by Stephen King
"Oh yeah, well, Frannie came by and said we'd be more apt to get everybody if we had something. She and her friend there, Patty Kroger, they're going to see to it. Cookies and Za-Rex." Ralph made a face. "If it came down to a choice between drinking Za-Rex and bullpiss, I'd have to sit down and think her over. You c'n have mine, Nicky."
Nick grinned.
"The only thing about this," Ralph went on more seriously, "is you guys putting me on this committee. I know what that word means. It means 'Congratulations, you get to do all the hard work.' Well, I don't really mind that, I been workin hard all my life. But committees are supposed to have idears, and I ain't much of an idear man."
On his pad, Nick quickly sketched a big CB setup, and in the background a radio tower with bolts of electricity coming from its top.
"Yeah, but that's a lot different," Ralph said glumly.
"You'll be fine," Nick wrote. "Believe it."
"If you say so, Nicky. I'll give her a try. I still think you'd be better off with this Underwood fella, though."
Nick shook his head and clapped Ralph on the shoulder. Ralph bid him goodnight and went upstairs. When he was gone, Nick looked thoughtfully at the handbill for a long time. If Stu and Glen had seen copies -- and he was sure they had by now -- they knew that he had unilaterally stricken Harold Lauder's name from their list of ad hoc committee members. He didn't know how they might be taking it, but the fact that they hadn't shown up at his door yet was probably a good sign. They might want him to do some horsetrading of his own, and if he had to, he would do it, just to keep Harold out at the top. If he had to, he would give them Ralph. Ralph didn't really want the position anyway, although, goddammit, Ralph had great native wit and the nearly priceless ability to think around the corners of problems. He would be a good man to have on the permanent committee, and he felt that Stu and Glen had already packed the committee with their friends. If he, Nick, wanted Lauder out, they would just have to go along. To pull off this leadership coup smoothly, there had to be no dissension at all among them. Say, Ma, how did that man get a rabbit to come out of that hat? Well, son, I'm not sure, but I think he might have used the old "misdirect 'em with cookies and Za-Rex" trick. It works just about every time.
He turned back to the page he had been doodling on when Ralph came in. He stared at the words he had circled not just once but three times, as if to keep them in. Authority. Organization. He suddenly wrote another one below them -- there was just room. Now the words in the triple circle read:
Authority. Organization. Politics.
But he wasn't trying to knock Lauder out of the picture just because he felt Stu and Glen Bateman were trying to hog what was really his football. He felt a certain amount of pique, sure. It would have been odd if he hadn't. In a way, he, Ralph, and Mother Abagail had founded the Boulder Free Zone.
There's hundreds of people here now and thousands more on their way if Bateman's right, he thought, tapping his pencil against the circled words. The longer he looked at them, the uglier they seemed. But when Ralph and I and Mother and Tom Cullen and the rest in our party got here, the only living things in Boulder were the cats and the deer that had come down here from the state park to forage in people's gardens... and even in the stores. Remember that one that got into the Table Mesa Supermarket somehow and then couldn't get out? It was crazy, running up and down the aisles, knocking things over, falling down, then getting up and running again.
We're Johnny-come-latelies, sure, we haven't even been here a month yet, but we were first! So there's a little pique, but pique isn't the reason I want Harold out. I want him out because I don't trust him. He smiles all the time, but there's a watertight
(smiletight?)
compartment between his mouth and his eyes. There was some friction between him and Stu at one time, over Frannie, and all three of them say it's over, but I wonder if it really is over. Sometimes I see Frannie looking at Harold, and she looks uneasy. She looks as if she's trying to figure out how "over" this over really is. He's bright enough, but he strikes me as unstable.
Nick shook his head. That wasn't all. On more than one occasion he had wondered if Harold Lauder might not be crazy.
Mostly it's that grin. I don't want to have to share secrets with anyone who grins like that and looks as if he isn't sleeping well at night.
No Lauder. They'll have to go along with that.
Nick closed his ring-binder and put it away in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he stood up and began taking off his clothes. He wanted a shower. He felt obscurely dirty.
The world, he thought, not according to Garp but according to the superflu. This brave new world. But it didn't seem particularly brave to him, or particularly new. It was as if someone had put a large cherry bomb into a child's toybox. There had been a big bang and everything had gone everywhere. Toys had scattered from one end of the playroom to the other. Some things were shattered beyond repair, other things would be fixable, but most of the stuff had just been scattered. Those things were still a little too hot to handle, but they would be fine once they had cooled off.
Meanwhile, the job was to sort things out. Throw away the things which were no longer good. Set aside the toys which could be fixed. List everything which was still okay. Get a new toybox to put the things in, a nice new toybox. A strong toybox. There is a frightening, sickening ease -- and a clear attraction -- to the way in which things can be blown apart. The hard job is bringing things together again. The sorting. The fixing. The listing. And discarding the things which are no good, of course.
Except... can you ever bring yourself to throw away the things which are no good?
Nick paused halfway to the bathroom, naked, his clothes held in his arms.
Oh, the night was so silent... but weren't all his nights symphonies of silence? Why had his body suddenly broke out in gooseflesh?
Why, because he suddenly felt that it was not toys the Free Zone Committee would be in charge of picking up, not toys at all. He suddenly felt that he had joined some bizarre sewing circle of the human spirit -- he and Redman and Bateman and Mother Abagail, yes, even Ralph with his big radio and his boosting equipment that sent the Free Zone signal flying far and wide across the dead continent. They each had a needle and perhaps they were working together to make a warm blanket to keep off the winter chill... or perhaps they had only, after a brief pause, begun once again to make a large shroud for the human race, beginning their work at the toes and working their way up.
After love, Stu had gone to sleep. He had been on short sleep rations lately, and the night before he had been up all night with Glen Bateman, getting drunk and planning for the future. Frannie had put on her robe and come out here on the balcony.
The building they lived in was downtown, on the corner of Pearl Street and Broadway. Their apartment was on the third floor, and below her she could see the intersection, Pearl running east-west, Broadway running north-south. She liked it here. They had the compass boxed. The night was warm and windless, the black stone of the sky flawed with a million stars. In their faint and frosty glow, Fran could see the slabs of the Flatirons rising in the west.
She passed a hand down from her neck to her thighs. The dressing gown she wore was silk, and she was naked underneath. Her hand passed smoothly over her breasts and then, instead of continuing on flat and straight to the mild rise of her pubis, her hand traced an arc of belly, following a curve that had not been this pronounced even two weeks ago.
She was beginning to show, not a lot yet, but Stu had commented on it this evening. His question had been casual enough, even comic: How long can we do it without me, uh, squeezing him?
Or her, she had answered, amused. How does four months sound, Chief?
Fine, he had answered, and slipped deliciously into her.
Earlier talk had been much more serious. Not long after they got to Boulder, Stu had told her he had discussed the baby with Glen and Glen had advanced the idea, very cautiously, that the superflu germ or
virus might still be around. If so, the baby might die. It was an unsettling thought (you could always, she thought, count on Glen Bateman for an Unsettling Thought or two), but surely if the mother was immune, the baby... ?
Yet there were plenty of people here who had lost children to the plague.
Yes, but that would mean--
Would mean what?
Well, for one thing, it might mean that all these people here were just an epilogue to the human race, a brief coda. She didn't want to believe that, couldn't believe it. If that were true--
Someone was coming up the street, turning sideways to slip between a dumptruck that had stalled with two of its wheels on the pavement and the wall of a restaurant called the Pearl Street Kitchen. He had a light jacket slung over one shoulder and was carrying something in one hand that was either a bottle or a gun with a long barrel. In the other hand he had a sheet of paper, probably with an address written on it from the way he was checking street numbers. At last he stopped in front of their building. He was looking at the door as if trying to decide what to do next. Frannie thought he looked a little like a private detective in some old TV series. She was standing less than twenty feet above his head, and she found herself in one of those situations. If she called him, she might scare him. If she didn't, he might start knocking and wake Stuart up. And what was he doing with a gun in his hand anyway... if it was a gun?
He suddenly craned his neck and looked up, probably to see if any lights were on in the building. Frannie was still looking down. They peered directly into each other's eyes.
"Holy God!" the man on the sidewalk cried. He took an involuntary step backward, went off the sidewalk into the gutter, and sat down hard.
"Oh!" Frannie said at the same moment, and took her own step backward on the balcony. There was a spider-plant in a large pottery vase on a pedestal behind her. Frannie's behind struck it. It tottered, almost decided to live a little longer, and then defenestrated itself on the balcony's slate flags with a loud crash.
In the bedroom, Stu grunted, turned over, and was still again.
Frannie, perhaps predictably, was seized with the giggles. She put both hands over her mouth and pinched viciously at her lips, but the giggles came out anyway in a series of hoarse little whispers. Grace strikes again, she thought, and whisper-giggled madly into her cupped hands. If he'd had a guitar I could have dropped the damned vase on his head. O sole mio ... CRASH! Her belly hurt from trying to hold in the giggles.
A conspiratorial whisper wafted its way up from below: "Hey, you ... you on the balcony... psssst!"
"Pssst, " Frannie whispered to herself. "Pssst, oh great."
She had to get out before she started hee-hawing away like a donkey. She had never been able to hold in her laughter once it got hold of her. She ran fleetly across the darkened bedroom, snatched a more substantial -- and demure -- wrapper from the back of the bathroom door, and went down the hall struggling it on, her face working like a rubber mask. She let herself out onto the landing and got down one flight before the laughter escaped her and flew free. She went down the lower two flights cackling wildly.
The man--a young man, she saw now--had picked himself up and was brushing himself off. He was slim and well built, most of his face covered with a beard that might be blond or possibly sandy-red by daylight. There were dark circles under his eyes, but he was smiling a rueful little smile.
"What did you knock over?" he asked. "It sounded like a piano."
"It was a vase," she said. "It ... it ..." But then the giggles caught her again and she could only point a finger at him and laugh quietly and shake her head and then hold her aching belly again. Tears rolled down her cheeks. "You really looked funny... I know that's a hell of a thing to say to somebody you just met but... oh, my! You did!"
"If this was the old days," he said, grinning, "my next move would be to sue you for at least a quarter of a million. Whiplash. Judge, I looked up and this young woman was peering down at me. Yes, I believe she was making a face. Her face was on, at any rate. We find for the plaintiff, this poor boy. Also for the bailiff. There will be a ten-minute recess."
They laughed together a little. The young man was wearing clean faded jeans and a dark blue shirt. The summer night was warm and kind, and Frannie was beginning to be glad she had come out.
"Your name wouldn't happen to be Fran Goldsmith, would it?"
"It so happens. But I don't know you."
"Larry Underwood. We just came in today. Actually, I was looking for a fellow named Harold Lauder. They said he was living at 261 Pearl along with Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith and some other people."
That dried her giggles up. "Harold was in the building when we first got to Boulder, but he split quite a while ago. He's on Arapahoe now, on the west side of town. I can give you his address if you want it, and directions."
"I'd appreciate that. But I'll wait until tomorrow to go over, I guess. I'm not risking this action again."
"Do you know Harold?"
"I do and I don't--the same way I do and don't know you. Although I have to be honest and say you don't look the way I pictured you. In my mind I saw you as a Valkyrie-type blonde right out of a Frank Frazetta painting, probably with a .45 on each hip. But I'm pleased to meet you anyway." He stuck out his hand and Frannie shook it with a bewildered little smile.
"I'm afraid I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about."
"Sit down on the curb a minute and I'll tell you."
She sat. A ghost of a breeze riffled up the street, shuffling scraps of paper and making the old elms move on the courthouse lawn three blocks farther down.
"I've got some stuff for Harold Lauder," Larry said. "But it's supposed to be a surprise, so if you see him before I do, mum's the word and all that."
"Okay, sure," Frannie said. She was more mystified than ever.
He held up the long-barreled gun and it wasn't a gun at all; it was a wine bottle with a long neck. She tilted the label to the starlight and could just barely read the large print--BORDEAUX at the top, and at the bottom, the date: 1947.
"The best vintage Bordeaux in this century," he said. "At least that's what an old friend of mine used to say. His name was Rudy. God love and rest his soul."
"But 1947 ... that's forty-three years ago. Won't it be ... well, gone over?"
"Rudy used to say a good Bordeaux never went over. Anyway, I've carried it all the way from Ohio. If it's bad wine, it'll be well-traveled bad wine."
"And that's for Harold?"
"That and a bunch of these." He took something out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She didn't have to turn this up to the starlight to read the print. She burst out laughing. "A Payday candybar!" she exclaimed. "Harold's favorite ... but how could you know that?"
"That's the story."
"Then tell me!"
"Well, then. Once upon a time there was a fellow named Larry Underwood who came from California to New York to see his dear old mother. That wasn't the only reason he came, and the other reasons were a little less pleasant, but let's stick to the nice-guy reason, shall we?"
"Why not?" Fran agreed.
"And behold, the Wicked Witch of the West, or some Pentagon assholes, visited the country with a great plague, and before you could say, 'Here comes Captain Trips,' just about everyone in New York was dead. Including Larry's mother."
"I'm sorry. My mom and dad, too."
"Yeah--everybody's mom and dad. If we all sent each other sympathy cards, there wouldn't be any left. But Larry was one of the lucky ones. He made it out of the city with a lady named Rita who wasn't very well equipped to deal with what had happened. And unfortunately, Larry wasn't very well equipped to help her deal with it."
"No one had the equipment."
"But some developed it quicker than others. Anyhow, Larry and Rita headed for the coast of Maine. They made it as far as Vermont, and there the lady OD'd on sleeping pills."
"Oh, Larry, that is too bad."
"Larry took it very hard. In fact, he took it as a more or less divine judgment on his strength of character. In further fact, he had been told by one or two people who should have known that his most incorruptible character trait was a splendid streak of self-interest, which came shining through like a Day-Glo madonna sitting on the dashboard of a '59 Cadillac. "
Frannie shifted a bit on the curb.
"I hope I'm not making you uncomfortable, but all of this has been sloshing around inside for a long time, and it does have some bearing on the Harold part of the story. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Thanks. I think that ever since we stopped by and met that old woman today I've been looking for a friendly face so I could spill this. I just thought it would be Harold's. Anyway--Larry continued on to Maine because there didn't seem to be anyplace else to go. He was having very bad dreams by then, but since he was alone he had no way of knowing that other people were having them, too. He simply assumed it was another symptom of his continuing mental breakdown. But eventually he made it to a small coastal town named Wells, where he met a woman named Nadine Cross and a strange little boy whose name turns out to be Leo Rockway."
"Wells," she marveled softly.
"Anyway, the three travelers sort of flipped a coin to see which way they should head on US 1, and since it came up tails, they headed down south where they eventually came to--"
"Ogunquit!" Frannie said, delighted.
"Just so. And there, on a barn, in huge letters, I made my first acquaintance with Harold Lauder and Frances Goldsmith."
"Harold's sign! Oh, Larry, he will be pleased!"
"We followed the directions on the barn to Stovington, and the directions at Stovington to Nebraska and the directions at Mother Abagail's house to Boulder. We met people along the way. One of them was a girl named Lucy Swann, who's my woman. I'd like you to meet her sometime. I think you'd like her.
"By then something had happened that Larry didn't really want. His little party of four grew to six. The six met four more in upstate New York, and our party absorbed theirs. By the time we made it to Harold's sign in Mother Abagail's dooryard there were sixteen of us, and we picked up another three just as we were leaving. Larry was in charge of this brave band. There was no vote or anything like that. It just was. And he really didn't want the responsibility. It was a drag. It was keeping him awake nights. He started popping Turns and Rolaids. But it's funny the way your mind boxes your mind. I couldn't let it go. It got to be a self-respect thing. And I--he--was always afraid he was going to fuck it up righteously, that he'd get up some morning and someone would be dead in their sleeping bag the way Rita was that time in Vermont and everyone would be standing around pointing their fingers and saying, 'It's your fault. You didn't know any better and it's your fault.' And that was something I couldn't talk about, not even to the Judge--"
