The Stand

ore. Now the motorcycle dealership rose out of it like some strange ship's prow constructed of cinderblock instead of wood.

Someone was next to him, and he saw that it wasn't Nadine who had joined him in the night, but Joe. The boy lay next to him, thumb corked in his mouth, shivering in his sleep, as if his own nightmare had gripped him. Larry wondered if Joe's dreams were so different from his own ... and he lay on his back, staring up into the white fog and thinking about that until the others woke up an hour later.



The fog had burned off enough to travel by the time they had finished breakfast and packed their things on the cycles. As Nadine had said, Joe showed no qualms about riding behind Larry; in fact, he climbed on Larry's cycle without having to be asked.

"Slow," Larry said for the fourth time. "We're not going to hurry and have an accident."

"Fine," Nadine said. "I'm really excited. It's like being on a quest!"

She smiled at him, but Larry could not smile back. Rita Blakemoor had said something very much like that when they were leaving New York City. Two days before she died, she had said it.



They stopped for lunch in Epsom, eating fried ham from a can and drinking orange soda under the tree where Larry had fallen asleep and Joe had stood over him with the knife. Larry was relieved to find that riding the motorcycles wasn't as bad as he had thought it would be; in most of the places they could make fairly decent time, and even going through the villages it was only necessary to putt along the sidewalks at walking speed. Nadine was being extremely careful about slowing down on blind curves, and even on the open road she did not urge Larry to go any faster than the steady thirty-five-miles-an-hour pace he was setting. He thought that, barring bad weather, they could be in Stovington by the nineteenth.

They stopped for supper west of Concord, where Nadine said they could save time on Lauder and Goldsmith's route by going directly northwest on the thruway, I-89.

"There will be a lot of stalled traffic," Larry said doubtfully.

"We can weave in and out," she said with confidence, "and use the breakdown lane when we have to. The worst that can happen is we'll have to backtrack to an exit and go around on a secondary road."

They tried it for two hours after supper, and did indeed come upon a blockage from one side of the northbound lanes to the other. Just beyond Warner a car-and-housetrailer combo had jackknifed; the driver and his wife, weeks dead, lay like grainsacks in the front seat of their Electra.

The three of them, working together, were able to hoist the bikes over the buckled hitch between the car and the trailer. Afterward they were too tired to go any farther, and that night Larry didn't ponder whether or not to go to Nadine, who had taken her blankets ten feet farther down from where he had spread his (the boy was between them). That night he was too tired to do anything but fall asleep.



The next afternoon they came upon a block they couldn't get around. A trailer truck had overturned and half a dozen cars had crashed behind it. Luckily, they were only two miles beyond the Enfield exit. They went back, took the exit ramp, and then, feeling tired and discouraged, stopped in the Enfield town park for a twenty-minute rest.

"What did you do before, Nadine?" Larry asked. He had been thinking about the expression in her eyes when Joe had finally spoken (the boy had added "Larry, Nadine, fanks," and "Go baffroom" to his working vocabulary), and now he made a guess based on that. "Were you a teacher?"

She looked at him with surprise. "Yes. That's a good guess."

"Little kids?"

"That's right. First and second graders."

That explained something about her complete unwillingness to leave Joe behind. In mind at least, the boy had regressed to a seven-year-old age level.

"How did you guess?"

"A long time ago I used to date a speech therapist from Long Island," Larry said. "I know that sounds like the start of one of those involved New York jokes, but it's the truth. She worked for the Ocean View school system. Younger grades. Kids with speech impediments, cleft palates, harelips, deaf kids. She used to say that correcting speech defects in children was just showing them an alternative way of getting the right sounds. Show them, say the word. Show them, say the word. Over and over until something in the kid's head clicked. And when she talked about that click happening, she looked the way you did when Joe said 'You're welcome.' "

"Did I?" She smiled a little wistfully. "I loved the little ones. Some of them were bruised, but none of them at that age are irrevocably spoiled. The little ones are the only good human beings."

"Kind of a romantic idea, isn't it?"

She shrugged. "Children are good. And if you work with them, you get to be a romantic. That's not so bad. Wasn't your speech therapist friend happy in her work?"

"Yeah, she liked it," Larry agreed. "Were you married? Before?" There it was again--that simple, ubiquitous word. Before. It was only two syllables, but it had become all-encompassing.

"Married? No. Never married." She began to look nervous again. "I'm the original old maid schoolteacher, younger than I look but older than I feel. Thirty-seven." His eyes had moved to her hair before he could stop them and she nodded as if he had spoken out loud. "It's premature," she said matter-of-factly. "My grandmother's hair was totally white by the time she was forty. I think I'm going to last at least five years longer."

"Where did you teach?"

"A small private school in Pittsfield. Very exclusive. Ivy-covered walls, all the newest playground equipment. Damn the recession, full speed ahead. The car pool consisted of two Thunderbirds, three Mercedes -Benzes, a couple of Lincolns, and a Chrysler Imperial."

"You must have been very good."

"Yes, I think I was," she said artlessly, then smiled. "Doesn't matter much now."

He put an arm around her. She started a little and he felt her stiffen. Her hand and shoulder were warm.

"I wish you wouldn't," she said uncomfortably.

"You don't want me to?"

"No. I don't."

He drew his arm back, baffled. She did want him to, that was the thing; he could feel her wanting coming off her in mild but clearly receivable waves. Her color was very high now, and she was looking desperately down at her hands, which were fiddling together in her lap like a couple of hurt spiders. Her eyes were shiny, as if she might be on the verge of tears.

"Nadine--"

(honey, is that you?)

She looked up at him and he saw she was past the verge of tears. She was about to speak when Joe strolled up, carrying his guitar case in one hand. They looked at him guiltily, as if he had found them doing something rather more personal than talking.

"Lady," Joe said conversationally.

"What?" Larry asked, startled and not tracking very well.

"Lady!" Joe said again, and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.

Larry and Nadine looked at each other.

Suddenly there was a fourth voice, highpitched and choking with emotion, as startling as the voice of God.

"Thank heaven!" it cried. "Oh thank heaven!"

They stood up and looked at the woman who was now half running up the street toward them. She was smiling and crying at the same time.

"Glad to see you," she said. "I'm so glad to see you, thank heaven--"

She swayed and might have fainted if Larry hadn't been there to steady her until her dizziness passed. He guessed her age at about twenty-five. She was dressed in bluejeans and a plain white cotton blouse. Her face was pale, her blue eyes unnaturally fixed. Those eyes stared at Larry as if trying to convince the brain behind them that this was not a hallucination, that the three people she saw were really here.

"I'm Larry Underwood," he said. "The lady is Nadine Cross. The boy is Joe. We're very happy to meet you."

The woman continued to stare at him wordlessly for a moment, and then walked slowly away from him and toward Nadine.

"I'm so pleased ..." she began, "... so pleased to meet you." She stumbled a little. "Oh my God, are you really people?"

"Yes," Nadine said.

The woman put her arms around Nadine and sobbed. Nadine held her. Joe stood in the street by a stalled pickup truck, his guitar case in one hand, his free thumb in his mouth. At last he went to Larry and looked up at him. Larry held his hand. The two of them stood that way and watched the women solemnly. And that was how they met Lucy Swann.



She was eager to go with them when they told her where they were headed, and that they had reason to believe there were at least two other people there, and possibly more. Larry found a medium-sized knapsack for her in the Enfield Sporting Goods, and Nadine went down to her house on the outskirts of town to help her pack ... two changes of clothes, some underwear, an extra pair of shoes, a raincoat. And pictures of her late husband and daughter.

They camped that night in a town called Quechee, now over the state line and into Vermont. Lucy Swann told a tale which was short and simple and not much different from the others they would hear. The grief came built-in, and the shock, which had driven her at least within hailing distance of madness.

Her husband had sickened on the twenty-fifth of June, her daughter the next day. She had nursed them as well as she had been able, fully expecting to come down with the rales, as they were calling the sickness in her corner of New England, herself. By the twenty-seventh, when her husband had gone into a coma, Enfield was pretty much cut off from the outside world. Television reception had become spotty and queer. People were dying like flies. During the previous week they had seen extraordinary movements of army troops along the turnpike, but none of them had business in such a little place as Enfield, New Hampshire. In the early morning hours of June twenty-eighth, her husband had died. Her daughter had seemed a little bit better for a while on the twenty-ninth, and then had taken an abrupt turn for the worst that evening. She had died around eleven o'clock. By July 3, everyone in Enfield except her and an old man named Bill Dadds had died. Bill had been sick, Lucy said, but he seemed to have thrown it off entirely. Then, on the morning of Independence Day, she had found Bill dead on Main Street, swollen up and black, like everyone else.

"So I buried my people, and Bill too," she said as they sat around the crackling fire. "It took all of one day, but I put them to rest. And then I thought that I better go on down to Concord, where my mother and father live. But I just ... never got around to it." She looked at them appealingly. "Was it so wrong? Do you think they would have been alive?"

"No," Larry said. "The immunity sure wasn't hereditary in any direct way. My mother ..." He looked into the fire.

"Wes and me, we had to get married," Lucy said. "That was the summer after I graduated high school--1984. My mom and dad didn't want me to marry him. They wanted me to go away to have the baby and just give her up. But I wouldn't. My mom said it would end in divorce. My dad said Wes was a no-account man and he'd always be shiftless. I just said, 'That may be, but we'll see what happens.' I just wanted to take the chance. You know?"

"Yes," Nadine said. She was sitting next to Lucy, looking at her with great compassion.

"We had a nice little home, and I sure never thought it would end like this," Lucy said with a sigh that was half a sob. "We settled down real good, the three of us. It was more Marcy than me that settled Wes down. He thought the sun rose and set on that baby. He thought ..."

"Don't," Nadine said. "All that was before."

That word again, Larry thought. That little two-syllable word.

"Yes. It's gone now. And I guess I could have gotten along. I was, anyway, until I started to have all those bad dreams."

Larry's head jerked up. "Dreams?"

Nadine was looking at Joe. A moment before, the boy had been nodding out in front of the fire. Now he was staring at Lucy, his eyes gleaming.

"Bad dreams, nightmares," Lucy said. "They're not always the same. Mostly it's a man chasing me, and I can never see exactly what he looks like because he's all wrapped up in a, what do you call it, a cloak. And he stays in the shadows and alleys." She shivered. "I got so I was afraid to go to sleep. But now maybe I'll--"

"Brrr-ack man!" Joe cried suddenly, so fiercely they all jumped. He leaped to his feet and held his arms out like a miniature Bela Lugosi, his fingers hooked into claws. "Brrack man! Bad dreams! Chases! Chases me! 'Cares me!" And he shrank against Nadine and stared untrustingly into the darkness.

A little silence fell among them.

"This is crazy," Larry said, and then stopped. They were all looking at him. Suddenly the darkness seemed very dark indeed, and Lucy looked frightened again.

He forced himself to go on. "Lucy, do you ever dream about ... well, about a place in Nebraska?"

"I had a dream one night about an old Negro woman," Lucy said, "but it didn't last very long. She said something like, 'You come see me.' Then I was back in Enfield and that ... that scary guy was chasing me. Then I woke up."

Larry looked at her so long that she colored and dropped her eyes.

He looked at Joe. "Joe, do you ever dream about ... uh, corn? An old woman? A guitar?" Joe only looked at him from Nadine's encircling arm.

"Leave him alone, you'll upset him more," Nadine said, but she was the one who sounded upset.

Larry thought. "A house, Joe? A little house with a porch up on jacks?"

He thought he saw a gleam in Joe's eyes.

"Stop it, Larry!" Nadine said.

"A swing, Joe? A swing made out of a tire?"

Joe suddenly jerked in Nadine's arms. His thumb came out of his mouth. Nadine tried to hold him, but Joe broke through.

"The swing!" Joe said exultantly. "The swing! The swing!" He whirled away from them and pointed first at Nadine, then at Larry. "Her! You! Lots!"

"Lots?" Larry asked, but Joe had subsided again.

Lucy Swann looked stunned. "The swing," she said. "I remember that, too." She looked at Larry. "Why are we all having the same dreams? Is somebody using a ray on us?"

"I don't know." He looked at Nadine. "Have you had them, too?"

"I don't dream," she said sharply, and immediately dropped her eyes. He thought: You're lying. But why?

"Nadine, if you--" he began.

"I told you I don't dream!" Nadine cried sharply, almost hysterically. "Can't you just leave me alone? Do you have to badger me?"

She stood up and left the fire, almost running.

Lucy looked after her uncertainly for a moment and then stood up. "I'll go after her."

"Yes, you better. Joe, stay with me, okay?"

"Kay," Joe said, and began to unsnap the guitar case.



Lucy came back with Nadine ten minutes later. They had both been crying, Larry saw, but they seemed to be on good terms now.

"I'm sorry," Nadine said to Larry. "It's just that I'm always upset. It comes out in funny ways."

"It's all right."

The subject did not come up again. They sat and listened to Joe run through his repertoire. He was getting very good indeed now, and in with the hootings and grunts, fragments of the lyrics were coming through.

At last they slept, Larry on one end, Nadine on the other, Joe and Lucy between.

Larry dreamed first of the black man on the high place, and then of the old black woman sitting on her porch. Only in this dream he knew the black man was coming, striding through the corn, knocking his own twisted swathe through the corn, his terrible hot grin spot-welded to his face, coming toward them, closer and closer.

Larry woke up in the middle of the night, out of breath, his chest constricted with terror. The others slept like stones. Somehow, in that dream he had known. The black man had not been coming emptyhanded. In his arms, borne like an offering as he strode through the corn, he held the decaying body of Rita Blakemore, now stiff and swollen, the flesh ripped by woodchucks and weasels. A mute accusation to be thrown at his feet to scream his guilt at the others, to silently proclaim that he wasn't no nice guy, that something had been left out of him, that he was a loser, that he was a taker.

At last he slept again, and until he woke up the next morning at seven, stiff, cold, hungry, and needing to go to the bathroom, his sleep was dreamless.



"Oh God," Nadine said emptily. Larry looked at her and saw a disappointment too deep for tears. Her face was pale, her remarkable eyes clouded and dull.

It was quarter past seven, July 19, and the shadows were drawing long. They had ridden all day, their few rest stops only five minutes long, their lunch break, which they had taken in Randolph, only half an hour. None of them had complained, although after six hours on a cycle Larry's whole body felt numb and achy and full of pins.

Now they stood together in a line outside a wrought-iron fence. Below and behind them lay the town of Stovington, not much changed from the way Stu Redman had seen it on his last couple of days in this institution. Beyond the fence and a lawn that had once been well kept but which was now shaggy and littered by sticks and leaves that had blown onto it during afternoon thunderstorms, was the institution itself, three stories high, more of it buried underground, Larry surmised.

The place was deserted, silent, empty.

In the center of the lawn was a sign which read:



STOVINGTON PLAGUE CONTROL CENTER

THIS IS A GOVERNMENT INSTALLATION!

VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT MAIN DESK



Beside it was a second sign, and this was what they were looking at.





ROUTE 7 to RUTLAND

EVERYONE HERE IS DEAD

ROUTE 4 to SCHUYLERVILLE

WE ARE MOVING WEST TO NEBRASKA

ROUTE 29 to I-87

STAY ON OUR ROUTE

I-87 SOUTH TO I-90

WATCH FOR SIGNS

I-90 WEST

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

FRANCES GOLDSMITH

STUART REDMAN

GLENDON PEQUOD BATEMAN

JULY 8, 1990

"Harold, my man," Larry murmured. "Can't wait to shake your hand and buy you a beer ... or a Payday."



"Larry!" Lucy said sharply.

Nadine had fainted.





CHAPTER 45


She tottered out onto her porch at twenty to eleven on the morning of July 20, carrying her coffee and her toast with her as she did every day that the Coca-Cola thermometer outside the sink window read over fifty degrees. It wa