of her was still committed to the other man… and making love to Larry would be like killing that part of herself forever. She wasn’t sure she could do that.
   And she wasn’t the only one who had dreamed of the dark man now.
   That had disturbed her at first, then frightened her. Fright was all it was when she had only Joe and Larry to compare notes with; when they met Lucy Swann and she said she’d had the same sort of dream, fright became a kind of frenzied terror. It was no longer possible to tell herself their dreams only sounded like hers. What if everyone left was having them? What if the dark man’s time had come around at last—not just for her, but for everyone left on the planet?
   This idea more than any other raised the conflicting emotions of utter terror and strong attraction within her. She had held to the idea of Stovington with a nearly panicky grip. It stood, by nature of its function, as a symbol of sanity and rationality against the rising tide of dark magic she felt around her. But Stovington had been deserted, a mockery of the safe haven she had built it up to be in her mind. The symbol of sanity and rationality was a deathhouse.

As they moved west, picking up survivors, her hope that it could somehow end for her without confrontation had gradually died. It died as Larry grew in her estimation. He was sleeping with Lucy Swann now, but what did that matter? She was spoken for. The others had been having two opposing dreams: the dark man and the old woman. The old woman seemed to stand for some sort of elemental force, just as the dark man did. The old woman was the nucleus the others were gradually cohering around.
   Nadine had never dreamed of her.
   Only of the dark man. And when the dreams of the others had suddenly faded away as inexplicably as they had come, her own dreams had seemed to grow in power and in clarity.
   She knew many things which they did not. The dark man’s name was Randall Flagg. Those in the West who opposed him or went against his way of doing things had either been crucified or driven mad somehow and set free to wander in the boiling sink of Death Valley. There were small groups of technical people in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but they were only temporary; very soon they would be moving to Las Vegas, where the main concentration of people was growing. For him there was no hurry. Summer was on the downside now. Soon the Rocky Mountain passes would be filling with snow, and while there were plows to clear them, they would not be able to spare enough warm bodies to man the plows. There would be a long winter in which to consolidate. And next April… or May…
   Nadine lay in the dark, looking up at the sky.
   Boulder was her last hope. The old woman was her last hope. The sanity and rationality she had hoped to find at Stovington had begun to form in Boulder. They were good, she thought, the good guys, and if only it could be that simple for her, caught in her crazy web of conflicting desires.
   Played over and over again, like a dominant chord, was her own firm belief that murder in this decimated world was the gravest sin, and her heart told her firmly and without question that death was Randall Flagg’s business. But oh how she wanted his cold kiss—more than she had wanted the kisses of the high school boy, or the college boy… even more, she feared, than Larry Underwood’s kiss and embrace.
   We’ll be in Boulder tomorrow, she thought. Maybe I’ll know then if the trip is over or…
   A shooting star scratched its fire across the sky, and like a child, she wished on it.

Chapter 50
   
Dawn was coming up, painting the eastern sky a delicate rose color. Stu Redman and Glen Bateman were about halfway up Flagstaff Mountain in West Boulder, where the first foothills of the Rockies rise up out of the flat plains like a vision of prehistory. In the dawnlight Stu thought that the pines crawling between the naked and nearly perpendicular stone faces looked like the veins ridging some giant’s hand that had poked out of the earth. Somewhere to the east, Nadine Cross was at last falling into a thin, unsatisfactory sleep.
   “I’m going to have a headache this afternoon,” Glen said. “I don’t believe I’ve stayed up drinking all night since I was an undergrad.”
   “Sunrise is worth it,” Stu said.
   “Yes, it is. Beautiful. Have you ever been in the Rockies before?”
   “Nope,” Stu said. “But I’m glad I came.” He hoisted the jug of wine and had a swallow. “I got quite a buzz on myself.” He looked out over the view in silence for a few moments and then turned to Glen with a slanted smile. “What’s going to happen now?”
   “Happen?” Glen raised his eyebrows.
   “Sure. That’s why I got you up here. Told Frannie, ‘I’m gonna get him good n drunk and then pick his brains.’ She said fine.”
   Glen grinned. “There are no tea leaves in the bottom of a wine bottle.”
   “No, but she explained to me just what it is you used to be. Sociology. The study of group interaction. So make some educated guesses.”
   “Cross my palm with silver, O aspirant to knowledge.”
   “Never mind the silver, baldy. I’ll take you down to the First National Bank of Boulder tomorrow and give you a million dollars. How’s that?”
   “Seriously, Stu—what do you want to know?”
   “Same things that mute guy Andros wants to know, I guess. What’s going to happen next. I don’t know how to put it any better than that.”
   “There’s going to be a society,” Glen said slowly. “What kind? Impossible to say right now. There are almost four hundred people here now. I’d guess from the rate they’ve been coming in—more every day—that by the first of September there’ll be fifteen hundred of us. Forty-five hundred by the first of October, and maybe as many as eight thousand by the time the snow flies in November and closes the roads. Write that down as prediction number one.”
   To Glen’s amusement, Stu did indeed produce a notebook from the back pocket of his jeans and jotted down what he had just said.
   “Hard for me to believe,” Stu said. “We came all the way across the country and didn’t see a hundred people all told.”
   “Yes, but they’re coming in, aren’t they?”
   “Yes… in dribs and drabs.”
   “In what and whats?” Glen asked, grinning.
   “Dribs and drabs. My mother used to say that. You shitting on my mom’s way of talking?”
   “The day will never come in when I lose enough respect for my own hide to shit on a Texan’s mother, Stuart.”
   “Well, they’re comin in, sure. Ralph’s in touch with five or six groups right now that will bring us up to five hundred by the end of the week.”
   Glen smiled again. “Yes, and Mother Abagail sits right there with him in his ‘radio station,’ but she won’t talk on the CB. Says she’s afraid she’ll get an electroshock.”
   “Frannie loves that old woman,” Stu said. “Part of it is because she knows so much about delivering babies, but part of it is just… loving her. You know?”
   “Yes. Most everybody feels the same.”
   “Eight thousand people by winter,” Stu said, returning to the original topic. “Man oh man.”
   “It’s just arithmetic. Let’s say the flu wiped out ninety-nine percent of the population. Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but let’s use that figure just so we have a place to put our feet. If the flu was ninety-nine percent fatal, that means it wiped out damned near two hundred and eighteen million people, just in this country.” He looked at Stu’s shocked face and nodded grimly. “Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but we can make a pretty good guess that figure’s in the ballpark. Makes the Nazis look like pikers, doesn’t it?”
   “My Lord,” Stu said in a dry voice.
   “But that would still leave over two million people, a fifth of the pre-plague population of Tokyo, a fourth of the pre-plague population of New York. That’s in this country alone. Now, I believe that ten percent of that two million might not have survived the aftermath of the flu. Folks who fell victims to what I’d call the—aftershock. People like poor Mark Braddock with his burst appendix, but also the accidents, the suicides, yes, and murder, too. That takes us down to 1.8 million. But we suspect there’s an Adversary, don’t we? The dark man that we dreamed about. West of us somewhere. There are seven states over there that could legitimately be called his territory… if he really exists.”
   “I guess he exists, all right,” Stu said.
   “My feeling, too. But is he simply in dominion of all the people over there? I don’t think so, any more than Mother Abagail is automatically in dominion over the people in the other forty-one continental United States. I think things have been in a state of slow flux and that that state of affairs is beginning to end. People are cohering. When you and I first discussed this back in New Hampshire, I envisioned dozens of little tinpot societies. What I didn’t count on—because I didn’t know about it—was the all but irresistible pull of these two opposing dreams. It was a new fact that no one could have foreseen.”
   “Are you saying that we’ll end up with nine hundred thousand people and he’ll end up with nine hundred thousand?”
   “No. First, the coming winter is going to take its toll. It’s going to take it here, and it’s going to be even tougher for the small groups that don’t make it here before the snow. You realize we don’t even have one doctor in the Free Zone yet? Our medical staff consists of a veterinarian and Mother Abagail herself, who’s forgotten more valid folk medicine than you or I will ever have a chance to learn. Still, they’d look cute trying to put a steel plate in your skull after you took a fall and bashed in the back of your head, wouldn’t they?”
   Stu snickered. “That ole boy Rolf Dannemont would probably drag out his Remington and let daylight through me.”
   “I’d guess the total American population might be down to 1.6 million by next spring—and that’s a kind estimate. Of that number, I’d like to hope we’d get the million.”
   “A million people,” Stu said, awed. He looked out over the sprawling, mostly deserted city of Boulder, now brightening as the sun began to hoist itself over the flat eastern horizon. “I just can’t picture that. This town would be busting at the seams.”
   “Boulder couldn’t hold them. I know that boggles the mind when you walk around the empty streets downtown and out toward Table Mesa, but it just couldn’t. We’d have to seed the communities around us. The situation you’d have is this one giant community and the rest of the country east of here absolutely empty.”
   “Why do you think we’d get most of the people?”
   “For a very unscientific reason,” Glen said, riffling his tonsure of hair with one hand. “I like to believe most people are good. And I believe that whoever is running the show west of us is really bad. But I have a hunch…” He trailed off.
   “Go on, spill it.”
   “I will because I’m drunk. But it stays between us, Stuart.”
   “All right.”
   “Your word?”
   “My word,” Stu said.
   “I think he’s going to get most of the techies,” Glen said finally. “Don’t ask me why; it’s just a hunch. Except that tech people like to work in an atmosphere of tight discipline and linear goals, for the most part. They like it when the trains run on time. What we’ve got here in Boulder right now is mass confusion, everyone bopping along and doing his own thing… and we’ve got to do something about what my students would have called ‘getting our shit together.’ But that other fellow… I’ll bet he ’s got the trains running on time and all his ducks in a row. And techies are just as human as the rest of us; they’ll go where they’re wanted the most. I’ve a suspicion that our Adversary wants as many as he can get. Fuck the farmers, he’d just as soon have a few men who can dust off those Idaho missile silos and get them operational again. Ditto tanks and helicopters and maybe a B-52 bomber or two just for chuckles. I doubt if he’s gotten that far yet—in fact, I’m sure of it. We’d know. Right now he’s probably still concentrating on getting the power back on, re-establishing communications… maybe he’s even had to indulge in a purge of the fainthearted. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and he’ll know that. He has time. But when I watch the sun go down at night—this is no shit, Stuart—I get scared. I don’t need bad dreams to scare me anymore. All I have to do is think of them over there on the other side of the Rockies, busy as little bees.”
   “What should we be doing?”
   “Should I give you a list?” Glen responded, grinning.
   Stuart gestured at his battered notebook. There were two dancers in silhouette and the words BOOGIE DOWN! on its hot pink cover. “Yup,” he said.
   “You’re kidding.”
   “No, I ain’t. You said it, Glen, we got to start getting our shit together someplace. I feel it, too. It’s getting later every day. We can’t just sit here jacking off and listening to the CB. We may wake up some morning to find that hardcase waltzing into Boulder at the head of an armored column, complete with air support.”
   “Don’t look for him tomorrow,” Glen said.
   “No. But what about next May?”
   “Possible,” Glen said in a low voice. “Yes, quite possible.”
   “And what do you think would happen to us?”
   Glen didn’t reply with words. He made an explicit little trigger-pulling gesture with the forefinger of his right hand and then hurriedly scoffed the last of the wine.
   “Yeah,” Stu said. “So let’s start getting it together. Talk.”
   Glen closed his eyes. The brightening day touched his wrinkled cheeks and forehead.
   “Okay,” he said. “Here it is, Stu. First: Re-create America. Little America. By fair means and by foul. Organization and government come first. If it starts now, we can form the sort of government we want. If we wait until the population triples, we are going to have grave problems.
   “Let’s say we call a meeting a week from today, that would make it August eighteenth. Everyone to attend. Before the meeting there should be an ad hoc Organization Committee. A committee of seven, let us say. You, me, Andros, Fran, Harold Lauder, maybe, a couple more. The job of the committee would be to create an agenda for the August eighteenth meeting. And I can tell you right now what some of the items on that agenda should be.”
   “Shoot.”
   “First, reading and ratification of the Declaration of Independence. Second, r and r of the Constitution. Third, r and r of the Bill of Rights. All ratification to be done by voice vote.”
   “Christ, Glen, we’re all Americans—”
   “No, that’s where you’re wrong,” Glen said, opening his eyes. They looked socketed and bloodshot. “We’re a bunch of survivors with no government at all. We’re a hodgepodge collection from every age group, religious group, class group, and racial group. Government is an idea, Stu. That’s really all it is, once you strip away the bureaucracy and the bullshit. I’ll go further. It’s an inculcation, nothing but a memory path worn through the brain. What we’ve got going for us now is culture lag. Most of these people still believe in government by representation—the Republic—what they think of as ‘democracy.’ But culture lag never lasts long. After a while they’ll start having the gut reactions: the President is dead, the Pentagon is for rent, nobody is debating anything in the House and the Senate except maybe for the termites and the cockroaches. Our people here are very soon going to wake up to the fact that the old ways are gone, and that they can restructure society any old way they want. We want—we need —to catch them before they wake up and do something nutty.”
   He leveled his finger at Stu.
   “If someone stood up at the August eighteenth meeting and proposed that Mother Abagail be put in absolute charge, with you and me and that fellow Andros as her advisers, those people would pass the item by acclamation, blissfully unaware that they had just voted the first operating American dictatorship into power since Huey Long.”
   “Oh, I cant believe that. There are college graduates here, lawyers, political activists—”
   “Maybe they used to be. Now they’re just a bunch of tired, scared people who don’t know what’s going to happen to them. Some might squawk, but they’d shut up when you told them that Mother Abagail and her advisers were going to get the power back on in sixty days. No, Stu, it’s very important that the first thing we do is ratify the spirit of the old society. That’s what I meant about recreating America. It has to be that way as long as we’re operating under direct threat of the man we’re calling the Adversary.”
   “Go on.”
   “All right. The next item on the agenda would be that we run the government like a New England township. Perfect democracy. As long as we’re relatively small, it’ll work fine. Only instead of a board of selectmen we’ll have seven… representatives, I guess. Free Zone Representatives. How does that sound?”
   “It sounds fine.”
   “I think so, too. And we’ll see to it that the people who get elected are the same people who were on the ad hoc committee. We’ll put the rush on everybody and get the vote taken before people can do any tub-thumping for their friends. We can handpick people to nominate us and then second us. The vote’ll go through as slick as shit through a goose.”
   “That’s neat,” Stu said admiringly.
   “Sure,” Glen said glumly. “If you want to short-circuit the democratic process, ask a sociologist.”
   “What’s next?”
   “This is going to be very popular. The item would read: ‘Resolved: Mother Abagail is to be given absolute veto power over any action proposed by the Board.’”
   “Jesus! Will she agree to that?”
   “I think so. But I don’t think she’d ever be apt to exercise her veto power, not in any circumstance I can foresee. We just can’t expect to have a workable government here unless we make her its titular head. She’s the thing we all have in common. We’ve all had a paranormal experience that revolves around her. And she has a… a kind of aura about her. People all use the same loose bunch of adjectives to describe her: good, kind, old, wise, clever, nice. These people have had one dream that frightens the bejesus out of them and one that makes them feel safe and secure. They love and trust the source of the good dream all the more because of the dream that frightened them. And we can make it clear to her that she’s our leader in name only. I think that’s how she’d want it. She’s old, tired…”
   Stu was shaking his head. “She’s old and tired, but she sees this problem of the dark man as a religious crusade, Glen. And she’s not the only one, either. You know that.”
   “You mean she might decide to take the bit in her teeth?”
   “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad,” Stu remarked. “After all, it was her we dreamed of, not a Representative Board.”
   Glen was shaking his head. “No, I can’t accept the idea that we’re all pawns in some post-Apocalypse game of good and evil, dreams or not. Goddammit, it’s irrational!”
   Stu shrugged. “Well, let’s not get bogged down in it now. I think your idea of giving her veto power is a good one. In fact, I don’t think it goes far enough. We ought to give her the power to propose as well as dispose.”
   “But not absolute power on that side of the slate,” Glen said hastily.
   “No, her ideas would have to be ratified by the Representative Board,” Stu said, and then added slyly: “But we might find ourselves a rubber stamp for her instead of the other way around.”
   There was a long silence. Glen had put his forehead into one hand. At last he said, “Yeah, you’re right. She can’t just be a figurehead… at the very least we have to accept the possibility that she may have her own ideas. And that’s where I pack up my cloudy crystal ball, East Texas. Because she’s what those of us who ride the sociology range call other-directed.”
   “Who’s the other?”
   “God? Thor? Allah? Pee-wee Herman? It doesn’t matter. What it means is that what she says won’t necessarily be directed by what this society needs or by what its mores turn out to be. She’ll be listening to some other voice. Like Joan of Arc. What you’ve made me see is that we just might wind up with a theocracy on our hands here.”
   “Theoc-what?”
   “On a God trip,” Glen said. He didn’t sound too happy about it. “When you were a little boy, Stu, did you ever dream that you might grow up to be one of seven high priests and/or priestesses to a one-hundred-and-eight-year-old black woman from Nebraska?”
   Stu stared at him. Finally he said: “Is there any more of that wine?”
   “All gone.”
   “Shit.”
   “Yes,” Glen said. They studied each other’s face in silence and then suddenly burst out laughing.

It was surely the nicest house Mother Abagail had ever lived in, and sitting here on the screened-in porch put her in mind of a traveling salesman who had come around Hemingford back in 1936 or ‘37. Why, he had been the sweetest-talking fellow she had ever met in her life; he could have charmed the birdies right down from the trees. She had asked this young man, Mr. Donald King by name, what his business was with Abby Freemantle, and he had replied: “My business, ma’am, is pleasure. Your pleasure. Do you like to read? Listen to the radio, perchance? Or maybe just put your tired old dogs up on a foot hassock and listen to the world as it rolls down the great bowling alley of the universe?”
   She had admitted she enjoyed all those things, not admitting that the Motorola had been sold a month before to pay for ninety bales of hay.
   “Well, those are the things I’m selling,” this sweet-talking road-merchant had told her. “It may be called an Electrolux vacuum cleaner complete with all the attachments, but what it really is, is spare time. Plug her in and you open up whole new vistas of relaxation for yourself. And the payments are almost as easy as your housework’s going to be.”
   They had been deep in the Depression then, she hadn’t even been able to raise twenty cents for hair ribbons for her granddaughters’ birthdays, and there was no chance for that Electrolux. But say, didn’t that Mr. Donald King of Peru, Indiana, talk sweet. My! She had never seen him again, but she had never forgotten his name, either. She just bet he had gone on to break some white lady’s heart. She never did own a vacuum cleaner until the end of the Nazi war, when it seemed like all of a sudden anybody could afford anything and even poor white trash had a Mercury hidden away in their back shed.
   Now this house, which Nick had told her was in the Mapleton Hill section of Boulder (Mother Abagail just bet there hadn’t been many blacks living up here before the smiting plague), had every gadget she’d ever heard of and some she hadn’t. Dishwasher. Two vacuums, one strictly for the upstairs work. Dispos-All in the sink. Microwave oven. Clothes washer and dryer. There was a gadget in the kitchen, eked like nothing more than a steel box, and Nick’s good friend Ralph Brentner told her it was a “trash masher,” and you could put about a hundred pounds of swill into it and get back a little block of garbage about the size of a footstool. Wonders never ceased.
   But come to think of it, some of them had.
   Sitting, rocking on the porch, her eye happened to fall upon an electrical plug-in plate set into the baseboard. Probably so folks could come out here in the summertime and listen to the radio or even have the baseball on that cute little round TV. Nothing in the whole country more common than those little wall-plates with the prong-slits in them. She’d even had them back in her squatter’s shack in Hemingford. You didn’t think nothing of those plates… unless they didn’t work anymore. Then you realized that one hell of a lot of a person’s life came out of them. All that spare time, that pleasure which the long-ago Don King had extolled her on… it came out of those switchplates set into the wall. With their potency taken away, you might as well use all those gadgets like the microwave oven and the “trash masher” to hang your hat and coat on.
   Say! Her own little house had been better equipped to handle the death of those little switchplates than this one was. Here, someone had to bring her water fetched all the way from Boulder Creek, and it had to be boiled before you could use it, just for safety’s sake. Back home she’d had her own handpump. Here, Nick and Ralph had had to truck up an ugly gadget called a Port-O-San; they had put it in the back yard. At home she’d had her own outhouse. She would have traded the Maytag washer-dryer combination in a second for her own washtub, but she had gotten Nick to find her a new one, and Brad Kitchner had found her a scrub-board somewhere and some good old lye soap. They probably thought she was a good old pain in the ass, wanting to do her own washing—and so much of it—but cleanly went next to Godly, she had never sent her washing out in her whole life, and she didn’t mean to start now. She had her little accidents from time to time, too, as old folks often did, but as long as she could do her own wash, those accidents didn’t have to be anybody’s business but her own.
   They would get the power back on, of course. It was one of the things God had shown her in her dreams. She knew a goodish number of things about what was to come here—some from the dreams, some from her own common sense. The two were too intertwined to tell apart.
   Soon all these people would stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off and start pulling together. She was not a sociologist like that Glen Bateman (who always eyed her like a racetrack agent looking at a phony ten), but she knew that people always did pull together after a while. The curse and blessing of the human race was its chumminess. Why, if six people went floating down the Mississippi on a church roof in a flood, they’d start a bingo game as soon as the roof grounded on a sandbar.
   First they’d want to form some sort of government, probably one they’d want to run around her. She couldn’t allow that, of course, as much as she would like to; that would not be God’s will. Let them run all the things that had to do with this earth—get the power back on? Fine. First thing she was going to do was try out that “trash masher.” Get the gas running so they wouldn’t freeze their bee-hinds off this winter. Let them pass their resolutions and make their plans, that was fine. She would keep her nose right out of that part. She would insist that Nick have a part in the running of it, and maybe Ralph. That Texan seemed all right, he knew enough to shut off his mouth when his brains weren’t running. She supposed they might want that fat boy, that Harold, and she wouldn’t stop them, but she didn’t like him. Harold made her nervous. All the time grinning, but the grin never touched his eyes. He was pleasant, he said the right things, but his eyes were like two cold flints poking out of the ground.
   She thought that Harold had some kind of secret. Some smelly, nasty thing all wrapped up in a stinking poultice in the middle of his heart. She had no idea what it might be; it was not God’s will for her to see that, so it must not matter to His plan for this community. All the same, it troubled her to think that fat boy might be a part of their high councils… but she would say nothing.
   Her business she thought rather complacently in her rocker, her place in their councils and deliberations had only to do with the dark man.
   He had no name, although it pleased him to call himself Flagg… at least for the time being. And on the far side of the mountains, his work was already well begun. She did not know his plans; they were as veiled from her eyes as whatever secrets lay in that fat boy Harold’s heart. But she did not have to know the specifics. His goal was clear and simple: to destroy all of them.
   Her understanding of him was surprisingly sophisticated. The people who had been drawn to the Free Zone all came to see her in this place, and she received them, although they sometimes made her tired… and they all wanted to tell her that they had dreamed of her and of him. They were terrified of him, and she nodded and comforted and soothed as best she could, but privately she thought that most of them wouldn’t know this Flagg if they met him on the street… unless he wanted to be noticed. They might feel him—a cold chill, the kind you got when a goose walked over your grave, a sudden hot feeling like a fever-flash, or a sharp and momentary drilling pain in the ears or the temples. But these people were wrong to think he had two heads, or six eyes, or big spike horns growing out of his temples. He probably didn’t look much different than the man who used to bring the milk or the mail.
   She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth’s children of darkness; they couldn’t make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God’s light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted—was able—only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.
   He would have his followers, of course; that was nothing new. He was a liar, and his father was the Father of Lies. He would be like a big neon sign to them, standing high to the sky, dazzling their sight with fizzing fireworks. They would not be apt to notice, these apprentice unshapers, that like a neon sign, he only made the same simple patterns over and over again. They would not be apt to realize that, if you release the gas which makes the pretty patterns from its complex assortment of tubes, it floats silently away and dissipates, leaving not a taste or so much as a whiff of smell behind.
   Some would make the deduction for themselves in time—his kingdom would never be one of peace. The sentry posts and barbed wire at the frontiers of his land would be there as much to keep the converts in as to keep the invader out.
   Would he win?
   She had no assurance that he would not. She knew he must be as aware of her as she was of him, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to see her scrawny black body hung up to the sky on a cross of telephone poles for the crows to pick. She knew that a few of them besides herself had dreamed of crucifixions, but only a few. Those who did had told her but no one else, she suspected. And none of that answered the question:
   Would he win?
   That was not for her to know, either. God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.
   God was a gamesman—if He had been a mortal, He would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann’s general store back in Hemingford Home. He played red to black, white to black. She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game was the candle. He would prevail in His own good time. But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand… and she would not overestimate the dark man’s craft and cozening. If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land. Only another private soldier—long past retirement age, it was true!—in the service of the Lord.
   “Thy will be done,” she said, and reached into her apron pocket for a packet of Planters peanuts. Her last doctor, Dr. Staunton, had told her to steer clear of salty foods, but what did he know? She had outlived both of the doctors who had presumed to advise her on her health since her eighty-sixth birthday, and she would have a few peanuts if she wanted to. They hurt her gums mortal bad, but my! weren’t they tasty?
   As she munched, Ralph Brentner came up her walk, his hat with the feather in the band cocked back well on his head. As he tapped on the porch door, he took the hat off.
   “You awake, Mother?”
   “That I am,” she said through a mouthful of peanuts. “Step in, Ralph, I ain’t chewin these nuts, I’m gummin em to death.”
   Ralph laughed and came in. “There’s some folk out past the gate that’d like to say howdy, if you ain’t too tired. They just got in about an hour ago. A pretty good crew, I’d say. The fella in charge is one of these longhairs, but he seems well about it. Name’s Underwood.”
   “Well, bring em up, Ralph, that’s fine,” she said.
   “Good enough.” He turned to go.
   “Where’s Nick?” she asked him. “Haven’t seen him today nor yesterday neither. He gettin too good for homefolks?”
   “He’s been out at the reservoir,” Ralph said. “Him and that electrician, Brad Kitchner, have been looking at the power plant.” He rubbed the side of his nose. “I was out this morning. Figured all those chiefs orta have at least one Indian to order around.”
   Mother Abagail cackled. She did like Ralph. He was a simple soul, but canny. He had a feel for how things worked. She was not surprised that he had been the one to get what everybody now called Free Zone Radio going. He was the kind of man who wouldn’t be afraid to try epoxy on your tractor battery when it started to split open, and if the epoxy did the job, why, he’d just take off his shapeless hat and scratch his balding head and grin that grin, like he was an eleven-year-old kid with the chores done and his fishing pole leaned against his shoulder. He was a good sort to have around when things weren’t going just right and the type of man who always somehow ended up on relief when rimes were flush for lust about everyone else. He could put the right sort of valve on your bicycle pump when it wouldn’t mate to a tire bigger than the kind that went on a bike and he’d know what was making that funny buzzing noise in your oven just by looking at it, but when he had to deal with a company timeclock, he’d somehow always end up punching in late and punching out early and get fired for it before very long. He’d know you could fertilize corn with pigshit if you mixed it right, and he’d know how to pickle cukes, but he would never be able to understand a car loan agreement, or to figure out how the dealers managed to rook him every time. A job application form filled out by Ralph Brentner would look as if it had been through a Hamilton-Beach blender… misspelled, dog-eared, dotted with blots of ink and greasy fingerprints. His employment history would look like a checkerboard which had been around the world on a tramp steamer. But when the very fabric of the world began to tear open, it was the Ralph Brentners who were not afraid to say, “Let’s slap a little epoxy in there and see if that’ll hold her.” And more often than not, it did.
   “You’re a good fella, Ralph, you know it? You’re a one.”
   “Why, you are too, Mother. Not that you’re a fella, but you know what I mean. Anyhow, that fella Redman came by while we were workin. Wanted to talk to Nick about being on some kind of committee.”
   “And what did Nick say?”
   “Aw, he wrote a couple of pages. But what it came down to was fine by me if it’s fine by Mother Abagail. Is it?”
   “Well now, what would an old lady like myself have to say about such doings?”
   “A lot,” Ralph said in a serious, almost shocked manner. “You’re the reason we’re here. I guess we’ll do whatever you want.”
   “What I want is to go on livin free like I always have, like an American. I just want my say when it’s time for me to have it. Like an American.”
   “Well, you’ll have all of that.”
   “The rest feel that way, Ralph?”
   “You bet they do.”
   “Then that’s fine.” She rocked serenely. “Time everyone got going. There’s people lollygaggin around. Mostly just waitin for somebody to tell em where to squat and lean.”
   “Then I can go ahead?”
   “With what?”
   “Well, Nick and Stu ast me if I could find a printing press and maybe get her going, if they got me some electricity to run it. I said I didn’t need any electricity, I’d just go down to the high school and find the biggest hand-crank mimeograph I could lay my hands on. They want some fliers.” He shook his head. “Do they! Seven hundred. Why, we only got four hundred and some here.”
   “And nineteen out by the gate, probably getting heatstroke while you and me chin. You go bring them in.”
   “I will.” Ralph started away.
   “And Ralph?”
   He turned back.
   “Print a thousand,” she said.

They filed in through the gate that Ralph opened and she felt her sin, the one she thought of as the mother of sin. The father of sin was theft; every one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to “Thou shalt not steal.” Murder was the theft of a life, adultery the theft of a wife, covetousness the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God’s name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out to—walk the streets like a strutting whore. She had never been much of a thief, a minor pilferer from time to time at worst.
   The mother of sin was pride.
   Pride was the female side of Satan in the human race, the quiet egg of sin, always fertile. Pride had kept Moses out of Canaan, where the grapes were so big the men had to carry them in slings. Who brought the water from the rock when we were thirsty? the Children of Israel asked, and Moses had answered, I did it.
   She had always been a proud woman. Proud of the floor she washed on her hands and knees (but Who had provided the hands, the knees, the very water she washed with?), proud that all her children had turned out all right—none in jail ever, none caught by dope or the bottle, none of them frigging around on the wrong side of the sheets—but the mothers of children were the daughters of God. She was proud of her life, but she had not made her life. Pride was the curse of will, and like a woman, pride had its wiles. At her great age she had not learned all its illusions yet, or mastered its glamors.
   And when they filed through the gate she thought: It’s me they’ve come to see. And on the heels of that sin, a series of blasphemous metaphors, rising unbidden in her mind: how they filed through one by one like communicants, their young leader with his eyes mostly cast down, a light-haired woman by his side, a little boy just behind him with a dark-eyed woman whose black hair was shot with twists of gray. The others behind them in a line.
   The young man climbed the porch steps, but his woman stopped at the foot. His hair was long, as Ralph had said, but it was clean. He had a considerable growth of reddish-gold beard. He had a strong face with freshly etched lines of care in it, around the mouth and across the forehead.
   “You’re really real,” he said softly.
   “Why, I have always thought so,” she said. “I am Abagail Freemantle, but most folks round here just call me Mother Abagail. Welcome to our place.”
   “Thank you,” he said thickly, and she saw he was struggling with tears. “I’m… we’re glad to be here. My name’s Larry Underwood.”
   She held her hand out and he took it lightly, with awe, and she felt that twinge of pride again, that stiffneckedness. It was as if he thought she had a fire in her that would burn him.
   “I… dreamed of you,” he said awkwardly.
   She smiled and nodded and he turned stiffly, almost stumbling. He went back down the steps, shoulders hunched. He would unwind, she thought. Now that he was here and when he found out he didn’t have to take the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. A man who doubts himself shouldn’t have to try too hard for too long, not until he’s seasoned, and this man Larry Underwood was still a little green and apt to bend. But she liked him.
   His woman, a pretty little thing with eyes like violets, came next. She looked boldly at Mother Abagail, but not scornfully. “I’m Lucy Swann. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” And although she was wearing pants, she sketched a little curtsy.
   “Glad you could come by, Lucy.”
   “Would you mind if I asked… well…” Now her eyes dropped and she began to blush furiously.
   “A hundred and eight at last count,” she said kindly. “Feels more like two hundred and sixteen some days.”
   “I dreamed about you,” Lucy said, and then retired in some confusion.
   The woman with the dark eyes and the boy came next. The woman looked at her gravely and unflinchingly; the boy’s face showed frank wonder. The boy was all right. But something about the woman made her feel grave-cold. He’s here, she thought. He’s come in the shape of this woman… for behold he comes in more forms than his own… the wolf… the crow… the snake.
   She was not above feeling fear for herself, and for one instant she felt this strange woman with the white in her hair would reach out, almost casually, and snap her neck. For the one instant the feeling held, Mother Abagail actually fancied that the woman’s face was gone and she was looking into a hole in time and space, a hole from which two eyes, dark and damned, stared out at her—eyes that were lost and haggard and hopeless.
   But it was just a woman, and not him. The dark man would never dare come to her here, even in a shape that was not his own. This was just a woman—a very pretty one, too—with an expressive, sensitive face and one arm about her little boy’s shoulders. She had only been daydreaming for a moment. Surely that was all.
   For Nadine Cross, the moment was a confusion. She had been all right when they came in through the gate. She had been all right until Larry had begun talking to the old lady. Then an almost swooning sense of revulsion and terror had come over her. The old woman could… could what?
   Could see.
   Yes. She was afraid that the old woman could see inside her, to where the darkness was already planted and growing well. She was afraid the old woman would rise from her place on the porch and denounce her, demand that she leave Joe and go to those (to him) for whom she was intended.
   The two of them, each with their own murky fears, looked at each other. They measured each other. The moment was short, but it seemed very long to the two of them.
   He’s in her—the Devil’s Imp, Abby Freemantle thought.
   All of their power is right here, Nadine thought in her own turn. She’s all they’ve got, although they may think differently.
   Joe was growing restive beside her, tugging at her hand.
   “Hello,” she said in a thin, dead voice. “I’m Nadine Cross.”
   The old woman said: “I know who you are.”
   The words hung in the air, cutting suddenly through the other chatter. People turned, puzzled, to see if something was happening.
   “Do you?” Nadine said softly. Suddenly it seemed that Joe was her protection, her only one.
   She moved the boy slowly in front of her, like a hostage. Joe’s queer seawater eyes looked up at Mother Abagail.
   Nadine said: “This is Joe. Do you know him as well?”
   Mother Abagail’s eyes remained locked on the eyes of the woman who called herself Nadine Cross, but a thin shine of perspiration had broken out on the back of her neck.
   “I don’t think Joe’s his name any more than mine’s Cassandra,” she said, “and I don’t think you’re his mom.” She dropped her eyes to the boy with something like relief, unable to suppress a queer feeling that the woman had somehow won—that she had put the little chap between them, used him to keep her from doing whatever her duty was… ah, but it had come so sudden, and she hadn’t been ready for it!
   “What’s your name, chap?” she asked the boy.
   The boy struggled as if a bone were caught in his throat. “He won’t tell you,” Nadine said, and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “He can’t tell you. I don’t think he remem—”
   Joe threw it off and that seemed to break the block. “Leo! ” he said with sudden force and great clarity. “Leo Rockway, that’s me! I’m Leo!” And he sprang into Mother Abagail’s arms, laughing. That generated laughter and some applause from the crowd. Nadine became virtually unnoticed, and Abby felt again that some vital focus, some vital chance, had ebbed away.
   “Joe,” Nadine called. Her face was remote, under control again.
   The boy drew away a bit from Mother Abagail and looked at her.
   “Come away,” Nadine said, and now she looked unflinchingly at Abby, speaking not to the boy but directly at her. “She’s old. You’ll hurt her. She’s very old and… not very strong.”
   “Oh, I think I’m strong enough to love a chap like him a bit,” Mother Abagail said, but her voice sounded oddly uncertain in her own ears. “He looks like he’s had a hard road.”
   “Well, he’s tired now. And you are, too, from the look. Come on, Joe.”
   “I love her,” the boy said, not moving.
   Nadine seemed to flinch at that. Her voice sharpened. “Come away, Joe!”
   “That’s not my name! Leo! Leo! That’s my name! ”
   The little crowd of new pilgrims quieted again, aware that something unexpected had happened, might be happening still, but unable to know what.
   The two women locked eyes again like sabers.
   I know who you are, Abby’s eyes said.
   Nadine’s answered: Yes. And I know you.
   But this time it was Nadine who dropped her eyes first.
   “All right,” she said. “Leo, or whatever you like. Just come away before you tire her any more.”
   He left Mother Abagail’s arms, but reluctantly.
   “You come back and see me whenever you want,” Abby said, but she did not raise her eyes to include Nadine.
   “Okay,” the boy said, and blew her a kiss. Nadine’s face was stony. She didn’t speak. As they went back down the porch steps, the arm Nadine had around his shoulders seemed more like a dragchain than a comfort. Mother Abagail watched them go, aware that she was losing the focus again. With the woman’s face out of her sight, the sense of revelation began to grow fuzzy. She became unsure of what she had felt. She was only another woman, surely… wasn’t she?
   The young man, Underwood, was standing at the base of the steps, and his face was like a thundercloud.
   “Why were you like that?” he asked the woman, and although he’d lowered his voice, Mother Abagail could still hear perfectly well.
   The woman paid no attention. She went by him without a word. The boy looked at Underwood in a beseeching way, but the woman was in charge, at least for the time being, and the little boy let her bear him along, bear him away.
   There was a moment of silence, and she suddenly felt at a loss to fill it, although it needed to be filled—
   –didn’t it?
   Wasn’t it her job to fill it?
   And a voice asked softly, Is it? Is that your job? Is that why God brought you here, woman? To be the Official Greeter at the gates of the Free Zone?
   I can’t think, she protested. The woman was right: I AM tired.
   He comes in more shapes than his own, the small interior voice persisted. Wolf, crow, snake… woman.
   What did it mean? What had happened here? What, in God’s name?
   I was sitting here complacently, waiting to be kowtowed to—yes, that’s what I was doing, no use denying it—and now that woman has come and something has happened and I’m losing what it was. But there was something about that woman… wasn’t there? Are you sure? Are you sure?
   There was an instant of silence, and in it they all seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to prove herself. And she wasn’t doing it. The woman and the boy were gone from sight; they had left as if they were the true believers and she nothing but a shoddy, grinning Sanhedrin they had seen through immediately.
   Oh, but I’m old! It’s not fair!
   And on the heels of that came another voice, small and low and rational, a voice that was not her own: Not too old to know the woman is —
   Now another man had approached her in hesitant, deferential fashion. “Hi, Mother Abagail,” he said. “The name’s Zellman. Mark Zellman. From Lowville, New York. I dreamed about you.”
   And she was faced with a sudden choice that was clearcut for only an instant in her groping mind. She could acknowledge this man’s hello, banter with him a little to set him at his ease (but not too much at ease; that was not precisely what she wanted), and then go on to the next and the next and the next, receiving their homage like new palm leaves, or she could ignore him and the rest. She could follow the thread of her thought down into the depths of herself, searching for whatever it was that the Lord meant her to know.
   The woman is —
   –what?
   Did it matter? The woman was gone.
   “I had me a great-nephew lived in upstate New York one time,” she said easily to Mark Zellman. “Town named Rouse’s Point. Backed right up against Vermont on Lake Champlain, it is. Probably never heard of it, have you?”
   Mark Zellman said he sure had heard of it; just about everyone in New York State knew that town. Had he ever been there? His face broke tragically. No, never had. Always meant to.
   “From what Ronnie wrote in his letters, you didn’t miss much,” she said, and Zellman went away beaming broadly.
   The others came up to make their manners as the other parties had done before them, as still others would do in the days and weeks to come. A teenage boy named Tony Donahue. A fellow named Jack Jackson, who was a car mechanic. A young R.N. named Laurie Constable—she would come in handy. An old man named Richard Farris whom everyone called the Judge; he looked at her keenly and almost made her feel uncomfortable again. Dick Vollman. Sandy DuChiens—pretty name, that, French. Harry Dunbarton, a man who had sold spectacles for a living only three months ago. Andrea Terminello. A Smith. A Rennett. And a great many others. She spoke to them all, nodded, smiled, and put them at their ease, but the pleasure she had felt on other days was gone today and she felt only the aches in her wrists and fingers and knees, plus the gnawing suspicion that she had to go use the Port-O-San and if she didn’t get there soon she was going to stain her dress.
   All of that and the feeling, fading now (and it would be entirely gone by nightfall), that she had missed something of great significance and might later be very sorry.
   He thought better when he wrote, and so he jotted down everything which might be of importance in outline, using two felt-tip pens: a blue and a black. Nick Andros sat in the study of the house on Baseline Drive that he shared with Ralph Brentner and Ralph’s woman, Elise. It was almost dark. The house was a beauty, sitting below the bulk of Flagstaff Mountain but quite a bit above the town of Boulder proper, so that from the wide living room window the streets and roads of the municipality appeared spread out like a gigantic gameboard. That window was treated on the outside with some sort of silvery reflective stuff, so that the squire could look out but passersby could not look in. Nick guessed that the house was in the $450,000–$500,000 range… and the owner and his family were mysteriously absent.
   On his own long journey from Shoyo to Boulder, first by himself, then with Tom Cullen and the others, he had passed through tens of dozens of towns and cities, and all of them had been stinking charnel houses. Boulder had no business being any different… but it was. There were corpses here, yes, thousands of them, and something was going to have to be done about them before the hot, dry days ended and the fall rains began, causing quicker decomposition and possible disease… but there were not enough corpses. Nick wondered if anyone other than he and Stu Redman had noticed it… Lauder, maybe. Lauder noticed almost everything.
   For every house or public building you found littered with corpses, there were ten others completely empty. Sometime, during the last spasm of the plague, most of Boulder’s citizens, sick or well, had blown town. Why? Well, he supposed it really didn’t matter, and maybe they would never know. The awesome fact remained that Mother Abagail, sight unseen, had managed to lead them to maybe the one small city in the United States that had been cleared of plague victims. It was enough to make even an agnostic like himself wonder where she was getting her information.
   Nick had taken three rooms on the basement level of the house, and nice rooms they were, furnished in knotty pine. No urging on Ralph’s part had moved him to enlarge his living space—he felt like an interloper already, but he liked them… and until his trip from Shoyo to Hemingford Home he hadn’t realized how much he had come to miss other faces. He hadn’t gotten his fill yet.
   And the place was the finest one he’d ever lived in, just as it was. He had his own entrance by the back door, and he kept his ten-speed parked under the door’s low, overhanging eave, where it stood axle-deep in generations of fragrantly rotting aspen leaves. He had the beginnings of a book collection, something he had always wanted and never been able to have in his years of wandering. He had been a great reader in those days (during these new days, there rarely seemed to be time to sit and have a good long conversation with a book), and some of the books on the shelves—shelves which were still largely empty—were old friends, most of them originally borrowed from lending libraries at two cents a day; in the last few years he had never spent enough time in one town to get a regular library card. Others were books he hadn’t yet read, books the lending library books had led him to look for. As he sat here with his felt-tip pens and paper, one of these books sat on the desk beside his right hand—Set This House on Fire, by William Styron. He had marked his place with a ten-dollar bill he had found on the street. There was a lot of money in the streets, blowing along the gutters in the wind, and he was still surprised and amused at how many people—himself among them—still stopped to pick them up. And why? The books were free now. The ideas were free. Sometimes that thought exhilarated him. Sometimes it frightened him.
   The paper he was writing on came from a ring binder in which he kept all his thoughts—the contents of the binder were half diary, half shopping list. He had discovered a deep fondness in himself for making lists; he thought one of his forebears must have been an accountant. When your mind was troubled, he had discovered that making a list often set it at ease again.
   He went back to the fresh page before him, doodling formlessly in the margin.
   It seemed to him that all the things they wanted or needed from the old life were stored in the silent East Boulder power plant, like dusty treasure in a dark cupboard. An unpleasant feeling seemed to run through the people who had gathered in Boulder, a feeling just submerged below the surface—they were like a scared bunch of kids knocking around in the local haunted house after dark. In some ways, the place was like a rancid ghost town. There was a sense that being here was a strictly temporary thing. There was one man, a fellow named Impening, who had once lived in Boulder and worked on one of the custodial crews at the IBM plant out on the Boulder-Longmont Diagonal. Impening seemed determined to stir up unrest. He was going around telling people that in 1984 there had been an inch and a half of snow in Boulder by September 14, and that by November it would be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. That was the kind of talk Nick would like to put a quick stop to. Never mind that if Impening had been in the army he would have been cashiered for such talk; that was an empty logic, if it was logic at all. The important thing was that Impening’s words would have no power if people could move into houses where the lights worked and where the furnaces blew hot air up through grates at the touch of a finger on a button. If that didn’t happen by the time the first coldsnap arrived, Nick was afraid that people would begin simply to slip away, and all the meetings, representatives, and ratifications in the world wouldn’t stop that.
   According to Ralph, there wasn’t that much wrong at the power plant, at least not that much visible. The crews who ran it had shut some of the machinery down; other machinery had shut itself down. Two or three of the big turbine engines had blown, perhaps as the result of some final power surge. Ralph said that some of the wiring would have to be replaced, but he thought that he and Brad Kitchner and a crew of a dozen warm bodies could do that. A much bigger work crew was needed to remove fused and blackened copper wire from the blown turbine generators and then install new copper wire by the yard. There was plenty of copper wire in the Denver supply houses for the taking; Ralph and Brad had gone one day last week to check for themselves. With the manpower, they thought they could have the lights on again by Labor Day.
   “And then we’ll throw the biggest fucking party this town ever saw,” Brad said.
   Law and Order. That was something else that troubled him. Could Stu Redman be handed that particular package? He wouldn’t want the job, but Nick thought he could perhaps persuade Stu to take it… and if push came to shove, he could get Stu’s friend Glen to back him up. What really bothered him was the memory, still too fresh and hurtful to look at more than briefly, of his own brief and terrible tour as Shoyo’s jailkeeper. Vince and Billy dying, Mike Childress jumping up and down on his supper and crying out in wretched defiance: Hunger strike! I’m on a fuckin hunger strike!
   It made him ache inside to think they might need courts and jails… maybe even an executioner. Christ, these were Mother Abagail’s people, not the dark man’s! But he supposed the dark man would not bother with such trivialities as courts and jails. His punishment would be swift and sure and heavy. He would not need the threat of jail when the corpses hung on the telephone pole crosses along I-15 for the birds to pick.
   Nick hoped most of the infractions would be small ones. There had been several cases of drunk and disorderly already. One kid, really too young to drive, had been rodding a big dragging machine up and down Broadway, scaring people out of the street. He had finally driven into a stalled bread truck and had gashed his forehead—and lucky to get off so cheaply, in Nick’s opinion. The people who had seen him knew he was too young, but no one had felt he or she had the authority to put a stop to it.
   Authority. Organization. He wrote the words on his pad and put them inside a double circle. Being Mother Abagail’s people gave them no immunity to weakness, stupidity, or bad companions. Nick didn’t know if they were the children of God or not, but when Moses had come down from the mountain, those not busy worshipping the golden calf had been busy shooting craps, he knew that. And they had to face the possibility that someone might get cut over a card game or decide to shoot someone else over a woman.
   Authority. Organization. He circled the words again and now they were like prisoners behind a triple stockade. How well they went together… and what a sorry sound they made.
   Not long after, Ralph came in. “We got some more folks coming in tomorrow, Nicky, and a whole parade the day after. Over thirty in that second one.”
   “Good,” Nick wrote. “We’ll get a doc before long, I bet. Law of averages says so.”
   “Yeah,” Ralph said. “We’re turnip into a regular by-God city.”
   Nick nodded.
   “I had a talk with the fella leadin the party that came in today. His name’s Larry Underwood. Smart man, Nick. Sharp as a tack.”
   Nick raised his eyebrows and drew a ? in the air.
   “Well, let’s see,” Ralph said. He knew what the question mark meant: give more information, if you can. “He’s six or seven years older’n you, I think, and maybe eight or nine younger than Redman. But he’s the kind of man you said we ought to be on the lookout for. He asks the right questions.”
   ?
   “Who’s in charge, for one,” Ralph said. “What comes next, for another. Who does it, for a third.”
   Nick nodded. Yes—the right questions. But was he the right man? Ralph might be right. He also might not be.
   “I’ll try to meet up with him tomorrow & say hello,” he wrote on a fresh sheet of paper.
   “Yeah, you oughtta. He’s all right.” Ralph shuffled his feet. “And I talked to Mother a little bit before this Underwood and his folks came up to be innerduced. Talked to her like you wanted me to.”
   ?
   “She says we ought to go ahead. Get moving. She says there’s people lollygaggin, and they need some folks to be in charge and tell em where to squat and lean.”
   Nick leaned back in his chair and laughed silently. Then he wrote, “I was pretty sure she’d feel that way. I’ll talk to Stu & Glen tomorrow. Did you print the handbills?”
   “Oh! Those! Shit, yeah,” Ralph said. “That’s where I been most of the afternoon, for Christ’s sake.” He showed Nick a sample poster. Still smelling strongly of mimeograph ink, the print was large and eyecatching. Ralph had done the graphics himself:


   MASS MEETING!!!
   REPRESENTATIVE BOARD
   TO BE NOMINATED AND ELECTED!
   8:30 P.M., August 18, 1990
   Place: Canyon Boulevard Park & Bandshell if FINE
   Chautauqua Hall in Chautauqua Park if FOUL
   REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED
   FOLLOWING THE MEETING
   Below this were two rudimentary street maps for newcomers and those who hadn’t spent much time exploring Boulder. Below, in rather fine print, were the names he and Stu and Glen had agreed upon after some discussion earlier in the day:


   Ad Hoc Committee
   Nick Andros
   Glen Bateman
   Ralph Brentner
   Richard Ellis
   Fran Goldsmith
   Stuart Redman
   Susan Stern
   Nick pointed to the line on the flier about refreshments and raised his eyebrows.
   “Oh yeah, well, Frannie came by and said we’d be more apt to get everybody if we had something. She and her friend there, Patty Kroger, they’re going to see to it. Cookies and Za-Rex.” Ralph made a face. “If it came down to a choice between drinking Za-Rex and bullpiss, I’d have to sit down and think her over. You c’n have mine, Nicky.”
   Nick grinned.
   “The only thing about this,” Ralph went on more seriously, “is you guys putting me on this committee. I know what that word means. It means ‘Congratulations, you get to do all the hard work.’ Well, I don’t really mind that, I been workin hard all my life. But committees are supposed to have idears, and I ain’t much of an idear man.”
   On his pad, Nick quickly sketched a big CB setup, and in the background a radio tower with bolts of electricity coming from its top.
   “Yeah, but that’s a lot different,” Ralph said glumly:
   “You’ll be fine,” Nick wrote. “Believe it.”
   “If you say so, Nicky. I’ll give her a try. I still think you’d be better off with this Underwood fella, though.”
   Nick shook his head and clapped Ralph on the shoulder. Ralph bid him goodnight and went upstairs. When he was gone, Nick looked thoughtfully at the handbill for a long time. If Stu and Glen had seen copies—and he was sure they had by now—they knew that he had unilaterally stricken Harold Lauder’s name from their list of ad hoc committee members. He didn’t know how they might be taking it, but the fact that they hadn’t shown up at his door yet was probably a good sign. They might want him to do some horsetrading of his own, and if he had to, he would do it, just to keep Harold out at the top. If he had to, he would give them Ralph. Ralph didn’t really want the position anyway, although, goddammit, Ralph had great native wit and the nearly priceless ability to think around the corners of problems. He would be a good man to have on the permanent committee, and he felt that Stu and Glen had already packed the committee with their friends. If he, Nick, wanted Lauder out, they would just have to go along. To pull off this leadership coup smoothly, there had to be no dissension at all among them. Say, Ma, how did that man get a rabbit to come out of that hat? Well, son, I’m not sure, but I think he might have used the old “misdirect em with cookies and Za-Rex” trick. It works just about every time.
   He turned back to the page he had been doodling on when Ralph came in. He stared at the words he had circled not just once but three times, as if to keep them in. Authority. Organization. He suddenly wrote another one below them—there was just room. Now the words in the triple circle read:
   Authority. Organization. Politics.
   But he wasn’t trying to knock Lauder out of the picture just because he felt Stu and Glen Bateman were trying to hog what was really his football. He felt a certain amount of pique, sure. It would have been odd if he hadn’t. In a way, he, Ralph, and Mother Abagail had founded the Boulder Free Zone.
   There’s hundreds of people here now and thousands more on their way if Bateman’s right, he thought, tapping his pencil against the circled words. The longer he looked at them, the uglier they seemed. But when Ralph and I and Mother and Tom Cullen and the rest in our party got here, the only living things in Boulder were the cats and the deer that had come down here from the state park to forage in people’s gardens… and even in the stores. Remember that one that got into the Table Mesa Supermarket somehow and then couldn’t get out? It was crazy, running up and down the aisles, knocking things over, falling down, then getting up and running again.
   We’re Johnny-come-latelies, sure, we haven’t even been here a month yet, but we were first! So there’s a little pique, but pique isn’t the reason I want Harold out. I want him out because I don’t trust him. He smiles all the time, but there’s a watertight
   (smiletight?)
   compartment between his mouth and his eyes. There was some friction between him and Stu at one time, over Frannie, and all three of them say it’s over, but I wonder if it really is over. Sometimes I see Frannie looking at Harold, and she looks uneasy. She looks as if she’s trying to figure out how “over” this over really is. He’s bright enough, but he strikes me as unstable.
   Nick shook his head. That wasn’t all. On more than one occasion he had wondered if Harold Lauder might not be crazy.
   Mostly it’s that grin. I don’t want to have to share secrets with anyone who grins like that and looks as if he isn’t sleeping well at night.
   No Lauder. They’ll have to go along with that.
   Nick closed his ring-binder and put it away in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he stood up and began taking off his clothes. He wanted a shower. He felt obscurely dirty.
   The world, he thought, not according to Garp but according to the superflu. This brave new world. But it didn’t seem particularly brave to him, or particularly new. It was as if someone had put a large cherry bomb into a child’s toybox. There had been a big bang and everything had gone everywhere. Toys had scattered from one end of the playroom to the other. Some things were shattered beyond repair, other things would be fixable, but most of the stuff had just been scattered. Those things were still a little too hot to handle, but they would be fine once they had cooled off.
   Meanwhile, the job was to sort things out. Throw away the things which were no longer good. Set aside the toys which could be fixed. List everything which was still okay. Get a new toybox to put the things in, a nice new toybox. A strong toybox. There is a frightening, sickening ease—and a clear attraction—to the way in which things can be blown apart. The hard job is bringing things together again. The sorting. The fixing. The listing. And discarding the things which are no good, of course.
   Except… can you ever bring yourself to throw away the things which are no good?
   Nick paused halfway to the bathroom, naked, his clothes held in his arms.
   Oh, the night was so silent… but weren’t all his nights symphonies of silence? Why had his body suddenly broke out in gooseflesh?
   Why, because he suddenly felt that it was not toys the Free Zone Committee would be in charge of picking up, not toys at all. He suddenly felt that he had joined some bizarre sewing circle of the human spirit—he and Redman and Bateman and Mother Abagail, yes, even Ralph with his big radio and his boosting equipment that sent the Free Zone signal flying far and wide across the dead continent. They each had a needle and perhaps they were working together to make a warm blanket to keep off the winter chill… or perhaps they had only, after a brief pause, begun once again to make a large shroud for the human race, beginning their work at the toes and working their way up.
 

After love, Stu had gone to sleep. He had been on short sleep rations lately, and the night before he had been up all night with Glen Bateman, getting drunk and planning for the future. Frannie had put on her robe and come out here on the balcony.
   The building they lived in was downtown, on the corner of Pearl Street and Broadway. Their apartment was on the third floor, and below her she could see the intersection, Pearl running east-west, Broadway running north-south. She liked it here. They had the compass boxed. The night was warm and windless, the black stone of the sky flawed with a million stars. In their faint and frosty glow, Fran could see the slabs of the Flatirons rising in the west.
   She passed a hand down from her neck to her thighs. The dressing gown she wore was silk, and she was naked underneath. Her hand passed smoothly over her breasts and then, instead of continuing on flat and straight to the mild rise of her pubis, her hand traced an arc of belly, following a curve that had not been this pronounced even two weeks ago.
   She was beginning to show, not a lot yet, but Stu had commented on it this evening. His question had been casual enough, even comic: How long can we do it without me, uh, squeezing him?
   Or her, she had answered, amused. How does four months sound, Chief?
   Fine, he had answered, and slipped deliciously into her.
   Earlier talk had been much more serious. Not long after they got to Boulder, Stu had told her he had discussed the baby with Glen and Glen had advanced the idea, very cautiously, that the superflu germ or virus might still be around. If so, the baby might die. It was an unsettling thought (you could always, she thought, count on Glen Bateman for an Unsettling Thought or two), but surely if the mother was immune, the baby… ?
   Yet there were plenty of people here who had lost children to the plague.
   Yes, but that would mean —
   Would mean what?
   Well, for one thing, it might mean that all these people here were just an epilogue to the human race, a brief coda. She didn’t want to believe that, couldn’t believe it. If that were true—
   Someone was coming up the street, turning sideways to slip between a dump truck that had stalled with two of its wheels on the pavement and the wall of a restaurant called the Pearl Street Kitchen. He had a light jacket slung over one shoulder and was carrying something in one hand that was either a bottle or a gun with a long barrel. In the other hand he had a sheet of paper, probably with an address written on it from the way he was checking street numbers. At last he stopped in front of their building. He was looking at the door as if trying to decide what to do next. Frannie thought he looked a little like a private detective in some old TV series. She was standing less than twenty feet above his head, and she found herself in one of those situations. If she called him, she might scare him. If she didn’t, he might start knocking and wake Stuart up. And what was he doing with a gun in his hand anyway… if it was a gun?
   He suddenly craned his neck and looked up, probably to see if any lights were on in the building. Frannie was still looking down. They peered directly into each other’s eyes.
   “Holy God!” the man on the sidewalk cried. He took an involuntary step backward, went off the sidewalk into the gutter, and sat down hard.
   “Oh!” Frannie said at the same moment, and took her own step backward on the balcony. There was a spider-plant in a large pottery vase on a pedestal behind her. Frannie’s behind struck it. It tottered, almost decided to live a little longer, and then defenestrated itself on the balcony’s slate flags with a loud crash.
   In the bedroom, Stu grunted, turned over, and was still again.
   Frannie, perhaps predictably, was seized with the giggles. She put both hands over her mouth and pinched viciously at her lips, but the giggles came out anyway in a series of hoarse little whispers. Grace strikes again, she thought, and whisper-giggled madly into her cupped hands. If he’d had a guitar I could have dropped the damned vase on his head. O sole mio… CRASH! Her belly hurt from trying to hold in the giggles.
   A conspiratorial whisper wafted its way up from below: “Hey, you… you on the balcony… psssst! ”
   “Pssst,” Frannie whispered to herself. “Pssst, oh great.”
   She had to get out before she started hee-hawing away like a donkey. She had never been able to hold in her laughter once it got hold of her. She ran fleetly across the darkened bedroom, snatched a more substantial—and demure—wrapper from the back of the bathroom door, and went down the hall struggling it on, her face working like a rubber mask. She let herself out onto the landing and got down one flight before the laughter escaped her and flew free. She went down the lower two flights cackling wildly.
   The man—a young man, she saw now—had picked him self up and was brushing himself off. He was slim and well built, most of his face covered with a beard that might be blond or possibly sandy-red by daylight. There were dark circles under his eyes, but he was smiling a rueful little smile.
   “What did you knock over?” he asked. “It sounded like a piano.”
   “It was a vase,” she said. “It… it…” But then the giggles caught her again and she could only point a finger at him and laugh quietly and shake her head and then hold her aching belly again. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “You really looked funny… I know that’s a hell of a thing to say to somebody you just met but… oh, my! You did!”
   “If this was the old days,” he said, grinning, “my next move would be to sue you for at least a quarter of a million. Whiplash. Judge, I looked up and this young woman was peering down at me. Yes, I believe she was making a face. Her face was on, at any rate. We find for the plaintiff, this poor boy. Also for the bailiff. There will be a ten-minute recess.”
   They laughed together a little. The young man was wearing clean faded jeans and a dark blue shirt. The summer night was warm and kind, and Frannie was beginning to be glad she had come out.
   “Your name wouldn’t happen to be Fran Goldsmith, would it?”
   “It so happens. But I don’t know you.”
   “Larry Underwood. We just came in today. Actually, I was looking for a fellow named Harold Lauder. They said he was living at 261 Pearl along with Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith and some other people.”
   That dried her giggles up. “Harold was in the building when we first got to Boulder, but he split quite a while ago. He’s on Arapahoe now, on the west side of town. I can give you his address if you want it, and directions.”
   “I’d appreciate that. But I’ll wait until tomorrow to go over, I guess. I’m not risking this action again.”
   “Do you know Harold?”
   “I do and I don’t—the same way I do and don’t know you. Although I have to be honest and say you don’t look the way I pictured you. In my mind I saw you as a Valkyrie-type blonde right out of a Frank Frazetta painting, probably with a .45 on each hip. But I’m pleased to meet you any way.” He stuck out his hand and Frannie shook it with a bewildered little smile.
   “I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
   “Sit down on the curb a minute and I’ll tell you.”
   She sat. A ghost of a breeze riffled up the street, shuffling scraps of paper and making the old elms move on the courthouse lawn three blocks farther down.
   “I’ve got some stuff for Harold Lauder,” Larry said. “But it’s supposed to be a surprise, so if you see him before I do, mum’s the word and all that.”
   “Okay, sure,” Frannie said. She was more mystified than ever.
   He held up the long-barreled gun and it wasn’t a gun at all; it was a wine bottle with a long neck. She tilted the label to the starlight and could just barely read the large print—BORDEAUX at the top, and at the bottom, the date: 1947.
   “The best vintage Bordeaux in this century,” he said. “At least that’s what an old friend of mine used to say. His name was Rudy. God love and rest his soul.”
   “But 1947… that’s forty-three years ago. Won’t it be… well, gone over?”
   “Rudy used to say a good Bordeaux never went over. Anyway, I’ve carried it all the way from Ohio. If it’s bad wine, it’ll be well-traveled bad wine.”
   “And that’s for Harold?”
   “That and a bunch of these.” He took something out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She didn’t have to turn this up to the starlight to read the print. She burst out laughing. “A Payday candy bar!” she exclaimed. “Harold’s favorite… but how could you know that?”
   “That’s the story.”
   “Then tell me!”
   “Well, then. Once upon a time there was a fellow named Larry Underwood who came from California to New York to see his dear old mother. That wasn’t the only reason he came, and the other reasons were a little less pleasant, but let’s stick to the nice-guy reason, shall we?”
   “Why not?” Fran agreed.
   “And behold, the Wicked Witch of the West, or some Pentagon assholes, visited the country with a great plague, and before you could say, ‘Here comes Captain Trips,’ just about everyone in New York was dead. Including Larry’s mother.”
   “I’m sorry. My mom and dad, too.”
   “Yeah—everybody’s mom and dad. If we all sent each other sympathy cards, there wouldn’t be any left. But Larry was one of the lucky ones. He made it out of the city with a lady named Rita who wasn’t very well equipped to deal with what had happened. And unfortunately, Larry wasn’t very well equipped to help her deal with it.”
   “No one had the equipment.”
   “But some developed it quicker than others. Anyhow, Larry and Rita headed for the coast of Maine. They made it as far as Vermont, and there the lady OD’d on sleeping pills.”
   “Oh, Larry, that is too bad.”
   “Larry took it very hard. In fact, he took it as a more or less divine judgment on his strength of character. In further fact, he had been told by one or two people who should have known that his most incorruptible character trait was a splendid streak of self-interest, which came shining through like a Day-Glo madonna sitting on the dashboard of a ‘59 Cadillac.”
   Frannie shifted a bit on the curb.
   “I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable, but all of this has been sloshing around inside for a long time, and it does have some bearing on the Harold part of the story. Okay?”
   “Okay.”
   “Thanks. I think that ever since we stopped by and met that old woman today I’ve been looking for a friendly face so I could spill this. I just thought it would be Harold’s. Anyway—Larry continued on to Maine because there didn’t seem to be anyplace else to go. He was having very bad dreams by then, but since he was alone he had no way of knowing that other people were having them, too. He simply assumed it was another symptom of his continuing mental breakdown. But eventually he made it to a small coastal town named Wells, where he met a woman named Nadine Cross and a strange little boy whose name turns out to be Leo Rockway.”
   “Wells,” she marveled softly.
   “Anyway, the three travelers sort of flipped a coin to see which way they should head on US 1, and since it came up tails, they headed down south where they eventually came to—”
   “Ogunquit!” Frannie said, delighted.
   “Just so. And there, on a barn, in huge letters, I made my first acquaintance with Harold Lauder and Frances Goldsmith.”
   “Harold’s sign! Oh, Larry, he will be pleased!”
   “We followed the directions on the barn to Stovington, and the directions at Stovington to Nebraska and the directions at Mother Abagail’s house to Boulder. We met people along the way. One of them was a girl named Lucy Swann, who’s my woman. I’d like you to meet her sometime. I think you’d like her.”
   “By then something had happened that Larry didn’t really want. His little party of four grew to six. The six met four more in upstate New York, and our party absorbed theirs. By the time we made it to Harold’s sign in Mother Abagail’s dooryard there were sixteen of us, and we picked up another three just as we were leaving. Larry was in charge of this brave band. There was no vote or anything like that. It just was. And he really didn’t want the responsibility. It was a drag. It was keeping him awake nights. He started popping Tums and Rolaids. But it’s funny the way your mind boxes your mind. I couldn’t let it go. It got to be a self-respect thing. And I—he —was always afraid he was going to fuck it up righteously, that he’d get up some morning and someone would be dead in their sleeping bag the way Rita was that time in Vermont and everyone would be standing around pointing their fingers and saying, ‘It’s your fault. You didn’t know any better and it’s your fault.’ And that was something I couldn’t talk about, not even to the Judge—”
   “Who’s the Judge?”
   “Judge Farris. An old guy from Peoria. I guess he really was a judge at one time back in the early fifties, circuit judge or something, but he’d been retired a long time when the flu hit. He’s plenty sharp, though. When he looks at you, you’d swear he has X-ray eyes. Anyhow, Harold was important to me. He got to be more important as there got to be more people. In direct ratio, you might say.” He chuckled a little. “That barn. Man! The last line of that sign, the one with your name, was so low I figured he really must have been hanging ass out to the wind when he painted it on.”
   “Yes. I was sleeping when he did that. I would have made him stop.”
   “I started to get a sense of him,” Larry said. “I found a Payday wrapper in the cupola of that barn in Ogunquit, and then the carving on the beam—”
   “What carving?”
   She felt that Larry was studying her in the dark, and she pulled her robe a little closer around her… not a gesture of modesty, because she felt no threat from this man, but one of nervousness.
   “Just his initials,” Larry said casually. “H.E.L. If that had been the end of it, I wouldn’t be here now. But then at the motorcycle dealership in Wells—”
   “We were there!”
   “I know you were. I saw a couple of bikes gone. What made an even bigger impression was that Harold had siphoned some gas from the underground tank. You must have helped him, Fran. I damn near lost my fingers.”
   “No, I didn’t have to. Harold hunted around until he found something he called a plug-vent—”
   Larry groaned and slapped his forehead. “Plug-vent! Jesus! I never even looked for where they were venting the tank! You mean he just hunted around… pulled a plug… and put his hose in?”
   “Well… yes.”
   “Oh, Harold,” Larry said in a tone of admiration that she had never heard before, at least not in connection with Harold Lauder’s name. “Well, that’s one of his tricks I missed. Anyway, we got to Stovington. And Nadine was so upset she fainted.”
   “I cried,” Fran said. “I bawled until it seemed I’d never stop. I just had my mind made up that when we got there, someone would welcome us in and say, ‘Hi! Step inside, delousing on the right, cafeteria’s on your left.’” She shook her head. “That seems so silly now.”
   “I was not dismayed. Dauntless Harold had been there before me, left his sign, and gone on. I felt like a tenderfoot Easterner following that Indian from The Pathfinder.”
   His view of Harold both fascinated and amazed her. Hadn’t Stu really been leading the party by the time they left Vermont and struck out for Nebraska? She couldn’t honestly remember. By then they had all been preoccupied with the dreams. Larry was reminding her of things she had forgotten… or worse, taken for granted. Harold risking his life to put that sign on the barn—it had seemed like a foolish risk to her, but it had done some good after all. And getting gas from that underground tank… it had apparently been a major operation for Larry, but Harold had seemed to take it purely as a matter of course. It made her feel small and made her feel guilty. They all more or less assumed that Harold was nothing but a grinning supernumerary. But Harold had turned quite a few tricks in the last six weeks. Had she been so much in love with Stu that it took this total stranger to point out some home truths about Harold? What made the feeling even more uncomfortable was the fact that, once he had gotten his feet under him, Harold had been completely adult about herself and Stuart.
   Larry said, “So here’s another neat sign, complete with route numbers, at Stovington, right? And fluttering in the grass next to it, another Payday candy wrapper. I felt like instead of following broken sticks and bent grasses, I was following Harold’s trail of chocolate Paydays. Well, we didn’t follow your route the whole way. We bent north near Gary, Indiana, because there was one hell of a fire, still burning in places. It looked like every damn oiltank in the city went up. Anyhow, we picked up the Judge on the detour, stopped by Hemingford Home—we knew she was gone by then, the dreams you know, but we all wanted to see that place just the same. The corn… the tire-swing… you know what I mean?”
   “Yes,” Frannie said quietly. “Yes, I do.”
   “And all the time I’m going crazy, thinking that something is going to happen, we’re going to get attacked by a motorcycle gang or something, run out of water, I don’t know.
   “There used to be a book my mom had, she got it from her grandmother or something. In His Steps, that was the name of it. And there were all these little stories about guys with horrible problems. Ethical problems, most of them. And the guy who wrote the book said that to solve the problems, all you had to do was ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ It always cleared the trouble right up. You know what I think? It’s a Zen question, not really a question at all but a way to clear your mind, like saying Om and looking at the tip of your nose.”
   Fran smiled. She knew what her mother would have said about something like that.
   “So when I really started to get wound up, Lucy—that’s my girl, did I tell you?—Lucy would say, ‘Hurry up, Larry, ask the question.’”
   “What would Jesus do?” Fran said, amused.
   “No, what would Harold do?” Larry answered seriously. Fran was nearly dumbfounded. She could not help wishing to be around when Larry actually met Harold. Whatever in the world would his reaction be?
   “We camped in this farmyard one night and we really were almost out of water. The place had a well, but no way of drawing it up, naturally, because the power was off and the pump wouldn’t work. And Joe—Leo, I’m sorry, his real name is Leo—Leo kept walking by and saying, ‘Firsty, Larry, pwetty firsty now.’ And he was driving me bugshit. I could feel myself tightening up, and the next time he came by I probably would have hit him. Nice guy, huh? Getting ready to hit a disturbed child. But a person can’t change all at once. I’ve had plenty of time to work that out for myself.”
   “You brought them all across from Maine intact,” Frannie said. “One of ours died. His appendix burst. Stu tried to operate on him, but it was no good. All in all, Larry, I’d say you did pretty well.”