The Stand (Original Edition)

by Stephen King

  “Stu,” Frannie whispered. “Please, Stu, say no.”

  They looked at him—all of them.

  Now you must lead, Stuart.

  He thought of Amette, of the old car carrying Charles D. Campion and his load of death, crashing into Bill Hapscomb’s pumps like some wicked Pandora. He thought of Denninger and Deitz, and how he had begun to associate them in his mind with the smiling doctors who had lied and lied and lied to him and to his wife about her condition—and maybe to themselves. Most of all, he thought of Frannie. And of Mother Abagail saying This is what God wants of you.

  “Frannie,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “And die.” She looked at him bitterly, almost hatefully, and then to Lucy, as if for support. But Lucy was stunned and far-off, no help.

  “If we don’t go, we’ll die,” Stu said, feeling his way along the words. “She was right. If we wait, then spring comes. Then what? How are we going to stop him? We don’t know. We never had a clue. We had our heads in the sand, too. We can’t stop him except like Glen says. White magic. Or the power of God.”

  She began to weep.

  “Frannie, don’t do that,” he said, and tried to take her hand.

  “Don’t touch me!” she cried at him. “You’re a dead man, you’re a corpse, so don’t touch me!”

  They stood around the bed in tableau as the sun came up.

  Stu and Frannie went up Flagstaff Mountain around eleven o’clock. They parked halfway up, and Stu brought the hamper while Fran carried the tablecloth and a bottle of Blue Nun. The picnic had been her idea, but a strange and awkward silence held between them.

  “Help me spread it,” she said. “And watch out for those spiny things.”

  They were in a small, slanting meadow a thousand feet below Sunrise Amphitheater. Boulder was spread out below them in a blue haze. Today it was wholly summer again. The sun shone down with power and authority. Crickets buzzed in the grass. They spread the white lawn tablecloth, which Fran had glommed from the Hotel Boulderado, and moving with quick economy (it made him feel strange to watch her supple grace as she bent and moved, as if there had never been a whiplash injury and sprained back at all) she set out their early lunch: a cucumber and lettuce salad dressed with vinegar; cold ham sandwiches; the wine; an apple pie for dessert.

  “Let’s eat,” she said. He sat down beside her and took a sandwich and some salad. He wasn’t hungry. He hurt inside. But he ate.

  When they had both finished a token sandwich and most of the salad—the fresh greens had been delicious—and a small sliver of apple pie each, she said: “When are you going?”

  “Noon,” he said. He lit a cigarette, cupping the flame in his hands.

  “How long will it take you to get there?”

  He shrugged. “Walking? I don’t know. Glen’s not young. Neither is Ralph, for that matter. If we can make thirty miles a day, we could do it by the first of October, I guess.”

  “And if there’s early snow in the mountains? Or in Utah?”

  He shrugged, looking at her steadily.

  “More wine?” she asked.

  “No. It gives me acid indigestion. It always did.”

  Fran poured herself another glass and drank it off.

  “Was she God’s voice, Stu? Was she?”

  “Frannie, I just don’t know.”

  “Have you ever read the Book of Job, Stu?”

  “I was never much on the Bible, I guess.”

  “My mom was. She thought it was very important that my brother Fred and me have a certain amount of religious background. She never said why. All the good it ever did me, so far as I know, was that I was always able to answer the Bible questions on ‘Jeopardy.’ Do you remember ‘Jeopardy/ Stu?”

  Smiling a little, he said: “And now here’s your host, Art Fleming.” “That’s the one. It was backward. They gave you the answer, you supplied the question. When it came to the Bible, I knew all the questions. Job was a bet between God and the Devil. The Devil said, ‘Sure he worships You. He’s got it soft. But if You piss in his face long enough, he’ll renounce You. So God took the wager. And God won.” She smiled dully. “God always wins. Like the Boston Celtics.” “Maybe it is a bet,” Stu said, “but it’s their lives, those folks down there. And the guy inside you.”

  “She wouldn’t even promise about him,” Fran said. “If she could have done that. . . just that... it would have been at least a little bit easier to let you go.”

  Stu could think of nothing to say.

  “Well, it’s getting on toward noon now,” Fran said. “Help me pack up, Stuart.”

  The half-eaten lunch went back into the hamper with the tablecloth and the rest of the wine. Stu looked at the spot and thought of how there were only a few crumbs to show where their picnic had been . . . and the birds would get those soon enough. When he glanced up, Frannie was looking at him and crying. He went to her.

  “It’s all right. It’s being pregnant. I’m always running at the eyes. I can’t seem to help it.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Stu, make love to me.”

  “Here? Now?”

  She nodded, then smiled a little. “It will be all right. If we watch out for the spiny things.”

  They spread the tablecloth again.

  Afterward, naked against each other, she put her arms around him and said, “Swear you’ll come back.” “Fran, how can I—”

  “God can’t run all of it!” she hissed. “Not all of it. Swear, Stu, swear it!”

  “Frannie, I swear to try.”

  “I guess that will have to be good enough, won’t it?”

  “We have to get down to Larry’s.”

  “I know.” But she held him more tightly still, her naked body insistent against his. “Say you love me.”

  “You know I do.”

  “I know, but say it. I want to hear it.”

  He took her by the shoulders. “Fran, I love you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and put her cheek against his shoulder. “Now I think I can say goodbye. I think I can let you go.”

  They held each other in the great sunny silence a little while longer, listening to the crickets in the dry grass.

  Chapter 50

  She and Lucy watched the undramatic start of their quest from the steps of Larry’s house. The four of them stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, no packs, no bedrolls, no special equipment ... as per instructions. They had all changed into heavy walking shoes.

  “Bye, Larry,” Lucy said. Her face was shiny and pale.

  “Remember, Stuart,” Fran said. “You’ll remember?”

  “Yes.”

  Glen put his fingers into his mouth and whistled. Kojak, who had been investigating a sewer grating, came running.

  “Let’s go then,” Larry said. His face was as pale as Lucy’s, his eyes unusually bright, almost glittery. “Before I lose my nerve.”

  Stu blew a kiss through his closed fist, something he could not remember having done since the days when his mother saw him off on the schoolbus. Fran waved back. The tears were coming again, hot and burning, but she did not let them fall. They began. They simply walked away. They were halfway down the block now, and somewhere a bird sang. The midday sun was warm and undramatic. They reached the end of the block. Stu turned and waved again. Larry also waved. Fran and Lucy waved back. They crossed the street. They were gone. Lucy looked almost sick with loss and fear.

  “Dear God,” she said.

  “Let’s go in,” Fran said. “I want tea.”

  They went inside and Fran put the teapot on. They began to wait.

  The four of them moved slowly southwest during the afternoon, not talking much. They were headed toward Golden, where they would camp this first night. They passed the burial sites, three of them now, and around four o’clock, when their shadows had begun

  to trail out long behind them and the heat had begun to sneak out of the day, they came to the township marker spotted beside the road
at the southern edge of Boulder. For a moment Stu had a feeling that all of them were on the verge of turning together and going back. Ahead of them was darkness and death. Behind them was a little warmth, a little love.

  Glen took a bandanna out of his back pocket, whipped it into a blue paisley rope, and tied it around his head. “Chapter Forty-Three, The Bald-Headed Sociologist Dons His Sweat-Band,” he said hollowly. Kojak was up ahead, over the line into Golden, nosing his way happily through a splash of wildflowers.

  “Ah, man,” Larry said softly. “I feel like this is the end of everything.”

  “Yeah,” Ralph said. “It does feel like that.”

  “Come on,” Stu said, smiling a little. “Do you dogfaces want to live forever?”

  They went on, leaving Boulder behind them. By nine that night they were camped in Golden, half a mile from where Route 6 begins its twisting, turning course along Clear Creek and into the stone heart of the Rockies.

  None of them slept well that first night. Already they felt far from home, and under the shadow of death.

  BOOK III

  THE STAND

  September 7,1980-January 10,1981

  “I understand you’ve been running from the man

  Who goes by the name of the Sandman

  He flies the sky like an eagle in the eye

  of a hurricane that’s abandoned . .

  —America

  “Hey Trash, what did old lady Semple say

  when you torched her pension check?”

  —Carley Yates

  “When the night has come

  And the land is dark

  And the moon is the only light we’ll see,

  I won’t be afraid

  Just as long as you stand by me.”

  —The Drifters

  Chapter 51

  The dark man had set his guardposts all along the eastern border of Oregon. The largest was at Ontario, where 1-80 crosses over from Idaho; there were six men there, quartered in the trailer of a large Peterbilt truck. They had been there for more than a week, playing poker the whole time with twenties and fifties as useless as Monopoly money. One man was almost sixty thousand dollars ahead.

  It had rained almost the whole week, and tempers were getting short. They had come out of Portland, and they wanted to get back there. There were women in Portland. Hung from a spike was a powerful two-way radio, broadcasting nothing but static. They were waiting for the radio to broadcast two simple words: Come home. That would mean that the man they were looking for had been captured somewhere else.

  The man they were looking for was approximately seventy years old, heavyset, balding. He wore glasses and he was driving a white-over-blue four-wheel-drive, either a Jeep or an International Harvester. He was to be killed when he was finally spotted.

  They were edgy and bored, but not enough so to just take off for Portland on their own. They had received their orders from the Walkin Dude himself, and even after rain-induced cabin fever had set in, their terror of him remained. If they screwed the job up and he found out, God help them all.

  So they sat and played cards and watched by turns. 1-80 was deserted in the dull, constant rain. They waited for the Scout to happen along here or somewhere else.

  “He’s a spy from the other side,” the Walkin Dude had told them. That horrible grin wreathed his chops as he spoke. Why it was so horrible none of them could have said, but when it turned your way you felt as if your blood had turned to hot soup in your veins. “He’s a spy and we could welcome him in with open arms, show him everything, and send him back with no harm done. But I want him. I want them both. And we’re going to send their heads back over the mountains before the snow flies. Let them chew on that all winter.” And he bellowed hot laughter at the people he had gathered together in one of the conference rooms at the Portland Civic Center. They smiled back, but their smiles were cold and uneasy. Aloud they might congratulate each other on having been singled out for such a responsibility. But inside, they wished that those happy, awful, weasel-like eyes had fixed on anyone but them.

  There was another large guardpost far south of Ontario, at Sheaville. Others were manned by pairs of men, and there were an even dozen of them, ranging from the tiny town of Flora, just off Route 3 and less than sixty miles from the Washington border, all the way down to McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada border.

  An old man in a blue and white four-wheel-drive. The instructions to all the sentinels were the same: Kill him, but don’t hit him in the head. There was to be no blood or bruise above the throat.

  “I don’t want to send back damaged goods,” Randy Flagg told them, and clacked and roared his horrible laughter.

  The northern border between Oregon and Idaho is marked by the Snake River. If you were to follow the Snake north from Ontario, where the six men sat in their Peterbilt playing spit-in-the-ocean for worthless money, you would eventually come to within spitting distance of Copperfield. The Snake takes a kink here that geologists call an oxbow, and near Copperfield the Snake was dammed by the Oxbow Dam. And on that seventh day of September, as Stu Redman and his party trudged up Colorado Highway 6 over a thousand miles to the east and south, Bobby Terry was sitting inside the Copperfield Five and Dime, a stack of comic books by his side, wondering what sort of shape the Oxbow Dam was in, and if the sluice gates had been left open or shut. Outside, Oregon Highway 86 ran past the dime store.

  He and his partner, Dave Roberts (now asleep in the apartment overhead) had discussed the dam at great length. It had been raining for a week. The Snake was high. Suppose that old Oxbow Dam decided to let go? Bad news. A rushing wall of water would sweep down on Copperfield and ole Bobby Terry and ole Dave Roberts might be washed all the way down to the Pacific Ocean. They had discussed going over to the dam to look for cracks, but finally just hadn’t dared. Flagg’s orders had been specific: stay under cover.

  Dave had pointed out that Flagg might be anywhere. He was a great traveler, and stories had already sprung up about the way he could suddenly appear in a small, out-of-the-way burg where there were only a dozen people repairing power lines or collecting weapons from some army depot. He materialized, like a ghost. Only this was a grinning black ghost in dusty boots with rundown heels. Sometimes he was alone and sometimes Lloyd Henreid was with him. Sometimes he was behind the wheel of a big white ’62 Thunder-bird and sometimes he was walking. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next moment he was. He could be in L.A. one day (or so the talk went) and show up in Boise a day later ... on foot.

  But, as Dave had also pointed out, not even Flagg could be in six different places at the same time. One of them could just scoot over to that damn dam, have a look, and scoot back. The odds in their favor were a thousand to one.

  Good, you do it, Bobby Terry told him. You have my permission. But Dave had declined the invitation with an uneasy grin. Because Flagg had a way of knowing things, even if he didn’t turn up on the dime. There were some who said he had an unnatural power over the predators of the animal kingdom. A woman named Rose Kingman claimed to have seen him snap his fingers at a number of crows sitting on a telephone wire, and the crows fluttered down onto his shoulders, this Rose Kingman said, and she further testified that they had croaked “Flagg . . . Flagg . . . Flagg . . .” over and over.

  That was just ridiculous, and he knew it. Bobby Terry’s mother Delores had never raised any fools. He knew the way stories got around, growing between the mouth that spoke and the ear that listened. And how happy the dark man would be to encourage stories like that.

  But the stories still gave him an atavistic little shiver, as though at the core of each there was a nugget of truth. Some said he could call the wolves, or send his spirit into the body of a cat. There was a man in Portland who said he carried a weasel or a fisher or something in that ratty old Boy Scout pack he wore when he was walking. Stupid stuff, all of it. But . . . just suppose he could talk to the animals, like a satanic Dr. Doolittle. And suppose he or Dave walked out to look
at that dam in a direct contradiction of his orders, and was seen.

  The penalty for disobedience was crucifixion.

  Bobby Terry guessed that old dam wouldn’t break, anyway.

  He shot a Kent out of the pack on the table and lit up, grimacing at the hot, dry taste. In another six months, none of the damn cigarettes would be smokable. Probably just as well. The damn things were death, anyway.

  He sighed and took another comic book off the stack. Some ridiculous fucking thing called Howard Duck, who was supposed to be a master of Quack-Fu. He threw it across the store and it fluttered down in a tent shape on top of a cash register. It was things like Howard Duck, he thought, that made you believe the world was maybe just as well off destroyed.

  He picked up the next one, a Superman—there was a hero you could at least sort of believe in—and was just turning to the first page when he saw the blue Scout go by out front, heading west. Its big tires splashed up muddy sheets of rainwater.

  Bobby Terry stared at the place where it had passed with his mouth a jaw. He couldn’t believe that the vehicle they were all looking for had just passed his post. To tell the truth, way down deep he had suspected this whole thing was nothing but a make-work shit detail.

  He rushed to the front door and jerked it open. He ran out on the sidewalk, still holding the Superman comic book in one hand. Maybe the thing had been nothing but a hallucination. Thinking about Flagg could get anyone hallucinating.

  But it wasn’t. He caught just a glimpse of the Scout’s roof as it went down over the next hill and out of town. Then he was running back through the deserted five-and-dime, bawling for Dave at the top of his lungs.

  The Judge held onto the steering wheel grimly, trying to pretend there was no such thing as arthritis, and if there was, he didn’t have it, and if he did have it, it never bothered him in damp weather. He didn’t try to take it any further because the rain was a fact, a pure-d fact, as his father would have said, and there was no hope but Mount Hope.

  He had been running through rain for the last three days. It sometimes backed off to a drizzle, but mostly it had been nothing more or less than a good old solid downpour. And that was a pure-d fact. The roads were on the point of washing out in some places, and by next spring a lot of them were going to be flat impassable.