Finally summoning up her courage, she had shined her flash into the corrugated pipe and had discovered a gaunt and shivering puppy. It looked to be about six months old. It shied from her touch and she was too big to crawl into the pipe. At last she had gone into the town of Monument, smashed her way into the local grocery, and had come back in the first cold light of false dawn with a knapsack full of Alpo and Cycle One. That did the trick. The puppy rode back with her, neatly tucked into one of the BSA saddlebags.
   Dick Ellis went into raptures over the puppy. It was an Irish setter bitch, either purebred or so close as to make no difference. When she got older, he was sure Kojak would be glad to make her acquaintance. The news swept the Free Zone, and for that day the subject of Mother Abagail was forgotten in the excitement over the canine Adam and Eve. Susan Stern became something of a heroine, and as far as any of the committee ever knew, no one even thought to wonder what she had been doing in Monument that night, far south of Boulder.
   But it was the morning the two of them left Boulder that Stu remembered, watching them ride off toward the Denver-Boulder Turnpike. Because no one in the Zone ever saw Dayna Jurgens again.
   August 27; nearly dusk; Venus shining against the sky.
   Nick, Ralph, Larry, and Stu sat on the steps of Tom Cullen’s house. Tom was on the lawn, whooping and knocking croquet balls through a set of wickets.
   It’s time, Nick wrote.
   Speaking low, Stu asked if they would have to hypnotize him again, and Nick shook his head.
   “Good,” Ralph said. “I don’t think I could take that action.” Raising his voice, he called: “Tom! Hey, Tommy! Come on over here!”
   Tom came running over, grinning.
   “Tommy, it’s time to go,” Ralph said.
   Tom’s smile faltered. For the first time he seemed to notice that it was getting dark.
   “Go? Now? Laws, no! When it gets dark, Tom goes to bed. M-O-O-N, that spells bed. Tom doesn’t like to be out after dark. Because of the boogies. Tom… Tom…”
   He fell silent, and the others looked at him uneasily. Tom had lapsed into dull silence. He came out of it… but not in the usual way. It was not a sudden reanimation, life flooding back in a rush, but a slow thing, reluctant, almost sad.
   “Go west?” he said. “Do you mean it’s that time?”
   Stu laid a hand on his shoulder. “Yes, Tom. If you can.”
   “On the road.”
   Ralph made a choked, muttering sound and walked around the house. Tom did not seem to notice. His gaze alternated between Stu and Nick.
   “Travel at night. Sleep in the day.” Very slowly, in the dusk, Tom added: “And see the elephant.”
   Nick nodded.
   Larry brought Tom’s pack up from where it had rested beside the steps. Tom put it on slowly, dreamily.
   “You want to be careful, Tom,” Larry said thickly.
   “Careful. Laws, yes.”
   Stu wondered belatedly if they should have given Tom a one-man tent as well, and rejected it. Tom would get all bollixed up trying to set up even a little tent.
   “Nick,” Tom whispered. “Do I really have to do this?”
   Nick put an arm around Tom and nodded slowly.
   “All right.”
   “Just stay on the big four-lane highway, Tom,” Larry said. “The one that says 70. Ralph is going to drive you down to the start of it on his motorcycle.”
   “Yes, Ralph.” He paused. Ralph had come back around the house. He was swabbing at his eyes with his bandanna.
   “You ready, Tom?” he asked gruffly.
   “Nick? Will it still be my house when I get back?”
   Nick nodded vigorously.
   “Tom loves his house. Laws, yes.”
   “We know you do, Tommy.” Stu could feel warm tears in the back of his own throat now.
   “All right. I’m ready. Who am I riding with?”
   “Me, Tom,” Ralph said. “Down to Route 70, remember?”
   Tom nodded and began to walk toward Ralph’s cycle. After a moment Ralph followed him, his big shoulders slumped. Even the feather in his hatband seemed dejected. He climbed on the bike and kicked it alive. A moment later it pulled out onto Broadway and turned east. They stood together, watching the motorcycle dwindle to a moving silhouette in the purple dusk marked by a moving headlight. Then the light disappeared behind the bulk of the Holiday Twin Drive-in and was gone.
   Nick walked away, head down, hands in pockets. Stu tried to join him, but Nick shook his head almost angrily and motioned him away. Stu went back to Larry.
   “That’s that,” Larry said, and Stu nodded gloomily.
   “You think we’ll ever see him again, Larry?”
   “If we don’t, the seven of us—well, maybe not Fran, she was never for sending him—the rest of us are going to be eating and sleeping with the decision to send him for the rest of our lives.”
   “Nick more than anyone else,” Stu said.
   “Yeah. Nick more than anyone else.”
   They watched Nick walking slowly down Broadway, losing himself in the shadows which grew around him. Then they looked at Tom’s darkened house in silence for a minute.
   “Let’s get out of here,” Larry said suddenly. “The thought of all those stuffed animals… all of a sudden I got a grade-A case of the creeps.”
   When they left, Nick was still standing on the side lawn of Tom Cullen’s house, his hands in his pockets, his head down.
   George Richardson, the new doctor, had set up in the Dakota Ridge Medical Center, because it was close to Boulder City Hospital with its medical equipment, its large supplies of drugs, and its operating rooms.
   By August 28 he was pretty much in business, assisted by Laurie Constable and Dick Ellis. Dick had asked leave to quit the world of medicine and had been refused permission to do so. “You’re doing a fine job here,” Richardson said. “You’ve learned a lot and you’re going to learn more. Besides, there’s just too much for me to do by myself. We’re going to be out of our minds as it is if we don’t get another doctor in a month or two. So congratulations, Dick, you’re the Zone’s first paramedic. Give him a kiss, Laurie.”
   Laurie did.
   Around eleven o’clock on that late August morning, Fran let herself into the waiting room and looked around curiously and a little nervously. Laurie was behind the counter, reading an old copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal.
   “Hi, Fran,” she said, jumping up. “I thought we’d see you sooner or later. George is with Candy Jones right now, but he’ll be right with you. How are you feeling?”
   “Pretty well, thanks,” Fran said. “I guess—”
   The door to one of the examining rooms opened and Candy Jones came out following a tall, stooped man in corduroy slacks and a sport shirt with the Izod alligator on the breast. Candy was looking doubtfully at a bottle of pink stuff which she held in one hand.
   “Are you sure that’s what it is?” she asked Richardson doubtfully. “I never got it before. I thought I was immune.”
   “Well, you’re not and you have it now,” George said with a grin. “Don’t forget the starch baths, and stay out of the tall grass after this.”
   She smiled ruefully. “Jack’s got it too. Should he come in?”
   “No, but you can make the starch baths a family affair.”
   Candy nodded dolefully and then spotted Fran. “Hi, Frannie, how’s the girl?”
   “Okay. How’s by you?”
   “Terrible.” Candy held up the bottle so Fran could read the word CALADRYL on the label. “Poison ivy. And you couldn’t guess where I got it.” She brightened. “But I bet you can guess where Jack’s got it.”
   They watched her go with some amusement. Then George said, “Miss Goldsmith, isn’t it? Free Zone Committee. A pleasure.”
   She held out her hand to be shaken. “Just Fran, please. Or Frannie.”
   “Okay, Frannie. What’s the problem?”
   “I’m pregnant,” Fran said. “And pretty damn scared.” And then, with no warning at all, she was in tears.
   George put an arm around her shoulders. “Laurie, I’ll want you in about five minutes.”
   “All right, Doctor.”
   He led her into the examining room and had her sit on the black-upholstered table.
   “Now. Why the tears? Is it Mrs. Wentworth’s twins?”
   Frannie nodded miserably.
   “It was a difficult delivery, Fran. The mother was a heavy smoker. The babies were lightweights, even for twins. They came in the late evening, very suddenly. I had no opportunity to make a postmortem. Regina Wentworth is being cared for by some of the women who were in our party. I believe—I hope —that she’s going to come out of the mental fugue-state she’s currently in. But for now all I can say is that those babies had two strikes against them from the start. The cause of death could have been anything.”
   “Including the superflu.”
   “Yes. Including that.”
   “So we just wait and see.”
   “Hell no. I’m going to give you a complete prenatal right now. I’m going to monitor you and any other woman that gets pregnant or is pregnant now every step of the way. General Electric used to have a slogan, ‘Progress Is Our Most Important Product.’ In the Zone, babies are our most important product, and they are going to be treated accordingly.”
   “But we really don’t know.”
   “No, we don’t. But be of good cheer, Fran.”
   “Yes, all right. I’ll try.”
   There was a brief rap at the door and Laurie came in. She handed George a form on a clipboard, and George began to ask Fran questions about her medical history.
   When the exam was over, George left her for a while to do something in the next room. Laurie stayed with her while Fran dressed.
   As she was buttoning her blouse, Laurie said quietly: “I envy you, you know. Uncertainty and all. Dick and I had been trying to make a baby like mad. It’s really funny—I was the one who used to wear a ZERO POPULATION button to work. It meant zero population growth, of course, but when I think about that button now, it gives me a really creepy feeling. Oh, Frannie, yours is going to be the first. And I know it will be all right. It has to be.”
   Fran only smiled and nodded, not wanting to remind Laurie that hers would not be the first.
   Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had been the first.
   And Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had died.
   “Fine,” George said half an hour later.
   Fran raised her eyebrows, thinking for a moment he had mispronounced her name. For no good reason she remembered that until the third grade little Mikey Post from down the street had called her Fan.
   “The baby. It’s fine.”
   Fran found a Kleenex and held it tightly. “I felt it move… but that was some time ago. Nothing since then. I was afraid…”
   “It’s alive, all right, but I really doubt if you felt it move, you know. More likely a little intestinal gas.”
   “It was the baby,” Fran said quietly.
   “Well, whether it did or not, it’s going to move a lot in the future. I’ve got you pegged for early to mid-January. How does that sound?”
   “Fine.”
   “Are you eating right?”
   “Yes, I think so—trying hard, anyway.”
   “Good. No nausea now?”
   “A little at first, but it’s passed.”
   “Lovely. Getting plenty of exercise?”
   For a nightmare instant she saw herself digging her father’s grave. She blinked the vision away. That had been another life. “Yes, plenty.”
   “Have you gained any weight?”
   “About five pounds.”
   “That’s all right. You can have another twelve; I’m feeling generous today.”
   She grinned. “You’re the doctor.”
   “Yes, and I used to be an OB man, so you’re in the right place. Take your doctor’s advice and you’ll go far. Now, concerning bicycles, motorbikes, and mopeds. All of them a no-no after November fifteenth, let’s say. No one’s going to be riding them by then anyway. Too damn cold. Don’t smoke or drink to excess, do you?”
   “No.”
   “If you want a nightcap once in a while, I think that’s perfectly okay. I’m going to put you on a vitamin supplement; you can pick it up at any drugstore in town—”
   Frannie burst into laughter, and George smiled uncertainly.
   “Did I say something funny?”
   “No. It just came out funny under the circumstances.”
   “Oh! Yes, I see. Well, at least there won’t be any more complaining about high drug prices, will there? One last thing, Fran. Have you ever been fitted with an intrauterine device… an IUD?”
   “No, why?” Fran asked, and then she happened to think of her dream: the dark man with his coathanger. She shuddered. “No,” she said again.
   “Good. That’s it.” He stood up. “I won’t tell you not to worry—”
   “No,” she agreed. The laughter was gone from her eyes. “Don’t do that.”
   “But I will ask you to keep it to a minimum. Excess anxiety in the mother can lead to glandular imbalance. And that’s not good for the baby. I don’t like to prescribe tranquilizers for pregnant women, but if you think—”
   “No, that won’t be necessary,” Fran said, but going out into the hot midday sunshine, she knew that the entire second half of her pregnancy was going to be haunted by thoughts of Mrs. Wentworth’s vanished twins.
   On the twenty-ninth of August three groups came in, one with twenty-two members, one with sixteen, and one with twenty-five. Sandy DuChiens got around to see all seven members of the committee and tell them that the Free Zone now had over one thousand residents.
   Boulder no longer seemed such a ghost town.
   On the evening of the thirtieth, Nadine Cross stood in the basement of Harold’s house, watching him and feeling uneasy.
   When Harold was doing something that didn’t involve having some sort of strange sex with her, he seemed to go away to his own private place where she had no control over him. When he was in that place he seemed cold; more than that, he seemed contemptuous of her and even of himself. The only thing that didn’t change was his hate of Stuart Redman and the others on the committee.
   There was a dead air-hockey game in the basement and Harold was working on its pinholed surface. There was an open book beside him. On the facing page was a diagram. He would look at the diagram for a while, then look at the apparatus he was working on, and then he would do something to it. Spread out neatly by his right hand were the tools from his Triumph motorcycle kit. Little snips of wire littered the air-hockey table.
   “You know,” he said absently, “you ought to take a walk.”
   “Why?” She felt a trifle hurt. Harold’s face was tense and unsmiling. Nadine could understand why Harold smiled as much as he did: because when he stopped, he looked insane. She suspected that he was insane, or very nearly.
   “Because I don’t know how old this dynamite is,” Harold said.
   “What do you mean?”
   “Old dynamite sweats, dear heart,” he said, and looked up at her. She saw that his entire face was running with sweat, as if to prove his point. “It perspires, to be perfectly couth. And what it perspires is pure nitroglycerin, one of the world’s great unstable substances. So if it’s old, there’s a very good chance that this little Science Fair project could blow us right over the top of Flagstaff Mountain and all the way to the Land of Oz.”
   “Well, you don’t have to sound so snotty about it,” Nadine said.
   “Nadine? Ma chère? ”
   “What?”
   Harold looked at her calmly and without smiling. “Shut your fucking trap.”
   She did, but she didn’t take a walk, although she wanted to. Surely if this was Flagg’s will (and the planchette had told her that Harold was Flagg’s way of taking care of the committee), the dynamite wouldn’t be old. And even if it was old, it wouldn’t explode until it was supposed to… would it? Just how much control over events did Flagg have?
   Enough, she told herself, he has enough. But she wasn’t sure, and she was increasingly uneasy. She had been back to her house and Joe was gone—gone for good this time. She had gone to see Lucy, and had borne the cold reception long enough to learn that since she had moved in with Harold, Joe (Lucy, of course, called him Leo) had “slipped back some.” Lucy obviously blamed her for that, too… but if an avalanche came rumbling down from Flagstaff Mountain or an earthquake ripped Pearl Street apart, Lucy would probably blame her for those things, too. Not that there wouldn’t be enough to blame on her and Harold very soon. Still, she had been bitterly disappointed not to have seen Joe once more… to kiss him goodbye. She and Harold were not going to be in the Boulder Free Zone much longer.
   Never mind, best you let him go completely now that you’re embarked on this obscenity. You’d only be doing him harm… and possibly harm to yourself as well, because Joe… sees things, knows things. Let him stop being Joe, let me stop being Nadine-mom. Let him go back to being Leo, forever.
   But the paradox in that was inexorable. She could not believe that any of these Zone people had more than a year’s life left in them, and that included the boy. It was not his will that they should live…
   …so tell the truth, it isn’t just Harold who is his instrument. It’s you too. You, who once defined the single unforgivable sin in the postplague world as murder, as the taking of a single life…
   Suddenly she found herself wishing that the dynamite was old, that it would blow up and put an end to both of them. A merciful end. And then she found herself thinking about what would happen afterward, after they had gotten over the mountains, and felt the old slippery warmth kindle in her belly.
   “There,” Harold said gently. He had lowered his apparatus into a Hush Puppies shoebox and set it aside.
   “It’s done?”
   “Yes. Done.”
   “Will it work?”
   “Would you like to try it and find out?” His words were bitterly sarcastic, but she didn’t mind. His eyes were working her over in that greedy, crawling little boy’s way that she had come to recognize. He had returned from that distant place—the place from which he had written what was in the ledger that she had read and then replaced carelessly under the loose hearthstone where it had originally been. Now she could handle him. Now his talk was just talk.
   “Would you like to watch me play with myself first?” she asked. “Like last night?”
   “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Good.”
   “Let’s go upstairs then.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “I’ll go first.”
   “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. Little dots of sweat stood out on his brow, but fear hadn’t put them there this time. “Go first.”
   So she went up first, and she could feel him looking up the short skirt of the little-girl sailor dress she was wearing. She was bare beneath it.
   The door closed, and the thing that Harold had made sat in the open shoebox in the gloom. There was a battery-powered Realistic walkie-talkie handset from Radio Shack. Its back was off. Wired to it were eight sticks of dynamite. The book was still open. It was from the Boulder Public Library, and the title was 65 National Science Fair Prize Winners. The diagram showed a doorbell wired up to a walkie-talkie similar to the one in the shoebox. The caption beneath said: Third Prize, 1977 National Science Fair, Constructed by Brian Ball, Rutland, Vermont. Say the word and ring the bell up to twelve miles away!
   Some hours later that evening, Harold came back downstairs, put the cover on the shoebox, and carried it carefully upstairs. He put it on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard. Ralph Brentner had told him that afternoon that the Free Zone Committee was inviting Chad Norris to speak at their next meeting. When was that going to be? Harold had inquired casually. September 2, Ralph had said.
   September 2.

Chapter 57
   
Larry and Leo were sitting on the curb in front of the house. Larry was drinking a warm Hamm’s Beer, Leo a warm Orange Spot. You could have anything to drink in Boulder that you wanted these days, as long as it came in a can and you didn’t mind drinking it warn. From out back came the steady, gruff roar of the Lawnboy. Lucy was cutting the grass. Larry had offered to do it, but Lucy shook her head. “Find out what’s wrong with Leo, if you can.”
   It was the last day of August.
   The day after Nadine had moved in with Harold, Leo hadn’t appeared for breakfast. Larry had found the boy in his room, dressed only in his underpants, his thumb in his mouth. He was uncommunicative and hostile. Larry had been more frightened than Lucy, because she didn’t know how Leo had been when Larry had first encountered him. His name had been Joe then, and he had been brandishing a killer’s knife.
   The best part of a week had passed since then, and Leo was a little better, but he hadn’t come back all the way and he wouldn’t talk about what had happened.
   “That woman has something to do with it,” Lucy had said, screwing the cap onto the lawnmower’s tank.
   “Nadine? What makes you think that?”
   “Well, I wasn’t going to mention it. But she came by the other day while you and Leo were trying the fishing down at Cold Creek. She wanted to see the boy. I was just as glad the two of you were gone.”
   “Lucy—”
   She gave him a quick kiss, and he had slipped his hand under her halter and given her a friendly squeeze. “I judged you wrong before,” she said. “I guess I’ll always be sorry for that. But I’m never going to like Nadine Cross. There’s something wrong with her.”
   Larry didn’t answer, but he thought Lucy’s judgment was probably a true one. That night up by King Sooper’s she had been like a crazy woman.
   “There’s one other thing—when she was here, she didn’t call him Leo. She called him the other name. Joe.”
   He looked at her blankly as she turned the automatic starter and got the Lawnboy going.
   Now, half an hour after that discussion, he drank his Hamm’s and watched Leo bounce the Ping-Pong ball he had found the day the two of them had walked up to Harold’s, where Nadine now lived. The small white ball was smudged, but not dented. Thok-thok-thok against the pavement. Bouncy-bouncy-bally, look-at-the-way-we-play.
   Leo (he was Leo now, wasn’t he?) hadn’t wanted to go inside Harold’s house that day.
   Into the house where Nadine-mom was now living.
   “You want to go fishing, kiddo?” Larry offered suddenly.
   “No fish,” Leo said. He looked at Larry with his strange, seawater-green eyes. “Do you know Mr. Ellis?”
   “Sure.”
   “He says we can drink the water when the fish come back. Drink it without—” He made a hooting noise and waved his fingers in front of his eyes. “You know.”
   “Without boiling it?”
   “Yes.”
   Thok-thok-thok.
   “I like Dick. Him and Laurie. Always give me something to eat. He’s afraid they won’t be able to, but I think they will.”
   “Will what?”
   “Be able to make a baby. Dick thinks he may be too old. But I guess he’s not.”
   Larry started to ask how Leo and Dick had gotten on that subject, and then didn’t. The answer, of course, was that they hadn’t. Dick wouldn’t talk to a small boy about something so personal as making a baby. Leo had just… had just known.
   Thok-thok-thok.
   Yes, Leo knew things… or intuited them. He hadn’t wanted to go in Harold’s house and had said something about Nadine… he couldn’t remember exactly what… but Larry had recalled that discussion and had felt very uneasy when he heard that Nadine had moved in with Harold. It had been as if the boy was in a trance, as if—
   (—thok-thok-thok —)
   Larry watched the Ping-Pong ball bounce up and down, and suddenly he looked into Leo’s face. The boy’s eyes were dark and faraway. The sound of the lawnmower was a far-off, soporific drone. The daylight was smooth and warm. And Leo was in a trance again, as if he had read Larry’s thought and simply responded to it.
   Leo had gone to see the elephant.
   Very casually Larry said: “Yes, I think they can make a baby. Dick can’t be any more than fifty-five at the outside. Cary Grant made one when he was almost seventy, I believe.”
   “Who’s Cary Grant?” Leo asked. The ball went up and down, up and down.
   (Notorious. North by Northwest.)
   “Don’t you know?” he asked Leo.
   “He was that actor,” Leo said. “He was in Notorious. And Northwest.”
   (North by Northwest.)
   “North by Northwest, I mean,” Leo said in a tone of agreement. His eyes never left the Ping-Pong ball’s bouncing course.
   “That’s right,” he said. “How’s Nadine-mom, Leo?”
   “She calls me Joe. I’m Joe to her.”
   “Oh.” A cold chill was weaving its slow way up Larry’s back.
   “It’s bad now.”
   “Bad?”
   “It’s bad with both of them.”
   “Nadine and—”
   (Harold?)
   “Yes, him.”
   “They’re not happy?”
   “He’s got them fooled. They think he wants them.”
   “He?”
   “Him.”
   The word hung on the still summer air.
   Thok-thok-thok.
   “They’re going to go west,” Leo said.
   “Jesus,” Larry muttered. He was very cold now. The old fear swept him. Did he really want to hear any more of this? It was like watching a tomb door swing slowly open in a silent graveyard, seeing a hand emerge—
   Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to know it.
   “Nadine-mom wants to think it’s your fault,” Leo said. “She wants to think you drove her to Harold. But she waited on purpose. She waited until you loved Lucy-mom too much. She waited until she was sure. It’s like he’s rubbing away the part of her brain that knows right from wrong. Little by little he’s rubbing that part away. And when it’s gone she’ll be as crazy as everyone else in the West. Crazier maybe.”
   “Leo—” Larry whispered, and Leo answered immediately:
   “She calls me Joe. I’m Joe to her.”
   “Shall I call you Joe?” Larry asked doubtfully.
   “No.” There was a note of pleading in the boy’s voice. “No, please don’t.”
   “You miss your Nadine-mom, don’t you, Leo?”
   “She’s dead,” Leo said with chilling simplicity.
   “Is that why you stayed out so late that night?”
   “Yes.”
   “And why you wouldn’t talk?”
   “Yes.”
   “But you’re talking now.”
   “I have you and Lucy-mom to talk to.”
   “Yes, of course—”
   “But not for always!” the boy said fiercely. “Not for always, unless you talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie! ”
   “About Nadine?”
   “No!”
   “About what? About you?”
   Leo’s voice rose, became even shriller. “It’s all written down! You know! Frannie knows! Talk to Frannie! ”
   “The committee—”
   “Not the committee! The committee won’t help you, it won’t help anyone, the committee is the old way, he laughs at your committee because it’s the old way and the old ways are his ways, you know, Frannie knows, if you talk together you can—”
   Leo brought the ball down hard—THOK! —and it rose higher than his head and came down and rolled away. Larry watched it, his mouth dry, his heart thudding nastily in his chest.
   “I dropped my ball,” Leo said, and ran to get it.
   Larry sat watching him.
   Frannie, he thought.
   The two of them sat on the edge of the bandshell stage, their feet dangling. It was an hour before dark, and a few people were walking through the park, some of them holding hands. The children’s hour is also the lovers’ hour, Fran thought disjointedly. Larry had just finished telling her everything Leo had said in his trance, and her mind was whirling with it.
   “So what do you think?” Larry asked.
   “I don’t know what to think,” she said softly, “except I don’t like any of the things that have been happening. Visionary dreams. An old woman who’s the voice of God for a while and then walks off into the wilderness. Now a little boy who seems to be a telepath. It’s like life in a fairy tale. Sometimes I think the superflu left us alive but drove us all mad.”
   “He said I should talk to you. So I am.”
   She didn’t reply.
   “Well,” Larry said, “if anything comes to you—”
   “Written down,” Frannie said softly. “He was right, that kid. It’s the whole root of the problem, I think. If I hadn’t been so stupid, so conceited, as to write it all down… oh goddam me!”
   Larry stared at her, amazed. “What are you talking about?”
   “It’s Harold,” she said, “and I’m afraid. I haven’t told Stu. I’ve been ashamed. Keeping the diary was so dumb … and now Stu… he actually likes Harold… everybody in the Free Zone likes Harold, including you.” She uttered a laugh which was choked with tears. “After all, he was your… your spirit-guide on the way out here, wasn’t he?”
   “I’m not tracking this very well,” Larry said slowly. “Can you tell me what it is you’re afraid of?”
   “That’s just it—I don’t really know.” She looked at him, her eyes wet with tears. “I think I’d better tell you what I can, Larry. I have to talk to someone. God knows I just can’t keep it inside anymore, and Stu… Stu’s maybe not the person who should hear. At least, not the first one.”
   “Go ahead, Fran. Shoot.”
   So she told him, beginning with the day in June that Harold had driven into the driveway of her Ogunquit home in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac. As she talked, the last bright daylight changed to a bluish shade. The lovers in the park began to drift away. A thin rind of moon rose. In the high-rise condominium on the far side of Canyon Boulevard, a few Coleman gaslamps had come on. She told him about the sign on the barn roof and how she had been sleeping when Harold risked his life to put her name on the bottom. About meeting Stu in Fabyan, and about Harold’s shrill get-away-from-my-bone reaction to Stu. She told him about her diary, and about the thumbprint in it. By the time she finished, it was past nine o’clock and the crickets were singing. A silence fell between them and Fran waited apprehensively for Larry to break it. But he seemed lost in thought.
   At last he said, “How sure are you about that fingerprint? In your own mind are you positive it was Harold’s?”
   She only hesitated a moment. “Yes. I knew it was Harold’s print the first time I saw it.”
   “That barn he put the sign on,” Larry said. “You remember the night I met you I said I’d been up in it? And that Harold had carved his initials on a beam in the loft?”
   “Yes.”
   “It wasn’t just his initials. It was yours, too. In a heart. The kind of thing a lovesick little boy would do on his school desk.”
   She put her hands over her eyes and wiped them. “What a mess,” she said huskily.
   “You’re not responsible for Harold Lauder’s actions, keed.” He took her hand in both of his and held it tightly. He looked at her. “Take it from me, the original dipstick, oilslick, and drippy dick. You can’t hold it against yourself. Because if you do…” His grip tightened to a degree where it became painful, but his face remained soft. “If you do, you really will go mad. It’s hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else’s.”
   He took his hand away and they were quiet for a time.
   “You think Harold bears Stu a killing grudge?” he said at last. “You really think it’s that deep?”
   “Yes,” she said. “I really think that’s a possibility. Maybe the whole committee. But I don’t know what—”
   His hand fell on her shoulder and gripped it hard, stilling her. In the darkness his posture had changed, his eyes had widened. His lips moved soundlessly.
   “Larry? What—”
   “When he went downstairs,” Larry muttered. “He went down to get a corkscrew or something.”
   “What? ”
   He turned toward her slowly, as if his head was on a rusty hinge. “You know,” he said, “there just might be a way to resolve all this. I don’t guarantee it, because I didn’t look in the book, but… it makes such beautiful sense… Harold reads your diary and not only gets an earful but an idea. Hell, he might have even been jealous that you thought of it first. Didn’t all the best writers keep journals?”
   “Are you saying Harold’s got a diary?”
   “When he went down to the basement, the day I brought the wine, I was looking around his living room. He said he was going to put in some chrome and leather, and I was trying to figure out how it would look. And I noticed this loose stone on the hearth—”
   “YES! ” she yelled, so loudly that he jumped. “The day I snuck in… and Nadine Cross came… I sat on the hearth… I remember that loose stone.” She looked at Larry again. “There it is again. As if something had us by the nose, was leading us to it…”
   “Coincidence,” he said, but he sounded uneasy.
   “Is it? We were both in Harold’s house. We both noticed the loose stone. And we’re both here now. Is it coincidence?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “What was under that stone?”
   “A ledger,” he said slowly. “At least, that was the word stamped on the cover. I didn’t look in it. At the time I thought it could just as easily have belonged to the previous owner of the house as to Harold. But if it did, wouldn’t Harold have found it? We both noticed the loose stone. So let’s say he finds it. Even if the guy who lived there before the flu had filled it up with little secrets—the amount he cheated on his taxes, his sex fantasies about his daughter, I don’t know what all—those secrets wouldn’t have been Harold’s secrets. Do you see that?”
   “Yes, but—”
   “Don’t interrupt while Inspector Underwood is elucidating, you giddy slip of a girl. So if the secrets weren’t Harold’s secrets, why would he have put the ledger back under the stone? Because they were his secrets. That was Harold’s journal.”
   “Do you think it’s still there?”
   “Maybe. I think we’d better look and see.”
   “Now?”
   “Tomorrow. He’ll be out with the Burial Committee, and Nadine has been helping out at the power station afternoons.”
   “All right,” she said. “Do you think I should tell Stu about this?”
   “Why don’t we wait? There’s no sense stirring things up unless we’re sure it’s something important. The book might be gone. It might be nothing but a list of things to do. It might be full of perfectly innocent things. Or Harold’s master political plan. Or it might be in code.”
   “I hadn’t thought of that. What will we do if there is… something important?”
   “Then I guess we’ll have to bring it up before the Free Zone Committee. Another reason to get it done quickly. We’re meeting on the second. The committee will handle it.”
   “Will it?”
   “Yes, I think so,” Larry said, but he was also thinking of what Leo had said about the committee.
   She slipped off the edge of the bandshell and onto the ground. “I feel better. Thanks for being here, Larry.”
   “Where should we meet?”
   “The little park across from Harold’s. What about there, at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”
   “Fine,” Larry said. “I’ll see you then.”
   Frannie went home feeling lighter at heart than she had for weeks. As Larry said, the alternatives were now fairly clear. The ledger might prove all of their fears groundless. But if it proved otherwise…
   Well, if it was otherwise, let the committee decide. As Larry had reminded her, they were meeting on the evening of the second, at Nick and Ralph’s place, out near the end of Baseline Road.
   When she got home, Stu was sitting in the bedroom, a felt-tip marker in one hand and a weighty leather-bound volume in the other. The title, stamped in gold leaf on the cover, was An Introduction to the Colorado Code of Criminal Justice.
   “Heavy reading,” she said, and kissed him on the mouth.
   “Arg.” He tossed the book across the room and it landed on the dresser with a thump. “Al Bundell brought it over. He and his Law Committee are really up and in the doins, Fran. He wants to talk to the Free Zone Committee when we meet day after tomorrow. What have you been up to, pretty lady?”
   “Talking with Larry Underwood.”
   He looked at her closely for a long moment. “Fran—have you been crying?”
   “Yes,” she said, meeting his gaze steadily, “but I feel better now. Much better.”
   “Is it the baby?”
   “No.”
   “What, then?”
   “I’ll tell you tomorrow night. I’ll tell you everything that’s been on what passes for my mind. Until then, no questions. Kay?”
   “Is it serious?”
   “Stu, I don’t know.”
   He looked at her for a long, long time.
   “All right, Frannie,” he said. “I love you.”
   “I know. And I love you, too.”
   “Bed?”
   She smiled. “Race you.”
   The first of September dawned gray and rainy, a dull, forgettable day—but one that no resident of the Free Zone ever forgot. That was the day the power came back on in North Boulder… briefly, at least.
   At ten to noon, in the control room of the power station, Brad Kitchner looked at Stu, Nick, Ralph, and Jack Jackson, who were all standing behind him. Brad smiled nervously and said, “Hail Mary, fulla grace, help me win this stock-car race.”
   He yanked two big switches down hard. In the huge and cavernous hall below them, two trial generators began to whine. The five men walked over to the wall-to-wall polarized glass window and looked below, to where almost a hundred men and women stood, all of them wearing protective goggles as per Brad’s order.
   “If we did something wrong, I’d rather blow two than fifty-two,” Brad had told them earlier.
   The generators began to whine more loudly.
   Nick elbowed Stu and pointed to the office ceiling, Stu looked up and began to grin. Behind the translucent panels, the fluorescents had begun to glow weakly. The generators cycled up and up, reached a high, steady hum, and leveled off. Down below, the crowd of assembled workers broke into spontaneous applause, some of them wincing as they did so; their hands were raw and frayed from wrapping copper wire hour after drudging hour.
   The fluorescents were shining brightly and normally now.
   For Nick, the feeling was the exact opposite of the dread he had known when the lights went out in Shoyo—not one of entombment now, but of resurrection.
   The two generators supplied power to one small section of North Boulder in the North Street area. There were people in the area who hadn’t known about the test that morning, and many of these people fled as if all the devils of hell were after them.
   TV sets went on in blares of snow. In a house on Spruce Street, a blender whirred into life, trying to blend a cheese-and-egg mixture that had congealed long since. The blender’s motor soon overloaded and blew out. A power saw whined into life in a deserted garage, puffing sawdust out of its guts. Stove burners began to glow. Marvin Gaye began to sing from the loudspeakers of an oldies record shop called the Wax Museum; the words, backed by a jive disco beat, seemed like a dream of the past come to life: “Let’s dance… let’s shout… get funky what it’s all about… let’s dance… let’s shout… ”
   A power transformer blew on Maple Street and a gaudy spiral of purple sparks drifted down, lit on the wet grass, and went out.
   At the power station, one of the generators began to whine at a higher, more desperate note. It began to smoke. People backed away, poised just below the point of panic. The place began to fill with the sickish-sweet smell of ozone. A buzzer went off stridently.
   “Too high!” Brad roared. “Bastard’s crossing over! Overloading!”
   He scrambled across the room and slammed both switches back up. The whine of the generators began to die, but not before there was a loud pop and screams, deadened by the safety glass, from below.
   “Holy crow,” Ralph said. “One of em’s afire.”
   Above them, the fluorescents faded to sullen cores of white light, then went out completely. Brad jerked open the control room door and came out on the landing. His words echoed flatly in the big open space. “Get the foam to that! Hustle!”
   Several foam extinguishers were turned on the generators, and the fire was doused. The smell of ozone still hung on the air. The others crowded out on the landing beside Brad.
   Stu laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry it turned out the way it did, man,” he said.
   Brad turned toward him, grinning. “Sorry? What for?”
   “Well, it caught fire, didn’t it?” Jack asked.
   “Shit, yes! It surely did! And somewhere around North Street there’s a transformer all blown to shit. We forgot, goddammit, we forgot! They got sick, they died, but they didn’t go around turning off their electrical appliances before they did it! There are TVs on, and ovens, and electric blankets, all over Boulder. Hell of a power drain. These generators, they’re built to cross over when the load’s heavy in one place and light in another. That one down there tried to cross, but all the others were shut down, see?” Brad was fairly jerking with excitement. “Gary! You remember the way Gary, Indiana, was burned to the ground?”
   They nodded.
   “Can’t be sure, we’ll never be sure, but what happened here could have happened there. Could be the power didn’t go off soon enough. One shorted-out electric blanket could have been enough under the right conditions, just like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over that lantern in Chicago. These gennies tried to cross and had nothing to cross to. So they burned out. We’re lucky it happened, that’s what I think—take my word for it.”
   “If you say so,” Ralph responded doubtfully.
   Brad said, “We’ve got the job to do all over again, but only on one motor. We’ll be in business. But—” Brad had begun to snap his fingers, an unconscious gesture of excitement. “We don’t dare turn the juice back on until we’re sure. Can we get another work-crew? A dozen guys or so?”
   “Sure, I guess so,” Stu said. “What for?”
   “A Turning-Off Crew. Just a bunch of guys to go around Boulder and turn off everything that was left on. We don’t dare turn the juice back on until that gets done. We got no fire department, man.” Brad laughed a little crazily.
   “We’re having a Free Zone Committee meeting tomorrow night,” Stu said. “You come on over and explain why you want them, and you’ll get your men. But are you sure that overload won’t happen again?”
   “Pretty damn sure, yeah. It wouldn’t have happened today if there hadn’t been so much stuff left on. Speaking of that, somebody ought to go over to North Boulder and see if it’s burning down.”
   Nobody was sure if Brad was joking or not. As it turned out there were several small fires, mostly from hot appliances. None of them spread in the drizzle that was falling. And what people in the Zone remembered later about the first of September 1990 was that it was the day the power came back on—if only for thirty seconds or so.
   An hour later, Fran pedaled her bike into Eben G. Fine Park across from Harold’s. At the park’s north end, just beyond the picnic tables, Boulder Stream chuckled mildly along. The morning’s drizzly rain was turning into a fine mist.
   She looked around for Larry, didn’t see him, and parked her bike. She walked through the dewy grass toward the swings and a voice said, “Over here, Frannie.”
   Startled, she looked toward the building that housed the men’s and women’s toilets, and felt a moment of utter confused fear. A tall figure was standing in the shadows of the short passageway running through the center of the dual comfort station, and for just a moment she thought…
   Then the figure stepped out and it was Larry, dressed in faded jeans and a khaki shirt. Fran relaxed.
   “Did I scare you?” he asked.
   “You did, just a little.” She sat down in one of the swings, the thud of her heart beginning to slow. “I just saw a shape, standing there in the dark…”
   “I’m sorry. I thought it might be safer, even though there’s no direct line of sight from here to Harold’s place. I see you rode a bicycle, too.”
   She nodded. “Quieter.”
   “I stowed mine out of sight in that shelter.” He nodded to an open-walled, low-roofed building by the playground.
   Frannie trundled her bike between the swings and the slide and into the shelter. The odor inside was musty and fetid. The place had been a make-out spot for kids too young or too stoned to drive, she guessed. It was littered with beer bottles and cigarette ends. There was a crumpled pair of panties in the far corner and the remains of a small fire in the near one. She parked her bike next to Larry’s and came back outside quickly. In those shadows, with the scent of that long-dead sex-musk in her nose, it was too easy to imagine the dark man standing just behind her, his twisted coathanger in hand.
   “Regular Holiday Inn, isn’t it?” Larry said dryly.
   “Not my idea of pleasant accommodations,” Fran said with a little shiver. “No matter what comes of this, Larry, I want to tell Stu everything tonight.”
   Larry nodded. “Yeah, and not just because he’s on the committee. He’s also the marshal.”
   Fran looked at him, troubled. Really for the first time she understood that this expedition might end with Harold in jail. They were going to sneak into his house without a warrant or anything and poke around.
   “Oh, bad,” she said.
   “Not too good, is it?” he agreed. “You want to call it off?”
   She thought for a long time and then shook her head.
   “Good. I think we ought to know, one way or the other.”
   “Are you sure they’re both gone?”
   “Yes. I saw Harold driving one of the Burial Committee trucks early this morning. And all the people who were on the Power Committee were invited over for the tryout.”
   “You sure she went?”
   “It would look damn funny if she didn’t, wouldn’t it?”
   Fran thought that over, then nodded. “I guess it would. By the way, Stu said they hope to have most of the town electrified again by the sixth.”
   “That’s going to be a mighty day,” Larry said, and thought how nice it would be to sit down in Shannon’s or the Broken Drum with a big Fender guitar and an even bigger amp and play something—anything, as long as it was simple and had a heavy beat—at full volume. “Gloria,” maybe, or “Walkin’ the Dog.” Just about anything, in fact, except “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”
   “Maybe,” Fran said, “we ought to have a cover story, though. Just in case.”
   Larry grinned crookedly. “Want to say we’re selling magazine subscriptions if one of them comes back?”
   “Har-har, Larry.”
   “Well, we could say we came to tell her what you just told me about getting the juice turned on again. If she’s there.”
   Fran nodded. “Yes, that might be okay.”
   “Don’t kid yourself, Fran. She’d be suspicious if we told her we’d come up because Jesus Christ just appeared and is walking back and forth on top of the City Reservoir.”
   “If she’s guilty of something.”
   “Yes. If she’s guilty of something.”
   “Come on,” Fran said after a moment’s thought. “Let’s go.”
   There was no need for the cover story. Steady hard rapping at first the front and then the back door convinced them that Harold’s house was indeed empty. It was just as well, Fran thought—the more she thought about the cover they’d worked out, the thinner it seemed.
   “How did you get in?” Larry asked.
   “The cellar window.”
   They went around to the side of the house and Larry pulled and tugged fruitlessly at the window while Fran kept watch.
   “Maybe you did,” he said, “but it’s locked now.”
   “No, it’s just sticking. Let me try.”
   But she had no better luck. Sometime between her first clandestine trip out here and now, Harold had locked up tight.
   “What do we do now?” she asked him.
   “Let’s break it.”
   “Larry, he’ll see it.”
   “Let him. If he doesn’t have anything to hide, he’ll think it was just a couple of kids, breaking windows in empty houses. It sure looks empty, with all the shades pulled down. And if he does have something to hide, it’ll worry him plenty and he deserves to be worried. Right?”
   She looked doubtful but didn’t stop him as he took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist and forearm, and crunched the basement window. Glass tinkled inward and he felt around for the catch.
   “Here tis.” He released it and the window slid back. Larry slipped through and turned to help her. “Be careful, kiddo. No miscarriages in Harold Lauder’s basement, please.”
   He caught her under the arms and eased her down. They looked around the rumpus room together. The croquet set stood sentinel. The air-hockey table was littered with little snips of colored electrical wire.
   “What’s this?” she said, picking up a piece of it. “This wasn’t here before.”
   He shrugged. “Maybe Harold’s building a better mousetrap.”
   There was a box under the table and he fished it out. The cover said: DELUXE REALISTIC WALKIE-TALKIE SET, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. Larry opened the box, but the heft of it had already told him it was empty.
   “Building walkie-talkies instead of mousetraps,” Fran said.
   “No, this wasn’t a kit. You buy this kind ready to go. Maybe he was modifying them somehow. It sounds like Harold. Remember how Stu bitched about the walkie-talkie reception when he and Harold and Ralph were out hunting for Mother Abagail?”
   She nodded, but there was still something about those snips of wire that bothered her.
   Larry dropped the box back onto the floor and made what he would later think of as the most wildly erroneous statement of his entire life. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let’s go.”
   They went up the stairs, but this time the door at the top was locked. She looked at him and Larry shrugged. “We’ve come this far, right?”
   Fran nodded.
   Larry bumped his shoulder against the door a few times to get the feel of the bolt on the other side, and then rammed it hard. There was a snapping-metal sound, a clunk, and the door swung open. Larry bent and picked up a bolt assembly from the linoleum kitchen floor. “I can put this back on and he’ll never know the difference. That is, if there’s a screwdriver handy.”
   “Why bother? He’s going to see the broken window.”
   “That’s true. But if the bolt’s back on the door, he’ll… what are you smiling about?”
   “Put the bolt back on, by all means. But how are you going to draw it from the cellar side of the door?”
   He thought about it and said, “Jeez, I hate a smartass woman worse than anything.” He tossed the bolt onto the Formica kitchen counter. “Let’s go look under that hearthstone.”
   They went into the shadowy living room, and Fran felt anxiety start to creep up. Last time Nadine hadn’t had a key. This time, if she came back, she would. And if she did come back, they would be caught red-handed. It would be a bitter joke if Stu’s first job as marshal turned out to be arresting his own woman for breaking and entering.
   “That’s it, isn’t it?” Larry asked, pointing.
   “Yes. Be as quick as you can.”
   “There’s a good chance he’s moved it, anyway.” And Harold had. It was Nadine who had replaced it under the loose hearthstone. Larry and Fran knew nothing of that, only that when Larry pulled the loose hearthstone aside, the book lay there in the hollow beneath, the word LEDGER gleaming mellowly up at them in gold-filled letters. They both stared at it. The room seemed suddenly hotter, stuffier, darker.
   “Well,” Larry said, “are we going to admire it or read it?”
   “You,” Fran said. “I don’t even want to touch it.”
   Larry picked it out of the hole and automatically wiped the white stone-dust from the cover. He began to flip through it at random. The writing had been done with a felt-tipped marker of the sort that had been marketed under the pugnacious brand name Hardhead. It had allowed Harold to write in a tiny, perfect script—the handwriting of an intensely conscientious man, perhaps a driven man. There were no paragraph breaks. There was only an eyelash of a margin to the right and left, but that margin was constant, so straight that it might have been drawn with a ruler.
   “It’d take me three days to read all this,” Larry said, and went on flipping toward the front of the book.
   “Hold it,” Fran said, and reached over his arm to turn back a couple of pages. Here the steady flow of words was broken by a boldly boxed-off area. What had been enclosed seemed to be some sort of motto:

To follow one’s star is to concede the power of some greater Force, some Providence; yet is it still not possible that the act of following itself is the taproot of even greater Power? Your GOD, your DEVIL, owns the keys to the lighthouse; I have grappled with that so long and hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION.
   HAROLD EMERY LAUDER
   “Sorry,” Larry said. “It’s by me. You get it?”
   Fran shook her head slowly. “I guess it’s Harold’s way of saying following can be as honorable as leading. But as a motto, I don’t think it’s going to put ‘Waste not, want not’ out of business.”
   Larry continued to flip toward the front of the book, coming upon another four or five of the boxed maxims, all of them attributed to Harold in capital letters.
   “Whoo,” Larry said. “Look at this one, Frannie!”


   It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To vent them is more noble; that is to say the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure.
   HAROLD EMERY LAUDER
   “That’s the work of a profoundly disturbed mind,” Fran said. She felt cold.
   “It’s the kind of thinking that got us into this mess to start with,” Larry agreed. He flipped rapidly to the start of the book. “Time’s wasting. Let’s see what we can make of this.”
   Neither of them knew exactly what to expect. They had read nothing of the ledger except the boxed mottos and an occasional phrase or two which, mostly owing to Harold’s convoluted style (the compound-complex sentence seemed to have been invented with Harold Lauder in mind), meant little or nothing.
   What they saw at the ledger’s beginning was therefore a complete shock.
   The diary began at the top of the first facing page. It was neatly marked with a 1 in a circle. There was an indent here, the only indent in the whole book, as far as Frannie could tell, excepting those which began each boxed motto. They read that first sentence holding the ledger between them like children at a choir practice and Fran said “Oh!” in a small, strangled voice and stepped away, her hand pressed lightly to her mouth.
   “Fran, we have to take the book,” Larry said.
   “Yes—”
   “And show it to Stu. I don’t know if Leo’s right about them being on the dark man’s side, but at the very least, Harold is dangerously disturbed. You can see that.”
   “Yes,” she said again. She felt faint, weak. So this was how the matter of the diaries ended. It was as if she had known, as if she had known it all from the moment she saw that big smudged thumbprint, and she had to keep telling herself not to faint, not to faint.
   “Fran? Frannie? Are you all right?”
   Larry’s voice. From far away.
   The first sentence in Harold’s ledger: My great pleasure this delightful post-Apocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too.
   “Ralph? Ralph Brentner, you home? Hooo-hooo, anybody home? ”
   She stood on the steps, looking at the house. No motorcycles in the yard, only a couple of bikes parked around to one side. Ralph would have heard her, but there was the mute to think about. The deaf-mute. You could holler until you were blue and he wouldn’t answer and still he, might be there.
   Shifting her shopping bag from one arm to the other, Nadine tried the door and found it unlocked. She stepped inside out of the fine mist which was falling. She was in a small foyer. Four steps went up to the kitchen, and a flight of them went down to the basement area where, Harold said Andros had his apartment. Putting her most pleasant expression on her face, Nadine went downstairs, fixing her excuse in her mind if he should be there.
   I came right in because I didn’t think you’d know I was knocking. Some of us wanted to know if there’s going to be a late shift wrapping those two motors that blew. Did Brad say anything to you?
   There were only two rooms down here. One of them was a bedroom as simple as a monk’s cell. The other was a study. There was a desk, a big chair, a wastebasket, a bookcase. The top of the desk was littered with scraps of paper and she looked through them idly. Most of them made little sense to her—she guessed they were Nick’s side of some conversation (I guess so, but shouldn’t we ask him if it can be done in some simpler way? one of them read). Others seemed to be memos to himself, jottings, thoughts. A few of them reminded her of the boxes in Harold’s ledger, what he called his “Guideposts to a Better Life” with a sarcastic smile.
   One read: Talk to Glen about trade. Do any of us know how trade starts? Scarcity of goods, isn’t it? Or a modified corner on some market? Skills. That may be a key word. What if Brad Kitchner decides to sell instead of giving away? Or the doc? What would we pay with? Hmmm.
   Another: Community protection is a two-way street.
   Another: Every time we talk about the law I spend the night having nightmares about Shoyo. Watching them die. Watching Childress throw his supper around the cell. The law, the law, what do we do about the goddamned law? Capital punishment. Now there’s a smiley thought. When Brad gets the power on, how long before someone asks him to rig up an electric chair?
   She turned away from the scraps—reluctantly. It was fascinating to look through papers left by a man who could think wholly only by writing (one of her college profs had been fond of saying that the thought process can never be complete without articulation), but her purpose down here was already completed. Nick was not here, no one was here. To linger overlong would be to press her luck unnecessarily.
   She went back upstairs. Harold had told her they would probably meet in the living room. It was a huge room, carpeted with a thick wine-colored shag rug, dominated by a freestanding fireplace that went up through the roof in a column of rock. The entire west wall was glass, giving on a magnificent view of the Flatirons. It made her feel as exposed as a bug on a wall. She knew that the outer surface of the thermoplex was iodized so that anyone outside would only see a mirrorlike reflection, but the psychological feeling was still one of utter exposure. She wanted to finish quickly.
   On the southern side of the room she found what she was looking for, a deep closet that Ralph hadn’t cleaned out. Coats hung far back inside, and in the rear corner there was a tangle of boots and mittens and winter woolens about three feet deep.
   Working quickly, she took the groceries out of her shopping bag. They were camouflage, and there was only a single layer of them. Beneath the cans of tomato paste and sardines was the Hush Puppies shoebox with the dynamite and the walkie-talkie inside.
   “If I put it in a closet, will it still work?” she had asked. “Won’t the extra wall muffle the blast?”
   “Nadine,” Harold had responded, “if that device works, and I have no reason whatever to believe it won’t, it will take the house and most of the surrounding hillside. Put it anywhere you think it will be unobserved until their meeting. A closet will be fine. The extra wall will blow out and become shrapnel. I trust your judgment, dear. It’s going to be just like the old fairy tale about the tailor and the flies. Seven at a blow. Only in this case, we’re dealing with a bunch of political cockroaches.”
   Nadine pushed aside boots and scarves, made a hole, and slipped the shoebox into it. She covered it over again and then worked her way out of the closet. There. Done. For better or worse.
   She left the house quickly, not looking back, trying to ignore the voice that wouldn’t stay dead, the voice that was now telling her to go back in there and pull the wires that ran between the blasting caps and the walkie-talkie, telling her to give this up before it drove her mad. Because wasn’t that what was really lying somewhere up ahead, now maybe less than two weeks ahead? Wasn’t madness the final logical conclusion?
   She slipped the bag of groceries into the Vespa’s carrier and kicked the machine into life. And all the time she was driving away, that voice went on: You’re not going to leave that there, are you? You’re not going to leave that bomb in there, are you?
   In a world where so many have died —
   She leaned into a turn, barely able to see where she was going. Tears had begun to blur her eyes.
   –the one great sin is to take a human life.
   Seven lives here. No, more than that, because the committee was going to hear reports from the heads of several subcommittees.
   She stopped at the corner of Baseline and Broadway, thinking she would turn around and go back. She was shuddering all over.
   And later she would never be able to explain to Harold precisely what had happened—in truth, she never even tried. It was a foretaste of the horrors to come.
   She felt a blackness creeping over her vision.
   It came like a dark curtain slowly drawn, flipping and flapping in a mild breeze. Every now and then the breeze would gust, the curtain would flap more vigorously, and she would see a bit of daylight under its hem, a little bit of this deserted intersection.
   But the curtain came over her vision in steady blackout drifts and soon she was lost in it. She was blind, she was deaf, she was without the sense of touch. The thinking creature, the Nadine-ego, drifted in a warm black cocoon like seawater, like amniotic fluid.
   And she felt him creep into her.
   A shriek built up within her, but she had no mouth with which to scream.
   Penetration: entropy.
   She didn’t know what those words meant, put together like that; she only knew that they were right.
   It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Later, metaphors occurred to her to describe it, and she rejected them, one by one:
   You’re swimming and suddenly, in the midst of the warm water, you’re treading water in a pocket of deep, numbing cold.
   You’ve been given Novocain and the dentist pulls a tooth. It comes out with a painless tug. You spit blood into the white enamel basin. There’s a hole in you; you’ve been gouged. You can slip your tongue into the hole where part of you was living a second ago.
   You stare at your face in the mirror. You stare at it for a long time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. No fair blinking. You watch with an intellectual sort of horror as your face changes, like the face of Lon Chaney, Jr., in a werewolf epic. You become a stranger to yourself, an olive-skinned Doppelgänger, a psychotic Vampira with pale skin and fishslit eyes.
   It was really none of those things, but there was a taste-trace of all of them.
   The dark man entered her, and he was cold.
   When Nadine opened her eyes, her first thought was that she was in hell.
   Hell was whiteness, the thesis to the dark man’s antithesis. She saw white, ivory, bleached-out nothingness. White-white-white. It was white hell, and it was everywhere.
   She stared at the whiteness (it was impossible to stare into it), fascinated, agonized, for minutes before she realized she could feel the fork of the Vespa between her thighs, and that there was another color—green—at the periphery of her vision.
   With a jerk she pulled her eyes out of their blank, locked stare. She gazed around herself. Her mouth was slack, trembling; the eyes themselves dazed and horror-drugged. The dark man had been in her, Flagg had been in her, and when he had come he had driven her away from the windows of her five senses, her loopholes on reality. He had driven her as a man might drive a car or a truck. And he had brought her… where?
   She glanced toward the white and saw it was a huge blank drive-in movie screen against a background of white late afternoon rainy sky. Turning around, she saw the snack-bar. It was painted a garish flesh-tone pink. Written across the front was WELCOME TO THE HOLIDAY TWIN! ENJOY ENTERTAINMENT UNDER THE STARS TO-NITE!
   The darkness had come on her at the intersection of Baseline and Broadway. Now she was far out on Twenty-eighth Street, almost over the town line to… Longmont, wasn’t it?
   There was a taste of him in her still, far back in her mind, like cold slime on a floor.
   She was surrounded by poles, steel poles like sentries, each of them five feet high, each bearing a matched set of drive-in speakers. There was gravel underfoot, but grass and dandelions were growing up through it. She guessed the Holiday Twin hadn’t been doing much business since the middle of June or so. You could say that it had been kind of a dead summer for the entertainment biz.
   “Why am I here?” she whispered.
   It was only talking aloud, talking to herself; she expected no answer. So when she was answered, a shriek of terror pealed from her throat.
   All the speakers fell off the speaker poles at once and onto the weed-strewn gravel. The sound they made was a huge, amplified CHUNK! —the sound of a dead body striking gravel.
   “NADINE,” the speakers blared, and it was his voice, and how she shrieked then! Her hands flew to her head, her palms clapped themselves over her ears, but it was all the speakers at once and there was no hiding from that giant voice, which was full of fearful hilarity and dreadful comic lust.
   “NADINE, NADINE, OH HOW I LOVE TO LOVE NADINE, MY PET, MY PRETTY —”
   “Stop it! ” she shrieked back, straining her vocal cords with the force of her cry, and still her voice was so small compared with that giant’s bellow. And yet, for a moment the voice did stop. There was silence. The fallen speakers looked up at her from the gravel like the rugose eyes of giant insects.
   Nadine’s hands slowly came down from her ears.
   You’ve gone insane, she comforted herself. That’s all it is. The strain of waiting… and Harold’s games… finally planting the explosive… all of it has finally driven you over the edge, dear, and you’ve gone crazy. It’s probably better this way.
   But she hadn’t gone crazy, and she knew it.
   This was far worse than being crazy.
   As if to prove this, the speakers now boomed out in the stern yet almost prissy voice of a principal reprimanding the student body over the high school intercom for some prank they had all played together. “NADINE. THEY KNOW.”
   “They know,” she parroted. She wasn’t sure who they were, or what they knew, but she was quite sure it was inevitable.
   “YOU’VE BEEN STUPID. GOD MAY LOVE STUPIDITY: I DO NOT.”
   The words crackled and rolled away into the late afternoon. Her clothes clung soddenly to her skin, her hair lay lankly against her pallid cheeks, and she began to shiver.
   Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid. I know what that word means. I think. I think it means death.
   “THEY KNOW EVERYTHING… EXCEPT THE SHOEBOX. THE DYNAMITE.”
   Speakers. Speakers everywhere, staring up at her from the white gravel, peeking at her from clusters of dandelions closed against the rain.
   “GO TO SUNRISE AMPHITHEATER. STAY THERE. UNTIL TOMORROW NIGHT. UNTIL THEY MEET. AND THEN YOU AND HAROLD MAY COME. COME TO ME.”
   Now Nadine began to feel a simple, shining gratitude. They had been stupid… but they had also been granted a second chance. They were important enough to have warranted intervention. And soon, very soon, she would be with him… and then she would go crazy, she was quite sure of it, and all this would cease to matter.
   “Sunrise Amphitheater may be too far,” she said. Her vocal cords had been hurt somehow; she could only croak. “It may be too far for the…” For the what? She pondered. Oh! Oh yes! Right! “For the walkie-talkie. The signal.”
   No answer.
   The speakers lay on the gravel, staring at her, hundreds of them.
   She pushed the Vespa’s starter and the little engine coughed to life. The echo made her wince. It sounded like rifle fire. She wanted to get out of this awful place, away from those staring speakers.
   Had to get out.
   She overbalanced the motor-scooter going around the concession stand. She might have held it if she’d been on a paved surface, but the Vespa’s rear wheel skidded out from under her in the loose gravel and she fell with a thump, biting her lip bloody and cutting her cheek. She got up, her eyes wide and skittish, and drove on. She was trembling all over.
   Now she was in the alley the cars drove through to get into the drive-in and the ticket stand, looking like a small toll-booth, was just ahead of her. She was going to get out. She was going to get away. Her mouth softened in gratitude.
   Behind her, hundreds of speakers blared into life all at once, and now the voice was singing, a horrid, tuneless singing: “I’LL BE SEEING YOU… IN ALL THE OLD FAMILIAR PLACES… THAT THIS HEART OF MINE EMBRACES… ALL DAY THROOOOO… ”
   Nadine screamed in her newly cracked voice.
   Huge, monstrous laughter came then, a dark and sterile cackling which seemed to fill the earth.
   “DO WELL, NADINE,” the voice boomed. “DO WELL, MY FANCY, MY DEAR ONE.”
   Then she gained the road and fled back toward Boulder at the Vespa’s top speed, leaving the disembodied voice and staring speakers behind… but carrying them with her in her heart, for then, for always.
   She was waiting for Harold around the corner from the bus station. When he saw her, his face froze and drained of color. “Nadine—” he whispered. The lunch bucket dropped from his hand and clacked on the pavement.
   “Harold,” she said. “They know. We’ve got to—”
   “Your hair, Nadine, oh my God, your hair —” His face seemed to be all eyes.
   “Listen to me! ”
   He seemed to gain some of himself back. “A-all right. What?”
   “They went up to your house and found your book. They took it away.”
   Emotions at war on Harold’s face: anger, horror, shame. Little by little they drained away and then, like some terrible corpse coming up from deep water, a frozen grin resurfaced on Harold’s face. “Who? Who did that?”
   “I don’t know all of it, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Fran Goldsmith was one of them, I’m sure of that. Maybe Bateman or Underwood. I don’t know. But they’ll come for you, Harold.”
   “How do you know?” He grabbed her roughly by the shoulders, remembering that she had put the ledger back under the hearthstone. He shook her like a ragdoll, but Nadine faced him without fear. She had been face-to-face with more terrible things than Harold Lauder on this long, long day. “You bitch, how do you know? ”
   “He told me.”
   Harold’s hands dropped away.
   “Flagg?” A whisper. “He told you? He spoke to you? And it did that?” Harold’s grin was ghastly, the grin of the Reaper on horseback.
   “What are you talking about?”
   They were standing next to an appliance store. Taking her by the shoulders again, Harold turned her to face the glass. Nadine looked at her reflection for a long time.
   Her hair had gone white. Entirely white. There was not a single black strand left.
   Oh how I love to love Nadine.
   “Come on,” she said. “We have to leave town.”
   “Now?”
   “After dark. We’ll hide until then, and pick up what camping gear we need on the way out.”
   “West?”
   “Not yet. Not until tomorrow night.”
   “Maybe I don’t want to anymore,” Harold whispered. He was still looking at her hair.
   She put his hand on it. “Too late, Harold,” she said.

Chapter 58
   
Fran and Larry sat at the kitchen table of Stu and Fran’s place, sipping coffee. Downstairs, Leo was stretching out on his guitar, one that Larry had helped him pick out at Earthly Sounds. It was a nice $600 Gibson with a hand-rubbed cherry finish. As an afterthought he had gotten the boy a battery-powered phonograph and about a dozen folk/blues albums. Now Lucy was with him, and a startlingly good imitation of Dave van Ronk’s “Backwater Blues” drifted up to them.
   Well it rained five days
   and the sky turned black as night…
   There’s trouble takin place,
   on the bayou tonight.
   Through the arch that gave on the living room, Fran and Larry could see Stu, sitting in his favorite easy chair, Harold’s ledger open on his lap. He had been sitting that way since four in the afternoon. It was now nine, and full dark. He had refused supper. As Frannie watched him, he turned another page.
   Down below, Leo finished “Backwater Blues” and there was a pause.
   “He plays well, doesn’t he?” Fran said.
   “Better than I do or ever will,” Larry said. He sipped his coffee.
   From below there suddenly came a familiar chop, a swift running down the frets to a not-quite-standard blues progression that made Larry’s coffee cup pause. And then Leo’s voice, low and insinuating, adding the vocal to the slow, driving beat:
   Hey baby I come down here tonight
   And I didn’t come to get in no fight,
   I just want you to say if you can,
   Tell me once and I’ll understand,
   Baby, can you dig your man?
   He’s a righteous man,
   Baby, can you dig your man?
   Larry spilled his coffee.
   “Whoops,” Fran said, and got up to get a dishcloth.
   “I’ll do it,” he said. “Jiggled when I should have joggled, I guess.”
   “No, sit still.” She got the dishcloth and wiped up the stain quickly. “I remember that one. It was big just before the flu. He must have picked up the single downtown.”
   “I guess so.”
   “What was that guy’s name? The guy that did it?”
   “I can’t remember,” Larry said. “Pop music came and went so fast.”
   “Yes, but it was something familiar,” she said, wringing the dishcloth out at the sink. “It’s funny how you get something like that on the tip of your tongue, isn’t it?”
   “Yeah,” Larry said.
   Stu closed the ledger with a soft snap, and Larry was relieved to see her look at him as he came into the kitchen. Her eyes went first to the gun on his hip. He had been wearing it since his election as marshal, and he made a lot of jokes about shooting himself in the foot. Fran didn’t think the jokes were all that funny.
   “Well?” Larry asked.
   Stu’s face was deeply troubled. He put the ledger on the table and sat down. Fran started to get him a cup of coffee and he shook his head and put a hand on her forearm. “No thanks, honey.” He looked at Larry in an absent, distracted sort of way. “I read it all, and now I’ve got a damn headache. Not used to reading so much. Last book I just sat down and read all the way through like that was this rabbit story. Watership Down. I got it for a nephew of mine and just started to read it…”
   He trailed off for a moment, thinking.
   “I read that one,” Larry said. “Great book.”
   “There was this one bunch of rabbits,” Stu said, “and they had it soft. They were big and well fed and they always lived in one place. There was something wrong there, but none of the rabbits knew what it was. Seemed like they didn’t want to know. Only… only, see, there was this farmer…”
   Larry said, “He left the warren alone so he could take a rabbit for the stewpot whenever he wanted one. Or maybe he sold them. Either way, he had his own little rabbit farm.”
   “Yeah. And there was this one rabbit, Silverweed, and he made up poems about the shining wire—the snare the farmer caught the rabbits in, I guess. The snare the farmer used to catch them and strangle them. Silverweed made up poems about that.” He shook his head in slow, tired incredulity. “And that’s what Harold reminds me of. Silverweed the rabbit.”
   “Harold’s ill,” Fran said.
   “Yeah.” Stu lit a cigarette. “And dangerous.”
   “What should we do? Arrest him?”
   Stu tapped the ledger. “He and the Cross woman are planning to do something so they’ll be made to feel welcome when they go west. But this book doesn’t say what.”
   “It mentions a lot of people he’s not too crazy about,” Larry said.
   “Are we going to arrest him?” Fran asked again.
   “I just don’t know. I want to talk it over with the rest of the committee first. What’s on for tomorrow night, Larry?”
   “Well, the meeting’s going to be in two halves, public business and then private business. Brad wants to talk about his Turning-Off Crew. Al Bundell wants to present a preliminary report from the Law Committee. Let’s see… George Richardson on clinic hours at Dakota Ridge, then Chad Norris. After that, they leave and it’s just us.”
   “If we get Al Bundell to stay after and fill him in on this Harold business, can we be sure he’ll keep his lip zipped?”
   “I’m sure we can,” Fran said.
   Stu said fretfully, “I wish the Judge was here. I cottoned to that man.”
   They were quiet for a moment, thinking about the Judge, wondering where he might be tonight. From below came the sound of Leo playing “Sister Kate” like Tom Rush.
   “But if it’s got to be Al, it’s got to be. I only see two choices anyway. We have to take the pair of them out of circulation. But I don’t want to put them in jail, goddammit.”
   “What does that leave?” Larry asked.
   It was Fran who answered. “Exile.”
   Larry turned to her. Stu was nodding slowly, looking at his cigarette.
   “Just drive him out?” Larry asked.
   “Him and her both,” Stu said.
   “But will Flagg take them like that?” Frannie asked.
   Stu looked up at her then. “Honey, that ain’t our problem.”
   She nodded and thought: Oh, Harold, I didn’t want it to come out like this. Never in a million years did I want it to come out this way.
   “Any idea what they might be planning?” Stu asked.
   Larry shrugged. “You’d have to get the whole committee’s thoughts on that, Stu. But I can think of some things.”
   “Such as?”
   “The power plant. Sabotage. An assassination attempt on you and Frannie. Those are just the first two things that occur to me.”
   Fran looked pale and dismayed.
   Larry went on: “Although he doesn’t come right out and say it, I think he went hunting for Mother Abagail with you and Ralph that time in hopes of getting you alone and killing you.”
   Stu said, “He had his chance.”
   “Maybe he chickened.”
   “Stop it, can’t you?” Fran asked dully. “Please.”
   Stu got up and went back into the living room. There was a CB in there hooked up to a Die-Hard battery. After some tinkering, he got Brad Kitchner.
   “Brad, you dog! Stu Redman. Listen. Can you round up some guys to stand watch at the power station tonight?”
   “Sure,” Brad’s voice came, “but what in God’s name for?”
   “Well, this is kind of delicate, Bradley. I heard one way and another that somebody might try doing some mischief up there.”
   Brad’s reply was blue with profanity.
   Stu nodded at the mike, smiling a little. “I know how you feel. This is just for tonight and maybe tomorrow night, so far as I know. Then I guess things’ll be ironed out.”
   Brad told him he could muster twelve men from the Power Committee without going two blocks, and any one of them would be happy to geld any would-be mischief-maker. “This something Rich Moffat’s up to?”
   “No, it ain’t Rich. Listen, I’ll be talking to you, okay?”
   “Fine, Stu. I’ll have them on watch.”
   Stu turned off the CB and walked back to the kitchen. “People let you be just as secret as you want to be. It scares me, you know? The old bald-headed sociologist is right. We could set ourselves up like kings here if we wanted to.”
   Fran put her hand over his. “I want you to promise me something. Both of you. Promise me we’ll settle this once and for all at the meeting tomorrow night. I just want it to be over.”
   Larry was nodding. “Exile. Yeah. It never crossed my mind, but it might be the best solution. Well, I’m going to collect Lucy and Leo and get home.”
   “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Stu said.
   “Yeah.” He went out.
   In the hour before dawn on September 2, Harold stood on the edge of Sunrise Amphitheater, looking down. The town was in a ditch of blackness. Nadine slept behind him in the small two-man tent they had picked up along with a few other camping supplies as they crept out of town.
   We’ll come back, though. Driving chariots.
   But in his secret heart, Harold doubted that. The darkness was upon him in more ways than one. The vile bastards had stolen everything from him—Frannie, his self-respect, then his ledger, now his hope. He felt that he was going down.
   The wind was strong, rippling his hair, making the tight canvas of the tent snap back and forth with a steady machine-gun popping sound. Behind him, Nadine moaned in her sleep. It was a scary sound. Harold thought she was as lost as he was, maybe worse. The sounds she made in her sleep were not the sounds of a person having happy dreams.
   But I can keep sane. I can do that. If I can go down to whatever’s waiting for me with my mind intact, that will be something. Yes, something.
   He wondered if they were down there now, Stu and his friends, surrounding his little house, if they were waiting for him to come home so they could arrest him and throw him in the cooler. He would go down in the history books—if any of those sorry slobs were left to write them, that was—as the Free Zone’s first jailbird. Welcome to hard times. HAWK CAGED, wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about it. Well, they would wait a long time. He was on his adventure, and he remembered all too clearly Nadine putting his hand on her white hair and saying, Too late, Harold. How like a corpse’s her eyes had been.
   “All right,” Harold whispered. “We’re going through with it.” Around and above him, the dark September wind drummed through the trees.
   The Free Zone Committee meeting was rapped to order some fourteen hours later in the living room of the house Ralph Brentner and Nick Andros shared. Stu was sitting in an easy chair, tapping an end table with the rim of his beer can. “Okay, folks, we better get started here.”
   Glen sat with Larry on the curving lip of the freestanding fireplace, their backs to the modest fire Ralph had kindled there. Nick, Susan Stern, and Ralph himself sat on the couch. Nick held the inevitable pen and pad of notepaper. Brad Kitchner was standing just inside the doorway with a can of Coors in his hand, talking to Al Bundell, who was working a Scotch and soda. George Richardson and Chad Norris were sitting by the large window-wall watching the sunset over the Flatirons.
   Frannie was sitting with her back propped comfortably against the door of the closet where Nadine had planted the bomb. Her pack, with Harold’s ledger inside it, was between her folded legs.
   “Order, I say, order!” Stu said, rapping harder. “That tape recorder working, baldy?”
   “It’s fine,” Glen said. “I see your mouth is in good working order, too, East Texas.”
   “I oil her a little and she do just fine,” Stu said, smiling. He glanced around at the eleven people spotted around the big combination living room/dining room area. “Okay… we’ve got a right smart of business, but first I’d like to thank Ralph for providing the roof over our heads and the booze and the crackers—”
   He’s really getting good at it, Frannie thought. She tried to judge just how much Stu had changed since the day she and Harold had met him, and couldn’t do it. You get too subjective about the behavior of the people you’re close to, she decided. But she knew that when she had first met him, Stu would have been stricken at the thought of having to chair a meeting of almost a dozen people… and he probably would have jumped straight up to heaven at the thought of chairing a mass Free Zone meeting of over a thousand people. She was now watching a Stu that never would have been without the plague.
   It’s released you, my darling, she thought. I can cry for the others and still be so proud of you and love you so much —
   She shifted a little, propping her back more firmly against the closet door.
   “We’ll have our guests speak first,” Stu said, “and after that we’ll have a short closed meeting. Any objections to that?”
   There were none.
   “Okay,” Stu said. “I’ll turn the floor over to Brad Kitchner, and you folks want to listen close because he’s the guy that’s going to put the rocks back in your bourbon in about three days.”
   This generated a hearty round of spontaneous applause. Blushing furiously, tugging at his tie, Brad walked to the center of the room. He came very close to tripping over a hassock on his way.
   “I’m. Real. Happy. To be. Here,” Brad began in a trembling monotone. He looked as if he would have been happier anywhere else, even at the South Pole, addressing a penguin convention. “The… ah…” He paused, examining his notes, and then brightened. “The power!” he exclaimed with the air of a man making a great discovery. “The power is almost on. Right.”
   He fumbled with his notes some more and then went on.
   “We had two of the generators going yesterday, and as you know, one of them overloaded and blew its cookies. So to speak. What I mean is that it overlooked. Overloaded, rather. Well… you know what I mean.”
   A chuckle ran through them, and it seemed to put Brad a little more at ease.
   “That happened because when the plague hit, a lot of stuff got left on and we didn’t have the rest of the generators on to take the overload. We can take care of the overload danger by turning on the rest of the generators—even three or four would have absorbed the load easily—but that isn’t going to solve the fire danger. So we’ve got to get everything shut off that we can. Stove burners, electric blankets, all that stuff. In fact, I was thinking like this: The quickest way might be to go into every house where no one lives and just pull all the fuses or turn off the main breaker switches. See? Now, when we get ready to turn on, I think we ought to take some elementary fire precautions. I went to the liberty of checking out the fire station in East Boulder, and…”
   The fire snapped comfortably. It’s going to be all right, Fran thought. Harold and Nadine have taken off without any prompting, and maybe that’s best. It solves the problem and Stu is safe from them. Poor Harold, I felt sorry for you, but in the end I felt more fear than pity. The pity is still there, and I’m afraid of what may happen to you, but I’m glad your house is empty and you and Nadine have gone. I’m glad you’ve left us in peace.
   Harold sat atop a graffiti-inlaid picnic table like something out of a lunatic’s Zen handbook. His legs were crossed. His eyes were far, hazy, contemplative. He had gone to that cold and alien place where Nadine could not follow and she was frightened. In his hands he held the twin of the walkie-talkie in the shoebox. The mountains fell away in front of them in breathtaking ledges and pine-choked ravines. Miles to the east—maybe ten, maybe forty—the land smoothed into the American Midwest and marched away to the dim blue horizon. Night had already come over that part of the world. Behind them, the sun had just disappeared behind the mountains, leaving them outlined in gold that would flake and fade.
   “When?” Nadine asked. She was horribly keyed up, and she had to go to the bathroom badly.
   “Pretty soon,” Harold said. His grin had become a mellow smile. It was an expression she could not place right away, because she had never seen it on Harold’s face before. It took her a few minutes to place it. Harold looked happy.
   The committee voted 7–0 to empower Brad to round up twenty men and women for his Turning-Off Crew. Ralph Brentner had agreed to fill up two of the Fire Department’s old tanker trucks at Boulder Reservoir and to have them at the power station when Brad turned on.
   Chad Norris was next. Speaking quietly, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his chino pants, he talked about the work the Burial Committee had done over the last three weeks. He told them they had buried an incredible twenty-five thousand corpses, better than eight thousand a week, and that he believed they were now over the bulge.
   “We’ve either been lucky or blessed,” he said. “This mass exodus—that’s all I know to call it—has done most of our work for us. In another town Boulder’s size, it would have taken a year to get it done. We’re expecting to inter another twenty thousand plague victims by the first of October, and we’ll probably keep stumbling over individual victims for a long time after, but I wanted you to know that the job is getting done and I don’t think we have to worry too much about diseases breeding in the bodies of the unburied dead.”
   Fran shifted her position so she could look out at the last of the day. The gold that had surrounded the peaks was already beginning to fade to a less spectacular lemon color. She felt a sudden wave of homesickness that was totally unexpected and almost sickening in its force.
   It was five minutes to eight.
   If she didn’t go in the bushes, she was going to wet her pants. She went around a stand of scrub, lowered herself a little, and let go. When she came back, Harold was still sitting on the picnic table with the walkie-talkie clasped loosely in his hand. He had pulled up the antenna.
   “Harold,” she said. “It’s getting late. It’s past eight o’clock.”
   He glanced at her indifferently. “They’ll be there half the night, clapping each other on the back. When the time’s right, I’ll pull the pin. Don’t you worry.”
   “When? ”
   Harold’s smile widened emptily. “Just as soon as it’s dark.”
   Fran stifled a yawn as Al Bundell stepped confidently up beside Stu. They were going to run late, and suddenly she wished she was back in the apartment, just the two of them. It wasn’t just tiredness, not precisely that feeling of homesickness, either. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be in this house. There was no reason for the feeling, but it was strong. She wanted to get out. In fact, she wanted them all to get out. I’ve just lost my happy thoughts for the evening, she told herself. Pregnant woman blues, that’s all.
   “The Law Committee has had four meetings in the last week,” Al was saying, “and I’ll keep this as brief as possible. The system we’ve decided on is a kind of tribunal. Sitting members would be chosen by lottery, much the same way as young men were once selected for the draft—”
   “Hiss! Boo!” Susan said, and there was some companionable laughter.
   Al smiled. “But, I was going to add, I think service on such a tribunal would be a lot more palatable to those who were called upon to serve. The tribunal would consist of three adults—eighteen and over—who would serve for six months. Their names would be picked out of a big drum containing the names of every adult in Boulder.”
   Larry’s hand waved. “Could they be excused for cause?”
   Frowning a trifle at this interruption, Al said: “I was just getting to that. There would have to be—”
   Fran shifted uneasily and Sue Stern winked at her. Fran didn’t wink back. She was frightened—and frightened of her own baseless fear, if such a thing were possible. Where had this stifling, claustrophobic feeling come from? She knew that what you were supposed to do with baseless feelings was to ignore them… at least in the old world. But what about Tom Cullen’s trance? What about Leo Rockway?
   Get out of here, the voice inside suddenly cried. Get them all out!
   But it was so crazy. She shifted again and decided to say nothing.
   “—a brief deposition from the person wanting to be excused, but I don’t think—”
   “Someone’s coming,” Fran said suddenly, getting to her feet.
   There was a pause. They could all hear motorcycle engines revving toward them up Baseline, coming fast. Horns were beeping. And suddenly, for Frannie, the panic overflowed.
   “Listen,” she said, “all of you!”
   Faces turning toward her, surprised, concerned.
   “Frannie, are you—” Stu started toward her.
   She swallowed. It felt as if there was a heavy weight on her chest, stifling her. “We have to get out of here. Right… now.”
   It was eight twenty-five. The last of the light had gone out of the sky. It was time. Harold sat up a little straighter and held the walkie-talkie to his mouth. His thumb rested lightly on the SEND button. He would depress it and blow them all to hell by saying—
   “What’s that?”
   Nadine’s hand on his arm, distracting him, pointing. Far below, snaking up Baseline, there was a daisy-chain of lights. In the great silence they could hear the faint roar of a great many motorcycle engines. Harold felt a thin thread of disquiet and threw it off.
   “Leave me be,” he said. “This is it.”
   Her hand fell from his shoulder. Her face was a white blur in the darkness. Harold pressed the SEND button.
   She never knew if it was the motorcycles or her own words that got them moving. But they didn’t move fast enough. That would always be on her heart; they didn’t move fast enough.
   Stu was first out the door, the snarl and echo of the motorcycles enormous. They came across the bridge that spanned the small dry wash below Ralph’s house, headlights blazing. Instinctively, Stu’s hand dropped to the butt of his gun.
   The screen door opened and he turned, thinking it would be Frannie. It wasn’t; it was Larry.
   “What’s up, Stu?”
   “Don’t know. But we better get them out.”
   Then the cycles were winding their way into the driveway and Stu relaxed a little. He could see Dick Vollman, the Gehringer kid, Teddy Weizak, others he recognized. Now he could allow himself to recognize what his chief fear had been: that behind the blazing headlights and snarling motorcycle engines had been the spearhead of Flagg’s forces, that the war was about to start.
   “Dick,” Stu said. “What the hell?”
   “Mother Abagail! ” Dick roared over the motors. More and more cycles filled the yard as the members of the committee crowded out of the house. It was a carnival of swinging headlights and merry-go-round shadows.
   “What? ” Larry screamed. Behind him and Stu, Glen, Ralph, and Chad Norris crowded out, forcing Larry and Stu to the foot of the steps.
   “She’s come back! ” Dick had to bellow to make himself heard over the cycles. “Oh, she’s in terrible shape! We need a doctor… Christ, we need a miracle! ”
   George Richardson pushed through them. “The old woman? Where?”
   “Get on, Doc!” Dick shouted at him. “Don’t ask questions! Just for Christ’s sake be quick!”
   Richardson mounted the cycle behind Dick Vollman. Dick turned in a tight circle and began to weave his way back through the cluster of motorcycles.
   Stu’s eyes met Larry’s. Larry looked as bewildered as Stu felt… but there was a gathering cloud in Stu’s head, and suddenly a terrible feeling of impending doom engulfed him.
   “Nick, come on! Come on! ” Fran cried, seizing his shoulder. Nick was standing in the middle of the living room, his face still, immobile.
   He couldn’t talk, but suddenly he knew. He knew. It came from nowhere, from everywhere.
   There was something in the closet.
   He gave Frannie a tremendous push.
   “Nick !”
   GO!! he waved at her.
   She went. He turned to the closet, pulled open the door, and began to rip madly at the tangle of things inside, praying God that he wasn’t too late.
   Suddenly Frannie was next to Stu, her face pallid, her eyes huge. She clutched at him. “Stu… Nick’s still in there… something… something…”
   “Frannie, what are you talking about?”
   “Death! ” she screamed at him. “I’m talking about death and NICK IS STILL IN THERE! ”
   He pulled aside a handful of scarves and mittens and felt something. A shoebox. He grabbed it, and as he did, like malign necromancy, Harold Lauder’s voice spoke from inside it.
   “What about Nick? ” Stu shouted, grabbing her shoulders.
   “We have to get him out—Stu—something’s going to happen, something awful—”
   Al Bundell shouted: “What the hell is going on, Stuart?”
   “I don’t know,” Stu said.
   “Stu, please, we have to get Nick out of there! ” Fran screamed.
   That was when the house blew up behind them.
   With the SEND button depressed, the background static disappeared and was replaced by a smooth, dark silence. Void, waiting for him to fill it. Harold sat cross-legged on the picnic table, summoning himself up.
   Then he raised his arm, and at the end of the arm one finger pointed out of his knotted fist, and in that moment he was like Babe Ruth, old and almost washed up, pointing to the spot where he was going to hit the home run, pointing for all the hecklers and badmouths in Wrigley Field, shutting them up once and for all.
   Speaking firmly but not loudly into the walkie-talkie, he said: “This is Harold Emery Lauder speaking. I do this of my own free will.”
   A blue-white spark greeted This is. A gout of flame shot up at Harold Emery Lauder speaking. A faint, flat bang, like a cherrybomb stuffed into a tin can, reached their ears at I do this, and by the time he had spoken the words of my own free will and tossed the walkie-talkie away, its purpose served, a fire-rose had bloomed at the base of Flagstaff Mountain.
   “Breaker, breaker, that’s a big ten-four, over and out,” Harold said softly.
   Nadine clutched at him, much as Frannie had clutched Stu only seconds ago. “We ought to be sure. We ought to be sure that it got them.”
   Harold looked at her, then gestured at the blooming rose of destruction below them. “Do you think anything could have lived through that?”
   “I… I d-don’t kn… ooow, Harold, I’m—” Nadine turned away, clutched her belly, and began to retch. It was a deep, constant, raw sound. Harold watched her with mild contempt.
   She turned back at last, panting, pale, wiping at her mouth with a Kleenex. Scrubbing at her mouth. “Now what?”
   “Now I guess we go west,” Harold said. “Unless you plan to go down there and sample the mood of the community.”
   Nadine shuddered.
   Harold slid off the picnic table and winced at the pins and needles as his feet struck the ground. They had gone to sleep.
   “Harold—” She tried to touch him and he jerked away. Without looking at her, he began to strike the tent.
   “I thought we’d wait until tomorrow—” she began timidly.
   “Sure,” he jeered at her. “So twenty or thirty of them can decide to fan out on their bikes and catch us. Did you ever see what they did to Mussolini?”
   She winced. Harold was rolling the tent up and cinching the ground-cords tight.
   “And we don’t touch each other. That’s over. It got Flagg what he wanted. We wasted their Free Zone Committee. They’re washed up. They may get the power on, but as a functioning group, they’re washed up. He’ll give me a woman who makes you look like a potato sack, Nadine. And you… you get him. Happy days, right? Only if I were wearing your Hush Puppies, I would be shaking in them plenty.”
   “Harold—please—” She was sick, crying. He could see her face in the dim fireglow, and felt pity for her. He forced it out of his heart like an unwelcome drunk who has tried to enter a cozy little suburban tavern where everybody knows everybody else. The irrevocable fact of murder was in her heart forever—that fact shone sickly in her eyes. But so what? It was in his, as well. In it and on it, weighing it down like stones.
   “Get used to it,” Harold said brutally. He flung the tent on the back of his cycle and began to tie it down. “It’s over for them down there, and it’s over for us, and it’s over for everybody that died in the plague. God went off on a celestial fishing trip and He’s going to be gone a long time. It’s totally dark. The dark man’s in the driver’s seat now. Him. So get used to it.”
   She made a squeaking, moaning noise in her throat.
   “Come on, Nadine. This stopped being a beauty contest two minutes ago. Help me get this shit packed up. I want to do a hundred miles before sunup.”
   After a moment she turned her back on the destruction below—destruction that seemed almost inconsequential from this height—and helped him pack the rest of the camping gear in his saddlebags and her wire carrier. Fifteen minutes later they had left the fire-rose behind and were riding through the cool and windy dark, heading west.
   For Fran Goldsmith, that day’s ending was painless and simple. She felt a warm push of air at her back and suddenly she was flying through the night. She had been knocked out of her sandals.
   Whafuck? she thought.
   She landed on her shoulder, landed hard, but there was still no pain. She was in the ravine that ran north-to-south at the foot of Ralph’s back yard.
   A chair landed in front of her, neatly, on its legs. Its seat-cushion was a smoldering black snarl.
   WhaFUCK?
   Something landed on the seat of the chair and rolled off. Something that was dripping. With faint and clinical horror, she saw that it was an arm.
   Stu? Stu! What’s happening?
   A steady, grinding roar of sound engulfed her, and stuff began to rain down everywhere. Rocks. Hunks of wood. Bricks. A glass block spiderwebbed with cracks (hadn’t the bookcase in Ralph’s living room been made of those blocks?). A motorcycle helmet with a horrible, lethal hole punched through the back of it. She could see everything clearly… much too clearly. It had been dark out only a few seconds ago
   Oh Stu, my God, where are you? What’s happening? Nick? Larry?
   People were screaming. That grinding roar went on and on. It was now brighter than noontime. Every pebble cast a shadow. Stuff still raining down all around her. A board with a six-inch spike protruding from it came down in front of her nose.
   –the baby! —
   And on the heels of that, another thought came, a reprise of her premonition: Harold did this, Harold did this, Harold —
   Something struck her on the head, the neck, the back. A huge thing that landed on her like a padded coffin.
   OH MY GOD OH MY BABY —
   Then darkness sucked her down to a nowhere place where not even the dark man could follow.

Chapter 59

   Birds.

   She could hear birds.
   Fran lay in darkness, listening to the birds for a long time before she realized the darkness wasn’t really dark. It was reddish, moving, peaceful. It made her think of her childhood. Saturday morning, no school, no church, the day you got to sleep late. The day you could wake up a little at a time, at your leisure. You lay with your eyes shut, and you saw nothing but a red darkness that was Saturday sunshine being filtered through the delicate screen of capillaries in your eyelids. You listened to the birds in the old oaks outside and maybe smelled sea-salt, because your name was Frances Goldsmith and you were eleven years old on a Saturday morning in Ogunquit—
   Birds. She could hear birds.
   But this wasn’t Ogunquit; it was
   (Boulder)
   She puzzled over it in the red darkness for a long time, and suddenly she remembered the explosion.
   (?Explosion?)
   (!Stu!)
   Her eyes flashed open. There was sudden terror. “Stu! ”
   And Stu was sitting there beside her bed, Stu with a clean white bandage wrapped over one forearm and a nasty-looking cut dried on one cheek and part of his hair burned away, but it was Stu, he was alive, with her, and when she opened her eyes the great relief came on his face and he said, “Frannie. Thank God.”
   “The baby,” she said. Her throat was dry. It came out a whisper.
   He looked blank, and blind fear stole into her body. It was cold and numbing.
   “The baby,” she said, forcing the words up her sandpaper throat. “Did I lose the baby?”
   Understanding came over his face then. He hugged her clumsily with his good arm. “No, Frannie, no. You didn’t lose the baby.”
   Then she began to cry, scalding tears that flowed down her cheeks, and she hugged him fiercely, not caring that every muscle in her body seemed to cry out in pain. She hugged him. The future was later. Now the things she needed most were here in this sun-washed room.
   The sound of birds came through the open window.
   Later she said, “Tell me. How bad is it?”
   His face was heavy and sorrowful and unwilling. “Fran…”
   “Nick?” she whispered. She swallowed and there was a tiny click in her throat. “I saw an arm, a severed arm—”
   “It might be better to wait—”
   “No. I have to know. How bad was it?”
   “Seven dead,” he said in a low, husky voice. “We got off lucky, I figure. It could have been much worse.”
   “Who, Stuart?”
   He held her hands clumsily. “Nick was one of them, honey. There was a pane of glass, I guess—you know, that iodized glass—and it… it…” He stopped for a moment, looked down at his hands, then up at her again. “He… we were able to make identification by… certain scars…” He turned away from her for a moment. Fran made a harsh sighing noise.
   When Stu was able to go on he said, “And Sue. Sue Stern. She was still inside when it went off.”
   “That… just doesn’t seem possible, does it?” Fran said. She felt stunned, numbed, bewildered.
   “It’s true.”
   “Who else?”
   “Chad Norris,” he said, and Fran made that harsh sighing noise again. A single tear slipped from the corner of her eye; she brushed it away almost absently.
   “Those were the only three from inside. It’s like a miracle. Brad says there must have been eight, nine sticks of dynamite hooked up in that closet. And Nick, he almost… when I think he might have had his hands right on that shoebox…”
   “Don’t,” she said. “There was no way to know.”
   “That doesn’t help much,” he said.
   The other four were people who had come up from town on motorcycles—Andrea Terminello, Dean Wykoff, Dale Pedersen, and a young girl named Patsy Stone. Stu did not tell Fran that Patsy, who had been teaching Leo how to play the flute, had been struck and nearly beheaded by a whirling chunk of Glen Bateman’s Wollensak tape recorder.
   Fran nodded, and it hurt her neck. When she shifted her body, even a little, her entire back seemed to scream with pain.
   Twenty had been wounded in the blast and one of them, Teddy Weizak of the Burial Committee, had no chance to recover. Two others were in critical condition. A man named Lewis Deschamps had lost an eye. Ralph Brentner had lost the third and fourth fingers on his left hand.
   “How badly am I hurt?” Fran asked him.
   “Why, you have a whiplash and a sprained back and a broken foot,” Stu said. “That’s what George Richardson told me. The blast threw you all the way across the yard. You got the broken foot and the sprained back when the couch landed on you.”
   “Couch? ”
   “Don’t you remember?”
   “I remember something like a coffin… a padded coffin…”
   “That was the couch. I yanked it off you myself. I was raving and… pretty hysterical, I guess. Larry came over to help me and I punched him in the mouth. That’s how bad off I was.” She touched his cheek and he put his hand over hers. “I thought you had to be dead. I remember thinking that I didn’t know what I’d do if you were. Go crazy, I guess.”
   “I love you,” she said.
   He hugged her—gently, because of her back—and they remained that way for some time.
   “Harold?” she said at last.
   “And Nadine Cross,” he agreed. “They hurt us. They hurt us bad. But they didn’t do anywhere near the damage they wanted to do. And if we catch him before they get too far west…” He held his hands, which were scratched and scabbed over, out in front of him and closed them with a sudden snap that made the joints pop. The hamstrings stood out on the insides of his wrists. A sudden cold grin surfaced on his face that made Fran want to shudder. It was too familiar.
   “Don’t smile like that,” she said. “Ever.”
   The smile faded. “People have been scouring the hills for them since daybreak,” he went on, no longer smiling. “I don’t think they’ll find them. I told them not to go further than fifty miles west of Boulder no matter what, and I imagine Harold was smart enough to get them further than that. But we know how they did it. They had the explosive hooked up to a walkie-talkie—”
   Fran gasped, and Stu looked at her with concern.
   “What’s wrong, babe? Is it your back?”
   “No.” She was suddenly understanding what Stu had meant about Nick having his hands on the shoebox when the explosive was detonated. Suddenly understanding everything. Speaking slowly, she told him about the snips of wire and the walkie-talkie box under the air-hockey table. “If we’d searched the whole house instead of just taking his damn b-book, we might have found the bomb,” she said, and her voice began to choke and break. “N-Nick and Sue would be a-a-alive and—”
   He held her. “Is that why Larry seems so down this morning? I thought it was because I punched him. Frannie, how could you know, huh? How could you possibly know?”
   “We should have! We should have known!” She buried her face against the good darkness of his shoulder. More tears, hot and scalding. He held her, bent over awkwardly because the electrically powered hospital bed would not crank up.
   “I don’t want you blamin yourself, Frannie. It’s happened. I’m telling you there’s no way anybody—except maybe a bomb-squad detective—could make something out of a few snips of wire and an empty box. If they’d left a couple of sticks of dynamite or a blasting cap around, that would have been a different proposition. But they didn’t. I don’t blame you, and nobody else in the Zone is going to blame you, either.”
   As he spoke, two things were combining, slowly and belatedly, in her mind.
   Those were the only three from inside… it’s like a miracle.
   Mother Abagail… she’s come back… oh, she’s in terrible shape… we need a miracle!
   With a little hiss of pain, she drew herself up a little so she could look into Stu’s face. “Mother Abagail,” she said. “We all would have been inside when it went off if they hadn’t come up to tell us—”
   “It’s like a miracle,” Stu repeated. “She saved our lives. Even if she is—” He fell silent.
   “Stu?”
   “She saved our lives by coming back when she did, Frannie. She saved our lives.”
   “Is she dead?” Fran asked. She grabbed his hand, clutched it. “Stu, is she dead, too?”
   “She came back into town around a quarter of eight. Larry Underwood’s boy was leading her by the hand. He’d lost all his words, you know he does that when he gets excited, but he took her to Lucy. Then she just collapsed.” Stu shook his head. “My God, how she ever walked as far as she did… and what she can have been eating or doing… I’ll tell you something, Fran. There’s more in the world—and out of it—than I ever dreamed of back in Arnette. I think that woman is from God. Or was.”
   She closed her eyes. “She died, didn’t she? In the night. She came back to die.”
   “She’s not dead yet. She ought to be, and George Richardson says she’ll have to go soon, but she’s not dead yet.” He looked at her simply and nakedly. “And I’m afraid. She saved our lives by coming back, but I’m afraid of her, and I’m afraid of why she came back.”
   “What do you mean, Stu? Mother Abagail would never harm—”
   “Mother Abagail does what her God tells her to,” he said harshly. “That’s the same God murdered his own boy, or so I heard.”
   “Stu!”
   The fire died out of his eyes. “I don’t know why she’s back, or if she has anything left to tell us at all. I just don’t know. Maybe she’ll die without regaining consciousness. George says that’s the most likely. But I do know that the explosion… and Nick dying… and her coming back… it’s taken the blinkers off this town. They’re talking about him. They know Harold was the one who set off the blast, but they think he made Harold do it. Hell, I think so too. There’s plenty who are saying Flagg’s responsible for Mother Abagail coming back the way she is, too. Me, I don’t know. I don’t know nothing, seems like, but I feel scared. Like it’s going to end bad. I didn’t feel that way before, but I do now.”
   “But there’s us,” she said, almost pleading with him. “There’s us and the baby, isn’t there? Isn’t there? ”
   He didn’t answer for a long time. She didn’t think he was going to answer. And then he said, “Yeah. But for how long?”
   Near dusk on that day, the third of September, people began to drift slowly—almost aimlessly—down Table Mesa Drive toward Larry and Lucy’s house. Singly, by couples, in threes. They sat on the front steps of houses that bore Harold’s x -sign on their doors. They sat on curbs and lawns that were dry and brown at this long summer’s ending. They talked a little in low tones. They smoked their cigarettes and their pipes. Brad Kitchner was there, one arm wrapped in a bulky white bandage and supported in a sling. Candy Jones was there, and Rich Moffat showed up with two bottles of Black Velvet in a newsboy’s pouch. Norman Kellogg sat with Tommy Gehringer, his shirtsleeves rolled up to show sunburned, freckled biceps. The Gehringer boy’s sleeves were rolled up in imitation. Harry Dunbarton and Sandy DuChiens sat on a blanket together, holding hands. Dick Vollman, Chip Hobart, and sixteen-year-old Tony Donahue sat in a breezeway half a block up from Larry’s tract house, passing a bottle of Canadian Club back and forth, chasing it with warm 7-Up. Patty Kroger sat with Shirley Hammett. There was a picnic hamper between them. The hamper was well filled, but they only nibbled. By eight o’clock the street was lined with people, all of them watching the house. Larry’s cycle was parked out front, and George Richardson’s big Kawasaki 650 was parked beside it.
   Larry watched them from the bedroom window. Behind him, in his and Lucy’s bed, Mother Abagail lay unconscious. The dry, sickly smell coming from her filled his nose and made him want to puke—he hated to puke—but he wouldn’t move. This was his penance for escaping while Nick and Susan died. He heard low voices behind him, the deathwatch around her bed. George would be leaving for the hospital shortly to check on his other patients. There were only sixteen now. Three had been released. And Teddy Weizak had died.
   Larry himself had been totally unhurt.
   Same old Larry—keeps his head while others all around him are losing theirs. The blast had thrown him across the driveway and into a flower bed, but he had not sustained a single scratch. Jagged shrapnel had rained down all around him, but nothing had touched him. Nick had died, Susan had died, and he had been unhurt. Yeah; same old Larry Underwood.
   Deathwatch in here, deathwatch out there. All the way up the block. Six hundred of them, easy. Harold, you ought to come on back with a dozen hand grenades and finish the job. Harold. He had followed Harold all the way across the country, had followed a trail of Payday candy wrappers and clever improvisations. Larry had almost lost his fingers getting gas back in Wells. Harold had simply found the plug vent and used a siphon. Harold was the one who had suggested the memberships in the various committees slide upward with population. Harold, who had suggested that the ad hoc committee be accepted in toto. Clever Harold. Harold and his ledger. Harold and his grin.
   It was all well and good for Stu to say no one could have figured out what Harold and Nadine were up to from a few scraps of wire on an air-hockey table. With Larry that line of reasoning just didn’t hold up. He had seen Harold’s brilliant improvisations before. One of them had been written on the roof of a barn in letters almost twenty feet high, for Christ’s sweet sake. He should have guessed. Inspector Underwood was great at ferreting out candy wrappers, but not so great when it came to dynamite. In point of fact, Inspector Underwood was a bloody asshole.
   Larry, if you knew —
   Nadine’s voice.
   If you want, I’ll get down on my knees and beg.
   That had been another chance to avert the murder and destruction… one he could never bring himself to tell anybody about. Had it really been in the works even then? Probably. If not the specifics of the dynamite bomb wired to the walkie-talkie, then at least some general plan.
   Flagg’s plan.
   Yes—in the background there was always Flagg, the dark puppet master, pulling the strings on Harold, Nadine, on Charlie Impening, God knew how many others. The people in the Zone would happily lynch Harold on sight, but it was Flagg’s doing… and Nadine’s. And who had sent her to Harold, if not Flagg? But before she had gone to Harold she had come to Larry. And he had sent her away.
   How could he have said yes? There was his responsibility to Lucy. That had been all-important, not just because of her but because of himself—he sensed it would take only one or two more fades to destroy him as a man for good. So he had sent her away, and he supposed Flagg was well pleased with the previous night’s work… if Flagg was really his name. Oh, Stu was still alive, and he spoke for the committee—he was the mouth that Nick could never use. Glen was alive, and Larry supposed he was the point-man of the committee’s mind, but Nick had been the heart of the committee, and Sue, along with Frannie, had served as its moral conscience. Yes, he thought bitterly, all in all, a good evening’s work for that bastard. He ought to reward Harold and Nadine well when they got over there.
   He turned from the window, feeling a dull throb behind his forehead. Richardson was taking Mother Abagail’s pulse. Laurie was fiddling with the IV bottles hung on their T-shaped rack. Dick Ellis was standing by. Lucy sat by the door, looking at Larry.
   “How is she?” Larry asked George.
   “The same,” Richardson said.
   “Will she live through the night?”
   “I can’t say, Larry.”
   The woman on the bed was a skeleton covered with thinly stretched, ash-gray skin. She seemed without sex. Most of her hair was gone; her breasts were gone; her mouth hung unhinged and her breath rasped through it harshly. To Larry, she looked like pictures he had seen of the Yucatán mummies—not decayed but shriveled; cured; dry; ageless.
   Yes, that’s what she was now, not a mother but a mummy. There was only that harsh sigh of her respiration, like a light breeze through hay-stubble. How could she still be alive? Larry wondered… and what God would put her through it? To what purpose? It had to be a joke, a big cosmic horselaugh. George said he had heard of similar cases, but never of one so extreme, and he himself had never expected to see one. She was somehow… eating herself. Her body had kept running long after it should have succumbed to malnutrition. She was breaking down parts of herself for nourishment that had never been meant to be broken down. Lucy, who had lifted her onto the bed, had told him in a low, marveling voice that she seemed to weigh no more than a child’s box kite, a thing only waiting for a puff of wind to blow it away forever.
   And now Lucy spoke from her corner by the door, startling all of them: “She’s got something to say.”
   Laurie said uncertainly, “She’s in deep coma, Lucy… the chances that she can ever regain consciousness…”
   “She came back to tell us something. And God won’t let her go until she does.”
   “But what could it be, Lucy?” Dick asked her.
   “I don’t know,” Lucy said, “but I’m afraid to hear it. I know that. The dying ain’t over. It’s just got started. That’s what I fear.”
   There was a long silence that George Richardson finally broke. “I’ve got to get up to the hospital. Laurie, Dick, I’m going to need both of you.”
   You aren’t going to leave us alone with this mummy, are you? Larry almost asked, and pinched his lips shut to keep it in.
   The three of them went to the door, and Lucy got them their coats. The temperature was barely sixty this night, and riding a cycle in shirtsleeves was uncomfortable.
   “Is there anything we can do for her?” Larry asked George quietly.
   “Lucy knows about the IV drip,” George said. “There’s nothing else. You see…” He trailed off. Of course they all saw. It was on the bed, wasn’t it?
   “Good night, Larry, Lucy,” Dick said.
   They went out. Larry drifted back to the window. Outside, everyone had come to their feet, watching. Was she alive? Dead? Dying? Perhaps healed by the power of God? Had she said anything?
   Lucy slipped an arm around his waist, making him jump a little. “I love you,” she said.
   He groped for her, held her. He put his head down and began to shudder helplessly.
   “I love you,” she said calmly. “It’s all right. Let it come. Let it come out, Larry.”
   He cried. The tears were as hot and hard as bullets. “Lucy—”
   “Shhh.” Her hands on the back of his neck; her soothing hands.
   “Oh Lucy, my God, what is all this? ” he cried out against her neck, and she held him as tight as she could, not knowing, not knowing yet, and Mother Abagail breathed harshly behind them, holding on in the depths of her coma.
   George drove up the street at walking speed, passing the same message over and over again: Yes, still alive. Prognosis is poor. No, she hasn’t said anything and isn’t likely to. You might as well go home. If anything happens, you’ll hear.
   When they reached the corner they accelerated, turning toward the hospital. The exhaust of their bikes crackled and echoed back, hitting buildings and bouncing off them, finally fading away to nothing.
   People did not go home. They remained standing for a while, renewing their conversations, examining each word George had said. Prognosis, now what might that mean? Coma. Brain-death. If her brain was dead, that was it. Might as well expect a can of peas to talk as a person with a dead brain. Well, maybe that would be it if this was a natural situation, but things were hardly natural anymore, were they?
   They sat down again. Darkness came. The glow of Coleman lamps came on in the house where the old woman lay. They would go home later, and lie sleepless.
   Talk turned hesitantly to the dark man. If Mother Abagail died, didn’t that mean he was stronger?
   What do you mean, “not necessarily”?
   Well I hold he’s Satan, pure and simple.
   The Antichrist, that’s what I think. We’re living out the Book of Revelation right in our own time… how can you doubt it? “And the seven vials were opened…” Sure sounds like the superflu to me.
   Ah, balls, people said Hitler was the Antichrist.
   If those dreams come back, I’ll kill myself.
   In mine I was in a subway station and he was the ticket-taker, only I couldn’t see his face. I was scared. I ran into the subway tunnel. Then I could hear him, running after me. And gaining.
   In mine I was going down cellar to get a jar of pickled watermelon slices and I saw someone standing by the furnace… just a shape. And I knew it was him.
   Crickets began to chirrup. Stars spread across the sky. The chill in the air was duly commented on. Drinks were drunk. Pipes and cigarettes glowed in the dark.
   I heard the Power people went right ahead turning things off.
   Good for them. If they don’t get the lights and heat back on pretty quick, we’re going to be in a peck of trouble.
   Low murmur of voices, now faceless in the gloom.
   I guess we’re safe for this winter. Sure enough. No way he can get over the passes. Too full of cars and snow. But in the spring…
   Suppose he’s got a few A-bombs?
   Fuck the A-bomb, what if he’s got a few of those dirty neutron bombs? Or the other six of Sally’s seven vials?
   Or planes?
   What’s to do?
   I don’t know.
   Damn if I know.
   Ain’t got a friggin clue.
   Dig a hole, then jump in and pull it over you.
   And around ten o’clock Stu Redman, Glen Bateman, and Ralph Brentner came among them, talking quietly and giving out fliers, telling them to pass the word on to those not here tonight. Glen was limping slightly because a flying stove dial had clipped a piece of meat out of his right calf. The mimeographed posters said: FREE ZONE MEETING * MUNZINGER AUDITORIUM * SEPTEMBER 4 * 8:00 P.M.
   That seemed to be the signal to leave. People drifted away silently into the dark. Most of them took the fliers, but quite a few were crumpled into balls and thrown away. All of them went home to get what sleep they could.
   Perchance to dream.
   The auditorium was crammed but extremely quiet when Stu convened the meeting the following night. Sitting behind him were Larry, Ralph, and Glen. Fran had tried to get up, but her back was still much too painful. Unmindful of the grisly irony, Ralph had patched her through to the meeting by walkie-talkie.
   “There’s a few things that need talking about,” Stu said with quiet and studied understatement. His voice, although only slightly amplified, carried well in the silent hall. “I guess there’s nobody here who doesn’t know about the explosion that killed Nick and Sue and the others, and nobody who doesn’t know that Mother Abagail has come back. We need to talk about those things, but we wanted you to have some good news first. Want you to listen to Brad Kitchner for that. Brad?”
   Brad walked toward the podium, not nearly as nervous as he had been the night before last, and was greeted by listless applause. When he got there he turned to face them, gripped the lectern in both hands, and said simply: “We’re going to switch on tomorrow.”
   This time the applause was much louder. Brad held up his hands, but the applause rode over him in a wave. It held for thirty seconds or more. Later Stu told Frannie that if it hadn’t been for the events of the last two days, Brad probably would have been dragged down from the podium and carried around the auditorium on the shoulders of the crowd like a halfback who has scored the winning touchdown of the championship game in the last thirty seconds. It had gotten so close to the end of the summer that, in a way, that was just what he was.
   But at last the applause subsided.
   “We’re going to switch on at noon, and I’d like to have every one of you at home and ready. Ready for what? Four things. Listen up now, this is important. First, turn off every light and electrical appliance in your own house that you’re not using. Second, do the same for the unoccupied houses around yours. Third, if you smell gas, track down the smell and shut off whatever is on. Fourth, if you hear a fire siren, go to the source of the sound… but go safely and sanely. Let’s not have any necks broken in motorcycle accidents. Now—are there any questions?”
   There were several, all of them reconfirming Brad’s original points. He answered each one patiently, the only sign of nervousness the way he bent his little black notebook ceaselessly back and forth in his hands.
   When the questions had slowed to a trickle, Brad said: “I want to thank the folks who busted their humps getting us going again. And I want to remind the Power Committee that it isn’t disbanded. There are going to be lines down, power outages, oil supplies to track down in Denver and haul up here. I hope you’ll all stick with it. Mr. Glen Bateman says we may have ten thousand people here by the time the snow flies, and a lot more next spring. There’s power stations in Longmont and Denver that are going to have to come on line before next year’s done with—”
   “Not if that hardcase gets his way!” someone shouted out hoarsely in the back of the hall.
   There was a moment of dead silence. Brad stood with his hands clutching the lectern in a deathgrip, his face pasty white. He’s not going to be able to finish, Stu thought, and then Brad did go on, his voice amazingly even:
   “My business is power, whoever said that. But I think we’ll be here long after that other guy’s dead and gone. If I didn’t think that, I’d be wrapping motors over on his side. Who gives a shit for him?”
   Brad stepped away front the podium and someone else bellowed, “You’re goddam right!”
   This time the applause was heavy and hard, nearly savage, but there was a note to it Stu didn’t like. He bad to pound with his gavel a long time to get the meeting back under control.
   “The next thing on the agenda—”
   “Fuck your agenda!” a young woman yelled stridently. “Let’s talk about the dark man! Let’s talk about Flagg! It’s long overdue, I’d say!”
   Roars of approval. Shouts of “out of order!” Disapproving babble at the young woman’s choice of words. Rumble of side-chatter.
   Stu whacked at the block on the podium so hard that the mallet-head flew off his gavel. “This is a meeting here!” he shouted. “You’re going to get a chance to talk about whatever you want to talk about, but while I’m chairing this meeting, I want… to have… some ORDER!” He bellowed the last word so loudly that feedback cut through the auditorium like a boomerang, and they quieted at last.
   “Now,” Stu said, his voice purposely low and calm, “the next thing is to report to you on what happened up at Ralph’s on the night of September second, and I guess that falls to me, since I’m our elected law enforcement officer.”
   He had quiet again, but like the applause that had greeted Brad’s closing remarks, this wasn’t a quiet Stu liked. They were leaning forward, intent, their expressions greedy. It made him feel disquieted and bewildered, as if the Free Zone had changed radically over the last forty-eight hours and he didn’t know what it was anymore. It made him feel the way he’d felt when he had been trying to find his way out of the Stovington Plague Center—a fly caught and struggling in an invisible spider’s web. There were so many faces he didn’t recognize out there, so many strangers…
   But there was no time to think about it now.
   He described the events leading up to the explosion briefly, omitting Fran’s last-minute premonition; with the mood they were in, they didn’t need that.
   “Yesterday morning Brad and Ralph and I went up and poked through the ruins for three hours or more. We found what seemed to be a dynamite bomb wired up to a walkie-talkie. It appears that this bomb was planted in the living room closet. Bill Scanlon and Ted Frampton found another walkie-talkie up in Sunrise Amphitheater, and we assume the bomb was set off from there. It—”
   “Assume, my ass!” Ted Frampton shouted from the third row. “It was that bastard Lauder and his little whore!”
   An uneasy murmur ran through the room.
   These are the good guys? They don’t give a shit about Nick and Sue and Chad and the rest. They’re like a lynch-mob, and all they care about is catching Harold and Nadine and hanging them… like a charm against the dark man.
   He happened to catch Glen’s eye; Glen offered him a very small, very cynical shrug.
   “If one more person yells out from the floor without bein recognized, I’m gonna declare this meeting closed and you can talk to each other,” Stu said. “This is no bull session. If we don’t keep to the rules, where are we?” Ted Frampton was staring up at him angrily, and Stu stared back. After a few moments, Ted dropped his eyes.
   “We suspect Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross. We have some good reasons, some pretty convincing circumstantial evidence. But there’s no real hard evidence against them yet, and I hope you’ll keep that in mind.”
   A sullen eddy of conversation rippled and disappeared.
   “I only said that to say this,” Stu continued. “If they happen to wander back into the Zone, I want them brought to me. I’ll lock them up and Al Bundell will see to it that they’re tried… and a trial means they get to tell their side, if they got one. We’re… we’re supposed to be the good guys here. I guess we know where the bad guys are. And being the good guys means we have to be civilized about this.”
   He looked out at them hopefully and saw only puzzled resentment. Stuart Redman had seen two of his best friends blown to hell, those eyes said, and here he was, taking up for the ones who did it.
   “For what it’s worth to you, I think they’re the ones,” he said. “But it’s got to be done right. And I’m here to tell you that it will be.”
   Eyes boring into him. Over a thousand pairs, and he could feel the thought behind each one: What’s this shit you’re talking, anyway? They’re gone. Gone west. You act like they were on a two-day bird-watching trip.
   He poured a glass of water and drank some, hoping to get rid of the dryness in his throat. The taste of it, boiled and flat, made him grimace. “Anyway, that’s where we stand on that,” he said lamely. “What’s next, I guess, is filling the committee back up to strength. We’re not goin to do that tonight, but you ought to be thinkin about who you want—” A hand shot up on the floor and Stu pointed. “Go ahead. Just identify yourself so everybody’ll know who you are.”
   “I’m Sheldon Jones,” a big man in a wool-plaid shirt said. “Why don’t we just go ahead and get two new ones tonight? I nom’nate Ted Frampton over there.”
   “Hey, I second that!” Bill Scanlon yelled. “Beautiful!”
   Ted Frampton clasped his hands and shook them over his head to scattered applause, and Stu felt that despairing, disoriented feeling sweep over him again. They were supposed to replace Nick Andros with Ted Frampton? It was like one of those sick jokes. Ted had tried the Power Committee and had found it too much like work. He had drifted over to the Burial Committee and that had seemed to suit him better, although Chad had mentioned to Stu that Ted was one of those fellows who seemed able to stretch a coffee break into a lunch hour and a lunch hour into a half-day vacation. He had been quick to join yesterday’s hunt for Harold and Nadine, probably because it offered a change. He and Bill Scanlon had stumbled on the walkie-talkie up at Sunrise through sheer luck (and to give Ted his due, he had admitted that), but since the find he had acquired a swagger that Stu didn’t like at all.
   Now Stu caught Glen’s eyes again, and could almost read Glen’s thought in the cynical look there, the slight tuck in the corner of Glen’s mouth: Maybe we could use Harold to stack this one, too.
   A word that Nixon had used a lot suddenly floated into Stu’s mind, and as he grasped it, he suddenly understood the source of his despair and feeling of disorientation. The word was “mandate.” Their mandate had disappeared. It had gone up two nights ago in a flash and a roar.
   He said, “You may know who you want, Sheldon, but I imagine some of the other folks would like to have time to think it over. Let’s call the question. Those of you who want to elect two new reps tonight say aye.”
   Quite a few ayes were shouted out.
   “Those of you who’d like a week or so to think it over, say nay.”
   The nays were louder, but not by a whole lot. A great many people had abstained altogether, as if the topic had no interest for them.
   “Okay,” Stu said. “We’ll plan to meet here in Munzinger Auditorium a week from today, September eleventh, to nominate and vote on candidates for the two empty slots on the committee.”
   Pretty crappy epitaph, Nick. I’m sorry.
   “Dr. Richardson is here to talk to you about Mother Abagail and about those folks that were injured in the explosion. Doc?”
   Richardson got a solid blast of applause as he stepped forward, polishing his eyeglasses. He told them that there were nine dead as a result of the explosion, three people still in critical condition, two in serious condition, eight in satisfactory condition.
   “Considering the force of the blast, I think that fortune was with us. Now, concerning Mother Abagail.”
   They leaned forward.
   “I think a very short statement and a brief bit of elaboration should suffice. The statement is this: I can do nothing for her.”
   A mutter ran through the crowd and stilled. Stu saw unhappiness but no real surprise.
   “I am told by members of the Zone who were here before she left that the lady claimed one hundred and eight years. I can’t vouch for that, but I can say she is the oldest human being I myself have ever seen and treated. I’m told she has been gone for two weeks, and my estimation—no, my guess —is that her diet during that period contained no prepared foods at all. She seems to have lived on roots, herbs, grass, and other things of a similar nature.” He paused. “She bas had one small bowel movement since she returned. It contained a number of small sticks and twigs.”
   “My God,” someone muttered, and it was impossible to tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman.
   “One arm is covered with poison ivy. Her legs are covered with ulcerations which would be running if her condition were not so—”
   “Hey, can’t you stop it?” Jack Jackson hollered, standing up. His face was white, furious, miserable. “Don’t you have any damn decency?”
   “Decency is not my concern, Jack. I’m only reporting her condition as it is. She’s comatose, malnourished, and most of all, she’s very, very old. I think she’s going to die. If she was anyone else, I would state that as a certainty. But… like all of you, I dreamed of her. Her and one other.”
   The low mutter again, like a passing breeze, and Stu felt the hackles on the nape of his neck first stir and then come to attention.
   “To me, dreams of such opposing configurations seem mystical,” George said. “The fact that we all shared them seems to indicate a telepathic ability at the very least. But I pass on parapsychology and theology just as I pass on decency, and for the same reason: neither of them is my field. If the woman is from God, He may choose to heal her. I cannot. I will tell you that the fact that she is still alive at all seems a miracle of sorts to me. That is my statement. Are there any questions?”
   There weren’t. They looked at him, stunned, some of them openly weeping.
   “Thank you,” George said, and returned to his seat in a dead sea of silence.
   “All right,” Stu whispered to Glen. “You’re on.”
   Glen approached the podium without introduction and gripped it familiarly. “We’ve discussed everything but the dark man,” he said.
   That mutter again. Several men and women instinctively made the sign of the cross. An elderly woman on the lefthand aisle placed her hands rapidly across her eyes, mouth, and ears in an eerie imitation of Nick Andros before refolding them over the bulky black purse in her lap.
   “We’ve discussed him to some degree in closed committee meetings,” Glen went on, his tone calm and conversational, “and the question came up in private as to whether or not we should bring the question up in public. The point was made that no one in the Zone really seemed to want to talk about it, not after the funhouse dreams we all had on the way here. That perhaps a period of recuperation was needed. Now, I think, is the time to bring the subject up. To drag him out into the light, as it were. In police work, they have a handy gadget called an Ident-i-Kit, which a police-artist uses to create the face of a criminal from various witnesses’ recollections of him. In our case we have no face, but we do have a series of recollections that form at least an outline of our Antagonist. I’ve talked to quite a few people about this and I would like to present you with my own Ident-i-Kit sketch.

 “This man’s name seems to be Randall Flagg, although some people have associated the names Richard Frye, Robert Freemont, and Richard Freemantle with him. The initials R.F. may have some significance, but if so, none of us on the Free Zone Committee know what it is. His presence—at least in dreams—produces feelings of dread, disquiet, terror, horror. In case after case, the physical feeling associated with him is one of coldness.”
   Heads were nodding, and that excited hum of conversation broke out again. Stu thought they sounded like boys who had just discovered sex, were comparing notes, and were excited to find that all reports put the receptacle in approximately the same place. He covered a slight grin with his hand, and reminded himself to save that one for Fran later on.
   “This Flagg is in the West,” Glen continued. “Equal numbers of people have ‘seen’ him in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland. Some people—Mother Abagail was among them—claim that Flagg is crucifying people who step out of line. All of them seem to believe that there is a confrontation shaping up between this man and ourselves, and that Flagg will stick at nothing to bring us down. And sticking at nothing includes quite a lot. Armored force. Nuclear weapons. Perhaps… plague.”
   “I’d like to catch hold of that dirty bastard!” Rich Moffat called shrilly. “I’d give him a dose of the everfucking plague!”
   There was a tension-relieving burst of laughter, and Rich got a hand. Glen grinned easily. He had given Rich his cue and his line half an hour before the meeting, and Rich had delivered admirably. Old baldy had been right as rain about one thing, Stu was discovering: a background in sociology often came in handy at large meetings.
   “All right, I’ve outlined what I know about him,” he went on. “My last contribution before throwing the meeting open to discussion is this: I think Stu is right in telling you that we have to deal with Harold and Nadine in a civilized way if they’re caught, but like him, I think that is unlikely. Also like him, I believe they did what they did on this man Flagg’s orders.”
   His words rang out strongly in the hall.
   “This man has got to be dealt with. George Richardson told you mysticism isn’t his field of study. It isn’t mine, either. But I tell you this: I think that dying old woman somehow represents the forces of good as much as Flagg represents the forces of evil. I think that whatever power controls her used her to bring us together. I don’t think that power intends to forsake us now. Maybe we need to talk it over and let some air into those nightmares. Maybe we need to begin deciding what we’re going to do about him. But he can’t just walk into this Zone next spring and take over, not if you people are standing watch. Now I’ll turn the meeting back to Stu, who’ll chair the discussion.”
   His last sentence was lost in a crash of applause, and Glen went back to his seat feeling pleased. He had stirred them with a big stick… or was the phrase played them like a violin? It didn’t really matter. They were more mad than scared, they were ready for a challenge (although they might not be so eager next April, after they’d had a long winter to cool off in)… and most of all, they were ready to talk.
   And talk they did, for the next three hours. A few people left as midnight came and went, but not many. As Larry had suspected, no good hard advice came out of it. There were wild suggestions: a bomber and/or a nuclear stockpile of their own, a summit meeting, a trained hit squad. There were few practical ideas.
   For the final hour, person after person stood up and recited his or her dream, to the seemingly endless fascination of the others. Stu was once again reminded of the endless bull sessions about sex he had participated in (mostly as a listener) during his teenage years.
   Glen was both amazed and heartened by their growing willingness to talk, and by the charged atmosphere of excitement that had taken over the dull blankness with which they had begun the meeting. A large catharsis, long overdue, was going on, and he was also reminded of sex-talk, but in a different way. They talk like people, he thought, who have kept the huddled-up secrets of their guilts and inadequacies to themselves for a long time, only to discover that these things, when verbalized, were only life-sized after all. When the inner terror sowed in sleep was finally harvested in this marathon public discussion, the terror became more manageable… perhaps even conquerable.
   The meeting broke up at one-thirty in the morning, and Glen left it with Stu, feeling good for the first time since Nick’s death. He left feeling they had gone the first hard steps out of themselves and toward whatever battleground there would be.
   He felt hope.
   The power went on at noon on September 5, as Brad had promised.
   The air raid siren atop of the County Courthouse went on with a huge, braying whoop, scaring many people into the streets, where they looked wildly up into the blameless blue sky for a glimpse of the dark man’s air force. Some ran for their cellars, where they stayed until Brad found a fused switch and turned the siren off. Then they came up, shamefaced.
   There was an electrical fire on Willow Street, and a group of a dozen volunteer firepeople promptly rushed over and put it out. A manhole cover exploded into the air at the Broadway-and-Walnut intersection, went nearly fifty feet, and came down on the roof of the Oz Toyshop like a great rusty tiddledywink.
   There was a single fatality on what the Zone came to call Power Day. For some unknown reason, an auto-body shop on outer Pearl Street exploded. Rich Moffat was sitting in a doorway across the street with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his newsboy’s pouch, and a flying panel of corrugated steel siding struck him and killed him instantly. He would break no more plate-glass windows.
   Stu was with Fran when the fluorescents buzzed into life in the ceiling of her hospital room. He watched them flicker, flicker, flicker, and finally catch with the old familiar light. He was unable to look away until they had been glowing solidly for nearly three minutes. When he looked at Frannie again, her eyes were shiny with tears.
   “Fran? What’s wrong? Is it the pain?”
   “It’s Nick,” she said. “It’s so wrong that Nick isn’t alive to see this. Hold me, Stu. I want to pray for him if I can. I want to try.”
   He held her, but didn’t know if she prayed or not. He suddenly found himself missing Nick very much, and hating Harold Lauder more than he ever had before. Fran was right. Harold had not just killed Nick and Sue; he had stolen their light.
   “Shh,” he said. “Frannie, shh.”
   But she cried for a long time. When the tears were finally gone, he used the button to raise her bed and turned on the night table lamp so she could see to read.
   Stu was being shaken awake, and it took him a long time to come all the way around. His mind ran over a slow and seemingly endless list of people who might be trying to rob his sleep. It was his mother, telling him it was time to get up and light the stoves and get ready for school. It was Manuel, the bouncer in that sleazy little Nuevo Laredo whorehouse, telling him his twenty dollars was used up and it would be another twenty if he wanted to stay all night. It was a nurse in a white all-over suit who wanted to take his blood pressure and a throat culture. It was Frannie.
   It was Randall Flagg.
   The last thought brought him up like a dash of cold water in the face. It was none of those people. It was Glen Bateman, with Kojak at his knee.
   “You’re a hard man to wake up, East Texas,” Glen said. “Like a stone post.” He was only a vague shape in nearly total darkness.
   “Well, you could have turned on the damn light to start with.”
   “You know, I clean forgot all about that.”
   Stu switched on the lamp, squinted against the sudden bright light, and peered owlishly at the wind-up alarm clock. It was quarter to three in the morning.
   “What are you doing here, Glen? I was sleepin, in case you didn’t happen to notice.”
   He got his first good look at Glen as he put the clock down. He looked pale, scared… and old. The lines were drawn deeply into his face and he looked haggard.
   “What is it?”
   “Mother Abagail,” Glen said quietly.
   “Dead?”
   “God help me, I almost wish she were. She’s awake. She wants us.”
   “The two of us?”
   “The five of us. She—” His voice roughened, went hoarse. “She knew Nick and Susan were dead, and she knew Fran was in the hospital. I don’t know how, but she did.”
   “And she wants the committee?”
   “What’s left of it. She’s dying and she says she has to tell us something. And I don’t know if I want to hear it.”
   Outside the night was cold—not just chilly but cold. The jacket Stu had pulled from the closet felt good, and he zipped it all the way to the neck. A frosty moon hung overhead, making him think of Tom, who had instructions to come back to them and report when the moon was full. This moon was just a trifle past the first quarter. God knew where that moon was looking down on Tom, on Dayna Jurgens, on Judge Farris. God knew it was looking down on strange doings here.
   “I got Ralph up first,” Glen said. “Told him to go over to the hospital and get Fran.”
   “If the doctor wanted her up and around, he would have sent her home,” Stu said angrily.
   “This is a special case, Stu.”
   “For someone who doesn’t want to hear what that old woman has to say, you seem to be in an all-fired hurry to get to her.”
   “I’m afraid not to,” Glen said.
   The jeep drew up in front of Larry’s house at ten minutes past three. The place was blazing with light—not gaslamps now, but good electric lights. Every second streetlamp was on, too, not just here but all over town, and Stu had stared at them all the way over in Glen’s jeep, fascinated. The last of the summer bugs, sluggish with the cold, were beating lackadaisically against the sodium globes.
   They got out of the jeep just as headlights swung around the corner. It was Ralph’s clattering old truck, and it pulled up nose to nose with the jeep. Ralph got out, and Stu went quickly around to the passenger side, where Frannie sat with her back resting against a plaid sofa cushion.
   “Hey, babe,” he said softly.
   She took his hand. Her face was a pale disk in the darkness.
   “Bad pain?” Stu asked.
   “Not so bad. I took some Advil. Just don’t ask me to do the hustle.”
   He helped her out of the truck and Ralph took her other arm. They both saw her wince as she stepped away from the cab.
   “Want me to carry you?”
   “I’ll be fine. Just keep your arm around me, huh?”
   “Sure will.”
   “And walk slow. Us grammies can’t go very fast.”
   They crossed behind Ralph’s truck, more shuffling than walking. When they reached the sidewalk, Stu saw Glen and Larry standing in the doorway, watching them. Against the light they looked like figures cut from black construction paper.
   “What is it, do you think?” Frannie murmured.
   Stu shook his head. “I don’t know.”
   They got up the walk, Frannie very obviously in pain now, and Ralph helped Stu get her in. Larry, like Glen, looked pale and worried. He was wearing faded jeans, a shirt that was untucked and buttoned wrong at the bottom, and expensive mocs on bare feet.
   “I’m sorry like hell to have to get you out,” he said. “I was in with her, dozing off and on. We’ve been keeping watch. You understand?”
   “Yes. I understand,” Frannie said. For some reason the phrase keeping watch made her think of her mother’s parlor… and in a kinder, more forgiving light than she had ever thought of it before.
   “Lucy had been in bed about an hour. I snapped out of my doze, and—Fran, can I help you?”
   Fran shook her head and smiled with an effort. “No, I’m fine. Go on.”
   “—and she was looking at me. She can’t talk above a whisper, but she’s perfectly understandable.” Larry swallowed. All five of them were now standing in the hallway. “She told me the Lord was going to take her home at the sunrise. But that she had to talk to those of us God hadn’t taken first. I asked her what she meant and she said God had taken Nick and Susan. She knew.” He let out a ragged breath and ran his hands through his long hair.
   Lucy appeared at the end of the hall. “I made coffee. It’s here when you want it.”
   “Thank you, love,” Larry said.
   Lucy looked uncertain. “Should I come in with you folks? Or is it private, like the committee?”
   Larry looked at Stu, who said quietly, “Come on along. I got an idea that stuff don’t cut ice anymore.”
   They went up the hall to the bedroom, moving slowly to accommodate Fran.
   “She’ll tell us,” Ralph said suddenly. “Mother will tell us. No sense fretting.”
   They went in together, and Mother Abagail’s bright, dying gaze fell upon them.
   Fran knew about the old woman’s physical condition, but it was still a nasty shock. There was nothing left of her but a pemmican-tough membrane of skin and tendon binding her bones. There was not even a smell of putrescence and oncoming death in the room; instead there was a dry attic smell… no, a parlor smell. Half the length of the IV needle hung out of her flesh, simply because there was nowhere for it to go.
   Yet the eyes had not changed. They were warm and kind and human. That was a relief, but Fran still felt a kind of terror… not strictly fear, but perhaps something more sanctified—awe. Was it awe? An impending feeling. Not doom, but as though some dreadful responsibility was poised above their heads like a stone.
   Man proposes—God disposes.
   “Little girl, sit down,” Mother Abagail whispered. “You’re in pain.”
   Larry led her to an armchair and Fran sat down with a thin, whistling sigh of relief, although she knew even sitting would pain her after a while.
   Mother Abagail was still watching her with those bright eyes.
   “You’re quick with child,” she whispered.
   “Yes… how…”
   “Shhhhh…”
   Silence fell in the room, deep silence. Fascinated, hypnotized, Fran looked at the dying old woman who had been in their dreams before she had been in their lives.
   “Look out the window, little girl.”
   Fran turned, her face to the window, where Larry had stood and looked out at the gathered people two days before. She saw not pressing darkness but a quiet light. It was not a reflection of the room; it was morning light. She was looking at the faint, slightly distorted reflection of a bright nursery with ruffled check curtains. There was a crib—but it was empty. There was a playpen—empty. A mobile of bright plastic butterflies—moved only by the wind. Dread clapped its cold hands around her heart. The others saw it on her face but did not understand it; they saw nothing through the window but a section of lawn lit by a streetlight.
   “Where’s the baby?” Fran asked hoarsely.
   “Stuart is not the baby’s father, little girl. But his life is in Stuart’s hands, and in God’s. This chap will have four fathers. If God lets him draw breath at all.”
   “If he draws—”
   “God has hidden that from my eyes,” she whispered.
   The empty nursery was gone. Fran saw only darkness. And now dread closed its hands into fists, her heart beating between them.
   Mother Abagail whispered: “The Imp has called his bride, and he means to put her with child. Will he let your child live?”
   “Stop it,” Frannie moaned. She put her hands over her face.
   Silence, deep silence like snow in the room. Glen Bateman’s face was an old dull searchlight. Lucy’s right hand worked slowly up and down the neck of her bathrobe. Ralph had his hat in his hands, picking absently at the feather in the band. Stu looked at Frannie, but could not go to her. Not now. He thought fleetingly of the woman at the meeting, the one who had put her hands rapidly over her eyes, ears, and mouth at the mention of the dark man’s name.
   “Mother, father, wife, husband,” Mother Abagail whispered. “Set against them, the Prince of High Places, the lord of dark mornings. I sinned in pride. So have you all, all sinned in pride. Ain’t you heard it said, put not your faith in the lords and princes of this world?”
   They watched her.
   “Electric lights ain’t the answer, Stu Redman. CB radio ain’t it, either, Ralph Brentner. Sociology won’t end it, Glen Bateman. And you doin penance for a life that’s long since a closed book won’t stop it from coming, Larry Underwood. And your boy-child won’t stop it either, Fran Goldsmith. The bad moon has risen. You propose nothing in the sight of God.”
   She looked at each of them in turn. “God will dispose as He sees fit. You are not the potter but the potter’s clay. Mayhap the man in the West is the wheel on which you will be broken. I am not allowed to know.”
   A tear, amazing in that dying desert, stole from her left eye and rolled down her cheek.
   “Mother, what should we do?” Ralph asked.
   “Draw near, all of you. My time is short. I’m going home to glory, and there’s never been no human more ready than I am now. Get close to me.”
   Ralph sat on the edge of the bed. Larry and Glen stood at the foot of it. Fran got up with a grimace, and Stu dragged her chair up beside Ralph. She sat down again and took his hand with her own cold fingers.
   “God didn’t bring you folks together to make a committee or a community,” she said. “He brought you here only to send you further, on a quest. He means for you to try and destroy this Dark Prince, this Man of Far Leagues.”
   Ticking silence. In it, Mother Abagail sighed.
   “I thought it was Nick to lead you, but He’s taken Nick—although not all of Nick is gone yet, it seems to me. No, not all. But you must lead, Stuart. And if it’s His will to take Stu, then you must lead, Larry. And if He takes you, it falls to Ralph.”
   “Looks like I’m riding drag,” Glen began. “What—”
   “Lead?” Fran asked coldly. “Lead? Lead where—?”
   “Why, west, little girl,” Mother Abagail said. “West. You’re not to go. Only these four.”
   “No! ” She was on her feet in spite of the pain. “What are you saying? That the four of them are just supposed to deliver themselves into his hands? The heart and soul and guts of the Free Zone?” Her eyes blazed. “So he can hang them on crosses and just walk in here next summer and kill everyone? I won’t see my man sacrificed to your killer God. Fuck Him.”
   “Frannie! ” Stu gasped.
   “Killer God! Killer God! ” she spat. “Millions—maybe billions —dead in the plague. Millions more afterward. We don’t even know if the children will live. Isn’t He done yet? Does it just have to go on and on until the earth belongs to the rats and the roaches? He’s no God. He’s a daemon, and you’re His witch.”
   “Stop it, Frannie.”
   “No problem. I’m done. I want to leave. Take me home, Stu. Not to the hospital but back home.”
   “We’ll listen to what she has to say.”
   “Fine. You listen for both of us. I’m leaving.”
   “Little girl.”
   “Don’t call me that! ”
   Her hand shot out and closed around Frannie’s wrist. Fran went rigid. Her eyes closed. Her head snapped back.
   “Don’t D-D-Don’t… OH MY GOD—STU—”
   “Here! Here!” Stu roared. “What are you doing to her?”
   Mother Abagail didn’t answer. The moment spun out, seemed to stretch into a pocket of eternity, and then the old woman let go.
   Slowly, dazedly, Fran began to massage the wrist Mother Abagail had taken, although there was no red ring or dent in the flesh to show that pressure had been applied. Frannie’s eyes suddenly widened.
   “Hon?” Stu asked anxiously.
   “Gone,” Fran muttered.
   “What… what’s she talking about?” Stu looked around at the others in shaken appeal. Glen only shook his head. His face was white and strained but not disbelieving.
   “The pain… the whiplash. The pain in my back. It’s gone.” She looked at Stu, dazed. “It’s all gone. Look.” She bent and touched her toes lightly: once, then twice. Then she bent a third time and placed her palms flat on the floor without unlocking her knees.
   She stood up again and met Mother Abagail’s eyes.
   “Is this a bribe from your God? Because if it is, He can take His cure back. I’d rather have the pain if Stu comes with it.”
   “God don’t lay on no bribes, child,” Mother Abagail whispered. “He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will.”
   “Stu isn’t going west,” Fran said, but now she seemed bewildered as well as frightened.
   “Sit down,” Stu said. “We’ll listen to what she has to say.”
   Fran sat down, shocked, unbelieving, lost at sea. Her hands kept stealing around to the small of her back.
   “You are to go west,” Mother Abagail whispered. “You are to take no food, no water. You are to go this very day, and in the clothes you stand up in. You are to go on foot. I am in the way of knowing that one of you will not reach your destination, but I don’t know which will be the one to fall. I am in the way of knowing that the rest will be taken before this man Flagg, who is not a man at all but a supernatural being. I don’t know if it’s God’s will for you to defeat him. I don’t know if it’s God’s will for you to ever see Boulder again. Those things are not for me to see. But he is in Las Vegas, and you must go there, and it is there that you will make your stand. You will go, and you will not falter, because you will have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God’s help you will stand.”
   She nodded.
   “That’s all. I’ve said m’piece.”
   “No,” Fran whispered. “It can’t be.”
   “Mother,” Glen said in a kind of croak. He cleared his throat. “Mother, we’re not ‘in the way of understanding,’ if you see what I mean. We’re… we’re not blessed with your closeness to whatever is controlling this. It just isn’t our way. Fran’s right. If we go over there we’ll be slaughtered, probably by the first pickets we come to.”
   “Have you no eyes? You’ve just seen Fran healed of her affliction by God, through me. Do you think His plan for you is to let you be shot and killed by the Dark Prince’s least minion?”
   “But, Mother—”
   “No.” She raised her hand and waved his words away. “It’s not my place to argue with you, or convince, but only to put you in the way of understanding God’s plan for you. Listen, Glen.”
   And suddenly, from Mother Abagail’s mouth, the voice of Glen Bateman issued, frightening them all and making Fran shrink back against Stu with a little cry.
   “Mother Abagail calls him the devil’s pawn,” this strong, masculine voice said, originating somehow in the old woman’s wasted chest and emerging from her toothless mouth. “Maybe he’s just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. Maybe he’s something more, something darker. I only know that he is. And I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put a stop to him. I think only white magic will do that.”
   Glen’s mouth hung open.
   “Is that a true thing, or are those the words of a liar?” Mother Abagail said.
   “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but they’re my words,” Glen said shakily.
   “Trust. All of you, trust. Larry… Ralph… Stu… Glen… Frannie. You most patic’ly, Frannie. Trust… and obey the word of God.”
   “Do we have a choice?” Larry asked bitterly.
   She turned to look at him, surprised. “A choice? There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But… this is what God wants of you.”
   That silence again, like deep snow. At last, Ralph broke it. “Says in the Bible that David did the job on Goliath,” he said. “I’ll be going along if you say it’s right, Mother.”
   She took his hand.
   “Me,” Larry said. “Me too. Okay.” He sighed and put his hands on his forehead as if it ached. Glen opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, there was a heavy, tired sigh from the corner and a thud.
   It was Lucy, whom they had all forgotten. She had fainted.
   Dawn touched the edge of the world.
   They sat around Larry’s kitchen table, drinking coffee. It was ten to five when Fran came up the hall and stood in the doorway. Her face was puffy from crying, but there was no limp as she walked. She was, indeed, cured. “She’s going, I think,” Fran said.
   They went in, Larry with his arm around Lucy.
   Mother Abagail’s breathing had taken on a heavy, hollow rattle that was horribly reminiscent of the superflu. They gathered around the bed without speaking, deep in awe and afraid. Ralph was sure that something would happen at the end that would cause the wonder of God to stand before all of them, naked and revealed. She would be gone in a flash of light, taken. Or they would see her spirit, transfigured in radiance, leaving by the window and going up into the sky.
   But in the end, she simply died.
   There was a single final breath, the last of millions. It was drawn in, held, and finally let out. Her chest just didn’t rise again.
   “She’s done,” Stu muttered.
   “God have mercy on her soul,” Ralph said, no longer afraid. He crossed her hands on her thin bosom, and his tears fell on them.
   “I’ll go,” Glen said suddenly. “She was right. White magic. That’s all that’s left.”
   “Stu,” Frannie whispered. “Please, Stu, say no.”
   They looked at him—all of them.
   Now you must lead, Stuart.
   He thought of Arnette, of the old car carrying Charles D. Campion and his load of death, crashing into Bill Hapscomb’s pumps like some wicked Pandora. He thought of Denninger and Deitz, and how he had begun to associate them in his mind with the smiling doctors who had lied and lied and lied to him and to his wife about her condition—and maybe they had lied to themselves, as well. Most of all, he thought of Frannie. And of Mother Abagail saying, This is what God wants of you.
   “Frannie,” he said. “I have to go.”
   “And die.” She looked at him bitterly, almost hatefully, and then to Lucy, as if for support. But Lucy was stunned and far-off, no help.
   “If we don’t go, we’ll die,” Stu said, feeling his way along the words. “She was right. If we wait, then spring comes. Then what? How are we going to stop him? We don’t know. We don’t have a clue. We never did. We had our heads in the sand, too. We can’t stop him except like Glen says. White magic. Or the power of God.”
   She began to weep bitterly.
   “Frannie, don’t do that,” he said, and tried to take her hand.
   “Don’t touch me!” she cried at him. “You’re a dead man, you’re a corpse, so don’t touch me! ”
   They stood around the bed in tableau as the sun came up.
   Stu and Frannie went to Flagstaff Mountain around eleven o’clock. They parked halfway up, and Stu brought the hamper while Fran carried the tablecloth and a bottle of Blue Nun. The picnic had been her idea, but a strange and awkward silence held between them.
   “Help me spread it,” she said. “And watch out for those spiny things.”
   They were in a small, slanting meadow a thousand feet below Sunrise Amphitheater. Boulder was spread out below them in a blue haze. Today it was wholly summer again. The sun shone down with power and authority. Crickets buzzed in the grass. A grasshopper leaped up and Stu caught it with a quick lunge of his right hand. He could feel it inside his fingers, tickling and frightened.
   “Spit n I’ll let you go,” he said, the old childhood formula, and looked up to see Fran smiling sadly at him. With quick, ladylike precision, she turned her head and spat. It hurt his heart, seeing her do that. “Fran—”
   “No, Stu. Don’t talk about it. Not now.”
   They spread the white lawn tablecloth, which Fran had glommed from the Hotel Boulderado, and moving with quick economy (it made him feel strange to watch her supple grace as she bent and moved, as if there had never been a whiplash injury and sprained back at all), she set out their early lunch: a cucumber and lettuce salad dressed with vinegar; cold ham sandwiches; the wine; an apple pie for dessert.
   “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat,” she said. He sat down beside her and took a sandwich and some salad. He wasn’t hungry. He hurt inside. But he ate.
   When they had both finished a token sandwich and most of the salad—the fresh greens had been delicious—and a small sliver of apple pie each, she said: “When are you going?”
   “Noon,” he said. He lit a cigarette, cupping the flame in his hands.
   “How long will it take you to get there?”
   He shrugged. “Walking? I don’t know. Glen’s not young. Neither is Ralph, for that matter. If we can make thirty miles a day, we could do it by the first of October, I guess.”
   “And if there’s early snow in the mountains? Or in Utah?”
   He shrugged, looking at her steadily.
   “More wine?” she asked.
   “No. It gives me acid indigestion. It always did.”
   Fran poured herself another glass and drank it off.
   “Was she God’s voice, Stu? Was she?”
   “Frannie, I just don’t know.”
   “We dreamed of her, and she was. This whole thing is part and parcel of some stupid game, do you know that, Stuart? Have you ever read the Book of Job?”
   “I was never much on the Bible, I guess.”
   “My mom was. She thought it was very important that my brother Fred and I have a certain amount of religious background. She never said why. All the good it ever did me, so far as I know, was that I was always able to answer the Bible questions on ‘Jeopardy.’ Do you remember ‘Jeopardy,’ Stu?”
   Smiling a little, he said: “And now here’s your host, Alex Trebeck.”
   “That’s the one. It was backward. They gave you the answer; you supplied the question. When it came to the Bible, I knew all the questions. Job was a bet between God and the Devil. The Devil said, ‘Sure he worships You. He’s got it soft. But if You piss in his face long enough, he’ll renounce You.’ So God took the wager. And God won.” She smiled dully. “God always wins. God’s a Boston Celtics fan, I bet.”
   “Maybe it is a bet,” Stu said, “but it’s their lives, those folks down there. And the guy inside you. What did she call him? The chap?”
   “She wouldn’t even promise about him,” Fran said. “If she could have done that… just that… it would have been at least a little bit easier to let you go.”
   Stu could think of nothing to say.
   “Well, it’s getting on toward noon now,” Fran said. “Help me pack up, Stuart.”
   The half-eaten lunch went back into the hamper with the tablecloth and the rest of the wine. Stu looked at the spot and thought of how there were only a few crumbs to show where their picnic had been… and the birds would get those soon enough. When he glanced up, Frannie was looking at him and crying. He went to her.
   “It’s all right. It’s being pregnant. I’m always running at the eyes. I can’t seem to help it.”
   “It’s okay.”
   “Stu, make love to me.”
   “Here? Now?”
   She nodded, then smiled a little. “It will be all right. If we watch out for the spiny things.”
   They spread the tablecloth again.
   At the foot of Baseline Road she made him stop at what had been Ralph and Nick’s house until four days ago. The entire rear of the house was blown away. The back yard was littered with debris. A shattered digital clock radio sat atop the shredded back hedge. Nearby was the sofa under which Frannie had been pinned. There was a patch of dried blood on the back steps. She looked at this fixedly.
   “Is that Nick’s blood?” she asked him. “Could it be?”
   “Frannie, what’s the point?” Stu asked uneasily.
   “Is it?”
   “Jesus, I don’t know. It could be, I suppose.”
   “Put your hand on it, Stu.”
   “Frannie, have you gone nuts?”
   The frown-line creased her brow, the I-want line that he had first noticed back in New Hampshire.
   “Put your hand on it!”
   Reluctantly, Stu put his hand on the stain. He didn’t know if it was Nick’s blood or not (and believed, in fact, that it probably wasn’t), but the gesture gave him a ghastly, crawly feeling.
   “Now swear you’ll come back.”
   The step seemed rather too warm here, and he wanted to take his hand away.
   “Fran, how can I—”
   “God can’t run all of it!” she hissed at him. “Not all of it. Swear, Stu, swear it!”
   “Frannie, I swear to try.”
   “I guess that will have to be good enough, won’t it?”
   “We have to get down to Larry’s.”
   “I know.” But she held him more tightly still. “Say you love me.”
   “You know I do.”
   “I know, but say it. I want to hear it.”
   He took her by the shoulder. “Fran, I love you.”
   “Thank you,” she said, and put her cheek against his shoulder. “Now I think I can say goodbye. I think I can let you go.”
   They held each other in the shattered back yard.

Chapter 60
   She and Lucy watched the undramatic start of their quest from the steps of Larry’s house. The four of them stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, no packs, no bedrolls, no special equipment… as per instructions. They had all changed into heavy walking shoes.
   “ ‘Bye, Larry,” Lucy said. Her face was shiny pale.
   “Remember, Stuart,” Fran said. “Remember what you swore.”
   “Yes. I’ll remember.”
   Glen put his fingers into his mouth and whistled. Kojak, who had been investigating a sewer grating, came running.
   “Let’s go then,” Larry said. His face was as pale as Lucy’s, his eyes unusually bright, almost glittery. “Before I lose my nerve.”
   Stu blew a kiss through his closed fist, something he could not remember doing since the days when his mother saw him off on the school bus. Fran waved back. The tears were coming again, hot and burning, but she did not let them fall. They began. They simply walked away. They were halfway down the block now, and somewhere a bird sang. The midday sun was warm and undramatic. They reached the end of the block. Stu turned and waved again. Larry also waved. Fran and Lucy waved back. They crossed the street. They were gone. Lucy looked almost sick with loss and fear.
   “Dear God,” she said.
   “Let’s go in,” Fran said. “I want tea.”
   They went inside. Fran put the teapot on. They began to wait.
   The four of them moved slowly southwest during the afternoon, not talking much. They were headed toward Golden, where they would camp this first night. They passed the burial sites, three of them now, and around four o’clock, when their shadows had begun to trail out long behind them and the heat had begun to sneak out of the day, they came to the township marker spotted beside the road at the southern edge of Boulder. For a moment Stu had a feeling that all of them were on the verge of turning together and going back. Ahead of them was darkness and death. Behind them was a little warmth, a little love.
   Glen took a bandanna out of his back pocket, whipped it into a blue paisley rope, and tied it around his head. “Chapter Forty-Three, The Bald-Headed Sociologist Dons His Sweat-Band,” he said hollowly. Kojak was up ahead, over the line into Golden, nosing his way happily through a splash of wildflowers.
   “Ah, man,” Larry said, and his voice was almost a sob. “I feel like this is the end of everything.”
   “Yeah,” Ralph said. “It do feel like that.”
   “Anybody want to take five?” Glen asked without much hope.
   “Come on,” Stu said, smiling a little. “Do you dogfaces want to live forever?”
   They went on, leaving Boulder behind them. By nine that night they were camped in Golden, half a mile from where Route 6 begins its twisting, turning course along Clear Creek and into the stone heart of the Rockies.
   None of them slept well that first night. Already they felt far from home, and under the shadow of death.
BOOK III
THE STAND
SEPTEMBER 7, 1990 – JANUARY 10, 1991

         
        This land is your land
        this land is my land,
        from California
        to the New York island,
        from the redwood forests,
        to the Gulf stream waters,
        this land was made for you and me.
         

        Woody Guthrie



       " Hey Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check? "

        Carley Yates



         
        When the night has come
        When the night has come
        And the land is dark
        And the moon is the only light we’ll see
        I won’t be afraid
        Just as long as you stand by me.
         

        Ben E. King

Book III

Chapter 61
   

The dark man had set his guardposts all along the eastern border of Oregon. The largest was at Ontario, where I-80 crosses over from Idaho; there were six men there, quartered in the trailer of a large Peterbilt truck. They had been there for more than a week, playing poker the whole time with twenties and fifties as useless as Monopoly money. One man was almost sixty thousand dollars ahead and another—a man whose working wage in the pre-plague world had been about ten thousand dollars a year—was over forty grand in the bucket.
   It had rained almost the whole week, and tempers in the trailer were getting short. They had come out of Portland, and they wanted to get back there. There were women in Portland. Hung from a spike was a powerful two-way radio, broadcasting nothing but static. They were waiting for the radio to broadcast two simple words: Come home. That would mean that the man they were looking for had been captured somewhere else.
   The man they were looking for was approximately seventy years old, heavyset, balding. He wore glasses and he was driving a white-over-blue four-wheel drive, either a jeep or an International-Harvester. He was to be killed when he was finally spotted.
   They were edgy and bored—the novelty of high-stakes poker for real money had worn off two days ago, even for the dullest of them—but not bored enough to just take off for Portland on their own. They had received their orders from the Walkin Dude himself, and even after rain-induced cabin fever had set in, their terror of him remained. If they screwed the job up and he found out, God help them all.
   So they sat and played cards and watched by turns at the sight-slit which had been carved through the side of the trailer’s steel wall. I-80 was deserted in the dull, constant rain. But if the Scout happened along, it would be seen… and stopped.
   “He’s a spy from the other side,” the Walkin Dude had told them, that horrible grin wreathing his chops. Why it was so horrible none of them could have said, but when it turned your way you felt as if your blood had turned to hot tomato soup in your veins. “He’s a spy and we could welcome him in with open arms, show him everything, and send him back with no harm done. But I want him. I want them both. And we’re going to send their heads back over the mountains before the snow flies. Let them chew on that all winter.” And he bellowed hot laughter at the people he had gathered together in one of the conference rooms at the Portland Civic Center. They smiled back, but their smiles were cold and uneasy. Aloud they might congratulate each other on having been singled out for such a responsibility, but inside, they wished that those happy, awful, weasel-like eyes had fixed on anyone but them.
   There was another large guardpost far south of Ontario, at Sheaville. Here there were four men in a small house just off I-95, which meanders down toward the Alvord Desert, with its weird rock formations and its dark, sullen streams of water.
   The other posts were manned by pairs of men, and there were an even dozen of them, ranging from the tiny town of Flora, just off Route 3 and less than sixty miles from the Washington border, all th
e way down to McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada border.
   An old man in a blue-and-white four-wheel drive. The instructions to all the sentinels were the same: Kill him, but don’t hit him in the head. There was to be no blood or bruise above the Adam’s apple.
   “I don’t want to send back damaged goods,” Randy Flagg told them, and clacked and roared his horrible laughter.
   The northern border between Oregon and Idaho is marked by the Snake River. If you were to follow the Snake north from Ontario, where the six men sat in their Peterbilt playing spit-in-the-ocean for worthless money, you would eventually come to within spitting distance of Copperfield. The Snake takes a kink here that geologists call an oxbow, and near Copperfield the Snake was dammed by the Oxbow Dam. And on that seventh day of September, as Stu Redman and his party trudged up Colorado Highway 6 over a thousand miles to the east and south, Bobby Terry was sitting inside the Copperfield Five-and-Dime, a stack of comic books by his side, wondering what sort of shape the Oxbow Dam was in, and if the sluice gates had been left open or shut. Outside, Oregon Highway 86 ran past the dime store.
   He and his partner, Dave Roberts (now asleep in the apartment overhead), had discussed the dam at great length. It had been raining for a week. The Snake was high. Suppose that old Oxbow Dam decided to let go? Bad news. A rushing wall of water would sweep down on Copperfield and ole Bobby Terry and ole Dave Roberts might be washed all the way down to the Pacific Ocean. They had discussed going over to the dam to look for cracks, but finally just hadn’t dared. Flagg’s orders had been specific: Stay under cover.
   Dave had pointed out that Flagg might be anywhere. He was a great traveler, and stories had already sprung up about the way he could suddenly appear in a small, out-of-the-way burg where there were only a dozen people repairing power lines or collecting weapons from some army depot. He materialized, like a ghost. Only this was a grinning black ghost in dusty boots with rundown heels. Sometimes he was alone, and sometimes Lloyd Henreid was with him, behind the wheel of a great big Daimler automobile, black as a hearse and just as long. Sometimes he was walking. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next moment he was. He could be in L.A. one day (or so the talk went) and show up in Boise a day later… on foot.
   But as Dave had also pointed out, not even Flagg could be in six different places at the same time. One of them could just scoot over to that damn dam, have a look, and scoot back. The odds in their favor were a thousand to one.
   Good, you do it, Bobby Terry told him. You have my permission. But Dave had declined the invitation with an uneasy grin. Because Flagg had a way of knowing things, even if he didn’t turn up on the dime. There were some who said he had an unnatural power over the predators of the animal kingdom. A woman named Rose Kingman claimed to have seen him snap his fingers at a number of crows sitting on a telephone wire, and the crows fluttered down onto his shoulders, this Rose Kingman said, and she further testified that they had croaked “Flagg… Flagg… Flagg…” over and over.
   That was just ridiculous, and he knew it. Morons might believe it, but Bobby Terry’s mother Delores had never raised any morons. He knew the way stories got around, growing between the mouth that spoke and the ear that listened. And how happy the dark man would be to encourage stories like that.
   But the stories still gave him an atavistic little shiver, as though at the core of each there was a nugget of truth. Some said he could call the wolves, or send his spirit into the body of a cat. There was a man in Portland who said he carried a weasel or a fisher or something less nameable than either in that ratty old Boy Scout pack he wore when he was walking. Stupid stuff, all of it. But… just suppose he could talk to the animals, like a satanic Dr. Doolittle. And suppose he or Dave walked out to look at that damn dam in a direct contradiction of his orders, and was seen.
   The penalty for disobedience was crucifixion.
   Bobby Terry guessed that old dam wouldn’t break, anyway.
   He shot a Kent out of the pack on the table and ht up, grimacing at the hot, dry taste. In another six months, none of the damn cigarettes would be smokable. Probably just as well. Fucking things were death, anyway.
   He sighed and took another comic book off the stack. Some ridiculous fucking thing called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Ninja Turtles were supposed to be “heroes on a half-shell.” He threw Raphael, Donatello, and their numbfuck buddies across the store and the comic book they inhabited fluttered down in a tent shape on top of a cash register. It was things like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he thought, that made you believe the world was maybe just as well off destroyed.
   He pic*ed up the next one, a Batman —there was a hero you could at least sort of believe in—and was just turning to the first page when he saw the blue Scout go by out front, heading west. Its big tires splashed up muddy sheets of rainwater.
   Bobby Terry stared with his mouth ajar at the place where it had passed. He couldn’t believe that the vehicle they were all looking for had just passed his post. To tell the truth, way down deep he had suspected this whole thing was nothing but a make-work shit detail.
   He rushed to the front door and jerked it open. He ran out on the sidewalk, still holding the Batman comic book in one hand. Maybe the thing had been nothing but a hallucination. Thinking about Flagg could get anyone hallucinating.
   But it wasn’t. He caught a glimpse of the Scout’s roof as it went down over the next hill and out of town. Then he was running back through the deserted five-and-dime, bawling for Dave at the top of his lungs.
   The Judge held on to the steering wheel grimly, trying to pretend there was no such thing as arthritis, and if there was, he didn’t have it, and if he did have it, it never bothered him in damp weather. He didn’t try to take it any further because the rain was a fact, a pure-d fact, as his father would have said, and there was no hope but Mount Hope.
   He wasn’t getting too far with the rest of the fantasy, either.
   He had been running through rain for the last three days. It sometimes backed off to a drizzle, but mostly it had been nothing more or less than a good old solid downpour. And that was also a pure-d fact. The roads were on the point of washing out in some places, and by next spring a lot of them were going to be flat impassable. He had thanked God for the Scout many times on this little expedition.
   The first three days, struggling along I-80, had convinced him that he wasn’t going to raise the West Coast before the year 2000 if he didn’t get off onto the secondary roads. The Interstate had been eerily deserted for long stretches, and in places he had been able to weave in and out of stalled traffic in second gear, but too many times he had been forced to hook the Scout’s winch on to some car’s back bumper and yank it off the road to make himself a hole he could crawl through.
   By Rawlins, he’d had enough. He turned northwest on I-287, skirted the Great Divide Basin, and had camped two days later in Wyoming’s northwest corner, east of Yellowstone. Up here, the roads were almost completely empty. Crossing Wyoming and eastern Idaho had been a frightening, dreamlike experience. He would not have thought that the feeling of death could have set so heavily on such an empty land, nor on his own soul. But it was there—a malign stillness under all that big western sky, where once the deer and the Winnebagos had roamed. It was there in the telephone poles that had fallen over and not been repaired; it was there in the cold, waiting stillness of the small towns he drove his Scout through: Lamont, Muddy Gap, Jeffrey City, Lander, Crowheart.
   His loneliness grew with his realization of the emptiness, with his internalization of the death feeling. He grew more and more certain that he was never going to see the Boulder Free Zone again, or the people who lived there—Frannie, Lucy, the Lauder boy, Nick Andros. He began to think he knew how Cain must have felt when God exiled him to the land of Nod.
   Only that land had been to the east of Eden.
   The Judge was now in the West.
   He felt it most strongly crossing the border between Wyoming and Idaho. He came into Idaho through the Targhee Pass, and stopped by the roadside for a light lunch. There was no sound but the sullen boil of high water in a nearby creek, and an odd grinding sound that reminded him of dirt in a doorhinge. Overhead the blue sky was beginning to silt up with mackerel scales. Wet weather coming, and arthritis coming with it. His arthritis had been very quiet so far, in spite of the exercise and the long hours of driving and…
   …and what was that grinding sound?
   When he had finished his lunch, he got his Garand out of the Scout and went down to the picnic area by the stream—it would have been a pleasant place to eat in kindlier weather. There was a small grove of trees, several tables spotted among them. And hanging from one of the trees, his shoes almost touching the ground, was a hanged man, his head grotesquely cocked, his flesh nearly pic*ed clean by the birds. The grinding, creaking sound was the rope slipping back and forth on the branch over which it had been looped. It was almost frayed through.
   That was how he had come to know he was in the West.
   That afternoon, around four o’clock, the first hesitant splashes of rain had struck the Scout’s windshield. It had been raining ever since.
   He reached Butte City two days later, and the pain in his fingers and knees had gotten so bad that he had stopped for a full day, holed up in a motel room. Stretched out on the motel bed in the great silence, hot towels wrapped around his hands and knees, reading Lapham’s Law and the Classes of Society, Judge Farris looked like a weird cross between the Ancient Mariner and a Valley Forge survivor.
   Stocking up well on aspirin and brandy, he pushed on, patiently searching out secondary roads, putting the Scout in four-wheel drive and churning his muddy way around wrecks rather than using the winch when he could, so as to spare himself the necessary flexing and bending that came with attaching it. It was not always possible. Approaching the Salmon River Mountains on September 5, two days ago, he had been forced to hook on to a large ConTel telephone truck and haul it a mile and a half in reverse before the shoulder fell away on one side and he was able to dump the bastardly thing into a river for which he had no name.
   On the night of September 4, one day before the ConTel truck and three days before Bobby Terry spotted him passing through Copperfield, he had camped in New Meadows, and a rather unsettling thing happened. He had pulled in at the Ranchhand Motel, got a key to one of the units in the office, and had found a bonus—a battery-operated heater, which he set up by the foot of his bed. Dusk had found him really warm and comfortable for the first time in a week. The heater put out a strong, mellow glow. He was stripped to his underwear shorts, propped up on the pillows, and reading about a case where an uneducated black woman from Brixton, Mississippi, had been sentenced to ten years on a common shoplifting offense. The assistant D.A. who had tried the case and three of the jurors had been black, and Lapham seemed to be pointing out that—
   Tap, tap, tap: at the window.
   The Judge’s old heart staggered in his chest. Lapham went flying. He grabbed for the Garand leaning against the chair and turned to the window, ready for anything. His cover story went flying through his mind like jackstraws blown in the wind. This was it, they’d want to know who he was, where he’d come from—
   It was a crow.
   The Judge relaxed, a little at a time, and managed a small, shaken smile.
   Just a crow.
   It sat on the outer sill in the rain, its glossy feathers pasted together in a comic way, its little eyes looking through the dripping pane at one very old lawyer and the world’s oldest amateur spy, lying on a motel bed in western Idaho, wearing nothing but boxer shorts with LOS ANGELES LAKERS printed all over them in purple and gold, a heavy lawbook across his big belly. The crow seemed almost to grin at the sight. The Judge relaxed all the way and grinned back. That’s right, the joke’s on me. But after two weeks of pushing on alone through this empty country, he felt he had a right to be a little jumpy.
   Tap, tap, tap.
   The crow, tapping the pane of glass with his beak. Tapping as he had tapped before.
   The Judge’s smile faltered a bit. There was something in the way the crow was looking at him that he didn’t quite like. It still seemed almost to grin, but he could have sworn it was a contemptuous grin, a kind of sneer.
   Tap, tap, tap.
   Like the raven that had flown in to roost on the bust of Pallas. When will I find out the things they need to know, back in the Free Zone that seems so far away? Nevermore. Will I get any idea what chinks there might be in the dark man’s armor? Nevermore.
   Will I get back safe?
   Nevermore.
   Tap, tap, tap.
   The crow, looking in at him, seeming to grin.
   And it came to him with a dreamy, testicle-shriveling certainty that this was the dark man, his soul, his ka somehow projected into this rain-drenched, grinning crow that was looking in at him, checking up on him.
   He stared at it, fascinated.
   The crow’s eyes seemed to grow larger. They were rimmed with red, he noticed, a darkly rich ruby color. Rainwater dripped and ran, dripped and ran. The crow leaned forward and, very deliberately, tapped on the glass.
   The Judge thought: It thinks it’s hypnotizing me. And maybe it is, a little. But maybe I’m too old for such things. And suppose… it’s silly, of course, but suppose it is him. And suppose I could bring that rifle up in one quick snap motion? It’s been four years since I shot any skeet, but I was club champion back in ‘76 and again in ‘79, and still pretty good in ‘86. Not great, no ribbon that year so I gave it up, my pride was in better shape than my eyesight by then, but I was still good enough to place fifth in a field of twenty-two. And that window’s a lot closer than skeet-shooting distance. If it was him, could I kill him? Trap his ka—if there is such a thing—inside that dying crow body? Would it be so unfitting if an old geezer could end the whole thing by the undramatic murder of a blackbird in western Idaho?
   The crow grinned at him. He was now quite sure it was grinning.
   With a sudden lunge the Judge sat up, bringing the Garand up to his shoulder in a quick, sure motion—he did it better than he ever would have dreamed. A kind of terror seemed to seize the crow. Its rain-drenched wings fluttered, spraying drops of water. Its eyes seemed to widen in fear. The Judge heard it utter a strangled caw! and he felt a moment’s triumphant certainty: It was the black man, and he had misjudged the Judge, and the price for it would be his miserable life—
   “EAT THIS! ” the Judge thundered, and squeezed the trigger.
   But the trigger would not depress, because he had left the safety on. A moment later the window was empty except for the rain.
   The Judge lowered the Garand to his lap, feeling dull and stupid. He told himself it was just a crow after all, a moment’s diversion to liven up the evening. And if he had blown out the window and let the rain in, he would have had to go to the botheration of changing rooms. Lucky, really.
   But he slept poorly that night, and several times he started awake and stared toward the window, convinced that he heard a ghostly tapping sound there. And if the crow happened to land there again, it wouldn’t get away. He left the safety catch off the rifle.
   But the crow didn’t come back.
   The next morning he had driven west again, his arthritis no worse but certainly no better, and at just past eleven he had stopped at a small café for lunch. And as he finished his sandwich and thermos of coffee, he had seen a large black crow flutter down and land on the telephone wire half a block up the street. The Judge watched it, fascinated, the red thermos cup stopped dead halfway between the table and his mouth. It wasn’t the same crow, of course not. There must be millions of crows by now, all of them plump and sassy. It was a crow’s world now. But all the same, he felt that it was the same crow, and he felt a presentiment of doom, a creeping resignation that it was all over.
   He was no longer hungry.
   He pushed on. Some days later, at quarter past twelve in the afternoon, now in Oregon and moving west on Highway 86, he drove through the town of Copperfield, not even glancing toward the five-and-dime where Bobby Terry watched him go by, slackjawed with amazement. The Garand was beside him on the seat, the safety still off, a box of ammo beside it. The Judge had decided to shoot any crow he might see.
   Just on general principles.
   “Faster! Can’t you move this fucking thing any faster?”
   “You get off my ass, Bobby Terry. Just because you were asleep at the switch is no reason to get on my butt.”
   Dave Roberts was behind the wheel of the Willys International that had been parked nose-out in the alley beside the five-and-dime. By the time Bobby Terry had gotten Dave awake and up and dressed, the old geezer in the Scout had gotten a ten-minute start on them. The rain was coming down hard, and visibility was poor. Bobby Terry was holding a Winchester across his lap. There was a .45 Colt tucked in his belt.
   Dave, who was wearing cowboy boots, jeans, a yellow foul-weather slicker, and nothing else, glanced over at him.
   “You keep squeezing the trigger of that rifle and you’re going to blow a hole right through your door, Bobby Terry.”
   “You just catch him,” Bobby Terry said. He muttered to himself. “The guts. Got to shoot him in the guts. Dasn’t mark the head. Right.”
   “Stop talkin to yourself. People who talk to theirselves play with theirselves. That’s what I think.”
   “Where is he?” Bobby Terry asked.
   “We’ll get him. Unless you dreamed the whole thing. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if you did, brother.”
   “I didn’t. It was that Scout. But what if he turns off?”
   “Turns off where?” Dave asked. “There’s nothing but farm roads all the way to the Interstate. He couldn’t get fifty feet up a one of them without going into the mud up to his fenders, four-wheel drive and all. Relax, Bobby Terry.”
   Bobby Terry said miserably, “I can’t. I keep wonderin how it’d feel to get hung up to dry on some telephone pole out in the desert.”
   “Can that!… And lookit there! See im? We’re sniffin up his ass now, by God!”
   Ahead of them was a months-old head-on collision between a Chevy and a big heavy Buick. They lay in the rain, blocking the road from one side to the other like the rusted bones of unburied mastodons. To the right, deep fresh tire tracks were printed into the shoulder.
   “That’s him,” Dave said. “Those tracks ain’t five minutes old.”
   He swung the Willys out and around the smashup, and they bounced wildly along the shoulder. Dave swung back onto the road where the Judge had before him, and they both saw the muddy herringbone pattern of the Scout’s tires on the asphalt. At the top of the next hill, they saw the Scout just disappearing over a knoll some two miles distant.
   “Howdy-doody!” Dave Roberts cried. “Go for broke!”
   He floored the accelerator and the Willys crept up to sixty. The windshield was a silvery blur of rain that the wipers could not hope to keep up with. At the top of the knoll they saw the Scout again, closer. Dave yanked out his headlight switch and began to work the dimmer switch with his foot. After a few moments, the Scout’s taillights flashed on.
   “All right,” Dave said. “We act friendly. Get him to step out. Don’t you go off half-cocked, Bobby Terry. If we do this right, we’re gonna have a couple of suites at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Fuck it up and we’re gonna get our assholes cored out. So don’t you fuck up. Get him to step out.”

“Oh my God, why couldn’t he have come through Robinette?” Bobby Terry whined. His hands were locked on the Winchester.
   Dave whacked at one of them. “You don’t carry that rifle out, either.”
   “But—”
   “Shut up! Get a smile on, goddam you!”
   Bobby Terry began to grin. It was like watching a mechanical funhouse clown grin.
   “You nogood,” Dave snarled. “I’ll do it. Stay in the goddam car.”
   They had pulled even with the Scout, which was idling with two wheels on the pavement and two on the soft shoulder. Smiling, Dave got out. His hands were in the pockets of his yellow slicker. In the lefthand pocket was a .38 Police Special.
   The Judge climbed carefully down from the Scout. He was also wearing a yellow rain slicker. He walked carefully, bearing himself the way a man might bear a fragile vase. The arthritis was loose in him like a pack of tigers. He carried the Garand rifle in his left hand.
   “Hey, you won’t shoot me with that, will you?” the man from the Willys said with a friendly grin.
   “I guess not,” the Judge said. They spoke over the steady hiss of the rain. “You must have been back in Copperfield.”
   “So we were. I’m Dave Roberts.” He stuck out his right hand.
   “Farris is my name,” said the Judge, and put out his own right hand. He glanced up toward the passenger window of the Willys and saw Bobby Terry leaning out, holding his .45 in both hands. Rain was dripping off the barrel. His face, dead pale, was still frozen in that maniacal funhouse grin.
   “Oh bastard,” the Judge murmured, and pulled his hand out of Roberts’s rain-slippery grip just as Roberts fired through the pocket of his slicker. The bullet ploughed through the Judge’s midsection just below the stomach, flattening, spinning, mushrooming, coming out to the right of his spine, leaving an exit hole the size of a tea saucer. The Garand fell from his hand onto the road and he was driven back into the Scout’s open driver’s side door.
   None of them noticed the crow that had fluttered down to a telephone wire on the far side of the road.
   Dave Roberts took a step forward to finish the job. As he did, Bobby Terry fired from the passenger window of the Willys. His bullet took Roberts in the throat, tearing most of it away. A fury of blood cascaded down the front of Roberts’s slicker and mixed with the rain. He turned toward Bobby Terry, his jaw working in soundless, dying amazement, his eyes bulging. He took two shuffling steps forward, and then the amazement went out of his face. Everything went out of it. He fell dead. Rain plinked and drummed on the back of his slicker.
   “Oh shit, lookit this! ” Bobby Terry cried in utter dismay.
   The Judge thought: My arthritis is gone. If I could live, I could stun the medical profession. The cure for arthritis is a bullet in the guts. Oh dear God, they were laying for me. Did Flagg tell them? He must have, Jesus help whoever else the committee sent over here…
   The Garand was lying on the road. He bent for it, feeling his guts trying to run right out of his body. Strange feeling. Not very pleasant. Never mind. He got hold of the gun. Was the safety off? Yes. He began to bring it up. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.
   Bobby Terry ripped his stunned gaze away from Dave at last, just in time to see the Judge preparing to shoot him. The Judge was sitting on the road. His slicker was red with blood from chest to hem. He had settled the barrel of the Garand on his knee.
   Bobby snapped a shot and missed. The Garand went off with a giant thunderclap and jagged glass sprayed Bobby Terry’s face. He screamed, sure he was dead. Then he saw that the left half of the windshield was gone and understood that he was still in the running.
   The Judge was ponderously correcting his aim, swiveling the Garand perhaps two degrees on his knee. Bobby Terry, his nerves entirely shot now, fired three times in rapid succession. The first bullet spanged a hole through the side of the Scout’s cab. The second struck the Judge above the right eye. A .45 is a large gun, and at close range it does large, unpleasant things. This bullet took off most of the top of the Judge’s skull and hurled it back into the Scout. His head tilted back radically, and Bobby Terry’s third bullet struck the Judge a quarter of an inch below his lower lip, exploding his teeth into his mouth, where he aspirated them with his final breath. His chin and jawbone disintegrated. His finger squeezed the Garand’s trigger in a dying convulsion, but the bullet went wild into the white, rainy sky.
   Silence descended.
   Rain drummed on the roofs of the Scout and the Willys. On the slickers of the two dead men. It was the only sound until the crow took off from the telephone wire with a raucous caw. That startled Bobby Terry out of his daze. He got slowly down from the passenger seat, still clutching the smoking .45.
   “I did it,” he said confidentially to the rain. “Killed his ass. You better believe it. Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Fuckin-A right. Ole Bobby Terry just killed him as dead as you’d want.”
   But with dawning horror, he realized that it wasn’t the Judge’s ass he’d killed after all.
   The Judge had died leaning back into the Scout. Now Bobby Terry grabbed the lapels of his slicker and yanked him forward; staring at what remained of the Judge’s features. There was really nothing left but his nose. To tell the truth, that wasn’t in such hot shape, either.
   It could have been anyone.
   And in a dream of terror, Bobby Terry again heard Flagg saying: I want to send him back undamaged.
   Holy God, this could be anyone. It was as if he had set out to deliberately do just the opposite of what the Walkin Dude had ordered. Two direct hits in the face. Even the teeth were gone.
   Rain, drumming, drumming.
   It was over here. That was all. He didn’t dare go east, and he didn’t dare stay in the West. He would either wind up riding a telephone pole bareback or… or something worse.
   Were there worse things?
   With that grinning freak in charge, Bobby Terry had no doubt there were. So what was the answer?
   Running his hands through his hair, still looking down at the ruined face of the Judge, he tried to think.
   South. That was the answer. South. No border guards anymore. South of Mexico, and if that wasn’t far enough, get on down to Guatemala, Panama, maybe fucking Brazil. Opt out of the whole mess. No more East, no more West, just Bobby Terry, safe and as far away from the Walkin Dude as his old boogie shoes could carry h—
   A new sound in the rainy afternoon.
   Bobby Terry’s head jerked up.
   The rain, yes, making its steel drum sound on the cabs of the two vehicles, and the grumbling of two idling motors, and—
   A strange clocking sound, like rundown bootheels hammering swiftly along the secondary road macadam.
   “No,” Bobby Terry whispered.
   He began to turn around.
   The clocking sound was speeding up. A fast walk, a trot, a jog, run, sprint, and Bobby Terry got all the way around, too late, he was coming, Flagg was coming like some terrible horror monster out of the scariest picture ever made. The dark man’s cheeks were flushed with jolly color, his eyes were twinkling with happy good fellowship, and a great hungry voracious grin stretched his lips over huge tombstone teeth, shark teeth, and his hands were held out in front of him, and there were shiny black crowfeathers fluttering from his hair.
   No, Bobby Terry tried to say, but nothing came out.
   “HEY, BOBBY TERRY, YOU SCROOOOWED IT UP! ” the dark man bellowed, and fell upon the hapless Bobby Terry.
   There were worse things than crucifixion.
   There were teeth.

Chapter 62

Dayna Jurgens lay naked in the huge double bed, listening to the steady hiss of water coming from the shower, and looked up at her reflection in the big circular ceiling mirror, which was the exact shape and size of the bed it reflected. She thought that the female body always looks its best when it is flat on its back, stretched out, the tummy pulled flat, the breasts naturally upright without the vertical drag of gravity to pull them down. It was nine-thirty in the morning, September 8. The Judge had been dead about eighteen hours, Bobby Terry considerably less—unfortunately for him.
   The shower ran on and on.
   There’s a man with a cleanliness compulsion, she thought. I wonder what happened to him that makes him want to shower for half an hour at a stretch?
   Her mind turned back to the Judge. Who would have figured that? In its own way, it was a damned brilliant idea. Who would have suspected an old man? Well, Flagg had, it seemed. Somehow he had known when and approximately where. A picket line had been set up all the way along the Idaho-Oregon border, with orders to kill him.
   But the job had been botched somehow. Since suppertime last night, the upper echelon here in Las Vegas had been walking around with pasty faces and downcast eyes. Whitney Horgan, who was one damned fine cook, had served something that looked like dog food and was too burned to taste like much of anything. The Judge was dead, but something had gone wrong.
   She got up and walked to the window and looked out over the desert. She saw two big Las Vegas High School buses trundling west on US 95 in the hot sunshine, headed out toward the Indian Springs airbase, where, she knew, a daily seminar in the art and craft of jet planes went on. There were over a dozen people in the West who knew how to fly, but by great good luck—for the Free Zone—none of them were checked out for the National Guard jets at Indian Springs.
   But they were learning. Oh my, yes.
   What was most important for her right now about the Judge’s demise was that they had known when they had no business knowing. Was there a spy of their own back in the Free Zone? That was possible, she supposed; spying was a game two could play at. But Sue Stern had told her that the decision to send spies into the West had been strictly a committee thing, and she doubted very much if any of those seven were in the Flagg bag. Mother Abagail would have known if one of the committee had turned rotten, for one thing. Dayna was sure of it.
   That left a very unappetizing alternative. Flagg himself had just known.
   Dayna had been in Las Vegas eight days as of today, and as far as she could tell she was a fully accepted member of the community. She had already accumulated enough information about the operation over here to scare the living Jesus out of everyone back in Boulder. It would only take the news about the jet plane training program to do that. But the thing that frightened her the most personally was the way people turned away from you if you mentioned Flagg’s name, the way they pretended they hadn’t heard. Some of them would cross their fingers, or genuflect, or make the sign of the evil eye behind one cupped hand. He was the great There/Not-There.
   That was by day. By night, if you would just sit quietly by in the Cub Bar of the Grand or the Silver Slipper Room at The Cashbox, you heard stories about him, the beginning of myth. They talked slowly, haltingly, not looking at each other, drinking bottles of beer mostly. If you drank something stronger, you might lose control of your mouth, and that was dangerous. She knew that not all of what they said was the truth, but it was already impossible to separate the gilt embroidery from the whole cloth. She had heard he was a shape-changer, a werewolf, that he had started the plague himself, that he was the Antichrist whose coming was foretold in Revelation. She heard about the crucifixion of Hector Drogan, how he had just known Heck was freebasing… the way he had just known that the Judge was on the way, apparently.
   And he was never referred to as Flagg in these nightly discussions; it was as if they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle. They called him the dark man. The Walkin Dude. The tall man. And Ratty Erwins called him Old Creeping Judas.
   If he had known about the Judge, didn’t it stand to reason that he knew about her?
   The shower turned off.
   Keep it together, sweetie. He encourages the mumbo jumbo. It makes him look taller. It could be that he does have a spy in the Free Zone—it wouldn’t necessarily have to be someone on the committee, just someone who told him Judge Farris wasn’t the defector type.
   “You shouldn’t walk around like that with no clothes on, sweetbuns. You’ll get me horny all over again.”
   She turned toward him, her smile rich and inviting, thinking that she would like to take him downstairs to the kitchen and stuff that thing he was so goddam proud of into Whitney Horgan’s industrial meat-grinder. “Why do you think I was walking around with no clothes on?”
   He looked at his watch. “Well, we got maybe forty minutes.” His penis was already beginning to make twitching movements… like a divining rod, Dayna thought with sour amusement.
   “Well, come on then.” He came toward her and she pointed at his chest. “And take that thing off. It gives me the creeps.”
   Lloyd Henreid looked down at the amulet, dark teardrop marked with a single red flaw, and slipped it off. He put it on the night table and the fine-linked chain made a little hissing sound. “Better?”
   “All kinds of better.”
   She held out her arms. A moment later he was on top of her. A moment after that he was thrusting into her.
   “You like that?” he panted. “You like the way that feels, sweetie?”
   “God, I love it,” she moaned, thinking of the meat-grinder, all white enamel and gleaming steel.
   “What?”
   “I said I love it!” she screamed.
   She faked an orgasm shortly after that, tossing her hips wildly, crying out. He came seconds later (she had shared Lloyd’s bed for four days now, and had his rhythms timed almost perfectly), and as she felt his semen beginning to run down her thigh, she happened to glance over at the night table.
   Black stone.
   Red flaw.
   It seemed to be staring at her.
   She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie.
   It sees me, she thought with hopeless horror in that defenseless moment before rationality reasserted itself. More: it sees THROUGH me.
   Afterward, as she had hoped, Lloyd talked. That was part of his rhythm, too. He would put an arm around her bare shoulders, smoke a cigarette, look up at their reflections in the mirror over the bed, and tell her what was going on.
   “Glad I wasn’t that Bobby Terry,” he said. “No sir, no way. The main man wanted that old fart’s head without so much as a bruise on it. Wanted to send it back over the Rockies. And look what happened. That numbnuts puts two .45 slugs into his face. At close range. I guess he deserved what he got, but I’m glad I wasn’t there.”
   “What happened to him?”
   “Sweetbuns, don’t ask.”
   “How did he know? The big guy?”
   “He was there.”
   She felt a chill.
   “Just happened to be there?”
   “Yeah. He just happens to be anywhere that there’s trouble. Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to LA with…”
   “What did he do?”
   For a long time she didn’t think he was going to answer. Usually she could gently push him in the direction she wanted him to go by asking a series of soft, respectful questions; making him feel as if he was (in the never-to-be-forgotten words of her kid sister) King Shit of Turd Mountain. But this time she had a feeling she had pushed too far until Lloyd said in a funny, squeezed voice:
   “He just looked at him. Eric was laying down all this funky shit about how he wanted to see the Vegas operation run… we should do this, we should do that. Poor old Trash—he ain’t all the way together himself, you know—was just staring at him like he was a TV actor or something. Eric’s pacing back and forth like he’s addressing a jury and like it was already proved he was going to get his own way. And he says—real soft—‘Eric.’ Like that. And Eric looked at him. I didn’t see nothing. But Eric just looked at him for a long time. Maybe five minutes. His eyes just got bigger and bigger… and then he started to drool… and then he started to giggle… and he giggled right along with Eric, and that scared me. When Flagg laughs, you get scared. But Eric just kept right on giggling, and then he said, ‘When you go back, drop him off in the Mojave.’ And that’s what we did. And for all I know, Eric’s wandering around out there right now. He looked at Eric for five minutes and drove him out of his mind.”
   He took a large drag on his cigarette and crushed it out. Then he slung an arm around her. “Why are we talkin about bad shit like that?”
   “I don’t know… how’s it going out at Indian Springs?”
   Lloyd brightened. The Indian Springs project was his baby. “Good. Real good. We’re going to have three guys checked out on the Skyhawk planes by the first of October, maybe sooner. Hank Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he’s a fucking genius. About some things he’s not too bright, but when it comes to weapons, he’s incredible.”
   She had met Trashcan Man twice. Both times she had felt a chill slip over her when his strange, muddy eyes happened to light upon her, and a palpable sense of relief when those eyes passed on. It was obvious that many of the others—Lloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man—saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck charm. One of his arms was a horrid mass of freshly healed burn tissue, and she remembered something peculiar that had happened two nights ago. Hank Rawson had been talking. He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, and finished what he was saying before lighting the cigarette and shaking out the match. Dayna saw the way that Trashcan Man’s eyes homed in on the match flame, the way his breathing seemed to stop. It was as if his whole being had focused on the tiny flame. It was like watching a starving man contemplate a nine-course dinner. Then Hank shook out the match and dropped the blackened stub into an ashtray. The moment had ended.
   “He’s good with weapons?” she asked Lloyd.
   “He’s great with them. The Skyhawks have under-wing missiles, air-to-ground. Shrikes. Weird how they name all that shit, isn’t it? No one could figure out how the goddam things went on the planes. No one could figure out how to arm them or safety-control them. Christ, it took us most of one day to figure out how to get them off the storage racks. So Hank says, ‘We better get Trashy out here when he gets back and see if he can figure it out.’”
   “When he gets back?”
   “Yeah, he’s a funny dude. He’s been in Vegas almost a week now, but he’ll be taking off again pretty quick.”
   “Where does he go?”
   “Into the desert. He takes a Land-Rover and just goes. He’s a strange guy, I tell you. In his way, Trash is almost as strange as the big guy himself. West of here there’s nothing but empty desert and godforsaken waste. I ought to know. I did time way up west in a hellhole called Brownsville Station. I don’t know how he lives out there, but he does. He looks for new toys, and he always comes back with a few. About a week after him and me got back from L.A., he brought back a pile of army machine guns with laser sights—never-miss machine guns, Hank calls them. This time it was Teller mines, contact mines, fragment mines, and a canister of Parathion. He said he found a whole stockpile of Parathion. Also enough defoliant to turn the whole state of Colorado bald as an egg.”
   “Where does he find it?”
   “Everywhere,” Lloyd said simply. “He sniffs it out, sweetbuns. It isn’t really so strange. Most of western Nevada and eastern California was owned by the good old U.S.A. It’s where they tested their toys, all the way up to A-bombs. He’ll be dragging one of those back someday.”
   He laughed. Dayna felt cold, terribly cold.
   “The superflu started somewhere out here. I’d lay money on it. Maybe Trash will find it. I tell you, he just sniffs that stuff out. The big guy says just give him his head and let him run, and so that’s what he does. You know what his favorite toy is right now?”
   “No,” Dayna said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know… but why else had she come over here?
   “Flametracks.”
   “What are flametrucks?”
   “Not trucks, tracks. He’s got five of them out at Indian Springs, lined up like Formula One racecars.” Lloyd laughed. “They used them in the Nam. The grunts called them Zippos. They’re full of napalm. Trash loves em.”
   “Neato,” she muttered.
   “Anyway, when Trash came back this time, we took him out to the Springs. He hummed and muttered around those Shrikes and got them armed and mounted in about six hours. Can you believe that? They train Air Force technicians about ninety years to do stuff like that. But they’re not Trash, you see. He’s a fucking genius.”
   Idiot savant, you mean. I bet I know how he got those burns, too.
   Lloyd looked at his watch and sat up. “Speaking of Indian Springs, I got to get out there. Just got time for another shower. You want to join me?”
   “Not this time.”
   She got dressed after the shower began to run again. So far she had always managed to get dressed and undressed with him out of the room, and that was the way she intended to keep it.
   She strapped the clip to her forearm and slid the switchblade knife into its spring-loaded clasp. A quick twist of her wrist would deliver all ten inches of it into her hand.
   Well, she thought as she slipped into her blouse, a girl has to have some secrets.
   During the afternoons, she was on a streetlamp maintenance crew. What the job amounted to was testing the bulbs with a simple gadget and replacing them if they had burned out, or if they had been broken by vandals when Las Vegas had been in the grip of the superflu. There were four of them on the job, and they had a cherry-picker truck that trundled around from post to post and street to street.
   Late that afternoon, Dayna was up in the cherry-picker, removing the Plexiglas hood from one of the streetlamps and musing on how much she liked the people she was working with, particularly Jenny Engstrom, a tough and beautiful ex-nightclub dancer who was now running the cherry-picker’s controls. She was the type of girl Dayna would have wanted for her best friend, and it confused her that Jenny was over here, on the dark man’s side. It confused her so much that she didn’t dare ask Jenny for an explanation.
   The others were also okay. She thought that Vegas had a rather larger proportion of stupids than the Zone, but none of them wore fangs, and they didn’t turn into bats at moonrise. They were also people who worked much harder than she remembered the people in the Zone working. In the Free Zone you saw people idling in the parks at all hours of the day, and there were people who decided to break for lunch from noon until two. That sort of thing didn’t happen over here. From 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., everybody was working, either at Indian Springs or on the maintenance crews here in town. And school had started again. There were about twenty kids in Vegas, ages ranging from four (that was Daniel McCarthy, the pet of everyone in town, known as Dinny) up to fifteen. They had found two people with teaching certificates, and classes went on five days a week. Lloyd, who had quit school after repeating his junior year for the third time, was very proud of the educational opportunities that were being provided. The pharmacies were open and unguarded. People came and went all the time… but they took away nothing heavier than a bottle of aspirin or Gelusil. There was no drug problem in the West. Anyone who had seen what had happened to Hector Drogan knew what the penalty for a habit was. There were no Rich Moffats, either. Everyone was friendly and straight. And it was wise to drink nothing stronger than bottled beer.
   Germany in 1938, she thought. The Nazis? Oh, they’re charming people. Very athletic. They don’t go to the nightclubs, the nightclubs are for the tourists. What do they do? They make clocks.
   Was it a fair comparison? Dayna wondered uneasily, thinking of Jenny Engstrom, who she liked so much. She didn’t know… but she thought that maybe it was.
   She tested the bulb in the hood of the light standard. It was bad. She removed it, set it carefully between her feet, and got the last fresh one. Good, it was near the end of the day. It was—
   She glanced down and froze.
   People were coming back from the bus stop, headed home from Indian Springs. All of them were glancing up casually, the way a group of people always glance up at someone high in the air. The circus-for-free syndrome.
   That face, looking up at her.
   That wide, smiling, wondering face.
   Dear sweet Jesus in heaven, is that Tom Cullen?
   A dribble of salt-stinging sweat ran into her eye, doubling her vision. When she wiped it away, the face was gone. The people from the bus stop were halfway down the street, swinging their lunch buckets, talking and joking. Dayna gazed at the one she thought might be Tom, but from the rear it was so hard to tell—
   Tom? Would they send Tom?
   Surely not. That was so crazy it was almost—
   Almost sane.
   But she just couldn’t believe it.
   “Hey, Jurgens!” Jenny called up brassily. “Did you fall asleep up there, or are you just playing with yourself?”
   Dayna leaned over the cherry-picker’s low railing and looked down at Jenny’s upturned face. Gave her the finger. Jenny laughed. Dayna went back to her streetlamp bulb, struggling to snap it in, and by the time she had it right, it was time to knock off for the day. On the ride back to the garage, she was quiet and preoccupied… quiet enough for Jenny to comment on it.
   “Just got nothing to say, I guess,” Dayna told her with a half-smile.
   It couldn’t have been Tom.
   Could it?
   “Wake up! Wake up! Goddammit, wake up, you bitch!”
   She was coming out of murky sleep when a foot caught her in the small of the back, knocking her out of the big round bed and onto the floor. She came awake at once, blinking and confused.
   Lloyd was there, looking down at her with cold anger. Whitney Horgan. Ken DeMott. Ace High. Jenny. Only Jenny’s usually open face was also blank and cold.
   “Jen—?”
   No answer. Dayna got up on her knees, dimly aware of her nakedness, more aware of the cold circle of faces looking down at her. The expression on Lloyd’s face was that of a man who has been betrayed and has discovered the betrayal.
   Am I dreaming this?
   “Get the fuck dressed, you lying, spying bitch!”
   Okay, so it was no dream. She felt a sinking terror in her stomach that seemed almost preordained. They had known about the Judge, and now they knew about her. He had told them. She glanced at the clock on the night table. It was quarter of four in the morning. The Hour of the Secret Police, she thought.
   “Where is he?” she asked.
   “Around,” Lloyd said grimly. His face was pale and shiny. His amulet lay in the open V of his shirt. “You’ll wish he wasn’t before long.”
   “Lloyd?”
   “What.”
   “I gave you VD, Lloyd. I hope it rots off.”
   He kicked her just below the breastbone, knocking her on her back.
   “I hope it rots off, Lloyd.”
   “Shut up and get dressed.”
   “Get out of here. I don’t dress in front of any man.”
   Lloyd kicked her again, this time in the bicep of her right arm. The pain was tremendous and her mouth drew down in a quivering bow but she didn’t cry out.
   “You in a little hot water, Lloyd? Sleeping with Mata Hari?” She grinned at him with tears of pain standing in her eyes.
   “Come on, Lloyd,” Whitney Horgan said. He saw murder in Lloyd’s eyes and now stepped forward quickly and put a hand on Lloyd’s arm. “We’ll go in the living room. Jenny can watch her get dressed.”
   “And what if she decides to jump out the window?”
   “She won’t get the chance,” Jenny said. Her broad face was dead blank, and for the first time Dayna noticed she was wearing a pistol on her hip.
   “She can’t anyway,” Ace High said. “The windows up here are just for show, didn’t you know that? Sometimes big losers at the tables get wanting to take a high dive, and that would be bad publicity for the hotel. So they don’t open.” His eyes fell on Dayna, and they held a touch of compassion. “Now you, babe, you’re a real big loser.”
   “Come on, Lloyd,” Whitney said again. “You’re going to do something you’ll be sorry for later—kick her in the head or something—if you don’t get out of here.”
   “Okay.” They went to the door together, and Lloyd looked back over his shoulder. “He’s going to make it bad for you, you bitch.”
   “You were the crappiest lover I ever had, Lloyd,” she said sweetly.
   He tried to lunge back at her, but Whitney and Ken DeMott held him back and drew him through the doorway. The double doors closed with a low snicking sound.
   “Get dressed, Dayna,” Jenny said.
   Dayna stood up, still rubbing the purpling bruise on her arm. “You people like that?” she asked. “Is that where you’re at? People like Lloyd Henreid?”
   “You were the one sleeping with him, not me.” Her face showed an emotion for the first time: angry reproach. “You think it’s nice to come over here and spy on folks? You deserve everything you’re going to get. And, sister, you’re going to get a lot.”
   “I was sleeping with him for a reason.” She drew on her panties. “And I was spying for a reason.”
   “Why don’t you just shut up?”
   Dayna turned and looked at Jenny. “What do you think they’re doing here, girl? Why do you think they’re learning to fly those jets out at Indian Springs? Those Shrike missiles, do you think they’re so Flagg can win his girl a Kewpie doll at the country fair?”
   Jenny pressed her lips tightly together. “That’s none of my business.”
   “Will it be none of your business if they use the jets to fly over the Rockies next spring and the missiles to wipe out everyone living there?”
   “I hope they do. It’s us or you people; that’s what he says. And I believe him.”
   “They believed Hitler, too. But you don’t believe him; you’re just scared gutless of him.”
   “Get dressed, Dayna.”
   Dayna pulled on her slacks, buttoned them, zipped them. Then she put her hand to her mouth. “I… I think I’m going to throw up… God!…” Clutching her long-sleeved blouse in her hand, she turned and ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She made loud retching noises.
   “Open the door, Dayna! Open it or I’ll shoot the lock out of it!”
   “Sick—” She made another loud retching noise. Standing on tiptoe, she felt along the top of the medicine cabinet, thanking God she had left the knife and its spring clip up here, praying for another twenty seconds—
   She had the clip. She strapped it on. Now there were other voices in the bedroom.
   With her left hand she turned on the water in the basin. “Just a minute, I’m sick, dammit!”
   But they weren’t going to give her a minute. Someone dealt the bathroom door a kick and it shuddered in its frame. Dayna clicked the knife home. It lay along her forearm like a deadly arrow. Moving with desperate speed, she yanked the blouse on and buttoned the sleeves. Splashed water on her mouth. Flushed the toilet.
   Another kick dealt to the door. Dayna twisted the knob and they burst in, Lloyd looking wild-eyed, Jenny standing behind Ken DeMott and Ace High, her pistol drawn.
   “I puked,” Dayna said coldly. “Too bad you couldn’t watch it, huh?”
   Lloyd grabbed her by the shoulder and threw her out into the bedroom. “I ought to break your neck, you cunt.”
   “Remember your master’s voice.” She buttoned the front of her blouse, sweeping them with her flashing eyes. “He’s your dog-god, isn’t that right? Kiss his ass and you belong to him.”
   “You better just shut up,” Whitney said gruffly. “You’re only making it worse for yourself.”
   She looked at Jenny, unable to understand how the openly smiling, bawdy day-girl could have changed into this blank-faced night-thing. “Don’t you see that he’s getting ready to start it all over again?” she asked them desperately. “The killing, the shooting… the plague? ”
   “He’s the biggest and the strongest,” Whitney said with curious gentleness. “He’s going to wipe you people off the face of the earth.”
   “No more talk,” Lloyd said. “Let’s go.”
   They moved to take her arms, but she stepped away, holding her arms across her body, and shook her head. “I’ll walk,” she said.
   The casino was deserted except for a number of men with rifles, sitting or standing by the doors. They seemed to find interesting things to look at on the walls, the ceilings, and the bare gaming tables as the elevator doors opened and Lloyd’s party stepped out, herding Dayna along.
   She was taken to the gate at the end of the rank of cashiers’ windows. Lloyd opened it with a small key and they stepped through. She was herded quickly through an area that looked like a bank: there were adding machines, wastebaskets full of paper tapes, jars of rubber bands and paper clips. Computer screens, now gray and blank. Cash drawers ajar. Money had spilled out some of them and lay on the tile floors. Most of the bills were fifties and hundreds.
   At the rear of the cashiers’ area, Whitney opened another door and Dayna was led down a carpeted hallway to an empty receptionist’s office. Tastefully decorated. Free-form white desk for a tasteful secretary who had died, coughing and hacking up great green gobbets of phlegm, some months ago. A picture on the wall that looked like a Klee print. A mellow light-brown shag rug. The antechamber to the seat of power.
   Fear trickled into the hollows of her body like cold water, stiffening her up, making her feel awkward. Lloyd leaned over the desk and flicked the toggle switch there. Dayna saw that he was sweating lightly. “We have her, R.F.”
   She felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her and was helpless to stop it—not that she cared. “R.F.! R.F.! Oh, that’s good! Ready when you are, C.B.!” She went off into a gale of giggles, and suddenly Jenny slapped her.
   “Shut up!” she hissed. “You don’t know what you’re in for.”
   “I know,” Dayna said, looking at her. “You and the rest, you’re the ones who don’t know.”
   A voice came out of the intercom, warm and pleased and cheerful. “Very good, Lloyd, thanks. Send her in, please.”
   “Alone?”
   “Yes indeed.” There was an indulgent chuckle as the intercom cut off. Dayna felt her mouth dry up at the sound of it.
   Lloyd turned around. A lot of sweat now, standing out on his forehead in large drops and running down his thin cheeks like tears. “You heard him. Go on.”
   She folded her arms below her breasts, keeping the knife turned inward. “Suppose I decline.”
   “I’ll drag you in.”
   “Look at you, Lloyd. You’re so scared you couldn’t drag a mongrel puppy in there.” She looked at the others. “You’re all scared. Jenny, you’re practically making in your pants. Not good for your complexion, dear. Or your pants.”
   “Stop it, you filthy sneak,” Jenny whispered.
   “I was never scared like that in the Free Zone,” Dayna said. “I felt good over there. I came over here because I wanted that good feeling to stay on. It was nothing more political than that. You ought to think it over. Maybe he sells fear because he’s got nothing else to sell.”
   “Ma’am,” Whitney said apologetically, “I’d sure like to listen to the rest of your sermon, but the man is waiting. I’m sorry, but you either got to say amen and go through that door on your own or I’ll drag you. You can tell your tale to him once you get in there… if you can find enough spit to talk with, that is. But until then, you’re our responsibility.” And the odd thing is, she thought, he sounds genuinely sorry. Too bad he’s also so genuinely scared.
   “You won’t have to do that.”
   She forced her feet to get started, and then it was a little easier. She was going to her death; she was quite sure of that. If so, let it be so. She had the knife. For him first, if she could, and then for herself, if necessary.
   She thought: My name is Dayna Roberta Jurgens, and I am afraid, but I have been afraid before. All he can take from me is what I would have to give up someday anyhow—my life. I will not let him break me down. I will not let him make me less than I am, if I can possibly help it. I want to die well… and I am going to have what I want.
   She turned the knob and stepped through into the inner office… and into the presence of Randall Flagg.