by Stephen King
“The rough beast is on its way,” Starkey said, turning around. He was weeping and grinning. “Things are falling apart. The job is to hold as much as you can for as long as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” Creighton said, and for the first time he felt the sting of tears in his own eyes. “Yes, Billy.”
Chapter 17
Randall Flagg, the dark man, strode south on US 51, listening to the nightsounds that pressed close on both sides of this narrow road that would take him sooner or later out of Idaho and into Nevada. From Nevada he might go anywhere. It was his country, and none knew or loved it better. He knew where the roads went, and he walked them at night. Now, an hour before dawn, he was somewhere between Grasmere and Riddle, west of Twin Falls, still north of the Duck Valley Reservation that spreads across two states.
He walked rapidly, rundown bootheels clocking against the paved surface of the road, and if car lights showed on the horizon he faded back and back, down over the soft shoulder to the high grass where the night bugs make their homes . . . and the car would pass him, the driver perhaps feeling a slight chill as if he had driven through an air pocket, his sleeping wife and children stirring uneasily, as if all had been touched with a bad dream at the same instant.
He walked south, south on US 51, the worn heels of his sharptoed cowboy boots clocking on the pavement; a tall man with no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket. His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature. When this man handed you a tract you took it no matter what the subject: the dangers of atomic power plants, the role played by the International Jewish Cartel in the overthrow of friendly governments, the CIA, the farm workers’ union, the Jehovah’s Witnesses (If You Can Answer These Ten Questions "Yes,” You Have Been SAVED!), the Blacks for Militant Equality, the Kode of the Klan. He had them all, and more, too. There was a button on each breast of his denim jacket. On the right, a yellow smile-face. On the left, a pig wearing a policeman’s cap. The legend was written beneath in a semicircle: HOW’S YOUR PORK?
He moved on, not pausing, not slowing, but alive to the night. His eyes seemed almost frantic with the night’s possibilities. There was a Boy Scouts of America knapsack on his back, old and battered. There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think—and you would be right. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make waterglasses shatter in the hands of tired truckstop waitresses, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with stake-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody.
He moved on south, somewhere on US 51 between Grasmere and Riddle, now closer to Nevada. Soon he would camp and sleep the day away, waking up as evening drew on. He would read as his supper cooked over a small, smokeless campfire, it didn’t matter what; words from some battered and coverless paperback novel. And after supper he would walk, walk south on this excellent two-lane highway cutting through this godforsaken wilderness, watching and smelling and listening as the climate grew more arid, strangling everything down to sagebrush and tumbleweed, watching as the mountains began to poke out of the earth like dinosaur bones. By dawn tomorrow or the day after that he would pass into Nevada, striking Owyhee first and then Mountain City, and in Mountain City there was a man named Christopher Bradenton who would see that he had a clean car. With a car the country would come alive in all its glorious possibilities, a body politic with its network of roads embedded in its skin like marvelous capillaries, ready to take him, the dark speck of foreign matter, anywhere.
He hammered along, arms swinging by his sides. He was known, well known, along the highways in hiding that are traveled by the poor and the mad, by the professional revolutionaries and by those who have been taught to hate so well that their hate shows on their faces like harelips and they are unwelcome except by others like them, who welcome them to cheap rooms with slogans and posters on the walls, to basements where lengths of sawed-off pipe are held in padded vises while they are stuffed with high explosives, to back rooms where lunatic plans are laid: to kill a cabinet member, to kidnap the child of a visiting dignitary, or to break into a boardroom meeting of Standard Oil with grenades and machine guns and murder in the name of the people. He was known there, and even the maddest of them could only look at his dark and grinning face at an oblique angle. The women he took to bed with him, even if they had reduced intercourse to something as casual as getting a snack from the refrigerator, accepted him with a stiffening of the body, a turning away of the countenance. Sometimes they accepted him with tears. They took him the way they might take a ram with golden eyes or a black dog—and when it was done they were cold, so cold, it seemed impossible they could ever be warm again. When he walked into a meeting the hysterical babble ceased—the backbiting, recriminations, accusations, the ideological rhetoric. For a moment there would be dead silence and they would start to turn to him and then turn away, as if he had come to them with some old and terrible engine of destruction cradled in his arms, something a thousand times worse than the plastic explosive made in the basement labs of renegade chemistry students or the black market arms obtained from some greedy army post supply sergeant. It seemed that he had come to them with a device gone rusty with blood and packed for centuries in the Cosmoline of screams but now ready again, carried to their meeting like some infernal gift, a birthday cake with nitroglycerine candles. And when the talk began again it would be rational and disciplined —as rational and disciplined as madmen can make it—and things would be agreed upon.
He rocked along, his feet easy in the boots, which were comfortably sprung in all the right places. His feet and these boots were old lovers. Christopher Bradenton in Mountain City knew him as Richard Fry. Bradenton was a conductor on one of the underground railway systems by which fugitives moved. Half a dozen different organizations, from the Weathermen to the Guevara Brigade, saw that Bradenton had money. He was a poet who sometimes taught Free University classes or traveled in the western states of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, speaking to high school English classes, stunning middle-class boys and girls (he hoped) with the news that poetry was an unquiet corpse. He was in his mid-forties now, but Bradenton had been dismissed from one California college fifteen years ago for getting too chummy with the SDS. He had been busted in The Great Chicago Pig Convention of 1968, formed his ties to one radical group after another, first embracing the craziness of these groups, then being swallowed whole.
The dark man walked and smiled. Bradenton represented just one end of one conduit, and there were thousands of them—the pipes the crazies moved through, carrying their books and bombs. The pipes were interconnected, the signposts disguised but readable to the initiate. In New York he was known as Robert Franq, and his claim that he was a black man had never been disputed, although his skin was very light. He and a black veteran of Nam—the black vet had more than enough hate to make up for his missing left leg—had offed six cops in New York and New Jersey. In Georgia he was Ramsey Forrest, a distant descendant of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and in his white sheet he had participated in two rapes, a castration, and the burning of a nigger shanty town. But that had been long ago, in the early sixties, during the first civil rights surge. He sometimes thought that he might have been born in that strife. He certainly could not remember much that had happened to him before that, except that he came originally from Nebraska and that he had once attended high school classes with a red-haired, bandy-legged boy named Charles Starkweather. He remembered the civil rights marches of 1960 and 1961 better—the beatings, the night rides, the churches that had exploded as if some miracle inside them had grown too big to be contained. He remembered drifting down to New Orleans in 1962, and meeting a demented young man who was handing out tracts urging America to leave Cuba alone. That man had been a certain Mr. Oswald, and he had taken some of Oswald’s tracts and h
e still had a couple, very old and crumpled, in one of his many pockets. He had sat on a hundred different Committees of Responsibility. He had walked in demonstrations against the same dozen companies on a hundred different college campuses. He wrote the questions that most discomfited those in power when they came to lecture, but he never asked the questions himself, because they might have seen his grinning, burning face as some cause for alarm and fled from the podium. Likewise he never spoke at rallies because the microphones would scream with hysterical feedback and circuits would blow. But he had written speeches for those who did speak, and on several occasions those speeches had ended in riots, overturned cars, student strike votes, and violent demonstrations. For a while in the early seventies he had been acquainted with a man named Donald DeFreeze, and had suggested that DeFreeze take the name Cinque. He had helped lay plans that resulted in the kidnaping of an heiress, and it had been he who suggested that the heiress be made crazy instead of ransomed. He had left the small Los Angeles house where DeFreeze and the others had fried not twenty minutes before the police had arrived; he slunk away up the street, his bulging and dusty boots clocking on the pavement, a fiery grin on his face that made mothers grab up their children and pull them into the house. And later, when a few tattered remnants of the group were swept up, all they knew was that there had been someone else associated with the group, maybe someone important, maybe just a hanger-on, a man of no age, a man who was sometimes called the Walkin Dude.
He strode on at a steady, ground-eating pace. Two days ago he had been in Laramie, Wyoming, part of an ecotage group that had blown a power station. Today he was on US 51, between Grasmere and Riddle, on his way to Mountain City. Tomorrow he would be somewhere else. And he was happier than he had ever been, because—
He stopped.
Because something was coming. He could feel it, almost taste it on the night air. He could taste it, a sooty hot taste that came from everywhere, as if God was planning a cookout and all of civilization was going to be the barbecue.
His time of transfiguration was at hand. He was going to be born for the second time, he was going to be squeezed out of the laboring cunt of some great sand-colored beast that even now lay in the throes of its contractions, its legs moving slowly as the birthblood gushed, its sun-hot eyes glaring into the emptiness.
He had been born when times changed, and the times were going to change again. It was in the wind, in the wind of this soft Idaho evening.
It was almost time to be reborn. He knew. Why else could he suddenly do magic?
Chapter 18
Lloyd Henreid, who had been tagged “the baby-faced, unrepentant killer” by the Phoenix papers, was led down the hallway of the Phoenix municipal jail’s maximum security wing by two guards. One of them had a runny nose, and they both looked sour. The wing’s other occupants were giving Lloyd their version of a tickertape parade. In Max, he was a celebrity.
“Heyyy, Henreid!”
“Go to, boy!”
“Tell the DA if he lets me walk I won’t letya hurt im!”
“Rock steady, Henreid!”
“Right on, brother! Rightonrightonrighton!”
Lloyd grinned happily. He was dazzled by his new fame. It sure wasn’t much like Brownsville had been. When you got to be a heavy hitter, you got some respect.
They went through a doorway and a double-barred electric gate. He was frisked again, the guard with the cold breathing heavily through his mouth as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. Then they walked him through a metal detector for good measure, probably to make sure he didn’t have something crammed up his ass.
“Okay,” the guard with the runny nose said, and another guard waved them on. They walked down another hall, this one painted an industrial green. At the far end, another guard was standing in front of a closed door. The door had one small window, hardly more than a loophole, with wire embedded in the glass.
“Why do jails always smell so pissy?” Lloyd asked, just to make conversation. “I mean, even the places where no guys are locked up, it smells pissy. Do you guys maybe do it in the corners?” He snickered at the thought, which was really pretty comical.
“Shut up, killer,” the guard with the cold said.
“You don’t look so good,” Lloyd said. “You ought to be home in bed.”
“Shut up,” the other said.
Lloyd shut up. That’s what happened when you tried to talk to these guys. It was his experience that the class of prison corrections officers had no class.
“Hi, scumbag,” the door-guard said.
“How ya doin, fuckface?” Lloyd responded smartly. There was nothing like a little friendly repartee to freshen you right up.
“You’re gonna lose a tooth for that,” the door-guard said.
“Hey, now, listen, you can’t—”
“Would you care to try for two teeth, barfbag?”
Lloyd was silent.
“That’s okay then,” the door-guard said. “Just one tooth. You fellas can take him in.”
Smiling a little, the guard with the cold opened the door and the other led Lloyd inside, where his court-appointed lawyer was sitting at a metal table, looking at papers from his briefcase.
“Here’s your man, counselor.”
The lawyer looked up. He was hardly old enough to be shaving yet, Lloyd judged, but what the hell? Beggars couldn’t be choosers. They had him cold-cocked anyway, and Lloyd figured to get twenty years or so.
“Thank you very—”
“That guy,” Lloyd said, pointing to the door-guard. “He called me a scumbag. And when I said something back to him, he said he was gonna have some guy knock out one of my teeth. How’s that for police brutality?”
The lawyer passed a hand over his face. “Any truth to that?” he asked the door-guard.
The door-guard rolled his eyes in a burlesque my God, can you believe it? gesture. “These guys, counselor,” he said, “they should write for TV. I said hi, he said hi, that was it.”
“That’s a fuckin lie!” Lloyd said dramatically.
“I keep my opinions to myself,” the guard said stonily.
“I’m sure you do,” the lawyer said, “but I believe I’ll count Mr. Henreid’s teeth before I leave.”
A slight, angry discomfiture passed over the guard’s face, and he exchanged a glance with the two that had brought Lloyd in. Lloyd smiled. Maybe the kid was okay at that. The last two CAs he’d had were old hacks; one of them had come into court lugging a colostomy bag, could you believe that, a fucking colostomy bag? The old hacks didn’t give a shit for you. Plead and leave, that was their motto. But maybe this guy could get him a straight ten, armed robbery. Maybe even time served.
It was with such pleasant thoughts dancing through his head like sugarplums that Lloyd sat down to conference with his lawyer.
He was in the exercise yard later that morning, watching a softball game and mulling over everything his lawyer had told him, when a large inmate named Mathers came over and yanked him to his feet. Mathers’s head was shaved bald, a la Telly Savalas, and it gleamed benignly in the hot desert air.
“Now wait,” Lloyd said. “My lawyer counted every one of my teeth. So if you—”
“Yeah, that’s what Shockley told me,” said Mathers. “So he told me to—”
His knee came up squarely in Lloyd’s crotch, and the sudden pain was so excruciating he couldn’t even scream. He collapsed in a hunching, writhing pile, clutching his testicles. After a while, who knew how long, he was able to look up. Mathers was still looking at him, bald head gleaming. The guards were looking elsewhere. Lloyd moaned and writhed, a redhot ball of lead in his belly.
“Nothing personal,” Mathers said sincerely. “Myself, I hope you make out. The law’s a bitch.”
He strode away and Lloyd saw the door-guard standing atop a ramp in the truck-loading bay on the other side of the yard. His thumbs were hooked in his belt and he was grinning at Lloyd. When he saw that he had Lloyd’s complet
e, undivided attention, the door-guard gave him the finger. Mathers strolled over and the door-guard tossed him a package of Pall Malls. Mathers sketched a salute and walked away. Lloyd Henreid lay on the ground, knees drawn up to his chest, hands clutching his cramping belly, and the lawyer’s words echoed in his brain: It’s a tough old world, Lloyd, a tough old world.
Right.
Chapter 19
Nick Andros pushed aside one of the curtains and looked out into the street. From here, on the second story of the late John Baker’s house, you could see all of downtown Shoyo by looking left and by looking right you could see Route 63 going out of town. Main Street was utterly deserted. The shades of the business establishments were drawn. A sick-looking dog sat in the middle of the road, head down, sides bellowsing, white foam dripping from its muzzle to the heat-shimmering pavement. In the gutter half a block down, another dog lay dead.
The woman behind him moaned in a low, guttural way, but Nick did not hear her. He closed the curtain, rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then went to the woman, who had awakened. Jane Baker was bundled up with blankets because she had been cold a couple of hours ago. Now sweat was streaming from her face and she had kicked off the blankets—he saw with embarrassment that she had sweated her thin nightgown into transparency in some places. But she was not seeing him, and at this point he doubted if her seminakedness mattered. She was dying.
“Johnny, bring the basin, I think I’m going to throw up!” she cried.
He brought the basin out from under the bed and put it beside her, but she thrashed and knocked it onto the floor with a hollow bonging sound which he also couldn’t hear. He picked it up and just held it, watching her.
“Johnny!” she screamed. “I can’t find my sewing box! It isn’t in the closet!”
