by Stephen King
“Come away,” Nadine said, and now she looked unflinchingly at Abby, speaking not to the boy but directly at her. “She’s old. You’ll hurt her. She’s very old and . . . not very strong.”
“I love her,” the boy said.
Nadine seemed to flinch at that. Her voice sharpened. “Come away, Joe!”
“That's not my name! Leo! Leo! That’s my name!”
The little crowd of new pilgrims quieted again, aware that something unexpected had happened, might be happening still, but unable to know what.
The two women locked eyes again like sabers.
I know who you are, Abby’s eyes said.
Nadine’s answered: Yes. And I know you.
But this time it was Nadine who dropped her eyes first.
“All right,” she said. “Leo, or whatever you like. Just come away before you tire her.”
He left Mother Abagail’s arms, but reluctantly.
“You come back and see me whenever you want,” Abby said, but she did not raise her eyes to include Nadine.
“Okay,” the boy said, and blew her a kiss. Nadine’s face was stony. She didn’t speak. As they went back down the path the arm Nadine had around his shoulders seemed more like a dragchain than a comfort. Mother Abagail watched them go, aware that she was losing the focus again. With the woman’s face out of her sight, the sense of revelation began to grow fuzzy. She became unsure of what she had felt. She was only another woman, surely . . . wasn’t she?
He comes in more shapes than his own . . . wolf, crow, snake . . . woman.
But the thought had no power over her now.
I was sitting here complacently, waiting to be kowtowed to—yes, that’s what I was doing, no use denying it—and now that woman has come and something has happened and I’m losing what it was. But there was something about that woman . . . wasn’t there? Are you sure? Are you sure?
There was an instant of silence, and in it they all seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to prove herself. And she wasn’t doing it. The woman and the boy were gone from sight; they had left as if they were the true believers and she nothing but a shoddy fake.
Oh, but I’m old! It’s not fair!
And on the heels of that came another voice, small and low and rational, a voice that was not her own: Not too old to know the woman is—
Now another man had approached her in hesitant, deferential fashion. “Hi, Mother Abagail,” he said. “The name’s Zellman. Mark Zellman. From Lowville, New York. I dreamed about you.”
And she was faced with a sudden choice that was clearcut for only an instant in her groping mind. She could acknowledge this man’s hello, banter with him a little to set him at his ease (but not too much at ease; that was not precisely what she wanted), and then go on to the next and the next and the next, receiving their homage like new palm leaves, or she could ignore him and the rest. She could follow the thread of her thought down into the depths of herself, searching for whatever it was that the Lord meant her to know.
The woman is—
—what?
Did it matter? The woman was gone.
“I had me a great-nephew lived in upstate New York one time,” she said easily to Mark Zellman. “Town named Rouses Point. Backed right up against Vermont on Lake Champlain, it is. Probably never heard of it, have you?”
Mark Zellman said he sure had heard of it; just about everyone in New York State knew that town. Had he ever been there? His face broke tragically. No, never had. Always meant to.
“From what Ronnie wrote in his letters, you didn’t miss much,” she said, and Zellman went away beaming broadly.
The others came up to make their manners as the other parties had done before them, as still others would do in the days and weeks to come. A teenage boy. A fellow named Jack Jackson, who was a car mechanic. A young R.N. named Laurie Constable—she would come in handy. An old man named Richard Farris whom everyone called the Judge; he looked at her keenly and almost made her feel uncomfortable again. And a great many others. She spoke to them all, nodded, smiled, and put them at their ease, but the pleasure she had felt on other days was gone today and she felt only the aches in her wrists and fingers and knees, plus the gnawing suspicion that she had to go use the Port-O-San and if she didn’t get there soon she was going to stain her dress.
All of that and the feeling, fading now, that she had missed something of great significance and might later be very sorry.
Nick Andros sat in the study of the house on Baseline Drive that he shared with Ralph Brentner and Ralph’s woman, Elise. It was almost dark. The house was a beauty, sitting below the bulk of Flagstaff Mountain but quite a bit above the town of Boulder proper, so that from the wide living room window the streets and roads of the municipality appeared spread out like a gigantic gameboard. That window was treated on the outside with some sort of silvery reflective stuff, so that the squire could look out but passersby could not look in. Nick guessed that the house was in the $150,000-$200,000 range . . . and the owner and his family were mysteriously absent.
On his own long journey from Shoyo to Boulder, first by himself, then with Tom Cullen and the others, he had passed through tens of dozens of towns and cities, and all of them had been stinking charnel houses. Boulder had no business being any different . . . but it was. There were corpses here, yes, thousands of them, and something was going to have to be done about them before the hot, dry days ended and the fall rains began, causing quicker decomposition and possible disease . . . but there were not enough corpses. Nick wondered if anyone other than he and Stu Redman had noticed it . . . Lauder, maybe. Lauder noticed almost everything.
For every house or public building you found littered with corpses, there were ten others completely empty. Sometime, during the last spasm of the plague, most of Boulder’s citizens, sick or well, had blown town. Why? Well, he supposed it really didn’t matter, and maybe they would never know. The awesome fact remained that Mother Abagail, sight unseen, had managed to lead them to maybe the one small city in the United States that had been cleared of plague victims. It was enough to make even an agnostic like himself wonder where she was getting her information.
He went back to his thoughts, doodling formlessly on a pad in front of him.
It seemed to him that all they wanted or needed from the old life was stored in the silent East Boulder power plant, like dusty treasure in a dark cupboard. An unpleasant feeling seemed to run through the people who had gathered in Boulder, a feeling just submerged below the surface—they were like a scared bunch of kids knocking around in the local haunted house after dark. There was a sense that being here in Boulder was strictly a temporary thing. There was one man, a fellow named Impening, who had lived in Boulder and worked on one of the custodial crews at the IBM plant out on the Boulder-Longmont Diagonal. Impening seemed determined to stir up unrest. He was going around telling people that in 1974 there had been an inch and a half of snow in Boulder by September 14, and that by November it would be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. That was the kind of talk Nick would like to put a quick stop to. Never mind that if Impening had been in the army he would have been cashiered for such talk; that was an empty logic, if it was logic at all. The important thing was that Impening’s words would have no power if people could move into houses where the lights worked and where the furnaces blew hot air up through grates at the touch of a finger on a button. If that didn’t happen by the time the first coldsnap arrived, Nick was afraid that people would begin to simply slip away, and all the meetings, representatives, and ratifications in the world wouldn’t stop that.
According to Ralph, there wasn’t that much wrong at the power plant, at least not that much visible. The crews who ran it had shut some of the machinery down; other machinery had shut itself down. Two or three of the big turbine engines had blown, perhaps as the result of some final power surge. Ralph said that some of the wiring would have to be replaced, but he thought that he and Brad Kitchner and a crew of a dozen warm
bodies could do that. A much bigger work crew was needed to remove fused and blackened copper wire from the blown turbine generators and then install new copper wire by the yard. There was plenty of copper wire in the Denver supply houses for the taking; Ralph and Brad had gone one day last week to check for themselves. With the manpower, they thought they could have the lights on again by Labor Day.
“And then we’ll throw the biggest fucking party this town ever saw,” Brad said.
Law and Order. That was something else that troubled him. Could Stu Redman be handed that particular package? He wouldn’t want the job, but Nick thought he could perhaps persuade Stu to take it . . . and if push came to shove, he could get Stu’s friend Glen to back him up. What really bothered him was the memory, still too fresh and hurtful to look at more than briefly, of his own brief and terrible tour as Shoyo’s jailkeeper. Vince and Billy dying, Mike Childress jumping up and down on his supper and crying out in wretched defiance: Hunger strike! Vm on a fuckin hunger strike!
It made him ache inside to think they might need courts and jails . . . Christ, these were Mother Abagail’s people, not the dark man’s! But he suspected the dark man would not bother with such trivialities as courts and jails. His punishment would be swift and sure and heavy. He would not need the threat of jail when the corpses hung on the telephone pole crosses along 1-15.
Nick hoped most of the infractions would be small ones. There had been several cases of drunk and disorderly already. One kid, really too young to drive, had been rodding a big dragging machine up and down Broadway, scaring people out of the street. He had finally driven into a stalled bread truck and had gashed his forehead—and lucky to get off so cheaply, in Nick’s opinion. The people who had seen him knew he was too young, but no one had felt he or she had the authority to put a stop to it.
Authority. Organization. He wrote the words on his pad and put them inside a double circle. Being Mother Abagail’s people gave them no immunity to weakness, stupidity, or bad companions. Nick didn’t know if they were the children of God or not, but when Moses had come down from the mountain, those not busy worshiping the golden calf had been busy shooting craps, he knew that. And they had to face the possibility that someone might get cut over a card game or decide to shoot someone else over a woman.
Authority. Organization. He circled the words again and now they were like prisoners behind a triple stockade. How well they went together . . . and what a sorry sound they made.
Not long after, Ralph came in to show Nick a sample poster. Still smelling strongly of mimeograph ink, the print was large and eyecatching. Ralph had done the graphics himself:
MASS MEETING!!!
REPRESENTATIVE BOARD TO BE NOMINATED AND ELECTED!
8:30 P.M., August 18, 1980
Place: Canyon Boulevard Park & Bandshell if FINE
Chautauqua Hall in Chautauqua Park if FOUL
REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED
FOLLOWING THE MEETING
Below this were two rudimentary street maps for newcomers and those who hadn’t spent much time exploring Boulder. Below, in rather fine print, were the names he and Stu and Glen had agreed upon after some discussion earlier in the day:
Ad Hoc Committee
Nick Andros
Glen Bateman
Ralph Brentner
Richard Ellis
Fran Goldsmith
Stuart Redman
Susan Stern
“Spent some time talking with the fellow in charge of that big group that came in today,” Ralph said after Nick had nodded his approval and handed the flier back. “Larry Underwood, his name is. Smart man, Nick. Sharp. He’s five or six years older than you, and maybe five years younger than Redman. He’s the kind of man you’ve been looking for. Wish we had room for him on this committee thing. You’d like him.”
Nick shrugged. It was too late now; he and the others had been finalizing the committee even as Larry and his party were meeting Mother Abagail.
He pointed to the line on the flier about refreshments and raised his eyebrows.
“Oh yeah, well, Frannie came by and said we’d be more apt to get everybody if we had something. She and her friend there, Patty Kroger, they’re going to see to it. Cookies and Za-Rex.” Ralph made a face. “If it came down to a choice between drinking Za-Rex and bullpiss, I’d have to sit down and think her over. You c’n have mine, Nicky.”
Nick grinned.
“The only thing about this,” Ralph went on more seriously, “is you guys putting me on this committee. I know what that word means. It means ‘Congratulations, you get to do all the hard work.’ Well, I don’t really mind that, I been workin hard all my life. But committees are supposed to have idears, and I ain’t much of an idear man.”
On his pad, Nick quickly sketched a big CB setup, and in the background a radio tower with bolts of electricity coming from its top.
“Yeah, but that’s a lot different,” Ralph said glumly.
“You’ll be fine,” Nick wrote. “Believe it.”
“If you say so, Nicky. I’ll give her a try. I still think you’d be better off with this Underwood fella, though.”
Nick 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 horse trading 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 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. And they would have to be constantly thinking three steps ahead . . .
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, planning for the future. Frannie had put on her robe and had 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 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—
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 and trying to decide what to do. Frannie was standing less than twenty feet above his head, and she found herself in one of those situations. If she called to 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. Frannie was still looking down. They peered directly into each others’ 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 Solo mio . . . CRASH! Her belly hurt from trying to hold in the giggles.
