Chapter 71
   It was nearly midnight on the evening of September 17. Randall Flagg was in the desert, wrapped in three blankets, from toes to chin. A fourth blanket was swirled around his head in a kind of burnoose, so that only his eyes and the tip of his nose were visible.
   Little by little, he let all thoughts slip away. He grew still. The stars were cold fire, witchlight.
   He sent out the Eye.
   He felt it separate from himself with a small and painless tug. It went flying away, silent as a hawk, rising on dark thermals. Now he had joined with the night. He was eye of crow, eye of wolf, eye of weasel, eye of cat. He was the scorpion, the strutting trapdoor spider. He was a deadly poison arrow slipping endlessly through the desert air. Whatever else might have happened, the Eye had not left him.
   Flying effortlessly, the world of earthbound things spread out below him like a clockface.
   They’re coming… they’re almost in Utah now…
   He flew high, wide, and silent over a graveyard world. Below him the desert lay like a whited sepulcher cut by the dark ribbon of the interstate highway. He flew east, over the state line now, his body far behind, glittering eyes rolled up to blind whites.
   Now the land began to change. Buttes and strange, wind-carved pillars and tabletop mesas. The highway ran straight through. The Bonneville Salt Flats lay to the far north. Skull Valley somewhere west. Flying. The sound of the wind, dead and distant…
   An eagle poised in the highest crotch of an ancient lightning-blasted pine somewhere south of Richfield felt something pass close by, some deadly sighted thing whizzing through the night, and the eagle took wing against it, fearless, and was buffeted away by a grinning sensation of deadly cold. The eagle fell almost all the way to the ground, stunned, before recovering itself.
   The dark man’s Eye went east.
   Now the highway below was I-70. The towns were huddled lumps, deserted except for the rats and the cats and the deer that had already begun to creep in from the forests as the scent of man washed away. Towns with names like Freemont and Green River and Sego and Thompson and Harley Dome. Then a small city, also deserted. Grand Junction, Colorado. Then—
   Just east of Grand Junction was a spark of campfire.
   The Eye spiraled down.
   The fire was dying. There were four figures sleeping around it.
   It was true, then.
   The Eye appraised them coldly. They were coming. For reasons he could not fathom, they were actually coming. Nadine had told the truth.
   There was a low growling, and the Eye turned in another direction. There was a dog on the far side of the campfire, its head lowered, its tail coiled down and over its privates. Its eyes glowed like baleful amber gems. Its growl was a constant thing, like endlessly ripping cloth. The Eye stared at it, and the dog stared back, unafraid. Its lip curled back and it showed its teeth.
   One of the forms rose to a sitting position. “Kojak,” it mumbled. “Will you for Chrissakes shut up?”
   Kojak continued to growl, his hackles up.
   The man who had awakened—it was Glen Bateman—looked around, suddenly uneasy. “Who’s there, boy?” he whispered to the dog. “Is something there?”
   Kojak continued to growl.
   “Stu!” He shook the form next to him. The form muttered something and was silent again in its sleeping bag.
   The dark man who was now the dark Eye had seen enough. He whirled upward, catching just a glimpse of the dog’s neck craning up to follow him. The low growl turned into a volley of barks, loud at first, then fading, fading, gone.
   Silence and rushing darkness.
   Some unknown time later he paused over the desert floor, looking down at himself. He sank slowly, approaching the body, then sinking into himself. For a moment there was a curious sensation of vertigo, of two things merging into one. Then the Eye was gone and there were only his eyes, staring up at the cold and gleaming stars.
   They were coming, yes.
   Flagg smiled. Had the old woman told them to come? Would they listen to her if she, on her deathbed, instructed them to commit suicide in that novel way? He supposed it was possible that they would.
   What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling: They were having their problems too, they were frightened too… and as a result, they were making a colossal mistake.
   Was it even possible that they had been turned out?
   He lingered lovingly over the idea but in the end could not quite believe it. They were coming of their own choice. They were coming wrapped in righteousness like a clutch of missionaries approaching the cannibals’ village.
   Oh, it was so lovely!
   Doubts would end. Fears would end. All it would take was the sight of their four heads up on spikes in front of the MGM Grand’s fountain. He would assemble every person in Vegas and make them file past and look. He would have photographs taken, would print fliers, have them sent out to LA and San Francisco and Spokane and Portland.
   Five heads. He would put the dog’s head up on a pole, too.
   “Good doggy,” Flagg said, and laughed aloud for the first time since Nadine had goaded him into throwing her off the roof. “Good doggy,” he said again, grinning.
   He slept well that night, and in the morning he sent out word that the watch on the roads between Utah and Nevada was to be tripled. They were no loner looking for one man going east but four men and a dog going west. And they were to be taken alive. Taken alive at all costs.
   Oh, yes.

Chapter 72
   “You know,” Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, “I’ve heard the saying ‘That sucks’ for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.” He looked down at his breakfast, which consisted of Morning Star Farms synthetic sausage links, and grimaced.
   “No, this is good,” Ralph said earnestly. “You should have had some of the chow we had in the army.”
   They were sitting around the campfire, which Larry had rekindled an hour earlier. They were all dressed in warm coats and gloves, and all were on their second cups of coffee. The temperature was about thirty-five degrees, and the sky was cloudy and bleak. Kojak was napping as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his fur.
   “I’m done feeding the inner man,” Glen said, getting up. “Give me your poor, your hungry. On second thought, just give me your garbage. I’ll bury it.”
   Stu handed him his paper plate and cup. “This walkin’s really something, isn’t it, baldy? I bet you ain’t been in this good shape since you were twenty.”
   “Yeah, seventy years ago,” Larry said, and laughed.
   “Stu, I was never in this kind of shape,” Glen said grimly, picking up litter and popping it into the plastic sack he intended to bury. “I never wanted to be in this kind of shape. But I don’t mind. After fifty years of confirmed agnosticism, it seems to be my fate to follow an old black woman’s God into the jaws of death. If that’s my fate, then that’s my fate. End of story. But I’d rather walk than ride, when you get right down to it. Walking takes longer, consequently I live longer… by a few days, anyway. Excuse me, gentlemen, while I give this swill a decent burial.”
   They watched him walk to the edge of the camp with a small entrenching tool. This “walking tour of Colorado and points west,” as Glen put it, had been the hardest on Glen himself. He was the oldest, Ralph Brentner’s senior by twelve years. But somehow he had eased it considerably for the others. His irony was constant but gentle, and he seemed at peace with himself. The fact that he was able to keep going day after day made an impression on the others even if it was not exactly an inspiration. He was fifty-seven, and Stu had seen him working his finger-joints on these last three or four cold mornings, and grimacing as he did it.
   “Hurt bad?” Stu had asked him yesterday, about an hour after they had moved out.
   “Aspirin takes care of it. It’s arthritis, you know, but it’s not as bad as it’s apt to be in another five or seven years, and frankly, East Texas, I’m not looking that far ahead.”
   “You really think he’s going to take us?”
   And Glen Bateman had said a peculiar thing: “I will fear no evil.” And that had been the end of the discussion.
   Now they heard him digging at the frozen soil and cursing it.
   “Quite a fella, ain’t he?” Ralph said.
   Larry nodded. “Yes. I think he is.”
   “I always thought those college teachers was sissies, but that man sure ain’t. Know what he said when I asked him why he didn’t just throw that crap to one side of the road? Said we didn’t need to start up that kind of shit again. Said we’d started up too many of the old brands of shit already.”
   Kojak got up and trotted over to see what Glen was doing. Glen’s voice floated over to them: “Well, there you are, you big lazy turd. I was starting to wonder where you’d gotten off to. Want me to bury you too?”
   Larry grinned and took off the mileometer clipped to his belt. He had picked it up in a Golden sports supply shop. You set it according to the length of your stride and then clipped it to your belt like a carpenter’s rule. Each evening he wrote down how far they had walked that day on a dog-eared and often-folded sheet of paper.
   “Can I see that cheat sheet?” Stu asked.
   “Sure,” Larry said, and handed it over.
   At the top of the sheet Larry had printed: Boulder to Vegas: 771 miles. Below that:


   Date
   September 6th
   September 7th
   September 8th
   September 9th
   September 10th
   September 11th
   September 12th
   September 13th
   September 14th
   September 15th
   September 16th
   September 17th
   Miles
   28.1
   27.0
   26.5
   28.2
   27.9
   29.1
   28.8
   29.5
   32.0
   32.6
   35.5
   37.2
   Total Miles
   28.1
   55.1
   81.6
   109.8
   137.7
   166.8
   195.6
   225.1
   257.1
   289.7
   325.2
   362.4
   Stu took a scrap of paper from his wallet and did some subtraction. “Well, we’re makin better time than when we started out, but we’ve still got over four hundred miles to go. Shit, we ain’t halfway yet.”
   Larry nodded. “Better time is right. We’re going downhill. And Glen’s right, you know. Why do we want to hurry? Guy’s just gonna wipe us out when we get over there.”
   “You know, I just don’t believe that,” Ralph said. “We may die, sure, but it isn’t going to be anything simple, anything cut and dried. Mother Abagail wouldn’t send us off if we was to be just murdered and nothing more come of it. She just wouldn’t.”
   “I don’t believe she, was the one who sent us,” Stu said quietly.
   Larry’s mileometer made four distinct little clicks as he set it for the day: 000.0. Stu doused what remained of the campfire with dirt. The little rituals of the morning went on. They had been twelve days on the road. It seemed to Stu that the days would go on forever like this: Glen bitching good-naturedly about the food, Larry noting their mileage on his dog-eared cheat sheet, the two cups of coffee, someone burying yesterday’s scut, someone else burying the fire. It was routine, good routine. You forgot what it was all leading to, and that was good. In the mornings Fran seemed very distant to him—very clear, but very distant, like a photograph kept in a locket. But in the evenings, when the dark had come and the moon sailed the night, she seemed very close. Almost close enough to touch… and that, of course, was where the ache lay. At times like those his faith in Mother Abagail turned to bitter doubt and he wanted to wake them all up and tell them it was a fool’s errand, that they had taken up rubber lances to tilt at a lethal windmill, that they had better stop at the next town, get motorcycles, and go back. That they had better grab a little light and a little love while they still could—because a little was all Flagg was going to allow them.
   But that was at night. In the mornings it still seemed right to go on. He looked speculatively at Larry, and wondered if Larry thought about his Lucy late at night. Dreamed about her and wished…
   Glen came back into camp with Kojak at his heel, wincing a little as he walked. “Let’s go get em,”—he said. “Right, Kojak?”
   Kojak wagged his tail.
   “He says Las Vegas or bust,” Glen said. “Come on.”
   They climbed the embankment to I-70, now descending toward Grand Junction, and began their day’s walk.
   Late that afternoon, a cold rain began to fall, chilling them all and damping conversation. Larry walked by himself, hands shoved in his pockets. At first he thought about Harold Lauder, whose corpse they had found two days ago—there seemed to be an unspoken conspiracy among them not to talk about Harold—but eventually his thoughts turned to the person he had dubbed the Wolfman.
   They had found the Wolfman just east of the Eisenhower Tunnel. The traffic was badly jammed up there, and the stink of death had been sickly potent. The Wolfman had been half in and half out of an Austin. He was wearing pegged jeans and a silk sequined Western shirt. The corpses of several wolves lay around the Austin. The Wolfman himself was half in and half out of the Austin’s passenger seat, and a dead wolf lay on his chest. The Wolfman’s hands were wrapped around the wolf’s neck, and the wolf’s bloody muzzle was angled up to the Wolfman’s neck. Reconstructing, it seemed to all of them that a pack of wolves had come down out of the higher mountains, had spotted this lone man, and had attacked. The Wolfman had had a gun. He had dropped several of them before retreating to the Austin.
   How long before hunger had forced him from his refuge?
   Larry didn’t know, didn’t want to know. But he had seen how terribly thin the Wolfman had been. A week, maybe. He had been going west, whoever he was, going to join the dark man, but Larry would not have wished such a dreadful fate on anyone. He had spoken of it once to Stu, two days after they had emerged from the tunnel, with the Wolfman safely behind them.
   “Why would a bunch of wolves hang around so long, Stu?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “I mean, if they wanted something to eat, couldn’t they find it?”
   “I’d think so, yeah.”
   It was a dreadful mystery to him, and he kept working it over in his mind, knowing he would never find the solution. Whoever the Wolfman had been, he hadn’t been lacking in the balls department. Finally driven by hunger and thirst, he had opened the passenger door. One of the wolves had jumped him and torn his throat out. But the Wolfman had throttled it to death even as he himself died.
   The four of them had gone through the Eisenhower Tunnel roped together, and in that horrible blackness, Larry’s mind had turned to the trip he had made through the Lincoln Tunnel. Only now it was not images of Rita Blakemoor that haunted him but the face of the Wolfman, frozen in its final snarl as he and the wolf had killed each other.
   Were the wolves sent to kill that man?
   But that thought was too unsettling to even consider. He tried to push the whole thing out of his mind and just keep walking, but that was a hard thing to do.
   They made their camp that night beyond Loma, quite close to the Utah state line. Supper consisted of forage and boiled water, as all their meals did—they were following Mother Abagail’s instructions to the letter: Go in the clothes that you stand up in. Carry nothing.
   “It’s going to get bad in Utah,” Ralph remarked. “I guess that’s where we’re going to find out if God really is watchin over us. There’s one stretch, better than a hundred miles, without a town or even a gas station and a café.” He didn’t seem particularly disturbed by the prospect.
   “Water?” Stu asked.
   Ralph shrugged. “Not much of that, either. Guess I’ll turn in.”
   Larry followed suit. Glen stayed up to smoke a pipe. Stu had a few cigarettes and decided to have one. They smoked in silence for a while.
   “Long way from New Hampshire, baldy,” Stu said at last.
   “It isn’t exactly shouting distance from here to Texas.”
   Stu smiled. “No. No, it ain’t.”
   “You miss Fran a lot, I guess.”
   “Yeah. Miss her, worry about her. Worry about the baby. It’s worse after it gets dark.”
   Glen puffed. “That’s nothing you can change, Stuart.”
   “I know. But I worry.”
   “Sure.” Glen knocked out his pipe on a rock. “Something funny happened last night, Stu. I’ve been trying to figure out all day if it was real, or a dream, or what.”
   “What was it?”
   “Well, I woke up in the night and Kojak was growling at something. Must have been past midnight, because the fire had burned way down. Kojak was on the other side of it with his hackles standing up. I told him to shut up and he never even looked at me. He was looking over to my right. And I thought, What if it’s wolves? Ever since we saw that guy Larry calls the Wolfman—”
   “Yeah, that was bad.”
   “But there was nothing. I had a clear view. He was growling at nothing.”
   “He had a scent, that’s all.”
   “Yeah, but the crazy part is still to come. After a couple of minutes I started to feel… well, decidedly weird. I felt like there was something right over by the turnpike embankment, and that it was watching me. Watching all of us. I felt like I could almost see it, that if I squinted my eyes the right way, I would see it. But I didn’t want to. Because it felt like him.
   “It felt like Flagg, Stuart.”
   “Probably nothing,” Stu said after a moment.
   “It sure felt like something. It felt like something to Kojak, too.”
   “Well, suppose he was watching somehow? What could we do about it?”
   “Nothing. But I don’t like it. I don’t like it that he’s able to watch us… if that’s what it is. It scares me shitless.”
   Stu finished his cigarette, stubbed it out carefully on the side of a rock, but made no move toward his sleeping bag just yet. He looked at Kojak, who was lying by the campfire with his nose on his paws and watching them.
   “So Harold’s dead,” Stu said at last.
   “Yes.”
   “And it was just a goddam waste. A waste of Sue and Nick. A waste of himself, too, I reckon.”
   “I agree.”
   There was nothing more to say. They had come upon Harold and his pitiful dying declaration the day after they had done the Eisenhower Tunnel. He and Nadine must have gone over Loveland Pass, because Harold still had his Triumph cycle—the remains of it, anyway—and as Ralph had said, it would have been impossible to get anything bigger than a kid’s little red wagon through the Eisenhower. The buzzards had worked him over pretty well, but Harold still clutched the Permacover notebook in one stiffening hand. The .38 was jammed in his mouth like a grotesque lollipop, and although they hadn’t buried Harold, Stu had removed the pistol. He had done it gently. Seeing how efficiently the dark man had destroyed Harold and how carelessly he had thrown him aside when his part was played out had made Stu hate Flagg all the more. It made him feel that they were throwing themselves away in a witless sort of children’s crusade, and while he felt that they had to press on, Harold’s corpse with the shattered leg haunted him the way the frozen grimace of the Wolfman haunted Larry. He had discovered he wanted to pay Flagg back for Harold as well as Nick and Susan… but he felt more and more sure that he would never get that chance.
   But you want to watch out, he thought grimly. You want to look out if I get within choking distance of you, you freak.
   Glen got up with a little wince. “I’m going to turn in, East Texas. Don’t beg me to stay. It really is a dull party.”
   “How’s that arthritis?”
   Glen smiled and said, “Not too bad,” but as he crossed to his bedroll he was limping.
   Stu thought he should not have another cigarette—only smoking two or three a day would exhaust his supply by the end of the week—and then he lit one anyway. This evening it was not so cold, but for all that, there could be no doubt that in this high country, at least, summer was done. It made him feel sad, because he felt very strongly that he would never see another summer. When this one had begun, he had been an on-again, off-again worker at a factory that made pocket calculators. He had been living in a small town called Arnette, and he had spent a lot of his spare time hanging around Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco station, listening to the other guys shoot the shit about the economy, the government, hard times. Stu guessed that none of them had known what real hard times were. He finished his cigarette and tossed it into the campfire.
   “Keep well, Frannie, old kid,” he said, and got into his sleeping bag. And in his dreams he thought that Something had come near their camp, Something that was keeping malevolent watch over them. It might have been a wolf with human understanding. Or a crow. Or a weasel, creeping bellydown through the scrub. Or it might have been some disembodied presence, a watching Eye.
   I will fear no evil, he muttered in his dream. Yea, though I walk though the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. No evil.
   At last the dream faded and he slept soundly.
   The next morning they were on the road again early, Larry’s gadget clicking off the miles as the highway switched lazily back and forth down the gentling Western Slope toward Utah. Shortly after noon they left Colorado behind them. That evening they camped west of Harley Dome, Utah. For the first time the great silence impressed then as being oppressive and malefic. Ralph Brentner went to sleep that night thinking: We’re in the West now. We’re out of our ballpark and into his.
   And that night Ralph dreamed of a wolf with a single red eye that had come out of the badlands to watch them. Go away, Ralph told it. Go away, we’re not afraid. Not afraid of you.
   By 2 P.M. on the afternoon of September 21, they were past Sego. The next large town, according to Stu’s pocket map, was Green River. There were no more towns after that for a long, long time. Then, as Ralph had said, they would probably find out if God was with them or not.
   “Actually,” Larry said to Glen, “I’m not as worried about food as I am water. Most everyone who’s on a trip keeps a few munchies in their car, Oreos or Fig Newtons or something like that.”
   Glen smiled. “Maybe the Lord will send us showers of blessing.”
   Larry looked up at the cloudless blue sky and grimaced at the idea. “I sometimes think she was right off her block at the end of it.”
   “Maybe she was,” Glen said mildly. “If you read your theology, you’ll find that God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane. It even seems to me—here’s the closet Jesuit coming out—that there are good psychological reasons for it. A madman or a person on her deathbed is a human being with a drastically changed psyche. A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet.”
   “The ways of God,” Larry said. “I know. We see through a glass darkly. It’s a pretty dark glass to me, all right. Why we’re walking all this way when we could have driven it in a week is beyond me. But since we’re doing a nutty thing, I guess it’s okay to do it in a nutty way.”
   “What we’re doing has all sorts of historical precedent,” Glen said, “and I see some perfectly sound psychological and sociological reasons for this walk. I don’t know if they’re God’s reasons or not, but they make good sense to me.”
   “Such as what?” Stu and Ralph had walked over to hear this, too.
   “There were several American Indian tribes that used to make ‘having a vision’ an integral part of their manhood rite. When it was your time to become a man, you were supposed to go out into the wilderness unarmed. You were supposed to make a kill, and two songs—one about the Great Spirit and one about your own prowess as a hunter and a rider and a warrior and a fucker—and have that vision. You weren’t supposed to eat. You were supposed to get up high—mentally as well as physically—and wait for that vision to come. And eventually, of course, it would.” He chuckled. “Starvation is a great hallucinogenic.”
   “You think Mother sent us out here to have visions?” Ralph asked.
   “Maybe to gain strength and holiness by a purging process,” Glen said. “The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you’re also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel.”
   Larry shook his head slowly. “I don’t follow that.”
   “Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?”
   “Reads a book,” Ralph said.
   “Goes to see his friends,” Stu said.
   “Plays the stereo,” Larry said, grinning.
   “Sure, all those things,” Glen said. “But he’s also missing that TV. There’s a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he’s still thinking, At nine o’clock I’m going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?”
   “Yeah,” Ralph said. “Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn’t feel right until it was back.”
   “It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It’s an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your selves, gentlemen—they are turning into a window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers.”
   “But what’s the point?” Ralph asked. “Why go through all the rigmarole?”
   Glen said, “If you read your Bible, you’ll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time—Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means ‘no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.’ Does that remind you of anyone?”
   “Sure. Mother,” Ralph said.
   “Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too—a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you’d never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car.”
   They were all listening closely.
   “Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner… all of it runs off the battery. A normal life—at least in what used to be Western civilization—was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?”
   “Yeah,” Ralph said. “Even a big Delco won’t ever overcharge when it’s sitting in a Cadillac.”
   “Well, what we’ve done is to strip off the accessories. We’re on charge.”
   Ralph said uneasily: “If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she’ll explode.”
   “Yes,” Glen agreed. “Same with people. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn’t say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here—”
   “Off my case, baldy,” Stu growled.
   “Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity.”
   They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over.
   “Are we changing?” Stu asked quietly.
   “Yes,” Glen answered. “Yes, I think we are.”
   “We’ve dropped some weight,” Ralph said. “I know that just looking at you guys. And me, I used to have a helluva beergut. Now I can look down and see my toes again. In fact, I can see just about my whole feet.”
   “It’s a state of mind,” Larry said suddenly. When they looked at him he seemed a trifle embarrassed but went on: “I’ve had this feeling for the last week or so, and I couldn’t understand it. Maybe now I can. I’ve been feeling high. Like I’d done half a joint of really dynamite grass or snorted just a touch of coke. But there’s none of the disorienting feeling that goes with dope. You do some dope and you feel like normal thinking is lust a little bit out of your grasp. I feel like I’m thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high.” Larry laughed. “Maybe it’s just hunger.”
   “Hunger’s part of it,” Glen agreed, “but not all of it.”
   “Me, I’m hungry all the time,” Ralph said, “but it doesn’t seem too important. I feel good.”
   “I do too,” Stu said. “Physically, I haven’t felt this good in years.”
   “When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there,” Glen said. “The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It’s a whole-body, whole-mind enema.”
   “You got such a fancy way of puttin things, baldy.”
   “It may be inelegant, but it’s accurate.”
   Ralph asked, “Will it help us with him?”
   “Well,” Glen said, “that’s what it’s for. I don’t have much doubt about that. But we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
   They walked on. Kojak came out of the brush and walked with them for a while, his toenails clicking on the pavement of US 70. Larry reached down and ruffled his fur. “Ole Kojak,” he said. “Did you know you were a battery? Just one great big old Delco battery with a lifetime guarantee?”
   Kojak didn’t appear to know or care, but he wagged his tail to show he was on Larry’s side.
   They camped that night about fifteen miles west of Sego, and as if to drive home the point of what they had been talking about in the afternoon, there was nothing to eat for the first time since they had left Boulder. Glen had the last of their instant coffee in a Glad Bag, and they shared it out of a single mug, passing it from hand to hand. They had come the last ten miles without seeing a single car.
   The next morning, the twenty-second, they came upon an overturned Ford station wagon with four corpses in it—two of them little children. There were two boxes of animal crackers in the car, and a large bag of stale potato chips. The animal crackers were in better shape. They shared them out five ways.
   “Don’t wolf them, Kojak,” Glen admonished. “Bad dog! Where are your manners? And if you have no manners—as I must now conclude—where is your savoir faire?”
   Kojak thumped his tail and eyed the animal crackers in a way which showed pretty conclusively that he had no more savoir faire than he did manners.
   “Then root, hog, or die,” Glen said, and gave the dog the last of his own share—a tiger. Kojak wolfed it down and then went sniffing off.
   Larry had saved his entire menagerie—about ten animals—to eat at once. He did so slowly and dreamily. “Did you ever notice,” he said, “that animal crackers have a faint, lemony undertaste? I remember that from being a kid. Never noticed it again until now.”
   Ralph had been tossing his last two crackers from hand to hand, and now he gobbled one. “Yeah, you’re right. They do have sort of a lemon taste to em. You know, I kind of wish ole Nicky was here. I wouldn’t mind sharing these old animal crackers a little further.”
   Stu nodded. They finished the animal crackers and went on. That afternoon they found a Great Western Markets delivery truck, apparently bound for Green River, pulled neatly over in the breakdown lane, the driver sitting bolt upright and dead behind the wheel. They lunched on a canned ham from the back, but none of them seemed to want much. Glen said their stomachs had shrunk. Stu said the ham smelled bad to him—not spoiled, just too rich. Too meaty. It kind of turned his stomach. He could only bring himself to eat a single slice. Ralph said he would have just as soon had two or three more boxes of animal crackers, and they all laughed. Even Kojak ate only a small serving before going off to investigate some scent.
   They camped east of Green River that night, and there was a dust of snow in the early morning hours.
   They came to the washout a little past noon on the twenty-third. The sky had been overcast all day, and it was cold—cold enough to snow, Stu thought—and not just flurries, either.
   The four of them stood on the edge, Kojak at Glen’s heel, looking down and across. Somewhere north of here a dam might have given way, or there might have been a succession of hard summer rainstorms. Whatever, there had been a flash flood along the San Rafael, which was only a dry-wash in some years. It had swept away a great thirty-foot slab of I-70. The gully was about fifty feet deep, the banks crumbly, rubbly soil and sedimentary rock. At the bottom was a sullen trickle of water.
   “Holy crow,” Ralph said. “Somebody oughtta call the Utah State Highway Department about this.”
   Larry pointed. “Look over there,” he said. They looked out into the emptiness, which was now beginning to be dotted with strange, wind-carved pillars and monoliths. About one hundred yards down the course of the San Rafael they saw a tangle of guardrails, cable, and large slabs of asphalt-composition paving. One chunk stuck up toward the cloudy, racing sky like an apocalyptic finger, complete with white broken passing line.
   Glen was looking down into the rubble-strewn cut, hands stuffed into his pockets, an absent, dreaming look on his face. In a low voice, Stu said: “Can you make it, Glen?”
   “Sure, I think so.”
   “How’s that arthritis?”
   “It’s been worse.” He cracked a smile. “But in all honesty, it’s been better, too.”
   They had no rope with which to anchor each other. Stu went down first, moving carefully. He didn’t like the way the ground sometimes shifted under his feet, starting little slides of rock and dirt. Once he thought his footing was going to go out from under him completely, sending him sliding all the way to the bottom on his can. One groping hand caught a solid rock outcropping and he hung on for dear life, finding more solid ground for his feet. Then Kojak was bounding blithely past him, kicking up little puffs of dirt and sending down only small runnels of earth. A moment later he was standing on the bottom, wagging his tail and barking amiably up at Stu.
   “Fucking showoff dog,” Stu growled, and carefully made his way to the bottom.
   “I’m coming next,” Glen called. “I heard what you said about my dog!”
   “Be careful, baldy! Be damn careful! It’s really loose underfoot.”
   Glen came down slowly, moving with great deliberation from one hold to the next. Stu tensed every time he saw loose dirt start to slide out from underneath Glen’s battered Georgia Giants. His hair blew like fine silver around his ears in the light breeze that had sprung up. It occurred to him that when he had first met Glen, painting a mediocre picture beside the road in New Hampshire, Glen’s hair had still been salt-and-pepper.
   Until the moment Glen finally planted his feet on the level ground of the mudflat at the bottom of the gully, Stu was sure he was going to fall and break himself in two. Stu sighed with relief and clapped him on the shoulder.
   “No sweat, East Texas,” Glen said, and bent to ruffle Kojak’s fur.
   “Plenty here,” Stu told him.
   Ralph came next, moving carefully from one hold to the next, lumping the last eight feet or so. “Boy,” he said. “That shits just as loose as a goose. Be funny if we couldn’t get up that other bank and had to walk four or five miles upstream to find shallower bank, wouldn’t it?”
   “Be a lot funnier if another flash flood came along while we were looking,” Stu said.
   Larry came down agilely and well, joining them less than three minutes after they had started down. “Who goes up first?” he asked.
   “Why don’t you, since you’re so perky?” Glen said.
   “Sure.”
   It took him considerably longer to get up, and twice the treacherous footing ran out beneath him and he nearly fell. But finally he gained the top and waved down at them.
   “Who’s next?” Ralph asked.
   “Me,” Glen said, and walked across to the other bank.
   Stu caught his arm. “Listen,” he said. “We can walk upstream and find a shallower bank like Ralph said.”
   “And lose the rest of the day? When I was a kid, I could have gone up there in forty seconds and registered a pulse-rate under seventy at the top.”
   “You’re no kid now, Glen.”
   “No. But I think there’s still some of him left.”
   Before Stu could say more, Glen had started. He paused to rest about a third of the way up and then pressed on. Near the halfway point he grabbed an outcrop of shale that crumbled away under his hands and Stu was sure he was going to tumble all the way to the bottom, end over arthritic end.
   “Ah, shit—” Ralph breathed.
   Glen flailed his arms and somehow kept his balance. He jigged to his right and went up another twenty feet, rested, and then up again. Near the top a spur of rock that he had been standing on tore loose and he would have fallen, but Larry was there. He grabbed Glen’s arm and hauled him up.
   “Nothing to it,” Glen called down.
   Stu grinned with relief. “How’s your pulse-rate, baldy?”
   “Plus ninety, I think,” Glen admitted.
   Ralph climbed the cut-bank like a stolid mountain goat, checking each hold, shifting his hands and feet with great deliberation. When he reached the top, Stu started up.
   Right up until the moment he fell, Stu was thinking that actually this slope was a little easier than the one they had descended. The holds were better, the gradient a tiny bit shallower. But the surface was a mixture of chalky soil and rock fragments that had been badly loosened by the wet weather. Stu sensed that it wanted to be evil, and he went up carefully.
   His chest was over the edge when the knob of outcropping his left foot was on suddenly disappeared. He felt himself begin to slide. Larry grabbed for his hand, but this time he missed his grip. Stu grabbed the outjutting edge of the turnpike, and it came off in his hands. He stared at it stupidly for a moment as the speed of his descent began to increase. He discarded it, feeling insanely like Wile E. Coyote. All I need, he thought, is for someone to go beep-beep before I hit the bottom.
   His knee struck something, and there was a sudden bolt of pain. He grabbed at the gluey surface of the slope, which was now speeding past him at an alarming rate, and kept coming away with nothing but handfuls of dirt.
   He slammed into a boulder sticking out of the rubble like a big blunt arrowhead and cartwheeled, the breath slapped from his body. He fell free for about ten feet, and came down on his lower leg at an angle. He heard it snap. The pain was instantaneous and huge. He yelled. He did a backward somersault. He was eating dirt now. Sharp pebbles scrawled bloody scratches across his face and arms. He came down on the hurt leg again, and felt it snap somewhere else. This time he didn’t yell. This time he screamed.
   He slid the last fifteen feet on his belly, like a kid on a greasy chute-the-chute. He came to rest with his pants full of mud and his heart beating crazily in his ears. The leg was white fire. His coat and the shirt beneath were both rucked up to his chin.
   Broken. But how bad? Pretty bad from the way it feels. Two places at least, maybe more. And the knee’s sprung.
   Larry was coming down the slope, moving in little jumps that seemed almost a mockery of what had just happened to Stu. Then he was kneeling beside him, asking the question which Stu had already asked himself.
   “How bad, Stu?”
   Stu got up on his elbows and looked at Larry, his face white with shock and streaked brown with dirt.
   “I figure I’ll be walking again in about three months,” he said. He began to feel as if he were going to puke. He looked up at the cloudy sky, balled his fists up, and shook them at it.
   “OHHH, SHIT! ” he screamed.

Ralph and Larry splinted the leg. Glen had produced a bottle of what he called “my arthritis pills” and gave Stu one. Stu didn’t know what was in the “arthritis pills” and Glen refused to say, but the pain in his leg faded to a faraway drone. He felt very calm, even serene. It occurred to him that they were all living on borrowed time, not because they were on their way to find Flagg, necessarily, but because they had survived Captain Trips in the first place. At any rate, he knew what had to be done… and he was going to see that it was done. Larry had just finished speaking. They all looked at him anxiously to see what he would say.
   What he said was simple enough. “No.”
   “Stu,” Glen said gently, “you don’t understand—”
   “I understand. I’m saying no. No trip back to Green River. No rope. No car. Against the rules of the game.”
   “It’s no fucking game!” Larry cried. “You’d die here!”
   “And you’re almost surely gonna die over there in Nevada. Now go on and get getting. You’ve got another four hours of daylight. No need to waste it.”
   “We’re not going to leave you,” Larry said.
   “I’m sorry, but you are. I’m telling you to.”
   “No. I’m in charge now. Mother said if anything happened to you—”
   “—that you were to go on.”
   “No. No.” Larry looked around at Glen and Ralph for support. They looked back at him, troubled. Kojak sat nearby, watching all four with his tail curled neatly around his paws.
   “Listen to me, Larry,” Stu said. “This whole trip is based on the idea that the old lady knew what she was talking about. If you start frigging around with that, you’re putting everything on the line.”
   “Yeah, that’s right,” Ralph said.
   “No, it ain’t right, you sodbuster,” Larry said, furiously mimicking Ralph’s flat Oklahoma accent. “It wasn’t God’s will that Stu fell down here, it wasn’t even the dark man’s doing. It was just loose dirt, that’s all, just loose dirt! I’m not leaving you, Stu. I’m done leaving people behind.”
   “Yes. We are going to leave him,” Glen said quietly.
   Larry stared around unbelievingly, as if he had been betrayed. “I thought you were his friend!”
   “I am. But that doesn’t matter.”
   Larry uttered a hysterical laugh and walked a little way down the gully. “You’re crazy! You know that?”
   “No I’m not. We made an agreement. We stood around Mother Abagail’s deathbed and entered into it. It almost certainly meant our deaths, and we knew it. We understood the agreement. Now we’re going to live up to it.”
   “Well, I want to, for Chrissake. I mean, it doesn’t have to be Green River; we can get a station wagon, put him in the back, and go on—”
   “We’re supposed to walk,” Ralph said. He pointed at Stu. “He can’t walk.”
   “Right. Fine. He’s got a broken leg. What do you propose we do? Shoot him like a horse?”
   “Larry—” Stu began.
   Before he could go on, Glen grabbed Larry’s shirt and yanked him toward him. “Who are you trying to save?” His voice was cold and stern. “Stu, or yourself?”
   Larry looked at him, mouth working.
   “It’s very simple,” Glen said. “We can’t stay… and he can’t go.”
   “I refuse to accept that,” Larry whispered. His face was dead pale.
   “It’s a test,” Ralph said suddenly. “That’s what it is.”
   “A sanity test, maybe,” Larry said.
   “Vote,” Stu said from the ground. “I vote you go on.”
   “Me too,” Ralph said. “Stu, I’m sorry. But if God’s gonna watch out for us, maybe he’ll watch out for you, too—”
   “I won’t do it,” Larry said.
   “It’s not Stu you’re thinking of,” Glen said. “You’re trying to save something in yourself, I think. But this time it’s right to go on, Larry. We have to.”
   Larry rubbed his mouth slowly with the back of his hand.
   “Let’s stay here tonight,” he said. “Let’s think this thing out.”
   “No,” Stu said.
   Ralph nodded. A look passed between him and Glen, and then Glen fished the bottle of “arthritis pills” out of his pocket and put it in Stu’s hand. “These have a morphine base,” he said. “More than three or four would probably be fatal.” His eyes locked with Stu’s. “Do you understand, East Texas?”
   “Yeah. I get you.”
   “What are you talking about?” Larry cried. “Just what the hell are you suggesting?”
   “Don’t you know?” Ralph said with such utter contempt that for a moment Larry was silenced. Then it all rushed before him again with the nightmare speed of strangers’ faces as you ride the whip at the carnival: pills, uppers, downers, cruisers. Rita. Turning her over in her sleeping bag and seeing that she was dead and stiff, green puke coming out of her mouth like a rancid party favor.
   “No! ” he yelled, and tried to snatch the bottle from Stu’s hand.
   Ralph grabbed him by the shoulders. Larry struggled.
   “Let him go,” Stu said. “I want to talk to him.” Ralph still held on, looking at Stu uncertainly. “No, go on, let him go.”
   Ralph let go, but looked ready to spring again.
   Stu said, “Come here, Larry. Hunker down.”
   Larry came over and hunkered by Stu. He looked miserably into Stu’s face. “It’s not right, man. When somebody falls down and breaks his leg, you don’t… you can’t just walk off and let that person die. Don’t you know that? Hey, man…” He touched Stu’s face. “Please. Think.”
   Stu took Larry’s hand and held it. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
   “No! No, but—”
   “And do you think that people who are in their right minds have the right to decide for themselves what they want to do?”
   “Oh, man,” Larry said, and started to cry.
   “Larry, you’re not in this. I want you to go on. If you get out of Vegas, come back this way. Maybe God’ll send a raven to feed me, you don’t know. I read once in the funny-pages that a man can go seventy days without food, if he’s got water.”
   “It’s going to be winter before that here. You’ll be dead of exposure in three days, even if you don’t use the pills.”
   “That ain’t up to you. You ain’t in this part of it.”
   “Don’t send me away, Stu.”
   Stu said grimly: “I’m sending you.”
   “This sucks,” Larry said, and got to his feet. “What’s Fran going to say to us? When she finds out we left you for the gophers and the buzzards?”
   “She’s not going to say anything if you don’t get over there and fix his clock. Neither is Lucy. Or Dick Ellis. Or Brad. Or any of the others.”
   Larry said, “Okay. We’ll go. But tomorrow. We’ll camp here tonight, and maybe we’ll have a dream… something…”
   “No dreams,” Stu said gently. “No signs. It doesn’t work like that. You’d stay one night and there’d be nothing and then you’d want to stay another night, and another night… you got to go right now.”
   Larry walked away from them, head down, and stood with his back turned. “All right,” he said at last in a voice almost too low to hear. “We’ll do it your way. God help our souls.”
   Ralph came over to Stu and knelt down. “Can we get you anything, Stu?”
   Stu smiled. “Yeah. Everything Gore Vidal ever wrote—those books about Lincoln and Aaron Burr and those guys. I always meant to read the suckers. Now it looks like I got the chance.”
   Ralph grinned crookedly. “Sorry, Stu. Looks like I’m tapped.”
   Stu squeezed his arm, and Ralph went away. Glen came over. He had also been crying, and when he sat down by Stu, he started leaking again.
   “Come on, ya baby,” Stu said. “I’ll be okay.”
   “Larry’s right. This is bad. Like something you’d do to a horse.”
   “You know it has to be done.”
   “I guess I do, but who really knows? How’s that leg?”
   “No pain at all, right now.”
   “Okay, you got the pills.” Glen swiped his arm across his eyes. “Goodbye, East Texas. It’s been pretty goddam good to know you.”
   Stu turned his head aside. “Don’t say goodbye, Glen. Make it so long, it’s better luck. You’ll probably get halfway up that frigging bank and fall down here and we can spend the winter playing cribbage.”
   “It’s not so long,” Glen said. “I feel that, don’t you?”
   And because he did, Stu turned his face back to look at Glen. “Yeah, I do,” he said, and then smiled a little. “But I will fear no evil, right?”
   “Right!” Glen said. His voice dropped to a husky whisper. “Pull the plug if you have to, Stuart. Don’t screw around.”
   “No.”
   “Goodbye, then.”
   “Goodbye, Glen.”
   The three of them drew together on the west side of the gully, and after a look back over his shoulder, Glen started to go up. Stu followed his progress up the side with growing alarm. He was moving casually, almost carelessly; hardly even glancing at his footing. The ground crumbled away beneath him once, then twice. Both times he grabbed nonchalantly for a handhold, and both times one just happened to be there. When he reached the top, Stu released his pent-up breath in a long, harsh sigh.
   Ralph went next, and when he reached the top, Stu called Larry over one last time. He looked up into Larry’s face and reflected that in its way it was remarkably like the late Harold Lauder’s—remarkably still, the eyes watchful and a little wary. A face that gave away nothing but what it wanted to give away.
   “You’re in charge now,” Stu said. “Can you handle it?”
   “I don’t know. I’ll try.”
   “You’ll be making the decisions.”
   “Will I? Looks like my first one was overruled.” Now his eyes did give away an emotion: reproach.
   “Yeah, but that’s the only one that will be. Listen—his men are going to grab you.”
   “Yeah. I figure they will. They’ll either grab us or shoot us from ambush like we were dogs.”
   “No, I think they’ll grab you and take you to him. It’ll happen in the next few days, I think. When you get to Vegas, keep your eyes open. Wait. It’ll come.”
   “What, Stu? What’ll come?”
   “I don’t know. Whatever we were sent for. Be ready. Know it when it comes.”
   “We’ll be back for you, if we can. You know it.”
   “Yeah, okay.”
   Larry went up the bank quickly and joined the other two. They stood and waved down. Stu raised his hand in return. They left. And they never saw Stu Redman again.

Chapter 73
   The three of them camped sixteen miles west of the place where they had left Stu. They had come to another washout, this one minor. The real reason they had made such poor mileage was because some of the heart seemed to have gone out of them. It was hard to tell if it was going to come back. Their feet seemed to weigh more. There was little conversation. Not one of them wanted to look into the face of another, for fear of seeing his own guilt mirrored there.
   They camped at dark and built a scrub fire. There was water, but no food. Glen tamped the last of his tobacco into his pipe, and wondered suddenly if Stu had any cigarettes. The thought spoiled his own taste for tobacco, and he knocked his pipe out on a rock, absently kicking away the last of his Borkum Riff. When an owl hooted somewhere out in the darkness a few minutes later, he looked around.
   “Say, where’s Kojak?” he asked.
   “Now, that’s kinda funny, ain’t it?” Ralph said. “I can’t remember seeing him the last couple of hours at all.”
   Glen got to his feet. “Kojak!” he yelled. “Hey, Kojak! Kojak! ” His voice echoed lonesomely away into the wastes. There was no answering bark. He sat down again, overcome with gloom. A soft sighing noise escaped him. Kojak had followed him almost all the way across the continent. Now he was gone. It was like a terrible omen.
   “You s’pose something got him?” Ralph asked softly.
   Larry said in a quiet, thoughtful voice: “Maybe he stayed with Stu.”
   Glen looked up, startled. “Maybe,” he said, considering it. “Maybe that’s what happened.”
   Larry tossed a pebble from one hand to the other, back and forth, back and forth. “He said maybe God would send a raven to feed him. I doubt if there’s any out here, so maybe He sent a dog instead.”
   The fire made a popping sound, sending a column of sparks up into the darkness to whirl in brief brightness and then to wink out.
   When Stu saw the dark shape come slinking down the gully toward him, he pulled himself up against the nearby boulder, leg sticking out stiffly in front of him, and found a good-sized stone with one numb hand. He was chilled to the bone. Larry had been right. Two or three days of lying around in these temperatures was going to kill him quite efficiently. Except now it looked like whatever this was would get him first. Kojak had remained with him until sunset and then had left him, scrambling easily out of the gully. Stu had not called him back. The dog would find his way back to Glen and go on with them. Perhaps he had his own part to play. But now he wished that Kojak had stayed a little longer. The pills were one thing, but he had no wish to be ripped to pieces by one of the dark man’s wolves.
   He gripped the rock harder and the dark shape paused about twenty yards up the cut. Then it started coming again, a blacker shadow in the night.
   “Come on, then,” Stu said hoarsely.
   The black shadow wagged its tail and came. “Kojak? ”
   It was. And there was something in his mouth, something he dropped at Stu’s feet. He sat down, tail thumping, waiting to be complimented.
   “Good dog,” Stu said in amazement. “Good dog!”
   Kojak had brought him a rabbit.
   Stu pulled out his pocket knife, opened it, and disemboweled the rabbit in three quick movements. He picked up the steaming guts and tossed them to Kojak. “Want these?” Kojak did. Stu skinned the rabbit. The thought of eating it raw didn’t do much for his stomach.
   “Wood?” he said to Kojak without much hope. There were scattered branches and hunks of tree all along the banks of the gully, dropped by the flash flood, but nothing within reach.
   Kojak wagged his tail and didn’t move.
   “Fetch? F—”
   But Kojak was gone. He whirled, streaked to the east side of the gully, and ran back with a large piece of deadwood in his jaws. He dropped it beside Stu, and barked. His tail wagged rapidly.
   “Good dog,” Stu said again. “I’ll be a sonofabitch! Fetch, Kojak!”
   Barking with joy, Kojak went again. In twenty minutes, he had brought back enough wood for a large fire. Stu carefully stripped enough splinters to make kindling. He checked the match situation and saw that he had a book and a half. He got the kindling going on the second match and fed the fire carefully. Soon there was a respectable blaze going and Stu got as close to it as he could, sitting in his sleeping bag. Kojak lay down on the far side of the fire with his nose on his paws.
   When the fire had burned down a little, Stu spitted the rabbit and cooked it. The smell was soon strong enough and savory enough to have his stomach rumbling. Kojak came to attention and sat watching the rabbit with close interest.
   “Half for you and half for me, big guy, okay?”
   Fifteen minutes later he pulled the rabbit off the fire and managed to rip it in half without burning his fingers too badly. The meat was burned in places, half-raw in others, but it put the canned ham from Great Western Markets in the shade. He and Kojak gulped it down… and as they were finishing, a bone-chilling howl drifted down the wash.
   “Christ! ” Stu said around a mouthful of rabbit.
   Kojak was on his feet, hackles up, growling. He advanced stiff-legged around the fire and growled again. Whatever had howled fell silent.
   Stu lay down, the hand-sized stone by one hand and his opened pocket knife by the other. The stars were cold and high and indifferent. His thoughts turned to Fran and he turned them away just as quickly. That hurt too much, full belly or not. I won’t sleep, he thought. Not for a long time.
   But he did sleep, with the help of one of Glen’s pills. And when the coals of the fire had burned down to embers, Kojak came over and slept next to him, giving Stu his heat. And that was how, on the first night after the party was broken, Stu ate when the others went hungry, and slept easy while their sleep was broken by bad dreams and an uneasy feeling of rapidly approaching doom.
   On the twenty-fourth, Larry Underwood’s group of three pilgrims made thirty miles and camped northeast of the San Rafael Knob. That night the temperature slid down into the mid-twenties, and they built a large fire and slept dose by it. Kojak had not rejoined them.
   “What do you think Stu’s doing tonight?” Ralph asked Larry.
   “Dying,” Larry said shortly, and was sorry when he saw the wince of pain on Ralph’s homely, honest face, but he didn’t know how to redeem what he had said. And after all, it was almost surely true.
   He lay down again, feeling strangely certain that it was tomorrow. Whatever they were coming to, they were almost there.
   Bad dreams that night. He was on tour with an outfit called the Shady Blues Connection in the one he remembered most clearly on waking. They were booked into Madison Square Garden, and the place was sold out. They took the stage to thunderous applause. Larry went to adjust his mike, bring it down to proper height, and couldn’t budge it. He went to the lead guitarist’s mike, but that one was frozen, too. Bass guitarist, organist, same thing. Booing and rhythmic clapping began to come from the crowd. One by one, the members of the Shady Blues Connection slunk off the stage, grinning furtively into high psychedelic shirt-collars like the ones the Byrds used to wear back in 1966, when Roger McGuinn was still eight miles high. Or eight hundred. And still Larry wandered from mike to mike, trying to find at least one he could adjust. But they were all at least nine feet tall and frozen solid. They looked like stainless steel cobras. Someone in the crowd began to yell for “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” I don’t do that number anymore, he tried to say. I stopped doing that one when the world ended. They couldn’t hear him, and a chant began to arise, starting in the back rows, then sweeping the Garden, gaining strength and volume: “Baby Can You Dig Your Man! Baby Can You Dig Your Man! BABY CAN YOU DIG YOUR MAN! ”
   He awoke with the chant in his ears. Sweat had popped out all over his body.
   He didn’t need Glen to tell him what kind of dream that had been, or what it meant. The dream where you can’t reach the mikes, can’t adjust them, is a common one for rock musicians, just as common as dreaming that you’re on stage and can’t remember a single lyric. Larry guessed that all performers had a variation on one of those before—
   Before a performance.
   It was an inadequacy dream. It expressed that one simple overriding fear: What if you can’t? What if you want to, but you can’t? The terror of being unable to make the simple leap of faith which is the place where any artist—singer, writer, painter, musician—begins.
   Make it nice for the people, Larry.
   Whose voice was that? His mother’s?
   You’re a taker, Larry.
   No, Mom—no I’m not. I don’t do that number anymore. I stopped doing that one when the world ended. Honest.
   He lay back down and drifted off to sleep again. His last thought was that Stu had been right: The dark man was going to grab them. Tomorrow, he thought. Whatever we’re coming to, we’re almost there.
   But they saw no one on the twenty-fifth. The three of them walked stolidly along under the bright blue skies, and they saw birds and beasts in plenty, but no people.
   “It’s amazing how rapidly the wildlife is coming back,” Glen said. “I knew it would be a fairly rapid process, and of course the winter is going to prune it back some, but this is still amazing. It’s only been about a hundred days since the first outbreaks.”
   “Yeah, but there’s no dogs or horses,” Ralph said. “That just doesn’t seem right, you know it? They invented a bug that killed pretty near all the people, but that wasn’t enough. It had to take out his two favorite animals, too. It took man and man’s best friends.”
   “And left the cats,” Larry said morosely.
   Ralph brightened. “Well, there’s Kojak—”
   “There was Kojak.”
   That killed the conversation. The buttes frowned down at them, hiding places for dozens of men with rifles and scopes. Larry’s premonition that it was to be today hadn’t left him. Each time they topped a rise, he expected to see the road blocked below them. And each time it wasn’t, he thought about ambush.
   They talked about horses. About dogs and buffalo. The buffalo were coming back, Ralph told them—Nick and Tom Cullen had seen them. The day was not so far off—in their lifetimes, maybe—when the buffalo might darken the plains again.
   Larry knew it was the truth, but he also knew it was bushwa—their lifetimes might amount to no more than another ten minutes.
   Then it was nearly dark, and time to look for a place to camp. They came to the top of one final rise and Larry thought: Now. They’ll be right down there.
   But there was no one.
   They camped near a green reflectorized sign that said LAS VEGAS 260. They had eaten comparatively well that day: taco chips, soda, and two Slim Jims that they shared out equally.
   Tomorrow, Larry thought again, and slept. That night he dreamed that he and Barry Greig and the Tattered Remnants were playing at the Garden. It was their big chance—they were opening for some supergroup that was named after a city. Boston, or maybe Chicago. And all the microphone stands were at least nine feet tall again and he began to stumble from one to the other again as the audience began to clap rhythmically and call for “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” again.
   He looked down in the first row and felt a slapping dash of cold icewater fear. Charles Manson was there, the x on his forehead healed to a white, twisted scar, clapping and chanting. And Richard Speck was there, looking up at Larry with cocky, impudent eyes, an unfiltered cigarette jittering between his lips. They were flanking the dark man. John Wayne Gacy was behind them. Flagg was leading the chant.
   Tomorrow, Larry thought again, stumbling from one too-tall mike to the next under the hot dreamlights of Madison Square Garden. I’ll see you tomorrow.
   But it was not the next day, or the day after that. On the evening of September 27 they camped in the town of Freemont Junction, and there was plenty to eat.
   “I keep expecting it to be over,” Larry told Glen that evening. “And every day that it’s not, it gets worse.”
   Glen nodded. “I feel the same way. It would be funny if he was just a mirage, wouldn’t it? Nothing but a bad dream in our collective consciousness.”
   Larry looked at him with momentary surprised consideration. Then he shook his head slowly. “No. I don’t think it’s just a dream.”
   Glen smiled. “Nor do I, young man. Nor do I.”
   They made contact the following day.
   At just past ten in the morning, they topped a rise and below them and to the west, five miles away, two cars were parked nose-to-nose, blocking the highway. It all looked exactly as Larry had thought it would.
   “Accident?” Glen asked.
   Ralph was shading his eyes. “I don’t think so. Not parked that way.”
   “His men,” Larry said.
   “Yeah, I think so,” Ralph agreed. “What do we do now, Larry?”
   Larry took his bandanna out of his back pocket and wiped his face with it. Today either summer had come back or they were starting to feel the southwestern desert. The temperature was in the low eighties.
   But it’s a dry heat, he thought calmly. I’m only sweating a little. Just a little. He stuffed the bandanna back into his pocket. Now that it was actually on, he felt all right. Again there was that queer feeling that it was a performance, a show to be played.
   “We go down and see if God really is with us. Right, Glen?”
   “You’re the boss.”
   They started to walk again. Half an hour brought them close enough to see that the nose-to-nose cars had once belonged to the Utah State Patrol. There were several armed men waiting for them.
   “Are they going to shoot us?” Ralph asked conversationally.
   “I don’t know,” Larry said.
   “Because some of the rifles are wowsers. Scope-equipped. I can see the sun ticking off the lenses. If they want to knock us down, we’ll be in range anytime.”
   They kept walking. The men at the roadblock split into two groups, about five men in front, guns aimed at the party of three walking toward them, and three more crouched behind the cars.
   “Eight of them, Larry?” Glen asked.
   “I make it eight, yeah. How are you doing, anyhow?”
   “I’m okay,” Glen said.
   “Ralph?”
   “Just as long as we know what to do when the time comes,” Ralph said. “That’s all I want.”
   Larry gripped his hand for a moment and squeezed it. Then he took Glen’s and did likewise.
   They were less than a mile from the cruisers now. “They’re not going to shoot us outright,” Ralph said. “They would have done it already.”
   Now they could discern faces, and Larry searched them curiously. One was heavily bearded. Another was young but mostly bald—must have been a bummer for him to start losing his hair while he was still in school, Larry thought. Another was wearing a bright yellow tank top with a picture of a grinning camel on it, and below the camel the word SUPERHUMP in scrolled, old-fashioned letters. Another of them had the look of an accountant. He was fiddling with a .357 Magnum, and he looked three times as nervous as Larry felt; he looked like a man who was going to blow off one of his own feet if he didn’t settle down.
   “They don’t look no different from our guys,” Ralph said.
   “Sure they do,” Glen answered. “They’re all packing iron.”
   They approached to within twenty feet of the police cars blocking the road. Larry stopped, and the others stopped with him. There was a dead moment of silence as Flagg’s men and Larry’s band of pilgrims looked each other over. Then Larry Underwood said mildly: “How-do.”
   The little man who looked like a CPA stepped forward. He was still twiddling with the Magnum. “Are you Glendon Bateman, Lawson Underwood, Stuart Redman, and, Ralph Brentner?”
   “Say, you dummy,” Ralph said, “can’t you count?”
   Someone snickered. The CPA type flushed. “Who’s missing?”
   Larry said, “Stu met with an accident on the way here. And I do believe you’re going to have one yourself if you don’t stop fooling with that gun.”
   There were more snickers. The CPA managed to tuck the pistol into the waistband of his gray slacks, which made him look more ridiculous than ever; a Walter Mitty outlaw daydream.
   “My name is Paul Burlson,” he said, “and by virtue of the power vested in me, I arrest you and order you to come with me.”
   “In whose name?” Glen said immediately.
   Burlson looked at him with contempt… but the contempt was mixed with something else. “You know who I speak for.”
   “Then say it.”
   But Burlson was silent.
   “Are you afraid?” Glen asked him. He looked at all eight of them. “Are you so afraid of him you don’t dare speak his name? Very well, I’ll say it for you. His name is Randall Flagg, also known as the dark man, also known as the tall man, also known as the Walkin Dude. Don’t some of you call him that?” His voice had climbed to the high, clear octaves of fury. Some of the men looked uneasily at each other and Burlson fell back a step. “Call him Beelzebub, because that’s his name, too. Call him Nyarlahotep and Ahaz and Astaroth. Call him R’yelah and Seti and Anubis. His name is legion and he’s an apostate of hell and you men kiss his ass.” His voice dropped to a conversational pitch again; he smiled disarmingly. “Just thought we ought to have that out front.”
   “Grab them,” Burlson said. “Grab them all and shoot the first one that moves.”
   For one strange second no one moved at all and Larry thought: They’re not going to do it, they’re as afraid of us as we are of them, more afraid, even though they have guns —
   He looked at Burlson and said, “Who are you kidding, you little scumbucket? We want to go. That’s why we came.”
   Then they moved, almost as though it was Larry who had ordered them. He and Ralph were bundled into the back of one cruiser, Glen into the back of the other. They were behind a steel mesh grill. There were no inside doorhandles.
   We’re arrested, Larry thought. He found that the idea amused him.
   Four men smashed into the front seat. The cruiser backed up, turned around, and began to head west. Ralph sighed.
   “Scared?” Larry asked him in a low voice.
   “I’ll be frigged if I know. It feels so-good to be off m’dogs, I can’t tell.”
   One of the men in front said: “The old man with the big mouth. He in charge?”
   “No. I am.”
   “What’s your name?”
   “Larry Underwood. This is Ralph Brentner. The other guy is Glen Bateman.” He looked out the back window. The other cruiser was behind them.
   “What happened to the fourth guy?”
   “He broke his leg. We had to leave him.”
   “Tough go, all right. I’m Barry Dorgan. Vegas security.”
   Larry felt an absurd response, Pleased to meet you, rise to his lips and had to smile a little. “How long a drive is it to Las Vegas?”
   “Well, we can’t whistle along too fast because of the stalls in the road. We’re clearing them out from the city, but it’s slow going. We’ll be there in about five hours.”
   “Isn’t that something,” Ralph said, shaking his head. “We’ve been on the road three weeks, and just five hours in a car takes you there.”
   Dorgan squirmed around until he could look at them. “I don’t understand why you were walking. For that matter I don’t understand why you came at all. You must have known it would end like this.”
   “We were sent,” Larry said. “To kill Flagg, I think.”
   “Not much chance of that, buddy. You and your friends are going right into the Las Vegas County Jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. He’s got a special interest in you. He knew you were coming.” He paused. “You just want to hope he makes it quick for you. But I don’t think he will. He hasn’t been in a very good mood lately.”
   “Why not?” Larry asked.
   But Dorgan seemed to feel he had said enough—too much, maybe. He turned around without answering, and Larry and Ralph watched the desert flow by. In just three weeks, speed had become a novelty all over again.
   It actually took them six hours to reach Vegas. It lay in the middle of the desert like some improbable gem. There were a lot of people on the streets; the workday was over, and they were enjoying the early evening cool on lawns and benches and at bus stops, or sitting in the doorways of defunct wedding chapels and hockshops. They rubber-necked the Utah S.P. cars as they went by and then went back to whatever they had been talking about.
   Larry was looking around thoughtfully. The electricity was on, the streets were cleared, and the rubble of looting was gone. “Glen was right,” he said. “He’s got the trains running on time. But still I wonder if this is any way to run a railroad. Your people all look like they’ve got the nervous complaint, Dorgan.”
   Dorgan didn’t reply.
   They arrived at the county jail and drove around to the rear. The two police cars parked in a cement courtyard. When Larry got out, wincing at the stiffness that had settled into his muscles, he saw that Dorgan had two sets of handcuffs.
   “Hey, come on,” he said. “Really.”
   “Sorry. His orders.”
   Ralph said, “I ain’t never been handcuffed in my life. I was picked up and throwed in the drunk tank a couple of times before I was married, but never was I cuffed.” Ralph was speaking slowly, his Oklahoma accent becoming more pronounced, and Larry realized he was totally furious.
   “I have my orders,” Dorgan said. “Don’t make it any tougher than it has to be.”
   “Your orders,” Ralph said. “I know who gives your orders. He murdered my friend Nick. What are you doing hooked up with that hellhound? You seem like a nice enough fella when you’re by yourself.” He was looking at Dorgan with such an expression of angry interrogation that Dorgan shook his head and looked away.
   “This is my job,” he said, “and I do it. End of story. Put your wrists out or I’ll have somebody do it for you.”
   Larry put his hands out and Dorgan cuffed him. “What were you?” Larry asked curiously. “Before?”
   “Santa Monica Police. Detective second.”
   “And you’re with him. It’s… forgive me for saying so, but it’s really sort of funny.”
   Glen Bateman was pushed over to join them.
   “What are you shoving him around for?” Dorgan asked angrily.
   “If you had to listen to six hours of this guy’s bullshit, you’d do some pushing, too,” one of the men said.
   “I don’t care how much bullshit you had to listen to, keep your hands to yourself.” Dorgan looked at Larry. “Why is it funny that I should be with him? I was a cop for ten years before Captain Trips. I saw what happens when guys like you are in charge, you see.”
   “Young man,” Glen said mildly, “your experiences with a few battered babies and drug abusers does not justify your embrace of a monster.”
   “Get them out of here,” Dorgan said evenly. “Separate cells, separate wings.”
   “I don’t think you’ll be able to live with your choice, young man,” Glen said. “There doesn’t seem to be quite enough Nazi in you.”
   This time Dorgan pushed Glen himself.
   Larry was separated from the other two and taken down an empty corridor graced with signs reading NO SPITTING, THIS WAY TO SHOWERS & DELOUSING, and one that read, YOU ARE NOT A GUEST.
   “I wouldn’t mind a shower,” he said.
   “Maybe,” Dorgan said. “We’ll see.”
   “See what?”
   “How cooperative you can be.”
   Dorgan opened a cell at the end of the corridor and ushered Larry in.
   “How about the bracelets?” Larry asked, holding them out.
   “Sure.” Dorgan unlocked them and took them off. “Better?”
   “Much.”
   “Still want that shower?”
   “I sure do.” More than that, Larry didn’t want to be left alone, listening to the echoey sound of footfalls going away. If he was left alone, the fear would start to come back.
   Dorgan produced a small notebook. “How many are you? In the Zone?”
   “Six thousand,” Larry said. “We all play Bingo every Thursday night and the prize in the cover-all game is a twenty-pound turkey.”
   “Do you want that shower or not?”
   “I want it.” But he no longer thought he was going to get it.
   “How many of you over there?”
   “Twenty-five thousand, but four thousand are under twelve and get in free at the drive-in. Economically speaking, it’s a bummer.”
   Dorgan snapped his notebook shut and looked at him.
   “I can’t, man,” Larry said. “Put yourself in my place.”
   Dorgan shook his head. “I can’t do that, because I’m not nuts. Why are you guys here? What good do you think it’s going to do you? He’s going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day. And if he wants you to talk, you will. If he wants you to tapdance and jerk off at the same time, you’ll do that, too. You must be crazy.”
   “We were told to come by the old woman. Mother Abagail. Probably you dreamed about her.”
   Dorgan shook his head, but suddenly his eyes wouldn’t meet Larry’s. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
   “Then let’s leave it at that.”
   “Sure you don’t want to talk to me? Get that shower?”
   Larry laughed. “I don’t work that cheap. Send your own spy over to our side. If you can find one that doesn’t look like a weasel the second Mother Abagail’s name gets mentioned, that is.”
   “Any way you want it,” Dorgan said. He walked back down the hallway under the mesh-enclosed lights. At the far end he stepped past a steel-barred gate that rolled shut behind him with a hollow crash.
   Larry looked around. Like Ralph, he had been in jail on a couple of occasions—public intoxication once, possession of an ounce of marijuana on another. Flaming youth.
   “It’s not the Ritz,” he muttered.
   The mattress on the bunk looked decidedly moldy, and he wondered a little morbidly if someone had died on it back in June or early July. The toilet worked but filled with rusty water the first time he flushed it, a reliable sign that it hadn’t been used for a long time. Someone had left a paperback Western. Larry picked it up and then put it down again. He sat on the bunk and listened to the silence. He had always hated to be alone—but in a way, he always had been… until he had arrived in the Free Zone. And now it wasn’t so bad as he had been afraid it would be. Bad enough, but he could cope.
   He’s going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day.
   Except Larry didn’t believe it. It just wasn’t going to happen that way.
   “I will fear no evil,” he said into the dead silence of the cellblock wing, and he liked the way it sounded. He said it again.
   He lay down, and the thought occurred that he had finally made it most of the way back to the West Coast. But the trip had been longer and stranger than anyone ever could have imagined. And the trip wasn’t quite over yet.
   “I will fear no evil,” he said again. He fell asleep, his face calm, and he slept in dreamless peace.
   At ten o’clock the next day, twenty-four hours after they had first seen the roadblock in the distance, Randall Flagg and Lloyd Henreid came to see Glen Bateman.
   He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his cell. He had found a piece of charcoal under his bunk, and had just finished writing this legend on the wall amid the intaglio of male and female genitals, names, phone numbers, and obscene little poems: I am not the potter, not the potter’s wheel, but the potter’s clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the Master’s skill? Glen was admiring this proverb—or was it an aphorism?—when the temperature in the deserted cellblock suddenly seemed to drop ten degrees. The door at the end of the corridor rumbled open. The saliva in Glen’s mouth was suddenly all gone, and the charcoal snapped between his fingers.
   Bootheels clocked up the hallway toward him.
   Other footfalls, smaller and insignificant, pattered along in counterpoint, trying to keep up.
   Why, it’s him. I’m going to see his face.
   Suddenly his arthritis was worse. Terrible, in fact. It seemed that his bones had suddenly been hollowed out and filled with ground glass. And still, he turned with an interested, expectant smile on his face as the bootheels stopped in front of his cell.
   “Well, there you are,” Glen said. “And you’re not half the boogeyman we thought you must be.”
   Standing on the other side of the bars were two men. Flagg was on Glen’s right. He was wearing bluejeans and a white silk shirt that gleamed mellowly in the dim lights. He was grinning in at Glen. Behind him was a shorter man who was not smiling at all. He had an undershot chin and eyes that seemed too big for his face. His complexion was one that the desert climate was never going to be kind to; he had burned, peeled, and burned again. Around his neck he wore a black stone flawed with red. It had a greasy, resinous look.
   “I’d like you to meet my associate,” Flagg said with a giggle. “Lloyd Henreid, meet Glen Bateman, sociologist, Free Zone Committee member, and single existing member of the Free Zone think tank now that Nick Andros is dead.”
   “Meetcha,” Lloyd mumbled.
   “How’s your arthritis, Glen?” Flagg asked. His tone was commiserating, but his eyes sparkled with high glee and secret knowledge.
   Glen opened and closed his hands rapidly, smiling back at Flagg. No one would ever know what an effort it took to maintain that gentle smile.
   The intrinsic worth of the clay!
   “Fine,” he said. “Much better for sleeping indoors, thank you.”
   Flagg’s smile faltered a bit. Glen caught just a glimpse of narrow surprise and anger. Of fear?
   “I’ve decided to let you go,” he said briskly. His smile sprang forth again, radiant and vulpine. Lloyd uttered a little gasp of surprise, and Flagg turned to him. “Haven’t I, Lloyd?”
   “Uh… sure,” Lloyd said. “Sure nuff.”
   “Well, fine,” Glen said easily. He could feel the arthritis sinking deeper and deeper into his joints, numbing them like ice, swelling them like fire.
   “You’ll be given a small motorbike and you may drive back at your leisure.”
   “Of course I couldn’t go without my friends.”
   “Of course not. And all you have to do is ask. Get down on your knees and ask me.”
   Glen laughed heartily. He threw back his head and laughed long and hard. And as he laughed, the pain in his joints began to abate. He felt better, stronger, in control again.
   “Oh, you’re a card,” he said. “I tell you what you do. Why don’t you find a nice big sandpile, get yourself a hammer, and pound all that sand right up your ass?”
   Flagg’s face grew dark. The smile slipped away. His eyes, previously as dark as the jet stone Lloyd wore, now seemed to gleam yellowly. He reached out his hand to the locking mechanism on the door and wrapped his fingers around it. There was an electric buzzing sound. Fire leaped out between his fingers, and there was a hot smell in the air. The lockbox fell to the floor, smoking and black. Lloyd Henreid cried out. The dark man grabbed the bars and threw the cell door back on its track.
   “Stop laughing.”
   Glen laughed harder.
   “Stop laughing at me! ”
   “You’re nothing!” Glen said, wiping his streaming eyes and still chuckling. “Oh pardon me… it’s just that we were all so frightened… we made such a business out of you… I’m laughing as much at our own foolishness as at your regrettable lack of substance…”
   “Shoot him, Lloyd.” Flagg had turned to the other man. His face was working horribly. His hands were hooked into predator’s claws.
   “Oh, kill me yourself if you’re going to kill me,” Glen said. “Surely you’re capable. Touch me with your finger and stop my heart. Make the sign of the inverted cross and give me a massive brain embolism. Bring down the lightning from the overhead socket to cleave me in two. Oh… oh dear… oh dear me!”
   Glen collapsed onto the cell cot and rocked back and forth, consumed with delicious laughter.
   “Shoot him! ” the dark man roared at Lloyd.
   Pale, shaking with fear, Lloyd fumbled the pistol out of his belt, almost dropped it, then tried to point it at Glen. He had to use both hands.
   Glen looked at Lloyd, still smiling. He might have been at a faculty cocktail party back in the Brain Ghetto at Woodsville, New Hampshire, recovering from a good joke, now ready to turn the conversation back into more serious channels of reflection.
   “If you have to shoot somebody, Mr. Henreid, shoot him.”
   “Do it now, Lloyd.”
   Lloyd blindly pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a tremendous crash in the enclosed space. The echoes bounced furiously back and forth. But the bullet only chipped concrete two inches from Glen’s right shoulder, ricocheted, struck something else, and whined off again.
   “Can’t you do anything right?” Flagg roared. “Shoot him, you moron! Shoot him! He’s standing right in front of you!”
   “I’m trying—”
   Glen’s smile had not changed, and he had only flinched a little at the gunshot. “I repeat, if you must shoot somebody, shoot him. He’s really not human at all, you know. I once described him to a friend as the last magician of rational thought, Mr. Henreid. That was more correct than I knew. But he’s losing his magic now. It’s slipping away from him and he knows it. And you know it, too. Shoot him now and save us all God knows how much bloodshed and dying.”
   Flagg’s face had grown very still. “Shoot one of us, anyhow, Lloyd,” he said. “I got you out of jail when you were dying of starvation. It’s guys like this that you wanted to get back at. Little guys who talk big.”
   Lloyd said: “Mister, you don’t fool me. It’s like Randy Flagg says.”
   “But he lies. You know he lies.”
   “He told me more of the truth than anyone else bothered to in my whole lousy life,” Lloyd said, and shot Glen three times. Glen was driven backward, twisted and turned like a ragdoll. Blood flew in the dim air. He struck the cot, bounced, and rolled onto the floor. He managed to get up on one elbow.
   “It’s all right, Mr. Henreid,” he whispered. “You don’t know any better.”
   “Shut up, you mouthy old bastard! ” Lloyd screamed. He fired again and Glen Bateman’s face disappeared. He fired again and the body jumped lifelessly. Lloyd shot him yet again. He was crying. The tears rolled down his angry, sunburned cheeks. He was remembering the rabbit he had forgotten and left to eat its own paws. He was remembering Poke, and the people in the white Connie, and Gorgeous George. He was remembering the Phoenix jail, and the rat, and how he hadn’t been able to eat the ticking out of his mattress. He was remembering Trask, and how Trask’s leg had started to look like a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner after a while. He pulled the trigger again, but the pistol only uttered a sterile click.
   “All right,” Flagg said softly. “All right. Well done. Well done, Lloyd.”
   Lloyd dropped the gun on the floor and shrank away from Flagg. “Don’t you touch me!” he cried. “I didn’t do it for you!”
   “Yes, you did,” Flagg said tenderly. “You may not think so, but you did.” He reached out and fingered the jet stone around Lloyd’s neck. He closed his hand over it, and when he opened the hand again, the stone was gone. It had been replaced with a small silver key.
   “I promised you this, I think,” the dark man said. “In another jail. He was wrong… I keep my promises, don’t I, Lloyd?”
   “Yes.”
   “The others are leaving, or planning to leave. I know who they are. I know all the names. Whitney… Ken… Jenny… oh yes, I know all the names.”
   “Then why don’t you—”
   “Put a stop to it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to let them go. But you, Lloyd. You’re my good and faithful servant, aren’t you?”
   “Yeah,” Lloyd whispered. The final admission. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
   “Without me, the best you could have done was small shit, even if you had survived that jail. Correct?”
   “Yeah.”
   “The Lauder boy knew that. He knew I could make him bigger. Taller. That’s why he was coming to me. But he was too full of thoughts… too full of…” He looked suddenly perplexed and old. Then he waved his hand impatiently, and the smile bloomed on his face again. “Perhaps it is going bad, Lloyd. Perhaps it is, for some reason not even I can understand… but the old magician has a few tricks left in him yet, Lloyd. One or two. Now listen to me. Time is short if we want to stop this… this crisis in confidence. If we want to nip it in the bud, as it were. We’ll want to finish things tomorrow with Underwood and Brentner. Now listen to me very carefully…”
   Lloyd didn’t get to bed until past midnight, and got no sleep until the small hours of the morning. He talked to the Rat-Man. He talked to Paul Burlson. To Barry Dorgan, who agreed that what the dark man wanted could—and probably should—be done before daylight. Construction began on the front lawn of the MGM Grand around 10 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, a work party of ten men with welding arcs and hammers and bolts and a good supply of long steel pipes. They were assembling the pipes on two flatbed trucks in front of the fountain. The welding arcs soon drew a crowd.
   “Look, Angie-mom!” Dinny cried. “It’s a fireworks show!”
   “Yes, but it’s time for all good little boys to be in bed.” Angie Hirschfield drew the boy away with a secret fear in her heart, feeling that something bad, something perhaps as evil as the superflu itself, was in the making.
   “Wanna see! Wanna see the sparks!” Dinny wailed, but she drew him quickly and firmly away.
   Julie Lawry approached the Rat-Man, the only fellow in Vegas she considered too creepy to sleep with… except maybe in a pinch. His black skin glimmered in the blue-white glare of the welding arcs. He was tricked out like an Ethiopian pirate—wide silk trousers, a red sash, and a necklace of silver dollars around his scrawny neck.
   “What is it, Ratty?” she asked.
   “The Rat-Man don’t know, dear, but the Rat-Man got hisself an idea. Yes indeedy he does. It looks like black work tomorrow, very black. Like to slip away for a quick one with Ratty, my dear?”
   “Maybe,” Julie said, “but only if you know what all of this is about.”
   “Tomorrow all of Vegas gonna know,” Ratty said. “You bet your sweet and delectable little sugarbuns on that. Come along with the Rat-Man, dear, and he show you the nine thousand names of God.”
   But Julie, much to the Rat-Man’s displeasure, had slipped away.
   By the time Lloyd finally went to sleep, the work was done and the crowd had drifted away. Two large cages stood on the back of the two flatbeds. There were squarish holes in the right and left sides of each. Parked close by were four cars, each with a trailer hitch. Attached to each hitch was a heavy steel towing chain. The chains snaked across the lawn of the Grand, and each ended just inside the squarish holes in the cages.
   At the end of each chain there dangled a single steel handcuff.
   At dawn on the morning of September 30, Larry heard the door at the far end of the cellblock slide back. Footsteps came rapidly down the corridor. Larry was lying on his cot, hands laced at the back of his head. He had not slept the night before. He had been
   (thinking? praying?)
   It was all the same thing. Whichever it had been, the old wound in himself had finally closed, leaving him at peace. He had felt the two people that he had been all his life—the real one and the ideal one—merge into one living being. His mother would have liked this Larry. And Rita Blakemoor. It was a Larry to whom Wayne Stukey never would have had to tell the facts. It was a Larry that even that long-ago oral hygienist might have liked.
   I’m going to die. If there’s a God—and now I believe there must be—that’s His will. We’re going to die and somehow all of this will end as a result of our dying.
   He suspected that Glen Bateman had already died. There had been shooting in one of the other wings the day before, a lot of shooting. It was in the direction that Glen had been taken rather than Ralph. Well, he had been old, his arthritis had been paining him, and whatever Flagg had planned for them this morning was apt to be very unpleasant.
   The footsteps reached his cell.
   “Get up, Wonder Bread,” a gleeful voice called in. “The Rat-Man has come for yo pale gray ass.”
   Larry looked around. A grinning black pirate with a chain of silver dollars around his neck stood at the cell door, a drawn sword in one hand. Behind him stood the bespectacled CPA type. Burlson, his name was.
   “What is it?” Larry asked.
   “Dear man,” the pirate said, “it is the end. The very end.”
   “All right,” Larry said, and got up.
   Burlson spoke quickly, and Larry saw that he was scared. “I want you to know that this is not my idea.”
   “Nothing around here is, as far as I can see,” Larry said. “Who was killed yesterday?”
   “Bateman,” Burlson said, dropping his eyes. “Trying to escape.”
   “Trying to escape,” Larry murmured. He began to laugh. Rat-Man joined him, mocked him. They laughed together.
   The cell door opened. Burlson stepped forward with the cuffs. Larry offered no resistance; only put out his wrists. Burlson attached the bracelets.
   “Trying to escape,” Larry said. “One of these days you’ll be shot trying to escape, Burlson.” His eyes flicked toward the pirate. “You too, Ratty. Just shot trying to escape.” He began to laugh again, and this time Rat-Man didn’t join him. He looked at Larry sullenly and then began to raise his sword.
   “Put that down, you ass,” Burlson said.
   They made a line of three going out—Burlson, Larry, and the Rat-Man bringing up the rear. When they stepped through the door at the end of the wing, they were joined by another five men. One of them was Ralph, also cuffed.
   “Hey, Larry,” Ralph said sorrowfully. “Did you hear? Did they tell you?”
   “Yes. I heard.”
   “Bastards. It’s almost over for them, isn’t it?”
   “Yes. It is.”
   “You shut up that talk!” one of them growled. “It’s you it’s almost over for. You wait and see what he’s got waiting for you. It’s gonna be quite a party.”
   “No, it’s over,” Ralph insisted. “Don’t you know it? Can’t you feel it?”
   Ratty pushed Ralph, making him stumble. “Shut up!” he cried. “Rat-Man don’t want to hear no more of that honky bullshit voodoo! No more!”
   “You’re awful pale, Ratty,” Larry said, grinning. “Awful pale. You’re the one who looks like graymeat now.”
   Rat-Man brandished his sword again, but there was no menace in it. He looked frightened; they all did. There was a feeling in the air, a sense that they had all entered the shadow of some great and onrushing thing.
   An olive-drab van with LAS VEGAS COUNTY JAIL on the side stood in the sunny courtyard. Larry and Ralph were pushed in. The doors slammed, the engine started, and they drew away. They sat down on the hard wooden benches, cuffed hands between their knees.
   Ralph said in a low voice, “I heard one of them saying everybody in Vegas was gonna be there. You think they’re gonna crucify us, Larry?”
   “That or something like it.” He looked at the big man. Ralph’s sweat-stained hat was crammed down on his head. The feather was frayed and matted, but it still stuck up defiantly from the band. “You scared, Ralph?”
   “Scared bad,” Ralph whispered. “Me, I’m a baby about pain. I never even liked going to the doctor’s for a shot. I’d find an excuse to put it off, if I could. What about you?”
   “Plenty. Can you come over here and sit beside me?”
   Ralph got up, handcuff chains clinking, and sat beside Larry. They sat quietly for a few moments and then Ralph said softly, “We’ve hoed us one helluva long row.”
   “That’s true.”
   “I just wish I knew what it was all for. All I can see is that he’s gonna make a show of us. So everyone will see he’s the big cheese. Is that what we came all this way for?”
   “I don’t know.”
   The van hummed on in silence. They sat on the bench without speaking, holding hands. Larry was scared, but beyond the scary feeling, the deeper sense of peace held, undisturbed. It was going to work out.
   “I will fear no evil,” he muttered, but he was afraid. He closed his eyes, thought of Lucy. He thought of his mother. Random thoughts. Getting up for school on cold mornings. The time he had thrown up in church. Finding a skin magazine in the gutter and looking at it with Rudy, both of them about nine years old. Watching the World Series his first fall in L.A. with Yvonne Wetterlin. He didn’t want to die, he was afraid to die, but he had made his peace with it as best he could. The choice, after all, had never been his to make, and he had come to believe that death was just a staging area, a place to wait, the way you waited in a green-room before going on to play.
   He rested as easily as he could, trying to make himself ready.
   The van stopped and the doors were thrown open. Bright sunlight poured in, making him and Ralph blink dazedly. Rat-Man and Burlson hopped inside. Pouring in with the sunlight was a sound—a low, rustling murmur that made Ralph cock his head warily. But Larry knew what that sound was.
   In 1986 the Tattered Remnants had played their biggest gig—opening for Van Halen at Chavez Ravine. And the sound just before they went on had been like this sound. And so when he stepped out of the van he knew what to expect, and his face didn’t change, although he heard Ralph’s thin gasp beside him.
   They were on the lawn of a huge hotel-casino. The entrance was flanked by two golden pyramids. Drawn up on the grass were two flatbed trucks. On each flatbed was a cage constructed of steel piping.
   Surrounding them were people.
   They spread out across the lawn in a rough circle. They were standing in the casino parking lot, on the steps leading up to the lobby doors, in the turnaround drive where incoming guests had once parked while the doorman whistled up a bellhop. They spilled out into the street itself. Some of the younger men had hoisted their girlfriends on their shoulders for a better look at the upcoming festivities. The low murmuring was the sound of the crowd-animal.
   Larry ran his eyes over them, and every eye he met turned away. Every face seemed pallid, distant, marked for death and seeming to know it. Yet they were here.
   He and Ralph were nudged toward the cages, and as they went, Larry noticed the cars with their chains and trailer hitches. But it was Ralph who understood the implication. He had, after all, spent most of his life working with and around machinery.
   “Larry,” he said in a dry voice. “They’re going to pull us to pieces!”
   “Go on, get in,” Rat-Man said, breathing a stale odor of garlic into his face. “Get on up there, Wonder Bread. You and your friend goan ride the tiger.”
   Larry climbed onto the flatbed.
   “Gimme your shirt, Wonder Bread.”
   Larry took off his shirt and stood barechested, the morning air cool and kind on his skin. Ralph had already taken off his. A ripple of conversation went through the crowd and died. They were both terribly thin from their walk; each rib was clearly visible.
   “Get in that cage, graymeat.”
   Larry backed into the cage.
   Now it was Barry Dorgan giving the orders. He went from place to place, checking arrangements, a set expression of disgust on his face.
   The four drivers got into the cars and started them up. Ralph stood blankly for a moment, then seized one of the welded handcuffs that dangled into his cage and threw it out through the small hole. It hit Paul Burlson on the head, and a nervous titter ran through the crowd.
   Dorgan said, “You don’t want to do that, fella. I’ll just have to send some guys to hold you.”
   “Let them do their thing,” Larry said to Ralph. He looked down at Dorgan. “Hey, Barry. Did they teach you this one in the Santa Monica P.D.?”
   Another laugh rippled through the crowd. “Police brutality!” some daring soul cried. Dorgan flushed but said nothing. He fed the chains farther into Larry’s cell and Larry spit on them, a little surprised that he had enough saliva to do it. A small cheer went up from the back of the crowd and Larry thought, Maybe this is it, maybe they’re going to rise up —
   But his heart didn’t believe it. Their faces were too pale, too secretive. The defiance from the back was meaningless. It was the sound of kids cutting up in a studyhall, no more than that. There was doubt here—he could feel it—and disaffection. But Flagg colored even that. These people would steal away in the dead of night for some of the great empty space that the world had become. And the Walkin Dude would let them go, knowing he only had to keep a hard core, people like Dorgan and Burlson. The runners and midnight creepers could be gathered up later, perchance to pay the price of their imperfect faith. There would be no open rebellion here.

Dorgan, Rat-Man, and a third man crowded their way into the cage with him. Rat-Man was holding the cuffs welded to the chains open for Larry’s wrists.
   “Put out your arms,” Dorgan said.
   “Isn’t law and order a wonderful thing, Barry?”
   “Put them out, goddammit!”
   “You don’t look well, Dorgan—how’s your heart these days?”
   “I’m telling you for the last time, my friend. Put your arms out through those holes!”
   Larry did it. The cuffs were slipped on and locked. Dorgan and the others backed out and the door was shut. Larry looked right and saw Ralph standing in his cage, head down, arms at his sides. His wrists had also been cuffed.
   “You people know this is wrong!” Larry cried, and his voice, trained by years of singing, rolled out of his chest with surprising strength. “I don’t expect you to stop it, but I do expect you to remember it! We’re being put to death because Randall Flagg is afraid of us! He’s afraid of us and the people we came from!” A rising murmur ran through the crowd. “Remember the way we die! And remember that next time it may be your turn to die this way, with no dignity, just an animal in a cage!”
   That low murmur again, rising and angry… and the silence.
   “Larry!” Ralph called out.
   Flagg was coming down the steps of the Grand, Lloyd Henreid beside him. Flagg was wearing jeans, a checked shirt, his jeans jacket with the two buttons on the breast pockets, and his rundown cowboy boots. In the sudden hush the sound of those bootheels clocking their way down the cement path was the only sound… a sound out of time.
   The dark man was grinning.
   Larry stared down at him. Flagg came to a halt between the two cages and stood looking up. His grin was darkly charming. He was a man completely in control, and Larry suddenly knew this was his watershed moment, the apotheosis of his life.
   Flagg turned away from them and faced his people. He passed his eyes over them, and no eye would meet his. “Lloyd,” he said quietly, and Lloyd, who looked pale, haunted, and sickly, handed Flagg a paper that had been rolled up like a scroll.
   The dark man unrolled it, held it up, and began to speak. His voice was deep, sonorous, and pleasing, spreading in the stillness like a single silver ripple on a black pond. “Know you that this is a true bill to which I, Randall Flagg, have put my name on this thirtieth day of September, the year nineteen hundred and ninety, now known as The Year One, year of the plague.”
   “Flagg’s not your name!” Ralph roared. There was a shocked murmur from the crowd. “Why don’t you tell em your real name?”
   Flagg took no notice.
   “Know you that these men, Lawson Underwood and Ralph Brentner, are spies, here in Las Vegas with no good intent but rather with seditious motives, who have entered this state with stealth, and under cover of darkness—”
   “That’s pretty good,” Larry said, “since we were coming down Route 70 in broad daylight.” He raised his voice to a shout. “They took us at noon on the Interstate, how’s that for stealth and under cover of darkness? ”
   Flagg bore through this patiently, as if he felt that Larry and Ralph had every right to answer the charges… not that it was going to make any ultimate difference.
   Now he continued: “Know you that the cohorts of these men were responsible for the sabotage bombing of the helicopters at Indian Springs, and therefore responsible for the deaths of Carl Hough, Bill Jamieson, and Cliff Benson. They are guilty of murder.”
   Larry’s eyes touched those of a man standing on the front rim of the crowd. Although Larry did not know it, this was Stan Bailey, Operations Chief at Indian Springs. He saw a haze of bewilderment and surprise cover the man’s face, and saw him mouthing something ridiculous that looked like Can Man.
   “Know you that the cohorts of these men have sent other spies among us and they have been killed. It is the sentence then that these men shall be put to death in an appropriate manner, to wit, that they shall be pulled apart. It is the duty and the responsibility of each of you to witness this punishment, so you may remember it and tell others what you have seen here today.”
   Flagg’s grin flashed out, meant to be solicitous in this instance, but still no more warm and human than a shark’s grin.
   “Those of you with children are excused.”
   He turned toward the cars, which were now idling, sending out small puffs of exhaust into the morning. As he did so, there was a commotion near the front of the crowd. Suddenly a man pushed through into the clearing. He was a big man, his face nearly as pallid as his cook’s whites. The dark man had handed the scroll back to Lloyd, and Lloyd’s hands jerked convulsively when Whitney Horgan pushed into the clear. There was a clear ripping sound as the scroll tore in half.
   “Hey, you people! ” Whitney cried.
   A confused murmur ran through the crowd. Whitney was shaking all over, as if with a palsy. His head kept jerking toward the dark man and then away again. Flagg regarded Whitney with a ferocious smile. Dorgan started toward the cook, and Flagg motioned him back.
   “This ain’t right! ” Whitney yelled. “You know it ain’t! ”
   Dead silence from the crowd. They might all have been turned to gravestones.
   Whitney’s throat worked convulsively. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a monkey on a stick.
   “We was Americans once!” Whitney cried at last. “This ain’t how Americans act. I wasn’t so much, I’ll tell you that, nothin but a cook, but I know this ain’t how Americans act, listening to some murderin freak in cowboy boots—”
   A horrified, rustling gasp came from these new Las Vegans. Larry and Ralph exchanged a puzzled glance.
   “That’s what he is!” Whitney insisted. The sweat was running down his face like tears from the brushy edges of his flattop haircut. “You wanna watch these two guys ripped in two right in front of you, huh? You think that’s the way to start a new life? You think a thing like that can ever be right? I tell you you’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of your lives! ”
   The crowd murmured its assent.
   “We got to stop this,” Whitney said. “You know it? We got to have time to think about what… what…”
   “Whitney.” That voice, smooth as silk, little more than a whisper, but enough to silence the cook’s faltering voice completely. He turned toward Flagg, lips moving soundlessly, his eye as fixed as a mackerel’s. Now the sweat was pouring down his face in torrents.
   “Whitney, you should have kept still.” His voice was soft, but still it carried easily to every ear. “I would have let you go… why would I want you?”
   Whitney’s lips moved, but still no sound came out.
   “Come here, Whitney.”
   “No,” Whitney whispered, and no one heard his demurral except Lloyd and Ralph and Larry and possibly Barry Dorgan. Whitney’s feet moved as if they had not heard his mouth. His sprung and mushy black loafers whispered through the grass and he moved toward the dark man like a ghost.
   The crowd had become a slack jaw and staring eye.
   “I knew about your plans,” the dark man said. “I knew what you meant to do before you did. And I would have let you crawl away until I was ready to take you back. Maybe in a year, maybe in ten. But that’s all behind you now, Whitney. Believe it.”
   Whitney found his voice one last time, his words rushing out in a strangled scream. “You ain’t a man at all! You’re some kind of a… a devil! ”
   Flagg stretched out the index finger of his left hand so that it almost touched Whitney Horgan’s chin. “Yes, that’s right,” he said so softly that no one but Lloyd and Larry Underwood heard. “I am.”
   A blue ball of fire no bigger than the Ping-Pong ball Leo was endlessly bouncing leaped from the tip of Flagg’s finger with a faint ozone crackle.
   An autumn wind of sighs went through those watching.
   Whitney screamed—but didn’t move. The ball of fire lit on his chin. There was a sudden cloying smell of burning flesh. The ball moved across his mouth, fusing his lips shut, locking the scream behind Whitney’s bulging eyes. It crossed one cheek, digging a charred and instantly cauterized trench.
   It closed his eyes.
   It paused above his forehead and Larry heard Ralph speaking, saying the same thing over and over, and Larry joined his voice to Ralph’s, making it a litany: “I will fear no evil… I will fear no evil… I will fear no evil…”
   The ball of fire rolled up from Whitney’s forehead and now there was a hot smell of burning hair. It rolled toward the back of his head, leaving a grotesque bald strip behind it. Whitney swayed on his feet for a moment and then fell over, mercifully facedown.
   The crowd released a long, sibilant sound: Aaaahhhh. It was the sound people had made on the Fourth of July when the fireworks display had been particularly good. The ball of blue fire hung in the air, bigger now, too bright to look at without slitting the eyes. The dark man pointed at it and it moved slowly toward the crowd. Those in the front row—a whey-faced Jenny Engstrom was among them—shrank back.
   In a thundering voice, Flagg challenged them. “Is there anyone else here who disagrees with my sentence? If so, let him speak now! ”
   Deep silence greeted this.
   Flagg seemed satisfied. “Then let—”
   Heads began to turn away from him suddenly. A surprised murmur ran through the crowd, then rose to a babble. Flagg seemed completely caught by surprise. Now people in the crowd began to cry out, and while it was impossible to make out the words clearly, the tone was one of wonder and surprise. The ball of fire dipped and spun uncertainly.
   The humming sound of an electric motor came to Larry’s ears. And again he caught that puzzling name tossed from mouth to mouth, never clear, never all of one piece: Man… Can Man… Trash… Trashy…
   Someone was coming through the crowd, as if in answer to the dark man’s challenge.
   Flagg felt terror seep into the chambers of his heart. It was a terror of the unknown and the unexpected. He had foreseen everything, even Whitney’s foolish spur-of-the-moment speech. He had foreseen everything but this. The crowd—his crowd—was parting, peeling back. There was a scream, high, clear, and freezing. Someone broke and ran. Then someone else. And then the crowd, already on an emotional hair-trigger, broke and stampeded.
   “Hold still! ” Flagg cried at the top of his voice, but it was useless. The crowd had become a strong wind, and not even the dark man could stop the wind. Terrible, impotent rage rose in him, joining the fear and making some new and volatile mix. It had gone wrong again. In the last minute it had somehow gone wrong, like the old lawyer in Oregon, the woman slitting her throat on the windowglass… and Nadine… Nadine failing…
   They ran, scattering to all the points of the compass, pounding across the lawn of the MGM Grand, across the street, toward the Strip. They had seen the final guest, arrived at last like some grim vision out of a horror tale. They had seen, perhaps, the raddled face of some final awful retribution.
   And they had seen what the returning wanderer had brought with him.
   As the crowd melted, Randall Flagg also saw, as did Larry and Ralph and a frozen Lloyd Henreid, who was still holding the torn scroll in his hands.
   It was Donald Merwin Elbert, now known as the Trashcan Man, now and forever, world without end, hallelujah, amen.
   He was behind the wheel of a long, dirty electric cart. The cart’s heavy-duty bank of batteries was nearly drained dry. The cart was humming and buzzing and lurching. Trashcan Man bobbed back and forth on the open seat like a mad marionette.
   He was in the last stages of radiation sickness. His hair was gone. His arms, poking out of the tatters of his shirt, were covered with open running sores. His face was a cratered red soup from which one desert-faded blue eye peered with a terrible, pitiful intelligence. His teeth were gone. His nails were gone. His eyelids were frayed flaps.
   He looked like a man who had driven his electric cart out of the dark and burning subterranean mouth of hell itself.
   Flagg watched him come, frozen. His smile was gone. His high, rich color was gone. His face was suddenly a window made of pale clear glass.
   Trashcan Man’s voice bubbled ecstatically up from his thin chest:
   “I brought it… I brought you the fire… please… I’m sorry…”
   It was Lloyd who moved. He took one step forward, then another. “Trashy… Trash, baby…” His voice was a croak.
   That single eye moved, painfully seeking Lloyd out. “Lloyd? That you?”
   “It’s me, Trash.” Lloyd was shaking violently all over, the way Whitney had been shaking. “Hey, what you got there? Is it—”
   “It’s the Big One,” Trash said happily. “It’s the A-bomb.” He began to rock back and forth on the seat of the electric cart like a convert at a revival meeting. “The A-bomb, the Big One, the big fire, my life for you! ”
   “Take it away, Trash,” Lloyd whispered. “It’s dangerous. It’s… it’s hot. Take it away…”
   “Make him get rid of it, Lloyd,” the dark man who was now the pale man whined. “Make him take it back where he got it. Make him—”
   Trashcan’s one operative eye grew puzzled. “Where is he?” he asked, and then his voice rose to an agonized howl. “Where is he? He’s gone! Where is he? What did you do to him?Lloyd made one last supreme effort. “Trash, you’ve got to get rid of that thing. You—”
   And suddenly Ralph shrieked: “Larry! Larry! The Hand of God! ” Ralph’s face was transported in a terrible joy. His eyes shone. He was pointing into the sky.
   Larry looked up. He saw the ball of electricity Flagg had flicked from the end of his finger. It had grown to a tremendous size. It hung in the sky, jittering toward Trashcan Man, giving off sparks like hair. Larry realized dimly that the air was now so full of electricity that every hair on his own body was standing on end.
   And the thing in the sky did look like a hand.
   “Noooo! ” the dark man wailed.
   Larry looked at him… but Flagg was no longer there. He had a bare impression of something monstrous standing in front of where Flagg had been. Something slumped and hunched and almost without shape—something with enormous yellow eyes slit by dark cat’s pupils.
   Then it was gone.
   Larry saw Flagg’s clothes—the jacket, the jeans, the boots—standing upright with nothing in them. For a split second they held the shape of the body that had been inside them. And then they collapsed.
   The crackling blue fire in the air rushed at the yellow electric cart that Trashcan Man had somehow driven back from the Nellis Range. He had lost hair and thrown up blood and finally vomited out his own teeth as the radiation sickness sank deeper and deeper into him, yet he had never faltered in his resolve to bring it back to the dark man… you could say that he had never flagged in his determination.
   The blue ball of fire flung itself into the back of the cart, seeking what was there, drawn to it.
   “Oh shit we’re all fucked! ” Lloyd Henreid cried. He put his hands over his head and fell to his knees.
   Oh God, thank God, Larry thought. I will fear no evil, I will f
   Silent white light filled the world.
   And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.

Chapter 74
   Stu woke up from a night of broken rest at dawn and lay shivering, even with Kojak curled up next to him. The morning sky was coldly blue, but in spite of the shivers he was hot. He was running a fever.
   “Sick,” he muttered, and Kojak looked up at him. He wagged his tail and then trotted into the gully. He brought back a piece of deadwood and laid it at Stu’s feet.
   “I said sick, not stick, but I guess it’ll do,” Stu told him. He sent Kojak out for a dozen more sticks. Soon he had a fire blazing. Even sitting close would not drive the shivers away, although sweat was rolling down his face. It was the final irony. He had the flu, or something very like it. He had come down with it two days after Glen, Larry, and Ralph left him. For another two days the flu had seemed to consider him—was he worth taking? Apparently he was. Little by little he was getting worse. And this morning he felt very bad indeed.
   Among the odds and ends in his pockets, Stu found a stub of pencil, his notebook (all the Free Zone organizational stuff that had once seemed the vital stuff of life itself now seemed mildly foolish), and his key ring. He had puzzled over the key ring for a long time, coming back to it over the last few days again and again, constantly surprised by the strong ache of sadness and nostalgia. This one was to his apartment. This one was his locker key. This one was a spare for his car, a 1977 Dodge with a lot of rust—so far as he knew it was still parked behind the apartment building at 31 Thompson Street in Arnette.
   Also attached to the key ring was a cardboard address card encased in Lucite. STU REDMAN—31 THOMPSON STREET—PH (713) 555-6283, it read. He took the keys off the ring, bounced them thoughtfully on the palm of his hand for a moment, and then threw them away. The last of the man he had been went into the dry-wash and clinked into a dry clump of sage, where it would stay, he supposed, until the end of time. He slipped the cardboard address card out of the Lucite, and then ripped a blank page from his notebook.
   Dear Frannie, he wrote at the top.
   He told her all that had happened up until he had broken his leg. He told her that he hoped to see her again, but that he doubted it was in the cards. The best he could hope for was that Kojak would find the Zone again. He wiped tears absently from his face with the heel of his hand and wrote that he loved her. I expect you to mourn me and then get on, he wrote. You and the baby have to get on. That’s the most important thing now. He signed, folded it small, and slipped the note into the address slot in the Lucite square. Then he attached the key ring to Kojak’s collar.
   “Good dog,” he said when that was done. “You want to go look around? Find a rabbit or something?”
   Kojak bounded up the slope where Stu had broken his leg and was gone. Stu watched his progress with a mixture of bitterness and amusement, then picked up the 7-Up can Kojak had brought him on one trip yesterday in lieu of a stick. He had filled it with muddy water from the ditch. When the water stood, the mud silted down to the bottom. It made a gritty drink, but as his mother would have said, it was a whole lot grittier when there was none. He drank slowly, slaking his thirst bit by bit. It hurt to swallow.
   “Life sure is a bitch,” he muttered, and then had to laugh at himself. For a moment or two he let his fingers fret at the swellings high on his neck, just under his jaw. Then he lay back, splinted leg in front of him, and dozed.
   He woke with a start about an hour later, clutching at the sandy earth in sleepy panic. Had he had a nightmare? If so, it seemed to still be going on. The ground was moving slowly under his hands.
   Earthquake? We got an earthquake here?
   For a moment he clung to the idea that it must be delirium, that his fever had come back while he dozed. But looking toward the gully, he saw that dirt was sliding down in small, muddy sheets. Bounding, bouncing pebbles flashed mica and quartz glints at his startled eyes. And then a faint, dull thudding noise came—it seemed to push its way into his ears. A moment later he was heaving for breath, as if most of the air had suddenly been pushed out of the gully the flash flood had cut.
   There was a whining sound above him. Kojak stood silhouetted against the western edge of the cut, hunkered down with his tail between his legs. He was staring west, toward Nevada.
   “Kojak!” Stu cried in panic. That thudding noise had terrified him—it was as if God had suddenly stamped his foot down on the desert floor somewhere not too distant.
   Kojak bounded down the slope and joined him, whining. As Stu passed a hand down the dog’s back, he felt Kojak trembling. He had to see, he had to. A sudden feeling of surety came to him: what had been meant to happen was happening: Right now.
   “I’m going up, boy,” Stu muttered.
   He crawled to the eastern edge of the gully. It was a little steeper, but it offered more handholds. He had thought for the last three days that he might be able to get up there, but he hadn’t seen the point. He was sheltered from the worst of the wind at the bottom of the cut, and he had water. But now he had to get up there. He had to see. He dragged his splinted leg behind him like a club. He got up on his hands and craned his neck to see the top. It looked very high, very far away.
   “Can’t do it, boy,” he muttered to Kojak, and started trying anyway.
   A fresh pile of rubble had piled up at the bottom as a result of the… the earthquake. Or whatever it was. Stu pulled himself over it and then began to inch his way up the slope, using his hands and his left knee. He made twelve yards and then lost six of them before he could grab a quartz outcropping and stop his slide.
   “Nope, never make it,” he panted, and rested.
   Ten minutes later he started again and made another ten yards. He rested. Went again. Came to a place with no holds and had to inch to the left until he found one. Kojak walked beside him, no doubt wondering what this fool was up to, leaving his water and his nice warm fire.
   Warm. Too warm.
   The fever must be coming up again, but at least the shivering had subsided. Fresh sweat was running down his face and arms. His hair, dusty and oily, hung in his eyes.
   Lord, I’m burning up! Must be a hundred and two, a hundred and three…
   He happened to glance at Kojak. It took almost a minute for what he was seeing to sink in. Kojak was panting. It wasn’t fever, or not just fever, because Kojak was hot, too.
   Overhead, a squadron of birds suddenly flocked, wheeling aimlessly and squawking.
   They feel it, too. Whatever it is, the birds feel it, too.
   He began to crawl again, fear lending him additional strength. An hour passed; two. He fought for every foot, every inch. By one o’clock that afternoon he was only six feet below the edge. He could see jags of paving jutting out above him. Only six feet, but the grade here was very steep and smooth. He tried once to just wriggle up like a garter snake, but loose gravel, the underbedding of the Interstate, had begun to rattle out from beneath him, and now he was afraid that if he tried to move at all he would go all the way to the bottom again, probably breaking his other damn leg in the process.
   “Stuck,” he muttered. “Good fucking show. Now what?”
   Now what became obvious very quickly. Even without moving around, the earth was beginning to shift downward beneath him. He slipped an inch and clawed for purchase with his hands. His broken leg was thudding heavily, and he had not thought to pocket Glen’s pills.
   He slipped another two inches. Then five. His left foot was now dangling over space. Only his hands were holding him, and as he watched they began to slip, digging ten little furrows in the damp ground.
   “Kojak! ” he cried miserably, expecting nothing. But suddenly Kojak was there. Stu flung his arms around his neck blindly, not expecting to be saved but only grabbing what there was to be grabbed, like a drowning man. Kojak made no effort to throw him off. He dug in. For a moment they were frozen, a living sculpture. Then Kojak began to move, digging for inches, claws clicking against small stones and bits of gravel. Pebbles rattled into Stu’s face and he shut his eyes. Kojak dragged him, panting like an air compressor in Stu’s right ear.
   He slitted his eyes open and saw they were nearly at the top. Kojak’s head was down. His back legs were working furiously. He gained four more inches and it was enough. With a desperate cry, Stu let go of Kojak’s neck and grabbed an outcrop of paving. It snapped off in his hands. He grabbed another one. Two fingernails peeled back like wet decals, and he cried out. The pain was exquisite, galvanizing. He scrambled up, pistoning with his good leg, and at last—somehow—lay panting on the surface of I-70, his eyes shut.
   Kojak was beside him then. He whined and licked Stu’s face.
   Slowly then, Stu sat up and looked west. He looked for a long time, oblivious of the heat that was still rushing against his face in warm, bloated waves.
   “Oh, my God,” he said at last in a weak, breaking voice. “Look at that, Kojak. Larry. Glen. They’re gone. God, everything’s gone. All gone.”
   The mushroom cloud stood out on the horizon like a clenched fist on the end of a long, dusty forearm. It was swirling, fuzzy at the edges, beginning to dissipate. It was backlighted in sullen orange-red, as if the sun had decided to go down in the early afternoon.
   The firestorm, he thought.
   They were all dead in Las Vegas. Someone had fiddled when he should have faddled, and a nuclear weapon had gone off… and one hellish big one, from the look and the feel. Maybe a whole stockpile of them had gone. Glen, Larry, Ralph… even if they hadn’t reached Vegas yet, even if they were still walking, surely they were close enough to have been baked alive.
   Close beside him, Kojak whimpered unhappily.
   Fallout. Which way is the wind going to blow it?
   Did it matter?
   He remembered his note to Fran. It was important that he add what had happened. If the wind blew the fallout east, it might cause them problems… but more than that, they had to know that if Las Vegas had been the dark man’s staging area, it was gone now. The people had been vaporized along with all the deadly toys that had just been lying around, waiting for someone to pick them up. He ought to add all of that to the note.
   But not now. He was too tired now. The climb had exhausted him, and the stupendous sight of that dissipating mushroom cloud had exhausted him even more. He felt no jubilation, only dull and grinding weariness. He lay down on the pavement and his last thought before drifting off to sleep was: How many megatons? He didn’t think anyone would ever know, or want to know.
   He awoke after six. The mushroom cloud was gone, but the western sky was an angry pinkish-red, like a bright weal of burnflesh. Stu hauled himself over into the breakdown lane and lay down, exhausted all over again. The shakes were back. And the fever. He touched his forehead with his wrist and tried to gauge the temperature there. He guessed it was well over a hundred degrees.
   Kojak came out of the early evening with a rabbit in his jaws. He laid it at Stu’s feet and wagged his tail, waiting to be complimented.
   “Good dog,” Stu said tiredly. “That’s a good dog.”
   Kojak’s tail wagged faster. Yes, I’m a pretty good dog, he seemed to agree. But he remained looking at Stu, seeming to wait for something. Part of the ritual was incomplete. Stu tried to think what it was. His brain was moving very slowly; while he was sleeping, someone seemed to have poured molasses all over his interior gears.
   “Good dog,” he repeated, and looked at the dead rabbit. Then he remembered, although he wasn’t even sure he had his matches anymore. “Fetch, Kojak,” he said, mostly to please the dog. Kojak bounced away and soon returned with a good chunk of dry wood.
   He had his matches, but a good breeze had sprung up and his hands were shaking badly. It took a long time to get a fire going. He got the kindling he had stripped lighted on the tenth match, and then the breeze gusted roguishly, puffing out the flames. Stu rebuilt it carefully, shielding it with his body and his hands. He had eight remaining matches in a LaSalle Business School folder. He cooked the rabbit, gave Kojak his half, and could eat only a little of his share. He tossed Kojak what was left. Kojak didn’t pick it up. He looked at it, then whined uneasily at Stu.
   “Go on, boy. I can’t.”
   Kojak ate up. Stu looked at him and shivered. His two blankets were, of course, below.
   The sun went down, and the western sky was grotesque with color. It was the most spectacular sunset Stu had ever seen in his life… and it was poison. He could remember the narrator of a MovieTone newsreel saying enthusiastically back in the early sixties that there were beautiful sunsets for weeks after a nuclear test. And, of course, after earthquakes.
   Kojak came up from the washout with something in his mouth—one of Stu’s blankets. He dropped it in Stu’s lap. “Hey,” Stu said, hugging him unsteadily. “You’re some kind of dog, you know it?”
   Kojak wagged his tail to show that he knew it.
   Stu wrapped the blanket around him and moved closer to the fire. Kojak lay next to him, and soon they both slept. But Stu’s sleep was light and uneasy, skimming in and out of delirium. Sometime after midnight he roused Kojak, yelling in his sleep.
   “Hap!” Stu cried. “You better turn off y’pumps! He’s coming! Black man’s coming for you! Better turn off y’pumps! He’s in the old car yonder!”
   Kojak whined uneasily. The Man was sick. He could smell the sickness and mingling with that smell was a new one. A black one. It was the smell the rabbits had on them when he pounced. The smell had been on the wolf he had disemboweled under Mother Abagail’s house in Hemingford Home. The smell had been on the towns he had passed through on his way to Boulder and Glen Bateman. It was the smell of death. If he could have attacked it and driven it out of this Man, he would have. But it was inside this Man. The Man drew in good air and sent out that smell of coming death, and there was nothing to do but wait and see it through to the end. Kojak whined again, low, and then slept.
   Stu woke up the next morning more feverish than ever. The glands under his jaw had swollen to the size of golfballs. His eyes were hot marbles.
   I’m dying… yes, that’s affirmative.
   He called Kojak over and removed the keychain and his note from the Lucite address-holder. Printing carefully, he added what he had seen and replaced the note. He lay back down and slept. And then, somehow, it was nearly dark again. Another spectacular, horrible sunset burned and jittered in the West. And Kojak had brought a gopher for dinner.
   “This the best y’could do?”
   Kojak wagged his tail and grinned shamefacedly.
   Stu cooked it, divided it, and managed to eat his entire half. It was tough, and it had a horrible wild taste, and when he was done he had a nasty bout of stomach cramps.
   “When I die, I want you to go back to Boulder,” he told the dog. “You go back and find Fran. Find Frannie. Okay, big old dumb dog?”
   Kojak wagged his tail doubtfully.
   An hour later, Stu’s stomach rumbled once in warning. He had just time enough to roll over on one elbow to avoid fouling himself before his share of the gopher came up in a rush.
   “Shit,” he muttered miserably, and dozed off.
   He awoke in the small hours and got up on his elbows, his head buzzing with fever. The fire had gone out, he saw. It didn’t matter. He was pretty well done up.
   Some sound in the darkness had awakened him. Pebbles and stones. Kojak coming up the embankment from the cut, that’s all it was…
   Except that Kojak was beside him, sleeping.
   Even as Stu glanced at him, the dog woke up. His head came off his paws and a moment later he was on his feet, facing the cut, growling deep in his throat.
   Rattling pebbles and stones. Someone—something —coming up.
   Stu struggled into a sitting position. It’s him, he thought. He was there, but somehow he got away. Now he’s here, and he means to do me before the flu can.
   Kojak’s growl became stronger. His hackles stood, his head was down. The rattling sound was closer now. Stu could hear a low panting sound. There was a pause then, long enough for Stu to arty sweat off his forehead. A moment later a dark shape humped against the edge of the cut, head and shoulders blotting out the stars.
   Kojak advanced, stiff-legged, still growling.
   “Hey!” a bewildered but familiar voice said. “Hey, is that Kojak? Is it?”
   The growling stopped immediately. Kojak bounded forward joyfully, tail wagging.
   “No!” Stu croaked. “It’s a trick! Kojak… ! ”
   But Kojak was jumping up and down on the figure that had finally gained the pavement. And that shape… something about the shape was also familiar. It advanced toward him with Kojak at his heel. Kojak was volleying joyful barks. Stu licked his lips and got ready to fight if he had to. He thought he could manage one good punch, maybe two.
   “Who is it?” he called. “Who is that there?”
   The dark figure paused, then spoke.
   “Well, it’s Tom Cullen, that’s who, my laws, yes. M-O-O-N, that spells Tom Cullen. Who’s that?”
   “Stu,” he said, and his voice seemed to come from far away. Everything was far away now. “Hello, Tom, it’s good to see you.” But he didn’t see him, not that night. Stu fainted.
   He came around at ten in the morning on October 2, although neither he nor Tom knew that was the date. Tom had built a huge bonfire and had wrapped Stu in his sleeping bag and his blankets. Tom himself was sitting by the fire and roasting a rabbit. Kojak lay contentedly on the ground between the two of them.
   “Tom,” Stu managed.
   Tom came over. He had grown a beard, Stu saw; he hardly looked like the man who had left Boulder for the West five weeks ago. His blue eyes glinted happily. “Stu Redman! You’re awake now, my laws, yes! I’m glad. Boy, it’s good to see you. What did you do to your leg? Hurt it, I guess. I hurt mine once. Jumped off a haystack and broke it, I guess. Did my daddy whip me? My laws, yes! That was before he run off with DeeDee Packalotte.”
   “Mine’s broken, too. And how. Tom, I’m awful thirsty—”
   “Oh, there’s water. All kinds! Here.”
   He handed Stu a plastic bottle that might once have held milk. The water was clear and delicious. No grit at all. Stu drank greedily and then threw it all up.
   “Slow and easy does it,” Tom said. “That’s the ticket. Slow and easy. Boy, it’s good to see you. Hurt your leg, didn’t you?”
   “Yes, I broke it. Week ago, maybe longer.” He drank more water, and this time it stayed down. “But there’s more wrong than the leg. I’m bad sick, Tom. Fever. Listen to me.”
   “Right! Tom’s listening. Just tell me what to do.” Tom leaned forward and Stu thought, Why, he looks brighter. Is that possible? Where had Tom been? Did he know anything about the Judge? About Dayna? So many things to talk about, but there was no time now. He was getting worse. There was a deep rattling sound in his chest, like padded chains. Symptoms so much like the superflu. It was really quite funny.
   “I’ve got to knock down the fever,” he said to Tom. “That’s the first thing. I need aspirin. Do you know aspirin?”
   “Sure. Aspirin. For fast-fast-fast relief.”
   “That’s the ticket, all right. You start walking up the road, Tom. Look in the glove-box of every car you come to. Look for a first-aid kit—it’ll most likely be a box with a red cross on it. When you find some aspirin in one of those boxes, bring it back here. And if you should find a car with camping gear in it, bring back a tent. Okay?”
   “Sure.” Tom stood up. “Aspirin and a tent, then you’ll be all better again, right?”
   “Well, it’ll be a start.”
   “Say,” Tom said, “how’s Nick? I’ve been dreaming about him. In the dreams he tells me where to go, because in the dreams he can talk. Dreams are funny, aren’t they? But when I try to talk to him, he always goes away. He’s okay, isn’t he?” Tom looked at Stu anxiously.
   “Not now,” Stu said. “I… I can’t talk now. Not about that. Just get the aspirin, okay? Then we’ll talk.”
   “Okay…” But fear had settled onto Tom’s face like a gray cloud. “Kojak, want to come with Tom?”
   Kojak did. They walked off together, heading east. Stu lay down and put an arm over his eyes.
   When Stu slipped back into reality again, it was twilight. Tom was shaking him. “Stu! Wake up! Wake up, Stu!”
   He was frightened by the way time seemed to be slipping by in sudden lurches—as if the teeth on the cog of his personal reality were wearing down. Tom had to help him sit up, and when he was sitting, he had to lean his head between his legs and cough. He coughed so long and hard that he almost passed out again. Tom watched him with alarm. Little by little, Stu got control of himself. He pulled the blankets closer around him. He was shivering again.
   “What did you find, Tom?”
   Tom held out a first-aid kit. Inside were Band-Aids, Mercurochrome, and a big bottle of Anacin. Stu was shocked to find he could not work the childproof cap. He had to give it to Tom, who finally worried it open. Stu washed down three Anacin with water from the plastic bottle.
   “And I found this,” Tom said. “It was in a car full of camping stuff, but there was no tent.” It was a huge, puffy double sleeping bag, fluorescent orange on the outside, the lining done in a gaudy stars-and-bars pattern.
   “Yeah, that’s great. Almost as good as a tent. You did fine, Tom.”
   “And these. They were in the same car.” Tom reached into his jacket and produced half a dozen foil packages. Stu could hardly believe his eyes. Freeze-dried concentrates. Eggs. Peas. Squash. Dried beef. “Food, isn’t it, Stu? It’s got pictures of food on it, laws, yes.”
   “It’s food,” Stu agreed gratefully. “Just about the only kind I can eat, I think.” His head was buzzing, and far away, at the center of his brain, a sweetly sickening high C hummed on and on. “Can we heat some water? We don’t have a pot or a kettle.”
   “I’ll find something.”
   “Yeah, fine.”
   “Stu—”
   Stu looked into that troubled, miserable face, still a boy’s face in spite of the beard, and slowly shook his head.
   “Dead, Tom,” he said gently. “Nick’s dead. Almost a month ago. It was a… a political thing. Assassination, I s’pose you’d say. I’m sorry.”
   Tom lowered his head, and in the freshly built-up fire, Stu saw his tears fall into his lap. They fell in a gentle silver rain. But he was silent. At last he looked up, his blue eyes brighter than ever. He wiped at them with the heel of his hand.
   “I knew he was,” he said huskily. “I didn’t want to think I knew, but I did. Laws, yes. He kept turning his back and going away. He was my main man, Stu—did you know that?”
   Stu reached out and took Tom’s big hand. “I knew, Tom.”
   “Yes he was, M-O-O-N, that spells my main man. I miss him awful. But I’m going to see him in heaven. Tom Cullen will see him there. And he’ll be able to talk and I’ll be able to think. Isn’t that right?”
   “It wouldn’t surprise me at all, Tom.”
   “It was the bad man killed Nick. Tom knows. But God fixed that bad man. I saw it. The hand of God came down out of the sky.” There was a cold wind whistling over the floor of the Utah badlands, and Stu shivered violently in its clasp. “Fixed him for what he did to Nick and to the poor Judge. Laws, yes.”
   “What do you know about the Judge, Tom?”
   “Dead! Up in Oregon! Shot him!”
   Stu nodded wearily. “And Dayna? Do you know anything about her?”
   “Tom saw her, but he doesn’t know. They gave me a job cleaning up. And when I came back one day I saw her doing her job. She was up in the air changing a streetlight bulb. She looked at me and…” He fell silent for a moment, and when he spoke again it was more to himself than to Stu. “Did she see Tom? Did she know Tom? Tom doesn’t know. Tom… thinks … she did. But Tom never saw her again.”
   Tom left to go foraging shortly after, taking Kojak with him, and Stu dozed. He returned not with a big tin can, which was the best Stu had hoped for, but with a broiling pan big enough to hold a Christmas turkey. There were treasures in the desert, apparently. Stu grinned in spite of the painful fever blisters that had begun to form on his lips. Tom told him he had gotten the pan from an orange truck with a big U on it—someone who had been fleeing the superflu with all their worldly possessions, Stu guessed. Much good it had done them.
   Half an hour later there was food. Stu ate carefully, sticking to the vegetables, watering the concentrates enough to make a thin gruel. He held everything down and felt a little better, at least for the time being. Not long after supper, he and Tom went to sleep with Kojak between them.
   “Tom, listen to me.”
   Tom hunkered down by Stu’s big, fluffy sleeping bag. It was the next morning. Stu had been able to eat only a little breakfast; his throat was sore and badly swollen, all his joints painful. The cough was worse, and the Anacin wasn’t doing much of a job of knocking back the fever.
   “I got to get inside and get some medicine into me or I’m gonna die. And it has to be today. Now, the closest town is Green River, and that’s sixty miles east of here. We’ll have to drive.”
   “Tom Cullen can’t drive a car, Stu. Laws, no!”
   “Yeah, I know. It’s gonna be a chore for me, because as well as being sick as a dog, I broke the wrong friggin leg.”
   “What do you mean?”
   “Well… never mind right now. It’s too hard to explain. We won’t even worry about it, because that ain’t the first problem. The first problem is getting a car to start. Most of them have been sitting out here three months or more. The batteries will be as flat as pancakes. So we’ll need a little luck. We got to find a stalled car with a standard shift at the top of one of these hills. We might do it. It’s pretty hilly country.” He didn’t add that the car would have to have been kept reasonably tuned, would have to have some gas in it… and an ignition key. All those guys on TV might know how to hotwire a car, but Stu didn’t have a clue.
   He looked up at the sky, which was scumming over with clouds. “Most of it’s on you, Tom. You got to be my legs.”
   “All right, Stu. When we get the car, are we going back to Boulder? Tom wants to go to Boulder, don’t you?”
   “More than anything, Tom.” He looked toward the Rockies, which were a dim shadow on the horizon. Had the snow started falling up in the high passes yet? Almost certainly. And if not yet, then soon. Winter came early in this high and forsaken part of the world. “It may take a while,” he said.
   “How do we start?”
   “By making a travois.”
   “Trav—?”
   Stu gave Tom his pocket knife. “You’ve got to make holes in the bottom of this sleeping bag. One on each side.”
   It took them an hour to make the travois. Tom found a couple of fairly straight sticks to ram down into the sleeping bag and out the holes at the bottom. Tom got some rope from the U-Haul where he had gotten the broiling pan, and Stu used it to secure the sleeping bag to the poles. When it was done, it reminded Stu more of a crazy rickshaw than a travois like the ones the Plains Indians had used.
   Tom picked up the poles and looked doubtfully over his shoulder. “Are you in, Stu?”
   “Yeah.” He wondered how long the seams would hold before unraveling straight up the sides of the bag. “How heavy am I, Tommy?”
   “Not bad. I can haul you a long way. Giddup!”
   They started moving. The gully where Stu had broken his leg—where he had been sure he was going to die—fell slowly behind them. Weak though he was, Stu felt a mad sort of exultation. Not there, anyway. He was going to die somewhere, and probably soon, but it wasn’t going to be alone in that muddy ditch. The sleeping bag swayed back and forth, lulling him. He dozed. Tom pulled him along under a thickening scud of clouds. Kojak padded along beside them.
   Stu woke up when Tom eased him down.
   “Sorry,” Tom said apologetically. “I had to rest my arms.” He first twirled, then flexed them.
   “You rest all you want,” Stu said. “Slow and easy wins the race.” His head was thudding. He found the Anacin and dry-swallowed two of them. It felt as if his throat had been lined with sandpaper and some sadistic soul was striking matches on it. He checked the sleeping bag seams. As he had expected, they were coming unraveled, but it wasn’t too bad yet. They were on a long, gradual upslope, exactly the sort of thing he had been looking for. On a slope like this, better than two miles long, a car with the clutch disengaged could get cruising along pretty good. You could try to pop-start it in second, maybe even third gear.
   He looked longingly to the left, where a plum-colored Triumph was parked askew in the breakdown lane. Something skeletal in a bright woolen sweater leaned behind the wheel. The Triumph would have a manual transmission, but there was no way in God’s world that he could get his splinted leg into that small cabin.
   “How far have we come?” he asked Tom, but Tom could only shrug. It had been quite a piece, anyway, Stu thought. Tom had pulled him for at least three hours before stopping to rest. It spoke of phenomenal strength. The old landmarks were gone in the distance. Tom, who was built like a young bull, had dragged him maybe six or eight miles while he dozed. “You rest all you want,” he repeated. “Don’t knock yourself out.”
   “Tom’s okay. O-and-K, that spells okay, laws, yes, everybody knows that.”
   Tom wolfed a huge lunch, and Stu managed to eat a little. Then they went on. The road continued to curve upward, and Stu began to realize it had to be this hill. If they crested it without finding the right car, it would take them another two hours to get to the next one. Then dark. Rain or snow, from the look of the sky. A nice cold night out in the wet. And goodbye, Stu Redman.
   They came up to a Chevrolet sedan.
   “Stop,” he croaked, and Tom set the travois down. “Go over and look in that car. Count the pedals on the floor. Tell me if there’s two or three.”
   Tom trotted over and opened the car door. A mummy in a flowered print dress fell out like someone’s bad joke. Her purse fell out beside her, scattering cosmetics, tissues, and money.
   “Two,” Tom called back to Stu.
   “Okay. We got to go on.”
   Tom came back, took a deep breath, and grabbed the handles of the travois. A quarter of a mile farther along, they came to a VW van.
   “Want me to count the pedals?” Tom asked.
   “No, not this time.” The van was standing on three flats.
   He began to think they were not going to find it; their luck was simply not in. They came to a station wagon that had only one flat shoe, it could be changed, but like the Chevy sedan, Tom reported it only had two pedals. That meant it was an automatic, and that meant it was useless to them. They pushed on. The long hill was flattening out now, beginning to crest. Stu could see one more car ahead, one last chance. Stu’s heart sank. It was a very old Plymouth, a 1970 at best. For a wonder it was standing on four inflated tires, but it was rust-eaten and battered. Nobody had ever bothered with much in the way of maintenance on this heap; Stu knew its sort well enough from Arnette. The battery would be old and probably cracked, the oil would be blacker than midnight in a mineshaft, but there would be a pink fuzz runner around the steering wheel and maybe a stuffed poodle with rhinestone eyes and a noddy head on the back shelf.
   “Want me to check?” Tom asked.
   “Yeah, I guess so. Beggars can’t be choosers, can they?” A fine cold mist was starting to drift down from the sky.
   Tom crossed the road and looked inside the car, which was empty. Stu lay shivering inside the sleeping bag. At last Tom came back.
   “Three pedals,” he said.
   Stu tried to think it out. That high, sweet-sour buzzing in his head kept trying to get in the way.
   The old Plymouth was almost surely a loser. They could go on over to the other side of the hill, but then all the cars would be pointing the wrong way, uphill, unless they crossed the median strip… which was a rocky half-mile wide here. Maybe they could manage to find a standard shift car on the other side… but by then it would be dark.
   “Tom, help me get up.”
   Somehow Tom helped him to his foot without hurting his broken leg too badly. His head thumped and buzzed. Black comets shot across his field of vision and he nearly passed out. Then he had one arm around Tom’s neck.
   “Rest,” he muttered. “Rest…”
   He had no idea how long they stood that way, Tom supporting him patiently as he swam around in the gray half-tones of semiconsciousness. When the world finally came back, Tom was still patiently supporting him. The mist had thickened to a slow, cold drizzle.
   “Tom, help me across to it.”
   Tom put an arm around Stu’s waist and the two of them staggered across to where the old Plymouth stood in the breakdown lane.
   “Hood release,” Stu muttered, fumbling in the Plymouth’s grille. Sweat rolled down his face. Shudders wracked him. He found the hood release but couldn’t pull it up. He guided Tom’s hands to it and at last the hood swung up.
   The engine was about what Stu had expected—a dirty and indifferently maintained V8. But the battery wasn’t as bad as he had feared it would be. It was a Sears, not the top of the line, but the guarantee-punch was February of 1991. Struggling against the feverish rush of his thoughts, Stu counted backward and guessed that the battery had been new last May.

“Go try the horn,” he told Tom, and propped himself against the car while Tom leaned in to do it. He had heard of drowning men grasping at straws, and he guessed that now he understood. His last chance of surviving this was a rattletrap junkyard refugee.
   The horn gave a loud honk. Okay then. If there was a key, take the shot. Probably he should have had Tom check that first, but on second thought, it didn’t much matter. If there was no key, they were most likely all through no matter what.
   He got the hood down and latched by leaning all off his weight on it. Then he hopped around to the driver’s door and stared in, fully expecting to see an empty ignition slot. But the keys were there, dangling from an imitation leather case with the initials A.C. on it. Bending in carefully, he turned the key over to accessory. Slowly, the gas gauge needle swung over to a little more than a quarter of a tank. Here was a mystery. Why had the car’s owner, why had A.C. pulled over to walk when he could have driven?
   In his light-headed state, Stu thought of Charles Campion, almost dead, driving into Hap’s pumps. Old A.C. had the superflu, had it bad. Final stages. He pulls over, shuts off his car’s engine—not because he’s thinking about it, but because it’s a long-ingrained habit—and gets out. He’s delirious, maybe hallucinating. He stumbles out into the Utah badlands, laughing and singing and muttering and cackling, and dies there. Four months later Stu Redman and Tom Cullen happen along, and the keys are in the car, and the battery’s relatively fresh, and there’s gas—
   The hand of God.
   Wasn’t that what Tom had said about Vegas? The hand of God came down out of the sky. And maybe God had left this battered ‘70 Plymouth here for them, like manna in the desert. It was a crazy idea, but no more crazy than the idea of a hundred-year-old black woman leading a bunch of refugee into the promised land.
   “And she still made her own biscuits,” he croaked. “Right up until the very end, she still made her own biscuits.”
   “What, Stu?”
   “Never mind. Move over, Tom.”
   Tom did. “Can we ride?” he asked hopefully.
   Stu pushed the driver’s seat down so Kojak could hop in, which he did after a careful sniff or two. “I don’t know. You just better pray this thing starts.”
   “Okay,” Tom said agreeably.
   It took Stu five minutes just to get behind the wheel. He sat on a slant, almost in the place where a middle front-seat passenger was supposed to sit. Kojak sat attentively in the back seat, panting. The car was littered with McDonald’s boxes and Taco Bell wrappers; the interior smelled like an old corn chip.
   Stu turned the key. The old Plymouth cranked briskly for about twenty seconds, and then the starter began to lag. Stu tapped the horn again, and this time there was only a feeble croak. Tom’s face fell.
   “We’re not done with her yet,” Stu said. He was encouraged; there was juice lurking inside that Sears battery yet. He pushed in the clutch and shifted up to second. “Open your door and get us rolling. Then hop back in.”
   Tom said doubtfully: “Isn’t the car pointing the wrong way?”
   “Right now it is. But if we can get this old shitheap running, we’ll fix that in a hurry.”
   Tom got out and started pushing on the doorpost. The Plymouth began to roll. When the speedometer got up to 5 mph, Stu said: “Hop in, Tom.”
   Tom got in and slammed his door. Stu turned the ignition key to the “on” position and waited. The steering was power, no good with the engine off, and it took most of his fading strength just to keep the nose of the Plymouth pointed straight down the road. The speedometer needle crawled up to 10, 15, 20. They were rolling silently down the hill Tom had spent most of the morning dragging them up. Dew collected on the windshield. Too late, Stu realized they had left the travois behind. 25 mph now.
   “It’s not running, Stu,” Tom said anxiously.
   Thirty mph. High enough. “God help us now,” Stu said, and popped the clutch. The Plymouth bucked and jerked. The engine coughed into life, spluttered, missed, stalled. Stu groaned, as much with frustration as with the bolt of pain that shot up his shattered leg.
   “Shit-fire!” he cried, and depressed the clutch again. “Pump that gas pedal, Tom! Use your hand!”
   “Which one is it?” Tom cried anxiously.
   “It’s the long one!”
   Tom got down on the floor and pumped the gas pedal twice. The car was picking up speed again, and Stu had to force himself to wait. They were better than halfway down the slope.
   “Now! ” he shouted, and popped the clutch again.
   The Plymouth roared into life. Kojak barked. Black smoke boiled out of the rusty exhaust pipe and turned blue. Then the car was running, choppily, missing on two cylinders, but really running. Stu snap-shifted to third and popped the clutch again, running all the pedals with his left foot.
   “We’re going, Tom,” he bellowed. “We got us some wheels now!”
   Tom shouted with pleasure. Kojak barked and wagged his tail. In his previous life, the life before Captain Trips when he had been Big Steve, he had ridden often in his master’s car. It was nice to be riding again, with his new masters.
   They came to a U-turn road between the westbound and eastbound lanes about four miles down the road. OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY, a stern sign warned. Stu managed to manipulate the clutch well enough to get them around and into the eastbound lanes, having only one bad moment when the old car hitched and bucked and threatened to stall. But the engine was warm now, and he eased them through. He got back up to third gear and then relaxed a little, breathing hard, trying to catch up with his heartbeat, which was fast and thready. The grayness wanted to come back in and swamp him, but he wouldn’t let it. A few minutes later, Tom spotted the bright orange sleeping bag that had been Stu’s makeshift travois.
   “Bye-bye!” Tom called in high good humor. “Bye-bye, we’re going to Boulder, laws, yes!”
   I’ll be content with Green River tonight, Stu thought.
   They got there just after dark, Stu moving the Plymouth carefully in low gear through the dark streets, which were dotted with abandoned cars. He parked on the main drag, in front of a building that announced itself as the Utah Hotel. It was a dismal frame building three stories high, and Stu didn’t think the Waldorf-Astoria had anything to worry about in the way of competition just yet. His head was jangling again, and he was flickering in and out of reality. The car had seemed stuffed with people at times during the last twenty miles. Fran. Nick Andros. Norm Bruett. He had looked over once and it had seemed that Chris Ortega, the bartender at the Indian Head, was riding shotgun.
   Tired. Had he ever been so tired?
   “In there,” he muttered. “We gotta stay the night, Nicky. I’m done up.”
   “It’s Tom, Stu. Tom Cullen. Laws, yes.”
   “Tom, yeah. We got to stop. Can you help me in?”
   “Sure. Getting this old car to run, that was great.”
   “I’ll have another beer,” Stu told him. “And ain’t you got a cigarette? I’m dying for a smoke.” He fell forward over the wheel.
   Tom got out and carried him into the hotel. The lobby was damp and dark, but there was a fireplace and a half-filled woodbox beside it. Tom set Stu down on a threadbare sofa below a great stuffed moosehead and then set about building a fire while Kojak padded around, sniffing at things. Stu’s breath came slow and raspy. He muttered occasionally, and every now and then he would scream something unintelligible, freezing Tom’s blood.
   He kindled a monster blaze, and then went looking around. He found pillows and blankets for himself and Stu. He pushed the sofa Stu was on a little closer to the fire and then Tom bedded down next to him. Kojak lay on the other side, so that they bracketed the sick man with their heat.
   Tom lay looking at the ceiling, which was scrolled tin and laced with cobwebs at the corners. Stu was very sick. It was a worrisome thing. If he woke up again, Tom would ask him what to do about the sickness.
   But suppose… suppose he didn’t wake up?
   Outside the wind had picked up and went howling past the hotel. Rain lashed at the windows. By midnight, after Tom had gone to sleep, the temperature had dropped another four degrees, and the sound turned to the gritty slap of sleet. Far away to the west, the storm’s outer edges were urging a vast cloud of radioactive pollution toward California, where more would die.
   At some time after two in the morning, Kojak raised his head and whined uneasily. Tom Cullen was getting up. His eyes were wide and blank. Kojak whined again, but Tom took no notice of him. He went to the door and let himself out into the screaming night. Kojak went to the hotel lobby window and put his paws up, looking out. He looked for some time, making low and unhappy sounds in his throat. Then he went back and laid down next to Stu again.
   Outside, the wind howled and screeched.

Chapter 75
   “I almost died, you know,” Nick said. He and Tom were walking up the empty sidewalk together. The wind howled steadily, an endless ghost-train highballing through the black sky. It made odd low hooting noises in the alleyways. Ha’ants, Tom would have said awake, and run away. But he wasn’t awake—not exactly—and Nick was with him. Sleet smacked coldly against his cheeks.
   “You did?” Tom asked. “My laws!”
   Nick laughed. His voice was low and musical, a good voice. Tom loved to listen to him talk.
   “I sure did. That’s a big laws yes. The flu didn’t get me, but a little scratch along the leg almost did. Here, look at this.”
   Seemingly oblivious of the cold, Nick unbuckled his jeans and pushed them down. Tom bent forward curiously, no different from any small boy who has been offered a glimpse of a wart with hair growing out of it or an interesting wound or puncture. Running down Nick’s leg was an ugly scar, barely healed. It started just below the groin, in the slab part of the thigh, and corkscrewed past the knee to mid-shin, where it finally petered out.
   “And that almost killed you?”
   Nick pulled up his jeans and belted them. “It wasn’t deep, but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection’s the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the superflu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind.”
   “Infection,” Tom whispered, fascinated. They were walking again, almost floating along the sidewalk.
   “Tom, Stu’s got an infection now.”
   “No… no, don’t say that, Nick… you’re scaring Tom Cullen, laws, yes, you are!”
   “I know I am, Tom, and I’m sorry. But you have to know. He has pneumonia in both lungs. He’s been sleeping outside for nearly two weeks. There are things you have to do for him. And still, he’ll almost certainly die. You have to be prepared for that.”
   “No, don’t—”
   “Tom.” Nick put his hand on Tom’s shoulder, but Tom felt nothing… it was as if Nick’s hand was nothing but smoke. “If he dies, you and Kojak have to go on. You have to get back to Boulder and tell them that you saw the hand of God in the desert. If it’s God’s will, Stu will go with you… in time. If it’s God’s will that Stu should die, then he will. Like me.”
   “Nick,” Tom begged. “Please—”
   “I showed you my leg for a reason. There are pills for infections. In places like this.”
   Tom looked around and was surprised to see that they were no longer on the street. They were in a dark store. A drugstore. A wheelchair was suspended on piano wire from the ceiling like a ghostly mechanical corpse. A sign on Tom’s right advertised: CONTINENCE SUPPLIES.
   “Yes, sir? May I help you?”
   Tom whirled around. Nick was behind the counter, in a white coat.
   “Nick?”
   “Yes, sir.” Nick began to put small bottles of pills in front of Tom. “This is penicillin. Very good for pneumonia. This is ampicillin, and this one’s amoxicillin. Also good stuff. And this is V-cillin, most commonly given to children, and it may work if the others don’t. He’s to drink lots of water, and he should have juices, but that may not be possible. So give him these. They’re vitamin C tablets. Also, he must be walked—”
   “I can’t remember all of that! ” Tom wailed.
   “I’m afraid you’ll have to. Because there is no one else. You’re on your own.”
   Tom began to cry.
   Nick leaned forward. His arm swung. There was no slap—again there was only that feeling that Nick was smoke which had passed around him and possibly through him—but Tom felt his head rock back all the same. Something in his head seemed to snap.
   “Stop that! You can’t be a baby now, Tom! Be a man! For God’s sake, be a man!”
   Tom stared at Nick, his hand on his cheek, his eyes wide.
   “Walk him,” Nick said. “Get him on his good leg. Drag him, if you have to. But get him off his back or he’ll drown.”
   “He isn’t himself,” Tom said. “He shouts… he shouts to people who aren’t there.”
   “He’s delirious. Walk him anyway. All you can. Make him take the penicillin, one pill at a time. Give him aspirin. Keep him warm. Pray. Those are all the things you can do.”
   “All right, Nick. All right, I’ll try to be a man. I’ll try to remember. But I wish you was here, laws, yes, I do!”
   “You do your best, Tom. That’s all.”
   Nick was gone. Tom woke up and found himself standing in the deserted drugstore by the prescription counter. Standing on the glass were four bottles of pills. Tom stared at them for a long time and then gathered them up.
   Tom came back at four in the morning, his shoulders frosted with sleet. Outside, it was letting up, and there was a thin clean line of dawn in the east. Kojak barked an ecstatic welcome, and Stu moaned and woke up. Tom knelt beside him. “Stu?”
   “Tom? Hard to breathe.”
   “I’ve got medicine, Stu. Nick showed me. You take it and get rid of that infection. You have to take one right now.” From the bag he had brought in, Tom produced the four bottles of pills and a tall bottle of Gatorade. Nick had been wrong about the juice. There was plenty of bottled juice in the Green River Superette.
   Stu looked at the pills, holding them closely to his eyes. “Tom, where did you get these?”
   “In the drugstore. Nick gave them to me.”
   “No, really.”
   “Really! Really! You have to take the penicillin first to see if that works. Which one says penicillin?”
   “This one does… but Tom…”
   “No. You have to. Nick said so. And you have to walk.”
   “I can’t walk. I got a bust leg. And I’m sick.” Stu’s voice became sulky, petulant. It was a sickroom voice.
   “You have to. Or I’ll drag you,” Tom said.
   Stu lost his tenuous grip on reality. Tom put one of the penicillin capsules in his mouth, and Stu reflex-swallowed it with Gatorade to keep from choking. He began to cough wretchedly anyway, and Tom pounded him on the back as if he were burping a baby. Then he hauled Stu to his good foot by main force and began to drag him around the lobby, Kojak following them anxiously.
   “Please God,” Tom said. “Please God, please God.”
   Stu cried out: “I know where I can get her a washboard, Glen! That music store has em! I seen one in the window!”
   “Please God,” Tom panted. Stu’s head lolled on his shoulder. It felt as hot as a furnace. His splinted leg dragged uselessly.
   Boulder had never seemed so far away as it did on that dismal morning.
   Stu’s struggle with pneumonia lasted two weeks. He drank quarts of Gatorade, V-8, Welch’s grape juice, and various brands of orange drink. He rarely knew what he was drinking. His urine was strong and acidic. He messed himself like a baby, and like a baby’s his stools were yellow and loose and totally blameless. Tom kept him clean. Tom dragged him around the lobby of the Utah Hotel. And Tom waited for the night when he would wake, not because Stu was raving in his sleep, but because his labored breathing had finally ceased.
   The penicillin produced an ugly red rash after two days, and Tom switched to the ampicillin. That was better. On October 7 Tom awoke in the morning to find Stu sleeping more deeply than he had in days. His entire body was soaked with sweat, but his forehead was cool. The fever had snapped in the night. For the next two days, Stu did little but sleep. Tom had to struggle to wake him up enough to take his pills and sugar cubes from the restaurant attached to the Utah Hotel.
   He relapsed on October 11, and Tom was terribly afraid it was the end. But the fever did not go as high, and his respiration never got as thick and labored as it had been on those terrifying early mornings of the fifth and the sixth.
   On October 13 Tom awoke from a dazed nap in one of the lobby chairs to find Stu sitting up and looking around. “Tom,” he whispered. “I’m alive.”
   “Yes,” Tom said joyfully. “Laws, yes!”
   “I’m hungry. Could you rustle up some soup, Tom? With noodles in it, maybe?”
   By the eighteenth his strength had begun to come back a little. He was able to get around the lobby for five minutes at a time on the crutches Tom brought him from the drugstore. There was a steady, maddening itch from his broken leg as the bones began to knit themselves together. On October 20 he went outside for the first time, bundled up in thermal underwear and a huge sheepskin coat.
   The day was warm and sunny, but with an undertone of coolness. In Boulder it might still be mid-fall, the aspens turning gold, but here winter was almost close enough to touch. He could see small patches of frozen, granulated snow in shadowed areas the sun never touched.
   “I don’t know, Tom,” he said. “I think we can get over to Grand Junction, but after that I just don’t know. There’s going to be a lot of snow in the mountains. And I don’t dare move for a while, anyway. I’ve got to get my go back.”
   “How long before your go comes back, Stu?”
   “I don’t know, Tom. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
   Stu was determined not to move too quickly, not to push it—he had been close enough to death to relish his recovery. He wanted it to be as complete as it could be. They moved out of the hotel lobby into a pair of connecting rooms down the first-floor hall. The room across the way became Kojak’s temporary doghouse. Stu’s leg was indeed knitting, but because of the improper set, it was never going to be the same straight limb again, unless he got George Richardson to rebreak it and set it properly. When he got off the crutches, he was going to have a limp.
   Nonetheless, he set to work exercising it, trying to tone it up. Bringing the leg back to even 75 percent efficiency was going to be a long process, but so far as he could tell, he had a whole winter to do it in.
   On October 28 Green River was dusted with nearly five inches of snow.
   “If we don’t make our move soon,” Stu told Tom as they looked out at the snow, “we’ll be spending the whole damn winter in the Utah Hotel.”
   The next day they drove the Plymouth down to the gas station on the outskirts of town. Pausing often to rest and using Tom for the heavy work, they changed the balding back tires for a pair of studded snows. Stu considered taking a four-wheel drive, and had finally decided, quite irrationally, that they should stick with their luck. Tom finished the operation by loading four fifty-pound bags of sand into the Plymouth’s trunk. They left Green River on Halloween and headed east.
   They reached Grand Junction at noon on November 2, with not much more than three hours to spare, as it turned out. The skies had been lead-gray all the forenoon, and as they turned down the main street, the first spits of snow began to skate across the Plymouth’s hood. They had seen brief flurries half a dozen times en route, but this was not going to be a flurry. The sky promised serious snow.
   “Pick your spot,” Stu said. “We may be here for a while.”
   Tom pointed. “There! The motel with the star on it!”
   The motel with the star on it was the Grand Junction Holiday Inn. Below the sign and the beckoning star was a marquee, and written on it in large red letters was: ELCOME TO GR ND JUNC ON’S SUMMERF ST ‘90! JUNE 12 – JU Y 4TH!
   “Okay,” Stu said. “Holiday Inn it is.”
   He pulled in and killed the Plymouth’s engine, and so far as either of them knew, it never ran again. By two that afternoon, the spits and spats of snow had developed into a thick white curtain that fell soundlessly and seemingly endlessly. By four o’clock the light wind had turned into a gale, driving the snow before it and piling up drifts that grew with a speed which was almost hallucinatory. It snowed all night. When Stu and Tom got up the next morning, they found Kojak sitting in front of the big double doors in the lobby, looking out at a nearly moveless world of white. Nothing moved but a single bluejay that was strutting around on the crushed remnants of a summer awning across the street.
   “Jeezly crow,” Tom whispered. “We’re snowed in, ain’t we, Stu?”
   Stu nodded.
   “How can we get back to Boulder in this?”
   “We wait for spring,” Stu said.
   “That long?” Tom looked distressed, and Stu put an arm around the big man-boy’s shoulders.
   “The time will pass,” he said, but even then he was not sure either of them would be able to wait that long.
   Stu had been moaning and gasping in the darkness for some time. At last he gave a cry loud enough to wake himself up and came out of the dream to his Holiday Inn motel room up on his elbows, staring wide-eyed at nothing. He let out a long, shivery sigh and fumbled for the lamp by the bed table. He had clicked it twice before everything came back. It was funny, how hard that belief in electricity died. He found the Coleman lamp on the floor and lit that instead. When he had it going, he used the chamberpot. Then he sat down in the chair by the desk. He looked at his watch and saw it was quarter past three in the morning.
   The dream again. The Frannie dream. The nightmare.
   It was always the same. Frannie in pain, her face bathed in sweat. Richardson was between her legs, and Laurie Constable was standing nearby to assist him. Fran’s feet were up in stainless-steel stirrups…
   Push, Frannie. Bear down. You’re doing fine.
   But looking at George’s somber eyes over the top of his mask, Stu knew that Frannie wasn’t doing fine at all. Something was wrong. Laurie sponged off her sweaty face and pushed back her hair from her forehead.
   Breech birth.
   Who had said that? It was a sinister, bodiless voice, low and draggy, like a voice on a 45 rpm record played at 33 1/3.
   Breech birth.
   George’s voice: You’d better call Dick. Tell him we may have to…
   Laurie’s voice: Doctor, she’s losing a lot of blood now…
   Stu lit a cigarette. It was terribly stale, but after that particular dream, anything was a comfort. It’s an anxiety dream, that’s all. You got this typical macho idea that things won’t come right if you’re not there. Well, bag it up, Stuart; she’s fine. Not all dreams come true.
   But too many of them had come true during the last half-year. The feeling that he was being shown the future in this recurring dream of Fran’s delivery would not leave him.
   He stubbed the cigarette out half-smoked and looked blankly into the gaslamp’s steady glow. It was November 29; they had been quartered in the Grand Junction Holiday Inn for nearly four weeks. The time had passed slowly, but they had managed to keep amused with a whole town to plunder for diverting odds and ends.
   Stu had found a medium-sized Honda electrical generator in a supply house on Grand Avenue, and he and Tom had hauled it back to the Convention Hall across from the Holiday Inn by putting it onto a sledge with a chainfall and then hooking up two Sno Cats to the sledge—moving it, in other words, in much the same way the Trashcan Man had moved his final gift for Randall Flagg.
   “What are we gonna do with it?” Tom asked. “Get the electricity going at the motel?”
   “This is too small for that,” Stu said.
   “What, then? What’s it for?” Tom was fairly dancing with impatience.
   “You’ll see,” Stu said.
   They put the generator in the Convention Hall’s electrical closet, and Tom promptly forgot about it—which was just what Stu had hoped for. The next day he went to the Grand Junction Sixplex by snowmobile, and using the sledge and the chainfall himself this time, he had lowered an old thirty-five-millimeter motion picture projector from the second-story window of the storage area where he had found it on one of his exploring trips. It had been wrapped in plastic… and then simply forgotten, judging by the dust which had gathered on the protective covering.
   His leg was coming around nicely, but it had still taken him almost three hours to muscle the projector from the doorway of the Convention Hall into the center of the floor. He used three dollies and kept expecting Tom to happen by at any moment, looking for him. With Tom to pitch in, the work would have gone faster, but it also would have spoiled the surprise. But Tom was apparently off on business of his own, and Stu didn’t see him all day. When he came into the Holiday Inn around five, apple-cheeked and wrapped in a scarf, the surprise was all ready.
   Stu had brought back all six of the movies which had been playing in the Grand Junction Cinema complex. After supper that evening, Stu said casually: “Come on over to the Convention Hall with me, Tom.”
   “What for?”
   “You’ll see.”
   The Convention Hall faced the Holiday Inn across the snowy street. Stu handed Tom a box of popcorn at the doorway.
   “What’s this for?” Tom asked.
   “Can’t watch a movie without popcorn, you big dummy,” Stu grinned.
   “MOVIE? ”
   “Sure.”
   Tom burst into the Convention Hall. Saw the big projector set up, completely threaded. Saw the big convention movie screen pulled down. Saw two folding chairs set up in the middle of the huge, empty floor.
   “Wow,” he whispered, and his expression of naked wonder had been all Stu could have hoped for.
   “I did this three summers at the Starlite Drive-In over in Braintree,” Stu said. “I hope I ain’t forgot how to fix one of these bastards if the film breaks.”
   “Wow,” Tom said again.
   “We’ll have to wait in between reels. I wasn’t about to go back and grab a second one.” Stu stepped through the welter of patch cords leading from the projector to the Honda generator in the electrical closet, and pulled the starter cord. The generator began to chug cheerfully along. Stu shut the door as far as it would go to mute the engine sound and killed the lights. And five minutes later they were sitting side by side, watching Sylvester Stallone kill hundreds of dope-dealers in Rambo IV: The Fire-Fight. Dolby sound blared out at them from the Convention Hall’s sixteen speakers, sometimes so loud it was hard to hear the dialogue (what dialogue there was)… but they had both loved it.
   Now, thinking about that, Stu smiled. Someone who didn’t know better would have called him dumb—he could have hooked a VCR up to a much smaller gennie and they could have watched hundreds of movies that way, probably right in the Holiday Inn. But movies on TV were not the same, never had been, to his way of thinking. And that wasn’t really the point, either. The point was simply that they had time to kill… and some days it died goddamned hard.
   Anyway, one of the films had been a reissue of one of the last Disney cartoons, Oliver and Company, which had never been released on videotape. Tom watched it again and again, laughing like a child at the antics of Oliver and the Artful Dodger and Fagin, who, in the cartoon, lived on a barge in New York and slept in a stolen airline seat.
   In addition to the movie project, Stu had built over twenty models, including a Rolls-Royce that had 240 parts and had sold for sixty-five dollars before the superflu. Tom had built a strange but somehow compelling terrain-contoured landscape that covered nearly half the floor space of the Holiday Inn’s main function room; he had used papier-mâché, plaster of paris, and various food colorings. He called it Moonbase Alpha. Yes, they had kept busy, but—
   What you’re thinking is crazy.
   He flexed his leg. It was in better shape than he ever would have hoped, partially thanks to the Holiday Inn’s weight room and exercising machines. There was still considerable stiffness and some pain but he was able to limp around without the crutches. They could take it slow and easy. He was quite sure he could show Tom how to run one of the Arctic Cats that almost everyone around here kept packed away in the back of their garages. Do twenty miles a day, pack shelter halves, big sleeping bags, plenty of those freeze-dried concentrates…
   Sure, and when the avalanche comes down on you up in Vail Pass, you and Tom can wave a pack of freeze-dried carrots at it and tell it to go away. It’s crazy!
   Still…
   He crushed his smoke and turned off the gas lamp. But it was a long time before he slept.
   Over breakfast he said, “Tom, how badly do you want to get back to Boulder?”
   “And see Fran? Dick? Sandy? Laws, I want to get back to Boulder worse than anything, Stu. You don’t think they gave my little house away, do you?”
   “No, I’m sure they didn’t. What I mean is, would it be worth it to you to take a chance?”
   Tom looked at him, puzzled. Stu was getting ready to try and explain further when Tom said: “Laws, everything’s a chance, isn’t it?”
   It was decided as simply as that. They left Grand Junction on the last day of November.
   There was no need to teach Tom the fundamentals of snowmobiling. Stu found a monster machine in a Colorado Highway Department shed not a mile from the Holiday Inn. It had an oversized engine, a fairing to cut the worst of the wind, and most important of all, it had been modified to include a large open storage compartment. It had once no doubt held all manner of emergency gear. The compartment was big enough to take one good-sized dog comfortably. With the number of shops in town devoted to outdoor activities, they had no trouble at all in outfitting themselves for the trip, even though the superflu had struck at the beginning of summer. They took light shelter halves and heavy sleeping bags, a pair of cross-country skis each (although the thought of trying to teach Tom the fundamentals of cross-country skiing made Stu’s blood run cold), a big Coleman gas stove, lamps, gas bottles, extra batteries, concentrated foods, and a big Garand rifle with a scope.
   By two o’clock of that first day, Stu saw that his fear of being snowed in someplace and starving to death was groundless. The woods were fairly crawling with game; he had never seen anything like it in his life. Later that afternoon he shot a deer, his first deer since the ninth grade, when he had played hooky from school to go out hunting with his Uncle Dale. That deer had been a scrawny doe whose meat had been wild-tasting and rather bitter… from eating nettles, Uncle Dale said. This one was a buck, fine and heavy and broad-chested. But then, Stu thought as he gutted it with a big knife he had liberated from a Grand Junction sporting goods store, the winter had just started. Nature had her own way of dealing with overpopulation.
   Tom built a fire while Stu butchered the deer as best he could, getting the sleeves of his heavy coat stiff and tacky with blood. By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing “Ave Maria.” The deer he had gotten with his Uncle Dale had gone to an old man named Schoey who lived in a shack just over the Braintree town line. He had skinned and dressed the deer for three dollars and ten pounds of deermeat.
   “I sure wish old man Schoey was here tonight,” he said with a sigh.
   “Who?” Tom asked, coming out of a semidoze.
   “No one, Tom. Talking to myself.”
   As it turned out, the venison was worth it. Sweet and delicious. After they had eaten their fill, Stu cooked about thirty pounds of extra meat and packed it away in one of the Highway Department snowmobile’s smaller storage compartments the next morning. That first day they only made sixteen miles.
   That night the dream changed. He was in the delivery room again. There was blood everywhere—the sleeves of the white coat he was wearing were stiff and tacky with it. The sheet covering Frannie was soaked through. And still she shrieked.
   It’s coming, George panted. Its time has come round at last, Frannie, it’s waiting to be born, so push! PUSH!
   And it came, it came in a final freshet of blood. George pulled the infant free, grasping the hips because it had come feet-first.
   Laurie began to scream. Stainless-steel instruments sprayed everywhere—
   Because it was a wolf with a furious grinning human face, his face, it was Flagg, his time come round again, he was not dead, not dead yet, he still walked the world, Frannie had given birth to Randall Flagg—
   Stu woke up, his harsh breathing loud in his ears. Had he screamed?
   Tom was still asleep, huddled so deeply in his sleeping bag that Stu could only see his cowlick. Kojak was curled at Stu’s side. Everything was all right, it had only been a dream—
   And then a single howl rose in the night, climbing, ululating, a silver chime of desperate horror… the howl of a wolf, or perhaps the scream of a killer’s ghost.
   Kojak raised his head.
   Gooseflesh broke out on Stu’s arms, thighs, groin.
   The howl didn’t come again.
   Stu slept. In the morning they packed up and went on. It was Tom who noticed and pointed out that the deer guts were all gone. There was a flurry of tracks where they had been, and the bloodstain of Stu’s kill faded to a dull pink on the snow… but that was all.
   Five days of good weather brought them to Rifle. The next morning they awoke to a deepening blizzard. Stu said he thought they should wait it out here, and they put up in a local motel. Tom held the lobby doors open and Stu drove the snowmobile right inside. As he told Tom, it made a handy garage, although the snowmobile’s heavy-duty tread had chewed up the lobby’s deep-pile rug considerably.
   It snowed for three days. When they awoke on the morning of December 10 and dug themselves out, the sun was shining brightly and the temperature had climbed into the mid-thirties. The snow was much deeper now, and it had gotten more difficult to read the twists and turns of I-70. But it wasn’t keeping to the highway that worried Stu on that bright, warm, and sunny day. In the late afternoon, as the blue shadows began to lengthen, Stu throttled down and then killed the snowmobile’s engine, his head cocked, his whole body seeming to listen.
   “What is it, Stu? What’s—” Then Tom heard it, too. A low rumbling sound off to their left and up ahead. It swelled to a deep express-train roar and then faded. The afternoon was still again.
   “Stu?” Tom asked anxiously.
   “Don’t worry,” he said, and thought: I’ll worry enough for both of us.
   The warm temperatures held. By December 13 they were nearly to Shoshone, and still climbing toward the roof of the Rockies—for them the highest point they would reach before beginning to descend again would be Loveland Pass.
   Again and again they heard the low rumble of avalanches, sometimes far away, sometimes so close that there was nothing to do but look up and wait and hope those great shelves of white death would not blot out the sky. On the twelfth, one swept down and over a place where they had been only half an hour before, burying the snowmobile’s track under tons of packed snow. Stu was increasingly afraid that the vibration caused by the sound of the snowmobile’s engine would be what finally killed them, triggering a slide that would bury them forty feet deep before they even had time enough to realize what was happening. But now there was nothing to do but press on and hope for the best.
   Then the temperatures plunged again and the threat abated somewhat. There was another storm and they were stopped for two days. They dug out and went on… and at night the wolves howled. Sometimes they were far away, sometimes so close that they seemed right outside the shelter halves, bringing Kojak to his feet, growling low in his chest, as taut as a steel spring. But the temperatures remained low and the frequency of the avalanches diminished, although they had another near miss on the eighteenth.
   On December 22, outside the town of Avon, Stu ran the snowmobile off the highway embankment. At one moment they were running along at a steady ten miles an hour, safe and fine, spuming up clouds of snow behind them. Tom had just pointed out the small village below, silent as a 1980s stereopticon image with its single white church steeple and the undisturbed drifts up to the eaves of the houses. The next moment the cowling of the snowmobile began to tilt forward.
   “What the fuck—” Stu began, and that was all he had time for.
   The snowmobile canted farther forward. Stu throttled back, but it was too late. There was a peculiar sensation of weightlessness, the feeling you have when you have just left the diving board and the pull of gravity just matches the force of your upward spring. They were pitched off the machine head over heels. Stu lost sight of Tom and Kojak. Cold snow up his nose. When he opened his mouth to shout, the snow went down his throat. Down the back of his coat. Tumbling. Falling. Finally coming to rest in a deep white quilt of snow.
   He fought his way up like a swimmer, gasping hot fire. His throat had been snowburned.
   “Tom!” he shouted, treading snow. Oddly enough, from this angle he could see the highway embankment very clearly, and where they had run off it, causing their own small avalanche as they did so. The rear end of the snowmobile jutted out of the snow about fifty feet farther down the steep gradient. It looked like an orange buoy. Strange how the water imagery persisted… and by the way, was Tom drowning?
   “Tom! Tommy! ”
   Kojak popped up, looking as if he had been dusted from stem to stern with confectioners sugar, and breasted his way through the snow toward Stu.
   “Kojak!” Stu shouted. “Find Tom! Find Tom! ”
   Kojak barked and struggled to turn around. He headed toward a churned-up place in the snow and barked again. Struggling, falling, eating snow, Stu got to the place and felt around. One gloved hand snagged Tom’s jacket and he gave a furious yank. Tom bobbed up, gasping and retching, and they both fell on top of the snow on their backs. Tom whooped and gasped.
   “My throat! It’s all hot! Oh laws, lawsy me—”
   “It’s the cold, Tom. It goes away.”
   “I was choking—”
   “It’s all right now, Tom. We’re going to be okay.”
   They lay on top of the snow, getting their wind back. Stu put his arm around Tom’s shoulders to still the big fellow’s trembling. A distance away, gaining volume and then diminishing, was the rumbling cold sound of another avalanche.
   It took them the rest of the day to get the three quarters of a mile between the place where they had run off the road and the town of Avon. There was no question of salvaging the snowmobile or any of the supplies lashed to it; it was just too far down the grade. It would stay there until spring, at least—maybe forever, the way things were now.
   They got to town half an hour past dusk, too cold and winded to do anything but build a fire and find a halfway warm place to sleep. That night there were no dreams—only the blackness of utter exhaustion.
   In the morning, they set about the task of reoutfitting themselves. It was a tougher job in the small town of Avon than it had been in Grand Junction. Again Stu considered just stopping and wintering here—if he said it was the right thing to do, Tom would not question him, and they had had an explicit lesson in what happened to people who pressed their luck just yesterday. But in the end, he rejected the idea. The baby was due sometime in early January. He wanted to be there when it came. He wanted to see with his own eyes that it was all right.
   At the end of Avon’s short main street they found a John Deere dealership, and in the garage behind the showroom they found two used Deere snowmobiles. Neither of them was quite as good as the big Highway Department machine Stu had driven off the road, but one of them had an extra-wide cleated driving tread, and he thought it would do. They found no concentrates and had to settle for canned goods instead. The latter half of the day was spent ransacking houses for camping gear, a job neither of them relished. The victims of the plague were everywhere, transformed into grotesquely decayed ice-cave exhibits.
   Near the end of the day they found most of what they needed in one place, a large rooming house just off the main drag. Before the superflu struck, it had apparently been filled with young people, the sort who came to Colorado to do all the things John Denver used to sing about. Tom, in fact, found a large green plastic garbage bag in the crawlspace under the stairs filled with a very potent version of “Rocky Mountain High.”
   “What’s this? Is it tobacco, Stu?”
   Stu grinned. “Well, I guess some people thought so. It’s locoweed, Tom. Leave it where you found it.”
   They loaded the snowmobile carefully, storing away the canned goods, tying down new sleeping bags and shelter halves. By then the first stars were coming out, and they decided to spend one more night in Avon.
   Driving slowly back over the crusting snow to the house where they had set up quarters, Stu had a quietly stunning thought: tomorrow would be Christmas Eve. It seemed impossible to believe that time could have gotten by so fast, but the proof was staring up at him from his calendar wristwatch. They had left Grand Junction over three weeks before.
   When they reached the house, Stu said: “You and Kojak go on in and get the fire going. I got a small errand to run.”
   “What’s that, Stu?”
   “Well, it’s a surprise,” Stu said.
   “Surprise? Am I going to find out?”
   “Yeah.”
   “When?” Tom’s eyes sparkled.
   “Couple of days.”
   “Tom Cullen can’t wait a couple of days for a surprise, laws, no.”
   “Tom Cullen will just have to,” Stu said with a grin. “I’ll be back in an hour. You just be ready to go.”
   “Well… okay.”
   It was more like an hour and a half before Stu had exactly what he wanted. Tom pestered him about the surprise for the next two or three hours. Stu kept mum, and by the time they turned in, Tom had forgotten all about it.
   As they lay in the dark, Stu said: “I bet by now you wish we’d stayed in Grand Junction, huh?”
   “Laws, no,” Tom answered sleepily. “I want to get back to my little house just as fast as I can. I just hope we don’t run off the road and fall into the snow again. Tom Cullen almost choked!”
   “We’ll just have to go slower and try harder,” Stu said, not mentioning what would probably happen to them if it did happen again… and there was no shelter within walking distance.
   “When do you think we’ll be there, Stu?”
   “It’ll be a while yet, old hoss. But we’re gettin there. And I think what we better do right now is get some sleep, don’t you?”
   “I guess.”
   Stu turned out the light.
   That night he dreamed that both Frannie and her terrible wolf-child had died in childbirth. He heard George Richardson saying from a great distance: It’s the flu. No more babies because of the flu. Pregnancy is death because of the flu. A chicken in every pot and a wolf in every womb. Because of the flu. We’re all done. Mankind is done. Because of the flu.
   And from somewhere nearer, closing in, came the dark man’s howling laughter.
   On Christmas Eve they began a run of good traveling that would last almost until the New Year. The surface of the snow had crusted up in the cold. The wind blew swirling clouds of ice-crystals over it to pile up in powdery herring-bone dunes that the John Deere snowmobile cut through easily. They wore sunglasses to guard against snow blindness.
   They camped, that Christmas Eve, on top of the crust twenty-four miles east of Avon, not far from Silverthorne. They were in the throat of Loveland Pass now, the choked and buried Eisenhower Tunnel somewhere below and to the east of them. While they were waiting for dinner to warm up, Stu discovered an amazing thing. Idly using an axe to chop through the crust and his hand to dig out the loose powder beneath, he had discovered blue metal only an arm’s length below where they sat. He almost called Tom’s attention to his find, and then thought better of it. The thought that they were sitting less than two feet above a traffic jam, less than two feet above God only knew how many dead bodies, was an unsettling one.
   When Tom woke up on the morning of the twenty-fifth at quarter of seven, he found Stu already up and cooking breakfast, which was something of an oddity; Tom was almost always up before Stu. There was a pot of Campbell’s vegetable soup hanging over the fire, just coming to a simmer. Kojak was watching it with great enthusiasm.
   “Morning, Stu,” Tom said, zipping his jacket and crawling out of his sleeping bag and his shelter half. He had to whiz something terrible.
   “Morning,” Stu answered casually. “And a merry Christmas.”
   “Christmas?” Tom looked at him and forgot all about how badly he had to whiz. “Christmas? ” he said again.
   “Christmas morning.” He hooked a thumb to Tom’s left. “Best I could do.”
   Stuck into the snowcrust was a spruce-top about two feet high. It was decorated with a package of silver icicles Stu had found in the back room of the Avon Five-and-Ten.
   “A tree,” Tom whispered, awed. “And presents. Those are presents, aren’t they, Stu?”
   There were three packages on the snow under the tree, all of them wrapped in light blue tissue paper with silver wedding bells on it—there had been no Christmas paper at the five-and-ten, not even in the back room.
   “They’re presents, all right,” Stu said. “For you. From Santa Claus, I guess.”
   Tom looked indignantly at Stu. “Tom Cullen knows there’s no Santa Claus! Laws, no! They’re from you!” He began to look distressed. “And I never got you one thing! I forgot… I didn’t know it was Christmas… I’m stupid! Stupid!” He balled up his fist and struck himself in the center of the forehead. He was on the verge of tears.
   Stu squatted on the snowcrust beside him. “Tom,” he said. “You gave me my Christmas present early.”
   “No, sir, I never did. I forgot. Tom Cullen’s nothing but a dummy, M-O-O-N, that spells dummy.”
   “But you did, you know. The best one of all. I’m still alive. I wouldn’t be, if it wasn’t for you.”
   Tom looked at him uncomprehendingly.
   “If you hadn’t come along when you did, I would have died in that washout west of Green River. And if it hadn’t been for you, Tom, I would have died of pneumonia or the flu or whatever it was back there in the Utah Hotel. I don’t know how you picked the right pills… if it was Nick or God of just plain old luck, but you did it. You got no sense, calling yourself a dummy. If it hadn’t been for you, I never would have seen this Christmas. I’m in your debt.”
   Tom said, “Aw, that ain’t the same,” but he was glowing with pleasure.
   “It is the same,” Stu said seriously.
   “Well—”
   “Go on, open your presents. See what he brung you. I heard his sleigh in the middle of the night for sure. Guess the flu didn’t get up to the North Pole.”
   “You heard him?” Tom was looking at Stu carefully, to see if he was being ribbed.
   “Heard something.”
   Tom took the first package and unwrapped it carefully—a pinball machine encased in Lucite, a new gadget all the kids had been yelling for the Christmas before, complete with two-year coin batteries. Tom’s eyes lit up when he saw it. “Turn it on,” Stu said.
   “Naw, I want to see what else I got.”
   There was a sweatshirt with a winded skier on it, resting on crooked skis and propping himself up with his ski poles.
   “It says: I CLIMBED LOVELAND PASS,” Stu told him. “We haven’t yet, but I guess we’re gettin there.”
   Tom promptly stripped off his parka, put the sweatshirt on, and then replaced his parka.
   “Great! Great, Stu!”
   The last package, the smallest, contained a simple silver medallion on a fine-link silver chain. To Tom it looked like the number 8 lying on its side. He held it up in puzzlement and wonder.
   “What is it, Stu?”
   “It’s a Greek symbol. I remember it from a long time ago, on a doctor program called ‘Ben Casey.’ It means infinity, Tom. Forever.” He reached across to Tom and held the hand that held the medallion. “I think maybe we’re going to get to Boulder, Tommy. I think we were meant to get there from the first. I’d like you to wear that, if you don’t mind. And if you ever need a favor and wonder who to ask, you look at that and remember Stuart Redman. All right?”
   “Infinity,” Tom said, turning it over in his hand. “Forever.”
   He slipped the medallion over his neck.
   “I’ll remember that,” he said. “Tom Cullen’s gonna remember that.”
   “Shit! I almost forgot!” Stu reached back into his shelter half and brought out another package. “Merry Christmas, Kojak! Just let me open this for you.” He took off the wrappings and produced a box of Hartz Mountain Dog Yummies. He scattered a handful on the snow, and Kojak gobbled them up quickly. He came back to Stu, wagging his tail hopefully.
   “More later,” Stu told him, pocketing the box. “Make manners your watchword in everything you do, as old baldy would… would say.” He heard his voice grow hoarse and felt tears sting his eyes. He suddenly missed Glen, missed Larry, missed Ralph with his cocked-back hat. Suddenly he missed them all, the ones who were gone, missed them terribly. Mother Abagail had said they would wade in blood before it was over, and she had been right. In his heart, Stu Redman cursed her and blessed her at the same time.
   “Stu? Are you okay?”
   “Yeah, Tommy, fine.” He suddenly hugged Tom fiercely, and Tom hugged him back. “Merry Christmas, old hoss.”
   Tom said hesitantly: “Can I sing a song before we go?”
   “Sure, if you want.”
   Stu rather expected “Jingle Bells” or “Frosty the Snowman” sung in the off-key and rather toneless voice of a child. But what came out was a fragment of “The First Noel,” sung in a surprisingly pleasant tenor voice.
   “The first Noel,” Tom’s voice drifted across the white wastes, echoing back with faint sweetness, “the angels did say… was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay… In fields… as they… lay keeping their sheep… on a cold winter’s night that was so deep…”
   Stu joined in on the chorus, his voice not as good as Tom’s but mixing well enough to suit the two of them, and the old sweet hymn drifted back and forth in the deep cathedral silence of Christmas morning:
   “Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel… Christ is born in Israel… ”
   “That’s the only part of it I can remember,” Tom said a little guiltily as their voices drifted away.
   “It was fine,” Stu said. The tears were close again. It would not take much to set him off, and that would upset Tom. He swallowed them back. “We ought to get going. Daylight’s wasting.”
   “Sure.” He looked at Stu, who was taking down his shelter half. “It’s the best Christmas I ever had, Stu.”
   “I’m glad, Tommy.”
   And shortly after that they were under way again, traveling east and upward under the bright cold Christmas Day sun.

They camped near the summit of Loveland Pass that night, nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level. They slept three in a shelter as the temperature slipped down to twenty degrees below zero. The wind swept by endlessly, cold as the flat blade of a honed kitchen knife, and in the high shadows of the rocks with the lunatic starsprawl of winter seeming almost close enough to touch, the wolves howled. The world seemed to be one gigantic crypt below them, both east and west.
   Early the next morning, before first light, Kojak woke them up with his barking. Stu crawled to the front of the, shelter half, his rifle in hand. For the first time the wolves were visible. They had come down from their places and sat in a rough ring around the camp, not howling now, only looking. Their eyes held deep green glints, and they all seemed to grin heartlessly.
   Stu fired six shots at random, scattering them. One of them leaped high and came down in a heap. Kojak trotted over to it, sniffed at it, then lifted his leg and urinated on it.
   “The wolves are still his,” Tom said. “They always will be.”
   Tom still seemed half asleep. His eyes were drugged and slow and dreamy. Stu suddenly realized what it was: Tom had fallen into that eerie state of hypnosis again.
   “Tom… is he dead? Do you know?”
   “He never dies,” Tom said. “He’s in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He’s blind like them.”
   “Will he be back?” Stu asked urgently. He felt cold all over.
   Tom didn’t answer.
   “Tommy…”
   “Tom’s sleeping. He went to see the elephant.”
   “Tom, can you see Boulder?”
   Outside, a bitter white line of dawn was coming up in the sky against the jagged, sterile mountaintops.
   “Yes. They’re waiting. Waiting for some word. Waiting for spring. Everything in Boulder is quiet.”
   “Can you see Frannie?”
   Tom’s face brightened. “Frannie, yes. She’s fat. She’s going to have a baby, I think. She stays with Lucy Swann. Lucy’s going to have a baby, too. But Frannie will have her baby first. Except…” Tom’s face grew dark.
   “Tom? Except what?”
   “The baby…”
   “What about the baby? ”
   Tom looked around uncertainly. “We were shooting wolves, weren’t we? Did I fall asleep, Stu?”
   Stu forced a smile. “A little bit, Tom.”
   “I had a dream about an elephant. Funny, huh?”
   “Yeah.” What about the baby? What about Fran?
   He began to suspect they weren’t going to be in time; that whatever Tom had seen would happen before they could arrive.
   The good weather broke three days before the New Year, and they stopped in the town of Kittredge. They were close enough to Boulder now for the delay to be a bitter disappointment to them both—even Kojak seemed uneasy and restless.
   “Can we push on soon, Stu?” Tom asked hopefully.
   “I don’t know,” Stu said. “I hope so. If we’d only gotten two more days of good weather, I believe that’s all it would have taken. Damn!” He sighed, then shrugged. “Well, maybe it’ll just be flurries.”
   But it turned out to be the worst storm of the winter. It snowed for five days, piling up drifts that were twelve and even fourteen feet high in places. When they dug themselves out on the second of January to look at a sun as flat and small as a tarnished copper coin, all the landmarks were gone. Most of the town’s small business district had been not just buried but entombed. Snowdrifts and snowdunes had been carved into wild, sinuous shapes by the wind. They might have been on another planet.
   They went on, but the traveling was slower than ever; finding the road had developed from a continuing nuisance into a serious problem. The snowmobile got stuck repeatedly and they had to dig it out. And on the second day of 1991, the freight-train rumble of the avalanches began again.
   On the fourth of January they came to the place where US 6 split off from the turnpike to go its own way to Golden, and although neither of them knew it—there were no dreams or premonitions—that was the day that Frannie Goldsmith went into labor.
   “Okay,” Stu said as they paused at the turn-off. “No more trouble finding the road, anyhow. It’s been blasted through solid rock. We were damned lucky just to find the turn-off, though.”
   Staying on the road was easy enough, but getting through the tunnels was not. To find the entrances they had to dig through powdered snow in some cases and through the packed remains of old avalanches in others. The snowmobile roared and clashed unhappily over the bare road inside.
   Worse, it was scary in the tunnels—as either Larry or the Trashcan Man could have told them. They were black as minepits except for the cone of light thrown by the snowmobile’s headlamp, because both ends were packed with snow. Being inside them was like being shut in a dark refrigerator. Going was painfully slow, getting out of the far end of each tunnel was an exercise in engineering, and Stu was very much afraid that they would come upon a tunnel that was simply impassable no matter how much they grunted and heaved and shuffled the cars stuck inside from one place to another. If that happened, they would have to turn around and go back to the Interstate. They would lose a week at least. Abandoning the snowmobile was not an option; doing that would be a painful way of committing suicide.
   And Boulder was maddeningly close.
   On January seventh, about two hours after they had dug their way out of another tunnel, Tom stood up on the back of the snowmobile and pointed. “What’s that, Stu?”
   Stu was tired and grumpy and out of sorts. The dreams had stopped coming, but perversely, that was somehow more frightening than having them.
   “Don’t stand up while we’re moving, Tom, how many times do I have to tell you that? You’ll fall over backward and go headfirst into the snow and—”
   “Yeah, but what is it? It looks like a bridge. Did we get on a river someplace, Stu?”
   Stu looked, saw, throttled down, and stopped.
   “What is it?” Tom asked anxiously.
   “Overpass,” Stu muttered. “I—I just don’t believe it—”
   “Overpass? Overpass?”
   Stu turned around and grabbed Tom’s shoulders. “It’s the Golden overpass, Tom! That’s 119 up there, Route 119! The Boulder road! We’re only twenty miles from town! Maybe even less!”
   Tom understood at last. His mouth fell open, and the comical expression on his face made Stu laugh out loud and clap him on the back. Not even the steady dull ache in his leg could bother him now.
   “Are we really almost home, Stu?”
   “Yes, yes, yeeessss! ”
   Then they were grabbing each other, dancing around in a clumsy circle, falling down, sending up puffs of snow, powdering themselves with the stuff. Kojak looked on, amazed… but after a few moments he began to jump around with them, barking and wagging his tail.
   They camped that night in Golden, and pushed on up 119 toward Boulder early the next morning. Neither of them had slept very well the night before. Stu had never felt such anticipation in his life… and mixed with it was his steady nagging worry about Frannie and the baby.
   About an hour after noon, the snowmobile began to hitch and lug. Stu turned it off and got the spare gascan lashed to the side of Kojak’s little cabin. “Oh Christ!” he said, feeling its deadly lightness.
   “What’s the matter, Stu?”
   “Me! I’m the matter. I knew that friggin can was empty, and I forgot to fill it. Too damn excited, I guess. How’s that for stupid?”
   “We’re out of gas?”
   Stu flung the empty can away. “We sure-God are. How could I be that stupid?”
   “Thinking about Frannie, I guess. What do we do now, Stu?”
   “We walk, or try to. You’ll want your sleeping bag. We’ll split this canned stuff, put it in the sleeping bags. We’ll leave the shelters behind. I’m sorry, Tom. My fault all the way.”
   “That’s all right, Stu. What about the shelters?”
   “Guess we better leave em, old hoss.”
   They didn’t get to Boulder that day; instead they camped at dusk, exhausted from wading through the powdery snow which seemed so light but had slowed them to a literal crawl. There was no fire that night. There was no wood handy, and they were all three too exhausted to dig for it. They were surrounded by high, rolling snowdunes. Even after dark there was no glow on the northern horizon, although Stu looked anxiously for it.
   They ate a cold supper and Tom disappeared into his sleeping bag and fell instantly asleep without even saying good night. Stu was tired, and his bad leg ached abominably. Be lucky if I haven’t racked it up for good, he thought.
   But they would be in Boulder tomorrow night, sleeping in real beds—that was a promise.
   An unsettling thought occurred as he crawled into his sleeping bag. They would get to Boulder and Boulder would be empty—as empty as Grand Junction had been, and Avon, and Kittredge. Empty houses, empty stores, buildings with their roofs crashed in from the weight of the snow. Streets filled in with drifts. No sound but the drip of melting snow in one of the periodic thaws—he had read at the library that it was not unheard of for the temperature in Boulder to shoot suddenly up to seventy degrees in the heart of winter. But everyone would be gone, like people in a dream when you wake up. Because no one was left in the world but Stu Redman and Tom Cullen.
   It was a crazy thought, but he couldn’t shake it. He crawled out of his sleeping bag and looked north again, hoping for that faint lightening at the horizon that you can see when there is a community of people not too far distant in that direction. Surely he should be able to see something. He tried to remember how many people Glen had guessed would be in the Free Zone by the time the snow closed down travel. He couldn’t pull the figure out. Eight thousand? Had that been it? Eight thousand people wasn’t many; they wouldn’t make much of a glow, even if all the juice was back on. Maybe—
   Maybe you ought to get y’self some sleep and forget all this nutty stuff. Let tomorrow take care of tomorrow.
   He lay down, and after a few more minutes of tossing and turning, brute exhaustion had its way. He slept. And dreamed he was in Boulder, a summertime Boulder where all the lawns were yellow and dead from the heat and lack of water. The only sound was an unlatched door banging back and forth in the light breeze. They had all left. Even Tom was gone.
   Frannie! he called, but his only answer was the wind and that sound of the door, banging slowly back and forth.
   By two o’clock the next day, they had struggled along another few miles. They took turns breaking trail. Stu was beginning to believe that they would be on the road yet another day. He was the one that was slowing them down. His leg was beginning to seize up. Be crawling pretty soon, he thought. Tom had been doing most of the trail-breaking.
   When they paused for their cold canned lunch, it occurred to Stu that he had never even seen Frannie when she was really big. Might have that chance yet. But he didn’t think he would. He had become more and more convinced that it had happened without him… for better or for worse.
   Now, an hour after they had finished lunch, he was still so full of his own thoughts that he almost walked into Tom, who had stopped.
   “What’s the problem?” he asked, rubbing his leg.
   “The road,” Tom said, and Stu came around to look in a hurry.
   After a long, wondering pause, Stu said, “I’ll be dipped in pitch.”
   They were standing atop a snowbank nearly nine feet high. Crusted snow sloped steeply down to the bare road below, and to the right was a sign which read simply: BOULDER CITY LIMITS.
   Stu began to laugh. He sat down on the snow and roared, his face turned up to the sky, oblivious of Tom’s puzzled look. At last he said, “They plowed the roads. Y’see? We made it, Tom! We made it! Kojak! Come here!”
   Stu spread the rest of the Dog Yummies on top of the snowbank and Kojak gobbled them while Stu smoked and Tom looked at the road that had appeared out of the miles of unmarked snow like a lunatic’s mirage.
   “We’re in Boulder again,” Tom murmured softly. “We really are. C-I-T-Y-L-I-M-I-T-S, that spells Boulder, laws, yes.”
   Stu clapped him on the shoulder and tossed his cigarette away. “Come on, Tommy. Let’s get our bad selves home.”
   Around four, it began to snow again. By 6 P.M. it was dark and the black tar of the road had become a ghostly white under their feet. Stu was limping badly now, almost lurching along. Tom asked him once if he wanted to rest, and Stu only shook his head.
   By eight, the snow had become thick and driving. Once or twice they lost their direction and blundered into the snowbanks beside the road before getting themselves reoriented. The going underfoot became slick. Tom fell twice and then, around quarter past eight, Stu fell on his bad leg. He had to clench his teeth against a groan. Tom rushed to help him get up.
   “I’m okay,” Stu said, and managed to gain his feet.
   It was twenty minutes later when a young, nervous voice quavered out of the dark, freezing them to the spot:
   “W-Who g-goes there?”
   Kojak began to growl, his fur bushing up into hackles. Tom gasped. And just audible below the steady shriek of the wind, Stu heard a sound that caused terror to race through him: the snick of a rifle bolt being levered back.
   Sentries. They’ve posted sentries. Be funny to come all this way and get shot by a sentry outside the Table Mesa Shopping Center. Real funny. That’s one even Randall Flagg could appreciate.
   “Stu Redman!” he yelled into the dark. “It’s Stu Redman here!” He swallowed and heard an audible click in his throat. “Who’s that over there?”
   Stupid. Won’t be anyone that you know —
   But the voice that drifted out of the snow did sound familiar. “Stu? Stu Redman?”
   “Tom Cullen’s with me… for Christ’s sake, don’t shoot us!”
   “Is it a trick?” The voice seemed to be deliberating with itself.
   “No trick! Tom, say something.”
   “Hi there,” Tom said obediently.
   There was a pause. The snow blew and shrieked around them. Then the sentry (yes, that voice was familiar) called: “Stu had a picture on the wall in the old apartment. What was it?”
   Stu racked his brain frantically. The sound of the drawn rifle bolt kept recurring, getting in the way. He thought, My God, I’m standing here in a blizzard trying to think what picture was on the wall in the apartment—the old apartment, he said. Fran must have moved in with Lucy. Lucy used to make fun of that picture, used to say that John Wayne was waiting for those Indians just where you couldn’t see him —
   “Frederic Remington!” He bellowed at the top of his lungs. “It’s called The Warpath! ”
   “Stu!” the sentry yelled back. A black shape materialized out of the snow, slipping and sliding as it ran toward them. “I just can’t believe it—”
   Then he was in front of them, and Stu saw it was Billy Gehringer, who had caused them so much trouble with his hot-rodding last summer.
   “Stu! Tom! And Kojak, by Christ! Where’s Glen Bateman and Larry? Where’s Ralph?”
   Stu shook his head slowly. “Don’t know. We got to get out of the cold, Billy. We’re freezing.”
   “Sure, the supermarket’s right up the road. I’ll call Norm Kellogg… Harry Dunbarton… Dick Ellis… shit, I’ll wake the town! This is great! I don’t believe it!”
   “Billy—”
   Billy turned back to them, and Stu limped over to where he stood.
   “Billy, Fran was going to have a baby—”
   Billy grew very still. And then he whispered, “Oh shit, I forgot about that.”
   “She’s had it?”
   “George. George Richardson can tell you, Stu. Or Dan Lathrop. He’s our new doc, we got him about four weeks after you guys left, used to be a nose, throat, and ears man, but he’s pretty g—”
   Stu gave Billy a brisk shake, cutting off his almost frantic babble.
   “What’s wrong?” Tom asked. “Is something wrong with Frannie?”
   “Talk to me, Billy,” Stu said. “Please.”
   “Fran’s okay,” Billy said. “She’s going to be fine.”
   “That what you heard?”
   “No, I saw her. Me and Tony Donahue, we went up together with some flowers from the greenhouse. The greenhouse is Tony’s project, he’s got all kinds of stuff growing there, not just flowers. The only reason she’s still in is because she had to have a what-do-you-call-it, a Roman birth—”
   “A cesarean section?”
   “Yeah, right, because the baby came the wrong way. But no sweat. We went to see her three days after she had the baby, it was January seventh we went up, two days ago. We brought her some roses. We figured she could use some cheering up because…”
   “The baby died?” Stu asked dully.
   “It’s not dead,” Billy said, and then he added with great reluctance: “Not yet.”
   Stu suddenly felt far away, rushing through the void. He heard laughter… and the howling of wolves…
   Billy said in a miserable rush: “It’s got the flu. It’s got Captain Trips. It’s the end for all of us, that’s what people are saying. Frannie had him on the fourth, a boy, six pounds nine ounces, and at first he was okay and I guess everybody in the Zone got drunk, Dick Ellis said it was like V-E Day and V-J Day all rolled into one, and then on the sixth, he… he just got it. Yeah, man,” Billy said, and his voice began to hitch and thicken. “He got it, oh shit, ain’t that some welcome home, I’m so fuckin sorry, Stu…”
   Stu reached out, found Billy’s shoulder, and pulled him closer.
   “At first everybody was sayin he might get better, maybe it’s just the ordinary flu… or bronchitis… maybe the croup… but the docs, they said newborn babies almost never get those things. It’s like a natural immunity, because they’re so little. And both George and Dan… they saw so much of the superflu last year…”
   “That it would be hard for them to make a mistake,” Stu finished for him.
   “Yeah,” Billy whispered. “You got it.”
   “What a bitch,” Stu muttered. He turned away from Billy and began to limp down the road again.
   “Stu, where are you going?”
   “To the hospital,” Stu said. “To see my woman.”

Chapter 76
   Fran lay awake with the reading lamp on. It cast a pool of bright light on the left side of the clean white sheet that covered her. In the center of the light, face-down, was an Agatha Christie. She was awake but slowly drifting off, in that state where memories clarify magically as they begin to transmute themselves into dreams. She was going to bury her father. What happened after that didn’t matter, but she was going to drag herself out of the shockwave enough to get that done. The act of love. When that was done, she could cut herself a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie. It would be large, it would be juicy, and it would be very, very bitter.
   Marcy had been in half an hour ago to check on her, and Fran had asked, “Is Peter dead yet?” And even as she spoke, time seemed to double so that she wasn’t sure if she meant Peter the baby or Peter the baby’s grandfather, now deceased.
   “Shhh, he’s fine,” Marcy had said, but Frannie had seen a more truthful answer in Marcy’s eyes. The baby she had made with Jess Rider was engaged in dying somewhere behind four glass walls. Perhaps Lucy’s baby would have better luck; both of its parents had been immune to Captain Trips. The Zone had written off her Peter now and had pinned its collective hopes on those women who had conceived after July 1 of last year. It was brutal but completely understandable.
   Her mind drifted, cruising at some low level along the border of sleep, conning the terrain of her past and the landscape of her heart. She thought about her mother’s parlor where seasons passed in a dry age. She thought about Stu’s eyes, about the first sight of her baby, Peter Goldsmith-Redman. She dreamed that Stu was with her, in her room.
   “Fran?”
   Nothing had worked out the way it should have. All of the hopes had turned out to be phony, as false as those Audioanimatronic animals at Disney World, just a bunch of clockwork, a cheat, a false dawn, a false pregnancy, a—
   “Hey, Frannie.”
   In her dream she saw that Stu had come back. He was standing in the doorway of her room, wearing a gigantic fur parka. Another cheat. But she saw that the dream-Stu had a beard. Wasn’t that funny?
   She began to wonder if it was a dream when she saw Tom Cullen standing behind him. And… was that Kojak sitting at Stu’s heel?
   Her hand flew suddenly up to her cheek and pinched viciously, making her left eye water. Nothing changed.
   “Stu?” she whispered. “Oh my God, is it Stu?”
   His face was deeply tanned except for the skin around his eyes, which might have been covered by sunglasses. That was not a detail you would expect to notice in a dream—
   She pinched herself again:
   “It’s me,” Stu said, coming into the room. “Stop workin yourself over, honey.” His limp was so severe he was nearly stumbling. “Frannie, I’m home.”
   “Stu!” she cried. “Are you real? If you’re real, come here!”
   He went to her then, and held her.