The Stand

THE CIRCLE OPENS

“Sally.”

A mutter.

“Wake up now, Sally.”

A louder mutter: leeme lone.

He shook her harder.

“Wake up. You got to wake up!”

Charlie.

Charlie’s voice. Calling her. For how long?

Sally swam up out of sleep.

First she glanced at the clock on the night table and saw it was quarter past two in the morning. Charlie shouldn’t even be here; he should be on shift. Then she got her first good look at him and something leaped up inside her, some deadly intuition.

Her husband was deathly pale. His eyes started and bulged from their sockets. The car keys were in one hand. He was still using the other to shake her, although her eyes were open. It was as if he hadn’t been able to register the fact that she was awake.

“Charlie, what is it? What’s wrong?”

He didn’t seem to know what to say. His Adam’s apple bobbed futilely but there was no sound in the small service bungalow but the ticking of the clock.

“Is it a fire?” she asked stupidly. It was the only thing she could think of which might have put him in such a state. She knew his parents had perished in a housefire.

“In a way,” he said. “In a way it’s worse. You got to get dressed, honey. Get Baby LaVon. We got to get out of here.”

“Why?” she asked, getting out of bed. Dark fear had seized her. Nothing seemed right. This was like a dream. “Where? You mean the back yard?” But she knew it wasn’t the back yard. She had never seen Charlie look afraid like this. She drew a deep breath and could smell no smoke or burning.

“Sally, honey, don’t ask questions. We have to get away. Far away. You lust go get Baby LaVon and get her dressed.”

“But should I… is there time to pack?”

This seemed to stop him. To derail him somehow. She thought she was as afraid as she could be, but apparently she wasn’t. She recognized that what she had taken for fright on his part was closer to raw panic. He ran a distracted hand through his hair and replied, “I don’t know. I’ll have to test the wind.”

And he left her with this bizarre statement which meant nothing to her, left her standing cold and afraid and disoriented in her bare feet and babydoll nightie. It was as if he had gone mad. What did testing the wind have to do with whether or not she had time to pack? And where was far away? Reno? Vegas? Salt Lake City? And…

She put her hand against her throat as a new idea struck her.

AWOL. Leaving in the middle of the night meant Charlie was planning to go AWOL.

She went into the small room which served as Baby LaVon’s nursery and stood for a moment, indecisive, looking at the sleeping infant in her pink blanket suit. She held to the faint hope that this might be no more than an extraordinarily vivid dream. It would pass, she would wake up at seven in the morning just like usual, feed Baby LaVon and herself while she watched the first hour of the “Today” show, and be cooking Charlie’s eggs when he came off-shift at 8 A.M., his nightly tour in the Reservation’s north tower over for another night. And in two weeks he would be back on days and not so cranky and if he was sleeping with her at night she wouldn’t have crazy dreams like this one and—

“Hurry it up!” he hissed at her, breaking her faint hope. “We got just time to throw a few things together… but for Christ’s sake, woman, if you love her”—he pointed at the crib—“you get her dressed!” He coughed nervously into his hand and began to yank things out of their bureau drawers and pile them helter-skelter into a couple of old suitcases.

She woke up Baby LaVon, soothing the little one as best she could; the three-year-old was cranky and bewildered at being awakened in the middle of the night, and she began to cry as Sally got her into underpants, a blouse, and a romper. The sound of the child’s crying made her more afraid than ever. She associated it with the other times Baby LaVon, usually the most angelic of babies, had cried in the night: diaper rash, teething, croup, colic. Fear slowly changed to anger as she saw Charlie almost run past the door with a double handful of her own underwear. Bra straps trailed out behind him like the streamers from New Year’s Eve noise-makers. He flung them into one of the suitcases and slammed it shut. The hem of her best slip hung out, and she just bet it was torn.

“What is it?” she cried, and the distraught tone of her voice caused Baby LaVon to burst into fresh tears just as she was winding down to sniffles. “Have you gone crazy? They’ll send soldiers after us, Charlie! Soldiers!”

“Not tonight they won’t,” he said, and there was some thing so sure in his voice that it was horrible. “Point is, sugar-babe, if we don’t get our asses in gear, we ain’t never gonna make it off’n the base. I don’t even know how in hell I got out of the tower. Malfunction somewhere, I guess. Why not? Everything else sure-God malfunctioned.” And he uttered a high, loonlike laugh that frightened her more than anything else had done. “The baby dressed? Good. Put some of her clothes in that other suitcase. Use the blue tote-bag in the closet for the rest. Then we’re going to get the hell out. I think we’re all right. Wind’s blowing east to west. Thank God for that.”

He coughed into his hand again.

“Daddy!” Baby LaVon demanded, holding her arms up. “Want Daddy! Sure! Horsey-ride, Daddy! Horsey-ride! Sure!”

“Not now,” Charlie said, and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment later, Sally heard the rattle of crockery. He was getting her pin-money out of the blue soup-dish on the top shelf. Some thirty or forty dollars she had put away—a dollar, sometimes fifty cents, at a time. Her house money. It was real, then. Whatever it was, it was really real.

Baby LaVon, denied her horsey-ride by her daddy, who rarely if ever denied her anything, began to weep again. Sally struggled to get her into her light jacket and then threw most of her clothes into the tote, cramming them in helter-skelter. The idea of putting anything else into the other suitcase was ridiculous. It would burst. She had to kneel on it to snap the catches. She found herself thanking God Baby LaVon was trained, and there was no need to bother with diapers.

Charlie came back into the bedroom, and now he was running. He was still stuffing the crumpled ones and fives from the soup-dish into the front pocket of his suntans. Sally scooped Baby LaVon up. She was fully awake now and could walk perfectly well, but Sally wanted her in her arms. She bent and snagged the tote-bag.

“Where we going, Daddy?” Baby LaVon asked. “I was aseepin.”

“Baby can be aseepin in the car,” Charlie said, grabbing the two suitcases. The hem of Sally’s slip flapped. His eyes still had that white, starey look. An idea, a growing certainty, began to dawn in Sally’s mind.

“Was there an accident?” she whispered. “Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph, there was, wasn’t there? An accident. Out there.”

“I was playing solitaire,” he said. “I looked up and saw the clock had gone from green to red. I turned on the monitor. Sally, they’re all—”

He paused, looked at Baby LaVon’s eyes, wide and, although still rimmed with tears, curious.

“They’re all D-E-A-D down there,” he said. “All but one or two, and they’re probably gone now.”

“What’s D-E-D, Daddy?” Baby LaVon asked.

“Never mind, honey,” Sally said. Her voice seemed to come to her from down a very long canyon.

Charlie swallowed. Something clicked in his throat. “Everything’s supposed to mag-lock if the clock goes red. They got a Chubb computer that runs the whole place and it’s supposed to be fail-safe. I saw what was on the monitor, and I jumped out the door. I thought the goddam thing would cut me in half. It should have shut the second the clock went red, and I don’t know how long it was red before I looked up and noticed it. But I was almost to the parking lot before I heard it thump shut behind me. Still, if I’d looked up even thirty seconds later, I’d be shut up in that tower control room right now, like a bug in a bottle.”

“What is it? What—”

“I dunno. I don’t want to know. All I know is that it ki—that it K-I-L-L-E-D them quick. If they want me, they’ll have to catch me. I was gettin hazard pay, but they ain’t payin me enough to hang around here. Wind’s blowing west. We’re driving east. Come on, now.”

Still feeling half-asleep, caught in some awful grinding dream, she followed him out to the driveway where their fifteen-year-old Chevy stood, quietly rusting in the fragrant desert darkness of the California night.

Charlie dumped the suitcases in the trunk and the tote-bag in the back seat. Sally stood for a moment by the passenger door with the baby in her arms, looking at the bungalow where they had spent the last four years. When they had moved in, she reflected, Baby LaVon was still growing inside her body, all her horsey-rides ahead of her.

“Come on!” he said. “Get in, woman!”

She did. He backed out, the Chevy’s headlights momentarily splashing across the house. Their reflection in the windows looked like the eyes of some hunted beast.

He was hunched tensely over the steering wheel, his face drawn in the dim glow of the dashboard instruments. “If the base gates are closed, I’m gonna try to crash through.” And he meant it. She could tell. Suddenly her knees felt watery.

But there was no need for such desperate measures. The base gates were standing open. One guard was nodding over a magazine. She couldn’t see the other; perhaps he was in the head. This was the outer part of the base, a conventional army vehicle depot. What went on at the hub of the base was of no concern to these fellows.

I looked up and saw the clock had gone red.

She shivered and put her hand on his leg. Baby LaVon was sleeping again. Charlie patted her hand briefly and said: “It’s going to be all right, hon.”

By dawn they were running east across Nevada and Charlie was coughing steadily.